Steel and the Homestead Strike

By eighteen ninety-two, the Carnegie Steel Company's Homestead Works, on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh, was the largest and most productive steel mill in the world. It employed nearly four thousand workers. It produced the structural steel that was building American cities.

And its owner, Andrew Carnegie, was in the process of demonstrating that industrial capitalism at scale operated by rules its workers had no part in writing. That summer, Carnegie's partner and plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, moved to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the union that represented roughly eight hundred of Homestead's most skilled workers. Frick locked out the entire workforce in late June, eighteen ninety-two, just before the labor contract expired.

He surrounded the mill complex with a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire. He hired three hundred armed Pinkerton detectives to float down the Monongahela on barges and retake the mill. On July sixth, those barges arrived at the Homestead dock at four in the morning.

What followed was a battle lasting fourteen hours. Workers on the riverbank opened fire. The Pinkertons fired back.

By the time the Pinkertons surrendered and were allowed to walk out, they were beaten by the crowd as they left, seven workers and three Pinkertons were dead, with dozens more wounded. Pennsylvania's governor sent roughly six thousand National Guard troops to Homestead six days later. The mill reopened with strikebreakers.

In November, the strikers voted to return on the company's terms. The Amalgamated Association, which had been one of the most powerful unions in American manufacturing, was effectively destroyed. It would be more than forty years before steelworkers at Homestead were represented by a union again.

Carnegie was in Scotland for the entire affair. He and Frick never fully reconciled, though they operated together for years. The Homestead Strike became one of the most studied events in American labor history, a case study in the relationship between capital, the state, and organized workers that Pennsylvania had made as stark as anywhere in the world.