The Homestead Strike of Eighteen Ninety-Two

On the morning of July sixth, eighteen ninety-two, two barges moved slowly up the Monongahela River toward the Carnegie Steel mill at Homestead, Pennsylvania. On board were approximately three hundred Pinkerton detectives, armed with Winchester repeating rifles, hired to retake the mill from striking workers. What happened when those barges reached the riverbank was one of the bloodiest days in American labor history.

Carnegie Steel's contract with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was expiring. Carnegie, who was in Scotland at the time, had given his operations manager Henry Clay Frick complete authority to break the union. Frick had locked out the workers on June twenty-ninth and surrounded the mill with a twelve-foot wooden fence topped with barbed wire, which the workers immediately called Fort Frick. He arranged for the Pinkertons to arrive by river, in darkness, so they could occupy the mill before the workers knew what was happening.

They knew. Thousands of striking workers and their families massed at the riverbank. When the barges tried to land, gunfire broke out. The Pinkertons were trapped on the barges for about thirteen hours, unable to advance. Seven workers died. Three Pinkertons were killed. The surviving Pinkertons eventually surrendered and were marched through the town, where the crowd attacked them.

Frick asked the governor of Pennsylvania for help. Eight thousand five hundred state National Guard troops arrived on July twelfth and occupied the mill. The strike was over. Carnegie Steel resumed production with non-union labor, and union organizing among steelworkers was effectively crushed for the next twenty-six years.

The Battle of Homestead, as it is called at the Rivers of Steel museum on the site today, is a foundational event in American labor history. What the workers lost that summer, they did not win back until the New Deal era, four decades later.