This Day in Labor History: July 6, 1892. In one of the Gilded Age’s most notorious anti-labor acts of violence, 300 Pinkerton detectives, working for Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel, attacked strikers who engaged in a day-long battle. Let's talk about Homestead! 
In 1889, workers at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel organized with Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) struck and won a union contract with wage gains for the next three years.
This was the latest in a long history of battles between Carnegie and unions that dated back to a strike in 1867 when he tried to reduce puddlers’ wages.
Over and over, Carnegie and his fellow steel employers sought to throw workers out of a job when they fought for the dignity a union can bring; in 1874, Carnegie forced local store owners to not advance strikers credit so they would be starved back to work.
The AA had been a force in western Pennsylvania throughout the 1880s, beginning with an 1881 organizing of the Bessemer Steelworks in Homestead.
It then went on to Carnegie in 1882, where it managed to beat down Homestead over yellow-dog contracts, which are contracts that make not joining a union a condition of employment. It continued fighting for worker rights through the successful 1889 action.
In 1892, Carnegie was determined to bust the union. But he was also very concerned about his own image. He was well-known among his fellow industrialists as a moralistic blowhard who talked constantly about how great he was. So he wanted to keep his hands clean.
Therefore, Carnegie decided to take an extended trip to Scotland and has his right-hand man, Henry Clay Frick, bust the strike for him.
Frick, a notorious union-hater and head of the hunting club whose indifference to dam safety had caused the Johnstown Flood in 1889, was a piece of work. Frick had once busted a strike in a mill he owned in part by picking up a striker and throwing him in a river.
Carnegie gave Frick carte blanche to deal with the union in any way he liked.
Workers asked for a wage increase; Frick responded with an offer of a 22 percent pay decrease while making military preparations around the factory to provoke the workers. They hanged Frick in effigy.
He locked out workers on June 28. The workers united to keep out scabs. Craft union members controlled the Homestead city government and so Frick could not rely on local police forces. He called in the Pinkertons.
When they arrived on July 6, an armed force of workers ready to fight for their jobs met them. For thirteen hours, the two sides traded gunfire. Eventually, the Pinkertons surrendered.
Workers believed that their jobs were their property. We have lost so much today--no one would believe they had a propertied right to their job in 2020. But in the 1890s, this was a common feeling among workers. So they were fighting for more than just a job.
With the failure of the Pinkertons to crush the strike, Frick and his henchmen created new tactics to bring down the union. Frick convinced Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison to send in the National Guard.
In 1892, the National Guard existed as a strikebreaking force, so the arrival of troops only strengthened Frick’s hand. Frick then evicted strikers from company homes. He had strikers arrested repeatedly so they would have to put up bail they could not afford.
Again, anarchists decided to act on their own without consulting the workers. On July 23, Alexander Berkman, an anarchist in a political and romantic relationship with the legendary anarchist activist Emma Goldman, walked into Frick’s office and shot him in the face.
Although armed with a gun and knife, Berkman failed even to seriously wound Frick, who was back at work within a few days. This once again shows that you can't trust an anarchist to do anything right.
In taking it upon himself to revenge the Pinkerton invasion, Berkman undermined public support for the strike and earned himself a 22-year prison sentence. The taint of radicalism helped doom the strike by November.
And let's be clear--Berkman and Goldman had no right to kill Frick. Not because he didn't deserve to be killed. Because they hadn't consulted with the affected workers. They hurt the strikers through their actions.
The company welcomed workers back without their union, while blacklisting union leaders.
Well-known for his vanity and concern about his public image, Andrew Carnegie regretted his actions at Homestead, writing, “It is expecting too much of poor men to stand by and see their work taken by others...The Works are not worth one drop of human blood. I wish they had sunk”
But when Carnegie wrote to Frick expressing his regret, Frick basically told him to shut up and that they'd meet in Hell.
Carnegie tried to soothe his conscious by building his famous libraries, but about half the towns in Pennsylvania rejected them, seeing them as blood money. That Carnegie was so successful at reviving his reputation, even to the present, is a shame because he was a very evil man.
For all his rhetoric and puritanical religious beliefs, when it came down to giving his workers a fair stake in a system which made him one of the world’s richest men, he chose to send it goons and then the National Guard to destroy the union.
All the libraries in the world don’t make up for that.
After all, I’d argue that the measure of the rich is how they make their money, not what they do with it after its made.
Today is the 9th anniversary of my This Day In Labor History series at @lefarkins, which I started with Homestead back in 2011. That's the root of these threads. It's at 360 threads and counting! Back tomorrow with #361, on Mother Jones and the Children's Crusade.
