There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  The man left to assume Jones’s duties, Henry Clay Frick, was far less empathetic. He was said to have once bodily picked up a disputatious striker and thrown him and all his belongings into a creek. Known as “the King of Coke,” Frick was a millionaire in his own right. His H. C. Frick Company had been one of the nation’s leading vendors of iron-smelting coke until the firm was absorbed by the Carnegie enterprise. It was Frick who had suggested to Andrew Carnegie that all the steel magnate’s concerns be merged under one rubric, Carnegie Steel, of which Frick was now chairman. Frick considered Carnegie’s oft-spoken solicitude for workers, whether genuine or not, to be antiquated and softheaded, and he was eager to demonstrate his own management style and willingness to trim costs.

  The Amalgamated, concerned about the imminent expiration of the earlier contract, had proposed a new pact that would align the wage scale with the greater prices being had for steel products and the increased production of the Homestead mills. Henry Clay Frick paid little heed to the offer. He wanted to undo Carnegie’s bonds to the Amalgamated, make Homestead a nonunion plant, and allow the firm to set wages as it saw fit, with no sliding scale. The Carnegie Company couched this desire in democratic-sounding language, saying it wished to deal with the majority of its workers, those who were unskilled and nonunion, rather than the more “elite” skilled members of the Amalgamated. But this was misleading; the unskilled employees largely supported the Amalgamated because plant conditions overall benefited from the union’s success.

  Carnegie later claimed that the first reports of bloodshed at his mills “came on me like a thunderbolt in a clear sky.”2 A New York paper as early as mid-June, however, had printed the headline “A Bitter Struggle Coming” above a story about the deteriorating situation,3 and Frick’s elaborate measures to prepare for violence as the showdown approached could not have been unknown to Carnegie, even in far-off Scotland. The King of Coke had ordered a ten-foot fence built around the plant, topped it with barbed wire, cut holes in it for rifles, and installed searchlights on a series of watchtowers. He arranged for barges to be at the ready to ferry Pinkerton agents to the site, if needed. Workers, nervously eyeing the extensive preparations, renamed the Homestead plant “Fort Frick.”

  On June 28 Frick locked out the entire workforce and announced that as of July 1 Homestead would be operated as a nonunion mill. The Amalgamated immediately went on strike, taking the nonunion workers with them. Having anticipated the company’s moves, the union divided one thousand employee volunteers into watch committees to keep an eye out for scabs, spies, or other interlopers; it also rented a small boat, the Edna, to patrol the river approach to the plant. When, on July 5, Allegheny county sheriff William H. McCleary showed up with a detachment of deputies to “secure” the Homestead works, he and his entourage were intercepted by one such committee of strikers, escorted onto the Edna, and taken back to Pittsburgh. McCleary’s visit was in all likelihood a bit of play-acting, the strikers’ “rejection” of the sheriff and his men serving as a pretext for Frick’s use of Pinkertons and armed force.

  That very night, at about 2 a.m., the union was informed by telegraph that barges were on the river headed toward Homestead. The Carnegie Company had purchased two vessels for use by the Pinkertons—the Iron Mountain, which served as a floating dormitory for three hundred agents, and the Monongahela, which held a kitchen and dining area. A tugboat, the Little Bill, had been engaged to tow them into position. The crew of the union’s boat, the Edna, shoved off to engage the intruders in the river, firing warning shots in the direction of the Little Bill before turning back to alert the workers. Not only strike volunteers heard the Edna’s shrill whistle of alarm. The town adjacent to the mill stirred to life and its residents descended to the riverfront. Some were armed with shotguns and pistols; others had hoes, rakes, or similar implements. As the barges came within hailing distance someone in the crowd warned: “Don’t step off that boat; go back, go back, or we’ll not answer for your lives!” An instant later a Pinkerton, Captain Frederick Heinde, appeared, and was told by Hugh O’Donnell, one of the strike leaders, “In the name of God and humanity, don’t attempt to land! Don’t attempt to enter these works by force!”

  “We were sent here to take possession of this property and to guard it for this company,” replied Heinde. “We don’t wish to shed blood, but … if you men don’t withdraw, we will mow every one of you down”—a somewhat audacious threat considering the crowd greatly outnumbered the men aboard the barges. “Before you enter those mills,” vowed a striker, “you will trample over the dead bodies of three thousand honest workingmen.”4 A few strikers moved to block any attempt by the Pinkertons to disembark. One, William Foy, lay down upon the gangplank and drew a revolver; Captain Heinde, coming toward him, swung at Foy with his baton and then, accidentally, stepped on an oar that bounced upward and struck another worker in the face. Suddenly shots were fired, wounding both Foy and Heinde. After a momentary pause there was more shooting, knocking down several Pinkertons and causing the rest to retreat belowdecks.

  As the sun rose the detectives made another effort to land, which brought a second exchange of gunfire; this time it was the Pinkertons’ aim that was accurate, killing and wounding several strikers. Further engaging the crowd which, having been fired upon, now appeared dangerously agitated, seemed an exceedingly poor idea, and the invaders gave up the effort to land the barges. As the Little Bill began to tow them away from shore, the tug’s captain raised an American flag, perhaps thinking the mob would hesitate to shoot at the Stars and Stripes; the workers, however, opened a withering fire on the tug, injuring a crewman and sending both the captain and pilot scampering for cover. The Little Bill then steamed away, abandoning the Pinkertons’ barges.

  “Men of Homestead and fellow strikers,” declared a worker, “our friends have been murdered—our brothers have been shot down before our eyes by hired thugs! Yonder in those boats are hundreds of men who have murdered our friends and would ravish our homes! Men of Homestead, we must kill them! Not one must escape alive!”5 His listeners, requiring little urging and seizing on their sudden tactical advantage, began at once trying to oust the agents from the barges, using small skiffs to come up alongside the vessels, shooting and hurling small projectiles. The Pinkertons struggled to mount a defense. Only forty of the three hundred agents were full-time Pinkerton men; the rest were recent recruits who had signed on to stand guard duty at a steel mill, and were inadequately trained (or motivated) to suppress an armed mob. But even the veteran agents began to recognize the hopelessness of their position when a white flag they raised in surrender was blown to tatters by the strikers.6

  Sheriff McCleary, alerted to the detectives’ predicament, wired Pennsylvania governor Robert E. Pattison at once for the militia, but Pattison, cognizant of the fact that Carnegie wanted an excuse to bring in troops and suspecting McCleary’s earlier visit to the mill had been staged, hesitated to intervene. “The sheriff has employed but 12 deputies up to the present time,” Pattison replied. “If the emergency is as great as alleged, he should have employed a thousand. It is not the purpose of the military to act as police officers.”7 The governor told McCleary that at Homestead he was facing a local challenge to law and order, and that as sheriff he must deputize a force to counter it.

  As appeals for military help went unanswered, the Pinkertons’ dilemma became grave, for some in the crowd had initiated an effort with potentially ghastly results, pouring oil on the water around the barges in an attempt to set them alight, which would surely incinerate those on board. Fortunately, senior officials of the Amalgamated had by now arrived on the scene. “Men, for God’s sake and your families’ sake, and for your own sake, listen to the pleadings of cool-headed men,” urged union president M. M. Garland. “We have positive assurance that these [Pinkertons] will be sent away, and all we want is a statement that you will not do any more firing.” But even as Garland spoke, workers were lighting fireworks near the barges in an at
tempt to ignite the oil. Hugh O’Donnell of the Amalgamated had better luck with the crowd, obtaining an agreement that would allow the Pinkertons to surrender their arms to the workers and submit to arrest by Sheriff McCleary on charges of murder.8

  The Pinkertons came ashore under a flag of truce. The crowd, however, ignoring the entreaties of the Amalgamated leaders, set upon the bewildered agents, beating them mercilessly with clubs, stabbing, and in some cases shooting them. Not a single Pinkerton escaped the mob’s punishment. As the agents were being roughed up, demonstrators boarded the now-abandoned barges and stripped them of beds, quilts, and cooking utensils, then set both vessels on fire.

  Nor was the crowd’s fury yet spent. Even after authorities took control of the Pinkertons and attempted to lead them through the town, men, women, and children emerged from their homes to heap further beatings and indignities on the already hobbled captives, hitting them with kitchen utensils, garden tools, and whatever came to hand. Eventually, the bruised and bleeding agents were secured in the local opera house and, in the middle of the night, put aboard a special train and taken away.

  There was widespread condemnation of the sadistic attack on the surrendering Pinkertons and, more generally, of the idea that a union-led mob would use deadly force against agents whose presence was legitimate in that they had been hired by the property’s management. “Men talk like anarchists or lunatics,” opined the Independent, “when they insist that the workmen at Homestead have done right.”9 Thus, even though a number of workers had been killed, the incident played into the company’s hands. “This outbreak settles one matter forever,” announced a Carnegie executive, “and that is that the Homestead mill hereafter will be run non-union and the Carnegie Company will never again recognize the Amalgamated Association nor any other labor organization.”10

  On July 12, with the strikers still occupying the site, Governor Pattison, responding to a request by Frick, finally consented to send in the militia. The Amalgamated workers welcomed the soldiers with cheers and an impromptu band concert, proudly telling commanding officer General George Snowden how they, the workers, controlled the plant by virtue of having fended off the invasion of the company’s hirelings. But Snowden rudely punctured the strikers’ mood. “Pennsylvanians can hardly appreciate the actual communism of these people,” he commented. “They [the strikers] believe the works are theirs quite as much as Carnegie’s.”11 His militia, eight thousand strong, easily managed where the Pinkertons had failed, taking control of the mills and safeguarding the arrival of hundreds of replacement workers. The Amalgamated countered by convincing some of the scabs to leave the plant—many, it seemed, had been lied to about the work they were accepting—but by early fall, Homestead was back in operation with two thousand new nonunion workers.

  In mid-November the Amalgamated admitted defeat, those members who returned forced to accept a nonunion wage structure. While events at Homestead had played out, an equally depressing labor setback had occurred in the silver and copper mine region of western Idaho at Coeur d’Alene, where a miners’ union violently resisted the importation of scabs, only to be crushed in turn by soldiers and a declaration of martial law; hundreds of strikers had been rounded up and imprisoned in a crude detention camp.

  The confrontations at both Homestead and Coeur d’Alene in 1892 showed corporations willing to act with ever-greater deliberation in confronting labor unions—supplanting workers with new technology, importing scabs in large numbers, and relying on the quick insertion of Pinkertons and soldiers to overwhelm local opposition.12 During the coming decade the Amalgamated would steadily lose membership as technology reduced the number of employees needed to run the Homestead plant, and union activism was squelched there and at other area mills by the firing or blacklisting of suspect employees. Carnegie and its corporate descendant, the United States Steel Company, would successfully inhibit labor organizing in the Pennsylvania steel mills for many years to come.

  THE INTENSITY OF THE HOMESTEAD CRISIS was unsettling to anyone mindful of the precarious state of labor-industrial relations in America, although it’s probably fair to say no one responded more dramatically than two young anarchists, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Goldman, born in Russia in 1869, had emigrated in 1886 to live with relatives in Rochester, New York; like many young intellectuals of her generation, she had been enraged by the Haymarket trial and executions. Acting on her deepening political commitment, she left a youthful marriage and came to New York City in 1889, ingratiating herself with the Lower East Side anarchist milieu dominated by men like Johann Most and Justus Schwab. She first encountered the peculiar and excitable Berkman, a young Lithuanian Jew, wolfing down his dinner in a bohemian café. Both Goldman and Berkman became adherents of Most; Goldman briefly was his sexual partner and Berkman worked in Most’s publishing business. Like their mentor, they were intrigued with the idea of the attentat, the violent “propaganda by deed” of anarchist philosophy.

  Poring over news accounts of the Homestead lockout and strike, they were outraged by Carnegie’s heavy-handed actions. One worker’s pregnant wife, they were horrified to learn, had been evicted from her house by sheriff’s deputies and left in the street. They resolved to go to Homestead at once to aid the workers in confronting so diabolical a creature as the Carnegie Company and its badge-wearing minions. They would compose an anarchist manifesto for the Homestead strikers, for while they saw in the Amalgamated’s resistance an inspiring “awakening” of anticapitalist fervor, it seemed a “blind rebellion,” one lacking “conscious revolutionary purpose.” In their view, “anarchism alone” could shape discontent into meaningful insurrectionary expression. “The dissemination of our ideas among the proletariat at Homestead,” Berkman later wrote, “would illumine the great struggle, help to clarify the issues, and point the way to complete ultimate emancipation.”13

  Before the two could advance their plans, however, news reached New York of the terrible battle that had taken place at Homestead with the Pinkertons. “We were stunned,” Goldman would recall. “We saw at once that the time for our manifesto had passed. Words had lost their meaning in the face of the innocent blood spilled on the banks of the Monongahela.” Berkman’s fervency was transformed immediately from the aim of educating the workers to exacting revenge on Henry Clay Frick. “Frick is the responsible factor in this crime,” he decided, “[and] must be made to stand the consequences.”

  With Goldman agreeing that “a blow aimed at Frick would re-echo in the poorest hovel” and show the world “the proletariat of America had its avengers,”14 the couple hatched a scheme to murder the villain. Frick would be killed, and Berkman, while fully expecting to be executed for his crime, would use the opportunity of his trial to denounce the Carnegie dynasty and defend the anarchist cause. Goldman insisted she be taken along because as a woman she might have an easier time getting close to Frick without raising suspicion, but Berkman argued there was no use in two people sacrificing themselves in an attentat when one would suffice, and that her skills as a public speaker made it important she remain free to be able to defend and explain the purpose of the deed.

  Planning an act of revolutionary terrorism, they soon discovered, did not come as easily as revolutionary thought. Having chosen a time bomb as the best way to kill Frick, Berkman purchased the raw materials and assembled it based on information contained in Most’s guidebook, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare. A friend led him to an abandoned field on Staten Island where he could test the homemade device; but after several hours of trials, an exasperated Berkman returned to Manhattan to tell Goldman he couldn’t get the gadget to detonate. They had wasted $40 on a nonexploding bomb.

  Goldman, meanwhile, having exhausted the generosity of friends who could loan her money to pay Berkman’s train fare to Pittsburgh and other expenses, decided that if he was willing to give his life for the cause, she would not be above selling her body to raise the needed funds. Putting aside her spectacles and usual modest garb
, she outfitted herself in a gauzy dress and makeup and joined the streetwalkers on Fourteenth Street. After a long while she managed to attract the attentions of an elderly man-about-town. He took her to a nearby saloon and bought her a beer, but soon sensed Goldman’s nervousness and lack of expertise. After eliciting from her the fact that she was a novice, he handed her $10 and advised her to go home.15

  Berkman soon left New York, a portrait of Frick clipped from a newspaper in his wallet so he would know his victim on sight. Riding west alone, gazing from the window of the train and musing on the role history had allotted him, he reminded himself that “the removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist … and what could be higher in life than to be a true revolutionist? It is to be a man, a complete MAN.”16

  On July 23 the “complete man” was in the reception area of Frick’s office on the second floor of the Chronicle-Telegraph Building on Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue, fingering the inexpensive pistol in his pocket. According to the New York Times account, Berkman may have attempted to see Frick at least once before, showing a secretary a phony business card bearing the name “Simon Bachman,” an “employment agent” seeking to know if Carnegie needed assistance arranging for replacement workers at Homestead, but had been turned away.

  Now, as on the previous occasions, Berkman was told by a porter that the boss was unavailable, but this time the assassin caught a glimpse of Frick in an adjoining room. Brushing past the porter, he ran inside and “with a quick motion I [drew] the revolver,” he later recalled. “As I raise[d] the weapon, I [saw] Frick clutch with both hands the arm of the chair, and attempt to rise. I [aimed] at his head…. With a look of horror he quickly avert[ed] his face, as I pull[ed] the trigger.”17 Berkman managed to fire three times at the startled executive, striking him twice in the neck, before being tackled by Carnegie vice president John G. A. Leishman, who had been in the room consulting with Frick. A crew of carpenters working nearby also responded to the gunshots and helped subdue the assassin, although during the struggle Berkman managed to break free and stab Frick. Despite his multiple wounds, Frick dragged himself to his desk chair, where he sat immobile as police swarmed into the building. “Don’t shoot!” Frick is said to have called to the arriving officers, who placed Berkman under arrest. “Leave him to the law, but raise his head and let me see his face.” Doctors were summoned who dressed Frick’s wounds and removed several bullet fragments from his neck.