Carnegie

by Peter Krass

  That night the Hungarians did not mass, their drunkenness dissipated, their energy and anger spent. Relieved, Frick cabled Carnegie that all was quiet.35

  For the moment, Schwab had regained control, and, by the end of 1891, he had his men beating twenty-four-hour production records at E.T. and rival mills. He did so by taking his best men, putting one in charge of each department, and setting them against one another like roosters in a cockfight. Any such esprit de corps was nonexistent at Homestead, however, where men like Hugh O’Donnell, who had pulled dead comrades from molten steel, harbored venomous resentment toward Superintendent Potter and other Carnegie managers. The Homestead men’s disgust with the Carnegie Company’s callous attitude toward wages, hours, and accidents was not limited to a group of Hungarians, but had taken root throughout all departments and ethnic groups and was growing like a beast gorging itself, building toward an explosive climax.

  Notes

  1. Warren, p. 54.

  2. Henry C. Frick to AC, February 4, 1899, quoted in Warren, p. 54.

  3. Henry C. Frick to AC, August 9, 1889, quoted in Warren, p. 54.

  4. AC to Henry C. Frick, September 3, 1889, quoted in Warren, p. 55.

  5. Henry C. Frick to AC, January 2, 1890, quoted in Warren, p. 61; Henry C. Frick to Jay Morse, April 24, 1890, quoted in Warren, p. 61.

  6. Henry C. Frick to AC, July 14, 1891, quoted in Warren, p. 62.

  7. AC to William L. Abbott, September 7, 1889, ACLOC, vol. 10.

  8. AC to William L. Abbott, August 13, 1888, ACLOC, vol. 10.

  9. AC to William L. Abbott, March 20, 1889, ACLOC, vol. 10.

  10. Quoted in Krause, pp. 231–232.

  11. Bridge, p. 199.

  12. Gage, p. 157.

  13. See David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968) for details.

  14. AC to William L. Abbott, n.d. (early July 1889), ACLOC, vol. 10.

  15. See Ingham, pp. 132–133, and Fitch, pp. 119–121, for good documentation of the 1889 Homestead strike; see also National Labor Tribune, June 15, July 13 and 15, 1889.

  16. National Labor Tribune, September 17, 1889.

  17. AC to Louise Carnegie, September 26, 1889, quoted in Hendrick and Henderson, p. 138.

  18. Captain Jones Manuscript, n.d., ACLOC, vol. 243.

  19. Quoted in Bridge, pp. 105–106.

  20. See Gage, pp. 158–159, for the Jones family version.

  21. AC to J. G. A. Leishman, August 1, 1895, ACLOC, vol. 35.

  22. Henry Phipps to AC, November 1, 1889, quoted in Bridge, p. 294.

  23. AC to William Gladstone, November 24, 1890, ACLOC, vol. 11.

  24. Charles Schwab to Henry C. Frick, October 20, 1890, quoted in Warren, pp. 68–69.

  25. See Dennis Diaries, ACLOC, vol. 10.

  26. New York Tribune, May 14, 1890.

  27. Burrows and Wallace, pp. 1074–1075; Elkhonon Yoffe, editor, and Lidya Yoffe, translator from Russian, Tchaikovsky in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 111.

  28. Secretary of the New York Botanical Garden to AC, May 25, 1891, ACLOC, vol. 12.

  29. Charles Schwab to Henry C. Frick, January 1, 1891, quoted in Warren, p. 71.

  30. Henry C. Frick to Charles Schwab, January 1, quoted in Warren, p. 71.

  31. Charles Schwab to Henry C. Frick, January 1, 1891, quoted in Warren, p. 72.

  32. Henry C. Frick to AC, January 1, 1891, quoted in Warren, pp. 69–71.

  33. Henry C. Frick to James Gayley, January 2, 1891, quoted in Warren, p. 72.

  34. Henry C. Frick to AC, January 2, 1891, quoted in Warren, p. 69.

  35. Henry C. Frick to AC, January 3 1891, quoted in Warren, p. 69.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Homestead Tragedy

  The year 1892 started pleasantly enough. Carnegie, Louise, and a party that included the president of the New York Chamber of Commerce, Charles Smith, made a monthlong tour of California and Mexico by private railcars. Planning the mid-February to mid-March trip himself, Carnegie relied on his railroad friends to accommodate his private train clear from New York to San Francisco, with George Pullman personally handling Carnegie’s travel on the Southern Pacific.1 Not having lost his appetite for adventure, Carnegie looked forward to San Francisco, a city founded by the Spanish in 1776, but later shaped by business tycoons like Leland Stanford. Its ports, controlling trade from Panama to Alaska, were set in the Bay, a beautiful expanse of water cuddled by the low red hills.

  Here, the Carnegies took in the mansions of Nob Hill, dined with millionaires who made their fortune in mining, and made forays into the wine country where the dry, cool climate agreed with the Scotsman. They visited the Beringer Brothers winery, from whom the temperance-minded Carnegie ordered twenty-five gallons of brandy and four cases of white wine. Then it was to northern Mexico and the Baja Peninsula, where it seemed there were as many policemen as churches under the regime of dictator Porfirio Diaz. Louise and he were enchanted by the primitive scenery, the lunar landscapes, the rugged peaks, the copper cliffs plunging into the sea, and the surf crashing into romantic coves. The denigrated Indian population was invisible, however.

  Back in Pittsburgh, Frick was pushing to consolidate the various companies and mills under one organization to realize greater efficiencies. The orchestration was simple: the Carnegie Steel Company, its nucleus being Edgar Thomson, would purchase all the other operations, except Frick Coke.2 Frick was to be chairman and the fallen Abbott shown the door; Charlie Schwab would remain general superintendent of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works and Furnaces, John A. Potter general superintendent of Homestead, and Thomas Morrison superintendent of Duquesne. The capital of the new organization would be an even $25 million, with Carnegie holding $13,833,333.33; Phipps, $2,750,000; Frick, $2,750,000; and Dod, $1,000,000. Nineteen other company men (including John Vandevort) held stakes ranging from $28,000 to $500,000. Carnegie still controlled with an iron fist armored with 55 percent, but at least Frick, who had been permitted to purchase the interest belonging to David Stewart, who had died in 1889, could take comfort that his share had increased to 11 percent, putting him on equal footing with Phipps. Carnegie and Frick planned for the reorganization to take effect on July 1, the day after the company’s contract expired with the Amalgamated men at Homestead and the day Carnegie expected to have a new agreement in place.

  Winning wage cuts, as usual, were going to be vital because Carnegie anticipated a business downturn while a relentless price war with Illinois Steel continued. The price of the steel billets made at Homestead had plunged from $36 a ton in December 1889 to $23 in March 1892. Also of grave concern, the union had become a major obstacle to efficiency as far as Carnegie and Frick were concerned. The Amalgamated insisted on having a certain amount of skilled men in particular departments, more than were necessary, adding to costs and infuriating the chieftains. And there was the Amalgamated’s Memorandum of Agreement for the Homestead Works, which included fifty-eight pages of “footnotes” with rules of work for the union men. Not surprisingly, union leaders wielded their power at times just for the sake of it by making unfounded grievances.3

  The two men held meetings at Carnegie’s Fifty-first Street home and focused on three goals to be accomplished in the Amalgamated negotiations: the tonnage wage rate had to be reduced to take into account increased productivity realized through new machinery; the minimum base the men could earn had to be lowered to reflect the depressed market; and the new contract had to terminate on December 31, not June 30. The wage reduction Carnegie sought amounted to about 15 percent, according to him, while the Amalgamated representatives insisted it was close to 18 percent.4 Regardless of the math, of the 3,800 Homestead employees, 800 were Amalgamated members, and of those only 325 would be affected by the new scale. These skilled workers were mostly Irish, Welsh, English, and German; the common laborers predominantly Hungarians, Italians, and Poles. Such a small number of men would be affected, men the common laborers were indifferent to, that
Carnegie anticipated no problems in forcing the new scale on them.

  The Amalgamated, which had reached its apex of power with over twenty-four thousand members, had also been making plans, plans stumbled upon by A. C. Buell, a government inspector at Homestead’s armor mill.5 When an Amalgamated member, J. W. Allen, posing as a reporter from the United Press, tried to elicit information from Buell about government armor contracts to use in the upcoming negotiations with Carnegie, Buell recognized him, but didn’t let on, and then reported their subsequent conversation to a fellow Navy Department official. Allen told him that the mill men knew there was “a bonanza in armor contracts” and wanted their share of it. “There was much more of the same sort,” Buell reported, “but the upshot of the whole was an impression that a great strike is impending in the steel industries. I considered the information I got from Mr. Allen valuable. In fact, it afforded me the first real insight into the workings of the Amalgamated Associations that I have ever enjoyed.” He also noted that Mr. Allen was quite sober.6

  The Homestead men weren’t fools; they knew the government’s armor contracts meant big money, and they wanted a share of the booty. They were also tired of hearing about jobs lost to new machinery, about wage cuts due to higher productivity. They were tired of the surrounding squalor. They were tired of hearing about Carnegie’s great benefactions and tours of Europe. In fact, confident the Homestead negotiations would conclude satisfactorily with Frick in charge instead of Abbott, Carnegie had already made plans for his annual sojourn to Scotland. Louise and he were to sail on April 13, stay at Coworth Park, a lovely estate in southern England, and then head for Scotland.

  As Carnegie’s departure date approached, Frick left his pregnant wife and their plush Homewood residence for yet another meeting at Carnegie’s home in New York. As a soft spring light filtered through the windows, they tackled the prickly issue of how to handle a strike if, in the unlikely case, the men walked out. Carnegie was in favor of shutting down the works and letting the men vote on the new scale by secret ballot as they had done at Edgar Thomson in 1888.7 Back then the union had been expelled from the works and the same result, he concluded, could be had at Homestead.

  The more he mulled over the power the Amalgamated wielded, the more convinced he was that the union had to be vanquished. Therefore, to support Frick’s impending hard-knuckled negotiations, Carnegie drafted a memo signed by himself to be posted if necessary. In complete opposition to his righteous 1886 labor essay proclaiming the right of men to organize, he now declared Homestead must run nonunion: “This action is not taken in any spirit of hostility to labor organizations, but every man will see that the firm cannot run Union and Non-union. It must be either one or the other.”8 The inconsistent Carnegie wanted consistency; it was a solid argument. Not only was the Amalgamated a hindrance to efficiency, he reasoned, but it wasn’t a true union because it admitted only a small group of skilled workers. It was in its own way an elitist, discriminatory organization that was not worthy of the Republic.

  During the crossing to Britain, Carnegie decided the memorandum was too self-condemning, however, and so, fearing for his already tainted reputation as a progressive employer, he gave Frick revised instructions. Instead, he was to post a sign stating that with “a consolidation having taken place, we must introduce the same system in our works; we do not care whether a man belongs to as many Unions or organizations as he chooses, but he must conform to the system in our other works.” This system, of course, was nonunion. So a man could belong to a union as long as it wasn’t related to Carnegie’s steelworks—some good that would do. He concluded his note to Frick by stating, “We are with you to the end.”9 It was mere Carnegie rhetoric, but a haunting conclusion to the letter as it forewarned of a fight. If tragedy struck, Carnegie might not be so quick to stand by Frick and regret those words.

  With just a month to go before the current agreement expired on June 30, Frick offered a slightly better wage scale and advised Superintendent Potter to tell his men, “We do not care whether a man belongs to a union or not, nor do we wish to interfere. He may belong to as many unions or organizations as he chooses, but we think our employees at Homestead Steel Works would fare much better working under the system in vogue at Edgar Thomson and Duquesne.”10 Carnegie and Frick were waffling over recognizing the union, when a decisive position was required.

  At the same time Frick was offering his fabricated olive branch, he ordered the construction of a three-mile-long fence along the Homestead perimeter. Spaced at regular intervals were portholes five to six inches in diameter, allegedly for lookouts but suitable for putting a rifle through. Barbed wire was strung across the top, and the rumor in town was that it could be charged with electricity at moment’s notice. Within the compound, platforms were built and equipped with searchlights. The Homestead men were surprised by the conversion of the works into a very military-looking, turreted complex and quickly dubbed it Fort Frick. Clearly, Frick’s words didn’t jive with his actions, as he appeared to be preparing for an extended lockout that he apparently expected to turn violent. Tension mounted not just between the union men and Carnegie management, but between all the men coming to work inside the “Fort” and management.

  Such an aggressive posture was hard to explain. If only 325 men were to be affected by the new wage scale, why was Frick apparently picking a fight with all 3,800 men? Because he feared another Hungarian rampage like the one at Edgar Thomson. Also spooking Frick was a three-month strike in 1881 that had wreaked havoc in the coalfields. Armed mobs committed arson and murder, blew up mines, and destroyed machinery. In all, seven strikers were killed in gun battles with deputy sheriffs.11 Influencing his preparations the most was the report from Buell that the men were planning to strike. Yes, Frick expected violence.

  Yet, while he prepared for an extended battle, a cocksure Frick, planning to visit Carnegie in Scotland that summer, expected a swift conclusion to any hostilities. So did Carnegie, who, surmising and advising, penned his second letter in three days to Frick: “Of course, you will be asked to confer [with the Amalgamated], and I know you will decline all conferences, as you have taken your stand and have nothing more to say. . . . Of course you will win, and win easier than you suppose, owing to the present condition of markets.” He also ordered Potter to tell the men that if they didn’t accept the new wage scale, Homestead would run nonunion.12 The next week, he reiterated that the Homestead men must be made to understand that if they didn’t accept the new wage scale, it meant “Non-Union forever.”13 His position was beginning to harden against the union, but Carnegie and Frick’s overconfidence and bravado masked what they were really feeling: uncertainty as to how the union men would react to the ultimatum. The uncertainty was evident in the two men’s wavering over whether to recognize the union and in the conflicting message sent during negotiations; that is, the offering of small wage concessions while building a stockade fence. It was not like Carnegie, nor like Frick, to be tentative, but Homestead had had a violent tradition of labor strife from day one, and across the nation, guns were settling more and more labor disputes.

  (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania)

  One week before the Homestead contract expired, Carnegie departed Coworth Park for Aberdeen, Scotland, where he was to dedicate a library and receive the city’s Freedom, the festivities to be held July 5 and 6.14 Then it would be on to Sir Robert Menzies’ Rannoch Lodge, a picturesque country home on Loch Rannoch in the Highlands, where the Carnegies were to spend the summer while Cluny was being refurbished. That same day Frick met with the Amalgamated’s national president, William Weihe, and a committee of some twenty-five Homestead men led by Hugh O’Donnell. Frick had promised and Carnegie expected that the two sides would no longer confer, but again demonstrating uncertainty, Frick had decided to meet with the enemy. For his part, Frick conceded $1 in per ton wages for billets, offering $23 as a minimum versus $22, but the Amalgamated wouldn’t accept anything les
s than $24, leaving Frick to advise Carnegie, “We are now preparing for a struggle.”15 Those preparations included Frick hiring a force of three hundred Pinkertons—considered capital’s assassins—to protect the company’s property.16 He instructed the Pinkertons to be prepared, equipped, and assembled on July 5 in Pittsburgh, from where they would boat to the Homestead works.

  The union also prepared for a fight and created an Advisory Committee of forty men to direct their battle. The committee set up headquarters in a three-story brick building in Homestead proper, a conspicuous American flag hanging over the dirt street, and two men assumed prominent roles: Hugh O’Donnell, who was elected chairman of the committee, and Homestead mayor John McLuckie. A skilled worker making $144 per month, O’Donnell had seen his share of death in the mill and was ready to make a stand against the greedy capitalists. He had short, cropped hair combed straight back and a walrus mustache, the style of the day; he was a thin, hollow-cheeked, plain-looking fellow, except for his large, round eyes, which were all the more intense as they debated the situation. McLuckie, also a skilled worker, was more hot-blooded than O’Donnell, although one wouldn’t know it by looking at him. He had slicked dark hair, parted just left of center, a soft face with a curtailed handlebar mustache, and oval glasses that gave him a studious air.