by Peter Krass
After the Advisory Committee was created, the union men hung Frick and Potter in effigy, amid much jeering as a mob psychology began to take hold. The company retaliated by shutting down the works on June 28, two days before the contract expired. In light of Frick’s blockade fence, and the hiring of Pinkertons, the union men realized it was 1889 all over again— war—inducing O’Donnell and McLuckie to issue a brazen declaration: “The committee has, after mature deliberation, decided to organize their forces on a truly military basis.” The document all but guaranteed bloodshed. The four thousand men were divided into three divisions, or watches, to guard against strikebreakers. They posted sentries at all mill entrances, set up a spy network extending to Pittsburgh, and chartered a steamboat to patrol the Monongahela. “In addition to all this, there will be held in reserve a force of 800 Slavs and Hungarians,” the committee declared. “The brigade of foreigners will be under the command of two Hungarians and two interpreters.”17 Considering the ill-feelings between the skilled and unskilled workers, between the Anglo-Saxons and the Huns, it was a point of interest that the unskilled workers were just as eager to join the imminent fight. That the entire workforce had united was unexpected; Carnegie and Frick had hoped the war would be limited to the union men.
As O’Donnell and the union men anticipated, the company was advertising in newspapers in Boston, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, among other cities, for strikebreakers. If Carnegie didn’t already know about it, news of the labor recruiting must have reached him—the man who six years earlier had pledged to take no man’s job—for he had good friends in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh to pass along information. Now acting decisively, on July 4, Frick, who wanted to restart the works as soon as possible, officially requested the Allegheny County sheriff to protect the property. Expecting the sheriff to prove himself useless (which he did), Frick also moved ahead with bringing in the Pinkerton men, on the same day reporting to Carnegie: “We expect to land our guards or watchmen in our property at Homestead without much trouble, and this once accomplished we are, we think, in good position. . . . We shall, of course, keep within the law, and do nothing that is not entirely legal.”18 They were not Pinkerton detectives, not mercenaries, not assassins to Frick, at least not when writing to Carnegie; they were guards or watchmen, a term all company officials were careful to use again and again. On this Independence Day, did Carnegie remotely recall his November 12, 1855, letter to Dod, in which he hoped to never be found upholding oppression in any form? The building tension within the borough of Homestead was obvious as groups of men and women huddled on street corners to gossip, to speculate what the next day would bring.
A grinning Carnegie, his white beard trimmed and decked out in a tailored black dress coat, a white waistcoat, and black, straight trousers, with patent leather button boots on his feet and a silk top hat perched on his head, was looking quite regal when he presented the library to Aberdeen and received the city’s Freedom, akin to the American tradition of receiving the key to the city, on July 5. Louise stood next to him proudly, she, too, in a black tailored jacket and a waistcoat, but with a bustle-supported skirt and a hat trimmed with ribbons and feathers. About the time the Carnegies were preparing for a second day of festivities on July 6, the three hundred Pinkerton guards, joined by Superintendent Potter and a deputy sheriff named Gray, boarded two customized barges at Bellevue, Pennsylvania, about five miles down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh.19 Their supplies included enough food to last several weeks and boxes of firearms—300 pistols and 250 rifles—which were not to be opened until the men were on mill grounds. The barges were to be pulled to Pittsburgh and then up the Monongahela to Homestead, where the guards would disembark and secure the steelworks.
Closely monitoring the activity, a spy cabled the union’s Homestead headquarters that the barges were on the move. At about 4 a.m., the flotilla was sighted about a mile below the mill. The Homestead men’s steamboat blasted a warning whistle and someone launched fireworks; flashing across the water and glowing in the river mist, hissing and exploding in the air, they made for a surreal scene. A crowd rushed to the river’s edge to greet the steamboat and the two enclosed barges, which looked much like the low-profile packet boat Carnegie had taken on the Erie Canal exactly forty-four years earlier; there was no deck and but a few portholes, allowing only a handful of Pinkertons to see what was happening. They witnessed ruddy-faced workmen in slouch hats or bowlers, frayed colored shirts and trousers held up with suspenders, and women in blouses and bustle-supported skirts carrying guns and babies, race along the railroad tracks that paralleled the river. Men, women, and children hurled insults and rocks at the Pinkertons, so spiffy in their banded slouch hats, white blouses, and dark blue trousers with navy stripes. Of course, O’Donnell and his lieutenants immediately lost control of the mob and gunshots were traded as the flotilla neared the Homestead wharf.
The riverbank crowd, suddenly realizing they had to beat the boat to the dock to prevent the Pinkerton guards from taking the property, ran ahead and broke through Frick’s stockade fence, which extended several feet into the water. They gathered on the bluff above the landing, a much better position than that of the Pinkerton men who were now trapped on their barges. Still, they attempted to establish a beachhead, and in the ensuing gunfight it appeared as though they would succeed, but the Homestead army rallied and pinned their quarry in the barges. Six Pinkerton guards were wounded and required treatment, so the tugboat, with Potter on board, left the barges for a dock downstream where the wounded could be put on a train for Pittsburgh. The cowardly Potter shouldn’t have abandoned the fight; instead, he should have remained to reason with the men.
As the early morning mist burned off, the challenge the Pinkertons faced fully revealed itself: a force now five thousand strong was entrenched in Fort Frick, a massive complex of looming mill buildings and smokestacks, stark against the sky. At 8 a.m., the Pinkertons again attempted to establish a beachhead only to be repulsed, although four Homestead men were killed. The cry of revenge ran through the crowd, and, between exchanges of gunfire, the Pinkertons watched horrified as the Homestead men diligently attempted to annihilate every last one of them. Completely succumbing to their thirst for blood, the workers sent a burning raft downriver, hoping it would crash into the barges and ignite them; but the fire went out before reaching the target. Next the men sent a railroad car loaded with burning barrels of oil at the barges; it stopped short. Undeterred, they pumped oil onto the surface of the river and then attempted to light the slick encircling the barges; it was lubricant oil and would not light. An old cannon was brought up; it kept firing high because it couldn’t be sighted downward any further. Dynamite, or “stuff” as the men called it, was the next weapon of choice. The feverish laborers hurled it onto the barge roofs, slowly blowing away sections, until they ran out of stuff. It was a comedy of errors, an entertaining show noir for the audience that had been arriving all morning from surrounding towns. A morbid carnival atmosphere prevailed. By late morning, two Pinkertons had been killed and they raised a white flag—it was ripped with bullets. Back at the union’s headquarters, telegrams of support were coming across the lines and the Homestead men realized they were fighting a much larger battle that represented all oppressed laborers.
Frick was kept fully apprised as each hour brought another horror. Later in the day, the company issued a statement that the workers had fired at the boats for a full twenty-five minutes before the watchmen returned a single shot. There was no mention by the company that those watchmen were Pinkerton guards. Meanwhile, the Allegheny County sheriff sent a number of urgent cables requesting help from the governor, who wired back that local authorities must exhaust all measures at their disposal, including deputizing enough citizens to handle the situation. No one was interested in tangling with the Homestead army, however.20
Later in the day, O’Donnell regained some control of the men and at 5 p.m. accepted the Pinkertons’ surrender. As the Hom
estead union men herded the Pinkertons, their uniforms disheveled and sweat-stained, through the mill, groups of workers, women, and children rushed forward to throw more insults and rocks, and the Pinkertons suddenly found themselves running a six-hundred-yard gauntlet. Cries went up to “kill the murderers” and the most upright citizens were said to have become a bloodthirsty pack of wolves, clubbing and stabbing the would-be guards—one of whom was clubbed to death. The Opera House proved the best temporary jail; the Pinkertons were held there until 12:30 a.m., when a transport train arrived. O’Donnell expected the sheriff to serve the Pinkerton men with arrest warrants for murder, but none were issued.
After surrendering, the Pinkerton guards were forced to run a six-hundred-yard gauntlet, during which they were attacked by men, women, and children.
After a restful night in the Haddo House hotel in Aberdeen, Carnegie could not comprehend what he awoke to. Newspaper headlines blared A DAY OF RIOTING: BLOODY WORK AT HOMESTEAD: TWENTY KILLED IN A BATTLE BETWEEN STRIKERS AND PINKERTON MEN. It was an international event, covered as diligently by the British press as by the American. Frantic, he wired Frick that he was willing to take the first steamer home. An excitable Scotsman was the last extra burden Frick wanted; his wife had just given birth to a son, Henry Clay Jr., prematurely, and the lives of both mother and child were in doubt. Frick cabled that the company was standing firm and Carnegie should remain in Scotland. If he returned, it would be seen as a sign of weakness, and now Frick, fearing for his wife and son and under duress, was determined to crush the union once and for all. Just before starting for Rannoch Lodge, Carnegie wired Frick: “All anxiety gone since you stand firm. Never employ one of these rioters. Let grass grow over works. Must not fail now.”21 His position was clear and yet it wasn’t: he didn’t want to employ any of the rioters, which could include every Homestead man; but he also didn’t want to bring in strikebreakers, preferring to let the works stand idle. The lack of definitive guidance left Frick to pursue his own means.
While Carnegie claimed all anxiety was gone, when an enterprising reporter tracked him down at Rannoch Lodge on July 8 and peppered him with questions, Carnegie became so agitated that Louise thought he was going to have a seizure and was forced to lead him away. The next day, a New York Herald reporter tried his luck. Carnegie, having realized he was facing a public relations disaster, made a statement in which he expressed some remorse, heartfelt or otherwise: “The strike is most deplorable, and the news of the disaster, which reached me at Aberdeen, grieved me more than I can tell you. It came on me like a thunderbolt in a clear sky. I must positively decline to enter into any discussion as to the merits or demerits of the case. All I will say is that the strike did not take place in the old Carnegie works, but the difficulty has been entirely in the recently acquired works.”22 The “recently acquired works,” however, had been under the Carnegie umbrella since 1883; and the strike was hardly an unexpected thunderbolt, considering Frick and he had been plotting strategy since the beginning of the year. The number of fatalities was the unfortunate surprise. One or two would have passed without notice as they had at Edgar Thomson during the Hungarian rampage, but as many as twenty dead? It was unthinkable.
On both sides of the Atlantic, radical proletarian papers were quick to fiercely condemn Carnegie, as did some of the mainstream publications. On the British side, the London Financial Observer opined: “Here we have this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through Scotland in a four-in-hand, opening public libraries and receiving the freedom of cities, while the wretched workmen who sweat themselves in order to supply him with the ways and means for this self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh.”23 And the ultraradical Star offered: “Mr. Carnegie, who is on this side of the water now, cannot of course be held directly responsible for yesterday’s tragedy; but his harsh treatment of his men makes him indirectly responsible, and any way it is a little odd that this enunciator of beautiful sentiments about the blessing of giving, and the rest of it, should be unable to carry on his business without such scenes as reported from Pittsburgh this morning.” Blackwood’s Magazine, a British periodical, didn’t find the violence surprising and blamed it on “the evil seed which has been so assiduously sown by Socialist agitators.”24 The magazine did not condemn Carnegie, considering him nothing more than a typical American employer.
On the American side, the St. Louis Post Dispatch cut a deep wound in Carnegie’s pride with an editorial that was widely reprinted:
Three months ago Andrew Carnegie was a man to be envied. Today he is an object of mingled pity and contempt. In the estimation of nine-tenths of the thinking people on both sides of the ocean he had not only given the lie to all his antecedents, but confessed himself a moral coward. One would naturally suppose that if he had a grain of consistency, not to say decency, in his composition, he would favor rather than oppose the organization of trades-unions among his own working people at Homestead. One would naturally suppose that if he had a grain of manhood, not to say courage, in his composition, he would at least have been willing to face the consequences of his inconsistency. But what does Carnegie do? Runs off to Scotland out of harm’s way to await the issue of the battle he was too pusillanimous to share. . . . America can well spare Mr. Carnegie. Ten thousand “Carnegie Public Libraries” would not compensate the country for the direct and indirect evils resulting from the Homestead lockout. Say what you will of Frick, he is a brave man. Say what you will of Carnegie, he is a coward. And gods and men hate cowards.25
There was widespread belief that a cowardly Carnegie had purposefully gone into hiding in Scotland, but that assessment was not quite fair. The plans had been made long ago. Frick knew where he was, and the British press tracked his movements. In other reactions, the Forum, in which Carnegie had published his enlightened labor essays, also came out hard against him, one of its authors decrying the work in the mills as tantamount to slavery; the Pittsburgh Leader kindly declared Carnegie’s progressive labor ideas expressed in 1886 to be as “extinct as a dodo”; and a handful of prominent men called him the arch snake of his age, demanding he be extradited for murder.26
As details came out in the press, Carnegie began to have his doubts about how Frick had handled the conflict, especially in hiring Pinkerton. The question observers would have to eventually answer about both Frick and Carnegie: was the tragedy a result of an error in judgment or malicious intent? One of Carnegie’s biggest concerns was who was in the legal right. If the Homestead men fired first, the Pinkertons, and thus Carnegie Steel, could claim self-defense and Carnegie could justify everything. But if a Pinkerton man shot first, then Carnegie Steel and Carnegie himself could easily be censured. That was how Carnegie’s mind worked: because he always considered himself highly evolved (as proven by his material progress) and on the moral high ground, he could justify any of his actions as being right as long as no law had been broken. Anxious to begin that process of justification, he cabled Frick, questioning who had shot first—a debate also carried by the newspapers.
“There is no question but that the firing was begun by the strikers,” Frick responded on July 11. “All that I have to regret is that our guards did not land, and, between ourselves, think that Potter was to blame. He did not show the nerve I expected he would. He was most anxious to accompany the guards to Homestead, but failed at the critical time.”27 Frick was a little too quick to drop the gunplay issue and shift the blame to Potter. Carnegie was not so convinced Frick’s account was truthful. Some of the newspapers were offering pretty clear details as to who shot first and at whom. “The first shot of the engagement came from the barge,” the New York Daily Tribune reported on July 7. “It was aimed at a big Hungarian who stood at water’s edge. The ball went wide of the human target, but it was the signal to the Pinkerton men to begin, and for a full ten minutes they continued to fire.” Before the congressional investigating committee that descended on Homestead, Deputy Sheriff Gray initially testified the first shot came from the shor
e, but under cross-examination he admitted shots were fired from the barges before a continuous volley from the shore. Testimony continued to differ, but one fact was certain: it was a Homestead man who was hit first.
Sensing Carnegie’s doubts as to the truth, Frick sent him a second letter on July 11, assuring him that once fully acquainted with the facts “you will be satisfied with every action taken in this lamentable matter. The best evidence of the character of the men employed at Homestead is shown by the manner in which they treated the watchmen after they had surrendered, and also, it would not have mattered who the men were that they were in those boats, their treatment would have been just the same. They did not know they were obtained through Pinkerton at the time they fired on them.”28 Again he deflected questions about the facts and pointed Carnegie to how the Homestead men treated the Pinkertons, suggesting the strikers were morally inferior and deserved no due consideration. To believe that the strikers, with their spy network, had no idea Pinkertons were in the barges, was nonsense; after all, a primary reason the Hungarians and the Slavs were so eager to join the Anglo-Saxons was to do battle with the hated Pinkerton men who had gunned down scores of their countrymen over the years. Again, both Carnegie and Frick were desperate to justify the killings.
A quiet tension settled over Homestead during the hot week following the battle, and the burning question was, what would Carnegie Steel do next? To begin, Frick and the sheriff finally convinced the governor to send the state militia to retake the works. On July 11, Homestead knew the troops were on the way, but as to when and where they would arrive was a highly guarded secret. Few slept easily that night. “Morning broke gray and somber,” the Harper’s Weekly correspondent wrote, “and still there was no news. A great red sun rising over the eastern hills was partially concealed by the mist that hung over the limpid waters of the Monongahela.”29 Within a few hours, the rhythmic rumbling of a train could be heard as eight thousand members of the militia arrived in ninety-five cars. The soldiers were impressive in their blue uniforms, guns and knapsacks slung over their shoulders, bayonets flashing, polished boots reflecting the sun as they marched in time, followed by horse-drawn artillery. McLuckie strode down to the tracks to meet them, but he was brushed aside. The townspeople meekly watched as the soldiers pitched their white tents on the side of a black hill overlooking the area and strategically positioned their cannons.