While Carnegie would in the years to come do his best to disavow all that took place during the “contest” at Homestead, one finds it hard to imagine marching orders more clearly worded: “We all approve of anything you do. . . .” Frick would have worn something of a smile as he folded that letter into his breast pocket.
11
THE WAGONS CIRCLE
WORKERS AND RESIDENTS of the surrounding community of Homestead were already bracing themselves for what was to come. In May, Frick had called in workmen to begin the construction of a tall fence of solid wood, topped by strands of barbed wire and running for three miles around the perimeter of the sprawling, 600-acre mill grounds.
By June the fence, strategically placed observation towers, and other security emplacements had been completed, inspiring workers to refer to the property as “Fort Frick.” As an article in the Pittsburgh Post described it, “The great fences that surround the mill are stronger than any fences one ordinarily sees. They are in reality massive board walls, and strung along the top are two wicked rows of jagged barbed wire. At each of the gates immense fire plugs have also been placed with an enormous water pressure in each. In all of the dark places and exposed portions of the mills are lights of 2,000 candle power each, which have been placed, so that when the strike commences, in the words of the Bible, ‘there will be no night there.’ ”
The Post went on to describe the preparations as tantamount to a declaration of war: “The bridge over the railroad tracks which connects the old city farm grounds . . . and the mill enclosure has not been considered conspicuous enough by the firm, hence they have placed in it an arc light which will reveal the presence of anyone who would try to cross it at night. Port holes with ugly mouths grimly look out upon the peaceful valley from the mill, fort, barricade, stockade, or whatever the Carnegie plant at Homestead could be called to-day, and silently bear witnesses that they are there, not for the peaceful purposes of steel manufacture, but for struggle and fight.”
By this time, it seemed, all pretense of a peaceful settlement of the differences at Homestead had vanished. But if Frick was expecting a fight, he evidently thought it would be a short one. On June 2 he wrote Carnegie, “I note that you have taken a place in Scotland. Have no doubt it is a very fine one and I might take a notion to run over for a short time in the latter part of August, say 30 day trip if everything should be going all right.”
To customers of Carnegie Steel, he alluded to possible slowdowns in delivery, but in markedly casual terms. To one he wrote, “The mill is going to be all right, but it takes time to break in the men and get things to work smoothly,” and to another associate he said, “[The] expiration of the scale, July 1st, and the preparation being made by us to enforce a new scale if necessary, has made the men somewhat careless. So that the product of the mill is not what it should be. We will overcome all this, however, in a short time.”
Whether he would be successful was an open question, however, at least in the press. The matter had national implications, for even Frick understood that any major embarrassment to the Republican Party as the champion of steel and other manufacturing tariffs could prove a significant factor in the upcoming presidential elections. It is entirely possible that such thinking led him to purposefully drive matters with the Amalgamated to an impasse so that he could then blame labor for any hostilities that erupted. The alternative was to “give in” to the demands of labor and lend the Democrats support for charges that big business had been shortchanging labor all along.
Whether Frick had such a devious plan in mind or not is impossible to ascertain, especially since he maintained the appearance of serious negotiations with the Amalgamated until the eleventh hour. The union, now sixty thousand strong, had held its annual national meeting—its seventeenth—in Pittsburgh early in June, where it was made clear that whatever happened at Homestead would have a momentous impact on the future of the organization. “[The Amalgamated] is beyond question the most powerful independent labor organization in the world,” wrote the Pittsburgh Post on June 7, the opening day of the meeting, “and every movement of the manufacturers seems to confirm the belief long held that they aim at its destruction in the coming conflict.”
At one point in the proceedings, nearly three thousand men crowded into the Eighth Avenue Opera House in Homestead to hear the town burgess, or mayor, John McLuckie, an AAISW member, express his concerns and his sense of betrayal. As quoted in the Pittsburgh Post, McLuckie, a $2.25-a-day employee in the Homestead converter department, had this to say: “The cause of this wage trouble is not generally understood. We were persuaded to vote the Republican ticket four years ago that our wages might be maintained. As soon as the election was over a widespread feeling on the part of manufacturers toward the reduction of wages was exhibited over the land. . . . You men who voted the Republican ticket voted for high tariff and you get high fences, Pinkerton detectives, thugs, and militia.”
As one delegate to the convention put it in the National Labor Tribune, “[N]ever has there been such a crisis before the organization, as the present. . . . The Carnegie Company have wiped out organization in the Edgar Thomson works at Braddock . . . under the management of Mr. Frick they have wiped out organization in the coke regions, and if they make up their minds to wipe it out at Homestead, who shall say them nay?”
Certainly officials of the Amalgamated, both local and national, were saying “nay.” On June 21, three days before the deadline that Frick had set for a union response to the company’s proposal, the Amalgamated called for a meeting. On June 23, Frick convened with national president William Weihe—described by one contemporary chronicler of the strike as “six and a half feet of sound sense, a brawny colossus quite free from pretense”—along with twenty-five local union representatives. At this gathering, Frick offered his compromise: the company would agree to an increase in the floor of steel prices from twenty-two dollars to twenty-three dollars. But the men were adamant at twenty-four dollars and the meeting broke up before there could be any serious discussion of the actual tonnage rates or of the anniversary date for establishing steel prices.
The impasse over a difference of a mere dollar seems to many of us now, as it did then, a tragedy. Surely this minor impediment could have been removed to avert an all-out war. But to workers, the difference of a dollar was a smokescreen that obscured other, equally important issues.
The anniversary date, for example, was more significant than it seemed. In addition to the likelihood that steel prices would be lower when construction was at low ebb, other factors would favor ownership. With less work available, where would unhappy workers go if they did not like what was handed them? And while winter meant no added expense to manufacturers, workmen incurred the extra expenses of heating fuel, warm clothing, and even groceries, which in winter could not be supplemented with homegrown vegetables.
Following the collapse of talks on June 23, some men held out faint hope that there would be another scolding letter from across the Atlantic, in which Carnegie would direct his underling to give in to workers’ demands. But despite the fact that Frick had cabled Carnegie on the failure of the meeting—“While harmonious it did not result in anything. . . . We are now preparing for a struggle. . . . Have ordered one of the Lucy furnaces blown out at once . . . we will have no more conferences with them”—no reply was forthcoming from the Scottish Highlands.
The June 24 deadline came and went, and on the morning of the 25th Frick posted notices at Homestead announcing that managers of the company would henceforth deal only with individual workmen. In the company’s eyes, the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers no longer existed.
Tensions at the plant and in the nearby town were escalating, to say the least. The Homestead Local News reported a fight between James Gibson, a steelworker, and John Caddy, a watchman for the Pittsburgh, Virginia, & Charleston Railroad lines that ran through a break in Frick’s newly built fence to service the Homestead works. When Gibson attempted to
enter the mill grounds by walking along the tracks, Caddy ordered him to stop and a tussle ensued, one “in which Gibson was getting the best of the fight, when Yardmaster James Dovey ran in and caught Gibson, whether to separate the combatants or to hold Gibson while Caddy assaulted him, as some say he did, is not known, but while Gibson was in this disadvantageous position, Watchman Caddy belabored him severely with a club.”
The News reported that an outraged crowd then pursued watchman Caddy, who fled down the railroad tracks toward the nearby town. Both the watchman and the yardmaster were arrested for assault, with the latter quickly bailed out by Homestead’s superintendent, John Potter.
Another incident, reported in the June 28 issue of the Pittsburgh Post, suggested that Frick’s warning of secrecy to Pinkerton had not been well heeded. The Post story said that strangers thought to be Pinkerton men, as well as several believed to be agents of the Coal and Iron police used to break the coke field strikes, had been spotted “lounging about” Homestead. According to the Post, “A committee of men was at once appointed to look up the strangers. The two men were found in a saloon. The workmen walked up to them and demanded their business.
“ ‘Oh, we are only here looking around. We have a little private business to attend to,’ said one of the men.
“ ‘You are only looking around, are you?’ queried Carney, one of the committee. ‘Well, the best thing you can do is to get out and do your looking around from some other seaport. . . .’
“ ‘I know you,’ broke in another member of the committee, ‘I saw you both several years ago. I worked at Joliet then, and you watched the mills there during the strike. Get out.’ ”
One can imagine the effects of such a confrontation inside a local tavern where every stare had turned as hard as the stuff the patrons made each day. According to the Post, the two strangers were given half an hour to get out of town, but “did not consume one-half that time in reaching a train.”
The Post went on to report that word had been received that “at least 300 Pinkertons and members of the Coal and Iron police will be here Thursday next. It is believed that if trouble ensues here, the company will order down all the men who served as policemen during the coke strike and that a few Pinkertons will be added.”
Another Post story reported that one M. P. Maverek, a workman suspected of having turned informant for Superintendent Potter in exchange for a raise in pay from $1.75 a day to $2.50, had turned up at a union rally, asking to speak so that he might clear his name. He was snatched up by a burly mechanic who reiterated the men’s suspicions of him. Maverek protested that if he had actually done the things he was accused of, he would want to be killed. “You won’t want long,” someone in the crowd shouted back. “You are just the kind of fellow that will be killed.” According to the Post, the rising passions of the crowd suggested that Maverek was about to get what he had asked for, when police arrived to break up the disturbance.
Another account in the local press suggested that in addition to Pinkertons and turncoats, local workmen had yet another type of interloper to deal with. It was reported that a stranger had approached a Homestead millworker on the streets on June 28, asking directions to a place where he might find comfortable lodging and decent food. The stranger explained that he was newly arrived in town to begin a new job on July 1. When the millworker asked the man where he was going to be working, the stranger pointed over the shoulder of his interrogator toward the Homestead works.
It was enough to prompt the millworker to invite several of his associates to hear a retelling of these plans, whereupon the crowd grabbed the stunned man and ran with him toward the banks of the Monongahela, where he feared he was about to be drowned. Instead, they tossed the scab into a skiff bound for the Pittsburgh side of the river, with a warning never to return.
By this time, workers in Homestead understood there was no hope of reprieve. With Master Carnegie gone to ground in his Scottish retreat, spies planted in their midst, scabs already summoned from distant points, and three hundred mercenary Pinkertons and Coal Field Police on the way to Homestead, there would be no peaceful settlement. As the headline in the Post blared: IT LOOKS LIKE WAR.
12
A FINISH FIGHT
IF FRICK HAD BEEN COUNTING on the element of surprise, his efforts had failed. The community saw what was coming, and began to prepare its own battle plans. At one point during those last tense days of June, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post overheard a group of tonnage men discussing the use of balloons that could be used to drop bombs directly into the mill. One of the workers described the stakes in simple terms: “My job means my life, and any fellow that takes my job tries to take my life and then his won’t be safe.”
Frick, meanwhile, was attempting to portray the company’s position in terms the American public would find favorable, sending copies of articles lauding the Homestead works to the company’s publicity agent as well as to several Pennsylvania newspapers. One such piece, published in the Pittsburgh Times in early June of 1892, noted the growing production at the works of armor plating for ships (the company had produced the plates for the ill-fated battleship Maine, the explosion of which, in 1898, would trigger the Spanish-American War), and described the work in terms that evoke something of the immensity and odd grandeur of the steelmaking process:
“When the steel is ready, the open hearth furnaces are tapped, and streams of molten steel run into the mold and the ingot is made. The weight varies from 20 to 100 tons. It is then . . . taken from the metal mold while still hot and is transferred on a special car to the press shop. This car has a capacity of 150 tons, five times that of the average freight car. At the press shop, two large cranes that could lift an ordinary house take this mountain of metal and put it in a furnace where it is heated . . . and is carried to the Armor rolling mill . . . a mill so vast that mere figures are powerless to convey a full appreciation of its size.”
Mere figures may indeed be “powerless,” for what contemporary reader’s brain has not gone blank at times when trying to comprehend the number of pixels per inch in a high-definition television screen, or the number of terabytes of data amassed by the leading online search engine? Still, perhaps we can grasp the magnitude of the steelmaking enterprise by contemplating a few old-fashioned numbers:
A cubic foot of steel weighs more than 600 pounds, and, given that there are about 120 cubic feet of steel in an ingot, the typical mass moving down the line weighs more than thirty tons (a military Humvee or a typical pyramid stone tips the scales at about two and a half tons). The rollers flatten that mass into a slab of whatever thickness is called for, and that slab is in turn trundled to the press shop, where its ragged ends are cut off by a hydraulic press with a pressure of 2,500 tons. As the Press story noted, that monster would “shear a plate of steel six inches or a foot thick as quickly as a hungry tramp will cut a tenderloin steak.”
The piece goes on to describe the endless array of machines and support services necessary to keep such an enterprise functioning. “Nineteen locomotives of all sizes are required to handle the traffic. . . . The blacksmith shop . . . keeps 25 men busy. . . . The open hearth furnaces require 32 skilled melters, one for each furnace for each shift.”
Toward the end of this tour, the reporter tosses off one final, telling observation: “It must not be forgotten that this mill never stops except a few hours on Sunday.” Unlike lumber milling, coal mining, rock quarrying, rail building, canal excavation, or any other exhausting, mind-numbing, and potentially life-threatening undertaking, halting the process of steelmaking entirely was not a matter of choice. Once lit, the furnaces would burn forever, or until the furnace was no longer fit for duty. It was far too expensive to allow the fires to die and then relight them. In that way, the fires were more precious than the machinery within which they burned.
In many respects, then, the Homestead mill was a self-contained organism, and, if one accepted the view of the Times writer, a thriving one at that. “F
urther removed from the mill are eight handsome residences built for the operative managers, and a handsome club-house for the accommodation of guests and officers. The firm has also erected 40 other houses for their better class workmen.
“All the 3,500 employees appear contented,” the piece concludes. “From a little village a few years ago, Homestead has grown to a borough of nearly 12,000 inhabitants, chiefly supported by the great Homestead Steel Works.”
If the residents of Homestead had ever supported the view of their employer as “great,” things had certainly changed. Effigies of plant superintendent Potter and of Frick were now hanging from the town’s telegraph posts, and the Amalgamated had taken possession of a newly laid railroad loading platform to prevent its use for discharging carloads of replacement labor. AAISW officials were reported as promising, however, that “no rioting will be countenanced and that every measure and discipline will be used to insure its utter suppression.”
While most speakers at union rallies pleaded with members to stay sober and avoid raucous behavior, one worker interviewed by the Pittsburgh Post said, “I have but one life to lose, and that is already far spent, but I am willing to sacrifice it for my little home.”
On the evening of June 29, after a delegation of AAISW members gathered outside the main gates of the Homestead mill and appealed to the non-unionized mechanics and laborers to honor the stoppage, the strike formally commenced. “What if we don’t want to come out,” one of the laborers was reported by the Pittsburgh Times as saying. “Come out anyway, or if you don’t you’ll have to be a rapid runner,” was the reply.
Meet You in Hell Page 13