Apparently this put an end to any resistance, and the mechanics and laborers returned quietly to the plant to remove their tools. By 9:00 p.m. that evening, the Homestead works had ceased to operate.
Meanwhile, in messages to Carnegie, Frick was resolutely upbeat. “Homestead seems to be the center of attraction, and I do not think anything has been left undone toward securing for us a complete victory at that place. Doubtless by the time this reaches you it will be uninteresting, at least I trust so. . . . We shall, of course, keep within the law, and do nothing that is not entirely legal.”
It is hard to imagine, of course, that anyone involved in the matter would find it “uninteresting,” let alone Andrew Carnegie. By this time the national press had gotten involved, and on July 1 the New York World published an editorial cartoon bearing the legend “The Modern Baron With Ancient Methods.” The drawing depicted a likeness of Carnegie atop a set of castlelike battlements on which “Carnegie Steel Works” had been chiseled. In the cartoon, cannons protrude from firing ports in the battlement walls, and a steaming pot of melted pitch sits near Carnegie’s feet. In his hands, Carnegie holds a fire hose labeled “hot water,” while overhead a banner bearing the words “Protection Castle” flutters in a breeze that courses above a fence that is “electrified.”
The coverage was typical; in the national press, it was Carnegie who bore the brunt of responsibility, while the local press focused upon Frick and plant superintendent Potter.
On June 30, the local Post carried the headline IT IS A LOCKOUT, and reported that notices had been posted about the plant advising the 3,800 employees to report to the central office on Saturday, July 2, to pick up their final pay. The paper also reported that because the firm had officially declared a shutdown at midnight of June 29, several hours shy of the time that workers had voted to leave their posts, the work stoppage was officially termed a lockout and not a strike.
An editorial-styled sidebar suggested the mood of the surrounding populace: “An undivided sentiment exists, now that the firm has unmistakably shown its hostile attitude and determination to attempt an extermination of the Amalgamated. . . . All expectation of an amicable settlement seems to have vanished, and nothing is now thought of but preparation for the trial that seems bound to come. There is quiet in Homestead, it is true, but it is like the quiet of a town under military surveillance. It is impossible for a stranger to set foot in the town without his presence being noted right away.”
One reason strangers were suddenly conspicuous was the determined organization of the workers, who were keeping the river, the roads into the town, and activities within the plant grounds under constant observation. Whether there had been a leak of Frick’s communiqués to Pinkerton, or whether it was supposition based on his previous anti-labor tactics, the workers assumed that an attempt would be made to bring hired guards as well as strikebreaking labor into the plant.
Since the burgess, or mayor, of Homestead, John McLuckie, was a skilled worker and thus one of the strikers, there was little distinction between the town’s government—or its very population, for that matter—and the organizing body of the strike itself. The millworkers did meet, however, to elect one Hugh O’Donnell, a skilled roller, as the chairman of the strike’s advisory committee.
From the moment that the lockout commenced, observers were posted on all the bridges around Pittsburgh and on the banks of the Monongahela to sound the alarm at any suspicious movement toward the area. In an effort to keep matters under control, Mayor McLuckie ordered all the saloons of Homestead closed and saw to it that the effigies of Frick and Potter decorating the town’s telegraph poles were cut down.
Frick, meanwhile, had cabled Carnegie to let him know that outside help was on the way to protect their interests. Of the arrival of the Pinkerton guards, scheduled for July 6, he was once again reassuring to a fault: “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.” The plan was to land the men on the banks of company property abutting the Monongahela and quarter them on mill premises.
The Pinkertons were not the only outside forces that had been summoned. On July 1 the Pittsburgh Dispatch reported that a man named James McNeally, a former Pittsburgh police officer, made an appearance at the company offices on mill grounds, then left, making the mistake of walking through downtown Homestead on his way. Whether McNeally’s choice of routes was born of an ex-cop’s disdain or simple stupidity is hard to tell.
Whatever the case, in accordance with procedures that the union committee had agreed upon, a member of the surveillance team stopped McNeally and demanded to know his business. McNeally suggested that his questioner mind his own, not so delicately described, business.
That was all it took to bring a crowd of union associates who subdued McNeally and searched his pockets. One of the men found a billy club secreted in McNeally’s jacket, and asked McNeally if there was anything else they should know about. McNeally repeated the same answer he had offered to earlier questions put to him, and a more vigorous search ensued. This time one of the men in charge found a revolver in one of McNeally’s pockets, along with a letter he’d been carrying. McNeally was hauled off to the Homestead jail, where he was charged with carrying concealed weapons, a fact he did not contest.
More important, however, was the wording of the letter he’d been carrying. It had been written on Carnegie, Phipps stationery and was addressed to McNeally, “ex-Police Officer, Pittsburg, Pa.” “DEAR SIR,” it boldly began. “Please come up to my office tomorrow. Wish to see you. Yours truly, J. A. Potter, Superintendent.”
There was no need for workmen to question McNeally as to why he had been summoned. As a Homestead constable escorted McNeally to the Pittsburgh jail following his guilty plea, the pair heard sounds of a disturbance in the distance. The constable rounded a corner, then brought his prisoner to a sudden halt. Outside the downtown station was a crowd of more than a thousand, waiting for McNeally’s arrival. Exactly what the mob had in mind would never be known. The constable wisely made an about-face and hurried his frightened prisoner to an outlying station.
Meanwhile, disquieting word of yet another Frick tactic had begun to spread through the streets of Homestead. The Tide Coal Company in Allegheny City had been approached by a known associate of Frick’s to arrange for the retrofitting of a pair of barges—the Monongahela and the Iron Mountain—each 125 feet long by 25 feet wide.
One of the barges was being hastily converted into a floating dormitory, the other into a mess hall with dining tables and a food-preparation area. Though no specific use had been stipulated for the vessels, the Homestead residents had little doubt that they would end up tethered at the wharf on plant grounds and put into service for the scab labor and hired mercenaries said to be on the way.
The Amalgamated had taken the possibility of a “sea assault” into account, of course, and had pressed a number of private watercraft into service as patrol boats up and down the Monongahela River. On the night of July 1, a New York World reporter was aboard one such craft, a steam-powered yacht called the Edna, along with Hugh O’Donnell, when three sharp blasts sounded from the whistle of the new Homestead power plant.
When O’Donnell and his crew responded to the alarm, they got the news from an exhausted but wild-eyed worker who had just rowed himself across the quarter-mile-wide river from Rankin to the Union Hall in Homestead: the Baltimore & Ohio evening express, due in Rankin in less than twenty minutes, was reported to be loaded with nonunion strikebreakers. In seconds, O’Donnell and his crew were back on board the Edna, steaming across the river, followed by crowds of workers in every skiff and rowboat that could be commandeered.
Well before the whistle of the express had sounded its approach, more than a thousand strikers had surrounded the B&O station. The scene resembled an ambush waiting to happen.
“Don’t be looking for a battle,” O’Donnell told the World repo
rter. “Every man knows the watchword: ‘hands down.’ No pistols or clubs or stones,” he said. “We will simply surround these strangers, whether they be ‘black sheep,’ workmen or Pinkerton detectives and very gently but very firmly push them away from this locality. If they are content to move in the direction of Pittsburg, well and good. If they choose to resist they may be forced to the river bank. We have flat boats there, which such people may cast themselves adrift in, if they don’t listen to reason.”
While the reporter gazed about at the quiet but determined faces of the massed men, wondering if in fact reason could prevail under such circumstances, the mighty B&O steam engine hissed to a stop down the tracks. O’Donnell and a knot of his closest advisers stepped forward on the platform beneath the startled gaze of the engineer and his wary crew. When the train’s conductor clambered down from the forward car, O’Donnell was quick to assure the nervous man that he meant no trouble. He simply wanted to talk to the men on board before they made any move to disembark in Rankin.
The conductor stared back at O’Donnell, bewildered. Why would a thousand tense steelworkers be surrounding his train, he wondered. And what men did O’Donnell want so badly to talk to? Aside from a few families and businessmen bound for Pittsburgh, there was hardly a soul on board the express.
O’Donnell turned to his men with a questioning look, but a quick search of the cars proved the conductor right. A false alarm, then. The workers melted back into the night.
THOUGH THAT PARTICULAR EVENT had proved an empty threat, the question that remained in O’Donnell’s mind was not “if” but “when.” By the following day, July 2, even the New York Times was reporting that the company would attempt to land as many as three hundred “mechanics” on company grounds, in order that “necessary repairs” be made.
No one in Homestead was buying such hogwash concerning “mechanics,” however, and O’Donnell had taken extraordinary care to be sure the strikers were not taken by surprise, readying his men like any battlefield commander. As he outlined the measures in a speech, “The Committee has, after mature deliberation, decided to organize their forces on a truly military basis. The force of four thousand men has been divided into three divisions or watches,” with each division responsible for an eight-hour surveillance shift.
Each division was headed by a “commander,” who in turn supervised eight “captains.” “During their hours of duty,” O’Donnell explained, “these Captains will have personal charge of the most important posts: the river front, the water gates and pumps, the railway stations, and the main gates of the plant. The girdle of pickets will file reports to the main headquarters every half hour, and . . . the plan is that in ten minutes’ time the Committee can communicate with the men at any given point within a radius of five miles.”
O’Donnell explained the makeup of a special ancillary group: “In addition to all this, there will be held in reserve a force of eight hundred Slavs and Hungarians. The brigade of foreigners will be under the command of two Hungarians and two interpreters.” This was a telling coda, pointing to one of the divisions in the ranks of workers that had traditionally bedeviled labor organization within the mills. Most of the unskilled workers at Homestead, as elsewhere, tended to be recently arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom did not even speak English.
To many of the “Huns,” the concept of labor organization was unfathomable, and even the lowest wages and scales promised an opportunity to live in circumstances far superior to those left behind in an impoverished European homeland. The interests of such a man, happy to be making $1.50 a day, were hardly the same as those of skilled workers and tonnage men who might earn ten times as much, seasoned workers who had seen how quickly they could be thrown out of work when the price of steel dropped.
Given their druthers, many of the unskilled workers might have chosen to work on at Homestead, but as they quickly learned, that was not an option. In the end, whatever their feelings, almost all of the nearly four thousand workers at Homestead would take an active role in the strike.
Meanwhile, the ramifications of the unrest at Homestead had not gone unnoticed at the highest levels of government. News reports placed Pennsylvania Republican committee chairman Chris Magee in a series of meetings with President Benjamin Harrison on the matter, and it was understood that Harrison had given Magee an unequivocal message to deliver to Carnegie and Frick: patch up the trouble at all hazards. If not, they were to understand, Harrison would undertake a serious review of all federal patronage earmarked for Pennsylvania.
If Frick got Harrison’s message, he seemed to pay it no mind. On the morning of July 2, striking workers saw that two of the open-hearth furnaces inside the Homestead works had been lit. When word reached O’Donnell, he quickly fired off a letter to assistant plant superintendent E. F. Wood asking that the furnaces be shut down immediately. “There is a great number of men who, on account of its being pay day, cannot be held in check,” O’Donnell advised. “If the gas is not turned off we cannot be responsible for any act that may be committed.”
As agitation grew among the pickets outside the plant gates, plant watchmen took it upon themselves to allow a group of workers inside to extinguish the fires. Soon after, another group of workers, realizing that materials already loaded inside the furnaces would be ruined if the heating process was disrupted, reentered the plant and lit the furnaces again. It was a series of events that led several papers covering the strike to suggest that the mill was being better cared for by the strikers than by the company itself.
At the same time, however, the secretary of the newly formed Carnegie Steel Company, Francis Lovejoy, issued a statement carried in the New York Times and elsewhere that as of July 2 the Homestead Mill would be operated as a non-union plant and that “no expense is to be spared to gain this point.” Lovejoy went on to say that the mills at Homestead “have been closed for repairs, and will remain closed for two or three weeks. About the 15th or 20th of July, it will be published and posted that any of our old employees may return to work and must make application by a certain day as individuals. All who do not apply by the time stipulated will be considered not to desire to work, and their places will be filled by new men.”
In the Times, Lovejoy predicted that “it will be easy to get new men into the mills, for one of the Vanderbilt [rail] lines passes directly through the property and the men can easily be set down there.” Then followed the company’s often-repeated refrain: “Only 280 of the 3,800 men employed in the Homestead Mills are affected by the new scales. . . . But so strong is the loyalty of the men to their organization that nearly all of the employees have decided to fight. . . . hereafter we will have nothing to do with trade organizations.”
The union’s response was equally forceful. O’Donnell claimed that while the new agreement initially applied only to a relatively small group of workers, the intention of the company was to cut wages across the board, anywhere from 20 percent to 60 percent. Just as clearly, he argued, the intention all along had been to abolish the AAISW’s right to bargain at Homestead so that wages and working conditions could be set by the company without the need to negotiate. As a result, the union would “fight to the end.”
On Sunday, July 3, Homestead mayor John McLuckie told a reporter for the New York World, “We do not propose that Andrew Carnegie’s representatives shall bulldoze us. We have our homes in this town, we have our churches here, our societies and our cemeteries. . . . They never have imported a man into Homestead, and by [damn] they never will. We shall not permit it.”
McLuckie went on to testify that the struggles of Homestead workers had attracted the support of many outside the Monongahela Valley: “Andrew Carnegie may beat us in this struggle, but if he does he beats himself. These mills have large contracts for architectural ironwork to be used in the World’s Fair buildings at Chicago. . . . Last Monday the Illinois Central Trades Assembly, which represents sixty thousand workmen, passed resolutions that not a single beam
of timber of non-union workmanship should enter these buildings.”
McLuckie concluded by holding out hope that a coalition of outside forces, including the governor of the state, might yet carry the day. “We have a united people,” he declared, “and I think that we can keep those mills idle till Mr. Carnegie’s representatives decide to put us to work again.”
On that same Sunday, Reverend J. J. McIlyar of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Homestead delivered a stinging sermon that made dire predictions should someone not see the light. “A suppressed volcano exists among American workmen,” McIlyar said, “and someday there will be an uprising that will become history. The question is often asked, what would Homestead be without the mills? Why not ask, where would Andrew Carnegie be without the millions he has made from his mills? . . . Capitalists should remember that men do not sell their self-respect when they sell their labor.”
DESPITE ALL THE PLEAS and rhetoric, a coded cable that arrived in Carnegie’s London office on the morning of Monday, July 4, suggested how the matter would actually play out: CARNEGIE, MORGAN, LONDON, the message was headed. SMALL POND PONY PLUNGE REPAIRING POND PONY CHOKE WATCHMAN ARRIVE PLUNGE MORNING BOARD. EARLY.
The sender of the coded message was Henry Clay Frick. A second message, this one addressed to Robert A. Pinkerton of New York City, offered unmistakable clues as to the news he had actually conveyed to his majority stockholder across the sea.
“My Dear Sir,” it began. “I am just in receipt of your favor of the 3rd. In reply would say, that we have all our arrangements perfected to receive your men at Ashtabula [in faraway northern Ohio, on the rail line between New York and Cleveland], and to conduct them to Bellevue Station, a few miles below this City of the Ohio River, where they will be transferred to two boats and two barges [the Monongahela and the Iron Mountain].”
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