Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  The United States Congress had also become involved. As early as May, the House Judiciary Committee had launched an investigation into the practices of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, fueled by complaints that the agency had been employed unlawfully by various railroad companies in strikebreaking practices. The investigation, carried out under the pretext that rail lines were involved in interstate commerce and delivery of the U.S. mail, was extended to Homestead when news of the riots reached Washington, and a subcommittee under the aegis of Representative William C. Oates, a seven-term Democrat from Alabama, began hearings in Pittsburgh on July 11, a day before the arrival of the militia.

  The first witness called was Frick, whose message to the subcommittee was resolute: “I can say with the greatest emphasis that under no circumstances will we have any further dealings with the Amalgamated Association as an organization. That is final.”

  The subcommittee heard as well from sheriff’s deputy Joseph Gray, who had accompanied the Pinkertons on the barges and who insisted that the workers on shore had precipitated the firing on the night in question. Gray’s contentions were supported by later testimony from William and Robert Pinkerton, as well as by Pinkerton commanders and employees on the barges themselves, including the unsuspecting student, John Holway.

  Arrayed against the company’s witnesses were Homestead town burgess John McLuckie, strikers’ advisory committee chairman Hugh O’Donnell, and union president William Weihe, as well as a number of strikers and citizens of Homestead, all of whom were certain that it was the men on the barges who had commenced the firing.

  The subcommittee completed its investigation in Pittsburgh and returned to Washington on July 15, where Chairman Oates, a former colonel in the Confederate Army, was quoted in press accounts as saying, “I think we got all the information possible. We got down to the bottom of the trouble. It will not take long to prepare the report.”

  He characterized Frick as “remarkably cunning” and union leaders as intelligent and capable, calling the workmen as a group “the most intelligent lot of manual workers I have ever seen.” The subcommittee had learned that the workmen earned anywhere between $1.00 and $1.50 a day for unskilled labor, to as much as $65 to $275 a month for the most demanding positions. Oates admitted, however, that he had been unable to pry from Frick or anyone else the actual cost to the company of making a ton of steel billets.

  Pressed to say how the matter would be resolved, Oates was equally vague. He did say that he feared that an attempt to introduce non-union workingmen to restart operations at Homestead would inevitably result in a fresh wave of bloodshed, “and a great deal of it.” But Oates, who would become the only congressman subsequently elected governor of his state, also suggested that the committee would likely conclude that the Homestead case was outside the scope of federal jurisdiction.

  Frick, meanwhile, had written Carnegie with his own summation of the investigation and its import: “Congressional inquiry ended. Business men and the impartial public without exception concede that we substantiated by good reasons our position.” He ended with a coded suggestion that the strikebound works would soon be back in operation, “Proper slowly tomorrow at Plunge,” he told Carnegie. He would start slowly, but start the Homestead works he would.

  Meantime, one of those dire rumors circulating in Homestead had proven true. On July 18, three Pittsburgh constables bearing arrest warrants for Hugh O’Donnell, John McLuckie, and five other union leaders on charges of murder were escorted through the streets of the town by two companies of militiamen. While General Snowden used binoculars to keep careful watch from his perch atop the nearby hill, the procession wound its way through the warren of streets below to the homes of the seven men. In every case they were stymied: the doors were locked and the windows shuttered.

  Tipped off by informants, all seven had left town, with O’Donnell said to be on his way to New York on union business. Evading the warrants was at best a temporary measure, however, designed to buy time and prepare something of a defense strategy.

  Late on the evening of July 18, McLuckie, swaggering drunk and full of brave declarations that it was nothing but a put-up job, surrendered himself to authorities and was hustled to the Allegheny County Jail. On the following day, constables returned to Homestead and issued subpoenas to forty persons expected to testify to McLuckie’s part in the riots.

  On July 20, McLuckie was released on $10,000 bail when the presiding judge stated that second-degree murder was likely the most serious charge that could be leveled against him. However, the judge made no secret of his essential reading of the matter to the assembled crowd of spectators. “The law makes every man guilty of rioting who stands idly by without any effort to suppress the disorder,” the court stated. “If the mob designs and commits murder, each man in it is guilty of murder.”

  Late that same evening, Hugh O’Donnell returned to Homestead from New York, accompanied by a representative of the national labor organization called the Knights of Labor. O’Donnell told reporters that he would travel to Pittsburgh on the following morning to turn himself in, along with three others of the accused.

  Two of the workers who would not be turning themselves in were Anthony Flaherty and James Flanagan. Both had fled the state, fearing that charges of first-degree murder would be leveled against them.

  The appearance of the Knights of Labor representative fueled speculation that O’Donnell’s trip to New York had been made to consult with political strategists for the Democratic Party and prepare for a national strike of sympathy by every major union in the country.

  Meanwhile, Carnegie, fearful of any renewed violence, counseled Frick to abandon the idea of bringing Homestead back on line immediately. “Your last cable received, in which you think that Plunge will be running again soon,” he wrote. “I wish I could share this view. You should announce that the works will not run this year. . . . Starting a few months sooner or later is nothing compared with starting with the right class of men. The only danger is that you may be tempted to start too soon. Nothing will cure the disease so thoroughly and give you peace in the future as a long stoppage now. I should be tempted, if in your place, to announce that the works will be closed . . . for the remainder of the year if the military departs and leaves an excited populace.”

  Frick seemed not to listen. Certainly he had no fears of any “excited populace,” whether or not the military stood guard. His reply of July 18 suggested that, in his mind, all difficulties at Homestead were not only behind them, but had almost never existed: “Looking back over the transactions of this month so far, or previous to that, I cannot see where we have made any serious blunders, or done anything that was not proper and right. . . . It will be of course our earnest effort to convict all of the men engaged in the riot and in law breaking . . . but it will all blow over before long, and when we do get started at our several works they will be all non-union, and if we treat the men as we always have done . . . it certainly will be a long while before we will have any more labor trouble.”

  In short order the company mailed notices to nearly all of the 3,800 employees at the Homestead works, informing them that they had until 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, July 21, to reapply for employment at the mill. “It is our desire to retain in our service all of our old employes [sic] whose past record is satisfactory and who did not take part in the [riots],” the notice read. “Such of our old employes as do not apply by the time above named will be considered as having no desire to re-enter our employment.” The document was signed by H. C. Frick, chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company.

  A reporter for the Associated Press toured the Homestead mill on July 19 and reported that about 150 men were at work. Four of the furnaces in the area given over to the manufacture of armor plating had been fired up and fires were still being tended in the open-hearth furnaces that had been relit earlier.

  Company secretary Lovejoy was quoted in a New York Times story on that same day as predicting a break in the ranks
of the union within a week. “There is no doubt of the existence of a large conservative element among the locked-out men,” Lovejoy said. “When one moves, others will follow like sheep.”

  Frick was himself hard at work, preparing for any contingency that might prevent the immediate return of the Homestead works to operation. In a letter to one of his associates, he pondered the wisdom of building fifty to one hundred houses as well as one or two large boardinghouses on mill property so that outside workers could more readily be enticed to come to work at the plant. Local press accounts claimed that cots and provisions sufficient to house four hundred men had been carried to the mill grounds. Large contingents of workmen were reported to be on the way to use those cots and foodstuffs: two hundred from Cincinnati, and hundreds more from Cleveland, Youngstown, even Chicago.

  Frick also had to contend with sympathy strikes on the part of workers at his Beaver Falls, Union Iron, and Duquesne works, where men walked out for a week. To Sheriff McCleary he sent yet another request for deputies, noting, “We are just in receipt of information that a crowd, aggregating probably 150, are congregated about the entrance of our works at Duquesne, intercepting workmen and preventing them from going to work.”

  Frick’s concerns did not end with the strikes and the strikers themselves. When he learned that in the battle’s aftermath the Munhall postmaster had boasted to a reporter, “We cleared the Pinkertons out,” Frick dashed off a telegram to the U.S. postmaster general demanding an investigation into the Munhall postal chief’s fitness for office.

  If the postmaster demurred, it did not keep Frick from pursuing other means of “handling” the situation. Dismayed at the arrival of more than one hundred press correspondents in the strike’s aftermath, Frick did what he could to court the coverage of papers more likely to favor the company’s position. He was certainly partial to the New York Times, which used the terms “strikers” and “rioters” interchangeably, and which disparaged the local press in one lengthy article that claimed the advisory committee bullied local writers into conforming to the union view of the situation. Frick, annoyed at the unfettered access that all reporters seemed to enjoy at the Homestead works, took the time to write to a colleague at the offices of the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad, asking that all nonemployees be prohibited from using the railroad’s supply tracks that led into the mill grounds.

  Meanwhile, dissension was growing within the ranks of the strikers. Hugh O’Donnell, perhaps overwhelmed by his encounter with General Snowden at what was now known as “Camp Sam Black,” and by the prospect of facing murder charges, had begun to talk of an “almost unconditional surrender” in the face of daunting odds. Though O’Donnell’s stated aims were to put the men of Homestead back to work, his apparent willingness to accept a settlement on company terms was anathema to men who had been willing to risk their lives in defense of the union’s position.

  According to a story carried in the Pittsburgh Post, O’Donnell went so far as to meet with two reporters, F. D. Madeira of the New York Recorder and J. Hampton Moore of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and authorize them to approach plant superintendent Potter to find out under what terms the striking workers might return to their jobs. According to the Post account, Potter received the two in a cordial fashion and said that, apart from “certain objectionable strife makers,” the company was prepared to take back any man. Even some of those “strife makers” might be welcomed back, Potter suggested, if the charges against them proved to be unfounded.

  Furthermore, Potter said, while the company would under no circumstances recognize or deal with representatives of any union or association, a man was free to join any organization he wished. Meanwhile, any man who wished to return to work would simply have to sign an agreement that fixed the initial floor of iron billets at twenty-three dollars, with the terms to be renegotiated on December 31 of the following year.

  The relative bonhomie with which the proposal was outlined could not obscure the fact that Potter was simply repeating what Frick had already laid out so bluntly: a twenty-three-dollar floor for wages, a wintertime anniversary date for the agreement, and, most significant, the end of the AAISW as a bargaining entity within Carnegie Steel forevermore.

  While a downcast O’Donnell tried to sell his men on this dreary prospect, Henry Frick went on with his preparations to reopen Homestead one way or another, and Andrew Carnegie continued to stew in his Highlands retreat, no longer so sure that he’d placed his trust in a “management genius” after all.

  How long the stalemate might have continued at Homestead is a matter of conjecture. But then the Russian assassin arrived upon the scene.

  19

  ANARCHY IN PITTSBURGH

  IT IS NEARLY 2:00 P.M. ON SATURDAY, July 23, 1892, a typically smoky and ash-strewn afternoon in downtown Pittsburgh, for Saturday constitutes no break in the everlasting work week, and the stacks of the various industries that line the banks of the Allegheny and the Monongahela and the Ohio pump their effluent into the confines of the high-walled valley with the indifference of a thousand domesticated dragons.

  In the Fifth Avenue building where the operations of Carnegie Steel and the Frick Coke Company are housed sits Henry Frick, engaged at this moment in a conversation with Carnegie Company vice-president John G. Leishman. Hearing a sound at the door behind him, Frick turns from the conference table with some annoyance at the interruption, to find a man he had dismissed from his offices only a day or two before.

  Though the man has earlier represented himself as Simon Bachman, employment agent, he is neither employment agent, reporter, striker, officer of law, nor business confidant. He is in fact one Alexander Berkman, age twenty-five, and he has come all the way from Worcester, Massachusetts—where he has lived with the radical social reformer Emma Goldman—on an urgent errand, the true nature of which can scarcely be announced. . . . But wait, let us now turn to the words of this unexpected man himself:

  The door of Frick’s private office, to the left of the reception-room, swings open as the colored attendant emerges, and I catch a flitting glimpse of a black-bearded, well knit figure at a table in the back of the room.

  “Mistah Frick is engaged. He can’t see you now, sah,” the Negro says, handing back my card.

  I take the pasteboard, return it to my case, and walk slowly out of the reception-room. But quickly retracing my steps, I pass through the gate separating the clerks from the visitors, and brushing the astounded attendant aside, I step into the office on the left, and find myself facing Frick.

  For an instant the sunlight, streaming through the windows, dazzles me. I discern two men at the further end of the long table.

  “Fr—,” I begin. The look of terror on his face strikes me speechless. It is the dread of the conscious presence of death. “He understands,” it flashes through my mind. With a quick motion I draw the revolver. As I raise the weapon, I see Frick clutch with both hands the arm of the chair, and attempt to rise. I aim at his head. “Perhaps he wears armor,” I reflect. With a look of horror he quickly averts his face, as I pull the trigger. There is a flash, and the high-ceilinged room reverberates as with the booming of cannon. I hear a sharp, piercing cry, and see Frick on his knees, his head against the arm of the chair. I feel calm and possessed, intent upon every movement of the man. He is lying head and shoulders under the large armchair, without sound or motion. “Dead?” I wonder. I must make sure.

  FRICK WAS NOT YET DEAD, as it turned out. As Berkman describes it, he advanced upon the prone Frick, who roused himself and began to crawl weakly toward the door. “Murder!” Frick cried. “Help.”

  Berkman raised his pistol and aimed it between Frick’s shoulder blades. Again he pulled the trigger, but as he did, the hand of Leishman struck Berkman’s arm and the second shot went astray.

  Berkman and Leishman struggled, but Berkman gained the upper hand. By now Frick was cowering behind his chair, with Berkman just inches away. He pointed the pistol at a spot between Frick’
s eyes and pulled the trigger again. There was a dull click, but no explosion came.

  Berkman stared at his pistol in disbelief. Frick’s eyes rose to something over Berkman’s shoulder. Berkman would have shot again, but felt a rush of air, then a thunderous crack as a hammer, wielded by a company carpenter, drove into the back of his head. The man who would have killed Henry Clay Frick slumped unconscious to the floor.

  OTHERS WHO WITNESSED THE INCIDENT described it somewhat differently. James Bridge reported in his 1903 Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company that Berkman’s first shot had grazed Frick’s ear and lodged in his neck. The second shot, said Bridge—by the time of his writing a confidant of Frick—did not miss, in fact, but had entered Frick’s neck as well.

  When this failed to dispatch his quarry, Bridge said, Berkman pulled out a dagger fashioned from a steel file and began to stab Frick, first in the hip, then in the side, and a third time just below the knee. According to Bridge’s account, Frick shrugged off his injuries and threw himself upon the would-be assassin, holding his knife hand down until frightened clerks and assistants finally came to their superior’s aid. As Frick steadied himself on the edge of his desk, the others dragged Berkman into a chair, where he seemed to be mumbling incoherently.

  A deputy sheriff rushed into the room at that point, his revolver drawn as if he were ready to shoot Berkman on the spot. According to Bridge, Frick lunged forward. “No, don’t kill him,” Frick cried.

  He stumbled forward. “Raise his head and let me see his face.”