with him at both ends. By the 1890s British liberals, pushed by the rise of a politicized labor movement, were coming to grips with the consequences of the manhood suffrage principle that stood at the root of Carnegie’s own Chartist-inspired political faith. For all his forward-looking projections, Carnegie himself could not quite make the move of many of his British contemporaries towards a New Liberalism for the industrial age. Rather, with his simple faith in democracy-equals-opportunity-for-all shattered by labor conflict, he turned to the bromides of international peace and reconciliation as an alternate site of idealization. In Carnegie’s case, however, the democratic ideal effectively stopped at the factory gate.
Even as many contemporaries (not to mention latter-day historians) on both sides of the Atlantic criticized and second-guessed Carnegie for his actions in 1892, there has been decidedly less second-guessing of organized labor’s decision-making there—and for good reason. Basically, both contemporaries and historians see little that the AAISW and its allies could have done to avert the disaster that befell it once Carnegie and his minions determined to operate non-union. Aside from the strategic opening to a less-skilled workforce enhanced by the shift to open-hearth steelmaking, Carnegie could play two decisive political cards in the Homestead showdown. Each of them, moreover, would figure repeatedly in defining a “weak-labor” American exceptionalist path for the next forty years.
The first was the employer’s ability to summon police power to put down a workers’ uprising and proceed, behind the security curtain, to restart production with a non-union workforce including a corps of strikebreakers imported from outside the local community. The sway of Carnegie and Frick over Democratic governor Robert Pattison and county Republican boss Christopher Magee proved critical in the governor’s decision to dispatch 8,500 National Guard troops to Homestead, thereby displacing effective control over events heretofore exercised by Burgess McLuckie and a disciplined strike Advisory Committee headed by steelworker Hugh O’Donnell. As O’Donnell immediately acknowledged following the governor’s decision, “We can’t fight the state of Pennsylvania, and even if we could, we cannot fight the United States government.” 36 Once the militia, bivouacked on company property and prepared to reopen the works at the company’s bidding, intervened, the confrontation was over.
It is worth noting that unlike many other American industrial disputes, Homestead was not a case of a fatally divided or poorly led workforce. Though hierarchies of skill, ethnicity (especially Old Immigrant versus East European), and race (African Americans in significant numbers first arrived at Homestead only in the aftermath of the 1892 strike) certainly existed within both the union and local community, a remarkable cross-ethnic (and cross-gender) solidarity had held up throughout the siege. Yet, everything changed with the arrival of the militia. Chicago’s Arbeiter-Zeitung compared the situation unfavorably to Bismarck’s threatened use of force against the Ruhr miners. As a self-identified “Homesteader” rhetorically asked in its German-language pages, “What is the difference between the state’s soldiers and the Pinkertons?” 37
The second (and often concurrent) resort of employers for help from the state was to the courts. In this case, Carnegie Steel’s chief counsel, Philander C. Knox, who would later serve the federal government as attorney general and secretary of state, proved a zealous litigant. As historian Paul Krause summarizes, “many of the Homestead workers, unable to raise sufficient funds for bail, were incarcerated for extended periods, and a number of those who had helped lead the sympathy strike at Duquesne also received prison sentences.” In a more controversial move, Knox collaborated with Chief Justice Edward Paxson of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to charge thirty-three members of the Advisory Committee with no less than a charge of treason, based on a Civil War-era statute aimed at discouraging those who would attack the state. Though the treason indictments were ultimately withdrawn, the union’s resources and a good bit of its public legitimacy had been shattered by the legal onslaught. 38
The degree to which the “political” landscape mattered at Homestead (and other big industrial centers) in the Long Gilded Age is perhaps best suggested by the outcomes once that landscape changed in the 1930s. The political maturation of the steel region’s immigrant working-class utterly changed the odds. When the CIO Steel Workers Organizing Committee opened its campaign in July 1936, the state police escorted their chief, lieutenant governor and UMWA secretary-treasurer Thomas Kennedy, into Homestead to be the main speaker, and “filtered through the crowd as insurance against interference by company-dominated municipal police.” 39 Before long, mighty U.S. Steel (heir to the Carnegie empire) would come to terms with the union. This was the New Deal alliance between the Democratic Party and organized labor in action.
Given what we know now about the circumstances of the 1890s, could any acts on the workers’ part have turned the tide at Homestead in a more favorable direction? It is unlikely. At a funeral service for one victim of the July 6 battle with the Pinkertons, local Methodist minister J. J. McIlyar insisted that “arbitration” might have resolved the dispute, but instead violence was “brought about by one man [Frick], who is less respected by the laboring people than any other employer in the country.” 40 The one pressure point that is perhaps more visible in retrospect than to contemporaries was the ambivalence of Carnegie himself. He visibly suffered, though more in Britain than in the United States, for the loss of reputation among liberal-radical circles that had proved an important point of his political identity. Had Homestead workers (and/or other American labor leaders) at the time appealed directly to the likes of Keir Hardie or John Burns—or even William Gladstone—to intervene with their friend Carnegie, might they have bought time for a process of conciliation to which Rev. McIlyar appealed?
To posit international solidarity action on the part of a grassroots movement in the 1890s, of course, risks conviction for historical anachronism. It is true that across the industrial lands of Euro-America, one looks hard for examples that Homestead or other steelworkers could have been expected to copy with any positive effect. Decades earlier, it is true, the abolitionist movement had operated across borders in safekeeping runaway slaves, but the lesson there for the labor movement would have involved a major imaginative leap. 41 If one looked beyond landed to maritime occupations, however, there was indeed a serious move afoot to harness the power of workers operating across national boundaries. Out of necessity (due to the recruitment of their workmates across national boundaries), seafarer and dockworker unions, who formed the core of the British “New Unionist” upsurge of the late 1880s and 1890s, were experimenting with transnational actions: as early as 1896 they would create a pan-European organization and by 1911 carry off a partially successful trans-Atlantic strike. 42 Whether workers outside the incipient seafarer-dockworker alliance took notice of such pioneering attempts at labor internationalism is an un-researched question. One thing seems certain. Left to their own resources, the strikers’ fate—without an apparent way to turn “Homestead” into a national or even international issue—was sealed.
Next to Carnegie, perhaps no industrialist is more associated with the combustibility of the Gilded Age than George Pullman. Like Carnegie’s Homestead, Pullman’s giant sleeping-car factory rose from bare farmland almost overnight. From 1881 to 1884 the town of Pullman grew from a population of 4 to 8,513. 43 Unlike Carnegie’s steel plants and almost every other American industrial setting, however, the rise of Pullman town was also stamped with a vision of company-planned social order and harmony. Just as famously, that “paternal” vision blew up in the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894. In a nutshell, when the company (along with the general economy) entered a profound slump in 1893 and Pullman drastically slashed wages without cutting rents of his tenants, his workers, newly organized into the fledgling American Railway Union (ARU), struck and soon secured the support of ARU president Eugene V. Debs for a nationwide boycott of trains bearing Pullman cars. When every move to uncouple sleeping cars led to the dismissal of the offending workers, the ARU called out all its members and allies on the offending railroad lines. The stage was thus set for a massive confrontation between the union and the nation’s railroad owners united under the General Managers’ Association. Alas for the workers, the railroads received immediate support in squashing the strike from the federal
