Homestead Lockout

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Homestead Lockout

Synopsis

Besides being one of the most violent episodes in American labor history, the importance of the Homestead lockout derives from two factors: the fame of the men who ran Carnegie Steel and the effect that it had on the Amalgamated Association, thought to be the strongest union of its day. In early 1892 the Carnegie Steel Company built a fence around its Homestead, Pennsylvania, mill. When its contract with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers expired on 29 June 1892, Carnegie Steel management locked out the 3,800 employees who worked there. On the morning of 6 July, two barges carrying 300 Pinkerton agents sailed up the Monongahela River toward Homestead to protect the new nonunion workers whom Carnegie Steel planned to hire to return the mill to operation. Tipped off about their arrival, a mob met the barges and started a gun battle that lasted all day. Ten people died in the fighting, including three detectives and seven townspeople. After the Pinkertons surrendered, the crowd marched the survivors through the streets of Homestead, beating and kicking them. The agents escaped by rail that night under sheriff's custody.

On 10 July the governor of Pennsylvania called in 8,500 Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, who quickly restored order. This allowed management to bring in replacement workers. On 17 November 1892, 300 of the locked-out workers successfully reapplied for work at the mill on a nonunion basis. On 20 November the remaining union members voted to return to work.

Timeline

1872: The Crédit Mobilier affair, in which several officials in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant are accused of receiving stock in exchange for favors, is the first of many scandals that are to plague Grant's second term.
1877: In the face of uncertain results from the popular vote in the presidential election of 1876, the U.S. Electoral Commission awards the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes despite a slight popular majority for his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden. The election of 1876 will remain the most controversial in American history for the next 124 years, until overshadowed by the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.
1882: Agitation against English rule spreads throughout Ireland, culminating with the assassination of chief secretary for Ireland Lord Frederick Cavendish and permanent undersecretary Thomas Burke in Dublin's Phoenix Park. The leader of the nationalist movement is Charles Stewart Parnell, but the use of assassination and terrorism—which Parnell himself has disavowed—makes clear the fact that he does not control all nationalist groups.
1885: German engineer Karl Friedrich Benz builds the first true automobile.
1888: Serbian-born American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla develops a practical system for generating and transmitting alternating current (AC), which will ultimately—and after an extremely acrimonious battle—replace Thomas Edison's direct current (DC) in most homes and businesses.
1890: U.S. Congress passes the Sherman Antitrust Act, which in the years that follow will be used to break up large monopolies.
1891: French troops open fire on workers during a 1 May demonstration at Fourmies, where employees of the Sans Pareille factory are striking for an eight-hour workday. Nine people are killed—two of them children—and sixty more are injured.
1893: Henry Ford builds his first automobile.
1893: New Zealand is the first nation in the world to grant the vote to women.
1894: French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, is convicted of treason. Dreyfus will later be cleared of all charges, but the Dreyfus case illustrates—and exacerbates—the increasingly virulent anti-Semitism that pervades France.
1896: First modern Olympic Games are held in Athens.
1900: The first zeppelin is test-flown.

Event and Its Context

The man whose name and reputation will forever be linked with events at Homestead is Andrew Carnegie. Before he became the greatest philanthropist of his generation, Andrew Carnegie was a model for poor and middle-class Americans who wanted to move up in the world. Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835 to a master weaver and the daughter of a cobbler, Carnegie and his family immigrated to the United States in 1848 because of the difficulties that the rise of the English factory system created for his father's career. Because the senior Carnegie was unable to support the family in America, Andrew went to work in a series of menial jobs. While employed as a telegraph messenger, he caught the eye of Thomas Scott, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Impressed by Carnegie's work ethic, Scott gave him a new job with the railroad and helped him make successful investments in a number of different industries. Carnegie moved from investor to full-time steel magnate in 1863, and by 1892 Carnegie Steel was the largest steel producer in the world.

Although the Homestead lockout was a complete triumph for Carnegie Steel and entirely eliminated the union from its mills, it hurt Carnegie by damaging his popularity with ordinary Americans. In 1886 Carnegie had written two essays for Forum magazine that seemed to support trade unions. Often-quoted parts of these articles paint Carnegie as far more liberal on labor questions at that time than any of his business contemporaries. For instance, in "An Employer's View of the Labor Question," he wrote, "My experience has been that trade-unions, upon the whole are beneficial to both labor and capital." In "Results of the Labor Struggle," Carnegie explained, "There is an unwritten law among the best workmen: 'Thou shalt not take thy neighbor's job.' No wise employer will lightly lose his old employees." Industrialists never wrote this sort of thing in the late nineteenth century. The two Forum essays made Carnegie a hero to the working classes. After the violence, much of the public thought Carnegie a hypocrite.

Carnegie's views on labor were self-serving, however. He wrote the Forum essays at a time when he had an overwhelming technological advantage in the industry. At that time, it paid for him to recognize the Amalgamated Association because this ensured that he would not have to shut down production when his nonunion competitors faced strikes. Because his superior technology could produce steel at a substantially cheaper price than other firms, he could afford the high union wages that this strategy required. By 1892, however, this situation had changed drastically. Because Carnegie's nonunion competitors had caught up to him in steel-making technology, the entire industry faced depression caused by overproduction. To make matters worse, Carnegie Steel's competitors could now undersell him because they paid lower wages. This is why Carnegie determined that the union had to go, despite the words he had written six years earlier.

When the lockout began, Carnegie was at his castle in Scotland. The man in charge in Pennsylvania was his lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick. Frick began his career in the coal business. He organized the Henry Clay Frick Coke Company in 1871, and the business quickly grew, selling all the coal it could produce, mostly to the rapidly growing steel industry. By 1880 Frick dominated the coal industry in western Pennsylvania. When Carnegie decided that his firm should be vertically integrated so as to protect his supply of coal, he began to buy up stock in Frick's company. Although Carnegie controlled approximately 50 percent of Frick's firm by the mid-1880s, Frick continued to run it himself. In 1889 Carnegie brought in Frick as a partner and named him chairman of Carnegie Steel. Frick already had a reputation for breaking trade unions in his company's coal fields. In a famous 1887 coal strike, Frick employed permanent replacement workers and Pinkerton guards to protect them.

During the lockout, Frick became famous for something other than producing coal and subduing unions. On 23 July 1892 an anarchist named Alexander Berkman appeared at Frick's downtown Pittsburgh office. Although Berkman appeared nervous, he was allowed to see the industrialist, at which time he shot and stabbed Frick. Despite being seriously wounded, Frick helped wrestle Berkman to the floor and hold him there until the police came. Then, while still in his office, a doctor removed a bullet from Frick's neck and back. Frick received no anesthesia. He finished his day's work before leaving for home in an ambulance. Even though Berkman had no ties to the Amalgamated Association, the public connected the assassination and the labor dispute. By creating sympathy for an unsympathetic figure, this incident helped dissolve what little public support remained for the union.

Although Carnegie was not in Pittsburgh to implement strategy during the strike (he had informally "retired" from business a few years before), he approved of Frick's tactics at the time. Only when the press and the public began to attack Carnegie for going back on the words in his Forum essays did he begin to change his mind. Criticism of Carnegie's role in events at Homestead was so rancorous that some towns for which he offered to build libraries actually turned him down with the lockout as the reason. Therefore, it is not surprising that over the years Carnegie increasingly began to distance himself from events at Homestead and even expressed his regret for the violence. Rather than defend the aspects of his earlier writings that supported his later policies, however, Carnegie mis-represented the facts so that he appeared to still believe in the ideas in the Forum essays that had once made him so popular with labor. Whether this constituted deliberate deception or merely self-delusion, the deception suggests that Carnegie was motivated by guilt.

Historians also consider the Homestead lockout to have been an important event in American labor history because of its negative effect on the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The role of the dispute in the collapse of the union, however, has been greatly overstated. Although widely perceived as the strongest labor union in the country at that time, the power of the Amalgamated Association had begun a precipitous decline in power in the years preceding Homestead.

To understand the weakness of the Amalgamated Association, it is important to consider the difference between iron and steel production. Iron and Bessemer steel were almost perfect substitutes for one another in the late nineteenth century. Therefore, the two products competed against one another. The first modern steel plants built in the 1870s and 1880s used the Bessemer process. Essentially, this technology replaced skilled iron puddlers, who had to make many informed decisions to remove impurities from molten slag, with an automatic system that used blown air to remove the impurities. Whereas it took up to two years to learn puddling, with the new process, a common laborer could become a skilled steelworker in as little as six to eight weeks. If labor savings were not enough to get producers and consumers to switch from iron to steel, the Bessemer process produced higher quality product than could the iron mills. Steel was more durable than iron when used for railroad rails, the industry's most popular product during this era. Because of this new technology, steel manufacturers hired many new workers, particularly immigrants, who had no experience in the iron industry. Unfortunately for the Amalgamated Association, it had always concentrated its organizing efforts on highly skilled puddlers. Less-skilled workers tended to view the union with contempt. The increased demand for less-skilled labor damaged the long-term viability of the organization.

Although strong in the iron industry, the Amalgamated Association was never able to organize even half the steelworkers in the Pittsburgh district, which was the union's strongest venue. As early as 1885, the signing of the union scale was irrelevant to most steel firms across the industry because they already ran nonunion. Steelmakers avoided the union by building entirely new mills and keeping the Amalgamated out. In this manner, they outflanked the skilled workers who had once wielded a considerable amount of power on the shop floor. When the Amalgamated Association reached its peak membership in 1891, only 25 percent of steelworkers eligible for Amalgamated membership nationwide were in the union. Even at Homestead, a few months before the strike less than 400 of the 2,000 workers at the plant who were eligible to join the union were actually members.

After 1889 the situation of the Amalgamated Association changed dramatically for the worse. In 1891 the union had 24,068 members, but by 1893 that figure had dropped by almost half to 13,613. Yet these numbers obscure a sharper drop in employment in the iron and steel sector of the industry. While employment in that sector of the economy decreased, the tin plate sector of the industry increased sharply. Tin plate is steel rolled into thin sheets and dipped in tin. Its primary uses were for cans and as roofing material. In 1890 the United States was completely dependent upon Wales for its tin plate; it produced virtually none of its own. High duties on tin plate passed as part of McKinley Tariff of 1890 caused imports of Welsh tin plate to drop sharply and jump-started a domestic tin plate industry. In the first quarter year of operations after the tariff took effect on 1 July 1891, United States manufacturers produced 826,922 pounds of tin plate. In each of the next two quarters, production nearly doubled to more than three million pounds. By 1896 American tin plate production exceeded imports from Wales for the first time. Without the tariff, this industry would not have existed in the United States.

The skilled labor that made this increase in production possible came from Wales. Thousand of Welshmen joined the Amalgamated Association in the early 1890s because of the strong tradition of trade unionism in their home country. Many Amalgamated members who were not Welsh had been displaced from nonunion rolling mills. Growth in employment for tin workers compensated for shrinking membership rolls in other sectors of the industry. If tin plate production had not taken off when it did, the decline in the Amalgamated Association's membership would have occurred earlier and been more pronounced than indicated by the total membership numbers.

In the iron and tin plate sectors of the industry, the skills possessed by Amalgamated Association members were indispensable to the production process. This was not true in the technologically advanced steel-producing sector. Because steel was by far the fastest growing segment of the industry, the Amalgamated Association would have been in serious decline even if Homestead had never occurred.

The other problem with the argument that the Homestead lockout destroyed the Amalgamated Association is that Carnegie Steel was not the first or the last firm to oust the union. In addition to losing ground as new steel manufacturers opened non union shops, Amalgamated conducted series of failed strikes in the late 1880s and early 1890s that could have crippled the organization regardless of these other losses. Under the weight of increased competition, iron and steel manufacturers across the United States moved to cut back on their labor costs by running nonunion with increasing frequency. By exploiting their lower labor costs, these firms increased the pressure on Carnegie Steel to jettison the union.

In 1892 the conflict between management and the union spread throughout the industry. Virtually every firm in both the iron and steel sectors of the industry found the Amalgamated Association scale unacceptable and refused to sign. Most companies that had previously signed the scale refused that year. In fact, manufacturers from every sector of the industry and every region of the country began to propose deep wage cuts even before the union first proposed its scale. Many steel manufacturers in addition to Carnegie Steel took on the union in the summer of 1892 because companies throughout the industry perceived the Amalgamated Association as vulnerable. In the struggle that followed, steelmakers across the country managed to banish Amalgamated permanently from their facilities. By August there were more nonunion mills up and running across the country than at any time in the previous 20 years. Approximately 70,000 steelworkers were out of work that summer. Even so, the struggle between labor and management at Homestead attracted all the attention.

After the lockout, the Amalgamated Association still had many members in sectors of the industry that still required skilled labor (such as tin plate production). When United States Steel formed in 1901, it completed the work that Carnegie Steel began by beating the Amalgamated Association in two disputes, a strike in 1901 and a lockout in 1909. Only then was the Amalgamated Association completely subdued. The iron and steel industry remained largely nonunion until the Steel Workers Organizing Committee found success in the late 1930s.

Key Players

Carnegie, Andrew (1835-1919): Carnegie was an industrialist and philanthropist whose rags-to-riches life was a model of success for countless Americans. His role in the Homestead lockout severely damaged his reputation.

Frick, Henry Clay (1849-1919): Coal baron, notorious opponent of organized labor, and art collector, Frick organized Carnegie Steel's campaign to destroy the Amalgamated Association in its mills but later broke with Carnegie in part over public revulsion to his tactics.

McLuckie, John (1852-?): Former steel worker and burgess (mayor) of Homestead who led the town's resistance to the lockout. His opposition to Carnegie Steel destroyed his political career.

Bibliography

Books

Burgoyne, Arthur. The Homestead Strike of 1892. Pittsburgh, PA: University Press, 1979. (Originally published by the Rawthorne Engraving and Printing Company, 1893).

Demarest, David, Jr. "The River Ran Red": Homestead 1892. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture and Steel. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Wolff, Leon. Lockout. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Periodicals

Rees, Jonathan. "Homestead in Context: Andrew Carnegie and the Decline of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers." Pennsylvania History 64 (autumn 1997): 509-533.