A Review of the Literature Written on the Homestead Strike of 1892
Jason Elms
History 297
18 November 2016
Abstract
In 1892 one of the most violent strikes of the nineteenth century occurred at Homestead
Pennsylvania. Strangely, there has not since been a wealth of literature written on the Homestead
Strike of 1892. The literature generally groups itself into two categories: early works consisting
of journalistic accounts and detached scholarly economic analysis, later works influenced by new
labor history. This literature review focusses on scholarly monographs dealing directly with the
strike, and journalistic works that are important to understanding the literature. The literature
written on the Homestead Strike of 1892 has been consistent in its positive attitude toward the
strike. The works also show that the literature has evolved with the proliferation of new labor
history to cover many outside events that influenced the strike, as well as the various minority
groups that had been left out of the narrative in past works. And finally finds that the literature is
limited by the small number of sources used across all the important works.
1
The picket lines have been drawn, the plant has been shut down, and rumors abound of
Pinkerton thugs coming to ferry non-union scab workers into the factory. This is the scene in
Homestead, Pennsylvania, in June of 1892 during the beginning of the strike that was to make
the name of this modest steel town synonymous with the struggle between organized labor and
capital. The events that took place in Homestead would change the nation’s views on the conflict
between labor and capital for years to come.
The 1892 strike at Homestead went down in the annals of history as one of the most
violent industrial strikes of the late nineteenth century, and shaped the landscape of the American
steel industry for decades, however, there have not been many large monographs written on the
events that transpired over the more than ninety days of the strike. This literature review focusses
on scholarly and journalistic monographs relating directly to the strike. What has been written on
the Homestead strike is altogether harmonious in the general view of the strike. Every work in
the literature presents the strikers in a positive light throughout most of the events, while placing
the blame for the strike largely on the Carnegie Steel Company, and particularly on Henry Clay
Frick the head of the company during the strike. The similarities present in the literature can be
attributed in large part to the fact that many of the works share a few important sources. While
the authors share a general outlook on the strike, the literature can be divided into two categories:
the first is found early in the form of journalistic narratives and detached scholarly analyses
spurred on by their proximity to the events of the strike, the second is broad Monographs within
or influenced by the new labor history school that focus on the common people involved and
investigates the many outlying forces that influenced the strike. The works are also characterized
by the absence of monographs outside of times where current events inspired interest in the
conflict between union and robber baron.
2
An essential step in understanding the literature is understanding the event that the it is
written on. The Homestead strike of 1982 started as a lockout when union contract negotiations
between the Carnegie Steel Company, headed by Carnegie’s second in command Henry Clay
Frick, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, the largest union in the
American steel industry, broke down. The breakdown in negotiations was primarily over
disagreements about the sliding scale that was used to determine the wages of some workers at
the Homestead Steel Works and a reduction in tonnage rates that determined the pay of some
other workmen.1 The Amalgamated refused to agree to these terms, and thus the negotiations
ground to a halt until June 28 when the workers were locked out of the armor plate mill and the
open-hearth department.2 Shortly after the lockout, the Amalgamated went on strike and were
joined by the many non-union workers employed at the Homestead Steel Works.
Now that the strike had officially started, tensions were running high. It was worried by
the strikers that the company would hire men from the Pinkerton detective agency to take control
of the steel mill and allow the importation of non-union strikebreakers to run the mill. On July 6,
the fears of the strikers were confirmed when two barges from the company were spotted
heading towards the mill. Upon the arrival of the barges at the mill’s waterfront entrance, there
was a large crowd of strikers waiting for the barges and barring the landing of the Pinkerton men.
With tensions at the breaking point a gunshot is heard. While it is unknow which side fired first,
this shot kicked off a battle that would leave a total of two Pinkertons and seven strikers dead3
and many more from both sides wounded, and resulted in the capture of the Pinkertons by the
1
Arthur Burgoyne, Homestead: A complete history of the struggle of July, 1892, between the Carnegie
steel company, limited, and the Amalgamated association of iron and steel workers (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1893), 31.
2
Burgoyne, Homestead, 34.
3
Bemis, “The Homestead Strike,” 382.
3
strikers. This battle proved to be a pivotal moment in the Homestead strike, and set the base for
many events that were to come.
The state militia of Pennsylvania, under the control of Major General George Snowden,
was called in by the governor to keep the peace in Homestead. The militia took custody of the
steel works from the strikers, thus allowing the introduction of non-union strikebreakers to work
the mill. Many strikers, including many of the leaders of the strike, were charged with various
crimes for their participation in the battle on July 6, and in retaliation the strikers filed charges
against some of the men in the company. The vast majority of these charges came to nothing.
With the mill back in operation, the demoralized strikers started to defect back to their old jobs.
The strike officially ended on November 20.
The literature on the Homestead strike started very soon after the event came to a close.
Published the year after the strike is the book Homestead: A complete history of the struggle of
July, 1892, between the Carnegie steel company, limited, and the Amalgamated association of
iron and steel workers (1893), by Arthur G. Burgoyne. Burgoyne was a journalist from Pittsburg
who covered the Homestead strike as it was happening. Homestead focuses on narrating the
events that took place in Homestead, providing a brief introduction to the strike’s background in
roughly chronological order without much pause for analysis. As to the purpose of his writing,
Burgoyne states that his job is not to analyze: “merely the facts are stated here, leaving it to the
reader to make his own deductions.”4 Burgoyne starts Homestead by giving background on the
actors and conditions that led up to the strike. During his introduction, Burgoyne states that it is
obvious that Frick wanted to “force a bloody conflict with organized labor,” and he later asserts
4
Burgoyne, Homestead, 30.
4
that the Pittsburg Post article claiming that the events at Homestead represented a concerted
effort by the east coast steel industry to weaken organized labor had “a strong coloring of
probability,” thus placing the blame for the conflict firmly on capital.5 Burgoyne devotes a large
portion of his text to the battle on July 6. Burgoyne does not try to determine who shot first in the
battle, however, Burgoyne’s portrayal of this incident characterizes the strikers anger as
righteous and places the Pinkertons in the wrong.
Burgoyne’s Homestead, ultimately, is limited greatly by two factors: it is the account of
a single individual, thus, it possesses a limited scope; and it lacks the perspective granted by
hindsight. The proximity to the strike is particularly hindering to Burgoyne’s work as it stops
Burgoyne from properly analyzing the strike, instead relegating his work to narration and
conjecture. Despite these flaws, Homestead is incredibly important to the literature. Homestead
has been cited in almost every other work on the topic for its first-hand account of the events and
its commentary on the role played by individuals important to the events of the strike.
Homestead has thus greatly influenced the discussion of the strike by serving as the blueprint of
the standard narrative about the events of the strike. The great prominence of Burgoyne’s
account of the events is one of the most important reasons for the general agreement on many of
the important events that is present in the literature. Furthermore, the weight placed on one
source hinders the exploration of certain facets of the strike.
In addition to Burgoyne’s Homestead, there was another important work published
shortly after the event concluded. In 1894 Edward Bemis published his essay “The Homestead
Strike” in the Journal of Political Economy. “The Homestead Strike”6 which provides an early
5
6
Ibid., 22, 27, 28
Edward Bemis, “The Homestead Strike,” journal of Political Economy 2, no. 3 ( June 1894).
5
scholarly look into the events that took place at Homestead. Bemis has degrees in both history
and economics and has written multiple journal articles about trade unions, among other topics.
Bemis’s status of being both an old labor historian and an economist predisposes him towards a
focus on economic analysis. In accordance with his areas of expertise, Bemis examines, at great
length, the economic clash between employer and employee that resulted in the strike. Missing
from Burgoyne’s account is Bemis’s note of the low percentage of eligible men that were a part
of the Amalgamated. When the union sensed trouble brewing, it attempted to rectify its low
membership with a recruiting drive, however, the union did not have enough time to properly
organize; Bemis cites this situation as “vitally important”7 to the failure of the strike. When
discussing the battle of July 6, Bemis gives less attention to the narrative of the situation
brushing off questions about the brutalities inflicted on the prisoners, or if the Pinkertons were
too aggressive. Bemis does, however, in stark contrast to Burgoyne, assert that “the men were
legally and morally wrong in resisting the entrance of the guards upon the property of the
company.”8
Once again providing what is lacking in Burgoyne’s narrative, Bemis analyses the results
of the strike. Bemis concludes, as opposed to Burgoyne who viewed the strike as a defeat, that it
is very difficult to ascertain whether the defeat of the Amalgamated affected wages in any major
way, adding that the industrial depression would most likely have lowered wages regardless of a
union victory.9 Bemis goes on to assert that overall the Homestead Strike was even an aid to the
7
Ibid., 372.
Ibid., 382
9
Ibid., 388-89.
8
6
labor movement at large, citing the public sympathy engendered by the strike, and the antiPinkerton laws that were passed after the strike.10
Bemis’s “The Homestead Strike” proved to be a foundational work in the literature on the
Homestead strike. It is regularly cited for its information on the background of the strike, and for
its analysis on the demands of the company. In addition, Bemis introduced the idea that the
Homestead strike was not a failure, and in fact a victory for labor in general, because of the
public support of the strike, as well as the anti-Pinkerton legislation and precedent set during the
aftermath of the strike. While Bemis’s work is important to the literature, it is limited by its time.
The sources used by Bemis are mostly statements made by individuals prominent in the events.
Additionally, Bemis is hindered by the lack of time between his time, and the time of the event,
meaning that Bemis lacks the ability to see how the aftereffects of the strike play out long term.
After the time immediately following the strike, there is a lack of major literature on the
Homestead Strike. This lack can perhaps be explained by old social history’s tendency to shy
away from political matters, and the absence happens to end only after new social history
emerges onto the scene, bringing with it the school of new labor history. The first historian to
write in this new fashion is Leon Wolff with his book Lockout: The Story of the Homestead
Strike of 198211 (1965). Wolff is a popular historian who had, prior to writing Lockout, written a
few works of popular history covering military endeavors. Wolff’s lack of experience with labor
history shows in the absence of any primary sources from the union, and the reliance on
secondary sources, shown in Lockout’s bibliography. As a work of popular history, Lockout
focuses largely on the narrative of the events. When discussing this narrative Wolff’s
10
11
1965).
Ibid., 390-91.
Leon Wolff, Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1982 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers,
7
interpretation lines up with the previous two works, such as placing blame for the strike on Frick,
or the events of the battle on July 6. Wolff does offer some new ideas, mostly inspired by the
new currents in labor history that had become popular in the sixties, such as focusing on the
ethnic dynamics present in the population of Homestead. According to Wolff, the factionalism
practiced by the Amalgamated weakened the power of the strike by alienating Slavs and
unskilled workmen. Wolff asserts that this animosity between the unskilled workers and the
skilled union men was a major reason the rushed 1892 membership drive failed.12
Not only does Wolff bring attention to the ethnic issues, he also focusses on the daily life
of the workers in the Homestead Steel Mill. The working conditions inside the mill were
described by Carnegie’s own biographer as unpleasant, with “pits gaping like the mouth of hell,
and ovens emitting terrible degrees of heat.”13 In addition to hellish working conditions, Wolff
writes about how the workers also had to deal with a grueling twelve-hour workday that left little
time for leisure, and the poor pay for unskilled workers who received only fourteen cents per
hour in pay.14 One possible reason for Wolff’s interest in the daily lives of the people living in
homestead could be the presence of Margaret F. Byington’s 1910 work, Homestead; the
households of a mill town15—not included in this literature review for its lack of text pertaining
directly to the strike—that presents a wealth of information on the wages, cost of living, daily
lives, and more of the residents of Homestead, both English speaking and Slavic.
Once again, the decades go by without a major work being published on the Homestead
strike. The next grouping of books is released on the centenary of the strike. The first centenary
12
Ibid., 40.
Ibid., 36.
14
Ibid., 38.
15
Margaret Byington, Homestead; the households of a mill town (Pittsburgh: University Center for
International Studies, 1910).
13
8
work is The River Ran Red (1992)16, edited by David P. Demarest, Jr. and others. The River Ran
Red is an unusual work as most of the text is dedicated to primary sources organized loosely into
chapters. The primary sources are many and varied, consisting of: newspaper stories, magazine
articles, and even the congressional reports conducted on Homestead; and covering everything
from the men involved in the strike, the factory itself, and the events of the strike.
Interspersed between the primary sources are essays written by scholars of labor and
industrial history as well as a few individuals involved in education or activism. These essays
cover many topics themselves, many of which had not been represented in a major work up to
this point. One essay, “Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers,”17 by Sharon
Trusilo, a local Allegheny county scholarly historian who has written before on the
Amalgamated, focusses on the history of the Amalgamated. She tells how it was formed from
three separate iron workers’ unions, and illustrates how the Amalgamated became so fixated on
the sliding scale. Another essay written by Paul Krause, a scholarly labor historian, “EastEuropeans in Homestead”18 addresses a topic that has received little attention up to that point, the
Eastern-Europeans in homestead. Krause highlights the material desires that brought them to
America, and asserts that the material desires shared between the Eastern-European workers and
their English-speaking counterparts was what compelled the Eastern-Europeans to strike with the
Amalgamated. Overall Demarest’s book shows that during the 1990s scholarship on the
Homestead strike had been greatly changed by the widespread success of new labor history and
its focus on more than just the institutions of labor.
16
Eds., David P. Demarest, Jr., et al., The River Ran Red (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).
Sharon Trusilo, “Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers” in The River Ran Red, eds.,
David P. Demarest Jr., et al., (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 16-17
18
Paul Krause, “East-Europeans in Homestead” in The River Ran Red, ed., David P. Demarest Jr., et al.,
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) 63-65
17
9
The second centenary work is The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture,
and Steel19 (1992), by Paul Krause. Krause is a labor historian of the new labor school, born and
raised in the Monongahela valley, and thus has a personal interest in the strike. The Battle for
Homestead is a comprehensive work that examines many topics related to the strike of 1892.
These topics range from the ideals of steel company management and changes to companies after
switching from iron to steel production, to the labor movement in greater Pittsburgh, as well as
minorities that have received little attention until now, such as Eastern Europeans and especially
women.
In much the same manner as The River Ran Red, Krause shows that the literature on the
Homestead strike has been profoundly affected by new labor history. In areas that have already
been tread by the previous authors Krause continues to provide new points of view. An example
of this is when Krause brings a figure that had been ignored by the literature up to this point to
the fore, Christopher Magee. Magee was an important member of the Republican Party in
Pennsylvania, a friend to both Andrew Carnegie and Frick, and he had some sway with both
Governor Robert Pattison and the sheriff of Allegheny County. According to Krause, the role
played by Magee in the events of the Homestead strike are so important as to “raise doubts about
all the accounts of the lockout.”20 As Magee was an important member of the Republican Party,
his inclusion in the events of homestead suggests that previously ignored political forces were at
play.
To sum up the literature, it was originally defined by a few near contemporary works,
both by a historian of labor and economics and a journalist, that were characterized by economic
19
Paul Krause The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press).
20
Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead 29.
10
analysis on the part of the former and simple narration on the part of the latter. After the
immediacy of the event faded, there is a lack of books written directly on the strike which is
broken by the popularization of new labor history. After new labor history enters the mainstream,
there are a few books written first by a popular historian during the sixties, and then scholarly
new labor historians during the strike’s centenary. The authors all takes a similar tone on certain
issues, such as portraying the strikers in a positive light. This similarity of tone is thanks to the
foundational nature of the early works, and the positive impression that the strike left on the
American public. This similarity is caused by the overwhelming popularity of a few sources with
notable flaws. This limitation in the literature leaves room for new works to study the figures and
groups that have been excluded from the literature up to this point.
11
Bibliography
Bemis, Edward W. “The Homestead Strike”, Journal of Political Economy 2, no. 3 (June 1894):
369-96.
Burgoyne, Arthur G. Homestead: A complete history of the struggle of July, 1892, between the
Carnegie steel company, limited, and the Amalgamated association of iron and steel
workers, Pittsburgh: Rawsthorne Engraving and Printing. 1893.
Byington, Margaret F. Homestead: The Houses of a Mill Town. Pittsburgh: University Center for
International Studies. 1910.
Demarest, David P. Jr., et al., eds. The River Ran Red. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
1992.
Krause, Paul. The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press. 1992.
Wolff, Leon. Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1982. New York: Harper & Row,
Publishers. 1965.