Homestead Strike

On July 6, 1892, a gunfight broke out on the banks of the Monongahela River outside Pittsburgh as 300 Pinkerton detectives attempted to land by barge at the Carnegie Steel Company's Homestead plant. Striking workers and their families had anticipated them. By evening, ten men were dead — three Pinkertons and seven workers — and the conflict over industrial wages had become something rawer: a fight over who had the right to control an American factory floor.

The strike began when Carnegie Steel, managed by the ruthless Henry Clay Frick while Andrew Carnegie was vacationing in Scotland, slashed wages and refused to negotiate with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Workers locked out of the plant prepared to defend it; management brought in Pinkertons to retake it. The workers repelled the barges, but the victory was brief. Pennsylvania's governor deployed 8,500 National Guard troops, strikebreakers crossed the picket lines, and the union was destroyed by November. An anarchist's failed assassination attempt on Frick — carried out independently, without the union's knowledge — gave management the public relations weapon it needed to frame the strike as radical insurrection.

The strike's collapse set back organized labor in the steel industry for more than four decades. Steelworkers would not be successfully unionized again until the 1930s under the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The episode also permanently damaged Andrew Carnegie's carefully constructed image as an enlightened, worker-friendly industrialist. He had publicly championed workers' rights in writing while allowing Frick to destroy them in practice. The gap between Carnegie's rhetoric and his conduct became one of the defining examples of Gilded Age hypocrisy.