Homestead Strike Timeline Where: Homestead, Pennsylvania Union: Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers Company: Carnegie Steel Company 1876: Amalgamated Association, union for iron and steel workers, forms. 1881: Carnegie put Frick in charge of the Homestead factory. 1882 and 1889: Amalgamated Association won two big strikes against the Carnegie Company. After 1889, the union became very powerful and organized. They had a very strong union contract. February 1892: Amalgamated Association asked for a wage increase. Frick responded with a wage decrease. June 29, 1892: The old contract expired without the two sides reaching an agreement. Frick locked the workers out of the plant, using a high fence topped with barbed wire. June 30, 1892: Workers decided to strike and they surrounded the plant to make sure that no strikebreakers would enter. July 6,1892: After the local sheriff was unable to control the strikers, Frick hired guards from the National Pinkerton Detective Agency to secure the factory so that strikebreakers could enter. The Pinkertons arrived by boat in the middle of the night, hoping to surround the factory unnoticed. The strikers knew they were coming. Shots were fired and people killed on both sides. Document A: Emma Goldman (Modified) It was May 1892. Trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Compa ny and its workers, organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Amalgamated Association was one of the biggest and most efficient unions in the country, consisting mostly of strong Americans, men of decision and grit, who stood up for their rights. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation. Andrew Carnegie, its president, had turned over management to Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his hatred of unions and workers. The Carnegie Company enjoyed great wealth and prosperity. Wages were arranged between the company and the union, according to a sliding scale based on the current market price of steel products. Andrew Carnegie decided to abolish the sliding scale. The company would make no more agreements with the Amalgamated Association. In fact, he would not recognize the union at all. Then, he closed the mills. It was an open declaration of war. The steel-workers declared that they were ready to take up the challenge of Frick: they would insist on their right to organize and to deal collectively with their employers. Their tone was manly, ringing with the spirit of their rebellious forebears of the Revolutionary War. Then the news flashed across the country of the slaughter of steel- workers by Pinkertons. In the dead of night, Frick sent a boat packed with strike-breakers and heavily armed Pinkerton thugs to the mill. The workers stationed themselves along the shore, determined to drive back Frick’s hirelings. When the boat got within range, the Pinkertons had opened fire, without warning, killing a number of Homestead men on the shore, among them a little boy, and wounding scores of others. Source: Emma Goldman was a political activist and radical who fiercely supported workers’ rights. The document above comes from her autobiography, written in 1931, where she remembers her reaction to the Homestead strike, thirty-nine years later. Document B: Henry Frick I can say as clearly as possible that under no circumstances will we have any further dealings with the Amalgamated Association as an organization. This is final. The workmen in the Amalgamated Association work under what is known as a sliding scale. As the price of steel rises, the earnings of the men also rise; as the prices fall, their wages also fall. The wages are not allowed to fall below a certain amount, which is called the minimum. Until now, the minimum has been $25 per ton of steel produced. We have recently changed the minimum to $23 instead of $25. We believe this is reasonable because the Carnegie Company has spent a lot of money on new machinery that allows workers to increase their daily output, and therefore increase their earnings. The Amalgamated Association was unwilling to consider a minimum below $24, even though the improved machinery would enable workers to earn more. We found it impossible to arrive at any agreement with the Amalgamated Association, so we decided to close our works at Homestead. The Amalgamated men surrounded our property and blocked all of the entrances and all roads leading to Homestead. We felt that for the safety of our property, it was necessary for us to hire our own guards to assist the sheriff. We brought our guards here as quietly as possible; had them taken to Homestead at an hour of the night when we hoped to have them enter without any interference whatever and without meeting anybody. All our efforts were to prevent the possibilities of a confrontation between the Amalgamated Association and our guards. We have investigated and learned that the Amalgamated men and their friends fired on our guards for twenty-five minutes before they reached our property, and then again after they had reached our property. Our guards did not return the fire until after the boats had touched the shore, and after three of our guards had been wounded, one fatally. Source: In this newspaper interview in the Pittsburgh Post on July 8, 1892, Frick explains his opposition to the union’s demands. Document C (read and underline key passages, interesting points/facts): Source: Bill of Rights Institute: The Homestead Strike Tensions between steel workers and management were the immediate causes of the Homestead Strike of 1892 in southwestern Pennsylvania, but this dramatic and violent labor protest was more the product of industrialization, unionization, and changing ideas of property and employee rights during the Gilded Age. The story of the Homestead Strike begins with Andrew Carnegie, who revolutionized the production of steel in 1885 when he integrated the Bessemer process of purifying and strengthening iron into his own operations. In 1892, Carnegie launched the Carnegie Steel Company, a conglomeration of feeder industries and steel plants, including the Homestead Steel Works. Many Americans lauded men like Carnegie for their innovation and ingenuity, but workers in the mills feared industrialists would increasingly turn to sophisticated technology to achieve maximum output, jeopardizing their job security and authority. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers (AA) represented skilled workers in the steel mills throughout southwestern Pennsylvania and negotiated their relationship with management. Workers organized into the AA in 1881 at the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works (which Carnegie purchased in 1883) after management increased hours while refusing to adjust pay. The AA went on strike at Bessemer Steel in 1882 to prevent management from using a nonunion clause in workers’ contracts, and at the Homestead Steel Works in 1889 after negotiations with management failed. Members were not afraid to act violently in pursuit of their goals, attacking workers brought in to break the strike and also fighting against local police. Not everyone who worked for Carnegie was as willing to let the AA wrest so much power from the hands of management. Carnegie placed Henry Clay Frick in charge of operations at his various steel works in 1891 and in doing so, shifted the momentum in the power struggle between labor and management. Frick despised unions, particularly the AA. “The mills have never been able to turn out the product they should, owing to being held back by the Amalgamated men,” he stated in a letter to Carnegie. Although Carnegie did not publicly condemn unions, he agreed with Frick that the AA (which represented 800 workers at Homestead) was hurting output. With Carnegie’s support, Frick set his sights on breaking the union. Relations between workers and management remained tense yet productive until early in 1892, when both the AA and Frick turned their attention toward the expiration of the current labor contract in June. Negotiations became volatile in February, with the AA demanding wage increases to match Carnegie’s financial success. Frick vehemently disagreed and went so far as to suggest a decrease in wages. Was Frick hoping for a strike by countering with such an audacious offer? Although Carnegie had ordered an increase in production at Homestead to make it through a potential strike, Frick was more interested in weakening the influence of the AA and reasserting management’s power. When the AA refused to accept Frick’s offers by April, Frick informed leaders that he would continue to negotiate for another 29 days. If within that time the AA failed to enter into a contract, Carnegie Steel would no longer recognize the union. Laborers and management were staring down a strike when the AA rejected Frick’s final offer of a modest increase in wages in May. This 1892 political cartoon criticizes Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick for being unwilling to raise wages, even after protective tariffs had been passed. With no contract in hand, Frick ordered the mill on lockdown and installed snipers as guards, turning the work site into a fortress impenetrable by any workers. On June 30, the AA officially went on strike and declared management had violated the existing company contract. Mechanics and transportation laborers at Homestead organized by the Knights of Labor (a national union dedicated to abstract goals of republicanism and workers’ rights) joined the AA, as did other workers across Carnegie’s company in the Pittsburgh area. The strikers declared “that it is against public policy and subversive of the fundamental principles of American liberty that a whole community of workers should be denied employment or suffer any other social detriment on account of membership in a church, a political party or a trade union.” To prevent Frick’s strikebreakers from entering the mill (“Fort Frick” as it became known) and to hold true to their statements, the laborers patrolled the area in military-style brigades. The AA’s determination to keep the plant closed led Frick to retaliate. He turned to the Pinkerton Detective Agency (a private security organization) and called on 300 of its agents to safely bring strikebreakers in to reopen the plant on July 6. Frick’s decision was not unusual at this time; Pinkertons became the protectors of private property during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At Homestead, they boarded barges on the Ohio River and attempted a water landing at the mill on the night of July 5. They had hoped to be able to complete their mission secretly, but they were met by a large crowd of strikers and their supporters at the mill. Strikers also boarded rafts to try (unsuccessfully) to set fire to the Pinkertons’ barges. Angry mobs tore down the fence surrounding the mill and climbed on higher structures to pelt the Pinkerton guards with rocks. At one point amid the chaos, shots were fired. Disputes persist over who fired first a striker or a Pinkerton but a violent exchange ensued in which the Pinkertons fired into a crowd of strikers and the crowd returned the shots. Almost a dozen strikers and Pinkertons were killed. By that afternoon, a crowd of 5,000 supporters from nearby mills had arrived at the site, prompting the Pinkertons to send up a white flag from one of the barges and surrender. Amalgamated Association leader Hugh O’Donnell assured the Pinkertons they would be allowed to leave town safely. However, he and other members of the AA marched the Pinkertons through the town to the Opera House, where they were held in a makeshift jail until Sheriff William McCleary arrived. A massive crowd hurled insults and stones at the Pinkertons as they proceeded to the jail and strikers clubbed two until they were unconscious. Sheriff McCleary and other town officials simply looked on as the crowd assaulted the Pinkertons. The AA members formed a mob and attacked members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The Eintracht Sainger Halle (Harmony Singers Hall) was the opera house where Pinkerton guards were detained. This illustration appeared in Harper’s Weekly a few days after the event. While violence ensued in the streets of Homestead, the leaders of the AA met with Sheriff McCleary in hope of convincing Frick to negotiate and end the strike. Frick refused to meet, however, choosing instead to hold out for the possible intervention of the Pennsylvania state militia. The strikers eventually released the Pinkerton agents to Sherriff McCleary, who escorted them to Pittsburgh (where they were not charged with any crimes), but the workers showed no signs of allowing Frick to reopen the mill. Amalgamated Association leaders traveled to the state capital in Harrisburg to meet with Governor Robert Pattison and assure him that order had been restored in Homestead and that there was no need for militia involvement. Pattison was wary of sending the militia to an area that was so heavily influenced by the AA and feared a massacre would ensue. But he was also in the pocket of pro-Carnegie political machines that had ensured his election to the highest office in Pennsylvania. Thus, he ordered the militia to Homestead on July 7. The strikers attempted to meet the troops peacefully, but more than 4,000 guardsmen successfully pushed them back and allowed strikebreakers to enter the mill. The Homestead Strike collapsed after the arrival of the state guard. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its leader Samuel Gompers attempted to hold boycotts at Homestead recruiting stations across the country, but Frick was able to hire replacement workers regardless and reopen the mill by July 15. To protect the workers and the mill, the governor placed Homestead under martial law. In an odd twist of events in Frick’s favor, an anarchist named Alexander Berkman, who later edited a journal for political activist Emma Goldman, gained access to his office on July 23 and attempted an assassination. Frick survived, and public opinion turned against the strikers despite there being no connection between the assassin and the AA. With waning public support, the AFL refused to further intervene in the strike, and many of the workers of the AA went back to their jobs. The AA agreed to end the week-long strike and accept management’s terms. Frick and Carnegie Steel pursued compensation in court for property damage at the mill. Sixteen of the strike’s leaders were arrested for conspiracy, inciting riots, and murder; all were held for one night in prison and forced to post $100,000 bail to be released. Four AA members went to trial on the charges, but only one was convicted. Carnegie Steel effectively broke AA’s power in the steel industry. The AA continued to have small yet active memberships through World War II, but its influence would never return to what it was during the Gilded Age. The use of physical force and intimidation by workers and management affected public opinion of labor unions; many came to view strikes as unnecessary and violent acts. 1. Use evidence from the timeline and above documents to answer the question below. Why did the Homestead Strike turn violent and Who was at fault?

Homestead Strike Timeline Where: Homestead, Pennsylvania Union: Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers Company: Carnegie Steel Company 1876: Amalgamated Association, union for iron and steel workers, forms. 1881: Carnegie put Frick in charge of the Homestead factory. 1882 and 1889: Amalgamated Association won two big strikes against the Carnegie Company. After 1889, the union became very powerful and organized. They had a very strong union contract. February 1892: Amalgamated Association asked for a wage increase. Frick responded with a wage decrease. June 29, 1892: The old contract expired without the two sides reaching an agreement. Frick locked the workers out of the plant, using a high fence topped with barbed wire. June 30, 1892: Workers decided to strike and they surrounded the plant to make sure that no strikebreakers would enter. July 6,1892: After the local sheriff was unable to control the strikers, Frick hired guards from the National Pinkerton Detective Agency to secure the factory so that strikebreakers could enter. The Pinkertons arrived by boat in the middle of the night, hoping to surround the factory unnoticed. The strikers knew they were coming. Shots were fired and people killed on both sides. Document A: Emma Goldman (Modified) It was May 1892. Trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Compa ny and its workers, organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Amalgamated Association was one of the biggest and most efficient unions in the country, consisting mostly of strong Americans, men of decision and grit, who stood up for their rights. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation. Andrew Carnegie, its president, had turned over management to Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his hatred of unions and workers. The Carnegie Company enjoyed great wealth and prosperity. Wages were arranged between the company and the union, according to a sliding scale based on the current market price of steel products. Andrew Carnegie decided to abolish the sliding scale. The company would make no more agreements with the Amalgamated Association. In fact, he would not recognize the union at all. Then, he closed the mills. It was an open declaration of war. The steel-workers declared that they were ready to take up the challenge of Frick: they would insist on their right to organize and to deal collectively with their employers. Their tone was manly, ringing with the spirit of their rebellious forebears of the Revolutionary War. Then the news flashed across the country of the slaughter of steel- workers by Pinkertons. In the dead of night, Frick sent a boat packed with strike-breakers and heavily armed Pinkerton thugs to the mill. The workers stationed themselves along the shore, determined to drive back Frick’s hirelings. When the boat got within range, the Pinkertons had opened fire, without warning, killing a number of Homestead men on the shore, among them a little boy, and wounding scores of others. Source: Emma Goldman was a political activist and radical who fiercely supported workers’ rights. The document above comes from her autobiography, written in 1931, where she remembers her reaction to the Homestead strike, thirty-nine years later. Document B: Henry Frick I can say as clearly as possible that under no circumstances will we have any further dealings with the Amalgamated Association as an organization. This is final. The workmen in the Amalgamated Association work under what is known as a sliding scale. As the price of steel rises, the earnings of the men also rise; as the prices fall, their wages also fall. The wages are not allowed to fall below a certain amount, which is called the minimum. Until now, the minimum has been $25 per ton of steel produced. We have recently changed the minimum to $23 instead of $25. We believe this is reasonable because the Carnegie Company has spent a lot of money on new machinery that allows workers to increase their daily output, and therefore increase their earnings. The Amalgamated Association was unwilling to consider a minimum below $24, even though the improved machinery would enable workers to earn more. We found it impossible to arrive at any agreement with the Amalgamated Association, so we decided to close our works at Homestead. The Amalgamated men surrounded our property and blocked all of the entrances and all roads leading to Homestead. We felt that for the safety of our property, it was necessary for us to hire our own guards to assist the sheriff. We brought our guards here as quietly as possible; had them taken to Homestead at an hour of the night when we hoped to have them enter without any interference whatever and without meeting anybody. All our efforts were to prevent the possibilities of a confrontation between the Amalgamated Association and our guards. We have investigated and learned that the Amalgamated men and their friends fired on our guards for twenty-five minutes before they reached our property, and then again after they had reached our property. Our guards did not return the fire until after the boats had touched the shore, and after three of our guards had been wounded, one fatally. Source: In this newspaper interview in the Pittsburgh Post on July 8, 1892, Frick explains his opposition to the union’s demands. Document C (read and underline key passages, interesting points/facts): Source: Bill of Rights Institute: The Homestead Strike Tensions between steel workers and management were the immediate causes of the Homestead Strike of 1892 in southwestern Pennsylvania, but this dramatic and violent labor protest was more the product of industrialization, unionization, and changing ideas of property and employee rights during the Gilded Age. The story of the Homestead Strike begins with Andrew Carnegie, who revolutionized the production of steel in 1885 when he integrated the Bessemer process of purifying and strengthening iron into his own operations. In 1892, Carnegie launched the Carnegie Steel Company, a conglomeration of feeder industries and steel plants, including the Homestead Steel Works. Many Americans lauded men like Carnegie for their innovation and ingenuity, but workers in the mills feared industrialists would increasingly turn to sophisticated technology to achieve maximum output, jeopardizing their job security and authority. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers (AA) represented skilled workers in the steel mills throughout southwestern Pennsylvania and negotiated their relationship with management. Workers organized into the AA in 1881 at the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works (which Carnegie purchased in 1883) after management increased hours while refusing to adjust pay. The AA went on strike at Bessemer Steel in 1882 to prevent management from using a nonunion clause in workers’ contracts, and at the Homestead Steel Works in 1889 after negotiations with management failed. Members were not afraid to act violently in pursuit of their goals, attacking workers brought in to break the strike and also fighting against local police. Not everyone who worked for Carnegie was as willing to let the AA wrest so much power from the hands of management. Carnegie placed Henry Clay Frick in charge of operations at his various steel works in 1891 and in doing so, shifted the momentum in the power struggle between labor and management. Frick despised unions, particularly the AA. “The mills have never been able to turn out the product they should, owing to being held back by the Amalgamated men,” he stated in a letter to Carnegie. Although Carnegie did not publicly condemn unions, he agreed with Frick that the AA (which represented 800 workers at Homestead) was hurting output. With Carnegie’s support, Frick set his sights on breaking the union. Relations between workers and management remained tense yet productive until early in 1892, when both the AA and Frick turned their attention toward the expiration of the current labor contract in June. Negotiations became volatile in February, with the AA demanding wage increases to match Carnegie’s financial success. Frick vehemently disagreed and went so far as to suggest a decrease in wages. Was Frick hoping for a strike by countering with such an audacious offer? Although Carnegie had ordered an increase in production at Homestead to make it through a potential strike, Frick was more interested in weakening the influence of the AA and reasserting management’s power. When the AA refused to accept Frick’s offers by April, Frick informed leaders that he would continue to negotiate for another 29 days. If within that time the AA failed to enter into a contract, Carnegie Steel would no longer recognize the union. Laborers and management were staring down a strike when the AA rejected Frick’s final offer of a modest increase in wages in May. This 1892 political cartoon criticizes Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick for being unwilling to raise wages, even after protective tariffs had been passed. With no contract in hand, Frick ordered the mill on lockdown and installed snipers as guards, turning the work site into a fortress impenetrable by any workers. On June 30, the AA officially went on strike and declared management had violated the existing company contract. Mechanics and transportation laborers at Homestead organized by the Knights of Labor (a national union dedicated to abstract goals of republicanism and workers’ rights) joined the AA, as did other workers across Carnegie’s company in the Pittsburgh area. The strikers declared “that it is against public policy and subversive of the fundamental principles of American liberty that a whole community of workers should be denied employment or suffer any other social detriment on account of membership in a church, a political party or a trade union.” To prevent Frick’s strikebreakers from entering the mill (“Fort Frick” as it became known) and to hold true to their statements, the laborers patrolled the area in military-style brigades. The AA’s determination to keep the plant closed led Frick to retaliate. He turned to the Pinkerton Detective Agency (a private security organization) and called on 300 of its agents to safely bring strikebreakers in to reopen the plant on July 6. Frick’s decision was not unusual at this time; Pinkertons became the protectors of private property during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At Homestead, they boarded barges on the Ohio River and attempted a water landing at the mill on the night of July 5. They had hoped to be able to complete their mission secretly, but they were met by a large crowd of strikers and their supporters at the mill. Strikers also boarded rafts to try (unsuccessfully) to set fire to the Pinkertons’ barges. Angry mobs tore down the fence surrounding the mill and climbed on higher structures to pelt the Pinkerton guards with rocks. At one point amid the chaos, shots were fired. Disputes persist over who fired first a striker or a Pinkerton but a violent exchange ensued in which the Pinkertons fired into a crowd of strikers and the crowd returned the shots. Almost a dozen strikers and Pinkertons were killed. By that afternoon, a crowd of 5,000 supporters from nearby mills had arrived at the site, prompting the Pinkertons to send up a white flag from one of the barges and surrender. Amalgamated Association leader Hugh O’Donnell assured the Pinkertons they would be allowed to leave town safely. However, he and other members of the AA marched the Pinkertons through the town to the Opera House, where they were held in a makeshift jail until Sheriff William McCleary arrived. A massive crowd hurled insults and stones at the Pinkertons as they proceeded to the jail and strikers clubbed two until they were unconscious. Sheriff McCleary and other town officials simply looked on as the crowd assaulted the Pinkertons. The AA members formed a mob and attacked members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The Eintracht Sainger Halle (Harmony Singers Hall) was the opera house where Pinkerton guards were detained. This illustration appeared in Harper’s Weekly a few days after the event. While violence ensued in the streets of Homestead, the leaders of the AA met with Sheriff McCleary in hope of convincing Frick to negotiate and end the strike. Frick refused to meet, however, choosing instead to hold out for the possible intervention of the Pennsylvania state militia. The strikers eventually released the Pinkerton agents to Sherriff McCleary, who escorted them to Pittsburgh (where they were not charged with any crimes), but the workers showed no signs of allowing Frick to reopen the mill. Amalgamated Association leaders traveled to the state capital in Harrisburg to meet with Governor Robert Pattison and assure him that order had been restored in Homestead and that there was no need for militia involvement. Pattison was wary of sending the militia to an area that was so heavily influenced by the AA and feared a massacre would ensue. But he was also in the pocket of pro-Carnegie political machines that had ensured his election to the highest office in Pennsylvania. Thus, he ordered the militia to Homestead on July 7. The strikers attempted to meet the troops peacefully, but more than 4,000 guardsmen successfully pushed them back and allowed strikebreakers to enter the mill. The Homestead Strike collapsed after the arrival of the state guard. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its leader Samuel Gompers attempted to hold boycotts at Homestead recruiting stations across the country, but Frick was able to hire replacement workers regardless and reopen the mill by July 15. To protect the workers and the mill, the governor placed Homestead under martial law. In an odd twist of events in Frick’s favor, an anarchist named Alexander Berkman, who later edited a journal for political activist Emma Goldman, gained access to his office on July 23 and attempted an assassination. Frick survived, and public opinion turned against the strikers despite there being no connection between the assassin and the AA. With waning public support, the AFL refused to further intervene in the strike, and many of the workers of the AA went back to their jobs. The AA agreed to end the week-long strike and accept management’s terms. Frick and Carnegie Steel pursued compensation in court for property damage at the mill. Sixteen of the strike’s leaders were arrested for conspiracy, inciting riots, and murder; all were held for one night in prison and forced to post $100,000 bail to be released. Four AA members went to trial on the charges, but only one was convicted. Carnegie Steel effectively broke AA’s power in the steel industry. The AA continued to have small yet active memberships through World War II, but its influence would never return to what it was during the Gilded Age. The use of physical force and intimidation by workers and management affected public opinion of labor unions; many came to view strikes as unnecessary and violent acts. 1. Use evidence from the timeline and above documents to answer the question below. Why did the Homestead Strike turn violent and Who was at fault?