INTRODUCTION:

At 12 o'clock last night every department of the immense Carnegie steel works at Homestead was shut down, throwing about 3,800 men out of employment. . . . It has been the custom of the Carnegies, and all other mills, to discharge their men on the night of the expiration of the yearly contract. The men had declared positively that they would strike at the date of the expiration of the yearly contract. This term of expiration was to occur either at 6 o'clock this morning, or at 6 o'clock this evening, just as the authorities decided. At midnight, the firm cleverly forestalled the men, and flatly declared a shut-down. Instead of being a strike then at the great steel works, the action of the firm has made it a lock-out. -- The Pittsburgh Post, 30 June 1892

Governor Pattison, being convinced that Sheriff McCleary is unable to restore order at Homestead, has ordered out the entire National Guard -- 8,500 men -- all the available military force of the state, to Homestead for service. It is understood that the Governor's purpose in calling out the entire National Guard is to make sure that there will be no demonstration on the part of the locked-out men. He thinks that men will quietly submit before such an overwhelming force, while they might resist if one regiment was sent there. --New York Herald, 11 July 1892

Between the lock-out on June 29, the day before the contract between Carnegie Steel and the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers expired, and the decision by Pennsylvania's governor to send all 8,500 members of the state's National Guard to occupy the town of Homestead, workers fought a pitched battle with a "private army" hired by Carnegie's partner, Henry Clay Frick. The "army" consisted of 300 Pinkerton detectives, heavily armed, who travelled the seven miles from Pittsburgh on barges early on the morning of July 6. Workers lined the shore and opened fire as the barges came within range. The battle lasted twelve hours before the company's force finally surrendered. The Pinkertons, often used as strikebreakers, had tried to surrender twice before. The workers, however, refused to acknowledge their white flag and continued to shoot round after round at the barges. The workers located an old cannon with which they also tried, without success, to sink the barges. Their attempts to set them on fire also failed.

When the workers did stop firing and allow the Pinkertons to surrender, they and their wives and children formed a gauntlet through which they forced the would-be strikebreakers to march. According to the reporters from the Pittsburgh newspapers on the scene, the workers and their families showed no mercy. They stoned the Pinkertons, dragged them to the ground, kicked and spat upon them. The ferocity of the women especially shocked the reporters. Women were supposedly the "gentle sex." In all, the day's fighting cost ten lives -- three Pinkertons and seven workers.

The workers won the battle, but lost the war. With the the mills occupied by the National Guard, the company was able to bring in replacement workers, "scabs" in union parlance, evict the former workers from their homes, and break the union. Historians share the view of contemporaries, that Homestead represented a turning point in ongoing contest between labor and capital, a turn decisively in capital's favor.

Skilled workers in the steel industry, as in the rest of the economy, exercised a good deal of control over working conditions. Capitalists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick wanted to exploit new mechanical advances to assert managementÕs right to control production. The Homestead Strike was a great battle in this struggle. Carnegie and Frick won but not before immigrant radical Alexander Berkman almost succeeded in assassinating Frick. How did the various parties to the strike see the issues?

Work in the mills was hard and dangerous. Noted writer Hamlin Garland wrote an extended description of work at the Homestead mills for McClure's Magazine. It was published the year after the strike, but the visit it described occured during the conflict.

Homestead and its Perilous Trades: Impressions of a Visit (excerpted)

By Hamlin Garland

McClure's Magazine, June, 1894.

A COLD, thin October rain was falling as I took the little ferry-boat and crossed the Monongahela River to see Homestead and its iron-mills. The town, infamously historic already, sprawled over the irregular hillside, circled by the cold gray river. On the flats close to the water's edge there severe masses of great sheds, out of which grim smoke-stacks rose with a desolate effect, like the black stumps of a burned forest of great trees. Above them dense clouds of sticky smoke rolled heavily away. 

Higher up the tenement-houses stood in dingy rows, alternating with vacant lots. Higher still stood some Queen Anne cottages, toward which slender sidewalks climbed like goat paths.  

The streets of the town were horrible; the buildings were poor; the sidewalks were sunken, swaying, and full of holes, and the crossings were sharp-edged stones set like rocks in a river bed. Everywhere the yellow mud of the street lay kneaded into a sticky mass, through which groups of pale, lean men slouched in faded garments, grimy with the soot and grease of the mills.

The town was as squalid and unlovely as could well be imagined, and the people were mainly of the discouraged and sullen type to be found everywhere where labor passes into the brutalizing stage of severity. It had the disorganized and incoherent effect of a town- which has feeble public spirit. Big industries at differing eras have produced squads of squalid tenement-houses far from the central portion of the town, each plant bringing its gangs of foreign laborers in raw masses to camp down like an army around its shops. 

. . . . .

The Carnegie mills stood down near the river at some distance from the ferry landing, and thither I took my way through the sticky yellow mud and the gray falling rain. I had secured for my guide a young man whose life had been passed in Homestead and who was quite familiar with the mills and workmen. I do not think he over-stated the hardships of the workmen, whose duties he thoroughly understood. He spoke frankly and without undue prejudice of the management and the work.

. . . . . . .

The great building which we entered first was a beam mill, "one of the finest in the world," my guide said. It was an immense shed, open at the sides, and filled with a mixed and intricate mass of huge machinery. On every side tumultuous action seemed to make every inch of ground dangerous. Savage little engines went rattling about among piles of great beams. Dimly on my left were huge engines, moving with thunderous pounding.

"Come to the starting point", said my guide. I followed him timidly far up toward the other end, my eyes fixed on the beautiful glow of a redhot bloom of metal saving high in the air. It lighted the interior with a glorious light.

I was looking at this beautiful light whey my guide pulled me suddenly behind some shelter. The furious scream of a saw broke forth, the monstrous exaggeration of a circular wood-sawÑa saw that melted its way through a beam of solid iron with deafening outcry, producing a gigantic glowing wheel of spattering sparks of golden fire. While it lasted all else was hid from sight. 

"That's the saw which cuts the beams of iron into lengths as ordered," my guide said, and we hurried past.

Everywhere in this pandemoniac shed was the thunder of reversing engines, the crash of falling iron, the rumbling growl of rollers, the howl of horrible saws, the deafening hiss of escaping steam, the wild vague shouts of workmen.

"Here are the ingots of steel, just as they come from the Bessemer converting mill," said my guide, pointing toward the mouth of the shed where some huge hunks of iron lay. " And there are the 'soaking pits,' or upright furnaces, where they are heated for rolling. They are perpendicular furnaces, or pits, you see."

We moved toward the mouths of the pits, where a group of men stood with long shovels and bars in their hands. They were touched with orange light, which rose out of the pits. The pits looked like wells or cisterns of white-hot metal. The men signalled a boy, and the huge covers, which hung on wheels, were moved to allow them to peer in at the metal. They threw up their elbows before their eyes, to shield their faces from the heat, while they studied the ingots within.

"It takes grit to stand there in July and August," said my guide. "Don't it, Joe?" he said to one of the men whom he knew. The man nodded, but was too busy to do more.

"I'd as soon go to hell at once," I replied. He laughed.

"But that isn't all. Those pits have to have their bottoms made after every 'heat,' and they can't wait for 'em to cool. The men stand by and work over them when it's hot enough to burn your boot-soles. Still it beats the old horizontal furnace." 

. . . . . .

Up at the pits again I stood to watch the "heaters" at their task. The crane and the travellers handled these huge pieces of iron deftly and surely, and moulded them into shape, as a girl might handle a cake of dough. Machinery has certainly come in here to lessen the horrors of the iron-worker's life, to diminish the number of deaths by exploding metal or by the leap of curling or breaking beams.

I watched the men as they stirred the deeps beneath. I could not help admiring the swift and splendid action of their bodies. They had the silence and certainty one admires in the tiger's action. I dared not move for fear of flying metal, the swift swing of a crane, or the sudden lurch of a great carrier. The men could not look out for me. They worked with a sort of desperate attention and alertness.

"That looks like hard work," I said to one of them to whom my companion introduced me. He was breathing hard from his work.

"Hard! I guess it's hard. I lost forty pounds the first three months I came into this business. It sweats the life out of a man. I often drink two buckets of water during twelve hours; the sweat drips through my sleeves, and runs down my legs and fills my shoes. "

"But that isn't the worst of it," said my guide; "it's a dog's life. Now, those men work twelve hours, and sleep and eat out ten more. You can see a man don't have much time for anything else. You can't see your friends, or do anything but work. That's why I got out of it. I used to come home so exhausted, staggering like a man with a 'jag.' It ain't any place for a sick manÑis it, Joe?"

Joe was a tall young fellow, evidently an assistant at the furnace. He smiled. "It's all the work I want, and I'm no chickenÑfeel that arm."

I felt his arm. It was like a billet of steel. His abdomen was like a sheet of boiler iron. The hair was singed from his hands and arms by the heat of the furnace.

"The tools I handle weigh one hundred and fifty pounds, and four o'clock in August they weigh about a ton."

"When do you eat?"

"I have a bucket of 'grub '; I eat when I can. We have no let-up for eating. This job I'm on now isn't so bad as it might be, for we're running easy; but when we're running full, it's all I can stand."

. . . . . .

We went on into the boiler-plate mills, still noisier, still more grandiose in effect. The rosy slabs of iron were taken from the white-hot furnaces by a crane (on which a man sat and swung, moving with it, guiding it) quite as in the beam mill. They were dropped upon a similar set of travellers; but as they passed through the rollers a man flung a shovelful of salt upon them, and each slab gave off a terrific exploding roar, like a hundred guns sounding together. As they passed to and fro, they grew thinner in form and richer in tone. The water which sprayed them ran about, fled and returned in dark spatters, like flocks of frightened spiders. The sheet warped and twisted, and shot forward with a menacing action which made me shiver.

Everywhere in this enormous building were pits like the mouth of hell, and fierce ovens giving off a glare of heat, and burning wood and iron, giving off horrible stenches of gases. Thunder upon thunder, clang upon clang, glare upon glare ! Torches flamed far up in the dark spaces above. Engines moved to and fro, and steam sissed and threatened.

Everywhere were grimy men with sallow and lean faces. The work was of the inhuman sort that hardens and coarsens.

In the "roughing" or "break-down" mill: the "rough" rolls merely give the beam shape; from them it is passed through the "finishing" rolls.

"How long do you work?" I asked of a young man who stood at the furnace near me.

"Twelve hours," he replied. "The night set go on at six at night and come off at six in the morning. I go on at six and off at six."

"For how much pay ? "

"Two dollars and a quarter.

"How much do those men get shovelling there in the rain?"

"One dollar and forty cents." (A cut has since taken place.)

"What proportion of the men get that pay?"

"Two-thirds of the whole plant, nearly two thousand. There are thirty-five hundred men in the mills. They get all prices, of course, from a dollar and forty cents up to the tonnage men, who get five and ten dollars per day when the mills run smooth. " 

"I suppose not many men make ten dollars per day." 

"Well, hardly." He smiled. "Of course the 'rollers' and the 'heaters' get the most, but there are only two ' rollers' to each mill, and three 'heaters,' and they are responsible for their product. The most of the men get under two dollars per day."

"And it is twelve hours' work without stop?"

"You be ! And then again you see we only get this pay part of the time. The mills are liable to be shut down part of the year. They shut down part of the night sometimes, and of course we're docked. Then, again, the tendency of the proprietors is to cut down the tonnage men; that is, the 'rollers' and 'heaters' are now paid by the ton, but they'll some day be paid by the day, like the rest of us."

"You bet they will," said my guide, who seemed quite familiar with the facts.

"Of course, you understand the tonnage men are responsible for their product. You see the improvement of machinery helps them, but it don't help the common laborer much. It wouldn't help the tonnage men if the company could fill their places cheaper. They don't pay them by the ton because they want to, but because they have to. But the tonnage men 'll get it next year."

Lining a furnace.

"That's right," said the man at the furnace door, as he seized his shovel to "line" the furnace.

The helper wheeled in a load of sand and gravel before the furnace door. He signalled a boy, the heavy iron door rose, the "heater" seized one of the long shovels, the helper lifted it with his own shovel and placed it in the mouth of the furnace and swiftly heaped it with sand. The "heater " ran the shovel in and turned it over on a thin place in the lining, and smoothed the sand out with desperate haste. The helper lifted the now red-hot shovel to the next door. The cover rose, and the process repeated. In each oven the beams reposed like potatoes in an oven.

By the time the helper lead a moment to spare he was wet with sweat. As he stood near me I noticed his grimy and sooty shirt, which lay close to his lean chest.

"One of the worst features about this thing is the sudden change of temperature. Now, that man's reeking with sweat, and this cold wind blowing upon him," I said to my guide. "It's always too hot or too cold."

. . . . .

Upon such toil rests the splendor of American civilization.

The converting mill was the most gorgeous and dangerous of all. Here the crude product is turned into steel by the Bessemer process. It also was a huge shed-like building open on two sides. In the centre stood supports for two immense pear-shaped pots, which swung on pivots ten or twelve feet from the floor. Over each pot was a huge chimney. Out of each pot roared alternately a ferocious geyser of saffron and sapphire flame, streaked with deeper yellow. From it a light streamedÑa light that flung violet shadows everywhere and made the gray outside rain a beautiful blue.

A fountain of sparks arose, gorgeous as ten thousand rockets, and fell with a beautiful curve, like the petals of some enormous flower. Overhead the beams were glowing orange in a base of purple. The men were yellow where the light struck them, violet in shadow. Wild shouts resounded amid the rumbling of an overhead train, and the squeal of a swift little engine, darting in and out laden with the completed castings. The pot began to burn with a whiter flame. Its fluttering, humming roar silenced all else.

"It is nearly ready to pour," said my companion; "the carbon is nearly burnt away."  

"Why does it burn so ferociously "

"Through the pivot a blast of oxygen is delivered with an enormous pressure. This unites with the silicon and carbon and carries it away to the surface. He'd better pour now, or the metal will burn."

Underneath the other pot men were shovelling away slag in the rain of falling sparks. They worked with desperate haste. To their wrists dangled disks of leather to protect their hands from heat. It was impossible to see what manner of men they were. They resembled human beings only in form. 

A shout was heard, and a tall crane swung a gigantic ladle under the converting vessel, which then mysteriously up-ended, exploding like a cannon a prodigious discharge of star-like pieces of white-hot slag. The "blowers" on their high platform across the shed sheltered themselves behind a wall.

I drew back into the rain. "They call this the death-trap," shouted my companion, smiling at my timid action.

Down came the vessel, until out of it streamed the smooth flow of terribly beautiful molten metal. As it ran nearly empty and the ladle swung away, the dripping slag fell to the ground exploding, leaping viciously, and the scene became gorgeous beyond belief, with orange and red and green flame.

Into this steam and smoke and shower of sparks the workmen leapt, and were dimly seen preparing for another blast, prying off crusted slag, spraying the ladle, and guiding the cranes. Meanwhile, high up above them in the tumult, an engine backed up with a load of crude molten iron, discharged into the converter, and the soaring saffron and orange and sapphire flames began again.

"Yes, the men call this the death-trap," repeated my guide, as we stood in the edge of the building; "they wipe a man out here every little while."

"In what way does death come?" I asked.

"Oh, all kinds of ways. Sometimes a chain breaks, and a ladle tips over, and the iron explodesÑlike that." He pointed at the newly emptied retort, out of which the drippings fell into the water which lay beneath like pools of green gold. As it fell, each drop exploded in a dull report.

"Sometimes the slag falls on the workmen from that roadway up there. Of course, if everything is working all smooth and a man watches out, why, all righ ! But you take it after they've been on duty twelve hours without sleep, and running like hell, everybody tired and loggy, and it's a different story."

My guide went on:

"You take it back in the beam mill Ñyou saw how the men have to scatter when the carriers or the cranes moveÑ well, sometimes they don't get out of the way; the men who should give warning don't do it quick enough."

"What do those men get who are shovelling slag up there?"

"Fourteen cents an hour. If they worked eight hours, like a carpenter, they'd get one dollar and twelve cents."

"So a man works in peril of his life for fourteen cents an hour," I remarked.

"That's what he does. It ain't the only business he does it in, though."

. . . . . .

We stood to watch the making of rails. And as the rosy serpent grew slenderer and swifter it seemed to take on life. It curved lightly, unaccountably, and shot with menacing mouth past groups of workmen.

"Sometimes they break," said my guide, "and then they sweep things." And his words pictured the swing of a red-hot scythe.

"The wonder to me is, you don't all die of exposure and the changes of heat and cold."

My guide looked serious. "You don't notice any old men here." He swept his hand about the building. "It shortens life, just like mining; there is no question about that. That, of course, doesn't enter into the usual statement. But the long hours, the strain, and the sudden changes of temperature use a man up. He quits before he gets fifty. I can see lots of fellows here who are failing. They'll lay down in a few years. I went all over that, and I finally came to the decision that I'd peddle groceries rather than kill myself at this business."

"Well, what is the compensation? I mean, why do men keep on ? "

"Oh, the common hands do it because they need a job, I suppose, and fellows like Joe expect to be one of the high-paid men."

"How much would that be per year?"

"Oh, three thousand or possibly four thousand a year."

"Does that pay for what it takes out of you?"

"No, I don't think it does," he confessed. " Still, a man has got to go into something."

As night fell the scene became still more grandiose and frightful. I hardly dared move without direction. The rosy ingots, looking like stumps of trees reduced to coals of living fire, rose from their pits of flame and dropped upon the tables, and galloped head on against the rollers, sending off flakes of rosy scale. As they went through, the giant engine thundered fin, reversing with a sound like a nearby cannon; and everywhere the jarring clang of great beams fell upon the ear. Wherever the saw was set at work, great wheels of fire rose out of the obscure murk of lower shadow.

. . . . . .

A roar as of a hundred lions, a thunder as of cannons, flames that made the electric light look like a twinkling blue star, jarring clang of falling iron, burst of spluttering flakes of fire, scream of terrible saws, shifting of mighty trucks with hiss of steam! This was the scene upon which I looked back; this tumult I was leaving. I saw men prodding in the deep soaking pits where the ingots glowed in white-hot chambers. I saw other men in the hot yellow glare from the furnaces. I saw men measuring the serpentine rosy beams. I saw them send the saw flying into them. I saw boys perched high in cages, their shrill voices sounding wild and animal-like in the midst of the uproar: a place into which men went like men going into war for the sake of wives and children, urged on by necessity, blinded and dulled by custom and habit; an inhuman place to spend four-fifths of one's waking hours. I crawled dismally back to my boarding-place, in the deep darkness, the chill, and the falling rain. The farther I got from those thundering beams and screaming saws, the deeper I drew my breath. Oh, the peace and sweetness of the dim hills across the river! . . . . .

Stop and Consider:

The all-day battle on July 6, 1893 made headlines across the country, as did the occupation of Homestead by the Pennsylvania National Guard. Among those who most avidly followed the story were two young Russian Jewish immigrants operating a small ice cream parlor in Worcester, Massachusetts. They were revolutionists, anarchists. Both would become famous political radicals. Emma Goldman would become especially famous for her activities in favor of unions, birth control, and free love. Alexander Berkman would become famous for attempting to assassinate Henry Clay Frick. Here is Goldman's account of their reactions to the Homestead strike.

from Living My Life
by Emma Goldman

It was May 1892. News from Pittsburg announced that trouble had broken out between the Carnegie Steel Company and its employees organized in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. It was one of the biggest and most efficient labour bodies of the country, consisting mostly of Americans, men of decision and grit, who would assert their rights. The Carnegie Company, on the other hand, was a powerful corporation, known as a hard master. It was particularly significant that Andrew Carnegie, its president, had temporarily turned over the entire management to the company chairman, Henry Clay Frick, a man known for his enmity to labour. Frick was also the owner of extensive coke fields, where unions were prohibited and the workers were ruled with an iron hand.

. . .

Far away from the scene of the impending struggle, in our little ice-cream parlour in the city of Worcester, we eagerly followed developments. To us it sounded the awakening of the American worker, the long-awaited day of his resurrection. The native toiler had risen, he was beginning to feel his mighty strength, he was determined to break the chains that had held him in bondage for so long, we thought. Our hearts were filled with admiration for the men of Homestead.

. . .

One afternoon a customer came in for an ice-cream, while I was alone in the store. As I set the dish down before him, I caught the large headlines of his paper: `LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN HOMESTEAD - FAMILIES OF STRIKERS EVICTED FROM THE COMPANY HOUSES - WOMEN IN CONFINEMENT CARRIED OUT INTO STREET BY SHERIFFS'. I read over the man's shoulder Frick's dictum to the workers: he would rather see them dead than concede to their demands, and he threatened to import Pinkerton detectives. The brutal bluntness of the account, the inhumanity of Frick towards the evicted mother, inflamed my mind. Indignation swept my whole being.

. . .

I locked up the store and ran full speed the three blocks to our little flat. It was Homestead, not Russia; I knew it now. We belonged in Homestead. The boys, resting for the evening shift, sat up as I rushed into the room, newspaper clutched in my hand. `What has happened, Emma? You look terrible!' I could not speak. I handed them the paper.

Sasha [Berkman] was the first on his feet. `Homestead!' he exclaimed. `I must go to Homestead!' I flung my arms around him, crying out his name. I, too, would go. `We must go tonight,' he said; `the great moment has come at last!' Being internationalists, he added, it mattered not to us where the blow was struck by the workers; we must be with them. We must bring our great message and help them see that it was not only for the moment that they must strike, but for all time, for a free life, for anarchism. Russia had many heroic men and women, but who was there in America? Yes, we must go to Homestead, tonight!

. . .

A few days after our return to New York, the news was flashed across the country of the slaughter of steel-workers by Pinkertons. Frick had fortified the Homestead mills, built a high fence around them. Then, in the dead of night, a barge packed with strike-breakers, under protection of heavily armed Pinkerton thugs, quietly stole up the Monongahela River. The steel-men had learned of Frick's move. They stationed themselves along the shore, determined to drive back Frick's hirelings. When the barge 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.

The wanton murders aroused even the daily papers. Several came out in strong editorials, severely criticizing Frick. He had gone too far; he had added fuel to the fire in the labour ranks and would have himself to blame for any desperate acts that might come.

We were stunned. We saw at once that the time for our manifesto had passed. Words had lost their meaning in the face of the innocent blood spilled on the banks of the Monongahela. Intuitively each felt what was surging in the heart of the others. Sasha broke the silence.

`Frick is the responsible factor in this crime,' he said; `he must be made to stand the consequences.' It was the psychological moment for an Attentat; the whole country was aroused, everybody was considering Frick the perpetrator of a coldblooded murder. A blow aimed at Frick would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle. It would also strike terror in the enemy's ranks and make them realize that the proletariat of America had its avengers.

. . .

`I will kill Frick,' Sasha said, `and of course I shall be condemned to death. I will die proudly in the assurance that I gave my life for the people. But I will die by my own hand, like Lingg. Never will I permit our enemies to kill me.'

I hung on his lips. His clarity, his calmness and force, the sacred fire of his ideal, enthralled me, held me spellbound. Turning to me, he continued in a deep voice. I was the born speaker, the propagandist, he said. I could do a great deal for his act. I could articulate its meaning to the workers. I could explain that he had no personal grievance against Frick, that as a human being Frick was no less to him than to anyone else. Frick was the symbol of wealth and power, of the injustice and wrong of the capitalistic class, as well as personally responsible for the shedding of the workers' blood. Sasha's act would be directed against Frick, not as a man, but as an enemy of labour. Surely I must see how important it was that I remain behind to plead the meaning of his deed and its message throught the country.

Every word he said beat upon my brain like a sledge-hammer. The longer he talked, the more conscious I became of the terrible fact that he had no need of me in his last great hour. The realization swept away everything else -- message, Cause, duty, propaganda. What meaning could these things have compared with the force that made Sasha flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood from the moment that I had heard his voice and felt the grip of his hand at our first meeting? Had our three years together shown him so little of my soul that he could tell me calmly to go on living after he had been blown to bits or strangled to death?

. . .

Berkman's account, from his Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, disclose his revolutionary ardor and his political ideas:

It is hot and stuffy in the train. The air is oppressive with tobacco smoke; the boisterous talk of the men playing cards near by annoys me. I turn to the window. The gust of perfumed air, laden with the rich aroma of fresh-mown hay, is soothingly invigorating. Green woods and yellow fields circle in the distance, whirl nearer, close, then rush by, giving place to other circling fields and woods. The country looks young and alluring in the early morning sunshine. But my thoughts are busy with Homestead.

The great battle has been fought. Never before, in all its history, has American labor won such a signal victory. By force of arms the workers of Homestead have compelled three hundred Pinkerton invaders to surrender, to surrender most humbly, ignominiously. What humiliating defeat for the powers that be! Does not the Pinkerton janizary represent organized authority, forever crushing the toiler in the interest of the exploiters? Well may the enemies of the People be terrified at the unexpected awakening. But the People, the workers of America, have joyously acclaimed the rebellious manhood of Homestead. The steel-workers were not the aggressors. Resignedly they had toiled and suffered. Out of their flesh and bone grew the great steel industry; on their blood fattened the powerful Carnegie Company. Yet patiently they had waited for the promised greater share of the wealth they were creating. Like a bolt from a clear sky came the blow: wages were to be reduced! Peremptorily the steel magnates refused to continue the sliding scale previously agreed upon as a guarantee of peace. The Carnegie firm challenged the Amalgamated Association by the submission of conditions which it knew the workers could not accept. Foreseeing refusal, it flaunted warlike preparations to crush the union under the iron heel. Perfidious Carnegie shrank from the task, having recently proclaimed the gospel of good will and harmony. "I would lay it down as a maxim," he had declared, "that there is no excuse for a strike or a lockout until arbitration of differences has been offered by one party and refused by the other. The right of the workingmen to combine and to form trades-unions is no less sacred than the right of the manufacturer to enter into association and conference with his fellows, and it must sooner or later be conceded. Manufacturers should meet their men more than half-way."

With smooth words the great philanthropist had persuaded the workers to endorse the high tariff. Every product of his mills protected, Andrew Carnegie secured a reduction in the duty on steel billets, in return for his generous contribution to the Republican campaign fund. In complete control of the billet market, the Carnegie firm engineered a depression of prices, as a seeming consequence of a lower duty. But the market price of billets was the sole standard of wages in the Homestead mills. The wages of the workers must be reduced! The offer of the Amalgamated Association to arbitrate the new scale met with contemptuous refusal: there was nothing to arbitrate; the men must submit unconditionally; the union was to be exterminated. And Carnegie selected Henry C. Frick, the bloody Frick of the coke regions, to carry the program into execution.

Must the oppressed forever submit? The manhood of Homestead rebelled: the millmen scorned the despotic ultimatum. Then Frick's hand fell. The war was on! Indignation swept the country. Throughout the land the tyrannical attitude of the Carnegie Company was bitterly denounced, the ruthless brutality of Frick universally execrated.

I could no longer remain indifferent. The moment was urgent. The toilers of Homestead had defied the oppressor. They were awakening. But as yet the steel-workers were only blindly rebellious. The vision of Anarchism alone could imbue discontent with conscious revolutionary purpose; it alone could lend wings to the aspirations of labor. The dissemination of our ideas among the proletariat of Homestead would illumine the great struggle, help to clarify the issues, and point the way to complete ultimate emancipation.

. . . .

The time for speech was past. Throughout the land the toilers echoed the defiance of the men of Homestead. The steel-workers had rallied bravely to the defense; the murderous Pinkertons were driven from the city. But loudly called the blood of Mammon's victims on the banks of the Monongahela. Loudly it calls. It is the People calling. Ah, the People! The grand, mysterious, yet so near and real, People. . . .

. . . I must form a definite plan of action. My purpose is quite clear to me. A tremendous struggle is taking place at Homestead: the People are manifesting the right spirit in resisting tyranny and invasion. My heart exults. This is, at last, what I have always hoped for from the American workingman: once aroused, he will brook no interference; he will fight all obstacles, and conquer even more than his original demands. It is the spirit of the heroic past reincarnated in the steel-workers of Homestead, Pennsylvania. What supreme joy to aid in this work! That is my natural mission. I feel the strength of a great undertaking. No shadow of doubt crosses my mind. The People—the toilers of the world, the producers—comprise, to me, the universe. They alone count. The rest are parasites, who have no right to exist. But to the People belongs the earth—by right, if not in fact. To make it so in fact, all means are justifiable; nay, advisable, even to the point of taking life. The question of moral right in such matters often agitated the revolutionary circles I used to frequent. I had always taken the extreme view. The more radical the treatment, I held, the quicker the cure. Society is a patient; sick constitutionally and functionally. Surgical treatment is often imperative. The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable; it is the highest duty of every true revolutionist. Human life is, indeed, sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, of an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered as the taking of a life. A revolutionist would rather perish a thousand times than be guilty of what is ordinarily called murder. In truth, murder and Attentat [a political killing] are to me opposite terms. To remove a tyrant is an act of liberation, the giving of life and opportunity to an oppressed people. True, the Cause often calls upon the revolutionist to commit an unpleasant act; but it is the test of a true revolutionist—nay, more, his pride—to sacrifice all merely human feeling at the call of the People's Cause. If the latter demand his life, so much the better.

Could anything be nobler than to die for a grand, a sublime Cause? Why, the very life of a true revolutionist has no other purpose, no significance whatever, save to sacrifice it on the altar of the beloved People. And what could be higher in life than to be a true revolutionist? It is to be a man, a complete man. A being who has neither personal interests nor desires above the necessities of the Cause; one who has emancipated himself from being merely human, and has risen above that, even to the height of conviction which excludes all doubt, all regret; in short, one who in the very inmost of his soul feels himself revolutionist first, human afterwards.

Such a revolutionist I feel myself to be. . . .

Goldman stayed in New York after Berkman went to Pittsburgh. In her autobiography she describes hearing of the assassination attempt:

In the early afternoon of Saturday, July 23, Fedya [a comrade of hers and Berkman's] rushed into my room with a newspaper. There it was, in large black letters: `YOUNG MAN BY THE NAME OF ALEXANDER BERKMAN SHOOTS FRICK - ASSASSIN OVERPOWERED BY WORKING-MEN AFTER DESPERATE STRUGGLE.'

Working-men, working-men overpowering Sasha? The paper was lying! He did the act for the working-men; they would never attack him.

Hurriedly we secured all the afternoon editions. Every one had a different description, but the main fact stood out - our brave Sasha had committed the act! Frick was still alive, but his wounds were considered fatal. He would probably not survive the night. And Sasha - they would kill him. They were going to kill him, I was sure of it. Was I going to let him die alone? Should I go on talking while he was being butchered? I must pay the same price as he - I must stand the consequences - I must share the responsibility!

. . .

In feverish excitement we read the detailed story about the `assassin Alexander Berkman'. He had forced his way into Frick's private office on the heels of a Negro porter who had taken in his card. He had immediately opened fire, and Frick had fallen to the ground with three bullets in his body. The first to come to his aid, the paper said, was his assistant Leishman, who was in the office at the time. Working-men, engaged on a carpenter job in the building, rushed in, and one of them felled Berkman to the ground with a hammer. At first they had thought Frick dead. Then a cry was heard from him. Berkman had crawled over and got near enough to strike Frick with a dagger in the thigh. After that he was pounded into unconsciousness. He came to in the station house, but he would answer no questions. One of the detectives grew suspicious about the appearance of Berkman's face and he nearly broke the young man's jaw trying to open his mouth. A peculiar capsule was found hidden there. When asked what it was, Berkman replied with defiant contempt: `Candy.' On examination it proved to be a dynamite cartridge. The police were sure of a conspiracy.

Summary: Berkman's attempt upon Frick's life did not succeed on any level. Frick made a full recovery. Neither the Homestead strikers nor any other segment of American labor saw the assassination as "propaganda of the deed." Quite the opposite. Berkman recorded his dismay in Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist at discovering that the strikers reviled him for having, in their eyes, given their opponents a weapon to use against them. Aside from Goldman and a few other radicals, no one supported Berkman's deed. Nor did it cause others to rally around the strikers' cause. By November even the most determined members of the Amalgamated gave up. A few hundred got their old jobs back. Many of the others were blacklisted and had to find other kinds of work.

The company's victory put an end to not only the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers in Homestead but to trade unionism in the entire steel industry until the late 1930s.

Frick's recovery meant that the state of Pennsylvania could only charge Berkman with attempted murder. He served fourteen years of his twenty-one year sentence. Upon his release, he resumed his political work as well as his association with Goldman. No longer lovers, they remained intellectual soulmates. But Berkman lost his romantic faith in revolution along with his sense of his own infallible ability to judge others.

He and Goldman opposed U.S. entry into World War I; they opposed the draft. Arrested during the Red Scare of 1919-1920, they were deported to the Soviet Union. Just before their deportation, at a farewell dinner given by fellow anarchists, a group of newspaper reporters showed up. It was 1920. Henry Clay Frick had died, of natural causes. Did Berkman have any comment? "Deported by God," was his response. Once in the Soviet Union, Berkman and Goldman quickly became critics of the ruling Bolsheviks and wound in exile in France where, in 1936, striken with incurable cancer, Berkman took his own life. He died, as Goldman wrote, beloved by all who knew him.

Reflect and Respond: