Harper’s Weekly illustration of the Pennsylvania state militia marching on the Homestead Steelworks, 1892 / Library of Congressįive days later, however, 6,000 state militiamen who had been dispatched by the governor of Pennsylvania marched into town, surrounded the steelworks, and reopened the plant. By the next afternoon, with several having been killed on both sides, the Pinkertons raised a white flag of surrender. The Pinkerton agents, who were aboard barges being towed toward the side of the steelworks that bordered the Monongahela River, were pinned down in the barges by gunfire from the striking workers. On July 6, gunfire broke out between striking workers and some of the three hundred Pinkerton detectives that Frick had hired.
But Frick hadn’t hired any old strikebreakers: he decided to hire men from the Pinkerton detective agency, who were technically dubbed “detectives” but who were actually armed men seeking to push past striking workers and forcibly reopen the steelworks. To get inside the steelworks, the replacement workers would have the daunting task of making their way past picketing strikers who had surrounded the steelworks. In the first days of the strike, Frick decided to bring in a group of strikebreakers (commonly called scabs). Henry Clay Frick, manager of the Homestead Steelworks / Library of Congress In response, the next day, AA members struck the plant. On June 29, 1892, Henry Clay Frick, the manager of the Homestead Steelworks outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-motivated by a desire to break the union of skilled steel workers who for years had controlled elements of the workflow on the shop floor in the steel mill and slowed output-locked the members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) out of the Homestead Steelworks. Strikes and Strikebreaking The Homestead Strike Unions-which function to protect workers’ wages, hours of labor, and working conditions-were on the rise. In 1892, for example, 1,298 strikes involving some 164,000 workers took place across the nation. Between 18, 35,000 workers per year lost their lives in industrial and other accidents at work, and strikes were commonplace: no fewer than 100,000 workers went on strike each year. The late nineteenth century was a time when industrial capitalism was new, raw, and sometimes brutal. From 1865 to 1918, 27.5 million immigrants poured into the United States, many aspiring to the opportunities afforded by the nation’s economic successes. Gilded Age Capitalism and the Rise of Unionsīy the late 1800s the United States’ industrial output and GDP was growing faster than that of any other country in the world.Īt the center of the nation’s economic success was a dynamic and expansive industrial capitalism, one consequence of which was mass immigration. The Pullman Strike of 1894 started outside Chicago at the Pullman sleeping car manufacturing company and quickly grew into a national railroad strike involving the American Railway Union, the Pullman Company, railroads across the nation, and the federal government. The steelworkers ultimately lost the strike. The strike culminated in a gun battle between unionized steelworkers and a group of men hired by the company to break the strike. The Homestead Strike occurred at the Carnegie Steel Company’s Homestead Steel Works in 1892. Read about the Homestead Strike and the Pullman Strike, two of the most famous labor battles in American history.Īs the United States’ industrial economy grew in the late 1800s, conflict between workers and factory owners became increasingly frequent and sometimes led to violence. “The Lucy Furnaces in 1886.” Carnegie Steel Company, Lawrenceville (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania / Wikimedia CommonsĪs the United States became a major industrial power, conflict between workers and factory owners intensified.
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