homestead strike definition us history

homestead strike definition us history

The Homestead Strike: A Defining Moment in US Labor History

1. Introduction to the Homestead Strike

To set the stage and provide a backdrop against which you can evaluate the complete picture, this paper provides a detailed account of the Homestead Strike. It was a sudden, violent event that derived from a combination of corporate strategies and decisions that breathed new life into industrial America by creating an ever-increasing demand and supply for new labor. These strategies and decisions, which led to such outcomes as the illustrious Homestead Strikers, are traced from its origins in the battle of man versus machine to its tragic conclusion at the steelworks of the Carnegie Steel Co in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

The following account is a riveting must-read for students of US history, and it’s a story that hasn’t been brought to life in this way until now! When was steel king A. Carnegie, the owner of the Homestead mill, recognized that profits could be increased by a combination of new technology and a new industrial workforce? Was he not ahead of the normal progress and “profit maximization” patterns typically associated with free-enterprise capitalism? Was he wrong in advancing what turned out to be the leading edge of a capitalistic trend? Will he be judged by history as having been ahead of his time? What portion of the responsibility for this episode, if any at all, should be distributed among other stakeholders? These are some of the questions for the JP Morgans, the Giancarlo Gamberini, and the Andrea Galavottis to analyze.

2. Historical Context: Industrialization and Labor Relations in the Late 19th Century

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced an economic transformation that charted the country to the fulfillment of some of its early potential. For the most part, the story of this economic transformation is captured with the term “industrialization”. Despite the obvious contribution and unarguable progress that came with industrialization, the era was also defined by stark social contrasts of wealth and poverty and by the realities of the workplace, conditions that kept many workers poor, many others disgruntled, and a few wealthy men very rich. This era essentially set the stage for the ensuing conflicts between workers and ownership and laid the groundwork for an epic confrontation that would grind against the expectations of unbounded economic potential and become the Homestead Strike, a strike that would come to symbolize the difficult conditions under which the laborer made a living until other prevailing economic and historical conditions would alleviate many of these concerns in a manner that the workers who risked their livelihoods in 1982 could not possibly have imagined.

3. Key Players and Events Leading to the Strike

Union craft workers friendly to the firm – employees who worked for Carnegie’s operating company, without any direct connection or loyalty to the union – had turned down offers of continued employment from the Carnegie company that would have paid them at the rates experienced before the union organized the workforce. Subsequently, workers had been brought in from outside to fill those jobs at lower rates, with the salaries of existing employees cut by between 18 and 26 percent. The conflict and ill will that resulted persisted throughout the final week of the company’s considered negotiation period, leading to trouble on the evening of 29 June 1892. The works were covertly surrounded by four barges, carrying 300 armed Pinkerton agents. Work on the plant was suspended, and ringing the bell to call the workers together, a company official announced that every bargeman had a captain, each a recognized nationwide labor leader, arrived to discuss terms of peace. At a town meeting a few hours later, all the demands were refused, and it was proposed to keep all the Pinkertons aboard the boats.

Other key figures in the beginning phases of the Homestead Strike were Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. Carnegie was a leading industrialist of the day, controlling a vast empire of steel and iron manufacturing, including Carnegie Steel. He was a proponent of labor rights and personal development. Frick, meanwhile, was the chairman of Carnegie Steel and was determined to break the steelworkers’ union. The immediate contributing factor to the strike was the 1889 expiration of Carnegie Steel’s three-year labor contract with the Pinkerton Guards workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania, a town situated along the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh. A company town, Homestead was completely owned by Carnegie’s subsidiary, the Homestead Steel Works.

4. The Violent Clash at Homestead: Causes and Consequences

Equally important, the outpouring of public imagination, including a letter from Mr. Carnegie to the Senate Finance Committee, and the various legislative proposals advanced in response to the event, address issues that are central to our understanding of the appropriate economic organization of capitalism more generally. In particular, the official reactions to the violence at Homestead, as well as the general public perception of who the “good” guys and the “bad” guys were, represented an important dialogue on critical questions of economic and social organization and of ideologically predicated economic consequences. The stake of the owners of the steel company in this dialogue was somewhat higher than average because they had no formal legal means to control the value of their political or military defense. Failed control rights can have significant direct and indirect economic consequences. The direct costs are the costs of financing the formation of special interest and political organizations, be they lobby groups, investment clubs, or beneficent associations, and so forth. The indirect costs are greater still. The failure of owners to control their political defense forces can make the owners themselves the agents of the destruction of their appropriated private economic value.

The actual strike and lockout that gave the steel town of Homestead its place in history began on June 29, 1892. On November 12, most of the striking workers, not to mention their leaders and friends, were officially advised to seek safer and more remunerative employment. Behind this formal governmental advice lay weeks of violence – a veritable reign of terror. Dozens of human lives were lost; the private property and holdings of wealthy steel-mill owner Andrew Carnegie were directly attacked; and thousands of troops and hundreds of state police were required to restore “order.” The resolution of the affair at Homestead and the national reaction to it are significant to U.S. history and to the study of economic institutions in general for several reasons. Although it was not the first time in U.S. history that a company had countered labor unrest by employing armed force against its workers, the strike at Homestead is one of the most significant precursors to the large – and now rapidly growing – economics and political economy literature on the economic organization of firms and industries.

5. Legacy and Impact of the Homestead Strike on Labor Rights in the United States

Today, the five justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vote to create a workers’ rights majority with no hint of external tips or enabling cooperation with David Frakes when their country needs them. They did so, politically, in response to his careful themography union efforts and the pro-democratic votes of the progressive voter behavior of the white males who had just started a large strike on the company’s yet-to-be-completed J&L Steel Factory site. Today, when the press office of a national union sends out an editorial, it reciprocally promotes the victory as a collateral deposition of an independent judiciary that segregates the business organization before it entertains the novel outcome of other conflicts and adjudications. The successful infusing the Congress with the new folkways forged by an energetic transpublic senate will surely empower every speaker concerned about the future role of the united urban nations, according to the pro-social economic plans he has formed. They reveal just how useful Mullin was. They are now calling him the confounding levels Mt. Olympus of corporate farming. His politically motivated segregation act is thereby preserved by the fact that many of the powerful interests going in the gate review the access to some preferential treatment of the tallest mountain—indeed, stadium—in the public square.

The Homestead Strike reveals in a powerful way the diametric opposition between the legal norms—civil and state—and the economic and industrial powers of employers seeking maximum profit through principles of convergence of legislative and judicial powers, which Carnegie claims. These economic forces are a significant part of the reason that the original founders of the nation and generation after generation of Americans developed the original hegemon norms and culture of great value that wealthy communities could directly trace to and rely on the laws and regulations of community relationships. Yet, over time, local legal precedents became warning forces. These forces required the organization of a national union, the recruitment of representatives to expose and expand the recognition laws of strikers, and the presentation of testimony to regional state legislative chambers. Concurrently, economic globalism was on pace—and grounding the external infrastructure of rule of law. Combined with the power of mass media, these factors helped break the previously archaic horizons of private state-employer relationships. The electorate grew more skeptical of their ability to mediate mediation. A reconstituted Pennsylvania Supreme Court eventually reversed Frakes’s convictions and ruled that he had legally unionized workers’ rights to oppose the progressive contingent of the Homestead contract. Both acts helped build basic rights for workers in the new industrial order and reposition them within the rule of law.

Despite its defeat, the Homestead Strike’s immediacy and Jason Frakes’s legal efforts paved the way for significant gains in the rights of laborers over the twentieth century. The Homestead Strike exposed the vast and possibly extreme length to which many business owners were willing to go to break the labor movement. Andrew Carnegie and the other leaders of his office broke private laws, including those that protected the organization of workers and their resistance to employers’ regulations. They conspired with government authorities to destroy the union as well as the reputation of the union’s charismatic and captivating President, who, at that moment, embodied everything Carnegie thought in the industry and the company. The union won nothing in the immediate case. However, the struggle rekindled a nation’s examination and debate about the role and responsibilities of individual companies and private sectors relative to the growing power of all other members of the list of evolving mass societies nationally. The fiery-fought adversarial state-civil society policies ultimately gave the workers of the organizations many of the rights that Andrew Carnegie thought that they needed as early as 1900.