Homestead battle still resonates Speakers will discuss its legacy, current impact
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Peering through a window of the Homestead Steel Works Pump House, John Morris could see the battle unfolding on the banks of the Monongahela River.
It was just past 8 a.m. on July 6, 1892, and thousands of enraged steelworkers lined the riverbank, brandishing rifles and shotguns. Two barges were docked on the shore, carrying 300 men sent by the Pinkerton Detective Agency to guard the mill against its own workers.
A three-year contract negotiated between the Carnegie Steel Co. and the mill’s unionized workers had expired the week before, and the two parties had failed to reach a new agreement. Anticipating a workers’ action, Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie Steel’s chairman, built an 11-foot fence around the mill, complete with turrets and gun sightings, said Ron Baraff, director of historic resources and facilities at the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area. The workers responded to the lockout by organizing a strike, stationing sentries along the river and bracing for armed conflict.
On the one side were the mill’s roughly 800 skilled workers — members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers — and the 2,000 unskilled workers who supported them, largely Eastern European immigrants who worked long hours in the blistering heat of the mills. On the other side were the Pinkerton agents, employed by Frick to secure the arrival of strikebreakers.
Some Pinkertons were seasoned fighters, others were young men recruited from rural Ohio, according to Charles McCollester, a retired professor of industrial and labor relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. But to the workers, they represented the oppressive power of Frick and Andrew Carnegie, the behemoths of the steel industry.
Morris was a 28-year-old Welsh immigrant who had labored in the mills for at least a decade, according to an 1892
article from the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette. A unionized steelworker, he lived in a small brown cottage on Ninth Avenue with his wife and children. On that morning, just minutes into the start of the battle, a Pinkerton guard spotted him in the Pump House and shot him in the forehead. He died instantly, the first casualty of a daylong battle that claimed the lives of at least seven workers. The conflict stunned the world and is recognized as one of the most infamous events in early American labor history.
On Thursday, local historians, teachers, clergymen, members of United Steelworkers and others will gather in Homestead to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the strike and honor the local men who died in the Battle of Homestead. The memorial service will begin at noon at the crest of the Homestead Cemetery hill, where three workers are buried, and end at the St. Mary Magdalene Cemetery across the street, where three others are buried. (A seventh is buried in Verona.)
Historians of the conflict see troubling similarities between the conditions steelworkers like Morris were fighting against in 1892 and those in America today, in which massive companies, led by wealthy individuals, dominate the digital economy while lower- and middle-class people struggle to make ends meet.
“We’re facing a more radical shift: Who’s going to control production and who’s going to benefit from it is just as real as it was for workers in Homestead,” Mr. McCollester said.
On July 6, 1892, the strength of Homestead’s labor-led community was put to the test. The Pinktertons arrived on Davis Island in the Ohio River in the dead of night and were transported up the Monongahela on barges, Mr. Baraff said. By 6 a.m., tens of thousands of people had gathered by the Pump House. The Pinkertons were unprepared for the crowds and had barely opened their crates of uniforms and firearms, he added. Union leaders told the Pinkertons not to disembark; the Pinkertons informed them that they were trespassing on Carnegie Steel property. It’s unclear who fired the first shots.
Peter Ferris, a 28-year-old Slovak, lived with his brother near the railroad tracks and crossed the river every week to attend Mass at a Catholic church in Braddock, according to Mr. McCollester. He arrived at the mill early in the morning, unarmed, to share a loaf of bread with the other workers. Shortly after Morris died, a Pinkerton agent shot Ferris in the head. As he lay dying, he raised the loaf aloft, shouting, “You cannot take this from our mouths!”
The workers fought with whatever they could find. Some began firing leftover Fourth of July fireworks at the Pinkertons, Mr. Baraff said. Others dragged a decommissioned Civil War cannon down from the Grand Army of the Republic veterans home in Swissvale. The plan backfired: iron shrapnel from a cannonball fatally struck Silas Wain, a 23-year-old laborer in the Bessemer mill, according to Mr. McCollester. He had recently emigrated from England and was engaged to be married within weeks.
George Rutter, a union man and Civil War veteran wounded at Gettysburg, was shot in the thigh and stomach. He held on for 11 days and died in a hospital bed next to Frederick Heinde, the injured Pinkerton captain, according to Mr. McCollester.
The battle peaked and the workers began to overpower the Pinkertons. “There were sharpshooters picking us off all day, and about 12 o’clock barrels of burning oil were floating around the bank to burn us up,” recalled John W. Holway, a student employed as a Pinkerton agent, according to a U.S. Senate testimony. The Pinkertons eventually surrendered.
Thomas Weldon, an Irishman who was a skilled roller in the mills, boarded the barges after the surrender and while trying to break a Pinkerton rifle, accidentally discharged it into his stomach, Mr. McCollester said. He was the last worker to die in the battle. Many others were injured and at least three Pinkertons died, according to historical records.
As union men marched the Pinkertons to a makeshift jail in the Homestead Opera House, thousands of incensed workers and townspeople formed a gauntlet around them, striking and denigrating them, Mr. Baraff said. The Pinkertons were imprisoned overnight and sent back to Ohio by train the next morning.
The workers’ deaths convulsed Homestead, touching nearly all of its religious and ethnic communities. Thousands joined funeral processions that wound their way from churches across town to cemeteries on the hilltop.
Hundreds attended the funeral service for Morris at the Fourth Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, where the pastor James J. McIlyar defended the workers’ actions, according to an 1892 Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette article. “The mill men were organized in an association that enabled them to obtain just and adequate remuneration for their services,” he told the crowd. “This town is bathed in tears today and it is brought about by one man, who is less respected by the laboring people than any other employer in the country.”
At the Methodist service for Joseph Sotak, a 34-yearold Slovak shot while dragging a wounded Welshman to safety, the Rev. J. Cedochi emphasized the magnitude of the workers’ cause. His sermon, titled “All Reforms Are Brought About By Bloodshed,” electrified the crowd, according to a historic NewYork World account.
During his remarks at Weldon’s funeral at St. Mary Catholic Church, the Rev. John J. Bullion asserted that a man has a “certain right” to protect the property where he works, according to the New York World. “As long as he does nothing wrong he has a right to expect permanent employment,” he said, “and hence it is wrong for a mob to come here and deprive the workman of the right that is his.”
Although Homestead steelworkers won the battle, they lost the war. A week after the clash, Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Pattison sent 8,000 state militiamen to restore order, Mr. Baraff said. Throughout the summer, the workers held out as strikebreakers kept the mill running. But by November, with little money and winter approaching, some began to reclaim their jobs. They faced conditions far worse than before the strike, said John Haer, president of the Battle of Homestead Foundation. Their wages were cut and shifts increased to 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
“These conditions were spread throughout the whole industry,” Mr. Haer said. “It wasn’t until the dawn of the First World War that the industry went back to an eight-hour day, six days a week.”
Many of the unionized leaders of the strike were blacklisted from the steel industry. Homestead did not have an active union until the New Deal era, when the 1935 National Labor Relations Act recognized workers’ rights to form unions and collectively bargain, Mr. Baraff said. U.S. Steel acquired the mill, which rapidly expanded during World War II and the post-war boom. Homestead steel became the “backbone of a new American imperialism,” Mr. McCollester said, responsible for miles of railroad tracks, soaring skyscrapers, and plate armor for U.S. Navy battleships. But in 1986, the mill closed, unable to keep pace with the technological advancements and global competition that left the American steel industry bankrupt.
“We’re moving away from industrial capital to the digital future,” said Mr. Haer. “The crux of the discussion is, what kinds of jobs will people work? And what kind of economy will keep the middle class from eroding? We need to talk about what will function as the new engine for people to earn a living wage, send their kids to college — especially the people not participating in this new economy.”
On Thursday, Mr. McCollester, Mr. Haer and others will discuss the legacy of the Battle of Homestead, with an eye to the socioeconomic conditions of the world today. But the main focus will be remembering the steelworkers who died on the banks of the Monongahela.
John Morris’ grave lies at the top of the Homestead Cemetery, between a Civil War memorial and a sprawling oak tree. For a century, it was the only marked grave of the workers who died in the battle, until historians and local officials installed marble plaques in 1992.
Listing only his name and lifespan, Morris’ grave bears no indication of his role in American labor history or the tragic circumstances of his death 125 years ago. Like many graves in the Homestead Cemetery, it is a simple stone marker just visible among the tall grasses and purple clover.