Jacob Goldstein
Jacob Goldstein spent more than a decade as co-host of the Planet Money podcast. He's also the author of the book Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, which the New…
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Concluding our story of Andrew Carnegie’s effort to break the unions at his Homestead steel factory, we look at how the plant boss Henry Clay Frick enlisted a private army of Pinkerton detectives to confront the steel workers. Gunfire erupts and there are deaths on both sides.
The so-called battle of “Fort Frick” seems to go the way of the unions – until a young anarchist comes to town hoping to piggyback on the unrest to further his goal of sparking a revolution. He finds a way into Frick’s office… and he comes armed with a pistol and a knife.
Write to us at businesshistory@pushkin.fm
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00:08
Speaker 2
Stop.
00:09
Speaker 1
You got it.
00:22
Speaker 2
Previously on Business History.
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Speaker 1
Profound technological change. A few people getting very rich. A lot of people worried about what the changes will mean for their jobs. It's America in the 1880s.
00:35
Speaker 2
A fight at the Homestead Steel Mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania. On one side, Andrew Carnegie, steel baron, on his way to becoming the richest man in America.
00:44
Speaker 1
You're going with Carnegie today? We're going with Carnegie.
00:47
Speaker 2
Yeah.
00:47
Speaker 1
On the other side, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.
00:52
Speaker 2
A-A-I-S-W.
00:53
Speaker 1
At least one too many letters. They're fighting over pay. They're fighting over control of their working conditions. And in 1889, shockingly, the union beat down. Carnegie.
01:05
Speaker 2
Amazing story that you can hear last week in Business History.
01:09
Speaker 1
Now, it's 1892, and the empire is about to strike back. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
01:16
Speaker 2
I'm Robert Smith, and this is Business History, part.
01:19
Speaker 1
Deux, a show about the history of business.
01:22
Speaker 2
Ouch. Do it.
01:23
Speaker 1
Today on the show, the second part of our two-part series on the Homestead Strike and the fight over work in America. It's going to be violent.
01:31
Speaker 2
And waiting in the wings are the anarchists.
01:33
Speaker 1
And the outcome... of the fight is going to shift the balance of power between workers and owners, between labor and capital for decades to come. The year is 1892. Andrew Carnegie is tired of having to negotiate with the union at his steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, tired of paying his workers there more than he pays at the other plants where he's already broken the unions. And so he decides he's going to break the union at Homestead when the union's contract comes up for renewal in July of 1892. A few months before that, in April, he writes a memo to be posted at the factory explaining to the workers about how Homestead needs to be like the other Carnegie plants.
02:15
Speaker 2
So you are a worker at a steel mill. You've just done 12-hour shift. You might wander in and read this on the wall. The minority must give place to the majority. These works, therefore, will be necessarily non-union after the expiration of the present agreement.
02:30
Speaker 1
Carnegie writes up this memo saying, And sales off to spend the summer in the UK. He's kind of semi-retired by this point. And the guy running the company is Henry Clay Frick. So Frick looks at this memo from Carnegie about making the plant non-union. He's like, there's no way I'm going to post this. There's no way I'm going to tell these workers exactly what's coming in a few months. But as the spring turns to summer, as July gets closer, Frick has to show his hand at some point. And One of the moves he makes to that end is having a three-mile-long fence built all the way around the perimeter of the homestead compound.
03:10
Speaker 2
Nothing to see here. Perfectly normal.
03:12
Speaker 1
Perfectly normal. The Pittsburgh Post described it as having massive board walls. And strung along the top are two wicked rows of jagged barbed wire.
03:22
Speaker 2
And it's not like the workers aren't going to notice because they live right next to this plant. The entire town.
03:27
Speaker 1
They work there.
03:28
Speaker 2
Facing the barbed wire is made up of workers or relatives of workers from the mill.
03:33
Speaker 1
They start calling it Fort Frick because they know. They know Frick is turning the factory into a fort, a fortress, a stronghold for the battle that is coming. Frick is insane. going to be a central figure in the show today. And he's kind of, I think, an underrated figure in business history. I knew of him as sort of Carnegie's stooge or Carnegie's employee, but he's bigger than that. He's his own guy. So let's talk about him for a minute. He's really different than Carnegie. Last time, I talked about how Carnegie wanted everybody to love him and publicly spoke in favor of unions, despite what he did with his business, which was different than that. Frick was different. Not like that. Frick was a rich, successful businessman before he went to work for Carnegie, with Carnegie. And Frick fought unions every chance he could, was not shy about that fact. When his workers who lived in employee housing joined unions, he'd evict them. There was one instance where he was evicting somebody and the guy refused to be evicted. So Frick went to the guy's house with the sheriff's deputy and he and the deputy physically picked the guy up and threw him into a creek. It's a hands-on manager. This is who Frick was. Also, he loved to buy old paintings from Europe, which you might know. Have you ever been to the Frick Museum?
04:51
Speaker 2
I have. It's this beautiful mansion and just gorgeous artwork. It's a wonderful museum.
04:57
Speaker 1
Yeah, a giant mansion on Fifth Ave across from Central Park. That was Frick's house, and that was his art. Frick made his first fortune in the Coke business, was known as the King of Coke. But he was not king of the fun Coke. Had nothing to do with Coca-Cola, which was a new product at the time. Had nothing to do with cocaine, which was a key ingredient in the extremely refreshing original recipe for Coca-Cola. No, he was the king of coal cake, the most boring kind of Coke. But an important Coke in the 1800s because... Coke is coal that you put in the oven and bake, and it is a key thing that.
05:38
Speaker 2
You need to make steel. Because it burns hotter than regular coal.
05:42
Speaker 1
This is the Coke that Frick was the king of. And the second half of the 1800s is a great time to be the king of that kind of Coke because America is going wild for steel. And it is through the Coke business that Frick and Carnegie start working together. And specifically, there's There's actually a nice kind of MBA-friendly business idea here that I want you to talk about, which is Carnegie, being in the steel business, has to answer this question, make or buy? Businesses always have to answer make or buy. In the case we're talking about here, it's do I make Coke or buy it?
06:19
Speaker 2
Yeah, if you have a product or service, is it something you want to do in-house or do you want to subcontract it out, have someone else do it? So do you want to hire an accountant or pay an accountant by the hour in an accounting firm? And the idea is you want to keep the things that are trade secrets close to your heart. You want to take the things that are essential, part of your competitive advantage. Your core competencies. You want to have that inside your company. And anything else that you can take advantage of the, you know, economies of scale, that is what you want to buy from outside your business.
06:52
Speaker 1
And sometimes it changes over time. Yeah. The guy who co-founded Netscape, not Andreessen, but the other guy, said there are only two businesses, bundling and unbundling, right? Yeah. taking more stuff in, you're letting more stuff out. So for a while, Carnegie is making Coke. He owns coal and ovens to make Coke. But he is not that big of a player. And so he doesn't have scale. So he can't do it as efficiently. And so he decides it's going to be more efficient, cheaper for him to buy rather than make.
07:19
Speaker 2
But not on the open market. He wants to make a deal. He wants to make a deal.
07:22
Speaker 1
So he goes to Frick and they make a deal. And it's complicated. But for a while, Frick is going to be the exclusive provider of Coke to Carnegie. The key thing for our story is this brings them together. And Carnegie likes Frick and winds up bringing him in to run some Carnegie operations. And eventually, Frick becomes the head, basically the guy running Carnegie Steel. And there's this letter that Carnegie writes to Frick at some point to congratulate him on his ascent. And it really speaks to their relationship at this point.
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Speaker 2
Expressing my thankfulness that I have found the man. That's in capitals. I have found the man. I am always yours, A.C., Andrew Carnegie.
08:07
Speaker 1
Well, thanks, A.C.
08:08
Speaker 2
Yeah. The man is erecting a giant fence.
08:11
Speaker 1
A giant fence. So that Andrew Carnegie doesn't have to. Carnegie can be far away and talking about how much he loves the workers while his buddy, the man, puts up the fence.
08:22
Speaker 2
The man.
08:23
Speaker 1
So now it's June 25th, 1892. The contract is about to expire between Carnegie's steel company and the union. And now Frick does tell the workers exactly what's coming. He posts notices at the factory that say, the company is done negotiating with the union. He doesn't want to make a different deal with the union. He is done with the union. Today, companies aren't allowed to do that. Under labor law, if workers decide they want to form a union, the company has to negotiate with that union, basically. This was a different era. This law didn't exist at the time. So now the battle is imminent. Everybody knows it's coming. And on the same day that Frick posts those notices, he writes a letter to one Robert A. Pinkerton.
09:10
Speaker 2
The Pinkertons. Is this the first time they've come up in business history?
09:13
Speaker 1
Yes.
09:14
Speaker 2
Oh, when the Pinkertons come in, things get dicey.
09:18
Speaker 1
So the Pinkertons had started out as a detective agency. Actually, this guy, Robert A. Pinkerton, who Frick is writing to, is the son of the founder of The founder was the first detective on the Chicago police force. And in 1861, he foiled an assassination attempt on President Lincoln. But by this point, this is 31 years after that, by this point, the Pinkertons are largely a private security company. And by security, I don't mean the guy who sits with the book at the front of the office. I mean an army that you can hire if you are running a company and your workers are out on strike and you need muscle. And Frick is very clear about this. Here is what he wrote to Pinkerton.
09:59
Speaker 2
We will want 300 guards for service at our homestead mills as a measure of prevention against interference with our plan to start the operation of the works on July 6th, 1892.
10:11
Speaker 1
So he's saying, we're going to open the plant. We're going to do it without the union workers. This is called a lockout. We're going to bring in replacement workers and we need... 300 soldiers, really, guards, so that we have the muscle to do it. Meanwhile, not long before this, Carnegie, who had been in London, was going off to Scotland where he was going to fish, be off in the countryside far away from anything ugly that might happen. He sent Frick a final message.
10:37
Speaker 2
One thing we are all sure of, no contest will be entered in that will fail. We are with you to the end. says the man who has already left the country and is about.
10:46
Speaker 1
To go fishing. Literally, he is about to go fishing. He's writing to Frick about like, oh, I caught a trout. It was five and a half pounds. A personal record.
10:55
Speaker 2
Right as things are getting violent at the factory.
10:57
Speaker 1
That's what we're going to talk about in just a minute. Music Today's segment is sponsored by ChatGPT. And this is an ad about how we used ChatGPT work to help us come up with a title for last week's episode. When Anarchists Attack. Yes, okay.
11:24
Speaker 2
Rich Guys vs. Unions.
11:26
Speaker 1
Yeah, Rich Guys vs. Unions is not bad. The Rise of Labor. The Rise of Labor in America. I always like In America. It makes it feel bigger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Labor in America. Gabriel, give us one. What the Frick. What the Frick. I typed these ideas into ChatGPT work. I uploaded the script from the show, and I asked ChatGPT Work to look at the titles of our previous episodes and then suggest tweaks and alternatives for the titles we suggested. ChatGPT Work pointed out that When Anarchists Attack was the strongest hook, but it overstated how much of the episode was about anarchists. Also, it said What the Frick was fun, but pointed out that Frick was barely a character in that episode. Tough but fair on both counts. After that, chat GPT work came back with a bunch of variations on our initial suggestions. Rich guys versus workers. Andrew Carnegie and the rise of labor. Bombs, steel, and strikes. And Andrew Carnegie versus the workers. America's first labor wars. I read those out, and our editor, Ryan Dilley, noticed the word war in a few of those suggestions. And he came up with a few variations of his own. He suggested, Carnegie goes to war with his workers. Or, Carnegie goes to war with the union. Let's see what ChatGPT work thinks. Carnegie goes to war with the union is pretty good. Oh, you know, here's a tighter version that suggests Andrew Carnegie's war with his workers.
12:50
Speaker 2
Andrew Carnegie's war with his workers is very good.
12:54
Speaker 1
And that is what we went with for the title of last week's show. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at ChatGPT.com, available on Plus and Pro plans.
13:15
Speaker 2
We have returned.
13:16
Speaker 1
We have returned. So what has happened is the union was going to strike. Technically, before that happened, the company closed the plant down on June 29th. So technically, it's a lockout, a you can't quit, I fire you kind of lockout. People hung effigies of Henry Clay Frick on the lampposts around the town of Homestead. The mayor ordered them cut down. The mayor also ordered the saloons closed to keep order. Smart. But interestingly, the mayor, his title was not technically mayor. It was Burgess, but he's basically the mayor. He was not some corporate puppet or stooge. He was a worker. He was in the union. He worked at the mill. His name was John McLuckie, and he was one of the main people fighting the company's attempt to break the union. which says something extremely interesting about this town. You know, it's a company town in a different sense than we usually think of that word. It's a worker's town. It's not a town where the company town in the sense of the workers get paid in script and have to shop at the overpriced company store. It's a town dominated entirely by the workers and their families. And what was going on at Homestead was national news. It was a big fight that people knew about. And on July 3rd, McLuckie, the mayor, gave an interview to the New York World where he talked about what was happening.
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Speaker 2
We do not propose that Andrew Carnegie's representatives shall bulldoze us. We have our homes in this town. We have our churches here, our societies and our cemeteries. They never have imported a man into Homestead. And by damn, they never will. We shall not permit it.
14:58
Speaker 1
The mayor, on July 5th, A bunch of sheriff deputies come to town to post a sheriff's notice warning people against interfering with the workmen, business or operation of the steel plant. The notices are immediately torn down and the deputies are marched out of town by Mayor McLuckie and like a thousand workers take them to the riverbank and put them on a boat back to Pittsburgh. By this point, the union had posted notice. lookouts at the entrances to town and on the river outside of town because they knew something was coming. And at around two in the morning on July 6th, a union lookout on a bridge in Pittsburgh saw a tugboat towing two barges up the river toward Homestead. And he ran to the telegraph office and sent a message to the union office in Homestead.
15:54
Speaker 2
Watch the river. Steamer with barges left here.
15:56
Speaker 1
Robert, I've heard you do a million times, but this time it actually is a telegraph. It actually is that sound. So this message comes into the union office in Homestead. Somebody there blows a steam whistle, which is the signal.
16:13
Speaker 2
Haven't heard me do that a million times, have you?
16:15
Speaker 1
Yeah. Somebody else is riding around town like Paul Revere, raising the alarm, telling people to come out in the streets. They don't know exactly what's coming yet, but they know it's something. And what's coming is the Pinkertons, those guards that Frick had requested. So what's coming on these barges is 300 Pinkertons, along with 350 pistols and 200 rifles. And the Pinkertons, of course, are going to come in and secure the factory so that it can reopen with non-union work.
16:47
Speaker 2
Perhaps hoping for a little bit of surprise coming in in the middle of the night.
16:50
Speaker 1
Indeed. And not getting it. Crucially, crucially. Because by the time the barges get to Homestead, it's around 4 a.m., and there are thousands of people out on the riverbank. You know, men, but also women and children. And there's people carrying babies, and other people are carrying clubs, and some people are carrying guns. And so the barges are coming up, and it becomes clear that that they're going to land on the shore at the mill behind that big fence with the barbed wire on top, which makes sense. And the union leaders had told the people not to trespass, not to break the law and go onto the factory property. But the people don't listen to that at this point. They knock down the fence to stop the Pinkertons from coming ashore. And there's some stray gunshots even before the boats land. The boats land, and there's a standoff. There is a standoff. There's these boats with the Pinkertons on it. There's these thousands of people. And one of the union members there was a guy named Hugh O'Donnell. He was a young guy in his early 20s. He'd been working at Homestead since he was 17. And he calls out to the men on the barges.
18:04
Speaker 2
On behalf of 5,000 men, I beg of you to leave here at once. I don't know who you are nor from whence you came, but I do know that you have no business here. And if you remain, there will be more bloodshed.
18:17
Speaker 1
We've talked about whether he really said these words. This is what the historical record says he says. I more and more think he kind of did.
18:24
Speaker 2
It's a little eloquent for yelling from a riverbank in the middle of the night, but sure.
18:28
Speaker 1
In any case, after Hugh O'Donnell yells this, the Pinkerton captain from the barge answers back, yells back. Also eloquently.
18:36
Speaker 2
We were sent here to take possession of this property and to guard it for this company. We don't wish to shed blood, but we are determined to go up there and shall do so. If you men don't withdraw, we will mow every one of you down and enter in spite of you.
18:50
Speaker 1
The Pinkertons put down a gangplank from the barge to the shore. A steelworker ran onto the gangplank and laid down to block the way. There's some blows, some hitting, and then people start shooting. It's not clear who shot first. People argue over who shot first. I actually don't think it matters who shot first. It was clearly going to be shooting or people with guns on both sides. And people get shot. The Pinkerton captain who had spoken got shot. O'Donnell, the Union guy who had spoken, he got grazed in the thumb. In all, something like 13 steelworkers and a dozen Pinkertons were shot in less than 10 minutes. Some of them died. And then there's another standoff for a few hours. The tugboat took the Pinkerton wounded across the river to safety. The Union workers are building barricades on the shore. Conveniently for them, the The factory had been stockpiling steel against the shutdown, so they have good barricade material. At 8 a.m., the Pinkertons try again to come on shore. There's more shooting. There's more deaths. Another standoff. At some point, the tugboat starts to come back, but then the townspeople shoot into the tugboat, and the tugboat steams off, which is very important because now these barges don't have any means of propulsion. So now you have these barges with hundreds of Pinkertons marooned on the shore, surrounded by thousands of angry people, many of them armed.
20:19
Speaker 2
And the only way off is through the crowd.
20:21
Speaker 1
Yes. The people on shore want to kill the Pinkertons at this point. At some point, they... They build a big fire on a raft and push it toward the barges to set it on fire. It burns out. They set a rail car on fire and run it down toward the shore. It doesn't work. They're still shooting into the barge. And the Pinkertons themselves, by this point, a lot of them don't want to fight. A lot of them are not career Pinkertons. They're not hardened quasi-soldiers. They're just guys who signed up for a job and probably didn't know what they were getting into. Some of the Pinkertons start putting on life jackets and they want to jump off the barges and just float away. But the Pinkerton leaders threaten to shoot those Pinkertons if they jump off. At one point, as the Union guys or the people on shore are shooting into the barges, they hit and kill a Pinkerton who was inside the barge, hiding under a table, wearing a life jacket. And that seems to push a lot of the Pinkertons over the edge. It's just so hopeless. at this point for them. So they decide to surrender. They raise a white flag from the barge and somebody on the shore shoots the white flag down. The crowd is not going to let the Pinkerton surrender yet. This is playing out over hours. This is not minutes. This is a thing that is playing out over hours and word of it is getting out. And outside town, people want Frick, the guy who's running Carnegie Steel, they want Frick to talk to union representatives, to negotiate essentially. But Frick Doesn't want to. Here's what he says.
21:55
Speaker 2
He said the company was not taking any active part in the matter at present, as we cannot interfere with the sheriff and the discharge of his duty and are now awaiting his further action.
22:05
Speaker 1
Okay. This is said by the guy who has just hired a private army, essentially, to come up the river to the factory. But now that his private army is pinned down, he's like, oh, no, it's a matter for the sheriff. And on a certain level, he's right. In a functioning country... The state, the government, the sheriff should have the monopoly on the use of force. It should not be up to the factory boss to hire the private army. And it is ultimately the state that sets the rules of the game for capital and labor. So Frick is appealing to the state here, to the government. And it's not clear at this moment which way the state is going to go. The sheriff asked the governor to send in the National Guard. This is a big fight. The sheriff can't handle it. Here's the governor's response.
22:56
Speaker 2
It is not the purpose of the military to act as police officers. The civil authorities must, in the end, settle the differences. Oh, so does not want to take sides at this point. Maybe doesn't know which way the political winds are blowing.
23:10
Speaker 1
Exactly. Imagine this. There is a shooting battle with thousands of people involved. People have died. The sheriff is asking for reinforcements. And the governor is like, no. Like, this is extraordinary. This is extraordinary. And at a certain level, it is democracy in action because the governor knows that some of his voters, some of the people who support him, are people. union members or families of union members or support unions. And he also knows people hate the Pinkertons. The Pinkertons are a known force and people don't like them. So what happens? The governor is going to wait and see what happens. Here's what happens. The union guys keep shooting at the barges and eventually a few Pinkertons walk out onto the deck holding up white handkerchiefs. A brave thing to do in a way. Trying again to surrender. And this time O'Donnell, the union guy who spoke, who had his thumb grazed, he goes down to the barges and to talk to the Pinkertons. If they lay down their arms and surrender, they will be given safe passage out of town. And they agree. They agree to this. So O'Donnell leads the Pinkertons off the barges onto the shore. But as the Pinkertons start walking up the shore, a line of people, angry people, forms on both sides, and the people start beating the Pinkertons. Robert, read to us from the Pittsburgh Post.
24:38
Speaker 2
They were knocked on the head and struck in the face. The men plunged wildly onward, begging for the mercy which they received not. No distinction was made. They were hit on the heads with hand billies and clubs and sticks and stricken to the ground. Eventually, the Pinkertons make it to the opera house, actually.
24:56
Speaker 1
They're going to hold them in the opera house. Every town had an opera house. And the word in town is that the sheriff is going to come and arrest the Pinkertons for murder or for attempted murder. But that doesn't happen. The sheriff doesn't arrest them. And just after midnight, the Pinkertons are put on a special train to Pittsburgh and then on to New York. The battle is over. At least seven townspeople are dead. At least three Pinkertons are dead. Many, many, many more are wounded. And for the workers, despite the violence... This feels like victory. They have prevented Henry Clay Frick from bringing in his army to secure the factory, which means, as of now, the company still can't bring in the replacement workers to break the union. A few days later, the governor ordered thousands of National Guard troops to go to Homestead to support the sheriff. Here's his order.
25:55
Speaker 2
Put the division under arms and move at once with ammunition to support the sheriff of Allegheny County at Homestead. Maintain the peace. Protect all persons and their rights under the Constitution and laws of the state.
26:07
Speaker 1
So the National Guard marches into Homestead and the workers let them. They don't really have a choice. There's so many guardsmen. But the workers are still on strike. Frick can't force them back to work. And the factory still is not open. We'll be back in just a minute. OK, we're back from the break. The National Guard has just marched into Homestead. And what's happening in Homestead is still a global story, the biggest story in America. Give us the lead story on page one of The New York Sun on July 13.
27:01
Speaker 2
Overawed by military, homestead strikers face to face with the state's armed force.
27:06
Speaker 1
I was looking at this in the reproduction of the front page, and I noticed that there's a second story on the front page of that paper that day about the federal government sending in troops to this violent strike at a mine in Idaho. which just tells you how much this is happening, how this labor versus capital fight is widespread in America at this time.
27:28
Speaker 2
And for most people in the country at this time, they must be looking at this with a little bit of alarm because it seems like something bad is happening out there and it's unclear who to blame for it. Yeah, there's a range of opinions and you can see it in the newspapers. You know, some newspapers.
27:47
Speaker 1
describe the workers as a mob, are sympathetic to the owners. But a lot of newspapers and a lot of people are sympathetic to the workers, to the union. There's one headline, while blood flowed, Frick smoked, which is kind of an off rhyme. And I found this speech on the Senate floor that a senator from Illinois gave around this time. that I found extremely interesting because I think it points to the way people are trying to sort this out, trying to understand this new world of work as it has come to exist. So this senator's name was John Palmer. He's from Illinois. He's clearly trying to balance property rights, which already existed in the law, with What he saw as workers' rights that weren't yet recognized by the law. So he's talking here about the workers who fought the Pinkertons.
28:41
Speaker 2
These citizens were right. These men had a right to be there. That makes it necessary for me to assert that these men had a right to employment there. A right to employment.
28:50
Speaker 1
A right to employment. And he is clear. He knows this doesn't exist in the law yet, but he's saying it should exist in the law. Just the same way that factory owners have a right to their property, he's arguing that that workers should be able to earn the right to continued employment, you know, subject to good behavior. Today, you see this kind of occasionally or sometimes in provisions where people can only be fired for cause. It's this kind of idea. And by the way, Senator Palmer also takes a swipe at the Pinkertons, calls them mercenaries, compares the head of the Pinkertons to a baron from the Middle Ages. This is a popular move. A lot of people are anti-Pinkerton. You know, they don't like this idea that rich people can hire what is more or less their own private army. Somebody actually wrote a song around this topic. Father was killed by the Pinkerton men.
29:43
Speaker 2
And I know you've asked me not to actually sing it. I'll just read the lyrics.' Twas in a Pennsylvania town not very long ago. Men struck against reduction of their pay. Their millionaire employer with philanthropic show had closed the works till starved they would obey.
29:59
Speaker 1
The millionaire and player with philanthropic show, we talked about last week on the show, that is Andrew Carnegie. Fishing. They're calling out his hypocrisy, right? The philanthropic show is he is famous as a philanthropist. And meanwhile, he is closing the works till.
30:15
Speaker 2
Starved they would obey.
30:17
Speaker 1
So what's going on at Homestead at this moment in July of 1892 is a dramatic story for all of America. But you know who's really... excited about it, you know, is really worked up about what's going on at Homestead.
30:32
Speaker 2
Is it a group of pacifists who really want everyone to calm down?
30:35
Speaker 1
It's the anarchists! The anarchists, of course, of course. We talked about the anarchists last time when we talked about the Haymarket Affair, literal bomb throwers. They threw a bomb because they wanted to start a revolution. You know, many anarchists thought the way to start a revolution to free the workers was to commit violent, dramatic acts like assassinating people. They called it propaganda of the deed. Maybe the most famous American anarchist was Emma Goldman. If you've heard of one American anarchist, it's probably her. And in 1892, she was in her early 20s, and she was living with another young anarchist named Alexander Berkman. And once the Homestead Strike happens, they are like, this is it. This is the moment for the revolution. You know, everybody sees The brutality of capital sees these armed men coming in to suppress the workers.
31:34
Speaker 2
And how ineffective the state has been to prevent this.
31:38
Speaker 1
So the eyes of the world are on Homestead, Pennsylvania now. And Goldman and Berkman think the right move could bring about the revolution. And they decide that that move is for Berkman to assassinate Henry Clay Frank. Bergman gets on the train from New York to Pittsburgh. He's armed with a revolver and a dagger that he has carved himself. He'll later write what was in his mind at the time.
32:08
Speaker 2
The removal of a tyrant is not merely justifiable. It is the highest duty of every true revolutionist.
32:15
Speaker 1
Bergman has a perfect cover story. He's going to say he's an employment agent. who's come to help the company find people to replace the striking workers at Homestead.
32:27
Speaker 2
Frick wants workers to come in, wants to meet with employment agents. It's perfect.
32:32
Speaker 1
Berkman shows up at Carnegie Steel headquarters in Pittsburgh on July 19th. Can't find Frick. Comes back on the 21st. Frick's seemingly not there. Berkman comes back again on Saturday the 23rd, and this time Frick is there. And Berkman sees him, sees him through a door, describes him as a black bearded, well-knit figure at a table in the back of the room. Frick is sitting, I guess it's a conference table. He's sitting with somebody else. And Berkman manages to get into the room where Frick is sitting. Here is Berkman's own description of what happens next.
33:05
Speaker 2
With a quick motion, I draw the revolver. As I raise the weapon, I see Frick clutch with both hands the arm of the chair and attempt to rise. I aim at his head. With a look of horror, he quickly averts his face as I pull the trigger. There's a flash, and the high ceiling room reverberates as with the booming of a cannon. I hear a sharp, piercing cry, and I see Frick on his knees, his head against the arm of the chair. I feel calm and possessed, intent upon every movement of the man. He's lying head and shoulders under the large armchair, without a sound or motion. About 25 feet separate us. I take a few steps toward him, when suddenly the other man, who's presence I had quite forgotten, leaps upon me. Suddenly I hear the cry, murder, help! My heart stands still as I realize that it is Frick shouting. I mean, wow.
33:58
Speaker 1
There are different stories about what happens next, but it's clear that at some point, Berkman shoots Frick a second time. At some point, Berkman also stabs Frick in the leg. Frick fights back in some way, At some point, a carpenter who was working in the building hits Berkman on the head with a hammer and that does it. That subdues Berkman. So Frick has been shot. He's been stabbed, but he doesn't die. And at least according to the story, as Frick told it and as his friends told it, Frick stayed at work, had a doctor come to the office to remove the bullets and sew up his wounds and finished his work for the day, and then he did clearly send a cable to Carnegie, who, remember, was summering in Scotland.
34:46
Speaker 2
Was shot twice, but not dangerously. There's no necessity for you to come home. I'm still in shape to fight the battle out.
34:53
Speaker 1
There was no chance Carnegie was going to come home.
34:56
Speaker 2
I mean, he is the man working through pain and blood.
35:00
Speaker 1
Berkman also was not killed.
35:03
Speaker 2
Which we could tell from his writing.
35:05
Speaker 1
We could tell from his writing. He was tried. represented himself. You know, I don't believe in your laws. I don't accept the authority of your courts. He was, of course, convicted. Emma Goldman went into hiding for a while. Police raided her apartment, but she was never charged. And Berkman, kind of amazingly, got out of prison 14 years later.
35:26
Speaker 2
Oh, still a young man.
35:27
Speaker 1
And he and Emma Goldman spent much of the rest of their lives together. They got kicked out of the U.S. around the time of World War I. They spent some time in the Soviet Union, which they were disillusioned by. They wrote a book about how the Soviet Union, not so great. So, OK, back to Homestead, back to 1892. Berkman has shot Frick. Of course, it is huge news and crucially, not good news for the strikers, not good news at all.
35:55
Speaker 2
Until now, it was easy for lots of people to be on the workers' side. You know, you had a millionaire off in Scotland and a hard-ass CEO clamping down versus a bunch of, you know, normal folk who just want to keep their jobs. Now, it feels different. It feels like the side of the union, the workers, includes, you know, this crazy anarchist and all the anarchists who people are genuinely afraid of.
36:17
Speaker 1
Yes. And so it's like, oh, wait, no, if that's what this side is, I don't want to be on this side. And this is.
36:24
Speaker 2
Immediately clear to the union.
36:26
Speaker 1
The union itself issued a statement condemning the attack, saying they, you know, hoped Frick would be OK. There was a union paper, a newspaper called the National Labor Tribune that called the attack a crime against both capital and workmen. But it didn't really matter, those statements. The anarchists had that idea, the propaganda of the deed. And what Berkman did was a kind of propaganda of the deed, but propaganda for the wrong side. Propaganda that ended up helping Carnegie and Frick. Hugh O'Donnell, the homestead worker who we talked about who negotiated with the Pinkertons during the battle, he wrote about this. Here's what he said.
37:02
Speaker 2
The bullet from Berkman's pistol, failing in its foul attempt, went straight through the heart of the homestead strike.
37:08
Speaker 1
So indictments do start to come. for what happened on July 6th in that battle at Homestead. Interestingly, Frick and a few other company leaders are indicted, but those indictments never go anywhere. They never go to trial. More than 100 townspeople from Homestead are indicted. The leaders, including McClucky, the mayor we talked about, and O'Donnell, who you just quoted, they were accused of murder, shockingly, also of treason. It's this big, what is America kind of idea. None of them were ever convicted. And Frick, with the support of the National Guard in Homestead, is able to get the plant up and running by August with replacement workers. The union officially stayed on strike a few months longer, but it didn't matter at that point. It was clear they were going to lose. And they did lose. They didn't just lose a negotiating battle. They ceased to exist as a union at Homestead. And this is very, very important. and historical because workers and owners at other steel mills were watching this. They were reading about it every day in the paper. And they saw that owners could break unions if they were sufficiently committed. And so owners did break unions so that just a few years later, not a single steel mill in Pennsylvania was unionized. And this meant things for workers got worse. 12-hour shifts became more common. This thing called the long-turn became more common. The long-turn was every few weeks when workers would shift from the day shift to the night shift. Some set of workers would work the long-turn, which means working 24 hours straight in a steel mill. And so the thing I want to make clear here is the outcome of the Homestead Strike was labor really lost in a big, profound, long-term way, and capital really won.
39:05
Speaker 2
And it's surprising because we think, at least in the 1900s, of the return of the labor movement. But I didn't actually know that there was this moment where the labor movement was almost extinguished.
39:18
Speaker 1
Yes. Well, and where things got worse for workers. I knew things used to be bad for workers. But this idea that, like, oh, at least these skilled workers were doing relative for the time okay. And then they had this fight and they lost and they were much worse off. And this persisted for a long time. Organized labor didn't go away entirely. People kept fighting, kept trying, but they mostly lost, frankly. And it wasn't until the Great Depression, the 1930s, that things really change.
39:50
Speaker 2
We have such a devastating economy that everyone is open to change at this point.
39:56
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, we know in many, many ways the economy is transformed during the 1930s. A lot of the modern financial world and industrial world, as we still live it, was created in that time. And that is true for labor as well. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act was passed. called the Wagner Act. You might have heard of it as the Wagner Act. And among other things, the law says employees are allowed to form unions. And when they do, the company has to bargain with the union. At least that's a simplified version of it. And this sets the stage for that post-war boom in union membership in America. And so I come back here to the government. You know, yes, it is a fight of labor versus capital. And it does matter.
40:44
Speaker 2
And the.
40:48
Speaker 1
The rules of the fight are set by the government. The government makes the laws, chooses how to enforce those laws. It is creating the rules of the game. And so what workers and owners are doing is playing that game. And those rules can be very different. And often the rules are what determine the outcome.
41:06
Speaker 2
And it's really interesting to see the timescale here, how long it took for this story to unfold. You first have unions getting going in the 1860s. But it takes this violent turn 30 years later, where there's this real confrontation to solve these problems that had not been solved over the last 30 years.
41:25
Speaker 1
And then.
41:27
Speaker 2
this really nadir, is that how you say it, of the labor movement. And then 40 years after that, you get this big shift again where workers have more power. And so it really makes me think about when we talk about something like AI today, and it's always like, what's happening next month? What's going to happen in three months? But the shifts that happen in the economy, especially in something as fundamental as this, can take a long time. long, long time to find a new equilibrium.
41:56
Speaker 1
And it'll be particularly interesting to see how that plays out if, in fact, AI keeps advancing so quickly. You know, the kind of political economy tends to move at this generational pace. If there is some profound shift in work in three years, it's going to be hard for the politics, for the rules of the game to keep up.
42:16
Speaker 2
At least there aren't Pinkertons and not too many anarchists. Okay.
42:21
Speaker 1
That is basically the end of the story. But I want to do a little epilogue here, like the way at the end of the movie, they sort of, while the credits are rolling, they tell you what happened to all the people in the movie. I want to do that with the people who we've been talking about. And I want to start with the workers. You know, we talked specifically about McLuckie and O'Donnell, these two of the workers who were central in Homestead in the strike. They were both blacklisted. So nobody in the steel industry would hire them. This was also a common tactic at the time. also later made illegal under modern labor law. So they couldn't work in the steel industry anymore. McLuckie wound up moving to Mexico. I saw one source that said he got a job on the railroad there. For O'Donnell, the last thing I could find was this newspaper report from 1905 that said he'd got a job as a factory inspector, I guess working for the state government, but he had contracted tuberculosis and was moving to New Mexico. Okay, now, Frick and Carnegie, the guys who we know more.
43:19
Speaker 2
About, somewhat happier ending.
43:21
Speaker 1
For them, yeah. I mean, Carnegie was clearly embarrassed by what happened at Homestead. You know, he told people he would have handled it differently. He wouldn't have brought in the Pinkertons, but whatever. You went to Scotland. Live with it. But clearly, things were never the same between Carnegie and Frick after this. Frick wound up resigning in 1899. He and Carnegie fought over money, and they never spoke after 1900.
43:44
Speaker 2
As for Carnegie.
43:47
Speaker 1
In 1901, J.P. Morgan bought Carnegie Steel to create his new mega company, U.S. Steel. And at that moment, Andrew Carnegie became the richest man in the world.
44:00
Speaker 2
And when people think about Carnegie to this day, they do not think about the strike. They don't think about the Pinkertons or the violence. They think about the libraries he funded, his university, Carnegie Hall. It's almost like he planned it that way.
44:14
Speaker 1
Today's show... was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang, engineered by Sarah Bruguier. Our video editor, because we are on YouTube, is Matt Nielsen. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilley. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
44:28
Speaker 2
I'm Robert Smith. Thanks for listening.
The Hosts
Robert Smith
Robert Smith, co-host of the Business History podcast, is a Professor of Journalism at Columbia University and contributing host of NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the…
