Homestead Lockout

Homestead Lockout (1892).Arguably the most infamous confrontation between workers and employers in the nineteenth century, this dispute began on 1 July 1892 when Henry Clay Frick, the coal magnate who managed Andrew Carnegie's steelmaking company, closed down the immense Homestead Steel Works near Pittsburgh rather than bargain with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Frick announced that the Carnegie company would no longer recognize any union and that all 3,800 employees would have to sign individual contracts. Homestead's workers knew that Frick had constructed fortified barriers around the mill as a defense for strikebreakers who would also be protected by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a private police force the company had used earlier to suppress trade unionism.

The workers responded by mobilizing virtually all twelve thousand residents of the town of Homestead, whose government was dominated by committed trade unionists. The workers also blocked all access to the mill. An uneasy calm prevailed until 6 July, when three hundred Pinkertons arrived by riverbarge at the mill and engaged the workers in a pitched battle. Three Pinkerton agents and seven workers were killed; after surrendering, the Pinkertons were forced to run a gauntlet of thousands of enraged men, women, and children.

The workers’ victory proved short‐lived. At Frick's request, Pennsylvania Governor Robert E. Pattison sent in eight thousand state militiamen. Homestead was placed under martial law, and the company reclaimed the mill. Soon strikebreakers were at work, union leaders had been arrested on charges ranging from murder to treason, and the workers defeated. The strikers were convinced that labor had a fundamental right to employment and that Frick and Carnegie, by abrogating this right, had violated the most basic tenets of justice. Frick and Carnegie, however, believed that they enjoyed the right to dispose of their property as they saw fit and therefore to hire whomever they chose. Thus, in fundamental ways, the dispute at Homestead arose from conflicting concepts of right and property.

The victory of Frick and Carnegie decimated the Amalgamated Association and signaled an industrywide collapse of unionism that would not be reversed until the 1930s. The lockout also proved to many Americans that in a showdown, private industry could summon the power of the state to defeat unions.
See also Gilded Age; Immigrant Labor; Iron and Steel Industry; Labor Movements; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

Arthur G. Burgoyne , The Homestead Strike of 1892, 1893, reprint 1979.
Paul Krause , The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel, 1992.

Paul Krause