![]() ![]() Frick tried to bring in three hundred Pinkerton guards surreptitiously, on two barges and a towboat up the Monongahela River, but as the guards tried to disembark on 6 July, they confronted a mass of armed workers and their families. Workers surrounded the plant with an armed picket line. The strike began on 1 July 1892, after the union suspended work and Frick closed the mills and announced his plans to reopen using nonunion labor. At the mills themselves, management dug in for a battle, ringing “Fort Frick, ” as the workers now named the plant, with watchtowers, gun slits, and a twelve-foot-high steel fence.īattle. ![]() Meanwhile, Frick contracted with the Pinkerton Detective Agency for a force of armed guards. Frick made his move in contract renewal negotiations in the spring of 1892, demanding wage reductions and announcing that the company would no longer bargain with Amalgamated. Homestead was the exception and, therefore, a test case for the union. However, it excluded unskilled workers and had failed to organize the larger steel plants. Amalgamated was founded in 1876 and by 1891 had a membership of more than twenty-four thousand, making it the largest craft union in the nation at the time. He came to Homestead, where twelve mills employed almost four thousand men, determined to dismantle the powerful leverage their union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, held over operations at the plant. As an operator of coal mines, Frick had established a reputation not only as a shrewd manager, but also as a tough union buster in 1890 he had violently suppressed strikes at his coalfields. But the man he chose in 1889 to manage affairs at his Homestead milk, Henry C. Prior to the strike, Carnegie had publicly endorsed unionization and had settled earlier disputes with his workers on relatively generous terms. Because of the prominence of its owner and because it was industries such as steel that were driving this new economy, the strike at Carnegie ’s Homestead steel plant in western Pennsylvania became an emblematic struggle of the age. One of the most violent business-labor clashes of this turbulent period involved a company that typified the new industriai economy: Carnegie Steel, which by 1892 had risen to become the nation ’s largest steelmaker. ![]()
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