by Peter Krass
In fact, it was the preexisting destitution that inspired the Slavs, Huns, and other unskilled workers to join forces with the discriminatory Amalgamated men, and transformed upright citizens into wild dogs thirsting for blood. The town was bleak; the buildings were all framed, dirt-gray structures; there were no paved roads and no sewage system; the inhabitants used outdoor privies just as Carnegie had in Dunfermline fifty years before; alleyways were filled with debris, and garbage blew aimlessly between the buildings; a row of saloons graced Eighth Avenue, and fifty-cent prostitution houses abounded; scruffy children played marbles, women gossiped, and old men smoked pipes and played cards. “Everywhere the yellow mud of streets lay kneaded into sticky masses,” wrote journalist Hamlin Garland, “through which groups of pale, lean men slouched in faded garments, grimy with the soot and dirt of the mills. The town was as squalid as could well be imagined, and the people were mainly aged and sullen type to be found everywhere where labor passes into the brutalizing stage of severity.”50
The men continued to work twelve-hour days, every day but Christmas and July Fourth, with wages ranging from fourteen cents an hour for a common laborer to $280 a month for the most highly skilled, but most skilled workers received no more than $50 a month.51 The sharp contrast between the laborer and the capitalist’s living conditions prompted a populist campaigner in Kansas, Mary Elizabeth Lease, to declare, “You may call me an anarchist, a socialist or a communist, I care not, but I hold to the theory that if one man has not enough to eat three meals a day and another man has $25,000,000, that last man has something that belongs to the first.”52 It was about the fair distribution of wealth argument raised by William Jewett Tucker in criticizing Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth.”
Not just the Homestead laborers were pushed hard; the office clerks were, too. “My eyes bothered me,” a clerk named Suter recalled. “At times they dazzled and would not focus probably from constant night work and long hours.” He once lost the power of speech and became so fearful for his health he actually transferred to the open-hearth department for arduous outdoor work.53 Highly prized chemists also suffered, including S. A. Ford, who wrote Carnegie, “I am still comparatively a young man and able to do a deal of work yet I know that my long close confinement in the laboratory is naturally telling upon my health and I wish to make some provision for—such a time—should it come to me—when living constantly amongst the chemical fumes would be no longer possible for me. . . . I ask therefore whether it is possible for me to obtain $1,000 worth of stock in any one of your companies.”54 Besides the fact that Ford was suffering physically from his work, it was a sad commentary that a skilled chemist could save but $1,000 over thirteen years. And if that’s all he could save, what of the common laborers?
It was a tolling bell to repeat again and again: the men were paid a pittance for dangerous work. It was estimated that in 1891 there were about three hundred fatalities in all Carnegie-owned and other Pittsburgh area mills.55 So in July 1892, the Homestead men were brought together by a common cause—to fight capital’s oppression and for a larger share of the wealth. As they walked through Homestead, the tenements, the stink, while the Pittsburgh papers trumpeted the privileged lives of Carnegie and Frick, they realized they deserved more. The men had been bent to a breaking point, but they didn’t break; they snapped back in a violent reaction.
O’Donnell, McLuckie, and the others who suffered could take some solace in knowing they weren’t the only losers: Republican candidate Harrison was crushed on election day. It had been an uphill climb for the president before Homestead. Blaine had jumped ship on June 4, three days before the Republican Convention; and that summer, Quay, who had been given the cold shoulder by Harrison and Wanamaker, supported Blaine for the presidential nomination, fracturing the party. Complicating matters, Harrison’s wife had tuberculosis and died on October 25. The McKinley Tariff, considered “the culminating atrocity of class legislation,”56 was another handicap and mercilessly attacked by democrats. Despite these extenuating circumstances, prominent republicans blamed Carnegie, Frick, and the strike for their loss.57
Initially unperturbed by Harrison’s loss, Carnegie wrote Frick from Italy: “Cleveland! Landslide! Well we have nothing to fear and perhaps it is best. People will now think the Protected Manfrs. will be attended to and quit agitating. Cleveland is a pretty good fellow. Off for Venice tomorrow.” But from Venice he expressed some regret: “I fear that Homestead did much to elect Cleveland—very sorry—but no use getting scared.”58 Carnegie’s trepidation was well founded as a backlash against him gathered strength. In addition to the Republican censure, in Britain it was argued he should be ejected from the National Liberal Club; the Labour Representative League and London Trade Council advised rejecting any monetary gifts offered by Carnegie; the Glasgow Trades Council compared him to Judas Iscariot; and a member of Parliament running for reelection took the $500 donated to him by Carnegie and sent it to the Homestead Relief Fund. Such harsh reactions were isolated, however, and he was hardly the leper he was made out to be by historians.
Letters of support came from many quarters throughout and after the strike, and friends were quick to absolve Carnegie of any responsibility. In September, the Scottish Home Rule Association invited Carnegie to a private conference, and Lord Rosebery was generous with his sympathy: “I know nothing of the rights and wrongs of the Homestead case, but I cannot believe that you would ever be illiberal or unjust. And even had you been taken with a sudden fit of those complaints all the more necessity for your friends to stand by you.”59 John Morley, silent during the strike, wrote Carnegie the next spring: “We’ve had a good deal of tribulation during the last twelvemonth both you and I. . . . As I told you, the world is often harsh to its benefactors. But this philosophic truth does not make me the less angry at the odious line taken about you by English newspapers and Scotch. However, it is past, and by now pretty well out of your memory, I’ll be bound.”60 Morley was wrong; Homestead would haunt Carnegie until his death. Uncle Lauder, not exactly sounding like a Dunfermline Chartist, wrote, “I am glad all your troubles are now over at Pittsburgh and will remain so for a long time. This working man question is the question of the day. The more you give them, the more they will take. I see this every day in little things as well as big.”61 Support from Uncle Lauder was very important to Carnegie, who claimed everything he accomplished was to please either his mother or his uncle.
When Carnegie finally returned to New York in January 1893, he was not treated like a leper, either. Abram S. Hewitt, mayor of New York and sometime Carnegie critic, invited the beleaguered steel master to his country home in Ringwood, New Jersey, where he had a good stable and excellent fishing.62 The editor of Engineering Magazine wrote Carnegie to say he thought that “Mr. H. C. Frick . . . has done more than any many man of his generation to re-establish the fundamental principles of property rights.”63 And Thomas Mellon voiced the business community’s support; “It was and is the opinion generally expressed by manufacturers and other employers of labor here that the stand taken by your firm was a necessity, forced upon it, and what all will be compelled to take sooner or later. . . . There has been so far no fair statement of the facts and merits of the controversy.”64 Like his peers, Mellon felt the press corrupted public sentiment and promoted anarchy, catering to the worst elements to gain readers and advertising.
Cities even wanted to be named after him. Carnegie was pleasantly surprised when in February 1893 he received a letter from Philander Knox, stating the boroughs of Mansfield and Chartiers, suburbs of Pittsburgh, wanted to merge and rename the new town Carnegie.65 He approved and even personally wrote the fourth assistant postmaster general to expedite the change— another piece of evidence demonstrating Carnegie did indeed relish his name on a monument, a library, and even a whole town. As he told the burgess of Chartiers, life wouldn’t be worth living if people in and around Pittsburgh didn’t reciprocate the affection he had for them! On March 1, 1894, the
governor of Pennsylvania officially recognized the borough of Carnegie.66
Of all the letters and friendly support, Carnegie most appreciated a letter from William Gladstone. When the eighty-two-year-old became prime minister for a fourth time and formed his cabinet in August 1892, Carnegie congratulated him, dubbing him William the Fourth. Responding in September, Gladstone thanked him and offered his sympathy:
I wish to do the little, the very little, that is in my power, which is simply to say how sure I am that no one who knows you will be prompted by the unfortunate occurrences across the water (of which manifestly we cannot know the exact merits) to qualify in the slightest degree either his confidence in your generous views of his admiration of the good and great work you have already done.
Wealth is at present like a monster threatening to swallow up the moral life of man; you by precept and by example have been teaching him to disgorge. I for one thank you.67
The venerable prime minister touched on three themes that marked the letters of support: authors tended to point out they did not know the merits of the case, therefore not completely absolving Carnegie; the press was criticized and held partly responsible for inciting the violence; and Carnegie’s philanthropic ventures were noted to strike a positive chord amid the dark times.
Within days of receiving Gladstone’s supportive letter, a grateful Carnegie earnestly wrote back as though at confession, although he continued to revise his story:
This is the trial of my life (death’s hand excepted). Such a foolish step—contrary to my ideas, repugnant to every feeling of my nature. Our firm offered all it could offer, even generous terms. Our other men had gratefully accepted them. They went as far as I could have wished, but the false step was made in trying to run the Homestead Works with new men.
It is a test to which workingmen should not be subjected. It is expecting too much of poor men to stand by and see their work taken by others. Their daily bread. . . . Feelings had been aroused, the Sheriff’s aid had been called in and his Deputies hooted. Then other guards sent for with Sheriff’s approval. These were attacked and then the military.
All this time I heard nothing until days had elapsed and, as the way easiest to peace, going on was then best—returning being impossible, for the State of Pennsylvania could not retire troops until they had established and vindicated Law. The pain I suffer increases daily. The Works are not worth one drop of human blood. I wish they had sunk.
I write this to you freely; to no one else have I written so. I must be silent and suffer but after a time I hope to be able to do something to restore good feeling between my young and rather too rash partner and them over at Homestead. . . . Look at me!—hitherto Master, now condemned to inaction yet knowing the right, and anxious to carry it. . . . I have one comfort, self-approval & a second—the support of a wife who is as strong & as wise as she is gentle & devoted—so I shall sail on & let the tempest howl.68
The howling tempest alluded to Shakespeare’s King Lear. The mad King Lear rages, “Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm/Invades us to the skin. . . . Pour on; I will endure.”69 In King Lear, Shakespeare played with several themes, including, in part: the universe is indifferent; man is but an animal; life is brutal and meaningless; the contrasting of an unappreciated child and the unwanted aging parent; and, of course, the perilous nature of power. Certainly, Carnegie must have felt as though he was fighting an indifferent storm, fraught with brutality. But more important, he was like King Lear, a ruler who “hath ever but slenderly known himself,”70 in that Carnegie deluded himself. In 1886, Carnegie had written, “It is the chairman, situated hundreds of miles away from his men, who only pays a flying visit to the works and perhaps finds time to walk through the mill or mine once or twice a year, that is chiefly responsible for the disputes which break out at intervals.” What he now failed to recognize was that he had become just such a chairman. He was also deluding himself as to his role in the Homestead tragedy. He claimed he had been retired for several years, but in truth he and Frick were the masterminds behind the campaign to expel the union; he believed he was receiving Homestead information too late to act upon it, but in fact he was in almost continuous contact with Frick via cable; and he believed he did not know Frick was planning to hire strikebreakers, but considering that Carnegie Steel agents were out recruiting men before the violence, word must have reached Carnegie, especially since the agents were recruiting north, south, east, and west. He was starting to believe his version of the events.
Carnegie had lost a realistic perspective on power, as had King Lear. By handing Frick the chairmanship and abdicating the throne by taking extensive European sojourns, but keeping the title of king, Carnegie was setting himself up for betrayal. Frick was the unappreciated child with restive ambitions, and Carnegie the unwanted parent whom Frick wanted out of the way and kept quiet. King Lear proclaimed, “I am a man/More sinn’d against than sinning,” but he brought it upon himself by failing to maintain his full authority; so had Carnegie.71 The abuse of power and the resulting unnecessary deaths at Homestead made for a gripping Shakespearean tragedy.
On returning from Europe in January 1893, Carnegie gathered himself and continued on to Pittsburgh. It was time to start healing the wounds and reconcile himself with the tragedy. On the train to Pittsburgh, he edited and refined a speech to deliver at Homestead. The words were old words, old themes—there’d been no epiphany—and he didn’t have the energy or the conviction to imagine a new relationship between capital and labor. He regurgitated what he had written in his 1886 labor essays; specifically, that there could be no winner in a strike or lockout. And he regurgitated his gospel in defending his wealth and asserting he would not die rich. With great conviction, he also told the workers they were the best paid in the world of steelmaking. He then extolled Frick, predicting that “no man who ever lived in Pittsburgh and managed business here will be better liked or more admired by his employees than my friend and partner Henry Clay Frick, nor do I believe any man will be more valuable for the city. . . . I hope after this statement that the public will understand that the officials of the Carnegie Steel Company, Limited, with Mr. Frick at their head, are not dependent upon me, or upon any one in any way for their positions, and that I have neither power nor disposition to interfere with them in the management of the business.” Carnegie was distancing himself from Frick and the Homestead violence by claiming he had not the power to interfere. It was a lie, a repeated lie, and Frick and he knew it. The lie continued to grow.
To further purge himself of Homestead, Carnegie wrote that March to Whitelaw Reid, who had briefly played intermediary between Carnegie and O’Donnell. The themes and excuses sounded in this letter echoed those in his letters to Gladstone and Stead months earlier—yet again he was refining his story, embracing it, believing it in full, as he sought pity and to apologize. The letter opened with almost the identical line as that to Gladstone: “This has been the hardest trial I ever had to endure (save when the hand of death has come).”72 Reid, who lost his bid for the vice presidency, never felt pity for Carnegie and never forgave him; thereafter, he used his Tribune to oppose him whenever possible.
Comfortably resettled in his Fifty-first Street home, Carnegie brooded over Homestead. What was done was done; now what could polish the tarnish? Although Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, and other titans would never admit they used their philanthropy to improve their image, in 1893 Carnegie most certainly did, only he would take a different tactic. He knew a sudden announcement of a new initiative would have the cynics jumping down his throat; therefore, he opted for a more subdued and charitable course as he continued to cleanse himself of the Homestead sin.73 At a notably increased rate, Carnegie gave money to strangers with hard-luck cases, passing acquaintances, old friends, and family.
He aided a mechanic’s wife who was sick and overwhelmed with doctor bills; he sent $150 to a woman whose husband was out of work and had had all her furniture taken except her
wedding presents; and he spent $99.80 to purchase and ship a loom to one Alice Burns.74 He sent a check to a Mrs. Henderson whose husband, an inventor, had died, because the family couldn’t live off the royalties from his inventions as he had promised.75 When Sarah Kerr Heistand, a retired telegraph operator who remembered Carnegie when he was at Altoona, wrote to say she was raising money for a new rectory for her church, Carnegie promptly contributed.76 The nonchurchgoer, perhaps seeking absolution, became very active in giving Farrand & Votey Pipe-Organs, at approximately $5,000 apiece, to various churches. He gave money to his friend William Clark for a soldiers’ monument.77 Carnegie sent $500 to another old friend, William Curtiss, who was unable to work after the untimely death of his daughter.78 As for the more fortunate, he kindly invested $5,000 for his New York friend Mrs. Alexander King.79 Carnegie’s blood relatives experienced a windfall in the year after Homestead. He gave money to his cousin William Carnegie, who was out of work, and an allowance to cousin Charlotte Carnegie. For his cousin Delia Morris, he invested $6,000, promising a handsome return of 12 percent per year, to be paid semiannually.80 Late in 1893, Carnegie donated $125,000 to a Pittsburgh relief fund managed by his friend Robert Pitcairn to aid the poor during a bitter economic downturn.81 Carnegie reported his good deeds to John Morley, who acted like his conscience in replying, “Such handsome and humane conduct ought to wipe out every trace of the mischief of last year—mischief for which you, I verily believe, were no more responsible than I was.”82
At the same time Carnegie was indulging in charity, he put some effort into suppressing newspapers stories about the company and himself, and hired a press clipping service to keep tabs. To curtail the bad press, he even played with the outrageous idea of paying the newspapers to not print articles, a strategy he shared with Leishman, who promised that “we have done everything possible to prevent articles in regard to our operations etc. from getting into the paper, even to the extent of telling the Superintendents to discharge any man that they found retailing our business to the newspapers. . . . We are so prominent and the newspapers here so hard up for news that it would be a very hard thing to shut them off entirely, and unless we went to the expense of paying different papers to keep us out it would not be possible, and even then I am afraid they would make a slip occasionally in order to cater to the working man’s vote.”83 Control of the press was key to a totalitarian regime’s success.
