Meet You in Hell

by Les Standiford

  Even if Carnegie hadn’t contradicted himself, it is doubtful Frick would have done anything but use his own discretion. When a representative of Reid’s visited Frick at Clayton during his convalescence, Frick told him that while he was certainly a Republican and a devoted one at that, he would not meet with the union ever again, even if President Harrison himself should request it. “I will never recognize the Union,” Frick thundered, “never, never!”

  By this point O’Donnell had essentially given up, observing to a friend that Berkman’s shots may not have killed Frick, but they had certainly killed the last hopes of the union. In essence, O’Donnell was now a man without a country, facing charges of murder, despised by capital, and disdained by his own men for trying too hard to appease their oppressors.

  O’Donnell was not the only one being pilloried by the public, of course. In England, virtually every newspaper had carried daily accounts of the strike and associated developments, and most issued scathing editorials aimed principally at Carnegie. Even the staid London Times condemned the use of a private police force as a deliberate provocation to labor. “Here we have this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through Scotland in a four-in-hand opening public libraries, while the wretched workmen who supply him with ways and means for his self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh.”

  The Edinburgh Dispatch joined this chorus: “We on this side of the Atlantic . . . may well feel thankful that neither our capitalists nor our labourers have any inclination to imitate the methods which prevail in the land of ‘Triumphant Democracy.’ ”

  And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial that had begun with that grudging line, “Say what you will of Frick, he is a brave man,” concluded with this: “Say what you will of Carnegie, he is a coward. And gods and men hate cowards.”

  Despite all his proclamations of support for Frick, the criticism he received stung Carnegie badly. As he would write to his friend, the British prime minister William Gladstone, in the aftermath, “The Works are not worth one drop of human blood. I wish they had sunk.”

  Later, in his posthumously published autobiography, Carnegie would add, “Nothing I have ever had to meet in all my life, before or since, wounded me so deeply. No pangs remain of any wound received in my business career save that of Homestead.”

  No doubt Carnegie was greatly troubled by what had taken place, and no doubt he would have handled matters somewhat differently had he remained in Pittsburgh that summer. But the fact is that he had chosen to absent himself from Homestead when he was well aware of what was coming. For better or for worse, he had placed his trust in Frick, and he would not return to the scene of this momentous conflict for many months more.

  ON AUGUST 31, FRICK MADE HIS first return to Homestead in more than two months, accompanied by one detective. He received no abuse entering or leaving the mill grounds, nor did he receive any from the men on the job. In an interview with reporters, he contended that his tour of the facilities showed everything to be in order and that the strike was a thing of the past. He had written to Carnegie shortly beforehand, declaring, “We have been having a rather exciting time for the last forty days, but I feel confident that we will be amply repaid for all of our trouble in this world, and in the near future. We shall be able to get closer to our men, and when they once become acquainted with us, they will find that we are probably the best friends they have.”

  Even if no one had fallen upon Frick with fists or weapons, it was a bold overstatement, of course. Although production was once again under way, shipments from Homestead for the month of September would total less than half of what they had in previous years, and Frick was forced to make arrangements with rival manufacturers to supply him with steel for fabrication. Such negotiations had to be handled secretly for the most part, owing to fears that sympathetic laborers would strike against their own bosses if they learned they were producing steel for Carnegie and Frick.

  In a series of letters he sent to Carnegie, Frick reiterated his hopes that the workers would one day thank them for their efforts to place the company’s operations on solid, if paternalistic, footing. In a mid-September message, he assured Carnegie that the strike would soon end and that eventually the public and their workers alike would see things their way. “We cannot expect that the public should understand just how kindly we do feel toward those who are in our service; that we are just as anxious for their welfare as we are for our own,” Frick wrote. “We must expect to be misrepresented, but time will cure this all.”

  To Carnegie’s cousin and company partner George “Dod” Lauder, Frick expressed similar optimism. “Am hoping to hear every day that a break has occurred among old men but it may take four months—not more—probably less. Don’t expect too much. It will come.”

  Carnegie, eager to resolve matters, may not have been convinced by such sanguine notions, but still he refrained from any direct remonstrations with Frick. His counsel was consistent: move slowly, wait the men out. “Nothing but time will give you victory; but this will do it, and we know that we have all the time we want.” In that same message, Carnegie offered his condolences to Frick on having inherited a difficult situation at the Homestead plant. “Captain Jones always told me there was the worst set of men at Homestead that he ever knew,” Carnegie wrote. “The worst in the world.

  “Nothing will ever be right at Homestead until a great manager of men takes charge there,” Carnegie continued. “Skilled workmen are the race horses, laborers the cart horses; the former have to be driven with a rein although firm, yet gentle.”

  And in a follow-up letter dated September 28, he went so far as to shift blame for the continuing rift onto Superintendent Potter: “I am expecting daily to hear that a break has occurred. . . . [H]e is a poor manager who has not sufficient influence over part of his men to draw them to him.”

  Nor did the mental stress of dealing with the continuing difficulty at Homestead escape Carnegie’s attention. He closed one memo on the strike by wondering if that Orchestrion had yet made its way to Clayton: “I hope you will find some respite from care in its music,” Carnegie told Frick, then went on to suggest there were other ways to find relief: “I recommend you make up a whist club to meet at your house at least once a week.” And as for himself, “I caught a trout yesterday that weighed five pounds one and one-half ounces, had only my light rod, and had to play with him an hour and a quarter up and down the Loch.” Added as a postscript in his own hand were the underlined words, “That’s my record.”

  PERHAPS WHAT FRICK DID NEXT was in response to the hint of impatience in Carnegie’s notes concerning the situation at Homestead; but more likely it was the result of his own desire to rid that installation of the influence of the AAISW once and for all.

  In any case, on September 30, the last of the bombshells to explode at Homestead was dropped. The entire advisory board of the AAISW—Hugh O’Donnell, John McLuckie, and twenty-seven others, including those already facing murder charges—were accused in a warrant of treason issued by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. To the men and to the residents of Homestead, such a charge was dumbfounding.

  Murder, riot, conspiracy, trespass, these were charges they could understand. But treason?

  In an October 10 appearance before an Allegheny County grand jury, Chief Justice Edward Paxson explained that the military precision and organization of the strikers into divisions with “captains,” “commanders,” and the like made the union guilty of setting up an alien invasion force designed to foment a “state of war” and “to deprive their fellow-citizens of their rights under the Constitutions and laws.”

  The grand jury was apparently swayed by such arguments, and on October 11 it returned indictments against all accused. Yet some sense of fairness seemed to come into play. While the grand jury returned those indictments as well as those against the workmen and union officials accused of murder during the riots, so they also returned murder indictments against Frick and the other company officials.


  The populace was apparently exhausted by the long struggle. In an article that detailed the grand-jury indictments, the New York Times reported that the announcement “did not cause much excitement among the people, and the defendants themselves took it quite coolly.” The story closed by noting that officials at Carnegie Steel would make no comment regarding their own indictments.

  On October 13, the last of the Pennsylvania guardsmen were withdrawn from the city, another action that was met by calm. It was as if everyone knew that the game was up, and while the association remained officially on strike, there was a sense that it meant little. Still, the workers were tenacious, even if their cause was lost, and Frick himself was moved to write Carnegie on October 31, noting that “the firmness with which these strikers hold on is surprising to everyone.”

  Hang on they did, but for not much longer. At the regular Saturday meeting held on November 12, striking workers heard an address from William T. Roberts, one of the most devoted committee members. When Roberts pointed out that the recent defection of the skilled finishers from the ranks constituted a major breach in their unity, most men in attendance seemed to sag.

  On November 17, some two thousand mechanics and laborers met and voted to petition the Amalgamated to end the strike. The union members, under the direction of now their national president, William Weihe, rejected the proposal, voting 224–129 to continue. But in a separate action, the union gave notice to the laborers and mechanics that they were free to deal with the company as they liked.

  It was an action that amounted to capitulation. On the following morning the laborers and mechanics descended upon the mill en masse, clamoring to be returned to their jobs. Though some mechanics had to be turned away owing to the replacements now holding their jobs, nearly every one of the unskilled laborers was immediately restored to work. On hand as the processing took place was Chairman Henry Clay Frick, who had at last seen his mission accomplished.

  On the following Sunday, November 20, local members of the AAISW gathered at union headquarters to hear Weihe advise them that without question the strike had been lost. By a vote of 101–91, the men agreed. On the following day, the local lodge called the strike at an end. The headline of the Pittsburgh Post’s lead story put it simply: THEY SURRENDER.

  “Through with the war at last, what a relief,” Carnegie wrote to Frick from Florence. “. . . think I’m about ten years older than when with you last. Europe has rung with Homestead, Homestead. We are all sick of the name. But it is all over now . . . now for long years of peace and prosperity.”

  Indeed, the Battle of Homestead was finally at an end. A different kind of battle, however, had just begun.

  21

  BURY THE PAST

  THERE WAS SOME TIDYING UP to follow the return of the last of the strikers so inclined during those dreary, late-November days of 1892. Although three of the strikers accused of murder—Sylvester Critchlow, Jack Clifford, and Hugh O’Donnell—were eventually tried, all three were swiftly acquitted, at which point the company declined to pursue further prosecutions.

  The indictments for treason were also dropped, and, as had been expected, no company official was forced to stand trial for murder. But the strike had taken its toll. While 1892 production for Carnegie Steel as a whole was up about 80,000 tons overall, production at the Homestead mill was significantly diminished, even though the facility was up and fully running soon after the formal surrender of the union.

  According to company reports, total crude steel production at Homestead dipped from 253,000 tons in 1891 to about 190,000 for 1892; steel plate tonnage was down from 44,000 tons to about 33,000; and beams were down from approximately 34,000 tons to about 22,000. Carnegie wrote to Frick that, by his reckoning, “We have lost a million in ore and another [million] trying to run Homestead with new men.”

  Overall profits for Carnegie Steel were down by about $300,000, a bit less than 10 percent, and the AAISW estimated that the workforce had lost about $1.25 million in wages. The cost to taxpayers for sending in the state militia was estimated at about $500,000. In the final analysis, and including not only direct casualties but ensuing accident, disease, and suicide, it was determined that the battle had taken thirty-five lives in total.

  The intangible costs, of course, were beyond reckoning.

  In January 1893, a weary-looking Carnegie made a return visit to Homestead, where he delivered what was intended as a conciliatory address to the workforce. In the speech, Carnegie reiterated his confidence in Frick, saying, “Of his ability, fairness and pluck, no one has now the slightest question. . . . I would not exchange him for any other manager I know.”

  Carnegie also told the men, however, that he had come to “bury the past”—a past with which, he suggested, he had had little to do. Following his fulsome praise for Frick, Carnegie went on to say, “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 . . . and that I have neither power nor disposition to interfere with them in the management of the business.”

  Shortly after delivering this disclaimer, Carnegie sat down to write his old friend John Morley, publisher of Britain’s Fortnightly Review, “I went to Homestead and shook hands with the old men, tears in their eyes and mine. Oh, that Homestead blunder—but it’s fading as all events do and we are at work selling steel one pound for a half penny.”

  Even if one were to accept Carnegie’s words at face value, the general circumstances for workers in Homestead had deteriorated significantly. Within a year of the strike’s failure, wages for many skilled workers had fallen by more than half, and the much-debated “minimum” floor upon which wages were to be based was abolished altogether. The eight-hour day was a thing of the past; shifts were once again twelve hours long, and the plant operated seven days a week.

  In the aftermath of the strike, the noted author Hamlin Garland journeyed to Homestead on an assignment from McClure’s Magazine, a liberal-leaning publication of the day. Garland, who had gained notoriety in 1891 with the publication of Main-Travelled Roads, a collection of stories depicting the harsh conditions of Midwestern farm life, found conditions equally grim in Homestead. Though the place had grown and the homes and businesses were the property of the citizenry, Homestead was as bleak as any “company town.”

  “The streets of the town were horrible,” Garland wrote in “Homestead and Its Perilous Trades.” “The buildings were poor; the sidewalks were sunken, swaying, and full of holes, and the crossings were sharp-edged stones set like rocks in a river bed. Everywhere the yellow mud of the street lay kneaded into a sticky mass, through which groups of pale, lean men slouched in faded garments, grimy with the soot and grease of the mills.”

  While Garland’s descriptions of the surroundings were gloomy enough, his observations of the work itself seemed drawn from a tour of Hell: “We moved toward the mouths of the pits, where a group of men stood with long shovels and bars in their hands. They were touched with orange light, which rose out of the pits. The pits looked like wells or cisterns of white-hot metal. The men signaled a boy, and the huge covers, which hung on wheels, were moved to allow them to peer in at the metal. They threw up their elbows before their eyes, to shield their faces from the heat, while they studied the ingots within.”

  Garland’s tone from first to last is one of awe: “I watched the men as they stirred the deeps. I could not help admiring the swift and splendid action of their bodies. They had the silence and certainty one admires in the tiger’s action. I dared not move for fear of flying metal, the swift swing of a crane, or the sudden lurch of a great carrier. The men could not look out for me. They worked with a sort of desperate attention and alertness.”

  When he admits to his guide that the work seems hard, the man can only stare at Garland’s naïveté. He lost forty pounds in the first three weeks he worked at the mill, the man tells him, his sweat often puddling in his shoes, and that fo
r the rate of $2.25 per day, not nearly what a tonnage man might make at $10 under the revised rates, but not so bad when compared to shovelers and other bottom-rung laborers who made less than $1.50 for their dozen hours in hell.

  Garland seems overwhelmed by the very observation of the process: “Everywhere dim figures with grappling hooks worked silently and desperately guiding, measuring, controlling, moving masses of white-hot metal. High up the superintending foremen, by whistle or shout, arrested the movement of the machinery and the gnome-like figures beneath.”

  It was a spectacle that called forth any number of ironies from the writer’s pen, but none more pointed than this: “Upon such toil rests the splendor of American civilization.”

  Garland spent the following morning at breakfast with a few of the workers. He found himself hardly surprised that, conditioned by a life that was a dozen hours a day of exhausting and dangerous labor, along with another ten for sleeping and eating to fuel the unending cycle, there was precious little to distinguish them from the machines with which they worked.

  In the end, it seems, Garland could not leave Homestead and its perils quickly enough. “The ferryboat left a wake of blue that shone like the neck of a dove,” he wrote as he made his way back toward his waiting train, “and over the hills swept a fresh moist wind. In the midst of God’s bright morning, beside the beautiful river, the town and its industries lay like a cancer on the breast of a human body.”

  Hellish though the conditions were, Garland found little sympathy for the strike among the laborers with whom he spoke. “It was the tonnage men brought it on,” one of the men told him. “They can afford to strike, but we couldn’t.”

  When Garland probed, the man shrugged. “We can’t hurt Carnegie by six months’ starving. It’s our ribs that’ll show through our shirts. A man working for fourteen cents an hour hasn’t got any surplus for a strike.” This line of inquiry also led more than one worker to point out that neither Carnegie nor the steel industry itself offered the worst employment opportunities around. “There are lots of other jobs as bad,” one worker said.