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Chapter 2

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Great Strikes Revisited

A strike is one thing, and we know what a strike is; but armed private mercenaries are another, and they are a thing which in this effete old country we emphatically would not tolerate… . Mr. Andrew Carnegie has preached to us upon “Triumphant Democracy,” he has lectured us upon the rights and duties of wealth… . It is indeed a wholesome piece of satire.

—St. James Gazette, 1892

The popular image of America’s era of titanic industrial conflicts has become all too tidy. Invocation of the labor battles of the Long Gilded Age typically triggers one of two sets of related dismissals (at least in my college classroom). The first takes comfort in historical distance. The bad old days of the Gilded Age, encompassing social Darwinism, robber barons, and a rough and sometimes tragic encounter between a new class of industrial workers and utterly rapacious business owners, ultimately gave way to a less primitive, more “modernized” set of employment relations and thus has little bearing on present-day concerns. Alternatively, the second disabling reaction derives from the all-too-close parallels between the older period’s central themes and our own. For some, especially on the political Left, the turn-of-the-century conflicts provide little more than an overt demonstration of capitalist class exploitation and determination to crush the system’s challengers that remains very much in place today. For these students, the forms and locales of exploitation may have changed, but the essential outcomes remain the same: the good guys get clobbered and our country is the worse off for it. Simply counter-posing the hard-hearted coldness of Gilded Age villains like capitalists Henry Clay Frick and George F. Baer to the hard-working immigrant steelworkers at Homestead or idealists like railroad leader Eugene Debs, however, risks turning the era into extended melodrama in which it is easy to take sides but hard to see why the details still matter.

To avoid this conceptual pitfall, this chapter offers a a renewed inquest into three major moments of Gilded Age industrial unrest: the Homestead lockout of 1892, the Pullman boycott and strike of 1894, and the anthracite strike of 1902. All three events were suffused with prime aspects of what many have considered immoveable and overwhelming obstacles facing the American labor movement—determinedly anti-union employers; a polyglot, often ethnically divided workforce, and ready resort to public authority (in the form of the militia, public officials, or courts) to curtail the conflict. Yet, my rereading of this decade of confrontation suggests more open-ended possibilities in real time than is assumed in subsequent consideration of the events by historians. Moreover, it is in keeping with the suggestion of recent business and legal scholars that politics as much as “economic and technological constraints” conditioned the American variant of industrial capitalism that rose to twentieth-century dominance. ¹ In particular, labor historians can learn much from a renewed emphasis on the role of elites and the ideology of anti-unionism over the course of modern American history. ²

The argument here equally emphasizes the role of contingency as invoked by historian Richard White: in short, “things did not have to be this way.” ³ Unexpected outcomes, to be sure, are not the same as random ones. Social actors have choices, but not free choices: they are constrained by various material (economic), political, as well as cultural limits of their surroundings. In the selective reconstruction that follows, therefore, I hope to identify both larger patterns of development and pivotal actors who in the context of their times might have moved history in a different direction.

Among the latter, consider the following facts. Andrew Carnegie lived to regret his actions in the case of the Homestead Steel strike. American Railway Union leader Eugene V. Debs knew the odds were long in the case of a nationwide boycott of Pullman sleeping cars. George Pullman himself won that battle but lost the war behind his vision of a well-ordered company town. Attorney General Richard T. Olney, who effectively hounded Debs to prison, tried later to do penance for his hard-line position. Ideologically pure railroad owner George F. Baer made a public fool of himself in the anthracite strike of 1902, while both self-seeking union leader John Mitchell and financial plutocrat J. P. Morgan emerged from the same conflict cloaked in civic-mindedness. Turning a biblical injunction into a question, we might well ask, “How are the mighty fallen?” and equally, How do the fallen sometimes do good? ⁴ The vicissitudes of triumph and tragedy are surely among the most compelling themes of historical narrative; as such it pays us to peer farther into events too long taken for granted.

One basic question, of course, is what set off these strikes? At least in a superficial way, we can quickly answer that question by pointing to a larger pattern in the proximate cause of American strikes. Practically every confrontation of the era has the same immediate trigger: a significant wage cut. What is more, this material sacrifice, regularly imposed in hard times, in every case is interpreted as an attack on worker rights if not more generally on human dignity and freedom. The pattern begins well before our period. The first “turnouts” among the young women textile workers at the Lowell mills in 1834 were responses to 15 percent wage cuts that had also been accompanied by increases in boarding-house rents. The Lynn shoeworkers’ strike, begun on Washington’s birthday in 1860 and the largest such action to that date, was initiated to restore rates that had been slashed three years before. Likewise, the tumultuous mass strikes of 1877 began when Baltimore and Ohio workers rebelled against a wage cut piled on a wage cut. ⁵

Every downturn, let alone panic and depression, it seems, induced the same dynamic. At Homestead in 1892, union refusal of a reduction in tonnage rates set Andrew Carnegie on a course to lock out the company’s union men. In the same year, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, coal miners walked out over a wage cut and increase in work hours. Famously, in the midst of depression conditions in 1894, George Pullman cut wages for the factory workers who built his sleeping cars an average of 25 percent, without any corresponding reduction in company housing rents. ⁶ Distress among the anthracite miners boiled over in 1900 around the more indirect attack on workers’ income from the “infamous system of dockage.” ⁷ In November 1909, some twenty thousand mostly Yiddish-speaking young women sparked an eleven-week strike over cuts in the piece-rate offered by inside contractors; the following year a walkout by a mere sixteen of their counterparts over another piece-rate cut at Chicago’s mammoth Hart, Schaffner, and Marx factory soon coalesced into a strike of 40,000 operatives. ⁸ Finally, when textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, learned in 1912 that employers had responded to state shorter hours legislation (reducing hours for women and children only from 56 to 54 per week) by eliminating the extra two hours’ pay, they too set off a walkout of more than 20,000 workers in what would subsequently become known as the Bread and Roses strike. ⁹ Indeed, in the annals of the era, the wave of May Day, 1886, eight-hour strikes stand out as worker initiatives not begun in response to employer wage cuts, though there is a caveat even to this exception: just as in the subsequent Lawrence Strike, many struck employers prompted walkouts by refusing worker demands to receive the same wage (previously figured on a ten-hour schedule) for the shortened workday.

In a boom-bust economy, conflicting imperatives, it seems, set employers and workers bitterly against each other. Employers, in particular, facing declining revenues and desperately clinging to property rights arguments (explored in Chapter 1) as well as their bottom lines, long appeared clueless in adopting any policy other than wage cuts, despite their disruptive social and political after-effects. ¹⁰ By the onset of the Great Depression, however, a new pattern seemed to emerge. Negative public reaction and labor upheavals as a result of wage-cutting—the old pattern we have observed from 1860 to 1912 (and which continued through the 1920/21 downturn)—appeared finally to take a behavioral toll on the nation’s business leaders. While hesitating to cut wages, beleaguered depression industries instead cut work hours, and then eliminated jobs altogether. ¹¹

In more recent times, other options continue to prevail over the incendiary wage cuts of the Long Gilded Age. Perhaps it was not until conservative anger at public-sector workers (highlighted by the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981) that the catchphrase “fire their asses” caught up to real-world managerial practices. ¹² In any case, selective layoffs and job cuts have regularly replaced the favored Gilded Age remedy to employer economic stress. If not exactly an “out of sight, out of mind” solution, reduction of the workforce tends to render the victims comparatively invisible, even as those spared a pink slip are effectively reminded to think again before upsetting corporate decorum. Even public-sector employers, faced with few options amid the recent Great Recession, have notably tried to avoid naked wage cuts in favor of “furloughs,” or mandatory days off.

Yet, knowing what “triggered’ Gilded Age unrest does little to explain how it developed or ended. For that, we must summon up some of the main characters. Given their power in the era, and the fact that in most labor-management conflicts they usually played with a winning hand, I want to look first, in each case, at labor’s opponents. Then I will circle back in selective reconsideration of the pro-labor forces of the day.

In the figures of Carnegie and Pullman, we have prime specimens of the class that has been popularly memorialized as either “Robber Barons” or “Captains of Industry,” but in either case as prototypes of American anti-unionism. Yet, they were also rather complex figures. In particular, as key contributors to the distinctiveness of the American industrial order, they seem sometimes to be grappling as much with the ghosts of British or European pasts as concrete American realities.

Carnegie, of course, was the protagonist of the Homestead Strike of 1892, a fateful standoff between one of the biggest corporations and the most powerful union of the Gilded Age. When the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW) together with an aroused local citizenry proved unable to withstand a combination of lockout, importation of Pinkertons to protect strikebreakers, and ultimate application of state militia, unionism took a toll beyond the immediate casualties of nine dead and eleven wounded. In the steel industry, declining wages and yellow-dog contracts requiring a binding non-union pledge subsequently became the norm. Overvaluing its remaining resources, the Amalgamated made a final, fateful decision to confront the newly formed U.S. Steel monolith in 1901, a decision ending in crushing defeat. ¹³ Once the last steel lodge in the country dissolved in 1903, Big Steel inoculated itself from trade unionism for the next thirty-four years. ¹⁴

Moreover, despite Carnegie’s calculated self-removal to his Scottish castle and delegation of authority to his business lieutenant Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead events, a clear chain of authority set the fateful events in motion. Like the Boston Associates who a half century before had created the spindle city of Lowell out of Merrimack River farmland, Carnegie had within a decade turned a village of a few hundred residents into an industrial center of 8,000 people mainly occupied making steel plate (much of it for the U.S. navy) with the nation’s largest rolling mill. It was Carnegie who first negotiated a “sliding scale” (geared to the market price of a key component in the manufacturing process) with the Amalgamated in 1889, then, deciding to go entirely non-union, provoked a strike by stockpiling plates, fencing in the plant, insisting on a reduction in tonnage rates, contracting with the Pinkertons to recruit a substitute labor force, then calling for military intervention and ultimately encouraging the most draconian legal penalties against the strikers. ¹⁵ Indeed, John McLuckie, the twice-elected burgess (mayor) of Homestead, fled the state rather than face charges of murder, conspiracy, and treason for opposing the Pinkertons; a once-proud skilled worker, his pro-union stand cost him his job, his home, and his marriage. ¹⁶ There is thus ample evidence to finger Carnegie as the “intellectual” author of the Homestead tragedy, while leaving Frick—who would survive an assassination attempt by anarchist Alexander Berkman at the end of the strike—to serve as the fall guy.

Yet, we are also left to reconcile Carnegie’s onerous role as industrial autocrat with his philanthropical acts both before and after the strike. Of course, his philanthropy, as perhaps most famously associated with his endowment of public libraries, could be chalked up to liberal guilt or worse. From the beginning there is a touch of defensiveness in “The Gospel of Wealth” (Carnegie’s famous 1889 essay). “While the law [of competition] may be hard for the individual,” Carnegie insisted, “it is best for the race.” Yet, he allowed that the concentration of wealth in a few hands (like his own) would likely be accepted in a free society only so long as the rich treat it as a “sacred trust.” ¹⁷ In addition, gift-giving could prove quite strategic: Carnegie himself was finalizing plans for the Carnegie Library of Homestead—arriving in town with “a Pullman-car-full of guests”—just two months before he locked out his employees. The Homestead historian thus does not have to reach far to contextualize such acts within the framework of behavioral “social deception” as explained by anthropologist Marcel Mauss, that “the transaction itself is based on obligation and economic self-interest” in furtherance of social hierarchy. ¹⁸

Still, there were aspects of the man that seem to point to less predictable behavioral patterns. Outwardly confident and even boisterously sure of himself, Carnegie likely could not easily dissociate the grievances of Homestead workers from his own past as the son of a failed Scottish handloom weaver and grandson of a proud Chartist activist in the working-class movement for radical democratic reform that swept British industrial districts for a decade after 1838. Escape from the class system is thus a central theme behind the soaring rhetoric of his Triumphant Democracy (1886). Notably, it is not entrepreneurship, technology, or even hard work which, for Carnegie, account for the American Republic’s triumphal “rush” past the “old nations of the world [that] creep on at a snail’s pace.” Rather, with universal suffrage and free public education, “the people are not emasculated by being made to feel that their own country decrees their inferiority, and holds them unworthy of privileges accorded to others.” Freed from a “social system which ranks them beneath an arrogant class of drones,” Carnegie anticipates Israel Zangwell’s melting-pot, where “children of Russian and German serfs, of Irish evicted tenants, Scottish crofters, and other victims of feudal tyranny are transmuted into republican Americans.” ¹⁹ Carnegie’s career was self-consciously steeped in the ideals of both social and political independence. It is thus no accident that when, at eighteen, having just graduated from four years of service as a telegraph messenger to become private secretary to Pennsylvania Railroad owner Tom Scott, Carnegie would look around at his adopted country and exclaim (in correspondence to a British uncle), “We have the Charter.” ²⁰

Even as a profit-seeking American industrialist, therefore, Carnegie was in some significant respects still tethered to the democratic concerns of the British liberal tradition. Regularly spending half of each year in the UK (historian A. S. Eisenstadt labels him the quintessential “Pan-Anglian”), Carnegie cultivated close ties with the “radical-liberal” wing of the Liberal Party, including an early friendship with writer-editor John Morley that led him into the inner circle of reform-oriented statesmen in the age of William Gladstone, Liberal leader and four-time prime minister from the late 1860s through the mid-1890s. ²¹ By the mid-1880s, Carnegie was helping to finance a syndicate of Liberal newspapers: pushing vociferously for Irish Home Rule and land reform, abolition of the House of Lords, and manhood suffrage. “Carnegie’s Radicalism” (according to biographer Joseph Wall) proved a frequent source of embarrassment to party leader Gladstone, with whom he maintained a generally cordial relationship. ²²

Yet, on specifically labor-related issues, Carnegie’s British commitments across the 1880s and early 1890s are unclear. Among his close associates, Morley in 1891 bitterly opposed an eight hour bill for miners, while other friends like Charles Dilke and John Burns were strong labor advocates. On the very eve of his September 1891 departure to America to deal with the expiring Homestead contract, Carnegie hedged on the question of hours legislation: internationally competitive industries like steel, he suggested, could not practically conform to restrictive regulation, yet he allowed that “we shall have more and more occasion for the State to legislate on behalf of the workers.” ²³ Perhaps most surprising was Carnegie’s £100 contribution to the campaign of Scottish socialist Keir Hardie, elected the first independent Labour MP (with de facto Liberal support) at West Ham South in 1892: was he expressing sympathies for Hardie’s social-democratic principles or merely patronizing a fellow Scot? ²⁴ Whatever the competing, sometimes contradictory pulls on his political sympathies, Carnegie surely bore witness to the contemporary tensions between an older, individualist liberal-radicalism and a New Liberalism that tied citizenship in an industrial society to state-aided worker welfare and trade union protections.

In retrospect, one aspect of Carnegie’s thought, evident in his own discourse, seems to have facilitated a confrontational stance with his American workforce. If he was a spread-eagled American patriot, Carnegie was also an Anglo American cultural chauvinist. Thus, even as he idealistically allowed for immigrants from other stock to remake themselves in the American setting, he betrayed no doubt as to which bloodline made up the “noble strain” (how odd a phrase for a radical anti-monarchist) of cultural inheritance. His sufferance of an obstreperous unionized workforce—particularly one heavy with unreconstructed ethnic outsiders—was noticeably limited. At his Edgar Thomson works in 1891, he readily assented to both Frick and Schwab’s denigration of workers’ recalcitrance as “nothing more than a drunken Hungarian spree” and anticipation of “another attack by the Huns tonight.” ²⁵ As lesser citizens, expressions from the vast ranks of unskilled, immigrant labor might be more easily dismissed. As Carnegie asserted on his way to Homestead in 1891, they “lack the necessary qualities: educational, physical, and moral. The common laborer is a common labourer because he is common.” ²⁶

In any event, Carnegie’s reckoning with the carnage and disfavor of the Homestead event proved an uneasy one. He was pilloried on both sides of the Atlantic by erstwhile allies. His home-country Edinburgh Dispatch sneered that “neither our capitalists nor our labourers have any inclination to imitate the methods which prevail in the land of “Triumphant Democracy,’ ” while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch judged that “America can well spare Mr. Carnegie. Ten thousand Carnegie Public Libraries would not compensate the country for the direct evils resulting from the Homestead lockout.” ²⁷ Depressed and secluded in the immediate aftermath of the violence, Carnegie returned to Homestead in January 1893, where he attempted publicly to bury the lockout and its aftermath as a kind of “horrid dream.” While rhetorically still supporting Frick’s moves, he loudly whispered at least a retrospective dissent from the decision to send in the strikebreakers, an event he glossed in a private message to Morley as “that Homestead Blunder.” ²⁸ Growing tensions dating from the strike between Frick and Carnegie would lead the former to resign his chairmanship in 1899, with Charles Schwab stepping into the breach. ²⁹ Echoing Carnegie’s own post-strike whisperings, Schwab, forty years later, would similarly regret his role in the Pinkerton affair, while offering a hypothetical tactical alternative:

At Homestead, had I been running affairs, I would have called the men in and told it was impossible to meet their terms. I would have told them we would simply close down until the justice of our position had been demonstrated—even if we had to close down for ever. But I would have told them that nobody else would be given their jobs… . There is nothing a worker resents more than to see some man taking his job. A factory can be closed down, its chimneys smokeless, waiting for the worker to come back to his job, and all will be peaceful. But the moment workers are imported, and the striker sees his own place usurped, there is bound to be trouble. ³⁰

Though there was never a direct mea culpa from Carnegie, we nevertheless witness some post-Homestead alterations in his thought and behavior. On the labor front, while taking advantage of lowered wage scales consequent to the decimation of the Amalgamated, he effectively cut workers’ living costs, with lowered rents at company housing and new low-interest mortgage loans as well as cut rates on coal and gas supplies. ³¹ In addition, Carnegie made much of what he considered a personal reconciliation with Homestead Strike martyr John McLuckie. When family friend and art historian, John C. Van Dyke, accidentally stumbled on an indigent McLuckie in Mexico’s Baja California in 1900, Carnegie, acting anonymously through Van Dyke, offered whatever money he needed “to put him on his feet again.” McLuckie declined the offer, insisting that he would make it on his own, and within months, Van Dyke found him again, now securely employed at the Sonora Railway and happily remarried to a Mexican woman. When Van Dyke then told McLuckie that the previous monetary offer had come from Carnegie, McLuckie reportedly replied, “Well, that was damned white of Andy, wasn’t it?” The compliment so moved Carnegie that in a memoir penned in 1906, he gushed that he “knew McLuckie well as a good fellow” and that he “would rather risk that verdict of McLuckie’s as a passport to Paradise than all the theological dogmas invented by man.” ³²

Aside from guilt offerings, however, perhaps the nearest hint of a change of heart towards trade unionism lay in Carnegie’s post-millennium connection to the AFL-friendly National Civic Federation (NCF): in 1908, Carnegie was not only its biggest financial backer but also contributed specifically to the defense of AFL president Samuel Gompers from contempt of court charges in the pivotal Buck’s Stove and Range case. ³³

Meanwhile, Carnegie increasingly turned his public advocacy to international affairs. Whereas he had happily supported a U.S. naval buildup (which also happened to rely on armored plate from his mills) and also joined the rush to “free Cuba” in 1898, Carnegie soon after refurbished his liberal, anti-imperialist principles in adamant opposition to the Philippines campaign. Opposing “distant possessions” (except where a colony could be expected to “produce Americans” as in Hawaii), Carnegie asked defiantly, “Are we to exchange Triumphant Democracy for Triumphant Despotism?” ³⁴ (Secretary of State Hay countered by pointing out the contradiction of Carnegie’s anti-interventionist stance regarding Filipinos and his treatment of striking workers at Homestead.) For a time Carnegie’s anti-imperialism extended even to possible political collaboration with the Republican’s archenemy William Jennings Bryan. Though never consummated as a political alliance, Carnegie later supported Secretary of State Bryan’s earnest efforts (in the Wilson Administration) at arranging international arbitration treaties. His last commitment, what he called his greatest, was the establishment of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910. As in his early simple faith in American democracy and free enterprise, Carnegie convinced himself that a series of international treaties and peace conferences were truly delivering world peace under international law by 1914. True to form, he died in 1919 still possessed of great hopes for the League of Nations. ³⁵

Never a deep thinker but rather an impressive doer, Carnegie was a man caught between different worlds of time and place. Living effectively as a bi-national, he regularly projected the idealism and worldly success that he attached to his American experience back onto the forms of mid-nineteenth-century British radical democracy. For decades he could thus remain a radical-liberal in Britain while adopting conservative Republican loyalties in the United States. Yet, the times caught up with him at both ends. By the 1890s British liberals, pushed by the rise of a politicized labor movement, were coming to grips with the consequences of the manhood suffrage principle that stood at the root of Carnegie’s own Chartist-inspired political faith. For all his forward-looking projections, Carnegie himself could not quite make the move of many of his British contemporaries towards a New Liberalism for the industrial age. Rather, with his simple faith in democracy-equals-opportunity-for-all shattered by labor conflict, he turned to the bromides of international peace and reconciliation as an alternate site of idealization. In Carnegie’s case, however, the democratic ideal effectively stopped at the factory gate.

Even as many contemporaries (not to mention latter-day historians) on both sides of the Atlantic criticized and second-guessed Carnegie for his actions in 1892, there has been decidedly less second-guessing of organized labor’s decision-making there—and for good reason. Basically, both contemporaries and historians see little that the AAISW and its allies could have done to avert the disaster that befell it once Carnegie and his minions determined to operate non-union. Aside from the strategic opening to a less-skilled workforce enhanced by the shift to open-hearth steelmaking, Carnegie could play two decisive political cards in the Homestead showdown. Each of them, moreover, would figure repeatedly in defining a “weak-labor” American exceptionalist path for the next forty years.

The first was the employer’s ability to summon police power to put down a workers’ uprising and proceed, behind the security curtain, to restart production with a non-union workforce including a corps of strikebreakers imported from outside the local community. The sway of Carnegie and Frick over Democratic governor Robert Pattison and county Republican boss Christopher Magee proved critical in the governor’s decision to dispatch 8,500 National Guard troops to Homestead, thereby displacing effective control over events heretofore exercised by Burgess McLuckie and a disciplined strike Advisory Committee headed by steelworker Hugh O’Donnell. As O’Donnell immediately acknowledged following the governor’s decision, “We can’t fight the state of Pennsylvania, and even if we could, we cannot fight the United States government.” ³⁶ Once the militia, bivouacked on company property and prepared to reopen the works at the company’s bidding, intervened, the confrontation was over.

It is worth noting that unlike many other American industrial disputes, Homestead was not a case of a fatally divided or poorly led workforce. Though hierarchies of skill, ethnicity (especially Old Immigrant versus East European), and race (African Americans in significant numbers first arrived at Homestead only in the aftermath of the 1892 strike) certainly existed within both the union and local community, a remarkable cross-ethnic (and cross-gender) solidarity had held up throughout the siege. Yet, everything changed with the arrival of the militia. Chicago’s Arbeiter-Zeitung compared the situation unfavorably to Bismarck’s threatened use of force against the Ruhr miners. As a self-identified “Homesteader” rhetorically asked in its German-language pages, “What is the difference between the state’s soldiers and the Pinkertons?” ³⁷

The second (and often concurrent) resort of employers for help from the state was to the courts. In this case, Carnegie Steel’s chief counsel, Philander C. Knox, who would later serve the federal government as attorney general and secretary of state, proved a zealous litigant. As historian Paul Krause summarizes, “many of the Homestead workers, unable to raise sufficient funds for bail, were incarcerated for extended periods, and a number of those who had helped lead the sympathy strike at Duquesne also received prison sentences.” In a more controversial move, Knox collaborated with Chief Justice Edward Paxson of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to charge thirty-three members of the Advisory Committee with no less than a charge of treason, based on a Civil War-era statute aimed at discouraging those who would attack the state. Though the treason indictments were ultimately withdrawn, the union’s resources and a good bit of its public legitimacy had been shattered by the legal onslaught. ³⁸

The degree to which the “political” landscape mattered at Homestead (and other big industrial centers) in the Long Gilded Age is perhaps best suggested by the outcomes once that landscape changed in the 1930s. The political maturation of the steel region’s immigrant working-class utterly changed the odds. When the CIO Steel Workers Organizing Committee opened its campaign in July 1936, the state police escorted their chief, lieutenant governor and UMWA secretary-treasurer Thomas Kennedy, into Homestead to be the main speaker, and “filtered through the crowd as insurance against interference by company-dominated municipal police.” ³⁹ Before long, mighty U.S. Steel (heir to the Carnegie empire) would come to terms with the union. This was the New Deal alliance between the Democratic Party and organized labor in action.

Given what we know now about the circumstances of the 1890s, could any acts on the workers’ part have turned the tide at Homestead in a more favorable direction? It is unlikely. At a funeral service for one victim of the July 6 battle with the Pinkertons, local Methodist minister J. J. McIlyar insisted that “arbitration” might have resolved the dispute, but instead violence was “brought about by one man [Frick], who is less respected by the laboring people than any other employer in the country.” ⁴⁰ The one pressure point that is perhaps more visible in retrospect than to contemporaries was the ambivalence of Carnegie himself. He visibly suffered, though more in Britain than in the United States, for the loss of reputation among liberal-radical circles that had proved an important point of his political identity. Had Homestead workers (and/or other American labor leaders) at the time appealed directly to the likes of Keir Hardie or John Burns—or even William Gladstone—to intervene with their friend Carnegie, might they have bought time for a process of conciliation to which Rev. McIlyar appealed?

To posit international solidarity action on the part of a grassroots movement in the 1890s, of course, risks conviction for historical anachronism. It is true that across the industrial lands of Euro-America, one looks hard for examples that Homestead or other steelworkers could have been expected to copy with any positive effect. Decades earlier, it is true, the abolitionist movement had operated across borders in safekeeping runaway slaves, but the lesson there for the labor movement would have involved a major imaginative leap. ⁴¹ If one looked beyond landed to maritime occupations, however, there was indeed a serious move afoot to harness the power of workers operating across national boundaries. Out of necessity (due to the recruitment of their workmates across national boundaries), seafarer and dockworker unions, who formed the core of the British “New Unionist” upsurge of the late 1880s and 1890s, were experimenting with transnational actions: as early as 1896 they would create a pan-European organization and by 1911 carry off a partially successful trans-Atlantic strike. ⁴² Whether workers outside the incipient seafarer-dockworker alliance took notice of such pioneering attempts at labor internationalism is an un-researched question. One thing seems certain. Left to their own resources, the strikers’ fate—without an apparent way to turn “Homestead” into a national or even international issue—was sealed.

Next to Carnegie, perhaps no industrialist is more associated with the combustibility of the Gilded Age than George Pullman. Like Carnegie’s Homestead, Pullman’s giant sleeping-car factory rose from bare farmland almost overnight. From 1881 to 1884 the town of Pullman grew from a population of 4 to 8,513. ⁴³ Unlike Carnegie’s steel plants and almost every other American industrial setting, however, the rise of Pullman town was also stamped with a vision of company-planned social order and harmony. Just as famously, that “paternal” vision blew up in the Pullman strike and boycott of 1894. In a nutshell, when the company (along with the general economy) entered a profound slump in 1893 and Pullman drastically slashed wages without cutting rents of his tenants, his workers, newly organized into the fledgling American Railway Union (ARU), struck and soon secured the support of ARU president Eugene V. Debs for a nationwide boycott of trains bearing Pullman cars. When every move to uncouple sleeping cars led to the dismissal of the offending workers, the ARU called out all its members and allies on the offending railroad lines. The stage was thus set for a massive confrontation between the union and the nation’s railroad owners united under the General Managers’ Association. Alas for the workers, the railroads received immediate support in squashing the strike from the federal government, as directed by President Cleveland’s attorney general Richard Olney, himself a longtime railway attorney and director. After securing injunctions against the strikers with a pioneering (not to mention unanticipated and legally dubious) invocation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Olney, over the objections of both state and local officials, sent federal troops under General Nelson A. Miles to Chicago to restore order. Over July 6 and 7, U.S. deputy marshals and state militia (ordered into action in Illinois, California, Iowa, and Michigan as well) shot and killed an estimated 13 railroad “rioters” and wounded 57 others in the Chicago area alone. ⁴⁴ For violating previous injunctions and additionally charged with conspiracy to subvert the U.S. government, indictments leading to arrest and ultimate conviction were issued against Debs and three other ARU leaders on July 10. With further prosecutions of hundreds of other strikers, the Pullman strike—and with it the ARU—was crushed. Following guilty verdicts for contempt of court sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court in May 1895, Debs would serve six months in the county jail in Woodstock, Illinois. ⁴⁵ Not long after he emerged, Debs declared that a new struggle—this for a socialist transformation of the American state—would be needed to defend the most basic of workers’ rights. ⁴⁶

Classic “exceptionalist” themes echo throughout the Pullman narrative. The obdurate capitalist owner, the fiercely anti-labor federal government backed both by a pliant judiciary and armed might, and a heroic but doomed effort of organized workers to swim against the tides of constituted authority and middle-class opinion. Yet, how set and foreordained were the options and outcomes?