Homestead : $b A complete history of the struggle of July, 1892, between the Carnegie-Steel Company, Limited, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers — John Shaqi
Homestead : $b A complete history of the struggle of July, 1892, between the Carnegie-Steel Company, Limited, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel WorkersBurgoyne, Arthur Gordon
History
Homestead : $b A complete history of the struggle of July, 1892, between the Carnegie-Steel Company, Limited, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers
Burgoyne, Arthur Gordon
Homestead Strike, Homestead, Pa., 1892
Mr. Frick had several serious strikes to contend with. His plan of
campaign was always the same--to crush the strikers by main force and
make no concessions. The Coal and Iron police, an organization of
watchmen maintained under a state law, the drilled and armed watchmen
of the Pinkerton detective agency, and the state militia were pressed
into service as the occasion demanded, and the shedding of blood and
sacrifice of human life resulted on more than one occasion.
Mr. Frick's character need not be analyzed at this point. It will be
illustrated clearly enough as our narrative progresses.
The Homestead mill and the Frick coke works, vast as they are,
constitute merely a fraction of the Carnegie Company's interests. In
addition to these the Company owns the Edgar Thompson furnaces and the
Edgar Thompson steel works at Bessemer, eleven miles from Pittsburgh on
the Pennsylvania railroad; the Duquesne steel works, on the same side
of the Monongahela river as the Homestead works; the Lucy Furnaces,
Pittsburgh; the Keystone Bridge Works, Pittsburgh; the Upper and Lower
Union Mills, Pittsburgh; the Beaver Falls mills at Beaver Falls, 32
miles from Pittsburgh on the P. & L. E. railroad; the Carnegie Natural
Gas Company; the Scotia ore mines in Center County, Pa.; the American
Manganese Company, and interests in several large ore companies in the
Lake Superior region. About 13,000 persons are employed in the various
concerns operated by the firm, and of these about 3,800 are engaged in
the works at Homestead.
In June 1892, Andrew Carnegie, while maintaining the controlling
financial interest in the firm, transferred the managing authority
to H. C. Frick. At that time the firm was reorganized, the separate
enterprises which had previously been conducted under the names
of Carnegie Bros. and Company, Carnegie, Phipps & Co., and other
independent titles, being merged under the control of a single
corporation known as the Carnegie Steel Company, Limited. H. C.
Frick was made chairman, the other partners being Andrew Carnegie,
Henry Phipps, Jr., George Lauder, H. M. Curry, W. L. Abbott, John
G. A. Leishman, F. T. F. Lovejoy, Otis H. Childs and sundry minor
stockholders whose interests were conferred upon them by Mr. Carnegie by
way of promotion.
The power of the firm in the iron and steel industries was now
dictatorial. On the fiat of the Carnegie Company depended almost
entirely the price of steel in the market. Rivalry was dwarfed and
competition nullified. Rarely in the industrial history of the world has
a similarly powerful monopoly been built up on no other foundation than
the combination of brains and capital, with such indirect aid as the
protective tariff system affords.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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