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
40,000 idle men in the Pittsburgh district, and as the Mahoning Valley
manufacturers and workmen quickly followed suit, the entire iron
district of Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio was relieved from a
situation pregnant with disaster to employers and workmen alike. The
finishers were the only disgruntled ones, and so keenly did they resent
what they professed to regard as unjust discrimination against their
interests that a number of them seceded from the Amalgamated Association
and formed a union of their own.
At Homestead the signing of the scale by the Manufacturers' Association
was regarded as a capitulation to the power of organized labor which
must force the Carnegie Company to abandon its individual fight.
It was the belief that Mr. Frick had been chosen to bear the brunt
of the general battle against the Amalgamated Association with the
understanding that, if he won, all the mills in the Pittsburgh district
would be made non-union; and the compromise agreed upon was accepted,
therefore, as meaning that the other manufacturers had lost faith in Mr.
Frick's ability to win, and that the Carnegie chairman himself could not
rationally continue his fight, now that his brethren had fallen away
from him. Subsequent events proved the baselessness of this supposition.
It was merely one of many straws at which the Homestead men grasped
eagerly in the face of the Carnegie firm's slow but sure fulfilment of
its pledge to fill the mills with non-union workmen and rely solely
thenceforward upon this class of labor.
The making of informations and counter-informations founded on the
Pinkerton affair went on uninterruptedly. Fred. Primer was the first of
the Pinkertons to be placed under arrest. He was held for court by
Alderman King on the strength of testimony showing that the first shot
on July 6 was fired from the barges. Primer, attended by the attorneys
for the Carnegie firm, was hurried before Judge Ewing, who promptly
released him on his own recognizance, stating very plainly at the same
time that whatever trouble occurred at Homestead was of the workmen's
own making and that no one else should be held responsible for the
consequences. The court also held Edward Burke in $10,000 bail on the
charge of murder preferred by Secretary Lovejoy. Burke had already
acquired some notoriety by an altercation with Sheriff McCleary on the
occasion of the Sheriff's last visit to Homestead before the arrival of
the troops.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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