The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
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 Though the treason indictments were ultimately withdrawn, the union’s resources and a good bit of its public legitimacy had been shattered by the legal onslaught. 38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?
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