John Lepley, director of education for the United Steelworkers, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast as part of the Labor 132 series to discuss the labor history that led to where American workers stand today, and confront the gap between how industrialists like Andrew Carnegie are remembered versus what they did to the workers they employed.
Lepley began by explaining the 1892 Battle of Homestead in detail. This included Carnegie's retreat to his Scottish castle, his delegation to Henry Clay Frick, the arrival of Pinkerton detectives on the Monongahela River, the day-long battle with workers and townspeople and the Pennsylvania militia that ultimately broke the union.
Lepley connected the events to the broader pattern of state violence against workers through the late 1800s, the political conditions that produced the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre and the slow, costly process by which workers built the collective bargaining agreements that changed their daily lives. He also recommended Thomas Bell's novel Out of This Furnace as essential reading about what steelworkers’ lives were actually like.
John Lepley opened by discussing the irony of Andrew Carnegie's place in history. All across Pittsburgh, southwestern Pennsylvania and much of the country, there are Carnegie libraries — buildings funded by the fortune of a man whose public image was that of a benevolent self-made philanthropist. He believed the wealthy should give away what they had accumulated. In 1889, Carnegie wrote an essay called “The Gospel of Wealth” for the North American Review. It articulated his vision. Museums, libraries and parks were built, with his name attached to all of them. There is even a town named Carnegie, not far from where Lepley lives.
And today, the workers at the Carnegie Library System in Pittsburgh are members of the United Steelworkers.
Lepley said Carnegie's public image and his private behavior were two entirely different things. Whether Carnegie was self-delusional or a pure hypocrite, he said, the fortune that funded all of those libraries was built on the degradation of workers’ lives. Homestead is where that gap became impossible to deny, Lepley said.
Carnegie arrived in the United States from Scotland and made his fortune first in railroads and then in steel. He purchased the Homestead Mill in 1883. At that time, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had a strong presence there and a cooperative vision. Workers would contribute their knowledge of steelmaking, the company would benefit from that knowledge, and the profits would be shared in ways that benefited the community, the workers and the company together.
Carnegie and his lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick, had a different vision. The employer maintained full control, with no room for a union. In 1892, Carnegie left for his castle in Scotland and delegated the task of breaking the union to Frick. Frick built a fence with parapets — sentries walking the perimeter — around the plant gates. Workers called it Fort Frick. In early July, two boats of Pinkerton detectives were brought up the Monongahela River.
In reality, Lepley believes the “detectives” were mostly poor men recruited for a job they likely did not fully understand. The tragedy of Homestead, he said, is that the workers had low wages, knowledge and their union, while the Pinkertons had nothing. The people with a little and the people with nothing were set against each other by a man who had everything, Lepley said.
When townspeople saw the boats landing, they converged on the riverbank. A day-long battle followed. Nobody knows who fired the first shot, but by the end of the day, the Pinkertons had raised the white flag. Workers made them run the gauntlet as they were marched to the Homestead Opera House, where they were held. The workers had won the battle.
Then Frick enlisted the Pennsylvania militia. The workers greeted the soldiers with banners and flags, expecting protection. The militia was there to break the union. The workers lost the war.
The Battle of Homestead illustrated what was happening to American workers in the decades after the Civil War. The use of state power against organized workers was the norm. In 1877, a nationwide railroad strike was broken by federal troops and militia in Martinsburg, Pittsburgh and Chicago. Workers who tried to organize in the early 1800s were charged with criminal conspiracy against trade. Throughout the 19th century, unions had a dubious legal standing at best, Lepley said. The period from the Civil War through the 1930s is a galling chapter in labor history that most Americans have never fully reckoned with. In part, because the history books were more interested in the Carnegie libraries than in what happened at Homestead.
Leple made a direct connection between Homestead and Labor Day. President Grover Cleveland signed the legislation creating Labor Day as a national holiday in 1894, two years after Homestead, partly to curry favor with workers after the federal government had just used the army against striking Pullman railroad workers. The holiday itself was born of violence and damage control.
The Great Depression changed the political conditions enough that the National Labor Relations Act became law in 1935. But Lepley said workers had already been organizing because they had no choice. The mine workers did not wait for legal protection. They organized because going underground was a matter of life or death. The government did not lead. It caught up, he said.
After the NLRA passed, the battle was not over, Lepley said. US Steel signed an agreement with what would become the United Steelworkers in 1936. But the companies known as Little Steel — Bethlehem, Jones and Laughlin and Republic — refused. They had prepared for war. There is documentation of weapons, munitions and tear gas stockpiled to use against their own workers.
On Memorial Day 1937 in Chicago, police armed and equipped by Republic Steel killed 10 striking workers. The 1937 Memorial Day Massacre is one of the most significant and least-known events in American labor history, Lepley said. The workers eventually prevailed, but they paid a high cost.
Lepley cited Jack Metzger of Johnstown, Pa., who wrote about his father's experiences working for Bethlehem Steel before and after the union. His father described his life in two halves: before the union and after the union. It included dozens of small changes to his day-to-day life, both at work and at home. It included the ability to be present for his family, to live a life that was just a little better, and, over time, it became pretty good.
Before the union Battle at Homestead, workers put in eight-hour shifts. After the union was broken in 1892, shifts went to 12 hours. The industry eventually introduced what was called the long turn — a rotating shift system in which workers would work 24 consecutive hours every two weeks, with schedules changing. Lepley asked what happens to a human body and mind after working that long in a hazardous environment? The answer, he said, was injury and death.
For readers who want to understand what steelworker life was actually like in that era, Lepley recommended “Out of This Furnace” by Thomas Bell, a novel written in the 1930s from inside a steelworker family. It documents the working conditions and includes the story of a worker killed in a blast furnace. The family received $75 and a burial. Workers were not even numbers; they were warm bodies, Lepley said. And when Ellis Island opened in 1892 — the same year as Homestead — Carnegie and his successors had a new stream of desperate immigrants to exploit.
More information on the United Steelworkers is available at usw.org.
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