The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
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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?”