650 ★ CHAPTER 17 Freedom’s Boundaries, at Home and Abroad
the hiring of new workers and to regulate the pace of work. To Carnegie and
Henry Clay Frick, his partner and chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, the
union’s power increasingly seemed an intolerable infringement on manage-
ment’s rights. In 1892, they decided to operate the plant on a nonunion basis.
Frick surrounded the factory with a fence topped by barbed wire, constructed
barracks to house strikebreakers, and fired the entire workforce. Henceforth,
only workers who agreed not to join the union could work at Homestead. In
response, the workers, including the unskilled laborers not included in the
Amalgamated Association, blockaded the steelworks and mobilized support
from the local community. The battle memorialized in song took place on
July 6, 1892, when armed strikers confronted 300 private policemen from the
Pinkerton Detective Agency. Seven workers and three Pinkerton agents were
killed, and the Pinkertons were forced to retreat. Four days later, the governor
of Pennsylvania dispatched 8,000 militiamen to open the complex on manage-
ment’s terms. The strikers held out until November, but the union’s defeat was
now inevitable. In the end, the Amalgamated Association was destroyed.
The Carnegie corporation’s tactics and the workers’ solidarity won the strik-
ers widespread national sympathy. “Ten thousand Carnegie libraries,” declared
the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, “would not compensate the country for the evils
resulting from Homestead.” The strike became an international cause célèbre
as well. British newspapers pointed out that their country restricted the use
of private police forces far more severely than the United States. Britons, they
claimed, understood economic liberty better than Americans.
Homestead demonstrated that neither a powerful union nor public opin-
ion could influence the conduct of the largest corporations. The writer Hamlin
Garland, who visited Homestead two years after the strike, found the workforce
sullen and bitter. He described a town “as squalid and unlovely as could be
imagined,” with dingy houses over which hung dense clouds of black smoke. It
was “American,” he wrote, “only in the sense in which [it] represents the Amer-
ican idea of business.”
In fact, two American ideas of freedom collided at Homestead— the employ-
ers’ definition, based on the idea that property rights, unrestrained by union
rules or public regulation, sustained the public good, and the workers’ con-
ception, which stressed economic security and independence from what they
considered the “tyranny” of employers. The strife at Homestead also reflected
broader battles over American freedom during the 1890s. Like the Homestead
workers, many Americans came to believe that they were being denied eco-
nomic independence and democratic self- government, long central to the pop-
ular understanding of freedom.
During the 1890s, millions of farmers joined the Populist movement in
an attempt to reverse their declining economic prospects and to rescue the