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After reading the excerpts from Homestead, “Fort Frick” or the Siege of Homestead, and viewing “Andrew Carnegie Plays a Double Role,” compose a thoughtful post using the questions below. After making the initial post, students should make multiple substantial posts to students in significant ways.
- Who is to blame for the violence at the Homestead Strike of 1892? Provide a quote to support your answer.
- Could the violence between the Pinkertons and the mill workers been avoided? If so how? If not, why?
- Based off all the information provided, how would you view Andrew Carnegie in 1893? What drew you to this conclusion?
- Provide a current example of a public figure who has done some type of amazing work but also did something bad. What is the general public’s viewpoint of this public figure?
READING FOR ASSIGNMENT BELOW :
Excerpts from Homestead: Chapter 4
by Arthur Bourgoyne
The agency was founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a young Scotchman, who had been
brought into public notice at Elgin, Ill., by his success in ferreting out a counterfeiter. Allan
Pinkerton’s fame as a detective became national. He organized a war secret service, was
trusted by Lincoln, whose life he once saved; by Grant and other national leaders in war times,
and aroused continual interest by his strokes of skill and daring. The enterprise from which
sprang the Pinkerton “standing army” of to-day was set on foot in a shabby little office in La
Salle Street, Chicago, and there the headquarters of the agency still remain.
Pinkerton detectives came into great request and were soon engaged in the unraveling of
crimes and the hunting down of criminals all over the continent. Allan Pinkerton meanwhile
discerned a fresh source of profit and turned it to account by hiring out his men as watchmen
for banks and great commercial houses. The “Pinkerton Preventive Watch,” composed of
trained men, uniformed and armed, and acting independently of the municipal police, was
established.
The emblem adopted by the agency was a suggestive one. It consisted of an eye and the motto,
“We never sleep.”
As old age came on Allan Pinkerton and his business kept growing, he turned over the work of
supervision to his sons, William A. and Robert A. Robert was placed in charge of a branch
bureau in New York and William remained in Chicago. Agencies with regular forces of men were
established in Philadelphia, Boston, St. Paul, Kansas City and Denver. By communication with
these centres, the chiefs could control, at a few days’ notice, a force of 2,000 drilled men, and
this could be expanded by drawing on the reserves registered on the books of the agency for
service on demand, to 30,000, if necessary,more men than are enrolled in the standing army
of the United States.
When a large number of recruits is needed, the Pinkertons usually advertise in the newspapers
asking for able-bodied men of courage, but without stating for whose service. In New York,
prospective recruits are brought to a building on lower Broadway where the44 Pinkertons have
an armory, stocked with Winchester rifles, revolvers, policemen’s clubs and uniforms. After the
number of men needed is secured, the addresses of the eligible applicants for whom there are
no places are taken and they are notified to hold themselves in readiness for a future call. Men
who have served in the army or as policemen receive the preference.
Pinkerton detectives have no real authority to make arrests. They are rarely sworn in as special
constables or as deputy sheriffs and the uniform which they wear is merely for show.
Of late years they have been employed very frequently to protect the property of great
manufacturing corporations during strikes or lock-outs. This is, without exception, the most
trying and perilous service which they have to undergo. The pay is good, however, the rate
agreed upon for duty at Homestead, for example, being $5 a day for each man.
In the great strike on the New York Central railroad, which cost the Vanderbilt corporation
$2,000,000, the item for Pinkerton service was about $15,000. The guards were posted at
danger points all along the line. Conflicts with the strikers were frequent, and, in many cases,
the guards used their rifles with deadly effect. On August 17, 1890, they killed five persons, one
a woman. So freely were the Pinkerton rifles brought into play during this trouble that the
people of New York state became thoroughly aroused and forced the legislature to pass an anti-
Pinkerton bill.
The agency was responsible for the killing of a boy during a longshoremen’s strike in Jersey and
at Chicago during the Lake Shore railroad strike a man named Bagley fell a victim to Pinkerton
lead. The guard who shot Bagley was spirited away and never brought to justice.
Pinkerton guards have done duty in the miners’ strikes in the Hocking Valley, at the H. C. Frick
Company’s mines in the Connellsville region and at Braidwood, Ill., as well as in all the great
railroad strikes since 1877.
In recent years, the conversion of the guards into an irresponsible military organization, with
self-constituted authority to overawe striking workmen has provoked a feeling of intense
hatred on the part of organized labor towards these soldier-policemen. Attempts to abolish the
Pinkerton system by legislation have succeeded in only a few states, New York and New Jersey
among the number, for the reason that the corporations which find use for armed mercenaries
have sufficient wealth and influence to control legislative action.
Congressman Thomas Watson, of Alabama, a representative of the Farmers’ Alliance,
introduced a bill in Congress making it illegal for private persons to maintain a “standing army”
to usurp the police powers of the states, and made a strong plea for its passage, but the
measure failed. The great industrial corporations have a hold upon the federal legislature too
strong to be broken by the insistence of common people.
As has already been told, the men of Homestead entertained a profound abhorrence of the
Pinkertons and were resolved to push resistance to any extreme rather than permit themselves
to be whipped into submission by armed hirelings. They had no knowledge of Mr. Frick’s
dealings with the agency, although their familiarity46 with the Frick policy in the coke regions,
coupled with the equipment of the mill property for occupation by a garrison excited a well-
defined suspicion of what was coming.
Mr. Frick gave the final order for a supply of guards in a letter written to Robert A. Pinkerton, of
New York, on June 25, the day after his meeting with the wage committee from the Amalgamated convention. The order was given in as matter-of-fact a manner as if the Carnegie
chairman were bespeaking a supply of coke or pig-iron.
“We will want 300 guards,” he wrote, “for service at our Homestead mills as a measure of
precaution against interference with our plan to start the operation of the works again on July
6, 1892.”
“These guards,” Mr. Frick went on to direct, “should be assembled at Ashtabula, O., not later
than the morning of July 5, when they may be taken by train to McKees Rocks, or some other
point on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh, where they can be transferred to boats and landed
within the enclosures of our premises at Homestead. We think absolute secresy essential in the
movement of these men, so that no demonstration can be made while they are en route.”
As Mr. Frick acknowledged in his letter the receipt of “your favor of the 22d,” it was evident
that the negotiations with the Pinkerton agency had been pending for some time.
Immediately after having despatched his order for a Pinkerton battalion, Mr. Frick sent for
Captain Rodgers, of the towboat Little Bill, and directed him to fit up two barges with sleeping
accommodations and47 provisions for 300 men, who were to be taken on board at some point
not then determined, brought to the works at Homestead, and subsequently lodged and
boarded on the barges.
He also notified the sheriff of Allegheny county, William H. McCleary, through Messrs. Knox &
Reed, attorneys for the Carnegie Company, that there would be a strike at Homestead and that
300 Pinkerton watchmen had been engaged, and requested the sheriff to deputize the entire
force; that is to say, to appoint them police agents of the county. The sheriff maintained
afterwards that, on the advice of his attorney, he had declined to deputize the Pinkerton men
until they should be installed in the mill and had reserved the right to act at his discretion when
that time came. Mr. Frick, on the other hand, declared on the witness stand that the sheriff
consented to deputize the men and assigned his chief deputy to swear them in.
The train was now laid; the fuse was lit, and all that remained to be done in the Carnegie camp
was to wait for the explosion.
To disarm suspicion on the other side, however, Mr. Frick, as the crisis approached, gave out
information leading the public in general and the locked-out men in particular to believe that
he meant to rely on the ordinary processes of law to protect him in the non-unionizing of his
works. On the evening of July 4, after a conference with the other chief officers of the firm, he
furnished a statement to the newspapers alleging that there was no trouble to be feared, that
the men were weakening, a large number of them being anxious to get back to work, and that
the plant would be48 placed in the hands of the county, the sheriff being requested to furnish
enough deputies to ensure adequate protection.
With all his firmness, the doughty chairman of the Carnegie Company dared not make a clean
breast of his program. The way for the coup de grace had to be cleared by strategy and dissimulation.
The locked-out men celebrated Independence Day with due patriotic fervor. The force of
guards was increased from 350 to 1,000, the picket system being expanded so as to form an
outline five miles in extent, covering both sides of the river.
In the afternoon an alarm was sent in to headquarters. Two men had been seen landing from a
boat near the works and were taken for spies. Quick as a flash a thousand men rushed to the
river bank and inclosed within a semi-circle of stalwart forms the place where the suspects had
landed. It proved that the latter were merely honest citizens of the town returning from a picnic
across the river, but the incident showed how effectually the men kept themselves on the qui
vive, precluding the entry of an enemy at any point.
When Sheriff McCleary reached his office in the Allegheny County court-house, on the morning
of July 5, he found awaiting him a formal application from the Carnegie Company for the
services of one hundred deputies at Homestead. The Sheriff was discomfited by the demand.
His predecessor in office, Dr. McCandless, had been forced to engage in a long and irksome
legal battle in order to recover from the Carnegie Company the money due for the service of
deputies at Homestead in 1889, and the prospect of a fresh dispute over the pay of special
officers was not inviting. So Mr. McCleary, who was gifted by nature with a strong tendency to
evasiveness, returned an evasive answer, and conceived the idea of going to Homestead with
his own office force of twelve men and making some sort of dignified showing pending the
arrival of that army of Pinkertons, which he already knew to be moving on the devoted town.
Source: Bourgoyne, Arthur. Homestead: A Complete History of the Struggle of July, 1892,
between the Carnegie Steel Company, Limited, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and
Steel Workers. Chapter 4. Pittsburgh, PA. 189.
Excerpts from “Fort Frick” or the Siege of Homestead: Chapter 4
by Myron Stowell
Then came a conference between the leaders on the shore and a stout, middle-aged man on
the boat, who seemed to be a leader. Said the millworker, who had stepped down to the
water’s edge:
“On behalf of 5,000 men I beg of you to leave here at once. I don’t know who you are nor from
whence you came, but I do know that you have no business here, and if you remain there will
be more bloodshed. We, the workers in these mills, are peaceably inclined. We have not
damaged any property and we do not intend to. If you will send a committee with us we will
take them through the works, carefully explain to them all the details of this trouble, and
promise them a safe return to their boats. But in the name of God and humanity don’t attempt
to land! Don’t attempt to enter these works by force!”
The leader on the boat, resting his rifle across his left arm, stepped to the front, and, in a voice
that could be heard by those on the bank, said:
” Men, we are Pinkerton detectives. We were sent here to take possession of this property and
to guard it for the company. We don’t wish to shed blood, but we are determined to go up
there and shall do so. If you men don’t withdraw, we will mow every one of you down and
enter in spite of you. You had better disperse, for land we will!”
A deathly silence followed this speech, and then the leader of the millworkers spoke again.
Every man within the sound of his voice listened with breathless attention. He said:
I have no more to say. What you do here is at the risk of many lives. Before you enter those
mills you will trample over the dead bodies of 3,000 honest workingmen.”
The next two hours were passed in ominous silence. The leader of the Pinkertons at 6 o’clock
stepped out and commanded the strikers to disperse, as at 7 o’clock he would take his men into
the mills against all obstacles. But before that hour arrived the mill workers had erected
substantial breastworks of structural steel, behind which they crouched with loaded guns.
At 7:45 o’clock the Pinkertons stepped out on the forward deck preparatory to landing. The
leader swinging an oar was the first to emerge, but before he or the men behind him could
make a jump, a rattling volley from the mill yard caused them to retreat hastily, and four men
dropped in their tracks. The Pinkertons returned the fire from the port-holes and from the ends
of the boat, wounding a number of workers who were in exposed positions. The firing from the
boat was kept up thereafter at intervals until 10 o’clock.
At 9 o’clock the fusil[l]ade became strong and heavy. The millworkers had secured a small
cannon and planted it on the hillside, concealed by shrubbery on the opposite side of the river,
from which position they were firing at the boat. The men behind the steel barricade and a
number of sharpshooters who had been distributed along the river front, at the same time were doing lively work. The Little Bill, with her dead and injured Pinkertons, had withdrawn
early in the second skirmish to Port Perry, leaving the barges moored, but just when the
exchange of shots was the heaviest, she returned and steamed in for the barges. A derisive yell
from the 150 men behind the barricade and the 2,000 unarmed who were back in the mill on
the trestles and other points out of range, greeted the little steamer. A hot volley from the
sharpshooters and the millworkers raked the steamer fore and aft as she turned her broad- side
toward the shore.
A dozen bullets struck the pilot house, and the occupant thereof dropped so suddenly that it
was supposed he had met death, while the crowd of workers broke into cheers. Men on the
boat returned the fire, but instead of landing, the Little Bill floated on down past the works,
running the fiercest blockade that has been witnessed on this continent since the days of 1865.
There was a perfect shower of lead from the boat, but it was returned with an energy to which
her perforated sides attested for weeks, and this attack was kept up as long as the craft was in
range.
During this fusil[l]ade the cannon across the river was busily engaged. Scrap iron, nails and slugs
were being fired. Suddenly Silas Wain, sitting on a pile of beams in the mill yard out of range of
the guns of the boats, was seen to keel over. A dozen men ran to him. A piece of scrap from the
cannon had struck him in the neck, severing the jugular vein and almost tearing off his head. He
was instantly killed.
This stopped the cannonading from the north side of the river, and by a code of signals known
to themselves, the workers signaled and the cannon was removed to the mill. It was planted
behind a big armor plate, and… [Content truncated to 3000 words]