The River Ran Red: Homestead 1892. - book reviews

Monthly Labor Review, Dec, 1992 by Henry P. Guzda

The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture and Steel. By Paul Krause. Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 548 pp. $39.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.

The River Ran Red: Homestead 1892. David Demarest, general editor. Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. 232 pp. $39.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.

These two books chronicle transformations in an industry whose product changed economic, social, and political policy on a global scale. But in the process, high technology machinery replaced workers, which critics argue was a deliberate scheme to wipe out the skills of unionized craftsmen, altering the societal fabric of many "smokestack" communities that depended on the industry. Finally, a major employer locked out workers from a jobsite, precipitating a violent dispute.

This scenario may fit neatly into the turbulent sweep of current labor relations lore, but the event flashes back to the dawn of American industrial capitalism: The great Homestead Steel Strike of 1892.

The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics Culture and Steel by Paul Krause is the more scholarly and extensive work of two recently published books about the Homestead Strike. The author contends that this book departs from traditional analyses of the much studied 1892 dispute. His thesis focuses on participation of the common folk-- steelworkers, their wives, local politicians, and small entrepreneurs rather than resembling standard works featuring the titanic struggle between industrialists Andrew Carnegie and his lieutenant Henry Clay Frick and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. But this approach, which historians draw from the model of historiography known as the "new labor history," is far from unique. In fact, most recently published labor history publications carry subheadings with "work, culture, society, and politics" in the title. Krause acknowledges the influences of Herbert Guttman's seminal book, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (1977). Regardless, Krause's analysis of the working lives of the men and women in the greater Pittsburgh area at the turn of the century is refreshing and interesting.

In today's era of rapid economic and technological change, the events of a similar past period warrant close examination. The Homestead works of the Carnegie empire were the high-tech paragons of late 19th century America. The shift from labor intensive to machine controlled work processes with fewer employees produced considerable cost savings for the company. Andrew Carnegie, imbued with nascent notions of scientific management, wanted labor cost reductions in proportion to other cost efficient measures.

When the union refused to accept bargaining concessions, Frick launched efforts to eliminate the union, first with a lockout in 1892 by importing strike breakers. To block the strike replacements, workers, in an orderly manner, insulated the mills and community from outside access. Laboring class support from other "Mon Valley" steel towns heightened tensions. Frick arranged for Pinkerton detectives to travel the Monongahela River in barges in the early hours of July 6 to repossess company property. The ensuing battle left seven strikers and three Pinkertons dead.

A failed assassination attempt on Frick's life by anarchist Alexander Berkman, who did not play an official role in the struggle, ignited Pennsylvania officials, who were influenced heavily by leaders of the steel trust, into using the State militia to restore peace. The strike and union broken, steelworkers waited for nearly half a century before the Congress of Industrial Organizations brought equitable living and working standards to the area.

Considerable debate among scholars of the industrial process has focused on how capital has encouraged technology development to "deskill" workers, control the production process, and shatter representational trade unionism---a distinct distortion of the republican concepts of our democracy. Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (1965), David Noble, Forces of Production (1984), and Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), among others, have put forward this theory. Krause offers additional support for the proposition, arguing that steel and other metallurgical industry research, development of the Bessemer furnaces, for example, and the search for alternative fuels were tied directly to assaults on trade unionism and other worker standards of representational democracy. Not all scholars support this theory, but it is a major force in current historiography.

The ethnic mix of the work force and community also plays an important part in The Battle for Homestead. The bonds of ethnic and racial solidarity have often been a factor in union formation. The author elaborates on how Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian members of the Homestead community, often identified as "Slavs" and regarded as the vilest members of society by native white residents, molded into the working class mainstream while maintaining their ethnic identities. Although this also is not a revelation--other writers have recognized this aspect of labor research recently, such as John Bodnar (Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town, 1977)--Krause adds to the body of knowledge.