Battle of Homestead helped labor movement

The mills have been closed since 1986, replaced by a sea of big box retail development and parking lots known as the Waterfront.

Save for a row of smoke stacks and the Homestead Works pumphouse, the site of one of the most notable events in the region's history and the history of the American labor movement looks nothing like it did in 1892.

"Beyond anything else, (the Battle of Homestead) was a watershed event in American labor history," said Auggie Carlino, executive director of the Steel Industry Heritage Corp. "It changed the scope of the working relationship between skilled labor and non-skilled labor. And if you look at it from the standpoint of the explosion of industry, it was the one event that led to Andrew Carnegie's ability to make the mills more technologically advanced."

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the Battle of Homestead.

The Battle of Homestead Foundation will mark the anniversary at 1:30 at the Homestead Pumphouse, one of the few remaining structures of the Homestead Works and the place where the battle started. Lynn Williams, former international president of the United Steelworkers of America, will be on hand and is expected to make comments comparing globalization and its effects on labor today to the industrialization that led to the Homestead Battle in 1892.

Ten men were killed in the battle between striking steel workers and 300 armed Pinkerton guards who had been hired as strikebreakers. But more than the black mark the daylong battle left on the region's steelmaking heritage, it allowed Andrew Carnegie to effectively break the unions at his Homestead Works and ushered a wave of immigration into the region that helped define Pittsburgh's character.

"I think one of the great ironies is that organized labor eventually found its strength in the masses of people who came here after that event," Carlino said. "It also allowed Carnegie to install the technology without union opposition that led from mills that may have had 2,000 or 3,000 people working there in the 1880s to the mills we saw in the 1920s where 20,000 or 25,000 people were working."

George DeBolt's life would be radically different today without the battle.

His grandfather, George S.T. DeBolt, was one of 30 union leaders charged with murder and treason as a result of the battle. While two of the men were acquitted and charges were dropped against the remaining 28, all 30 found themselves blacklisted.

While most left Homestead, DeBolt accepted a job cleaning stables. It was there that he got the idea to start a company that would transport hay around Homestead. That company, DeBolt Transit Co., became one of the region's better-known bus tour companies and is one of the oldest privately owned transportation companies in the country.

"I never knew him, but he was very reluctant to talk about it. All my father ever said was that my grandfather was once in jail for working at the mill," said DeBolt, who now heads the third-generation company. "My father was taught to love Homestead because of it, and I've learned to love this town as well."

So much so that DeBolt has become a Homestead history buff. He fires off facts and figures about the battle and has tracked down the handwritten order at the Allegheny County Jail charging his grandfather with murder and treason.

A three-year contract with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had expired on June 30, 1892. Andrew Carnegie, who would eventually reap $400 million and become the richest man in the world when the mill was transferred to the new U.S. Steel in 1902, had gone to his estate in Scotland and had left Henry Clay Frick with instructions to break the union.

It was an action that would be considered hypocritical. Previously, Carnegie had been seen as supportive of organized labor and in 1886 he wrote, "To expect that one dependent upon his daily wages for the necessities of life will stand by peacefully and see a new man employed in his stead is to expect too much."

Frick built a three-mile long, 12-foot high wall around the mill, complete with barb wire and rifle slots, prompting workers to call it "Fort Frick." On the morning of July 6, he attempted to bring in 300 armed men from the Pinkerton Detective Agency by barge to occupy and restart the mill.

No one knows who fired the first shot shortly after 4 a.m. But 13 hours later, seven steel workers and three Pinkertons had been killed. Hundreds more were injured.

One dated history text reported that the Pinkertons were "allowed to return to Pittsburgh" after they surrendered. In reality, DeBolt said, they were forced to walk a gauntlet from the mill to the train station.

"The strikers, their wives, their daughters, their mothers-in-law — they all lined up and beat them with anything they had. They hit them with rolling pins, sticks, pitch forks — you name it," DeBolt said. "It was a very bloody and an awful, awful struggle."

The strikers may have won the battle, but they lost the war, said Russ Gibbons, a former member of United Steelworkers and a board member of the non-profit Battle of Homestead Foundation.

"Frick effectively broke the union," Gibbons said. "The unions were destroyed, and they didn't come back until 1936."

Still, Carlino sees that as ultimately strengthening the unions. He said the new technology allowed Carnegie to build the massive mills that became synonymous with Pittsburgh, and the cheap, immigrant labor that came to replace organized labor would become the unions' rank-and-file in the coming decades.

Gibbons described the Pinkertons as the equivalent of "modern-day rent-a-cops." Frick eventually cabled Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Emory Pattison, who sent in state militia troops. Homestead would be occupied for the next four months.

"About 40 of them were professional Pinkertons — they were trained marksman and a lot of them had experience from the Civil War," DeBolt said. "But most of the strikebreakers were just kids from the Midwest who didn't really know what they were getting into."

The fallout of the battle was considerable. Within seven years, 26 states passed laws against hiring outside guards during labor disputes. Frick was branded as "cold-hearted, bloodthirsty and mercenary." Newspaper editorial pages condemned Carnegie as a "coward."

Carnegie never spoke publicly about the battle, but years later he would say, "No pangs remain of any wound received in my business career save that of Homestead."