'Fort Frick' and the Amalgamated: The Homestead Lockout of 1892 in Historical Perspective

Abstract

On 6 july, one hundred years to the day from the outbreak of the great Homestead Strike in 1892, I was privileged to participate in a symposium at Homestead sponsored by the United Steelworkers of America and other bodies in commemoration of that event. What I encountered during those three days was a series of images and incidents that will long remain with me, and which say much about the road we have travelled over the past century. The most searing, dramatic, image is the memory of angry, disgruntled steelworkers at the symposium. Dressed in black t-shirts which said 1892 ? The Pinkertons ? 1992 ? USWA International ? The NEW Pinkertons, they made it clear that their anger was directed not at management of the steel mills, but at their own union, and most especially at its president, Lynn Williams, and several of his colleagues. Williams and others had, according to these men, sold them out ? bargained away the jobs of rank and file steelworkers ? in order to obtain preferential treatment for themselves. The unemployed steelworkers further ob jected that the symposium merely celebrate[s] and glorif[ies] the landing of the Pinkertons! instead of dealing with the reality of suffering of unemployed steel workers of the present day. Part and parcel of that image is an even more upsetting and depressing one ? the rusting, vacant hulks of what once were the magnificent Homestead Works of Carnegie Steel and later United States Steel. The great mill was closed in 1986, the victim of the profound dismantling of America's great industrial heartland. Once the works were the very heart and soul of the milltown of Homestead. Well into