Pittsburgh loves it’s fireworks. We have them for pretty much no reason. Even the Pirates, that overpaid little league team, break out the top-shelf fireworks a few times a month. So it’s heartening that the people of the region still get excited for the symbolic explosions, even if it’s on the anniversary of the half-revolution of 1776, especially since there were several notable attempts to finish the job in the region.
The Battle of Homestead was one such occasion. You know the story, on July 6, 1892, thousands of locked-out steelworkers and their families, forcefully seized Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead works, which had been fortified in anticipation of battle with workers unwilling to accept the 18% pay cut. A well-organized Strike Committee put the town of Homestead into the hands of the workers and forced a retreat of Henry Clay Frick’s hired Pinkerton guns, with rifles, cannon, incendiaries, and dynamite. When Gov. Pattison, who was elected with help from Carnegie, mobilized the state militia, and the workers naively hoped to reason with them. The militia regained control of the plant in less than an hour, but the strike continued. By the time of the unsuccessful attempt on Frick’s life by a young Alexander Berkman, which was manipulated by the bourgeois press to erode sympathy for the strikers, scabs were running the Homestead works at full capacity.
Where are they now?
- The site of the former Homestead works is now a vast 265 acre strip mall; only the pump house and two of the furnaces remain. The same can be said of the steel industry in Southwestern PA, which, despite having many things with the word “steel” in their name, has been dead since the early 1980’s.
- The Pinkerton Detective Agency is still in existence, but professional State police forces carry out such political and economic violence in the US, although the use of private mercenary armies to achieve desired political outcomes is at an all time high, and the Pinkertons designed that template.
- The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, merged with the CIO’s Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which would eventually would become the United Steelworkers. Years of collusion between the business unions and corporations have dramatically weakened organized labor in the US.
- Carnegie and Frick named many things in the Pittsburgh area after themselves (despite many drunken conspiracies to rename them after Berkman). Their descendants are still exceedingly wealthy.
- Western Penitentary, where Berkman served 14 years of his 22 year sentence was closed several years ago, but is in the process of being reopened.
- The pistol and sharpened file used by Berkman are in the local history center.
- The house on Sterling Street where Berkman hoped to tunnel out of prison into, was lost in a gas line explosion.
If I missed anything, or got something wrong, let me know.
The Yinsurrectionary Times 