Homestead Strike Battle Between Workers and Pinkerton Agents Leaves 10 Dead

Three hundred Pinkerton Detective Agency agents attempt to forcibly seize Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill in Pennsylvania, triggering a 14-hour armed battle with locked-out steelworkers that leaves seven workers and three Pinkertons dead, with dozens more wounded. The violent confrontation occurs after Carnegie Steel operations manager Henry Clay Frick—given “carte blanche to break the union” by Carnegie, who conveniently remained in Scotland during the crisis—cuts workers’ wages, locks out all 3,800 employees when the union rejects the cuts, and builds a massive barbed-wire-topped fence around the plant that workers dub “Fort Frick.” The Pinkertons assemble on the Davis Island Dam on the Ohio River at 10:30 PM on July 5, 1892, receiving Winchester rifles before boarding two specially-equipped barges towed upriver under cover of darkness.

When the Pinkerton barges attempt to land at the Homestead mill on the morning of July 6, workers and citizens meet them with fierce resistance. Strikers fire at the barges, use dynamite, pour oil on the river and attempt to set it ablaze, and maintain sustained gunfire throughout the day. The Pinkertons eventually surrender after suffering casualties and enduring hours of siege, with the defeated agents subjected to beatings and humiliation as they are marched through hostile crowds. The workers’ military victory, however, proves pyrrhic: Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison deploys 8,000 state militia troops on July 12, occupying Homestead and protecting strikebreakers as Carnegie and Frick systematically replace the entire unionized workforce.

The strike lingers until November 1892, when it collapses in complete defeat for the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The union is destroyed at Homestead, and the broader defeat sets back labor organizing in the steel industry for four decades until the Congress of Industrial Organizations successfully organizes steel in the 1930s. The Homestead Strike demonstrates the alliance between corporate power, private security forces, and state military power in crushing labor: Carnegie retains plausible deniability through his absence, Frick deploys a private army to attack workers, and the state provides military occupation to enable strikebreaking. This pattern of corporate deployment of Pinkerton agents and state militia against striking workers is replicated at Coeur d’Alene (1892), Pullman (1894), Cripple Creek (1894), Ludlow (1914), and throughout American labor history as a template for violent union suppression.