Homestead Steelworkers' Strike

The Battle of Homestead is the most famous event in American labor history and one of its most significant. On July 6, 1892 along the banks of the Monongahela River below the Pump House of the Homestead mill of the Carnegie Steel works, a battle erupted when locked-out Homestead steelworkers and 10,000 of their family members and supporters rushed to meet the barges coming up the Monongahela River that carried 300 Pinkerton guards who had been sent to break the Homestead Strike and Lockout.

After a bitter day of conflict that left 12 strikers and Pinkerton men dead the Pinkerton guards surrendered to the mob. Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie's partner, convinced Pennsylvania governor Pattison that Homestead was under "mob rule" and on July 12, 1892, 8,000 state militiamen entered Homestead. The strike and lock-out continued until November when unskilled laborers asked to be released from their strike pledge. Two days later, the strike ended: the union had been broken.

The Battle of Homestead signaled the end of union activity in the steel industry until the 1930s. It was a severe blow to organized labor, which was being challenged by dozens of corporate giants in the country's other rapidly growing industrial fields. Yet the Homestead strike laid the essential groundwork that led to mass industrial unionization and the granting of union rights to virtually all American workers in the 1930s.