Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town
By William Serrin
Copyright 1992, Times Books
413 pages
Reviewed by Lou Nemeth
WILLIAM SERRIN'S Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town, presents an epic tale of the great U.S. Industrial Age through the eyes of the residents of Homestead, Pennsylvania.
It is a story that encompasses a century of history, two world wars, the birth of industrial production, the building of the U.S. labor movement and the rise and fall of the world's largest corporation. It includes some of the most famous names in business and labor, such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, John L. Lewis, J.P. Morgan, Elbert Gary, Samuel Gompers and John D. Rockefeller. Serrin manages to convey this sweep of history on both a personal and grand scale, keeping to the roots on which his story is based while discussing people and events far from Homestead.
Homestead, Pennsylvania was a quintessential company town. A few miles outside Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River, it was settled in 1786. But it would be almost 100 years before the town became the heart of the U.S. steel industry.
In 1881, a group of merchants opened the Homestead Works. Confrontations between workers and management, a severe lack of capital and the falling price of steel compelled the owners to approach Andrew Carnegie, who purchased the Works in 1883 for $350,000. Along with Carnegie's extensive holdings in iron mills, natural resources and other companies, Homestead would form the backbone of what became Carnegie Steel.
As Carnegie's fortune grew, so did Homestead. The great wave of immigration in the 1870s and 1880s, primarily English, Welsh, Irish and German, provided Homestead with a skilled labor force. Supplemented by Eastern and Southern Europeans, who began arriving in the late 1880s, Homestead Works grew to employ more than 3,500 people by 1890. Homestead had become a steel town.
The U.S. labor movement was growing almost as fast as industrial production, despite the best efforts of Carnegie and other industrialists. By 1892, Carnegie had broken the union at the nearby Edgar Thomson Works, and had prevented the Amalgamated Association Of Iron and Steel Workers from organizing other Monongahela Valley plants. Homestead was the last holdout, and Carnegie was determined to eliminate union representation at the Works.
On July 1, 1892, 2,400 Homestead workers walked off the job, joining 1,100 others who had been locked out by the company in the previous two days. On July 2, the company served the workers notices of discharge. What followed was one of the epochal events in U.S. labor history. Carnegie hired armed Pinkerton guards to secure the Works so strikebreakers could enter the plant. Arriving on two barges on July 6, 300 Pinkertons were confronted by hundreds of workers and townspeople who had stormed the Works.
In the ensuing melee, dozens were wounded, and several people on both sides of the confrontation were killed. As the Pinkertons huddled down on the barges, the workers and townspeople employed numerous strategies to roust them. They fired cannons at the ships (with poor aim and little effect); set afire an oil-soaked raft and released it to float downstream to the barges; rolled a flaming railroad car down train tracks toward the water; and used a fire engine to pump oil, which was then set ablaze, onto the water.
By 4:00 p.m., 12 hours after the fighting had started, the Pinkertons had surrendered. But the Homestead workers' victory was short-lived. On July 12, the National Guard was dispatched to "protect the property rights of the Carnegie company." The company brought in strikebreakers, and the struggle was lost. Four strikers were arrested and charged with murder in the death of a Pinkerton guard; in all, 167 were indicted on charges ranging from riot to conspiracy; 34 were charged with treason against the State of Pennsylvania. It would be 30 years before unions regained prominence in the steel industry.
Serrin relates these events in great detail, and links them to the submissive spirit of Homestead workers and residents who, even 100 years later - when faced with extinction - could not effectively rise up against the company that built, and then abandoned, their town.
In 1901, Carnegie sold his companies to J.P. Morgan and other investors for the then-incredible sum of $480 million. The Carnegie properties formed the backbone of what became the world's largest corporation, "the combination of combinations," as it was called at the time, U.S. Steel.
At its forming, the United States Steel Corporation controlled 65 percent of the U.S. steel industry and employed 168,000 workers. It owned the combined assets of Carnegie and Federal Steel, about half the nation's known iron-ore reserves, and 57,000 acres of coal lands in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Over the next 60 years, U.S. Steel would build the United States. Across the country, bridges, skyscrapers, railroads, warships, aircraft and roads were all built with steel from plants owned by the corporation. And Homestead was at the center of it all. The post-World War II boom in consumer appliances further fueled the company's - and Homestead's - fortunes.
With the exception of the Great Depression, the first half of the 20th century was a time of growth for U.S. company towns. With the unionization of the late 1930s came increased pay, increased benefits and better lifestyles. Homestead residents reaped these fruits of their hard labor.
Serrin excels in describing these "golden years," and in relating how the complacency of organized labor planted the seeds for the eventual devastating decline in workers' standard of living and job security. For most of this period, labor and management were essentially partners. The Steelworkers Union's bureaucracy - far removed from the concerns of the average worker and consumed with its own power - reveled in friendships with presidents, corporation executives and the wealthy denizens of society.
Homestead, however, truly comes alive in its portrayal of the downside of the industrial revolution. U.S. Steel - saddled with executive complacency, stifling bureaucracy and its own gigantic size - time and time again failed to anticipate or adequately respond to the threats all around it, including increased international competition. The last section of Homestead outlines the fall of U.S. Steel. More than just a recital of industrial demise, Serrin's book conveys the human toll by returning to Homestead.
On July 25, 1986, U.S. Steel closed the Works for good. On that day, only 23 workers remained employed at the plant - all that was left of a workforce that had once numbered almost 10,000. Serrin relates the despair of the town:
"There was one man I never got out of my mind - Rich Locher, the hooker from Number Two Structural who had denounced the government's retraining programs [as ębullshit']... I had planned to meet with Locher, but time passed, and I was busy. ... When I got to Homestead, I ran into Mike Stout, the former grievance man. When I told him that I was going to call Locher, he said: ęDon't bother. Locher is dead. He finished the retraining program [to be a nurse] but couldn't get a job, so he took a gun and killed himself - shot half his head away, in his garage.' ...
"I liked Locher. He was a good man. ... He was an excellent father and husband, and he probably deserved more out of life than to take two brief vacations at hot trailer parks in Virginia and go out to eat once a month at McDonald's or Long John Silver's, to lose his job as a craneman and not get a job as a nurse. One more thing. Locher was right about the retraining programs. They were bullshit."
Serrin's book is a compelling indictment of U.S. corporations, a stunning reminder of the devastation of industrial centers such as Homestead, and an engaging story of the people that built the United States. As George Couvaris, who once owned a restaurant and candy store in the town, points out: "It wasn't Homestead, Pa. It was Homestead, USA."