The Homestead Strike, or technically lockout, was a struggle between the most powerful union in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Carnegie Steel, one of the largest enterprises in America. When Andrew Carnegie purchased the Homestead Mill in 1889, he attempted to lower costs by announcing a 25 percent decrease in wages, but the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers forced him to rescind the pay cut and sign a three-year contract. Since Carnegie was not one to share control of the workplace, it was a pyrrhic victory for the Amalgamated.
In 1892 Carnegie instructed his chairman, Henry C. Frick, to remove the union from Homestead. Frick prepared for a confrontation with the union by increasing production and constructing a 12-foot-high stockade around the plant. In April, Frick demanded that the union accept a 22 percent cut in wages and gave the union until June 24 to accept his terms. On June 9, the day before the contract expired, he closed the mill.
To keep the company from replacing its members, the Amalgamated organized a 24-hour watch to prevent anyone from entering the plant. Frick asked local authorities to protect company property, but finding little sympathy in the community, he turned to outside support. On July 6, a steamer towed two barges containing 300 armed Pinkerton detectives from Pittsburgh up the Monongahela River toward Homestead. Despite efforts at secrecy, strikers and their sympathizers knew the Pinkertons were coming. The strikers, most carrying weapons, broke through the stockade around the plant and were on hand at the landing near the pump house when the barges arrived. A shot followed by a volley killed one detective and wounded five as they attempted to disembark. The Pinkertons returned the fire, killing three and wounding 30. The battle continued sporadically throughout the day, claiming a total of 16 dead and 60 wounded. Finally the Pinkertons surrendered, and an angry crowd assaulted them as they were marched to the railroad station.
Although peace returned to Homestead after the battle, Governor Robert Pattison ordered the Pennsylvania National Guard into the steel community. Under the command of General George Snowden, the troops protected strikebreakers and allowed the plant to reopen. Public opinion at first was solidly aligned against Carnegie Steel, but the bungled attempted assassination of Frick on July 23 by anarchist Alexander Berkman eroded this support. Nevertheless the union continued its fight until November 20, when, with its treasury exhausted and its stockpile of supplies depleted, the Amalgamated called off the strike. Carnegie Steel, however, rehired only a few of the strikers and blacklisted their leaders. The defeat at Homestead virtually eliminated effective trade unionism in the steel industry for more than 40 years.
Further reading: Paul Krause, The Bat-tie for Home-stead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Leon Wolff, Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892: A Study of Violence, Unionism and the Carnegie Steel Empire (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
—Harold W. Aurand
Hooker, Isabella Beecher (1822-1907) women's rights activist
Isabella Beecher Hooker was a radical, eccentric suffragist. Born on February 22, 1822, in Litchfield, Connecticut, Hooker was the daughter of the distinguished Calvinist minister Lyman Beecher, and she was the half sister of Henry Ward Beecher, the preacher; Catharine Beecher, the educator; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author. Educated largely in schools founded by Catharine, Isabella in 1841 married John Hooker, a lawyer, but having observed the “radical defect” in the marriages of her brothers, she did so with the understanding that she and John would be partners. They ultimately settled in Hartford, prospered, and raised three children. Although she desired domestic equality, Isabella Hooker was not attracted to the women’s rights movement until the 1860s, when she read the English philosopher John Stuart Mill on the enfranchisement of women.
Hooker, who had longed for some kind of significant public activity, found her avocation. She met Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and in 1868 joined Olympia Brown in establishing the New England Woman Suffrage Association. In that same year she published “A Mother’s Letters to a Daughter on Woman’s Suffrage” in
Putnam's Magazine. In 1869 Hooker joined the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) and was the chief organizer of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association. John Hooker, with the support of Isabella, drafted a married-woman’s property bill that in 1870 was introduced in the Connecticut state legislature; the Hookers lobbied vigorously for the bill until it passed in 1877. Isabella Hooker played a prominent role in NWSA meetings, testified at congressional hearings, and also published arguments for women’s rights, including Womanhood: Its Sanctities and Fidelities (1873). Drawing upon her own life, Hooker argued that a woman’s job supervising children and running a household gave her ample experience to participate in government.
Hooker had radical and bizarre ideas. Her preacher relatives were not happy that she agreed with Anthony and Stanton that marriage and divorce laws needed reform to give women equal rights. Her Beecher relations were made even more unhappy by Hooker’s support of Victoria Woodhull, a suffragist, spiritualist, and an adventurer whom she befriended after Woodhull addressed the January 1871 Washington Convention that Hooker had organized. In November 1872 Woodhull published in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly the scandalous tale of Henry Ward Beecher’s adulterous affair with a parishioner, Elizabeth Tilton. While the Beechers supported Henry, Hooker was the exception and was ostracized by her family. She obviously thought him guilty and deplored the double standard that exonerated her brother. The Beechers, for their part, accused her of mental instability.
The alienation and accusations of her family took their toll on Hooker. In 1874 she and John went to Europe for two years, and they found some solace in spiritualism, to which Woodhull had introduced them. Upon her return in 1876 she got the idea that she was destined to lead a matriarchal government of the United States and then of the world. With local Hartford mediums present on New Year’s Eve 1876, she expected to receive the call, but it did not come. Hooker abandoned her fantastic notion (but not spiritualism) and continued to work for women’s rights. After the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) (1890) emphasized state campaigns, she backed Olympia Brown’s Federal Suffrage Association (1892), but her activities tapered off. She died in Hartford on January 25, 1907.
Further reading: Milton Rugoff, The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).
World History
