Homestead. Bart. Field Marshal Sir John Burgoyne

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СКАЧАТЬ to overawe striking workmen has provoked a feeling of intense hatred on the part of organized labor towards these soldier-policemen. Attempts to abolish the Pinkerton system by legislation have succeeded in only a few states, New York and New Jersey among the number, for the reason that the corporations which find use for armed mercenaries have sufficient wealth and influence to control legislative action.

      Congressman Thomas Watson, of Alabama, a representative of the Farmers' Alliance, introduced a bill in Congress making it illegal for private persons to maintain a "standing army" to usurp the police powers of the states, and made a strong plea for its passage, but the measure failed. The great industrial corporations have a hold upon the federal legislature too strong to be broken by the insistence of common people.

      As has already been told, the men of Homestead entertained a profound abhorrence of the Pinkertons and were resolved to push resistance to any extreme rather than permit themselves to be whipped into submission by armed hirelings. They had no knowledge of Mr. Frick's dealings with the agency, although their familiarity with the Frick policy in the coke regions, coupled with the equipment of the mill property for occupation by a garrison excited a well-defined suspicion of what was coming.

      Mr. Frick gave the final order for a supply of guards in a letter written to Robert A. Pinkerton, of New York, on June 25, the day after his meeting with the wage committee from the Amalgamated convention. The order was given in as matter-of-fact a manner as if the Carnegie chairman were bespeaking a supply of coke or pig-iron.

      "We will want 300 guards," he wrote, "for service at our Homestead mills as a measure of precaution against interference with our plan to start the operation of the works again on July 6, 1892."

      "These guards," Mr. Frick went on to direct, "should be assembled at Ashtabula, O., not later than the morning of July 5, when they may be taken by train to McKees Rocks, or some other point on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh, where they can be transferred to boats and landed within the enclosures of our premises at Homestead. We think absolute secresy essential in the movement of these men, so that no demonstration can be made while they are en route."

      As Mr. Frick acknowledged in his letter the receipt of "your favor of the 22d," it was evident that the negotiations with the Pinkerton agency had been pending for some time.

      Immediately after having despatched his order for a Pinkerton battalion, Mr. Frick sent for Captain Rodgers, of the towboat Little Bill, and directed him to fit up two barges with sleeping accommodations and provisions for 300 men, who were to be taken on board at some point not then determined, brought to the works at Homestead, and subsequently lodged and boarded on the barges.

      He also notified the sheriff of Allegheny county, William H. McCleary, through Messrs. Knox & Reed, attorneys for the Carnegie Company, that there would be a strike at Homestead and that 300 Pinkerton watchmen had been engaged, and requested the sheriff to deputize the entire force; that is to say, to appoint them police agents of the county. The sheriff maintained afterwards that, on the advice of his attorney, he had declined to deputize the Pinkerton men until they should be installed in the mill and had reserved the right to act at his discretion when that time came. Mr. Frick, on the other hand, declared on the witness stand that the sheriff consented to deputize the men and assigned his chief deputy to swear them in.

      The train was now laid; the fuse was lit, and all that remained to be done in the Carnegie camp was to wait for the explosion.

      To disarm suspicion on the other side, however, Mr. Frick, as the crisis approached, gave out information leading the public in general and the locked-out men in particular to believe that he meant to rely on the ordinary processes of law to protect him in the non-unionizing of his works. On the evening of July 4, after a conference with the other chief officers of the firm, he furnished a statement to the newspapers alleging that there was no trouble to be feared, that the men were weakening, a large number of them being anxious to get back to work, and that the plant would be placed in the hands of the county, the sheriff being requested to furnish enough deputies to ensure adequate protection.

      With all his firmness, the doughty chairman of the Carnegie Company dared not make a clean breast of his program. The way for the coup de grace had to be cleared by strategy and dissimulation.

      The locked-out men celebrated Independence Day with due patriotic fervor. The force of guards was increased from 350 to 1,000, the picket system being expanded so as to form an outline five miles in extent, covering both sides of the river.

      In the afternoon an alarm was sent in to headquarters. Two men had been seen landing from a boat near the works and were taken for spies. Quick as a flash a thousand men rushed to the river bank and inclosed within a semi-circle of stalwart forms the place where the suspects had landed. It proved that the latter were merely honest citizens of the town returning from a picnic across the river, but the incident showed how effectually the men kept themselves on the qui vive, precluding the entry of an enemy at any point.

      When Sheriff McCleary reached his office in the Allegheny County court-house, on the morning of July 5, he found awaiting him a formal application from the Carnegie Company for the services of one hundred deputies at Homestead. The Sheriff was discomfited by the demand. His predecessor in office, Dr. McCandless, had been forced to engage in a long and irksome legal battle in order to recover from the Carnegie Company the money due for the service of deputies at Homestead in 1889, and the prospect of a fresh dispute over the pay of special officers was not inviting. So Mr. McCleary, who was gifted by nature with a strong tendency to evasiveness, returned an evasive answer, and conceived the idea of going to Homestead with his own office force of twelve men and making some sort of dignified showing pending the arrival of that army of Pinkertons, which he already knew to be moving on the devoted town.

      The Sheriff and his little posse proceeded accordingly to Homestead and were received by the men, if not with cordiality, at all events with decent consideration. A proclamation was issued embodying the usual warning against breaches of the peace. Then a phalanx of strong-limbed steel workers escorted the officers to the mill and pointed out that nobody was trespassing upon or damaging the Carnegie Company's fortified territory.

      The sheriff stated that, under the law, the company should be permitted to bring in whatever men it chose and to operate its own works.

      The men responded that neither the county authorities nor anyone else would be permitted to bring non-union men into the mill, and, having thus emphatically signified their purposes, escorted the sheriff and his followers – all of them more or less afflicted with nervousness – to the railroad station and saw the little party safely out of town.

      Had the sheriff been less evasive, less nervous, less of a politician and more of a man, there was still time for him to avert disaster. He, as chief police officer of the county, had been informed of the coming of Mr. Frick's hired army. He could not fail to be aware that a collision between the Pinkerton men and the 4,000 steelworkers was bound to come, that blood would run like water at Homestead, that demoralization and disgrace, and perhaps even heavy financial loss to the county would follow, and that, therefore, to remain supine in the face of all this, to let the crash come and not lift a finger to prevent it was literally a dereliction of duty.

      There was no obligation resting on this official to keep Mr. Frick's operations secret. On the contrary, he was under a strong moral obligation to prevent the execution of those operations at all hazards by giving them prompt publicity and enabling the exhaustion of all available legal means of stopping an invasion of the county by armed mercenaries of a class condemned by law in two neighboring states and bitterly hated by workingmen in every state of the Union.

      It did not appear to occur to the sheriff that the hiring of Pinkerton detectives was an offensive arraignment of himself as the county's chief executive officer. The one idea uppermost in his mind seemed to be to steer clear of the whole unpleasant business as far as he conveniently СКАЧАТЬ