Homestead

[narrator] By 1880, thousands of workers
man the sixteen iron and steel mills

that were stretched along the rivers
and outskirts of Pittsburgh.

The largest employer was Andrew
Carnegie.

By 1890, Carnegie was the richest man
in America,

his net worth estimated
at over 100 million.

In today's dollars, he was a billionaire.

The embodiment of the American Dream,
Carnegie became the spokesman for the

country's industrial aristocracy.

It was a time of no income tax and little
government interference.

The divide between rich and poor grew
to a colossal scale.

Carnegie's continuing demand for lower
costs often pushed his workers to the

limits of endurance.

[Dr. W. David Lewis] The standard
workweek in the steel industry was

84 hours per week.

And they worked for very low wages.

For 84 hours of brutal labor in the
steel mills was often less than

ten dollars a week.

[narrator] In the winter of 1891, Carnegie
took over the Homestead Mill.

[Dr. David P. Demarest] The Homestead
was a particular bastion of jnion power.

The issue, ultimately, was trying to get
the union out.

[narrator] At the time, Carnegie's
second-in-command was Henry Frick.

Frick was violently
anti-labor,

and fought the attempts to organize the
steelworkers with ruthless methodology.

[Lewis] By that time, Carnegie was
under a lot of pressure from his directors

and from Frick, who felt that he had
made a mistake by being too cozy with

organized labor, especially with skilled
workers.

What Carnegie did here, I think, is very
interesting.

He went to Europe. He went to England
and let Frick run things.

[narrator] The union called a strike on
June 29th, 1892.

Hundreds of workers walked off their
jobs in protest of wage cuts.

[crowd shouting]

Frick was determined to personally handle
the Homestead negotiation.

That meant breaking the union's hold on
the Homestead works.

He basically
turned the Homestead Works,

which are right outside of Pittsburgh,
into an armed camp.

And he hired a fleet of Pinkerton agents.

And so Frick, well in advance, was not
hiding the fact that he was probably

gonna go toe-to-toe and come into
conflict with the union.

[Lewis] It's certainly true that Carnegie

regretted...

the bloodshed, in the sense that it was a
blot on his reputation. I mean, he's, uh,

he was a person who had gone around
talking about the

"rights of labor" and slogans like
"Thou shall not take thy neighbor's job."

And to be connected with a notorious
episode like this,

prompted by what was obviously an
intent to bring in scab labor

resulting in bloodshed,

I mean, this was a real blot on his
charisma.

[narrator] Carnegie's victory demolished

the strength of organized labor in
the steel industry for decades.

But Homestead was also a turning point
for the industry:

a bloody signpost marking the end of
an age and the beginning of an era of

consolidation, as American steel became a
global power.

[music fades]