In labor history, the Homestead Strike of 1892, in which steel magnate Andrew Carnegie broke the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW), is recalled as a terrible defeat for organized labor. But historian Elaine S. Frantz suggests a different way of looking at the event: as a moment when workers prevented the United States from developing the kind of powerful paramilitary organizations that have been central to the suppression of people’s movements in other parts of the Americas.
By the 1890s, the Pinkerton Detective Agency had been building its reputation for strikebreaking for two decades. Frantz suggests that it was well on its way to becoming “the paramilitary equivalent to Standard Oil or Carnegie Steel.”
The Pinkertons’ success wasn’t only a matter of muscle and spycraft but also an ideological project. Americans idealized a vision of hardworking, respectable men who formed the backbone of the nation, and the agency’s founder, Allan Pinkerton, worked to turn those associations to his advantage. In sixteen popular books, he depicted strikers as dishonest, irrational, rootless radicals pitted against sober, manly detectives.
Frantz writes that Homestead was a perfect counter to the Pinkertons’ self-mythologizing. Both the company and the workers idealized the town as a modern community of respectable workers where immigrants and native-born men worked side by side. Local officials, newspaper editors, and religious leaders viewed themselves as part of a community of workers and often emphasized their own backgrounds in industrial labor.
When Carnegie decided to break the Homestead union, locking out workers who refused a bad contract, the local police declined to side with the company against the workers.
And so, Frantz writes, on July 6, 1892, the company brought three hundred Pinkertons in on two river barges. Strikers immediately attacked, resulting in a gun battle and the surrender of the Pinkertons within hours. Six days later, Pennsylvania Governor Robert E. Pattison sent in the state militia to break the strike.
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But, in the meantime, the national press descended on Homestead. And the town used the opportunity to speak out against the Pinkertons. Importantly, this message came not just from the steelworkers but also from religious and political leaders—and even the local sheriff. The resulting narrative portrayed the workers as respectable, sober, disciplined homeowners and family men, while the Pinkertons became an external, extralegal threat.
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“If Homestead workers were model republican citizens defending their property rights, the use of Pinkertons posed a threat to all US residents,” Frantz writes.
In the year after Homestead, ten states banned private police, nearly doubling the number of states with such a law. And a federal law introduced following the strike banned the hiring of Pinkertons or similar agents by the US government or Washington, DC. The Pinkertons retreated from strikebreaking to focus on security and investigation, and formalized paramilitary forces never gained the kind of foothold in the US that they did elsewhere in the hemisphere.
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