had arranged with the
Pinkerton detective agency for 300 men to serve as guards. These men
arrived at a station on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh near midnight of
July 5. Here they embarked on barges and were towed up the river to
Pittsburgh and taken up the Monangahela River to Homestead, which they
approached about four o'clock on the morning of July 6. The workmen had
been warned of their coming and, when the boat reached the landing back
of the steel works, nearly the whole town was there to meet them and to
prevent their landing. Passion ran high. The men armed themselves with
guns and gave the Pinkertons a pitched battle. When the day was over, at
least half a dozen men on both sides had been killed and a number were
seriously wounded. The Pinkertons were defeated and driven away and,
although there was no more disorder of any sort, the State militia
appeared in Homestead on July 12 and remained for several months.

The strike which began in Homestead soon spread to other mills. The
Carnegie mills at 29th and 33d Streets, Pittsburgh, went on strike. The
strike at Homestead was finally declared off on November 20, and most
of the men went back to their old positions as non-union men. The
treasury of the union was depleted, winter was coming, and it was
finally decided to consider the battle lost.

The defeat meant not only the loss by the union of the Homestead plant
but the elimination of unionism in most of the mills in the Pittsburgh
region. Where the great Carnegie Company led, the others had to follow.
The power of the union was henceforth broken and the labor movement
learned the lesson that even its strongest organization was unable to
withstand an onslaught by the modern corporation. The Homestead strike
stirred the labor movement as few other single events. It had its
political reverberation, since it drove home to the workers that an
industry protected by high tariff will not necessarily be a haven to
organized labor, notwithstanding that the union had actively assisted
the iron and steel manufacturers in securing the high protection granted
by the McKinley tariff bill of 1890. Many of the votes which would
otherwise have gone to the Republican candidate for President went in
1892 to Grover Cleveland, who ran on an anti-protective tariff issue. It
is not unlikely that the latter's victory was materially advanced by the
disillusionment brought on by the Homestead defeat.

In the summer of 1893 occurred