r of Iowa, on a free silver platform.

The campaign was accompanied by labor disturbances of unusual extent
and violence. Shortly after the meeting of the national conventions, a
contest began between the powerful Amalgamated Association of Steel
and Iron Workers, the strongest of the trade-unions, and the Carnegie
Company over a new wage scale introduced in the Homestead mills. The
strike began on June 29, 1892, and local authority at once succumbed
to the strikers. In anticipation of this eventuality, the company had
arranged to have three hundred Pinkerton men act as guards. They arrived
in Pittsburgh during the night of the 5th of July and embarked on barges
which were towed up the river to Homestead. As they approached, the
strikers turned out to meet them, and an engagement ensued in which men
were killed or wounded on both sides and the Pinkerton men were defeated
and driven away. For a short time, the strikers were in complete
possession of the town and of the company's property. They preserved
order fairly well but kept a strict watch that no strike breakers should
approach or attempt to resume work. The government of Pennsylvania was,
for a time, completely superseded in that region by the power of the
Amalgamated Association, until a large force of troops entered Homestead
on the 12th of July and remained in possession of the place for several
months. The contest between the strikers and the company caused great
excitement throughout the country, and a foreign anarchist from New
York attempted to assassinate Mr. Frick, the managing director of the
company. Though this strike was caused by narrow differences concerning
only the most highly paid classes of workers, it continued for some
months and then ended in the complete defeat of the union.

On the same day that the militia arrived at Homestead, a more bloody and
destructive conflict occurred in the Coeur d'Alene district of Idaho,
where the workers in the silver mines were on strike. Nonunion men were
imported and put into some of the mines. The strikers, armed with rifles
and dynamite, thereupon attacked the nonunion men and drove them
off, but many lives were lost in the struggle and much property was
destroyed. The strikers proved too strong for any force which state
authority could muster, but upon the call of the Governor, President
Harrison ordered federal troops to the scene and under martial law order
was soon restored.

Further evidence of popul