In his own time there raged about Andrew Carnegie, as about any man who pushes his head above the crowd, many a controversy. From the standpoint of his place in history, none is more important than the great strike that erupted at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, works of the Carnegie Steel Company in the summer of 1892.

Carnegie himself owned a controlling interest in the company, but when the strike broke in July he was, in accordance with his annual custom, on an extended vacation in Scotland. In charge at Homestead was Henry Clay Frick, the company’s hard-driving, forty-one-year-old chairman. Frick’s attitude toward labor unions was quite blunt: he was against them, and he was out to break the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, which represented the plant’s skilled laborers.

Carnegie’s labor views, like his attitude toward wealth, were not quite so simple. In two magazine articles in 1886 he had expressed pro-labor sentiments remarkable in a capitalist of his times; where strikebreaking was concerned (and it was to become a key issue in the Homestead strike) he had been particularly forthright: to the traditional Ten Commandments he had suggested adding an eleventh- “Thou shall not take thy neighbor’s job.” Nevertheless, before leaving for Scotland in the spring of 1892 he sent Frick a notice to be posted at the works informing the men that after the expiration on July i of the existing agreement with the Amalgamated, the Carnegie Steel Company would be operated as a non-union shop.

The union had enrolled only about one-fifth of the workers at Homestead, and when contract negotiations broke down late in June, Frick adopted a tactic calculated to divide the unskilled majority from the organized elite: he declared he would close the mill on July i and reopen it on July 6 with non-union men. He surrounded the plant with a high board fence; he topped it with barbed wire, pierced it with portholes—for observation, he later claimed —and erected at strategic intervals platforms equipped with searchlights. To make sure he could fulfill his promise to reopen the works, he arranged secretly for three hundred armed Pinkerton guards to be brought up the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh in the early morning hours of July 6. Clearly, Frick was ready for a fight. But the workers stole a march on him. The unskilled majority, mostly illiterate immigrants, closed ranks with the union men against the company, seized the plant, and assumed control of the town as well.

The night of July 5-6 was foggy, and the Pinkertons headed upriver silently in two covered barges. Union sentries on the bank were not deceived, however, and when the barges tied up at the company wharf at 4 A.M. , the strikers were ready for them. At once, gunfire broke out. Early in the fray the tug that had towed the barges steamed away, leaving the Pinkertons stranded at the dock. All day —with dynamite bombs, a small brass cannon,