An Accurate Account Of The History Channel's 'Men Who Built America' --Parts 1 through 24

Andrew Carnegie

May 12, 2013, Historyhalf.com

This is the twenty-fourth in my series of posts about the five businessmen the History Channel profiled in a terribly inaccurate and un-historical TV miniseries titled The Men Who Built America. I’m writing these posts in response to several comments and e-mails from TV viewers who have expressed interest in a more accurate version of the story.

Post #24: The Homestead Steel Mill Strike

In late June of 1892 a labor strike at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Works turned deadly when a gunfight erupted between striking workers and the security guards the company had brought in to protect the plant. The History Channel’s portrayal of this event was probably the low point of the entire eight hour The Men Who Built America miniseries. It was pure fiction.

That’s a shame, because the truth is far more interesting than the fictitious version the History Channel saw fit to broadcast.

The violence at Homestead was painfully embarrassing to Carnegie, who had always been guilty of a certain level of hypocrisy on labor-management issues. In public he tended to give lip service to semi-Marxist ideas about the rights of the proletariat, but the way he ran his business generally contradicted the principles he so publicly espoused.  In that he had much in common with modern day billionaires like George Soros and Warren Buffett.

Several times over the years leading up to the Homestead strike Carnegie had made pro-union comments, particularly on the issue of employers hiring strikebreakers. On one occasion, in a comment ironically foreshadowing the behavior of his own employees at Homestead, he said that no worker could be expected to “stand peaceably and see a new man employed in his stead.” When confronted with that prospect at Homestead, the Carnegie workers were far from peaceful, and Carnegie showed little sympathy.

Carnegie’s conflicted stance on labor relations issues is perhaps best illustrated by his 1877 attempt to convert the standard work week of the steel industry from seven twelve-hour days per week to seven eight-hour days.

Carnegie and his partners only owned one steel mill at this time, the Edgar Thompson Steel works, popularly known as the E.T. Plant manager William Jones convinced Carnegie that if the started using three eight hour shifts per day rather than two twelves, their competitors would follow suit, and the eight hour day would become the standard of the industry. Carnegie was all for making the workers’ lives easier, as long as it didn’t give his competitors an advantage.

Read the full story:  www.historyhalf.com

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