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| 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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