Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. Berkman Alexander

come, I tell you. First they’ll come; then the blacklegs.30 You want ’em?”

      “No! No!” roars the crowd.

      “Well, if you don’t want the damned scabs, keep out the soldiers, you understand? If you don’t, they’ll drive you out from the homes you have paid for with your blood. You and your wives and children they’ll drive out, and out you will go from these”—the speaker points in the direction of the mills—“that’s what they’ll do, if you don’t look out. We have sweated and bled in these mills, our brothers have been killed and maimed there, we have made the damned Company rich, and now they send the soldiers here to shoot us down like the Pinkerton thugs have tried to. And you want to welcome the murderers, do you? Keep them out, I tell you!”

      Amid shouts and yells the speaker leaves the platform.

“McLuckie! ‘Honest’ McLuckie!” a voice is heard on the fringe of the crowd, and as one man the assembly takes up the cry, “‘Honest’ McLuckie!”31

      I am eager to see the popular Burgess of Homestead, himself a poorly paid employee of the Carnegie Company. A large-boned, good-natured-looking workingman elbows his way to the front, the men readily making way for him with nods and pleasant smiles.

      “I haven’t prepared any speech,” the Burgess begins haltingly, “but I want to say, I don’t see how you are going to fight the soldiers. There is a good deal of truth in what the brother before me said; but if you stop to think on it, he forgot to tell you just one little thing. The how? How is he going to do it, to keep the soldiers out? That’s what I’d like to know. I’m afraid it’s bad to let them in. The blacklegs might be hiding in the rear. But then again, it’s bad not to let the soldiers in. You can’t stand up against ’em: they are not Pinkertons. And we can’t fight the Government of Pennsylvania. Perhaps the Governor won’t send the militia. But if he does, I reckon the best way for us will be to make friends with them. Guess it’s the only thing we can do. That’s all I have to say.”

      The assembly breaks up, dejected, dispirited.

      26 By 1892, there were between eight hundred and a thousand East European workers at Homestead. There were also significant numbers of English, Irish, and Scottish workers.

      27 Apparently a reference to sheriff of Allegheny County, William H. McCleary.

      28 It may be that Berkman is being rather creative here. He did not arrive in Pittsburgh/Allegheny City until late on July 13. The militia arrived in Homestead at 9 in the morning of July 12. The subject matter of this meeting concerns the expected arrival of the militia and would have been held before July 12, at least two days before Berkman’s arrival in the area. Indeed a large meeting of around five thousand did take place on July 11, and was reported in the New York Sun on July 12. Berkman may be paraphrasing that report, which he could have read on the way to Homestead. What appears certain is that he was not at this meeting and that, perhaps, some of the speakers he presents are serving here as literary tropes.

      29 Hugh O’Donnell was an Irish American steel worker at Homestead and chairman of the workers’ Advisory Committee (a union-based group that essentially played a leadership role in the dispute) and worked as a heat treater in the mill. O’Donnell played a leading role in the events of July 6 after having urged the Pinkertons to leave peacefully. He worked for a compromise with company management once the state militia arrived and appears to have lost the confidence of some of the workers. He, like many others on the Advisory Committee, was arrested the week of July 18, on charges of murder, treason, and riot/conspiracy of which he was, after a lengthy process, acquitted. He would go on to manage a traveling vaudeville and concert company.

      30 “Blacklegs” was another term for scabs or replacement workers hired by management in place of union workers during a strike.

      31 John McLuckie was an early member of the Knights of Labor. He moved to Homestead in the 1880s and was elected Burgess of Homestead in 1890 and 1892. He was a member of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and took part in earlier industrial action at Homestead in 1889. During the 1892 lockout he was one of the leaders of the workers’ Advisory Committee. The July 24 Chicago Tribune quoted McLuckie’s reaction to Berkman’s attempt on Frick’s life as “I can’t say that I am sorry … Frick sent a lot of thugs and cut-throats into … Homestead, and they murdered my friends and fellow citizens.” McLuckie was arrested on July 18, and charged with murder, treason, and riot/conspiracy. He was released on bail and went to Youngstown to avoid further imprisonment. He resigned as Burgess on November 7, 1892 and went to work as a miner in Northern Mexico.

      Chapter III: The Spirit of Pittsburgh

      I

      Like a gigantic hive the twin cities jut out on the banks of the Ohio, heavily breathing the spirit of feverish activity, and permeating the atmosphere with the rage of life. Ceaselessly flow the streams of human ants, meeting and diverging, their paths crossing and recrossing, leaving in their trail a thousand winding passages, mounds of structure, peaked and domed. Their huge shadows overcast the yellow thread of gleaming river that curves and twists its painful way, now hugging the shore, now hiding in affright, and again timidly stretching its arms toward the wrathful monsters that belch fire and smoke into the midst of the giant hive. And over the whole is spread the gloom of thick fog, oppressive and dispiriting—the symbol of our existence, with all its darkness and cold.

This is Pittsburgh, the heart of American industrialism, whose spirit molds the life of the great Nation. The spirit of Pittsburgh, the Iron City! Cold as steel, hard as iron, its products. These are the keynote of the great Republic, dominating all other chords, sacrificing harmony to noise, beauty to bulk. Its torch of liberty is a furnace fire, consuming, destroying, devastating: a country-wide furnace, in which the bones and marrow of the producers, their limbs and bodies, their health and blood, are cast into Bessemer steel, rolled into armor plate, and converted into engines of murder to be consecrated to Mammon by his high priests, the Carnegies, the Fricks.32

The spirit of the Iron City characterizes the negotiations carried on between the Carnegie Company and the Homestead men. Henry Clay Frick, in absolute control of the firm, incarnates the spirit of the furnace, is the living emblem of his trade. The olive branch held out by the workers after their victory over the Pinkertons has been refused. The ultimatum issued by Frick is the last word of Caesar33: the union of the steel-workers is to be crushed, completely and absolutely, even at the cost of shedding the blood of the last man in Homestead; the Company will deal only with individual workers, who must accept the terms offered, without question or discussion; he, Frick, will operate the mills with non-union labor, even if it should require the combined military power of the State and the Union to carry the plan into execution. Millmen disobeying the order to return to work under the new schedule of reduced wages are to be discharged forthwith, and evicted from the Company houses.

      II

      In an obscure alley, in the town of Homestead, there stands a one-­story frame house, looking old and forlorn. It is occupied by the widow Johnson and her four small children. Six months ago, the breaking of a crane buried her husband under two hundred tons of metal. When the body was carried into the house, the distracted woman refused to recognize in the mangled remains her big, strong “Jack.” For weeks the neighborhood resounded with her frenzied cry, “My husband! Where’s my husband?” But the loving care of kind-hearted neighbors has now somewhat restored the poor woman’s reason. Accompanied by her four little orphans, she recently gained admittance to Mr. Frick. On her knees she implored him not to drive her out of her home. Her poor husband was dead, she pleaded; she could not pay off the mortgage; the children were too young to work; she herself was hardly able to walk. Frick was very kind,