Volume 39, Number 17 · October 22, 1992
A Triumph of the Gilded Age
By Sean Wilentz
The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel
by Paul Krause
University of Pittsburgh Press, 548 pp., $19.95 (paper)
'The River Ran Red': Homestead 1892
edited by David P. Demarest Jr.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 232 pp., $19.95 (paper)
In a year of important American centenaries—Columbus's landing, the Salem witchcraft trials, the death of Whitman—it may be easy to overlook the lockout and strike at the Carnegie steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. Yet the Homestead strike was perhaps the culminating event of the Gilded Age. The stakes were enormous, in a fight that pitted the world's mightiest steel corporation against the nation's strongest union. Several of its episodes—the workers' pitched battles with the Pinkerton strikebreakers, the arrival of the Pennsylvania state militia, the shooting of Henry Clay Frick by Alexander Berkman—these are set pieces in the history of the American labor movement.
Review, 5607 words
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