Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 278 - The Homestead Strike

Episode Date: September 24, 2023

Striking factory workers hold off an attempted amphibious invasion launched by Pinkertons with guns, bombs, and fire ships. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/homestead-strike https://battleofhomestead.org/the-battle-of-homestead/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegie-strike-homestead-mill/ https://www.americanheritage.com/battle-homestead https://archive.org/details/jstor-25102447

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lionsledbydonkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me, and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad-free. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me still in the literal content factory, since today's episode is going to be about a labor union,

is Tom. I spilled coffee on my shirt today, Joe. How could you possibly survive? Well, it wasn't a great start to the day. You know, last night I was just chilling out. I was playing Starfield, an exceptionally... I was also doing that an exceptionally mid game that i am probably gonna pay play about 200 hours of i'm having fun so far um i will say i do not like the the space dog fighting yeah um but i kind of

knew that going in and it's gonna sound weird as someone who writes sci-fi. I'm really not interested in that part of sci-fi. I don't know why. It just doesn't appeal to me. I mean, and specifically in the video game, I swear to... I don't get motion sickness, but that shit fucks me up. Specifically in Starfield. You just prefer the ground-based sci-fi misery. Yeah, just kill me in orbit if I have to go from point A to point B.

With the tungsten rod. Yeah, hit me with the rods from god you know uh and i before we get started i do have to say after our conversation about anime weebs in the gym during our last episode i am convinced that somehow we birthed something into my current existence no because i was uh going into the metro station uh last night and a group of youths ran by doing the naruto run directly onto a train and i was like god damn it we had something to do with we willed this into existence because i've never seen anything like that before it's the lathe of heaven you know but it's it's the it's the pregnant woman uh fallacy or not fallacy i can't remember the correct term for it but it heaven. But it's the pregnant woman fallacy, or not fallacy, I can't remember the correct term for it, but it's like

when a woman becomes pregnant, she starts noticing so many more pregnant women around her. It's like, you know, if you break your leg, you only really notice how many people are walking with a limp once you break your leg. We're dealing with the pregnant Naruto

conspiracy. Yeah yeah it's like it's once again we bring it back to our previous episode it's once you notice people who have train rash on their chest they like you know once you see people who look like liver king you see them everywhere i know when i when the perfect picture of health is uh looking like you got too close to chernobyl and you're just that red all the time. Now, speaking of nothing we've just been talking about, how do you feel about the Pinkertons? Fuck them.

Thank you. For maybe our listeners who aren't familiar with the Pinkertons, I don't think we've actually ever talked about them before. It's been five years and I've had a lot of concussions, so I don't really remember all of the episodes that we've done harley onset dementia is coming for the two of us that that is my retirement plan as i will forget of my own existence um but if you've played red dead redemption 2 uh they're the enemies in that game so just keep that in mind um now today we're going to talk about the time a bunch of striking steel workers in homestead pennsylvania got into a pitched naval battle with the fucking pinkertons fuck yeah unions versus

pinkertons and it's funny because it's still you know present because people like amazon and other big companies are using the pinkertons to try and break strikes still. Recently, Magic the Gathering's owners, Wizards of the Coast, deployed Pinkertons to go to a man's house and take back magic cards. They still exist. What is with Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop just like having the worst ideas of how to, you know,

grow their community? Wizards of the Coast are sending the FBI Black Lotus squad to shoot your dog, and Games Workshop are just sending the Emperor's Rat to kick you in the nuts straight into space if you even dare upload a fan movie you have made of 40K. Yeah, like, Wizards of the coast is like i don't really consume any media from games workshop anymore not that i've ever played uh warhammer like the

tabletop i've read it of course i've read the gaunt ghost series which beyond being the best piece of warhammer media in my opinion it's like a very good military science fiction series uh which i highly recommend uh but wizards of the coast i'm much more familiar with being absolute bastards i mean they if you look back at some of the designs and cards that they've had you can kind of like they literally had a card called race war once oh this is exactly what i expect from magic the gathering fans and the people who make it i mean i still if i'm really bored i might fire up magic the gathering arena but not really anymore yeah like at least you know like magic the gathering fans are like doxing each other

at least like warhammer fans well the non-racist fascist ones are just like playing out their own Slaanesh punishment fantasies on Discord servers. Yeah. Okay, so I need to correct myself. The card was not called Race War. There was one called Invoke Prejudice, Jihad, Crusade, one

that used a slur for travelers. Invoke Prejudice. And that used a slur for travelers uh invoke prejudice and the online database for oh and the invoke prejudice card looked like it had a member of the kkk on it invoke prejudice is just what i play whenever i have to deal with customers some customer support in britain it's just like i do not want to talk to english people right now please give me a really nice indian person who is like who will solve my problem in like 90 seconds versus like an english person from hull who's gonna send me you know on 15 different side quests to unlock the like content filter on my phone i should also point out that the official online database of magic the gatherings cards like the database they put all their

cards on that you can look at, ended with the URL of 1488. I'm laughing because this is fucking ridiculous. I'm learning this along with everybody else. The Invoke Prejudice card looked like a member of the KKK holding a battle axe.

Surprisingly, however, it's a blue card and like a member of the kkk holding a battle axe um surprisingly however it's a blue card not a white card um but yeah this is the company that employed the uh the pinkertons like four months ago like i i i've never played magic i just know that there is like a very popular perception of people who play magic are very smelly in the same way that people who play that perception is true and like as someone who frequented magic the gathering tournaments when i was much younger and know people who still do it is not uncommon for magic the gathering tournaments to put like email people who buy tickets to go to them to remind them to wash themselves beforehand it's like going to smash tournaments yeah i mean it's like going to sci-fi conventions which i have been to as an author and a fan um yeah it's like in terms of like the ranking of who is the worst

smelling fan base is it you know warhammer gathering by far i would argue it's probably smash players but like it's like smash players that area is foreign to me i actually don't know so if if you're if you're a competitive smash fleet smash fleet uh or play warhammer 40k right into the show tell us how smelly your areas are gonna rebrand fucking a lot to being a smash lead smash lead i really hope i'm not the first person because it's very stupid anyway the pinkertons yeah the pinkertons uh they were recently employed by wizards of the coast to fucking raid a guy's house who had from my understanding completely legal magic to gather like he

had they had mailed him or mistakenly mailed him or something cards that weren't released yet and they sent the fucking Pinkertons to his house and I should remind people the Pinkertons are mostly known for machine gunning unarmed civilians during the 1800s

Arthur Morgan just shows up the door and is like are mostly known for machine gunning unarmed civilians during the 1800s. Arthur Morgan just shows up to the door and is like, What? What do you mean I got a card? What? You trying to take my Black Lotus? Now, before we get to the point of the Pinkertons invading a small town of Pennsylvania via a river, we have to talk about how we got to this point. And of course, that brings us to one, Andrew Carnegie. Now, we could just say Andrew Carnegie happened and then move on, but it can't quite be that simple. And like, I know the Carnegie's are we're very, very wealthy.

I love the joke is like, how do you get to Carnegie Hall practice? practice now like carnegie has is i think the first american example of like reputation laundering because nowadays he's mostly donating a ton of money to arts music even labor movements um but you should also know that that came with one hell of a fucking body count and a man desperately not trying to go to hell as he died so for a large I would say he should fairly be remembered as a fucking asshole he played the Jeff Bezos

gambas he's like the Sackler family before the Sackler family like the Carnegie Hall Carnegie Universities, Carnegie Colleges are everywhere. So people like remember him as this rich man who gave up

so much of his wealth for these institutions when he was a cutthroat fucking oligarch during the Gilded Age. He was quite literally the richest man in the world at some point. Yeah, so now he's spending eternity being dick punched by beelzebub one could only hope now by the 1880s carnegie steel was by far one of the largest companies in the united states and pretty much

owned a blank check on the american economy they pretty much made every kind of steel anyone would use, but specifically the U.S. Navy, who used their steel, and only their steel, for armored plating and structural beams. And they were worried they might sell it to someone else, made massive amounts of money on wildly inflated government military contracts, which is thankfully no longer a thing that happens in the United States at all. Of course, as this happened, factories expanded and more workers were brought in chasing those sick factory paychecks, which worked good. Only to see their wages plummet as Carnegie made record profits. The factory workers were union men, being members of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, shortened to AA.

Not that AA, though they probably would be members of that AA as well, being factory workers in the 1800s. They drank at levels no longer known by human beings. When you have guessed it, this was not an easy process, and this resulted in strikes and street fights in the early 1880s. The AA negotiated contracts for workers nationwide and in 1881 carnegie attempted to force workers to sign what was known as a yellow dog contract this meant it was effectively a union contract locking them into their current benefits but part of the agreement was they could not be a part of that labor union oh fuck off once again right time is a flat circle. Some things never change. Yep. This failed, and soon the AA was allowed to start unionizing workers in the

homestead Pennsylvania plant of Carnegie Steel. That did not mean, however, Carnegie and his factory manager, arguably a man even more evil than Carnegie himself, Henry Frick, were going to take that lying down. Carnegie believed that unions themselves hindered efficiency and called them, quote, an elitist, discriminatory organization not worthy of the American Republic. Now, I should point out, part of that is actually true. Unions at this point were racist as fuck. I will say that outright. I mean, like, to be fair.

But they were as racist as the american public yeah i was about to say everyone was racist at this time yeah i'm not arguing that uh because you know if i don't point out that they were truly deeply discriminatory i would be remiss though they were not any more racist than anyone else and much less racist than andrew carnegie yeah yeah you know that that's a that's a yardstick that's a mile long yeah and not to mention literally the richest man in the entire world calling a steel union elitist is quite hilarious once again some things never change i mean okay caveat on that. Carnegie was not the richest man in the world yet. That was still John Rockefeller, though Carnegie would surpass him in like 11 years in 1901.

So he's close. Yeah, J.D. Rockefeller's getting slobbed on in some tower in New York, and Carnegie's there trying to fight with steel workers. Literally having eyes wide shut parties. Yeah, but like this thing of like oh like workers fighting for their rights being cast as elitist is like it's just a divide and conquer tactic that is like of course it is yeah it's you still see it like like dickheads like tucker carlson saying like teachers fighting for you know better pay or once again give me fucking i was a union teacher and the fact that like people think

teachers unions are these overpaid elitist power grabbers is fucking hilarious because the first thing that happens every time a state shits its own budget out of its ass is teachers lose their jobs like me not cops not fucking government workers, teachers. Every fucking time. Instead, after I got laid off, losing all of my benefits, the cops in Honolulu, where I worked, all got a 12% raise from COVID money. Do you know what? Listen, if maybe we funded the education system more, we would need less cops because none of them are able to fucking read so it takes 15 of them to fill out

paperwork like but like it is the thing of like it's to divide other working class people against each other like like even now there are coal workers in Appalachia like fighting for insurance

payouts for black lung That happened in the past five years. If you want to hear more, shout out to Kim Kelly, look up Fight Like Hell. You can read all about it there. Yeah, I highly recommend it. Now, Frick was Carnegie's second in command, and there might be some people, maybe our fans of the Well, There's Your Problem podcast or other people interested in weird bits of American history, Henry Frick's name might sound familiar to you. This is because he'd go on to be partially responsible for the catastrophic Johnstown flood because his country club had built a shitty dam to block off a river so they could have their own personal lake.

The flood killed 2,000 people. I am... It's just cartoonishly, a fucking country club killed 2,000 people because they wanted their own yachting lake. We should f*** these people, both then and still now. Unfortunately, that... Beep! Yes, I am turning into Ted Kaczynski.

The leftist kind of Ted Kaczynski, not the race war Ted Kaczynski. Yeah, a lot of people don't know that part about him. Yeah, please. Let's actually talk about the Unabomber for a second. Do we have to? Yes, we do. So if you were a leftist and you were saying like oh

ted kaczynski was so right literally read anything more than the first seven pages of his manifesto or nobody's done that other than his brother who turned him into the fbi yeah like listen imagine writing shit so bad that your own brother turns you into the cops like imagine writing in such a psychotic way that your brother knew who you were based on your manifesto yeah there is this thing called eco-fascism maybe look it up yeah he was definitely an eco-fascist he he really hated himself some black and jewish folks and women he really hated women as well yeah turns out turns out the guy who constructs bombs in his weird fucking log cabin in the middle of nowhere not a good guy yeah not a good guy yeah i know hot takes all around today

i'm the ted kaczynski of podcasting because i am recording this in a remote shack in the middle of nowhere that means i'm going to be uniquely suspicious of anything you mail me from now yeah don't use those elf bars I'm bringing to you in October now Carnegie put Frick in charge of strangling the AA out of existence the perfect time for this came in 1892

because the AA's labor contract was expiring and they had no intention of signing another one with the union if they could fucking help it. So, Carnegie ordered Frick to have the factory pump out as much armor plating for the Navy as they possibly could before the contract expired. And if the union refused to back down to Frick's demands, which were 22% wage cuts and was effectively a right-to-work deal that would all but kill the union, he was then to shut the factory down for as long as it was needed until the workers

left the union and came back to work. This isn't the first time either of them had done this, and all of the other occasions, it worked. It turned out, however, the workers of Homestead were not going to put up with this shit one bit. Instead of backing down, the workers of homestead were not gonna put up with this shit one bit instead of backing down the workers started hanging freaking effigy in the middle of the factory and setting him on fire that that's what i do at home with my effigy of joe it's just like that's fair enough it's fire resistant so i can set it on fire so i don't have to keep making one like every time i set it on fire it's the only effigy keep making one every time I set it on fire. It's the only effigy that smells like burnt hair all the time.

Yeah, this is the problem with the effigy industry. It is not a renewable product. They're not very green, because you burn the effigy, you have to make a new one every time. This is why I'm bringing eco-effigy to your door. If you want to buy effigies of your boss or people you hate and burn them in the comfort

of your own home and have it in a reusable, sustainable manner, look up eco effigy dot com. And I'm unionizing the eco effigy workers. Oh, no. Tom is building a pleasure yacht lake near my apartment. I'm I'm mailing you envelopes full of cyanide. During the negotiations, the AA

had backed down on pretty much all of its points. They'd agreed to a wage slash. They agreed to a vacation slash, which this is the 1890s. Vacation was you get a lunch break. Now, the one thing they wouldn't do is agree to the right toto-work... It was effectively

a right-to-work contract that said, you got all of the same benefits from the union if you were not a member of the union and you did not have to pay union dues out of your paycheck. It would have killed the AA. So that was the only thing that the AA did not agree to. And since he had their back against the wall, agreeing to all these cuts left and right, Frick was now straight up demanding the disillusion of the AA within the Homestead plant, which is kind of wild here. Okay. The AA had not unionized the entire factory. In fact, a massive minority of the workers in the factory were members of the union. Only 800 out of 3,800 workers were union men. Isn't a massive minority kind of an oxymoron?

I mean, it's a minority of a minority, I guess. Shut up. With their contract expiring on June 30th, 1892, Frick decided five days before that he would no longer negotiate with the union. Workers were then locked out of the armor plate mill and one of the other steel furnaces, with the rest of the plant being locked down the next day. He also built a three-mile-long fence, which was 12 miles high, around the factory and topped it with barbed wire before adding peepholes for rifles he after that he built sniper towers next to each mill and installed a high pressure water hose that had

been modified to spray boiling hot furnace liquid first of all ow and second of all like how quickly can you build a three mile fence i mean if you use scabs probably pretty fast. Yeah fuck scabs like fuck scabs in every industry you podcast scabs when the strike is coming I see you. Yeah like sniper towers like imagine being hit with one of those hoses though. Jesus.

Yeah the workers nicknamed it Fort Frick. This just makes me think of that tweet about Star Wars fans. It's like, oh my god, it's Glorp Shitto. So Glorp Shitto is building a three-mile fence.

Now, folks, this is what we call foreshadowing. Now locked out of the entire steel mill, Frick had seriously fucked up. Remember, only that fraction of the workers were union men, but a full 3,000 of the workers, all but 800, met up at a nearby tavern and decided to go on strike. He had pissed off the workers so much, the non-union guys were like, yeah, fuck them. Now, the workers knew what was coming next. A tried and true tactic to break the back of many strikes. And, you know, back then and today. Frick planned to completely ignore the strike,

reopen the plant, and staff it entirely with scabs. Now, for people who are unaware, scab is a nickname given to a strike breaker. They're a non-union worker brought in by bosses to cross picket lines and take the jobs of those on strike, normally for less pay and no benefits. The workers were just not going to let that happen. They would not let the scabs in the factory. So Frick reached out to the local sheriff, a guy named William McCleary, and asked him to intervene and open a path for the scabs to make it into the plant. The sheriff sent a couple deputies, like maybe 20 guys, marched into town

and nailed up posters ordering the strikers to stop intervening with the plant's operation and allow the scabs to go inside. The workers showed up, tore the posters down, and told the cops to get the fuck out of town because they're not welcome there anymore. Hell yeah. They forced the cops to walk down to the river's edge, loaded them up on a boat,

and kicked their asses downriver towards Pittsburgh. I just love it this time. He was like, get in the boat, I'm gonna fucking blow your brains out, you're going to Pittsburgh. Because, like, remember, this is an area where you could go by, like, a repeating rifle at the hardware store. Like, everybody is armed to the teeth. I mean, like, you know, some things, once again, never change.

But, like, let's take a moment to talk about scabs, picket lines, and strike breaking, everyone. This is Tom's Labor History Corner. everyone uh this is this tom's labor history corner um so recently uh as in like early this year and last year there was a series of rmt strikes that is the rail union for the uk i experienced those when i was in the uk actually yeah so there's also an ambulance strike which as a former ambulance worker i am a massive fan of because it is illegal for us to strike in the united states yeah so the function of those of a withdrawal of service or a complete shutdown strike is in order to because services like public transport if they shut off that equals companies lose money the government cares about companies making money money makes everything go around and those

are not necessarily like pickets and strikes that you can cross the picket line because you can use other alternative public services that aren't on strike but if it is in the case of a service or a business that has striking workers don't cross the picket line i don't care if you can only eat cinnamon toast crunch for breakfast lunch and dinner you can go without it you can eat carrots it's it's uh we'd like to apologize for that to that particular person for dying horrifically of scurvy at some point of their life yeah like i i saw a lot with the we all saw that bullshit yeah but like the starbucks unionization strike um with amazon with like a lot of other kind of services we're seeing with the wga and sag after after right now and striking uh media properties

essentially and like i saw a lot of people with the Starbucks things, I used to work in a coffee shop, so I understand. And like their situation is a lot worse than mine because they're simply by being in the US. And it's like, do you know what? Go to an independent coffee shop, or better yet, make your own coffee for a couple of weeks.

You know, these people are fighting for their living. You're just arguing for your daily coffee it it is especially in the united states there's benefits and i say this as someone who no longer lives there but was a member of several unions when i did live in the united states many of the benefits that people enjoy who are not union in the u.s weekends off holidays off overtime pay those are all the the product of union people literally fighting and dying for it so show some fucking respect yep like people fought for your rights to go get drunk on a saturday and it is your fucking right it's your obligation to one go do it and to respect them respect the history respect people who are fighting for the workers rights of the future because right now they're trying to take

all those rights back from you yeah yep i grew up in i grew up in a proudly united auto workers home uh household and family so i was raised uh to be supportive of unions. Yeah, you're from Michigan, of course. Yeah, fucking right. It's the one good thing our state ever did. And then it was melted away slowly, death by a thousand cuts between bad governance, shitty leadership in the auto industry, and right to work laws, which thankfully either are being repealed or already have been repealed in Michigan. Like it's the only reason why my family can even survive now is union

pensions. And if you cross a picket line or you're scabbed, fuck you. We don't want your money. Dying a puddle. If you know, you know now. Um, so yeah yeah the cops get kicked down the river to fucking pittsburgh which rules and at this point it's important to point out that the mayor of homestead himself is a union man as are like you know there's union families and then not to mention these scabs coming in carnegie frick they're all outsiders to these towns this town. So the people who are not union, have nothing to do with the union, are now all supporting the strike. Thousands upon thousands of people are like, yeah, fuck Carnegie, fuck this factory. These guys all live here. And not to mention the practicality of it, their wages get slashed.

It directly impacts the economy of Homestead. So, to the workers, if Frick was going to close the plant, which he did, the workers were going to make goddamn sure it stayed that way and closed for everyone. And this is where they form a militia. Picket lines march back and

forth in front of the plant, and other workers organize themselves into paramilitary units, patrolling the nearby ferries, rail lines, and towns looking for any incoming scabs or cops or outsiders and chasing them off at gunpoint should they appear. Are you a member

of the provisional WGA or the continuity WGA? Then they secured a fucking strike navy. This included a steam powered river launch and several rowboats, which were manned around the clock, and if any of the workers' patrols, staffed by men who were born and raised in the area, came across any strangers who had no good reason to be there, they were escorted to the edge of town and politely invited to fuck off or get their ass kicked.

I suppose that kind of makes sense, though, because that's how they're're transporting all this steel as it's brought to the river and then loaded up and then shipped off yeah it's a lifeline to the factory so they they did a blockade because like the like i suppose these factories are probably running on like a mixture of like hydroelectric and like coal uh probably mostly coal for the blast furnaces but they use the they use the river for transport cooling any kind of water you need for the factory they absolutely need the river to be open fair fair okay okay they were incredibly thorough in their organization to the point they made sure to secure the local telegraph stations where they could remain in contact with other members of the AA outside of town.

They also had spies intercept the company telegrams so they could monitor the company's attempts to hire more scabs from abroad and their movements through the rail lines in the river. They invented a strike intelligence network on the fly. Fucking steel worker signal intel shit rules. They have better intel in recon than many of the actual invasion forces we have covered on the show once again time is a flat circle union organizers are

communicating via telegram once again yep workers all but controlled the entire town and even formed a kind of shadow government even though the real government was overwhelmingly supportive. Now, they didn't take the town's governance order over, but they did kind of fill in the gaps. They issued their own press credentials so journalists could get into striking groups. They ran soup kitchens and pop-up housing. And knowing so many dudes who were not working, they were bored breeds problems. So they put strict rules in place for local bars, forbidding them to serve any more than a few beers per day to any single man. They're like, this is going to end badly. But like everybody's drunk and has guns.

Please don't give them alcohol. But they fundamentally understand that the biggest tensions in doing something like that are people being hungry, people being unhoused, people being idle. So what are they going to do? Can't go to work. Might have a drink. People getting too drunk. Whatever. communication because if you're striking and fighting against someone like Glorp Shido who has like probably has good contacts with

the press if you're you know controlling the flow of information from your side you're on a winning strategy yep yep they effectively created an armed commune overnight yeah see what was the anarchist yoke in fucking seattle from a couple years ago

the like autonomous zone thing the less the less spoken of chas the better now none of this slowed frick down he still assumed that he would have to give up at some point probably not aware of how much support the strikers had from the town of Homestead itself, virtually the entire town of Homestead. He carpeted the nation's newspapers with ads for more scabs and kept sending them toward the town, hoping that through sheer attrition of scabs, they would eventually get into the factory,

but they never did. He's using like the World War Z tactic is like if you pile enough of them against the wall, so the rest of them will be able to climb up the corpse's corpse infrastructure yep so scab wall in many cases he put ads in newspapers as far away as Europe

luring people in with the promises of high wages though they would be cut as soon as you showed up to work knowing since they had traveled so far they would almost still certainly take the job though Frick was starting to get pissed that his local muscle wasn't working out and his scabs still weren't making it into the plant. So Frick did what every monster industrialist did in the 1800s when confronted by workers

who demand that little bit of fucking dignity. He hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Now, we went over the Pinkertons a little bit as how it pertains to modern day, but the Pinkertons were already something of a known quantity as the arch villain of the American Gilded Age. They were effectively a private military company meets law enforcement agency started in 1850 by Alan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant. Pinkerton had started his career in the US with the Chicago Police Department, surprise, surprise,

before starting his company and earning his reputation first by investigating train robberies before working as a spy network kind of for hire for the Union Army during the US Civil War. So it is 1800s Black Rock then. It's like 1800s Wagner

because like... Frontier Eugenie Pergoton. black rock then it's like 1800s wagner because like because i wear you get any precaution hit the finest hot dogs nebraska i see i have to i have to find dutch vandalin i must return them to medvedev because like i would call them you know blackwater or any of these other companies but like as disgusting as blackwater and likeynCorp and Sandline International are, I'm not saying this as a gotta give it to them, but they would hire veteran special forces guys generally. It was a high level for entry. The Pinkertons would hire people straight out of prison

because they were only hiring them for their capacity of violence. I say, I say, can I have your finest bowl of borscht? Like there was like actual detectives who did the actual hired detective work. But then they had their, again, much like Wagner, they have their actual skilled professionals, many of whom are far away from the Ukraine war in Africa because they know that they can't use them like that. But like, then they have their strike breaking, which they just hire goons are like,

you look like you've killed a guy you're hired. Yeah. Goons. Yeah. Yeah. The flat nose geezers. Yeah. Now after this time,

uh, after they were known as like a spy network for the union, they'd become known for being hired by any asshole with a paycheck large enough to brutalize workers, break strikes, and shoot unarmed picketers. revolution in 1872 which was a slave revolt which is kind of ironic because alan pinkerton is incorrectly remembered as being anti-slavery he was very pro-slavery as long as you paid him to be he was a fucking mercenary yeah this is the thing with pmcs you know they'll they'll believe whatever you paid them to believe yeah exactly like in personal life, he could have been an abolitionist and a lot of his writings around the time of the US of war were explicitly abolitionist.

But how he makes his money, he doesn't care. So is he really an abolitionist if he's putting in a Cuban slave revolt for the fucking Spanish crown? I would argue no. Yeah. Now Frick

hired 300 Pinkertons all armed with Winchester repeating rifles to go and finally open the factory. Now, these guys were not cops. Not even in the 1800s definition of the term cop, which mostly boiled down to a violent Irish guy.

People on horseback catching escaped slaves. Yes. I mean, that is the origin of the American policing. Most of them were bandits, cutthroats, and local tough guys, or some random people who answered a newspaper ad. They had no training and hadn't even been told exactly what it is they were going to do at the factory. They were simply told to get in a boat and leave. were going to do at the factory.

They were simply told to get in a boat and leave. They were paid the princely sum of $2.50 per day, which is the equivalent of about $85 today. It's not bad. Though since the strikers were so clearly in control of the entire town,

the Pinkertons would have to approach via the river that ran alongside the plant property. The hundreds of Pinkertons were loaded into river barges, which were have to approach via the river that ran alongside the plant property. The hundreds of Pinkertons were loaded into river barges, which were then towed down the river by tugboats because the barges could not move on their own. The barges were completely like they were halfway covered. They kind of had an open top, but there was walls. The workers had posted lookouts on the river and saw them coming at around 3 a.m. on July 6th, on the river and saw them coming at around 3 a.m. on July 6, 1892. Now, the Pinkertons insist that the steelworkers immediately fired at them, but according to the steelworkers, because they kind

of knew that this was like a Pinkerton thing, they fired warning shots into the air to tell them to fuck off. There's no evidence that they actually shot at the barges yet. A relay system of messengers jumped on horseback and rode into town like a fucking striking pony express to warn the people that the pinkertons were coming and the pinkertons had no idea what they were floating into at this point not only striking workers left their home to come to the riverbed but the entire town got out of their beds, grabbed whatever weapon they had firearms, knives

a spear and walked over to the river's edge to see what was going on. Getting gall in the head with a spear by Huckleberry Finn. As the barges pulled up the river, the Pinkertons were greeted by thousands of people on either side telling them to fuck

off and go home if they valued their lives to not step off the barges and try to enter town. Jesus. This is getting good now. The Pinkertons, in their brilliance, ignored them and landed their barges near the plant

and began to step off. They were greeted by a hail of rocks. Kids, adults alike, just started pelting them with stones. And nobody's exactly sure what happened next, but somebody opened fire and we don't know who. According to John McCurry, one of the tugboat captains, the workers fired first, and the Pinkertons responded when several of them were wounded. According to a New York Times investigation,

the Pinkertons shot first, saying a Pinkerton man opened fire and wounded William Foy, one of the strikers. Regardless of whatever happened, fuck them Pinkertons is what we're trying to say. After this,

the Pinkertons retreated to the barges under a hail of gunfire. Now, the Pinkertons also returned fire with the repeating rifles, not even aiming, just pumping rounds

into the crowd, killing two and wounding 12 people. The workers retreated behind a pile of scrap metal as McCurry, the tugboat captain, unhooked the Pinkerton barges

from his tugboat and bailed the fuck out, leaving them in the middle of the river. Then it's just pot shots now. As the Pinkertons began to cut holes in the side of their barges to create gun ports, the workers quickly began to construct scaffolding out of nearby scrap steel

so they could shoot down onto the hiding Pinkertons like someone in fucking Fortnite. What? Yep. You know, gotta love union ingenuity. As the men of the town began to shoot at the pinkertons with any weapon they had, the women gathered around to cheer the strikers,

telling them, quote, kill those goddamn pinkertons. Kill those goddamn Pinkertons. Oh, this is so cool. Now, remember, the barges cannot go anywhere. They're trapped in the middle of the river, and the Pinkertons are completely and totally pinned down inside the barges, unable to escape, as the workers fired on them from all sides with any weapon they had.

At one point, someone broke into the town museum and found a 20-pound cannon that had been used at the Civil War only a few decades prior. Then, obviously, they didn't have cannonballs, so they just loaded it with random bits of steel from the factory and just began to fire a homemade flechette into the barges now these these guys are steel workers not artillerists so they were kind of missing an awful lot but the pinkertons were hearing a cannon go off at this point yeah jesus like you're stuck on a essentially a raft in the middle of a river surrounded by thousands of people shooting at you and you hear a cannon go off I'm jumping out

A chorus of women cheering them on to murder you I'm jumping out, I'm going I'm doing you know like call of duty underwater swimming to get down as far as way, I'm like fuck that $2.50 a day Yeah, this is not worth that two dollars 50 not to garner sympathy for the pinkertons because i'm not but remember these guys had no idea what

they're going into or what they had signed up for but they found themselves trapped into a barge as thousands of people attempted to kill them now this quote comes from pbs as an american experience quote the noise they made on the shore was awful and it made us shake in our boots according to experience. for someone to give them a drink of water, but no one dared to get a drop, although there was water all around us. It was a wonder that we did not go crazy or commit suicide. Just surrender. You're probably the cop. We'll get to that point.

Let's just say the workers were not very empathetic to their plight. Yeah, I suppose. Though it's not like they had given up. The Pinkertons were returning fire, and at various points, small groups of them made for the shore, trying another landing attempt. Now, this is probably them trying to flee for their lives, but the workers at this point ramped up their tactics, trying to sink those goddamn barges once and for all.

They loaded a boat up with oil-soaked lengths of timber, lit it on fire, and kicked it down the river towards the Pinkerton barges. Now, this burning boat inched towards the Pinkerton barges, and they freaked out, knowing if it hit them, they were going to catch on fire and burn alive. One of the Pinkerton bosses threatened any man who tried to run with immediate execution. So,

one guy did jump overboard, and he drowned. So, whoops. R.I.P. bitch. Sucks to suck. Skill issue. Yeah, skill issue. Learn to swim. So they remained in the barges as the boat approached, but the workers were lacking on their siege warfare knowledge

since they were kind of learning on the fly and hadn't added enough oil. So the fire had burnt out and the boat ran into the side of the barge harmlessly. But the boat was just like slowly getting towards it, just like bounces off slightly. Yep. But they weren't done.

Workers climbed the scaffolding that they had built for rifle positions and began to throw lit sticks of dynamite down at them. I was about to say, did they figure out some kind of MacGyvered Greek fire? Hold on to that thought. Now, either because they had shitty arms or because the barges were just a little bit too far away, the dynamite didn't really hit the target. A lot of it just fell into the water and exploded. But one of them did land aboard one of the ships, one of the barges,

and blew a chunk out of one of them and gave everybody a concussion, which is is you know welcome to the club buddies still the workers were not done they reloaded a rail car up with drums of oil lit the whole fucking thing on fire took the brakes off and set it flying down the rails directly toward the river they hoped it would hit the water with enough force to explode and send a curtain of burning oil flying through the air and carpet the river in oil and light the barges on fire. Though, because it's not a cartoon, the rail car just crashed into the riverbank and exploded and burned itself to the ground.

Going back to the drawing board, the workers then decided to simply dump as much oil as they could find directly into the river hoping they would saturate enough to light the whole fucking thing on fire oh does it work no they didn't have enough oil so they sit there trying to light it and it's not working uh but with that they quit their wily wily coyote ass tactics and resorted back to simply shooting at them. As thousands of other people heard what happened and flooded the town with more support, people as far away from Pittsburgh came into Homestead

bringing rifles and dynamite with them so they could join in. Surely someone has a good enough arm to throw some dynamite onto the ship? Apparently not. Things had spiraled so wildly out of control

that the Union bosses at the AA's international branch reached out to Frick for emergency negotiations so nobody else would die, as the bodies were rapidly beginning to pile up. However, Frick still didn't give a fuck. He knew if the battle continued for much longer, the state's governor, Robert

Pattinson, no, not that one, would soon send in the National Guard on his side to end the conflict. Bella, where have you been, loca? was worried that since the strikers clearly commanded the loyalty of the entire town that if he sent in the National Guard he would kind of restart the US Civil War in his backyard and it would turn into an outright massacre. Yeah, that's the last

you don't need to send in the federales, you know. Yeah, instead of doing that, he told the local sheriff it's your town, raise your own goddamn men to handle the situation mind you the workers ad hoc militia now numbered close to 5 000 people oh unions rule so much we should do we should do this again get that dynamite now the aa president the international president of the union showed up in town it just had time to see the pinkertons run up a white flag trying to surrender the workers telling them to fuck off

and go to hell and then shooting at them anyway shooting the flag down they literally did three times after watching this process unfold on four different occasions the president begged the workers to allow the pinkertons to surrender. He noted correctly that, look guys, if we kill 300 Pinkertons, this would make the Union look bad. We would lose public support.

Pod PR. So finally, after 12 hours of battle, the workers allowed the Pinkertons to surrender, but they weren't done yet. As the Pinkertons filed off the barges under a white flag and threw their Winchester repeating rifles in a pile, thousands of men, women, and children lined the streets on either side of them and beat the shit out of them as they walked by. They formed a town-wide gauntlet for them to run.

by. They formed a town-wide gauntlet for them to run. You have to walk back past hundreds of people that are kicking you in the shins as you're trying to walk out of the town. Like men pistol-whipping you, kids punching you in the dick.

As they should. Quote, we were clubbed at every step, one Pinkerton recalled. Sticks, stones, and dirt were thrown at us. The women pulled us down, spat in our faces, and kicked us, and tore our clothing off while the crowd jeered and cheered. Then the townspeople, union men and non-union men alike, stormed the barges, eluded them, and burnt them to the river's bottom.

Somehow, this entire situation gets even weirder. Instead of marching the Pinkertons out of town, which was originally agreed upon, Hugh O'Donnell, the strike's leader, interned them in the town's opera house with the goal of using them for a POW exchange and charged them all with murder.

You're creating the fucking Pinkerton version of John McCain. Yep. Though this didn't happen, and instead the AA president, their lawyers, and local town officials, who, remember, were loyal to the Union cause, but realized acting as a base for a statewide

ransom was probably a bad move, loaded all the Pinkertons into a train and sent them towards Pittsburgh. Where, you know, everybody sends their trash. At the end of the battle, things still got weirder, namely because nobody is exactly sure how many Pinkertons died. According to William Pinkerton, three men died. Two were shot and a third killed themselves while the barges. According to the men who survived the battle, seven died. In another report,

According to the men who survived the battle, seven died. In another report, an agent died after diving off the barge and drowning. With the battle over, O'Donnell tried to convince the governor that, Hey, everything's cool in Homestead now. You got nothing to worry about. We're all back to just being strikers now. But the governor didn't believe him, seeing how he just had a town-wide uprising and sent the National Guard in to secure the town.

But, of course, most importantly, the steel plant. The Strikers didn't want to fight the National Guard. They had no beef with them, and instead of doing that, they did the opposite. They left the rifles at home and greeted the marching soldiers with a brass band, food, and drinks.

Hearts and minds, baby. It didn't work. Their commander, General George Snowden, no relation I assume, a Union Civil War general and veteran of such battles as Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, did not have time for

their shit. Yeah. It's like, oh man, they just had the hardest motherfucker in Pennsylvaniasylvania over here this dude is made out of nothing but wooden legs it's like the guy with four wooden legs from spongebob and his all of his insides have been replaced with fucking shrapnel he wasn't sent to keep the peace but rather to secure carnegie's property he told o'donnell quote i don't want any this brass bad business while i'm here i want you to distinctly understand that i am the master peace, but rather to secure Carnegie's property. He told O'Donnell, quote, I don't want any of this brass bad business while I'm here. I want you to distinctly understand that I am the master of the

situation. Martial law was immediately declared and the steel mill was taken over by the soldiers within 20 minutes. Company bosses were soon back in the mill and the combined force of 6,000 soldiers secured the town so they could bring in thousands of scabs, reopen the mill, and begin work once again within a few short weeks. Though not everything was easy for the soldiers, several strikers tried to break into the mill and stop it by restarting by throwing dynamite into the furnace. This broke down into hand-to-hand combat where soldiers bayoneted six people. Love to see it. Love to see it.

Love to see it. There was also a race war happening within the walls as the white scabs refused to work with the black scabs, resulting in still more bayoneting. The strike went on regardless. White Law Reed, a Republican vice presidential candidate and owner of the most Republican name of all time, tried to get Frick to restart negotiations with the AA. Frick refused despite everything. Public support was still very much still on the side of the strikers. Not to mention scabs kind of fucking suck at their job and Frick knew he would need to find the skilled union workers to go back to work while still doing what he set out to do, which was killing their power and allowing him to fuck up the workers. This probably would have worked out and the AA probably would

have eventually returned to work with a decent contract. But then some fucking asshole in New York ruined everything. As always. Alexander Berkman, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and influential member of the New York anarchist movement with absolutely no connection to the AA whatsoever, nor the strike or even the entire state of Pennsylvania, attempted to assassinate Frick in his New York offices. He barged in, shot Frick three times, and when that didn't work, stabbed him once more. Frick didn't die. How bad of a shot do you have to be to shoot someone three times with 1880s munitions and not kill them? Like point blank rage.

Yeah. And he stabbed him. And he stabbed him. Now rather than supporting his actions, a group of union men who were there for negotiation purposes barged into the office and beat Berkman half to death to turn him over to police. This completely imploded public support for the strikers and led to O'Donnell being voted out of his role. Other unions like the American Federation of Labor pulled their support from the strikers

and refused to boycott Carnegie products, all but making the AA strike pointless. As a strike wore on without support, the AA became bankrupt and strikers finally gave up and voted to return to work. The AA itself would never really recover with the union crushed Carnegie slashed wages, imposed 12 hour work days, eliminated 500 jobs and took away overtime pay. Frick and Carnegie were roundly hated for their roles in the battle but since they were titans of industry and fantastically wealthy they had enough money that reality and consequences simply bent around them nothing ever came from them or hurt them if there's one bright spot to come from all of this is that none of the workers were ever charged

for the role in a 12 hour long pitched gun, which at one point involved a cannon bombardment and killed multiple people. Something, anyway. Also, despite the public largely turning against the strikers, everyone, public and government alike, turned against the Pinkertons even more. Good. The Battle of Homestead was just another in a long line of brutal pitched battles

that this gang of assholes had found themselves in. And it wasn't even the first one. In the years after the battle, most of the states in the US passed laws that were specifically targeted at the Pinkertons, refusing to allow to hire them to act as a private army to solve labor disputes and strikes. This isn't a bright spot though. Instead, they would just use the National Guard, who ended up being ten times more deadly than the Pinkertons ever were. For instance, the Ludlow Massacre of Colorado in 1914. So, you know, there's really no bright spot here. The end.

Fuck Scabs. Fuck the Pinkertons. Union strong, baby. Yup. I thought it'd be fun. We haven't talked about anything stupid like this in a while. There were some people that were brought up on some charges

in connection to the battle, but they all were dropped. They realized we'd literally have to charge the entire town of Homestead and not to mention a healthy number of people that flooded in from Pittsburgh and all this other stuff.

Let's call this one a wash, boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, call your losses while you're ahead. Violence at a large enough scale you eventually get away with. I mean, as evidenced by this, not so much. I mean, how many thousands of people have been prosecuted

for January 6th so far? So, you know, the time for this kind of getting away with this kind of thing is unfortunately passed. I don't know if I should say unfortunately or fortunately, depending since we know who's committing the vast majority

of violence in the United States these days. So, Tom, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, donate to the show on Patreon.

You can ask us a question on Patreon or you can ask us on Discord or load it into a small river boat and kick it down the river towards Pittsburgh where none of us live and we will answer your question. Or alternatively

brand it into the forehead of a Pinkerton, float them down the river and I'll get it that way so today's question is what is your favorite weird assassination story successful or failed i mean obviously the shinzo abi one but with the device yeah like the doohickey rules um i like olaf palm was also a very interesting one it's like the only assassination of a head of state that nobody knows what the fuck happened. I'm not familiar with that. Maybe for a future episode.

Long story short, Olaf Palm, whose name I'm sure I'm pronouncing correctly, was the prime minister of Sweden and walked outside of his house one day and got gunned down. And it's never been solved. There's this weird... I think I've brought it up on the show before One day and got gunned down. And it's never been solved. Like there's, there's this weird,

I think I've brought it up on the show before. Cause it's like there, they have a sub, like a possible suspect. His name's like Stieg, Stieg Eggstrom. And he, cause like Olaf Palm is a very progressive head of state for instance uh like

there's a lot of conspiracy theories that like apartheid south africa had something to do with it because he uh palm was one of the people that was uh very vocally and uh globally anti-apartheid um but like if if my memory serves me correctly the guy they believe pulled the trigger died in a long time ago like 20 years ago or something like that so they have no idea if he actually did it or not um so everybody just kind of like oh yeah like my like obviously the shinzo abe one is like the first one that comes to mind getting got with the device like honestly I don't have like one that stands out

in my mind I much prefer theories around them like I find the whole like Woody Harrelson's dad assassinating a judge really funny and like yeah a lot of people don't know that his dad was literally a hitman and like his dad lot of people don't know that his dad was literally a hitman and like his

dad be like arguably being connected to the jfk assassination um like if we're going in that vein it's not necessarily assassinations and maybe this isn't adhering to the spirit of the question but like my favorite kind of unsolved thing is the broadband killers in Belgium. Like that is just. I've never even heard of that. Have you not? That sounds like something that you would. I mean, I do my best to forget that Belgium exists. Yeah.

So essentially it was in the like 70s and 80s. This like series of like robberies and like mass shootings that happened with like military precision that were like spaced out I think over the space of like 10 or 12 years I can't remember the exact time frame I don't know how but I know Gaddafi had something to do with this. No literally no one no one was ever caught and like because at the time

Belgium's police force wasn't federalised so a lot of people argued that this was like actually like gladio supported paramilitary action to get the belgian police force federalized but it's like it's it's super interesting i wouldn't do a series on it because it's like it's too complicated and you have to like spend 12 episodes explain explaining gladio but like that's kind of my it's not an assassination but

that gladio is one of those specters that people blame for a lot of shit without evidence um which like i'm not saying they didn't do a lot of fucked up shit they did especially in italy um but like it's it's it's the mk ultra of like of conspiracy theory in europe whereas like in reality mk ultra did quite a few fucked up things but was universally a failure when it came to all of its stated goals so they didn't really do anything um and like gladio kind of was too yeah i think it's like everyone's willingness to the call something a psyop right now but uh yeah like like broadband killers and like they're like connected to the like the mark dutro affair which was like this like pedophile ring yeah the belgium jeffrey epstein

but worse yeah so it's like that sort of stuff is like really fascinating to me because it's like actual deep state stuff but uh yeah there's also one that we covered very, very briefly, I believe, on our episode about the Battle of Jadaville, where the UN General Secretary was assassinated. His plane mysteriously fell out of the sky over the Congo. And it was like the weirdest connection of special, like everybody's connected to it, because he was against, the Soviet Union was connected to it at one point, MI everybody's connected to it because like he was against every like the soviet union is connected to it at one point mi6 is connected to it the belgians were

connected to it ca was connected to it and the thing is is like it seems like the belgians the french and the cia killed him but like literally anybody could have done it or like another one that i find and this will be the last one i find really interesting is it like the scurple affair where the dude poisoning yeah was they were just really interested in old churches like or is that the dude who was like murdered in his hotel room and then put inside of like a sports bag that was then padlocked from the outside and they said it was a suicide yeah no that was a different one uh the scurple poisoning was uh i believe two or three fs bay agents poisoned a man ended up poisoning i think his family his daughter yeah and they were very clearly caught on cctv

because they were in london or the uk in general which like every square inch is under cctv yeah yeah and uh they went back to russia and did uh an interview and said they were just there for tourism because they love the city's churches or that yeah it's just like come on man yeah eventually we will talk about the assassination of evgeny prokhorov but uh that that's in a couple years time i don't what you're talking about. Planes just do that sometimes. Especially planes in Russia. Anyway, Tom, thank you so much

for joining me here on a little bit of American labor history. You can use this space to plug your show. Listen to Beneath the Skin, the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. We've actually done an episode with

a labor journalist, Kim Kelly, about the early, well, late 19th, early 20th century freak show circuit in America and how that tied in with labor unions and labor rights and everything. So so you know

check it out we do a lot of cool other stuff um unionize the bearded woman that's what we want um yeah uh listen to that uh this is the only show that I do but if you like what we do here on the lines that by donkeys podcast you can donate to us on patreon you can find the link in the show notes and you know if you get five plus years of bonus content, Discord access, access to the History of Armenia side series that I do on my own, I occasionally bring guests on whenever our current reality gets a little bit too spicy as it seems to be once again.

And you get eBooks, you get audio books that I'm currently working on, you get stickers, you get locks of Tom's hair. That's why I'm growing it back. And if you like science fiction and military science fiction, you can find my books under the name Joe Kasabian anywhere it is that you buy your books, both digitally and physically. Until next time, light the river on fire, fuck the Pinkertons.