In 1892 Andrew Carnegie created the Carnegie Steel Company Ltd. It
included the Edgar Thomson, Duquesne, and Homestead mills and was
the largest steel company in the world. That summer, Carnegie and
Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie's partner and manager of the mills, deter-
mined to rid the Homestead mill of the Amalgamated Association of
Iron & Steel Workers, then the strongest union in the country. The
technology of steel production had advanced to a point that made
reliance on the skilled craft workers that composed the Amalgamated
Association no longer necessary. Carnegie and Frick were determined to
use this technological change to their advantage in reshaping both
production and social relations in the Monongahela Valley.

The Homestead strike was long and bitter, climaxed by a major gun
battle on July 6 that left sixteen dead and scores of others injured. Strikers
held firm until late November, when cold weather and hunger delivered
victory to Carnegie and Frick and destroyed the Amalgamated Associa-
tion.

Alexander Berkman was an anarchist sympathetic to but not directly
involved with the strikers. On July 23, 1892, shortly after the bloody
battle of Homestead, he entered Frick's office and fired at him with a
pistol at close range. However, Berkman's poor aim deprived us of an
adequate test of whether the Pittsburgh elite of that era was compact
enough to have been deterred from its goals by removing one key actor.

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