Just before he left for Europe, Carnegie advised the head of the Homestead plant Henry Clay Frick to call for a reduction of wages by 25 percent and an end to union recognition. Frick followed this advice and handed the committee representing the company union (to which only about 800 of the 3,800 workers belonged) the new contract "proposal," offering no explanation for the changes. The union rejected the proposal, and in response Frick erected a wall around the Homestead plant and locked out the workers before they could attempt to strike. Violence ensued when Frick hired Pinkerton detectives to clear the way for strikebreakers, many of whom were forced and locked into trains, unaware of their destination nor of the strike. Eventually the Pennsylvania militia took over the town, cleared the way for strikebreakers, and forced the workers to agree to Frick's and Carnegie's terms. As a result, unionism would die in steel plants throughout the region, workers would have virtually no say in their conditions or wages, and while the company's profits soared, the common laborer was reduced to a state of semi-slavery.8
While there is ample evidence that Carnegie was fully complicit in how the Homestead incident was handled (he himself wrote: "The handling of this case on the part of the company has my full approval and sanction."), some paint Carnegie to be more a victim of his workers. "Carnegie himself was astounded, shocked, and hurt," Paul Johnson writes, for instance, "by the apparent willingness of his men to [walk] out. He thought he paid good wages and that conditions at Homestead...were as good as they could ever be in such a horrific and dangerous trade as steel-making."9 Perhaps Carnegie was indeed shocked, like a stunned father over learning of his son being unappreciative of his disciplined upbringing. But this possibility does not excuse the poor handling of this event nor the payment of poverty wages to the great majority of his workers, on whose backs he earned much of his fortune.
And so the question of how one should treat Andrew Carnegie and those like him arises. Glossing over most or all of Carnegie's faults like in Johnson's narrative or in high school texts such as Daniel Boorstin's A History of the United States (not one negative word about Carnegie in his short biography, or about Rockefeller or Morgan for that matter) is at the very least an unconscious historical bias, at the most a blatant attempt to omit the class struggles from America's story and to preserve the tradition of hero-making in American story-telling. In either case, the result remains the same: an incomplete, misleading account. But nor would it be ethical to only describe Carnegie's downside while omitting his contributions, particularly if the writer is operating under the guise of impartiality, like so many historians fruitlessly attempt to do.
