Damming Memoryįor over four decades following the Homestead Strike, long after Carnegie’s mill became part of “The Corporation,” as US Steel was known, the Homestead works remained an open shop. One of these moments, the Great Depression, is the focus of this essay, which intends to set the stage for discussion of why labor’s great defeat has loomed so large in working class cultural memory. At several moments - for instance, during the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and early 1940s, and again during the fight against the shutdowns in the 1970s and 1980s - collective public memory of the Homestead Strike of 1892 has informed and motivated labor activism. Of particular importance here is the role the Strike has played in working class activist culture. The exceptional case of Homestead, moreover, exposed weaknesses in the anarchist movement of the nineteenth century and signaled the decline of the ideology of labor republicanism, opening the door for the emergence of the pure and simple business unionism of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the social movement industrial syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the political activities of the Socialist Party. This dramatic course of events in 1892 showed that even the mightiest craft union could be smashed by the combined power of a determined employer and a compliant state. Despite the extraordinary support of the local community and some solidarity from the labor movement at large, in Homestead the power of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (also known as “the Amalgamated”) was destroyed by Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Pennsylvania militia, thus transforming a union town into a company-controlled town. The Homestead Lockout and Strike of 1892 is among the most significant and well-remembered labor actions in history. Accepting the premise that the hegemonic bloc must from time to time resort to arms in order to enforce the economic laws of capital accumulation, via a narrative of the labor movement’s commemoration of one such event I will suggest that public collective memory of these exceptional moments of overt violence can play a role in the maintenance, reconstitution, or overthrow of a hegemonic regime. This essay is about the significance of extra-economic compulsion and the memory of it - in particular, the collective public memory of employer and state violence - in working class culture, social movements, and politics. This essay is about one of these exceptional cases, the Homestead Lockout and Strike of 1892. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. … The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance.

Homestead strike