The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel by Paul Krause (review)

156 Canadian Review of American Studies Victorian America and the Civil War-and do not omit reading the footnotes !-provides an excellent introduction into several facets of nineteenthcentury American society, and each chapter merits much further study. Rose shows how public events, like the Civil War, impacted the long-term trends within her select group, but there remains the reverse question: did societal evolution influence the public events? It can be argued that the diverging societal evolutions in the north and south were a cause of the Civil War. Victory for northerners thus affirmed their long-term societal/political trends, while defeat forced reevaluation and a new direction on southerners. For northerners, the long-term trends impacted the public events, but for southerners the reverse was true. Rose's ideas are interesting and offer challenges for future research, but research which must include all Americans and not just a select group. Donald Alcock University of Calgary Paul Krause. The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. Pp. xiv + 548 and illustrations. Scholars have long regarded the 1892 Homestead lockout as a turning point in the history of American workers. In one fell swoop it shattered the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AAISW), then the nation's most powerful craft union; it marked unambiguously the limitations of middle-class philanthropy, as exercised by Homestead entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie; and in the intervention of 8,500 national guardsman to retake the mill after the Pinkerton's debacle of 6 July, it confirmed the alliance of state and business in the post-civil war republic. In its basic outline, then, the battle for Homestead is well known and has been told often by historians such as David Brody, David Montgomery, and Melvyn Dubofsky. Yet, as Paul Krause points out in this volume, these scholars depend in large part on Alfred G. Burgoyne's 1893 account of the lockout, and place most emphasis on the clash between labour and capital over wages and union recognition. In doing so, they fail, Krause argues, either to tell the full story or to situate the events of 1892 in their broader political and cultural context. The fight for Homestead was, both in actuality Book Rev1eu1s 157 and symbolically, far more than a mere struggle for union gains: "It is about the endless conflict between the pursuit of private interest and the defense of the common good. It is about the right of individuals to accumulate unlimited wealth and privilege versus the right of individuals to enjoy security in their jobs and dignity in their homes 11 (5-6). Accordingly, Krause's organizing principle in Battle forHomestead is nothing less than the struggle between two competing, contradictory, and irreconcilable versions of American Republicanism. One the one hand is that represented here by Carnegie himself, the belief in the sanctity of property and the right to accumulate capital and wealth. On the other hand is the version personified by labour reformer Thomas 'Beeswax' Taylor, which saw in the ideology of republicanism the guarantee of an individual's right to dignity and security. At its most radical, this interpretation of republicanism viewed labour as the inalienable property of the individual worker, and thus stood full-square opposed to the newly emerging industrial-capitalist order of the post-civil war era. Anyone familiar with the work of, say, Sean Wilentz and David Montgomery , will recognize much in this approach to nineteenth-century workingclass ideology. Yet Krause's portrayal of events in Homestead stands on its own merits. In massive and meticulous detail, Krause traces the technological and managerial innovations which transformed the steel industry from the 1860's through to the 1880's, changes which threatened the traditional status of thousands of craft workers. He carefully records both organizational (ie. AAISW, Knights of Labor) and personal (ie. Carnegie, Taylor) reactions to these developments, avoiding any simple deterministic explanations. Of particular value is Krause's emphasis on the part played by Pittsburgh political machine bosses, such as Chris Magee. Against this wide-ranging backdrop stands Krause's nuanced readings of the events of 6 July, when steelworkers and Pinkerton agents fought...