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Working-Class Muscle:
Homestead and Bodily Disorder in the Gilded Age
Edward Slavishak, Susquehanna University
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"They are having a very searious [sic] riot at Homestead. There is a great many killed and wounded on both sides and it will continue until the state troops put it down." In his diary entry from the evening of July 6, 1892, Robert Cornell recorded the news of violence that had occurred earlier that day in Homestead, a mill town six miles upriver from Pittsburgh and home to the Carnegie Steel Company's massive works. Even without the avalanche of details that would emerge throughout 1892 and 1893 in the regional and national press, Pittsburghers like Cornell placed immediate emphasis on the events at Homestead. The former coal worker offered two ways to capture the day's meaning—as a breakdown of civic order and as a tally of the damage done to bodies. By describing the clash between steelworkers and employees of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency as a riot that would cease only when National Guard troops enforced order, Cornell assumed that workers had broken free of the constraints that normally held them in check. Industrial discipline, craft pride, and regular wages no longer channeled the power of Homestead's 3,800 workers into the production of steel. Instead, workers now exhibited that power on the streets through acts of violent unity. Furthermore, in noting the physical toll of the day's fighting, Cornell situated July 6, 1892 as a day of battling bodies that could be understood in terms of injury and death. Combined, Cornell's pair of explanations represented a striking interpretation of the meaning of Homestead, one that was echoed throughout the nation in the establishment press.1
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The Homestead steel lockout claims a powerful place in the history of American labor. Historians have viewed the lockout as a contest over definitions of rights and responsibilities, a stunning setback for a dominant labor union, and a triumph of employers over workers in the Gilded Age. Paul Krause has called the story of Homestead a "quasi-mythical epic" that became entrenched in American folklore through images of riot and bloodshed. Placing the lockout at Cornell's intersection of chaos and physiques emphasizes two themes that are central to the historiography of late nineteenth-century industrial labor: immigration and industrial masculinity.2
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First, studies of turn-of-the-century immigration to American industrial cities have stressed the mix of nativism and Progressive science that shaped a perception of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as an invading horde. Dale Knobel and Matthew Frye Jacobson have examined nativist writers' and lawmakers' equation of immigrants' appearance with their supposed inability to function in the American political and economic system. Such physiognomic scrutiny worked to classify both individual subjects encountered directly in daily life and masses of immigrants glimpsed in newspaper articles, magazine editorials, and census reports. Jacobson, especially, saw "moments of violence and civic unrest" such as riots and lynchings as a key opportunity for nativist marginalization of immigrants. Civic crises allowed journalists and politicians to establish a correlation between ethnic diversity and disorder. Moreover, historians of science and public health in the late nineteenth century have found a similar sense of alarm about alien physical attributes in the discourses of municipal engineers and municipal health departments. Studies of the ways in which city officials labeled immigrants as health threats have shown that medical and social sciences offered an authoritative means for explaining the immigrant as a social burden. Ultimately, immigration historians have provided vivid case studies of Americans' ability to translate the visual cues of ethnic identity into signs of bodily danger.3
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