stpd.net → Percy Did It
Freedom for capital. Specifically.
There is a word that does a great deal of work in American political life. It appears in the founding documents, in presidential speeches, in the rhetoric of every war the country has ever fought. It is carved into monuments and printed on currency. The word is freedom.
It is worth asking, occasionally, what it meant in practice.
In June 1892, the steelworkers of Homestead, Pennsylvania, were about to find out. Andrew Carnegie’s steel company had decided to cut wages and break the union. Carnegie himself had taken the precaution of being in Scotland — at his castle, Skibo, where he was presumably thinking philanthropic thoughts — when the operation began. He left the dirty work to his partner Henry Clay Frick, who had a clearer sense of what needed doing and fewer scruples about being seen to do it.
What Frick did was hire the Pinkertons.
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency had been founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant with a talent for self-promotion and an instinct for which side his bread was buttered on. By the 1880s it had become something that no democratic society should have been comfortable with: a private army, available for hire, whose primary business was protecting the interests of capital against the interests of labour. They infiltrated unions, compiled dossiers on organisers, provided strikebreakers, and when required, arrived in force to ensure that the word freedom applied to employers rather than employees.
On the night of 5th July 1892, three hundred Pinkerton agents travelled by barge down the Monongahela River towards the Homestead steelworks. The workers were waiting for them. What followed was a battle — a genuine battle, with rifles and improvised weapons, lasting fourteen hours. Seven workers were killed. Three Pinkertons died too. The Pinkertons eventually surrendered, were marched through a crowd of furious workers and their families, and were beaten as they went.
Carnegie sent a telegram from Scotland expressing his confidence in Frick’s handling of the situation.
The Pennsylvania governor sent in the National Guard — eight thousand men — to restore order, which in this context meant restoring the employer’s ability to run his plant without the inconvenience of organised workers. The union was broken. Wages were cut. The men who had fought on the riverbank went back to work on worse terms or didn’t go back at all. Carnegie returned from Scotland, gave interviews about his commitment to the working man, and continued building libraries.
This is not ancient history. The Homestead Strike happened within living memory of people alive today’s grandparents. The country that would spend the twentieth century positioning itself as the global champion of freedom and democracy was, in 1892, deploying private armies against workers who had asked for a living wage.
The Pinkertons were not an aberration. They were a service industry, and they had customers because there was demand. The demand came from the people who owned things — the railroads, the mines, the steel mills, the meatpacking plants — and who had concluded that organised labour was a threat to their freedom. Which it was, in the sense that it threatened their freedom to pay whatever they chose and extract whatever they wished.
It is worth being precise about what the Pinkertons did, because the word ‘detective agency’ suggests something more genteel than the reality. They ran what would now be called an intelligence operation against the labour movement: infiltrating unions, identifying organisers, compiling blacklists. A worker identified as a union man could find himself unemployable across an entire industry. The Pinkertons shared intelligence between employers. The blacklists moved with the workers — or rather, ensured that certain workers couldn’t move at all.
When infiltration and blacklisting weren’t sufficient, they provided muscle. Strikebreakers — ‘scabs’ in the vocabulary of the labour movement, a word that contains its own moral judgement — arrived under Pinkerton protection. Picket lines were broken. Meetings were disrupted. Organisers were beaten, occasionally killed, and in the killing, the paperwork was usually clean enough that nobody went to prison for it.
The legal framework accommodated all of this because the legal framework had been built by the same class of people who hired the Pinkertons. Property rights were absolute. The right to organise was not. An employer could lock his workers out; workers who refused to work were in breach of contract. The courts issued injunctions against strikes as readily as they issued them against anything else that inconvenienced people with money.
This was the system. It was not a failure of the system. It was the system working as intended.
In 1894, the workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois went on strike. George Pullman had built a company town — literally, a town he owned — where his workers lived in his houses, bought food from his shops, and paid rent to his company. When business fell off, he cut wages. He did not cut rents. He did not cut the prices in the company shops. The workers, earning less, still owed the same to the man who employed them. They struck.
The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, refused to handle Pullman cars. The strike spread across the rail network. At its peak, a hundred and fifty thousand workers were involved and rail traffic across twenty-seven states was disrupted.
This was too large for the Pinkertons. So President Grover Cleveland sent in the federal army.
Cleveland’s justification was that the strike was interfering with the US mail. This was technically true and entirely beside the point. The mail was the pretext. The purpose was to break the strike, which the army duly did. Debs was arrested, charged with contempt of court for defying a federal injunction against the strike, and sentenced to six months in prison. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence unanimously.
Debs went into prison a trade unionist and came out a socialist. It is hard to see what else he was supposed to have concluded.
The pattern here is worth holding onto, because it recurs throughout this period and well beyond it: private violence first, then state violence when private violence proves insufficient, then the courts to legitimise both. The sequence is not random. It reflects the actual structure of power — the understanding, held by everyone who needed to hold it, that the machinery of the state was available to defend the interests of capital when required.
If Homestead was a battle and Pullman was a suppression, Ludlow was a massacre.
The Colorado coalfields in 1913 were owned primarily by John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose Colorado Fuel and Iron Company employed around eleven thousand miners. The conditions were as close to serfdom as an industrial economy could manage without using the word. Workers were paid in company scrip redeemable only at company stores. They lived in company housing. The company weighed the coal and the company’s weights were not always accurate. Union organisers were barred from the camps. Workers who joined the United Mine Workers of America were evicted from their homes.
In September 1913, the miners struck. Eleven thousand men walked out. They were immediately evicted from company housing and moved, with their families, into a tent colony near the town of Ludlow. The colony held around twelve hundred people through a Colorado winter.
Rockefeller hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency — the Pinkertons of the southern coalfields — who arrived with an armoured car mounted with a machine gun, which they used to fire into the tent colony on several occasions. The Colorado governor called in the National Guard. By April 1914 the Guard had been on duty for months, was running short of money, and had developed a particular hostility to the strikers.
On 20th April 1914, National Guard troops attacked the tent colony with rifles and machine guns. The tents caught fire. Two women and eleven children were found suffocated in a pit beneath one of the burned tents, where they had taken shelter. Twenty people died in total that day.
Rockefeller was in New York. He went to church on Sunday, as usual. He subsequently hired Ivy Lee — one of the founding figures of the public relations industry — to manage his reputation in the aftermath. This too is part of the pattern: when the violence becomes visible, hire someone to make it invisible again.
The Ludlow Massacre, as it came to be called, provoked outrage, congressional investigations, and eventually some reforms. It did not result in criminal charges against anyone who ordered or carried out the attack. Freedom, in Colorado in 1914, meant what it had always meant.
Joseph Hillström was born Joel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, in 1879. He arrived in the United States in 1902, one of the millions of immigrants who crossed the Atlantic in those years in search of the freedom the country advertised. He found instead the coalfields, the docks, the construction sites — the industries where immigrant labour was cheap and disposable and where the gap between the promise and the reality was widest.
He joined the Industrial Workers of the World — the IWW, known as the Wobblies — and discovered that he had a gift. He could write songs. Not sentimental songs, not the parlour music of the comfortable classes, but sharp, funny, angry songs that said plainly what was happening and who was doing it. ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ gave the English language the phrase ‘pie in the sky.’ ‘There Is Power in a Union’ is still sung. His songs travelled ahead of him through the labour movement, copied and passed hand to hand, sung on picket lines and in jail cells.
In January 1914, a grocer named John Morrison and his son were murdered during a robbery in Salt Lake City. Joe Hill was arrested. The evidence against him was circumstantial — he had a gunshot wound he refused to explain, and he had been in Salt Lake City. There was no physical evidence connecting him to the crime. There were no witnesses who identified him. What there was, in abundance, was the fact that he was a known IWW organiser at a time when the state of Utah, its mine owners, and its law enforcement apparatus considered IWW organisers to be a problem requiring solution.
Hill was convicted. The Swedish government, President Woodrow Wilson, and tens of thousands of workers around the world appealed for clemency or a new trial. The governor of Utah declined. On 19th November 1915, Joe Hill was executed by firing squad. His last telegram to IWW leader Bill Haywood read: ‘Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organise.’
His last word to the firing squad, by several accounts, was ‘Fire.’
Whether Hill was guilty of the Morrison murders, nobody can now say with certainty. What can be said is that the case against him would not have survived scrutiny in any court genuinely committed to the presumption of innocence, and that the people who wanted him dead had reasons entirely unconnected to the Morrison family’s grief. The state, in this instance, did what the Pinkertons had done at Homestead and the National Guard had done at Ludlow — it removed someone who was causing difficulty for the people who owned things. It just used a cleaner mechanism.
‘Don’t mourn — organise’ has outlasted everyone who wanted Joe Hill silenced. This is the one thing that didn’t go according to plan.
Here is what the United States was doing in the decades either side of 1900: executing trade unionists, deploying private armies against workers, sending federal troops to break strikes, massacring miners’ families in tent colonies, and building an elaborate legal framework to ensure that all of this was, technically, lawful.
Here is what the United States was simultaneously saying about itself: that it was the home of freedom, the land of opportunity, the model for civilised governance, the nation whose founding documents had changed the course of human history.
Both of these things were true. This is the point.
It was not hypocrisy in the simple sense — not a gap between what people believed and what they did. The people who hired the Pinkertons and sent in the National Guard and signed the death warrant for Joe Hill believed in freedom. They just had a specific definition of it. Freedom meant the freedom of a man to deploy his capital as he chose, to pay what the market would bear, to crush any collective action that threatened his ability to do so. Freedom for the worker — freedom to organise, to withhold labour, to negotiate collectively — was not freedom. It was interference with the market. It was, in the language of the time, un-American.
This is not ancient ideology, retired along with the Pinkertons. The same definition of freedom — capital’s freedom, specifically — underlies the American position in international affairs throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. When the United States intervened in Guatemala in 1954, it was because a democratically elected government had proposed to redistribute land that belonged to the United Fruit Company. When it destabilised Chile in 1973, it was because Salvador Allende proposed to nationalise copper mines owned by American corporations. The Marshall Plan, for all its genuine generosity, was also a mechanism for ensuring that Western European economies remained open to American capital rather than turning leftward, as several of them showed signs of doing.
The workers at Homestead knew this. Eugene Debs knew it from his prison cell. Joe Hill knew it, and put it into songs that are still sung because the knowledge in them has not gone stale.
America did not export freedom. It exported a version of freedom — the version that was good for business. The distinction matters, and the people who needed to understand it generally did.
There is a coda worth noting. Andrew Carnegie, having broken the union at Homestead and destroyed the livelihoods of the men who built his fortune, spent the last decades of his life giving his money away. He funded libraries across the English-speaking world, endowed universities, established peace foundations. He died one of the most celebrated philanthropists in American history.
The workers of Homestead did not get a library.