Why did the federal and state governments consistently side with factory owners, rather than workers, during strikes?
In 1892, while Andrew Carnegie vacationed in Scotland, he ordered his assistant, Henry Clay Frick, to break employees' resistance to a wage cut at his steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Frick attempted to lock out the striking workers and to hire strikebreakers to take their jobs. When workers picketed the closed plant, Frick hired 300 Pinkerton private security guards to end the strike. Violent clashes between strikers and the guards resulted in the deaths of ten strikers and three Pinkerton agents. At this point, the governor of Pennsylvania ordered the entire state militia, 8,000 soldiers, to stop the strike and protect Carnegie's plant. Frick and Carnegie succeeded not only in breaking the strike and reducing wages at Homestead, but broke the steelworkers' attempt to form a union. However, the steelworkers' resistance made them heroes across the country and symbols of workers' desire for union representation and better working conditions. Not until the 1930s would American steelworkers succeed in unionizing.
A major financial depression hit the American economy in 1893. The following year, George Pullman, whose company manufactured railway cars, ordered a 25 percent wage cut for his employees. Workers responded by striking against Pullman's factory south of Chicago. The 150,000 member American Railway Union called a national strike, which spread to 26 states. President Grover Cleveland sent U.S. troops to protect railway property. Thirty four strikers were killed. The union's leader, Eugene Debs, was jailed. Upon his release from prison a few months later, Debs announced that he was a socialist, and that he advocated government ownership of basic industries. Debs continued his crusade against big business for decades, running for president four times on the Socialist Party ticket. He received nearly one million votes in 1912.