Carnegie's victory at Homestead enabled him to slash wages, impose twelve-hour workdays, eliminate jobs, and gain monumental profits. This "magnificent record was to a great extent made possible by the company's victory at Homestead," a historian of the company wrote in 1903. Carnegie's "free enterprise" achievements relied on more than the use of state violence to break the union. As in the case of other industries from textiles to electronics, state protection and public subsidy were critical to Carnegie's success. "Under the beauties of the protective tariff system the manufacturing interests of the country are experiencing unparalleled prosperity," the Pittsburgh Post reported on the eve of the lockout, while Carnegie and others like him were preparing "an enormous reduction in the wages of their men." Carnegie was also a master swindler, defrauding the city of Pittsburgh in collusion with city bosses. Famed as a pacifist as well as philanthropist, Carnegie looked forward to "millions for us in armor" in construction of battleships -- purely for defense, he explained, hence in accord with his pacifist principles. In 1890 Carnegie had won a large naval contract for his new Homestead plant. "It was with the help of...powerful politicians and crafty financiers who operated in the grand arenas of national and international government -- as well as in the backrooms of Pittsburgh's businesses and city hall -- that Carnegie was able to construct his immense industrial fiefdom," Krause writes: the world's first billion-dollar corporation, US Steel. Meanwhile, the new imperial navy was "defending" the US off the coasts of Brazil and Chile and across the Pacific.¹⁷

The press gave overwhelming support to the Company, as usual. The British press presented a different picture. The London Times ridiculed "this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through Scotland in a four-in-hand opening public libraries, while the wretched workmen who supply him with ways and means for his self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh." The far-right British press ridiculed Carnegie's preachings on "the rights and duties of wealth," describing his self-congratulatory book Triumphant Democracy as "a wholesome piece of satire" in the light of his brutal methods of strike-breaking, which should be neither "permitted nor required in a civilized community," the London Times added.

In the US, strikers were depicted as "brigands," "blackmailers whom all the world loathes" (Harper's Weekly), a "Mob Bent on Ruin" (Chicago Tribune), "anarchists and socialist[s]...preparing to blow up...the Federal building and take possession" of the money in the treasury vaults (Washington Post). Eugene Debs was a "lawbreaker at large, an enemy of the human race," who should be jailed (he soon was), "and the disorder his bad teachings has engendered must be squelched" (New York Times). When Governor John Altgeld of Illinois wired President Cleveland that press accounts of abuses by strikers were often "pure fabrications" or "wild exaggerations," the Nation condemned him as "boorish, impudent, and ignorant"; the President should put him in his place forthwith for his "bad manners" and "the bad odor of his own principles." The strikers are "untaught men" of "the lowest class," the Nation continued: they must learn that society is "impregnable" and cannot allow them to "suspend, even for a day, the traffic and industry of a great nation, merely as a means of extorting ten or twenty cents a day more wages from their employers."

The press was not alone in taking up the cudgels for the suffering businessman. The highly respected Reverend Henry Ward Beecher denounced "the importation of the communistic and like European notions as abominations. Their notions and theories that the Government should be paternal and take care of the welfare of its subjects [sic] and provide them with labor, is un-American... God has intended the great to be great, and the little to be little." How much has changed over a century.¹⁸

After its victory at Homestead, the company moved to destroy any vestige of workers' independence. Strike leaders were blacklisted, many jailed for lengthy periods. A European visitor to Homestead in 1900 described Carnegie's "Triumphant Democracy" as "Feudalism Restored." He found the atmosphere "heavy with disappointment and hopelessness," the men "afraid to talk." Ten years later, John Fitch, who took part in a study of Homestead by urban sociologists, wrote that employees of the company refuse to talk to strangers, even in their homes. "They are suspicious of one another, of their neighbors, and of their friends." They "do not dare openly express their convictions," or "assemble and talk over affairs pertaining to their welfare as mill men." Many were discharged "for daring to attend a public meeting." A national union journal described Homestead as "the most despotic principality of them all" in 1919, when the 89-year-old Mother Jones was dragged "to their filthy jail for daring to speak in behalf of the enslaved steel workers," though some were later "allowed to speak for the first time in 28 years" in Homestead, Mother Jones recalled. So matters continued until the movements of the 1930s broke the barriers. The relation between popular organization and democracy is vividly illustrated in this record.¹⁹

We cannot really say that the current corporate offensive has driven working class organization and culture back to the level of a century ago. At that time working people and the poor were nowhere near as isolated, nor subject to the ideological monopoly of the business media. "At the turn of the century," Jon Bekken writes, "the U.S. labor movement published hundreds of newspapers," ranging from local and regional to national weeklies and monthlies. These were "an integral part of working class communities, not only reporting the news of the day or week, but offering a venue where readers could debate political, economic and cultural issues." Some were "as large, and in many ways as professional, as many of the capitalist newspapers they co-existed with." "Like the labor movement itself, this press spanned the range from a fairly narrow focus on workplace conditions to advocacy of social revolution." The socialist press alone had a circulation of over 2 million before World War I; its leading journal, the weekly Appeal To Reason, reached over 760,000 subscribers. Workers also "built a rich array of ethnic, community, workplace and political organizations," all part of "vibrant working class cultures" that extended to every domain and retained their vitality until World War II despite harsh government repression, particularly under the Wilson Administration. Repression aside, the labor press ultimately succumbed to the natural effects of the concentration of wealth: advertisers kept to capitalist competitors that could produce below cost, and other market factors took their toll, as happened to the mass working class press in England as late as the 1960s. Similar factors, along with federal government policy, undermined efforts in the 1930s to prevent radio from becoming, in effect, a corporate monopoly.²⁰

Left intellectuals took an active part in the lively working class culture. Some sought to compensate for the class character of the cultural institutions through programs of workers' education, or by writing best-selling books on mathematics, science, and other topics for the general public. Remarkably, their left counterparts today often seek to deprive working people of these tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality -- a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use. One recalls the days when the evangelical church taught not-dissimilar lessons to the unruly masses, as their heirs do today in peasant societies of Central America.

It is particularly striking that these self-destructive tendencies should appear at a time when the overwhelming majority of the population wants to change the "inherently unfair" economic system, and belief in the basic moral principles of traditional socialism is surprisingly high (see p. 76). What is more, with Soviet tyranny finally overthrown, one long-standing impediment to the realization of these ideals is now removed. However meritorious personal motives may be, these phenomena in left intellectual circles, in my opinion, reflect yet another ideological victory for the culture of the privileged, and contribute to it. The same tendencies make a notable contribution to the endless project of murdering history as well. During periods of popular activism, it is often possible to salvage elements of truth from the miasma of "information" disseminated by the servants of power, and many people not only "consult their neighbors" but learn a good deal about the world; Indochina and Central America are two striking recent examples. When activism declines, the commissar class, which never falters in its task, regains command. While left intellectuals discourse polysyllabically to one another, truths that were once understood are buried, history is reshaped into an instrument of power, and the ground is laid for the enterprises to come.

¹⁷ Demarest, "River", 32; Krause, Battle, 361, 274ff.

¹⁸ Demarest, "River", 159; Sexton, War, 83, 106ff.

¹⁹ Demarest, "River", 199, 210f.; Krause, ch. 22.

²⁰ Bekken, in Solomon and McChesney, New Perspectives. England, see MC, ch. 1.1-2.