Blood River

THIS screen play describes how greed and a bloody local war devastated the 19th century town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and its great steel mill. The conflict foretold the death of a vibrant national industry, perhaps U.S. basic industry itself. THE city had grown up around and was specialized to accommodate mill production, becoming a magnet for the people who worked, lived, loved; and went into debt around its belching furnaces. It was a classic company town, emerging...
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THIS screen play describes how greed and a bloody local war devastated the 19th century town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and its great steel mill. The conflict foretold the death of a vibrant national industry, perhaps U.S. basic industry itself. THE city had grown up around and was specialized to accommodate mill production, becoming a magnet for the people who worked, lived, loved; and went into debt around its belching furnaces. It was a classic company town, emerging from a culture of uninterrupted output. In the language of the times, the owners and executives of the mill were captains, barons, behemoths. In a modern metaphor they could be termed manipulators of stock of equipment, mind and muscle. THE mill realm was a complex, layered industrial protectorate, a few directing the many. Ranking at the top levels of mill operations were men of genteel greed and stark arrogance; at the lower reaches emerged the rough play of ethnic divisions and racism, ignorance and a Dantesque economic underworld. Above the level of sweat-labor in the mill and the hillside geography of the town, a coterie of well-paid, full-time managers held court. Down in the fire and heat of the furnaces labored their charges, union workers from Western Europe. These union men, trade-proud as in an earlier age, guarded their crafts and ranks from migrants, so-called black sheep of Italian, Eastern European and African ancestry. For they viewed these helots of low-wages and day labor as potential scabs that steel managers might permanently install as replacements. AS the factory and town astride the Monongahela pulsed with vigor, other trades took life. The hillsides thrived with retailers and consumers, merchants of every class taking up license, appealing to human passions for goods and services of the latest variety. Already congested neighborhoods imploded, densely packing new generations destined to become mill hands and brothel-and beer-hall patrons, or housewives trying to make do with leftovers of Friday''s wages. TO picture this town''s portrait and recount its oral and bibliographic gyrations, one must see, feel and literally smell the place, visit its mills and shops, saloons and red-light district; walk its streets and squares; hear its sounds ; describing the city''s fugue, recounting the brutalizing military battle here in this city; projecting its violent and degrading past upon a more placid order of deprivations here and now. CONSIDER the ways of steel-making in the unfolding drama of events at Homestead. Coal and coke, iron ore and lime; shipping fleets, railroads and mills; workers and company towns — these were the basics everywhere for making steel during the 1890s. Great sums of capital mobilized all of them; and in the Monongahela Valley none were richer and better positioned for such tasks than Messrs. Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie, overlords of an emergent empire centered on Homestead. ALONE Andrew Carnegie had fought and schemed his way to ownership of the Homestead Steel Works, also securing a dominant position controlling steel-making in the U.S. And at Homestead he created a town of mill serfs, driving for global power and unheard of riches — mounting to some $300 billion at his death! His effort, though, depended on ever-improving technology and a docile, expendable workforce; corporate control of governments; federal military contracts; and domestic and federal military forces, and, as well, private spies and Pinkerton mercenaries paid a pittance, maimed, some at death’s door. AS the complexities of steel production turned on unrestrained heavy-labor and mayhem in the mills, there was unimaginable degradation and strife in all the company towns. Among these, none emerged so central as Carnegie’s Homestead, the daily affairs and fulminations of its exploited leading to the powerful and bloody strike of 1892 — the apogée of violence Americana. USING sheriffs, the Pinkerton private army, political arm-twisting, and the state militia, Frick and Carnegie ultimately emerged as the victors at Homestead, the intervening century also focusing on short-sighted considerations of profit, leading to the hollowing out of U.S. industry and production capability. *********** ALL this and more are dramatized with actual and fictionalized characters and graphics based on real events and evolving social relationships found in the historic record, written literature and siren songs of the times. THERE is torment and pathos, love and incredible violence here. NO other screenplay depicting these detailed, melodramatic events exists, revealing the implosive dynamics of this — the most brutal strike and local war in U.S. history. PLOT SUMMARY The film begins in July 1892 with portents of struggle: a wealthy and influential Carnegie plans total control of production in his Homestead steel mills by the 4th of July. Carnegie has gained influence in Washington where there is talk of war with Chile and the need for more steel for armaments. He has government contracts. The steelworkers know longer work days, speed-ups, and machine replacement of workers are possible, but take comfort in the pride in their skills and the strength of their union, the nation’s largest union which can issue widespread calls for support. At the workweek end, they gather in the Rolling Mill saloon and exchange gossip and sarcasm while the band plays on. One union leader, Hugh O’Donnell, makes the rounds, talking of the struggle; the other, John McLuckie, mayor of Homestead, dances cheek-to-cheek with O’Donnell’s wife and is rather pessimisstic about saving the union and jobs. He knows the new manager of the mills, Henry Frick, was able to call in militia who shot workers during a struggle at Frick’s coke ovens. The three friends leave the saloon and walk up the hill to O’Donnell’s house and observe the miserable tenements for most workers and the fortifications going up around the mill (called by them Fort Frick). O’Donnell emphasizes his faith that the union can beat Carnegie by stopping production – and a few days later, when the new contract banning collective bargaining and other union aims for a shorter workday and safer conditions, leads the formation of a picket line outside the walls and fences now surrounding the mill. Frick summons a private army of Pinkerton agents, who arrive midnight, July 6, by armored river barge at the Homestead works. They are armed with new repeating rifles, but are met by virtually the entire population of Homestead, alerted in the style of Paul Revere. They shoot at the people point blank; then the workers and supporters begin to respond with whatever weapons they can find, including dynamite used in mining nearby. A stand-off develops until the Pinkertons, trapped for some 12 hours on the barges and exhausted by dynamite blasts, oil flames, and the heat in the barge holds, surrender. They are marched past a gauntlet of angry townsfolk, stoning and hitting the men, tearing their clothes, and calling them murders and criminals. Women are especially active in the reprisals, though 3 O’Donnell, in the name of the union, tries to cool the crowd. The union obviously is losing influence. The news spreads across the nation, and in Massachusetts, two anarchists, Emma Goldman and Sasha Berkman decide that killing Frick would be the spark for a general uprising; Emma briefly becomes a prostitute to get the money for a pistol and Sasha’s fare to Homestead. He gets into Frick’s office, fires three times, but does only slight damage to the “icon of greed.” He and Goldman are imprisoned and Frick made something of a hero by the media, even receiving condolences from the steel union. Carnegie’s lawyer, who will rise to become U.S. Secretary of State, convinces the Pen