Early on the morning of July 6, 316 men recently recruited by the Pinkerton Detective Agency clambered onto a flotilla of barges and, led by the steam tug Little Bill, headed up the Monongahela from Pittsburgh toward Homestead, where Andrew Carnegie’s big steel plant was surrounded by striking workers. The strike had been called because Carnegie’s lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick (his boss was on vacation in Scotland), had recently tried to break the Amalgamated Association union in his plant by firing its members.
As the makeshift Pinkerton fleet approached the works, union men opened fire. For the next twelve hours the barges lay just offshore while most of Homestead’s ten thousand citizens lined the river bank shooting at them with rifle and cannon and occasionally tossing sticks of dynamite to flush the hidden invaders from below deck. The guards shot back when they dared.
Hugh O’Donnell, head of the strike committee, had little control over his membership. The strikers showed no mercy; they shot one guard who dangled a white flag and shot another’s flag to shreds. Finally, with their water and ammunition running low and the stench of their fallen comrades becoming unbearable below deck, the Pinkertons voted to give themselves up. As the guards straggled ashore, O’Donnell pleaded successfully for their lives, but he could not keep most of the townspeople from forming a cruel gantlet as the prisoners marched up the hill. Seven strikers and three Pinkertons had died in the long battle, but clubs and stones injured almost all the guards as they made the brief climb.
The governor had initially refused to call out the militia, but eventually they moved in, and the Homestead workers, after holding out for four bitter months, lost their union and had their wage rate cut in half.
Young women had increasingly been spotted wearing suspenders during the preceding two years. The trend had even gained the approval of designers in Paris, and by August some editorialists were complaining of an “epidemic.” Men who returned to wearing belts in response hoped the fad would die by fall.
1942Fifty Years Ago
August Sleigh Bells
Irving Berlin’s song “White Christmas” made its unlikely first appearance in August, when the Mark Sandrich film Holiday Inn was released. The movie featured Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby vying for the same woman amid tap dancing and Berlin’s music. “White Christmas” took over the airwaves from another great ballad of separation and lament, “White Cliffs of Dover,” and went on to become the biggest seller of any record to date. Among the less eternal tunes going around that militant summer were “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap” and “We’re Gonna Find a Feller Who Is Yeller and Beat Him Red, White and Blue.”
As wartime restrictions kicked in, silk stockings were among the first items to become scarce: the material was needed for parachutes. Nylon hose, made from petroleum, grew expensive, and “bottled-stocking” kits appeared on drugstore shelves that summer; Legfizz and Legstick were just two of the brands of paint-on stockings. Sales of slacks ran five times what they had been in 1941, due both to shortages and to the greater number of women going to work in factories.
1967Twenty-five Years Ago
Fires
The Monterey Pop Festival, in California, was over by July, but the hippie assault on Haight-Ashbury continued long into the summer. Tourist buses were rerouted to pass through the ragged crowds of drug dealers, guitar poets, and flower children. Scott McKenzie’s anthem to this new San Francisco, one of July’s top songs, urged visitors to “wear flowers in your hair.” Among the ringing successes at Monterey had been a Los Angeles band called the Doors, named for a line from William Blake and a hallucinatory memoir by Aldous Huxley. Singer Jim Morrison’s voice achieved a pop gravity when combined with a mockbaroque organ, splashy jazz drums, and the invocations of sex and death in the lyrics. In the last week of July, “Light My Fire” (written by guitarist Robby Krieger) became the Doors’ first top-selling single. It was peppy and affirming compared with the later, darker efforts of Morrison, who became a kind of Nietzschean crooner.
The band had four smash years after breaking in; its run lasted until 1971, when “Love Her Madly,” from the L.A. Woman album, became its last number-one record. In the music world of 1967, the Doors were a relative rarity: neither folk singers nor Englishmen doing American blues. Morrison was recuperating in Paris after some very hard living when he died in 1971 of a heart attack. He was buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery there. Young girls still weep over his grave.
Other Fires
Amid all the love-ins, acid tests, and dreamy good feeling, the summer of 1967 also saw some of the greatest internal violence since the Civil War as riots broke out in at least seventy American cities from Grand Rapids to Boston, Buffalo to Tampa. The riots shared a bleak uniformity—each with an inciting police incident, brutality either real or alleged, looting, and fire bombing.
The violence in Newark and Detroit began with the usual combination of heat, long-held grievance, and powerful rumor. In Newark, stories that a black cab driver had been fatally beaten by police on the night of July 12 brought a crowd down to the station. After some rock throwing, the protesters were dispersed by the police, but then roamed the early-morning streets looting and torching businesses. Almost three thousand National Guardsmen were called out. Snipers fired from rooftops all over town at anyone wearing a uniform. Newark’s “open rebellion,” as Gov. Richard Hughes called it, took six days to finally burn out. By then twelve hundred people had been arrested and twenty-six killed. Before the riots Newark had more condemned housing than any other American city; afterward many of these buildings had been torched, and hundreds of businesses had been looted.
Within a week Detroit was blazing too. On July 23 the city’s police arrested seventy-three patrons of a club serving liquor after hours. The club happened to be a gathering place for some of the leaders of the city’s “black power” movement. The arrests, happenstance or not, provoked scattered looting nearby that expanded into fire bombings. Some community leaders later charged that the catastrophe that followed could have been avoided had the police been quicker to move against this initial looting on Sunday morning.
Instead, President Lyndon Johnson and Gov. George Romney met fire with fire by calling in Gen. John L. Throckmorton, forty-seven hundred paratroopers, and three thousand National Guardsmen, plus tanks and armed helicopters. After two days of battles between snipers and roving tanks, Throckmorton reported, “The east side is secure.” The heaviest fighting took place within a mile of General Motors headquarters. “If we see anyone move,” said one Guardsman, “we shoot and ask questions later.” Much of the fighting occurred in total darkness because streetlights had been smashed. The looting extended over most of the city, and some of the plundering was the work of integrated groups. Unlike earlier riots of that summer, painted “Soul Brother” signs on black-owned businesses were no protection against the mobs.
South Bend, Indiana, and East Harlem, in New York City, suffered their own series of lootings during these same days, but nothing like those in Detroit, where on July 26 helicopters were still sweeping rooftops and tanks were searching the business district for gunmen. By midnight Throckmorton pronounced the city “under control except for a few isolated snipers.” The riots ended after nearly a week; forty-three had died and five thousand had lost their homes in the violence.
Justice
On August 30, at the end of that extraordinary summer, the United States Senate voted 69 to 11 to confirm Thurgood Marshall as the first black associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
