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fashioned according to the varied goals and scopes of each project—overlapping in regards certain events
and perhaps altogether obscuring others. No single work sought to account for all of the strike-related
fatalities during the period in question while some strikes involving fatalities were included within multiple
studies. Their combined fatality count was thus bound to be marred by inconsistencies and missing data.
Numerous case studies and other supplementary works were thus employed to corroborate evidence, reveal
oversights, and otherwise mediate disputes. Supplementary works were pursued through citations within
known sources; computer-assisted searches of library catalogues utilizing the key-terms strikes and
violence; and the manual perusal of library shelves.
Count Mediation/Revision:
The Battle of Homestead in 1892, for instance, involved a storied clash between striking workers
at Andrew Carnegie’s famed steel mill along the banks of the Monongahela River and a contingent of
Pinkerton Guards who were called upon to police the picketers. The Pinkertons arrived on site in a floating
river barge; but their landing was bitterly opposed by the armed picketers whom they had been summoned
to police. Consensus holds the resulting battle as one of the most dramatic in American labor history.
Casualty reports, however, were quite disparate. Taft & Ross (1969:295) claimed the deaths of two
Pinkertons and two strikers. Jeffreys-Jones (1974:582) reported ten total deaths; and Goldstein (1978:46)
claimed fatalities to nine strikers and seven Pinkertons. Initial research only muddled the count. Wolff
(1965), cited by Goldstein, claimed the deaths of ‘approximately’ nine strikers and seven Pinkertons.
Fortunately, the prominence of the strike had enticed much study. Even the detailed case histories,
however, lacked consensus. Burgoyne [1893](1979), for instance, provided a coroner’s list that included
seventeen names of individuals whom were listed as either ‘dead’ or ‘fatally wounded,’ seemingly
suggesting that seventeen individuals had indeed died. Only three of these, meanwhile, were identified as
Pinkertons. A study of the Pinkertons by James D. Horan and Howard Swiggert (1951) confirmed that
only three Pinkertons were killed during the event, as did two centennial case histories of the Homestead
strike (Demarest 1992; Krause 1992). These latter studies also served to refine the casualty count among
the workers, the most convincing argument of which was made by Krause (1992), who claimed that only
the deaths of six workers and two sympathizers could ultimately be confirmed. I thus accepted the deaths
Convention