"Only in Exceptional Cases": The Steel Workers Organizing Committee Remembers the Homestead Strike

The representation of Homestead Lockout and Strike of 1892 is powerfully mobilized by later generations of labor activists. But why choose to memorialize, over any of the very real accomplishments of the labor movement, this moment of abject defeat? Rather than endorsing the celebratory discourse of mainstream progressive historiography, Joel Woller turns instead for an answer to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”