[CHAPTER XVI.]
More Prosecutions—The Soldiers Withdraw—A Non-Union Hotel Dynamited—Homestead Figures in Parades and Gives a Democratic Majority—Slavs Weakening—The "Local News" Predicts Defeat—Gompers Again—Sheriff McCleary Is Harassed and Increases His Corps of Deputies—Lawyer Jones in Trouble—Schwab Succeeds Potter as Superintendent—Homestead's Last Riot—Striker Roberts Hints at Defeat—Mechanics and Laborers Go Back to Work.
AS an offset to the activity of Secretary Lovejoy, Burgess John McLuckie went before Alderman F. M. King on Wednesday, September 21, and lodged information for aggravated riot and conspiracy against H. C. Frick, George Lauder, Henry M. Curry, John G. A. Leishman, Otis Childs, F. T. F. Lovejoy, Lawrence C. Phipps, John A. Potter, G. A. Corey, J. F. Dovey, Nevin McConnell, William Pinkerton, Robert Pinkerton, John Cooper, C. W. Bedell, Fred Primer, W. H. Burt, Fred Heinde and others. In the information for conspiracy the defendants were charged with conspiring to "depress wages" and to incite riot by feloniously importing a force of armed men. No arrests were made on these informations. Blank bail bonds were signed by the Mellon banking firm and filled in by the defendants.
Sheriff McCleary, while he no longer experienced trouble in procuring a sufficient number of deputies at $2.50 a day, to patrol every street in Homestead and enforce order when necessary, found it a hard matter to induce these emergency policemen to attend to their duties. Non-union men coming out of the mill at noon for dinner, were repeatedly assaulted, the intractable element among the strikers caring little for the presence of the sheriff's officers. Early in September, Mr. McCleary quietly investigated the methods of his underlings, and ascertained that many of them were simply taking a holiday at the county's expense. The force was then reorganized, the loafers being summarily discharged. It was only now that the sheriff's pent-up feelings found vent. He was utterly disgusted, he said, and had come to the conclusion that, even if the salary of the sheriff were increased to $15,000 a year, the man who sought the office would be an idiot. The show of authority which Mr. McCleary made had a visible effect and when the deputies bestirred themselves order was sufficiently restored, for the time being, to elicit from Provost Marshal Mechling the opinion that, if the sheriff kept on attending to business, the troops would be withdrawn within two weeks.