A Show of Support: Farmers Feed Homestead Strikers

Abstract: In 1892 the possibility of a Labor-Populist alliance circulated. Populist orators like Mary Lease sought to build ties between the Farmer's Alliance and the labor movement by mobilizing farmers to send wheat and corn to striking workers at Carnegie's Homestead steel mill outside Pittsburgh. Despite the support for such an alliance among many in the labor movement, American Federation of Labor leader Samuel Gompers opposed such political action. Gompers insured that the A.F.L maintained, in his words, "a masterly inactivity" on political involvements. In this appeal to Kansas farmers, published as a letter to the editor in the Topeka Advocate , Lease attacked the "misrepresentations" of those who claimed that farmers did not understand and sympathize with workers.

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