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Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892
Non-fiction book on labor relations in Pennsylvania
297 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
Leon Wolff
31 books2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Leon Wolff was born and raised in Chicago, the son of Abe Wolff, a traveling salesman, and Bessie Billow, a Russian emigrant. He graduated from Northwestern University, then served as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.
After the war he started a correspondence school, the Lincoln School of Practical Nursing, in Chicago. In 1953, he and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he transplanted the business and cultivated his interests in golf and jazz.
Wolff wrote four books over the next dozen years. Low Level Mission (1957) described World War II's Operation Tidal Wave against the Ploești oil fields in Romania, by the US Army Air Force.
In Flanders Field: The 1917 Campaign (1958), an account of the World War I offensive in 1917, otherwise known as the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele.
Wolff also wrote the Francis Parkman Prize-winning book Little Brown Brother (1961), then wrote a final book, Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892 (1965), about the eponymous steel strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania.
He died in Los Angeles in 1991.
Leon Wolff was born and raised in Chicago, the son of Abe Wolff, a traveling salesman, and Bessie Billow, a Russian emigrant. He graduated from Northwestern University, then served as a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.
After the war he started a correspondence school, the Lincoln School of Practical Nursing, in Chicago. In 1953, he and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he transplanted the business and cultivated his interests in golf and jazz.
Wolff wrote four books over the next dozen years. Low Level Mission (1957) described World War II's Operation Tidal Wave against the Ploești oil fields in Romania, by the US Army Air Force.
In Flanders Field: The 1917 Campaign (1958), an account of the World War I offensive in 1917, otherwise known as the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele.
Wolff also wrote the Francis Parkman Prize-winning book Little Brown Brother (1961), then wrote a final book, Lockout: The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892 (1965), about the eponymous steel strike at Homestead, Pennsylvania.
He died in Los Angeles in 1991.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 22, 2012
I got this book because I'm a fan of Leon Wolff's history books, most especially his book about the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, Little Brown Brother. I've found so far that he is very thorough in his research, detailing not only the primary events themselves but the surrounding culture and political opinions, the events leading up to main one, the main players' biographies, the debates that went on, etc., presenting all sides without really takes sides himself.
He was no different with this book, which is about the Homestead Strike of 1892, as the title says. This was during, I believe, the Gilded Age, or towards the end of it. The Gilded Age was a period of huge economic growth due to industrialization, and it created a class of super-rich industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller. Unfortunately, such men sometimes acquired their great wealth by being robber-barons and taking advantage of the labor, and the longer this went on, the more the discontent grew among the laborers. Having unions helped the laborers somewhat to have some power of negotiation, but even today, those who run companies do what they can to minimize the unions' power.
Lockout is about one particular struggle between an industrialist and a union and the explosive events that came with it — the Carnegie Steel Corporation versus the Amalgamated Steel Workers Association — and it's actually quite exciting and scary both. Both sides are equally presented as both bad and good; Wolff presents the motivations and background of each person involved, the different personalities and how they mixed, how they acted and reacted to each other. And because of these people's stubbornness, pride, desperation, volatility, and need, Wolff is easily able to show the build up of resentment and antagonism in all the dealings. They all have their strong reasons for doing what they do, and the conflict just escalates because neither side is willing to give in. Having read this book, I would dearly love to see all of this on film, either as a documentary or a fictionalized movie.
It's been a while now since I've read this book, so it's not as fresh in mind as a book normally is when I review it, but I still remember how suspenseful it was. So as always Leon Wolff did not disappoint me.
He was no different with this book, which is about the Homestead Strike of 1892, as the title says. This was during, I believe, the Gilded Age, or towards the end of it. The Gilded Age was a period of huge economic growth due to industrialization, and it created a class of super-rich industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller. Unfortunately, such men sometimes acquired their great wealth by being robber-barons and taking advantage of the labor, and the longer this went on, the more the discontent grew among the laborers. Having unions helped the laborers somewhat to have some power of negotiation, but even today, those who run companies do what they can to minimize the unions' power.
Lockout is about one particular struggle between an industrialist and a union and the explosive events that came with it — the Carnegie Steel Corporation versus the Amalgamated Steel Workers Association — and it's actually quite exciting and scary both. Both sides are equally presented as both bad and good; Wolff presents the motivations and background of each person involved, the different personalities and how they mixed, how they acted and reacted to each other. And because of these people's stubbornness, pride, desperation, volatility, and need, Wolff is easily able to show the build up of resentment and antagonism in all the dealings. They all have their strong reasons for doing what they do, and the conflict just escalates because neither side is willing to give in. Having read this book, I would dearly love to see all of this on film, either as a documentary or a fictionalized movie.
It's been a while now since I've read this book, so it's not as fresh in mind as a book normally is when I review it, but I still remember how suspenseful it was. So as always Leon Wolff did not disappoint me.
January 4, 2013
I want to read everything Leon Wolff wrote because he is a model of a solid, well-enough written narrative non-fiction book. It was not as vivid as I hoped. A bit of a disappointment after his superb In Flanders Field.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews