Biography
Hugh Dempsey was a Knights of Labor District Master Workman convicted in 1892 of conspiracy to poison strikebreakers at the Homestead Steel Works during the great Homestead Strike. The conviction rested almost entirely on testimony from an informer who later recanted. Sentenced to seven years in the Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania.
Horace B. Davis's July 1933 Labor Defender retrospective identifies the Homestead defendant as Hugh S. Dempsey and names Louis Kossuth Porter as his defense lawyer. It says the prosecution informers confessed after six months that the poisoning story had been fabricated, then repudiated their recantations within days. These are the article's attributed retrospective claims; the seven-year imposed sentence is not seven years actually served, and the article supplies no new custody endpoints. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n07-jul-1933-lab-def.pdf#page=20
Horace B. Davis’s Homestead retrospective describes the Knights of Labor leader hiring two men to investigate whether Carnegie violated naval armor contracts. He attributes the poisoning case to a Pinkerton setup and describes a go-between named Beatty as another imprisoned defendant. The two agents briefly recanted after six months and then withdrew their recantations. The reported seven-year penalty is nominal, not a new service duration. Pages18,20. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n07-jul-1933-lab-def.pdf
