WAR
Samuel J. Parks was born in County Down, Ireland, in the early 1860s. Around the age of 10, he emigrated to Canada, and by 14 he was working in the northern forests as a lumberman. He crossed the border into the United States and worked variously as a river-driver, a coal-heaver, and a sailor on the Great Lakes. He also spent time in western railroad camps. It was here, probably, that he first acquired the trade of bridge work. He later worked as a bridgeman in Wisconsin, where he earned a reputation as a riveter of Bunyanesque prowess. It was said that Sam Parks could drive more rivets per hour than any bridgeman alive.
Sometime in the early 1890s, Parks moved to Chicago. He went to work on the skyscrapers that were rising from the prairie city, but by the time he left a few years later, he’d gained something more important to him than employment: an education in union politics. Chicago was the labor capital of America, boasting more unions, and more powerful unions, than anywhere in the country. The only way to deal with employers, the labor bosses of Chicago believed, was to be stronger than they were. Parks learned this lesson well.
The contempt that labor unions and employers felt for each other in late-nineteenth-century America is difficult to appreciate today. Labor and capital were engaged in a sustained class war, and “war” was no metaphor. On one side of the divide, riotous workers armed with fists and cudgels and dynamite fought for better working conditions, better pay, and shorter hours. On the other side, businessmen who controlled America’s largest assets—railroads, oil wells, coal fields, and, of course, steel plants—did everything in their power to stamp out agitation that might diminish profits and productivity.
The employers had the upper hand in most disputes. They were often supported by local and federal government, which supplied them with police or military protection. In the courts, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, intended by Congress to limit corporate monopolies, was more often applied against unions. Even lacking government help, employers, particularly large corporations, were better positioned to wage war than workers. They had the financial resources to survive long strikes, and they had a pool of hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving in the country every year from whom they could draw fresh workers to replace strikers. Many businesses hired small armies of Pinkerton “detectives” to provide additional protection against proletarian incursions.
Nowhere was the deck more unevenly stacked against workers than in the steel industry. The kind of corporation that Andrew Carnegie and his fellow steel magnates envisioned controlled every aspect of production and distribution, much of this carried out by subsidiaries. The concept of total control was called “vertical integration,” and the steel-frame skyscraper was its soaring triumph. From the raw iron ore deposits of the Mesabi Range in northeastern Minnesota, Big Steel’s reach extended to the coalmines that supplied the coke needed to fuel the furnaces that converted the iron ore into steel. It included the plants along the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, where the ore was melted down, swept clean of slag, and molded into steel ingots. It included, too, the plants where the steel was fabricated—soldered, hole-punched, riveted—and many of the rail lines that ran between its various components. Finally, it extended to the building contractors and ironworkers who erected the steel columns and beams that had begun their journeys as bits of earth.
Ideally, the workers would fall in with the program as easily as the ore gave itself up from the ground. In the words of Frederick Taylor, the renowned efficiency expert who spent much of his career in the steel industry, the perfect laborer was “merely a man more or less the type of the ox, heavy both mentally and physically”—all the better to behave exactly as told, and to do so without complaint.
Much to the dismay of employers, workers refused to play their assigned role. They wanted to earn more money while working fewer hours, in better conditions. When, in the summer of 1892, Carnegie’s second-in-command, Henry Clay Frick, told unskilled workers at a plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, that he intended to lower their already meager wages, they responded in an altogether un-oxlike manner. They struck.
Frick immediately fired all 3,800, then surrounded the plant with a barbed wire–trimmed fence and shipped in 300 armed Pinkertons to protect strikebreakers. As the Pinkertons arrived by barge on the night of July 5, 1892, gunfire broke out between guards and strikers. Nine workers and seven guards were killed, and 163 more seriously injured, before the skirmish ended. Six days later, the governor of Pennsylvania came to Frick’s aid, placing Homestead under martial law and effectively terminating the strike. Frick reduced the mill wage by half and brought in replacements.
“Our victory now complete and most gratifying,” Frick cabled Carnegie, who had removed himself to his estate in Scotland. “We had to teach our employees a lesson and we have taught them one they will never forget.”
He was right. There would be no more union activity at Homestead for another 44 years. An executive at U.S. Steel, which took over the Homestead plant in 1901, later expressed management policy even more bluntly than Frick: “I have always had one rule: if a workman sticks up his head, hit it.”
The steelworkers had been subdued. The ironworkers were another story—a story in which Sam Parks would play a large role. Sam Parks had his own policy: he hit back.
Sam Parks.
(Courtesy of Wirtz Labor Library, U.S. Department of Labor)
SAM I AM
In a 1902 photograph his power is evident. His face is sharp-boned, his hair slicked back, his moustache dark and thick beneath his prow nose. His expression is flat but his eyes glimmer with intensity. As you stare at them, they stare right back, seeming to take your measure and find you lacking. Even those who despised Parks acknowledged the remarkable force of his character. “In many ways he is a leader of men,” said New York District Attorney William Jerome, the man who would devote himself to putting Parks in jail. “He has personal magnetism and the power to convince others that his word is law. He has physical bravery, daring, and a dashing style of leadership. He is a brute, his language is foul, and the man is personally offensive to decent people, but his shrewdness is beyond question.”
Parks had arrived in New York in 1895 at the invitation of the George A. Fuller Company, the builders of the Flatiron. He had worked for Fuller in Chicago, and when the company opened an office in New York, it asked Parks to come east and work as a foreman. The exact nature of Parks’ relationship with Fuller would later become a subject of speculation. For the moment, Parks was simply another ironworker, albeit a gifted one.
William Starrett, of the legendary Starrett family of builders, recalled working with Parks in New York in the 1890s. Starrett was a young man at the time, recently embarked on a lustrous career that would lead, in time, to the Empire State Building, and he had been given his first opportunity to supervise a steel erection job. Steel was starting to rise from the hole, but young Starrett, anxious and inexperienced, still had no foreman to run his riveting gangs. Just then, “a long, lanky Englishman tapped me on the shoulder,” Starrett recalled years later in his memoir (apparently confusing Parks’ Irish brogue for an English accent). “It was Sam Parks, that debonair Robin Hood of the building industry…. Sam produced a pair of overalls, and within an hour his bellowing voice resounded in that deep excavation, and I knew that I had a leader.”
Parks didn’t do much in the way of hands-on ironwork after the Starrett job. He’d found his true calling in the work of the union. Just before Parks’ arrival in New York, structural ironworkers had reorganized into the Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Society. Its members were still bloodied by the strike they’d lost a few years earlier. And they were still making between $1.75 and $2.50 for a 10-hour day while their Chicago counterparts were making $4. Parks was their man.
Within three months of his arrival in New York, Parks managed to get himself elected as walking delegate. The job of walking delegate, common to trade unions at the end of the nineteenth century, was to patrol the job on beha
lf of the union; to ensure that the men were being treated fairly and that no scabs were sneaking onto union jobs; to find work for the idle; and to provide a decent burial for the dead. In theory, it was useful and reasonable to have such men to act as watchdogs and facilitators. In practice, the position was a breeding ground for the kind of corruption in which Parks would soon come to specialize.
Parks at once dedicated himself to “organizing” Local 2. Another walking delegate, named Ely, later described Parks’ remarkable efficacy in the early days of his tenure: “I was organizing on the East Side, but I could make no headway at all. I met Parks who had just started in to organize the West Side and he offered to change places with me. I agreed, and in about six weeks he had the entire East Side organized. Every Friday over three hundred dollars was coming in at the meetings of the union for initiation fees. I met with as little success on the West Side as on the East Side, and Parks changed off with me again. In six or seven weeks, he had the West Side as thoroughly organized as the East Side. How he did it, I don’t know.”
How he did it, according to Parks’ own account, was with his fists: “In organizing men in New York I talked with them at first nice and pleasant, explaining how they could be better off in a union. Bosses began to learn that I was about and pretty busy; and they had men stationed around to ‘do’ me. But they could not keep me off a job. I sneaked up ladders and elevator shafts, stole up on beams, waited for the men on cellar doors where they ate their dinner. Some did not believe that unions would be good for them; and I gave them a belt on the jaw. That changed their minds.”
Parks once claimed to have gotten into as many as 20 fistfights in a single day’s work. “I like a fight,” he said. “It’s nothing after you’ve risked your life bridge-riveting at three dollars a day.”
Parks soon surrounded himself with an entourage of like-minded lackeys. His group called itself, with grim irony, “the entertainment committee” and convened at a saloon near the union hall, on the northeast corner of Third Avenue and 59th Street. Owned by a man named Bernard Lynch, the saloon served as unofficial headquarters of the Parks faction in the union. And to ensure that their faction was the only faction, they used the back room of Lynch’s saloon to “entertain” men who hadn’t gotten the full thread of Parks’ argument. If a man had the temerity to stand up at a union meeting and question one of Parks’ proclamations, they might just attack him on the spot. The union meetings at Maennerchor Hall on East 56th Street frequently degenerated into brawls. One method of intimidation favored by the entertainment committee was to knock a man down, then stand on his face. Eye gouging and rib cracking were also in bounds. In one instance, members of the committee allegedly ripped the flesh off the face of a recalcitrant unionist, scarring him for life.
Parks’ tactics were brutal but effective. Union membership swelled from several hundred to 1,500, then to 3,000, then to 3,500, and as it grew so did the union’s power over builders in the city. The more ironworkers who came into the union, the fewer non-union men employers could call upon in the event of a strike. And if contractors tried to remedy a strike by importing non-union men from outside New York, as they often did, Parks’ men would pay the unfortunate imports a visit and “entertain” them vigorously.
Parks liked ordering strikes almost as much as he liked hitting people. At any given moment he had up to a dozen jobs tied up around the city. Parks demanded better working conditions and better wages, and he seldom negotiated on his demands. His dim view of negotiation was represented by his prized bulldog, a fearsome-looking creature named Arbitrator. The name was both a joke and a threat. Arbitration, to Parks, was something that came at the end of a leash and had big teeth. Parks had no interest in achieving peace with employers, an opinion he made clear in a short essay he published in The Bridgemen’s Magazine:
…since the sun first arose on a newly erected world there has always been a battle between the strong and the weak, a struggle for mastery between the bulldogs of war and the craven worshipers of the white-winged dove, and it always ended the same way. The worshipers of the bulldogs of war, making the earth re-echo with paeans of victory, while the worshipers of the bird of peace humbly bowed their necks, permitting the collar of bondage to be clasped thereon…. God helps those that help themselves.
Parks’ bias against compromise would have disastrous long-term consequences for the ironworkers. In 1902, he fought and killed a proposed agreement between the international union and American Bridge Company, by far the largest employer of structural ironworkers in the country. The agreement offered better terms for ironworkers than any they’d received—or would again for decades to come.
In the short term, though, Parks’ tactics paid off splendidly. Builders yielded to his demands. There was so much money to be made in the skyscraper boom they could ill afford to lose time on an ironworkers’ strike. Because the steel frame preceded the rest of the building, ironworker strikes devastated employers. Stopping the steel, Parks understood, was the surest way to a builder’s wallet. He succeeded in raising the prevailing union ironworkers’ wage in New York to $2.50 across the board by 1898, to $3.20 by 1900, to $4 in 1902. “By then,” Parks later boasted, “we had them all. Why, for 1903, they went to $4.50 without a murmur.” He promised to raise the wage to an even $5. “And then we’ll stop,” he added drily. “Capital has some rights.”
His fellow ironworkers may have disagreed with his tactics, but they couldn’t argue with his results. The more Parks pushed around builders, and the more the builders capitulated, the greater Parks grew in the estimation of his fellow ironworkers. He was “Fighting” Sam Parks, “The Bismarck Among Bridgemen.” When he told the men to walk, they walked. “His four thousand ironworkers,” observed McClure’s magazine, “obeyed like children.”
Parks’ power expanded still further after the Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union joined the Board of Building Trades, an alliance representing 39 separate trades in New York. Parks quickly worked his way up to become its president. He now held sway over not only 4,000 or so ironworkers, but also 26,000 other building tradesmen, all of whom, it was said, were prepared to strike at his command. Nobody had ever wielded as much power in the building trades. And nobody had ever been as willing to abuse it.
On an afternoon late in the winter of 1902, Sam Parks met with a man named Neils Poulson, president of Hecla Iron Works, in a small unfinished room in the Flatiron Building, still under construction at the time. The men met to discuss a strike that Parks had called on Hecla six weeks earlier. Since Hecla was supplying ornamental iron for the Flatiron, the George A. Fuller Company, the building’s general contractor, was eager to get the strike settled and so had arranged this meeting. Poulson told Parks he’d lost about $50,000 due to the strike, and that the strike was wrong and unjust. “I also told him the way the men were picketing the works and slugging the people at work was illegal,” Poulson later recounted. According to Poulson, Parks responded, “I don’t give a damn for the union or the law.” The only way the strike would end, Parks insisted, was if Poulson paid him $2,000. “I want the money, and the strike won’t stop till it comes…. Don’t you forget I am Sam Parks.” Another newspaper gave the quote a more Seussian turn: “I’m Sam Parks, I am.”
Exactly when Parks began grafting is unclear. Perhaps he had been doing it all along. Certainly by 1901 it had become a serious habit. Pay up, he would tell a contractor, or he’d pull the men and stop the job. Or, more effectively, he’d call a strike first, then demand a few hundred or a few thousand dollars to call it off. “Seeing Sam Parks” was a common phrase in the building industry, and everybody knew what it meant. If you intended to put up a steel building in New York, you’d better pay Parks. Otherwise, you’d have no ironworkers to build it.
Graft was a profitable calling. On his modest salary of $48 a week, Parks began to collect diamonds, including three large stones mounted on a gold ring he wore on his right hand. He also wore a thousand-dollar sealskin co
at, according to one account, and no longer made his rounds on foot but in a hansom cab, accompanied by his bulldog. The legend of his quickly accumulated wealth grew in the telling. He was said to live in a luxuriously appointed home, where oil paintings festooned the walls and champagne flowed freely. His wife was said to spend her days shopping at department stores and having her nails manicured and her hands massaged, while Parks sauntered around town squeezing more graft and adding to his fortune of several hundred thousand dollars. Some of this was true, much of it was not.
For the most part, the employers paid up without a fight. Keeping Parks happy was worth a few thousand dollars when millions were at stake. In any case, hardly anyone begrudged a man a little graft in turn-of-the-century New York. Boss Tweed had been dead over twenty years, but Tammany Hall, and the Tammany way of doing things, still prospered in New York City. The muckraker Lincoln Steffens, writing in McClure’s magazine in November of 1903, estimated that the Tammany machine pocketed millions of dollars a year in graft. Steffens quoted the ex-chief of police, William “Big Chief” Devery, who once admitted that the police alone took in over three million dollars in one year during his short reign. Devery wasn’t confessing; he was bragging.
Graft flourished exceptionally well in New York’s booming building industry. Poorly paid inspectors from the Department of Buildings routinely made side deals with builders to let violations pass for a fee. (The customary fee was one-half of what the builder would have spent to repair the violation.) What the builder saved, the inspector made, and everybody was happy. Paying graft to unions was accepted practice, too. In many cases, builders initiated payments to union representatives, bribing walking delegates to strike competing firms. In Chicago, always the leader in such matters, they had a fancy term for these collusive payoffs: “trade agreements.”
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