But if for some iron- and steelmaking seemed the realm of the gods, for others it appeared the province of Satan, like the early English mills had been for Blake. Hawthorne described molten ribbons of iron as looking “like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet,” the place in the Old Testament where worshippers burnt their children alive in sacrifices to Moloch and Baal, a hell on earth. Early in the twentieth century, the manager of an iron and steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado, wrote, “The steam, the fire, the fluid metal, the slag and the whir of the machine all ma[d]e it look like it was the Devil’s Workshop.” For Joseph Stella, Pittsburgh, “Often shrouded by fog and smoke, . . . ever pulsating, throbbing with the innumerable explosions of its steel mills—was like the stunning realization of some of the most stirring infernal regions sung by Dante.” Similarly, Lincoln Steffens wrote, “I have never lost my first picture of Pittsburgh when I went there to write about it. It looked like hell, literally . . . with its fiery furnaces and the two rivers which pinched it in.” 33
Figure 3.3 Charles Graham’s 1886 illustration, Making Bessemer Steel at Pittsburgh.
Hellish though they might have been, iron and steel mills were often hailed as markers of national greatness and the advance of civilization. Their growth allowed the introduction of iron and steel implements on farms and in homes, the mechanization of other industries, a transformed landscape of railroads, bridges, and skyscrapers, and imperial power based on giant guns and steel warships. In 1876, George Thurston described the then-new Edgar Thomson steel mill in Braddock, Pennsylvania, as “a striking illustration of . . . the progress of civilization.” “No grander monument to the growth of the nation . . . or the triumph of American manufactures and of American mechanics, could well be built.” Mary Heaton Vorse, a left-wing journalist with a very different sensibility, nonetheless agreed in her 1920 book Men and Steel: “Our civilization is forged in the steel towns.” And not just any civilization, but modernity: “Iron and Steel began the life of the moderns.” Sociologist Sharon Zukin noted that “Steel has power because it has been the lifeline of industrial society. . . . Steel is linked upward to the national government by warfare and international trade, and downward to the local manufacturing community as an emblem of economic power.” In the late 1940s, best-selling journalist John Gunther declared, “The basic power determinant of any country is its steel production.”34
Class War
Fire, power, but one more thing, too, made iron and steel factories centers of public attention—labor strife. The English textile industry sparked a great debate about child labor and working conditions, if not much effective worker organization. The American textile industry was hailed, with considerable exaggeration, for harmonious relations between owners and workers. By contrast, labor conflict came to be strongly associated with the iron and steel industry, the site of some of the most dramatic episodes of what can only be called class war in the history of the United States.
In the decades after the Civil War, the growing power of industrial capital set off fierce economic and political struggles, at their broadest about what type of society the United States would be, and who would decide. Former slaves, farmers, women, and the unemployed mobilized, as a wide range of voices, far wider than we hear today—populists, monetary reformers, socialists, anarchists, social Darwinists, Christian reformers, feminists, and cooperativists—jumped into debates over social values and structures. Workers and the organizations they built composed the single most important force challenging the growing economic and political dominance of industrialists and financiers during what Mark Twain so aptly labeled the Gilded Age. Nowhere was labor conflict more intense than in the iron and steel industry.35
More than any other industry, iron and steel seemed to confirm the notion that the factory system was creating two, new, hostile classes. With much higher costs for starting up an iron or steel mill than a textile mill, capital tended to concentrate in a handful of powerful firms. For the men who controlled them, usually hands on, they were not one of many investments—as the textile mills were for the Boston Associates—but the source of all their wealth and power, the means to achieve some of the largest fortunes in the country. Their workers recognized what they were up against. The preamble to the constitution of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers declared “Year after year the capital of the country becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of the few . . . and the laboring classes are more or less impoverished. It therefore becomes us as men who have to battle with the stern realities of life, to look this matter fair in the face.” Only admitting skilled workers, the Amalgamated’s membership fluctuated with good times and bad, peaking in 1891 at more than 24,000 members. Its power rested on a sense of solidarity among its members and their skills, without which the mills could not operate.36
Or couldn’t until they began mechanizing. New technology and the shift from iron to steel diminished the number of skilled workers and the level of skill needed in various phases of production. The move to steel also increased firm size and created an intensely competitive atmosphere, both of which worked against labor.
The market for rails, which drove the steel industry until late in the nineteenth century, fluctuated wildly, encouraging a ruthless management culture. During economic upswings, there were plenty of orders for everyone, but in downturns companies had to scramble and slash prices to keep their mills operating. Steel executives repeatedly made and broke deals with other companies to fix prices and divvy up markets, while pressing their subordinates to lower costs. Mechanization provided one route; reducing wages and extending hours another. But squeezing labor costs meant having to take on unions, leading to escalating battles in the 1880s and 1890s.37
The big companies took the lead in fighting the Amalgamated, equipped with the financial resources and multiple plants to win extended battles. Homestead saw some of the sharpest clashes. In 1882, the management of the plant (not yet owned by Carnegie) insisted that to keep their jobs employees had to sign an ironclad agreement not to join a union. Refusing, several hundred skilled workers struck for over two months, surviving repeated battles with private guards and the state militia until the general manager capitulated. Six years later, Carnegie used a four-month lockout and Pinkerton National Detective Agency guards to crush the union at his Edgar Thomson mill and go from a system of three shifts of eight hours to two shifts of twelve, a rout not only of unionism but of the standards it had defended.38
The next year, 1889, Carnegie tried to replicate his Thomson triumph at the Homestead mill, which he had purchased in 1883, plotting his moves while on a visit to Europe to see the great Paris exhibition. Once again, his company delivered a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum to his workers, locked them out when they rejected it, and hired Pinkerton guards. But after two efforts to bring in scabs were repulsed by massive crowds of steelworkers and Homestead residents, the local manager gave in and negotiated a new agreement with the Amalgamated Association.39
When the contract expired at the end of June 1892, Carnegie sought to rid himself of the union once and for all. By then, nearly a decade of industrial strife had placed the issue of labor relations at the center of American life. Observers saw Homestead as a bellwether for the future of class relations. The high productivity of the Homestead plant and the Amalgamated’s sliding scale made labor costs at the mill, according to Carnegie’s calculations, above the norm, while allowing its skilled workers relative comfort, buying small houses in town (and electing one of their own to lead its government), purchasing some furnishings, living in decency.
The economic conflict had an ideological dimension. Carnegie and his partners, determined to drive down labor costs, wanted complete freedom to set wages and working conditions without union interference, to control what they saw as solely their property. By contrast, workers felt they had a moral claim on the company, having contributed to its success through their skill and toil. Many shared what at the time was a common democra
tic vision in which working people (or at least the white, English-speaking men among them) should—and in Homestead for a while did—have a say in both civic and industrial life.40
As the battle loomed, Carnegie again absented himself to Europe, leaving in charge his partner Henry Clay Frick. Again, the company prepared an offer it knew the union would reject. As it shut down operations and locked out its workers, Frick surrounded the mill with an eleven-foot-high fence, with gun ports and topped by barbed wire, and contracted with Pinkerton for three hundred guards.
All remained peaceful until the company tried to sneak the Pinkertons into Homestead on barges. In the middle of the night, union lookouts spotted them, alerting the town. As the New York Herald described it, “Like the trumpet of judgement blew the steam whistle of the electric light works at twenty minutes to three-o’clock this morning. It was the signal to battle, murder and sudden death, though not one of the thousands who heard and leaped from their beds to answer its signal dreamed of how much blood was to flow in response to its call.” Workers and townspeople positioned on the steep banks of the Monongahela River kept the well-armed private army from disembarking, firing a cannon at them (which ended up killing a union backer by mistake), rolling flaming railcars toward the moored barges, raining down fireworks and sticks of dynamite, and pouring oil on the river and setting it on fire. Finally surrendering, the Pinkertons found themselves beaten, robbed, and humiliated by a gauntlet of strikers and local residents. Seven workers and three Pinkertons died in the fighting.
The union victory proved short-lived. Within a week, the governor of Pennsylvania sent 8,500 men—the state’s entire National Guard—to occupy Homestead, where they remained until October. This massive application of state power—accompanied by the indictment of well over a hundred workers on charges of murder, riot, and conspiracy—proved the key to the company’s victory. With the troops in place, it began recruiting scab workers from around the country. On July 23, anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to kill Frick—a rare American example of European-style propaganda by the deed—but the Carnegie executive proved a tough bird, surviving bullet and knife wounds, even helping to tackle his assailant. When a National Guardsman shouted, “Three cheers for the man who shot Frick,” he was court-martialed and hung from his thumbs. In November, the union formally gave up.41
Figure 3.4 An Awful Battle at Homestead, Pa., depicting the bloody clash between Carnegie’s locked-out workers and the Pinkertons in the summer of 1892.
The fight at the Carnegie plant was closely followed across the country and abroad. A hundred reporters and sketch artists from major magazines, the press syndicates, and newspapers in Pittsburgh, New York, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and London assembled in Homestead to cover the conflict. With special telegraph lines installed, news from the front lines immediately spread. Photographers documented the clash as well. Several companies sold stereoscopic images for home viewing, providing three-dimensional portrayals of the industrial war.42
The workers’ defeat reverberated far and wide. Having been pushed out of the most advanced steel mill in the country, the Amalgamated saw its hold in the industry rapidly deteriorate. Within a year, more than thirty of the sixty-four mills in southwestern Pennsylvania rid themselves of the Amalgamated. In the iron industry, the union maintained strength among puddlers and sheet and tin plate workers, but even there company resistance and inept leadership gradually diminished its power. By 1914 it was down to just 6,500 members.43
Like the early British textile industry, the American iron and steel industry grew in an atmosphere of denied political rights—free speech, free assembly, rule of law. With unions weakened or eliminated, the steel companies came to exert near-autocratic control over not only the mills but the communities in which they were located. The town of Homestead sank into a dark era of suspicion and demoralization. In mid-1894, Hamlin Garland wrote in McClure’s Magazine, “The town was as squalid and unlovely as could well be imagined, and the people were mainly of the discouraged and sullen type to be found everywhere labor passes into the brutalizing stage of severity.” Theodore Dreiser, who lived in Homestead for six months that same year, found “a sense of defeat and sullen despair which was over all.” More than a dozen years later, when John Fitch came to town, residents shied away from talking to him, fearful of company spies and retribution. Steel company influence over Homestead was so great that no halls could be found for any sort of union meeting. As late as 1933, four decades after the lockout, the only place in Homestead Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins could find to address a crowd of workers was inside a post office, an island of federal authority.44
In 1919, radical critic Floyd Dell called Pittsburgh, across the river and likewise dominated by the iron and steel industry, “capitalism armed to the teeth and carrying a chip on its shoulder. . . . lynch-law carefully codified by a trained legislature and carried out by uniformed desperadoes.” The city, he suggested, was “an experiment in what might be called super-capitalism. It is a sociological experiment, akin (despite the oddity of the comparison) to the Utopias founded here and there from time to time by enterprising if unrealistic socialists. But instead of a poor, precarious, struggling, starved, doomed Utopia, it is a flourishing and, so far, absolutely triumphant Utopia. It is a Billion Dollar Capitalist Utopia.”45
Often repression and paternalism mixed together. During the 1870s and 1880s, leading European iron and steel companies built industrial villages, including Krupp in Essen and Schneider in Le Creusot. Many American companies followed suit. Like the Lowell textile firms, steel mills in isolated locations needed to provide housing if they were to attract a workforce. When in the early 1890s the Pennsylvania Steel Company built its complex at Sparrows Point, an empty spit of land on the north side of Baltimore’s harbor, it constructed a new town a half mile from the blast furnaces. Under an arrangement with the governor of Maryland, the company directly ran the community, without any local democratic structures. Rufus Wood, the company executive who designed the town, was the son of a foreman at the Boott cotton mill in Lowell. He modeled Sparrows Point on the Massachusetts city, though with mostly family accommodations rather than boardinghouses. Dwellings ranged in size and quality from an eighteen-room, three-story colonial for Wood himself down to small wooden houses without running water or indoor plumbing for black workers. As in Lowell, elaborate rules governed behavior not only on the job but in the housing, too.46
The most ambitious mill town scheme came in 1895, when the Apollo Iron and Steel Company decided to build a new mill a mile and a half from its existing plant in western Pennsylvania. It contracted with the firm headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the foremost landscape architect and town planner in the country, to design a new town, Vandergrift, named after the Standard Oil partner who was the largest investor in the company. Cost concerns kept the Olmsted plan from being fully realized, but parts of the town featured curvilinear streets, wide boulevards, scattered small parks, and a village green, characteristic of the high-end suburbs that were beginning to surround older cities. But only the best-paid workers could afford those areas; most lived in a less attractive grid laid out on one side of town or in an unplanned hovel on another.47
Company officials saw housing as a way to retain workers. Some companies offered their employees rental housing at below market rates. Others sold them houses. Carnegie built housing for his workers just outside Homestead, offering low-interest loans that could be repaid through small deductions from their pay. Because many steel mills sat in essentially one-employer towns, home-owning employees, as their bosses knew, would be reluctant to jeopardize their jobs in any way, because without them they would be forced to move. Companies hoped that orderly, well-regulated communities—both Sparrows Point and Vandergrift banned the sale of alcohol—would produce orderly, disciplined workers.48
In the early twentieth century, when the world’s largest company built the world’s largest steel mill, it, too,
built a company town. As the United States recovered from the depression of the 1890s, a wave of corporate mergers swept through the already highly concentrated steel industry. In 1901 Carnegie threatened to expand his finishing operations, in response to the backward integration of firms that had been purchasing his steel ingots. To avoid overcapacity and ruinous competition, J. P. Morgan, the country’s leading financier, arranged a huge merger of steel concerns. For his interests, Carnegie received $226 million (the equivalent of several billion dollars today). The new entity, the United States Steel Corporation, controlled almost 60 percent of the output of the industry and was widely seen as the very embodiment of industrial capitalism.49
Four years after its formation, U.S. Steel bought nine thousand acres on the shore of Lake Michigan, just east of Chicago, where it erected a massive, sprawling integrated steel mill. To allow boat delivery of ore from its Minnesota mines, the company built a deep harbor next to the plant. It also laid out a new city, Gary, named after its chairman, Elbert H. Gary—American industrialists loved naming towns after themselves and each other—where it sold vacant lots and constructed rental housing. Vandergrift, by then part of the U.S. Steel empire, served as something of a model. But in building the new city, the company spurned the utopian pretensions of Lowell and Vandergrift, stating that it was not trying to create a model community, only building a necessary adjunct to its new facility.50
Scientific Management
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