20.Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 39, 54–55; Temin, Iron and Steel, 3–5, 14–15, 21. For the difficulties in producing rails, see John Fritz, The Autobiography of John Fritz (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1912), 92–101, 111–15, 121–23, 149. Overman quoted in Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 47.
21.In addition to iron ore and fuel (charcoal, coke, or sometimes anthracite coal), limestone was put into blast furnaces to help form slag out of impurities. Temin, Iron and Steel, 58–62, 96–98, 157–63; U.S. Steel, The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel (Pittsburgh, PA: U.S. Steel, 1957), 221–25.
22.Krause, Battle for Homestead, 48–49; David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11–12. For a firsthand account of puddling, see James J. Davis, The Iron Puddler; My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1922).
23.Temin, Iron and Steel, 66–67, 85, 105–06, 109–13; Fritz, Autobiography of John Fritz, 91–135; Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness: The European Response to American Industrialization, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 162–63.
24.Krause, Battle for Homestead, 52–65; Temin, Iron and Steel, 125–27, 130, 153; David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (1960; New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 8.
25.Some companies also integrated backward, buying or leasing ore mines and making their own coke. Temin, Iron and Steel, 153–69, 190–91; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 10–12; William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York: Random House, 1992), 56–59.
26.Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 213; Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 47, 53; Gross and Snyder, Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, 83; Schneider Electric, 170 Years of History (Rueil-Malmaison, France: Schneider Electric, 2005), 3–5, 20–22 (http://www.schneider-electric.com/documents/presentation/en/local/2006/12/se_history_brands_march2005.pdf).
27.Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 6–7; David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 405; U.S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States—1900; Census Reports, vol. VII—Manufactures, part I (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Office, 1902), 583, 585, 597.
28.U.S. Steel, Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel; Carnegie quoted in Brody, Steelworkers inAmerica, 21.
29.Michael W. Santos, “Brother against Brother: The Amalgamated and Sons of Vulcan at the A. M. Byers Company, 1907–1913,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 111 (2) (Apr. 1987), 199–201; Davis, Iron Puddler, 85; John Fitch, The Steel Workers (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 36, 40–44, 48, 52. William Attaway’s novel, Blood on the Forge ([1941] New York: New York Review of Books, 2005), set in Pittsburgh at the end of World War I, gives a good sense of the rhythms of steelwork, with its alternate periods of exhausting labor and waiting for the next burst of activity.
30.Harry B. Latton, “Steel Wonders,” The Pittsburgh Times, June 1, 1892, reprinted in David P. Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red”: Homestead 1892 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 13–15; Fritz, Autobiography of John Fritz, 203; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 9; Mark Reutter, Sparrows Point; Making Steel—The Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 18.
31.Fitch, The Steel Workers, 3; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 1 (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1872), 370–72. I was pointed to Hawthorne’s statement by John F. Kasson, who quotes part of it in Civilizing the Machine, 142.
32.Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 192, 200, 270–71; Joseph Stella, “In the Glare of the Converter,” “In the Light of a Five-Ton Ingot,” “At the Base of the Blast Furnace,” and “Italian Steelworker” (accessed Apr. 28, 2015), http://www.clpgh.org/exhibit/stell1.html; W. J. Gordon, Foundry, Forge and Factory with a Chapter on the Centenary of the Rotary Press (London: Religious Tract Society, 1890), 15; John Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States, vol. II ([1918] New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966), 80.
33.Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books, 371; Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 62; Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America: Autobiographical Notes,” quoted in Maurine W. Greenwald, “Visualizing Pittsburgh in the 1900s: Art and Photography in the Service of Social Reform,” in Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 136; Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), 401.
34.Nasaw, Carnegie, 164; Mary Heaton Vorse, Men and Steel (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 12; Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 60; Gunther quoted in Reutter, Sparrows Point, 9.
35.For a vivid account of the tumultuous struggles of the Gilded Age, see Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence; The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015), chap. 4–6, especially chap. 5 on industrial strife.
36.The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was created by an 1876 merger of the Sons of Vulcan with two unions of rolling mill workers. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 50–53; Preamble to the Constitution of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, reprinted in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 17; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9–22.
37.Some companies continued to just make iron goods, without the intensely competitive ethos of the dominant steel producers. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 22–36; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 1–10, 23–28, 31–32.
38.Krause, Battle for Homestead, 177–92; Nasaw, Carnegie, 314–26.
39.Nasaw, Carnegie, 363–72. See also Krause, Battle for Homestead, 240–51.
40.Joshua B. Freeman, “Andrew and Me,” The Nation, Nov. 16, 1992; Nasaw, Carnegie, 406.
41.Frick had made a fortune producing coke before joining forces with Carnegie. Most of the charges against workers were dropped after acquittals in the first trials. The Local News, July 2, 1892, New York Herald, July 7, 1892, Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, July 25, 1892, and Robert S. Barker, “The Law Takes Sides,” all in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” a wonderful compilation of essays, contemporary accounts, photographs, and drawings about the 1892 battle; Freeman, “Andrew and Me”; Krause, Battle for Homestead; Nasaw, Carnegie, 405–27.
42.Russell W. Gibbons, “Dateline Homestead,” and Randolph Harris, “Photographers at Homestead in 1892,” in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 158–61.
43.Nasaw, Carnegie, 469; Anne E. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 66–67; Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 41; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 56–58, 60–75.
44.Hamlin Garland, “Homestead and Its Perilous Trades; Impressions of a Visit,” McClure’s Magazine 3 (1) (June 1894), in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 204–05; Dreiser in Nasaw, Carnegie, 470; Fitch, The Steel Workers, 214–29; Serrin, Homestead, 175–76.
45.Floyd Dell, “Pittsburgh or Petrograd?” The Liberator 2 (11) (Dec. 1919), 7–8.
46.Bethlehem Steel later purchased the Sparrows Point mill, which during the 1950s was the largest steel complex in the world. Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 73–74; Reutter, Sparrows Point, 10, 55–71.
47.Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 73–12
7.
48.Brody, Steelworkers in America, 87–89; Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 74, 102; Reutter, Sparrows Point, 50.
49.For many years after its formation, U.S. Steel functioned essentially as a holding company, with its many subsidiaries operating independently. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 359–62; Nasaw, Carnegie, 582–88.
50.To prevent workers from sieging or seizing the mill, U.S. Steel redirected a river on the site into a concrete channelway, a moat separating the plant from the town. James B. Lane, “City of the Century”: A History of Gary, Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 27–37; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 158; Mosher, Capital’s Utopia, 177; S. Paul O’Hara, Gary, the Most American of All American Cities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 19–20, 38–53.
51.Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 25.
52.In Taylor’s account, all the iron loaders eventually achieved the high rate, but independent evidence indicates that only one worker was able to carry anything like forty-seven tons of pig iron a day over an extended period. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, esp. chap. 6; Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 85–123. See also Charles D. Wrege and Ronald G. Greenwood, Frederick W. Taylor, the Father of Scientific Management: Myth and Reality (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991).
53.Brody, Steelworkers in America, 31–40, 170–73; U. S. Steel, Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, 314; Fitch, Steel Workers, 43, 60, 166–81.
54.Fitch, The Steel Workers, 57–64.
55.Steel mills in Maryland also hired a substantial number of black workers. Homestead was something of an exception in the strong solidarity between the Eastern European laborers and the English-speaking skilled workers, before and during the 1892 clash. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 96–111, 135–37; Henry M. McKiven, Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 41; Paul Kraus, “East-Europeans in Homestead,” in Demarest, Jr., ed., “The River Ran Red,” 63–65. For an evocative portrait of Slovak steelworkers in Braddock, Pennsylvania, see Thomas Bell’s novel Out of This Furnace ([1941] Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976).
56.Strictly speaking, these were not steelworkers; they worked in a factory that built steel railway cars. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 125, 145–70; Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. IV: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 281–305.
57.“Labor,” in Eric Foner and John A. Garrity, eds., The Reader’s Companion to American History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 632; Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 146–47.
58.Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” The North American Review 148 (391) (1889): 654.
59.Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 88; Whiting Williams, What’s on the Worker’s Mind, By One Who Put on Overalls to Find Out (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920); “WILLIAMS, WHITING,” in The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (accessed May 5, 2015), http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=WW1; Nasaw, Carnegie, 386. There is a vast literature on Progressive Era reform. A good place to start is Michael McGeer, Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
60.The Pittsburgh Survey examined the whole region and its economy, but steel dominated the study and was the main subject of several volumes. Greenwald and Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed.
61.In 1920, the Supreme Court dismissed the antitrust case against U.S. Steel. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 147, 154, 161–71; Fitch, The Steel Workers, 178–79.
62.Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 61–76; union data calculated from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 126, 177; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 121–40, 144 (quote).
63.David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1965), 45–51, 59–60.
64.The most thorough accounts of the steel organizing drive and the 1919 strike are William Z. Foster, The Great Steel Strike (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1920), and Brody, Labor in Crisis. Except where otherwise noted, I have drawn from them.
65.Freeman et al., Who Built America? 258–61.
66.For the strike in Gary, see Lane, “City of the Century,” 90–93. For a gripping portrayal of the strike from the point of view of black workers, see Attaway, Blood on the Forge.
67.The actual demands of the striking workers were far from radical, dealing, very concretely, with hours, wages, and union recognition. See Brody, Labor in Crisis, 100–101, 129. The New York Times, like many newspapers, gave heavy coverage to the strike. From September 23 through September 26, the Times ran three-line banner headlines about the strike on its front page that emphasized the strike’s size and violence.
68.Foster, The Great Steel Strike, 1; Vorse, Men and Steel, 21; John Dos Passos, The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
Chapter 4
“I WORSHIP FACTORIES”
1.Henry Ford, “Mass Production,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th ed. (New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica, 1926), vol. 30, 821–23; David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984), 1, 218–19, 224; Helen Jones Earley and James R. Walkinshaw, Setting the Pace: Oldsmobile’s First 100 Years (Lansing, MI: Public Relations Department, Oldsmobile Division, 1996), 461; The Locomobile Society of America, “List of Cars Manufactured by the Locomobile Company of America,” http://www.locomobilesociety.com/cars.cfm, and “U.S. Automobile Production Figures,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Automobile_Production_Figures (both accessed Feb. 6, 2017); Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 277.
2.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1, 228. My discussion of the development of the Ford system draws heavily from Hounshell’s superb study.
3.Edward A. Filene, The Way Out: A Forecast of Coming Changes in American Business and Industry (Garden City, NY: Page & Company, 1924), 180; Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 74.
4.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 4–8, 15–50.
5.Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 44.
6.John A. James and Jonathan S. Skinner, “The Resolution of the Labor Scarcity Paradox,” Working Paper No. 1504, National Bureau of Economic Research, Nov. 1984.
7.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 115–23; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 196.
8.Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 240, 249–53; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 240–43.
9.Until 1915, Ford partner James Couzens played a central role in the Ford Motor Company, developing many of its innovative practices and contributing greatly to its overall success. Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1948), 9–27, 43–46.
10.Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, 44–45; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 224.
11.Stephen
Meyer, The Five Dollar Day; Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 16, 18; Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations ([1776] London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 6–7; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 227.
12.Though various accounts at the time and after, including by the Ford company, have claimed that by the time of the introduction of the assembly line complete interchangeability of parts had been achieved, apparently for several years some filing and grinding of parts on the assembly line occurred. Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, 42, 46, 68–77; Ford Factory Facts (Detroit, MI: Ford Motor Company, 1912), 46–47, 49; Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1957), 522; Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 219–20, 224–25, 230–33; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 10, 22–29; Jack Russell, “The Coming of the Line; The Ford Highland Park Plant, 1910–1914,” Radical America 12 (May–June 1978), 30–33.
13.Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: The Origins of the New Factory System in the United States 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 21–23; David Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line and Capitalist Control of Work at Ford,” in Andrew Zimbalist, ed., Case Studies on the Labor Process (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 197–98; Ford, “Mass Production,” 822; Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 29–31; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (1867: New York: International Publishers, 1967), 380.
14.Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 237–49; Gartman, “Origins of the Assembly Line,” 201.
15.Russell, “The Coming of the Line,” 33–34, 37 (includes Ford quote). Photographs of cars and trucks being assembled using the craft method at various early vehicle companies can be seen in Bryan Olsen and Joseph Cabadas, The American Auto Factory (St. Paul, MN: Motorbooks, 2002).
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