Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
labor organizers enjoyed the most success in building a true industrial union; the United Mine Workers organized all underground workers regardless of specialty. Despite the challenges posed by technological change and ethnic prejudice, in 1882 a strike by the Amalgamated Union at the newly built Homestead Works forced the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Company to sign a contract with the union. A year later, the bankrupt company sold the mill to Andrew Carnegie, which prompted a decade of simmering labor tension even as production skyrocketed.18
The ascendance of the region’s large industrial corporations also resulted in close ties between executives and politicians on the local and state levels. Among the numerous benefits of generous financial support for members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly was the creation of the infamous Coal and Iron Police, which allowed companies to create their own private security forces. In 1888 and 1889, the deputization of hundreds of armed guards allowed Carnegie to introduce replacements and break the union at the Edgar Thomson Works. However, Amalgamated Union workers at Homestead had enough support from local politicians to resist such tactics until 1892. During a final attempt to break the union, on July 5, Henry Frick, Carnegie Steel’s chairman, attempted to land three hundred armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency on the shore of the Monongahela to protect plant access for replacement laborers. Locked-out workers and residents resisted, which resulted in a firefight that ended with bystanders killing several guards after they had surrendered. In the aftermath, the Pennsylvania governor sent in the entire state militia to support management, effectively breaking the strike and eventually the union.19
The battle at Homestead quickly became a “quasi-mythical epic,” in the words of one historian, captured for the world by at least 135 journalists that covered the story. Despite attempts by union organizers to halt the violence, most accounts focused on what Reuben Gold Thwaites described as “the attendant horrors [of] the mob.” This negative representation of workers provided the political cover employers needed to finally eliminate organized labor in Pittsburgh’s iron and steel industry. Over the next forty years, company officials and their allies in state and local government systematically rooted out union activity in mills, employed company spies to prevent worker organization, and undermined pro-labor candidates in local government. Anti-union sentiment among employers was especially strong in southwestern Pennsylvania and extended beyond the steel mills, with only one union, a carpenter’s local, remaining intact throughout the entire period. While few statistics are available, one scholar discovered that officials at six Carnegie mills fired at least 700 workers between 1896 and 1910 as a result of company spy reports.20
A nuanced analysis of manufacturing in the Steel Valley also reveals intra-regional patterns that would later have significant ramifications for metropolitan development. On the one hand, Wheeling iron-makers, too, began vertical integration during the 1880s and adopted Bessemer converters, thereby eliminating some skilled occupations and placing more control over production in the hands of managers. Unable to match their better capitalized rivals in terms of basic steel and with a declining market for cut nails, however, the largest Wheeling firms diversified their operations into the production of pipes, tin plate, and other finished goods. The creation of the American Tin Plate Company in 1898 resulted in the acquisition of the tin milling operations of most of the large companies in Wheeling and Steubenville, with other area mills becoming parts of American Steel and Wire, American Steel Hoop Company, and National Tube Company. The 1901 creation of U.S. Steel from the merger of Carnegie’s empire with Federal Steel, National Steel, and a host of smaller companies marked the high point of this wave of consolidation. The new conglomeration also included eight plants on the Ohio River in and around Wheeling and Steubenville, marking the functional consolidation of operations throughout the entire Steel Valley.21
Because the production of tin plate remained a relatively skilled operation, mill workers in Wheeling and Steubenville remained unionized well after the industrial unions had been crushed in southwestern Pennsylvania. After Homestead, the Amalgamated Union essentially gave up trying to organize basic steel and focused their efforts on the less technologically advanced finishing mills. However, the creation of U.S. Steel resulted in a protracted industry-wide strike, with workers shutting down all eight plants along the Ohio that had been included in the new conglomeration. Strikers had a great deal of public support in local communities, with Mingo Junction, Ohio, Mayor W. J. O’Donnell stating flatly that he was “with the Amalgamated Association men in this fight to the end.” In spite of this support, the strike was in disarray by September as managers hurriedly trained new workers to take the place of skilled workers and the escalation of violence turned public opinion against organizers. In the years following the strike, the number of local union lodges in the Wheeling district fell from eighteen to about six, though this was still relatively more than along the Monongahela and other areas around the country.22
The complex relationship between politics, union activity, and corporate growth set the stage for increasing community dependence on companies for a wide variety of municipal services, as industrial employers matched their anti-union activities at the workplace with a positive campaign to win the hearts and minds of the area’s residents. Many corporations instituted corporate welfare programs aimed at encouraging workers to identify with company interests. Beginning in 1903, U.S. Steel instituted a profit-sharing stock purchase program for employees and joined other large employers in instituting modest pension and accident benefits programs. A wave of steel strikes following World War I prompted further expansion of corporate welfare activities. “Good will is not a sentiment that trickles down from above,” declared Homestead Works superintendent L.C. Gardner. “It comes into existence at the bottom of the social structure. The place to cultivate good will is where it grows naturally—in the community, in the neighborhood, where people meet as folks.” Corporations held huge picnics and organized excursions to local amusement parks, such as Kennywood near Homestead and the White Palace in Wheeling, designed to cement the relationship between employees and management. Many companies fielded sports teams, with the Edgar Thomson Works fielding baseball, track and field, basketball, and boxing teams. Company coffers paid for playgrounds, community centers, government buildings, pools, libraries, and hospitals. Throughout the Steel Valley, local politicians said that if they needed something, they simply went to the mill superintendent or plant supervisor and asked for it.23
Industrialists also used the process of municipal incorporation to limit their tax liability, exert additional control over workers, and maintain wealthy enclaves in which to enjoy the fruits of their investments. The mill site along the Ohio River across from Steubenville, for example, appealed to Ernest T. Weir not only for its accessibility and low cost, but also for its relative isolation from older urban centers. “We had something else in mind besides building an integrated plant,” Weir explained in 1955. Weirton was “deliberately selected and consciously planned as the location for both a steel plant and a community.” Cities, Weir believed, “if not breeders, were certainly magnifiers of discontent among workers.” “In a small town,” he continued, workers and management were friendly, and residents were often “relatives or close friends.” Weirton employees owned homes or rented private residences, but the company provided water and other services, paid for the police, controlled access to jobs, and dominated the local culture as well as the economy. In exchange for this paternalism, Weirton Steel employees remained steadfastly nonunion even after the great organizing drive of the CIO in the 1930s. By 1920, the area already counted 9,500 residents, and in 1940 its population of approximately 25,000 made it the largest unincorporated town in the nation.24
In ways similar to Weirton Steel’s domination of its mill town, the famous libraries donated by Andrew Carnegie illustrate the community structure of the Steel Valley at its peak as well as the political discord that often simmered just below the surface. The Pittsburgh industrialist used the 1898 dedication ceremony for the Homestead Library to outline his program for the institution that was, in his words, “the gift of one workingman to other workingmen.” “May it indeed be between capital and labor,” he concluded, “an emblem of peace, reconciliation, confidence, harmony and union.”25 Local boosters throughout the region supported construction of Carnegie libraries both as needed investments in their communities and also in recognition of the financial power wielded by corporate interests. Wheeling attorney Nelson Hubbard, whose father was a state representative