Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
“a permanent establishment which would be a constant power in building up [its] deficiencies.” On the eve of a referendum to raise the required 10 percent local contribution, the Daily Intelligencer also warned, “Mr. Carnegie is so situated that any affront to him at this time might in the end prove very disastrous to the physical welfare of Wheeling.” The editor then cited all the steel mills in the vicinity as evidence of the city’s dependence on heavy industry, concluding, “We desire Mr. Carnegie’s good will. He deserves our good will.”26
Others, however, were less enthusiastic about the new cultural jewels scattered throughout metropolitan Pittsburgh. Despite Carnegie’s stated desire to bury “all regretful thoughts, all unpleasant memories,” Wheeling unionists, such as Valentine Reuther whose sons later helped start the United Auto Workers, denounced any facility provided by the villain of the Homestead Massacre, who had “blood on his hands.” Wheeling’s funding issue failed by a slim 201 votes after members of the local Carpenters’ and Joiners’ Union declared they wanted a library that would be Wheeling’s own, “not a Carnegie monument where a large portion of our citizens could only enter with repugnance and servility.” Wheeling’s failed attempt to obtain a Carnegie library also reveals the weakness of local governments in metropolitan Pittsburgh and their reliance on corporate largesse for infrastructure that elsewhere would have been a service of municipal authorities. “Wheeling needs a good library sadly,” Hubbard lamented. “The city is scarcely able to provide one, and is by no means willing to do what it can and should do in that direction. For the latter reason, especially, we shall probably do without the library until someone from outside thinks best to offer substantial help.”27
Politics of Production
The political systems forged in the late nineteenth century largely stymied attempts at dealing effectively with the environmental and social consequences of the Steel Valley’s industrial economy. As in the earlier era, the relationship between local leaders and state politics in Harrisburg, Charleston, and Columbus continued to be of major importance in determining the fortunes of the region’s communities. Despite Wheeling’s increased influence in West Virginia politics during a period of Republican ascendance between 1895 and 1931, for instance, the ability of the community to attract investment from state government remained limited. West Virginia’s taxation structure remained heavily weighted in favor of the large coal and timber companies who controlled the sparsely settled counties that made up much of the state. Lacking a sufficient source of development funds, civic administration in Wheeling remained more like a nineteenth-century frontier town than a community with aspirations to become a modern metropolis. Because of the lack of taxing authority, fees charged for liquor licenses were so important to municipal coffers that it was virtually impossible to place any limitations on saloonkeepers, some of whom served as unofficial political bosses in the shifting alliances of the period. Wheeling gained a reputation as being “wide-open” for organized crime with “Big” Bill Lias and other gangsters controlling prostitution, gambling, and later bootlegged alcohol.28
Things were even worse in Steubenville, which continued to decline in importance compared to other parts of Ohio even as the expansion of heavy industry brought with it the same social and environmental problems affecting other areas of the region. “Millmen are notoriously free spenders,” observed a local Protestant minister, who blamed the “new tide of immigration [that] infiltrated Steubenville: Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Ukrainians [for] the jaws of vice [that] closed upon the city.” Unlike Weirton and other communities dominated by a single company, civic elites in Steubenville had no effective means of imposing social control, particularly as municipal politics became increasingly fragmented along ethnic and class lines. “Other than a 40 percent Italian dominance, no other group has produced a leader capable of solidifying the sub-cultures into a cohesive community,” reported a later observer. “Although the area is economically above the Ohio median income level, sociologically they respond as fractionated lower-middle class isolates. Consequently, the dynamic necessary to coalesce the diverse interests into a unified progress effort, for all intent and purpose, does not exist.”29
Political leaders in wealthier and more populous Pittsburgh, on the other hand, established strong ties to the state government, which generally obliged with enabling legislation whenever necessary. They also built a relatively stable municipal administration that, while machine-driven and corrupt, was able to effectively deliver services to constituents. Political rings organized a fragmented, neighborhood-controlled municipal government by means of a centralized, boss-dominated system that could tame tumultuous city councils and provide basic services from rudimentary street paving and lighting to park construction and the laying of sanitary sewer and water lines. Republican operative Christopher Magee and state legislator William Flinn created this type of boss system using patronage, payoffs, and political maneuvering to enrich themselves and their followers. After 1879, those seeking to do business with the city or to bank its assets paid a premium to the machine, while Flinn’s contracting business, Booth and Flinn, Ltd., received millions in padded contracts for roads and other public improvements as the lowest “responsible” bidder. The organization allied itself with the Mellon family and other bankers holding the city’s funds, owners of traction (streetcar) companies with city contracts, and railroad powers such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, as well as liquor and vice interests who could depend on city hall to turn a blind eye once the proper bribes were paid.30
Under the reign of Magee and Flinn, Pittsburgh undertook a massive program of public improvements that far outstripped anything attempted in the Steel Valley’s other urban centers. The Magee-Flinn machine pursued a pro-growth agenda focused on delivering services to those middle and upper class neighborhoods most able to pay. They were supported in this endeavor by the Pennsylvania legislature, which created a new city charter in 1887 (denounced by the Democratic Pittsburgh Post as the “Mageesburgh” charter) that placed appointing power for municipal departments in the hands of the machine-controlled city council. The legislature then passed a bill authorizing Pittsburgh to provide for street improvements, sewers, sidewalks, and other public works that created a bonanza of lucrative projects ripe for patronage. While public works served a political function in providing the graft that oiled the cogs of the political machine, celebrated Public Works director Edward Bigelow (who was also Magee’s cousin) insisted on efficient administration of projects, resulting in the laying of 190 miles of new sewers, the grading of 94 miles of city streets, and the repairing of an additional 75 miles with asphalt or block stone between 1888 and 1899 alone.31
Despite these successes, ring-led development was inherently limited and provided services in such an uneven way that they actually tended to increase the social and environmental inequalities separating the middle and working classes. During the 1880s and 1890s, many new office and retail buildings rose in the region’s downtown areas as Henry Phipps, Andrew Mellon, Henry Frick and others competed to build the most distinctive and opulent buildings as symbols of their growing fortunes. Similarly, Union Deposit Bank president Dorhman Sinclair built a ten-story steel-and-concrete structure in 1915 hailed as “Steubenville’s First Skyscraper.” Middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in the cities as well as exclusive areas in the upper reaches of mill towns and railroad commuter suburbs benefitted the most from infrastructure development initiatives. In Pittsburgh, the burgeoning East End neighborhoods of Shadyside, Oakland, Homewood, and Highland Park were protected by their topography from the grit and soot of the industrialized river valleys and were the first to enjoy paved streets, municipal water and other benefits. “The old wards of our city,” explained Edward Bigelow in 1890, “are very rapidly being turned into manufacturing sites and thereby forcing the residents thereof to locate in the East End in outer wards. Having once established their homes there, they very naturally and very properly ask [for] such streets and sewer improvements as well as water supplies that will make their lives accessible and healthful.”32
Early on, some labor leaders and others began advocating for reform of the political boss system. Not all residents of the river valleys could move, of course, and industrial expansion meant increasing crowding of working-class neighborhoods where political leaders could more easily placate residents with jobs and other personal favors. “Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination,” wrote newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken