Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
have disgraced a race of alley cats.” Until the 1890s, organized labor had a powerful presence throughout the Steel Valley, and just as skilled workers continued to exercise critical control over work processes in the mills so too did union leaders, both Republican and Democrat, who often served as town burgesses and other key officials. Labor leaders also teamed up with civic officials to push for improvements to the quality of life of working-class residents through public works spending. This was particularly notable in Wheeling, where Valentine Reuther and the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly helped lead a decades long push for a municipal filtration system that would provide “water fit to drink [and] a city fit to live in.” Political bosses, however, proved adept at co-opting union officials with the promise of patronage positions, a practice that effectively turned labor leaders into party hacks. Combined with blacklisting, lock-outs, and other tactics employed by industrialists as well as corporate welfare programs, the rise of political machines subverted union solidarity, effectively co-opted the role of unions in shaping a working-class identity, and undercut attempts at an independent labor politics.33
Middle-class reformers, too, highlighted the inefficiencies of the boss-system and blamed political corruption for the increasing inequalities in the Steel Valley. The paternalism of civic elites combined with the pro-development agenda of Magee and Flinn resulted in many high-profile public works projects in Pittsburgh, most notably in the new hilltop civic center of Oakland. However, the Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the rapid decline of living conditions for working-class residents as well as high rates of communicable diseases and rising concerns about the negative effects of air and water pollution. Kellogg and his investigators blamed the region’s serious social problems and environmental degradation on the “production of wealth on a vast scale,” “inequity in distribution,” “and the inadequacies of municipal governments” that could “be overcome rapidly” if the community really wanted to do so. At the same time, Pittsburgh reformers seemed to hit their stride with the 1906 mayoral election of George Guthrie, a Progressive bitterly opposed to the Magee-Flinn machine. The new mayor created a Division of Smoke Inspection in the Bureau of Health, which itself was elevated to a full municipal department in 1909 in order to better regulate tenements and improve sanitary conditions. Guthrie also partnered with business leaders, who were concerned about economic threats to the city in the wake of a disastrous flood and a national financial panic, to create a new Civic Commission tasked “to plan and promote improvements in civic and industrial conditions.” In turn, the group of eighteen business and professional leaders hired pioneer city planner Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., to prepare a plan for the city. When completed in 1911, Olmsted’s Pittsburgh: Main Thoroughfares and the Downtown District established a comprehensive framework for remaking Pittsburgh as a modern metropolis.34
Ethnic fragmentation, a rugged landscape, and the desire of industrialists to control the levers of political power in the area around their plants meant that vertical integration of the economy was not matched by centralized municipal administrations. Civic boosters in both Pittsburgh and Wheeling expressed a mixture of pride and annoyance at the relatively small percentage of population the central city contained in relation to that of their dependent regions. In the eyes of Progressive reformers, the region’s fragmented political system created a plethora of inefficient minor municipalities that duplicated services, prevented comprehensive planning, weakened civic administrations, and lent themselves to control by corrupt interests. “Pittsburgh is dwarfed and made small in comparison with other cities, where outlying but dependent suburbs have been merged into one municipal organization,” declared George Anderson of the Chamber of Commerce in 1902. “Civic pride … should demand that this, the acknowledged industrial center of America, should occupy her proper place among other great cities of the nation.”35 Similarly, a decade later a booster publication sponsored by the Wheeling Corrugating Company bemoaned the fact that “the census cannot go beyond legal boundaries and so Wheeling does not get credit for her real extent and true proportions.”36
As regional elites began to see their competitive advantages slip in the early decades of the twentieth century, corporate leaders and some politicians, such as Pittsburgh Mayor William A. Magee, who replaced Guthrie in 1909, joined Progressives in their belief that “some form of centralized administration” was necessary. Similarly, proponents of a “Greater Wheeling Charter” authorized by the West Virginia Legislature after nearly a decade of campaigning cited the need for a larger water reservoir and regional sewer authority as well as the need to avoid “much embarrassment” and “great humiliation” at a time when many other cities were annexing adjacent territories. As a result of these initiatives, Pittsburgh, which had already incorporated its East End and the South Side communities across the Monongahela River during the 1860s and 1870s, forcibly annexed the separate City of Allegheny across the Allegheny River in 1906. In 1919, Wheeling, too, consolidated its control over the eight adjacent municipalities including Fulton, Woodsdale, and Elm Grove.37
Despite the successful campaigns of the early twentieth century, Progressive reforms as a whole largely failed to alter the Steel Valley’s underlying political and social structure. Though William Magee adopted some of the proposals put in place by the Guthrie administration, the pragmatism required by machine politics ensured a watering down of more “inspiring ideals” for slum improvement, smoke control, sanitation regulation, and comprehensive planning. When the Olmsted plan appeared in 1911, local officials observed that while “there is no doubt that Mr. Olmsted is an expert engineer and a fine gentleman,” his plans were not “practical.” In Wheeling, city politics remained chaotic with effective municipal programs and public works spending limited by lackluster support on the state level. Indeed, the lack of alternative means of funding led many officials to conclude that, despite their illegality, it was better to regulate rather than eliminate “the vices of gambling, prostitution, etc., for revenue, and that this was really required by the financial customs of the city.” Such open acceptance of and financial dependence on criminal activity for the basic functioning of the region’s communities did not bode well for reformers interested in creating modern cities capable of attracting outside investment.38
The early twentieth century also represented the high point of annexation campaigns, particularly in Wheeling, where boosters were limited not only by municipal boundaries, a wide river and rough terrain, but also by a state line dividing the city from its hinterland in Ohio. Neither Pittsburgh nor Wheeling proved effective in further consolidating their authority in the face of a metropolitan backlash that continued into the postwar period and through the end of the century. While the 1906 referendum on Pittsburgh’s proposal to annex Allegheny City passed easily, nearly two-thirds of voters in the smaller community opposed consolidation. Anger over this type of forced annexation prompted other municipalities to organize in 1911 the League of Boroughs, Townships and Cities of the Third Class of Allegheny County to fight further consolidation. Wheeling, of course, as one booster publication pointed out, would never be able to “be made legally one [with] our strong and aggressive neighbors in Ohio” in the same way Pittsburgh was able to merge with its satellite communities across the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. That said, following the 1919 annexation in which all but one of the smaller communities opposed consolidation, Wheeling had no better luck than Pittsburgh in expanding substantially its southern, eastern or northern borders despite periodic attempts. As a result, metropolitan Pittsburgh remained one of the nation’s most fragmented regions, ensuring that the underlying political framework established during its period of industrial growth would not be seriously challenged even as the economic conditions that gave rise to the Steel Valley began to shift in favor of areas to the south and west.39
The infrastructure superimposed on the natural landscape formed the prism through which residents and visitors alike crafted a regional identity for the Steel Valley. Profits from the mills were at the core of the region’s prosperity; however, their products should be measured not only by the metric ton of steel produced, but also in ways equally important to understanding the region. “The pulsating whang of steel-making plants and rolling-mills” was ever-present, observed Rueben Gold Thwaites on his epic voyage down the Ohio River, making even “the air tremble.” Workers carried in their bodies the burden of working in difficult conditions, where a decade of hard labor left men “only fit for the boneyard.” Of course, waste from the mills manifested itself in