Homestead Town - The Story of a Glory Boom Town

Homestead Town - By Mike Stout 

 

 

Homestead Town – The Story of a Glory Boom Town

 

In the two decades since the Homestead Steels Works closed in 1986, a generation of Pittsburghers has grown up knowing little about the major events and that took place there and in the town of Homestead.  They know Homestead as a boarded up town of abandoned storefronts that one drives past to get to site of the Homestead Works which is now the Waterfront Shopping Center.  In celebration of Pittsburgh 250^th anniversary, we recount the Glory Boom Days of the Homestead Steel Works, the town of Homestead, and the thousands of its heroic hard working townsfolk.

 

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The area of Homestead, West Homestead, and Munhall on the south bank of the Monongahela River just upriver from Pittsburgh’s South Side was first settled in the 1770s by farmers.  It remained pastoral for its first 100 years.  In 1871 the farms on the river flats and hillsides were purchased by banks and developers, divided into lots, and sold to create the town of Homestead.   A rail line, a glass factory, and the first iron mill called the Homestead Works were built in 1879 beginning an era of rapid growth.  At its inception the Homestead works was unionized by the Amalgamated Association.  In 1883 Andrew Carnegie acquired the Homestead Steel Works to make it the hub of his Carnegie Steel Company.  Carnegie installed new open-hearth technology, electrification, continuous rolling machines, and overhead cranes making it one the world’s most productive steel mills.  The open-hearth process pioneered at Homestead generated high quality steel in large quantities at lower costs than the Bessemer process.  Using this technology the Homestead Works was a leader in the transition from the Iron Age to the Steel Age. 

 

 

 

In its heyday the Homestead Steel Works was a national center of mass industrial production.  At one point in its history it produced nearly a third of all the steel used in the United States.  The high quality structural steel rolled at Homestead dramatically changed the urban landscape and the military. Homestead produced the armor plate for battleships and tanks used in five major wars including the U.S.S. Maine and the U.S.S. Missouri.  The girders for America’s most famous bridges and skyscrapers including the Brooklyn Bridge, The Golden Gate Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Sears Tower, the World Trade Center, the U.S.X Tower, and the Gateway Arch in St Louis.  More than 200 millions tons of steel were produced during the Homestead Steel Works 105 year history. 

 

 

 

In 1901 Andrew Carnegie sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan for $480 million in a merger with Morgan’s Federal Steel.  Capitalized at $1.1 billion the world’s largest corporation, United States Steel was born.  In Homestead U.S. Steel grew, prospered, and fell into decline.

 

A wave of English, Irish, Welsh, and German immigrants came to the Homestead area in the 1870’s and 1880s to work in the steel works.  In the late 1880s a second wave of Eastern and Southern Europeans began arriving.  A third wave of African-American workers came to Homestead from the 1890s through 1930.  Each immigrant group built its own churches and social halls in the community.  With each wave of immigrants employment at the mill grew from 3,500 in 1890, to 7,000 in 1910, and to 10,000 in 1920.   During World War II employment peaked at 15,000.  In the 1980’s when U.S. Steel began downsizing the Homestead Steel Works employment was around 7,500.

 

As the mill prospered Homestead grew in population from 2,000 in 1880 to 12,554 people in 1900. The population continued to grow reaching 18,713 in 1910, 20,452 in 1920, and around 25,000 in the 1940s.  Several generations of workers raised their families in Homestead.  More than 40 percent of its employees were father-and-son combinations by 1951.

 

 

 

Homestead was at the center of the birth of the American labor movement.  The thousands of workers who toiled under dangerous conditions 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at low pay tried to negotiate for better working conditions. Their efforts to organize were repressed with military force and the denial of the rights to free speech and assembly.  An epic 40 year struggle against political and economic repression began in 1892 with the Battle of Homestead and ended after the re-election of FDR in 1936.  In 1892 Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick shut down the mill and locked out the union.  Their goal was to break the union to increase workdays and cut wages.  To take control of the mill and bring in replacement workers Frick brought a private army of 300 Pinkerton detectives to Homestead.  The townspeople rallied in support of the workers and drove off the Pinkertons.  The entire Pennsylvania militia then occupied the town of Homestead.  Under military guard immigrant replacement workers were brought in to crush the union.  Only 400 of the strikers were hired back, the rest were blacklisted.  To prevent future strikes, the town of Homestead was put under authoritarian control for 44 years.

A large portion of the workers hired to replace the 1892 Homestead strikers were non-citizen non-English speaking immigrants who could not vote or participate in political life.  Working long hours they were unable to attend night-school to take classes in English and American History required for the citizenship test.  With the vote falling to the American born Homestead Works management class, the government and police came under the control of Carnegie Steel.  Company men took control of the newspapers, churches, schools, social clubs, police, and municipal government. The mayors of the Mon Valley deputized 25,000 armed me to put down any union activity.  Private detective companies were hired to spy on, denounce, raid, and disrupt union meetings.  The Homestead police strongly enforced a ban on the holding of union meetings and the constitutional right to free assembly was taken away from the people of Homestead.  Free speech was outlawed in Homestead.  Voter registration rights were also restricted.  Allegheny County reported to employers the party registrations of their employees.  In Republican controlled Allegheny County workers were fired for registering as Democrats.  Democracy was banned in the Mon Valley.  This repressive tyrannical system remained in placed until the election of FDR.

The defeat of the union in 1892 had dire consequences for the steel workers.  They were unprotected from company demands and wages plummeted. The 12-hour day and the 7-day week became the norm for the bottom half of the workforce.  Sunday rest, holidays, and the concept of overtime all but disappeared.  Health and safety standards deteriorate so much so that by 1907, Crystal Eastman found that 195 men were killed in the iron and steel industry in a single year in Allegheny County.  While Frick invested his huge profits building ornate 100 room mansions in New York and amassing a huge art collection, the workers of Homestead lived in squalor.  Writer Theodore Dresser visited Homestead in 1894 where he found a depressed sullen defeated town.  He wrote of the hovels, grime, and deprivations of Homestead in sharp constant to the mansions of Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue.

From 1892 until 1936 the ban on free speech and the right to hold union meetings continued in Homestead.  Labor activist Mother Jones was arrested and convicted for speaking at an organizing rally in Homestead in 1919. 

Mother Jones described her trial:  “A cranky old judge asked me if I had a permit to speak on the streets.  Yes sir’ said I. I had a permit.  Who issued it? He growled. Patrick Henry; Thomas Jefferson, John Adams Said I.”

 

 

 

After the conviction of Mother Jones, the AFL attempted to organize an industry wide union organizing Steel Strike in1919.  Ten thousand deputized gunman carrying heavy rifles guarded the Mon Valley steel plants.  Machine guns were mounted at the plant gates.  The Pittsburgh newspapers attacked the immigrant strikers calling them disloyal un-American revolutionaries seeking to overthrow civilization.  A series of 30 full page ads in the papers proclaimed: “Be a 100% American. GO BACK TO WORK”.  None of the papers reported on the intolerable conditions drove the workers to strike.  The private army of the Steel industry, the mounted Iron and Coal Police, road horseback down the sidewalks on the Mon Valley towns swinging clubs and shooting.  Using intimidating force the strike of 1919 was broken. 

Following the crash of the stock market in October 1929, four million workers were unemployed by the November 1930 elections.  The Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress.  Also in 1930 the progressive Gifford Pinchot won the Pennsylvania governorship campaigning on a promise to help the unemployed.  Economic conditions worsened with 28% unemployment in Allegheny County in 1931.  Meanwhile President Hoover assured the country that the economy was “fundamentally sound”.  Franklin Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election beating Hoover by 35,000 votes in Allegheny County.      Along with the Depression, the dramatic raise in the number of second generation immigrant workers registering to vote, was leading to the end of the Republicans 70 year stranglehold on Allegheny country municipal governments. 

After Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933 Congress passed the NIRA, the National Industrial Recovery Act,.  Section 7A of NIRA recognized the right of employees to organize and collectively bargain.

“Employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.”

Roosevelt appointed Francis Perkins, who had devoted her career to labor reform, as secretary of Labor.  To gain support for the NIRA and its collective bargaining rights, Perkins came to Homestead in 1933 to make a speech to the workers.  Homestead authorities denied her permission to speak to people on the streets outside the very building where Mother Jones had been arrested in 1919.  Perkins moved her meeting to the Federal Post Office and spoke freely to the crowd about their newly won rights to organize.  The return of freedom of speech in Homestead began that day.

Francis Perkins in Homestead 1933

 

Labor leaders John L. Lewis of the AFL compared section 7A of the NIRA to the Emancipation Proclamation. He urged the unions to interpret section 7A as a “franchise to nationwide organizing.”   . 

But the Frick Coal Company, a U.S. Steel subsidiary, resisted the attempt by the UMWA to unionize its workers.  In July 1933, 70,000 miners went on strike against the company that supplied the coal for the Mon Valley steel plants.  When the supplies of coal and coal where exhausted all of the Mon Valley steel plants would have had to shut down.   As in 1892 U.S. Steel appealed to the Pennsylvania Governor to use military force to stop the strike.  Govern Pinchot refused and urged U.S. Steel to comply with the NIRA and sign the UMWA contract.  The success of the UMWA led the American Federation of Labor to create the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) headed by Phil Murray to launch a steel industry unionization effort in 1936.

 

 

With the election of Roosevelt, the support of the Pennsylvania governor, and the passages of the NIRA in 1933 and the Wagner act in 1935, workers were finally granted the legal right to freely organize and bargain collectively.  After 40 years of struggle and bloodshed a steel workers union was formed and a contract was signed with U.S. Steel in 1937.  An era of prosperity from good wages, high productivity, and improved workplace safety followed from the 1940’s into the early 1980’s. 

Homestead was at the heart of America’s war production during World War II.  The volume of steel produced in Pittsburgh more than doubled from 1939 to 1942.  To meet the huge demand for heavy armor the Homestead Works was greatly expanded.  It was largest war-time expansion of a mill in the nation.  Added to the Homestead Steel Works were 11 open-hearth furnaces, a slab mill, a forge, a 160-inch plate mill, and several machine shops.  Employment swelled from 12,000 to 15,000 and workers hours were increased.  To accommodate the mill expansion, 120 acres of land along the river were clear using eminent domain powers.  The town’s teeming ethnic wards were completely obliterated.  More than 8,000 inhabitants of the lower wards, 40% of the Homestead’s population, were displaced.  In a short time, 1,225 homes, 12 churches, 5 schools, 2 convents, and 28 saloons, and numeric ethnic social halls were torn down.  The displaced families were relocated to public housing projects.

 

 

With gains from unionization in the late 1930s and the post war boom, the workers of Homestead had significant disposable income for the first time, along with shorter work days and work weeks.  They achieved a middle class standard of living.  The rising prosperity of the steel workers created growth in the construction industry and small businesses.  The workers moved out of the industrial valleys building new homes in West Mifflin and White Oak.  The bars, restaurants, and stores of Homestead flourished 24 hours a day.  There were three movie theaters in Homestead including the Leona which booked national acts and the Stahl (the nations 1^st million dollar theater).  There were five furniture stores, seven appliance stores, and five “five and dime stores”.  When the shifts changed the streets were flooded with people and street life continued around the clock.  Many graveyard shift workers started their after work drinking at 7 A.M.  The workers of Homestead came to believe that the mill and their well paying jobs would be there forever.

 

After World War II the boom in demand for cars and appliances created high demand for flat-rolled sheet products. The post-war boom in highway and home construction increased demand for bar and beam materials.   The Homestead works designed to produce heavy alloyed plated war materials was poorly positioned to satisfy the post-war consumer driven demand for steel.  Demand for heavy armed plated steel continued during the Korean War, Cold War and the Vietnam War.  Homestead was able to survive for a generation producing steel for the military while the European and Japanese steel industries were being rebuilt.

The Steel industries in Europe and Japan rebuilt investing in modern oxygen furnaces and continuous casters, thereby improving productivity and lowering the cost of steel.  The U.S. steel Industry failed to invest in new technology during the 1960’s through the 1980s.  Protected by tariffs on foreign steel they had little competition.  They failed to innovate to create new lighter weight stronger materials to compete against aluminum and plastic.  The United States share of the world’s steel production shrank from 62% in 1944 down to 26% in 1960.  Demand for Homestead’s products declined.  The 1980’s saw the election of union busting Ronald Reagan, the end of steel import protections against low cost foreign steel, and the effort to ship steel industry jobs overseas to low wage non-union countries.  Today China is now the world leader in producing steel.   U.S. Steel has fallen to become the world’s ninth largest steel producer.  There was no government “bail-out” to save the American Steel Industry.  Without government support the United Steel Workers union was unable to stop the closing and dismantling of the once mighty Homestead Steel Works. 

With aging equipment unable to produce competitively priced modern steel products, the Homestead plant slowly became unprofitable.  The last open-hearth furnace at Homestead was closed in 1982.  The Homestead Steel Works closed its doors on July 25, 1986.  Two years following, U.S. Steel sold the steel works site a developer, the Park Corporation, who tore down most of the buildings and sold it off as tons of scrap metal.  The county’s once most productive steel plant was now a 400 acre empty lot. 

 

 

All across Western Pennsylvania in the late 1980s the steel plants were closed and torn down.  During the past three decades, tens of thousands of Pittsburghers unable to find work migrated from the Homestead area and Western Pennsylvania.  They immigrated to the West and South for jobs that paid one-half to two-thirds of what they had earned in the mills.  Their voices are heard at hundreds of Steelers bars and at a Steelers road games across the nation.  Today Homestead’s population has shrunk to less than 3,600.

A shopping center called the Waterfront was built on the Homestead Work Site.  Today the people of Pittsburgh’s East End purchase low priced Chinese manufactured goods from low wage service employees, standing on the ground of the once mighty Homestead Steel Works.

When the mill went down so did Homestead Town

 

Homestead - By Joe Grushecky and Bruce Springteen from American Babylon

 

 

The Battle of Homestead (1892)

The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was the most powerful labor organization of its time and was founded in Pittsburgh in 1876 representing skilled iron industry trades.  During the 1880s almost all of the iron mills in Allegheny County were unionized.  1891 Amalgamated’s membership reached 24,000 making it the largest union in the American Federation of Labor.  But the new steel mills were more difficult to organize as the traditional iron crafts were being replaced with new technology.  Carnegie prevented Amalgamated from organizing at the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock and other Monongahela Valley plants.  Andrew Carnegie and his partner Henry Clay Frick were determined to keep the unions out of their factories.  The Homestead Steel Works which was unionized by Amalgamated before Carnegie purchased it was the last holdout.

As a union shop working conditions at the Homestead Works steadily improved during the 1880s. Sunday work was practically abolished and there where shortened work days, more holidays, and overtime pay.  The 300 skilled workers at Homestead enjoyed significantly higher wages than any other plant in the country.  The union was looked on by all workers as the source of their prosperity and protection.  Business was booming and Carnegie celebrated a record $4.5 million profit in early 1892.  But Carnegie and Frick wanted to keep more of the profits for themselves.

Carnegie composed a memo to the Homestead workers on April 4, 1892 proclaiming the Homestead would become non-union upon the expiration of Amalgamated’s contract at the end of June.  He would merge the Homestead Works with the non-union Edgar Thompson and Duquesne plants into Carnegie Steel.  He commanded: “As the vast majority of our employees are Non-Union, the Firm has decided that the minority must give way to the majority.”  But the secretive Henry Clay Frick decided to keep the Homestead workers in the dark and did not post the memo.  Instead Frick erected “Fort Frick” a three mile long ten foot high wall with gun ports, electrified barb wire, and search lights around the Homestead works.  Frick then demanded a reduction in pay at the expiration of the contract.  He knew the workers would reject his demands.  Carnegie authorized Frick to close the plant and wait until the workers accepted his terms.  He wrote to Frick "We... approve of anything you do," "Far too many men required by Amalgamated rules." "This is your chance to re-organize the whole affair," …"We are with you to the end."

if the workers went on strike to resist the wage cuts and de-unionization, they feared that Carnegie Steel would once again use its union busting tactic of importing replacement workers to Homestead.  In light of this fear, Amalgamated organized the people of Homestead.  “Honest John” McLuckie, spokesman for the town told a reporter.  “We have our homes in this town, we have our churches here, our societies and our cemeteries.  We are bound to Homestead….The Carnegie Company has imported all nationalities in places that are east of us and west of us and south of us. They have never imported a man into Homestead, and by [God] they never will.”   The town organized pickets on eight hour shifts, a river patrol, and a signaling system from the roof of the union office at the Bost Building,

 

 

Frick, at the end of June, closed the open hearth and armor-plate mills, locking out 1,100 workers.  On June 25th, he announced he would not negotiate with the union.  He would deal with the workers individually.  Three thousand of the Homestead workers met and voted to strike.  The 3,800 workers of Homestead struck in support of Amalgamated rejecting the dissolution of the union.   The company fired all of the strikers on July 2.

 

At 2 A.M. in July 6, 1892 Homestead received a telegraph that a private army of two 300 Pinkerton agents armed with Winchester rifles were coming in two barges up the Monongahela River.  At twenty minutes to 3:A.M. a steam whistle awakened the town.  Thousands of men and women jumped from their beds and marched to the river armed with clubs. When the barges approached the Homestead Works at dawn, the crowd jeered and warned the Pinkertons to turn away.  The townspeople breached the walls of Fort Frick and took up positions on the hillside by the Pump House above the landing dock.  One of the barges docked and the Pinkerton captain announced; “We are coming ashore and you can’t stop us.”  Billy Foy, a steel workers son, stood in the captain’s way saying: “If you come, you’ll come over my carcass”. The captain struck Foy in the head with a cane and shots immediately rang out wounding both of them.  The Pinkertons stepped forward in a row of rifles and opened fired on the crowd.  Three steel workers were killed in the initial volley.   The townspeople fired back wounding 5 Pinkertons driving the barge away.  The barge returned at 8 A.M and was repulsed again.  Gunfire ranged for 14 hours.  Strikers rolled a flaming freight train car at the barges, tossed dynamite, pumped oil into the river setting it afire.   At the end of the battle three detectives and nine townspeople were dead.

At 4:00 P.M the Pinkertons surrendered and were marched through the jeering crown of townspeople.    The enrage mob including women attacked the Pinkertons slapping and beating them.  Two hundred of the Pinkertons were injured before members of Amalgamated stepped forward to stop the violence.  After midnight the Pinkertons were put on a train to Pittsburgh.

 

On July 10^, 1982, the Pennsylvania Governor ordered the states entire National Guard of 8,500 men to Homestead.  The troops marched into Homestead and surrounded the Homestead Steel Works.  The commander of the National Guard General George Snowden announced: “I am not here to look after the strike or the Amalgamated Association or pay any attend to either.  I do not accept and do not need at your hands the freedom of Homestead.  I have that now in my possession, and I proposed to keep the peace…and I want it distinctly understood that I am in absolute control of the situation.”

 

The military took over of Homestead from the townspeople taking away their right to unionize.  With the military coup, Frick proceeded to hire replacement workers.  The Amalgamated was defeated.  In September, the 21 member union advisory committee was indicted for treason against the Commonwealth.  Charges were file against 167 people ranging from riot to murder.  But none were convicted due to sympathetic juries.  On November 13, the strike was declared ended.  Many of Homestead strikers were blacklisted for life.   Carnegie and Frick successfully drove the union out of Homestead and the Pittsburgh area.  The growth of unions in America was stalled until Roosevelt’s New Deal.  An era of labor exploitation began in 1892.