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Blood on the Rocks

Workers Unite Against "The Pit of Infamy"

 

Our last blog about Crystal Eastman’s landmark book “Accidents and the Law” examined the dangerous working conditions of Pittsburgh area factories and mines that lead to the death of 526 workers in Allegheny County in 1906.  One of the most deadly in-humane places to work in Allegheny County was the Pressed Steel Car Company plant located near McKees Rocks, Pa.  The bodies of workers killed on its assembly lines were kicked aside as fresh workers took their place.  The Pittsburgh Leader called the plant “the most outrageous of all industrial plants in the United States”.  When workers organized to demand humane working conditions and treatment, the owners of the Pressed Steel Car Company suppressed their demands leading to a violent bloody confrontation.  It was one of the bloodiest battles in American labor history.  Over 500 men where injured and 13 killed when the blood spilled in McKees Rocks.

 

 

At the end of the 19th century the railroads began to replace wooden rail cars with cars made of pressed steel.  Steel coal-carrying hopper cars were stronger and more durable than wooden cars.  Orders for steel cars exploded from two hundred in 1887 to fifteen thousand in 1899.  A merger the Schoen Pressed Steel Company with another firm created the Pressed Steel Car Company in 1899 with a near monopoly on steel car production.   A new plant was constructed on a large 180-acre plant in Stowe Township.  Four thousand new employees were hired and a company town called Preston was built to house their families.

 

Pressed steel cars were fabricated in long belt-driven assembly lines with overhead cranes dangling heavy material above the workers.  Cars moved through a series of 10 to 13 assembly stations.  Each assembly station had a team of workers.  With thousands of orders the workers were under constant pressure to speed up their work and keep the assembly line constantly moving.  The work was relentless and the workers were only paid for completed cars.  With the high pressure assembly line working conditions and no regard for worker safety, serious accidents occurred almost daily. The Pressed Steel Car Company was a human slaughter house.  With lurid accounts of the horrendous working conditions, the press called it the “Last Change” job.

In protest to the dangerous working conditions, low pay, and abusive treatment by company owners and managers, the workers of the Press Steel Car Company walked out in strike in 1903.  The company ignored the strikers’ demands and replaced them with Slavic immigrants who were willing to work for less than “native" Americans.  Eager for employment thousands of Slavic workers came from Russia, the Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Lithuania, and Croatia to work in Pittsburgh’s factories.   They were paid $2.50 for a 10 hour day.  Pressed Steel’s owners hoped that these non-English speaking workers would be docile uncomplaining workers.  They also believed that these foreign born workers, who came from diverse cultures and spoke 16 different languages, would be unable to unite. 

Over time the Slavic workers united to fight the horrendous conditions of the plant and the company town.  Conditions grew worse for the replacement workers.  Press reports of the day show that plant workers continued to be killed and maimed with little regard for human dignity.

“When some poor ‘Hunky’, as they even familiarly call themselves now, is maimed and mangled in his work, some foreman or other petty “boss” pushes the bleeding body aside with his foot to make room for another living man, that no time be lost in the turning out of pressed steel cars.  The new man often works for some minutes over the dead body until a labor gang takes it away”. – Pittsburgh Leader July 15 1909

A county coroner Joseph G. Armstrong testified “It seemed to me that the deaths averaged about one a day.  Many of the deaths resulted from men being struck by heavy moving cranes and the dogs suspended from the cranes.  Investigation made it look to me as though a lot of young fellows who were operating the cranes did not much care whether or not a “hunky” laborer was hit every now and then” – Pittsburgh Leader July 16, 1909.

Workers complained of a plant wide system of extortion.  They had to pay to get a job and to keep it.  Workers paid $5 to get a job and were periodically fired and asked to pay again to get their jobs back.  It was estimated that company officials extorted $10,000 a month.  Workers were paid under a “pool system” in which workstation team members were paid based on the weekly output of their team.  The team foreman decided which members got what share of that payment and that took a cut from each workers pay.  Pay rates were not published and the workers pay changed weekly.  In 1909 the plant workers were averaging a pay rate of 12 cents per hour.  The workers were forced to purchase over priced goods from the company stores and paid $12 a month to live in 4 room shacks without facilities.  The system of company stores and company houses that regulated the workers life outside of the factory enforced a system of industrial servitude. 

Father A.F. Toner, pastor of Saint Mary’s Church wrote.  “Men are persecuted, robbed, and slaughtered and their wives are abused in a manner worse than death – all to obtain or retain positions that barely keep starvation from the door.  It is a pit of infamy where workers are driven lower than the degradation of slave and compelled to sacrifice their wives and daughters to the villainous foremen…to be allowed to work.  It is a disgrace to a civilized country.  A man is given less consideration than a dog, and dead bodies are literally kicked aside while men a literally driven to their death.”

 

On Saturday July 10, 1909 many workers were shorted in their pay receiving less than their usual amount.  Tired of the unfair wages, they demanded to know the exact pay rate.  When management refused to give them the pay rates shop after shop walked out emptying the entire plant.  Encouraged by the IWW (The Industrial Workers of the World) 600 Pressed Steel Car employees went on strike on the morning of July 13, 1909.  Pressed Steel’s President Frank N. Hoffstot fired all of the strikers.  The next day, the IWW led 8,000 unskilled and semi-skilled immigrant workers out in support of the strike.  The ensuing two-month long strike erupted with several violent clashes. 

 

The first violent confrontation occurred on July 14th 1909.  To repress the strikers, management hired the king of strike breakers Pearl Berghoff and his private militia of guards, thugs, and scabs.  Berghoff received $5 a day for each replacement worker hired.   Berghoff quickly hired a group of 500 strike breakers in New York under false pretenses.  He told the strike breakers they were being hired to work on the Erie Railroad for $2.00 a day and he locked them into railroad cars. They traveled all night without food and were let off the train inside the Pressed Steel Car Company yard.  Other Berghoff hires were escorted on foot to the plant gates by Allegheny County Deputies.  When the strike breakers reached the gate they were greeted by storm of brick, stones, and clubs.  Terrified, the strike breakers ran off.  The deputies drew their weapons enraging the strikers.  Strikers closed in and hand-to-hand fighting broke out.  A deputy fired and shot a striker.  A giant striker seized the deputy and turned the revolver on him.  The deputies were beaten and driven off.   In the wild frenzy strikers and women were struck and knocked down by other strikers.

On the evening of the July 14, a company hired boat attempted to land with 300 scabs.  Gun fire erupted and the boat was turned away.  On July 15th 300 deputy sheriffs, 200 state Coal & Iron Police including 62 mounted policeman, who the strikers called the “Black Cossacks”, surrounded the company town of Preston and evicted the strikers families from the company owned houses.    The mounted police charged the strikers and dragged their families into the streets.  The troopers fired into the crowd and one hundred people were injured.  Stowe Township Police Chief John Farrell was shot in the arm and stabbed nine times.

 

 

Thousands of strikers met at the Indian Burial Mound, on a hill overlooking the McKees Rocks bottoms.  They selected 16 different speakers to cover all of the principal languages of the strikers. They elected a committee of ten who went to Pittsburgh to present their grievances to Frank Hoffstot, the Pressed Steel company president.  He refused to see them Hoffstot vowed to fire all of the strikers and never negotiate with them.  He said, “They are dead to us.  There are enough idle men in Pittsburgh to fill any vacancy.”     The Pittsburgh Leader wrote:  “Who is this Hoffstat who assumes the power of a Czar?  Does he not know that he is in America, and not in Russia?”

 

 

The strikers and their families then organized a 24-hour watch system.  Pickets checked every trolley and ferry to intercept strike-breakers.  Newspapers from around the country came to McKees Rock and found a disciplined organization of strikers.  The Pittsburgh Leader newspaper raised funds to feed the strikers and their families and sent 20 wagonloads of food from the people of Pittsburgh.  The District Council of Carpenters announced their support. “We sympathize with these poor men and their wives and children, whose condition is worse than the African slave.”

 

 

 

Violence continued throughout August.  A Croatian striker , Steve Howatt, was shot by a deputy on August 11.  A procession of 5,000 strikers marched with thousands of mournersr at his funeral in McKees Rocks.  

 

 

A gun battle on August 15th turned away a steamer of replacement workers.  The tension continued to build until August 22, 1909 which became known as “Bloody Sunday”.  An armed deputy sheriff opened fire on strikers who boarded a trolley searching for scabs.  In the ensuing fight the deputy Harry Exler was killed.  A company of state troopers arrived on a second trolley car and a bloody gun battle erupted.  According to the Pittsburgh Post, More than 500 shots were fired and for two hours. The dead, the dying, and the wounded lay bleeding in the streets while ambulance crews and physicians risked their lives to save them.  The wounded were dragged to jail with blood streaming from the wounds.  Eleven more men died, including eight strikers, two scabs, and a mounted state policeman.  More than 50 were wounded. 

The following day mounted troopers stormed the company town they called “Hunkeyville” and drove the strikers and their families from their homes.   Strikers meetings were raided and broken up.  The County Sheriff placed a ban on public meetings of strikers.

 

The violent attempts to repress the strike attracted national and international attention.  On August 25th, the oft-times presidential candidate Eugene V Debs came to McKees Rock ignoring threats against his life and the Sheriff’s ban of strike meetings   Addressing a crowd of 10,000 at the Indian Mound, Debs called the strike “the greatest labor fight in all my history in the labor movement.”  The Austro-Hungarian Embassy protested the treatment of the replacement workers.

 

Conditions grew desperate for the replacement workers locked inside the Pressed Steel Car Plant.  Strikebreakers who complained or who asked to go home were beaten.  The strike breakers told numerous stories of false recruitment, brutality, and ill-treatment with the plant.  The New York Times investigated and published a story with the headline “Steel Car Plant Called A Prison”.  One striker breaker told a reporter:

“They treated us like dogs.  Of all the promises made when we were hired not one was kept.  We were practically starved, and what little food they gave us was moldy.  Everyone who ate it got sick.  When we dared complain we were beaten and kicked.  Everyone swore at us and called us vile names.  We were made to work whether we were sick or not, and when we wanted to quit, the bosses threatened to blow our heads off with big revolvers.”

In late August 60 of the strikers secretly hired on as scabs and penetrated the plant.  They rescued 300 of the 400 replacement workers convincing them to leave the plant.

On September 8, a settlement offer was made by Press Steel that included a 15% pay increase, posting of wage rates, modification of the pooling system, and ending of abuse of families in housing, institution of accident prevention precautions, abolition of Sunday workdays, and elimination of graft in job assignments.  The hungry workers and their families proclaimed victory and marched into the plant singing songs of victory in their native tongues.   Their inspiring example of worker solidarity had proven that immigrant workers were a militant force who refused to be exploited.  They arose against a corrupt inhuman system and fought off Bergoff’’s private militia and the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police.

But once the strikers were back at work, the company back tracked on its agreements.  On September 15, 4,000 immigrant workers walked out on strike.  The following day 2,000 mostly native born workers broke ranks with the immigrants and marched back into the plant.  The immigrants conceded and followed them back into the plant.  The strike was ultimately broken by a deep split between the immigrant workers and the skilled and semi-skilled “American” workers. 

While the Press Steel Car workers gained improved conditions and won a measure of respect, their employer’s refusal to bargain in good faith with employees, regardless of the justice of their grievances, remained intact as it had after the Homestead Strike of 1892. 

 

Mike Stout pays tribute to the McKees Rocks strikers in the song  "Blood on the Rocks"