7 posts tagged “pittsburgh history”

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.

 

 

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"

 

 

The Point of Pittsburgh Celebration 

Nov 21, 2008 7:30 PM
Carnegie Lecture Hall
4400 Forbes Avenue (Oakland)
Pittsburgh, Pa.

 

Hear Pittsburgh celebrities tell the untold tales of Pittsburgh heroes in story and song in an event to benefit the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.

Telling the Story of Pittsburgh and its Heroes

 

Sally Wiggens of WTAE

Lynne Hayes-Freeland and Jon Burnett of KDKA

Senator James Ferlo

Steve Hansen

Chris Potter – of the City Paper

Minette Seate of WQED

 Filmmaker Carl Kurlander

Judge Joe Williams

And More Community Leaders

 

 

Mike Stout, the NewLanders, Joe Grushecky and other guest musicians will perform songs about Pittsburgh heroes from The Point of Pittsburgh CD. 

 

Tickets are being sold by the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank & Just Harvest

Call 412-460-3663 ext 205 for Tickets

Or Purchase online at http://www.pittsburghfoodbank.org/store/products.cfm?catid=2

 

http://www.pittsburghfoodbank.org

Ticket Proceeds will benefit the Great Pittsburgh Community Food Bank
You can also contribute non-perishable food items at the event.

 

Pittsburgh’s community leaders will tell the stories of Pittsburgh’s heroes: Queen Aliquippa, Johnny Apple Seed, Martin Delany – the doctor, abolitionist, soldier and Renaissance man. Journalist Jane Grey Swisshelm, the Battle of Homestead, Crystal Eastman, the defiant McKees Rocks Strikers of 1909, Mother Jones and the 1919 fight for free speech, Andrew Mellon, Father Cox, Max Vanka, Father Charles Owen Rice, the 8 fighting Grossman Brothers of WWII, journalist Frank Bolden, and more.

During the 250 year history of our city Pittsburghers made the steel for America’s most famous bridges and skyscrapers, built destroyers and landing craft for WWII on Neville Island, ended the Polio epidemic, invented the distribution systems for electricity and natural gas, and served ketchup to the world.  Pittsburghers died fighting in the 40 year bloody struggle for freedom of speech and the right to unionize, winning the 40 hour – 5 day work week and work place safety.  

Celebrate the great achievements of the city of Pittsburgh on Nov 21 at the Carnegie Lecture Hall and help raise funds for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank.

 

 

Help the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank

                                

 

Crystal Eastman

America’s Most Dangerous Woman

Pioneer of Worker Safety and Worker's Compensation

 

Crystal Eastman

At turn of the 20^th century America’s fifth largest city, Pittsburgh was booming.  It was the center of the growing steel and coal industries. The millionaire industrial tycoons of the 5^th Avenue mansions celebrated their success while the working class lived and worked under horrendous conditions.  In 1906 the steel mills, mines, railroads and factories of the Pittsburgh area were human slaughterhouses.  Forced to work long 12 hour days 7 days a week, with unprotected dangerous machinery having few safety controls, at extreme temperatures, and under constant pressure to speed up work, workers were frequently killed and maimed.  During 1906 in Allegheny County 526 workers were killed on the job and hundreds more were injured.  Between 1890 and 1920 the death toll in Pennsylvania coal mines exceeded 1,000 men per year for twenty-six of the thirty year period.  In 1907 alone 1,514 miners were killed in Pennsylvania.  Lost workers were quickly and cheaply replaced with immigrant workers who were streaming to the Pittsburgh area by the thousands.  Bereaved families went uncompensated and injured workers were on their own to pay medical bills.  In addition to its leadership in the Steel Industry, Pittsburgh was also the center of a thriving the prosthesis industry, replacing the lost limbs of thousands of Pittsburgh workers. 

 

Pittsburgh Injured Workers from Work Accidents Book

 

 

 

The truism of the day was that workers were careless and responsible for their own injuries and deaths.  Employers believed that 95 percent of all accidents were due to workers' carelessness.  Pennsylvania labor laws at the time were the most one-sided in the nation, strongly favoring employers.  A Pennsylvania law passed in 1901 stated “if the negligence of the party contributed in any degree to the injury he cannot recover damages or compensation.”  Employers placed the blame for the high level of accidents and death on the workers. They rarely paid medical costs or supported injured workers.  Industry and the Pennsylvania government were indifferent to the carnage inflicted on workers limbs, lives and families.

 

Work Accidents Excerpt

 

 

To challenge the truism of the industrial age that attributed the cause of worker injuries and deaths mostly to the workers themselves, the Russell Sage Foundation undertook a study of workplace injuries as part of its Pittsburgh Survey.   The “Pittsburgh Survey” was a massive survey of living and working conditions in Pittsburgh.  Published in six volumes, it was well widely read and revealed in detail the social deprivation suffered by the workers of Pittsburgh.

The Pittsburgh Survey’s quantitative study of workplace injuries was undertaken to find their root causes and to measure the damage to the economy and quality of life.  A bright young woman, Crystal Eastman, a graduate of Vassar (1903), with an M.A. in sociology from Columbia (1904), and who recently graduated second in her class at the New York University Law School (1907), was hired in 1907 to undertake this study.  She came to Pittsburgh for a two month project but stayed more that a year investigating the industrial accidents that occurred in Allegheny County during 1906-1907.  In her study she examined the causes of the accidents and deaths along with their profound impact on workers families.

Eastman gathered data on all industrial deaths for one year and on accidents for a three month period in the Allegheny County.  Over a thousand accident cases were documented.  Eastman and her investigators identified the cause of each accident, who was at fault, and the financial effects on each worker’s family.  They examined coroner’s file, interviewed witnesses, and followed the plight of 132 worker families up to eighteen months after accidents.  Workers in the steel, mining, and railroad industries were studied.  What distinguished Eastman as a safety research was her rigorous detailed data collection along with her deep compassion for the plight of the workers and their families.

Crystal Eastman sought to answer two questions:

·         What was the actual distribution of blame for accidents to workers and employers?

·         Which group, the workers or the employers incurred the highest economic burden from work accidents?

Causes of Worker Deaths and Accidents

Eastman's answer to the question of blame for accidents contradicted the prevailing views of the day. Eastman refuted the conviction that worker carelessness was the cause of 95% of accidents and deaths with statistical findings showing that:

·         Of the 377 accidents surveyed for which fault could be attributed, 30% were solely the employers' fault.

·         Only 44% could be partially blamed on the victim or fellow workmen.

·         Of the 132 deaths found to be the victim's fault, 47 cases (35%) involved very young or inexperienced workers, or those with physical conditions that made them vulnerable.

·         Only 85 cases (23%) were incurred by experienced, able‑bodied victims of "carelessness"

 

Causes of workplace fatalities

The study commented:  “For the heedless ones, no defense is made. For the inattentive we maintain that human powers of attention, universally limited, are in their case further limited by the conditions under which the work is done — long hours, heat, noise, intense speed. For the reckless ones we maintain that natural inclination is in their case encouraged and inevitably increased by an occupation involving constant risk.”

Eastman wrote that the “careless” workers were put under press to cut corners:

“If a hundred times a day a man is required to take necessary risks, it is not in reason to expect him to stop there and never take an unnecessary risk. Extreme caution is as unprofessional among the men in dangerous trades as fear would be in a soldier.”

The Economic Impact of Work Deaths and Injuries

·         Of the 526 workers deaths in 1906-1907 survey period, 45% involved survivors.

·         Of the survivors, 53% received $100 or less in compensation from the employer.

·         Of the 509 workmen injured in a three month period, employers paid hospital costs for 84%, but only 37% percent received any benefits after their hospitalization.

Eastman wrote. "For our present purpose this fact is significant enough:  In over one-half of the deaths and injuries ... the employers assumed absolutely no share of the inevitable income loss.”

“If we were to regard the year’s industrial fatalities in Allegheny County as one overwhelming disaster in which the dead numbered 526, its most appalling feature would be that it fell exclusively upon workers, bread winners.  Among those killed there were no aged helpless persons, no idle-merry-makers, no irresponsible children.  The people who perished were those upon whom the world leans.”

“A crippling injury to a bread winner could be more devastating than death….When a man is disabled by injury, the number in the family remains the same, and their situation is further complicated by the presence of a sick man to be feed and cared for – an invalid whose recovery is delayed by the very conditions of increasing poverty and anxiety which his injury caused and which his recovery alone can terminate.”

Family with lost breadwinner

 

Injured Pittsburgh Worker and Family

 

“Worker Accidents and the Law”

Crystal Eastman’s findings and recommendations were published in 1910 in the classic report entitled “Work Accidents and the Law”.  It is regarded a major factor leading to the passage of worker health and safety laws in the United States.  It was republished in 1970. The report highlighted inadequate worker safety laws and the need for safety protections on machinery.  The report exposed the paltry sums of compensation paid for worker injury and deaths.  After the publication of the report, many companies began to look at worker accidents and deaths and as a problem to be solved, not a business cost.  With the explosive growth in unions there was great pressure to improve working conditions and many companies began to institute safety programs.

Calls were made for the passage of workers compensation laws, which had already adopted in Europe.  But in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania, the progressive legislative reforms called for in Crystal Eastman’s report, were thwarted by the repressive political machine controlled by Pittsburgh’s industrialists.

Following her stay in Pittsburgh, the governor of New York appointed Eastman to a New York State commission in 1909 to investigate work accidents and to recommend legislation.  While serving on the commission, Eastman authored the first workman’s compensation law to be passed in the United States.  It became the model for laws passed in other states.  The courts struck down the law shortly before the Triangle Shirt Factory fire that killed 146 women.  The outrage over that tragedy propelled the passage of workers compensation laws by many state legislatures including Pennsylvania. 

During Woodrow Wilson’s presidency Eastman served as an investigating attorney for the U.S Commission on Industrial Relations throughout 1913 and 1914 and continued to campaign for occupational safety.

 

Eastman Fights For Women's Suffrage and Founds the ACLU

Crystal Eastman went on to become a dynamic activist for woman’s suffrage, feminism, social justice, and world peace working as a journalist, attorney, and political organizer.  She became a founder of the National Woman’s Party in 1913 that campaigned for women’s suffrage.  After women won the right to vote in 1923, Eastman and three others authored the first Equal Rights Amendment.  During World War I she founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which exists today.  Also during the War Eastman organized the National Civil Liberties Bureau to protect the rights of conscientious objectors.  That organization became the American Civil Liberties Union and she was the attorney in charge.  With her brother Max Eastman she owned and edited the Liberator, a journal of politics, art, and literature from 1918 to 1922.

From 1919 to 1921 a “Red Scare” occurred in the United State.  Crystal Eastman was labeled as a “Red” dangerous un-American.  Called the “most dangerous woman in America”, the FBI put her under surveillance. Her speeches were recorded and her journals were banned from the mail.  Blacklisted and unemployable, she spent the majority of her last years in exile in England.  She returned to New York in 1927 after the death of her husband and died ten months later from Nephritis at the age of forty eight.

Crystal Eastman was an important national leader who accomplished much to be that affects our daily lives during her short life. She wrote pioneering workers compensation legislation, campaigned for work place safety, fought for woman’s suffrage and equal rights, and founded the ACLU and the other long lasting political organizations.

The Continuing Need for Work Place Safety and Workers Compensation Programs

Annually, approximately 4.2 million workers are injured on the job in the United States.  Over 5,000 are killed on the job and another 50,000 die due to occupational exposure. American workers need a strong OSHA and MSHA to protect workers safety and health.

For a detailed look at Pittsburgh in 1907 - Read "Work Accidents and the Law"

Crystal Eastman’s “Work Accidents and the Law” is can be read online and downloaded at http://books.google.com/books?id=18sJAAAAIAAJ  It contains the stories of Pittsburgh workers and their families.

 

Crystal Eastman - By Mike Stout

Hail Crystal Eastman - A Spirt of the Free Women - She Lead the Fight to Right So Many Wrongs

History of Workplace Safety narrated by Studs Terkel

 

Fannie Sellins Angel of Mercy

 

Fannie Sellins, a union organizer known as the “Angel of Mercy”: gave her freedom and life defending free speech, demanding the right to organize, and helping the poor struggling mining and steel families of Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.  Due to brutally long work days 7 days a week, low pay, and dangerous unhealthy working conditions, there was much worker unrest in the mining and steel industries at the time of the First World War.  With 12 hour days workers had little time or energy for family, education, recreation, or religion.  The mining and steel companies with near total control of the police, courts, and newspapers crushed efforts of workers to unionize and fight for better working conditions.  Free speech and public meetings were banned in the cities and towns surrounding Pittsburgh.  Workers were fired for attending union meetings and registering for the Democratic Party. Speakers like Mother Jones, J.L Beaghan, and Fannie Sellins were arrested for speaking out.  Freedom was just a dream to the repressed workers of the Pittsburgh area.  In the midst of terror and repression Fanny Sellins came to Pittsburgh to fight these conditions and was assassinated in the battle for freedom.

 Fanny was born Fanny Mooney in New Orleans in 1872 and married garment worker Charles Sellins in St. Louis.  Widowed with death of husband, Fanny took a job in a St. Louis garment factory to support her four children.  She later moved to Chicago and became involved in the union movement.  In 1911 when a garment factory locked out 400 women workers, Fanny became a negotiator in a struggle that lasted two years.  She helped to organize the United Garment Workers of America and came to national attention with her fiery oratory at meetings across the country collecting money for strikers and calling for boycotts of anti-union companies.

In 1913, the United Miner Workers of America (UMWA) took notice of Fanny and brought her to Pittsburgh.  They assigned her to aid and organize mine workers in West Virginia.    She moved to the anti-union area of Colliers, West Virginia, to support families driven out of their homes by the Pennsylvania and West Virginia Coal Company.  Fanny wrote of that her work there was to distribute "clothing and food to starving women and babies, to assist poverty stricken mothers and bring children into the world, and to minister to the sick and close the eyes of the dying."

A coal-operator friendly judge banned all union organizing activity in Colliers and forbade memberships in unions.  Fanny defied the anti-union injunction and spoke out against the judge’s efforts to stifle free speech and the right to association.  At a miner’s rally Fanny said:

"I am free and I have a right to walk or talk any place in this country as long as I obey the law.  I have done nothing wrong. The only wrong they can say I've done is to take shoes to the little children in Colliers. And when I think of their bare little feet, blue with the cruel blasts of winter, it makes me determined that if it be wrong to put shoes upon those little feet, then I will continue to do wrong as long as I have hands and feet to crawl to Colliers."

Fanny was charged with "inciting to riot" and served six months in prison for defending constitutional freedoms.  In response to a mine workers petition campaign, President Woodrow Wilson pardoned Fanny in December of 1916.

Fanny then moved to New Kensington in Allegheny-Kiski valley to recruit miners into the UMWA union. The Allegheny Valley was called the “Black Valley” because of the violent repression of mine owners to union organizers.  An able energetic idealistic speaker Fanny persuaded thousands of miners and steel workers in the region to join the union.  She visited the miner’s homes, talked to their wives, and took care of their sick.  She raised the awareness of the immigrant miners about their rights and inspired them to demand better working conditions.  The coal operators of the Black Valley feared and hated Fanny Sellins and threatened to “get her”. 

In 1919 UMWA president Phil Murray assigned Fanny to work with miners on strike from the Allegheny Coal and Coke Company in New Kensington.  On August 26, 1919 a dozen drunken sheriff’s deputies along company guards rushed picketing strikers outside a mine in Brackenridge, Pa.  The deputies and guards clubbed and shot at the strikers wounding five.  Sellins and a group of women and children watched in horror as guards fatally beat and shot striking miner Joseph Starzelski.  Fanny ran to the aid the dying miner.  The guards turned on Fanny, chased her into a miner’s back yard, clubbed her crushing her skull, shot her in the back, flipped her over and shot her in the face in cold blooded murder.  In one account of the story the guards then danced before the crowd of mining families wearing her hat and mocking her.  They then threw her body into the back of a truck.  The coroners report describes two bullets to the head, one from behind and the other from the front, as well as a depressed fracture running from her left eye to above her right ear. 

Fannie Sellins Coroner's Photo

 

Fannie died at age 49 a grandmother whose only son was killed in World War I fighting for democracy.   On August 29, 1919 in New Kensington a crowd estimated at 10,000 marched in the funeral procession for Joseph Starzelski  and Fanny Sellins.  They were buried at the Union Cemetery in Arnold, Pa. where the UMWA erected a memorial in their honor.  The memorial’s inscription reads: "In memory of Fannie Sellins and Joe Starzelecki, killed by the enemies of organized labor”.   In 1989, Sellins' grave was designated a Pennsylvania state historic landmark and an historic marker was built which reads: "An organizer for the United Mine Workers, Fannie Sellins, was brutally gunned down in Brakenridge on the eve of a nationwide steel strike on August 26, 1919."

 

Fannie Sellins Historical Marker

 

The American labor press called her death an assignation.  Mother Jones called her death a murder at the UMWA convention 8 days after Fannie’s death.  Phil Murray of the UMWA wrote to President Wilson and the governor demanding an investigation.  Many persons witnessed the murder and the guilty were named in newspapers.  Two sheriff deputies were eventually arrested.  But witnesses were intimidated.  In 1923 an Allegheny County corner’s jury ruled that Fanny’s death was justifiable and commended Sheriff Haddock for protecting the property of Allegheny Coal and Coke against alien agitators who instill anarchy and bolshevism in the minds of uneducated UnAmericans.   The two deputies accused of Fanny’s murder were acquitted.

The frightening picture of Fannie’s battered face hung in union halls around Pittsburgh.  The forces of economic repression silenced Fannie’s voice, but her drive for free speech and the fight to unionize lived on. 

“She fought with tireless energy, no duty would she shirk / though murderers cut short her life – we carry on her work." – Ann Feeney

 

Fannie Sellins written by Ann Feeney and performed by Mike Stout

 

 

When  the Cotton Mill Women Rose

In the 1840’s cotton mills were the primary employers of Pittsburgh’s young women and children.  Allegheny City, now the North Side, was the location of seven cotton mills employing thousands of women and children.   They toiled 12 hours a day 6 days a week repetitiously feeding the relentless and unforgiving spinning and weaving machines.  They labored long days for meager pay getting home at 10 at night.  Women cotton mill workers were paid a mere $2.50 per week for 72 hours of work, while male laborers in other trades earned $1.00 per day. In response to pay cuts in 1843 the female cotton workers marched through the streets of Pittsburgh parading with a banner proclaiming “Two dollars a day and a plate of roast beef”. Their outspoken demand for a 10 hour work day shocked Pittsburgh’s believers in female decorum.

In 1845 the cotton mill workers shocked the industrial world when 5,000 workers walked out in strike demanding a 10 hour day and an end to child labor.  The workers forcefully entered several plants to eject scab workers.  Accompanied by a legion of men and boy supporters at the Battle of Blackstock’s Factory the women strikers broke down the plant gate and drove off the replacement workers.

The strike of 1845 led to the passage of a Pennsylvania law in 1847 that limited work in textile mills to 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week.  Hiring of children under the age of 12 in the cotton, wool, silk, and or flax factories was outlawed.  However, the law contained a loophole that allowed workers or a minor’s parent or guardian to sign a personal contract with an employer waiving the worker’s rights to 10 hours days and the hiring of minors.

Pittsburgh’s cotton mill owners insisted that they could not complete with the mills of New England where workers still toiled 12-14 hours a day.  In July of 1847 the mill owners locked the workers out of the plants and demanded that they sign personal contracts as a condition of employment. Refusing to be coerced into signing the contracts, the workers stayed out for an entire month without pay.  When the owners attempted to open one of the plants with scab workers, a riot erupted. A crowd of 1,500 surrounded the Penn plant.  Trying to drive the strikers away the mill manager ordered an engineer to turn a steam value on the crowd and several strikers were burned.  With their fury aroused the strikers stormed the fence, broke down the doors with axes and took over the mill driving out the scabs.  At the end of August the strikers returned to work when one of the mills agreed to a ten hour day with a sixteen per cent reduction in wages.

A blow was struck for workers everywhere when the Cotton Mill Women rose.  These courageous nameless unknown forgotten women affected the passage of important laws that restrict child labor and length of the work day.  We take for granted their heroic effects that touch all of us today in our work life.

The Pennsylvania Labor History Society dedicated a historical marker on September 29, 2007 at Allegheny Landing on Pittsburgh’s North Shore to honor their legacy.

One of Pittsburgh’s unsung heroes discussed in The Point of Pittsburgh is abolitionist Martin Delany a national leader who fought for the end of slavery and equal rights throughout his life as a physician, speaker, author, soldier, and judge.

 

Martin Delany – Renaissance Man

 

 

Martin Delany song by Mike Stout

Martin Delany (1812 – 1885), a man of many important accomplishments, was the renaissance man of early Pittsburgh.  He was a national African American abolitionist leader, author, newspaper publisher, doctor, school principal, judge, inventor, explorer, the first advocate of Black Nationalism, the first black American novelist, and the first black officer in the U.S. Army.  Born a free man in Charles Town Virginia, he learned to read and write in violation of Virginia law making it illegal to teach blacks. Fleeing persecution for learning to read in Virginia, the Delany family settled to Chambersburg Pennsylvania in 1822.  At the age of 19 in 1831 Martin traveled on foot to Pittsburgh to become a barber and laborer.  In Pittsburgh he attended Jefferson College where he studied the classics. Martin began his medical education in 1833 under several doctors and established his own practice n 1836.

In 1843 Delany founded the first Black newspaper west of the Alleghenies, The Mystery, whose masthead declared: Hereditary bondsmen! Know yet not who would be free, themselves must strike the first blow!”   The paper’ stories, which publicized grievances of blacks and championed women’s rights, were often reprinted in the white press.  Fredrick Douglas come to Pittsburgh on an anti-slavery tour in 1847 and met Delany.  Together they co-founded the weekly national abolitionist paper The North Star.  Delany toured the country through 1849 reporting and lecturing on the abolitionist movement often confronting hostile mobs,

The passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slaw Law on September, which required authorities in the free states to return runaway slaves, drove many Pittsburghers to acts of resistance.  A massive protest meeting was held in the Allegheny City market-house on September 30^th, 1850.  Delany spoke to the crowd and declared his intention to resist the Fugitive Slave Law: “My house is my castle; in that castle are none but my wife and children, as free as the angles of heavens, whose liberty is as sacred as the pillars of God.  If any man approaches that house in search of a slave…and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting place and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. On No! He cannot enter my house and we both live.”

With recommendation letters from 17 doctors, Delany was admitted to Harvard University to study medicine in the fall of 1850.  In response to the hostile protests of white students against the admission of black students, Delany and two other black students were forced out of Harvard. 

Returning to Pittsburgh in 1851, Martin published a treatise that earned him the title of “father of Black nationalism”.  The discrimination at Harvard persuaded Delany that the white ruling class would not allow deserving blacks to become leaders.  In response to the discrimination he experienced Delany wrote his first book, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, which was a declaration of racial price and a call for blacks immigrate to Africa to found a new nation.  With his second book he became the first black American to publish a novel: Blake: Or the Huts of America  The novel was serialized in the Weekly Anglo African Magazine and was based on his travels in 1839 down the MMississippi to Louisiana and Texas, seeking a haven for freed blacks.  Disillusion by the oppressive conditions in the United States, Delany moved to Canada in 1856 to continue his medical practice.

In 1859 Delany took a nine month journey Liberia  to explore the possibiliy of creating of a new black nation. He signed an agreement with chiefs in the Abeokuta region that would allow Afro-American settlers to live on unused land.  Returning to America in 1860 he began planning the settlement of Abeokuta seeking passengers and funding. But with the outbreak of the Civil War Delany decided to remain in America to work for the emancipation of slaves.

In 1863 Delany traveled the Northeast recruiting thousands of black enlistees to the army’s United States Colored Troops.  In 1865 Delany met with President Lincoln to propose a corps of black men led by black officers who would serve to win over Southern blacks. Lincoln, impressed by Delany, described him as "a most extraordinary and intelligent man" and recommended his commission as a major, making Delany the first black field officer in the U.S. Army. 

After the war Delany settled in South Carolina to participate in the Reconstruction as an official in the Freedmen’s Bureau. In 1874 he ran for lieutenant governor narrowly missing election. In 1876, he was appointed a judgeship in Charleston by the governor.  He published his third book Principles of Ethnology in 1879.  As his political support waned in 1879 Delany returned to his medical practice.  He later became a businessman in Boston and died on January 24, 1885.

"His was a magnificent life, and yet, how many of us have heard of him?"
--W.E.B. DuBois, The Pittsburgh Courier, July 25, 1936.

More Information on Martin Delany and his writings

Martin Delany song by Mike Stout