Homestead; the households of a mill town

Front matter

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REYNOLDS HISTORICAL

Appendix

I. Methods of Budget Study 187

II. Tables giving general description and average weekly

expenditure of each of the 90 budget families . . 206

III. Employes in Homestead Plant of the United States

Steel Corporation classified according to skill, citizenship, conjugal condition, etc., Mar. 1, 1907 . 214

IV. Classification and Earnings of Employes in Three

Representative Steel Plants in the Pittsburgh District 215

V. An Act to Enable Borough Councils to Establish

Boards of Health. State of Pennsylvania. 1893 218

VI. Report of the Board of Health of the Borough of

Homestead for the year ending December 31, 1908 222

VII. Record of Casualties on Unprotected Grade Crossings, Homestead, 1905-1907 233

VIII. Seven-Day Labor 236

IX. Cost of Living in Pittsburgh 237

X. Ratings on Men Employed in Iron and Steel Industry,

by Prudential Insurance Company of America . 243

XL Carnegie Relief Fund 245

XII. Accident Relief Plan of the United States Steel Corporation 249

XIII. The Carnegie Library, Homestead 255

XIV. Slavic Organizations in Homestead . . .271

XV. Population of Homestead and Munhall, 1910 . . 276

Index 281

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PACING

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The Homestead Plant: Carnegie Steel Company . Frontispiece

Pittsburgh Survey Map i

Homestead from the Pittsburgh Side of the Monongahela . 9

Of the Old Time Irish Immigration (In color) . . 12

Head: Slavic Day Laborer (In color) 16

Detached Dwellings of the Better Type. Sixteenth Avenue,

Munhall 19

“The Mansion” 22

The Street 22

Glen Alley, a Few Blocks from Frick Park, Homestead . 25

Double Grade Crossing Near the Heart of Homestead . . 28

An Unpaved Alley 28

Where the Mill Meets the Town 37

Slavic Laborers 41

Back Yard Possibilities in Homestead — I .... 48

Back Yard Possibilities in Homestead — II .... 48

A One-Room Household 53

A “Front Room” 56

Row of Detached Workingmen’s Houses in Munhall; Mill

Stacks Showing above Housetops 56

Frame Houses. Five rooms and bath 60

Brick Houses. Four rooms and bath 60

Residence Street 60

“Buckets” 65

The Street Market 73

Where Some of the Surplus Goes 85

Eighth Avenue at Night, Homestead 88

A Nickelodeon Audience in Homestead 88

On the Outskirts 102

In the Crowded Section 102

Spontaneous Recreation Center, Homestead, 1907 . . 107

Saloon Corner, Saturday Night hi

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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The Lights of Kennywood Park 1 1 3

Carnegie Library, Munhall 116

Orchestra; Carnegie Library 117

BandStand 117

In Carnegie's Footsteps 1 19

The Brook in Munhall Hollow 121

Draughting Room, Schwab Manual Training School .124

Carpenter Shop, Schwab Manual Training School . 124

Machine Room, Schwab Manual Training School . 127

Slav: Calling (In color) 129

Section of Ward Two, Homestead, 1908 132

Slavic Court 133

Summer Evening in a Court 137

Wash-Day in a Homestead Court 141

Into America Through the Second Ward of Homestead 144

When Meadows Have Grown Too Many Smokestacks . 145

Out of Work (Homestead Court, Spring of 1908) . 148

A Contrast — I 152

A Contrast — II 152

Gathered for a Bit of Gossip 157

Washing up After a Day in the Mill 157

Greek Catholic Church 161

Old Worlds in New (In color) 164

Going Home from Work 173

Type of Steel Worker: Thirty-five Years from Germany . 176

Type of Steel Worker: Slav 178

Type of Steel Worker: Pennsylvanian 180

Balcony and Entrance, Carnegie Library, Homestead . 258 xii

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE PACE

1. Total population, and number and per cent of native and foreign born in -

Homestead, 1900 13

2. Total population, and per cent of native white and foreign born in four

boroughs of Allegheny County, 1900 13

3. Total employes, and number and per cent of various racial groups in the

Homestead Plant, Carnegie Steel Co., July, 1907 13

4. Homestead and Munhall taxes, 1907 20

5. Analysis of 90 budget families. — By racial group and normal weekly

wage of man 38

6. Men employed in the Homestead Mill in July, 1907. Number and per-

centages. By racial groups and degree of skill 40

7. 90 budget families. — By racial and expenditure group .... 44

8. Average weekly expenditures of 90 budget families in 1907: amounts

and percentages. — By chief items of expenditure and racial group. . 44

9. Average weekly expenditures of 90 budget families, amounts and per-

centages.— By chief items of expenditure and expenditure group . 45

10. Average weekly expenditures of 77 house-renting families, amounts and

percentages. — By chief items of expenditure and expenditure group . 45

1 1 . Average amount of rent per week paid by the 77 house-renting families. —

By expenditure and racial group 50

12. Expenditure for rent of 77 house-renting families. Average amount and

percentage of total expenditure. — By racial group 52

13. Expenditure for rent of 77 house-renting families. Average amount

and per cent of total expenditure. — By expenditure group . . . 52

14. Families having running water in the house and indoor closets. — By

weekly rent 54

15. 18 house purchasers among 90 budget families. — By normal weekly in-

come and by racial group 57

16. Average weekly expenditure for food of 90 budget families and per cent

of total expenditure. — By racial group 68

17. Same as Table 16. — By expenditure group 68

18. Average weekly expenditure for food of 90 budget families. — By racial

and expenditure group 68

19. Average expenditure for food per man per day of 90 budget families. — By

racial and expenditure group 69

20. Twenty-one families spending less than 22 cents per man per day for

food. — By expenditure and racial groups 72

21. Itemized account of food expenditures for one week by a thrifty house-

keeper 76

22. Itemized account of food expenditures for one week for a poor house-

keeper 76

23. Two weekly food budgets of a thrifty family 78

24. Average weekly expenditure of 90 budget families for various items. — By

expenditure group 84

25. Ratio of weekly expenditures for various items between different ex-

penditure groups 84

26. Number of persons insured in 90 budget families and per cent of families

carrying insurance. — By expenditure group

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LIST OF TABLES

TABLE PAGE

27. Number of persons in 90 budget families insured in regular companies

and lodges. — By racial group 91

28. Expenditures of a family for one week in 1907 (Normal time) and in

1908 (Time of depression) 98

29. Budget families whose income included money drawn from the bank or

goods secured on credit. — By income and racial group .... 99

30. Food purchased on special order for boarders during month account was

kept 139

31. Food expenditures of a Slavic family for one week 141

32. Two hundred and thirtyoine Slavic families in 21 courts. — By numbers,

nationality and number of lodgers 143

33. Number of persons per room in the 21 courts in families which took

lodgers compared with the number in families which did not take lodgers, January, 1908 144

34. Number of births in each ward in Homestead for 1907. — By racial group . 146

35. Number of deaths of children under two years of age in each ward in

Homestead for 1907. — By racial group 146

36. Ratio of children born in each ward in Homestead in 1907 to deaths of

children under two in the same ward. — By racial group . . . 146

37. Average weekly expenditure of 29 Slavic budget families . . . *152

38. Average expenditure of Slavic families compared with those of other

races spending more than $15 per week 156

39. Average expenditures of two groups of 10 families each, those spending

$15 or more a week and those spending less than $12, with the ratio of increase 156

40. Membership, dues and benefits of 9 Slavic societies in 1908 .... 162

1. Analysis of 90 budget families. — By racial group, occupation and normal

weekly wage of man 200

2. Average normal weekly income and income from specified sources, of 90

budget families. — By racial group 201

3. 90 budget families. — By number of families having income from given

sources in normal times and by racial group 20 1

4. Average size of families, and of families including lodgers. — By expendi-

ture and nationality groups 201

5. 90 budget families. — Number of persons per room by racial group . . 202

0. Number of house-owning and house-renting families having water in

house, and number having two or more persons per room. — By expenditure group 202

7. 90 budget families occupying tenements of specified number of rooms. —

By racial group 202

8. 90 budget families occupying specified number of rooms. — By expenditure group 203

9. Cost of certain articles of food in nine cities and ratio of the cost of these

articles in other cities to the cost in Pittsburgh. — By cents per pound . 203

10. Total average weekly expenditures of house-renting families expending

less than $12 a week, and proportions spent for food and rent by racial group 204

11. Average expenditure for food per man per day, by size of family and

expenditure group 204

APPENDIX II

Tables giving general description and average weekly expenditure of each of

the 90 budget families 206

XIV

LIST OF TABLES

APPENDIX III PAGE

Employes in Homestead Plant of the United States Steel Corporation classified according to skill, citizenship, conjugal condition, etc.,

APPENDIX IV

Classification and earnings of employes in three representative Steel Plants

of the Pittsburgh District. October 1, 1907 215

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■SCALE * 300 r-T TO 1/lCrt

Chapter I

HOMESTEAD gives at the first a sense of the stress of industry rather than of the old time household cheer which its name suggests. The banks of the brown Monongahela are preempted on one side by the railroad, on the other by unsightly stretches of mill yards. Gray plumes of smoke hang heavily from the stacks of the long, low mill buildings, and noise and effort dominate what once were quiet pasture lands.

On the slope which rises steeply behind the mill are the Carnegie Library and the '‘mansion" of the mill superintendent, with the larger and more attractive dwellings of the town grouped about two small parks. Here and there the towers of a church rise in relief. The green of the parks modifies the first impression of dreariness by one of prosperity such as is not infrequent in American industrial towns. Turn up a side street, however, and you pass uniform frame houses, closely built and dulled by the smoke; and below, on the flats behind the mill, are cluttered alleys, unsightly and unsanitary, the dwelling place of the Slavic laborers. The trees are dwarfed and the foliage withered by the fumes; the air is gray, and only from the top of the hill above the smoke is the sky clear blue.

There is more to tell, however, than can be gained by first impressions. The Homestead I would interpret in detail is neither the mill nor the town, but is made up of the households of working people, the sturdy Scotch and Welsh and German of the early immigration, the sons of Yankee "buckwheats," and the daughters of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers. Set off against the hill streets, lined with these English-speaking homes, are the courts where all Austria-Hungary seems gathered afresh. Here are lodging houses filled with single men, where the “ boarding bosses" keep accounts in Russian, Slovak or Hungarian; alley

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dwellings where immigrant families are venturing a permanent home in one or two rooms, near by the Slavic church where their children are christened and receive their first communion. It is the home life the mill town leads on the wages the mill pays that has been the subject of my study.

The glaring evils and startling injustices found on every hand in the congested sections of large cities supplied the first and strongest impetus toward social reform in this country. But many of the unwholesome living conditions which we associate with the poorer city neighborhoods are repeated in the average mill town with less excuse and with as bitter effects. Furthermore, industrial conditions, such as low wages and long hours of labor, have as direct an influence upon home life as high rents and bad sanitation, and their influence can be studied in a community which grows up about a single plant more easily than in one which presents the complications of a great city. With a knowledge of tenement districts in New York and Boston as a basis of comparison, I spent the greater part of a year in Homestead, studying the family side of the labor problem as presented there.

Homestead* is a community of approximately 25,000 people, chiefly mill workers and their families. There is today no labor organization among them. Trade unionism belonged to an earlier chapter in the history of the town. A generation of boys has now grown up and entered the mills without knowing by personal experience what unionism is, or, except by hearsay, what the great strike of 1892 was about. Yet, as the history of the town has been largely the history of the mill, I must first sketch the development of both, and the labor struggle which fifteen years ago determined the relations between them.

As late as 1870, two farms, the old McClure and West homesteads, occupied the site of the present mill and town. Scattered along the river on smaller holdings were the simple homes of a farming population. To get to Pittsburgh, seven miles down stream, the people had either to travel the distance by road or cross the river and take the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Brad-

* Politically, as will be noted later, Homestead is made up of three independent boroughs : in common speech the one term covers them all.

dock, two miles away. In 1871, the Homestead Bank and Life Insurance Company, which had bought the farms, cut them up into building lots and put them on the market, intending that Homestead should be a residential suburb. With the building of the Pittsburgh, Virginia and Charleston Railroad in 1872, it became possible for people doing business in the city to live in Homestead. In 1874 the first church, St. John’s Lutheran, was erected, and the little village began to have a social life of its own. In 1878, when its population was about 600, Bryce and Highbie opened a glass factory and the town’s industrial history began. Ten houses, the first to be built for rent, were erected on Fifth Avenue for the married workmen. The land above the works was still an open field where farmers from the nearby country drove their cows to graze.

In 1881, when Klomans built a steel mill on the banks of the river, the step definitely determining the future of Homestead was taken. The Klomans mill was absorbed by the Carnegie Steel Company in 1886, and became in turn one of the most important plants of the United States Steel Corporation on its organization in 1901. The site of Homestead made its part in this industrial development almost inevitable. Situated on the Monongahela River, six miles below its confluence with the Youghiogheny and seven miles above the point where with the Allegheny it forms the Ohio, the town has unusual facilities for water carriage, as well as the supply of water necessary for the processes of steel manufacture. Railroad and lake routes bring iron ores from the mines of Michigan to meet here the fuel needed to reduce them. The river, which is navigable from Fairmont, West Virginia, — a distance of over one hundred miles, — runs through a region of bituminous mines. It has been this nearness to the coal beds which has made the Pittsburgh District a steel center, and the level space in the bend of the river at Homestead the floor of a great steel mill.

By 1892, 8000 people had gathered at Homestead, though the town still kept many of its village characteristics. The population was composed of a fairly homogeneous group, most of them speaking the same language and mingling freely in school, church and neighborhood life, as well as within the mill. While it is impossible to secure any definite figures as to the make-up of the population in those days, certain facts give us a general picture of the earlier situation. Among the families visited for this study, half of the Americans and about half of the foreign born, who came from Great Britain and Western Europe, had been 15 years in Homestead; of 264 Slavs, however, only 31 were living here before the strike of 1892.

The churches founded before 1892 were Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, United Presbyterian, Episcopal, and German Evangelical. It was not until 1896 that a Slavic church was built. During the ten years following the starting of the mill, there was still much immigration to the United States from Great Britain and Germany, and the growing town was in a large measure recruited from these peoples. The good pay offered in the mills attracted also American boys. Apparently, the officials fostered this natural gravitation to the industry.

In a letter written in the early days. Captain Jones, of the Edgar Thomson Works, said, “ My experience has shown that Germans, Irish, Swedes and ‘buckwheats’ (young American country boys), judiciously mixed, make the most effective, tractable force you can find. Scotsmen do very well, are honest and faithful. Welsh can be used in limited quantities. But Englishmen have been the worst class of men — sticklers for high wages, small production and strikes.”*

According to an old resident, the men of each nationality often grouped themselves in separate mills, and, when there were good openings, sent to the old country for their friends. The ties thus created had their share in making possible an early development of trade unionism, for along with uniform standards of living, existed the opportunity to organize in order to secure conditions which would make those standards possible. Almost immediately after the opening of the mill the men formed a lodge of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, and within a year there was a small, quickly settled strike.

The Homestead lodges grew steadily in power until they held an assured place. The wage scale was each year fixed by agreement between committees representing the Amalgamated Associa- * Bridge, J. H.: Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company, p. 81.

tion and the employers in the industry. Within the mill also the men had much influence, and in many minor points controlled the action even of the superintendents. There developed, however, a diversity of interest, not between the different races but between two main wage groups, — the less skilled men, many of whom are paid by the day, and the highly skilled workers upon whom the output of the mills depends, who are paid by the ton. The lodges of the Amalgamated Association, consisting almost entirely of the tonnage men, were charged with ignoring the interests of the day men. A man employed there at the time told me that some of the highly skilled workers, such as rollers, — who were really sub-bosses and were paid on the basis of the output of the gang under them, — made as much as $300 in two weeks. The rank and file felt with some bitterness that not only were the capitalists securing far more than their share of the proceeds of labor, but that these few among the workers were also unduly favored. False standards in some cases were developed by the abnormally high pay, and the tendency of the few to spend carelessly what had been earned thus easily gave the town a reputation for extravagance. A woman said, “ My father used to earn $300 in two weeks and yet he never saved anything, and never tried to buy a house; that was because he drank. Why, now we have paid for our house and have money in the bank and the ‘mister’ never makes more than $25 a week.” The reckless expenditure of the exceptionally paid men, however, apparently no more than reflected the general spirit of the Pittsburgh District in days when new processes were doubling output and money was easily made.

This, then, was the situation at the time of the great strike in 1892, which in so many ways influenced the future of Homestead. Within the five years preceding, the Carnegie Steel Company had doubled its capital and had increased the number of employes in Homestead alone to about 4000, 800 of whom were members of the Amalgamated Association. In 1889, a sliding scale had been introduced by which the rate of pay per ton varied with the market price of steel, under the proviso, however, that if the latter fell below $25 per ton no further reduction in wages was to be made. This agreement did not affect the wages of the daymen. In the spring of 1892, the Association voted to renew the contract on the old terms, but the company demanded that the base should be $22 instead of $25 and that the contract should expire in January instead of July. After a number of conferences, the company advanced its minimum to $23 and the men reduced theirs to $24, but no concessions at all were made in regard to the date of expiration of the contract. The men felt that in case of disagreement and strike they would be at a far greater disadvantage in the winter when lack of work would be more keenly felt. The company, on the other hand, claimed that as its commercial contracts were frequently made to date from January 1, it was necessary to know at that time what was to be the labor cost for the ensuing year.

Behind these ostensible points of disagreement, however, lay one fundamental issue which, though seldom mentioned, was the keynote of the strike, — trade unionism. The Amalgamated Association had been taking to itself more and more power. A small group secured the desirable positions; the permission of the Association had to be obtained before any of its members could be discharged. It stood in the way of lowering individual wage rates, and in general not only obstructed the free hand which the company wanted but interfered with many details of operation.

In 1889, H. C. Frick became chairman of Carnegie Brothers and Company. As he had aroused the antagonism of the labor world through his suppression of the strike in the coke region a few years before, the mill men feared that he would crush the Amalgamated Association. More keen, therefore, than their interest in the points at issue was the belief that if they failed in this strike, the power, if not the very existence of the union, would go. This fear accounts for the pertinacity with which the struggle was fought to the finish and for the deep-seated bitterness which followed the men’s defeat.

The strike began June 30. The Association, which had been so recently indifferent to the condition of the day men, now realized, since many of the latter could be put into the skilled positions, that the strike could not be won without their assistance. A call was thereupon issued for them to strike, and the day men, with everything to lose and almost nothing to gain, went out too, and

Homestead from the Pittsburgh Side of the Monongahela remained faithful supporters to the end. A committee of fifty men, called the advisory board, conducted the strike.

Shortly after the trouble began, the company attempted to bring into the mill some 300 men in charge of Pinkerton detectives. The strikers had feared that the company would do this, since Mr. Frick had called in the Pinkertons at the Connellsville coke strike and bloodshed had followed. The detectives started up the river in boats in the early morning of July 6, and a scout who had been stationed by the strikers came on horseback to warn the town. The story of that morning, as it is retold among the people of Homestead, suggests vividly the ride of Paul Revere to rouse other insurgents more than a century earlier. Men and women hurried to the mill, weapons were hunted up and baTricades erected. Which side fired the first shot is still a debated question, but a miniature battle followed in which seven persons were killed and others wounded. The Pinkertons finally surrendered, were brought into the town and later were returned to Pittsburgh. There are conflicting stories as to the incidents of the day, stories of bloodshed and cruelty. The one clear fact is that the mob fury latent in most men was wakened by that first shot. It is hard to believe that the sober, self-contained workmen who told me the story fifteen years afterward had been part of the frenzied crowd on the river bank.

As is so often the case, however, that July morning overshadowed in the minds of the public the true character and significance of the determined struggle, which under conservative leadership lasted four or five months. For after the first clash the question became one of endurance, and though the state militia were called in no further disturbance of any magnitude arose. One woman, the owner of a number of small houses, told me that in the latter part of the strike she rented some of them to non-union men, but that contrary to her expectation she experienced no personal annoyance. Quietly, stubbornly, the men continued the fight. The contributions which poured in from fellow workmen and the public prevented physical suffering; sympathetic strikes kept up their courage, as did the difficulty of the company in finding men to take their places. In the meantime the life of the town went on, changed but little by the industrial conflict. The local papers tell of weddings, of picnics, of church suppers and of the casual comings and goings of the townspeople, while in the mill below was being contested, though in a waiting game, the issue which was to determine in many respects the future of the village.

Since the whole town was in one way or another dependent on the mill, the interest even of small merchants and others not directly concerned was of course intense. While some of the people appreciated the weak points in the claims of the Amalgamated Association, the general feeling was so strong that no one would express an opinion unfavorable to the union. The mild tone of the local papers leads one to believe that they did not reflect the state of the public mind, with its resentment at the presence of the soldiers and its alternations of hope and despair as to the outcome of the summer. About the middle of October the men realized that they had failed, and went back — those who could get their old jobs — at a wage determined by the company. A few were refused positions, and many others who found that their places in the mill had been taken by the strike breakers had either to take inferior positions or go elsewhere. The resulting bitterness made itself felt for years in the relation of the men to the Carnegie Company. When you talk with a skilled and intelligent man who is still refused work in any mill of the United States Steel Corporation because of the part he played in that strike, over fifteen years ago, you realize why the passions it aroused have not died out. For most of the town, life resumed its normal course. Newspapers in New Orleans and St. Paul and San Francisco ceased to discuss Homestead; it dropped back to its place among industrial towns, facing for good or ill the problems which this changed labor situation created.

Looking back from the vantage ground of the present, one is impressed by the vital character of the questions at issue. The particular change in the wage scale which was ostensibly the point under dispute, was, comparatively speaking, a small matter; the significant fact is that every cut since has been accepted by the men without hope and with no effective protest.

There was involved a question of social equity apart from

io whether the union carried its interference in mill administration to unwarranted lengths, or whether the company had grounds for adopting its inflexible policy of suppressing any labor organizations among the men. This question was whether the workmen in the industry were to profit in the long run by improved and cheapened processes of production; in other words, was mechanical progress to mean a real increase of prosperity to the community as the years passed. If the Homestead strike had been won by the men, the company would have continued to recognize that settled employes have some claims with respect to the terms of their employment, and to grant them a voice in the wage adjustments which from time to time determine what share of the proceeds of production belongs to labor. It may well be questioned whether the standards of living for steel employes would have settled to their present levels.

The union ceased to exist, and since that date those common factors in employment which circumscribe a man’s life, — his hours, his wages, and the conditions under which he works, — and which in turn vitally affect the well-being of his family; these he was to have less and less share in determining.

Chapter II

HE strike ended, mill and town continued their rapid growth until little is now left to suggest the village which in 1870 we saw developing on the farms beside the river. The changes of the intervening years, however, except for the influx of the Slavs, have been gradual and unnoticed. Their history is unwritten, and our real interest lies rather in the present development, in the type of town which the great plant and its 7000 employes have created at Homestead. The population is typical of the newer American industrial centers as distinguished from the New England village or the western county seat. It is a town primarily of workingmen — a town of many transients. It is, moreover, strikingly representative of the two waves of immigration,— the first, of Teutons and Celts, the later, of Slavs — and of the great social cleavage between them.