Men and steel

Part I. Strike Background Chapter Page"

I. The Principality of Steel 11

The Industry. Ore Mines. Coal, Coke and Carriers. Steel Corporation Profits.

II. Steel Mills 18

The Mills. Poured Iron and Steel. Open Hearth Furnace. Blooming Mill. Wire Mill. Skull Cracker. Wages and Hours.

III. Men axd Machines 27

Spring in the Steel Towns. Men Going to Work. Fraycar. The Mad Gunner.

IV. Steel Towns 32

Braddock. Slack. Flag of Hope. Pittsburgh, Youngstown. New Steel Towns.

V. Steel Masters and Labor 43

Old Organizations. Freedom and Welfare. National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers. Strike Demands. The President's Conference. Laughter of Europe. " What Meaneth a Tyrant."

Part II. The Steel Strike

VI. Strike and Strike Leaders 57

Scope of Strike. W. Z. Foster. Some Organizers. VII. Violence 63

Constabulary in Braddock. The Brutality oi Power. Foster's Office. Fanny Sellings. Third Degree. Rank and File.

VlJLL Strike Meetings 73

Meetings in Pittsburgh. Father Kazinci's Church. Meeting in Homestead. Marching Men. Youngstown Strikers.

v vi Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

IX. Senators and Steel Workers 8£

The Senate Investigation. Bullied Workers. Outside Arrests. Docile Steel Workers. Amerieanizers.

X. Outside People 91

The Comfortable People. The Convention. Quiet Towns.

Part III. Silence

XI. Dark Towns 99

Mother Jones. Steubenville. The Meeting in Mingo. Weirton. Pensions. Tamo Daleko. Johnstown.

XII. Silence 110

The Miner's Son. The Smothered Strike. What Everyone Knew. English Workers. Publicity Department. Letter from Alabama. Espionage.

XIII. Commissary 120

Pittsburgh Workers. The Strike Woman. Commissary in Braddock. Strike Relief Money. Meaning of Strikes.

XIV. Anonymous People 130

The Strike Baby. Old Country Children. Rosie's Measles. The Contented Woman. How They Came Here.

Part IV. The Dying Strike

XV. The Break 141

The Mills Are Pried Open. The Youngstown Office. Picket Line. Steel Workers' Children. Why Men Strike. Fighting Women.

XVI. White Terror 152

Johnstown Mobs. Youngstown Arrests. The Scab. Thanksgiving at Dinora.

XVII. The Dying Strike 160

The Funeral. The Federal Raids. The Last Days. The End.

XVIII. Strike Derelicts 168

Scrapped. The Riddle's Answer. Life -Long Protest. Old Strikers. Derelicts.

XIX. Aliens 176

Boy Without a Country. Strikers' Christmas A Worker's Story. They Want to Go Home. They Will Wait.

Chapter I The Principality Of Steel

PRINCIPALITIES in America do not exist as geographical areas. In America principalities exist by industries.

The principality of Steel is young. It has the despotism and the power of youth; its power rests only on wealth and dominion. Power without responsibility. Power which throttles among its subjects all efforts at selfgovernment. Power brutal, young, riotous, lusty, driven by the force of steam. Power which treats men's lives as commodities. A creative thing made of fire and iron and taking no account of the lives of men. Smoke, fire, iron and human lives are its substance. Gain and greed and the sullen discontent of men are the stuff from which this unthinking despotism is made.

The men who have iron prevail. The iron masters have always had power. The smiths have always been the aristocrats of the artisans. America of the Indians might yet dispute the civilization of Europe, as does North

Africa, had the Indians had iron. Iron and Steel began the life of moderns. Iron and Steel still rule.

No industry is as imposing as Steel, no industry so knocks at the door of the imagination. There must have been a time when that piece of molten metal made from a stone seemed magic; it still is so.

The magic has grown.

The might of Steel has increased.

This industry has progressed mightily. There is no prouder achievement in American industry than Steel. In manufacture of Steel we surpass the world. Sheffield is an old man in his dotage. Newcastle sleeps. Pittsburgh is To-day making To-morrow.

The steel towns make all the raw stuff of life as we know it. Here are our great forges. Here is the core of our civilization. They make steel cars in Lyndora. They make rails in Monessen. In all the world there are no such tubing works as in Youngstown and McKeesport.

In the steel towns they make the raw material for all the swift moving things; the wheels of great machines, the engines which move trains and vessels and airships, the frame- work of high buildings. Our civilization is forged in the steel towns.

A rampart of mills lines the river bottoms near all steel towns. These mills stretch in a mighty frieze miles long. The men who go in mornings and come out nights, who go in nights and come out mornings, seem like processions of ants.

Smoke belches perpetually from the black mill chimneys,

The Principality of Steel 13

which rise like the pipes of black organs, three chimneys, five chimneys, seven chimneys in a row. Chimney and furnace follow one another along the rivers.

The fires of these mills burn night and day. Night and day steel is made by the men who live huddled around the flanks of the mills.

Through the work of these men Pittsburgh grew strong and built high towers. Town after town made steel; one mill bred another. Youngstown, Johnstown, Wheeling, Steubenville made steel and iron, or things that were made from steel and iron.

Steel grew powerful and great. Steel blackened the skies of South Chicago; Steel built Gary and the towns in Calumet Basin. Steel was made in Joliet; Allentown grew rich on Steel, and Steel was made in Colorado and Alabama.

A great industry flung itself across a continent. Through the ceaseless energy of the steel masters and through the unfailing faithfulness of the men who went to the mills every morning and every night, a principality was built.

If these men stopped working our civilization would stop. Between them coal and iron hold America in their hands. Coal and iron and steel rule our civilization and are its masters.

Ore Mines

They make steel from piles of red dust — the crushed ore. These are the places where the iron-ore comes from:

Marquette

Menominee

Gogebic

Vermilion

Mesaba

It is like a song. Much of the ore from which they make fine steel comes from Mesaba. The Mesaba range is a crescent of towns and mines flung over sixty miles of pit-scarred country, open pits yawning, open pits half a mile across, red as dried blood, pits so deep that the engines crawling up their flanks look like beetles. Pits the color of burnt umber, streaked with rust, streaked with yellow. Around the pits forest fires have left the charred stumps of great trees. Among the burnt stumps are bowlders strewn there by glaciers. There are nine beautiful towns and fifty bleak "locations" squatting about the flanks of the mines.

When I was on the Mesaba Range there was a strike. At that time I saw drunken gunmen wearing the stars of deputy sheriffs guarding company property. These were on Indian Reservation where no drink is allowed.

There were no houses in this location, only cabins made from logs and the sides of square oil cans. There were

The Principality of Steel 15

no streets in this town. The cabins were placed haphazard among stumps and bowlders. The company owned the single pump. The company owned the land under the cabins. Refuse lay where it fell, and hogs rooted in it. But the women who stood at the doorways were wide-bosomed and clean. Their curtains in the windows were clean and they grew flowers from tin cans. I saw one cabin which had a piece of stained glass above the door.

Past the cabins went the drunken gunmen; one held himself up on the arm of the other and shouted:

"I don't know if I'm coming or going. I don't know if it's night or morning/'

They saw me and cursed at me foully. On this location two Italians had been sentenced to a year's imprisonment for bringing red wine here to drink at table.

Coal, Coke and Carriers

From the Mesaba mines railways take the ore to Duluthu Long, ungainly ore boats ferry it across the lakes. These rails and these boats are owned and controlled by the iron masters.

They are digging coal to smelt this ore in Pennsylvania. As you go through the country you cannot forget coal, you cannot forget that underneath the earth men work night and day.

In Connelsville the coke ovens burn with red licking fires to make coke for the blast. They burn night and day.

At night the river runs red where it passes Connelsville.

The steel masters own and control the iron mines. The coal and coke to smelt the ore they own and control.

All these things — the mines, the railways and the boats — belong to those who own the ramparts of the mills. They also own the men who work in the mills. But if the men mining coal and making steel stopped, then life as we know it would cease.

The Principality of Steel 17

Profits

About one half of the steel industry is owned by the U. S. Steel Corporation. These are the figures of the Corporation's surplus: /

Compared with the wage budgets in 191 8, the Corporation's final surplus after paying dividends of $96,382,027 and setting aside $174,277^835 for Federal taxes payable in 1919:? was $466,888,421 — a sum large enough to have paid a second time the total wage and salary budget for 1918 ($452,663,524), and to have left a surplus of over $14,000,000. In 1919 the undivided surplus was $493,- 048,201.93, or $13,000,000 more than the total wage and salary expenditures.*

* Interchurch Report of Steel Strike.

Chapter II

IN the steel towns the mills are surrounded by high walls. The gates are guarded by uniformed guards* You must have a permit to go in. A man may live years in steel towns and see no more of the mills than smoke and steam.

The yards of the steel mills are surrounded by tracks. Engines puff up and down through the twenty-four hours. Mountains of ore, mountains of coke, trains unloading, scrap engines unloading ore and coke, trains carrying off steel bars. Magnets everywhere are loading and unloading steel ingots into cars. Men moving in unhurried fashion. No one moves rapidly ; every one has time. There is a never-ending quality to all this.

The size, the leisure, the intensity of the fires and the furnaces give the illusion of ritual. Rooms as high as the apse of a cathedral, with a core of molten-metal furnace, poured steel, red hot steel bars. Through the gloom shafts of blue light from outside, shafts of sunlight solid as searchlights, while little unhurried men, small men whose presence is scarcely observed, are standing on platforms pulling levers.

Three things impress you when you go into the mills: the size, the absence of men, the absence of haste. Here a tremendous work is in progress. Here is being manufactured the steel skeleton of our monstrous civilization. Here before your eyes you may see it being made from fire and iron with the help of great machines. That is what you think first.

Later you say, "Oh, men are helping too !" This is an after-thought.

Poured Iron and Steel

There is no glory comparable to poured iron or poured steel. The gushing out of fiery metal from a great wheellike container seems like the beginning of Creation. This black container of molten iron is twenty feet high. A ladle advances on an overhead railway. It travels to the container of molten iron. It moves forward on its track and then laterally and then down. The black container swings around slowly on its axle as a man presses a lever.

Then follows the sudden magnificence of poured metal. Like giant fireworks, a thousand sparks fly from it, a river of white fire throwing off cascades of stars, a fiery shower on all sides. On a greasy platform above the ladle are the men who operate it. They look down with indifference into its seething deadly brightness.

My guide said: "A man fell into that once, and they buried him and all the tons of metal. Right here they held the burial service."

The story of the man who fell into the vat of molten metal and became part of it obsesses the men's minds. I have heard it told in different ways.

They tell you of a man made into iron rails, of another who went into the structure of great buildings.

This story is as old as time. There was a great bell once which was cast and re-cast and would not ring true until a human being was sacrificed to it.

Open-Hearth Furnace

Very slowly, with caution as though afraid of spilling its contents, the ladle moves on its track, away from the container. It moves laterally to the open-hearth furnace. A gigantic hook descends from above as though of its own intelligence. It hooks itself under the rim of the ladle; the door of the furnace lifts up. You look in into the intolerable white glare. The red flames seem dark. The red flames seem to be the brothers of smoke, beside the white incandescence of the molten mass that will become steel.

I would rather see steel poured than hear a great orchestra. The furious hallelujah of the blast furnace gives you the impression of sound.

When you stare at the glory of the open furnace and see the molten metal giving forth its shower of sparks, you are witnessing creation. Worlds have been made with the intolerable glory of fire. In this fashion, too, our modern world has been created.

The ladle of iron pours crackling into the open-hearth furnace. Before the furnace are mounds of manganese and of other metals of which the steel is made. I asked an old Welsh steel worker: "What is in steel?"

He stamped his foot on the earth. "Everything in that is steel," he said. "There is naught you wouldn't find in steel." It seemed to him that it was a cosmic creation.

Force is confined in these furnaces; from one moment to another it may escape its bounds, from one moment to another fire may cease to be docile to men's wills, fire will destroy instead of create. It does destroy. Steel falls where there is water and explodes. Furnaces explode. The steel towns are full of tales of disaster, and as though in warning, the men's clothes are speckled with burns from glancing sparks of poured metal. You are forever conscious that this force working for man is trying to escape. In many steel mills all that human ingenuity can do to prevent disaster has been done. There are two facts against which no safety device can guard: fire burns, and men forget.

Blooming Mill

The red ingots weighing a ton are carried deliberately on the moving track, from soaking pit to blooming mill. The mill is lofty and dark and the fiery metal is like a red eye. The red-eyed ingot, the green spitting fire of the lever, are the only light things in the twilight. Blue light from an opening in the roof pours down solid like a curtain and shuts off the vista of the mill.

The man on the platform pushes a lever; the hot steel bar is hurled forward and crashes beneath the roller. Bristling iron tongues, like iron fingers, turn it over. The man pushes the lever and unchains the force that carries the steel bar back. It seems like a tortured thing. There is anguish in the force that compresses the great bar of glowing steel. Again it is dashed forward and again the steel fingers turn it over. The force here unchained is so great that it holds an element of terror.

The roar of the blooming mill and of the rolling mill, the hum of machinery, the crackling and spitting of the electric levers never stop. So constant is the noise that it gives the effect of quiet.

Poured iron, open-hearth furnace, poured steel, soaking pit, blooming mill, rolling mill, gray steel still smoking hot, bars of steel piled ready for use — this is the sequence of the mill which goes on night and day like some process of nature. It seems too inevitable to be man's invention. The little slow men seem the servants of the great forces of fire and iron.

Wire Mill

Wire is lengthened by running rapidly in long loops over pegs. It forms streaks of fire that seem to move of their own volition — fiery snakes, writhing and leaping, running on endlessly forever. They daze you as they rush before you. It does not seem possible that these things are not alive.

Behind is the gloomy mill, in front brilliant moving wire. Slow moving laborers pass with loaded barrows; they seem hypnotized by monotony, by the leaping red serpents. Without stopping, this thin line of fire runs on night and day; night and day men tend them in their courses. This thin, long line of writhing red fire is one of the most beautiful things in the world — a leaping ribbon of flame, yard on yard of it, looping and twisting. This happy, leaping, running, twisting, flame-colored wire makes iron fences when it is cold.

The Skull Cracker

Behind the walls of the same steel mill are the skull-cracker and the wire mill.

I found the skull-cracker by chance down the end of a muddy lane one spring day. It was at the very end of the mill. A narrow railway track runs to it and brings pieces of steel refuse to be cracked over and fed back into the furnaces.

These great fragments of gray steel look old as time; they look like pieces of extinct worlds. They look as though they must have been fused in the heart of some long extinct volcano. It does not seem possible that they were made only yesterday in the furnaces above. They are unloaded from the car, which brings them by a huge circular magnet. The magnet reaches over and touches the fragment of gray metal and places it where it wishes. The current is turned on again and the magnet touches a sphere of steel weighing five tons, and draws it up forty feet in the air; the current is turned off and the steel sphere falls upon the fragment below and cracks it.

It looks like some strange game — the magnet picking up the gray ball, dropping it and then picking it up, and loading and unloading the steel.

The skull-cracker is in a little yard by itself, out of doors. There are three men in the crew. The craneman pulls the levers which work the great crane to which the magnet is attached, the laborer does what manual work there is, and the foreman looks on.

Wages and Hours

The United States Steel Corporation's policy as regards labor dominates the steel industry.

There are, roughly speaking, 500,000 steel workers in the United States.

191,000 employees work in U. S. Steel Corporation's manufacturing plants.

32% do not make enough pay to come to the level set by Government experts as minimum subsistence standard for family of five.

72% of all steel workers are below the level set by Government experts as minimum of comfort level set for families of five. That means that three-quarters of the steel workers cannot earn enough for an American standard of living.

50% of the U. S. Steel Corporation's employees work 12 hours a day. -50% of these work 7 days a week.

Steel workers work from 20 to 40 hours longer a week than other basic industries near steel communities.

American steel workers work over 20 hours a week longer than British steel workers.*

*Interchurch Report of Steel Strike.

Chapter III Men And Machines

Spring in a Steel Town

FROM the skull-cracker and out of the mill I walked through muddy unpaved lanes, past unlovely littered yards of workers' houses. Only the foreman of the skull-cracker had made a small garden behind the mill gate. One young Slovak was digging to plant things in front of his frame cottage.

The mills of this town were on the flat river bottom. The old river banks mount steeply. The yards of the rickety frame houses slope sharply down. Melting snow had uncovered the refuse of winter. In the air was the sickly sweet smell of rotting garbage. The steep yards were surrounded by ramshackle fences. At the bottom near the street heavier things had slipped down hill — discarded bed springs, coal scuttles with holes in them, rusty pots and pans, old corsets, shoes, and more tin cans. In these towns on the Monongahela refuse and garbage are not taken away. For months it rots where it lies. Spring finds it there.

In my country there is a dreary spot which we call the town dump. Here it seems that the children of Lazarus have been keeping house.

There are disabled cook-stoves, old beds leaking their entrails, ruined cook pots, ruined scuttles, ruined buckets. Old hats, old corsets and old shoes. Little boys with wheel-barrows come and throw away things down the dump which is over the steep side of a dune.

Spring uncovers thousands of such places in the steel towns.

Order for the machines ; disorder for the men who tend them. Man's affairs are dwarfed outside the mills as men are dwarfed in the mills.

On one hillside was a single irregular patch of green. Some hopeful soul beside the foreman of the skull-cracker had planted a garden in the midst of the tin cans and refuse. There was the only sign of spring in that town.

Men and Machines 29

Men Going to Work

The steel workers were streaming from the mills. Night and morning the streets of all steel towns are black with steel workers swarming up from the river bottom, streaming down the hillsides. They come on trolleys — special cars bring the steel workers. The men going to work walk with their heads down. They lurch as if heavy with sleep. They walk fast; they don't talk; they look neither to the right nor to the left, but with heads down they plunge forward as though the mill gates sucked them in.

They meet the shift coming off. The men are worn with fatigue and their eyes are hollow, but they chat together. They are going home to food and to bed.

Men coming, men going. Day shift, night shift. Ten hours light, fourteen night. This procession is punctual as the tide. It never stops. It goes in every morning, it comes out every night. Like the sun, like the tides, it knows neither holiday nor Sunday.

It does not seem as if men owned the mills. It seems as if the mills owned the men. The mill gates open up in the morning and suck the men in and at night they open up again and spew them out. As you go through towns this idea becomes an obsession.

Fraycar

There was a man named Fraycar who, when he was drunk, would come down before the mill gates and would curse the mills; he would curse slag and slack; he would curse the mill bosses and the men who worked; he would curse the pouring steel and the fires, and the smoke that poured out of the mills and blackened the sky. His friends would follow him and watch him fearfully as he stood, huge, before the mill gates, cursing. He would cry out to the silent wall:

"I am stronger than you."

As he drank in the saloon a fury would overtake him and he would begin to talk of the mill, and then he would rush out, and behind him there would be silence, no one would laugh. He would curse the mills and furnaces; he would curse the machines; he cursed slag and slack. When he was drunk he thought the machines were alive, he thought they owned him and that he was their slave.

Men and Machines 31

The Mad Gunner

You will find repeated again and again the illusion that the machines have a life of their own.

In France I heard a variation of Fraycar's story. There was a wounded man whose head had been hit by shrapnel. He had been a gunner of one of the great guns. He thought that he had a tremendous secret and he would stop his nurse and the visitors and the doctor because he feared that he might die and with him his secret would perish. The secret was this :

It was that the machines, in revenge for the work that we made them do, were killing men. He thought that machines were alive and that they were malevolently disposed to men.

"Stop making machines/' he would cry, "and you will stop war."

He believed that the great gun had not been obedient to him, but that he and the other men of the gun crew obeyed the great gun and did its bidding.

CHAPTER IV BraddocJc

CIVILIZATIONS write their history in terms of buildings. Towns name their aspirations and testify to their failures in brick and mortar. In the slums of cities civilization writes with stones and wood the story of its defeat. Each generation through its palaces names its ruler and its deity. Our noblest temples are built in the service of transportation, and the towers of industry laugh at the church spires.

Streets and the houses on them cannot lie, nor do the crowds which walk down them tell anything but truth.

For nearly half a century Coal and Steel have owned great districts of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois. For nearly half a century Steel has been writing its own history in the houses and factories of its towns.

Braddock is one of the oldest steel towns. Here Carnegie Steel was born. Its mills existed before the great mills of Homestead. A ganglion of towns — Braddock, Rankin, Homestead, Bessemer, lined the Monongahela River with steel mills.

All of Braddock is black. The soot of the mills has covered it. There is no spot in Braddock that is fair to see. It has neither park nor playground. It is a town of slack disorder and of scant self-respect. Those who have made money in Braddock mills live where they cannot see Braddock. The steel workers who can, escape up the hillsides. They go to North Braddock or to Wolftown; but many and many of them live and die in the First Ward.

They live some in two-story brick houses, some in blackened frame dwellings. One set of houses faces the street, the other the court. The courts are bricked and littered with piles of cans, piles of rubbish, bins of garbage, hillocks of refuse — refuse and litter, litter and refuse. Playing in the refuse and ashes and litter — children. The decencies of life ebb away as one nears the mills. I passed one day along an alley which fronted on an empty lot. Here the filth and refuse of years had been churned into viscous mud. A lean dog was digging. Pale children paddled in the squashy filth and made playthings of ancient rubbish. Beyond was the railroad tracks, beyond that the mills. Two-storied brick houses flanked the brick street. No green thing grew anywhere.

But in the brick courtyard Croatian and Slovak women were weaving rugs. In their villages in Europe they had woven the clothes of their men. In Braddock's squalid courtyards they weave bright colored rugs and sing as they weave. Here and there men bring tables out of doors and play cards. They nod to me in village fashion as I pass. Everywhere were children — Slovak children with flaxen hair and blue eyed; wide- faced Magyar children, Gypsy children. Then I knew that the chief product of Braddock and its sister towns was not steel.

Their principal product is children.

Generation after generation of children, born where no green thing grows. Hundreds and thousands of children playing in the refuse of forsaken brick courtyards or along the streets. Generations of children reared under the somber magnificence of the clouds of smoke which blanket the sky and obscure the sun.

I learned in Braddock what condemns men to live in these tenements on the river bottom where the slack from the mills rains on them.

What condemns them to live here is their children. The more children the less the chance of escape. Here in these Braddock houses live the people of eternally unfulfilled dreams, here live those whose hopes forever are betrayed by the unforeseen, the people without a margin.

I know two men, Milko and Pasterik. They came to this country together, a generation ago. Pasterik has escaped to Wolftown and owns a square box of a house. From his windows he can see the yellow water of the Monongahela. Milko lives among the condemned in the courtyard off Willow Way. He explained this to me.

"Missus," he said, "my friend Pasterik get ten children. I get eleven. Four of his children die by diphtheria all together. He can go — he can buy house. My children, they all live."

Slack

Slack covers everything. It sifts in everywhere. Slack is what doesn't melt in the mountains of red ore — a metal particle, powdered ore, powdered metal. It silts down all growing things. You can see the tiny bits of ore gleaming on your hands. The shining ore dusts your coat. It gets in your hair.

On certain days they blow the slack out. Mighty currents of air blow the choking slack out of the costly mill chimneys onto the cheap human life outside. Those days the sun is darkened, and the steel workers returning home hide their faces as from a sand storm. They duck along, jackets over heads, under the fury of the falling slack. You find it everywhere. It lodges in the creases of your clothes. Your hands are never clean. Nothing, between soot and slack, can be clean long in the steel towns.