tight. In Johnstown the Cambria Company was so hard hit that, swallowing
its pride, it had to ask the hated unions for a detachment of workers to
protect its plants. The Buffalo district men struck almost 100 per
cent., after a bitter organizing campaign and an eight months' free
speech fight. The Wheeling and Steubenville districts' steel mills and
blast furnaces were abandoned altogether by their crews. In Coatesville
and Birmingham, the response was poor, in the first locality because of
insufficient organization; and in the second because of discouragement
due to a lost local strike the year before. But in far away Colorado,
the steel workers, hearkening to the voice of freedom abroad in the
land, expressed their contempt for the company-union slavery of John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., by tieing up every department in his big Pueblo
mills.
In the immediate Pittsburgh district, though here more strenuously
opposed by the Steel Trust, the strike ranged from 75 to 85 per cent.
effective. That it did not go as strong as other districts was purely
because of the denial, by the companies and the authorities, of the
workers' rights to meet and to organize. In the "Black Valley" section
of the district, comprising the towns lying along the Allegheny river,
Apollo, Vandergrift, Leechburg, Brackenridge, Natrona and New
Kensington, and notorious as the scene of the brutal murder of organizer
Mrs. Fannie Sellins, the strike went 90 per cent. or better; but in the
Monongahela river section it was not so good. Of the steel towns in that
district, Donora and Monessen took the lead with a 100 per cent. strike.
Due to the terrorism prevailing exact figures were almost impossible to
get for the other towns, but according to the best information
procurable they averaged about as follows; Clairton 95, Braddock 90,
Homestead 80, Rankin 85, McKeesport 70, and Duquesne 50 per cent. In
Pittsburgh itself all the larger mills and furnaces, except those of the
Jones and Laughlin Company, either suspended operations altogether or
lost heavily of their employees during the first two days of the strike.
The Jones and Laughlin men had been profoundly discouraged by a lost
strike two years previously, and had responded poorly to the organizers'
efforts. But when they saw the magnitude of the strike they took heart
somewhat, and by strenuous efforts in a rapid fire campaign, the
organizers had at least 60 per cent. of them on strike by the end of the
first week.
In the plants of the Bethlehem Steel Company the strike did not become
effective until September 29. The cause was to be found in local
conditions. In the early spring of 1918, before the National Committee
began its campaign, ruthless exploitation by the company had resulted in
a strike of machine shop employees. The National War Labor Board settled
the strike, erecting a shop organization to handle grievances. In the
meantime the National Committee came into the field and began active
operations. Up till this time the organized movement, led by David
Williams and Patrick Duffy, had been confined principally to the
Machinists, Electrical workers and a few other skilled trades; but now
it spread to the main body of the employees. To head it off the company
proposed to the National Committee that a Rockefeller union be set up in
the plants. Naturally this was unacceptable. Then they offered to sign
an agreement covering all their shipyard employees if the organization
of their steel plants was given up, feeling no doubt that the shipyard
boom was only temporary. For the National Committee, John Fitzpatrick
spurned this shameful trade, and the organization campaign went on--with
the shipyard men getting their agreement later on just the same.
Technically the employees of the Bethlehem Company should have struck
under the first strike call, as they had no union agreement; but being
tied up with futile negotiations under their "collective bargaining"
arrangement, they did not get out until the twenty-ninth. When they did
strike the response was not so good. A fair average for the plants in
South Bethlehem, Steelton, Reading, Lebanon and Sparrows' Point would
be a 50 per cent. strike.
On the whole the strike affected practically the entire industry,
seventy important steel centres being involved. About the only mills of
consequence to escape it were those located at Midland, Woodlawn, Lorain
and Duluth. And the only reason for this was lack of sufficient
organizers to cover them. It is noteworthy that the strike followed
strictly the lines of organization. In hardly a single instance did the
unorganized go out spontaneously, even though they had previously been
clamoring for the unions to help them. This tends to show how completely
the steel companies dominated their unorganized workers and how hard it
was for the latter to act in concert.
For the most part the great walkout was concentrated on the smelting and
rolling branches of the steel industry. It had been the original
intention to make the movement thoroughly industrial, taking in all the
workers from those who mine the coal and iron to those who transfer the
finished products to the railroad lines. But insufficient resources
compelled the modification of this program, and forced the unions to
confine their work principally to the blast furnaces and rolling mills.
However, where the company mines or fabricating works lay close to the
general plants, or were part of them, the essentially industrial
character of the campaign manifested itself and these departments were
organized along with the rest. In various places, including Gary,
Chicago, Homestead, etc., bridge, car, and other fabricating shops were
an integral part of the drive. The iron miners working close in to
Birmingham responded to some extent, but a big defeat of the local
metal trades in the mills a couple of years previously held them back
from making a strong demonstration. The coal miners struck in several
places. In Johnstown, 2,000 of them working in the Cambria Steel
Company's mines organized during the campaign, became affiliated with
the local mill workers' council, and walked out 100 per cent. on the
historic twenty-second of September.
Although the United States Steel Corporation was recognized as the arch
enemy of the unions, the strike was not directed against it alone. Every
iron and steel mill and furnace in the country not working under union
agreements was included. This meant at least 95 per cent. of the
industry, because the only agreements of any consequence were between
some of the smaller companies and the Amalgamated Association. A number
of these concerns were affected also, their agreements relating only to
skilled workers, and the plants having to close when the laborers
struck. This occurred quite extensively in the Cleveland, Youngstown and
Pittsburgh districts.
Considering the large number of them involved and their traditions of
isolated action, the unions displayed reasonably good solidarity in
going "over the top" against the Steel Trust. The battle line was far
from perfect, however. Much harm was done the morale of the strikers by
local unions here and there that were under the sway of ignorant
blockheads or designing tools of the bosses, refusing to recognize the
National Committee's strike call and insisting upon getting instructions
from their own headquarters, meanwhile scabbing it in the mills. And
the worst of it was that sometimes it was difficult, or even impossible
to have the necessary instructions issued.
Far more serious than this, however, was the action of the executive
officers of the International Union of Steam and Operating Engineers.
Just as the strike was about to begin President Snellings and Secretary
Comerford sharply condemned it by letter and through the press, urging
their men to stay at work upon the flimsy pretext that the President's
industrial conference would attend to their interests. Roused to
indignation by this cold-blooded course, the local unions of engineers,
almost without exception, repudiated their international misleaders and
stuck with the rest of the steel workers. After President Gompers had
been quoted in the newspapers as pledging the support of the A. F. of L.
to the strike (two days after it started) and Labor generally had shown
its determination to stick by the steel workers, the officers of the
Engineers' international were compelled to publicly endorse the strike.
But throughout its duration they nevertheless privately encouraged their
strategically situated tradesmen to return to work, thus doing
incalculable harm when the strikers had begun to weaken a little. This
plain case of official scabbery was inspired by a jurisdictional dispute
between the engineers and the electrical workers over the disposition to
be made of electrical crane-men signed up in the campaign. Because they
could not have their unreasonable way in the matter, the officials of
the engineers deliberately knifed the strike and lent aid and comfort
to the bitterest opponents of Organized Labor on this planet. To such
extremes will union men go in internecine wars over trade demarcations.
But in spite of opposition, blundering and treachery, the steel workers
had spoken. Mr. Gary was answered. Previous to the strike, he declared
that the unions represented only an insignificant minority of his men,
the great bulk of his working force being satisfied. He compelled the
Committee to show its credentials. Result: 365,600 steel workers laid
down their tools. This estimated total has never been disputed by the
steel companies. Here and there, in some individual town or district,
they pointed out a figure occasionally as being excessive; but although
importuned by newspaper men to do so, they never ventured to issue a
statement of the number on strike at all points. The reason was that
they feared to print the grand total which even their lying press bureau
would have to admit. Word came to the Committee from reliable sources
that the steel manufacturers considered the union figure well within the
real total.
While not accurately ascertainable, the number of Mr. Gary's employees
actually taking part in the strike may be closely approximated. Mr. Gary
stated to the Senate Committee that the total number employed by the
United States Steel Corporation in the departments affected by the
strike was 201,065. Against this number should be checked off about half
of the total number of strikers, or 182,500. This is based upon the
theory that the official U. S. Steel Corporation plants form
approximately 50 per cent. of the industry, and that the strike was
just as effective against them as against those of any other company. It
is not asserted that these figures are absolutely accurate; but they
will serve to indicate that the claim of a 90 per cent. strike in the
plants of the Steel Corporation is a fair one. It is exceedingly
doubtful if as many as 10 per cent. of Mr. Gary's employees remained at
their posts and failed to heed the strike call. Fully 125,000 of them
were members of the unions before the strike started, and most of the
rest would have been also, had they dared brave the anger of their
bosses.
The great steel strike thoroughly exposed the hypocrisies of Mr. Gary
and his ilk that in some mysterious way labor policies and conditions in
the steel industry depend upon the wishes of the body of the workers. It
made plain that in the autocratic system now prevailing the democratic
principles of majority and minority do not enter. It is a case pure and
simple of the absolute sway of property rights over human rights. A
handful of social parasites hidden away in Wall street, with no other
interest in the steel industry than to exploit it, settle arbitrarily
the vital questions of wages, hours and working conditions, while the
enormous mass of the workers, actual producers whose very lives are
involved, have no say whatsoever. No matter how bitter their grievances,
when they raise their voice to ask redress, they are discharged,
blacklisted, starved, beaten, jailed and even shot, until they bend the
knee again and yield to the will of their industrial masters.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] In this connection occurred one of the finest incidents in the
strike: Wm. J. Brennan, an able, conscientious attorney of Pittsburgh,
and one of the counsel who defended the Homestead strikers in 1892, went
to Clairton to get the "rioters" released on bonds. But such a state of
terror existed that no one dared to go their bail. Thereupon, Mr.
Brennan himself, without knowing a single one of the defendants, but
smarting under the injustice of it all, pledged his entire property
holdings, amounting to $88,000, to get them set free.
VIII
GARYISM RAMPANT
THE WHITE TERROR--CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS DENIED--UNBREAKABLE
SOLIDARITY--FATHER KAZINCY--THE COSSACKS--SCIENTIFIC
BARBARITY--PROSTITUTED COURTS--SERVANTS REWARDED
It was the misfortune of the steel strike to occur in the midst of the
post-war reaction, which still persists unabated, and which constitutes
the most shameful page in American history. Ours are days when the
organized employers, inspired by a horrible fear of the onward sweep of
revolution in Europe and the irresistible advance of the labor movement
in this country, are robbing the people overnight of their most precious
rights, the fruits of a thousand years of struggle. And the people, not
yet recovered from war hysteria and misled by a corrupt press, cannot
perceive the outrage. They even glory in their degradation. Free speech,
free press, free assembly, as we once knew these rights, are now things
of the past. What poor rudiments of them remain depend upon the whims of
a Burleson, or the rowdy element of the American Legion. Hundreds of
idealists, guilty of nothing more than a temperate expression of their
honest views, languish in prison serving sentences so atrocious as to
shock the world--although Europe has long since released its war and
political prisoners. Working class newspapers are raided, denied the use
of the mails and suppressed. Meetings are broken up by Chamber of
Commerce mobs or thugs in public office. The right of asylum is
gone--the infamous Palmer is deporting hundreds who dare to hold views
different from his. The right of the workers to organize is being
systematically curtailed; and crowning shame of all, workingmen can no
longer have legislative representatives of their own choosing. In a
word, America, from being the most forward-looking, liberty-loving
country in the world, has in two short years become one of the most
reactionary. We in this country are patiently enduring tyranny that
would not be tolerated in England, France, Italy, Russia or Germany. Our
great war leaders promised us the New Freedom; they have given us the
White Terror.
Realizing full well the reactionary spirit of the times, the steel
companies proceeded safely to extremes to crush the steel strike, dubbed
by them an attempt at violent revolution. To accomplish their end they
stuck at nothing. One of their most persistent and determined efforts
was to deprive the steel workers of their supposedly inalienable right
to meet and talk together. Throughout the strike, whenever and wherever
they could find municipal or court officials willing to do their
bidding, the steel barons abolished the rights of free speech and free
assembly, so precious to strikers. Few districts escaped this evil, but
as usual, Pennsylvania felt the blow earliest and heaviest. Hardly had
the strike started when the oily Schwab prohibited meetings in
Bethlehem; the Allegheny and West Penn Steel Companies did the same at
Natrona, jailing organizer J. McCaig for "inciting to riot"; in the
Sharon-Farrell district the steel workers, denied their constitutional
rights in their home towns, had to march several miles over into Ohio
(America they called it) in order to hold their meetings.
Along the Monongahela river the shut-down was complete. Following
Sheriff Haddock's proclamation and the "riots" at Clairton and
Glassport, it was only a few days until the city and borough officials
had completely banned strike meetings in all the territory from
Charleroi to Pittsburgh. The unions' free-speech, free-assembly victory
of the past summer was instantly cancelled. For forty-one miles through
the heart of America's steel industry, including the important centers
of Monessen, Donora, Clairton, Wilson, Glassport, McKeesport, Duquesne,
Homestead, Braddock, Rankin, etc., not a meeting of the steel workers
could be held. Even in Pittsburgh itself meetings were prohibited
everywhere except in Labor Temple. The steel-collared city officials
never could quite muster the gall to close Labor's own building--or
perhaps because it is so far from the mills and so poorly situated for
meetings they felt it to be of no use to the strikers. Thus the Steel
Trust gave its workers a practical demonstration of what is meant by the
phrase, "making the world safe for democracy."
Not only were mass meetings forbidden, but so also were regular business
meetings under the charters of the local unions. To test out this
particular usurpation, Attorney W. H. Rubin, then in charge of the
strike's legal department and possessed of a keener faith in
Pennsylvania justice than the Strike committee had, keener probably than
he himself now has, prayed the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas to
enjoin Mayor Babcock and other city officials from interfering with a
local union of the Amalgamated Association holding its business meetings
on the south side of the city where its members lived and where several
large mills are located. At the hearing the Mayor and Chief of Police
freely admitted that there had been no violence in the strike, and even
complimented the men on their behavior, but they feared there might be
trouble and so forbade the meetings. The honorable Judges Ford and
Shafer agreed with them and denied the writ, saying among other things:
It is the duty of the Mayor and Police Department to
preserve the peace, and it must be sometimes necessary for
that purpose to prevent the congregating in one place of
large numbers of people such as might get beyond the control
of the Police Department, and it must be left to the
reasonable discretion of the officers charged with keeping
the peace when such intervention is made.
In other words, the sacred right of the workers to meet together depends
upon the arbitrary will of any politician who may get into the office
controlling the permits. Shortly before Judges Ford and Shafer handed
down this noble conception of free assembly, Judge Kennedy of the
Allegheny County Court, ruling on the appeal of Mother Jones, J. L.
Beaghen, J. M. Patterson and Wm. Z. Foster in the Duquesne free speech
cases of several weeks prior to the strike, had this to say:
It cannot be questioned that the object of these
meetings--increasing the membership in the American
Federation of Labor--is a perfectly lawful one, but the
location of the meetings in the Monongahela valley, built up
as it is for mile after mile of an unbroken succession of
iron and steel mills, and thickly populated with iron
workers, many of whom obviously are not members of this
association, and among whom, on both sides, there are, in
all probability, some who upon the occasion of meetings such
as these purported to be, might through excitement
precipitate serious actions of which the consequences could
not be foreseen and might be disastrous, presents questions
which are sufficient to cause the court to hesitate before
interfering with the exercise of discretion on the part of
the Mayor in refusing to permit such meetings at this time.
The Court is still hesitating to interfere with Mayor Crawford's
tyranny, and the defendants had to pay $100 and costs each for trying to
hold a meeting on ground they had leased. One would think that the
remedy in the case conjured out of thin air by the learned judge (for in
the thousands of meetings held in the steel campaign he cannot point to
one incident of violence) would be for the local authorities to provide
ample police protection to insure order. But no, in Pennsylvania the
thing to do is to set aside the constitutional rights of the workers.
Would such action be taken in the case of members of a Chamber of
commerce? Wouldn't the governor, rather, order out the state troops, if
necessary, to uphold their right of assembly?
In the hope of getting some relief, or at the least some publicity about
the unbearable situation, a committee of 18 local labor men,
representing the largest trade unions in Western Pennsylvania, went to
Washington and presented to the Allegheny County congressional
delegation a petition expressing contempt for the judges and other
officials in their part of the State and asking Congress to give them
the justice these men refused to mete out. Surely, the Allegheny County
congressmen were exactly the ones to bring the Steel Trust to time. With
a grand flourish they introduced a resolution into the House calling for
an investigation--then they forgot all about it.
The official tyranny and outlawry along the Monongahela was so bad that
the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor had to voice its protest. On
November 1-2 it held a special convention in Pittsburgh, attended by
several hundred delegates. A resolution was adopted demanding that
protection be given the rights of the workers, and that if the
authorities failed to extend this protection, "the Executive Council of
the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor shall issue a call for a State-wide
strike, when in its judgment it is necessary to compel respect for law
and the restoration of liberty as guaranteed by the Constitution of the
United States and of the State of Pennsylvania." For this action
President Jas. H. Maurer of the Federation was hotly assailed and even
menaced with lynching by the lawless business interests.
By some inexplicable mental twist the ex-union man Burgess of Homestead
eventually allowed the unions to hold one mass meeting each week--to
this day the only ones permitted in the forty-one miles of Monongahela
steel towns. They were under the supervision of the State police. At
each meeting a half dozen of these Cossacks, in full uniform, would sit
upon the platform as censors. Only English could be spoken. As the
saying was, all the organizers were permitted to talk about was the
weather. When one touched on a vital strike phase a Cossack would yell
at him, "Hey, cut that out! You're through, you--! Don't ever come back
here any more." And he never could speak there again.
Judging from past experiences the strike in the Pittsburgh district
should have been impossible under such hard circumstances. With little
or no opportunity to meet for mutual encouragement and enlightenment,
the strikers, theoretically, should have been soon discouraged and
driven back to work. But they were saved by their matchless solidarity,
bred of a deep faith in the justice of their cause. In the black,
Cossack-ridden Monongahela towns there were thousands of strikers who
were virtually isolated, who never attended a meeting during the entire
strike and seldom if ever saw an organizer or read a strike bulletin,
yet they fought on doggedly for three and one-half months, buoyed up by
a boundless belief in the ultimate success of their supreme effort. Each
felt himself bound to stay away from the mills, come weal or come woe,
regardless of what the rest did. These were mainly the despised
foreigners, of course, but their splendid fighting qualities were a
never-ending revelation and inspiration to all connected with the
strike.