I NOW decided that Pittsburgh would be as good a field as any, and one
morning seeing a sign outside a cut-rate ticket-broker’s window reading
“Pittsburgh, $5.75,” I bought a ticket, returned to my small room to
pack my bag, and departed. I arrived at Pittsburgh at six or seven that
same evening.
Of all the cities in which I ever worked or lived Pittsburgh was the
most agreeable. Perhaps it was due to the fact that my stay included
only spring, summer and fall, or that I found a peculiarly easy
newspaper atmosphere, or that the city was so different physically from
any I had thus far seen; but whether owing to one thing or another
certainly no other newspaper work I ever did seemed so pleasant, no
other city more interesting. What a city for a realist to work and dream
in! The wonder to me is that it has not produced a score of writers,
poets, painters and sculptors, instead of—well, how many? And who are
they?
I came down to it through the brown-blue mountains of Western
Pennsylvania, and all day long we had been winding at the base of one or
another of them, following the bed of a stream or turning out into a
broad smooth valley, crossing directly at the center of it, or climbing
some low ridge with a puff-puff-puff and then clattering almost
recklessly down the other slope. I had never before seen any mountains.
The sight of sooty-faced miners at certain places, their little oil and
tow tin lamps fastened to their hats, their tin dinner-pails on their
arms, impressed me as something new and faintly reminiscent of the one
or two small coal mines about Sullivan, Indiana, where I had lived when
I was a boy of seven. Along the way I saw a heavy-faced and heavy-bodied
type of peasant woman, with a black or brown or blue or green skirt and
a waist of a contrasting color, a headcloth or neckerchief of still
another, trailed by a few children of equally solid proportions, hanging
up clothes or doing something else about their miserable places. These
were the much-maligned hunkies just then being imported by the large
manufacturing and mining and steel-making industries of the country to
take the place of the restless and less docile American working man and
woman. I marveled at their appearance and number, and assumed,
American-fashion, that in their far-off and unhappy lands they had heard
of the wonderful American Constitution, its guaranty of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, as well as of the bounteous opportunities
afforded by this great land, and that they had forsaken their miseries
to come all this distance to enjoy these greater blessings.
I did not then know of the manufacturers’ foreign labor agent with his
lying propaganda among ignorant and often fairly contented peasants,
painting America as a country rolling in wealth and opportunity, and
then bringing them here to take the places of more restless and greatly
underpaid foreigners who, having been brought over by the same gay
pictures, were becoming irritated and demanded more pay. I did not then
know of the padrone, the labor spy, the company store, five cents an
hour for breaker children, the company stockade, all in full operation
at this time. All I knew was that there had been a great steel strike in
Pittsburgh recently, that Andrew Carnegie, as well as other steel
manufacturers (the Olivers, for one), had built fences and strung them
with electrified barbed wire in order to protect themselves against the
“lawless” attacks of “lawless” workingmen.
I also knew that a large number of State or county or city paid deputy
sheriffs and mounted police and city policemen had been sworn in and set
to guarding the company’s property and that H. C. Frick, a leading steel
manager for Mr. Carnegie, had been slightly wounded by a desperado named
Alexander Berkman, who was inflaming these workingmen, all foreigners of
course, lawless and unappreciative of the great and prosperous steel
company which was paying them reasonable wages and against which they
had no honest complaint.
Our mid-Western papers, up to the day of Cleveland’s election in 1892
and for some time after, had been full of the merits of this labor
dispute, with long and didactic editorials, intended in the main to
prove that the workingman was not so greatly underpaid, considering the
type of labor he performed and the intelligence he brought to his task;
that the public was not in the main vastly interested in labor disputes,
both parties to the dispute being unduly selfish; that it would be a
severe blow to the prosperity of the country if labor disputes were too
long continued; that unless labor was reasonable in its demands capital
would become disheartened and leave the country. I had not made up my
mind that the argument was all on one side, although I knew that the
average man in America, despite its great and boundless opportunities,
was about as much put upon and kicked about and underpaid as any other.
This growing labor problem or the general American dissatisfaction with
poor returns upon efforts made crystallized three years later in the
Free Silver campaign and the “gold parades.” The “full dinner-pail” was
then invented as a slogan to counteract the vast economic unrest, and
the threat to close down and so bring misery to the entire country
unless William McKinley was elected was also freely posted. Henry
George, Father McGlynn, Herr Most, Emma Goldman, and a score of others
were abroad voicing the woes of hundreds of thousands who were supposed
to have no woes.
At that time, as I see it now, America was just entering upon the most
lurid phase of that vast, splendid, most lawless and most savage period
in which the great financiers were plotting and conniving at the
enslavement of the people and belaboring each other. Those crude parvenu
dynasties which now sit enthroned in our democracy, threatening its very
life with their pretensions and assumptions, were then in their very
beginning. John D. Rockefeller was still in Cleveland; Flagler, William
Rockefeller, H. H. Rogers, were still comparatively young and secret
agents; Carnegie was still in Pittsburgh, an iron master, and of all his
brood of powerful children only Frick had appeared; William H.
Vanderbilt and Jay Gould had only recently died; Cleveland was
President, and Mark Hanna was an unknown business man in Cleveland. The
great struggles of the railroads, the coal companies, the gas companies,
to overawe and tax the people were still in abeyance, or just being
born. The multi-millionaire had arrived, it is true, but not the
billionaire. On every hand were giants plotting, fighting, dreaming; and
yet in Pittsburgh there was still something of a singing spirit.
When I arrived here and came out of the railway station, which was
directly across the Monongahela River from the business center, I was
impressed by the huge walls of hills that arose on every hand, a great
black sheer ridge rising to a height of five or six hundred feet to my
right and enclosing this river, on the bosom of which lay steamboats of
good size. From the station a pleasingly designed bridge of fair size
led to the city beyond, and across it trundled in unbroken lines
street-cars and wagons and buggies of all sizes and descriptions. The
city itself was already smartly outlined by lights, a galaxy climbing
the hills in every direction, and below me as I walked out upon this
bridge was an agate stream reflecting the lights from either shore.
Below this was another bridge, and upstream another. The whole river for
a mile or more was suddenly lit to a rosy glow, a glow which, as I saw
upon turning, came from the tops of some forty or fifty stacks belching
a deep orange-red flame. At the same time an enormous pounding and
crackling came from somewhere, as though titans were at work upon
subterranean anvils. I stared and admired. I felt that I was truly
adventuring into a new and strange world. I was glad now that I had not
found work in Toledo or Cleveland or Buffalo.
The city beyond the river proved as interesting as the river cliffs and
forges about the station. As I walked along I discovered the name of the
street (Smithfield), which began at the bridge’s end and was lined with
buildings of not more than three or four stories although it was one of
the principal streets of the business center. At the bridge-head on the
city side stood a large smoke-colored stone building, which later I
discovered was the principal hotel, the Monongahela, and beyond that was
a most attractive and unusual postoffice building. I came to a cross
street finally (Fifth Avenue), brightly lighted and carrying unusual
traffic, and turned into it. I found this central region to be most
puzzlingly laid out, and did not attempt to solve its mysteries.
Instead, I entered a modest restaurant in a side street. Later I hunted
up a small hotel, where I paid a dollar for a room for the night. I
retired, speculating as to how I should make out here. Something about
the city drew me intensely. I wished I might remain for a time. The next
morning I was up bright and early to look up the morning papers and find
out the names of the afternoon papers. I found that there were four: the
_Dispatch_ and _Times_, morning papers, and the GAZETTE-TELEGRAPH and
_Leader_, afternoon. I thought them most interesting and different from
those of other cities in which I had worked.
“Andy Pastor had his right hand lacerated while at work in the
23-inch mill yesterday.”
“John Kristoff had his right wrist sprained while at work in the
140-inch mill yesterday.”
“Joseph Novic is suffering from contused wounds of the left
wrist received while at work in the 23-inch mill yesterday.”
“A train of hot metal, being hauled from a mixing-house to open
hearth No. 2, was side-swiped by a yard engine near the 48-inch
mill. The impact tilted the ladles of some of the cars and the
hot metal spilled in a pool of water along the track. Antony
Brosak, Constantine Czernik and Kafros Maskar were seriously
wounded by the exploding metal.”
Such items arrested my attention at once; and then such names as
Squirrel Hill, Sawmill Run, Moon Run, Hazelwood, Wind Gap Road,
Braddock, McKeesport, Homestead, Swissvale, somehow made me wish to know
more of this region.
The _Dispatch_ was Republican, the _Times_ Democratic. Both were
evidently edited with much conservatism as to local news. I made haste
to visit the afternoon newspaper offices, only to discover that they
were fully equipped with writers. I then proceeded in search of a room
and finally found one in Wylie Avenue, a curious street that climbed a
hill to its top and then stopped. Here, almost at the top of this hill,
in an old yellow stonefront house the rear rooms of which commanded a
long and deep canyon or “run,” I took a room for a week. The family of
this house rented rooms to several others, clerks who looked and proved
to be a genial sort, holding a kind of court on the front steps of an
evening.
I now turned to the morning papers, going first to the _Times_, which
had its offices in a handsome building, one of the two or three high
office buildings in the city. The city editor received me graciously but
could promise nothing. At the _Dispatch_, which was published in a
three-story building at Smithfield and Diamond streets, I found a man
who expressed much more interest. He was a slender, soft-spoken,
one-handed man. On very short acquaintance I found him to be shrewd and
canny, gracious always, exceedingly reticent and uncommunicative and an
excellent judge of news, and plainly holding his job not so much by
reason of what he put into his paper as by what he kept out of it. He
wanted to know where I had worked before I came to Pittsburgh, whether I
had been connected with any paper here, whether I had ever done feature
stuff. I described my experiences as nearly as I could, and finally he
said that there was nothing now but he was expecting a vacancy to occur
soon. If I could come around in the course of a week or ten days (I
drooped sadly)—well, then, in three or four days, he thought he might do
something for me. The salary would not be more than eighteen the week.
My spirits fell at that, but his manner was so agreeable and his hope
for me so keen that I felt greatly encouraged and told him I would wait
a few days anyhow. My friend in Toledo had promised me that he would
wire me at the first opening, and I was now expecting some word from
him. This I told to this city editor, and he said: “Well, you might wait
until you hear from him anyhow.” A thought of my possible lean purse did
not seem to occur to him, and I marveled at the casual manner in which
he assumed that I could wait.
Thereafter I roamed the city and its environs, and to my delight found
it to be one of the most curious and fascinating places I had ever seen.
From a stationery store I first secured a map and figured out the lay of
the town. At a glance I saw that the greater part of it stretched
eastward along the tongue of land that was between the Allegheny and the
Monongahela, and that this was Pittsburgh proper. Across the Allegheny,
on the north side, was the city of Allegheny, an individual municipality
but so completely connected with Pittsburgh as to be identical with it,
and connected with it by many bridges. Across the Monongahela, on the
south side, were various towns: Mt. Washington, Duquesne, Homestead. I
was interested especially in Homestead because of the long and bitter
contest between the steel-workers and the Carnegie Company, which for
six months and more in 1892 had occupied space on the front page of
every newspaper in America.
Having studied my map I explored, going first across the river into
Allegheny. Here I found a city built about the base of high granite
hills or between ridges in hollows called “gaps” or “runs” with a street
or car-line clambering and twisting directly over them. A charming park
and boulevard system had been laid out, with the city hall, a public
market and a Carnegie public library as a center. The place had large
dry-goods and business houses.
On another day I crossed to the south side and ascended by an inclined
plane, such as later I discovered to be one of the transportation
features of Pittsburgh, the hill called Mt. Washington, from the top of
which, walking along an avenue called Grand View Boulevard which skirted
the brow of the hill, I had the finest view of a city I have ever seen.
In later years I looked down upon New York from the heights of the
Palisades and the hills of Staten Island; on Rome from the Pincian
Gardens; on Florence from San Miniato; and on Pasadena and Los Angeles
from the slopes of Mt. Lowe; but never anywhere have I seen a scene
which impressed me more than this: the rugged beauty of the mountains,
which encircle the city, the three rivers that run as threads of bright
metal, dividing it into three parts, the several cities joined as one,
their clambering streets presenting a checkered pattern emphasized here
and there by the soot-darkened spires of churches and the walls of the
taller and newer and cleaner office buildings.
As in most American cities of any size, the skyscraper was just being
introduced and being welcomed as full proof of the growth and wealth and
force of the city. No city was complete without at least one: the more,
of course, the grander.
Pittsburgh had a better claim to the skyscraper as a commercial
necessity than any other American city that I know. The tongue of land
which lies between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, very likely not
more than two or three square miles in extent, is still the natural
heart of the commercial life for fifty, a hundred miles about. Here meet
the three large rivers, all navigable. Here, again, the natural runs and
gaps of the various hills about, as well as the levels which pursue the
banks of the streams and which are the natural vents or routes for
railroad lines, street-cars and streets, come to a common center.
Whether by bridges from Allegheny, the south bank of the Ohio or the
Monongahela, or along the shores of the Allegheny or Monongahela within
the city of Pittsburgh itself, all meet somewhere in this level tongue;
and here, of necessity, is the business center. So without the tall
building, I cannot see how one-tenth of the business which would and
should be normally transacted here would ever come about.
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