a community of people. Pittsburgh is usually defined in other terms.
First among American cities in the production of iron and steel, we
are told that it ranks fifth as a general manufacturing center. There
are forty-seven furnaces within forty miles of the heart of the city,
with an annual capacity of over seven million tons of pig iron,--more
than twenty-five per cent of the total production in the United States.
Statistics of the American iron trade for 1907 show that Allegheny
county produced a fourth of all Bessemer steel and a third of all open
hearth steel, a fifth of all rails rolled in the United States, a third
of all plates and sheets, and very nearly a half of all structural
shapes. Pittsburgh proper ranked fourth in foundry and machine shop
products, second in brick and tile, pottery and fire clay, and first
in electrical apparatus and supplies. In coal and coke, tin plate,
glass, cork, and sheet metal,--in products as varied as the fifty-seven
varieties of the pickles in which it excels,--its output is a national
asset. Pittsburgh stands tenth in postal receipts and fifth in bank
deposits. Its banking capital exceeds that of the banks of the North Sea
empires and its payroll that of whole groups of American states. Here is
a town, then, big with its works.
[Illustration: BLAST FURNACES AT NIGHT.]
Again, there is a temptation to define Pittsburgh in terms of the matrix
in which the community is set, and the impress of this matrix on the
soul of its people no less than on the senses of the visitor. Pipe lines
that carry oil and gas, waterways that float an acreage of coal barges,
four track rails worn bright with weighty ore cars, wires surcharged
with a ruthless voltage or delicately sensitive to speech and codes,
bind here a district of vast natural resources into one organic whole.
The approaching traveller has ample warning. Hillsides and valleys are
seamed with rows of coke ovens, gaunt tipples bend above mine mouths,
derricks and bull-wheels stand over fuel wells, and low lying mill
buildings, sided with corrugated iron, rear their clusters of stacks
like the pipes of huge swarthy Pans. Then comes the city with its
half-conquered smoke cloud, with its high, bare hills and its hunch of
imposing structures. The place to see Pittsburgh from is a much whittled
little stand on the high bluff of Mt. Washington, where votaries of
the national game assemble on a clear afternoon and spy upon a patch
of green in Allegheny City, hundreds of feet below them, and more than
a mile away across the Ohio River. Their business is with Honus Wagner
and the three-bagger he is going to knock out. But yours can be with the
great Y of the rivers, churned by stern-wheeled steamers and patched
here and there with black fleets of coal barges. Below you to the right
is the South Side; to the left across the rivers, is Allegheny City,
and between them is a little trowel of land piled high with office
buildings. This is the "Point," cut short as it is by the "Hump" and
by higher hills behind; and flanked by narrow river banks that grudge
a foothold to the sounding workshops and lead up and down to the mill
towns. You are looking at commercial Pittsburgh. From the Herron Hill
reservoir, mid-way between the forks of the Y, you get a panorama of the
other side of the community,--Shenley Park to the right of you, with
the Carnegie buildings and the ample residences of the East End, and
to the left, long swales of small, thickly built houses that make up
Lawrenceville and the adjoining home areas.
But it is at night that the red and black of the Pittsburgh flag marks
the town for its own. The lines of coke ovens seen from the car windows
have become huge scythes, saw-edged with fire. The iron-sheathed
mills are crated flame. Great fans of light and shadow wig-wag above
furnaces and converters. From Cliff street, the lamps of Allegheny lie
thick and clustered like a crushed sky, but from the bridges that span
the Monongahela between the mills,--where choleric trains shuttle on
either bank, and the rolls are at thumping war with the sliding, red
billets,--the water welds the sparks and the yellow tumult, and you
feel as if here were the forges of the sunrise, where beam and span and
glowing plate are fabricating into the framework of dawns that shall
"come up like thunder." Here,--if we doubted it before,--is a town that
works; and that works in a big way.
But the people, rather than the product or the setting, concern us. In
December, 1907, Pittsburgh and Allegheny were merged, and the Greater
City entered the class of Baltimore, St. Louis and Boston. This is
the half-million class. Last September, Pittsburgh celebrated its
one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, and a street pageant exhibited
both the industrial vigor of the community, and the variety of its
people. There was a company of Corn Planter Indians, descendants of
the aboriginal Pittsburghers; there were floats representing the early
settlers; there were Scotchmen with kilts and bagpipes; nor were they
all. A wagon load of Italians bore a transparency,--"Romans dig your
sewers," and Polish, Slovak and other racial organizations marched in
the costumes of their native countries. For the life of the city has
become intricate and rich in the picturesque. That old man you passed on
the street was a Morgan raider, and behind him trudged a common soldier
of the Japanese War. Here is an American whose Pittsburgh is the marble
corridors of an office building, and the night desks of the men in shirt
sleeves and green eye shades; and here, one whose Pittsburgh reaches
back to a stately old parlor with gilt-framed mirrors and spindling
Chippendale. Here is "Belle," who exchanges her winter in the workhouse
for a summer in a jon-boat, which she reaches by a plank. Here is the
_gazda_ who ruined himself that his boarders might not starve. And here,
the inventor who works with many men in a great laboratory and scraps a
thousand dollars' worth of experimentation at the turn of a hand. Here
is a gallery of miners pounding their grimy fists at a speech by Haywood
in the old town hall; and here a bunch of half-sobered Slavs in the
Sunday morning police court.
You do not know the Pittsburgh District until you have heard the
Italians twanging their mandolins round a construction campfire, and
seen the mad whirling of a Slovak dance in a mill town lodge hall; until
you have watched the mill hands burst out from the gates at closing
time; or thrown confetti on Fifth avenue on a Halloween. Within a few
blocks of the skyscrapers of the Point, I have seen a company of Syrians
weaving almost unceasingly for four days a desert dance that celebrated
the return of one of them to Jerusalem. (An Irishman thought it a wake.)
A possum swings by the tail at Christmastide in front of that Negro
store in Wylie avenue; long bearded Old Believers play bottle pool in
that Second avenue barroom; a Yiddish father and five children lie sick
on the floor of this tenement; this old Bohemian woman cleaned molds as
a girl in the iron works of Prague; that itinerant cobbler made shoes
last winter for the German children of the South Side, who were too poor
to pay for them, and stuffed the soles with thick cardboard when he was
too poor to buy leather. Here is a Scotch Calvinist, and there a Slavic
free thinker; here a peasant, and there a man who works from a blue
print; engineers, drag outs, and furnace-men from the mill district;
yeggs and floppers and '69ers from the lower reaches of the city;
strippers and core makers and coffin buffers. There a Russian exile
with a price on his head, and here a Shaker of old Pennsylvania stock!
You have heard of Shakespeare's London, of the port of Lisbon in the
days of the Spanish Main, of the mixtures of caste and race and faith
on the trade routes of the East. They are of the ilk of Pittsburgh. How
to get orderly plans of social betterment out of the study of such a
community is at first sight a staggering question. But the clue to its
answer is that same fact that stood out when we looked at Pittsburgh as
a city of tonnage and incandescence. These people are here to work. This
fact once grasped in its bearings and we get a foothold for estimating
Pittsburgh. The wage earners become a fairly well-defined belt in the
population. What the issues of life and labor mean to them will help
us in understanding the trend of conditions in industrial communities
generally.
First, you have the mere fact of aggregation. Pittsburgh has as many
people as the whole state of Pennsylvania had at the opening of the last
century; Allegheny county as many as at that time the commonwealths of
Massachusetts and New York combined. The Greater City has twice as many
as all the future cities of the United States had in 1800; as many as
Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, combined, in 1850.
Here, then, is a community worthy of as serious statesmanship as that
which has served whole commonwealths at critical periods in our national
advance. Now in all history, cities have never reproduced themselves.
They draw on the country districts to replace the stock that they burn
out. But when one-third of the total population comes to live in cities,
they can no longer do this. It becomes vitally important that city
people live well, else the race lapses. At risk, then, of going over old
ground, let us look at some of the dynamic influences that affect the
life of this particular community.
No American city presents in a more clear-cut way than Pittsburgh the
abrupt change from British and Teutonic immigration. Sociologists
tell us that in the mid-eastern valleys of Europe successive waves of
broad-headed, long-headed, dark and fair peoples gathered force and
swept westward to become Kelt and Saxon and Swiss and Scandinavian and
Teuton. They were the bulwark which obstructed the march of Hun and Goth
and Turk and Tartar, sweeping in from the East. It is from Slavs and
mixed people of this old midland, with racial and religious loves and
hates seared deep, that the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to
work out civilization under tense conditions. A vineyard blighted, a
pogrom, torture, persecution, crime, poverty, dislodge them, and they
come.
Further, the sociologists tell us that by mixed peoples the greatest
advances have been made. It was in Amsterdam, Venice, London, and the
Hanse towns, places of mart which brought together the blood and
cultures of distant races,--it was here that democracy gathered head and
the arts flourished. But in Pittsburgh are the elements of a mixture
yet more marvelous. A common fund of Slavic words, almost a Pittsburgh
dialect, is finding currency. The Pole still speaks Polish, but he makes
an adaptation of his words, and the Slovak understands. The Syrian and
Arabian peddlers know these words and use them in selling their wares in
the courts and settlements,--a contrast to the great gulfs that still
separate the Slav and the English-speaking.
Furthermore, the city is the frontier of to-day. We have appropriated
and parcelled out most of our free land. The edge of settlement is
no longer open as a safety valve for foot-loose rebels against the
fixity of things. They come to the cities. They swarm in new hives. To
Pittsburgh especially where men deal with devil-may-care risks and great
stakes, come the adventurous and the unreckoning. A smack of the mining
camp is in the air about the mill yards.
The life to which these people come is different from that known of any
previous generations. We have seen how in Pittsburgh traction lines,
tunnels, inclines, telephone wires, weave a city of a size and on a
site which would have been impossible in the old days. The householder
is far removed from the sources of his food supply. He lives two or
three families deep and many to the acre. The very aggregation of
people breeds disease, a complication which in turn may yet be balanced
by those revolutions in medical science which have brought glad, new
optimism to sanitarian and physician.
[Illustration: SOURCES OF IMMIGRANT LABOR FORCE, CARNEGIE STEEL CO.
Each dot a man.
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: 10421
INCLUDING: SLOVAKS 6477
POLES 611
BOHEMIANS 45
GERMANS 135
CROATIANS 1239
HUNGARIANS 1323
ROUMANIANS 410
RUSSIA: 2577
INCLUDING: POLES 1644
LITHUANIANS 476
BRITISH ISLES: 2010
INCLUDING: ENGLAND 1456
IRELAND 257
SCOTLAND 137
WALES 100
SWEDEN: 287
BULGARIA 58
FRANCE 52
TURKEY IN EUROPE 26
ROUMANIA 24]
The work to which these people come is not the work of their fathers.
The discipline of the mill is not the discipline of the field. Human
nature is put to new and exacting tests. It works unremittingly as it
has not worked before,--eight, ten, twelve hours a day, seven days in
the week, with the chance of twenty-four hours once in the fortnight.
It works by artificial light and at night. It works in great plants and
creates and puts together in fierce new ways. Of that growing share
of the population of Pittsburgh which is continental born, a large
proportion is from the country and small villages. This is no less
true of the influx of southern Negroes,--a north-bound movement here
and in other cities, the final outcome of which we do not know. The
newcomers, it is true, may be groomed in passage. A railroad may open up
a Hungarian back country and the peasant get his first training there;
a Ruthenian may work on the plantations and sugar beet factories of
Bessarabia before coming on; a southern Negro may hire out in the mills
of Alabama before starting north; or a Slovak may work as a slate picker
or miner's helper in the anthracite fields on his way westward. The
drift through it all none the less is from field to mill.
New stock, then, a mixed people, venturesome, country-bred,--so much
the sociologist has pointed out to us; the economist has other things
to tell. He sees about him the potent aftermath of those great changes
from household and domestic forms of production to the factory system.
As each new peasantry leaves the soil, the history of the industrial
revolution is repeated, but processes are accelerated and the experience
of a generation is taken at a jump. With this has occurred a great
lateral stratification of industry. There is no longer the feudal
loyalty to a particular concern, but to the men of a particular trade.
Unions have sprung up, and have grown or broken. The thing above all
others which has tended in Pittsburgh to their undoing in certain great
trades has been the subdivision of labor. The flea on the hair of the
tail of the dog of the wild man of Borneo just come to town, is an
entity large and complete compared with the processes which occupy many
men in the electrical works and car shops. This change has multiplied
product, and set unskilled labor to busy itself at a thousand stints;
but it has fore-shortened trade knowledge and ousted much craftsmanship.
Along with it has come another physical change. The skilled men of the
old time hammers and anvils work with electric cranes and at continuous
processes that reach from the heat of great ovens and the jaws of
soaking pits to the piled and finished product. An intricate dovetailing
of flagmen, brakemen, engineers and train despatchers makes up a train
to carry huge dynamos and steel structural shapes across the continent.
This fact has a new and vital social significance. Its essence is team
play. Its reactions upon the psychology of associated effort have yet to
be explored. Once again, new and unheard of crafts are ushered in, to
engage their quota of the time and strength of the working force, and to
put it to new tests of adaptability. Take the implications of the steel
industry itself, in the building trades. The old time carpenter and
builder gives way to the house-smith and the structural steel worker.
[Illustration: INDUSTRIAL TOWNS OF ALLEGHENY CO. PA.
PERCENTAGE OF NATIVE & FOREIGN BORN WHITES IN CITIES &
BOROUGHS HAVING 2500 INHABITANTS OR MORE
1900]
In Pittsburgh, too, we have a stupendous example of the influence upon
the wage earners' city of a mighty fiscal change in industry, combining
in one corporation all processes from the ore to the completed bridge.
Work is organized nationally. The steel center like the mill town is
not a thing by itself. It is a step in a bigger process managed from
without and owned by a multitude of nonresident stockholders. Pittsburgh
must build up an active, native citizenship or be merely an industrial
department. The community and the workshop are at issue.
Finally,--in our roster of dominating influences,--within the last
twenty-five years, has come the invasion of women into industry. This is
not a simple thing, nor a little one. It can directly affect half the
population. Pittsburgh is not primarily a woman's town, yet 22,000 women
engage in the trades, and each year they invade a new department. These
women workers are affected by all the forces noted and in turn affect
and complicate those forces.
These are some of the dominant influences that affect wage-earners in
cities assembled. One element runs through their complications and
brings us clear-seeing and hope. It is the element of change and flow.
In the Royal Museum at Munich are the miniatures of a group of medieval
towns carved out of wood. The spires of the churches, the walls and
gates of the city, markets, houses, outbuildings and gardens are
reproduced with a fidelity that has stood these centuries. They embody
the old idea of a town, of the fixity of things. A man was his father's
son. He worked as his father worked. He was burgher, or freeman, or
serf as his father was burgher, or freeman, or serf. His looms and his
spinning wheels and vats were as his fathers had contrived them. He
lived in the house of his father as his father had lived and it served
him well. Pittsburgh is the antithesis of such a town. It is all motion.
The modern industrial city is a flow, not a tank. The important thing
is not the capacity of a town, but the volume and currents of its life
and, by gauging these, we can gauge the community. We must gauge at the
intake,--the children, the immigrant, the countrymen who come in; gauge
at the outlets; and gauge at the stages in the course of the working
life. If there be unnecessary death, if strong field hands are crippled
or diseased through their manner of living or working, if the twelve
hour man sees everything gray before his eyes in the morning, if women
work in new ways that cost their strength or the strength of their
young, if school children are drafted off as laborers before they are
fit; if boys grow into manhood without training for the trades of this
generation,--then we have a problem in social hydraulics to deal with.
We must put old social institutions and usages to the test of these
changing tides. Herein lies the essence of constructive philanthropy.
In this light, tenement house legislation is no more than an adaptation
of domestic necessities and customs to the difficulties of living three
stories deep, and factory acts no more than an effort to work out the
law of skull crackers, freight yards, and electrically driven mines. We
have to fashion a city not alone for the hereditary householder, but for
the mobile and transient and half-assimilated, for workers with multiple
tools and above all for people on an upward trend.
Faced with its great task of production, Pittsburgh has not set itself
to the thrift of self-knowledge. When half a thousand people were dying
each year from typhoid fever, the movement to clear the water supply
was blocked and exploited at every turn. Half a thousand workmen are
now killed each year in the industries of Allegheny county, and yet the
public has not taken the trouble to sift the accidents through and see
which can be prevented. Nobody knows how many men are seriously injured
every year; nobody knows how many men and women are beset with trade
diseases. Nobody knows how much the community is paying for such wastes
as these. Nobody knows how far the seeping off of human integers into
hospitals, and jails, insane asylums, brothels, and orphanages, could be
checked; the guesses of the town's best men are that much is needless.
Pittsburgh is a town which does not know the number of its children of
school age, nor, the physical status of the children of its classes; it
is a town which, for five years, did not so much as demand a report from
its health department. In such an arraignment, we must bear in mind that
there are notable exceptions in one phase of social concern or another
to this lack in Pittsburgh's self-knowledge, and that Pittsburgh is not
merely a scapegoat city. It is the capital of a district representative
of untrammeled industrial development, but of a district which, for
richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, for vigor, waste and
optimism, is rampantly American.
The Pittsburgh Survey has been carried out with such a working
conception of the field it had before it. We have brought to one city
people of special experience in others, to gauge its needs. We have
measured its institutions against standards worked out in this city or
in that, or in other local enterprises; and we have estimated civic
and industrial conditions by their effect on groups of individual
families. In the present issue we put forward the composite situation
as reflected in the lives of two groups--the immigrant and the Negro.
Later issues will go into the social bearings of courts and schools,
hospitals, houses and factories. But such individual problems have no
reality unless seen in their human relations and for this reason, this
issue begins with an interpretation of the genesis of the community by
a native Pittsburgher, who has become one of the civic leaders of New
England. We have an estimate of new immigration by a Welshman from the
Anthracite region, who is representative of the old, and an estimate of
his fellows by one of the Slavs. The outlook of the steel mill worker is
appraised by a man whose eyes have known the broad sweep of prairies of
the American Northwest. A description of the working women whose hours
and wages and conditions of employment will next concern us, and of the
families into whose lives come the tragedies of industrial accidents,
are included. And finally, the issues of life in a representative
mill town are put forth, standing out more isolated and clear cut for
the purposes of analysis than it is possible to find them in the more
intricate operations of the Greater City.
* * * * *
One of my earliest recollections of a canvas covered geography is the
prime fact which is Pittsburgh,--that here the Allegheny and Monongahela
rivers unite to form the Ohio. Huge economic foundations buttress this
fact (oil and gas and clay and iron and coal). History in the making
has rolled it into new shapes and a changing significance. The junction
is the great left fist of the Father of Waters. The three rivers give
the town common cause and intercourse with the Atlantic coast ranges to
the east, and the mid-continental bottom lands, north and south, to the
west. Their waters carry the ores and fill the boilers and douse the
hissing billets of the steel makers. They are not easy overlords, this
triumvirate of rivers. They carry fever which scotches one town and
the next. They rise a bit too far and the fires are out, the streets
flooded. But grudgingly and inevitably, they yield mastery. They are
dammed and sluiced and boiled and filtered to suit the demands of
navigation and power and temperature and thirst.
The mastery they yield is to another current--the eddying peoples which
make up the community and all its works--a current more powerful and
mysterious than the bulk of brown waters. The War Department engineers
can tell you the exact number of cubic feet which slide past either
side of the Point every minute. The sanitarians can give you the
number of bacteria, friendly or plague-besetting, which infect any
cubic centimeter. The weather man in a high building can forecast the
exact stage which the water will register hours hence. But what of the
people?--they have largely taken themselves for granted. They have
rarely taken the time to test their own needs or consciously gauge
the destination of the currents that possess them. They are here--the
strong, the weak, the cowed, the ambitious, the well equipped and the
pitiful. They jostle and work and breed. For the most part they run a
splendid course. But they do not keep tally, and their ignorance means
sorrow and death and misunderstanding.
* * * * *
To give a little help to those who are trying to understand, and measure
these currents, and deal with them as intelligently as the locks and
channels of the rivers are dealt with, has been the purpose of the
Pittsburgh Survey. Such chartings as we have attempted have been of
these living waters.
[Illustration: COKE OVENS AT NIGHT]
PITTSBURGH
AN INTERPRETATION OF ITS GROWTH
ROBERT A. WOODS
HEAD OF SOUTH END HOUSE, BOSTON