dingy capital of a "black country," during all but the latest period
of its growth it has attracted few visitors save those whose business
motive brought them. The nucleus of its population is different from
that of any other of our large centers. Its situation at the gateway of
the Middle West was sure to bring it into significance as the center
of the country's population and activity shifted, but the Allegheny
mountains were for a long time a barrier against the easy movement of
population in this direction. It is the varied mineral resources of
western Pennsylvania, and the pertinacity of the chief element among its
inhabitants in developing them, which has created a new metropolitan
district, having virtually a population of a million, to be added to the
seven or eight urban centers which now dominate different sections of
the United States.
Beginning as a little hamlet about the fortifications used first by
the French, then by the English, at the junction where the Allegheny
and Monongahela rivers form the Ohio, the settlement developed from a
trading post to a market town. It would have been limited to the career
of such a place much longer if, in spite of the excellent soil of the
surrounding region, the farmers had not found it difficult to compete in
the matter of the staple crops with the slave-tilled plantations of the
South. It was as a sort of forced alternative that small iron-working
plants began to spring up along the rivers. The ore was brought down
from the Alleghenies. Bituminous coal,--the distinguishing asset of the
coming industrial center,--had already been discovered by the French in
the river valleys.
The "town beyond the mountains" again found itself embarrassed in
marketing its commodities,--not by competition this time, so far as
America was concerned, but by the heights over which its ponderous new
output must be carried. This obstacle was overcome by a system of canals
with inclined cable portage lines up the mountain slopes. Meanwhile the
great trade with the West for the supply of its incipient civilization
was being established through the river traffic as well as by newly dug
canals.
Some of the first citizens of the town after the revolutionary days
were naturally men who had been prominently engaged in the war. Two of
them were Irishmen who had leaped to the opportunity to fight England.
At the close of hostilities they had foresight to discern that large
developments were to come at the juncture of the rivers. The descendants
of these men,--some of whom by a curious irony are English and have
never seen this country,--are at the present moment the greatest holders
of Pittsburgh real estate. The great bulk of the early immigrants
into the town were Scotch-Irish, who began to come in large numbers
early in the nineteenth century, and almost two generations before the
inrush of the southern Irish. Until recent great developments, when
the skyscrapers began to appear, the older part of the city in its
aspect was distinctly suggestive of British towns of the same size
and character. Two of its local sections were very naturally called
Birmingham and Manchester, names which have almost passed out of use
among the American born generations. The manners and customs of the
people showed about equally the traces of pioneer days in the Ohio
valley and the traditions of the old country. Unlike the large cities
that have grown up along the Great Lakes, Pittsburgh owes nothing to
successive waves of migration from New England. It is only in very
recent years, with the varied developments of technical and educational
interests, that there have been enough New Englanders living in the
city to develop any of the organized front which they maintain in all
other northern cities. It is natural therefore that, though Pittsburgh
was strongly loyal for the union during the Civil War, the spirit of the
city should in many respects suggest the South rather than the North.
Around the nucleus of Scotch-Irish, gathered, as time went on, large
numbers of southern Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Germans and German Jews.
But these different types are still to a noticeable degree always
considered as being marked off by themselves as against the dominant
Scotch-Irish. It is only as individuals from among them gain a position
of influence by special achievement that they are considered a part of
the bone and sinew of the city. The Scotch-Irish with their contrasted
traits of sturdiness and ardor, have two great separate interests in
life,--industry and religion. The other nationalities have either had
the same traits in good measure, or by process of selection individuals
have caught the spirit and have come to the front while the rest have
fallen to the rear. Yet those who fell back have in most cases found a
reasonable opportunity in the great material progress of the town.
Pittsburgh is all the more characteristically American for having
been built up from first to last by immigrant stock, not merely by
unsettled natives. It remains to this day a sort of natural selection
of enterprising spirits from out of every European nation and tribe,
Americanized not by any tradition or other educational process than that
of having the typical American experiences in what still remains the
heart of the country.
Pittsburgh has never been a place to emigrate from. It has held its own,
and constantly invites each nationality to bring more of its kind. The
only deserters were those who found it in them to care for a reasonable
measure of cultivated life, difficult to secure in a town where there
was not a library worthy of the name until 1895 and where a whole winter
would sometimes pass without a single lecture on a significant theme
intelligently treated. It was natural that in the formative period there
were some who sought more congenial associations in the seacoast cities.
In religion until comparatively recent days it could be said that
there was not a more Calvinistic atmosphere about Edinburgh, Glasgow
or Belfast. The early Pittsburghers had almost as strong a tradition
of what it means to fight for their faith as the Puritans themselves,
and this sense has not had time yet altogether to fade. The orthodox
spirit of the town has all along palpably affected the religion of
the other racial types. So it is hardly surprising to find that
certain regulations of the Catholic Church seem to be more insistently
promulgated and more rigorously observed in Pittsburgh than in other
places.
There is not a city in the country, and probably not in the world, where
strict Sabbath and liquor legislation is more strenuously put into
effect. Unusually genial people to those who do well, they are summary
and even relentless with those who would lower the moral decorum of the
city. But as is very likely to happen where there is a rigid ethical
creed, there is here a very anomalous double standard. The amount
of Sunday work in the steel mills is appalling. There is a certain
sanctity in the operations of business which enables it in specific
ways to nullify the precepts of religion, as when the over-strain of
seven days' work a week is measured in the gradual destruction of the
religious sense in great sections of the population. Local option
sentiment is easily bewildered by political cross-currents. Though the
Brooks law maintains a severe standard as to the conduct of the saloon
business, applied by the county judges to whom a complaint is _prima
facie_ adverse evidence; yet Pennsylvania remains, in the midst of an
unexampled national temperance movement, among the small and ignoble
company of states marked black on the reformers' map.
Few cities have had a greater degree of political machine control, and
the prime sources of this corruption have been nowhere else than among
the Scotch-Irish. Ever since the days of Simon Cameron a clan-like
political organization has dominated the state of Pennsylvania; and
the city of Pittsburgh has been only a less important headquarters
for its operations than Philadelphia. The condition of politics in
Pennsylvania has led many to think that the people of the state
were characterized by a generally lax moral sense. On the contrary,
and in Pittsburgh particularly, this situation is because of a too
intense and therefore too restricted ethical motive. The passage and
enforcement of certain types of legislation having an immediate and
obvious ethical bearing satisfies this restricted ethical demand, and
sidetracks tendencies which might check the indirect causes of great
underlying demoralization. A long list of charities each year receives
substantial appropriations from the Legislature. The 20,000 earnest and
influential people in Pennsylvania who are members of managing boards
of philanthropic institutions receiving state subsidies, are by the
same token so much less inclined and less able to be alert and watchful
against such matters as the theft of millions from the state treasury
and from banks which carry state accounts.
The difficulty with Pennsylvania, and emphatically with Pittsburgh,
is not degeneracy; it is simply public moral adolescence, and the
confusion that inevitably accompanies it. The materialism of Pittsburgh
is that of the overwrought, not of the over-indulgent. No one can study
the life of the city without feeling a mighty under-current of moral
capacity not yet in any sufficient degree brought to the surface. Its
religion cultivates definite restraints and reassurances, rather than
aspiration and moral enterprise. This is, however, always the case when
a community's moral powers are absorbed in the subduing of nature and
the achieving of a great material destiny. The spirit of adventure in
Pittsburgh has been thus far economic. The moral movement of this people
in any case is slow: but it is unyielding always; and once fully aroused
knows how to be irresistible.
The situation can hardly seem abnormal when one realizes the unsurpassed
material resources of the Pittsburgh district and the pressure which has
been laid upon a single community by the whole world for the products
out of which the foundations of world enlightenment are laid. It is
of particular importance in the case of Pittsburgh, that the social
student should take the full measure of the function of the city as the
almost limitless and tireless creator of the solid means of civilized
existence, for this and other nations. The simple fact that it is the
first city in the country in the tonnage of its product, and the second
city of the country in banking capital, largely on account of its great
wage payments, will suggest both the service which it renders and the
power which it has achieved. It is significant that in this district the
two greatest individual fortunes in history have been amassed and the
two most gigantic concentrations of economic power built up.
Without in the least abating the test of moral and legal standards upon
the policy of industrial leadership in the great activities of western
Pennsylvania, it can hardly be doubted that later generations will
include the leaders in such enterprise among the master builders of
modern civilization. The place of Pittsburgh in the American system of
life is that of the city which in an altogether unparalleled way is made
up of producers, of those whose purposes are focused in bringing to pass
the creation of durable and indispensable utilities. Contrasted with
Pittsburgh, every other city in the country is rather a market-place,
made more refined but in some sense less noble by the dominance of
traders and consumers.
It is one of the curious anomalies of American legislation that it
should have so zealously guarded against foreign competition in price
standards, while withholding all protection against competitors bringing
with them a low wage standard. Pittsburgh, in its larger estate, may be
said to be a monument to this anomaly. Severe restrictive protection
against foreign steel, and unlimited immigration, have enabled
Pittsburgh, well-enough otherwise provided, to throw the reins upon the
neck of her prosperity. And it must be borne in mind that the protective
system, for years tacitly acknowledged by Pittsburgh manufacturers to
be unnecessary, is yet clung to as an exclusive and powerful tribal
fetich, from whose point of view every question as to the welfare of the
nation must first be considered. The fresh constructive moral aspects of
politics and patriotism impress Pittsburgh probably less easily than any
other community in the country.
So great and continuous has been the tide of immigration, that the
insistence of the new immigrants for employment on any terms has made
it comparatively easy for industrial captains to control industrial
administration, to the exclusion of all substantial efforts on the part
of the workmen to organize in their own behalf. Beginning with the
British operatives and coming down through the successive types to the
present southeast Europeans, each type up to the present has gradually
raised its demands, made some headway, organized to reach still higher
ground, lost by attack from both front and rear, and disappeared up
and down the social scale in the general community. This very costly
process has been thought necessary to industrial prosperity. There is,
of course, no doubt that the holding down of the wage standard, like
the artificial maintenance of the price standard, has conduced largely
to the making of some of the great personal fortunes; but it is certain
that the future historian will find this checking of the normal and
typically American aspirations of successive waves of newcomers, to
have been distinctly detrimental to the economic, quite as well as to
the social and political well-being of the Pittsburgh community. This
unthrift in the matter of the prime essential productive force and
economic value is again partly accounted for by the very pressure of
opportunity afforded by unlimited resources and the insatiable demand
of the world market. There has not even been sufficient time for
consideration of many economies in process and administration whose
value to manufactures would be unquestioned.
It is to the point here to remember that the two great fortunes just
mentioned began to be great as individual fortunes through special
privileges gained in railroad rates. The topographical convergence of
the Great Lake region on the one side and the Ohio river valley on the
other to a territory less than a hundred miles wide, brought all the
chief means of transportation between the West and the Atlantic seaboard
through this particular territory. These exceptional facilities for
transportation gave a culminating stimulus to industrial progress.
The intense localization of resources and transportation facilities led
almost inevitably to the phenomenal concentration of industrial capital,
followed by highly centralized industrial administration. This process
has in a sense been its own undoing, so far as Pittsburgh is concerned,
because the financial and even the administrative center of the great
combinations have inevitably gravitated to New York, and the old type of
self-reliant leader of industry is fast disappearing. Yet the lesson of
the large spirit of associated production is constantly being inwrought
into the consciousness of the community. A later article in this series
will show that the statesmanlike initiative, which until recent days had
been inevitably swung into the strategy of business, is beginning to
express itself in many promising forms of public spirited activity.
Physical environment, no less than racial stock and economic factors,
condition the development of public sentiment in a community. The
growth of Pittsburgh as a center of population under the pressure of
business opportunity would have been very greatly hampered if electric
transit had not prepared the way. The ground plan runs up and down
almost impossible foldings of hill and valley. The electric cars make
possible the utilizing of all the slopes and hilltops for homes. This
has weakened the inevitable centripetal force of urban growth, and led
to the building up of suburbs very accessible to the central business
section, and comparing for attractiveness and comfort with those of any
other city in the country. Such a transfer of well-to-do population has
made possible other important shiftings both of poorer population and
of business, by which the business center has gained in area and in the
character and adaptability of its structures.
Pittsburgh has grown into an industrial metropolis with outlying
manufacturing towns reaching along the rivers, and following the course
of all the railroads for a distance of thirty or forty miles. The time
is soon coming when all the large industries will be eliminated from
the city, and Pittsburgh proper will become simply the commercial and
cultural headquarters of its district.
Meanwhile all these methods of expansion and relief have not been
sufficient to give adequate room in the downtown section either for
industry, trade or housing. This area, which is closely hemmed in by
the rivers and the hills, now includes the great central commercial
activities, the railroad terminals, several large industrial plants
and numerous smaller ones, together with the homes of the unskilled
population which finds employment within it.
The congestion within these tight limits brings out, in a peculiarly
acute way, the breakdown of many branches of the social administration
of the city, from the point of view of the welfare of its population
as a whole. Here not only the unfitness of hundreds of houses under
existing conditions for human habitation, but the actual and serious
shortage of roofs under which to shelter the lower grades of the
industrial population, is most strikingly seen. Here typhoid fever,
for which Pittsburgh has these many years held a tragic pre-eminence,
is at its highest rate. Here the actual congestion of machinery within
industrial plants which cannot get land to expand upon, is particularly
conducive to the diseases, and to accidents which are associated with
the different branches of industry.
In this situation appears another of the strange contrasts of Pittsburgh
life. The problem of the downtown district is further complicated by the
fact that great sections of it are held under a landlord system like
that of the old world. Thirty-three million dollars' worth of real
estate located almost wholly in the downtown district is held by five
estates, some of the holders living abroad permanently, others traveling
much of the time. Commercial enterprise is handicapped by the difficulty
of securing an independent title to real estate. Much of the most
objectionable tenement house property is held by two of these estates.
Absentee landlordism thus oddly parallels absentee capitalism. To the
fact that the industrial authorities are remote and, by controlling many
plants, can take the fiscal rather than the close range administrative
view of industry, must be largely traced that stern reprobation of any
equity on the part of the workman in his work, which has on occasion
made, and will again make Pittsburgh the country's chief point of social
unrest and danger.
The anti-trade-union policy tends strongly to fix and standardize the
immigrant rate of wages, and has given strong cumulative force to the
personal profit-reapings of the past two decades. Recognizing clearly
the serious limitations of trade unionism as part of the organization
of a tumultuous industry like that of Pittsburgh, it must still be said
that there is substantial evidence to believe that the community cheats
itself when it keeps up a glutted labor market and a lower than standard
wage. However this may be, the Pittsburgh employers' point of view, more
than that of any other city of the country, is like that of England in
the early days of the factory system,--holding employes guilty of a sort
of impiety, and acting with sudden and sure execution, if they undertake
to enforce their claims in such way as to embarrass the momentum of
great business administration. A sound standard of living for the
workman and his right by organized competition to win it, Pittsburgh
must eventually recognize as fundamental to the country's economic and
political welfare. Should she persist in excluding trade unionism,
European experience shows that her hordes of immigrants will quickly
learn to carry their alien types of unrest to the ballot box.
The backwardness of Pittsburgh in the development of culture and public
spirit, must be traced in part to the negative attitude of a serious
minded people toward the amenities of life, and their distrust of the
process of government. There has been no sufficient tradition in the
city of more balanced and varied human interests. The city's population,
instead of finding an increasing social unity, has been increasingly
sectionalized by the overwhelming influx of every type of immigrant.
There has not been leisure for the consideration and discussion of
public questions. The very ground plan of the city, which scatters
all of its responsible citizens through the suburbs at night, tends
to deprive the city of their disinterested co-operation out of office
hours toward raising its tone and standards. But other American cities
have shown how, when many of their people began to be released from the
treadmill of the purely industrial stage of their growth, it is possible
to take advantage of the experience of older communities and move by
long strides toward a humanized type of urban life.
From the foremost absentee capitalist and the foremost absentee landlord
have come as gifts the two epoch-making improvements toward the finer
public life of the city. Schenley Park and the Carnegie institutions
located at its entrance form a civic center whose possibilities of
civic influence are very great. It may be noted that the coming in of
these improvements was coincident with the work of a city engineer
who, indifferent to the political principles under which the city was
administered, and acting as a kind of despot within his domain, carried
through many great improvements in the layout of the new districts of
the city, and with the first move in the direction of a great hospital,
which is one day to be built with money left for the purpose by the man
who for many years was the political master of the city.
The effect upon the city of benefits wrought out in this undemocratic
fashion will of course be subject to heavy abatements; but it would
be a strange doctrinaire who could not see that these specific steps
represent most substantial net gains in the life of the community.
There is indeed a distinct undertone of feeling that such benefactions
represent simply a return to the city of what the city itself has
produced. One can find comparatively few indications that the park, the
library and the rest have placed the city under the depressing bonds of
patronage. The existence and service of these institutions, in any case,
give a new and strong focus to the rising city sense, and the evidence
goes to show that, rather than weakening the spirit of collective
initiative on the part of the citizens themselves, they have conduced to
give shape and force to it.