Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  The bus dropped Sadlowski in front of a Polish bakery on 106th Street, a block from his house. But before he stepped off, he had one more message for the ironworkers.

  “Get that associate’s degree,” he told them. “There’s a lot better things in life than being a carpenter or a millwright. There’s a lot worse things, too. You are the salt of the earth. The smartest people I ever met were guys who ran cranes in the mill.”

  And then Sadlowski was stamping down the sidewalk, his broad shoulders clenched inside his bulging windbreaker. The morning had been a class in class. Labor unions were a mass movement in the 1940s and 1950s, when a third of American workers carried a card. That was the heyday of the middle class, an interregnum from the dominance of Ivy Leaguers at either end of the twentieth century. Now labor unions are a niche: only 13 percent belong. This is an individualistic era. The communal “we” of Sadlowski’s day sounds like socialism to the conservative’s ear and serfdom to the liberal’s. White South Siders used to define themselves by their loyalty to four institutions: the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, the Chicago White Sox, and the University of Notre Dame. But people who grew up after World War II are less likely to look for their identities in a church, or a party, or a baseball team, or a college. The white-collar ethic of individual achievement has, generation by generation, replaced the blue-collar ethic of banding together. But the philosophy behind labor unions is timeless: the boss ain’t your friend.

  7.

  Homestead

  No place in America has more history per square mile than Homestead, Pennsylvania. That’s an easy statement to make, because the entire borough of Homestead, from the S-shaped bank of the Monongahela to the cemetery atop what was once known as Carnegie Hill, is only six-tenths of a mile in area, less than half the size of New York’s Central Park. The hill rises three hundred feet in roughly ten times that distance, its incline stair-stepped with row houses and bristling with steeples. Nearly as vertical as Manhattan, Homestead’s upwelling makes it twice as large as it appears on a flattened map, which may be why its story is twice as eventful as any other small town’s.

  The Homestead Works, built on the flats in 1881, was not Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill. That was the Edgar Thomson Works, across the river and upstream in Braddock. But Homestead was Carnegie’s largest mill, and since Carnegie was the world’s greatest steelmaker, he built it into the world’s most productive steel operation. Homestead perfected open-hearth steelmaking, with a Bessemer furnace copied all over the world. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Pacific Fleet, and the Atlas rockets were all built with Homestead steel, the raw material of the American Century.

  As Homestead was first in steel, it was also the first scene of the violence that results when a mill owner and his workers disagree on a fair division of the wealth that results from forging the most useful product ever invented. The Homestead Strike of 1892 began with a shootout. After members of the Amalgamated Association stopped working to protest a wage cut, a company of Pinkerton guards attempted to occupy the mill via amphibious landing. The Pinkertons, members of a detective agency founded by Allan Pinkerton, who had made his name by foiling an assassination plot against President-elect Lincoln, were the preferred mercenaries of every nineteenth-century industrialist. Wherever working men rose up to assert their rights—at Homestead, at Pullman in Chicago—Pinkertons were there to beat them down. In the wee hours of July 6, as their barge wallowed across the Monongahela, it was fired on by unionists crouched behind barricades of scrap iron. The Pinkertons fired back, so the workers procured a cannon, filled its muzzle with steel scrap, and bombarded the invading vessel. The barrage killed three Pinkertons. Their bodies were carried back across the river to Pittsburgh. The Pinkertons killed six strikers, who were buried in the cemetery atop the hill.

  Carnegie broke the strike by bringing in 1,500 scabs, who entered his mill under the protection of the Pennsylvania militia. By Thanksgiving, the union was licked: the workers Carnegie was willing to rehire slunk back into the mill to continue laboring twelve hours a day, seven days a week, at wages he dictated. The strike was ruinous both to the labor movement and to Carnegie’s reputation. While the workers were still picketing, anarchist Alexander Berkman barged into the office of Henry Clay Frick, the business partner who looked after Carnegie’s interests while the great man was at his Scottish castle. The anarchist shot Frick twice in the neck, but somehow failed to kill the business magnate. Berkman—the lover of Emma Goldman, his co-conspirator in the shooting—was a freelance assassin who had nothing to do with the Amalgamated Association. Nonetheless, his attempt on Frick’s life made the strikers look like allies of treason, mob rule, and bearded immigrants smuggling the virus of socialism into middle America.

  On the other side of the pay scale, working-class outrage over the Homestead Strike helped return Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House that November. Carnegie was reviled as a coward for hiding out in Scotland while Pinkertons gunned down steelworkers in his name. The Homestead Strike, he would write in his autobiography, “wounded me so deeply. No pangs remain of any wound received in my business career save that of Homestead. It was so unnecessary.”

  Carnegie tried to make amends by building Homestead a magnificent library—one of more than two thousand he built for communities around the world. A slate-roofed manse of autumn-colored brick, atop a terraced hill, the Homestead Library not only had a reading room with a fireplace and leather armchairs, it had a swimming pool, a billiard room, a gymnasium, and a thousand-seat music hall—a dollhouse Carnegie Hall. The most imposing building in Homestead, it bore Carnegie’s name, making it both a peace offering and a reminder to those who would instigate a second Homestead strike that the steel magnate was still laird of the borough.

  To prevent further labor trouble, Carnegie imported Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Croatians, reassembling the peasantry of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in his foundry, where they were melted into a panethnic alloy known to the native-born workers as “Hunkies.” The Hunkies couldn’t read, write, or even speak English, weren’t citizens, and thought twenty cents an hour in a Carnegie mill was better than life as a Bohemian farmhand.

  The architectural consequence of crowding so many ethnicities into such a small space is that Homestead contains a collection of ecclesiastical buildings that could only be duplicated by a dioramist for the World Congress of Religions. Every nationality arrived toting an Old World creed and, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, felt called to prove their faith by building a temple bigger than any of their infidel rivals. No matter how high or low you stand on Homestead’s slopes, you’ll see a Roman spire, a Presbyterian steeple, or an Oriental dome in the shape of an inverted spinning top, surmounted by a tilted cross, like an antenna for receiving messages from God. The churches are the only structures that rise higher than the shingle roofs or the black cross-hatching of telephone lines. In Homestead, religion and ethnicity were inseparable. At St. Mary Magdalene, whose God’s-eye window is set between brick pillars that lack only swirled peaks to be minarets, the Great War Honor Roll is filled with Conroys, Devines, Gallaghers, and Muldowneys. St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cathedral, its foundation tilted to follow the rising street, was the first church in America built to serve Carpatho-Rusyns, the Austro-Hungarian mountain folk who begat Andy Warhol, the pop artist born across the river in Pittsburgh. The Hungarian Reformed Church’s name was chiseled beneath a trapezoidal frieze of gray angels.

  “In the days of the mills, they had churches and bars,” said Betty Esper, who belonged to St. George’s Syrian Orthodox and grew up to become mayor of Homestead. “I don’t know if they drank and prayed, or prayed and drank.”

  After the Homestead Strike was broken, the borough remained free of labor trouble until 1919, when the World War I Armistice allowed workers to demand a share of the 160 percent increase in profits that U.S. Steel had realized from building ships, bombs, and barbed wire to kill Germans. The
American Federation of Labor demanded an eight-hour day, a six-day week, and an “American living wage” that included double pay for overtime. U.S. Steel’s president, Judge Elbert Gary, refused to meet with the AFL’s organizers, even when asked by President Woodrow Wilson. Union sympathizers were fired from the mill. The Homestead burgess prevented the union from renting a hall. When workers met in the street instead, the speakers were arrested and fined. The agitators were condemned as “Hunkies” and Bolsheviks. As if to prove their radicalism, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, then in the ninth decade of a lifetime dedicated to stirring up labor trouble, appeared in Homestead to support the strike.

  Mother Jones was a short, stout former dressmaker who dressed in widow’s weeds and may have inspired the name “granny glasses” for her oval spectacles. After losing her family to yellow fever and her home to the Great Chicago Fire, Jones quit domestic life and traveled the country, organizing miners and conducting an anti-child-labor march that led a brigade of mill waifs to President Theodore Roosevelt’s Long Island estate. After leading a West Virginia miners’ strike, this matron of labor was identified as “the most dangerous woman in America” by the local district attorney. Her motto was “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” When a senator called her the grandmother of agitators, Mother Jones replied that she hoped to live long enough to be their great-grandmother.

  In the summer of 1919, Mother Jones spoke to steelworkers throughout the Monongahela Valley but did not find trouble until she arrived in Homestead. Addressing laborers at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Amity Street, near the mill gates, Jones had this to say:

  “We are to see whether Pennsylvania belongs to Kaiser Gary or Uncle Sam. Our Kaisers sit up and smoke seventy-five-cent cigars and have lackeys with knee pants bring them champagne while you starve, while you grow old at forty, stoking their furnaces. You pull in your belts while they banquet. They have stomachs two miles long and two miles wide and you fill them … If Gary wants to work twelve hours a day, let him go in the blooming mill and work. What we want is a little leisure, time for music, playgrounds, a decent home, books, and the things that make life worthwhile.”

  For making such socialistic demands, Jones was arrested and jailed in the Homestead borough hall. In court, the judge asked who had granted her a public speaking permit.

  “Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams!” she retorted.

  During Mother Jones’s trial, workers surrounded the borough hall, demanding her release. The old lady of labor was set free on $15 bond, on the condition that she tell her supporters to go home.

  A month and two days later, hundreds of thousands of workers in the Steel Belt, from Lackawanna to Chicago, walked off the job. The nation’s steel production was cut in half. In Homestead, the Coal and Iron Police—a strikebreaking militia that replaced the Pinkertons after the violence of 1892—dragged strikers from their homes, beat them up, and threw them in jail. The borough banned outdoor gatherings and prohibited foreign languages at indoor meetings. After the Russian Revolution and Germany’s defeat in World War I, a wave of nativism had swept the country. The Great Steel Strike of 1919 coincided with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the Irishman’s whiskey, the Italian’s wine, and the German’s beer. It also coincided with the Palmer Raids, in which the Justice Department arrested Russian immigrants suspected of plotting an American soviet. (The raids snared Goldman and Berkman, Frick’s would-be assassins. After serving fourteen years in prison for the shooting, Berkman had resumed his radical activities, founding the No Conscription League to oppose the World War I draft. During the steel strike, the anarchists were deported to Russia and Frick finally died—“deported by God,” as Berkman put it—thus settling old scores from 1892.) In Seattle, shipyard workers called a general strike that shut down the city. In Boston, a police strike was suppressed by Governor Calvin Coolidge. It was a radical spring and summer. With unions and aliens held in such suspicion, it was easy for the steel companies to turn Protestant America against strikers who spoke babel languages and worshipped in exotic, Oriental temples. American workmen should take no part in a “Hunkie strike,” the newspapers lectured. On a flier distributed by the steel companies, Uncle Sam told workers, “Go back to work,” in Polish, Croatian, Italian, Lithuanian, and Hungarian.

  “The end of the steel strike is in sight,” it read. “Failure was written across it before it was a day old. American workers who understood the radical element that is seeking to operate under the cloak of organized labor are now back. Few of them even left their work—only a few foreign-born—mostly aliens—who allowed themselves to be swayed by the un-American teachings of radical strike agitators.”

  The propaganda worked. The coal miners and the railroad workers refused to support the strike. After seeing blacks and Mexicans take their old jobs, thousands of steelworkers returned to the mills. By Christmas, the strikers had dwindled to a third of their original strength. In January, the Amalgamated Association called off the strike. Defeated for the second time in two generations, it was never again a force in American labor.

  AFTER THE 1892 STRIKE, Carnegie had begun hiring blacks at the Homestead Works, not because he was enlightened on the race question, but because illiterate blacks, like illiterate Hunkies, were grateful enough not to join unions. The blacks were put to work shoveling coal into furnaces—the hottest, dirtiest job in the mill, labor even more exhausting than the sharecropping they’d left behind in the South. In his search for ethnicities to exploit, Carnegie brought to Homestead the roster for the town’s second-most-famous export: a baseball team. At the turn of the twentieth century, the sandlot leagues were just as segregated as the major leagues, so black steelworkers organized their own club. For the first ten years, they called it the Blue Ribbons. Then it was the Murdock Grays. Finally, the team was taken over by Cumberland “Cum” Posey, scion of the richest black family in Homestead. Most blacks lived in the Ward, the riverfront flats that would be razed to expand the works during World War II. The Poseys, who owned a coal company, lived atop the hill, on 11th Avenue, almost as high as the numbers ran in Homestead. Posey would become manager of the Homestead Grays, the Yankees of the Negro Leagues. The team’s most renowned player was Josh Gibson, a steelworker’s son from Pittsburgh’s Hill District, who was said to have hit eighty-four home runs in one season. But the Grays also fielded Hall of Famers Judy Johnson, Oscar Charleston, Martin Dihigo, Rube Foster, and James “Cool Papa” Bell. Because of their aggressive barnstorming, the Grays were the winningest team in the Negro National League for nine straight seasons, from 1937 to 1945. They averaged eight games a week, once enduring a fourteen-hour round-trip bus ride for a single-night contest in Buffalo. Homestead was too small to hold the team: they started out playing home games at Edgar Thomson Field, in Braddock, then used Forbes Field, when the Pirates weren’t busy with it, and finally moved to Washington, D.C., which had a bigger black population than Pittsburgh. Even in their new home, they were the Washington Homestead Grays, never forgetting their steel-town origins.

  TWICE DEFEATED in their efforts to unionize, Homestead’s steelworkers didn’t try again until the 1930s, when they had a prolabor president to protect them. With 1892 and 1919 still in living memory, steelworkers had learned “not to join unions rashly, as that meant strikes, and hardships, and losing out in the mill,” according to a labor study. The Flint Sit-Down Strike, a victory by the more assertive autoworkers, convinced U.S. Steel to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, progenitor of the United Steelworkers of America.

  On Labor Day 1941, the workers celebrated their victory by erecting a granite cenotaph to the martyrs of the Homestead Strike. They placed it at the foot of the High Level Bridge, which crosses the Mon into Pittsburgh, so everyone going in and out of Homestead could read about the skirmish that Carnegie and company had wished to forget.

  ERECTED BY THE MEMBERS OF THE STEEL WORKERS ORGANIZING COMMITTEE LOCAL UNIONS IN MEMORY
OF THE IRON AND STEEL WORKERS WHO WERE KILLED IN HOMESTEAD, PA, ON JULY 6, 1892, WHILE STRIKING AGAINST THE CARNEGIE STEEL COMPANY IN DEFENSE OF THEIR AMERICAN RIGHTS.

  So reads the inscription, beneath an etching of a burly puddler stirring molten iron with a long rake.

  Once they won the right to strike, the steelworkers used it—over and over again. In the decade and a half after World War II, they struck five times—in 1946, 1949, 1952, 1956, and 1959. The last was the most expensive strike in American history and has been blamed for destroying the domestic steel industry two decades later. The issue was, to use a technical term, featherbedding. In exchange for a big raise, the steel companies asked the union for the right to reduce the number of workers assigned to a task (“featherbedding” refers to the practice of making life for workers easier by hiring more hands than strictly necessary for the workload, thus allowing everyone to work at a more humane pace) and to install machinery that might cost a worker his job. No sale, said the union’s president, suave, pipe-smoking David McDonald, and its general counsel, future Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg. Half a million workers walked out. They stayed out for four months, until President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Taft-Hartley Act. Starved of steel, General Motors laid off 40 percent of its autoworkers, causing a recession in Detroit. The air force slowed down construction of a missile base in Colorado. With no steel shipments, the railroads lost half a billion dollars and cut employment to its lowest level since 1900. Once the furnaces went cold, customers began buying steel from foreign manufacturers. It was, they discovered, as good as American steel, and cheaper.