“Imports more than doubled over the previous year, to 4.4 million tons, making the United States a net importer of steel for the first time since the 1800s,” wrote John P. Hoerr in And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry.
Technically, the union won the strike, preserving the work rules and gaining an automatic cost-of-living adjustment. But foreign steel had found a market in the United States. From then on, whenever the union talked strike, customers would stock up on steel, creating more demand than American companies could supply.
“Steel users increasingly turned to foreign steelmakers, who frequently demanded long-term supply contracts,” Hoerr wrote. “Imports surged to 10.4 million tons in 1965, to 18 million tons in 1968, and to 18.3 million tons in 1971. The 1971 imports constituted 18 percent of the domestic market, an intolerable intrusion in the view of both steel companies and the USW.”
UNLIKE THEIR COUNTERPARTS at Wisconsin Steel, who showed up at work one day to find a padlocked gate, the workers in Homestead knew their mill was going down. To stop it from closing, they used every protest tactic short of violence.
Mike Stout found his way to Homestead in 1977, looking for a secure job after spending eight years trying to make it as a folksinger in New York City. He was hired as a crane operator in the one-hundred-inch plate mill. In the late 1970s, the steel industry was going through its last employment boom. Unlike previous waves, this one brought in blacks, women, and members of the counterculture—including college-educated “colonizers” who took steel jobs to spread socialism in the mills. The new workers arrived just before the industry’s collapse. Homestead’s steelworkers combined the militance of the antiwar movement with a working-class resentment that had been simmering since 1892, to turn their local into “the hardest of the hard core,” as a Mon Valley historian would put it.
“Not only was the rank-and-file upsurge at Homestead embedded in the workplace itself, it seemed to be the continuity of the spirit that evolved out of the workplace, over years and decades of work and struggle at Homestead, dating back through the consent decree battler, the CIO drive, and the strike of 1892,” Stout would later say. “It was something I felt the minute I walked into the mill and started working there, it was something in the air.”
In the bitter 1977 election for the presidency of the United Steelworkers, Homestead voted for Ed Sadlowski by a margin of two to one. After Oil Can Eddie’s defeat, workers inspired by his “throw out the old hacks” campaign began plotting to take over their own local, 1397. They began by publishing an underground newspaper, Rank and File, which won a following when it editorialized against U.S. Steel’s plan to recover $385,000 in overpayments from Homestead employees—anywhere from $40 to $800 a worker. The paper also published cartoons lampooning unpopular foremen, ran articles with headlines such as “LOCAL PRESIDENT BETRAYS MEMBERSHIP,” and used as a logo the Homestead Strike memorial, thus connecting its cause to the borough’s martyrs.
The Young Turks’ candidate for president was a welder named Ronnie Weisen. Weisen was a pugnacious street tough, a pompadoured greaser who had boxed Golden Gloves in his youth. After his boxing career ended, he continued to pursue his interest in brawling by picking fights in Homestead bars. At union meetings, Weisen railed against the leadership as “a bunch of sellouts”; he was so disruptive that the local president finally asked the police to attend, to prevent fistfights from breaking out.
Weisen and his Rank and File Caucus took over the local in 1979, winning big. On election night, Stout performed his campaign song “We Are the 1397 Rank and File” for two hundred steelworkers crammed into the campaign headquarters on Amity Street, not far from where Mother Jones had been arrested. He would remember it as one of the highlights of his music career.
For his loyalty to the Rank and File Caucus, Stout was appointed assistant grievance man in his department, making him an ombudsman between the workers and their foremen. Six months later, U.S. Steel announced it was shutting down thirteen mills, including all of its operations in Youngstown, Ohio, and the forty-eight-inch mill in Homestead. With little seniority, Stout was laid off for over a year. It was the beginning of a slow-motion economic bloodletting.
When Stout returned to the mill, he found himself fighting nickel-and-dime firings intended to cut down the work force. He managed to save the job of an epileptic who was let go after suffering a seizure at work. But when U.S. Steel laid off 1,800 workers, there was nothing Stout could do to save them.
By late 1982, it was clear to Stout that U.S. Steel was intent on shutting down not only entire departments but entire mills. Braddock’s Edgar Thomson Works seemed doomed. The executives in Pittsburgh were telling plant managers, “Get your man-hours down or shut down.” Fortune magazine illustrated a story about the company with the U.S. Steel logo cracked in half. “There are no more sacred cows,” board chairman David Roderick was quoted as saying. “If you aren’t down to 4.5 man hours per ton of steel produced, you’re finished.” Crews were cut from twelve to two or three people. Entire shifts were eliminated, forcing those still employed to work overtime.
Most of those laid off from the Homestead Works never stepped foot inside a mill again. Stout was now grievance man for the entire Slab and Plate Zone, so his job was protected. To help those who were not so lucky, he started a food bank with money from a benefit concert. Not only did the concert raise $12,000, it was covered by the CBS Evening News and the Today show. In the spring of 1982, the unemployed were hotter than they’d been since the Depression. Bruce Springsteen chipped in $10,000 of the gate from a Pittsburgh show and allowed the union to collect money outside the concert hall.
As in South Chicago, the Mon Valley steel crisis inspired local pastors to found an organization that used Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a guidebook for fighting mill closings. Chicago is a Catholic town, so its movement was run by the Catholic Church. Homestead, city of competing faiths, produced the Denominational Ministry Strategy, led by Protestant ministers, with no archbishop to moderate their militance. The pastors’ first action was against Mellon Bank, which had foreclosed on Homestead’s Mesta Machine Company for failure to make payments on a $20 million mortgage. Mesta, an eighty-five-year-old company that employed thousands of Homesteaders, went bankrupt and closed. At first, the pastors organized a demonstration outside the bank’s Homestead branch. Unionists withdrew over $100,000 in savings and held a press conference accusing Mellon of bankrupting Mesta and denying its laid-off workers their severance pay and pension benefits. The withdrawals spread, costing Mellon millions in deposits. The bank agreed to a settlement with Mesta’s workers.
The Denominational Ministry Strategy’s organizer, a hard-ass named Chuck Honeywell, was pleased with the victory but thought the union needed to stage more theatrical protests. Laid-off steelworkers changed five-dollar bills for rolls of pennies at Mellon branches, then counted the coins at the teller’s window, while customers in line seethed. The workers rented safe-deposit boxes, in which they locked mackerel and trout. “Smelliest fish we could find,” Stout explained. Deer hunters who used skunk oil to camouflage their scent began pouring the odoriferous concoction on the bank’s carpets, a trick that became known as “Smellin’ Mellon.” Pranking Mellon Bank was fun, but Honeywell’s next step was too much for even a labor militant like Stout.
“It’s not enough to attack the banks,” Honeywell told Stout. “We’ve got to start going inside the churches and attacking the leaders right inside their churches and places of worship.”
“You lose me here,” Stout responded. “You’re crazy.”
But Honeywell hadn’t lost the combative, confrontational Weisen or several other hard-line local leaders. On Easter Sunday 1984, they infiltrated Shadyside Presbyterian Church. Located in one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Shadyside was attended by executives of U.S. Steel and Mellon Bank. During the service, the president of USWA Local 2227 strode to the nave and began reciting a sermon ab
out confronting evil. The husky unionist quoted German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s conclusion that assassinating Hitler was a Christian response to Nazism.
“Heresy!” parishioners cried, until the union leader told them he was reading a sermon written by their previous pastor. During other services, workers laid cast-off steel on the altar while carrying a sign that read “All We Have Left. Scraps of the Mills.”
The militants were getting plenty of publicity—the New York Times and 60 Minutes documented Homestead’s proletarian uprising, while presidential candidates Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson came to town to be photographed showing solidarity—but the attack they sprang that holiday season wiped out most of the sympathy they’d won in the community: three men in gas masks invaded a Christmas pageant at Shadyside Presbyterian. They tossed water balloons laced with skunk oil, splattering and terrifying children at the party. Weisen was unapologetic.
“What about our women and children?” he asked. “They don’t get any banquets at Christmas.”
Just two months later, Weisen was reelected as president of Local 1397. Stout won a term as chairman of the Grievance Committee. That was the last straw for U.S. Steel. The company had been planning to close the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock. Instead, it closed Homestead. The reason, a company official told Stout: your confrontational union.
“Because of Ronnie Weisen, the militancy of our local, they decided to shut down Homestead,” Stout said. “I wouldn’t say the militancy went too far. I would say the idiocy went too far, with attacking kids at Christmas parties and stuff like that and attacking people inside churches. Any time you attack innocent people, I think it’s ridiculous. I actually don’t think we were militant enough. They were going to shut us down anyway. We lost nine out of ten workers. We lost ninety percent of the steel industry.”
As grievance chairman, Stout’s job was protected by the union contract, so he was among the last group of workers to leave the Homestead Works on the day it closed in 1986. Most of his union brothers and sisters left the Mon Valley, but Stout, who had bounced from Kentucky to New York to Homestead, decided to stick around and keep fighting for steelworkers. A year after the mill closed, his unemployment ran out, leaving him “destitute” and dependent on friends. Even though he was totally broke, Stout decided to run for the state legislature in Harrisburg. He lost the Democratic primary by thirty-nine votes. Stout also tried to find a buyer to reopen the mill. He formed an organization called the Steel Valley Authority to bring back the region’s manufacturing base but failed at that, too, due to U.S. Steel’s determination that the Homestead Works never make steel again. When it was finally torn down in the mid-1990s—with ex-steelworkers working on the demolition crew—the cranes that Stout had operated were shipped to Poland.
“The whole shift in the ruling class at that time was to begin exporting jobs and going global and basically shut down our manufacturing base, and they deregulated everything from the trucking industry to the banks,” Stout said. “That paved the way for the burgeoning of this whole slave-wage labor, Third World, put the jobs over there because we’ve got people who’ll work for twenty cents an hour. I’d say the policies of the Reagan administration at that time pretty much paved the way and greased the skids. They eliminated every law, they allowed banks and S & Ls to ship overseas. They busted the air-traffic controllers’ union. They couldn’t bust our union, so they pulled the floor out from under us.”
Stout eventually opened a print shop on Eighth Avenue, Homestead’s main drag. Rent was cheap, because the department stores and the theaters and the restaurants had closed and boarded up their windows. He got his equipment from the Catholic archdiocese and the United Steelworkers International in Pittsburgh, which were both shutting down their in-house printing, and went into business with a couple other ex–mill workers. Stout also resumed his music career, writing prolabor anthems, which he performed as the World’s Grievance Man. He toured Germany four times and released nine CDs, including Soldiers of Solidarity and American Dreams: Keeping the Promise. But he’s never earned as much money as he did at U.S. Steel.
IT’S HARD not to meet Mayor Betty. As mayor of Homestead Borough, her only responsibilities are breaking tie votes during council meetings and overseeing the police force. You can get her home phone number from the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area Museum on Eighth Avenue (a steel museum is the surest sign that steel is dead in Homestead). When you call, she’ll invite you to the house on Eleventh Avenue, halfway up the hill. Mayor Betty Esper has lived alone in the upstairs unit since her mother died. A slender woman, with a raptor’s profile and flossy white hair that covers her head like a shower cap, Mayor Betty never had a family of her own. Homestead is her family. She doesn’t have long-distance phone service or the Internet, because nothing outside her borough interests her, except the Syrian Orthodox church in Pittsburgh, which she began attending after Homestead could no longer support a congregation. Mayor Betty sits on her second-floor balcony and keeps an eye on the neighborhood children. You can tell someone important—or at least someone colorful—lives up there, because overhanging the railing are a seamstress’s dummy wearing a rubber Einstein mask, a stuffed Kermit the Frog holding a ladybug flag, and a faux-leather helmet in the yellow and black colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers. (Everyone in the Mon Valley owns at least one article of Steelers apparel or memorabilia. Not only are the Steelers the most successful NFL franchise, with six Super Bowl victories, their name and history flatter the industrial heritage of a region that doesn’t have much industry left.)
“I got the dummy from the dump and set it up for Halloween,” Mayor Betty explained. “And it became a thing with me.”
Mayor Betty spent over thirty years as a clerk of the Homestead Works, working finally for the men in charge of shutting down the mill. (“The only person there was me and [my boss] and five or six laborers that threw stuff in Dumpsters.”) In 1990, she became “the first lady mayor in the Steel Valley”—a woman finally got the job because it was worthless by then. The “Welcome to Homestead” signs identified the borough as the “Steel Center of the World.” But without the steel mill that had made it famous, Homestead was broke. The borough had no money, and neither did anyone who lived there.
“The steelworkers, they lost their houses,” Mayor Betty remembered. “A lot of my friends, they were young, they had to be retrained. They got security jobs. Didn’t pay pfft. Some got divorces, some became alcoholics, some committed suicide. Many of them divorces.”
Two years into Mayor Betty’s first term, Homestead went bankrupt. The state of Pennsylvania took over its finances. The borough laid off half the street department and had to rely on a government grant just to keep its ten police officers on the job.
Once the skies over Homestead turned blue again, the folks across the river and up the hill—architects, city planners, historians, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and philanthropists who would never have visited a filthy steel town—adopted the little borough as a reclamation project. There were study groups and committees, historical exhibits, film proposals, lectures, brown-bag lunches, dinners, economic analyses, historical surveys, and histories. The Harvard Business School published a case study of disinvestment and redevelopment plans in the Monongahela Valley.
One of the slumming architects was a Carnegie Mellon University professor named David Lewis. Lewis had grown up in England, where he graduated from Leeds University, in the steelmaking Midlands. The future of industrial cities, he believed, was the most important urban planning issue of the late twentieth century.
In his desire to find new purposes for abandoned steel towns, Lewis had an ally from his native country. In the early 1980s, the Prince of Wales had been asked to substitute for his flu-ridden father at the Royal Institute of British Architects’ annual dinner. At the time, Sheffield and Birmingham, the cities where steel was invented, were in the same slough as Cleveland, South Chicago, and Homestead. Instead of offering the
architects stodgy royal praise, as the Duke of Edinburgh might have, the modern prince challenged them: how many of you, he asked, have offices in the North of England, “where the real problems lie?”
When Lewis read about the speech, he was thrilled. Was not the Mon Valley America’s North of England? The Royal Institute of British Architects and the American Institute of Architects were planning the Remaking Cities Conference in Pittsburgh. Lewis invited Prince Charles. The prince not only agreed to attend, but once he was there, he agreed to visit Homestead. Riding in the royal Jaguar as it crossed the High Level Bridge, on its way to a handshaking visit with students at Steel Valley High School, Lewis told the prince about the Mon Valley’s similarities to Sheffield and Glasgow. The prince was very disturbed, Lewis recalled. He suggested founding two organizations to wipe away postindustrial blight. Britain’s would be called the Prince of Wales Foundation.
“You chaps make yours the Remaking Cities Institute,” Prince Charles suggested.
Lewis was so convinced of Homestead’s potential for revival that the next year, he bought an old rooming house for $40,000, converted it to a single-family home, and moved in.
“My colleagues all thought I was bloody well crazy,” he said. “I wasn’t crazy at all. I was doing what I wanted to do. The life had gone out of Homestead. Shops closed, boarded up. I thought all the world’s attention would leave the Mon Valley.”
The save-Homestead movement had generated some airheaded proposals. Even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette lampooned the idea of using the empty mills as pavilions for a flower show to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Homestead strike. But when Lewis examined a map of the Mon Valley, he noticed that Homestead possessed two geographical benisons: the borough had once been peripheral to Pittsburgh, but now that suburbia had spread south and east of the Three Rivers, it was at the center of the metropolitan area. And with the mill closed, Homestead had the longest stretch of unused riverfront on the Monongahela. Through a member of the West Homestead Borough Council, Lewis got to know Ray Park, president of the company that had bought the Homestead Works and was tearing it apart for scrap. (The Homestead Works actually crossed the borders of three boroughs—Homestead was bracketed by West Homestead and Munhall, which contained the Carnegie Library and the managers’ brick homes. U.S. Steel had created multiple municipalities in the valley, to prevent any one from telling it how to run the mill.)
Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 17
