Thursday June 1, 1916
The International Socialist Review on the Pittsburgh Steel Strike

Dante Barton on the Pittsburgh Steel Strike of April & May 1916:

THE United States Steel Corporation went to the front for the Employers' Association of Pittsburgh on May 2. Repeating the Homestead tactics of 1892, its armed guards, thugs, special policemen and detectives fired volley after volley from riot guns and repeating rifles into the crowds of strikers and sympathizers—men, women and children—killed three, fatally wounded three others and seriously wounded from forty to sixty more.

Following that open violence, the Steel Corporation and Employers' Association invoked the legal process of Pittsburgh to put the wrong persons in jail. Dragnet warrants brought in the leaders of the unorganized numbers of the workers. They were thrown into jail and kept there without bond and without trial by the most arbitrary seizure of power.

There had been no violence in the Pittsburgh industrial district until the strike, which originated in the Westinghouse Electric Company's plant in East Pittsburgh, had spread to the Edgar Thompson Works of the Steel Trust—a Carnegie branch in Braddock. Realizing that their men were going out, the steel corporation officials began importing the coal and iron guards from Gary, Ind. These men arrived on Saturday, April 29. Several of them boasted that they had been in the employ of the Rockefellers in the Ludlow massacre in Colorado. For ten days before the fight at the Thompson Works, about 60,000 workmen and working women, from skilled mechanics to unskilled laborers, had been out on strike.

Beginning on April 21 in the Westinghouse Electric Company in East Pittsburgh, the strike had spread rapidly until it included all of the 40,000 employes of the various Westinghouse plants. Within five or six days partial or complete strikes had seriously crippled or tied up 23 other industries scattered throughout the entire Pittsburgh district. The Pressed Steel Car Works and the National Tube Company of the United States Steel Corporation became involved in big strikes later in the week.

This great strike in the Pittsburgh district centers in the demand for an eight-hour work day. It is part of the great industrial movement of the workers throughout the nation for the eight-hour day. The demand among practically all the workers of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County has not been lessened or affected by the shooting of the workers in Braddock. The consent of the Westinghouse strikers to accept the mediation offered by Patrick Gilday, chief of the mediation and conciliation board of the state department of labor and industry of Pennsylvania, was in no sense an offer of arbitration. The workers declared that the eight-hour day was not a subject of arbitration. They demanded it as of right.

But back of the eight-hour day demand is the realization by the workers that the opportunity of labor to assert itself to control its own pay and its conditions of work and of life is here now in the United States. Practically without organization—there were fewer than 1,000 members of the American Federation of Labor among the 40,000 employes of all the Westinghouse plants—the workers of all grades and of both sexes threw themselves into the strike movement. Workers of all nationalities acted with solidarity. The great mass of them were still getting low wages; but they and the skilled mechanics, and some favored few workers receiving as high as from ten to even eighteen or twenty dollars a day for long hours of overtime in the manufacture of war munitions, joined simultaneously in the strike for the eight-hour day.

Gains of big and increasing importance have already been made by the workers. Starting with practically no organization, great numbers of the strikers have joined the International Association of Machinists and other unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Andrew T. McNamara, an organizer for the Machinists, and Patrick J. Kelly, of the Machinists Local No. 6 of Pittsburgh, estimated that in the first week of the struggle 4,000 machinists, skilled workers, had left the several plants involved in the strike. Requests for many hundreds of these machinists to go to work in other cities had been received. For a year the Westinghouse employers had advertised for skilled workers, and in a day they lost more men from their labor market than they had added in the year.

Until the new demand for labor, and especially skilled labor, in the Pittsburgh district had arisen along with the mad scramble of the mill owners for war profits, the condition of the great army of the workers in the district had been frightful. A survey of a typical residence section of the unskilled mill workers was taken very recently under the direction of the Rev. C. R. Zahnizer, Secretary of the Christian Social Service Union of the 500 Protestant churches of the Pittsburgh district. This section is known as "the Strip." It is in the heart of Pittsburgh. It extends from 11th street to 34th street and lies between the Allegheny River and the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks.

In the whole of it there is only .57 of a square mile, and a little more than half of it is occupied by great industrial plants, a big Carnegie plant being one of them. In the less than 1/4 square mile left for the dwelling of the poor, more than 15,000 persons live. An intensive study of the half block between Smallman street and Mulberry alley and between 31st street and 32nd street showed 43 industrial homes, of which 32 kept boarders. In 32 houses, containing 177 rooms, there were 110 members of the several families, and 174 men boarders—a total of 284 persons living in 177 rooms. Eight families, each family living in three rooms and keeping boarders, averaged six persons to a three-room apartment.

From January 1, 1915, to September 15, 1915, the average rate of wages paid to the 155 men living in that half block was $10.40 a week. But the average pay received by each of the 155 men was only $4.66 a week, as the men were given employment for only four-ninths of the time.

Such terrible facts of brutalizing poverty and oppression are entirely ignored by the Westinghouse and Steel Trust and other Pittsburgh industries who have been advertising in the Pittsburgh news papers that now there are hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars in wages being lost to the workers of Pittsburgh because of the strikes. The wage earners remember the many millions of wages they did not get when the masters of the plants and the tools kept them from work and forced them to the most miserable wages and to the terror of unemployment. You hear on all sides from among the workers of Pittsburgh the expressed determination no longer to permit their lives and their earning power to be at the mercy of those whose caprice or selfishness or incapacity had subjected them to such degradation and misery.

But the industries of Pittsburgh are under the shadow of the Steel Corporation with its long workday and its ferocious prohibition of organization among its workers. About 70 per cent of the workers for the Steel Corporation still have the straight 12-hour day. The banks, the politics and the general industrial life of Pittsburgh look to the United States Steel Corporation for their orders. An Employers' Association, succeeding an earlier Manufacturers' Association, was formed within two days of the strike and walkout in the Westinghouse plants.

A few of the smaller employing concerns told representatives of the International Association of Machinists that they would gladly grant the eight-hour day, and some few already had it, but they were afraid of the power of the steel trust and the allied big interests. The Employers' Association adopted resolutions to fight the demands of the workers. It did not publish the names of its officers, but it delegated Isaac W. Frank, President of the United States Engineering and Foundry Company, and president of the Frank-Kneeland Company, to be its spokesman. The Steel Corporation kept out of this Association, but gave the direction to its activities.

Mr. Frank talked to the writer of this report with the same ferocity and violence with which the Steel Corporation acted at its Edgar Thompson Works in Braddock. In the presence of his partner, Mr. Edward Kneeland, Mr. Frank told the writer that the man whom he held chiefly responsible for the eight-hour day movement and other demands of the workers "should be assassinated." Becoming frightened then at his own indiscretion, he said that his statement had been very "unrational" and that he did not mean it.

The Steel Corporation has also expressed regret at the death of the men its guards killed, though it still has the guards at its plant, and a compliant district attorney, R. H. Jackson, has issued wholesale warrants for inciting to riot and for being accessory to murder against the workers whom the guards wounded. The coroner, a person named Jamison, has committed these men and one woman to jail without bail until he may be pleased to summon a coroner's jury to hear their side of the case.

There was no violence attending the strike until the Steel Corporation acted. The only semblance of violence occurred on the first day of the shutting down of the Westinghouse plant when a crowd of from 500 to 700 of the striking men marched from East Pittsburgh to the Westinghouse Air Brake plant in Wilmerding, about a mile away. They went to encourage the workers there to join them in striking for the eight-hour day. They marched through the company's plant—whether being first taunted by the guards, accounts differ. At any rate, no serious injury was done to property or to persons.

But the men and women in the Wilmerding plant all walked out. Until the fatal day of May 2 at the Edgar Thompson Workers, the strikers and men who had been locked out by the panic or the cunning of the various industries were remarkably quiet and good natured. They met peacefully in mass assemblages and listened to addresses of leaders or stood in the streets and most of them evidently stayed in their homes. There had been parades with and without bands. On Monday, May 1, crowds totaling from 3,000 to 4,000 marched from Wilmerding, Swissvale and East Pittsburgh to the Edgar Thompson Works in Braddock. The greater number stayed on the hillside overlooking the works and about a half a mile from it.

Toward the late afternoon several hundred persons of the crowd went into Thirteenth street along the high board fence built there, and into the tunnel leading into the plant. They met no resistance and going through the works succeeded in causing probably one-half of the 10,000 or so employes of all grades to quit work. The company then banked all the furnaces and declared the plant shut down.

It was the next day, along about one o'clock in the afternoon, that the first shooting by the guards occurred. There was another fight between two and three o'clock in the same afternoon.

As usual in cases of such confusion, stories vary as to how the fighting started. The testimony of many of the men in the Street is that the crowds were walking along in the street hurrahing and urging the men in the works to come out and join the strike. Many of the workers from the inside were trying to get over the fence to unite with the crowds and company guards were pulling or driving them back. The firing of guns and the throwing of stones by the men, who later tried to storm the fence and were shot down or driven back by the guards, came in a pell mell of action.

The crowd of strikers and bystanders was entirely undisciplined and unled. It included very few organized labor workers. That it was not a "mob" intent on murder or other violence was shown by its general character, as it included many hundreds of women and children. Several of the women were wounded. The firing was done through the high board fence along Thirteenth street. A concrete wall surrounds all other sides of the works. While from fifty to sixty strikers and lookers-on were shot down, not a guard or company official or other person was injured. But immediately state troops were sent for by the sheriff and were sent by the Governor.

It is notable that the ten policemen of North Braddock, comprising the entire police force of that borough of Allegheny County, had refused to take any part in guarding the Edgar Thompson Works and in being in readiness to shoot down their fellow citizens. "For the honor of the Borough," as the Borough Commissioners said, those ten policemen were afterward discharged.

Following the shooting by the guards and special police, many of the leaders of the strikers, most of whom had not been near the scene of the trouble, were arrested and put in jail on charges of being accessories to murder. John H. Hall, Anna Bell, Henry H. Detweiler, R. W. Hall, George Zeiber, Frank Imhoff, Geo. Cregmont, Joseph Cronin and Fred H. Merrick were the victims of this perversion of the due process of justice, what ever may have been its standing in the due process of Pennsylvania's trust-made criminal law.

John H. Hall had been one of the organizers of and leaders in the "American Industrial Union," a federation of some hundreds of the otherwise unorganized workers within the Westinghouse plants. His discharge for that activity had been one of the immediate causes of the strike. Anna Bell, a young woman who had worked nine and one-quarter hours a day at the standard wage of $1.10 a day, had led most of the 2,000 to 3,000 women and girl workers out of the plant on the first day of the strike.

Fred Merrick had been active for years in Pittsburgh as a Socialist speaker and writer and newspaper man. At a mass meeting of the workers, the first day of the strike, Merrick had shown a shot gun and had spoken of the constitutional right to bear arms. There was no advice to use arms and no other reference to their possible use, even in defense, at any of the public meetings. On the contrary, it was pointed out at all the meetings that now, with an absence of strike breakers and "with a greater labor demand than there was a labor supply among the skilled workers, the workers had only to stand together until the desire of the mill owners for their abnormal quick profits had forced them to grant the eight-hour day.

The growing solidarity of the labor movement was shown in the concerted action of skilled and unskilled, including the women workers who, wholly unorganized, are especially exploited in the Pittsburgh plants.

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[Photograph of Anna Bell and paragraph breaks added.]

SOURCE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 16
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company,
July 1915-June 1916
https://books.google.com/books?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ
ISR OF June 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...
The Pittsburgh Strikes -by Dante Barton
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...

IMAGES
Pittsburgh Steel Strike, Blast Furnace Workers, ISR June 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...
Pittsburgh Steel Strike, Barton, ISR June 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...
Pittsburgh Steel Strike, Jerusalem Court, ISR June 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...
Pittsburgh Steel Strike, Four Beds in a Room, ISR June 1916
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=9VJIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...
Pittsburgh Steel Strike, Anna Bell, Day Book, May 4, 1916
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1916-05-04/ed-1/seq-3/

See also:

City At The Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh
-by Samuel P. Hays
University of Pittsburgh Pre, Mar 15, 1991
https://books.google.com/books?id=DLMA08v5gLcC
"Women and Labor Militancy"
(Click once forward.)
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=DLMA08v5gLcC&printsec=frontcove...
NOTE: Interesting history of the role of women in the various Steel Strikes in the Pittsburgh area. Includes information on Anna Bell who was mentioned above as the woman jailed. Also mentioned was the "girl in the paper mask." Militant women both:

Strike reports in daily newspapers only occasionally mention women by name and typically give but little information about them, as witness the case of twenty-one year old Anna Katherine Bell, a seasoned worker at Westinghouse, whose family evicted her because she participated in the 1916 strike, or the "girl in the paper mask" who obviously feared public recognition but was determined to head one of the many street processions of Westinghouse strikers.

Search at Chronicling America: Pittsburgh Steel Strike May 1916-
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?state=Pennsylvan...

Search at Chronicling America: Anna Bell May 1916-
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?state=&dateFilte...

Search at Chronicling America: Girl in paper mask 1916-
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045433/1916-04-25/ed-1/seq-1/...