Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ employers matched their anti-union activities at the workplace with a positive campaign to win the hearts and minds of the area’s residents. Many corporations instituted corporate welfare programs aimed at encouraging workers to identify with company interests. Beginning in 1903, U.S. Steel instituted a profit-sharing stock purchase program for employees and joined other large employers in instituting modest pension and accident benefits programs. A wave of steel strikes following World War I prompted further expansion of corporate welfare activities. “Good will is not a sentiment that trickles down from above,” declared Homestead Works superintendent L.C. Gardner. “It comes into existence at the bottom of the social structure. The place to cultivate good will is where it grows naturally—in the community, in the neighborhood, where people meet as folks.” Corporations held huge picnics and organized excursions to local amusement parks, such as Kennywood near Homestead and the White Palace in Wheeling, designed to cement the relationship between employees and management. Many companies fielded sports teams, with the Edgar Thomson Works fielding baseball, track and field, basketball, and boxing teams. Company coffers paid for playgrounds, community centers, government buildings, pools, libraries, and hospitals. Throughout the Steel Valley, local politicians said that if they needed something, they simply went to the mill superintendent or plant supervisor and asked for it.²³

      Industrialists also used the process of municipal incorporation to limit their tax liability, exert additional control over workers, and maintain wealthy enclaves in which to enjoy the fruits of their investments. The mill site along the Ohio River across from Steubenville, for example, appealed to Ernest T. Weir not only for its accessibility and low cost, but also for its relative isolation from older urban centers. “We had something else in mind besides building an integrated plant,” Weir explained in 1955. Weirton was “deliberately selected and consciously planned as the location for both a steel plant and a community.” Cities, Weir believed, “if not breeders, were certainly magnifiers of discontent among workers.” “In a small town,” he continued, workers and management were friendly, and residents were often “relatives or close friends.” Weirton employees owned homes or rented private residences, but the company provided water and other services, paid for the police, controlled access to jobs, and dominated the local culture as well as the economy. In exchange for this paternalism, Weirton Steel employees remained steadfastly nonunion even after the great organizing drive of the CIO in the 1930s. By 1920, the area already counted 9,500 residents, and in 1940 its population of approximately 25,000 made it the largest unincorporated town in the nation.²⁴

      In ways similar to Weirton Steel’s domination of its mill town, the famous libraries donated by Andrew Carnegie illustrate the community structure of the Steel Valley at its peak as well as the political discord that often simmered just below the surface. The Pittsburgh industrialist used the 1898 dedication ceremony for the Homestead Library to outline his program for the institution that was, in his words, “the gift of one workingman to other workingmen.” “May it indeed be between capital and labor,” he concluded, “an emblem of peace, reconciliation, confidence, harmony and union.”²⁵ Local boosters throughout the region supported construction of Carnegie libraries both as needed investments in their communities and also in recognition of the financial power wielded by corporate interests. Wheeling attorney Nelson Hubbard, whose father was a state representative and later U.S. Congressman, wrote the steel magnate explaining how his “distinctly … labor city” desperately needed “a permanent establishment which would be a constant power in building up [its] deficiencies.” On the eve of a referendum to raise the required 10 percent local contribution, the Daily Intelligencer also warned, “Mr. Carnegie is so situated that any affront to him at this time might in the end prove very disastrous to the physical welfare of Wheeling.” The editor then cited all the steel mills in the vicinity as evidence of the city’s dependence on heavy industry, concluding, “We desire Mr. Carnegie’s good will. He deserves our good will.”²⁶

      Others, however, were less enthusiastic about the new cultural jewels scattered throughout metropolitan Pittsburgh. Despite Carnegie’s stated desire to bury “all regretful thoughts, all unpleasant memories,” Wheeling unionists, such as Valentine Reuther whose sons later helped start the United Auto Workers, denounced any facility provided by the villain of the Homestead Massacre, who had “blood on his hands.” Wheeling’s funding issue failed by a slim 201 votes after members of the local Carpenters’ and Joiners’ Union declared they wanted a library that would be Wheeling’s own, “not a Carnegie monument where a large portion of our citizens could only enter with repugnance and servility.” Wheeling’s failed attempt to obtain a Carnegie library also reveals the weakness of local governments in metropolitan Pittsburgh and their reliance on corporate largesse for infrastructure that elsewhere would have been a service of municipal authorities. “Wheeling needs a good library sadly,” Hubbard lamented. “The city is scarcely able to provide one, and is by no means willing to do what it can and should do in that direction. For the latter reason, especially, we shall probably do without the library until someone from outside thinks best to offer substantial help.”²⁷

      Politics of Production

      The political systems forged in the late nineteenth century largely stymied attempts at dealing effectively with the environmental and social consequences of the Steel Valley’s industrial economy. As in the earlier era, the relationship between local leaders and state politics in Harrisburg, Charleston, and Columbus continued to be of major importance in determining the fortunes of the region’s communities. Despite Wheeling’s increased influence in West Virginia politics during a period of Republican ascendance between 1895 and 1931, for instance, the ability of the community to attract investment from state government remained limited. West Virginia’s taxation structure remained heavily weighted in favor of the large coal and timber companies who controlled the sparsely settled counties that made up much of the state. Lacking a sufficient source of development funds, civic administration in Wheeling remained more like a nineteenth-century frontier town than a community with aspirations to become a modern metropolis. Because of the lack of taxing authority, fees charged for liquor licenses were so important to municipal coffers that it was virtually impossible to place any limitations on saloonkeepers, some of whom served as unofficial political bosses in the shifting alliances of the period. Wheeling gained a reputation as being “wide-open” for organized crime with “Big” Bill Lias and other gangsters controlling prostitution, gambling, and later bootlegged alcohol.²⁸

      Things were even worse in Steubenville, which continued to decline in importance compared to other parts of Ohio even as the expansion of heavy industry brought with it the same social and environmental problems affecting other areas of the region. “Millmen are notoriously free spenders,” observed a local Protestant minister, who blamed the “new tide of immigration [that] infiltrated Steubenville: Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Ukrainians [for] the jaws of vice [that] closed upon the city.” Unlike Weirton and other communities dominated by a single company, civic elites in Steubenville had no effective means of imposing social control, particularly as municipal politics became increasingly fragmented along ethnic and class lines. “Other than a 40 percent Italian dominance, no other group has produced a leader capable of solidifying the sub-cultures into a cohesive community,” reported a later observer. “Although the area is economically above the Ohio median income level, sociologically they respond as fractionated lower-middle class isolates. Consequently, the dynamic necessary to coalesce the diverse interests into a unified progress effort, for all intent and purpose, does not exist.”²⁹

      Political leaders in wealthier and more populous Pittsburgh, on the other hand, established strong ties to the state government, which generally obliged with enabling legislation whenever necessary. They also built a relatively stable municipal administration that, while machine-driven and corrupt, was able to effectively deliver services to constituents. Political rings organized a fragmented, neighborhood-controlled municipal government by means of a centralized, boss-dominated system that could tame tumultuous city councils and provide basic services from rudimentary street paving and lighting to park construction and the laying of sanitary sewer and water lines. Republican operative Christopher Magee and state legislator William СКАЧАТЬ