Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ themselves and their followers. After 1879, those seeking to do business with the city or to bank its assets paid a premium to the machine, while Flinn’s contracting business, Booth and Flinn, Ltd., received millions in padded contracts for roads and other public improvements as the lowest “responsible” bidder. The organization allied itself with the Mellon family and other bankers holding the city’s funds, owners of traction (streetcar) companies with city contracts, and railroad powers such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, as well as liquor and vice interests who could depend on city hall to turn a blind eye once the proper bribes were paid.³⁰

      Under the reign of Magee and Flinn, Pittsburgh undertook a massive program of public improvements that far outstripped anything attempted in the Steel Valley’s other urban centers. The Magee-Flinn machine pursued a pro-growth agenda focused on delivering services to those middle and upper class neighborhoods most able to pay. They were supported in this endeavor by the Pennsylvania legislature, which created a new city charter in 1887 (denounced by the Democratic Pittsburgh Post as the “Mageesburgh” charter) that placed appointing power for municipal departments in the hands of the machine-controlled city council. The legislature then passed a bill authorizing Pittsburgh to provide for street improvements, sewers, sidewalks, and other public works that created a bonanza of lucrative projects ripe for patronage. While public works served a political function in providing the graft that oiled the cogs of the political machine, celebrated Public Works director Edward Bigelow (who was also Magee’s cousin) insisted on efficient administration of projects, resulting in the laying of 190 miles of new sewers, the grading of 94 miles of city streets, and the repairing of an additional 75 miles with asphalt or block stone between 1888 and 1899 alone.³¹

      Despite these successes, ring-led development was inherently limited and provided services in such an uneven way that they actually tended to increase the social and environmental inequalities separating the middle and working classes. During the 1880s and 1890s, many new office and retail buildings rose in the region’s downtown areas as Henry Phipps, Andrew Mellon, Henry Frick and others competed to build the most distinctive and opulent buildings as symbols of their growing fortunes. Similarly, Union Deposit Bank president Dorhman Sinclair built a ten-story steel-and-concrete structure in 1915 hailed as “Steubenville’s First Skyscraper.” Middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in the cities as well as exclusive areas in the upper reaches of mill towns and railroad commuter suburbs benefitted the most from infrastructure development initiatives. In Pittsburgh, the burgeoning East End neighborhoods of Shadyside, Oakland, Homewood, and Highland Park were protected by their topography from the grit and soot of the industrialized river valleys and were the first to enjoy paved streets, municipal water and other benefits. “The old wards of our city,” explained Edward Bigelow in 1890, “are very rapidly being turned into manufacturing sites and thereby forcing the residents thereof to locate in the East End in outer wards. Having once established their homes there, they very naturally and very properly ask [for] such streets and sewer improvements as well as water supplies that will make their lives accessible and healthful.”³²

      Early on, some labor leaders and others began advocating for reform of the political boss system. Not all residents of the river valleys could move, of course, and industrial expansion meant increasing crowding of working-class neighborhoods where political leaders could more easily placate residents with jobs and other personal favors. “Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination,” wrote newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken of Pittsburgh in its industrial heyday, “and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.” Until the 1890s, organized labor had a powerful presence throughout the Steel Valley, and just as skilled workers continued to exercise critical control over work processes in the mills so too did union leaders, both Republican and Democrat, who often served as town burgesses and other key officials. Labor leaders also teamed up with civic officials to push for improvements to the quality of life of working-class residents through public works spending. This was particularly notable in Wheeling, where Valentine Reuther and the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly helped lead a decades long push for a municipal filtration system that would provide “water fit to drink [and] a city fit to live in.” Political bosses, however, proved adept at co-opting union officials with the promise of patronage positions, a practice that effectively turned labor leaders into party hacks. Combined with blacklisting, lock-outs, and other tactics employed by industrialists as well as corporate welfare programs, the rise of political machines subverted union solidarity, effectively co-opted the role of unions in shaping a working-class identity, and undercut attempts at an independent labor politics.³³

      Middle-class reformers, too, highlighted the inefficiencies of the boss-system and blamed political corruption for the increasing inequalities in the Steel Valley. The paternalism of civic elites combined with the pro-development agenda of Magee and Flinn resulted in many high-profile public works projects in Pittsburgh, most notably in the new hilltop civic center of Oakland. However, the Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the rapid decline of living conditions for working-class residents as well as high rates of communicable diseases and rising concerns about the negative effects of air and water pollution. Kellogg and his investigators blamed the region’s serious social problems and environmental degradation on the “production of wealth on a vast scale,” “inequity in distribution,” “and the inadequacies of municipal governments” that could “be overcome rapidly” if the community really wanted to do so. At the same time, Pittsburgh reformers seemed to hit their stride with the 1906 mayoral election of George Guthrie, a Progressive bitterly opposed to the Magee-Flinn machine. The new mayor created a Division of Smoke Inspection in the Bureau of Health, which itself was elevated to a full municipal department in 1909 in order to better regulate tenements and improve sanitary conditions. Guthrie also partnered with business leaders, who were concerned about economic threats to the city in the wake of a disastrous flood and a national financial panic, to create a new Civic Commission tasked “to plan and promote improvements in civic and industrial conditions.” In turn, the group of eighteen business and professional leaders hired pioneer city planner Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., to prepare a plan for the city. When completed in 1911, Olmsted’s Pittsburgh: Main Thoroughfares and the Downtown District established a comprehensive framework for remaking Pittsburgh as a modern metropolis.³⁴

      Ethnic fragmentation, a rugged landscape, and the desire of industrialists to control the levers of political power in the area around their plants meant that vertical integration of the economy was not matched by centralized municipal administrations. Civic boosters in both Pittsburgh and Wheeling expressed a mixture of pride and annoyance at the relatively small percentage of population the central city contained in relation to that of their dependent regions. In the eyes of Progressive reformers, the region’s fragmented political system created a plethora of inefficient minor municipalities that duplicated services, prevented comprehensive planning, weakened civic administrations, and lent themselves to control by corrupt interests. “Pittsburgh is dwarfed and made small in comparison with other cities, where outlying but dependent suburbs have been merged into one municipal organization,” declared George Anderson of the Chamber of Commerce in 1902. “Civic pride … should demand that this, the acknowledged industrial center of America, should occupy her proper place among other great cities of the nation.”³⁵ Similarly, a decade later a booster publication sponsored by the Wheeling Corrugating Company bemoaned the fact that “the census cannot go beyond legal boundaries and so Wheeling does not get credit for her real extent and true proportions.”³⁶

      As regional elites began to see their competitive advantages slip in the early decades of the twentieth century, corporate leaders and some politicians, such as Pittsburgh Mayor William A. Magee, who replaced Guthrie in 1909, joined Progressives in their belief that “some form of centralized administration” was necessary. Similarly, proponents of a “Greater Wheeling Charter” authorized by the West Virginia Legislature after nearly a decade of campaigning cited the need for a larger water reservoir and regional sewer authority as well as the need to avoid “much embarrassment” and “great humiliation” at a time when many other cities were annexing adjacent territories. As a result of these initiatives, Pittsburgh, which had already incorporated СКАЧАТЬ