Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ controls, a series of massive dams, and new parks with the construction of a modern highway system, the encouragement of residential suburbs, and the transformation of Pittsburgh’s mixed-use central business district into the high-rise skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle.

      Indeed, thanks to the implementation of its landmark smoke control law, by 1948 the city easily weathered the conditions the caused the Donora Smog without even having to “turn on its downtown streetlights in the daytime.” The real legacy of the Renaissance, however, was more complicated and in key ways reflected a continuation of earlier patterns of political economy and ecology rather than the clean break from the past described by the region’s boosters. After all, the same executives at U.S. Steel and the region’s other industrial corporations who celebrated the blue skies now visible from their offices in the Golden Triangle also depended on profits gained from the ongoing pollution of mill towns like Donora. Similarly, the construction of dams and rural parks relied on the projection of urban political power in much the same way that urban capital had already rearranged rural landscapes in the form of mines and coking ovens. Nevertheless, the clear successes of Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership established a new framework for metropolitan development in the 1950s and 1960s that helped compensate for the continued stagnation of the Steel Valley’s industrial economy even as it privileged new commuter suburbs and select urban neighborhoods.³

      Steel Valley in Crisis

      The economic forces that had drawn German immigrant Valentine Reuther to the Steel Valley were shifting even by the 1920s to growing industrial centers in other areas. When Reuther’s son Walter left for Detroit in 1927, he was making forty-two cents an hour at the Wheeling Corrugating Company. Walter and his friend Leo Hores reached Detroit on the last Saturday in February 1927 and were met by family friends, his brother Victor later recalled. On Sunday they found a boarding house and on Monday afternoon they were hired at Briggs Body Works in Highland Park. Within a few months Walter secured a job as a tool and die maker at Ford Motor Company making $1.05 an hour by using the skills he had gained as an apprentice in Wheeling. While his parents, older brother Ted, and younger sister Christine remained in Wheeling for the rest of their lives, Walter’s two younger brothers soon followed him to Detroit, where they were instrumental in the formation and rise of the United Auto Workers union.⁴

      The decision of the three Reuther brothers to leave Wheeling highlighted the region’s growing economic and environmental problems. Production in the mills did not falter during the 1920s, but the rate of growth in the heavy manufacturing sector, both nationally and in Pittsburgh, slowed following the boom period of the early twentieth century. There are multiple reasons for the region’s decline from industrial preeminence, including technological change that lessened geographical advantages, increased competition from other areas, and reduced demand for the types of products in which local firms increasingly specialized. The production of steel ingots and castings in southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, rose by over 450 percent between 1890 and 1910, but this rate of increase slowed to only 17 percent during the subsequent two decades. As a percentage of total national production, steel ingot capacity in the four-county Pittsburgh Industrial Area declined from 24.1 to 20.8 percent between 1920 and 1940, while its share of plate glass production collapsed from 54.9 percent in 1928 to 27.2 percent in 1940. One indicator of this loss of competitive advantage during the 1920s was the low growth rate for the total product value added by Pittsburgh manufacturers (6.6 percent) compared to the national average (27.1 percent), the total increase in the 33 largest industrial cities (29.6 percent), and the increases for Cleveland (27.2), Detroit (28.6), and Chicago (52.6). While the expansion of other industries such as window glass, electrical equipment, and food production offset losses in basic manufacturing to an extent, the Steel Valley was clearly losing ground to competitors.⁵

      The region’s over-specialization in a relatively few heavy industrial products and a concentration of the labor force in large mills distinguished it from other areas of the country. Because of the lack of flat land amid the rugged terrain, it also contained some of the nation’s most extensively developed factory sites, with many examples of continuous occupancy, even by a single firm, for several generations. In short, this meant that a disproportionate number of workers in the region were employed by a relatively small number of corporations operating increasingly aged facilities. This was not necessarily a problem in and of itself. Weirton Steel, for example, aggressively adopted new technology, moved into new product lines, and increased employment even as new records in ingot production kept it among the nation’s most important heavy industrial firms. At the much larger U.S. Steel, however, management’s business model focused on maintaining stable and fixed prices on steel through monopolistic practices, such as pools and a “gentlemen’s agreement” to respect competitors’ territory. When chairman Elbert Gary forced out president Charles Schwab, formerly one of Carnegie’s top lieutenants, U.S. Steel lost an important connection to its roots in Pittsburgh even as the company broke ground in 1905 on an enormous new integrated mill near Chicago that would soon bear Gary’s name. Population figures for the metropolitan core paralleled this loss of relative industrial power during the 1920s and 1930s, as Allegheny County expanded by a meager 19 percent compared to 33 percent in Cook (Chicago), 71 percent in Wayne (Detroit), and 197 percent in Los Angeles counties.⁶

      Rural communities in the Steel Valley, too, faced serious economic problems that were also intimately related to environmental degradation. The region’s mines encountered increasing competition from oil and natural gas as well as the development of new coalfields in southern West Virginia and Kentucky. Broader changes in agriculture made already precarious small farms increasingly untenable, even as mining companies systematically replaced humans with machines allowing higher output with fewer miners. Between 1904 and 1944, Joseph Joy, founder of Pittsburgh-based Joy Mining Machinery, filed 106 patents on various types of mining equipment, from cutting and loading machines to drills and conveyers. As a consequence, mining employment in southwestern Pennsylvania dropped from a high of 82,000 in 1914 to only 46,000 in 1940. The decline in the need for workers also came from the rising use of surface mining, with technological advances in excavating equipment that dramatically increased the ability to reach deeper coal seams even as they left behind overturned and unproductive fields, enormous cliffs known as high walls, and a variety of other environmental problems. The United Electric Coal Company began using two electric power shovels in a mine near Steubenville in 1913, and five years later six surface mines were operating near the city. The world’s largest electric shovel began mining in the area in 1935, and between 1921 and 1945 coal stripping in twenty-two eastern Ohio counties affected nearly thirty thousand acres.⁷

      The Great Depression was longer and harsher in the Steel Valley than in other regions as falling demand and the economies of scale on which the coal and steel industries depended produced a glut in the national market. The nation’s steel mills ran at only one-third capacity by 1933, with the result that U.S. Steel did not have a single full-time employee anywhere in the country. When companies idled workers and scaled back corporate welfare programs, the uneasy peace between labor and management that had dominated industrial relations since the 1890s began to falter. The election of Progressive Republican Gifford Pinchot as Pennsylvania governor in 1931 and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 further diminished the ability of employers to completely dominate the social landscape. The United Mine Workers (UMW) under John L. Lewis, whom Roosevelt appointed to his Labor Advisory Board in 1933, was the first to take advantage of the new situation. The union gambled on a massive membership drive with the slogan, “The President wants you to join the UMW!” and regained nearly 300,000 members within a few months.⁸

      This rebirth of a unionization movement that had been severely weakened on the local level since the failure of the Homestead Strike and then devastated by the Great Steel Strike of 1919 had major ramifications for both labor and municipal politics. When the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) arrived in the Steel Valley in 1936, the ground had already been prepared by three years of organizing activity in the region. Despite nationwide resistance by employers, the CIO soon demonstrated its ability to halt production at a major corporation with a sit-down strike СКАЧАТЬ