Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ the CIO, to begin secret negotiations in January 1937—a process that initiated a top down approach to organizing that would define the subsequent relationship between the company and union leaders. The formal pact between U.S. Steel and its workers was signed on March 17, 1937, and led directly to a host of other labor agreements in the steel industry that continued without serious challenge for the next forty years.⁹

      On the other hand, Ernest Weir’s ability to control both the community and the company that bore his name demonstrated the continuation of the earlier pattern of industrial relations into the postwar period. As many as 10,000 Weirton Steel workers also struck in fall 1933, but Weir countered the threat of unionization with the same combination of corporate benevolence and violence against organizers used during the strike wave of 1919. When laborers at U.S. Steel and other companies “were happy … if you would get two or three days pay in two weeks,” Weir raised his wage scale by 15 percent and the company continued to produce at nearly full capacity. A “Security League” was created in 1935 to reinforce the company-controlled Employee Representation Plan (ERP), support management, and oppose the CIO, even as Weir increased wages to five dollars a day in 1937 to match similar rates in U.S. Steel’s new contract. Members of the Security League fostered community support through a series of parades designed “as an open protest against outside interference” by labor organizers who also faced continuous red-baiting. “WE DON’T WANT LEWIS OR HIS CIO,” proclaimed league-distributed placards. “WE ARE STEELMEN NOT MINERS. WE ARE SATISFIED AND SECURE. LET US ALONE.” Weir’s success in thwarting the union movement demonstrates the power of corporations to dominate the local political economy in the multitude of mill towns where they were the largest landowners, taxpayers, and employers.¹⁰

      Conversely, the relative success of labor unions in the 1930s came in tandem with the collapse of the Republican power structure in Pittsburgh. Democratic politicians had long reconciled themselves to minority party status in much of the region, even agreeing to deliver votes for Republican candidates in exchange for a share of the patronage spoils. The 1920s were a low point for the city’s Democrats and their chairman David Lawrence, with defeat following defeat in local elections. The trauma of the Great Depression, however, shook workers’ faith in the city’s machine politicians, as Father James Cox of Pittsburgh’s Old St. Patrick’s Church led an “army” of the unemployed on a march to Washington, D.C., in January 1932 seeking unemployment assistance. Political infighting among the Republican candidates as well as federal patronage garnered after Roosevelt’s victory later that year allowed Democrats to win the city’s mayoral race as well as all five open positions on the city council. Republicans carried only seven wards—their worst defeat ever and an embarrassment from which the party would not recover. Lawrence, who played an important role in Roosevelt’s nomination, later had a meteoric rise in the party, serving as mayor from 1946 to 1959 and Pennsylvania governor from 1959 to 1963. “For Pittsburgh’s Republicans,” historian Bruce Stave concluded, “the advent of the New Deal signified ‘the Last Hurrah’; for the city’s Democrats it sounded the first Hallelujah.”¹¹

      World War II was a boom time for Steel Valley communities, but as residents began to make their plans for the future, the troubling trends of the late 1920s and 1930s appeared set to continue into the postwar period. Despite a wartime industrial resurgence, between 1940 and 1960, a period when the nation as a whole grew by 35 percent, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Jefferson County (Steubenville) gained only 15 percent and 1 percent respectively, while Ohio County (Wheeling) actually lost more than 6 percent of its population. In confronting these problems, the nascent coalition between Pittsburgh’s Republican businessmen and Democratic politicians was part of a broader trend toward community planning that emerged from Progressive-era attempts to scientifically manage the urban environment. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., for example, saw in his 1910 redevelopment proposal, Pittsburgh Main Thoroughfares and the Down Town District, an opportunity to demonstrate “practical city planning” in a community that would be divided efficiently into “healthful … residence districts” connected by “ample streets” to separate “districts for retail and wholesale trade, manufacture and commerce.” This modernist framework designed for the automobile was also the defining characteristic of New York engineering czar Robert Moses’s 1939 Arterial Plan for Pittsburgh. Moses’s proposal, funded by Howard Heinz, Ernest Weir, R. K. Mellon, and the region’s other elite planning enthusiasts, went so far as to advocate scrapping the city’s iconic trolleys in favor of buses and urged that “traffic science—not emotion or aesthetics should govern improvement decisions.” Taken together the two reports formed the guiding framework for the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association (PRPA), a group headed by financier Mellon that subsequently served as the planning arm of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.¹²

      The shock of the Great Depression and concerns about the postwar transition to a peacetime economy forced some among the conservative economic elite to rethink their opposition to direct government involvement in urban redevelopment. On the state level, the Pennsylvania legislature followed New York and Massachusetts by creating a Post-War Planning Commission in 1943 to coordinate the transition from war to peacetime among the various state departments. That May, PRPA director Wallace K. Richards and Robert E. Doherty, president of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, sponsored a “Citizens Conference on the Postwar Situation for Allegheny County” aimed at fostering a successful transition to a peacetime economy and “the resuscitation of a devitalized and deteriorating metropolitan area” through comprehensive, coordinated planning. Soon renamed the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, the group received the backing of Mellon, who served as Pittsburgh’s spokesperson on the state commission. In December 1945, Mellon’s support in turn enabled the Allegheny Conference to secure recognition as the primary voice of the private sector in public policy formulation for southwestern Pennsylvania.¹³

      Earlier business-sponsored civic organizations in the Steel Valley had a narrow view of the role of government, but the industrialists and financiers at the helm of the Allegheny Conference shifted to a limited endorsement of public sector intervention. This position reflected a growing acceptance among business groups nationally of government’s role in areas traditionally viewed as the private domain. In St. Louis, for example, a new generation of corporate executives joined urban politicians, civic organizations, and construction unions in a program to stem industrial flight from the city through expanded use of eminent domain to clear “blighted areas,” implementation of smoke control legislation, and increased public works spending on highways and physical infrastructure. Pittsburgh attorney Arthur Van Buskirk, who served as deputy administrator of the Lend Lease program during World War II, was typical of this new generation of civic-minded business leaders. “A Republican, he was nonetheless in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania, a liberal,” recalled Leland Hazard, an attorney and a fellow member of the Allegheny Conference’s executive committee. Buskirk “could live with the New Deal when others in his era spent their time in futile fulmination.”¹⁴

      The success of the Pittsburgh Renaissance was due to the nature of the city’s economic and political structure, a strong partnership between business elites and municipal officials, and the ability to present the group’s program as serving the public interest. By the end of the 1940s, the Conference’s executive committee included the presidents and chief executive officers of the region’s major commercial, financial, and manufacturing interests. Members reached decisions by consensus, with the result that policies, when decided upon, had the backing of the bulk of the business community. Between 1943 and 1947, the group developed a program, endorsed by the region’s largest corporations that focused mainly on rebuilding and stimulating investment in downtown Pittsburgh. Public officials agreed with this approach, believing that the corporate offices and other business in the “Golden Triangle” furnished a tax base that supported the remainder of the city and anchored the region’s manufacturing interests. Before urban infrastructure redevelopment of any kind could take place, however, both the Lawrence administration and the leaders of the Allegheny Conference had to face the environmental consequences of industrialization in a city with a dismal national reputation and little record of successful coordinated action. Indeed, when noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright СКАЧАТЬ