The Socio-economic Causes of the Steel Strikes in Pittsburgh
When the Carnegies arrived in 1848, Pittsburgh was already a bustling industrial city. But the city had begun to pay an environmental price for its success. The downtown had been gutted by fire in 1845; already the newly constructed buildings were so blackened by soot that they were indistinguishable from older ones. Industrial waste fouled the rivers and the air hung across the city like a thick black curtain.
Any accurate description of Pittsburgh at that time would be set down as a piece of the grossest exaggeration,” Carnegie wrote, setting aside his usually optimistic tone. “The smoke permeated and penetrated everything…. If you washed your face and hands they were as dirty as ever in an hour. The soot gathered in the hair and irritated the skin, and for a time … life was more or less miserable.”
Often described as “hell with the lid off,” Pittsburgh by the turn of the century was recognized as the center of the new industrial world. A British economist described its conditions: “Grime and squalor unspeakable, unlimited hours of work, ferocious contests between labor and capital, the fiercest commercial scrambling for money literally sweated out of the people, the utter absorption by high and low of every faculty in getting and grabbing, total indifference to all other ideals and aspirations.”
But if Pittsburgh had become a focus of unrestrained capitalism, it also drove the American economy. And to the men who ran them, the city’s industries meant not just dirty air and water, but progress. Pittsburgh’s furnaces symbolized a world roaring toward the future, spurred onward by American ingenuity and omnipotent technology.
To those who worked in Carnegie’s mills and in the nation’s factories and sweatshops, the lives of the millionaires seemed immodest indeed. An economist in 1879 noted “a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution.” Violent strikes and riots wracked the nation through the turn of the century. The middle class whispered fearfully of “carnivals of revenge.”
The frustrations of Gilded Age workers transformed the labor movement into a vigorous, if often violent, force. Workers saw men like Andrew Carnegie getting fabulously rich, and raged at being left behind. With their own labor the only available bargaining chip, workers frequently went on strike. The 1880’s witnessed almost ten thousand strikes and lockouts; close to 700,000 workers struck in 1886 alone.
The results were often explosive-none more than the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. When the B&O Railroad cut wages, workers staged spontaneous strikes, which spread nationwide. In Baltimore, the state militia fired on strikers, leaving 11 dead and 40 wounded. In Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie’s mentor, Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, urged that strikers be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.” In Philadelphia, strikers battled local militia, burning much of the downtown area before the federal troops intervened. The wage reductions remained in place, and the War Department created the National Guard to put down future disturbances.
Industrialists took a harder line against unions, but the labor movement grew. In 1877, three national unions existed; in 1880 there were eighteen. For many Americans, unionization fed a fear that “barbarians” had invaded the nation. During a Cleveland steel strike, violent confrontations led local newspapers to attack the “un-American” Polish workers as “Ignorant and degraded whelps,” “Foreign devils,” and “Communistic scoundrels [who] revel in robberies, bloodshed, and arson.”
In 1886, a national strike called for changing the standard workday from 12-hours to eight. At 12,000 companies nationwide, 340,000 workers stopped work. In Chicago police were trying to break up a large labor meeting in Haymarket Square, when a bomb exploded without warning, killing a police officer. Police fired into the crowd, killing one and wounding many more. As a result of the riot, four labor organizers were hanged.
The hangings demoralized the national labor movement and energized management. By 1890, Knights of Labor membership had plummeted by ninety percent. The 1892 battle at Carnegie’s Homestead mill became a model for stamping out strikes: hold firm and call in government troops for support.
The brutal depression of 1893-94 triggered some of the worst labor conflicts in the country’s history, including the strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company. When George Pullman slashed wages and hiked rents in his company town, a national strike and boycott was called on all railways carrying Pullman cars. Railroad traffic ground to a halt as 260,000 workers struck, and battles with state and federal troops broke out in 26 states. The strike ultimately failed, its leaders imprisoned and many strikers blacklisted.
The labor movement lay in shambles, and would not rise again for nearly fifty years. Although workers would find new strength in the next century, they would never again pose the same broad challenge to the claims of capital.
