Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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shops that employed many thousands of workers. Railroad exhaust was a major contributor to air pollution, particularly in those urban areas where trains idled for loading and unloading. This dense, acrid smoke helped create the “shabby, dirty and altogether unsightly” hillsides above many of the region’s communities that, according to Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., were contributing largely to the “slatternly conditions” in which so many of Pittsburgh’s working people were “compelled to live.”11
The lack of any sort of environmental regulation during the heyday of the Steel Valley meant that companies were largely free to dispose of industrial wastes as they saw fit, which created a legacy of environmental contamination extending throughout the region. As the introduction of byproduct ovens suggests, managers made decisions according to cost principles and, when corporations found it profitable, materials were recycled. Executives at Carnegie Steel were legendary for engineering waste disposal systems that maximized the use of each product. In one famous example at the Edgar Thomson Works, executive Henry Phipps found that flue-cinder and the tiny pieces of high-grade steel that were scoured off by rolling machines could be reused at another point in the iron-making process. In both cases, he ordered the “waste” to be recycled and purchased the unwanted material from competitors at a discount. On the other hand, when waste recovery was not economically valuable, plant managers allowed particulates, slag and gases to follow their natural course into the river, slag heap, or atmosphere. Of the total industrial waste produced by the mills, only a small portion went into landfills on company property as smokestacks and pipes dispersed pollution beyond the mill’s borders into the community’s air and water. Even offloading materials from barges and trains created vast amounts of dust around the huge stockpiles of coal and iron. When managers attempted to control the dust problem by wetting the piles, particles suspended in the water passed untreated into the environment.12
Those most affected by industrial pollution were the workers themselves. Laborers encountered a wide range of work environments inside mines and mills: dust almost inevitably led to breathing problems and a lifespan often shortened by the dreaded black lung; coke workers faced blasts of thick smoke and fumes when they opened the doors to insert or remove materials; and mill hands in open-hearth furnaces sometimes had to fasten themselves together with rope to navigate their way through clouds of particulates. Whether through constant exposure to environmental hazards or tending “the monstrous crucibles of molten iron and steel, the fast-moving cranes, the great cutting machines, the locomotives and railroad cars,” industrial employment “was a natural place for injury and death.” In an age before occupational safety requirements, workers’ compensation laws, and social security benefits, employment in the region’s mills, mines, and railroads crystallized the relationship between social and environmental inequalities for contemporary social reformers. “Often I was told by workmen of forty and forty-five that they had been at their best at thirty years of age, and that at thirty-five they had begun to feel a perceptible decline in strength,” explained sociologist John Fitch in 1910. “The superintendents and foremen are alert to detecting weakness of any sort, and if a man fails appreciably, he expects discharge.”13
The integrated system of coal, steel, and rail that formed the basis of the region’s economic life thus imperiled the lives of its inhabitants even as it generated enormous wealth. Boosters and industrialists, labor leaders and politicians, locals and visitors alike built layer by layer a cultural framework of human triumph over nature that paralleled the physical processes transforming minerals into finished goods and industrial pollution. The body of the “Man of Steel” as well as the numerous sites of production were symbolically recreated time and again, “held motionless,” in the words of one commentator, “while those who wished to understand Pittsburgh … charted its strengths and weaknesses.” This dynamic was captured perfectly by Reuben Gold Thwaites who found the essence of the region in the “whirr and bang of milling industries,” “black offal of the pit,” “sooty smoke belched from hundreds of stacks,” and amid it all “a ninety-cent [per hour] man working in a place … nearer to the mediaeval notions of hell … than anything imagined by Dante.” It was from this foundation that residents forged their individual and community identities even as the area’s natural and built landscapes constrained development in ways that would later complicate the region’s economic transition.14
Forging Community
The transformation of the Upper Ohio Valley into the Steel Valley reshaped the daily rhythms, identities, and demographics of the region’s residents, embedding the social structure of the Gilded Age in the region’s politics, economy, and environment. While corresponding in general to the sequence of city building in other communities, Pittsburgh had important differences that affected the timing and complicated the process of metropolitan development. At the same time, industrialists effectively wielded the power to shape the material and social environments in ways that limited the ability of workers to organize collectively and made many communities dependent on corporate benefaction for basic services. Following a long period of bitter labor strife, this unequal relationship resulted in deeply entrenched social inequalities and increased calls for political reform. If James Parton’s 1868 description of the region as “Hell with the lid taken off” was meant to evoke the technological sublime, its use by muckraker Lincoln Steffens in his 1904 Shame of the Cities reflected the struggles of an “angry and ashamed [community] that has tried to be free and failed.”15
The process of industrialization produced a range of social changes embedded in the natural and built infrastructure, but the region’s topography itself presented a host of formidable challenges that raised costs, hindered institution building, and constrained development. Landscape architect and planner Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., observed in 1911 that “no city of equal size in America or perhaps the world, is compelled to adapt its growth to such difficult conditions of high ridges, deep valleys and precipitous slopes.” The ruggedness of the landscape also lent itself to the creation of neighborhoods with strong, often ethnic-based, identities and boundaries. Whether in a new mill town or a more established neighborhood, the spatial layout of housing increasingly reflected the hierarchy of the workplace, with unskilled workers occupying the dirtiest, noisiest, and cheapest housing in the river valleys, followed by skilled workers, foremen, and finally executives in their hillside mansions. As the pace of industrialization accelerated, new types of immigrants, including southern and eastern Europeans, Christian Syrians, and Maronites (Christian Lebanese), as well as smaller numbers of African Americans poured into the cities. Wheeling nearly tripled its 1870 population, peaking at around 62,000 in 1930, while Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) grew from 262,000 to more than 1.3 million during the same period.16
In addition to personnel policies that pitted various ethnic groups against one another, industrialists used political tools to more effectively control their workforces beyond the factory gates. From the 1860s to the 1890s, ironworkers and coal miners developed some of the nation’s most powerful labor unions, including the Sons of Vulcan (1858), the Knights of Labor (1869), the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (1876), and the United Mine Workers (1890). Skilled workers, such as iron puddlers, heaters, and rollers, enjoyed considerable autonomy, and their unions followed a craft model that often broke down along racial and ethnic lines as well as skill level. As Andrew Carnegie, B. F. Jones and the Steel Valley’s other industrialists tightened their control of workplace processes, however, the integration of coal, iron, and steel production in increasingly large mines and mills presented challenges that union organizers were able to overcome only by expanding their notions of solidarity.17
The introduction of new technologies, such as the Bessemer converter, lessened the importance of workers whose expertise had been acquired through years of workplace training. Without the need for artisanal labor, during strikes employers were able to introduce new workers, often of different ethnic or racial backgrounds, who were frequently either excluded from or uninterested in joining the existing unions. Even when unionists responded by building broader organizations, solidarity still had its limits for workers who defined their shared interest as often in terms of ethnic or racial prejudices as along class lines. Notwithstanding the Amalgamated’s emphasis on inter-craft solidarity, for example, the organization did not allow blacks to join segregated lodges until 1881, nor did they allow common laborers admittance