Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
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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 at General Motors in Flint led by Wheeling natives Walter and Victor Reuther. U.S. Steel president Myron Taylor invited Lewis, who was also head of 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