Free The Company Town by Hardy Green Page B

industry executives held for the purpose of praising themselves (and fixing prices), Gary announced: “The man who has the intelligence and the success and the capital to employ labor has placed upon himself voluntarily a responsibility with reference to his men. We have the advantage of them in education, in experience, in wealth, in many ways, and we must make it absolutely certain under all circumstances that we treat them right.” Such a responsibility, it almost goes without saying, did not extend to permitting unionism. There, too, a matter of principle was at stake, the steel companies argued before a congressional investigation of the steel industry: No man’s right to work should be abridged by a requirement that he join any organization. 19
    During the run-up to the war, maintaining wages rather than cutting them had become a consensus policy within the industry, even during
financial downswings. The question of unionism seemed largely moot: Outside of U.S. Steel, all steel mills were nonunion after 1908, and Gary’s corporation adopted a policy of starving the union out, regularly idling mills where the union had any membership. The war, however, changed all that. In Gary, 11,896 men were employed in steelmaking by 1917. Although wages increased by 21 percent by 1916, growing demand for steel first from Europe and then from the U.S. government led profits to double, then to triple. A persistent scarcity of labor and of living space—Gary experienced a shortfall of 4,000 housing units, according to its Daily Tribune —led to worker restiveness and even a revival of the Amalgamated Association. By war’s end, that organization had a membership of 15,000, up from 6,500 in 1914 . 20
    Organized labor seemed to have an ally in the Wilson administration. Its National War Labor Board—which primarily sought labor peace to guarantee industrial productivity—asserted that workers had a right to organize in unions without interference. It ordered Bethlehem Steel to stop blocking the union and to organize shop committees. As a halfway measure and in what they hoped the government would regard as a show of good faith, the companies threw ever more energy into organizing employee-representation plans, notably at Midvale, Bethlehem, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, Inland Steel, and more. U.S. Steel held back from employee-representation plans, saying that its wage policies and welfare spending, which had tripled during the war, should be sufficient to satisfy employees. Meanwhile, companies stepped up their patriotic-propaganda efforts: Illinois Steel asked its workers to sign a “pledge of patriotism” vowing to oppose disruptive actions; flag days and patriotic signs were common; in Gary, there were dramatic patriotic parades through the streets, one featuring 25,000 marchers and delegations from Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Serb, Croat, and Russian societies. 21
    By 1919, with the war over, the workers were ready to reap the reward for their patriotic efforts. The American Federation of Labor’s National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers demanded improved wages, an eight-hour day and a six-day week, abolition of the twenty-four-hour shift, and collective bargaining. It set a strike date of September 22.
    Reporting on how steelmakers were gearing up for the strike in the Pittsburgh area, the New York World wrote: “It is as though preparations
were made for actual war.” The sheriff of Allegheny County mobilized 5,000 deputies on the eve of the strike, and 3,000 more were sworn in at McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Publicly, steel company executives said they expected few workers to back the walkout. However, by the union’s count, 365,000 men, or perhaps half of U.S. steelworkers and many more than the companies expected, responded, shutting down about half of the industry.
    Across the land, police broke up workers’ meetings and beat and jailed strikers, and the