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CHAPTER 2

Mines and Mills

In 1909, Pittsburgh industrialist Ernest T. Weir purchased 105 acres of West Virginia farmland overlooking the Ohio River across from Steubenville, thirty-five miles west of Pittsburgh and thirty miles north of Wheeling. Weir was the son of immigrants from Northern Ireland and, before striking out on his own, had worked his way up to general manager of U.S. Steel’s tin plate mill in Monessen. The new mill site was at the intersection of river and rail transportation with good connections to Pittsburgh and national markets. It also featured a ready supply of cheap land and cheap fuel from nearby coal mines and oil wells. Proximity to Steubenville via a new bridge provided Weir with a pool of workers, while the older city also allowed access to goods and services, functioning as a downtown marketplace for the new factory town. “As we were walking over the vacant fields and looking over the land,” Weir declared of his first visit to the site, “it was already a settled matter that we would build a completely integrated steel plant.” The company’s first facility was in operation before the end of 1909 and consisted of ten mills. Within a few years the Weirton Steel Company had fifty mills and was second only to U.S. Steel in production of tin plate.¹

During its heyday between 1880 and 1920, the Steel Valley developed a set of social and environmental patterns that, while similar to other industrial areas, yielded unique challenges that require a nuanced analysis in order to understand subsequent attempts at regional economic restructuring. Just as with the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant in Detroit or the Googleplex in the San Francisco Bay Area, Weirton’s mills existed as nodes in a larger district where companies both competed over and shared a common labor force, natural resources, management expertise, and technical innovations. While cities with flatter topography like Chicago and St. Louis developed rings of manufacturing suburbs extending out from the central city, the dearth of flat land in the Upper Ohio Valley resulted in dense urban-industrial areas that snaked along the narrow riverbanks leaving large parts of the higher elevations relatively unpopulated. Further, Pittsburgh’s status as both a manufacturing center and an energy capital meant that metropolitan development included an industrialized countryside with pockets of urban-like densities occurring around company-controlled mine sites. Exploring the process of steel making from mine to mill provides a clearer understanding of the ways in which the values of the Gilded Age were embedded in this landscape of production.

As the formation of Weirton suggests, dispersed industrial development, a rugged landscape, and strong kinship networks, bolstered by employment policies designed to splinter class unity along ethnic lines, encouraged the formation of small tightly knit communities divided among hundreds of separate political jurisdictions. Weak civic administrations were expected to keep taxes low and serve the needs of industry, while corporate paternalism and the repression of organized labor undercut challenges to the existing economic and political system. As late as the 1960s, outsiders remarked on the continuance of a “strange ethnonationalism” among the various immigrant communities, which made it difficult to achieve any sort of political consensus. Despite annexation campaigns and attempts at government reform during the Progressive era, understanding this history of “perpetrated factionalism that approaches total chaos” is vital for interpreting attempts at public-private coalition building in later decades. Of the region’s older cities, only Pittsburgh was able to overcome this political splintering and embark on a meaningful program of urban planning and infrastructure development under the infamous political machine of Christopher Magee and William Flinn. Indeed, the creation of new public parks, and especially the expansion of the University of Pittsburgh in the hilltop civic center of Oakland, provided the first glimmer that Pittsburgh’s destiny might be more than that of the “Smoky City.”²

Coal, Steel, and Rail

The process of industrial production shaped the social and physical landscape of the Steel Valley, forming a common set of opportunities and challenges for the region’s residents. A ton of steel required approximately a ton and a half of iron ore, a half ton of coke, and a quarter of a ton of limestone, not to mention a few other elements, vast quantities of water, more coal to power the railroads and barges that ferried minerals from the mines, and electricity (also produced from either coal or natural gas) to run the mills. Similar to the region’s other major corporations, Carnegie Steel and its subsidiary, Frick Coke Company, owned a number of so-called captive mines that were transferred to U.S. Steel at its founding in 1901. The Leith Mine & Coke Works in the Connellsville region, for example, began operation in the 1880s to produce coke for the Joliet Steel Company near Chicago. Frick bought the mine in 1889 and upgraded operations, building the first steel tipple in the region to hoist cars loaded with coal up the shaft and lower workers into the mine. Despite some geological characteristics that made it “a hard one to manage” according to one mine inspector, the Leith mine was easily connected to Homestead and the rest of Carnegie’s steel empire by both the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio Railroads. By the turn of the century, more than three hundred people worked in the mine and the adjacent coking facilities, producing nearly 120,000 tons of coke annually.³

As with iron and steel manufacturing, consolidation and vertical integration produced dramatic changes in the way coal was mined, particularly in large companies. Mine owners worked to replace what had been essentially underground workshops controlled by skilled miners with new management practices aimed at lowering costs and controlling the production process. Mines became much more hierarchical spaces, with individual workers forming parts of interdependent, coordinated, and carefully supervised groups. Standard practice throughout the region was to divide the actual extraction of coal among specialized workers, including cutters (operated mechanical cutting machines along the coal seam), loaders (loaded coal by shovel into mine cars), and shooters (used dynamite to blast coal from the front of the seam) as well as myriad assistants, helpers, and other subcategories. Animal or mechanically powered coal cars then hauled the coal to the mine shaft and up to the coal tipple where it was sorted and weighed by supervisors.⁴

Upon reaching the surface, coking coal, such as that produced at the Leith Mine, was processed in one of the “beehive” ovens dotting the area. Over 40,000 such ovens produced 18 million tons annually; this amounted to 60 percent of the nation’s coke produced in a region only fifty miles long and five miles wide. Workers loaded the coal and processed coke onto train cars and shipped them to blast furnaces that created raw or “pig” iron. For the Homestead Works, this initial process occurred in the Carrie Furnaces, across the Monongahela River in the mill town of Rankin, “a small bleak place,” according to one observer. Each day three hundred railroad cars of coal and coke, limestone, iron ore from the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, and other materials passed through the Carrie complex, which was dominated by the furnaces themselves—four steel behemoths more than two hundred feet high—each with the capacity to turn out sixty-five hundred tons of iron a day. Once there, the ore, coke, and limestone were hoisted to the top of the brick lined towers, while enormous stoves used coal to heat air to three thousand degrees and then blasted it into the bottom of the stacks. The downward movement of the ore, coke, and limestone, and the upward movement of hot gases refined the iron through a series of chemical reactions. Every three or four hours, workers extracted the molten iron from the furnace, as well as the heating process residue called slag.⁵

Even by the turn of the century, the dearth of flat land that forced both railroad lines and enormous mills to be located in the narrow river valleys required expensive and novel infrastructure to adapt the landscape to the needs of industry. From the Carrie Furnaces, for example, the molten iron was poured into huge cigar-shaped cars and went back across the river to the Homestead Works on a “hot metal bridge” that opened on New Year’s Eve, 1900. Once inside the mill, the iron was transferred to steel ladles and transported by enormous cranes to the open-hearth furnaces where it cooked in intense gas heat and hot air with a mixture of limestone and steel scrap. The men who worked at the tapping hole, where the steel flowed from the hearth into a giant ladle, wore thick protective coats, dark goggles, and heavy leather boots for protection from the intense heat. After the mixture had cooked for eight to ten hours depending on the type of steel needed, the skilled melter overseeing the process ordered a sample to be taken. If the molten metal was judged ready, workers used a long steel lance with a dynamite charge on the end to blow out the tapping hole and release the red hot metal. The slag floating on the surface was siphoned away leaving pure steel that was then poured into molds, where it solidified into ingots the size of a house.⁶

Once the raw steel cooled, workers reheated it until malleable and sent it to the primary mills where the ingots were rolled into semi-finished forms or to the forge division where they were crushed into shape by enormous presses on the way to becoming gun turrets, railroad axles, ship propeller shafts, and other finished products. From the primary mills, the steel shapes were taken to the finishing mills and rolled into plates, beams, pilings, or railroad wheels and sheared to the desired lengths. Workers then loaded finished products onto railroad cars or barges that traveled to consumers around the world. While it was only one of dozens of mills throughout the region, by the end of World War II the Homestead Works alone could churn out annually 2 million tons of pig iron; 4 million tons of steel ingots; 1 million tons of blooms; 2.7 million tons of slabs; 1 million tons of beams, pilings, and other structural products; 1.75 million tons of plates; 10,000 tons of forgings; 75,000 tons of wheels and other circular sections; 50,000 tons of axles; and 40,000 tons of fabricated products.⁷

Each step of the production process also produced solid, liquid, and airborne wastes that quickly found their way into the natural environment, including the bodies of workers and nearby residents. At the base of the production process, coal is composed of water, carbon, and smaller amounts of other materials, including hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur. When mining disrupts natural groundwater systems, the interaction of water and air with coal generates sulfuric acid that is carried off through gravity drainage or pumped out of shafts. Because the Ohio River watershed is naturally alkaline, the region’s streams diluted pollution from early mining operations. As coal production increased in the late nineteenth century, however, the self-purification capacity of streams and major rivers was overwhelmed. Changes in water color revealed the first signs of acid degradation as streams became deep red or brown from the iron oxide. By 1900, several Ohio River tributaries, including the Monongahela and Youghiogheny that flowed near the Leith Mine were “usually acidic” and increasingly endangered aquatic life.⁸

But the most visible byproduct of the mining process in the Connellsville region was the smoke from the coke ovens. “It takes a fine summer morning to see what the … valley is like,” reported one resident. “Uniontown [is] sprawled in the flat in the foreground, Leith ovens smoking busily in the fields to the right … and the long ranks of Continental No. 1 ovens far away in the middle.”⁹ Coke production was a dirty business, with the frequent moving and handling of coal dispersing large amounts of dust. Furthermore, even a well-built beehive oven converted only 70 percent of each ton of coal into coke. This meant that the other 30 percent of suspended carbon particles, tars, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide escaped from the ovens in the form of smoke and noxious fumes. When workers doused the baked coal with water to stop the chemical process, the resulting steam lifted tiny coke particles into the air, while the used water containing coke residue, ammonia, and phenol drained into nearby streams. After World War I, as coke production moved from beehive ovens at the mine mouth to by-product ovens at the mills, the environmental effects of coke production moved from the rural periphery to the industrialized river valleys and U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works earned a reputation as one of the largest contributors to the region’s air pollution problems. “All that is left is this desolation,” declared Duquesne University biologist Emmanuel Sillman while standing on a barren hillside overlooking Clairton in 1971. “The killer is sulfur dioxide.”¹⁰

As imposing a presence as mines and mills were on the Steel Valley’s landscape, the railroad had an even more widespread, immediate, and intimate impact on the region’s residents. Transportation infrastructure was omnipresent, particularly in the narrow confines of the river valleys and central cities. “The railroads blanketed the city,” explained one recent study, “tunneling through the hills, bridging the rivers and ravines and usurping the riverbanks.” The Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, was four-tracked throughout much of the region, combined with massive and strategically located freight and switching yards, roundhouses, and repair 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 until 1889. Indeed, it was in the mines and not the mills where labor organizers enjoyed the most success in building a true industrial union; the United Mine Workers organized all underground workers regardless of specialty. Despite the challenges posed by technological change and ethnic prejudice, in 1882 a strike by the Amalgamated Union at the newly built Homestead Works forced the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Company to sign a contract with the union. A year later, the bankrupt company sold the mill to Andrew Carnegie, which prompted a decade of simmering labor tension even as production skyrocketed.¹⁸

The ascendance of the region’s large industrial corporations also resulted in close ties between executives and politicians on the local and state levels. Among the numerous benefits of generous financial support for members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly was the creation of the infamous Coal and Iron Police, which allowed companies to create their own private security forces. In 1888 and 1889, the deputization of hundreds of armed guards allowed Carnegie to introduce replacements and break the union at the Edgar Thomson Works. However, Amalgamated Union workers at Homestead had enough support from local politicians to resist such tactics until 1892. During a final attempt to break the union, on July 5, Henry Frick, Carnegie Steel’s chairman, attempted to land three hundred armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency on the shore of the Monongahela to protect plant access for replacement laborers. Locked-out workers and residents resisted, which resulted in a firefight that ended with bystanders killing several guards after they had surrendered. In the aftermath, the Pennsylvania governor sent in the entire state militia to support management, effectively breaking the strike and eventually the union.¹⁹

The battle at Homestead quickly became a “quasi-mythical epic,” in the words of one historian, captured for the world by at least 135 journalists that covered the story. Despite attempts by union organizers to halt the violence, most accounts focused on what Reuben Gold Thwaites described as “the attendant horrors [of] the mob.” This negative representation of workers provided the political cover employers needed to finally eliminate organized labor in Pittsburgh’s iron and steel industry. Over the next forty years, company officials and their allies in state and local government systematically rooted out union activity in mills, employed company spies to prevent worker organization, and undermined pro-labor candidates in local government. Anti-union sentiment among employers was especially strong in southwestern Pennsylvania and extended beyond the steel mills, with only one union, a carpenter’s local, remaining intact throughout the entire period. While few statistics are available, one scholar discovered that officials at six Carnegie mills fired at least 700 workers between 1896 and 1910 as a result of company spy reports.²⁰

A nuanced analysis of manufacturing in the Steel Valley also reveals intra-regional patterns that would later have significant ramifications for metropolitan development. On the one hand, Wheeling iron-makers, too, began vertical integration during the 1880s and adopted Bessemer converters, thereby eliminating some skilled occupations and placing more control over production in the hands of managers. Unable to match their better capitalized rivals in terms of basic steel and with a declining market for cut nails, however, the largest Wheeling firms diversified their operations into the production of pipes, tin plate, and other finished goods. The creation of the American Tin Plate Company in 1898 resulted in the acquisition of the tin milling operations of most of the large companies in Wheeling and Steubenville, with other area mills becoming parts of American Steel and Wire, American Steel Hoop Company, and National Tube Company. The 1901 creation of U.S. Steel from the merger of Carnegie’s empire with Federal Steel, National Steel, and a host of smaller companies marked the high point of this wave of consolidation. The new conglomeration also included eight plants on the Ohio River in and around Wheeling and Steubenville, marking the functional consolidation of operations throughout the entire Steel Valley.²¹

Because the production of tin plate remained a relatively skilled operation, mill workers in Wheeling and Steubenville remained unionized well after the industrial unions had been crushed in southwestern Pennsylvania. After Homestead, the Amalgamated Union essentially gave up trying to organize basic steel and focused their efforts on the less technologically advanced finishing mills. However, the creation of U.S. Steel resulted in a protracted industry-wide strike, with workers shutting down all eight plants along the Ohio that had been included in the new conglomeration. Strikers had a great deal of public support in local communities, with Mingo Junction, Ohio, Mayor W. J. O’Donnell stating flatly that he was “with the Amalgamated Association men in this fight to the end.” In spite of this support, the strike was in disarray by September as managers hurriedly trained new workers to take the place of skilled workers and the escalation of violence turned public opinion against organizers. In the years following the strike, the number of local union lodges in the Wheeling district fell from eighteen to about six, though this was still relatively more than along the Monongahela and other areas around the country.²²

The complex relationship between politics, union activity, and corporate growth set the stage for increasing community dependence on companies for a wide variety of municipal services, as industrial employers matched their anti-union activities at the workplace with a positive campaign to win the hearts and minds of the area’s residents. Many corporations instituted corporate welfare programs aimed at encouraging workers to identify with company interests. Beginning in 1903, U.S. Steel instituted a profit-sharing stock purchase program for employees and joined other large employers in instituting modest pension and accident benefits programs. A wave of steel strikes following World War I prompted further expansion of corporate welfare activities. “Good will is not a sentiment that trickles down from above,” declared Homestead Works superintendent L.C. Gardner. “It comes into existence at the bottom of the social structure. The place to cultivate good will is where it grows naturally—in the community, in the neighborhood, where people meet as folks.” Corporations held huge picnics and organized excursions to local amusement parks, such as Kennywood near Homestead and the White Palace in Wheeling, designed to cement the relationship between employees and management. Many companies fielded sports teams, with the Edgar Thomson Works fielding baseball, track and field, basketball, and boxing teams. Company coffers paid for playgrounds, community centers, government buildings, pools, libraries, and hospitals. Throughout the Steel Valley, local politicians said that if they needed something, they simply went to the mill superintendent or plant supervisor and asked for it.²³

Industrialists also used the process of municipal incorporation to limit their tax liability, exert additional control over workers, and maintain wealthy enclaves in which to enjoy the fruits of their investments. The mill site along the Ohio River across from Steubenville, for example, appealed to Ernest T. Weir not only for its accessibility and low cost, but also for its relative isolation from older urban centers. “We had something else in mind besides building an integrated plant,” Weir explained in 1955. Weirton was “deliberately selected and consciously planned as the location for both a steel plant and a community.” Cities, Weir believed, “if not breeders, were certainly magnifiers of discontent among workers.” “In a small town,” he continued, workers and management were friendly, and residents were often “relatives or close friends.” Weirton employees owned homes or rented private residences, but the company provided water and other services, paid for the police, controlled access to jobs, and dominated the local culture as well as the economy. In exchange for this paternalism, Weirton Steel employees remained steadfastly nonunion even after the great organizing drive of the CIO in the 1930s. By 1920, the area already counted 9,500 residents, and in 1940 its population of approximately 25,000 made it the largest unincorporated town in the nation.²⁴

In ways similar to Weirton Steel’s domination of its mill town, the famous libraries donated by Andrew Carnegie illustrate the community structure of the Steel Valley at its peak as well as the political discord that often simmered just below the surface. The Pittsburgh industrialist used the 1898 dedication ceremony for the Homestead Library to outline his program for the institution that was, in his words, “the gift of one workingman to other workingmen.” “May it indeed be between capital and labor,” he concluded, “an emblem of peace, reconciliation, confidence, harmony and union.”²⁵ Local boosters throughout the region supported construction of Carnegie libraries both as needed investments in their communities and also in recognition of the financial power wielded by corporate interests. Wheeling attorney Nelson Hubbard, whose father was a state representative and later U.S. Congressman, wrote the steel magnate explaining how his “distinctly … labor city” desperately needed “a permanent establishment which would be a constant power in building up [its] deficiencies.” On the eve of a referendum to raise the required 10 percent local contribution, the Daily Intelligencer also warned, “Mr. Carnegie is so situated that any affront to him at this time might in the end prove very disastrous to the physical welfare of Wheeling.” The editor then cited all the steel mills in the vicinity as evidence of the city’s dependence on heavy industry, concluding, “We desire Mr. Carnegie’s good will. He deserves our good will.”²⁶

Others, however, were less enthusiastic about the new cultural jewels scattered throughout metropolitan Pittsburgh. Despite Carnegie’s stated desire to bury “all regretful thoughts, all unpleasant memories,” Wheeling unionists, such as Valentine Reuther whose sons later helped start the United Auto Workers, denounced any facility provided by the villain of the Homestead Massacre, who had “blood on his hands.” Wheeling’s funding issue failed by a slim 201 votes after members of the local Carpenters’ and Joiners’ Union declared they wanted a library that would be Wheeling’s own, “not a Carnegie monument where a large portion of our citizens could only enter with repugnance and servility.” Wheeling’s failed attempt to obtain a Carnegie library also reveals the weakness of local governments in metropolitan Pittsburgh and their reliance on corporate largesse for infrastructure that elsewhere would have been a service of municipal authorities. “Wheeling needs a good library sadly,” Hubbard lamented. “The city is scarcely able to provide one, and is by no means willing to do what it can and should do in that direction. For the latter reason, especially, we shall probably do without the library until someone from outside thinks best to offer substantial help.”²⁷

Politics of Production

The political systems forged in the late nineteenth century largely stymied attempts at dealing effectively with the environmental and social consequences of the Steel Valley’s industrial economy. As in the earlier era, the relationship between local leaders and state politics in Harrisburg, Charleston, and Columbus continued to be of major importance in determining the fortunes of the region’s communities. Despite Wheeling’s increased influence in West Virginia politics during a period of Republican ascendance between 1895 and 1931, for instance, the ability of the community to attract investment from state government remained limited. West Virginia’s taxation structure remained heavily weighted in favor of the large coal and timber companies who controlled the sparsely settled counties that made up much of the state. Lacking a sufficient source of development funds, civic administration in Wheeling remained more like a nineteenth-century frontier town than a community with aspirations to become a modern metropolis. Because of the lack of taxing authority, fees charged for liquor licenses were so important to municipal coffers that it was virtually impossible to place any limitations on saloonkeepers, some of whom served as unofficial political bosses in the shifting alliances of the period. Wheeling gained a reputation as being “wide-open” for organized crime with “Big” Bill Lias and other gangsters controlling prostitution, gambling, and later bootlegged alcohol.²⁸

Things were even worse in Steubenville, which continued to decline in importance compared to other parts of Ohio even as the expansion of heavy industry brought with it the same social and environmental problems affecting other areas of the region. “Millmen are notoriously free spenders,” observed a local Protestant minister, who blamed the “new tide of immigration [that] infiltrated Steubenville: Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Ukrainians [for] the jaws of vice [that] closed upon the city.” Unlike Weirton and other communities dominated by a single company, civic elites in Steubenville had no effective means of imposing social control, particularly as municipal politics became increasingly fragmented along ethnic and class lines. “Other than a 40 percent Italian dominance, no other group has produced a leader capable of solidifying the sub-cultures into a cohesive community,” reported a later observer. “Although the area is economically above the Ohio median income level, sociologically they respond as fractionated lower-middle class isolates. Consequently, the dynamic necessary to coalesce the diverse interests into a unified progress effort, for all intent and purpose, does not exist.”²⁹

Political leaders in wealthier and more populous Pittsburgh, on the other hand, established strong ties to the state government, which generally obliged with enabling legislation whenever necessary. They also built a relatively stable municipal administration that, while machine-driven and corrupt, was able to effectively deliver services to constituents. Political rings organized a fragmented, neighborhood-controlled municipal government by means of a centralized, boss-dominated system that could tame tumultuous city councils and provide basic services from rudimentary street paving and lighting to park construction and the laying of sanitary sewer and water lines. Republican operative Christopher Magee and state legislator William Flinn created this type of boss system using patronage, payoffs, and political maneuvering to enrich themselves and their followers. After 1879, those seeking to do business with the city or to bank its assets paid a premium to the machine, while Flinn’s contracting business, Booth and Flinn, Ltd., received millions in padded contracts for roads and other public improvements as the lowest “responsible” bidder. The organization allied itself with the Mellon family and other bankers holding the city’s funds, owners of traction (streetcar) companies with city contracts, and railroad powers such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, as well as liquor and vice interests who could depend on city hall to turn a blind eye once the proper bribes were paid.³⁰

Under the reign of Magee and Flinn, Pittsburgh undertook a massive program of public improvements that far outstripped anything attempted in the Steel Valley’s other urban centers. The Magee-Flinn machine pursued a pro-growth agenda focused on delivering services to those middle and upper class neighborhoods most able to pay. They were supported in this endeavor by the Pennsylvania legislature, which created a new city charter in 1887 (denounced by the Democratic Pittsburgh Post as the “Mageesburgh” charter) that placed appointing power for municipal departments in the hands of the machine-controlled city council. The legislature then passed a bill authorizing Pittsburgh to provide for street improvements, sewers, sidewalks, and other public works that created a bonanza of lucrative projects ripe for patronage. While public works served a political function in providing the graft that oiled the cogs of the political machine, celebrated Public Works director Edward Bigelow (who was also Magee’s cousin) insisted on efficient administration of projects, resulting in the laying of 190 miles of new sewers, the grading of 94 miles of city streets, and the repairing of an additional 75 miles with asphalt or block stone between 1888 and 1899 alone.³¹

Despite these successes, ring-led development was inherently limited and provided services in such an uneven way that they actually tended to increase the social and environmental inequalities separating the middle and working classes. During the 1880s and 1890s, many new office and retail buildings rose in the region’s downtown areas as Henry Phipps, Andrew Mellon, Henry Frick and others competed to build the most distinctive and opulent buildings as symbols of their growing fortunes. Similarly, Union Deposit Bank president Dorhman Sinclair built a ten-story steel-and-concrete structure in 1915 hailed as “Steubenville’s First Skyscraper.” Middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in the cities as well as exclusive areas in the upper reaches of mill towns and railroad commuter suburbs benefitted the most from infrastructure development initiatives. In Pittsburgh, the burgeoning East End neighborhoods of Shadyside, Oakland, Homewood, and Highland Park were protected by their topography from the grit and soot of the industrialized river valleys and were the first to enjoy paved streets, municipal water and other benefits. “The old wards of our city,” explained Edward Bigelow in 1890, “are very rapidly being turned into manufacturing sites and thereby forcing the residents thereof to locate in the East End in outer wards. Having once established their homes there, they very naturally and very properly ask [for] such streets and sewer improvements as well as water supplies that will make their lives accessible and healthful.”³²

Early on, some labor leaders and others began advocating for reform of the political boss system. Not all residents of the river valleys could move, of course, and industrial expansion meant increasing crowding of working-class neighborhoods where political leaders could more easily placate residents with jobs and other personal favors. “Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination,” wrote newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken of Pittsburgh in its industrial heyday, “and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.” Until the 1890s, organized labor had a powerful presence throughout the Steel Valley, and just as skilled workers continued to exercise critical control over work processes in the mills so too did union leaders, both Republican and Democrat, who often served as town burgesses and other key officials. Labor leaders also teamed up with civic officials to push for improvements to the quality of life of working-class residents through public works spending. This was particularly notable in Wheeling, where Valentine Reuther and the Ohio Valley Trades and Labor Assembly helped lead a decades long push for a municipal filtration system that would provide “water fit to drink [and] a city fit to live in.” Political bosses, however, proved adept at co-opting union officials with the promise of patronage positions, a practice that effectively turned labor leaders into party hacks. Combined with blacklisting, lock-outs, and other tactics employed by industrialists as well as corporate welfare programs, the rise of political machines subverted union solidarity, effectively co-opted the role of unions in shaping a working-class identity, and undercut attempts at an independent labor politics.³³

Middle-class reformers, too, highlighted the inefficiencies of the boss-system and blamed political corruption for the increasing inequalities in the Steel Valley. The paternalism of civic elites combined with the pro-development agenda of Magee and Flinn resulted in many high-profile public works projects in Pittsburgh, most notably in the new hilltop civic center of Oakland. However, the Pittsburgh Survey emphasized the rapid decline of living conditions for working-class residents as well as high rates of communicable diseases and rising concerns about the negative effects of air and water pollution. Kellogg and his investigators blamed the region’s serious social problems and environmental degradation on the “production of wealth on a vast scale,” “inequity in distribution,” “and the inadequacies of municipal governments” that could “be overcome rapidly” if the community really wanted to do so. At the same time, Pittsburgh reformers seemed to hit their stride with the 1906 mayoral election of George Guthrie, a Progressive bitterly opposed to the Magee-Flinn machine. The new mayor created a Division of Smoke Inspection in the Bureau of Health, which itself was elevated to a full municipal department in 1909 in order to better regulate tenements and improve sanitary conditions. Guthrie also partnered with business leaders, who were concerned about economic threats to the city in the wake of a disastrous flood and a national financial panic, to create a new Civic Commission tasked “to plan and promote improvements in civic and industrial conditions.” In turn, the group of eighteen business and professional leaders hired pioneer city planner Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., to prepare a plan for the city. When completed in 1911, Olmsted’s Pittsburgh: Main Thoroughfares and the Downtown District established a comprehensive framework for remaking Pittsburgh as a modern metropolis.³⁴

Ethnic fragmentation, a rugged landscape, and the desire of industrialists to control the levers of political power in the area around their plants meant that vertical integration of the economy was not matched by centralized municipal administrations. Civic boosters in both Pittsburgh and Wheeling expressed a mixture of pride and annoyance at the relatively small percentage of population the central city contained in relation to that of their dependent regions. In the eyes of Progressive reformers, the region’s fragmented political system created a plethora of inefficient minor municipalities that duplicated services, prevented comprehensive planning, weakened civic administrations, and lent themselves to control by corrupt interests. “Pittsburgh is dwarfed and made small in comparison with other cities, where outlying but dependent suburbs have been merged into one municipal organization,” declared George Anderson of the Chamber of Commerce in 1902. “Civic pride … should demand that this, the acknowledged industrial center of America, should occupy her proper place among other great cities of the nation.”³⁵ Similarly, a decade later a booster publication sponsored by the Wheeling Corrugating Company bemoaned the fact that “the census cannot go beyond legal boundaries and so Wheeling does not get credit for her real extent and true proportions.”³⁶

As regional elites began to see their competitive advantages slip in the early decades of the twentieth century, corporate leaders and some politicians, such as Pittsburgh Mayor William A. Magee, who replaced Guthrie in 1909, joined Progressives in their belief that “some form of centralized administration” was necessary. Similarly, proponents of a “Greater Wheeling Charter” authorized by the West Virginia Legislature after nearly a decade of campaigning cited the need for a larger water reservoir and regional sewer authority as well as the need to avoid “much embarrassment” and “great humiliation” at a time when many other cities were annexing adjacent territories. As a result of these initiatives, Pittsburgh, which had already incorporated its East End and the South Side communities across the Monongahela River during the 1860s and 1870s, forcibly annexed the separate City of Allegheny across the Allegheny River in 1906. In 1919, Wheeling, too, consolidated its control over the eight adjacent municipalities including Fulton, Woodsdale, and Elm Grove.³⁷

Despite the successful campaigns of the early twentieth century, Progressive reforms as a whole largely failed to alter the Steel Valley’s underlying political and social structure. Though William Magee adopted some of the proposals put in place by the Guthrie administration, the pragmatism required by machine politics ensured a watering down of more “inspiring ideals” for slum improvement, smoke control, sanitation regulation, and comprehensive planning. When the Olmsted plan appeared in 1911, local officials observed that while “there is no doubt that Mr. Olmsted is an expert engineer and a fine gentleman,” his plans were not “practical.” In Wheeling, city politics remained chaotic with effective municipal programs and public works spending limited by lackluster support on the state level. Indeed, the lack of alternative means of funding led many officials to conclude that, despite their illegality, it was better to regulate rather than eliminate “the vices of gambling, prostitution, etc., for revenue, and that this was really required by the financial customs of the city.” Such open acceptance of and financial dependence on criminal activity for the basic functioning of the region’s communities did not bode well for reformers interested in creating modern cities capable of attracting outside investment.³⁸

The early twentieth century also represented the high point of annexation campaigns, particularly in Wheeling, where boosters were limited not only by municipal boundaries, a wide river and rough terrain, but also by a state line dividing the city from its hinterland in Ohio. Neither Pittsburgh nor Wheeling proved effective in further consolidating their authority in the face of a metropolitan backlash that continued into the postwar period and through the end of the century. While the 1906 referendum on Pittsburgh’s proposal to annex Allegheny City passed easily, nearly two-thirds of voters in the smaller community opposed consolidation. Anger over this type of forced annexation prompted other municipalities to organize in 1911 the League of Boroughs, Townships and Cities of the Third Class of Allegheny County to fight further consolidation. Wheeling, of course, as one booster publication pointed out, would never be able to “be made legally one [with] our strong and aggressive neighbors in Ohio” in the same way Pittsburgh was able to merge with its satellite communities across the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. That said, following the 1919 annexation in which all but one of the smaller communities opposed consolidation, Wheeling had no better luck than Pittsburgh in expanding substantially its southern, eastern or northern borders despite periodic attempts. As a result, metropolitan Pittsburgh remained one of the nation’s most fragmented regions, ensuring that the underlying political framework established during its period of industrial growth would not be seriously challenged even as the economic conditions that gave rise to the Steel Valley began to shift in favor of areas to the south and west.³⁹

The infrastructure superimposed on the natural landscape formed the prism through which residents and visitors alike crafted a regional identity for the Steel Valley. Profits from the mills were at the core of the region’s prosperity; however, their products should be measured not only by the metric ton of steel produced, but also in ways equally important to understanding the region. “The pulsating whang of steel-making plants and rolling-mills” was ever-present, observed Rueben Gold Thwaites on his epic voyage down the Ohio River, making even “the air tremble.” Workers carried in their bodies the burden of working in difficult conditions, where a decade of hard labor left men “only fit for the boneyard.” Of course, waste from the mills manifested itself in many ways—flowing into the water or creating an atmosphere thick with smoke. By the 1890s, Thwaites declared, the region’s riverbanks were already primarily used as the dumping ground for cinders, slag, and “rubbish of every degree of foulness.” “Sometimes for nearly a mile in length,” he concluded, “the natural bank is deep buried out of sight; and we have from our canoe naught but a dismal wall of rubbish, crowding upon the river to the uttermost limit.”⁴⁰

Taken together, the cultural, social, and physical development of the region created an integrated framework that resisted change even as residents faced a series of economic and environmental problems rooted in the very fabric of community life. Even by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Steel Valley exhibited a host of environmental and social problems, which extended from the sewage filled rivers that gave Pittsburgh the nation’s highest rate of typhoid fever to the smoke-belching furnaces that kept many of the region’s communities engulfed in a perpetual twilight. Indeed, the role of heavy industrial corporations in metropolitan Pittsburgh’s economic and political life actually grew after World War I as glass, pottery, cigar making, and other traditional employers began to decline. Whether in the mill towns dominated by large industrial employers, small cities such as Wheeling or Steubenville that proved incapable of overcoming ethnic and class differences, or Pittsburgh of the Magee-Flinn era, however, regional politics generally impeded collective action to remediate these problems. It was not until after the jarring dislocations of the 1930s that a new public-private partnership emerged that held out the promise of urban and regional revitalization.⁴¹