Edward Slavishak is Assistant Professor of History at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.

BODIES OF WORK

CIVIC DISPLAY AND LABOR IN INDUSTRIAL PITTSBURGHBy EDWARD SLAVISHAK

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4206-9

Contents

ILLUSTRATIONS…………………………………………………………………………….ixACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………………..xiNOTE ON USAGE…………………………………………………………………………….xiiiINTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………..11 The Magic of the Nineteenth Century: Industrial Change and Work in Pittsburgh…………………172 Working-Class Muscle in the Battle of Homestead……………………………………………643 The Working Body as a Civic Image………………………………………………………..894 The Pittsburgh Survey and the Body as Evidence…………………………………………….1495 “Delicately Built”: The “Problem” of Working Women in Pittsburgh…………………………….2006 Hiding and Displaying the Broken Body…………………………………………………….224EPILOGUE. “That’s Work, and That’s What People Like to Watch!”………………………………..265NOTES……………………………………………………………………………………277BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………..319INDEX……………………………………………………………………………………345

Chapter One

THE MAGIC OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

INDUSTRIAL CHANGE AND WORK IN PITTSBURGH

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, a lively debate sprang up in the pages of the national press, centering on a thorny issue: the proper nickname for the city of Pittsburgh. Choosing the right name for the southwestern Pennsylvania manufacturing center was a matter of choosing the industrial product that best represented the business that took place there. In an edition of the Magazine of Western History from 1885, the writer Seelye Willson claimed that the association of the city with its metal products was so strong that the words Pittsburgh and iron were, in fact, synonymous. The Iron City produced metal for the world, creating the very foundation of modern civilization. Willson’s historical sketch of the city’s development confirmed what he believed was a widely held mental association: Pittsburgh as a city founded on iron, bursting with iron, named for iron. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, when the local steel magnate William Scaife announced to the nation the arrival of a “new great city,” he wrote of iron production in Pittsburgh as a thing of the past, a relic of the last century. Scaife praised the “growth and wealth of the Steel City” as the new story of interest for American readers. Iron had seen its best days; steel was ascendant. Harper’s Weekly went even further, declaring in 1903 that the Steel City was a more appropriate title for Pittsburgh than the Iron City because “if Iron is King, the steel throne of His Industrial Highness is in Pittsburgh.” Moreover, it was important for Harper’s readers to take note of the Steel City because, the writer announced, “the Steel Age is upon us.” Ultimately, however, the anonymous writer concluded that such royal analogies had no place in a city where “human labor is our King.” Steel epitomized turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh, but it was the effort of workers that epitomized steel.

This flurry of name calling underscores the intense national scrutiny Pittsburgh received in the second half of the nineteenth century. The popular press, technical journals, trade groups, and writers and artists all looked closely at Pittsburgh in an attempt to explain the new brand of industrial life exhibited there. In 1850, Pittsburgh was well known as the nation’s Iron City. Between 1880 and 1920, however, the city came to be much better known throughout the United States as the Steel City. This minor change in appellation denoted several significant transformations in industrial technology that led to iron’s displacement by steel as the nation’s most demanded structural and manufacturing metal. Mechanization of metal production, epitomized by the introduction of the Bessemer and open-hearth processes in the 1870s and 1880s, made steel cheaper and faster to produce than iron. New processes also required fewer highly skilled workers to fashion molten metal into finished products. Whereas mills of the Iron City were filled with skilled workmen controlling discrete segments of the production process, the Steel City’s mills were filled with greater numbers of semiskilled and unskilled workers operating machines and moving raw materials. The shift from iron to steel incorporated multiple changes in the social and economic relations of industrial work in Pittsburgh. As steel plants grew in size and number throughout the Pittsburgh district, the steel workforce expanded in proportions that dwarfed the earlier ranks of ironworkers. In the process, skilled workers lost much of their power to hire assistants and apprentices. The craft pride and relatively high wages associated with skilled work in Pittsburgh’s iron mills gave way to the routine tasks and meager wages offered by lower-status jobs. Despite diminishing prospects for steelworkers in a city that pushed production records and trampled unions, Pittsburgh attracted increasing numbers of new immigrant groups to its mills and factories after 1880. The city grew as the steel industry grew.

Although it provided a fitting rubric for this series of developments in the metals industry, the symbolic shift from the Iron City to the Steel City failed to describe the evolution of two other leading industries that employed hundreds of thousands and made Pittsburgh the third most productive manufacturing city in the nation at the turn of the century. Pittsburgh during these years was also a national center for the glass and bituminous coal industries. Similar shifts occurred in these sectors as well, as both the manufacture of glass and the mining of coal were mechanized between 1880 and 1905 and transformed by an influx of immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe. Iron and steel may have stolen much of the national attention fixed on Pittsburgh during this time, but it was the glass and coal trades that first put the city on the manufacturing map. Pittsburgh’s glassworks met a raging domestic demand for tableware, bottles, and lamp chimneys and made possible the extensive use of window glass in retail establishments in the late nineteenth century. Coal from the region’s mines and its refined counterpart, coke, fueled every major industry in the city as well as the burgeoning national railroad network. The extensive industrialization of the glass and coal industries, along with the startling expansion of the regional steel industry, remodeled Pittsburgh as a vision of American industrial life.

As the Steel City emerged from the remnants of the Iron City, a new world emerged with it-an unfamiliar order of industrial organization and labor for those who worked in Pittsburgh and those who worked to popularize their efforts. First, the physical demands of the workday changed as local capitalists orchestrated an era of labor-saving machinery that collected, transported, refined, and shaped raw materials with little human assistance. Mechanical engineers and machinists replicated key segments of the manufacture of steel and glass and the extraction of coal, increasing production without relying on a commensurate amount of exertion from workers. Simultaneously, the increasing pace and scope of industrial establishments meant that work became less strenuous for certain workers and more onerous for others. The individual skilled worker who manipulated massive quantities of raw materials at a pace he determined, a common sight in the premechanized mill or mine, gave way to teams of lesser-skilled workers hauling much greater quantities of raw materials at a pace determined by both machines and a centralized production plan. By the early 1900s machines did much of the lifting, picking, and hammering, but in large mills and mines much was still demanded of the hands, arms, and backs of laborers.

Second, workers’ repertoire of tasks and manual techniques changed as well. Several well-known manual work tasks of the late nineteenth century either became obsolete or no longer featured the very physical acts that made them the object of such interest to those who visited area workplaces before 1900. As puddling vanished from Pittsburgh, the sight of an individual worker shaping incredible quantities of metal at the door of a furnace vanished. Glassblowing machinery eliminated the vast majority of skilled workers who stood before melting pots and fashioned window glass cylinders with the help of their upper-body strength and gravity. The miner’s daily task of removing coal with picks, shovels, and hammers became less common in the new era of mining machinery. Each of these work spectacles was replaced by new regimes in which compressed air and the metal surfaces of machines interacted with raw materials and finished goods, removing workers’ bodies further from the work process. Compared to the traditional means of working in Pittsburgh, the new type of work appeared to be far less exotic to the contemporary writers and illustrators who represented the daily toil and sweat of the city’s laboring classes.

Finally, the implementation of massive machinery meant that workers faced greater physical threats to their well-being, whether from accidental injury, occupational disease, or gradual exhaustion. After 1800 the heaviest work may have been done by machines, but the mechanical speed and mass needed to do the work of many laborers precluded any sense of repose for employees. When functioning well, machines placed great demands of pace and repetition on those who worked with them. Machines that collapsed, exploded, or otherwise malfunctioned created serious conditions for workers. The physical effects of industrial work-the way it conditioned, strained, and focused attention on the body-changed as machinery began doing the work that thousands of men in Pittsburgh had used previously to define themselves as vigorous, masculine individuals. Critics of industry focused on the bodily dangers inherent in mechanized industrial work as a primary characteristic of modern life in American cities, but the implications of mechanized industrial work went beyond the crisis of injuries and death. Even those working-men whose strenuous lives were arguably improved by the advent of labor-saving machinery experienced an ambiguous change as work became more a matter of mechanical power than human power.

PITTSBURGH’S INDUSTRIAL PROMINENCE

When he toured the mills and mines of southwestern Pennsylvania in the early 1890s, James Kitson, a representative of the British Iron and Steel Institute, touted the inevitability of Pittsburgh’s expansion in size and industrial output at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Kitson noted that Pittsburgh “could not help becoming a great industrial centre,” such was its advantage in natural resources and location. Kitson’s theory was simple: owing to its prime location at the confluence of three rivers and atop a rich vein of bituminous coal, Pittsburgh had transformed itself from a nondescript commercial town to an industrial giant that defied description. Coal and coke fueled manufacturing establishments in the city. Rivers and railroads expedited the transport of materials to Pittsburgh’s mills and the distribution of finished products to the rest of the world. By achieving new feats in the production of iron, steel, glass, and coal, the city claimed the lofty position that geological and geographical fortune had determined for it. City boosters agreed with this assessment; the souvenir city guide created by the Pittsburgh Committees of Reception for Kitson’s visit informed him that the city’s “purpose in history has been manifest from the first; it has always been a city of manufactures.” Congressman John Dalzell echoed this tale of Pittsburgh’s success at a Chamber of Commerce banquet in 1902: “Nature designed her [Pittsburgh] for the center of industrial enterprise. Situated in the midst of raw materials of unbounded wealth, she has all the facilities for manufacture. Situated at the headwaters of the Ohio, with the Monongahela on the one side and the Allegheny on the other, she has all the facilities for distribution.” Kitson and Dalzell removed humans from the process of economic growth and made the city’s location and topography the agent of profit.

The tale of Pittsburgh’s inevitable rise to industrial glory overlooked the key role that mechanization played in the growth and commercial record breaking of the 1880s and 1890s. Pittsburgh industrialists did not build their empires on the strength of coal and river transportation alone. Instead, national figures such as Andrew Carnegie and national conglomerates such as the U.S. Steel Corporation built themselves upon a foundation of gears, pistons, and power. The writer Lillian Betts recognized this when she observed in 1901 that “the whir and throb of machinery have silenced the songs of birds” in Pittsburgh. Yet Betts, too, separated the transformation from the people who engineered it, noting that “the magic of the nineteenth century [had] wrought her marvelous changes.” If the city’s production machinery was captivating by the turn of the century, it was also profitable. Mechanization of production and increasing numbers of plants and residents went hand in hand-swift, mechanized production allowed greater scales of production, which demanded newer, larger establishments and greater workforces. Industry in Pittsburgh between 1880 and 1900 was a pageant of change, witnessing an unprecedented growth that can be seen in both the increasing number of manufactories in the city and the rising population figures for the city and the surrounding Allegheny County.

Publishers of Pittsburgh’s business directories struggled in the 1880s and 1890s to keep apace of annual industrial additions. The number of blast furnaces dotting the city’s landscape increased from 15 in 1880 to 44 in 1908. The size of blast furnaces grew during this period as well, allowing a standard furnace in 1900 to do the work of two or three from 1880. The number of iron- and steelworks that spewed forth finished products rose steadily during these years-from 10 in 1880 to 27 in 1890 to 50 in 1900. In 1910, the state’s factory inspector reported 313 iron- and steelworks in the Pittsburgh inspection region. The size of the average mill grew threefold during this period, culminating in mile-long mills stretching to the horizon. In the early 1880s, the average workforce of an iron or steel mill in Pittsburgh was 350. Although smaller steelworks remained throughout the city after 1900, several immense mills employed thousands of men each. Large steel workforces became more common in Pittsburgh, not because there were simply more workers in the area, but because continuous processes replaced traditional batch-production techniques that did not benefit from large numbers of workers. After mechanization, the increased scale and pace of production made hiring of more workers economically rational.

In the Pittsburgh glass industry, the late nineteenth century witnessed the specialization of production, as companies stopped making several forms of glass in individual factories and instead erected factories that produced single product lines. At the end of the 1870s, there were 61 glasshouses in the Pittsburgh district, roughly a third of the national total. Of these, 24 produced only window glass and employed 1,200 workers. In 1890, the Committees of Reception counted 29 window glass works in Pittsburgh. By the turn of the century, 115 glassworks spread throughout the city’s manufacturing region, not counting 62 establishments within 80 miles of Pittsburgh in West Virginia and Ohio. Approximately 20 of these factories produced window glass. The number of window glass works in Pittsburgh actually declined after 1890, as machinery allowed firms to produce more glass with fewer glasshouses. The total number of glassworks in the area increased, however, as industrialists built more tableware and bottle factories along the rivers. The relatively early mechanization of pressing and bottle blowing created a boom in those branches of the industry in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

The number of coal-mining operations in the Pittsburgh district increased as well. In 1880, there were fewer than 700 mining operations in the bituminous region. By the turn of the century, there were well over 1,000 mines, most deeper and more extensive than the mines of twenty years earlier. The infrastructure of the regional industry, combining railroads, water transportation, riverside storage yards, and outdoor mechanized sorting systems, matured into a relatively seamless network that brought coal to the city. The vast Pittsburgh deposit to the south and east of the city fueled massive activity along the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers, creating the infamous southwestern Pennsylvania mining towns that received intense scrutiny during the Progressive era.

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Excerpted from BODIES OF WORKby EDWARD SLAVISHAK Copyright © 2008 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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