Chapter 37
Our forefathers were pioneers.
So are we.
—Haniel Long, Pittsburgh Memoranda
WHAT is steel?” I asked Harold J. Ruttenberg, research director of the United Steelworkers of America and now vice president of the Portsmouth Steel Corporation. He answered promptly, “America!” Eighty-five per cent of all manufactured goods in the United States contain steel in one form or another, and 40 per cent of all wage earners in the country owe their livelihood to steel, directly or indirectly. But this is not what Mr. Ruttenberg was driving at. The basic power determinant of any country is its steel production, and what makes this a great nation above all is the fact that it can roll over go million tons of steel ingots a year, more than Great Britain, prewar Germany, Japan, France, and the Soviet Union combined. The United States Steel Corporation alone makes twice as much steel as the entire U.S.S.R.
This is a steel age; the whole of modern industrial history, which often means political history, is based on steel. The Civil War was an iron war. Every war since has been a steel war. The day that iron ore was discovered in Brazil, the only important source in the Western Hemisphere outside the United States, we became an imperial nation. We do not control Brazilian production (though one American ore firm has big Brazilian holdings), but we could not afford to let any other country control it. Almost the same thing might be said of the deposits of bauxite in Dutch Guiana. The State Department would not admit this in so many words, and pious adherents of the Good Neighbor policy would of course deny it, but not conceivably could we ever permit any but a friendly power to remain in these areas.
Pittsburgh is Gibraltar. Where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join to form the Ohio a vast ragged umbrella of soot tells you that this is indeed steel’s own citadel; civilization based on industrial aggrandizement reaches here its blackest and most brilliant flower. Why? The chief reason is the structure of the rivers, and the great coal deposits near-by. Even so, Pittsburgh is not nearly so “ideally situated” for steel as is, say, Birmingham, Alabama, and it lacks several of the advantages of Cleveland. In Minnesota I heard people say that the “great tragedy of the last century” was the creation of the steel industry so far away from its major supply of iron ore, the Mesabi Range. But there was a good reason for this, in that in the beginning it was cheaper to ship ore to coal than coal to ore. Still, many people in the Northwest yearn for the industrialization that might have been theirs. Perhaps oddly, Pittsburgh did not become the steel capital of the world out of any characteristics inherent in the city itself. Why did automobiles come to Detroit? One reason is that it was already the home both of a considerable foundry and a considerable carriage industry, with skilled craftsmen in both trades available; and an automobile is, after all, as I heard it put in Detroit, nothing but a stove (a foundry product) in a wagon. But Pittsburgh became what it is largely through forces released by nature rather than expressed by man.
Small iron manufactories were built in the Pennsylvania hills near the coal mines a hundred years ago; one can travel a short distance from Pittsburgh today and see furnaces that have not been operated since 1853, but which are still in good repair. In those days a furnace did well if it made eight hundred tons of iron a year. Today, a furnace that doesn’t do 50 per cent more per day is obsolete. If an owner didn’t have cash with which to pay his workmen in the old days, he gave them actual chunks of pig iron, which was traded in for groceries at the near-by store—“iron money” in the most literal sense. Today, iron is made for a penny a pound. A few years later the Pennsylvania Steel Works at Steelton made its first Bessemer blow, and in 1871 the Pittsburgh Steel Casting Company organized the first steel foundry in the United States. By 1889, American production of pig iron for the first time passed that of Great Britain, and in 1900 we passed the British in open hearth steel. New century, new industrial era, new equilibria in world politics came all at once.
But go back a bit. Steel, in its natural form of iron, is, like wheat, primordial. Iron, in connection with Tubal Cain, is mentioned in Genesis, and crude saws and sickles found in the Pyramids date back at least five thousand years. One authority says, in fact, that iron was known in Egypt from about 7,000 B.C. onward; it was certainly known in both China and India from about 2,000 B.C. Homer is full of iron. Jump forward several thousand years. Iron works are known to have existed in Schasslau, in what is now Czechoslovakia, in A.D. 677, and by the middle of the fourteenth century cannons were used in France and needles in Norway. The first discovery of iron ore in North America appears to have taken place in North Carolina in 1585; members of Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition found it. By 1608 the Virginia Company at Jamestown was actually exporting iron to the East India Company at £4 per ton. The first blast furnace in America was probably built in Pennsylvania near Pottstown in 1720. Four signers of the Declaration of Independence were ironmasters, and in 1795 the first nail mill west of the Alleghenies was built at Brownsville, Pennsylvania. By 1830 there were fourteen steel furnaces in the United States, with a capacity of 1,600 tons of steel; by 1855 the American Iron Association, which was to grow into the present immensely powerful American Iron & Steel Institute, was organized; by the 70’s Frick and Carnegie were in action and in 1875 the first sixty-foot steel rails ever rolled in America were produced at Braddock, Pennsylvania. Only seventy-odd years ago!1
United States Steel
The simplest thing to do is look in the Pittsburgh telephone book. Here is what I saw:
US Steel Corp Subsidiaries
Amer Bridge Co
American Steel & Wire Co
Atlas Lumnite Cement Co
Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp
Carnegie Natural Gas Co
Cyclone Fence Division—
Am Steel & Wire Co
Frick H C Coke Co
Hostetter Connellsville Coke Co
Natl Mining Co
Nat Tube Co
Oil Well Supply Co
Pgh Limestone Corp
Tennessee Coal Iron & Railroad Co
Union Supply Co
US Coal & Coke Co
US Steel Supply Co
United Supply Co
Universal Atlas Cement Co
Wilson-Snyder Mfg Corp
But this does not tell all the story. It does not, naturally, mention that Carnegie-Illinois is the largest unit of its kind in the nation; it gives no conception of the enormousness of American Steel & Wire nor American Bridge. Figures, names become meaningless and dull. It matters little that United States Steel manufactured nine million tons of coke in 1901, had operating expenses of half a billion dollars in 1910, owned 61,999 railway cars in 1918, and in 1945, with assets of more than two billion dollars and 279,000 employees, had gross sales of $1,700,000,000.
What does matter, even if General Motors and some bigger companies should disagree, is that U.S. Steel is the world’s premier corporation. In the words of Life2 it is “the most fabulous giant yet produced by the industrial revolution. It runs the world’s biggest steel plant (at Gary, Indiana), the world’s biggest soft coal company, the world’s biggest cement company … and makes nearly a third of the nation’s steel.”
U.S. Steel was put together mostly by the heavy, intuitive fingers of the senior J. P. Morgan. Steel was a prodigious advancing business, and various consolidations and abstruse competitions were going on in the 1890’s. The ore in a furnace was hardly in a greater state of flux—and heat—than were the jealous interweaving steel men of the day. Andrew Carnegie, I heard it said in Pittsburgh, was “the Sewell Avery of his time,” but he was an Avery with a keenly developed sense of public relations—he even projected his reputation into posterity. Henry C. Frick was mainly a coal and coke man. He and Carnegie worked together, but once he told the sharp little Scot that he would see him in hell some day since he knew surely that both would be there. The Carnegie interests coalesced in 1892, and five years later came the “great wire consolidation,” with the formation of the American Steel & Wire Company. Still, frictions and abrasions disturbed these mammoths. A contemporary chronicle says, for instance, “The Lackawanna Works broke up the rail pool. The price of rails dropped from $27 to $17 a ton.” Another weighty factor was the Rockefeller family, which had bought heavily into the iron ore properties in Minnesota. In the end, J. P. Morgan bought out Carnegie at a considerably inflated price, almost 500 million dollars—the grandiose Morgan despised Carnegie’s small shrewdnesses—and in 1901 the United States Steel Company was formed, the first billion-dollar corporation in all history.3
Labor people often have, it seems, a nice paradoxical loyalty to the corporations they are pitted against. In Detroit I heard UAW leaders call General Motors “the most brilliantly run of companies.” Similarly, in Pittsburgh, United Steelworkers called U.S. Steel the most “intelligent” and “advanced” corporation in the industry. U.S. Steel was a merger of other mergers, but the men who made it were not all economic libertines. Certainly they sought to freeze wages in the holy name of “stabilization,” but gradually they developed institutional ideas. They had to. For a time United States Steel actually had more employees than the United States government. In a way, Morgan wanted Big Steel to be so big in order that it should influence all other industries in the nation. At the same time—the paradox is not too difficult—it tried consistently not to be too big in its own major field, steel. As we know, it had twice as large a share of the industry’s business in 1901 as it has today.
U.S. Steel ramifies of course through the whole abric of American finance and enterprise, just like General Motors. A list of its twenty largest stockholders, as printed in that suggestive and useful book The Modern Corporation and Private Property,4 is extraordinarily revealing. The largest individual shareholder was the late George F. Baker. Myron C. Taylor had 40,100 shares, or about 0.37 per cent of all stock outstanding. The twenty largest holders of preferred held only 1.7 per cent of the total preferred shares, and only 8.8 per cent of the common. But, though the ownership steadily became more and more diffuse, the management remained fixed and concentrated.
Judge Elbert H. Gary, Morgan’s man, was chairman of the board of U.S. Steel, its chief executive officer, and chairman of the finance committee. He was never president. Perhaps as a result of this, perhaps by reason of almost fortuitous development, the company has always been run by triumvirs. Its presidents, like kings—it has only had five since 1901—have been somewhat undistinguished men since the electric and restless Charles M. Schwab, who resigned in 1903. Hardly anybody remembers the other names—William E. Corey (1903–1911), James A. Farrell (1911–1932), William A. Irvin (1932–1938). The president today, whose name is of course in the contemporary news a good deal, is Benjamin S. Fairless. He was a miner’s son who taught school in order to be able to go to college, and who became an engineer. He did not join Big Steel till as recently as 1935.5 But whereas the actual presidents were relatively obscure, other steel executives became very well known indeed, like Edward R. Stettinius Jr., the son of a Morgan partner, who later became secretary of state among other things, and Myron C. Taylor, who has distinguished himself at many types of public service, and who is now the president’s ambassador to the Vatican.
When Gary died in 1927 at eighty-one, the high command was split three ways; J. P. Morgan Jr. became the chairman of the board, Farrell the chief executive officer, and Taylor the chairman of the finance committee. A decade later, when Taylor himself resigned, the company maintained this self-division, and three much younger men took over: Stettinius as chairman of the board, though he was only thirty-eight at the time, Fairless as president, and Enders M. Voorhees, a former accountant, as chairman of the finance committee. Of course what this system does is to insure checks and balances. No president is ever the number one man. The notion that any pirate or lone wolf could “invade” Big Steel and seize it, even though steel is a famously anarchic industry, is of course absurd. But a three-way leadership is a sensible precaution. The triumvirs today are Fairless, Voorhees, and Irving S. Olds, a Morgan lawyer who has only been with Steel since 1936, and who became chairman of the board in 1940. Behind these men are other directors too, like James B. Black, president of the Pacific Gas & Electric Co., Cason J. Callaway, a Georgia textile manufacturer, one big Chicago banker, one big New York banker, Sewell Avery, and a former governor of New York state, Nathan L. Miller.6 Finally, there is Thomas W. Lamont, chairman of J. P. Morgan & Co. Of all names mentioned so far, right back to Gary, Lamont is probably the most important. If there is any supreme decision for Big Steel to take, Mr. Lamont’s word will probably be decisive. And certainly his counsel will be sage.
From the Pittsburgh point of view Big Steel is, obviously, absentee controlled. Its liver and lights are in Pennsylvania, but the heart and brains are in New York.
Steel, Big and Little
Little Steel is not so little; all the Littles combined are, for instance, as big as Big. By customary definition, Little Steel comprises Bethlehem, Republic, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, and Inland. Weirton is not, as a rule, considered to be in Little Steel, although it certainly is an independent. The word “Little” is not only a misnomer; it becomes absurd when applied to a corporation like Bethlehem, which has assets today of over two billion dollars. Late in 1946, during the portal-to-portal crisis, one of the largest single suits in the country was that filed against Bethlehem, for 200 million dollars.
Schwab moved into U.S. Steel; then he moved out. When he took over Bethlehem it had only one important customer; soon he built it into the second biggest steel company in the world. The president of Bethlehem today, Eugene G. Grace, runs his mastodon strictly as a one-man show, almost as Gary ran his before the era of triumvirates began. Grace is probably as relentless a labor-hater as any in the industry. Big Steel has, it need not be pointed out, no particular sentimentality toward labor, but it appears to have accepted for good the principle of collective bargaining; none of its executives talk quite in terms of going back to the turn of the century and abolishing unions. But seemingly Grace would like to drive the Steelworkers out of existence. What he stands for is complete reaction and resurrection of the open shop.
The Little Steel companies compete vigorously in some respects, and work together in others. Many of their executives, through the great eastern banks, are interlaced with Big Steel men. Perhaps oddly, Little pays on the whole better salaries than Big. The top U.S. Steel salaries are, if you look at them with appropriate perspective, quite “moderate,” being in the $100,000 to $200,000 class. Look at some figures for 1932, the worst year of the depression. Myron Taylor got $197,203. But Schwab’s salary was $250,000 in that year, and G. G. Crawford, an executive of Jones & Laughlin, another formidable independent, got $247,225. In 1940 Grace got $478,144 and in 1941, $537,724; in both these years he was the second highest-paid man in the nation.7
Best of the Unions
About the United Steelworkers of America, which a Pittsburgh management man told me was the “most adult labor organization in the United States,” we could write much. Nothing more dramatically illustrates the sharp, heady rise of American labor than its organization of the steel industry. In 1900 men worked twelve hours a day seven days a week. Think merely of the stupendous development that has taken place within the last decade; it is necessary to take hold of oneself sternly, and look backward with vigilance, to appreciate all that has occurred. In 1936, after two disastrous strikes (one in 1892 at Homestead, one in 1919 led from Chicago), the steelworkers were still unorganized. Then came the evolution of the Committee for Industrial Organization, later to become the CIO, and its powerful, well-thought-out, well-executed drive into steel. The steelworkers’ organizing committee, led by Philip Murray, represented an insurgent wing of an old AF of L craft union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Assisting Murray, who was at the time vice president of the United Mine Workers, were men who became famous in the CIO later, like Lee Pressman and Van A. Bittner. Big Steel fought the drive hard for a year. But it didn’t want a catastrophic strike, after years of the great depression. On one of the supreme dates of labor history, March 1, 1937, Myron Taylor, chairman of the board of Big Steel, signed a contract agreeing to collective bargaining. The workers got a forty-hour week and a substantial wage rise. The repercussions of this have sounded ever since. The man who signed for labor was John L. Lewis.
Little Steel could scarcely contain itself with rage; it thought of Taylor practically as a wrecker, a saboteur. It refused to treat with labor during most of 1937, and severe strikes took place in several independents. Tom Girdler of Republic was Little Steel’s spearhead in those days. The companies contended that they could not “afford” labor boosts. On Memorial Day occurred the tragic massacre at South Chicago, at the gates of the Republic mills, when police fired into crowds of men, women and children, killing ten and wounding forty. Finally the National Labor Relations Board ordered Republic to bargain collectively and by the end of 1942 all of Little Steel had followed Big into labor contracts. The fight was won, and no serious setback to unionization in the industry has occurred since, though two sizeable independents are still non-CIO.
Meantime the United Steelworkers of America, CIO, was born out of this struggle and grew. From the beginning this great union had characteristics very distinctive. Its mood and organization were, and are, quite different from those of the United Auto Workers, which was winning its first victories in Detroit at roughly the same time. Workers by the thousand poured into the UAW, which grew practically by a process of mass rebellion, as we know. But the Steelworkers were organized little by little by skillful and devoted leaders who went into the mills and stayed there. Nothing remotely like the confusions and rivalries of the UAW exists in the Steelworkers. Their union is run, and run well, from the top; it believes in what I heard called “centralized decentralization”; it has the kind of unity you can’t get by hammering people down, and its sub-leaders can move, stick their necks out, and take subordinate decisions without risk—all of which embodies lessons Walter Reuther might well learn. The rank and file is educated and soberminded, and almost everybody has some share of responsibility. Mostly this is the result of complete confidence by the membership in the courage, integrity, and good judgment of Philip Murray.
Murray is probably the most seasoned and civilized of contemporary American labor leaders. This is not a man for whom unionization could ever be a promotion racket. One source of his power is that he has almost complete authority—and practically never uses it. Murray is, of course, president of the CIO itself as well as of the Steelworkers. He was born in Scotland in 1886, and came to the United States with his father in 1902; he worked in the mines as a boy and educated himself by correspondence courses. His father was, incidentally, president of a miners’ union in Lanarkshire, and he himself went to his first labor meeting at the age of six.8 Murray is a strong Catholic, and in 1946 he received an award as “outstanding Catholic layman of the year.” He has always kept Communists severely down in the Steelworkers, and is a marked, steady influence against Communist troublemakers and malingerers in the CIO at large. In the long run Murray has, it would seem, only one thing to fear—John L. Lewis, his former leader.
During the war, the no-strike pledge was of course in effect. The Steelworkers were notably loyal. But they did not forget that, from 1924 to 1929, in one of the richest periods of industrial expansion the country has ever known, steel did not grant a single wage increase. As to later years a pamphlet published by the union says that the national income rose 132 per cent between 1939 and 1943, from something over 72 billion to 168 billion dollars; the income of corporations, before taxes, rose 302 per cent, from 6 billion to more than 23 billion dollars; that of the farmers, 179 per cent, from over 4 billion to 12 billion dollars; that of labor only 72 per cent—and much of this as a result of overtime—which meant a lift in average annual earnings only from $1,372 to $2,360. Labor, Mr. Murray likes to point out, did not profiteer during the war.
On the other side profits, before taxes, of Republic Steel rose 779.6 per cent between 1940 and 1942, as against the 1936–39 level. The analogous figure for Bethlehem is 320.4 per cent; for United States Steel, 151.5 Per cent. Mr. Girdler of Republic got $275,000 salary in 1942, an increase of 60.7 per cent over 1936–39; Mr. E. T. Weir similarly got $275,000 or an increase of 52 per cent. Other figures published by the Steelworkers compare the five war years, 1940 to 1944, to the five years 1935 to 1939 from the point of view of profits. Profits before taxes for the steel industry as a whole rose not less than 276 per cent, from 933 million dollars to more than three and a half billion, in these years; profits after taxes rose 113 per cent. Dividend payments rose 82 per cent; total assets rose 22 per cent; undistributed profits rose 81 per cent. Look at wages by contrast. Careful investigation showed that the average steelworker’s earnings in January 1945 were $50.85 a week, of which federal taxes took $4.93. Compared to 1941, and taking into account the decrease in purchasing power of the dollar, his income actually was substantially lower, not higher, than it had been in 1941.
All this, together with much else, led to the twenty-six-day steel strike of 1946, which, when it began, was called freely the “greatest strike in history.” Yet, so vivacious is the pace of events these days, that, looking back only a year later, one can scarcely remember what the details were. Several days before the strike, during the most arduous and acrid negotiations, Mr. Truman suggested that a compromise be reached on the basis of an 18½¢ hour pay raise. Murray had asked 25¢; Big Steel offered to pay 15¢. Later the union cut its proposal to 19½¢, but Steel refused to move forward from 15¢ and the strike began, on January 23. It tied up 1,292 companies in thirty states. The Truman offer made interesting headlines—and in some unexpected places. Life captioned one editorial “Mr. Fairless should pay 18½¢ right or wrong, the President picked it, and we’ve got to get on with the job.” The New York Daily News said simply, FAIRLESS MADE A BIG MISTAKE. The only three steel companies that maintained operation during the strike were Henry Kaiser’s plant in Fontana, California, Weirton in West Virginia, and the American Rolling Mill Company in Ohio. The negotiations that went on between government, industry and labor, to say nothing of those between the Iron & Steel Institute (Mr. Grace), Big Steel, and Little, while the strike was on, cannot be dealt with in this space. Formula after formula was worked out and rejected, and the president overruled his own fact-finding board. The whole question became mixed up with OPA, since the industry insisted that it could only pay more if it were allowed to charge more for its product. It held out for a $6.25 per ton rise in the price of steel; OPA held out for $4.00; finally Steel got $5.00. The strike came to an end on February 15. That it was a labor victory though by no means clearcut, could scarcely be denied; workers’ pay was lifted by $32 a month, the largest single raise in the history of the industry.
Pittsburgh Plus
But Pittsburgh is much more than just steel. In fact its root strength is not in steel at all, per se, but coal. It is the home of Westinghouse and its intricate nucleus of industries, of great glass works, and above all of Alcoa, which is a whole tremendous story in itself. Look at the telephone book again. We have scarcely mentioned in these pages one of the supreme concentrations of wealth in this country, and one of the least known and most curious. Not only will you find the name Mellon in the book; you will find the Mellon National Bank, the Mellbank Corporation, and the Mellbank Surety Corporation. Then note the listings of the Koppers Company and the Koppers Gas & Coke Company, which are Mellon firms, with their divisions ranging from butadiene to couplings from tar and chemicals to wood.
Thinking of Alcoa, I asked innocently enough what other interests the Mellons had. Answer: “All they are interested in is everything.” They have profound ramifying investments in petroleum (Gulf Oil is a Mellon concern), railways, banks, coal, utilities, and steel. Recently the Rockefellers joined the Mellons to form a new insurance company specifically designed to compete with Lloyd’s and handle risks too great for smaller firms; recently, too, the First Boston Corporation, one of the notable investment houses of the nation, joined up with the Mellon Securities Corporation, owned by Richard K. Mellon, the nephew of old Andy. Also in 1946, two Mellon banks, the Union Trust and the Mellon National, announced plans to merge and thus give Pittsburgh its “first billion dollar bank.”9 Mellons, through the Mellbank Corporation, a holding company, control eighteen other Pennsylvania banks also. Finally, Mellon announced recently the formation of a private organization to be known as T. Mellon & Sons, the name of the original banking house founded by old Andy’s father, as a voluntary kind of family team for co-ordination of all the Mellon enterprises.10
Perhaps oddly, the Mellon clan keeps itself carefully under wraps. Customarily it has not, like the Du Ponts, participated much in the life of the community. Nor are the Mellons active politically in any direct manner, though, as is more than obvious, their power, should they choose to exert it financially, could be overwhelming. W. L. Mellon, another nephew, was for some years the Republican state chairman. But the Mellons like to keep out of the news, perhaps because they are sensitive about Andy’s reputation, and they have withdrawn from most relationships in public affairs.
Pittsburgh is a vulnerable city. Lay off steel, and everything lays off. Its industrial life is not, like that of St. Louis or Cincinnati, diversified. The rash of strikes in 1946, culminating in that of an independent union in the Duquesne Light Company, which cut off power, left the community irritable and sullen. December 8 was the first day in a solid year that Pittsburgh did not have some strike or other.
There are all manner of curious Pittsburgh distinctions. From the point of view of tonnage handled, it is by far the greatest port in the world, though hundreds of miles from any ocean and 150 miles from the nearest lake. The Pittsburgh locks, like those at Sault Ste. Marie, handle more traffic than the Panama Canal. The city is, as everybody knows, one of the most shockingly ugly and filthy in the world; most of the time, like London, it lies under a grim tart canopy of smoke and fog. Its approaches are the most forbidding of any city I saw in America, and its traffic arrangements the worst. In the environs, near steel mills like Irvin, are cemeteries of motorcars, thick with rusting carcasses. Pittsburgh has the biggest neon sign in the world, and no locally owned newspaper. Its Catholic community has liberal elements; recently the official organ of the archdiocese went so far as to attack General Franco as an “undisguised dictator.” Its university is in the form of a forty-two-story skyscraper, and is called “the Cathedral of Learning”; it has an admirable symphony orchestra, and its Carnegie Exhibition is one of the chief annual events in the American world of art.
Never, until I came to Pittsburgh, had I heard the phrase “industrial folklore.” Its heroes are such Paul Bunyans of steel as Joe Magarac, who could toss a locomotive off the tracks with his little finger. Magarac is a Hungarian, and his formidable rival is a Jugoslav, Steve Mestrovic, who can twist a five-hundred pound iron bar into a pretzel. Both comb their hair with traveling cranes, and boil their eggs in a Bessemer converter.
Negroes in Pittsburgh
I went to see William G. Nunn, managing editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, to ask about Negro problems in the community. The main thing to say is that, in his view, the situation of Negroes in Pittsburgh is probably better than in any comparable American city, certainly better than in Chicago or Detroit. There are about 65,000 Negroes in Pittsburgh proper (roughly 10 per cent of the population), and some 35,000 more in a fifty-mile radius. Negroes live almost everywhere in this whole area; there is no ghetto like Harlem or the Chicago “Black Metropolis,” though plenty are indeed clustered in the “Hill” district. No discrimination exists in streetcars or elevators; the good hotels accept Negroes without much question; admittance to concerts, the theater, and football games is normal. Other items in segregation are determined by individual neighborhoods. Negroes go to the public schools in circumstances of theoretical equality, and to the university. Three Negro boys were on a recent University of Pittsburgh football team, and one, miraculous to relate, made a touchdown against Notre Dame.
Detroit is the home par excellence of the skilled worker; Pittsburgh of the unskilled. The Pittsburgh working class, with its immense foreign-born and foreign-descended population, seems to tolerate Negroes better than that of any major industrial city. The most hostile foreign communities are the Poles and Italians; the Irish and the Germans are the friendliest. Catholic influence is active; any Negro can go to any Catholic mass in Pittsburgh, and many Negro children go to the parochial schools. As to labor, the pattern is familiar. The CIO welcomes membership by Negroes, and no CIO union in the region would refuse one; many Negroes are, in fact, officers in CIO locals. But the big AF of L unions, particularly the plumbers and bricklayers, continue to resist Negro participation. As to politics, Negroes in Pittsburgh (and in Pennsylvania in general) are not quite so conspicuous as, say, those in Illinois. There are no Negro congressmen, and only one legislator at Harrisburg is a Negro. Partly this is because the community is so widely dispersed; it does not have the geographical impact that it has in Chicago in several wards. But Pittsburgh has plenty of Negro policemen, including a few officers and even motorcycle cops; these serve all over the city, not merely in the Negro districts.
The Courier is one of the best known of American Negro newspapers, and this is, perhaps, a good place for brief mention of the Negro press in general. There is only one Negro daily in America, the Atlanta World. Most of the others are weeklies, which means two things: (a) they cannot deal much in spot news, so that their readers are obliged to take in a white paper too; (b) they compete hotly with one another in overlapping areas. Most Negro journalists whom I met, all over the country, think that the Journal and Guide of Norfolk is the best Negro paper in the nation, with the Chicago Defender as runner-up. The Courier, with a circulation of about 280,000, is the biggest, followed by the Afro-American group in Baltimore. Often the Negro press is attacked for its sensationalism and stereotyped way of handling “color” news. On the other hand it seldom prints flagrant cheesecake, and does not go in for the more salacious gossip columns.
Of course the Courier is a national institution; it prints thirteen different editions which go all over the country. Next to Pennsylvania itself, its biggest circulation is in Florida. It was Republican until Roosevelt, and liberal Negroes sometimes attack it as the organ of the black petite bourgeoisie; it supported Dewey in 1944, largely because its editors resented the dragooning of Negroes by southern white Democrats. Not everybody knows the work of George S. Schuyler, the manager of the Courier’s office in New York, and one of the best—and most provocative—political writers, white, black, or of any color, in the nation. The following is a fair example of his style. It was written some years ago in protest at the way most white newspapers identify Negroes in the news as Negroes.11
This is a subtle form of discrimination designed to segregate these individuals in the mind of the public, and thus bolster the national policy of biracialism. Thus, Paul Robeson is not a great baritone; he is a great “Negro” baritone. Dr. Carver is not just a great scientist; he is a great “Negro” scientist… Langston Hughes is not a poet merely; he is a “Negro” poet…. No other group in this country is so singled out for racial identification, and no one can tell me that there is not a very definite reason for it. No daily newspaper refers to Mr. Morgenthau as the “Jewish” Secretary of the Treasury or New York’s Herbert H. Lehman as the “Jewish” governor, or Isador Lubin as a “Jewish” New Dealer…. There would be considerable uproar if Senator Robert F. Wagner were termed “New York’s able German-American solon,” or Representative Tenerowicz dubbed “Detroit’s prominent Pole.”
We shall hear more from Mr. Schuyler soon, when we reach the Negro problem itself in Chapter 41.
The Plain Sects
And be not conformed to this world.
—Amish precept
I drove to Lancaster, city and county, and there sought to learn something of the Plain Sects, or Plain People, as they are sometimes called. The placid, swelling fields here—Lancaster is the second richest agricultural county in the entire United States—are, needless to say, an acute contrast to the pistonlike atmosphere of Pittsburgh. Here are farmers among the best on earth, irremovably fixed to the soil from life to death, who for the most part have never even seen the belching mills not far off—still another American study in differentiation and amalgam.
It would be a rash person who would attempt to define the term “Pennsylvania Dutch.” The criteria are racial, religious, and linguistic intermixed, with language—the famous “schoenste lengevitch”—probably the most important factor. But use of this tongue is declining. Courses in it are still given, however, in the Franklin and Marshall College at Lancaster. The Pennsylvania Dutch (or Pennsylvania Germans more properly) derive mostly from the Palatinate and Wurttemberg, and their migrations date from 1720 or earlier. Simple people like the Quakers, frugal, pious, they constitute one of the most striking communities in America. Some of their place names are Paradise, Bird-in-Hand, Perkiomenville, Gap, Intercourse, and Fertility. Mostly they are aloof, polite, and interested in nothing so much as accumulating a property for their children. They take beautiful care of their farms, come into Lancaster to markets like those in Balkan provincial capitals, build magnificent modern barns—and decorate them with various abstruse symbols to ward off the hex-women and the evil eye. They are among the most progressive farmers in the world, but to list even the more conspicuous of their superstitions would take a page.
All manner of sects live in this neighborhood. There are Mennonites of sixteen different types (and they want you to be very clear about which they belong to), Dunkards, members of the Church of the Brethren, Schwenkfelders, Moravians, Seventh-Day Adventists, Brinsers, and Weinbrennarians.12 Most are extreme pacifists, and believe devoutly in nonresistance. During World War II, if they refused to wear uniform, they were as a rule assigned to the civilian public service corps set up under Selective Service. The Quakers started work on this system a year before Pearl Harbor, and it cost them almost five million dollars to administer it before the war was over. Ninety per cent of Mennonites were conscientious objectors. The figure for Dunkards and Church of Brethren was somewhat less, that for the Quakers themselves about 25 per cent.
The most interesting group is the Amish, of whom there are about 3,500 in the Lancaster environs; these are in turn divided into the “Old Order” or “House Amish,” and the “Church Amish” or “Amish-Mennonites.” They practiced contour farming and soil conservation long before the Department of Agriculture did, but tractors and other agricultural machines are still forbidden; that is, tractors “may be owned and operated for belt power, but they may not be used to operate implements in the field.”13 This—near the inmost heart of industrial America!
The Amish smoke, but do not drink, and they are liable to excommunication if they marry outside the sect. No Amish may, except in cases of force majeure, sleep outside his home, and domestic servants are called “livers.” It is an odd experience to hear one Amish say to another, “Is your liver in or out?” Mennonites may have telephones—but I talked to one leader of the faith who told me how for years his father had resisted installing one—and freely drive in automobiles, but in theory at least, no Amish may own or use any mechanical contrivance, not even radios or vacuum cleaners. The Amish can use buggies to move about in, but these must be open, and dashboards and whipsockets are forbidden. They are not supposed to read anything whatever except the Bible and Bible stories. They do not vote or participate in any way in civic affairs. The House Amish (who worship in their own homes) do not use electricity, and their children may not even play with manufactured dolls. They do, however, use water pumped from wells, and in some other respects the purity of their nonmechanical isolation is breaking down.
Above all, the Amish manner of dress and appearance is unusual. Members are not allowed to wear buttons, which might be considered a sign of display; instead, hooks and eyes are used. The girls wear black bonnets, with a white cap underneath; the men wear broad black hats. In some circumstances, however, the Amish may make use of bright colors, for instance purple and green; but there must be no design, no pattern, in the material. The men wear their hair long, parted in the middle; unmarried men shave, and then, upon marriage, never cut their beards again. They do, however, always continue to shave their mustaches.
Lancaster itself, a flourishing industrial town and the center of a great tobacco region, has much of interest. Its four-square-mile boundary has not been changed since 1718, and every street, so the saying goes, leads to a cemetery. Its population, in extreme contrast to Pittsburgh, is 93.2 per cent of native white stock, and it bounces with vitality. Cattle would be sent here all the way from Texas, because the grass is so rich, except for the cost of fencing; even so, Lancaster has the biggest stockyards in the nation east of Chicago. Also it is a great nucleus for cork manufacture. The newspaper situation is curious in the extreme. All three papers are owned by the Steinman family; the Intelligence Journal, founded in 1794, the morning paper, is Democratic; the evening paper, the New Era, is Republican; the Sunday paper, the News, is independent.
1 Most of these details come from an invaluable privately printed booklet, Chronology of Iron and Steel, by Stephen L. Goodale and J. Ramsey Speer, Pittsburgh, 1920.
2 November n, 1946.
3 The Morgan fee for its services was $62,500,000. See Beard, op. cit. p. 308.
4 By Adolf A. Berle Jr. and Gardiner C. Means.
5 Life, op. cit.
6 Others: George A. Sloan of Bankers Trust and Goodyear Rubber; ex-president Irwin; Mr. Taylor; Robert C. Stanley, president of International Nickel; and several Morgan partners.
7 These figures are from PM, January 1, 1946, and the New Republic, February 18, 1945.
8 Time, January 21, 1946.
9 Time, July 8 and 22, 1946.
10 New York Times, July 14, 1946.
11 From Myrdal, op. cit., II, p. 1184.
12 Cf. Pennsylvania in the American Guide Series, p. 63.
13 See a fascinating Department of Agriculture Pamphlet, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community, by Walter M. Kollmorgen, 1942.