The Steel Strike of 1919 was the largest of a wave of strikes that shook the country following the end of World War I. The strike, which began on September 22, 1919, and lasted until January 8, 1920, involved 365,000 steelworkers and marked the end of the wartime labor accord. Prior to the war, the steel industry was largely unorganized. Steel companies vigorously opposed unionization. They sought to keep workers divided and unionization at bay by perpetuating ethnic and racial tensions in the workplace. The strategy was very effective. During the war, however, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson wanted to prevent production delays by avoiding labor disputes. When the administration created the War Labor Board to arbitrate labor conflicts, progressives in the labor movement, including William Zebulon Foster, took advantage of the opening to launch a drive to organize steelworkers.
Despite efforts to organize workers, conditions in the steel industry remained harsh. Steelworkers put in an average of 68.7 hours a week, considerably more than workers in other industries. In addition, wages were low and working conditions hazardous. In 1918, Foster convinced Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to launch an organizing drive among steel and ironworkers. They created the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, which targeted industry giant U. S. Steel in its Gary, Indiana, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plants. The company had a long history of antiunionism and vowed to resist the organizing effort at all costs. Despite opposition from local officials and U. S. Steel’s threat to use replacement workers to break the union, the organizing committee succeeded in unionizing 100,000 steelworkers by June 1919. The effort succeeded because organizers aggressively recruited foreign-born unskilled laborers, to whom they portrayed the union as patriotic and an integral part of the fight against Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany. U. S. Steel responded by reiterating its commitment to maintaining a nonunion workplace. The company fired suspected union organizers and union leaders. Its efforts backfired and greatly increased rank-and-file support for the union.
In May 1919, the National Committee demanded a significant wage increase, an eight-hour workday, the abolition of company unions, the rehiring of workers fired for union activities, and union recognition. U. S. Steel refused to negotiate with union representatives. By August 1919, the crux of the conflict centered on union recognition. Gompers believed that Wilson and the National War Labor Board would pressure U. S. Steel president Elbert H. Gary to keep the peace. Gary, however, informed the War Labor Board that he was unwilling to even meet with the union. When Wilson refused to pressure the company, militants criticized Gomper’s faith in the War Labor Board and began preparing for a strike. Led by William Z. Foster and Chicago trade unionist John Fitzpatrick, the National Committee prepared for an all-out strike; but Gompers, worried about the reliability of unskilled, foreign-born steel workers, agreed to a request by President Wilson to postpone any labor action.
Foster and Fitzpatrick were outraged and pushed ahead with plans to launch an industry-wide strike on September 22, 1919. Response to the strike call was massive. An estimated 275,000 steelworkers walked off the job the first day and their number peaked at 365,000 the next week. U. S. Steel, the media, local officials, and the federal government responded swiftly and forcefully. Striking
State troopers armed and ready to quell rioters during the Steel Strike of 1919 in Farrell, Pennsylvania (Library of Congress)
Workers were threatened, intimidated, fired, and beaten. By the end of the walkout, 22 strikers had been killed. Many local newspapers reported that foreign-born radicals bent on undermining American society were leading the strike. Wilson and the War Labor Board stood by as local business and political leaders called on the police and militias to disperse striking workers and escort replacement workers safely inside plants. When Gompers and the AFL leadership refused to commit more support, the strike collapsed. It began to lose support among workers by December, and the National Committee officially called off the strike on January 8, 1920.
Critics of Gompers, at the time of the strike and since, maintain that massive support of the strike indicated that it could have been successful if the AFL had fully supported the action. The AFL’s distrust of foreign-born unskilled workers and its preference for craft unionism ensured that the strike failed. More importantly, the AFL’s reluctance to organize mass-production industries on an industrial rather than craft basis meant that the labor movement failed to capitalize on the nascent militancy and radicalism of unskilled industrial workers and ensured that the labor movement remained small and weak until the Great Depression.
See also LABOR AND LABOR MOVEMENT.
Further reading: David Brody, Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965).
—Robert Gordon
Steffens, Lincoln (1866-1936) reformer, journalist Born in San Francisco, California, in 1866, Lincoln Steffens was among a handful of turn-of-the-century writers and journalists collectively known as MUCKRAKERS. The son of a wealthy businessman, Steffens attended the University of California, where he became actively involved in radical politics and began writing about the rampant corruption and excess in both private and public life.
Steffens began his career in journalism in 1892 and had modest success. It was as editor of McClure’s Magazine that Steffens established himself as one of the most influential journalists in the country. He edited McClure’s between 1902 and 1906. Determined to make McClure’s a financial and political success, Steffens hired a staff of progressive writers that included UPTON SINCLAIR, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Standard Baker. As editor, Steffens transformed McClure’s into the leading political magazine in the country. Articles by Upton Sinclair exposed unsafe and unsanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards. Ida Tarbell chronicled the unsavory way in which Standard Oil became one of the largest and most powerful corporations in the country. In Shame of the Cities, Steffens himself railed against the power of corporations and the new business elite, who, he argued, were lining their pockets, undermining democracy, and corrupting the nation’s political, legal, and economic systems at the expense of the common people. Although President THEODORE RoosEvELT and others chaffed at the manner in which Steffens exposed corporate greed and corruption, they understood the depth of popular resentment and initiated legislative reforms. These reforms included the Meat INSPECTION Act (1906), the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), and the HEPBURN Act (1906).
Under Steffens’s leadership, sales of McClure’s expanded, as did its influence among progressives, socialists, and political reformers. In 1906 Steffens decided to leave the magazine to form a new, more radical journal, American Magazine, along with Tarbell and Baker. Despite an impressive roster of writers, American Magazine never achieved the critical or financial success of McClure’s. Throughout the Progressive Era, Steffens’s politics continued to evolve along more radical lines, culminating with his self-exile in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1921. Steffens’s support of the Soviet experiment was ultimately short-lived. By the time he published his autobiography in 1931, he had become thoroughly disenchanted with the Soviet government.
See also JOURNALISM; PROGRESSIVISM.
Further reading: Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958).
—Robert Gordon
World History
