CHAPTER VI

THE WORLD OF THE STEEL WORKERS

“The sky-line of your cities is the monument of your civilization.” These words summed up the impression of an Oriental visiting America for the first time. He had seen everything of America that could be shown during his two months’ visit. Boards of trades in the various cities entertained him. Figures concerning miles of pavements, hundreds of miles of trolley lines, millions of dollars in the various banks, thousands of bales of cotton, millions of tons of coal, iron, steel, potatoes, rice, wheat, corn, and all the rest of the things that go to make America great had been quoted to him. He was apparently impressed by what he saw but did not become enthusiastic, and accepted every statement with becoming politeness. No one could tell what moved him most. When he summed up his total impressions and expressed his opinion, it showed that he had really formed a most exact judgment of that which makes the true material basis of our national life. The skyscraper building is the only important contribution that America has made to the art of architecture. This structural development, which is so truly American, has been made possible only because we have learned how to use steel for the framework of the gigantic construction.

=The Steel Industry.= Interesting statistics as to the extent of the steel industry have been compiled. The United States and Canada together produce about half of the world’s output. According to the last figures, there are employed in the iron and steel industry of this country 1,426,014 workers. At the present time the capacity of all the shops is taxed to the utmost and hundreds of new factories have been erected. Canada and the United States are cooperating in the production of ships. The huge bridge works are giving over all of their machinery and time to the building of new boats to carry men and food in support of the Allied armies in France.

=The Use of Steel.= Steel is made by melting iron and combining it with a certain proportion of carbon. The softest grade of steel contains less than one per cent. of carbon, the hardest contains about thirty per cent. Iron furnishes almost every useful thing that is necessary to our life in the community. When we have food and clothes, we are then ready to take up the routine of living a part of the common life of our city or town. Iron is used extensively in building our homes. The house is held together with nails made of iron; its plumbing, its lighting, its heating are all made possible by the use of steel.

Possibly the building in which we work is a steel building, if not, it may be made of reenforced concrete and this form of construction is dependent upon the use of iron. The product toward which we are contributing our industry, whatever it may be, is dependent upon commerce, transportation, and communication; and these great branches of activity are dependent upon steel. Iron can be melted and cast into a thousand different shapes. It is used to make the most simple kitchen utensil and the largest and most complicated machinery. Again, it is melted in larger quantity, combined with carbon, and put through the rolling-mills. By this process it may become steel rails, or be made into plates and huge sheets that form the protective outer skin of the great ships of war. It is rolled out thin and corrugated to be used as sheeting for houses, and sides of freight-cars, and roofs of houses; or it may issue in things as delicate as knitting-needles or the finest springs which form the adjustment and motive power in the most costly watches. It is used in the construction of buildings that tower up hundreds of feet above the level of the street, and is the only thing that has been found so far that can be used successfully for such a purpose. At the same time this most necessary substance is formed into pliable rope and used to draw the miner and the minerals he mines from the depths of the earth, and to keep the elevators running up and down in hotels, office buildings, and apartment houses. The finest cambric needles are first cousins to the great guns with which the Germans were able to shell Paris from a distance of seventy-five miles.

The advance in recent years in invention and new processes as applied to the manufacture of steel has brought about more changes in the industrial life of the world than any other thing. The cities of the future will all be steel cities. We have already built our cities twice--once of wood and once of brick--and we are now building them of steel. An advertisement in a hotel in a Middle-Western city reads: “This hotel is built without a stick of wood. We could roast an ox in the room next to yours and never disturb you.” Steel mesh is replacing lath in ceilings, and ornamental steel ceilings are replacing plaster. In subway systems quantities of steel have been used for tunnels; the elevated railroads are prolonged bridges. Williamsburg Bridge between New York and Brooklyn cost $20,000,000, and 45,000 tons of steel were used in its construction. One pound in every ten of all the steel manufactured is made into wire. The Brooklyn Bridge cables have each 6,400 strands of wire. Other wires made of steel have approximately a dimension of one tenth the thickness of a hair. A carpet tack is an insignificant sort of thing, but one factory in Chicago produced 3,000,000 pounds of these tacks in a year. Steel goes into furniture, is made into barrels; utilized in art work, so that the value of common iron when refined and drawn out to the highest possible utility makes steel the most precious of all metals to-day. Watch-screws cost $1,600 a pound and hair springs twice this amount.

=The Making of Steel.= The workshop of civilization is now on the west side of the Atlantic because of the vast manufacturing establishments producing steel on this side of the ocean. The so-called Bessemer process in making steel has brought about a change that is almost as revolutionary in its far-reaching results as any of the great revolutions in the past. Within thirty years American resources have been developed, and American methods have been reorganized with such amazing rapidity that the United States has to-day, together with the natural advantage, the means at hand for utilizing its almost inexhaustible supplies of fuel and iron. The world needs these supplies and America is glad that she is able to do her part in supplying them.

Steel has been made for centuries, but until a few years ago, the process was slow and costly, and the tools with which the men worked were really treasures. In those days a pocket-knife was a thing of great value. The railroads used iron rails but these soon wore out. If it had been suggested that steel be used a protest would have been made on the grounds that steel is too expensive. Trains had to be shortened; coaches and locomotives built of light material because iron rails and bridges could not stand the strain. As land in the cities became more valuable and taller buildings were needed, stone and brick not proving adaptable and too expensive, the Bessemer process, which manufactured steel cheaply and in great quantities, came to meet a long-felt need. Iron was plentiful but the process of converting it into steel had not been mastered. The great difficulty in manufacturing steel is to get just the right proportion of carbon mixed with the iron. The Bessemer system takes all the carbon out and then puts back into it the quantity that is needed. Tons of molten iron are run into an immense pear-shaped vessel called a converter. Blasts of air are forced in from below. These unite with the carbon and the impurities such as sulphur and silicon are destroyed. There is a roar and clatter and a terrific din. A great bolt of red flame shoots forth many feet from the mouth of the converter. Its color changes from red to yellow and then to white. When the flame becomes white the workers know that the carbon and other impurities are all gone; and this is the signal for the blast of air to be turned off. Then a quantity of special iron ore in melted form, containing the right amount of carbon to convert the whole into steel of the desired degree of hardness, is poured into the purified molten iron in the converter. This huge converter is perfectly poised upon pivots so that it can be moved with very little effort. The molten steel at the next stage is poured from the converter into square molds and the blocks resulting from it are called blooms. These are then started through the mill, passed under and between rollers of different shapes and kinds, and drawn out into plates, rails, or beams.

=The Steel Factory or Rolling-mill.= One of the foremost pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a picture of a steel-mill. It seems to be a prosaic subject but it makes an appealing picture, and one typical of our modern world. Some one has described a steel-mill as a modern materialization of Dante’s Inferno. The sky above Pittsburgh, Birmingham, and other steel centers is aflame at night as the process of manufacturing is carried on in the miles of buildings that contain the workers and the machinery. To step into one of these steel factories even in broad daylight is to step out of the world of reality into the semi-reality of a new and unknown world. Most of the men work stripped to the waist. The long ribbons of red hot steel writhe and twist about the length of the room. The jangle of chains mingles with the creaking of the machinery above our heads. The sparks are flying and a bluish haze hovers about the heads of the men like some unholy halo as they move back and forth appearing as gnomes in the unnatural light of the place. There is a peculiar odor that we instinctively associate with the blacksmith shop that used to stand at the side of the street on the way between our house and the butcher shop where we used to be sent every day for the meat for dinner. Everything moves with feverish haste. No one lags. Every man knows his task and does it. He must keep up.

The days are unusually long in the steel-mills. It used to be that the men worked twelve hours a day and seven days a week. This has been changed now in most of the mills, but even yet there is a great deal of twelve-hour work and a great deal of Sunday labor. The rumble of the cranes above the heads of the gnome-like men at work in the building fills our ears with an unearthly sound. The peculiar glare of the gigantic open hearth changes at frequent intervals as the white cascade of molten metal announces the beginning of the shaping process of the new rail or the new plate for some new man-of-war, or the beam that is to live for centuries in some skyscraper. These men working in this mill are kneading the metal into shape, for as it goes under the rollers it is pressed and twisted until the final process is completed.

=Accidents.= If it was a lucky day when we visited the steel-mill there were no serious accidents. Men are being continually hurt in the works. A report concerning one says: “John Schwobboda and Joseph Mikelliffyky were standing near one of the hearths. Something went wrong, and instead of the steel coming out in an orderly stream it broke out and before these two could get away they were caught in the midst of the stream and absorbed by the burning metal.” This thing has happened many times. The percentage of deaths due to accidents and injuries during the last ten years among soldiers and sailors of the United States has been about twelve to the thousand; in the same period with the workers in the steel-mills it has been about sixteen to the thousand.

=Wages and Conditions of Labor.= The toil is strenuous and the hazards great; the hours are long and the product is of almost incalculable value. What do men get out of it? They are the servants of civilization and without them we would have no such trade as we have to-day, we would have no commerce and no progress. Steel is king. When the price of steel is up to normal, times are good; when the price of steel is down, times are bad. A Pittsburgh man said that steel is the elevator which carries civilization, “The world goes up or goes down with the price of steel rails.” The workers are the subjects and the slaves of this king. They are giving their lives as well as their time in fealty to him. Yet how little the average person knows of the lives of these men.

A genius for mathematics has estimated that if the 587 rolling-mills in the United States were set end to end in a circle around Pittsburgh it would be 100 miles in diameter. Inside of this circle can be formed another circle three quarters as large if we set end to end the 532 smaller steel-mills and 3,161 puddling furnaces, where the iron is first melted and made into bars called pigs. There are 577 open-hearth works, or factories that manufacture steel by another process much slower than the Bessemer, but having certain advantages because the process does not have to be carried on so rapidly. These works would make a third circle 50 miles across. The 410 other furnaces of various kinds would form a fourth circle 35 miles in diameter. If all the Bessemer converters were made into one great big converter and put in the center, it would be a mile in circumference and would pour a river of molten steel every hour.

The furnaces are fed literally mountains of ore every year. The families dependent upon the iron and steel trade for their living, if gathered together, would form a state more populous than Illinois. The steel business thinks its own thoughts, prints its own literature, and very largely makes its own laws. There is no trade on the face of the earth equal to it. The results of the present world war hang in the balance. The needs come back definitely to the steel industry. If we can get more workers we can get more steel. If we get more steel, we can build more ships, and if we can get more ships, we can get more soldiers, more ammunition, and more food with which to fight the war for democracy.

The year 1916 was the most prosperous one which the American steel trade has ever known; manufacturers especially were driven to the limit of their capacity. The purchases amounted to startling proportions. Wages were increased so that the workman shared in a measure in the general prosperity. Three advances were made, each time approximating 10 per cent. The workmen are paid on a sliding schedule thus benefiting by the rise in the value of the product they make. Never have workmen received such wages as are now being paid to the workmen of America. But over against this increase in wages must be considered the increase in the cost of living, and also the base line, or average wage in days before the war upon which these increases are figured. Hours are still very long and no process has been devised for making the work very much easier or less wearing upon the individual worker. Investigators who made their report in 1912 said that during the year 1910, the period covered by their investigation, 29 per cent. of the employees in the blast furnaces and steel works and rolling-mills ordinarily worked seven days a week; 24 per cent. worked eighty-four hours or more a week. This means a twelve-hour day seven days a week.

These long hours were not confined to the men in the blast-furnace department, where there is a real necessity for continual toil, but to a large extent to the other departments, where no such necessity existed, except the necessity of making all the profits possible from the workers. When the shift was made from day to night work or from night to day work, the employees making the shift were required to remain on duty without relief for periods of from eighteen to twenty-four hours consecutively. No one can visit a steel-mill and not feel that there is something merciless in the way the workers are being goaded by invisible forces to keep their speed at the topmost notch. The very nature of the work is such that men are forced to labor at high tension. The mill stops for nothing either day or night. “You must draw or be dragged to death,” said one of the workers.

A steel employee in South Chicago made good wages but was a hard drinker and with his companions spent most of the evenings in the saloons so that there was rarely a night that he went to bed sober. A friend of the family had a chance to talk with him about the situation and tried to argue with him to show him the folly of drinking. His reply was, “Why, who cares? The mill drives me all the day long and dries me all up. I have to draw, draw, draw, or be dragged. By the end of the day there is only one thing that I want and that is beer.”

A large proportion of the workers in the steel-mills are immigrants. There are Magyars, Poles, Slovaks, Croatians, Italians, as well as Austro-Hungarians, and all the other races mixed in. Many of the men are single, or if they are married they have left their wives in the old country. The wage is very largely based on the needs of a single man. Nearly all the families take boarders. This reduces the cost of living and in some of these families, the “boarding boss” as he is known, is the head of the household consisting of himself, his wife, his children, and anywhere from four to sixteen boarders or lodgers. Each lodger pays the boarding boss a fixed sum, usually two or three dollars a month for lodging, cooking, and washing. The food is bought by the boss and its cost shared individually by the members of the group. A study was made of a community in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and it was found that the food consumed was cheap beef, bread, and coffee. Some of the people used vegetables sparingly. The Italians ate only a small quantity of meat, but used large quantities of vegetables, spaghetti, bread, and olive oil. The Austro-Hungarians used vast quantities of meat.

=Houses and Homes.= The housing conditions among the poorly paid steel workers are invariably bad. In a part of Pittsburgh known as the “strip” the living conditions are bad almost beyond belief. The reason given for this situation is that the wages are so low no better is possible. The standard of living among all the steel workers is low. Comfort or ordinary provisions for decency are almost entirely lacking in nearly every steel-producing district. The housing conditions are congested, the children play in the streets, and only the cheapest and most dangerous forms of recreation are open to the young people. A large proportion of the workers are members of the Roman Catholic Church. The men, however, for the most part have no use for the church and rarely if ever attend. The women cling to it, since they are naturally more devout.

The children suffer from the hard circumstances in the laboring communities. The mothers have generally gone to work too early in life to give proper vitality to the child. The lack of conditions that make for decent home life brought about through inadequate incomes of the fathers and the overcrowded housing conditions taxes life heavily by infant mortality, and mortgages the future health and morals of the children, thus threatening the future efficiency of the state. Investigations conducted by the Children’s Bureau in Washington show that the chances of life for a baby grow appallingly small as the father’s earnings grow less. For instance, the cases of one thousand babies in eight representative cities were studied. The returns show that in families where the father earns less than $550 a year every sixth baby dies; while in families where the father’s income is $1,050 or more a year only one baby in sixteen dies.[2]

[2] See “Infant Mortality,” a pamphlet issued by the Children’s Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor, Washington, D. C.

=The Church and the Homes of the Workers.= The disorganizing influence on the social and industrial life incident to the war accentuates the importance of protecting mothers and children. The churches have a remarkable opportunity here, for it is to the homes that the church makes its first and strongest appeal. Jesus set a little child at the very center of his system for regenerating humanity and saving the world.

The church must produce and train skilled leaders who can direct affairs; it must set in motion forces that will counteract the evil in these industrial communities; and must help to create public sentiment so that the city that allows bad housing to exist and the industry that forces it will be looked upon as murderers of little children. Playgrounds, recreation centers, and the strict enforcement of all the laws that protect the home must be urged upon the church as a part of its program. Without these the gospel fails.

=The Church and the Workers.= Another feature incident to the life in the steel-mills is the apathy that develops in the workers themselves. Their attitude toward life is characterized by a dumb, brutish fatalism. The editor of a paper in one of the steel cities when discussing this attitude of mind remarked: “A Finlander cares less about being killed in the mill than I do about having my tooth pulled.” It is almost impossible to enforce the necessary precautions. Life becomes of little value to the worker pressed as he is for production. This thing called steel looms big and human; life looks small in proportion. Jesus, appealing to the rural-minded people of his day, said that man is more precious than a sheep. The church in our great steel centers must often and persistently preach the gospel from this text which interpreted in modern times will be, “Man is more precious than a bar of steel.”

=Progress Toward Justice.= The process of adjustment between manufacturing, the cost of labor, and the selling price of the material is a difficult one. Labor conditions have been such, and competition so keen, that it has been very difficult to safeguard the men employed in this industry. Union labor has had a hard time to establish itself. Nearly all of the mills and factories are run as open shops. Of late years, however, it has been found that there must be closer cooperation between the management, the owners, and the workers; and certain concessions have been made and new elements have been introduced into the system which are bettering conditions. It is now possible for the workers to have shares of the common stock of the United States Steel Corporation. The workers are suspicious of this scheme as well as of all other forms of profit-sharing and welfare work because they believe that it leads to a deepening of the dependence of the worker upon the concern for which he works, and thus hinders the coming of industrial democracy. It must be said, however, for a plan which makes it possible for the employees to buy stock in the concern, that it is a step toward democracy if it is democratically carried out. The difficulty at present is that only the better paid, higher class of laborers in the steel-mills can or will take the stock. Until the wages of all the laborers are increased to the place where each one can have a decent home located in a desirable part of the city, and a degree of leisure so that he can give some time and attention to other things than the mere process of making steel, the distributing of stock will not go far toward settling the labor difficulties that so often embarrass the great steel companies.

=A Successful Experiment.= Democracy means that each worker shall have a voice and a vote in determining the conditions under which he works as well as some share in the ownership of the business. The only answer to the argument against democracy is a successful experiment in democracy. A manufacturing plant in a democratic country must recognize in these days that the only scheme that will succeed must make for a larger control of the business by a larger number of the people employed. The Baker Manufacturing Company, of Evansville, Wisconsin, has carried out a stock-owning, profit-sharing plan with great success. Since 1899 the lowest additional wage paid to the employees has been 60 per cent. and the highest 120 per cent. based on average wages. Every employee has a vote in the company, and the annual meetings are held in the town hall. The stock issued each year represents real value, for every dollar of it is put into material improvements in the shop and its equipment. I visited Mr. Baker some years ago and he told me of the success of his plans. Just before I left I said: “Mr. Baker, do you think that you have been wise in putting so much effort into the creation of this new form of industrial organization?” He replied: “Well, I am past seventy years of age and have all the money I can use conveniently. I enjoy life and have the friendship of my workmen. I do not need to station detectives about my home to protect me while I am asleep; and another thing, we never have had a strike in this town. We are all friends and fellow workers.” Surely these are the things that accumulations of money cannot produce and their possession is beyond value. What has been done in this factory connected with the steel trade ought to be possible everywhere.

=The Church and Its Approach.= The scheme of adjustment is a difficult one, and the church is not meeting the situation in any adequate way. Its task is before it and must be attacked with persistence, with skill, and with patience. This means, first of all, that the church in the communities where the steel workers live must find a method of approach through the home and the school to the heart and the life of the people. Until this is done, it will be futile for the church to even attempt to minister to the people in the deeper things of life.