Part 4

Practical labor officials who have handled mass movements understand the great difficulties attendant upon the organization of large bodies of workingmen. In the steel campaign these were more serious than ever before. The tremendous number of men involved; their unfamiliarity with the English language and total lack of union experience; the wide scope of the operations; the complications created by a score of international unions, each with its own corps of organizers, directly mainly from far-distant headquarters; the chronic lack of resources; and the need for quick action in the face of incessant attacks from the Steel Trust--all together produced technical difficulties without precedent. But the foregoing systems went far to solve them. And into these systems the organizers and secretaries entered whole-heartedly. They realized that modern labor organizations cannot depend wholly upon idealism. They bore in mind that they were dealing with human beings and had to adopt sound principles of responsibility, standardization and general efficiency.

But another factor in the success of the campaign possibly even more important than the systems employed was the splendid morale of the organizers. A better, more loyal body of men was never gathered together upon this continent. They knew no such word as defeat. They pressed on with an irresistible assurance of victory born of their faith in the practicability of the theory upon which the campaign was worked out.

The organization of workingmen into trade unions is a comparatively simple matter when it is properly handled. It depends almost entirely upon the honesty, intelligence, power and persistence of the organizing forces. If these factors are strongly present, employers can do little to stop the movement of their employees. This is because the hard industrial conditions powerfully predispose the workers to take up any movement offering reasonable prospects of bettering their miserable lot. All that union organizers have to do is to place before these psychologically ripe workers, with sufficient clarity and persistence, the splendid achievements of the trade-union movement, and be prepared with a comprehensive organization plan to take care of the members when they come. If this presentation of trade unionism is made in even half-decent fashion the workers can hardly fail to respond. It is largely a mechanical proposition. In view of its great wealth and latent power, it may be truthfully said that there isn't an industry in the country which the trade-union movement cannot organize any time it sees fit. The problem in any case is merely to develop the proper organizing crews and systems, and the freedom-hungry workers, skilled or unskilled, men or women, black or white, will react almost as naturally and inevitably as water runs down hill.

This does not mean that there should be rosy-hued hopes held out to the workers and promises made to them of what the unions will get from the employers once they are established. On the contrary, one of the first principles of an efficient organizer is never, under any circumstances, to make promises to his men. From experience he has learned the extreme difficulty of making good such promises and also the destructive kick-back felt in case they are not fulfilled. The most he can do is to tell his men what has been done in other cases by organized workingmen and assure them that if they will stand together the union will do its utmost to help them. Beyond this he will not venture. And this position will enable him to develop the legitimate hope, idealism and enthusiasm which translates itself into substantial trade-union structure. The wild stories of extravagant promises made to the steel workers during their organization are pure tommyrot, as every experienced union man knows.

The practical effect of this theory is to throw on the union men the burden of responsibility for the unorganized condition of the industries. This is as it should be. In consequence, they tend to blame themselves rather than the unorganized men. Instead of indulging in the customary futile lamentations about the scab-like nature of the non-union man, "unorganizable industries," the irresistible power of the employers, and similar illusions to which unionists are too prone, they seek the solution of the problem in improvements of their own primitive organization methods.

This conception worked admirably in the steel campaign. It filled the organizers with unlimited confidence in their own power. They felt that they were the decisive factor in the situation. If they could but present their case strongly enough, and clearly enough to the steel workers, the latter would have to respond, and the steel barons would be unable to prevent it. A check or a failure was but the signal for an overhauling of the tactics used, and a resumption of the attack with renewed vigor. At times it was almost laughable. With hardly an exception, when the organizers went into a steel town to begin work, they would be met by the local union men and solemnly assured that it was utterly impossible to organize the steel mills in their town. "But," the organizers would say, "we succeeded in organizing Gary and South Chicago and many other tough places." "Yes, we know that," would be the reply, "but conditions are altogether different here. These mills are absolutely impossible. We have worked on them for years and cannot make the slightest impression. They are full of scabs from all over the country. You will only waste your time by monkeying with them." This happened not in one place alone, but practically everywhere--illustrating the villainous reputation the steel companies had built up as union smashers.

Side-stepping these pessimistic croakers, the organizers would go on to their task with undiminished self-confidence and energy. The result was success everywhere. The National Committee can boast the proud record of never having set up its organizing machinery in a steel town without ultimately putting substantial unions among the employees. It made little difference what the obstacles were; the chronic lack of funds; suppression of free speech and free assembly; raises in wages; multiplicity of races; mass picketing by bosses; wholesale discharge of union men; company unions; discouraging traditions of lost local strikes; or what not--in every case, whether the employers were indifferent or bitterly hostile, the result was the same, a healthy and rapid growth of the unions. The National Committee proved beyond peradventure of a doubt that the steel industry could be organized in spite of all the Steel Trust could do to prevent it.

Each town produced its own particular crop of problems. A chapter apiece would hardly suffice to describe the discouraging obstacles overcome in organizing the many districts. But that would far outrun the limits of this volume. A few details about the work in Johnstown will suffice to indicate the tactics of the employers and the nature of the campaign generally.

Johnstown is situated on the main line of the Pennsylvania railroad, seventy-five miles east of Pittsburgh. It is the home of the Cambria Steel Company, which employs normally from 15,000 to 17,000 men in its enormous mills and mines. It is one of the most important steel centers in America.

For sixty-six years the Cambria Company had reared its black stacks in the Conemaugh valley and ruled as autocratically as any mediaeval baron. It practically owned the district and the dwellers therein. It paid its workers less than almost any other steel company in Pennsylvania and was noted as one of the country's worst union-hating concerns. According to old residents, the only record of unionism in its plants, prior to the National Committee campaign, was a strike in 1874 of the Sons of Vulcan, and a small movement a number of years later, in 1885, when a few men joined the Knights of Labor and were summarily discharged. The Amalgamated Association, even in its most militant days, was unable to get a grip in Johnstown. That town, for years, bore the evil reputation of being one where union organizers were met at the depot and given the alternative of leaving town or going to the lockup.

Into this industrial jail of a city the National Committee went in the early winter of 1918-19, at the invitation of local steel workers who had heard of the campaign. A. F. of L. organizer Thomas J. Conboy was placed in charge of the work. Immediately a strong organization spirit manifested itself--the wrongs of two-thirds of a century would out. It was interesting to watch the counter-moves of the company. They were typical. At first the officials contented themselves by stationing numbers of bosses and company detectives in front of the office and meeting halls to jot down the names of the men attending. But when this availed nothing, they took the next step by calling the live union spirits to the office and threatening them with dismissal. This likewise failed to stem the tide of unionism, and then the company officials applied their most dreaded weapon, the power of discharge. This was a dangerous course; the reason they did not adopt it before was for fear of its producing exactly the revolt they were aiming to prevent. But, all else unavailing, they went to this extreme.

Never was a policy of industrial frightfulness more diabolically conceived or more rigorously executed than that of the Cambria Steel Company. The men sacrificed were the Company's oldest and best employees. Men who had worked faithfully for ten, twenty or thirty years were discharged at a moment's notice. The plan was to pick out the men economically most helpless; men who were old and crippled, or who had large families dependent upon them, or homes half paid for, and make examples of them to frighten the rest. The case of Wm. H. Seibert was typical; this man, a highly skilled mechanic, had worked for the Cambria Company thirty years. He was deaf and dumb, and could neither read nor write. He was practically cut off from all communication with his fellow workers. Yet the company, with fiendish humor, discharged him for being a union agitator. For every worker, discharge by the Cambria Company meant leaving Johnstown, if he would again work at his trade; for most of them it brought the severest hardships, but for such as Seibert it spelled ruin. With their handicaps of age and infirmities, they could never hope to work in steel mills again.

For months the Company continued these tactics.[6] Hundreds of union men were thus victimized. The object was to strike terror to the hearts of all and make them bow again to the mastery of the Cambria Steel Company. But the terrorists overshot the mark. Human nature could not endure it. They goaded their workers to desperation and forced them to fight back, however unfavorable the circumstances. The National Committee met in Johnstown and ordered a ballot among the men. They voted overwhelmingly to strike. A committee went to see Mr. Slick, the head of the Company, who refused to meet it, stating that if the men had any grievances they could take them up through the company union.

This company union played a large part in the drama of Johnstown. It was organized late in 1918 to forestall the trade unions. Such company unions are invariably mere auxiliaries to the companies' labor-crushing systems. They serve to delude the workers into believing they have some semblance of industrial democracy, and thus deter them from seeking the real thing. They consist merely of committees, made up for the most part of hand-picked bosses and "company suckers." There is no real organization of the workers. The men have no meetings off the property of the companies; they lack the advice of skilled trade unionists; they have no funds or means to strike effectively; they are out of touch with the workers in other sections of the industry. Consequently they have neither opportunity to formulate their grievances, nor power to enforce their adjustment. And little good would it do them if they had, for the lickspittle committees are always careful to see that they handle no business unless it relates to "welfare" work or other comparatively insignificant matters.

Company unions are invariably contemptible. All of them are cursed with company dictation, and all of them lack the vivifying principles of democratic control; but it is doubtful if a more degraded specimen can be found anywhere than that of the Cambria Steel Company. Without a murmur of protest it watched the company abolish the basic eight hour day late in 1918. Nor did it raise a finger to help the multitude of unfairly discharged union men. It habitually pigeonholed all real grievances submitted to it. But what else could be expected of a committee from which the company boldly discharged every man who dared say a word for the workers?

By referring the men's grievances to the despised company union, Mr. Slick only added fuel to the fire. A strike loomed threateningly, but just as it was about to break, Mr. Slick lost his job, presumably because of his unsuccessful labor policy. He was supplanted by A. A. Corey, Jr., formerly general superintendent of the Homestead Steel Works. Thinking perhaps the change in personnel might involve a change in policy, the committee approached Mr. Corey. He, too, refused to meet with it, stating publicly that the management would not deal with the representatives of outside organizations, but would take up the men's grievances, either through the company union, or "through any other accredited committee selected by the men in any way that is agreeable to them from among their own number." The last proposition was acceptable, and with joy the men held big open mass meetings of union and non-union men, and elected their committee. But their joy was short-lived. Mr. Corey, unashamed, wrote the committee that he had acted hastily before, and said, "I have had no previous experience with arrangements in the nature of collective bargaining, but a careful survey of this plan (company union), which I have since had time to make, convinces me that it makes full and complete provision for every contingency which can arise between the company and its employees." And then to make the men like this bitter medicine, the Company discharged an active member of the committee. All these events consumed many weeks and wore away the late winter and early spring months.

Mr. Corey's double-dealing provoked a fresh strike crisis; but by heroic measures the organizers repressed it. At all times a strike in Johnstown alone against the united steel companies was considered a move of desperation, a last resort to be undertaken only because nothing else could be done. But now relief was in sight. Spring was at hand and the national movement fast coming to a head. Its committees were knocking at the doors of the steel companies. The exposed and invaluable Johnstown position had to be held until this main army could come up and relieve it. So the Johnstown workers were told that they must refrain from counter-attacking, that they had to take all the blows heaped upon them and hold their ground at all costs.

And right nobly they did it. In spite of the bitterest hardships they built up and developed their organizations. In this they were unwittingly but powerfully aided by the company union. Several weeks before the big strike the officials took the hated general committee to Atlantic City, wined them and dined them and flattered them, as usual, and then had them adopt a set of resolutions condemning the national movement of the steel workers and endorsing long hours, low wages and heavier production as the remedy for prevailing bad conditions. This betrayal was the last straw. It provoked intense resentment among the men. Whole battalions of them, the most skilled and difficult in the plant to organize, walked down and joined the unions in protest. Almost 3000 enrolled the week after the resolutions were adopted. But it was always thus. Every move that the Cambria made the unions turned to their advantage. They outgeneraled the Company at every turn.

It was almost pitiful to watch the later antics of the haughty and hitherto unchallenged Cambria Company, humbled in its own town by its own workers. A few weeks before Labor day the unions, innocently presuming the mills would be closed as usual on that day, decided to have a parade. Then the strategical experts of the Company became active. A warning was issued that every man marching in the parade would be summarily discharged. The unions would not brook this unwarranted and cold-blooded attack. They promptly sent word to the Company that if a single man was discharged the whole plant would be stopped the next day. It was a clear-cut issue, and Johnstown held its breath. When Labor day came the city saw the biggest demonstration in its history. Fifteen thousand organized workers defied their would-be masters and marched. The Company swiftly backed water. And the next day not a man was discharged. It was a victory well worth the heroic efforts and suffering of the previous eight months.

When the great strike broke on September 22 the Johnstown workers went into the fight almost one hundred per cent. organized, and with about the same percentage of grievances. So few men were left in the plant that the Company had to ask the unions to give them help to shut down their furnaces, and to keep the fire protection in operation. All the power of the great corporation, which had made $30,000,000 the year before, could not forestall the unions. It had no arrow in its quiver that could strike fear to the hearts of its workers; no trick in its brain pan that could be substituted for industrial democracy.

And Johnstown was only one point in the long battle line. Its experiences were but typical. Each steel town had its own bitter story of obstacles encountered and overcome. Youngstown, Chicago, Bethlehem, Cleveland, Wheeling, Pueblo, Buffalo and many other districts, each put up a hard fight. But one by one, despite all barriers, steel towns all over the country were captured for unionism.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] As a side light on organizing methods, it may be noted that the temporary receipts were red, white and blue cards. The patriotic foreigners were proud to carry these emblematic cards pending the time they got their regular cards. More than one man joined merely on that account.

[6] In its war against unionism the Cambria Steel Company held nothing sacred, not even the church. During the campaign the Reverend George Dono Brooks, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Johnstown, took an active part, speaking at many meetings and generally lending encouragement to the workers. For this crime the company punished him by disrupting his congregation and eventually driving him from the city, penniless.

V

BREAKING INTO PITTSBURGH

THE FLYING SQUADRON--MONESSEN--DONORA--McKEESPORT--RANKIN --BRADDOCK--CLAIRTON--HOMESTEAD--DUQUESNE--THE RESULTS

The time was now ripe for a great drive on Pittsburgh, a district which had been the despair of unionism for a generation. The new strategy of the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers was succeeding. Pittsburgh had been surrounded by organized posts, established during the winter. The Chicago district had also been held. The committee's finances were improving. The crew of organizers was larger and more enthusiastic than ever. The mills were operating stronger and stronger. And spring was here. The movement was now ready for a tremendous effort to capture Pittsburgh, and thus overcome, as far as might be, the original mistake of not starting the campaign soon enough and everywhere at the same time. This done, it would put the work squarely upon the essential national basis. So the assault was ordered on the stronghold of the Steel Trust.

First free speech and free assembly had to be established; for the towns about Pittsburgh were still closed tight against the unions. During the winter incessant attempts had been made to break the embargo by political methods, but without avail. In vain a special convention of all the unions in Western Pennsylvania had appealed to the Governor for assistance. For a moment the federal Department of Labor displayed a languid interest and sent a dozen men to investigate conditions. But until this day their report has never appeared. In answer to inquiries, the Secretary of Labor is reported to have said that "its publication at this time would be inadvisable." That may be one reason, and another may be that the Department, in its eager cooperation with Attorney General Palmer, in deporting hundreds of workingmen without trials, is so busy that it hasn't time to attend to such trifles as the wholesale suppression of constitutional rights in Pennsylvania.

But in seeking relief no appeal was made to the courts to set up the rights of the unions. This was for two reasons. First, it would involve such a loss of time that the chance to organize the steel workers would have passed long before any decision could be secured. Then, again, there was no faith that the courts of Pennsylvania would be just, and the National Committee had no money to carry the fight higher. The unions conceived their rights to speak and assemble freely too well established to necessitate court sanction at this late date. Hence, they determined to exercise them, peacefully and lawfully, and to take the consequences. At Atlantic City, where the A. F. of L. was in convention, a dozen presidents of international unions in the steel campaign expressed their willingness to enter the steel districts, to speak on the streets, and to go to jail if necessary.

To carry on the difficult and dangerous free speech fight, and to oversee generally the organization of the immediate Pittsburgh district, a special crew of organizers was formed. This was known as "The Flying Squadron," and was headed by J. L. Beaghen, A. F. of L. organizer and President of the Pittsburgh Bricklayers' Union. The following brief references to the fights in the various towns will illustrate the forces at play and the methods employed.