The Great Steel Strike and its LessonsFoster, William Z.
History
The Great Steel Strike and its Lessons
Foster, William Z.
Steel Strike, U.S., 1919-1920; United States Steel Corporation
Judging from past experiences the strike in the Pittsburgh district
should have been impossible under such hard circumstances. With little
or no opportunity to meet for mutual encouragement and enlightenment,
the strikers, theoretically, should have been soon discouraged and
driven back to work. But they were saved by their matchless solidarity,
bred of a deep faith in the justice of their cause. In the black,
Cossack-ridden Monongahela towns there were thousands of strikers who
were virtually isolated, who never attended a meeting during the entire
strike and seldom if ever saw an organizer or read a strike bulletin,
yet they fought on doggedly for three and one-half months, buoyed up by
a boundless belief in the ultimate success of their supreme effort. Each
felt himself bound to stay away from the mills, come weal or come woe,
regardless of what the rest did. These were mainly the despised
foreigners, of course, but their splendid fighting qualities were a
never-ending revelation and inspiration to all connected with the
strike.
Through the dark night of oppression a bright beacon of liberty gleamed
from Braddock. There the heroic Slavish priest, Reverend Adelbert
Kazincy, pastor of St. Michel's Roman Catholic church, bade defiance to
the Steel Trust and all its minions. He threw open his church to the
strikers, turned his services into strike meetings, and left nothing
undone to make the men hold fast. The striking steel workers came to his
church from miles around, Protestants as well as Catholics. The
neighboring clergymen who ventured to oppose the strike lost their
congregations,--men, women and children flocked to Father Kazincy's, and
all of them stood together, as solid as a brick wall.
Reverend Kazincy's attitude aroused the bitterest hostility of the steel
companies. They did not dare to do him bodily violence, nor to close his
church by their customary "legal" methods; but they tried everything
else. Unable to get the local bishop to silence him, they threatened
finally to strangle his church. To this the doughty priest replied that
if they succeeded he would put a monster sign high up on his steeple:
"This church destroyed by the Steel Trust," and he would see that it
stayed there. When they tried to foreclose on the church mortgage, he
promptly laid the matter before his heterogeneous congregation of
strikers, who raised the necessary $1200 before leaving the building and
next day brought in several hundred dollars more. Then the companies
informed him that after the strike no more Slovaks could get work in
the mills. He told them that if they tried this, he would do his level
best to pull all the Slovaks out of the district (they are the bulk of
the mill forces) and colonize them in the West. The promised blacklist
has not yet materialized.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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