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
Father Kazincy and the clergymen who worked with him, notable among whom
was the Reverend Molnar, a local Slavish Lutheran minister, constituted
one of the great mainstays of the strike in their district. They are men
who have caught the true spirit of the lowly Nazarene. The memory of
their loyal co-operation will long live green in the hearts of the
Pittsburgh district steel strikers.
A description of the repressive measures taken by the Steel Trust
against its workers during the early period of the strikes necessarily
relates almost entirely to Western Pennsylvania. With few exceptions,
the other districts were in a deadlock. So tightly were the mills shut
down that the companies could hardly stir. It took them several weeks to
get their stricken fighting machinery in motion again. But it was
different in Western Pennsylvania, in what we call the greater
Pittsburgh district; that has always been the key to the whole industry,
and there, from the very first, the steel companies made a bitter fight
to control the situation and to break the strike. The tactics used there
are typical in that they came to be universally applied as the strike
grew older, the degree of their application depending upon the amount of
control exercised by the Steel Trust in the several localities.
To carry on the terror so well begun by the suppression of free speech
and free assembly, the Steel Trust turned loose upon the devoted
strikers in Western Pennsylvania the great masses of armed thugs it had
been recruiting since long before the strike. These consisted of every
imaginable type of armed guard, official and unofficial, except
uniformed troops. There were State Constabulary, deputy sheriffs, city
police, city detectives, company police, company detectives, private
detectives, coal and iron police, ordinary gunmen, armed
strike-breakers, vigilantes, and God knows how many others. These
legions of reaction, all tarred with the same brush--a servile,
mercenary allegiance to the ruthless program of the Steel Trust--vied
with each other in working hardships upon the steel workers. In this
shameful competition the State Constabulary stood first; for downright
villainy and disregard of civil and human rights, these so-called
upholders of law and order easily outdistanced all the other plug-uglies
assembled by the Steel Trust. They merit our special attention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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