If you’ve spent any time in Pittsburgh, you know the view from the Fort Pitt Tunnel.
You drive through the mountain in darkness, and then the tunnel spits you out into daylight and the city opens up in front of you; the rivers, the bridges, the skyline. It’s one of the great urban entrances in America. People gasp the first time they see it.
But that’s Pittsburgh. The story we’re telling happened upstream.
Follow the Monongahela River southeast out of the city and you’ll find a different world. The Mon cuts through steep river hills, and tucked into those hills are the towns. Homestead. Braddock. Rankin. Duquesne. McKeesport. Clairton.
They sit one after another along the river, strung like beads on a wire for twenty miles. Geographers call the region the Mon Valley. The men who worked there just called it the valley.
Pittsburgh got the name. The valley got the work.
This was the industrial heart of the United States. The Monongahela and its sister rivers, the Allegheny to the north, the Ohio to the west, gave the region everything it needed. Water transportation. Coal deposits so vast they sat practically on the surface. Easy reach to the iron ore coming down from Minnesota through the Great Lakes.
The railroads did the rest. What Andrew Carnegie and then U.S. Steel built along those riverbanks was, by the early twentieth century, the most productive steel-making corridor ever known.
The mills were enormous. They had to be. The Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock — Carnegie’s first jewel, opened in 1875 — ran continuously, day and night, because stopping a blast furnace cost more than running it around the clock.
The Homestead Steel Works, a few miles downstream, sprawled across the riverbank for half a mile. The National Tube Works in McKeesport employed ten thousand men at its peak. The Clairton coke works, at the far end of the valley, fed the furnaces everything else needed to turn iron ore into steel; much of it arriving from the beehive ovens of the Connellsville coalfield to the southeast, a place with its own remarkable story.
These weren’t factories in any ordinary sense. They were cities unto themselves, breathing fire and smoke into the river hills twenty-four hours a day.
William Z. Foster, the labor organizer who would soon attempt the impossible, described Pittsburgh’s location with an accuracy that had nothing romantic in it. The city sat where the rivers joined, he wrote, with coal all around it, the Great Lakes in easy reach, railway connections to every market worth having.
Just along the Mon and its neighboring rivers: Homestead, Braddock, Rankin, McKeesport, McKees Rocks, Duquesne, Clairton, Woodlawn, Donora, Midland, Vandergrift, Brackenridge, New Kensington. Within seventy-five miles: Johnstown, Youngstown, Wheeling, and a dozen more.
He was mapping a battlefield.
The men who worked those mills in 1919 were, overwhelmingly, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe; Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, Serbs, Croatians, Italians. They had come over in waves through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, flooding into the valley towns in search of work.
They found it. It was brutal, dangerous, and relentless, but there was plenty of it, and the mills were always hiring. They settled into the hillside neighborhoods above the river, built their churches — Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran — organized their fraternal clubs, and made something like a life in those cramped, smoke-darkened towns.
They couldn’t vote in many cases. They often couldn’t speak English. What they could do was work.
And work they did. Twelve hours a day. Six days a week. Every other week, when the shifts rotated, a man pulled a “long turn”, the swing shift; twenty-four hours straight at the furnace, a single break to eat, then back to the heat.
This wasn’t a wartime emergency measure. It was standard operating procedure, and had been since Henry Clay Frick broke the union at Homestead in 1892.
By 1919, some of these men had been pulling that schedule for twenty years.
In September of that year, they went on strike. Three hundred and fifty thousand of them, not just in the Mon Valley but across every steel town in the country, walked away from the furnaces and the rolling mills and the coke ovens.
It was the largest strike in American history to that point. It lasted three and a half months. And when it was over, the men went back to work on exactly the same terms.
This is the story of how that happened. It’s a story about labor and capital, about race and immigration, about the Red Scare and the power of the press.
But at its core, it’s a story about a place; about what it meant to live and work in those valley towns, and about the machinery, human and industrial, that kept them exactly as they were.
The Shadow of 1892
To understand what happened in the fall of 1919, you have to go back twenty-seven years. Same river. Same mills. Different disaster.
In 1892, the Homestead Steel Works, Carnegie Steel’s flagship plant on the Monongahela, was the most productive steel mill in the world and one of the most heavily unionized.
The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had real power there. Skilled men, men who knew the furnaces and the rolling mills intimately, men who had negotiated contracts and won them. Carnegie himself had publicly expressed admiration for labor’s right to organize.
When contract negotiations broke down in the summer of 1892, it was Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s partner and the man actually running daily operations, who acted.
Frick locked the workers out, surrounded the plant with a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire, and hired three hundred Pinkerton detectives to move in by barge and retake the facility. Carnegie was in Scotland.
The Pinkertons arrived before dawn on July 6th. The workers were waiting for them. What followed on the banks of the Monongahela was a full-scale battle; rifles, clubs, a cannon, burning oil poured on the water. By the time it ended, ten men were dead and dozens wounded, Pinkertons and steelworkers both.
The Pinkertons surrendered and were marched through a gauntlet of furious workers and their families. The governor called in the state militia. Eight thousand soldiers occupied Homestead and held it while Carnegie Steel brought in strikebreakers and resumed production. The union, broken, never recovered at Homestead.
The defeat at Homestead triggered a wave of de-unionization across the steel industry. One by one, the mills along the Mon shed their union contracts. Skilled workers who had once negotiated their hours and wages found themselves on management’s terms, or out of a job.
And the terms management preferred were straightforward: twelve hours a day, six days a week, with the long turn thrown in every other week when the shifts rotated. Twenty-four hours straight, then home to sleep and back again.
This arrangement had a certain brutal kind of logic to it. Steel mills run around the clock; blast furnaces can’t simply be switched off at the end of a workday. Somebody has to be there, always. The question was how to divide the labor.
With a union, workers had leverage to demand shifts of reasonable length. Without one, the easiest solution for management was two twelve-hour shifts and let the men figure out the rest. The men had no say in it.
For the next twenty-seven years, that was life in the valley. A man working the day turn left for the mill before sunup and came home after dark. On long-turn weeks, he didn’t come home at all until the following day. His wife managed everything else.
His children might see him on Sundays, if he was lucky enough to have Sundays off, which many weren’t. The mills ran on holidays. They ran through winter. They ran through the influenza pandemic of 1918, which tore through the cramped mill towns with particular ferocity and which the steel companies largely ignored.
By 1919, the men in those mills had given U.S. Steel, which had been built around Carnegie Steel in 1901, more than two decades of uncontested twelve hour days. They had built the steel that laid the rails, framed the skyscrapers, and armed the American military in the war just ended.
They had bought Liberty Bonds on wages that, adjusted for wartime inflation, had barely moved. And they had done all of it without a union, without a grievance process, without any formal mechanism to bring a complaint to management at all.
The Interchurch World Movement, a Protestant investigative commission that would later become important to this story, documented what that actually looked like in numbers. The average steelworker in the Pittsburgh district put in sixty-eight to eighty-four hours per week.
The long turn, which came around every two weeks, added twenty-four hours in a single stretch. Investigators found men who had worked the long turn so many times they had simply stopped counting. The heat at the furnaces was staggering. Accidents were common and underreported. Compensation for injuries was at the company’s discretion, which meant non-existent.
This is what the men were striking to change in 1919. The demand for union recognition was, at its core, a demand to have someone to talk to; someone who might actually listen. For the men of the Mon Valley, it had been a very long time since anyone had.
The Men in the Mills
They called them “hunkies.”
It was a catchall slur for the eastern and southern Europeans who had flooded into the valley towns since the 1880s; Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, Serbs, Croatians, Lithuanians, Italians. Management used the word. Native-born workers used it. The newspapers used it.
The men it described used it about each other, sometimes with contempt, sometimes with a type of defiant pride. If you worked the mills, you were probably a hunky. If you were a hunky, you probably worked the mills.
They had come for work, and the valley had plenty. The steel industry’s appetite for labor was essentially bottomless. Blast furnaces needed men to charge them with ore and coke. Rolling mills needed men to handle the finished steel.
Every part of the operation had hot, heavy, miserable, and dangerous jobs that the mills needed filled around the clock, jobs that didn’t require English or citizenship or anything beyond a body willing to show up and take the punishment.
So they showed up. They packed into the hillside neighborhoods above the river, neighborhoods so steep that some streets were little more than staircases cut into the hillside.
They built their churches wherever they could find the ground for them. Slovak Catholics on one block, Polish Catholics on the next, Serbian Orthodox a street over, each congregation worshipping in its own language, each with its own priest who doubled as a community anchor and, when necessary, a go-between with the English-speaking world.
They organized fraternal clubs; the Slovak Sokol, the Polish Alliance, the Croatian Fraternal Union, that served as insurance societies, social halls, and the closest thing many men had to a safety net when the mill hurt them.
The mill hurt them regularly. Molten steel is unforgiving, and the pace of production in the valley left little room for caution. Men lost fingers and hands to the rolling mills. They were burned by slag and scalded by steam.
Falls, cave-ins, equipment failures; the accident rate in American steel mills in this period was, by any measure, catastrophic, and the Pittsburgh district led the country.
A researcher for the Russell Sage Foundation had documented the human cost at Homestead alone in 1907: in a single year, 195 men killed or injured at one mill. The company paid what it chose, when it chose, and if a man’s family disputed the settlement, they found themselves dealing with company lawyers in a company town.
Most of the immigrant workers couldn’t navigate that system even if they had wanted to. Many spoke little or no English. The Interchurch World Movement’s investigators, working the valley during the strike, found themselves needing translators in a dozen languages just to take testimony.
These were men who had come from villages in Galicia or Slovakia or the Croatian highlands, men whose entire previous frame of reference for authority was the landlord and the priest.
The American legal system, the AFL bureaucracy, the English-language newspapers; all of it was opaque. What they understood was the mill, the shift whistle, and the paycheck.
The paycheck, by 1919, was not stretching far. Wartime inflation had pushed the cost of living up sharply while wages had not kept pace.
The Interchurch investigators ran the numbers and found that the majority of common laborers in the Pittsburgh district were earning below what the Bureau of Labor Statistics considered the minimum for a family of five to live decently. A man working twelve hours a day, six days a week, was still coming up short.
His wife took in boarders. His older children worked. The family budget allowed for food and rent, church on Sunday, and not much else.
What it did not allow for was any meaningful sense of security. A man could be discharged for union affiliation, for talking to the wrong person, for being seen at the wrong kind of meeting. The companies maintained blacklists.
They employed undercover agents — “labor spies” was the casual term for them — who moved through the ethnic communities and reported back to management on who was organizing and who was talking. In a town where the company owned the housing as well as the mill, a man who lost his job also lost his home.
This is the population that voted 98% in favor of a strike. Not the skilled, English-speaking, native-born workers who had some small semblance of leverage in the labor market, though many of them walked out too.
The backbone of the 1919 strike was these men. The hunkies. The ones who couldn’t vote, couldn’t speak English, couldn’t navigate the courts or the press or the political system. The ones who had nothing to fall back on if the strike failed.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They walked out anyway.
The Company Owns the Town
Here is something worth reiterating before we get to the strike itself: by 1919, U.S. Steel didn’t just own the mills. It owned the towns.
Not in a loose, metaphorical sense. In some of the valley communities, the company owned the housing outright; the rows of identical frame houses climbing the hillsides above the furnaces, rented to workers at rates the company set and collected.
It owned or controlled the stores where those workers bought their food and their goods. Through a combination of direct ownership, political appointment, and the pressure that comes from being the only employer for miles, it controlled the local governments, the police departments, and in most cases the courts.
Foster documented this with the specificity of a man who had run into it personally. In Duquesne and Clairton, the mayors were company officials or their close relatives; men who could simply issue an order barring workers from holding meetings, and did.
In Homestead, McKeesport, Monessen, and Rankin, the economic leverage was sufficient without formal ownership: hall owners and vacant-lot holders knew better than to rent their property to union organizers, and they didn’t.
Pittsburgh itself, the big city upriver, was little different. AFL organizers trying to hold meetings found halls shut down for sudden “health violations” and building owners who had developed convenient scheduling conflicts.
The county sheriff, during the strike, forbade the use of foreign languages at indoor meetings entirely. Think about that for a moment. The men most likely to attend a union meeting, the Slovak and Polish and Hungarian workers who formed the overwhelming majority of the valley workforce, were legally barred from speaking to each other in any language they actually understood.
A gathering of men who couldn’t speak English, prohibited from speaking anything else, is not a meeting.
In Braddock, across the street from the Edgar Thomson Works, Father Adelbert Kazincy opened the doors of his Slovak church of St. Michael’s to the strikers. It was the only public meeting space in the town that would have them.
One church. One priest willing to take the risk. In a town built around one of the largest steel mills in the world, that was the full extent of organized labor’s access to public space.
For those who pushed too hard, there were more direct remedies.
Organizers attempting to speak at Slavish Hall in McKeesport were arrested on the mayor’s orders and released only after paying a fine.
Foster describes the Pennsylvania State Police, the “Cossacks,” as the workers called them, riding through the immigrant neighborhoods and running men off the streets, forcing pedestrians into whatever house they happened to be passing, regardless of whether they lived there.
A commission member who published his findings under the title Pennsylvania’s Cossacks collected first-hand testimony of beatings, of women and children clubbed, of methods of intimidation that would be recognizable to anyone familiar with the occupation tactics of a hostile army.
Because that is, in a meaningful sense, what it was. U.S. Steel had prepared for the strike. The company was estimated to have 25,000 armed men at its disposal in the Mon Valley alone; a force assembled from mill management, deputized merchants and professionals, private security, and law enforcement that answered to company-aligned officials.
The Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police, a nominally state force that was functionally a private army paid by the steel and coal companies, operated throughout the region. Pinkerton agents moved through the communities. Informants attended whatever gatherings workers managed to hold.
The Republican Party, dominant at every level of Pennsylvania government, served as the political arm of this arrangement. The corporation controlled the party, the party controlled the state, and the state controlled the police.
It was not a conspiracy so much as a system, interlocking pieces that had been built and maintained over decades, since the aftermath of 1892, specifically to prevent another Homestead from ever becoming a serious threat.
Foster put it frankly in his account: a man who had not seen with his own eyes the evidence of steel company control in the towns where their plants were located would have difficulty comprehending its scope and power. He was right.
The workers of the Mon Valley were not simply fighting their employer in 1919. They were fighting the entire civic and physical infrastructure of the place they lived; the government, the police, the courts, the press, and the ground under their feet. U.S. Steel had not left much to chance.
Into this landscape, in the summer of 1919, walked William Z. Foster with a clipboard and a plan.
The Organizing and the 98%
William Z. Foster was not the kind of man the AFL usually sent to do important work.
He was thirty-eight years old in 1919, a former “Wobbly” — a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union that gave Samuel Gompers nightmares — who had spent years on the fringes of American labor before concluding that the IWW’s strategy of building a separate radical movement was a dead end.
His new theory was simpler: work inside the existing system, use whatever structures were already there, and organize everyone. Skilled and unskilled. Native-born and immigrant. The AFL’s craft unions had never shown much interest in the unskilled laborers who filled the steel mills. Foster thought that was suicidal, and he intended to prove it.
He had gotten his chance in Chicago. In 1917 and 1918, he organized the stockyards workers — another vast immigrant workforce, another industry where the big companies had long since decided unions were not welcome — and largely succeeded.
The packinghouse workers got a contract. Gompers, who had every reason to distrust a former radical, had to admit the man could organize. When Foster came to him with a proposal to take on U.S. Steel, Gompers said yes.
The result was the National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, a coalition of twenty-four AFL unions assembled in the summer of 1918.
John Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Federation of Labor was the committee’s public face, a respected and politically safe choice. Foster was the engine. He understood that organizing the steel mills meant organizing in a dozen languages, in church basements and private homes, in the scattered moments when workers weren’t being watched.
He hired organizers who spoke Slovak and Polish and Serbian. He built the structure quietly, from the inside out, in the communities that U.S. Steel had spent decades making inhospitable to exactly this kind of activity.
It took the better part of a year. The companies fired workers who signed union cards when they could identify them, which they often could; the labor spies were doing their jobs.
Meetings were broken up. Organizers were arrested and run out of towns. Foster kept moving.
His theory about the steel mills was the same one he had applied in Chicago: in industries where men work together in large numbers, you can get everyone to strike even if you have only ten percent organized.
The social pressure of a mass walkout does what formal membership can’t. Get enough people committed, announce the date, and the rest will follow.
By August 1919, he had enough. The committee put the question to the workers: do you authorize a strike? The vote came back at 98% in favor. In towns where workers couldn’t legally hold a meeting, couldn’t speak their own language in any organized setting, couldn’t rent a hall or a vacant lot, the men had managed to find each other anyway. 98%.
The committee took that number to Elbert H. Gary.
Gary was the chairman of U.S. Steel, a former judge from Illinois who had built the company into the largest corporation in the world and intended to keep it exactly as it was.
He had his own theory about labor relations, which he called the open shop; the principle that a man had the right to work without belonging to a union, which in practice meant that U.S. Steel would never recognize a union, negotiate a contract, or acknowledge that its workers had any collective standing whatsoever.
Gary held to this position with the confidence of someone who had never had to work a long turn.
Gompers wrote to Gary asking for a meeting. Gary declined. The committee wrote to Gary. Gary declined.
President Woodrow Wilson, back from Versailles and trying to keep the postwar economy from flying apart, called an industrial conference and asked Gary to participate in good-faith negotiations. Gary attended, stonewalled, and walked out.
Gompers tried again. Gary declined again. By the time the sixth refusal arrived, the committee had been asking for a meeting for months. They had a 98% strike mandate. They had exhausted every formal channel available to them.
From Pittsburgh, the organizers sent word to the committee: we cannot be expected to meet the enraged workers, who will consider us traitors if the strike is postponed.
The date was set for September 22, 1919.
Foster had been right about one thing: once the date was announced, the pressure was immense. Workers who had signed no card, paid no dues, belonged to no union, began making their own calculations.
The man at the next furnace was going out. The man down the street was going out. The Slovak church was buzzing with it. Staying in meant crossing a line that, in those tight-knit valley communities, carried a social cost that was hard to bear.
September 22 arrived. The shift whistles blew. And for the first time since 1892, the men of the Mon Valley walked away from the furnaces.
The Strike
On the morning of September 22, 1919, the shift whistle blew at the Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock and a large share of the men simply did not go in. They gathered instead on the hillside streets above the mill, in front of the churches, on the corners where they had been told not to congregate.
The same scene played out along twenty miles of river. At Homestead, at Duquesne, at McKeesport, at Clairton; men who had shown up every day for years, through war and flu and inflation and the long turn, stayed home.
The scale of it stunned everyone, including Foster. Three hundred and fifty thousand workers across the country walked out on the first day. The Pittsburgh district, the heart of the strike, saw walkout rates that in some mills exceeded 90%.
Even Foster, who had bet his theory on mass social pressure doing what formal organizing couldn’t, had not fully anticipated what a 98% strike mandate actually looked like when it moved from a show of hands to men standing on a picket line.
For the Mon Valley towns, the immediate effect was something the oldest residents had never seen. The mills did not stop entirely; U.S. Steel kept skeleton operations running with supervisory staff, office workers, and the first trickle of replacement men the company was already recruiting.
Blast furnaces can’t simply be switched off; banking them requires controlled reductions that take days. So the fires didn’t go out, the smoke didn’t disappear, and the mills didn’t fall silent in any total sense. But the roar dropped. The pace slowed. The streets filled with men who should have been at the furnaces.
That was a signal all its own, visible to anyone who lived there. These were towns built around continuous production. The routine of daily life — the shift changes, the traffic at the mill gates, the particular noise of a working plant — was so constant that people stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing a clock.
When it changed, you noticed. Workers standing on Eighth Avenue in Homestead instead of walking through the mill gate. Men in their work clothes with nowhere to go, gathered in clusters outside St. Michael’s in Braddock.
The strike spread beyond the Pittsburgh district in ways that reflected both Foster’s organizing and its limits. Youngstown went out strongly. So did Cleveland and Buffalo. Chicago and the Illinois mills had significant walkouts.
In some southern and border state operations, the strike was lighter; the companies had more leverage there, the organizing hadn’t been as successful, and the racial dynamics Foster had failed to resolve were already making themselves felt.
But in the Mon Valley, the core of American steel production, the walkout was as close to complete as a strike could get in a company controlled landscape.
U.S. Steel’s response came quickly. The company had not been surprised. Gary and his management team had watched Foster’s organizing drive for more than a year, had fired workers and deployed informants and pressured local governments in preparation for exactly this moment.
Within days of the walkout, the company was running advertisements in newspapers across the South and in the black press of northern cities, recruiting replacement workers. Trains were arranged. Housing inside the mill compounds, away from the picket lines, was prepared. The replacement men began arriving within the first week.
At the mill gates in Homestead and Braddock, the Pennsylvania State Police were already deployed. They rode on horseback through the streets, dispersing gatherings of more than a handful of men.
Workers who tried to talk to the replacement men coming off the trains were arrested. In some towns, simply standing on a public street in a group was treated as an illegal assembly.
Foster moved constantly, town to town along the river, trying to hold the lines together. He spoke at whatever gatherings the committee could arrange, in church halls, in the open air when no hall was available, sometimes from the back of a car.
The translators worked alongside him. The message was the same in every language: hold the line. The companies are going to try everything. Hold.
The companies were, in fact, trying everything. And they had resources that Foster and the committee could not match.
The Cossacks and the Red Scare
The Pennsylvania State Police had a reputation in the valley that preceded them by years.
Workers called them Cossacks, a direct reference to the mounted troops that the Russian czars had used to suppress labor unrest and terrorize civilian populations. The comparison was not casual.
This was the visible, physical face of suppression. The legal face was just as effective. The county sheriff had banned foreign languages at indoor meetings before the strike even began.
Father Kazincy’s church in Braddock remained one of the only places along the Mon where the strikers could legally assemble, and even there, the police watched the door.
U.S. Steel understood that physical suppression alone wouldn’t be enough. The strike was too large and too public. What the company needed was to discredit it; to transform, in the minds of the American public, a walkout over the twelve-hour day into something sinister and foreign. The Red Scare gave them the tool.
The timing was almost perfect. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was barely two years old. The American government, still in a wartime posture of suspicion toward anything that smelled like radicalism, had been running deportation proceedings against foreign-born anarchists and socialists since 1917.
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was months away from the raids that would bear his name, but the machinery was already assembled and running. The steel companies did not need to build the Red Scare. They just needed to aim it.
Foster’s past made him the obvious target. His years with the IWW and his pamphlets from the syndicalist period of his career were dug out and republished; in company-friendly newspapers, in the trade press, in congressional testimony.
Foster had written, years earlier, that labor’s goal should be to take over industry. He had written it in a specific theoretical context that had nothing to do with the 1919 strike, but context is a casualty of propaganda.
The steel companies circulated his old writing as evidence that the strike’s true purpose was not the eight-hour day but the overthrow of capitalism; funded, the insinuation went, by Moscow.
The mainstream press did the rest. Mother Jones, who was in her eighties by 1919 and had been agitating in the coal and steel towns for decades, was blunt about it: the press groveled at the feet of the steel gods. She was right.
Newspapers that depended on steel company advertising ran daily stories about radical agitators, foreign influences, and the Bolshevist threat lurking in the mill towns. The Department of Justice conducted raids on immigrant communities in the Pittsburgh district, arresting and in some cases deporting workers on the thinnest of legal pretexts.
Palmer himself, the Attorney General of the United States, warned publicly that the strike was connected to Bolshevism.
None of this had anything to do with the twelve-hour day. The men walking the picket lines in Homestead and Braddock were not revolutionaries. They were steelworkers who wanted to go home before dark and see their children occasionally.
But the Red Scare reframing served its purpose with an American public that was, in the fall of 1919, genuinely frightened by the news coming out of Europe. If the strike was a communist conspiracy rather than a labor dispute, then breaking it was patriotism. Crossing the picket line became an act of loyalty to the republic.
Gary played his role in this with a confident ease that suggested long practice. He gave interviews in which he framed the open shop as a fundamental American liberty; the right of a man to work without being compelled to join a union.
He was not wrong that this was one way to describe the open shop. He was simply quiet about the other description: the right of U.S. Steel to pay its workers whatever it chose, work them however long it wished, ignore the conditions that were horrific, and the complete takeover of civic institutions it was present in.
By October, the strike was holding in the Mon Valley but fraying at the edges. The replacement men were inside the mills. The Cossacks were on the streets. The newspapers were calling the strikers radicals.
And the AFL, never fully committed to an organizing drive that had been Foster’s idea from the beginning, was starting to look for the exit.
The Fault Line
There was a second front in the 1919 steel strike, and it ran right through organized labor.
The AFL had a problem with black workers that it had declined to solve for decades. Some of its constituent craft unions excluded black members explicitly, written into their constitutions. Others managed it through tacit agreement; a handshake understanding among local officers that certain applicants would not be admitted.
The effect was the same either way. Black workers across a wide range of industries had learned, through experience, that the AFL’s solidarity had a color line running through it.
Foster knew this was a problem. He had tried, in assembling the National Committee, to push the affiliated unions toward opening their membership. He largely failed.
The craft unions that made up the committee were not going to rewrite their policies for a steel organizing drive, and Foster had neither the authority nor the leverage to make them. He pressed the issue, noted it in his reports, and moved on, because the alternative was to not organize at all.
U.S. Steel had been watching this failure closely.
The company began recruiting black workers from the South within days of the strike’s start; advertisements in southern newspapers, labor agents working the Deep South states, promises of steady wages and housing inside the mill compounds where the strikers couldn’t reach them.
The numbers that came were significant. Estimates ran to 30,000 or more across the Pittsburgh district and the other struck mills. In Homestead and Braddock, replacement workers arrived by the trainload and were walked directly into the mill gates, past whatever picket lines the Cossacks had left standing.
The black press was not silent about what was happening. The Chicago Defender and other papers warned readers against taking strikebreaker jobs and pointed out the human cost of crossing a picket line.
Black community leaders urged caution. Some men listened. Others made a different calculation, and the Interchurch World Movement’s investigators, who interviewed black workers in the Pittsburgh district during and after the strike, found out why.
The answer was simple. The men who came north as replacement workers largely knew they were strikebreakers. They were not deceived about the situation. What they said to the investigators, in various ways, was that organized labor had given them no alternative.
The unions had kept them out. The AFL had told them, through years of exclusion, that their labor was welcome in the mills but their membership was not. If the union wanted black workers to honor its picket lines, the men asked the investigators, why had the union not honored them first?
It was, as arguments go, difficult to refute. Foster refuted nothing. His postmortem on the strike was frank about it: the racial exclusion policy of the AFL unions had handed the steel companies a ready-made strikebreaking force. He was right.
But saying so after the fact did not change what had happened on the ground in September and October of 1919, when the replacement men were walking into the mills and the picket lines were thinning.
The consequences ran deeper than the strike. U.S. Steel had accomplished something that would serve it for years: it had driven a wedge between black and white workers in the valley towns that would not easily be removed.
The white workers on the picket lines saw the replacement men as the instrument of their defeat, and they did not, for the most part, look past that to the AFL policy that had created the situation.
The black workers who had come north and taken the mill jobs stayed, built lives in the valley communities, and found themselves in neighborhoods and workplaces poisoned by the resentment the strike had generated.
A divided workforce is easier to manage. The steel companies understood this with the clarity of long practice.
They had used ethnic divisions for years; placing Slovak workers in departments where they would have little contact with the Poles, rotating nationalities through jobs in ways that discouraged the formation of the cross-ethnic solidarities that organizing required. Racial division was simply a larger version of the same tool.
And the AFL, through its own exclusion policies, had built that tool and handed it over.
Foster would spend years writing about what went wrong in 1919. The Red Scare, the company-controlled towns, the Pennsylvania State Police, he catalogued all of it. But the racial fault line sat at the center of his analysis, and he returned to it with the recurring frustration of a man who had seen the problem coming and lacked the power to fix it.
The strike could survive the Cossacks and the closed halls and the newspaper smears. It could not survive a structural division that ran through his own workforce.
The Collapse and What Came After
By November 1919, the strike was dying.
The Pittsburgh district held longer than most; the Mon Valley workers had too much invested to quit easily, and the social pressure that had driven the 98% vote in August still operated in those tight hillside communities.
But the mills were running. The replacement men were inside. The AFL leadership, which had never been fully committed to a drive that was Foster’s idea more than Gompers’, was looking for a way out that would not look like surrender.
It looked like surrender anyway. On January 8, 1920, the National Committee officially called off the strike. The men went back to work on the same terms they had left. No union recognition. No eight-hour day. No adjustment to the long turn.
Three and a half months of picket lines, Cossack raids, Red Scare propaganda, and genuine sacrifice by 350,000 workers had produced nothing that could be put in a contract. Gary had outlasted them.
Foster published his postmortem the same year, The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons, and he was not gentle with anyone, including himself.
He catalogued the company-controlled towns, the suppression of civil liberties, the AFL’s racial exclusion policy, and the Red Scare machinery that had turned a dispute about working hours into a congressional hearing on Bolshevism. He had no illusions about what had happened or why.
What Foster could not have fully anticipated was what came next.
The Interchurch World Movement had been conducting its own investigation of the steel industry throughout the strike.
The Interchurch was not a labor organization. It was a coalition of Protestant churches — Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists — that had set out to examine industrial conditions as a matter of Christian social concern.
Its investigators went into the valley towns, took testimony, reviewed company records where they could get them, and ran the numbers. Their report, released in the summer of 1920, confirmed everything Foster had said and said it in the language of mainstream Protestant America rather than the language of labor radicalism.
The twelve-hour day was documented in detail. The long turn was documented. Wages below subsistence, company-controlled towns, the suppression of workers’ civil liberties, violent abuses, the use of labor spies; all of it was in the report, sourced and specific.
U.S. Steel attacked the report as dangerously radical, an accusation that landed somewhat awkwardly when directed at a committee of Protestant ministers. The press, which had spent the strike covering Foster as a Bolshevist threat, found the Interchurch findings harder to dismiss.
Congress took notice. So did the Harding administration, which was not pro-labor by any standard but was sensitive to the particular embarrassment of having American industry’s flagship corporation defended against a coalition of religious clergy.
In 1923, President Harding called the steel executives to the White House. The twelve-hour day, he told them, was a national embarrassment.
The pressure was not a threat of legislation; Harding had no intention of legislating labor standards. It was simpler than that. The optics had become untenable. In August 1923, U.S. Steel announced the adoption of the eight-hour day. The other major producers followed.
The men of the Mon Valley had walked off the job in September 1919 demanding, among other things, an eight-hour day. They had gone back in January 1920 with nothing.
Four years later, they had the eight-hour day; delivered by a Protestant commission report and a Republican president’s concern for appearances, not their union. There is something in that sequence that resists any tidy conclusion about how change happens in America.
Full unionization of the steel industry took another fourteen years. The Steel Workers Organizing Committee, operating under the CIO, won recognition from U.S. Steel in March 1937, without a strike, after years of patient organizing that drew direct lessons from what Foster had attempted and failed in 1919.
The men who had walked the picket lines along the Mon in the fall of 1919 were in their forties and fifties by then, if they were still alive, still working, still in the valley. Some of them lived to see it.
The mills themselves are mostly gone now. The Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock still operates; the last active blast furnace in the Pittsburgh district, a piece of living industrial history that most people drive past without knowing what it is. The Clairton Coke Works is also still active.
The Homestead Works were demolished in the 1980s. The site is a shopping mall. The hillside neighborhoods are still there, older and quieter, the churches still standing in many cases, the fraternal clubs mostly closed or closing.
Follow the Mon southeast out of Pittsburgh and the valley is still recognizable in its bones; the steep hills, the river, the towns tucked between the water and the ridgeline.
What happened there in the fall of 1919 left no monument. The men who pulled the long turn and walked off the job and went back on the same terms did not get a statue or a plaque or a named holiday. What they got, eventually, was the eight-hour day. It arrived late and through the wrong door, but it arrived.
That will have to be enough.
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