Smoketown Read online

  Once the colonies won independence and Americans began to push west, Pittsburgh’s long maritime tentacles stretching in three directions made it a busy trading center. To the north was the Allegheny River, stretching 325 miles to the western border between Pennsylvania and New York. To the south was the Monongahela River, flowing 130 miles through the mountains of West Virginia. To the west was the Ohio River, meandering 981 miles across six states, all the way to the Mississippi River, which could carry boats as far as the lakes of Minnesota or the Gulf coast of Louisiana.

  In the early 1800s, Pittsburgh was known for its longboats, which could make it to New Orleans in four weeks. (Upriver keelboats were required to make the return trip, which could take up to four months.) As steam engine technology spread, the city became headquarters to more than five hundred steamboats that ferried passengers, mail, farm goods, and other supplies in three directions. Even after railroads came along in the middle of the century, steamers remained the only or the least expensive way to reach many rural areas in Ohio and western Virginia. Every week, dozens of vessels from three major “packet lines” arrived in Pittsburgh from towns along the Ohio, the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and their tributaries. They docked for several days while their captains sold their wares and purchased new provisions, then made their way back to the farmers, miners, and storekeepers the railroads hadn’t yet reached.

  By the 1880s, the opportunity to profit from booming new industries beckoned. For decades, Pittsburgh’s proximity to seams of coal used for smelting had made it a hub for the manufacture of glass and of iron created from ore imported from as far away as Minnesota. More recently, it had become a laboratory for the more efficient and profitable mass production of steel. Making iron products was highly labor-intensive: artisans called “puddlers” had to stand for hours by small, searing furnaces, poking molten pig iron with long rods to refine it into wrought iron. Then in the 1850s, an English engineer named Henry Bessemer invented a method of removing the impurities from pig iron with blasts of air inside a converter, a method that yielded a substance that was more malleable and more durable than iron. Because converters were mechanized, they could also run around the clock, seven days a week, producing more than three times the output of iron ovens.

  Bessemer’s invention coincided with the rise of the locomotive industry, and the product he called “steel” quickly became the preferred material for railway lines. The Englishman went into business as a manufacturer and built one of his first American plants in Homestead. Pictures from the period show the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Company occupying a stretch of waterfront on a curve of the Monongahela River, belching dark clouds as high as the surrounding hilltops from three smokestacks and spurting steam in every direction. Yet like many of the early steel producers, Bessemer went into debt to build his mill and was unprepared for the financial toll of a worker’s strike and a fall-off in demand as rail expansion slowed. By 1883, the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Company couldn’t pay its creditors and was forced to sell the Homestead mill.

  The buyer was Andrew Carnegie, the bantam-sized Scottish immigrant to Pittsburgh who was fast becoming America’s most successful industrialist. Carnegie had already opened his own plant using the “Bessemer process” across the Monongahela River in Braddock. With the addition of the Homestead mill, he was on his way to building an empire that would make him one of the world’s richest men and make Pittsburgh the source of more than half of America’s steel. So it was, in 1883, that Andrew Carnegie planted his flag in Homestead just as Cap Posey brought his new bride, Anna, there to live. And for the next decade, the Poseys were able to study the practices of the ingenious Scot and the city’s other remarkable industrial entrepreneurs as they calculated how they, too, even as Negroes, could profit from Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age.

  • • •

  AS A CHILD, ANDREW CARNEGIE watched the forces of technology and corporate consolidation crush his father, and he was determined never to suffer the same fate. William Carnegie was a weaver who produced linens on a loom in the family’s tiny cottage in the Scottish village of Dunferm- line. As steam-powered looms and powerful wholesalers came to dominate the textile industry, the family’s modest living was reduced to bare subsistence. In desperation, Andrew’s mother, Margaret, borrowed £20 from a childhood friend to pay for the voyage to a new life in America. Their destination was the town of Allegheny City, just north of Pittsburgh, where several of Margaret’s relatives had already emigrated. At the age of thirteen, Andrew went to work as a bobbin boy in a Pittsburgh cotton mill, running fresh spools of thread to the women on the looms, and then as a messenger for a local telegraph company. He proved so able that one of his customers, the manager of the local office of the Pennsylvania Railroad, hired Carnegie as a personal telegraph officer and then as a full-time assistant.

  Carnegie spent the next decade working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, eventually rising to run the Pittsburgh branch himself. Yet he would build his first fortune not from his working wages but from the investments he made, with the help of his superior and the owner of the railroad, in companies with which they had sweetheart contracts. When Carnegie was wealthy enough to move his family to the neighborhood of Point Breeze, on the eastern edge of Pittsburgh, he became friends with a neighbor who put him into a lucrative oil company stock. By his late twenties, Carnegie had assets of almost $50,000, all but 5 percent of which came from his crony investments.

  Standing barely five feet tall and weighing less than 110 pounds, Carnegie cut a diminutive figure that belied his ferocious business instincts. In his early thirties, he quit the railroad company so that he could be even freer to exploit his connections. He began investing in firms that made railroad bridges and tracks, and selling bonds to finance them. He became fascinated by breakthroughs in iron processing that promised to create more durable rail lines to replace the ones that had been destroyed and degraded during the Civil War. When over-borrowing in the early days of railroads and steel mills led to a cascade of bankruptcies, Carnegie pounced. He had managed his finances prudently enough that he was in position to buy out competitors, dictate terms to customers and creditors, and expand into new products. Over the next three decades, Carnegie’s virtual monopoly on the steel mills of Pittsburgh would bring him vast riches that he used to build a mansion in Manhattan, to erect a castle in Scotland, and to fund a legacy as one of history’s most generous philanthropists, donating $350 million to libraries, concert halls, peace research, and other causes before he died.

  While Carnegie was making Pittsburgh the steel capital of the world, four other entrepreneurs were turning it into a powerhouse in other industries. In the late 1860s, George Westinghouse, a young inventor from New York, moved to Pittsburgh to test the use of steel in his railroad patents. He began experimenting with electricity, and soon he was competing head-to-head with Thomas Edison, the inventor of the incandescent light bulb and the first electrical power grid. Partnering with the Italian inventor Nikola Tesla, Westinghouse devised a method of alternating high and low currents that made distributing electricity more practical and less expensive than Edison’s direct current method. Despite Edison’s attempts to discredit AC technology—including trying to associate it in the public’s mind with the electric chair—it emerged as the winner in the “war of the currents.” By the 1890s, Westinghouse was employing thousands of workers in four separate electricity, railroad, gas, and steam-power plants in the Pittsburgh area.

  In 1869, Henry J. Heinz, the son of German immigrants, began selling foodstuffs in the town of Sharpsburg, north of Pittsburgh. He founded a company to make horseradish, and when it went bankrupt he regrouped and started producing tomato ketchup. By the 1880s the H. J. Heinz Company had opened a factory in Pittsburgh and was claiming to make “57 Varieties” of food products. In fact, that number was made up: Heinz had lifted the marketing gimmick from a New York shoe store that advertised “21 styles” and came up with 57 because he thought the number had special
subliminal resonance. Over time, however, Heinz would more than deliver on his famous slogan. He would sell ketchup, pickles, baked beans, mustard, chutney, and hundreds of other products, as well as introduce innovations in technology and sanitation that made working in his factories among Pittsburgh’s most desirable manufacturing jobs.

  Another son of immigrants transformed the city into a banking hub. Andrew Mellon was still in his teens when he dropped out of college and used a loan from his father, Thomas, a local judge and banker who came from Ireland, to begin investing in lumber and coal. By the 1880s, Andrew had taken over his father’s bank, formed two others, and become the principal financier of numerous firms that came to dominate their industries. (One was the Aluminum Company of America, better known as Alcoa, which was also based in Pittsburgh.) By the 1920s, when Andrew Mellon served as secretary of the treasury under three presidents, he was America’s third richest man, and Pittsburgh ranked second to New York City as a repository of U.S. financial assets.

  The fifth titan in this formidable group owed his fortune to both Mellon and Carnegie. The grandson of a local Pittsburgh whiskey maker, Henry Clay Frick was a sickly child and a poor student, and he never finished school. He went to work as bookkeeper in his grandfather’s distillery, and then gravitated toward the coal business, seeing opportunity in the large seam of coal deposits south of Pittsburgh. With loans from Thomas and Andrew Mellon, Frick cornered the local market in coke, a high-burning coal concentrate. He invested in hundreds of “beehive ovens” to bake raw coal at the minefields, and in a transportation network to get the coke to the Pittsburgh mills, where it was used in the blast furnaces that made pig iron hot enough to purify into steel. By his thirtieth birthday, Frick was supplying a hundred railroad carloads of coke a day to Carnegie’s steel mill in Braddock, and he had already made his first million dollars.

  By then, Carnegie saw that he needed Frick as much as Frick needed him. When Frick traveled to New York on his honeymoon in 1881, Carnegie invited him to dinner and toasted their partnership. After Carnegie bought the Homestead steel plant two years later, he decided to take the business relationship a step further. He offered to buy 50 percent of H. C. Frick & Company, to pay all of its debts, and to invest millions to ensure a guaranteed supply of coke for his mills. After his brother and business partner Tom Carnegie died prematurely, Andrew decided that Frick was the man to take over day-to-day management of his Pittsburgh empire while he devoted himself to travel and philanthropy. In 1887, Frick went to work for the Carnegie Brothers and Company, and by the end of the decade he was named its chairman and president.

  Both Carnegie and Frick were intent on curbing the growing power of labor unions in their mills. In the late 1880s, they succeeded in breaking two brief strikes by the newly formed Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, forcing it to accept a sliding scale of wages based on the sale price of steel. When the Homestead contract came up for renewal in the summer of 1892, the owners thought they could win more concessions. But this time the union dug in. As both sides prepared for a walkout, Frick hired Pinkerton guards to bring in strikebreakers. To protect them, he ordered the construction of a three-mile, eleven-foot-high fence that encircled the Homestead plant and ran down to the river. Three strands of barbed wire stretched across the top of the fence. Small holes were bored into its planks to allow snipers to fire out. Meanwhile, four thousand workers and sympathizers organized to prevent scabs or their protectors from reaching the plant. Lookouts took their places at Homestead’s two rail stations, at the roads into town, and along both sides of the Monongahela River.

  At midnight of July 6, a day after Frick set a final deadline for the union to accept his offer, a tugboat called Little Bill chugged out of harbor at Bellevue, Ohio, twenty-five miles south of Pittsburgh. It pulled two barges carrying three hundred Pinkerton guards hired to secure the mill for the strikebreakers. Around one o’clock in the morning, a watch party stationed on the Smithfield Street Bridge in Pittsburgh spied the barges in the distance. An hour later, a man on horseback rode through Homestead shouting the news. A steam whistle at the electric light factory in town sounded a coded alert. Hundreds of mill workers and their supporters poured into the streets carrying shotguns, knives, and rocks. Arriving at the mill, they tore through Frick’s fence and took up positions. As the barges docked and the first Pinkerton guards appeared on the gangplank, a shot rang out. Suddenly gunfire rained through the darkness in both directions.

  The battle raged into the morning and through the next day. At one point, the workers fired a cannon from across the river. At another, they loaded a freight car with lumber and oil, set it ablaze, and pushed it toward the river, where it toppled over before reaching the barges. More and more townspeople arrived, brandishing everything from Roman candles to homemade petrol bombs to hurl at the Pinkerton vessels. By nightfall, half a dozen protesters were dead, and five guards had been killed or suffered soon-to-be-fatal wounds. Most of the Pinkertons weren’t regulars but freelancers, and finally one frightened recruit surrendered. Sensing victory, the strikers stormed the barges and chased the rest of the guards onto the waterfront. The Pinkertons were force-marched through a gauntlet of jeering, stone-throwing townspeople, herded into town, and sent packing on rail cars to Pittsburgh.

  The union had won the battle, but it was about to lose the war. When the town sheriff returned the next day to demand that the strikers leave the mill, they refused. The sheriff appealed to the governor of Pennsylvania, who dispatched the commander of the state militia and four thousand of his men to Homestead. They set up artillery and Gatling guns on an overlook called Shanty Hill, then marched toward the mill in battle formation, rifles and bayonets drawn. Completely outnumbered, the strikers surrendered. The militia occupied the mill and garrisoned the town, remaining for several weeks as nonstriking workers began returning to the mill.

  A week after the siege, the strikers suffered another embarrassment when anarchist Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman’s lover, barged into Frick’s office and tried to kill him. Frick was shot in the neck and back and stabbed three times before his deputy overcame Berkman and got him to spit up a capsule of mercury that could have blown them all up. Although the anarchist was making a political statement that had little to do with the strike, the attack won public sympathy for Frick and made him more determined than ever not to give an inch to the union.

  As Christmas neared and the workers faced the prospect of a long winter with no work or pay, the union finally gave in. But Frick and Carnegie hadn’t exactly won the battle of Homestead, either. The standoff had made headlines around the world and cast their empire in a harsh new light. Carnegie, who had posed as a friend of the union movement, was denounced as a hypocrite. Critics began to question whether his philanthropy was a form of expiation for his ruthless business practices. The crisis also put a harsh damper on his partnership with Frick. Carnegie had been on vacation in a remote area of Scotland during the crisis, but he had remained in close touch by mail and telegraph and had encouraged Frick’s tough line every step of the way. Now word got back to Frick that Carnegie was second-guessing his decisions and claiming that he hadn’t been fully aware of what was happening in Homestead. Although they remained in business together, their relationship would never be the same.

  One man did benefit from the bloody Homestead strike, however: Cap Posey. In 1892, the year that Frick and Carnegie crushed the union, Posey made his first investment in coal boats. He went on to organize a small mining company, the Delta Coal Company, serving as its general manager and treasurer. Selling his shares in that company, he founded Posey Coal Dealers and Steam Boat Builders, a company that is said to have manufactured twenty-one steamboats. By the end of the decade, he had become a major shareholder in the Marine Coal Company and earned a yearly salary of $3,000 to manage the business. By this point, another account suggests, Posey oversaw a payroll of one thousand employees and had nine white investors. Without specifying the exact c
onnections, numerous accounts describe Posey as a business partner of Henry Frick and a supplier to Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills, which he almost certainly would have had to be to move ahead in the coal mining and steel shipping businesses at a time when those two men controlled so much of both industries.

  By the 1890s, Carnegie was becoming known for his support of Negro causes, so it stands to reason that he would want to help an ambitious striver like Cap Posey. Carnegie had befriended Booker T. Washington and begun making substantial donations to Tuskegee Institute, which Washington founded, and Hampton Institute, where he had gone to school. Later Carnegie would give a speech titled “The Negro in America,” which foresaw slow but steady progress toward more racial harmony.

  After the Homestead strike, Carnegie and Frick had other reasons to welcome a black business partner. Once the siege was over, they refused to rehire most of the workers who had gone out on strike, the majority of whom were white European immigrants. They were in the market for new workers who hadn’t taken part of the union movement, and Negroes qualified. While blacks had largely been shut out of the mills and the unions before the strike, a decade later there would be 346 Negroes working in three Carnegie steel mills in the Pittsburgh area.