Ellwood City, near Pittsburgh, where the National Tube Co. has one of its big seamless tube plants, probably comes nearer to solving this difficult problem than any other point. Here the Tube Company maintains what is really a men’s hotel, with excellently kept bedrooms, club rooms, etc., rented at a cost of a few dollars weekly to the workers. The hotel, boarding house, or club, call it what you will, is located but a few steps from the big restaurant maintained by the company. Thus the boarding-house menu is avoided while the worker, tired out with his day’s toil, is spared the necessity of a long walk for his evening meal.
Down below the Mason and Dixon Line conditions are considerably different from what they are in the North. In dealing with the white worker of Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states the Corporation has sought to avoid anything that smacks of paternalism. It has simply provided the worker with certain advantages, leaving as much as possible to him the management of these. But in the South, with a large percentage of the workers colored, it has been necessary for the Tennessee Coal & Iron Co., the Corporation’s southern subsidiary, to manage directly the affairs of the settlements of its workers.
Although among the smallest of the steel towns Westfield, Ala., is one of the most important from the sociological standpoint. It is a development devoted exclusively to the negro, its entire population being black, and it seeks to give the colored worker who resides there advantages identical with those which his white brother enjoys elsewhere.
Situated in a little valley, amid rolling hills, the town slopes down from all sides to a big common, the most noticeable feature of which is a large and well-kept baseball park. Around this centre are grouped two excellent schools, community houses, and other buildings used as social centres, while, divided by winding roads, the well-built houses of the town straggle in all directions, half-hidden by the southern foliage, along the sides of the hills.
It need hardly be pointed out that a development of this character has a broad and important economic aspect. The negro constitutes a substantial percentage of the American population. In the South he predominates. But until now the negro has never enjoyed any advantages or the opportunity for social betterment. In Westfield he has such an opportunity and while, temporarily, the town must be managed by white brains it is almost certain that, in time, the negro residents of this delightful village will learn to manage their own affairs and will do so. And unless the writer misunderstands the spirit of the Steel Corporation, it will put every encouragement in their way to that very end.
Fairfield, Ala., but a short distance from Westfield, has been called the South’s model industrial city, and also the “city of homes.” Situated like the negro village, on softly undulating ground amid the luxurious southern foliage, the site chosen for Fairfield offered its builders an excellent field for achieving artistic effects in its layout, and they did not fail to make use of the opportunity. Like Morgan Park, although almost within a stone’s throw of the steel mills, it presents the appearance of an exclusive suburb. Its well-paved streets are shaded by green trees through the leaves of which peep out the fronts of cosy-looking modern houses. Even the trolley cars running through its principal streets fail to disturb its peaceful charm.
To describe the many “steel towns” scattered all over the eastern half of the American continent would be impossible, as it would be to discuss the problems presented by local conditions in each case. Broadly speaking, the Corporation, wherever it has built to house its employees, has sought first of all the comfort and happiness of these workers and not its own gain. And it has always borne in mind that comfort and happiness are æsthetic as well as physical, and built accordingly. In the older steel centres the Corporation, as it has not built from the ground up, has naturally not been able to introduce into the communities as many basic improvements as has been possible in the newer developments. But it has in every case sought to improve existing conditions, always with the workers’ comfort, health, and happiness as its goal.
The H. C. Frick Coke Co. has set itself the task of making attractive the coal-mining towns of the Connellsville region. By the usual corporation methods of sanitation, of making personal and community cleanliness easily attainable, it has raised very materially the standard of living in the coal towns, and the standard of management of the towns themselves. It has even managed to make many of these towns attractive—if the reader has ever been through coal-mining regions he will appreciate the size of this achievement—by encouraging gardening by means of prizes and so on, and by fostering community pride. It has set new community standards in the coal districts.
To the late George G. McMurtry must be given much credit for the movement for bettering conditions in industrial centres. Over 30 years ago Mr. McMurtry conceived and laid out a model city in the environs of Pittsburgh for the workers of the American Sheet Steel Co. The town laid out by the former head of the Sheet Steel Company will stand as a lasting monument to him, though it does not bear his name—Vandergrift, Pa., the first of the steel towns.