The Great Steel Strike and its Lessons

by William Z. Foster

Monessen, forty miles from Pittsburgh on the Monongahela river, the home of the Pittsburgh Steel Company and several other large concerns, and notorious as the place where organizer Jeff. Pierce got his death blow in a previous campaign, was the first point of attack. Wm. Feeney, United Mine Workers' organizer and local secretary in charge of the district for the National Committee, superintended operations. Several months previously the Burgess of Monessen had flatly refused to allow him to hold any meetings in that town. So he was compelled to operate from Charleroi, several miles away. But as soon as spring peeped the question was opened again. He called a meeting to take place square in the streets of Monessen on April 1st. The Burgess forbade it with flaming pronunciamentos and threatened dire consequences if it were held. But Feeney went ahead, and on the date set marched 10,000 union miners from the surrounding country into Monessen to protest the suppression of free speech and free assembly. Mother Jones,[7] James Maurer, President of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, Philip Murray, President of District No. 5, U. M. W. A., Mr. Feeney, the writer and others spoke. The demonstration was a huge success. Public opinion was clearly on the side of the steel workers, and the Burgess had to recede from his dictatorial attitude and allow them to exercise their constitutional rights. This they hastened to do with gusto. The affair established the unions in the big mills of Monessen.

In Donora, an important steel town a few miles down the river from Monessen, and part of organizer Feeney's district, the fight was not so easily won. The United States Constitution provides that not even Congress may pass laws abridging the rights of free speech and free assembly; but in Pennsylvania the Constitution is considered a sort of humorous essay; hence the lickspittle Donora council, right in the face of the steel campaign, passed an ordinance forbidding public meetings without the sanction of the Burgess, which sanction, of course, the unions could not get. But nothing deterred, the indomitable Feeney hired a couple of lots on the edge of the town and held meetings there. The company officials left nothing undone to break up these gatherings. They held band concerts and ball games at the same hour, and set dozens of their bosses and police to picket the meetings. But it was no use; the workers attended and joined the unions in droves.

This lasted a couple of months. And all the while a local paper was villainously assailing Feeney. Finally, the steel company agents got the business men to sign an ultimatum to Feeney, demanding that he leave the district at once. Feeney took this matter up with his miners, and they decided that not he, but they, would quit Donora. Organized solidly, they easily put a strict boycott on the town, and it was not long before the same business men, with their trade almost ruined, made a public apology to Feeney, and ousted their own officials who had been responsible for the attack.

Naturally these events heartened the steel workers. They organized very rapidly, and soon had a majority of the men in the mills—a large plant of the American Steel and Wire Company. They also became a big factor in the local fraternal associations, which controlled all the halls; and suddenly the Lithuanian Society deposed its President, who was friendly to the steel company, and voted to give its hall to the unions, permits or no permits. In the face of this situation the Burgess reluctantly granted sanction for union meetings. And thus free speech and free assembly were established in the benighted town of Donora, and with them, almost complete organization of the steel workers.

But the heart of the conspiracy against free speech and free assembly was in McKeesport, twenty miles from Pittsburgh. When the organizers tried to hold meetings in that city they could hire no halls without the Mayor's permission, and this the latter, George H. Lysle, stubbornly refused to give. He feared a revolution if the staid A. F. of L. unions were permitted to meet; but the Socialist party and other radical organizations went ahead with their gatherings without opposition. The truth was that he knew the unions would organize the workers if they could but get their ear, and this he determined to prevent. Nor would he shift from his autocratic position. Appeals by the organizers to the Federal government, the Governor and the local city council were alike fruitless. No meetings could be held in McKeesport. And the officials of all the steel towns along the Monongahela river, drawing inspiration from the little despot, Lysle, took the same stand. Free speech and free assembly were stifled in the whole district.

The Federal authorities being so active setting the outside world aright that they could find no time or occasion to correct the most glaring abuses at home, the unions resolved to attend to the free speech and free assembly matter themselves. Knowing that Lysle could knife the workers' rights only so long as he was allowed to work in the dark, they determined to drag him into the daylight and let the public judge of his deeds. They would hold meetings on the streets of McKeesport in spite of him; give him a few hundred test court cases to handle, and finally find out whether the A. F. of L. is entitled to the same rights as other organizations.

The fight opened as soon as the weather permitted. May 18 was the date set for the first meeting. The Mayor stormed and threatened all concerned with instant arrest; but the preparations went on just the same. When the fated day arrived thousands turned out to hear the speakers. But the Mayor, failing to defend his course, dared not molest the meeting. After this, meetings were held on the streets each Sunday afternoon, always in the face of the Mayor's threats, until eventually the latter, seeing that he was the laughing stock of the city and that the street meetings were organizing hundreds of the workers, shame-facedly granted the following niggardly permit for meetings:

CITY OF McKEESPORT.

Department of Police.
McKeesport, Pa., July 7, 1919.

Mr. Reddington,
Chief of Police,
McKeesport, Pa.,