As the memorable twenty-second of September approached a lurid and dramatic setting developed for the beginning of the great steel strike. Everywhere the steel companies made gigantic preparations to crush their aspiring workers back to slavery. The newspapers shrieked revolution. The whole country was a-tremble with anxiety and apprehension.
Pittsburgh was the storm center. There, in its stronghold, the Steel Trust went ahead with strike-breaking measures unprecedented in industrial history. It provisioned and fortified its great mills and furnaces, surrounding them with stockades topped off with heavily charged electric wires, and bristling with machine guns. It assembled whole armies of gunmen. Brute force was to be used in breaking the solidarity of the workers. Said the New York World editorially September 22: "In anticipation of the steel strike, what do we see? In the Pittsburgh district thousands of deputy sheriffs have been recruited at several of the larger plants. The Pennsylvania State Constabulary has been concentrated at commanding points. At other places the authorities have organized bodies of war veterans as special officers. At McKeesport alone 3,000 citizens have been sworn in as special police deputies subject to instant call. It is as though preparations were made for actual war."
Along the Monongahela river from Pittsburgh to Clairton, a distance of twenty miles, there were not less than 25,000 armed men in the service of the Steel Trust. In the entire Pittsburgh district, practically all the petty parasites who prey upon the steel workers—the professional and small business men—had been sworn in as deputies and furnished firearms to defend their great overlord, to whom they all do unquestioning service no matter how dirty the job. During the strike Sheriff Haddock of Allegheny county stated to the Senate Committee investigating the strike that there were 5,000 deputy sheriffs and 5,000 strikers in his jurisdiction, or one deputy for each striker. His totals should have been multiplied by at least ten in each case; 50,000 deputies and 50,000 strikers would have been well below the mark. It is noteworthy that although the danger of an uprising in the Pittsburgh district was widely advertised no appeal was made for troops, nor was there even any talk of an appeal. The reason was that the Steel Trust had a vast army of its own, officered by its own officials, and it needed no outside help.
Western Pennsylvania is controlled body and soul by the Steel Trust. The whole district has the psychology of a company-owned town. All authority centers in the steel industry. From there practically every institution takes its orders. Local governmental agencies are hardly more than public service departments of the Steel Trust. Their officials, city, county, state and federal, obey the mandates of the steel magnates just about as readily and naturally as do the superintendents and mill bosses. No less than the latter they felt it to be their duty to break the strike by whatever means their masters told them to use.
With the approach of the strike these lackey officials hastened en masse to the aid of the Steel Trust. Sheriff Haddock, besides swearing in an army of guards and turning them over to the steel companies to carry out their plan of terrorism, issued a flaming proclamation practically setting up martial law and making it a riotous assembly for three steel workers to meet together. Next day, September 21, the organizers tried to hold a meeting in North Clairton—with the Burgess' permission, and at a place on the public commons especially set aside by the authorities for union meetings. About 3,000 steel workers gathered to hear the speakers. Everything was going as peacefully as a Sunday school picnic, when suddenly a troop of State Constabulary appeared upon the scene, and without a word of warning, rode full tilt into the crowd, clubbing and trampling men and women indiscriminately. They tore down and threw in the mud the American flag floating above the speakers' stand. Scores were arrested (including organizers J. B. Etchison and P. H. Brogan) and held for heavy bonds on charges of rioting.[12] Many were seriously injured, but fearing to report their cases to the doctors and thus court arrest, as the latter were nearly all deputies, they cured themselves as best they could. This crying outrage was perpetrated under the authority of the Sheriff's proclamation. It was endorsed and lauded by Governor Sproul, than whom the Steel Trust has no more willing champion.
At the same hour as the Clairton outrage a similar attack was made on the workers at Glassport, adjoining McKeesport. Not being allowed to meet at the latter city the organizers had leased a plot of ground in Glassport and had been holding regular meetings there, with the full sanction of the local authorities. For the meeting in question they had an official permit. But just as it was about to begin the State Constabulary broke it up in true Cossack fashion, almost riding down the Burgess in so doing. They arrested all they could seize. These were held as rioters under bail of from $1,000 to $3,000 each. The venal Pittsburgh papers screamed about the outbreaks that had been crushed by the gallant State police, and praised them for their bravery in facing the "rioting mobs."
Despite all these terroristic methods the Steel Trust could not break the will of its workers. On September 22 they struck throughout the entire industry with a discipline and universality that will be remembered so long as steel is made in America. On Tuesday, the twenty-third, 304,000 had quit their posts in the mills and furnaces. All week their ranks were augmented until by September 30, there were 365,600 on strike. It was a magnificent effort for freedom, and twice as big a strike as this country had ever known. By cities and districts, the numbers of strikers were as follows:
The shut-down was almost complete. Throughout the country the industry was stricken with paralysis. On an average the strike was at least 90 per cent. effective. In the great Chicago district practically all the men struck, hamstringing the big plants in the various steel towns of that section, Gary, Joliet, Indiana Harbor, South Chicago, etc. The holding of the organizations in this district for a year, in the face of Steel Trust opposition, by the organizers under Secretary Evans, and later, De Young, was one of the most notable achievements of the whole campaign. When the pent-up force was finally released it swept the district like a flood, leaving hardly a wheel turning anywhere.
Youngstown is another place where great difficulties had been encountered in the organizing work, the workers being deeply discouraged by recently lost local strikes, and the authorities at some points so hostile that it was impossible to hold meetings in the strategic places. But so widespread was the discontent at the miserable working conditions, and so well had the district crew of organizers under Secretaries McCadden and Hammersmark done their work that when the strike clarion sounded, the masses of steel workers responded almost to a man. Trust plants and "independents" alike had to shut down. The steel working population of the entire Mahoning Valley went on holiday. It was a clean walkout. In the outer Youngstown district, as established by the National Committee system, the companies, by the use of desperate tactics, succeeded in keeping some of their men at work; in Sharon, Farrell and Newcastle probably twenty per cent refused to obey the strike call. But in Canton and Massillon, John Olchon and the other organizers brought all the important mills to a dead stop.