The Steel Strike of 1919

An excellent history of labor relations in the steel industry is that of R. R. R. Brooks , As Steel Goes, . . . ( Yale University Press, New Haven, 1950). Other general volumes on labor history which contain chapters on the steel industry include Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, History of Labor in the United States, 1896-1932, Chapters XIV and XXXV ( Macmillan, New York, 1935), Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles Chapter VIII ( Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1936), and Norman J. Ware , Labor in Modern Industrial Society, Chapter 17 ( D. C. Heath, Boston, 1935).

Insights into housing, living standards, working conditions, and the social environment of steel workers in the Pittsburgh area a few years before the 1919 strike are afforded by the six volumes edited by Paul U. Kellogg entitled The Pittsburgh Survey, published by the Russell Sage Foundation between 1910 and 1914. Of these, John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers ( New York, 1911), deals most directly with conditions in the steel mills, although the other volumes give significant insights into the setting of the 1919 conflict. These are: The Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage ( New York, 1914), Wage-Earning Pittsburgh ( New York, 1914), Women and the Trades ( New York, 1909), Work-Accidents and the Law ( New York, 1910), Homestead, The Households of a Mill Town ( New York, 1910). A perceptive account of the impact of mechanical evolution on labor types employed in the steel industry is given by Charles Reitell in The Journal of Political Economy, Volume 26, pp. 274-290, March 1918.

The viewpoint of the U.S. Steel Corporation in the 1919 strike is sympathetically presented by Arundel Cotter, United States Steel--The Corporation with a Soul ( Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1921). Something of the same eulogistic attitude permeates the biography by Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary, A Story of Steel ( D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1925) (note especially Chapter 11).

A militant stand against the labor policies of the steel companies is taken by Horace B. Davis in his Labor and Steel ( International Publishers, New York, 1933) and by Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America ( Harper & Bros., 1931), Chapter 27. In the latter volume, the moral is drawn that nonviolence has proved an inadequate weapon of strike strategy.

The two basic source books on the steel dispute of 1919 include the hearings of the Senate Committee and the investigations of the Interchurch World Movement. Three volumes of hearings and conclusions were published by the United States Senate, Sixty-sixth Congress: Hearings before the Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. Senate, Sixty-sixth Congress, Pursuant to S. Res. 202 ( Government Printing Office, Washington, 1919), Hearings before the Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. Senate, Sixty- sixth Congress, Pursuant to S. Res. 188 ( Government Printing Office, Washington, 1919). and Investigation of Strike inSteel Industries, Hearings before the Committee on Education and Labor

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