Hellraisers Journal: Duluth Labor World: Mary Heaton Vorse Reports from Front Lines of Great Steel Strike, Part I

Quote Mother Jones, Strikes are not peace Clv UMWC p537, Sept 16, 1919 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 26, 1919
Report from Front Lines of Great Steel Strike by Mary Heaton Vorse

From the Duluth Labor World of October 25, 1919:

[Part I.]

MEN SHOW DOGGED ENDURANCE;
-EVERY RIGHT IS DENIED THEM
—–
State Troopers Serve Masters of Steel-Break up Meeting
-Search Homes Without Warrant-Override Children Playing
in Streets, But Men Are Determined to Win Out at Any Cost.
—–

By MARY HEATON VORSE.

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 23.—(Special to The Labor World.)—The other day a man came in to Foster’s office. He had been on strike three weeks, and now he had about 90 cents left. He had some chickens, he had good neighbors, that had given him vegetables and things from their gardens. The man was a foreigner, a young married man, and what he had come for was not to ask strike benefits. He wanted advice and the moral support of encouragement.

He wanted to know how he was going to get along. He came rather deprecatingly, smiling in an embarrassed sort of fashion over his difficulties. Then he went away, still with his smile, his only assets his friends, his 90 cents and his indomitable will to stick out.

The strike is based on people like this; people full of faith; people full of endurance; people full of sacrifice—thousands and thousands of them.

Thousands of them looking upward and forward to a better life for themselves and their children—for these people are striking for a right to be considered as men. They are striking for the right of a little leisure. They want an end put to this de-humanizing double shift.

The other day in Braddock a mill superintendent stopped an old timer on the street. “Aren’t you working?” he asked.

“No, I am not working. I’m on strike; I’m taking a holiday. I am paying myself back those 20 Christmases I worked for the company,” said the man.

That has been the situation with the mill workers. No Sundays, no Christmas. Work that took it out of a man so that he was old at 40. Work that left him so tired at the end of a day that he wasn’t a human being any more. And now these people are willing to sacrifice to change this sort of thing, for themselves, for their children, and for the workers of all time.

When History Is Written.

So when the history of this strike of the faith and courage and endurance of men and women living in wretched slums, their windows looking on filthy court yards—living in desolate mill towns in sheds around the great mills; living in bleak houses on steep hillsides where the roads turn to roaring torrents during each rain.

Allegheny county is a fair, sweet place. There are large, fat farms; oil bubbles underneath the earth, and all around are beautiful towns full of comfortable American homes. At each turn of the road the ravines and abrupt hills make you a new picture. Smoke shuts out all of this when you get to the towns where the mill workers live. Their landscape is the rows and rows of great chimneys and the smoke pouring out of them. Their music is the din of the shop and the roar of the whistle.

They have no life and now because they have asked for a few hours in which to live, every form of suppression and terror is being used against them.

Why Strike Lasts.

Why has the strike not already been smothered out of existence? Only because of the dogged endurance and the dogged faith of the men. This strike is not kept together by the ordinary strike discipline. It goes on by its own momentum through the faith and courage of the rank and file.

There is no one who reads this who does not know how the morale of the strike is kept up. There is no one who has seen strikers where there were not meetings, entertainments, processions, the coming together of men working for a common purpose—there is nothing like this in the steel towns. It isn’t allowed. If more than half a dozen strikers stop on the street to talk over their affairs, they are arrested for “blocking traffic,” “inciting to riot,” etc.

No strike poster can be stuck up in a steel town—no leaflet passed on the street to tell the news. No meeting can be held without a permit of police. Many towns do not allow any meetings at all. In other towns where meetings are grudgingly allowed, the hails are so little that they can hold only a very small fraction of the men on strike.

A Smothering Silence.

So a smothering silence shuts down over the men. Every day they get up to read lieing reports in the papers. Every day they meet on the street mill employes who try to bribe them, to go back. I know a young fellow who was discharged because he was getting men to join the union, and he was one of many in his town—I have a list of their names though Mr. Gary states that men are never discharged for union activities. This man recently met the foreman of his shop who offered him back his old job at an increased wage. He didn’t go, for they are not going back because they have settled down to a long grim fight in spite of every force of the community against them including uncertainty and suspense; in spite of all the rumors of strike breaking and that their jobs are gone forever, in spite of terror of the “Cossacks,” the beatings, and the continual menace of arrest.

[Emphasis added.]