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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday September 2, 1909
Strikebreakers Return to New York City from McKees Rocks with Tales of Abuse
From The New York Times of August 28, 1909:
RETURN FROM McKEES ROCKS.
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Strikebreakers Who Enlisted Here
Come Back with Tales of Abuse.
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Five white-faced, sunken-cheeked men got off a train at Jersey City yesterday and disperse, wearily and in silence, to their east side tenement homes.
They were James Gottfried, Alexander Friedman, Joseph Diamond, James Graden, and Joseph Bredes. They had been taken to Schoenville, near Pittsburg, with more than a hundred other machinists from this city two weeks ago to break the Pressed Steel Car Company’s strike [at McKees Rocks]. They had been hired for the job through the activity of Leo Bergoff’s “Service Bureau” ” of this city.
According to the story told by the five men yesterday, they spelled out an advertisement for “machinists” in the “help wanted” columns of a Manhattan newspaper about two weeks ago. All five had recently come to this country and wanted work. They went over to the basement at 205 West Thirty-third Street, as the advertisement directed. They were met there by Bergoff, “Sam” Cohen, and their lieutenants. Cohen told them that he wanted ” 1,000 railroad car truck builders,” and that he was willing to pay $3 a day. He said the “job” was in Pittsburg, and that it was a “good one.” To impress the men with its excellence he had them sign their names to a piece of paper, on which there was some writing which they could not see, because, the men said yesterday, his hand was in the way.
The men agreed to go, and on July 16 they were taken to Jersey City by Cohen and put on a train. Getting off at Pittsburg, they were herded on a big transport and taken up the river to the Pressed Steel Car Company’s works. Here they were set to work immediately without being given even a chance to rest after their journey. For the next nine days and nights the five men worked, ate and slept in big, barn-like structures inside the stockade with 2,000 machinists and other laborers who, they say, were kept at work inside the stockade against their will.
Big as these structures were, the one in which the strike breakers’ meals were served was not big enough to seat them all at once. The men at mealtimes were separated into divisions. Those in the last divisions often found that either there was nothing left for them to eat, or that, still more tantalizing, they had no time to eat before the bell for work sounded, and the guards came and drove them out. The company’s commissariat, the men say, frequently broke down. The meals consisted principally of bread and cabbage.
Guarded Like Convict.
Although they had been told that they were going to a “good Job,” the men worked, they say, like convicts surrounded by armed guards, in constant fear of attack and within earshot of exploding pistols. The 2,000 men slept herded together in the same big shack, without privacy or comfort of any kind. Unnerved by hunger, discomfort, and physical fear they asked for their wages and to be allowed to go. They were answered, they say, with oaths and threats of a box car.
Finally one of the men smuggled a letter out to the Austrian Consul in Pittsburg. The latter came over to the strike-besieged car works and, in spite of the reassurances of the company officials, insisted on talking to the Hungarian who had written the note. The man implored the Consul to effect his release. The Consul appealed to the District Attorney. And then followed tho investigation at which Gottfried. Friedman, and their companions testified on Thursday.
Gottfried, one of the five men who returned yesterday, after testifying before Special Commissioner Hoagland on Thursday in Pittsburg, is the twenty-seven-year-old son of a delicatessen dealer at 120 Avenue A.
[He explained in broken English yesterday:]
I saw an advertisement for machinists in the paper. I went over to the basement place and saw Cohen. Cohen said he didn’t want any machinists, but he wanted truck-builders. He said he would pay me 30 cents an hour. He never said anything about any strike. He made me put my name on a paper with some writing on it. Then, a day or two latter-Aug. 16 it was-he took me and about a hundred others to Jersey City, to some place we didn’t even know the name of.
“That’s the place,” he told us, pointing out of the car window. We got on a big ship and went to the big shops. We got there at noon. We had sat up all night on the train. I was too tired even to eat dinner, and the dinner looked bad. I said I wanted to sleep first, and that I would be willing to lose that much pay. He said: “You’ll work now.” Then he called some big ugly looking men. They were not in uniform, but we understood that they were police. I was frightened and went to work without sleeping.
Virtually Held Prisoners.
Gottfried, according to his story yesterday, got disgusted with the food a few days later because all that he could eat of it was the bread and the cabbage. All the men had to wash in were wooden wash tubs, and the cold water in this wouldn’t remove the machine grease. He had also missed breakfast one morning because he was in the “shift” which ate last. The state of siege in which the company’s works were, also frightened, him.
Gottfried says that he walked up to Cohen inside the stockade one day and asked for his money and permission to leave the stockade. He charges that Cohen merely cursed him and threatened to “lock him in a box car.”
[Said Gottfried yesterday:]
I and my friends were helpless. We were surrounded by armed guards. Part of them seemed to have been hired to keep the strikers out. Others seemed to be engaged to keep us strikebreakers in. I kept on working until the Austrian Consul came and made a fuss. Then Cohen said me: “Don’t go around talking. We’ll give you your money and you can go.” I had been there nine days and they paid me $27.
Joseph Smith of 245 Third Street is another strikebreaker, who says he was able to leave the stockade only after the Austrian Consul’s investigation. Smith returned here from Pittsburg the night before last. He is an Austrian and cannot talk English.
Another man who went down to the car works as a strikebreaker is seventeen-year-old George Grafenstein, a band saw operator, who lived with his father, Emile, a cleric, at 1,266 Sixtieth Street, Brooklyn, up to about two weeks ago. Then he saw Bergoff’s advertisement, and borrowing carfare from his family went over to Manhattan to answer it. He did I not come back. His family received a postcard from Philadelphia several days later saying that he was on his way to Pittsburg in a box car. His family got the following letter from him last Saturday:
I live here like an army soldier. I can’t go out. There are 6,000 strikers, and if I went out they would kill me. Two Sheriffs and twelve men were killed right near me last Sunday. I was talking to a fellow when there came a pour of bullets. Dr. Merano’s son is here as a riveter. He went to Pittsburg with his foreman the other day. The strikers attacked them and threw the foreman into the river. Charles Merano has a fractured skull. I sleep in a row of 100 beds. There are twelve of these rows.
The letter concludes with the statement that the meals are good and that young Grafenstein is satisfied.
Charles Merano is the son of Dr. George Merano of 1,565 Fifty-ninth Street, Brooklyn, who had not heard of his son’s injury until yesterday. Young Merano had run away to join the strikebreakers in answer to Bergoff’s advertisement, very much as young Grafenstein did. Dr. Merano visited the offices of Bergoff’s Service Bureau on Thursday. Bergoff was away. Dr. Merano left after threatening to thrash Bergoff.
When Bergoff was engaged by the car company to find 1,100 strikebreakers in this city three weeks ago he rented the basement at art West Thirty-third Street from Mrs. Mary E. Jones. Bergoff and Cohen had so many strong men with them that Mrs. Jones says that she thought they were going to “open gambling establishment.”
“It’s a rough crowd, but I’ve a couple of heelers,” Mrs. Jones says Cohen told her when he first moved in. All the furniture he wanted was “a table and three chairs.” For two weeks, according to Mrs. Jones, there was a constant stream of unemployed pushing in and out of the basement door. Cohen took the men to Pittsburg, and Bergoff resumed his regular business as head of the “Service Bureau” at 1,416 Broadway. An effort was made to see Bergoff and get his side of the “peonage” charges, but no one seemed to know, where he was.
[Photograph, emphasis and paragraph breaks added.]
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SOURCES
Quote Mother Jones, Powers of Privilege, Ab Chp III
https://www.iww.org/history/library/MotherJones/autobiography/3
The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-Aug 28, 1909
https://www.newspapers.com/image/25977798
IMAGE
McKees Rocks Strike, Stockade, Loco Fmen Mag p715, Nov 1919
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=D2tJAAAAYAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA715
-from:
Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen’s Magazine
“Published Monthly by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen”
(Indianapolis, Indiana)
-July-Dec 1909-Volume 47
https://books.google.com/books?id=D2tJAAAAYAAJ
Photo from edition of Nov 1909
-Article: “McKees Rocks Strike”
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=D2tJAAAAYAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA709&pg=GBS.PA709
See also:
Tag: McKees Rocks Pressed Steel Car Strike of 1909
https://weneverforget.org/tag/mckees-rocks-pressed-steel-car-strike-of-1909/
Tag: Scabs Held in Peonage During McKees Rocks Strike of 1909
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