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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday November 1, 1919
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – The Steel Strikers: Courageous Men, Enduring Women
From The Quarry Workers Journal of November 1919:
CONDITIONS AMONG [STEEL] STRIKERS
AS SEEN BY A WOMAN
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By Mary Heaton Vorse,
Author of “The Prestons.” Etc.
—–[Part I.]
This week the commissary stores are being opened in all the steel towns. For six weeks the strikers had nothing. They have been living on their savings; some who have had no savings, have existed from hand to mouth, picking up a chance bit of work here and there and being helped out by their friends.
The first strike relief which will have been given will be the groceries given out twice a week from the commissary stores. Not everyone can have these groceries. They are for those who are starving or on the edge of want, for it would be unthinkable at this stage of organized labor that any one should be forced to scab by hunger.
You do not need much imagination to understand what endurance it has taken on the part of the rank and file to stay out on strike for six weeks without strike benefit or relief. It is going to take even more endurance from now on, when the narrow line will have to be drawn between those actually in want and those nearly in want.
Yesterday I saw how that was being done. When a striker applies for re lief, one of the strike committee goes around to talk the matter over with the family. I went out in Pittsburgh with a Polish fellow-worker who was going out to make such visits of investigation.
We had some difficulty in finding the house where the strikers live. We went down back alleys, past refuse dumps that seemed as venerable as the dilapidated meeting house on the corner. Like everything else in this neighborhood, it was falling to pieces. The paint had scaled from its pillars, but it spoke of a former day before all the mild red brick of the houses had been defiled with the grime soot, and when the well to do, comfortable families lived a family in a house, instead of a family in a room.
