Book Launch Date Set

The book has been sent to the printer and the launch date and place for Darkness Visible has been set:

The Bost Building as it appeared in 1892

Saturday, March 17th, 3 p.m. 
Bost Building in the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area 
623 E. Eighth Avenue
Homestead, PA
Newly built in 1892, the Bost Building served as union headquarters during the lockout and strike, and is listed as a National Historic Landmark.  A scene from the novel takes place in the building.
     If you're coming to the launch, come early and walk the streets where much of the action of the book takes place:
The Waterfront shopping complex, former site of the Homestead Works of Carnegie Steel. The Jones-Phillips house would have been somewhere in the Target parking lot.
Eighth Avenue: Doctor's office, saloons, General Office Building for Carnegie Steel
Tenth Avenue: Doctor's house and Pump House: site of the Battle for Homestead

The Bost Building today.

City League Champs. 1895

Mayor Loth's Champion Football Team

I was rummaging around in a box of my dad's old photos when I came upon the image at right. It's a photo of Loth's (the mayor's) team, Pittsburgh champions in 1895.  This is the earliest known extant picture of my grandfather (first row left), and it includes my grandmother's brother, Jesse Edwards (front, third from right), and (my dad thought) Grandpap's brother Will (top row, far right).
     What's interesting to me is the scruffiness of the players (no uniforms, little padding, no helmets) and the debris on the field where they took the picture. Note that no player has a beard and only one guy has a mustache. Everyone and everything looks completely beat to hell.
      I know that long exposures made for stiff expressions on subjects, but even so, this team seems pretty bummed for just having whupped Duquesne University 0-66 for the city title.  Could it be that they were only reflecting the malaise of the times--the dangerous working conditions, the deep economic depression following the Panic.
      What's amazing is that in the note on the back, my father writes that this photo was taken on his parents' wedding day, November 26th.  Dad says that after the wedding, Grandpap played in this game.  I assume that Grandma was there, cheering him and her brother on. * Still, it's strange to think that the only photo of Grandpap on his wedding day is of him with his football team--and this would not exist had they not won the championship.  No pictures were taken of the wedding.  My grandparents were too poor to afford such a luxury.  It was Grandpap's third year of working in the Homestead Machine Shop (for pitifully small wages), and Grandma, having finally graduated from the orphanage where she landed at age 8, had been working as a waitress for a couple of years. (Apparently that's how they met, at the restaurant.)
     One can only imagine what it was like to be in the places shown in these old photos.  What strikes me about this and most of the other images of 1890s Homestead and environs is how down-and-out the place looks. 
      Hamlin Garland's 1893 description reinforces this impression: "The streets of the town were horrible; the buildings were poor; the sidewalks were sunken, swaying, and full of holes, and the crossings were sharp-edged stones set like rocks in a river bed. Everywhere the yellow mud of the street lay kneaded into a sticky mass, through which groups of pale, lean men slouched in faded garments, grimy with the soot and grease of the mills. . . .Such towns are sown thickly over the hill-lands of Pennsylvania, but this was my first descent into one of them. They are American only in the sense in which they represent the American idea of business."
       Garland's last sentence is informative.  His description of the town and the steelworks reveals an ugly, dreary, hellish place where "the people were mainly of the discouraged and sullen type to be found everywhere where labor passes into the brutalizing stage of severity."

A street in Braddock, across the river from Homestead, 1983. (Photo by T.B.)

  Yes, this is the kind of world where industrial workers lived during the so-called "Gay 'Nineties."  What's more appalling is that wages and working conditions did not improve appreciably until after the New Deal.  Tom Brokaw has called the children of these people, those who lived through the Depression and fought in WWII, the "Greatest Generation"; however,  I don't think it's fair to single out one generation.  This late-19th-century generation who endured poverty and backbreaking labor to provide for their families is just as "great."     

I wonder what future generations will say about us.

*Correction: The program for George and Annie's 60th wedding anniversary banquet confirms that they were married on November 26, 1895. However, they were married at 5 p.m., which had to be after the game. "Annie Edwards and George W. Busch were married on November 26th 1895 at 5 p.m. by the Rev. John Weidley D.D., pastor of the Bethany Lutheran Church, East Liberty, Pittsburgh, Pa. They moved to Homestead in October 1898. . . ." 

                                    George and Annie, 1955 Anniversary banquet
 

So Depressing! Part 2: Lockouts

When I opened my copy of the New York Times yesterday, my eyes immediately jumped to a front-page article titled "More Lockouts as Companies Battle Unions."  The article notes the recent employment (pun intended) of the lockout, not only in professional sports, but also in such diverse industries as manufacturers (Cooper Tire) and the arts (the New York City Opera).

Continued in the Business section, the article observes that the use of the lockout was "once a rarity," and goes on on to highlight the ongoing dispute between American Crystal Sugar, based in Moorhead, Minnesota, and its unionized workers.  Since the lockout began on August 1st of last year, the company has hired 900 replacement workers to keep its sugar beet plants running.  Thanks to Federal regulations, unlike 19th century Robber Barons, American Crystal cannot make make scabs permanent hires.  However, these regulations may not be enough to save the 1,300 workers struggling without paychecks in a depressed economy.

A locked-out worker walks by an American Crystal plant.

As the lockout drags into its seventh month, the locked-out workers are sinking into financial ruin.  Many have defaulted or will soon default on their mortgages; many bills and insurance policies have not been paid. Layoffs are starting in other sectors, like education.  In this war of attrition, the company has the upper hand.  How long can these people hold on before, like the Carnegie Steel workers in 1893, they are forced to give up and try to move on?  The economic ripple effect of the lockout is spreading through the Red River Valley. I ask you, who is benefiting from this situation?  Replacement workers, union members, public workers, taxpayers?  Not.

Pickets on the line at American Crystal in the January cold.

Sugar workers in default on their mortgages are not being thrown into the street by sheriff's deputies, as they were in 1892 Homestead--at least not yet.  But nationwide, we've witnessed homeowners, deep in debt on properties bought during the housing bubble, kicked out by the same banks that caused the crash in the first place, banks bailed out by American taxpayers.  Then, maddeningly, those banks put the house up for sale at a price below what the dispossessed owner owed.  Crazy, crazy.      
As in all of these company vs. labor disputes, the two sides have very different perspectives.  Labor attorney Robert Batterman (metaphorical name?),who represents companies, declared that "the pendulum has swung too far toward the unions, and in these tight economic times employers are looking for givebacks."  But according to union member Paul Woinarowicz, the lockout is "just another way of trying to break the union." As in 1892 Homestead, the Red River Valley community has been torn apart by the pitting of worker against worker. As Woinarowicz put it, "[Being locked out] was just like a knife stuck in your heart."

Members of the Pennsylvania militia on patrol in Homestead, securing the mill for replacement workers, 1892.

In an ironic twist, it turns out that American Crystal Sugar is a co-op, formed in 1973 when growers bought out a corporation founded in the 1890s.  Co-ops have long enjoyed the image of the "Little Guys" banding together to get free of "The Man."  However, some co-ops have become huge companies, with boards of directors far removed from the workers toiling in their plants.  These company executives and boards have their eyes on the bottom line, just as do those in same roles in corporations.   
During the Homestead lockout, anarchists came to town to urge the workers to take over the mill.  The workers threw them into jail.  What the anarchists did not understand is that American workers did not want to run the company; they wanted decent pay and decent working conditions.  How ironic, then, that American Crystal actually is a company that was taken over by the farmers that the corporate company was kicking around.  Now they've been in charge for forty years, they are acting like the company they took over.

A Trygve Olson editorial cartoon.

American Crystal has spent a lot of cash keeping government subsidies flowing their way.  According to opensecrets.org, through the first years of this century, the co-op's PAC routinely spent between $300,000 and $600,000 each election cycle. Again, irony:  the same elite minority that want to keep their own tax percentage low are asking the rest of us taxpayers to keep subsidizing their profits. But alas for American Crystal, despite their efforts, it's virtually guaranteed that the government subsidies on sugar will be taken away in the next congressional session.  On top of that, a bad crop last year caused a drop of 39% in company profits.What to do?  Take a lesson from H.C. Frick and cut employees' earnings to shore up your bottom line.


Looking at nightmarish economic and political turmoil in the nation and world, it's tempting to give into despair. However, throwing in the towel never changed anything for the better. Take to heart the message of Mother Jones, champion of the Little Guy: "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

Mother Jones exhorts workers to stand up for their rights.

So Depressing! 1893, 1929, and 2008

Most Americans have heard of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and many Americans today are suffering from the effects of the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash.  But few are aware of the so-called "Panic of 1893," which sank the US and other industrialized countries into a depression that lasted for a decade.  Some aspects of the '93 Panic bear an uncanny resemblance to those of the current economic mess.

The economic motivations for the 1892 Homestead Strike are harbingers of the Panic.  In 1891 Carnegie and Frick, casting their eyes upon the great flood of unemployed Americans and immigrant labor entering the country, decided to slash workers' wages to take up the slack in their sagging bottom line.  Theirs was a conscious, orchestrated move to take out unions and their negative impact on Robber Baron income.  The Strike, after all, began with a lockout. Frick planned to keep control of the situation by enclosing the Homestead Works in a huge fence (aka "Fort Frick"), then bringing in Pinkerton guards, who would secure the mill for scab workers.

The flaw in this strategy proved to be the bringing in of Pinkertons.  Frick did not anticipate that his mercenaries would encounter a few thousand angry, armed townspeople on the river bank.  But this defeat did not deter Frick.  He convinced the Pennsylvania governor to send in the State militia to occupy the site to allow replacement workers to come inside the Works.  End of strike. What the strikers had not realized is that for every one of them, there were several hungry, unemployed workers desperate for any income.  A torrent of scabs flowed into the mill, and that was that.

During the previous decade, the US had enjoyed a tremendous period of economic expansion, driven by speculative building of railroads.  No one seemed to care that there were too many railroads, all being built with shaky financing.  Banks, investors, and railroad workers were all profiting from the building of this economic house of cards.  What, them worry?

A run on a bank in 1893.

But then, in February of 1893, the first cards came tumbling down with the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, followed by three other major railroads, including the Great Northern. A series of bank failures followed, with thousands of small investors losing their life savings. The mining industry, heavily reliant on railroad building and the silver standard, went into a deep depression.

Bankrupt, many people couldn't pay their mortgages and were forced to abandon the homes they'd recently built.  Brand-new houses stood unoccupied and unsalable. The ranks of the bankrupt and unemployed swelled, driving wages on existing jobs even lower. Double-digit unemployment continued for nearly a decade, reaching a high of 18% in 1894. The US Treasury was in such bad shape that President Grover Cleveland took out a loan of $65 million in gold from banker J.P.Morgan (the future owner of U.S. Steel) to keep it afloat.

A soup line, with ironic billboard, 1930s.

While the government implemented some reforms during the next several decades to try to stabilize the economy, it took the horrors of  the Great Depression for things to change significantly for the average American worker.  Roosevelt's New Deal spurred the creation of government agencies that not only brought economic stability, but a social safety net for ordinary American workers and their families: the WPA, Social Security, the United States Housing Authority and the Farm Security Administration. Regulation was imposed not only on banking, but also on other commercial enterprises, like the sale of foods and pharmaceuticals.

A farm foreclosure auction in Iowa, 1933.

But then, in 2008 Americans found themselves facing the unimaginable: an international crisis of debt.  The cause: the bursting of the real estate speculation bubble.  Shaky lending practices (subprime mortages) had spurred an enormous housing boom, driving up real estate prices while creating enormous debt.  Worldwide, banks and  governments got suckered into helping build this house of cards.  Then the crash came, with painful consequences: banks failing, governments on the verge of bankruptcy, companies downsizing or folding, mass layoffs, huge numbers of unemployed.

Editorial cartoon: I thought we were just buying a house."

While the economic situation in 1893 is in many ways different from our current one, the parallels are nonetheless stunning: financial speculation driving overbuilding, resulting in bank failures and mass unemployment. In both cases, a tiny privileged minority acquired fabulous wealth, elections were partisan and fiercely contested, and ineffectual and/or corrupt elected representatives were reviled by the people who elected them.  Instead of Robber Barons and banks, we have international corporations and banks running the show.  Either way, it's still a very small, elite group in control of the wealth of nations.

A brand-new house, abandoned.

Amazing to me is the solution that some today are trying to implement to fix this mess: dismantle the regulations and social safety network put in place in the last century.  Let's get rid of safety and environmental regulations, the workers' right to bargain collectively, and expensive programs like Medicare and Social Security, and all will be well, they say.  Let capitalism work its magic on the economy, they say, staring dreamily into their Brave Newer World.  Emulating Frick, they would like to take advantage of American workers by eliminating their jobs and benefits and handing over the profits gained thereby to the Fortunate Fewer.  The workers with gainful employment will continue to shoulder the tax burden, while the rich sit by and build up their fortunes.

I say, you folks must be nuts to consider even for a second catapulting our country back into the ugly, filthy, brutal economic free-for-all of the 1890s. Yours is neither a practical nor ethical vision.

Take a lesson from history.  As George Santayana famously remarked, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

'Nuff said.

Christmas in Homestead Past

A few days ago I got a phone call from former Munhall neighbor George Couvaris, who is now living in Florida. (He happens to have been born on Christmas Eve on a Greek island ).  We reminisced about old times on Wayne Road and Eighth Avenue, where George and his wife Carol had a restaurant.  Before he hung up, George said, "You know, I could not have chosen a better place as my new home than the Homestead area.  We had such a wonderful sense of community in those days.  Everyone on the Avenue knew everyone.  If someone needed help, it was there. We worked hard, but got satisfaction from it.  I think many people really miss that today."

Of course, that's true, not only of Homestead, but other towns and neighborhoods across North America. It got me thinking about my childhood Christmases in Homestead.  Some memories stand out:
     
         The decorations on Eighth Avenue--garlands strung across the street with lighted plastic bells.. Our cocker spaniel Buffy knocking over the tree not once, but twice, chasing the train around underneath. . .Candlelit Christmas Eve services at St. John's Lutheran Church, with a large creche surrounded by evergreens to one side of the altar. . .The bells in the numerous Homestead churches pealing together at midnight. . .My father driving around in a Santa Claus suit, creating a sensation among the kids who sighted him. . .Visits to all the aunts' and uncles' homes on the Day, each one short and sweet.

St. John's Lutheran in 1976 (photo by G. Edward Busch)

And then there were the memories of the older generations, the stories that were repeated each year: During the Depression, my mother ripping up a newspaper and giving it to her young brother Bernie as a "jigsaw puzzle."  He burst into tears. . .My Great-Grandfather Busch drilling holes in a broomstick and inserting twigs in it to make a tree. (One of the first artificial ones?) They were too poor to buy a real tree for their eleven children.

There are also images of those long-ago Christmases.  One I like to hang up in my house every year is the one taken of my grandfather, George Busch, on December 23, 1937 in the Homestead Machine Shop.  Grandpap is standing to one side, admiring the tree. American flags "fly" on the railing around the tree, while behind the tree a sign warns workers about safety concerns .  It suggests the pride the machinists, many of them immigrants, took in their work and in being Americans. 

     These stories and images are literally long ago and far away now.  It's easy to indulge in sentimentality about the "good old days", which for many involved backbreaking labor and a constant struggle to stay afloat financially.  Nevertheless, it's important to recall the good part of these times:  the joy in community--working, playing, dancing, and singing together.

May we all recapture some of the pleasure derived from simple gifts in these turbulent and alienating times. Let's join the angels in Luke, singing, "In terra pax hominibus, bonae voluntatis" ---"Peace on Earth and goodwill to all."


  

Visible Darkness: Cover Design

The preliminary cover design for Darkness Visible

Slag pouring from an open hearth ladle

I am coming down the home stretch in preparing Darkness Visible for publication.  My son-in-law Richard Mueller has come up with a preliminary cover design, shown above.  We have settled on a four-color image of molten steel being poured from a ladle.

I like it for a couple reasons. First, the image works as a graphic metaphor for the title itself, the text being visible only via the light from the molten metal.  Second, the image is reminiscent of the opening cues of  "The U.S. Steel Hour," a TV drama series that ran 1953-63. One of the cues is a shot of molten steel pouring into a gigantic ladle. When I showed the cover design to two of my Pittsburgh friends, they immediately thought of this image. In their memories (and mine) these images of molten steel blazing forth in the darkness of the mill interior is emblematic of U.S. Steel, and by extension, its predecessor, Carnegie Steel.  This may be a faulty memory, but I recall my dad saying that the cues were filmed inside the Homestead Works, which at the time was USS's flagship mill.  If they weren't, they could have been.

Subterranean Homesick Blues 2011

"Well, I rapped upon a house
With the US flag upon display.
I said, 'Could you help me out,
I got some friends down the way.'
The man says, 'Get out of here
I'll tear you limb from limb.' 

I said, 'You know, they refused Jesus, too.' 

He said, 'You're not him.'"

--"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream"

One hundred and nineteen years ago on July 4th, the inhabitants of Homestead, Pennsylvania, were on edge.  The Fourth of July was one of just two days off annually for the workers at Carnegie Steel, the other being Christmas.  Only this year, 1892, was different.  On Saturday, July 2nd, the company had paid off all workers and served notices of discharge.  Andrew Carnegie was off in his castle in Scotland, letting Henry Clay Frick handle the situation. Frick had ordered a lockout.  He had called in the Sheriff to deal with the workers, but they had overpowered the lawmen and sent them away.  Frick then decided to bring in a private militia, the Pinkertons, to handle the workers.  The mercenaries were on their way by rail to Pittsburgh, where they would be loaded into barges and brought to Homestead.  The majority of these soldiers, many of them young men who had signed on for temporary summer work, had no idea how dangerous their job was going to be.

 

On this steamy, drizzly Monday, Homesteaders tried to carry on with their usual Fourth activities, but their hearts weren't in it.  Over the town hung the shadow of impending violence.  Most townspeople believed that Frick would try to bring in scabs via the river, as the deputies' arrival by land had been thwarted.  The workers, armed with guns, some dating back to the Civil War, patrolled the roads and lined the river banks, on the alert for the next assault.

 

 The confrontation between company soldiers and the workers came at daybreak on the morning of July 6th.  Very few on either side had any idea that this confrontation would blossom into a full-fledged battle that raged throughout the hot afternoon.  Frick, however, did know of the likelihood of war on the riverbank.  He had to know, as he had brought in both private and public militia to protect corporate interests on occasions before that, and they had all ended with one or both sides suffering casualties.  What he probably didn't understand was the steely (pun intended) determination of the Homestead workers.  

Usually, historical accounts of the Battle for Homestead focus on the casualties of the battle itself.  What they do not relate are the stories of the countless casualties that came afterward: strikebreakers killed by explosions and poison, strikers' lives claimed by despair and heartbreak.  The stories of these casualties have not been told in print. The company kept a lid on unionist sabotage at the mill because they didn't want to scare away new workers.  Many of the strikers, demoralized and starving, moved away, leaving the town to the company and its scabs. 

As a child, I heard the story over and over of my Great-Grandfather Busch's post-battle death in a boiler explosion set by unionists.  It made me anti-union.  In the 'Sixties and 'Seventies, the steelworkers' union was at the peak of its power and influence.  Workers who had not completed ninth grade were making two or three times what my father made as a teacher with a master's degree.  It didn't seem fair.

In 1986, three years after the Homestead Works shut down, I found myself confronted with the choice of whether or not to join a union, the union for faculty in the Minnesota State College and University system.  One had to pay one's fair share anyway, so I chose to join and thereby have some control over union decisions.  It took a few years, but I eventually realized that if it were not for the union, as an adjunct, I would be doing the same work for far less than full-time instructors, unable to build seniority, unsure of whether I'd be hired back during the next semester. 

Thanks to a fair and decent dean, Manley Olson, and a department chair, Karen Gleeman, who worked tirelessly to support adjunct faculty, I was hired as a full-time faculty member in 1992, assuming the rights and privileges attendant thereof--many of these acquired by union representation at MNSCU negotiations.  I enjoyed these benefits throughout my teaching career, but the situation started to change during the last few years.  When I retired in 2006, the department had more adjuncts than tenured faculty.  New hires did not get anything like the salaries and retirement packages my generation enjoyed.  I got in and out just in time.

Now, five years later, the situation with public unions is far worse than many of us could ever have envisioned.  With Wisconsin in the lead, many states are slashing away at unions, rescinding the workers' collective bargaining rights.  Governments at all levels are cutting away at publicly funded programs such as medical care for the aged, poor, and vulnerable, and police and fire departments.  Few would argue that we do not have to tighten our belts, to sacrifice some of the government benefits we've enjoyed for so long. What I don't understand is prevailing attitude among supporters of draconian cuts that these are all we need to set things right with the economy.  How conveniently they forget that it was the unbridled greed of banks, corporations and "investors" that took down the U.S. economy in 2008.  How easily they forget that it was the Bush administration that, while dragging the country into two extremely costly wars abroad, let this blind rapaciousness run unfettered. 

Take, for example, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.  He is trying to fuel his run for the presidency by bragging about what he did for the state during his tenure.  Go ahead and brag, smug Timmy, about how your "no-new-taxes" policy threw millions of dollars of tax burden onto the middle-class, especially city dwellers, who have been forced to live with much less while paying much more.  My property taxes more than doubled during your governorship, while my property value plummeted. You don't fool me, nor apparently 94% of your targeted Tea Party supporters, who are backing other candidates.

As I see it, the government of the state of Minnesota is shut down now, at a loss of millions in state revenue, for one reason and one reason only: Governor Mark Dayton's insistence that the wealthiest 1% Minnesotans pay their fair share of the tax burden.  There is no way to justify their refusal to shoulder a bit more of the burden to keep the state solvent.  Have we reached such a sad pass that the greedy rich have the state and nation in their grip so tightly that they are willing to the country go to hell before giving up even a little of their wealth? 

Doesn't it get you angry that Big Business and Big Government, bolstered by a stacked Supreme Court, have been methodically funneling the nation's resources into the coffers of the big banks, big oil companies, and big corporations for years now?  Doesn't it get you angry that this small minority--and their corrupt judges and public officials--want you and me to keep sacrificing so they can keep biggering and biggering?

If so, speak out.  I'm not arguing for you to grab a rifle and head for the riverbank. Just let the moneybags and their minions know that you are tired of their jive.  Unlike Homesteaders in 1892, you don't even have the option of moving to somewhere with better opportunities.  Where are you going to go--Iceland?  Greece? 

As Ben Franklin put it, if we don't hang together, we will hang separately.