Pressed Steel Car and the McKees Rocks Strike of 1909

The following italicized print is taken from The Point of Pittsburgh, Charlie McCollister (pp. 181–186)

The Pressed Steel Car Company was situated in the Schoenville Section of McKees Rocks …. The population of McKees Rocks was divided into three parts. The old settlers, mainly Scots, English, and German, owned much of the business and real estate, and many lived on the higher ground above the industrial and commercial “Bottoms”; the next, second and third generation workers, mainly Irish and German, performed most of the skilled craft and maintenance work in the factory ….The Slavs, referred to as “Hunkies” … were regarded with contempt by the corporation and by many native born workers as “the least intelligent, the least independent … the most content to be driven like slaves.” 

The company purposely split the workforce into nationality and language groups in order to communicate with them, but also to keep the groups divided. The plant had the reputation of being a “slaughterhouse” with serious accidents as an almost daily occurrence. Lurid accounts in the press call the plant “the last chance”: “When some poor Hunky … is maimed and mangled in his work, some forman or other petty “boss” pushes the bleeding body aside with his foot to make room for another living man, that no time is lost in the turning out of pressed steel car. The new man often works for some minutes of the dead boy until a labor gang takes it away. A former county coroner, Joseph G. Armstrong, testified about the appalling death toll. It seemed to me that the deaths average about one a day …. Investigation made it look to me as though a lot of young fellows who were operating the cranes did not care much whether or not a “hunky” laborer was hit every now and then.

On Saturday, July 10, 1909, the men were paid, and many were shorter in their pay than usual. A demand was raised to know the pay rate. Upon management’s refusal to talk, shop after shop walked out until virtually the entire plant was struck. The company immediately contacted Pearl Berghoff, “king of the strikebreakers”… Berghoff received five dollars a day for each body delivered to the plant. He quickly mobilized some 500 strikebreakers, who began arriving on the morning of July 14. Most entered the plant by rail, but deputies initially escorted contingents on foot to the plant gate.

When they reached the gate they were greeted by a storm of bricks, stones and clubs …. Terrified, the strike-breakers broke ranks and ran for their lives, leaving the policemen to look out for themselves. The latter drew their revolvers and this act seemed to further enrage the already maddened crowd. With the men shouting oaths and the hundreds of women in the crowd screaming with rage, the strikers closed in and began hand-to-hand battle. A policeman fired into the crowd, his shot striking a man in the stomach, inflicting a wound that will probably be fatal … (from a newspaper account at the time).

The McKees Rocks strike continued throughout the summer, with violence erupting several times, and the company continued to bring in strikebreakers. At one point, 300 strikebreakers were shipped in via a riverboat that was turned away at the dock by striking workers. Despite that, by August of 1909, over 1,000 strikebreakers were working at Pressed Steel Car Company, under even more deplorable conditions than prior to the strike. 

Violence escalated in August as matters came to a head. On August, 11 a Croation striker trying to prevent the entry of strikebreakers, was killed by a deputy …. In August 15, a second gun battle prevented another steamer from landing replacement workers. On the 17^th, 8,000 strikers and their supporters rallied at Indian Mound. The IWW took public control of the strike … tension continued to build until August, 22, which became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Strikers boarding a trolley searching for scabs were confronted by an armed deputy who opened fire. In the ensuring fight, the deputy, Harry Exler was killed. A company of state troopers was called in to restore order; and in the bloody confrontations that followed, ten more men including eight strikers were killed. The next day, the troopers stormed through “Hunkeyville” attacking men and women indiscriminately…

On August 25, ignoring threats on his life, the Socialist leader and oft-times candidate for President, Eugene V. Debs, then at the height of his powers and popularity, addressed a crowd of 10,000 from the Indian Mound. He called the strike the “greatest labor fight in all my history in the labor movement”; one that signaled a “new spirit among the unorganized, foreign-born workers in the mass production industries.”

On September 8, a settlement offer was made that ignored many of the workers' issues, but the workers' families were “hungry,” and so they proclaimed victory and “marched back into the plant.”

Once there, however, the company began to backtrack from the agreement. This triggered a walkout by 4,000, primarily immigrant worker, on September 15. The following day, 2,000, mostly native born workers marched behind a huge American flag toward the immigrant worker picket line. The immigrant workers opened their ranks and allowed the marchers to enter the gate unscathed, and most of the immigrants followed the Americans insider shortly after. The skilled men exercised their shared management control by slowly squeezing out the IWW supporters and other resisters. From a claimed membership of 6,000 inside and outside the plant in the immediate aftermath of the strike, by 1912 the IWW chapter had dwindled to 20 members.