Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town
- ISBN-10
- 081291886X
- ISBN-13
- 9780812918861
- Series
- Homestead
- Category
- History / United States / State & Local / General
- Pages
- 452
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1992
- Publisher
- Times Books
- Author
- William Serrin
Description
For more than a century Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the heart of the American steel industry and the preeminent symbol of America's industrial might. Today Homestead, like the steel industry, like much of industrial America, is a relic of its former self. William Serrin, a distinguished former labor correspondent of The New York Times, tells the story of America's most famous industrial town in a sweeping narrative that spans more than a hundred years, and encompasses great movements and moments in American history and the day-to-day lives of working men and women. Homestead is an epic work of business, labor, and human history. When Andrew Carnegie purchased the Homestead Steel Works in 1883, he rapidly built it into a vast steel empire that set the pace for industrial America and the world. Jobs in the Homestead Works drew thousands of immigrants from Europe, as well as blacks from the South. Steel from the Homestead Works built the Empire State Building, the George Washington Bridge, and many other symbols of America. Homestead Steel played so vital a part in the nation's efforts in World Wars I and II that its site on the Monongahela River became known as Victory Valley. The greatest corporate colossus the world had ever seen, the United States Steel Corporation was so wealthy, so powerful that no one could either see or believe the signs of impending trouble. American labor history begins with Homestead. The bitter, bloody Homestead strike of 1892 was an unprecedented worker uprising, but its defeat set back strong unionism for two generations. It was not until 1937, under the leadership of the charismatic John L. Lewis, that a steelworkers' union was formed. In more recent years, the union has degenerated into a replica of the corporation it had pledged to reform. Skillfully weaving together the many strands of a complex story, Serrin also brings us into the lives of Homestead workers and their families: the backbreaking, brutalizing work in the mill, where, it was said, in winter a man could get frostbite on his ears while working at a furnace in which steel boiled at 3,000 degrees, and where in summer workers would frequently remove their boots to pour out the perspiration. He describes with rich irony the philanthropy for which the corporation was famous - funding churches, schools, athletic fields, the town library - which in reality was nothing more than a system of worker control; and throughout we see the workers' efforts to build a vibrant community, to make a better life for themselves and their children. Finally, in a vitally important story that has gone largely unreported, Serrin exposes the terrible plight of individuals and a town when the community's major industry collapses. This is a story being played out all over America - in automobile, rubber, and mining towns, the result, the author says, of the way "we use things up, people, resources, cities, then discard them."
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