Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town

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Overview

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
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Overview

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, wh

This chronicle of Homestead, Pennsylvania, is labor and business history with the power of Theodore Dreiser. Homestead was a town made by steel, and its history is that of a mighty corporation, a bloody strike, and a bloodless but very real civic death in 1986, when the last plant closed. Photos. rint.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Serrin, a former labor reporter for the New York Times, begins here with a poignant account of the 1986 closing of U.S. Steel's Homestead Works, the most famous steel mill in the world. In retracing the mill's history, he suggests that Homestead, just outside Pittsburgh, is emblematic of a classic American story of industry, labor, immigration and community. Serrin ably reconstructs the growth of Homestead, especially the role of industrialist Andrew Carnegie and the epic 1892 strike at the mill. He explains how the company controlled community life, how the unions grew in the 1930s and how neither labor nor management saw the need to change as the industry lost jobs in the 1950s. The narrative gains in power when Serrin reenters it to relate eyewitness stories of despair in depressed 1980s Homestead, including those of a futile redevelopment effort, of a minister-led protest movement, and of how the virtually abandoned town became, ironically, a fashionable subject for study by anthropologists, sociologists and social workers. Though the book is valuable as history, its account of the industry's collapse in the 1980s is less comprehensive than John P. Hoerr's 1988 book, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Oct.)
Library Journal
Serrin (journalism, NYU), former labor correspondent for the New York Times , on the whole paints a depressing story of the rise and demise of one of America's largest steel towns--Homestead, Pennsylvania. Spanning over 100 years, Homestead sympathetically presents business, labor, and human history from a strongly pro-labor, working-class perspective. Serrin relies heavily on interviews with the town's diverse ethnic and racial population. He sees worker repression as a continual theme throughout the city's colorful history, from the crushing of the steel workers' labor organization by Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick in the bloody strike and lockout of 1892 to the closing of the mill in 1986. The author warns the reader that there will be more Homesteads in America's industrial future but offers no solutions. He writes with passion and has a readable and vibrant style. This is not a scholarly work but a moving biography of a town that the general reader will find informative. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/92.--Charles C. Hay III, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Archives, Richmond
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Kirkus Reviews
A profoundly moving elegy on the death of a legendary Pennsylvania steel town—and, by extension, the end of a century of Smokestack America—from Serrin (Journalism/NYU), a former labor correspondent for The New York Times. The Homestead Steel Works was the site of the epic 1892 strike and lockout that saw steel chieftains Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick use the Pinkertons to crush the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers and set back the cause of unionism several decades. Serrin's account is more comprehensive than Paul Krause's The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892 (p. 654), for it follows "America's most famous steel town" through another 100 years that saw its fortunes rise and fall with that of the town's company overlord, U.S. Steel, and even the nation as a whole. During this time, Homestead steel was used for America's skyscrapers, railroads, bridges, and battleships (during WW II, U.S. Steel alone produced as much steel as the Germans). Serrin covers, with an often acerbic eye, the major corporate and labor leaders who became a part of the town's history, including Carnegie, Frick, Charles Schwab, Judge Elbert Gary, John L. Lewis, and Philip Murray. But his real contribution is in detailing how the town's heyday in the 1950's and early 1960's masked problems in long-term planning and out-of-date equipment, and in the corruption, complacency, and authoritarianism of both management and labor. Serrin discusses with mixed rage and pity the fraying of ties in this once vibrant community after the mill's closing in July 1986: declining schools, half-empty churches, ineffectual government, deteriorating homes, and a rash of heart attacks andsuicides by men who could not find work again. A devastating, heartbreaking object lesson in "how America uses things...then discards them." Serrin has made Homestead's tragedy our own. (B&w photos—16 pages—not seen.)

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780679748175
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 8/31/1993
  • Edition description: 1st Vintage Books ed
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 460
  • Product dimensions: 5.22 (w) x 7.98 (h) x 1.03 (d)

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