Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Thomas Mellon, sure. But who are James Smith, Miranda Hollander, and William Tinker?
That latter trio comprises just three of the lives the authors of the new book “Pittsburgh Rising: From Frontier Town to Steel City, 1750-1920” explore to illuminate the city’s history. The University of Pittsburgh Press publication, by Pitt professors Edward K. Muller and Rob Ruck, sketches everything from the slaughter, betrayal and displacement of Native Americans here to the ascent of heavy industry in the Mon Valley, with an eye on not only generals, land speculators and robber barons, but also the men and women who lived and labored in their shadows.
“We weren't trying to write a book for academics, but for people on the street,” said Ruck. “We tried to find people whose stories were illustrative of larger dynamics.”
Everyday people
Smith, for instance, was an 18-year-old, Pennsylvania-born British soldier who in 1755 was captured by Native Americans and lived as one of them for the next four years. (Though he found much to admire about their way of life, Smith later returned to white society and became an Indian fighter.) Hollander was a young textile worker who figured in the big 1848 strike in the city — just one of many labor conflicts the book covers. And Tinker was a Black migrant from Alabama who came to the Hill District in 1916, during the Great Migration; he worked as a barber, and his son Harold later played and managed for the Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team.
Others whose lives the authors outline include Agostino Carlino, an Italian-born stonemason who came to Pittsburgh during the great influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe that began in the late 1800s, and even members of the fictional Kracha family, Slovak immigrants in “Out of This Furnace,” Thomas Bell’s iconic, multi-generational novel about life among mill workers in Braddock. (The authors note the novel is often assigned reading for college courses about labor and immigration history.)
Muller is a professor emeritus of history who formerly directed Pitt’s urban-studies program, and Ruck is best known as the author of numerous books about sports including “Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh.” While “Pittsburgh Rising” is their first formal collaboration, they’ve been working on the book since the 1990s.
That’s a fair-sized chunk of Pittsburgh history right there, but Muller said there are several reasons the book ends in 1920. One is that the authors wanted to keep it short enough to attract lay readers. Another is that they see 1920 or thereabouts as an inflection point in local history: Contrary to conventional wisdom, which traces Big Steel’s decline here to the 1960s or later, Muller said the peak actually came right after World War I.
“The reality is the American economy began to shift, and iron and steel were no longer the growth sectors,” he said. Coal, a locally extracted resource, was also in decline thanks to the burgeoning oil and gas industries, he said.
Fresh perspectives
Those conversant in Pittsburgh history will recognize the broad outlines of the larger story, as Pittsburgh cedes its early role as Gateway to the West and turns its focus, in turn, to glass, iron and steel. Muller and Ruck detail how tycoons like Carnegie, Frick and Mellon built their empires, even as they emphasize the brutal exploitation of the largely immigrant workforce that made those fortunes possible — and the ethnic social clubs and other organizations that helped those workers and their families survive.
Still, the authors pay heed to underrepresented aspects of local history. For one, they limn the vibrant Black community that thrived in Pittsburgh in the first half of the 19th century, when it was home to figures like abolitionist and publisher Martin R. Delany and entrepreneur John Vashon. Ruck said that all came crashing down with passage, in 1850, of the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which “allowed the hand of slavery to reach over the Mason-Dixon Line and grab people, whether or not at the time they had legally free status.”
Many Blacks simply fled the country, and the Black population in Northern cities including Pittsburgh was devastated. “The demolition of that community had repercussions that would last for decades, as it meant that when a Black community reforms” — starting around the turn of the 20th century — “it doesn’t have the foundation of economic accomplishment, of roots and institution building that allows European immigrant communities to emerge from fairly rough conditions and embark on a fairly upward trajectory. … It's always trying to play catch-up ball. And that is an issue to this day.”
The book also dives deep into labor struggles here — not just 1892’s Battle of Homestead, which every Pittsburgher knows, but other instances in which working people fought for a fairer deal, from those textile-mill strikes in 1848 to the Great Strike of 1877, the massive 1919 steel strike, and many in between.
The past hasn't passed
However, as the authors repeatedly note, working-class solidarity was often difficult to achieve across ethnic and racial lines, especially with management pitting different groups against each other, for instance by shipping in strikebreakers from out of town.
It turns out that violent disagreements about who counts as “American,” or as white, predate Pittsburgh’s founding, and echo throughout its history, into the present day. For instance, anti-Catholic sentiment in mid-19th-century Pittsburgh, inflamed by demagogues like future mayor Joseph Barker, ran high enough that, in 1851, a mob torched Downtown’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“I hope people will also feel the connection with current issues — the nativism, the anti-Catholicism, the sense that, you know, things that we're going through today and in the country as a whole, but Pittsburgh, too — anti-Semitism — we've gone through it before,” said Muller. “It's not new news. And we will get through that again as we evolve.”
As Ruck put it, “We’re not writing this book simply to appreciate the antiquarian past of the city.”
