The Company Town by Hardy Green

steelmakers brought in strikebreakers, including some 30,000 southern blacks, to run the mills.
    In Gary, patriotism—that last refuge of a scoundrel—showed its usefulness again. With 85 percent of the city’s 18,000 steelworkers honoring the strike, there was calm at first, then clashes with black strikebreakers on October 4, prompting intervention by 1,500 federal troops under General Leonard Wood. The military declared martial law, prohibited all outdoor meetings, and began arresting pickets and strike leaders, putting the miscreants to work sweeping the city’s streets. Wood—who incidentally as a U.S. presidential candidate enjoyed the backing of Judge Gary as well as Morgan partner and U.S. Steel board member George W. Perkins—ardently fell to his work, repeatedly identifying the union with radicalism. “Gary is a hotbed of anarchy,” he announced. The strike, he found, had been instigated by a “dangerous and extremely active group of IWW and the Red anarchist element.” Wood was joined in his scare campaign by the Loyal American League, a business-backed group that worked to sway native-born workers away from the “Hunky” strike, and the Tribune , which ran banner headlines declaring RED PLOT UNCOVERED and REDS’ BOMBS MADE HERE. By November, most Gary strikers had returned to work.
    The strike served as a catalyst for a national “red scare,” with the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer raiding political meetings and arresting nearly 10,000 alleged radicals across the country. The government deported dozens of recent immigrants. Meanwhile, the steel strike lagged under the combined corporate-government attack, and the union called off the walkout in January. 22

    With that conflagration over, both the company and the city of Gary looked ahead to the 1920s, which they saw as fat times. In reality, the two were headed in different directions: The city, already a flawed effort, would by the end of the decade enter a period of decline; the steel industry would revive after the Great Depression and emerge in a period of unmatched productivity and prosperity.
    As the original city infrastructure no longer sufficed, Gary authorities called for a raft of new building, including new streets and sanitation facilities and a new civic center. The city went so far as to contract for a professional city plan that would allow improved transportation, street layouts, and zoning—but the move came to a halt when U.S. Steel, the railroads, and real estate interests showed a distinct lack of interest. Even so, a building boom brought new skyscrapers, office buildings, hotels, and apartment buildings. The large Gary State Bank Building was erected at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue; not far away were the twin Gary City Hall and County buildings.
    In addition to being the home of the Gary Works, the city was becoming a commercial center for the region. By the end of the 1920s, there were 1,300 retail stores employing 4,000 workers. The presence of 1,800 hotel rooms facilitated convention business, and thirteen movie houses provided distraction from the world of toil. 23
    For steelworkers, the long workday gradually shortened despite the company’s best efforts to fight off change. The U.S. Labor Department reported in 1920 that the twelve-hour shift was still as prevalent as it had been in 1910, while 25 percent of blast-furnace, Bessemer, and open-hearth workers were enduring seven-day weeks. Christian reformers at the Interchurch World Movement issued a voluminous report criticizing the long hours. U.S. Steel responded by circulating a pamphlet written by Reverend E. Victor Bigelow of Andover, Massachusetts, calling demands to shorten the workday “the hobo doctrine . . . [that] glorifies leisure and denounces toil.” In 1921, U.S. Steel stockholder Charles M. Cabot of Boston financed an engineering report that