Effects of Industrialization in Pittsburgh

The question Couvares seeks to answer in his book is how the working people of the city could have had such relative power over their lives and their workplaces in 1877, and be so relatively powerless by 1919. It is a fact that in the 1870s the power of labor was steady and growing. However, as the power of the steel corporations increased, labor lost its power. The result was that by 1920 big steel firms ruled the city and the lives of the working people.

Earlier studies have emphasized the economic aspect of the answer to this question. Couvares does not minimize the economic aspect, but he adds that the cultural and political aspects of the industrialization process are also important and worthy of serious study. His book is in part written to remedy this lack of focus on those cultural and political aspects.

This part of the message of the book, then, is that the massive changes wrought by the industrialization of Pittsburgh wer

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we read of the growing power of unions, especially the Knights of Labor. The Knights brought to the workers a sense of organization and efficiency which they had previously lacked. The leaders of the Knights knew that a simple sense of community would not last long as the glue that held the workers together. The Knights wanted to create an organization which would unify economic, political, and social spheres of working-class life at the heart of the Knight's vision of the labor movement. . . . Moreover, it corresponded to social realities in plebeian Pittsburgh. Sprung from the craftsmen's empire, . . . the movement had . . . reproduced in somewhat altered form an older set of communal relations that bound workers to one another and to many of their neighbors (60). So we see once again that the changes in labor and industry were outgrowths of conditions already present in the city's social and economic realities. At the same time, the "business methods" of the developing labor union brought about a gulf between the less educated workers and those running the unions and taking an active part in its activities. Couvares in the next few chapters makes clear that there were other fluctuations in labor and social relations thr
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Approximate Word count = 2077
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)