Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town

by William Serrin

Homestead, Pennsylvania, was the city Andrew Carnegie built to make steel. For a century it made its mill owners fortunes and armed America through two world wars. It became the site of a defining battle between management and organized labor and gave thousands of families a livelihood and a way of life. When Homestead died in 1986, it was because steel could be made more cheaply elsewhere -- and because the logic of the time decreed that a town and the people who lived in it were as disposable as any other kind of industrial waste.

In this crucial, important book, Homestead's story unfolds with galvanizing vividness and tragic depth. It is a blistering report on the fate of America's backyards -- a book that is dangerous to ignore and impossible to forget.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Business, Labor, Economics, American History

460 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[David V. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Purchased this at a used book sale. It was in such pristine condition that I thought it was a new book. It was actually published in 1992, but it's as relevant today as it was then. I grew up 2 towns away from Homestead in western Pennsylvania, McKeesport, also now a defunct steel town. If you enjoyed the series on the History Channel recently The Men Who Built America, then you'll like this book. It gives a more detailed look at Andrew Carnegie, one of the robber barons---a nickname he earned. This book centers on steel production, and how it used and abused the workers, the towns, and then blamed cheap imports for the decline of the business, when with some creativity, upgrading and future planning this country would still have a booming domestic steel industry.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had thought the book was going to cover mainly the 1892 strike at the Carnegie owned steel works in Homestead. Instead I found it a fascinating history of the steel industry, both the corporation side and the union side. It is also a book about the rise and fall of a single industry based small town America. Perhaps the most telling statement is found when the author mentions the early 1990s when it was fashionable "to say that the corporation (US Steel) and the rest of the steel industry had recovered from the massive downturns of the 1970s and 1980s" and gives some of the statistics. He then notes that "none of this took into consideration the loss of about 125,000 jobs at the corporation and 250,000 jobs in the American steel industry in the 1980s and early 1990s and the devastation that was visited upon Homestead and the other steel towns...." The book also points out it wasn't the workers and imports that caused the demise of the industry, but bad management decisions.

[Bonnie_blu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up in Pittsburgh and had many of my uncles and other male members of my family work in the steel mills (Edgar Thompson Works, Braddock Works, etc.). They told horror stories about the abominable conditions in the mills in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. They also complained about the union (when the union became prevalent) and its lack of support for the workers. When I saw this book, I had to read it.

If anyone doubts that power corrupts, they need only read this book. From the very beginning with Carnegie and Frick, the steel workers were viewed as little more than easily replaced pieces of machinery. All that mattered was profits and power. And even the government supported the near-villainious methods of the steel magnates. What was most disheartening, however, was how the unions bought in to the world of the corporate leaders. They, too, became just as power and money hungry as the steel magnates and sold out their members.

The steel industry is a study in how not to survive in a changing world. It failed to keep up with changes in the industry, and to upgrade its equipment and mills as new advances developed in steel making. It also failed to recognize changes in society and believed that it could just coast along making poor quality steel, treating its employees as indentured servants, and counting on the government to allow its practices to continue. Without the collusion of the government, the industry would have failed earlier. The only way it kept going from the middle of the 20th century onward was due to WW II, Korea, and Vietnam. The government needed steel and was willing to ignore the poor quality of the steel and the obvious plight of the workers. And in the end, the steel industry abandoned the workers who gave their lives to it. Instead of putting profits back into the mills or remaking them into a different, cleaner manufacturing plant, the industry dumped the mills and totally abandoned the towns that had grown up to support it.

[Elizabethballog · Rating 5 out of 5]

I work at the site of the former Homestead Works and am a frequent visitor to the Carnegie Library of Homestead (built 1898 and christened by Carnegie and Frick as a make peace with the 1892 strikers). Am fascinated to know what author would make of Homestead today and its bland Waterfront development (where else can you have a Red Robin next door to a Fuddruckers and TGIFridays)

The Homestead mills was the sole purpose of the town. Now the Waterfront development could have less to do with the town over the railroad tracks.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although dated (published in 1992, before the turnaround of the American steel industry), " Homestead" is a fascinating look at the birth and death of an American steel town. The first and last sections focus almost exclusively on Homestead and the Homestead Works, while the middle sections chronicle the rise and fall of US Steel, the United Steelworkers, and the American steel industry in general.

Homestead itself experienced a modest turnaround of its own when an upscale mixed use community replaced the Homestead Works.

[Amelia King · Rating 2 out of 5]

I believe that the author had a bit of an impossible task in writing this story. The problem with the story of Homestead is that its climax is in the beginning. I loved this book at first, as it was exciting and well-written. However, the book begins to become less interesting from the 1920s onwards and gets bogged down in big names and political information. It is hard to keep things straight. This made me lose all interest in the book and I could not finish it. The author generally has a good writing style, but it is just too hard to read a book that gets less interesting and exciting as it goes along.

[Ginger Gritzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great history of not just the steel town of Homestead, PA, but of the steel industry and unions in general. It was completed in 1992, so doesn't include the revitalization of some of the former steel towns. This was a particularly interesting story to me because I grew up around the steel towns and many members of my family and parents of my friends were employed by the mills. What I remember the most were the strikes and the workers being laid off. The end days of the mills were very hard on entire communities.

[Tom Bantle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complete history of Homestead, from its founding as a steel mill and a town for its workers, through the Homestead strike, ruthlessly put down by the Pennsylvania militia, through its decline because of U.S. Steel's complacency and failure to keep investing in new technology.

It truly is a tragedy emblematic, not just of Homestead, but of the decline in the heartland's industrial core. And of American entrepreneurs' greed and lack of empathy.

Mostly its an elegy to the American worker. The historical parts of the narration are first rate, but the end gets a little maudlin.

[Skylar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A narrative history of a steel town outside pittsburgh, home to what was once the largest steel mill in the world. It begins at the founding of the town, and chronicles the rise of Andrew Carnegie, US Steel, and the various clashes of labor and capitol that came with it.

It recounts the boom times, the bad times, the rise and fall of the town. The book illustrates how Capitalism can raise a place to fantastic heights and abandon it just as quickly once it has extracted all it can. I read this book very much on a whim, I picked it up at a little free library, and enjoyed it quite a bit.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful history of the rise and fall of not only Homestead, but the entire steel industry. The author does so with compassion for the effects of what happens to entire town when the industry that saw to its success collapses.

[Patrick Koroly · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a book about Homestead, it spends a disappointing amount of time focused on New York board meetings and faraway conferences. A lot of the book does a great job of showing the hearts and souls of Homesteaders, but I wish it was more of a story about the town’s people than the town’s investors.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the first two chapters and Part IV to be overly sentimental, but eminently readable. Parts 2 & 3, outlining the heyday of U.S. Steel and its squashing of various attempts to organize labor until the NLRA made it inevitable was a fascinating history of the labor movement viewed through the lens of a single industry.

He makes no secret of his siding with labor, perhaps to a degree that goes beyond recognizing his own biases, but it's a journalist's book, so I get how not burning your sources is important. His sources were mostly former union laborers and townspeople rather than steel executives.

The sentimentality sells the point, on which he and I are agreed: the Steel industry created a town to work its mill and used the town and its people like non-renewable resources, leaving proverbial scorched earth in its wake about 100 years later.

I borrowed it from the library and purchased a used copy while I was reading it, so I liked it enough for that.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book about the rise and decline of the American steel industry as seen through the lens of one town, Homestead, PA. Serrin really gets the personal histories intertwined with the corporate history, and shows that the mill was much more than just a source of employment for the town, becoming an important source of self-esteem not just for the town, but for the employees and the citizens who didn't even work in the mills.

[Mike Nettleton · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exhaustive if uninspired history of Homestead, PA with an obvious focus on the steel industry. I tried to finish this book as I try to finish every book I start, but honestly it bogged down with thoroughly uninteresting minutiae — the people of Homestead enjoyed celebrating holidays! — and I finally gave up. This book is worth reading if you cherry pick chapters to suit your interest. Cover to cover, it's just not that compelling.

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Feh. Like so many histories of the deindustrialization of the Mon Valley, this book gets extremely bogged down in personality profiles of the Union and USS leadership and lacks an attempt at larger understanding of the causes, global economic context, or any real descriptions of grassroots responses to the implosion of these towns in the 80's.

[Andrew Peerless · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty engaging read, but could have dealt with a bit of a shallower dive into the intricate histories of the corporation and - especially - the unions. i understand that these materially impacted homestead and its citizens, but i think that impact could've been adequately explained with a brief history lesson instead of a blow-by-blow history of every union president, character, etc.

[Abbey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very engaging and interesting. I'm not big on non-fiction, but it held my attention, and I had trouble putting it down!

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very good.