A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead.

A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead. By Judith Modell (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. xxiv plus 341pp.).

Everytime I see another project that focuses on Homestead, the Monongahela River town which once was the linchpin of Andrew Carnegie's empire of iron and steel, I'm reminded of a Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson. Glancing out his window, a native notices outsiders approaching and shouts "Anthropologists! Anthropologists!" while two of his tribesmen hurriedly hide their television, VCR, and telephone. Homestead has been so scrutinized by scholars, filmmakers, journalists, and activists that its residents have developed an extraordinary level of self-consciousness about themselves and their town. They seem to anticipate the soundbytes or anecdotes their interrogators seek. Their relative sophistication as the subjects of scrutiny poses a number of problems for an outsider trying to understand the trauma caused by the steel industry's collapse. Not the least of these obstacles is the tendency to romanticize Homestead's past now that the mill which dominated its landscape and their lives has disappeared.

Armed with a tape recorder, camera, an understanding of Homestead's recorded past, and a commitment to listen, Judith Modell and Charlee Brodsky spent the better part of a decade, beginning in 1986, attempting to understand the complex ways in which steelworkers, their families, and townspeople responded to the crisis wrought by deindustrialization. By asking people to pull out their family snapshots and talk about their lives, by walking around the town's different neighborhoods, and by photographing their subjects, Modell and Brodsky elicited a complex, sometimes jarring, and above all brutally honest set of responses.

These interviews and photos, as well as Modell's probing discussion of them, form A Town Without Steel: Envisioning Homestead. Whatever self-consciousness, reticence, or inclination to dissemble people in Homestead might have initially displayed, Judith Modell and her collaborator, photographer Charlee Brodsky, ultimately overcame these barriers. They did so by their straightforwardness, persistence, and willingness to listen as people poured out their anger, despair, hopes, joys, and perceptions. Rather than hide their VCRs and televisions upon spotting these anthropologists, Homesteaders welcomed them into their homes. In the process, they revealed more about themselves than they probably realized or intended to upon their first encounters.

Modell and Brodsky used Margaret Byington's Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974) and the wonderful photographs by Lewis Hine which documented her findings for the Pittsburgh Survey in 1908 and 1909 as a point of comparison. These two collaborative projects are separated by over 80 years, during which the steel industry which defined Homestead reached its peak and then collapsed. While Modell and Brodsky worked on their project, the mill came down, replaced by a wide open space filled with weeds and debris. Both pairs of investigators sought to understand not only the men who made steel, but the community it created and especially the women who were invariably missing from portraits of work in the mill. Both respected the dignity of these men and women while appreciating their often desperate vulnerability to industrial forces beyond their control.

Modell and Brodsky used photographs, those belonging to Homesteaders and the ones Brodsky took, to help people move beyond the familiar saga of steel and the work of men, to a larger, more variegated set of stories in which women and the hearth come into focus. By asking people to talk about their reaction to the mill's closing, they sought to explore how people felt and thought about themselves and "the core aspects" of their town's and their own identity. People responded, exposing their own fears in conversations that must have been cathartic. Given the chance to talk and reflect about themselves and their community, they presented a set of often conflicting personal, neighborhood, and workplace histories.

Modell lets them explain these inter-related histories in their own words. But she doesn't accept them at face value. She challenges and questions their remembrances, confronting the idealized Homestead constructed out of memories, wistfulness, and anxiety as the years recede with the messier and more contradictory reality of the present. As Modell points out, the often bleak, utterly intolerable elements of life and work in the steel mills best captured in Thomas Bell's 1941 novel, Out of this Furnace, is not the Homestead now remembered. With the mills gone, Homesteaders "tended to emphasize the glories of work now vanished(p. 95)." In looking back at their town and themselves after steel's collapse, Homesteaders reconstructed their sense of the past to help them understand, justify, and rationalize the present and the future. "Thus," Modell points out, "strikes were remembered as signs of solidarity, extra turns a proof of stamina, and black smoke an indication of prosperity(p. 57)."

Modell reminds us how much a vision of the past is influenced and informed by the moment in which it is being considered. Remembrances of Homestead's past are based on both history and myth. The mythic past includes the somewhat idyllic image of Homestead "below the tracks." Below the tracks meant a particular ward close to the mill where steelworkers and their families lived in what is remembered as a unified, cohesive neighborhood characterized by racial and ethnic harmony and worker solidarity. But as Modell reveals, it was never quite that. As she probes for a fuller picture of the past and the present and dissects the stories she hears, Modell shows that the remembered past was never entirely free of conflict and discord over race, nationality, and religion. Nor, in one of the more compelling parts of this book, is the present free of a deepening racial fault line. Modell plumbs the significance of the arrival of a new group of residents, often African Americans without roots in the community, who appea red in the 1980s and 90s. Why, she asks, did so many people connect these 'drifters' with the deterioration of the town, linking African Americans with decline? Nor does she flinch from acknowledging the increasing discouragement that came in the wake of the shutdowns.

Hine's haunting photos of the past, Brodsky's stark portraits of the present, and Homesteaders' snaphots provide a visual subtext to A Town Without Steel. They helped unlock memories and broke down barriers between the authors and their subjects. The resulting collaboration captures the often contradictory and competing emotions of these people: harmony vs. conflict, resignation vs. resilience, romanticizing the past vs. realistically appraising the present and future.

Modell excels at revealing women's world, much as Margaret Byington did earlier this century. She presents their experience in the context of the mill's rhythms, but not simply as a byproduct of steel, for as she argues, women's experiences were "equally central to the history of Homestead" and are now, perhaps, the key to its future. As the drama of steel became more of a legend than a reality, Modell writes, "Now men's work was in disarray compared to women's activities; now as often as nor women upheld a household(p. 104)." Steel once provided a means by which several generations of men and women defined masculinity as well as femininity. A steelworker, Homesteaders attested, could take it. Modell explores what happens when that proving ground for masculinity ceases to exist and how the roles, status, and identity of women change as they become even more of a factor in holding households together.

Steel centered Homestead for over a century, defining its political economy and shaping the townspeople's lives. A Town Without Steel is about what happens after that center of gravity has imploded. It's an intimate and revealing portrait of the myriad ways in which people coped or failed to cope with working in steel after it collapsed. As someone who has lived most of my life in Pittsburgh and known scores of people from Homestead, I came away with a much better understanding of them as people. Reading A Town Without Steel was like being in their living rooms or kitchens, listening to them talk. The book, like people, tends to repeat itself and tells you more than you need or want to know at times. But that's a small price to pay for the insight provided. This work displays a level of self-consciousness on the part of the authors and the subjects rarely acknowledged by scholars. As a result, it's as honest a description of what people felt as they underwent the wrenching impact of losing their livelihood a s I've read. Complex, nuanced, yet analytical and grounded in solid historical account, A Town Without Steel is a model worth considering for anyone seeking to understand how people convey their sense of the past.