Pittsburgh has always been unique among American towns. Known as the dingy capital of a "black country," during all but the latest period of its growth it has attracted few visitors save those whose business motive brought them. The nucleus of its population is different from that of any other of our large centers. Its situation at the gateway of the Middle West was sure to bring it into significance as the center of the country's population and activity shifted, but the Allegheny mountains were for a long time a barrier against the easy movement of population in this direction. It is the varied mineral resources of western Pennsylvania, and the pertinacity of the chief element among its inhabitants in developing them, which has created a new metropolitan district, having virtually a population of a million, to be added to the seven or eight urban centers which now dominate different sections of the United States.

Beginning as a little hamlet about the fortifications used first by the French, then by the English, at the junction where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers form the Ohio, the settlement developed from a trading post to a market town. It would have been limited to the career of such a place much longer if, in spite of the excellent soil of the surrounding region, the farmers had not found it difficult to compete in the matter of the staple crops with the slave-tilled plantations of the South. It was as a sort of forced alternative that small iron-working plants began to spring up along the rivers. The ore was brought down from the Alleghenies. Bituminous coal,—the distinguishing asset of the coming industrial center,—had already been discovered by the French in the river valleys.

The "town beyond the mountains" again found itself embarrassed in marketing its commodities,—not by competition this time, so far as America was concerned, but by the heights over which its ponderous new output must be carried. This obstacle was overcome by a system of canals with inclined cable portage lines up the mountain slopes. Meanwhile the great trade with the West for the supply of its incipient civilization was being established through the river traffic as well as by newly dug canals.

Some of the first citizens of the town after the revolutionary days were naturally men who had been prominently engaged in the war. Two of them were Irishmen who had leaped to the opportunity to fight England. At the close of hostilities they had foresight to discern that large developments were to come at the juncture of the rivers. The descendants of these men,—some of whom by a curious irony are English and have never seen this country,—are at the present moment the greatest holders of Pittsburgh real estate. The great bulk of the early immigrants into the town were Scotch-Irish, who began to come in large numbers early in the nineteenth century, and almost two generations before the inrush of the southern Irish. Until recent great developments, when the skyscrapers began to appear, the older part of the city in its aspect was distinctly suggestive of British towns of the same size and character. Two of its local sections were very naturally called Birmingham and Manchester, names which have almost passed out of use among the American born generations. The manners and customs of the people showed about equally the traces of pioneer days in the Ohio valley and the traditions of the old country. Unlike the large cities that have grown up along the Great Lakes, Pittsburgh owes nothing to successive waves of migration from New England. It is only in very recent years, with the varied developments of technical and educational interests, that there have been enough New Englanders living in the city to develop any of the organized front which they maintain in all other northern cities. It is natural therefore that, though Pittsburgh was strongly loyal for the union during the Civil War, the spirit of the city should in many respects suggest the South rather than the North.

Around the nucleus of Scotch-Irish, gathered, as time went on, large numbers of southern Irish, Scotch, Welsh, Germans and German Jews. But these different types are still to a noticeable degree always considered as being marked off by themselves as against the dominant Scotch-Irish. It is only as individuals from among them gain a position of influence by special achievement that they are considered a part of the bone and sinew of the city. The Scotch-Irish with their contrasted traits of sturdiness and ardor, have two great separate interests in life,—industry and religion. The other nationalities have either had the same traits in good measure, or by process of selection individuals have caught the spirit and have come to the front while the rest have fallen to the rear. Yet those who fell back have in most cases found a reasonable opportunity in the great material progress of the town.

Pittsburgh is all the more characteristically American for having been built up from first to last by immigrant stock, not merely by unsettled natives. It remains to this day a sort of natural selection of enterprising spirits from out of every European nation and tribe, Americanized not by any tradition or other educational process than that of having the typical American experiences in what still remains the heart of the country.

Pittsburgh has never been a place to emigrate from. It has held its own, and constantly invites each nationality to bring more of its kind. The only deserters were those who found it in them to care for a reasonable measure of cultivated life, difficult to secure in a town where there was not a library worthy of the name until 1895 and where a whole winter would sometimes pass without a single lecture on a significant theme intelligently treated. It was natural that in the formative period there were some who sought more congenial associations in the seacoast cities.

In religion until comparatively recent days it could be said that there was not a more Calvinistic atmosphere about Edinburgh, Glasgow or Belfast. The early Pittsburghers had almost as strong a tradition of what it means to fight for their faith as the Puritans themselves, and this sense has not had time yet altogether to fade. The orthodox spirit of the town has all along palpably affected the religion of the other racial types. So it is hardly surprising to find that certain regulations of the Catholic Church seem to be more insistently promulgated and more rigorously observed in Pittsburgh than in other places.

There is not a city in the country, and probably not in the world, where strict Sabbath and liquor legislation is more strenuously put into effect. Unusually genial people to those who do well, they are summary and even relentless with those who would lower the moral decorum of the city. But as is very likely to happen where there is a rigid ethical creed, there is here a very anomalous double standard. The amount of Sunday work in the steel mills is appalling. There is a certain sanctity in the operations of business which enables it in specific ways to nullify the precepts of religion, as when the over-strain of seven days' work a week is measured in the gradual destruction of the religious sense in great sections of the population. Local option sentiment is easily bewildered by political cross-currents. Though the Brooks law maintains a severe standard as to the conduct of the saloon business, applied by the county judges to whom a complaint is prima facie adverse evidence; yet Pennsylvania remains, in the midst of an unexampled national temperance movement, among the small and ignoble company of states marked black on the reformers' map.

Few cities have had a greater degree of political machine control, and the prime sources of this corruption have been nowhere else than among the Scotch-Irish. Ever since the days of Simon Cameron a clan-like political organization has dominated the state of Pennsylvania; and the city of Pittsburgh has been only a less important headquarters for its operations than Philadelphia. The condition of politics in Pennsylvania has led many to think that the people of the state were characterized by a generally lax moral sense. On the contrary, and in Pittsburgh particularly, this situation is because of a too intense and therefore too restricted ethical motive. The passage and enforcement of certain types of legislation having an immediate and obvious ethical bearing satisfies this restricted ethical demand, and sidetracks tendencies which might check the indirect causes of great underlying demoralization. A long list of charities each year receives substantial appropriations from the Legislature. The 20,000 earnest and influential people in Pennsylvania who are members of managing boards of philanthropic institutions receiving state subsidies, are by the same token so much less inclined and less able to be alert and watchful against such matters as the theft of millions from the state treasury and from banks which carry state accounts.

The difficulty with Pennsylvania, and emphatically with Pittsburgh, is not degeneracy; it is simply public moral adolescence, and the confusion that inevitably accompanies it. The materialism of Pittsburgh is that of the overwrought, not of the over-indulgent. No one can study the life of the city without feeling a mighty under-current of moral capacity not yet in any sufficient degree brought to the surface. Its religion cultivates definite restraints and reassurances, rather than aspiration and moral enterprise. This is, however, always the case when a community's moral powers are absorbed in the subduing of nature and the achieving of a great material destiny. The spirit of adventure in Pittsburgh has been thus far economic. The moral movement of this people in any case is slow: but it is unyielding always; and once fully aroused knows how to be irresistible.

The situation can hardly seem abnormal when one realizes the unsurpassed material resources of the Pittsburgh district and the pressure which has been laid upon a single community by the whole world for the products out of which the foundations of world enlightenment are laid. It is of particular importance in the case of Pittsburgh, that the social student should take the full measure of the function of the city as the almost limitless and tireless creator of the solid means of civilized existence, for this and other nations. The simple fact that it is the first city in the country in the tonnage of its product, and the second city of the country in banking capital, largely on account of its great wage payments, will suggest both the service which it renders and the power which it has achieved. It is significant that in this district the two greatest individual fortunes in history have been amassed and the two most gigantic concentrations of economic power built up.

Without in the least abating the test of moral and legal standards upon the policy of industrial leadership in the great activities of western Pennsylvania, it can hardly be doubted that later generations will include the leaders in such enterprise among the master builders of modern civilization. The place of Pittsburgh in the American system of life is that of the city which in an altogether unparalleled way is made up of producers, of those whose purposes are focused in bringing to pass the creation of durable and indispensable utilities. Contrasted with Pittsburgh, every other city in the country is rather a market-place, made more refined but in some sense less noble by the dominance of traders and consumers.

It is one of the curious anomalies of American legislation that it should have so zealously guarded against foreign competition in price standards, while withholding all protection against competitors bringing with them a low wage standard. Pittsburgh, in its larger estate, may be said to be a monument to this anomaly. Severe restrictive protection against foreign steel, and unlimited immigration, have enabled Pittsburgh, well-enough otherwise provided, to throw the reins upon the neck of her prosperity. And it must be borne in mind that the protective system, for years tacitly acknowledged by Pittsburgh manufacturers to be unnecessary, is yet clung to as an exclusive and powerful tribal fetich, from whose point of view every question as to the welfare of the nation must first be considered. The fresh constructive moral aspects of politics and patriotism impress Pittsburgh probably less easily than any other community in the country.

So great and continuous has been the tide of immigration, that the insistence of the new immigrants for employment on any terms has made it comparatively easy for industrial captains to control industrial administration, to the exclusion of all substantial efforts on the part of the workmen to organize in their own behalf. Beginning with the British operatives and coming down through the successive types to the present southeast Europeans, each type up to the present has gradually raised its demands, made some headway, organized to reach still higher ground, lost by attack from both front and rear, and disappeared up and down the social scale in the general community. This very costly process has been thought necessary to industrial prosperity. There is, of course, no doubt that the holding down of the wage standard, like the artificial maintenance of the price standard, has conduced largely to the making of some of the great personal fortunes; but it is certain that the future historian will find this checking of the normal and typically American aspirations of successive waves of newcomers, to have been distinctly detrimental to the economic, quite as well as to the social and political well-being of the Pittsburgh community. This unthrift in the matter of the prime essential productive force and economic value is again partly accounted for by the very pressure of opportunity afforded by unlimited resources and the insatiable demand of the world market. There has not even been sufficient time for consideration of many economies in process and administration whose value to manufactures would be unquestioned.

It is to the point here to remember that the two great fortunes just mentioned began to be great as individual fortunes through special privileges gained in railroad rates. The topographical convergence of the Great Lake region on the one side and the Ohio river valley on the other to a territory less than a hundred miles wide, brought all the chief means of transportation between the West and the Atlantic seaboard through this particular territory. These exceptional facilities for transportation gave a culminating stimulus to industrial progress.

The intense localization of resources and transportation facilities led almost inevitably to the phenomenal concentration of industrial capital, followed by highly centralized industrial administration. This process has in a sense been its own undoing, so far as Pittsburgh is concerned, because the financial and even the administrative center of the great combinations have inevitably gravitated to New York, and the old type of self-reliant leader of industry is fast disappearing. Yet the lesson of the large spirit of associated production is constantly being inwrought into the consciousness of the community. A later article in this series will show that the statesmanlike initiative, which until recent days had been inevitably swung into the strategy of business, is beginning to express itself in many promising forms of public spirited activity.

Physical environment, no less than racial stock and economic factors, condition the development of public sentiment in a community. The growth of Pittsburgh as a center of population under the pressure of business opportunity would have been very greatly hampered if electric transit had not prepared the way. The ground plan runs up and down almost impossible foldings of hill and valley. The electric cars make possible the utilizing of all the slopes and hilltops for homes. This has weakened the inevitable centripetal force of urban growth, and led to the building up of suburbs very accessible to the central business section, and comparing for attractiveness and comfort with those of any other city in the country. Such a transfer of well-to-do population has made possible other important shiftings both of poorer population and of business, by which the business center has gained in area and in the character and adaptability of its structures.

Pittsburgh has grown into an industrial metropolis with outlying manufacturing towns reaching along the rivers, and following the course of all the railroads for a distance of thirty or forty miles. The time is soon coming when all the large industries will be eliminated from the city, and Pittsburgh proper will become simply the commercial and cultural headquarters of its district.

Meanwhile all these methods of expansion and relief have not been sufficient to give adequate room in the downtown section either for industry, trade or housing. This area, which is closely hemmed in by the rivers and the hills, now includes the great central commercial activities, the railroad terminals, several large industrial plants and numerous smaller ones, together with the homes of the unskilled population which finds employment within it.

The congestion within these tight limits brings out, in a peculiarly acute way, the breakdown of many branches of the social administration of the city, from the point of view of the welfare of its population as a whole. Here not only the unfitness of hundreds of houses under existing conditions for human habitation, but the actual and serious shortage of roofs under which to shelter the lower grades of the industrial population, is most strikingly seen. Here typhoid fever, for which Pittsburgh has these many years held a tragic pre-eminence, is at its highest rate. Here the actual congestion of machinery within industrial plants which cannot get land to expand upon, is particularly conducive to the diseases, and to accidents which are associated with the different branches of industry.

In this situation appears another of the strange contrasts of Pittsburgh life. The problem of the downtown district is further complicated by the fact that great sections of it are held under a landlord system like that of the old world. Thirty-three million dollars' worth of real estate located almost wholly in the downtown district is held by five estates, some of the holders living abroad permanently, others traveling much of the time. Commercial enterprise is handicapped by the difficulty of securing an independent title to real estate. Much of the most objectionable tenement house property is held by two of these estates. Absentee landlordism thus oddly parallels absentee capitalism. To the fact that the industrial authorities are remote and, by controlling many plants, can take the fiscal rather than the close range administrative view of industry, must be largely traced that stern reprobation of any equity on the part of the workman in his work, which has on occasion made, and will again make Pittsburgh the country's chief point of social unrest and danger.

The anti-trade-union policy tends strongly to fix and standardize the immigrant rate of wages, and has given strong cumulative force to the personal profit-reapings of the past two decades. Recognizing clearly the serious limitations of trade unionism as part of the organization of a tumultuous industry like that of Pittsburgh, it must still be said that there is substantial evidence to believe that the community cheats itself when it keeps up a glutted labor market and a lower than standard wage. However this may be, the Pittsburgh employers' point of view, more than that of any other city of the country, is like that of England in the early days of the factory system,—holding employes guilty of a sort of impiety, and acting with sudden and sure execution, if they undertake to enforce their claims in such way as to embarrass the momentum of great business administration. A sound standard of living for the workman and his right by organized competition to win it, Pittsburgh must eventually recognize as fundamental to the country's economic and political welfare. Should she persist in excluding trade unionism, European experience shows that her hordes of immigrants will quickly learn to carry their alien types of unrest to the ballot box.

The backwardness of Pittsburgh in the development of culture and public spirit, must be traced in part to the negative attitude of a serious minded people toward the amenities of life, and their distrust of the process of government. There has been no sufficient tradition in the city of more balanced and varied human interests. The city's population, instead of finding an increasing social unity, has been increasingly sectionalized by the overwhelming influx of every type of immigrant. There has not been leisure for the consideration and discussion of public questions. The very ground plan of the city, which scatters all of its responsible citizens through the suburbs at night, tends to deprive the city of their disinterested co-operation out of office hours toward raising its tone and standards. But other American cities have shown how, when many of their people began to be released from the treadmill of the purely industrial stage of their growth, it is possible to take advantage of the experience of older communities and move by long strides toward a humanized type of urban life.

From the foremost absentee capitalist and the foremost absentee landlord have come as gifts the two epoch-making improvements toward the finer public life of the city. Schenley Park and the Carnegie institutions located at its entrance form a civic center whose possibilities of civic influence are very great. It may be noted that the coming in of these improvements was coincident with the work of a city engineer who, indifferent to the political principles under which the city was administered, and acting as a kind of despot within his domain, carried through many great improvements in the layout of the new districts of the city, and with the first move in the direction of a great hospital, which is one day to be built with money left for the purpose by the man who for many years was the political master of the city.

The effect upon the city of benefits wrought out in this undemocratic fashion will of course be subject to heavy abatements; but it would be a strange doctrinaire who could not see that these specific steps represent most substantial net gains in the life of the community. There is indeed a distinct undertone of feeling that such benefactions represent simply a return to the city of what the city itself has produced. One can find comparatively few indications that the park, the library and the rest have placed the city under the depressing bonds of patronage. The existence and service of these institutions, in any case, give a new and strong focus to the rising city sense, and the evidence goes to show that, rather than weakening the spirit of collective initiative on the part of the citizens themselves, they have conduced to give shape and force to it.

There are several instructive ways in which this growth of civic consciousness is expressing itself. The movement for a greater Pittsburgh now consummated in the union of Pittsburgh and Allegheny with a few adjacent towns, arises no doubt in the general effort toward power and prestige; but the step toward inclusiveness is entirely normal, and has gathered up into a public movement aggressive impulses which had never before run in that channel. Happily the expansion was preceded by the election for the first time in a generation of a reform mayor. The movement came directly as a result of the impudent interference of the state machine in unseating a mayor who had been elected by an opposing local faction. This action, carried out under the forms of legislation, brought Pittsburgh people into a new feeling of municipal self-respect, and led to their electing on a democratic ticket George W. Guthrie, who is in every respect one of Pittsburgh's first citizens and has for many years been earnestly interested in the cause of municipal reform.

The date 1898 may be taken as marking a kaleidoscopic shifting in the Pittsburgh ensemble. Then the city emerged into the day of large things,—into the great concentration of capital, and the incidental liquidation which gave many families overpowering fortunes of cash in hand; the assembling of vast heterogeneous multitudes of laborers to keep up with the demands of a period of unparalleled prosperity; the ampler civic sense signalized by the Carnegie institutions with their unusual cultural opportunities, and embodied after a time in solid municipal reform and progress, in a truly enlightened Chamber of Commerce, and in excellent forms of social service. On the one hand, irresponsible individuals have gone forth with boundless power to represent the city to the world at her worst. On the other, Pittsburgh is gradually and quietly taking to herself the world's lessons in the making of the modern city and in the building up of citizenship. The former phenomenon, in which to many this city is allegorized, is but the froth and the scum; the latter has the beginnings of a tidal energy behind it.