The Rise and Fall of the Rust Belt

-America's Great Lakes, with an abundance of coal, iron ore, and lots of water fueled an unparalleled industrial revolution.

It forged some of the world's most innovative industries.

The region grew the greatest labor force of the Western world to run its factories and made the fortunes of a mighty few who took astonishing risks and created America's first corporations.

-They're innovative, so they begin to change the way that business is done and business practices take place.

Sometimes for the better.

Sometimes for the worse.

Some of the regulations on business come because of the things that they do.

They're entrepreneurial in both good and bad ways.

They try new things.

They take risks.

They're interconnected.

So you'll often find that many of these titans -- They know each other.

They're friends.

They're rivals.

Sometimes they're enemies.

But they're all pushing each other to do different things.

And you can't get the development, the Industrial Revolution in the United States that comes from the late 19th century onwards, without these companies, because they're covering everything.

You know, they are the pioneers in their industries, both for good and bad.

-The Rust Belt is concentrated in the formerly dominant industrial states surrounding the country's Great Lakes.

They feed the states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, and Minnesota.

Without them, there would have been no Industrial Revolution here.

In 1865, a brutal Civil War had divided America.

It was a nation torn by economic differences between North and South by the question of slavery and ways of government.

America had not yet become a United States.

Then an Industrial Revolution connected east to west, north to south, first by water and then by railroad.

Suddenly, like a phoenix rising from the flames, America becomes a United States.

-There is this very dramatic rise-and-fall story which mimics, in a lot of ways, a rise-and-fall story that we could tell about many other other things, formal empires.

But there is something of an of an informal empire dynamic about the industrial United States and the ways that it operates in through the late 19th and early 20th century.

-This is Buffalo, situated in Erie County in the western part of New York state.

It's where America first got connected.

In French, "Buffalo" means "beautiful river."

It was once America's eighth-largest city, and her outlook still shimmers with the grandeur of its gilded yesteryear.

The city remains largely unspoiled, boasting an iconic city hall and what was once the world's largest office building.

It developed because it was perfectly placed on the confluence of the Niagara and Buffalo rivers.

15 miles up from here is Lockport, where in 1825 they built the Erie Canal.

The canal had staggering consequences because, for the first time in her history, America had a trade route to call her own.

The Midwest, now known as Rust Belt, was, until the early 19th century, largely unpopulated.

Originally explored by French fur traders, it had little agricultural use, as most production, including the lucrative cash crops of cotton, sugar, and tobacco, were concentrated in the southern states.

-The first areas to be industrialized are New England because that is the area you've got more densely populated with European settlers coming over.

And then it moves out to the Great Lakes because of the expanse of land, the availability of land, the cheapness of land.

And as soon as you start to invest in canals, then the movement of goods drops from �100 a ton to �10 a ton.

And therefore it becomes -- Financially it makes more sense to invest.

Land is cheaper.

It's up for grabs because native peoples have already been displaced.

And the government is interested in encouraging investment.

So the push westward is very much supported from a variety of different angles.

-The canal flowed eastward into the Hudson River basin, which courses down to New York, from where a world of trade opened up across the Atlantic Ocean.

More canals were built linking the Great Lakes to its rivers.

This is how America first got connected.

-And then when you've then got the building of canals further west, going out towards Chicago, then Chicago in particular gets connected not only through the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal to the Atlantic Ocean, but also through, the Mississippi River, the whole way down to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

And essentially then what you've got is ways of moving heavy goods and large amounts in a simple and cheap way across the entire part of the settled part of the United States.

-Buffalo's canal side has since become a recreational promenade, one enjoyed by families over summer weekends, but not so long ago, it was where the grain trade held sway.

The construction of the Erie Canal transformed Buffalo into the leading grain port of the American Midwest.

What remains here are giant storage elevators rising like skyscrapers on the harbor skyline.

Eleven still stand, towering stubbornly in defiance of an economic depression to come.

Soon, Midwestern farms were producing the grain that fed a hungry eastern seaboard.

Before the canal, folk used wagon trains and flatboats.

It took forever and was very expensive.

But on the Erie Canal, freight became cheap, In fact, transporting produce was such a profitable exercise that Buffalo quickly became the world's biggest grain hub.

The Industrial Revolution followed the building of the Erie Canal, and it gave Buffalo the mechanized infrastructure in which it could store and process the grain it was transporting.

Merchants started to make cereals in the new workplace called the factory.

General Mills of Cheerios fame is one example.

The advance to mechanization in Buffalo was born with the grain elevator because, back in the day, lake ships couldn't travel into the canals and canal boats struggled on the open water.

The grain elevator was invented to scoop up, transfer, and store all grain productively and efficiently.

Buffalo guide Brad Hahn heads right to the top of one of these massive structures.

-Oh.

We're almost there.

About another 40 feet or so.

What we're able to see here on the top floor is all the inner workings of the grain elevators.

When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, all of a sudden.

Buffalo started seeing huge amounts of grain coming through the city.

By 1840, it was about 2 million bushels of grain were coming through the city every year.

And originally, all of that grain was being unloaded by Irish immigrants.

They would go into the hold of the ship.

They would scoop up a basket of grain.

They would carry it out on their backs.

And it would take them days or even weeks to unload a ship.

Dart invented a vertical conveyor belt with a series of buckets attached to it that would lower into the hull of the ship.

Sort of be like an elephant's trunk.

It would scoop up the grain in those buckets, toss it out at the top, and be a continuous cycle.

And this could unload the ship in a matter of hours instead of days.

And this enabled Buffalo to take in far greater amounts of grain than it ever had before.

Just as an example of some of the stats here, one million bushels of grain would fit inside of this facility beneath our feet.

One bushel of grain makes 45 boxes of cereal.

So just from this building, which is the smallest one still standing in Buffalo, you could make about 45 million boxes of cereal.

-Even today, depending upon which way the wind is blowing, Buffalo is a town that actually still does smell of cereal.

The labor population in Buffalo were overwhelmingly Irish immigrants fleeing the blighted potato famine on home shores.

They came here to make new friends with the wheat crop and lived in these quaint little houses.

But technological developments were moving at a rapid pace in the Rust Belt, and soon, the canals, which had opened up the Midwest, would be challenged by a new mode of transportation for its grain -- the railroad.

[ Train whistle blows ] -The railways are even more important, arguably, than the canals because the railways are not restricted by the need to have water.

Generally, canals are connecting a lake to a river or connecting two rivers.

Building a canal the distance that you would be building railways would cost far, far, far much more money and therefore wouldn't really be viable.

Whereas railways, compared to canals, relatively quick and relatively cheap to put down.

They can overcome natural hurdles much more easily.

And the building of railways absolutely explodes in that first half of the century, certainly, but kind of in the second half, the 1820s up to the 1850s, there's a massive expansion of the railways, and you can see how important the Midwest is to that.

And Chicago in particular becomes a city where it is connected to everything on the east, and it is also kind of the frontier to the west.

The railways are the death of the cowboys and things like that because you don't need to drive the animals.

You can just put them on railways and you can move them up.

And especially that investment in terms of refrigerated cars, so that you can actually refrigerate the butchered meat and the processed meat out to eastern markets, as well.

So it becomes a national market and isn't just a local market through those technological innovations.

-The railways were one of the industries that ushered in the era of the industrial titan.

They became known as robber barons if you were on the wrong side of the deal.

But these innovators took huge risks and made massive fortunes, as well.

One of America's first CEOs, or titans, was Cornelius Vanderbilt, a bruising ferryboat owner from New York City.

He pretty well much bullied his way to the top of the railroad ladder by stopping his competition from entering the city.

-He actually lived quite a restrained life compared to some of his descendants.

He comes from a fairly modest background.

His father operates a ferryboat in New York Harbor, which, of course, is before trains have really picked up, is one of the main ways in which people and freight are getting from one place to another.

So he learns the skill from his father, from working on his father's ferry boat, moves into building up a business himself by running passenger and freight ferries around New York Harbor and the broader area.

Starts with one, builds up so that he has quite significant control of the way in which products and people are moving around that area.

And New York's such an important city in this period.

That gives him an awful lot of influence over prices and costs and the way people move.

It's probably a natural development, then, that eventually he moves on from steamships and ferry boats to trying to have influence and control over railroads in and around the same area.

-Basically, he shut down the Hudson River Bridge, which he happened to own.

No passageway into New York meant no business.

Cornelius, who was 72 years old at the time, just sat back and watched his rivals drown in falling stock and bought their shares as soon as they hit very low prices.

-He sort of came to be known for... underhand business practices.

Now, whether they really were underhand or whether we simply think of them as being part of the way business was done at the time... Different people think of them in different ways.

But certainly he would take over a railroad, would reduce the prices for a period of time to undercut all of his competitors, wait until they were in financial trouble, and then either take them over and merge them into his at a cheaper price because they weren't so profitable... or he would try and drive them into bankruptcy.

-At the end of this cruel game, Vanderbilt owned all the railroads in America.

South by railroad, you'd reach Pittsburgh via Cleveland.

It's a 215-mile journey into Pennsylvania's burnished coal hills, where an Industrial Revolution also took flight.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the gateway to the west.

It became the USA's smoggy and once almighty Steel City.

Pittsburgh had a thriving timber trade before coal was unearthed in these hills in 1760.

This area was the most commercially viable mineral deposit in all of North America, producing one billion tons of precious black gold that flowed through the veins underneath this earth 435 million years in the making.

It was this coal that propelled the city into steelmaking in the 19th century.

Then, Pittsburgh produced half of the U.S.

's total steel output.

-Coal is one of the key two or three raw ingredients of the industrialization of the United States because the thing that coal does is it's a transportable, high-energy source.

A steam engine is powered by coal.

With coal, you don't have to rely on wind power... or you don't have to rely on water power.

Previously, the manufacturing industries of the world, but particularly the United States, have clustered around riverways.

They've clustered around other spots to make use of the fact that water and wind are the key energy sources.

Coal provides a portable energy source.

And it doesn't just provide a portable energy source.

It provides a hugely powerful energy source.

Within a coal deposit, there's huge amounts of energy that's obviously burned and unleashed, which powers these much more powerful machines for manufacturing.

So coal is really fundamental to this.

And it's not just fundamental to providing the energy that powers engines, but it's fundamental throughout the process.

To make steel, you need coal.

To move coal, you need railroads.

But to make railroads, you need steel.

It's a sort of circular process where almost every industry that we could think of within this Midwest, the region that becomes the Rust Belt, is relying on coal.

And in part, too, that explains some of the emergence and clustering of these industries within this place because within a 500-square-mile region of Pennsylvania are around three quarters of the world's best coal deposits.

Anthracite coal, the most clean-burning, the most high-energy coal, sits within this region.

-Toledo in Ohio is a long way, in every sense, from its namesake, the medieval capital of Spain.

But it was an industrial city in the Rust Belt that flourished after the building of the Erie Canal.

Manufacturing and glassworks prospered in Toledo, and they were fed by raw materials shipped along its Maumee River.

Here you can find the Titanic of all freighters, the Colonel James Schoonmaker.

This ship is more than 600 feet long.

She was known as the Queen of the Water, and her hull is made of Pittsburgh steel, of course.

In its heyday, it used to carry coal mined in Appalachia to Duluth, Minnesota.

Then in Duluth, it would pick up iron ore and take that to Cleveland.

It had a crew of 35.

And just one of these three cargo holds could hold up to 5,000 tons of raw material.

All of that had to be removed manually until, of course, the grain elevator was invented.

A growing steel industry attracted half a million European migrants via Ellis Island, and German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other Eastern Europeans all poured into Pittsburgh's melting pot to provide strong backs to carry a mechanizing industry that was quickly exploding.

They were at the forefront of invention, like this steel barn, or incline, which takes you to the top of Pittsburgh's Mount Washington.

It used to be known as Coal Hill.

A tireless immigrant labor force mined all the coal they found here, collected it, and hauled it up and down the slope in these steel carriages.

Immigrant German farmers, when they arrived here in the early to mid 19th century, brought the idea with them, hence the funicular had arrived in Pittsburgh.

The city soon became very polluted.

This photograph was taken at 3: 00 in the middle of the afternoon.

It looks like midnight, it's so smoggy.

And this one, at 9:00 in the morning.

The streetcar even has its lights on.

People used to bring an extra white shirt to work because the smog was so horrendous.

-This is it.

This is the original hoisting equipment.

It was put together by a guy named Sam Diescher, who was actually born in Budapest, Hungary, but he got his engineering degree at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

There were a lot of Europeans that got involved in building America.

This is where everybody came, you know, to seek their fortune.

Obviously, they had enough funiculars in Europe.

We had none.

So Sam Diescher made a good living over here making cable cars.

Prior to that, a guy named John Roebling brought that wonderful wire-rope cable that we have here that pulls the cars up and down the hill.

Prior to that, they used rope like you would make a tree swing.

And one of the interesting things, Pittsburgh has its own accent.

And I always thought -- You know, they said, "Well, why does everybody -- Why did everybody learn to speak English real quick?"

Well, if you worked in a mill and something heavy was coming your way and was gonna hit you in the head and somebody was yelling in Polish, and the guy that had the crane was speaking German or Italian, they had to be able to have a common language that they would know right -- immediately.

So everybody learned English as fast as they could.

-Pittsburgh is on a confluence of three rivers -- the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the Ohio.

They all converge and eventually lead to the Mississippi River.

Water.

You couldn't have an Industrial Revolution without it.

Its proximity to the Great Lakes helped another city, Chicago, prosper early on as the Industrial Revolution took hold in the Midwest.

So much so, it would soon become one of the biggest cities in America.

-It happens to be where it is, at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

The fact that it's -- Pushing west is important.

And that it has early boosters who commit to it and invest in it and bring business there.

So, steel is brought out there very, very early.

There are mines, coal mines, in the region -- Wisconsin, Illinois, upper part of Michigan on the border with Wisconsin.

And so the proximity of that coal and the fact that it can then easily come down through Lake Michigan means that heavy industry, which is really fuel-intensive, is able to be established in Chicago very early on.

-Chicago was uniquely placed, linking both the east of the country and being gateway to the little explored west.

Its biggest industry was soon meatpacking, its stockyards receiving cattle from the west, butchering them and processing them into canned goods.

-Meatpacking is established in Chicago relatively early on.

It becomes a really big industry in part as a result of the Civil War, because the Union Army puts in orders to have processed meat.

And the reason that Chicago over maybe another city in the Midwest is, again, because of it being on that western edge of the Midwest.

So, actually, Cincinnati had already developed as a meatpacking town for pork and called itself Porkopolis earlier before Chicago takes off.

But Chicago becomes bigger for beef initially... but, actually, ultimately becomes a bigger producer of pork, as well, than Cincinnati.

You get a development of an area called the Union Stockyards on the South Side of Chicago, where the movement of cattle from the Midwest -- And there are still -- there's a lot of farmers locally.

So they can bring their cattle in.

They are held in these stockyards before they are ready to be slaughtered.

Um, the companies that are established there, Swift and Armour being the two largest, invest in vertical integration, so they are able to buy the refrigerated railway cars.

They invest in technologies in the meatpacking factories, using steam to hoist up carcasses, and then an assembly line kind of, um, you know -- trolley taking them along so that they can be butchered in kind of a very, very efficient assembly-line way.

So they are making a lot of money, and the profit margins are -- Once the investment of these technologies has taken off, then the profit margins are increasing.

-The booming meatpacking industry needed labor.

Among the workers were the first wave of Black migrants from the South as slavery came to an end after the Civil War.

-They don't have any money.

They don't have any savings, obviously, to fall back on because they've been enslaved people.

They also -- Many of them are illiterate because it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write in most states.

So they have limited -- You know, many of them were literate.

They had taught themselves secretly or they had masters who allowed them to learn to read or write, but they have very little knowledge about how the rest of the country works and what their options are.

And without a, you know, kind of federally funded program of actually moving people, then it's unrealistic to expect people to have upped and taken up a new opportunity right in the generation that is experiencing freedom.

African-Americans are living in a Jim Crow South.

They're living in a South where there is legal segregation that's been enshrined after a law in the late 19th century, Plessy v. Ferguson.

And so the conditions are limited opportunities.

The South is overwhelmingly still agricultural.

And because there had been no redistribution of land after the Civil War, then, although the freed -- the former enslaved communities became free, they got their freedom, they were very clearly economically disenfranchised still.

Jim Crow legislation then actually politically disenfranchises them, and they are not able to register to vote, et cetera, et cetera.

The economic -- The reliance on agricultural labor.

They're tenant farmers.

They're sharecroppers.

There's very limited opportunities.

-The first immigrants to arrive in Chicago from Europe were the Irish escaping the potato famine... and Germans escaping the political upheavals of the 1848 revolutions.

-It's the second-largest Irish city, as it were, for parts of the 19th century.

By the mid 19th century, we then get large numbers of Germans coming over.

And so by 1850, Germans outnumber the Irish by 2 to 1.

Both of those groups become prominent very quickly.

So we see trade unions being run and managed by Germans, kind of for Germans, particularly, you know, in skilled work.

We see the Irish picking up an important role in politics, the kind of stereotype that I think is played out in various movies with Irish policemen in Chicago.

But, also, a lot of Chicago's mayors are Irish or of Irish heritage.

-Following the Irish and the Germans came the Italians and then Jews escaping the pogroms in Russia.

-Russian Jews have got one of the big push factors.

Like the Irish with the famine, Russian Jews are persecuted within the Russian Empire.

They are very limited.

This had begun, you know, ages before under Catherine the Great.

They are limited in the sorts of employment they can have, the sorts of areas they can live in.

They're restricted to this area called the Pale of Settlement.

And then, beginning in the 1880s and moving into the beginning of the 20th century, there are a series of pogroms of violence specifically against Jewish people in this part of Russia, which obviously encourages migration out.

Because it's escaping persecution and these restrictions, their pattern of migration tends to be whole families.

So Chicago becomes the second-largest city in 1890, when its population reaches just over a million, from having been only 30,000 half a century before.

In Chicago, 78% of the population are immigrants or the children of immigrants, so they might have been born there themselves but their parents were immigrants.

-The five lakes of the Great Lakes make up a giant inland sea, the largest body of fresh water on Earth.

Milwaukee, a name derived from the native Indian word for "pleasant land," has a natural harbor connected by lakes and canals to the east and 10 rail lines to the west.

It's no wonder this metropolis exploded during the Industrial Revolution.

in the 19th century, an oppressive agricultural feudalism in Germany had also forced many poor farmers to the only land that would take them -- America.

They brought many skills with them, but one of the most important was the art of beer making.

The city was awash with taverns.

There was one tavern for every 40 residents, and they were served by some 24 breweries.

Blatz, Miller, Pabst, and Schlitz.

Those were the big names in beer making, and they soon turned Milwaukee into the beer capital of the USA.

-Milwaukee is beer.

Okay?

Beer is the bread of life.

You know that when you live in Wisconsin.

That's the knowledge that we have here.

And that's why -- Some call us thirsty.

We call it healthy.

After Prohibition, Milwaukee was the Paris of the Midwest.

You know what else?

When you work at a brewery, you can drink the beer while you work.

And then when automation came, the union wouldn't let you replace people, so you even had more time to drink.

-As so many folk drank beer, brewery owners made a lot of money.

They erected glorious residences, like this ornate Renaissance Revival mansion which was built by and for Captain Frederick Pabst of the Pabst Brewery Company over two years in 1892.

He was a German migr who left the fatherland with his family to seek fortunes new.

Pabst became one of the world's largest beer companies at the time.

He's a typical story of the European immigrant leaving home shores.

The Industrial Revolution produced many tycoons like Captain Pabst.

In their quest for a thing called class, they furnished their great mansions with the best that the Renaissance could offer.

-Going back in its history, this was one of the most amazing, important residential streets in the state of Wisconsin.

It's interesting to go back in time and kind of think of what this street was at the very beginning, which was kind of a dusty country road leaving downtown Milwaukee.

But then by the 1870s, people started building large mansions.

And, like, every architectural style you can imagine, from Flemish Renaissance Revival to Gothic Revival to Queen Anne, these homes were just loaded with interiors shipped in from New York, stained glass from Cincinnati.

There was just so much money pouring into these Midwestern cities.

Along with the Pabsts, there were the Brumders, who owned the largest German printing house in America -- lived on the street.

Down the street, you would have had Alexander Mitchell, who was a railroad baron.

You had John Plankinton, who was a meatpacking entrepreneur.

And then down this direction, you had Mrs.

Pabst's sister's house, which was 40,000 square feet, the largest home ever to have been built in Milwaukee.

Torn down in 1927, even before the Depression.

-A great titan who changed the fortunes of the Rust Belt and those of America, perhaps more than any other, was the Scotsman Andrew Carnegie.

Of course, his name is forever a part of Pittsburgh's steel history.

He came here to make more steel than anyone else in the world.

When Chicago burned down in 1871, he realized Americans didn't want to build their houses and offices out of wood anymore.

They wanted them made out of glass and steel and to rise hundreds of feet into the air.

So he set out to make sure he produced as much steel as the new America needed.

With that, he changed the landscape of the U.S.

forever.

-The production of innovative technologies, innovative products demonstrates this national economic strength and prowess much more than simply moving money around, being involved in finance, et cetera.

And that's certainly a mindset that someone like Andrew Carnegie, in an earlier period, embraces because, in many ways, Andrew Carnegie gets involved in the steel industry at a moment in time where it seems illogical if the goal is purely to make money.

He's left the railroad industry in part out of dissatisfaction with what's going on.

He's involved in speculative financial endeavors and being involved in incorporation on a more hands-off role.

And he's making a lot of money in doing so.

But, undoubtedly, if we look at what Andrew Carnegie is saying in various columns and places written by other people for him under his name, you can see him articulating this idea that to be a titan of industry or to be an influential figure, it involves producing or making something.

We sometimes refer to this as producerist logic -- would be the technical term here.

The sort of strong moral idea that's developing about the, um -- about morally good types of ways of making money, but also ways of making money and building business success that contribute more to the nation.

-If Andrew Carnegie was going to rebuild America, then he was going to need a lot of steel.

Five miles south of downtown Pittsburgh in Homestead is where he built the world's largest steel mill.

Carnegie was determined to be the most productive, the most efficient, the best steel maker ever.

To stake America's vertical building revolution with his giant plant, he procured a $24-million loan.

Having moved his business to coal-mine and water-friendly Pittsburgh, his new plant in Homestead was capable of producing 22.5 tons of structural steel a day.

In just two years of operation, the Carnegie Steel Company incinerated the competition.

In 1907, he opened the Carrie Furnace.

This gigantian blast furnace melted iron ore for some 80 super-productive years, using a revolutionary technology which could handle the impurities of Mesabi, the superior iron-ore grade of the day.

But labor disputes would soon spread across the Rust Belt, and the Carnegie Steelworks would see some of the most controversial practices.

In 1901, Carnegie had sold his steel empire to the banker J.P.

Morgan for the equivalent of $360 billion.

Now, to his credit, he donated most of his staggering wealth to acts of charity and philanthropy.

He founded the Carnegie Mellon University, the Carnegie Music Hall, the Institute of Technology, and the Carnegie Library and Museum.

However philanthropic, Andrew Carnegie wasn't an angel in his working life.

Like most men who built America, he was ruthless and fiercely competitive.

-A lot of that wealth is being built on the backs of often paying very low wages to workers.

We know that some of these big industries were wary about hiring non-white workers in an era of sort of white supremacy throughout the 19th century, particularly if they've got manufacturing in the South.

Or if they are hiring, for example, Black workers, they're hiring them at very low wages.

Some won't hire Catholics.

There was a big anti-Catholic movement in the United States in this period.

And even those who have got jobs, this is a period before Social Security, before health insurance, before what we would think of as health and safety legislation now.

There's also no job security.

So people who were workers at this point are often living -- Certainly in the 19th century, anyway.

It changes a little bit later.

But you've got people living in slums because they can't afford anything else.

If they get injured or family members are killed, for example, working in big industry, there's no insurance for that.

So that can devastate a family with the loss of an income.

And there's also often no guaranteed work.

So it's sort of you might get some work sometimes if times are good and sometimes not.

So there's an awful lot of uncertainty.

-Carnegie wanted to maximize profits, even at the cost of his workers.

He brought in a tough, unscrupulous business partner, Henry Clay Frick, to lay down the law.

Frick's law laid out a 12-hour, 6-day working week in the fire pit of the Homestead steel mill.

Conditions were insufferable, and it led to fatalities on the furnace floor.

The union of Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers went on strike, but in doing, so they goaded Frick into a drastic reaction.

Historian Ron Baraff explains.

-He's willing to be the bad guy, so he's brought in to really set the course of what's going to happen within the corporation and especially what's going to happen in Homestead, that they're going to break this union.

He has a history of bringing Pinkerton guards in to do the dirty work.

Pinkerton guards were a private army.

By the 1890s, they had a larger standing army than the United States government.

These were guards for hire that oftentimes would do things like go to the coal fields and break strikes.

-Andrew Carnegie retired to his native Scotland.

It was a calculated vacation because it put Frick in charge of the Carnegie Steel Company, a taskmaster who was going to do everything in his power to get his laborers back to work.

To this end, he dispatched an army of Pinkerton detectives along the Allegheny River to the mill's Pump House.

Their mission was to crush the strikers.

The date was July 6, 1892.

-The Pinkerton barges came in, and it was at that point that they were met by the townspeople.

What happens is they're met by thousands of angry strikers and their families who were here to tell them, "Go home."

This is where it all breaks out.

So, the Pinkertons are here, but up along this hillside, you've got townsfolk taking fireworks that were left over from the Fourth of July just a couple days before up on the shore, firing the fireworks down at them.

They're throwing torches onto the top of the barge to try to set it on fire, which, of course, are rolling off and into the river.

None of this is working.

Anything they can do to try to repulse these Pinkertons and get them to surrender.

From this window, John Morris, who's one of the strikers, is looking out, pokes his head up in a lull in the action and gets shot.

Stumbles backwards and falls down into the pit.

Yeah, so he's among the first of the strikers killed.

By the end of the day, there's ten people dead -- seven Pinkertons and three strikers.

It's at that point that the tide of public opinion begins to turn, and it's where that scare tactic that comes in that this could happen to you, this could be your town.

And it shifts everything, and it really becomes the death of labor for 40 years in this industry.

There's no union in the steel industry for the next 40 years.

-The first golden age of the Rust Belt had begun just after the end of the Civil War, and it lasted until the start of World War I. This was when Carnegie was making steel and Chicago building skyscrapers.

This unleashed a second wave of mass migration into the Rust Belt from the South.

It was known as the Great Migration.

-As a result of the First World War, essentially, immigration from Europe ends, and yet there is still a demand for labor, especially as the American economy does really well as a result of the First World War.

It doesn't enter the First World War until very, very late, but it is supplying the European powers with goods, and therefore there's economic boom.

And places like Chicago really benefit from this.

So there's an encouragement -- there's a recruitment of African-Americans to come from the South, to come to northern cities like Chicago and Detroit to take on these jobs.

And racial tensions result as a consequence because they're not readily welcomed, you know, as we wouldn't expect, given the racial tensions of the day.

So Chicago's population of African-Americans increases 150%.

Detroit's increases 600%.

Detroit's a smaller city, so you can have a larger impact there.

And there are some really awful events, such as a big race riot in 1919.

-Chicago's meatpacking plants, with their dangerous work environments, became the epicenter of unionized health and safety protests.

-What you get is not an openness to unionization at all, but instead you get the first health and safety regulations, in fact, because the middle-class consumers of these goods -- Because this processed meat was expensive.

This was what the middle classes were eating, not the working classes.

They were not happy to find out that there was a possibility they were eating rats or they were eating people's arms or whatever had fallen into the sausage-making machines.

When you get the arrival of African-Americans who first come into meatpacking in large numbers, being brought in as strikebreakers, then that adds a racial dimension that is not overcome really successfully until the 1930s.

-When the railroads were connecting America and transporting its valuable fuel, steel, and other manufacturers, another titan in the Rust Belt was busy developing a fuel that would change the world forever.

Daimler had just invented the combustion engine, and the titan based in Cleveland John D. Rockefeller was very busy refining kerosene to fuel it.

Kerosene was the fuel that transformed America when it lit up houses across the country.

In Ohio, Rockefeller exploited the kerosene industry more than anybody when he created one of the first corporations in Standard Oil back in 1870.

-He's one of the first to recognize that kerosene, which is the biggest product from raw oil, is not the only thing that you can make out of oil.

So, a lot of companies at the time that he's working, sort of in the late 19th century, the last two or three decades -- A lot of companies are selling on the kerosene and then dumping about 40% of what they term to be waste products from the oil.

Not good for rivers and things around the areas.

But Rockefeller begins to see that you could do something with the products that are left.

So he starts making things like petroleum jelly and lubricating oil and all the other products that we now know come from refining crude oil.

-Then Rockefeller met Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the two of them struck up a deal to carry Rockefeller's oil on Vanderbilt's trains.

-He's one of the first to start thinking both about horizontal development and vertical development.

So, he's also quite ruthless.

When we think about someone like Vanderbilt being ruthless about his competitors, Rockefeller is sort of the same about his oil competitors.

He's always looking to try and take over smaller oil productions.

He's based initially in Cleveland, Ohio, and there's this event called -- It's often called the Cleveland Massacre, when in the space of about four months his company takes over -- I think something like 22 out of 26 of the local oil refineries in the area.

So he's basically getting almost a monopoly of the oil refining in a particular area.

So he's spreading outwards.

But he also sees the value in what's called vertical integration.

So things like owning your own oil fields so you don't have to rely on other people bringing it in, having interests with... or at least being friendly with the railroad industry so you can negotiate beneficial rates to transport your oil to the refineries.

He hired his own plumbers.

So as things begin to move from transport through railroads to pipelines, he hires his own plumbers, in-house plumbers.

So if there are problems, he can get it fixed without having to hire people.

He hires carpenters to build the barrels that the oil is transported in.

And then he begins to look into outlets to sell it, as well.

So he's controlling every element of his business.

And he's one of -- Maybe not the first, but certainly one of the first to begin to do that.

Standard Oil, at one point around about the 1870s, is manufacturing or refining about 90% of the United States' oil product, which is huge, which gives him money and political influence.

It means he's got money often to finance other companies in other areas.

Like a lot of the titans of this period, he'd got fingers in a lot of pies, even though oil is his main industry.

-Suddenly all of America had the oil it needed to light its homes and its lamps.

The future was looking brighter.

The arrival of oil would soon lead to the birth of the gas station.

This was an exciting time to be living in the Rust Belt.

Thomas Edison and Nicholas Tesla were now creating the electricity to light as well as power the machines of the Industrial Revolution.

-The titans are controversial, but they're controversial and lauded for many of the same reasons.

They made money, which gave them the freedom to innovate, to try new things, to risk the possibility of failure, for example, to try new manufacturing processes or to try and invest in new equipment or new technology or to try new chemical processes to see if things would work.

So the financing and the big money that they're making from some of these rather ruthless business practices also give the give them the option to do things like that.

-This was known as the horseless carriage.

It was, in fact, Henry Ford's Model T. Built in 1908, he made it for the everyman.

It was a four-cylinder car and sold for as little as $850.

Ford also created the production assembly line, and soon after that, car manufacturing became one of the biggest industries in the United States.

Next time, in part two, the age of the motorized vehicle, where mass production would help seal victory for the allies in the Second World War, build the fortunes and skyline of another great city, and make American motorcycles among the coolest things on Earth.

[ Engine revs ]