For more on my grandfather’s professional soccer career, war experience, and political engagement prior to his emigration to the United States, please visit this extraordinary article published by The Thistle Archive, an organization of Glasgow-area researchers, writers, commentators, and fans of Partick Thistle F.C. committed to preserving the club’s history and legacy. My sister and I are deeply indebted to the incredible wealth of historical information The Thistle Archive has provided our family.
Today, on this Labor Day, I’d like to reflect on the personal meaning labor has for my family.
There was a time when 40-hour work weeks, eight-hour days, and a minimum wage weren’t the norm in the United States. Unions and organized labor made that a reality. There was a time when health insurance and retirement plans weren’t reasonable expectations of a full-time job, but unions and organized labor helped make that a reality too, along with child labor laws, collective bargaining, maternity leave, overtime, sick leave, workplace safety oversight, even lunch breaks.
My grandfather, Bert Hough, was one of those labor leaders of an earlier era who worked to first organize labor at his workplace into a force to stand as equals with management. The era was the 1920s, and the location was the Crucible Steel Works along the Ohio River in Midland, Pennsylvania, about 35 miles northwest of Pittsburgh near the border with Ohio — steel country.
Born in Glasgow in 1892, my grandfather survived the Gallipoli and Western Front campaigns of the First World War and was wounded in both theaters, bayoneted by a Turkish soldier in the Dardanelles in 1915 and left for dead for several days in No Man’s Land after being shot by a surrendering German officer in 1917. Already a hardscrabble man, Bert recovered from his wounds, and his war experience only added to his working class fearlessness. My grandfather had long been afraid of no one. By 1918, he had the scars of battle to show for it.
After the war Bert returned home and, picking up where he left off athletically, played professional soccer for a pair of Glasgow clubs for several years, including as a “red jag” with the legendary Partick Thistle in Maryhill. Bert also attended the Scottish Central Labour College in Glasgow, which had been founded by “radical” Scottish socialist John Maclean. At one point, Maclean had been charged with treason for his opposition to British involvement in World War One and imprisoned, but was released following the signing of the armistice at war’s end in 1918.
Bert made several speaking appearances at the short-lived Scottish Workers’ Republican Party in 1923, occasionally sharing the stage with his mentor Maclean, and became part of the “Red Clydeside” socialist movement, named for the River Clyde that flows through the industrial and shipbuilding heart of Glasgow.
In the early 1920s the British government was growing increasingly concerned about the rise of socialism, and communism, throughout Europe just as the first Red Scare was also underway in the United States, and the Red Clydesides were one of several organizations kept under surveillance for their political activity. But when the Red Clydesides made Scottish nationalism a part of their platform, that was too much for London — and the tanks rolled into Glasgow.
At this point, Bert was advised by several of his associates to take leave of his native Scotland to avoid trouble, and in October 1923 became something of a forced immigrant as he departed Liverpool for Montreal. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Bert made use of his Glasgow contacts and soccer skills, and was recruited by several immigrant-heavy mill towns to play for their respective teams. He ultimately landed in Midland, Pennsylvania, with a job at Crucible Steel and a spot on the mill’s soccer roster.
Already a dangerous industry, there were few, if any, protections in the mid-1920s for steelworkers if someone was injured or killed on the job. While injuries and deaths were not unusual, employee recourse was non-existent. Like all new mill employees, Bert began as a scarfer retouching raw steel to remove imperfections. Slowly but surely, he rose through the ranks of leadership, and by the time of the Stock Market Crash in 1929 he was actively working to organize workers at Crucible’s Midland works. This did not make him a favorite of management.
Unlike organizing in a major city, Bert’s activism presented problems living in a small “company town” like Midland, where everyone knew each other’s business, and city services and even the police were recruited and paid for by Crucible. Intimidation, violence, and bomb threats were a part of the blowback to the organizing process that demanded courage. But with support from mill colleagues and fellow organizers, Bert and his team prevailed, and in 1936 he founded United Steelworkers Local 1212 as the local’s first president. By the time the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, Crucible Steel’s Midland Works was the largest producer of tool-grade steels in the United States, and Crucible manufactured more types of steel than any other company during the war era.
Bert was ultimately elected the District 20 director of United Steelworkers in 1942 to coordinate steelworker union activities throughout Western Pennsylvania, a position he held until his death in 1960. Years later, our family came across several surreptitious photos taken of Bert in 1958 made available on the internet, and learned about the surveillance he was subjected to during the McCarthy era and after, presumably by the FBI — a paranoid relic of his activity with the Red Clydesides after the First World War.
The Crucible mill’s stability and versatility was enabled not just by the capability and expertise of its employees, but by organized labor and Local 1212’s apprenticeship program, which continues to this day. That stability was also guaranteed as part of the expectations for workers as spelled out in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which remains the gold standard upon which labor operates in the U.S. The stability the United Steelworkers brought to the region also benefited my father, who went on to become a steelworkers lawyer after law school. He eventually went into private practice in 1968, argued before the United States Supreme Court, and became an expert on collective bargaining, which he later taught at the University of Pittsburgh Law School from 1975 to his retirement in 2003.
The stability the labor movement provided also improved the region’s environment. When tough pollution standards were proposed following the end of World War II in 1945 so the air, water, and natural ecology of Western Pennsylvania would no longer be irreparably harmed by pollution, labor was an engaged and willing partner. Sadly, however, by 1982 the era of Big Steel had come to an end in Western Pennsylvania, and the era of collective bargaining is now threatened by the recent Janus v. AFSCME decision. Nevertheless, thousands of workers around the nation continue to work today under contracts that guarantee benefits and a livable wage, negotiated in good faith by labor and management.
The National Labor Relations Act also remains the law of the land, which is why the “reason for the season” is so critical to remember today, on Labor Day, first celebrated as a federal holiday in 1894.
I hope you and your family enjoy your time together on this day enabled by the labor movement. If you find yourself along the Ohio River in Midland, the Bert Hough building that served for decades as the union hall for USW Local 1212 still stands at 617 Midland Ave., which is now the site of a Pennsylvania Cyber School after Local 1212 moved to new offices in 2010.
Photos by kind courtesy of George W. Harris, Mark Grago, Keith Schneider, and Tony Tepsic.
