The national revolt began at the Pressed Steel (railroad) Car Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel in McKees Rocks, outside of Pittsburgh, where 5,000 workers from sixteen different national groups endured working conditions that would have appalled Czarist officials. According to the former coroner of Pittsburgh, “the Pressed Steel Car Company killed an average of one man a day at its works because of the speed-up system and the failure to protect machinery.” When the workers walked out in July 1909, the company’s president declared: “They’re dead to us. There are more than enough idle men in Pittsburgh to fill every vacancy.” The company immediately brought in armed strikebreakers, mounted state police, and the militia, panicking the small group of skilled American unionists involved in the strike. But, as Philip Foner explains in his history of the IWW, “a group of the foreign-born strikers … had experience in revolutionary and labor struggles in Europe. They realized early in the strike that only a vigorous, militant strategy would achieve victory.” They elected an “Unknown Committee” that synthesized the combined experience of the European veterans and kept the strike going despite mass arrests, a “Bloody Sunday” massacre, and evictions of strikers’ families. The company, which had dismissed the strikers as little more than ignorant “Hunkie” peasants, was actually fighting a sophisticated leadership of former Hungarian socialists, Italian anarchists, Swiss social democrats, blacklisted German metalworkers, and Russian revolutionaries. The Unknowns eventually affiliated the struggle with the IWW, which mounted a brilliant national solidarity campaign on the workers’ behalf, and in September the company capitulated.1