| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 57

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Mark Reutter, Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (Urbana: University of Illinois 2004)

MARK REUTTER's book explores the history of the American steel industry through the story of a single mill at Sparrows Point, New Jersey. From its beginnings in 1887 to its peak as the world's largest steel works in 1956–57 when it employed 30,000 people, to its near ruin with the bankruptcy of the Bethlehem Steel Company in 2004, molten iron flowed at this vast industrial complex. Making Steel, however, is far more than a study of a single mill in isolation. It provides a narrative history of the steel barons who built, expanded, and let wither the Sparrows Point mill and of the steel workers who toiled on the shop floor. Oral history is the glue that holds this dual narrative together.

The tidewater location of the mill on the Chesapeake Bay was perfectly situated to exploit imported iron ore from Cuba and Pennsylvania coal. Frederick Wood designed the mill and his brother, Rufus, engineered the adjoining company town. The two men sought to "develop a centralized management that would fuse business and social life in a way that was rational, orderly, and free of any dissenting voice." (34) In the early years, employees sweated eleven to fourteen hours a day, alternating weekly between days and nights. When shifts changed on Sun-days, many worked 24 hours straight as back-to-back shifts were the norm.

Needless to say, there was no union. This changed in 1941 when the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the CIO, with the backing of Franklin Roosevelt, forced Bethlehem Steel (which took over the mill in World War I) to agree to a free vote. Interestingly, the issue that swung a majority behind the union was job security in the face of technological change. Bethlehem Steel had unthinkingly shifted work from the old hot mill to the new automated mill (reducing the workforce from 2,200 to 350) without any regard for seniority. Senior men found themselves demoted to general labourer in the flash of a pen. As trade unionist Mike Howard recalled of the supervised election, "you could feel this mass of men going forward and voting their true mind." (297)

Thanks to the state of Maryland, whose motto was "Deeds are manly, words womanly," the town site was a company town in the traditional sense of the word. The company owned the land and buildings and operated a company store. The town's physical layout thus reflected the social hierarchy of the mill itself. The streets were lettered "A" to "K" with company officials and town notables living closest to commercial "A" street. They were separated from skilled white workers by a school and several churches located on "D" street. As this was the Jim Crow South, Black workers and their families lived across a small bridge on "H" through "K" streets or in the shanties that lay beyond the town site. Their homes were designed to be the smallest.

World War I saw Charles Schwab, the high flying head of the Bethlehem Steel Company, purchase the plant. The Sparrows Point mill would be Bethlehem's largest. For much of the century, company managers were the best paid in America. Schwab required that all company executives live in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Reutter draws the reader into this insular world: "the officers lunched daily in the corporate dining room, occupying leather chairs with their names affixed to gold-plated plaques, and on Saturdays they socialized at the Saucon Valley Country Club." (388)

The negative portrayal of Schwab and his associates underpins Mark Reutter's explanation of why the company went into decline. Despite the prosperity of the immediate World War II era, and the continued expansion of the Sparrows Point mill, Bethlehem Steel failed to innovate. Because the company had no research laboratories, Bethlehem lagged behind much of the world in the adoption of new steel-making technologies. Japan, Europe, and even Canada were building basic oxygen furnaces [BOFs] in the 1950s, but Bethlehem was building yet another open hearth, the world's largest, at Sparrows Point. The company seemed oblivious to the fact that open hearths had been rendered obsolete.

The failure to innovate was only part of the problem. Reutter makes a strong case that government protection of the US steel industry allowed it to price itself out of business. Higher steel prices in the 1940s and 1950s opened the door to steel imports on the one hand and the rise of aluminum and plastics in packaging and manufactured products on the other. Bethlehem Steel executives failed to anticipate that many of their customers would stop using steel products altogether.

The steel industry has since undergone 30 years of upheaval. Household names like Republic, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and Bethlehem have vanished. Dozens of steel mills have been closed and hundreds of thousands of steelworkers have lost their jobs. The list of former steel towns that no longer produce steel is a long one. Places like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio, have had to reinvent themselves. Sparrows Point, luckier than most, continues to operate. But its once formidable work force has been whittled down to just 3,000 employees.

Originally published in 1988, Making Steel was the culmination of years of investigative journalism into workplace accidents and pollution at Sparrows Point for the Baltimore Sun. Mark Reutter's hard-hitting articles forced the Maryland government to fine the company. A handful of other American journalists were doing the same elsewhere. Making Steel thus appeared on bookstore shelves the same year as journalist John P. Hoerr produced And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry and a few years prior to William Serrin's Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town. All three books evoked the hardship and hurt prevailing in steeltown USA and sharply criticized corporate and government mismanagement. Reutter is less critical of the United Steelworkers union than the other two. These three books provide a comprehensive record of industrial decline in the American steel industry.

At this juncture, we might ask what is new about the 2004 University of Illinois edition of Making Steel. Readers of the earlier edition will find little new material here. The author has included a new four-page foreword, inserted a short photo essay, and added one thinly researched chapter entitled "The Discarded American Worker" that brings the story up to the present. None of the other 23 chapters were revised or updated. Sadly, the author also failed to cite virtually any of the secondary scholarship published in the intervening seventeen years.

Given these minimal changes, why did the Press print a new edition? Timing seems to have played an important part in this decision. The US steel industry was in disarray during the 1990s and early 2000s. LTV and Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt and many more steelworkers were left jobless. Because Bethlehem's pension fund was grossly under-funded, the company stopped paying benefits to its 95,000 retirees in March 2003. As Reutter states, the demise of Bethlehem Steel "seemed an appropriate time to update the book." (464) I would have to agree. While "turnaround specialist" Wilbur Ross picked up the profitable pieces, including the Sparrows Point mill, the retirees were cast adrift. In the most expensive rescue of a private pension plan in US history, the federal government picked up the $4.3 billion tab. Ross has since sold his interest in the US steel industry for a tidy profit and has shifted his money to a steel mill in China.

And yet, there is so much more that needs to be said about the post-1988 experience of Bethlehem Steel and its treatment of past and present employees. I wish the author had more deeply investigated these final days. One only has to look at Stelco to realize that what happened to the pensions of retired US steelworkers might happen to Canadian steelworkers as well. It was only a sharp upturn in steel prices and the determined resistance of the United Steelworkers that prevented Stelco from "doing a Bethlehem" this past year. More research on the pension issue is urgently needed. Until then, the new edition of Mark Reutter's Making Steel is a useful reminder that a public debate about corporate obligations to past and present employees is long overdue.


Steven High Concordia University

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