Excerpts from INTRODUCTION
“ Age of Steel”

When journalist John Gunther asked, “What is steel?” in 1947, a business expert’s answer was “America.” Four out of five manufactured items contained steel, and 40 percent of all wage earners owed their livelihood to the industry. Steel was everywhere, from the 70-story towers of the Golden Gate Bridge to the steel wool that post-war housewives used to clean pots and pans. Steel was the building block of cities, the spine of transportation, the weapon of war. “The basic power determinant of any country is its steel production,” Gunther wrote in Inside U.S.A., “and what makes this a great nation above all is the fact that it can roll over 90 million tons of steel ingots a year, more than Great Britain, prewar Germany, Japan, France, and the Soviet Union combined.”

This is the story of steel as seen through the lens of the once largest steel plant in the world. Sparrows Point lay dormant until 1887 when a 29-year-old engineer named Frederick Wood walked across the windswept marshes, stared out at the blue breadth of Maryland’s inland sea, and concluded that the spot would make a superb deep-water port for the Pennsylvania Steel Company.

Sparrows Point on the Chesapeake Bay became a symbol of America’s superiority in making steel. By 1910 the railway track rolled at the plant had spanned Mongolia, climbed the Andes, breached the pampas of Argentina, and descended into the tunnels of the London Underground. Purchased by the Bethlehem Steel in 1916, the mill expanded relentlessly until, in the 1950s, it had the greatest metalmaking capacity on earth. Out of its furnace fires came the steel for the tail fins of Chevy Bel Airs and Thunderbird convertibles, the tin plate for Campbell’s Soup cans, the hulls of ocean tankers and Navy destroyers, the wire and girder plate of suspension bridges, and a thousand and one other products that made our culture of bigness and abundance possible.

Such achievements came hand in hand with international events. When Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders splashed ashore on Cuba in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, the place they liberated first was the iron mine feeding Sparrows Point. The plant’s appetite for iron ore led to more distant claims, first in Chile and then in the rainforests of Venezuela. The same access to the Atlantic Ocean that gave Sparrows Point a unique position in gathering raw materials gave it enormous strategic importance during the two World Wars. The mill was a prime manufacturing and shipping point of steel for gun barrels, bomb forgings, ships, and landing craft. Presidential aides monitored the plant’s output, and the army and navy became its chief customers.


The first part of the book concentrates on the capital side. Frederick Wood built the mill as a marvel of machine coordination, and his brother, Rufus, engineered the town as a paternalistic combination of Puritan thrift, social betterment, and rigid control. Charles Michael Schwab was almost the mirror opposite of the Wood brothers in personality and outlook. The owner of Bethlehem Steel had chosen the fast track of furtive sales of artillery guns and torpedo submarines to expand his empire in the run-up to World War I. He needed a well-located plant on the East Coast to turn his munitions wealth into peacetime profits, and Sparrows Point needed a war chest to diversify from its solid but unspectacular market of steel rails and billets.


The “missing person” of so many accounts of business is the fellow who did the actual work. Herbert Gutman and other historians have pointed out how little we know about the people who filled the positions that Schwab and Grace and other industrialists offered. The second half of the book speaks to this omission, describing, often in their own words, the experiences of people who got dirt on their faces, burnmarks on their legs, grease on their hands; people who chewed Brown’s Mule Plug tobacco to keep the dust out of their throats and nailed sections of old tires to their shoes to keep their feet from getting burned on the brick floors; people who swung on shifts that set the rhythm of family and community life.


As in so much else in our economic world, the changes that have closed the once-mighty mills of Youngstown and Pittsburgh have been portrayed as almost inevitable, a natural outgrowth of modern corporate capitalism. The accompanying loss of jobs in working-class communities is treated somewhat like a heat wave in September—worth complaining about, yet beyond human control. But steel’s plunge, like its earlier build-up, is broadly a tale of individuals who made specific decisions in pursuit of definite aims. The pursuit of monopoly rather than new products by the managements of the major steelmakers had the intended effect of freezing technology and averting risk. This pursuit also had many unintended effects that ended with the industry taking on huge unacknowledged risks.

The origins of the disease that attacked the mill capitals of America have been evident for a long time. They appeared when Sparrows Point was flush with profits and exercised near absolute dominance as market maker and labor colonizer. There were warnings along the way, flashing lights that no business could ignore without reaping the consequences.