Acclaim for Making Steel

race and steel

Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism, by Judith Stein. University of North Carolina Press, 1998

Reviewed by Mark Reutter
Enterprise & Society
March 2000

An odd thing happened to black steelworkers over the last decades of the 20th century: They won almost every battle against racial discrimination, but their economic security vanished. At the Bethlehem Steel plant at Sparrows Point, Md., the total number of employees today (4,000) is less than half the number of black workers alone in the 1950s. Jim Crow may have reigned separate and unequal then, but at least there were jobs. Now, it seems, working-class blacks have equal rights to join blue-collar whites on the unemployment line.

What caused this sad state of affairs, so far divorced from the heady idealism of the John F. Kennedy-Lyndon Johnson era when bigotry was going to be banished by government fiat and all races were to parade down the road of plenty?

Judith Stein, a historian at the City University of New York, offers two explanations. The first, and the most convincing, is that liberals misperceived the race question as a civil liberties issue without economic dimensions. Litigation involving Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of color, was focused on protecting blacks from the consequences of poor education and inadequate job skills.

By addressing past discrimination rather than future work opportunities, government lawyers placed a few blacks in better jobs, but at the huge cost of alienating white employees and disrupting the Progressive-working class coalition.

Stein fleshes out her argument with excellent accounts of civil rights litigation at Sparrows Point and at Lackawanna, N.Y. She skillfully explains the complex traditions of the mills, which she contrasts to the mathematical gamesmanship of Washington litigators. In one telling irony, many black steelworkers did not want to leave their segregated units, where they enjoyed camaraderie and shared values, for shops with different pecking orders, work demands, and physical dangers.

But then Stein advances a more dubious proposition. Determined to win the Cold War, Democratic Party policymakers nurtured and financed steel industries abroad, then encouraged them to import steel into the U.S. in reckless disregard of the welfare of domestic workers. “It was the foreign commitments and economic policies of liberalism,” according to Stein, that ended “the marriage between modernization and working-class progress, the essence of New Deal liberalism.”

This argument has been repeated often and loudly by lobbyists representing steelmakers and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). But in fact substitute materials hurt the industry much more than “unfairly” cheap imports. Aluminum started making deep inroads in the 60-billion-can-a-year metal container market as early as 1965, while plastics eroded steel sales in everything from housewares to automobile parts. In response to these domestic challenges, steel executives stuck their heads in the sand, cutting back already puny levels of R&D and initiating massive layoffs.

These layoffs struck the black working class with special ferocity. With less of a toehold in the knowledge economy than white families, minority steelworkers were more susceptible to unemployment and less able to move to communities with more job opportunities. The outcome has been a ring of slums and neglect around the rusting hulks of once-proud mills, a dispiriting symbol of social regress in an age of self-congratulatory prosperity.

By blaming liberals and foreigners for what ails steel, Stein fails to explore how short-sighted corporate decisions affected a vulnerable group of workers, and this omission undercuts the keen social history that she constructs of the 1960s.