Sentimental Steelmaking

sentimental steelmaking

“Bethlehem Steel: The People Who Built America,” a documentary program written by Jeff Chirico and produced by Lehigh Valley PBS.

Reviewed by Mark Reutter
Baltimore Sun
Originally published on September 1, 2003
© 2003 Baltimore Sun

“Bethlehem Steel: The People Who Built America,” to be aired tonight on Maryland Public Television, is a paean to the lost world of American-made steel. The program traces the history of the jumbo I-beams and girder plates that bore the Bethlehem Steel name during its heyday.

And what a heyday it was. Not only the Golden Gate Bridge, but Rockefeller Center, Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and hundreds of Navy destroyers and aircraft carriers were the products of a company that once employed 165,000 people and paid its top bosses higher salaries than any other corporation in the world.

This hour-long documentary focuses almost exclusively on Bethlehem, Pa., corporate headquarters and the site of the original Bethlehem mill. The company dates back to the Civil War, but did not gain size and scope until after it was acquired by Charles M. Schwab in 1904. Slick and smart and salesman sharp, Schwab hawked steel from London to Tokyo and eventually bought every major steel plant east of Pittsburgh to make Bethlehem second in size only to U.S. Steel Corp.

The strength of this documentary is the mix of contemporary interviews with retired employees and old film footage to portray a way of life that was alternately harsh and paternalistic. The stories of Richard Check, Nathan Tumminello, and other workers add a human touch to the drumbeat of heroic words and larger-than-life images taken from company newsreels of bridge joinings and World War II ship launchings.

Work conditions at the mill often were appalling, workers and supervisors agree, but the wages were sweet, and the local establishment was happy to bend to the will of the region’s dominant employer. Bethlehem was “the patron saint of the town,” recalls John Strohmeyer, retired editor of the Bethlehem Globe-Times, and politicians came hat-in-hand to win favors from “The Steel,” the firm’s local nickname.

Management’s complacency is evident as we see film clips of Eugene Grace, Schwab’s successor, spending his time on the company’s golf links in the 1950s. Bethlehem executives became so absorbed in their imperial lifestyle that they weren’t interested in new inventions. To them, World War II blast furnaces worked just fine. “They thought that life in the future would be pretty much the same as life in the past,” Dale Falcinelli, a business professor at Lehigh University, said.

In other words, “The Steel” stopped taking risks. Management couldn’t bring itself to invest in anything it didn’t recognize. And there was no competition for ideas, no challenges to the Bethlehem Way, in the narrow confines of Lehigh Valley.

That’s why the company was so taken by surprise when competition struck in the 1970s from “mini-mills,” which made steel more cheaply from scrap metal, and from aluminum, concrete, and modular construction methods that replaced the jumbo beams and plates on buildings and bridges.

The documentary is least successful when it tries to tackle the downfall of this once-formidable enterprise. It recites all of the conventional reasons for Beth’s competitive woes – cheap foreign steel, expensive labor contracts, changes in technology – but fails to explore the cultural mindset that led to paralysis.

Unlike U.S. Steel, which learned to adjust, BSCo. became a striking example of an organization that slowly cannibalized itself into bankruptcy and dissolution. (Last May, International Steel Group purchased what was left of the company, which had abandoned steelmaking in its namesake town in 1995.)

A more trenchant analysis could have brought real perspective to the question of what happened to American steel, and, more broadly, why large companies seem especially susceptible to dysfunction in the face of changing market conditions despite their reserves of money and manpower.

Instead, the filmmakers rely on sentimental gestures, letting local boosters hijack the story with spin and questionable assertions. Contrary to all evidence, for example, the ex-mayor of Bethlehem proclaims that the city has “not missed a beat” following the collapse of steelmaking. The film touts the proposed opening of a “mega-recreation and shopping destination” (whatever that means) on the site of the old mill as evidence of the region’s fighting spirit and pending rebirth.

Such rebirth, however, has yet to materialize despite hefty infusions of taxpayer cash. Instead, a mile-long stretch of crumbling buildings marks the spot where Schwab built an empire that his inbred successors let slip away.