PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 24, No. 13, Jan. 20, 2005

Rise and fall of steel industry chronicled

Click photo to enlarge "Making Steel" (UI Press/2005) by Mark Reutter

Steel was once the prototype and pace-setter of American industry, dwarfing every competitor in the world. “Making Steel” chronicles the rise and decline of the steel industry by focusing on the 115-year history of a steel mill and company town – Sparrows Point, Md.

Established on the outer tip of Baltimore Harbor in 1890, Sparrows Point grew to be the largest steelmaking complex on earth. Out of the blaze and hiss of its furnaces came the tin plate for Campbell’s soup cans, the tailfins of Thunderbirds, the cable for the Golden Gate Bridge, and a way of life for tens of thousands of families.

Author Mark Reutter, business and law editor at the UI News Bureau, describes the different worlds that overlapped at Sparrows Point, their destinies tied to the mill’s early engineering advances and to the later myopia of upper management as the mill came under pressure from new technology and competitive materials such as aluminum and plastics.

Updated and expanded from its 1988 edition, “Making Steel” (UI Press/2005) features a 24-page photo section, an author’s preface, and an afterword titled “The Discarded American Worker.” The new section examines the final years of Bethlehem Steel and the workings of the U.S. bankruptcy court that stripped the health-care benefits of 95,000 retired employees and handed the Bethlehem properties, including the remnants of Sparrows Point, to a billionaire financier.
Praised by reviewers around the country, “Making Steel” is filled with dramatic events and forceful personalities. It takes the reader back to the headlong expansion of the industry, through war and peace when the interests of steel and the U.S. government were intimately bound.

In this edition, Reutter demonstrates how even in the late 1990s executives at Bethlehem Steel refused to change their practices in the face of inroads from “mini-mill” steel companies, falsely blamed foreign steel for their troubles, stopped paying into their employee pension funds, and, after filing for bankruptcy, dumped billions of dollars of pension debt into the lap of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., resulting in the worst pension shortfall in U.S. history.

Throughout the book, Reutter portrays the world of steelworkers, including people such as Charlie Parrish, who fought to become the first black millwright at Sparrows Point, and Marian Wilson, who defied the iron rule of Elizabeth Alexander, forelady of the tin inspectors, by refusing to wear the prescribed blue uniform.

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