A Century Of American Steel

The story of Nucor's billion dollar gamble to build a steel mill in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

The steel industry provides much of the material basis for modern civilisation. Although its end products are numerous, the largest sector of the industry is involved in the production of wide strip. This is used by countless other industries to make a range of products from automobile bodies, and the cases of domestic appliances, to metal furniture and cans for the preservation of foodstuffs and drinks. A hundred years ago sheet steel was made in labor-intensive operations by a large number of small rolling mills. This is an account of how this relatively backward part of the industry was transformed by the invention and industrial application of a revolutionary new technology. In the hot strip mill a slab of steel was passed through a series of rolls to be reduced into a continuous band of wide strip, which was then shipped either as coils or cut into sheets. The introduction of the wide continuous hot strip mill began to concentrate the sheet and tin plate industry into much bigger operations complete with iron making, steel works, rolling mills and finishing plant. New companies rose to prominence; some old industry leaders fell behind. Many former locations for sheet manufacture were abandoned, but other old plants and companies re-equipped and survived. Major producers of other products entered the new trade. Less than thirty years ago another major change began when electric arc steel furnace operators began to install strip mills and the trade of the now rather inappropriately named `mini-mill` grew rapidly at the expense of the longer established iron—open hearth steel—primary rolling mill—strip mill industry. Now, as its centenary approaches, the strip mill sector is still undergoing major changes. This book surveys the growth, structure and changes in this dominant part of the steel industry. The strip mill has transformed steel world-wide, but in its origins and development it has above all been a distinctively American achievement.

At its formation in 1901, the United States Steel Corporation was the earth’s biggest industrial corporation, a wonder of the manufacturing world. Immediately it produced two thirds of America’s raw steel and thirty percent of the steel made worldwide. The behemoth company would go on to support the manufacturing superstructure of practically every other industry in America. It would create and sustain the economies of many industrial communities, especially Pittsburgh, employing more than a million people over the course of the century. A hundred years later, the U.S. Steel Group of USX makes scarcely ten percent of the steel in the United States and just over one and a half percent of global output. Far from the biggest, the company is now considered the most efficient steel producer in the world. What happened between then and now, and why, is the subject of Big Steel, the first comprehensive history of the company at the center of America’s twentieth-century industrial life. Granted privileged and unprecedented access to the U.S. Steel archives, Kenneth Warren has sifted through a long, complex business history to tell a compelling story. Its preeminent size was supposed to confer many advantages to U.S. Steel—economies of scale, monopolies of talent, etc. Yet in practice, many of those advantages proved illusory. Warren shows how, even in its early years, the company was out-maneuvered by smaller competitors and how, over the century, U.S. Steel’s share of the industry, by every measure, steadily declined. Warren’s subtle analysis of years of internal decision making reveals that the company’s size and clumsy hierarchical structure made it uniquely difficult to direct and manage. He profiles the chairmen who grappled with this “lumbering giant,” paying particular attention to those who long ago created its enduring corporate culture—Charles M. Schwab, Elbert H. Gary, and Myron C. Taylor. Warren points to the way U.S. Steel’s dominating size exposed it to public scrutiny and government oversight—a cautionary force. He analyzes the ways that labor relations affected company management and strategy. And he demonstrates how U.S. Steel suffered gradually, steadily, from its paradoxical ability to make high profits while failing to keep pace with the best practices. Only after the drastic pruning late in the century—when U.S. Steel reduced its capacity by two-thirds—did the company become a world leader in steel-making efficiency, rather than merely in size. These lessons, drawn from the history of an extraordinary company, will enrich the scholarship of industry and inform the practice of business in the twenty-first century.

period of international leadership was challenged, this book interprets steel from the viewpoints of historical and economic geography. It considers both physical factors, such as resources, and human factors such as market, organization, and governmental policy. In major discussions of the east coast, Pittsburgh, the Ohio Valley, the Great Lakes, the South and the West, Warren analyzes the location and relocation of steel plants over 120 years. He explains the influence on location of a variety of factors: The accessibility of resources, the cost of transportation, the existence of specialized markets, and the availability of entrepreneurial skills, capital, and labor. He also evaluates the role of management in the development of the industry, through an analysis of individual companies, including Bethlehem, Carnegie, United States Steel, Kaiser, Inland, Jones and Laughlin, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Warren examines the influence exerted on the industry by complex technological changes and weighs their significance against market forces and the supply of natural resources. In the production process alone, the industry changed from pig iron to steel; from charcoal to anthracite; to bituminous coking coal; and from the widespread use of low-grade ore from the eastern United States, to the high quality but localized deposits of the Upper Great Lakes, to imported ores. Unlike other industrialized nations, the United States has undergone major geographical shifts in steel consumption since the 1850s. As the American population moved south and west into new territory, steel followed. Warren concludes that these radical alterations in the distribution and demand were the decisive force in the location of steel production.

This book provides a basic outline of the history of the American steel industry, a sector of the economy that has been an important part of the industrial system. The book starts with the 1830's, when the American iron and steel industry resembled the traditional iron producing sector that had existed in the old world for centuries, and it ends in 2001. The product of this industry, steel, is an alloy of iron and carbon that has become the most used metal in the world. The very size of the steel industry and its position in the modern economy give it an unusual relevance to the economic, social, and political system.

'Tiffany shows that American decision makers who ignore the past are likely to jeopardize America's future. So persuasive is his account of the historical antagonism between steel management, labor and government that advocates of industrial policy will have to reconsider the premise of cooperation on which it is based.

"This study examines the development and implications of the wide continuous hot strip mill, a technological innovation that transformed the steel industry starting in the 1920s. It changed the profitability of companies, the number and skills of their employees, and the nature, scale, and location of their operations"--

Examines the business, labor, and human history of Homestead, Pennsylvania, the heart of the American steel industry.