Iron and Steel Industry

Iron and Steel Industry. The history of iron‐ and steelmaking in the United States reflects the rise, fall, and partial recovery of the productive capacity of the nation's industrial sector, from its origins in the Colonial Era, to the enormous productivity of the 1880–1970 period, to the cutbacks and restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. This history has been marked by dramatic events, triumphant technological innovations, and well‐known entrepreneurs.

Through the early 1800s, the three essential stages in the production of finished metal, typically conducted in small rural ironworks, consisted of smelting, which melted iron ore into a raw, intermediate material; refining, which imparted properties such as hardness or malleability; and shaping, which molded the metal into rails, beams, sheets, or tools and other objects. In the mid–nineteenth century, highly skilled workers refined and shaped the smelted metal. These workers, called puddlers, produced high‐quality wrought iron through a demanding and expensive process. Before the iron could be used, however, it had to be rolled through grooved cylinders. Skilled rollers then controlled the production of small amounts of finished iron.

When the Civil War began, U.S. mills output only one million tons per year through a slow and costly process that produced a wrought iron too weak to be made into rails, a much‐demanded product. Fortunately for the ironmasters, a new technology, named for its English inventor, Henry Bessemer, became available in the postwar years. This process bypassed puddlers by mechanizing the refining process. In a large, egg‐shaped “converter,” workers combined molten pig iron and a blast of air that produced an explosion so powerful that virtually all the impurities were removed. The result was a new, hard metal, Bessemer steel, ideal for rail‐making. The new process sparked mechanical improvements throughout the industry, prompting steelmasters to integrate all stages of the production process. These integrated mills employed thousands of workers, many of them recent immigrants, and made three thousand tons of steel per day. The Bessemer process and its successor, the open‐hearth method, underlay a second industrial revolution that transformed the United States into the world's premier industrial and military power.

Andrew Carnegie was the first to see in the Bessemer process new possibilities for industrial organization. At his mammoth mills near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he streamlined and automated production. Significantly, Carnegie's mills required less and cheaper labor than had been necessary in the days of puddling, and thousands of workers were displaced by the innovations that swept the metals industry in the late nineteenth century. Carnegie's initiatives essentially eliminated trade unionism in the steel industry until the 1930s, when the Steel Workers Organizing Committee succeeded in creating an industry‐wide union open to workers of all skill levels. Throughout the twentieth century, industrial relations in steelmaking were often marked by acrimony and, as in the nineteenth century, occasionally by violence.

The United States retained its premier position in metal‐making until the 1970s, when international competition, higher production and labor costs, and questionable managerial decisions led to the collapse of the U.S. Steel Corporation, the direct heir of Carnegie's empire. In Pittsburgh and other locales in the Northeast, the effects were devastating. This region, which had profited so handsomely in the Age of Steel, was forced to look to service industries, education, and information technologies to rebuild its economic base. In other venues, however, the American steel industry staged a renaissance by the 1990s and succeeded in producing quality products in efficient and profitable mills, some large, others belonging to smaller competitors.
See also Gilded Age; Global Economy, America and the; Homestead Lockout; Immigration; Industrialization; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Railroads; Strikes and Industrial Conflict.

Bibliography

William T. Hogan , Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, 5 vols., 1971.
John P. Hoerr , And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry, 1988.

Paul Krause