In the summer of 1919, a few weeks before the Great Steel Strike, I
bought some second-hand clothes and went to work on an open-hearth
furnace near Pittsburgh to learn the steel business. I was a graduate of
Yale, and a few weeks before had resigned a commission as
first-lieutenant in the regular army. Clean-up man in the pit was my
first job, which I held until I passed to third-helper on the
open-hearth. Later I worked in the cast-house, became a member of the
stove-gang, and at length achieved the semi-skilled job of hot-blast man
on the blast-furnace. I acquired the current Anglo-Hunky language and
knew speedily the grind and the camaraderie of American steel-making. In
these chapters I have put down what I saw, felt, and thought as a
steel-worker in 1919.
Steel is perhaps the basic industry of America. In a sense it is the
industry that props our complex industrial civilization, since it
supplies the steel frame, the steel rail, the steel tool without which
locomotives and skyscrapers would be impossible. And in America it
contains the largest known combination of management and capital, the
United States Steel Corporation. Some appreciation of these things I had
when I went to work in the steel business. It was clear that steel had
become something of a barometer not only for American business but for
American labor. I was keenly interested to know what would happen, and
believed that basic industries like steel and coal were cast for leading
roles either in the breaking-up or the making-over of society.
The book is written from a diary of notes put down in the evenings when
I was working on day shifts of ten hours. Alternate weeks, I worked the
fourteen-hour night shift, and spent my time off eating or asleep.
The book is a narrative--heat, fatigue, rough-house, pay, as they came
in an uncharted wave throughout the twenty-four hours.
But it is in a sense raw material, I believe, that suggests the
beginnings of several studies both human and economic. Mr. Walter
Lippmann has recently pointed out that men do not act in accordance with
the facts and forces of the world as it is, but in accordance with the
"picture" of it they have in their heads.[1] Nowhere does the form and
pressure of the real world differ more sharply from the picture in men's
heads than among different social and racial groups in industry. Nor is
anywhere the accuracy of the picture of more importance. An open-hearth
furnace helper, working the twelve-hour day, and a Boston broker, owning
fifty shares of Steel Preferred, hold, as a rule, strikingly different
pictures of the same forces and conditions. But what is of greater
importance is that director, manager, foreman, by reason of training,
interest, or tradition, are often quite as unable to guess at the
picture in the worker's head, and hence to understand his actions, as
the more distant stockholder.
Perhaps a technique may some day arise which will supply the executives
of industry not only with the facts about employees in their varied
racial and social groups but supply the facts with _due emphasis_ and in
_three dimensions_ so that the controller of power may be able to see
them as descriptive of men of like mind with himself. The conclusion
most burned into my consciousness was the lack of such knowledge or
understanding in the steel industry and the imperative need of securing
it, in order to escape continual industrial war, and perhaps disaster.
There are certain inferences, I think, like the above, that can be made
from this record. But no thesis has been introduced and no argument
developed. I have recorded the impressions of a complex environment,
putting into words sight, sound, feeling, and thought. The book may be
read as a story of men and machines and a personal adventure among them
no less than as a study of conditions and a system.