STEEL
The Diary of a
Furnace Worker
By CHARLES RUMFORD WALKER

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON

Copyright, 1922, by
CHARLES RUMFORD WALKER

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Foreword

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 rôles 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.

C. R. W.

Contents