Reviews in American History

History had a human face for Judith Stein. She travelled to Birmingham, Alabama to conduct research on a crippled steel industry (she doesn’t tell us when; sometime in the 1990s, evidently). The Birmingham USX facility had employed 27,000 workers during World War II to, and had shriveled to 2,400 when she arrived. Her cab driver was a 19- to 20-year-old black man whose father held a good job at the plant. But the son could not get on at the mill and did piece work at low wages while he hoped for an opening. Her cab ride told her that her young driver was “intelligent and hard-working” and a young man who “possessed the values of his family,” and he “deserves a better future.” A job in steel, presumably.

Why does he not have that high-paying job? Who or what fumbled away that young man’s future? Stein sensed, plausibly, that pursuing that question required the fusion of two fields of historical study that had been artificially and regrettably separated—civil rights and economic policy and history. Joining them might produce a “new narrative,” and an answer to the question about her driver. It certainly did produce an impressively researched book which indicts public policy for the sad fate of both steel and blacks like the taxi driver, policy conceived for the most part under Democratic presidents. Running Steel, Running America is built around the belief that governments have great capacity to do good, especially economic good. Since decent job opportunities as ladders of opportunity are within the national government’s power to deliver or maintain in place, lesser outcomes were the government’s fault. The book documents the default on that social responsibility, anchored in the author’s intimate familiarity with the evolution of the steel industry since World War II.

Reading such a book in the late 1990s involves not just a trip to Birmingham and Sparrow’s Point and other places that make steel; it also has the feel of a trip back to the sixties. The New Left lives! The Liberals are responsible. [End Page 497] On closer examination, the author’s viewpoint is decidedly nineties. She sees good outcomes snatched from history by governmental policy, crushing the hopes of individuals and communities. And she has an explanation for it. To the New Left, the liberals bungled things because they were not staunch socialists. Here, liberal administrations, dutifully followed by the Republicans when they took a turn, sacrificed both steel and black (and white) workers on the alter of foreign economic policy—the religion of free trade, in the form of head-in-the-sand, foreigner-favoring, import-enhancing foreign economic policy. Pat Buchanan lives!

Her topic is post-World War II U.S. industrial policy toward the nation’s crown jewel heavy industry, steel. To this she attaches a sort of parallel story of race relations and civil rights. The book begins in the 1950s, when two adverse developments turned big steel into a beleaguered, declining industry—hostile government policy arising from Eisenhower and then Kennedy and Johnson’s suspicion that oligopolistic steel (the industry) was a main cause of inflation, and import competition deriving from the expansion of steel capacity abroad. (I would have reversed these two causes of steel’s troubles and added managerial mistakes and inflexible labor costs due to the behavior of the unions, but Stein’s causation is external, nine parts federal government and one part foreign competition.) Quickly moving to the sixties, Stein traces the civil rights movement in Alabama with occasional references to the Fairfield plant, the two topics—steel and race—more side by side than intertwined. An intricate discussion of the evolution of civil rights policy affecting black employment, and the emergence of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a prelude to a narrative of job discrimination complaints and politics...