Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy and the Decline of Liberalism

Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy and the Decline of Liberalism. By Judith Stein. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xvi, 410 pp. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8078-2414-3. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8078-4727-5. Many Americans fortunate enough to have done well after the tumultuous, decades-long shift away from basic industry to today's streamlined, technology-driven economy tend to regard the process as natural, almost evolutionary, and one that delivered impressive social benefits along with prosperity. Judith Stein's multilayered study of the decline of American steel challenges this perspective. The industry's collapse in the mid-1980s had been in the making for nearly three decades, she argues, and was a casualty of Cold War foreign policy. American political leaders, anxious to avert social unrest abroad, opened the door to foreign penetration of the domestic steel market, thereby undermining industrial prosperity at home. They insisted upon market competition as the solution to the woes of the American steel industry while its major rivals benefited from aggressive state intervention. And when the industry appeared on its last legs after the mid-1970s, neither the Carter nor the Reagan administrations were compelled to come to its rescue.

Steel's decline exacted a devastating toll, hollowing out the ranks of the "middle class" and jettisoning the New Deal-inspired accommodation between labor and management for the trickle-down panacea that "promoting capital would eventually benefit labor" (p. 6). Significantly, the downturn coincided with the rise of the Civil Rights movement, precluding union-initiated solutions that might have bridged the racial divide and leaving black and white steelworkers with little else to argue over save the "fair" division of a quickly shrinking pie. The attempt to promote black progress in Birmingham's steel mills, Stein recalls, required "assertive blacks, committed union leaders, and job vacancies. TO [Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company] possessed the first two but ... not the third" (p. 101). Industrial decline therefore inevitably reinforced racial divisions. More fundamentally, it dissolved the link between the Democratic Party and its New Deal constituency. By failing to "devise a modernization project compatible with the interests of their working-class base" (p. 6), Stein argues, Democratic elites "sent [industrial workers] shopping for other candidates and programs" (p. 271).

Students of Alabama labor history, industrial history, and civil rights history will find Stein's discussion of Birmingham steel particularly useful. Challenging the argument advanced by Robertj. Norrell and others that the steelworkers' union itself was the pillar of discrimination in the mills, Stein shows that the context of decline is essential to any consideration of racial practice in the workplace. Although one suspects that she is overly generous in crediting trade union officials with championing black grievances, she does succeed in widening the view to suggest that perhaps TCI management had a more fundamental role in assigning work in the plants. -BRIAN KELLY, Florida International University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jan 2000
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