Bethlehem Steel: Builder and Arsenal of America

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Bethlehem steel: Builder and Arsenal of America is historical analysis of the late Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Kenneth Warren writes this book; Kenneth Warren is scholar of the America steel industry and knows about industry very well.

In the early chapters, Warren shows why western Pennsylvania became the major region for iron making in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, overtaking the small Bethlehem Iron Company of eastern Pennsylvania. The company’s geographical location hindered the development of Bethlehem city during these years, while contributing to the growth of the Pittsburgh region. Western Pennsylvania’s proximity to bituminous coal in West Virginia, cheaper water transportation on the Great Lakes, access to high quality Lake Superior iron ore, and closeness to expanding railroad construction in the Midwest made possible the dominance of Pittsburgh in iron production. At the same time, Bethlehem Iron continually struggled in eastern Pennsylvania because of declining demand for rails; as railroad construction fell off in the East, a preponderance of lower quality anthracite coal and dependence on more expensive, often over land transportation to markets. Still, Warren admires the efforts of early leaders Robert Heysham Sayre, John C. Fritz, and Joseph Wharton who “survived” the extended challenge from western Pennsylvania. Bethlehem leaders worked hard to find new products and update equipment. By the 1880s–1890s, Bethlehem Iron cultivated a niche in the production of armor plate for the US Navy as well as foreign buyers, which allowed the company to participate with the powerful Carnegie Steel firm (later US Steel).

The middle chapters of Warren’s study examine Bethlehem Steel’s re...

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...agreement throughout the book is that capital intensive industries are dangerously slow to innovate, burdened by aging technology, vast infrastructure and overhead costs, and managers’ limited ability to anticipate changing markets and threats posed by up-and-coming competitors.

Steelworkers and their unions figure awkwardly in this company history despite their importance to Bethlehem Steel’s operations. Warren should have integrated labor relations more fully into his analysis in order to examine managers’ regard for another of their most important assets: their employees. In particular, the understudied subject of worker safety would have deepened his discussions of managerial priorities and policies in what was a very dangerous industry. Bethlehem Steel Baltimore facilities, for instance, were notoriously unsafe, as Mark Reutter pointed out in Sparrows Point.

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