Acceptable Men

Acceptable Men “Gary Works is situated on the southern tip of Lake Michigan, with hardly a single elevation to break the wind between it and the North Pole. In January, working out-of-doors much of the time as motor inspectors, we feel the cold to our bones, no matter how many layers of silk, wool, and down we wear.” Noel Ignatiev, “Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World” An idealistic “Red Diaper Baby,” who as a youth helped his father before breakfast seven days a week deliver copies of a Yiddish-language Communist Party newspaper, Freheit, Noel Ignatiev quit college after his junior year and, a member of the ultra-leftist Sojourner Truth Organization, became a factory worker, hoping to convince Black workers to rise up against a capitalist system that exploited and oppressed them. His unfinished memoir (he died two years ago) describes working at U.S. Steel, beginning in 1972, the year Gary mayor Richard Hatcher convened the Black National Political Convention at West Side High School. He trained under a Black motor Inspector named Jackson, who showed him the ropes, including how to minimize the chances of serious injury under truly dangerous conditions, and, incidentally, taught him to play duplicate bridge; the two of them competed in games against Black social workers and teachers that included the Mayor’s wife Ruthellyn Hatcher. Wary of industrial unionism as a path to progress, Ignatiev learned that Blacks members were confined to the worst jobs due to the principles of division seniority and separate tracks for production and maintenance workers. He wrote: “Gary Works ran seven miles long and two miles deep. Moving from east to west, the divisions ran from crude (the coke plant) to finish (the rolling mills), from dirty to comparatively clean, and from black to white.” Ignatiev’s descriptions of mill culture reminded me of folklorist Richard Dorson’s “Land of the Millrats,” as he relates stories of pilfering, sleeping on the job, nicknames (Big Cat, Polecat, Roto-Rooter, Slick, Big Hickey, and Little Hickey), and Old Timers, such as a Greek immigrant who talked about growing olives and cooked pigeons he captured on the rafters of the repair barn. “Acceptable Men” concludes with the author taking advantage of an opportunity - denied to his co-workers – to transition into academia, followed by this paragraph: “On the 200th anniversary of the Republic, Gary Works management decided to clean up some areas, build walkways, and throw open the gates to public tours. People from all over the world came to wonder at the ‘Industry that made America great.’” I recall how those Bicentennial tours were extremely popular- and how misleading they were. There was little resemblance to the description of Charles Dickens, quoted by Ignatiev, that it was “hell with the lid off.” I went on guided tours of Inland and Bethlehem Steel’s facilities that were similarly sanitized. Michael Goldfield, author of “The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s,” wrote: “Noel Ignatiev’s combining of the technical details of steel making, irreverent comradery, accounts of racism both in the plant and in the country as a whole, with damning matter-of-fact indictments of the company’s total lack of concern for the safety of its workers, makes this a must read for all who want deeper insights into U.S. society and capitalism in general.”