Roots of Steel

I wrote the first draft of my “Roots of Steel” review, ass usual, leading off with a quote. Here it is:

“I became a union man at my father’s knee, and I’ll be one till they put me in a box,” Manuel Alvarez
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Deborah Rudacille, whose previous books dealt with animal rights (The Scalpel and the Butterfly) and transgendered Americans (The Riddle of Gender), returned to her childhood neighborhood in Dundalk, Maryland, a blue collar suburb of Baltimore, and produced an elegy to a vanishing culture. For more than a century Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant symbolized the triumph and travail of industrial capitalism. With the advent of unionism in 1941 laborers secured a significant stake in the system. Jessie Schultz, one of over 50 people interviewed by Rudacille, recalled: “It was a dangerous job. But if it wasn’t for Bethlehem Steel, I wouldn’t have what I got today.” Workers had to cope with a racial and ethnic pecking order, shift work, asbestos, noxious pollution, and a harsh workplace environment that drove many to drink (as her dad’s sidekick the author recalls coaxing bar patrons into giving her coins for the jukebox).
Though certainly no utopia, those days seem idyllic compared with when the bottom fell out. Oldtimers regret the loss of solidarity among neighbors and union comrades. Now, to quote Judy Martin, there is homelessness, overcrowded soup kitchens, and “everyone is afraid of opening doors.” Rudacille blames the “bust” not only on automation but on management shortsightedness and greed. Still it was a mistake for unions to have pressed for employer-funded health and retirement plans rather than national health insurance and adequate Social Security pensions. Starting in 2001 with Bethlehem's bogus bankruptcy, Sparrows Point has changed corporate hands five times in eight years, with huge profits accruing to speculators and downsizing inevitably resulting . At the time "Roots of Steel" went to press the mill, whose patriotic employees helped win two world wars and fueled the prosperity of the mid-twentieth century, was in Russian (OAO Severstal) hands.
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Yesterday we drove to Valparaiso to watch James star in a play that was a clever take-off on “Cinderella.” He had everyone’s parts memorized and said all his lines so clearly that the audience heard every word. Rebecca would have been in the play as well, but she had rehearsal at the Star Plaza for “Annie,” in which she got the prized role of Molly. Burgeoning thespians both! Afterwards, we celebrated James’s triumph and Alissa’s twenty-second birthday at Longhorn Steak House. My riibs were perfect – not too much barbeque sauce.

Commenting on what Suzanne said about my having stayed married for 45 years, I replied: “Virtually all my colleagues at IU Northwest divorced during the Seventies, some of whom went on to marry former students. It was an age when many wives resented going from their parents’ home right into homemaking responsibilities without having ever enjoyed the freedom feminists were talking about.” I could have added that there were many temptations and some flirtations, but in the end Toni and I weathered the inevitable storms.

Ron Cohen emailed me about running into Bill Ayers, the onetime radical who belonged to the SDS Weathermen in the late Sixties and participated in the 1969 Days of Rage in Chicago. FOX news tried to use his being on a board with Obama as an issue during the 2008 Presidential election. Ron also ran into a guy (he couldn’t recall his name) who told him he was a former student of mine and that the two of us had seen the Ali-Foreman fight (the Rumble in the Jungle) in Zaire at a Hammond movie theater. That had to be Rick Dawson, a brilliant student who was a labor negotiator and now, according to Ron, a lawyer. I remember Rick giving an oral report about Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and using the word pariah in describing how trolley riders shunned the main character because he smelled so bad from his job in the meat packing industry. I recall debating whether to pay 20 dollars to see the fight and how the crowd, composed of an approximately equal number of whites, blacks, and Latinos, was overwhelmingly for Ali, who had us worried when he went into his Rope-a-Dope strategy. Prior to the fight the theater showed a softcore porno movie that drew hoots and applause from the boisterous crowd.

Steve McShane asked me to talk to his class about doing oral history projects about social life in Hobart – a chance to reprise my Kiwanis talk, ending with seven people reading excerpts from Ryan’s “Bad Seeds” piece. I’ll show them my tape recorder, which to them will seem like a real museum piece.