United States Steel: A Corporation with a Soul

by Arundel Cotter

Once having decided on its shipbuilding venture the Corporation did not lose time in setting about the work. The New Jersey plant was the first one decided on and ground was broken for the plant on August 1, 1917. By November 15th the first keel was laid and the first vessel, the Liberty, was launched on June 19, 1918, and finished and turned over to the Shipping Board, which had charge of all American shipping during the war, on October 5th of the same year.

Chickasaw came later. This yard was started in November, 1917, and the first ship to leave its ways did not do so until December 29, 1919, or some time after the armistice. The vessel, the Chickasaw City, was purchased by the United States Steel Products Co., the Corporation’s export subsidiary, and put into service carrying steel products to different parts of the world.

At the time of writing six vessels have been launched from the southern yard, all for the Products Co., while the Federal yard has launched and delivered a total of forty-four. Of these thirty have been delivered to the Shipping Board and nine of the remainder have been taken over by the Products Company, the other five having been sold to other concerns.

Although it is dubious whether, as a commercial undertaking, the two shipyards will prove very profitable immediately, there is little reason to doubt that they will eventually justify the expenditures on them, occasioned by the war, from the purely business standpoint. They are both favorably located for cheap manufacture and, making fabricated ships, can naturally build at satisfactory costs in comparison with yards constructing steamers under the old methods.

For there is every reason to believe that the fabricated ship has come to stay. It has fully proven its right to existence in competition with other vessels. Its methods of construction are standardized, which is what made the cheap Ford car possible, and standardization should eventually mean as much saving in ship as in motor-car building.

Whether the war had come or not the erection of shipyards by the Corporation was a natural development sooner or later. It was in line with the plans laid down by the Corporation’s founders. And it was also part and parcel of the big company’s export programme. With its exports mounting up to the two-million-ton mark annually the Corporation had necessarily either to own or charter a large number of vessels. Ownership, of course, was better in the long run and it was, for a concern like U. S. Steel, with its big steel plants and experienced organization, cheaper to build than to buy the vessels.

The Steel Products Company’s need of a large number of vessels—before the war it owned nine and chartered constantly from thirty to forty—itself assures a steady demand, at least for a time.

If the future of the fabricated ship is assured the Corporation, in its shipbuilding programme, starts with an advantage over most competitors. Now that it appears the great Hog Island yards, with their fifty ways, will be abandoned, the Federal and Chickasaw plants will be the largest fabricated shipyards in the world—and they should be among the lowest cost of all yards.

But the assistance which the Corporation rendered the Government in respect to providing ships to meet the war emergency was not confined to the erection of the two yards and the fabrication of ships there. Long before the yards were built, or even conceived, the American Bridge Co. was pioneering in the production of fabricated ship parts and the great part of the steel that went into the vessels built at Hog Island and other plants was supplied by that company and by the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., which put up plants specially for the purpose. Before the close of 1918 these two subsidiaries of the big company had shipped the steel for seventy complete hulls to various yards.

No other metal plays such an all-important part in modern warfare as does steel. Warships, transports, big and field guns, small arms, shells, gun mounts, and other munitions are made entirely or almost entirely of the metal. And when Germany first threw down her gauntlet to the civilized world the Allies found it necessary to depend to a great extent on American mills for a supply of this vital war metal. And the manufacturers of the United States responded, among them the Steel Corporation.