On one occasion a special order for a number of boilers took one of the Corporation’s vessels to a harbor on the west coast of South America where the arrival of a steamer was a rarity, and facilities for landing cargo were conspicuous by their absence. The lack of hoists or any other method for lifting the boilers ashore was easily overcome, however. The crew of the ship was ordered to plug up the boilers at both ends and hoist them overboard, floating them on the waves to the sandy beach.
But this novel method of delivery created a dearth of labor in the vicinity. The natives, at the sight of the huge steel cylinders leaping from the waves and rushing ashore on the tide, decided that they were strange and fearsome monsters of the deep and they fled in panic to the woods where they remained for several days before they could be induced to return and carry the boilers to their destination.
On another occasion similar difficulties were encountered, but the cargo in this case was one of steel rails for the first line ever built to Buenaventura, Colombia. The rails had to be unloaded separately and sent ashore one by one on the little native dugout canoes. It was only the skill of the natives in handling their frail barks with such unwieldy cargoes that prevented a large part of the shipment finding a resting place at the bottom of the harbor.
The American Bridge Co. has erected a number of bridges in the Far East. Some of these have been in the interior of China, where the rivers, subject to seasonal floods and periods of absolute dryness, provide the main highways for freight traffic. In such instances the steel for the bridges was hauled up the river beds during the dry seasons, and if the rains arrived before the destination was reached, the steel was simply left on the river bed until the subsidence of the flood permitted the resumption of the journey up-stream.
In developing its export trade the Steel Corporation has performed a real and important service to American commerce generally. To a great extent, shipping depends on the trend of “weight cargo,” and exports of other goods classed as “measured cargo” depend similarly on shipping facilities. By supplying the heavy cargo for numerous markets where American goods had never sold before the Corporation made it possible for manufacturers of many lighter products to develop business for themselves in these new markets. In other words, it blazed the way for American commerce as a whole. How great is the debt that American business generally owes to the Corporation, and to a less extent to the Standard Oil and International Harvester companies, is plain when it is realized that these three companies shipped for many years more than half the “weight cargo” leaving the shores of the United States.
One of the principal benefits of large exports is its effect on labor in the producing country. The Corporation’s effort has been to find a regular market in foreign countries for 20 per cent. of its total output. This level was never actually reached under normal conditions, although during the war exports did, at one period, run about 33 per cent. of total production for a time. Taking the year 1912, the record pre-war year for exports, as a representative period, we find that shipments to customers abroad represented nearly 18 per cent. of total finished steel delivered by the Corporation’s mills. As the “Steel Trust” in that year employed an average of 221,000 men, this meant that about 39,000 workers were busy on material destined for export and that $34,000,000, of the Corporation’s payroll of $190,000,000 was being paid to American labor by foreign consumers. In 1919, 16.5 per cent. of the total business was export and by the same analysis, foreign buyers paid American workmen in the Corporation’s plants more than $79,000,000 in wages.
In the final analysis, this figure will be increased, as the Corporation under normal conditions encourages and assists companies manufacturing its products into machinery, cars, locomotives, etc., to expand their exports, by giving price concessions on steel purchased for that purpose. This re-export business gives work to a substantial number of the Corporation’s employees.
The building up of the vast export sales organization maintained by the Corporation has been a Herculean task, but it has been well worth the effort. By establishing its name and its product all over the world the Corporation has not only added to its profits and to its markets but it has helped to relieve the pressure of over-production which the industry feels from time to time, and thus it has conferred a substantial benefit on the steel trade as a whole.