Men and Things

by Henry A. Atkinson

Steel has been made for centuries, but until a few years ago, the process was slow and costly, and the tools with which the men worked were really treasures. In those days a pocket-knife was a thing of great value. The railroads used iron rails but these soon wore out. If it had been suggested that steel be used a protest would have been made on the grounds that steel is too expensive. Trains had to be shortened; coaches and locomotives built of light material because iron rails and bridges could not stand the strain. As land in the cities became more valuable and taller buildings were needed, stone and brick not proving adaptable and too expensive, the Bessemer process, which manufactured steel cheaply and in great quantities, came to meet a long-felt need. Iron was plentiful but the process of converting it into steel had not been mastered. The great difficulty in manufacturing steel is to get just the right proportion of carbon mixed with the iron. The Bessemer system takes all the carbon out and then puts back into it the quantity that is needed. Tons of molten iron are run into an immense pear-shaped vessel called a converter. Blasts of air are forced in from below. These unite with the carbon and the impurities such as sulphur and silicon are destroyed. There is a roar and clatter and a terrific din. A great bolt of red flame shoots forth many feet from the mouth of the converter. Its color changes from red to yellow and then to white. When the flame becomes white the workers know that the carbon and other impurities are all gone; and this is the signal for the blast of air to be turned off. Then a quantity of special iron ore in melted form, containing the right amount of carbon to convert the whole into steel of the desired degree of hardness, is poured into the purified molten iron in the converter. This huge converter is perfectly poised upon pivots so that it can be moved with very little effort. The molten steel at the next stage is poured from the converter into square molds and the blocks resulting from it are called blooms. These are then started through the mill, passed under and between rollers of different shapes and kinds, and drawn out into plates, rails, or beams.

The Steel Factory or Rolling-mill. One of the foremost pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a picture of a steel-mill. It seems to be a prosaic subject but it makes an appealing picture, and one typical of our modern world. Some one has described a steel-mill as a modern materialization of Dante’s Inferno. The sky above Pittsburgh, Birmingham, and other steel centers is aflame at night as the process of manufacturing is carried on in the miles of buildings that contain the workers and the machinery. To step into one of these steel factories even in broad daylight is to step out of the world of reality into the semi-reality of a new and unknown world. Most of the men work stripped to the waist. The long ribbons of red hot steel writhe and twist about the length of the room. The jangle of chains mingles with the creaking of the machinery above our heads. The sparks are flying and a bluish haze hovers about the heads of the men like some unholy halo as they move back and forth appearing as gnomes in the unnatural light of the place. There is a peculiar odor that we instinctively associate with the blacksmith shop that used to stand at the side of the street on the way between our house and the butcher shop where we used to be sent every day for the meat for dinner. Everything moves with feverish haste. No one lags. Every man knows his task and does it. He must keep up.

The days are unusually long in the steel-mills. It used to be that the men worked twelve hours a day and seven days a week. This has been changed now in most of the mills, but even yet there is a great deal of twelve-hour work and a great deal of Sunday labor. The rumble of the cranes above the heads of the gnome-like men at work in the building fills our ears with an unearthly sound. The peculiar glare of the gigantic open hearth changes at frequent intervals as the white cascade of molten metal announces the beginning of the shaping process of the new rail or the new plate for some new man-of-war, or the beam that is to live for centuries in some skyscraper. These men working in this mill are kneading the metal into shape, for as it goes under the rollers it is pressed and twisted until the final process is completed.

Accidents. If it was a lucky day when we visited the steel-mill there were no serious accidents. Men are being continually hurt in the works. A report concerning one says: “John Schwobboda and Joseph Mikelliffyky were standing near one of the hearths. Something went wrong, and instead of the steel coming out in an orderly stream it broke out and before these two could get away they were caught in the midst of the stream and absorbed by the burning metal.” This thing has happened many times. The percentage of deaths due to accidents and injuries during the last ten years among soldiers and sailors of the United States has been about twelve to the thousand; in the same period with the workers in the steel-mills it has been about sixteen to the thousand.

Wages and Conditions of Labor. The toil is strenuous and the hazards great; the hours are long and the product is of almost incalculable value. What do men get out of it? They are the servants of civilization and without them we would have no such trade as we have to-day, we would have no commerce and no progress. Steel is king. When the price of steel is up to normal, times are good; when the price of steel is down, times are bad. A Pittsburgh man said that steel is the elevator which carries civilization, “The world goes up or goes down with the price of steel rails.” The workers are the subjects and the slaves of this king. They are giving their lives as well as their time in fealty to him. Yet how little the average person knows of the lives of these men.

A genius for mathematics has estimated that if the 587 rolling-mills in the United States were set end to end in a circle around Pittsburgh it would be 100 miles in diameter. Inside of this circle can be formed another circle three quarters as large if we set end to end the 532 smaller steel-mills and 3,161 puddling furnaces, where the iron is first melted and made into bars called pigs. There are 577 open-hearth works, or factories that manufacture steel by another process much slower than the Bessemer, but having certain advantages because the process does not have to be carried on so rapidly. These works would make a third circle 50 miles across. The 410 other furnaces of various kinds would form a fourth circle 35 miles in diameter. If all the Bessemer converters were made into one great big converter and put in the center, it would be a mile in circumference and would pour a river of molten steel every hour.

The furnaces are fed literally mountains of ore every year. The families dependent upon the iron and steel trade for their living, if gathered together, would form a state more populous than Illinois. The steel business thinks its own thoughts, prints its own literature, and very largely makes its own laws. There is no trade on the face of the earth equal to it. The results of the present world war hang in the balance. The needs come back definitely to the steel industry. If we can get more workers we can get more steel. If we get more steel, we can build more ships, and if we can get more ships, we can get more soldiers, more ammunition, and more food with which to fight the war for democracy.

The year 1916 was the most prosperous one which the American steel trade has ever known; manufacturers especially were driven to the limit of their capacity. The purchases amounted to startling proportions. Wages were increased so that the workman shared in a measure in the general prosperity. Three advances were made, each time approximating 10 per cent. The workmen are paid on a sliding schedule thus benefiting by the rise in the value of the product they make. Never have workmen received such wages as are now being paid to the workmen of America. But over against this increase in wages must be considered the increase in the cost of living, and also the base line, or average wage in days before the war upon which these increases are figured. Hours are still very long and no process has been devised for making the work very much easier or less wearing upon the individual worker. Investigators who made their report in 1912 said that during the year 1910, the period covered by their investigation, 29 per cent. of the employees in the blast furnaces and steel works and rolling-mills ordinarily worked seven days a week; 24 per cent. worked eighty-four hours or more a week. This means a twelve-hour day seven days a week.

These long hours were not confined to the men in the blast-furnace department, where there is a real necessity for continual toil, but to a large extent to the other departments, where no such necessity existed, except the necessity of making all the profits possible from the workers. When the shift was made from day to night work or from night to day work, the employees making the shift were required to remain on duty without relief for periods of from eighteen to twenty-four hours consecutively. No one can visit a steel-mill and not feel that there is something merciless in the way the workers are being goaded by invisible forces to keep their speed at the topmost notch. The very nature of the work is such that men are forced to labor at high tension. The mill stops for nothing either day or night. “You must draw or be dragged to death,” said one of the workers.

A steel employee in South Chicago made good wages but was a hard drinker and with his companions spent most of the evenings in the saloons so that there was rarely a night that he went to bed sober. A friend of the family had a chance to talk with him about the situation and tried to argue with him to show him the folly of drinking. His reply was, “Why, who cares? The mill drives me all the day long and dries me all up. I have to draw, draw, draw, or be dragged. By the end of the day there is only one thing that I want and that is beer.”