Steel Remembered: Photographs from the LTV Steel Collection

We are accustomed to photographs of deserted, rusted, and decayed steel mills that graphically depict the nation's rust belt in decline. With this volume of remarkable photographs culled from the LTV Steel Collection, Christopher J. Dawson reminds us of the time when the steel industry was the nation's economic pacesetter. The Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS) acquired the collection, one of the largest collections of steel industry records in the United States, after the bankruptcy of LTV. In addition to print records, the collection includes thousands of photographs. For Steel Remembered, Dawson, who was curator of Urban and Industrial History at the WRHS, selected photographs of Republic Steel, Otis Steel, and Corrigan, McKinney Steel mills, most located in Ohio. Taken between 1910 and 1970 by unnamed photographers for company publications and records, the images are good examples of industrial photography and are interesting to business and labor historians.

A lively and informative preface describes the acquisition, processing, and distribution of the massive steel industry collection. A clearly written and instructive overview of the steelmaking process, past and present, follows. Three separate chapters then offer concise and straightforward business histories of each of the three firms—all of which became part of LTV—followed by photographs. The photos in the Corrigan, McKinney Steel chapter are of the building of the plant in 1914 and 1915. There is scant human activity in these monumental construction photographs, although in most at least one figure or automobile emphasizes the scale of the buildings. The photos of the Otis Steel mill are not the famous ones taken by photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. Shot by staff photographers for Otis Steel's in-house magazine, these photos nevertheless are important because they show workers as well as work processes in the 1930s. Interior shots of the mill include workers whose inadequate safety gear heightens the manifest danger of steel jobs. Work crew photos provide employees' names that call attention to diverse ethnic backgrounds. Two photographs on facing pages speak to racial segregation in the steel industry: on the left the blooming mill crew is all white; all the blooming mill slab yard workers on the right are black.

The Republic Steel chapter has stunning photos of blast furnace casts, Bessemer converter blasts, open hearth and electric furnace tappings, basic oxygen furnace charges, teeming, running ingots, and cold-rolled, coiled, and polished steel. Taken from the 1930s through the 1960s, these pictures document change over time. Open hearth furnaces and hot strip mills in the 1930s exposed workers to all kinds of dangers. But basic oxygen furnaces and other technological advances by the 1960s placed workers in control rooms where they observed rather than physically controlled the process.

Steel Remembered is neither labor history nor business history. The photographs that Christopher Dawson has selected, however, inform them. And this absorbing book should encourage scholars to use the LTV Steel Collection to write them.