City of Steel: How Pittsburgh Became the World’s Steelmaking Capital during the Carnegie Era by Kenneth J. Kobus (review)

Kenneth J. Kobus’s City of Steel is a straightforward, chronological examination of how the ferrous metals industry in Pittsburgh came to dominate not only the regional economy of western Pennsylvania, but also the national and international iron and steel market. An essential premise of the work is that Pittsburgh appears only in hindsight to be the natural capital of steelmaking in America. Kobus reminds us that many other steel centers, including those in Chicago and throughout Ohio, had ready access to coal, as did Pittsburgh firms, and were even closer to the major iron ore-producing region of the Upper Midwest. If Pittsburgh enjoyed no special geographic advantage, asks Kobus, why did it dominate the field? The author highlights two factors in the story of Pittsburgh steel: technology and the man who most effectively employed that technology, Andrew Carnegie.

The link between mill technology and Carnegie is seemingly inextricable, yet Kobus suggests that his company’s dominance is too often attributed to a rigorous regime of cost accounting that squeezed every possible cent from his workers and, by extension, their families and communities. The reality is more complicated, according to Kobus, and centers around Carnegie’s ability to (a) cultivate partnerships with competent managers while pushing aside those unable to adjust to Carnegie’s vision, (b) wring efficiencies from older but still-relevant technologies in ways his competitors seemed unable to match, and (c) adopt critical technologies at the right moment. The last factor, Carnegie’s almost preternatural ability to install machinery when it was most needed, was an undeniable example of the fusion of innovation and will; new technology is useless to a business unless the will to implement the technology exists. Carnegie provided that will and his competitors often had little choice but to follow his lead or fail, conditions that ultimately led to Pittsburgh steel firms’ technological edge over other areas.

Kobus, a third-generation steelworker who worked himself up to executive status at US Steel, is at his best describing the technical operations of a steel mill. He included dozens of photographs of mills and their machinery as well as schematics of the most important pieces. The importance of the technology to the narrative Kobus weaves challenges the reader to conceptualize the evolution of steelmaking across the industry, and not simply as it occurred within Carnegie Steel. As technically detailed as the book is, Kobus keeps his narrative confined strictly to the business of steel and pays scant attention to the workers, families, and communities who hosted Carnegie’s mills and made his fortune. The environmental, health, and socioeconomic consequences of concentrating such a high degree of pollution and power in the hands of so few is not contemplated, and indeed Kobus did not set out to examine such messy details; his is a book about hero industrialists and technology triumphant, not the degradation inflicted on the little guy and their loved ones. However, readers interested in the social history of the Pittsburgh region will profit from the insights they gain by reading a narrow technical history of steelmaking and, according to Kobus, the one man—Carnegie—who most shaped the world of the mills and the world that sat in the shadow of the mills.