Mill & Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century by H. Lee Scamehorn (review)

242 Canadian Reviewof American Studies nothing else, he is perhaps the best corrective we have against ideologically minded cultural critics like Sacvan Bercovitch. The pragmatic centre of Gunn's thesis-that the need these days is for discourse looking to the empirical necessities of self, culture, and community rather than arbitrary ideological or theological certainties yielding more beat than light-seems to me, when the dust has settled, well worth asserting, if only in the interests of a useful enlargement of critical debate. As Emily Dickinson had it, "Better an ignis fatuus/Than no illume at all." Robert Adolph York University •••••• H. Lee Scamehorn. Mill & Mine: The CF&I in the Twentieth Century. Llncoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Pp. x + 247, illustrations, bibliography, and index. Professor Scamehorn has written a solid corporate history of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) in Pueblo, Colorado, a follow-up to his 1976 book, Pioneer Steelmaker: The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1872-1903 (Pruett Publishing). Colorado Fuel and Iron is famous for being a part of the vast Rockefeller economic empire, and most particularly for the brutally violent strike at its Ludlow facilities, in 1913.Of great interest to Canadians is that as a result of that strike, they brought in William Lyon McKenzie King, former labour minister and future prime minister of Canada, who devised a revolutionary employee representation plan for the company . Scamehorn covers all of this territory, and much more. CF&I, although a rather small firm in comparison to eastern giants like U. S. Steel, Bethlehem, and Republic was, nonetheless, a giant in the Rocky Mountain West. Also a large producer of coal and coke, CF&I employed 16,000,as early 1903.In the early years, the majority of these were European immigrants, the greatest number from Italy, but by World War II they had been displaced by Latinos, mostly of Mexican descent. At about the same time, the Rockefeller family sold their interest in the firm, and it was taken over by a Wall Street syndicate. That group attempted to make CF&I a national steelmaker, pursuing an ambitious strategy of technological innovation into the 1960s.In 1969,the company was sold again, this time to a New York conglomerate, but the new owners did not fare well. The great implosion of the American steel industry ensued, and it was all management could do to keep CF&I afloat. They downsized rapidly, closing furnaces and mines, and selling sur- BookReviews 243 plusproperty. By the 1980s,the firm, by then called CF&I Steel Corporation, was no longer an integrated operator. Makingits steel from scrap in electric furnaces, it wasstill a significant producer, and the largest employer in the Pueblo area. It is a storyof challenge and response for the firm throughout the century, a story that Scamehorn tells clearly and well. There are two aspects of this book that command broader attention. First, it concerns one of the "non-core" firms in the steel industry. Nearly every study, with the exception of my own (Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820-.1920, Ohio State University Press, 1991) and one by Mansel Blackford (A PortraitCast in Steel: Buckeye International and Columbus, Ohio, 1881-1980, Greenwood Press, 1982) has focused on the giants of the industry. Scamehom's analysis givesyet another view of the ability of smaller firms to adapt and change with the market;to transcend the mandates of mass production and "throughput" that Alfred Chandler has lionized (see, for example, Chandler's The VisibleHand: The ManagerialRevolution in American, Harvard University Press, 1977).The other element of importance is the view of the "Ludlow massacre," and of labour-management relations generally in the industry, from the standpoint of management rather than labour. As far as I know, all previous works have tended to side almost completely withlabour in these confrontations (see especially, Howard M. Gitelman, Legacy of theLudlow Massacre: A Chapter inAmerican Industrial Relations, University of Philadelphia Press, 1988).Scamehorn is perhaps too uncritical of the firm in its handling of these labour matters, and I doubt that he will manage to convince most labour historians of his stand, but it nonetheless stands as an important corrective to the existingliterature. It is, all and all, a very good and useful...