Running Steel, Running America

by Stein, Judith

• ISBN13: 9780807847275
• ISBN10: 0807847275
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

The history of modern liberalism has been hotly debated in contemporary politics and the academy. Here, Judith Stein uses the steel industry--long considered fundamental to the U.S. economy--to examine liberal policies and priorities after World War II. In a provocative revision of postwar American history, she argues that it was the primacy of foreign commitments and the outdated economic policies of the state, more than the nation's racial conflicts, that transformed American liberalism from the powerful progressivism of the New Deal to the feeble policies of the 1990s. Stein skillfully integrates a number of narratives usually treated in isolation--labor, civil rights, politics, business, and foreign policy--while underscoring the state's focus on the steel industry and its workers. By showing how those who intervened in the industry treated such economic issues as free trade and the globalization of steel production in isolation from the social issues of the day--most notably civil rights and the implementation of affirmative action--Stein advances a larger argument about postwar liberalism. Liberal attempts to address social inequalities without reference to the fundamental and changing workings of the economy, she says, have led to the foundering of the New Deal state.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Politics Of Steel Fundamentalism: The Long 1950s

Birmingham Before and After King: Racial Change in Steel

The Strange Career of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Segregation of Racial and Economic Policies

Title VII in the Mills, Agencies, and Courts: Theories and Practices

Tales of Lackawanna and Sparrows Point: Implementing the Kerner Commission Report

Litigation Is Everything: The Nixon Years

The Limits of Fair Employment: The Consent Decrees and the Economic Crisis of the 1970s

U.S. Foreign and Domestic Policy in Steel: The Creation of Conflict, 1945-1974

The Locomotive Loses Power: Jimmy Carter's Industrial and Trade Policies

An Industrial Policy for Steel? The Decline of the Democratic Party

Steel Is Not So Fundamental: The Reagan Reconstruction and Contemporary America

Conclusion: Steel and the History of Postwar America

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Roger M. Blough and Benjamin F. Fairless

Industrial Birmingham

Howard Strevel

Temper mill at the TCI tin mill

Bruce Thrasher

David J. McDonald, David Feller, and Frank "Nordy" Hoffman

Bayard Rustin and I. W. Abel

E. B. Rich

Virgil L. Pearson and Fred Shepherd

"Soaked" ingot leaving pit

Sparrows Point, Maryland

Jerome Cooper

USWA picket line at Newport News Shipbuilding Company

Charging the basic oxygen furnace

Auto scrap for the electric furnace

Continuous casting of steel

Meyer Bernstein addresses Japanese steelworkers

Lloyd McBride at unfair trade rally

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.