If one was to drive up Broadway (the main street) in Gary, Indiana, probably not a recommended thing these days, although my mother and sisters used to do their Christmas shopping there saying it was just as good as the ‘Miracle Mile’ in Chicago, one would get to the 0 block, and then one would get to 1 North Broadway. When you got there you would find the main gate of United States Steel, Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in the world.
It was built to be such, at a time when US Steel already produced more steel than Great Britain, in 1906. US Steel also built Gary, itself, for its workers, and the city’s fortunes gained with the mill, and then declined with it.
Why Gary? Because it was close to the railroad superhub of Chicago, with a usable lakeshore on Lake Michigan for the ore freighters from the Missabe Range in Minnesota (like the Edmund Fitzgerald), and railroads like the Nickle Plate and the Pennsylvania could economically bring the coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. A good share of the steel would go on to Detroit to build American cars and trucks, mostly by rail.
This was the world that J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie designed: utilitarian, efficient, huge, and yes, a bit depersonalizing. In my first post here, I commented on driving through here back in the early sixties, when the flares from the mills illuminated the skies like hell itself.
But even then, things were changing. European and Japanese mills were starting to export steel to the US, not least because their mills were more modern and efficient. They should have been, they were built in the fifties, not least because of American aid, and their protective tariffs, which we allowed to subsidize their recovery from World War II.
And that is what President Trump is trying to fix, the unfair tariffs which have hobbled American business ever since World War Two. How’s he doing? I’d say, not too badly.
From Breitbart:
U.S. Steel has announced that they will invest $750 million at their 110-year-old steel manufacturing plant known as Gary Works in Gary, Indiana, crediting President Trump’s protective tariffs on steel imports.
What was once the largest steel mill in the world will now get a $750 million facelift thanks to Trump’s 25 percent tariff on all imported steel into the United States, designed to protect American industries and jobs from being outsourced.
In a statement this week, U.S. Steel executives said they would be revitalizing the Indiana plant which employs about 3,800 American workers, the Chicago Tribune noted.
While U.S. Steel executives say they are not yet planning to increase the number of jobs at the Indiana plant, U.S. Steel Corp. President and CEO David Burritt said the company is “experiencing a renaissance” because of Trump’s tariffs.
Now mind, it will never be as it was back in the day when reports of guys earning $20 an hour for leaning on a broom were believed, in a country where the minimum wage was $2 an hour. That world where America had 50+% of gross world product, and most of the world’s steel capacity, is gone forever.
But American workers are amongst the best in the world, and we can compete with anybody in the world, given an at least fairly level field.
And that is what this trade policy is about. It’s not about increasing corporate treasuries, or boosting Wall Street, although it probably will do that.
It about putting America back to work, doing productive things, not shuffling through the wreckage. I can remember in the Eighties when I was working on air conditioning systems for contractors who were tearing down USS South Works, which had the only rolling mill in the world that could roll the armor for the Iowa class battleships. That entire mill is gone. Killed by the Unions, poor management, and foreign competition, not to mention newer processes, such as used by Nucorp, now the largest American producer.
And that too is necessary and proper. Capitalism is, above all, a force that working through free markets forces us to do our best or fall behind. Sometimes we call it “creative destruction”. That’s an accurate term, the old has to give way to the newer, better way of doing necessary things. Just as the Conestoga gave way to the railroad which in turn gave way to the airplane and the automobile.
We can long for a simpler, slower time, and many of us do, but I doubt we’d want to live there, knee deep in horse dung, and working at least dawn to dusk. or at least, I wouldn’t.
MAGA indeed, a new and improved (still again) America.