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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253222886 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2011 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Gary, the Most American of All American Cities
By Stephen Paul O'Hara
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Stephen Paul O'HaraAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35598-0
CHAPTER 1
"An Industrial Utopia"
THE SEARCH FOR INDUSTRIAL ORDER
The United States Steel Corporation had ensured that its process of converting large shipments of coal and iron ore into finished steel was fast, efficient, and seamless. Great care had gone into the planning of its newest production center in Gary, Indiana, so that no unnecessary movement, wasted energy, or pause in production would mar the creation of steel. The entire process started at the ore dock where, in an artificial canal 22 feet deep and 250 feet wide and lined with massive concrete retaining walls, the ore steamers from Duluth, Minnesota, would disgorge their content with the help of large unloading machines. Traveling conveyor bridges then moved the product into storage yards that were designed to hold enough supply to keep the mills running during the winter months when lake navigation was suspended. Moving through elevated storage bins via transfer cars and electric gates, the iron ore, along with limestone and coke, made its way into the massive blast furnaces, which baked the substance with high temperature gases. The blast furnace, which was continuously in operation, varied in temperature from the cool top with its newly added ingredients to the hot molten iron at its bottom. As the combination of ore, coke, and limestone heated, it descended in the furnace and slag floated to the top. This by-product was drawn off and either placed in the slag heap (which would eventually be used as lake fill for future expansion) or turned into pig metal. From taps in the bottom of the furnace the molten iron was removed and hauled away in 40-ton ladles. Each furnace at Gary had a capacity of 450 tons.
From there the molten iron was poured into several mixers before it traveled through Gary's open-hearth furnace. Here the mixture was subjected to the intense heat of burning gases passing over it. Much like the Bessemer process, the open hearth burned off the impurities of the metal and created the stronger product of steel. Once the metal met the standards of the grade the mill was producing that day, the molten steel was poured into ingot molds and allowed to cool into a solid state. From there the steel was moved into either one of the billet mills, where the ingots were rolled into smaller and more manageable sizes, or it moved into a rail mill where massive steel rails were rolled directly from the ingot without the necessity of reheating the steel. The rail mill at Gary was capable of making 4,000 tons of 80-pound rails in twenty-four hours.
Here was both the simplicity and awe-inspiring scale of the process of making steel in Gary. Starting from the shipping basin on the eastern side of the complex, the mixture of ingredients would flow westward from the blast furnace to the open-hearth furnace to the finishing mills. This process does not even take into account the massive power plant, the blower plant, and the complex system to trap, cleanse, and reuse the hot gases from the blast furnace. All quite efficient, all modernized and mechanized, and seemingly dehumanized. The above tour of the steel mills at Gary comes from Scientific American's 1909 description of the newest steel center. The article makes no mention of the steelworkers involved in the process. Rather, it would seem that steel made itself. The magazine revels in the dehumanized passive voice: for instance, before the steel can be poured into the ingots, "the proper amount of ferromanganese is added to the metal in each ladle and then they are picked up by 125-ton traveling cranes and carried to the platform, from which by opening a plug in the bottom the molten steel is poured." The only mention of human involvement by Scientific American is the operator of the transfer cars that bring the raw material into the blast furnace, yet even then "the operator merely starts the skip on its journey. Its journey up the incline and the halt at the charging platform above are purely automatic."
The efficiency, integration, and technological innovation of the new Gary mill were fitting symbols for this new system of industry. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the size of potential markets and the scale of production grew rapidly. American industry began to reinvent itself in terms of centralization. This new system wove together massive production, rapid transportation, and expanding markets into a tightly locked network dominated by massive companies. It was an era of rapid growth and heavy industrialization. Much of this growth was made possible by the expansion of industrial technology and invention. For steel in particular, the development of the Bessemer process and the open hearth made production faster, cheaper, and larger in scale.
One of the industrialists leading this process in steel was Andrew Carnegie. For Carnegie there were three key principles to steel production. The first was an obsession with efficiency. With reduced costs, such as keeping the steel molten through constant production, came higher profits. Equally important was keeping the cost of labor low. Second, Carnegie readily encouraged cutthroat competition both in terms of price with his competitors and with production within his plants. These two concerns allowed Carnegie to survive the "price war" within steel in 1897. Third, and perhaps most important, Carnegie was always looking for expansion, in terms of steel production and its subsidiaries, including coal and iron mines and rail lines. By the turn of the century, Carnegie's company had come to dominate the American steel industry. The consolidation of Carnegie's steel empire with J. P. Morgan's banking interests, which created the U.S. Steel Corporation in 1901, only further consolidated this domination.
At its creation, U.S. Steel immediately became a major force in steel production. It contained over 200 companies and nearly 1,000 miles of railroad track, and it produced two-thirds of all American steel. Its value exceeded $1 billion, making it the first major American corporation in an era of rapid consolidation and corporate mergers. In addition, the corporation was an economic giant in Chicago. It controlled one-third of all the shipping tonnage on the Great Lakes and had a massive 330-acre steel plant in South Chicago. However, as the corporation began to examine ways to expand its production, it looked across the border at northwest Indiana. Not only did the Calumet Region promise nearly limitless land for expansion and growth, but relocation still placed the corporation on the major East Coast trunk lines and the Lake Michigan shipping lanes to the Mesabi iron range of Minnesota. To avoid the speculative boom that followed rumors of meatpacking relocation, U.S. Steel began secretly purchasing lakefront land in the Calumet Region to build its newest mill.
When U.S. Steel arrived in Indiana in 1906, however, it was not the first industry in the region. Rather, the Calumet Region of northwestern Indiana already had a long and complicated history with industrialization. All of the trunk lines that terminated in Chicago ran through Lake County, Indiana, making the space an attractive site for industrial expansion. The first large-scale industry of the region was the meatpacking plant of George Hammond. Having developed a system of refrigerating rail cars, Hammond was able to pack and send fresh meat from the Midwest to the urban markets of the East without the meat spoiling. This immediately made him a player in the meat market, yet Hammond was shut out of the Union Stockyards by the meatpacking trust that was emerging in Chicago. Hammond's response was to move across the state line into Indiana. In 1869 he opened the State Line Slaughterhouse in the city of Hammond, Indiana.
Over the next several decades, other industries, including the Inland Steel Company in East Chicago and Standard Oil in Whiting, would follow the same pattern of capital relocation. In 1890, as meatpackers in Chicago battled with the city over regulations, a rumor of an impending relocation led to an upsurge in land speculation throughout the county as people prepared for another major move. Despite these industrial relocations, however, the population of the region remained modest. In 1880, the county had a population of 15,000. By 1900, the number would be only 38,000. This, of course, would change with the arrival of U.S. Steel.
Despite its effort to move out of Chicago and transform seemingly empty space into a steel production center, U.S. Steel was cautious in limiting the expectations others may have had about the newest city of Gary. While the company was happy to have people talk about the display of industrial might and scientific planning, the official rhetoric about the city stressed that it was not a social experiment. Often plans for new industrial spaces such as Pullman, Illinois, brought expectations of utopian benevolence and social responsibility. (Workers, of course, felt quite differently about cities such as Pullman.) U.S. Steel felt no such obligation in designing Gary. This did not stop observers such as Henry Fuller of Harper's Weekly from declaring the newest site an industrial utopia. Here was a city not only made from scratch by a powerful corporation but also made to order. The construction of Gary was not simply capital relocation but an opportunity for vast expansion and efficient production. Unlike the rest of the Calumet Region, which had long been industrialized, Gary caught the attention of observers such as Henry Fuller because of its scale, its intricate planning, and its seemingly limitless possibilities. It was not just U.S. Steel's newest plant but also the corporation's opportunity to create industrial order. For many, the significance of Gary's construction was the evolution of utopian dreams that accompanied the spectacular industrial and urban growth of the Gilded Age.
"MONOTONOUSLY PATTERNED IN THE IMAGE OF COKETOWN": THE MEANING OF INDUSTRIAL UTOPIA
In its form as well as its meaning, Gary was a continuation of as well as a dramatic change from the utopian language and experiments of the early nineteenth century. Most of these utopian ideals emerged as the processes of market expansion and industrial modernization were just beginning. Thus some utopianists tried to reject industry and create a close-knit community, others tried to craft a more equitable form of industrialism, and still others embraced an industrial future but sought order through concrete planning. The question of utopia served as a critique of industry, modernization, and the sense of change and chaos. It was a fantasy of different options and different outcomes.
The earliest form of industrial utopianism was a rejection of both the metropolis and the market as well as a critique of modern social relations. In the United States, such communalist utopias often centered on religion and religious community. Thus there was the experimental community of Oneida which rejected not only the role of market individualism but also private property and Victorian marriage. The Pietists of Harmony, Indiana, removed themselves from the larger society in order to create a perfect and homogeneous community. When he took over the failing Harmony community and transformed it into New Harmony, Robert Owen embraced a different principle of utopian communities. Instead of rejecting machines, he tried to fix the inequalities of the market and create a different form of industrialism. What these utopias envisioned was not a pre-industrial religious community but rather a more fair and equal modern society, yet one still small in scale and communal in purpose.
Likewise, the designers of Lowell sought to combine republican community and industrial production within a pastoral setting. Many Americans of the early republic were enamored by the wealth and power that industrialization promised. But they were also concerned by what they saw as the dangerous, immoral, and nonrepublican conditions of English industrial cities, especially Manchester. American critics of such cities feared both industrial conditions, such as the permanent working class of Irish immigrants including men, women, and children, and the urban conditions of smoke, crowded housing, and vice districts. Instead of disordered industrial cities, American industrialists hoped to create republican centers of pre-industrial order within pastoral settings. Thus when planning their new industrial center of Lowell, the Boston Associates intentionally tried to infuse the city with republican virtues (including a rotating workforce of young women) and natural surroundings so as not to create industrial classes, poverty, pollution, and moral decay. By the 1840s, however, Lowell manufacturers had already begun to hire Irish laborers, including children, for lower wages.
By the second half of the nineteenth century the ideologies of industrial modernity, which demanded massive scale and technological advancements, challenged the pastoral and communal assumptions of utopianism. Thus many utopianists such as Étienne Cabet did not envision small close-knit communities but rather used utopian planning to model a better future. Cabet's cities were to be large and modern, yet clean and ordered. By the end of the nineteenth century, this brand of broad utopianism would be the basic blueprint for experiments like Pullman, Illinois. Planned to manufacture luxury Pullman sleeping cars, the city of Pullman combined large-scale industrial production with reformist efforts toward the betterment of the workers who resided there. By controlling every aspect of the city, George Pullman attempted to eliminate industrial strife and social conflict through sanitation, education, and moral uplift. Yet it was this paternalistic control, combined with a series of wage cuts, which triggered a devastating strike in 1894. For a city which assumed that labor unrest could not occur within its planned environment, the strike shook the foundations of the experiment.
The creators of Gary, drawing on the lessons of Pullman and other utopian failures, made no such assumptions. Having witnessed Pullman's demise, their fundamental expectation in planning Gary was that industrial strife and social conflict were inevitable by-products of modernization. Moreover, the planners of U.S. Steel were clearly interested in learning from the Homestead strike of 1892. During that strike Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick turned their steel mill into a fortified stronghold by constructing a 12-foot-high fence around the plant, with rifle holes at useful intervals. As the failures of paternalism and order in Pullman soured the experience of paternalistic planning for industrialists, many began to turn to the model offered by Carnegie and Homestead. A militarized factory came to represent order far more than a pastoral factory. The builders of such factories and their surrounding cities seemed not to be interested in the democratic community of middle-class reformers, the networks and interests of workers, or even the paternalism of planned industrialism. Rather, industrialism in the twentieth century was to be centered upon uninterrupted production and profits. The building of Gary came to represent both the culmination of the industrial utopia and its demise.
By 1922, Lewis Mumford would eulogize these efforts at utopia. Grand utopian schemes had failed precisely because they were so grand, disconnecting them, he would argue, from any social reality. Utopian thinkers had failed to catch Thomas More's playful pun in creating "utopia." It was a place caught in between outopia (nothingness) and eutopia (a good place): thus a utopia could never really exist. Efforts at reform had been "spotty and inconsecutive and incomplete." "It was not, let us remember, by any legislative device that the cities of the industrial age were monotonously patterned in the image of Coketown," he would say. "It was rather because everyone within these horrid centers accepted the same values and pursued the same ends." Far from a social ideal, industrial spaces "expressed the brutality and social disharmony of the community." Epitomizing the cultural pessimism of the 1920s as well as the shifting thought on utopias in the twentieth century, Mumford argued that utopias were not possible. Instead, we should borrow the methods of the utopianist thinker to "project an ideal community" but use it in a "practical way" to carve out smaller utopias where we could.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gary, the Most American of All American Cities by Stephen Paul O'Hara. Copyright © 2011 Stephen Paul O'Hara. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: "Built as It Is on Shifting Sand" 1
Part 1 Gary, the Magic City: Creation Myths
1 "An Industrial Utopia": The Search for Industrial Order 19
2 "Making a City to Order": U.S. Steel and the Building of an Industrial Center 38
Part 2 A City Built on Sand: Paradox and Meaning
3 "The Youngest City in the World": The Early Years of an Industrial Frontier 57
4 "The Gibraltar of the Steel Corporation": Narrative Meaning in a Steel Strike 74
5 "You're a Damned Liar-It's Utopia": Imagining Industrialism between the Wars 93
Part 3 The Very Model of Modern Urban Decay: Decline and Fall
6 "Gary Is a Steel City, Young, Lusty, Brawling": Declension Narratives about Gary 121
7 "Epitaph for a Model City": Race, Deindustrialization, and Dystopia 144
Conclusion: "In Search of America" 166
Notes 173
Selected Bibliography 187
Index 193
What People are Saying About This
"This book is a very good and delightful rendition of how Gary has been/is perceived by the media and those outside of its region."
This book is a very good and delightful rendition of how Gary has been/is perceived by the media and those outside of its region.
This book is a very good and delightful rendition of how Gary has been/is perceived by the media and those outside of its region.