And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline and Fall of the American Steel Industry

by John Hoerr

• Choice 1988 Outstanding Academic Book
• Named one of the Best Business Books of 1988 by USA Today A veteran reporter of American labor analyzes the spectacular and tragic collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s. John Hoerr’s account of these events stretches from the industrywide barganing failures of 1982 to the crippling work stoppage at USX (U.S. Steel) in 1986-87. He interviewed scores of steelworkers, company managers at all levels, and union officials, and was present at many of the crucial events he describes. Using historical flashbacks to the origins of the steel industry, particularly in the Monongahela Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania, he shows how an obsolete and adversarial relationship between management and labor made it impossible for the industry to adapt to shattering changes in the global economy.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Economics, American History, Business

736 pages, Paperback

First published July 6, 1988

Reviews

[Kyra · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first moved to Pittsburgh in 1990, 26 years ago (!) I bought this book. It had been published just a few years before and I thought reading it would give me insight into the place. But, at 620 pages it was a daunting prospect. I got pregnant with my first child shortly thereafter and the time to read -- especially books like this -- dwindled as my family grew.

So, several years of an empty nest later I finally picked it up. And I'm so glad I did. It is a fantastic read. Perhaps not a page turner for most people, but if you have a curiosity about the rise and fall of industrial America, and wonder what happened to turn the steel belt into the rust belt, it is a fascinating and reliable journalistic account.

Now, these many years later my intimacy with this place inspired a close reading; as if it were the biography of a relative. I work for my adopted city now. On the river fronts that once housed the steel mills and the jobs of hundreds of thousands, I help the City build office parks and shopping centers. I look at economic and population statistics and trends routinely as part of my job. So, this book provided insight into the power structures of the region that I work to redevelop, and the communities along the Monongahela River valley that I now know so well.

What is just as interesting even if you don't live here is Hoerr's insights into management and political philosophies of the leaders of the companies and the unions. His thesis; when management disregards the innovative and collaborative potential of it's labor force that labor force disconnects from the basic economics of the industry, and this disconnect is poisonous when the economics of the business falters. Management also gets entrenched in power struggles. Labor and management get invested not in the prosperity of the company, but in their relationship as adversaries across a bargaining table. Too obsessed with preserving wage and benefits structures of a time of prosperity, labor won battles without realizing it was in a war. Management was too heavy handed and authoritarian to appeal to its labor leadership and its members as partners in the health and longevity of the business. Everyone lost. Especially the communities where steel is produced, who continue all these years later to be challenged by these gigantic losses that the end of major manufacturing wrought on the Mon Valley and beyond.

I thought every one of those 620 pages was worth reading. Hoerr is not a terrific writer, but he is a terrific journalist with an attention to detail and a keen analytical mind. He cares deeply about the Mon Valley where he grew up, but picks no sides. There's enough fault to go around in his telling. Everyone he writes about is called to account in the failure of his lifetime. The book is a cautionary tale about the abuse of power, the failure to innovate and be flexible, and the "ostrich" impulses of a parochial politic leadership which plays bingo while Rome burns. The scale of the defeat is as big as the prosperity it once treated as god given. Labor's victory over the companies lasted merely a generation. And it's losses continue to ripple through the Pittsburgh landscape to this very day.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading this massive, fact-packed tome on and off since the end of grad school (2012). There's simply no better labor book: Hoerr, a long-time financial reporter, had been on the scene for 25 years by the time And the Wolf Finally Came dropped in 1988. The book is quote-filled and at times engagingly written, but the devil is in the details, namely his treatment of the 1980s labor negotiations between the steel companies and the USW. Owing to that Good Work, we've got a permanent record of bad, blundering, ill-timed, etc. decisions by all involved, regardless of Hoerr's occasional "boosterism" (as a native of the Pittsburgh region and even a summer "casual" at the plants back in the day, he remained hopeful that profit-sharing, employee ownership, labor-management participation could help salvage the industry, which of course they couldn't).

I buckled down and pushed through the past 200 pages in about a week, off and on between working and reading all these other books, and let me tell you: Hoerr did the lord's work here, because it's unlikely these long stretches of minutiae-packed material would've been better handled by an academic as against a veteran journalist with an expert-level understanding of labor and manufacturing.

That said, despite the excellent historical sections - very engaging, particularly when he's covering the development of Mon Valley manufacturing in the late 1800s/early 1900s and the battles in the 30s/40s to determine the future role of labor (cooperative? part of government? merely "labor" vs. management control (the result, for good or ill)) - this is a tedious book you should read only if you to get this material down cold (Wm Greider's similarly exhaustive Secrets of the Temple, on the Federal Reserve, is another inf0-packed slog I've been picking away at for years).

As a side note, this is arguably the "best" and best-reviewed book ever published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, was on US History comps lists in the Pitt PhD program as late as 2011-2012, and has been in print ever since it dropped. Yet...I'm reasonably sure Hoerr made very little off the book, royalties-wise, but I suppose that wasn't the point. Instead, the book offers a good example of how to take a massive heap of interviewing and reporting accumulated over a working career, a career of paid bylines, and then compile that stuff into a "definitive" treatment that will remain on the market for ages. Of course, there are points (surprisingly few!) when it's clear this was "present-focused" magazine writing, as when quotes are in the present tense ("he says" vs "he said" despite this occurring in '82, etc.) or sections on proposed reforms end with the sort of speculative, hopeful flourishes found in article "kickers," only to have these topics revisited as glaring failures, sans explanation, in subsequent chapters.

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts of this book were good - the author grew up in Post-World War II Mon Valley, and describes life and culture in the Unionized steel towns vividly and with an obvious affection. Further, it provided the best narrative of the decline of the US steel industry in the 1970's and 80's I've found - but that's a qualified statement. The book puts the Union/Management negotiations under the microscope, analyzing every detail, every personality quirk with the obsessive detail of a sports-news reporter filling up that hour and half before the game starts. This obsessive detail comes at the great omission of the larger economic forces causing deindustrialization in the global north, both economic and political. Further, the author condescendingly marginalizes and writes off the non-union social movements that happened in and around Pittsburgh as tens of thousands of Union jobs were lost; instead, he seems to imply, all those jobs would have been saved were it not for the 1959 Steel Strike and the 1986 lockout - if only labor and management had worked together, he seems to say, if only, then the Mon Valley would be buzzing still.

Again, a good narrative and interesting account of the death of the Mon Valley, told without a larger perspective that would answer the larger question, "why?"

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was an amazing book if you are from Pittsburgh and grew up or lived thru the decline.

[Slow Reader]

dry at points but gives a flavour of what living through the fall of US steel was like for the workers who lived it

[Harriett Milnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in sixth grade, My Weekly Reader had a story about the steel strike in Pittsburgh. Although I lived in Pittsburgh, it was a shock to realize that NEWS was happening in Pittsburgh, not in Washington D.C. or NYC.
When I started this "tome", I had no idea that "Labor History" was a field of study.
So, I can't say I Really Enjoyed this book. But it is very well researched and looks at all the reasons for the Decline of the American Steel Industry. Very well done.
One day before I finished it, President Trump announced tariffs on foreign producers of steel and aluminum.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book thoroughly although I was at times exhausted by the level of detail in it. It is also a useful book at this point in time when Donald Trump is promising the restoration of the American steelmaking and coal mining industries. It is worthwhile to recall the reasons that led to the massive contraction in American steelmaking during the 1980s and afterwards. The author apportions blame to both the management of steel companies as well as to the United Steelworkers union. Both grew complacent during the 40s, 50s and 60s when the major steel companies in America operated under cartel like conditions. When competition eventually came from both foreign steelmakers as well as non-unionized minimills in the U.S. they were caught completely unprepared.

[Keane George · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extremely detailed book on the downfall of the U.S. Steel industry and specifically Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley region. I personally enjoyed the sections about the history of the industry and the narratives of what these steel towns were like in their heyday. After spending some time in these towns, it’s devastating and difficult to imagine them as the once vibrant communities they once were.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extensive, but insightful, history of American manufacturing using steel as the focus.

[Kraft · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book attempts to chronicle the decline of the American steel industry. The author focuses on labor negotiations during the 1980's, work stoppages during the 1980's and a detailed account of the USW election to replace the deceased Roger McBride. During the course of the book, he digresses into some USW history and the history of various mill towns along the Monongahela River. He also spends a good deal of space with numerous digressions into the activities of other unions, including the UMW, the UAW and the air traffic controller strike of 1981. The book, with footnotes, covers 680 pages. During these 680 pages, the author completely misses the point. The reader gets 680 pages of trees and almost no forest.

The book is flawed in two major respects.

(1) The American steel industry collapsed basically for one reason - the wages that the companies were forced to pay were at least $10.00 higher than the market could bear and $10.00 higher than a level at which the companies could compete with foreign steel makers. The American steel industry had dealt with this problem for decades and continuously lost market share to foreign competition. While the $10.00 number can be found in the book in a discussion of labor negotiations at one point, the author spent most of the book attempting to work around the issue of union wages and their effect upon competition. The author spent 680 pages trying to distract from this one basic issue. Had he dealt with the issue head on, the author could have saved hundreds of pages. Other book length studies have demonstrated the industry decline with a few charts and graphs related to wages, costs and other measurable factors.

(2) The author several times tried to blame the decline on "Reaganomics." He made these passing references despite several citations in the book to massive layoffs during the 1970's - a decade in which Reagan was not yet president. Despite hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the 1970's, the author acted as if everything was fine until Reagan lowered taxes in 1981, thus causing the closure of many plants. No one can make that claim explicitly, so the author stretched the story out with digressions and needless details about negotiations and union elections. This book was written in time for the 1988 elections. It would have been more informative had the author eschewed politics and focused on causes and effects.

To understand the decline, one must focus on the steel strike of 1959 and the layoffs and closings of the 1970's. The author references these events only in passing before continuing on his heavily footnoted narrative of the battles of the 1980's. By the 1980's, those battles were the equivalent of survivors fighting each other over the last can of beans after a nuclear war. The mills were down to their last few employees fighting over how much of their previous gains to give back in order to save the remnants of the industry. One does not explain the war by narrating the battle over the survivors' rations that takes place among the rubble.

[Lis Kovach · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent textbook complete with all details of the steel industry. However, there were a lot of names, places, and details that do overwhelm the reader. I came away from this with a new understanding of the relationship between management and union leadership, and learned that the actual steelworkers were pawns. What could possibly go wrong when male egotistical leadership in a corporation meets greedy men who head up a union? Butting heads got workers eliminated and an entire industry went bankrupt. Do you think unions are a good thing? Read this book and find out.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A balanced appraisal from a different angle of the decimation of the US steel industry in the latter half of the 20th Century. Well worth a read for economists & historians alike.

[Bimus · Rating 4 out of 5]

In depth coverage of the process and decline of one of America's monolithic industries.