In journalistic and scholarly narratives of deindustrialization and globalization, the U.S. steel industry looms large. There are good reason for this. Between 1974 and 1986 employment in the American steel industry fell by 300,000, more than 600 steelmaking facilities closed, and some of the world’s largest steel corporations went bankrupt. Not only was this a period of acute economic pain, it was also a period of fierce debate about trade and the role and responsibilities of corporations and federal government in sustaining heavy industry.
In telling the story of the U.S. steel industry’s travails, most political and business historians have focused on the immediate post-war period and the decades in which the sector continued to expand and report large profits. In so doing, they have argued that the U.S. steel industry’s decline was not the inevitable consequence of short-term business cycles or market forces, but the product of thirty-years of corporate decision-making. While there are grains of truth to this analysis, this focus on the 1950s and 1960s combined with a desire to rush stories to their modern-day endpoint has helped to produce a narrative of the steel industry’s contemporary history that is far too straightforward and too smooth.
Drawing on archival research from corporate, political, and social movement archives, this paper will examine the restructuring of the U.S. steel industry during the 1970s and 1980s. By taking this approach, it illustrate how explore how one of the largest sectors of the economy were reshaped as a result of differing views about the roles and responsibilities of the state and market, ideas about the causes of industrial decline and local and regional activism. As a result, this paper will tell the neglected story of how local, regional, national, and international discussions over trade policy, corporate responsibility, and investment decisions during the 1970s and 1980s determined the shape of steel making in North America in the 21st century.