[125 years ago this week, the United States Steel Corporation was created. That was and remains one of the most striking moments of incorporation in American history, but it’s far from alone, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of moments and contexts for that subject. Leading up to a special weekend post on our own, particularly fraught moment!]
On three telling moments in the history of one of America’s largest corporations (not including the ongoing present moment, on which more this weekend).
In 1911, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States (1911) had effectively broken up that monopolistic corporation (on which more tomorrow), the Taft administration decided to pursue a similar application of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to U.S. Steel. That second case, United States v. United States Steel Corporation, was filed in 1911 but not decided by the Supreme Court until 1920—and in that decision, although the majority did agree that the 1901 U.S. Steel merger had in some key ways violated the Sherman Act, that majority nonetheless insulated U.S. Steel from liability and upheld the merger. I’ll let legal historian William H. Page explain how the Court threaded that particular needle, but will quote here his conclusion (with which I certainly agree) that the decision “caused lasting harm to the American economy by making the crucial steel industry less competitive.” Both U.S. Steel and the 20th century might have looked very different had the Court ruled differently in this crucial case.
Half a century later, U.S. Steel’s continued existence likewise negatively affected the fight for racial integration in the South. As Douglas Blackmon argues in his book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War Two (2008), U.S. Steel had long been one of the corporations benefitting most aggressively from convict labor in the Jim Crow South. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the company aggressively resisted the Civil Rights Movement’s integration efforts, as illustrated by the influential mid-century U.S. Steel President Roger M. Blough, who according to historian Dan Carter in 1963 “went out of his way to announce that any attempt to use his company position in Birmingham to pressure local whites was ‘repugnant to me personally’ and ‘repugnant to my fellow officers at U.S. Steel.’” I argued in Monday’s post that American corporations have far too consistently allied themselves with white supremacist exclusion, and I’m not sure there’s a clearer example than U.S. Steel during the Civil Rights era.
A couple decades after that, U.S. Steel was at the center of a different but equally telling political and social controversy. When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, he and his Republican Congressional allies made it a priority to offer tax breaks and other governmental incentives to American corporations like U.S. Steel; those incentives allowed U.S. Steel to expand its monopoly even further, such as with its 1982 merger with Marathon Oil (which saved U.S. Steel $500 million in taxes thanks to these federal tax breaks). Senator Arlen Specter, a chief author of those tax breaks, argued that “we go out on a limb in Congress and we feel they should be putting it in steel.” But I think folk singer-songwriter Anne Feeney said it best about this particular era and its policies, in her 2003 “U.S. Steal Song” (from her album Union Maid). If, as I argued in Tuesday’s post, one foundational model for American corporations has been that they are a public good, U.S. Steel has to be located at the exact opposite end of the spectrum: as a corporation that actively and aggressively opposes the public good in order to further its monopolistic methods.
Last incorporation context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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