FEAR VALLEY, U.S.A.
Gibbon, Russell W.
FEAR VALLEY, U.S.A. RUSSELL W. GIBBONS A form of industrial slaughter On Sunday, September 18, Lynn Pflug left his new home in Columbiania, a small town about 20 miles down the Mahoning River...
...Now that it is permissible to speak the unspeakable, Soap more than compensates for years of repression and euphemism...
...Bethlehem Steel Co...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 TELEVISION Somedaymprobably not in our lifetime--there will come a new television season that will not be greeted with moans of dismay and editorial hand-wringing...
...People still think that it's a bad dream, that the plant will reopen again," says Campbell Mayor Katula, "but I'm looking ahead to many years of hardship...
...They deal with industries like pieces on a checkerboard...
...The next day in Youngstown, the company announced that it was shutting down --and that 5,000 jobs would be wiped out...
...Centered around the mill, local taverns, ethnic social clubs, union halls and the churches, it has been seen by most planners and sociologists as a secure social base in what had always been considered as a stable basic industry, both symbolizing the strength of industrial America...
...Far from health, it exudes a kind of sickness, or some malady from which we must instinctively recoil...
...This is fear valley," said one of them as he left the Campbell Works for the last time in October...
...By devoting itself nearly exclusively to its notion of sex it has, inevitably, been applauded in the usual places, and has about it that air of self-congratulations so characteristic of low-minded pioneers...
...It is a positive orgy of liberated language...
...Only a skeleton maintenance and security force patrols the yards of what was the leading employer of the town for decades...
...The Lykes "view of the future of steel" was soon decided at the six-hour meeting presided over by Ferguson...
...Lambeth earned $198,514 in salary and cash iticentives, not including stock options, from Sheet & Tube...
...It is true that, what we gaze at in horror today may very well have been impossible to show ten, or even five, years ago...
...For not only has a shipping-insuranceCommonweal: 721 electronics conglomerate taken over one of the largest firms, but the largest--United States Steel--is now into real estate...
...so infrequently, in fact, 11 November 1977:722...
...It was a logical extension of the cutbacks which were even being felt, ripple-like, in middle management...
...SOAP, ere...
...Some see a poorly disguised attempt to gain Lockheed-like subsidies along with higher quotas on imported steel...
...What is remarkable about Soap is that it is unremittingly juvenile, and that this immaturity is considered to be a sign of health...
...face cutbacks in municipal services and even in schools...
...At the end of the meeting it was decided to shut the Campbell Works down and move operations to more modern mills in Indiana Harbor near Chicago...
...After years as the poor relation of the commercial networks, ABC has suddenly come to dominate the airways, and may therefore be expected to serve as the weather vane for the programming future...
...They don't care about people," said an angry Mayor Mike Katula of Campbell, whose community was in effect Sheet & Tube...
...Sheet & Tube had no case with the conglomerate directors...
...Others see the demographic map of mill shutdowns and massive layoffs in the late summcr affecting a dozen communitics in Pcnnsylvania, New York and Ohio and conclude with open cynicism that 20,000 11 November I977:720 jobs have been sacrificed in a deliberate bid by the industry to get government subsidy for an ailing domestic manufacturing sector...
...If so, the future is disheartening...
...Lynn Pflug was incredulous...
...For many of these families, steeped in two or three generations of steel-making, the closures and shutdowns threaten their very way of life...
...The drive is depressing, with the smokestacks dominating the skyline and abandoned stores and buildings broken only by an occasional fraternal hall or tavern which has survived the hard times that had already engulfed Lackawanna when Bethlehem announced in the middle of August that it was terminating 3,500 jobs...
...it may more properly be said to overwhelm them...
...Yet while the import "flood" has grown to an expected 15 percent of the domestic market this year, the price of American-made steel has gone up over 12 percent...
...Those "other purposes" soon became apparent in the Lykes expansion into insurance and electronics and the downturn of its steel acquisition...
...Let us be thankful, therefore, for whatever crumbs are thrown our way, and who are we, after all, to tell Everyman what he should and should not enjoy...
...day his department foreman said that cutback rumors were without any foundation...
...Instead of an incidental reference to sex or an occasional allusion, it is the nonsexual content that is slipped in every few minutes to relieve us from the hilarity...
...The condolences offered by Jennings Lambeth, president of the Sheet & Tube, at the press conference announcing the shutdown (employees had been told of the decision only 15 minutes earlier than the press) did little to reassure him...
...Younger workers like Lynn Pflug face the dilemma of raising a family with a newly-acquired mortgage, while being laid off at the area's largest source of traditional employment...
...A corporation can scarcely be expected to profit from symphony concerts, panel discussions and experimental drama...
...Whatever the merit in these accusations---made by several steel analysts---there can be little doubt that the industry is today reaping the whirlwind of decades of post-World War H conservatism and insulation from competition...
...The industry claims that unfair foreign competition has eaten into the domestic steel market and has enlisted the support of steel communities and the union against the specter of "forcign imports" and in some instances pollution controls...
...Soap is an "adult character comedy series," whatever that may be, on ABC...
...Lykes milked this plant dry and put the profits elsewhere--now they're getting rid of the COW...
...Every audience expects itself to be satisfied in entertainment, and as long as television remains a predominantly commercial enterprise (as it will), it can not be much different from what it has become...
...Last July the last of 3,000 workers at what was once a prosperous independent steel producer, Alan Wood Steel Co., were laid off...
...College may never be realized by the sons and daughters of many of them...
...Eight years ago Lykes bought out Sheet & Tube, the nation's eighth largest steelmaker, in a move that was described as a financial coup on Wall Street, as the steel company was six times larger than the buyer...
...But if U.S...
...The plot seems to be a kind of revolving door of ancient burlesque gags...
...Only the previous FriI I I RUSSELL W. GIBBONS, a ]requent contributor, i.~ a labor editor in Pitt.~burgh...
...In a symbolic irony reminiscent of the dominance which the steel trusts enjoyed over virtually every aspect of the lives of those who lived within its shadow at the turn of the century, United States Steel announced last month that this year it was not going to have its elaborate employees Christmas choral group and manystoried Yule tree in front of the 64-story corporate giant that pierces the Pittsburgh skyline...
...For Lynn Pflug and thousands of others, there still remained only prospects of a bleak winter, closed mills, unemployment assistance that must eventually terminate and the special fear that comes when stable institutions begin to crumble...
...In the industrial belt outside of Philadelphia, Conshohocken may be the worst of the future for many of these steel towns...
...Business Week said of the Lykes experience at Sheet & Tube: "The conglomerateurs' steel acquisitions were seen as cash boxes for corporate growth in other areas...
...The impact in Ohio's "Ruhr Valley" was devastating, for people who have been intertwined with the making of steel for almost a century could quickly translate the loss of 5,000 basic jobs in steelmaking to another six or seven thousand in the retail and service industries dependent on mill payrolls...
...Stccl, Bcthlehem, Republic and Youngstown Sheet & Tube--and know that they decry government "intcrfcrcncc" in pricing and cnvironmental standards, whilc rushing to seek government assistance whcn profits arc down...
...What do you do when you have been making steel all your life...
...Towns like Campbell and Lackawanna, N.Y., Conshohocken, Pa...
...The question, of course, is whether this represents progress or regression...
...They didn't lay their position on the line," he said...
...That news had seared through the Western New York steel town with the same impact as similar news had been received in Johnstown, Pa.--still reeling from the disastrous flood of only a month earliermwhere a 3,800 job cutback was announced with monumental insensivity...
...Campbell may become a classic tale of late 20th Century American conglomerate capital in action: Sheet & Tube dictated everything that took place in the town --politics, services, attitudes (it was named after Tom Campbell, a founder of the predecessor company)--and after three generations of steelworkers had helped build the mill and turn over big profits, the ownership sold to a conglomerate hardly concerned that it would drain the mill and then discard it...
...Steel has turned a former slag dump where its mills deposited redhot slag for 60 years into retail gold, building what will be Pennsylvania's largest shopping mail in 1978...
...It is populated by the usual inhabitants of 1970s sitcoms ---everyone seems to be in his or her mid-thirties, all of the men have styled hair, everyone over 50 is a fool, the blacks are hip and wise, the women are committed to careers (one, alas inevitably, is a reporter...
...Lambeth offered that "I know what it is for these people to pay a mortgage or send kids to college...
...The mile-long drive from Lake Shore Road where the huge Lackawanna Works of Bethlehem Steel is located, toward Our Lady of Victory Basilica, the ornate marble monument built by Father Baker, is along Ridge Road...
...why should television be any different...
...RUSSELL W. GIBBONS A form of industrial slaughter On Sunday, September 18, Lynn Pflug left his new home in Columbiania, a small town about 20 miles down the Mahoning River Valley from the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, where he has worked for seven years, to report for the 3 o'clock afternoon shift...
...today announced a plan to help improve its profitability," began the lead sentence of the August 19 Bethlehem press statement, which on the third page matter-of-factly observed that 7,000 jobs would be eliminated in both communities...
...The way of life for Campbell, Lackawanna, Johnstown, Conshohocken and other communities is threatened...
...We will be into plastics in five years," predicts a corporate lawyer...
...In 1975 Mr...
...Where once there was a begrudging respect for the steel companies, which at least provided the means to achieve a good wage--after several confrontations with the United Steelworkers, a cornerstone of the old Congress of Industrial Organizations that was the instrument for this attainment--today there is only bitterness and anger toward the companies in these towns...
...In West Mifflin, Pa., U.S...
...No ohe expects the publishing business to stop printing its pulps that support its prestige items...
...The news was greeted with satisfaction by the directors of Lykes, who saw the possibility of the profit line returning to its retrenched steel operation with such sympathy from Washington...
...At the time the Lykes people made an ominous prediction, declaring that "we will not hesitate to use the $100million Sheet & Tube cash flow for other purposes if our view of the future of steel should change...
...Ferguson, the chairman of Lykes Brothers Inc., a conglomerate that had extended its shipping line to ranching, meat packing, citrus growing and processing, banking and real estate, was attending a special meeting of the corporation to decide on the future of the Campbell Works of Sheet & Tube...
...the viewer in Televisionland has, thanks to the rating services, made his own preferences abundantly clear...
...The White House meeting, held the same day that the President had unleashed his attack on the oil companies, brought only a promise from Carter that "we are going to do something about" enforcement of existing trade laws to curtail foreign steel "dumping...
...Charles Bradford, a Merrill Lynch analyst whose report last summer charged that Japanese steel-making was more efficient, says that their bite into the American market is as much because of innovative and aggressive customer marketing as anything...
...A little over a hundred miles to the southeast, Chester H. Ferguson was arriving at the private runway of Pittsburgh International Airport in the Lear jet of the First Financial Corporation of Tampa, Florida...
...He had made only two payments...
...Whole communities are facing a difficult winter with literally thousands of unemployed, who were in the past the central core of the local work force...
...Steel had canceled Christmas for the enjoyment of Pittsburgh shoppers, it and its corporate counterparts had promised a bleak Christmas for thousands of their workers and their families--and the uncertainties of economic things to come for many thousands more in 1978...
...Middle-aged workers with some seniority are especially hard hit--too old to really find another job, too young to qualify for a pension, and still with mortgage commitments and many times with one or more older children in college...
...its 76-year-old plant was a financial loser and the target of costly environmental actions by both the state and the federal government...
...The effect was a form of industrial slaughter...
...All they are looking for is profits...
...The show has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention because it has been condemned by a number of religious organizations...
...That, I think, is being charitable...
...Far-Reaching Consequences All of this debate about the industry and the reasons for its difficulty has deep social consequences in the heartland of the steel belt...
...Throughout the industrial northeast there were other steel towns in trouble, and the events of August and September led to a White House conference in midOctober that brought an acknowledgment from President Carter that the American steel industry was, indeed, in deep troublc...
...A case in point is Soap, which represents, it seems to me, what is generally thought to be progress but is in fact regression...
...Now the industry is crying foul, saying that Japanese and German counterparts are doing it in, seeking relief and favoritism from government where before it had always championed the Gospel of Adam Smith as interpreted by Ben F~idess and Charles Schwab...
...It has, in fact, and in spite of itself, a kind of unconscious genius in its reflection of national taste and trends...
...It is a consecutive series --hence, I suppose, the title---which, in its substance if not subject matter, takes advantage of the new liberties in the treatment of sexuality...
...and Johnstown, Pa...
...By then, presumably, we will have learned that "the television that could he" never could have been, and that whatever hopes and expectations greeted its invention were illusory, and unequivocally so...
...Other workers might have avoided the Sunday turn, but Mr...
...Steel Realty Development, a division of the steelmaker, is the developer...
...Old steelmasters like Faidess and Schwab might be appalled at the diversification of their steel business as with its decline, should they be around to see the end result of the classic Executive Suite-type struggle which apparently has seen the finaneml faction win over the steel men...
...asks a 50-year-old millwright at Pat's Bar, once a familiar stop for Allan Wood workers, and today facing a questionable future along with dozens of other satellite businesses which were based on a steel mill economy...
...Pflug, a burly, bearded man of about 30, welcomed the chance for the Sunday time and a half to help pay for his new home...
...Yet sophisticated steclworkers know the history of the steel giants--U.S...
Vol. 104 • November 1977 • No. 23
