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I DA U N I V E R S A L M a rc h -A p r i l 2 0 1 5 34 PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to e Real News Network, and welcome to Reality Asserts Itself. Sparrows Point is an industrial location just outside of Baltimore City. In the late 1950s, Bethlehem Steel had 30,000 people working there. By 2012, there was nobody. To help tell us the story of why and how that happened and whether public policy could have made a diff er- ence, joining us in the studio is Mark Reutter. Mark has been reporting and writing on Baltimore since 1970, when he started as a 19-year-old summer intern covering cops for e Evening Sun. He later moved on to e Baltimore Sun, where he was a reporter for eight years. In addition to his writings on Baltimore, he's edited the historical magazine, Railroad History, and is the author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Indus- trial Might. And he's the senior writer at the Baltimore Brew, which is doing the best inves- tigative journalism in the City of Baltimore. JAY: So your book is about, like, this thick, so you can't give us all the detail. But give us, fi rst, to start conversation, just the big brushstrokes of why steel collapsed, closed in Baltimore County. REUTTER: e broad brushstroke is that steel was the biggest basic industry in the fi rst part of the 20th century. It was the founda- tion of, really, modern society. But things began to change a er that. Technology moved on. ere were other materials, aluminum, plastic, and others, that began to be developed, and these began to impinge on this huge industry that had a basic monopoly for many, many years. Faced with that competi- tion and change, the steel industry, both at Sparrows Point and around the country at these big installations – Chicago, Pittsburgh, etc. – stayed put. And they just put their feet down. ey decided that no one was going to dislodge them, that foreign competition and government overregulation was the cause, and they weren't about to change. Finally, they just canni- balized themselves, and eventually the mill was just a mishmash. At its very tail end, it was a mishmash of old and new, and basically leaking money throughout the whole process. JAY: Now, steel produc- tion moved, to a large extent, to Asia and some other places. ere's lots of steel being produced. ere's lots of steel being used. Why couldn't it be here? I mean, one of the arguments one hears is that it's essentially the cost of labor, and so China's cheaper labor, so China's kind of – because nobody would defend the American steel market, China is really the reason for the demise of American steel. REUTTER: Well, going out of World War II, the U.S. had around 60 percent of the world's steel production. And a part of that was, yes, Europe had destroyed itself during the war. One little-known fact is that the U.S. steel industry then doubled its actual production between 1945 and 1960, but it doubled it in old technology while things were massively changing, and their costs did get too high. You and probably some of the listeners will remember, if you go back, not just with President Kennedy, but how once a year, U.S. Steel would announce a price increase of 5 or 6 percent for hot-coiled steel, and within hours, every single of the other so-called big steel companies – Bethlehem, Inland, Armco, Jones and Laughlin – all kind of lost names – all did the same lockstep. And so a lot of it had to do with the U.S. steel compa- nies pricing themselves out of the business, and they didn't innovate. JAY: Well, there are two diff erent pieces here: the cost of labor, and innovation in technology. So let's start with what is usually talked about, which is that labor costs were What Happened to Making Steel in Baltimore? Mark Reutter on Reality Asserts Itself Mark Reutter has been reporting and writing on Baltimore since 1970, when he started as a 19-year-old summer intern covering cops for e Evening Sun. He worked on a wide range of beats for the Sunpapers, including inner-city housing and downtown develop- ment, and exposed (with colleague Steve Luxenberg) the corrupt practices of the Pallottine Fathers, a local Catholic order. In the 1980s, he under- took an intensive study of blue-collar life and the business history of Baltimore's then-largest employer, Bethlehem Steel, which resulted in the now classic "Making Steel." In addition to his writings on Baltimore, he has edited the histor- ical magazine, Railroad History, and publishes with the Progres- sive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. MARK REUTTER, EDITOR AND SENIOR JOURNALIST, BALTIMORE BREW