Word: steelmen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Blame for Steelmen? That was no overstatement. Production in August was only 6,000 cars, and in September, 7,597. Hardly anyone expected that the figure would go any higher for the last three months of this year. As the railroads were sending 6,500 cars a month to the junk yards, the U.S. was barely making more cars than it lost. Though freight traffic is up 80% over 1940, U.S. railroads now have about the same number of freight cars (2,000,000-odd) as they had then. Everybody concerned pointed the blame at the other fellow...
...steelmen, who are blamed by the railmen for the failure of the building program, pointed a finger at the car builders. Walter Sheldon Tower, head of the American Iron & Steel Institute, said that steelmakers had, by Government figures, supplied carmakers with enough steel to build 26,950 cars in June, July and August-5,950 more than the program figure. But production for domestic use in those months totaled only...
...soon plain that Senator Martin was only sounding a rather obvious generality. Ed Martin, a longtime friend of steelmen, had allowed them to obtain advance notice of his remarks. As he spoke, newsmen already had copies of the steelmen's reply. Up rose U.S. Steel's President Benjamin Fairless to deliver it. "It is simply amazing to me," he said, "that anyone should suggest, by inference or otherwise, that U.S. Steel has a public-be-damned attitude. Our attitude is, and will always continue to be, just the reverse...
...Then the steelmen nimbly turned the investigating committee into a sounding-board to broadcast their case. Bethlehem Steel's Eugene Grace deplored-but denied any responsibility for-the existence of a racketeering "grey market" in steel. Present extraordinary demands for steel could have been met, said Jones & Laughlin's Chairman Ben Moreell, if strikes had not caused a postwar loss of 18 million tons of production...
Critics of the present system, under which there are basing points scattered through the land, have sought to replace it with an "F.O.B. mill" formula, whereby the customer would pay the actual freight charges. The industry contends the basing point setup is virtually F.O.B. mill. Steelmen were also quick to point out that they had been using the present system since 1924, when FTC outlawed the "Pittsburgh plus" system, which made Pittsburgh the basing point for the whole country. They suspected aloud that all the sudden hollering was just a political maneuver to take housewives' minds off high prices...