Word: steele
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...time the Great Lakes opened for ore traffic last March, steelmen had made their forecast of the year's demand by letting the price of ore crack (the cracker: Henry Ford) for the first time in steel history. A month later, they dropped the price of steel by $4 a ton too. Their hope was to stay above their break-even point of 55% of capacity. By November they were not only at 96% of capacity, but confronted by an unfamiliar shortage in their coke and ore supplies. They even found themselves accused of not having capacity enough...
...years steel's most spectacular moneymaker was cigar-chewing Ernest Weir, whose modern mills put competition back into the steel business. In 1940 he yielded his news value to others. Mr. Weir is a salesman, and in 1940's market all the salesmen went fishing. It was a productionman's show. Shrewd Old Dealer Eugene Grace opened his mouth just wide enough to lap up the cream of the business. He also took the lead in cooperating with the New Deal's exhortations to expand: $100,000,000 worth, half of which was Government money...
More remarkable was the case of Republic Steel's Tom Girdler. During the campaign his name was used by Candidate Roosevelt as a synonym for enemy-of-the-people. At year's end, tough Tom Girdler's emissaries were in Washington and Wall Street, working on a deal to carry out one of the President's pet ideas: an integrated steel company on the West Coast (there is none) to supply booming Pacific shipyards...
...planes, the key material is not steel but aluminum. Already harassed by an anti-trust suit that predated even Thurman Arnold, Aluminum Co. of America faced a much more important test of social responsibility in 1940. It entered 1941 with a 380,000,000-lb. market, enough to keep it at capacity. But latest forecast for 1942 is that aircraft alone would need 300,000,000 Ib. It was announced that Aluminum Co. by then would have 825,000,000 Ib. of capacity...
...time, excitedly watching their spending theory get its first real test, some New Dealers boasted that consumption would get the long end of this boom too. But 1940 killed any hope that Defense spending might be a short cut to plenty and graceful living. The imminence of rationing in steel, in aluminum, in tools, in a dozen lesser consumer-goods necessities made 1941 look like an uncomfortable year. In 1940, consumers did benefit; 1940 produced more guns and more butter. But 1941 would have to produce still more guns and-perhaps-less butter...