Steel Backbone

Homestead, Pennsylvania, home of US steel, that's how the song begins. The story relates the role of steel production in the building of this promised land and the sorrow that came with the closing of the steel mill along the Monongahela river. Tom Russell Band sing the dejection of the workers sharing their one last meal. The doors will close and the mill won't run no more. I listened and thought of my Dad telling me of his years of shoveling coal into the furnaces of a steel mill and I realized what I had never thought of before.
I owe my existence to US Steel. That's a startling revelation coming from one who spent years of protesting against huge conglomerates which took advantage of American workers with poor pay, long hours and company stores. It's true. But not for the indentured servants brought in by the steel companies to put their sweat and blood in the production of steel, I would not exist.
In 1905 my Dad escaped the Austra-Hungarian Empire via one of those steel ships before he reached the age of eighteen where he would have been inducted into the army and sent into the war with Russia. The only men in his village who returned at all were hopelessly mutilated. His mother foresaw a better future in the “new” world – the promised land where the streets were paved with gold.
That was over one hundred years ago and it took a song, recorded in Norway decades past, to bring me to the realization of what big industry means to me. And to millions of others. Conglomerates were broken and real prosperity bloomed, so much so that eventually new industries combined to fix prices and control products here and abroad. Will we break the circle?
Talk about history repeating itself!
Naomi Sherer