Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation

Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation was a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation whose Irvin Works became the focus of a Truman Committee investigation into the falsification of steel-plate tests during wartime production. The inquiry found that substantial quantities of plate failing Navy specifications had been recorded and delivered as compliant, bringing the reliability of the company’s testing and its response to scrutiny after the SS Schenectady broke in two.

Company and Wartime Scrutiny

The Truman Committee’s investigation grew out of employee letters reporting suspected problems with steel plate. The committee received so many complaints from around the country that it could not follow every lead; many appeared to be crank mail. The break-up of the newly launched SS Schenectady, a tanker built by Henry J. Kaiser, at Portland, Oregon, in January 1943 made the quality of steel plate a matter of urgent concern.

In March, roughly two months after the incident, three committee investigators visited Carnegie-Illinois’s Irvin Works, its rolling mill at West Mifflin, Pennsylvania. Their inquiry examined whether plate used in ships was being tested and certified according to Navy requirements. The investigation would establish that the problem was not merely a suspicion raised by scattered employee complaints: records at the mill documented a recurring failure to meet specifications.

Findings at Irvin Works

The investigators found that at least 5 percent of the plant’s output—about 3,000 tons of steel each month—did not meet Navy specifications but was nevertheless labeled and delivered as if it did. Chemical analyses, used to determine the proportions of carbon and other elements in a batch of steel, had been altered. Tests of tensile strength were also changed. When a chemical analysis was unknown, an entry could simply be made up for the record book.

At the March 23, 1943, hearing, chief specifications examiner Murray Stewart explained how the false entries were recorded. He testified that fabricated analyses were written in pencil while ordinary entries were in ink, and that an “F” was commonly placed before them. Under questioning by Hugh Fulton, Stewart acknowledged that the letter meant fake, despite having earlier told an investigator it meant phone. The exchange gave the committee a concrete account of how the records distinguished falsified results from routine entries—and of how Stewart had initially tried to explain the practice away.

Investigators, Records, and Management

The company’s president, J. Lester Perry, had insisted that investigators could not speak with employees without a company lawyer present and could not enter the mill until he had contacted Harry S. Truman. At Irvin Works, the investigators were kept waiting, invited to lunch despite asking to see the records, and then delayed further. When the record book was finally produced, they learned that it had been taken apart the previous night and distributed among people working for the company attorney; it took two hours to reassemble. The investigators could not determine how much had been removed or altered.

When Perry testified after Stewart and other witnesses, Harry S. Truman challenged the company’s lack of cooperation and asked why it had not immediately investigated and corrected the practices. Perry first evaded questions about whether anyone had been fired or what corrective action had been taken, then acknowledged that nothing had yet been done. He said he needed time to understand the full implications. Harry S. Truman argued that the company had learned of the problem when the investigators did and should have acted at once.

Disputed Responsibility and Significance

Perry’s prepared statement and testimony distinguished between the practices uncovered at the mill and the responsibility of senior management. He said management deplored the conduct but had not participated in it, and characterized the failures as the work of a few individuals who had grown lax under heavy production pressure. He rejected the term cheat in favor of misrepresentation, and argued that the substandard plates were still suitable for their intended use, even if they did not match what the Navy had ordered.

Perry also denied that plate failure caused the SS Schenectady to break apart. He maintained that the plate at the point where the break began had not come from Irvin Works. At the hearing, Republican senators Homer Ferguson and Owen Brewster pressed Perry particularly hard on this issue, while Fulton and Harry S. Truman also questioned him. The testimony therefore exposed two related but distinct disputes: whether the mill had falsified quality records, and whether its defective plate had contributed to the ship’s failure. The documented scale of the testing violations made the company’s assurances of fitness and limited responsibility central to the committee’s examination of wartime production.