Irvin Works was the Carnegie-Illinois rolling mill at West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, and the setting of a consequential wartime investigation into steel quality. The inquiry found that the mill had been supplying steel plate that failed Navy specifications while labeling it as compliant; the effort to examine its records then raised further questions about the company’s cooperation and the integrity of its documentation.

Production and the quality problem

The issue acquired urgent significance in January 1943, when the newly launched tanker Schenectady broke in two at Portland, Oregon. Reports from employees had already alerted the Truman Committee to possible trouble with steel plate, but the volume of complaints had initially made it difficult to distinguish actionable leads from crank mail. The tanker’s failure made the quality of shipbuilding steel a matter of immediate concern.

At Irvin Works, investigators found that at least 5 percent of production—about 3,000 tons of steel each month—did not meet Navy requirements. Yet the material was identified and delivered as though it did. Mill tests included chemical analyses measuring carbon and other elements, as well as tests of tensile strength. Test results were altered to match the quality customers expected to receive; when the analysis for a batch, or “heat,” of steel was unknown, an analysis could simply be invented for the records.

The investigators and the record book

Three Truman Committee investigators visited the mill in early March, roughly two months after the Schenectady incident. At the Carnegie-Illinois headquarters in Pittsburgh, the company president, J. Lester Perry, said the investigators could not speak with employees without a company lawyer present. They were also barred from entering the mill until Perry called Senator Truman to ask what the inquiry concerned. The call angered Truman and made him suspect that Perry was trying to conceal something.

At Irvin Works, the investigators waited about half an hour before being invited to lunch. They declined, explaining that they wanted to inspect the mill’s record book. After another hour’s delay, the book was made available at two o’clock. The investigators then learned that it had been taken apart the previous night and distributed among people doing work for the company attorney. Reassembling it had taken two hours. The investigators could not determine how much material had been removed or altered.

Testimony and significance

At the March 23, 1943, hearing, chief specifications examiner Murray Stewart described the fabrication of test results. Under questioning by committee counsel Hugh Fulton, Stewart acknowledged that entries representing invented analyses were made in pencil, while ordinary entries were in ink. A prefix letter used to identify such entries was explained under oath as standing for “Fake”; Stewart had earlier told an investigator it meant “phone.” The exchange made the falsification concrete: it was embedded not only in the numbers reported but in a record-keeping practice that marked invented results for those using the book.

After Stewart, Ireland, and McGarrity had testified, Perry took the witness table. Truman challenged the company’s handling of the inquiry, pointing to the delay in providing the book and to the absence of immediate action to investigate the procedure at the mill. Perry replied that he did not intend to be controversial; Truman told him he was free to be. Irvin Works thus became more than the location of defective steel production: the mill’s records, and the obstacles placed before investigators seeking them, formed a central part of the committee’s examination of wartime industrial oversight.