U.S. Steel

U.S. Steel became the focus of one of the Truman Committee’s most memorable wartime investigations when its subsidiary Carnegie-Illinois Steel was found to have altered steel-quality records and delivered nonconforming plate as if it met Navy standards. The case exposed a grave failure in production oversight, while leaving unresolved who beyond the mill’s technical staff knew that tests were being falsified.

Company and the quality-control failure

The committee’s scrutiny centered on steel plate produced for ships by Carnegie-Illinois Steel, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Investigators at the Irvin Works, the company’s rolling mill at West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, found that at least 5 percent of production—about 3,000 tons each month—failed to meet Navy specifications but was labeled and delivered as conforming.

The investigation began with letters from employees who believed they had a patriotic duty to report problems. At first, little action followed: the committee was receiving so many complaints from across the country, many of them apparently crank mail, that it could not pursue every lead. The stakes changed when the newly launched tanker Schenectady, built by Henry J. Kaiser, broke in two at Portland, Oregon, in January 1943, bringing the reliability of steel plate into urgent question.

At Irvin Works, investigators found that chemical analyses used to measure carbon and other elements had been altered, as had tests of tensile strength. The chief specifications examiner, Murray Stewart, said the results were changed “to conform to what the customer expected to receive.” When the analysis of a batch of steel was unknown, he said, a result might simply be invented for the record book. The discrepancy was therefore not merely a matter of defective material: the records meant to verify quality had themselves been made unreliable.

The hearing and management’s response

The committee’s hearing lasted five hours. When a company attorney, testifying after Perry, discussed the technical knowledge needed to understand the steel business before “justifying this situation,” Truman challenged the relevance of technical complexity to the removal of people responsible for cheating. He said, “I don’t know anything about the steel business,” Truman said, “and don’t expect to know about it, but I can tell you when the books have been tampered with and when there is a bunch of crookedness going on. That is plain enough for me to see.” His intervention framed the issue as one of plainly recognizable dishonesty, not specialized industrial expertise.

The hearing did not determine how high responsibility extended. No one above chief metallurgist McGarrity admitted knowing about the rigged tests or falsified records, and the testimony established no substantial motive for passing off inferior steel. The plausible explanation offered was that employees had been trying to set an impressive production record; those implicated had nothing to gain personally and much to lose if exposed. The gap between the scale of the deception and the uncertainty about who authorized or understood it remained unresolved.

U.S. Steel management promised to correct the situation. In the hearing’s final hour, company president Benjamin F. Fairless told Truman that whoever was responsible would “walk the plank.” Senator Brewster emphasized how astonishing it seemed that subordinates would risk their futures without any prospect of reward. Asked by Senator Ferguson whether Carnegie-Illinois Steel’s operation represented good management, Fairless answered, “I certainly do not,” and called it “very, very poor management.” The admissions acknowledged failure without settling the question of how it had become possible.

Significance of the case

The inquiry made U.S. Steel an example of the wartime tension between industrial production and public accountability. The company’s output formed part of a national effort in which the scale and speed of production mattered enormously; yet the committee’s findings showed that claims of production success could not substitute for reliable inspection, truthful records, or clear responsibility. In this case, a system designed to measure whether steel met specifications had been turned into a means of concealing that it did not.

For Truman, the hearing reinforced his suspicion of large corporations and his conviction that misconduct could not be excused by technical complexity. At the same time, the book notes that he gave too little credit to the many businesspeople and industrialists whose work helped sustain the war effort. The episode thus supports a narrower conclusion than a general indictment of U.S. Steel: the committee documented serious falsification at Carnegie-Illinois Steel and poor management, but its testimony did not establish how far knowledge of the deception reached within the corporate hierarchy.