Books: Chronicle of Steel

THE VALLEY OF DECISION—Marcia Davenport—Scribner ($3).

This big (790-page) novel by the author of Mozart and Of Lena Geyer is an unusually successful attempt to dramatize the central factor in the last half-century of U.S. life—big industry. To most writers, industry has been a monster—to be avoided as too grim or assailed as too inhuman. To Novelist Davenport industry is a fact to be understood. Her approach to such understanding is through the human relationships of a steelmaking family. The Valley of Decision is also a chronicle of American family life. It begins in the 1870s, when young men were dazzling in straw boaters and yellow gloves, it ends four generations later with the bombs blasting Pearl Harbor.

The central character in the Scott family drama is Mary Rafferty. Mary was 16 when she left her Irish shanty in Pittsburgh to work as a maid in Ironmaster William Scott’s mansion. The Scott Iron Works were still a young, vigorous business. Soon they were to produce shells that won victory for Dewey at Manila Bay. Later the Works descended from father to son, slowly losing their family stamp as they passed more & more into the hands of stockholders, corporation lawyers, bored Scott cousins.

But Mary Rafferty stayed at the heart of the Scott family life. From ” ‘tween maid” she became the trusted equal of the younger generation of Scotts. But because of her shanty birth she would never marry her lover, Paul Scott. Instead, she raised the children of his half-crazy wife, lived on unmarried in the lonely mansion after Paul’s death.

Author Davenport has packed her book with descriptions of the unfeminine workings of Bessemers, open-hearth furnaces, skip-hoists, cast-houses. The men who pump lifeblood through the heart of Pittsburgh come alive in her pages—Irish steelworkers of the 1870s, Slovaks and “Hunkies” pouring in from the mills of Europe. Novelist Davenport’s description of this hard, world-transforming valley of steel and furnaces is the most memorable part of her impressive work.