PRODUCTION: Girdler Writes a Book

In March 1902, a young Lehigh graduate was working in London as sales engineer for the Buffalo Forge Co. His name: Tom Mercer Girdler. His paycheck: $12.50 a week. One day, from Pittsburgh’s Oliver Iron & Steel Co., came the offer of another job with a salary of $1,000 a year. Homesick Tom Girdler snapped it up, caught the next ship back to the U.S. “That,” he confessesin his just-published autobiography (Boot Straps, written in collaboration with Boyden Sparkes; Scribner; $3), “is how I happened to get into the steel business.”

Now Tom Girdler, Republic Steel’s $176,000-a-year Chairman of the Board, Chairman of the Board of Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, has come to be almost symbolic in steel, the industry he got into because he was homesick. As such, he has come to share the fate of most symbols—sworn by and sworn at. But Tom Girdler’s autobiography, told with professional Saturday Evening Post briskness, is more than the story of steel—more than another Horatio Alger success story. Certain to give laborites the fits, the book is also a belligerently forthright portrait of a notoriously belligerent individual (“My friends tell me that when I get mad my head seems to swell and my eyes to stick out”) who has been a central figure in some of the most turbulent episodes in modern U.S. industrial history.

The Girdler Way. Few U.S. citizens outside of the steel industry ever heard of Tom Girdler until March 1937, when the battle of “Little Steel” began. When U.S. Steel signed a collective bargaining agreement with C.I.O., then bossed by Samson-haired John L. Lewis, Tom Gird-ler’s beady eyes bulged with rage. He writes:

“I was bitter about this. . . . Why did we not all sign? Simply because we were convinced that a surrender to C.I.O. was a bad thing for our companies, for our employes; indeed for the U.S. of America. . . . We were determined to fight.”

Tough Tom Girdler’s determination to fight led to more fighting than perhaps he bargained for. Almost one-third of Boot Straps traces the battle of Little Steel from its first ominous rumblings through its bloody climax on Memorial Day, 1937, when Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers and sympathizers parading past the gates of the Republic plant. (Casualties: 10 dead, 90-100 injured.) Says Tom Girdler:

“From that moment until now I have been unable to see how we could have prevented the clash. It happened only because the Communist leaders wanted it to happen. We had, literally, no part in it.”

Future labor historians will be glad to have Tom Girdler’s version of the battle of Little Steel, as his side of the story, but with the evidence of the Senate La Follette Civil Liberties report at hand, they will not accept it as being fully authentic.

The Girdler Mind. Eagle-bald, hawk-nosed Tom Girdler, at 66, has one possession of which he is inordinately proud—a mind of his own. Most readers will find its self-revelations the most interesting part of Tom Girdler’s autobiography. The pugnacious author often mistakes shallowness for insight (“With free water and cheap soap who really is obliged to live in filth?”), but in his wrestling with the problem of Labor & Management he tackles squarely one of the thorniest problems in the U.S. The conclusions he has reached are important, not because they are Tom Girdler’s, but because they are shared in part by both Big and Little Business, and by many a U.S. citizen who is not in business at all. Says the author:

— “The job, as I see it, is to eradicate the false idea that the interest of theemployer and the interest of the employes are distinct. In the final analysis theirinterest is the same. . . .”

—”In my opinion 90% of the people who belong to unions belong because they must belong if they want to work. . . . I accept unions. I believe the right of people to join unions should be protected by law but I believe just as strongly that there should be a law to protect the right to work of anybody who wants to keep out of a union. . . .”

—”Any contract is supposed to represent a balance of interests between two parties. Today there is no balance in the arrangements between workers and those whose function in the economy is to create work. The most important factor in the elements causing the lack of balance is the short sighted policy of the government which behaves as if all employers were the natural enemies of all who are employed. . . . This is a monstrous fallacy.”

Seeking an answer to the problem of Labor & Management, Tom Girdler voices some emphatic conclusions. No lover of unions, he insists that they are necessary, equally insists that under the present Administration they are a disorganizing influence in American industry. Holding that America’s future is a great challenge to the managers of American industry, Girdler ends with the suggestion that management will be unable to meet thechallenge unless wartime emergency controls are lifted. He concludes:

“Inevitably the people of the United States before long are going to have to make up their minds whether they want to gamble their lives and happiness on some Socialistic scheme of state capital ism, entirely theoretical, or whether as free individuals to drive ahead to achieve a still higher living standard. . . . When we reach the end of the war, this country will confront a problem almost as big as preparing for war. If there were the same desire in government as there is out of it to enable capitalism to meet this test there could be more intelligent planning for the emergency ahead in every county in the country. . . .

“If we are to avoid dictatorship, jobs ought to be made for at least 55,000,000 workers. . . . The least hopeful aspect of our future is that amateurs are likely to be tinkering with our economic machinery. . . . It should be kept in mind that generous, even fabulous, rewards for those at the top are as a magnet that all along has been exerting an upward pull. . . . After all, what you find in a pay envelope is profit and most of the people I have known in my life have been constantly trying to get a fatter pay envelope.”