Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker

In the summer of 1919, a young veteran steps out of the Army and into the inferno of a Pennsylvania steel mill. What follows is a diary of sweat, steel, and survival. Charles R. Walker records his initiation into the brutal apprenticeship of a furnace worker: the seventeen-hour shifts, the heat that melts ordinary men, the molten metal that demands absolute respect. But this is more than a catalog of physical extremity. Walker documents a workforce assembled from every corner of Europe, men who share a common language of danger even as they struggle to understand each other's words. The mill becomes a crucible where immigrant lives are forged into American industrial muscle. Written in spare, honest prose, this is firsthand testimony from a pivotal year in American labor history, just before the great steel strike that would reshape the nation's relationship with its workers. For anyone who wants to understand the human cost behind the skyscrapers and bridges of 1920s America, there is no better place to look.