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 confesses in 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.