THE man who has the biggest say over what wages the steel industry will—or will not—pay in its new steel contract is Roger Miles Blough (rhymes with now), 55, the tough-minded chairman of U.S. Steel. Blough, who sternly calls for "renewal of the present contract with no rise in wage rates for one year," has the sinewy build (6 ft., 175 Ibs.) and face of a steel puddler. But he is not cast in the steelmaker's bluff, up-from-the-mills mold. He is an "outside man," a lawyer who got to the top by applying his logician's mind to the problems of heavy industry. Reserved in manner, quiet in speech, he runs Big Steel's $3.7 billion empire and its 230,000 employees with an almost academic air. "Blough," says one steelman, "is a real, warm, likable IBM machine." Unlike former Chairman Benjamin Fairless, who thought one of the ways to labor peace was to tour plants with Union Boss David McDonald, Blough believes in separation of management and labor. Grouses one union leader: "Blough is a man you don't get to know much about. He stays in his ivory tower."
Roger Blough's upbringing was anything but ivory tower. The son of a poor Pennsylvania Dutch truck farmer, he got his schooling in one-room schoolhouses, spent his free time stoking stoves and cleaning blackboards for $5 a month to help the family get by. He went through high school and Susquehanna University, taught school and coached basketball for three years before he worked his way through Yale Law School, graduating with top marks in 1931.
In those Depression days, the young lawyer had to canvass ten firms before he got his first offer. When he applied for a job at the Manhattan law firm of White & Case, which numbered U.S. Steel among its clients, the official who interviewed Roger Blough noted: "First-class chap; good, clean-looking, talked intelligently. We would probably make no mistake." Irving Olds, former chairman of U.S. Steel, who moved into the company from White & Case himself, puts it another way: "Blough was one of those fellows who turn up no more than once in ten years."
Blough, hired by White & Case, got his first big chance when the New Deal's Temporary National Economic Committee launched a congressional study, which was a veiled attack on Big Business. Blough was put in charge of a task force of 20 lawyers to make Big Steel's case, did so well that, at 38, he was named general solicitor for U.S. Steel itself.
Blough streamlined the legal department, went on to important roles in labor negotiations, financing, a hundred other tasks. Within ten years he had scrambled through the corporate hierarchy so fast that when Ben Fairless shifted over from president to chairman in 1952, a special post of vice chairman was created for Blough and he became, in Fairless' words, "my right bower." Three years later, when Fairless retired, it was a foregone conclusion that Blough would be the new boss.