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Abandoned Clichés. Many a battle-scarred unionist snorts at Dave McDonald's airs and the fact that, never baring his chest to the furnaces, he came to the Steelworkers' presidency on the white-collar route. Yet McDonald is, in fact, far more in tune with his times than his classconscious critics. In the phenomenal growth of the competitive U.S. economy over the past four years, most of the old labor-management clichés have gone out the window. Labor and management still argue and labor still strikes, but enlightened leaders on both sides know more specifically than ever before that they have a mutual stake in the general economy. Moreover, the economy is strong enough to stand a strike−even in steeland with Government playing it strictly hands off, both sides must coldly face the results of a strike on profits and incomes. The pressures are new and different. Industry must keep up its earnings or lose new investment capital. As for labor, a TIME correspondent reported from Gary, Ind. last week: "Not many of the men have been hungry for years. Most of them are up to their ears in installment debt. They don't really want a strike."
Philip Murray, McDonald's predecessor as the Steelworkers' president, always geared his thinking to the inevitable strike, as a Washington labor specialist points out, but McDonald always thinks ahead to the inevitable settlement. Emphasizing the mutual trusteeship of labor and management. McDonald persuaded negotiators to sit around the table to discuss this year's contract−instead of across the table from each other. Then he suggested that the table be taken away altogether so they could just sit around. Even on the eve of the strike, the worst thunderbolt that McDonald could think of to hurl at Big Steel management was "These people are still thinking in terms of the '30s. The backward look returns to the steel industry."
The Lace Curtain. On Nov. 22, 1902, the night David McDonald was born in Pittsburgh's Hazelwood section, his father was walking a picket line as a member of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. David McDonald Sr. had been a union man since he arrived in the U.S. from Wales, was hustled out of Springfield, Ill. for union activity there. Dave's mother, Mary Kelly McDonald, was the daughter of an officer of the Sons of Vulcan, an early union for iron craftsmen. Both her brothers were union men. After a brief, unsuccessful interlude of trying to run a saloon on the south side of the Monongahela River, the elder McDonald finally went into the Jones & Laughlin rolling mill as a guide setter. One day in 1915 a piece of hot steel sliding through the rollers sheared off accidentally. A hot, jagged end whipped through his left leg, put him in bed for ten months. When he walked again it was with a bad limp. In healing, the injured leg was shortened.