Document: Deep South; Portrait of strength

Document Deep South. Fields of cotton barns and factories in the heart of Dixie. A revealing story of progress documented with on the spot recordings and produced by the radio broadcasting service extension division. University of Alabama. For the next 30 minutes you will make a transcribed trip through the day. You will see the significance of a new industrial solve a changing South. You will see how determined people are nature's plug into prosperity a move that more than ever is making itself felt in our nation's economy. Portrait of strength.

Your work makes two towering installations with steaming cauldrons and the courage of combining muscle might have been the crank and the roar of the revelation of things being done being accomplished being achieved. And become doers of rolling hills and the concrete valleys of the busy bustling city. Apply the lessons learned by trial and the heartbreaks the happenings the history some 90 years. Give generously. The generosity of nature. The God given ingredients that make possible this progress. Stir well and dig deep into your imagination

and paint a portrait if you please of the art in the steel industry down Dixie way. A steel industry down south. Is it possible. You would rather imagine the South L.A. indices of honeysuckle and cypress swamps and synthetic lag on a land of cotton tobacco and sharecropper shanty and majestic columned mansion. But now you discover a different South. A new South. South that has its roots planted firmly in the fortunes of a first beginning in history and it started during the earliest stages of the colonial period because a sector is needed to cooking

utensils to survive. And as each of the colonies was opened up local the process of buying or using charcoal for a few will enable them to make cast iron and a writer and you know the area from 18 from 16 40 to 1860 they never had steel they used cast iron castings and they used right iron ore for its parts. You're listening to the head of the department of metallurgical engineering at the University of Alabama professor E.C. Wright were if you were to paint a portrait of the Southern iron and steel industry you must trace its development on a canvas that could cover several centuries in Jamestown Virginia. Optimism in a future unborn was being hammered into our end of an unforgettable past.

Yes Jake was usually self-contained and iron manufacture the early and they say they started it with. DANIEL. Stayed. At his new colleague like oh I can't I have passed a venue in New York. They also put in clients for supplying the local district. Since Irene is very heavy and costly to transport and there were no roads most of the island was made locally and sold and consumed like settlers moved westward and southward taking with them the art to early on making days early R&D projects were all worked in open pit and easier what we call Brown. And they only fuel a had was charcoal and that gave rise to an interesting situation that they call an iron plantation.

The maker had to buy several thousand acres of land to get wood. To make use charcoal. From Tennessee to Georgia and to Alabama. Today you steel center of the Deep South and there today is a monument to this momentous occasion. A city of sound and surging traffic a big office buildings residential section walls that sprawled in the valley below right now. This is Birmingham this is the Pittsburgh of a cell nestled in a valley where one's Indian Cherokee Choctaw Creek hunted wild game. It's top of cars that now have are on the horizon not bear not deer. And today's tepees are tall metallic monsters of twisted pipe and towering stacks. And to paint a portrait of this giant industry. One mustn't overlook Vulcan

the giant who looks down on the city of St.. You see his likeness. The iron statue that stands atop Red Mountain among television towers his Hamel poised his torch raised high. History representative of the industry the product of the people. A portrait of the steel industry is also a portrait of people in the man who minds the door to the consumer who carries home the product and in Gadsden Alabama you sit in the office of one of these men the Southern District Manager of the Republic Steel Corporation and listen to his recollection of the years how many years well over no longer what it was to live as I hate to tell you all over that I was one of the first you put it that way.

And you reported it will take on the characteristics of other areas even other countries you find Scotsman Scotland are proud of it too. You're talking to Mr Evans Head of the Gadsden plant. He's been in the industry since he was 11 years of age. I came to this country from Glasgow at the age of 18. A year was one thousand eight hundred six. He started in the chemical laboratory as worked in about every phase of the steel industry since I'm not going to go for it I don't think I wanna live it with you. Or an accurate portrayal of a steel industry you must see it in action. You must see the smoke and the sound. You must be the man in the muscles in the white hot metal. You must do if you are doing now in the mail. Your guide is Mr. Delaney battery which consists in this particular case of sixty five separate chambers each chamber all in about fourteen times a call

from the top. It is finally called Nana heated after being sealed up for 17 hours and it is and as your first stop the coke ovens where you see the first essential for steel making coal burned Indico best of them and it turns out it takes to make enough to run a blast but in run time it makes about seven tenths of atomic blast furnace practice very concerned of a bad case it takes about 1 ton a cup to make one ton of iron and end this plant in a neighborhood of a hundred tons of iron a day. There are ways to provide data under.

The code goes to the blast furnace where it's combined with iron ore and limestone to form a charge a charge being the correctly proportioned amounts. A blast furnace is a very tall silo like installation six stories high and receives the charge at the top from a special cars that run up an inclined plane at a 90 degree angle. A blast of hot air a shock to the mixture causing the limestone a cleaning agent known as flux to combine with silica and clay and other impurities and float to the surface. This allows the arm to be drawn off at the bottom in its purest state. The waste is known as slag and is skimmed off the top. A blast furnace operates continuously day and night every day of the week. You find that it takes 200 men to operate a

blast furnace in three ships. So your portrait must capture the perpetual motion a long line of rail cars with or on limestone. A car zooming up and down the inclined plane. The burst of steam the volcanic stream of slag the old truck with molten metal. The man in the den. Eh. As you leave the blast furnish you notice a pile of the steel man called pig began. Oblong lumps of hardened diamond. You're told that most of the yarn is transported to the steel mill in its moat and state that the pile of pig iron represents production above that which the steel mill can handle. You leave the blast furnace and approach the noise of the next stage. The manufacture of steel. Or as.

The error bars that Operation Steel and lie as. It is hard to. Say. There's one other thing. But never the gentle way back. If you like Marty Cole is a hefty individual with sharp eyes and a keen mind. The very next day will make Marty thirty six years in the open hearth but a third of that time and again in class. And as Marty proudly explains his department. You look calm and it's here that you see the drummer steelmaker big ladled with molten metal pouring white hot and starry sparks you see giant cranes overhead grinding into position huge hooks dangling. It's a motor

driven scoops jocking into position selecting material as a cook when selecting gritty textures are North Korea fine cold from Pennsylvania Dolemite near Birmingham. Twenty eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit receive the metal from the blast furnace receives scrap iron and additions of iron ore with oxygen and a mixture in about three hours and then the metal is motive into it. It's hard work. It's tiring it's a trying task but the methods of making steel have improved greatly. Ask Marty. Saw an awful lot when I was when I first started it. Any readers. That. We had a group that I would. Watch. We had to do it the hard way. Testament to progress. Marty

Cole maker of steel. And you a portrait of the iron and steel industry will show the glare from the blooming mill the monstrous machine that remold the white hot in goods into long bars of metal. From here the steel will be channeled to any one of many operations to make wire to make nailed to make pipe to make heavy plates top ten sheets. But now you are standing near the blooming Mel watching any goods being slowly flapping not Dr Jones is also watching. Now we are a damn good family had good they fucking bad. Now you're blaming me. And standing out watching one of the young guy running back and. Change it. Ramesh get me a band

elongated my now dead body and a map of the bet they are not brain dead and get there by mail but neither about money warranted. Yeah. Right. Damn Damn it as Marseilles a bit of an Asian male NSA employee not a smart. Man. They raided it and ran it at any time they might have. A portrait of spring. Painted against Southerns guys in the night glare of cowardness open hearts. Painted in the pilot of the production line going in good pain to the thousands of people will change shifts three times a day. They did in the ploughshare wire fence a water pipe painted of the

Red hill in the rich valley this is a picture of Munich. No one would deny the importance of steel in our modern age. As Professor Wright put it our present civilization is based on studio proudly present several races based on Steam. Practically everything we use as stealing and many things we make such as railroads or forms of transportation ships trucks buses automobiles are precisely made out of iron and steel. We would have no transportation industry without steel. In fact we never had railroads in this country until Bessemer steel was invented in 1860

and made a large supply of cheap steel and people before that invention which is equal in importance to the invention of the cotton Geno that we put the cost of steel was tremendous because it was made in small quantities almost by hand. How does this now then figure into the national picture. Throughout our present output US Steel is of the order of a hundred million times a year. The only other metal approach is that an output is aluminum which is about two million times so that gives you some idea of the tremendous size of the steel industry and its impact on our civilization. The South produces about. 5 or 6 percent of the total steel in the United States. That would be of the order of 5 and a half million tons of steel a year.

We produce about 6 million tons of iron ore a year in Alabama which is also about 6 percent of the total hundred million tons of Iowa. That's used in the United States. The industry also uses about. 15 million tons of scrap here and the South produces quite a bit as scrap some of which is exploited to know other plants melting. The recap of the consumption of steel the United States is about 1000 pounds per person. It's a happy time for Ivory Coast states and their stock is considerably less than that. I think it's about 700 pounds per capita. That's due to the fact that we do not have the fabricating and manufacturing industry centralized here as we do have and you know I say eastern states

south uses more steel I put nooses why. It seems that all of their paragon you make goes into stealing your own steel now and then through various buildings. This steel is fabricated and readily process but adapt. Yeah all right well do you fabricate all of the steel you make now we don't find the end product we start out to customers. TRUE friend is a fabrication and put an end to whatever they want such as their battling. On the roofs of buildings. Railroad cars design this plant which you've been through

today. And iron and steel mill it employs some 5000 workers which has an annual payroll of between 18 and 20 million dollars. Makes a great variety of products perhaps than any other similar concern in the south. Yet you heard the managing this tab and the Scotsman say no fabrication. I believe you feel professor right that the South needs more fabrication plants is not right. Yeah I say it works. But actually the expansion and the SAS is a great lack of any fabricating industry which are the companies that use the metal steel man as only a raw material producer and he ships his bars structural and Xi and wire to people who make things out of products. Like screens and care of all the tractors and baby buggies and all the various kinds of machinery that we use in other words.

Plan ahead. My. Plan may finish manufacturing goods here and we buy part. Of Our with radiators and automobiles and baby buggies for Essex in the country. Even one new South has old problems. What this one has been a blight on southern economies and Zander bellum days. The need for specialty industry industry to make consumer goods the baby buggy is the boxcars the bathtubs. Will Dixie's trend toward industrial development change things. Will changing South transform the future of the Southern Steel industry. Well it depends. It depends on the cost. How much overhead is involved in the production of Southern Steel. How much the consumer has

to play the day it is. Priced at that level and the words of the Scotsman. Today you pay the price of the mill. To influence manufacturers of consumer products to locate in the southeast to use Southern Steel It is imperative that production costs be cut to an absolute minimum. And to do this you start with the mine. Iron ore is mined by two methods depending on its accessibility either on the surface or on the ground. The latter being more expensive and the prevalent method of mining in the Birmingham area and the underground mining costs is one of the great detriment to surviving in the street or is very costly as why go back to their districts. All of it has just created an easy area as for days after Cyrus and it has great cost.

While the proximity of or and other needed materials tend to offset the more expensive mining methods. Southern Steel men face still another problem for the most part Southern iron ore is of low grade. Which means that it takes more of it to produce the same product of other areas. Again that means higher cost. It means also that the South cannot produce high grade specialty steels. Will wait again for patients for an ors which will probably increase with the opening of the Venezuela or have any effect a higher type studios that we may produce. I don't think so but they will have each other letters in fact about a potential 20 year steel later factor. This material is much higher and higher current and therefore should increase our furnace capacity should vary greatly.

Yes that was geologist who Pallister talking with Professor Wright. Posing the possibility of foreign ours as an answer to the problem of high grade economical steel. In fact interested Southerners are well underway with plans to improve the navigable qualities of several Alabama rivers in hopes that someday he will form the easy economical route for a steady stream of top quality or. Flowing from foreign ports through Abele and up into the busy atmosphere of the Birmingham area. For the present however your portrait of strength is painted of Southern effort of Southern supply and demand. Where you discover the demand of the South forms the dimensions of the industry. That's true of most every steel plant days because. The freight rates on Finnish steel have increased so largely. That the South can't produce steel at a cost very similar to the

cost of Pittsburgh or Chicago. The other large producing centers and they can sell steel favorably with a larger radius around our Yes despite the dark colors that define a portrait of Southern Steel. It still remains in harmony with national figures. And the University of Alabama recently. The Bureau Business Research conducted a study. Professor Wright mentions it leave your business research at the university made a survey ending in 1950 of the cost of making Pig-Iron and the cost of making steel and all importing steel making districts in the United States and it was quite interesting to note that the bearing and district had a cost or Pig-Iron of about twenty three dollars and sixty cents a ton

compared to Youngstown Ohio $24 a town Pittsburgh $23 a tonne Chicago $24 and 50 cents a ton. In other words Birmingham's costs were very close or like. You are the side with the other large districts and then the cases do your very same right comparison. Well how does your portrait look them out. It is a picture of light and shadow of progress and of problems but it shows mighty Vulcan poised on the threshold of an even greater future. For today's South is a changing sound. And there must be steel to match the strength and stretch of an expanding Dixie.

So for now. Put aside the incompleted portrait. And in the meantime please prepare brighter shades. For you have the word of the Scotsman himself in craft store crisis Southern Steel will meet the challenge of an unpredictable future. For that I've thought about it for the figure and the feeling that that it is every bit as optimistic but you know is what I do want to faff the day that overnight would happen that one of it. It happened to me here around the United States and all along about a lot of it does live for a day to a bit. This has been program seven of the document Deep South a series of

actuality documentaries depicting the increasing importance of the South and the economic development of our nation. This week portrait of strength the story of Southern iron and steel. The narrator was wild Whitaker document Deep South is written and produced by Leroy BANNERMAN As a Doctor Walter B Jones as a senior consultant. Document itself is presented by the radio broadcasting services extension division University of Alabama and is made possible by a grant and aid from the fund for adult education. An independent agency established by the Ford Foundation. And now this is Keith bars reminding you that this has been a radio

presentation of the University of Alabama. This is the network.