The Fakers of Irvin

The pressure of producing steel in record-breaking time has apparently been too much even for U.S. Steel Corp., the world's No. 1 steelmaker. The Senate's powerful, long-nosed Truman Investigating Committee last week sniffed out the industrial scandal of the year. Employes in the giant Irvin, Pa. plant of U.S. Steel's subsidiary, Carnegie-Illinois, had falsified records, had delivered some 26,000 tons of questionable steel plates to the Navy, Maritime Commission and Lend-Lease customers. According to testimony, this tonnage was about 5% of everything turned out by the Irvin Works.

Sordid Side. As witnesses the Committee called steel foremen, metallurgists and plain mill hands. Their evidence: 1) most of the chiseling was in the tests of the chemical content and tensile strength of the steel plates; 2) false entries on the test sheets were a "common practice." Big point in the investigation: Did faulty Carnegie-Illinois steel cause the Kaiser-built tanker Schenectady to break in half? The answer: yes & no. The American Bureau of Shipping report chiefly blamed poor welding ("There was neglect [in] adhering rigidly to established welding procedures . . . there were insufficient numbers of trained, experienced welders and shipfitters"). But the Bureau added that the tanker's plates lacked uniformity, some of them looked like "cast iron" instead of high-quality finished steel.

Remarkable Side. What floored the committeemen was that nobody seemed to know why cheating was done. No graft or even bonuses had been traced. Thus employes had everything to lose, nothing to gain. Explained harried, worried Carnegie-Illinois President J. Lester Perry: "A few individuals . . . grew lax under the pressure of heavy production."

U.S. citizens paid little attention to the whole affair. There were good reasons: 1) no big-time officials were involved; the highest ranking wrongdoer found was a plant metallurgist; 2) U.S. Steel's president, smart, suave Benjamin F. Fairless, made no attempt to defend his company, readily admitted "very, very poor management," promised that all involved "will have to walk the plank."

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