U.S. Steel went from two-thirds of American steel to eight percent
In 1902, its first full year, U.S. Steel poured 67 percent of all the steel made in the United States and was valued as the first billion-dollar corporation anywhere. A century later its share of the national output had shrunk to eight percent, and for a stretch its biggest earner had been oil.
J. P. Morgan assembled the company in 1901 by combining Carnegie Steel with Federal Steel and National Steel for $492 million. Andrew Carnegie insisted on gold bonds for his stake, and the resulting debt, plus fear of antitrust suits, made the new giant cautious. Wall Street simply called it The Corporation. Charles M. Schwab, the Carnegie executive who had pitched the merger to Morgan, became its first president, but he later ran Bethlehem Steel, a quicker innovator, and by 1911 U.S. Steel's share had slipped to half. A federal antitrust attempt to split it up that year failed.
Size brought other firsts. The company ran the largest commercial fleet on the Great Lakes, and in March 1908 chairman Elbert Gary set up a safety committee that launched the modern Safety First movement. Employment topped 340,000 in 1943, and output peaked above 35 million tons in 1953. Presidents tangled with it: the Supreme Court stopped Harry Truman from seizing its mills during a 1952 union dispute, while John F. Kennedy pressured the industry into rolling back price rises in 1962. Historian Douglas Blackmon has documented that its Alabama operations relied on leased convict labour into the late 1920s, paying counties nine dollars a month per prisoner.
Postwar restructuring shrank the workforce to 52,500 by 2000. On January 7, 1982, the company bought Marathon Oil, using money from tax breaks meant to help steel, which angered Senator Arlen Specter. It became USX in 1986, then endured a stoppage from August 1, 1986 that the company termed a strike and the union a lockout, lasting until February 1987, while Carl Icahn made a failed run at a hostile takeover.
After spinning off Marathon in 2001, it went back to the U.S. Steel name and bought plants in Slovakia and Serbia. Nippon Steel completed its purchase of the Pittsburgh company on June 18, 2025, with Washington holding a golden share.
Source: U.S. Steel
