196 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820—1920. By John N. Ingham. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 297; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $45.00. A number of once near-monolithic scholarly notions about the course of industrialization in America are now crumbling: for in stance, the idea that as technology developed, units of production of necessity progressed from small to large to immense, and that owner-managers accordingly were replaced by hired managers, and they by elaborate managerial bureaucracies. Recent studies of indi vidual industries, of the industrialization of particular communities, and of small businesses facing consolidation movements have exposed the weaknesses of prevailing assumptions. One of the seminal works responsible for the trend was Philip Scranton’s path-breaking Propri etary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1983), which upended the old “truths” for the textile industry. John N. Ingham has now performed essen tially the same service for—of all industries and places—iron and steel in Pittsburgh. He has done it, moreover, in a remarkably brief but well-researched, well-argued monograph of less than three hundred pages. Following a helpful introduction that concisely reviews the course of recent scholarship on the subject, Ingham turns to the matter at hand. He traces the economic development of Pittsburgh from a commercial-mercantile economy to manufacturing center, reinforc ing the views advanced by Glenn Porter and Harold Livesay in Merchants and Manufacturers (Baltimore, 1971) that many early manu facturers began as merchants trying to assure a steady supply of goods. When he turns specifically to iron production, to my mind no one has more succinctly or clearly spelled out the various types of mills, their specific functions, or their relations to one another. In the next chapter, Ingham carefully lays the foundation for his thesis. He spells out not only sharp differences in background between the established iron aristocracy of late-19th-century Pitts burgh and the newcomer steelmasters, exemplified by Andrew Car negie, but also explores the differences in the psychology of iron making and steel production. Whereas steel making could be mecha nized, speeded up, and efficiency made the prime goal, iron puddlers and their puddling could not be hurried, and little of their work could be performed by machines. Following these technological differences in the closely related industries, labor policies went in separate directions. Steel companies crushed the unions as impediments to increased efficiency, while the thinking of iron masters ranged from antiunionism to implicit acceptance of collective bargaining to tolera tion of unions. Ingham’s most startling finding was the long and strong persistence of iron making in Pittsburgh. Steel, it has commonly been assumed, took over the city’s economy by the end of the 19th century. The TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 197 secret of the surviving iron producers, according to Ingham, lay not in competing with the large steel firms, but in carving out profitable niches for themselves. This might involve, for example, producing specialty items that steel firms would not bother with, or filling customer needs by offering a variety of both iron and steel products. As a consequence, the amount of iron produced in Pittsburgh continued to rise until 1887. So did the number of independent firms as newcomers entered the held. Independent iron and steel produc ers held a significant portion of the market as late as the eve of World War II. A few firms persisted into the postwar period. As both iron production and its more tolerant labor relations persisted, so did the social and political dominance of the iron aristocrats in Pittsburgh. Again, it has been assumed that when steel displaced iron, the Pittsburgh managers representing the absentee owners thereafter dictated political life in the city. Further, because the owners had little interest in Pittsburgh except where it affected costs, the city suffered accordingly. Ingham argues to the contrary, showing that the old iron families continued to live and thrive in Pittsburgh and to dominate its social and political life. When political reform became fashionable in the early 20th century, members of the old families, with education, social standing, and presumably inde pendence of the steel trust, once...