[Illustration: Ingot on Way to Rolling Mill]
Broadly speaking, the Corporation’s policies might be divided under five heads--relations with competitors, prices, publicity, relations with employees and, finally, with stockholders.
No better proof can be offered of the wisdom and success of the big company’s methods of treating its competitors than the fact that, in its hour of trial, when the Government of the United States was seeking to disintegrate it, its competitors, the men who met and fought it for industrial success, came forward practically in a body to its defense and testified that its dealings with them and with the public had always been fair and honorable.
The era that preceded the birth of the Corporation was one of unrestrained, bitter, and often unfair, competition in the steel trade. Too many manufacturers then worked, to paraphrase a well-known piece of advice, on the principle of: “Sell steel, honestly if you can, but sell steel.”
But the management of the big company had the foresight to realize that a new day was dawning and, to help to make the morning of that day brighter, it adopted the policy of candid treatment of competitors, the principle of coöperation. Possibly its motives were not entirely altruistic. The Corporation itself benefited, as appeared later, from its course of action. However this may be, it sought to make friends rather than enemies of its competitors.
In this it had no easy task, for the trade had too long been used to fear gift-bringing Greeks, to view with suspicion every unhostile act of a competitor, to believe that business could possibly be done on the higher plane adopted by the new consolidation. “Live and let live” was then unknown in business, or, at least, in the steel trade. But gradually the fears alluded to were overcome and the steel trade changed, or its methods did.
The Steel Corporation was an evolution, the natural result of the integration in the industry that had been going on for many years. In it were concentrated into a single organization all the processes of steel making from ore mining to the manufacture of the most highly finished products of all kinds, including transportation. And the evolution was not merely a physical one. The new company stood for development along the lines of modern thought of business methods and practices.