(sizzling) (string music) (male #1) People had virtually risked their lives in this tremendous heat.

(male #2) You had things blowing up around you.

(male #3) It was like, "Oh, my God this is Hell."

(narrator) That's steelmaking.

Over more than a century, hundreds of thousands of men and women worked at Bethlehem Steel... (male #4) When you start in a steel company, you were almost assured of a lifetime job.

(narrator) ...that provided all your needs and a lot more.

Those workers gave their all to create some of America's greatest landmarks.

Most of the great bridges and most of the great skyscrapers were built with the Bethlehem beam.

(dramatic music) (narrator) Bethlehem Steel made the ships, tanks, and guns that helped win the world wars, while at home, the plant welcomed women to their force.

So, we were called "pistol-packing mamas."

(narrator) Bethlehem prospered and grew into America's second largest steel company, but new competition was waiting in the wings.

(male #1) Some people could see the ship crumbling, but... not gonna tell that to the chairman.

They saw that imported steel was cheaper.

(narrator) But eventually, a once mighty corporation could no longer stand.

I never in my life would have dreamed that this plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, would have closed.

(narrator) Some promises of pensions and benefits came up empty.

(male #2) Now that they tell me I can't get my pension and go back there?

That I don't like.

(narrator) But tough times in this old steel town have given way to a vibrant new community, which celebrates its rich history as the home of Bethlehem Steel.

(piano music) (announcer) Bethlehem Steel: The People Who Built America is sponsored by Lehigh Valley Hospital-Muhlenberg in Bethlehem.

By the Pennsylvania Public Television Network, representing the eight public television stations throughout Pennsylvania.

And by... (somber music) ♪ ♪ (clanging and screeching) ♪ ♪ (male #5) I was sitting on the end of my bed, and my pop come by.

♪ And he asked me, you know, "What's wrong?"

And I told him, "Pop," I says, "I couldn't sleep."

And he knew what it was.

And all you hear is banging and booming, banging and booming.

He said to me... ♪ He says, "Richie," he says, "You be happy when you hear that banging and booming, 'cause," he says, "if you don't hear it, you're going to cry.

There won't be no more work.

So you won't have to worry about the noise."

(narrator) In the same South Bethlehem neighborhood where he grew up, Richard Check often gazes at eerily quiet blast furnaces.

(machinery hissing) He remembers a very different time when steel ruled.

Like many children from this industrial eastern Pennsylvania city, Richard and his eight brothers followed in their father's footsteps and became part of the banging and booming that often punctuated the South Bethlehem night.

(Richard) And that was Steve and John, Andy, Frank, Mike, George, Bartholomew, Richie, and Amol.

I was the last one to retire in July 31, 1994.

(narrator) At age 18, this son of Czechoslovakian immigrants found work as a rigger at Bethlehem Steel, a job that often led him hundreds of feet in the air to fix broken blast furnaces.

(Richard) Was I ever afraid of the gas leaking that I could get a whiff of it because the gas was very deadly.

It was tasteless and odorless.

If you didn't get pure oxygen in your bloodstream, you died from it.

(explosion) (narrator) It was sometimes dangerous but reliable work for the Check family and thousands of others during the 20th century.

(male #4) When you started in a steel company, you were almost assured of a lifetime job, you know, but we lasted longer than the steel company.

(motor puttering) (female #1) Bethlehem Steel was not just a job for him; it was what he was.

He is a steelworker, and that's his life; it was the life of his family, his father, his grandfather, his uncles before him, and it's what he was, so we put up with it and we reaped the benefits of it because we put three children through college, and just paid for a wedding, and we were able to do that because he worked at the Bethlehem Steel.

It'll be 38 years in May.

Thirty-eight years.

Quality of life?

Like I say, I have everything I want.

Working here from the neighborhood I grew up in was like a dream.

(dramatic music) (narrator) The American corporate giant known as Bethlehem Steel began as an iron manufacturer in 1860.

It rolled out high quality iron rails for the railroad industry under the direction of railroad mogul Robert Sayre.

The plant sprouted up in an ideal location along the Lehigh River at the junction of the Lehigh Valley and the North Penn railroads.

(male #6) You could use this rail network to send the rails all over the United States to send its products all over the Middle Atlantic area, the region.

You could create something which would really have the potential to grow.

(narrator) Within 20 years, the Bethlehem Iron Company started making steel.

In 1901, the former president of U.S. Steel, Charles Schwab, bought the company and created the Bethlehem Steel Corporation.

To those, my friends, and of the American people in business and especially to the youth of the country, my word is, "Be not fearful of the future of this great country."

(narrator) Some describe him as a brilliant salesman who relished in taking risks.

(Lance) He took an enormous gamble in 1907, 1908, when he purchased control of the patent of Henry Gray to create a mill, a mill which could roll wide flange beams which were lighter and stronger.

(narrator) The gamble paid off.

(newsreel announcer) The mill began rolling wide flange beams that winter and it never had a chance to quit.

(metallic booming and banging) Bethlehem began a program of steady expansion for all kinds of structural steel.

Lucky it did.

Before long, there came an undreamed-of demand.

(narrator) The wide flange steel beam allowed engineers to heighten our cities and hurdle our rivers.

Company films chronicled its significant contributions.

(newsreel announcer) From these mills came the beginning of America's famous skylines, cities full of towering office buildings.

(uplifting music) ♪ Factories, warehouses, lofts.

(Lance) Most of the great bridges and most of the great skyscrapers that were built within the first four decades of the 20th century were built with the Bethlehem beam.

(narrator) Including San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

(newsreel announcer) Bethlehem, the major contractor, will build the steel towers and suspended span of the bridge.

♪ Huge sections, formed and temporarily assembled at the shops, are disassembled and shipped by rail to the Philadelphia docks.

It takes miles of railroad cars to carry the steel for the towers and suspended span.

♪ At Philadelphia, the sections are loaded aboard ships of Bethlehem's Calmar line for the long trip to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal, and finally through the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay.

Finally, on November 18, 1936, the closing members are lowered into place.

The Golden Gate is bridged.

(triumphant music) (narrator) Bethlehem Steel revolutionized building construction in America.

It helped support landmarks such as Rockefeller Center, the George Washington Bridge, the U.S. Supreme Court building, and 85 percent of the New York skyline.

In 1916, Schwab began acquiring steel mills along the East Coast.

His growing empire was flourishing as he turned over control of day-to-day operations to his right-hand man, Eugene Grace.

(Lance) Grace is the person who took Schwab's vision and made it into a reality.

He is the one who created the idea of Bethlehem and the steel, not Bethlehem Steel, but the steel, the image of this all-powerful, all-engulfing corporation, which shaped the way Bethlehem was going to develop during most of the 20th century.

Many of the products made in this community helped America build America, transport America, and defend America.

(guns firing) (narrator) Bethlehem Steel continued its long-standing contribution to American defense during World War I.

It beefed up its workforce to more than 37,000 at numerous mills and shipyards in Steelton, Pennsylvania, Sparrows Point, Maryland, Lackawanna, New York, and Massachusetts.

(Lance) 40 percent of the ammunition and 40 percent of the can on the western front came from this plant.

(narrator) World War I helped turn Bethlehem Steel into a mammoth corporation responsible for rolling out the symbol of a rising America: the wide flange beam.

The company also virtually controlled the growing city of Bethlehem.

(male #1) They're also the--sort of the patron saint of the town.

Any time anybody needed anything, including the mayor and the councilmen, they went hat in hand to Bethlehem Steel.

(narrator) As the company flourished, the promise of work lured thousands of immigrant families to Bethlehem.

Joe Achando's parents came from Portugal.

(Joe Achando) I think it became a great company because they had diversified people, different nationalities.

If a Hungarian worked alongside of a Slovak and he was going pretty fast, that Hungy didn't want that Slovak to outwork him.

He would work just as hard.

(male #1) People with the broad backs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Italians, the Irish, the Germans.

(Lance) Where you had a community which had 30 or 40 different ethnic groups of different religious backgrounds with different political persuasions living together under the aegis of this great company.

(narrator) Despite their cultural differences, immigrants built a strong community where neighbors helped neighbors.

(Richard) Everybody always worked together.

I mean, if you were building something, nobody got paid.

You went and helped each other.

If it was carpenter work, or brick work, or somebody knew something, or plastering work, or whatever, roofing work, somebody was always there to help you.

There were people... with virtually no ambitions except to put in that hard day's work and then go home and have a couple beers and--and just hope that their kids would have a better life.

(narrator) More often than not, those kids, like Vincent Brugger, would end up as hourly workers at the Steel.

In 1935, he followed his father's and grandfather's footsteps and joined the foundry staff.

(Vincent) I expected I would work at the Steel, yes, and had a desire to work there because I learned from their conversations that they were making history with the things that they were making.

(peppy music) (narrator) In the late '40s and '50s, Bethlehem Steel began recruiting in Puerto Rico.

Guillermo Lopez's family was among the first searching for a better life in Bethlehem.

They, for the most part, worked in the blast furnace, one hot place, or the Coke Works, the majority in the Coke Works, which was another hot place.

So, I guess the thinking was that people from Puerto Rico can handle the heat.

(narrator) Guillermo knew by the time he was 16 that he was heading for the Steel.

His father offered a loving warning.

(Guillermo) What my father said to me was, "Son, don't go to the Coke Works.

Take any job but don't go to the Coke Works."

Then, I remember the first day I was on the job, it was like, "Oh, my God, this is Hell."

Smoke and fire and it was just incredible.

I almost ran out of there.

It was like a dungeon.

(narrator) But Guillermo didn't run.

He stayed 25 years.

Leading up to the 1940s, workers say plant conditions were terrible.

(Nathan) People were getting killed down there, foolishly.

(female # 2) They did not pay the men a working wage.

They gave them no benefits.

Men, when they didn't work, they didn't get paid.

(male #7) The conditions in a place like this before the unions were horrific, and you could be fired at a moment's notice with just look somebody the wrong way, you could be fired.

(crowds yelling) (narrator) So in March 1941, workers walked off the job and onto the picket line.

They believed a union would help improve the plant's environment.

(male #8) The strikers turned over cars.

The state police had come down Third Street Bethlehem on horses trying to break up the strikers from picketing down there.

But, you know, that took a lot of guts for our guys to hang in there.

And, our forefathers, I have so much admiration for them.

(narrator) With the United States on the verge of war and valuable defense contracts up for grabs, Bethlehem Steel wanted to settle quickly.

It agreed to recognize the union now known as the United Steelworkers of America.

(female #2) So, in the early, early '40s, the union came into power and they demanded a 10-minute lunch break, which the men didn't have.

They demanded a wash room, a room where the men could change and not come into work with clean clothes and leave with filthy, dirty clothes and go home in their cars.

(Richard) If you worked at the centering plant for the shift, your face was totally, totally dirty, and your hands were totally dirty.

And you came into this welfare room, and just about everybody took a shower.

This basket here, you notice these homemade hooks that are here.

You put your towel on there or whatever you wanted to put on there.

You were like sardines in that shower.

Yes, you were.

You were like sardines and maybe Joe asked you, "Wash my back," and you did.

And Billy asked you, "Wash my back," and another guy's washing yours.

And that was every day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

(dramatic music) (narrator) In December 1941, the United States plunged into World War II.

Bethlehem Steel played a major role.

(Lance) You could not conceive of the United States winning World War I and World War II without Bethlehem Steel.

(narrator) Whatever the military needed, Bethlehem made.

Airplane engine forgings, giant cannon forgings, and parts for warships all left the mills for battle.

So did some steelworkers, including Nathan Tumminello's close friend, Eddie Muslich.

(Nathan) He had work in scarfing and I was working machine shop at that time, and when the last time he visited me with his wife, he says, "I got drafted."

I felt bad then.

(narrator) The two kept in touch through letters.

Nathan says he wanted to join the military, but as a machinist, his skills were needed at home.

I used to go to the draft board and I was demanding to get drafted.

He says, "We can't do that because that's up to the war department."

And he says, "You're doing war work, which is essential for the war effort."

(somber music) (narrator) This precious film is all Nathan has left of his childhood friend, Eddie.

He remembers day in 1944 when his father-in-law delivered the devastating news.

(Nathan) He came down, he said, "Your buddy Eddie was killed."

And, boy, I... Hard.

♪ Yeah.

♪ But I was always wishing he'd try to get into machine shop, too.

(narrator) For the first time since World War I, Bethlehem Steel hired women to fill the vacant jobs.

(Ethel) It was possible for the Bethlehem Steel to keep going and keep producing because of women and the female workforce.

(narrator) Ethel Gasda took a job in the plant patrol where the women earned an interesting nickname.

(Ethel) We carried .38 revolvers, so we were called "pistol packin' mamas."

(newsreel announcer) Immediately after the country's entrance into the war, Bethlehem Steel Company set up plant protection organizations at its various steel plants and shipyards.

Women that took these jobs were teachers, nurses, doctors' wives, mostly professional women because the job, at that point in time, paid more than professional jobs on the outside.

I worked at the main gate and checked in the workers, the laborers and everybody else that came through the main gate and checked their lunch bags.

Looked in the bags, squeezed the bags, and made sure there wasn't any gun or knives or anything else like that in.

(narrator) The mixed workforce turned out record amounts of steel.

President Eugene Grace promised the government a ship a day in 1943.

Bethlehem's busy mills and shipyards across the country worked feverishly to meet that ambitious goal.

Working in industrial engineering, Vincent Brugger encouraged his staff to produce more.

I was able to develop friendships with a lot of men and impart to them the contribution that they were making, and, in a sense, I guess, the feel that they were part of a great movement at the moment that might save our country.

(newsreel announcer) Bethlehem management made a worldwide report of progress when E.G.

Grace, president, broadcast a message to the 300,000 men and women of Bethlehem, to all America, and by short wave overseas, from a destroyer at Staten Island.

(Grace) War needs ships.

The United States' production of ships has been a prime factor in turning the tide to victory.

There is no other navy afloat that, ship for ship, man for man, gun for gun, can equal the United States' fleet.

And we are proud to have had a major part in the building of this magnificent fighting force.

(narrator) In 1940, Bethlehem Steel sales totaled $602 million, making it the nation's second largest steel producer.

The company's top management and workers raked in huge bonuses.

War created some of the best of times for Bethlehem Steel.

Sweltering, filthy, and treacherous; that's steelmaking.

It all begins in a scorching blast furnace where processed coal, known as coke, limestone, and iron ore mix to create pig iron.

From there, the process heats up.

(metallic clanging) Cold scrap metal dumps into a basic oxygen furnace, followed shortly by a ladle full of fiery iron.

The burning mixture seems to explode as a glowing shower of sparks rains down.

Inside, a pipe blows oxygen into the furnace as the mixture blazes to a raging 3,000 degrees.

Next, the molten steel is poured into molds or cast into slabs at some Bethlehem plants.

Rolling mills press and shape the steel into bars, beams, rails, sheets, and much more.

(John) They would virtually risk their lives in this tremendous heat and the tremendous smoke and the tremendous pressure and the tremendous danger.

Steelmaking was a dangerous job.

And you had things blowing up around you when you didn't know that it was gonna blow up, and you had to have one foot in another direction to get away from it.

My job was strictly an inspector in the beam yards.

There's a lot to inspecting.

You are responsible for the straightness of a bar, you are responsible for the surface defects in a bar, but you did work in all conditions, where when you would get a heavy snowstorm, steel company would be calling up to tell the main office workers to stay home.

The production workers, they would ask them if they would come into work.

And the machines used to break down in the bitterest cold weather because the metal gets brittle, you know, and gears would break.

We'd have to go out alongside the river there and the wind was always blowing down there.

And I used to look across the river at the homes.

I could see the lights in the windows, nice and warm.

(narrator) From the numbing cold to the blistering heat.

I was a molder; I poured hot metal.

It would get so hot that when you sweated, you got steam burns on your arms from the-- you know, the heat of skimming the molds.

It wasn't--it was an interesting job, but not a good job.

And once you got a job at the Steel, you were supposedly set for life, and of course they hoped that they got jobs in the offices rather than down there in the Coke Works where... where people sometimes seemed to be expendable.

(male #9) There's two classes of people: The ones that wear a suit and the ones that were wearing hard-tipped shoes and they had to work in inclement weather.

(narrator) Despite the hard work, men were grateful for the job.

(male #10) It was a good life; it afforded me a good life.

It afforded my family a good life.

Both my children got college educations, and I have no complaints about the Bethlehem Steel.

I started out in the blast furnace, and it was a physical job.

Hot, you know, but I loved it.

You know, work with a great bunch of guys.

"Those were the good days," I say.

(narrator) "The Steel," as it was called, provided good paying jobs and a decent life for workers.

Many had no college education.

But the mighty Steel also needed managers and researchers.

They found a plentiful supply just blocks away at Lehigh University.

This recruitment film encouraged young graduates to join the Steel.

(newsreel announcer) At Bethlehem Steel Company, for example, a training program called the Loop Course exists specifically to help new graduates, engineers, and others, men who will become a part of management, find the phase of modern steelmaking most suited to their talents and desires.

(narrator) Charles Luthar, a chemical engineering graduate from Lehigh University, started his steel career as a looper in 1965.

You study the entire operation, from the coke oven operation through the blast furnaces to the BOFs, and, at the time I started, open hearths, and right down to the structural rolling mills and how the rolling mills operated.

(narrator) At the end of the five week loop training, Luthar started working in the coke ovens.

(newsreel announcer) At the coke oven division of the steel plant, many varieties of coal arrive from different mines to be blended.

The blended coal is heated in ovens to drive off volatile matter, then discharged as metallurgical coke, the proper fuel for today's blast furnace.

(sizzling) (narrator) When the Steel opened its lavish headquarters on Third Street, it began hiring young, attractive women to escort visitors through the building.

The theory was that because all these girls were around and there were all of these loopers right out of college, I found that they might hook up.

(narrator) Ruth Allen worked for the Steel for 43 years and hired many of the escorts.

(Ruth) The number one responsibility of the escort job, I would say, was to be pleasant, to be able to smile and greet the person, be it an employee or visitor, and to recognize them, to get to know them, and everybody likes to be recognized, and to be able to call them by name.

(narrator) Business prospered and executives flaunted their wealth.

A few miles from the plant, Bethlehem Steel built the exclusive Saucon Valley Country Club.

It's here where officials often made crucial business decisions over a game of golf.

(John) They'd frequently also meet in the locker rooms of Saucon Valley Country Club, where they all prided themselves on golf because Eugene Grace, the great mentor, would, I say, never really embellish the ability of what a great contribution his company was making.

But it was always a news release when he would shoot his age in golf.

(fanfare) (narrator) This company film shows how much emphasis Grace placed on his golf game.

(reporter) Now, you've been playing golf for a long, long time, Mr. Grace, and don't you feel that golf is a great asset to any businessman or any man in any walk of life, man or woman?

(Grace) I think it's one of the... greatest development in the field of sports and competition... that we've come along with in this country.

(narrator) Some workers condemned what they considered an elitist mentality among top-level execs.

People have asked me to give a description what I would like to see or what kind of statue the Bethlehem Steel should put out in front of their company as a monument.

And I tell people what they should do is they should have an executive with a golf club in his hand getting ready to hit the ball with 15 or 20 assistant executives standing behind him with their hands in his pockets.

(laughs) ♪ Because that's the big reason Bethlehem went down the tubes.

♪ Too many management people.

(narrator) Grace's golf game improved along with company profits.

In 1958, the flourishing corporation owned 10 plants across the country, 13 fabricating mills, 10 shipyards, and 20 other manufacturing units.

Domestic and foreign sales offices reached more than 50.

Ships, roadways, oil rigs, government office buildings.

This steel giant did it all, but the seeds for its eventual demise were already planted.

(John) It was a very insular board, and as the book points out, this probably was part of their problem.

There was no-- some people could see the ship crumbling, but... not gonna tell that to the chairman.

(narrator) Most never imagined Bethlehem Steel, this icon of American industry, could falter.

In 1957, it employed 165,000 people across the country and produced 23 million tons of steel-- double that of the World War II heyday.

(Lance) For the first 25 years after World War II, the United States was economically dominant in the free world.

We had about 80 to 90 percent of the world's productive capacity in 1945 based upon the fact that France was damaged by the war, Italy, Japan, and Germany had been bombed flat, and the belief grew up is the most important thing is to keep the products rolling.

We can always find a market for them.

(narrator) Beginning in the '50s, Bethlehem found that new market in the growing suburbs.

We are self-sufficient in the suburbs, and we like it.

That fact has built us a new skyline-- a skyline of low horizontal proportions, of bold colors and designs, of new imaginative interiors, and of structural steel.

(narrator) From the outside it seemed Bethlehem had a bright future until the 1959 nationwide steel strike halted production.

(Charles) I think really the crux of Bethlehem's problems today started back in 1959 with the strike that lasted 117 days.

I think that set the tone then for the way Bethlehem operated from that point on.

(narrator) A half million steelworkers walked off the job in July of that year.

The strike silenced plants owned by 11 steel companies in the United States.

Vice President Richard Nixon helped negotiate a deal that gave workers a 41 cents an hour raise, expanded pension and health benefits, and offered a generous vacation package.

Some credit this deal with improving a steelworker's quality of life.

They could now send their children to college and move to the suburbs.

(Charles) I think it also influenced the way Bethlehem Management approached the union, because they recognized the union as a significant force now impacting their operations.

(male #11) The next time that the contract came up, the company took a more serious look at the union, and they gave us more respect when it came to negotiating.

(narrator) But that contract and future deals may have contributed to Bethlehem's eventual fall.

To pay for the high cost of these new employee benefits, steel management nationwide raised steel prices.

The federal government investigated alleged price fixing.

(John) Some people, some high executives, were wakened up late in the night by the FBI to be quizzed on whether they talked to so and so.

In other words, after the-- after the steel contract was signed, Bethlehem didn't go up alone on price, every steel company in the country went up, so there must have been collusion there.

They won't call it collusion.

Steelmakers will still call it the facts of life.

We had to pay the union.

(narrator) Those higher steel prices opened the door for cheaper steel imports from the rebuilding countries of World War II.

(John) People who we had bombed into submission-- the Germans, the Japanese-- were now coming out with new plants.

(Lance) They were able to start from scratch and adopt a new technology and get a jump on the long established American companies, which had billions of dollars investment in existing plants.

Whenever they-- Japan made a profit, they put it back into their company.

Bethlehem Steel put it into their pockets.

(Guillermo) After the '50s here in this plant, there wasn't a whole lot done towards reinvestment and change, you know?

If they woulda continued doing what they did in the '30s and the '40s, I believe this plant would still be running.

315, Joe, on the money, babe.

(Joe) That's good.

(newsreel announcer) "On the money, babe," has the ring of pride and confidence, but that's how you feel when you set the pace for the whole industry.

(narrator) Some believe an attitude of superiority prevented the company from adapting.

(John) One of the most powerful presidents was a president of operations.

And we had the best open hearth system of any steel company in the world.

We can make steel better than anybody else, so why should we change?

Here you have a group of execs, one of the highest paid groups in the 1960s.

This group that inherited Bethlehem and its rich history was a group that thought that life in the future would be pretty much the same as life in the past.

(narrator) But that proved not to be the case.

Bethlehem Steel was about to meet its greatest competition yet.

In the late 1950s, early '60s, the emergence of the mini mill became a threat for Bethlehem Steel.

Mini mills could be constructed for just several hundred million dollars instead of several billion dollars.

(narrator) Mini mills produced cheaper steel by melting scrap metal and through a process called continuous casting.

(Lance) Where you could make shapes, you know, coming right from the furnace.

(newsreel announcer) Engineers are working on new developments, continuous casting of slabs and billets to bring even greater economy to basic steelmaking.

(narrator) Historian Lance Metz says Bethlehem Steel tried this less expensive and quicker practice, but never followed through with it.

It wasn't cost-effective at the time.

(newsreel announcer) Continuous production is the engineer's objective today.

(Lance) We might not need a continuous caster for 20 years.

We have to make profits for our stockholders during that 20 years.

And then all of a sudden in the late '70s, these terms or these trends which had been building up since the 1950s hit with a start, and the company came very, very close to bankruptcy.

And then from that point on, the company really, really never recovered.

(narrator) But Bethlehem continued making profits and expanding.

In 1962, it opened a huge integrated steel plant in Burns Harbor, Indiana.

It produced sheet and plate steel for the Midwest automobile industry.

But foreign companies continued dropping cheaper imports on U.S. shores.

Not all hope was lost, however.

Bethlehem won major contracts for projects like New York's Madison Square Garden.

(fanfare) In the '60s, Bethlehem tried to reinvent itself as the new Bethlehem Steel.

This promotional film touts a high-tech business setting trends in the industry, but not enough had changed.

(newsreel announcer) The new Bethlehem Steel is 130,000 eager people with a purpose.

Over Narragansett Bay at Newport, Rhode Island, Bethlehem iron workers made engineering history when they erected the first suspension bridge anywhere in the world with shop fabricated parallel wire strand.

This dramatic new concept of bridge building is a product of the new Bethlehem Steel.

(Dale) The new Bethlehem Steel that was portrayed in their promotional films that were shot during the early 1960s probably earned Bethlehem Steel an A in public relations.

Their performance in later years, as the facts clearly reveal, demonstrates that they earned an F in economics.

(narrator) Despite the claims, Bethlehem had not updated its operations, and in the late '60s, it was about to be dealt a painful blow.

(Lance) One of the great symbols of the potential decline of the American Steel industry was the construction of the World Trade Center.

(John) They were the low bidder on building the Twin Towers in New York.

They outbid U.S. Steel, their main rival.

There was cheering of all sorts about that.

And suddenly the Port Authority said, "Hey, this bid is too high."

(Lance) They saw that imported steel was cheaper.

(John) And they split the job among private contractors who then went out and built the towers far more cheaply using foreign steel all the way through.

That was a--that was a blow.

That was almost a fatal blow.

(Lance) And once other people saw how successful that model of building high rise structures was in reality, they copied it, and that was the beginning of the end for these big companies' dominance in the structural steel market.

(narrator) The 1970s brought a series of changes to the Bethlehem plant-- one of them, Jeanne "Honi" Brugger.

I was the first girl since World War II to go back out into the plant and put on safety equipment.

(narrator) As a member of the Industrial Engineering Department, Honi was the first of a wave of women to re-enter the plant.

And that bothered some men.

A lot of men felt very threatened by it, I think.

And although maybe their fathers worked side by side with women during the war, the next generation then did not want women there at all.

(narrator) And the men made it known she wasn't welcome.

(Honi) But I still had a lot of tricks, you know, oil in the shoes and water in the hat and lunch is destroyed and Ex-Lax in your sandwich-- a lot of different things.

(narrator) Meanwhile, the late '70s brought what would be Bethlehem's first of many rounds of pink slips over the next two decades.

The company restructured and tried to innovate.

The new methods that should have been explored and tested and eventually implemented as Bethlehem moved into the decade of the 1970s were not manifest until the 1980s.

Ten years later.

And ten years later means catch up.

Too little too late.

(narrator) Bethlehem couldn't compete with the mini mills.

Why?

Many blame expensive union contracts promising generous medical benefits and pension plans for tens of thousands of retired workers.

(Dale) No matter how efficient you are, you're having to deal with costs that somehow have to find their way into product pricing.

(narrator) Within the plant, animosity grew between the union and management.

Some believe workers demanded too much.

(John) Some of the contracts were outrageous.

And on the other hand, the steel management was under tremendous pressure by government to settle, too.

(soft music) Don't want any more strikes.

♪ So they were caught in the middle, and the union has got to take on blame for this as well as the management, who should have said, "Okay, the holiday is over, and we've got to face facts..." ♪ "...for both of our salvations."

(Judy) I think it was the mentality at the times, you know, the steel was booming so the union wanted to get what they could for their workers.

Of course, the executives wanted to get what they could for themselves.

And it was everybody pulling, you know, everything out of the company, and they just sucked it dry.

(Guillermo) Since 1983, you can say that the people that worked at this plant worked with a gun pointed to their head.

And there was a point where people said pull the trigger.

The company would come back to the union and say, "Can you give us back?"

And it was always said, "Look, if you don't give us back, the plant's gonna close," you know?

So that was the gun.

The plant's gonna close, the plant's gonna close eventually.

The guys said, "Go ahead, pull the trigger, close the plant."

(narrator) November 18th, 1995, the end of the road for the South Bethlehem plant.

This home video shows the last ingot mold pouring.

Two and a half years later on March 28th, 1998, the last remaining operation ended in South Bethlehem as the coke ovens were turned off.

The plant that helped build America, bridge America, and defend America sat silent, blast furnaces cold.

(melancholy music) Nine and a half miles of once bustling Bethlehem Steel land, motionless.

Thousands of workers and supervisors forced to look for work.

(John) I never in my life would have dreamed that this plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, would have closed.

Never in my wildest dreams.

I felt that this was an industry that would not only be there for me, but be there for my sons and be there for my grandchildren.

(Adnan) Even when they shut it down, the last minute, I thought, "Oh, something's gonna happen."

It didn't happen.

(Charles) You work with these folks day in and day out for many, many years.

You got to know where they were and what their family's background was, what their hobbies were, and you really built tremendous friendships.

And here was the end.

(Lance) People look and say, "Who was responsible for the decline of Bethlehem Steel?"

Well, the problem is everybody and nobody was responsible.

It wasn't all union, it wasn't all management.

It was a combination of union, management, market factors, changes in technology.

(suspenseful music) (narrator) But that didn't mean the end of steelmaking for Bethlehem Steel.

The company's more modern plants kept rolling it out.

Thousands of laid off steelworkers from Bethlehem found work at the company's other plants, including this one in Sparrows Point, Maryland.

Adnan Issa, Jeff Hoffert, and Joseph Spengler came down here to put in what they believed would be just a few years before their pensions would kick in.

Some moved their families.

Others left loved ones behind.

(Adnan) Well, I had my house in Bethlehem, and I own an apartment here.

And I'll go--whenever I have days off I'll go back home and come back.

I've been doing it for almost six years now.

Knowing that I had about six and a half years to go to get my 30 years, I figured I'd come down here to Sparrows Point, put my six and a half in.

Shared an apartment with another person for two years, and then my wife and daughter came down, and we moved down here.

But it wasn't the easiest thing to do.

But you had to do it.

(narrator) Once they reached their 30 years in 2003 and 2004, these men planned to head home to Bethlehem.

But soon those plans will be ruined.

(clanging) Back in Bethlehem it didn't take long for demolition crews to get to work tearing down the coke ovens and other buildings that once roared with activity.

(beeping and creaking) (soft music) ♪ (male #13) The old Bethlehem Steel is dead.

We're in limbo right now and a new company's going to come out the other end.

And if we're willing to change, the new Bethlehem Steel can live long and prosper.

(narrator) Change--that's what CEO Steve Miller believes Bethlehem didn't do.

It's resistance to change.

This company very much has enjoyed being at the very top of American industry going back 40 or 50 years, and has been slow to realize that the world has changed.

(narrator) In fall 2001, Miller, credited with helping bail out a struggling Chrysler Corporation, took over the frail Bethlehem Steel.

At the time, 13,000 employees worked at operations in Burns Harbor, Indiana, Sparrows Point, Maryland, Steelton, Pennsylvania, and the Lukens division in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.

(Steve) We also were a company that had 300,000 workers in World War II.

Today we have perhaps six retirees for every active worker, and it is just impossible for us to both meet our obligations to our retired workforce and have the capital left over to invest to grow the business going forward.

(narrator) In late 2001, Bethlehem Steel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Even though Miller says the remaining plants are efficient and profitable, he claims the exorbitant cost of health benefits and pensions the company pays to its employees and retirees has driven the company more than $3 billion in the red.

The human tragedy which is occurring is not so much the great loss of jobs.

That occurred in the '70s and the '80s.

The great human tragedy is the many, many people who are dependent upon benefits which they thought were guaranteed.

(narrator) The reality of losing their health benefits... We have to show force.

(narrator) ...brought thousands of steel retirees to rally in the nation's capital in February 2002.

They called for President George W. Bush to impose a 40 percent tariff on steel imports.

We're not asking for a handout, we're asking just to give us a level playing field, and that's all we really want.

(narrator) The protesters believe tariffs will enable American companies to compete with cheaper foreign steel and help foot the bill for retirees' healthcare.

President Bush responded with a 30 percent three-year tariff.

Most believe it helped, but it wasn't enough to save the company.

(Steve) My commitment to all of you is to stay until the job is finished of putting Bethlehem back on solid footing, and I intend to finish that job while I'm here.

(narrator) In December 2002, a government agency abruptly took over Bethlehem Steel's pension payments to 96,000 retirees, a bill the bankrupt company could no longer afford.

The government takeover put an end to the company's policy that allowed workers to retire after 30 years.

Many folks, like Jeff Hoffert, were looking forward to retiring within months.

Now he has to work another 12 years before he can retire at the age of 62.

Families are furious about the change.

(Jeff) I chose to come down here, but now that they tell me I can't get my pension and go back there?

That I don't like.

(Judy) Well, you can't help but be bitter.

And we devoted our entire lives to this moment, really.

He would have gotten his pension next year, you know, he was one year away.

Some people were one week away.

So you can't help but be bitter.

(Adnan) Imagine if you've got ten more days till you get your-- till you get your pension, go retire.

Now I'm gonna have to work until 62, and I don't know if I can keep up working here.

(Joseph) I figure I'll lose around $300,000.

Like I said before, if you say it fast, it doesn't sound like much.

It's only $300,000.

Yes, there is a lot of animosity now against Bethlehem Steel.

(narrator) Some blame CEO Steve Miller for pushing the government to take over pension payments.

(Steve) I'm very sorry for their personal situation, but this is not how the company wanted it.

We wanted to have more time so as to be able to reduce our workforce by special early retirement programs, so those people who were not going to continue working would have the benefit of an early retirement.

That was not in the cards.

The government slammed the door in our face.

We're upset about it, but it is the reality.

We do not have the money to make good on all the promises made by this corporation over the last 50 years.

("O Little Town of Bethlehem" playing) ♪ (narrator) The old steel town of Bethlehem had fallen on tough times after the plant closed, but the Christmas City of 70,000 has rebounded.

Each year millions visit the city's quaint shopping districts and annual summer music festival.

(male #14) Bethlehem really has not missed a beat.

You know, we've got a lot of former steelworkers here.

We've got sons and daughters of steelworkers.

And the steel's gone into history, but the city has actually prospered and taken on a new life beyond steel.

When we really think about this site, I think it truly does describe what has gone on over the last century.

(narrator) In 1999, Bethlehem Steel broke ground on Bethworks, a mega recreation and shopping destination using many of the plant's historic buildings.

Eight million dollars of state and federal money improved the infrastructure and funded new roads, street lights, and park benches.

The Smithsonian even announced plans to construct a museum of American industry on the site.

Some steel land has been turned into an intermodal commerce center while other portions have given rise to centers for growing high-tech companies.

A steelworker's son, former mayor Don Cunningham, oversaw much of the city's revitalization during his seven years in office.

(Don) My job has been to preserve what we can and reuse what we can so that the generations of tomorrow in Bethlehem have job opportunities that the past generations had, and that the city has a strong and vibrant economy like it did for the last 120 years.

(narrator) While many focus on Bethlehem's future, the rusting blast furnaces keep folks from forgetting the past.

(John) When they dig out our ruins, the story of the steel industry will be a case study on how a civilization possibly failed... (melancholy music) ...failed in the-- from the viewpoint of sticking to conventional methods for too long, believing that this country could not exist unless we had the steel companies to produce the very vital product that made this country run.

(female #3) It's sad, too, because Bethlehem Steel was a giant, and you knew if you worked for a place like that that you were pretty much set for life, and you bought your homes and put your children through college because of Bethlehem Steel, and there was pride in that.

And, um... ♪ (Dale) Eugene Grace-- Bethlehem Steel president 1916, former Lehigh alumnus, would be walking the halls in the old Bethlehem Steel's headquarter building in complete disgust.

He would probably be saying to himself, the modern age and so-called modern management have combined to disenfranchise my company.

(narrator) While the city moves forward, it hasn't lost touch with its past.

In the shadow of the blast furnaces, a steelworker's memorial lists thousands of names.

In the center, a bronze statue of a steelworker hoisting an I-beam.

Visiting the memorial triggers waves of memories for former workers.

(Vincent) When I'm down there and see the smoke stacks of the blast furnace without any production, I just--feels very sad because I know that many of my friends, many of my men have worked there and are just broken hearted when they look at it.

(female #3) It's just really hard to imagine that a company like Bethlehem Steel that you read about, I read about in my history books is just gone like it never happened.

(Richard) You go out the back of my house on my back porch, and you look at the skyline,