Fight Against Shutdowns: Youngstown's Steel Mill Closings

by Staughton Lynd

Book by Lynd, Staughton

244 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1982

About the author

The son of renowned sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Lynd, Staughton Lynd grew up in New York City. He earned a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD in history from Columbia. He taught at Spelman College in Georgia (where he was acquainted with Howard Zinn) and Yale University. In 1964, Lynd served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project. An opponent of the Vietnam War, Lynd chaired the first march against the war in Washington DC in 1965 and, along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker, went on a controversial trip to Hanoi in December 1965 that cost him his position at Yale.

In the late 1960s Lynd moved to Chicago, where he was involved in community organizing. An oral history project of the working class undertaken with his wife inspired Lynd to earn a JD from the University of Chicago in 1976. After graduating the Lynds moved to Ohio, where Staughton worked as an attorney and activist.

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great account of the attempt of steelworkers to buy the local mills from the corporate owners shutting them down. Though they eventually failed, they were nearly able to cause path breaking legal decisions to be make on community property rights via law suits against U.S. Steel. A great takeaway is how the free market backfired in the domestic steel industry, which saw steel manufacturers opting to invest in more profitable industries rather than modernize their facilities--which by several accounts were the most profitable steel mills in the world.