I thought the same thing. Maybe Alabama tries to get Birmingham to do this but with the race issue being such an issue and unions not being well liked down south, would it work? Could US steel just say screw you and build plants in say Birmingham and Chattanooga and Atlanta and basically just operate without unions and bend to segregation?
Or might a place like Pueblo Colorado or Salt Lake City or Denver want to attract such industries to Be close to iron mines? Or maybe even Iowa and have railroads bring Minnesota Iron Ore to Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Davenport, Des Moines or Sioux City if feasible? Seems like that’s all unlikely.
The thing is, they sort of did. Atlanta and Chattanooga had nascent iron industries dating back to before the Civil War. Atlanta's growth as a heavy industrial center mostly ended in 1864 as post-war the city shifted to becoming more of a light manufacturing and logistical hub centered around the railroad and local cotton markets, but Chattanooga, whose factories weren't destroyed in war, continued to boom as a center of heavy industry into the 20th century. Chattanooga's operations fostered a proliferation in iron and steel manufacturers in surrounding parts of East Tennessee (like Rockwood), North Georgia (Chickamauga and Rising Fawn) and northeast Alabama (Battelle). When Birmingham took off in the 1870s-1890s, it helped fuel this rise, especially in places like Anniston and Gadsden, Alabama. The "steel industry" is a fairly complex sector which manufactures a whole range of different products with different materials. So, what ended up happening was places like Chattanooga and Birmingham became centers for rolling mills, pipe foundries, and other finished products while the smaller areas, which were closer to the raw materials, tended to support these operations by producing the raw pig iron, coking, etc.
For the most part these operations started off as local affairs, but by the 1920s-1950s companies like US Steel and Republic Steel began to set up operations there. Unlike the plants in the Midwest, the Southern plants were for the most part non-union (there were still some unions, but not like up north), but the issue was a lot of the supporting infrastructure that led to the rise of places like Chattanooga dated to roughly the same time frame as their northern counterparts, and the Southern mills weren't substantially more modern than anything you'd find in Ohio. Also, a lot of times companies would just purchase an existing plant rather than build a completely new one. US Steel did this with a lot of the East Tennessee and North Georgia plants when they merged with TCIR in the 1900s.
Usually when people talk about industry moving South, they don't mean the old industrial centers like Birmingham, but new plant operations built in places like Nissan's plant in Canton, Mississippi. The problem is companies like US Steel weren't really structured to do that sort of thing, and the companies that did end up setting up new mills in the South (like Nucor) opted to use recycled scrap metal as opposed to iron ore and coke, which means they require a lot less workers and supporting industries.
Still after the recession of '57-58. where Steel demand was lower. But the main problem of the existing Steel plants themselves.
The Steel Companies didn't want to replace the 1910-1920s era Bessemer Plants with the new basic oxygen process plants that were developed after WWII.
After all, they had won both World Wars with those plants, why upgrade? New plants cost money.
Now West Germany and Japan, they weren't shackled with the old technology plants. They were destroyed in the War
They had to start fresh, and there was no reason to build the old style plants, when the new basic Oxygen process plants was far more efficient, fewer workers but made cheaper, and higher quality steel.
By time the 1970s roll around, they just can't compete, so the Steel Unions and Steel Plant Owners, just delayed the inevitable by requesting tariffs and outright limits on the import of higher quality, lower cost steel . Now South Korean Steel was starting to do to Japan, even cheaper and just as good, with China just around the corner, with improved relations after Mao was gone
So even without the Strike, still run into the problem that US Steel costs too much, and much was of lower quality and not the newer more desired alloy types. So the old plants are shuttered, Unionmen laid off.
But at this point, new US Plants were opening using the new methods, so actually US steel production didn't totally drop off, but still was more expensive, so imports continued to take market share, as US demand for Steel kept increasing after the 1970s Economic shocks
This is a big part of it, but it also leaves out some other factors. Copying from an earlier post of mine:
Unions
People don't like to blame the unions, but they were a big reason US manufacturing become so uncompetitive against non-union labor, even within the United States. In short, the unions became too greedy and demanded, and received, too lucrative contracts that US manufacturing companies simply weren't capable of meeting. GM, for example, was famous for allowing an employee to fully retire after 20 years of service. That sounds reasonable, until you realize that means a person could start working at a GM plant in Detroit aged 18 and fully retire at 38, allowing them to live 30-40 years fully on GM's dime without producing anything for the company. Union benefits were also pretty generous, especially for that time, though it of course varied from company to company.
Poor urban planning, taxes, and governance
Much like how the Antebellum South was heavily reliant on one or two industries, most Rust Belt cities were heavily reliant on one or another manufacturing "specialty." For Detroit it was cars, for Gary, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland it was steel, for Rochester cameras/photo-optics. Whatever it was, most cities had a clearly dominant sector, which meant that when downturns happened in those industries their city governments were ill-prepared to deal with the consequences. This was especially true in the urbanized north, where city governments had to deal with large infrastructure costs, a burdensome regulation/taxation environment, strong pro-labor laws, etc. that made locating a manufacturing site there less desirable over time. For a while they could counteract this with the fact the Manufacturing Belt was the only real source of the skilled labor necessary to operate a factory, but this changed after WW2. Education attainment rates began skyrocketing in post-war Europe and Asia, and in the American South new development meant it was easier to locate a factory in right-to-work, low-tax states like Tennessee, Georgia, etc. Northern city leaders failed to address these problems, and as a result their cities became less and less desirable for new businesses to locate to, and for existing businesses to continue operating in. When these businesses pulled out they left a massive tax hole for city governments, not to mention crippled community fabrics (many towns were built around a plant, and a whole plethora of smaller businesses often sprung up to support that plant's operations or the workers who were employed there). This meant they had less money to give away as incentives for newcomers, less money to invest in infrastructure/education systems, more blight, and from there the downward spiral began.
The New South
New Southern leaders began taking a more open-minded position to industrialization after the boll weevil and WW2, and industrial growth was further spurred by the rise of the Sun Belt phenomenon and desegregation. The South had several competitive advantages over the north, especially for foreign manufacturers looking to establish operations in the US; the South did not have a prominent union culture, and it's labor laws were considerably more business-friendly, the South had plentiful, and cheap, raw materials, the South had new power infrastructure (such as the TVA and new nuclear sites) that provided cheap energy, land was cheaper in the South, and rising education rates, lower wages, and population growth meant that companies didn't have to worry as much about a lack of a skilled work force. As early as the 1900s Northern industries like textile manufacturing had moved to the South, and this phenomenon spread as the 20th century wore on until now most manufacturing is done in the Southern US.
Globalization
This is similar to the New South phenomenon, except on a global scale. It's no secret that free trade agreements like NAFTA, and other "globalist" policies have had a big impact on American manufacturing. Companies like Ford are notorious for transferring operations from US sites to Mexican ones, as NAFTA lifted any barriers to trade between the two countries. This meant that American companies could make their goods right across the border, and ship them north to sell to the more lucrative American market. However, globalization and neoliberalism affected American manufacturing in other ways. One was the US' position of a "strong dollar policy," which was designed to boost US economic performance. Although this policy was successful in boosting American trade and imports, it had the downside of making American products much less competitive with foreign ones. As the dollar strengthened, American consumers could purchase foreign products for less, most notably Japanese automobiles, steel and electronics. Since these products were generally more in-line with consumer demands in the first place, it was the weaker stance of the dollar that helped insulate American manufacturers from some of the fallout. This strengthening took that away and, as such, a crisis soon developed in the American manufacturing sector, principally the steel industry.
Changing manufacturing practices
The advent of management/production techniques like just-in-time manufacturing revolutionized how manufacturing was done. They made operations more efficient, and company profits greater. However, they came with a notable downside, and that was that such optimization efforts, combined with increasing automation, meant that fewer workers were needed to produce a car or ton of steel in the 1990s than were needed even in the 1960s. In short, factories, even successful ones like US Steel's Gary Plant, needed far less workers to produce a similar amount of units than they did before, and combined with the costs associated with plant union labor, meant that plants that operated by these changes were a lot more cost effective.
I agree with you that in the end the Rust Belt was more or less inevitable to a degree. It would take some serious PODs to change all of these things.
