Never a City So Real

by Alex Kotlowitz

  Oil Can Eddie

  Ten minutes now I have been looking at this.

  I have gone by here before and wondered about it.

  This is a bronze memorial of a famous general

  Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver on him.

  I want to smash the whole thing into a pile of junk to be hauled away to the scrap yard.

  I put it straight to you,

  After the farmer, the miner, the shop man, the factory hand, the fireman and the teamster,

  Have all been remembered with bronze memorials . . .

  Then maybe I will stand here

  And look easy at this general of the army holding a flag in the air . . .

  CARL SANDBURG

  (from “Ready to Kill,” Chicago Poems)

  Fourteen miles southeast of the Loop, at the base of Lake Michigan, the city’s easternmost corner, one finds a fistful of neighborhoods with hearty names like Irondale, Hegewisch, The Bush, and Slag Valley. This is South Chicago. Apart from Altgeld Gardens—a vast public housing complex virtually hidden from the rest of the world by towering mountains of garbage and often referred to as Chicago’s Soweto—South Chicago is the city’s most isolated community, its most removed. The labor lawyer and author Tom Geoghegan has called it “a secret city.” The vast majority of Chicagoans have never set foot here, and as if to ensure such detachment, above the compact redbrick bungalows with postage-stamp-size yards looms the Chicago Skyway, a highway on stilts, which takes the prosperous to their cottages along the Indiana and Michigan shorelines. The neighborhoods below are modest in appearance, a collection of small homes and small taverns and diners with simple names like Steve’s, Pete’s Hideaway, Who Cares?, Small World Inn, and Maria’s Den. There’s nothing fanciful about this area. As one observer wrote: “Streets named Commercial and Exchange offer testimony that people came here to make a buck, not admire the scenery.”

  And yet the scenery, so to speak, is awe-inspiring, the man-made equivalent of the Rockies. Dark, low-to-the-ground muscular structures, some three times the size of a football field, sprawl across the landscape, sprouting chimneys so tall that they’re equipped with blinking lights to alert wayward aircraft. These chimneys shoot full-bodied flames thirty feet into the sky; at night they appear almost magical, like giant torches heating the moon. Billows of smoke linger in the air like phantom dirges. It used to be, when the steel mills were going strong, that these smokestacks spat out particles of graphite that would dust the streets and cars and rooftops like snow, catching the sun and setting the neighborhood aglitter. Suspended conveyor belts, pipes, and railroad overpasses weave in, out, and over the behemoth buildings. The noise is crushing, the stench of sulfur so powerful that not even a closed car window can keep it at bay. Had Rube Goldberg lost his sense of humor, this is, I imagine, what he would have produced.

  This is the heart of American industrial might, or what’s left of it. The first of the mills was built in the 1850s, and within a hundred years more steel was produced in this stretch of land than anywhere else in the world. The freighters delivered iron ore from Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, and the mills turned the mineral into steel, shipping it west by rail and eventually east by the St. Lawrence Seaway. By the 1960s, the mills employed eighty thousand men and women; they cascaded in from Poland, from Yugoslavia, from Mexico, and from the American South. Steel mills and refineries lined up along the dredged Calumet River and along the Lake Michigan shoreline, extending twenty-two miles from South Chicago to Gary, Indiana. This stretch of boiling steel was the equivalent of an industrial mountain stream, the source for can openers and knives, refrigerators and cars, bridges and skyscrapers. It fed this country’s insatiable hunger for consumption and comfort. It was, in short, the nation’s lifeblood.

  The local population is still so dependent on the mills that the daily newspaper in Hammond, Indiana, which is just over the Chicago border, runs a box score every Wednesday of the region’s steel tonnage and capacity. Nonetheless, there are only fifteen thousand working in the mills now; the owners grew complacent, so accustomed to their oligopoly that they forgot how to compete. Between the mills that still roll steel, there are hundreds of acres of vacant land littered with abandoned factory buildings stripped of their exteriors, brick coke houses collapsing in on themselves, and railroad tracks and bridges that have turned a muddy brown from rust.

  Ed Sadlowski, who is a sixty-four-year-old resident of South Chicago and who loves his city’s opera, its museums, and its baseball teams, can’t understand why his wife wants to move to Florida, where the world seems dipped in pastels. Sadlowski loves his neighborhood. Although he’s been retired from the mills and from his union work for twelve years, he still feels most at home among its tired workers and its skeletal factories. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. For him, the landscape of the past that connects him to his neighbors and to the world is palpable here, and Sadlowski fears that the story of his people might disappear if he were to abandon this place. He has become the custodian of its history.

  I first became acquainted with Sadlowski in 1976, not in Chicago, but in a steelworkers’ union hall in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when he was making labor history rather than fighting to preserve it. I was attending college nearby, where I eagerly detected rumblings of the coming class war in any worker who spoke derisively of his or her boss (which, I would later learn, included just about anyone who worked for someone else). Then I heard that this maverick, freespoken steelworker from Chicago was running for the international union’s presidency, and that he actually had a chance. So a group of friends and I drove to Bridgeport and climbed the stairs to the second-floor meeting room where, despite our soft hands, long hair, and youth, we somehow thought we’d blend in. To be honest, I don’t remember much of that gathering except for Sadlowski himself, who, dressed in an open-collared polyester shirt, was as eloquent and clearheaded a speaker as I’d ever heard. He talked of how the workers and the bosses have nothing in common. “It’s a class question,” he bellowed. I went away thinking that if this was the proletariat, I wanted in.

  Sadlowski, who was a beefy man back then, has become beefier. (He once told a reporter while speaking of an eighty-seven-year-old friend who was physically fit: “He’s as sharp as ever. I wonder what he drinks that keeps him that way.” To which Sadlowski’s wife, Marlene, replied, “Exercise!”) He’s always been a charismatic man—I’ve heard more than one woman say she had a crush on him—but his barrel of a belly now seems to rest precariously on his toothpick-thin legs. It’s more, though, than just his physical bearing that’s oversized. It’s also his appetite for new people, new places, new ideas. His friends have included Studs Terkel and former presidential speechwriter Richard Goodwin. He’s traveled throughout Europe, as well as to Russia, both for pleasure and to meet fellow trade unionists. His house is littered with books, mostly historical works on labor and war: on bookshelves, on tables, on the floor, in the basement, in the sun room. “Eddie’s interests are omnivorous,” says Tony Judge, a mutual friend. “He refuses to be limited by others’ expectations of a labor guy. . . . He loves talk. He loves history. He’ll talk to you about the Crimean War, about the Boer War, about Eskimos, about the union. He’s an enormous furnace of a man who demands that those who come around him throw the door open and shovel like hell.”

  Age has been both cruel and kind to Sadlowski. He has had an operation for a brain tumor, which nips at his memory, and he’s undergone three bypass surgeries. Over time, though, his features have softened, giving him a gentler look. He’s still prone to say things that he knows will make others twitch with discomfort. His bushy eyebrows rise and fall with his pronouncements. Once, a labor reporter for the Chicago Tribune introduced himself to Sadlowski at a conference. “He looked at me,” the reporter recounted for a local newsweekly, “and said ‘How unusual. You never see prostitutes in the daylight.’ ” I had heard of this encounter, so when I introduced myself to Sadlowski at a
gathering in Chicago, twenty-six years after I’d first heard him speak, I was careful to identify myself in the vaguest terms possible, as a “writer.” I told him about sneaking into the union hall in Connecticut. His eyebrows rose like drawbridges. He leaned down. “Colonizer, huh,” he said.

  “Colonizer?” I asked.

  “Which group were you with?”

  I got it. It was how he referred to the steelworker wannabes, the young leftist sectarians who figured working in the mills would bring them closer to the revolution. “None,” I stuttered.

  “Man, thirty years that memory goes.”

  He patted me on the back, and laughed. What I later learned is that if, in fact, I had been a colonizer, it would have been okay by Sadlowski. At least, it would have meant I was on his side. And with Sadlowski, which side you’re on still matters.

  Sadlowski was seventeen when he first went to work for U. S. Steel at its South Works plant, a collection of more than a hundred buildings that covered an area nearly the size of New York’s Central Park. It employed so many people—twenty thousand—that it sponsored a softball league of sixty-three teams. “When I went into high school, a counselor would steer you,” he recalls. “He said, ‘Sadlowski, you’re assigned to industrial arts.’ You know, wood shops, print shops, making shoeshine boxes, glass wind chimes, lamps out of old bowling pins. The whole point was that you were assigned to that with the thought that you were going to end up a worker in life, doing mechanical things.” In his junior year (it’s as far as he would get in school), a recruiter from U. S. Steel told an assembly of boys, “You can go there and get a trade, and no one can ever take a trade from you.” Sadlowski didn’t need much coaxing. His father, also named Ed, had become a millwright at Inland Steel after a stint as a semipro baseball shortstop, and although he discouraged the younger Ed from following him into the mills, he was his son’s hero. Often during the summer, after the elder Sadlowski’s shift ended near midnight, his son would meet him at the Plant 3 gate, and the two would drive to Calumet Fisheries, a takeout shack along the Calumet River (it still exists, and is worth a visit), where they’d order two pounds of deep-fried shrimp or sections of peppered smoked trout and pick up a six-pack of Meisterbrau. Then they’d wander down to the rocks along Lake Michigan, where they’d talk through the night—about baseball, about family, and about the union.

  The younger Sadlowski’s first job at the South Works plant was in the machine shop. The men called it “Happy Valley” because compared to places like the blast furnace, where temperatures topped one hundred fifty degrees, it was a fairly reasonable place to work. There Sadlowski oiled the prehistoric-looking machines—the lathes, the drill presses, and the hulking overhead cranes—and so earned the moniker “Oil Can Eddie.”

  “There was guys in the shop who done a lot of reading on the job,” he says. “They’d be running a lathe, and it’s gonna take an hour to go from here to there with the cutting tool, and they’d read a book. Management frowned on that, but guys did it. I’d read a book every couple of days. I’d go into the oil shanty away from the shop or into the locker room and sit in the toilet and read a book.” Sadlowski read John Steinbeck and James T. Farrell, Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos; in these novels he recognized himself and his fellow steelworkers, and the world began to make sense to him.

  In 1959, Sadlowski married Marlene, who was at that time working as a dental assistant, and in four years they had four children. In 1962, he became a griever for the union. A griever is the union representative who takes workers’ complaints to the boss, and for Sadlowski, there was never much of a gray area. “The company was the devil,” he said. “Anyone who worked in the steel industry knew that—that the company wasn’t no good.” He learned the importance of good theater early on, and so made it a point to confront the foreman in his all-glass office where his coworkers could witness the exchange: the foreman sitting behind his desk with Sadlowski towering over him, gesticulating wildly, his hands slashing the air as if he were about to impart physical damage. “When they see that and they see that you produce, they’ll follow you to hell,” he told me.

  Sadlowski rose fast in the union. First, he became president of his local, then he ran for the directorship of District 31, a consortium of the locals in the mills along the Chicago–Indiana corridor. The incumbent union machine, which called itself “the Official Family,” had been in power for thirty years and wasn’t about to relinquish its position easily. They refused, for instance, to give Sadlowski the location of all 285 locals, and so he, as well as family members and friends, dispersed throughout the city, looking for factories and then sneaking in to talk with the union members there. He lost the election, but it soon became clear that the Official Family engaged in massive voter fraud, filling out blank ballots—for their own family, of course. In a new election, which was monitored by four hundred federal observers, Sadlowski won by twenty thousand votes.

  In 1976, at the age of thirty-seven, Sadlowski took on sixty-year-old Lloyd McBride for the presidency of the international union. The old guard, of which McBride was a part, had recently entered into a more cooperative arrangement with management. They had signed a contract that called for all disputes to be settled by arbitration. The union had promised not to strike, and I. W. Abel, who was stepping down as president of the union, had signed and let his picture be used in an industry newspaper ad pleading for higher productivity. Sadlowski saw things differently. His perspective harked back to labor’s more militant days. He believed that there was a point at which the interests of management and that of the workers diverged. He believed it was a mistake for the union to give up its most powerful weapon. He believed that the members of the union should be allowed to vote on this new experimental contract. His campaign gathered momentum, and soon Time magazine warned that “if Sadlowski does become the Steelworkers’ chief, both the economy and the climate of the nation’s labor–management relations could be significantly affected.” One company executive told a reporter that if Sadlowski was elected “it would be a whole new ballgame.” (The executive also tipped his hat to Sadlowski, saying “He was far and away the ablest union guy who has come down this pike—dedicated, tireless, and honest.” ) Profiles of Sadlowski appeared in Rolling Stone and The New York Times Magazine. He gave an interview to Penthouse and appeared on Meet the Press. He became the darling of the left; Richard Goodwin and the television producer Norman Lear held fund-raisers for him. Geoghegan, in his marvelous book Which Side Are You On?, wrote, “It’s hard to believe now, but in 1976 this was a big story.” Bigger for some, Geoghegan recounts, than the presidential election that year, between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Sadlowski became a modern-day paradox, a working-class hero in a country that doesn’t think it has classes.

  When the old guard accused Sadlowski of being a communist dupe, he told a New York Times writer: “You can make it sound like any kind of revolutionary rhetoric you want but the fact is it’s the working class versus the coupon clipper. The boss is there for one damn purpose alone, and that is to make money, not to make steel, and it’s going to come out of the worker’s back. . . . I guess maybe I’m a romantic, but I look on the American labor movement as a holy crusade, which should be the dominant force in this country to fight for the workingman and the underdog and make this a more just society.”

  Sadlowski tapped a deep vein of worker discontent, and so faced deep hostility from the opposition. One Sadlowski supporter at a steelworkers’ convention was beaten up by three old-line unionists. Another, while pamphleteering outside a Houston factory, was shot in the neck. (Marlene says the supporter resembled her husband from behind, and she believes that that’s who they thought they were shooting.) In the end, Sadlowski lost the election, garnering forty-four percent of the vote. In hindsight, some say he should have waited—until he was older, until his politics had mellowed, until the world caught up with him. But Sadlowski was impatient, and not without reason, since he saw what was coming in
America’s heartland, a dismantling of people’s livelihoods.

  It wasn’t easy for Sadlowski after the loss. He spent the next fifteen years working in various union staff jobs, and for some of that time drinking too much. (“I drank everything,” he says.) “In the end,” a friend observed, “he had to answer to guys who in every way were his inferiors, ham-and-egg guys, guys who should’ve been glad to hold his overcoat. They couldn’t get rid of him, but they reduced him.” He retired from the union in 1992, the same year that U. S. Steel shuttered South Works, where he had begun. But Sadlowski has brushed himself off and started again. He has stopped drinking and is now involved with labor and with his community in a new capacity, as a guardian of their histories.