The Past and Future of U.S. Steel

In today’s newsletter, Paige Williams travels to Gary, Indiana, which used to be a bustling company town. Then, Antonia Hitchens looks back at one month of Trump 2.0. Plus:

U.S. Steel’s Gary Works is the largest integrated steel mill in North America, producing six million tons of steel annually. It was once Gary, Indiana’s biggest employer, landowner, and taxpayer, but, when the demand for steel declined, so did the city itself. A third of its population now lives below the poverty line, and much of its infrastructure is dilapidated. “A company town inevitably depends on the whims and fortunes of its company,” Paige Williams writes, in a piece for the 100th Anniversary Issue. For Gary, that company is U.S. Steel, which is currently for sale. In 2023, the Japanese company Nippon Steel Corporation offered to pay $14.9 billion for it, but, in a rare show of bipartisanship, Joe Biden and Donald Trump both opposed the deal, citing national-security concerns. Now Trump says Nippon will acquire a minority stake in the company. Meanwhile, Gary’s future remains uncertain.

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In the course of the past few weeks, the new Administration has adopted a “flood the zone” strategy: issuing all kinds of executive orders, attempting to defund federal agencies, introducing new policies on pennies and the Panama Canal, giving seemingly unchecked power to Elon Musk’s DOGE, and announcing that the U.S. would take a “long-term ownership position” in Gaza. “Welcome to the circus,” Antonia Hitchens overheard one journalist say to another as they waited in the White House briefing room in January. Read the story »

P.S. K.F.C. will, to the dismay of its home state, no longer be headquartered in Kentucky. In 1970, as the franchise was expanding in New York City, William Whitworth profiled Colonel Sanders, who was nearing eighty years old. “The Colonel is a striking figure,” Whitworth wrote. “He always wears a white suit, a white shirt, a black string tie, and black shoes—the appropriate outfit for a Kentucky Colonel.” 🍗