Kenneth Warren – författare

With a voice emerging from class tensions, labor struggles, the Great Depression, and World War II, Vincent Ferrini lived as a people's poet crying out for an end to exploitation and organized greed. Radical Christian gnosis and the conviction that poetry should be more than a display of word-craft distinguished him from poets like T. S. Eliot, infusing his work with dynamic images of Christ as a fighter, a revolutionary, and a martyr in opposing the mighty for the sake of the poor.

The factory specializing on hydraulic cranes, the engineers, armament makers and naval shipbuilders was set up in 1847 by William Armstrong at Elswick, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. It had become, before 1900, the ordanance, armour, naval and merchant shipbuilding and commercial engineering giant, Armstrong Whitworth. Armstrongs was prominent in the half dozen world-ranking armament concerns. After the extensions and exertions of the Great War, it was faced with collapse. It then became one of the earliest subjects for Bank of England involvement in industrial reconstruction. This book analyzes Armstrong's 80 years rise, decline and reorganization, treating it, in some ways, as a case study of British industrial malaise. The author has had access to Armstrong papers and minute books at Tyne and Wear Archives and Vickers Ltd, material in the University of Glasgow's Business Archives, and the extensive files of the Securities Management Trust in the Bank of England.

A detailed, carefully wrought business biography of Henry Clay Frick, one of the leading entrepreneurs in American heavy industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kenneth Warren has provided not only insight into the life of Henry Clay Frick, but a major contribution to our understanding of the history of the basic industries, the shaping of society, locality, and region - and thereby of laying the foundations for the value systems and landscapes of present-day America.

At its formation in 1901, the United States Steel Corporation was the earth\u2019s biggest industrial corporation, a wonder of the manufacturing world. Immediately it produced two thirds of America\u2019s raw steel and thirty percent of the steel made worldwide. The behemoth company would go on to support the manufacturing superstructure of practically every other industry in America. It would create and sustain the economies of many industrial communities, especially Pittsburgh, employing more than a million people over the course of the century. A hundred years later, the U.S. Steel Group of USX makes scarcely ten percent of the steel in the United States and just over one and a half percent of global output. Far from the biggest, the company is now considered the most efficient steel producer in the world. What happened between then and now, and why, is the subject of Big Steel, the first comprehensive history of the company at the center of America\u2019s twentieth-century industrial life.Granted privileged and unprecedented access to the U.S. Steel archives, Kenneth Warren has sifted through a long, complex business history to tell a compelling story. Its preeminent size was supposed to confer many advantages to U.S. Steel—economies of scale, monopolies of talent, etc. Yet in practice, many of those advantages proved illusory. Warren shows how, even in its early years, the company was out-maneuvered by smaller competitors and how, over the century, U.S. Steel\u2019s share of the industry, by every measure, steadily declined. Warren\u2019s subtle analysis of years of internal decision making reveals that the company\u2019s size and clumsy hierarchical structure made it uniquely difficult to direct and manage. He profiles the chairmen who grappled with this \u201clumbering giant,\u201d paying particular attention to those who long ago created its enduring corporate culture—Charles M. Schwab, Elbert H. Gary, and Myron C. Taylor.Warren points to the way U.S. Steel\u2019s dominating size exposed it to public scrutiny and government oversight—a cautionary force. He analyzes the ways that labor relations affected company management and strategy. And he demonstrates how U.S. Steel suffered gradually, steadily, from its paradoxical ability to make high profits while failing to keep pace with the best practices. Only after the drastic pruning late in the century—when U.S. Steel reduced its capacity by two-thirds—did the company become a world leader in steel-making efficiency, rather than merely in size. These lessons, drawn from the history of an extraordinary company, will enrich the scholarship of industry and inform the practice of business in the twenty-first century.

In the late 19th century, rails from Bethlehem Steel helped build the United States into the world's foremost economy. During the 1890s, Bethlehem became America's leading supplier of heavy armaments, and by 1914, it had pioneered new methods of structural steel manufacture that transformed urban skylines. Demand for its war materials during World War I provided the finance for Bethlehem to become the world's second-largest steel maker. As late as 1974, the company achieved record earnings of $342 million. But in the 1980s and 1990s, through wildly fluctuating times, losses outweighed gains, and Bethlehem struggled to downsize and reinvest in newer technologies. By 2001, in financial collapse, it reluctantly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Two years later, International Steel Group acquired the company for $1.5 billion.In Bethlehem Steel, Kenneth Warren presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it—along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry.Warren considers the investment failures, indecision and slowness to abandon or restructure outdated \u201cintegrated\u201d plants plaguing what had become an insular, inward-looking management group. Meanwhile competition increased from more economical \u201cmini mills\u201d at home and from new, technologically superior plants overseas, which drove world prices down, causing huge flows of imported steel into the United States.Bethlehem Steel provides a fascinating case study in the transformation of a major industry from one of American dominance to one where America struggled to survive.

Charles Schwab was known to his employees, business associates, and competitors as a congenial and charismatic person-a 'born salesman.' Yet Schwab was much more than a salesman-he was a captain of industry, a man who streamlined and economized the production of steel and ran the largest steelmaking conglomerate in the world. A self-made man, he became one of the wealthiest Americans during the Gilded Age, only to die penniless in 1939.Schwab began his career as a stake driver at Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thomson steel works in Pittsburgh at the age of seventeen. By thirty-five, he was president of Carnegie Steel. In 1901, he helped form the U.S. Steel Corporation, a company that produced well over half the nation's iron and steel. In 1904, Schwab left U.S. Steel to head Bethlehem Steel, which after twelve years under his leadership, became the second-largest steel producer in America. President Woodrow Wilson called on Schwab to head the Emergency Fleet Corporation to produce merchant ships for the transport of troops and materials abroad during World War I.Kenneth Warren presents a compelling biography that chronicles the startling success of Schwab's business career, his leadership abilities, and his drive to advance steel-making technology and operations. Through extensive research and use of previously unpublished archival documentation, Warren offers a new perspective on the life of a monumental figure--a true visionary--in the industrial history of America.

The southwestern Pennsylvania town of Connellsville lay in the middle of a massive reserve of high quality coal. Connellsville coal was so soft and easily worked that one man and a boy could cut and load ten tons of it in ten hours. This region became a major source of coke, a vital material in industrial processes, above all in steel manufacture, producing forty-seven percent of America`s supply in 1913. But by the 1920s, what had seemed to be a gold mine was turning into a devastating economic, environmental and social loss. In Wealth, Waste and Alienation, Kenneth Warren draws from primary source material, including the minutes and letters of the Carnegie Steel Company, the United States Steel Corporation, and the archives of Henry Clay Frick, to explain the birth, phenomenal growth, decline and death of the Connellsville coke industry. Its rich natural resources produced wealth for individuals, companies, and some communities, but as Warren shows, there was also social alienation, waste, and devastation of the natural environment. The complicated structure of enterprise, capital, and labor which made this region flourish unwound almost as quickly as it arose, creating repercussions that are still reverberating in what's left of Connellsville today, a kind of postindustrial rural shell of its former productive glory.

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.