Gary, Indiana: The Company Town That Shook the World

Gary, Indiana did not exist before nineteen oh six. The United States Steel Corporation built it from scratch on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and the company named it after its chairman, Elbert Henry Gary. Groundbreaking for the Gary Works plant happened in March of that year. The first ore boat arrived in July nineteen oh eight, and steel production began the following year. Within two decades the plant was the largest steel producer in the world, at its peak employing more than thirty thousand workers.

U.S. Steel laid out streets, built housing, and planted a city with extraordinary speed. Workers flooded in from across the South and from Europe: Polish, Serbian, Croatian, and Mexican immigrants alongside Black Southerners seeking escape from Jim Crow. By nineteen thirty, Gary and the surrounding Lake County region had become arguably the most ethnically diverse place in the United States.

In September of nineteen nineteen, three hundred fifty thousand iron and steel workers across the country went on strike, the largest labor action in American history to that point. They demanded an eight-hour workday and union recognition. U.S. Steel chairman Elbert Gary tried to break the strike by shipping Black workers from the South to replace strikers, attempting to foment racial division. In Gary the strategy failed. Black organizers and white strikers held together, with eighty-five percent of the regional workforce walking out. The strike ultimately collapsed nationally after four months, but the organizing in Gary planted seeds that would eventually flower into the industrial unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

A steelworker in Gary named Joe Jackson ran a family musical group in his spare time. His son Michael, born in nineteen fifty-eight, grew up at two three hundred Jackson Street and would become the best-selling recording artist in history. Gary has been economically hollowed out by deindustrialization, but those two facts, the steel strike and the Jackson Five, tell you everything about what this lakefront town once was.