Starting as a scrap operator in 1915,
Commercial Metals celebrates a century
By Gregory DL Morris
Fallen giants litter the field in the
North American iron and steel business.
Andrew Carnegie’s United States Steel,
formed under the hand of JP Morgan in
1901, was the first billion-dollar corporation. It remains the largest integrated
steelmaker in the country, but not without
struggling mightily. Those same struggles,
financial and operational, claimed Bethlehem Steel, at one time the second-largest
steelmaker in the country.
Just 10 years after the founding of US
Steel, Moses Feldman founded an enterprise of slightly more modest scale: a scrap
business in Dallas that came to be Commercial Metals Company (CMC). Feldman, an immigrant from Russia, gradually
established himself in the industry, and by
the mid-1920s his company was one of the
leading secondary metals dealers in the
area. Moses ran the business until 1932,
when his son, Jacob, took over.
Through the decades CMC grew by
expansion and acquisition, eventually
integrating downstream to steelmaking
and diversifying into some related industries. The company went public on the
American Stock Exchange in 1960 and
today has 200 facilities in almost two
dozen countries.
“Moses was the founder and built the
business,” said Joseph Alvarado, CMC’s
chairman of the board, president and
CEO. “He did make some mistakes, but
Jake got us out of them. I believe he had
gone into another business and came back
to help his father.”
In one of those powerful and resonant
stories from the Depression, Alvarado
said at one point the bank was moving to
A crane unloading scrap metal from a Model
T pick-up truck in the early 1920s. Many scrap
dealers in this era still relied on mule-drawn
wagons to gather scrap.
foreclose. “Jake went into the bank with the
keys, but persuaded them to stick with him
and the company. They did, and the company gutted it out through the Depression.”
Stanley Rabin, former CEO, had 28
years with CMC, retiring in 2008. “I overlapped a few years with Jake Feldman.
He would always relate stories about the
Depression; nothing major, just little
things to get through a day at a time.”
In a small irony, the Depression was
not the toughest test for CMC or the scrap
industry. Times were tough all over to be
sure, but with people selling what they
could, it was a buyers’ market. Public works
and even some big private ventures — such
as the Empire State Building, completed in
1930 — kept some demand for steel.
Once the United States entered World
War II, the collection and processing of
scrap metal became a component of the
war effort. Steel mills, metal producers
and foundries converted to war production plants making tanks, guns and ships.
Americans were instructed to take their
scrap metal to their local scrap yard for
recycling. CMC operated at full capacity
and bought and sold scrap at a rapid pace.
The war years presented CMC the opportunity to both make a profit and play a
part in the war effort.
Peace brought prosperity in the postwar boom. A small part of that boom
was manifest a few hundred miles southwest of Dallas in Seguin, Texas, between
San Antonio and Austin. Marvin Selig
founded Structural Metals (SMI) there in
1947. It was literally a greenfield operation, built on what had been a cornfield,
and started as a rolling mill, rolling rail to
produce reinforcing bar, or rebar, the lattice of steel inside large concrete columns.
In 1949, the first reb