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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.
    â€œColonizer?” I asked.
    â€œWhich 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.
    â€œMan, 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.
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    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