It was a club that existed for just sixteen years, from 1914 to 1930, at first shamateur and then professional, and before that for seven amateur years. Legend has it that a foot-ball had first come to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania that is, in 1904. It seems highly unlikely. Soccer had come to the USA twenty years earlier in the feet of immigrants from the British Isles to Newark, which was from 1875 just a few hours away from Bethlehem by train. Furthermore the Bethlehem Iron Company had been founded in 1857 and, although it would be wound up in 1901, it was two years after the creation in 1899 of the steel company of the same name, which took over its assets. The iron works would have drawn on immigrant labour, Britons amongst them, with from perhaps 1875 the contagion of football already in their blood. They would have played no matter, balls would have been found and the steel company would have simply draw from an existing well, formalising the informal.
However, the change that prompted the football club was perhaps not in industry but employee numbers. From 1903 an until then embryo Bethlehem Steel was reorganised. It would begin also to re-equip. In 1904 the Bethlehem Steel Corporation was created, into which the Company was subsumed. And it would expand, an expansion that required a larger workforce, immigrant labour that had not just the sport of football in its veins but now ingrained in its DNA. It was probably their arrival and the example of
Tacony, where the
Disston Saw Mill had created its own team, which would win the American Cup in 1910, that provided an environment for football in Bethlehem finally to be organised through the foundation of Bethlehem F.C. in 1907 outwith the steel company and its absorption as a well-funded works team at the end of the 1913 season.
At that point it is also said that the owner of Bethlehem Steel used his own money to import several top players, a number of which came from England and particularly Scotland. Initially they were shamateur. Bethlehem Steel remained notionally amateur in strictly amateur leagues from 1911 to 1915. It would reach the play-off final of the Allied Association Football League of Philadelphia in 1912, win it in 1913 and 1914 and take the American Cup in 1914. It would be notionally amateur still in 1915-16 yet we know the team that took the field in 1914-15 already included a number of former professionals. It's line-up was Graham, Lawson, Fletcher, Campbell,
Morrison, Robert Morrison, the captain, Murray, Ford, Duncan, Ferguson, Pepper. Clarke, Fleming, Tagle and Millar. At least nine of the eleven were Scots, with at a minimum, Ferguson, Neil Clarke, Fleming and Robert Millar senior professionals in the old country and Robert Morrison and no doubt others playing for semi-pro junior teams.
The Steel would become openly professional in 1917, joining the National Association Football League (NAFBL), having until then played only friendlies and Cup games. It would then have almost of decade of consolidation and considerable success but not without difficulties that would soon become apparent. It would, however, start well. The club would finish second in its first season in the NAFBL,win it for the next three years and take the American Cup again for four years in succession from 1916. In the meantime, however, the end of the Great War had seen the beginning of an unprecedented boom in soccer clubs. Works teams, no doubt trying the emulate Bethlehem's success, proliferated, and money men, entrepreneurs like Sam Marks of
Fall River Marksmen, and notably, as a generation earlier, baseball club owners to started to move in. It would be to the detriment of the locally-rooted game, in New Jersey, for example, it would lead to political problems that would in the end prove disastrous and short term it would require or rather produce a reorganisation of the American game.
Reorganisation had already started in 1913-14 with the introduction of the National Challenge Cup, with
Tommy Dewar's Dewar Cup the trophy competed for. Bethlehem had won it in 1915, 1916, 1918 and 1919 but then did not enter it in 1920, 1921 and 1922, in 1923 was knocked out in fourth round, in 1924 in the semi-final, losing to the eventual winner, Fall River. It had preferred to stay with the American Cup, taking it once more in 1924, the year before it ceased to exist. Meanwhile in 1922 it had joined the new American Soccer League (ASL) and take it in the first year but moving its games to Philadelphia and playing as the Philadelphia Field Club.
In fact the season as the Philadelphia Field Club was a first sign of one of the underlying difficulties, which would eventually lead to The Steel's demise. The move to the city of Brotherly Love was a failure but had been made because, in spite of past successes, crowds in Bethlehem had never been never large. The club ran at a loss. It required a hefty, annual subsidy from the company. However, the Field Club attracted even lower crowds still. A return to Bethlehem was inevitable and there the club continued seemingly to prosper, at least on the field. In 1923 it recruited well. It was runner-up to another works team,
Pawtucket's J & P Coats, and its centre-forward, "Big Dan" McNiven, ex. of Partick Thistle, was the league's top scorer, that is until he ran off with the manager's wife, married her and became involved in a case of bigamy. In 1924 it recruited if anything better. In its ranks were both
Wattie and Alex Jackson, the former already an established player with Kilmarnock and the latter in the Dumbarton team at the start of a career that would see him certainly as a footballing star and perhaps the World's best player of the second half of the 1920s. Then in 1925, as the Jackson's returned to Scotland and Aberdeen without somehow letting the club know it turned to
Archie Stark, converted him from a winger to a centre-forward and the rest is footballing history.
With Stark in the team the National Challenge Cup would be won in in 1926. Stark would hit a hat-trick. The American Soccer League title would follow in 1927 and with a team that was, if it were possible, still more Scots. There seemed to be a conveyor belt of recruits. Galbraith was in goal, then there was Allan and Ferguson, McDonald, MacGregor, Robertson, Jaap, Granger, Archie Stark, Rollo and Goldie. However, that same year the American Soccer League (ASL) clubs were accused by FIFA of signing players already under contract to European clubs. It wasn't true or at least hardly so. What was true was that a large number of Scottish players were being signed but Scotland was not a member of FIFA. It had withdraw in 1920. FIFA should not have been concerned or at least far less concerned than it made out. Scottish contracts had no validity in its terms. Yet it was clearly bending to pressure channelled to America via its FIFA member, the United States FA from the SFA, which had left FIFA in 1919 but had more or less rejoined in 1924 if not officially, or the International Football Association Board, the organisation that to this day still governs the laws of the game and of which all the Home Nations and FIFA are members.
In fact the difficulty over players was only one of two and in truth the lesser one. Ultimately it had been and continued to be an argument over the league model and control both within the USA and worldwide. The problem in the USA was that the ASL was run as a closed league, just as the major American leagues today. There was no relegation or promotion, only selection. The clubs were increasinglfranchises, often owned by baseball clubs, and interested in permanent income. They needed to make money and did not like interference. On the other hand FIFA, for all its faults, with the game, the World game at heart wanted its model and no other. It had already in 1925 sought to bring the ASL into line, could only do it through the USFA and saw the National Challenge Cup once again as the stick.
The National Challenge Cup had until 1925 always been scheduled in the ASL off-season. That year USFA, that is FIFA, had decided it should take place during the season. As a result in 1925 the ASL clubs had boycotted it, at which the proposal had been withdrawn and might have gone away or been pushed a long way down the road. But then the transfer problem was brought to the mix, to which was added by FIFA on the one hand the accusation of a failure by ASL teams to bring through American-born talent and on the other plans from those same teams to expand the game, which were unapproved and frankly fantasy. It was a difficult situation, one which rapidly became bizarre. The President of the United States Football Association, travelled to Helsinki for the 1927 FIFA Congress. His name was Andrew Brown. He was a Scot, born in Paisley, arriving in the USA aged twenty, settling in Philadelphia and there playing for as Scottish a team as could be possible, Philadelphia Thistle before stepping up to administration. He understood how football had evolved in Scotland and how it worked there and elsewhere, league and cup competition in parallel, yet he found himself having to argue against much of what he knew. That he came away with nothing is no surprise. In fact he came away with less. FIFA now not asked but insisted that all the ASL clubs take part in the Challenge Cup and that it should happen in the normal season, starting forthwith.
Of course the ASL clubs, or at least the majority of them, were not having it. For the 1927-8 season they came back with alternative proposals that were, if anything more restrictive. The National Challenge Cup was at least open to any club affiliated to the USFA, even if the ASL cream rose to the top. The ASL idea was to restrict the new competition to just it members. The cream would rise to the top but now inevitably. However the ASL had not cleared its decks. It must have thought that none its members would in the end take any disagreements they had any further. They were wrong. Three clubs objected, three teams, New York Giants, Newark Skeeters and Bethlehem Steel, the previous year's ASL champion and Challenge Cup semi-finalist.
The ASL responded by suspending all three clubs and fining each $1,000. They promptly left the league and joined a rival, the Eastern Professional Soccer League (ESL). The Steel would top its table in 1929 and was still recruiting, notably Alex Massie. He from 1931 would go on to play for Scotland eighteen times. He would captain the national team, in which he would finally be displaced by a certain William Shankly. Yet after a junior career in north Glasgow he was recruited in 1928 to Bethlehem from Bury as a twenty-two year old who had played seventeen first team games for the Lancashire club in a season and perhaps a little more. True, he was not yet a regular first team player but he was still young and Bury had just finished fifth in the English top flight with only Derby, Leicester, Huddersfield and champions Everton above it. It appeared to be a good team, if one which admittedly was relegated the following season, and in April 1928 must have seemed to have been a far better prospect than one not just outwith the British Leagues but three thousand miles away, yet still he came. It can only be assumed that money was persuasive.
However, away from the pitch once more the net result of all the FIFA/ASL shenanigans was firstly revenue loss all round, for all clubs no matter the league, secondly the threat of the ASL being further sanctioned and thirdly from the ASL unfortunate background propaganda with nationalist overtones. It was the background propaganda that was particularly damaging in the long-run as in the end the ASL had to back down, not least because "Soccer" was for FIFA on the world-scale frankly a minor matter. As an example, in 1928 a far more pressing argument erupted about amateurism at the Olympic Games, as a result of which England terminated its FIFA rapprochement in protest but the problem persisted. Professional and amateur football needed separating. The World Cup was the means, its first in 1930 had to be organised and meanwhile FIFA could afford to do nothing more than watch until across the pond the financial pips squeaked, which they did. A settlement was reached in late 1929. The Challenge Cup would be supreme, and, whilst Bethlehem with Stark and now Massie in the team would top the ESL again in the second half of 1929, a new FIFA-endorsed league was created, which promptly changed its name to ASL and which The Steel equally promptly joined.
And then two weeks later came the Wall Street Crash. Within a year the franchise system had crumbled and in the meantime the story that had told since the FIFA/ASL spat, what are now called the American Soccer Wars, and had begun two years earlier as an ASL tactic, that foreigners, FIFA, were interfering in American decisions, also came home to roost. That there was truth in the story at least in American terms is undoubted. The interference might also have seemed un-American but globally it had validity and the story's damage went far beyond the expected. The American public swallowed it. Soccer was now not an American game. More than that, grid-iron was. They voted with their feet and, under increasing pressure themselves from approaching Depression, also with their wallets. Within three years soccer, what had been the second largest spectator sport in the USA, was reduced to a local game of immigrants.
And as for The Steel. At the end of the 1930 season Bethlehem Steel, the company, the corporation, with its inevitable financial problems, simply pulled the plug. From one day to the next the club, the Scots club, ceased to exist, its players like so many of those, who had watched them perform, unemployed.