David J. McDonald

David John McDonald (November 22, 1902 – August 8, 1979) was an American labor leader and president of the United Steelworkers of America from 1952 to 1965.

McDonald was born in 1902 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to David and Mary (Kelly) McDonald, Welsh immigrants. David McDonald, Sr. was a long-time union activist who had been run out of Springfield, Illinois, because of his union activity. After failing as a saloonkeeper, McDonald, Sr. got a job as a guide setter at a Jones and Laughlin Steel Company rolling mill and joined the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Mary McDonald's father had been an officer in the Sons of Vulcan, an early ironworkers' union, and both uncles on his mother's side were unionists. The night that he was born, his father was walking a picket line.

He was educated in Catholic parochial schools. In 1915, his father was severely injured when a piece of hot steel impaled his left leg, causing him to be bedridden for 10 months and leaving him with a bad limp.

He got his first job as a paperboy at the age of 13 to help support the family, but his mother refused to let her son work full-time. He became an excellent student, singer and actor. He graduated from high school in 1918, receiving a two-year vocational technology diploma.

McDonald obtained a clerical job at the Jones & Laughlin mill, and later became a machinist's helper. In 1922, he became a typist-switchboard operator at Wheeling Steel Products Co. and studied accounting at Duquesne University.

McDonald married Emily Price in August 1937, who had been a secretary to Mine Workers president John L. Lewis. They had a son, David J. McDonald, Jr., in 1939. The couple divorced in 1946. McDonald then married his secretary, Rosemary McHugh, in 1950.

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