Harry Sternberg believed that by depicting workers' lives in the steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania, he would be able to show all Americans the desperate working conditions that helped to sustain their new, modern America built largely of steel. Sternberg spent a few weeks living and working among the coal and steel workers to better understand his subject.

Sternberg influenced generations of American realist artists and pioneered the artistic development of commercial print processes such as screen printing and offset lithography, both through activities with the WPA Graphics Division, and by teaching graphic arts at the Art Students League from 1933 to 1968.