[5] After meeting Diego Rivera, the prominent Mexican muralist, and his wife Frida Kahlo in 1934 Sternberg became more politically active in union and socialist causes.

Carl Zigrosser, then Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Rare books at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wrote in 1941:[8]  “Harry Sternberg has done much to spread an interest in silk screen.

A powerful workman, standing on a steel beam, constructing a New York skyscraper, wielding a heavy riveting gun, attached to a curling, treacherous air hose, surrounded by dizzying high towers -- a perfect subject for Expressionism!

Here Sternberg plays on the potential for 'crudeness' in screen printing: rough edges between color planes and contrasting tonal effects.

"[10] Sternberg was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936,[5] and spent the year studying the conditions of workers in coal mines and steel mills.

His drawings, etchings and paintings depicting life in industrial America influenced his subsequent post office mural designs.

It depicts the history of the city from its first settlement of Fort Dearborn to the Great Fire to the life in the stock yards and the steel mills.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, had graphically described life for workers in Chicago's stockyards and steel mills and Sternberg strived to captured their struggle.

In 1990 he published a collection of prints: Sternberg: A Life in Woodcuts, one of which depicts his painting of the Lakeview post office mural.