United States Steel: A Corporation with a SoulCotter, Arundel
History
United States Steel: A Corporation with a Soul
Cotter, Arundel
United States Steel Corporation
All those who during the World War were in touch with what was being
done by the Government to meet the enormous new manufacturing needs
created by the war know that the Steel Corporation, in the great
emergency, invariably put patriotism above profits and that its hearty
coöperation helped materially in bringing about the desired end. Judge
Gary was responsible for the Corporation’s attitude in this as in other
matters.
Honors have been showered upon the head of the Steel Corporation by
universities and colleges, and the American, French, Belgian, and
Italian governments, and the late Pope Pius X presented a gold medal
containing his profile portrait to Judge Gary in recognition of his
efforts for improving working conditions. But beyond all these honors
he values the esteem of the men under him, and the good will of his
competitors.
It would be hard to find a more suitable ending for this brief study of
the leading figure in the industrial world than the quotation applied
to him by the principal steel makers of the United States and Canada
on the occasion of a dinner given in his honor in October, 1909. Here
were men who had fought with him and against him, who had had every
opportunity to estimate him both as friend and foe, and who, after the
trying times of the 1907 panic, declared that he had “played the game
and played it fair”:
“Moderate, resolute, whole in himself, a common good.”
JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN
“The greatest banker the world has ever seen.” Thus the head of the
Deutsche Bank called the late J. P. Morgan during his lifetime, and as
the years pass students of finance are becoming more and more satisfied
that the German, himself a banker of no mean repute or ability, spoke
truly.
Without J. Pierpont Morgan the organization of the United States Steel
Corporation would, in all probability, have been an impossibility.
The carrying through of so vast a project required a financier of his
prestige and of his financial courage. There was no other banker big
enough or bold enough to undertake such a task, and no history of the
Corporation would be complete unless it contained a résumé of the work
of the former money wizard.
So large did Morgan loom in the public eye during his lifetime and so
much has been said and written of him since that it would be difficult
to say anything of him with which the reader is not already familiar.
But it has perhaps not been generally realized that Morgan was a
patriot of the right type. He was, to use a financial term, “a bull on
America.” His confidence in his country’s future was unbounded, and he
had the courage of his convictions to put his great fortune into the
development of American enterprises.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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