HOW AN IDEA BUILT A FORTUNE- MOTIVATIONAL STORY

HOW AN IDEA BUILT A FORTUNE:

Because of the need for faith and cooperation in operating business and industry, it will be both interesting and profitable to analyze an event which provides an excellent understanding of the method by which provides an excellent understanding of the method by which industrialists and businessmen accumulate great fortunes, by giving before they try to get.

The event chosen for this illustration dates back to 1900, when the United States Steel Corporation was being formed. As you read the story, keep in mind these fundamental facts and you will understand how ideas have been converted into huge fortunes.

If you are one of those who have often wondered how great fortunes are accumulated, this story of the creation of the United States Steel Corporation will be enlightening. If you have any doubt that men can think and grow rich, this story should dispel that doubt, because you can plainly see in the story of United States Steel the application of a major portion of the principles describes in the book.

This astounding description of the power of an idea was dramatically told by John Lowell, in the New York World Telegram, with whose courtesy it is here reprinted.

A PRETTY AFTER DINNER SPEECH FOR BILLION DOLLARS

When, on the evening of December 12, 1990, some eighty of the nation's financial nobility gathered in the banquet hall of the University Club on Fifth Avenue to do honor to a young man from out of the West, not half a dozen of the guests realized they were to witness the most significant episode in American Industrial history.

J. Edward Simmons and Charles Stewart Smith, their hearts full of gratitude for the lavish hospitality bestowed on them by Charles M. Schwab during a recent visit to Pittsburgh, had arranged the dinner to introduce the 38 year old steel man to eastern banking society. But they didn't expect him to stampede the convention. They warned him, in fact, that the bosoms within New York's stuffed shirts would not be responsive to oratory, and that, if he didn't want to bore the Stillmans and Harrimans and Vanderbilts, he had better limit himself to fifteen or twenty minutes of polite vaporings and let it go at that.

Every John Pierpont Morgan, sitting on the right hand of Schwab as became his imperial dignity, intended to grace the banquet table with his presence only briefly. And so far as the press  and public were concerned, the whole affair was of so little moment that no mention of it found its way into print the next day.

So the two hosts and their distinguished guests ate their way through the usual seven or eight courses. There was little conversation and what there was of it was restrained. Few of the bankers and brokers had met Schwab, whose career has flowered along the banks of the Monongahela and none knew him well. But before the evening was over they and with them Money Master Morgan were to be swept off their feet, and a billion-dollar baby, the United States Steel Corporation, was to be conceived.

It is perphaps unfortunate, for the sake of history, that no record of Charlie Schwab's speech at the dinner ever was made.

It is probable, however, that it was a 'homely' speech, somewhat ungrammatical (for the niceties of language never bothered Schwab), full of epigram and threaded with wit. But aside from that it had a galvanic force and effect upon the five billions of estimated capital that was represented by the diners. After it was over and the gathering was still under its spell although Schwab had talked for ninety minutes, Morgan led the orator to a recessed window where, dancing their legs from the high, uncomfortable seat, they talked for an hour more.

The magic of the Schwab personality had been turned on, full force, but what was more important and lasting was the full- fledged, clear-cut program he laid down for the aggrandizement of Steel. Many other men had tried to interest Morgan is slapping together a steel trust after the pattern of the biscuit, wire and hoop, sugar, rubber, whisky, oil or chewing gum combinations. John W. Gates, the gambler, had urged it, but Morgan distrusted him. The Moore boys, Bill and Jim, Chicago stock jobbers who had glued together a match trust and a cracker corporation, had urged it and failed. Elbert H. Gray, the sanctimonious country lawyer, wanted to foster it, but he wasn't big enough to be impressive. United Schwab's eloquence took J.P.Morgan to the heights from which he could visualize the solid results of the most daring financial undertaking ever conceived, the project was regarded as a delirious dream of easy-money crackpots.

The financial magnetism that began, a generation ago, to attract thousands of small and sometimes inefficiently managed companies into large and competition-crushing combination-crushing combinations had become operative in the steel world through the devices of that jovial business pirate, John W. Gates. Gates already had formed the American Steel and Wire Company out of a chain of small concerns, and together with Morgan had created the Federal Steel Company. 

But by the side of Andrew Carnegie's gigantic vertical trust, a trust owned and operated by fifty-three partners, those other combinations were picayune. They might combine to their heart's content but the whole lot of them couldn't make a dent in the Carnegie organization, and Morgan knew it. 

The eccentric old Scot knew it, too. From the magnificent heights of Skibo Castle he had viewed, first with amusement and then with resentment, the attempts of Morgan's smaller companies to cut into his business. When the attempts became too bold, Carnegie's temper was translated into anger and retaliation. He decided to duplicate every mill owned by his rivals. Hitherto, he hadn't been interested in wire, pipe, hoops, or sheet. Instead, he was content to sell such companies the raw steel and let them work it into whatever shape they wanted. Now, with Schwab as his chief and able lieutenant, he planned to drive his enemies to the wall.

So it was that in speech of Charles M. Schwab, Morgan saw the answer to his problem of combination. A trust without Carnegie giant of them all would be no trust at all, a plum pudding, as one writer said, without the plums.

Schwab's speech on the night of December 12, 1990, undoubtedly carried the inference, though not the pledge, that the vast Carnegie enterprise could be brought under the Morgan tent. He talked of the world future for Steel, of reorganization for efficiency, of specialization, of the scrapping of unsuccessful mills and concentration of effort on the flourishing properties, of economies in the ore traffic, of economies in overhead and administrative apartments, of capturing foreign markets.

More than that, he told the buccaneers among them wherein lay the errors of their customary piracy. Their purpose, he inferred, had been to create monopolies, raise prices, and pay themselves fat dividends out of privilege. Schwab condemned the system in his heartiest manner. The shortsightedness of such a policy, he told his hearers, lay in the fact that it restricted the market in an era when everything cried for expansion. 'By cheapening the cost of steel, he argued, an ever-expanding market would be created, more uses for steel would be devised, and a goodly portion of the world trade could be captured. Actually, though he did not know it, Schwab was an apostle of modern mass production.

So the dinner at the University Club came to an end. Morgan went home, to think about Schwab's rosy predictions. Schwab went back to Pittsburgh to run the steel business for "Wee Andra Carnegie," while Gary and the rest went  back to their stock tickers, to fiddle around in anticipation of the next move.

It was not long coming. It took Morgan about one week to digest the feast of reason Schwab had placed before him. When he had assured himself that no financial indigestion was to result, he sent for Schwab and found that young man rather coy. Mr. Carnegie, Schwab indicated, might not like it if he found his trusted company president had been flirting with the Emperor of Wall Street, the Street upon which Carnegie was resolved never to tread. Then it was suggested by John W. Gates , the go-between, that if Schwab "happened" to be in the Bellevue Hotel in Philadelphia, J.P.Morgan might also "happen" to be there. When Schwab arrived, however, Morgan was inconveniently ill at his New York home, and so, on the elder man's pressing invitation, Schwab went to New York and presented himself at the door of the financier's library.

Now certain economic historians have professed the belief that from the beginning to the end of the dreme, the stage was set by Andrew Carnegie that the dinner to Schwab , the famous speech, the Sunday night conference between Schwab and the Monkey King, were events arranged by the canny Scot. The truth is exactly the opposite. When Schwab was called in to consummate the deal, he didn't know whether "the little boss" as Andrew Carnegie was called, would so much as listen to an offer to sell, particularly to a group of men whom Andrew regarded as being endowned with something less than holiness. But Schwab did take into the conference with him, in his own hand writing, six sheets of copper-plate figures, representing to his mind the worth and the potential earning capacity of every steel company he regarded as an essential star in  the new metal firmament.

Four men pondered over these figures all night. The chief, of course, was Morgan, steadfast in his belief in the divine right of money. With him was his aristocratic partner, Robert Bacon, a scholar and gentleman. The third was John W. Gates whom Morgan Scorned as a gambler and used as a tool. The fourth was Schwab, who knew more about the processes of making and selling of steel than any whole group of men then living. Throughout that conference, the Pittsburgher's figures were never questioned. If he said a company was worth so much, then it was worth that much and no more. He was insistent, too, upon including in the combination only those concerns he nominated. He had conceived a corporation in which there would be no duplication, not even to satisfy the greed of friends who wanted to unload their companies upon the broad Morgan shoulders.

When dawn came, Morgan rose and straightened his back. Only one question remained.

" Do you think you can persuade Andrew Carnegie to sell?" he asked.

" I can try," said Schwab.

" If you can get him to sell, I will understand the matter," said Morgan.

So far so good. But would Carnegie sell? How much would he demand? (Schwab thought about $320,000,000.) What would he take payment in? Common or preferred stock? Bonds? Cash? Nobody could raise a third of a billion dollars in cash.

There was a golf game in January on the frost-cracking heath of the St.Andrews links in Westchester, with Andrew bundled up in sweaters against the cold, and Charlie talking volubly, as usual, to keep his spirits up. But no word of business was mentioned until the pair sat down in the cozy warmth of the Carnegie cottage nearby. Then, with the same persuasiveness that had hypnotized eighty millionaires at the University Club,Schwab poured out the glittering promises of retirement in comfort, of untold millions to satisfy the old man's social caprices. Carnegie capitulated, wrote a figure on a slip of paper, handed it to Schwab and said, "All right, that's what we'll sell for."

The figure was approximately $400,000,000, and was reached by taking the $320,000,000 mentioned by Schwab as a basic figure, and adding to it $80,000,000 to represent the increased capital value over the previous two years. 

Later, on the deck of a trans- Atlantic liner, the Scotsman said ruefully to Morgan, "I wish I had asked you for $100,000,000 more."

"If you had asked for it, you'd have gotten it," Morgan told him cheerfully.

These was an uproar, of course. A British correspondent cabled that the foreign steel world was "appalled" by the gigantic combination. President Hadley, of Yale, declared that unless trusts were regulated the country might expect "an emperor in  Washington within the next twenty-five years." But that able stock manipulator, Keene, went at his work of shoving the new stock at the public so vigorously that all the excess water- estimated by some at nearly $600,000,000- was absorbed in a twinkling. So Carnegie has his millions, and the Morgan syndicate had $62,000,000 for all its "trouble," and all the "boys," from Gates to Gray, had their millions.

                                              *** 

The 38 year old Schwab had his reward. He was made president of the new corporation and remained in control until 1930.