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  • Industrial Genius: The Working Life of Charles Michael Schwab
  • Christiane Diehl Taylor
Kenneth Warren . Industrial Genius: The Working Life of Charles Michael Schwab. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. xiv + 285 pp. ISBN 0-8229-4326-3, $35.00 (cloth).

As Kenneth Warren acknowledges in his introduction, only new material or the adoption of a different perspective justifies the issuance of a new biography of an already well-documented life, and a new perspective is what he delivers in his biography of Charles M. Schwab. Schwab rose from an underling in the engineering corps of Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thomson Works in 1878 to the presidency of Carnegie Steel in 1897, and at age thirty-eight, the presidency of US Steel in 1900. After resigning from US Steel in 1904, he assumed the presidency and chairmanship of Bethlehem Steel, which he built into the primary rival of his former employer. His achievements, particularly at Bethlehem, later led to his appointment as head of the US Emergency Fleet Corporation in 1918. Whereas in his 1975 biography, entitled Steel Titan, Robert Hessen likened Schwab to the hero in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged—a man of vast intelligence, aptitude, and ambition with an ego and appetite for pleasure to match, the Charles Schwab that Kenneth Warren depicts is less colossal.

While both biographers acknowledge that Schwab's vast intelligence and dedication to hard work underlay his achievements, they substantiate their claims differently. Whereas Hessen relied heavily on first-person accounts and interviews, Warren uses production, cost, and market share figures to demonstrate how Schwab utilized his notable analytic abilities and attention to details in his relentless pursuit of maximized output, minimized costs, and market domination at Carnegie Steel, US Steel, and Bethlehem Steel. Through such figures, he also points out that not all of Schwab's efforts were as successful as depicted by Hessen. For example, while Hessen noted that US Steel profits in 1900 reached $40 million, Warren's close examination of the company's financial records showed profits of $28 million.

In contrast to Hessen's depiction of Schwab as a man capable only of negotiation and compromise when such benefited him personally, Warren reveals, through his discussion of Schwab's role in price setting among steel competitors in Carnegie's interests and in foreign mineral acquisitions on behalf of Bethlehem Steel, that he employed such skills as much for the benefit of his company as of himself.

Such subtle, but critical, differences in depiction extend to dealing with Schwab's stance on labor. Through numerous excerpts [End Page 239] drawn from his personal and business correspondence, Warren reveals that while Schwab gave the public appearance of getting along well with his workers, a quality Hessen noted repeatedly, Schwab, like many of his contemporaries, equated common laborers with machinery—something to be driven to maximum output for the lowest cost achievable. Participation in labor protests led to firing and blacklisting. Under Schwab, the resolution of labor disputes and the improvement of working conditions always took a backseat to maximizing output and minimizing costs.

Unlike Hessen, Warren pays greater attention to the industrial context in which the firms under Schwab's guidance operated. Benefiting from his expertise in the history of the American steel industry, Warren's account of the eroding status of the eastern steel industry at the time of Schwab's assumption of the helm at Bethlehem Steel make his achievements with the firm even more notable. Moreover, his account of Bethlehem's involvement in the armament business prior to the Schwab presidency better explain how the company achieved its leading market position in armaments and shipbuilding during World War I.

The most divergent aspect of the Hessen and Warren biographies lies not, however, in their treatment of Schwab's accomplishments, but his weaknesses. While this, in part, is due to Warren's focus solely on Schwab's professional life, much is also due to the biographers' varying perspectives. To illustrate Schwab's monumental ego, Hessen devoted a great deal of his narrative to Schwab's supposed destructive testimony in the Congressional investigations of Carnegie Steel in 1894 and Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation in 1921. Warren says little...

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