Charles M. Schwab
Charles Michael Schwab (February 18, 1862 in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania - October 18, 1939 in London, England) was an American industrialist who became a multimillionaire in the steel industry but died bankrupt.
He started as a stake driver in Andrew Carnegie's steelworks and rose to become (1897) president of the Carnegie Steel Company and then the first president (1901) of the U.S. Steel Corp. He resigned (1903) to run the Bethlehem Steel Company, which under his direction became the largest independent steel producer in the field.
Part of Bethlehem Steel's success was the development of the H-beam, a precursor of today's ubiquitous I-beam. Charlie Schwab was interested in producing such a wideflange steel beam, a risky venture that required capitalization and new plant construction, to make an unproven product.
"I've thought the whole thing over," Schwab told his secretary, "and if we are going bust, we will go bust big." It is his most famous remark.
In 1908, Bethlehem Steel began producing the beam that revolutionized building construction and made possible the age of the skyscraper and helped make Bethlehem Steel the second-largest steel company in the world. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was incorporated, virtually as a company town, by uniting four previous villages. He was the industrial baron that busted the Bethlehem Steel strike (1910) by calling out the newly-formed Pennsylvania State Police; Shwab kept labor unions out of Bethlehem Steel. (Bethlehem was union organized after his death, in 1941.)
A company town could not hold Charlie Schwab forever. Once he was settled in New York, Schwab struck out for the Upper West Side, the 'wrong' side of Central Park, where he built "Riverside" the most ambitious private house ever built in New York, combining details from three French chateaux on a full city block. Its fate was sealed when mayor Fiorello La Guardia turned it down as an official mayoral residence as too grandiose, and it was replaced by a drab apartment block (for additional details, see "Riverside").
Schwab was a gambler, who personally went broke in the stock market crash of 1929, and died comparatively penniless ten years later. He was no relation to Charles R. Schwab, founder of the Charles Schwab Corporation.
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Further reading
- Hessen, Robert, Steel titan: the life of Charles M. Schwab, Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press (1990).
- James H. Bridge, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company (1903)
- Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary (1925)
- Arundel Cotter, The Story of Bethlehem Steel (1916) and United States Steel: A Corporation with a Soul (1921)
- Burton J. Hendrick, The Life of Andrew Carnegie (2 vols., 1932; new introduction, 1969)
- Stewart H. Holbrook, Age of the Moguls (1953)
- Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (1970) and Louis M. Hacker, The World of Andrew Carnegie (1968).