Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,881

This is the grave of Elbert Gary.

Born in 1846 in Wheaton, Illinois, Gary went to Wheaton College and then Union College of Law, finishing there in 1868. That soon became Northwestern’s law school, so it was pretty good. He started to practice in both Chicago and Wheaton (which to be fair is just outside of Chicago so it’s not like there was much of a difference) and became a corporate attorney, the kind of railroad hack that made the Gilded Age go. But Gary wasn’t satisfied just being a legal functionary of the capitalist class. He wanted to be at the top of that capitalist class himself. So he started not only doing corporate legal work but investing in corporations themselves, particularly in rail and steel.

By the 1880s, Gary was a big time guy. He pushed this into local politics, becoming a judge in DuPage County for two terms, from 1882 to 1890. When Wheaton became a city in 1892, he became its mayor. Then in 1893 and 1894, he was president of the Chicago Bar Association. And he loved to be called Judge Gary. He made people call him that. He founded banks and was generally just a rich guy. There were lots of rich guys in the Gilded Age. If you go to a venerable old cemetery in a big city, you see all sorts of giant graves for these type of guys. But really, who are they? They are the unknown bankers and lawyers and functionaries of corporate America.

Again, Gary was determined to rise above that. In the early 1890s, he was hearing a case that had to do with the steel industry. While he was doing so, he became more interested in the process of making steel and decided to engage in greater investments in that industry. He had so much money by this point that it wasn’t so hard for him to do so. In 1898, during a merger of a bunch of steel companies into something called Federal Steel, Gary became its president. In 1901, Federal Steel merged with Carnegie Steel and became U.S. Steel. Gary was elected board of directors.

Gary was more of a second generation steel guy, as people such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick were retiring from the scene. But he would become perhaps the dominant steel capitalist of the first three decades of the twentieth century. He was based in New York after 1901 and dominated the industry until his death in 1927. He basically was the leader of the next generation of capitalist–the corporate lawyer turned CEO, moving from the founders to the managers. The company was the first in the world worth more than a billion dollars. It became a target of Theodore Roosevelt’s trustbusting–an overrated reputation for the president for sure–in 1904 and Gary was able to easily shunt the president’s suspicions by opening the company’s books for him to poke around in. Basically, Gary said that if Roosevelt’s men found any problems, they’d make a deal and work it out. Roosevelt, who was extremely pro-corporate no matter his self-generated reputation, gladly agreed to this, which was exactly what he wanted. In a sense, you could handle Roosevelt like you can handle Trump–agreeing to ridiculousness to make the president look and sound good while going on with your business.

Gary believed strongly in efficiency and was aggressive about closing out of date factories and investing in new, modern factories. So he closed a lot of old plants early in his time and then opened the giant new integrated steel plant and built a city around it–in what became known as Gary, Indiana, in 1906. Part of the goal here was to undermine competition. This was so important–industries with over-competition are not good and were a major reason for bargain basement prices and bargain basement wages. In an age where people are rightfully concerned about antitrust issues, we can forget that too much competition can be a problem as well. Industries such as textiles, coal, and timber had problems for decades around this, which is why later, the FDR administration tried to solve some of these problems through the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 to create codes that all employers would agree to. Didn’t work though, the potential to cut corners remained too tempting. Anyway, Gary did away with a lot of small operators by forcing them out through the steel he produced in his high end mill.

Of course, Gary still wanted to keep wages at those bargain basement rates. This may be a new generation of steel capitalist, but he hated organized labor as much as Frick or Carnegie or anyone else. In 1919, steel workers across the nation went on strike, trying to unionize this horrible industry. Gary led the corporate fight to crush them. He called their goals, “the closed shop, Soviets and the destruction of property.” He was the major target for the workers. They tried to get Woodrow Wilson to intervene, but Wilson was more concerned with the League of Nations and Gary refused to meet with the president and so there was no real pressure from the White House. Gary successfully ensured that more workers would die and wages would stay low and poverty would remain the norm. What a hero of capitalism.

Gary’s pro-immigrant sentiment was completely cynical. Gary loved immigrants because he relied upon them for cheap labor. He became a major corporate leader in the business fight against what became the Immigration Act of 1924. He wanted cheap labor, period. His argument, as he presented to his shareholders, was that “restrictions upon immigration should be directed to the question of quality rather than numbers” and that the law “was one of the worst things this country has ever done for itself economically.” One would be more sympathetic perhaps if Gary wasn’t such a self-serving bastard who only wanted to exploit these people as opposed to allowing them to live better lives than they had in eastern and southern Europe The lack of immigration would eventually lead to the hiring of more Black steelworkers and of course Gary became a major destination of the Great Migration and the Black city that it mostly remains today.

Gary’s heart started to break down in the early 20s but he was not the kind of guy who retire. He mostly hid his condition from his other corporate leaders. When he was about to die and had to go to the hospital, the message was that it was food poisoning and he would recover. Of course he did not, dying in 1927, at the age of 80.

Elbert Gary is buried in Wheaton Cemetery, Wheaton, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other steel capitalists, and what a great set of people they are, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Eber Brock Ward is in Detroit and John Fritz is in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.