Elbert Henry Gary - Biography

Biography

Elbert Gary was born near Wheaton, Illinois on October 8, 1846 to Erastus Gary and Susan A. Vallette. He attended Wheaton College (IL) and graduated first in his class from Union College of Law in 1868. The school later became the Northwestern University School of Law. Gary started to practice law in Chicago in 1871 and also maintained an office in Wheaton. He was a co-founder with his uncle, Jesse Wheaton, of the Gary-Wheaton Bank that merged with Bank One Corporation in the middle 1990s.

While he was working as a young corporate attorney for railroads and other clients in the years after the Great Chicago Fire, Gary was elected as president of Wheaton three times, and when it became a city in 1892 served as its first mayor for two terms.

He served two terms as a DuPage County judge from 1882 to 1890. For the rest of his life he was known as "Judge Gary." It was a common custom in the nineteenth century for men to be addressed by military, political, or academic titles long after those titles were current .

Gary practiced law in Chicago for about twenty-five years. He was president of the Chicago Bar Association from 1893 to 1894. It was while he was hearing a case as a judge that he first became interested in the process of making steel and the economics of that business. In 1898 he became president of Federal Steel Corporation in Chicago that included a barbed wire business. At this time he retired from his law practice. Federal and other companies merged as U.S. Steel in 1901. He was elected chairman of the board of directors and the finance committee.

Gary moved from Wheaton to New York in 1900 at the age of 54, where he established the headquarters of U.S. Steel. The town of Gary, Indiana, laid out in 1906 as a model home for steel workmen, was named in his honor. In 1914 he was made chairman of the committee appointed by the Mayor of New York, John Purroy Mitchel, to study the question of unemployment and its relief. When America entered World War I in 1917, he was appointed chairman of the committee on steel of the Council of National Defense. Through his connection with a business essential for munitions of war, he exerted great influence in bringing about cooperation between the government and industry. He was interested in strengthening the friendship between America and Japan. In 1919, he was invited by President Wilson to attend the Industrial Conference in Washington, and took a prominent part in it as a firm upholder of the “open shop,” of which he was always a strong advocate.

From 1906 to 1908, he served as president of the Illinois State Society of New York, a group of Illinois expatriates living in New York who got together for social reasons a few times each year. They held an annual Lincoln Day Dinner in February at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and a Chicago Fire Remembrance Day each October at the same Delmonico's Restaurant that still stands today in Manhattan. There were also Illinois State Societies in San Diego and San Francisco and a large Illinois State Society of Washington, D.C.. Only the Washington, DC club remains. It celebrated 152 years of activities in 2006.

He served as president and chairman of the board of America's first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel, from the company's founding in 1901 until his death on August 15, 1927 in New York at the age of 82.

In November 1904, with a government suit looming, Gary approached President Roosevelt with a deal: cooperation in exchange for preferential treatment. US Steel would open its books to the Bureau of Corporations; if the Bureau found evidence of wrongdoing, the company would be warned privately and given a chance to set matters right. Roosevelt accepted this "gentlemen's agreement" because it met his interest in accommodating the modern industrial order while maintaining his public image as slayer of the trusts.

He died on August 15, 1927.