Foreign Traders

President James Augustine Farrell of U. S. Steel Corp., six feet tall, towering and blocky as a full-rigged schooner, took a gavel in his great fist last week. He thwacked the speaker's table smartly and the 14th yearly convention of the National Foreign Trade Council went into three-day convention at Detroit. Mr. Farrell organized the Council in 1914 and has always been its chairman. When he rapped for order, he got it. Nor did many of the 2,000 manufacturers, merchants, shippers, railroaders, steamship men, importers and exporters who went to Detroit last week stray across the river to Windsor, Ontario, seeking a glass of good beer.

For one thing it was not necessary to sneak an indiscretion out of Mr. Farrell's ken. No drinker himself, he tolerates another man's vices and pleasures. He talks little, likes to study scholarly volumes, enjoys boating; but imposes none of his pleasures on others.

Those are some of the qualities that led Judge Elbert H. Gary to make Mr. Farrell president of U. S. Steel in 1911. He had begun work in a New Haven wire mill; soon he made himself one of the best wire pullers in the country. Shortly after, J. P. Morgan and Judge Gary organized the steel corporation (1901). Mr Farrel became president of U. S. Steel Products Co., the corporation's export division. He was the best salesman of steel goods then known.

While Charles Michael Scwab was president of U. S. Steel (1901-3), Mr. Farrell sold steel products abroad. Export of 200,000 tons of steel a year was considered prodigious at that time. By 1903 when William Ellis Corey became second president of U. S. Steel, Salesman Farrell was selling practically a million and a half tons of steel to foreign consumers.

Both Mr. Schwab and Mr. Corey were self-assertive. Judge Gary could not persuade them that he, and he only, was the proper spokes-man for the corporation; that they must be merely administrators. There was no derogation in being administrator to the Judge.

In 1911 a message came to Mr. Farrell. He was appointed, it read, U. S. Steel's third president. Said he: "I'm a good soldier." He and the Judge have always worked well together. In 16 years' administration he has doubled and redoubled many an item of U. S. Steel profit*. The Judge makes speeches and directs policies; President Farrell consolidates reports of subsidiaries and coordinates work of under-presidents.

In the National Foreign Trade Council however, he abandons the president-administrator attitude; assumes that of councillor. Far from didactic, he makes his point.

At Detroit last week he said: "The time has gone when direct balances between separate nations can be struck accurately without reference to other countries, or when these direct balances can be taken as a criterion of the actual trade positions of these countries. The world has become one market. It is a vast composite of many sections which, to suit our political convenience, we call empires, nations and countries but which, in fact, in so far as trade is concerned, have been welded together by the developments of recent years in those two fundamentals, transportation and communication." By those few words he set to naught complaints of South Americans and South Africans against U.S. tariffs.

Notable at the Detroit meetings were the Canadian visitors. Where but 50 Canadians went to the Charleston, S. C., meeting last year, 200 were at Detroit last week. They listened to the sage advice of John F. Tinsley of Worcester, Mass., vice president of the New England Foreign Trade Council: "What Canada needs most of all, I believe, is better advertising in the United States. You must tell us what you have to sell, and advertising alone can do that. You have told us so far only about your scenery, your summer camping and your winter tobogganing. You are making many things that we want and need, but we do not hear enough about them."

1911 1926

*Gross receipts $615,148,840 $1,508,076,090

Net earnings 104,305,464 199,058,869

Surplus 135,104,213 577,729,662

Wages per man 820 1,840

Book value common stock 139 285