Magnetism v. Dictaphone

OWEN D. YOUNG--Ida M. Tarbell-- Macmillan ($3).

Biographer Ida Minerva Tarbell's concern with business ethics dates from way back yonder, when oil was discovered in her native Pennsylvania hills. Her family cleared out of the way of the oil tycoons' sent Ida to Allegheny College. She worked with Chautauqua for eight years, then went off to Paris to study French methods of writing biography. Her work attracted Editor Samuel Sidney McClure then starting McClure's Magazine. Biographer Tarbell's Life of Abraham Lincoln, serialized, brought 150,000 subscribers to the magazine. Her History of the Standard Oil Co., also serialized, reverberated from trust to trust, rocked the whole U. S. When, in 1924, it was announced that "the terror of the trusts" was about to publish her biography of Elbert Gary, U. S. Steel tycoon, anticipations of juicy revelations ran high. They soon ran low when it was discovered that Gary was the hero, not the villain, of the book. She pictured Gary as the champion of "decent business ethics," has been on the lookout for more ethical business heroes ever since.

In Owen D. Young she finds her beau ideal. Her investigations for his biography, carried on at her Connecticut farm, at the General Electric Co.'s plant at Schenectady, at her E. 19th St. retreat in New York City, lead her to say at their conclusion: "My best research failed to show him as less good than he looks." More a historian of business ethics than a biographer of men, had not its hero announced that he is positively out of the Presidential running, her book (being serialized in American Magazine} would make a first-class campaign biography. Though more competent than most such, it has the generic earmarks--it is simply written, meticulously laudatory, tolerably dull.

In 1874, on the family farm at Van Hornesville, N. Y. Owen was born, christened with a middle initial D. which stands for nothing but nicely balances the name. At the district school Owen soon called attention to himself, was sent, on his teacher's recommendation, to the East Springfield Academy, whence he was graduated as valedictorian in 1889. His unusual abilities led his family to send him to St. Lawrence University. Luck attended him. Once in class, when he mumbled an apology for not knowing an answer, the deaf professor praised him: "Your answer is correct, Mr. Young." In 1894 he went, to Boston University, studied law. For years he practiced law, specializing in public utilities, until in 1912 he caught the attention of General Electric's President Charles Coffin. As head of the law department he had plenty of practice in his specialty: negotiation by mutual compromise. Negotiator Young was so adept, so tactful that a gift to Belgian Emile Francqui of one of his prize Van Hornesville bulls contributed to the successful termination of the 1929 Reparations conference.

Authoress Tarbell tells at length of Mr. Young's educational, industrial and agricultural theories, but there is nothing particularly Owenyoungish about these and the man behind them fails to appear. Even her long account of her hero's Van Hornesville activities leaves him half mythical. All who know him testify that personal magnetism, intangible as electricity, is the substance on which Owen D. Young has founded his success. Apparently that magnetism is too elusive to register on Biographer Tarbell's dictaphone.

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