Secretary of the Treasury

GEORGE MAGOFFIN HUMPHREY, 62, lawyer and industrialist.

Family & Early Years: Born at Cheboygan, Mich, of Scottish-English ancestry. His father, Watts S. Humphrey, was a lawyer. After taking engineering courses along the way, George graduated from the University of Michigan law school in 1912, became the second Humphrey in his father's firm (Humphrey, Grant & Humphrey) in Saginaw. In 1913, he married Pamela Stark, his school-day sweetheart. They have two daughters and a son (another son died), and eight grandchildren.

Business Career: Although he is little known to politicians and public, Humphrey is one of the country's liveliest (and quietest) industrialists. As head of the M. A. Hanna Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, he presides over a vast business and industrial empire which includes important interests in iron, steel, coal, copper, oil, natural gas, rayon, plastics, shipping and banking. The company was named for Mark Alonzo Hanna, Ohio's great Republican political power, who owned and ran it until he died in 1904. Humphrey resigned from his father's law firm to become general counsel for the Hanna Co. in 1918, when it was an ore and coal business. He was made a partner two years later, executive vice president in 1925, president in 1929, chairman of the board last May. The company lost $2,000,000 the year before Humphrey took over as executive vice president, has made money every year since. He sailed it through the Depression expanding and making money while other firms were floundering. When demand for steel was increasing, he steered into the steel business in a big way. When Cleveland banks needed shoring up during the Depression, Humphrey took the company into the banking business. When plastics began to show promise, he went into plastics. One of the Hanna interests, Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co., is the largest producer of soft coal in the U.S. A Hanna subsidiary, the Hanna Coal and Ore Corp., is currently the leading force in a $225 million project to tap the 400 million-ton ore deposit in Labrador. His Labrador interests have made Humphrey an enthusiastic proponent of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Total assets of the M. A. Hanna Co.: $121 million. Earnings in 1951: $14 million. Industrialists give George Humphrey the major credit for the company's rise to eminence. Said one of his associates: "If you dropped Humphrey in the middle of the Sahara, he'd come out with a newly organized corporation--on a dividend-paying basis." Humphrey's business interests have taken him almost everywhere except the middle of the Sahara. He travels about 100,000 miles a year, says: "There is no fertilizer like the footsteps of the boss."

Politics: Says Humphrey: "I have been a supporter of Taft from the first time he ever ran for office." A lifelong Republican and a good friend of Ohio's bell-ringing G.O.P. Representative George Bender, Humphrey has been a quiet big-money-raiser for Bender's Ohio Republican organization, but only the leaders knew him. It was no politician who proposed him to Ike as Secretary of the Treasury. The man who did: General Lucius D. Clay (ret.), onetime commander of U.S. occupation forces in Europe, now board chairman of Continental Can Co. Clay met and admired Humphrey in Germany in 1948 when Humphrey was chairman (appointed by then ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman) of the Industrial Advisory Committee to the Economic Cooperation Administration. On advice from Humphrey's committee, the U.S., Great Britain and France decided to save 159 German industrial plants which had been slated for dismantling. Humphrey said the plants could be more useful to European recovery if left as they were, not removed as reparations. This year, Humphrey swung behind Eisenhower immediately after the G.O.P. convention, but had never met Ike personally until they talked about the Cabinet post last week. The appointment, said Humphrey, was "a great surprise."

Personality: Inconspicuous is the word for George Humphrey. He has made few public speeches, held few press conferences. To avoid the press while on the ECA mission in London, he went up & down the service stairs at Claridge's Hotel, and had his wife screen all visitors and telephone calls. He is sharp of eye and of mind, has a square jaw and a balding head, holds his middle-sized frame ramrod straight. A horseman and hunter, he has fine stables at his 150-acre estate in Lake County, 24 miles out of Cleveland, a stable of brood mares at Lexington, Ky., a training stable at Charlottesville, Va., and a plantation complete with game preserve at Thomasville, Ga. He rides to the hounds, shows his horses, is a member of the exclusive (50 members in the U.S.) Jockey Club. He is a vestryman of St. Hubert's Episcopal Chapel of Kirtland Hills, Ohio, not far from his estate. He centers most of his social life around his family and his hunting companions.

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