100 years of U.S. Steel

摘要

New Yorkers strolling past their city's exclusive University Club on the crisp evening of Dec.11, 1900, may have slowed their stride to study the top-hatted gentlemen parading into the opulent establishment. The 80 moguls filing into the club couldn't know it, but they were about to witness an event that would help shape the new century. They were here to attend a dinner honoring Charles M. Schwab, right-hand man of steel king Andrew Carnegie. The gathering would become a legend. But in the weeks ahead, some of the assembled would wonder whether it had been a carefully planned performance, a show staged to woo into an unthinkably huge business deal their most notable brother, hard-eyed J. Pierpont Morgan, the railroad magnate and the Gilded Age's foremost financierSchwab was president of the then-reigning steel giant, Carnegie Steel, and a superb manager of people. He also was a natural actor, a frustrated song-and-dance man who, as a boy in Loretto, Pa., won the attention of adults by performing stunts and magic tricks. Blessed with a photographic memory and a golden throat, he would scan a script and get it down cold. Then he would tear up the text, stride to the podium, and flawlessly deliver a talk that sounded off-the-cuff.