The Rugged Individual

The tendency of empire builders is to grow cautious with size and success. But Ernest Tener Weir, who built his National Steel Corp. into a $675 million empire, never seemed to have a cautious moment. In defense of the free-enterprising society that gave him his chance, he loudly fought all attempts to restrict its liberties. He staunchly resisted the U.S. Government, unions, even his fellow steelmasters. Praised and berated by liberals and conservatives alike, Ernest Weir was a non-organization man, a symbol of rugged individualism.

He was pardonably proud of the Dickensian way he had come; he had read David Copper field 101 times. The son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, Weir quit school at 15 to support his widowed mother, worked as a $3-a-week office boy for a Pittsburgh wire company, later said he did "not consider it a handicap for a boy in his teens to have to go to work. Being forced to earn one's living strengthens character, equips for bigger battles." By 1905 Weir was manager of a U.S. Steel Corp. plant; at 30 he bought a wheezing West Virginia tinplate mill.

Often paying himself less than his men, young Steelmaster Weir painfully rebuilt the plant, put up another on farm land along the Ohio River near Wheeling. There he laid out streets, schools, homes for a company town called Weirton, which grew into a city of 24,000.

In the Black. By 1929 Weirton Steel Co. was among the world's biggest independent tinplate producers, but Weir was "tired of sawing wood in West Virginia." He put through a merger with Detroit's Great Lakes Steel Corp. and subsidiaries of Cleveland's M. A. Hanna Co. to form the $120 million National Steel Corp.

As National Steel's boss. Weir set out to finance its lively ambitions. "I wanted $40 million at a time when that money looked like the national debt. I got it, not from Wall Street, but from Main Street." Instead of turning, like other steelmen, to J.P. Morgan & Co., Weir sold bonds to the public. With new equipment, Weir operated on a stubbornly independent policy of "no order too little, none too big." He supplied Detroit automakers on a booming scale that yielded National Steel a profit during every Depression year, made it the only U.S. steel company in the black in Depression 1932.

The New Deal enraged Weir. He saw its proliferating regulations as a damper on expanding capitalism, emerged as a symbol of business besieged by Government and by the growing C.I.O. In 1936 he wrote: "I am what Mr. Roosevelt calls an economic royalist." But, unlike the President, he added proudly, "I was born a commoner, have lived a commoner, and am still a commoner."

In the Right. When Weirton Steel Co., which had a company union, was struck, Weir personally polled his men, decided that outside union organizers were responsible, refused to allow a National Labor Relations Board election. National Recovery Act Administrator General Hugh Johnson threatened him with "jail in 24 hours." but Weir stood firm even under desperate White House coaxing. His hot court battle against a key NRA clause forbidding company unions ended in victory. A federal judge held that NRA applied only to interstate commerce and did not cover Weirton, an event widely held as the beginning of the end for NRA. To this day, Weirton is one of the last few steel strongholds with a company union.

Ernest Weir was no less intransigent with his peers. In 1941 he gave his employees a io/ hourly raise at a time when U.S. Steel was holding out against the United Steelworkers for 7-c-. Steelmen had to fall into line, bitterly accused Weir of boosting the ante just to keep the union out of his plants. "In view of the industry's [booming] earnings," retorted Weir, "we felt the men should share the improvement." A few weeks later he helped sabotage U.S. Steel's plan to hike prices; he publicly supported a pending wartime price freeze, then marched out of the American Iron and Steel Institute.

Never afraid to speak his mind, Weir urged negotiations with the Russians to end the cold war when such talk was unpopular. Meanwhile he steadily pushed National Steel into position as the nation's sixth biggest producer (1956 sales: $664 million). When, after a severe heart attack, he finally stepped down as chairman and chief executive this spring, he was the last U.S. steelman still running a major company he had founded. Last week, at 81, Ernest Tener Weir died in Philadelphia of the infirmities of great age.

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