Background
Eaton was born on December 27, 1883 in Pugwash in Nova Scotia, Canada. His father owned three farms and ran a general store in Pugwash.
Eaton was born on December 27, 1883 in Pugwash in Nova Scotia, Canada. His father owned three farms and ran a general store in Pugwash.
Eaton was schooled in Canada at Amherst Academy, Woodstock College, and McMaster University.
Before enrolling at McMaster in preparation for the Baptist ministry, Eaton visited his uncle, the Reverend Charles A. Eaton, in Cleveland. In the summer of 1901, Charles Eaton introduced young Cyrus to Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Sr. , who were members of his congregation. Rockefeller soon hired Cyrus as a messenger in the telegraph room at his mansion. Eaton came to Cleveland from McMaster every summer to work for Rockefeller's Cleveland Gas Company. Eaton earned his B. A. in philosophy in 1905.
After he received his B. A. Rockefeller wanted to hire him full time. Instead, Eaton spent two years as a cowboy in western Canada and as a lay minister before he finally returned to work for Rockefeller in 1907.
Eaton's initial assignment for Rockefeller was in Manitoba, where he negotiated franchises for a natural-gas and electricity network. When the Rockefellers backed out of this venture during the Panic of 1907, Eaton constructed the power plants in Canada with the financial assistance of Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian financier. These became the nucleus of the Continental Gas and Electric Company, which by the mid-1920's was the third-largest public utility corporation in North America. He earned his first $2 million at Continental Gas, which had properties on both sides of the U. S. -Canadian border. In 1912, Eaton moved his growing family to his 850-acre estate, Acadia Farms, outside Cleveland.
He became a naturalized American citizen in 1913. Three years later he joined the Otis and Company investment bank as a partner. It was through Otis that he would multiply his wealth with shrewd investments in rubber, iron, coal, and steel. An early example of Eaton's entrepreneurial skill was his flamboyant gesture to the directors of the troubled Trumbull Steel Company of Warren, Ohio, in 1925. Eaton presented the astonished businessmen, who at the time were unaware of the scope of his wealth, with a personal check for $18 million and assumed control of the company. The following year he launched Continental Shares Incorporated, which purchased undervalued steel and rubber companies.
In 1930, Eaton consolidated his steel holdings into the Republic Steel Company, the nation's third-largest steel producer.
Although Eaton lost $100 million in the Wall Street crash of 1929, unlike many of his colleagues, he was not left completely destitute. A maverick financier, he opposed the J. P. Morgan Company's control of investment banking in the railroad industry during this era. In the 1930's, Eaton and the Van Swearingen brothers of Cleveland were successful in opening up railroad investment banking to competitive bidding, thus breaking the Morgan monopoly. Later in the decade, Eaton also helped found the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company. He made his second fortune early in World War II. At the Steep Rock Iron Mines in Quebec, he drained a lake of 121 billion gallons of water to access a rich iron lode beneath. The wartime demand for this iron helped propel Eaton to the head of a business empire valued in the billions.
The industrialist was assisted further by John L. Lewis, the president of the United Mineworkers Union (UMW). Lewis invested union pension funds in Eaton's businesses in 1942 in return for unionization at iron and coal mines Eaton acquired in Kentucky and Ohio. This arrangement eventually led to a congressional investigation when a UMW-funded mine failed and lawmakers learned Eaton had enjoyed interest-free use of union money.
In 1943, with the help of railroad magnate Robert R. Young, Eaton bought a major portion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, the country's largest bituminous coal transporter.
In 1954 he became chairman of the board of the Chesapeake and Ohio, which acquired the Baltimore and Ohio in 1963. Eaton chaired the firm until 1973, when it became the Chessie System, and continued as a director until 1978. Throughout his career he served on the boards of dozens of companies and was a trustee of many institutions, including Denison University and the University of Chicago. Eaton personally knew every American president from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter.
Between 1956 and 1965, Cyrus Eaton met Communist leaders including Kádár János of Hungary, and Nikita Khrushchev, Anastas Mikoyan, and Alexei Kosygin of the Soviet Union. The industrialist advocated increased trade with the USSR as the best way to improve relations between America and the Communist bloc. Many of his critics considered Eaton a tool of the Soviets because he promoted increased contacts with Moscow and nuclear disarmament. However, Eaton's main goal was business. Washington's barriers to trade with Moscow limited his efforts, and his chief export to the Soviet Union was cattle-breeding stock.
He served as a trustee of the University of Chicago, Denison University in Ohio, and the Harry S. Truman Library. He was also a lifetime trustee of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Eaton died at Acadia Farms in Northfield, Ohio, leaving a personal fortune estimated at $200 million.
A staunch Republican until the early 1930's, he became a Democrat and supported Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential campaign. He believed Roosevelt best able to redress the economic crisis of the Great Depression and save America's capitalist system. With the onset of the atomic age, Eaton's interest in international affairs grew. In the mid-1950's, he became an early proponent of improved relations with the Soviet Union. He sponsored a meeting of nuclear scientists from both the Western and Communist blocs at his summer home in Nova Scotia in 1955. The gathering evolved into the annual Pugwash Conference, named for its original site, which brings together scientists, scholars, and intellectuals from all over the world for discussions. Eaton sometimes found himself embroiled in controversy. When he criticized the Federal Bureau of Investigation during a television interview in 1958, the tycoon was threatened with a subpoena from the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities.
In 1965, Eaton urged President Lyndon B. Johnson to stop the bombing of North Vietnam, suggesting that otherwise Communist China and the Soviet Union would jointly attack the United States.
In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, he and his wife traveled to Hanoi to meet North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong. Eaton strongly endorsed United States-Soviet detente in the early 1970's and continued to press for normalized relations with China and Cuba.
He was a the soft-spoken and nattily attired.
In December 1907 Eaton married Margaret House; they had seven children and were divorced in 1934. He married Anne Kinder Jones in December 1957.