Background
Arthur Bartlett Homer was born on April 14, 1896 in Belmont, Massachussets, United States. Information on his parents and childhood is sparse.
Arthur Bartlett Homer was born on April 14, 1896 in Belmont, Massachussets, United States. Information on his parents and childhood is sparse.
Homer attended local elementary schools and Providence Technical High School; later he took courses in mechanical drawing and machine design at the Rhode Island School of Design, where his father was managing director. He next entered Brown University, where he majored in economics and engineering administration. After graduating from Brown in 1917, Homer attended the U. S. Naval Academy and the U. S. Navy Submarine School.
Homer became a lieutenant in the Submarine Service as an engineering officer and was assigned to the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Quincy, Massachussets In 1919, after Homer left the navy, he obtained a post at the Quincy shipyard as assistant to the general superintendent. In 1921, he became manager of the diesel engineering and sales division, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1931 Homer was named sales manager of the shipbuilding division, and in 1934, assistant vice-president of shipbuilding.
In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered large increases in the navy's capital budget, and Homer was placed in charge of readying Bethlehem for an influx of contracts. When these contracts were received, he headed the Liberty ship program at Bethlehem. In this new position Homer became a national figure. For the most part he continued policies he inherited and had the approval of his fellow steel executives, most of whom were cut from the same pattern. Homer was among the steel men who failed to prepare for the global markets that eventually shrank the market for American steel and caused the industry to collapse in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1945, Chairman Grace recommended that Homer be elevated to the Bethlehem presidency. In this capacity Homer acted to boost spending on research and development, but he held back on a much-needed modernization plan. Later he created the $10 million research complex at South Mountain, Pennsylvania, near Bethlehem, a major installation that later was named for him. As president of the company at a time when the United States had the only intact economy in the developed world, Homer was optimistic regarding the future of the steel industry. He advocated large-scale expansion, and led Bethlehem in this direction. In 1955, the steel industry produced 117 ingot tons (11. 7 million tons) of steel, a new record. In May of that year, Homer predicted further growth. Capacity would increase by 50 percent by 1970, he assured an audience at the annual meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute. "As someone has said, the American people are 'wanters. ' Their wants are going to require a great deal of steel. "
During the period from 1945 to 1959, Bethlehem's production capacity rose from 12. 9 million tons to 23 million tons. At the same time, however, Homer refused to invest in new technologies then being developed in Europe and Japan. Seeking labor peace in order to avoid strikes, he agreed to large wage and benefits increases that obliged the major steel companies to raise prices at a time when the foreign steel companies had just begun to challenge their American counterparts. Frank Brugler, who was Bethlehem's comptroller during the latter part of Homer's leadership, spoke for him and others when he said, "We're not in business to make steel, we're not in business to build ships, we're not in business to erect buildings. We're in business to make money"--to which Vice-President James Slater added, "Unlike some [companies] who can't wait, we don't have to add to capital unless we are sure it will pay out. " Homer put it somewhat differently: "We are not only entitled to make, but have an obligation to make, the earnings and profits sufficiently high as to attract investors, so that the supply of funds needed for the replacement and expansion of our facilities, including adequate standby capacity for national defense, may be forthcoming. "
When Grace stepped down in 1957, Homer became Bethlehem's chief executive officer, and upon Grace's death in 1960 he was named chairman as well. There were other executives the board might have selected rather than Homer, who was sixty-one years old at the time and regarded by those within the industry as the weakest candidate. But the board considered him the least willing to disrupt the old order they so prized. Homer figured peripherally in the showdown between President John Kennedy and the steel executives who, in 1962, attempted to boost the price of steel contrary to their earlier assurances that they would not do so. He assigned the task of stating Bethlehem's position in favor of the price hike to President Edmund F. Martin, who had privately stated his opposition. Also in 1962, Homer told a reporter that Bethlehem was rich enough not to innovate. All the plants were making money. "We have a nice business as it is, " he boasted. He did what he could to pay a large dividend and obtain all the tax credits possible under federal and state laws. Homer did, however, oversee the construction of a major facility at Burns Harbor, Indiana, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, and the expansion and renovation of existing plants.
Homer retired in 1964 and moved from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Otter Cove, Connecticut.
Homer was an honorary vice-president of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers and a trustee of the Rhode Island School of Design. He died in Hartford, Connecticut.
Newspapers reported that Homer was a workaholic, with few outside interests except sailing. "He sticks to the business at hand with a singlemindedness that overlooks no pertinent detail, " said one observer. "People who do not like him call him ruthless. Those who like him call him determined. " In fact, however, Homer possessed neither of these attributes: he was, for the most part, unimaginative and vacillating. He lacked the clear vision of Charles Schwab and Eugene Grace, his two immediate predecessors, who made Bethlehem the second-largest American steel company.
Homer was married to Sara Yocum; they had three children.