He was born Benjamin Franklin Williams, at Pigeon Run, Ohio, near Massillon, the son of David Dean Williams, a coal miner, and Ruth Woolley.
Because his mother was injured when Williams was two years old, he went to live with her sister Sarah and her husband, Jacob Fairless, a grocer in nearby Justus, Ohio.
In 1907 he graduated valedictorian of a class of eight from Justus three-year high school.
He then took courses at the College of Wooster to complete a fourth year of high school and enrolled at Ohio Northern University in 1909.
Four years later he received a civil engineering degree.
To finance his schooling at Wooster, he taught school at Riverdale (1907), Rockville (1908), and Navarre, Ohio (1909).
This part-time work and a loan paid for his college education.
After graduation Fairless worked as a surveyor for the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad. In 1914, while going to Massillon to watch the assembling of Coxey's second army of the unemployed for a march to Washington, he saw a steel mill under construction. Getting off the trolley, he applied for a job and was hired on the spot.
The Central Steel Company kept him on after the plant was built, making him mill superintendent, then general superintendent, and finally, in 1921, vice-president in charge of operations.
In 1926, the firm merged with the Central Furnace Company and the United Alloy Steel Corporation to form the United Alloy Steel Corporation. Fairless became vice-president and general manager and, two years later, president.
When the Republic Steel Corporation absorbed United Alloy Steel in 1930, Fairless was made executive vice-president of that company.
In 1952 Fairless became chairman of the board and chief executive officer, a position that he held until 1955. In retirement he remained a member of the board of directors and until his death was president of the American Iron and Steel Institute. Under Fairless' leadership United States Steel enjoyed swelling profits, particularly between 1945 and 1955. Fairless plowed some of this income into plant expansion and modernization.
In 1945 he authorized explorations in Venezuela for new sources of ore, and within a decade the Cerro Bolivar mines were shipping eight million tons of ore each year to the United States. Meanwhile, to process the Venezuelan ore into steel, United States Steel constructed a huge modern facility at Morrisville, New Jersey. The new Fairless Works added 1. 8 million tons to the corporation's capacity.
Overall, between 1938 and 1955, United States Steel increased its output 35 percent. Fairless was an effective defender of bigness in the steel industry. He branded critics of concentration "Calamity Johns suffering from a midget complex--they think small. "
During Fairless' tenure major steel strikes occurred in 1942, 1946, 1949, and 1952. Although he vigorously contested union demands, he usually was obliged to concede both higher wages and such other demands as a closed shop for employees in the "captive mines" owned by United States Steel, noncontributing worker pensions and welfare benefits, and a modified closed shop for all steelworkers. Fairless often complained of having to battle the unions and the federal government simultaneously.
The strikes of 1946 and 1952, for example, came at times when the government controlled prices. Although Fairless was willing to grant part of the wage demands of the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), he argued that he could not do so unless the government allowed substantial price increases. In both instances the government, after much resistance, yielded.
At the close of the fifty-four-day strike of 1952, which President Harry Truman tried to forestall by seizing the companies, Fairless concluded that there must be a better way of dealing with labor. The celebrated "Ben and Dave" tours of United States Steel's mills followed.
Fairless died at Ligonier, Pennsylvania.
In 1935, Fairless faced a major career decision: to become president of Republic Steel or president of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation--a subsidiary of United States Steel. He accepted the latter post and two years later succeeded William A. Irvin as president and chief administrative officer of United States Steel.
(The Enrichment of Man: Benjamin F. Fairless Memorial Lect...)
Fairless and David McDonald, president of the USWA, mingled with workers, radiating goodwill and a spirit of mutual conciliation. No important strikes took place during the balance of Fairless' career. These labor policies illustrate negative aspects of equalizing the power of big business and big labor: when the two disagree, the resulting protracted strikes hurt the public as much as or more than the principals; when they agree, costly wage increases are simply passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Quotations: "No one, " he once observed, "has yet invented an accordion-pleated steel plant that will contract conveniently under the glowering eye of the Department of Justice, and then expand obligingly in times of national peril. "
In 1912, Fairless married Jane Blanche Trubey; they had one son. On October 14, 1944, two years after the death of Fairless' first wife, he married his son's mother-in-law, Hazel Hatfield Sproul. They were divorced on December 20, 1961, twelve days before his death.
