Clifford Firoved Hood was an American steel industry executive. He served as a president of the United States Steel Company.
Background
Clifford Firoved Hood was born on February 8, 1894 on a farm near Monmouth, Illinois, United States. He was the only child of Edward Everett Hood and Ida Florence Firoved. His family soon moved to another farm, near Cameron, Illinois.
His first paying job came at age ten, working as a water boy for a threshing crew and earning fifty cents per day. Hood probably would have become a farmer if a young electrical engineer who was working on the new interurban line between Monmouth and Galesburg had not come to room with his family. They became friends and often went squirrel hunting together.
Education
In Cameron Hood went to school, walking three miles each way, then attended high school in Galesburg. In 1915, Hood graduated from the University of Illinois with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. While a student he had managed the annual show of electrical equipment, which gave him the opportunity to meet manufacturers.
Career
Hood went to work for the Packard Electric Company of Warren, Ohio, as a sales engineer and assistant manager of cable sales. In 1917 he took a job as an operating clerk with a leading producer of electrical cable, American Steel and Wire, at its Worcester, Massachussets, facility. A subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation, American Steel and Wire Company also produced wire rope and steel cable. Hood was there only six weeks before being inducted into the army; he spent two years with a coast artillery unit and was discharged with the rank of lieutenant.
He returned to American Steel and Wire in 1919 as a foreman in the electrical cable department. In 1925 he was promoted to assistant superintendent of the South Works in Worcester and became superintendent in 1928. In 1932, Hood moved again, to assistant manager of Worcester district operations and then to manager in 1933. He displayed his skills in managing production, piling up an exemplary record, and in 1935 he was brought to American Steel and Wire headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, as vice-president in charge of operations.
In 1937, Hood became executive vice-president and on January 1, 1938, he was elected president, with day-to-day responsibility for a company with 70, 000 products--from watch springs and piano wire to Erector-set girders and cyclone fence. During World War II, he managed major plant expansions at Worcester; Gary, Indiana; and Pittsburg, California.
After the war he developed an incentive plan for management that in 1953 was extended to all of U. S. Steel. Hood might have gone no further than this because U. S. Steel was a holding company with dozens of semiautonomous subsidiaries, each with its own board of directors, and with comparatively little movement of operating personnel between the units. After World War II, however, senior management believed that it was critical to the long-term health of the corporation that it acquire significant new raw material sources, modernize its physical plant, expand into new product lines, and tighten managerial control. Hood's demonstrated abilities in production management made him an obvious choice to implement these changes.
Thus, in 1950 he became president of Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation, the largest subsidiary of U. S. Steel, which was undertaking major expansion, and simultaneously joined the board of directors and the executive committee of United States Steel Corporation of Delaware, the operating subsidiary of the holding company.
In 1951, Carnegie-Illinois and two other major subsidiaries were merged with the Delaware company to form the United States Steel Company. In March 1951, U. S. Steel began construction of the largest single expansion in steel industry history, the $450 million Fairless Works in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Philadelphia and across the Delaware River from Trenton, New Jersey. This was U. S. Steel's first major facility in the eastern United States, where it would position the company to compete more effectively with Bethelem Steel in the region. A site on the Delaware River was also critical because it permitted U. S. Steel to receive highquality ores directly from major deposits it had discovered in Venezuela and Labrador.
On January 1, 1953, Hood became president of a reorganized U. S. Steel Corporation; the operating subsidiary, the U. S. Steel Company, had been dissolved. For the first time since the creation of the U. S. Steel Corporation in 1902 the company had a centralized management, with Hood, a knowledgeable steel man, as president. He was responsible for operations and sales, which were based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and spent nearly half his time visiting company facilities; Benjamin F. Fairless, the former president of the holding company, who now served as chairman, had responsibility primarily for public relations and worked from New York City, while Enders Voorhees chaired the Finance Committee, also in New York.
In 1954, Roger Blough replaced Fairless as chairman, and in 1955 Blough announced a multibillion dollar program to rebuild and expand U. S. Steel over the next twenty-five years, the beginning of which was overseen by Hood. At the same time, Hood was reelected president and appointed to the newly created position of chief administrative officer.
In 1956, Hood was elected chairman of the board's Executive Committee and opened a new corporate research center in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. At this time the American steel industry was investing less in research and development than any other industrial sector; U. S. Steel and other major American steel firms were largely ignoring important technological developments, including the basic oxygen process, which cut the openhearth's eight-to-ten hour heat time to just forty-five minutes. The vaunted expansion plans of U. S. Steel focused exclusively on rounding out existing facilities. This approach looked cost-effective but actually reduced efficiency in American plants (largely because of crowding and poor layouts that increased materials handling). At the same time, foreign competitors were building new plants, using the superior basic oxygen process, and locating them at deep-water sites (like the Fairless Works) to take advantage of the rich ores available from new mines in the developing world. U. S. Steel also aggressively raised prices throughout the 1950s, even in the recession year 1958, when the industry was operating at only 60 percent of capacity. The aggressive pricing followed by the oligopolistic American steel industry, coupled with a devastating steelworkers strike in 1959, led steel consumers both to a serious search for substitutes, particularly aluminum and plastics, and to their first significant purchases of foreign-made steel.
From 1959 the American steel industry began a dramatic, longterm decline, which did not end until the early 1990s. Thus, Hood's retirement as president on May 5, 1959, coincided with a major turning point in the history of the American steel industry. Hood remained on the board of directors and the executive committee until 1967 but focused his energies on humanitarian and civic concerns. In 1976 he helped found the Christian Businessmen's Fellowship. In 1969 he moved to Palm Beach, Florida, where he died.
Achievements
Hood is best remembered as a prominent U. S. Steel Corporation President. During his presidency the steel industry flourished in the United States. As a president he managed 4, 000 contractors employing 10, 000 workers on the 4, 000-acre Fairless site and brought the new works on line in just over twenty-one months, an industry record for building a facility.
Religion
An active Baptist, Hood supported such organizations as the American Enterprise Institute, American Cause, and the Freedoms Foundation.
Membership
Hood was a member of the National Council on Alcoholism where he chaired an industrial advisory committee in 1960 that encouraged the creation of hundreds of corporate rehabilitation programs.
Connections
In 1917 Hood married Emilie R. Tener; they adopted two children. In 1943 he married his second wife, Mary Ellen Tolerton, his first wife having died a few years earlier.
