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(Original Newcomen Society publication, not a reprint.)
Original Newcomen Society publication, not a reprint.
https://www.amazon.com/Progress-productivity-Newcomen-England-Publications/dp/B0007DP596?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0007DP596
Ernest Tener Weir was born in Pittsburgh, Pa. , the son of James Weir and Margaret Manson. Little is known of his family or childhood. His proudest boast was "I was born a commoner. I'm still a commoner. No one has ever given me anything. " His father, a day laborer, died when Weir was fifteen.
He began work as a $3-a-week office boy in the Braddock Wire Company. The following year, he became a clerk for the Oliver Wire Company. Alarmed at the ever-increasing wire production in Pittsburgh, Weir decided that there was no future in that business. "I concluded that at the rate we were going, we would in a few years have made enough wire to last civilization for a long time. " In 1899, with characteristic resolve, he left the Oliver Wire Company, where his future advancement was assured, and became chief clerk at the American Tin Plate Company. In 1903 Weir became plant manager and then superintendent of the Monessen Tin Plate Mills, subsidiaries of the American Tin Plate Company. Two years later, he was ready to strike out on his own. With a group of associates, including his brother David, James R. Phillips, and John Charles Williams, he purchased a bankrupt tinplate mill in Clarksbury, W. Va. In a short time the renamed Phillips Sheet and Tin Plate Company was prospering enough to allow the young partners to expand. In 1909 they bought 400 acres of land on the Ohio River twenty miles north of Wheeling and began building a new tinplate mill and the industrial town of Weirton. This plant continued to expand, and in 1913 a mill for the production of strip steel was built. It became the first plant of the Weirton Steel Company, which was incorporated in 1918 with a capitalization of $30 million. Weir first achieved nationwide notoriety immediately after World War I, when he closed his profitable Steubenville, Ohio, plant rather than negotiate with the striking workers. In October 1919, at the Weirton plant, 185 Finnish workers, accused of being Communists, were forced by a local vigilante group to kneel in the public square and kiss the American flag. They were then run out of town. Weir issued a formal order to all of his plants never again to hire a Finn. This incident was an appropriate introduction of Weir to the American public, for throughout his long career in industry he remained an implacable foe of unions and an outspoken advocate of "American rugged individualism. " Weir was one of the first steel manufacturers to realize that the future of the industry lay not with railroads but with automobiles. He sought and got contracts with Detroit, including a major contract with Henry Ford. And he raised the capital necessary to expand production and fill these contracts by selling stock directly to the public. "I went to the opposite side of Wall Street from J. P. Morgan and Company. I wanted $40 million for 25 years at a time when that money looked like the national debt. .. . I got it not from Wall Street but from Main Street. " In September 1929, Weir joined forces with the Great Lakes Steel Corporation of Detroit and the M. A. Hanna Company subsidiaries of Cleveland to form the National Steel Company. It was not an auspicious moment for a new venture; but following the stock market crash the next month, while every other steel company was cutting back on production, Weir boldly planned expansion - a $25 million plant in Detroit to be followed by a $40 million plant in Gary, Ind. National Steel quickly became the fifth largest producer of steel in America, second only to U. S. Steel in terms of ore resources in Minnesota and Michigan. Although the Great Depression ultimately forced Weir to limit his plans for plant expansion, National Steel was the only major steel producer to show a profit in every year from 1930 to 1935. Insisting that the cure was infinitely worse than the disease, Weir became one of the nation's most outspoken critics of the New Deal. Claiming that his workers were fully satisfied with their own company-sponsored union, he refused to comply with Section 7 (a) of the National Recovery Act, which called for free elections for union representation within plants. Taken to court by the government, Weir emerged triumphant when a federal district judge in Wilmington, Del. , declared Section 7 (a) null and void as applied to a manufacturing plant. It was one of the New Deal's earliest setbacks in the courts, and before the government could appeal this ruling, the U. S. Supreme Court, in a separate case, declared the entire National Recovery Act unconstitutional in 1935. Weir's victory was short-lived, however. Changes in membership resulted in the Supreme Court's upholding the National Labor Relations Act, which Weir had claimed was grossly unconstitutional. Forced to bow to the dictates of government and to the lead taken by Big Steel, Weir admitted union elections into his plants. He himself retreated ever further into reactionary politics. One of the early and most ardent supporters of the Liberty League, he urged his fellow industrialists to become more active in politics in order to save the nation from what he considered socialistic dictatorship. He obeyed his own preaching by seeking and obtaining the position of chairman of the Republican National Finance Committee in 1940. In the midst of his difficulties with the government and the top leaders in his own industry, Weir was also beset by personal problems. During and immediately after the war, he continued to criticize the government, freely giving interviews and making speeches whenever he had an opportunity. His name was frequently linked to such ultra-right-wing organizations as American Action, established to counteract the political influence of the CIO Political Action Committee. He felt some measure of vindication when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry S. Truman's veto in 1947 and when the Supreme Court declared the president's seizure of the nation's steel mills in 1952 unconstitutional. In April 1957, Weir granted his last interview. He died in Philadelphia, Pa. , and left an estate appraised at $10. 6 million.
He is best known for having founded both Weirton Steel (which became National Steel Corporation) and the town of Weirton, West Virginia. Weir was well known in the 1930s for opposing President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program, for resisting union organizing drives by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and its successor, the United Steelworkers, and for challenging the legal authority of the National Labor Relations Board.
(Original Newcomen Society publication, not a reprint.)
Something of an anachronism as the last founder of a major steel plant who was still active, he gave no indication of any diminution of energy. Nor had his political and economic views been in any way affected by wars or depression.
Quotes from others about the person
"There is only one word to describe Mr. Weir, " the reporter commented. "He is indisputably a rugged individualist. "
In 1901 he married Mary Kline of Pittsburgh. They had one daughter and twin sons. On January 12, 1925, following the death of his first wife, he had married Mrs. Aeola Dickson Siebert. In 1941 she divorced him on the grounds of desertion. On December 11, 1941, he married Mary E. Hayward. They had one son.
