Background
Irving Sands Olds was born on January 22, 1887, in Erie, Pennsylvania, the son of Clark Olds, an admiralty lawyer, and of Livia Elizabeth Keator.
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(This Newcomen Address, Dealing With The History Of United...)
This Newcomen Address, Dealing With The History Of United States Steel Corporation On Occasion Of Its 50th Anniversary, 1901-1951, Was Delivered At A National Newcomen Dinner Of The Newcomen Society Of England, Held In Ballroom Of The Pierre, At New York, New York, When Mr. Olds Was The Guest Of Honor, On November 15, 1951.
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Irving Sands Olds was born on January 22, 1887, in Erie, Pennsylvania, the son of Clark Olds, an admiralty lawyer, and of Livia Elizabeth Keator.
Upon graduation from the Erie Public High School in 1903, Irving Olds was sent to Yale College, from which he received the B. A. in 1907, and then to the Harvard Law School. He graduated near the top of his law class in 1910.
After graduation Irving Olds received one of the prize law clerk positions, being assigned to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. In August 1911, Olds joined the New York law firm of White and Case. His first important legal assignment was to serve as counsel for the export department of J. P. Morgan and Company (1915 - 1917). Although a member of Squadron A of the New York National Guard, Olds was not called to active military service when the United States entered World War I. He was instead appointed as counsel to the purchasing department of the British War Mission. Later in the war he served as special assistant to Edward R. Stettinius, Sr. , in Washington, D. C. , when Stettinius became surveyor general of supplies for the War Department. After the war Olds returned to White and Case as a partner. Soon his expertise in corporate affairs, particularly in the reorganization and administration of corporate enterprises, was widely recognized on Wall Street. In 1936 he was elected to the board of directors and the finance committee of the U. S. Steel Corporation. His success as special counsel for that corporation in dealing with the Temporary National Economic Committee's inquiry into monopoly in the steel industry was hailed by Fortune magazine as "a model of how Big Business could defend its right to a profit and still be solicitous of the public interest. "
When the chairman of the board of U. S. Steel, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. , following the example set by his father in World War I, left business to serve the government as a member of the National Defense Committee in 1940, Olds was chosen to succeed him. His election as chairman of the board was a clear signal that the days of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Elbert Gary had passed for the steel industry. Olds and the president of the company, Benjamin Fairless, were recognized throughout the industry as part of the "young guard" of bright, articulate, and soft-spoken corporate executives who knew that big labor and big government were as much of a reality as big business and must be treated with finesse, understanding, and compromise. During the twelve years of his chairmanship, Olds's skill in dealing with both labor and government was fully tested. These were years of total war and postwar reconstruction, perhaps the most dramatic and significant period in the history of U. S. Steel. The company greatly expanded its own facilities, and built and operated for the government the Geneva Steel Works, its first major steel production center on the West Coast. By working its facilities at more than 100 percent of capacity, U. S. Steel broke all previous production records. Within one year after Pearl Harbor, U. S. Steel alone was turning out more steel than the Axis powers combined. By the end of 1943, Olds could proudly announce that his company had made 60 million tons of steel since the beginning of America's all-out defense effort in 1940 and that its new shipbuilding yard at Port Newark, NewJersey, was building one new destroyer every five days.
Profits during the war years also reached an all-time high, and a great part of these earnings were used for an expansion program that approached the billion-dollar mark. Victory over Germany and Japan meant no diminution in the demand for steel. In spite of severe postwar labor strife in the steel and coal industries, production exceeded the records set during the war. In the spring of 1947, Olds negotiated a strike settlement with Philip Murray of the United Steel Workers of America that granted a fifteen-cent hourly wage increase and provided for severance pay and paid vacations for workers. It also stipulated that company and union representatives would meet regularly to discuss labor-management problems. The 1947 settlement set an industrywide pattern for labor negotiations.
The Korean War placed new pressure on steel production. Olds became increasingly critical of the demands of both government and labor, vigorously resisting President Harry S. Truman's proposal for new wage and price controls and labor's demands for a guaranteed annual wage. Through his frequent speeches and articles in popular journals, the increasingly conservative Olds became a leading spokesman for the deregulation of industry. Having reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five in 1952, Olds resigned as chairman of the board, ironically at the moment when Truman seized all of the strikebound steel mills of the nation for the federal government, an action that Olds regarded as the first step toward socialism. Although he remained a director of U. S. Steel until 1960, after his retirement as chairman and particularly after the death of his wife in 1957, Olds turned most of his energy and interest toward fund raising for the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Opera Association, the Lincoln Center project, and especially his two favorite educational institutions, Cooper Union and Yale University. In 1952, with Frank W. Abrams of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. , of General Motors, Olds founded the Council for Financial Aid to Education, to encourage corporate giving to private colleges and universities. Olds's last business venture came in 1960, when he agreed to serve as one of three voting trustees of the huge block of Trans World Airlines (TWA) stock that Howard Hughes and the Hughes Tool Company owned, in order to save that airline from bankruptcy. Olds, over Hughes's protests, succeeded in completely reorganizing the directorship of TWA. He resigned as trustee because of ill health in 1962. He died in New York City.
(This Newcomen Address, Dealing With The History Of United...)
Irving Olds together with Frank W. Abrams of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. , of General Motors, founded the Council for Financial Aid to Education in 1952.
Olds was president of The New-York Historical Society.
On October 13, 1917, Olds married Evelyn Foster, a painter of some renown. They had no children.