Industrialist politician statesman
He was born on August 30, 1862 in Amityville, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of William Henry Phipps, a Methodist minister, and Agnes McCall. When he was five years old, the family moved to Pittsburgh, where his father had accepted the call of a small congregation.
Phipps graduated from Pittsburgh High School in 1879.
After studies he went to work in the Carnegie steel mills as a weight clerk. Phipps was a model employee who quickly won the favor of his foreman, the plant superintendent, and those higher up in the Carnegie hierarchy of power. With that accolade always came a small percentage of the interest in the company partnership.
During the final, bitter struggle for power between Carnegie and his chairman of the board, Henry Clay Frick, Phipps sided with Carnegie and Schwab. When Frick was driven from the company in 1899, Phipps was rewarded with the position of vice-president and treasurer and an increased percentage of the partnership. Although that share was only 2 percent, it was enough to make him a very wealthy man when Carnegie sold his company (1901) for nearly half a billion dollars to the syndicate created by J. P. Morgan to form the United States Steel Corporation. Although only thirty-eight years old, Phipps retired from the industrial world.
He moved to Denver, Colorado, where he invested his wealth in the Denver and Salt Lake Railway and the California Electric Power Company, which provided power to the Nevada goldfields and the farming districts of California.
Phipps quickly moved into the center of the political life of Colorado. In 1913 he was elected president of the Colorado Taxpayers' Protective League, which provided him with a base for assuming leadership of the most conservative faction within the Republican party. In 1918 he was elected to the U. S. Senate. In the Senate, which liberals of the day called the "millionaire's club, " Phipps was frequently the butt of attack by Southern Democratic Populists and Progressive insurgents within his own party. On at least two occasions the presiding officer had to reprimand fellow senators for impugning Phipps's motives for voting against legislation that would adversely affect his business interests. He served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads and of the Committee on Education.
Phipps easily won reelection in 1924. Two years later, while serving as national chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, he was greatly embarrassed by losing control of the Republican party in Colorado. The more liberal faction of the party was able to defeat the junior senator, Rice W. Means, in the primary and to oust Phipps from his position as head of the party in Colorado because both men had sought and received the support of the Ku Klux Klan. Phipps's political fortunes ebbed and he had the good sense to quit while still ahead.
He refused to run for another term, in what would probably have been a hopeless contest. Although he served twice more as national committeeman from Colorado and was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1932 and 1936, he had little political influence within his state or the nation for the rest of his life.
He died in Santa Monica, California.
Lawrence Cowle Phipps was the first vice president in Carnegie Steel Company. He founded the Agnes Memorial Sanatorium for the treatment of tubercular patients and was appointed to the National Finance Committee of the American Red Cross. Phipps also built the Phipps Estate to provide jobs during the Great Depression. In the Senate he defended a bill for the building of Hoover Dam and appropriations for national highways.
He urged President Herbert Hoover in 1930 to sponsor the building of an interstate highway system as a means of easing the Great Depression by providing employment and stimulating industry. Phipps was not generally a proponent of an activist federal government. Calvin Coolidge was his political hero, and in the 1924 presidential campaign he attributed American prosperity and happiness to Coolidge's being in the White House and to the passage by Congress of a high protective tariff and a restrictive immigration bill.
He was hardworking and extremely ambitious.
Quotes from others about the person
Andrew Carnegie considered Phipps "one of my young geniuses".
In 1885 Phipps married Isabella Hill Loomis, who died three years later, leaving two infant children. In 1897 he married Genevieve W. Chandler; they had two daughters. This marriage ended in divorce in 1904.
In 1911 he married Margaret Rogers, the daughter of Judge Platt Rogers of Denver; they had two sons.
