Background
Humphrey was born in Cheboygan, Mich. on March 8, 1890. He was the son of Watts Sherman Humphrey, an attorney, and Caroline Magoffin. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Saginaw, Mich.
Humphrey was born in Cheboygan, Mich. on March 8, 1890. He was the son of Watts Sherman Humphrey, an attorney, and Caroline Magoffin. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Saginaw, Mich.
After attending public schools in Saginaw, where he was a star high school football player, Humphrey entered the University of Michigan in 1908, intending to become a civil engineer. After one year, he transferred to Michigan Law School. There he achieved an academic record that earned for him the editorship of the Michigan Law Review and election to the order of the Coif, the national honor society for students of law. He received his LL. B in 1912.
Upon receiving his LL. B, Humphrey returned to Saginaw to become a partner in his father's law firm, which then became Humphrey, Grant, and Humphrey. Although his law practice grew and he acquired such important clients as the Michigan Central and Grand Trunk railroad companies, Humphrey began to search for new interests. In 1917, when he was considering entry into the banking business in Saginaw, his senior partner, Richard Grant, became general counsel for the M. A. Hanna Company in Cleveland, Ohio, and invited Humphrey to join him as an assistant. (The Hanna Company, an iron-ore and shipping firm, had been founded in 1886 by Marcus A. Hanna, who later served as United States senator from Ohio. )
Humphrey's rise in the company was rapid. Within a year, he had succeeded Grant as general counsel; in 1920 he was made a partner in charge of the Hanna iron-ore properties; and soon thereafter, he was named executive vice-president. The Hanna Company was in serious financial difficulties during the post-World War I slump, but Humphrey reorganized the company and eliminated unprofitable operations. By 1924 the company had once again become a leader in iron-ore production and Great Lakes shipping.
As the fortunes of the company improved, the restless Humphrey looked for new enterprises into which to direct his energy and managerial talents. Through his business connections, he had become a close friend of the steel manufacturer Ernest T. Weir. In 1929 Humphrey, the newly chosen president of the Hanna Company, joined forces with Weir to create the National Steel Corporation, with steel mills in Detroit, Mich. , and Gary, Ind. One month later, the Wall Street stock market crash heralded the onset of the Great Depression, but National Steel, with its sound financial basis and its expert management, continued to expand while its competitors cut back. It became the sixth-largest steel producer in the nation and was the only steel company to show a profit during each year of the depression.
Humphrey's legal background, conservative economic philosophy, and keen ability to evaluate corporate efficiency were characteristic of the new generation of twentieth-century organization men. His conservatism was deeply ingrained, but it was not inflexible. He liked to think of himself as a practitioner of "imaginative orthodoxy. " It was said of him that he would fire his own grandmother if she were not doing a good job – but he would give her a pension. That ameliorating clause distinguished him from such archconservatives as his associate E. T. Weir.
Both the Hanna Company, which Humphrey had transformed into a holding company for several subsidiary enterprises, and National Steel were in a position to profit greatly from the World War II demand for steel products. In the immediate postwar period, Humphrey further expanded his operations by creating the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company. He regarded the development of the theretofore untapped iron-ore resources of Labrador as his most significant business achievement. At a time when the northern iron ranges of Michigan and Minnesota were being exhausted, the Labrador iron ore was crucial to American steel mills. In 1948 Humphrey was asked by Paul Hoffman, head of the Economic Cooperation Administration, to serve as his adviser for the coal and steel industries.
On a trip to Germany in that year to assess the possibilities of rehabilitating the German steel industry, Humphrey greatly impressed General Lucius D. Clay, administrator of the American occupied zone. It was Clay who urged Dwight D. Eisenhower to name Humphrey as his secretary of the treasury in 1952. Humphrey had long been active in Republican politics, but he had supported Senator Robert Taft for the presidency since 1940. Humphrey and Eisenhower had never met until the president-elect decided to follow Clay's recommendation and asked Humphrey to join his cabinet. The nomination came as a surprise to both the press and the Senate.
Although one of America's leading industrialists, Humphrey had always shunned publicity and had never given an interview. The only time he had come to the attention of the general public was in 1947 when he successfully negotiated a new labor contract for the coal industry with John L. Lewis' United Mine Workers. To their mutual surprise, Lewis and Humphrey had discovered that they could deal successfully. Both men had a deep-seated distrust of big government, and in the interest of negotiating a contract outside of governmental supervision, both had been willing to make concessions. Humphrey easily won Senate confirmation, and in a matter of weeks after taking office, the press, which had dubbed him Eisenhower's "dark horse, " now hailed him as "the strong man of the Cabinet. " Humphrey welcomed the public attention he had so long avoided. Of all the Eisenhower team, he enjoyed the best press. His financial program was simple and direct: reduce government expenditures, particularly in the military sector; lower taxes; and balance the budget. Eisenhower took the unprecedented step of inviting him to sit on the National Security Council, and it was Humphrey who became the major architect of the president's "New Look" in national defense – a sharp curtailment of expenditures for conventional weapons and a greater reliance on nuclear arms, which were less expensive.
During his four years as secretary of the treasury, Humphrey was able to implement his major goals: taxes were reduced by some $7. 4 billion, inflation was checked, the value of the dollar abroad rose, and for two years the budget was balanced. "When George speaks, all the rest of us listen, " Eisenhower said of Humphrey. At the beginning of his second term, however, Eisenhower, under pressure from the Defense Department, submitted the largest peacetime budget in history. Humphrey's displeasure was apparent, and he warned the nation that unless expenditures were sharply cut and taxes further reduced, "you will have a depression that will curl your hair. " Shortly thereafter, Humphrey resigned to return to private business. It was believed at the time that his remark had caused a break between him and the president, but in reality Humphrey was expressing Eisenhower's true philosophy. The two men remained close friends, taking frequent trips together. In 1962 Humphrey resigned as chairman of National Steel and thereafter devoted much of his time to breeding racehorses on his Georgia estate. He died in Cleveland.
On May 3, 1913, he married Pamela Stark; they had three children.