steel executive marketing expert
Stewart Shaw Cort was born on May 9, 1911 in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, United States. He was son of Stewart Joseph Cort and Carolyn Myrtilla Schreiner. The family moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1917, when Cort's father got work as an open hearth superintendent at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. By the time of his retirement, Cort's father had become a company vice-president.
Cort attended public schools until 1928, then Blair Academy in New Jersey for two years. He received a B. A. in economics from Yale in 1934 and an M. B. A. from Harvard in 1936.
Cort began his lifelong career with the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1937 as a clerk in the commercial research department.
Thirty-three years later, he became the fifth chief executive officer of the nation's number two steel corporation.
In 1939, Cort was transferred to the sales department of the company's Pacific Coast division.
During World War II, he became manager of the commercial research department and of the sheet and tinplate sales department.
In later years, the company constructed missile silos for the United States Air Force and other national defense equipment. After the war, promotions took Cort back and forth between California and Pennsylvania.
From 1954 to 1960 he served as vice-president in charge of sales for the Pacific Coast. In 1960 he was transferred back to Bethlehem's head office and named assistant general manager of sales for the entire corporation. A year later, he returned to California as vice-president of the Pacific Coast division.
In 1963, he returned to Bethlehem as president of the corporation and a director.
In 1970, Cort was appointed chief executive officer by his predecessor, Edmund F. Martin. He served in the top position until his retirement in 1974 and continued as a director until 1977. Cort held the reins of the corporation during the beginning of its decline in the 1970's. Competition from Japan and Europe crept up on American steel corporations, whose fat years of profit and growth had blinded them to technological and global market changes.
Bethlehem Steel was especially known for its rigid corporate structure and conservative attitude toward technological innovation. For example, during the 1960's, when the technological breakthrough of continuous casting was taken up by steel mills around the world, Bethlehem and other American steel corporations failed to incorporate what is now considered an essential cost-saving, energy-efficient part of any modern steel mill. Bethlehem experimented twice with continuous casting in the 1960's. The first experiment was successful, but Bethlehem's executives felt the technique was not adaptable to high-volume output and therefore abandoned the innovation. The Japanese soon adapted continuous casting for high-volume output. Glowing reports of technological advances convinced Bethlehem to try continuous casting again, but, against the advice of their own research department, company executives decided to build a caster in a plant that was too small. After a loss of $10 million, the project was abandoned. Bethlehem's research department often struggled against the corporation's conservative vision. In 1973 and 1974, company profits climbed as a result of the country's demand for steel. However, foreign competition, along with Bethlehem's outdated technology and increasingly hostile management-labor relations, soon crippled the steel giant and the entire steel industry.
As president, he encouraged the construction at company expense of Wey-hill, one of the most exclusive golf courses in the eastern United States. The impetus for a new golf course came about when Cort was leaving the overcrowded course at the local Saucon Valley Country Club and saw a woman in golf clothes changing her baby's diaper on the hood of his car. The Weyhill course, which was restricted to clients and top executives, barred women.
In 1970, the year Cort became chief executive officer, Bethlehem suffered a crushing blow to its reputation as a construction giant when it lost its bid to build the World Trade Center towers in downtown New York City. Bethlehem had originally beaten out its larger competitor, U. S. Steel, but then was accused by New York's Port Authority of price rigging. The job of building the towers went instead to several small companies that imported foreign steel. Even though Bethlehem's engineers had done a significant part of the towers' design, the company never received credit for its contribution.
Discriminatory practices that held back women, blacks, and Latinos had long gone uncontested at Bethlehem and other steel companies. In the wake of the civil rights movement, however, the government forced nine of the country's steel companies, including Bethlehem, to pay compensation to minority workers that amounted to the most costly civil rights settlement in American history. Known for his fondness for hard liquor and occasionally excessive reveling, Cort was in poor health when he retired in 1974.
He died in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He left the company in the hands of Lewis W. Foy, whom he had praised for his ability to bargain and his abstinence from alcohol.
Cort was the first company president at Bethlehem to have risen through the ranks of the sales division. Under Cort's leadership Bethlehem became the largest industrial plant and by 1946, Bethlehem had built and repaired more ships than any other private shipbuilder in the world. Bethlehem Steel engineered and constructed some of America's most impressive landmarks: the George Washington Bridge and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.
Cort, a staunch Republican, supported Richard Nixon's presidential race in 1972. Like many other Bethlehem executives, Cort expected his employees to share his loyalty to the Republican party.
Like many other business executives of his generation, Cort believed that wives should not speak their mind or pursue careers of their own.
The epitome of the old-style Bethlehem executive, Cort was a company man who enjoyed the luxurious life-style of its top executives.
Cort was married twice, but there is little public information about either marriage or either wife. On April 15, 1961 he married Elizabeth Fiske Brumiller. In 1978 he married Alys Faurot.
