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Junked Cats. The Hanna company was originally one of Cleveland's "ore houses," built up by Mark Hanna, who became the G.O.P. political power in William McKinley's day. When Humphrey arrived in 1917, the company was thriving on the wartime boom. Humphrey was put to work unraveling the company's World War I tax problems and became an expert on all the details of Hanna's operations. In 1920, at 30, he was made a junior partner just in time to watch Hanna slip into the postwar inventory depression.
By 1925, Humphrey says, "the corporation was in a bad way." It was losing some $2,000,000 a year. Humphrey was installed as executive vice president with wide powers. He set about junking millions of dollars worth of unprofitable cats & dogs, wrote off inventories and cut payrolls. ("He'd fire his grandmother if she wasn't doing a good job," said a friend, "but he'd put her on a pension.") Hanna never again lost money, even during the depression of the 1930s. On the solid foundation Humphrey started building up a new Hanna, drawing on his understanding of basic U.S. industry and his self-acknowledged talent for picking good partners. ("I'm as good at picking partners," he says, "as any man in the U.S.")
In 1929 he linked Hanna's ore and coal mines with a sheet-steel plant in Detroit and Ernest Weir's assortment of steel plants in the Pittsburgh area, forming the National Steel Corp. Hanna owns a controlling interest (27%) in National Steel, and in 1951 earned $6,000,000 in National Steel dividends. In Pittsburgh, Humphrey spotted a young coal-company executive named George Love. He spent years on a carefully drawn plan to buy two Pittsburgh coal companies and form them into Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Co.—for George Love to run. Humphrey's own account of the operation is typical: "We took two busted coal companies and put them together to build the greatest coal company in the world."
Iron for Gold. For simple survival, an operator of Humphrey's caliber must have an instinct for projecting trends—political as well as economic—into the future. "In extraction industries," he says, "you have to look ahead or you will find that you have got everything out of the ground that is to be had—and you're out of business." The rich Mesabi iron-ore lode in Minnesota is wearing thin as the nation's (and Hanna's) prime ore source. Twenty years ago Hanna proved the big ore field which Bethlehem Steel is now operating in Venezuela. ("We didn't develop it," says Humphrey, "because there were political difficulties in Venezuela.") Then Humphrey heard about a Canadian named Jules Timmins, who held the mineral rights to 24,000 square miles of land along the Labrador-Quebec border. Timmins had been looking for gold and all he was able to find was a fabulous deposit of iron ore.