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Due to having a keen intellect, a natural savvy for business and an agreeable disposition, Young was appointed Chairman of the General Electric Corporation in 1922 after many years as a distinguished lawyer. At age forty-eight, he was still just warming up. Over the next ten years, his fingerprints were everywhere. On the domestic side, Young founded the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and co-founded the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).
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In 1924, Young moved into the arena of international affairs by lending his legal and financial expertise to prominent businessman and banker Charles G. Dawes (1865-1951) to reconfigure Germany's reparations from the First World War. As the German economy remained structurally unstable after years of hyperinflation (1921-1924) and tangled banking practices, he was again tapped by the US government and led a commission and produce a new plan in 1929. Taking a page out of the financial playbook of Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802), the French minister who was forced to resign his position due to the intransigence of the upper classes to his financial reforms (the result of which was the French Revolution two-years later), Young lengthened the repayment schedule to ease the burden on Berlin. For his efforts, he was chosen as "Man of the Year" for Henry Luce's (1898-1967) relatively new yet widely-read weekly publication Time magazine (est. 1923) - the same publisher and magazine that would declare the twentieth century to be "The American Century."
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Of all of his accomplishments, however, his greatest hour has been buried by the passage of time. In 1927, Young was invited to give an address to the Harvard School of Business. In the spirit of true American republicanism, he delivered the following remarks:
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"Slowly we are learning that low wages for labor do not necessarily mean high profits for capital. We are learning that productivity of labor is not measured alone by the hours of work, nor even by the test of physical fatigue in the particular job. What we need to deal with are not the limits to which men may go without physical exhaustion, but the limits within which they may work with zest and spirit and pride of accomplishment. When zest departs, labor becomes drudgery, when exhaustion enters, labor becomes slavery."
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"Here in America, we have raised the standard of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that, full equality in economic opportunity?...No man is wholly free until he is both politically and economically free. No man with an uneconomic and failing business is free. No man with an inadequate wage is free. No man is free who can provide only for physical needs. He must also be in a position to take advantage of cultural opportunities."
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If an audience member did not know who was speaking, he or she would probably assume that the speaker was either a socialist or some kind of left-wing ideologue. Young was neither. He was a titan of American business and a powerful figure in the construction of international capitalism.
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There is a profoundly disturbing element to Young's 1927 address in relation to our time in the twenty-first century. It is nearly impossible to imagine a business executive or corporate lawyer giving a similar speech today. The social well-being of workers - the very people that make the economy run - has been largely off the table in corporate boardrooms and in MBA programs for more than thirty years. Human beings have become human resources, and the idea that the social component of our lives ought to be the foremost consideration in economic policy currently has little to no place in American discourse - or in the discourse of many other countries. If Young were to appear and deliver his 1927 address to the professors and students at Harvard Business School tomorrow, he would be denounced as "radical" and out of touch with the modern demands of production and efficiency.
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Yet, is not the worldwide culture of business out of touch with what ought to be the first and foremost business ethic - developing business to help and empower people rather than to acquire more and more capital for the impersonal purpose of dominating a market?
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American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) once said "The time is always right to do what is right." What America and the world desperately need is for leaders of the business community to courageously stand up for human interests over corporate interests. Young understood that when companies make people their raison d'etre - everyone profits both socially and materially.
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The world is impatiently waiting for this Enlightenment.
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(Image: Owen D. Young on the cover of Time magazine, 1929)
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Key Source
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Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
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J Roquen