Owen D. Young and American Enterprise

A large-scale biography of a major figure in American enterprise, the man who built General Electric and founded the Radio Corporation of America.

Owen D. Young belonged to a unique American generation: the last to know a country where the majority made their living from the land and the first to feel the full impact of modernization. Born on an upstate New York farm, educated at St. Lawrence, a small college nearby, and armed with a Boston University law degree, Young made a large difference in that transforming change.

His early career was with the new and sprawling utilities, and brought him to the attention of the General Electric Company. Joining it in 1913 as vice president and general counsel, and becoming chairman in 1922, with Gerard Swope as president, he soon transformed, with Swope’s impressive aid, a large national enterprise into a dominant international one. They were a singularly effective team, enterprising at home and abroad, and notably progressive in labor relations. Always the entrepreneur, Young saw the possibilities of the ‘wireless’ and so set up the Radio Corporation of America.

This is a life of a titan of business, built on the classical pattern of American success.