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Owen D. Young and American Enterprise – SAVE 40%!:

A Biography

by Everett Needham Case and Josephine Young Case

Regularly: $25
Sale Price: $15.00
  • Format: Hardcover
  • ISBN: 978-0-87923-360-0
  • Pages: 964
  • Published: 1986

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.

Everett Case was educated at Princeton, Cambridge and Harvard. He served as the president of Colgate College from 1942 to 1962. After leaving Colgate, Case enjoyed a prestigious and varied career that spanned academia and industry. He was president and chief executive officer of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, president of the American Council on Education, chairman of National Educational Television (NET), and board member of IBM World Trade, the Committee for Economic Development and the Fund for Financial Aid to Education. Additionally, he was an alumni trustee of Princeton, board member of the Sloan-Kettering Foundation and a member of the Harvard Overseers Committee. He received 13 honorary degrees. A true renaissance man, the educator and financier was also a poet, pianist, and composer.

 

 

Josephine Young Case, the daughter of Owen D. Young, was a poet and writer and the first woman to be a director of the Radio Corporation of America. She was educated at the Brearley School and at Bryn Mawr College. In 1931, after her marriage to Everett Needham Case, she received an M.A. in American literature at Radcliffe College. After her family moved to her father’s native town of Van Hornesville, she wrote and published her first book, At Midnight on the 31st of March (1938), in blank verse.

For 20 years while her husband was president of Colgate University, Mrs. Case taught a literature course at Colgate and published Written in Sand (1945), a historical novel, and Freedom’s Farm (1946), a poetry collection. Her writing included a biography of her father, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (Godine, 1982), in which her husband collaborated.

She became the first female director of RCA in 1961, and remained in the post until 1972. She was also a board member of Bryn Mawr, the Fund for the Advancement of Education and the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. She was also a member of the national board of the Girl Scouts from 1948 to 1953 and was on the board of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the mid-60’s.

A trustee of Skidmore College for many years, Mrs. Case became chairwoman of the board in 1960.