Benjamin Franklin Fairless (May 3, 1890 — January 1, 1962) was an American steel company executive. He was president of a wide range of steel companies during a turbulent and formative period in the American steel industry. His roles included President of Central Alloy Steel from 1928 to 1930; First Vice President of Republic Steel (which had absorbed Central Steel) from 1930 to 1935; President of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Company from 1935 to 1938; and then President (1938–1955), and later Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the board of directors (1952–1955) of U.S. Steel, the largest steel corporation in the United States.
Fairless was a well-known humanitarian, and one of the few steel executives willing to allow unionization in the steel industry. He received the Medal for Merit in 1946 for helping to break steel production bottlenecks in the United States during World War II.
Early life and career
Fairless was born Benjamin Franklin Williams in May 1890 in Pigeon Run, Ohio (a hamlet near the town of Massillon). His father was David Dean Williams, a poor coal miner born in Wales in 1865, and Ruth Wooley Williams, a miner's daughter from Pontypool, Wales, born in 1867. His parents emigrated to the United States in the 1880s, and settled in Ohio. They married in October 1888. Benjamin was their second child; he had an older brother, John, and two younger siblings, Mary Ann and Ralph.
His father was a coal miner and worked summers as a farmer, and the family remained poor. Fairless later recalled that his father repeatedly said the only way to survive in the world was to work and work very hard. His mother was seriously injured in a horse and buggy accident when he was two years old, and he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Sarah and Jacob Fairless, in nearby Justus, Ohio. His uncle ran a small grocery store from the front of his home. His relatives adopted him, and he took their last name. (He continued to maintain a home in Justus until the end of his life.) He began selling copies of the Cleveland Press at the age of five to raise money for his family. Fairless remained close to his mother and father, however. He described his father as a happy-go-lucky person who liked almost everyone, and who thought little of walking on his day off to see his teenage son play baseball. His called his mother "a truly great woman" who had little education but who taught her children the values of honesty, thrift, hard work, and saving.
Fairless was educated in local public schools, and graduated as class valedictorian from Justus High School in 1905. While in elementary and high school, he worked summers for Clark McClintock, a man with a lumber business. Fairless mowed his lawn, took care of his horses, plowed the fields of farms he owned, and did other general jobs for $9 a month (including meals). In high school, he acted as his school's janitor. He arrived early each morning, fired the coal-burning furnace, dusted desks and chairs, swept floors, and shoveled the sidewalks for $65 a year. When his grades began to suffer due to work and lack of attention, McClintock's nephew, Charles Blaine McClintock (whom everyone called "Blaine") began tutoring him. Blaine McClintock encouraged him to go to college, even though Justus High School only provided a three-year program. McClintock helped Fairless obtain a teaching position rather than go into manual labor, which would have ended his aspirations for college. He taught school for three years (1905 to 1908) at Riverdale, Ohio; Navarre, Ohio; and Rockville, Ohio, in order to earn money to pay for summer classes at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Having received enough credits to make up for the lacking fourth year of high school, he enrolled at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio. He worked as an assistant in a psychiatric hospital to pay for tuition. He received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Ohio Northern in 1913.
In 1912, while still in college, Fairless married Jane Blanche Trubey (sometimes spelled "Truby"). The couple's son, Blaine, was born on June 27, 1913. (Blaine graduated from Babson College, was a lieutenant in the United States Navy during World War II, and later was an electric company executive.) The couple appeared to have marital problems in 1940, and Jane Fairless went to Nevada (at the time, the only U.S. state to offer a quick and easy divorce), but they reconciled in May 1940. She died on September 29, 1942, at the family home in Massillon after a long, unspecified illness. She was buried in Massillon's Rose Hill Cemetery (now Rose Hill Memorial Park).