Boot Straps.

GIRDLER, Tom M..

$3,500.00

Item Number: 122678

New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1943.

First edition of this autobiography of the CEO of one of the “Big Three” steel companies of the twentieth century. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to Ayn Rand, “To Miss Rand. Her book inspired me. Tom M. Girdler.” After launching the Republic Steel Company in 1930, Tom Girdler guided Republic Steel through the difficult years of the Depression to emerge as one of the “Big Three” in the steel industry, along with U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel. Girdler’s management of Republic Steel was recognized as a “one man show.” Autobiography of the CEO of Republic Steel, one of whose main plants was in Youngstown Ohio, and the steel industry’s response to the historic joining of the AFL and CIO in the late 1930s. If there is any doubt of the impact Rand and especially her book “The Fountainhead” had on corporate policy, this book dispels it. The alliance between Girdler and Rand is well documented, and one of her letters to Girdler, from July 1943, can be read online, after Rand had read Girdler’s other book, The Right To Work. In her letter, she praises Girdler for his “defense of the industrialist” but faults him for positing his defense as altruistic, arguing there’s no such thing as altruism, “The basic falsehood which the world has accepted is the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal. That is, service to others as a justification and the placing of others above self as a virtue. Such an ideal is not merely impossible, it is immoral and vicious. And there is no hope for the world until enough of us come to realize this. Man’s first duty is not to others, but to himself. He can survive only through the function of his reasoning mind directed toward the conquest of nature.” In a letter a month later, Rand congratulates Girdler on purchasing and reading The Fountainhead as well as Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, and it would seem that this copy of Boot Straps must have been sent after he read her book. While writing Atlas Shrugged, Rand interviewed Girdler still further, as both of them were firm opponents of FDR’s New Deal. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. From the library of Ayn Rand. Books inscribed to Rand are rare.