GEORGE F. BAKER

In the death of George F. Baker Harvard has lost one of its greatest benefactors, and the Business School has lost its patron. Though not a college man himself, Mr. Baker always took a keen interest in the educational world, and his gifts to Harvard have been among his largest.

Looked at from another point of view, Mr. Baker's death means the passing of one of the greatest figures in the economic development of the United States. He belonged to that generation of financiers and business men whose peculiar and unique privilege it was to witness and aid in the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen. Their methods and outlook were necessarily a product of the environment in which they built, and it is extremely unlikely that any such conditions will ever again be approximated. Mr. Baker was one of the last of the economic pioneers whose fabulous wealth and stormy careers have made the American multi-millionaire a world-wide figure of mixed curiosity and worship.

Mr. Baker presented a strange mixture of qualities. Possessed of a personality and will so compelling that few ventured to stand in his path, he was also fortunate enough to have a degree of foresight, judgment, and daring rarely rivalled in the financial history of this country. In his business relations he exhibited a hardness which was difficult to reconcile with the kindly consideration which he always displayed toward his personal friends. Over them he exercised an almost magical spell, and there were few who knew him well who did not love him. His manner in private life was smoothly, charming, and his nature had a strain of sentimentality which seemed utterly foreign to the stern manner of the great business man.

The "old man", as he was known to his Wall St. associates, is gone now, and it will be his accomplishments by which America will remember, him. The First National Bank, as near a one-man enterprise as it is possible for a $400,000,000 corporation to be, will stand as a monument to his fame as long as there is a shred of capitalism and conservatism in the land. It was Mr. Baker's job to build up this prince of commercial banks; it is the task of his less imaginative and more conservative successors to maintain it. Outside of the First National, Mr. Baker's chief interests were in America's two greatest pioneer industries, Steel and Railroads. In these his influence was always great, often decisive.

The death of George Fisher Baker writes "finis" to one of the most remarkable records of service and accomplishment that this country will ever see.