# Elbert Gary **Elbert Henry Gary** (1846–1927) was the founding chairman of **[[U.S. Steel]]**, the world's first billion-dollar corporation, assembled by [[J.P. Morgan]] in 1901 from [[Andrew Carnegie]]'s steel empire and rival firms. A former county judge — hence the lifelong honorific "Judge Gary" — he ran the steel trust for a quarter century and lent his name to Gary, Indiana, the company town built around its largest mill. Gary is best known for the **"Gary Dinners,"** private gatherings of steel executives used to coordinate prices and stabilize the industry without formal collusion, and for his hardline opposition to organized labor during the **1919 Steel Strike**, when U.S. Steel maintained the twelve-hour day. He is relevant to the KB as a case study in Gilded Age corporate consolidation — and as the subject of [[Ida Tarbell]]'s sympathetic late-career biography *[[The Life of Elbert H. Gary]]* (1925), which marked her drift from trust-buster to corporate chronicler. ## See Also - [[U.S. Steel]] - [[Ida Tarbell]] - [[The Life of Elbert H. Gary]]