In Charleston

In Charleston,* S. C., last week the shippers, innkeepers and other public men prepared for the convention of the National Foreign Trade Council, which will meet there under the chairmanship of President James Augustine Farrell of the U. S. Steel Corporation April 28-30. The businessmen of Charleston will display their harbor and shipping facilities, their stores and shops and factories. They realize that this visitation will mean much to Charleston as an exporting city. In 1901-02 they tried to stimulate foreign trade through the port by holding the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition. That was a financial loss, which the Federal Government made good by appropriating $160,000. The coming convention is far less pretentious yet probably more momentous to the local commerce, for the National Foreign Trade Council groups some of the shrewdest exporters in the world.

In Mr. Farrell, Charleston has a miracle-worker of commerce as well as a commercial miracle. In his thin, ascetic features, in his calm eyes, about which tiny wrinkles have come, in his masterful grey mustache and his silky grey hair, in these they will not see the boy of 16 who on the death of his seafaring father went into a New Haven, Conn., wire mill as a common laborer. But he was alert, had already begun consciously to train his now superb memory, studied night and day, and in 14 months was rated a mechanic; by 21 he was foreman over 300 men; at 30 a master supersalesman and general manager of the important Pittsburgh Wire Co. of Braddock, Pa. He knew more about the mining, the processing and the utilization of steel than nine-tenths of his customers, to whom he sold intelligently and helpfully.

All his life he had been collating knowledge about shipping, foreign trade and the internal conditions, principal industries, steel requirements and tariffs of foreign nations. So when in the panic year of 1893 he got his promotion to the general managership, he could go abroad to sell his products. Outside of the U. S. he sold one-half of the 1893 output of his plant, to the wonder of the trade. Then through successive absorptions and mergers the U. S. Steel Corporation was organized in 1901. Mr. Farrell still ranked as the great authority on the steel foreign trade. He became president of the U. S. Steel Products Co., the exporting agent of the parent U. S. Steel Corporation; raised its business, which he himself largely had created, from the 31 millions of 1904 to the hundreds of millions of today.

Before the War he could tell from memory the exact location of hundreds of ships plying all the oceans. In 1911 he was elected president of the U. S. Steel Corporation. Throughout his astounding progress and accomplishments in the steel field, which he to a considerable extent built up, he has retained his pleasant humanity.

He inspires his 280,000 employes and holds their loyalty, for he has gone through the sorts of work they do. He knows, and they know he knows. He has done much for their welfare. His charities are even more unobtrusive than his public life. He gives quietly to children's homes and to hospitals.

Such a man will Charleston see within a few weeks. He and his associates of the National Foreign Trade Council in their turn will see a very pleasant southern city, rising as though seaborne only eight to ten feet above the Cooper River on the east and the Ashley on the west and southwest. The narrow peninsula of the city is only seven miles from the ocean. The harbor is deep and spacious. Once there was a sandbar across the mouth of the river, but the Government built jetties that have helped wash it away. The courteous members of the Carolina Yacht Club are planning to show their visitors about the bay, to point at Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie of Civil War fame and at the other landmarks and islands.

The visitors will find Charleston one of the naturally beautiful cities of the world. Live-oaks and lindens shade the streets. The palmetto is a graceful ornament. Flower gardens of roses, azaleas, jasmines, magnolias and camellias will delight them. A great many colonial homes, with their spacious two-story verandas looking on walled-in gardens along one side of the house, still endure. The estimated population is now 73,175; in 1920 it was 67,957.

Railroad and shipping services are now excellent. The back country furnishes excellent lumber. Commerce in raw cotton, rice, fertilizers from the phosphate beds along the Ashley and from cottonseed meal, fruits and naval stores is large. Surprising to most but not to Mr. Farrell, is the fact that the South now has more cotton spindles than the North, that its mills consume more cotton than those of New England. Charleston has gained its share of the expansion. Further, it makes cotton bagging, lumber, cooperage goods, clothing, vehicles.

*Certain people, more accustomed perhaps to use their legs than their heads, associate with the name "Charleston" only the idea of a certain terpsichorean divertisement. It was not the dance which gave its name to the fine old southern city, but the city which lent its name to the dance. Only last week the beautiful city was deserted by its mayor, Charles P. Stoney, the mayor's wife, and ten members of the mayor's cabinet. These twelve journeyed to Chicago to attend the first national Charleston championship contest which opened there, Mayor Stoney going so far as to claim that his fine old city had actually originated the dance several years ago. In Charleston, it is safe to say, the oldest families still dance the waltz.