Forbes's 50

In 1906, a young Scotsman who was earning $25 a week as a financial reporter made an unusual investment. From his savings, he spent $10 a day to live at Manhattan's old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. There he could rub elbows with the rich who gathered nightly in "Peacock Alley" to swap gossip. Before long, Bertie Charles Forbes was on speaking terms with many a tycoon. He became the rich man's Poor Richard and Boswell. As a Hearst columnist and later as publisher of his own Forbes--Magazine of Business, "B.C." found a hundred ways of repeating the obvious ("Dawn will come. . . . The self-starter never allows his steam to run down. . . . Everything may not be for the best, but let's make the best of everything").

But never had B.C. rubbed elbows with so many tycoons at one time as he did last week at the Waldorf-Astoria. The bosses of Du Pont, General Motors Corp., General Electric Co., U.S. and Bethlehem Steel, Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Corp., the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. and many another great industry came to eat breast of guinea hen with Forbes (at his expense) and get illuminated scrolls naming them "Today's 50 Foremost Business Leaders."

Empire-Builders. The 50 (only 39 were at the dinner) were selected in a poll by Forbes of businessmen in the same way that, 30 years before, Forbes started his magazine by listing the "foremost 50" of that day. Of the old 50 only one--79-year-old Thomas E. Wilson, chairman of Wilson & Co., Inc.--was still alive. At the dinner, where New York's Governor Thomas E. Dewey spoke (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), white-thatched Mr. Wilson cracked: "Perhaps I should not say that I am glad to be the only one left, but I will say that I am certainly happy to be here." There was a marked difference between most of Forbes's new "leaders" and "the crop of 1917. Then they were empire-builders such as Andrew Carnegie, James B. Duke, John D. Rockefeller. The leaders of 1947 are largely managers.

Empire Employees. Many of the new leaders--U.S. Steel Corp.'s Ben Fairless, Lever Bros.' Charles Luckman, General Electric Co.'s Charles E. Wilson, Henry Kaiser, Eastern Air Lines, Inc.'s Eddie Rickenbacker, Procter & Gamble Co.'s Richard R. Deupree, Sam Goldwyn and Radio Corp. of America's David Sarnoff --fitted the rags-to-riches pattern set by some of 1917's tycoons. And some of the leaders still had the old empire-building names--Harvey S. Firestone Jr., Henry Ford II and Nelson Rockefeller.

But in general, Forbes's new leaders were salaried men who had risen through the ranks. As often as not, their financial stakes in the industries they ran were small. More than anything, the lists of new and old leaders showed the shift in power in the last 30 years from the empire builders to the empire managers.

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