"I have not heard that Germany or any one else has offered to buy the Bethlehem Steel Company. If such an offer were made, Charles M. Schwab would be the man who would know it."
The New York Times of June 10, 1915, included this report of Charles M. Schwab's purposes with respect to the control of the Bethlehem Steel Company:
There is not the least danger of German interests getting control of the Bethlehem Steel Company and breaking the concern's contracts with the British for arms and ammunition, it was made known yesterday from an authoritative source. This same authority had no information that, as alleged by The Chicago Herald and The Providence Journal, and quoted in The New York Times yesterday, the same interests were seeking to obtain control of other companies.
What blocks the attempts of the German agents, in the case of the Bethlehem Steel Company, for one thing, is that the majority of the stock of the concern is not in the market. Contrary to rumors that have lately been floating about hotel corridors and into and out of the brokers' offices adjacent to them, Charles M. Schwab still owns the majority of stock. This much Mr. Schwab emphatically confirmed to a Times reporter yesterday at the St. Regis. That he had no intention of selling he asserted just as emphatically.
At the same time the information is authoritative that agents representing the German Government or German interests have approached Mr. Schwab, not once, but several times, since the beginning of the war, asking that negotiations be opened. It has been intimated that interests, private or Governmental, were willing to pay any price that Mr. Schwab would name for his controlling interest.
Figures running into scores of millions have been named in offers, it being the understanding that the prospective owners simply wished to buy the big plant—the only one in the world that now compares with that of the Krupps, with the possible exception of that of the Schneiders at Creusot—and shut it up, in order to stop the vast sales of munitions of war to the Allies, and the filling of contracts so big that their delivery has hardly begun. Mr. Schwab, it is understood, could get today $100,000,000 or more for his stock in the Bethlehem Company.
It was established yesterday that more or less directly the visit of Mr. Schwab to England last Fall, on the Olympic, was due to the activity of German agents in this country in their efforts to buy the Bethlehem Steel Company.
Word of the attempts of the German agents to obtain control of the Bethlehem Company soon found its way to England, and the result was that Mr. Schwab was invited to London for a special conference with the War Office. He renewed his acquaintance with Lord Kitchener, and his previously formed intention not to sell out was fortified with a guarantee of orders large enough to keep the big plant at Bethlehem going steadily for eighteen months or more.
When rumors were prevalent about New York that the visit of Sir Trevor Dawson, head of a great English steel concern, had as its object an attempt to obtain control of the Bethlehem Company so as to insure that it would continue turning out supplies for the Allies, the German agents here were making a strong bid for the control of the concern, and their efforts have since continued.
A Times reporter put to Mr. Schwab yesterday the direct question as to whether he was in actual control of the Bethlehem Steel Company.