Tom Fanning
Steve Mitnick has authored four books on the economics, history, and people of the utilities industries. While in the consulting practice leadership of McKinsey & Co. and Marsh & McLennan, he advised utility leaders. He led a transmission development company and was a New York Governor’s chief energy advisor. Mitnick was an expert witness appearing before utility regulatory commissions of six states, D.C., FERC, and in Canada, and taught microeconomics, macroeconomics, and statistics at Georgetown University.
Everyone in the electric utilities industry knew who Owen D. Young was in the nineteen teens and twenties. The chairman of General Electric, he led the company Thomas Edison founded. GE was not only the largest manufacturer of electric equipment but the owner of several utilities as well, though only until 1924 because of federal antitrust action.
Young was a patriot of his country and industry. This was never clearer than when he founded in 1919 the Radio Corporation of America, RCA, to propel America's leadership in a critical new industry, at the request of a friend, Navy Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And then when he led the U.S. delegation and in 1929 brokered the deal to settle Germany's World War I reparations. This might have averted a second brutal war but for Hitler's rise.
The reparations settlement hailed internationally as the Young Plan, he was made the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, named Time Magazine's Man of the Year, and was a favorite to be the Democratic Party's nominee for President in 1932. He instead deferred to that friend, Franklin Roosevelt.