Charles Edward Wilson (businessman)

Wilson left school at the age of 12 to work as a stock boy at the Sprague Electrical Works, which was acquired by the General Electric Company. He took night classes to graduate from high school, and he worked his way up to the position of president of the corporation in 1939.

During World War II, Wilson served on the War Production Board as its executive vice-chairman in September 1942, supervising the huge American war production effort.[2] He resigned in August 1944 after a bitter dispute over jurisdiction with the Department of War and the Department of the Navy.

Wilson returned to General Electric in 1945 and began an anti-union campaign. He also served President Harry S. Truman as the chairman of the blue-ribbon President's Committee on Civil Rights in 1946 to 1947. The committee recommended new civil rights legislation to protect "all parts of our population."

After returning to General Electric, he left to become head of the new Office of Defense Mobilization in December 1950, which took control of the US economy, rationing raw materials to the civilian economy, a position so powerful that the press began calling him the "co-president." After being accused of backing big business, he resigned in March 1952 after a bitter dispute with his own Wage Stabilization Board, which had recommended wage increases for unionized steel workers without his knowledge. He intervened to back the steel companies' demand for price increases to offset them, only to see Truman back the board.

Wilson next returned to General Electric briefly, before becoming chairman of the board of W.R. Grace & Co. until his retirement in 1956, when he became the president of the People-to-People Foundation, a nonpartisan program promoting international friendship and understanding.

In 1944, after the end of the Second World War, Wilson stated that the US must keep her economy on a war footing to avoid another Great Depression.

Mausoleum of Charles E. Wilson

John G. Forrest, wrote in The New York Times, "Charles Wilson is a big man by any standard, physical, moral, or mental."

Electric Charlie and his wife adopted their daughter, Margaret Wilson, from an orphanage when she was 18 years old. Margaret later married Hugh Pierce and they had one son, named for his grandfather and father: Charles Edward Wilson Pierce.

Charles Wilson died in Westchester County, New York, in 1972, and his remains are interred in a private mausoleum in the Kensico Cemetery.

He was nicknamed "Electric Charlie" to avoid being confused with Charles Erwin Wilson, US Secretary of Defense under President Dwight Eisenhower and earlier the Chairman of the General Motors Corporation, who was nicknamed "Engine Charlie." (This nicknaming meme included at least one other contemporary American industrialist, Charles E. Sorensen, who was "Cast-Iron Charlie.")

• Pierpaoli, Paul G., Jr. Truman and Korea: The Political Culture of the Early Cold War. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.
• Sandler, Stanley (editor), "The Korean War: An Encyclopedia", Garland, 1995, pages 357 - 58.

• Newspaper clippings about Charles Edward Wilson in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW