United States Cabinet Secretary. He is recognized as the fifty-fifth United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1953 to 1957, serving during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term. Born George Magoffin Humphrey, the oldest of four children, he was also a lawyer and a successful businessman. Majoring at first in engineering, he received his BA and then his law degree in 1912 from the University of Michigan before becoming a partner with his father's firm for five years. At that point, he left for a position of general counsel at M. A. Hanna Company, formerly one of Cleveland's major iron-ore houses. In 1921 he became a partner when a position opened with a death. During his term as Hanna's vice-president from 1922 and then president from 1929 to 1952, he brought the company to a profit after a $2 million deficit. He diversified the company's focus from iron-ore to producing copper, plastics, coal, rayon, and natural gas, among other items and engaging in banking. By 1953, the successful company was a $250-million corporation. After World War II, he became interested in politics, serving as the chairman of the Reparations Survey Committee of the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1948, on the Business Advisory Council of the Department of Commerce in 1949, and helping the federal government negotiate a contract between coal company owners and the United Mine Workers of America in 1950. In 1952 he was asked by President Eisenhower, with whom he had developed a close relationship, to work with General Lucius D. Clay, who had been head of the post-World War II occupied West Germany. Impressed with this outcome, Eisenhower asked him to join his cabinet. When he became a member of Eisenhower's cabinet on January 21, 1953, his $300,000-a-year salary became $22,500 a year. Upon accepting the position, he attended to cut taxes, balanced the budget, eliminate governmental waste, and place limits on welfare and foreign aid. Advocating a free market economy, he believed that the less the Government did, the more the American people would prosper. He placed the national debt on a longer-term basis in order to ward off further inflation. By 1956, Humphrey's fiscal policies allowed the United States to experience its first budget surplus in five years, helping to reduce the national debt. Upon Eisenhower's plans for re-election, he submitted his letter of resignation on May 28, 1957 and left the cabinet position on July 29, 1957 to become the President of the National Steel Company. With his resignation, Robert B. Anderson would become Secretary of the Treasury. In 1961, he retired to his "Milestone" estate in Thomasville, Georgia, continuing to breed horses, which was his life-long hobby. He suffered an apparent heat stroke in August of 1969, and his health declined until his death six months later. Established in 1951, the George M. and Pamela S. Humphrey Fund was his main philanthropic interest, supporting the needs in medical fields and higher education. He married and had two daughters and a son. English-born American artist Thomas Edgar Stephens painted Humphrey's portrait in 1957 along with all the members of Eisenhower's cabinet. His professional papers are located on film at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.