Gerard Swope (1872-1957) was an engineer who became president of General Electric during a period of exponential growth. He was also a public servant who was influential in the early New Deal.

Gerard Swope was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on December 1, 1872, the son of Isaac and Ida (Cohn) Swope. Isaac Swope was a Jewish immigrant to the New World in 1857 who lived for a time in Cincinnati before settling in St. Louis to open a watch-assembly factory. He returned to Germany in 1865 to marry Ida Cohn, the daughter of the chief rabbi in Thuringia, and to bring her to the United States. Two of their sons became famous, Gerard as an industrialist and Herbert Bayard as a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for the New York World.

Gerard, who was the older brother, became interested in how things operated at an early age and decided, even before going to...