SHIPPING: Defeat for Dollar

When Robert Stanley Dollar stumped into the annual meeting of American President Lines Ltd. in San Francisco last week, he had every legal reason to believe that the U.S. Government would give him back the $68 million company that once carried his name. He had fought his case up to the U.S. Supreme Court, had won (TIME, Nov. 27). But Dollar got a surprise. President George L. Killion refused to turn the company over to him.

Killion was only following orders of the Department of Justice, which was out to balk Dollar’s court victory. The Maritime Commission had hauled the line off the rocks in 1938 by assuming $9.5 million of its debts. Now that the company was earning $3.2 million a year, the U.S. wanted to keep it. To justify its action, the U.S. hauled out a moth-eaten precedent established in 1882.* Ruled the Department: Dollar’s suits had been directed against members of the Maritime Commission and other Government officials as private individuals, did not affect the Government’s claims to 93% of the line’s stock.

Snorted Stanley Dollar: “The rankest pettifogging I ever saw . . .” He filed suit in federal district court, charging President Killion & Co. with contempt of court, and it looked as if the fight would go on for months.

San Franciscans, who had once been less than sympathetic to Dollar’s fight, now thought he was getting a dirty deal from the Department of Justice. Editorialized the San Francisco Chronicle: “A dangerous kind of cavalier attitude . . . towards the rights of a group of private citizens.”

*During the Civil War, federal troops confiscated the Robert E. Lee family mansion at Arlington, Va. When heirs sued to recover it, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1882 returned the mansion to the Lees. But it ruled that the U.S. could make a claim to the property because the family had named individual Army officers as defendants, instead of the Federal Government itself. The U.S. never pressed its claim, paid the Lees $150,000 for the mansion, now a museum in Arlington National Cemetery.