MANAGEMENT: Sound & Fury

Three famed industrial managers last week made headlines.

Confusion by Hudson. At a stockholders’ meeting of Hudson Motor Car Co., the story finally came out of how Detroit’s body-building Fisher brothers, retired from General Motors, had shopped around for an automobile company. The deal not only came out; it came to grief.

Hudson President Abraham Edward Barit read stockholders the Fisher offer: $8,500,000 (approximate book value) for 400,000 shares of Hudson’s unissued stock. Pointing out that this was approximately $21.66 a share compared to the current market price of $28. President Barit declared that the stock’s real worth was far greater than its book value.

Said one small stockholder: “Any holder who looks at our prewar record and turns down an offer like the Fishers’ is silly. Of course, I can see why Mr. Barit, who is getting $100,000 a year, wouldn’t like to see them in. . . .”

To an accusation that he had secretly rejected the Fisher offer six months ago without informing the directors, President Barit hotly retorted that the Fishers had pressured him to sell, and expressed indignation at the manner in which it was done. The sale was not carried: Barit had all of the important proxies safely on his side.

Bombardment by Kaiser. Irrepressible Builder Henry J. Kaiser opened his campaign to keep postwar control of the west coast steel works which he built with Government money.

With a flutter of headlines, Alfred John Gock, chairman of the board of Bank of America, announced that, if the Reconstruction Finance Corp. will underwrite the venture, his bank will give Kaiser “100% cooperation” in raising $60,000,000 to finance purchase and expansion of his $110,000,000 plant at Fontana, Calif.

To drum Washington into agreement, Kaiser rounded up the California Senate and Assembly, got them to forward a joint resolution to President Truman, Federal Loan Administrator John Wesley Snyder and California’s Senators and Congressmen—urging continued postwar operation of western war plants by “those who pioneered them.”

Whooped Kaiser’s pressagent battery: “The California uprising.”

Comeback by McNear. A federal judge decided that hefty, hustling George Plummer McNear Jr., president of the Toledo, Peoria & Western R.R., was entitled to get his railroad back after three years of Government operation. Because he refused to grant the railroad brotherhoods a wage raise unless they gave up “featherbedding” (making jobs for themselves), T.P.& W. had a three months’ strike in 1942.

To break the strike the Government kicked McNear out, seized his 239-mile freight line and still holds it, in spite of McNear’s repeated claims of inefficiency under Government operation. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the T.P.& W. should have been returned to McNear in January 1944, when the War Department ordered all railroads returned to their owners. Now he had the law on his side. But he has still to recover his railroad.