MANAGEMENT: Fair, with Scattered Clouds

The 1,600 prosperous delegates who streamed into Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel last week for the 62nd Congress of the National Association of Manufacturers had one big question on their minds: How prosperous will we be in 1958? They soon got reassuring news from their own ranks. After taking a poll answered by 4,330 manufacturer members, who make up a wide spectrum of U.S. business, the N.A.M. announced that 45% expect no significant change in business next year, and more than a third look for sales to go up; only one in five predicted a decline in sales. A third expect their profits to be down in 1958, but one in five expects them to go up. Fully 55% foresee no change in their capital expenditures for next year. Summing up, N.A.M. Director and Carrier Corp. President William Bynum described 1958 business prospects as “fair, with scattered clouds and a chance of thunderstorms along two warm fronts—the taxation and labor fronts.”

When it came to taxation, Vice President Nixon had some realistic forecasting for the N.A.M. members. Speaking at their annual dinner, he told them that “there will obviously not be a tax cut” in 1958, though neither “do we anticipate a tax increase” (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Nixon also hinted at the possibility of an unbalanced budget, made a strong plea for foreign aid, plugged for the extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements.

Nixon’s dose of realism was hard for the N.A.M. to take. Although a panel of four Congressmen had earlier warned that a tax cut was unlikely, most of the preceding speeches had been full of the sort of wishful thinking that the N.A.M.’s members apparently never tire of. Speakers argued for tax reductions and less Government spending, against interstate commerce regulations and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In selecting its new president, the N.A.M. turned away from the relatively small businessman who has often been its choice, instead voted in Milton C. Lightner, 67, president of Singer Manufacturing Co., world’s biggest sewing-machine maker. Basing his maiden speech on a new N.A.M. oath in which he vowed to “earnestly seek to promote a healthy economy,” Lightner warned the delegates that “to be militarily strong, to give proper aid to our allies, to assist those who need our help, we must have a strong economy here at home,” promised to fight the growth of central government. Nervously facing the first press conference he has ever held, he told reporters that “there is every reason to believe 1958 may prove to be as good a year as 1957 for the economy as a whole.”

N.A.M.’s new president was born in Detroit, went into law after graduating from the University of Michigan and Harvard Law School. He campaigned against Pancho Villa as a National Guard cavalryman in 1916, supervised overseas shipments in New York as an Army captain in World War I. In 1927 Singer wooed him away from his Manhattan law firm of Ver Planck, Prince, Burlingame & Lightner, made him a director and vice president of its marketing and distributing subsidiary; the next year he became vice president of the parent company, whose worldwide sewing-machine empire includes 85,000 employees and plants in eight countries, was made president in 1949. Father of four and grandfather of 16, he is active in civic affairs, was a delegate to the convention that drafted New Jersey’s new constitution in 1947. His chief hobby is vegetable gardening, but he likes to fish for black bass at the Singer timber tract in Canada, play an occasional game of golf. Last week, to give himself more time for N.A.M. duties, he retired as Singer’s president (see Personnel), was immediately named to the newly created post of chairman of the board.