Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T18:46:58.707Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Business Without a Boss”: The Columbia Conserve Company and Workers' Control, 1917–1943

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Robert Bussel
Robert Bussel
Affiliation:
ROBERT BUSSEL is assistant professor of industrial relations and labor studies at Pennsylvania State University.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, the role of workers in the management of business enterprise has been the subject of ongoing debate. Opponents of centralized, bureaucratic management have proposed a series of participatory alternatives—workers' control, industrial democracy, employee stock ownership, and more recently, employee involvement—that have sought to democratize workplace governance. Much of the literature on such initiatives, be it historical or contemporary, has implied that workers favor exercising greater responsibility over shop-floor matters but have been deterred by employer resistance and cautious labor leadership. This literature often fails to capture the complexity of workers' attitudes towards greater participation and the tensions felt by reform-minded business leaders seeking to share power and authority with their employees. It is in this context that the story of the Columbia Conserve Company, an Indianapolis-based producer of canned soups, assumes particular relevance as a pioneering attempt to implement workplace democracy. Between 1917 and 1943, Columbia Conserve's owner, William P. Hapgood, established a system of workers' ownership and management. However, workers at Columbia Conserve, while sympathetic to Hapgood's experiment, were reluctant to accept full managerial responsibility. Instead, they embraced a more familial concept that met their psychological needs for fellowship and security. William Hapgood's faith in worker self-management subsequently waned, revealing an authoritarian streak that undercut his democratic pretensions. The experience at Columbia Conserve illustrates the enduring problems involved in sustaining workplace democracy and illuminates the status of current efforts aimed at empowering workers on the job.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 71 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1997 , pp. 417 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Fraser, Steve, “‘The Labor Question,’” in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 55–84Google Scholar; Aitken, Hugh G. J., Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908–1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960)Google Scholar; Nelson, Daniel, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison, Wisc., 1980)Google Scholar; McCartin, Joseph A., “‘An American Feeling’: Workers, Managers, and the Struggle Over Industrial Democracy in the World War I Era,” in Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise, ed. Lichtenstein, Nelson and Harris, Howell John (Cambridge, 1993), 67–86Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; and The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar.

2 Among the key works on industrial relations and workplace governance during this period are Fraser, “The Labor Question;” Lichtenstein and Harris, Industrial Democracy in America; Fraser, Steve, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Brody, David, “The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism,” in Brody, David, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (Oxford, 1980), 48–79Google Scholar; and “Workplace Contractualism: A Historical/Comparative Analysis,” in Brody, David, In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (Oxford, 1993), 221–250Google Scholar; Lichtenstein, Nelson, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge, 1982)Google Scholar; and The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. For contemporary views, see Bluestone, Barry and Bluestone, Irving, Negotiating the Future: A Labor Perspective on American Business (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; and Heckscher, Charles C., The New Unionism: Employee Involvement in the Changing Corporation (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

3 The quote is taken from the sub-title of Hapgood's, William P.The Columbia Conserve Company: An Experiment in Workers' Management and Ownership (Philadelphia, Pa., 1975)Google Scholar.

4 Hapgood, Hutchins, A Victorian in the Modern World (Seattle, Wa., 1972), 17, 41, 55, 256, 431–432Google Scholar; Marcaccio, Michael, The Hapgoods: Three Earnest Brothers (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), 1–17Google Scholar, 165–167; Hapgood, The Columbia Conserve Company, 10, 57.

5 Vance, Russell E. Jr., “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy: The Columbia Conserve Company” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1956), 19, 28, 61Google Scholar; Marcaccio, The Hapgoods, 214–218; Jacoby, Sanford, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–1945 (New York, 1985), 193Google Scholar. Jacoby observes that most progressive industrial managers exercised tight control over their companies, which were mostly small, privately owned concerns, and faced little shareholder opposition in implementing their policies.

6 On the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century middle class, see Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Fishburn, Janet, The Fatherhood of God and the Victorian Family (Philadelphia, Pa., 1981)Google Scholar; and May, Henry, The End of American Innocence (New York, 1959)Google Scholar.

7 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 21; Report of Proceedings, Columbia Conserve Annual Banquet, 22 Dec. 1917; Annual Meeting of Employees, 14 Jan. 1919 and 19 Jan. 1923; Columbia Cauldron, April 1932, Columbia Conserve Papers (hereafter referred to as CCC Papers), Lilly Library, Indiana University; Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 1, 44, 46. For a similar view on the decline of craftsmanship, see Lynd, Robert S. and Lynd, Helen Merrell, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (New York, 1929), 80Google Scholar.

8 Information Service, Department of Research and Education, Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, 31 Oct. 1931; CCC Annual Banquet, 22 Dec. 1917; Minutes, Annual Meeting, 14 Jan. 1927, CCC Papers. For perspectives on Progressivism and scientific management, see Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 99–105; Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York, 1965), 165Google Scholar; and Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 362, 420–424.

9 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 34, 52, 69, 170—171, 367.

10 Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 21, 43; H. Dorothea NordHolt to Frieda S. Miller, 18 Sept. 1931, box 1, Correspondence, 1931, CCC Papers; “Workers' Ownership: Industrial Democracy in the Columbia Conserve Company,” Indianapolis, 19 May 1933, box 1, Correspondence, 1933, CCC Papers; Columbia Cauldron, April 1930, CCC Papers; Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 192–193; Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 143.

11 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 54; Lloyd G. Reynolds, “Industrial Experimenters, Unlimited,” Columbia Cauldron, Nov. 1931, 6; “Workers Ownership: Industrial Democracy in the Columbia Conserve Company,” Indianapolis, 19 May 1933, box 1, Correspondence, 1933, CCC Papers.

12 Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 19–20, 46; Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 52–58, 87, 95–99; William P. Hapgood, “The High Adventures of a Cannery,” Survey (1 Sept. 1922): 65; Allen, Devere, Adventurous Americans (New York, 1932), 224–226Google Scholar; Minutes, Annual Meeting, 19 Jan. 1923, CCC Papers.

13 H. Dorothea NordHolt to Frieda S. Miller, 18 Sept. 1931; H. Dorothea NordHolt to Albert Miller, 22 April 1932, box 1, Correspondence, 1932, CCC Papers; Minutes, CCC Annual Meeting, 14 Jan. 1927, CCC Papers; Brody, “The American Worker in the Progressive Age,” in Workers in Industrial America, 9–14.

14 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 63–64.

15 Council Minutes, 29 Jan. 1926; 5 Oct. 1928; 10 Sept. 1928; Powers Hapgood to Mother and Father, 25 Oct. 1927; Jack to Powers Hapgood, 24 Sept. 1928; Powers Hapgood to Jack Evans, 27 Sept. 1928, Powers Hapgood Papers (hereafter PH Papers), Lilly Library, Indiana University; Columbia Cauldron, 11 April 1932, CCC Papers.

16 John Brophy to Powers Hapgood, 29 Oct. 1929, PH Papers; Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 9–11.

17 See survey figures in Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 173, 199.

18 Labor Clarion, 31 Oct. 1930, Columbia Conserve Scrapbook; Cornell Hewson to William P. Hapgood, 20 Sept. 1922, Box 1, Correspondence, 1922, CCC Papers; Meyer, Donald, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941 (original pub. date 1960; second edition, Middletown, 1988), 66–70Google Scholar; Allen, Adventurous Americans, 227–229; Boyd Gurley, “Business Without a Boss,” Indianapolis Times, 13 Feb. 1930. For a British counterpart to Columbia Conserve, see Dellheim, Charles, “The Creation of a Company Culture: Cadburys, 1861–1931,” The American Historical Review 92 (Feb. 1987)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. See Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 212–215, for a discussion of Arthur “Golden Rule” Nash, a business reformer whose efforts were far less successful than Hapgoods.

19 CCC Annual Meetings, 22 Dec. 1917, and 1924; Council Minutes, 16 June 1920, CCC Papers; Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 80–81; Dellheim, “The Creation of a Company Culture,” 41; John Brophy, Unpublished reflection on Columbia Conserve dispute, John Brophy Papers, Catholic University of America. The Council also retained the right to reduce time off in instances where workers failed to display a sufficiently cooperative attitude.

20 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 132.

21 Minutes of Special Council Meeting, 17 Nov. 1930; Council Minutes, 31 July 1931; Columbia Cauldron editorials, July 1927, June 1929, CCC Papers; Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 101–105; Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 246–256; and Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 268–269. Not all former unionists “regulated their productivity.” In an article in the company's magazine, George Gregory, the militant former coal miner, explained how it was possible for one worker to run three machines and repeatedly exhorted his fellow workers to labor more efficiently. See Columbia Cauldron, Jan. 1928.

22 Council Minutes, June 1927, June 1929, 8 Dec. 1930, 4 Dec. 1932; Special Council Meeting Minutes, 17 Nov. 1930, CCC Papers. On “soldiering,” see Taylor, Frederick Winslow, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1967), 20–26Google Scholar; and Drucker, Peter F., The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (New York, 1949), 82–87Google Scholar. For a different approach to stimulating worker efficiency, see Meyer, Stephen III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany, N.Y., 1981), 85–89Google Scholar, 100–121.

23 William P. Hapgood Letter, 8 May 1933; “Workers' Ownership and the Columbia Conserve Company,” Indianapolis, 19 May 1933, Box 1, Correspondence, 1933, CCC Papers.

24 H. Dorothea NordHolt to Frank Walser, 19 May 1933, box 1, Correspondence, 1933, CCC Papers; Minutes, 1927 Annual Meeting; Reynolds, “Industrial Experimenters, Unlimited,” 5; Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 39. On tensions contained within the Progressive emphasis on education, see Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 159–168.

25 Council Minutes, 30 Jan. 1933, CCC Papers; William P. Hapgood to Powers Hapgood, 14 Aug. 1927, PH Papers.

26 Reynolds, “Industrial Experimenters, Unlimited,” 6. On workers' defensive attitudes towards education, see Halle, David, America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics Among Blue-Collar Property Owners (Chicago, Ill., 1984), 48–50Google Scholar. In their classic study, Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd found workers in Muncie, Indiana to be demoralized about their own prospects but enthusiastic supporters of education for their children. Their findings underscored the priority that workers assigned to job security. See Middletown, 53–68.

27 Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 27–32; Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 100–103, 120–121, 137; Dellheim, “The Creation of a Company Culture,” 25; NordHolt to Frieda S. Miller, 18 Sept. 1931; Council Minutes, 18 March 1932, CCC Papers.

28 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 129; Council Minutes, 10 May 1929, 13 March 1935, CCC Papers; Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 48. Powers Hapgood was even more fiercely egalitarian than his father. He justified a needs-based system of compensation on the grounds that one person should not “enjoy more comfort than another.” Council Minutes, 26 Sept. 1932, CCC Papers.

29 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 129; Council Minutes, 10 May 1929, CCC Papers; Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 29–32.

30 Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 29; Human Relations Council Meeting Minutes, 10 May 1929; Council Minutes, 13 Jan. 1933, CCC Papers.

31 On Ford's Sociological Department, see Meyer, The Five Dollar Day, 123–147; and Bluestone and Bluestone, Negotiating the Future, 119–120.

32 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 367; and Brophy, unpublished reflection on Columbia Conserve dispute.

33 Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 170–210; Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 58–59; Council Minutes, 8 and 22 April 1932; 13 and 17 May 1932; 4, 11, and 18 Nov. 1932; 22 Dec. 1932; Salesmen's letter to Council, 27 Nov. 1932, CCC Papers.

34 Council Minutes, 8 and 22 Dec. 1932, CCC Papers.

35 Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 71; William P. Hapgood to Frank Walser, 28 April 1933, 1933 Correspondence, box 1; Council Minutes, 8 and 22 Dec. 1932, CCC Papers.

36 For accounts of the crisis at Columbia Conserve, see Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 212–247; Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 49–97, which includes various reports from the “Committee of Four” convened to investigate the dispute; Kim McQuaid, “Industry and the Cooperative Commonwealth: William P. Hapgood and the Columbia Conserve Company, 1917–1943,” Labor History (Fall 1976): 523; Marcaccio, The Hapgoods, 175–180; and Council Minutes from Jan-May 1933, CCC Papers.

37 Council Minutes, 26 Feb. 1923, 17 March 1933, 14 April 1933, CCC Papers.

38 Council Minutes, 17 March, 14 April, 8 May, 1933, CCC Papers. On the tensions associated with casting the workplace as a family, see Levering, Robert, A Great Place to Work: What Makes Some Employers So Good (And Most So Bad) (New York, 1988), 15–17Google Scholar.

39 Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company, 10; Minutes, Columbia Conserve Company Annual Meetings, 21 July 1939, 19 July 1940; William P. Hapgood to Stockholders, 9 Sept. 1943, box 1, Correspondence, 1943, CCC Papers; Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 279–283. William Hapgood attributed declining support for his reelection to Columbia's Board of Directors to his advocacy of unionization. In 1939, his son, Powers, then an official with the CIO, attended the company's annual meeting in order to plead his father's case.

40 National War Labor Board, In the Matter of Columbia Conserve Company and Federal Labor Union No. 2317, A. F. of L., Case No. AR-65, 7 Nov. 1942; Statement of Columbia Conserve Company Subsequent to Hearing, 24 Oct. 1942, CCC Papers. William Hapgood speculated that the strike may have been fomented by the A. F. of L. in order to embarrass his son, who had returned to Indiana as a CIO regional director. See Minutes of Annual Meeting, 24 July 1942, CCC Papers.

41 National War Labor Board Report, 15 Feb. 1943; William P. Hapgood to the Shareholders of the Columbia Conserve Company, 30 Sept. 1943, CCC Papers; Louis Filler, Introduction to Hapgood, Columbia Conserve Company; Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 343–350. A decade earlier, Columbia had tangled with the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) guidelines regarding hours and minimum pay, unsuccessfully seeking relief from regulations that failed to recognize what an NRA assistant legal counsel acknowledged were the company's “advanced sociological steps.” See John M. Keating to Norman Hapgood, 19 Oct. 1933; NRA Compliance Board to William P. Hapgood, 1 Nov. 1933; Norman Hapgood to Robert Kenneth Straus, 11 Aug. 1933, box 1, Correspondence, 1933; and William P. Hapgood to Albert Armstrong, 7 March 1935, box 1, Correspondence, 1935, CCC Papers.

42 Hapgood to Stockholders, 30 Sept. 1943; William P. Hapgood, Supplementary Chapter to The Columbia Conserve Company: An Experiment in Workers' Management and Ownership, 1 March 1941, Correspondence, 1941, box 1, CCC Papers; Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991), 304–306Google Scholar.

43 Leo Simmons, quoted in Vance, “An Unsuccessful Experiment in Industrial Democracy,” 113.

44 Brandeis is quoted in Council Minutes, 8 April 1932, CCC Papers.

45 Columbia Cauldron, March 1930; Minutes of Columbia Conserve Annual Meetings, 14 Jan. 1919, and 19 Jan. 1923, CCC Papers; Nelson, Daniel, Farm and Factory: Workers in the Midwest, 1880–1990 (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), 7, 11, 15, 28Google Scholar.

46 On workers' attitudes towards industrial democracy, see David Montgomery, “Industrial Democracy or Democracy in Industry?: The Theory and Practice of the Labor Movement, 1870–1925,” in Lichtenstein and Harris, Industrial Democracy in America, 20–24; Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, 211–219, 293–294; Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, 1989), 212–216Google Scholar, 219–229; and Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York, 1995), 201–226Google Scholar. On the concept of family, see Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, Leloudis, James, Korstad, Robert, Murphy, Mary, Jones, Lu Ann, and Daly, Christopher B., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 490–493Google Scholar; Levering, A Great Place to Work, 232–234; and Zahavi, Gerald, Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and Tanners of Endicott-Johnson, 1890–1950 (Urbana, Ill., 1988), 104–119Google Scholar.

47 Marcaccio, The Hapgoods, 206; Bluestone and Bluestone, Negotiating the Future, 195, 225–227, 235; and Levering, A Great Place to Work, 15.

48 Kelley, Maryellen R. and Harrison, Bennett, “Unions, Technology, and Labor-Management Cooperation,” in Unions and Economic Competitiveness, ed. Mishel, Lawrence and Voos, Paula B. (Armonk, N.Y., 1992), 247–277Google Scholar. For a useful overview of labor's approach to joint initiatives, see Schurman, Susan J. and Easton, Adrienne E., “Labor and Workplace Democracy: Past, Present, and Future. Introduction to the Special Issue,” Labor Studies Journal 21 (Summer 1996): 3–23Google Scholar.

49 Council Minutes, 3 Feb. 1933, CCC Papers.