Encyclopedia of american business history part 4 pdf

Deere sold his interest in the company to Andruss and started his own business in Moline, Illinois, in 1847, which initially used English steel as its main component because American ste

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D

Dawes, Charles G. (1865–1951) financier

and politician Born in Ohio, Dawes’s family

traced its origins to the Mayflower After

graduat-ing from Marietta College and studygraduat-ing law, he

moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he engaged in

several successful businesses, including real

estate, meat packing, and banking It was only

after he and his brothers acquired extensive

hold-ings in two utility companies that he began to

amass a sizable fortune The brothers would

even-tually control 28 companies in 10 states Then in

1902, Charles turned his attention to banking,

founding the Central Trust Co of Illinois

He entered politics about the same time After

working for William McKinley’s presidential

campaign, he was named comptroller of the

cur-rency in 1898 He enlisted in the army as a major

in 1917 and rose to brigadier general within two

years He served on General John Pershing’s staff

and was in charge of supply procurement and

disbursement for the American Expeditionary

Force Dawes also became one of the few

Repub-licans to support the League of Nations The

nickname “Hell and Maria” for Dawes began to

be used after he appeared at a congressional

hear-ing investigathear-ing budgetary waste durhear-ing the war

When asked whether he paid excessive prices for mules, he replied, “Hell, Maria, I would have paid horse prices for sheep if the sheep could have pulled artillery to the front.”

He was appointed the first director of the budget in 1920 and proceeded to introduce effi-ciency measures into government accounting, many for the first time The League of Nations invited him to write a report on German war reparations in 1923; the Dawes Report was pub-lished in 1924, suggesting reparations be made

on a sliding scale The report was so popular and powerful in political and diplomatic circles that

he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with Austen Chamberlain of Britain for his efforts in 1925 He then became Calvin Coolidge’s vice president in 1925, ambassador to Great Britain in 1929, and American delegate to the Disarmament Conference in 1932 but resigned to become chairman of the RECONSTRUC

-TIONFINANCECORP (RFC) in the same year The government agency was developed to make loans

to distressed companies during the early days of the Great Depression Controversy erupted when the RFC’s first loan was made to Dawes’s bank in Chicago

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During his life, he also found time to write

nine books and become an accomplished

musi-cian, playing both flute and piano He died in

Evanston, Illinois, in 1951

Further reading

Dawes, Charles G The First Year of the Budget of the

United States New York: Harper & Row, 1923.

Timmons, Bascom N Portrait of an American: Charles

G Dawes New York: Henry Holt, 1953.

Debs, Eugene V. (1855–1926) labor

organ-izer Eugene Victor Debs was born in Terre

Haute, Indiana, on November 5, 1855, the son of

French immigrant parents At 14 he quit school

to join the RAILROADS and spent several years

employed as a paint scraper Through dedication

and hard work, Debs eventually rose to become a

locomotive fireman, although he ultimately lost

his job during the depression of the 1870s He found new work as a grocery clerk but nonethe-less maintained close contact with the railroad industry, and in 1874, he joined the Brotherhood

of Locomotive Firemen By now a committed

labor activist, he became editor of the Firemen’s

Magazine, in which he promoted social harmony

through labor reform and peaceful means In

1880, Debs’s popularity was parlayed into poli-tics, and he was elected city clerk of Terre Haute and also briefly held a seat in the Indiana legisla-ture However, he remained disillusioned by rail-road workers who were often bitterly divided along trade lines and sought to consolidate them

to present a unified face to management There-fore, in 1893, he helped to organize the American Railway Union (ARU) and was roundly elected its first president Debs continued arguing for change through peaceful means, but in 1894 he was unable to prevent union members from par-ticipating in the unsuccessful Pullman strike As the strike spread and nearly paralyzed rail com-merce in the West, federal troops were eventually dispatched to put down the strike Debs was sub-sequently arrested for contempt of court, and, while serving out his six-month sentence, he became exposed to the writings of Karl Marx This proved a turning point in his political for-tunes, for he formally converted to socialism In

1898 he established the Social Democratic Party and its more famous successor, the Socialist Party

of America, in 1901 Based on his own experi-ences, Debs also added prison reform to his pro-gressive social agenda

Like most socialists, Debs felt that ingrained competition between capital and labor ensured class struggle and social inequity To him no sin-gle union could protect worker’s rights, and he argued that a cooperative commonwealth would better serve the workers than the profit system Debs nonetheless couched his radicalism in terms of peaceful political change In fact, he strenuously maintained that America’s tradi-tional political values, which he strongly endorsed, were threatened by the unwillingness

114 Debs, Eugene V.

Eugene V Debs, 1921 (L C )

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or inability of capitalism to promote economic

democracy He was nonetheless a fiery orator and

highly popular with the rank and file, who

nom-inated him five times to run for the presidency In

1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, Debs ran

unsuccessfully for high office, ultimately

receiv-ing only 6 percent of votes cast; as a political

movement, the Socialists failed to gain broad

electoral acceptance Part of this failure was

Debs’s continual struggle to unite moderate

fac-tions of the party with more revolutionary

ele-ments However, after 1917 his reputation as a

moderate was reaffirmed when he was repelled

by the antidemocratic nature of the Russian

Rev-olution and refused to join the newly emerging

Communist Party

In 1916, Debs vocally criticized the neutralist

policies of President Woodrow Wilson and

pre-dicted that they would culminate in war When

the United States formally entered World War I

in 1917, he was arrested for sedition under the

Espionage Act and received a 10-year prison

sen-tence the following year He thus ran for

presi-dent in 1920 from his prison cell and received

nearly 1 million votes, but his political impact

began to wane Debs was released from prison

under an amnesty program in December 1921,

and, although in poor health, he labored to bring

the discredited Socialists back to prominence

But despite large, enthusiastic crowds, the party

had lost its previous appeal He died in Elmhurst,

Illinois, on December 20, 1926, a successful

labor leader, a failed politician, and a forceful

advocate for social change Curiously, many of

the radical positions he enunciated, such as

abo-lition of child labor, woman suffrage, and a

grad-uated INCOME TAX, were eventually co-opted by

the political mainstream

Further reading

Carey, Charles W Eugene V Debs: Outspoken Labor

Leader and Socialist Berkeley Heights, N.J.:

Enslow Publishers, 2003.

Constantine, J Robert, ed Letters of Eugene V Debs, 3

vols Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Debs, Eugene V Walls and Bars: Prisons and Prison Life

in the “Land of the Free.” Chicago: C H Kerr, 2000.

Papke, David R The Pullman Case: The Clash of Labor

and Capital in Industrial America Lawrence:

Uni-versity Press of Kansas, 1999.

Young, Marguerite Harp Song for a Radical: The Life

and Times of Eugene Victor Debs New York: Alfred

Knopf, 1999.

John C Fredriksen

Deere, John (1804–1886) inventor and

busi-nessman Born in Vermont in 1804, Deere’s father was British, and his mother was the daughter of a British army officer who served during the American Revolution At age 17, Deere became a blacksmith’s apprentice and then worked as a blacksmith until 1837 He moved to Grand Detour, Illinois, where he began designing plows with a partner, Leonard Andruss His first inventions used steel cut from an old sawmill blade and bent into shape The invention was much more effective than plows currently in use

by farmers, and within 10 years they were selling more than 1,000 per year

Deere sold his interest in the company to Andruss and started his own business in Moline, Illinois, in 1847, which initially used English steel as its main component because American steel at the time was inferior He then commis-sioned the same sort of steel to be made in Pitts-burgh to save on costs, and the plow he produced became the first steel plow manufactured in the United States Within 10 years, he produced more than 10,000 annually In 1858, Deere took his son Charles H Deere into partnership and five years later took his son-in-law Stephen Velie in as well

In 1868, the company was incorporated as Deere

& Co., with John Deere as president, Charles Deere as vice president, and Velie as secretary It introduced the first successful riding plow in

1875 John Deere died in Moline in 1886 Charles succeeded him as president of the company Charles Deere expanded the company’s distri-bution as president and also added new lines of

Deere, John 115

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Deere products, including corn planters, plows,

and harrows Over the next century, Deere & Co

again added other lines to its product mix,

includ-ing tractors, lawn care products, forestry

equip-ment, and other types of farm equipment The

company name became a household word in the

Midwest, especially after it offered very liberal lines

of credit to farmers during the Great Depression so

they could remain in business By 1958, Deere

surpassed INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER as the

coun-try’s largest manufacturer of agricultural

equip-ment Five years later it became the largest in the

world, selling more than $3.5 billion worth of its

products

Despite its growth, the company remained

headed by a family member until the early 1980s

Many of its tractors and plows were painted

green, and the color became the company’s

hall-mark The name Deere and the image of a green

tractor became synonymous with American farm

equipment manufacturing

See also FARMING

Further reading

Broehl, Wayne G John Deere’s Company: A History of

Deere & Company and Its Times New York:

Dou-bleday, 1984.

Burlingame, Roger March of the Iron Men New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.

Sanders, Ralph W Ultimate John Deere: The History of

the Big Green Machines Stillwater, Okla.: Voyageur

Press, 2001.

Depository Institutions Act (1982) Also

known as the Garn–St Germain Act, named after

its two congressional sponsors, Senator Jake

Garn of Utah and Representative Fernand St

Germain of Rhode Island, the act was passed to

aid thrift institutions In the mid- to late 1970s

and early 1980s, many thrift institutions (SAVINGS

AND LOANSand savings banks) were

disintermedi-ated as savers withdrew their deposits in favor of

higher yields offered by money market mutual

funds Savings deposits at thrifts, like

commer-cial banks, were regulated by Regulation Q of the

FEDERALRESERVE, which allowed the central bank

to cap the amount of interest paid As a result, the outflow from the thrifts caused many to begin recording losses, and the entire industry recorded a net loss between 1980 and 1982 The act allowed the thrifts to liberalize their balance sheets in favor of an expanded array of assets that could potentially yield more than a con-ventional mortgage They were allowed to offer commercial loans and consumer loans in limited amounts and to acquire insurance underwriting operations Interest rate restrictions on accounts were lifted, and they were also allowed to purchase corporate bonds, again as a specific maximum per-cent of their total assets They were also allowed to invest in computer networks that provided auto-mated teller machine facilities across state lines Unfortunately, in their rush to regain profits, many of the thrifts made ill-advised investments, including poor nonresidential mortgages and JUNK BONDS Within six years, the industry again was in financial trouble, caused by defaults in the junk bond market and a weakening in the commercial real estate market As a result, Congress passed the Financial Institutions Return, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) in 1989, which reformed the industry and forced many of the mar-ginal thrifts out of business On balance, the act only temporarily saved the industry before its more liberal provisions caused the industry to fail again The greatest legacy of the act was to help spark the interest in junk bonds during the early and mid-1980s The thrifts became major investors in the bonds, many of which were sold

by the investment banking house DREXELBURN

-HAMLAMBERT The act remains as one of the least successful efforts at DEREGULATION in financial services passed in the 1980s

See also DEPOSITORYINSTITUTIONSDEREGULATION AND MONETARY CONTROL ACT; FINANCIAL INSTITU

-TIONSREFORM, RECOVERY ANDENFORCEMENTACT

Further reading

Barth, James R The Great Savings and Loan Debacle.

Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1991.

116 Depository Institutions Act

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White, Lawrence J The S&L Debacle New York:

Oxford University Press, 1991.

Depository Institutions Deregulation and

Monetary Control Act (1980) Better known

by its acronym, DIDMCA, the act was passed by

Congress in 1980 It was the first major bank

deregulatory legislation since strict regulations

were passed during the NEWDEAL The act had

two sides On one side, it deregulated some

activ-ities of banks, while on the other it gave the FED

-ERAL RESERVE more power to cope with all

depository institutions in the new deregulated

environment

DIDMCA began the phasing out of

Regula-tion Q, which allowed the Federal Reserve to cap

interest paid on savings accounts The original

plan was to phase out the ceiling over a six-year

period, with the actual mechanics controlled by a

committee of federal officials When the DEPOSI

-TORY INSTITUTIONS ACTwas passed in 1982, the

phaseout was completed earlier than originally

anticipated Deposit insurance offered by the

FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION was

also increased to $100,000 per account at

insured banks and in authorized NOW accounts

(negotiated orders of withdrawal), a checking

account that paid interest NOW accounts had

been offered for several years by a small group of

banks, but they were legal only after the law was

passed

The Federal Reserve was given widened

pow-ers to deal with the high interest rate

environ-ment caused by oil-driven inflation The Fed

now set reserve requirements for all depository

institutions in the country, not just for its

mem-ber banks This measure was designed to stop

banks from withdrawing from membership in

the Fed system and shore up the central bank’s

authority in the marketplace Banks had been

withdrawing since the 1960s because the Fed

traditionally paid no interest on the reserve

bal-ances it held, and many banks wanted to revert

to a state charter in order to earn interest on their

reserves The new law substituted a mandatory requirement on all depository institutions, regardless of type or charter It also shortened the time for check clearing All banks in the country were now also allowed access to the Fed’s dis-count window, not just members as in the past Before the act was passed, the Fed’s authority extended only to banks that were members of one of the regional Federal Reserve Banks Now,

by allowing all banks access to the lender of last resort facilities at the discount window and imposing standard reserve requirements, the Fed’s authority was more uniform, extending to state-chartered banks and thrifts and the agricul-tural cooperatives as well The act, along with the Eccles Act passed in 1935 and the BANK

HOLDINGCOMPANYACTpassed in 1956, became a major building block in shoring up the authority

of the Federal Reserve while liberalizing interest rates at the same time

Further reading

Timberlake, Richard H “Legislation Construction of

the Monetary Control Act.” American Economic

Review 75 (May 1985): 97.

West, Robert Craig “The Depository Institutions Deregulation Act of 1980: A Historical Perspec-tive Economic Review.” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Mo., February 1982.

deregulation The process of lifting govern-mental restrictions that had been placed on cer-tain industries since the Great Depression Beginning in the 1970s and given further impetus

by the Reagan administration in the 1980s, a new attitude toward business led Congress to begin passing legislation allowing various industries greater latitude in the sorts of activities they could engage in Not all industries were involved, and the new environment was not put into place at once but phased in over a number of years

REGULATIONof industry began in the 19th cen-tury, when several states established regulatory commissions to monitor RAILROADS operating

deregulation 117

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within their borders Congress created the INTER

-STATECOMMERCECOMMISSIONin 1887 in order to

regulate the railroads from Washington But

reg-ulation became stalled until the stock market

crash of 1929 and the early 1930s During the

Depression, restrictions were placed upon the

securities and banking industries as well as on

the UTILITIES Since the early 1920s, AT&T had a

virtual monopoly over telephone service that

seriously restricted competition in

telecommuni-cations During and after World War II,

restric-tions were placed upon other industries as well,

including the airlines, defense contractors, and

other forms of transportation Many of these

reg-ulations defined the scope of an industry and

sometimes prohibited companies within select

businesses, such as banking, from branching

across state lines During the post–World War II

period, many industries were regulated over

rates that they could charge the public Others

were limited to domestic investors so that

for-eigners could not gain control over industries

considered vital to the national defense

A great deal of regulation was passed during

the NEWDEAL, restricting the activities of many

different businesses, among them the securities

industry, banking, and public utility companies

The general theory behind these regulations was

that any business serving the public interest

needed to be regulated by government so that it

would not violate its basic purpose of providing a

public service at a reasonable price After the

Korean War in the 1950s, these regulations

became less popular as a strengthening and

growing economy often caused conflicts in

regu-lated industries Thus a slow drive toward

dereg-ulation was begun

Deregulation can be interpreted in different

ways depending upon the industry under

consid-eration Often, patterns in the regulation of

industries paralleled developments in antitrust

law At other times, it was more closely related to

trends in FOREIGN INVESTMENT Conversely,

changes in ANTITRUSTsignaled changes in

regula-tion, especially in the case of AT&T, which lost

its government-granted monopoly after a chal-lenge to its dominance in the 1970s The deregu-lation movement gained strength in the 1970s Transportation was one of the first sectors of the economy to experience deregulation One of the first industries to be deregulated was the airlines, and the STAGGERSRAILACTof 1980 allowed rail-roads greater flexibility in pricing During the Reagan years in the 1980s, deregulation picked

up considerable momentum and was advocated

by the administration as a way of reducing the role of government in business

Deregulation continued during the Clinton administration, and significant new laws were passed allowing previously regulated businesses greater flexibility, if not total freedom The Energy Policy Act of 1992 allowed utility compa-nies greater flexibility in pricing and eventually paved the way for many MERGERS between them later in the decade The Telecommunications Act

of 1996 broke down the barriers existing between AT&T and the local Bell companies, while the Surface Transportation Board, created

in 1996, abolished the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first regulatory agency created

in 1887 The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 abolished many of the regulations found in the BANKINGACT OF 1933, and the Inter-state Banking Act of 1994 replaced the restrictive branching provisions of the MCFADDEN ACT of 1927

The deregulation trend in the 1990s and the 21st century also owed much of its impetus to the increasing globalization of the world’s mar-kets In order to be as competitive as possible, many regulated industries argued for greater freedom in order to maintain a competitive edge

in the global marketplace, especially if they had

to compete with foreign companies that had no restrictions on their activities

Further reading

Geisst, Charles R Deals of the Century: Wall Street,

Mergers, & the Making of Modern America New

York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.

118 deregulation

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McCraw, Thomas Prophets of Regulation Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Rose-Ackerman, Susan Rethinking the Progressive

Agenda: The Reform of the American Regulatory

State New York: Free Press, 1992.

Dillon Read & Co. An investment banking

house founded by William Read in 1905 Its

predecessor, Vermilye & Co., was founded in

1832 Over the years, Vermilye developed as a

conservative bond house, and when Read joined

in 1886, he specialized in fixed income

securi-ties, mainly bonds and preferred stocks He

helped develop many early bond valuation

tech-niques that later became standard calculations on

Wall Street When Vermilye dissolved, Read

founded his own firm that continued to

special-ize in bonds

Read remained a small, specialized securities

firm until 1913, when Clarence Dillon joined the

firm Beginning as a bond salesman, Dillon soon

helped revamp the firm, making it more

aggres-sive He also introduced it to the mergers

busi-ness, whereby the firm’s reputation would be

made in the following years The first major deal

for Read came in 1920, when Dillon helped

refi-nance the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co The size

of the $90 million transaction established the

firm’s reputation on Wall Street, and its name was

officially changed to Dillon Read in the same year

Dillon’s best-known deal came later in the

1920s, when he won the mandate to arrange the

sale of Dodge Brothers, the third-largest

automo-bile manufacturer in the country After the death

of the two brothers, the company was put up for

sale by the Dodge family, and Dillon bid for it,

intending to run the company himself He

peted with J P Morgan Jr., who bid for the

com-pany on behalf of GENERALMOTORS Dillon won

the bidding with an offer that was less than

Mor-gan’s but was all cash versus a cash and securities

offer by Morgan Dillon’s method of estimating

the company’s future cash flows and then

dis-counting their value to arrive at his bid price was

one of the first deals employing that method, which has been commonly used on Wall Street since that time The deal established the firm’s reputation as a merger and acquisitions specialist Within a few years, Dillon realized that he was unable to run Dodge successfully and in

1928 sold the company to Walter CHRYSLER of Chrysler Motors for $170 million, $24 million more than the purchase price The deal made Chrysler the second-largest manufacturer in the country at the time Dillon withdrew from the firm at the end of the 1920s to pursue other interests The firm continued as a small merger specialist with other limited product lines, including underwriting In 1971, it chose Nicholas Brady as its senior partner Brady later became secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan Clarence Dillon died in 1979

Dillon Read survived as a partnership until

BARING BROTHERSof Britain bought a 40 percent stake in the mid-1990s A scandal at the British bank caused Dillon Read to buy back the share, and the bank remained independent until it was purchased by the Swiss Bank Corp in 1997 and merged with another subsidiary, S G Warburg &

Co After the purchase, it operated as Warburg Dillon Read

See also INVESTMENT BANKING; MORGAN, JOHN

PIERPONT, JR

Further reading

Geisst, Charles R The Last Partnerships: Inside the

Great Wall Street Money Dynasties New York:

McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Perez, Robert C., and Edward F Willett Clarence

Dil-lon: Wall Street Enigma Lanham, Md.: Madison

Books, 1995.

Sobel, Robert The Life and Times of Dillon Read New

York: Dutton, 1991.

Disney, Walt (1901–1966) animator and

businessman Born in Chicago, Disney studied drawing informally as a youth After a series of odd jobs, he studied art in the evening at the

Disney, Walt 119

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Chicago Academy of Fine Arts In 1918, he served

as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in

France Upon his return to the United States, he

became an apprentice cartoonist for the magazine

Film Advertising Deciding to pursue his interest in

cartooning, he opened a small production

com-pany in Kansas City that produced animated

shorts, which ran before feature films at cinemas

After a short period, he moved his operation to

Hollywood in 1923 and opened a movie studio

dedicated solely to cartoons In collaboration with

his brother Roy Disney (1893–1971), the Disney

brothers’ studio began producing cartoons

featur-ing a heroine named Alice These early cartoons

became known as the Alice movies By 1926, they

had produced more than 50 short films

The next cartoon character he created was

Oswald the Rabbit, under contract with

Univer-sal Studios, and his cartoons became very

suc-cessful But he lost the Oswald copyright and had

to create a new character He developed Mickey Mouse after watching mice scurry around his studios Originally, the character was called Mor-timer After a couple of short films, Mickey

Mouse starred in his first hit, Steamboat Willie It

was the first cartoon with a sound track that Dis-ney produced, and the film became very success-ful By 1934, the company was producing more than 20 pictures per year, and profits were almost

$700,000 per year Part of the profits was from merchandise tie-ins that Disney helped pioneer along with manufacturers of consumer goods, a practice that the company continues today Success followed upon success Disney

pro-duced Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,

Holly-wood’s first feature-length animated film, in

1937 It won a special Academy Award that year Other successful full-length films followed,

among them Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi.

When television made its breakthrough after World War II, Disney quickly embraced the medium In 1950, his first television show was produced, and by 1954, he introduced his first

television series, called Disneyland The name of

the program was also the name of the company’s first amusement park, opened in Anaheim, Cali-fornia, in 1955 The theme park became one of the most popular attractions in the country and prompted the opening of another in 1971 in Florida, called Disney World This park, along with the EPCOT center, was planned from the mid-1960s Disney himself did not live to see the opening He died in 1966 in Los Angeles

By the 1990s, under the leadership of Michael Eisner, Disney had become the world’s largest media company, with annual sales exceeding $20 billion A Disney theme park was opened in Europe and another planned for Japan, and the company continued to engage in movie produc-tion, publishing, and television production in addition to the signature cartoons and entertain-ment parks In 1996, the company expanded its operations, buying broadcaster Capital Cities/ ABC for $19 billion, giving it access to broadcast-ing and television stations across the country

120 Disney, Walt

Walt Disney (LIBRARY OF C ONGRESS )

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Further reading

Eliot, Marc Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince New

York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Schickel, Richard The Disney Version: The Life, Times,

Art and Commerce of Walt Disney New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1968.

Watts, Steven The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the

American Way of Life Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1997.

Dow Chemical Company Founded by

Her-bert H Dow (1866–1930), chemist and

horticul-turist, in Midland, Michigan, in 1897, the

company is the second-largest chemical

com-pany in the United States Dow was born in

Belleville, Ontario, Canada, but grew up in

Cleveland, where he studied chemistry at Case

School of Applied Science (now Case-Western

Reserve University) He invented a process for

extracting bromine from brine while still a

stu-dent, and after several failed ventures founded

the Dow Chemical Company at Midland,

Michi-gan, in 1897

Dow continued his chemical research

activi-ties throughout his life, amassing 107 patents

while simultaneously directing a growing

chemi-cal company Among his developments was

Dowmetal, a magnesium metal extracted from

underground brines At the time of his death he

was working on the extraction of magnesium

from seawater, a development completed under

the direction of his son and successor, Willard H

Dow He died at Rochester, Minnesota, in 1930

His avocation, horticulture, gave birth to his

company’s agricultural chemicals division and to

the Dow Gardens, now a major Michigan tourist

attraction

The company continued to flourish after his

death and inaugurated a plant where magnesium

was extracted from seawater in 1939 in Freeport,

Texas The process was considered an

engineer-ing triumph and a major contribution to the

Allied victory in World War II The company also

was a pioneer in the plastics field during the

1930s, developing polystyrene, saran, and Styro-foam, among other products Its styrene was a key component of styrene-butadiene rubber, which replaced natural rubber during the war In the postwar era the company again expanded rapidly to become a global force in the CHEMICAL INDUSTRY, manufacturing some 2,000 products These range from metals to agricultural chemi-cals, among them Dursban, the world’s largest-selling insecticide In the 1960s, the company became a favorite target of students protesting the war in Vietnam because of its production of napalm for the military forces During the 1990s the company reorganized, selling its pharmaceu-tical branch, Marion Merrell Dow, to the Hoechst Company of Germany, disposing of several smaller ventures, and streamlining its workforce from about 55,000 to 40,000 In 1999, it announced plans to merge with Union Carbide Corporation of New York City

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