Fertilizer Fight (Cont'd)

The battling fertilizer men of Virginia Carolina Chemical Corp. last week staged a new and surprising session of their long extended civil war. Last autumn Director George S. Kemp of Richmond brough about a complete management turnover with a new president, a new vice president and a new directorate, of which he was himself a member (TIME, Oct. 21 et seq.) In Richmond last week, while two polio sergeants saw to it that nothing more potent than personalities were exchanged, the anti-Kemp factor won a completely decisive victory. Headed by Alphonso Lyn Ivey, ousted from the presidency in October, they got rid of Kemp-President F. Swift Gibson, Kemp-Vice President Gustavus Ober Jr., and eight Kemp directors, including Boss Kemp himself. Then Mr. Ivey went back into the presidency, along with the men who had served under him as vice president and as treasurer, precisely restoring the status quo ante.

Mr. Kemp fought a defensive as well as a losing battle. He did not even attend the stockholders' meeting. His side contented itself with refusing to send in proxies in the hope that the meeting would fail to establish a quorum. After much last-minute proxy hunting, the Ivey-men established their quorum and the managerial casualties began. The victors sent the losers a resolution which, in effect, asked them please not to take the new elections to court, as the company had already done enough quarreling. "They must be afraid," commented Mr. Kemp, "otherwise they would not have passed such a resolution." Mr. Kemp also said that the conduct of the meeting was "chockfull of errors," and that "they have built up a beautiful legal case for us." He did not say whether he would take his case to court.

President Ivey was Virginia-Carolina's counsel in 1932, when internal troubles over a proposed merger with an Armour & Co. fertilizing subsidiary brought Mr. Kemp to the fore and began Virginia-Carolina's warfare. A tightlipped, poker-faced Baptist, Mr. Ivey is 50, a Georgia farm-boy with a law degree from Columbia University who was "reared between the plough-handles." 1886-1936 "At the annual meeting in 1886, Mr. Coolidge, then Treasurer, called your attention to the trend of [the cotton] industry southward. In 1889, 1891, 1896 and 1897 he stressed the same idea, pointing out the South's advantages in the low cost of labor, freight and taxes, and in few restraining laws. . . , "Despite attractive opportunities to liquidate, the management has carried or against what to some may seem sounder judgment and advice. ... No management is competent to operate a plant like this, handicapped with existing wage differentials. No management could by any ingenuity overcome the $2.56 average labor differential . . . particularly fatal to us, as we have no mills in the South. . . .

"New England has lost its prestige . . . 80% of the country's cotton spinning is done outside New England. . . . [Our problems] are beyond the power of the management to solve."

Thus, last spring, wrote Frederic Christopher Dumaine in the 1934 annual report of great Amoskeag Manufacturing Co., century-old cotton spinner of Manchester, N. H. Last week Mr. Dumaine added a potent postscript by petitioning Federal Judge George C. Sweeney to allow Amoskeag a haven of refuge in Section 776 of the Federal Bankruptcy Act. Mr. Dumaine noted that the company had lost almost $5,000,000 in the past five years, that its funded debt had impaired its credit, that further payments of bond interest might be unfair to other creditors. "Manufacturing operations can no longer be continued on a satisfactory basis," said Mr. Dumaine. He added that if the company were permitted to resume operations, "it will do so only in that portion of the plant which can be economically operated. . . . The balance will be disposed of as purchasers are found."

For the past five months the Amoskeag plant, largest cotton textile mill in New England, mainstay of Manchester, has in fact been closed. Its French-Canadian, Irish, Greek, Polish and German workers drifted to relief rolls. Flustered City Fathers offered to reduce Amoskeag's local tax bill of $416,000 provided the mill was in operation at the time of the next assessment. This provisional drop did no good in Amoskeag's huge bucket.

Frederic Christopher Dumaine is treasurer of Amoskeag but here, as in other oldline New England companies, the treasurer is really the first officer. Not only are Amoskeag's reports signed by Mr. Dumaine, but his is the only executive name appearing in them. At 69, he is stocky, squarejawed, heavy-jowled, profane, two-fisted. An up-from-the-ranks tycoon of French-Canadian descent, he got his first job in 1880 as office boy in Amos-keag's Boston office. There he attracted the attention of T. Jefferson Coolidge, the Amoskeag treasurer who sounded the 1886 warning. Grandfather of the present Undersecretary of the Treasury and only the remotest kin to the 30th President of the U. S., Mr. Coolidge was also a dominant power in Boston's Old Colony Trust Co. As his protege, young Mr. Dumaine rose not only in Amoskeag but also in Old Colony, became prominent in a group of Boston financiers who were termed everything from the Boston Gang to the Old Romans. Mr. Dumaine lives at Groton, Mass., rides horses, breeds dogs.

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