Mr. X Goes to Town

To Muncie, Ind. last week went the Wall Street Journal's able young Cincinnati correspondent, Harlan V. Hadley, to see if he could put at rest some rumors which had been agitating Wall Street for the past fortnight. It was not the first Muncie assignment for Newshawk Hadley. After Muncie's George Alexander Ball was unexpectedly boosted into the driver's seat of Midamerica Corp. last November following the death of Oris Paxton Van Sweringen (TIME, Nov. 30), he interviewed the aging fruit-jar maker about his plans for that corporate key to the $3,000,000,000 rail and real-estate empire. And 28-year-old Newshawk Hadley left with an invitation from 74-year-old Mr. Ball to return any time he needed assistance on a story.

Last week Mr. Hadley's task was to find out what old Mr. Ball had been up to of late. Mr. Ball had been in Washington getting acquainted with RFC Chairman Jesse Holman Jones. He had been in Cleveland. He had been in Manhattan. But his secretary at Ball Bros. Co. on Muncie's Macedonia Avenue soon scotched the idea that Mr. Ball was selling his 90% equity in Midamerica Corp. That Mr. Ball had received propositions was certain. Cleveland's Cyrus Stephen ("The Great") Eaton for one had been trying to recruit a buying syndicate.

Mr. Ball had not forgotten Newshawk Hadley, gave him a scoop which was not even shared with the Muncie Star and the Indianapolis Star, in both of which the Ball family has interests. The story: "George A. Ball . . . today confirmed the creation of the George & Frances Ball Foundation, charitable trust organized un der the laws of Indiana, and his donation to that foundation of his entire common stockholdings in Midamerica Corp." Directors were Mr. Ball, three members of his family and President Lemuel Arthur Pittenger of Ball State Teachers College. Kept by Mr. Ball were 18,733 of 20,000 shares of Midamerica preferred stock.

Instead of silencing conjecture, the big Ball gift generated a swarm of new stories. Hearst's New York American "learned exclusively" that California Banker Amadeo Peter Giannini's Transamerica Corp., through Bancamerica-Blair Corp., had been negotiating for Midamerica's 2,064,000 shares of Alleghany Corp. common stock which it holds in the complex Van Sweringen corporate setup. But old Mr. Giannini denied this.

Associated Press reported that Midamerica might be sold "within 48 hours." But days passed without any announcement of a sale. Cleveland newspapers placed Boston's crusty old Frederick Henry Prince, chairman of Armour & Co. and onetime president of the Van Sweringens' Pere Marquette Ry., at the head of a propositioning group which had withdrawn from the race. Other "overnight selections": a Manhattan syndicate represented by Brokers Young, Kolbe & Co.; a General Motors-Du Pont combine.

Best guess about Midamerica at week's end was that nothing would be done until Cleveland's Probate Judge Nelson J. Brewer should decide whether or not receivers of the Van Sweringens' estate have any rights to the option which the Cleveland brothers held to buy back control of Midamerica from George A. Ball and George A. Tomlinson, 71, related to Mr. Ball by marriage and his partner in backing the Vans in 1935 when they regained control of their empire from a J. P. Morgan & Co. banking group at auction for $3,121,000. Sale of Midamerica at the present time would give the new Ball Foundation between $7,000,000 and $10,000,000.

Mr. Ball had nothing to say last week. Newshawks had difficulty keeping up with him. He was supposed to appear in Indianapolis to introduce New Hampshire's Senator H. Styles Bridges to Indiana's Republican Editorial Association. Instead, Republican National Committeeman Ball telephoned regrets from Cleveland, went to Washington for the Gridiron Club dinner. On the average, white-mustached old Mr. Ball spends three nights each week on trains. He never takes a compartment, refuses to have a private car, explaining simply that he has been used to upper & lower berths all his life.

"Middletown." Until George Alexander Ball emerged as the financial heir to the Brothers Van Sweringen the name of Ball outside of Muncie and Indiana was seldom seen except encrusted on housewives' fruit jars. But to thousands of U. S. sociology students who have read Robert S. & Helen Merrell Lynd's case study of a typical town in Mid-America, Middletown, "Middletown" is Muncie and "Middletown's" leading family is Muncie's Ball family. Columbia University's capable Lynd and Mrs. Lynd spent 18 months in Muncie in 1924 and 1925. They wrote the book which Henry Louis Mencken called "one of the richest and most valuable documents ever concocted by American sociologists."

To be published next week is Mr. & Mrs. Lynd's second book about Muncie, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (Harcourt, Brace, $5). Criticized locally for underplaying the Ball family in their earlier book, the Lynds discovered that the family's power had grown so much in ten years that, still incognito as the "X Family," it now demanded a separate chapter. Because the Ball industry (fruit jars) thrived on Depression, the Balls were able not only to cushion the shock of the lean years upon their city but to step up to the local bargain-counter, just as George Ball stepped up for Mid-america Corp. Their resulting domination of the town, say the Lynds, "may be viewed as epitomizing the American business-class control system." A Muncie citizen told the Lynds:

"If I'm out of work I go to the X plant; if I need money I go to the X bank, and if they don't like me I don't get it; my children go to the X college; when I get sick I go to the X hospital; I buy a building lot or house in the X subdivision; my wife goes downtown to buy clothes at the X department store; if my dog stays away he is put in the X pound; I buy X milk; I drink X beer, vote for X political parties, and get help from X charities; my boy goes to the X Y.M.C.A. and my girl to their Y.W.C.A.; I listen to the word of God in X-subsidized churches; if I'm a Mason I go to the X Masonic Temple; I read the news from the X morning newspaper; and if I'm rich enough, I travel via the X airport."

Of the original five Brothers Ball, two remain to head the family, George A. & Frank Clayton, vice president and president, respectively, of Ball Bros. Co. Of them the Lynds say: "[They are] alert, capable, democratic, Christian gentlemen, trained in the school of rugged individualism, patrons of art, education, religion, and a long list of philanthropies." Of the X family: "To Middletown's workers the X family epitomizes the sanctimonious oppressions of the employing class and is often even made to bear the brunt of animus generated by the less personalized actions of the absentee owners of other large Middletown plants [General Motors, Borg-Warner, Owens-Illinois]; while, on the other hand, the X family sincerely regards itself as unusually scrupulous in looking out for its workers."

Since 1925 Muncie's population has grown from 36,000 to almost 50,000. Mirrored in detail after dispassionate detail in the 604 pages of Middletown in Transition is the city's life through Boom and Depression--in the business class the institutionalization of bridge, the omission of song at Rotary luncheons, the budding of the small-town "parlor pink"; in the working class the disappearance of apprenticeship, the blurring of the distinction between skilled and unskilled labor, the "ladder of opportunity" hiked beyond the reach of the mill floor. Yet with all the basic impetus to social change, the Lynds discovered, Middletown's culture remains outwardly the same.

"The city is uneasily conscious of many twinges down under the surface . . . conflicts among values hitherto held as compatible; conflicts among institutions-- economic and political, economic and educational and religious, economic and familial; conflicts among groups in the community . . .; conflicts between deep-rooted ideas of individual and collective responsibility. . . ." But, "at point after point--in its handling of relief, in city government, in its dealing with dissent-- it deals with present situations simply as it must, using the old words. . . ." In viewing Muncie, the Lynds conclude, "One recalls now and again Tawney's characterization of the ruling class in Europe after the French Revolution: '. . . they walked reluctantly backwards into the future, lest a worse thing should befall them.' "

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