Stockholders' Revolt

The U.S. Steel Corp. has a 22-story building in downtown Manhattan that houses its main offices and the conference rooms in which much of its important business is transacted. Yet for 48 years, the important business of the annual stockholders' meeting has been transacted across the Hudson River in Hoboken, N.J., in a small bank building.* Last week at Big Steel's annual meeting, only 350 stockholders (out of a total of 228,000) bothered to come. But not even all of them could find a place to sit; for three sweltering hours 50 of them had to stand in a cramped, stuffy room.

Big Steel's Chairman Irving S. Olds was cool enough. He calmly used the management's 8,889,042 proxy votes to kill a proposal to move the annual meeting to Manhattan. Olds's action roused Stockholder Wilma Soss (five shares), who recently founded the Federation of Women Shareholders in American Business, Inc. Mrs. Soss had come to the meeting dressed in a 1901 costume with mutton-chop sleeves and ostrich-plumed hat. As Chairman Olds and President Benjamin F. Fairless listened in polite boredom, Stockholder Soss sassed them. Her costume, she said, was appropriate for a management "50 years behind the times in stockholder relations."

The Wall Street Journal also admonished Big Steel: "There seems no reason why the sessions should not take place in a hall of sufficient size." Forbes Magazine Publisher B. C. Forbes also let fly: "The time is past when companies can get away with holding their meetings in damned inaccessible places like Squeedunkus or Hohokus . . ." In midweek, the stockholders' revolt gained a small victory. Continental Can Co., Inc., which has been holding its annual meetings in Millbrook, N.Y., a more than two-hour train & bus trip from Manhattan, announced that it would hold future meetings in its Manhattan headquarters.

*A holdover from the New Jersey regulation, changed in 1926, that the annual meeting had to be held in the state because the company had been incorporated there.

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