Victory for Alcoa

As relentlessly as Inspector Javert dogged Jean Valjean, the Justice Department has dogged the steps of the Aluminum Co. of America. When Alcoa was acquitted of monopoly charges in 1941, the trustbusters appealed their case. Four years later, an appeals court found that Alcoa had, indeed, been a monopoly before the war but it withheld judgment on Alcoa's postwar status until all Government-owned aluminum plants were disposed of.

In the five years since that decision, Alcoa's shrewd President Roy A. Hunt has done the best he could to build up competition. Hunt made available to the Government some of Alcoa's key patents, thus paving the way for Reynolds Metals Co. and Henry Kaiser to buy and lease a majority of the war-built aluminum plants. But to Roy Hunt's dismay, nothing he could do was enough to satisfy the trustbusters; in 1948 they marched back into court to demand that Alcoa's properties be carved up on the grounds that it still monopolized aluminum ingot production. Last week, at long last, it was Alcoa's turn to win a round. In a 180-page decision, Manhattan's Federal Judge John C. Knox refused to order Alcoa broken up. His reason: since 1947, Alcoa's share of the U.S. aluminum business had dropped from 60.6% to 54.5% while, in the same period, Reynolds' share had increased from 24.8% to 26.7% and Kaiser's from 14.6% to 18.8%, a combined total nearly as big as Alcoa's. Judge Knox was so impressed by the growth of competition that he gave Alcoa permission to buy a surplus aluminum plant at Massena, N.Y. from the War Assets Administration, a deal that had been blocked up by protests from the trustbusters.

Judge Knox granted the trustbusters only one major point. It was dangerous, he ruled, for Alcoa's stockholders, who control the world's biggest aluminum company, also to dominate Canada's Aluminium Ltd., the second biggest. He ordered them to dispose of their holdings in one company or the other. He also left a loophole for the Justice Department. He ruled that if competition diminishes during the next five years and the trustbusters can prov it, they may come back and try again to break up Alcoa. That was not much consolation for antitrust's Javerts.

. . .

Undismayed, the trustbusters wound up to swing the sledge on General Electric Co. A year ago G.E. was found guilty of monopolizing the manufacture of incandescent lamps through control of patents and price fixing. Last week, Federal Judge Phillip Forman, at Trenton, N.J., was considering the Government's demand for a drastic penalty. Though G.E.'s share of U.S. lamp production has declined from 82% in 1912 to 58% at present, the Government asked that G.E. :

P: Get rid of half of its lampmaking facilities.

P: Make its patents available to all other manufacturers.

P: Divest itself of any foreign holdings in which it has less than 100% of the capital stock.

P: Be barred from buying into any other lampmaking company, U.S. or foreign, or permitting G.E. officials to serve as directors.

Appalled, the New York Daily News this week asked some pertinent questions. Said the News: "Suppose G.E., instead of throwing its property on the market for sale, just locks up those plants, tosses their 15,000 highly skilled employees out in the cold, and sits tight. Can the Government force a sale? ... If G.E.'s production capacity is suddenly cut 50%, won't that create a bulb shortage, with retail prices jumping? . . . What the hell goes on here, anyway?"

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