To contrast GE's emergence from World War II in 1945 with its emergence from World War I in 1919, consider the odyssey of GE Installation and Sales Engineer W. H. Denny. In the aftermath of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he and 57 of his colleagues voyaged across the Pacific to the site of that disaster. Their job was to restore the motive power of two salvageable battleships, West Virginia and California. They accomplished this challenging task ahead of schedule. Before the war's end, the California was unleashing its salvos on the Japanese island of Honshu.
Following their wartime achievements in 1919, GE engineers had returned to their peacetime pursuit of electrifying America. Not so in 1945. Denny and several of his colleagues were instead sent to White Sands, New Mexico. There they met 80 train cars filled with machinery brought back from Germany. Their job was to assemble these parts into 75 V-2 rockets, and preside over test firings. As the U.S. flowed rapidly from hot to cold war, GE ventured into a new world of rockets, jet planes, atomic energy, new types and uses of electronics, and computers. (404)
How did that transition from hot war to peace and cold war affect GE's policies, structure and products? That is the question this chapter answers. Regarding policies, the buck stopped at the desk of Gerard Swope's successor as president, Charles E. Wilson. Everyone called him Charlie. By contrast, the only GE employee alleged to have called Swope "Gerry" was also allegedly drunk at the time.
Wilson was born in 1878 in New York City's Hell's Kitchen. His father, a bookbinder, died when Charlie was three. Charlie became an office boy at 12 at a company GE later bought. His steady rise featured mentorship by a foreman, a night school education, experience as a semipro basketball player and boxer, promotion to assistant superintendent by age 21, specialization as a manufacturing manager, and, from 1942-1944, Vice Chairmanship of the War Production Board. He ended as a GE lifer, credited with 50 years service.
A description of Wilson by War Production Board colleague Bruce Catton, later a well known historian, emphasized the pugilist perspective: "massive, powerful, abrupt, with a rasp to his voice like a top sergeant's", Wilson "rather looked like he had been hewed from a block of weathered hardwood with an adz." (405)
Wilson brought to Washington a reputation as the top manufacturing man in the country, a status he enhanced by effectively directing previously stalled programs producing airplanes, radar, and antisubmarine escort vessels. His management style, however, drew less praise. Historian Paul Koistinen summed up the criticism. "While powerful and shrewd, he was insecure and ruthless… [He] surrounded himself with yes men [and] often threatened to resign to get his way." (406)
On the other hand, Wilson's World War II performance impressed Harry Truman sufficiently that he later chose Wilson for a pair of key government assignments. One, in 1951, was to head the Office of Defense Mobilization during the most intense phase of the Korean War. Another, in 1946, was Chairmanship of the Federal Civil Rights Commission. Wilson was recommended for that post by Walter White of the NAACP, who viewed Wilson as a strong supporter of racial equality. The Commission's report, entitled "To Secure These Rights," was a milestone both in its specific recommendations and its condemnation of racism. Wilson approved both the report's progressive slant, and its frank exposure of what he called the "bad side of our record." (407)
Within GE also, Wilson would receive both high praise and strong criticism. By the management elite he was revered. One manager recalls Wilson, at GE's annual summer management retreat, responding to a claim that Westinghouse would overtake GE. "They should live so long!", he proclaimed. "Their children should live so long! Their grandchildren should live so long!". The cheering crowd then marched from the hall to the strains of "Onward Christian Soldiers". (408)
GE union leaders, by contrast, were more likely to see Wilson as an arrogant plutocrat who had forgotten his origins. In 1946, Wilson's dismissive attitude and demeaning pronouncements would infuriate and stiffen the resolution of GE strikers. In reality Wilson was neither exceptionally charismatic, nor merely a caricature capitalist. He was a typical CEO of his time. Capitalism has been good to Electric Charlie (so named to avoid confusion with his contemporary, General Motors CEO "Engine Charlie" Wilson). So it was not surprising that Electric Charlie was good to capitalism. Nor was there anything surprising about his alleged statement that the twin dangers to the U.S. were communism overseas and labor unions at home. This sentiment was likely shared by perhaps most CEOs, and many ordinary citizens. Also typical among corporate executives was his combination of public service in New Deal/Fair Deal governments and opposition to New Deal/Fair Deal policies.
When Wilson returned to GE from wartime Washington service in 1944, a management-labor truce uneasily prevailed. A National War Labor Board with management, labor and public interest members had secured from the unions for the duration of the war a sometimes briefly violated but generally respected no strike pledge. It had supported further increases in union strength. It had sharply limited wage increases, to perhaps 10%, following the so-called "Little Steel Formula". (409)
This truce began to break down by early 1945. After the war ended, the two sides squared off. The focus became wages. The "big three" industrial unions, auto workers, steel workers, and electrical workers had their wage hopes fueled by Truman administration pronouncements. Truman himself said in a radio address that a raise for workers was "imperative". A government economic agency's study concluded that manufacturers could raise wages 24% without raising prices and still keep profits at prewar levels. The UE rounded this off to 25%, or in other words an increase of "two bucks a day". (410)
Beginning in August, 1945, UE delegations began meeting with Wilson and his associates at GE headquarters in New York City to bargain on a national contract. Negotiations continued, on and off, until mid January, 1946. Looking back, one UE negotiator, James Matles, summed up the process by recalling one meeting in the GE president's office. Wilson conducted it while bathing in the rays of a sun lamp (a product GE was then promoting). The meeting lasted only 30 minutes. Matles summarized it this way. The union asked for that two-bucks-a-day 25% raise. Wilson offered 10%, implying, in the union negotiators' view, that it was a take it or leave it offer. "Mr. Wilson", answered Julius Emspak, "in that case, we'll just have to leave it." (411)
Actually there were many meetings, and some give and take. GE subsequently offered a slight increase over that 10% to workers making less than $1 an hour. The UE found this inadequate. On Jan 15, 1946, the first company-wide strike in GE history began. It was part of a massive national strike wave that included, in addition to the United Electrical and Machine Workers, the United Steel Workers and the United Auto Workers, as well several smaller unions.
The GE strike began at 6 AM in bitter cold with a vigorous demonstration at the Schenectady Works front gate by 7000 workers. It quickly settled down to orderly daily picketing that kept out of the Works all but several hundred permitted maintenance workers. Nationwide, the UE got the publicity upper hand. Picket lines included recently discharged servicemen carrying signs reading "GIs versus GE". Members of the clergy and students from such womens' colleges as Mt. Holyoke and Vassar joined those picket lines. At Schenectady, artist and CIO union member Rockwell Kent, whose painting of a winter scene currently graced the January, 1946, GE calendar, took his turn on the line, asserting "artists are workers too." (412)
Public opinion in Schenectady was less clear. Looking back, Schenectady UE officer Joe Mangino felt the strikers got little community support. Midway thru the strike, the City Council refused a UE request that it approve the strike. More influential than community support was pressure from the Federal government. President Truman called Charlie Wilson to a meeting on January, 1946. In February a Federal Conciliation Commission met with both GE and union representatives in New York City. The government position began to focus on an 18-1/2% raise. This was just over half way between GE's proposed 10% increase and the UE demand for 25%. (413)
The UE went along, switching its demand from 25% to "at least" 18-1/2%. On February 11, General Motors settled with its electrical workers on that basis. GE balked. Wilson said he would only raise the company offer if government restraints on appliance prices were also removed. The government replied, settle wages first, then we will issue price policy guidelines. (414) Back in Schenectady, a by now familiar message was heard. A local newspaper columnist wrote on February 13 that
GE officials are quietly but determinedly discussing removing the commpany's general office workers from Schenectady.
Then came a key break in local attitude. On March 2 some 125 small merchants and professionals in Schenectady came out on the union side, both in a mass meeting and in a full page newspaper advertisement. Nationally also, the tide turned. That 18-1/2% figure came to be the standard for autos and steel as well as electrical manufacturing. Wilson held out for a couple of weeks, but on March 12, 1946, gave in and accepted 18-1/2%. (415)
At the time, this settlement was considered a great union victory, celebrated in Schenectady with a torchlight rally. Looking back from the 21st century, however, progressive labor historian Norman Lichtenstein was less happy. He identified 1946-1948 as a different kind of turning point. Labor turned away from advocacy of industrial democracy within the workplace. Instead, the big industrial unions became just another interest group, focused on higher wages and better benefits for themselves (including employment-based medical insurance). "The 1946 strike settlement," wrote Lichtenstein, "ended left liberal hopes that organized labor could play a direct role in reshaping class relations for the society as a whole." (416)
This setting aside issues of industrial democracy in favor of an immediate pay increase had been evident on the Schenectady picket line. When a quartet of union women that included Helen Quirini sang "Solidarity Forever" on that picket line, they supplied new lyrics. Ralph Chaplin's original had included such sentiments as
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might
The UE Local 301 version, in contrast, proclaimed
We need two bucks — we want two bucks, that's the offer we present
So come across and we'll come back and we'll all be friends again. (417)
If the strike changed the union, it also changed the company. In the 1930s GE had been praised by progressives and panned by conservatives for its calm acceptance of unions. After 1946, it would be praised by conservatives and panned by progressives, for its aggressive anti-unionism.
Charlie Wilson seems to have taken the GE defeat personally. He had some reason to do so. The UE succeed in making him look both heartless and clueless. Before the strike, in discussing complaints that wages had not kept up with the cost of living, Wilson had praised the nutritional qualities and low cost of beans. The union positioned him as a 20th Century Marie Antoinette, proclaiming "let 'em eat beans". After the strike began, the UE publicized Wilson's alleged characterization of the woman workers on the picket line as "bobbysoxers".
In response to the defeat, in May, 1947, Wilson called to his office a recent GE hire named Lemuel Boulware. The assignment given Boulware was to find a better way of dealing with "the employee and community relations problem."
Lemuel Boulware was not an employee relations or community relations expert. He was the son of a Kentucky banker, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He then became a washing machine salesman, then a manager at such companies as Easy Washing Machine and Carrier Air Conditioning, and then a World War II dollar-a-year-man. Wilson brought him to GE as the corporate staff coordinator for seven GE-owned affiliate companies. Though some of these companies were unionized, none, while on Boulware's watch, was hit by the 1946 strike.
Responding to Wilson's 1947 assignment, Boulware came up with an employee and community relations program that would become known, over his protests, as "Boulwarism." He preferred to call it "doing right voluntarily." Critics, such as historian Kim Phillips-Fein, would call it "highly politicized antiunionism". She saw it as not merely a labor policy, but as a key part of a capitalist counterrevolution. She credited Boulware himself with a significant role in developments ranging from the creation of the Business Roundtable to the rise of Ronald Reagan. (418)
Though Boulware's supporters and critics disagreed on the program's name and its implications, both agreed on what the program did. It sold the company's position on wages, benefits and working conditions in the way one might sell a washing machine. It was an exercise, said Boulware, in "job marketing". The product was a GE job. The employee was the "job customer". Some 12,000 GE foremen and supervisors were the "job salesmen". The product was advertised by a flood of messages both in company publications and the public media, aimed not only at workers but their wives, family members and the community. This flood was aimed at convincing all stakeholders that, when the time came to renew the GE-UE contract, the company offer was in the balanced best interest of them all. So they all ought to put pressure on the union to accept it.
Where did collective bargaining fit into this program? It did not fit. To Boulware, collective bargaining meant either the union was trying to get credit for the good things the company was ready to do voluntarily, or the union was seeking terms that would be destructive to the successful operation of the enterprise. So, instead of bargaining, the company would, by itself, design the best job product possible, and put it on the table. That offer could, Boulware said, be changed in response to "new information," but never on the basis of "haggling."
In practice, things only intermittently followed that planned pattern. From 1948 to 1955, sometimes Boulwarism prevailed, but sometimes bargaining happened. In neither case did GE workers' settlements differ much from those of other giant corporations. In the key 1955 negotiation of a five year national contract, GE and its unions engaged in more or less normal collective bargaining. The workers came out with a generous medical plan and cost of living raises.
The settlement of grievances under Boulwarism also assumed a corporate and confrontational form. Helen Quirini recalled the first time she, accompanied by three other women shop stewards and Leo Jandreau, took a grievance to GE headquarters in New York City. She recalled her exchange with a management representative. Rejecting the description of the skill level of a particular job, the management man said "my five year old son could do any of the jobs that women worked on." Replied Quirini:
Mr. so-and-so, you know, I have a three year old nephew who could do your job. Because all you do is say "no", and he could do that as well as you do.
"There was silence in the room," Quirini recalled later, "and I was never again afraid to take on anyone." (419)
Meanwhile, Boulwarism's impact was being blurred by other aspects of the class struggle. Regarding class in general, national UE leader James Matles expressed the traditional view by titling his 1967 memoir "Them and Us." Employee relations at GE was not however, simply a face off between the "them" of management and the "us" of the union. About half of GE's employees in 1945-1950, were neither.
The thousands of foremen, for example, were often recent skilled workers with sympathy to union claims. During the strike, UE urged the foremen to join their union, or form their own. However, after winning decisively in the 1946 Congressional Election, Republicans eliminated that possibility with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. One of its provisions forbade foremen's unions. Boulware subsequently drafted GE's foremen into that job salesmen role. Also in labor limbo were graduates of the GE Apprentice Program. They were seen by management as workers and potential union members. The union, however, saw them as management favorites not to be trusted. Occupying the middle ground between management and its now unionized shop workers were engineers, laboratory workers, and office workers. Engineer Charles Elston recalls that the GE engineering force added during wartime some "atypical engineering types." Some of them invited fellow engineers to a meeting at the UE union hall aimed at forming an engineers union. Instead, Elston became an officer in a new GE Engineer's Association. It aimed not at union activity but at making management's secretive salary policies more transparent, and proposing plans for developing affordable housing in Schenectady. A GE Office Workers Association also emerged by 1946. It enrolled an unknown fraction of Schenectady's 3000 office workers and 500 or so laboratory workers. It held a meeting early in the 1946 strike urging its members to join the picket line. Later its organizing committee, which included a prominent GE "atomic scientist", John Blewitt, endorsed the union's position in a newspaper ad. (420)
In the "them" of GE management, enthusiasm for Boulwarism was far from unanimous. This was especially the case for those who had day to day manufacturing responsibility. Alfred C. Stevens, for example, the Schenectady Works Manager, found Boulwarism less than helpful in carrying out his production responsibilities. "I'm sure", said Stevens, "that Mr. Boulware suspected me of getting in bed with the union to a hazardous degree." (421)
Even managers who approved of Boulwarism in principle disapproved of the way it was carried out. Motor Department General Manager Olaf Vea, for example, called Boulwarism a "great concept" but added:
Unfortunately, however, in the end negotiators didn't come out with humility, only the expression of management knows best. (422)
The biggest division within management, however, did not involve Boulwarism. It involved an invitation. A GE manager knew he had made it when he got invited to attend GE's annual top management meeting called "the Island". What happened on Association Island in the St. Lawrence River was part standard speechmaking, part summer camp, and part notification of membership in the management elite. Teams in different colored T-shirts would vie on the athletic field. Speeches would follow, interspersed with opportunities to engage informally with Charlie Wilson and his entourage in the Black Catte bar. All these were, however, mere preliminaries to the big Island moment: the "Charge to the Rookies", held in the shade of the Elfun Society's Sacred Elm.
"There were 25 or so of us initiates gathered around a campfire, under the biggest elm tree I ever saw," one of those rookies later recalled.
It was a clear summer night with a big half moon… Coming down the St. Lawrence River paddled an Indian in a canoe — standing up. He came ashore and opened the ceremonies… Electric Charlie Wilson read the charge… he told us about good fellowship and how we did not stand alone… about success through individuals… the challenge of change… a great company as an association of people and purpose… and then led us in singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was 31 or 32, already becoming a cynic — but it was a spine chilling experience. (423)
So management ranged from this small Island elite to lowly middle managers, from Boulwarism enthusiasts to pragmatic production men. It was far from a unified "them". Nor were even the shop workers a unified "us". The UE was not the only union at the Schenectady Works. Early in the 1946 strike, some of those other unions settled with GE on the company's terms. This included the old but small (65 member) Patternmakers Union, and the larger (900 member) Draftsman's Association. Even within the UE the unity displayed on the 1946 picket line only briefly papered over differences among workers of different skill levels, political preferences, and cultural backgrounds. Schenectady union leader Joe Mangino described differences between the pieceworkers, "the more aggressive guys and gals," and the dayworkers, "who just wanted to coast along." He described the "union people" as "mainly pieceworkers", adding "most of the grievances and strikes were by pieceworkers." (424)
Divisions also occasionally sprung up among the pieceworkers. In 1943-1944 for example, a complex dispute about pay and promotion arose between the company and its toolmakers, some of the most skilled of the pieceworkers. Dissatisfied with the support they were getting from the union, the toolmakers then led a revolt which briefly overthrew the union officers. It took intervention by the Local 301 Board to settle this issue and restore the original leadership team. (425)
In contrast to the importance of being a pieceworker, Mangino recalled that in Local 301 in the 1940s, "being a communist wasn't a big thing." He described how
a guy [who] joined the communist party was single and out of work… He could get coffee and something to eat. He went to the conventions to meet the girls… when he got a good job and settled down he lost interest in the communist party.
The number of communists in local 301 was probably never large, perhaps dozens rather than hundreds. If their presence was no big deal to the Schenectady rank and file, it was, however, a big deal to two other groups. One was the communist party itself. It had installed what Mangino referred to as "the New York people" — party regulars, some from New York City, others trained there by the party — in such such Local 301 positions as attorney, office manager, assistant bargaining agent, treasurer, and switchboard operator. Another of those New York City people was Leo Jandreau's second wife, Ruth Young.
Communism in Local 301 was also a big deal to Congressman Charles Kersten of Wisconsin. Though in 1948 only a freshman, he had gained the chairmanship of a subcommittee of the House of Representatives Committee of Education and Labor tasked with Investigation of Communist Infiltration of the Union of Electrical, Machine, and Radio Workers. In September, 1948, exactly when his friend and fellow Representative, Richard Nixon was vaulting to national notice by agressive participation in the more sensational investigation of Alger Hiss by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Kersten took his subcommittee to Schenectady. (426)
There he had a star witness. Salvatore Vottis fit both of the above descriptions of Schenectady communists. He had, in 1935, been injured and subsequently laid off by GE. He found coffee, something to eat, and refuge with the communist party. He also then went down to New York City to attend communist school, and came back as the New York City person installed as Local 301 treasurer. He would quit the party after World War II for what he describes as disgust with the policies of the Soviet Union. Now, on Sept 30, 1948, he was ready to tell all. That included his role as collector of Communist Party dues in Local 301. He claimed to have collected these dues from some current union leaders, most notably Leo Jandreau. (427)
A dozen Schenectady workers were called to testify under oath, ranging from the current local president to former Workers Council President Bill Hodges. Unanimously, and unequivocally, they rejected Vottis' testimony, and refused to discuss anything about the political opinions of their co-workers. Notable was the testimony of Helen Quirini, now union recording secretary, the first woman to hold a Local 301 office. Asked "do you share the view that to expose the communists in your union would cause the union to be busted" she answered, "I believe very strongly in our constitution, because you are starting with communism. Tomorrow it will be married women, the next day Jews; next day Negroes; next day Italians; next day Poles." (428)
Leo Jandreau also rejected subcommittee questions, in the process dismissing Vottis as "a degraded rat". When asked for his views on Joseph Stalin's foreign policy, Jandreau replied:
I am not an authority on foreign affairs… I am only a fellow who came from the shop, elected as an officer of the union, and try to do my job honestly. (429)
Had Leo Jandreau been a communist agent, he probably would have said something similar. In fact, however, in making this simple statement, Leo Jandreau told the simple truth. Even Vottis said he never heard Jandreau address any matters of ideology. This was echoed over the years across the GE ranks. Top GE executives, such as Albert Stevens, Don Craig, and Charles Elston, who contested bitterly with Bargaining Agent Jandreau, praised his non-ideological honesty, integrity, effectiveness, and constructive approach. Union members, such as Julius Emspak, Helen Quirini and Joe Mangino, who saw Jandreau from the inside, and not always from the same side, agreed with this evaluation. Mangino summed it up:
Leo was from Schenectady, a toolmaker… At one time he was a foreman. He had great leadership ability. He was smart as hell. He was a real mechanic. (430)
A final note on the Kersten hearings, and similar exercises in Red-hunting at Schenectady, concerns a primary motive: the search for spies. As of 2024, there is no evidence that any member of the UE in Schenectady ever spied for the USSR. So far, the only known communist spy at Schenectady GE during World War II or in the Cold War era was Morton Sobell, an electronics engineer. He worked for five years for the GE Marine and Aeronautics Division at Schenectady, where he had access to GE information on military electronics systems such as fire control radars, which he likely passed on to the USSR. (431)
Despite this absence of evidence for worker espionage or disloyalty to the nation, in 1949 the UE came under fire not only from anticommunists in Congress, but from those in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It expelled the UE and chartered in its place a new anti-communist electrical workers union, the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE). It was led by a UE founder, James Carey, who had been voted out of the post of UE president in 1941. GE did not, at this point, jump on the anti-communist bandwagon. "A plague on both your houses" read a 1948 GE ad. GE successfully petitioned the National Labor Board for a vote to determine which union would represent the workers. In 1950 the UE emerged from that election still representing two thirds of the nation's electrical workers. At Schenectady, the UE won by 7761-5847. A second election at Schenectady, in 1951, increased the margin in favor of the UE to 9005-5179. (432)
The national tide, however, was turning. So was the tide within GE. The company came under criticism for being soft on communism. GE's Vice President of Public Affairs noted in 1953 that "the semi annual Link Audit [a national survey of public opinion] gave us clear signals we should have been more concerned over the public relations aspects of domestic communism." He concluded that "the time was ripe — perhaps over-ripe — for an unequivocal policy on communism." On December 9, 1953, GE announced a new "Policy Concerning Admitted Communists, Saboteurs and Subversives." Any GE employee who admitted to being a communist would be discharged immediately. Any employee who took the Fifth Amendment when asked if he was a communist would be suspended from employment for 90 days. If he did not produce in those 90 days a certificate from an "accredited security agency of the United States government" testifying that there "was no evidence that the employee is a communist or otherwise a substantial risk" the employee would be discharged." (433)
GE had made an employee's exercise of Constitutional rights inconsistent with GE employment. It had ruled that an employee suspected of "substantial risk" was guilty until proven innocent. Leo Jandreau wrote an open letter to GE's president saying "I am shocked at the un-American and anti-labor stand you have just announced." GE could not act against Jandreau, who worked for the UE, not GE. One who could go after him however was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. In late 1953, coincident with yet another round of UE vs. IUE elections, he called Jandreau and other Local 301 leaders to secret hearings in Washington. Then, in January, 1954, he announced public hearings in Albany NY. On the day the hearings were to begin, 2000 GE workers rallied to protest the "McCarthy Smear Sessions".
Jandreau, however, never appeared. Two weeks earlier, he had met with Philip Carey in a New York City hotel room. They reached a deal. In exchange for substantial independence for Local 301, Jandreau agreed to support the IUE in the coming union election. McCarthy then lost interest in Jandreau, who was never subsequently called on to testify publicly. The IUE then won the Schenectady election by a 2 to 1 margin. Nationally also, the IUE gained a majority. The UE held on to a significant minority, a status it still retains, in particular keeping control of GE's Erie, PA works. It took years for the bitterness of this internecine union battle to die down. How would the new IUE predominance fare against Boulwarism? That would not become clear until the next two decades. (434)
In the immediate postwar period union leaders were not the only GE employees called before an unfriendly Congressional committee. It also happened to Charlie Wilson. The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee called on Wilson in 1949 to testify in its Hearings on the Study of Monopoly Power. The hearings were chaired by a redoubtable opponent of monopoly, Rep. Emanuel Cellar of New York. (435)
The tone of Cellar's reception of Wilson is captured in the following exchange. When asked in how many antitrust cases GE had been a defendant, Wilson said he did not know. After telling Wilson that the number was 16, from 1911 thru 1947, Cellar asked "do you believe in the antitrust laws? " Wilson replied "I do." "Why," Cellar then asked, "is it that you cannot operate under them?" (436)
The reference was to the three antitrust cases that had been postponed by the war, on monopolizing light bulbs, cooperating with Krupp on Carboloy, and suppressing international competition. GE was found guilty of violating the antitrust laws in all three. As in 1911, though the image was embarrassing, the effects were small. They were most severe in light bulbs. GE was required to share its patents and refrain from controlling prices. The business was left intact, however, and remained profitable, though at a much lower profit-to-sales ratios than before the war.
GE also stayed in the Carboloy business, though it and some executives, including a distinguished metallurgist, Zay Jeffries, were found guilty and fined. (Jeffries was, much later, pardoned posthumously by President Donald Trump). As for the international verdict, the guilty verdict had little impact on GE. The European economy was devastated by war, and it would be two decades before GE received serious competition from that direction. (437)
Similar to the way the Kersten hearings had relied on Salvatore Vottis, Cellar also had a friendly witness with inside information. He was Ted Quinn, last seen in this book leading GE's refrigerator business to profitable success. Quinn and Charlie Wilson had been GE's most Promising Young Men of the 1920s. They were named GE Vice Presidents on the same day in 1930. By 1934 they appeared neck and neck in the race to be Swope's successor. Quinn later claimed that in that year he was offered the post by Swope himself. Then, at the end of 1935, Quinn suddenly and unexpectedly left GE. (438)
Asked by the Cellar Committee to explain, Quinn and Wilson gave different answers. Quinn said he quit as "a matter of conscience". Wilson said Quinn was "eased out" in a "face saving manner" after Swope "desired to dispense with his [Quinn's] services". Quinn would give his side of the story in full in a 1948 book entitled "I Quit Monster Business." At the 1949 Cellar hearings, he summed up his case against GE in particular, and Monster Business in general, in one very long sentence.
I quit monster business because it is unnecessarily undemocratic, because it is big only for the sake of bigness or for purposes of concentrated power and control, because it is inefficient, because it is creating a dependent society where only masses count, genuine individual freedom languishes, and opportunity and expression are restricted, and because through its collectivistic forms and methods and mockery of free enterprise, it is leading us toward a brand of totalitarianism which is a perversion, so far as what is inherent individualism, civil liberties and the democratic process, as Russian communism. (439)
Wilson replied that
in an expanding economy and in a growing world there is a need for economic institutions of such sizes as are best adapted to cope with the ever growing problems — scientific, technical and economic — of that world. Our economy demands the most efficient, the most able, and the most aggressive business institutions which a free competitive system will produce. This demand is interpreted in some cases by very small companies, in others by medium sized companies, and in still others by large companies.
In presenting an example illustrating the role of large companies, Wilson chose not one of the the high technologies of the day, such as atomic energy, jet engines, or electronics. Instead, he told the story of the humble garbage disposer.
This idea of grinding garbage fine enough to dispose down the sink and through the existing sewer system had been brought to GE in the early 1930s by Morris Cohen, a Schenectady public health official. GE applied to Cohen's idea the resources of its giant Schenectady Works, from craftsmen to engineers to its world class research laboratory. A product went on the market in 1935. GE shared its patents on generous terms with competitors and sustained millions of dollars in losses in order to build the market. With success in sight, in 1941, production was frozen for the war's duration. Only now, in 1949, was GE beginning to see the fruits of it more than 15 years of costly effort. Only a big company, Wilson concluded, could have both supplied the needed skills and showed such expensive patience. (440)
There was, however, another reason for Wilson addressing the committee with uncharacteristic humility. Secretly, he knew that there was some truth in Quinn's indictment. Furthermore, he was about to put in place the very cure for the problems of bigness that Quinn had suggested. The particular truth in Quinn's indictment was the accusation of giant business inefficiency. GE manufacturing expert W. W. Beardslee would later recall Wilson's secret acceptance of this accusation. Beardslee and other manufacturing "shock troops" were brought in from other companies after the war. They were told how Wilson's Washington duties had enabled him to compare GE with its peers. He was not pleased by the comparison. Wilson concluded, Beardslee said, that "General Electric had a long way to go if it was ever to come up to the standards of the top industrial suppliers to the war effort." GE had slipped from its previous technology leadership. (441)
This was most evident in electronics. Promising young electronics experts joining GE at Schenectady were quickly disillusioned. Stanford graduate David Packard would later say "I enjoyed my experience at GE," but also expressed dissatisfaction about the opportunities there for a believer in the future of electronics. He was told on arrival in Schenectady in 1937 that there was no future in electronics for a GE engineer. After a stint of refrigerator quality control, and another at getting the bugs out of the dangerous manufacturing process for a mercury vapor based power device that dated back to Steinmetz, Packard returned to California and an entreprenerial startup with fellow Stanford grad William Hewlett. (442)
Simon Ramo, later a founder of the major high-tech company TRW, was more scathing in his recollections of his 1936-1945 GE employment. He began at GE's Research Lab in Schenectady. There he found its publicity-generated image as the "House of Magic" much overblown. "Most of GE's R&D stars were well past their prime," he concluded. He went on to describe GE as "a very minor player, however, in the research and development effort needed to create new military technology". More generally:
The company had become bureaucratic. Creativity at the management level was modest. Being careful was adequate. The engineering executives of GE were badly out of date… as secure as civil servants…
Other future leaders of the electronics revolution also passed briefly through GE before finding more productive and personally satisfying careers at newer, smaller, more specialized companies. These included Cecil Green of Texas Instruments and Charles Sporck of National Semiconductor. (443)
Charlie Wilson was aware of all of this. He not only secretly accepted parts of Quinn's indictment. He also had begun adopting Quinn's proposed cure. Presenting that cure to the disease of giant business, Quinn had proclaimed in his testimony that "the ultimate solution is decentralization, total and complete."
Quinn was practicing that solution. He had gone back into the appliance business. This time he was organizing not a giant appliance business, but a cooperative alliance, named Monitor after Quinn's refrigerator triumph. It was a cooperative of small or middle sized appliance makers. That this effort failed in the post-war environment of inflation and materials shortages does not prove the idea invalid. (444)
Wilson did not say so at the Cellar Hearings, but he agreed with Quinn. Decentralization was the cure for the growing pains of the giants. He also believed, however, that decentralization could be achieved while doubling down on bigness. In 1946, he practiced both solutions. To finance the doubling down on bigness, GE went into the investment market for $200 million in loans, its biggest borrowing ever. It bought up 31 out of 135 factories built by the government for war production, at the bargain price of three-fourths their construction cost. Meanwhile, Wilson appointed a former dollar a year colleague, Ralph Cordiner, as his GE assistant. Cordiner's special assignment was developing a plan to decentralize GE. Here GE was in the familiar position of follower. As earlier mentioned, other companies such as Du Pont and General Motors had long since adopted the decentralization form that Chandler called the multidivisional or "M-form" structure. By the 1940s even Westinghouse had begun to adopt it. Ralph Cordiner would take six years to propose and install GE's particular version.
Decentralization seemed needed because GE could see a leveling off of strictly electrical innovation. The Disposall and the air conditioner would be its last big home appliance opportunities. At the other end, the steam turbine generator was approaching its limits of efficiency, about 30% and power, several hundreds of (or perhaps as much as 1000) megawatts. The big growth opportunities seemed the ones publicized by the war, notably atomic energy, jet engines, rockets, electronics and computers. In none of these had GE been a pioneer or even wartime leader.
In the atom bomb project, GE had been a significant subcontractor but not a major player. In jet engines, it had been brought in by the government to make a copy of the British Whittle jet. In electronics, GE often bragged about sending out the first U.S. television broadcast in 1928. It did not point out that this was done with an immediately obsolete electro-mechanical technology. In that same year Philo Farnsworth, the principal inventor of the ultimately successful electronic system, came to GE seeking to sell his system and patents to cash rich GE. Alexanderson recommended against purchase. GE made a low offer, and Farnsworth refused it. (445)
Some GE engineers were working on all-electronic television. For example, Camille Sabah, a Saudi Arabian born, MIT trained electrical engineer at the Schenectady Works obtained between 1925 and 1930 at least two patents on "cathode ray scan" TV systems. GE demonstrated an all electronic system in 1930. Then, however, as part of a 1932 government mandated settlement of old radio industry issues. GE sent its television effort to RCA. As a result, when it got back into television on its own account in 1938 GE was far behind RCA. (446)
GE also, as Packard and Ramo said, trailed in electronic device development. In the first electronics revolution, the vacuum tube revolution, GE had run neck and neck with AT&T. In the second, post-World-War 2 solid state electronics revolution, AT&T Bell Labs would invent the transistor, leaving GE in the dust.
In computing, University of Pennsylvania engineers built the first large scale digital computer, the ENIAC, and its principal inventors then commercialized it as the UNIVAC. IBM supported a competing approach at Harvard. Bell Labs sponsored the major digital conceptual and circuit advances at Bell Labs of George Stibitz and Claude Shannon. By contrast, GE did not move immediately into this new digital arena. Instead it built more immediately useful analog computers for its power businesses. Its digital computers in 1945 were still mainly women punching adding machines. (One of them, Marion Kellogg, would go on to become GE's first female Vice President).
GE's lags were not fatal. The nuclear, jet engine and digital computer areas were new and undefined. They offered plenty of opportunities for a fast follower. Immediately after World War II ended, GE launched those fast follower efforts. In aircraft engines, GE went to work on efforts at Schenectady and Lynn (which became its jet engine headquarters) on improving the British Whittle jet. At Schenectady a development program, Project Hermes, began the design of rocket engines and the development of new kinds of rocket fuels. This led to an initial government project in air-to-air missiles. In electronics, in 1948 GE created at Syracuse, NY, an Electronics Park devoted to development and manufacture of devices and products ranging from vacuum tubes to televisions. The "electronics czar" chosen to run it, Walter R. G. Baker was so highly respected within GE as a leader of the earlier radio and vacuum tube revolution that a close colleague credited him (erroneously) with coining the word "electronics". Baker was also an old style authoritarian who kept a bullwhip mounted on his office wall. Despite that, he was admired as a champion of new ideas. He helped create national standards for future color televisions, and led GE into such new fields of transistors and computers. (447)
In "atomic energy", henceforth, nuclear power, GE built on a 1946 opportunity. Du Pont had been in wartime the reluctant builder and operator of the giant secret plant at Hanford WA that produced plutonium. That human-made fissionable material was the explosive element of the Trinity bomb, and the planned basis for subsequent ones. Du Pont had, after producing gunpowder in World War I, been labeled a "Merchant of Death." To avoid a repeat, it sought to shed its World War II Hanford responsibilities as soon as possible. The government asked GE to take over. GE agreed, but only as part of a deal. It would take over Hanford if the government would build a separate $20 million GE-run nuclear power laboratory near Schenectady. That laboratory would explore peaceful uses of nuclear power, as a government contractor.
Even before this agreement, GE recruiters were heading for such wartime nuclear locations as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. They brought back members of the rising younger generation of nuclear physicists, the first such generation trained in the U. S. Examples were Harvard Ph.D. Henry Hurwitz, and Princeton Ph.D. Thomas Snyder. The most eminent of the new hires was George Placzek, a renowned theoretical physicist from Czechoslovakia. He spent 1946-1948 at GE in Schenectady before moving on to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Other Los Alamos veterans and future Nobel laureates, such as physicists Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, became GE consultants. (448)
In addition to these catch up efforts, the late 1940s were a great time for researchers already at GE to get a hearing for radical ideas. Two examples were an old idea, rain making, and a new one, automation. In 1947, GE researcher Vincent Schaefer demonstrated that if you dropped dry ice into cirrus clouds you could cause rain. Soon, with government support, GE's Project Cirrus was under way. It explored everything from seeding clouds to reduce the severity of hurricanes to putting a more effective seeding agent, silver iodide into clouds in New Mexico with the goal of making it rain thousands of miles away. Was weather control the next superweapon? No less a scientist than GE Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir claimed success in early long distance rainmaking experiments.
Meanwhile, at Schenectady, engineers were experimenting with a similarly explosive idea. This was using the new technology of magnetic recording to record the movements of a skilled machinist. Henceforth the recording could run the machine — the machinist was no longer needed. Soon the term "automation", of which this GE "record playback" technology was just one early example, drew widespread public concern. (449)
For both ideas, both optimism and fears soon proved overblown. Langmuir's long distance rainmaking proved an illusion. On the spot rainmaking proved scientifically valid but difficult to control. As for job-destroying automation, the record-playback technique did not prove practical. It was an analog approach to an automation future that would be dominated by the digital computer. The initial versions of that digital approach, called numerical control, initially proved too expensive for use in any but a few industries, such as aircraft and steam turbines. GE manager of industrial control Lou Rader recalls that the first numerical control his department built for one of GE's conventional businesses, Low Voltage Switchgear, experienced a 100% cost overrun, and he never got an order for the second. By the early 1950s, spurred by a big order from the Air Force, automation was firmly linked to the high-tech, high-cost defense businesses. GE's President would say:
We are not interested in making any product for the defense area that is easy to manufacture, that requires very little engineering. We are searching for items that require basic research and advanced development, that have enough direct labor content so that you can adequately tool up your shop and put in more and more automation or cybernetics as they call it in MIT — automatic processing of the product. (450)
GE's experience paralleled the rest of U.S. industry. Automation and numerical control remained in the 1950s and 1960s concentrated in the high technology end of the defense business. As late as 1980, only 5% of U.S. machine tools were run by numerical control. (451)
There was however, one immediate consequence of the two radical ideas, rainmaking and record playback. The inventor of silver iodide cloud seeding was a GE Research Lab physicist named Bernard Vonnegut. He was soon joined at the Schenectady Works by his brother, then on the mend from a traumatic war experience and failure as an anthropology graduate student. As a publicity writer for GE from 1948 to 1951 Kurt Vonnegut wrote press releases about such GE advances as the record playback machine. This became the basis of his first novel, Player Piano [free PDF viewer required] (1952). Its main character, Paul Proteus, echoed Charles Proteus Steinmetz. A subsequent novel, Cat's Cradle echoed brother Bernard's work on possible world shaking consequences from messing with water. A principal character in Cat's Cradle was recognizably based on Irving Langmuir. (452)
Despite the immediate collapse of its own radical ideas for making rain or making machinists obsolete, by the early 1950s GE had come a long way. No longer was it the electrical manufacturing company of 1892-1940, content to ride the electrification wave. Its sales had increased from $500 million in 1940 to over $3 billion in 1953. Even adjusting for inflation, this far exceeded its traditional rate of more than doubling its sales every decade. It also far outraced the growth of U.S. electricity use, and the growth of the U.S. GDP.
The difference between this newer Old GE and that older Old GE was the extent of diversification. By the early 1950s, GE was investing serious amounts of capital, both financial and human, in exploring a wider range of future possibilities than it had ever explored before — indeed, wider than it would ever explore again. From rockets to rainmaking it was seeking entry into technologies that might change the world.
Its product line might have been summed up in 1940 as 80% electrical manufacturing and 20% all other. By 1954 that product line rested by 1954 on four roughly balanced legs. About 25% was defense related products and services, heavily subsidized by the federal government. About 25% was products sold to the electric utility industry. About 25% was equipment and materials used by other industries. At a little more than 25% was its now biggest business, consumer products. GE had in 1945-1950 balanced markets and doubled down on diversification. These were not strategies cooked up in the office of the CEO, either by Swope or by Wilson. The new look of GE was an adaptation to Hot and Cold War.
Regarding people, the main thing to be adapted to was unions. They were not, as they had done after World War I, going away. Vanquishing, or neutering, unions became not an immediate but a long term goal. Hence Boulwarism. This program of "doing right voluntarily" was a way of operating within the letter of, while defying the spirit of, the Wagner Act. For all its controversy, Boulwarism would not be the main shaper of GE labor relations in the decade. Half of the labor now being related to was neither the "us" of the dominant union not the "them" of management .
Increasingly, standing between the two was the rapidly growing number of college trained professionals, especially engineers. A retrospective cross sectional hint at this demographic comes from a random sampling of 50 early 21st century Schenectady obituaries collected by GE's Elfun Society, of people who joined GE just before, during, or just after World War II.
Though GE was recruiting nationwide, 25 (50%) of those professionals were born in New York State, 8 (16%) of them in Schenectady. Only two were born West of the Mississippi and two overseas. Their college attendance also skewed local. Both RPI in nearby Troy, NY with 5 (10%) and Union in Schenectady with 4 (8%) edged out MIT with 3 (6%) as the top supplier of engineers and scientists. Only 2 (4%) went to prestigious top tier universities (one Columbia, one Stanford).
All but two were white (the exceptions being Asian-Americans), all male, and (based on their funeral arrangements) overwhelmingly Protestant, with some Catholics and two Jews. Twenty-two (44%) specifically listed wartime military service, with the most common specialty being pilot. That predominance of military service had a policy effect. From its early days, GE had initiated new engineers through that earlier described program called "the Test". It served three purposes. First, it was a source of low cost electrically knowlegeable people for testing newly manufactured apparatus. Second, doing this testing on the shop floor put the new engineers in daily face to face contact with shop workers, learning from their skills and experience and establishing mutual respect. Third, the Test smoothed the transition from college. The test men lived in fraternity-house-like lodgings, with such names as the Rut, the Monastery and Wimpy's. They took part in organized sports: golf or tennis at GE's Edison Club, baseball and basketball in GE leagues. In early decades a Test football team took the gridiron against local colleges. (453)
Lou Rader recalled that, though he came with a Ph. D. from Caltech, "when interviewed for my first job in GE in 1937, I opted for their factory floor test course instead of their research lab." He went on to conclude
Despite the hand dirtying work, looking back on my choice of industrial training causes me no regrets for as I later found when trouble-shooting designs, the knowledge accumulated in those months of testing was invaluable.
For the new crop of World War II veterans, these benefits of the Test became liabilities. The vets were older, more mature, often married, and eager to get started immediately on a career. This made a combination of menial labor and a college fraternity less attractive. "Returning veterans," said engineer Charlie Elston. "were not interested in dragging cable or cleaning oil tanks." In 1946 the Test was ended. With it something important was lost — a chance for GE's leaders to get to know, daily and face to face, those skilled people on the shop floor. (454)
So, in sum, returning to the question with which this chapter began, how did that transition from hot war to peace and cold war affect GE's policies, structure and products? In policies, GE moved from its 1935-1945 cooperation with unions to what it called, pompously and deceptively, "doing right voluntarily," a.k.a. Boulwarism. In structure GE belatedly began following the Chandlerian progression from unitary to decentralized form. Even before World War II, GE's unified structure and lack of an organization chart was becoming unwieldy. Once again a follower, GE followed such leaders as Du Pont and General Motors at choosing the multidivisional (M-form) structure. The particular twist GE put on that M-form would not become apparent until the mid-1950s, and will appear in the next chapter. Beside the unwieldiness of its unified structures the war had revealed other weaknesses. GE had lagged in electronics, had been a mere subcontractor on the first nuclear bombs, and had been perceived by manufacturing wizard Charlie Wilson as a mediocre manufacturer. The solution chosen to all this was not to focus in or specialize but to to diversify and double down.
In characterizing its products, changes were less a product of strategy than a result of adaptation. This new emphasis was exemplified in that decade in the 1950s both concretely and conceptually. Concretely, two brand new structures went up on the banks of New York's Mohawk River, five miles east of the Schenectady Works. Each cost tens of millions of dollars, and was capable of supporting the efforts of more than a thousand scientists, engineers, technicians, and support staffers. One was the new home of GE's now 50 year old corporate research laboratory, paid for with GE's own money. The other was the new GE-run Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (KAPL), paid for by the U.S. government.
Conceptually, GE public relations sought a corporate slogan that could express this diversified doubling down. The old "initials of a friend" was too folksy. The recently tried "you can put your confidence in General Electric" was too pedestrian. The question was: how do you tell the world that GE is moving in the right direction, when even GE did not yet know what that direction was? A next attempt got closer: "big business means big progress". It also, however, reminded people of recent antitrust crusades against big business. Better to get rid of any reminders of the curse of bigness. With that last tweak, the right approach had, in 1954, at last been found. A new slogan graced that year's Annual Report. "Progress," that report proclaimed, "is our most important product."
Notes
- W. M. Denny. Oral History undated. General Electric Hall of Electrical History, MiSci.
- Catton, Bruce. 1948. The War Lords of Washington, Harcourt Brace. p. 242, see also pp. 277-282.
- Koistinen, Paul. 2004. Arsenal of World War II. Kansas. p. 32.
- Hamby, Alonzo. 1973. Beyond the New Deal. Columbia. p. 446. Berman, William. 1970. The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration. Ohio State, p. 64, 70. Gardner, Michael. 2002. Harry Truman and Civil Rights. Southern Illinois.
- Olaf Vea Oral History, 24 Oct 1978. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.
- Harris, Howell. 1962. The Right to Manage. Wisconsin. pp. 32-44.
- Seidman, Joel. 1976. American Labor from Defense to Reconversion. Chicago, pp. 230-231.
- Matles, James, and Higgins, James. 1974. Them and Us. Beacon. pp. 140-141.
- Schenectady Union Star 25 Jan 1946 p. 21.
- Interview with Joe Mangino, 12 Aug 1983. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci. Schenectady Union Star 5 Feb 1946 p. 9.
- Schenectady Union Star 11 Feb 1946, 13 Feb 1946.
- Schenectady Union Star 13 Feb, 2 Mar 1946, p. 10.
- Lichtenstein, Nelson. 2013. A Contest of Ideas. Illinois. pp. 79,88.
- Schenectady Union Star 9 Feb 1946 p. 2.1
- Phillips-Fein, Kim. 2006. American Counterrevolutionary: Lemuel Ricketts Boulware. In Lichtenstein, Nelson. American Capitalism. pp. 249-270. See also Bella, Salvatore J. 1962. Boulwarism and Collective Bargaining at General Electric. Cornell U. Ph.D. Thesis, and Boulware, Lemuel. 1969. The Truth About Boulwarism. Bureau of National Affairs.
- Quirini, Helen. 1997. Helen Quirini and General Electric. [free PDF viewer required] Privately Printed.
- Charles Elston. Interview. 19 July 1984. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci. Schenectady Union Star 20 Feb 1946 p. 11.
- Alfred C. Stevens Interview. 26 Feb 1975. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.
- Interview with Olaf F. Vea, 24 Oct 1978, General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.
- Jim Peterson, "Charge to the Initiates", Pittsfield, MA 4/20/83. MiSci.
- Interview with Joe Mangino, 12 Aug 1983. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.
- Schenectady Gazette 17 Jan. 1944.
- Investigation of Communist Infiltration of UERMWA. 1948. Hearings Before a Special Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor. House of Representatives 80th Congress. September 2, 28 and 29, 1948, Schenectady NY. U.S. GPO.
- Investigation of Communist Infiltration of UERMWA. 1948. pp. 191-217.
- Investigation of Communist Infiltration of UERMWA. 1948 pp. 200-206.
- Investigation of Communist Infiltration of UERMWA. 1948. pp. 207-273
- Interview with Joe Mangino, 12 Aug 1983. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.
- Usdin, Steven T. 2009. The Rosenberg Ring Revealed. Journal of Cold War Studies. 11. 91-143. See especially p. 115.
- Bella, Salvatore J. 1962. Boulwarism and Collective Bargaining at General Electric. Cornell Ph.D. Thesis. pp. 194, 218.
- Chester H. Lang. 1954. GE Public Relations Services Division Management Conference. 6-7 Jan 1954. MiSci. GE Monogram. Winter 1953-54.
- UE News 11.18 Dec 1953. UE 301 Information Bulletin 11 Mar 1954. Local 301 File 858, UE Archives, U. of Pittsburgh.
- Study of Monopoly Power. Hearings Before the Committee on Judiciary of the House of Representatives. Nov 21-30, 1949. Serial #14. Part 2B. U.S. GPO. 1950.
- Testimony of Charles E. Wilson to Study of Monopoly Power. Hearings Before the Committee on Judiciary of the House of Representatives. Nov 21-30, 1949. Serial #14. Part 2B. U.S. GPO. 1950. p. 1185.
- Testimony of Charles E. Wilson to Hearings on the Study of Monopoly Power. 1949. House Committee on the Judiciary 81st Congress. 1st session. Washington, DC. pp. 1207-12. Trump's pardon is Described in Washington Times 10 Oct 2019.
- Works News 10 Jan 1931 p. 3. Quinn, T. K. 1948. I Quit Monster Business. Privately Printed.
- Study of Monopoly Power. Hearings Before the Committee on Judiciary of the House of Representatives. Nov 21-30, 1949. Serial #14. Part 2B. U.S. GPO. 1950. pp. 544-545.
- Study of Monopoly Power. Hearings Before the Committee on Judiciary of the House of Representatives. Nov 21-30, 1949. Serial #14. Part 2B. U.S. GPO. 1950. pp. 1164-65. Hay, Suellen. 1985. The Garbage Disposer, the Public Health, and the Good Life. Technology and Culture. 26. 758-784 is a well researched account of the garbage disposer (Disposall is its GE trade name) history.
- W. W. Beardslee. Oral History 15 Feb 1983. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.
- Packard, David. 1995. The HP Way. Harper Collins. p. 27. Malone, Michael S. 2007. Bill and Dave. Penguin. pp. 48-52.
- Ramo, Simon. 1988. The Business of Science. Hill & Wang pp. 21-28. Cecil and Ida Green. Benefactors and Philanthropists. 1979. Web Site of Cecil and Ida Green Institute Astrophysics and Planetary Physics. Charles Sporck. 1984. Computer Museum Web Site.
- Study of Monopoly Power. Hearings Before the Committee on Judiciary of the House of Representatives. Nov 21-30, 1949. Serial #14. Part 2B. U.S. GPO. 1950. pp. 544-545. Kiplinger Magazine Feb 1947. Little Monitor Battles the Giants. p. 41-41.
- Fisher, David and Marshall. 1996. Tube: The Invention of Television. [free PDF viewer required] p. 156.
- Schenectady Gazette 2 April 1935. U.S. Patents 1,694,982 and 1,706,185. [free PDF viewer required] GE Historical File 54-10-54-24 MiSci. Series 1. Board of Directors Minutes. 22 Apr 1938. p. 23. My thanks to Chris Hunter for informing me about Sabah's work.
- Metcalf, George. 1992. Making Waves in the Information and Space Age. Binford and Mort. p. 27. W. R. G. Baker Oral History. Columbia U. Oral History Project.
- Gottvald, Ales. George Placzek. p. 62. Seminars were given at GE Schenectady Spring Summer 1946 by Bethe, Teller, Placzek and Feynman. Weisskopf, Victor. 1956. George Placzek, Theoretical Physicist. Science. 123. 409.
- On Rainmaking, see Fleming, James Rodger. 2012. Fixing the Sky. Columbia. On Automation see Louis T. Rader, Interview with A. C. Stevens, 5 April 1983, General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci, and Rader, "Automation Over the Years," unpublished manuscript, 6 Nov 1980.
- Cordiner, Ralph. Remarks. GE Services Management Meeting 1954.
- "The Machine Shop Computer Arrives at Last", Business Week, September 13, 1976, 44R; Robert W. Breiken, the NC Story, GE General Management Meeting, 1/15/84, SN, General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci; GE Monogram, Winter, 1987, p. 14. Interview with John Cassidy, 7 October 1986.
- Strand, Ginger. 2015. The Brothers Vonnegut. MacMillan.
- Furnas, J. C. 1941. How America Lives. Holt. p. 55.
- Rader, Louis T. 1980. Automation over the Years. Unpubl. MiSci. Charlie Elston Oral History. 19 July 1984. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci. Interview with Joseph I. Whittlesey, Feb 4, 1985. General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci.