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The W. L. Douglas Shoe Company: Background of a Recent Merger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Charles W. Chatfield
Charles W. Chatfield
Affiliation:
E. C. A., Industry Division, Paris, France
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Extract

The W. L. Douglas Shoe Company, founded in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1876, achieved an outstanding success as the first shoemanufacturing company to establish its own chain of retail stores. After World War I, however, the company entered a long and dreary decline which resulted finally in its removal to another state and its eventual sale to another company. This recent merger, with Arthur Million, Inc., a subsidiary of the General Shoe Corporation, marks the end of W. L. Douglas as an independent company.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1950 , pp. 159 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1950

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References

1 The Boy Who Pegged Shoes, privately printed by the W. L. Douglas Shoe Company, p. 12.

2 Ibid., p. 7.

3 Ibid., p. 10.

4 Hazard, Blanche E., The Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industries in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, 1921), p. 93.Google Scholar

5 Hoover, E. M. Jr, Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industries (Cambridge, 1937), p. 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Idem.

7 Idem.

8 Quoted in The Boy Who Pegged Shoes, p. 11.

9 Hazard, op. cit., pp. 121, 145 ff.

10 Hoover, op. cit., p. 231.

11 Ibid., p. 232.

12 An excellent historical analysis of this subject is found in Hoover's Location Theory and the Shoe and Leather Industries, pp. 159 ff.

13 Ibid., p. 233.

14 This was a book figure, probably carried over from the Maine company.

15 For information about the Brotherhood, I am indebted to its founder and first president, John Murphy.

16 Labor trouble in Brockton had recurred intermittently from about 1923. When the Douglas company had asked for a wage cut in that year and the State Board had assented, a reaction had occurred. A wildcat strike, starting in the cutting room had spread through the factory and had lasted for 14 weeks. It had been defeated mainly because the workers had been striking against both management and the union organization. Some strikers had been fined, others had been fired, and the wage cut had been put into effect. The importance of the strike had been not in the outcome but in the expression it gave to the general worker dissatisfaction with B. S. W. U. policy.

In 1929, after settling a Cincinnati strike to the satisfaction of both labor and the union, John J. Mara had been elected to the presidency of the Boot and Shoe Workers Union. He had promised more local autonomy but had found that, to maintain control of a national union, some degree of centralization was required. The mobility of the shoe industry for one thing, had often made the militant attitude, so characteristic of local rule, dangerous to the interests of both the town and the workers in the town. By 1933, when the B. S. W. U. was replaced, Mara's attitude and policy had come to approximate that of former incumbents.

17 Quoted in The Brockton Enterprise and Times, January 11, 1934.

18 Annual Statements of the W. L. Douglas Shoe Company.

19 Leather and Shoe Financial Statements, 1939, 1940.

20 Moody's Industrials, 1950.

21 Conversation between Mr. Joseph W. Bartlett and Mr. T. R. Navin, September 18, 1950.

22 New York Times, June 1, 1950.