'Era of Expediency' Exposed:
MORGAN, EDWARD P.
'Era of Expediency' Exposed By Edward P Morgan The American corporate morality got a caustic going-over in Federal court in Philadelphia last week-and it was high time. The split personality...
...In a sad hut memorable scene before Chief U.S...
...a member of a hospital board...
...Not unsympathetically, Judge Ganey saw them torn "between conscience and an approved corporate policy" wherein the company man, the conformist "who goes along with his superiors finds balm for his conscience in additional comforts and the security of his place in the corporate set-up...
...Attorneys for the defendants stressed as mitigating circumstances that their clients were pillars of their communities...
...The Justice Department has already prepared similar suits on behalf of the Government where bids were elaborately rigged on Federal contracts...
...In a very real sense, however, the country shares the guilt of these men and their companies...
...Perhaps this signals an additional need for revision of the tax laws so that incentive may become more legitimate, but more is involved here than taxable technicalities...
...The split personality of the organization man has haunted the American dream long enough...
...This is the era of expediency for material gain and under the expense-account psychology almost anything goes...
...What is really at stake here," Judge Ganey said, "is the survival of the kind of economy under which America has grown to greatness, the free enterprise system...
...But the damages and the punishment are not as important as the conditions, the attitudes of the society in which the violations were committed...
...Judge Ganey also noted that the taxpayers were saved the expense of possibly endless litigation by the fact that both corporate and individual defendants "faced up to the situation realistically" and admitted their guilt...
...The Eisenhower years may be generally remembered or regretted as the heyday of the "business Administration in Washington...
...Some extent of the vastness of the schemes for price fixing, bid rigging and job allocations can be gleaned from the fact that the annual corporate sales covered by these bills of indictment represent a billion and three-quarter dollars...
...And pillars they were: a deacon of a church...
...The conduct of the corporate and individual defendants alike . . has flagrantly mocked the image of that economic system of free enterprise which we profess to the country...
...In a biting pre-sentence statement he said: "One would be most naive indeed to believe that these violations of the law, so long persisted in, affecting so large a segment of the industry and finally, involving so many millions upon millions of dollars, were facts unknown to those responsible for the conduct of the corporation...
...Not only ethics but criminal violations of the law were involved in the case...
...In the face of these admissions, there can be no appeal from the sentences...
...The occasion was the sentencing of seven business executives to prison terms and the fining of their corporations-whose trademarks are largely household words in electrical equipment-after all had pleaded guilty or no defense to charges of conspiring to fix bids and prices in the biggest anti-trust case on record...
...Judge James Cullen Ganey for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the corrosively hypocritical though widely accepted practice of going to church on Sunday and being unethical the rest of the week received its come-uppance...
...Accordingly, he fined the companies heavily...
...But the fact is that these prosecutions of the electrical industry were originated and pressed by the Justice Department under a Republican Attorney General, William Rogers, and the judge went out of his way to commend Rogers' anti-trust ace, young Assistant Attorney General Robert Bicks, who spearheaded the action...
...We cannot compete with Communism on these terms because we are converting liberty to license...
...Let not only the business community but labor unions, bureaucrats and even bridge clubs take deeply to heart the lesson that Judge Ganey has so sharply pointed up...
...a chief fund raiser for the Community Chest...
...While the Justice Department prosecutors were unable to pin specific charges on the topmost officials of General Electric, Westinghouse and others, Judge Ganey did not spare them with his words...
...Edward P. Morgan reports nightly on the American Broadcasting network...
...a Chamber of Commerce president...
...With grasping greed we have been threatening a way of life...
...In addition, those industrial customers conspiratorily over-charged for electrical equipment may bring civil suits for treble damages...
...a sponsor of local Little League baseball teams-all respected and presumably respectable men, with their sons and daughters in the best colleges...
Vol. 44 • February 1961 • No. 8
