The Giants

Up before a House subcommittee last week strode the Federal Trade Commission's Lowell B. Mason. Under his arm was a new FTC report on the concentration of economic power in the U.S. Brooklyn's Congressman Emanuel Celler considered the 96-page report important enough to call his subcommittee into special session to hear it. What the committee heard was a collection of giant-sized facts.

At the end of 1947, Mason reported, almost half of the U.S. net capital assets was controlled by just 113 corporations. There were 13 industries in which better than 60% of all manufacturing facilities were owned by three companies in each industry.

Some of the examples of control were old stuff. It would surprise few that U.S. aluminum-producing facilities were completely dominated by Alcoa, Reynolds Metals and-Henry Kaiser's Permanente Metals; that the Big Four tobacco companies--American Tobacco, Liggett & Myers, R. J. Reynolds, P. Lorillard--owned 87.8% of all the industry's manufacturing facilities; that Armour and Swift controlled 54.7% of U.S. meat-packing capital assets.

But many businessmen might blink at the narrow control in some industries not usually mentioned in the same breath with aluminum or tobacco. Carpetmakers, for example, were dominated by four firms, Alexander Smith & Sons, James Lees & Sons, Bigelow-Sanford and Mo hawk Carpet, which owned 57.9% of the industry's productive facilities. National Biscuit Co. controlled 46.3% of all net capital assets in its industry in 1947. Armstrong Cork owned 57.9% of all the land, buildings and equipment in the linoleum industry. "Two giant organizations virtually preempt" the making of tin cans, charged the FTC report, with American Can Co. and Continental Can Co. sealing up a total of 92.1% of productive assets.

(Some of the more familiar targets for trustbusters, according to the FTC survey, showed a much greater spread in control. U.S. Steel, for example, owned only 28.6% of the steel industry's net capital assets.)

FTC made no recommendations on what should be done about the trend to bigness. But Committee Chairman Celler thought that the antitrust statutes should be tightened up. His subcommittee will take testimony from Government bureaus, labor leaders and industrialists for the remainder of the year, and will probably have a fresh batch of antitrust legislation ready for Congress next January.

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