Business: Fertilizer Fight (Cont'd)

• Share

The battling fertilizer men of Virginia Carolina Chemical Corp. last week staged a new and surprising session of their long extended civil war. Last autumn Director George S. Kemp of Richmond brough about a complete management turnover with a new president, a new vice president and a new directorate, of which he was himself a member (TIME, Oct. 21 et seq.) In Richmond last week, while two polio sergeants saw to it that nothing more potent than personalities were exchanged, the anti-Kemp factor won a completely decisive victory. Headed by Alphonso Lyn Ivey, ousted from the presidency in October, they got rid of Kemp-President F. Swift Gibson, Kemp-Vice President Gustavus Ober Jr., and eight Kemp directors, including Boss Kemp himself. Then Mr. Ivey went back into the presidency, along with the men who had served under him as vice president and as treasurer, precisely restoring the status quo ante.

Mr. Kemp fought a defensive as well as a losing battle. He did not even attend the stockholders' meeting. His side contented itself with refusing to send in proxies in the hope that the meeting would fail to establish a quorum. After much last-minute proxy hunting, the Ivey-men established their quorum and the managerial casualties began. The victors sent the losers a resolution which, in effect, asked them please not to take the new elections to court, as the company had already done enough quarreling. "They must be afraid," commented Mr. Kemp, "otherwise they would not have passed such a resolution." Mr. Kemp also said that the conduct of the meeting was "chockfull of errors," and that "they have built up a beautiful legal case for us." He did not say whether he would take his case to court.

President Ivey was Virginia-Carolina's counsel in 1932, when internal troubles over a proposed merger with an Armour & Co. fertilizing subsidiary brought Mr. Kemp to the fore and began Virginia-Carolina's warfare. A tightlipped, poker-faced Baptist, Mr. Ivey is 50, a Georgia farm-boy with a law degree from Columbia University who was "reared between the plough-handles." 1886-1936 "At the annual meeting in 1886, Mr. Coolidge, then Treasurer, called your attention to the trend of [the cotton] industry southward. In 1889, 1891, 1896 and 1897 he stressed the same idea, pointing out the South's advantages in the low cost of labor, freight and taxes, and in few restraining laws. . . , "Despite attractive opportunities to liquidate, the management has carried or against what to some may seem sounder judgment and advice. ... No management is competent to operate a plant like this, handicapped with existing wage differentials. No management could by any ingenuity overcome the $2.56 average labor differential . . . particularly fatal to us, as we have no mills in the South. . . .

"New England has lost its prestige . . . 80% of the country's cotton spinning is done outside New England. . . . [Our problems] are beyond the power of the management to solve."