Business & Finance: Meetings

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Once each year, in theory, the legal owners of a corporation assemble for an accounting of the stewardship of their property. In practice the annual stockholders' meeting is largely a matter of form. Only with the greatest difficulty can stockholders be persuaded to sign enough proxies for a quorum, let alone attend in person. The few stockholders who do attend can do little except talk, since the majority of the shares are generally voted, not by disinterested stockholder representatives, but by a management primarily interested in staying in office. Almost nothing short of scandal ever bestirs the absentee owners to a concerted effort to exercise any real control over their company's affairs. It is much easier for a dissatisfied shareholder to sell his stock and get out. Last week the season for these well-rehearsed assemblies was in full swing.

Steel. For U. S. Steel's annual meeting Chairman Myron Charles Taylor and a battalion of executives, clerks, lawyers and pressagents piled into a Manhattan subway one morning last week, dived under the Hudson River to Hoboken, N. J. where U. S. Steel maintains its legal residence. Among stockholders awaiting Mr. Taylor's arrival was one William Snelling, a knickerbockered 14-year-old from Allentown, Pa. who said he was in the ink business with his younger brother. Having bought one share of U. S. Steel for $30 in 1932 and watched it climb to last week's price of $71, Stockholder Snelling wanted to find out how Steel ran its business.

Aside from hearing that Chairman Taylor had as yet arrived at no definite plans for payment of U. S. Steel's $58,000,000 preferred dividend arrears, Stockholder Snelling learned little about his company that he could not have found out from published sources. Mr. Taylor's address was largely confined to sonorous generalities on the past & present of the Corporation. "In times of peace and war," intoned the handsome, dignified chairman, "it has advanced American corporate practice upon the road to ultimate perfection."

One stockholder thought that the company was still short of perfection, objecting bitterly to the salaries of Mr. Taylor ($161,000) and President William A. Irvin ($102,000). Instead of offering in rebuttal the noteworthy fact that Steel's ratio of total executive salaries to average profits has been among the lowest in the land, Mr. Taylor declared: "I think that many of us take too narrow a view on the whole salary question. I do not like anyone to attack the salaries that this corporation's executives receive. I resent it."

Among those who enjoyed U. S. Steel's annual luncheon was a grimy unemployed who slipped into the meeting unobserved, dozed through the morning session, wolfed all the food he could, crammed his pockets with sandwiches and sauntered quietly out.