I dunno... a corporation sharing profits with its workers and treating them fairly? By today's standards in the US a lot of people would think that was soCiAlisM!
1919 Red Scare Era WDC Pipe Advertisement
- Thread starter Briar Lee
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Human nature is immutable and unchanging.
Neanderthal women bitched that the Jones next door had a better cave.
I had a dear old friend named Jack who owned a factory that produced marker balls to put on power wires, which are there to warn low flying pilots of wires.
Jack used to say, the only effective advertisement appeals to sex or fear of death.
And I’d say what about more money, Jack?
He’d reply having more money is a sure way to live longer and have better sex.
His most effective advertisement was a testimonial he recieved from a pilot that simply said:
Dear Jack
Your balls saved my life
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I missed this thread back in 2023, but glad it was revived.
What a fascinating article as was the Leitch system of labor management.
Triumph motorcycles went thru a similar upheaval in the late 1970's and finally closed in 1983.
The workers locked the gates and tried to buy the factory. My former neighbor, a DC area Triumph dealer was selected to go to England by the US dealer group to try and buy the factory from bankruptcy. They raised a million dollars. He showed me his typed business plan. When he met with the Bank of England, they changed the price to $2M, which they couldn't meet.
Yesterday I got in two Bertram pipes and I realize now, what I’ve been missing in fit and finish of aged , unstained, unvarnished and unpainted Algerian briar pipes. I have four Bertrams now, and each one looks like it was made by elves in the heart of Washington DC.
I had the same revelation the day my daughter bought a dead perfect 10 year old Mercedes and I crawled under it and then detailed the interior. And it occurred to me that above a Mercedes is a Rolls Royce.
We read the 1950 Bertram catalog and they were bragging about hiring disabled veterans. Can you even imagine such boasting today? Think of all the heroes who dodged all the bullets. To hire a disabled veteran meant an able bodied one had to seek employment elsewhere.
But we read on to discover that the neighbor hood Bertram’s was in became seedy, and the 1968 riots were the last straw for the Bertram widow who owned the business, and some of the workers bought the company and made Bertram pipes another decade or so.
Too bad Gerald Ford didn’t take out his World War Two officer’s uniform and stage a huge press event on the White House lawn to promote Bertram’s. Maybe he didn’t want to offend Kaywoodie.
I was in Washington DC in late July 1977.
If I’d heard of Bertram’s I’d have visited, the same way we drove on to visit Billy Carter’s gas station in Plains Georgia and bought a Papst Blue Ribbon beer I still use for a coin bank. Jimmy Carter was proud of his brother, and I still have a photo of Billy handing 19 year old me a Pabst.
Bertram’s might have gone on a while longer employing disabled veterans than 1978, if the Presidents would have promoted Bertram.
But really, the public doesn’t care much about crippled soldiers anymore.
Sing one Merle
Me and Crippled Soldiers
I had the same revelation the day my daughter bought a dead perfect 10 year old Mercedes and I crawled under it and then detailed the interior. And it occurred to me that above a Mercedes is a Rolls Royce.
We read the 1950 Bertram catalog and they were bragging about hiring disabled veterans. Can you even imagine such boasting today? Think of all the heroes who dodged all the bullets. To hire a disabled veteran meant an able bodied one had to seek employment elsewhere.
But we read on to discover that the neighbor hood Bertram’s was in became seedy, and the 1968 riots were the last straw for the Bertram widow who owned the business, and some of the workers bought the company and made Bertram pipes another decade or so.
Too bad Gerald Ford didn’t take out his World War Two officer’s uniform and stage a huge press event on the White House lawn to promote Bertram’s. Maybe he didn’t want to offend Kaywoodie.
I was in Washington DC in late July 1977.
If I’d heard of Bertram’s I’d have visited, the same way we drove on to visit Billy Carter’s gas station in Plains Georgia and bought a Papst Blue Ribbon beer I still use for a coin bank. Jimmy Carter was proud of his brother, and I still have a photo of Billy handing 19 year old me a Pabst.
Bertram’s might have gone on a while longer employing disabled veterans than 1978, if the Presidents would have promoted Bertram.
But really, the public doesn’t care much about crippled soldiers anymore.
Sing one Merle
Me and Crippled Soldiers
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What do you mean by missing and fit and finish? Do you just mean that it is really nice on those versus other pipes that use Algerian Briar?
Mine were made by elves and sprinkled with fairy dust I'm pretty sure
What do you mean by missing and fit and finish? Do you just mean that it is really nice on those versus other pipes that use Algerian Briar?
Mine were made by elves and sprinkled with fairy dust I'm pretty sure
Here’s what best grade quality really means.
In 1950, the disabled veterans at Bertram were making pipes ONLY from aged, unstained, unvarnished and unpainted Algerian briar, from $1.50 to $25.
So that meant the more a pipe cost, the better grade of briar and more artistic the fit and finish, until the very top grade, which was the best grade.
Assuming that Bertram stayed true to their formula by 1978 a $25 grade in 1950 would have been nearly $70 in 1978.
When I visited the Capitol Mall in 1977 the tour bus driver warned us under no circumstances should we stray off the mall, because the surrounding neighborhood was dangerous.
We had to spend $75 for a cheap hotel 30 miles out and ride a tour bus into Washington DC.
But if I’d known that a hundred dollar bill could have bought the finest pipe in America if not the world, I’d have risked a visit to Bertram’s.
If those veterans had lost their legs in our service I’d have braved hurting my feet walking a block to pay them back just a little.
In 1977 I was 19 and received about a hundred dollars each month as Social Security Survivors benenfits.
And my mother wore $200 outfits every day as a school teacher, a different one each day.
Times were really good in 1977.
The DJs nearly wore out Lukenbach that summer.
Luckenbach Texas
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actually the Taiping rebellion took more lives.We have our problems today, but in 1919 the modern western democracies had just ended the bloodiest and most costly war in human history, the greatest pandemic since the Black Death, Spanish Flu, had killed at least 50 million souls, there was rampant inflation, anarchist bombings, labor unrest, Russia had fallen to communism, and the USA was in the middle of the First Red Scare.
First Red Scare - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
You might relax with a Bud Light and read how the advertising agency for WDC pipes, the world’s largest pipe maker, ran an ad campaign in 1919:
Where Pipe Democracy Reigns Supreme
View attachment 223194
They should have invented the Drinkless fitting instead , so that every man could smoke a pipe.
View attachment 223196
Can you imagine that much democracy in any factory today?
And if they did, they surely couldn’t brag about it.
Dunhill really should have used Stalin to promote their pipes.
“After all, 20 million dead Russians can’t be wrong!”
“After all, 20 million dead Russians can’t be wrong!”
BTW, there are still many employee-owned businesses in the US. And many, many companies that hire military veterans, disabled or not.
Which is not the same as a corporation sharing profits with its workers and treating them fairly, or hiring specifically disabled vets. I wonder how many there are of either of these types today?
I dunno.
Maybe you should try starting a company like that, see how it goes?
There is nothing stopping organized labor from owning businesses. Unions could run the companies exactly the same way as they’ve been telling companies to do for the past 100+ years.
What could possibly go wrong?
the whole regime was really just a marketing stunt.
Well, apparently a lot of companies do have profit-sharing models, including Proctor & Gamble, Walgreens, Delta and Home Depot. Who knew. Not everything has to the exploitative Amazon-style model where you have minimum wage workers kept on part-time contracts so they can't benefit from legal protections that full-time workers get, not to mention healthcare, so Jeff Bezos can get obscenely richer by the second. He can still be an obscenely rich multi-billionaire while be a better employer. Same with sweatshops in China or India. It's a matter of degrees.
The companies that prosper create a market niche and advertise to appeals to sex and health.
I can find no trace of Estille Skinner.
She must have been one of the vestal virgins Bernays found and used.
——
The first campaign succeeded; women smoked more cigarettes; American Tobacco Company brought in more revenue; and Lucky Strike led the market in growth. But a taboo remained on women smoking in public. Bernays consulted with psychoanalyst Abraham Brill, a student of Freud's, who reported to him that cigarettes represented "torches of freedom" for women whose feminine desires were increasingly suppressed by their role in the modern world.[50]
Bernays wrote:[51]
en.m.wikipedia.org
Altruism and supporting the lame, the halt, and the disabled is no way to sell beer or cigarretes or whiskey or smoking pipes.
It might put Stars in Your Crown but it won’t sell sin.
I can find no trace of Estille Skinner.
She must have been one of the vestal virgins Bernays found and used.
——
The first campaign succeeded; women smoked more cigarettes; American Tobacco Company brought in more revenue; and Lucky Strike led the market in growth. But a taboo remained on women smoking in public. Bernays consulted with psychoanalyst Abraham Brill, a student of Freud's, who reported to him that cigarettes represented "torches of freedom" for women whose feminine desires were increasingly suppressed by their role in the modern world.[50]
Bernays wrote:[51]
Edward Bernays - Wikipedia
Altruism and supporting the lame, the halt, and the disabled is no way to sell beer or cigarretes or whiskey or smoking pipes.
It might put Stars in Your Crown but it won’t sell sin.
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I don't know where you live but in Maryland, Amazon was my worst enemy - they paid WAY more than minimum wage (which in MD is $15.25 and offer paid health insurance. They opened two distribution centers right in the middle of two of my restaurants. We pay above minimum (or we wouldn't have any employees) but they are constantly losing employees and managers to Amazon. They often come back, because the work is pretty demanding.
People work at Amazon by their own free will. They can leave at any time. It’s not a sheltered workshop. The world has voted with their wallets.