Last month Corporation Heckler Lewis D. Gilbert, who holds 80 of the 3,250,000 voting shares of American Tobacco Co. stock, moved that American's famously generous bonus to officers should be cut. President George Washington Hill, whose bonus was $300,300 for 1939 (plus a $120,000 salary) threatened to resign if the Gilbert resolution passed. (TIME, March 11). Last week, of American's 15,000 voting stockholders, 91 marched into a small, stuffy room in Jersey City for the annual meeting, soon veiled it with smoke from free Lucky Strikes. Absent were holders of 2,174,671 votes whose proxies were held by President Hill's...
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