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Bat'a facts are that the company has been selling this year for $1.50 shoes which it sold ten years ago for $6.60. Of the 23,000 working partners in Zlin last February, about one-third have had to be discharged from partnership, leaving some 15,000 still employed in Zlin last week. But there are Bat'a branches in 27 foreign countries. The total of Bat'a working partners throughout the world still exceeds 25,000. In 1931 the Bat'a plants were turning out 150,000 pairs of shoes daily (latest available figures) compared to the 190,000 daily production of U. S. International Shoe Co. (world's largest) in the same year.
Direct and simple, the Bat'a saga is the story of a will-to-power. When he was 18 Thomas Bat'a, the humble cobbler's son, was managing his own shoe factory with 50 working partners. He drank milk, urged them to drink milk, ruled them for what he conceived to be their own good (and his) with a will of iron. Today Zlin boasts the largest per capita per day consumption of milk on earth.
"Mr. Bat'a was devoid of sentiment except in one matter—that of the Bohemian Union Bank," said Director Vavrecka last week. "It was the Olmutz branch of that bank which 30 years ago extended him the loan that proved to be the turning point of his career. Till the day of his death Mr. Bat'a insisted that all the business of his huge concern should go through the little Olmutz branch bank."
Enemies of Thomas Bat'a called him a Wartime profiteer. Certainly the marching feet of Kaiser Franz Josef's men wore out millions of Bat'a shoes. After the feet ceased to march and the Austrian Empire collapsed Thomas Bat'a took his profits across the Atlantic, opened a shoe factory at Lynn, Mass, in 1922, learned all the tricks of Fordized technique. When the new Czechoslovakian Republic had been safely launched, Mr. Bat'a moved the machinery of his Lynn factory to Zlin in 1924.
Soon, despite mounting U. S. tariffs, he began and continued to offer Bat'a shoes in the U. S. at a price some 30% below U. S. cost of production. He pushed his cheap, Fordized shoes turned out by cheap Czechoslovak labor not only into the U. S. but into most of the countries of Europe and Asia. In Manhattan R. H. Macy & Co. sell Bat'a shoes, in Cleveland, The May Co. But in Chicago Marshall Field & Co. no longer handle Bat'a shoes, which are now sold there by 28 Bat'a stores.
As a supersalesman Tycoon Bat'a had at his disposal a fleet of ten airplanes strategically located. He used to boast to competitors, "The reason why you do not get ahead and I do is because you travel in wheelbarrows, while I travel in air planes." During most of the night before his death, Salesman Bat'a worked over the terms of a shoe contract he hoped to close in Switzerland. Rising at 5 a. m. he fumed at the fog & mist which made a take-off risky. Twice the pilot refused his mas ter's order to start. Finally at 6:30 a. m. Bat'a said, "We must start!"
What was there to fear? Bat'a, who had already flown more than 20,000 miles, was more than willing to take what seemed to him the smallest of chances. The plane's engine roared. It thundered across the perfectly smooth Bat'a Airfield, be gan to climb, disappeared into the mist.