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This is the first year that Lever could rightfully speak in half-century terms but both the plaintiffs are accustomed to rolling off a round century or more, William Colgate sold his first cake of soap in his little Manhattan shop 128 years ago. For three generations the Colgates ruled Colgate, their hegemony ending with the Palmolive-Peet merger in 1928. As late as 1931 the company was selling $90,000,000 worth of Palmolive, Cashmere Bouquet, Octagon soaps, tooth paste, shaving cream and whatnot. But profits dropped from $8,900,000 to a slight deficit in 1932. That was the signal for the return of the Colgates. S. (for Samuel; Bayard Colgate, 36, was elected president, and a management representing stock control stepped in. A quiet, clear-headed great-grandson of the founder, President Colgate has been house-cleaning ever since—with the result that in the first six months of the year C. P. P. made $2,400,000 against $765,000 in the 1933 half.
Procter & Gamble may be many years the junior of Colgate but its profits are bigger, more consistent. Its peak year, curiously, was 1931 when it rolled up a profit of $22,600,000. Even last year it made $14,000,000. Until last spring P. & G. was always headed by a descendant of one of the two Cincinnati founders, with the Procters generally in the ascendency. But Chairman William Cooper Procter died childless and the management is now in the hands of Richard Redwood Deupree, a conservative steeped in good Procter paternalism.
The South Bend trial could hardly be described in terms of two venerable soapmakers ganging a struggling competitor. The assets of Britain's Lever Brothers Ltd. are $175.000,000 larger than the assets of P. & G. and Colgate combined. Its profits last year footed up to £6,200,000—about $31,000,000. Lever's properties are so far flung that at the annual meeting last April the chairman had a map of the world on the wall behind him with Lever plants —and plantations—picked out with tiny colored electric bulbs. When the chairman pushed one button, green lights showed the extent of Lever interests at the death of Lord Leverhulme. Red lights revealed subsequent additions. Finally all were flashed, showing 36 bulbs in Britain & Ireland, 21 on Continental Europe, 18 in Africa, eight in North America, two in South America, one at an Antarctic whaling station on the Island of South Georgia, 13 in Australasia, seven scattered through the Far East and India.
William Lever was the seventh child but first son of a Bolton wholesale grocer. He soon tired of gigging about the countryside selling groceries, decided to go into soap. Unlike Harley Procter who had a soap before he had a name,* William Lever had a registered name (Sunlight) before he had the soap. By 1888 he was breaking ground for Port Sunlight, the first of his countless adventures in "enlightened self-interest." The biggest was his Congo adventure into which, in his restless search for raw materials, he plunged in 1910. He acquired from Belgium millions of acres of palm-fertile jungle which the late great imperialist King Leopold II had opened for exploitation.