April Dividends

Stockholders in a few more than 500 U. S. corporations last week received and cashed dividend checks totaling more than $500,000,000 as their income for the first quarter of the year. More than 30 companies also declared extra dividends, notably American Safety Razor, Childs (restaurants), Coca-Cola, Pere Marquette R.R., Midland Steel, Humble Oil & Gas, St. Louis & San Francisco ("Frisco") R.R., United Fruit, Singer Sewing Machine. The largest extra dividend--$60 a share--was paid by a relatively obscure concern, Pratt & Whitney, manufacturers of aircraft.

Singer Manufacturing Co., which makes 80% of the sewing machines in the world and sells them through agencies in practically every community of the world, is one of the corporations which Professor William Zebina Ripley of Harvard scolded in his book Main Street and Wall Street-- for furnishing "neither hide nor hair of financial data ... in the usual sources of information." Singer officials are seemingly thus niggardly because their stock is closely owned by people, many of whom knew the founders of their corporation and remember the anecdote of how the late Inslee A. Hopper became their first president.

It was before the Civil War. Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-75) was a Yankee peddler hawking notions through Connecticut when he came across the lock stitch sewing machine that Elias Howe (1819-67) had invented in 1846. Peddler Singer made some modifications, upon which he got a patent in 1852. There were law suits, in which Edward A. Clark, Manhattan lawyer, represented Singer. Lawyer and client formed the Singer corporation. Mr. Hopper was their bookkeeper at $20 a week. To him they came. Said Singer: "Clark won't let me be president, and I swear I won't let him." Said Clark: "Our president ought to be a married man. The office requires some dignity. . . . Don't you know some nice girl that you would like to marry?" Mr. Hopper did know such a girl, married her.

*Published by Little, Brown ($2.50). The professor has compiled articles and statements that have appeared variously in the magazines and in TIME summaries. Together they make what he is pleased to call "a study in the relation of property to civilization." Some businessmen dislike his study.