Soap & Soap v. Soap

Thousands of housewives bought thousands of packages of Ivory Snow, of Supersuds or of Rinso, last week, with never a thought of who made those incipient soap bubbles, much less how they were made. But in the new Federal Building in South Bend, Ind., the process of spraying soft soap through a nozzle and having it dry before it falls engaged the million-dollar attention of a battalion of lawyers who represented four-fifths of the entire U. S. soap business. Brilliant Newton Diehl Baker led the mass-attack of Procter & Gamble (Ivory Snow) and Colgate-Palmolive-Peet (Supersuds) against Lever Brothers Co. (Rinso) for alleged infringement of patents.

Filed nearly four years ago, the complaint asks for injunctions, an accounting of Rinso profits, additional punitive damages and the destruction of all Rinso machinery. For the British-owned, U. S. managed defendant, Chicago's Frank Parker Davis, famed patent lawyer, was ready to do his part.

Across the hall from the court room, a library was hastily converted into a theatre where reels of soapmaking film were screened for the benefit of Federal Judge Thomas Whitten Slick, whose brother Albert runs a big South Bend laundry. As the trial progressed last week the court adjourned across the street to an office building where Lawyer Baker had installed complete laboratories. There white-coated chemists practiced the art of soapmaking at long tables groaning with beakers, bottles, vials, tubes. Most elaborate in the history of the Northern Indiana district court, the trial was expected to last three weeks.

Anybody with a few pennies and a big pot can make soap from fat and caustic soda. The only trick is to make the soap strong enough to take off the dirt but not so strong as to take off the skin. Selling soap is another matter. And soap is moulded, colored, perfumed, chipped, flaked, powdered and blown through the end of a nozzle for the sole purpose of making a housewife buy one soap instead of another. Indeed, the defense went further last week, arguing that the form of Ivory Snow, Supersuds or Rinso had little to do with their extraordinary success: it was only the advertising that counted.

Nevertheless, the biggest U. S. soap company and the second biggest were determined to fight it out against the third biggest, which is an important affiliate of Britain's utterly fabulous soap trust. P. & G. and Colgate had acquired the patents with an eye to competing with Lever's Rinso; but no sooner was the product on the market, said the plaintiffs, than Lever began to alter the form of Rinso, eventually hitting on practically the same process. Last week Lever contended that spray-drying was an old, old idea, that its own patents went back for half a century.

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 -L-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.

Often compared to Henry Ford, William Lever was Britain's most famed mass-production, short hours and high pay-man. He sold senior securities to the public, but not a share of the ordinary (common) stock left his vault until four years after his death when Margarine Union, the Dutch margarine trust, was merged with Lever Brothers as Unilever, Ltd. When he was raised to the Peerage, he simply added his wife's maiden name to his own, becoming Lord Leverhulme. When a grateful Throne raised the energetic little soapman to a viscountcy he became Leverhulme, 1st Viscount of the Western Isles, which included two of the Hebrides which he had bought with the idea of improving the natives' lot.

Methodical, the Soap Lord kept daily records of the cigars he smoked, the wine he drank, the exercise he took. When he rode on one of his numerous estates, he always walked his horse to precisely the same point, then trotted to another designated point and so on. Once in a great while he cantered.

His son, Leverhulme, 2nd Viscount of the Western Isles, is now governor of Lever Brothers Ltd. And the Honorable Philip William Bryce Lever, 19, will inherit the kingdom of soap.

*Ivory occurred to Soapman Procter in church while listening to Psalm 45:8: "All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad."

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