BOOKS
109
that only 60 of the 200 corporations "were without a visible center of
ownership control," while in the remaining 140 "the blocks of stock in
the
hands of one interest group were large enough to justify, together
with
other indications such as representation in the managment, their
classification as ... under ownership control." It is true that 60 of these
140
were controlled by other corporations, and that the study unfortu·
nately does not trace the control of these parent corporations, some or
many of which may themselves
be
without "a visible center of ownership
control." On the other hand, there are
invisible
"centers of ownership
control" which even a government committee, while it has much better
means of extracting information than private investigators like Berle
and Means had, may be unable to locate in the maze of dummy share·
holdings, trustees, and so on. Also, no less than 40 of these 200 super·
corporations are controlled by "one-family interest groups" (Ford, Du–
Pont, Mellon, Rockefeller, Duke, McCormick, etc.).
Drucker, however, writes as though the ownership of big business
were spread fairly evenly among millions of small stockholders, and as
though U. S. Steel or American Telephone
&
Telegraph, where no one
ltockholder has as much as 1
ro
of the total stock outstanding, were the
typical great corporations.
If
these were the case, then indeed the mana–
gers
would have
ll
field day of "unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and
irresponsible power." But it would seem that the Mellons' Aluminum
Company or the DuPont's General Motors are more typical, and that
American big business is owned and controlled by a fairly tightly knit
oligarchy. The T.N.E.C. monograph reveals (p. 5) that 60% of the
common stock of the 200 corporations was held by the top 1% of the
ltockholders, and that less than 75,000 of the eight to nine million stock–
holders in
all
nonfinancial corporations got half the total dividends.
h would thus appear that ownership is still concentrated enough to
CODtrol management, and that, from Drucker's conservative standpoint,
the
modern big corporation provides a "legitimate" basis for power.
The
whole question, of course, is very complicated and other important
data
could be brought up on each side. But in any case there is insuffi–
cient basis for such grandiose conclusions as Drucker, and Burnham,
have drawn.
I'm sure this will be welcome news to Drucker, who can now with–
draw his most serious criticism of the present American economic system.
He
is
not a man to bear down unduly hard on the powers that be. He is
mn able to find a few kind words for the "illegitimate" managers (who
DOW
happily turn out to be legitimate after all). "There has never been,"
he
writes on p. 99 with his usual moderation, "There has never been a
110re
efficient, a more honest, a more capable and conscientious group
of
rulers than the professional management of the great American cor·
porations today."
The line of Drucker's second proposition is carried back to the
!ipteenth
Century:
Far
from being the roots of freedom, the Enlightenment and the
