William C. Procter

William Cooper Procter inherited a soap company and a famous name, and might easily have spent his life as a comfortable Cincinnati gentleman collecting dividends from Ivory ^[5][6]. Instead, the grandson of one of the firm's two founders turned Procter & Gamble into a laboratory for a radical proposition: that the surest path to industrial peace and rising output was to make the worker a partner, first in the profits, then in the stock, and finally in the security of his own job ^[5][6][7]. Over a career that ran from the factory floor in 1883 to the chairmanship he held until his death in 1934, he carried the company from a regional soap maker into one of the great consumer-products corporations of America, with sales rising from roughly $20 million when he became president in 1907 to more than $200 million by the time he stepped down as chief executive in 1930 ^[5][6].

The idea that defined him arrived early and was greeted as folly. Troubled by recurring strikes, the young Procter pushed the firm in the mid-1880s to shorten hours, and in 1887 he persuaded the partners to do something stranger still, to hand every employee a semi-annual "dividend" pegged to the company's profits and to the worker's own wages ^[2][7]. When he first proposed it, by one contemporary account, "the family thought he had lost his senses" ^[7]. He made the twice-yearly distribution an institution, gathering the workforce to hand out the checks and to deliver a plain-spoken sermon on where profit came from ^[5].

Profit-sharing alone, Procter found, did not bind men to the company, because the cash was too easily spent and felt like found money ^[7]. So he kept revising. In 1903 he tied the profit-share to ownership of actual Procter & Gamble stock, with the company adding to what a worker set aside, until employees held a meaningful slice of the firm they worked for; by 1915 roughly 61 percent of the workforce was taking part ^[1][7]. The logic was nakedly practical as well as paternal: a man who owned shares, Procter reasoned, would not walk out on his own dividend ^[1][6].

From there the innovations came in a steady file, each aimed at binding the worker to the work, a Saturday half-holiday at full pay, the eight-hour day, sickness and life insurance, a disability pension, and in 1918 a Conference Plan that put elected worker representatives in dialogue with management, with employee representation eventually reaching the board ^[5][6]. The capstone came on August 1, 1923, when Procter announced Guaranteed Employment: any worker with six months' service who participated in profit-sharing was promised at least forty-eight weeks of work a year ^[1][6]. To make the pledge affordable he attacked the root cause of seasonal layoffs, pushing P&G to sell directly to retailers and smooth its own production. "Five years ago," he later observed, "the sales curve showed a series of mountains and gorges. Today the manufacturing and employment curves are straight horizontal lines" ^[1].

Procter was no firebrand reformer; he was a hard-headed manufacturer who happened to believe that fairness paid. He prized cost reduction over sentiment and ran a tightly held, family-dominated firm whose progressivism was designed in part to make a union unnecessary ^[6][7]. "The first job we have," he told his workers on a dividend day, "is to turn out quality merchandise that consumers will buy and keep on buying" ^[3]. The dividend, in his logic, was the reward for doing exactly that. In 1911 the company launched Crisco, the first all-vegetable shortening, and backed it with the kind of national advertising that would make P&G the most relentless brand-builder in America ^[5][6].

Beyond Ivorydale he was a civic monument in his own right, an Episcopal warden, a colonel of the Ohio National Guard who relished being called "the Colonel," head of Cincinnati's Red Cross chapter for two decades, and a philanthropist who poured the soap fortune into Princeton's Graduate College and Cincinnati's Children's Hospital ^[5][6][8][9]. When he died in 1934, the country had absorbed his methods as a model of welfare capitalism, a private, paternalist answer to the labor question that the New Deal would soon begin to nationalize ^[5][6].

William Cooper Procter was born on August 25, 1862, in Glendale, a leafy railroad suburb north of Cincinnati, the only son among the children of William Alexander Procter and Charlotte Jackson Procter, and a grandson of William Procter, the English-born candlemaker who in 1837 had joined his brother-in-law James Gamble to found the firm ^[5][6]. He grew up in Glendale, attended the local elementary school, commuted into the city to Hughes High School, and went east to Princeton, from which he graduated in 1883 ^[5][8].

What distinguished him was that he refused to enter the company through the executive door his name entitled him to. On returning to Cincinnati he started at the bottom of the Ivorydale works as an ordinary laborer, hauling, packing, learning the trades of soap-boiling, the shipping room, and the sales force before he ever sat in an office ^[5][6]. The years on the floor gave him an unsentimental sympathy for the men beside him and a conviction, unusual among owners of his class, that the chronic strikes plaguing the company in the 1880s were a problem of design, not of agitators ^[5][7]. The construction of the great new Ivorydale plant, begun in 1886, gave him both the scale and the occasion for experiment.

When the company incorporated in 1890 his father became its first president and William Cooper, at twenty-eight, was made general manager, the post from which he actually ran the enterprise ^[5][6]. He married Jane Eliza Johnston on January 1, 1889; the couple had no children, and across his life the company's workforce and Cincinnati's civic causes would, in a sense, stand in for the family he did not raise ^[5].

Procter's experiments at Ivorydale became a touchstone for the whole movement of early-twentieth-century welfare capitalism. Profit-sharing pegged to employee stock ownership, guaranteed annual employment, the eight-hour day, and worker representation on the board were studied and imitated, and they helped fix Procter & Gamble's reputation as a model employer, a reputation the company has traded on for a century ^[1][5][6]. That he achieved relative labor peace without surrendering family control made him, to admirers, proof that enlightened management could substitute for the union; to critics, the most sophisticated practitioner of a paternalism designed precisely to keep unions out ^[6][7].

His fortune also reshaped institutions far from soap. He gave Princeton the funds for Procter Hall and the Graduate College, a gift whose terms ignited the famous 1909–1910 battle between President Woodrow Wilson and Dean Andrew Fleming West and helped push Wilson out of academia toward national politics ^[8]. In Cincinnati he led the Red Cross chapter for two decades, served as president of Children's Hospital, and gave it more than $5 million, including the endowment of a research foundation whose later work touched polio and beyond ^[9]. As the last of the founding families to run P&G, he handed the company to professional managers, fittingly to Richard Deupree, who would write his memorial, leaving behind both a global consumer-goods giant and a distinctly American argument that capital could keep its workers whole ^[1][5][6].