H and H Coffee

Dedicated to the history of the Hoffmann-Hayman Coffee Co. founded 1899 in San Antonio, Texas.

Hartford-Empire testimony names Three Rivers Glass in U.S. Senate monopoly probe

On 12 December 1938, the U.S. Senate Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC, the “monopoly committee,” chaired by Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney) hears full-day testimony from F. G. Smith, president of Hartford-Empire Co. of Hartford, Connecticut. Smith — questioned by Hugh Cox of the U.S. Department of Justice — defends Hartford-Empire’s ownership of the patents on the machinery by which glass containers can be produced most economically, its practice of leasing the machinery on a royalty basis to individual manufacturers, and its stipulation of what type of container each licensee may produce and, in some cases, how many. Hartford-Empire’s licensing terms also reserved the right to decide whether or not a new manufacturer is to be admitted to the business.

A second day of testimony (13 December) introduces R. T. Bufford Jr., secretary and counsel for Hartford-Empire (from R. H. Eberty, attorney for Hartford-Empire’s San Antonio office on the witness panel), who reads aloud from an internal Hartford-Empire memorandum explicitly characterizing Three Rivers Glass Company as “a perpetual thorn in the side of all the manufacturing companies” of the patent pool. Bufford further confirms that Hartford-Empire physically removed its machinery from the Three Rivers factory when the Texas firm could not pay — the closest period-source documentation on this site of the upstream chain of events that pushed Three Rivers into the 1932 receivership and the December 1936 reorganization under Ball.

The same testimony documents Hartford-Empire’s licensing income from 1916 through the late 1930s (a multi-million-dollar revenue stream tabulated on the witness exhibit) and Smith’s careful refusal to “unqualifiedly” deny that price control was within Hartford-Empire’s power — the line Senator O’Mahoney calls “the defect” of the system.

The TNEC investigation contributed to the evidentiary record that informed United States v. Hartford-Empire Co., decided by the Supreme Court in 1945 — the federal anti-trust case that the January 1946 Three Rivers shareholders’ suit invoked as its broader legal frame.

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