The Winner?

After eight years, the legendary trust-busting suit against the Aluminum Co. of America quietly, and suddenly, ended last week. In Manhattan's U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a special panel of three judges, sitting for the U.S. Supreme Court, held that Alcoa was a monopoly. Few years ago this would have been the biggest trust-busting news since Standard Oil was broken up. Now, in the light of war changes in the aluminum industry, it had little more than academic meaning.

In its nonstop campaign to break up Alcoa, the Government called Board Chairman Arthur Vining Davis, 77, onetime $60-a-month peddler of pots & pans, to the witness stand for seven straight weeks, five days a week.

His publicity-hating brother, Edward K. Davis, 64, president of Canada's Aluminium, Ltd., was on the stand for six weeks, while Government lawyers tried to prove that Aluminium, Ltd. was the corporate stooge of Alcoa and its link with the international aluminum cartel. All told, the Government and the defense filled 58,000 pages with testimony of these and other witnesses, brought 1,803 exhibits into court. Then, in 1940, the Government and the defense rested.

While they did, the Defense Plant Corp. went ahead and built $500,000,000 in aluminum plants, soon became owner of 52% of the aluminum-making capacity of the U.S. Last week, the court found that the diligence of the trustbusters had been overmatched by the diligence of OPC, concluded that, while Alcoa Lad been a monopoly, there is no reason to suppose that Alcoa now has a monopoly or will have one after war's end.

Victory for Antitrust; The decision, written by liberal Judge Learned Hand, reversed Manhattan's famed ad-libbing judge, Francis Gordon Caffey. Back in 1941 Judge Caffey, who had heard the testimony and arguments, cleared Alcoa of all the Government's charges. It took him ten days to deliver his opinion, took stenographers 737 pages to set it down.

In last week's opinion, there was still some comfort for Alcoa and Judge Caffey. The court found no proof that: 1) Alcoa had monopolized bauxite deposits or waterpower sites; or 2) Alcoa and Aluminium, Ltd., had any corporate relationship, even though the Mellon family and Alfred Vining Davis owned a controlling interest in both.

Besides a moral victory, the Government had little more to cheer about. Alcoa had at one time, the court found, tried to freeze out competing aluminum-sheet plants by charging more than a "fair price" for ingots. And Aluminium, Ltd. had also entered an illegal cartel, through the Alliance of Aluminium Cie. of Switzerland, which restricted imports of aluminum into the U.S.

But to the Justice Department's No. 1 demand--that Alcoa be dissolved, the panel said.no. It held: "It will be impossible to say what will be Alcoa's position in the industry after the war. ... It is as idle for the plaintiff to assume that dissolution will be proper, as it is for Alcoa to assume that it will not be; and it would be particularly fatuous to prepare a plan now, even if we could be sure that eventually some form of dissolution will be proper. ... It will be a disservice to break up an aggregation which has for so long demonstrated its efficiency."

Victory for Alcoa. For the time, the court held that the remedy lies with the Surplus Property Board. Its job is to dispose of the DPC plants in such a way as to "discourage monopoly." If this meant setting up real competition for Alcoa, it would take some doing.

Alcoa's own plants, and those it operates for the Government, now supply 92% of U.S. aluminum. The only other aluminum companies, Reynolds Metals Co. and Olin Industries, Inc., supply only a small 8%. Even Reynolds and Olin are tied to Alcoa's apron strings; most of their alumina (the intermediate material between bauxite and aluminum) is supplied by Alcoa.

So Alcoa could say last week: "We have no quarrel with the Department of Justice and expect to be able to work in harmony with it."

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