Uncomfortable Town

When four of a small town's leading citizens are either thrown into prison or heavily fined for breaking a federal law, the town's preachers and the rest of its' residents must inevitably make some jarring moral adjustments. Just that happened early this year in Pittsfield, Mass., when executives of General Electric (Pittsfield's biggest employer) were convicted of violating the antitrust laws (TIME, Feb. 17). In Christian Century, the Rev. Raymond E. Gibson, who then was pastor of Pittsfield's South Congregational Church, describes the resulting shock. It passed through several waves.

Right after the indictment in early 1960. he writes, Pittsfield sympathized with the wrongdoers, rationalizing that "if these men had violated a law, there must be something wrong with that law!" The new managers sent by the company to replace the convicted price fixers were suspiciously regarded as "hatchet men" and "company tools." The town looked upon the fallen executives, who made salaries ranging up to $125,000, as heroes who "had done what had to be done in a business world that wasn't moral anyway; and because they had at least created jobs, they were the 'moral' ones."

Later, when it became evident that the antitrust conspiracy, by lessening price competition, had encouraged smaller automated companies to cut into G.E.'s market, the executives' halos dimmed somewhat, says Gibson. It seemed harder to argue that what the executives had done was moral when it turned out to be unprofitable. But "by and large, the community did nof begin to censure the men involved until the deviousness of their manner of violating the statues was revealed-- which suggest that they were polularly condemned for deviousness rather than law breaking."

While the citizenry was vacillating beween moral and economic interpretations of the affair, churchmen stood mute, says Gibson: "Throughout the whole turmoil, the irrelevance of the churches to the situation was evident. No statement on the affair came from the council of churches. Ministers confessed the sense of confusion they felt." Counting himself among those who neglected Pittsfield, Gibson says: "Now is the time when a cogent word on the whole problem of corporate moral responsibility needs to be spoken."

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