Proxies for Protesters

Entrenched managements usually try to brand those who start proxy fights as "raiders" or, in the epithet applied by Montgomery Ward executives to Louis Wolfson and associates, "financial pirates." Executives of Minneapolis-based Honeywell Inc. can hardly take that line against one discontented stockholder. He is Charles Pillsbury, 22-year-old scion of the family that founded the flour-milling Pillsbury Co. Far from seeking control of Honeywell, young Pillsbury, a senior in Latin American studies at Yale, is trying to convert the proxy fight into an instrument of protest against the Viet Nam War.

Father Knows Best. Though Honeywell is best known for its automatic controls, it also manufactures some military equipment, including fragmentation 'bombs. Pillsbury, who owns 101 Honeywell shares, contends that these bombs have killed many innocent Vietnamese civilians. Last June he joined the "Honeywell Project," a group of Minneapolis radicals that has tried to pressure the company to stop bomb production by staging demonstrations at plants. Pillsbury did not participate in the picketing. Instead, last month he filed suit in a Minneapolis court to win the right to inspect the list of Honeywell's other shareholders. He wants to solicit their proxies for Honeywell's April 28 annual meeting, with the aim of electing at least one director who would vote to stop the manufacture of bombs.

Pillsbury says that he got the idea in a conversation with his father, a former Pillsbury Co. group vice president, who pointed out to him the rights of a stockholder. His parents still play tennis with Honeywell Chairman James Binger, and young Pillsbury concedes that Honeywell executives "really believe that they are being good citizens in honoring the request of the Government." He insists that he has no intention of demanding that Honeywell default on its present bomb contracts, but only that it make no new ones.

Emancipated Executives. Consciously or not, Pillsbury is staging a trial run for an idea of Saul Alinsky's, the radical organizer. Alinsky says that he is trying to induce "some leading left-wing economists and emancipated corporation executives" to help him form an organization called Proxies for People. It would solicit proxies from foundations, mutual funds, union welfare funds, churches and universities, and vote them to compel corporations to pursue such social goals as ending pollution. Alinsky says that he is getting voluntary proxies every day from individual sympathizers--and telephone calls from worried and presumably unemancipated corporation executives sounding him out about his intentions.

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