Johns-Manville Corporation

Cold War

Iowa born and educated, Lewis Herold Brown (1894-1951) led for two decades until his death in 1951 Johns-Manville Corporation, New York. He also founded in that city in 1943 the forerunner of today's American Enterprise Institute of Washington, DC, a conservative and libertarian, business-led think tank.   Brown was a self mad man, though, by he age of ten working on a farm and later and paying his way through college at the University of Iowa.  By 1945 when he received an honorary L.L.D. (Doctor of Laws) honoris causa from Lake Forest College, he was al ready a national figure, having been one of the youngest presidents of a major corporation at thirty-five in 1929, having appeared on the cover of Time magazine, on April 3, 1939.  He already had such as honor from Brown University (1943).  Brown would write A Report on Germany (New York: Farrar Straus, 1947), a blueprint in detail for the reconstruction of Germany and a basis for the Marshall Plan, created by among others George F. Kennan and put forward by George Marshall to combat communism in 1947.  But already in 1945 Brown was an acknowledged leader of American economic life.   

In 1942 the Johns-Manville plant in Waukegan had forged a working relationship with Lake Forest College, one that would continue into the 1960s.  This partnership was mutually beneficial for the two organizations from its start, with the establishment of the "Manville Girls" cooperative program.  This supplied bright young women also in College (a night school also began in 1942) to work to fill gaps from the World War II draft to keep the defense-related company producing and also provided more women students and the means to cover their tuition to the College, faced with a drastic reduction in students by that same draft.  When the war ended and both the company and the College sought to return to peacetime norms, Johns-Manville again, with other Waukegan and area firms, called on Lake Forest College to offer special training for veterans back to work, but behind or having missed college work.  In 1946 Lake Forest College its Industrial Management Institute to help men convert wartime skills to new uses, and reboot American peacetime industrial productivity.  By the 1960s this program was independent, as the Advanced Management Institute, and by the 1970s the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, no longer on campus by the 2000s ( http://www.lakeforestmba.edu/ ).  Beginning in 1942 Johns Manville relied on Lake Forest College for personnel and for educational enrichment; Lake forest College in turn drew crucial, timely financial support for its students and operations.  

In this environment nationally recognized corporate leader and spokesperson Lewis H. Brown agreed to give the Commencement Address for Lake Forest College on May 26, 1945.  Entitled "Freedom or Planned Economy -- There is No Middle Road" Brown's address, a month after Russian tanks rushed across Germany to meet the Allies at Berlin and to occupy that eastern segment of the land, spoke up for a vigorous corporate-driven economy unfettered by government interference.  Brown’s anti-regulatory stance, and a related Johns Manville corporate policy framework, led to un-checked work procedures that contaminated workers, Waukegan Harbor, Lake Michigan, and ordinary citizens, like Nancy Nichols’ family, described in her 2008 book Lake Effect, who ate contaminated harbor and lake fish.  A policy that posed a strong defense against totalitarian socialism or communism at a moment of great challenge ossified into a mindset that by the mid 1980s brought havoc to people and the community, and bankruptcy to Johns Manville, Brown's own firm.