The World of Dow

"FRANKLY," said H.D. "Ted" Doan, president of the Dow Chemical Company, "we're trying to make a buck."

Doan, a lithe man who looks a little like John Lindsay, swiveled around a bit in his swivel chair and stared squarely at the 20 college editors in their swivel chairs who were staring back.

"We're in business," Doan continued, "and you kids don't know how hard it is just to stay in business. And we can do more good by doing business than by turning to social questions."

Doan was disarmingly honest, as were all the public relations men, scientists, and minor officials we met in our frenzied one-day tour of Dow's Midland, Mich., facility. They all talked about making money through the market system, and they all believed that society would benefit from their efforts if only they concentrated on making money for Dow.

I suppose Dow spent $150 to fly me out to Midland and feed and hotel me so I would return to inform the readers of this newspaper that only five per cent of Dow's business is with the federal government, and only one half per cent is napalm. That Dow is good to its employees, and that Dow wishes the war were over as much as we all do.

All these statements about Dow are true. But my overriding impression was that Dow is a world unto itself; moulder of its employees' minds rather than sum total of them, creator of its environment rather than occupier of it, and would-be fulfiller of all the spiritual and material needs of its constituents.

Our morning tour bus drove through a gate in the miles of barbed wire fence surrounding Dow's plant, 4500 acres of land. "The largest industrial complex in the country within one fence." 700 smoking buildings. Miles of ground-level piping. Miles of overhead piping. Hundreds of vats, some of them 40 feet in diameter with a soupy green liquid bubbling inside.

Each building has a number, but some are also known to employees by product--the Aspirin Building.

JUST about everything Dow needs, it has access to on the plant. Midland's main water route, which is called a river but looks like a sewer, flows right through the area and Dow extracts 300,000,000 gallons of water a day from it. The company also puts back the same amount of used water each day, after running it through a $10 million waste cleaning plant. Dow provides the power for all its machines, in three Midland power plants which generate enough electricity to supply a city of over half a million people.

And just about everything Dow's people need, Dow provides for them--right there. Dow has its own 131-man police force, its own 20-bed hospital, two fire stations, and a mammoth cafeteria for its 12,000 employees. It seems, in fact, that a person can spend his whole life fenced within Dow's plant, at no great physical inconvenience--if he can learn to tolerate the smoke.

After talking with Dow's people (at least the people we met, most of whom were PR types) one might be excused for thinking that they had, in fact, spent their whole lives inside the plant. Except, of course, when they drove to nearby Saginaw Tri-City Airport to catch a flight to one of Dow's several hundred other plants and sales offices around the nation and the world.

They all sounded alike. All honest about their faith in the market system. All exuberant about the tremendous value of this dialogue with concerned young people. All extraordinarily proud of Dow. In pairs, they tended to play straight man for one another, laughing at each other's jokes. And they all kept repeating how wonderful it was that at Dow every man was free to think for himself.

WHAT WAS most irritating about their collective stance was the unstated premise that anything you do is all right, provided you are willing to talk about it. And the talk was not worth much, because instead of hedging they simply stated their principle that business's business is business and that it must generally go along with governments, U.S. or foreign as the case may be, on social questions. This leads to an immediate impasse. It is as if you are playing chess and your opponent moves his king so as to place himself in check. You explain to him that the move is not permissible, but he responds, "Your move."

Early in the day, one of Dow's public relations men told us in a short speech that Dow knew there was going to be something of a communications gap. If he thought we would leave Midland unfairly equating Dow in our minds with the German munitions-makers, he was wrong. But we, at least I, hadn't arrived at Midland with that impression in the first place.

There was a gap, but it was a barrier far more formidable than the barbed wire fence where a Dow guard takes away your camera while you go on your tour of the plant. It was a gap between people who enjoyed working for a profit, who accepted money flow as a measure of their success, and people like me who felt uncomfortable all day with the idea.

After breakfast, before the bus tour, one Dow scientist gave a 20-minute lecture on Dow's plastics business -- "growing at a much faster rate than industry as a whole." Sitting through that discourse on the multifarious uses of polystyrene, I realized how Benjamin Braddock must have felt. He, at least, had had the good fortune of receiving his advice in a single word.