For The Public Good

Even before he became involved in the US Chamber of Commerce, my Uncle Boyd wrote and orated obsessively. He began his adult life as an educator before discovering one day that a man might make a living selling blackboards and chalk to Mississippi Schools.

From the earliest days of the Mississippi School Supply Company, he wrote seasonal letters to his employees, even when it was just his brother, Jim Woodson, and himself. He encouraged optimism and faith during the worst of the Depression and World War II. Mississippi people are tough and more durable than most, but when tough times came, Mississippi often got more than their share of it.

My grandfather used to joke and say that Mississippi was so poor that when the Depression hit, nobody really noticed. That was so very typical of his personality. He also described his first heart attack as indigestion. Mississippi noticed the depression pretty well. Mississippi noticed the armies of young men leaving Mississippi to fight in Asia and Europe. Mississippi noticed rationing and the uncertainty of war.

Uncle Boyd wrote of faith in the American experiment during “this present darkness.” He reminded people that he believed in them and that they should believe in themselves. More than anything, he wrote about American Business For “The Public Good.”

One of the first things they teach you in business school is that “The purpose of the corporation was to increase shareholder wealth.” My grades were pretty bad, but I had that one down pat. The profit motive is what separates American business apart from all other economic models, particularly communism and royalism. By working to increase the wealth of the owners rather than the wealth of the state, American businesses find avenues of invention and efficiency that they otherwise have no motive for.

Boyd spoke of something beyond the profit motive, though. He spoke of American Business as a vehicle “For The Public Good.” It became the overarching theme of his professional career and the principal thing that led a Mississippi small business owner to become elected as President of the US Chamber of Commerce twice and travel the world with the message of American prosperity.

In his mind, “For The Public Good” meant a great deal more than simple socialism, even though he was a pretty big believer in public roads, public schools, public libraries, social security, Medicaid, Medicare, and other programs that grew out of American socialism.

In his mind, “For The Public Good” was the capacity of American Business to provide for the welfare of the American people through the quality and price of the products they sell on one hand and the economic benefits and quality of the jobs they create on the other. “For The Public Good” meant securing a profit for yourself but also recognizing the place American Business has in the lives of their customers and their employees and serving them equally to your own profits.

I thought about this recently because I knew a man once who made a whole pile of money from selling absolute garbage to the poorest people in Mississippi and Arkansas, and it worked because he moved into those areas so poor that Walmart wouldn’t, giving him close to a literally captive market. He died a few years back, and now his wife is steadily giving away the money he made to the most racist, most oppressive conservative “think tanks” she can find.

“For The Public Good” was lost on both of them, I thought. Spending your life scraping pennies off the hide of Mississippi’s poorest people and then using your wife to oppress them from beyond the grave is a pretty tough pill for me to swallow. Part of it is that I actually liked the guy, apart from his business practices. Sometimes, a guy can be objectively evil but still a lot of fun.

In a poor state like Mississippi, every one of us has to keep our eyes on the goals of what Boyd called “For The Public Good,” whether you’re in business or education, government or the arts. We all have to pull together, or we’ll surely pull apart.

During the height of World War II, there became an issue where there were so many men working as soldiers that it became difficult to keep up with manufacturing back home. President Roosevelt asked American Businessmen to step in with answers. My Uncle Boyd contacted the feds and asked “what do you need?”

They actually had a list of things they needed. On that list was somebody to raise turkey meat and somebody to manufacture hinges for ammo boxes.

My grandfather and some of his neighbors began raising turkeys in their backyards on St. Ann Street in Belhaven. It wasn’t a huge help, but it was some. My Uncle Boyd had never worked in a machine shop, but he knew a guy who did, so he found some old sheet metal handling equipment and found some space on Farish Street, not far from his South Street headquarters, and went into the ammo box hinge business.

In high school, my father couldn’t provide that much help, but he was young and strong and could help move stacks of sheet steel, and so he did. Finding people to operate these metal handling machines was a bit of a challenge. It needed to be people with a bit of experience but also people who weren’t part of the war effort.

What they got was a bunch of older fellas who had been machinists around Mississippi. Some of them had to move to Jackson, but apparently working as a machinist didn’t provide much of an income, so they basically moved from one rented room to another one in Jackson.

My Uncle Boyd knew that most of the people who worked for him were poor, so he always worked to provide them with a meal. It also meant that his non-white employees got to eat without having to face all the “whites only” signs in Downtown Jackson. We called her “Aunt Annie Ruth,” which is part of a pretty racist tradition of calling older black people “aunt” or “uncle” and then excluding them from society. It was a different time, though. My Uncle Boyd loved Annie Ruth and built her a little house on the backside of South Street so she could run the kitchen at Mississippi School Supply Company. I look at Cathead Vodka now and think, “Right back there is where Annie Ruth’s house was.

My father noticed that most of the old men who came to work at the ammo box hinge operation were missing all or parts of their fingers. They had a free hot meal every day, which they weren’t used to. They weren’t with us very long. The war ended, the demand for ammo box hinges went way down, and the people who normally handled machine handling jobs went back to it.

Hearing my uncle’s speeches about “For The Public Good,” my father wondered what kind of men these fingerless machinists worked for before. They seemed so shocked by the way they were treated in Jackson. They ate their beans and biscuits lunch with missing fingers and grateful faces.

Thomas Newcomen invented what he called an “Atmospheric Engine,” which was a steam operation used to pump water out of the mines in Great Britain, making mining considerably safer as an occupation than it was before. The “Newcomen Society” is an organization that discusses and rewards the use of science and engineering in business for the public good.

Every year, the Newcomen Society selects a business to honor as an example of the qualities they felt Newcomen expressed. Then, it holds a dinner where the honored businessman tells his story. In 1962, they selected my Uncle Boyd as their honoree.

Not many people knew that Boyd’s health was pretty bad in 1962. He would soon die. The Newcomen society still wanted to honor him, so my father stepped in to tell Uncle Boyd’s story.

Boyd’s secretary was pretty obsessive about saving his speeches and letters, so my Dad turned to the subject Boyd wrote and spoke about so often and wrote a long essay entitled “For The Public Good—The Story of Boyd Campbell and the Mississippi School Supply Company.” The Newcomen Society published it as a short book. You can still find copies of it on eBay and Amazon sometimes.

Attitudes about American Business have changed quite a bit since 1962. An attitude of “get what you can—and get out.” seems to prevail. Scraping what you can from people who are already poor might be the order of the day. Getting as much as you can from your employees and returning as little as you can to them is all too common.

I think about “For The Public Good” fairly often, as a philosophy and as my personal history. I know guys who have taken this philosophy to heart in a very genuine way. Guys like Jeff Good are a great example. He provides for The Public Good, both to his employees and to his customers, and gives back to the community as well.

There will always be guys who scrape what they can from the hides of Mississippi’s poorest people. I can’t do anything about that. There will always be people who work “For The Public Good” too though. They give me hope.