Zig-Zag-and-Swirl: Alfred W. Lawson's Quest for Greatness

12. Collapsing Equaeverpoise

12 COLLAPSING EQUAEVERPOI SE On several occaSIons In the early 1950S Lawson professed to be pleased with the way things were going at DMUL. He had long since ceased to reside there. Removing his family to Columbus, Ohio, sometime in the mid-1940s, Lawson had returned to the road in his familiar pattern of incessant wandering. However, in testimony before a United States Senate subcommittee in 1952, he disclosed that he still came to the Des Moines campus for short visits every month or so to make sure that "the boys" he had left in charge were doing their jobs properly. "They haven't done anything wrong as far as I can see," he concluded. Evidence of his continuing interest and pride in DMUL was his oftstated determination to open more universities , including one for women only. But if all was well, why had Lawson and two DMUL colleagues been subpoenaed to testify in a Senate hearing? Since 1945, the residents at DMUL had been left more or less free from outside interference. What was portended, then, by this resumed interest in DMUL by outsiders-this time, not merely neighbors or city officials, but officials of the federal government? The circumstances leading up to the investigation of DMUL by the Senate revealed Lawson's continuing knack for finding and exploiting opportunities. Once again, he had shown, in Vincent Burnelli's words, "a positive genius" for "latching onto a new trend"-in this instance, acquiring from the federal government valu- 248 UTOPIA IN DES MOINES able surplus machines at huge discount prices after World War II. But Lawson had then multiplied his good fortune by selling most of the machines at a very substantial markup over the ridiculously low purchase price. To be more specific: the sale had yielded for DMUL close to a 3,000 percent profit. When this astonishing bit of entrepreneurial derring-do became known, DMUL and Lawson were suddenly thrust into the spotlight again. In the background of Lawson's new difficulties were these facts: in 1946-1947 the War Assets Administration (WAA) had made surplus production machinery available to educational institutions which held a tax-exempt status with the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) and swore that the machines were needed and would be used for educational purposes. The terms offered were extremely generous; when all the calculations were made, the cost ran to 5 percent or less of the current market value. Many institutions fell in line to take advantage of this deal. Among them was DMUL, which bought sixty-two machines , valued at $204,000, at a cost of about $4,400. DMUL's purchase included such items as production milling machines, production automatic lathes, grinders, gear shapers, drilling and tapping machines, turret lathes, precision boring machines, and thread mills. But then came the Korean War, and suddenly machine tools of the kind sold by WAA a few years earlier were in short supply for use in war industries. What had happened to the government's machines? Why hadn't they been stored? Were they recoverable? These were questions of keen interest to various government agencies. Included among the interested ones was the United States Senate's Committee on Small Business, which empowered Senator Blair Moody (Democrat -Michigan) as a one-man subcommittee to find the answers. To this end, Moody subpoenaed officials from a number of businesses and educational institutions, including DMUL. There were several things Moody wanted to know about DMUL's involvement with government machine tools. First, how had DMUL ever qualified for them in the first place? That is, was DMUL a legitimate educational institution? True, DMUL had a BIR tax exemption , first granted in 1946. But early in 1952 the Des Moines Register published a story revealing that ever since 1948 the Des Moines city COLLAPSING EQUAEVERPOISE 249 Aportion of the production machines which OMUl bought from the federol government, shown in Machine Hall. From a OMUl promotional flier lrom the late 1940s. assessor, Bert Zuver, and an Iowa congressman, Paul Cunningham, had been pressuring BIR to withdraw the exemption on the grounds that DMUL was a university in name only. BIR had let the matter drift for over three years but promised a ruling shortly. Lawson's most potent argument in his numerous unsuccessful attempts to get a city tax exemption had been his federal tax exemption; it now looked likely that his failure to get...