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Though distant from political and economic centers of wartime decision making , Charles H. Segerstrom kept careful track of events from his company headquarters on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Unless on a business trip he was never far from the teletype machines that connected his office in Sonora with the Nevada mines and his eastern brokerage in New York. An inveterate reader and writer, whenever he had a free minute he scanned and clipped the voluminous newspapers and trade journals that daily piled up on his desk, and pounded out correspondence on a manual typewriter. For fast contact with business and government associates outside the teletype network, he used telephone and telegram. The frenetic pace of his wartime business affairs required all available forms of communication. At the time America entered the conflict he headed or controlled five different mining operations. Three were producing tungsten: the Nevada-MassachusettsCompanyatMillCityandGolconda,Nevada;RareMetals Corporation at Oreana, Toulon, and Wadsworth, Nevada; and Charles H. Segerstrom’s family mines and mills at Milford, Utah, and Topaz Lake, California . Two others were gold producers: the Boston California Mining Company at Coulterville, California, and Keystone Mines Syndicate at Amador City, California. The government’s order in 1942 closing gold mining for the duration reduced the diversity of his operations, but by that time the insatiable demands of the tungsten business kept him totally preoccupied.1 PRAGMATIC PRODUCTION Segerstrom’s efforts to prepare for the war’s impact on tungsten supply and demand have already been described. As president of the American Tungsten Association, he kept lobbyists busy in Washington defending the tungsten tariff and monitoring real or potential legislative threats. When the Senate Finance Committee tried to drop the excess profits tax exemption NEVADA-MASSACHUSETTS IN WORLD WAR II 8 176 T U N G S T E N I N P E A C E A N D W A R on strategic metal producers, he “immediately got busy,” as he told a Boston board member. Alerted to constituent concerns, Nevada’s Senator McCarran and Congressman Scrugham got the exemption restored in the 1941 Revenue Act. After the opm pressured steel mills to use more molybdenum and less tungsten in tool steels, Segerstrom took umbrage. Assuming the government was more concerned with prices than scarcity, he wrote H. K. Masters, chief of the Tungsten Branch of the opm—the same man whom he had escorted a month before through the western mining districts and thought was “one man in Washington who knows our problems.” Tungsten producers, he told the opm official, are “loyal Americans. . . . I can assure you if greater production in America is desired, it can only be obtained by giving the domestic producer more encouragement, either freezing the prices of labor or increasing the prices of tungsten.”2 Domestic tungsten producers did get government help, as we have seen, but not exactly what Segerstrom prescribed. While openly advocating wage freezes and price increases, privately he recognized that for his own companies the most important government support was its guarantee to buy all the tungsten he could produce. Along with the boom in industrial demand, the new government stimulus ensured a virtually unlimited market for the gray metal, at least so long as wartime conditions prevailed. Segerstrom well remembered an important lesson of World War I: maximize production while demand was “hot,” but look to the future and avoid overcapitalizing at all costs.3 Meeting the upsurge in demand required not only increasing production but also maintaining profitability, either by cutting costs or by raising commodity prices. The opa had not yet set a ceiling price on tungsten when the government quietly began expanding its strategic metals purchase program in 1941. In October the Nevada-Massachusetts president signed a contract with Metals Reserve for 75,000 units to be delivered in quarterly installments over a twenty-month period beginning January 1, 1942, at the prevailing market price of $23 per unit. Segerstrom also agreed to sell Metals Reserve another 50,000 units from Golconda concentrates sent to Molybdenum Corporation for secondary processing. The government contracts provided a comfortable hedge against erratic industrial demand, but the company president thought the price too low for high-grade Mill City scheelite. In September 1941 he headed east on the train for preliminary talks with opm officials. After “a long conference” in Washington, he came away with an agreement that Nevada-Massachusetts could supply the government with concentrates from [18.119.159.150] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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