Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946

Epilogue

As a corporate entity, the Nevada-Massachusetts Company lasted more than fifty years. For the first thirty Charles H. Segerstrom Sr. was president and chief executive officer. He essentially raised the company out of the ashes of its predecessor, Pacific Tungsten, and he remained its primary source of inspiration and leadership through the critical thirties and early forties. Under his management the company successfully anticipated and adjusted to dynamic shifts in macroeconomic business trends. Learning important lessons from the chaotic aftermath of World War I, Segerstrom built a solid business foundation that held steady through the economic turbulence of depression and war. Though politically conservative and philosophically opposed to government intervention in private or corporate activities, he adapted pragmatically to New Deal policies and programs when they directly benefited him or his company. At the same time he learned enough about the political system to develop strategies for influencing decisions at the highest level. His efforts on behalf of tungsten producers made him a national spokesman for the industry and an effective lobbyist for domestic mining causes. Working twelve to fourteen hours a day six days a week gradually took its toll. Exhausted and frequently brought down by illness during the war years, the elder Segerstrom died on August 2, 1946, leaving the family assets in the hands of his heirs. His wife and five children consolidated their business interests in the immediate postwar years, buying out nonfamily shareholders, closing marginal operations, and reorganizing the remaining properties under a family management led by the late president’s eldest son, Charles “Tod” Jr.1 Unlike the tungsten market slump after World War I, world tungsten prices dipped slightly in 1946 but then rose again on the postwar industrial and military demand for high-speed tools and high-temperature superalloys in the auto, aerospace, and electronics industries. Prices skyrocketed when the U.S. government began an intensive effort to fill newly established stockpile quotas EPILOGUE 206 T U N G S T E N I N P E A C E A N D W A R after China fell to the communists in 1949 and the Korean War opened a year later. With Chinese wolfram sales restricted, Nevada-Massachusetts and other domestic producers did a booming business. Between 1951 and 1957, while the government’s intensive buying program was in effect, tungsten prices remained more than double that of the late 1940s. Succeeding his father as president of Nevada-Massachusetts, the younger Segerstrom skillfully maneuvered family interests to meet these changing postwar social and economic conditions. Labor strife was a serious issue in western mining during the boom-and-bust cycles of the late 1940s and 1950s. Despite the efforts of W. G. Emminger, Merrill Cronwall, and Eldridge Nash, all managers more sympathetic to worker complaints than their predecessors, Nevada-Massachusetts faced several work stoppages until Tod bowed to union demands and recognized the United Mine Workers as the “sole and exclusive bargaining agent” for all but technical, clerical, and supervisory employees. Union success was short-lived, however. All the company mines shut down less than eighteen months after signing the new contract.2 While metal prices were still attractive, Tod diversified the family’s mining interests. The Rare Metals Corporation remained on the books as a family holding company, but the mill and most of its operating mines were reorganized under new subsidiaries. As we have seen earlier, Tod and Ott Heizer’s son John Madden Heizer, a graduate of the Mackay School of Mines, operated the Nightingale and Star mines as well as the Long Lease mine near Lovelock under a partnership known as the Wolfram Company. In the 1950s they shipped ore processed at the Toulon mill to eastern buyers, using the same Metal and Ore brokerage as Nevada-Massachusetts. A decade later, with prices depressed, the partnership dissolved after selling the mill and other assets. Tod and John Heizer also teamed up to lease an iron mine in the Buena Vista Hills of Pershing County, later subleased to the Dodge Construction Company. Most of the estimated half-million tons of ore produced in the decade after World War II went to Japan, helping spur that nation’s postwar steel industry.3 Nevada-Massachusetts remained under control of the Segerstrom family through the postwar boom, but company prospects faded quickly in the late 1950s. Confronted by a combination of lower prices, slowing markets, declining ore grades, and changing federal policies, the Segerstroms shut down all tungsten operations in...