Horrigan: Twitchy-nosed capitalism, then and now : Stltoday

Horrigan: Twitchy-nosed capitalism, then and now : Stltoday

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Ralcorp is one of the fragments of what once was Ralston-Purina, a great old-school capitalist company. In 1893, young William H. Danforth, recently graduated from Washington University, got into the horse and mule feed game.

Thus was born Purina Mills. No Gilded Age lily, Will Danforth shoveled feed into bags himself. No tax incentives for him.

He bought from local growers. He traveled and sold and employed local men as millers and as drovers. He rebuilt after the Great Tornado of '96 and two years later made a deal with Webster Edgerly, a whole-grains kook who called himself “Dr. Ralston” and his movement “Ralstonism.” The new company, Ralston-Purina, added human foods to the product line.

Service in World War I convinced Will Danforth that there was magic in the word “chow.” After the war, he insisted that his animal feeds were animal chows. He adopted a red and white checkerboard pattern to reflect his “four-square” belief in balance among the physical, mental, social and religious aspects of life.
He built a great company and turned it over to his son. They employed tens of thousands of people, who raised families and retired on pensions. He made a great fortune. His grandsons, William H. Danforth II and John C. Danforth, now elderly men themselves, have given most of that fortune away to the great benefit of St. Louis.

These days most of your great tycoons don't build things as much as they buy and sell them, employing fewer people more “efficiently” and enriching people like themselves who wouldn't know which end of a mule to feed. In recent years, the financial sector has reaped 30 percent of the nation's corporate profits.