Customers read President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proclamation about taking over a Jamaica (N.Y.) Montgomery Ward store on Dec. 28, 1944. | AP Photo FDR seizes control of Montgomery Ward, Dec. 27, 1944

On this day in 1944, as the nation entered its fourth year of war, President Franklin D, Roosevelt ordered Secretary of War Henry Stimson to seize all of Montgomery Ward’s properties after the merchandising giant repeatedly refused to comply with labor agreements.

In 1942, in a bid to avert strikes in critical industries backing the war effort, Roosevelt created the National War Labor Board to negotiate settlements between management and workers. Montgomery Ward, founded in 1872 and then on its way to becoming the third-largest department store chain in the country, supplied the Allies with such goods as tractors, auto parts and work clothes. Planners viewed such mundane items as vital to prosecuting the war as tanks and planes.


But Sewell Avery, Montgomery Ward’s chairman, refused to comply with the terms of three collective bargaining accords with the United Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union.

“To hell with the government!” Avery yelled in April 1944 at Attorney General Francis Biddle, who had flown to Chicago in hopes of placating him. “I want none of your damned advice.”

Biddle ordered two National Guardsmen to lift Avery out of his office chair and carry him out of the building. “You ... New Dealer!” Avery bellowed. In an iconic photo, the two soldiers hold Avery in a sitting position, his arms crossed, as they remove him from the premises.

Roosevelt ordered Stimson to seize the firm’s plants and facilities in New York, Michigan, California, Illinois, Colorado and Oregon. The president said, “Strikes in wartime cannot be condoned, whether they are strikes by workers against their employers or strikes by employers against their government.”

As a federal judge deliberated over the legality of the seizure, the U.S. Department of Commerce nominally ran the company. Before a ruling could be handed down, however, the union completed its election and employees returned to work. On May 9, 1944, Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones returned the company to private management.

Avery, however, rejected the union contract, and by December the labor situation had deteriorated once more. Workers in Detroit and Chicago again walked out. The second time around, Avery stayed in his executive suite, while Maj. Gen. Joseph Byron and his staff made do with an office nearby. The general and the CEO traded control of Avery’s reserved parking space, depending on who arrived first.

Avery retired in 1955 with a $327 million fortune. He died in 1960, a few days short of what would have been his 86th birthday.



In 2000, declining sales forced Montgomery Ward to close its retail stores and shut down its once vaunted catalog operations. In 2008, the “Montgomery Ward” brand was acquired by a subsidiary of The Swiss Colony, Inc. (now known as Colony Brands, Inc.), a family-owned direct-mail business based in Monroe, Wisconsin.

SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.COM

