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The Colt Mystery
TIME Magazine, Monday, Jun. 19, 1944

A prime mystery of World War II is Hartford's famed Colt's Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Co. Colt, as the biggest of all prewar U.S. gunmakers, had a backlog of $30,000,000 in orders when war came. And stockholders remembered that in 1917 Colt had paid a fantastic $60 cash dividend, later tossing in a 100% stock dividend to boot. But in March 1944, Colt stockholders got another kind of shock. For the first time in 27 years, Colt paid no dividend. On April 20 came shock No. 2. Up to board chairman went Colt's ailing president, Samuel M. Stone, who had driven Colt with a tight rein for 22 years. To the presidency came Graham H. Anthony, 52, a veteran Colt director.


New Boss Anthony lost no time in letting out the biggest shocker of all: in the first 16 weeks of this year, Colt had managed to lose $1,100,580, had actually been in the red since June 1943. The big question : how could a gunmaker lose money in the greatest war in history?

Get Out the Guns. By last week, hard-driving President Anthony had some of the answers. He was hard at work to pull Colt out of its queer hole, if anyone could. Gunman Anthony, born in Shelby, N.C., graduated from North Carolina State College into a job in a machine shop. By the black days of 1932 he was president of Veeder-Root, Inc. (mechanical counting devices) in Hartford, Conn. Veeder-Root was on the downgrade, as were so many firms, and losing money. Anthony managed to stop the skid and make Veeder-Root profitable. He is still board chairman. His strategy to save Colt: "Get out the guns."

WPA at Work. But getting out the guns at Colt has long been hamstrung by a 100-year-old handwork tradition. In trying to graft war production of 6,800 guns monthly onto peacetime artisan manufacture of 400 yearly, Colt fell into a fearful production tangle. Typical example: Colt numbered all barrels at the beginning of assembly, as they had always done, and would not test finished guns unless they came up in sequence. Result: when one gun was pulled out because of a faulty part, the whole test line stopped. Quipped one worker: "Production was like a Rube Goldberg cartoon—everyone and his brother was a foreman. . . . Mobs of men walked through the plant all day with books and no one knew what they did. ... It was like WPA."