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Maurice Duke and Daniel P. Jordan vividly describe the colorful life and times of one of the South's -- and America's -- most important businesses and provide insight into how luck, management practices, and personalities helped the company rise to international prominence. Universal Leaf Tobacco Company, the world's largest independent leaf tobacco dealer, is one of the major buying arms for tobacco manufacturers worldwide, selecting, purchasing, processing, and storing leaf tobacco. The story opens during the aftermath of the Civil War when Southerners realized once again the worldwide potential of their native crop. The authors follow the company from its incorporation 1918 through one of the first hostile takeover attempts in American business, to its evolution in 1993 into Universal Corporation, a worldwide conglomerate with a number of products including tobacco. Based on scholarly research and over two hundred interviews with past and present Universal employees, this objective saga reveals much about American business and economic history.

Universal Leaf was typical in many ways of corporations that came into being during World War I. At first, demand virtually guaranteed success and encouraged sudden and at times reckless growth, but a postwar depression brought disaster. The organizers of Universal aimed high and fell hard before they adjusted to a moderate course and finally achieved success. Along the way corporate leadership changed dramatically; virtually all Universal’s founders retired, left the company, or assumed passive roles as younger men assumed control. Although the exact date is unknown, at some point during the war years Jaquelin P. Taylor set upon a

At the turn of the twentieth century, America’s favorite tobacco product was unquestionably the cigar, and consumers spent more money for cigars than for cigarettes, snuff, chewing and smoking leaf combined. Cigars were made coast to coast, usually by small manufacturers who numbered in the tens of thousands, with strong concentrations in New York and Pennsylvania. Production hit four billion in 1890 and rose to seven billion in 1906. Significantly, when the giant American Cigar came into being in 190 I, it controlled only one-sixth of the market. There were cigar brands for every pocketbook, and retail outlets often made

By 1966 Universal had gained the level of technical proficiency with which it continues to operate today. Its partner companies were fading, some having been dissolved, others disappearing by attrition. Complete with all the technology that modern science could provide, the era of the super plant had arrived. Sales had become international in scope, and the change from selling with samples to servicing preexisting accounts was firmly established. In earlier times, life on the markets was often a hectic catch-as-catch-can existence. Transportation was by train and automobile, and amenities such as air-conditioning and rooms with private bathrooms were usually little

When Gordon Crenshaw assumed the presidency, the company’s Canadian and Rhodesian branches were solidly based, moves had been made into Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia, and another was planned for Angola. Greek tobacco interests had been developed, but Germany, briefly the site of the Microflake venture, would become a casualty of the business climate of the 1970s. Universal had for years been steadily growing, but greater enterprises were yet to come. By 1966, most if not all of Universal’s top executives had had experience in foreign countries. One man in particular, however, was to be of major importance in the years

The most recent major change to take place at Universal centers on the appointment of Henry H. Harrell as the company’s president in 1987. A native Richmonder, Harrell graduated from the city’s St. Christopher’s school and later from Washington and Lee University, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa English major. He joined Universal in 1966 and, as all newcomers, was sent off to the factories. His introduction to the company was through a lifelong friendship with Jan La verge, who at first had serious reservations about the young man’s ability to fit into the tobacco world. When Harrell was

As Pinckney Harrison and James Covington were developing Universal’s China business, other company officials were pioneering in Canada and in various cigar-leaf districts of the United States. These three profit centers had much in common. In each case, a younger generation of entrepreneurs took over an enterprise of modest proportions and turned it into an impressive operation. Each company operated on a relatively autonomous basis, and each featured an essentially self-made man whose individual drive and acumen led him to a dominant position not only with a key subsidiary but within the geographic region. In the 1920s and 1930s, China

Under the leadership of Gordon L. Crenshaw, Universal became a worldwide organization. Expansions were made into all parts of the globe, most notably in South America, the Far East, and Southeast Asia. To see the growth of the company during Crenshaw’s tenure, one need only look at yearly revenues. In 1966, for example, Crenshaw’s first year as company leader, annual revenues were $348 million. Two decades later, in 1987, it had reached the $2 billion mark. Figures reflected in the company’s annual reports are not startlingly large for any particular fiscal year; rather, they reflect solid growth: in 1966, $348