Pollux’s Spears

SARAH NICHOLS

It soon became clear to me that it was impossible to render understandable the concentration and interconnections, in other words the anatomy of imperialism, without using the graphical method of which I became one of the rare specialists worldwide. 1

Cement is the binding agent for concrete. A homogenous, low- value, perishable bulk commodity, it is the constant in reinforced concrete. 2 But a trio of graphics, published in 1946, depicts it as another sort of binder, one gluing a whole swath of the build - ing material industry into a conglomerate. An array of building materials is shown framed by cement—or, rather, by the network of companies that produce it. 3 The three graphics are the center - piece of an exposé titled The Cement and Building Material Trust published under the pseudonym “Pollux,” after the mytho - logical twin, positioning the unmasking of corporate-political power structures as a heroic act. 4 At the time of publication, the author’s real identity remained unknown. The Swiss conserv - ative press doggedly attacked Pollux’s work and attempted to smear any number of figures by accusing them of being behind the moniker. 5 Finally in 1953, with palpable satisfaction, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung unmasked Pollux, revealing that while his work had been published in Social Democratic and pro- union periodicals, the author not only held communist sympa - thies—an association Social Democrats were taking pains to disavow—but had defected to East Germany. Behind Pollux was Georges Baehler, a hydroelectric engineer who had worked for eighteen years in Switzerland, France, and Morocco before switching to his particular form of economic research. The three graphics, then, were drawn by an engineer—one with firsthand knowledge of the materiality of construction—to subvert the cartels that structured his professional life. Working outward from this insight, the present article situates the graphics, first in their biographical and political context, then in a longer history of organizational and anti-imperialist draw - ings, in order to locate their intervention at the intersection of information and materiality. Though Pollux was unmasked, Baehler’s voluminous, obsessive work and resulting archive of over 30 linear meters of newspaper clippings, articles, corre - spondence, and half-finished research projects has never been properly unpacked. This article is thus also a first pass at and invitation to further research his compelling and complicated life and work. In the mid-1930s, Baehler made what he describes as an abrupt shift from building systems to interrogating them. Just before, he had worked on the El Kansera dam in Morocco

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 (1928–1934), for which François de Pierrefeu—who began collaborating with Le Corbusier in 1931 on the journal Plan s— was lead contractor. Baehler describes the experience as both his most important success as an engineer but also his first encounter with colonialism and the “stranglehold” held on the country by European finance. 6 From Morocco, he moved to Paris in 1935, attributing an easy landing to Le Corbusier— a fellow émigré from La Chaux-de-Fonds —and Paul Vaillant- Couturier, editor of L’humanité , at the time, the official news - paper of the French Communist Party. 7 From 1936 to 1939, he worked within the Maison de la culture on rue d’Anjou and for the Confédération générale du travail (CGT; General Confederation of Labor) and, together with a group of collabo - rators released pieces under the name Pierre Lenoir that cri - tiqued the power of global finance, including an investigation of the French cement industry. The outbreak of war forced Baehler back to engineering. While managing a hydroelectric plant in Corrèze, he was arrested by the Vichy regime for Resistance activities and was eventually involuntarily repatriated to Zurich in 1942. There, he found work at Elektrobank, a company that financed and planned hydropower projects worldwide. 8 At the same time, Baehler continued writing articles and founded a publishing house (Verein für wirtschaftliche Studien , 1944–1946) that released a series of five antitrust missives on topics such as the electrical and insurance industries and the complicity of German corpo - rations supporting the Nazi regime. 9 Baehler returned to Paris in 1945, working for the Centre d’études et de recherches économiques et sociales (Center for Social and Economic Study and Research) of the French Communist Party. Then in 1950 he relocated to the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany). There, under the pseudonym Baumann, he wrote on topics such as the Bonn government, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, and Krupp— a sampling of the GDR’s bogeymen and antagonists. As in Paris, his publications were supported by a research position, this time at the Forschungsstelle Baumann (Baumann Research Unit) within the Deutsches Institut für Zeitgeschichte ( German Institute for Contemporary History ). By the end of the 1950s, his articles taper off, and some speculate he lost favor with the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party). 10 During Baehler’s time in both France and East Germany, his research was published in journals and newspapers of ruling leftist governments, yet it was the short period in Zurich where, writing against the grain, his work generated the most controversy. Throughout Baehler’s work, pervasive concerns include the concentration of power in the hands of the few (especially when passed down through familial links), the tendency toward monopolization in different industrial sectors, and—uniting the two—the oligarchic superimposition of corporate and polit - ical power. Baehler uses the English word trust in both the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 German and French editions of his books, treating the trust as an import from American capitalism. 11 In his usage, trust refers to a large corporation whose hegemony over a given industry tends toward a monopoly, like Standard Oil. 12 In the case of cement, trust is also used to refer to an industry woven into an effective monopoly by common actors and investment. From Standard Oil onward, trusts were condemned from both ends of the economic spectrum. Free-market economists attacked monopolies, viewing them as a distortion of fair compe - tition, while Marxists critiqued them for fostering consumption, forming a new bourgeoisie, and feeding a brutal form of expan - sionism. While Pollux’s graphics deal with a topic that was hotly debated in his time, his early work is somewhat solitary, more in dialogue with an earlier generation of scholars than his contemporaries. Baehler draws heavily from Vladimir Lenin’s

Pollux [Georges study of imperialism. In 1916, Lenin argued that the inherent Baehler]. tendency toward concentration in capitalism created not just “Deutschland” monopolies but a pernicious overlap between finance and (Germany). From Wer leitet industry, thereby ending any semblance of a free-market system Deutschland? and propelling a worldwide search for new sources for expan - (Who leads sion. 13 In 1910, Rudolf Hilferding, in a work influential for Germany?, 1945), plate 6. Lenin, had described the growing separation between capital and production and with it the emergence of a new group of powerful individuals. These insiders—often financiers—held seats on many corporate boards and their interests came to influence disparate industries. This interweaving of industries through finance and the resulting power of their alliances were what Baehler sought to “unmask.” Paul Sweezy’s theory of monopoly capitalism, published in 1942 at the height of Pollux’s activity but known to Baehler only later, offered a revi -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 sion of Lenin’s theory similar to Baehler’s views. While par - tially rejecting the notion of the central power of finance, Sweezy saw that capitalism was no longer a free-market sys - tem. The state had become an economic instrument, and the world economy was an interlocked network of states—more or less capitalist—experiencing varying degrees of monopoly. 14 | | | | |

The three cement industry plates are different views of the same subject: the Swiss building material industry at midcen - tury. Plate 1 shows the industry in western, French-speaking Switzerland centered on the concerns of cement producer Ernst Martz; plate 2, German-speaking Switzerland through the group of companies owned by the Schmidheiny family; and plate 3, a simplified representation of the industry as a whole, with substantial overlap between the two groups. Financial institutions are at the top, a placement that reflects their impor - tance. 15 Major figures or institutions are below, linked businesses from other sectors are at the sides, and foreign subsidiaries are at the bottom. Though their names may seem unfamiliar, sev - eral are of continuing global importance today, albeit under new names such as LafargeHolcim, UBS, and Credit Suisse. 16 Boxed text indicates organizations of all kinds, while circles indicate powerful individuals. 17 Arrows from circle to box indi - cate membership on the board of directors; tapering lines indicate a president, vice president, or delegate. Arrows between two boxes indicate common board members, and tapered lines indicate that the organization at the narrow end is a subsidiary. A dashed line indicates that the person, association, or connec - tion no longer exists. Though an economic diagram, Pollux traces familial connections and close personal associations, indicated here by thin lines. 18 The plates only show connec - tions, the pieces of the network that confirm interweaving. In a deceptive omission, independent board members are not shown. The central role of the cement trade groups in structuring the industry is visible only in the third graphic, where all arrows point to the four overlapping organizations at the bottom. Pollux depicts the three cartels: EG Portland for cement, AG Kalk for lime, and the Gips Union for gypsum, and super - imposes them on the umbrella organization Verein Schweizerische Zement-, Kalk- und Gipsfabrikanten (VSZKGF; Association of Swiss Cement, Lime, and Gypsum Manufacturers). 19 Seeking support to establish a national cement norm, the Swiss national material testing laboratory’s founding director, Ludwig von Tetmajer, had prompted the formation of the VSZKGF in 1881, and it was thenceforth a powerful central voice with the means to support not just substantial research—85,305 tests on cement in just the first twelve years—but also one wielding substantial political clout. 20 While wood was still processed locally, stone was excavated in hundreds of independent quarries, and steel was rolled in just a handful of domestic mills, cement was orga - nized nationally. The constancy and predictability dictated by

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 the norm helped shift cement from a palette of competing types to a standardized material, a factor known to support either cartel formation or a nationalized industry. 21 Over most of the twentieth century, EG Portland was a legally recognized cement cartel that coordinated production, pricing, and distribution. 22 It was so intermingled with VSZKGF, however, that it is of little use to talk about them as separate entities. 23 Together, they permeated all spheres and states of cement and concrete, from research to practice to dissemination. 24 The connections depicted

Top: Pollux [Georges Baehler]. “Zement-Industrie” (Cement industry), plate 2, “Schmidheiny Gruppe” (Schmidheiny group). From Zement und Baumaterialien Trust (1946). Bottom: Pollux [Georges Baehler]. “Zement-Industrie” (Cement industry), plate 3. From Zement und Baumaterialien Trust (1946). by Pollux are also paradigmatic of what economic historians Thomas David and André Mach recently claim are the three features of corporate governance in Switzerland: the “central role” of the large banks, interconnections between the boards of the major companies, and concentration of ownership—an indication that the structure of the cement industry as depicted by Pollux was not a singular occurrence. 25 At the time Pollux was writing, the cement industry had to varying extents absorbed many other building materials,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 including brick, lumber, and Eternit (cement fiberboard). 26 The relationship between materials, even when owned by the same families, was not always smooth. Masonry, for example, was perceived to be under threat from the concrete frame. Equating the frame with modernism, the Swiss association of brick man - ufacturers sent copies of the book Bausünden und Baugeld- Vergeu dung (Construction sins and construction-budget waste)— which disparages the cracks and leaks at banner projects like the Weißenhofsiedlung—to architecture offices across the country. 27 Yet, at the same time, brick manufacturers had also long been adapting with products that fit into the frame of re- inforced concrete such as insulated masonry units for façades and ceramic hollow-core floor slabs. 28 By the mid-1930s, salvos attacking other materials largely disappear. Pollux’s graphics also depict striking vertical integration of the cement industry. Often, the same businesses that produced cement ran the quarries to extract limestone; sold ready- mix concrete; produced prefabricated concrete elements; and overlapped with the manufacturers of cement production machinery—crushing and grinding machines, for example, and the rotating kilns made by Escher Wyss Maschinenfabrik. 29 This machinery was also exported as the Swiss cement industry rapidly expanded abroad—as far as Egypt, Lebanon, and South Africa by the end of the 1920s and globally by the beginning of the 1990s. While the raw materials, labor, and production were and still are local, the financing, machines, expertise, and man - agement were largely material and immaterial exports. Both abroad and domestically, cement producers initiated and invested in real estate companies as well as large-scale infrastructure projects, from the construction of an electrified tram line in the Rhine Valley (1890–1897) to hydropower projects such as the Sarganserland power plant completed in the late 1970s. In this manner, the cement industry created demand for its core prod - uct. Pollux’s arrows also connect land to extraction, factory, and empire, revealing how cement production requires a con - stant search for new markets and new sources of raw material and the fuel to process them. 30

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Pollux considered the graphics’ reification of flows of power in complex power structures to be his main methodological con - tribution. They are “nothing like the ‘organigrams’ published by the trusts themselves,” he protests. Yet the managerial devices of organigrams or flow charts are clearly precedents for his work. 31 In tracing the origins of the American “managerial revolution” in the nineteenth century, business historian Alfred D. Chandler cites an 1855 chart by the general supervisor of the New York and Erie Railroad as one of the first organizational charts. Such charts “stressed that channels of authority and responsibility were also channels of communication.” 32 The 1855 railroad chart’s structure is genealogical: transferring the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 familial and generational hierarchies to the managers and telegram communications of the corporation. All lines radiate out from the central general superintendent. 33 The author of the chart, Daniel McCallum, was an apprenticed engineer-architect who had designed churches and bridges before reworking the management architecture of the railroad, an echo of how Pollux’s engineering training informed his critical graphics. A link between McCallum’s dendritic chart and Pollux’s more rhizomatic structure is provided in a 1904 book campaigning

G.H. Henshaw and Daniel McCallum. New York and Erie Railroad: Diagram Representing a Plan of Organization , 1855. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. for reduced competition. In The Truth about the Trusts , John Moody—the eponymous founder of Moody’s, the bond credit rating company—shows the interconnections of the Rockefeller and Morgan “family tree.” 34 Like Pollux’s graphics, the chart clusters the Rockefeller and Morgan groups and financial insti - tutions at the center of the chart; in outer orbit are railroads, industrial trusts, and franchise groups. The chart has a mirrored structure that doubles many actors to create the impression of a hierarchy when, in fact, it is describing a set of interwoven connections closer to Pollux’s graphics than McCallum’s rail -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 road. Seen within this lineage, Pollux’s graphics are more a détournement of the tools of the trusts themselves than a wholly new representational convention, seeking to implicate instead of order. 35 Unlike the anonymity of McCallum’s chart, which labels the chain of command in terms of managerial roles (general super - intendent, agents, watchmen), or Moody’s “family tree,” which treats the Rockefeller and Morgan groups as lumped, abstract entities, Pollux names specific people and draws sinuous, tapering lines emanating from each. At some intersections, they appear like devilish horns and tails in what is perhaps a delib - erate demonization of the individual figures. In this demonization, Pollux’s charts perhaps evoke nothing so much as the limbs of that great icon of expansionism: the octopus. 36 A decade after Victor Hugo’s Les travailleurs de la mer described the octopus as the most frightful of creatures—

John Moody. one capable not just of eating but, as Allen S. Weiss points out, “The Rockefeller – drinking its victims—an 1877 “serio-comic map” started the Morgan ‘Family genre of the greedy cephalopod, depicting Russia with its ten - Tree .’” From The Truth about Trusts tacles strangling Finland, Poland, and Persia and duly entwin - (1904). ing the limbs of the Ottoman Empire. 37 Later, expansionist corporations were similarly treated. A 1904 cartoon depicts the Standard Oil Company as a rampaging octopus with an oil-tank head whose arms squeeze Congress, the state house, the steel and copper industries, and shipping, with its last arm aimed at the White House—the liquidity of capital turned into Hugo’s liquid death. 38 Pollux draws on this lineage of critical cartoons, multiplying the motif into a network of crisscrossing arms. The octopus becomes a pack animal instead of a solitary creature. Diverging from Hilferding, who saw anarchy in the free market and nefarious order in the “will to organization” of the monop - oly, Pollux argues that through this interweaving, the structure of power is bent and contorted. 39 The argument is fundamen -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 tally aesthetic; it is also a display of how the structure of capitalism had evolved from behemoths like Standard Oil to “cascades of subsidiaries and holding companies” that, in the “crisscrossed complexity of trusts, unions, groups, [and] banks,” was, according to Pollux, “becoming increasingly dif - ficult to account for.” 40 Pollux’s critique of the cement industry aims squarely at power and profit. Leading from this, he proposes its national - ization. A year after publication, in 1947, a member of the Swiss national council put forward a motion to do just that, stating, “what the EGP does is good and well, but it and the whole cement industry shouldn’t belong to a few private people but to the state.” 41 As the postwar economy in Switzerland boomed, the nation’s per capita consumption of cement surged to become one of the highest in the world. 42 For national projects such as alpine dams, contracts signed with EG Portland fixed

Udo Keppler. the cement price and guaranteed timely provision over long Next! , 1904. construction periods. 43 Despite the problematic nature of con - Library of centrated power embodied by the cartel, that same centraliza - Congress, Prints 44 and Photographs tion worked with clocklike efficiency. In 1992 a new concern Division. controlling approximately two-thirds of the Swiss market was formed by buying up most of the companies that had composed the cartel, making an ongoing federal investigation into its price-fixing irrelevant. 45 Two years later, the cartel was formally dissolved. The 1947 parliamentary motion reveals a limit equally pres- ent in Pollux’s work: the point of critique was not the industry’s sway in driving construction and dictating material use but the fact that this power was held by private individuals. Despite indicating remorse for having worked for the very corporations whose power he criticized, Pollux considered the violence of construction a necessity for more electrical power, more highways, larger factories, and modern housing. 46

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in Pollux’s profes - sional field of hydropower. Through territorial and often geopolitical monumentality, sheer material intensity, the inter - weaving of state and private capital, and the labor required to build them, dams presented some of the most jarring contradic - tions between the promises offered by modernism and the means required to achieve them. 47 Having faced this firsthand, it is somewhat astonishing from today’s perspective that Pollux kept his focus on immaterial arrangements instead of formulat - ing a broader critique of what is embodied in building materials production and the artifacts themselves. Pollux’s myopia reveals the porousness of the line dividing cement as cartel or nation - alized industry, as well as the correlate line dividing monopoly capitalism and state enterprise. Indeed, writing contemporane - ously, Joseph Schumpeter saw in monopolies the end of capitalism. 48 Pollux weaponized the organigram. Tracing flows of power and information, his graphics make visible both the managerial network and the material effects of monopoly. This particular material monopoly had its roots in the laboratory, where the data and centralized organization necessary for the material norm were established. 49 In doing so, metrics of chemical composition and compressive strength materially helped bring building materials into the continual evolution of capitalist forms of production, themselves founded on information. The resulting bulk commodity maintained its domination over other materials through the efficient management of a network of extraction, production, and supply. This flow of information —in this case, as Pollux takes pains to point out, through the hands of a limited set of powerful individuals—was material and perpetual, an assembly of actors and technologies config - uring extraction landscapes, buildings, and infrastructure and producing a whole host of externalities, such as atmospheric carbon dioxide and the acrid smell of cities in transformation. The inadequacy of the insipidly passive notion of supply, and the supplier, in reference to building materials is on dis - play in Pollux’s demystification of their tentacular architecture. The business of cement, and of building materials at large, extracts, produces, and normalizes; it seeks energy sources, arranges logistical networks, and commissions infrastructure. That is, through the immaterial it produces and continually adapts an apparatus that perpetuates material demand. As the cement industry’s own history of the industry states, “Cement usage stands worldwide for a country’s state of development. And development is never complete.” 50

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 Notes 1. Georges Baehler, “ Méthode de travail ” (undated, unpub.), in Zentral- bibliothek Zürich, Ar 27.1–5, p. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2. Cement is produced by burning limestone and clay; concrete mixes cement with water and aggregate; when reinforced, steel is anchored in, pro - ducing the “material” as theorized in architecture. But while the aggregates, the concrete mix design, and the type of reinforcement vary, for most of the twentieth century the vast majority of concrete was made with nationally standardized Portland cement. 3. Looking at the processes that converge to make reinforced concrete reveals it to be as much an assemblage—and organization—as a material. Three of the most widely read early architecture publications on reinforced concrete were released in 1928: Ludwig Hilberseimer and Julius Vischer, Beton als Ge stalter (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1928); Francis S. Onderdonk Jr., The Ferro-Concrete Style: Reinforced Concrete in Modern Architecture (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1928); and Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig and Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928). Much of this work reinforces earlier narra - tives of concrete as a progenitor of modernism, although Bauen in Frankreich also argues that new materials had changed what could be built, that the whole surface of the earth had begun to be designed by new infrastructure, industry, and the extraction and storage of the materials needed for such developments. Giedion thus demonstrates that organizational changes in the building trade happened in parallel to a reorganization of the territory with a previously impossible strength, under presumably (unmentioned) new political economical structures. Key recent works on concrete as produced through chemistry, law, and discourse (and ones I have been drawing on while preparing my dissertation on concrete) include Adrian Forty’s Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), where con - crete has a power of assembly and is approached more as a medium and process than a material; Cyrille Simonnet’s Le béton: Histoire d’un matériau (Marseille: Parenthèses, 2005), which describes the patenting of formerly tacit knowledge and perpetual constructions of concrete as building material through laboratories, manuals, and codes; Réjean Legault’s “ L’appareil de l’architecture moderne : New Materials and Architectural Modernity in France, 1889–1934” (Ph.D. diss., MIT, 1997), which traces how architectural circles denoted concrete as “modern” in journals, conferences, and treatises; and Amy Slaton’s Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), which shows concrete’s role in the formation of a new professional class. 4. Pollux [Georges Baehler], Zement u nd Baumaterialien Trust (Zurich: Verein für wirtschaftliche Studien , 1946); and Pollux [Georges Baehler], Le trust du ciment (Zurich: Verein für wirtschaftliche Studien , 1946). Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri or Gemini twins, are commonly depicted on horse - back as warriors or hunters wielding spears or clubs. 5. “Der entlarvte Pollux,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung , no. 2587 (11 March 1953, evening ed.). An earlier book had collected a series of anti-Pollux articles: Lucius Simeon, Pollux der Faustkämpfer: Antwort an einen Demagogen (Buochs, Switzerland: Verlag “Das Aufgebot,” 1945). 6. Baehler added that despite the difficulties of the El Kansera project— building on unstable ground and relocating 2,000 inhabitants—“thanks to a brilliant team of collaborators and excellent relations with the administra - tion, all difficulties were resolved with vivacity and devotion.” He was employed on the El Kansera project, also referred to as Oued-Beth, by Entreprises des grandes travaux hydrauliques , a company held by the Haute banque de Genève and the contractor Zschokke. Georges Baehler, curriculum vitae, 23 November 1977, in Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Ar 27.1–1.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 7. Baehler refers to both by their pseudonyms in his curriculum vitae. They corresponded and Le Corbusier kept some of Baehler’s work as refer - ence material. In addition to Baehler’s work with Pierrefeu, both he and Le Corbusier were of the same generation, and both were in Paris writing for the same circle of leftist periodicals. 8. Elektrobank (later, Elektrowatt) was founded by AEG to grow the market for its products and was backed by Schweizerische Kreditanstalt (Credit Suisse). AEG withdrew its backing after World War I, but Elektrowatt contin - ued. For a brief summary of the history of the company, see Barbara Bonhage, “Elektrowatt,” Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz , 14 November 2005, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D41791.php. 9. The Verein für wirtschaftliche Studien (Society for Economic Studies) released only these five books, all by Pollux. Baehler lists one collaborator— Jean Mussard, who would go on to become the director of General Motors Switzerland. The extent of Mussard’s involvement or that of additional collaborators is unclear. Given, however, his consistency of production as Lenoir, Pollux, and Baumann, I assume Baehler was the main author. The first Pollux volume collects a series of articles on trusts, exposing “ Herrschende Familien und Bundesrat ” (Ruling families and the Federal Council), “ Die Diplomatie: Ein Monopol der herrschenden Familien ” (Diplomacy: A monop - oly of ruling families), “ Der Bally-Trust: Ein Familienunternehmen ” (The Bally trust: A family enterprise), and so on. Later volumes focus on specific industries (electricity, insurance, and cement), and the final book is about German corporations and the Nazi regime. 10. He continued working on several unpublished manuscripts and pitched projects to foreign governments in the hope of research support until his death in 1982. This biography of Baehler has been compiled on the basis of his unpublished curriculum vitae and two further biographies : Markus Bürgi, “Bähler [Baehler], Georges,” Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz , 26 December 2001, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F15156.php; and Philipp Mäder, “Pollux, der unsterbliche Faustkämpfer: Leben und Werk von Georges Bähler (1895–1982),” Studienbibliothek Info: Bulletin der Stiftung Studienbibliothek zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung , no. 20 (December 2002). 11. According to Sweezy, Friedrich Engels added a footnote to the fourth edition of Capital referring to “English and American ‘trusts.’” Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (1942; London: Penguin UK, 1962), 256. Here, though, Engels’s usage was more specific than Baehler’s use of the term, which is largely meant to imply a monopoly. 12. The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) defined a trust as “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade,” declaring this illegal (§1). The act goes on to declare that monopoliz - ing or attempting to monopolize “any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations” is a felony (§2). Sweezy defines trust as a “tighter form of organization than a cartel” in which stock is con - verted to trust certificates but notes that its common use “is a generic descrip - tion covering pretty much the entire range of monopolistic combination.” Sweezy, 264. On the Standard Oil Company as the first corporate trust and the model for similar trusts, see Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1905). 13. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916; London: Penguin UK, 2010). 14. Sweezy, 244, 252. 15. In addition to their role as financiers, banks at that time could repre - sent the individual stockholders who had deposited their shares, voting in the general assembly on behalf of all of them as a large block. Thomas David and André Mach, “4.1 Corporate Governance,” in Wirtschaftsgeschichte der

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 Schweiz im 20. Jahrhundert , ed. Patrick Halbeisen, Margrit Müller, and Béatrice Veyrassat (Basel: Schwabe Verlag , 2012), 833. 16. The Schmidheiny group’s Holderbank is the latter half of the recent merger that formed LafargeHolcim, now purportedly the world’s “leading” material supplier. The Schweizerische Bankverein, Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft , and Eidgenössische Bank AG later merged to form UBS, while the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt was renamed Credit Suisse. 17. Description of drawing conventions from the legends published in Pollux, Die Schweizerische Elektrizitätswirtschaft (Zurich: Verein für wirt - schaftliche Studien , 1945); and Pollux, Versicherung-Zauber , Schriften des “Vereins für wirtschaftliche Studien ” 4 (Zurich: Verein für wirtschaftliche Studien , 1945). 18. Pollux’s earlier graphics also indicate which individuals are members of a “ruling family,” a concern he left aside for the building material industry, whose main actors, even when forming new familial dynasties, were rarely part of the old noble families. 19. EG Portland and VSZKGF were particularly consistent, powerful forces for the building material industry and in national politics. 20. The national testing lab was called the Institut für die Prüfung von Baumaterialien , now known as EMPA; it was founded just one year earlier as part of the national Polytechnic (now ETH Zurich), with the aim of develop - ing scientifically valid means of materials testing in the service of construc - tion, industry, and trade. M. Roš, “ Fünfzig Jahre Eidgen: Materialprüfungs- anstalt,” Schweizerische Bauzeitung 96, no. 18 (1 November 1930): 254. My estimate of the number of cement tests conducted is based on the ETH yearly reports. 21. On the tendency toward cartel formation or nationalization in cement and bulk commodities as a whole, see Roger Pierenkemper, Kartellbussen aus Rechtlicher und Ökonomischer Sicht: Der Problemfall der Zementkartelle (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012). An earlier, more rudimentary study by Baehler examines the similar structure of the French cement industry. Pierre Lenoir [Georges Baehler], Les trusts et le cartel des chaux et ciments (Paris: Fédération nationale des travailleurs du bâtiment, des travaux publics et des matériaux de construction de France et des colonies , 1939), in Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Ar 27.2–7. 22. EG Portland was formed in 1910 after two short-lived cartels from 1895 to 1900 and 1901 to 1908. The company was dissolved in 1994. The federalist Swiss state also expected every branch of industry to be self-regulating, co- ordinated as one body, and active in advocating for its interests in Bern. See David and Mach, 831–871. 23. EG Portland and VSZKGF had overlapping board members, financing, and operations. Pollux’s division of the western and eastern factions is simi - larly artificial. As he shows, they were one group. 24. EG Portland and VSZKGF ran a concrete research institute (Technische Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle ); published a journal (Cementbulletin ), widely read by architects, to disseminate projects and methods in concrete; ran a research and lobbying organization for the promo - tion of concrete roads and highways (Betonstrassen AG); held architectural competitions (e.g., one in 1922 on Gussbetonhäuser ); sponsored exhibitions (e.g., Hans Leuzinger and Robert Maillart’s Zementhalle for the 1939 Swiss National Exhibition); and sponsored architecture awards (Architekturpreis Beton). 25. David and Mach, 832–833. 26. Brick had been the beginning of the Schmidheiny group (the subject of plate 2 of The Cement and Building Material Trust ), when the brick indus - try grew quickly at the end of the nineteenth century before nearly collapsing from the challenge of cheaper cement-based products at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 27. Curt R. Vincentz, Bausünden und Baugeld-Vergeudung: Mit 55 Bild- Dokumenten von Bauwerken der sog. modernen Sachlichkeit , 7th ed. (Hannover: Deutsche Bauhütte Zeitschrift der deutschen Architektenschaft, 1932). 28. Unsurprisingly, the brick company owned by the Schmidheiny family group was particularly keen to develop products for reinforced concrete frames. Hans O. Staub, From Schmidheiny to Schmidheiny , Swiss Pioneers of Economics and Technology, vol. 4 (Meilen, Switzerland: Association for Historical Research in Economics, 1994), 71. 29. Emil Walder, “ Maschinen für die Zement-Industrie,” Schweizerische Bauzeitung 69, no. 17 (1951): 231–235. 30. Cement producers also supported hydropower projects in their polit - ical roles. Ernst Schmidheiny, for example, voted to exploit the water resources of the canton of St. Gallen while serving in the cantonal parlia - ment. See Staub, 18, 58–59. 31. Baehler, “ Méthod de travail.” 32. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 103. 33. G.H. Henshaw and Daniel McCallum, New York and Erie Railroad: Diagram Representing a Plan of Organization , September 1855, in Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G3801.P3 1855 .M2, http:// hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g3301p.ct007696. Caitlin Rosenthal’s article on the dia - gram points out that Chandler wrote about the chart without having seen it. Caitlin Rosenthal, “Big Data in the Age of the Telegraph,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 2013, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/ our-insights/big-data-in-the-age-of-the-telegraph. 34. John Moody, The Truth about the Trusts: A Description and Analysis of the American Trust Movement (New York: Moody Publishing, 1904). 35. In this way, they are similar to the diagrams of the congressional “Pujo Committee” (1912–1913). United States House of Representatives, Committee on Banking and Currency, Arsène Paulin Pujo, and the Sixty-Second Congress, Money Trust Investigation: Investigation of Financial and Monetary Conditions in the United States under House Resolutions Nos. 429 and 504 before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Banking and Currency, House of Representatives , 1912–1913, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/80. 36. In the Internet age, the octopus might not seem like a threatening crea - ture, when videos of them opening jars or scuttling across the ocean floor proliferate online. A recent continuation of the sinister octopus is the mis - sion logo for the National Reconnaissance Office satellite USA-247, launched in 2013, which has an octopus looming over the globe, one tentacle envelop - ing Russia, with the slogan “Nothing is beyond our reach.” Daniel Damler traces the octopus and its uses in cartooning the trusts in Daniel Damler, Konzern und Moderne: Die verbundene juristische Person in der visuellen Kultur 1880–1980 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2016), 21–84. 37. Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de la mer (1866); Allen S. Weiss, “Ingestion/The Epic of the Cephalopod,” Cabinet Magazine , no. 4 (Fall 2001), http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/4/weiss.php; and F.W. Rose, Serio-comic War Map for the Year 1877 , rev. ed. (London: G.W. Bacon, 1877), in Cornell University Library, Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection, PJM_2272_01.jpg. 38. Udo Keppler, Next! (New York: J. Ottmann Lith., 1904), in Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZCN4-122. 39. Rudolph Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital: Eine Studie über die jüngste Entwicklung des Kapitalismus (1910; Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1955), 502. 40. Baehler, “ Méthode de travail,” 3. 41. The motion was put forward by Maurice Jeanneret, a member of the Partei der Arbeit (and no relation to Le Corbusier), who described the cement and lime industries as “monopolized by trusts.” “‘Holderbank’ Financière

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 Glarus AG,” Basler Nachrichten , no. 117 (18 March 1949), in Schweizerische Wirtschaftsarchiv , ERW.G./Bank. 1167. Lacking the legal basis in the Swiss constitution to nationalize an industry but also lacking political support, the motion was declined. Georges Spicher, Hugo Marfurt, and Nicolas Stoll, Ohne Zement geht nichts: Geschichte der schweizerischen Zementindustrie (Zurich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 2013), 190. 42. National projects like the buildout of Alpine hydropower networks, housing, and highways devoured millions of tons of cement even in the absence of a reconstruction effort. 43. For La Grande Dixence, one of the largest dams, the cartel arranged a special contract with the national railway, allowing 1,500 tons of cement to be delivered by train per day over ten years without a single construction delay. G. Bolomey, “ Problèmes administratifs de l’entreprise,” Le choucas , no. 46 (1961): 14. 44. Cement, which is cheap and perishable, has high wastage rates. Because of the carbon dioxide output of cement production, this is a real con - cern. Since the cartel set yearly production quotas using projective estimates based largely on government contracts, the reduction in competition meant that the material produced was more likely to correspond to actual use. Hence, Jeanneret’s proposal to nationalize the cartel rather than dismantle it. On Switzerland as a “Clockwork Nation,” see Marc Angélil and Cary Siress, “Operation Switzerland: How to Build a Clockwork Nation,” Trans 18 (2011): 64–75. 45. Holderbank Cement und Beton AG was formed through acquisition and restructuring within the sixteen remaining cement plants. Spicher, Marfurt, and Stoll, 264. A year later, the federal Kartellkommission released its report “ Die Wettbewerbsverhältnisse auf dem schweizerischen Zementmarkt ,” recommending that quotas, fixed prices, special discounts, product restrictions, and agreements on secured markets all cease. 46. See the inner cover text of The Cement and Building Material Trust translated in this issue of Grey Room . 47. While working for Elektrobank, Baehler was involved in a study for a massive hydroelectric complex in the Saint-Gotthard Massif three times larger than the Grande Dixence Dam. Had it moved forward, the project would have forced the relocation of Andermatt. Never realized, it is one of the most notorious overreaches of the development mentality in midcentury Switzerland. 48. Joseph Schumpeter, “Can Capitalism Survive?” in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942; London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 59–164. Schumpeter diverged from others by arguing that monopolies were neither inherently good nor bad. 49. In many ways, the Swiss cement industry is an inversion of Schumpeter’s statement that “The first thing a modern concern does as soon as it feels that it can afford it is to establish a research department every mem - ber of which knows that his bread and butter depends on his success in devising improvements.” Schumpeter, 96. 50. From the introduction by Urs Schwaller and Kaspar E.A. Wenger in Spicher, Marfurt, and Stoll, 8.

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