QUEEN OF THE
CorporateGadflies
THE UNSTOPPABLE WILMA SOSS
By Janice Traflet
A cleaning woman, with mop and pail
in tow. A well-dressed Victorian lady,
wearing a purple velvet hat, a fancy lace
blouse and an expensive mink. A safari
guide, sporting khaki long shorts and a
helmet. All of these — and more — were
costumes donned by the colorful Wilma
Porter Soss as she vividly made her points
at various stockholder meetings across the
United States.
For more than 40 years, beginning in
the late 1940s, the legendary shareholder
activist energetically and passionately
pressed management for a wide range of
reforms, such as appointing more women
to corporate boards, moving stockholder
meetings to more accessible locations,
curbing executive compensation packages and increasing the transparency of
financial statements. “Corporate gadfly”
was the term often applied to Soss. Like a
pesky fly, she irritated management as she
publicly questioned their practices, and
many chief executives probably wished
they could swat her away.
Soss, however, proved to be remarkably
persistent, and she helped highlight the
potential power of owning even one share
in a public corporation. While one share
equals only one vote (and hence larger
shareholders carry more weight with their
votes), one share nevertheless entitles the
bearer to certain privileges, like attending and speaking at stockholders meetings. Soss strategically accumulated small
numbers of shares in multiple companies
in order to be able to attend their annual
meetings and proffer shareholder resolutions there. Having built a lucrative career
in public relations prior to embarking on
Wilma Soss speaks at a US Steel
shareholders meeting, May 1, 1955.
her crusade as a shareholder activist, Soss
well understood the power of publicity,
and she worked hard to harness it.
In the early postwar period, Soss both
reflected and helped disseminate the
shareholder ideology rhetoric then being
promoted by the financial community in
the United States — discourse that extolled
the power and the responsibilities of the
individual investor, no matter how small.
As the Cold War began to take shape,
stock exchanges, listed corporations and
member firms stressed the importance of
American citizens from all walks of life
buying stocks and becoming more actively
involved in the free enterprise system.
Equity advocates constantly noted that
investors in a corporation actually together
owned that business, which entitled them
to share in any profits that accrued. Moreover, as the financial community liked to
say, people buying stock were not just purchasing a piece of an American corporation (as critical as that was); they were also
buying “a share in America,” which would
serve as a defense against communism,
as more people would have a stake in the
system. An army of small investors, the
lifeblood of capitalism, purportedly would
enrich not just the shareholders themselves, but also the American way of life.
In her writings and interviews, Soss
expressed many of these same thoughts. In
March 1951, for example, Soss told The New
Yorker, “The truth is, we shareholders own
the corporations. All those Prussian-faced
directors are just our employees — laboring people, you might say…” A fierce
proponent of “shareholder democracy,”
Soss perceived herself as the voice of overlooked shareholders, particularly women
shareholders. And she saw her work as
helping preserve American capitalism.
Soss did not become involved in the
fight for shareholder rights until she was
in her mid-40s, when she began attending
corporations’ annual meetings and started
realizing their deficiencies. Soon, she
was actively participating and challenging management. Soss’s first clash with a
board was at the annual meeting of US
Steel in May of 1947, when she leapt to her
feet and made an impassioned speech. She
demanded that women be represented on
US Steel’s board, arguing that women held
more than half of the company’s stock,
and therefore were entitled to have their
point of view represented, and by one of
their own gender.
Recalling that meeting four years later,
Soss told The New Yorker, “No one could
have been more surprised than I was when
I got to my feet that morning and said
what I did.” She added, “I didn’t choose to
be the head of the woman’s economic-suffrage movement; I was just sitting quietly
in my seat, brooding over my one share
of stock, when the woman’s economicsuffrage movement chose me.”
At that same meeting, Soss announced
to the “gentlemen on this board” that “…
there is being born in this room today
the Federation of Women Shareholders
in American Business. And they will call
upon the steel industry and ask for representation in the business they own.” True
to her word, Soss quickly organized a nonprofit corporation, which was chartered in
the fall of 1947 with the endorsement of
Justice Ferdinand Pecora, who had presided over the acrimonious investigation
of Wall Street after the Crash of 1929.
In 1949, at another US Steel meeting in
Hoboken, New Jersey, Soss offered the first
of the Federation’s many proposed shareholder resolutions: to move US Steel’s
annual meeting from Hoboken (where the
company had been incorporated) to New
York City (which was more convenient
for a greater number of shareholders). As
would become her modus operandi, Soss
dressed in costume to make her point.
www.MoAF.org | Fall 2016 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 21