RCGA History Part II
For 173 Years, A Force For Progress
When war began in Europe in 1939, Chamber President Thomas N. Dysart thought St. Louis should prepare—in case the U.S. became involved. In mid-1940, William McChesney Martin, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Dysart initiated a census of area manufacturers. The results, published in five volumes, listed the machinery, equipment, floor space, and manpower available in every St. Louis factory. Copies of the survey were sent to each of the 1,100 prime defense contractors in the nation. St. Louis had at least a six-month start on other cities when the U.S. became “the arsenal of democracy.”
Quickly contracts began to come in. A $16 million order was placed with Curtiss-Wright Aircraft Company for training and cargo planes. Construction was begun on a $14 million high-explosives plant near Weldon Spring and a small arms ordinance factory at Goodfellow and Bircher boulevards. Emerson Electric Company, Monsanto Chemical Company, Continental Can, and McQuay-Norris also received large contracts. By the end of World War II, at least 420
St. Louis area plants worked on direct defense contracts; as many as 2,000 more acted as subcontractors.
Once the United States entered the war, the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce became a full time war agency and supported every patriotic project from Bundles for Britain to collecting aluminum for scrap drives. The Chamber’s help in war bond drives put the city “over the top” six times. The Chamber also monitored the burgeoning job market, calling for an end to discrimination against women, Blacks, the handicapped, and older workers. Everyone was needed in the war effort, and the Chamber moved rapidly to end labor pirating and job migration.
The U.S. had been at war a little more than a year and a half when a terrible tragedy struck St. Louis. On August I, 1943, Dysart, Mayor William Dee Becker and five other prominent St. Louis men were killed in the crash of a St. Louis-made troop-carrying glider during a demonstration flight at Lambert Field. The city mourned its loss. George C. Smith was chosen to replace Dysart.
At the close of the war, the Chamber had a bold idea for beating swords into plowshares. It proposed that the abandoned Weldon Spring ordinance plant be transformed into the setting for the headquarters of the new United Nations organization. The location was ideal—in the center of the nation protected by geography, but easily accessible by all forms of transportation. Despite strong lobbying by President Harry S. Truman, Governor Phil Donnelly, Mayor Aloys P. Kaufmann, and Chamber President Smith, the proposal was turned down. (Other rejected proposals in subsequent years included area sites for the Air Force Academy, the NASA space center, and a second Disneyland.)
As the Chamber looked toward the 1950s, it saw a number of serious problems in the city: continued blight, serious traffic congestion, a rising crime rate, and the migration of businesses, factories, and families to the county. Construction in the suburbs boomed in the years after World War II. Many city stores closed and moved west.
Former Mayor Al Kaufmann succeeded George Smith as Chamber president in 1954 and immediately turned the Chamber’s attention to a search for new ways to keep the city alive and growing. He also moved the Chamber into new offices at 224 North Broadway, at the corner of Olive Street. Creation of a privately financed Urban Redevelopment Corporation was a positive step toward slum clearance and urban renewal, things Kaufmann had fought for as mayor.
A widely praised Chamber plan banned on-street parking downtown and established a system of one-way streets, which helped clear much of the traffic congestion. An Anti-Racketeering Bureau and a Crime Commission began to tackle the crime problem. And there were campaigns for a new terminal at Lambert Field, a canal to by-pass the Chain of Rocks in the Mississippi, tax reform, modernized building codes, flood plain protection, and professional football and basketball teams for St. Louis.
In his 1959 annual report, Chamber President Kaufmann announced a privately financed $90 million redevelopment project for the south side of the downtown area, which included construction of a 55,OOO-seat sports stadium. He hailed the new interstate highway system that was in the process of being built, along with a new Mississippi free bridge for autos, Kaufmann also declared the Chamber’s intention to work for an industrial park in the extensive Columbia Bottoms at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Despite years of hard work, the project never materialized.
By 1960, despite a national recession, St. Louis had turned the corner and was reclaiming its decaying downtown. The first urban renewal project championed by the Chamber, the Plaza Apartments, opened, and demolition of the Mill Creek Valley slums was under way. As the decade progressed, St. Louisans watched with pride as the long planned great, soaring Gateway Arch rose on the riverfront, and work resumed on the national park memorializing President Thomas Jefferson—a project started 30 years earlier.
In 1963, a year before St. Louis observed the 200th anniversary of its founding, the
St. Louis County Chamber of Commerce merged with that of the City and enabled the latter to truly live up to the name it had adopted a decade earlier—the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis. The Chamber kicked off the city’s birthday celebration with a lavish dinner on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1964. More than 2,000
St. Louisans attended the black-tie affair at the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel and heard Sen.
Stuart Symington introduce Honorary Chairman August A. Busch, who introduced the main speaker, President Lyndon B. Johnson. The President saluted the “unquenchable spirit of St. Louis.”
Al Kaufmann stepped down as president of the Chamber in 1967 after 13 outstanding years in that post. Shortly thereafter began a major reorganization of the Chamber that eventually led, in 1974, to creation of a new organization with broad goals for economic development of the entire nine-county bi-state region. The name chosen was unwieldy but best suited the organization—the St. Louis Regional Commerce and Growth Association. Along with the new name came new quarters at 10 South Broadway, at the corner of Market Street. Again the name “Chamber of Commerce,” disappeared.
The RCGA’s first fulltime president, Harry T. Morley, was recruited back to St. Louis from a subcabinet post at HUD and immediately launched a campaign to reawaken the flagging interest of St. Louisans in St. Louis. Called “St. Louis Has It ...from A to Z,” it featured a jingle with catchy words that was heard constantly on radio and television—and it apparently accomplished its purpose. St. Louis faced up to RCGA-inspired drives for more Blacks and women in management, for better labor-management relations, for educational programs to improve management skills, for retraining people to
re-enter the job market.
An energy crisis forced members to look at methods of conservation and at the wisest use of resources, The RCGA set up the country’s first Waste Exchange in 1975 to help Midwest firms sell their waste products and buy others’ on the theory that one company’s waste is another’s wealth. Another concept new to St. Louis came to fruition, the establishment of a Foreign Trade Zone in the Chain of Rocks Canal port in Granite City. The Chamber of Commerce had been promoting foreign trade in the area for more than a century, and the Department of Commerce’s approval of the duty-free FTZ capped years of effort by the Chamber and its successors.
In 1978, James M. O’Flynn, a banking executive, succeeded Morley as RCGA president and redoubled economic development efforts, including retention and expansion of local firms; he also launched an aggressive marketing campaign to “sell” St. Louis nationwide. The RCGA was joined in this by the City and St. Louis County under a subsidiary called the St. Louis Partnership.
The corporate offices of Graybar Electric Company and St. Joe Minerals Company were wooed away from New York. And the RCGA managed to convince General Motors, a major St. Louis employer since 1920, not to pull out, as the firm planned; instead, GM built a $500 million assembly plant in Wentzville, whereupon Chrysler and Ford enlarged and modernized their big assembly plants in Fenton and Hazelwood.
Several large government installations also were convinced to stay, and others expanded. Modernization of rail switching yards was advocated with some success. The mushrooming health care industry was encouraged, and the importance of St. Louis as a leading medical center, for both care and research, was advanced.
The RCGA counted three other major accomplishments in the early 1980s. One was the federal authorization, funding and start of construction on the $800 million replacement Lock and Dam 26 in the Mississippi just north of the city, for which the RCGA had campaigned for more than a decade. (The largest public works project in the history of the Midwest, it took eight years to
complete.) The second success was inducing the National Bowling Hall of Fame and Museum to relocate in St. Louis. And the third was the creation of the St. Louis Technology Center to help high-tech businesses get started, part of a long-range program that also embraced a Missouri research park and a venture capital fund (results would become the Center for Emerging Technologies, the Missouri Research Park, and CORTEX).
In addition, the RCGA was proud that its official publication, St. Louis Commerce Magazine, won numerous awards as one of the finest magazines of its kind in the
country. Commerce’s editor from 1966 to
1986 was Robert E. Hannon, a former
St. Louis newspaperman.
As the direct descendent of the Chamber of Commerce, the RCGA retains many of the Chamber’s goals—the promotion of the commercial, industrial, financial, cultural, educational and civic interests of the community. But it also emphasizes long-term, well-planned economic development of the entire bi-state metropolitan region, and it looks for commercial and industrial prospects not only nationwide, but worldwide.
It also directs much of its marketing program toward selling St. Louis as an ideal site in the population geographic center of the country for regional and district office
headquarters, an effort that is meeting a good deal of success. Attesting to that is the lower-than-average vacancy rate in the many new office buildings that have risen in the region in recent years. And, of course, the RCGA has been very supportive of the remarkable renaissance of the area that began in the 1970s and continues unabated in the 1980s, a development that has captured national attention.
As the RCGA prepared for a public
observance of the 150th anniversary of the Chamber and its successors, President
James O’Flynn made a two-fold announcement: one, that he planned to step down
from the RCGA’s top office; and two, that
while anniversaries are traditionally a time to look back, they also afford an occasion to look ahead.
“We are grateful for the work and dedication of the many community leaders who kept St. Louis growing in the best possible way over a century and a half,” O’Flynn said. “The Chamber of Commerce and the organizations that followed, by whatever name, have been a real force for progress. That force must continue, for many challenges lie ahead. May our successors meet those future challenges as successfully as our predecessors did the past ones.”
