The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
A candid look back at Oneida Ltd.’s fall
John Hatcher: Community descendant pens book about silversmiths
KENWOOD » “With its goodly heritage of more than one hundred successful years of existence, Oneida Ltd. is dedicated to making the Corporation a continuously profitable venture, thus providing its owners with security and growth, and its members with an opportunity to earn a good living under fine working conditions.”
These words prefaced the official Oneida Ltd. Creed as written by then-president Pierrepont T. Noyes and dated Jan. 1, 1967. That creed promised to “firmly believe in the ‘ family spirit’ way of operating because it, by definition, implies cooperation and teamwork. This belief in the Oneida Ltd. family makes for a strong, self-perpetuating organization which receives its strength from a united endeavor.”
That promise ended up far from the reality as the heyday of the world-renowned silversmiths fell far behind them less than four decades later.
Now, longtime Oneida Ltd. employee John P. L. “Lang” Hatcher, the great-grandson of one of the original Oneida Community founders, wants the full story to be known. After several years of interviews and research, Hatcher has written his version of the events that led to the fall of the silversmiths, placing much of the blame on costly investments that didn’t pan out for the company.
“Oneida (Community) Limited: A Goodly Heritage Gone Wrong” gives Hatcher the chance to tell the tale as he lived through it, in a matterof-fact way rather than pointing blame about a lost business venture. He looks back at the early days of the social experiment of the original Oneida Community in the mid-1800s, a group where all members were equal and all men were married to all women. While the marital aspects of that community were called into question by doubters in their later years, their commitment to quality and a solid work ethic — coupled with management’s belief that higher productivity could be gained from treating employees compassionately — led themto create an Oneida Ltd. silverware business that became world-renowned for quality.
“They used to think, ‘If our employees can’t own their own home within five years, we have failed,’” Hatcher said of the early company management.
Divided up into chapters following each of the company president’s tenures, Hatcher tells of the glory days when Oneida Ltd. was constantly expanding to new market places, while keeping the promise to provide their employees with
a workplace where they would truly want to continue to be a part. He continues to write about the collapse of their business, and Hatcher himself was with the company during their final days.
“I was stupid — I went down with the ship,” he recalled. “Had we only saved our resources and not spent all that money I think we could have had a fighting chance to survive.”
Hatcher contacted many of the persons directly involved in running the company as he could, finding mixed reactions from some who wanted to help, and others who likely didn’t really want to relive those days. He studied several decades worth of annual reports, compiling the data, including the eye-opening comparison by percentage of company presidents’ salaries to their annual sales figures, that in the book appears in a variety of text and charts.
He was also tasked with another obstacle, but one he quickly overcome thanks to his enthusiasm for the subject matter.
“I had never written a book before,” Hatcher said. But that didn’t end up slowing him for long, as helpers came along to read over his hand-written work and aid him in formatting everything for the computer needs of the publisher.
While the reviews of people who have read the book have been flattering, Hatcher admits they are likely kindred readers who feel the same way he does about the situation. He has been complimented for his hard work and presentation of the facts, and has even gotten suggestions that maybe he went a little too easy on the people responsible.
“Some people say I should have been rougher on some of them,” Hatcher said.
But that isn’t what the book is about, he explained. Hatcher isn’t trying to cast an accusatory finger -- he simply wants to tell the true story fromhis point of view, and to be able to offer that story of a big part of central New York heritage to read- ers for generations to come.
“I figured if I didn’t do it, nobody else was going to, and that’s the way a lot of people would have liked it to be,“he said. “I really thought this story needed to be told. I got most of it off of my chest, and I didn‘t have to invent a thing. This was a company that at one time really stood for something and meant something, and I want people to remember that.”
“Oneida ( Community) Ltd: A Goodly Heritage Gone Wrong” is available through online retailers or at the gift shop of the Oneida Community Mansion House, located at 170 Kenwood Avenue in Kenwood, during their regular business hours.