1955 - Commerce

Commerce

New York's 133-year-old National City Bank merges March 30 with the 92-year-old First National Bank of New York to create First National City Bank (Citibank); New York's 78-year-old Chase National Bank merges March 31 with the 156-year-old Bank of Manhattan Co. to create Chase Manhattan Bank, whose assets are second in size only to those of Bank of America (see Chemical, 1995).

H. & R. Block is founded by Kansas City tax accountants Henry (Wohlman) Bloch, 32, and his brother Richard (Adolf), 29, who use the firm name Block to avoid mispronunciation. Specializing in low-cost, mass-produced income tax returns at a time when the Internal Revenue Service is scaling back its tax-preparation services, the firm will open seven offices at New York next year and go on to have franchised offices in every major U.S. city. By 1977 it will be preparing 10 percent of all U.S. tax returns (25 percent in some cities), and by 2004 its offices will be filling out one in every nine returns.

Austrian banker Baron Louis Rothschild dies in Jamaica, B.W.I., January 15 at age 73; Reynolds Metals founder Richard S. Reynolds at Richmond, Va., July 29 at age 73; German steel magnate Hermann Rechling at Mannheim August 24 at age 82 (he was convicted of war crimes in 1948 and served 3 years of a 10-year sentence).

The U.S. federal minimum wage rises from 75ยข per hour to $1 August 12 by act of Congress.

A contract signed with American Can and Continental Can August 13 wins the United Steel Workers the first 52-week guaranteed annual wage in any major U.S. industry.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and CIO merge December 2 in a pact engineered by Walter P. Reuther and George Meany, who at age 61 assumes the presidency of the combined AFL-CIO that he will hold for more than 23 years (Chicago-born United Steelworkers of America counsel Arthur [Joseph] Goldberg, 48, has helped to bring about the merger). Some 12 million U.S. workers are unionized, a number that will increase to 20 million in the next 20 years.

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes December 30 at 488.40, up from 404.39 at the end of 1954. A staff report issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking and Currency has observed that "less than one percent of all American families [own] over four-fifths of all publicly held stocks owned by individuals."