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steadily larger mergers leading toward one final merger to end all mergers in which Ward would com-
bine multiple giant bakery companies into a single firm with dominant positions in every bread market
in the country.
It almost succeeded. By 1925, using millions of dollars staked by stock speculators, William had con-
solidated much of the industry into three massive companies: the Ward Baking Company, the General
Baking Company, and Continental Baking. The General Baking Company, itself the product of sever-
al previous combinations, had dominant positions in some twenty-five hundred towns. Continental was
even bigger. The Wards' first bakery in Pittsburgh had used 15 barrels of flour a week. Continental's
forty massive plants spread out in thirty-five cities across the country consumed 57,500.
Most consumers hadn't yet noticed the changes, but Wisconsin's great Progressive politician Robert
M. La Follette attacked the “Ward Bread Trust” in his presidential campaign rhetoric. Bakery workers'
unions, bearing the brunt of Ward's growing power, railed against the “Ward Bread Octopus.” And, for
once, workers found common cause with many independent bakery owners, who decried the dirty tac-
tics Ward's merger managers used to drive small firms out of business. Democrats in the House and
Senate introduced resolutions against Ward, and federal regulators filed an antitrust complaint against
Continental.
Unfazed, William Ward moved ahead without pause. In January 1926, he announced the formation
of the Ward Food Products Corporation (WFPC), which would absorb General, Continental, and the
family's New York flagship Ward Baking Company along with sundry interests in flour milling, yeast
production, bakery equipment manufacturing, and transportation companies acquired over the years. In
2011 terms, the WFPC would be a $25-billion company, but more importantly, it would have a dominant
presence in every important bread market in the country. Its gorilla weight and market presence would
give it unprecedented power to determine the price of flour and bread. One company would, effectively,
dictate the terms of access to the country's single most important food.
President Coolidge's pro-business administration was not known for its enthusiastic enforcement of
antitrust laws, and Ward had actively supported the president's campaign—but the WFPC went too far.
A month later the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed an injunction against the merger, ruling that
the General, Continental, and Ward Baking Companies must remain independent.
The precise choreography of Ward's undertaking had come unglued. The pieces had begun to spin
away from him. Faced with this, Ward retreated to home turf: the Ward Baking Company's flagship
bakeries in Brooklyn and the Bronx. There, on February 6, 1929, almost three years to the date after
the WFPC's incorporation, Ward's secretary found him slumped at his desk, dead of a heart attack three
days short of his forty-fifth birthday.
Today, baseball buffs, interested in the Wards' short-lived Brooklyn Tip-Toppers major league franchise,
are more likely to remember the Ward family than food historians. But the Wards' imprint lingers on our
loaves and in our bakery aisles. The family revolutionized the technology of modern baking and created
its business model. For, while the FTC balked at one company controlling the country's bread, it left
untouched the larger structure of mini-monopolies. The giants General and Continental emerged from
the fracas unscathed, living to combine and grow larger. Continental survived into the 1990s, when it
was absorbed by Interstate Bakeries Corporation, an even bigger company—evidence that an impulse
to combine and monopolize still dominates the industry. In his last year of life, however, William Ward
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