Postwar Problems; Arthur Curtiss James

WALTER DOUGLAS succeeded his father, Dr. James Douglas, as president of Phelps Dodge in 1916. Before assuming office, the new president had been assayer at Bisbee, superintendent of the Copper Queen, general manager of all the Phelps Dodge mining interests, and altogether had spent a full quarter of a century in various phases of the company's business. Energetic and imaginative, experienced and courageous, he had need of all these qualities before he surrendered the direction of affairs into younger hands, fourteen years later. For the period of his administration was one of sudden ebb apd flow, flush production, drastic curtailment, quick recovery, and near-disaster. In 1917, soon after Walter Douglas became president, Phelps, Dodge & Co., Inc., which had been formed in 1908 as a holding company, went through an internal reorganization for the purpose of simplifying the structure and changing it from a holding company to an operating company. The Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company, which had the necessary charter power and authority to carry on the business of any and all the subsidiary com-