Supporting Publications

The “Rubber City” persona of Akron has begun.

Move ahead 25 years. The bicycle craze is sweeping America. The renamed B.F. Goodrich Co. is thriving, making solid bike and carriage tires, hose, belts, rubber gloves-just about anything it can out of rubber. The latest innovation is a set of pneumatic tires made on order for auto pioneer Alexander Winton of Cleveland. Goodrich executives are wary about it: payment is requested in advance.

The real growth of the “Tire Capital” is just beginning.

Now it is 1920. World War I has caused an economic bonanza in the country. People have money and are spending it on new cars, and the tire industry comes along for the ride. Akron explodes - the population jumps from 69,067 in 1910 to 208,435 a decade later, and the number of employees in the rubber plants grows from 22,000 to 70,000.

Like the boom towns of the California Gold Rush, Akron is an exciting, vibrant city mmed with people and money. Rubber workers are getting as much as $7 a day, and spending it in shooting galleries, saloons, barbershops, music halls, burlesques, the red light district and at clothing stores where expensive silk shirts are the hot item.

Akron overflows with humanity - Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, blacks, and, in particular, hillbillies from West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. They have come to “The City of Opportunity,” as the flyers and their kin say, to work at “The Goodyear,” “The Firestone,” “The Goodrich” or any of the dozens of tire and rubber product companies that call Akron home.

The town is overpopulated: Rubber workers share beds in shifts at boarding houses, and Goodyear and Firestone build housing developments to give their employees a place to live; people stand in line everywhere waiting for everything; city services are taxed to the limit.

A little more than 100 miles away in Detroit, cars are rolling off production lines with tires made in Akron, and the city roars through the 1920s, enjoying the general prosperity of the nation.

Then the Great Depression hits. Akron goes bust. The tire plants lay off 25,000, and the community reels as the ripple effect costs thousands more their jobs.

In the depths of the economic stagnation, the labor movement finally hits Akron. After an abortive strike in 1913 led by the socialist-oriented International Workers of the World, organized labor under the banner of the American Federation of Labor spends two decades unsuccessfully trying to unite the Rubber Workers of Akron. Encouraged by a section of the National Industry Recovery Act that guaranteed collective bargaining, the AFL begins organizing the rubber plants. Eventually, the United Rubber Workers of America is formed, massive strikes are called and the workers do battle with the companies, strikebreakers and the local sheriff.

The URW persists, and violence occurs in 1938. But by 1941 the union has won recognition from the companies in Akron and at their plants in other locations. At the time, it is a somewhat hollow victory - the Depression forces the rubber companies to pare employment in Akron to 33,285 by 1939, a decrease of more than 25,000 from the decade earlier.

But the tide turns again. Just as the onset of World War I sparked an economic uplift for Akron and the tire industry, the beginning of World War II gives the city and factories new life. In 1939, the tire plants get back up to full capacity, boasting four-shift, 24-hour, six-day per week schedules. And during the war years, the city becomes a center for the production of war goods, including aircraft tires and dirigibles used to protect convoys heading across the Atlantic.

In the post-war era of the 1950s Akron thrives. But the decline of the tire industry in the Tire Capital is close at hand.

By now, Akron’s huge, multi-story tire plants are fast becoming dinosaurs, as the industry turns to more-efficient single-story structures. Worse than that for the city, when the tire makers do build new radial tire plants, they place them in the non-union South or foreign locations where labor rates are even lower.

Employment figures tell the tale. In 1950, the Big Four tire makers employ 50,584 hourly and salaried workers. By 1978, it’s down to 25,487.

The city is helpless in the face of the plant closings, and Akron’s tax base and population slide. One by one, Goodyear, Firestone, Goodrich and Mohawk Rubber Co. close their tire plants in Akron, and suppliers to the industry do the same. Finally, in 1982, General shuts down its truck tire plant. The Tire Capital produces no more tires, except for a few low-volume lines.

But the Rubber City isn’t dead. Homemakers no longer start the day by sweeping tireplant dust from their porch, but Akron remains the home for the corporate offices and research centers of Goodyear, General and, eventually, the Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Co. joint venture. And while Firestone’s corporate headquarters moves to Chicago, its world tire division offices and R&D remain in Akron.

Now the city has returned to its roots of diversified manufacturing, although many nontire rubber goods manufacturing and supplier companies remain in the area. The Rubber City strives to create a new identity for itself (along with nearby Cleveland) as “Polymer Valley,” the polymer research center of the world.

Tire production has ended, and the Seiberlings, Firestones and O’Neils no longer run the corporations their families built. But on the strength of the corporate headquarters that emain in the area, Akron still can lay claim to the title Tire Capital - by default, if for no other reason.

Read Update - Conference Chairman’s Message: May 29, 2008
Read Update - Conference Chairman’s Message: September 18, 2007