Arthur Middleton Hill was an American transportation executive and government official. He founded the Midland Transit Company, and served as a consultant to the advisory council of the Commission for National Defense and to the Office of Defense Transportation, and as director of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.
Background
Arthur Middleton Hill was born on March 23, 1892 in Charleston, West Virginia. He was the son of Ellen Dickinson and Arthur E. Hill, founder of a chain of wholesale and retain dry goods establishments. For much of his youth, Hill worked at a variety of jobs in the West, including a two-year stint in an Arizona mining camp.
Education
Hill spent two years at Central Missouri State Teachers College, but later returned to Charleston and spent the next seven years in banking.
Later Hill also attended the Army General College at Langres, France.
Career
At the outbreak of World War I, Hill was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and rose through the ranks to captain, then assistant chief of staff for the Seventy-seventh Infantry Division.
Hill's involvement in transportation began that year, when he became secretary-treasurer of the Charleston Interurban Railway Company. The firm was later renamed the Charleston Transit Company, and Hill became its president and chairman. In 1924, he organized the Midland Transit Company, a bus transit firm that later became the Atlantic Greyhound Corporation serving the southeastern United States. In 1927, Hill was elected president of the newly organized National Association of Motor Bus Operators.
By the late 1920s, Hill was the major spokesman for the bus industry in its rivalry with the railroads. A major advocate of both cargo and passenger operations in motor transit, Hill strongly supported efficient practices in motor transportation, including new bus designs, increased passenger comfort, streamlined operations, and lean management. His emphasis on training bus personnel and improving highways resulted in much improvement throughout the industry.
In 1933, President Roosevelt appointed Hill chairman of the National Recovery Administration's Motor Bus Code Authority. The authority was designed to establish codes limiting price competition, encouraging cooperation in marketing bus transit, and weakening cutthroat competition in general. However, the authority was put out of business as part of the Supreme Court's 1935 decision in Schecter Corp. v. U. S. Shortly before World War II began, the Roosevelt administration named him as consultant to the advisory council of the Commission for National Defense.
During World War II, Hill also served as consultant to the Office of Defense Transportation, special assistant in charge of transportation to the Secretary of the Navy, chairman of the Naval Secretary's Committee on Public Works project, and director of rubber procurement for the Navy.
Hill's performance of his wartime duties had brought him to the attention of then Senator Harry S. Truman, who was impressed with his efficient leadership. On August 26, 1947, President Truman appointed him to head the new National Security Resources Board, which included seven members drawn from the president's Cabinet. This agency, created by the National Defense Act of 1947, advised the president on the coordination of military, industrial, and civilian mobilization in the event of war. An article in Business Week showcased Hill's sensible, low-key approach in organizing and running this government agency. Many in the Truman administration regarded his appointment as an attempt to keep the planning and conduct of war a bipartisan activity. Frustrated by the lack of enthusiasm with which Congress received his proposals, Hill resigned his chairmanship on December 6, 1948, and returned to the Atlantic Greyhound Corporation.
Shortly thereafter he was also named a director of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hill returned to Greyhound as chairman of the executive committee of Greyhound Corporation, the parent company of Atlantic Greyhound, and he devoted his energy to the expansion and promotion of motor transit. No stranger to the value of public relations, as a result of his government experience, Hill used massive advertising to promote Greyhound, emphasizing safety and reliability. From the late 1940s through the early 1950s, Greyhound had its greatest financial success under Hill's leadership. Surely and systematically, Hill guided the company and the motor transit industry toward complete domination over the railroads in passenger service.
Hill retired from Greyhound in 1957 but remained as chairman of the Association of Motor Bus Owners until shortly before his death in Clifton Forge, Virginia.
Achievements
Politics
Hill made no secret of his Republican affiliation. Hill asserted that the best way to avoid yet another war was to keep America fully prepared, and to this end he supported universal military training.
He coordinated economic mobilization and developed a plan for instantaneous mobilization of the country under an emergency powers act. Throughout the summer and fall of 1948, Hill and his associates drafted such legislation to be presented to the Eighty-first Congress.
Membership
Hill was a member of the Asociation of Motor Bus Owners.
Connections
After World War I, Hill married Caroline Quavier Staunton on June 6, 1918; they had two children. He and his first wife divorced, and on December 4, 1944, he married Mary McDowell Ellis.