Donald Cushing McGraw

Background

Donald Cushing McGraw was born on May 21, 1897 in Madison, New Jersey. He was the youngest son of James H. McGraw, founder of the McGraw Publishing Company, and Mildred Whittlesey.

Education

McGraw graduated from the Lawrenceville School and attended Princeton University before joining the United States Navy during World War I as a teacher of mathematics.

Career

In 1919, McGraw began a long and successful career with the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, which was created two years before by the merger of his father's firm with the publishing company of John A. Hill. Young McGraw went to work in the advertising division of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering (now called Chemical Engineering). In 1921, he was transferred to the firm's pressroom and composing room. By 1924, McGraw was managing both the print shop and the building operations where the printing plant was housed. In 1933, when the company stopped doing its own printing, he was assigned to manage production, which included contracting for printing and binding, engraving, and paper supply. Two years later, McGraw was elected secretary of McGraw-Hill and made a member of its board of directors. After the United States entered World War II, he added to his responsibilities by serving as a consultant to the Publishing and Printing Division of the War Production Board. In 1945, he became vice president for manufacturing and purchasing of McGraw-Hill's book and magazine divisions. In 1950 he was made director both of the company's book division and of Newton Falls Paper Mill, Inc. , in which McGraw-Hill had a half-share. On September 17, 1953, McGraw was elected president, picking up the reins of his older brother Curtis, who had died suddenly the week before. During his presidency McGraw-Hill grew enormously in both domestic and international sales. The company was already ranked fourth among American magazine publishers, and it was the foremost trade publisher with twenty-six domestic and nine international trade magazines. During McGraw's presidency, McGraw-Hill expanded that number to sixty publications. Its book company, well established in the field of business and technical books, began to produce encyclopedias, art books, religious books, and language-instruction materials. A wide range of educational, financial, and construction information services were also offered. Under McGraw's leadership, his company acquired Standard and Poor's Corporation, F. W. Dodge Corporation, Webster Publishing Company, California Test Bureau, Educational Developmental Laboratories, Shephard's Citations, National Radio Institute, Capitol Radio Engineering Institute, Opinion Research Corporation, American Heritage Publishing Company, and four television stations in Indianapolis, Denver, San Diego, and Bakersfield, California. By the end of his presidency in 1965, revenues had exceeded $216 million. On January 1, 1966, McGraw became chairman of the board. He held that position until February 1, 1968, when he assumed the chairmanship of the executive committee, a position he retained for the remainder of his life. Although McGraw had opportunities he would not have had were he not born to the company's co-founder, he proved to be a conscientious and enterprising manager. He devoted his entire business career to advancing the work of his father and his brothers before him, and he achieved a scope of expansion they could have only imagined. He died of a stroke in Boynton Beach, Fla.

Achievements

• Donald C. McGraw is known as a President of McGraw-Hill from 1953 to 1966. During his time as president, he expanded the company beyond publishing and acquired three industry reference sources: Standard & Poor's, F. W. Dodge Corporation, and Platts. Between 1956 and 1960, McGraw-Hill was one of America's Top 50 performing companies.

Views

McGraw was buoyed chiefly by the nation's annual $4 billion expenditure on research, and he was convinced that this research would provide increasingly sophisticated methods of producing improved goods and services. It was, as he saw it, up to him and his company as business publishers to help American business take advantage of these methods. Publishing technical periodicals and books in various fields had been the primary vocation of McGraw-Hill since the beginning of the century. McGraw stressed the need to satisfy specialized reading interests promptly and more economically than other sources. He emphasized accurate and thorough reporting of information, knowing it would attract subscriptions and advertising that would in turn foster McGraw's primary objective the growth of McGraw-Hill. Faced with a changing marketplace that included the looming possibilities of television, McGraw adapted. He employed task forces comprised of people from several divisions who studied and then reported on various problems and issues pertaining to the company as a whole. McGraw utilized the results of these and other studies to enact necessary changes. He was prepared to develop whatever means of communication the people chose, even if that meant focusing on the electronic media over reading materials. In the meantime, he continued to publish whatever technical books, college textbooks, encyclopedias, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals, films, newsletters, and catalogs the market required. By 1960, revenues had increased to $117 million, compared to $67 million when he took office. But rising costs and a recession at the beginning of 1961 brought about a decline in advertising, which caused a drop in the net income of the publications division. Subscriptions, however, rose to about 1. 5 million readers; of that figure, 65. 5 percent were renewals, which set new records. The occasional downturn in any of the several McGraw-Hill divisions did not seriously hinder the overall performance of the company during McGraw's tenure. Revenues continued to increase by the tens of millions of dollars in the succeeding years.

Personality

McGraw possessed unremitting determination and optimism in striving for the continuing success of McGraw-Hill. As president he emphasized its continuing significance, advising his staff that "only by maintaining a high standard of dissatisfaction for our own performance shall we be able to avoid complacency and to make the most of the great opportunities that are open to us in the years ahead. " However much McGraw encouraged and earnestly entreated his employees, he did not wield excessive authority. He was known as a low-key manager, and he gave the staff the freedom to explore new arenas. To him, the possibilities were nearly boundless in the mid-1950's.

Connections

On July 9, 1921 McGraw married Elizabeth Bidgood. They had three children. Their sons, Donald Cushing, Jr. , and John Louis, were, like their father, later to rise to the highest ranks of McGraw-Hill.

Father:

James H. McGraw

Mother:

Mildred Whittlesey

Wife:

Elizabeth Bidgood

References

• Endless frontiers: the story of McGraw-Hill