The Most Hated Man in Dubuque

According to The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz by Thomas Gifford (1997), Charles “Chuck” Stoltz was “the most unpopular man in Dubuque with the working man—maybe the most unpopular man in the history of Dubuque.” Considering that Stoltz faced death threats, needed personal bodyguards and off-duty police to protect his home and family, and once even narrowly escaped a roadblock meant to ensnare him, it might be more accurate to call Stoltz the most hated man in Dubuque history.

Stoltz became president of the Dubuque Packing Company, one of the largest and most prestigious companies in the city, at a time when the local pork processing operation was losing nearly $10 million per year. Stoltz closed the local hog kill and fired 1,400 workers, and then sold the entire Dubuque plant to his brother-in-law Bob Wahlert in a deal that enabled Wahlert to rename the facility and cut union wages by 40 percent. Stoltz, a “Dubuquer born and bred,” then moved the remaining Dubuque Packing Company to Omaha, Nebraska, where he later sold it to Eastern speculators in a leveraged buyout.

Stoltz got his start at “The Pack” in the 1960s by marrying the daughter of R. C. Wahlert, acting head of the family company and nephew of founder H. W. Wahlert. Frustrated by his outsider status and by resistance to change at the “tired and overconfident” pork processing company, Stoltz found his niche managing DPC’s long-neglected beef operations.

A self-styled “master of the art of the deal,” Stoltz used DPC resources to acquire several beef processing companies and plants located near cattle supplies in states like Nebraska and Kansas. By the late 70s, beef operations boomed as pork operations stagnated, and R. C. Wahlert chose Charles Stoltz over his own son and heir apparent Bob Walhert to become president of Dubuque Packing Company.

Thomas Gifford’s book, The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz, is an apologia for what happened next. According to the book, Stoltz was forced to close the Dubuque hog kill and sell the Dubuque plant to Bob Wahlert and FDL Foods in order to save the remaining core of the Dubuque Packing Company. From Stoltz’s perspective, intense competition and consolidation within the meatpacking industry made the failure of the Dubuque pork processing plant inevitable. The ultimate demise of Bob Wahlert’s FDL Foods, even after union wages had been slashed, seems to support this argument.

On the other hand, Gifford’s book makes clear that at a time when the overall company was profitable, Stoltz had no qualms about using the acquisition of efficient, modern, and non-union plants to intimidate the union at the older Dubuque facility into making difficult concessions. Gifford even seems to suggest that Stoltz had wanted to rid the Dubuque Packing Company of pork operations all along, and had planned to eventually sell the remaining company at a profit to benefit shareholders.

The book, however, favors Stoltz. The author, Thomas Gifford, was a native Dubuquer, Harvard University graduate, and best-selling novelist. Before he died in 2000, Gifford wrote a weekly column called “Jazzbo of Old Dubuque” for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald. Despite this, I could not find a review or even a mention in the Telegraph Herald of Gifford’s The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz. No publisher is cited in the book, either. Copyright, with “all rights reserved,” is listed as being owned by none other than Charles E. Stoltz.