Cassella Color Company

New York, ostensibly owned by two American-born men, William J. Matheson and Robert Shaw, but actually controlled from Germany. Matheson had represented Cassella in the United States at least as early as the 1880s. By 1914, his Cassella Color Company in New York had branches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. So, too, Kalle Co., Bielbrich, had at the end of the nineteenth century set up a New York office, under the supervision of a German-trained color chemist. " ... 

Cassella Color Company to Cassella in Germany, November 12, 1915, and December 21, 1915, telegrams confiscated by the British and quoted in War Trade Intelligence Department [British], The Cassella Colour Co., New York, May 8, 1918, NARA, RG 131, entry 190, box 1 S. H. and Lee J. Wolfe, Preliminary Report on National... 

Century Colors Company, 47 8. See also Cassella Color Company... 

Accordingly, from 1915 to the time of U.S. entry into the war, a reluctant expansion of German direct investment in the United States occurred. No new monies came in, albeit there were American profits that could be reinvested. The output of Bayer s Rensselaer plant spurted upward. The Hoechst plant in Newark raised production Metz acquired a half interest in the Central Dyestuffs and Chemical Company in 1915, which hiked its once minimal output. The Cassella Co. organized a new U.S. subsidiary— Century Color Co.—to begin manufacture under Cassella s familiar C.C.C. trademark (the trademark it had used for imports). U.S. dyestuff production, which had been 2.5 million in 1914, by 1917 soared to 57.8 million. The general price index had risen, but nowhere near this extent. A substantial part of the expansion in dyestuff output was by German subsidiaries in the United States. 

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