THE BIRTH OF A NEW

SOCIAL SCIENCE DISCIPLINE:

Achievements of the First Generation of American

Economic and Business Historians – 1893-1974

 

by Arthur Harrison Cole

 

 

New York: Economic History Association, 1974

LC Control Number: 75319095

HC28.C58

 

 

PREFACE

 

            The ensuing tabulation was originally conceived as an effort on my part to give broad recognition to the recent achievements of three or four friends who had maintained scholarly activities despite advancing years and sometimes physical disabilities. The friends I had in mind were Thomas C. Cochran of Pennsylvania, E. A. J. Johnson of Johns Hopkins, and Frederick Merk and Fritz Redlich of my Harvard acquaintance. All four quite properly had been recognized locally with honors, but I was left wishing that the economic and business history fraternity had some type of monetary award, perhaps financed by annual assessments of the two allied guilds, to give these distinguished scholars national recognition. The longer I thought about it, the longer grew the list of those I considered worthy of such recognition, until the number had climbed to more than tenfold the original.

            The notion of rewarding outstanding performance in individual fields has been popular in this country for many decades. There are numerous halls of fame honoring athletes; there are Oscars and Emmys and other awards for distinguished activities in the world of entertainment; and there is quite a generous provision of honors for creative thinkers in science. Historians, however, seem to fall outside such public commendation and often their particular qualities, essential for the research and composition of historical investigations, exist unnoticed. As director of an historical library for a quarter of a century, I was concerned personally or officially with the prosecution of research in the field of economic and business history. I can testify to the diversity of materials, techniques, and persistence needed for the exercise of that talent which Schumpeter believed to be essential for businessmen of first-rate quality: "creative response."

 

I

 

            The intellectual atmosphere of the country over its earlier development was surprisingly congenial toward historical considerations. Perhaps the necessary relationships of the colonies along the eastern coast to areas of almost unlimited historical depth across the water played a part. By the nineteenth century, state and local historical societies as well as the American Antiquarian Society could boast of vigorous activities; and a crop of statistically inclined men arose to keep quantitative chronicles of change within areas of rising population and economic growth. The federal censuses had flourished from 1790 onward, with attention to economic measurements increasing after 1850. The American Statistical Association was launched in 1839 in Boston (where it remained for some years) and its members paid considerable heed to time series.

            Something of the impact of such forces upon the emergent economics profession may be sensed in the teaching and writing of its early members. At Harvard, Charles F. Dunbar, professor of political economy - the first such in this country - Frank W. Taussig, the second member of the Economics Department, and others gave courses on the "financial history of the United States," "the tariff history of the country," and similar historically-oriented subjects in the years between 1871 and the end of the century. Dunbar's essays, mainly historical, were subsequently assembled by O. M. W. Sprague and published in 1904. Taussig's studies of the American tariff began to appear in the 1880s. Charles J. Bullock had written his "Essays on the Monetary History of the United States" before he joined the Harvard faculty; Thomas N. Carver composed a history of American agriculture for Bailey's Encyclopedia; and Sprague wrote his "History of Crises under the National Banking System" in the early years of the new century. I myself have always especially admired Joseph S. Davis's two volume, modestly entitled "Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations," compounded when he was a young doctoral candidate under the general guidance of Professor Bullock.

            In even a casual survey of the academic conditions pertinent to economic and business history in America during those early years, the situation at Columbia University should surely be mentioned. Columbia could then boast the presence and scriptorial prowess of such prominent figures as Edwin R. A. Seligman, Charles A. Beard and his wife Miriam, and a foreign importation, M. I. Rostovtsev. Seligman's chief interests were public finance and economic theory. He wrote extensively on the history of taxation and public debts, and he collected widely of past literary productions in the area of economic thought - a collection that was purchased by Columbia University from the estate of Professor Seligman in the latter 1930s at almost the same time that the Foxwell collection was acquired by the Harvard Business School for the Kress Room of the Baker Library. The Seligman collection reposes in the library of Columbia University but, unhappily, it is available only through a skimpy card catalog.

            Professor Beard stirred a whole generation of political economists by his efforts to relate early governmental developments in this country to contemporary economic-social conditions, while his wife produced the first domestic survey of "The Business Man." Rostovtsev's field was economic change in classical times. And Wesley C. Mitchell, who joined the Columbia faculty around 1910 and, in effect, annexed the National Bureau of Economic Research downtown to the University on Morningside Heights, combined a lively and continuing interest in the history of economic thought with a concern for business cycle phenomena, past and present. In the matter of business history, one should add to Mrs. Beard's achievements the initiation and expansion of documents pertaining to domestic corporation finance assembled in the Marvin Scudder Collection of the University Library.

            Meanwhile, important developments at the Carnegie Institution at Washington had begun, antedating, in fact, the Harvard and Columbia activities. Here the productions surely owed much to the earlier work on manufactures by Albert S. Bolles and James L. Bishop but the several studies emanating from the Institution helped to open new fields. Particularly noteworthy were the volumes of Caroline E. MacGill on transportation, Lewis Cecil Gray on Southern agriculture, and Victor S. Clark on manufactures. Clark's study extended beyond the 1860 terminal date of the series because of the persistent personal devotion of the author in his declining years.

            Out of Wisconsin came Frederick J. Turner's pathbreaking historical study of the economic significance of the American frontier. And there were other individuals and groups scattered across the country, each contributing a greater or lesser share in the evolution of economic-business history, an evolution that is almost as well supplied with innovators as that of industrial apparatus. Indeed, so well supplied that it makes difficult the task of selecting outstanding history productions at the early stage of performance. I should certainly add to my list the names of those innovators, perhaps less well-known than the foregoing but creative responders nonetheless, who were responsible for the founding of professional societies and professional journals in the two fields.

 

II

 

            As the economic and business history professions developed, their members soon found it necessary - for communication - to belong to a professional association. At first they had only two from which to choose the American Historical and the American Economic Association. These organizations naturally could give but limited attention to individual fields of scholarly interest and gradually splinter groups appeared. The historians primarily concerned with change in American culture established themselves in 1907 as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. This title became increasingly inappropriate, however, nonetheless so when Edward C. Kirkland of Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, was elected its president. In 1962 it changed its name to the Organization of American Historians - as if that short designation of interests constituted an improvement!

            A real innovation came from Dean Wallace B. Donham's interest in business history. In the early 1920s, as the relatively new dean of Harvard's School of Business Administration, Donham gathered together the editor of the Boston Globe, the Federal Reserve agent attached to the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, and two or three others to form a Business History Society. The fee for membership in the Society during those halcyon days of the 1920s was $100 a year, and the Society regularly issued a Bulletin containing news of its activities.

            Another group of scholars that coalesced into an organization devoted to the furtherance of their chosen intellectual territory was the agricultural historians. The founding of the Agricultural History Society was surely warranted by the long time dominance in our country of that economic/business activity. Edward E. Everett of the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington seems to have been the leading spirit, and he served long (from 1931 to his death in 1952) as editor of the Society's periodical.

            The recently deceased Charles E. Fisher somehow made a living as an insurance salesman but in large measure carried alone the work of surveying the changing equipment of domestic and Canadian railways. He began to collect the lesser materiel of railroad operations tickets, timetables, specimens of rail, even the varied locomotive bells. In 1919 he engineered the formation of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society, and two years later began to edit and publish that Society's Bulletin. In the latter he placed the findings of the Society's members and friends as to the materiel acquired from time to time by individual roads. The Bulletin had reached its 126th volume when Mr. Fisher died a year ago. If one adds a search of the American Railway Equipment Register - an extraordinary periodical still awaiting any sort of historian - much may be learned of the changing physical endowment of our once flourishing railway industry.

            Still another innovator and his achievement needs to be noted. I have in mind Richard C. Overton and his - almost his alone - Lexington group. The name was as informal as all else about this voluntary combination of the research folk in American railroad history - it derived from the city (in Kentucky) where a meeting of the American Historical Association was being held, and where Overton and his railroad-loving friends chanced to gather together, more than likely in a hotel cocktail bar. Subsequently Overton and his associates in the field, particularly at Northwestern University, prepared successive lists of members and successive annual reports of events especially scriptorial in character. The organization was effected in 1942 and it is still functioning even though Overton has retired from his post at the University of Western Ontario, and is now "filling in" at a preparatory school in Manchester, Vermont.

            Three residents of Mystic, Connecticut, moved chiefly by antiquarian interest, gathered together in 1929 to form an Institute of Maritime History. In 1941 the sole survivor of the three, Carl C. Cutler (now retired from law practice) girded his loins to carry his own and his friends' 1929 commitment one step further. The Mallory shipping family became interested and a Mrs. Munson, daughter of the Mallory family, bequeathed money to establish an institute for the study of maritime history. Thus the Munson Institute was born.

            Subsequently Robert Albion and other younger scholars joined this unit; a connection with the University of Connecticut was devised; and soon a summer scholastic assembly was established. James P. Baughman, an associate in the 1960s of Ralph Hidy at the Harvard Business School also joined the group, and indeed wrote more or less for the Institute his Maritime company history, The Mallorys of Mystic.

            The larger and more inclusive organization, the Economic History Association, was the brain-child of Earl J. Hamilton, Anne Bezanson, and E. A. J. Johnson - with Edwin F. Gay at least bestowing his benediction. Here representatives of Duke, Pennsylvania, and New York University took the lead under the banner at that time flying at the Huntington Library at San Marino, California. The organizers did provide for as much unity or collaboration with the foregoing groups as seemed feasible: it was decreed that the Agricultural History and the Business History Societies should always possess a representative each on the new Association's board of directors.

 

IV

 

            Although early publications of books on economic and business history, such as those of Bolles and Bishop, were issued by private publishing houses, the first really broad surveys were sponsored by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Later such publications became the province chiefly of university presses. Over recent decades, volumes have also appeared under the sponsorship of such institutions as the National Bureau of Economic Research or the Brookings Institution. Studies of historical experiences of individual business units have often been financed by the subject concerns themselves. Notable achievements of relatively recent date have reached classic proportions, for example, the volumes of the Standard Oil of New Jersey series or Overton's long studies on the rise and career of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. In the latter case, a large single volume represents a compression of a much more extensive study, the manuscript version of which now rests in the custody of the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, thanks to the generosity of the author and the library.

            Publication of essays in either economic or business history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was almost a random affair. Journals devoted primarily to contemporary developments such as the American Economic Review, or the Political Science Quarterly would print an occasional essay written on a time basis, but the total output of historical essays in our fields, even with aid from the American Historical Review, was meagre. The Review of Economic Statistics offered some noteworthy time studies in the early 1920s, e.g., the survey of the American balance of international payments by Charles J. Bullock, John H. Williams, and Rufus S. Tucker. This Review also printed numerous essays on business cycles of previous experience in this country.

            At the Harvard Business School in the 1920s, Dean Wallace B. Donham, who had already been responsible for the founding of the Business History Society, as mentioned earlier, also sought and obtained money to endow a chair at the School to assure the teaching of his new subject and induced Norman S. B. Gras to try his hand - and head - at this new branch or deviation from economic history.

            Before the crisis of 1929 put a damper on Dean Donham's ambitious plans for business history - and indeed on his dream of an "historical base" " for the School's Baker Library - he had coaxed the previous dean, Edwin F. Gay, back to action at the School and engineered the combination of Gay and Gras as editors of a new Journal of Economic and Business History. Some outstanding essays were published in the journal, one of the most provocative of which was Louis C. Hunter's study on the early experiences of the iron industry, but the onset of economic crisis and depression proved too debilitating to both the Society and the School. Issuance of the Journal ceased with its Volume IV. Possibly the endeavor gave heart to the founders of the subsequent Economic History Association when the courageous E. A. J. Johnson and Shepard B. Clough proposed to establish a journal in their field.

            Johnson's and Clough's labors were centered at New York University, which institution responded with financial assistance to the project in the early years. Thus it was perhaps no accident that Herman E. Krooss of NYU's School of Business became the long-run, creatively laboring treasurer of the publishing Association.

            Finally, mention must be made of the Business History Review which was launched by Thomas R. Navin and the Harvard Business School in 1954 - really a revision of the older Bulletin of the Business History Society. The Review, with guidance from time to time from Ralph Hidy and Fritz Redlich, has become a mature and useful periodical.

 

V

 

            In the period covered by this survey, scholars frequently had duties beyond the preparation and giving of lectures, the holding of class discussions and the inevitable correcting of examination papers. They participated in the assembling of materials for study, the prosecution of study, and the furtherance of research. To be sure, much of this work proceeded casually, even in the larger universities, where monies for book purchase were more likely to become available than in the small college.

            A few cases will illustrate the course of events. On his arrival at Harvard in 1902 after ten or fifteen years of reading in European libraries, Edwin F. Gay was co-opted by the officials of the Harvard libraries to assist them in the improvement of the Harvard holdings; and he worked much on this chore until he became tabbed a few years later to head the newly conceived Graduate School of Business Administration. One of Gay's ablest students, Julius Klein, thereafter was despatched on book purchasing tours of Europe and then South America. Again, another of Gay's earlier students at Harvard, Chester W. Wright, spent much of his time at the University of Chicago in efforts to enrich that institution's assembly of research materials. As still another of Gay's proteges, I was in 1929 routed to the evolving library of the Business School that Gay had helped to launch at Harvard, and there I remained a quarter of a century. Similarly, Hamilton at Duke and Chicago, Heath at North Carolina, and Kirkland at Bowdoin served much in the enlargement and enrichment of the collections in their libraries.

            Note may also be taken of a broadening of library operations as a result of expansion and intensification of research work under the direction of the new scholars in our fields. Numerous university libraries of the West sought to strengthen their holdings of immigrant diaries and contacts with the Indians as concern with immigration and land settlement increased in scope. Added emphasis came to the university law libraries as problems of railroad competition, "trust busting," and improvement of labor conditions expanded in importance and scholarly inquiry.

            A development of a different sort affected the realm of business history -and here also I had a minor part to play. In his role as guide for me in my doctoral thesis work on the evolving wool manufacturing of this country, Gay urged that I seek data from the original records of individual manufacturing establishments, if any such were to be found. I did run upon a few record books at the Stevens mill in North Andover, Massachusetts, and encountered a much larger store at the Samuel Slater establishment at Webster, also in Massachusetts. When I mentioned to my preceptor the quality of these Slater records, he sent me asking the Harvard College Library if it would be willing to accept a gift of such materials were I able to gain their release from the company. The Slater concern agreed rather readily to the plan, and shipped the scores of volumes to Cambridge at their own expense. Thus was the collection of business records in university libraries begun.

            Under the influence of Gras and the expanding interest in business history, Overton was able ultimately to arrange for the containment of the older records of the Burlington enterprise at the Newberry Library at Chicago, while some of the New Haven materials were deposited at Yale. Meanwhile Cochran, then at New York University, and Clough at Columbia became interested in business history, examined the manuscript records of such institutions as the New York Life Insurance Company and the New York Stock Exchange, realized that college and university libraries could never house such tons or acres of materials, and hit upon the idea of trying to persuade the enterprises themselves to preserve their own records after the huge masses had been screened by experts trained by scholars.

            By then the Second World War was drawing to a close, and men were available, free of previous commitments, who had learned archival methods in the storehouses of the armed forces. An appeal to the Rockefeller Foundation evoked a modest grant to help start operations. An institution called the National Records Management Council was established, with representatives on its board of directors drawn from both business and academia. The experiment proved successful, financially and otherwise, with operations extending considerable distances outside of Manhattan, indeed sometimes with branch offices in western centers. By 1958 stability of operations seemed sufficient to inspire the director of the enterprise and some of his subordinates with hope of financial gain under private auspices. They created a private concern labeled Naremco, an acronym of the earlier denomination, and the company continues to prosper with a spreading influence from offices on New York's Fifth Avenue.

            Other types of bulky materials, especially in the field of business publications but extending to periodicals pertinent to law, the theater, or music have been retained within practicable dimensions in scattered university libraries. Collections have been necessarily restricted to those of geographically local concern or of relatively recent appearance, except in the cases of a few large or old universities such as Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Illinois, or Stanford. Furthermore the problem of bulk as relative to newspapers or publications of the Securities and Exchange Commission have been met, in part, by the employment of microfilm or microfiche. The costly, if less bulky type of business and economic research material - rare books and pamphlets - has been collected in large part by the libraries at Columbia, Harvard, the University of Illinois, Berkeley, and not least, at Yale and Oklahoma. A considerable degree of pressure for the possession at a particular institution of such items must have been significantly reduced by the publication of four large printed volumes of the holdings of the Kress Library - established in 1936 - at Harvard; and the liberal arrangements for reproduction encouraged by that library.

            Indeed, a case could surely be made for the proposition that one aspect in the evolution of economic and business history over the past half or three-quarters of a century has been the enhanced complexity of research in the areas and the efforts of library personnel to lighten the difficulties. Around the time when I myself invaded Harvard 1911- it was sufficient, as I recall the circumstances, for the student to learn the tricks and limitations of the dictionary form of card catalog as provided in university, as well as large public libraries, with perhaps familiarity with the rising quantum of documents flowing out of Washington, and possibly to learn to find his way around the files of "British Documents."

            As the larger library schools began to lay stress upon reference materials, an initial attack on one phase of materials then considered important to economic historians was being made: under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Adelaide R. Hasse was compiling a series of surveys into the "economic materials in state documents." Apparently the compiler became discouraged; she did cover thirteen states but then stopped. Later came the more broadly useful but also more difficult compilations known as "The Union List of Serials," "The Union List of Newspapers," and the like - largely the product of Miss Winifred Gregory and the staff at the Carnegie Institution.

            The efforts to aid scholars became broader still in the decades of the 1930s and later. There was the contribution of economic historians in the formation and later revision of a volume of "historical statistics" published by the U.S. Census Bureau. I myself sought to make a contribution - with the aid of a colleague - relative to the reports and attached documents prepared and published by "royal commissions" of Great Britain and of the self-governing colonies.

            Over the decades, materials of a bibliographical character became so numerous and extensive in American research libraries that a certain Miss Isadore Gilbert Mudge, reference librarian at Columbia University, took time to compile a sort of bibliography of bibliographies. The first version of this aid to reference librarians appeared in 1917 and was superseded by later revised editions. Now an equivalent volume by another name has replaced the original compilation. "Mudge," for many decades, was the generic term for this sort of guide but I understand that the name of Miss Mudge's immediate successor, Winchell, has lately taken its place.

            Now, thanks in part to more abundant research funds and in part to the advance of the electronic apparatus mentioned earlier, students - with adequate funds directly or indirectly at their disposal - will be able to obtain microfiche reproductions of any number of books possessed by the Kress Library at the Harvard Business School or the Goldsmiths Library of the University of London at low cost. Also, students can now obtain a reproduction of any doctoral dissertation presented at most American universities subsequent to January 1972 from the microfilm headquarters at Ann Arbor, Michigan. I expect that soon all doctoral dissertations accepted at any university in this country will become available at reproduction cost from this same source, even including those from the now reluctant Harvard.

 

VI

 

            Most important of matters pertinent to our present survey is, of course, the introduction and spread of new dimensions to our broad intellectual territory. Early promoters of inquiry in our area such as Richard T. Ely, Edwin F. Gay, and Norman S. B. Gras drew inspiration from the German scholars of the nineteenth century, but already local talent was making its imprint.

            As alluded to earlier, the first sophisticated contribution in this connection should be credited to Frederick J. Turner of Wisconsin and was contained in a paper on the economic significance of the frontier published by the American Historical Association in 1893, and broadcast in the succeeding decades. From its influence may be traced, in large part, the course of development displayed by such scholars as Merk of Harvard, Gates of Cornell, and Hedges of Brown. Also one may well add the appearance of the aforementioned Mississippi Valley Historical Association and even the Agricultural History Society, and surely such explorations as those of Katherine Coman.

            The influence of Edwin F. Gay upon a noteworthy assemblage of doctoral candidates was also profound. As indicated earlier, those students included Chester Wright, Norman S. B. Gras. Abbott Usher, Julius Klein, and Earl J. Hamilton, all of whom manifested in one way or another their perception of economic (or later business) history as an adjunct of economic theories. Wright attempted to carry the relationship farthest as in his Economic History of the United States, published in 1941, but Usher displayed theoretical prowess in his labors upon technological advance and the analysis of space, as did Gras in his efforts to extend the Germanic scheme of economic stages, and Hamilton in his analysis of the impact of commodity price changes. Indeed, the last named formed a link with the activities of the International Committee on Price History.

            This Committee, which incidentally was the recipient of an early grant of funds for historical research by the Rockefeller Foundation, instituted a fresh area of study, at least for modern scholars. It collected and published numerous time series of commodity values in European countries and the United States. In this country, Anne Bezanson at the University of Pennsylvania, George Warren and G. A. Pearson at Cornell, and George R. Taylor, Thomas S. Berry, and Ruth Crandall, all laboring at Cambridge, made outstanding contributions.

            A notable extension of the held of economic history had been effected in 1913, and the creator or actor here was Wesley C. Mitchell. Not that the phenomenon of changing levels of business activity in given economies had not been noted previously, even noted to conform to waves of slowly changing quantities. Such movements, however, seem to have been viewed as essentially episodic, like the "tulip mania" of Holland in the seventeenth century or the Mississippi and South Sea "bubbles" that broke almost simultaneously in Paris and London in 1720. Mitchell's assemblage of business data in his opus of 1913 and his cautious comments on the various series seemed to forecast a new theory of business cycle movements. Indeed, the author inserted a brief digest of existing theories - often speculative in cast - in an introductory chapter of his monumental book.

            Concurrently an interest in business cycles was proceeding independently at Cambridge under the auspices of the Harvard Committee on Economic Research, promoted by Charles J. Bullock already mentioned as a member of the university's economics department. Warren M. Persons, himself a product of Wisconsin, was added to the group just as the United States entered World War I, and soon a new theory of economic cycles was elaborated. At the same time, the journal, Review of Economic Statistics, mentioned earlier, was launched as a vehicle for the publication of essays of theoretical and historical interest. A number of economic historians were attracted into the new field, and I myself devoted a couple of years to efforts at identifying historical bases for the Personian theory.

            Interest in historical research in this area did not, in fact, last long. Activities and aggregates of research scholars turned to efforts at forecasting the next downturn from the then pervasive era of prosperity with the failure almost everywhere of useful success.

            In this wave of interest, however, the elaboration of statistical methods and the instruction of students in their niceties proceeded rapidly, and perhaps the mathematically supported work in economic, even sometimes business history may be viewed as a distant, interesting descendant.

            Productions in the field of economic history were broadened by the work of John R. Commons of Wisconsin, as illustrated by his ten-volume Documentary History of American. Industrial Society (1910-11) and his History of Labor in the United States (1918-35), as well as by the work of his many students.

            The Committee on Research in Economic History, launched in 1941 with the intellectual promotion and financial aid of the Rockefeller Foundation, was incited to action almost at once by E.A.J. Johnson (a member of the original board of consultants). The Committee introduced and gained nearly universal support for an examination of the role of government, especially state government, in the period before 1860. Members of the Committee supervised individual projects in some measure, and out of the operations came the excellent studies of the Oscar Handlins, Louis Hartz, Milton Heath, and James N. Primm, pertinent respectively to conditions in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Missouri. The Committee also underwrote the research work, alluded to earlier, for the Census Bureau's volume of "Historical Statistics of the United States" (which, incidentally, was much improved in its second edition by G. Heberton Evans of Johns Hopkins).

            This general theme of state activities in an era once designated as dominated by a philosophy of laissez-faire appealed to Carter Goodrich, then at Columbia. With the aid of graduate students, he carried further a series of investigations and himself compounded the excellent volume Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890 (1960). The entire study may be considered as only now drawing to a close. E. A. J. Johnson in the early 1940s had consented to prosecute an examination of the conditions of state intervention in economic affairs as of 1790, or thereabouts, as a sort of starting line for all studies into individual state experience. The Second World War and subsequent efforts to build a better world in Europe and the Far East caused a postponement of the completion of this research. Johnson, however, did not forget his commitment, and shortly before his death he returned to the old areas. A book of his discoveries, The Foundations of American Economic Freedom; Government and Enterprise in the Age of Washington, was prepared for publication by his wife and son and appeared posthumously in 1973.

            In any survey of the development of economic and business history in this country, surely appreciable attention should be given this Committee on Research in Economic History, even beyond the relatively "bare bones" of experience that I have already presented for the benefit of future historians.^[1] Here it seems appropriate to make note of certain features in the Committee's own history.

            The organization was surely the brain child of Anne Bezanson, at that time teaching personnel administration and recently selected by the Wharton School to head its Industrial Research Department. Miss Bezanson also had been added to the personnel of the Social Science section within the Rockefeller Foundation at the nomination of Dr. Joseph H. Willits, head of the section. And these folk at the Foundation took occasion to consult with Gay and Heaton regarding the feasibility of the project, and probably the composition of its membership. (The Committee seems to have been conceived as a project to last two or three years and as covering foreign as well as American studies. A grant from the Foundation of $250,000 was generous enough for such objectives, especially to provide a fresh start in research and writing within the discipline. But the outbreak of war in Europe served to curtail the scope of its efforts; and the habits of its members, always tending toward the niggardly, allowed the monies to last something like fifteen years instead of two or three. Also it is appropriate to record that the almost simultaneous rise and development of the Economic History Association with Hamilton and Anne Bezanson [again] as leading spirits and with Johnson and Clough as tireless promoters of the Association's Journal provided a vigorous development on which the Foundation could not have counted, and indeed for which success could only obliquely be attributed to the new Committee.

            Surely one purpose in the action by the Foundation was to broaden the geographical and institutional basis of research and teaching. Perhaps inevitably, in the light of academic history, a number of the Committee members came from eastern universities, especially the "Ivy League" schools as, for example, Hutchins of Cornell, Kuznets then of Pennsylvania, Warren of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Gay surely identified with Harvard although already resident at the Huntington Library in southern California, and myself, also at Harvard, even if for some years merely a librarian concerned with economic-business literature. Others in the original cast included Hamilton of Duke, Heaton of Minnesota, and Innis of Toronto. Indeed, this objective of geographical and institutional dispersion in the matter of personnel was continued in later years with the addition of Jenks of Wellesley, Lane of Johns Hopkins, and Kirkland of Bowdoin. (Happily, Cochran and Anne Bezanson of Pennsylvania and Goodrich of Columbia were also added as resignations or deaths provided places.)

            Similarly, the chairman of the Committee was encouraged to pay visits in hope of stimulating research at various universities. He did pay calls at the universities at Madison, Iowa City, and Louisville, in the West, and at Chapel Hill and Baltimore in the South. Again, efforts to aid worthy young scholars were directed at institutions from Maine to California. Nor has the objective of geographical stimulation diminished since the effective merger of Committee and Association in 1956. To be sure, the Journal and the Association have been in recent years the more potent factors making for growth of the discipline. The informal and formal organizations within the territory of business history, however, and the successful flotation of a Review devoted to the field have certainly added to the dispersion and intensification of efforts at research and writing.

            Out of the Committee on Research in Economic History and, like the latter, benefiting by support from the Rockefeller Foundation, came the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard. This institution, as its name implies, owed much to the theories of Joseph Schumpeter and Frank W. Taussig. Taussig had sprinkled his advanced theory course with Walker and Veblen; he set a doctoral candidate to tracing the vicissitudes over time in the theorists' valuation of entrepreneurship; and he himself surely gave his academic weight to the project of bringing Joseph Schumpeter to Harvard. The Research Committee was undoubtedly also influenced by Gras's presence at Harvard and the possibility that any new research could take advantage of the work and writing in business history already carried through at the Business School.

            At all events, the Center was established in the fall of 1948 with Thomas C. Cochran, already an author in the field,^[2] and Leland H. Jenks of nearby Wellesley helping in the actual launching of the institution. (I undertook the Chairmanship of the Center, which post I held for the ten years of its existence.) Fortunately we had been able to entice two younger men, Hugh G. J. Aitken from Scotland via Toronto, and R. Richard Wohl out of New York University, to act, in a sense, as "guinea pigs" for the older members to try out ideas upon, and fortunate soon to attract Fritz Redlich, an emigre German scholar who had come to America in the 1930s with intentions of studying "the businessman" in his dufflebag.

            The young men contributed much toward the dissemination of the Center's influence by virtue of the mature "Explorations in Entrepreneurial History" which they conceived and nurtured, and directors of the institution seconded this endeavor by using some of its scarce funds to invite such scholars as W. T. Easterbrook of Toronto and Lewis E. Atherton of Missouri to come to Cambridge on semester or full year visits.

            The Center closed its doors in 1958, but some of its influence continued to be felt. There was, for example, Aitken's study of "Taylorism" at the Watertown Arsenal, published in 196(), and Redlich's most scholarly survey of the "military enterpriser" in Europe of the early modern era (1964-1965). Explorations had a rebirth under the midwifery of Ralph Andreano at Earlham College. When Andreano moved to Wisconsin, Explorations moved with him and there it remains, under the new name, Explorations in Economic History.

            A goodly number of monographs in the area of entrepreneurial history were published in the period of the Center's activities at Cambridge, but the group failed to make much impression upon scholars in the area of economic, theory. Insufficient attention seems to have been given by any group of historians to the relationship through time of an expanding business or entrepreneurial system and an increasing total economic production, a rising GNP. Acceptance of the concept of such a relationship might have given to business administration a scientific standing previously lacking. Personally, in the years subsequent to the era of the Harvard Research Center, I have come to believe that a reasoned significant relationship, based upon a broad examination of American economic growth, is possible.

            .

VII

 

            Not without value in the evolution of our discipline have been specific anatomical developments and some bibliographical achievements. Of the former, it should be recorded that Gay, back from New York after an unsuccessful adventure in newspaper editing, was returned to his chair in the Economics Department of Harvard University with the title of "Professor of Economic History" - a title that he retained until his retirement in 1936. Gay now did venture a merger of European and American economic histories, in place of the earlier practice of offering two half courses in European and American economic histories respectively. In these years, Usher offered a course in medieval economic history as well as work in location theory. In the universities of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and perhaps Yale, organization was carried a step or two further: courses in history and economics, recognized by the total faculties of these institutions as adequate and appropriate for a degree in our subject, were carried in the curricula to guide graduate students in their preparation for a doctoral examination in the specific field.

            Consideration of new academic institutions within the confines of business and economic history should not close without attention to a unique creation, essentially the effort of a domestic business enterprise, with distinguished timeborne roots, to establish a research institution advantageous to historical scholars. I have in mind the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library (already mentioned), situated close to the remnants of powder works of the venerable DuPont family in Wilmington, Delaware, The library was opened in 1961 and the librarian, Richmond D. Williams, a former doctoral student under Thomas C. Cochran at Pennsylvania, has endeavored to build up a collection of materials, including records of local business units, which would be useful to young folk working in the fields of economic and business history, to engineer conferences in new fields of possible research endeavors, and to publish worth-while monographs in our disciplines. The Library also has done well in obtaining the aid of resident counselors such as George R. Taylor, Hugh G. J. Aitken, Thomas C. Cochran, and Harold F. Williamson.

            To an outsider, the results seem to have come with exasperating slowness. As is common with new institutions, the management has walked with much caution. The two or three conferences thus far held at Wilmington have proven successful, and publications have been well carried through, but the institution seems to have suffered from being linked with a scheme to train managers of historical exhibitions and from the widespread and diverse external interests of the DuPont family. Inevitably perhaps, the fortunes of the establishment have proven dependent somewhat upon the business fortunes of the DuPont industrial empire.

 

VIII

 

            Meagre as is our current knowledge of course organization, even course offering, in the numerous universities and colleges of the country, even more difficult to determine is the changing content of such courses or indeed the changing quanta and distribution by subject of the literature available for teaching or the collateral reading at various times over the past century or so. The only source of course content that I have discovered, with data for changes over time and with a sort of panorama of the changing total of worth-while literature in our field, is a set of "readings" formulated by Gay almost from the start of his courses on both European and American economic history, a broken file of which is preserved in the Harvard Archives. In these pamphlets the required readings for students are differentiated from the total selected literature of the area. Noteworthy also are the volumes in Turner's (and later Turner-Merk) series entitled "List of References on the History of the Frontier," which appeared at intervals from 1913 to 1942.

            Unhappily there is also no history of the rising literature in our subject, and only a few helpful bibliographies. Of the latter, one of the earliest is that of E. E. Edwards relative to the evolution of American agriculture, published in 1930. And on a wider front for American economic history one should cite the so-called Channing, Hart, and Turner Guides to American History which appeared in earlier decades and were superseded by the Harvard Guide to American History, prepared under the general direction of Schlesinger, Handlin, and Merk and published in 1954.

            Meanwhile an aid to exploration in the new territory of business history had been prepared by Henrietta Larson and was published in 1948 as Guide to Business History. This useful tool for research in business history was in some degree superseded in 1971 by Robert W. Lovett's American Economic and Business History Information Sources.

            Happily two eminent scholars, Messrs. Taylor and Kirkland, have recently been persuaded to apply their talents to the formulation of bibliographies of American Economic History before and subsequent to 1860, published respectively in 1969 and 1971. The most inclusive bibliography relative to European and American economic change prior to 1850 is presented in the four volumes, containing 29,000 items, of the Kress Library of Business and Economics.

            Happily also, a recent compendium upon varied themes of economic development has appeared under the editorship of George R. Taylor, Approaches to American Economic History (1971). The essays include those of Hugh Aitken on the entrepreneurial approach and of Taylor himself, on "stages" of development.

            In general, then, surely one is justified in contending that now there are data adequate for a history of our discipline.

            And surely not least important among developments to economic and business history in the era since about 1900 has been the increased availability of financial aid. In the early days, this assistance took the form of institutional or personal controls: the Carnegie labors of the years after 1903, the commitment of moneys from Messrs, Hollander, Seligman, and Kress to the enlargement of library facilities actually with many smaller contributions elsewhere in the country and then in the prodigious opening in mid-century of the coffers of Rockefeller, Carnegie of New York, and Ford - here again with numerous smaller sources. The work of economic and business history was much stimulated - happily for all of us.

 

IX

 

            Although the first effort at planned research and writing in economic-business history was that carried out under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution, I chose to begin my tabulation with earlier historians, Frederick J. Turner, Edwin F. Gay, and Wesley Clair Mitchell, all of whom seemed to have attracted and encouraged graduate students.

            Also, my terminal point became more or less arbitrary. As I recalled the numerous scholars in the field, I decided to limit my choice to men and women who had completed their academic commitments. Even then I drew lines in some degree with preference to my personal acquaintanceships.

            Unfortunately, I must confess to a certain naivete in matters academic. I believed that as a chief source of information on the achievements of my distinguished friends I could rely on the citations attached to the honorary degrees many of them received in their later, more mature years. Apparently, however, not only do university presidents take varying interest in such degrees but their institutions often fail to preserve the citations with which such gifts were usually tendered.

            Another way in which I might have indicated the achievements was to have listed the academic appointments and advances subsequent to the attainment of an advanced degree. I have failed to provide these data, too, however, not because they were unavailable but because they tended to become rather voluminous, especially if such information as advancements in levels of appointment and transference of activity were to be recorded.

            I also decided against securing data upon another criterion of advancement and achievement: the number of volumes dedicated to specific teachers by grateful and admiring students. Here, too, the data seemed likely to prove bulky, if my own collection of a dozen or so such items be taken as typical. And I learned that the much beloved Professor Frederick Merk of Harvard - popular with students over several decades at Harvard - also possesses a collection (or his wife possesses) of at least a dozen volumes dedicated to him. Admittedly, such data about a deceased scholar would sometimes be difficult or impossible to acquire. Surviving family members might possess pertinent records, as might the library or archives of the institution with which the respondent was associated during the latter part of his teaching career, but there is no certainty that complete records could be obtainable for everyone. Still, such information does seem useful for giving a quick assessment of the particular scholar's character and academic influence.

            I have tried to assemble data upon Festschriften prepared and published by students as an indication of their affection and indebtedness to their teachers. Here I was fortunate, in various cases, because of a practice adopted by the Harvard College Library: a special or separate card noting the Festschrift has been introduced into the card catalog immediately following the cards pertinent to the books written by the particular scholar.

            More difficult to run to ground were the essays contributed by a given scholar in honor of other men and women of similar accomplishments. Two ladies of my acquaintance, Hedwig Schleiffer and Ruth Crandall, did compile in 1953 a record of all the economic history essays to be found in Festschriften available in the Harvard Libraries.

            Simpler to secure were published biographies. Here most university library catalogs will be found to make record of such studies as an annex to the listing of books written by the scholar himself or herself besides placing the cards in the usual subject, author, title slots. Some academic institutions follow a truly courteous practice of preparing and publishing "minutes" of the life and contributions of individual scholars either upon their retirement from active teaching or upon their deaths. Usually groups of colleagues serve on boards of appraisal in the preparation of these "minutes."

            Finally there is the question of what the deceased professor really taught. Unless his "literary remains" - including his notes on research and records of course activities completed - are destroyed by his family, which practice is unfortunately not uncommon, such materials may well find place in the archives of the college or university where he last taught. Even this, however, is not always the case. Gay's diversified materials were divided among the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Huntington Library in California, and two locations at Harvard. Carter Goodrich's documents were presented to Columbia University, not kept at Pittsburgh; and Raymond de Roover's equivalent documents went to an archive in his native Belgium.

            Most important of such data is information on the content of particular courses, undoubtedly changing over time. As already indicated, this is very difficult to find. Professor Gay went to the trouble of preparing - and from time to time changing - manuals of readings which were printed and distributed to his students. Lists of this sort coincidentally give concrete evidence as to what books or periodical essays in our fields were available from time to time; items marked with asterisks or otherwise differentiated indicated required reading. Occasionally equivalent listings may be found in a professor's literary archives. Most important are the notebooks kept by diligent students who attempted to record in extenso the lectures of a given course. These are scarce indeed, and sometimes preserved in unexpected places. One set of lectures in Gay's course in European Economic History -and those of a relatively early point in his teaching career appeared in the "remains" of a certain William Woodworth and are preserved, fittingly, in the archives of the Harvard Business School; but another set was kept by a scholar who wound up teaching political science at Columbia, and there the lecture notes repose.

            Perhaps there is at least a minor obligation for the successive editors of the Journal of Economic History to run a section on individualized memorabilia as significant items come to light. At one time I heard the suggestion voiced at a Harvard Business School faculty meeting that each professor, as he reached retirement age, prepare and submit documents attempting to reveal the condition of his area of teaching as he found it when he began instruction, and an account of the changes - for better or for worse - that he believed subsequently to have appeared in this area. Nothing came of this proposal. Yet the timing of important advances in any academic field, subsequent events in such areas, and the sources chiefly responsible for these events are always difficult to reconstruct after three or four decades have elapsed and the scholars especially active in the new developments have grown old or "passed to their rewards."

            Lastly I would make mention of the desirability somewhere to develop a collection of photographs and other equivalent representations of the outstanding scholars in our field - perhaps with aid from some interested donor. I should like nothing better than to devote myself to this project, with the collection eventually to be located at the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, at the Kress Library of the Harvard Business School, or elsewhere. I think that I would include such writers as the leaders of the German Historical School, Archbishop Cunningham, and Arthur Young.

            My friend, Harold Williamson, as a means of self-training for an academic career, sought to try his hand at all sorts of investigation and composition in order better to guide the footsteps of students who might ultimately come under his influence. He has performed excellently in this regard as all who have known him will testify; but unhappily he failed to include the current type of composition! I have had to fumble my way toward adequate accuracy or even faithful intimation. I have tried to present my own concept of the character and contributions of the several scholars, almost all of whom, as already stated, I have known and followed in their individual progresses. I did not have the time or energy to give in each instance a complete record - for example, I ventured to omit almost all data on academic advances as common to us all, as indicated above, and I personally made choices among the scholars' individual literary contributions to our fields of interest. If I have sometimes erred or seemed to give an inadequate or defective impression, I beg forgiveness. I have admired one and all and wished in every case to offer a modest set of Nobel awards. I have had aid from many friends, research assistants, and sometimes widows or students of my nominees. I am thankful to all such. The ensuing record, even if sometimes defective, will, I hope, serve to promote a series of biographies, with critics of the Economic History Association possibly serving as judges in an annual contest. I still believe in competition.

 

 

RECORD OF THE ACTORS

 

ROBERT G. ALBION

Place and date of birth:

Malden, Massachusetts, August 15, 1896

 

Degrees earned:

A.B., Bowdoin College, 1918

Ph.D., Harvard University, 1924

 

Honors conferred:

Litt. D., Bowdoin College, 1943

L.H.D., University of Maine, 1948

Litt. D., Southampton College, Long Island University, 1970

 

Citation: Southampton College

"No study of man's history can be complete without a chronicling of his struggles with the forces of Poseidon. We came to America by sea - many from Albion, as literary men have named Britain - and the sea has shaped our economy, our letters, and may in fact ensure our survival . . .

"It is through the scholarly devotion of Robert Greenhalgh Albion to the pains and glories of the sea-going tradition that oceanic and maritime history has gained the stature of an academic discipline."

 

Honorific appointments:

Historian of the United States Naval Administration, 1943-1950.

Awarded Presidential Certificate of Merit, 1948.

Gardiner Professorship of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard, 1949-1963.

Co-ordinator of the Munson Institute of American Maritime History, 1955 and later years.

Lowell Lecturer at Harvard University, 1963.

 

Principal academic affiliations: Princeton and Harvard Universities.

 

Selected publications:

Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652-1862. 1926. Reprint 1965.

The Rise of the New York Port, 1815-1860. 1939. English edition, 1971.

Naval and Maritime History; An Annotated Bibliography. 1st ed.1951. 4th ed. with slightly amended title, 1972.

 

Festschrift for this scholar now in preparation to be entitled "The Atlantic World of Robert G. Albion."

 

ANNE BEZANSON

 

Place and date of birth:

Dalhousie, Canada, February 28, 1881

 

Degrees earned:

A.B., Radcliffe College, 1915

Ph.D., Radcliffe College, 1929

 

Honors conferred:

D.Sc., University of British Columbia, 1948

D.Sc., University of Pennsylvania, 1951

 

Citation: University of Pennsylvania:

"Native of Canada and daughter of Radcliffe College - building upon a successful career as an industrial executive you have made unusual contributions as a research administrator, scholar, and teacher. Cofounder in 1921 and later director of the Industrial Research Department of the University of Pennsylvania, you pioneered in the development of organized team research in the social sciences. A student of price trends you have brought new knowledge of the business and industrial past out of which our great economy has evolved. One of the founders and later president in 1946 of the Economic History Association you have done much to stimulate new interest in economic history as a discipline and, in particular, to give encouragement to young scholars in the field. Your research has been equally skilled and penetrating, whether dealing with current industrial problems or reconstructing the business life of 18th century Philadelphia. But above all you have been a thought-provoking and sympathetic teacher and critic who has opened new vistas to students and colleagues alike, and for thirty years have given distinguished service to this University and to the field of scholarship in which you are a pioneer and a national figure.

"Mr. President, I have the honor to present Anne Bezanson whom the Trustees wish to honor through the award of the degree of Doctor of Science:"

 

Honorific appointments:

Director, Industrial Research Department, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1938-1945.

Consultant on Canada and Economic History, Social Science Section, Rockefeller Foundation, 1939-1951.

Member of Research team on American Price History under International Scientific Committee on Price History. 1935-1942.

(With Earl J. Hamilton and E. A. J. Johnson) Original Promoter of Economic History Association. 1940.

Member of Committee on Research in Economic History, 1944-1954.

President of the Economic History Association, 1946-1948.

 

Principal academic affiliation: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

 

Selected publications:

"The Early Use of the Term Industrial Revolution:" Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 36 (1921-1922), 343-349.

"The Advantages of Labor Turnover: An Illustrative Case:" Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 42 (1927-1928), 450-64.

Wholesale Prices in Pennsylvania, 1720-1896. 4 vols.

1. (With Robert D. Gray and Miriam Hussey) Prices in Colonial Pennsylvania.

1935.

2. (With Robert D. Gray and Miriam Hussey) Wholesale Prices in Philadelphia,

1784-1861. Part I. 1936.

3. (With Miriam Hussey) Part II. Series of Relative Monthly Prices. 1937.

4. (With Blanch Daley, Marjorie C. Denison, and Miriam Hussey) Prices and

 Inflation during the American Revolution: Pennsylvania, 17701790. 1951.

5. (With Marjorie C. Denison, Miriam Hussey, and Elsa Kemp) Wholesale Prices

in Philadelphia, 1852-1896; Series of Relative Monthly Prices. 1954.

 

VICTOR S. CLARK

 

Place and date of birth:

Portageville, New York, June 12, 1868

 

Degrees earned:

Litt.B., University of Minnesota, 1890

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1900

 

Selected publications:

History of Manufactures of the United States, 1607-1860. 1916.

History of Manufactures of the United States, 1860-1914. 1923. 1929 3 vols., Reprint, 1949.

 

Place and date of death:

Washington, D.C., April 2, 1946

 

SHEPARD B. CLOUGH

Place and date of birth:

Bloomington, Indiana, December 6, 1901

 

Degrees earned:

A.B., Colgate University, 1923

Ph.D., Columbia University, 1930

 

Honorific appointments:

Associate Editor, Journal of Economic History. 1941-1943.

Membership in Division of Economic Studies, United States, Department of State, 1942-1943.

Membership in Historical Service Board, Advisory Council on War History, Social Science Research Council. 1943-1952.

Membership in Council of Research Institute of World Affairs. 1944.

Secretary, Social Science Research Council. 1946-1956.

Visiting Professor at Institut d'Etudes Politiques, University of Paris, 1952.

Visiting Lecturer, Free University, Berlin, 1952-1953.

Appointment to be a Knight of the Order of Merit of Italy, 1956.

President, Society of French Historical Studies, 1964-1965.

President, Economic History Association, 1968-1970.

President, Society of Italian Historical Studies, 1971-1972.

 

Principal academic affiliation: Columbia University

 

Selected publications:

A Century of American Life Insurance; A History of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, 1843-1943. 1946.

The Economic Development of Western Civilization. 1959.

 

THOMAS C. COCHRAN

 

Place and date of birth:

New York City, New York, April 29, 1902

 

Degrees earned:

B.S., New York University, 1923

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1930

 

Honors conferred:

LL.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1972

 

Citation: University of Pennsylvania

"As the inventive constructor of his own estimable history, Thomas Childs Cochran has opened new vistas for the examination of the American heritage and its underlying social themes.

"Bold and experimental, he was the first to emphasize the significance of private enterprise as the basis for this country's formative institutions at a time when such discernment was original, courageous, and striking. Considered by many to be the foremost American economic historian, he has influenced a new generation of scholars long after he suggested a change in problems and themes and introduced techniques from the social sciences into historical methodology. With the intensity of the seer, he has taught others to share with him the broad and long-range perspective that gives meaning to facts.

"Creating their own historical moment, the Trustees ask that he, a Benjamin Franklin Professor, receive another mark of his peers' regard, the honorary degree, Doctor of Laws:"

 

Honorific appointments:

Member of Committee on Research in Economic History, 1945-1949.

Member of original founding committee of Research Center