“When I was a young boy, my father Took me into the city to see a marching band…”
On February 22, 1864, Harvey Gridley Eastman, founder, president, and proprietor of his namesake business college in Poughkeepsie, NY, threw a business parade.
Technically, it was just “a parade” – he footed the bill for an expansive, city-wide celebration of George Washington’s birthday. A public spirited sort, at least when it came to associating his name with winning causes, Eastman likely calculated that a patriotic celebration in the waning days of a war where Union victory looked increasingly certain was a win-win proposition, for both his private enterprise (Eastman College) and the Republic for whose business world it stood ready to supply with clerks.
Putting a corps of his students hailing from “every loyal state” on display to wave the flag was certainly good advertising, at least in New York – and gave Eastman chance to claim to rival the “honored festivities” of a similar nature that Yale and Harvard had recently observed.
The parade followed what was by then a standard script. There were invited guest of honor, local dignitaries, and faculty members on hand to fill leading carriages and add dignity to the proceedings; while a grand “corps d’arme”of Eastman students marched formed the primary body of the parade, marching in time to the “Cornet Band of the College” brassily sounding patriotic tunes in bright new blue uniforms. There were floats with brave Union officers and wounded veterans, and some regimental bands, too. Patriotic animals got in the act, too: reporters made note of how the parade included dozens of “spirited horses” – including Prof. Eastman’s “elegant black team,” turned out with “silk flags” and “gold plated harness” (the latter ornaments all gifts from grateful, successful alumni).
Crowds of Poughkeepsie citizens, supplemented by “hundreds from the country and towns,” provided a cheering audience for all this pomp and circumstance as it wound through the downtown streets, and past the College’s campus. Some in the multitude shouted huzzahs for Washington, alone; others, ecumenically anticipating future car dealer’s sales, hoorayed for Lincoln and Washington as presidents together; and one onlooker, confused but supporting the right side at least, clapped and hooted all honors to General Grant.
The city’s “fair maidens,” meanwhile, waved handkerchiefs from “windows, verandahs, stoops, and side walks” – a sign, perhaps, that they favored Eastman’s humble clerks over those “to the manor born. Even the “ladies” of Vassar College, normally secluded on their hill, graced the town with their presence and “honored the procession with smiles.”
The parade, and its encore events – a reading of Washington’s “Farewell Address” and a closing torchlight march – was a big hit, “a great success in every sense of the word.”
No slouch, Eastman immediately put the event to work for the cause of “practical, popular education,” generally, and his proprietary brand, specifically, inviting press from local and metropolitan newspapers to report on the event, and republishing an official account in pamphlet form.
~~~
Now, the infusion of George Washington’s commemoration and public memory with the public performance of a “business man’s” identity is a longstanding interest of mine, so for me this whole affair is as much catnip, as you might expect.
But! What moved me to write it up was not the founding father appropriation, but rather the what Eastman students carried. As they marched along Poughkeepsie’s streets, witnessed by thousands of people, the students hoisted seventeen double-sided banners, with mottos and aphorisms inscribed on each side.
They started off fairly on-brand: an announcement of what the parade was about (George Washington’s birthday), the college’s name and motto, and some key facts and figures from Eastman’s catalogue.
Then came some more pointed comparison to Ivy League upstarts, a celebration of the students shift from business to war, and praise for “their” president.
The next half-dozen banners shifted gears into pure aphorism territory – a familiar for Eastman and his employees, who bedecked the margins of all the college’s print ads and the halls of the college itself with seemingly-random words of instruction and encouragement. (Though backside of banner number 9 – “Big thing on the Yankee Schoolmaster” – ventures into more… vernacular assertions of masculine pride.)
Then the banners trend to more boring graphics indicating education and patriotism …
… before winding up with a frankly odd, but striking trio.
No. 15 is baffling (“Opportunity has hair in front, behind she is bald”), while No. 16 reminds everyone of who the important daddies in American politics are, before No. 17 ends the celebration with some solid perfectionist theology metaphors.
And that’s how Harvey Gridley Eastman welcomed you to the business parade.
Header image, generated by DALL*E (AI) with the phrase “A parade of chibi emo businessmen carrying american flags”
Source: Grand and Imposing Celebration of 22d February, 1864 in Commemoration of George Washington by the Students of Eastman National Business College (Poughkeepsie, NY: Telegraph Press, 1864), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100406934.
Or, What Value Did Role-Playing Have in 19th-Century Business School?
AKA Improv Everywhere, Even the Counting House
#BizManBook Research Note #4
Author’s note: this piece is an abstract draft for a proposed paper; that’s why the style at the end gets a bit formal and academic – or more so than usual. Space and time allowing, I’d rewrite it to be less so…but, well, space and time haven’t allowed.
Imagine you’re young, ambitious, and living in the hinterland of Gilded Age Chicago. Once burned (but never shy), Nature’s Metropolis is booming beyond a booster’s wildest dreams. It’s a gigantic, thudding piston, pumping the heart of North America’s capitalist machine. Every day the buildings are getting taller, the sky’s getting blacker with smoke, and the bellows from the stockyards louder and more baleful. It’s a city on the rise, figuratively and literally, and you want to get in on the action – but how?
Metropolitan Business College (1883), Chicago History Museum, MBC – Misc Pamphlets
Enter the Metropolitan Business College. Maybe you spot one of the school’s lavishly illustrated pamphlets in the mail piled high on the shabby entryway table at your boarding house; or maybe a relative eager to foster your independence – and limit your drain on family expenses – pressed it into your hands at the last potluck. However it got to you, what catches your eye – beyond the arresting graphic design, all ornate capital letters and naturalistic vignettes – is what the college promises: a “thorough, practical business training and education” in “the shortest possible time and at a moderate expense.” It’s an opportunity, the proprietors claim, that “every young man who is ambitious to rise in the world to distinction, independence, and wealth” should look to, valuable not just for would-be clerks and bookkeepers, but merchants, lawyers, legislators, teachers, editors – even widows! In a nation that buzzes like “one vast busy hive,” where “commerce is king,” every young man or woman needs a “knowledge of business matters, and the ability to keep accounts correctly.” Exciting, certainly; but what does that mean in practice?
Metropolitan Business College, Annual Prospectus (1888) Chicago History Museum
The Metropolitan’s circulars and handbills were peppered with claims about the institution’s many virtues: an accessible location, an affordable price, an able and experienced faculty, etc., etc. But the for-profit private business college’s core pitch – and the subject depicted in finely illustrated detail in much of its advertising – was the “PRACTICAL DEPARTMENT.” A “business world in itself,” the “practical department” was both place and pedagogy. Physically, the department was a “great counting room” on the second floor of the college’s main building, where “Banking, Manufacturing, Importing, Commission and Wholesale Houses, Real Estate, Insurance, and Transportation Offices” could be found. Each “business” in the Department was defined by its proper teller windows and office furniture, and fully supplied with “everything necessary to conduct the business as it is conducted in the large business houses of Chicago.”
Metropolitan Business College (1883), Chicago History Museum, MBC – Misc Pamphlets
“Everything necessary” included pens and ink as well as blank ledgers, blank day books, blank journals, blank bills, blank sales slips, blank insurance contracts, blank partnership agreements – the whole specialized apparatus of modern commercial paperwork. These expensive, extensive fixtures set the stage for accelerated learning through creative improvisational acting. (Yes, the Metropolitan Business College wasn’t just in the Second City, it anticipated The Second City’s methods, too.)
Assigned to an office with a role and a desk to match, Metropolitan students learned white collar work first-hand by doing deals and organizing transactions between and among themselves, running their “firms” to model the operations of the real industrial economy. Under expert game master, er, faculty guidance, students mastered business skills in a fraction of the time required by an old-style apprenticeship; and paired with the college’s other lectures and classes, their knowledge was more thorough, too. Critically, the “practical department” produced real, useful feelings. Role-playing as business men and women, the Metropolitan’s proprietors claimed, filled students with a “zest and determination” for knowledge that was “unseen and unknown in the history of Business Colleges in this country.”
It’s possible Metropolitan students’ zeal might be “unseen and unknown” in the annals of business history, but the “practical department” was a common feature of late nineteenth-century private for-profit business colleges. Bryant & Stratton’s national chain of fifty colleges featured “business departments” that combined “office and stationery store, fitted throughout in solid walnut, richly carved,” while branches of the Eastman National Business College provided students with a dizzying array of blank printed forms (articles of copartnership, ledgers, and shipping receipts) all stamped with the logo of their “Actual Business Department.”[2] But despite their apparent ubiquity – and abundant material culture – “practical departments” seem not to have merited inclusion in narratives about the historical development of business education, or to have entered into debates about the balance modern business schools should strike between “theory” and “practice.” They are almost as overlooked as for-profit schools are generally in business education history. [3]
Eastman National Business College records, 1865-1866, Chicago History Museum
Yet careful consideration of “practical departments,” and the private for-profit business colleges to which they were attached, can open new questions about the early development of American business education, as well the intellectual and physical infrastructures of industrializing America. Too, they can potentially shed new light on what’s novel – or not – in modern business education. The materials for such a study are plentiful: common institutions with often surprising durability (several Bryant & Strattonbranch colleges are still operating today), the advertisements, curricula, and textbooks produced by for-profit private business colleges are held in digital and physical libraries in virtually every major city in the United States; and while manuscript materials are less common, collections of notes, correspondence, and personal papers from educators and students exist in significant numbers, and are readily available.[4]
While this research is as-yet-ongoing, I see three questions where “practical departments” may be particularly useful as objects of study for business history and the history of business education:
1) How did for-profit business colleges model the economy for students – and what role did material culture play in that instruction?
Divided into firms linked together through paper transactions, “practical departments” were intentionally-designed working models of the economy, and as such provide new insights into how Gilded Age business people sought to apprehend and manage it using accounting methods and other technologies. The specific furniture and material culture of “Practice Departments” reveals the long-standing importance of physical environments to business education, anticipating later lauded trends in business education that also depended on specific arrangements in space, like the case method’s “horseshoe-shaped classrooms.”[4] Comparing different schools’ approach to “practical departments” could reveal the role that material culture and spatial arrangements played in affording or structuring economic models, and vice versa.
2) How did for-profit business colleges produce knowledge – and what were the consequences?
Exploring materials related to “practical departments” can help uncover the processes of knowledge-creation. As students rotated through the different firms in this Potemkin business world, they apprehended its multiple angles and interrelationships; a shipping office’s books revealed a different set of operations than a bank’s, and understanding their connections was greater than the sum of understanding either, separately. In promotional materials, business colleges highlighted the benefits of this gestalt: a year of preparation at Bryant & Stratton fitted a student out not just for a specific business, like an apprenticeship or work experience would, but for the world as a whole – present and future. Business colleges collectively trained hundreds of thousands of students – and graduates not infrequently made up a significant portion of a given city’s white collar workforce. The influence of the “practical department” was thus potentially significant – and explorable, through students’ correspondence and reflections on their experiences, as well as through more public discussion of different schools curricula and benefits.
3) What can “practical departments” reveal about the purpose(s) of business education – and its intended role for individuals, and in society?
That institutions commonly understood as narrow vocational operations sought to develop a broad perspective is perhaps surprising from a contemporary position – but is perfectly consonant with Gilded Age for-profit business colleges’ own claims, as well as those of supporters. Editor and politician Horace Greeley, for example, claimed that “Business Colleges will find their greatest sphere of utility” in “developing a larger capacity to apprehend and to seize the opportunities that so abundantly exist on every side, for giving new activity and new power to the creation of material wealth.” Facing the challenge of adapting the American nation in a post-slavery, globalized, and industrializing world, Greeley argued young people needed to develop “a many-sided-ness,” through an “education that teaches men to look in various directions” – a capacity that for-profit business colleges employed “practical departments” to provide. [5] In contrast to the higher education industry today, where disciplinary and professional knowledge is valued primarily for its capacity to secure students’ individual future earnings in specific occupations, supporters of Gilded Age business education organizations championed values aligned – at least rhetorically – with the broader social and intellectual goals of the “liberal arts.”
DALL*E Image (AI-generated), from prompt “Watercolor, Businessman and Businesswoman Working at a Desk on a Stage in Black Box Theater”
Learning through role-playing is not an unusual pedagogical technique; arguably, it’s the oldest there is. But in their widespread “practical departments,” Gilded Age for-profit American business colleges made playing at bookkeeper into a serious, significant experience – one, indeed, which usually formed the capstone of a business education. A closer examination of how these “practical departments” modeled the business world in paper, how they functioned to produce knowledge, and how and why they served as the foundation for business college advocates’ claims about their contribution to individual lives and national projects has the potential to add a new chapter to the history of business education, illuminate the infrastructures and assumptions supporting 19th-century business practice, and better contextualize ongoing debates in modern business schools.
——
NOTES
[1] Metropolitan Business College, 77 & 79 Madison Street, Chicago, Howe & Powers, Proprietors (1883), Chicago History Museum, MBC – Misc Pamphlets, F38QH .M5Z
[2] H. B. Bryant’s Chicago Business College (1875), 24; Eastman National Business College records, 1865-1866, Chicago History Museum
[3] While for-profit business colleges, like other kinds of “lower ed,” have received less attention than their more prestigious counterparts, graduate schools at major research universities, they do appear in some standard narratives about business education – but primarily for their role in transmitting and popularizing new kinds of technology, like typewriters, shorthand, or filing systems. E.g. Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). On “lower ed”: Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2017).
[4] However, these materials are often not cataloged or identified as specifically pertaining to business colleges, or their “practical departments,” but rather left in generic categories; discovery is somewhat difficult as a result. This is a familiar problem in business history; see the discussion of “account books” as sources in Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[6] Horace Greeley, An Address on Success in Business, Delivered before the Students of Packard’s Bryant & Stratton New York Business College by Hon. Horace Greeley at the Large Hall of the Cooper Union, Nov. 11, 1867, (New York: S. S. Packard, Publisher, 1867), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001123944, 21, 29.
Or, How Many Beards (er, Ritters) Does It Take to Make George Washington a Businessman?
#BizManBook Research Note #3
I mentioned in my last post that many of the arguments Sol Bloom’s arguments in his essay “Washington the Businessman” were first published – at enormous and tedious length – in Halsted Lockwood Ritter’s book, Washington as a Business Man (New York: Sears Publishing Company, Inc., 1931).[1]
Ritter is a curious figure. His moonlighting as an early national historian is not his greatest claim to fame – not by a long shot. An Indiana boy who moved to Miami to make money as a Republican lawyer, he found his way into the judiciary via an appointment from the businessman’s president, Calvin Coolidge. Ritter’s time on the bench was notable for the expanse and creativity of his graft and corruption. His corruption stunk badly enough that he managed to make himself the fourth person to ever be successfully removed from office through impeachment – the Senate convicted him in 1936 of “bringing the judiciary into disrepute.” (Can you imagine? How quaint!)
But he’s also notable for another coincidence, a bit closer to my historiographical heart. Halsted Ritter was the brother of Mary Ritter Beard. Yes, that Mary Ritter Beard: prolific Progressive historian, and partner to the similarly productive Charles Austin Beard – who famously argued in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States that the framers were a cabal of anti-democratic capitalists, and the Constitution their effort to put property over people.
Even more interesting, the first historian to attempt to write a history of “the business man” was Miriam Beard – Mary and Charles’s daughter, and Halsted’s niece.[2] And how did Miriam Beard think about Washington’s connection to business? Well, pretty much in the same way her uncle and parents did:
It seems possible that the extended Ritter-Beard clan might be responsible for shifting public understanding of Washington, and other founders – and in the process also elevating the “businessman” to the status of main character in American history. Something of an irony, given the Progressive politics of many of the family’s members…
[1] Sol Bloom, “Washington the Business Man,” inHonor to George Washington and Reading about George Washington, ed. Albert Bushnell Hart (Washington, D.C.: United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission, 1932), 131-45. Note, however that Ritter’s earlier publication does not necessarily mean he originated these ideas, or this argument; Bloom had been working on the Bicentennial Commission since the mid-1920s, it’s entirely possible he had come to his conclusions earlier, had prior communication with Ritter, or even that the two collaborated. More research will tell…
In 1932, the Hon. Sol Bloom (D-NY) staked a bold claim on the public reputation of George Washington. Director of the U.S. George Washington Bicentennial Commission, the experienced Congressman declared Washington a “business man,” par excellence. In a prominent essay, Bloom argued that the father of the nation was not just a brave soldier or a steady statesman. Rather, he was a “remarkable man of affairs” whose qualities as a “practical modern spirit” lay behind his success as a public man. A modern businessman’s mastery of system and detail proved the critical factor in Washington’s success on the battlefield and in the halls of power, Bloom claimed; a genius for business was what made Washington “the most successful American of his century.”[1]
As you might imagine, contorting the nation’s favorite hero into a businessman during the nadir of the Great Depression took some effort. Bloom didn’t do it alone; his article was developed in conversation with other historians and scholars, and together they built a case step by step. Bloom and his collaborators went over Washington’s early life to make the case that the provincial Virginian’s experiences with credit and debt instilled a worldly financial acumen – and then ransacked his rough and rarely balanced ledgers to demonstrate Washington’s capacity for analytical bookkeeping. Drawing on correspondence and diaries, they argued Washington carefully optimized his workforce, using different methods to “drive” his laborers, both enslaved and free, toward greater efficiencies. Finally, they integrated Washington’s activities as a real estate promoter and experimental planter into his presidential political agenda. The General’s prophetic vision for a westward-expanding nation – and thus, American greatness – was rooted in his experience as a “business organizer” seeking to enhance land sales through infrastructural development.[2]
The work didn’t end with the evidence. Bloom’s essay was tip of an iceberg of public addresses, research monographs, curricular plans, and radio programs that aimed to redefine Washington for a new era. The publications and presentation created or directed by the Bicentennial Commission were legion – Bloom claimed “4,760,345 separate and distinct programs” over the course of nine months celebration – and a significant portion explicitly described Washington’s business acumen.[3] And they inspired many, many more.[4]
In Washington, Bloom and his collaborators found – or rather, made – a prototypical businessman, one who happened to exhibit exactly the kind of genius (and public spirit) that the early 20th-century entrepreneurial elite claimed for itself. The question is: why? Why would busy public officials spend federal resources – and invest immense amounts of personal time – to promote a new understanding of a remarkable eighteenth-century gentleman planter as a conventional contemporary business man? And why do it during the greatest crisis capitalism had yet produced?
I’m not sure yet. Bloom’s own biography provides some clues: born in Illinois to a family of immigrant Polish Jews, he made his fortune as an impresario and then publisher in the music industry, before going big-time in NYC as a music store magnate and real estate developer; the entrepreneurial ethos was part of his own story. But while that’s perhaps necessary background, it’s not sufficient – particularly given the reaction that Bloom received for this work.
In his own time, Bloom’s work appears to have been both publicly persuasive and important to the cause of New Deal liberalism. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of many who wrote to congratulate Bloom on the Bicentennial Commission’s successes, lauded him for going beyond a “mere demonstration of memorial fervor” and creating “an immortal legacy in the form of historical facts” that “future historians and scholars may rely upon.” Bloom’s work had “reached deep into the hearts of the people,” FDR noted, “and revived in them fundamental reasons for pride of country and faith in its system of government.”[5]
Given this, it seems important to figure out how and why accounting George Washington as a businessman came to do such critical work in restoring faith in the American system in a moment when it faced an unprecedented crisis.
[2] Sol Bloom, “Washington the Business Man,” 131–45. Though reproduced widely throughout Bicentennial Commission productions, the arguments in Bloom’s essay appear to have been published first – and at much greater length – in Halsted Lockwood Ritter, Washington as a Business Man (New York: Sears Publishing Company, Inc., 1931). Historian Albert Bushnell Hart, Bloom’s collaborator on the U.S. George Washington Bicentennial Commission, also summarized these points in an address to the Business History Society in which he nominated Washington for an honorary, posthumous membership. Albert Bushnell Hart, “George Washington as a Business Man,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 5, no. 1 (1931): 14–17. These publications are close enough together – and close enough to the large effort of the Bicentennial Commission – that it is as-yet unclear who originated this argument, and under what circumstances.
[4] Subsequent biographers of Washington have repeated and ratified these claims. E.g., James Thomas Flexner, George Washington, 4 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), John Berlau, George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father’s Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World (New York: All Points Books, 2020).
[5] Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Sol Bloom, December 29, 1933, in Sol Bloom Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Box 61, Folder R.
Or, Who Did The Work of Making the Business Lobby?
#BizManBook Research Note #1
Source: Peter Schawang, Minnesota Association of Commercial Secretaries 25th Anniversary, St. Paul., February 12, 1944, photograph, b&w, 8″ x 10″, February 12, 1944, AV1982.85.1, Minnesota Historical Society, https://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10692948.
In the early 20th century, a new kind of man appeared in America. “[L]ooking pleasant but worried,” he scurries toward his downtown office, arriving by 8:30am to be attend to a packed schedule of meetings, calls, and endless paperwork, working through breakfast, lunch, dinner, and not infrequently well beyond. He’s an avid golfer, but those hours on the links aren’t leisure, they’re a good walk ruined by networking. His blood pressure is high, his hair is going prematurely grey, perhaps because others claim his hours; he has “about as much time to call his own as a member of the fire department.”1 Often the sole salaried employee of his organization, he wears as many hats as the haberdasher can supply: he serves as “a business man, an organizer, a diplomat, a strategist, a mixer, and an all-around man of versatile ability.”2
So who was this new, harried man – and what was his business?
As he was described and then theorized in the business print culture of the 1910s and 1920s, this busy, multifarious, and frankly tired figure was the “commercial secretary.” Sometimes also styled the “commercial executive” – when he was feeling presumptuous – his work was to shape the business men of an American city into a purposeful, effective force. His labor was organizing capitalists.
The commercial secretary made his home in an institution that first became pervasive in Gilded Age America: the local commercial association, aka the chamber of commerce, board of trade, or business league. The keystone administrator of a nonprofit organization that served the cause of for-profit enterprise, the commercial secretary was an employee whose task was to nurture and guide entrepreneurs and executives – and translate their aggregate economic power into civic improvement and public infrastructure.
The commercial secretary occupies an interesting niche in the modernizing United States. Within the paradigm of the “managerial revolution,” he must be figured a partisan for professional, systematized, and scientific control of corporate bodies, against the amateurish whims of individual owners. From another perspective, however, the commercial secretary was simply another creature of the era’s powerful proprietary capitalists, like a railroad lawyer or “friendly” politician. But unlike those figures, commercial secretaries claimed to represent the business men of a given locality, as a whole class, not particular enterprises or even industries. As such they might be properly characterized as a kind of community organizer, or class activist, engaged in the slow, boring political work of building “business solidarity.”3
Understanding themselves to be agents of capital-p “Progress,” commercial secretaries thought of civic improvement as their special purview. As they took steps to professionalize in the early 20th-century, they did so in the name of something greater than the sum of their members private interests: they claimed to work for the good of the whole city. (And it was usually the urban core they focused on – like many other Progressives, they saw cities as the key problem of the present, and the path to the future). You can glimpse something of the grandiosity of secretaries’ ambitions in the courses of study and reading lists they designed to train the rising generation: organizational design and commercial law, macro, micro, and political economics, business statistics, and accounting, to start; and then for more advanced students, education in corporate finance, scientific management, urban governance, immigration reform, military science, European and American history, the classics, socialism, marketing, advertising, and psychology – all to be supplemented with the daily newspaper, and founded on practical experience.4
So far in my research for my new project, TheBeginnings of the “Businessman,” I have been working with institutional collections – the records and publications of the New York Chamber of Commerce, or the Boston Board of Trade, etc. Stepping into these records means entering a world authored, almost entirely, by commercial secretaries. Secretaries took the meeting minutes, summarized committee findings, and then drafted, edited, and ordered the printing and layout of institutional reports and periodicals. They also did a significant share of the backroom backslapping and conversational cajoling that brought members together in the first place (traces of which shows up in correspondence). And though commercial associations’ power and legitimacy were always understood to reside in their members, it was through the secretary that that they found collective expression.
In that sense, we might usefully consider commercial secretaries to be the “stage managers” in the managerial revolution. Offstage organizers who kept things moving while emotionally overwrought players rushed in and out of the wings to take action. And indeed, in some organizations, they often refused (or were denied) the limelight. George Wilson, the longtime secretary of the New York Chamber of Commerce, oversaw his organizations’ transformation from provincial mercantile club to industrial and financial lobbying giant; but after he died, a member who stood to hail his memory still failed to recognize his portrait hanging on the wall of the meeting room he was in.5 Most commercial secretaries claimed more space than Wilson – but even those who modeled themselves on his shy propriety left a mark, in the record, shaping how business men were represented to the world, and to themselves.
As this post suggests, commercial secretaries have caught my attention. A prolix group of liminal figures, they are interesting as indexes of how apolitical “progressivism” mixed with the celebration of business “civilization” in the bubbling stew of modern urban capitalist America. But they are also something of a distraction. While they occasionally weighed in on how “business men” should get involved in civic affairs, and offered useful some delineation of what that character of a “business man” looked like, they mostly shied away from any close examination of their meal tickets. Instead, they preferred to look inward, and consider what qualities and capacities they and their organizations needed to make the world safe for vigorous local capitalist enterprise. But as I get back into the habit of writing through my sources, I thought it would be fitting to go meta, and give some attention to the men (and some women) who sent the fancy business banquet invites, and organized the diners.
1. John E. Northway, “The Secretary in Action,” in Proceedings: Fifth Annual Meeting of the National Association of Commercial Organization Secretaries (Worcester, MA: National Association of Commercial Organization Secretaries, 1919), 96-98, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100438129
3. Edward D. Jones, “The University and the Secretary,” in Commercial Organizations, Their Function, Operation and Service, ed. William George Bruce (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1920), 420, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006566591
Dael A. Norwood 