Author: daelnorwood

Corporate Voters Project

Little Delaware, Gangrened with Envy

daelnorwood

Or, Delaware Caught Heat for Playing the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Even in 1899 

Corporate Voters Project – Research Note #2

Recently, there’s been a bit of controversy about amendments to Delaware’s General Corporation Law. Supporters pushing recent amendments have gotten quite hot under the collar in public print and in legislative debates, and have accused critics of (what is now the signed) law of threatening the state’s entire political economy with their unprecedented rudeness. 

Much like the recent revisions to state law themselves, these reactions to mild criticism are expressions of myopia. Criticism of the sort SB 313 attracted in 2024 – that it proceeded anti-democratically, that it harmed ordinary people, that it was motivated by a small set of special interests’, and would lead to abuse – were leveled at Delaware state legislators when the state’s corporate law first passed in 1899.

If anything, earlier observers of Delaware corporate law in the Gilded Age were far more blunt in their criticism than anyone in the 21st century has ever thought about being. To illustrate, lend your eyes to this brief article from the American Law Review, a legal journal based in St. Louis:  “Little Delaware Makes a Bid for the Organization of Trusts,” American Law Review 33, no. 3 (May-June 1899): 418–24.

Well-known to Delaware lawyers – and recently, at least one historian – the article takes the form of an unsigned “note,” one of a few dozen that appeared at the back section of every journal issue, after the treatises and articles, but before the listings of recent major court decisions. My assumption is that it is either written by the editors, Seymour D. Thomson and Leonard A. Jones, or one of their close associates – and either way expresses their editorial views. 

And my goodness, are the Am.L. Rev. editors unimpressed with Delaware trying to copy New Jersey’s loose corporate charter rules, much less their attempt to “improve” on them by giving corporations even more expansive powers. After some praise for Delaware’s old Democratic (and enslaving) political establishment (and some sharp elbows at the emerging state Republican party), the editors note that the curious feature of US federalism – that state sovereign powers are equal, and that states set corporate law – is what provides the temptation that Delaware has now given into:  

“The “sovereign” States of the American Union are equal: equal in the Senate, for little Delaware wields the same voting power there as does great New York. They are also equal in regard of the deviltry they can do – equal in regard of the injury they can inflict upon their sister States. It is as though a Klondike gold mine had been discovered in New Jersey, and all Delaware were on the rush to get there. In other words little Delaware, gangrened with envy at the spectacle of the truck-patchers, sand-duners, clam-diggers and mosquito-wafters of New Jersey getting all the money in the country into her coffers, – is determined to get her little tiny, sweet, round, baby hand into the grab-bag of sweet things before it is too late.” (p. 419)

And, the editors note, this law will be a jobs-employment program for Delaware politicians; they may need to even import labor:

“But with this exception; and herein the little great “State of Delaware” casts its little great anchor to the windward. Although ” any three persons may organize a corporation,” yet ” only one director need be a resident of Delaware.” And this ” one director'” is going to be paid for being a director, and don’t you forget it. If the rush to organize corporations and trusts under this new Delaware law is as great as under the New Jersey law, there will not be politicians enough in Delaware to serve as directors of corporations and trusts for all the other States of the Union, but professional directors will have to migrate to Delaware from other States, and their name will be Legion.” (p.420)

 
Delaware legislators’ grandiose proclamations about their new law’s global applicability seem to be particularly grating:  

” Nor will you be confined, in the conduct of your business, when so happily incorporated, to your drought-smitten and grasshopper-eaten prairies. “It,”  – that is to say you when you have turned yourselves into Delaware corporations – ” may conduct business anywhere in the world.” Certainly you may. Why not? The great State of Delaware says so, and is not that enough?” (p. 421)

Halfway through, the editors re-frame their note as addressing the great political enemies of the Big Corporations in this particular moment – the hardworking, Populist Party-supporting farmers of Kansas.  (This is for rhetorical effect; I doubt too many populists were reading this attorney-specialty journal). And in this section, the editors suggest that should these farmers try to use the state power they control, they’ll face a potent force – in law, if not actually in the military.

“If Kansas attempts, through its legislation, to interfere with the sovereign prerogatives of Delaware, Delaware will be there with its oyster-boat and clam-boat navy, and with its unterrified militia; and what then will Kansas do about it?” (p.423)  

And then finally, they note the alchemical aspects of Delaware’s new law. 

“Let us not forget, oh, toiling brothers of the Kansas deserts, one other feature of this congenial law: 6. “The liability of the stockholder is absolutely limited when the stock has once been issued for cash, property or services.” Brother, do you need to photograph this sentence by means of an X-ray? Can you not see through it? Is it not pellucid ? It says, ” issued for cash.” It does not say paid for in cash. Is it not ” issued for cash” when it is issued for the promise of cash? and is it not issued for property or services when it is issued for the promise of such commodities? And if the gold bugs, bond- holders and other octopi, should render it hard to redeem your promise to pay for your shares – even in chips and whetstones, – why should you so pay? You have launched your corporation; the sovereign laws of Delaware allow you to commence business before any “sum whatever was paid in; ” and who or what is going to stop you from continuing your business? Do you not see that here is a scheme to turn the world into a sudden millennium? And if you object that a millennium must consist of a thousand years and cannot be created in a day, the answer is that all things are possible with the sovereign State of Delaware. What were the dreams of the ancient alchemists to this? They at most could, by processes somewhat tedious and expensive, convert gross metal into gold. But, without any gross metal of any kind to work upon, not even silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, the sovereign State of Delaware stretches forth her wand over the prairies of Kansas and calls upon money to come, and it comes.” (p.424)

What the irritated attorneys have described here is the central magic of finance, generally, and corporate finance, in particular. With some law and a bit of market faith – and a willingness to grift – you can conjure something out of nothing, and profit.  Devolving sovereign power onto private parties who derive artificial persons, and then mortgage those “persons’ ” future cash flows for current income to actually do something (well, sometimes) – That’s Capitalism, Baby! If it feels like fraud, well, you probably don’t sit on the right corporate boards.

This is all to say that criticism of those would weave this kind of spell – and of Delaware legislators’ meddling in its magics, specifically – is nothing new in 2024. The First State’s legislators been catching heat for playing sorcerer’s apprentice, and carrying water for outside financial interests, for a very long time. Maybe they should get used to it? (Or, I dunno, change their ways?)

Note: for further discussions of this article, and critiques of Delaware law generally, see:  “Law for Sale: A Study of the Delaware Corporation Law of 1967,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 117, no. 6 (April 1969): 861–98, and Hal Weitzman, What’s the Matter with Delaware?: How the First State Has Favored the Rich, Powerful, and Criminal―and How It Costs Us All (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).

Corporate Voters Project, Delaware, Power At Play

Corporations are Voters, My Friends

daelnorwood

Or, An Investigation Into Just How Deep Delaware’s Commitment to the Bit Goes

Corporate Voters Project – Research Note #1

In Delaware, corporations can vote. So can LLCs, partnerships, and trusts, provided they own real property within the municipality where the election is taking place. In “The Company State,” capital not only has a voice – it has the franchise. 

And I want to know why.  

~*~

I first learned about corporations’ access to the ballot when I moved to Newark, DE in the summer of 2018. In breaks between schlepping boxes to our rented house, I caught up on local news, and learned that the City of Newark had recently held a referenda to authorize infrastructure borrowing – bonds to pay for new parks, and better sewers. All the measures passed handily. But of the over 2,000 ballots cast, some 118 “came from non-residents and corporations” – including 31 votes made by one representative of a local real estate company. 

So just as I became a new, working citizen of Delaware, I discovered that my rights paled next to the those enjoyed by old, rentier capital.

Though the election raised many questions – as well as my blood pressure – in the busy season of a new semester on an unfamiliar campus, I let it lie as an oddity. In the wake of that bond election, there was enough concern expressed by other locals that the City Council petitioned the state legislature to revise its charter, to limit the franchise to human residents and human non-resident property owners “in accordance with the principle of ‘one person, one vote.’” The charter was successfully amended in 2019. [1] 

But “dead labour” in the form of company capital, wasn’t done enlivening Delaware’s politics. In late spring 2023, news broke that the leaders of Seaford, DE had got a charter revision bill of their own introduced. It was the mirror image of Newark’s reform. Seaford wanted to empower a property owner, “whether a natural person or an artificial entity,” to vote in all town elections. (It seems the unpopular town council in Seaford was eager to substitute property for people, as voters). Delaware Republicans, eager to claim fifteen minutes of public infamy for supporting corporations’ right to stuff the ballot, used parliamentary tactics to bring the legislature to a screeching halt until the bill passed in the House. It did – though the measure was later quietly smothered in a Senate committee, and never became law. [2]

Needled twice by the news, my interest – and my ire – was piqued. And if that’s not a reason for research, what is?

~*~

If there was anywhere in the United States you might expect to find a corporation voting, Delaware is it. A state that only recently reached the milestone of one million human residents, the self-proclaimed “Corporate Capital of the World” is home to over two million business entities, including two-thirds of the Fortune 500.  

Corporations and LLCs don’t come here for the beaches, though. They sink shallow roots into our clayey soils because the state government offers a uniquely “business-friendly” regime. In return for filing a simple registration form and paying some light taxes and fees, DE state officials ask few questions, and impose fewer regulations. When conflicts between companies arise, as they tend to in the hurly-burly world of modern business, Delaware’s uniquely commercially-oriented Court of Chancery offers speedy, jury-free resolutions. And if that service fails to satisfy, well, the Delaware legislature is ready to bend to meet the whims of capital with a flexibility an Olympic gymnast would envy.

While intentionally obscured from ordinary residents, “The Franchise,” so-called, is well understood by CEOs and corporate lawyers, as well as the state’s politicians and their lobbyist handlers. For multinational conglomerates, secretive shell companies, and mom & pop landlords alike, Delaware offers the best deal within U.S. territory for running your business cheaply, opaquely, and just “legally” enough. 

This frictionless pliability pays for Delaware’s government. In fiscal year 2023, for example, the various fees and taxes levied on nominally Delaware-domiciled corporations and business entities provided $2.9 billion in revenue – a fairly typical 46.4% of total state collections. Whether clued in or not, all Delawareans are complicit in these arrangements. Their tax burden is low, yet their roads remain well-paved – because the First State has decided to use its sovereign power to charge a light toll in return for  displacing the true costs of unchecked capitalism onto the rest of the nation, and the world. [3]

It’s a little gift, from our little state. 

~*~

Still, even in Delaware, the idea that a corporation can vote gives people pause. It sure as heck arrested my attention, and puzzled me. So as the furor of the 2023 Seaford bill died down, and with my new hometown’s recent bond vote in mind, I’ve spent the last month or so digging into the practice of corporate voting in Delaware. 

I’ve tried to keep my questions simple, obvious, and answerable:  

  • How widespread is corporate voting? Does it only happen in Delaware towns, or beyond? 
  • When did the practice take hold – and under what circumstances? Is corporate voting a relic of the state’s Jim Crow past, or a more recent disease of the body politic? 
  • And finally: why? Of all the ways to arbitrarily pervert the democratic process to favor the wealthy, why have Delawareans chosen this method? And how is the local “corporate franchise” connected to “The Franchise” – if it is at all? 

My research plan is similarly straightforward. I’ve completed the first step, a close examination of the current charters of all 57 municipalities incorporated in the state of Delaware.  

Some early findings:

  • 70% of DE municipalities (40 towns & cities) allow corporations and other “artificial entities” to vote in at least some circumstances, usually referenda on annexation and/or bonds; 
  • Three towns (Dagsboro, Fenwick Island, and Henlopen Acres) allow corporate voting in all circumstances
  • The local corporate franchise is premised on property ownership: the “entity” must own real property within municipal limits (or proposed municipal limits, for annexations); and generally companies exercise their voting rights through a representative with power of attorney;
  • Most towns that allow corporate voting limit it using a “one person / one entity” rule – but not all of them do;

There is also a pronounced geography to corporate voting rights in Delaware: it gets more common as you travel south. New Castle County only counts 3 municipalities that allow it; Kent Co. has 16; and Sussex Co., land of beaches, chicken farms, and confederate monuments, has a whopping 21.   

Since it quickly became apparent to me reading charters that property ownership is critical to local corporate voting rights, I also tallied how many Delaware towns enfranchise non-resident property owners, and found that:

  • 81% of DE municipalities (46 towns & cities) allow non-resident real property owners to vote in at least some circumstances (again, most commonly annexation and bond elections); 
  • However, fully 23% of them (13 towns & cities) allow non-residents to vote in all elections – and some even allow people who don’t reside within the municipality to govern, as members of the town council!

As with corporate voting, the enfranchisement of non-resident property owners is more common in Sussex (24 towns), than it is in Kent Co. (17 towns), with New Castle coming last in the number of municipalities that allow it (just 5 towns).

Now that I’ve gotten a sense of the current landscape of corporate and property-defined voting, my next task is to dig into the history of a handful of municipalities, using newspapers and legislative archives, to see if I can find out when – and perhaps why – this corporate citizenship first appeared. 

I have no doubt but that further unpleasant surprises await; but that’s history, in Delaware.

[1]: Charter of the City of Newark, Art. IV,  Sec. 407.2(5); 82. Del. Laws., Ch 107; 

For coverage, see: Karl Baker, “Newark, Delaware, Where Some People Can Vote More than Once,” News Journal, July 5, 2018, https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2018/06/29/newark-delaware-where-some-people-can-vote-more-than-once/735314002/; Karl Baker, “Only Person with ‘Heartbeat,’ Not Companies, Should Vote in Newark Elections, Council Says,” News Journal, March 12, 2019, https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2019/03/12/latest-backlash-against-llc-voting-newark-sends-heartbeat-voting-standards-dover/3127235002/ ; Josh Shannon, “Newark Asks State to Eliminate LLC Voting Rights from City Charter,” Newark Post, March 13, 2019, https://www.newarkpostonline.com/news/newark-asks-state-to-eliminate-llc-voting-rights-from-city-charter/article_afc76923-c835-5c68-a61e-79fed13d80ca.html

[2] HS 1 for HB 121: “An Act to Amend the Charter of the City of Seaford Relating to the City’s Ability to Authorize Artificial Entities, Limited Liability Corporations’ Partnerships and Trusts to Vote in Municipal Elections Held in Seaford,” (April 20, 2023), https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail?LegislationId=130205.

For coverage, see: Meredith Newman, “Why This Delaware Town Wants Corporations to Vote in Its Local Elections,” News Journal, May 11, 2023, https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/11/why-seaford-wants-corporations-to-vote-in-town-elections/70203037007/ ; Meredith Newman, “If Seaford Gets Its Way, These Corporations and LLCs Could Be Voting in the next Election,” News Journal, May 17, 2023, https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/05/17/delaware-llcs-could-vote-in-seaford-elections-if-charter-passes/70224526007/; Meredith Newman, “House Gop Kills $1.4 Billion Bond Bill After Effort to Allow LLCs in Seaford to Vote Fails,” News Journal, June 29, 2023, https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/29/delaware-house-republicans-bond-bill-not-passed/70368194007/ ; Meredith Newman, “House Democrats OK Seaford LLC Voting Charter, Leading GOP to Pass Spending Bills,” News Journal, June 30, 2023, https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/30/delaware-legislature-bond-bill-grant-in-aid-house-democrats-ok-llc-voting-bill/70372196007/

[3]“State General Fund, Revenue by Category (FY 2022-FY 2024),” Delaware Fiscal Notebook: 2023 Edition (Delaware Department of Finance), Section 2, p. 32, https://finance.delaware.gov/financial-reports/delaware-fiscal-notebook/.

In my calculation of the revenues generated by “The Franchise,” I include the corporate income tax, the franchise tax, the LLC/LP tax, business entity fees, “unclaimed property” (aka escheatment, aka Delaware skimming off of unused gift cards), and the bank franchise tax. 

For more on this system see: Hal Weitzman, What’s the Matter with Delaware?: How the First State Has Favored the Rich, Powerful, and Criminal―and How It Costs Us All (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).

And now for something completely different..., Archival Follies, Beginning the "Businessman", The Past is a Foreign...Something

Fear is the neuro-mudkiller

daelnorwood

Or, figuring out if you’ve hit a typo, a fnord, or some history 

Doing historical research – reading sources – you find things. That’s more or less the point, after all. But sometimes the things you find are … odd things. Confusing things, things that raise more questions than they answer. 

The historian’s standard approach to this situation is to to explore further, to keep reading until you know what’s going on. The only way out is through; ever upwards – excelsior and etc. One reason historians work this way is that confusion is a sign of context collapse – you can’t see the window until you find the frame. The other is that confusion is a sign of a gap. Reading until you figure out why Parisian apprentices thought murdering cats was so damned funny can isn’t just a key to understanding the (horrible) joke, but something bigger about the constellation of power and people in a critical moment in the past. And that’s more or less the point, after all. 

Sometimes, you fail to figure out your little mystery. Sometimes, your little detour doesn’t lead to enlightenment, at least not directly. Sometimes, the puzzle remains unsolved.

And sometimes, you run into a neuro-mudkiller, and it leaves you flat.

~~~

Last week, following up on a suggestion from a colleague, I was poking around in some early 20th-century US newspaper databases to see if people in the 1920s were reinterpreting Paul Revere like they had done George Washington – that is, reading him as a “businessman.”  While I didn’t find much to support that theory, I did run into an unexplained historical phenomenon.(1) 

It took the form of a short notice in the Omaha Daily Bee published Friday, May 25, 1923.  Sandwiched in the middle of page two was a two paragraph article describing a public barbecue to be hosted Chamber of Commerce the following day in Elmwood park, a major recreation area on the city’s western side. The C. of C. party, the piece promised, would feature a “ ‘family quarrel contest.’” Most events on the roster for this “battle of the sexes” are readily legible as games or contests of skill, like a “longest kicker” match or a “needle-threading contest.” Others took a bit more to understand: a “peanut scramble” is when you toss candy and peanuts in the air for children to catch and collect. 

But as I read through this piece, I ran across one event that defied my understanding: “a neuro-mudkiller control contest.”(2) And <BOOM> went the Parisian cat.

~~~

I tried a number of different methods to get a handle on this phrase. I searched for the term in other newspapers, and then, when that failed, other large full-text databases, like the Internet Archive and HathiTrust. I read other reports about the event, and accounts of previous’ years similarly-organized Chamber-sponsored “field days.” 

Then I tried that all again with variants of the phrase, its components, its near alikes: mudsiller, mudskipper, mudbiller, etc. I broke each term into component parts.

Alas, nothing has led me any closer to figuring out what a “neuro-mudkiller control contest” might be – or what, ssuming the intervention of some wandering fingers on the linotype machine, the Daily Bee reporter had intended to say, originally.

Having lost hours down this rabbit hole, the phrase for me now conjures Melville’s white whale, by way of Frank Herbert’s desert-addled space opera. (Or perhaps a “neuro-mudkiller control contest” is a fnord that slipped through spacetime for surrealist ends, or to waste my time.)

~~~

Friends, the neuro-mudkiller still eludes me. But by plinking away at search bars and reading across morning editions and evening issues, I learned some things about Omaha and its roaring twenties denizens. I learned that Omaha newspapers have a non-trivial amount of typos, for one. 

I also learned the Omaha Chamber of Commerce was an active, and seemingly successful, civic association. In May of 1923 alone, the body sponsored a “trade booster tour” to Wyoming, built and hosted a new “rest room” for business women and professional at its downtown headquarters, and weighed in on a dozen different matters of public import, from traffic regulations to fraternal organizations’ convention bookings.

I further learned that the Chamber of Commerce in Omaha was operating, organizationally, as a primus inter pares. Its leading members led the city’s other leading civic, social, and charitable institutions; and those organizations participated in Chamber events, like the party in Elmwood park. Internally, the Chamber was structured with standing committees of volunteers and a guiding, paid manager (a “commissioner and secretary”) – a successful implementation of the Cleveland “modern chamber” model that famed commercial secretary Ryerson Ritchie developed and then theorized, to national acclaim. (3)

I learned that there was a local laundry called “Pantorium” (they did more than just wash pants). (4)

And I learned that the party at Elmwood park was a “Great Success,” at least in the eyes of local reporters. It fed “3,5000 Mouths” with “1,500 pounds of Steer and Lamb” prepared under the expert eye of “Doc Fry,” a local “master of the art of barbecue,” and served alongside with truckloads of bread, pickles, mustard, onions, radishes and – distressingly, given the temperature and the hour – coffee. Attendees were “knocked…dead” with delight by an amateur “minstrel show” and a fake horse race, sponsored by the Continental and the Lions clubs, respectively. With Boy Scouts and visiting nurses on hand to organize and aid participants, the barbecue’s roster athletic events went off without a hitch; winners got a prize donated by a local business, and their names – and addresses – in the paper. (Congratulations, Doris Frederick of 5020 California street, for winning the “longest-winded” (balloon blowing) contest). And as the afternoon turned to evening, a twenty-piece band started playing and “those who cared to tripped and stumbled the light fantastic until it was time to go home.”(5)

Finally, I learned that while the “neuro-mudkiller control contest” was happening – or not, if it wasn’t actually real – another conspiracy was being busted across town, when the Omaha “police morals squad” raided the house of a man named Nick Carmo, and seized his sugar, corn, mash and still.(6)

Violent and unpleasant, that history at least made some sense.

Image Source:”Elmwood Park, Omaha, Nebraska.” Card. Pub. by General Distributors Company, Omaha, Nebraska. “Tichnor Quality Views,” Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Made Only by Tichnor Bros., Inc., Boston, Mass., [ca. 1930–1945]. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/xs55mk23n (accessed June 27, 2024).

(1) David Hackett Fischer, in his biography of Paul Revere, includes an appendix in which he tracks the popular and academic historical “image” of Paul Revere through the centuries. He dates the reconceptualization of Revere as a “Capitalist Democrat” (a propagandist for “free enterprise”) to the early Cold War – a more than a generation later than when Washington was reconfigured. David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 339.

(2) “Men Will Thread Needles: ‘He-Man’ Contests for Women,” Omaha Daily Bee, Friday, May 25, 1923, p. 2, https://www.newspapers.com/article/omaha-daily-bee-men-will-thread-needles/150182706/

(3) “Firms Sign for 1923 Trade Booster Tour,” Omaha World-Herald, Sat. April 1923, p.8; “Open Women’s Lounge C. of C., With Reception,” Omaha World-Herald, Fri, May 25, p.1; “Meetings,” The Omaha Daily News, Mon., June 4, 1923, p.11

(4) “Slow Sales,” Omaha Chamber of Commerce Journal, vol. 9, no. 15 (November 27, 1920): 3.

(5) “Entertain 4,000 at Big Barbecue,” Omaha Daily News, Sat, May 26, 1923, p.1;  “Crowd of 3,500 at Field Day Barbecue: Annual Stunt of Chamber of Commerce Proves Great Success: Appetites Enormous,” Omaha World Herald, Sunday, May 27, 1923, p. 2; “Barbecue Guests Eat 1,500 Pounds of Steer and Lamb,” Omaha Daily News, Sunday, May 27, 1923, p.2C; “Nature and Human Beings Conspire Against Gloom at C. of C. Barbecue: Result is that 3,500 Mouths Are Fed under Doc Fry’s Expert Tutelage–Field Carnival Brings Out Freak Contests,” Omaha Daily Bee, Mon. May 28, 1923, p.2

(5) “Sugar, Corn, Still Are Seized in Raid,” Omaha World Herald, Sunday, May 27, 1923, p.2. 

Uncategorized

Christmas, Slavery, & Freedom in Medford

daelnorwood

[It’s been too long since I had a post, so here’s something with a bit of Christmas theme, cobbled together from my instagram and the closing lecture of my US survey course this year – DN]

A few years ago, visiting family for Christmas, I stretched my legs for a walk in Medford, MA. Over the course of a short hour, I encountered three sites, all with historic markers, that together neatly illustrate the ways New England is defined by slavery – and how New Englanders have defined Christmas for the rest of the United States.

The first stop was Royall House, at the corner of George and Main Streets. An 18th-century estate built by a Massachusetts slave trader, rum distiller, and plantation owner, aka the unholy trinity of colonial New England business synergy. The building has long been known as a great example of local Georgian architecture – and thanks to a more recent interpretation, also of the central importance of enslavement and slave ownership to wealth among the colonial Massachusetts elite, too.

Next: Simpsons Tavern, on High Street.

It claims to be the site of the composition of “One Horse Open Sleigh,” in 1850 – better known today as “Jingle Bells.” It dominates holiday music now, but in the 1850s it was generic piece, one of dozens of contemporary “sleighing songs” about taking sexy, fast rides with single, fun girls. James Lord Pierpont published it in 1857; after failing as a whaler, gold miner, and photographer, he found success in writing it and similar pieces for minstrelsy singers, who performed his compositions in blackface. The uncle of J.P. Morgan (yes, that J.P. Morgan) Pierpont later moved to Georgia to teach piano, joined the Confederate Army, and wrote shitty ditty’s for rebel traitors before dying in Florida.

And finally, one last house: 114 South Street. Just across the Mystic river from Simpsons Tavern, it was the home of Paul Curtis, Lydia Maria Child’s grandfather. Curtis was a shipbuilder, famous for clipper ships designed to make quick voyages in the tea and opium trade.

His granddaughter Lydia was much more important, and famous.  An activist, editor, author, and publisher, she was a powerhouse in reform movements to promote women’s rights, arrest the U.S. government’s mistreatment of Native Americans, and end slavery. (Among other things, she was the editor of The Freedmen’s Book, a collection of works by and about freed people, which includes the best epistolary work in the English language, Jourdon Anderson’s letter to his former enslaver).

Child made her childhood journey to 114 South Street the subject of a poem, “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day” – a composition better known now from its first line: “Over the river and through the woods, to grandfather’s house we go.” Much like Pierpont’s cheap song, Child’s short poem helped fix New England winter as the image for the Christmas season (and winter, generally) in American culture. Hallmark movies would look a lot different without the two of them (and Currier & Ives).

Elite enslaver, racist failson, and effective abolitionist. You can see the spaces of all their lives within the circuit of short winter walk.

Merry Christmas, Medfahd. Don’t forget your past.

Archival Follies, Beginning the "Businessman", Our Glorious National Heritage

Welcome to the Business Parade

daelnorwood

Or, A Grand and Imposing Branding Opportunity 

#BizManBook Research Note #5

“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.