Tag: Businessman

In an AI generated image (Gemini), a mainframe computer opens it's mouth and expels wires and cables, with sound waves moving out of its mouth. White background, black lines, like an editorial newspaper cartoon. It's not subtle.
Corporate Voters Project, Delaware

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud, Now

daelnorwood

Or, The Oligarchy’s Apologia

Corporate Voters Project – Research Note #8

In an AI generated image (Gemini), a mainframe computer opens it's mouth and expels wires and cables, with sound waves moving out of its mouth. White background, black lines, like an editorial newspaper cartoon. It's not subtle.

It’s been a busy few months for corporate voting in Delaware. As late spring turned to summer heat, the practice emerged as a politically salient issue, attracting local, state, and national attention. In both the courtroom and Legislative Hall, Delawareans have been articulating their positions on it – doing so publicly for perhaps for the first time in the state’s history. 

In the process, supporters of corporate voting have outlined a clear theory of local oligarchy. In this vision, the ownership of taxable real estate justifies rights to formal electoral power – and perhaps especially so if the property owner in question is a non-human business entity who cannot otherwise act locally (while thinking globally). 

In a moment when rights claims based on residence and birthright are under sustained attack by fascists and their allies, Delaware’s defenders of corporate voting have reinvigorated an old idea for a new era. Like early modern republicans, they envision a world in which ownership of taxable property produces and justifies citizenship – at least at the level of government closest to the ground. Unlike their predecessors, though, Delaware’s apologists for corporate voting imagine artificial entities, the law’s golems, as equally worthy bearers of a municipality’s political rights as any flesh and blood burgher might be. Jus soli might be hanging on by a single SCOTUS vote – the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment be damned – but for some in the First State, legitimate voting power springs from owning the soil, for human and entity alike.

For their part, opponents of corporate voting have not questioned the importance of property to power, but only averred that human beings, alone and individually, should access the ballot. They’ve avoided the question of whether wealth itself is sufficient justification for suffrage, and dodged bigger problem of non-resident (human) property-owner voting, which is widespread and popular in Delaware, and not entirely unheard of beyond the state. There are limits to Delaware’s institutional advocates for human-centered democracy.

This debate marks a new phase in Delaware’s self-understanding about the foundations of its local political economies, one in which the parties engaged in the contest, and the values at stake, are finally named. Too, with this controversy, the connections between the capillary oligarchy of local government and the better-known corporate domination of the state’s politics have emerged from obscurity – or perhaps they’ve been forged for the first time. 

It’s an exciting time to be doing frustratingly difficult historical research!

~ ~ ~

A lawsuit kicked off Delaware’s unprecedentedly public debate over corporate voting. In December 2025, the ACLU of Delaware sued the Town of Fenwick Island over the municipality’s practice of awarding votes to the “corporations, partnerships, trusts, and limited liability companies” that owned property there. The ACLU-DE argued that by allowing 214 non-human artificial entities to registered to vote – with no limit on more – the town “risks the dilution of votes cast by natural persons” and therefore was in violation of the Delaware Constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal” elections.

The ACLU-DE also tied corporate voting to the state’s better-known corporate franchise, and its status as the “Corporate Capital.” In a press release, the plaintiff’s attorney, Andrew Bernstein, noted that “[t]here are over 2 million artificial business entities incorporated in Delaware and only about 1 million people,” and in those circumstances “the people of Delaware risk having their voices drowned out when towns like Fenwick Island allow artificial entities to vote.”

In response to the suit, Fenwick Island Mayor Natalie Magdeburger offered a robust defense at a Town Council meeting. She insisted, pace the ACLU-DE’s insinuations of corporate influence, that “a great number of the artificial entities that vote in Fenwick Island elections are family trusts,” not corporations per se. But regardless of the type of artificial entity, she said the Town would defend their rights to political representation. “We think it’s important that everyone in town who pays taxes, who is subject to our ordinances whether they’re a business owner or not, have a right to a vote.” An entity’s compulsory monetary contributions to the local fisc, made on the basis of assessed real estate, was, in her view, the entry ticket to town government. 

On May 26, 2026, Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig A. Karsnitz sided with Fenwick’s officials, and dismissed the ACLU-DE’s complaint. In his opinion, Karsnitz developed what appears to be a wholly new legal interpretation to justify corporate voting, becoming the first to “clearly articulate the ideological connection between Delaware’s ‘corporate franchise’ and its enfranchised corporations.“

Perhaps fitting the unusual circumstances, Judge Karsnitz’s opinion was a curious one. After some throat-clearing featuring a wandering quotation from an obscure Luso-Luxembourger teacher of English, Judge Karsnitz explained his dismissal did not rest on any detailed scrutiny of newly-gathered facts.[1] Reasoning that because the Delaware General Assembly’s laws are presumed constitutional,  challenges to Fenwick’s charter must meet a high burden to merit review – a burden he argued the ACLU-DE failed to meet, not least because the state did not just extend voting rights to corporations once, but several times, in different municipalities.[2] Then, going well beyond election law and constitutional provisions, Karsnitz argued that because the State of Delaware’s business law explicitly recognizes trusts, partnerships, LLCs, and corporations as “persons” in limited circumstances, their votes cannot be considered as diluting other persons’ votes.[3]  He concluded by stating that while he “appreciate[s] that Plaintiff may disagree with Delaware’s policy of authorizing” corporate voting, the vision of “faceless large corporations or even HAL, controlling a small town” are “the stuff of science fiction” – and not a suitably adjudicable problem.[4] 

SIDEBAR: A few days after Judge Karsnitz invoked the prospect of an autonomous computer taking control of a polity to dismiss it, the Delaware AI Commission met to announce their draft legislation that would suspend regulations to allow the creation of Artificial Intelligence Companies. These “AICs,” members of the commission explained, would have legal agency to do “anything that a company can do” without their owners being held liable.

Including, presumably, vote as property-owners in Fenwick Island.

(Judges, at all levels, seem unwilling to contemplate just how eager Delaware is to create and implement the Torment Nexus, provided there are fees to collect.)

The ACLU-DE has appealed the dismissal. In their press release following the decision, they noted that the judge’s ruling has “garned national attention” – one might also say outrage and bewilderment – and that many people had expressed concern about the precedent it would set. Responding to the ruling, Fenwick Island Mayor Natalie Magdeburger reiterated the Town’s position, and expanded her emphasis on the righteousness of the cause, stating that “[w]e firmly believe our voting system is just, fair and gives everyone a voice.” Every property owner paying taxes “should have a say in who represents them on our Town Council,” she explained. In the political arithmetic of corporate voting, property taxation to any amount is a moral liability that can only be balanced by representation, an asset that takes the form of one vote per entity.

~ ~ ~

While this courtroom drama was playing out, the Delaware General Assembly was considering – and then passing – HB 430, legislation that would amend the state constitution to restrict voting in all Delaware elections to “natural persons,” and thereby end corporate voting. (Constitutional amendments in Delaware are enacted if they pass both houses of the legislature with a two thirds majority, in two successive sessions. The earliest this bill could become law is when the legislature meets next spring 2027).

According to its sponsor, House Majority Leader Rep. Kerri Evelyn Harris (D-Dover), the bill is not about “how municipalities govern themselves” but rather “who gets to decide who gets to choose their governments in the first place.” For Harris and the other cosponsors of the bill (all Democrats), “voting is a right that belongs to human beings,” not corporations. Anticipating pushback from local officials, Harris further noted that the state had undisputed power to issue these restrictions. The General Assembly, she informed a House committee, has never treated municipalities as “independent sovereigns”; their powers are defined by the charters that the state grants them. (Historically, state and federal governments share sovereign powers in the US; localities have no constitutional claims to “home rule.”)

HB 430 passed the Delaware House of Representatives on June 16, 2026 with the required two-thirds majority. The vote was bipartisan, but just: only one GOP representative voted for it. Though the Republican caucus opposed it, only one member spoke against the bill. Rep. Bryan Shupe (R-Milford) sought to put on the record that he and other “small business owners” who used LLCs were responsible, as human beings, for paying taxes, and that is why some municipalities have allowed – and still others seek to allow – “small business owners” to vote in municipal elections. For Shupe, voting rights in exchange for payments was simply a fair transaction, hallowed by long use. In response, Rep. Harris noted that tradition was no defense: “just because something is a longstanding practice does not mean that it should continue.”[5]

In these and later comments, Rep. Shupe attempted to draw a distinction between large corporations and mom-and-pop LLCs, while still leaving unexplained the justification for property earning a vote. “We don’t necessarily want the Fortune 500 having a say in elections here,” he told the Wilmington News Journal, “but homegrown businesses should.” (Why that should be the case, he left unstated).

Similarly, the mayor of Fenwick Island declared the HB 430 vote “a shame” and a “glaring example of the erosion of home rule.” “The ACLU has come in and painted Fenwick Island as a town that has been taken over by corporate entities,” Mayor Magdeburger told Coastal Point, but most of the artificial entities registered to vote in Fenwick were trusts, LLCs, or limited partnerships. While maintaining that critics concerns that “businesses are going to take over and dilute the vote” were unfounded, the mayor also complained that if made law, HB 430 would disenfranchise around 200 of the Town’s 900 registered voters (i.e. ~22% of the electorate).  

On the last day of the legislative session, HB 430 passed the Senate on a strict party-line vote, with all Democrats voting in favor and all Republicans against, completing the first “leg” of the constitutional amendment process. Reportedly, Sen. Gerald Hocker, GOP minority leader – and the legislative sponsor of Fenwick’s 2008 charter that established the present regime – “vocally opposed” the bill.

~ ~ ~

Corporate voting in Delaware is not the creation of world-dominanting oligarchs, nor is it a tool they use. Amazon.com, Inc. is not going to spoil the race for town council in Middletown by voting its warehouse holdings; JPMorgan Chase & Co. is unlikely to cast the deciding ballot for a beach-town mayor on the basis of repossessed mortgages. Rather, corporate voting in Delaware is a vehicle for granting those lesser grandees who own property – specifically, taxable real estate – extra political power because of their local, landed wealth. 

As Rep. Shupe’s comments and Mayor Magdeburger’s statements make clear, for defenders of corporate voting in Delaware, there are distinctions to be drawn among artificial entities, but no disagreement over whether property creates citizenship rights for fictional people. In the courtroom, in the legislature, and in the public square, apologists for corporate voting imply that corporations are somehow different than other kinds of business entities – they are distant, faceless, perhaps malevolent – in contrast to LLCs, trusts, and limited partnerships. 

This difference has little relationship to reality. While legally these entities are distinct in their governance and their means of assigning tax responsibilities, those structural differences do not determine their proximity to a human community or their degree of similarity to “natural persons.” An LLC can be a huge, opaque, and far-away abstraction, and a corporation can be a one-person operation familiar and friendly to all on Main Street. Neither of them are human beings.

It’s important to note here that Delaware’s critics of corporate voting have not attacked the practice of granting civil and political rights to individual human beings purely on the basis of their personal property ownership. The objection of HB 430’s sponsors and the ACLU-DE is to the type of person – artificial or natural – submitting a ballot, not the basis upon which they do so. 

That’s notable because corporate voting is just one way for property-owning nonresidents to exercise control over places where they do not live. This may be part of the reason why it is so common in Sussex County, an area with valuable beach front property – owned, in many cases, by absentees, members of the “family trusts” that Fenwick’s mayor has been fond of invoking (with emphasis on “family”).  

In granting property owners more power than mere mortal persons, corporate voting echoes anti-democratic mechanisms from earlier eras of American history. Like the U.S. Constitution’s 3/5ths clause (granting enslavers more representation on the basis of their human property) or Jim Crow Delaware’s poll taxes (which limited the vote to taxpayers, stealing suffrage from the poor), corporate voting is yet one more way those with more money get a louder voice in public affairs. 

Whether artificial entities get to keep that register for their influence is an open question now in a way it was not before, a salutary development for all fans of democracy. Still, that landed wealth remains unquestioned as a source of citizenship, even amid this change – and perhaps may emerge stronger as a unifying principle across parties and activist groups – should raise some red flags. 

—–

[1] This may be a confession of my own ignorance; until reading Judge Karsnitz’s order, I had never encountered “Diogo Joao Baptista Gomes of Brachtenbach,” someone who appears to have responded to a reader poll sponsored by Philosophy Now magazine. While those more learnèd in the law may know his work well, it appears there is at least one other observer puzzled by the Superior Court judge’s compliment. “What Is a Person?,”Philosophy Now, April/May 2022.

[2] Worthy magistrate Karsnitz only mentions the 2008 Fenwick charter in his decision. Am. Civ. Lib. Union of Del. v. Town of Fenwick Island, Del. Super., C.A. No. S25C-12-003, Karsnitz, R.J. (May 26, 2026)(ORDER), p.6; see pp. 8-12 for wider consideration on charters. 

Wise and worldly readers will know that corporate voting came to Fenwick in a limited way through its 1965 charter revision – and then was expanded in practice, first under unpublished bylaws and only later legislatively blessed by formal charter amendments.  

[3] Am. Civ. Lib. Union of Del. v. Town of Fenwick Island, Del. Super., C.A. No. S25C-12-003, Karsnitz, R.J. (May 26, 2026)(ORDER), pp. 13-17.

[4] If you’re wondering if this sober jurist used the opportunity of his own dated reference to insert a superfluous citation to a famous film, why yes, yes he did. Am. Civ. Lib. Union of Del. v. Town of Fenwick Island, Del. Super., C.A. No. S25C-12-003, Karsnitz, R.J. (May 26, 2026)(ORDER), p. 19

[5] Delaware House of Representatives, 153rd General Assembly, Legislative Session 2, 36th Legislative Day, June 16, 2026, 7:29pm-7:39pm.

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. 

Archival Follies, Beginning the "Businessman", History and Historians

Practically “Actual” Business

daelnorwood

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 & Stratton branch 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).

[5] “The Case Method Classroom,” From Inquiry to Action: Harvard Business School & the Case Method, Online Exhibit, HBS Baker Library, accessed December 27, 2022, https://www.library.hbs.edu/case-method/exhibition/the-case-method-classroom 

[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.

Beginning the "Businessman", Our Glorious National Heritage

Many Historians, One Myth

daelnorwood

Or, How Many Beards (er, Ritters) Does It Take to Make George Washington a Businessman?

#BizManBook Research Note #3

A crowd of bearded white men, wearing black hats and holding american flags. (AI art created via DALL-E)

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,” in Honor 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…

[2] Miriam Beard, A History of the Business Man (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938).

Beginning the "Businessman", Our Glorious National Heritage

George Washington, Businessman?

daelnorwood

Or, Why did an 18th-century planter become a load-bearing symbol for the New Deal?

#BizManBook Research Note #2

Photorealistic portrait of George Washington, dressed in a modern business suit and standing in front of an American flag. Citation: redditKingBaboon97, “I Created a Photorealistic Image of George Washington If He Lived in the Present Day.,” Reddit Post, R/Interestingasfuck, May 2, 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/n39zq5/i_created_a_photorealistic_image_of_george/.
redditKingBaboon97, “I Created a Photorealistic Image of George Washington If He Lived in the Present Day.,” Reddit Post, R/Interestingasfuck, May 2, 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/n39zq5/i_created_a_photorealistic_image_of_george/.

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]

The first page of Sol Bloom's essay, "Washington the Business Man." It contains text an an image of Gilbert Sullivan's portrait of George Washington: he is standing, hand on a table, in a black coat.

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. 

I’ll let you know how it goes…

[1] Sol Bloom, “Washington the Business Man,” in Honor to George Washington and Reading about George Washington, ed. Albert Bushnell Hart (Washington, D.C.: United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission, 1932), 131

[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.

[3] Sol Bloom, “Preface,” Activities of the Commission and Complete-Final Report of the United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission(Washington, D.C.: United States George Washington Bicentennial Commission, 1932), xii.

[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.