This study is an exploration, on a limited scale, of the part played by businessmen in early railroad construction and operation. The business history of railroading is significant not only for that industry but also for the leadership that the railroads maintained among the large business units in the nineteenth century and the consequent influence on organization, management methods, and policies of big business. In this paper we are concerned only with a sample, the beginnings in the decades of the 'thirties and 'forties, in order (1) to see wherein our knowledge of early railroad history needs enlarging and (2) to demonstrate the type of information that can be gleaned from the manuscript minutes, reports, and correspondence of early railroads.

The W. L. Douglas Shoe Company, founded in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1876, achieved an outstanding success as the first shoemanufacturing company to establish its own chain of retail stores. After World War I, however, the company entered a long and dreary decline which resulted finally in its removal to another state and its eventual sale to another company. This recent merger, with Arthur Million, Inc., a subsidiary of the General Shoe Corporation, marks the end of W. L. Douglas as an independent company.

Business history reveals that business has been a major factor in the development of our present civilization. Business is the “core” of modern society. Consequently, business philosophy (an explanation of the phenomena of business) should logically be considered of extremecimportance in the realm of ideas and thoughts which shape and guide our civilization.

It is not often—perhaps fortunately—that Baker Library receives a collection totaling four tons. That was the approximate weight of material brought by moving van from Augusta, Maine, this past May. The four tons comprised the paper remains—apparently untouched since the early nineteen-hundreds—of the E. C. Allen mail-order and publishing house, which flourished in Augusta during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Of the four tons, approximately one and a half are represented by bound and unbound files of Home and Fireside, Sunshine, Golden Moments, and the dozen other farm and home magazines published by Allen and his associates. Another ton consists of the oleographs, or colored reproductions of oil paintings, distributed as premiums or as mail-order offerings. The remaining ton and a half is the measure of the business records, bound and unbound, with which we are here chiefly concerned. It is expected that the full story of the enterprise will be told later, possibly by someone working for a Ph.D. degree. But before describing the collection itself, and some of the incidents met in its arrangement, a brief account of E. C. Allen's activities will be helpful.

Throughout American history the frontier was plagued by a shortage of capital and credit. The small pioneer farmer who migrated westward to take up cheap or free land needed capital or credit to build his homestead, secure tools and supplies, and provide for the immediate needs of himself and his family until the farm became self-sustaining. Likewise, men who wished to engage in commercial and industrial enterprises on the frontier had to have adequate capital or credit facilities to establish their businesses and to continue operations until the regular marketing of their products made the project self-supporting. The characteristic frontiersman was optimistic about the future and desired to enlarge his capital investment by expanding his landholding or his business in the expectation that future prosperity would create a greater demand for his produce—he believed that the larger the scale of his operations the greater the profits he would reap. His investments and operations, therefore, tended to outrun his own capital, and he characteristically turned to others for help. Since all elements in a frontier society were handicapped by the insufficiency of capital, and its handmaiden, credit, only limited aid could be expected from the frontier community. Assistance from the more stabilized eastern regions was necessary if the pioneer effort was to expand and prosper.

The history of the Sante Fe Trail has been written and rewritten, replete with colorful episodes of wars and skirmishes, of Indian massacres and Spanish resistance, and of privations of hunger, thirst, and exposure. Regarded from the long-time point of view, these efforts have been far from satisfying. The more basic story of the rooting of capital and the building of towns, for which all these hazards appeared inviting and worth bearing, has received little attention.

Business history as a differentiated subject is of comparatively recent origin in the American academic scene. It has naturally been most closely associated with collegiate schools of business, and particularly with those offering graduate or semi-graduate programs of instruction. It now seems appropriate to inquire what rôle it plays in such programs, what should be its content, how it should be presented, and what relationship it has to the closely associated fields of economic history, economics, business administration, and public administration

The over-all challenge to research in business history is to provide facts and generalizations concerning the history of business which may lead to a better understanding of business itself and of its rôle in society. This is an urgent challenge in our age of revolution, a revolution in which the generally expressed objective is a better and more secure living, the political tool being largely economic class conflict, and the target, private capitalism.

The major challenge to historians today is the same whether one's research lies in business history or general history. It is to focus the rapidly growing social knowledge of the mid-twentieth century upon historical materials and to do this mainly by asking new questions of the records, questions that will make history an analytic as well as a descriptive discipline.

The historian of business is peculiarly well placed to meet this challenge. He works with the human element in an area that heretofore has been the concern of the oldest, most complex, and least humanistic social theory, economics. That is, by the nature of his materials the historian of business is forced to seek a reconciliation between actual human behavior and the implications of rigorous economic analysis. A similar challenge is offered in harnessing each of the other social sciences to the business historian's task. In so far as he succeeds in remolding these analytical disciplines to fit reality in the sphere of business, he solves the major problems of all historians and all social scientists.

Both Disraeli and Walter Leaf are credited with having said that there are three things that drive men to madness: love, ambition, and the study of currency problems. Regardless of the origin of the quotation, both men were happily innocent of the vast potentialities inherent in teaching business history. For teaching business history is a chain of problems. And problems and challenges are synonymous. To cite a few: What shall be the purpose of teaching business history? Shall the subject be presented by the case method or in a less specific and more abstract way? Having answered these problems more or less to his own satisfaction, the instructor is then confronted with the ubiquitous problem of defining the entrepreneur. And he is constantly plagued by the incidental problems of overcoming the amorphous nature of the subject, not to speak of the monumental tasks of correcting the preconceived and fallacious notions of the student and overcoming the vast mass of misleading and misinformed interpretations that parade under the name business history. But these are the inevitable problems in the teaching of business history.

Business history, as distinct from economic history, is now being taught on the freshman, senior, and graduate levels in a number of colleges and universities. I am to speak only on the problems and challenges of teaching business history on the freshman level, but in this connection I shall mention the desirability of courses for senior and graduate students.

A familiar figure on the roads of the Middle West during the second half of the last century was the lightning-rod salesman with his wagon. In an area frequently visited by thunder storms, there was a ready market for the latest adaptation of Franklin's protective device. Even in frontier towns, new buildings were not long unequipped with rods, their points tipped with platinum and perhaps ornamented with glass balls. The preservation of two record books, a ledger, and a few letters enables us to tell the story (or at least part of it) of the firm largely responsible for the widespread acceptance of this method of protection against lightning. Cole Brothers, of Mount Pleasant in southeastern Iowa, was a family company, but the fact that its owners were four brothers does not mean that the minutes of their meetings are any less frank or complete. One must only regret that the surviving volumes start after the business had been under way for some time and stop many years before the firm disbanded. However, the story of the intervening years in the life of the company reveals not only steady growth, despite temporary setbacks, but also the interplay of personalities. An enterprise responsible for a product in common use by our ancestors (one which shows signs of returning popularity) is for a moment illumined.