This account of the activities of an energetic, highly diversified mercantile capitalist illustrates in some detail the world-wide flow of commodities and capital in the early nineteenth century. Aggressive merchandising and sophisticated administration were involved, and one by-product was a rich reservoir of investment capital for developing American industries.

The story of George Gunton is that of an astonishingly accurate economic prophet whose viewpoints have found wide acceptance a half-century after they were enunciated. Gunton is shown in this article not as a paid defender of big business but as an apostle of compromise, standing in the No Man's Land of a vast battleground. With equal fervor Gunton declared, “It is our industries that make us great,” but that laborers' wages were “as elastic as human wants … capable of as much expansion as the social character of man.” His numerous commentaries are a lucid clue to the relative importance of contemporary issues, and those commentaries are enhanced by Gunton's instinctive sense of history. Out of the confusion of contradictory evidence recorded at the Chicago Conference on Trusts, before the Industrial Commission, and elsewhere on the business and political stage Gunton framed his thesis of the essential interdependence of big business and organized labor. His convictions were, in total, unique, and his judgment and reconciliation of conflicting viewpoints have meaning and utility today.

Business history, if it is to comprehend the men and movements with which it deals, must of necessity invade other academic fields. This article is an attempt to trace the social and economic influences which fashioned the ultimate business activities of German-Jewish investment bankers in the late nineteenth century. Second only to the group of houses of Yankee origin, the group led by Kuhn, Loeb & Co. provides us with an outstanding example of a business elite in operation. Significant from the point of view of business history is the fact that in origins, early activities, and outlook, these family firms displayed remarkable similarities. Once established in New York they became even more tightly knit through marriage and social life. Only when all these factors have been taken into account can we claim to understand the unique role which these businesses played in the development of the American capital market.

The glamor of the American whale fishery has tended to obscure its economic outlines and significance. For certain areas one of the first successful efforts at natural resources exploitation, the fisheries developed centers of highly specialized technical and administrative skills. Capital amassed in whaling was a far from inconsequential economic force when it was shifted into other channels of investment. The shifting process itself highlights the circumstances surrounding a dying industry and provides an example of variant national investment patterns.

Conventional for the time in his basic economic thinking, Charles Elliott Perkins was nevertheless enough of an intellectual to discern flaws in the philosophies of natural law and free competition. Creative, literate, retiring, dedicated to enlightenment but realistic about the limitations of public education, Perkins was anything but the conventional business figure of his generation. The personal background here set forth brings into sharp focus the hitherto hazy image of one of America's great railroad leaders.

The main lines of the Eastern Rail-road served a rich coastal trade, yet even in an age of great commercial expansion this historic railroad enterprise courted continual disaster. The crisis of 1855 (Spring, 1957, Business History Review) had been compounded out of unprofitable branch connections, poor management, and a major defalcation. Reorganization promised a better future, but history repeated. Management generally chose to cover up, rather than correct, the operational and financial weaknesses that existed. New mistakes were made — and concealed. Ineffective management controls left power concentrated in a few careless hands. The inevitable final crisis in the mid-seventies paved the way for absorption of Eastern by the Boston & Maine — a major step in the building of that system. Through this narrative of repetitious error runs the thread of railroading progress — cut-and-try improvements in management techniques, in competitive strategy, and in operating methodology.

The vital task of measuring jobs in order to establish equitable incentive wage rates is usually accomplished by a combination of techniques involving both time and motion studies. Yet for many years a highly personal competition between leading exponents of each type of study prevented a union of techniques from taking place. In the early days of the scientific management movement, Frank Gilbreth was a fierce admirer of Frederick W. Taylor, but Taylor and his disciples rejected Gilbreth, whose micromotion techniques came into competition with the Taylorites' stop watches. Thereby scientific management was split into two antagonistic camps and the course of the movement decisively influenced.

Even in laissez-faire days there was a “corporate conscience,” well defined and with active, if limited, manifestations. Over the course of years not only criticism but changing social forces and modifications of the economic system itself exerted a broadening influence on the attitude of American business toward its public responsibilities.

Teapot Dome has long stood in the public mind as a conspicuous symbol not only of political corruption but of degenerate business morality as well. An examination of the charges against Albert B. Fall, therefore, though necessarily concerned with political and personal rather than business data, touches the interest of students of business history, whose natural concern lies in identifying the factual basis for incidents which have become part of the folklore of American business.

The early development of Rochester as a flour-milling center demonstrates several themes. Here, as in countless other places, the resiliency of the petty capitalist in the face of natural disasters and violent commodity price swings stands clear. But the early millers, flexible and energetic in entrepreneurial activity, were also, like their product, perishable. The broader and more important pattern is that of the persistence of an industry favored by basic geographic and market circumstances. Individual milk succumbed in rapid sequence, but rapidly they were replaced. Surviving the handicap of limited capital, the milling industry burst its heal bonds and exploited the regional potentialities of water access to Canada. Transition to what then amounted to a national market came in 1823, when the Erie Canal linked Rochester with the Hudson. Thus a new epoch was forecast, when a broadened market would not only stimulate local growth but shape it through complex economic influences hitherto little felt by the millers on the Genesee.

The practice of giving advice to employees is probably as old as the employer-employee relationship itself, but personnel counseling has become institutionalized over the past half-century and provides an example of the emergence of a specialized staff function.

A study of the career of Ignaz Jastrow, guiding spirit of the Berlin Handelshochschule, invites attention to the broader subject of academic education for business. There was a close relationship between the educational philosophy embodied in the founding of the Berlin school in 1906 and in that of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1908. This relationship was not accidental, and establishment of these two institutions constituted a decisive point in a long history, beginning in the eighteenth century. Over the years, the basic difficulty had been that of endeavoring to raise professional training for business above the secondary school level. In those instances during the nineteenth century where university-level training was attempted, the result was overemphasis on the general background of business. In 1900, despite the many promising experiments in European countries and America, a sound foundation for high-level business training was still lacking. Jastrow's Handelshochschule was the first institution that focused on the real world of business and at the same time was truly academic in nature. This same combination was also effected at Harvard, where the basic objectives were implemented by reformed teaching techniques and by a continuing program of research upon business subjects.

National divergencies in economic development produce variant national patterns of business organization. But the reverse is also true. In France, the legal structuring of business has been a causative factor of some importance, imparting a distinctive character to the timing and nature of French economic growth. At the same time, however, the history of organizational evolution in France has a certain universality. Here, as elsewhere, such evolution essentially has taken the form of a series of compromises between the need for greater corporate flexibility and the fear of abuse. From 1673, when the unlimited liability of partners was affirmed, the pressures of economic expansion produced a succession of devices aimed at facilitating the flow of investment funds into commerce and industry. When, however, that point was finally reached where limited investor liability, freely negotiable shares, and recognition of a corporate autonomy had been achieved, fear of fraudulent practice became a dominant factor. Legislative steps to protect the investing public introduced rigidities into French business at the very time when internal growth and international competition for markets called for a highly adaptable business system.

Compared with the great inter-regional networks, the Eastern Railroad did not loom large. Its creation, however, is an integral part of New England history and well worthy of inclusion in any first chapter of American railroading history. The development pattern is one of piece-meal extension from several population centers, the linking of the segments, and the proliferation of branch lines. External difficulties took the shape of competition from stage and boat lines, and the rivalry of the fledgling Boston & Maine. Internally, the chief problems revolved around establishment of an effective management organization and the maintenance of adequate financial controls. Threading a populous route from Boston to Portland, Eastern's future seemed bright. Yet, in a faint foreshadowing of events of a far later day, main-line profits were swallowed up by operation of branch connections built or acquired with more enthusiasm than foresight and, once acquired, not easily disowned.

In the 1890–1907 period Populist-Progressive protests, public ignorance of the economic functions involved, and obvious abuses in the performance of those functions combined to produce a major peak of adverse opinion. Public protest shaped the course of stock exchange history through subsequent decades and yielded operator prototypes that have become classic Americana.

The following article served to introduce the first issue of Tradition, a German journal of business history, in October, 1956. It constitutes a review of business history generally, with particular reference to progress and ideas in Germany, notes of efforts in other Continental countries, and comparative references to American progress. Guideposts are set up both for the journal and for scholars active in the field. These illustrate certain unique problems facing German historians, but at the same time emphasize the existence of broad agreement among business historians on basic goals and operating methods. Reprinted in translation through the courtesy of Tradition and of Professor Wilhelm Treue, Editor.

Neither cash sale nor barter were adequate means for bringing a growing number of high-priced durable goods to the American consumer. The employment of installment credit facilitated the growth of a mass market for such products and provides an example of the utilization of an old commercial technique for a new purpose.