For several reasons the aspect of management decisions that has interested most business historians has involved the innovating function. For one, the main responsibility for introducing innovations in a capitalist society, without which the economy would tend to stagnate, is undertaken by the business executives. Secondly, the fortunes of individual companies are closely related to the capacity of the managements to undertake and cany through changes. While it is true that a passive policy may be sufficient to establish a new firm or to maintain a going concern, the rewards in the form of prestige, income, size or position in the market, and the like, are more likely to go to those organizations whose managements take an active role, who pioneer changes or are quick to see the applications to their own organization of innovations developed outside.

The inventor does the work and the promoter gets the money. That seems to sum up the popular view of the relation between promotion and technology in nineteenth-century America. Take the typewriter as an example. Thomas A. Edison declared in 1921: “Mr. Christopher L. Sholes was the father of the typewriter and got nothing but trouble and neglect in connection with the invention. He fell into the hands of promoters with the usual results.” Who were these promoters? Edison did not name names, but chief among them were in fact the following: James Densmore, George Washington Newton Yost, the firm of E. Remington & Sons, and finally the latter's selling agents—Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict—who in 1886 bought the Remingtons' typewriter property and organized the Remington Standard Typewriter Company, which was eventually succeeded by Remington Rand, Inc. Among all these, Densmore is the one whom Edison had particularly in mind, and the one whom many others have denounced. Indeed, according to one account, the only thing Densmore did for the typewriter was to give Sholes $6,000 for the invention and then turn it over to the Remingtons for a cool million!

The student of the various working-class movements which originated in the period of the Industrial Revolution in England has always to take account of the influence of Robert Owen on these movements. To each of them, this strange and interesting man brought a set of ideas and a range of experience which, when viewed in the light of his personal history, are of significance to the business historian.

At first, the early Massachusetts railroads did not fix the passenger and freight rates on the basis of any theoretical rate-making formula. Instead, they met the competition of wagons and stages and, where necessary and possible, the steamboats. The railroad directors wanted to assure the stockholders reasonable and regular dividends, but I have seen no evidence that the directors expected to maximize the profits, even within the limits of the charters. Only an occasional director was willing to risk the possibility of greater profits by experimenting with extremely low rates on the theory that really cheap, improved transportation sufficiently increases the demand for transportation to justify the lower fares.

Building “Zion” in the intermountain West was a constant challenge to the officers and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) in the last half of the nineteenth century. The practical problem of developing a balanced and progressive economy in the arid mountain valleys and formless desert wastes of the Great Basin required perseverance, cooperation, and intelligent planning. The development of Utah is unique among western states in the form and extent of group planning and in the close supervision and direction of social and economic activities by a dominant church. The heroic efforts of the religious leaders of early Utah to develop the resources of the Great Basin are partly responsible for the progressive growth of employment and production after the permanent settlement of the region in 1847.

The builders of the railroads in the 'thirties included not only inventors and engineers but also businessmen. It is the latter, usually neglected by historians, who solved business problems as significant as the problems of the engineers. At least, that was true of the roads in this study—the Boston & Lowell, the Boston & Worcester, the Eastern, and the Western. Although the formal structure of a business is not very important for small business firms, these four railroads represented at least two or three times the capitalization of the larger factories of that time. The early railroads, except for small branch lines like the Andover & Wilmington, were sufficiently large to demand careful business organizations if the enterprises were to be successful.

Many will think it strange that the textile machinery industry should have been chosen to point up a discussion of innovation, especially technological innovation. No industry in America has been more consistently singled out as an example of technological backwardness. About a decade ago the Honorable Henry Wallace, while on a lecture tour of New England, voiced the opinion that the American textile machinery industry was a hundred years behind the times. That Mr. Wallace based his statement on information so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless is of little importance. What is important is that all with eyes to see are likely to agree with him. Anyone who is familiar with the modern spinning frame and who, on visiting the Smithsonian Institute, chances to see on display there the spinning frame built by Samuel Slater in 1790 is inevitably struck by the similarity between the two machines.

The Chinese have a proverb to the effect that language is used to conceal intentions. Notwithstanding their traditional frankness, Americans have written letters designed to mislead the reader. Certainly no series of letters, whether from clergymen, politicians, or businessmen can be taken uniformly at face value. But how may statements be discounted or interpreted in such a way that one may draw the correct meaning from them?

Usually the letters of one man are used in connection with the preparation of a biography of their author or the detailed analysis of a series of his actions. In either case cumulative knowledge of the writer's idiosyncrasies, continuing motivation, and, most of all, his actions themselves provide clues to acceptable interpretations. But when one reads the letters of a large group of men engaged over the course of many years in a common occupation, all of these conventional indicators are lacking.

Three manuscripts in the possession of the Reading Antiquarian Society contain information about the business of shoemaking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One is the journal of James Weston, from 1788 to 1793; the others are account books of John Goodwin, Jr., and John Johnson, covering a somewhat later period. Each presents its distinctive picture of a shoemaker's work, with interesting contrasts. The career of Goodwin, in particular, illustrates one course of development from workman to businessman, which has been followed by many in past generations. It also demonstrates one reason why class lines have been so hard to draw in American experience. Often a man played both the employer's and the employee's roles at different stages of his own personal history, which not only affected his thinking, but also that of many who aspired to follow his example, and were sure it could be done because they had seen it happen. This transition has become more difficult since the development of the factory and its enormous capital requirements, but, in the days before the centralized workshop, enterprise and imagination were often capital enough to launch a business career.

America's indebtedness to Europe in the nineteenth century as a source of industrial ideas and technique is well-known. Our purpose, however, is to show that the transfer of technological knowledge was by no means one way, from Europe to America. In fact at least one important exception exists in the rubber manufacturing industry, the foundations of which were laid in the first half of the nineteenth century. The origins of this industry in the United Kingdom and throughout the Continent of Europe, including European Russia, show a marked dependence of the Old World on the New, not only in terms of technique but in the establishment of American business houses in Europe.

For one hundred and forty-four years (or from 1796 to 1940) a certain drug store did business in the town of Beverly, Massachusetts, in the same location, for all but the first two years of this long span. To the writer's generation it was known as Baker's Drug Store, and it stood on the corner of Washington and Cabot streets. In 1796, when Robert Rantoul started his shop, there was no Washington Street and Cabot was called Country Lane. But the young man chose his business and its location well and when, an old man, he came to review his life for his grandchildren, he could point with pride to the success of this and his other ventures.

While Jacksonian democrats moved resolutely to abolish the National Bank of the United States and denounced the very idea of such an institution as being incompatible with liberty, Governor José Felix Trespalacios, colonel of the imperial armies of Mexico and political chief of the Province of Texas, promulgated a decree in the historical city of the Alamo establishing the first “national” bank in the Americas west of the Mississippi. “Consonant with my duties,” he declared, “and mindful of the interests of this beautiful country and the deep regard in which I hold its inhabitants, I hereby order and command that a National Bank be established temporarily in this Province, subject to its ultimate approval by the Government.”

This is the tale of a nonentity and failure. Were it not for the fame of his brother, the great John, we should know nothing of Ebenezer Hancock. As it is, a handful of his papers have been handed down to us, mixed up with the letters of Brother John the statesman and Uncle Thomas the merchant prince. Because he played poor relation to these celebrities, we can follow the life of a mediocre man who would in the ordinary course of events have been utterly forgotten; what is perhaps more interesting, we can trace his ill-starred business doings, which were probably a great deal nearer to the norm than were memorably successful ventures.

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 early railroads in Massachusetts employed two groups of fulltime officials: the civil engineer and the agent who supervised the construction of the road, and the superintendent and other officials who supervised the operation of the trains and depots. In this section we shall trace the early evolution of the latter group together with the development of the president and the treasurer.

In the economic affairs of Britain the mid-nineteenth ccntury was the age of the relatively small and independent employer, conscious of a long-established prowess which had been surpassed nowhere in the world and in the conduct of the affairs of his works but little affected by the embryonic factory legislation and the feeble trade unionism of the time. Equally the large combine with its tendency towards standardization of conditions had still to come. Lord of all he surveyed, the employer's views on conditions of work are a good index of what actually was.