Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T22:57:30.082Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The National Recovery Administration Reconsidered, or Why the Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Code Succeeded

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2011

Gerald Berk
Gerald Berk*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
*
gberk@uoregon.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry Code was one of the only successful codes in the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Compliance was high. It increased production, wages, employment, and product diversity. NRA administrators marveled at its success. Why? And why have historical and rational-choice institutionalists, studying the NRA, overlooked the container code? This paper provides two answers: one microbehavioral, the other macrohistorical. At a micro level, it is impossible to understand the container code with rational-choice theory. It was successful not because it coordinated and enforced collective action, but because it organized “collaborative learning.” The code showed manufacturers how to compete over productivity and product diversity instead of volume. At a macro level, historical institutionalists miss the movement that spawned the container code, because they search in vain for liberal corporatism and state autonomy. Instead, this paper shows how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) led a movement of cost accountants, trade associations, and peak business associations in an effort to channel competition from predation into improvement in products and production processes through “developmental trade associations.” The container code drew its personnel and practices from this project. In order to make sense of the container code, I introduce a novel theory of institutions, called “creative syncretism.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , April 2011 , pp. 56 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Hawley, Ellis, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Brand, Donald R., Corporatism and the Rule of Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Bellush, Bernard, The Failure of the NRA (New York: Norton, 1975)Google Scholar; Gordon, Colin, New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 166–203Google Scholar; Finegold, Kenneth and Skocpol, Theda, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 90–103Google Scholar; Eisner, Marc Allen, Regulatory Politics in Transition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 82–88Google Scholar; Eisner, Marc Allen, From Warfare State to Welfare State: World War I, Compensatory State-Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Lyon, Leverett S., Homan, Paul T., Lorwin, Lewis L., Terbough, George, Dearing, Charles L., and Marshall, Leon, The National Recovery Administration (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1935)Google Scholar; Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 152–76Google Scholar.

2. See, for example, Brand's account of the petroleum code in Brand, Corporatism and the Rule of Law, 175–206.

3. The classic statement of this perspective on technology in business history is Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Scale and Scope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. See also Daems, Herman, “The Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise: A New Perspective,” in Managerial Hierarchies, eds. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. and Daems, Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Among organizational historians who make this assumption, see McCraw, Thomas K., “Rethinking the Trust Question,” in Regulation in Perspective, ed. McCraw, Thomas K. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1981), 1–55Google Scholar; and Galambos, Louis, “Technology, Political Economy and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–93Google Scholar. This assumption is also shared by leading economic sociologists. See Fligstein, Neil, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 33–74Google Scholar; and Dobbin, Frank and Dowd, Timothy J., “The Market That Anti-Trust Built,” American Sociological Review 65 (2000): 631–57Google Scholar. Historical institutionalists in political science, studying business regulation, also assume technology determined the characteristic economic problems of industrialization. See, for example, Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 121–25Google Scholar.

4. Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 41–47Google Scholar; Amenta, Edwin and Skocpol, Theda, “Taking Exception: Explaining the Distinctiveness of American Public Policies in the Last Century,” in The Comparative History of Public Policy, ed. Castles, Francis G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 292–333Google Scholar; Skowronek, Building a New American State; Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda, “Introduction: Understanding American Social Politics,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, eds. Weir, Margaret, Orloff, Ann Shola, and Skocpol, Theda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–36Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Working Class Formation in Western Europe and the United States, eds. Katznelson, I. and Zolberg, A. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–41Google Scholar; Martin Shefter, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Working Class Formation, eds. Katznelson and Zolberg, 197–275.

5. Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, “Beyond the Iconography of Order,” in The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches and Interpretations, eds. Dodd, Lawrence C. and Jillson, Calvin (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994)Google Scholar; Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 108–18Google Scholar; Thelen, Kathleen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–37Google Scholar; Streeck, Wolfgang and Thelen, Kathleen, eds., Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. On layering in the U.S. presidency, see Tulis, Jeffrey, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

6. This paragraph and the following two are based on Chandler, The Visible Hand; Fligstein, Transformation of Corporate Control, 38–66; Dobbin and Dowd, “Market That Antitrust Built”; Bowman, John R., Capitalist Collective Action: Competition, Cooperation and Conflict in the Coal Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Williamson, Oliver E., “The Modern Corporation: Origins, Evolution, Attributes,” Journal of Economic Literature 19 (Dec. 1981): 1537–68Google Scholar; Hollingsworth, J. Rogers, “The Logic of Coordinating American Manufacturing Sectors,” in Governance of the American Economy, eds. Campbell, John L., Hollingsworth, J. Rogers, and Lindberg, Leon L. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 38–40Google Scholar.

7. On segmentation and the absence of associational coordination in the U.S. economy, see McCraw, Prophets of Regulation; Hollingsworth, “Logic of Coordinating American Manufacturing Sectors”; Hall, Peter and Soskice, David, “Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism,” in Varieties of Capitalism, Peter Hall and David Soskice (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. On the ineffectiveness of the FTC, see Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7–11Google Scholar; Lowi, Theodore, End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States (New York: Norton, 1979)Google Scholar, 97, 101, 111–12; Gordon, New Deals, 137; Finegold, Kenneth and Skocpol, Theda, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 53–57Google Scholar; Thomas Lane Moore III, “The Establishment of a ‘New Freedom’ Policy: The Federal Trade Commission, 1912–1918” (PhD diss., University of Alabama, 1980); McCraw, Prophets of Regulation, 81, 125–28.

9. On the steel industry, see Brand, Corporatism and the Rule of Law, 207–26; and Alexander and Liebcap, “The Effect of Cost Heterogeneity,” 393–94. On abrasives, see Gordon, New Deals, 138. On “spontaneous cooperation,” see Bowman, John R., “The Politics of the Market: Economic Competition and the Organization of Capitalists,” Political Power and Social Theory 5 (1985): 35–88Google Scholar.

10. Salisbury, Robert H., “Why No Corporatism in the United States,” in Trends toward Corporatist Intermediation, eds. Schmitter, Philippe and Lembruch, Gerhard (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1972), 213–30Google Scholar; Gordon, New Deals, 35–86, 128–65; Himmelberg, Robert F., The Origins of the National Recovery Administration (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Hawley, Ellis, “Three Facets of Hooverian Associationalism: Lumber, Aviation, Movies,” in Regulation in Perspective, ed. McCraw, Thomas K. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Finegold and Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal; Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State, 106–21; Skowronek, Building a New American State, 267–71; Galambos, Louis, Competition and Cooperation: The Emergence of a National Trade Association (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Cuff, Robert D., The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations during World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

11. See note #1. See also Skocpol, Theda, “Political Responses to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics and Society 10 (1980): 155–201Google Scholar; and Fligstein, Neil, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 119–22Google Scholar.

12. Lamoreaux, Naomi, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21–41Google Scholar; Roy, William G., Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. See also Thompson, Gregory L., “Misused Product Costing in the American Railroad Industry: Southern Pacific Passenger Service between the Wars,” Business History Review 63 (Autumn 1989): 510–554Google Scholar.

13. Berk, Gerald and Schneiberg, Marc, “Varieties in Capitalism, Varieties of Association: Collaborative Learning in American Industry, 1900–1925,” Politics and Society 33:1 (Mar. 2005): 46–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. On the continuing debate over the meaning of competition, see Hawley, Ellis W., The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Peritz, Rudolph J.R., Competition Policy in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Best, Michael H., The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 88–92Google Scholar; Eisner, Marc Allen, Antitrust and the Triumph of Economics: Institutions, Expertise and Policy Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Berk, Gerald, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

15. On the variety of trade association strategies, see Berk, Gerald, “Discursive Cartels: Uniform Cost Accounting among American Manufacturers before the New Deal,” Business and Economic History 26:1 (Fall 1997): 229–251Google Scholar; Berk, Gerald, “Communities of Competitors: Open Price Associations and the American State, 1911–1929,” Social Science History 20:3 (Fall 1996): 375–400Google Scholar; Berk, Louis D. Brandeis, 150–84; Himmelberg, Origins of the National Recovery Act; Gordon, New Deals, 128–65; and Harris, Howell J., Bloodless Victories: The Open Shop Movement in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

16. Berk and Schneiberg, “Varieties in Capitalism, Varieties of Association”; Berk, Louis D. Brandeis, 150–84.

17. Berk, Gerald and Galvan, Dennis, “How People Experience and Change Institutions: A Field Guide to Creative Syncretism,” Theory and Society 38(6) (2009), 10.1007/s11186-009-9095-3, 43–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Berk, Brandeis, 15–25.

18. Miller, Peter, “Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice: An Introduction,” in Accounting as Social and Institutional Practice, eds. Hopwood, Anthony G. and Miller, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. There has been a lot of excellent scholarship on the social studies of accounting in recent years. In addition to the articles in Hopwood and Miller, see Porter, Theodore M., Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Power, Michael, Accounting and Science: Natural Inquiry and Commercial Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Post-positivist policy studies have also taken up the social construction of measurement in the public sector. See, for example, Stone, Deborah, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (NY: Norton, 2002), 163–87, 305–23Google Scholar; and Yanow, Dvora, Constructing “Race” and “Ethnicity” in America: Category Making in Public Policy and Administration (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp, 2003)Google Scholar. See also Schneiberg, Marc and Berk, Gerald, “From Categorical Imperative to Learning by Categories: Cost Accounting and New Categorical Practices in American Manufacturing, 1900–1930,” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 31 (2010):255–92Google Scholar.

19. Berk and Galvan, “How People Experience and Change Institutions.”

20. Crouch, Colin, Capitalist Diversity and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64–65Google Scholar, 88–91; Crouch, Colin and Farrell, Henry, “Breaking the Path of Institutional Development: Alternatives to the New Determinism,” Rationality and Society 16(1) (Feb. 2004): 5–43Google Scholar.

21. Weick, Karl E., Making Sense of the Organization (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 33–56Google Scholar. On syncretic or “recombinant” institutions, more generally, see Unger, Roberto, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 33–37Google Scholar; Sabel, Charles and Zeitlin, Jonathan, “Stories, Strategies, Structures,” in World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization, eds. Sabel, Charles F. and Zeitlin, Jonathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Zeitlin, Jonathan and Herrigel, Gary, eds., Americanization and Its Limits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Sil, Rudra, Managing “Modernity”: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Galvan, Dennis, The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Sustainable Development in Senegal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Stark, David and Bruszt, Laszlo, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Sewell, William H., “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology (July 1992): 1–29Google Scholar; and Clemens, Elisabeth S., “Afterward: Logics of History? Agency, Multiplicity, and Incoherence in the Explanation of Change,” in Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, eds. Adams, Julia, Clemens, Elisabeth S., and Orloff, Ann Shola (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 499–507Google Scholar.

22. Clemens, Elisabeth S., “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change: Women's Groups and the Transformation of U.S. Politics, 1890–1920,” American Journal of Sociology 98(4) (Jan. 1993)Google Scholar; Clemens, Elisabeth S., The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Groups in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 41–65Google Scholar.

23. Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford, “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, DiMaggio and Powell, 232–263; Sewell, “A Theory of Structure.”

24. Dewey, John, Human Nature and Conduct (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002Google Scholar [1922]).

25. In addition to Berk, and Galvan, , “How people experience and change institutions,” on the creativity of action, see the recent literature on entrepreneurship: Adam Scheingate, “Political Entrepreneurship, Institutional Change and American Political Development,” Studies in American Political Development 17 (2003): 185–203Google Scholar; Crouch, Capitalist Diversity and Change; Hwang, Hokyu and Powell, Walter W., “Institutions and Entrepreneurship,” in Handbook of Entrepreneurial Research (Norwell, MA: Kluwer, 2005), 179–210Google Scholar. For a more general effort to bring creativity into the center of social and political research, see Joas, Hans, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

26. Or, as Clemens writes, although organizational repertoires situate human action in a historical field, they always serve as a potential platform for both mimesis and innovation. See Clemens, “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change”; and Clemens, Elisabeth S., “Invention, Innovation, Proliferation: Explaining Organizational Genesis and Change,” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 19 (2002): 397–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Somers, Margaret R., “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Class Formation,” Social Science History 16 (Winter 1992): 591–630Google Scholar; Somers, Margaret M., “Narrativity, Narrative Identity and Social Action: Rethinking English Working Class Formation,” Social Science History 16 (Winter 1992): 591–630Google Scholar; Polkinghorne, Donald, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

28. Berk, Louis D. Brandeis, 90–111.

29. This paragraph and the following three are based on ibid., 122–29.

30. Ibid., 133–34.

31. Ibid., 134–40.

32. Ibid., 140–43.

33. This paragraph and the following three are based on ibid., 150–84.

34. Berk and Schneiberg, “Varieties in Capitalism, Varieties of Association,” 46–87.

35. Berk and Schneiberg, “Varieties in Capitalism, Varieties of Association.”

36. Browder, 1–2.

37. Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, Code History, pp. 1–2 RG 9, E. 25, Box 1686, File 13.

38. Container News Digest, 1(2) (Apr. 1935): 1–2Google Scholar.

39. Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, Code History, pp. 1–2 RG 9, E. 25, Box 1686, File 13.

40. Daly, Grover J., The Corrugated Container Industry – A History and Analysis (Oak Park, IL: Henry J. Bettendorf, 1971)Google Scholar, 24.

41. Alexander and Liebcap, “The Effect of Cost Heterogeneity”; Alexander, Barbara and Liebcap, Alexander, “Public Choice and the Success of Government-Sponsored Cartels: The Different Experience of New Deal Agricultural and Industrial Policies,” in Public Choice Interpretations of American Economic History, eds. Heckelman, J.C., Moorhouse, J.C., and Whaples, R.M. (Boston: Kluwer, 2000), 123–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bowman, “The Politics of the Market.”

42. Hankins, E.R. and Whiting, Grafton, Text Book for Corrugated Fiber Box Industry (ER Hankins and Grafton Whiting, 1925)Google Scholar, 7.; Powell, Wilbur F., A History of the Corrugated Shipping Container Industry in the United States (Camden, NJ: Samuel M. Langston Co., 1940), 23–34Google Scholar; Bettendorf, Harry J., Paperboard and Paperboard Containers: A History (Chicago: Harry J. Bettendorf, 1946), 61–77Google Scholar; Twede, Diana, “The History of Corrugated Fiberboard Shipping Containers,” Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing, Duke University, Durham, NC, 17–20 May 2007, 242–43Google Scholar.

43. Carton Age 7(3) (Mar. 1927)Google Scholar: 9; Carton Age 7(2) (Feb. 1927)Google Scholar: 14; Carton Age 6(8) (Aug. 1926)Google Scholar: 19; Carton Age 6(2) (Feb. 1926)Google Scholar: 12; Howell, History of the Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 23–6.

44. See U.S. Department of Commerce, “Packing for Domestic Shipment: Fiber Containers,” Domestic Commerce Series-No. 10 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1927); Carton Age, 4(12) (Dec. 1924)Google Scholar: 14; Carton Age, 5(12) (Dec. 1925)Google Scholar: 14; Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, 22–23. On the Department of Commerce's efforts to encourage simplification and standardization as paths to efficiency in the 1920s, see Hawley, Ellis, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History 61 (1974): 116–40Google Scholar; Hawley, Ellis, “Three Facets of Hooverian Associationalism: Lumber, Aviation, and Movies, 1921–1930,” in Regulation in Perspective, ed. McCraw, Thomas K. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1982), 95–123Google Scholar.

45. Howell, History of the Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 35.

46. On the reduction of product variety through standardization in this period, see also U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labour Statistics, Cost Savings Through Standardization-Simplification-Specialisation in Containers (Paris: Foreign Operations Administration, nd), 32–33; and Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, 21–22. On the diversity of products before 1910, see Bettendorf, Harry J., Paperboard and Paperboard Containers: A History (Chicago: Harry J. Bettendorf, 1946), 76–77Google Scholar

47. Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, 24–25, 37, 101 (Table 22).

48. On the printing industry, see Berk, Brandeis, 185–215.

49. Joint Cost Committee, Label Mfrs National Association, Folding Box Mfrs National Association, Nat'l Association of Employing Lithographers, Uniform Cost System (NY: Cost Division of Labor, Folding Box and Lithographing Industries, 1925), 8–9Google ScholarPubMed.

50. Charles Stevenson was typical of a new breed of management consultants, cost accountants. Stevenson graduated from Harvard with a bachelor of science degree in 1902. His first job was as an assistant metallurgical engineer at the Homestead Works of US Steel; he went on to become assistant superintendent of the US Steel Casting Corporation. From 1904 to 1911, Stevenson served as a junior partner in the accounting and engineering firm of Miller, Franklin and Stevenson. From 1911 to 1915, he became general manager of the Thomas Motor Car Company and then of the National Veneer Products Company. In 1916, he organized the Stevenson Corporation, a management-engineering firm, which was consolidated with G. Charter Harrison and Associates in 1925, to become SJ&H. Among its many clients were manufacturing trade associations. Indeed, several partners served as association secretaries, such as Stevenson, for instance, to the National Envelope Association. In 1928, he became president of the NACA. For a biography of Stevenson's career, see National Association of Cost Accountants (NACA), NACA Year Book, 1927, Proceedings of the Eighth International Cost Conference (New York: NACA, 1927)Google Scholar, 20.

51. See Container Age 3(11) (Dec. 1924)Google Scholar: 16; Container Age 4(11) (Nov. 1924)Google Scholar: 16; Container Age 4(12) (Dec. 1924)Google Scholar: 11.

52. Container Age 5(10)(Oct. 1925): 7–16Google Scholar; Container Age 5(12) (Dec. 1925)Google Scholar: 10.

53. Carton Age 6(8) (Aug. 1926)Google Scholar: 18; Carton Age 7(3) (Mar. 1927)Google Scholar: 8; Carton Age 7(4) (Apr. 1927)Google Scholar: 14.

54. Stevenson, Jordan & Harrison, Management Engineers, “Brief in Explanation of the So-Called Stevenson Plan of Invoice Analysis,” “MEMORANDUM OF EXPLANATION TO BE GIVEN VERBALLY TO ADMINSTRATOR PICKARD,” 3–4. RG 9, E 25, Box 1689, File 22.

55. Whiting, Grafton, “Price Stabilization in the Container and Paperboard Industries,” Carton Age 6(4) (Apr. 1926): 10–14Google Scholar, quotation on 12.

56. Hurley, Edward N., Awakening of Business (New York: Doubleday, 1917)Google Scholar, 7.

57. On the assumption of joint costs in the container industry, see Memorandum, To: Consumers' Advisory Board, From: M.S. Massel, Subject: Preliminary Rules of Cost Determination for the Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, 30 Oct. 1934, RG 9, E 25, Box 1689, File 24 (Cost Accounting).

58. On a cost-accounting system for the container industry, more generally, see Hankins and Whiting, Text Book for Corrugated Fiber Box Industry. For an excellent account of the management accounting movement of the early twentieth century, of which this case was a part, and how that movement was eclipsed by financial accounting and corporate organization, see Johnson, H. Thomas and Kaplan, Robert, Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

59. Hankins and Whiting, Exhibit 9, “Conversion Cost Distribution,” Text Book for Corrugated Fiber Box Industry, 77.

60. On departmentalization, see Carton Age 3(7) (July 1923): 9–10Google Scholar; Whiting, Grafton, “Uniform Cost Accounting and its Effect Upon the Industry,” Carton Age 4(11) (Nov. 1924): 10–12Google Scholar; Hankins and Whiting, Text Book, 67–74.

61. Whiting, “Uniform Cost Accounting,” 10–12.

62. Ibid., 12.

63. Whiting, Grafton, “Price Stabilization in the Container and Paperboard Industries,” Carton Age 6(4) (Apr. 1926): 10–14Google Scholar, quote on 14.

64. United States Federal Trade Commission, Trade Practice Conferences (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933)Google Scholar, 19.

65. Ibid., 19–21.

66. Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, Code History, RG 9, E. 25, Box 1686, File 13, p. 2.

67. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 39–43; Brand, Corporatism and the Rule of Law; Bellush, The Failure of the NRA, 3–5; Eisner, Regulatory Politics in Transition, 77, 83–85; Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration, 3–7; Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, 87–98, 100–102; Blyth, Marc, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 55–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fligstein, Transformation of Corporate Control, 121; Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration, 756–75.

68. See note 1.

69. Gordon, New Deals, 166–203.

70. Alexander and Liebcap, “The Effect of Cost Heterogeneity”; Alexander and Liebcap, “Public Choice and the Success of Government-Sponsored Cartels.”

71. Brand, Corporatism and the Rule of Law, 207–26.

72. Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, 66.

73. See Enid Baird, Price Filing under NRA Codes, Work Materials No. 76. Vols. I and II, Trade Practice Studies Section, Division of Review, Mar. 1936. For a catalog of NRA codes with open-pricing provisions, see Vol. I, Exhibit II, pp. 785–91. On the open-pricing provisions of the codes, see also Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 55–62; Brand, Corporatism and the Rule of Law, 110–12; and Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration, 224–25.

74. The president of the corrugated and solid fiber shipping container code, W.W. Pickard, is quoted at length in Enid Baird, Price Filing Under NRA Codes, “ARGUMENTS PRESENTED AT HEARINGS OF APPLICATION FOR CODE OF FAIR COMPETITION, CORRUGATED AND SOLID FIBRE SHPPING CONTAINER INDUSTRY,” Article VII - Equitable Distribution Plan, Work Materials No. 76. Vol. I, Trade Practice Studies Section, Division of Review, Mar. 1936, pp. 317–18.

75. Ibid.

76. Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, Code History, RG 69, E. 25, Box 1686, File 13, p. 3.

77. Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, 68–70.

78. Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, Code History, RG 9, E. 25, Box 1686, File 13. p. 4–5, 17

79. Tomlins, Christopher, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 111–15Google Scholar; Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, 149–51; David Plotke, Building a Democratic Majority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 93–95; Bernstein, Irving, The New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 57–62Google Scholar; Bellush, Failure of the NRA, 85–135.

80. Code of Fair Competition for the Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, Code History, 12–14.

81. Code of Fair Competition for the Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry, Code History, 12–14.

82. Container News Digest l(2) (Apr. 1935)Google Scholar: 1. See also that the trade-practice complaint rules included uniform cost accounting.

83. Memo From Code Authority of Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry to R&P Division, re: Information Requested by John T. Lynch of R&P Division, 22 Feb. 1935, RG 9, E 25, Box 1689, file 24. On production control provisions in the codes, see Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration, 623–50.

84. Fibre Box Industry Statistics, 1958 (Chicago: Fiber Box Association, 1959)Google Scholar, 5.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid., 19, 23.

87. “National Container Assn Urges Continuance of NRA” Container News Digest 1(2) (Apr. 1935): 1–2Google Scholar.

88. Address Delivered Before the Container Division of The National Association of Purchasing Agents, Cleveland – 19 June 1934 by James B. Fenton, Chairman, Container Code Authority, 9.

89. Container News Digest 1(2) (Apr. 1935)Google Scholar: 3.

90. “ARGUMENTS PRESENTED AT HEARINGS OF APPLICATION FOR CODE OF FAIR COMPETITION, CORRUGATED AND SOLID FIBRE SHPPING CONTAINER INDUSTRY,” 2-Article III - Hours of Labor, Article IV - Wages, Article V - General Labor Provisions, Presented by Mr. V. Young, of Robert Gaylord, Inc, Hearing, 17 Nov. 1933, 5.

91. Howell, A History of The Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 35–36, 49.

92. Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, 46–48.

93. Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, 48.

94. Howell, A History of The Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 35–36, 48–49.

95. Malcomson, J.D., “Opportunities and Problems in Packing and Shipping,” in Problems in Packing and Shipping (New York: American Management Association, 1935)Google Scholar, 8.

96. Ibid., 3.

97. Howell, A History of The Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 35.

98. These figures are calculated from Fiber Box Industry Statistics, 5; U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of Manufactures, 1931 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935)Google Scholar, 394; U.S. Department of Commerce, Biennial Census of Manufactures, 1935 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1938)Google Scholar, 432; U.S. Department of Commerce, Census of Manufactures, 1937, Part I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939)Google Scholar, 467; Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition Online (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar, Table Ca 20-27, “National Income by Type of Income, 1929–2002,” and Table Ca 208-212, “Gross National Product, 1869–1929.”

99. Daly, The Corrugated Container Industry, “Table 5: Number of Sheet Plants and Converters, 1915–1970,” 94.

100. Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration, 117–140; Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 72–90.

101. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 85–86. For Marshall's Brookings credentials, see his co-authorship of Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration; Baird, , Price Filing Under NRA Codes, Work Materials No. 76. Vol. I, Trade Practice Studies Section, Division of Review, Mar. 1936Google Scholar; Baird, Price Filing Under NRA Codes, Work Materials No. 76. Vol. II, Trade Practice Studies Section, Division of Review, Mar. 1936.

102. Baird, Price Filing Under NRA Codes, Vol. 1, 316–20; Baird, Price Filing Under NRA Codes, Vol. II, 472–73. For a good example of the influence of the economist's concept of “perfect competition” in this report, see Baird, Price Filing Under NRA Codes, Vol. I, 121–22.

103. “ARGUMENTS PRESENTED AT HEARINGS OF APPLICATION FOR CODE OF FAIR COMPETITION, CORRUGATED AND SOLID FIBRE SHPPING CONTAINER INDUSTRY,” Article VII - Equitable Distribution Plan, 3–4. On the economists' criticisms of the price-fixing provisions in the codes more generally, see Brand, Corporatism and the Rule of Law, 112–16; and Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly, 72–90.

104. National Association of Cost Accountants (NACA), National Association of Cost Accountants Yearbook, 1934 (Chicago: NACA, 1934), 63–64Google Scholar.

105. Pickard is quoted at length in Baird, Price Filing Under NRA Codes, Work Materials No. 76. Vol. I, Trade Practice Studies Section, Division of Review, Mar. 1936, 318. See also “ARGUMENTS PRESENTED AT HEARINGS OF APPLICATION FOR CODE OF FAIR COMPETITION, CORRUGATED AND SOLID FIBRE SHPPING CONTAINER INDUSTRY,” Article VII - Equitable Distribution Plan.

106. See Jacques B. Fenton, Chairman Code Committee, National Container Association to Ward W. Pickard, Deputy Administrator, National Recovery Administration, 11 Dec. 1933, with “New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, Dissenting Opinion of Justice Brandeis,” NARA, RG 9, E 25, Box 1689, Folder 25.

107. Daly, The Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 68–71.

108. Howell, A History of the Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 47–4; Daly, The Corrugated Shipping Container Industry, 42, 51–54, 60–63.

109. McKenna, Christopher D., “The Origins of Modern Management Consulting,” Business and Economic History 24(1) (Fall 1995): 51–58Google Scholar; McKenna, Christopher D., “The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century,” Enterprise & Society 2(4) (Dec. 2001): 673–79Google Scholar; McKenna, Christopher D., The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

110. Bernstein, Michael A., The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 121–43Google Scholar.

111. Howard, Christopher, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditure and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Surrey, Stanley S. and McDaniel, Paul R., Tax Expenditures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Ippolito, Dennis S., Hidden Spending: The Politics of Federal Credit Programs (Chapel Hill, NC: University Of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Block, Fred, “Swimming Against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State in the United States,” Politics and Society 36(2) (June 2008): 169–206Google Scholar; Hacker, Jacob S., “The Historical Logic of National Health Insurance: Structure and Sequence in the Development of British, Canadian and U.S. Medical Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 12 (Spring 1998): 129–30Google Scholar; Balogh, Brian, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis: Federal-Professional Relations in Modern America,” Studies in American Political Development 5(1) (1991): 119–72Google Scholar. A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1996)Google Scholar.

112. See for example Rorty, Richard, “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics,” Philosophy and Social Hope, Richard Rorty (London: Penguin, 1999), 175–89Google Scholar.

113. Although I draw from Gerring, who defines “crucial” cases as “cases most- or least-likely to exhibit a given outcome,” I do not see this case as an example of Popper's “black swan,” that is, a single well-chosen case, which disproves a theory. For one thing, the institutionalist assumptions, which inform the conventional historical interpretation of the NRA, are not a tightly predictive theory. For another, as I indicate in the text, the pragmatist approach to theory to which I am committed in this article insists that social science is inescapably populated by multiple, partial theories, which are better for some uses than others. On the concept of a “crucial case,” see Gerring, John, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–22Google Scholar. For a view of case-study research closer to the one taken here, see Bent Flyvberg, “Five Misunderstandings in Case Study Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 12(2) (Apr. 2006): 219–45Google Scholar.

114. See Berk and Schneiberg, “Varieties in Capitalism, Varieties of Association,” for a catalog of potential cases.

115. Wendt, Alexander, “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46(2) (Spring, 1992): 391–425CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

116. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly.