The striking problem faced by the labor administrator in the early Connecticut button industry was the shortage of native skilled artisans. While unskilled laborers, bookkeepers, and even managers could be drawn from sources in this country, highly skilled artisans were usually available only in England. The shortage of skilled labor thus truly constituted the bottleneck to quality production. In the correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, for the year 1791, there is a letter from one John Mix, pewter buttonmaker of New Haven, reporting that he was going to produce diverse kinds of buttons. This was possible “because we have a person lately from Europe who has the skill perfectly who is a gentleman who is able and has engaged to instruct and teach us everything necessary in the making of them.”

Students of the innovative process in American manufacturing have emphasized the scarcity of labor and the consequent need for labor-saving machines. In the late nineteenth century one of the country's largest manufacturing industries was the production of carriages, which, in its most important center, Cincinnati, was organized on a mass production basis. But Professor Duggan finds that problems of the quantity and quality of labor were secondary in carriage factories, compared to other factors such as fuel costs, factory space, and the need to stabilize the quality and price of vehicles marketed by the industry as a whole.

An address delivered by Dr. Ralph M. Hower at the Annual Meeting of the Business Historical Society.

I propose to interpret my subject rather liberally and to concentrate upon what seem to me to be some fundamental changes in retailing—ranging the whole of the 19th century, but focussing attention especially upon the years from 1850 to 1875, a period of great innovation. And please note that all my remarks have to do with American experience.

To start, then, let me sketch briefly the retailing picture in the larger American cities about 1850. In general the principle of specialization dominated the scene: both retail and wholesale trades were split up, by types of merchandise, into single-line or specialty stores. If you examine the advertisements and business directories of the period, you will find a really astonishing array of stores, each of which confined itself to a narrow range of goods.