The distinguishing aspect of business in modern times, particularly in the United States, is that it has permeated the entire fabric of civilization. Historical interpretations of this circumstance have been in sharp conflict and have tended toward extremes. The wave of national self-criticism of the early twentieth century focused attention on the shortcomings of business, ignoring its constructive aspects. On the other hand, the modern revisionist school of historians, depicting the businessman not as a “robber baron” but as an “architect of material greatness,” has been prone to stress ends ahead of means and to overlook the deeper implications of the businessman's role in society as a whole. True perspective is not afforded by either of these opposing academic positions, nor is it likely to be gained by further blind amassing of facts-in-isolation on the part of business historians. A general theory of business evolution is needed — one that neither praises nor blames the businessman but seeks to locate him in the larger context of human experience.

This article deals with development of basic management structures of large American corporations. In general, the problem has been one of growing operational complexity; the solution commonly adopted has been operational decentralization. This solution, however, has raised difficult questions of control, and various administrative answers have been evolved. These have fallen into recognizable patterns, for an examination of case histories graphically illustrates the close connection between the nature of a company's business and its administrative structure. Those firms whose activities cross established industry lines have tended toward product decentralization. Companies producing a relatively restricted line have decentralized on a functional or a geographic basis. Market-oriented firms have tended to decentralize on a geographic basis. Among the fifty companies studied, however, other variations are discernible. Historical analysis of the decentralization trend also suggests the importance of management personalities in governing the timing of structural changes and indicates clearly the reasons why some companies have yet to find decentralization a meaningful answer for their prevailing administrative problems.

In what ways and to what extent has business exerted an influence on cultural development? The question has had many answers. Most of these have dealt with the diversion of business wealth to specific cultural ends — the accumulation of great art collections, the importation of Italian villas, the subsidization of noted performers and craftsmen. Considerable attention has also been paid to the direct aesthetic contributions of businessmen who manufactured objects of art, or who were successful in imparting artistic attributes to objects of utility. The present article probes a more subtle but quite possibly more basic kind of business influence. Available evidence suggests that American musical tastes and talents were directly and forcefully molded by the commercial environment itself. Market characteristics of the music publishing trade, pricing policies, associationist activities, and other purely economic circumstances helped determine the nature of musical America. This case study involves a capsule in time and a small segment of the total culture, but its implications are broad and merit further investigation.

J.J Cole, of Indianapolis, was one of the small group of entrepreneurs who successfully passed from carriage manufacture to automobile assembly. His initial success in the new field derived from technical competence, style consciousness, and marketing ability. These three attributes were not, however, subsequently exercized with equal and consistent effectiveness, and Cole, the talented individualist, did not survive the era of integration and combination in the 1920's. His firm passed from the scene, not as a bankrupt but as a typical founder-dominated organization that seemingly spent its energies in surviving one major transition and was unwilling or unable to face up to another.

The Best Friend of Charleston was a famous locomotive engine, but the real best friend of Charleston was the engine's owner, the South Carolina Railroad. Together the city and the railroad faced and endured the rigors of Reconstruction; both held fast to an ante-bellum dream of regional dominance. The railroad made bold moves to acquire the trunk lines and feeder systems that would make Charleston a Gateway to the West. But frustrating forces were at work. Developing traffic patterns did not favor Charleston, and profligate multiplication of competing lines cut into existing business. Rate agreements and pooling arrangements gave the company only mild relief at best. By 1878 Charleston had resigned itself to its role as a local trading center, and the SCRR was in bankruptcy, the victim of circumstances too powerful for even the most competent of managements to combat.

This timely account of the hunching of the Suez Canal project reveals both sides of the coin of innovation. It is, on the one hand, a study of the character and methods of one of the most famous innovators of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand DeLesseps was not a politician, a financier, an engineer, a promoter (in the common sense of the word), or a businessman. Yet he succeeded brilliantly in a venture requiring consummate mastery of all these professional fields. On the other hand is revealed the waterway itself — vital to one civilization, useless and neglected in another, and then of transcendent importance as world history marched on. Realization of the grand scheme envisaged by the Pharaohs came at last when economic and political factors momentarily aligned in a pattern of opportunity for a unique set of entrepreneurial qualifications.

Robert Livingston's career provides the first opportunity to consider in detail the emergence of an early New York businessman. Trained in business in Rotterdam, he brought to the New World the experience, knowledge, and techniques of one of the most advanced commercial centers of his day. On the Albany frontier he applied the Old World's business methods to advantage and gradually emerged as a dominant figure in colonial New York. His records and business correspondence leave no doubt that Livingston belonged to that class of businessmen often referred to as sedentary or resident merchants, though he did not employ as many agents and partners as his later, more mature counterparts. Neither did he engage in as many ventures or perform as many functions as the Browns, Hancocks, and other late eighteenth-century merchants, nor did he create an impressive business organization at home or abroad as was customary among certain European contemporaries. Still, as a wholesaler and retailer, importer and exporter, shipowner and land speculator, Livingston was an early New York practitioner of diversified business functions and investments. His extensive land dealings, no doubt motivated in part by the social prestige attached to real estate, were undertaken primarily as a source of credit and revenue. Livingston Manor was operated as a business enterprise: some of it was cultivated on Livingston's behalf, parts were leased to tenants who provided for the Lord of the Manor not only rents but a steady market for the goods he obtained in overseas trading ventures, and other sections were devoted to various manufacturing enterprises. Livingston's political life was an integral and necessary part of his business ventures, which reflected at all points the total instability of most colonial institutions. From the details of Livingstons many-sided commercial life emerges a rare picture of an embryonic business society in which the means were sorely taxed to achieve the ends conceived by ambitious men.

History has recorded many instances where inconspicuous competitive units have achieved success in opposing mighty combinations of power. The thesis has been voiced that even in periods of wildest competition the small businessman has not been entirely hapless. His size has been a political asset, and very early he learned to exploit that asset to the utmost. Louis Houck, the Missouri railroader, played the part of David; his Goliath was none other than Jay Gould. Houck not only made capital of his economic vulnerability, but boldly employed the very tactics for which the public was condemning his formidable adversary.

This article goes beyond the usual easy generalization that the coming of the railroad brought profound economic and social changes. Here a broad panorama is revealed, but with specific features in sharp focus, These features include the conflicting impact of the railroads on local craftsmen and tradesmen; the initial stimulus to extreme concentration and then to dispersion of population; the influence upon industrial decentralization; the changing railroad attitude toward passenger traffic; the rise of dormitory suburbs and their conversion into integrated communities; the social implications of the new mode of conveyance; the significance in labor reform of the railroads as large employers. Students of American transportation will find much of interest in this British pattern and in the method by which it is set forth.

The widespread advent of money-back guarantees and one-price policies were symptomatic of a major transition in merchandising history. As trade grew and retail stores multiplied, standardization of terms and practices became apparent. Before 1864 Champaign-Urbana merchants had made little progress in developing a policy of standard prices. The postwar years brought increasing competition at the retail level, and the use of the money-back guarantee spread. When this practice became widespread, a one-price-to-all policy became essential. Some old-time merchants continued to haggle with customers, and barter trade in country produce created complications, but by the early 1870's the integration of one-price policies and money-back guarantees had been generally accomplished and the way paved for the advent of mass distribution.

The attitudes and preoccupations of businessmen at any given time are deemed important by historians both as clues to and reasons for business action. The year 1900 is a promising one in which to probe those attitudes and preoccupations because at that time a great many important characteristics of the business community were undergoing rapid change. Examination of business literature of the day suggests that the businessman of 1900 was preoccupied with the merger movement and with labor agitation, with shifting distribution patterns, and with trade association activity. His concern with financial techniques and public relations was intense, if erratic, and he was preoccupied with problems of administrative structure. He was, in short, concerned with those developments commonly emphasized by historians, but with so much more besides as to suggest several new research avenues. Surprising results emerge when business attitudes and preoccupations of 1900 are compared with those of 1956.

Only recently have business historians turned their attention to the motor transportation industry. Interest in this “new” and obviously important field is well served by an historical analysis of major industry-wide trends. Too often the historian and the businessman alike work without benefit of such perspective. The evolution of the motor transportation industry is here divided into four major chronological divisions, with some summary observations about post-World War II conditions. Major emphasis is laid upon the different developmental patterns exhibited by various motor carrier classifications, upon the competitive interreaction of rail and motor transport interests, and upon the far-reaching effect of state and federal regulation. The history of the motor transportation revolution yields information of value about railroad developments and provides a background for understanding basic twentieth-century trends in commodity distribution.

Business historians have become increasingly aware of the pertinence to their endeavors of developments in the field of public accountancy. The present article is a pithy summary of the rise of the profession in the United States. British precedent and personnel were influential in the formation of early American accounting firms and associations. The movement for state regulation developed early, as did efforts directed at institutionalizing on a sound basis the education of young men seeking a career in the field. Public recognition of the profession came in the wake of the income tax laws of 1909 and 1913, the important effects of which are set forth. Early associations of accountants gave way to new organizations with a broader professional base, while a series of important legal actions have continued down to the present time to alter the nature of the accountants' services and responsibilities.

This article traces the birth and early growth of a major industry. Before Imperial Leduc No. 1 brought in the Edmonton field in 1947, Canadian oil producing operations had been sporadic. The Edmonton and subsequent discoveries in western Canada created an industrial giant overnight, providing historians and economists with a remarkable, documented, accessible case study of the process of industrial growth. Imperial Leduc No. 1 generated economic impulses that surged through a nation. The immediate effects were felt by the Canadian oil industry itself, which crystallized into a new pattern of integration. The domestic consumer of petroleum products was vitally affected, and his counter-reactions created new necessities. Canadian economic development in general was immediately and largely influenced; the flow of oil touched off a chain reaction in state and national fiscal affairs, in agriculture, in population trends, in education, in public expenditures, and in Dominion politics. Nor was the end here. The impulse for change swept across international boundaries, affecting monetary exchange and the competitive alignments of the world petroleum industry.

Public accounting practice and the nature of the accounting profession itself has, in the years under consideration, been shaped by a series of external forces. The Great Depression stimulated codification and regulation of practice. Further refinements of auditing procedures were introduced in the wake of the McKesson & Robbins case. The basic question of who was authorized to practice received almost continuous attention, and was the subject of much legislation and some important legal action. World War II introduced new practices, added responsibilities, and certain difficulties. And finally, the emergence of a strong national organization provided the profession with a means for achieving internal consistency and the capacity for co-ordinated reaction to rapid external change.

In the early days of the Republic, opposition to a national bank derived from fear, ignorance, and a basic cleavage of prophecy. To many persons banks were synonymous with speculation; others viewed them as “aristocratic engines” designed to advance the interests of the few over those of the many. Most important, however, was the discrepancy of viewpoints between those who envisaged an agricultural nation and those who already sensed the embryonic stirrings of a vast industrial economy. To the htter, a strong central bank seemed indispensable. The struggle to establish the First Bank of the United States emphasized the rural-urban cleavage that was to influence much nineteenth-century history. It was also a conspicuous early recourse to implied Constitutional powers, anathema to States' Rights defenders and a great hope of businessmen in a still feeble nation.