Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T12:43:09.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Elimination of the Unworthy: Credit Men and Small Retailers in Progressive Era Capitalism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

David Sellers Smith
David Sellers Smith
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The largest organization of capitalists during the Progressive Era was one that most American historians have never heard of. Motivated primarily by overproduction and ruthless competition, many of the nation's largest manufacturers, distributors, and commercial banks formed the National Association of Credit Men (NACM) in 1896 to reduce the supply of credit available to retailers and consumers. The story of the Credit Men confirms many standard assumptions regarding the rise of corporate America to economic power and cultural legitimacy while challenging others. Advances in technology and salaried organization made possible their mobilization, yet more important was the significant lag in the development of mass retail institutions and consequently mass consumerism behind mass production and distribution. The NACM deployed standardized methods and hungered for administrative efficiency but used these modern tools to instill order and ethical discipline in the nation's business, not to secularize the economy and culture of the new century. America's corporate capitalists seized power by promising moral regulation for unbridled individualism.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 197 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2010

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

2 Preston, William H., Credits, Collections, and Their Management (New York, 1897), 96Google Scholar;Hoover, Herbert, “Economic Self Government Better Than Business Dependent Upon Government,” Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Convention of the National Association of Credit Men, Baker Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MAGoogle Scholar.

3 The Credit Men have received significant historical attention in one chapter of one book:Olegario, Rowena, A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which skillfully traces broad developments in mercantile credit in the United States before 1920 and provides the best account of mercantile agencies yet produced. Yet her account of the NACM, ch. 6, is hampered by an analytical framework that flattens the impact of the ideology and culture. The Credit Men become significant only as a modernizing extension of an already existing desire among businessmen for transparent credit information, and their ambitious national project to cut down the flow of credit gets obscured. For other large Progressive Era commercial organizations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Civic Federation, seeWiebe, Robert, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, MA., 1962); 25–33, 36–41Google Scholar;Cyphers, Christopher J., The National Civic Federation and the Making of a New Liberalism, 1900–1915 (Westport, CT, 2002)Google Scholar;Werking, Richard Hume, “Bureaucrats, Businessmen, and Foreign Trade: The Origins of the United States Chamber of Commerce,” Business History Review 52 (Autumn 1978): 321–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The essential summary of Chandler's impact on business history isJohn, Richard R., “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s The Visible Hand after Twenty Years,” Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 151–200.CrossRefGoogle ScholarThe assertions of business and organizational historians challenged both the “progressive” historians–especially Charles and Mary Beard, who had argued that the new experts found common cause with mobilized citizens in assaulting entrenched economic interests–and Richard Hofstadter's argument that the progressive impulse emerged from the status anxiety of denizens of the old patrician-merchant elite, who had been bypassed by the organizational revolution.Charles, A. and Beard, Mary R., The Rise of American Civilization (1927; New York, 1939)Google Scholar;Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955)Google Scholar;Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA., 1977)Google Scholar;Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar;Porter, Glenn, The Rise of Big Business: 1860–1920, 3rd ed. (Wheeling, IL, 2006)Google Scholar;Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Hays, Samuel P., The Response to Industrialism: 1885–1914 (Chicago, 1957)Google Scholar.

5 Cannon, James G., Credit, Credit Man, Creditor, Collected Pamphlets, Baker Library.Google Scholar

6 Lewis, E. St. Elmo, The Credit Man and His Work (Detroit, 1904), 8–9.Google Scholar

7 , Chandler, Visible Hand, 17–19Google Scholar;Porter, Glenn and Livesay, Harold C., Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing (Baltimore, 1971), 5–7, 16–17Google Scholar;, Olegario, A Culture of Credit, 32–33Google Scholar;Madison, James H., “The Evolution of Commercial Credit Reporting Agencies in Nineteenth-Century America,” Business History Review 48 (Summer 1974): 165–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Breen, T. H., Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, 1985)Google Scholar.

8 , Chandler, Visible Hand, 19–29, 36, 209–19Google Scholar;, Porter and , Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers, 7, 17–29Google Scholar;, Olegario, A Culture of Credit, 9–11, 25–26Google Scholar;Moeckel, Bill Reid, The Development of the Wholesaler in the United States, 1860–1900 (New York, 1986), 5–35Google Scholar;Hagerty, James Edward, Mercantile Credit (New York, 1913), 214Google Scholar.

9 Fred Jones noted that the only census effort before 1930 to estimate number of retailers was made in 1840. The federal tally was 57,565 retailers with an aggregate capital of just over $250 million.Jones, Fred Mitchell, “Middlemen in the Domestic Trade of the United States, 1800–1860,” Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 21 (May 1937): 44–63.Google Scholar, Olegario, A Culture of Credit, 25, 98–99, 150–51Google Scholar;Atherton, Lewis, The Pioneer Merchant in Mid-America (Columbia, MO, 1939)Google Scholar;Atherton, Lewis, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington, IN, 1954)Google Scholar;Terry, Samuel, The Retailer's Manual: Embodying the Conclusions of Thirty Years' Experience in Merchandising (Newark, NJ, 1869), 250, 17Google Scholar;, Chandler, Visible Hand, 216–17Google Scholar.

10 Friedman, Walter, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, MA., 2004), 56–87Google Scholar;, Chandler, Visible Hand, 219–21Google Scholar;, Hagerty, Mercantile Credit, 158–59Google Scholar;, Porter and , Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers, 162–63Google Scholar;, Moeckel, Development of the Wholesaler, ch. 4Google Scholar.

11 , Olegario, A Culture of Credit, 36–79Google Scholar;, Madison, “Evolution of Commercial Credit Reporting Agencies,” 167–85Google Scholar;, Chandler, Visible Hand, 221–22Google Scholar;, Hagerty, Mercantile Credit, 134–57Google Scholar.

12 The Daily Columbian, June 23, 1893; Banker's Monthly, June 1893, 243, and July 1893, 277; Business: The Office Paper, May 1896, 216, and June 1896, 260;Tregoe, J. Harry, Pioneers and Traditions of the National Association of Credit Men, Baker Library, 10–13, 58–60Google Scholar;World's Congress of Bankers and Financiers (Chicago, 1893), 254Google Scholar; Chicago Tribune, June 24, 25, 1893; Minutes of the First National Convention of Credit Men, Toledo, Ohio, June 23, 1896, Baker Library, 204; “Report of the Membership Committee,” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, July 1904, 15–19.

13 , Cannon, Credit, Credit Man, Creditor.Google Scholar

14 Eckels, James H., “The Association of Credit Men as Viewed by the Banker,” The Lawyer and Credit Man 8 (May 1898): 8Google Scholar;, Hagerty, Mercantile Credit, 215Google Scholar.

15 Murphy, Daniel B., The Objects and Possibilities of Credit Men's Associations, Business Literature Committee, NACM, 1900,Google ScholarButler Library, Columbia University; Cannon, Credit, Credit Man, Creditor;Field, John, Credit Association Utilities, Collected Pamphlets, New York Public Library, New York, New YorkGoogle Scholar.

16 , Porter, Rise of Big Business, 67–77Google Scholar;Livingston, James, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca, NY, 1986), esp. ch. 2Google Scholar;, Chandler, Visible Hand, 287Google Scholar;Lamoreaux, Naomi, The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 (New York, 1985), esp. ch. 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York, 1963), 31–54Google Scholar.

17 Goddard, Frederick B., Giving and Getting Credit (New York, 1895), 14–15;Google ScholarEdgar, I. E., “Facts Versus Impressions,” Mercantile Adjuster 14 (Mar. 1900): 220Google Scholar.

18 , Porter and , Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers, 10–11;Google Scholar, Chandler, Visible Hand, 285–89;Google Scholar, Porter, Rise of Big Business, 48–52;Google Scholar, Lamoreaux, Great Merger Movement, 14–16Google Scholar.

19 Campbell, W. S., Business: The Office Paper, July 1896, 311.Google Scholar

20 Between 1896 and 1900, just over 3,000 firms sent delegates to the Credit Men. A summary of local meetings and national organization charts preserved in four monthly business periodicals from that period yields a list of about 830 firms. The periodicals are Business, The American Lawyer, The Lawyer and Credit Man, and The Mercantile Adjuster. The list of firms, with its periodical sourcing, is in the author's possession.

21 , Porter and , Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers, 131–79;Google Scholar, Chandler, Visible Hand, 302Google Scholar;, Porter, Rise of Big Business, 50–56Google Scholar.

22 The nation's largest hardware firm, Simmons Hardware, did vertically integrate and join the NACM., Porter and , Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers, 214–27;Google ScholarBecker, William H., “American Wholesale Hardware Trade Associations, 1870–1900,” Business History Review 45 (Summer 1971): 179–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 , Hagerty, Mercantile Credit, 38–46, quotation 43Google Scholar;James, John A., Money and Capital Markets in Postbellum America (Princeton, 1978), esp. ch. 3Google Scholar.

24 Gage, Lyman J., “American Enterprise–Some of Its Trials and Achievements,” The Lawyer and Credit Man 8 (May 1898): 9Google Scholar;, Hagerty, Mercantile Credit, 94–95Google Scholar.

25 “Whereas the activities of single-unit traditional enterprises were monitored and coordinated by market mechanisms,” Chandler famously wrote in The Visible Hand, “the producing and distributing units within a modern business enterprise are monitored and coordinated by middle managers.”, Chandler, Visible Hand, 7Google Scholar.

26 Murphy, Objects and Possibilities.

27 Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York, 1983), xiiGoogle Scholar;, Chandler, Visible Hand, 12, 224–35Google Scholar;, Porter, Rise of Big Business, 93–128Google Scholar;Lears, T.J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981)Google Scholar;Leach, William: Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1993)Google Scholar;Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, 1979)Google Scholar.

28 Cannon, James G., “Individual Credits,”Google ScholarCollected Pamphlets, Baker Library; Murphy, Objects and Possibilities.

29 Pender, George L., Business Hints as to Business Success, Business Literature Committee, NACM, Butler Library, Columbia University; LewisGoogle Scholar, The Credit Man and His Work, 33.

30 Prendergast, William A., Credit and Its Uses (New York, 1906), 88Google Scholar;, Hagerty, Mercantile Credit, 79, 87Google Scholar.

31 Jacobs, Meg, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005), 15–18Google Scholar;Tedlow, Richard, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990)Google Scholar;Strasser, Susan, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989)Google Scholar;Calder, Lendol, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, 1999)Google Scholar;Olney, Martha L., Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s (Chapel Hill, 1991)Google Scholar;Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003)Google Scholar;Horowitz, Daniel, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Baltimore, 1985)Google Scholar;Cross, Gary, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (New York, 1993)Google Scholar;Frank, Dana, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar;Heinze, Andrew R., Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

32 Among many historians of anti-vice movements, seeFoster, Gaines, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar;Boyer, Paul S., Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1978)Google Scholar;Kerr, K. Austin, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar;Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986)Google Scholar;Hopkins, Charles Howard, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven, 1940)Google Scholar;Fitzgerald, Maureen, “Losing Their Religion: Women, the State, and the Ascension of Secular Discourse, 1890–1930” in Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, ed. Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts and Brereton, Virginia Lieson (Urbana, 2002), 280–303Google Scholar. On the tendency of business and organizational historians to downplay culture, see, John, “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents,” 169–70Google Scholar;Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 117–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar;McGraw, Thomas K., “The Challenge of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.: Retrospect and Prospect,” Reviews in American History 15 (Mar. 1987): 160–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 “Sioux City,” Mercantile Adjuster 14 (Jan. 1900): 226Google Scholar. On earlier similar attitudes toward morality and credit worth in the mid-nineteenth century, see, Calder, Financing the American Dream, esp. ch. 2Google Scholar; and, Olgeario, A Culture of Credit, ch. 3Google Scholar.

34 Tribou, Nahum M., “Greater Responsibility: An Address Delivered at the Sixth National Convention of the National Association of Credit Men at Cleveland, Ohio, June 1, 1901,”Google ScholarCollected Pamphlets, New York Public Library.

35 , Foster, Moral Reconstruction, 4, 75–77Google Scholar;Foster, A. C., “Co-operation and Good Fellowship,” The Mercantile Adjuster 15 (July 1900): 258Google Scholar.

36 , Foster, Moral Reconstruction, 4, 75–81Google Scholar;, Preston, Credits, Collections, and Their Management, 45–46Google Scholar.

37 Earling, P. R., Whom to Trust: A Practical Treatise on Mercantile Credits (Chicago, 1890), 80Google Scholar;, Cannon, “Individual Credits.”Google Scholar

38 Foster, A. C., “Co-operation and Good Fellowship,” 258Google Scholar;Mapes, Dorchester, Why I Am a MemberGoogle Scholar, Collected Pamphlets, New York Public Library.

39 , Preston, Credits, Collections, and Their ManagementGoogle Scholar, appendix;“For Standard Credit Blanks: Credit Men to Urge the General Use of Signed Statements,” The American Lawyer 5 (Sept. 1897): 459–60Google Scholar;Boocock, F. R., “Policy, Practice, Plans, and Potency of Association of Credit Men,” The Mercantile Adjuster 13 (Feb. 1899): 10Google Scholar;“A Model Credit Department,” The Mercantile Adjuster 14 (Feb. 1900): 11–16, 236–39Google Scholar;“Report of Credit Department Methods Committee,” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, July 1903, 16Google Scholar;“Report of Credit Department Methods Committee,” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, July 1910, 492–502Google Scholar.

40 Davis, W.E., “If Overbuying is a Device of the Devil, Who is the Devil's Chief Apostle?” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, Oct. 1903, 9–12.Google Scholar

41 , Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 220–251Google Scholar(quotation 220–21);, Foster, Moral Reconstruction, 42–43Google Scholar, 80–81, 101, 220.

42 , Foster, Moral Reconstruction, 54–68Google Scholar;, Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 191–219Google Scholar.

43 , Cannon, “Credit, Credit Man, Creditor”Google Scholar;Beach, E. H., “What I Do Not Know About Collecting Bad Debts,” The Mercantile Adjuster 13 (Apr. 1899): 14Google Scholar.

44 “Plan for the Organization and Government of the Investigation and Prosecution Bureau of the National Association of Credit Men,” The Mercantile Adjuster 14 (Mar. 1900): 214–16Google Scholar;“Report of the Investigation and Prosecution Committee,” The Mercantile Adjuster 15 (July 1900): 253–57Google Scholar.

45 “Report of the Investigation and Prosecution Committee,” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, July 1910, 464–73.Google Scholar

46 “Address of Julius Henry Cohen,” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, July 1909, 441–53Google Scholar;“Report of the Legislative Committee,” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, July 1910, 426–27Google Scholar;, Tregoe, Pioneers and Traditions, 70Google Scholar;Prendergast, William A., Credit and Its Uses (New York, 1931), 275–80Google Scholar.

47 , Tregoe, Pioneers and Traditions, 86–91.Google Scholar

48 Proceedings of the National Association of Credit Men, 55th Cong., 2nd sess. (Feb. 24, 1898), S. doc. 156, 1–43Google Scholar;U.S. House Committee on Judiciary, Bankruptcy, 59th Cong., 1st sess. (Mar. 2, 1906), 1–54Google Scholar;Bankruptcy Bill, Hearing before Subcommittee No. 1 on the Judiciary on H.R. 189694, 61st Cong., 2nd sess. (Feb. 3, 1910), 1–31Google Scholar;Skeel, David A. Jr, Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar;Hansen, Bradley, “Commercial Associations and the Creation of a National Economy: The Demand for a Federal Bankruptcy Law,” Business History Review 72 (Spring 1998): 86–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 House Committee on Banking and Currency, Banking and Currency Reform, Part 3, 62nd Cong., 3rd sess. (Jan. 8, 1913), 151–203Google Scholar;Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, Hearings on Banking and Currency, 63rd Cong., 1st sess. (Nov. 6, 1913), S. doc. 232Google Scholar, 1038–50;Glass, Carter, “The Federal Reserve Banking and Currency Law,” Monthly Bulletin of the National Association of Credit Men, Aug. 1914, 505–17Google Scholar. On the moralistic appeal of the Fed's rediscount window, see, Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System, 169–80, 190–202Google Scholar.

50 Jacob, Meg, Pocketbook PoliticsGoogle Scholar, complicates this twentieth-century narrative of consumerism as de-politicizing, however. In her view, middle-class consumers and organized labor defined much of twentieth-century liberalism by challenging the power of businessmen to set wages and forging “demands as consumers with rights in the marketplace” (5).

51 , Skeel, Debt's Dominion, ch. 7–8Google Scholar;Sullivan, Teresa A., Warren, Elizabeth, and Lawrence, JayWestbrook, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit (New York, 1989), ch. 15–17Google Scholar.

52 Haskell, Thomas L., Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore, 1998), 78–114Google Scholar, quotation on 91;Thomas, John L., Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983)Google Scholar.

53 Smith, Fred W., “Our Larger Opportunities,” Mercantile Adjuster 15 (Mar. 1901): 15.Google Scholar