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Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Richard R. John
Richard R. John
Affiliation:
RICHARD R. JOHN is professor of history at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago.
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For almost half a century, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has enjoyed an enviable reputation as the most influential business historian in the world. Chandlerian business history is a mainstay of the “new” institutionalism that John Higham discerned over four decades ago in a justly admired survey of American historical writing; in addition, it has long been a cornerstone of the “organizational synthesis” that Louis Galambos championed in three widely discussed essays. Even in history departments that have shifted their primary focus from politics and economics to society and culture, Chandler remains required reading.

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Business History Review , Volume 82 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on Alfred D. Chandler Jr. , Summer 2008 , pp. 227 - 240
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Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2008

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References

1 Higham, John, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore, 1965), 231Google Scholar; Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galambos, , “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galambos, , “Recasting the Organizational Synthesis: Structure and Process in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Business History Review 79 (Spring 2005): 138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 This claim is based on an altogether unsystematic e-mail survey of history graduate students at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia.

3 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).Google Scholar For an overview of the first two decades of historical writing to have been influenced by Chandler's magnum opus, see John, 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 Scholar Historians with an interest in social theory may find stimulating Teece, David J., “The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Perspectives on Alfred Chandler's Scale and Scope,” Journal of Economic Literature 31 (Mar. 1993): 199–225.Google Scholar For a brief, illuminating tribute, see Porter, Glenn, “In Memoriam: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., 1918–2007,” New England Quarterly 80 (Dec. 2007): 687–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 For a rare exception, see Parker, William N., “The Scale and Scope of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.,” Journal of Economic History 51 (Dec. 1991): 960.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Perhaps some foreign observer of the American mind might point out to us,” Parker observed, “that best of all, despite his span of years in the atmosphere of the Harvard School of Business Administration, or perhaps because of it, Chandler remains an intellectual, albeit a very American one, showing in the whole thrust of his effort, the opinions, the intelligence, the national concerns and values, including even the bias toward technocracy, that characterized the best minds and spirits of the era of true Republican Progressivism.”

5 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “The Origins of Progressive Leadership,” in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Morison, Elting E., Blum, John M., Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, and Rice, Sylvia (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), vol. 8, 1462–65.Google Scholar

6 My understanding of Turner and Beard builds on Fitzpatrick, Ellen, History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 8, 53, and 97; Breisach, Ernst A., American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 9; and Tyrrell, Ian, “Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Con text of Empire,” Journal of American History 86 (Dec. 1999): 1017–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Each challenges in different ways the older, less nuanced, and, in certain respects, self-serving, characterization of Turner and Beard that Lee Benson and Richard Hofstadter popularized in the 1960s and Peter Novick echoed in the 1980s. Benson, Lee, Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, Ill, 1960)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (Chicago, 1968)Google Scholar; Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectiv ity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar In so doing, they critique the conventional, whiggish narrative of twentieth-century U.S. historiography, in which the progressivism of Turner and Beard is challenged by the “consensus school” of Dan iel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter, and Louis Hartz before being triumphantly supplanted by the neoprogressivism of the “new” historians of the 1960s. With few exceptions, the new his torians exaggerate the progressives' emphasis on social conflict and downplay their engage ment with late-nineteenth-century industrialization. “In Progressive history,” Breisach as tutely observed, “conflict is auxiliary to progress and not a force important in and by itself” (226 n.26).

7 Turner, Frederick Jackson, “Social Forces in American History” [1911], in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Billington, Ray Allen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961), 155, 156.Google Scholar

8 Beard, Charles A. and Beard, Mary R., The Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1927), vol. 2, 713.Google Scholar While Charles and Mary Beard (Charles's wife) collaborated on virtually every chapter of American Civilization, Charles was primarily responsible for the sections on politics and the economy, Mary for the sections on culture and society. Nore, Ellen, Charles A. Beard: An Intellectual Biography (Carbondale, Ill, 1983), 112–13.Google Scholar Historians who are familiar with the Beards' Rise of American Civilization only by reputation, and who assume that progressive historical writing is informed by a pervasive antibusiness bias, may be surprised to discover that it includes numerous vignettes of business leaders that look forward less to Matthew Josephson's Robber Barons (1934) than to Livesay's, Harold C.American Made: Shapers of the American Economy (1979, 2nd ed., 2007)Google Scholar, an engaging collective portrait of various business leaders by one of Chandler's students. In 1938 the Beards' daughter, Miriam, published a largely admiring History of the Business Man. If the Beards' Rise of American Civilization is taken as a proof text, there is little reason to suppose that either of Miriam's parents would have found fault with either the subject or the tone of their daughter's book. For a related discussion, yet a different conclusion, see Yeager, Mary A., “Mavericks and Mavens of Business History: Miriam Beard and Henrietta Larson,” Enterprise and Society 2 (Dec. 2001): 687–768.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Beard, Charles A., “Time, Technology, and the Creative Spirit in Political Science,” American Political Science Review 21 (Feb. 1927): 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Beard's flirtation with technological determinism is conspicuously underplayed in Benson's Turner and Beard and Hofstadter's Progressive Historians. For a corrective, see Nore, Charles A. Beard, ch. 9. Also useful is Strout, Cushing, “The Twentieth Century Enlightenment,” American Political Science Review 49 (June 1955): 333–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Though Chandler always distinguished between technology and organization, there is much truth in the common charge, which he always denied, that he was, at bottom, a technological determinist. See, for example, Technology and Culture 19 (July 1978): 572. “There are,” Chandler observed, “profound differences between modern managerial capitalism and modern managerial socialism in economic performance and activity, in the distribution of income, and in the quality of life, but an evaluation of these differences cannot be made until the operational characteristics of capitalism and socialism are more precisely defined, and the technological imperatives of mass production and mass distribution in urban, industrial mass societies are more carefully sorted out.”

11 Chandler, , “Organizational Capabilities and the Economic History of the Industrial Enterprise,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 6 (Summer 1992): 79–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Another similarity between Chandler, Turner, and Beard was their common characterization of the early American economy. Like Turner and Beard, yet unlike the proponents of the “market revolution” thesis that Charles Sellers popularized in the 1990s, Chandler took it for granted that capitalism arrived on the first ships, and that the nineteenth-century economy evolved not from a subsistence-based stage to a market-based stage, but, rather, from a market economy that was oriented primarily toward Europe to a market economy that was oriented primarily toward the trans-Appalachian hinterland. In this transition, cotton plantations played a pivotal role. Cotton planters, in Chandler's view, had little incentive to be self-sufficient, since they could make far more money selling cotton in overseas markets than by growing the foodstuffs they needed to feed their slaves. The coming of the railroad shifted the geographic orientation of this market–from North–South to East–West–but not its market-oriented character. Chandler, The Visible Hand, 516–17n. 570.

13 McCraw, Thomas K., “The Intellectual Odyssey of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.,” in The Essential Alfred Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business, ed. McCraw, (Boston, 1988), 19–20.Google Scholar Chandler's Turnerianism is particularly evident in the introduction he prepared for a documentary collection on fiscal policy during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–1837): “Jacksonian Democracy and the Bank War: The Crisis of 1830–1834,” in Major Crises in American History: Documentary Problems, 1689–1861, 2 vols., ed. Levy, Leonard W. and Peterson, Merrill D. (New York, 1962), vol. 1, 334–42, 400.Google Scholar

14 Turner, “Social Forces,” 158.

15 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., “The Beginnings of ‘Big Business’ in American Industry” [1959], in The Essential Alfred Chandler, ed. McCraw, , 47, 48Google Scholar. Though Chandler altered his views on various subjects during his long publishing career, he was remarkably consistent in his characterization of the main contours of American economic development. For this reason, in glossing his argument, I have drawn freely not only on his Visible Hand, but also on essays that he published before and after its appearance in 1977.

16 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 36, 49.

17 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “Learning and Technological Change: The Perspective from Business History,” in Learning and Technological Change, ed. Thomson, Ross (New York, 1993), 27.Google Scholar

18 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 735.Google Scholar Other Turnerian metaphors that Chandler adopted included “evolution” and “seedbed”—a variant of the Turnerian “seed-plot.”

19 Journal of Economic History 29 (Sept. 1969): 563.

20 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “The Coming of Big Business,” in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. Woodward, C.Vann (New York, 1968), 233–34.Google Scholar

21 Economic and business historians have oddly neglected the Beards' contribution to the field. Neither Charles nor Mary Beard is included, for example, in the list of forty-four “first generation” economic and business historians that Cole, Arthur H. profiled in The Birth of a New Social Science Discipline: Achievements of the First Generation of American Economic and Business Historians–1893–1974 (New York, 1974).Google Scholar Cole did briefly discuss Charles Beard in his preface, yet, somewhat oddly, he limited his legacy to “political economists” rather than historians. Interestingly, Cole acknowledged Miriam Beard's History of the Business Man as the “first domestic survey” of the subject (p. 3), though Cole mistakenly listed its author as Mary rather than Miriam (p. 3). Among the historians Cole profiled were Turner, Frederick Merk, Henrietta M. Larson, and Thomas C. Cochran. Chandler himself did not make the cut, presumably because Cole did not consider him a member of the “first generation.”

22 One way to gain insight into the intellectual influences that shaped Chandler's development as a historian is to survey the books that he owned, a task that is facilitated by his gift of his personal library to Baker Library at Harvard Business School. Chandler's library includes many canonical works in American history, including Beard's Economic Interpretation, as well as a smattering of titles on organizational sociology and business management (though none by Talcott Parsons or Max Weber), and virtually nothing on economics. Though Chandler's library included neither Turner's collected essays nor either of his books, it did contain a first edition of Frederick L. Paxson's resolutely Turnerian History of the Frontier (1924).

23 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Henry Varnum Poor: Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), chs. 7, 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Poor's antifinancialism was so pronounced that it would not be in the least surprising should some intrepid historian discover documentary proof that it was Poor himself—that is, Chandler's own great-grandfather—who first coined the damning epithet “robber baron” to characterize a financially unscrupulous business leader. The concept (“German barons”), though not the phrase itself, can be found in a New York Times editorial on 9 February 1859. While Poor almost certainly did not write this editorial, he did occasionally write editorials in the Times on economic topics. I am grateful to T. J. Stiles for bringing this Times editorial to my attention, and for putting it into the context of financial journalism of the 1850s.

24 Chandler, , “The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management” [1965], in The Essential Alfred Chandler, ed. McCraw, , 179–201.Google Scholar

25 While Chandler often praised the investment necessary to sustain large-scale enterprise, he rarely praised investors, and he was particularly hard on short-term investors like Gould, whom he tended to dismiss, as had his great-grandfather before him, as financial buccaneers.

If anything, Chandler's anti-investor bias grew more pronounced over time. “We are going to pay a price for shareholder capitalism,” Chandler declared in an interview in 1991: “Among the 50 largest chemical companies in the world, the only ones that pay over 10 percent dividends are the Americans, and they pay 15 percent. If you really believe—this is where I get upset—that the function of the firm is to give dividends to shareholders, we're going to end up worse than Britain. Intel has never declared a dividend and it has put a billion dollars back into the business. That's the way to do it.” Cited in Parker, “Scale and Scope,” 961.

26 Chandler, “Beginnings of Big Business,” 194.

27 Klein, Maury, Life and Legend of Jay Gould (New York, 1986).Google Scholar

28 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 88, 147–48, 154. See also Chandler, , “Jay Gould and the Coming of Railroad Consolidation,” in Management Past and Present: A Casebook on the History of American Business, ed. Chandler, , Tedlow, Richard S., and McCraw, Thomas K. (Cincinnati, 1996), 2–41, 45, 46, 48.Google Scholar

29 Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50 (June 1963): 146–47.

30 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 135–36, 148–51, 160. “Antitrust legislation,” Chandler observed, “reflected a powerful bias of Americans against special privilege, which had expressed itself earlier in the controversy over the Bank of the United States during the Jacksonian period. In Europe, governmental support of special class and family interests was more accept able.” Chandler, “Coming of Big Business,” 234.

31 The inability of railroad leaders to persuade judges to sanction pooling, Chandler believed, furnished compelling evidence that big business did not dominate the regulatory process, as, for example, Kolko, Gabriel had contended in Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar “If the American cartels had had some kind of legal support or sanction by the government,” Chandler observed, “as was true of those in continental Europe, the giant corporation would surely have been slower in coming.” Chandler, “Coming of Big Business,” 226. Or to put it somewhat differently, the most distinctive feature of the U.S. regulatory regime was not the absence of “big government” but the presence of an antimonopoly regulatory regime.

32 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “The Depression Crisis and the Emergence of the Welfare State, 1932–1935,” in Major Crises in American History: Documentary Problems, 1865–1953, 2 vols., ed. Peterson, Merrill D. and Levy, Leonard W. (New York, 1962), vol. 2, 330–38, 387Google Scholar; Chandler, “Jacksonian Democracy,” 334–42, 400, quotation on p. 400.

33 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “The Role of Business in the United States: A Historical Survey,” Daedalus 98 (Winter 1969): 40.Google Scholar “To suggest how and in what ways the managers will respond to the current challenges is,” Chandler observed, “fortunately, not the task of the historian. Such analyses are properly left to social scientists and businessmen” (p. 40).

34 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “Industrial Revolutions and Institutional Arrangements,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 33 (May 1980): 33, 48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Contrary to what seems to be a widespread impression, Chandler did not, like Lewis Mumford, assign labels to periods of American economic history based on changing energy sources. In fact, Chandler regarded the commercialization of anthracite coal in the 1840s as largely fortuitous and, as he grew older, deemphasized the significance of electric power.

35 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr and Cortada, James W., “The Information Age: Continuities and Differences,” in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, ed. Chandler, and Cortada, (New York, 2000), 290.Google Scholar

36 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries (Cambridge, Mass., 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chandler, , Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (New York, 2001).Google Scholar

37 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, “How High Technology Industries Transformed Work and Life Worldwide from the 1880s to the 1990s,” Capitalism and Society 1, no. 2 (2006): 4–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In this essay, the last Chandler published in his lifetime, he politely but pointedly faulted several prominent colleagues for their failure to locate the United States in a sufficiently global context (pp. 52–54). For a ringing endorsement of Chandler's critique, see Sylla, Richard, “Chandler on High Technology Industries from the 1880s to the 1990s: A Comment,” Capitalism and Society 1, no. 2 (2006): 3–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Tyrrell, “Making Nations/Making States,” 1020.