When I agreed to recount the story of the Business Historical Society, I naturally thought it was my own swan song that was expected. The occasion was presented to me as the probable closing of a period in the history of the Society and the opening of another day. On thinking over the events of the last twenty-five years, however, I have discovered a number of facts of larger issue and have had a chance to peer beneath the curtain of changing circumstances of world-wide import. The Business Historical Society is not just one more of those numerous American organizations that display our national weakness. It was set up under circumstances of high import by men who were feeling their way toward something significant which they but vaguely understood. In this story, therefore, are revealed some of the social processes which are the fabric of our history. There is, indeed, very little of the merely antiquarian in the theme with which we have to deal—the first survey of the Business Historical Society's experiences.

Editor's Note: This memorandum of a manager of a Hearst hacienda in Mexico from 1922 to 1931 records an episode in the re-distribution of lands during the revolution which began in 1910. This memorandum, set down soon after the events which it records, is indicative of the methods used by revolutionary governments and officials in fulfilling their promise of land to their agrarian followers. It also illustrates the resulting confusion to business managers and the insecurity of property, especially foreign-owned. By such methods a great deal of foreign management and capital was driven out of Mexico.

Though their roots reach back for centuries, both public relations and the corporation annual report have reached semi-maturity only during the present century. Business public relations began with the reaction of the first customer to the goods, services, and personality of the first man who offered some commodity—the ham of a squirrel, a live coal, a stone spear—for sale or barter. Everyone has business public relations of some sort, and even those modern companies which still disdain any formal public relations cannot escape the fact that daily they produce some sort of relations reaction in dealing with their segment of the public. As for corporation annual reports, they go back to the time the first corporation totaled its receipts and expenditures at the end of the first year and told its stockholders that they had lost or made so much money. From those beginnings have developed a public relations field that is today a professional science, albeit somewhat ambiguous, and corporation annual reports that rival the sleek magazines in budget requirements, circulation, attention-getting features, and the worry and labor of the staff which prepares them.

“English accounting practice has been developing for many years, but it has not made any substantial contribution to economic science over its own field of the analysis of the results of industry, although it has practically a monopoly grip of the required data. Accountants have the figures; other people cannot use them and if accountants will not, then we get nothing; economics continues its abstract declarations and business blunders on by individual instinct.” This ringing challenge delivered by the late Lord Stamp more than twenty-five years ago has not been fully met by either the English or the American accounting profession. An assessment of progress to date and an analysis of the factors impeding accounting research are the purposes of this paper.