America's Inc. Stain
Rowe, Jonathan
AMERICA’S INC. STAIN How the corporate imperative overwhelmed America’s local decency by Jonathan Rowe John O’Hara once wrote a short story, “The Hardware Man,” about two merchants in a...
...One had to get inside them, see their lives in their own terms...
...Esterly’s store was empty during Mauser’s sales...
...Tom Esterly was a man of the old order, who sat on the boards of local charities and ran his hardware store the traditional way: practical implements displayed without ado on well-trodden wood floors...
...Still, this was before the mass marketplace had trained Americans to think of themselves as passive consumers...
...Tom Esterly never held sales, never even advertised, except in the high school yearbook...
...Esterly demurred...
...Then, in 1904, the DuPont cousins consolidated their various interests into the E. I. DuPont de Nemours Powder Company, and headquarters went on a central management kick...
...But the list is a little pathetic next to the swollen claims Zunz makes for them: namely, that these were “some of the most significant and challenging tasks of their generation...
...But no part of it belongs to you...
...It reminds us of a cautionary note that is missing in the current (and mainly valid) extolling of entrepreneurs...
...These people were doing something new...
...Esterly used to refer customers to the other store when he was out of an item...
...Then too, there were the farm implement salesmen...
...Members of the new corporate middle class were not passive minions, he argues...
...Some awarded small sales agencies to Grange supporters...
...University of Chicago Press, $24.95...
...Once, he stormed through his accountants’ offices tossing the ledgers out the window...
...But he stresses the managerial “autonomy” they demonstrate...
...Zunz discusses at length, for example, the role of middle managers at the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad...
...Told in terse detail from the evidence of correspondence between Rice and his home office, the story is suggestive of betrayal and pain...
...Nobody in America had managed a business on so large a scale...
...It is a story still heard today in airport lounges and in commuter trains heading out of Grand Central...
...Then the Volkswagen and the Japanese showed that Ford was onto something America had lost at its peril...
...The agents weren’t mere corporate foot soldiers, he argues...
...John Lamuth, a farmer in Algona, Iowa, offered to sell McCormick his fourhorse equalizer, “thoroughly tested and works to perfection...
...There are denunciations af the Robber Barons, laments for those beneath...
...Olivier Zunz...
...The aim seems to be to turn the tables on the populists, to portray the corporation as the result of grass roots participation, the popular will...
...But after World War 11, with returning vets flocking into the new white collar world, Americans did begin to worry about the kind of people these new functionaries were turning into...
...Time and again his story tells the opposite of what he intends: how little the actions of individual operatives could alter the overwhelming corporate current in which they found themselves...
...One wishes Zunz had pursued this dimension further...
...The managers elevated to the G. M. tower gradually put marketing ahead of production...
...It was a matter of principle...
...C. Wright Mills wrote White Collar, an impassioned denunciation of the middle-class workplace...
...But the conservative politics of the country channeled opposition into mainly economic measures, such as railroad regulation and antitrust law...
...certainly there’s nothing wrong with showing the middle class a little respect...
...The result is engaging and suggestive if at times bogged down in detail...
...A week from Saturday night at nine o’clock, this store goes out of business forever...
...Lou Mauser was an entrepreneur, not a large corporation...
...Instinctively, he broke the bounds that had kept commerce within a community norm...
...STAIN How the corporate imperative overwhelmed America’s local decency by Jonathan Rowe John O’Hara once wrote a short story, “The Hardware Man,” about two merchants in a Pennsylvania town...
...Ford’s precepts were a kind of Shiite version of the corporate engine, committed to basics but still having a homogenizing impact upon the nation...
...The cultural impact of the corporation-turning independent business people into employees, uprooting enterprise from its community context-went increasingly unnoticed as more and more Americans joined the ranks...
...Where would the salesmen sit...
...They hired clerks and workers, wrote job descriptions, advertised land for sale, reorganized payroll sheets, and the like...
...Capita I ist Shiite For all Zunz’s attempts to portray corporate foot soldiers as builders of the new business culture, the one individual in this book who truly stands out is Henry Ford...
...A million dollars cash,” he said...
...Writing from Sycamore, Illinois to the main office in 1869, the agent noted that if a farmer had a piano in the house, he was likely to choose a mower “because it is polished, burnished, and painted fancifully...
...Market segmentation, product lines, and annual style changesall these were born far from the wrenches and welding gear...
...Yet having begun with Hofstadter’s challenge, Zunz proceeds to forget it...
...Nevertheless, the book is a rich lode of business history, and Zunz is an observant guide when he is not straining for grand formulations...
...Trying to elevate the white-collar army, he ends up inflating it...
...The real lesson seems to be the opposite: how deeply the corporation, exempt from the web of local memory and reciprocity, affected the mores of otherwise decent people...
...Clerical errors Zunz has done much inventive research in corporate archives, pored through correspondence between field agents and headquarters, and examined floor plans and visitor logs in the new office towers that arose around the turn of the century...
...What is missing is a sense of the significance of the ,ordinary-in this case the men and women who left the Tom Esterly world to become salesmen and clerks and middle managers at corporations like DuPont...
...As with the coal agents who swindled illiterates in the Appalachians, their story still inspires outrage after decades of retelling...
...Ford was a fundamentalist on production, a captain of industry who had more in common with Thorstein Veblen than with his industrialist peers...
...Rice watched helplessly while headquarters violated his territorial authority without even telling him...
...Hofstadter replied with some criticism of his own...
...American corporate capitalism was largely the creation of a new middle class,’’ he writes, in one of many assertions along that line...
...White Collar in particular drew a great deal of criticism, and at one point Mills wrote to Richard Hofstadter, the historian, for advice on how to respond...
...The good will would have to be separate...
...It wasn’t enough to throw stones at the new corporate bureaucrats, he said...
...In the process, it broke down the glue of community and local tradition that Tom Esterly represented...
...They took initiative and were “highly sensitive to market circumstances...
...Zunz tells, for example, how salesmen for the McCormick farm implement company dealt with anticorporate radicals on the farm, and what happened when the new office towers brought large numbers of men and women together in the workplaceaespite efforts of employers to keep the sexes apart...
...Lou Mauser, by contrast, was a shrewd and driven man without apparent social ties...
...Zunz acknowledges the unseemliness of these transactions...
...People sensed these changes and talked about them...
...Today, by contrast, most companies return many suggestions unopened, to forestall litigation over royalty claims...
...Eventually, he went out of business...
...He had to submit to humiliating audits of his petty cash accounts...
...One can almost imagine the breathless adulation of a Forbes profile...
...He even hired Tom Esterly’s employees out from under him...
...Why no pity, no warmth...
...Centralized economic power posed no problem, the assumption went, as long as prices weren’t too high...
...But Zunz founders on a desire to be significant...
...Zunz describes a culture coming haltingly to terms with the new mixing of the sexes...
...In other words it isn’t for sale to you...
...While General Motors was building a modem office tower that separated management from the factory, Ford stuck his accountants into a wing of his new assembly line...
...He contributed free gunpowder for police and fire department picnics and festivities so he could store his powder illegally near his office...
...After expressing perfunctory regrets, he offered to buy out Esterly’s stock, 20 cents on the dollar...
...Unawed by the experts in Chicago, the farmers were full of suggestions for McCormick to make his implements better...
...Arthur Miller’s Jonathan Rowe is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...He doesn’t get inside these lives, but instead enlists them as evidence for a theory calculated to make waves among historians...
...Contrarian history like this is often a source of new insight...
...Most of us probably forget, walking by the office towers of Chicago or New York, that a hundred years or so ago a whole culture was virtually invented in these structures...
...Consider the railroad agents who lied and cheated in order to acquire land...
...After a few years, he quit...
...Quirky and contentious, given to soy bread fads and homegrown monetary prescriptions, Ford emerges as a prophetic voice against what American capitalism eventually became...
...The question Zunz doesn’t ask is whether anyone could have done these jobs much differently, given the imperative from above...
...the farmers in his district that portended the future of the American auto industry...
...But he represented the animus that the corporation set loose upon the nation after the Civil War-because of that war, many would say...
...The secretaries...
...He ran big display ads in the papers, opened branch stores, and sold at cost during promotional sales...
...His letters of complaint fell on deaf ears...
...After Tom Esterly announced he was going out of business, Lou Mauser paid him a visit...
...Historians have tended to dismiss the middle class, Zunz notes, not least during that period in America known as the Gilded Age in which the modern corporation came into being...
...This call for empathy is the professed point of departure for Making America Corporate,* by Olivier Zunz, who teaches history at the University of Virginia...
...He detested waste, inefficiency, academic degrees, accountants, financierscredentialism and paper enterprise of all sorts...
...Hooray for them...
...They’re all down at Mauser’s,” his head clerk would say...
...Companies maintained voluminous correspondence like this with farmers...
...collectively, they established the social grooves in which America marched for at least another 50 years...
...It redefined America as a mass market, and Americans as consumers...
...At first he enjoyed much of the same autonomy he once had running his own business...
...Death of a Salesman portrayed a miserable man cut off from his instincts and roots...
...Ford, meanwhile, stuck with his Model T. He seemed a quaint relic for many years thereafter, and the Model T became a synonym for “behind the times...
...One of the few flesh-and-blood sketches in Making America Corporate shows how much more this happened at the middle-management level: Elliot Rice was a successful merchant in Western Pennsylvania who moved to Chicago in 1882 to represent DuPont in a new regional office...
...This former independent businessman had been reduced to a functionary...
...This civility stopped, but otherwise Esterly held to the traditional ways...
...One McCormick agent made an observation about *Making America Corporate...
...Hofstadter admonished...
...They actually created the new corporations as much as the captains of the industry did...
...His sister ran the Springfield branch and generated good will by helping the families of sick miners...
...The number of clerks in the nation jumped by 127 percent in the first decade of this century alone...
...The way they dealt with the farmer radicals was protoDukakis: stress the technology, and stay away from politics...
...Oh, I know it isn’t worth it, Mauser, but I won’t sell it to you for any less...
...Without recognizing this significance, Zunz cites the case of a railroad agent who actually apologized to a Nebraska landowner after buying his property under false pretenses...
...Fixtures and good will included...
...Those are all worthy and important functions, well deserving of a gold watch after 50 years...
Vol. 22 • September 1990 • No. 8
