The Enterprising Americans: A Business History of the United States [antikvár]

Introduction T„ .HIS book, which in a somewhat condensed form ran through thirteen successive issues of Fortune magazine, had a double origin. First of all, John Davenport, one of Fortune's assistant managing editors, had been dismayed by a daughter's request for something to counteract the "robber baron" approach to American business history for a class paper she had to write. Looking for a history which would treat business as a prime creative force, Mr. Davenport found nothing made to his hand. His suggestion to Duncan Norton-Taylor, Fortune's managing editor, that the deficiency be repaired fell on ready ears. How I came into the picture as a chosen instrument derived from conversations with Mr. Davenport. He had listened to my complaints, voiced in certain reviews of "new" American histories, that the books all seemed to be written by authors who looked to politics for their guiding thread. The ancient tradition of Bancroft had never been overthrown. True enough, the Beards, Charles and Mary, had suggested the importance of a Carnegie, an Armour, a Cornelius Vanderbilt, to the "rise of American civilization." But, having suggested the "Elizabethan" contributions of such figures, the Beards had returned to the mode of their times, which was to let economic matters provide the ground tone for the usual political history. Later on, Caret Garrett, in The American Story, really did accept the great U.S. business innovators as the equivalent of Drake and Hawkins, the adventurous mariners who, in the age of Elizabeth, laid the basis for Britain's world mercantile empire. But the emphasis of Mr. Garrett's history was still on the political story. Mr. Davenport's search for an author and my own inclinations to correct what seemed to me an ancient bias coincided, with what justification the reader of this book must decide for himself. It is not that either Mr. Davenport or myself takes an anarchic view of things: man is, after all, a political animal, as Aristotle was prob- IX