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The Small City Industrialist, 1900–1950: A Case Study of Norristown, Pennsylvania*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2012
Abstract
Historians of the entrepreneur and of the firm encounter great difficulty in finding comparative data against which to measure their subject. Empirical studies such as this one, dealing in broad yet specific terms with the ebb and flow of enterprise in a community, provide a workable guide to what constitutes typical patterns of business development.
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- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1958
References
1 Kaplan, A. D. H., Small Business: Its Place and Problems (New York, 1948), p. vii.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., p. 42. The number of establishments per 1,000 population was 15.43 in 1900, reached 18.38 in 1926, and stood at 15.10 in 1943.
3 Ibid., p. 57.
4 See Sidney Goldstein and Mayer, Kurt, “Patterns of Business Growth and Survival in a Medium-Sized Community,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. XVII (1957), pp. 193–206Google Scholar, a statistical study of birth and death rates of business in Norristown, Pennsylvania, based on data in city directories. Hutchinson, R. G., Hutchinson, A. R., & Newcomer, Mabel, “A Study in Business Mortality: Length of Life of Business Enterprises in Poughkeepsie, New York, 1843–1936,” American Economic Review, Vol. XXVIII (1938), pp. 497–514Google Scholar, is likewise based on city directories. Data showing numbers of new and discontinued businesses for the United States as a whole appear in Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office).
5 Kaplan, op. cit., p. 4.
6 Bowen, Howard R., The Business Enterprise as a Subject for Research, Social Science Research Council, Pamphlet 11 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1955), p. 48.Google Scholar
7 Out of 146 industrial establishments in the Norristown area in 1950, 115 had fewer than 100 employees. See Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 10–22, for some definitions of small business. A proposed system of classification which recognizes the wide variations in different industries was submitted to the United States Senate Committee on Small Business in 1951. According to this classification, a concern with 50 employees might be regarded as small business in one industry, while a firm with 4,000 employees might be regarded as small in another industry. Small-Business Programs of the National Production Authority, Hearings Before the Select Committee on Small Business, United States Senate, 82d Cong., 1st Sess., Oct. 4, 1951 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1951).
8 Corporation, Synthane, Synihane, 1929–1939 (Oaks, Pennsylvania: The Company, 1939).Google Scholar
9 As Andrews, P. W. S., Manufacturing Business (London, 1949)Google Scholar, points out, where special factors such as low labor costs “do not apply and where, nevertheless, the smaller businesses are surviving relatively profitably, the reason will usually be found to be the fact of the smaller business being able to specialize more effectively than the bigger business is able to do, in effect concentrating more upon the sections of the market which are relatively more profitable for it. In this connexion, it is necessary to recognize that what is ordinarily and conveniently thought of as a single industry is usually producing a group of products, which are alike in that they emerge from the same sort of technical processes, but yet differ significantly in quality…. The smaller business is frequently a lot freer to ‘go for’ a particular section of the common market than is the big business, whose very position will make it necessary for it to sell to the market as a whole, taking what orders come its way.” (Chapter VII.)
10 Boore, James P., The Seamless Story (Los Angeles, 1951), pp. 205–206.Google Scholar
11 Norristown Daily Register, Dec. 5, 1908. Norristown Times Herald, Nov. 14, 1951. Minute Book, Board of Directors, Rambo and Regar, Inc.
12 Cole, Arthur H., “Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurial History: The Institutional Setting,” in Harvard University Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, Change and the Entrepreneur (Cambridge, 1949), p. 101.Google Scholar
13 For example, in 1907 local investors contributed $20,000 toward a proposed fund of $50,000 to erect a factory building for an out-of-town automobile manufacturer who proposed moving to Norristown, but the company ultimately decided to remain at its Bryn Mawr location. Norristown Register, March 20, March 21, April 5, 1907.
14 Greenhut, M. L., Plant Location in Theory and in Practice (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1956), p. 277Google Scholar, points out the importance of personal considerations in location decisions of a group of Alabama manufacturers. In some cases, “the personal considerations were unrelated to cost or sales advantages; they expressed themselves mainly in the sense of offering psychic income.”
15 Bread and bakery products are distributed daily or more frequently to retailers. Commercial gases are shipped in heavy cylinders by track to industrial users.
16 For a brief history of the Claflin Company, see Gras, N. S. B., Business and Capitalism: An Introduction to Business History (New York, 1939), pp. 201–206.Google Scholar
17 Twenty of the sixty-five companies are enterprises whose origins or location were considered in the previous sections.
18 More than a third of the business discontinuances in the United States in the period before World War II were attributed to change of ownership, according to Kaplan, op. cit., p. 56.
19 According to Victor S. Clark, the “displacement of cheaper weaves like ingrains by more expensive fabrics and the substitution of rugs for continuous floor coverings” was a development which began early in the century. History of Manufactures in the United States (New York, 1929; 3 volumes), Vol. III, pp. 207–208.
20 Bowen, op. cit., p. 74.