In the streaked shade of a scrub mesquite a vaquero pours boiling water into a can holding two spoonfuls of concentrated coffee, adds cream from a tin, spoons in sugar to suit, and miles away from the nearest house enjoys a cup of coffee. Chances are good that the coffee came in a jar marked “Borden's” and that the cream, condensed but fresh and pure though hours away from a refrigerator or a cool well, came in a can bearing a similar label; for radiating from its New York hub The Borden Company has pushed into American homes and American life until its products are known wherever food products are bought, sold, and used.

Like all others in the historical profession, the student of economic and business history is obligated to ascertain the truth about the social order of the past, remote and immediate. To those who rely heavily upon historical data to understand the present that obligation is a categorical imperative. In the search for truth, whether in Western Europe or in the United States, the historian is faced with the necessity of correctly evaluating the evolution, functions, and operation in society of the large business unit. In some areas in space and time the large unit may be a simple partnership, in others a large corporation, in still others it may be a cartel. In any case, the historian must collect and evaluate data about this phenomenon which is almost exclusively a product of modern Western Civilization, particularly during the past one hundred years.

The drummer's rôle in American merchandising prior to the Civil War has already been pointed up in a number of articles in this BULLETIN. To the picture already presented may be added detail taken from reports on trips, to the area west of the Alleghenies, made by two sales representatives of a Connecticut manufacturer in the 1830's and the 1850's. The present article is devoted to the circumstances of the sales trips made in the 1830's. The traveler's letters cast light on the prevalence of eastern buying trips by merchants, the similar prevalence of long-established ties between western merchants and jobbers or other merchants in the eastern cities, also the further difficulties which a salesman encountered when freight and postal services were highly uncertain and banking facilities permitted eastward remittances to be made only with difficulty.

A book has recently been published in the field of medieval business which should be called to the attention of readers of the Bulletin. It is The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations, and Decline, by Raymond de Roover. This hundred-page volume in large part appeared earlier in the form of articles in a learned journal, but it is now available to a wider circle of readers in attractive form and beautifully illustrated. This notice is especially addressed to businessmen, who presumably did not see the articles as they appeared in the Journal of Economic History.

In discussing this topic I have chosen to consider only the original records of American business concerns. To be sure, there is a wealth of printed materials, primary and secondary, which are invaluable to research in the history of business, such materials as legal records, reports of government investigations, and trade publications; the indispensable research material for the study of business administration and operation, however, is the inside record of the individual company. It is, therefore, the availability of that record which I shall deal with here.

The University of Nebraska is introducing a freshman course in “The Evolution of Business and Capitalism” to replace a survey course in the economic history of England and the United States. The change in title will become effective in September, 1948, although the new content has been in use on an experimental basis for nearly a year. The stages in the development of the course may be of interest to other teachers in economic and business history.

The distinctive and by far the most difficult of all the “Problems in Writing the History of Large Business Units” centers around the word “large,” because the mere size of the project complicates each step of the historian's program. Let me be specific.

Wells, Fargo & Company, established in 1852, had its roots in Harnden & Company, the first of all express carriers. In the year 1841, Vermont-born Henry Wells, whose name was to rank in prominence with that of William F. Harnden and Alvin Adams in the history of the express business, was serving as Harnden's agent in Albany, New York. Many years later he explained how he came to leave Harnden's employ and to become the moving force in the first of several new express enterprises:

“I was in his [William F. Harnden's] employ and recommended him to extend his express line from Albany to Buffalo, and as transportation was offered, to Chicago, [but] Mr. Harnden did not believe that the People were there and he declined. His words of declination were ‘If Mr. Wells chose to run an Express to the Rocky Mountains he might — He [Mr. Harnden] would not do it.’ ”

At the close of the Napoleonic era, the banking business of France except in one respect had not advanced much over what it had been in 1789. At that time it had been dominated by Protestant Swiss, the best known of whom was Necker. Some of them like the Mallets, Delesserts, and Thélussons, descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Geneva and other places and in a later generation returned to France as Swiss. The business of these bankers consisted in lending their own funds and those entrusted to their care to worthy applicants for loans, probably merchants as well as noblemen. They administered fortunes for their owners, which is especially true of the court bankers who were charged with the financial affairs of the king and his family. In addition, like all eighteenth-century bankers they had a flourishing business in bills of exchange, including the accepting of drafts of bankers and merchants in other cities and countries. Necker is said to have organized these bankers and their foreign correspondents so as to provide by a system of short-term drafts the funds for French participation in our Revolutionary War.

American business, for the most part, is cognizant of the existence of a foreman's problem. In 1943–45 the rather infectious spirit of foreman organization was manifest in several severe walkouts in key defense plants. Newspaper and magazine readers and radio listeners were deluged with commentaries on the reasons for this abrupt outcropping of dissatisfaction and dissension. Tenuous security, denial of recognition, lack of communication, small pay packets, no provision for overtime pay — these were some of the principal causes for disorder as interpreted by these experts. Hearings were held by a panel appointed by the National War Labor Board, and the panel was deeply impressed by what seemed to be a “conspicuous disproportion between the number and seriousness of the individual complaints of foremen … on the one hand and by the evident interest of foremen in organization on the other.” It was obvious from these voluminous hearings that there was an awareness of the serious nature of the immediate threat of foremen's organization.