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The American Business Elite: A Collective Portrait*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Affiliation:
Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University
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Extract

The Dictionary of American Biography contains 1,464 biographies of eminent American businessmen. Among them are most of the wellknown financial and business figures, as well as many others never widely known or else long forgotten. The announced criterion for inclusion in the D.A.B. is that the person “did something notable in some field of American life.” Over 100 “consulting specialists” handled the various lists of candidates for inclusion; these specialists included economic and business historians.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 5 , supplement S1 , December 1945 , pp. 20 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1945

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References

1 Briefly, the D.A.B. includes persons who died before 1927–1935, the exact date depending upon the alphabetical position of the name in question. The present study includes the original twenty volumes of the D.A.B. It does not include the one supplementary volume, which was issued too late for inclusion in these tabulations.

2 Members of the author's seminars at the University of Maryland, A. B. Conner, C. R.

3 This does not necessarily imply criticism of the D.A.B. as a source for sociological work on collective biographies. It is not known how many of these deficiencies are due to the schedulers' lack of persistence and how much relevant information was actually not in the D.A.B. On many items which we have run, the schedules were rechecked against the biographies for that one item. In several cases this slightly increased our usable returns.

4 These generations were determined in conference with three professional historians, each of whom was requested to set up a periodization for the American social structure. Approximately thirty to thirty-five years were then subtracted from the middle years of these pivotal eras and treated as the middle year of birth for each of our generations. These units were checked for each of the tables: all data were tabulated by decades, and each three decades making up a single generation were inspected. The decade structure of each generation appeared to be satisfactorily homogeneous in each of the tabulations. The first period, 1570–1699, was rather arbitrarily determined by the distribution of our data and the range of the earlier generations. The births occurring during this period are evenly distributed over the 120 years. The seventh generation is somewhat biased in favor of short-lived persons and anything associated with this fact: it contains more persons born in the fifties than in the sixties and more born in the sixties than in the seventies.

5 “Place of origin” means the place of birth unless (a) the family of the subject moved before the subject was ten years of age, or (b) before the subject's dependence upon the family was terminated; occasionally, (c) locality of elementary schooling was taken as the indicator of place of origin. The decisive idea which guided us in all doubtful cases of origin was where the subject “grew up.” “Place of origin” thus means the locality of the major preoccupational biography.

6 This does not preclude the possibility that these first jobs were already high. Ascent or success does not necessarily mean “from poor to rich,” but is relative to the beginning levels. See Table III, however, for cross tabulations of class origin, migrations, and upward mobility.

7 The data on Table I, like the other tables in this report, are broken down by generations, as defined in footnote 4 above.

8 The population and the economic character of the divisions and regions used in the tables changed greatly during the time span with which we are concerned. Ideally, these difficulties of changing and heterogeneous categories might be overcome by progressive redefinitions of the regions in terms of such factors as population density. Such a refinement would lower the proportions of origins and successes in “the West.” In view of the small numbers in our sample and the chaotic and unreliable conditions of population statistics for the earlier periods, such precision is not entirely possible, and the attempt would seem mislocated. But we have compared the percentage of total successes in the West with the percentage of total population in the West. The resulting figures show that the former exceeded the latter only from around 1780 to 1810 (for the generation, that is, born 1760–1789); thereafter the latter exceeded the former.

9 The critical ratio, , of 20.4% and 71.7% is 18.4.

10 For a more adequate conception of class of origin, see Table V.

11 The three generations composing this time period are homogeneous with regard to the items considered here.

12 The critical ratio of these two proportions indicates that the chances are 98 in 100 that this difference is statistically significant.

13 Quoted by Nock, A. J., Jefferson (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926), p. 108.Google Scholar

14 In 1763, probably about one third of the people of North America, were “legally unfree.” Greene, Evarts B., The Revolutionary Generation, 1763–1790 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1943), p. 75.Google Scholar

15 See Sorokin, P., Social Mobility (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1927), for various references to this literature.Google Scholar

16 Prepared by Miss M. G. Stavropoulos and Miss K. M. Wood in “The Sociology of Professions” at the University of Maryland, 1943; unpublished.

17 For the technique of “discernment,” see Komarovsky, Mirra, The Unemployed Man and His Family (New York: The Dryden Press, 1940), Appendix 1.Google Scholar

18 Sixteenth Census, “United States Summary” (Washington, 1943), Table VI.Google Scholar

19 That the D.A.B. sample is not biased toward including businessmen of higher education is perhaps suggested by the Taussig and Joslyn educational figures. In their sample, big businessmen actually in the higher offices of business organizations in 1928 were educated as follows: 31.9 per cent, college graduates; 13.4 per cent, college nongraduates; 28.0 per cent, high school or equivalent; 25.7 per cent, grammar school; and 1.0 per cent, none. Taussig, F. W. and Joslyn, C. S., American Business Leaders (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), p. 162, Table 37.Google Scholar

20 The total number of cases from which this 37.5 per cent was computed is rather small; the figure is quite unstable.

21 Our schedules on “The American Political Elite” are not yet complete enough to permit a cross check on this. We are particularly interested in the type and number of governmental officials whose departments have to do with the regulations of business and who are mobile between public and private structures.

22 Cf. Nettels, C. P., The Roots of American Civilization (New York: F. S. Crofts and Company, 1938), pp. 311–12.Google Scholar In connection with our data on political office holding among the business elite, there is the possibility that the D.A.B. is biased toward including those eminent businessmen who were also eminent in other contexts, including the political. We have no way of checking this for certain. If, however, such a bias does exist, it would distort only the figures on the proportions at any given time; if we may assume that it operated constantly across the generations, the trends we have indicated might still be correct.

23 Blaisdell, Donald C., Economic Power and Political Pressures (Temporary National Economic Committee, Monograph No. 26. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1941), is the latest factual account of the matter.Google Scholar

24 Our schedule contained detailed requests for these items as well as for religious affiliations, indications on status, membership in voluntary associations, etc. The information obtained is not adequate for statistically reliable use.

25 Charles, A. and Beard, Mary R., Rise of American Civilization (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936), II, 173 ff.Google Scholar

26 See Beard, Rise of American Civilization, I, 635.

27 Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, I (September 1839), 201.Google Scholar Quoted by Thomases, Jerome, in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXX (December 1943), 398.Google Scholar