Book Review

Canada and the United States

When writing about business, historians often have to decide whether to focus on the firm or the boss. Edwin J. Perkins, a specialist on the history of American banking and finance, focuses on the boss, Charles Merrill, to personalize the history of Merrill Lynch, the securities firm he cofounded in 1914. The resulting book does a very good job explaining brokerage and investment banking operations and how government regulation affected them. Although by no means uncritical of Merrill and his firm, Perkins clearly admires both for their innovations and inclusive policies. Merrill was a Wall Street outsider who succeeded in promoting the "people's capitalism," stock ownership for a broad-based middle class, sometimes by challenging the practices of the tight, conservative old guard of syndicate managers at the New York Stock Exchange.

1

This combination of biography and history of a business firm was made possible because Perkins received cooperation from Merrill's family and unrestricted access to Merrill Lynch's historical files. Those sources yielded personal interviews and some of Merrill's correspondence but apparently not Merrill Lynch analyses of stocks or many important internal documents. What Perkins did find especially useful in Merrill Lynch's files were five unpublished authorized manuscripts: three biographies of Merrill, one of his partner Edmund Lynch, and one history of the firm. In an appendix, Perkins provides a telling critique of those manuscripts for too often failing to frame their narratives in the most appropriate context; without recognizing the broad signficance of their subjects, they gave priority to anecdotes over substance and analysis. He aims to rectify those deficiencies in his account, but he does not fully succeed.

. . .