| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. By Walter A. Friedman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 356 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-674-01298-4.)
Walter A. Friedman has crafted a carefully researched history of selling in America from 1877 to the mid-1940s. His modern mid-twentieth-century salesmen evolved circuitously from nineteenth-century peddlers to commercial traveling salesmen, from members of corporate sales forces to William H. Whyte's organization men. Arguing that salesmanship, a uniquely masculine American phenomenon, was pivotal to the creation of the consumer economy, Friedman suggests that, as a global market emerged, selling was systematized to spur the consumption so necessary to mass production. He supports his claims with copious statistics, a wide array of archival and business sources, and memoirs and fiction.	1
Historical case studies illustrate the motivations, techniques, and business practices that emerged as selling matured with the growth of national and international markets. One chapter is devoted to John H. Patterson of National Cash Register, who developed an "all encompassing science of selling" (p. 117). Like other servants of mass production, Patterson used the ideas of Frederick Taylor to shape scientific selling strategies. An intimidating but charismatic man, he was one of the first to create a company culture by promoting health fads, holding motivational sales meetings, and establishing (and regularly raising) quotas. Patterson aimed to create a cash register trust, just as John D. Rockefeller had created an oil trust and James Buchanan a tobacco trust.	. . .

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