Alfred Dupont Chandler, Jr.

Luck and the Shaping of a Historian's Professional Education

In 1964, the Council of the Massachusetts Historical Society created the John F. Kennedy Medal to honor the slain president and recognize those individuals who, in their judgment, have "rendered distinguished service to the cause of history." The Council stated that the medal should be awarded "from time to time (but not too often)," making it a rare honor. Before the fall of 2003, only four other historians had received the medal: Samuel Eliot Morison, Dumas Malone, Oscar Handlin, and Edmund S. Morgan. Professor Alfred Dupont Chandler, Jr., now joins this exceptional group. Awarded to him on October 28, 2003, at the annual meeting, the Kennedy Medal expresses the Society's profound respect for Professor Chandler's extraordinary career and the enormity of his contribution to the study of history–particularly to business history. The Straus Professor of Business History, emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, he is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). Chandler wrote or edited about thirty other books on the history of business and management, including Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (1962); The Railroads, The Nation's First Big Business (1965); Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990); and A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, edited with James W. Cortada (2000). Professor Chandler also edited several volumes of the Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower (1970). Harvard University Press will publish his latest book, Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Chemical and Electrical Industries, in the spring of 2005. Its predecessor, Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronic and Computer Industries, appeared in 2002. The range and depth of his work is striking, and we are privileged to offer his thoughts on receiving the Kennedy Medal–The Editors.

LAST YEAR IN THIS JOURNAL Ed Morgan published his remarks upon receiving the Society's John F. Kennedy Award for "doing outstanding service for history." MHS director Bill Fowler has asked me to do the same, establishing a tradition for Kennedy Award winners, and I am pleased to do so. I will expand a little on the basic theme of my informal remarks when I received the award about the creation of the academic discipline of business history. Additionally, I want to remark upon what I came to understand about my own career as I reconsidered my original Kennedy Award talk last October.

The emergence of business history as an academic discipline is inextricably tied to the development of the broader field of economic history. Creation of the Research Center of Entrepreneurial History at Harvard in 1940 by Joseph Schumpeter and Arthur H. Cole, both members of the university's economics department, constituted one of the most important events in the development of the modern field of business history. Schumpeter (1883–1950), author of the oft-quoted economic term "creative destruction" and one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, trained a generation of great economic thinkers. Cole (1889–1974), professor and librarian at the Harvard Business School, almost single-handedly brought about the study of entrepreneurship and authored many studies, including the much-respected Business Enterprise in Its Social Setting (1959).

The Center, although short-lived, played a significant role in creation of the field of business history by bringing together young scholars from the United States and abroad to research and write economic history. Researchers who came to the Center grounded their studies in corporate records, statistics, and other essential historical data that focused on entrepreneurial and industrial enterprises in a broad range of areas. They asked the historical records about who, when, and where, before attempting to answer the how and why of economic and industrial development. In other words, Schumpter and Cole set scholars onto a historical approach to the study of economics. After World War II, the formation of The Economic History Association with its Journal of Economic History and annual meetings further solidified the legitimacy of a historical approach to analyzing business and economic change.

In this same period, the discipline of economics moved in another direction, that of the systematic collection and analysis of statistical data. The new trends not only affected economic departments, but also the U.S. Department of Commerce, as testified by the publication of the two-volume Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (1960). Economists developed new economic theories based on such new historical findings.

This intellectual activity led to the publication in 1971 of The Redefinition of American Economic History, by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman. That title reflected their intention to "introduce students to the quantitative revolution in historiography and the far reaching and substantive discoveries produced by the new techniques." "The essays in the book," they emphasized, displayed "the powers of simple economic theory and mathematics in illuminating the problems of American life." In this way, Fogel and Engerman created a new economic discipline, cliometrics [Clio–Greek muse of history], that directly challenged the Schumpeterian historical approach, based on the enterprises and industries that had evolved over time. To practioners of cliometrics, such efforts and other human economic activities became little more than sources for statistical data.

These trends wrought major changes in the teaching and writing of economic history and also led to its bifurcation. Economic history scholarship became dominated by statistical analysis and a new branch of study, business history, became institutionalized as a separate and accepted academic discipline. The process began in an informal manner. Historians met at the annual convention of The Economic History Association, presented papers on various aspects of business history, and labeled themselves the Business History Conference. As members of The Economic History Association, they continued to rely on the Journal of Economic History and the Harvard Business History Review to publish their articles.

By the late 1970s, scholars formalized the Business History Conference with its own elected officers and annual meetings. In the early 1980s, the same pattern occurred in Japan and Europe. In Japan, business historians began the Fuji Conference, for the presentation of scholarly papers, and the Business History Society of Japan, with an annual yearbook that publishes articles in English to reach an international audience. In 1981, academics formed the German Society of Business History and published its own yearbook, also in English. British scholars, who had long approached economic history as history, created a comparable society and began publishing the journal Business History.

Meetings of the International Economic History Society, held once every four years from the 1960s through the 1990s, continued to provide a major outlet for papers on business history. At the same time, international conferences at universities in Stockholm, Milan, and elsewhere led to the publication of scholarship on specialized topics, including major works on broad themes as embraced by such books as the Dynamic Firm, Big Business and the Wealth of Nations, and Business Around the World.

In the same period, university and college courses that focused on business history expanded. In the 1960s, in addition to the classes offered earlier at the Harvard Business School, new courses at Ohio State, Northwestern, Bowdoin, Columbia, Berkeley, and elsewhere made business history available to a growing number of young scholars. By the 1990s, graduates from those colleges and universities took their skills in business history to an ever-widening number of universities. As a result, economics departments rarely hired business historians and today scholars of business history are nearly all members of history departments.

Academic journals also played a major role in shaping the new discipline. Harvard's Business History Review, published since the 1920s, found itself in the 1980s in the company of similar journals from British, Japanese, and German historical societies. In 1988, Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History, published by the Business History Conference, joined the burgeoning field. Corporate and Industrial Change, an influential journal begun in 1992 at the University of California, Berkeley, publishes economic history articles based upon a wide variety of methodological approaches. Business history is now written by scholars who employ both traditional and cliometric analytical tools and thrives as a separate academic discipline.

I now turn to reviewing the impact of my World War II experience on my graduate education, for the war proved critical to my intellectual growth. Graduating in Harvard's Class of 1940, I was immediately affected by the war in Europe. I completed my military commitments in June 1950, at the outset of the Korean War. During those ten years, I was presented with intellectual challenges that otherwise would not have presented themselves in a normal graduate education.

Let me begin by saying that I always wanted to be a historian. In 1926, when I was eight, my father gave me a copy of Elementary History of the United States by William Fiske Gordon. I read it again and again, more than twenty times. I still have the book and looked it over one more time before my talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society. I am impressed by how readable and relevant it remains.

At Harvard University, of course, I majored in history, but only in my senior year was I certain that I would become a professional historian. That year, I took Frederick Merk's class on the Westward Movement. I spent the rest of my time writing my senior thesis, a study of the political campaign of 1876 in South Carolina. In this fascinating election, the low country's rice and cotton planters supported Gov. Daniel H. Chamberlain, the carpetbagger from Boston, and the up country backed Wade Hampton, a Confederate hero. I wanted to do a thorough job and enjoy a couple of weeks of duck hunting on my grandmother's South Carolina rice plantation (next to a much larger one owned by Boston's Tom Yawkey), so my research carried me to Charleston and Columbia.

Because my family had summered in Nantucket, sailing became second nature to me. I participated in intercollegiate races on the Charles River and elsewhere throughout my undergraduate days. In May 1940, Jack Kennedy, his roommate Jim Rousmaniere, two other seniors, and I went to the Naval Academy at Annapolis to participate in the annual big boat intercollegiate sailing competition. All of us felt fortunate not to have to muster at quarters at 6:00 A.M. Little did I realize that within seven months I would be at the Naval Academy and indeed rising at that time.

On our return to Cambridge, we learned that the Germans had reached Paris and that the rescue of British forces at Dunkirk had begun. As a member of the Class of 1940, I had planned to go to graduate school in September. Instead, World War II intervened and I did not return permanently to Harvard until 1946. Mine was a soft war, but it provided me with a maturing and invaluable learning experience. Indeed, of all the various influences that shaped my career as a business historian, what I learned during the war strikes me as the most important.

In June of 1940, President Roosevelt announced the V-7 Program, which permitted qualified individuals to become a naval officer in a bit over three months time. During our graduation ceremonies, a sizeable number of the class went down to the Boston Navy Yard in Charlestown to sign up as a naval officer, becoming "90-day wonders." On arrival, our contingent was ordered to strip down. After spending the day standing around with nothing on, military officials sent us home. Anyone who has served in the military will see nothing particularly unusual in this.

In September, I spent a month as an apprentice seaman on the U.S.S. Quincy, a heavy cruiser that the Japanese later sunk off Savo Island during the Battle of Guadalcanal. After my brief tour as an apprentice seaman, in itself a valuable experience, I elected to go to Annapolis to join the first reserve class at the academy. The three-month course provided an informative and surprisingly pleasant introduction to the military. Graduating in May 1941, I returned to Harvard Summer School for two excellent courses: Sterling Dow's on Minonian and Greek history and David Owen's on British history.

In August 1941, when summer school ended, I decided that the U.S. would most certainly enter the war before the fall term ended. So I made the trip to the Bureau of Personnel in Washington to request active duty. The officer on duty asked what I would like. I replied, "What do you have?" "Trinidad" was the response. I answered, "Too hot." He asked, "How about Cape May, New Jersey?" I exclaimed, "Delighted!" My home was in Wilmington, Delaware, and many of my friends lived not far away in Princeton.

After six weeks at Cape May on a fishing trawler converted into a mine-sweeper, I received orders to report to the Atlantic Fleet Camera Party on the staff of the commander of the Service Force, Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Alexander Sharp, whose flagship was in Norfolk, Virginia. That assignment, my greatest piece of luck during the war years, proved invaluable. The Camera Party recorded the gunnery effectiveness of vessels in the Atlantic Fleet. Still photographs recorded the fall of shot at towed targets and motion pictures tracked anti-aircraft bursts at towed, sleeve-like, airborne targets. Exercises took place in Chesapeake Bay, protected by a net that stretched across its mouth from the German submarines that soon prowled the coast. The recently organized Fleet Camera Party unit included two Naval Academy lieutenants and half a dozen recent graduates of the V-7 Program or university naval ROTC courses. All the men in the program, like myself, had graduated from college within the last year or two. The attack on Pearl Harbor occurred almost immediately after formation of the unit. The first ships we serviced possessed experienced crews, but increasingly the vessels whose gunnery we documented came manned with the greenest of recruits.

Late in 1942, the Navy sent me to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to establish a camera unit for the new destroyers stationed there in part to protect the shipping lanes to the Panama Canal. In the spring of 1943, the Navy ordered me back to Norfolk, Virginia. When the two senior officers and Annapolis graduates of my unit, now lieutenant commanders, transferred to combat duty, my closest friend, Ted Bowman, became the Atlantic Fleet Camera Officer and I became the Assistant Camera Officer. I was twenty-four years old and Ted was twenty-six.

By this time, inexperienced crews manned nearly all the ships sent to the Chesapeake Bay for an extensive training schedule. When I took one party out to train on a new destroyer, I learned just how youthful ships' crews had become. Much to my astonishment, as I went aboard I was greeted by a friend who had courted my younger sister. "George," I asked, "what are you doing here?" He replied, "I'm the Executive Officer," which placed him second in command of a new destroyer that dwarfed the British cruisers we often provided with camera party service.

As the Fleet Camera Officers, Bowman and I were responsible for quickly delivering our analysis of the accuracy of the gun crews on each of the ships based on photographed gunnery exercises. First came the destroyers, hence my mission to Guantanamo. By the time I had returned to Norfolk, we were servicing new light cruisers, next heavy cruisers, then battleships and aircraft carriers. The Navy established Camera Party units at other naval bases. When I first returned to Norfolk, I helped set up one such base in Bermuda. Soon others appeared in Trinidad and Casco Bay (Portland), Maine. Ted, more than I, was responsible for all supervision and management of the unit, as well as our Norfolk base.

The remaining portion of our mission involved preparation of the Atlantic Fleet for combat in support of the major landings in Europe. In August 1943, with the conquest of the northern coast of Africa completed, the Allies landed 140,000 soldiers in Sicily, followed in September by landings at Solerno and Naples. The Anzio landings up the coast took place in January 1944. Finally, D-Day and the Normandy invasion took place in early June. Meeting the Camera Party's responsibilities in those pre-invasion weeks reminded me of prolonged exam periods at college, followed by a much-appreciated period of rest for both officers and enlisted men. Ted and I would take our reference ship, usually an elegant yacht, up the James River to Jamestown where our wives would meet us for a long weekend in Williamsburg.

For meritorious services as Assistant Fleet Camera officer from July 1943 until March 1945 while attached to the staff of the Commander Service Force, Atlantic Fleet, I received the following citation:

Lieutenant Commander Chandler, with unflagging interest and determined efforts, devised new triangulation doctrines which enabled the Atlantic Fleet Camera Party to greatly expand services to the Fleet despite the limited specialized equipment available. He was responsible for developing a method of computing fall of shot which reduced by one-half the time required for the operation and thereby made it possible to complete reports of gunnery exercises prior to departing for combat areas. Through his skill and untiring efforts, the large error in obtaining accurate range from tow to target was greatly reduced. He was largely responsible for the development of a method of determining accurate deflection error without the use of a reference vessel and thus made this service available in training areas where no reference vessels were available.
Lieutenant Commander Chandler's initiative, efficiency, and outstanding performance of duty reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Naval Service.

In early January 1945, my conscience troubled me. I had been enjoying the softest of duties on the admiral's staff with sea pay. I had married Fay in January 1944. After Ted's marriage, he and Flo moved into our apartment building which was across from the Norfolk Yacht and Country Club. So, I planned a visit to the Bureau of Personnel. As a result of my request, I received a transfer to the Photo Interpretation School at Anacostia across the river from Washington. Among the things I did during my three months there, I evaluated photographs of bombing missions, particularly over European industrial centers. Through this work I became familiar with production processes, plant layouts, and the like, which later proved helpful to me as a historian of industrial enterprises.

After I completed the course at Anacostia, the Navy sent me to the Joint Intelligence Center at Pearl Harbor and then quickly transferred our unit to Guam. During my brief stay there, I studied photographs of a beach on Kyushu, Japan, the location for a diversionary landing to the main one intended for Tokyo Bay. The bombing attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered the costly invasions, in terms of American lives, unnecessary. Our unit was stationed on the same airfield from which the famed B-29 bombers Enola Gay and Bockscar left for their bombing runs–the flights that ended the war and began the nuclear age.

With the end of the war, my good fortune continued. I had forty-four points, the minimum needed in the system that the military devised to establish an orderly release of personnel to return to the United States, and the promise of extended leave. After four weeks on a Liberty Ship, I gratefully arrived in San Francisco and quickly returned home to Delaware, just in time to enter graduate school for the 1945 fall term.

Because five years had passed since the beginning of my graduate work at Harvard, I decided to start over, this time at the University of North Carolina. Paul Buck, who had been my thesis advisor at Harvard, urged me to begin graduate school with Fletcher Green at Chapel Hill. Choosing an outside field in sociology, I took courses from Howard Odum and Rupert Vance which influenced me considerably and taught me the value of sociology for a historian. I returned to Harvard the next September to work with Samuel Eliot Morison and eagerly arrived at Boylston Hall where graduate students met and conferred with their mentors. Professor Morison marched into the room in a commander's uniform, still on active duty having been asked by President Roosevelt to write the history of the navy during the war. He later retired as naval historian with the rank of rear admiral. Again I chose sociology as my outside field, much against Morison's wishes. "Sociology!" he exclaimed. Again, luck shined on me. Thanks to Talcott Parsons, I encountered the writings of Max Weber, Emile Durkhiem, Frederick W. Taylor, and many others who did so much to shape my thinking about economic and business history.

If World War II provided a unique learning experience unavailable to the typical graduate student, graduate school in the post–World War II years also proved unusual and formative. With the GI Bill of Rights paying the tariff, my fellow students and I entered graduate school possessing maturity beyond our years and often with the responsibility of wives and children. My memories are filled with the constant and stimulating discussions that I had with close friends. This lively interaction characterized our "cell" of the Henry Adams Club, a well-established organization of history graduate students. There John Blum, Bud Bailyn, Sid Ahlstrom, and one or two others summarized required readings and helped us prepare for exams. Thanks to Blum, who had become associate editor of the Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, I was offered my first job at MIT.

Again, world events interrupted. On Friday, June 22, 1950, Professor Elting Morison at MIT, editor of the Roosevelt Letters project, invited me to become assistant editor–and after a year a member of the faculty. Three days later, however, the North Korean Army moved across the 38th parallel into South Korea and war began again. After World War II's end, my fellow reservists and I had not been permitted to retire from the service. Instead, we spent two weeks a year on active duty, in my case at the Photo Intelligence Center at Anacostia. I received a phone call ordering me to report immediately for active duty. I checked with several of my compatriots in our photo interpretation unit; none had received such a call. So, once again I paid a visit to the Bureau of Personnel in Washington. Upon arrival, the unit's Senior Officer, also a lieutenant commander, said: "Chandler, we have a great opportunity! Photo Intelligence has come into its own." I replied that I had just been offered my first job, ten years after graduating from college, and if I received orders to serve again I would write my two senators. It worked–the orders never came.

Editing Roosevelt's letters presented an extraordinary opportunity to acquire a wide range of historical knowledge. And as a teacher, the small classes at MIT and student skepticism as to why they should be compelled to take courses in the humanities, helped insure lively class discussion. While at MIT, Harvard published my Ph.D. dissertation, Henry Varnum Poor, Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer (1956). Poor's name lives on today through Standard and Poor's indices and services. In 1963, the opportunity came to join the faculty of Johns Hopkins University to teach recent American History and, because of my role as assistant editor of the Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, edit the papers of Dwight Eisenhower. I accepted and decided not to follow the standard pattern of beginning with the subject's earliest papers but focused instead on his distinguished service in World War II. The first five volumes of the project, published in 1970, began with George C. Marshall's order to Eisenhower on December 15, 1941, to take charge of the War Plans Division of the army's general staff. The last volume of his wartime papers concludes with Eisenhower's famed terse cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff: "This mission of the Allied Forces was fulfilled at 0241 local time May 7, 1945."

In 1972, I returned to New England and focused on teaching and writing business history. I became the Straus Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School and began playing my own role in the institutionalizing of business history. But my approach to the teaching and writing of history had undergone profound change, reflecting the sweeping and challenging experiences men and women of my generation acquired during World War II and its immediate aftermath. And reflecting some extraordinary good luck.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.