Yankees at Work

Until last week, Author Carl Crow's reputation rested on his richly flavored understanding of the Chinese, his long-term hatred of the Japs. His 400 Million Customers (1937), the fruit of his 26 years of successful journalism and advertising in the Orient, became a best-seller in nine languages. But this week Carl Crow's twelfth book--The Great American Customer (Harper; $3)--proved that its author was also an adept in U.S. business history.

Uncritical, without even a dash of Economics I, without a Robber Baron in a carload of The-Men-Who-Made-America, The Great American Customer deals only inferentially with the subject of its title, concentrates on the all-but-forgotten manufacturers and salesmen who supplied the U.S. customer's meager demands in the early days after Independence. But it is a plum cake rich in things most U.S. citizens never knew before about their forebears.

The whole book is interleaved with reproductions of early advertisements, ranging from Colonial day notices of brandy fresh off the boat to Victorian plugs for high-wheeled gentlemen's velocipedes and high-heeled ladies' boots. This collection of the ads that moved Father to buy is both nostalgic and funny. Coony Author Crow presents it without comment, as if it had nothing to do with the times which it so perfectly illustrates (see cuts).

Prime plums:

> The average American Revolutionary was an ignorant shopkeeper-turned-farmer who went broke in England, emigrated to a promised land where the best he could do was to farm enough to keep his growing family alive. He planted a herring with his crops because the Indians did--and it seemed to help them grow. But it never occurred to him that his oxen's manure would make better fertilizer. He refused to use a metal plow because he thought iron poisoned the soil.

> The food the farmer's busy wife served in his malodorous one-room house (where she also removed the grease from wool with urine) "would cause a riot in any modern penitentiary," and the antique collector's prized four-poster bed originated as a cubicle to shield man & wife from the curiosity of their growing children.

> For years after the early Dutch settlers ruined the scarcity value of wampum by mass-producing shells with holes in them, there was almost no money. The U.S. Mint did not get started till ten years after Independence, and even in 1795 produced less than 4-c- of currency per capita.* For years currency in different parts of the country included tobacco, coonskins, honey, wild turkey and venison. Peace with England cut off many profitable early sources of income, most notably "legalized" privateering, which had formerly employed more men than there were in George Washington's entire army.

> Eli Whitney should be famed in the U.S. less for his cotton gin, on which he never made a dime (his landlady blabbed about it and it was copiously copied before he could make his patents stick), than for producing the world's first manufactured goods with interchangeable parts. When he assembled the scrambled parts of ten muskets before U.S. War Department brass hats, they were as startled as if a magician had conjured them up. Besides contributing to mass production, Whitney's revolutionary discovery also helped the U.S. kill the beginnings of the slavish apprentice system.

> Eli Terry, Connecticut clockmaker, revolutionized production and sales methods by making his clocks before he had any orders for them. He also originated installment selling: when he encountered sales resistance to his cheap "wag on the wall," he left it for a trial period, collected for it gradually during periodic selling trips.

> Epaphroditus Peck, export salesman for Chauncey Jerome, another pioneering clockmaker, taught the English an early lesson in Yankee underselling. British customs authorities seized his first shipment of clocks because they were invoiced at such a low price that it looked like fraud. Under British law, Mr. Peck received the amount of his invoice plus 10%, and the British Government sold his clocks while he settled comfortably in London to wait for another shipment. The British bit a second time, but by the time they gave up and let in his third shipment in orthodox fashion, the Jerome trade-mark was firmly established.

>Like Eli Whitney, Paul Revere is famed for the wrong thing: he never completed his gallant ride, but he learned how to make and roll copper and brass (British monopolists thought they had that essential art sewed up) and he pioneered the theory that high wages mean high production and profits. The $2 a day he paid his workmen was infinitely more of a shock than Henry Ford's $5 in 1914.

> Tacks and nails were all made by hand: Thomas Jefferson kept a dozen nail makers busy at Monticello all the time, and it took as many man-hours to forge the nails for a house as it did to build it. Jeremiah Wilkinson's 1776 "invention"--putting a dozen headless tacks in a vise and hammering them all with one blow--was the talk of Rhode Island, and it was not until 1850 that a machine was invented to make "horse nails" tough enough to supplant the blacksmith's.

> Pins were also handmade, and cost about 15-c- apiece; as late as 1843 the U.S. Patent Office report called excited attention to a pin-making machine.

>-U.S. farmers invented rye and bourbon whiskey because by the time Midwesterners could get their corn to the Eastern markets the horses that carried it would have had to eat it all up. A Kentucky ironmaster named William Kelly discovered the blast furnace by accident when he let a blast of air pass through his molten iron; even his young wife was so skeptical of the process (he correctly insisted that cold air raises the temperature of molten metal) that she had his head examined.

Moral for Americans. Careful Carl Crow draws only one moral from his collection of early Americana: that the U.S. grew great precisely because it "had no carriage trade," and had to cater to the needs of its ubiquitous poor. But implicit in almost all his tales of Yankee ingenuity and invention-for-the-masses is another moral even more pertinent to U.S. industry. The U.S. got its head start in mass production precisely because the old countries thought they could maintain their monopoly of all the known skills of the 18th and 19th Centuries. In so doing they forced their poor relations in the new world 1) to build better and cheaper mousetraps than had ever been made before; 2) to believe in competition because they had proved that it could bring the world to their door -- and make them rich in the process.

* A strangely-forgotten date in U.S. history underlined by Author Crow: Sept. 3, 1783, when Britain signed a treaty that formally recognized the U.S.

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