American Enterprise: Free and Not So Free, by Clarence Cramer (Tariffs and Tycoons)

American Enterprise: Free and Not So Free By Clarence Cramer Little, Brown, 728 pp., $17.50 The subtitle of this enormous book is “a history of the rise of the American business community and its entrepreneurs from colonial times to the present.” If the book could live up to that advance billing, we would have something worth our while. Instead, Professor Cramer has constructed a strangely selective chronicle. For the careful reader he drops in all manner of juicy details, but his emphasis and interpretation are at times shockingly off, and nowhere does he give a summary of his own conclusions. The subtitle implies a “rise” of business, but the book seems to say that business has actually fallen from its former state of freedom into a morass of subsidies and governmental interventions. As to details:

Bet you didn’t know that piracy in the eighteenth century played a significant role in maintaining a reasonable balance of trade for the Northern colonies; surely I didn’t know that pirates not only fitted out in Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia, but were backed by reputable merchants who invested openly by buying shares in the ventures. Bet you didn’t know that the largest manufacturing industry in the pre-revolutionary American colonies was distilling; that, on the eve of the Revolution, more than 600,000 gallons of rum were shipped abroad annually; that as late as 1807 there were forty rum distilleries in Boston alone. It comes as a surprise that the emigration of Loyalists during the Revolution was, proportionally, almost five times as high as the emigration of aristocrats during the French Revolution: In France 5 persons per thousand headed for the border, in America 24 per thousand. It is wonderful to learn that when Nathaniel Bowditch died in 1838 the ships of all nations in ports throughout the world flew their flags at half-mast. Bet you didn’t know that Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, sported an American middle name—his full name was Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.

WR

About the Author

William F. Rickenbacker

Featured Tags

American Enterprise: Free and Not So Free By Clarence Cramer Little, Brown, 728 pp., $17.50 The subtitle of this enormous book is “a history of the rise of the American business community and its entrepreneurs from colonial times to the present.” If the book could live up to that advance billing, we would have something worth our while. Instead, Professor Cramer has constructed a strangely selective chronicle. For the careful reader he drops in all manner of juicy details, but his emphasis and interpretation are at times shockingly off, and nowhere does he give a summary of his own conclusions. The subtitle implies a “rise” of business, but the book seems to say that business has actually fallen from its former state of freedom into a morass of subsidies and governmental interventions. As to details:

Bet you didn’t know that piracy in the eighteenth century played a significant role in maintaining a reasonable balance of trade for the Northern colonies; surely I didn’t know that pirates not only fitted out in Boston, Newport, New York, and Philadelphia, but were backed by reputable merchants who invested openly by buying shares in the ventures. Bet you didn’t know that the largest manufacturing industry in the pre-revolutionary American colonies was distilling; that, on the eve of the Revolution, more than 600,000 gallons of rum were shipped abroad annually; that as late as 1807 there were forty rum distilleries in Boston alone. It comes as a surprise that the emigration of Loyalists during the Revolution was, proportionally, almost five times as high as the emigration of aristocrats during the French Revolution: In France 5 persons per thousand headed for the border, in America 24 per thousand. It is wonderful to learn that when Nathaniel Bowditch died in 1838 the ships of all nations in ports throughout the world flew their flags at half-mast. Bet you didn’t know that Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, sported an American middle name—his full name was Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.