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  • Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America
  • Andrew Godley
Walter A. Friedman . Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 356 pp. ISBN 0-674-01298-4, $27.95.

Given the centrality of selling to the emergence of the modern business corporation, it is surprising that there has been no full-length study of the subject before. Walter A. Friedman's pathbreaking Birth of a Salesman is a truly welcome attempt to fill this void. While he begins with earlier developments in selling techniques, Friedman's real focus is on the emergence of "modern" selling, when the selling process became systematically organized and managed. Friedman maintains that this came about in the United States, not in Europe, in the early decades of the twentieth century, as the giant manufacturing firms in the automobile, office machinery, and branded consumer products sectors needed to develop methods of marketing their mass-produced products.

The book begins by charting the transformation of peddling in the nineteenth century, from the early hawking of books and clocks to the emergence of trained canvassers selling items like sewing machines. Key developments during the nineteenth century came from the efforts of itinerant ministers, who depended on sales of Bibles and pamphlets to supplement their meager salaries. We begin to discern Friedman's case for American exceptionalism here, in his emphasis on both the fervor and organization that Methodists and other evangelicals brought to selling—not a feature associated with European ecclesiastical behavior of the time. Mark Twain, that most perceptive [End Page 408] observer of American life, recognized the conflation of religion and patriotism and recruited unionist veterans to push General Ulysses Grant's Civil War memoirs in the 1880s. This secularization of sales drives was such a successful technique of manipulating consumer desires that more than 300,000 orders were taken in the first year.

Pride of place in Friedman's pantheon of pioneers goes, however, to John H. Patterson, the creator of National Cash Register, who took the art of selling and molded it into more of a system than anyone had before. Pioneering new sales techniques from the late 1880s through to the early 1900s, Patterson dominated the cash register market through the firm's analytical approach to specific sales techniques. National Cash Register had 750 salesmen by 1910. Along with Heinz (a sales force of 952 by 1919) and Burroughs Adding Machine (205 by 1908), these pioneers of selling had created their systems before the First World War.

After the war, the science of selling spread from the few pioneers to many. Friedman suggests that the number of books published on selling had increased forty-fold by the 1910s compared with the 1890s, with growing interest in the subject from university professors in marketing, business administration, and psychology. Developments in selling in the 1920s came from General Motors in automobiles, Fuller Brush, and California Perfume (the predecessor to Avon). By the end of the 1920s, according to Friedman, all the principal components of modern selling were in place among these leading companies. Modern selling had arrived. But in the 1930s the Depression was to change America's perception of selling, prompting the emergence of a strain of thought that questioned the art of persuasion.

The book is a pioneering effort and one that will be the key reference in this field among the business history community for many years to come. It is focused on the emergence of the more systematic approach to selling, as told through a series of case studies. This straightforward narrative—peppered with quotations from manuals and scripts produced for salesmen, the principal mechanisms for training salesmen in the science of selling—is one of the book's great strengths. It is accessible and has what publishers describe as plenty of "voice," or personal testimony from contemporary witnesses. Students surely will read it.

But the book's occasional lapses may also be in part a consequence of wanting to write for the broader general market in addition to the scholarly specialist. A more critical focus would have been welcome. A fuller treatment of Singer would have been...

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