Enterprising Elite; The Boston Associates and the World They Made (review)

book reviews283 economic legislation beneficial to the South—an effort which, if handled properly, might have been used as a party-building aid. By the time of the presidential campaign of 1868, the party had reverted to the familiar tactic of staking everything on winning the North; only five percent of the funds raised for the campaign went to the beleaguered southern Republicans. With Grant safely in office, support for the southern wing, as minimal as it had been, largely disappeared in the face of the Northerners' continuing distrust of the scalawags, distaste for the carpetbaggers, and lack of respect for the black electorate and politicians . As Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune opinedin 1869, it was time for southern Republicans to "Root, hog, or die!" Clearly, there was no "first southern strategy." Only a handful of variously motivated Northerners really tried to build a party in the South and by 1868, their "effort was so limited, and the commitment so weak, that the future of Southern Republicanism was dim indeed" (p. 244). In the face of his evidence, it is curious that Abbott suggests that since the Northerners were obviously not into party building, their primary motivation must have been "identifying, expanding, and protecting black rights" in the South (p. xii). Yet, as he notes, they failed here as well. It appears that northern Republicans, caught between black and white and a clash of northern and southern values, simply bungled their halfhearted and indecisive attempt to build a biracial political coalition in the South. Perhaps their task bordered on the impossible, but even within the limited framework of what waspossible, Abbott's convincing account makes it evident that northern Republicans could have done more. Terry L. Seip University of Southern California Enterprising Elite; The BostonAssociatesand the World They Made. By Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. xviii, 298. $27.50.) In this thoroughly researched and gracefully written reinterpretation of the Boston Associates, Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., persuasively argues that business leaders such as Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, and Amos and Abbott Lawrence were transitional figures in the history of American capitalism, whose desire for profit was closely linked to their conservative social goals. They sought to maintain their own position at the top of Boston's social and economic order—which profits in commerce had made possible—and to pass it on to their descendente. The innovations in production, marketing, management, and capital allocation at their Waltham-Lowell textile mills were thus directed not at producing a disruptive industrial revolution but, rather, at securing the foundation for the prosperity, power, and socal position of their class. 284civil war history Innovation was to be the handmaiden of stability. Profits werethus to be steady rather than spectacular. The Associates werewilling to pay comparatively high wages to a female and, hopefully, docile labor force in an effort to limit the disruptive consequences of the factory system. And all of their other interlocking investments were directed primarily at insuring the health and, especially, thelong-term stability of their textile mills. Thus, they created the Suffolk Bank to provide their firms with capital; they financed the Boston and Lowell Railroad; and they used the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company as a trustee to ensure continued family control of the companies they had founded. These same values and objectives also motivated the Boston Associates ' other activities. For example, philanthropy and class self-interest went hand in hand. Thus, the Associates supported the Massachusetts General Hospital, which was to help restore the sense of community which industrial growth threatened at the same time that it provided secure, respectable medical careers for their sons who were invariably educated at Harvard, and whose governance and finances the Associates themselves dominated. After 1845, however, the security of the Associates and their class was increasingly threatened by the consequences of rapid economic growth and the slavery issue. American femalemill workers werereplaced byIrish Catholicswho personified the industrial ills which the Waltham-Lowell system had sought to avoid. Philanthropy seemed unable to tame the apparently intractable evils of Boston's Irish proletariat. And the collapse of the Whig party in Massachusetts threatened the political...