NEWS FROM THE INQUIRE CAPITALISM TEAM
After a productive semester (Spring 2021), the team working on the Inquire Capitalism program has edited and curated over 500 entries of corporate archives worldwide. The concentration of the database of business archives continues to be in firms based in the US, but many of the more recent entries are multinational corporations or companies headquartered abroad. Our goal is to create the most comprehensive and accessible list of corporate archives available for researchers and the general public. Through the Inquire Capitalism Database, we seek to advance research on the history of capitalism by suggesting hundreds of repositories of business records and bibliographies for each of the companies. In addition, our goal is to provide researchers with data that can be used to analyze the presence of corporate-driven history available digitally and the changes and facets in how companies provide access to their historical holdings.
The Inquire Capitalism database is open for contributions. Send us your contribution through our website or by email to inquirecapitalism@history.clas.ufl.edu. For more information contact Professor Sean Adams, director of the Inquire Capitalism Program at the University of Florida (spadams@ufl.edu).
Bottoms Up!: Beer in the Inquire Capitalism Database; by JT Hayden (University of Florida)
an IC database highlight from the program’s interns
There are few alcoholic drinks as ubiquitous and recognizable as beer. For thousands of years, civilizations from the Nile to Scandinavia have been consuming the drink in pints, kegs, and flagons. In 2021, there are over 20,000 breweries around the world, including major brands like Molson Coors and Heineken. According to the Brewers Association in the United States, over 8,000 of these breweries are in the United States alone as of 2019.1 From as early as the 16th century, American colonists have been brewing beer, and despite the best efforts of Prohibition in the 1920s and market consolidation in the 1950s, that tradition is still strong in the twenty-first century. With such a legacy, it is no surprise that the Inquire Capitalism database has its own share of breweries on tap.
Popularized by German immigrants in the US, brewing was first a lucrative market in the American Midwest, especially in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The oldest breweries with located archival records in the database, Pabst Brewing Company from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Yoerg Brewing Company from St. Paul, Minnesota, were founded in 1844 and 1848. Their founders—Jacob Best and Anthony Yoerg, respectively—brought traditional German brewing techniques to St. Paul, including Yoerg’s famous cave-aged “Bavarian-style” beers. After the Great Chicago Fire destroyed many Chicago breweries in 1871, Milwaukee and St. Paul became the dominant beer-producing cities for a further forty years. German-style brewers like Pabst, Yoerg, and Milwaukee’s Blatz Brewing Company rose to the top of America’s beer market.
Another Midwestern rival to Pabst and Yoerg was Anheuser-Busch Companies, LLC. Founded in 1852 in St. Louis, Missouri, Anheuser-Busch was a pioneer in beer brewing and transportation. The company to transport products in refrigerated train cars and it was the first to pasteurize its beer, heating bottles and kegs to kill the yeast fermenting in the brew. In the late 1870s, Anheuser-Busch’s “Bohemian-style” Budweiser brand became a national craze; the beverage’s creamy taste and light texture quickly outpaced the heavier, Bavarian-style beers from Pabst and Yoerg. “I never found a business so easy as this Budweiser,” wrote one sales agent.2
The dominance of Midwestern breweries ended in late 1910s. In 1920, the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol, forced numerous breweries to diversify. Pabst, for example, expanded into cheesemaking, and Blatz began brewing non-alcoholic drinks. However, the overwhelming impact of Prohibition was the closure of American breweries. According to Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, of 1,300 independent breweries in 1915, fewer than 100 survived to Prohibition’s end in 1933.3 By the late twentieth century, most of these breweries were consolidated under major brands like Miller, Coors, and Anheuser-Busch.
Today, the American beer market is back on the path to greatness. Microbreweries and brewpubs—smaller breweries that produce less beer annually than larger companies—are appearing across the United States. Even for those breweries lost to Prohibition and corporate consolidation, archive programs can keep their history alive. The team of the Inquire Capitalism database project has located and documented its fair share of archival collections for breweries, both online and physical archives, so take a look and see where the story of American beer takes you.
1Bart Watson, ed., “National Beer Sales & Production Data,” Brewers Association (Brewers Association, August 17, 2020), https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/national-beer-stats/.
2Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: A History of American Beer (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), 166.
3Christopher Klein, “How America’s Iconic Brewers Survived Prohibition,” History.com (A&E Television Networks, January 29, 2019), https://www.history.com/news/brewers-under-prohibition-miller-coors-busch-yuengling-pabst.
ARTICLE and NEWS ROUNDUP
Read about Black Journal in the article “An Invaluable Black Public Broadcasting Archive Is Now Accessible Online” by Cydnii Wilde Harris
Interested or doing research on the global history of insurance? The call for sessions for the International Conference History of Insurance in Global Perspective at the University of Basel, Switzerland (20–22 July 2022), is available here. Also, the bilingual CFP for The Business History Conference (April 7-9, 2022) is available here.
Connect with the h-NET & MSU Press forum Feeding the Elephant to know all about what it takes to publish and promote an academic book.
It is exciting to see archives opening up again! Read about how the Library of Congress is gradually reopening its rooms on June 1st, 2021.
Interview with Marcelo Bucheli, Associate Professor of Management (Gies College of Business, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
talking about his experience researching at the archives of Chiquita in Colombia.
The Inquire Capitalism podcast is a new show where we interview scholars and archivists about their experiences working with business records. The first episode of our show features Dr. Marcelo Bucheli, Associate Professor of Management at the Gies School of Management at the University of Illinois speaking about his experience researching the business archives of the United Fruit Company in Colombia.
[What follows is an edited transcript of Episode 1 of the IC podcast show. Listen to the interview in the link at the end of the interview, on our podcast site, on Spotify, or Stitcher]
Paula A. de la Cruz-Fernández (PCF): […] how did you come to study United Fruit Company?
Marcelo Bucheli (MB): I started actually a long time ago during my undergraduate years in Colombia. I was on my way to earn an undergraduate degree in economics at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. And the subject of the United Fruit is kind of, like, in the air. I mean, there is this mystique around this firm. It is the quintessential representative of American imperialism in Latin America. Gabriel García Márquez wrote about them without mentioning them by name in one hundred years of solitude. So, I just wanted to learn more about them. And I was in a research seminar directed by Adolfo Meisel Roca, a renowned Colombian economic historian, and I proposed to study United Fruit. He supported the idea. I discovered that even though many people think about United Fruit in Colombia, there was not really much written about the firm. So after that, I kept thinking about that, and I started inquiring all over the place.
I worked to find more information. And we have to remember that this was in the 90s — no Internet or any like that. I started sometimes contacting people via letter, and I was, again, an undergrad student. And at some point, I read a book by a former employee of United Fruit. His name is Thomas McCann. He wrote a book called An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit. I went to the American Cultural Institute in Bogota and looked for him, in phone books, for his address because I knew he was living in the city of Boston. I found three people with his name, and I sent letters to the three of them. And eventually, he replied. And my question was, why did United Fruit leave Colombia in the 60s? And his answer was: -“Honestly, I really don’t know.”
But he sent my letter to a former official of United Fruit who was retired as well and he replied with another paper letter and he said, -“ […] well, we actually went from the original Magdalena to Urabá, which is also in the Colombian Caribbean.” He said it was because of labor problems, and also climate issues.
And that short letter opened a whole avenue of research, because then I asked, how can I find out about this shift? Again, I was inquiring all over the place and I couldn’t find any information. But that single letter was my only guide to go elsewhere. And this is how I continued to through my M.A. and later in my doctorate, studying United Fruit.
PCF: Did that letter open any archive? When was your first access to one box of the United Fruit Company in Colombia?
MB: The letter didn’t open an archive, although, at that moment, I didn’t realize it was a really good primary source. I started asking around where the archives could be. And I sent a letter to another historian, Catherine LeGrand, who was working at McGill University at that point, and she had written her dissertation and a book partially about United Fruit [See Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations. And she replied, and she was extremely kind, “-[…] honestly, look, I did my research, and I never found those archives.”
So, I thought at that point, well, better to ask the company itself. I went again to the American Cultural Institute in Bogota, open phone books, and found the address of Chiquita Brands. I sent a letter, but just a letter, like, the envelope just said Chiquita Brands address in Cincinnati and just sent it through normal mail. And that was it. A couple of months later, once I came home and found a Chiquita envelope at home, and I thought: “-that’s good!.” And it was a very short letter. It only said, “-call this phone number.” I called the phone number, and nobody answered. It sounded like if he didn’t exist, beep, beep, all the time. And I was calling and calling. I mean, maybe they gave me the wrong phone number. So, I went one day to the office of another banana firm in Bogota. And I was talking to this woman who was very nice and was helping me at that time. And I told her, look, I’ve been calling this phone number and nobody I mean, it seems it’s broken, or it’s the wrong number. And she said, well, Chiquita doesn’t have any office in Bogota. They have offices in Medellín. And she looked at the phone number and she was like, “-oh, they didn’t put the area code!” She said, “-call this area code.” I called again, and the gentleman who replied to my phone call, […] I started introducing myself, and he was like, “-Oh, Marcelo, hi, how are you?” Like if he knew who I was, and I thought, “-this is strange.” I mean, like, “-how does he know?” He asked me if I was coming. And, of course, I said, “-yes, I can go.” I took a bus, it was like nine hours in those times, a nine hour trip to Medellín, I have an aunt there, I stayed with my aunt. I went to this person’s office and he–it was a nice building, with a nice office. And again, when I arrived, it was like if he knew who I was. We then started talking; he was a manager for the firm, for the subsidiary. He told me, “-look, what happened is that they received a letter from you in Cincinnati. They called me and asked me and I said that you could get in touch with me.” And that’s why they sent me the letter.
The archives were in an old building in downtown Medellín, you might want to go. There the people opened the room, I saw all these books with all their archives neatly organized
PCF: Did an archivist process them? Did they have an archivist on staff?
MB: There was an archivist, but not a historical–I mean, it was a relatively informal way to keep the archives. But they were very well organized. I made a lot of copies of the material.
The reason they were in the city of Medellín was precisely because they moved to the area of Urabá. And the main city connecting that area is Medellín in Columbia. With this, I finished my B.A. thesis, and then during my M.A., I continued using that material. And when I finished that M.A. thesis, that letter was part of my writing sample to apply for the Ph.D. program, which eventually got me accepted at Stanford. I went back to Columbia to continue visiting the archive and interviewing people in Medellín and going to other archives in that city and then the city of Santa Marta in Magdalena.
I also visited other public archives, city and government archives. I was lucky that what opened the door was this archive in Medellín at that time. That letter to Chiquita, with the broken English I had at the time, and also to Thomas McCann. But those two doors were the ones that eventually led me to have sources to conduct my research.
PCF: Right. And do you know if United Fruit has any corporate archives in the US?
MB: I’ve tried to find them and I have not been lucky. Now, Chiquita, which is the inheritor, is not even a public company anymore. I mean, they were merged by a Brazilian conglomerate. So, I know people who have found archives in Costa Rica, archives that were abandoned. I mean, Philippe Bourgois is the name of the historian who found some archives over there. And in Cuba as well because they were expropriated.
PCF: In the Archivo Nacional?
MB: I would need to go back to the book that used those archives. But the good thing is that since they were expropriated, they have everything.
PCF: [to conclude … ] tell us a bit about that website that you created, the United Fruit Company Historical Society.
MB: during grad school I created a website. I was at Stanford and everybody was creating websites in the 1990s, and I created a website related to my dissertation and I was called UnitedFruit.org. It’s called the United Fruit Historical Society. I created it with a friend called Ian Read who had been writing about United Fruit at the time. And, basically what I put there was a chronology that I created based on my reading of the books of the firm, biographies of important characters in the history of the firm, and summaries of books and articles written about the firm.
Admittedly, it’s been some time since last time I worked on the website. I still receive emails, but it was created to have a space where anybody could go and find information. It has been cited in books or in journalist articles. It was through that website and through my other academic work that I was contacted by the director of the documentary series, The Cuba Libre Story on Netflix. I talk about United Fruit in Cuba in the documentary.
[End of the interview]Interviewed recorded, edited, and broadcasted by Dr. Paula de la Cruz-Fernández.