NEWS FROM THE INQUIRE CAPITALISM TEAM
The Inquire Capitalism Internship program offers two students every semester the opportunity to contribute to creating the Inquire Capitalism corporate archives database and to learn about digital archives and archiving, digital content creation, digital history, and different digital tools that are key for today’s writing and publishing in history and the Humanities job market.
In this new issue of the Inquire Capitalism program, meet the Summer 2021 interns Ashleigh Smith and Chandler L’Hommedieu.
Ashleigh Smith started her internship in Digital Business History in May 2021. She is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Florida with a double major in history and economics. Ashleigh has an academic interest in political and social history in the United States and recently studied the political economy of the Middle East. Regarding future career goals, she wants to pursue graduate-level education in global health with a historical, sociological, and economic emphasis. She learned about the Inquire Capitalism internship program while taking the History of American Capitalism course taught by Professor Sean Adams.
She applied to this internship opportunity to gain insight into the development of the global economy and various industries. Ashleigh also aims to learn more about business history and further understand the role businesses have in society. Another reason she pursued this internship was to gain professional experience and skills in digital history and digital humanities tools. Also, by participating in the Inquire Capitalism database she will be introduced to archival research and digital archiving practices as she works in data collection, data entry, and reference management.
Chandler L’Hommedieu is a rising senior who doubles majors in political science and history and he is also pursuing minors in statistics and sociology. Chandler plans on applying to graduate school this coming fall and his research interests are centered around American political behavior and media. His current work focuses on reaggregating the study of TV and politics. Chandler’s main historical interests are 20th century American economic, political and media history. 
His interest in this internship comes from taking Dr. Sean Adam’s history of American capitalism class. He was particularly interested in the monetary system of the early republic. Furthermore, Chandler understands and appreciates the importance of making private business archives more publicly accessible. Chandler is looking forward to learning how to do digital archival work and how to collect, manage, and enhance databases. He hopes to use what he learns from the internship to add to his research kills and improve his understanding of business history.
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).
The Business of Beauty: Cosmetic Companies in the Inquire Capitalism Database; by Tamsyn Butler (University of Florida)
an IC database highlight from the program’s interns
Does beauty have a universal meaning for women in the history of the United States? From the Republican mother of the American Revolution to the liberated flapper girl of the Roaring Twenties, to now, women have constantly adapted to America’s ever-changing beauty ideals. And though ideas have changed over time within the business of beauty, nothing has remained quite as profitable as the cosmetics industry. In 2019, beauty became a $532 billion industry and since then it has continued to grow in value.[1] With cosmetics’ dynamic and increasingly lucrative history, it is no wonder that the Inquire Capitalism database has its own collection of companies on display.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cosmetic formulas brought over by English immigrants mixed with those of the American Indians, French, Spanish, and Africans.2 These homemade concoctions were crucial to the woman of the Early Republic. Preserving a fair complexion, reducing the presence of smallpox and other diseases, and mastering bodily care all became feminine obligations achieved through cosmetology.3
By the time of the publishing boom of the 1840s and 1850s, cosmetic magazines, etiquette books, and beauty manuals—often sold by traveling agents and peddlers—populated American households.4 The editorial advice from this era often endorsed the products sold by American druggists. Depending on a woman’s class and region, she may have been suggested Edward Townsend’s cold cream to “keep sweet during warm weather,” or Hunter’s Invisible Face Powder to prevent tanning and perspiration.5 Skin whiteners were one of the most popular products of the nineteenth century and contributed to the bourgeois refinement that so many women desired. And as consumption of cosmetic knowledge grew in the era, distinctions between classes became more apparent in a woman’s appearance.
What was once a regional beauty culture quickly became a national network of mass production, advertising, and distribution by the 1920s. During this time, advertising expenditure boomed, with the thirty most popular magazines spending a combined $1.3 million in 1915 to $16 million by 1930.6 Throughout the 1920s, it became common practice for women in commercial and urban settings to routinely wear lipstick, rouge, and mascara.7
Maybelline and Revlon—founded in 1914 and 1932, respectively—advertised their products for the “modern woman.”8 Ads mentioned, “Girls and women everywhere, even the most beautiful actresses of the stage and screen, now realize that Maybelline is the most important aid to beauty…”9 By the beginning of World War II, both companies were among the most popular American cosmetic companies. In 1917, adding to the wide selection of powders and rouge, Maybelline introduced a new product that embellished the eyes. It was the Maybelline Cake Mascara, and founder Tom Lyle Williams released it using his sister Mabel’s crafty concoction of a little coal dust and Vaseline. With other products like the Great Lash Mascara and Kissing Koolers, Maybelline quickly became a national sensation. Finally, in 1995, L’Oreal S.A. acquired the company for $508 million in cash.10
In the twenty-first century, profitability within the cosmetics industry has largely shifted to online marketing through social media influencers and brand ambassadors. Founded by social media mogul Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics has earned a net worth of nearly a billion dollars since its debut in 2015.11 There is an emerging internet beauty culture where many influencers have developed their own brands. Other examples are Rhianna’s Fenty Beauty, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, or Addison Rae’s Item Beauty, and they all have their stories to tell. The Inquire Capitalism database has collected information about how these companies perceive their history and legacy within the cosmetics industry and as global businesses. For more, click here.
[1] Bethany Biron, “Beauty has blown up to be a $532 billion industry — and analysts say that these 4 trends will make it even bigger,” Business Insider, July 9, 2019. [2] Kathy Peiss, Hope In A Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 12. [3] Peiss, Hope In A Jar, 11-12. [4] Peiss, Hope In A Jar, 14. [5] Peiss, Hope In A Jar, 17-40.
[6] Peiss, Hope In A Jar, 105.
[7] Peiss, Hope In A Jar, 53. [8] Peiss, Hope In A Jar, 102. [9]Maybelline Co., Eyes That Charm, 1923, advertisement, Pictorial Review. [10] Leslie Wayne, “L’Oreal to Buy Maybelline in Cash Deal,” The New York Times, December 11, 1995. [11] Taylor Borden and Katie Warren, “Kylie Jenner just turned 23 years old —and she’s already worth $900 million. Take a look at how the mogul built her empire,” Business Insider, August 10, 2020.Interview with Susie Pak, Associate Professor in the Department of History at St. John’s University.
talking about her experience researching for her book on bankers’ networks.
The Inquire Capitalism podcast is a new show where we interview scholars and archivists about their experiences working with business records.
The second episode of our show features Dr. Susie Pak, Associate Professor in the Department of History at St. John’s University. Dr. Pak specializes in the study of American business networks and with us, she talked about her research at the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum analyzing social registers at the New York Public Library for her first book, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of JPMorgan, published in 2013 by Harvard University Press.
[What follows is an edited transcript of Episode 2 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 de la Cruz-Fernández (PCF): […] how did you come to study business networks within banking in New York?
Susie Pak (SP): […] one thing I would say is that all histories start with a question. And the question that I had for Gentlemen Bankers was what is the basis of trust? […] what is the basis of trust within the private banking community in New York before the Second World War? […] This book came out of my dissertation where I was studying US foreign policy in East Asia. At the time, when you looked at private American bankers who were financing countries like Japan’s expansion into China, and also ostensibly supposed to be funding China’s development of railroads after the end of the Qing dynasty, one of the things that I noticed is that there was a mix of bankers, of course, in terms of international background, but also ethno- religious background. And the two groups I wanted to study were basically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant bankers like the Morgans and German American Jewish bankers like Kuhn, Loeb, & Co. And what really interested me, because I went to graduate school to study American race relations, was that if and how these two banking communities were able to work together in a business that was so personal and that could not be operated as something like private investment banking that was dominated by banks that were, by tradition, unlimited liability, private partnerships, and usually family banking partnerships.
I thought, in the context of antisemitism, how do these two banks work together? Do they work together? That was one of the first things that I wanted to test. We know that Morgan’s historian Vincent Carosso, who knew more about the Morgans than probably anyone alive at the time, and he wrote extensively in the seventies and eighties about the bank, said that they did work together, that they had this kind of level of trust. And [to my question], how do you build trust in the context of antisemitism? That’s what led me to try and understand the structure of the community and the nature of their relationships.
PCF: [how was your] first visit to the archive? How did you know where to go?
SP: Well, in the case of the Morgans, really, with any project, of course, you start with the secondary literature. The Morgans were a bank that had been written about before. And so luckily, we had examples from other scholars like Carosso. Jean Strouse did a wonderful biography of J.P. Morgan called Morgan: American Financier, Carosso, did a giant volume called The Morgans: Private International Bankers. I can’t remember the exact secondary title. Barry Supple did one an article about German Jewish bankers. This is one of the ways that I identified the archives. I also did a lot of research, for example, at the American Jewish Archives, where Schiff’s papers and his son’s are kept, Mortimer and son in law, Felix Warburg. And that was a wonderful experience. So. Of course, Morgan, the Morgan–the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum–holds the papers of the family. And then, of course, J.P. Morgan Chase has its own corporate archive.
But in the period that I studied the bank, which is before the Second World War, the bank is still really, well, the bank is a private partnership, and it’s slowly over time became less of a family bank. So, not all the members of all the partners were necessarily related to one another, but it kind of operated that way, particularly when Jack Morgan was still alive, and he dies in 1943, and the bank doesn’t become a corporation until 1940. All the records that the partners have, including the papers of the family which are held at the Morgan Library Museum, are totally relevant to the study of the bank as a bank because in this time period the bank and the family are, I wouldn’t say that they’re indistinguishable, but they’re highly integrated .
Sean Adams (SA): Did you find with that with that intermingling of family and business that is was more challenging to untangle what was family and what was business? Or did it take a long familiarity with t the archives to be able to sort that out?
SP: [In terms of] what is the difference between business and family, I didn’t really have any problems with that. And I think part of it is because I just expected it. I mean, they come out of a merchant banking tradition. As unlimited liability, all of your assets are on the line, your personal assets are on the line. And so you are going to be very highly selective about the people that you do work with. And so it makes sense that you start with your family because you have to vet people. You have to be able to monitor them and you really have to trust them. [What was challenging was] the distinction between personal and business networks [and this] is at the center of the book. […] How is it that WASP bankers and German Jewish bankers were able to work together in the context of anti-Semitism? People would just say it’s money, right, that it was profitable and that’s why they work together. So, I think it was Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns who said […] everyone’s green, right? It’s all about profit and making money. But [in the case of] Jewish bankers, particularly Jacob Schiff–Jacob Schiff, was very proudly Jewish and he would not have worked with anyone who is openly anti-Semitic because reputation was so important to the bank […]
Through papers […] You begin to see how personal their relationships are. So, when the partners write to each other, and we assume that they’re talking to each other as if they’re only talking to each other and a historian is not going to come and read their papers after one hundred years […] they’re being honest with each other. We believe them. They talk about love. They talk about care, I love you, how are you? They inquire about each other. There’s this emotion there in their relationships. They really care about each other, and they have this in their community. The question is, in a business that is very personal, how do you create trust in the context of racism? And so, the answer cannot be money, because there were situations where the Schiff said, no, I’m not working with that person because he’s known to be anti-Semitic. […] The question is: to what extent and how does that impact things like the flow of capital, like the selection of clients […] the idea that banking is embedded in its society is fundamental to [my] book.
PCF: What other sources besides correspondence between bankers tell you about those emotions?
SP: […] One major source that I looked at […] is the syndicate books of JPMorgan and Co. And there’s also a set of syndicate books […] of Drexel, Morgan and Co., which was the predecessor to J.P. Morgan and Co. When Drexel and Morgan were around, it was when Junius Morgan was still alive, who was Pierpont Morgan’s father. He was really the founder of the bank. And it’s not until he dies, and Anthony Drexel dies that J.P. Morgan reorganizes the firm and creates J.P. Morgan and Co. So, there are these two sets of books. I’m talking primarily about the second set. And they’re the syndicate books that are in the library [the New York Public Library]. And the way that I found them is an example of how when you get into an archive, you just have to talk. […] you can tell I talk a lot. I’m a very chatty person [… now] I am friends with the archivist. That’s how long I’ve been researching there.
And I said, what are they? […] she brings them up and she shows me this book. It’s a massive book. So, I’m small. I’m not tall […]. And in order for me to read it, I had to stand at the table. […] I believe there’s either 11 or 12 of them, […] handwritten mostly. […] when I looked and I said, oh! it’s a deal book, it lists all the syndicates that the Morgans had been a part of basically since like 1894. And these included syndicates that other people had included them in that were not managed by the Morgans […].
The nature of syndicates is that you cannot, as one bank, no matter how wealthy you are, take on all the risk of one deal. Impossible. […] So you have to basically spread the risk. And so how do you spread your risk? Because you share it with your friends.
So around this time, I had been doing a lot of reading, social network analysis, and I looked at this deal book and I said, oh, this is like a friendship network. It’s like a Facebook of the bank. But it’s not presented to you in any way that you can analyze it unless you translate it and recode it. And that’s what I had to do. On the left-hand side, there would be a description of the deal. On the right-hand side, it would list all of the participants. For example, for the US Steel deal in 1901, it enlisted all the people with their participations, in descending order, and the people who got the most were at the top and the people who got the least were on the bottom. And you knew in some cases there’s a deal, for example, for J. I. Case threshing company, if it was a really good deal, because there would be in that deal, there was a private list. […]
To really know what their network is, you have to do it in all the books. [There is no] pick and choose because you have to contextualize each individual person. And that was a process that took me about three years, to code, where I went through every single deal and I translated it into this Excel file that I made up as I went along. And at one point I presented my results to the Columbia Economic History Seminar. […] I just made up [the spreadsheet] to look at their friendship network, their syndicate network. […] so if it’s a commercial bank, they’re going to have more money than a private bank –we have to call them differently. That gets a column. If they’re an individual versus an insurance company, that’s going to be different, too. So, they had to be coded by affiliation. Then I said, let’s say you did a lot of business with the Morgans in 1900, but you didn’t do any business with them in 1920. That could be, something might have happened there. And in fact, in the book, I talk about how Speyer and Co., at a certain point, just falls off because they don’t get any participations at all.
And [in the spreadsheet I] matched this correspondence that I had found of the Morgan bank –because you know they had a British branch, which is now part of Deutsche Bank, because Deutsche Bank bought out Morgan Grenfell and Company. And that was the original bank in Britain. I went to look, and they had these letterpress books and in a one of press books they talk about [being] betrayed by the Speyers, and after that point, they just don’t get any participations at all. Before that point, you actually see more participations from them than you do Kuhn Loeb. So, I spent literally two and a half years, three years, translating these books with no guarantee that I was ever going to figure something out. But I just knew it had to be done. And the goal was to see how good a friend was Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., a Jewish bank, German Jewish bank, to the Morgans.
Carosso says they were really good friends and they did a lot of work together. […] His papers are at the Morgan I looked at them, and he’s looking at the syndicate books, he had these yellow pads that he hand wrote deals on. Because he doesn’t have Excel at this point. He doesn’t have social network analysis and the Internet. So part of what I had to do is I had to study social network analysis with a great group of people at Carnegie Mellon, at the CASOS Institute.
Then I took another workshop at the University of Essex in the summer to figure out how I could use the technology to study the syndicate books. And then I coded it. And it was probably one of the most painful things I’ve ever done in my life. But it’s just one of those things that you sign up for when you’re a historian. The tables in my book are backed up by that work. […] 20 something Excel files. Two thousand participants […] and then I had to separate it up by a year. But it was worth it because I was able to answer the questions that I wanted.
The first year it took me a year to code the first book because I had to do it by hand in the library. And then I went and presented it at a quantitative methods seminar at Columbia. And one of the Masters students said to me, I will never forget her, how do you know it’s not because of the profits? I sighed. I had to go back and recode the whole first book, because, of course, she was right, this is why you present, right, to people. So, I had to go back and recode the whole event that took me like a year. Meanwhile, I’m on the tenure clock. And I was like, this is very unwise, tenure clock behavior. But it had to be done because I couldn’t answer the question of the book without actually quoting this book.
But then after the first year, you know, the Morgan took pity on me, and they allowed me to photograph the books. And the one advantage of that, of course, is that now there is a photographic record. They’ve actually since then taken all the books apart and scanned them professionally.
[… For me] it was like sixteen thousand photos. It took me like a month. At a certain point the iPad came out and it saved my life because I could look at them and just kind of zoom in as I was coding into my computer, literally thousands of pages and people. But in the end, […] I was able to ask the question of whether or not they did work together. And the answer was yes.
SA: […] that’s a really fascinating blend of qualitative and quantitative analysis that you had to do and the organization that’s involved. But these human relationships, you know, anti-Semitism, for example, is not something that’s necessarily easily quantifiable. It’s something that you’re going to see in the written record. But at the same time, you’re also trying to figure out these business relationships, which means a lot of counting and a lot of organization and a lot of kind of putting all of it together. Did you find yourself doing that kind of analysis simultaneously or was it like, let’s crunch the numbers, see what we have, and then I will put my historian hat back on and try to figure out the kind of human angle on this? How you describe the way that Morgan did business, it is very personal. And you really need to be a historian who has an understanding of how humans work and how humans think in the context of their times.
SP: […] it really was simultaneous. I remember when I was kind of coding for hours. And […] when I was done, people asked: you’re happy you finished? And I was like, no, I feel ill. I feel ill that I put myself through this, that I did this to myself. And for a long time after that, I actually teamed up with one of my colleagues, Jana Diesner at the University of Illinois in Champaign because I was like, Jana, let’s do data mining. Let’s figure out how to mine data, through an algorithm so we don’t have to do genealogies. And of course, in the end, I found out you have to just do genealogies. […] It was always simultaneous because I think that that’s an important thing for people to know about being a historian is that you have to wear a lot of different hats at the same time, and you really have to be an advocate for yourself all the time.
And the other thing that you have over time, though, is that the bank, particularly the Morgans–earlier, for example, than the Jewish bank, is that the Morgans start to incorporate partners who are not family members fairly early on. And the question that I had is, how do you maintain that kind of trust that you would have in a family, as you do in a bank, when you work with someone who is not related to you? I argue in the book they do this through common associations. You see people who went to the same university, for example. They went to Harvard, went to Yale. And UPenn was a big commonality among the partners. In the British side, you had like Eton and Oxbridge and this kind of thing. It’s even stronger, I would say, in Great Britain or in a place like Boston. I did comparative things, too. I looked at Lee, Higginson & Company I want to say until well into the 20th century, like one hundred percent of their partners went to Harvard. When you look at their obituaries–obituaries are wonderful documents–is that they, until about 1960, would always end with a list of the partners clubs. I started looking at a source called the social register, which is again, is like a Facebook for rich people in the past, and the social register was, it was actually very selective. It was like a club. You had to know somebody in order to get listed in the social registry. You needed to be recommended. And then there were social registers for different cities.
I said, let’s look at the social register membership of the Morgan’s partners. And then I did other banks that were comparable to the Morgans. And there is no one place that I know of in America that has all the social registers of every city for every year in one place. One day I’d be coding at the Morgan. In the next day, I’d be on the train to Philadelphia, to the Philadelphia Historical Society to look at the Philadelphia social registers. The next day, I might be in the New York Society Library because they had a volume that the New York Public Library did not; or the Columbia Library, Butler Library, because I had to basically hustle to get access to all these different libraries.
And so I started collecting their addresses and I said, let me figure out this ArcGIS. And that became a huge part of the book where I start to map the German Jewish bankers and where they lived. And I mark and I map the Morgan bankers and where they lived.
That is why I started with the question, because you always go back to what it is, the question. You can’t just randomly research one institution.
My book argues that one of the ways that they did it, that they were able to work together is that they kept their personal lives totally separate from their place of work, and I show that when I map the distance between downtown and uptown.
I could probably talk for four hours to describe all of the research that went into the book. I particularly love […] maps because now I can show people and I do this – I have a quantitative methods class at St. Johns where [and] I walk students through the process of it and now you can just do it online. You can do it on ArcGIS, you can do it on Esri.com. It’s fantastic. You could actually even do it through Google Maps now because, and when you download if you go to NYPL, they have a map division and they have actually geocoded old maps of New York and maps from all over the place. I love talking about the process of research and also about the kind of collaboration that historians do with archivists, because the work that they do in safeguarding the archives is so critical to the work that we do in trying to understand the past.
[End of the interview]
Interviewed recorded, edited, and broadcasted by Dr. Paula de la Cruz-Fernández.
https://soundcloud.com/user-633663654/the-inquire-capitalism-podcast-interview-with-dr-susie-pak