The Birth of the 'Meritocratic' Nepo Baby
What Even Is Leadership? Part Three
Welcome to Making History, a newsletter about how historians make history. Also sometimes a newsletter, as in this series on the origins of “leadership,” that doesn’t so much go behind the scenes of history-making as it offers a preview of some of the latest arguments and findings in the field. For the beginning of the series, go here. And to subscribe, go here. It’s free!
What leadership meant was determined in part by the raw material universities had to work with. As the new corporate behemoths grew into household names — General Electric, Standard Oil, US Steel — a new class of bureaucrats were called into being. Neither entrepreneurs nor passive owners, these were “executives,” a word that first began to be heard around 1902. In most historical accounts, it was the prospect of these new careers that drove more and more young men into college.1
Again, though, what continued to make the United States distinctive was the persistence of political fragmentation, economic decentralization, and the corresponding huge universe of “mid-sized” manufacturers. These companies, well below the ranks of GE but far larger than the local blacksmith, remained in private hands and continued to be directed by family owners, even as what it meant to be “mid-sized” increased in scale decade after decade. At the very largest firms, too, many families declined to offload their controlling shareholder stakes well into the twentieth century. (Just think of Ford and DuPont in the 1920s; Koch Industries and News Corp today.) Nearly a majority of the largest manufacturing companies were still under family control as late as 1930.
To maintain family control, whether at companies large or middling, the training and legitimation of heirs became all the more important. It was these students, largely ignored in the story of the rise of the modern American university, that defined what higher education at the most elite levels looked like and what leadership came to mean.2
At places like Harvard and Yale, recruitment on a national scale began to bring in more and more such heirs. Those few Pittsburgh business owners who attended college in the 1860s and 1870s, for instance, largely enrolled at local institutions like Pitt and Washington and Jefferson. When these men’s sons reached college age in the 1890s and 1900s, Yale and Princeton were far more prominent. Only a few other schools entered this elite circle. This is why the popular image of the “college man” in business for much of the 1890s and 1900s was not a poor or even middle-class graduate applying the work ethic that had allowed him to rise from the masses and attend a state university — it was the Yale–educated son of a wealthy, self-made, nouveau-riche business owner struggling for the first time to work hard as he took over his father’s firm or moved his way up the career ladder at another company. While most colleges still sent most graduates into the professions, at Harvard between 1880 and 1910 the proportion of graduates entering business rose to 60 percent — and, by and large, these graduates did not get there on their own. Executives at mid-sized firms, most likely to be heirs, were nearly twice as likely to be college educated as executives at the largest companies, which other scholars have presented as the great recruiters of the college educated.
As families, executives, and the academics who taught and advised them looked out on the vastly expanding world of business of the late nineteenth century, they sought methods to ride the wave of economic expansion without losing control. One way to respond to increased economic scale was with more bureaucracy: the paternalistic owner replaced by the paternalistic social welfare department; the “family firm” by the “corporate family.” But bureaucracy could be alienating. Managers could more effectively exert control if they could provide the feeling of being led by an individual, not some faceless bureaucrat far away in an office. Instead of large-scale bureaucracy, the idea went, personal relations between manager and worker might be maintained by increasing the scale of managerial personalities.
This thought didn’t come out of nowhere. Across US politics and culture, the late nineteenth century witnessed the rise of new kinds of imagined connection between figureheads and movements. Preachers like Billy Sunday and politicians like Eugene Debs used emotional appeals and personal “magnetism,” as this capacity was often called, to connect with followers across an increasingly disconnected society.
The use of emotion and claims of personal connection went back millennia, but such rhetorical devices had generally been limited to the arenas of religion, war, and, most recently, democratic politics. The idea that the social relations of politics, religion, and war could be transferred to everyday social life was greeted in the late nineteenth century as fundamentally new. So, too, was the idea that religious revivalists or military heroes were not just products of unaccountable genius. That similar figures could be educated for “leadership,” and systematically produced at scale — this was a mark of the modern age.
The preacher Henry Ward Beecher was at the cutting edge of such ideas when he delivered a landmark set of lectures at Yale in 1873. Rather than an occasional wild mass revival meeting led by a singular charismatic preacher, Beecher advocated for a kind of continual revivalism, based in what he called “spiritual engineering.” Instead of the traditional practices of religious revival, where a congregation might be swept up by a connection between a charismatic figure and the experience of faith, Beecher wanted to rein in the forces of revival through the preacher’s carefully controlled “personality.” Instead of an outbreak of revivalism, soon to flame out, the preacher’s congregation, Beecher promised, would then be “amenable to good management.”
Whether members of Beecher’s conservative Brooklyn congregation, or witnesses to the mass appeal of leftists like Debs, business managers and their ideological standard-bearers took note. As late as 1884 the “captains of industry,” the term Thomas Carlyle had earlier introduced in an attempt to loan businessmen a little of the charisma of Napoleon, could be portrayed in US advice literature not as individuals with distinctive personalities but as interchangeable officeholders. Into the 1870s higher education remained a place for the virtues of character — “self-control,” “self-denial,” and “discipline” — not expansive personality. It was in the 1880s and 1890s that students, administrators, and alumni embraced a more ambitious aim: “producing leaders.” The university would not only instruct those destined for high positions; the institution would now “multiply … such men” and actively “develop the qualities of leadership.” Or as Harvard graduate W. E. B. Du Bois recast this approach at African-American colleges: the project was “to raise the Talented Tenth” to “trained leadership,” producing “college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture.”
“The university is the school of leadership” one prominent Progressive advised a group of Harvard undergraduates. The aim of education was to produce the kind of man who “contracts the crowd into the span of his personality,” who “gives to the masses coherence vivid and individual.” Rather than a dangerous “chameleon quality,” as once condemned by skeptical students, “personality” became as essential as “character,” the measure of an individual’s “value as a social factor.”
By 1915, the study of distinctive “forceful personalities” had become the sine qua non of business education. “Handling men,” the main way of talking about management as a dispassionate, impersonal task of bureaucratic administration, was displaced by a more personalistic conception, one that rose to prominence across the Global North to fill the human gap in management charts. This was “leadership.”3
According to the typical story about the relationship between industry and higher education, companies began hiring college graduates in large numbers for the first time in the 1890s and 1900s because the new corporate behemoths needed managers with basic clerical skills, some technical expertise, and the capacity to lead subordinates while themselves navigating bureaucratic hierarchies. A university degree helped make managers’ claims to expert authority appear legitimate; it also signaled that a graduate could be trusted to navigate uncertainty to the benefit of the firm. Once graduates seized sufficient positions, they pursued their own self-interest and that of their fellow alumni by hiring fellow alumni for managerial positions, producing what sociologists call “social closure.” The result was an enduring form of credentialism. No less a figure than Andrew Carnegie moved in a decade from believing that higher education “injured” a young man destined for business to declaring that such a man would win out since “he has more education, and education will always tell.”
The problem with this story is that it presents college educated managers as promoting a worldview that, as we shall see, they in fact saw themselves as standing above, i.e. scientific authority. This story also uses the words of managers to suggest that higher education produced qualities like leadership that are not straightforward natural attributes but rather discursive productions of both universities and the business world. Whether a college administrator’s claims that graduates had “more experience in leadership by three times” than non-graduates, or a manager’s belief that college education produced “sound judgment,” discourses about the qualities college produced and the criteria of business success cross-pollinated until they became one and the same. It is not that firms needed “bureaucratic workers,” as one scholar puts it, and higher education providentially came to provide masters of bureaucracy. Rather, companies and universities co-constituted the very meaning of bureaucratic relations in the United States, with leadership and its constituent qualities an ongoing joint project. “Social closure” and “credentialism” are not inapt descriptions of the results, but these ends were achieved by culture and discourse as much as by the straightforward “signaling,” as economists put it, of college degrees.
Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, US universities enrolled students from a mix of social backgrounds and largely sent them into the professions. The proportion of Harvard graduates entering business grew slowly but remained roughly steady between 10 and 25 percent from the 1790s to the 1870s. It was one of these students who informed a young Henry Adams, “The degree of Harvard is worth money to me in Chicago.” Adams found himself shocked by this statement because in the nineteenth century college for most remained a road to relative economic stagnation, only mitigated by the promise of cultural prestige in a professional career. It was not until the 1900s and 1910s that the children of business began to predominate in student bodies nationwide. But this change in student backgrounds, at the vast majority of institutions, did not produce a change in career destinations. Although more children of businessmen entered college, these students continued to follow their fellows into professional positions. This is why the business success guides consumed by middle-class children in the 1900s and 1910s continued to present higher education as a distraction, not a path into management.
Contemporary observers knew what later historians, focused on the rise of a supposed pipeline from college to management in the 1890s and 1900s, have missed. Previous historians have drawn their conclusions about the turn by students to managerial careers without close attention to surveys of graduate careers. These scholars have also extrapolated far too much from contemporary census reports that claim to document the rise of “managers” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The data in question cover not only corporate bureaucrats but all “managers, officials, and proprietors,” including vast numbers of owners of corner stores, boarding houses, and other low-level establishments. These data are practically useless for tracking the rise of corporate managers. A more revealing finding, based on new work with the census data, is that even as American companies rapidly grew in size in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number of positions coded by the census as “managers” that could sustain a respectable haut bourgeois lifestyle, such as owning a home and employing a domestic servant, remained extremely small. (Analysis based on IPUMS 1 percent census samples; thank you to Senan Hogan-Hennessy for coding work.)
The history of “leadership” in the United States has only begun to be written. The scholar Warren Susman promised a study of leadership to follow his great work on “personality.” But Susman’s premature death left this work unpublished. For the draft, Warren Susman, “Leadership and Opinion in an Age of Cultural Personality,” no date, Box 6, Folder 2, Warren Susman Papers, R-MC 118, Rutgers University Archives. The most extensive assessment, and the source for this observation about the transition from “handling men” to “leadership,” is untranslated. Yves Cohen, Le siècle des chefs: une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorité (1890-1940) (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2013). Cohen’s treatment of the American case remains schematic. For a suggestive cultural history, Jeremy C. Young, The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). One incisive study finds in German social science a source for early US academic theories of leadership. Erik Baker, “The Rise of Entrepreneurial Management Theory in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History, November 2021, 1–25. But if German economists and sociologists were crucial in the formalization of US ideas about leadership, the celebration of the business leader long predated the arrival of these thinkers’ students and writings on US shores.