374 Indiana Magazine of History Volumes Received Much Praise

374 Indiana Magazine of History

volumes received much praise from the historical profession. Volume I11 is equally impressive.

University of Southern California, Richard Allen Heckman Los Angeles

The Credit Merchants: A History of Spiegel, Inc. By Orange A. Smdley and Frederick D. Sturdivant. Introduction by Harold F. Williamson. (Carbondale : Southern Illi- nois University Press, 1973. Pp. xvii, 336. Tables, illustrations, appendix, notes, index. $12.50.)

This is a well written book dealing with the complex history of one of the best known mail order firms. The work amply documents the Spiegel family’s considerable success in merchandizing. It is a substantial contribution to the literature of business history, complimenting an existing study of Sears, Roebuck and Company and surpassing a company history of Spiegel. That first Spiegel history, in fact, was produced from Orange A. Smalley’,s original manuscript in 1965, after Smalley’s death in 1964. The present book, spon- sored by Northwestern University’s Committee for Business History and completed by Frederick D. Sturdivant, is also based upon Smalley’s decade of research, which had received support from the Spiegel Company through the same committee. The Credit Merchants depicts the endurance and audacity of three generations of the Spiegel family in maintaining their family firm. Joseph Spiegel of the immigrant generation survived a Confederate prison and ran high quality retail furniture stores in Chicago until he stumbled suddenly into bankruptcy in 1892. Modie Spiegel, his eldest son, im- mediately led his doubting father and others into high pres- sure sales of low quality furniture to working class Chicago- ans on credit. This venture proved quite successful, despite the depression of 1893, and endured until liquidation in early 1929. Long before, in 1905, the youngest son, Arthur, initiated an experiment coupling mail order sales and installment credit which was the Spiegel firm’s innovative contribution to retailing. The company preceded both Sears and Mont- gomery Ward by some years in the use of credit. Well before Book Reviews 375

World War I mail order credit became the mainstay of Spiegel’s profits. Spiegel managed to take both the recession of 1914 and the postwar depression in stride ; the second generation management. chiefly Modie, grew mildly complaisant during the 1920s. The authors’ most intriguing discussions are of Spiegel’s near discovery of the possibilities of add-on (modern revolving credit) in 1908 and again in 1917. Both times the second generation management drew up short after successful experiments produced rapidly mounting short term debt and receding customer maturities. The practice of revolving credit was not adopted by them and their competi- tors until the 1930,s. The third generation, led by Modie Spiegel jr., took charge during the depression of the 1930s. Spiegel throve, first by enlarging their quest for customers geographically and numerically, later by improving their product lines to tap a more discerning market. World War I1 brought an end to “no downpayment, no interest” credit terms ; since then hidden charges have become more visible. After the war Modie jr. took Spiegel on an ill fated decade long effort to match Sears’ success with new retail outlets. After a decade of ap- parent success with mail order and notable moderization of technology, the Spiegels sold their firm to Beneficial Finance Corporation in 1965. As a work of business history this book has considerable merit. It could have been improved by closer attention to comparisons with Montgomery Ward and Sears, by analysis of the importance of locational factors (Chicago) in the success of all three (or just Spiegel as the newest), and by analysis of the dependence of all three (or just Spiegel as the smallest) on bankers for short term debt needs to offset customer credit. As a scholarly work the book is marred by missing notes for one chapter, by an added and threadbare final chapter, by inadequate research beyond the Spiegel archives, and by the lack of a bibliography. As a study of the family and its firm from a conventional historian’s point of view, it is suggestive but scarcely definitive. It largely overlooks, or stops short of adequate inquiry into, the company’s dealings with labor, its attitudes on blacks as customers and as workers, and its feelings about anti-German and anti- Semitic prejudice. Matters like reasons for incorporation 376 Indiana Magazine of History under West Virginia laws and instances of lobbying in vari- ous eras are simply not plumbed.

University of Wisconsin, Madison Merrill Hough

Guerrilla Warrior: The Early Life of John J. Pershing. By Donald Smythe. (New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. Pp. ix, 370. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $10.95.)

This very readable study of General Pershing’s career prior to World War I is based on massive scholarship. Donald Smythe has consulted more than eighty manuscript collections (including sixteen separate collections of Pershing papers), interviewed some one hundred persons and corresponded with even more, read newspapers ranging from the Boston Globe to the Manila Times, and mastered the vast array of literature on the “old Army” before 1917. The result is first rate military biography, and Smythe’s Pershing will sit well along side of Edward Coffman’s Peyton March, Clayton James’ Douglas MacArthur, or Forrest Pogue’s George Marshall. The man chosen to command the American Expeditionary Force to France in 1917 had, ironically, spent his entire miIitary career in command of small units. Smythe’s focus is on Pershing as frontier cavalryman-“guerrilla warrior” -chasing Apaches in Arizona and Sioux in the Dakotas, pacifying Moros in the Philippines, and leading the famous Punitive Expendition against Pancho Villa in northern Mexico. During the 1890s Pershing fought in the Spanish American War in the battles around Santiago and also com- manded cadets at the University of Nebraska and at West Point. It was at West Point that he earned the nickname “Black Jack” or “Nigger Jack,” an uncomplimentary epithet resulting from his excessive concern for discipline. Indeed, the Pershing of those early years was very much a “professional’s professional,” an ambitious and capable soldier who won jungle campaigns through diplomacy as well as through force and who rose in rank through g0od connections as well as through good deeds. Smythe proves that Pershing did not owe his rapid promotion to direct political influence ; none- theless, it did not hurt that his father-in-law was chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. Similarly, Per-