THE SOCIAL NETWORK WOVEN BY AN ENTREPRENEURIAL ELITE IN THE INDUSTRIAL CENTURY

In 1949, at a time when influential historians were advising readers of their texts that the typical American business leader of the era of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan was a self-made man who had risen from humble beginnings as a poor farm boy or penniless immigrant, William Miller published an article that demolished this comforting notion. Substituting an investigation of the social origins of 190 top leaders in manufacturing, mining, railroads, public finance, insurance, and banking for the impressionism and intuitive surmise that had been relied on by the architects of the rags-to-riches thesis, Miller showed that with few exceptions turn-of-the-century tycoons were born to privilege and advantage unknown to the general population. As his memorable concluding sentence observed, "poor immigrant and poor farm boys who become business leaders have always been more conspicuous in American history books than in American history."' Three years later Miller's students, Frances Gregory and Irene Neu, reported that the business leaders of the 1870s had backgrounds similar to those disclosed by Miller for the early 1900s: the typical post-Civil War leader of the nation's largest textile, steel, and railroad companies, like his counterpart of a generation later, was born into a family of "relatively high social standing" and was not at all "a 'new man,' an escapee from the slums of Europe or from the paternal farm."2 In a small-gauged but provocative study completed only a decade ago, the protean Herbert Gutman challenged these findings by revealing that, at least in Paterson, New Jersey, "the most successful . .. iron, locomotive, and machinery manufacturers" of the period 1830-80 were with few exceptions self-made ironworkers, who had "opened small shops or factories of their own." Aware of the smallness of his sample-fewer than three dozen men -and the possible atypicality of their locale, Gutman called for research in the backgrounds of industrialists of "other new industrial cities" such as