The prestige of the American businessman, appropriately enough in this land of free enterprise and social mobility, has always been great. In other societies, where private enterprise labors under many restrictions and holds out fewer rewards, and venerable professions or traditional aristocracies enjoy a more exalted status, the businessman has never basked in such public favor. For a brief interval during the depression of the 1930’s and in its afterglow, his prestige even in America was low, his word little heeded, his story unappealing as a subject for the popular magazines. But the return of prosperity, the extraordinary performance of industry during and since World War II (aided, of course, by labor and government), and the big corporations’ emphasis on public service and social responsibility seem to have raised the businessman to new heights of esteem. Of course, there is still a fair amount of criticism of big business in the air, but the big businessman himself is held in very high regard. In novels and short stories, in the movies and now on television, in politics and technology, he is enjoying a bullish period.

This is not the only new development involving the contemporary businessman. Important changes in the social origins, education, experience, and qualifications of America’s top executives would seem to be taking place, according to three studies—based on similar methods of research and analysis—that have appeared in recent months.

For The Big Business Executive. The Factors That Made Him, 1900-1950¹, Professor Mabel Newcomer of Vassar College culled reference books, newspapers, local histories and biographies, and consulted the executives themselves, or their relatives, or those chroniclers of local talent, the home-town librarians with their manila folders full of clippings detailing the careers of native sons. Professor Newcomer gathered information about company presidents and board chairmen for three periods: 1899-1903, 1923-25, and 1948-53. Her conclusions for the 1948-53 period are based on the careers of 863 officers in 428 corporations, each with assets of 75 million dollars or more, and together representing a third of all the business wealth in the country.

The findings of a study by W. Lloyd Warner and James C. Abegglen, based on a much larger sampling of businessmen than Professor Newcomer’s, are published in two independent volumes. The bulkier and more technical one, Occupational Mobility in American Business and Industry 1928-1952², is directed to the “professional audience,” while Big Business Leaders in America³ attempts “to interpret the larger significance” of the authors’ results for the layman. The Warner and Abegglen study repeats the one made in 1928 by F. W. Taussig and C. S. Joslyn, American Business Leaders (Macmillan, 1932), and uses the same kind of sample—executives of the largest firms. Ninety per cent of the 8,300 executives investigated by Warner and Abegglen come from firms with an annual gross income of at least five million dollars, and more than half from companies taking in over 50 million dollars a year.

Finally, Herrymon Maurer, in The Great Enterprise⁴—though he is more concerned with the nature and activities of corporations and their directors than with the background of their executives—draws on a Fortune study (November 1952) of 900 executives of the 250 industrial companies with the largest volume of sales, the 25 biggest railroads, and the 25 biggest utilities, each of these men being among the three highest paid executives of his own corporation. Eighty per cent of these executives earned more than $50,000 annually.

All three studies deal with two major questions: social mobility in the class of business executives, and the character of the business leader’s training and experience. Firstly, are the top executives of our biggest companies being recruited more and more from the higher income and occupational groups, or does the poor man’s son have a better chance than before of joining the business elite? (It must be borne in mind that this is social mobility of a special type—not the rise of a worker’s son to a mere clerical or teaching job, but to the highest paid position in American industry, that of a major executive.) And, secondly, what kind of educational and occupational experience do today’s executives have as compared with those of earlier eras or, within the current crop, how do the younger compare with the older?

The answer given by both Warner-Abegglen and Newcomer to the question of social mobilty is pretty much what we might have expected. “Fathers at the elite levels,” say Warner and Abegglen, “still find it possible to endow their sons with greater opportunity than those further down enjoy. Nevertheless, they do so now in decreased numbers. The sons of men from the wrong side of the tracks are finding their way increasingly to the places of power and prestige.” And Newcomer: “The sons of families in the low-income groups will not reach the top as quickly as the sons of the wealthy, but the chance of arriving eventually is improving.” But—as we shall see in a moment—the evidence offered for these conclusions does not yield quite so clear a picture.

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Not surprisingly, the first thing both the Warner-Abegglen and the Newcomer studies show is that the sons of businessmen or professionals have a better chance of becoming top executives than, say, the sons of laborers. Thus Warner and Abegglen find that among their 8,300 business leaders, nearly two-thirds are the sons of business owners, executives, and professionals; these three occupational groups, however, constituted only about one-eighth of the total adult male population of the United States in 1920, when the fathers of the present executives were in their prime. On the other hand, they find that only 15 per cent of the present executives are sons of laborers, who in 1920 constituted 47 per cent of the total male population. Thus the sons of workers are greatly under-represented in the executive class, while the sons of businessmen and professionals are over-represented. Newcomer finds an even greater difference among her more select sampling of executives. About three-quarters of the 860 top executives in her study are the sons of business owners, executives, and professionals, although these callings were filled by only a little more than a tenth of all employed males in 1910. Conversely, she finds that only 2 per cent of the executives had working-class fathers, though workers in 1910 accounted for 65 per cent of all employed men.

These facts only add precision to what we already know—that the men who run American business are more likely to come from a socioeconomic group higher than the working class. What we still want to know is what the trend has been in recent decades. Are the privileged groups becoming even more privileged, or do the sons of humble fathers constitute a growing proportion of the top executives? To answer this question, Warner and Abegglen compare the origins of executives today with those of the executives studied in 1928 by Taussig and Joslyn. Of the 1952 group, 15 per cent are the sons of workers, whereas in 1928 only 11 per cent were. The proportion of executives who are the sons of professionals rose, however, from 13 to 14 per cent. The proportion of executives whose fathers were themselves major executives and business owners declined from 58 per cent in 1928 to 52 per cent in 1952. Newcomer’s executives show a slightly different trend from 1925 to 1950. Of her 1950 sampling, 63 per cent turned out to be the sons of businessmen and major executives, compared with only 56 per cent in 1925. Executives who were the sons of professionals declined from 23 to 18 per cent, while those with working-class fathers rose from 6 to nearly 8 per cent.

Thus the Warner-Abegglen and the Newcomer conclusions do not quite jibe. Both studies find an increase in the proportion of executives from working-class familes, although Newcomer finds the proportion itself, as well as its increase, smaller than do Warner and Abegglen. As for the sons of professionals who reach the top, Warner and Abegglen discover a slight increase from 13 to 14 per cent, whereas Newcomer charts a decline from 23 to 18 per cent. And as for the sons of businessmen who become executives, Warner and Abegglen trace a drop from 58 to 52 per cent, while Newcomer sees an increase from 56 to 63 per cent.

Yet, as Warner-Abegglen and Newcomer both point out, this is not the whole story. Some of these shifts in the proportion of executives coming from the various occupations between the 1920’s and the 1950’s may only, as Newcomer puts it, “reflect changes in the total occupational distribution of the male population” in this country. For example, since white-collar workers today constitute a much larger proportion of all employed persons than they did twenty-five years ago, we should not be surprised to learn that the sons of workers comprise an increasing proportion of white-collar workers—there being relatively many more such opportunities today than a generation or two ago.

Warner and Abegglen have tried to take occupational changes of this kind into account by devising a ratio “between the percentage of the population in each occupation and the percentage of business leaders from each occupational background.” According to this measure, if 45 per cent of the adult males in one generation were workers, we should expect—given the impossible condition that such factors as education and family influence do not interfere with the workings of pure statistical chance or probability—that 45 per cent of the next generation of business leaders will be the sons of workers; the theoretical “chance” ratio, then, would be 45:45 or 1. But if on investigation it turns out that only 15 per cent of all top executives are actually sons of workers, the “real” mobility ratio becomes 45:15, or 3:1, which means that only a third of the number of workers’ sons who should have risen to executive status, if chance alone decided, have in fact done so. This allows us to say that an occupational group is “over-represented” when its ratio is higher than 1, while those groups supplying a lower proportion of executives than their numerical strength in the total population warrants by itself, have a ratio of lower than 1.

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Having established this standard of measurement, Warner and Abegglen go on to compare the “real” mobility ratios of the various occupational groups in 1928 with those in 1950. They find that for the sons of workers, mobility rose from a low 0.24 to a low 0.32; for the sons of white-collar workers, from 0.71 to 0.80; and for the sons of farmers, from 0.32 to 0.33. These “under-represented” groups, which have been supplying business leaders at a faster rate than their own ranks are being swelled, are therefore tending to be less under-represented. At the same time, the mobility ratios of the sons of businessmen and professionals (the over-represented groups) have declined, respectively, from 9.67 to 4.73 and from 4.33 to 3.50. This means that business and the professions, while they continue to breed executives in much higher proportions than their numbers in the total population warrant, are nevertheless doing so at a declining rate. And this the authors cite as evidence for the contention that the top business careers are opening up more and more to men of lower socio-economic background.

Actually, however, the changes indicated by their mobility ratios for 1928 and 1952 are not very impressive, except for the drop where the sons of businessmen are concerned. These changes certainly do not seem large enough to sustain the weighty conclusions about social mobility that Warner and Abegglen pile onto them: a rise in the ratio of sons of workers among top executives from 0.28 to 0.32 won’t go very far to prove the Horatio Alger myth. Moreover, we do not know whether this difference is the result largely of chance and the particular sample of executives the two studies happened to catch, or whether the difference is so great that it would show up in other samples. There are formal tests of statistical significance to determine such matters, but unfortunately the authors don’t tell us whether they have made such te9ts. Even assuming, however, that the differences are indeed an accurate measure of what has happened to mobility in this country, they are still much too small to bear the weight of Warner-Abegglen’s confident belief that mobility from bottom to top has increased significantly since 1928.

But what accounts for the discrepancies between the Warner-Abegglen findings and those of Newcomer? The former, it will be recalled, found a greater increase than Newcomer over the last quarter-century in the proportion of executives stemming from working-class families, and with respect to the sons of businessmen, Warner and Abegglen noted a decline between 1928 and 1952, whereas Newcomer saw a rise in approximately the same period. It is pretty clear that these incongruous results can be ascribed to the fact that the two studies covered dissimilar samples. Warner-Abegglen’s group of 8,300 are not necessarily the very highest executives in the country. Newcomer’s 863, on the other hand, includes only the very highest officials in the companies selected—that is, the presidents and the chairmen of boards of directors. Since a less exalted status makes an executive eligible for their sampling, Warner and Abegglen naturally find greater mobility than Newcomer, who remains at the most rarefied and least accessible heights of the business hierarchy.

This explanation of the difference between the two studies is borne out by the Fortune study mentioned earlier. Restricting itself to 900 top executives of the 300 largest companies in their field, the Fortune study is of course closer in nature to Newcomer’s than to Warner and Abegglen’s. Instead of comparing the executives of today with those of the 1920’s, Fortune confines itself to the present crop, but it does compare the occupations of the fathers of executives under fifty years of age with those of the fathers of all 900 executives. This is another way to establish a trend; and Fortune finds that the trend is toward less mobility. Thus 62 per cent of the 900 fathers were themselves businessmen but 68 per cent of the fathers of executives under fifty were businessmen. Conversely, while 8 per cent of the 900 fathers were workers, only 3 per cent of the fathers of the younger executives were workers. According to this study, then, the very top executives are being drawn to an increasing degree from the sons of businessmen, and less and less from among the workers.

What can we conclude from all this? If a broad range of executive jobs in industry today is considered, an increase shows up in the proportion of workers’ sons who enter the charmed circle and a decrease in the proportion of businessmen’s sons who do so (Warner-Abegglen). But if only the very top executive jobs are in question, then the chances of the workers’ sons have increased only slightly (Newcomer), or have actually declined (Fortune), while the chances of businessmen’s sons have increased (Newcomer and Fortune). In other words, there has been some movement from the bottom to the lower limits of the top, but very little to the upper limits of the top.

What these studies demonstrate is not so much that the myth of rags to riches is a reality in America, but that the much more prosaic progress from comfort to luxury is a commonplace among us. Newcomer calculates that the executives coming from poor familes constitute a smaller proportion of all executives today than they did in 1900, which seems to be a reflection of the increasing rarity of poverty itself in this country. The proportion from wealthy families has shrunk much more since 1900, but the gap has been filled by the sons of middle-income families. Then there is the question of inheritance and nepotism. Both Warner-Abegglen and Newcomer find that direct inheritance of positions has declined, especially in the larger firms. But this is misleading, for both studies demonstrate the growing importance of education as a qualification for reaching the top in business—among the 1928 business leaders, for example, only 32 per cent were college graduates, compared with 57 per cent among the 1952 executives—and it is still true that college education is reserved largely for the middle and upper classes. As Warner and Abegglen put it: “The men from the higher origins get the most education, and the ones from the lower, the least.” “Inheritance” has taken the new form of providing a child with the means to get ahead. Newcomer describes the change in this way: “For all groups of executives, family assistance increasingly takes the form of providing a college education, and perhaps professional training at the graduate level, rather than capital or a place in the family business or the business of some friend.”

The influence of inheritance or family wealth on education is important in another way too, since the sons of the wealthy, whether they go into business or the professions, soon earn more than do the sons of the less wealthy in the same occupations. A few years ago Ernest Havemann and Patricia Salter West showed in They Went to College (Harcourt, Brace, 1952), that a decreasing proportion of those who worked their way through college have been entering high-paid professions like medicine, law, and dentistry, whereas a steady (and higher) proportion of those whose families paid for their tuition are entering the more lucrative fields. Similarly, among the graduates who worked while at school, a steady (and higher) proportion have been entering the low-paid professions like teaching, the clergy, and the fine arts; among the graduates who did not have to work there has been a considerable drop in the number who have had to satisfy themselves with these jobs. Moreover, the two types of graduates fare differently even when they go into business. About two-thirds of each category wind up in business, but those who did not have to support themselves through school do much better than the ones who did.

What does this mean for the present group of executives? It means that even though a substantial number of their sons never become executives, many of those who don’t will end up fairly comfortably in one of the high-paid professions. Indeed, Warner and Abegglen show that of the sons of executives in 1952, perhaps a third have become professionals—and although the authors don’t tell us anything more, we can guess that they are in the professions that require longer and more expensive training and pay off better financially.

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None of these laboriously established conclusions—that mobility from bottom to top is limited, that if you’re going to be wealthy it’s better to start by being born rich, and that money, as the adage has it, still goes to money-is startling. Why should anyone expect workers’ sons to become executives even in approximately the same proportion as the sons of businessmen? If the facts do not bear out the most optimistic notions, does this mean that the economy is a total failure? Our ideas about the extent of social mobility have undergone an interesting change. In the 1930’s we were told that mobility was declining; it was assumed that in the 19th century mobility was rather high. Now we are being told by many observers that mobility is rising; and the assumption is that earlier in this century it was rather low.

Both assertions are probably exaggerations, for at no time does mobility seem to have been as high or as low as either position claimed. Several studies of the social origins of business leaders after the Civil War show that even in the days before the closing of the frontier, the industrial elite came from the upper socioeconomic strata and was much more highly educated than the rest of the population. From one such study dealing with the 1870’s, by Frances W. Gregory and Irene D. Neu (“The American Industrial Elite in the 1870’s,” in Men in Business, edited by Willam Miller, Harvard University Press, 1952), we learn that 51 per cent of 303 top executives in the largest textile, steel, and railroad companies were the sons of businessmen, only 25 per cent the sons of farmers (even though America was still largely an agricultural country) and only 8 per cent the sons of workers—all this despite the myths so widely accepted about the openness of our class system. Gregory and Neu compare their findings with those of Miller (the editor of the volume in which their paper appears), who examined the origins of top executives in 1901-10. In this thirty-year period the proportion of business leaders whose fathers had likewise been in business rose slightly from 51 to 55 per cent. These results are in extraordinarily close agreement with those of both Newcomer and Warner-Abegglen; their data for 1900 show that exactly 51 per cent of executives were the sons of businessmen.

The achievement and virtue of the American economy, it would seem, is not so much that it has permitted considerable social mobility—it assuredly has, but not nearly to the extent many observers have supposed—but rather, that it has provided an increasingly high standard of living for all social classes, and, in recent years, the less privileged classes in particular. As for the claims of social mobility, the least favorable thing one can say is that they are premature. This is the conclusion Professor Eli Ohinoy of Smith College reaches at the end of his survey of the evidence in the American Sociological Review of April 1955. And the most favorable thing we can say is—as William Petersen concludes in his Commentary article “Is America Still the Land of Opportunity?” (November 1953)—that a lot of Americans reach occupations with higher status and pay than their fathers enjoyed and that many Americans improve their occupational standing in their own lifetime. But mobility in this sense is not very marked. As Petersen puts it: “Its range . . . tends to be limited: that is, farmers may become workmen; workers may rise to a higher level of skill or become small businessmen or lower white-collar employees; lower employees may rise to executives; and professional positions tend to be filled from upper white-collar or business groups.” Workers, that is, don’t become top executives.

In contrast to the uncertainty regarding mobility or, at best, the certainty of its limited range, there is no question at all about the vast increase in the real income and the standard of living of the American working class. Reviewing “The Facts About ‘Capitalist Inequality’” in Commentary of June 1951, William G. Grampp pointed out that in 1850 the average worker put in 66 hours a week for 14 dollars. A hundred years later he worked only 36 hours for 62 dollars weekly—the dollar figures being corrected for price rises and inflation in this century. At mid-century the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published a special issue of its Monthly Labor Review (July 1950) examining the changes in workers’ lives since 1900. In one article in the issue (“Changes in Mode of Living”), Witt Bowden reported that real earnings doubled during this half-century; that the work week declined by 15 or 20 hours; that workers now have about a third of their income to spend on things other than food, shelter, and clothing, compared with only a sixth in 1901; that housing is better, education more readily available, freedom to join unions and freedom from company domination greater; and that work itself is physically less burdensome, although its pace may have quickened.

Such economic gains, with their social and personal concomitants, rather than social mobility, are the achievement of the American economic and political system. Greater equalization of incomes is of course another development in the American economy. The Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Bureau of the Census have recently published a comprehensive study of the Income of the American People by Herman P. Miller (Wiley, 260 pp., $5.50) which shows, first of all, that in 1940-50 the gap between lowest and highest incomes narrowed. This came about as a result of the fact that average income for all Americans rose during the period, but not uniformly for all groups. “The greatest relative gains were made by the lowest paid occupations, and the smallest relative gains were made by the highest paid occupations.” Moreover, the range of incomes within most occupations has likewise narrowed.

In other words, the lowest income groups have been able to share more and more in America’s great wealth, although their relative social status has remained pretty much what it was. They’re better off economically, but not so much because they’re advanced occupationally or because the occupations themselves have been shuffled. In fact, the relative income position of the various occupations, as Miller shows, has hardly changed at all; the job that put a man into the lowest tenth of all income groups in 1939 was still likely to keep him in the lowest tenth a decade later. Other studies also indicate that the average person hasn’t gone much higher, if at all, in the occupational hierarchy, but that those at the lower end are enjoying more real income than ever before.

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But these questions of mobility are perhaps less spectacular than the changes that have taken place in the character of the businessman. A picture of the modern top executive emerges from these studies that deserves careful scrutiny. The big businessman was once a captain of industry, an organizer of great aggregates of capital, a builder of the better mouse-trap to whose door people beat a path. As time goes on, these descriptions are becoming more and more anachronistic. According to Newcomer, for example, in 1900 only a fifth of 313 executives had begun their careers as salaried administrators, but in 1950 two-fifths of the 871 studied had come up this way. Warner and Abegglen, dealing with a much larger sample and therefore including lower rungs in the managerial ladder, discover that 82 per cent of today’s executives reached the executive level fifteen years after taking their first jobs. During the same period, from 1900 to 1950, Newcomer finds that the proportion of entrepreneurs and capitalists among the major executives declined sharply from 44 per cent to only 15 per cent. Warner and Abegglen’s sample includes only 5 per cent who can lay claim to the good old American business virtue of owning their own business. Obviously a very large majority of today’s executives have themselves never really met a payroll.

Or take the matter of educational level. The proportion of executives with a college degree has always been much higher than the proportion of the total male population who are college graduates. Even in the 1870’s, when attendance at a university was rather rare, more than a third of the executives studied by Gregory and Neu had a college degree. Since then the highly educated executives have grown more and more numerous, until today, according to Newcomer, Warner-Abegglen, and Fortune, they constitute 60 to 85 per cent of all executives. These findings demonstrate that today the high road to business leadership is formal education and a slow, undramatic process of promotion, rather than the breaking of new entrepreneurial paths. Indeed, from Newcomer we learn that in 1900 half the executives reached their positions principally by organizing or investing in the firm, while fewer than a fifth had worked their way up to the top from less exalted jobs within the company. Today the proportions are reversed: half of the 1950 class of executives had climbed up through the salariat, while only an eighth owed their positions to entrepreneurship or capital investment.

All this points to the increasing “professionalization” of business leadership—greater emphasis on general education (witness the businessmen’s discovery of the value of the liberal arts course) or on specialized training (witness the growing importance of the business school in undergraduate and graduate work).

The professionalization or bureaucratization of business documented in the studies examined here is no new phenomenon. Back in 1921 (to confine ourselves to a relatively recent period) Veblen, in some famous passages in The Engineers and the Price System, distinguished between the “industrial arts,” which are a “matter of tangible performance” calling for “an increasingly exhaustive knowledge of material fact,” and the “business arts” of bargaining, effrontery, salesmanship, make-believe.” Veblen was already noting that “management of corporate business has, in effect, been shifting into the hands of a bureaucratic clerical staff. The corporation financier of popular tradition is taking on the character of a chief of bureau.” Some years later Joseph Schumpeter observed that “innovation,” the entrepreneur’s main function, “itself is being reduced to routine. Technological progress is increasingly becoming the business of teams of trained specialists who turn out what is required and make it work in predictable ways.” Newcomer, Warner-Abegglen, and Fortune all supply statistical backing for these observations.

But they also show how the character of the bureaucracy is changing. Whereas it used to be the “operations and production” men or the “general management” men who most often reached the top, now (according to Newcomer’s and Fortune’s figures) the sales and advertising men are more and more forging ahead (and Newcomer adds the finance department men too). The sharp trend away from the technical “production” departments as a source for top executives is further reflected in Fortune’s data on the academic subject that most interested the executives when at school. The trend here is toward the arts, law, business, and economics, and away from science and engineering, which is the field of academic interest named by 46 per cent of all executives, but only by 29 per cent of those under fifty years of age.

Accompanying these changes has been the discovery of the “human relations” approach by industry in our time. The corporation executive has become a community leader, a public figure. Corporations show more concern than ever with the consumer. Even if this policy aims only to increase sales, it nevertheless has a great effect on the public position of the firm. Thus corporations are now the most generous contributors to charities. And they have begun to give grants to liberal arts colleges and universities on a large scale (itself an interesting bit of evidence that business recognizes its dependence on higher education for the development of managerial talent).

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We have been considering social mobility and professionalization separately, but they are actually related. As an occupation or a calling becomes professionalized its ranks are bound to be opened to a broader range of social groups, since entrance into a profession is typically governed by the attainment of competence through education and experience rather than by social or family position. The ability to acquire this degree of competence of course depends in part—but only in part—on one’s financial resources; no other restrictions bar the lowly, as they did formerly. Despite professionalization, as we have seen, occupational mobility throughout our society—and especially from the bottom to the very top of the business world—has been rather limited. Education is now a prime avenue of approach to high places, but education is still available mainly to the middle and upper classes.

But there are other limiting factors at work in American society apart from education. Professor Newcomer observes, “without further comment,” that “no woman and no Negro has been found among the top executives of this study.” There are, however, some foreign-born who have managed to get to the top, although the great majority of these come from English-speaking countries. As for religion, Episcopalians especially, but also Presbyterians and Congregationali9ts, are more heavily represented among executives than among the general population. Roman Catholics are considerably under-represented—in 1950 they constituted less than a tenth of the executives but nearly a third of the country’s total population. Jews are better represented; they constitute 5 per cent of the executives Newcomer studied, which is rather close to their numerical strength in the total population (6 per cent). But, as we might have suspected, the 18 Jewish executives on Newcomer’s list are concentrated in merchandising, entertainment, and mass communications; few are in heavy industry or utilities, and none in railroads. Moreover, an impressive 40 per cent of the Jewish executives reached the top by organizing their own companies, compared with only 6 per cent for all executives. Entrepreneurship and the spirit of the Protestant ethic, traditionally viewed as the economic and spiritual backbone of the free enterprise system, seem to be embodied these days mainly in Jewish businessmen. As Nathan Glazer remarked in his review of the “Social Characteristics of American Jews, 1654-1954” (American Jewish Year Book, Vol. 56, 1955): “In general, the tendency of Jews was to stay out of the bureaucracies of government and private corporations. In the case of the large corporations, anti-Jewish prejudice played an important role in restricting the number of Jews. . . . But even where prejudice played no role, or practically none, Jews seemed to prefer occupations where they were less dependent on others and had a chance eventually to become completely independent.”

There have, incidentally, been several claims about the “revival” of religion among businessmen. Since church membership is increasing in general, it may well be that it is also increasing among businessmen, although we have no evidence that their turn to religion is either more profound or more pervasive than in the country at large. Fortune, ever alert for the slightest indication of a trend among businessmen, several years ago (October 1953) ran an article hinting that businessmen were becoming more and more religious. This article insisted, against the cynics and some skeptical clergymen, that the turn to religion was really spontaneous and not calculated as a means of bringing God into the firm. Newcomer presents some interesting data on this point. Although she warns that her information on the religion of executives is incomplete, she observes that “there is a good deal of evidence that a large proportion of the executives do not belong to any church and have no strong denominational preference.” The proportions of executives having no apparent religious “preference” are 44 per cent in 1900, 37 per cent in 1925 and 59 per cent in 1950. From this, it looks as though executives are not churchgoers to the same extent as the general population, among whom about 60 per cent are said to be members of a religious body. One may well ask what has happened to the Protestant ethic that was once so intimately related to the spirit of capitalism; it seems to have vanished with entrepreneurship.

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For some years the Luce publications, chroniclers of business activity and guardians of business values, have been disturbed by the tendency of college seniors to prefer employment to enterprise. Now that the entrepreneurial spirit is apparently shunned by businessmen, it is being embraced by publicists and even by scholars. Historians are finding overlooked subjects (not to mention virtues) in the entrepreneurs of bygone eras. Economists and sociologists specializing in the study of “under-developed areas” prescribe heavy doses of the spirit of entrepreneurship to help open the clogged paths to industrialization. Ironically, as traditional entrepreneurial audacity wanes in the United States, the quality of mind and purpose it once fostered is advanced as the greatest asset the West has to offer the poorer countries of Asia eager (despite their “spirituality”) to taste national power and material comfort.

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¹ Columbia University Press, 164 pp., $4.00.

² University of Minnesota Press, 315 pp., $5.50.

³ Harper, 243 pp., $3.75.

⁴ Macmillan, 303 pp., $5.00.

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