The Great A and P and the Struggle for Small Business in America Part 11

U.S. Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933.

_____. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1923.

_____. Historical Statistics of the United States, Centennial Edition. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976.

U.S. Congress. Joint Commission on Agricultural Inquiry. Marketing and Distribution. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1922.

U.S. Department of Commerce. Census of Distribution. Mimeo, 1927.

U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Chain Stores: Cooperative Grocery Chains. Senate doc. 12, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., 1931.

_____. Chain Stores: Final Report on the Chain-Store Investigation. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935.

_____. Chain Stores: Growth and Development of Chain Stores. Senate doc. 100, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., 1932.

_____. Chain Stores: Scope of the Chain-Store Inquiry. Senate doc. 31, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., 1931.

_____. Chain Stores: Sources of Chain-Store Merchandise. Senate doc. 30, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., 1931.

_____. Chain-Store System of Marketing and Distribution. Senate doc. 146, 71st Cong., 2nd sess., 1930.

_____. Resale Price Maintenance. House of Representatives doc. 1480, 65th Cong., 3rd sess., December 3, 1918.

_____. A System of Accounts for Retail Merchants. House of Representatives doc. 1355, 64th Cong., 1st sess., July 15, 1916.

_____. Wholesale Business of Retail Chains. Senate doc. 29, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., 1931.

_____. Wholesale Marketing of Food. Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Historical research is not a solitary process. Many people aided my research for The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. Some were enthusiastic when they heard about the chain-store wars and learned that the old A&P they remembered from childhood was once part of the largest retail enterprise in the world. Others were bemused that anyone would care about grocery stores. All deserve my thanks.

The far-flung repositories of the National Archives and Records Administration were indispensible in researching this book. The details at the heart of The Great A&P come from the extensive legal record created in the course of the criminal ant.i.trust trial in U.S. v. New York Great Atlantic & Pacific. Those who think the U.S. government is overzealous about sealing public records will not be surprised to learn that the entire case file, including the trial transcript and the thousands of exhibits originally produced in open court in 1945, was considered cla.s.sified as late as 2009, and was released to me only upon the filing of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. These records are now available for public use, albeit in extremely dirty cartons, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and I thank James R. Mathis and Heather MacRae for arranging their release. Duplicates of some of the trial materials are also available at the National Archives and Records Administration's Great Lakes Region archives in Chicago, where Scott M. Forsythe and Donald W. Jackanicz a.s.sisted me; for reasons known only to the muses, those materials were never cla.s.sified.

At the National Archives' Center for Legislative Archives in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., Rodney A. Ross helped me locate congressional doc.u.ments related to the chain-store controversies. The staff of the National Archives' New York branch found Civil Warera records concerning both George H. Hartford and George F. Gilman; and Georgia Higley, head of the newspaper section at the Library of Congress, gave me access to periodicals that are critical to understanding commodity markets in the Civil War era. Archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, especially Virginia Lewick, guided me through a ma.s.s of relevant records. Wright Patman's papers are at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, where Bob Tissing was my navigator.

In New Jersey, Avis Anderson went out of her way to help me with materials from the Hartford Family Foundation's collection. George H. Hartford is all but forgotten in Orange, but Doris Walker, former director of the Orange Public Library, came up with microfilms of local newspapers and historical materials. Bob Leach of the Jersey City Public Library provided materials about A&P's headquarters complex there. Father Augustine Curley, O.S.B., of St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, located early yearbooks mentioning George L. Hartford. In New York, the staffs of the New-York Historical Society and the New York Public Library's ma.n.u.scripts division helped me delve into the tea and leather trades in the 1850s. Mary Witkowski of the Bridgeport Public Library sent me articles about George F. Gilman, and even found photos of him. My thanks also to Kathy Maher of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport-although my hunch that Gilman and P. T. Barnum knew each other personally remains only a hunch.

Claire Uziel of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Was.h.i.+ngton helped me with that organization's collection of oral histories related to Jewish grocers. Debbie Vaughan, archivist at the Chicago History Museum, led me to a wealth of information on the food trade. David Kessler of the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley came up with oral histories and other doc.u.ments related to the grocery business in the early decades of the twentieth century. Sarah Ticer, an intern at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, arranged for me to use Sam Rayburn's papers. In the midst of major renovation, the staff of the Texas State Library and Archives located doc.u.ments related to that state's chain-store debates in the 1930s.

Domenica Carriere of the Archives and Special Collections Department, Noel Memorial Library, at Louisiana State University in Shreveport, W. K. Henderson's hometown, sent me transcripts of anti-chain broadcasts on KWKH. Sharon Sumpter, an archivist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, furnished a copy of one of Henderson's broadcasts. I also wish to record my thanks to Jocelyn K. Wilk of the Columbia University Archives; Debbie Greeson of the Kansas Historical Society; Edwin Frank and Chris Ratliff of the Special Collections Department at the University of Memphis library; and Marcia Stentz of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives. Barry Herbert, deputy librarian of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, sought out pictures of Judge Walter Lindley, and Becky Woodrum of the U.S. bankruptcy court in Danville, Illinois, gave me a tour of the building where the 1945 ant.i.trust trial was held.

I received suggestions and helpful leads from Tracey Deutsch, Hasia Diner, Joshua Freeman, Thomas Kessner, Nelson Lichtenstein, Terri Lonier, David Nasaw, and Helen Veit, and from partic.i.p.ants at meetings of the American Historical Society and the Business History Conference. The guidance of my agent, Ted Weinstein, and of Thomas LeBien, my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was vital. I owe a special debt to Margaret Cannella for getting me interested in the grocery trade in the first place.

This book is dedicated to my father, Harry Levinson, who long ago wrote an article for executives t.i.tled "Don't Choose Your Own Successor." Unfortunately, his advice came too late for the Hartfords.