“What we have done is … to put business in its broader political and cultural setting…. We are not out to defend business, but to try to do an impartial, scholarly investigation of an important American institution.”
– Henrietta Larson (1894–1983), Harvard business historian
For many decades, corporate histories were dominated by simplistic notions of big-is-bad and capitalist exploitation. Yes, Ida Tarbell documented many innovations and economies from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, but she jumped to examples to paint the Standard Trust as ultimately evil in its exploitation of competitors.
Much “Robber Baron” history followed in the decades after Tarbell, failing to comprehend the advantages of industrialization and to differentiate free-market entrepreneurship on the one hand from corporate/government cronyism on the other. As Harvard business historian Thomas McCraw would later explain:
…Without the benefit of a vocabulary that distinguished conceptually between center and peripheral firms, productive and allocative efficiency, vertical and horizontal integration, economies of scale and transaction cost, these observers had only their personal sensibilities and political ideologies to guide them.
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060071515
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“Government agencies are easily born, but they never seem to die. Rarely do they even fade away. But at 5 P.M. today the Government’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation closed its doors forever.”
– “U.S. Synthetic Fuel Corporation Shuts Down,” New York Times, April 19, 1986, p. 46.
Only occasionally in U.S. energy history has a government energy agency disbanded. Almost all have been after wartime when bureaucracies were disbanded (such as World War II’s U.S. Petroleum Administration for War).
The demise of the United States Synthetic Fuels Corporation (SFC) in 1986 was a rarity. Established under the Energy Security Act of 1980, and called by President Jimmy Carter “the cornerstone of U.S. energy policy,” the SFC was premised on a belief in the increasing scarcity of crude oil and natural gas–and thus the need to turn coal into (synthetic) oil and gas.…