Perspective Improves Corporate History Books

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Over the years I have spoken to hundreds of potential clients interested in corporate history books. Nearly all understood that there is a difference between history and public relations, but few seemed to know what it was. One company even got a proposal from me, handed it over to its PR team, and came back later disappointed with the result—but not sure why. It was perspective that was lacking.

Among the things that good historians can bring to corporate history books that no one else can is the ability to put things into a broader context, adding dimension and depth to the story of a single firm. That requires two things often lacking in the corporate suite: the willingness to spread the credit beyond the organization, and the inclination and ability to take a hard look  at the organization from the outside in as well as from the inside out.

Putting your company story into historical perspective is not easy, but it brings great benefits.  Context can breathe life into founding legends, cast a new light on corporate successes and failures, and help readers recognize the familiar in the past.

“You Didn’t Build That”

When Barak Obama told an audience in Roanoke Virginia that “If you’ve got a business . . . you didn’t build that,” he was skewered, and rightly so. It was a surprisingly inept speech from a usually adept speaker. But if you look at the words surrounding that unfortunate phrase you see not a denial of the value of entrepreneurship but a plea for consideration of context in corporate history, that success depends on things beyond the business, like infrastructure, the internet, and good government.

If Obama erred in one direction, most amateur corporate historians err in the other: painting corporate leaders as unfailingly courageous, uncommonly capable, and singlehandedly responsible for success or failure. Indeed, some corporate history books are even structured on a “one chapter per CEO” basis. Not only is this a staggering failure of imagination, it also papers over underlying contextual shifts that can be far more important than the personal qualities of individual leaders.

Apple Macintosh, 1984

In the context of the mid-1980s, for example, when Apple lost its battle with Microsoft to control the PC market, Steve Jobs came off as an ineffective executive. Twenty years later the CEO who failed to see the importance of open architecture was hailed as an iPhone visionary. But in truth only the context changed. In both cases Jobs insisted on integrating hardware and software.

Perspective does not always get squeezed out of the C-Suite—in rare cases an entire corporate culture has been built upon recognition that it was context more than commercial savvy that led to success. While I was researching my history of the engineering consulting firm MPR Associates for my book Sustaining Excellence, it became clear that the company’s three founders “didn’t,” in Obama’s words, “build that.” Instead they had adopted a corporate culture and an engineering consulting model wholesale from the United States Nuclear Navy. Admiral Hyman Rickover, who had never served in the company was as much a founder as anyone.  MPR, to its credit, was glad to acknowledge that debt.

Taking the Outside View

I have known of corporate historians whose expectations regarding sources were pretty low. Give them some annual reports, scrapbooks, some internal papers and photographs, and a few oral history interviews and they could produce a passable story. But clients deserve better, and a good historian should be driven to provide it. The client relationship and use of internal records all push an author to take a particular perspective—that of looking from the inside the company out.

There are hazards to this approach. First is the problem of evidence—how do you know that a particular story, told over and over again in company publications is entirely accurate? In the case of one professional organization that I worked for, its first “historian” more than a century ago, had gotten the sequence of events leading up to the founding wrong. That sequence was passed down—incorrectly—for nearly 150 years. How is the historian to know?

When I take on a project, I begin with a look from the outside in, starting with a review of books and articles about the particular business, discipline, or specialty in question. I then pivot to an in-depth newspaper search about the corporation. In doing so I help inoculate myself from buying uncritically into legend and lore that may have long ago come untethered from fact. In the case of the professional association’s founding sequence, it seemed “off” to me, so I dove into my 150-year-old newspaper collection and figured out what really happened.

There are even greater consequences when the corporate historian never decamps from inside company walls. Competitors might be overlooked, demonized, or worst of all, not recognized for their contribution to the overall business. Particular corporate initiatives may be chalked up to “innovation” or a mere whim when they actually resulted from a competitor’s insight or even regulatory change. There was a time when internal company records like annual reports and board of directors meeting minutes laid out the motivations for business decisions in some depth and detail. In the post-World War II era, however, that candor slowly evaporated so that internal sources are often guaranteed to provide only a partial picture at best or to mislead at worst.

Challenging Founding Legends

Most corporations cling to a bold, all-caps, less-than-paragraph length founding legend that inevitably revolves around a word like vision. Not to discredit those entrepreneurs who have truly been uncommonly foresighted, but in many cases business enterprises begin with a good idea, a willingness to take risks, and a context which minimizes the hazards to the point that the business can succeed.

I have written corporate history books for two of the great long-haul trucking pioneers, Consolidated Freightways, and Roadway. Only the former fits the “up from the bootstraps” narrative preferred by the writers and consumers of corporate history. Leland James progressed from lone trucker to CEO of Consolidated Freightways because he was one of the first to the field in the thinly settled Pacific Northwest where, despite the delays caused by bad roads, he could still provide faster service than the railroads.

Leland James of Consolidated Freightways

Roadway’s Galen Roush on the other hand, lived a much different story. Roush never drove a truck, and by the time he started business in the 1930s the nation’s industrial heartland was crisscrossed with good roads and trucking startups. It was context that provided Roush with his advantage, for he started out in Akron, Ohio, home to the world’s largest rubber manufacturers. Firestone and Goodyear diverted their loads from trains to trucks despite the higher shipping costs in order to burn up more tires and thus build their own businesses.

The Consolidated Freightways founding story may be more conventional than Roadway’s, but later developments in its corporate history show how attention to context can make past accomplishments all the more interesting. In the expansive western states where Consolidated Freightways operated it was essential to haul as much load as possible. The states though, influenced by railroads and seeking to protect their pavement, put strict length limits on trucks. In 1940 Consolidated Freightways manufactured one of the first practical cab-over-engine tractors in order to get around this contextual hurdle. These allowed additional freight to be carried where the hood of the truck used to be. Consolidated Freightways no longer survives, but its manufacturing offshoot, Freightliner, is now one of the world’s leading truck manufacturers.

In these cases, as in so many others, contextual factors like these were well-known to company old-timers and most writers would surely mention them as being important. But in line with the writer’s dictum “show, don’t tell,” whenever possible I build these contextual substories into the corporate history itself so that the reader is just not told, but experiences through description just how much of an obstacle state length limits were or how much an advantage being located in the tire capital of the world could be.

The Familiar and Fascinating in a Relived Past

This, in the end, is the greatest advantage of maintaining a wide sense of perspective in writing corporate history books. Lived experience takes place on a broad stage, becoming ever more complex due to endless encounters with unexpected things.  Relived experience (that is, history) must offer the same kinds of encounters if it is to come to life in the mind of the reader.

Most writers understand this and so make sure to include “history” in their accounts. Worst case efforts, which I encounter all too often, shrink the stage and turn the history into mere props.  A paragraph might begin by evoking the “Gay Nineties” or the “Great Depression” in a few predictable stereotypes before pivoting back to the internal company story with no indication of how or why those larger landmarks mattered.

The Blue Eagle was issued to firms that complied with the New Deal’s “Codes of Fair Competition.”

If you know your context, you know that seemingly abstract national stories do matter. You can show your reader how they mattered rather than simply include them as so much window dressing. For example, one of the earliest federal initiatives of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was an effort to create “Codes of Fair Competition” for all industrial sectors. That story is one of those that I often tell to make the connection between corporate history and the Great Depression.  When it comes to trade associations the connection is even more direct—existing organizations were often put in charge of particular industry codes, and where one did not exist, they were often created with the blessing of the Roosevelt administration.  Since the effort was ultimately pronounced unconstitutional it is little known today. Still, its historical consequences and its role in a corporate history can be profound. But you have to know to look for it.

A similar thing happened around the time of World War I. That conflict came at the end of what historians call the Progressive Era, a time of sustained reform that transformed America in countless ways. When I began researching the history of the Associated General Contractors of America, the official story was that President Wilson had personally asked contractors to form a trade association. But there was no evidence of that. One of my co-authors even searched the papers of Woodrow Wilson at the Library of Congress, but we never found an indication that this could be true. Instead we found a story that made much more sense—that the organization got its spark not from a war-weary president but from the United States Chamber of Commerce, itself the exemplar of Progressivism in the American business community.

And that, in the end, is the best reason to have a professional historian writing corporate history books. Your institution’s story does not simply stand alone—it is part of the complicated and endlessly fascinating sweep of the American story.

Contact me if you would like to talk about bringing new perspective to your corporate history book.

The NIDDK Oral History Project: The Individual and the Institution

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In 2019 I had the honor of serving as oral history consultant for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), among the oldest and largest of the institutes under the National Institutes of Health.  My preparation for a series of video interviews took me through diverse areas of research that have distinguished NIDDK, including carbohydrate chemistry, regulatory proteins, polyamines and metabolism, protein folding, and sickle cell disease.  Much of the focus of these interviews was on the stellar scientific careers of the individual interviewees and their colleagues at NIDDK, which included six Nobel laureates.

Four of the interviews made publicly available in time for NIDDK’s 70th Anniversary year focus also on the growth and development of the Institute itself. Dr. Herbert Tabor was there at the 1950 founding of the institution originally named the National Institute of Arthritic and Metabolic Diseases. Dr. Phillip Gorden served as Director from 1986 to 1999, Dr. Allen Spiegel from 1999 to 2006, and Dr. Griffin Rodgers from 2006 to the present. Each of these interviewees discuss organizational challenges such as funding, relations with legislators, and the growing importance of public-facing programs. All express a shared commitment to ensure that NIDDK’s accomplishments were greater than the sum of its individual scientists.  As Dr. Gorden put it, “it’s not necessarily about what one individual does but how one can create a collaborative effort.”

My own research for the project, conducted as a consultant to HAI, included immersion in the history of NIDDK and hours of study of each individual’s career. My goal was to ensure that I knew enough in advance to steer my conversations in fruitful directions, yet to keep as low a profile during the sessions as possible. NIDDK’s production is simple but effective, allowing viewers to either view the sessions in their entirety or to directly access sections covering important episodes or areas of inquiry.

Take a look at the interviews on NIDDK’s YouTube page, and give me a call if you would like to talk about capturing your institution’s history in an oral history project.

1920 in Business History: “Cooperative Capitalism”

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The year 1920 marked the emergence of decentralized management, which enabled large, capital intensive firms to succeed for the rest of the century. But every company was not a GM or a DuPont. There were other businesses in mining, textiles, and construction, for example, which sought to remain efficient and competitive while operating on a smaller scale. For industries such as these came another transformative moment at almost exactly the same time, the establishment of “cooperative capitalism.”

As with decentralized management, the context was created by World War I. When the United States entered the war, the Federal Government immediately sought to boost the nation’s productive capacity to its most efficient level. One step was encouraging, through the United States Chamber of Commerce, the creation of trade associations so that every industry could speak with one voice in Washington, and most importantly, so that Washington could get members of every industry to cooperate. To ensure that competitors were not working at cross purposes, the government even suspended antitrust laws for a time allowing businesses to set industry standard prices. All worked closely with the government’s War Industries Board.

At the close of the war the Chamber of Commerce hoped to keep this comfortable arrangement intact. Price fixing in peacetime was beyond the pale for most senators and congressmen, but legislators had no problem with industry cooperation, so long as competition was protected. The extent to which they would continue to work with the government had yet to be determined.

Then, in 1920 Warren Harding was elected president. He chose Herbert Hoover as his Secretary of Commerce. It is imperative to forget what we think we know now about Hoover to understand his importance at the time. Before the United States entered the war, the globe-trotting mining engineer had, on his own, orchestrated a system of public/private relief for Europeans displaced by the conflict. After 1917 he continued to work effectively as Food Administrator for the United States.

Hoover firmly believed, and had seemingly proven, that working together, business and government could serve the general welfare yet still preserve competitive individualism. When Hoover took over as Secretary of Commerce the nation was reeling from the recession that had begun in mid-1920. He began turning what had previously been a collection of relatively unimportant bureaus into a powerful administrative apparatus that would help business survive and thrive.

Hoover’s Department of Commerce began systematically collecting and disseminating the kind of information previously available only to the largest businesses—data on raw materials, production costs, and markets. Next, the government began working closely with new trade associations such as the Associated General Contractors of America to develop priorities and objectives much as it had done during the war. This did, to some extent enable smaller firms to operate efficiently and compete effectively. Events of 1929, however, brought the demise of Hoover’s vision of “cooperative capitalism,” although the structures established in 1920, an effective Department of Commerce and strong industry-wide trade associations, endure.

1920 in Business History: Decentralized Management

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The year 2020 may well change the course of business history for years to come. The year 1920, another time of turmoil and recession, most certainly did. The turn of the century had begun a lengthy period of growth for American business giving rise to national, capital-intensive companies that could obtain ever higher efficiencies due to their size. For a time it was not certain that these firms would be allowed to exist. Then in its 1920 US Steel decision the Supreme Court affirmed that large firms need not be broken up so long as they did not inhibit competition. But as that barrier fell a new one arose—large firms were simply becoming too big to manage, especially during a time of economic hardship.

Take the history of DuPont, for example. From 1914 to 1918, its capitalization increased from $86 million to $310 million and its workforce rose from 5,300 to 85,000. Its roots were in explosives, but DuPont had diversified into chemicals, dyes, paints, and artificial fibers. As the company grew ever more complex, the corporate structure remained centralized. It became increasingly harder to conduct all of its businesses effectively: selling rayon was very different from selling black powder.

President Pierre du Pont had already developed sophisticated forms of reporting and accounting that indicated where the problems lay. In 1920 he began planning to decentralize management. The goal was for executives in the central office to stop trying to conduct the day-to-day affairs of the company. Instead, using the kind of information that DuPont was developing, they would monitor overall performance and set strategic priorities for the company as a whole. The plan also called for creation of administrative divisions, each responsible for sourcing, producing, and selling one particular type of product.

By pure chance, it was GM rather than DuPont that first implemented the plan. During the 1910s the munitions maker, looking for a place to invest its extraordinary earnings, invested heavily in the automobile business founded by entrepreneur William Durant. Durant had steadily folded individual car companies and even consumer products manufacturers into his General Motors Corporation. By the time the recession hit in mid-1920, Durant’s agglomeration was in trouble. That fall, Pierre du Pont stepped in, and working with Alfred Sloane, a brilliant manager that Durant had ignored, he began implementing his decentralized management structure. It took about three years to take hold, but decentralization worked well, enabling GM to soon overtake Ford.

Decentralization was not for every firm, but over the next few decades nearly every diversified, capital-intensive company adopted it. DuPont did so in 1921, Westinghouse in 1934, International Harvester in 1943, and General Electric in 1950. In time, changing markets, technology, and regulations would expose weaknesses in decentralized management, but the legacy of this watershed in business history remains into the 21st century.

Richard Llewellyn, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Experience in Storytelling

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On my Kindle is a famous novel of a Welsh mining family, on my Spotify playlist a classic album from the cutting edge of the outlaw country music movement, and on my calendar, a reminder to write a blog. Obviously then, the subject will be the role of experience in storytelling.

At least a dozen times over the last 20 years I have had a client, a potential client, or someone who had no intention of ever becoming a client explain that they are sure I’m a good historian, it’s just that to write about a company you have to have worked there. Or to write about—let’s say The Society of Geophysical Engineers—you have to be a geophysical engineer. You can’t write about it unless you’ve lived it, I’ve been assured. Like a cart full of explosives, it seems, an institution’s story can be dangerous in inexperienced hands.

That seems, at first, to square with what I’ve been reading. How Green Was My Valley is a beautifully written novel about growing up in a mining town in South Wales during the late 19th century. The characters are organically Welsh, as sparkling as memories of the valley’s now-polluted stream and as consequential as the slag pile that rises ever higher over the once green valley. As I read I marveled at how well Llewellyn captured the experiences of his childhood.

Then there is Mr. Bojangles, an album of lyrically incandescent country-folk songs. Everybody knows that the title track was written from experience, that Jerry Jeff Walker actually spent time with an inebriant dancer “in a cell in New Orleans.” The masterpiece of the album, “My Old Man,” describes an itinerant musician with a “tattered bag for his violin” arriving in a (presumably) southern town, falling in love, fathering a child, and being drawn away, as always, by a steam whistle. Since “Mr. Bojangles” was based on experience, I’d assumed “My Old Man” offered an approximation of Walker’s origins.

The authors of How Green Was My Valley and “My Old Man” had much in common, but it was not that they wrote from experience. As his novel hit the bestseller lists in 1940, Llewellyn insisted that he hailed from southern Wales. That was not so, we learned after he died. He was from suburban London and his name was not really Richard Llewellyn. He was just a great storyteller who had done his research. Jerry Jeff Walker did a lot of things (especially when under the influence, which he often was) but he never fudged his origin story. He was a middle-class kid from upstate New York named Ronald Clyde Crosby. The subjects of his songs had just led me to assume otherwise.

Perhaps, despite what I’ve been assured over the years, you do not need to live it to write about it. Perhaps you just need to be a great storyteller who knows where to look for a great story. Richard Llewellyn was posthumously accused of duplicity, but nothing can detract from the book that he had drawn, in part, from the life of his Welsh grandfather. The hard-partying Jerry Jeff Walker never reached the heights that his 1968 album seemed to point toward. But “My Old Man” remains achingly poignant, even if it had nothing to do with Walker and his actual “old man.” The song was partly based, he later admitted, on his grandfather.

All About the Water: The Creation of the Monongahela National Forest

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This spring the Monongahela National Forest celebrated its 100th Anniversary. It is generally assumed that national forests were set aside as places to recreate and reflect. In this case, however, those aspirations came later. The creation of the Monongahela National Forest was all about the water.

In the early 20th century lumber barons were clear-cutting the southern Appalachians at an unprecedented rate and the region was paying a price. Average rainfall was stable, but the rivers were behaving badly. In the summer and fall once-reliable streams barely ran. Deckers Creek in northern West Virginia once powered eight sawmills. By 1907 it could support only one.

The swing of the pendulum brought even more dire problems. In March 1907, the Cheat, Tygart, and other mountain rivers raged. Downstream in Pittsburgh the Monongahela hit 36.6 feet. The torrent nearly reached the deck of the Sixth Street Bridge, shut down factories and railroads, and caused about $8 million in damages.

Although the flood cost West Virginia towns about $100 million, it was Pittsburgh’s predicament that got noticed. City leaders developed an ambitious plan to rein in the Monongahela that included building 17 dams throughout the river system. And since the Monongahela flowed into the Ohio and carried national commerce, Pittsburgh (and legislators sympathetic to its beleaguered industries) argued that the federal government should pay the price. It was not likely to be high. Having already destroyed Appalachian lands, lumber companies were now happy to sell them off at bargain prices. What was not for sale could be condemned.

In December 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt duly supported acquisition of eastern forests. “These lands,” he said, “because they form a national asset, are as emphatically national as the rivers which they feed.” Roosevelt apparently believed that the 17 dams would not be necessary, that by protecting what forests remained and planting new ones the federal government could calm the troubled eastern waters.

That is how Gifford Pinchot, the father of forestry in America, explained it to the congressional committee considering Roosevelt’s plan in early 1908.  “Mountains are substantially great reservoirs of water,” he explained, demonstrating their destruction in photographs of Appalachian clear cutting.

The legislators presumably understood Pinchot’s point, but conservative congressmen did not care. Some deemed creation of national forests within existing states unconstitutional. “If you can condemn the mountains, you can condemn every foot of land from the mountains to the seaboard,” claimed Georgia Congressman Charles Bartlett. Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon, on the other hand, vowed to spend “not one cent for scenery.” The opposition broke in 1911 with the passage of the Weeks Act. There was no mention of scenery in the bill. It was all about commerce, allowing states to cooperate with each other and the federal government “for the protection of watersheds of navigable streams.”

By late 1915, the Forest Service had begun purchasing land in West Virginia, creating fire protection districts, and blazing trails through struggling secondary growth. On April 28, 1920 President Woodrow Wilson designated the 54,000-acre area the Monongahela National Forest. On its 100th anniversary, the national forest’s 921,000 acres serve, like Pinchot had intended, as a “great reservoir of water,” that (usually) keeps the Monongahela within its banks and the city of Pittsburgh above water.

President Harding, Doctor Fauci, and a Return to Normality

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For every Lincoln and Roosevelt there have been many other presidents content to blather their way through office. Few did as much damage to our language as a former Ohio newspaper editor whose speeches, a contemporary wrote, sounded like “an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”

Recently I was pleasantly surprised—no, elated—when out of the army of pompous phrases emanating from a presidential task force briefing emerged Dr. Anthony Fauci with the term “normality.” I had long ago given up expecting to hear that word from a public figure or anyone else thanks to Warren Harding.

While running for president in 1920 Harding repeatedly promised “a return to normalcy” to a war-weary nation. (Listen to a recorded version of the speech at the Library of Congress.) Indeed, Americans wanted normality so much that they made Harding president and adopted his verbiage as well. The 29th President is not entirely to blame. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term first appeared in 1857. But, as the British Society for Pure English put it in 1929, “if…‘normalcy’ is ever to become an accepted word it will presumably be because the late President Harding did not know any better.”

He did not. Nor, apparently, do the populous, the press, or our public servants. An online search yields a few mentions of  “normality,” mostly in UK publications. In America the term has been has been nearly obliterated by “normalcy.” What steeled Fauci to gain and retain his hold on “normality?” Perhaps it was the undergraduate education steeped in the classics or family devotion to the liberal arts that the NIH scientist discusses in this oral history. And perhaps, if a few more voices reject this legacy of one of our worst presidents, there will one day be “a return to normality.”

Commemorating the Troubled Spring of 1970 in University History

“The End of School,” 1970

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College students face a tough close to the school year. The Atlantic, with its characteristic sense of history recently called the coronavirus pandemic “the single most disruptive event in American higher education in at least a half century.” It is worth looking back fifty years in university history to the last time school was out.

Starting as early as 1964, student protest swelled throughout the decade; mostly fueled by Vietnam, mostly at elite campuses and big state schools. On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced he was sending troops into neutral Cambodia and things escalated. Historian Ira Gitlin estimated that about half of America’s college students participated in protest at some point that spring.

The fuse was Cambodia, the dynamite Kent State—my undergraduate alma mater. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard killed four students during antiwar protests at a school mostly attended by middle- and working-class students—not the type supposed to make trouble. There were about 2,500 colleges and universities in the United States at the time. About half of them exploded in protest. Students went on strike at about a third. On May 14, trigger-happy police killed two more students at Jackson State in Mississippi.

By then administrators had closed a large number of schools, at least temporarily. While some students kept protesting, others mobilized through organizations like Young Americans for Freedom to reopen campuses.

But as political cartoonist Herblock observed, it was “The End of School,” not only for six students from Mississippi and Ohio but for thousands more. About 75 institutions closed for the remainder of the academic year. There were no virtual classrooms or ceremonies. Most schools allowed students to get a pass/fail grade or take an incomplete. Graduates got their diplomas in the mail.

Allan Nevins and the Roots of Historical Consulting

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Allan Nevins was a journalist, biographer, oral historian, and chronicler of corporations. He was never officially a historical consultant. His life’s work, however, set standards that every historian worth his or her hire should follow, namely: that history should be well-written, that it should be informed by lived experience through oral history, and that it should deal empathetically yet honestly with institutions—even if they are footing the bill.

Once the great American histories were written by literary gentlemen. As historians professionalized in the late 19th century, however, they traded broad subjects and popular audiences for specialized monographs and audiences of fellow academics. Early on Nevins wanted no part of that—he made his living as a journalist. But Nevins could not stay away from history. In his spare time he began writing biographies for a lay audience, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize. In 1931 Columbia University made Nevins a full professor, even though he had never earned a PhD.

His first books were relatively uncontroversial biographies of politicians and presidents, but in the 1940s Nevins took up the life of John D. Rockefeller. Convinced by the rise of the wartime “Arsenal of Democracy” that there was a creative as well as a destructive side to the great American business enterprises, Nevins offered an unusually balanced portrayal of the man historians had previously preferred to vilify.

By then Nevins was also champion of a new methodology: “oral history.” Having been a journalist, he understood the importance of the interview. Nevins also realized that as the documentary record gave way to the telephone, historians had to find new ways to capture the past. In 1948 he founded an ongoing oral history program at Columbia.

It was in the 1950s that Nevins came closest to becoming a historical consultant, as co-author of a multi-volume history of the Ford Motor Company. Not surprisingly, Nevins approached Henry Ford and his company with an open mind, drew upon oral history, and crafted an engaging and edifying story. “It requires imagination to penetrate the past,” Nevins wrote. It also required imagination to work for Ford without working for Ford. Although the company had commissioned Nevins to write the history, it sent the checks to Columbia University.

Contours of Corporate History: National Crises and the News Business

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Forty years ago today, the once stately broadcast news business began moving faster. As with most fundamental change in American corporate history, there was a crisis behind it. Starting in the fall of 1979, the American Broadcasting Corporation began running “America Held Hostage,” a late-night news program that breathlessly counted down the days of captivity during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

It was soon evident that the hostages were in for the long haul and that late-night news could compete against NBC’s Tonight Show. So on March 24, 1980, ABC renamed the show Nightline. The program accustomed its viewers to both Ted Koppel and coverage of satellite-fed immediacy. The cycle sped up when Ted Turner launched his network three months later, but it took another crisis, the 1991 Gulf War, for CNN to truly hook viewers on 24-hour coverage. Fox News and MSNBC joined the maelstrom in 1996, but neither was sure to endure until September 11, 2001 provided yet another boost to instant news. That’s when Fox News began running the relentless ticker along the bottom of the screen. It has never stopped.