James Bowron: The Autobiography of a New South Industrialist by Robert J. Norrell

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 157 an essential contributor to New Hampshire’s industrial development and the region’s economic prosperity. By and large, the courts as well as various state agencies agreed. “Generally,” Steinberg concludes, “New Hampshire’s water law favored large, industrial users over other competing claimants. . . . Farmers, petty producers, and others . . . were the losers” (pp. 163—64). Steinberg does an excellent job of detailing the legal contours of water usage in 19th-century New England. With an instructive chapter on the decline and rebirth of fishing on the Merrimack and another on water pollution and public health, he provides consider­ able insight into the ecological problems that arose with the industri­ alization of New England’s rivers. However, the book concludes somewhat abruptly. After suggesting in the next-to-last section that the Lake Company seemed to enter a stage of decline after losing a series of court cases in the late 1870s, the author fails to relate the actual circumstances of that decline—and the reader is thus left wondering how the story ends. Perhaps owing to this problem, the author never gets around to spelling out the broader implications of his study or relating them to the historiography of industry, technol­ ogy, and the environment in 19th-century America. These shortcom­ ings notwithstanding, Nature Incorporated is a suggestive work that deserves a wide readership. The book enunciates an important thesis that will doubtless stimulate further inquiry. The material is rich, and Steinberg is to be congratulated for opening new terrain in American industrial history. Merritt Roe Smith Dr. Smith directs the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. James Bowron: The Autobiography of a New South Industrialist. By Rob­ ert J. Norrell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xxxii + 285; illustrations, notes, index. $39.95. Coming to America in 1877 as representative of an English company that planned to develop the mineral resources of the Cumberland plateau in eastern Tennessee, James Bowron remained actively engaged in the southern iron business for the rest of his long life. As an executive of such industries as Tennessee Coal and Iron, the Dimmick Pipe Works, and Gulf States Steel, he was at the center of New South developments until the time of his death in 1928. He was therefore in a position to understand the enormous complexities of southern economic development, and his autobiography, based on a diary in which he made entries every day for a full fifty years, should 158 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE be “must” reading for every student of New South business, industry, or technology. In reading the book, one gathers that the fundamental causes of the South’s problems in industrial development were the same as those that inhibited development prior to the Civil War—namely, a dearth of capital and inadequate local demand for industrial products. Both of these conditions had been exacerbated by the wartime destruction of capital, which caused a continuation of the colonial economy while bringing the added feature of absentee ownership. In the case of the iron business, the long delay in beginning production of steel while concentrating on pig iron had resulted as early as 1892 in the familiar problem of overproduction of an item that depended absolutely on an export market. The result, predictably, was that the bottom dropped out of the price of pig iron and years of distress followed. Bowron, however, had brought with him from England an ideal skill for operating in the environment in which he found himself—a real mastery of the kind of creative credit found in business every­ where before the development of modern banking, but especially essential in the cash-poor and underdeveloped South. The art of “meeting one note by swapping and discounting another” (p. 17), and the technique of paying accounts by note, which “put off the evil day of payment” (p. 200), had been developed by Bowron in keeping his father’s glass business from bankruptcy, and he used these skills almost daily throughout his twenty years with Tennessee Coal and Iron and in his successful efforts to keep Gulf States Steel afloat during its reorganization. His...