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Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built. By Richard S. Tedlow. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. 528 pp. Cloth, $30.00. ISBN 0-066-62035-X.
In this genial volume aimed at a general audience, Richard S. Tedlow offers a gallery of portraits of business leaders in the tradition of Jonathan R. T. Hughes, Harold Livesay, Robert Sobel, and Gerald Gunderson, spicing it with a newer mix of subjects. Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford represent the usual suspects; joining them are George Eastman, Thomas J. Watson Sr., Charles Revson, Sam Walton, and Robert Noyce. Of this group only Revson seems a clear misfit, largely because available source materials are far too scant to answer most of the questions posed about him. For large stretches of his chapter, Revson virtually disappears; a third of his sketch is devoted to the issues surrounding the controversial television show The $64,000 Question.
The chief difficulty with this genre has always been to find a theme or technique that would unify a narrative built around separate portraits of distinctive individuals. Hughes chose people who represented five different stages of American economic development; Livesay selected men who were all manufacturers; Sobel picked men he thought had not received their just due from historians; and Gunderson used his subjects to illustrate an entrepreneurial history of the nation. None really succeeded in weaving an integrated, cohesive tale out of...