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Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. By Walter A. Friedman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 356 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-674-01298-4.)
Walter A. Friedman has crafted a carefully researched history of selling in America from 1877 to the mid-1940s. His modern midtwentieth-century salesmen evolved circuitously from nineteenth-century peddlers to commercial traveling salesmen, from members of corporate sales forces to William H. Whyte's organization men. Arguing that salesmanship, a uniquely masculine American phenomenon, was pivotal to the creation of the consumer economy, Friedman suggests that, as a global market emerged, selling was systematized to spur the consumption so necessary to mass production. He supports his claims with copious statistics, a wide array of archival and business sources, and memoirs and fiction.
Historical case studies illustrate the motivations, techniques, and business practices that emerged as selling matured with the growth of national and international markets. One chapter is...