Prologue > - Page Three
The merchants and businessmen of the Chamber could afford the luxury of farsightedness. Above the scrabble and concern of daily business, they stood against short-term schemes that could harm future generations. In the nineteenth century, they were strong and effective conservationists, working to preserve the quality of nature for their own – and their descendants’ – profitable enjoyment. This was an elite environmentalism, but the results – in Central Park and the Adirondacks, for instance – constitute the Chamber’s most beneficial legacy.
Perhaps, its greatest energy went to celebrating its own traditions. Annual banquets and a spectacular portrait gallery connected the generations into a genealogy of commerce. Not much was said about the War for Independence, when the pro-British merchants had served as the occupation force’s civil administrators. But, the more glorious episodes were recounted again and again for each successive cohort. “Never in my life have I seen such a patriotic impulse, such evidence of national devotion,” a longtime secretary recalled of the Chamber’s response to the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
Its success ensured imitation. In its first century, anyone who spoke of a “chamber of commerce” was most likely speaking of New York. By 1900, this was no longer so. There was a United States chamber, an aeronautical chamber, and chambers in every Dogpatch, railroad junction, and satellite city. “With some three thousand organizations and a basic membership of perhaps a million people,” the U.S. Secretary of Commerce wrote in the 1920s, “the chamber of commerce may be classed as an American institution.”
These facsimiles began eventually to impair the effectiveness of the original. In the years following Calvin Coolidge’s speech, the City’s merchants suffered through an economic depression that sapped their confidence and left many with an indelible “inferiority complex.” Despite the postwar recovery, and New York’s continued position as a center of finance, the changing structures of capitalism would never align so well again for the Chamber of Commerce. Its traditions told against it. Family business and limited partnerships gave way to impersonal corporate hierarchies. Flexibility and “action programs” seemed more profitable than dusty portrait galleries and ancient lineages. The annual banquets were cancelled. Few members bothered to attend monthly meetings.
Since 1768, the Chamber of Commerce of New York had represented the interests of the City’s business community. As the economy intensified and became more complex, these interests had grown increasingly variegated. As long as business could speak as one, the Chamber provided the voice.
WHEN IT DISBANDED in the 1980s, it did so because the chorus of business had become so polyphonic that they could no longer be orchestrated by a single institution.