The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

by Marc Levinson

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  MANUSCRIPT

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  DISSERTATIONS AND WORKING PAPERS

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  GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS

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  Temporary National Economic Committee. Investigation of Concentration of Economic Power. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939.

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  _____. Resale Price Maintenance. House of Representatives doc. 1480, 65t
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  _____. A System of Accounts for Retail Merchants. House of Representatives doc. 1355, 64th Cong., 1st sess., July 15, 1916.

  _____. Wholesale Business of Retail Chains. Senate doc. 29, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., 1931.

  _____. Wholesale Marketing of Food. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Historical research is not a solitary process. Many people aided my research for The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America. Some were enthusiastic when they heard about the chain-store wars and learned that the old A&P they remembered from childhood was once part of the largest retail enterprise in the world. Others were bemused that anyone would care about grocery stores. All deserve my thanks.

  The far-flung repositories of the National Archives and Records Administration were indispensible in researching this book. The details at the heart of The Great A&P come from the extensive legal record created in the course of the criminal antitrust trial in U.S. v. New York Great Atlantic & Pacific. Those who think the U.S. government is overzealous about sealing public records will not be surprised to learn that the entire case file, including the trial transcript and the thousands of exhibits originally produced in open court in 1945, was considered classified as late as 2009, and was released to me only upon the filing of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. These records are now available for public use, albeit in extremely dirty cartons, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and I thank James R. Mathis and Heather MacRae for arranging their release. Duplicates of some of the trial materials are also available at the National Archives and Records Administration’s Great Lakes Region archives in Chicago, where Scott M. Forsythe and Donald W. Jackanicz assisted me; for reasons known only to the muses, those materials were never classified.

  At the National Archives’ Center for Legislative Archives in Washington, D.C., Rodney A. Ross helped me locate congressional documents related to the chain-store controversies. The staff of the National Archives’ New York branch found Civil War–era records concerning both George H. Hartford and George F. Gilman; and Georgia Higley, head of the newspaper section at the Library of Congress, gave me access to periodicals that are critical to understanding commodity markets in the Civil War era. Archivists at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, especially Virginia Lewick, guided me through a mass of relevant records. Wright Patman’s papers are at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, where Bob Tissing was my navigator.