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Show 'Wstorical MJghlights Lf ZUux Scott Watia. (Released by Western Newspaper Union.) First Credit Reporters TF YOU'RE accustomed to "buying - it on time" instead of paying cash for it, you can thank two brothers named Tapptn for that convenience. For your ability to "buy it on time" depends upon your credit rating, and Messrs. Tappan were the first , credit reporters. They established that business just 100 years ago. Their doing so was one of the re- : suits of the panic of 1837, the first , great financial disaster in America. ! Arthur and Lewis Tappan were na- ! tives of Massachusetts. In 1814 they j established a dry goods business in Boston, importing most of their goods from England. They were very successful and accumulated a large fortune. Then they branched out and in 1827 became silk merchants mer-chants in New York and financial sponsors of button manufacture, under un-der the name of Arthur Tappan and Co. For 10 years they prospered in i New York. But when the panic of 1837 hit the country, among its first victims were the Tappans. Their failure was the result of the "freezing" "freez-ing" of hundreds of thousands of dollars owed them by country merchants. mer-chants. Although they re-established their business within 18 months, this disaster gave Lewis Tappan an idea. He realized that the method of granting credits to country merchants, mer-chants, often on forged letters of Introduction, was not only unreliable but out-of-date. True, a few of the i ; y f big American importers had individual individ-ual credit reporters and others cooperated co-operated to hire one. But the expense ex-pense of sending a credit reporter into the West and South was too great even for a group of importers. So he proposed the establishment of a mercantile agency, the function of which was to serve as a central office of credit information. This information in-formation would consist of the contributed con-tributed experiences of the leading importers, commission houses, wholesalers and bankers which would be supplemented by the reports re-ports of correspondents appointed in every community. After their disastrous experience with the old slipshod methods of extending credit, all of these business busi-ness men were quite willing to listen to Tappan's proposal. So the first credit reporting agency was opened in New York on August 1, 1841, and was a success from the start. Soon two young men came in1;o the company com-pany who did a great deal to develop the credit reporting business. They were Benjamin Douglas, the son of a West India trader, who joined the firm in 1846, and Robert Graham Dun of Ohio, who came in 1854. In 1859 young Dun purchased full control of the company and the . Tappans retired from the business to devote their time to the various philanthropies and social reforms in which they were interested. Meanwhile Mean-while John M. Bradstreet had established estab-lished a similar credit reporting company in 1849. For 85 years the two companies were competitors. Then in 1933 the Bradstreet company com-pany and R. G. Dun and Company were merged to form the famous combination of "Dun and Bradstreet" Brad-street" which has become synonymous synony-mous with the word "credit" In 1859, when Dun bought out the Tappans, the first "credit reference book" was published and it contained con-tained 20.000 names. The 1941 "Blue Book," its descendant, lists 2,300,000 names of commercial enterprises in 50,000 different communities! Moreover More-over it is published six times a year and is the largest publishing venture ven-ture of its kind in the world. It is interesting to note that among the early correspondents of the pioneer pio-neer credit reporters were four future fu-ture Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. The Tappans were also journalists and reformers. They started the New York Journal of Commerce in 1828 and Arthur Tappan founded the Emancipator, an anti-slavery organ, in 1833. Both were ardent abolitionists. abolition-ists. Arthur Tappan frequently aided fugitive slaves in their flight northward and he rescued William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the Liberator, Libera-tor, when he was imprisoned in Baltimore. Bal-timore. He was president of the American Anti-Slavery society and contributed $1,000 a month to its support for several years. |