By Jonathan McQuarrie
Recently, I spent some time with Daniel Sidorick’s fantastic monograph Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (Ithica, 2009). Among the timely observations made by the work is the vital point that a managerial effort to enforce efficiency through the threat of outsourcing is hardly new. At the turn of the 20th century, John Dorrance famously held the line on 10-cent cans of Campbell Soup, and that low price derived from pressures on workers to meet high production requirements and from contracts with farmers obliging them to sell their produce at a low price.
After reading it, I felt it had some information that would enhance some Wikipedia entries because I consider editing Wikipedia one entry point for public history engagement. Given how much students, the public, and (let’s be honest here) historians use Wikipedia, providing little edits never seems a bad idea. Continue reading