The Business Ethic for Boys: The Saturday Evening Post and the Post Boys

Jan Cohn

Business History Review, 1987, vol. 61, issue 2, 185-215

Abstract: George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1937, dedicated his magazine to business, businessmen, and business values. As part of an early campaign to increase the Post's circulation, the Curtis Company extended their interest to the businessmen of the future. The Circulation Bureau devised a plan of recruiting middle-class boys, training them in selling techniques, and educating them in business values. Victor Pelz, a boy agent recruited in Seattle, soared to selling stardom between 1902 and 1905. During those years the Post wrote him hundreds of letters, exhorting, praising, sometimes chastising. In Victor's career and in this surviving correspondence are inscribed the business ethic of the early twentieth century with all its promise and all its contradictions.

Date: 1987
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