Credit to the Age

"Credit - the commodity in which we deal - is ever in demand." With this perception, revolutionary in 1909, Henry Ittleson founded the C.I.T. Financial Corporation. How right he was - and how perceptive! For borne by the historical inevitability of an idea whose time had come, the corporation which was founded on an initial investment of $100,000 has now grown into a $7.5 billion diversified financial enterprise.

In. 1976, when installment buying and easily available credit are so universally accepted as to seem unremarkable, it comes as something of a surprise to learn from Wilson's book that less than 60 years ago many industrial leaders, among them Henry Ford, sternly disapproved of the concept of time-payment on the basis of moral principle. It was an affront to the traditional American virtues of self-reliance and thrift, they claimed. Easy credit was not, they argued, a marketable commodity, as Ittleson saw it; it was a sin against the puritan ethic.

But of course the defenders of the consumer credit principle prevailed, C.I.T. thrived and prospered even in the Great Depression straight-backed manufacturers of automobiles and other consumer goods bowed to the logic to say nothing of the profits - of the marketplace, and for better or worse traditional patterns of American consumption, production, and distribution were forever revolutionized. C.I.T.'s part - and it was a very considerable part indeed - in abetting and financing the modern credit revolution is the subject of this book. The moral aspects of this revolution are perhaps best left to the sociologists, even the philosophers. Wilson is an economic historian.

In the arcane world of credit financing even corporate giants of the order of C.I.T. seem shadowy entities, their very names upper-case initials on the edges of the average reader's consciousness. With this compendious history Wilson gets C.I.T.'s light out from under the bushel. But having himself been vice president for public relations with C.I.T. from 1946 to 1973, Wilson must be as aware as the next man that his specialized book will attract few cover-to-cover readers from among the general public. Perhaps it ought to, for it is not solely the history of a successful corporation but also, in microcosm, the economic history of our 20th century. And furthermore, it's useful: the next time you make a payment on your new car you'll at least have the consolation of knowing how it all came about.

FULL FAITH AND CREDITBy William L. Wilson '31Random, 1976. 376 pp. $12.95