he SWPC of the Second World War and the SDPA of the Korean War were aimed at small manufacturing businesses. It is not at all obvious that small retail businesses and small manufacturing businesses had similar interests; in fact, one would expect that often these two groups had conflicting interests. The story of legislation for small independent retailers suggests that after the 1930s this legislation became less and less effective. Did the associations of retail druggists, wholesale grocers, and independent tire dealers, which had been the primary lobbyists in the 1930s, stop lobbying, or was there simply no real crisis small retail businesses could use?
The common thread between the small-retail-business legislation of the 1930s and the war legislation to promote small manufacturing firms is the set of politicians promoting each and the crisis phraseology those politicians used. Bean argues that between 1946 and the Korean War the Reconstruction Finance Corporation picked up some of the funding of small businesses. This argument suggests that the RFC concentrated its activities on small manufacturing firms, not small retail firms. The Small Business Administration created in 1953 was the Republicans means of eliminating both the RFC and the SDPA. If so, it was intended to affect small manufacturing more than small retail businesses. I would have liked to have seen more discussion of the different influences of small retail businesses and small manufacturing businesses on the creation and early behavior of the SBA.
In general, Bean argues that the confluence of ideology, crisis, and political entrepreneurship resulted in federal small business legislation. Evidently, the ideology continually lay in the background as political entrepreneurs waited for opportunities to exploit. The emergence of a crisisthe Great Depression, the Second World War, the Korean Warbrought the three factors together to produce new federal policies toward small businesses. As Bean points out, from 1953 through the end of the Eisenhower administration, the SBA, through growing, remained a relatively marginal agency, but later it began to grow sharply and by the 1980s was providing around half of the intermediate- and long-term credit that small businesses obtained. Does the intersection of crisis, ideology, and political entrepreneurship explain this growth? What crises explain it? Or did political entrepreneurship change so that a real crisis was no longer required?
These questions may be material for an additional book, as no one can fault Bean for not extending his research into the post-1961 years. Overall he has done us a great service by dissecting the development of federal policies toward small businesses from 1936 to 1961. His book is excellent, and I heartily recommend it.