| If a subtitle were being selected for this book now, it would probably be "A Pioneer Conglomerate." In a very real sense, this is what Caldwell and Company was. The term "conglomerate" is more appropriate than the more restrictive term ''congeneric," which is now frequently applied to financial organizations. If Caldwell and Company had limited its acquisitions to banks and insurance companies and its activities to investment banking and the establishment of an investment company, it could properly be placed in the latter category. I would argue, however, that the acquisition of control of a professional baseball team, to say nothing of newspapers and a wide range of industrial enterprises, clearly justifies calling it a conglomerate. Its chief difference from present-day conglomerates is that most of these, at least the more visible ones, are publicly held. Caldwell and Company was not. Six months before its demise, as the text spells out, it merged by a stock swap with a publicly-held corporation, BancoKentucky Company. Caldwell and Company had expected to sell a part of this stock to raise money. Had this been successful, there would have been even this final characteristic of the present-day conglomerate. The similarities do not end with the diversity of types of controlled companies. The shifting of funds from one company to another, the use of the new acquisition to make the whole look better, the apparent hope, if not conviction, that the upward movement of stock prices would offset any overoptimistic outlay made for an acquired company, all of which were so destructively characteristic of the operations of Caldwell and Company, are not without parallel in the modern conglomerate. In this sense at least, Caldwell and Company was thirty-five years ahead of its time. It may be that the managers of some of the present-day conglomerates will be aided by some knowledge of a pioneer in their field. |
| The development and crash of Caldwell and Company happened long enough ago to make it enticing to attempt to evaluate its long-run impact on the region it purported to serve. "We Bank on the South" was not without its implications. I do not believe that my over-all assessment has particularly changed during the passage of these years. The firm unquestionably aided, during its years of operation, in attracting capital to the region. Some of the capital goods, both private and public, financed by the company are still in use. It is impossible to say how much and by what rate economic development would have been delayed had these improvements not occurred when they did. Clearly the surge of new real capital into the South during and in the years following World War II was not materially influenced by the presence or absence of capital attracted by Caldwell and Company. Viewed in this way, the longer-run |
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