Old Credit Raters

After his Manhattan silk house went to the wall in the panic of 1837, Lewis Tappan, casting around for a new deal, hit on the idea of selling his knowledge of other people's businesses. His Mercantile Agency grew into the largest credit rating firm in the world. Before the Civil War it was acquired by R. G. Dun who changed the official name to R. G. Dun & Co., The Mercantile Agency. He developed the art of dispassionate snooping & prying during the next 40 years until today R. G. Dara & Co. has nearly 200 offices in the U.S. and Canada, 54 offices in 21 foreign countries. But it was not the Mercantile Agency. In 1849 John M. Bradstreet, a Cincinnati lawyer who had learned an amazing amount about other people's affairs as an assignee of an insolvent estate, also started to sell his knowledge. The Bradstreet Co. bloomed into the second largest credit agency, with 183 offices in the U.S. and Canada, 17 offices in foreign lands. Last week these two old credit raters announced that they would merge. President Arthur Dare Whiteside of R. G. Dun & Co. will head the new Dun & Bradstreet Inc. Reason for the merger was the complete duplication of services. Each knew approximately the same things about 2,000,000 U.S. people and their business. Each had offices in every important city, each had its own investigators and correspondents putting the same questions to the same 2,000,000 people and their friends & enemies. Each had its own method of rating a man's credit but the net result was the same. Huge savings could be effected by elimination of these costly duplications. R.G. Dun & Co. is proud of the fact that Abraham Lincoln while an Illinois lawyer was one of their correspondents. Still in their files is a Lincoln report noting a rat hole in the office of a concern he was investigating suggesting that it "should be looked into."

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