Financial safety
A few lines beneath the enormous all-caps headline (“AGENCIES”), a series of truncated sentences in a large, bold type summarized the article: “Private Detectives Watching Business Men Day and Night—Spies Around the House and in the Kitchen—Questioning a Man’s Tradesmen and Pumping his Domestics—The Family History of Business Men and Their Wives Made a Subject of Daily Record, &c., &c.”
To be accused of spying was, at this point, par for the course for the commercial credit bureaus. Thirty years prior, Lewis Tappan, the founder of the agency that would eventually turn into Dun & Bradstreet, took out an ad defending his creation, “It is not a system of espionage, but the same as merchants usually apply—only on an extended plan—to ascertain whether persons applying for credit are worthy of the same and to what extent.”
A few lines beneath the enormous all-caps headline (“AGENCIES”), a series of truncated sentences in a large, bold type summarized the article: “Private Detectives Watching Business Men Day and Night—Spies Around the House and in the Kitchen—Questioning a Man’s Tradesmen and Pumping his Domestics—The Family History of Business Men and Their Wives Made a Subject of Daily Record, &c., &c.”
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