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Theodore N. Vail and the Civic Origins of Universal Service

In 1907, AT&T President Theodore N. Vail proclaimed universal service to be a key corporate goal. The following year, at Vail's prodding, AT&T popularized this goal in a major publicity effort that historian Roland Marchand has termed "the first, the most persistent, and the most celebrated of the large-scale institutional advertising campaigns of the early twentieth century" [Marchand, 1998]. Over the course of the next decade, Vail himself explored its ramifications in a remarkable series of reports and addresses [Vail, 1917]. Though historians quarrel about precisely what Vail meant by universal service, few doubt its importance. For the next three-quarters of a century, it played a major role in the firm's business trategy and was a central element of its corporate culture. Historical scholarship on universal service has been greatly influenced by the antitrust suit against AT&T that culminated in its breakup in 1984. While this work is often suggestive and revealing, it tends to be far more concerned with the consequences of universal service than with the context out of which it emerged. This paper-which, I should emphasize, is preliminary and exploratory, and an invitation to critique-points the discussion in a different direction. It has three sections. The first section surveys the literature on the origins of universal service. The second proposes an alternative account. The final section makes a few observations about the implications of this alternative for the Galambosian "organizational synthesis"-and, in particular, for its characterization of the main lines of institutional development in the nineteenth-century United States. Historical scholarship on the origins of universal service typically link the concept with the subject of inquiry. Historians of AT&T, for example, almost invariably trace it back to the beginnings of the firm. Characteristic of this genre are the essays collected in Ithiel de Sola Pool's Social Impact of the •lephone, a project that grew out of a conference that AT&T sponsored in the mid-1970s at MIT. Though Pool declared in his introduction that AT&T exerted no influence over the contents of this volume, it would be hard to imagine a scholarly work that was more congenial to the sensibilities of its patron [Pool, 1977, p. x]. With minor variations, all of the essays in the volume share a sim-