Editors' bookshelf;

              THE EDITORS'
BOOKSHELF
The Rise of the Accounting Profession:
From Technician to Professional 1896-
1936, by John L. Carey. American In­stitute
of Certified Public Accountants,
1969, 387 pages, $7.50.
The first volume of this history, writ­ten
by the former Administrative Vice
President of the American Institute of
CPAs, deserves comment in HirS Re­ports
even before the appearance of the
second volume, scheduled for 1970.
While we await the balance, it is al­ready
apparent that Mr. Carey has
capped his forty years of service to ac­countancy
with yet another major con­tribution.
This book makes clear that
the vast cargo of information about the
profession that he accumulated and
carried with him all those years was an
important factor in his capable leader­ship.
It is cargo worthy of the intellect
that won a Phi Beta Kappa key at Yale
in 1925.
The title might seem a bit broad in
view of the book's preoccupation with
professional organizations. The author
acknowledges that it is "written from
the viewpoint of the Institute," the or­ganization
that has absorbed his mani­fold
talents throughout his working life.
Yet this focus is entirely appropriate.
Since accounting is a very social science
and accountancy a most social profes­sion,
its history, more than the history
of any other profession, concerns the
story of its organization into societies
and particularly the American Institute.
25
Hence anyone pursuing a satisfying ca­reer
as a public accountant ought to
know the background of the organized
profession. He will not likely ever find a
more informed and readable account;
certainly now it stands alone among the
handful available. A copy is in the li­brary
of every H&S office.
One will find there the germinating
forces that make the practice of public
accounting what it is today. Mr. Carey
is particularly interesting and authori­tative
on the history of professional
ethics, licensing, legislation and the
early development of the CPA exami­nation
before it became the uniform
national test we know today.
Of special significance in the light of
the still unfolding relationship between
the profession and the federal govern­ment
is the chapter on the Securities
Acts of 1933 and 1934, which estab­lished
the government's legal right to
set accounting principles. It includes
some of the fascinating testimony of
Colonel (later General) Arthur H. Car­ter,
then managing partner of Haskins
& Sells, before the Senate Committee
on Banking and Currency. Colonel
Carter was a West Point graduate of
military bearing and imposing charac­ter.
As president of the New York State
Society of CPAs, he was facing a skep­tical
committee of equally powerful in­dividuals,
and he was not disposed to
waste words on them. Consider the fol­lowing
pithy exchange:
SENATOR BARKLEY. Do you not think
it is more in the interest of the public
that is to buy these securities, if there
is to be any checkup or any guarantee
as to the correctness, that it be done by
some government agency rather than
by some private association of accoun­tants?
MR. CARTER. . . . I think the public
accountant is better equipped to do that
than the average government agency
would be able to do that. . . .
SENATOR BARKLEY. Is there any re­lationship
between your organization
with 2,000 members and the organiza­tion
of controllers, represented here yes­terday
with 2,000 members?
MR. CARTER. None at all. We audit
the controllers.
SENATOR BARKLEY. You audit the con­trollers?
MR. CARTER. Yes; the public accoun­tant
audits the controller's account.
SENATOR BARKLEY. Who audits you?
MR. CARTER. Our conscience.
Mr. Carey traces the early sparring
between government and accountants
for authority over accounting princi­ples.
In showing how, by setting its
house in order, the profession retained
responsibility, the author helps to jus­tify
his purpose of relating "the devel­opment
of the profession to the chang­ing
environment."
But this is essentially an insider's
story of the profession for the profes­sion.
Mr. Carey, though not an ac­countant
himself, has long been one of
accounting's leading protagonists, a
committed member of the fraternity
and the only non-accountant to receive
the CPA Gold Medal and be admitted
to the Accounting Hall of Fame. His
sources, including much unpublished
material from the Institute's files, are
essentially confined to the profession's
literature. The one exception in the
one-page list of fifteen references is
Samuel Eliot Morison's "The Oxford
History of the American People."
So we must still await a book that
will do what desperately needs to be
done, tell the story of the rise of the
profession to the world outside. The
accountants are still talking mostly to
each other. The Institute persists in
publishing its own books largely for the
assured market of its own membership.
This one is marred by the overuse of
grotesque headings that give indiscrim­inate
emphasis. And readers will have
a hard time finding their way to what
they are looking for, as the history has
no index. It is to be hoped that Vol­ume
II will correct that inadequacy.
—Charles P Rockwood
Mr. Rockwood, director of public relations for
H&S, was director of public relations for the
AICPA from 1956 to 1962.