Firms that tell their history boost vitality of communities.

This article first appeared in the June 26, 2002, issue of The Detroit News.
Reprinted with permission from The Detroit News.

By James V. Higgins / The Detroit News

If it were up to me, every major business in Metro Detroit would have a CHO -- a chief historical officer.

That thought came after reading a delightful little book about Miller Canfield, one of Detroit's top law firms, which celebrated its 150th anniversary this year by commissioning its history. Miller Canfield at 150 adds significantly to the story of Detroit and is thus a solid service to the community.

That isn't primarily why officials at the law firm went through the trouble. They wanted it mostly to give their employees a source of information about the effort, policies and traditions that sustained the company over time.

Fortunately, some of our larger businesses also are awakening to this duty.

Ford Motor Co., long conscious of its role in world history, remains the ultimate role model. It hired professional historian Alan Nevins, who wrote its story in two objective, valuable and fascinating volumes. Ford also has taken care to deposit important records in a central archive, which is open to scholars and researchers.

The Nevins series, however, ends in 1962. An attempt was made in the early 1990s to bring it up to date. But the project was put into the wrong hands, and it came to nothing.

Today, the U.S. arm of DaimlerChrysler AG is following that path. A corporate history by independent scholars is in the works, and records are being collected at its museum/archive in Auburn Hills.

General Motors Corp. has been slow to assemble its history, partly because of its traditional structure as an association of highly independent divisions. Hundreds of books have been written about the company, but no authoritative history a la Nevins.

But GM has recently begun to build an oral history library through interviews with retiring executives. Important documents, such as minutes of board meetings, are collected centrally. And the company also has complied a brief history that Chairman John F. Smith Jr. uses it as a basic text in the classes he teaches for new employees.

GM also has been digitizing its historic photos and plans to offer them publicly via the Internet. In addition, there are plans to build a GM historical center at the RenCen that could include a corporate archive for scholars.

Smaller local companies have begun to issue historical summaries on their Internet sites. These are interesting and helpful, but fall far short of Miller Canfield's effort, which sets a new standard for this type of production among medium-sized concerns. For one thing, its story was written by a skilled historian and successful author, James E. Tobin Jr., whose other works include Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II, and Great Projects, the story of significant civil engineering projects in American history.

Tobin, a former Detroit News reporter and son of a prominent Miller Canfield partner, seasoned Miller Canfield at 150 generously with the kind of stuff we like in a book like this: readability, broader historical context and revealing anecdotes about principal characters.