BOOK REVIEW: THE NEW YORK STATE SOCIETY OF
CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS, FOUNDATION FOR A PROFESSION
Edited by Julia Grant

Garland Publishing, Inc.,
302 pages, $55

Review by

James L. Craig, Jr., CPA

This volume presents a compilation of the historical articles published between 1949 and 1972 in The New York Certified Public Accountant, the predecessor magazine to The CPA Journal. The publication of this collection is particularly appropriate at this time because of the 100th anniversary of the first CPA licensing law in the United States, which was enacted in New York.

The goal of editor Julia Grant was to reproduce the articles in a manner similar to the original publication and to retain the sense of language and usage. The articles are grouped by topic areas of professional history, educational history, history of the New York State Society of Certified Public Accountants, and individual biographies.

The collection of articles make fascinating reading. Readers are free to pick and choose the area that interests them the most. The very first article on the early development of the profession contains a quote from Charles Waldo Haskins at the time of the founding of the New York University School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance. Haskins became dean of the school and a professor of the history of accountancy. Haskins is quoted as saying:

No attempt will be made in the school to foster the notion that commerce or accountancy is a royal road to wealth, or to leisure, or to unmerited social position; but in addition to the intellectual qualifications of talent for observation, power of perception, patience of investigation, presence of mind, judgment, reflection, order and method, aptitude for calculation, abstraction memory, mental activity, and steadiness, which is hoped the student will possess in some fair degree, the moral virtues of honesty, candor, firmness, Prudence, truth, justice, economy, temperance, liberality, politeness, good temper, self control, and perseverance will be inculcated as necessary to his own personal welfare an the stability of the business world.

The compilation includes articles on the first institutions of higher learning to present programs in accountancy, the first CPA exam review courses, and biographies of some of the early leaders in the profession, all taking from material first published in The New York State Certified Public Accountant. Some of the names for whom biographies are presented are Charles Ezra Sprague, Robert Montgomery, Ferdinand William Lafrentz, George O. May, William Lybrand, General Arthur H. Carter, Arthur Young, and Samuel D. Leidesdorf.

The profession benefitted greatly from these leaders of those early days.

Julia Grant is a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Richard Brief, professor at New York University is series editor of the Garland Series called New Works in Accounting History, of which this is a part. *