Alfred Chandler, Pulitzer winner, leading business historian

Alfred D. Chandler Jr., the preeminent historian of American business, died Wednesday at Youville Hospital in Cambridge. Dr. Chandler, who was himself associated with one of the most famous American corporate families, was 88.

Colleagues credit Dr. Chandler with creating the field of business history. A longtime professor who had taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School, he won both the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize for "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business."

In that book, Dr. Chandler offered a sweeping overview that began in the Colonial period and extended well into the 20th century and contended that "In many sectors of the economy the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith referred to as ' the invisible hand ' of market forces."

Along with his books "Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise" (1962) and "Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism" (1994), "The Visible Hand" established Dr. Chandler's reputation as, in the words of one writer, "the Boswell of American capitalism."

Dr. Chandler could "explain the sea to the fish who swim in it," wrote one of his proteges, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Thomas K. McCraw . Dr. Chandler's greatest accomplishment, McCraw said, was to "establish business history as an independent and important area for study." While such other fields as political, social, economic, and cultural history have long flourished, it was Dr. Chandler who showed that business history was a fully comparable field.

His work would also resonate beyond business spheres. Dr. Chandler's "research and publications over five decades exercised a transformational effect far beyond his own discipline in business history," Geoffrey G. Jones, professor of business history at Harvard, said in a statement.

The preferred subject throughout Dr. Chandler's work was the large organization, with a specific focus on how managers functioned within it. In "Strategy and Structure," for example, he showed how Du Pont, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Sears, Roebuck & Co. effectively invented the idea of multidivisional organizations in the years after World War I.

Although Alfred Dupont Chandler Jr. was born in Guyencourt, Del., he had Massachusetts roots: His paternal grandfather was Brookline's first selectman.

Dr. Chandler's father was a businessman. His mother, Carol (Ramsay) Chandler, was the daughter of a senior DuPont executive and upon his death became an unofficial ward of the du Pont family. This bestowed on Dr. Chandler "the Wilmington connection," as he later called it, referring to DuPont's Delaware headquarters. The connection would influence his work, both in terms of subject matter and availability of archival material.

Dr. Chandler spent his first five years in Buenos Aires, where his father worked for a locomotive manufacturer. After returning, the family lived in Philadelphia and Delaware, spending summers on Nantucket. Among Dr. Chandler's friends in Delaware were various du Ponts and painter Andrew Wyeth.

When he was 7, his father gave him a copy of a history of the United States intended for sixth-graders. He read it 19 times. "For as long as I can remember," he later said, he knew he wanted to be a historian.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Dr. Chandler went to Harvard University . A teammate on the sailing team was John F. Kennedy. Sailing was a lifelong enthusiasm, as were hunting, surf fishing, and art.

Dr. Chandler served five years in the Navy during World War II, mostly analyzing reconnaissance photographs, and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. He did a year of graduate work at the University of North Carolina and then returned to Harvard, where he earned his master's and doctorate.

As a graduate student, Dr. Chandler became strongly influenced by the work of social scientists Talcott Parsons and Max Weber, as well as economist Joseph Schumpeter. Their interest in structures, comparative approaches, and sociological interpretation would be an important element in his own work.

Dr. Chandler wrote his dissertation on his great-grandfather, Henry Varnum Poor, a pioneering business journalist who specialized in railroads. The project was literally close to home: His research drew on Varnum's papers, which he discovered in his great aunt's house in Brookline, where Dr. Chandler and his wife, Fay (Martin) , were living. The couple had married in 1944.

Dr. Chandler taught at MIT from 1951 to 1963, then at Johns Hopkins University from 1964 to 1971, and joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1971. He took emeritus status in 1989.

While at MIT, Dr. Chandler worked as an assistant editor on the four-volume "Letters of Theodore Roosevelt." He also assisted in the writing of "My Years at General Motors," the autobiography of Alfred P . Sloan, who was credited with transforming General Motors into a powerhouse and icon of American business. It was another instance of the DuPont connection at work, as the company had been instrumental in the formation of GM. Dr. Chandler would also later collaborate on a biography of Pierre S. du Pont , who headed DuPont from 1915-1919 and was GM chairman during the '20s.

A decade later, Dr. Chandler edited the first five volumes of Dwight D. Eisenhower's papers. This might have seemed a departure from Dr. Chandler's emphasis on business. He later noted, though, that Eisenhower's experience as a manager, both in the military and in Washington, made his "day-to-day activities" bear a closer resemblance to a CEO's "than to those of Andrew Jackson or even Ulysses S. Grant."

Among other honors, Dr. Chandler was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1958 and was a fellow of Oxford University's All Souls College in 1975.

In addition to his wife, Fay, of Cambridge, Dr. Chandler leaves two daughters, Alpine "Dougie" Chandler Bird of Annapolis, Md., and Mary "Mimi" Chandler Watt of Dinas Powys, Wales; two sons, Alfred III of Rowley, and Howard of Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa; two sisters, Nina Murray of Bedford and Nantucket, and Sophie Consagra of New York City; five grandchildren and two step-grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

A memorial service will be held at the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard on Sept. 28.