ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the various ways forward for studying early marketing thought. It stresses Richard T. Ely's caution about discussing socialism, but the conditions of acceptability for racist views were less stringent. The chapter proposes that the nodal point for the distancing project, that is, the forgetting of the German Historical School of Economics, can be traced to the First World War. It focuses on Ely's espousal of patriotic sympathies and explores the more vociferous political denunciations of Germany and its value system by David Kinley. He provides some of the most scathing critiques of Germany, its leadership, and the philosophical assumptions guiding the nation. Kinley illustrates how marketing was a vehicle whose conceptual apparatus and argumentation was used to deflate the prejudice that historians of economic thought are linking to the progressives. His views are sometimes progressivist, but he was a vocal critic who was prone to making contentious claims about Germany.
