The greatest expansion of the Commerce Department's budget and responsibility during the 1920s came about with the growth and institutionalization of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce housed within it. The first couple of years saw expansion of foreign commerce, in particular, as the Bureau focused on helping American businessmen locate and exploit international markets. Beginning in 1923, the emphasis shifted to marketing goods to the domestic consumer, and seventeen new commodity divisions came into existence, including one (evidently short-lived) for the automotive industry.
Secretary of Commerce Hoover created a Merchandising Research Division, a Domestic Regional Division, and a Marketing Service Division to guide businessmen faced with such challenges as the chain store movement, an ever-increasing number of mergers, and the trend toward offering consumer credit. The principal way in which assistance was offered was through the production of survey and statistical data -- in effect, market research. (INTRO NOTE Social Sciences)
Secretary Hoover picked to head the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce one of the academic authorities on whom he had most relied for statistical studies, Julius Klein, a Harvard-trained economist and historian. In Land of Desire (1993), William Leach comments that under Hoover's direction, "Klein turned the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce into a bulging databank for businessmen" (p. 362), supplying them with statistics about consumer preferences, marketing trends, and production and distribution data that, in turn, exponentially increased the ability of businesses to chart the most profitable course. (For a