Book Review: ‘Little Bosses Everywhere,’ by Bridget Read

When Read introduces the characters behind America’s first big multilevel marketing scheme, it almost sounds like the setup to a joke: What happens when a Gilded Age dilettante, a eugenics-curious Dale Carnegie acolyte and an overzealous marketer of burial plots come together? The answer is Nutrilite, a vitamin company that in the mid-1940s started offering its distributors a new business opportunity. Instead of just selling vitamins, they could recruit other distributors and form a “downline,” with lower-level sellers all contributing to their higher-ups’ sales volume.

This business started as a hack — straggling businessmen trying to inflate their sales — but quickly became a playbook. Nutrilite’s approach inspired more businesses to set up similar models, where a distributor’s goal became not to sell the product but to sell the opportunity to join the enterprise.

There were Holiday Magic and Koscot, both ostensibly cosmetics companies that were found in the 1970s to have violated federal trade regulations. (The Federal Trade Commission’s case led to its creation of the “Koscot test,” which made it illegal for businesses to require participants to pay upfront for the right to sell goods and to recruit other sellers with the promise of rewards unrelated to product sales.) There is Mary Kay, the cosmetics group that sits at the book’s emotional core as we watch an Air Force veteran named Monique climb the company’s ranks toward the “Princess Court” title, or maybe even the famous blush-pink Cadillac. There’s also Amway, started by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos — the father-in-law of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Trump’s first term.

His is not the only familiar name in the book; the 20th-century history Read traces has direct connections to today’s politics. In her telling, it was partly under the leadership of Van Andel and DeVos that multilevel marketers coalesced with the New Right, forming an alliance of “the country’s wealthiest businessmen, evangelicals and other conservative Christians, positive thinkers and free-market radicals.” The story of multilevel marketing is one of Americans falling prey to the idea that they should turn against experts and big institutions: Try supplements as a way to hack your health, work for yourself as a way to hack your career. These lifestyle tips can end up forming a political worldview, too, one that’s doggedly anti-expert and fiercely capitalist.

Anyone who’s seen or read “Death of a Salesman” knows that workplace dramas are as much about markets and money as they are about self-esteem warped, dreams deferred and families broken. Read captures that same heartache, quoting Arthur Miller’s own description of his traveling salesman uncle, on whom he based the character Willy Loman: “There was something in him which was terribly moving because his suffering was right on his skin.” The same could be said of some of Read’s characters, except their skin might be coated in lotion from Mary Kay.

LITTLE BOSSES EVERYWHERE: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America | By Bridget Read | Crown | 351 pp. | $30