As production workers in late-nineteenth-century American heavy industry moved towards regular use of concerted action, including the strike, to gain their demands, employers generally adopted rigid policies of opposition. That it was a frightening period for manufacturers, with prices for their goods steadily falling and widespread business failure, has been emphasized by Edward C. Kirkland and others. But lack of scholarship in business archives has improverished labor-management history on this point. Professors Skaggs and Ehrlich offer one case history, based on a study of the “inner truth” of such a conflict in the 1880s. It confirms the suspicion that it was not practical economic imperatives but a long-run policy to maintain the principles of paternalism that often accounted for the intransigence of management.

Students of the efforts of western maritime nations to improve conditions aboard their merchant ships, and to tighten regulations in general, are aware that one result was the emergence of the “flag of convenience,” whereunder a nation exploits the need of operators for a haven from high standards. One such nation was Panama, but by the end of World War II its officials had come to demand such private tribute that a new flag of convenience was needed. Providing such a registry under the flag of Liberia became a major service of the development company formed by former U. S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., in the late 1940s.

As the American economy, for the second time since the end of World War II, seemed about to falter in late 1953, the nation watched closely to see what economic policy the first Republican administration in twenty years would adopt. A new factor was the Council of Economic Advisers, whose professional economists, mild conservatives though they were, had long since adopted Keynesian compensatory spending as the new orthodoxy. Government spending was increased very moderately and once again the severe postwar downturn that Americans had been expecting for nearly a decade failed to develop. The credit went to Keynesianism and the Council but, as Professor Engelbourg emphasizes, whether another policy or no policy at all would have produced different results, is beyond our knowing.