When the United States entered World War I, economic interest groups were far better developed and vocal than they had been at the beginning of the Progressive era. Resolving differing views of equitable policy as entertained by these groups resulted in government economic planning for prosecution of the war effort that, so far from being expertly organized and scientific, was confused and ad hoc. Further dramatic proof of this generalization is provided by Professor Guth in his essay on the marketing of fluid milk and its surplus during the war emergency. Producers had been moving towards marketing cooperatives, with all the risk of violation of antitrust laws that entailed. Much of the volume of milk sales had become concentrated in the previous three decades in a few large dealers who were economically strong, especially in the major milksheds. And a new force, the consumer groups, emerged to try the patience of all concerned with orderly marketing of milk in a time of rising production costs, including Herbert Hoover and his subordinates in and around the Food Administration. Quickly dismantled after the Armistice, the mechanisms they worked out nevertheless became the foundation for massive intervention in a highly demoralized industry after 1933.

Of the innumerable types of business enterprise that flourished in nineteenth-century America, none was more important than the railroads. For the first time in the national experience they provided relatively cheap, dependable transportation into the heartland and created a national market that prompted the growth of so many other aspects of national endeavor. As railroad leaders built what became America's first big business, they also developed a new self-image and with it a vocabulary drawn from their conception of competition as war. It is this new self-image and the lexicon that went with it that form the subject of this article by James A. Ward.

Just as the colonial trade created commercial elites in Spain, so, too, did businessmen rise to economic and social importance in the New World. In Central America, for example, the marketers of indigo played an especially significant role.

As part of its centennial celebration, Harris commissioned a historical survey of the 1994 list of Fortune 500 companies, inquiring as to when they were founded and what their initial names, products, or services were. Harris then sent this list to several historians, including Professor Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and the editor of this Review. We believe the Harris compilation to be a potentially valuable research tool. We are pleased to present it here, along with the following brief introduction, which is a composite of observations by the Harris researchers, Professor Chandler, and the Editor and Assistant Editor of the Review.

Although Woodrow Wilson's administration was slow to develop a coherent, comprehensive labor policy during the First World War, it did experiment with a scheme designed to test the effectiveness of centralized government control over the labor market. This experiment, confined to shipyard labor in the Seattle district, involved a cooperative agreement among shipyard management, organized labor, the U.S. Employment Service of the Department of Labor, and the Emergency Fleet Corporation of the U.S. Shipping Board. It quickly became obvious that the four parties to the agreement had different objectives, and a bitter but unpublicized administrative struggle developed, with each group trying to manipulate the experiment in ways that would promote its own interests. The deadlocked bureaucratic struggle in Seattle undermined support for the Department of Labor and served to retard rather than to accelerate centralization of the wartime labor market.

The profitability and the mechanisms of the old Cuban sugar trade are illustrated through Professor Ely's study of the leading businessmen involved.

Over a famous Congressional investigation lies the shadow of evidence suppressed for political reasons and long ignored by scholars, who by too glib acceptance of the printed testimony have perpetuated bias as historical fact.

The Revisionist trend in American business history has been shaped by values, premises, logic, and procedure that bear certain striking similarities to Marxism, most clearly seen in the Revisionists' acceptance of the inevitability of abuse in capital accumulation.

A leading business archivist provides insights into the difficulties of selecting, organizing, and preserving corporate records. Dr. Ernst reflects on the future needs and responsibilities of the business archivist in a changing economic and social environment.

Professor Gilbert examines the impact of the corporate form of organization upon the utopian thinking of American intellectuals of the progressive era, using the ideas of Charles Steinmetz as an example of the way in which collectivist assumptions were brought to bear on descriptions of society.

By systematically analyzing ship registry documents it is possible to illuminate shipholding practices at major American ports in the early national era. In this article, Professor Gilbert focuses on shipholding in Baltimore in the period just prior to the late eighteenth century European war-induced shipping boom. He finds the port's foreign trade to be largely controlled by Baltimore residents. Merchants owned by far the largest percentage of the shipping, while mariners constituted an important, albeit secondary, investor group. Sole ownership of vessels was more extensive in Federalist Baltimore than in colonial Boston or Philadelphia. More detailed comparisons of shipowning practices among the major United States ports, Gilbert concludes, await further research.

As distrust of American investments lessened, conservative international brokers allowed themselves to be drawn into an economic orbit with ever-widening western limits. Short-term credits to support an active agency business in railroad construction materials led inevitably to longer term commitments. The merchant bankers supplied the facilities for transatlantic capital exchange and by absorbing the best rail and government issues helped create an American market for all grades of railroad securities.

The story of George Gunton is that of an astonishingly accurate economic prophet whose viewpoints have found wide acceptance a half-century after they were enunciated. Gunton is shown in this article not as a paid defender of big business but as an apostle of compromise, standing in the No Man's Land of a vast battleground. With equal fervor Gunton declared, “It is our industries that make us great,” but that laborers' wages were “as elastic as human wants … capable of as much expansion as the social character of man.” His numerous commentaries are a lucid clue to the relative importance of contemporary issues, and those commentaries are enhanced by Gunton's instinctive sense of history. Out of the confusion of contradictory evidence recorded at the Chicago Conference on Trusts, before the Industrial Commission, and elsewhere on the business and political stage Gunton framed his thesis of the essential interdependence of big business and organized labor. His convictions were, in total, unique, and his judgment and reconciliation of conflicting viewpoints have meaning and utility today.

A case study of two ventures undertaken by a Belgian company in Russia focuses upon several of the major problems experienced by foreign entrepreneurs under the Czars at the turn of the century.

The origins of an American zinc-miners' trade association and its experiments with cooperative price controls illustrate several of the supply and demand problems of an industry characterized by many sellers and few buyers.