The 1916 Tariff Commission, created to provide expert analyses of tariffs, is an example of Progressive-Era reliance on technical analysis. However, the Commission was motivated not only by a desire to improve technical understanding of tariffs, but also by distinctly political goals. President Woodrow Wilson and Treasury Secretary McAdoo adopted this Republican invention in response to pressure to prevent potential foreign “dumping” after the First World War. Congressional Democrats supported the Tariff Commission for this and an additional reason: they hoped Commission analyses of the consumer welfare costs of protectionism would undermine future electoral support for Republican high-tariff candidates.

This article presents a new list of France's 100 largest publicly-held manufacturing firms in 1913 and compares them to the 100 largest American, British, and German firms identified by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in Scale and Scope. The largest French firms clustered in the same industries as the largest firms in the other countries. They were much smaller than their American counterparts, but in some industries they compared favorably with their German counterparts in size. More importantly, many of the largest French firms were behaving like the leading industrial firms elsewhere, developing cutting-edge technology, investing in state-of-theart production facilities, and putting professional managers in charge of operations. In contrast to the notion that France was a follower in the Second Industrial Revolution and eschewed the trend toward managerial enterprise in the early twentieth century, this article presents a picture of considerable dynamism, with France's leading industrial firms laying the organizational foundations from 1900 to 1930 for the managerial capitalism that would flourish in France in the post-Second World War era.

Throughout the nineteenth century, merchants and manufacturers involved in interstate commerce sought federal bankruptcy legislation to overcome diverse and discriminatory state laws that raised the cost of credit and impeded interstate trade. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, they formed a national organization to lobby for bankruptcy legislation. While many scholars have seen the passage of federal bankruptcy legislation as a response to the economic depression of the 1890s, this article shows that it was the formation of this national organization, rather than the economic crisis, that was the primary force behind the Bankruptcy Act of 1898.