Of all forms of personal services supplied to business enterprise, that of sales workers has perhaps defied the application of “standard” management practices more than any other. Professor Benson shows that this generalization is especially applicable to female department store sales personnel, who were necessarily recruited chiefly from “lower” social classes whose members lacked education and refinement. Thus, regimentation and rote training seemed appropriate. On the other hand, selling style goods to sophisticated female customers involved elements not of a trade but an art, and an attitude of deference, which was not a common trait among working-class girls. Department store managers, almost exclusively male, failed to solve this paradox and, as Professor Benson relates, failed also to deal with the invisible solidarity of female sales persons.

It is a truism that government regulation of business, like all institutions of the political economy, has been evolutionary in nature. Yet few regulatory programs have metamorphosed quite so completely as that of the Federal Trade Commission, which converted itself in the period covered by this article from a watchdog of “competitive practices” that might militate against preservation of atomistic industrial organization, to an agency bent on protecting the interests of consumers. Professor Tedlow shows how this process worked itself out in the important case of truth in advertising.

Unprecedented rates of consumption by the American and Allied war machine during World War II, along with a reduction in world supplies as a result of enemy victories, first brought the United States face to face with the possibility of dependence upon others for our oil after the war. Government officials attempted to avoid that outcome through the Anglo-American Oil Agreement but only succeeded in provoking domestic producers. Meanwhile, British and American oil companies provided relief by private commercial arrangements in the then-new Middle Eastern fields. While Professor Stoff's story ends in the dark ages of naive American belief that such enterprises, when countenanced by our government, constituted freedom from dependence, it is indispensable to an understanding of what came later.

Since the landmark article of Thomas Navin and Marian Sears on the rise of the market for industrial securities in the Business History Review (XXIX, June 1955), there has been an active interest in the causal relationship between the remarkable upsurge in corporate mergers of industrial companies early in this century, and the greater activity of the securities markets. Professor Smiley adds to this literature with a study of interest rates and the growth of activity in what contemporaries called “financial banking” (lending money for transactions in securities) as opposed to commercial banking. There are limits to the inference of cause and effect relations from financial activity, however, and historians must continue to study these phenomena merger by merger in order to draw conclusions as to the reasons for them.