Historians of the New South will find in Professor Killick's essay, based on the business archives of an important fin-de-siécle and early-twentieth-century cotton marketing enterprise, further powerful proof that the real story can only come from informed, sympathetic studies of what private men of affairs were accomplishing behind the dust storm of political demagogy that marked most public utterances, North and South, on southern problems in this era. Real entrepreneurship sprang up to give the marketing of the cotton crop a directness and an efficiency that ineffectual antebellum southern leaders had only dreamed of. This torch of enterprise was successfully passed, moreover, from a dying family firm to a more modern corporate organization, headed by even more skilled marketers who had learned well the lessons of their predecessors and were well prepared to flourish in the vastly changed post-1929 world. The stereotype of the prolonged backwardness of the South after 1877 is further discredited in this essay, which, significantly, is written from the far side of the Atlantic, where marketing of the cotton crop was always the most important aspect of its history.

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.

American railroad executives since the end of World War II have learned — the hard way, as usual — how little real salvation there is in the expedient of the massive merger. They might have studied to good purpose the experiences of the English railways, which were forced to consolidate into four great systems under legislation passed in 1921. Dr. Channon has done so, and tells a dreary story that scouts the idea that great cost savings flow all but automatically from consolidations. His discussion of the Great Western's failure to introduce railway cars capable of carrying 20 tons of coal, at a time when the typical American coal car carried a payload of more than twice that amount, will be variously interpreted by both sides in the controversy over the decline in British entrepreneurship since 1870. Dr. Channon throws much light, moreover, on the problems of managerial organization, a subject that claims considerable attention in current business history.

In the first of two articles, Professors Aduddell and Cain introduce the complex relations between a dynamic meatpacking industry and a government committed, in uncertain degree, to the philosophy of antitrust. From its earliest beginnings as an industry in the 1830s, meatpacking has experienced constantly changing parameters of technology, supply, demand, and public policy. Matters reached the first of several climaxes a few years after the new and naive Federal Trade Commission was established. Admittedly the dominant factor in a highly integrated meat industry, the largest companies were diversifying into non-meat food products, giving rise to the charge that they proposed to “monopolize” the entire food industry. The outcome was a consent decree in 1920 that, in confirming the large companies in their domination of meatpacking in return for their withdrawal from non-meat foods, revealed a government with a very weak case against an industry that it had made the cynosure of 120 million Americans. True to the familiar pattern of antitrust settlements, the dynamics of technology in transportation and marketing thereupon proceeded to render the decree meaningless. The second article, bringing the subject down to recent times, will appear in the Autumn issue.