How should a company observe the venerable occasion of a Centennial birthday? Many businessmen question the dollars-and-cents wisdom of elaborate ceremonies; others have made corporate birthdays a fetish. The Borden Company formulated the unconventional answer that its Centennial should serve as a springboard for increased sales and profits.

Adventure as well as hope for great gain touched off the western cattle boom of the 1880's. The magic lure of the West proved irresistible even to conservative Eastern financiers. Losses were large, but the disillusioned and precipitous withdrawal of capital made them even larger.

The growth of big business in America in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was primarily a response to the rise of urban markets — a result, in turn, of the spreading railroad network. Then, as a new century began to unfold, the dominant influence upon big business development came to be technological. Discernible patterns of integration, combination, diversification, and administration influenced and were influenced by the rise of huge companies and oligopolistic industries. Price competition yielded to other weapons, and the economy adjusted to make room for the young giants in its midst.

This study of the working habits of early American businessmen focuses on long-forgotten details that help clarify methods of the day and suggest that business in colonial times had not yet become an end in itself nor a dominant means for self-expression.

There was an interlude when enchantment with Dollar Diplomacy overcame the reluctance of Washington to become involved in Near East politics. The Chester project, however, was defeated by German imperialism, lack of popular support for business ambitions abroad, and vacillation by the promoters themselves. The time for effective alliance between the State Department and American businessmen was not yet at hand.

In the years from 1880 to 1910 the Pacfiic Northwest went through a development that appears to have been broadly typical. This boom stage, a nonrecurrent frontier phenomenon, is actually the process of integrating the developing area with the national economy. The patterns set in the pliant boom era by forceful “ground floor operators” are likely to harden into long-term permanence.

Reform spokesmen, believing that fundamental issues of social control were involved, hailed the refusal of the judiciary to intervene in the 1880's against state regulation of corporate power. The progressive triumph was short-lived. Reversing the earlier trend, the courts retreated into economic conservatism, but in so doing generated the fierce pressures that were later to explode into new outbursts of legal and social revolt.

Heirs to the Populist-Progressive tradition in Congress declaimed, in the 1920', against low rediscount rates, the use of bank credit for speculative purposes, the rising volume of brokers' loans, and the flow of money to New York from the hinterland. In the bull market environment of the day the warnings went unheeded, in part at hast because of their origins.

The founding of the Estey Organ Company is a case study in the precarious cut-and-try method by which, in the nineteenth century, most American firms were created. Fleeting partnerships reflected the continuous search for and exhaustion of numerous small reservoirs of capital. Survival and growth were tied to increasing entrepreneurial specialization, broadening markets, and immunity to developing geographic handicaps.

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.

The Western traders who made centers like Kansas City their base soon found that urban development offered greater, safer investment opportunities than did trade. Bonanza real estate earnings became a major source of capital for the further development of the West.

Who were the originators of the Robber Baron concept? Not the injured, the poor, the faddists, the jealous, or a dispossessed elite. Rather, it was a frustrated group of observers led at last by protracted years of harsh depression to believe that the American dream of abundant prosperity for all was a hopeless myth.

In post-Colonial days and well into the nineteenth century the merchant's role in smaller communities was incredibly versatile and complicated. This study calls attention to one such “Yankee trader,” who was the focal point for scores of enterprises but whose nonspecialized adventures became progressively restricted with changing times.

Personnel management as we know it today grew out of welfare work, on the one hand, and Scientific Management on the other. It came to embrace added functions and concepts, the most important of which was that idealism and realism were compatible in dealing efficiently with human beings.

The process whereby enormous tracts of agricultural hinterland passed from original tract owners to individual settlers was facilitated by skilled mediators. These owner-agents incurred great risks, operated boldly on none-too-firm credit, and, sometimes, profited handsomely. Their task was to open new frontiers and sell America to Americans.

This allegorical representation of commerce is based on the business scene in sixteenth-century Germany. It was conceived by Johann Neudorfer, was engraved on six woodblocks by Jost Amman (1539–1591), and printed at Augsberg in 1622. Mr. Philip Hofer, Curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts of the Harvard College Library, early this year presented this intricately detailed engraving, measuring 30 × 46 inches, to Baker Library, where it enriches a growing collection of works of art portraying the business scene.

It was not in the nature of the local American entrepreneur to concede to monopolistic power. Technical competence, good controls, and appeals to local pride were potent weapons in the struggle of a small company to succeed in the face of competition with the giant Bell system.

What happens when a major modern enterprise is abruptly superimposed on a country where business patterns have been fixed for centuries? One of the most interesting reactions is that by entrepreneurs in the national population. Adaptation, imitation, and eagerness are characteristic responses, and these go remarkably far in solving the problems of carrying on a twentieth-century business in a fifteenth-century economy.

The forces that originally impelled manufacturers to unite were often of fleeting impact and were soon replaced by the cohesive influence of new issues. The NAM, conceived to wage a tariff war, discovered in organized labor a common enemy for its members and traced its prosperity from the date it became a gladiator in the labor arena.

The movement for nation-wide association among businessmen was echoed at the local level as well. This study of why and how a “grass roots” association developed suggests that the causative forces included not only material benefits but also a desire for status.