In this article Professor Perkins reexamines President Andrew Jackson's objections to the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, as expressed in his famous veto message of 1832. He observes that, in addition to its exaggerated rhetoric, the veto message discusses at length a number of alleged deficiencies in the existing charter provisions. Professor Perkins's systematic analysis of the probable ramifications of a series of judicious alterations reveals that a compromise bill reformulated to meet most of the president's stated objections would not have seriously undermined the institution's position in American financial markets. Although several opportunities for sensible compromise arose, Nicholas Biddle and other members of the probank faction disregarded them. Perkins argues that the failure of bank supporters to consider comparatively modest modifications in the terms of recharter was a major blunder that ultimately doomed the Second Bank.

George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1937, dedicated his magazine to business, businessmen, and business values. As part of an early campaign to increase the Post's circulation, the Curtis Company extended their interest to the businessmen of the future. The Circulation Bureau devised a plan of recruiting middle-class boys, training them in selling techniques, and educating them in business values. Victor Pelz, a boy agent recruited in Seattle, soared to selling stardom between 1902 and 1905. During those years the Post wrote him hundreds of letters, exhorting, praising, sometimes chastising. In Victor's career and in this surviving correspondence are inscribed the business ethic of the early twentieth century with all its promise and all its contradictions.

In this article, Dr. Newbury focuses on the technical and financial reasons for amalgamation at the Kimberley mines in South Africa, drawing on primary records to account for the rise of De Beers as the world's major diamond mining company in the 1880s. He finds that prior experience in local government and on the mining boards prepared company directors for competition in joint stock enterprise, while differences in production policies and performance influenced the pattern of mergers within and among the four Kimberley mines. De Beers's close relationship with diamond merchants and private banks in London, particularly N. M. Rothschild & Sons, was central to its position as a prime mover toward consolidation. Dr. Newbury views De Beers as a firm that relied for its success less on its renowned chairman, Cecil J. Rhodes, than on a combined managerial expertise that reflected the interests of both mining producers and merchant buyers.

In this article, Professor Stabile examines the experimentation with Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management by managers at the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company. Despite their initial interest in efficiency, those managers quickly recognized that there was a direct relationship between efficiency and safety, an issue Taylor had not considered. When it was alleged that the efficiency methods had been a factor in two explosions, the emphasis in the company shifted to a more systematic approach to promoting safety. As a consequence, the company was able to manage a full-scale expansion of its production during the First World War with little disruption resulting from safety problems.

In this article Professor Blanchard examines the Associated Press antitrust suit of the early 1940s in terms of its protagonists, Chicago newspaper leaders Robert McCormick and Marshall Field. The analysis avoids traditional antitrust terms and instead examines the suit as part of an effort by the federal government to use the antitrust law to implement a public-interest interpretation of the First Amendment. Professor Blanchard also looks at McCormick's attempt to obtain special legislation from Congress to void the Supreme Court's decision in favor of Field. She concludes that, although the government's efforts to use the First Amendment to force the news agency to serve a broader public interest were successful, the Associated Press emerged from the suit stronger than before the legal action.

A growing number of black men and women attempted to establish businesses in the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth century. These enterprises, which ranged from small shops and retail establishments to more substantial banks and insurance companies, were organized primarily to increase the economic self-sufficiency of black Americans. In this article, Professor Henderson chronicles the efforts of Heman Perry to develop a complex business organization in Atlanta. Although Perry failed to achieve all of his entrepreneurial goals or to sustain the businesses that he founded, his endeavors nevertheless had a significant impact on the city's later development as an important center of black business activity.

Business historians and students of political economy quite often analyze the success of foreign investors in the periphery in terms of the entrepreneur's competitive advantage and of the host country's beneficial economic policies. One cannot explain the extraordinary success of British engineer Sir Weetman Pearson in Mexico's early oil history according to such criteria, however, for his American competitors had experience in the technologically advanced U.S. petroleum industry and should have prevailed. Sir Weetman succeeded because Mexican politicians, pursuing their own internal political interests, willed and nurtured his success.

In this wide-ranging article, Professor Yonekawa identifies and examines in detail the burst of cotton spinning company formation that occurred in the late nineteenth century among the major cotton-producing nations of the world. His comparative approach allows him to focus on key local factors responsible for the company flotation booms in the areas discussed. He is also able to compare the effects of more general circumstances in the industry, such as trends in the price of raw cotton and the disruption during the American Civil War, on the various locations. Finally, his multinational approach brings to light many intriguing questions and illuminates areas for productive future research.

In interwar Germany, the overall economic importance of big business rapidly increased, as concentration was seen as a suitable means of coping with Germany's post–First World War problems. Growing and integrating vertically and laterally, Germany's big combines had to adjust their organization to deal with these amalgamations. In the following article, Professor Feldenkirchen takes a close look at the measures employed at Vereinigte Stahlwerke, IG Farben, and Siemens, Germany's three largest combines during the interwar period.

British free trade has been variously attributed to the importuning of business interests, to the advanced state of manufacturing, to politicians acting on improper or unworthy motives, or to imperialism. Professor Grampp examines a critical event in the history of free trade: Parliament's declaration in 1820 that future commercial policy should be guided by that principle. By 1850, all major restrictions had been abolished. The decision of 1820, according to Thomas Tooke, a principal in the event, was made by the Tory Government with the concurrence of the Whig Opposition, both of which had come to believe free trade would increase per capita real income: that is, both acted in what they and others since have understood to be the public interest.

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.

J. I. Case Company in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a long-established business faced with the challenge of rapid technological and market change in the agricultural equipment industry. The contrasting styles and policies of Marc B. Rojtman and William J. Grede, Case's two presidents during this period, represented the management tension between the desire for radical experiment and the hope of maintaining the Case traditions of quality and character. Professor Miner's study, based on interviews and on Grede's extensive papers, concentrates on Grede as director and as president. It illuminates the impact of personality on management and illustrates the complexities of adapting an old company to a new industrial world.

While the fact of Dutch capitalist involvement in building and operating the American railroad network in the nineteenth century is relatively well known, the ways in which the Amsterdam capital market was tapped by American railroad companies or their representatives have remained relatively obscure. In this article, Dr. Veenendaal, using hitherto unknown archival material, explains how the promoter of the Kansas City, Pittsburg & Gulf Railroad (now the Kansas City Southern), Arthur E. Stilwell, set out to procure the millions he needed to realize his dream, a direct railroad from the Midwest to the Gulf.

Although historians have thoroughly discussed the impact of transformations in the workplace and the corporate structure that accompanied the rise of modern business enterprises, Professor Santos argues that they have ignored the traditional firms that continued to exist amid these changes. Constituting a significant portion of companies operating in the industrial economy, firms like Byers employed simple systems of managerial control based on the entrepreneurs' personal authority and property interest in the business. While labor policy at modern corporations was shaped by the managers' need to establish administrative control over the production and distribution systems, Byers's labor policy was defined by family attitude and the company's history.