On December 28, 1948, the oldest of the three American watch manufacturers, the Waltham Watch Company, filed an application for reorganization in the Federal District Court of Boston, Massachusetts. For some time it had been common knowledge, both in the trade and among the more informed public, that the company was in serious financial straits. The action of December 28 made the difficulties and future of this old New England firm no longer a regional issue but a pressing national one. Officials of the firm, representatives of labor, of the press, of radio, and politicians, both State and Federal, offered explanations and suggested answers to the timely question: What caused the company's bankruptcy and how could Waltham be saved? In attempting to find answers to this question, the representatives of management, labor, and government indicated a new direction and a new development in American business.

In September the members of the Society received copies of a new number in the Harvard Studies in Business History: The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work, 1763-1861, by Ralph W. Hidy. This work, the first history of any Anglo-American merchant banker to be written from the records of the firm itself, traces the progress of Baring Brothers & Company during the first hundred years of its existence.

Materials in Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration for the study of labor relations have been recently increased by the gift of an unusually complete and well-organized collection from Thompson Products, Inc., of Cleveland. The equivalent of fifty thousand pages of documents, arranged chronologically and indexed, illustrating labor-management-government relations during the eventful years 1933 to 1948, are a welcome addition in themselves. But the fact that they illustrate the labor history of a company which has been in the forefront of the conflict over governmental interference in labor matters makes them of even greater interest to the student. In fact, had the company not been so labor-minded, the collection itself would probably not have existed.

In New England, as nowhere else in the country, petty capitalism is showing its great abiding strength. The region's large industrial establishments may close their doors and move to other parts of the country, but its small firms stand ready to take over where the larger ones have given way. Today, New England is dotted with manufacturing plants that were once the property of great industrial enterprises but that are now the honeycombed homes of countless small shops and foundries.