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.

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.

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.

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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.

For many years Americans engaged in business abroad at their own risk, unaided in any important way by the backing of their government. When confronted with the forces of national self-interest, they faced frustration. Then the policy of the United States, aware of its economic responsibilities and opportunities and dangers, swung to their support. The new diplomacy was not always adept, but it produced remarkable changes. These are exemplified in the thirty-year history of American efforts to gain an entry to the oilfields of the Netherlands East Indies. The files of the Department of State provide an intimate and unique view both of motivations and the mechanisms of change.

It was one of history's sardonic pranks that the forces deriding business efficiency and clamoring for regulation made Samuel Insull a favorite scapegoat. He had built his early electric system in Chicago with vision, administrative and political skill, and a conspicuously advanced concept of public relations. Insull espoused the “natural monopoly” principle, but he shocked contemporaries by insisting upon the corollary necessity for public control. He fought hard and effectively for state regulation, not as a radical theorist hut as a realist with a record of public service unsurpassed in the infant electric utility industry.

Durant has been described as “the most picturesque, spectacular, and aggressive figure in the chronicles of American automobiledom” but he was much more than this. His career is a chssic study in the dual abilities, promotional and administrative, that created and nourished big business in America. Ultimate personal disaster grew out of Durant's failure to strike a balance between the two, yet his genius left imperishable marks, and his luster as the symbol of an era is untarnished.