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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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