Jay Gould's image is stamped heavily upon the picture historians have drawn of the “Gilded Age” of American economic development. Our lack of knowledge of the man, and our meager efforts to understand him, account in large measure for the fatuous traditional interpretation of the era. Professor Klein explains how the work of recent historians has made the hackneyed view of both the man and his age obsolete. He reviews the constructive role that Gould played in the rise of modern America, and offers an explanation of why the man was singled out for extraordinary condemnation in his own time.

One of the most durable stereotypes of recent American history is that of the 1920s as “a conservative Republican interlude between the progressive Democratic administrations of Wilson and Roosevelt.” An important feature of this stereotype is the “Mellon plan” for tax reform. Professor Murray demonstrates that there was remarkable unanimity among Republicans and Democrats on the policy issues addressed by the “Mellon plan,” and finds continuity, rather than contrast, between the tax plans of the Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge administrations. As Secretaries of the Treasury came and went between 1918 and 1921, staff assistants cultivated the plan which Mellon later adopted.

From its beginnings as a supplier of lamps for bicycles in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Professor Church follows Joseph Lucas Ltd., through three generations of management and several revolutions in the character of its trade, to its emergence as the largest supplier of components to British automobile manufacturers. Shrewd but rigidly upstanding business policies, a clear-headed view to the future, and conservative financing methods gave Lucas's the strength and flexibility to survive and eventually dominate a field that was constantly changing, and in which both domestic and foreign competition was an important factor. Lucas's management, watching the rise and fall of firms that were, as Professor Church says, “young, inventive, and financially weak,” might have agreed with Andrew Carnegie that “pioneering don't pay.” But Lucas's, like Carnegie, pioneered with great success where increased productivity, lower prices, and growth were the rewards.

Is there a “military-industrial complex” in the United States? What is the relationship between business, government, and the military with its needs for vast quantities of goods and services? How has organization for war and defense changed since the demands of World War I first made such questions important? How much do we know about what actually happened between World War I and Vietnam to change the relationship between private and public organizations? Professor Cuff discusses the complexities involved in trying to answer such historical questions, and prescribes a professional historian's regimen for future work on this subject.