In the years from 1880 to 1910 the Pacfiic Northwest went through a development that appears to have been broadly typical. This boom stage, a nonrecurrent frontier phenomenon, is actually the process of integrating the developing area with the national economy. The patterns set in the pliant boom era by forceful “ground floor operators” are likely to harden into long-term permanence.

As production workers in late-nineteenth-century American heavy industry moved towards regular use of concerted action, including the strike, to gain their demands, employers generally adopted rigid policies of opposition. That it was a frightening period for manufacturers, with prices for their goods steadily falling and widespread business failure, has been emphasized by Edward C. Kirkland and others. But lack of scholarship in business archives has improverished labor-management history on this point. Professors Skaggs and Ehrlich offer one case history, based on a study of the “inner truth” of such a conflict in the 1880s. It confirms the suspicion that it was not practical economic imperatives but a long-run policy to maintain the principles of paternalism that often accounted for the intransigence of management.

Until recently, students of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries concentrated on technological changes or on labor and social problems but neglected capital and the capitalist. Mantoux gave 160 pages to technology, 100 to labor, and only 34 to capital. Mrs. Knowles devoted 8½ pages out of 392 to capital, companies, and combinations. The Hammonds have given us volumes on the town laborer, the skilled laborer, and the village laborer, but we still lack the book Unwin once hoped they would write on the working life and ideals of the entrepreneur.

Practical demonstrations in Great Britain led some observers to conclude that the railroad would soon introduce “a new era in the business and arrangements of Society.” Thus inspired, promoters of the first American rail ventures began to draw heavily, both for practical information and equipment, upon the resources of the British pioneers, whose response was magnificently cooperative.

Students of planning may profitably ponder the myriad difficulties faced by the British aircraft industry in the decade before the outbreak of World War II. On a small civilian aircraft industry, provided with hardly any opportunity to gain military aircraft experience between World War I and the early 1930s, the Air Ministry tried to impose a nearly anarchic system of strategic military planning in which the very philosophy of the use of aircraft in war was at issue. Forced to work under conditions that included a “shadow industry” of civilian plant space that was theoretically capable of quick conversion to military aircraft production and that in the meantime turned out automobiles, the aircraft industry somehow ended up with two superb heavy bombers, the Halifax and the Lancaster, and a highly dependable prime contractor, A. V. Roe. Basing his narrative on both government and industry sources, Dr. Smith concludes that this was an outstanding example of British wartime “muddling through.”

In sending copies of Dr. Henrietta M. Larson's Jay Cooke—Private Banker to its members, the Business Historical Society has taken a definite step forward. For the first time in its eleven years' existence, the Society has, with this presentation, been instrumental in distributing a significant historical volume prepared by a trained business historian and dealing with the business career of an important business man.