No American presidency in this century has inspired quite so much controversy as the turbulent administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even now, on the one-hundreth anniversary of his birth, and nearly fifty years after the coming of the New Deal, the contentious debates sparked during his four terms as chief executive are no less the subject of argument among historians than they were among the adversaries of the day. One issue in point is the question of antitrust, particularly the principles and practices of Thurman Arnold, who headed the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department during the later stages of the New Deal. While this essay will hardly resolve the contumacious debates over the policies of either Arnold or Roosevelt, Dr. Miscamble nonetheless offers some surprising, but persuasive, evidence about the internal workings of the administration, the antitrust philosophy of Roosevelt, and the remarkable practices of Arnold, the law professor turned antimonopolist.

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw various advertisers embark on a concerted effort to create professional instruction at American universities. They had two objectives. They thought that such instruction might help individual firms determine precisely how advertising worked in the marketplace — and thereby create a science of advertising — and they hoped that university education would transform their business into a full-fledged profession. Yet these efforts brought mixed results. As such instruction came into being, advertisers found that they had little influence over the education they had sought to promote, and they found that such training had chosen to follow one of two divergent paths, neither of which the industry thought wholly acceptable. Even more to their dismay, advertisers found that this education did not in fact convert their business into a profession.

The now-famous merger movement that highlighted the economic cross-currents of the late nineteenth century created no more controversial enterprise than James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company. From the time of its incorporation in 1890, Duke's firm dominated the cigarette business, for which it is so justly renowned, but this controlling position by no means extended into other branches of the industry, particularly the manufacture and marketing of chewing tobacco, or what was known as plug. Yet with almost ineluctable force, Duke and his associates gradually extended their domination to this segment of the business, albeit by a much more uncertain course that included the “plug war” of the mid-1890s and some questionable securities transactions later on. While Dr. Burns takes no side in the still-simmering controversies of the day, in this essay he examines the historical events through which American Tobacco acquired its dominant position in chewing tobacco; equally important, he brings economic theory and new empirical evidence to bear on the contentious issue of predatory pricing as a strategy of monopolization, and from that emerges his surprising conclusion.

In studying the economic growth of Latin America, historians of widely divergent viewpoints have tended to emphasize the role of foreigners in the developmental process. As a result, they have often overlooked the efforts of Central and South American entrepreneurs in mobilizing capital and adopting technology to foster the growth of their countries. Chile is a case in point. Like their counterparts throughout Latin America, mid-nineteenth-century Chilean businessmen have been generally portrayed as the followers of foreign interests that dominated the nation's economy. This interpretation, however, has ignored the activity of Chileans in building railroads and promoting various other sectors of their economy. In this essay, Dr. Oppenheimer offers conclusive evidence that Chilean businessmen, closely linked to government—but not foreigners—dominated the two firms that brought the iron horse into Chile's Central Valley.