It is well known that contemporary critics of the National Banking System complained about its failure to meet peak demands for currency. Less often discussed are complaints about the system's inability to remove excess notes from circulation during periods of slack demand for currency—a problem that critics attributed to the lack of an effective redemption mechanism. Beginning in 1864, important attempts were made to reform redemption arrangements, both privately and through legislation, and redemption reform was a key component of the “asset currency” movement to deregulate note issue. This article examines the motives and outcomes of redemption reform efforts up to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, which substituted a discretionary control over the currency stock for the automatic elasticity that the asset currency movement had originally sought.

This article examines the statistical work done by Leonard Porter Ayres for the Council of National Defense during the First World War. Director of statistics for the Russell Sage Foundation when war was declared, Ayres immediately volunteered his own and the foundation's statistical expertise. The article focuses on the first year of American intervention in the war and argues that Ayres's important statistical work evolved in three overlapping but distinct stages. The structure of the American state, however, confounded the wider ambitions of Ayres (just as it had those of his rival Edwin Gay) to centralize all government statistical data.

This article challenges both those historians—represented primarily by neo-colonialists and World Systems theorists— who stress economic factors as motivations of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia during the 1950s. Although such analyses provide valuable insights into American foreign policy, neither the desire to secure the markets and raw materials of Southeast Asia for American industry nor the perceived need to preserve a capitalist World System offers an adequate explanation for the American commitment to Southeast Asia. Using the business press and trade journals as primary sources, this article examines the public remarks and activities of the American business community throughout the decade; it concludes that, despite their frequently strong rhetoric, business leaders were generally ambivalent about the proper course of action in Southeast Asia and about the region's importance to American interests. The research presented here suggests that other, non-economic, factors may better explain U.S. policy in that region during the 1950s.

This article explores the first attempt by American physiologists to assist employers with the stubborn problem of tired workers. It examines the work of Frederic Lee and the Committee on Industrial Fatigue, which was set up to increase productivity in the face of the long hours deemed necessary for war readiness. Despite the biomedical investigators' strenuous efforts and their incisive critique of Taylorism, however, corporate management found few practical uses for their findings and remedial proposals. Instead, industrial physiology helped to pave the way for rival consultants from psychology.

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has maintained that the persistence of the personally managed firm in Britain may be a cause of that nation's long-run industrial decline. This article contributes to the debate over decline through a detailed exploration of the business role of personally managed firms in a strategic sector of the Second Industrial Revolution: the metal and metal-making trades of Sheffield. Our study shows that the business strategies of Sheffield firms, based on quality production and flexible technology, had close similarities to those of American companies described by scholars such as Philip Scranton. Many of the Sheffield firms were not lacking in enterprise; they demonstrated tenacity and, in certain key segments of the metal trades, enjoyed a high degree of business success. Our examination of personal capitalism in Sheffield suggests that the terms of the debate over Britain's industrial decline may require further refinement.

This article begins with an overview of the changing context of U.S. industrial enterprise from the Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. It then examines the changes in the nature of competition, in the financial markets, and in corporate management that transformed the industrial environment in the postwar decades. Against that historical background, the essay describes in detail the results of an empirical study aimed at discovering how U.S. companies maintained, increased, or dissipated their organizational capabilities and how the market for corporate control affected that behavior.

In 1909, the leaders of the American Association for Labor Legislation launched a campaign to eradicate phosphorus matches from the American market. Because phosphorus match workers often contracted a hideous disease called phosphorus necrosis (or “phossy jaw”), many European countries had already prohibited the poison matches from their markets. In the United States, nearly all interested parties supported legal abolition but found that the nation's federal system constituted a formidable obstacle. No state wanted to be the first to act (for fear of driving industry from its borders), and the federal government lacked the power to regulate intrastate economic activity. This article examines how, in order to circumvent the federalism obstacle, an alliance of academic reformers and business leaders worked to tax phosphorus matches out of existence—that is, to use the federal taxing power as a regulatory instrument.

Established to mobilize science during the Second World War, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and its director, Vannevar Bush, created new weapons as well as a new relationship between science and government that helped shape Cold War America. Yet much about the partnership that emerged disappointed Bush, especially its uncontrolled expansion and the failure of civilian oversight. The failure, ironically, as this article explains, can be traced to the very approach that allowed Bush to mobilize rapidly during wartime, especially to an “associationalism” and contractual strategy that centralized the management of R&D in Washington while leaving its performance to private contractors. Forged in more conservative decades, the strategy facilitated the rapid exploitation of private-sector resources at the cost of promoting the uncontrolled proliferation of public-private arrangements that undercut Bush's postwar hopes.

The authors of this article argue that companies' high cost of capital or short investment horizons do not explain the decline in global competitiveness of many U.S. industries in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, they find the source of malaise in the capital-budgeting and financial-planning systems that arose after the Second World War. Although they allowed managers in large companies to evaluate some aspects of their business efficiently and comprehensively, these systems also obscured the value of investment in organizational capabilities, because such investments were hard to quantify—indeed, even to describe—within the financial models in widespread use. As a result, companies often invested vigorously—but in the wrong things. The authors define a set of desirable capabilities and, using case studies, describe both the problems of the recent past and the requirements for successful investment in the future.

Many observers of the corporate restructurings that reached major proportions in the United States in the 1980s have believed that the market for corporate control had a serious negative impact on companies' long-term investment, which in turn contributed to the United States's decline in global competitiveness. In the following study, the author looks carefully at the effects of financial restructurings on investment, especially at expenditures on R&D, in a large set of companies categorized according to their level of technology and the length of their investment horizon. She then compares the U.S. situation with that in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. She concludes that, though many such events occasioned no change at all in investment strategies, restructuring pressures and declines in investment tended to concentrate in certain industries. She also finds that investment decisions were usually rational, given high interest rates and a tax environment that favored debt over equity.