Management's Crisis of Confidence and the Origin of the National Industrial Conference Board, 1914–1916

1984 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
H.M. Gitelman

In this essay, Professor Gitelman draws upon new primary source materials to help clarify the outlook of American business leaders in the years immediately preceding U.S. entry into World War I. He shows how business leaders brooded, at periodic private conferences, over the profound loss in public esteem they believed business had suffered. This “crisis of confidence,” he concludes, precipitated defensive associational efforts. The creation of conference boards—the brainchild of Magnus W. Alexander—provided an institutional base for these efforts, and pointed the way to the creation of the National Industrial Conference Board.

2009 ◽  
pp. 455-462
Author(s):  
George Makari

- In opposition to the traditional historiography of psychoanalysis, based essentially on biographies, the creation of psychoanalysis is seen as both a body of ideas and a movement that can be better understood by focusing on the way this field constituted itself, broke apart, and then rebuilt itself prior to World War II. Outlining the argument of the author's book, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), it is argued that a distinct Freudian theory emerged from Freud's engagements with three pre-existing fields: French psychopathology, German biophysics/psychophysics, and sexology. As Freud pulled them together in an new synthesis, followers from these fields found their way to him. But a series of schisms shattered Freud's fragile movement. After World War I, a new community emerged that was more "psychoanalytic" than "Freudian". It placed less emphasis on Freud's authority, and instead emphasized technique and professionalization. World War II led to the destruction of these communities and sparked battles for control in the two major centers that remained, London and New York.


1978 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim McQuaid

Contrasting with the resentment of other power structures, especially corporate business, that democratic governments display is the obvious need of the powerful and the productive for each other in times of stress. Professor McQuaid follows the activities of a group of “corporate liberals” (i.e., big business leaders who believed that intelligent collaboration between business, government, and organized labor was an attainable goal) from World War I through the prosperous 1920s, the despondent 1930s, and the busy and prosperous years of World War II. He concludes that corporate liberal opinion grew more influential in both corporate and governmental circles during and after the period.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.


Author(s):  
Chris Forster

This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million "surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression.


Author(s):  
Kirsty Hooper

What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material history reveals how, for almost three decades, Anglo-Spanish connections, their history and culture were more visible, more colourfully represented, and more enthusiastically discussed in Britain’s newspapers, concert halls, council meetings and schoolrooms, than ever before. It shows how the expansion of education, travel, and publishing created unprecedented opportunities for ordinary British people not only to visit the country, but to see the work of Spanish and Spanish-inspired artists and performers in British galleries, theatres and exhibitions. It explores the work of novelists, travel writers, journalists, scholars, artists and performers to argue that the Edwardian knowledge of Spain was more extensive, more complex and more diverse than we have imagined.


2021 ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad

Part I of the book—covering Europe’s continental empires—begins with Chapter 2 on the Russian Empire. The state’s overreliance on revenues from the imperial vodka monopoly is laid bare beginning with the temperance revolts of the 1850s, when the empire was almost bankrupted when peasants refused to drink. The understanding of temperance as opposition to imperial autocracy is traced through the antistatist teachings of Leo Tolstoy and early Bolsheviks, including the prohibitionists Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite official opposition to “subversive” temperance activism, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Tsar Nicholas II made Russia the first prohibitionist state, though the loss of state revenue paved the way for the revolutions of 1917. Lenin maintained a prohibition against the vodka trade, which was only undone after Lenin’s death by Joseph Stalin, who reintroduced the tsarist-era vodka monopoly in the interests of state finance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-133
Author(s):  
Robert Doričić ◽  
Toni Buterin ◽  
Igor Eterović ◽  
Amir Muzur

The Spanish flu, one of the worst epidemics in history, appeared in 1918, on the eve of the end of the World War I. The characteristic of the epidemic on the territory of the city of Rijeka has been poorly studied. Certainly, the lack of primary sources, such as hospital registries, have made the understanding of the incidence and the course of the epidemic in the city more difficult. Therefore, the death certificates have emerged as the main primary source. The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe mortality caused by the (Spanish) flu during 1918 and at the beginning of 1919, using the death registers of those who lived in the area of the city center and the surrounding parishes. The results of the Spanish flu mortality research in the area of Rijeka are compared to the Spanish flu specific mortality on the territory of the three parishes situated in the wider area of Rijeka – Brseč, Mošćenice and Lovran. The elucidation of the characteristics of the Spanish flu epidemic and its impact on the quotidian life in the city of Rijeka is possible through the analysis of daily newspapers as well. In this paper, we have explored such articles in the La Bilancia, Rijeka’s newspaper published in Italian.


Author(s):  
S. Slonim

The roots of the South West Africa dispute relate back to the events that took place at the end of World War I and led to the creation of the League of Nations mandates system. More particularly, the conflict between the United Nations and South Africa cannot be understood except by tracing the manner in which South West Africa became a part of that system. The “great compromise” hammered out by President Wilson and the Dominion ministers at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 produced a three-tiered system of mandates which reflected in a sliding scale a varied balancing of national and international interests. The result of the compromise was a divergency of interpretation that has endured to this day and in considerable measure has fostered and sustained the dispute in its present-day dimensions.


Author(s):  
Charlie Laderman

Although the League of Nations was the first permanent organization established with the purpose of maintaining international peace, it built on the work of a series of 19th-century intergovernmental institutions. The destructiveness of World War I led American and British statesmen to champion a league as a means of maintaining postwar global order. In the United States, Woodrow Wilson followed his predecessors, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, in advocating American membership of an international peace league, although Wilson’s vision for reforming global affairs was more radical. In Britain, public opinion had begun to coalesce in favor of a league from the outset of the war, though David Lloyd George and many of his Cabinet colleagues were initially skeptical of its benefits. However, Lloyd George was determined to establish an alliance with the United States and warmed to the league idea when Jan Christian Smuts presented a blueprint for an organization that served that end. The creation of the League was a predominantly British and American affair. Yet Wilson was unable to convince Americans to commit themselves to membership in the new organization. The Franco-British-dominated League enjoyed some early successes. Its high point was reached when Europe was infused with the “Spirit of Locarno” in the mid-1920s and the United States played an economically crucial, if politically constrained, role in advancing Continental peace. This tenuous basis for international order collapsed as a result of the economic chaos of the early 1930s, as the League proved incapable of containing the ambitions of revisionist powers in Europe and Asia. Despite its ultimate limitations as a peacekeeping body, recent scholarship has emphasized the League’s relative successes in stabilizing new states, safeguarding minorities, managing the evolution of colonies into notionally sovereign states, and policing transnational trafficking; in doing so, it paved the way for the creation of the United Nations.


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