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J.P. Morgan, a titan of the 19th century who helped set the stage for the 20th (see following article), acted in his day as a cross between today's Federal Reserve Board and the Goldman Sachs' mergers-and-acquisitions department, providing the money and acumen needed to launch the prototypes of modern industrial corporations. Under Morgan's leadership, this century began much as the 19th century ended, with heavy industry--steel, rails, electricity, and oil--ascendant. Automobiles were in short supply until 1913, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line and mass production, making ours a consumer as well as an industrial society. As the century progressed, the service economy began to compete with industry as fortunes were made in soft drinks (Coca-Cola), processed foods (Heinz), insurance (Travelers, AIG) and retail (Sears, Wal-Mart). The information age began in the 1920s, when Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer and the rest of Hollywood began to build businesses of scale. But it wasn't until the 1950s, with the emergence of television as a mass medium, and the two most recent decades, with the computer's coming of age, that information has replaced manufacturing as the primary source of growth. In fact, it is really too soon to pass judgment on most of the information age's brightest lights, among them Apple's Steve Jobs, America Online's Steve Case and Netscape's Marc Andreessen, who may wind up contributing even more to the 21st century than to the 20th.
Nor do we honor economists here, preferring to include them in a subsequent issue devoted to scientists and thinkers. But surely our nation and the world would be less strong today, and many of our most famous business leaders would seem less prescient, absent the guidance of the Federal Reserve Board's Alan Greenspan. John Maynard Keynes, who convinced us of the value of fixed exchange rates and the need to use deficit financing to spend our way out of recessions, had tremendous influence over economic policy through the Depression and in the years after World War II. Although his name is back in vogue as many nations cope with the most serious economic crisis since the Depression, my own vote for economist of the century goes to Milton Friedman, whose books, including Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose (written with his wife Rose), articulate the importance of free markets and the dangers of undue government intervention. Our list, recognizing only 20 people, is by definition subjective, especially since we sought to recognize leadership in several different industries. If, as I believe, the automobile is the product of the century, we could easily have filled the list with the names of famous automakers, including Alfred P. Sloan, Charles Kettering and William Durant (all from General Motors), Walter Chrysler, Ferdinand Porsche (Porsche and Volkswagen), Ransom Olds, Clement Studebaker and the Dodge brothers. Henry J. Kaiser not only built cars but also played a key role in shipbuilding, construction, housing and hospitals. In the end, however, we settled on Henry Ford because his individual genius was so responsible for automating the assembly line and building the industry.