Word: 20th
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...General Motors president Charles E. Wilson ("What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country") and, alas, Wall Street's Gordon Gekko ("Greed...is good. Greed is right. Greed works") in defining and defending the 20th century as the century of business...
...almost entirely American. It does include Sony's Akio Morita, and it arguably could include a handful of other leaders from abroad, notably Japan's Soichiro Honda and Eiji Toyoda (Toyota), Italy's Giovanni Agnelli (Fiat) and Australia's Rupert Murdoch (now a U.S. citizen). But if the 20th century was, as Luce also said, the American Century, it was largely because our system, espousing freedom of markets and freedom of the individual, rewarding talent instead of class and pedigree, bred a group of leaders whose single-minded fixation on getting rich--and creating great products in the process...
...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...
...meddling regulators and other curbs on the animal spirits of freewheeling entrepreneurs. Yet these febrile decades, forever decried as the era of the robber barons, forged the tremendous engine of economic growth that propelled the country from rural isolationism in the 19th century to world industrial leadership in the 20th...
...crafting the first major multinational corporation, Standard Oil, Rockefeller (1839-1937) provided a sneak preview of the 20th century. At his zenith, he refined, distributed and marketed nearly 90% of America's oil. The unlikely offspring of a raffish snake-oil salesman and a strict Baptist mother, Rockefeller grew up in several rustic hamlets in upstate New York and Ohio. He began his career as an assistant bookkeeper in a Cleveland, Ohio, commodity-brokerage house in 1855 and invested in his first refinery during the Civil...