When historians tell the tale of American domestic policy, they focus on Washington—and politicians. Energetic statesmen are their heroes. Their villains are business figures, pictured as too selfish to know what the average man might need. The story—memorialized nearly universally in high school and college texts—conveys a single lesson: When people are in need, the government rescues.

Yet the record suggests otherwise. In moments of economic crisis from the Panic of 1907 to the Great Depression to the Stagflation of the 1970s, government often floundered. In moments of prosperity—the early 1960s—ambitious political leaders’ actions often undermined that prosperity.

Policy leaders and voters did learn from the Twentieth Century’s economic record. After the failures of the New Deal, mainstream politicians still cast themselves as market saviors, but rarely proposed New Deal-scale intervention.

Today, however, the mood is different.

That is why the past warrants review. This conference revisited the three periods of greatest intervention in the Twentieth Century. The first was the period of the progressive drive led by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson. The second came under Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Finally there was the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson and New Federalism of Richard Nixon. What did government aim for? Did government achieve that? What did business do? Did it achieve the same goals? Often, it emerges, business proved not the problem or sinner but rather the solution. And more often than not, the dichotomy of bad business on the one hand and angelic government on the other proved false.

This conference brought renewed attention to overlooked business leaders who played important roles in restoring and sustaining American prosperity.