The public's reaction to the growth of large concentrations of industrial wealth and power and the government's increasing regulatory response produced a widespread and sometimes bitter debate over the best way to achieve a balance between the need to control the trusts and the benefits to be derived from them. Increasingly, the trusts' defenders feared that public disenchantment would result in governmental takeovers of.industries providing services of great benefit to the majority of Americans, particularly the nation's rail systems. Conditions were thus ripe for the development of some imaginative alternatives, one of which rose to capture briefly the public's interest.

William W. Cook was an attorney and general counsel for the Mackay Cable and Telegraph Company, a sizable corporation. Though widely known as a defender of the trust as a natural outgrowth of a changing economy, Cook was convinced that...