One of the regular features of the American Heritage of Invention and Technology is editor Frederick Allen's article, “They're Still There,” in which some heroic lump of nineteenth- or early-twentieth century machinery is shown still clunking away and churning out profits, operated by people who still embody traditional manual, engineering, and entrepreneurial skills. The attraction of Allen's reports to the industrial antiquarian is obvious, but there is a serious point too: “Progress” does not entirely eliminate or obliterate the past; institutions can survive and adapt; the present is a composite in which things and behaviors we have been taught to disregard, as unimportant or passé, continue alongside what we like to consider normal, or significant, or the wave of the future.

The title quote, taken from the membership development director of a midwestern employers' association's report on a conversation with a hesitant recruit, echoes Allen's charming evocation of the survival of traces of the past in the present. But it meant something different to the woman who uttered it. The message that she intended to pass to her prospective member was that the employers' association movement, as it stood on the brink of its second century, had become a permanently useful and necessary feature of the environment in which managers and entrepreneurs operate. If the prospect did not want to join this year, fair enough; there would be plenty of time to reconsider.

Employers' associations today are not mere charming survivals.