The growth of big business in America in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was primarily a response to the rise of urban markets — a result, in turn, of the spreading railroad network. Then, as a new century began to unfold, the dominant influence upon big business development came to be technological. Discernible patterns of integration, combination, diversification, and administration influenced and were influenced by the rise of huge companies and oligopolistic industries. Price competition yielded to other weapons, and the economy adjusted to make room for the young giants in its midst.

In the years from 1880 to 1910 the Pacfiic Northwest went through a development that appears to have been broadly typical. This boom stage, a nonrecurrent frontier phenomenon, is actually the process of integrating the developing area with the national economy. The patterns set in the pliant boom era by forceful “ground floor operators” are likely to harden into long-term permanence.

The founding of the Estey Organ Company is a case study in the precarious cut-and-try method by which, in the nineteenth century, most American firms were created. Fleeting partnerships reflected the continuous search for and exhaustion of numerous small reservoirs of capital. Survival and growth were tied to increasing entrepreneurial specialization, broadening markets, and immunity to developing geographic handicaps.

In post-Colonial days and well into the nineteenth century the merchant's role in smaller communities was incredibly versatile and complicated. This study calls attention to one such “Yankee trader,” who was the focal point for scores of enterprises but whose nonspecialized adventures became progressively restricted with changing times.

What happens when a major modern enterprise is abruptly superimposed on a country where business patterns have been fixed for centuries? One of the most interesting reactions is that by entrepreneurs in the national population. Adaptation, imitation, and eagerness are characteristic responses, and these go remarkably far in solving the problems of carrying on a twentieth-century business in a fifteenth-century economy.

In many instances the recruitment of outstanding business executives for [federal] posts is both unfair to the individual and of no advantage to the executive branch.

On the whole … there is no class of people better equipped for public service than the businessmen.