An Illustrated Business History of the United States

by Richard Vague

From Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, and Cornelius Vanderbilt to Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates, with Madam C.J. Walker, Martha Stewart, Jay-Z, and many more in-between, An Illustrated Business History of the United States is a sweeping, lively, and highly approachable history of American business from the nation's founding to the twenty-first century.

Author Richard Vague divides this history into fourteen eras, with each era featuring lists of the wealthiest individuals, notable inventions, and companies founded, and the largest organizations, banks, and insurance companies. Much of the data to create these lists stems from original research, and the book contains a wealth of primary business information extended and supplemented on a companion website.

Major themes include the nation's business beginnings in land and real estate, the pivotal place of financial institutions from the nation's earliest days, America's emergence as an industrial powerhouse, its outsized innovations, the dominance of its railways, automobiles, and other transportation companies, and the ever-changing role of government. As the book moves to the contemporary era, it highlights the merchandising of comfort, entertainment, and controversy, and looks to the future as it touches on the potential of emerging industries such as genetic engineering, green energy, and virtual reality.

A must read for any student of American history, the book covers both catastrophe and triumph, innovation and failure, and provides a crucial context for a better understanding of the nation's political and social history. Lushly illustrated with 300 color images, it is equally rewarding for those who want to read it cover to cover and those who prefer to focus on select eras of special interest.

Genres: History, Business, Economics

304 pages, Hardcover

Published May 21, 2021

Reviews

[Jason Hillenburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is obvious Richard Vague believes, with good reason, that the history of American business reveals much about our national journey. The confluence of capitalism, human nature, and democracy has and continues powering one of the wealthiest civilizations in the history of the species. Including photographs, artwork, and other informative and eye-catching graphics throughout "An Illustrated Business History of the United States" further underlines the dramatic trajectory American business has taken.

Vague’s wealth of professional experience informs his observations. The current Pennsylvania Banking and Securities Secretary has occupied several other high-profile roles such as chairperson for The Governor’s Woods Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization, as well as co-founding two successful businesses. He matches his subject matter with vigorous writing that attempts to capture each significant turn, the circumstances birthing that moment, and providing appropriate context. Some may think this book has the feel of a textbook but Vague’s writing saves it from being a staid reading experience. His lively prose, thorough research, and polished presentation come together to ensure many readers will return often to this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: https://www.richardvague.com/

He tells the history in a linear fashion. It spans fourteen chapters condensing the evolution of American business periods that ring true with the historical record. Vague never adopts a strident position; his writing, however lively, has a contrasting dispassionate point of view. He isn’t any sort of academic by training and this background has a profound effect on the book. It fuels his erudite yet conversational tone, takes stands, and draws conclusions without ever browbeating readers with his reasoning.

Vague’s masterful handling of the illustrations is one of its greatest strengths, but it's his selections that show the highest degree of discernment. He shows exceptional care making choices for this book rather than relying on the same pictures in other books. The blocks of text scattered through the book, often either lists or other informative sidebars, are balanced well with other facets of the book. The illustrations, overall, never dominate the book.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Bu...

His writing leads the way. Richard Vague’s intent is writing a definitive chronicle of the businesses who helped build America and, without even a sliver of pretension, he succeeds. You cannot say, reading this book, that he wrote it with potential academic use in mind, but it would make a valuable primary or secondary classroom text. It has the unique flexibility, as well, to be accessible across the board. Anyone can read An Illustrated Business History of the United States and finish it far more knowledgeable about American history, business and otherwise, than before they began.

It is a considerable accomplishment. Many fine books serve a single purpose but Richard Vague’s new book possesses wide potential. "An Illustrated Business History of the United States" is part reference book, part history book, and part treatise on the American experience as seen through a business lens. It, likewise, is home to an assortment of character studies in miniature. It marshals an enormous amount of knowledge into a digestible package without ever risking self-indulgence.

[Dr. Harold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Harold Goldmeier harold.goldmeier@gmail.com is a free public speaker to community groups, a writer, and a business consultant.

The American empire is not disintegrating. Americans are reassessing national values, vision, mission, and strategies. It is the regular exercise of any healthy enterprise. She still reigns supreme as the most powerful cultural, political, and economic influencer on the planet. China and Russia can destroy the world but are no match for America as influencers. Small countries like Israel and Singapore are disruptors nibbling at American prowess in spheres like innovation. But America, primarily U. S. businesses, adapt quickly. They buy out the competition. Israel, for example, is a most willing seller. Business history tells us a lot about nation-building.
History teaches how religious beliefs, military prowess, political architecture, and entrepreneurial sparkle weave a tenacious web in nation and empire-building. Yet, business history receives short shrift in business schools and academic writing. Professor Richard Vague, in An Illustrated Business History of the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) writes: “Less has been written on this subject than on U.S. political, military, or social history, even though… business is equal to any of those fields in influence on society and arguably greater.”

Real Estate is the Business of Business
The pursuit of wealth always determined the priorities in western countries. For instance, colonialism and its by-product of slavery became enshrined in law. Tax codes favor corporations over individuals. The Dutch East India Company valuation hit $8.28 trillion in 1637. By 1720, the English South Sea Company and Mississippi Company were valued at $4.5 and $6.8 trillion.
Before the issuance of the Declaration of Independence, wealthy Virginians established The Ohio Company in 1748. It was essentially a real estate company to profit from westward expansion. “From the outset, ambitious Americans well understood that buying land and waiting for the population to increase was a path to riches.” Andrew Carnegie quipped, “90% of all millionaires become so through owning real estate.” I know Ray Kroc became one by insisting franchisees lease their McDonalds from Kroc. American real estate is valued at $60 trillion. Real estate is “the single highest-value asset in the United States, greater than the value of stocks, bonds, or any other major asset category” Vague reports.
Real estate was America’s first big business. The most influential events in the history of business are Vague’s chapters covering manufacturing and banking are next in importance. The land and its resources are given extensive coverage. So are the ages of prosperity and reform, mass production and cars, excess and depreciation, the stormy eighties, and the digital revolution. Greater thought and attention to the importance of slavery on the building of America would better round out its business history. Wealth and power are the silk entwining the tenacious web.

War is the Business of Business
Real estate undergirds America’s business. War is the best for business expansion. American imperium is not threatened despite our hideous exits from Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. We maintain over 200,000 military troops on 800 known bases in 150 of the 195 nation-states across the globe. 11 U.S. aircraft carriers roam the seas. America spends more money employing more people engaging in cyberwarfare and intelligence gathering across the planet and in outer space.
No amount of government spending builds corporate wealth like war. Presidents abandoned isolationism in the 1800s engaging in skirmishes with foreign powers. The Civil War birthed the arms and ammunition industries, transportation, science and medicine, the business of prisons, the mass food industry, and more, like no other war before it. Until the two World Wars that followed.
It moved President General Eisenhower to warn the country, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Vague brings this relationship to today: it is war that most “profoundly affected the course of U.S. business and incubated technological innovations that propel business forward.” It catapulted the world into the digital revolution of the 1980s. The government’s Manhattan Project catapulted the U.S. into the nuclear age, producing bombs, power, and medical possibilities. We built the highway system not to sell cars but to move soldiers and equipment cross-country fast and furious.

Building Wealth thru Tech
The newest Revolution is based on digitalization and technology. Artificial intelligence and Big Data dominate the fields of biotech, Fintech, space tech, infotech, Med-tech, nanotech, ed-tech, prop tech, sleep tech, and Green Tech. They are the latest sources of wealth and power.
Small nations like Israel, Singapore, Hong Kong, and several of the Gulf States are ferociously penetrating markets with tech innovations and products. But their biggest exports are their companies. Israel’s business parks are dominated by office towers housing American, European, and Chinese companies. Israelis do not build the infrastructure for a long-lasting growing nation-state. There are no legacy companies. Israeli politicians take pride in their entrepreneurs selling businesses. A major newspaper and several websites give weekly reports on how much money Israeli businesses collect as investments and later sell in a heated M&A environment. There is no mention of the ensuing job losses.
Israel’s tech-business miracle is a direct benefit of its eight decades wars for survival Israeli’s developed a passion for thinking out-of-the-box. Social anthropologist Osnat Lautman claims Israeli business success results from a culture nourishing risk-taking and living in the moment. The start-up nation blossomed into an economic miracle. A plethora of tech companies birthed from military software and hardware inventions and innovations developed to stay ahead of her many enemies. There is nary a legacy company in Israel today. Israel’s largest company is cybersecurity Check Point Software Technologies. Israel’s decision-makers seem not to be learning any lessons from Vague’s business history about the waxing and waning of business cycles that portend the health and strength of a nation.

The Takeaway
America’s business sector undergirds the nation and is the world’s greatest influencer. U.S. tech stocks are more valuable than the entire European stock market. America might have lost its manufacturing edge to Asia and other low-wage countries, but robotics, innovations in mass production, and the vagaries of dictatorial rule in those countries are spurring America to sharpen its competitive edge. The American empire is strong despite adventurous setbacks. Its business sector is the integral engine of growth and leadership. Small nations should look to American business, learn its history, and apply the lessons to growing their own nations to sustainability.
Vague’s history book is 320 pages of facts, stories, cartoons of the period, charts, and pictures. The book is laced with over 300 pictures and he tells the stories behind them. He includes lots of stories about failed choices and failed leaders. The empire absorbed them all, shook them off, and moved on. Small nations don’t have the luxury. The breadth of his scholarship and sourcing of materials offers lessons of great value to political decision-makers and businesspeople. The stories and brief bios of characters are amusing but readers should learn from the successes and failures.
The book pays short shrift to the ruthless influences of Papism and anti-Semitism across the business world and their influences on America’s development of all its institutions. Worse is Vague’s lack of more history about the contributions of brutal slavery in building the American economy. The slave trade was a wealth-building business stretching from Africa to Europe, North America, and South America. Slavery and institutional posterity, racism and sexism, (e.g., Jim Crow Laws, red-lining by banks that created America’s slums) dominate the news in every ear about which Vague writes.
The book covers events and people from 1763 through 2015. Pages are beautifully and conveniently organized, supplemented by an Index of Companies and Select Individuals. Every page has something to attract the reader’s attention. The font is small for old eyes like mine. An Illustrated Business History will make an appreciated gift for the upcoming holidays. It might inspire small business owners for the spirit of entrepreneurship it conveys. Politicians ought to read it to understand the implications for nation-building.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review title: First of a kind

This is a truly unique book that proved worthy of its spot in my reading wish list. Think of it as a reference book covering the expanse of American business growth, failure, innovation, and competition over the sweep of American history, undertaken by Richard Vague to fill in the many gaps he uncovered while attempting to "find information on the largest businesses and wealthiest Americans in each business era" (p. xi). He has done that and more.

Vague breaks American business history down into 14 chronological chapters each covering a block of 10 to 20 years based on key events like wars, inventions, and economic factors. Each chapter has tables listing the

--top cities by population;
--wealthiest individuals;
--biggest industry sectors;
--biggest businesses, banks, and insurance companies (by both revenue and assets);
--stock market companies by industry sector;
--notable new businesses and inventions in the period; and
--the top imports and exports by both country and commodity.

The tables enable fascinating comparisons across time. For example, for the whole of American history up to the decade after World War II, the top import was sugar and the top export was raw cotton, then supplanted by coffee as the top import (I suppose to fuel the war effort and the post-war economic boom!) and machinery and automobiles as the top exports. Watching the stock market transform from its domination by finance (banking and insurance) and transportation (railroads) which consistently accounted for 80% of the stock market listings in the first century of the market, to the 1950 market dominated by energy, materials and consumer products corporations, is a telling indicator of the direction of America's business history and society at large.

Summarizing this 300-page summary of American business history would be futile. Vague himself summarizes: "The story of American business is a story of real estate." (p. vii). Other major factors Richard Vague lists in the introduction: the industrial revolution, innovation, transportation, and financial institutions. Most telling for me was the cataclysmic breaking points of the three major wars:

"The Civil War was a training ground, albeit a heart-wrenching one, that taught a generation of leaders how to manage enormous and complex logistical enter-prises. . . . The war had taught them how to marshal hundreds of thousands of men, manage huge quantities of supplies, and organize large-scale logistics.

Before the war, only the rare business had as many as a thousand employees. In contrast, by 1901, U.S. Steel would establish a new scale with a market capitalization of over $1 billion and more than 160,000 employees. The Civil War was a pivotal event in the business transition toward that much larger size and scale.

The population of the country continued its extraordinary ascent, rising from 31.5 million to 47.1 million, even with the 600,000 deaths from the Civil War. In size, the U.S. economy now trailed only China and India, which were both still preindustrial." (p. 81)

In the years following the Civil War, the size and scale of business management drove the emergence of accounting as a profession, taught in dedicated business schools at major universities like the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (p.116). Yet agriculture and food production remained the largest industry group until 1890, when it was eclipsed by the rampant age of railroads (p. 112), whose overbuilding drove economic boom and bust cycles through the last half of the 19th century.

After World War I, car sales and road construction enabled real estate to move away from cities and rail lines, leading to booms in car sales and construction. Meanwhile farm income, which had been driven by war-time exports, dropped as European farmers recovered from the war, "and a 'scientific' tariff . . . provoked a tariff war between Europe and the United States. As U.S. tariffs rose, those in other countries followed." (p. 174)

American businesses played a huge role in winning World War II: "In 1941 before the U.S. had declared war, the country's automobile industry produced over 3 million cars. From America's entry into the war until V-J Day, car manufacturers made just 139. All other production was diverted to assembling the country's 'Arsenal of Democracy.' American manufacturers built 300,000 airplanes, 640,000 jeeps, 86,000 tanks, and 6,000 ships. The Ford Motor Company alone surpassed the Italian economy in producing materials for war." (p. 196)

While this approach could seem superficial and episodic, Vague uses it to provide a different and unique perspective on history. Consider for example his high-level summary of the 1960s: "From a purely business perspective, the 1960s was one of the best decades of the century and one of the most remarkable periods of growth in U.S. business history. It was a golden age bracketed by recessionary deleveraging in the years that preceded it and strangulation by OPEC-induced high oil prices in the years that followed." (p. 219). Any student of American history has read about the civil rights progress, the Vietnam War and protest movement against it, the violent political assassinations, the sexual revolution, the rock/soul/folk music explosion, the end of the studio era of movie making.....and behind all these cultural and political shifts sits the business platform upon which so much of them rested.

This will indeed be a key reference on the shelf of any student who wants to understand America's history. The thick, glossy, oversize pages are well-illustrated with charts, photographs, and sidebars on key people and events. A timeline at the bottom of each chapter heading page shows the years covered in the chapter. Along with the chronological layout, the index of company and individual names will facilitate using this reference again and again.