In what ways and to what extent has business exerted an influence on cultural development? The question has had many answers. Most of these have dealt with the diversion of business wealth to specific cultural ends — the accumulation of great art collections, the importation of Italian villas, the subsidization of noted performers and craftsmen. Considerable attention has also been paid to the direct aesthetic contributions of businessmen who manufactured objects of art, or who were successful in imparting artistic attributes to objects of utility. The present article probes a more subtle but quite possibly more basic kind of business influence. Available evidence suggests that American musical tastes and talents were directly and forcefully molded by the commercial environment itself. Market characteristics of the music publishing trade, pricing policies, associationist activities, and other purely economic circumstances helped determine the nature of musical America. This case study involves a capsule in time and a small segment of the total culture, but its implications are broad and merit further investigation.

Robert Livingston's career provides the first opportunity to consider in detail the emergence of an early New York businessman. Trained in business in Rotterdam, he brought to the New World the experience, knowledge, and techniques of one of the most advanced commercial centers of his day. On the Albany frontier he applied the Old World's business methods to advantage and gradually emerged as a dominant figure in colonial New York. His records and business correspondence leave no doubt that Livingston belonged to that class of businessmen often referred to as sedentary or resident merchants, though he did not employ as many agents and partners as his later, more mature counterparts. Neither did he engage in as many ventures or perform as many functions as the Browns, Hancocks, and other late eighteenth-century merchants, nor did he create an impressive business organization at home or abroad as was customary among certain European contemporaries. Still, as a wholesaler and retailer, importer and exporter, shipowner and land speculator, Livingston was an early New York practitioner of diversified business functions and investments. His extensive land dealings, no doubt motivated in part by the social prestige attached to real estate, were undertaken primarily as a source of credit and revenue. Livingston Manor was operated as a business enterprise: some of it was cultivated on Livingston's behalf, parts were leased to tenants who provided for the Lord of the Manor not only rents but a steady market for the goods he obtained in overseas trading ventures, and other sections were devoted to various manufacturing enterprises. Livingston's political life was an integral and necessary part of his business ventures, which reflected at all points the total instability of most colonial institutions. From the details of Livingstons many-sided commercial life emerges a rare picture of an embryonic business society in which the means were sorely taxed to achieve the ends conceived by ambitious men.

History has recorded many instances where inconspicuous competitive units have achieved success in opposing mighty combinations of power. The thesis has been voiced that even in periods of wildest competition the small businessman has not been entirely hapless. His size has been a political asset, and very early he learned to exploit that asset to the utmost. Louis Houck, the Missouri railroader, played the part of David; his Goliath was none other than Jay Gould. Houck not only made capital of his economic vulnerability, but boldly employed the very tactics for which the public was condemning his formidable adversary.

Only recently have business historians turned their attention to the motor transportation industry. Interest in this “new” and obviously important field is well served by an historical analysis of major industry-wide trends. Too often the historian and the businessman alike work without benefit of such perspective. The evolution of the motor transportation industry is here divided into four major chronological divisions, with some summary observations about post-World War II conditions. Major emphasis is laid upon the different developmental patterns exhibited by various motor carrier classifications, upon the competitive interreaction of rail and motor transport interests, and upon the far-reaching effect of state and federal regulation. The history of the motor transportation revolution yields information of value about railroad developments and provides a background for understanding basic twentieth-century trends in commodity distribution.