The purpose of this research is to examine the most important influences on American economic history in the period after the Industrial Revolution, the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, and the Great Depression. The plan of the research will be to set forth the outlines of each period of history, and then to cite those influences that appear to have had lasting effect on the American economy. As appropriate, reference will be made to changes in the American economic structure that resulted from the various events, and to show a progressively stronger linkage between private and public sector economic activities in the United States.
The virtually uninterrupted process of industrialization in America, which may be said to have begun with the introduction in the eighteenth century of interchangeable parts, which in turn eliminated home industry as a principal factor of American commerce, has had profound impact on the history of political and social economy in the country from 1800 onward. Wiltse positions the onset of aggressive American industrial development from before the War of 1812:
Profits wrung from neutrality by elusive Yankee Traders had been immobilized by the embargo and the war. For want of better employment they had been invested in manufacturing ventures to the tune of $40,000,000. Stimulated by wartime demands and with the customary sources of supply cut off, American industry reached out into new directions, and grew fat in proportion to the ingenuity of its votaries. (Wiltse, 1961, 52).
Textiles, iron, steam engines and the boats to go with them, all manner of apparatus, and ultimately eastern seaboard and frontier railroad development framed the details of economic history in the United States.
Exacerbated by the idiosyncratic demands of the Civil War, which were most tellingly responded to in the North, and the inevitable growth of foreign trade as the American markets expanded, the seemingly bottomle...