After initial widespread use of private cars under the “common road” concept of early railways, railroad-owned freight cars predominated from the 1840's through the 1860's, except for a short-lived boom in cars owned by “fast freight” lines. From this time on, however, the percentage of private cars has increased as railroads refused to build specialized freight cars because of high initial costs, rapid technological obsolescence, outside pressure, and managerial shortsightedness.

This article argues that, in the mid-nineteenth century, the American merchant community created local commercial organizations to propagate a vision of economic development based on republican ideals. As part of a “business revolution,” these organizations attempted to balance competition and cooperation in order to promote and direct the expansion of national markets and commercial activity throughout the country. Faced with the crisis of divergent sectional political economies and committed to the belief that businessmen needed a stronger political voice, merchant groups banded together to form the National Board of Trade, an association devoted to creating a unified commercial interest and shaping national economic policies.

In his last two major works, Inventing the Electronic Century and Shaping the Industrial Century, Alfred Chandler extended his well-known historical model put forth originally in Strategy and Structure, The Visible Hand, and Scale and Scope by drawing on insights from scholarship dealing with organizational learning and evolutionary economics. In the earlier works, he won high praise, as evinced by the awarding of the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for his contribution in advancing the understanding of history, economics, and sociology. His work presented a powerful alternative vision of businesspeople from the version usually communicated by the older Progressive school of history. Although practitioners of the latter brand of history generally acknowledged industrialization's material benefits, many worried that such change represented a Faustian bargain: they feared that concentrated economic power threatened the preservation of cherished democratic institutions and values.

The Johnson Company was initially innovative in both a technological and a managerial sense, but its technically-oriented inventor-managers proved unable to provide creative leadership once the enterprise had passed through its early, technologically creative period.