ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of business and industry in nation-building. It focuses on the nativity and lives of leaders of American food industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Foreigners generally and immigrants from central and southern Europe enjoyed special prominence as builders of important business enterprises in American food industries. A strong and growing market for alcoholic beverages, coupled with a politically powerful movement to purge the American nation of the problems associated with alcohol abuse, created a paradoxical business climate in the United States in the nineteenth century. Many of the technical innovations that made mass production possible in American food industries came from Europe in the nineteenth century, giving bilingual foreigners some advantages in locating and introducing technologies developed abroad. The German sugar refiner Claus Spreckels returned to Europe personally to study and then to introduce new techniques of beet-sugar refining.
