THE PICTURES: Illustrations used in this Report are taken from engravings depicting "business" and related activities during the American Revolution era. The Colonies were primarily an agricultural society, and businesses, even relatively speaking, were small. The industrial age was yet to come, there were less than a half dozen corporations, banks did not exist, manufacturing was in its infancy, and the production of goods and services was essentially hand work. The upgrading of this "economy" was a key issue. With the Declaration of Independence, America's first money was Administrator's Message This 1974 Annual Report to the President and the Congress, the We enter the Bicentennial era with a renewed appreciation of small businessmen. They came on the same ships with the first colonists. They were among the country's founding fathers as the nation gained independence. They were in the footsteps of the first explorers and pioneers as young America pushed its frontier westward. They were the beginning of the earliest commerce from which sprang our greatest inventions, industries, and science. The significance of small business has not diminished. Alongside the giants that get the business headlines are more than 9 million men and women in small business who quietly account for nearly one-half of the country's business production, more than one-half of its business jobs, and represent livelihood, directly and indirectly, for one-half of our population. Small business remains the key to the health of our competitive, free enterprise system. 1974 saw small business run into a falloff, as did all business, but with a difference. As the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Small Business observed: "Small businessmen by experience suffer first, hardest, and longest of any economic unit in the country in times of an economic downturn". |