Without salesman to cross the country in the nineteenth century, would the United States of today exist? The argument:

But in a very real sense, salesmen built the American economy and, by extension, America itself. In his book, Friedman notes that in the mid-19^th century, more than half the U.S. population lived on a farm. Consumer markets were nonexistent. Salesmen went out and made them from scratch, a sale at a time, and not simply by bringing quality goods to eager buyers; they took them by their lapels and didn’t let go until they signed on the dotted line. Fortune magazine observed, in the mid-20^th century, “Mass production would be a shadow of what it is today if it had waited for the consumer to make up his mind.” But because of what scholars call “supply-side bias,” we regard 19^th-century tycoons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt as Übermensch, while erasing the accomplishments of the legions of lowly salesmen. Why? Economists, generally insulated from the dirty realities of turning a buck by tenure and/or wealth, think of demand as a vast natural force to be harnessed, like wind or oil—a conception that fits hand in glove with the equally simplistic “great man” theory, which posits that some people (men) are just born great. Sounds nice, but things look a little less elegant to the salesmen in the trenches. They know: Demand is more like blood, and it has to be mercilessly extracted, drop by drop, by an army of sweaty little goblins who don’t eat unless they hit their quotas. Suddenly, the economy looks more like an infinite series of tiny frauds than a harmonious ecosystem. And if the Greatest Economy in the World is little more than a shill mill, the implications for the Greatest Country in the World are dismaying, to say the least.

For this argument to work, what social conditions were present?

1. The United States is more rural, or at least non-urban. A lot more people are engaged in farming or agricultural work.
2. Brands, mass production, and access to information do not exist in the same way as today.
3. Might there have been a different response to interacting with strangers or visitors or sales people? Today, people might be nervous about opening their doors but in the 1800s would a visitor prompt hospitality and/or interest in hearing about the broader world?

Another way to put this: how does the role of sale person shift as social conditions change? If telemarketers of the 1990s used phones and machines to rapidly call people in the United States and those in the mid-1800s traveled to farms and small towns, what do sales people look like in the 2030s? Or are there ebbs and flows in the activity and influence of sales people?

But perhaps the broader picture is this: o Americans – as individuals, communities, a country – embody the spirit an activity of sales people more than other countries? Are we always selling something, even when we are not?