The Death of General Montgomery at Quebec City

WE NOW SIT AT A TURNING POINT for the American Republic and for all of the human species. Since January of 2025 President Donald Trump has unleashed a torrent of courageous initiatives, all aimed at dismantling the decades-long oligarchical system of globalization, Malthusian climate change and the destruction of America’s productive economy. It is not an exaggeration to insist that Donald Trump is not just changing America, he is step-by-step transforming the world.

Not surprisingly, the loudest howls and most murderous animosity directed against Trump now comes, not from China or Russia, but from Europe. From London to Brussels, to Berlin, Paris and elsewhere, the ruling elites—who are trying desperately to cling on to power in the face of patriotic upsurges within their own countries—are united in their almost rabid rage against Trump. As of now, these old oligarchical power-brokers of Europe have proven themselves powerless to stop what Trump is doing. They are exposed as inept and impotent.

During the last 12 months these European pessimists have rallied around a new leader, their chosen champion to slay the Trump dragon. His name is Mark Carney, the current Prime Minister of Canada. Apparently Carney is the only one available to raise the guidon, calling to arms the other members of NATO and the European Union to attack Trump’s policies on every front:— economic, tariffs, energy, immigration, Climate Change, Ukraine, Iran, and basic freedom and liberty itself.

Think of Carney as a malformed beetle, as might be portrayed by Franz Kafka on psychedelics. He has been groomed over decades and has twisted himself into whatever grotesque shape demanded of him by his oligarchical masters. These masters reside at Chatham House, on Lombard Street in the City of London, within Buckingham Palace and at the various enclaves of the Continental elite. Carney, the only individual to have served as the Director of BOTH the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada, has been a sycophant of the British Financial Empire for the entirety of his adult life, and he is now on center stage.

Carney’s climb up the ladder is all too familiar. He studied at Harvard and then Oxford, after which, for 13 years, he learned the ropes at Goldman Sachs. He served a stint at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland. He became an intimate fixture at Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. Finally, in 2007 he was named Governor of the Bank of Canada. He stepped down from that position in 2013 to become Governor of the Bank of England, where he served for seven years. In other words, he is a Central Banker, par excellence, groomed to that role over many years.

Those he allies with today (against Trump) all come from this same oligarchical swamp. French president Macron was a Rothschild banker, German Chancellor Merz was the Chairman of BlackRock’s German subsidiary, European Union head Ursula von der Leyen married into one of Germany’s oldest aristocratic families, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb was the head of the European Investment Bank. These are Carney’s pals.

The chief economic advisor to Andy Burnham, likely the next British Prime Minister, was Carney’s subordinate at the Bank of England during Carney’s directorship. Carey is the senior partner of that relationship, and one might hypothesize that key initiatives of the British Empire will now emanate from Ottawa, not 10 Downing Street. Carney himself has dual British and Canadian citizenship, and in a recent event at Buckingham Palace, King Charles III (who is also legally Canada’s Head of State) planted a red maple tree in the Palace’s garden, symbolizing the Monarchy’s deep ties to Canada.

Today, Carney is aggressively fostering a Canada/Europe anti-Trump coalition, what he calls a “dense web of connections,” against the “hegemon” Donald Trump. The concrete manifestation of this effort is what is called “The Coalition of the Willing,” whose leaders, as this is being written, are meeting in Paris. Carney is also in the center of military and financial support for the gangster Zelensky regime in Ukraine. In his latest speech at Davos he delivered an explicit manifesto against Trump to rapturous applause from the audience.

What exactly is the “nation” of Canada?

Canada is a full member of the British Commonwealth. The actual legal sovereign of Canada is not the Prime Minister but King Charles III. In fact, Carney is not even the actual head of government. Canada is one of 14 Commonwealth “nations” in which a Governor-General, appointed in London by the British Monarch, has the absolute power over the elected officials of those countries. (This is exactly what happened in 1975 when Australian Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, acting on orders from Queen Elizabeth, dismissed the elected Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam.) Forget the hair-splitting: de facto, Canada is a British colony, and it sits in North America as an ongoing oligarchical threat to the American Republic.

It is true that for much of the 20th century, as America was pulled closer and closer into the “Special Relationship” with Great Britain, relations between Canada and the United States were generally cordial, and of course the peoples of the two countries have always been friendly toward one-another. Nevertheless, the danger of this foreign bacillus on our border has manifested itself many times throughout our history. The first of these was the use of Canada in the Revolutionary War as a staging ground for attacks on American patriots, most notably the invasion from Canada by the army of General Burgoyne. The second was the role of Canada in Britain’s attempt to dismember the United States during the Civil War. More evil was the involvement of Canada-based intelligence operations in the assassinations of both Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy.1

Today we have Mark Carney, lickspittle of the British imperial elite, who has been chosen by London to create and lead the anti-Trump coalition. Some might say that his is a futile task, that what Trump is doing can not be reversed. Perhaps. But the damage and devastation Carney and his friends can inflict is a very potent threat.

Trump has proposed Canada as the 51st state. It is a great idea, but how many people today know that Canada was almost our 14th state? That it really should have been part of the American Republic from the beginning? That is the story we present below. It is the true tale of America’s attempt to liberate the people of Canada and to bring them within the fold of republican liberty and freedom. If that attempt had succeeded, the Carneys of today’s world would not even exist.

We come as Friends to “Eradicate Tyranny”

On September 14, 1775 George Washington, newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, issued an open letter, titled “Address to the Inhabitants of Canada.” Addressing the people of Canada as “Friends and Brethren,” he began the letter with these sentences;

“The unnatural Contest between the English Colonies and Great-Britain, has now risen to such a Height, that Arms alone must decide it. The Colonies, confiding in the Justice of their Cause, and the Purity of their Intentions, have reluctantly appealed to that Being, in whose Hands are all human Events. He has hitherto smiled upon their virtuous Efforts—The Hand of Tyranny has been arrested in its Ravages, and the British Arms which have shone with so much Splendor in every Part of the Globe, are now tarnished with Disgrace and Disappointment.—Generals of approved Experience, who boasted of subduing this great Continent, find themselves circumscribed within the Limits of a single City and its Suburbs, suffering all the Shame and Distress of a Siege. While the trueborn Sons of America, animated by the genuine Principles of Liberty and Love of their Country, with increasing Union, Firmness and Discipline repel every Attack, and despise every Danger.

“. . . Our Enemies have been deceived with Regard to you—They have persuaded themselves, they have even dared to say, that the Canadians were not capable of distinguishing between the Blessings of Liberty, and the Wretchedness of Slavery; that gratifying the Vanity of a little Circle of Nobility—would blind the Eyes of the People of Canada.—By such Artifices they hoped to bend you to their Views, but they have been deceived, instead of finding in you that Poverty of Soul, and Baseness of Spirit, they see with a Chagrin equal to our Joy, that you are enlightened, generous, and virtuous—that you will not renounce your own Rights, or serve as Instruments to deprive your Fellow Subjects of theirs.—Come then, my Brethren, unite with us in an indissoluble Union, let us run together to the same Goal.—We have taken up Arms in Defense of our Liberty, our Property, our Wives, and our Children, we are determined to preserve them, or die. We look forward with Pleasure to that Day not far remote (we hope) when the Inhabitants of America shall have one Sentiment, and the full Enjoyment of the Blessings of a free Government. . .”

And, he concludes, saying:

“The Cause of America, and of Liberty, is the Cause of every virtuous American Citizen; whatever may be his Religion or his Descent, the United Colonies know no Distinction but such as Slavery, Corruption and arbitrary Domination may create. Come then, ye generous Citizens, range yourselves under the Standard of general Liberty—against which all the Force and Artifice of Tyranny will never be able to prevail.”

Thus, we see General Washington extending the hand of friendship, inviting the people of Canada to join in the fight for freedom. From the beginning of the Revolutionary War, long before the Declaration of Independence, the intention of American Patriots was not simply independence for the 13 colonies, but to rid the Americas entirely of British imperial presence.

The reality is that in 1775 the continued existence of Quebec as a British colony posed a strategic danger to the 13 colonies. The Quebec Act of 1774, passed by the British Parliament and going into effect on May 1, 1775, had annexed all of the Northwest Territories (the later states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin) to Quebec. Thus the 13 colonies were surrounded on both the north and the west. Washington and others knew that Canada would become a staging ground for attacks on the Continental Army. One British Lord proclaimed he “saw no reason why the loyal inhabitants of Canada should not co-operate with the rest of the empire in subduing the upstart colonists” to the south. Washington and leaders of the First Continental Congress knew that action was required to secure the Canada flank. Skirmishes had already occurred with British troops along the border as early as April, and on June 26, 1775 the Congress, with Washington’s blessing, voted to authorize an invasion of Canada.

Despite these strategic concerns, Washington had made it very clear that he did not consider the Canadian people enemies. He addressed them as “Friends and Brethren.” He stated that the American forces come “not to plunder, but to protect you.” He urged Canadians to join this War of Liberation. General Richard Montgomery, Commander of one of the invasion armies, echoed this sentiment in a December 6, 1775 Letter to the People of Quebec, where he stated, “We come with the professed intention of eradicating tyranny.”

Earlier, on October 19, a group calling itself “The Sons of New England” had published an appeal to the people of Canada in the Massachusetts Essex Journal. It read in part:

(Our) “aim is to establish a pure system of civil and religious liberty through all America,” (You) “should in all respects be as perfectly free as ourselves. . . entitled to all the liberties and privileges of English men, and free Americans.”

They emphasized that the Catholic religion was no obstacle, because the 13 colonies all honored freedom of religious worship. They condemned the British plan as “a foundation for continent-wide political slavery,” and they concluded the appeal,

“We trust your generous bosoms are animated with the most free and noble sentiments and that you will, with us, resolve to exert all your powers and risk every thing for the defense of AMERICAN LIBERTY.”

Then, on October 26, 1774, the Continental Congress sent a letter to the people of Canada, titled “Address to the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec.” This was an appeal to the people of Quebec, which declared, “Your Province Is the Only Link Wanting to Complete the Bright and Strong Chain of Union.” In the Continental Congress, numerous speakers declared their eagerness to welcome Quebec as the “14th rebellious colony,” and later in 1777 the Articles of Confederation stated that Canada “shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this union,” at any time they request it.

Most histories of the Canadian invasion focus on the military battles, but the reaching out by American patriots to the people of Canada was paramount. Many Delegates to the Continental Congress sent letters to personal friends in Canada urging them to join the revolutionary cause. Later, in March of 1776, Benjamin Franklin and Charles Carroll headed up a diplomatic delegation sent to Quebec to negotiate with local leaders to support the American invasion. This was a torturous mid-winter journey that almost cost Franklin his life.

Britain’s leaders, however, also understood the importance of Quebec. Between the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and 1775, the British Empire had consolidated its own oligarchical power structure in that Province. It was grounded in two inter-locking phenomena. First was a corrupt deal between London and the leaders of the Catholic Church in Quebec, whereby the rabidly anti-Catholic British oligarchy had agreed to essentially grant Church officials full control over the domestic affairs of Quebec as long as they remained loyal to the British throne. After 1763 the salary of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Quebec, Jean-Olivier Briand, was paid directly from London, so the Church establishment was snugly in London’s pocket. Second, the British also gave official recognition to Quebec’s feudal land distribution system. In 1775 there were 100,000 residents of Quebec, over 90 percent of whom were tenant farmers known as habitants, essentially a subservient peasantry. They were ruled over by a tiny landed aristocracy, a self-styled nobility known as seigneurs. These seigneurs were the wealthiest individuals in Quebec and after 1763 they quickly adjusted to life within the British Empire.

The Invasion

In June 1775 the Continental Congress authorized General Philip Schuyler to carry out a military expedition to Montreal, but stipulated that it be “done in a manner agreeable to the Canadian people.” In August George Washington organized a second expedition, this one against Quebec City. The two armies proceeded separately. Schuyler was forced to withdraw due to ill health, and General Richard Montgomery assumed command of the first expedition. On August 25, 1775 he led his Army north. He traveled northward through Lake Champlain toward Montreal. This route had been made possible with the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in April. The second Army, under the command of Benedict Arnold, started in Massachusetts and proceeded through Maine to Quebec City. It should be noted that this was the first offensive military operation authorized by the Continental Congress in the Revolutionary War.

Montgomery’s army consisted of 1,400 soldiers, while Arnold’s totaled 1,100 men. It is critical to note that General Schuyler (and others) had insisted that a minimum force of 6,000 troops were required to secure Canada, but this target was never met. At no time during the conflict did the American forces possess adequate manpower, artillery, weaponry or funds for their task.

Both Armies encountered several grave difficulties. First, the severe early Canada winter took a heavy toll as Arnold’s invasion force traveled overland through the wilderness of Maine. Many died. By the time he reached Quebec his force consisted of only 650 men. Second, most of the soldiers had enlisted for only short term service (anywhere from 1 to 6 months), and many simply returned home when their obligation was fulfilled. This particularly affected Montgomery’s army which was reduced to only 500 men at Montreal. Third, once in Quebec, both armies were devastated by a smallpox epidemic, and it is estimated that 25 percent of all the American soldiers in Canada either died from smallpox or were rendered unfit for service.

Fortuitously, both armies possessed excellent commanders. Marching north from Lake Champlain, Montgomery’s army entered the city of Verchères (about 20 miles from Montreal), and then, on October 18, they captured Fort Chambly where they were welcomed enthusiastically by the population. On November 3, they captured Fort St. Jean, the fort which defended Montreal, as 700 British troops surrendered. Montgomery’s army then occupied Saint Paul’s Island in the Saint Lawrence River and crossed over to Pointe-Saint-Charles. At this point, Canada’s Royal Governor Guy Carleton abandoned Montreal and fled to Quebec City, and Montgomery’s troops entered the city unopposed. He next stationed 200 soldiers in Montreal and moved with a force of 300 down the St. Lawrence River valley to link up with Arnold who had arrived at Quebec City on November 13. As Montgomery’s troops traveled along the river, they were greeted in town-after-town and village-after-village as liberators.2

Benedict Arnold’s army had a much tougher going. When his troops left Newburyport, Massachusetts,3 Arnold’s expectation was that it would take 20 days to reach Quebec City. It took 64 days. They marched through untracked wilderness. The weather turned bitter cold, with snow and ice storms. Provisions ran out.

By the time Arnold reached the outskirts of civilization along the Saint Lawrence River in November, his force had traveled almost 400 miles. Men died of exposure, accidents and disease. They were reduced to eating birds and rodents to stay alive. On October 25th one of his Lieutenant-Colonels decided to turn around, having determined that his men could not go on, and he took a quarter of the expedition’s force back to Massachusetts. By the time Arnold reached the outskirts of civilization along the Saint Lawrence River, his force was reduced to 650 starving men. What saved them was the people of Canada. When the army reached the village of Sartigan, the local populace took them into their homes, fed and sheltered them and tended to the sick. This was repeated at many subsequent towns and villages. Everywhere they advanced, Arnold distributed copies of a letter written by George Washington asking the habitants to assist the expedition, and Arnold added promises to respect the persons, property, and religion of the locals.

Arnold’s troops reached the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City on November 13. Arnold sent a negotiator with a white flag to demand the city’s surrender, which was rebuffed. However, with no cannon, and his men barely fit for action and facing a fortified city, Arnold was in no position to attack. Thus, his Army waited, knowing that Montgomery’s Army was rapidly approaching along the St. Lawrence River.

The People of Quebec Arise

In no way should Montgomery’s and Arnold’s expeditions be seen as an attack on Canada. In truth this military action was in support of a groundswell of unrest within a Quebec population who were yearning to throw off British tyranny. By the time the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, many patriot leaders in Boston, Philadelphia and New York were already in communication with anti-British leaders in Quebec. By the summer of 1775 revolutionary ferment was sweeping across Quebec. Governor Carleton, working directly with General Gage in Boston, adopted Gage’s approach to use military force to suppress discontent.

One of Carleton’s actions was to organize the formation of a pro-British citizens militia, and recruiting officers were sent out to many cities and towns. Almost everywhere these recruiters were greeted with open hostility. In many towns they were expelled by force, sometimes at gunpoint. In one town the local women turned out to stone the recruiters. Carleton charged that the people’s minds had been “poisoned by the same hypocrisy and lies practiced with so much success in the other provinces.” One observer stated that the people “have broke out into acts of open violence to resist them,” and Bishop Briand declared that resistance to Church authority was so widespread that almost the entire diocese deserved to be placed “under the interdict.” Finally, in June 1775 Governor Carleton declared martial law in Quebec.

Meanwhile, Philip Schuyler and other American officials were besieged with letters from Quebec rebels, pleading for American military support to gain their freedom. This was all before a single American soldier had set foot in Quebec.

Once Montgomery’s Army began to move up the Richelieu Valley, south of Montreal, and then later during his subsequent passage through the St. Lawrence Valley, there was an outpouring of support from villagers and townspeople. Everywhere the Americans arrived, General Washington’s manifesto was distributed and read aloud to the people. At St. Francis parish locals rang their church bell and informed Arnold that they considered him “sent from heaven to restore their liberty.” One town issued a manifesto proclaiming that their “chains are broken.” In many locations pro-American militias were organized. The city of Verchères (about 20 miles from Montreal) was captured by a force of half Continentals and half local militia. The same thing happened at Fort Chambly. These were the habitants, fighting for their freedom.

The Canadian partisans also destroyed bridges, boats and canoes which the British troops relied upon; they captured food and other supplies; they stole horses, which they turned over to Montgomery’s and Arnold’s armies — basically acting like the French Resistance in 1943-44. In November 1775 a British Colonel wrote to London, saying “What Contributed most to the loss of the Country is the treachery and Villainy of the Canadians.”

Before departing Montreal for Quebec City, Montgomery published messages to the inhabitants that the Congress wanted Quebec to join them, and he invited Quebec residents to elect delegates to the Continental Congress. He also wrote to General Schuyler, requesting that a Congressional delegation be sent to take up diplomatic activities. Unfortunately, Congress did not act on this request for several months, producing very bad consequences.

The Catastrophe at Quebec City

On December 2, 1775 Montgomery’s Army reached Quebec City and joined with Arnold’s force gathered before the City. Their task was formidable. Their combined force numbered only slightly over 1,100 men, and they were armed with only a small number of light 3-pound and 6-pound cannon, insufficient to breach the walls of the city. The weather was horrendous for the exposed American soldiers.

One might ask, why didn’t they just wait for reinforcements and better weather? They couldn’t. The St. Lawrence River freezes in the winter, but the spring thaw would permit heavily armed British warships, with large reinforcements, to sail up the river and relieve Quebec. This is, in fact, what eventually happened. It was urgent for Montgomery and Arnold to capture the Canadian capital during the winter months.

Arnold and Montgomery first began a siege of the city, but it was soon apparent that this would not result in a surrender of the enemy. With no other options, on December 31, in the middle of a snowstorm, Montgomery ordered a full assault on the city. The result was a disaster. Montgomery was killed in the first artillery barrage from the city’s walls, throwing his forces into disarray, with the Colonel who assumed command ordering a withdrawal. Arnold actually succeeded in entering the city, his men fighting house-to-house, but he was severely wounded, forcing his removal from the battlefield. Daniel Morgan assumed command and continued the fight, but when Montgomery’s men failed to arrive at the ordained rendezvous point, they were surrounded and forced to surrender. In the end about 100 American soldiers were killed or wounded and an additional 400 were captured or missing. The remaining American force, outside the city’s walls was now down to 800 men, about half of whom were Quebec militia.

Following the American defeat Bishop Briand rushed to celebrate the event, proclaiming a Te Deum —a special hymn of praise or thanks—to celebrate the rebel defeat.

Arnold, now promoted to General, was determined to continue the siege. One of the things that made this possible was the activity of the Quebec militia. Armed detachments recruited from the local population burned British ships in the harbor, fired upon British sentries and harassed the city’s defenders. In February reinforcements arrived from the 13 colonies, allowing the American army to strengthen the siege, but without heavy artillery it was not possible to attempt another assault. The exposed American Army and the Quebec militia both suffered through the bitter cold, and it was at this moment that a wave of smallpox hit, killing more than 100.

Then the ice melted, and on May 6, 1776, five British warships arrived to relieve Quebec, carrying 3,000 troops. Three weeks later a second force arrived, commanded by Lieutenant General John Burgoyne, who brought with him 4,000 Hessian soldiers. These actions precipitated an American retreat.

The Withdrawal

Unbelievably, in the midst of these dramatic setbacks, it was at this point that the Congress sent a delegation to Canada to work out with Canadian Patriots the organizing of a civilian government and eventual union with the 13 colonies. General Montgomery had urged this 5 months earlier, when it might have made a difference. Now it was an act of futility. The delegation was headed by Benjamin Franklin and included the Roman Catholic Charles Carroll of Maryland, but by they time they began their work, the British Army was already approaching Montreal. Franklin and Carroll left Montreal on May 11, following news that the American forces were in panicked retreat.4

Montgomery was replaced as the overall commander of the Quebec expedition by General John Thomas who in late May ordered a retreat along the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, which he hoped to hold. Within two weeks he abandoned that hope and moved his army out of the City. He divided his forces. Arnold would defend the Richelieu Valley south of the city, while Thomas would move to challenge the British further up the St. Lawrence. Thomas, however, took ill and would die. He was replaced by General John Sullivan. On June 8 Sullivan attacked the British at Trois-Rivières where they had a major military and naval base. The American forces were routed, leading to a very disorganized retreat. On June 18 American forces evacuated Fort St. Johns, their last remaining military possession, and the Army began a full retreat, with the last American soldiers reaching the New York border on July 1. British troop’s followed them into New York, but eventually withdrew back to Quebec. The Battle of Quebec was over.

One interesting development—one which recommends the courage of the people of Quebec—is that as the British Army advanced, following the defeat at Quebec City, even larger numbers of Quebec habitants flocked to join the American ranks, desperate not to live again under British tyranny. They knew they were fighting for freedom. Ultimately, many of them joined with the retreat into New York State, settled and became American citizens.

Reasons for the Failure

There is no individual, or group of individuals, who can be blamed for the American defeat in Canada. As is the case for all of the attacks on George Washington’s military reputation, it must be understood that the Continental Army was battling the most powerful military empire in the World. At all times, they were out-gunned and out-manned. Even if they had succeeded in capturing Quebec City, the arrival of a British war fleet in the Spring was a certainty. One might argue that the Canada expedition was a gamble, but even if that, perhaps, was the case, it was a necessary gamble.

There were several contributing factors for the ultimate defeat. First—and this is the only case where blame might enter in—was the incompetence with which the Continental Congress handled the invasion. First, they refused to fund an adequately sized invasion force—2,500 instead of Schuyler’s requested 6,000. They never provided adequate artillery of weaponry. They never provided adequate funds for provisions, paying for re-enlistments and reimbursing the local citizenry. They delayed 5 months in sending a diplomatic delegation to organize Quebec self-government, until it was too late to do so. The major reinforcements they eventually sent all arrived after the defeat at Quebec City.

A second contributing factor was the death of Montgomery at Quebec City (as well as the wounding of Arnold). This had a profound demoralizing effect on the soldiers and removed Montgomery’s insightful and courageous leadership. Finally, it would be a mistake to underestimate the effect of both weather and disease. Smallpox, which no one could have predicted, killed and disabled hundreds. At the same time the freezing weather and snowstorms had a crippling effect on the always under-provisioned troops.

Despite all this, the Americans, with their Quebec allies, came very close to succeeding. If Montgomery had not been killed; if he had succeeded in linking up with Daniel Morgan’s forces inside the city, it all might have turned out differently.

Franklin Almost Saves the Day

At the 1782 Paris Peace negotiations to end the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin presented the British with a series of non-negotiable demands. One of these was the cession of ALL of Canada to the United States. He came very close to getting it. After Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, the British Government was desperate to end the war. They were now fighting a global war against the French Empire, a war they might lose, and they would agree to almost anything to extricate themselves from the American fiasco. They quickly acceded to every other of Franklin’s demands and only hesitated on the question of Canada. Franklin was convinced he could get them to do it, and he kept pressing them. What sabotaged his efforts were two things. First, America’s peace negotiators were divided. John Adams and John Jay were prepared to give up on Canada, and the British knew this. Second, our ally, the French monarchy, was strongly opposed to the American acquisition of Canada, and the British knew that too. The French, acting from the standpoint of a geopolitical empire, believed that a continued British presence in Canada would make the new American nation dependent on France for protection, which is what they wanted. So, Franklin battled alone, without allies, and in the end he couldn’t pull it off. But he almost did.

250 Years Overdue

Today, George Washington’s pledge to Free the People of Quebec from Tyranny stands as an incomplete task. Unfinished Business. Isn’t it time—now at the 250th Birthday of the Declaration of Independence—to finish the job that Schuyler, Montgomery and Arnold began? Tyranny still rules in Ottawa, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific millions of Canadians yearn to be free from their bondage. They suffered for long years under Justin Trudeau, and now the Bank of England’s own creature, Mark Carney, dictates policy. The Canadian people are our brethren. Let us help liberate them.

END

Henry J. Kaiser (1882–1967) — the Miracle Man. The man who accomplished—again and again—what others insisted was impossible. In addition to his personal virtues, the story we focus on here is the unprecedented explosion of production which he helped lead. Looking back on those years, what was done seems almost unbelievable today. But it happened. Kaiser’s triumphs weren’t achieved through magic. This was the American System, led by a man of courage and genius.

The son of immigrants, born in a small upstate New York town along the Erie Canal, Henry Kaiser epitomizes what the American Dream meant for immigrant families. His family was semi-impoverished, and Henry left school at the age of 13 to find employment. He never attended high school. His first job was a clerk at a dry-goods store where he made $1.50 per week. He became fascinated with photography, and at 15 years old found employment at a photography studio. For the next 10 years he led a somewhat nomadic life, traveling extensively, continuing his work in photography but also holding a variety of jobs, including a stint working in a brickyard, where he was exposed to the harsh realities of manual labor.

In 1906 Henry relocated to Spokane, Washington and became a hardware salesman. After a few years, he went to work for the J.F. Hill Company, a paving and road contractor. This was at a time when the explosion of automobile ownership had created a nationwide demand for more paved roads. In 1914 Henry formed his own construction company, and between 1914 and 1931 he became the leading road-builder in the Pacific Northwest. By 1931 Henry was 49 years old, and one might assume that road-building had defined his adult career, but he was just getting started.

Henry acquired a reputation for completing contracts with remarkable speed and at a lower cost than his competitors. One reason was that he developed an uncanny skill at coordinating the flow of workers and materials. He also adapted new technology to his construction techniques and he pioneered several inventions which had implications beyond the realm of road-building. In 1916 his company bid on and won the contracts to develop two irrigation projects, both in Oregon. These were, by far, the largest and most ambitious projects he had attempted up to that time. Then in 1926 he won the contract to build the Philbrook Dam in northern California. This would be the turning point of his career.

Kaiser had never built a dam. His partner in the project was Robert LeTourneau, a brilliant inventor of construction equipment and another un-sung hero of the American System. Experts predicted it would take two years to build the Dam. Kaiser and Le Tourneau did it in four months. LeTourneau’s mechanized “Earth Movers” were critical to achieving this speed, as more than $150,000 worth of mechanized equipment were used. These included tractors, powered shovels, a deep subsoiler (to rip up the hard ground) and much more. A 15 mile road was built to bring the mechanized equipment in from the nearest railroad junction. What was not found anywhere on the work site were horses and mules, which were standard at construction sites up to that time.

Kaiser also made sure that the worksite included tents, stoves, bedrolls, food and medical care for his workforce, another priority which became standard on all of his future projects. In his book Mover of Men and Mountains, Robert LeTourneau describes the significance of the Philbrook Dam:

“The Philbrook Dam was a milestone in the engineering business and in my life. It was the first major project in which the new broke entirely away from the old. There was not a mule on the site. We were still using men with shovels and pick axes for clean-up work, but the heavy labor was done with power shovels, mechanized dump trucks and, in the starring role, my scrapers. From the start it was clear that nothing short of an earthquake would stop us from setting an all-time record in dam building.

“For my part, I was getting lessons from a master organizer. At onetime we must have had 1,000 men on the job, with some crews working on digging and others on hauling, and some on concrete mixing, and others on 57 varieties of odd jobs. Kaiser had that big job timed to perfection. More, he knew how to get along with men even when the men didn’t know how to get along with each other.

“The speed with which we completed the Philbrook Dam astonished the construction world, and Kaiser was swamped with offers of even bigger jobs”1

The Greatest of Dam Builders

The proposal to build a dam on the Colorado River, for flood control, irrigation and hydroelectric power had been authorized by Congress in 1928, but it was not until 1931 that the Hoover administration made the decision to move forward with construction. The scope of the project was far too large for one company, so Kaiser spearheaded the formation of Six Companies, Inc., a joint venture that brought together six major construction firms, including the Kaiser Construction Company, the Bechtel Corporation,2 the Morrison-Knudsen Company and the Utah Construction Company. Kaiser personally directed the construction of the Hoover Dam and he would serve as Chairman of the Executive Committee for the Six Companies from 1931 to 1936,

The Hoover Dam was to be the largest Dam in the world, the largest ever built in human history. The project would have to tame the mighty Colorado River, which one engineer at the time characterized as a “torrent of red mud roaring through Black Canyon with the speed of a railway train.” The entire project would have to be carried to completion in a remote desolate location, under brutal conditions. During the long summer months daytime temperatures averaged 120◦ Fahrenheit, and during the summer of 1931 a dozen workers died of heat prostration in one week alone.

The project was straightforward:— build a dam more than 700 feet (60 stories) high and 660 feet wide at its base, with a reservoir 110 miles long and the foundations for a 1.2-million-horsepower hydro-electric plant that would generate enough electricity to illuminate seven states.

The job was so immense that nobody could predict the materiel and labor required for each phase. Eventually, more than 4.5 million cubic yards of concrete were used, more than the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had used in all previous federal construction jobs combined. An entire town (Boulder City) had to be built to house the 10,000 workers. Electricity and fuel had to be brought to the site. A railroad was built to bring in the machinery, equipment, raw materials and building supplies.

The engineering challenges were unprecedented, and the solutions were not to be found in textbooks. The builders had to combine current knowledge with imagination and creative insights. No one personified this more than Henry Kaiser, and his approach was hands-on. He visited the site repeatedly, driving thousands of miles round-trip from his home in Oakland. By the spring of 1931 Kaiser knew the canyon better than anyone but job superintendent Frank T. Crowe.

The Hoover Dam was completed in 1936, two years ahead of schedule, and under budget by $4 million. It provided enough water to irrigate 1 million acres, and its generators produced 4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year (compared to the 16 million kilowatt-hours generated by Niagara Falls).

In September 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt visited the worksite of the near-complete dam. In his remarks, he said:

“This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered as everyone will be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind. This is an engineering victory of the first order, another great achievement of American resourcefulness, skill, and determination.”

The Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams

Even while construction on Hoover Dam proceeded, Henry Kaiser had already proposed the next great project to his partners in the Six Companies—a dam across the Columbia River in Oregon. Initially, almost all of them opposed this.

The Columbia was treacherous, swift and deep. With a maximum flow of one million feet per second, it was five times as powerful as the Colorado River. Unlike the Hoover Dam site, there was no canyon of solid rock to form a bottleneck and the riverbanks were soft and far apart. There was no way to build diversion tunnels as at Boulder. Most who had studied the proposed site at Bonneville declared that erecting a dam at that location was impossible. As Kaiser said later, “My associates said, ‘You are going to break your heart. That can’t be done. It just can’t be done’. Some of my most intimate associates sat up with me until 4 o’clock in the morning and said, ‘Just don’t try that one.’”

Henry’s son, Edgar Kaiser, would later say:

“Bonneville was without question the most difficult construction project we have ever built. At the start there were no specifications, not even a solid plan. Engineers had to improvise as we went along. There were constant changes. Nothing ever stayed put. One stormy night when the water was high and really roaring, I was afraid we were going to lose our cofferdam so I phoned a supervisor at the dam site, a short distance upstream. ‘Everything is OK’, he reported, ‘I think we’re going to be all right’. Just then, I looked out the window and saw a dark mass approaching. It was one of our cofferdam cribs floating down the river. With it went the unlimited hours of work of hundreds of men. This was a real tragedy. But the will and determination of the men of the camp were unbroken. We could turn from that tragedy back to the drawing board, knowing that we would build again, and yet again, if it happened that way.”

Kaiser was convinced that the team that had built Hoover could build Bonneville. He had assembled a trusted team, including his son Edgar, Clay Bedford, and chief engineer George Havas. The Bonneville Dam—an immense 1,027-foot dam holding back a larger volume of water than Boulder Dam— took four years to build, but it was finished one year ahead of schedule. In addition to electric power generation, the Bonneville Dam was one of the most successful projects in flood control ever built. “They said it couldn’t be done,” Kaiser remarked, “but my kids went ahead and did it.”

Even while the Bonneville Dam was under construction, and before the Hoover Dam was complete, Kaiser bid on a third dam project, what became the Grand Coulee Dam, 350 miles east of the Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River. He won the bid for the second (construction) phase of the project. Again, it was an enormous undertaking.

At 550 feet tall, the Grand Coulee Dam was somewhat shorter than Hoover, but, at 4,173 feet, it was much wider. It was, up to that time, the largest structure ever built. Three times the concrete used on the Hoover Dam project was needed. To hold back the enormous water pressure, the walls of the Dam were 550 feet thick. Behind the Dam, a reservoir named Lake Roosevelt stretched for 151 miles, with an average width of 4,000 feet and depth of 375 feet. The Dam provided hydro-electric power and water for irrigation through an extensive network of canals.

Toward the end of the 1930s, Kaiser, Bechtel and some of the other partners took on a series of other projects, including the Shasta Dam in northern California. The Six Companies lost the bid for Shasta Dam, but Kaiser (on his own) bid successfully for the contract to supply all the sand, gravel, concrete and cement for the project. At the time Kaiser didn’t own a cement factory and knew nothing about making cement. This put him into the cement business, and this was to be his first entry into industry, as opposed to construction. Later, during World War II, his concrete plant supplied most of the concrete used by the military in the Pacific Theater.

Shasta would prove to be Kaiser’s swan song in dam building, and simultaneously the end of his career in construction. By 1940 he began a second career in manufacturing, and his accomplishments were to prove even more dazzling.

Revolutionary Ship-builder

“What man can conceive and imagine he can accomplish. Impossibles are only impossible as thinking makes them so.”

— Henry J. Kaiser

Henry Kaiser’s relationship with the Roosevelt administration was somewhat complicated. On the one hand he and Franklin Roosevelt developed a very close personal bond, but his dealings with many administration officials were often strained or even hostile. Many of the “New Dealers,” e.g., Harold Ickes, considered him an outsider and didn’t want to work with him. Then, when the World War II mobilization arrived, he found himself in constant conflict with William Knudsen, head of the War Production Board, and Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. They generally viewed him as the “wild man” of dam building with no experience in manufacturing, and both were very leery to allow him a major role in the war mobilization.

Kaiser’s view was that he and his team could accomplish the impossible, even in a field they knew nothing about. And he would prove that this was true.

Kaiser’s opportunity appeared with a plea from the British. By the winter of 1939/1940 German U-boats were sinking British merchant ships three times faster than they could be replaced. Winston Churchill made a desperate appeal to FDR that the United Kingdom needed 60 new freighters. He stated that without these ships Britain would face starvation, and the war would be lost. He asked, ‘could America help’?

The reality was that American shipyards had never built that many ships in so short a time. At the same time, the nation’s biggest ship companies, the so-called Big Five, didn’t want the contracts. They had all down-sized during the depression years and were already at their limit producing ships for the U.S. Navy.

On his own, with no U.S. government backing, Kaiser invited a group of senior British officials out to California to show them where he would build their new ships. To their amazement he took them out to a series of desolate mudflats on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay. Shivering in the cold, the Britons looked around in confusion.

“But where are your shipyards?” one of them asked.

“There are the shipyards,” Kaiser declared, pointing to the empty mudflats. “It’s true you see nothing now, but within months this vast space will have a shipyard on it with thousands of workers building the ships for you. This is an ideal place.”

One thing that was often said about Henry Kaiser was that he could talk anybody into anything, and on December 21, 1939, with nothing but mudflats and a vision, he signed a contract with the British to produce their ships, with the British government underwriting all of the costs. Next he telephoned his right-hand-man Clay Bedford in Texas. This is how it went:

“Clay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re going to build me a shipyard.”

“Where?”

“Richmond.”

Clay Bedford had earlier held top-level positions in the building of the Boulder, Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams. But in 1939 he had never even seen a shipyard. One week later, Bedford’s top foreman stood in a driving rain and gazed on the mudflats that were to be the site for the new shipyard. He ordered one of his men to drive a bulldozer into the marsh to clear a service road. The bulldozer immediately sank out of sight. This was the beginning of what would become the most famous shipyard in the world.

The experts predicted it would take Kaiser, Bedford and their team six months to build up enough solid ground before they could begin work on the shipyard itself. It took Kaiser’s men three weeks. Truck after truck brought up 300,000 cubic yards of rock and gravel around the clock. In more or less continuous rain, gangs of workmen sank 24,000 iron piles for the shipways and piers. 637,000 cubic yards of silt had to be dredged out of the canal and launch basin where completed ships would get their final outfitting.

When finished, the yard had seven shipways, each 425 feet long. Adjacent to the shipways was a massive building housing the plate shop and assembly bay, as well as a large open area where preassembled parts could be moved and stored until hoisted into place. Each shipway was serviced by cranes that moved along steel tracks set on either side, so that the crane could swing from one slipway back to another. These were the same cranes that Bedford had used building Grand Coulee Dam. He ordered for them to be dismantled and shipped to Richmond.

The key that made it all work was that Kaiser and his top staff took the assembly-line mass production approach of Henry Ford and applied it to ship-building. Prior to this ships had been built one at a time by hand. Hundreds of workers, handling heavy and dangerous tools, swarming into cramped quarters to perform many different functions. Kaiser, his son Edgar and Clay Bedford visited a Ford manufacturing plant and studied the assembly-lines and work-flow. They were convinced this could work in shipbuilding. In addition to simplifying and streamlining the whole process, they made two crucial changes. First, they decided to prefabricate large sections of a vessel separately and then bring the individual sections to the ship’s hull, using the massive cranes. Second, in assembling the parts into a whole, they replaced the use of rivets with welding.

Kaiser had by this time assembled a very close team of trusted engineers and site managers, but among the tens of thousands of individuals hired to work in the shipyards, almost none of them had ever been anywhere near a ship, with backgrounds in farming, construction jobs, sawmills, and lumber camps, not to mention the later army of women who arrived almost completely unskilled. Kaiser knew the work had to be made simple, straightforward and safe.

Most importantly, what Kaiser depended on was the ingenuity of Bedford and his group of engineers to lay out the yard and make the whole process work. Constant improvements in the manufacturing process were a matter of course.

Pearl Harbor and Liberty Ships

The keel of the first ship was laid on April 14, 1941. Two days later the government approved construction of a second shipyard at Richmond. The initial goal—prior to Pearl Harbor—was to build 45 ships a year. This all changed dramatically after December 7, 1941. In January 1942, the Maritime Commission approved a third shipyard at Richmond, and then a fourth. Kaiser was also authorized to build three shipyards in Oregon. There were now a total of fifty-eight shipways in the seven yards.

From the beginning the Kaiser shipyards focused on the production of what were called Liberty Ships, the merchant ships which carried thousands of tons of weapons, equipment, food and other supplies to Britain, Russia and U.S. troops in the war zones. Before Pearl Harbor, the estimate of the U.S. government was that five million tons of shipping would be needed in 1942 and seven million for 1943. Most experts believed this was unachievable. But in February 1942, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the Maritime Commission to reach targets of 9 million tons of new ships for 1942 and a staggering 15 million for 1943. Everyone in the U.S. Navy, the War Production Board and the Maritime Commission was certain that this was impossible.

It was at that moment that the full genius of Kaiser and his team reveled itself.

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, on December 31, the first Liberty Ship, produced at Richmond Yard #2, was launched. What followed was staggering. The construction pace became furious. In the summer of 1941, there were only 4,000 employees working at Richmond, most living in ramshackle shacks. By the end of 1942, some 80,000 men and women were employed in the yards; a year later there were 100,000. From all over the nation they came— New York, Boston, Texas Oklahoma, Montana, and many black Americans from the deep south.

Kaiser and Bedford’s production genius worked near flawlessly. In 1940 the average time it took to build a ship in the United States was 220 days. This is what Kaiser accomplished in 1942:

• February 154 days (Portland)

• April 86 days (Richmond)

• May 73 days (Portland)

• July 43 days (Portland)

• August 24 days (Richmond)

• September 10 days (Portland)

Kaiser simply revolutionized ship-building.

Attending the September christening of the “10 day” ship at the Portland Yards, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed:

“I am very much inspired by what I have seen, and I wish that every man, woman, and child in these United States could have been here to see the launching and realize its importance in winning the war.”

Henry Kaiser, at the same christening, stated:

“Our original contract called for the delivery of ships in about 150 days. The average in the first World War had been more than 200. Many experts shook their heads and said we could not do it. Yet, here beside us is this great craft — only ten days from keel laying to launching; and in a few days she will be on the ocean bearing cargo to our allies and to our soldiers. It is a miracle no less — a miracle of God and of the genius of free American workmen.

“How long will that ten-day record stand?” Kaiser was asked. “I expect that record to go by the boards in the very near future. Never in my long experience have I seen men so imbued with the joy of achievement as these shipyard workers. I have gotten a tremendous lift myself from the manner in which these men have taken hold and responded to opportunity.”

Kaisers prediction proved accurate. In November 1940 Richmond Yard #2 produced a finished Liberty Ship in 4 days and 15 hours (!), an unchallenged record.

A Ship a Day

821 Liberty Ships were built in Kaiser shipyards, but they also built more than 600 other ships, including troop transports, tankers, landing craft, and more than 100 warships, including 50 “baby flattop” aircraft carriers. At their peak the seven shipyards employed 197,000 workers. Between 1941 and 1945 the shipyards produced 1,490 ships, 26 percent of the total shipbuilding program of the United States. This for a company that didn’t even exist in 1939.

Between January 1942 and August 1945 the Kaiser shipyards produced 392 ships per year, an average of well more than 1 per day. No other shipyard in the United States came even remotely close to this.

Steel and Magnesium

Severe steel shortages were chronic during the war, and in 1941 there were no major steel mills west of the Rockies. Major delays in shipbuilding were the result. On April 21, 1941, in a private meeting with Franklin Roosevelt, Kaiser presented plans for a $150 million steel complex in Fontana, California. FDR was enthusiastic,3 and given that the nation was facing a 4.2-million-ton steel shortfall just two months into the war, other administration officials fell into line. The problem was how to pay for it. Eventually, Jesse Jones of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation reluctantly agreed to loan the money.

Kaiser established Kaiser Steel, and the first integrated steel mill in the history of California began operation on December 1, 1941. By 1943 this plant was producing almost all the steel plating for the ship-building yards on the Pacific coast. After the war, the Fontana plant increased operations, and although it never approached the output of the big steel producers like Bethlehem or Republic, by the 1950s it did supply the majority of steel for use in the western states. Kaiser Steel continued in operation until 1983 when it closed because it could not compete with cheaper Japanese and Korean imports.

Steel was not Kaiser’s only concern as to what was needed for the war mobilization. In February, 1941, Kaiser met with Jesse Jones, now the Federal Loan Administrator, to obtain a loan to build a magnesium factory. Magnesium was called by some the “miracle metal,” because it possessed some of the durability and toughness of steel, but it was much lighter. In 1940 Nazi Germany was producing 100,000 tons of magnesium annually (which they were using in their Stuka dive bombers and other military hardware), while American production was a pitiful 6,500 tons.

Usable magnesium does not occur in nature; it must be refined from magnesite ore. Kaiser built a plant on property his company owned at Permanente, California, in Santa Clara County. Kaiser employed Dr. F. J. Hansgirg, an Austrian scientist and a refugee from the Nazis, who had developed a revolutionary method, called the “Carbothermic Process” to refine the ore. Then Kaiser built a second plant in Manteca, California, which utilized an even more advanced technique, called the “Ferrosilicon Process,” to produce magnesium. During the war, with the exception of one East Coast plant operated by Dow Chemical, the Permanente and Manteca facilities produced all of American magnesium. Total U.S. production increased from 12 million pounds in 1940, to nearly 600 million pounds in early 1944.4

A Word about Financing

There are some who accuse Henry Kaiser of amassing his corporate empire off of “big government” spending. The reality is that Kaiser’s career epitomizes the correct approach to the American System of Economics. Kaiser never received one dime in government grants, except for payment on what he produced (e.g., Liberty Ships). The great dams and other infrastructure he built in the pre-war years paid for themselves many times over and created an avalanche of new industries, new cities and millions of productive jobs for the American people. As for his shipyards, steel and magnesium plants and other industrial projects, these were all built with borrowed money, not handouts.

Kaiser was not afraid to borrow. He once said, “Debts are assets. It’s through debts that you get the money to meet payrolls and buy the plants and equipment. Then you finish the job and pay off your debts and everybody is happy.” Alexander Hamilton could not have said it better.

One of the primary, but not sole, lenders to Kaiser was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. They did not just give the money to Kaiser. Jesse Jones was scrupulous of where the money went, and he and Kaiser had a respectful but often contentious relationship. Yet, by 1950, Kaiser had paid back every cent he had borrowed from the RFC. The final payment of $91,476,989.92 was made on November 1 of that year. This is how Public-Private partnerships are supposed to work.

The Post-War Vision

As the War drew to a close in 1945, many economists were predicting a severe post-war recession, if not something worse. Kaiser combated this doomsday mentality and intervened repeatedly with initiatives which would ignite post-war production. He was concerned about the future of America, but also about the future of American citizens—millions of returning soldiers and domestic defense workers—all of whom would soon find themselves without employment.

Kaiser fought as long as he could to keep his shipyards operating. One of his ideas was to transform the Richmond Yards into a center for building up the U.S. Merchant Marine, to build the largest and most modern merchant fleet in the world. He made an official proposal to the administration as early as the Summer of 1944, stating, “We now enjoy strategic location, low-cost production, and an inter-national reputation through established records and world-wide publicity. There is an instant need to capitalize on these fully if favorable competitive position is to be assured.” Kaiser even offered to build half of the vessels at cost, plus a one-dollar profit. Both Maritime Commission Chairman Emory S. Land and FDR himself were very favorable to this proposal, but it died under the Truman administration.

By the summer of 1946, most of the Kaiser shipyard workers had been laid-off, with the Richmond Shipyard #3 down to only 3,500 workers. In October 1946 the Maritime Commission closed the great yards permanently. Kaiser never got over what was done to his shipyards, and he believed that the shipyard workers and the City of Richmond had been betrayed.

Despite this tragic setback, Kaiser was nothing if not an eternal optimist, and he waged a relentless fight for post-war economic expansion. In a 1945 speech he said:

“The new world of the postwar period will have to be supported by a volume and variety and a quantity of production heretofore unknown. That challenging prospect will be met in many regions of the earth, but nowhere will its fulfillment be more convincing than here on the Pacific coast where the outlines of the future are traced in bold relief for all who have the courage to read.”

Two key recommendations which Kaiser stressed were, first, a national plan for public works, dwarfing even what had been accomplished in the 1930s. Kaiser proposed that up to ten billion dollars’ worth of self-liquidating public works projects be undertaken following the war.5 Second, perhaps with the tragic example of the Richmond shipyards in mind, he proposed the rapid reconversion by private employers of wartime manufacturing plants for peace-time production.

None of what Kaiser proposed, except in a piecemeal way, was adopted in the immediate post-war years. Kaiser bitterly criticized small-minded Washington, DC bureaucrats, but he placed the bulk of the blame on America’s corporate leadership. In a speech at Washington State College, Kaiser lambasted business leaders:

“Unhappily the remnants of monopoly and vested interests are still with us. They are always selfish, short-sighted, anti-social. They are willing to pay any price to perpetuate their privilege and to prolong that which they think is to their advantage.”

Automobiles, Aluminum and Health Care

For his part, Kaiser continued to produce. In August 1945 he formed a partnership with a man named Joseph Frazer and went into the automobile business. The next year they purchased the Willow Run factory that Ford had used during the war to produce airplanes but which now stood empty. They were in business.

Kaiser-Frazier Automobile was at first very successful. In 1948 they produced 181,316 vehicles, capturing 5 percent of the American market. Ultimately, Wall Street and the Big Three automakers—Ford, GM and Chrysler—acted to crush the new upstart. By 1949, Kaiser found that he could not buy steel, engines and specialized parts. The Big Three, with their deep pockets, simply cornered the market in these critical materials. The same thing happened with car dealerships, as the Big Three wooed away (or bribed) many of his independently owned car dealerships. Wall Street used loan shark tactics to deny credit and squeeze him for payments. Kaiser-Frazer was simply frozen out.

Kaiser struggled on through the mid-1950s, but eventually he merged the company with Willys-Overland Motors of Toledo, Ohio. At this point Kaiser essentially stopped making automobiles and Kaiser-Willys focused almost exclusively on Jeeps. This continued until 1970 when Edgar Kaiser sold off his interests and pulled out of the auto-business completely.

Kaiser’s other major post-war manufacturing venture had a happier outcome. During the war Kaiser had become convinced of the growing importance of aluminum. In 1946 he moved directly into aluminum production with the creation of the Permanente Metals Corporation in Spokane, Washington. Between 1946 and Henry Kaiser’s death in 1967, Kaiser Aluminum grew exponentially, with facilities all across the United States. No more will be said about it here, except that it still exists to this day.

Today, of course, Kaiser’s name is mostly associated with the Kaiser-Permanente health care system. Kaiser-Permanente is far too vast a topic to discuss here, but there are a few things important to know. It originated not as part of a corporate scheme, but out of compassion for his workers. While building the Grand Coulee Dam in 1934, Kaiser was convinced by his on-site medical advisor, Dr. Sidney Garfield, to oversee the health of his workers. What they decided upon was to establish a voluntary medical withholding payment from each paycheck to provide health insurance in case of injury or illness for every worker and their family members. This began the Kaiser Health Plan—the biggest and most successful private health insurance plan ever established by a business.

At the Richmond shipyards, as tens of thousands of desperate job-seekers arrived looking for employment, emergency medical stations were set up in each shipyard, and a 175-bed field hospital, staffed by sixty doctors, was built. This was so successful that 95 percent of the shipyards’ employees joined the Kaiser Health Plan. Kaiser would build his first permanent hospital 1943, and in 1945 he opened his Health Plan to the general public.

Labor’s Best Friend

Perhaps it was his hardscrabble existence as a youth, working his way through many jobs involving physical labor, or maybe it was the deeply religious faith of his mother that was a lifetime influence on him, but unlike many of the other titans of industry, Henry Kaiser never considered his workers to be adversaries, let alone enemies. In a speech at LaSalle College in 1944, Kaiser said:

“Some years ago I ventured to say that labor relations were nothing more than human relations. As I understand it, humanity is a broad term which means not only mankind as a whole; it also denotes certain virtues which mark man’s progress toward perfection: kindness, forbearance, sympathy, and understanding.

“It is my belief that the Christian faith rests wholly on a humanitarian basis. The rank and file of labor and management accept Christianity, even though they do not always practice it. Nevertheless, the principle should, and does obtain in all human relationships which build, rather than destroy. I know I speak for countless thousands when I say that both labor and management want to build. When we generalize our hopes in the thought that we want to build a better America, we really mean that we want to build a more abundant life for every American. And this, again, is a Christian precept, preserved in the immortal words: ‘I am come that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly’. There is neither secret nor mystery about labor relations. There is no need for a complicated formula, or for cumbersome legislation. The only approach is the humanitarian one: the ‘give and take’ between men of good will; the wholehearted desire to agree; the will to work together.”

Kaiser believed in taking care of his employees, including higher pay and good working conditions. At the Richmond yards he hired more than 100,000 completely unskilled workers, trained them and then paid them premium wages. Throughout most of his life he rarely experienced a serious labor dispute. The only violent exception was during the first year of building the Hoover Dam, but that was due to the initial horrific working conditions and the presence, in the workforce of IWW and other radical agitators. Kaiser acted as fast as he could to improve conditions, build housing, provide decent food and improve safety conditions, and the labor problems resolved themselves.

Kaiser was attacked publicly by other corporate leaders for his “softness” on labor. This hostility came to a head in 1946 with the threat of nation-wide strike by U.S. Steelworkers. A government mediation board recommended a pay raise of 18 ½ cents per hour. The Steelworkers accepted it, but the steel companies refused, demanding a raise of only 15 cents. A nation-wide steel strike loomed. At that moment, at a press conference in Washington, DC, Henry Kaiser, representing Kaiser Steel, announced he would accept the 18 ½ cents raise. The other steel producers caved in, but they never forgave Henry Kaiser.

Later at a conference of business leaders in Washington, Kaiser told his audience, “If you spent as much time on your labor as your sales, you wouldn’t have any problems with getting the best workers and raising productivity.”

Optimism

On November 7, 1943, speaking to 7,500 workers at the Brewster Aeronautical plant at La Guardia Airport, the 61 year-old Henry Kaiser began his remarks with the words, “I feel so cheerful I could sing to you.” Then without pause he burst into the refrain from Oklahoma:

Oh, what a beautiful morning,

Oh, what a beautiful day,

I got a beautiful feeling,

Everything’s going our way.

This was not just momentary exuberance. Years earlier, speaking to a reporter at the Richmond shipyards, and gazing out at the multitude of male and female machinists busily assembling ships, Kaiser asked:

“Where else in the world, where else in the world can you see anything like this? . . . Our main business is building people, building ourselves, and those who join us to take on bigger and tougher jobs, building the courage, the faith, the imagination, the will and joy of work. . . I always have to dream up there against the stars”

It is not possible to know for certain what motivated Henry Kaiser, but one aspect of his life is clearly worth considering. Like Abraham Lincoln, he never stopped praising the influence his mother had on his formative years, particularly on the principles he adopted for his life work.

Kaiser’s mother was deeply religious, and he was raised in the Lutheran Church. Later, as he moved around he also joined both Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. He was very active in these churches and served for a time as a lay leader in one of them. Later, as his career overwhelmed his time, his church activities dropped off, but the lasting effects of these past influences stayed with him. Many of his closest friends were devout Christians, including Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Minister of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City and Robert Le Tourneau, the inventor who had supplied him with his earth-moving equipment. Le Tourneau was a very religious man, and Kaiser recounts that as they drove on unpaved dusty roads from worksite to worksite, the two men would occupy their time by singing religious songs that both of them knew.

Kaiser loved his workers. He loved to build. He hated small-mindedness and pettiness. His vision for America was much grander. A land of opportunity; a land of manufacturing and technological progress; a productive future for hard-working young Americans, all within the economic power-house of the American System. That is the American Dream.

— END —

Bibliography:

Colby, Robert, “Philbrook Dam: Where Giants Made History,” from Tales of the Paradise Ridge, Butte County Historical Society

Cousins, John, The Man who Built America: Henry J. Kaiser, BizB Press

Foster, Mark, Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West, University of Texas Press, 1989

Heiner, Albert, Henry J. Kaiser: Western Colossus, Halo Books, 1991

LeTourneau, R.G. Mover of Men and Mountains, Moody Publishers, 1967

Most, Doug, Launching Liberty, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2025

Henry Ford and his 1896 Quadricycle

The creator of mass production. The builder of the largest factory in the world. The passionate supporter of working men and women. The life-long friend of Thomas Edison, beginning with their first meeting in 1896 and continuing to Edison’s death in 1931. This was, and is, Henry Ford, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.

Born in 1863, only 27 days after the Battle of Gettysburg, and dying in 1947, Ford’s life encompassed more than half of the existence of the American Republic, from the age of Lincoln all the way up through the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He was born to immigrant parents and spent the first 13 years of his life on the family farm in Michigan. But farm life could not contain him, and after he witnessed an early steam-powered carriage in 1875, he left the farm the next year for Detroit and found work, first as a watch repairer and then as an apprentice machinist at several firms.

For the next 70 years, Ford never stopped working, never stopped innovating, always pushing forward. His life defines the meaning of a “commitment to progress.”

The Road to the Model T

Ford was not the first to develop an internal combustion engine, nor the first to produce a “horseless carriage” powered by gasoline. The first internal combustion engine was invented by a German named Nicolaus Otto in 1876. It was a single-cylinder four-stroke engine, but Otto never applied it to transportation. The young Henry read about Otto’s “silent gas engine” in a British magazine, and in 1885, while employed at the Eagle Iron Works, he had the opportunity to repair one of the Otto engines. He took the engine apart, literally dissecting it, studying it until he had mastered its entire operation.

The young Ford read everything he could get his hands on related to internal combustion engines, including reports of Gottlieb Daimler’s petroleum-burning engine which was attached to a bicycle, causing great astonishment among the inhabitants of Mannheim, Germany.

Two Americans began to study the possibilities of using the internal combustion engine to power vehicles—Elwood Haynes, an employee of the Indiana Gas Company at Kokomo and Charles E. Duryea in New England. In 1894 Hayes demonstrated his two-cylinder topless carriage near Kokomo, carrying three persons a distance of 2 miles at a speed of seven miles per hour.1

In Detroit, Ford converted a shed in his backyard into a workshop. There, in 1887, he built his first experimental engine powered by gasoline. In 1890 he began work on his second, a double-cylinder, engine. At first he planned to put the engine on a bicycle, but figured out that with the gas tank and necessary controls it was too heavy. In 1891 he accepted a job as engineer and machinist with the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit, but he continued experimenting in his “leisure” hours.

In the early spring of 1893, Ford developed his first gasoline-powered motor car, but it would take another three years before he deemed it road-worthy. Then, on June 4, 1896, he drove what he called his “Quadricycle” down Grand River Avenue and onto the streets of Detroit. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, he described the car as follows:

“There were two cylinders with a two-and-a-half-inch bore and a six-inch stroke set side by side and over the rear axle. I made them out of the exhaust pipe of a steam engine that I had bought. They developed about four horsepower. The power was transmitted from the motor to the countershaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the rear wheel by a chain. The car would hold two people, the seat being suspended on posts and the body on elliptical springs. There were two speeds one of 10 and the other of 20 miles an hour obtained by shifting the belt, which was done by a clutch lever in front of the driving seat. Thrown forward, the lever put in the high speed; thrown back, the low speed; with the lever upright the engine could run free.

“To start the car it was necessary to turn the motor over by hand with the clutch free. To stop the car one simply released the clutch and applied the foot brake. . . I bought the ironwork for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and the springs. The wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made, and all of the more delicate mechanism I made myself. One of the features that I discovered necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The machine altogether weighed about five hundred pounds. A tank under the seat held three gallons of gasoline which was fed to the motor through a small pipe and a mixing valve. The ignition was by electric spark. The original machine was air-cooled or, to be more accurate, the motor simply was not cooled at all. I found that on a run of an hour or more the motor heated up, and so I very shortly put a water jacket around the cylinders and piped it to a tank in the rear of the car over the cylinders.”

Ford had studied three approaches to powering a motorcar:— steam, electricity and internal combustion, and he concluded that only the latter was practical. A steam-powered engine was too cumbersome, requiring a boiler and a fire, and the requirement for electric storage batteries was prohibitive. He also studied some of the motor cars coming out of Germany and France and concluded that they were far too heavy. His goal was to produce a light-weight, inexpensive but reliable automobile.

Shortly after the debut of his Quadricycle Ford had the opportunity for a personal meeting with Thomas Edison. Ford and Edison poured over the designs for Ford’s next proposed car, lighter than the first and with gears instead of a belt-drive. Edison enthusiastically urged him to continue his work, saying “Young man, that’s the thing. . . Keep at it.”

In 1898 Ford produced his second, improved, car. At the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit, Ford had been promoted to Chief Engineer in 1893, and in 1899 the company offered to make him chief supervisor at the Edison Company, with a substantial pay raise. Instead, he resigned from the company and devoted all of his efforts into producing automobiles. There was no going back; he had crossed the Rubicon. Backed by the capital of Detroit lumber baron William H. Murphy, Ford founded the Detroit Automobile Company, but the cars that were produced were too expensive and not up to Ford’s quality standards, and the company was dissolved in January 1901.

With new backers, in November of 1901 he founded the Henry Ford Company, but when his financial backers attempted to exert control over his work, he left the company a year later. Two failed companies within three years. In both companies Ford had no real control. He was a minority stockholder and essentially employed as chief engineer. He was determined to be his own boss. At that point he entered into a partnership with a man named Alexander Y. Malcomson, a Detroit-area coal dealer. This led to the founding of the Ford Motor Company on June 16, 1903. Ford was then 40 years old. He began with 25 per cent of the $100,000 of capital stock, but within two years he acquired a 51 per cent control of the company. He was now in control, and this company would last.

The new company placed an advertisement, written by Ford, in newspapers and magazines across America. It read:

“Our purpose is to construct and market an automobile specially designed for everyday wear and tear business, professional, and family use; an automobile which will attain to a sufficient speed to satisfy the average person without acquiring any of those break-neck velocities which are so universally condemned; a machine which will be admired by man, woman, and child alike for its compactness, its simplicity, its safety, its all-around convenience, and last but not least its exceedingly reasonable price, which places it within the reach of many thousands who could not think of paying the comparatively fabulous prices asked for most machines.”

Over the next five years he debuted a series of cars (numbered A through S), each more perfected than the previous model, and these were sold in modest, but increasing numbers. Ford oversaw the development of each model. He had them torn to pieces and every part subjected to intense scrutiny. For example, he tested every part to see what sort of steel was best for each—a hard steel, or a tough steel, or an elastic steel. He introduced the use of vanadium to create a variety of specialty steels, which revolutionized automobile production. It was also during those years that he oversaw the building of the largest auto manufacturing plant in the world, covering 60 acres—the Highland Park Plant. This would become the birthplace of the Model T.

Ford was not the first to manufacture large numbers of automobiles. In addition to the European imports, Ransom Olds was already producing several models, including his popular Runabout at his plant in Lansing. Ford, however had a different vision. By 1907 there were already 140,000 automobiles on the road in America, but they were almost exclusively marketed to the wealthy. The lowest-priced—and most unreliable—models sold for well more than $1,000 and the majority went for $3,000 to $8,000, this at a time when the average annual income for American workers ranged from $150 (unskilled) to $400. Ford was determined to produce automobiles for the masses. His first car in 1903 for the Ford Motor Company was priced at $850 and sold 1,700 cars, but that was just the beginning Models A through S were mere stepping stones toward producing what Ford called his “Universal Car.” This arrived in 1908 with the Model T.

Mass Production

Ford concentrated on only one model—the Model T—and he believed that the secret to financial success was to sell a lot of cars, each with a small profit margin, as opposed to a much smaller number of expensive cars. He reduced the price of the Model T again and again. His partners thought he was mad—so he bought them out and took majority control.

What made Ford’s success possible was the manufacturing plant he built at Highland Park. This witnessed the introduction of true “mass production” into American manufacturing. The figures speak for themselves: 10,607 cars in 1909; 18,664 cars in 1910 (first year of the new plant); 34,528 cars in 1911; 78,440 cars in 1912; 168,220 cars in 1913; 248,307 cars in 1914. By 1919 Highland Park was turning out 10,000 cars every twenty-four hours. That same year half of all cars in the United States were Model Ts. During that time period Ford had managed to reduce the price of a basic Model T from $850 to $350, making it affordable to working and middle class Americans. By 1924 he had lowered the price of a new Model T to $265.

Much of this was accomplished through the creation of the assembly line, which was studied, tweaked and improved over many months. Often maligned by later muckrakers, the assembly line was a revolutionary step in manufacturing, and the way that Ford developed it and oversaw its use, it was designed, not only to reduce the time in producing cars, but to make the work less strenuous and easier to accomplish for the individual workman. Several times Ford mandated a reduction in speed of the line, i.e., no “speed-up.” The work was designed to be comfortable, with less bending, twisting and running. Workers were given the option to leave the assembly line for other positions in the plant, but most refused, preferring the safer and more comfortable pace.

Ford never stopped working to improve his products, developing new transmissions, revolutionary engine designs, improvements in steering and suspension. The factory itself was the subject of continuous improvements. Old machinery and methods were constantly scrapped and replaced by newer technologies. Capacity was increased. The delivery and processing of raw materials was streamlined, and then streamlined again. Raw materials entered the plant on one end and a finished car, with over 5,000 parts, came out the other end within a span of only hours.

The assembly line started out gradually, for certain parts of the car, but it was in full operation, covering every aspect of production and assembly by 1913. Almost overnight manufacturing industries, not only in the United States but throughout the world, began copying Ford’s method, but Ford was first, and he never stopped improving his operations. As he said at the time, “Everything can always be done better than it is being done.”

River Rouge

By 1926 there were 88 Ford plants in the United States and 28 in other countries. Not counting his production of agricultural vehicles, nor his manufacture of military vehicles (including aircraft) in World War I, Henry Ford produced only the Model T automobile for 19 years. By 1927 almost 16 million had been sold, but in 1927 he announced the end of Model T production and introduced his new car, the Model A. To accomplish this he turned the Ford Motor Company on its head.

In the spring of 1927, Ford closed down Highland Park and all of his other factories. More than 40,000 machines were scrapped and new ones installed. Every aspect of the factories was rebuilt from top to bottom, including the assembly lines. The final cost was more than $100 million. All the work was finished within four months, and the Model A went on sale in October of that year.

Initially, the Highland Park Plant bore the brunt of Model A production, but Ford decided it was inadequate for what he had planned. His answer was to build the world’s largest and most advanced manufacturing complex at a site called River Rouge, near Dearborn, Michigan. Ford had purchased the property in 1915 and had set up a facility there to produce equipment for the military during World War I, but in 1927 what was accomplished was breathtaking. What arose was a massive industrial complex, covering more than 2 square miles. This was not a “factory”; it was an industrial complex the likes of which had never been seen before. The Rouge Complex had its own port, docks and railroad yards to received shipments of necessary raw materials. It had factories to produce its own steel, glass, rubber, fabrics and other materials. It produced its own electricity. Turbogenerators were installed, giving 250,000 horsepower, more than double what was previously used in ALL of Ford’s factories combined. The construction to build the Rouge Complex was so massive that contemporary writers compared it to the construction of the Panama Canal.

The sheer size of the Rouge operation is almost impossible to visualize. Raw ore was unloaded at the docks on Monday, machined and assembled into units, shipped to a near-by branch, put into a finished car, delivered to a dealer, and sold to a customer by the following Thursday. Half a million railroad cars were required each year to carry the merchandise. One-fourth of all the plate glass produced in the country was used at the Rouge and 1,000,000 feet of lumber daily. The yearly pay roll aggregated more than a quarter of a billion dollars. The recipient who received the benefits of all this was the customer, as prices of the new cars dropped to a new low.

When Ford had opened his first factory in the 1890s, he employed one foreman and seven laborers. By 1941 River Rouge alone had a workforce of 120,000. This was essentially a modern technological Wonder of the World, and scientists, engineers, manufacturers and government officials came from all over the world to study it. Industrial complexes, based on River Rouge were built in France, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Low Prices and High Wages

In January of 1914 Henry Ford did something which overnight made him a household name, and it had nothing to do with building Model Ts. He announced that he was more than doubling the wage of ALL of his workers, not just the most highly skilled, from $2.40 a day to $5.00. Wall Street was shocked. Other titans of manufacturing were aghast. The people cheered. Cars, wagons, trains, boats and probably even horses brought tens of thousands into Detroit, and the Ford plant was besieged with job applicants. It should be noted that the existing $2.40 per day wage was already among the highest in the country with hundreds of other companies paying as little as $1.00 per day.

And he continued to raise wages, from $5 per day to $6, then to $7, and for a short period in 1930 to $8. At the same time, he reduced the working day from ten hours to eight. Consider that between 1909 and 1925 Ford had reduced the price of the basic Model T from $850 to $250, a reduction of more than 70 percent. Yet, during the years from 1914 to 1925 he raised the daily wage for his workers from $2.40 to $7.00, an increase of 200 percent. Wages dramatically up; prices dramatically down. Most “economists” today would insist that this is impossible, perhaps black magic, since “everyone knows” that wage increases produce inflation. Ford punctured that myth.

When Ford first proposed a wage increase to his Board of Directors, the majority were solidly opposed. Finally they relented and proposed a 25 cent increase and then a 50 cent increase. Ford just shook his head. A dollar increase was proposed, then $1.25, then $1.50, then $2.00. Ford maintained it was not enough. After hours of wrangling, the figure stood at a $2.40 raise, a doubling of the current wage. This would cost the company tens of millions of dollars a year. Ford accepted the $2.40 hour raise, but when a close advisor complained, “Why don’t you just pay them $5.00 per day and bust the company outright?,” Ford declared, “I’ll take it.” In addition, a fund of $10 million dollars was created to pay bonuses to the workers four times a year on top of their wages.

He insisted that a well-paid, well-rested, properly fed and healthy workforce would result in lowered costs for producing his cars, and he proceeded to prove it. James Couzens, the secretary-of-the company, stated, “Henry Ford believes there has been too big a division between capital and labor; labor has not shared to the extent that it should.” And Ford said, “The commonest laborer who sweeps the floor shall receive the $5.00 per day,”

Another enlightening aspect of the Ford labor policy was Ford’s policy of hiring those with disabilities, which he rigorously enforced. This included the blind, deaf-mutes, paraplegics, amputees, and even those with tuberculous. More than 11,000 of these were hired. He also hired, or retained, many older men, as well as numerous ex-convicts. This was not a scheme to secure cheap labor; all were earning full pay.

Ford also established numerous schools, hospitals and other facilities, not only in Detroit and Dearborn, but in the dozens of locations throughout the country where he had established operations, including many in rural areas. He established a technology Museum which was integrated into his educational efforts, and apprenticeships were given to thousands of young boys for advanced study in technology, machining and science. One observer of the Ford schools described them thus:

“The Ford plants and exhibitions are their textbooks in the main, though the study of subjects ordinarily taught up to the high-school grades is not neglected. Under experienced craftsmen the older boys learn, for example, about electricity, machinery of every sort, the extraction of iron ore, the grinding of flour, and the making of an automobile from top to bottom. At the institute the ages range from seventeen to nineteen years, in the trade school from thirteen to eighteen. Courses are not fixed, nor methods stationary. The boy is taught to do what seems to suit his natural bent. Many graduate into jobs at the Ford plants; others go elsewhere, for no attempt is made to hold them longer than they want to stay, and the founder takes pride in scattering his alumni into different industries.”

In some ways, what Ford did echoed the earlier efforts of George Westinghouse who also paid his workers far more than the prevailing wage and strongly supported education, but Ford went even beyond Westinghouse in his commitment to his employees and their families.

Response to the Crash

Five weeks following the stock market crash of 1929, Henry Ford announced his response. His first action was to increase the minimum wage to $7.00 per day, and one month later he increased this to $8.00 per day, or $1.00 per hour. As the economic situation worsened throughout 1930 and 1931, the word from Wall Street was “cut back,” “retrench,” “lower costs,” “raise prices.” Ford did the exact opposite. River Rouge and the other factories continued full production. By the end of 1930, more than 20 million Model As had been sold, and in 1931 he was employing more men in his plants than ever before. Ford was convinced that this was a financial crisis not a real economic crisis and that the only solution was for the nation to produce its way out. He led the way, but almost no one else followed his lead.

Ford kept Wall Street financiers out of any role in his company. He said:

“It has been our policy always to keep on hand a large amount of cash, and the cash balance in recent years has usually been in excess of fifty million dollars. This is deposited in banks all over the country. We do not borrow, but we have established lines of credit, so that if we so cared we might raise a very large amount of money by bank borrowing. But keeping the cash reserve makes borrowing unnecessary. Our provision is only to be prepared to meet an emergency. I have no prejudice against proper borrowing. It is merely that I do not want to run the danger of having the control of the business and hence the particular idea of service to which I am devoted taken into other hands.”

By the end of 1930 Ford was already preparing his next “universal car.” This was to be built around Ford’s first 8-cylinder engine. The V-8, at 65 horsepower, was the most powerful car Ford had ever produced and also the most technologically advanced. The two four-cylinder banks were cast in a single piece with the crankcase. An automatic spark, synchronized gear shifting, rubber mountings at scores of points to lessen noise, a double-drop frame, and rustless steel were among the features of the car, which was advertised as the last word in economical maintenance. And it was capable of great speed.

To bring the V-8 online, Ford scrapped 46 per cent of the entire Rouge Plant and replaced it with new equipment and machines. Most of the discarded equipment was in excellent condition and could have been utilized for many more years. None of it was worn out, broken down or obsolete, but for Ford, anything became obsolete, no matter how good it is, when something better appears. The scrapped equipment was replaced with $217 million worth of new machines. He also added a third turbo-generator and a second high-pressure boiler; and the capacity of the powerhouse was raised to 462,000 horsepower, enough to power a major city like Boston or San Francisco.

When Ford put the V-8 up for sale in January 1932 the price was $460, only slightly higher than the Model A. None of the other 8-cylinder automobiles, marketed by other automakers, sold for less than $2,000. An improved V-8 was brought out at the beginning of 1933. With a 75 horsepower engine, it could run 84 miles an hour. Many other changes were made, including the installation of safety glass. In introducing this car, Ford issued a statement which said:

“We have never yet had a sufficient production of all the things which the family needs. It would be splendid if the world should seriously attempt to overproduce everything that everybody needs. We should then discover that our present machine facilities could not even catch up with the need. Give the world a money system that makes it easier for goods to flow from man to man, and all the factories on earth could not begin to supply a tenth of the demand.”

and:

“We do not build a low-price car. The cost to us of building our car is pretty expensive. But we do build a high-quality car at a low price.”

With the V-8 and Model A both in production, by the spring of 1934—in the nadir of the depression—Ford was producing 90,000 cars a month, or more than 1,000,000 a year.

The New Deal and Unionization

Although he was a lifelong Republican, Ford almost never dabbled in politics. He supported Hoover in 1932, largely because of Hoover’s engineering background, but earlier in 1916 he had backed Woodrow Wilson, based on Wilson’s pledge to “keep us out of war.” Ford and Franklin Roosevelt had actually worked together during the war mobilization of 1917-1918, and during the 12 years of the Roosevelt Presidency, Ford never once criticized FDR, saying at one point, “The President is trying to do the best he can, like everybody else.”

There were however, several New Deal initiatives that Ford strenuously and publicly objected to. The most egregious of these was the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Ford refused to sign the NRA code, required of all manufacturers. Ford believed that the suspension of anti-trust laws and the suppression of honest competition—both of which the NRA imposed—were un-American and injurious to American progress. He believed that NRA was unconstitutional, but he never challenged it in court. He just ignored it. In 1935 the Supreme Court agreed with Ford, unanimously ruling that the NRA was unconstitutional.

There were several other New Deal policies that Ford opposed, but the one which generated the greatest trouble for him was the Wagner Act of 1935, which established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). During the depression-era unionization efforts, the NLRB sided almost 100 percent of the time with the unions against the companies. During and following the first “sit-down” strike against General Motors in 1936, the NLRB ruled in favor of the unions again and again. GM was soon unionized, followed shortly thereafter by Chrysler. Ford held out.

As with the NRA, Ford considered the NLRB—and essentially forced unionization—to be un-American. He stated:

“The Ford Motor Company has had a labor relations act for years. I would be ashamed to have anyone tell me our conditions and pay are wrong. That part of my job was started twenty years ago. I have heard no complaints from our men. There is nothing a union can give them that they haven’t already got. I haven’t given the Wagner Act a thought. We’ve always had it in force.”

Ford believed that the same interests on Wall Street who had sought to gain financial sway over his business twenty years previous, and whose object had been to stabilize industry on a basis of no competition, were now seeking to stabilize labor at a definite level. He said:

“There is no mystery about the connection between corporation control and labor control. They are the two ends of the same rope. A little group of those who control both capital and labor will sit down in New York and settle prices, dividends—and wages.”

What is very revealing is that it took the UAW five years to unionize the Ford plants. This was not due to any thug tactics or intimidation by Ford officials. It was simply because Ford workers were already the highest-paid—with the best health care—workforce in America. Eventually, the massive build-up in defense production in 1941—which Ford strongly supported—gave the NLRB the power to dictate labor policy to Ford, and unionization became a fait accompli.

Real Economics

At the time of the Bank Holiday in 1933, Henry Ford put forward two of his own proposals on banking:

“First, absolute security of deposits at all times; Second, no loans for speculation but only for constructive and productive purposes.”

Ford added:

“Politicians think that money can do anything. It can do nothing. Money is only something the bookkeepers put down. It ought to be a sign of a man’s right to his work. It is not a commodity of any value in itself—merely a part of the mechanism of exchange. America is not a land of money, but of wealth—not a land of rich people, but successful workers.”

In his criticism of the NRA, Ford stated:

“It is only in finance that one man’s gain is another man’s loss. Customer, maker of the product, and manufacturing plant all must profit. That is what happens in honest industry. The customer gets creative labor transformed into some utility for living. What he buys is worth more to him than what he pays for it. The maker of the product gets his profit in wages or salary, and the third share goes to the manufacturing plant which for the sake of its customers as well as for its employees must be kept up to date and efficient. The surpluses created in busy times must be used to tide over periods of adversity. This is the ideal condition, and were it universal, wealth would be shared.

“The NRA had that for its object, to kill competition, and if you kill competition the world will not progress. When I speak of competition I am talking about fair competition, not the cannibal kind that murders and steals in order to get ahead of the other fellow. . . This world was built to develop character and healthy competition is one of the principal agents in doing this. Trying to stop it is like throwing a handful of ashes into the teeth of a gale.”

One of the most interesting and humorous anecdotes which illustrates Ford’s thinking arose from a dispute in 1917. In addition to raising wages and cutting the price of the Model T, Ford had proposed to use almost all of the previous year’s profits to begin construction of the River Rouge facility. The stockholders, led by the Doge brothers, howled, insisting that Ford had no right to deny them their rightful dividends by spending the profits on new projects. They went to court, and a circuit judge ruled in the stockholders favor, ordering Ford to pay the dividends and halt all construction at River Rouge.

Ford appealed to the Supreme Court. He was cross-examined by an attorney representing the Doge brothers, and the following interchange ensued:

• A. It has been my policy to force the price of the car down as fast as increased production would permit.

• Q. Then your conscience would not let you sell cars at the price that you did last year and make such awful profits, that is what you said, isn’t it?

• A. I don’t know that my conscience has anything to do with the case.

• Q. Why did you say it wasn’t right to get such awful profits if it wasn’t your conscience?

• A. It isn’t good business.

• Q. And for that reason you were not satisfied to continue to make such awful profits

• A. We don’t seem able to keep the profits down.

• Q. You are not able to keep them down; are you trying to keep them down? What is the Ford Motor Company organized for except for profits, will you tell me, Mr. Ford?

• A. Organized to do as much good as we can everywhere for everybody concerned.

• Q. Do you know of anything in the law that discusses anything about doing people good in connection with the manufacture of automobiles?

• A. I don’t know very much about law.

The Supreme Court decided in favor of Henry Ford. He went right on building the blast furnaces at River Rouge, lowering the price of his car and increasing wages.

END

Suggested Reading

Simonds, William Adams, Henry Ford: His Life~His Work~His Genius, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1946

Graves, Ralph H., The Triumph of an Idea: The Story of Henry Ford, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1934

Chicago - 1893

Prelude

On the stormy night of June 10, 1752, Benjamin Franklin and his son William walked to an open field, where Franklin proceeded to conduct an experiment of his own design. His apparatus was a kite, composed of two perpendicular cedar rods, covered by a silk cloth,. A small piece of iron wire was fixed at the top of the kite. At the bottom, Franklin attached a long length of hemp twine. A metal key was attached to the bottom of the twine, and a silk ribbon was attached to the key as an insulator.

Thunderclouds swept overhead. The kite was sent aloft. Contrary to the depictions of some later artists, lightning did not strike the kite. It is not even certain if there was any lightning that day. Rather, it was Franklin’s contention that, in a thunderstorm, the upper atmosphere itself is ionized with an electric charge, and his intention was to see if an electrical charge could be drawn “out of the air.”

As the kite flew upward toward the lower clouds, the hemp twine became very wet (acting as a conductor), and Franklin noticed that threads of the hemp twine began to stand erect and vibrate. Touching his knuckle to the metal key, he received a small shock. He then attached the hemp twine to a Leyden Jar, and as the electricity flowed through the twine, the jar became charged. Franklin had succeeded in drawing electricity from the heavens, and demonstrating that electricity is an invisible force which permeates all of nature.

The Beginning

During his lifetime Franklin was the premier experimental scientist in the field of electricity. However, he often bemoaned the fact (which he wrote about frequently) that he was frustrated in his inability to find practical applications for the discoveries he had achieved. Others would carry on this work.

The first successful attempt to find a practical application of electricity came with the invention and deployment of a telegraph system, beginning in the 1840s. Although today this is associated with the name Samuel Morse, the telegraph was actually invented by Abraham Lincoln’s friend Joseph Henry. This development, as profound as it was, was soon eclipsed by an even greater project—the effort, using electricity, to create “artificial daylight.” This was first accomplished by the British scientist Humphrey Davy. In 1806 he demonstrated his Arc Lamp, which produced electrically generated light. It worked, but due to the limitations of the device itself and the physical requirements necessary to operate it on a large scale, it found only limited use. Perhaps the most successful demonstration of Arc lighting was that by Father Joseph Neri in San Francisco in 1876 (see: A Grand Jollification Time: the 1876 San Francisco Centennial Celebration)

By the mid-19th century, several individuals were working on the development of an incandescent light bulb. These included Warren de la Rue who created an incandescent lamp using a platinum filament in 1840. This lamp functioned, but only for very brief periods in the laboratory. In 1878 Joseph Swan developed a functional incandescent lamp. Swan used his lamps to light up a theater in London, and he formed the Swan Electric Light Company. Unfortunately, Swan’s lamp was hampered by its use of copper wiring, its low resistance and the very short life of the bulbs.

Enter Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison developed his own incandescent lamp almost simultaneous with Joseph Swan, and, in fact, both inventions were patented in 1880, Swan’s in Britain and Edison’s in America.

Because of the competing patents, Edison and Swan agreed to merge their efforts and in 1883 formed the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company. Over time, Edison began to exercise the dominant role in the partnership, and the company went through several transformations, finally emerging as General Electric in 1892.1

Edison’s light “lamps” were of a more advanced design than Swan’s, but he incorporated Swan’s use of cellulose filaments, eventually inventing the metallized cellulose filament. Earlier, Edison had spent thousands of hours in testing hundreds of different materials for use as filaments, while also perfecting his vacuum bulb.

From the beginning, Edison was focused on not simply a localized generation of electrical light, but the ability to create systems where electrical light could be deployed over a large geographic area. His first demonstration of this, in Manhattan, came in September 1882. Eventually, his network of electrical lighting grew to a grid of more than 10,000 lights and spelled the beginning of the end of the “gaslight era.”2

Dynamos & Generators

Electrical lighting was all very good in the laboratory, or in a localized setting, but for its deployment to be widely realized a powerful provider of electricity was required. During the second half of the 19th century many advances were made in this area, particularly in Britain and continental Europe, but with indispensable contributions coming from America. Most historians begin the tale of electrical power generation with the invention of the Faraday Disk, by Michael Faraday in 1832; however, several scientists, including Joseph Henry in America, had developed similar devices several years before Faraday.

These earliest generators all functioned on the basis of generating an electro-magnetic field which produced an electrical current, but the earliest of these—known as dynamos—were capable of only producing a small volume of Direct Current (DC). Through the middle of the 19th century, these dynamos were improved and used in limited ways outside the laboratory. All of Edison’s early electrical experiments were conducted using Direct Current,

One of the prerequisites for the widespread deployment of electricity was the need for a power source which could convert mechanical energy into electricity on a mass scale. This was provided by combining steam power with electricity generation. Steam engines were capable of infusing electrical generators with far more power to generate and operate the electro-magnetic processes. By the 1880s, several projects were underway—in Germany, Britain and the United States—for centralized power generation. The first large scale central power station in America was Edison’s Pearl Street Station in New York, which began operating in September 1882. The station had six 200 horsepower Edison dynamos, each powered by a separate steam engine and producing 110 volts of Direct Current. The invention of the modern steam turbine in 1884 by the British engineer Charles Parsons, made the operation of the dynamos even more efficient.

Transformers and the War of the Currents

The deployment of electricity through Direct Current dynamos (generators) had already proven the potential for the widespread use of electricity by the 1880s, but Direct Current’s limitations presented a serious roadblock. Direct Current could only operate at a low wattage, its range was limited to a small geographic area and the DC generators were expensive to operate and difficult to integrate into an electrical grid. A leading problem was the exorbitant cost of the massive copper wiring that was required. There was no way for a large area, let alone an entire nation, to be “electrified.”

The solution arrived with Alternating Current (AC). Several experiments into AC began in the 1870s in both Britain and France. Alternating Current was much more powerful, but a paramount challenge was the need to transform the high-wattage AC into a usable lower-wattage current at the point of consumption (i.e., in industry, transportation, lighting, etc.). This was solved through the invention of the transformer (sometimes called “alternator”).

Work had begun on this in Europe by the mid-1880s, but the two individuals responsible for the mass deployment of Alternating Current were George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. Several European inventors, including Walter Baily, Elihu Thomson and Marcel Depres had earlier developed primitive transformers, utilizing what was called a “rotating magnetic field.” The idea was to be able to quickly and efficiently “step-up” and “step-down” the voltage of the Alternating Current. Perhaps the most advanced early transformer at that time was that built by Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs.

In 1885 George Westinghouse founded the Westinghouse Electric Company, with the express purpose of developing Alternating Current for the transmission of electricity. In 1886, he purchased the patents of the Gaulard/Gibbs transformer for $50,000 and assembled a team of scientists, led by William Stanley, with the hope that the Gaulard/Gibbs transformer could be improved for use in America. What they discovered was that the Guilard/Gibbs transformer was very crude and completely unusable. For months Westinghouse worked to improve the transformer, but eventually he discarded it entirely, and decided to start from scratch. He would retain the principle but make an entirely new design of his own. He accomplished this within three weeks, and it must be noted that he did not “oversee” the work; rather the new transformer was invented solely by him.

Westinghouse’s system allowed the generated electricity to be carried through miles of wiring with minimal loss of power. The first “field test” of Westinghouse’s transformer took place in March 1886, when an electric current was transmitted four miles at Lawrenceville, Massachusetts. Nine months later, Buffalo, New York became the first city in the world to receive electric light and power on a commercial scale utilizing Westinghouse’s equipment. This was the beginning of the “Age of Electricity,” all due to Westinghouse’s Alternating Current.

What Westinghouse made possible was the transmission of electricity over long distances over thinner and cheaper wires at very high voltage (up to 1,000 volts), and the ability to “step down” (reduce) the voltage at the destination for distribution to users. This allowed AC to be used in street lighting, lighting for small businesses and domestic customers and ultimately for transportation and manufacturing. Edison’s DC plants could not deliver electricity to customers more than one mile from the plant, and left a patchwork of unsupplied customers between plants, even in urban areas. Small cities and farm areas were entirely left out of the Edison scenario, leaving a large part of the nation without electrical service. Westinghouse’s breakthrough was greatly aided by his partnership with the scientist Nikola Tesla, and together they solved all of those problems.

Despite his genius, Edison’s role in the War of the Currents was lamentable. He insisted that Alternating Current was unworkable, and the high voltages used were dangerous. As George Westinghouse installed his first AC systems in 1886, Thomas Edison struck out personally against his chief rival stating:

“Just as certain as death, Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size. He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically.”

Chicago

The 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago has been discussed in an earlier post in this series (see: “1876 and 1893: The American System Dazzles the World“). Here we revisit that scene because this is where the decisive event in the War of the Currents took place. Early on in the planning for the Exposition a decision was made to install electric lighting. Westinghouse Electric won the contract, beating out a rival bid from Edison’s General Electric. Westinghouse engineers installed twelve huge generators, each of which produced 1,000 horsepower of alternating current. These generators powered not just the lighting but also a plethora of machines and inventions, many of which were displayed in Electricity Hall. To honor the father of electricity research, a statue of Benjamin Franklin with his kite was displayed at the entrance to that Hall.

The centerpiece of the Westinghouse exhibit was a room devoted to the “Tesla Polyphase System.” Tesla had developed a revolutionary approach (the “polyphase system”), using two separate alternating currents in the transformer. This made it work flawlessly, with a steady uniform motion and the ability to pass through a greater volume of current. The Chicago exhibit included the induction motors, transformers and model generators, showing on a miniature scale how alternating current could be transmitted great distances to serve the needs of the public. All of this was designed to educate the fair-goers about Alternating Current.3

What truly astounded the millions who visited the Chicago Exhibition was the fairgrounds at night. Westinghouse used 25 percent of all of the light bulbs that then existed in the world to illuminate the buildings and grounds. The effect of this, reflecting off the white facades of the buildings and the glimmering surfaces of the lagoons and canals was stunning. People literally stood in awe of the dazzling sight. This was made possible by the use of the newly-invented “Tesla Coil,” an air-cored, dual-tuned resonant transformer that was used to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current. The Age of Electricity had begun.

Niagara Falls

By the mid-1890s plans were underway to harness the immense power of Niagara Falls for the mass production of electricity. A competition was held, with seventeen companies competing to secure the contract. George Westinghouse refused to submit a proposal remarking “These people are trying to secure $100,000 worth of information by offering prizes, the largest of which is $3,000. When they are ready to do business, we will show them how to do it.” All of the seventeen proposals were rejected, and eventually Westinghouse was awarded the contract, once again beating out his closest rival, General Electric.

Westinghouse’s contract to build the Niagara power station called for three mammoth generators, each capable of producing 5,000 horsepower of electricity. Westinghouse was given a deadline that these had to be installed within twenty-four months. Westinghouse, Tesla and their team did it in eighteen months. These were the largest and most powerful generators in the world, and the Niagara Project was fully operational in 1895. From the first day of operations, the Niagara Project was generating more electricity than all of the other power facilities in the United States combined. But Westinghouse did not stop there. By 1902 seven more generators were added (bringing the total to ten), and the Niagara complex was operating at 50,000 horsepower to produce electricity. The War of the Currents was over. By 1902, 61 percent of electrical generating capacity in the United States came from systems using Alternating Current, and this increased to 95 percent by 1917.

On January 12, 1897, a gathering of 350 dignitaries was arranged to celebrate the triumph of the Niagara project. Nikola Tesla was asked to deliver the keynote address, and in his remarks, he said:

“Among all these many departments of research, there is one which is of the greatest significance for the comfort and existence, of mankind, and that is the electrical transmission of power. . . We have many a monument of the past ages exemplifying the greatness of nations, power of men, love of art and religious devotion. But that monument at Niagara has something of its own, worthy of the scientific age, a true monument of enlightenment and of peace. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering. . . Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies.”

Buffalo

Most people today think of Buffalo New York, if they think of it at all, as an aging rust-belt city of little importance, but in 1890 it was the 8th largest city in America, the nation’s premier port on the eastern Great Lakes and a major manufacturing center. In 1896 George Westinghouse brought electricity to the entire city of Buffalo, the first city in the world to be fully electrified. This was not a demonstration project; it was the future.

Once the initial stage of the Niagara project had been completed in 1895, Westinghouse began to build transmission lines to the city of Buffalo, 20 miles away. At that time Buffalo already possessed one small electrical plant, which supplied power to 12 carbon Arc Lamps on the city’s main street. That was the full extent of electrical usage in the city. But, only one year after beginning construction on the transmission lines, on November 15, 1896, Nikola Tesla flipped the switch and the first electricity from Niagara Falls reached the city. Westinghouse built an additional generator inside the city, and soon electricity—and lighting—was flowing to thousands of homes and businesses and newly electrified streetcars. Within months both manufacturing and the region’s agriculture were revolutionized with the introduction of electricity. Buffalo became the first fully-electrified city in the world.

Buffalo was the proof-of-principle. From there Westinghouse moved on to other upstate New York cities, including Rochester and Syracuse, and then into New York City. Beginning in 1904, the creation of the New York City Subway system was made possible through the introduction of electrical current. Streetcar systems were electrified; water management systems were electrified, all street-lighting was electrified; railroads were electrified; and step-by-step manufacturing was electrified, making possible the stunning breakthroughs led by Henry Ford and others. A massive electrification of manufacturing in America took place between 1900 and 1930, as the price of generated electricity steadily dropped throughout those years.

All Hail the American System

George Westinghouse was an intimate friend of William McKinley, being both an Elector for McKinley in 1896 and subsequently moving to Washington, DC where he met with McKinley on a regular basis. Like McKinley, Westinghouse not only supported the American System of Economics, but he firmly believed that the progress that was being created must first-and-foremost benefit the people, not the Wall Street and other financial Trusts. In this regard, Westinghouse also resembled his partner Nikola Tesla who rejected the idea of amassing huge personal riches from his inventions, declaring that his efforts were intended to benefit the people. McKinley and Westinghouse were also both Christians, and their Christian faith was central to the morality they brought to business and politics.4

The successes in Chicago, Niagara Falls and Buffalo must not be seen as isolated phenomena; they all transpired—as did the slightly later accomplishments of the Wright brothers and Henry Ford—in the “Era of Protection,” made possible by the McKinley Tariff of 1891 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897. The gift of “Light to the World” by Westinghouse and Tesla was intended to benefit all of humanity, and during those years the enemy was J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt and the Wall Street financial trusts, whose only goal was the creation of monopolies and the maximization of financial profit. Westinghouse was an outspoken critic of the Trusts, condemning their actions to fix prices and restrain competition. During the “Current War,” it had been J.P. Morgan and his allies, now in control of General Electric, who had deployed a huge propaganda campaign against Westinghouse, charging that his Alternating Current posed a deadly threat to the public.

Westinghouse came from an abolitionist family, and like McKinley, his father had been involved in iron manufacturing. Throughout his life he was an unmovable supporter of both labor unions and high wages, as was McKinley himself. There was no conflict between labor and capital in their outlooks. The American System would benefit all.

This same commitment—that electricity was a gift that should be used for the benefit of the people—would surface again, decades later, with the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1933 Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge project which encompassed more than 80,000 square miles in seven southeastern States, including one of the most impoverished regions in the nation. Massive facilities were built for both water management and electricity generation, the effect of which was to lift millions out of poverty. Two years later, in 1935, Roosevelt issued an Executive Order creating the Rural Electrification Administration to bring electricity to farms and rural areas throughout the country. It should be noted that as late as 1930, of the 6.3 million farms in America, only 3 percent (!) had electricity. After 1935, farms were electrified, production increased and prosperity ensued.

This was, and is, the American System. As Nikola Tesla said at Niagara Falls:

[The Niagara Project] “is a true monument of enlightenment and of peace. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.”

George Washington, in prayer, at Valley Forge

Scene 1 - Lexington (April 19, 1775)

On the evening of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere crossed the Charles River in a rowboat, acquired a horse, and set out on his famous “ride,” arriving in Lexington about midnight. There he stopped at the home of the Reverend Jonas Clarke, pastor of the Church of Christ in Lexington, where both John Hancock and Samuel Adams were in hiding. An urgent discussion ensued, and the decision was made to oppose the imminent British incursion into Cambridge with military force. Hancock asked Pastor Clarke if the local people would fight; Clarke replied, “I have trained them for this very hour; they will fight, and, if need be, die, too, under the shadow of the house of God!” Word went out, and armed men began to gather on the Lexington Green at 2:00 AM, with Clarke the first to arrive. By daybreak, about 100 American patriots blocked the path of the British columns. Most of these men were members of Clarke’s congregation at the Church of Christ. When the British troops first appeared at Lexington, it was Rev. Clarke, his congregation and his Church who stood in their way. At the conclusion of the fateful battle, eight Americans lay dead, all members of Clarke’s church. Viewing the dead and wounded on Lexington Green, Clarke proclaimed, “From this day will be dated the liberty of the world.”

Later in the day, in the British advance to Concord and subsequent retreat under fire to Boston, most who awaited the British along the road were members of either Clarke’s church or from the churches of the Rev. Phillips Payson and the Rev. Benjamin Balch, both of whom had rallied their congregations to meet the returning British. As word of the fighting spread, other pastors quickly responded and sent word out to their congregants to join the attack on the retreating British troops.

Years later in recalling those events, the Rev. William Ware of Cambridge wrote, “It would not be beyond the truth to assert that there was no person at that time and in that vicinity—not only no clergyman, but no other person of whatever calling or profession—who took a firmer stand for the liberties of the country or was more ready to perform the duties and endure the sacrifices of a patriot than the minister of Lexington.”

Scene 2 - Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775)

On the morning of June 17, when word came that fighting had commenced at Bunker Hill, several Christian ministers rushed to give support. Rev. David Grosvenor left his pulpit in mid-sermon and, with rifle in hand, marched to the scene of action. He was accompanied by the Rev. Jonathan French, pastor of South Church at Andover. At the battle-site they were met by Rev. John Martin of Rhode Island, who, after praying with the soldiers at Bunker Hill, seized a musket and fought gallantly to the close of the battle. He became known as the “Fighting Parson of Bunker Hill.” One day after the Battle, Martin preached to the remnants of his shattered regiment from Nehemiah iv. 14: “And I said unto the nobles and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, Be ye not afraid of them. Remember the Lord which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons and daughters, your wives and your houses.” Later, on the Day of Prayer, authorized by the Continental Congress to be observed on July 20, 1775, he expanded on this sermon. At the Great Valley Baptist Church in Tredyffryn, Pennsylvania. He said:

“Alas! alas! that ever there was occasion of even a defensive war: but occasion there has been and occasion there now is. The reason why a defensive war seems so awful to good people is they esteem it to be some kind of murder, but this is a very great mistake, for it is no more murder than a legal process against a criminal. The end is the same, the mode is different. In some cases it is the only mode left to obtain justice. And surely that religion is not from a heaven which is against justice on earth. .

“We have no choice left to us but to submit to absolute slavery and despotism, or as freemen to stand in our own defense and endeavor a noble resistance. Matters are at last brought to this deplorable extremity. Every reasonable method of reconciliation has been tried in vain. Our addresses to our king have been treated with neglect or contempt. . . Now therefore let us join, and fight for our brethren. Remember our Congress is in imminent danger. It is composed of men of equal characters and fortunes of most, if not superior to any in North America. — These worthy gentlemen have ventured all in the cause of liberty for our sakes. . . if we do not stand by them, even unto death, we should be guilty of the basest ingratitude, and entail on ourselves everlasting infamy. . . Oh! remember if you submit to arbitrary measures, you will entail on your sons despotic power. Your sons and your daughters must be strangers to the comforts of liberty. They will be considered like beasts of burden, only made for their masters’ use. If the groans and cries of posterity in oppression can be any argument, come now, my noble countrymen, fight for your sons and your daughters.”

At least 13 ministers served at Bunker Hill. At least four would be killed in the battle. Some provided moral support and guidance, some tended the injured, some picked up guns and fought, and many brought members of their congregations with them. One was the Rev. Samuel McClintock of Greenland, New Hampshire. During the battle McClintock stood in sight of the soldiers. He did not carry a weapon but raised his arms in prayer throughout the battle, a scene captured later by Jonathan Trumbull in his painting. Another, more militant, participant that day was the Rev. Joseph Thaxter. He had earlier participated in the fight at Concord Bridge, and at the battle of Bunker Hill forty-nine members of his regiment were killed at the Breed Hill redoubt. He later fought at the Battle of White Plains, and he became known for always carrying two loaded pistols throughout the war.

Perhaps one of the most valiant combatants at Bunker Hill was the Rev. David Avery. Some years earlier, Avery had been converted to the Christian faith by George Whitefield. He also studied medicine. When word of the crisis in Boston reached Vermont, Avery promptly gathered twenty men and marched toward Boston, recruiting additional troops along the way, At Bunker Hill, he did not bear arms, but he stayed to the end, and according to one report was “intrepid and fearless in battle, unwearied in his attentions to the sick and wounded.” Later in the War, Avery often rode with General Washington and took meals with him.

One month after the Battle, the Rev. Robert Davidson, a Philadelphia Presbyterian, delivered a sermon to the assembled American troops of that city. Pointing to the devastating losses the British had taken at Breed’s Hill, he took his theme from 1 Chronicles v. 22: “For there fell down many slain because the war was of God.”—which created the intense enthusiasm among officers and men.

Scene 3 - Newburyport, on the way to Canada (September 16, 1775)

In the Summer of 1775, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, with the full support of George Washington, decided upon America’s first offensive military action of the War—an invasion of Quebec. Two armies were organized to carry out the attack. The first, under General Montgomery, proceeded up the Hudson Valley to Montreal. The second, under Benedict Arnold, traveled through New England to attempt an overland expedition to Quebec City.

On September 16, 1775, Arnold’s army, with more than 1,000 volunteer soldiers, arrived at Newburyport, Massachusetts. That city would be their staging camp, from which the invasion force would head north. On the eve of their departure, soldiers of the army, led by Arnold and his second-in-command Daniel Morgan, entered the Newburyport First Presbyterian Church and proceeded to the tomb of George Whitefield in the basement vault of the Church. The Rev. Samuel Spring, an eye-witness, later reported on what transpired:

“On the Sabbath morning the officers, and as many of the soldiers as could be crowded on to the floor of the house, were marched into the Presbyterian Church in Federal Street. They marched in with colors flying and drums beating and formed two lines through which I passed—they presenting arms and the drums rolling until I was seated in the pulpit. Then the soldiers stacked their arms all over the aisles and I preached to the army and to the citizens who crowded the galleries from this text: ‘If thy spirit go not with us, carry us not up hence.’” After the service the general officers gathered around me. The men requested a visit to Whitefield’s tomb. The sexton was hunted up, the key procured, and we descended to his coffin. He had lain in the tomb six years but was in good preservation. The officers induced the sexton to take off the lid of the coffin. The body had nearly all returned to dust. Some portions of his graveclothes remained. His collar and wristbands, in the best preservation, were taken and carefully cut in little pieces and divided among them.”

The soldiers took small pieces from Whitefield’s garments—from his shirt, his coat and his trousers—and shared them among themselves. They tucked them in their boots or sewed them to their coats or put them in the lining of their hats. All of these volunteer soldiers who gathered around his tomb knew of Whitefield, and many had personally heard him speak at one or more of the multitude of his public sermons. To them he was the “Apostle of the Age,” and they would take these “holy relics” with them on the arduous journey to Canada.

The Black Regiment

The examples given above, of Lexington, Bunker Hill and Newburyport, tell only a minuscule portion of the larger picture. During the initial stages of the Revolution—1775 and 1776—the ranks of Washington’s Army and the local militias were filled with congregants from dozens of Christian churches, and it was the ministers of those churches who inspired these men to abandon their homes and fight for liberty, sometimes personally leading them into battle.

Perhaps the most famous example of this was the Rev. Peter Muhlenberg (1746-1807). On January 21, 1776, at a service in his Lutheran Woodstock, Virginia church, Muhlenberg, took his sermon text from the third chapter Ecclesiastes, which starts with “To every thing there is a season. . .” After reading the eighth verse, “a time of war, and a time of peace,” he declared, “And this is the time of war!” With those words, Muhlenberg unbuttoned and removed his clerical robe to reveal a Colonel’s uniform. He instructed that the doors of the church be opened, and outside the church door a military band began a drum roll. Muhlenberg called on his parishioners to step forward in defense of their country. Men, sitting in the pews, turned to kiss their wives and children, and then walked down the aisle to enlist. Within half an hour, 162 men were enrolled. The next day Muhlenberg led 300 new soldiers on a march out of the county. They would form the nucleus of the 8th Virginia Regiment. They would suffer at Valley Forge and Morristown and fight at Brandywine, Germantown and Yorktown. By the war’s end Muhlenberg would rise to the rank of Major General.

As inspiring as Muhlenberg’s story is, note that similar incidents occurred over and over again at dozens of churches throughout the colonies. A complete list of the churches and ministers involved in this is far too numerous to enumerate here. Just consider the following examples:

• Rev. Nathaniel Bartlett, of the Congregational Church of Redding, Connecticut, was a firebrand for the Colonial American cause. He allowed war provisions to be stored in his home, including gunpowder. Local Tories vowed to hang him if he were captured. Throughout the War, Bartlett made his parochial rounds with a loaded musket in one hand, and a Bible in the other.

• Rev. James Caldwell, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, urged his congregations to volunteer during the American Revolution. Because of his strong stand for liberty and his sermons encouraging the colonists to fight, he became a target for the tories. Each Sunday he would step into his pulpit, wearing two pistols, place them on the pulpit, and then proceed to preach powerful sermons about the need for Christians to stand for truth. He was so hated by the British they called him the “Rebel Priest.”

• Rev. John Steele, a Presbyterian minister from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, led a force of 100 volunteers to attack Howe’s army; Rev. Joseph Willard raised two full companies and then marched with them to battle; Rev. James Latta recruited almost all of his male parishioners and then joined with them as a common soldier; Rev. William Graham , of Paxton, Pennsylvania, was so dismayed by the reluctance of young men in his church to enlist that he signed his own name on the enrollment papers. This shamed them into patriotism, and they all became riflemen in Washington’s Army; Rev. Nathaniel Porter marched on foot like a common soldier through the wilderness to Fort Independence on Lake Champlain; Rev. Thomas Read of Pennsylvania enlisted in the militia, shouldered his musket; and with fifty others marched to Philadelphia to aid in defending it against Howe; and the next year saved Washington from being overwhelmed at Elk Ferry by his knowledge of the country; Rev. Samuel Spring, mentioned above, accompanied Benedict Arnold in his march through the wilderness, the only chaplain attached to the perilous expedition to Quebec.

• It was said of Rev. John Craighead that “he fought and preached alternately”; Rev. John Blair Smith was captain of a company that rallied to support the retreating Americans after the battle of Cowpens; Rev. James Hall commanded a company that armed against Cornwallis; Rev. Amnie Bobbins of Branford, Massachusetts accompanied Schuyler’s brigade as a volunteer to Canada and became an angel of mercy to the army when it was stricken down with the small pox; Rev. Stephen Farrar of New Hampshire led 97 of his parishioners to Cambridge to enlist in Washington’s Army; Rev. Benjamin Balch, whose congregants fought at Concord, later in the war served in the Navy. In one fierce battle against two British ships, Balch grabbed a musket and fought so fiercely that he earned the nickname “The Fighting Parson”.

• Rev. Azel Roe, minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Woodbridge, New Jersey placed himself under the enemy’s fire and refused to retire, rallying his fellow soldiers to stand and fight. Later, he was taken prisoner and thrown into the infamous Sugar House prison of New York; Rev. David Ely, a Congregational Minister from Connecticut, though surrounded by Tories, he preached rebellion, and the tories vowed to hang him on an oak that stood near his own church; Rev. Joseph Fish, from Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, was pastor of the Congregational Church in North Stonington, Connecticut. Although seventy-six years of age, he was invited to address the men assembled at the call of Washington for immediate volunteers. He said, “Were it not that my nerves are unstrung and my limbs enfeebled with age, on such a call as you have, I think I should willingly quit the desk, put off my priestly garments, buckle on the harness, and with trumpet in hand hasten to battle”; Rev. Abraham Keteltas – authored God Arising And Pleading His People’s Cause; Or The American War . . . Shewn To Be The Cause Of God, where he avowed that the American effort was “the cause of truth, against error and falsehood . . .the cause of pure and undefiled religion, against bigotry, superstition, and human invention . . .in short, it is the cause of heaven against hell.”

• Rev. Manasseh Cutler, a Congregational minister from Ipswich, Massachusetts. In 1778, he took part in General John Sullivan’s expedition to Rhode Island. Cutler was friends with both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. After the War, he became a member of the United States House of Representatives and in 1787 was influential in the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and wrote the section prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory.

• Rev. Isaac Lewis - of Stratford, Connecticut. When the British attempted to land at Norwalk, he assembled with his parishioners to repel them and saw a cannon ball land three feet away. Forced back by superior numbers, he witnessed the British burn down the town. Only one house was left standing, and into this the pastor gathered his people and preached to them from Isaiah lxiv. 11, 12: “Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned with fire, and all our pleasant things are laid waste. Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O Lord, wilt thou hold thy peace and afflict us very sore?” Lewis’s battle experience was brief but memorable. Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was adopted in July 1776, Isaac left wife, child, and family farm behind to go to war against the British. He fought in the Battle of Long Island, was shot in the thigh and crippled for life.

For those who think the above list is too long or tedious, please be aware that it is merely a partial list. Triple, quadruple or quintuple the number of Christian heroes could be named. It was the Christian ministers who recruited Washington’s army. As one historian observed, the Christian ministers “were far more effective than army recruiters in rounding up citizen-soldiers.”

In London, the paramount role of the American ministers in the Revolution was fully recognized. George III, Lord North and others raged against what they called the “Black Regiment” of Christian ministers, with the epithet referring to the black clerical robes that many of the clergymen wore. Word went out to the British field commanders that the Christian clergy were to be specifically targeted. Writing in 1864, the historian Joel Headley said:

“There was a class of clergymen and chaplains in the Revolution whom the British, when they once laid hands on them, treated with the most barbarous severity. Dreading them for the influence they wielded and hating them for the obstinacy, courage, and enthusiasm they infused into the rebels, they violated all the usages of war among civilized nations in order to inflict punishment upon them.”

• Rev. Naphtali Daggett, President of Yale — When the British attacked his New Haven home, Daggett fought them off with a rifle. After he was captured and unarmed, British soldiers stabbed him multiple times with their bayonets. Local townspeople secured Daggett’s release, but he died from the wounds.

• Rev. James Caldwell offered similar resistance in New Jersey, so the British burned his church, and he and his entire family were murdered.

• Rev. David Cauldwell of Pennsylvania had his house plundered, his library and furniture burned while he was hunted like a common felon. He was finally captured and was forced to witness as British officers burned his Presbyterian church to the ground. Shortly thereafter, Cauldwell’s wife was killed by British soldiers as they shot through the window of Cauldwell’s home, killing his wife as she sat on a bed, holding their child.

• Rev. Charles McKnight - one of the founders and trustees of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Reverend McKnight’s church at Middletown Point was burned in 1777, and Reverend McKnight was arrested. He was thrown into the British prison ship HMS Jersey in New York Harbor and treated with such brutality that he died soon after his release.

• Rev. Hezekiah Ripley - a Chaplain in the Continental Army and good friend of George Washington, He watched as British soldiers and Hessians burned down his church. Later, his house was burned to the ground. He was later captured, but escaped at night when the guards were sleeping.

• As stated above, Rev. Azel Roe, minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Woodbridge, New Jersey, was captured and thrown into the infamous Sugar House prison of New York

• Rev. John Witherspoon – the President of Princeton University, which the British charged was a “seminary of sedition,” he was repeatedly hunted by the British. Later, in 1776, he would sign the Declaration of Independence.

• In many of the colonies, particularly New York and Virginia, almost all of the non-Anglican churches were destroyed by the British, usually accompanied by great bloodshed. It should be pointed out that American Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Quaker and Baptist ministers refused to take the Oath of Allegiance to the British Monarch, something required of all Anglican clergymen since 1604.

A Chaplain at Brandywine

The following Sermon was delivered, at George Washington’s request, by a Reverend Trout to the assembled troops on the eve of the Battle of Brandywine (September 10, 1777):

Matthew xxvi — “They that take the sword shall perish by the sword!”

Soldiers and countrymen! We have met this evening, perhaps, for the last time. We have shared the toil of the march, the peril of the fight, the dismay of the retreat; alike we have endured cold and hunger, the abuse of the infernal foe, and outrage of the foreign oppressor. We have sat night after night beside the same campfire; shared the same rough soldiers’ fare; we have together heard the roll of the reveille which called us to duty or the beat of the tattoo which gave the signal for the hardy sleep of the soldier, with the earth for his bed and his knapsack for a pillow. And now soldiers and brethren, we have met in the peaceful valley on the eve of the battle while the sunlight is dying away behind yonder heights— the sunlight that to-morrow morn will glimmer on scenes of blood. We have met amid the whitening tents of our encampment; in times of terror and gloom have we gathered together. God grant it may not be for the last time.

It is a solemn moment. Brethren, does not the solemn voice of nature seem to echo the sympathies of the town? The flag of our country droops heavily from yonder staff. The breeze has died away along the green plain of Chadd’s Ford—the plain that spreads before us glistening in sunlight—the heights of the Brandywine arise dark and gloomy beyond the waters of yonder stream and all nature holds a pause of solemn silence on the eve of the uproar of the bloodshed and strife of tomorrow.

“They that take the sword shall perish by the sword,” and have they not taken the sword?

Let the blood-stained valley; the desolated homes; the burned farmhouse; the murdered farmer; let the whitening bones of our own countrymen answer!  Let the starving mother with the babe clinging to her withered breast— let her answer with the death rattle mingling with the murmuring tones that mark the last struggle for life; let the dying mother and her babe answer!

It was but a day past and our land slept in the light of peace.  War was not here, wrong was not here.  Fraud, and woe, and misery, and want dwelt not among us.  From the eternal solitude of the green woods arose the blue smoke of the settler’s cabin; and golden fields of corn looked forth from amid the waste of the wilderness; and the glad music of human voices awoke the silence of the forest.

Now! God of mercy! Behold the change. Under the shadow of a pretext, under the sanctity of the name of God invoking the Redeemer to their aid, do these foreign hirelings slay our people. They throng our towns; they darken our plains; and now they encompass our posts on the lonely plain of Chadd’s Ford. “They that take the sword shall perish by the sword,” Brethren! think me not unworthy of belief when I tell you that the doom of the Britisher is near!

Think me not vain when I tell you that beyond the cloud which now enshrouds us, I see gathering thick and fast the darker cloud and the blacker storm of Divine Retribution They may conquer us on the morrow!—might and wrong may prevail and we may be driven from the field—but the hour of God’s vengeance will come! Aye, if in the vast solitudes of eternal space; if in the heart of the boundless universe there throbs the being of an awful God, quick to revenge and sure to punish guilt, there will the man— George of Brunswick, called King— feel in his brain and in his heart the vengeance of the eternal Jehovah! a blight will be upon his life; a withered brain, an accursed intellect; a blight will be upon his children and his people. Great God! how dread the punishment!

Soldiers! I look around upon your familiar faces with a strange interest. Tomorrow we will all go forth to battle; for need I tell you that your unworthy minister will march with you— invoking God’s aid in the fight. We will march forth to battle. Need I exhort you to fight the good fight for your homesteads, your wives, and your children? And in the hour of battle, when all around is darkness, lit by the lurid cannon glare and the piercing musket flash, when the wounded strew the ground and the dead litter your path. Then remember, soldiers, that God is with you. The eternal God is with you and fights for you. God! the awful, the infinite, fights for you and you will triumph.

“They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.”

You have taken the sword; but not in the spirit of wrong and revenge. You have taken the sword for your homes, for your wives, and for your little ones. You have taken the sword for truth, for justice, and for right; and to you the promise is, be of good cheer for your foes have taken the sword in defiance of all man holds dear. They shall perish by the sword. And now, brethren and soldiers, I bid you all farewell. Many of us may fall in the fight of tomorrow. God rest the souls of the fallen; many of us may live to tell the story of the fight of tomorrow and in the memory of all will rest the quiet scenes of this autumn night.

Solemn twilight advances over the valley; the woods on the opposite heights fling their long shadows over the green of the meadow; around us are the tents of the continental host; the suppressed bustle of the camp; the hurried tread of the soldiers to and fro among the tents; the stillness that marks the eve of battle.

When we meet again, may the long shadows of twilight be flung over a peaceful land. God in heaven grant it! Amen.

George Whitefield

In a work like this one is tempted to go back and examine all of the influences at play that led into the outbreak of war in 1775. To do this justice one would really have to begin with the Plymouth colony in 1620, and the arrival of the Puritans in 1630. That is where the “freedom seed” was planted. Later, the path to Revolution began in 1684 with the revocation of the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an action which the Congregational ministers of Boston, led by the Rev. Increase Mather, fought fiercely against. This was repeated in many other colonies as the British Crown acted to transform all of them into Royal Colonies, by abolishing or limiting self-government. During those years, we see many individuals who fanned the flame of rebellion, including the Reverends John Wise, Samuel Willard, Jacob Duché, Jonathan Mayhew, Timothy Dwight and many others. Opposition to London’s tyrannical actions came originally from American Congregationalists and Presbyterians, but as the crisis deepened they were joined by Lutherans, Baptists, Catholics, a smattering of Quakers, and even a few dis-affected Anglicans. All of this is important—one might argue very important—but we must pass over any further discussion of it here. A detailed litany of those events will not deepen the understanding of what transpired. Instead, in this closing section, we shall focus on the ministry of George Whitefield.

“Upon his lips the Gospel appears even to the coarsest of men as sweet and as true as, in fact, it is.”

— George Washington on George Whitefield

To understand the profound influence of George Whitefield, it is crucial to recognize that between 1739 and 1770 more than 80 percent of the people then living in the American colonies had personally attended one or more of his sermons. In fact, by the time of his death in 1770, Whitefield had addressed more human beings than any other individual in human history.

His youth was turbulent, with ups and downs, and he was pulled in many directions. During those years, however, there were a number of religious works which had a lasting impact on him. One was Thomas á Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, which he read at the age of sixteen. He said that the work made him “impatient till the bell rang to call me to tread the courts of the Lord’s House.”

He was also influenced by William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Law was a theologian who lost all of his positions in the Church of England because of his refusal, in 1714, to swear an Oath of Allegiance to the new King George I. Law also authored a powerful rebuke of Bernard de Mandeville in 1723, in his Remarks on Mandeville’s ‘Fable of the Bees’. At the age of eighteen, George read and was greatly influenced by Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man, and Scougal’s message that “true religion was union of the soul with God, and Christ formed within us.”

At Oxford, he befriended John Wesley, beginning a long, sometimes affectionate and sometimes contentious relationship. In 1736 he was ordained as an Anglican minister, and the next year he undertook his first (of eight) trips to America. He had been invited to preach in Georgia by George Oglethorpe, the original anti-slavery founder of that colony. Whitefield was twenty-three years old.

On February 17, 1739, in England, George Whitefield lifted his voice and delivered his first out of doors sermon. This was unheard of at the time and was condemned by Church of England leaders. He preached again in Kingswood and this time to thousands. The meetings continued, night after night, and the crowds grew. The climax arrived on March 25, when more than twenty-three thousand people gathered to hear the young preacher’s final sermon. He then began open-air preaching in London itself. During the summer of 1739, Whitefield preached to somewhere between eight hundred thousand and one million people. It was more than any Englishman had ever addressed in the entire history of the nation.

On October 30, 1739, Whitefield arrived for the second time on American shores. Landing in Delaware, he traveled to Philadelphia, where he spoke from the Courthouse steps to a crowd of somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand. It was here that he met Benjamin Franklin, which began what would prove to be a life-long friendship. He next traveled to New York, stopping in New Jersey to preach at the “log college” (what would become Princeton University) of William Tennent and his son, Gilbert, He returned to Philadelphia and preached repeatedly. On November 29, the day of his departure, people thronged his door, pleading with him to remain. A company of two hundred horsemen escorted him from the city and the justices, who were in session, suspended their business until he had preached his final sermon.

In subsequent American trips, he repeatedly visited Philadelphia (and Franklin), but his mission took him to every corner of the 13 colonies. He rode south by horseback, through Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, preaching everywhere. He went to New England, preaching in Boston, Rhode Island and Connecticut. He preached to tens of thousands on the Boston Commons. He preached in many smaller surrounding towns. On one trip, in eight days he traveled 178 miles by horseback and preached sixteen times.

Whitefield found particular success in Connecticut. In fact, it is from the pen of a Connecticut farmer, a man named Nathan Cole, that we have one of the most moving testimonials of Whitefield’s fame and preaching power. Here, in part, is Cole’s account:

“Now it pleased God to send Mr. Whitefield into this land; and my hearing of his preaching at Philadelphia, like one of the old apostles, and many thousands flocking to hear him preach the Gospel, and great numbers were converted to Christ, I felt the Spirit of God drawing me by conviction; I longed to see and hear him and wished he would come this way …

“Then on a sudden, in the morning about 8 or 9 of the clock there came a messenger and said Mr. Whitefield preached at Hartford and Wethersfield yesterday and is to preach at Middletown this morning at ten of the clock. I was in my field at work. I dropped my tool that I had in my hand and ran home to my wife, telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach at Middletown, then ran to my pasture for my horse with all my might, fearing that I should be too late.

“Having my horse, I with my wife soon mounted the horse and went forward as fast as I thought the horse could bear; and when my horse got much out of breath, I would get down and put my wife on the saddle and bid her ride as fast as she could and not stop or slack for me except I bade her, and so I would run until I was much out of breath and then mount my horse again, and so I did several times to favour my horse. .

“As I drew nearer it seemed like a steady stream of horses and their riders, scarcely a horse more than his length behind another, all of a lather and foam with sweat, their breath rolling out of their nostrils every jump. Every horse seemed to go with all his might to carry his rider to hear news from heaven for the saving of souls. It made me tremble to see the sight, how the world was in a struggle.

“I found a vacancy between two horses to slip in mine … When I saw Mr. Whitefield come upon the scaffold, he looked almost angelical; a young, slim, slender youth, before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance. And my hearing how God was with him everywhere as he came along, it solemnized my mind and put me into a trembling fear before he began to preach; for he looked as if he was clothed with authority from the Great God, and a sweet solemn solemnity sat upon his brow, and my hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.”

Whitefield had read the earlier Puritan writings and he knew that New England had forgotten her God. When he preached to the descendants of “the first comers,” he reminded them of their past heritage, their calling that made the exploits of their ancestors possible. He delivered more than 175 sermons in New England to tens and tens of thousands. He engendered a revived vision of purpose that caused people to view their world differently. This was the effect, not only in New England, but throughout all of the colonies. Whitefield said “All things concur to convince me that America is to be my chief scene for action.”

Whitefield’s preaching turned the colonists to a God many had long forgotten. As with the apostles of the first century AD, he preached not simply good works or obedience to doctrine, but salvation through Jesus. His was a demanding calling, but it was also one of profound love. He called upon Americans to see themselves in terms of a divine destiny, to understand the true mission of America. He reminded them of their Puritan heritage and the dream of becoming a “City upon a hill,” a Christian light to all men. On the wings of these truths arose a new identity, an American identity. He stressed again and again that our inalienable rights came not from kings or parliaments but from God alone. The rapacious demands from imperial London, beginning with the taxes to pay off the imperial French-and-Indian-War debt, were the opening salvo of an imperial offensive, one that would end political and religious freedom. All of this would ultimately lead to revolution, and Whitefield saw this. His tireless work was the birth of what became the “Spirit of 1776.”

One of the most telling tributes to him comes from the wife of Jonathan Edwards. While touring Massachusetts, Whitefield was invited to preach at Northampton in the church of the famed Jonathan Edwards. Edwards, of course, was known for sermons like “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” After hearing Whitefield preach, Edwards’ wife Sarah said this of him, “He makes less of the doctrines than our American preachers generally do, and aims more at affecting the heart. It is wonderful to see what a spell he casts over an audience by proclaiming the simplest truths of the Bible. I have seen upwards of a thousand people hang on his words with breathless silence, broken only by an occasional half-suppressed sob.”

As time passed, Whitefield came under brutal attack. The Church of England was determined to destroy him. Former allies, like John Wesley deserted him. The attacks were the most brutal in his journeys in England, Scotland and Wales, where his meetings were broken up. He was beaten, stoned, even stabbed. His pulpits were smashed, and there was at least one attempt to assassinate him. In America, it was not as bad, but by the 1750s and 60s leading Anglican officials, together with London’s colonial authorities did everything they could, including hiring thugs to break up his sermons, to stop his preaching. But Whitefield did not stop.

One individual who never deserted Whitefield, who cherished and embraced their relationship, was Benjamin Franklin. The bond between the two men was unbreakable. Franklin once wrote to Whitefield: “I sometimes wish, that you and I were jointly employ’d by the Crown to settle a colony on the Ohio. . . to settle in that fine country a strong body of religious and industrious people. Might it not greatly facilitate the introduction of pure religion among the heathen, if we could, by such a colony, show them a better sample of Christians than they commonly see in our Indian traders?”

On February 13, 1766, Franklin was summoned to appear before the entire Parliament to answer questions about American opposition to the Stamp Act. This was not exactly a Star Chamber proceeding (like Franklin’s later appearance before the Privy Council in the Cockpit), but it was a grueling interrogation that went on for hours. Accompanying Franklin to the Parliament and standing at his side as he was forced to answer 174 separate questions, was George Whitefield. . . and no one else.

Whitefield knew a Day of Reckoning was coming for America. In 1764 he sent an urgent plea to the leading ministers of Portsmouth. It is blunt, but note the compassion, the tender devotion to the cause of America.

“I can’t in conscience leave the town without acquainting you with a secret. My heart bleeds for America. O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against both your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end. You have nothing but trouble before you.”

As the 1760s proceeded, he spoke often of liberty and the obligations of church and state to preserve it. And, in New England, he always admonished the people and their leaders to measure themselves against the courage and devout belief of the “old-comers” of 1620 and 1630. He awakened in hundreds of thousands of hearts a sense of their true destiny. Given the moronic “No Kings” protests of today, it is ironic that many of the Christian soldiers who marched into battle in 1775 and 1776 chanted “No King but King Jesus! No King but King Jesus!” This is why they pledged to God their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

George Whitefield died in 1770, simply worn out by the toll from decades of ceaseless labor. At the time of his death, Whitefield was the most famous man in America, more famous even than Benjamin Franklin. Knowing that the end was near for his friend and compatriot, Franklin wrote to his brother concerning Whitefield. He simply said, “He is a good man, and I love him.”

Those who followed later—the patriot ministers of 1775 and 1776 and the patriot soldiers from dozens of Christian congregations—were all Whitefield’s children. And it was through their courage that the American Republic was born.

For further reading:

• Clarke, Jonas, Opening of the War of the Revolution: 19th of April 1775-A Brief Narrative, Lexington Historical Society, 1901

• Headley, Joel, Chaplains & Clergy of the American Revolution, Charles Scribner, Bew York, 1864

• Mansfield, Stephen, Forgotten Founding Father: The Heroic legacy of George Whitefield, Highland Books, Cumberland House, Nashville, Tennessee, 2001

• Various authors, Sermons on the Outbreak of War, 1775, National Humanities Center, 2010/2013

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The 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, the premier national event celebrating the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence, opened its doors in May 1876 and continued into November of that year. During those six months, more than 10 million guests visited the Exposition grounds, almost 25 percent of the nation’s total population. This would be the equivalent, if we held such an Exposition today, of 82 million people attending.

The people came from every corner of the nation. Over 23,000 trains brought visitors to Philadelphia, often more than 100,000 per day. The Pennsylvania Railroad and the Reading Railroad also built rail tracks from downtown Philadelphia to the site of the Exposition. Over the course of the summer, almost 6 million people were carried on these trains to the fairgrounds. 200,000 visitors were there for Opening Day, and attendance peaked on September 28, when 275,000 visited the Exposition on a single day.

This was, of course, the 100th birthday of the creation of the American Republic. But it also took place only 11 years after the Union victory in the Civil War, and most of those Civil War veterans—who had fought, suffered and bled—were still alive. The Union had been saved, and the 13th 14th and 15th Amendments had guaranteed citizenship rights for the former slaves, thus honoring the promise in the Declaration of Independence that “All Men are created equal.” The Exposition was a celebration of human freedom, and at the same time a proclamation of what a free people are capable of accomplishing in advancing the human condition. No longer shackled by the oligarchical systems of Europe, free people were able to think, to invent, to act—to consciously and deliberately create a better future.

The celebration also took place only 7 years after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, the greatest of the modern “Wonders of the World.” 1876 was the peak of the Lincoln economic era, with the full effect of Lincoln’s Greenbacks, Tariffs, and National Banking policies creating the most powerful productive economy in human history. The Centennial was both a glorious celebration of the Principles of 1776, as well as a showcase for the staggering progress that was being accomplished in science, technology, industry and agriculture by the free citizens of the American Republic

1876 – PHILADELPHIA

On May 10, President Ulysses Grant opened the Exposition with the following remarks:

“My countrymen, it has been thought appropriate upon this Centennial occasion to bring together in Philadelphia, for popular inspection, specimens of our attainments in the industrial and fine arts, and in literature, science and philosophy, as well as in the great business of agriculture and of commerce. That we may the more thoroughly appreciate the excellencies and deficiencies of our achievements, and also give emphatic expression to our earnest desire to cultivate the friendship of our fellow-members of this great family of nations, the enlightened agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing people of the world have been invited to send hither corresponding specimens of their skill to exhibit on equal terms in friendly competition with our own. . .

“And now, fellow-citizens, I hope a careful examination of what is about to be exhibited to you will not only inspire you with a profound respect for the skill and taste of our friends from other nations, but also satisfy you with the attainments made by our own people during the past one hundred years. I invoke your generous co-operation with the worthy Commissioners to secure a brilliant success to this International Exposition. . . I declare the International Exposition now open.”

Immediately following President Grant’s speech, the flag of the United States was raised atop the Exposition’s Main Building, and then a chorus of more than 1,000 singers, accompanied by the forty-foot high Centennial Organ, sang the Hallelujah Chorus from Handle’s Messiah, and this was followed by a 100-gun salute.

The overall size of the Exposition was (staggering.) There were more than 250 buildings, spread out over an area of about one square mile, significantly larger than today’s New York Botanical Garden. There were tens of thousands of individual exhibits. Within the grounds of the Exposition were five major buildings: the Main Building, Memorial Hall, Machinery Hall, Agricultural Hall, and Horticultural Hall.

• The Main Building was the largest building in the world. At 1,880 feet, in length it was longer than 6 football fields, and it occupied 21 acres. More than 30,000 businesses and individuals exhibited their wares in this building.

• Machinery Hall was the second largest structure. Every conceivable type of machinery and tool was on display, most making their first appearance. It was a show case for state of the art industrial technology.

• Memorial Hall was devoted entirely to the arts and designed as a permanent art museum, while Agricultural Hall, and Horticultural Hall were each devoted to the creative and scientific breakthroughs related to their specific fields, again with thousands of exhibits.

The most impressive building on the fairgrounds was Machinery Hall. The huge glass and iron structure contained miles of overhead belts and pulleys for driving steam-powered line shafts. There were 8,000 operating machines in the 14-acre building. The centerpiece of Machinery Hall was the 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engine, which, through a series of shafts totaling more than a mile in length, powered not only the machines in Machinery Hall but all the devices in the entire Exposition. The Corliss Engine was built by George H. Corliss at his factory in Providence, Rhode Island. Visitors who viewed its operation were awestruck. The message was clear for all to see:—America was now the world’s leading industrial power.

Thousands of new inventions were showcased at the Exposition. It was a dizzying display, and as much as it celebrated the first 100 years of the American Republic, the Exhibition and all of the individuals who displayed their wares were looking forward—to the dawn of a productive and prosperous future:

• John A. Roebling & Sons Company displayed a slice of their 5 ¾ inch diameter cable to be used for the planned construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. This was a revolutionary cable, covered with Zinc and with a strength of 160,000 pounds per square inch.

• Baldwin Locomotives had a large exhibit featuring breakthrough designs in railroad technology. In the years following the Exposition, Baldwin locomotive engines would be shipped to China, Australia, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere.

• Pratt & Whitney of Hartford, Connecticut and William Sellars & Co. of Philadelphia both displayed what they called large “planing machines,” capable of very fine metal work. This was the birth of the modern machine tool industry.

• The world’s first elevated railway was built to carry passengers between the buildings, designed by Civil War veteran General LeRoy Stone.

• At the Agricultural Hall, new types of harvesters, reapers plows, cultivators, threshers and other agricultural equipment were presented, as well as new types of crops that were resistant to disease and would produce higher yields.

• The Remington Company exhibited its new invention, the typewriter; the first internal combustion engine, invented by George Brayton, was also demonstrated; the Emerson Stone Saw Company of Pittsburgh used a diamond circular saw to make precision cuts through large blocks of stone; and the first rubber boots and shoes manufactured by Charles Goodyear were displayed.

Also participating in the Exhibition were a number of young inventors who would become famous in the years to come. Thomas Edison won the Centennial Award for best new invention, with his presentation of the Quadruplex Telegraph, capable of transmitting four messages simultaneously over a single telegraph wire. Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone was set up at opposite ends of Machinery Hall, amazing those who spoke over it. George Eastman and George Westinghouse both attended the Exposition, as did the father of Henry Ford.

This was an explosion of American ingenuity, but for our purposes here, consider the extraordinary effect—not just economic, but the CULTURAL effect on the American people—that flowed from the Philadelphia Exposition. In only four years, between 1876 and 1880, more than 10,000 new U.S. patents were issued for a wide variety of machines, devices and ingenious inventions,—all imagined and created by inspired American citizens.

FOUR DECADES OF EXPLOSIVE GROWTH

The years from 1861 to 1901—i.e. from the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln to the assassination of William McKinley—represent a profound period in American history. These four decades witnessed the most rapid and most powerful industrial, technological and scientific growth, not only in America, but in all of human history. This was the “Era of Protection.” Despite attacks on the tariff system, particularly under President Grover Cleveland, during those 40 years tariff rates never fell below 30 to 35 percent and reached their peak in the 1890s with the McKinley and Dingley Tariffs.

Manufacturing output boomed. New technologies—really revolutions in technologies—followed one after another. Whole new industries were created. Major scientific advances were accomplished. Agriculture flourished. The high tariffs, combined with the efforts of McKinley and others to increase the availability of productive credit, created an era of unprecedented prosperity.

The McKinley and Dingley Tariffs led to the creation of whole new industries. The Tin-Plate industry was created from scratch. Motivating the tariff on tin, Congressman McKinley argued:

“We have now four mills which can be at once adapted to making tin plate. They can produce about 4,000 tons a year. It would require ninety mills of the dimensions of those now here to make the tin plate used in our country, and it would require over 23,000 men to be employed directly in this industry. But the benefits would not stop there. The additional labor in mining the coal and ores, in producing the pig metal, the lead, the tin, the lumber for boxing, and the sulfuric acid, would furnish labor to 50,000 workmen and bring support to 200,000 people. The capital required would be above $30,000,000. I know no more certain and encouraging field for labor and capital than is here presented. We have not hesitated, therefore, to recommend the advanced duty.”

Confounding tariff critics, not only did tin production soar, but under the high tin tariffs, the price of tin-plate dropped from $6.75 for a box of tin-plate in 1880, to $3.87 in 1895 and then to $2.99 in 1898.

Another industry that was revived and then taken to an unprecedented new level by the McKinley Tariff was the American glass industry, which had been almost wiped out between 1830 and 1860 by free trade policies and Britain flooding the American market with cheap glass products. In 1860 there existed no domestic production of either polished or plate glass. Glass production was revived under the Civil War tariffs, but even then the production of polished glass stood at zero in 1865. Under the 1891 McKinley Tariff glass production exploded. By 1895, 97 percent of plate glass and 82 percent of polished glass sold in America was produced in U.S. factories by American labor. By 1899 there were 355 glass factories in the nation, and the introduction of continual technological breakthroughs would result in American dominance in glass-making by 1910. Wages for glass-workers also rose, from an average of $479 a year in 1890 to $521 in 1900.

During those years, railroad mileage went from a pre-war total of about 9,000 miles to 35,000 by 1865. Then, as the Era of Protection continued, total mileage increased to 78,000 in 1874, 199,000 in 1900 and 270,000 in 1910. That is, in a span of 36 years from 1874 to 1910, more than 192,000 miles of railroad trackage was built. Goods carried by the rail lines increased enormously, from 90 million tons in 1860, to 235 million in 1880, and 425 million in 1900, an increase of almost 500 percent in 40 years.

This “Industrial Renaissance” created an even greater impact on the steel industry. In 1880 domestic steel production was 1.3 million tons annually. By 1900 this reached 11.2 million tons, and in 1910 America produced 28.3 million tons of steel. That is an increase of more than 2,000 percent in only 30 years. Already, by the time of President McKinley’s second inauguration in 1901, America was making more steel than Britain and Germany combined.

Between 1880 and 1910, the annual output of bituminous coal skyrocketed from 9 million tons to 138 million. The United States rose from the fourth largest manufacturing power in 1860 to first place by 1894. In the four years of the McKinley Presidency, steel production increased 111 percent, electrical equipment production increased 271 percent and farm equipment increased 149 percent. During those same years, wages increased 10 percent and employment by 20 percent. Prices also fell, driven by productivity gains through technological innovation. For example, the price of steel rail (for the railroads) went from $68 a ton to $32 a ton.

This was also an era of unprecedented investment in research and development (R&D). The Bessemer process revolutionized steel production, and new technologies and inventions similarly transformed glass production, the refining of oil and almost every industry in America. The “Era of Protection,” was the most inventive period in American history, even down to the present day. The number of patents issued by the U.S. government went from 13,000 in 1880 to 25,000 in 1900. By 1901 America led the world in steel, coal, and oil production. Electricity had been introduced into many major cities. By 1900, there were 14,000 automobiles on the road, and McKinley was the first President to ride in an automobile (a Stanley Steamer). There were also more than 1.5 million telephones in use, and McKinley was the first President to have a fully electrically-wired White House.

1893 – CHICAGO

In 1893, the people of America, through their elected Representatives in Congress, created the largest Exposition in human history. This was the World Columbian Exposition, organized to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The Exposition was like nothing seen before. In size and attendance it dwarfed the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition. The fairgrounds covered 690 acres. More than 200 buildings were constructed, including 14 “great buildings.” There were more than 60,000 individual exhibits, and over the course of the summer and early Autumn of 1893, 27 million of people visited the Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. On October 9, 1893, the fair drew 751,026 visitors in a single day.

As in Philadelphia, many of the buildings contained exhibits of the powerful advances in American industrial and scientific might. These included the Agricultural Building, the Mines and Mining Building, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, the Machinery Hall, the Electricity Building, the Transportation Building, the Fisheries Building and the Horticultural Building. A plethora of new inventions, as well as many new commercial products, were presented to the public. First prize was awarded to Josephine Cochran for her invention of the world’s first dishwashing machine. The Electricity building, with Nikola Tesla’s exhibit on Alternating Current, drew huge crowds.

An elite team of leading architects were employed to design the “great buildings” of the Exposition. This included Louis Sullivan who designed and built Agricultural Hall. The “City Beautiful” architectural movement arose out of the Chicago Exposition, transforming architecture and city planning in many American cities, including Philadelphia and Washington, DC. The Exposition was built around a series of man-made canals and lagoons, and it became popularly know as the “White City” because many of the buildings were sheathed in white stucco.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Early on in the planning for the Exposition a decision was made to install electric lighting. One must grasp the audacity of this decision. Although Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb had been invented 14 years earlier, large scale use of electricity had never been attempted before. The two main competitors to illuminate the Exposition were (Edison’s) General Electric and Westinghouse Electric, and this competition was to be the decisive victory for Westinghouse in the “Battle of the Currents” between Thomas Edison’s “Direct Current” and Westinghouse’s “Alternating Current.”

To provide electricity for the Fair, Westinghouse engineers installed twelve huge generators, each of which produced a thousand horsepower of alternating current. These generators powered not just the lighting but also a plethora of machines and inventions, many of which were displayed in Electricity Hall. To honor the father of electricity research, a statue of Benjamin Franklin with his kite was displayed at the entrance to that Hall.

The Westinghouse exhibit included models, working machines, graphical displays and placards, all designed to educate the fair-goers about Alternating Current. The centerpiece of it was a space devoted to what was called the “Tesla Polyphase System,” including the induction motors, transformers and model generators, showing on a miniature scale how alternating current could be transmitted great distances to serve the needs of the public.

As educational as all of this was, what truly astounded the millions who visited the Exhibition was the fairgrounds at night. Westinghouse used 25 percent of all of the light bulbs that then existed in the world to illuminate the buildings and grounds. The effect of this, reflecting off the white facades of the buildings and the glimmering surfaces of the lagoons and canals was stunning. People literally stood in awe of the dazzling sight. No one had ever seen anything like it.

CELEBRATING THE NEW WORLD

There was another intervention at the Columbian Exposition, one little noted today, which is uniquely representative of the “Spirit of the Age,” a spirit that takes hold of a people—a people often unaware of what is acting upon them—and lifts them to new heights.

The great Czech composer Antonín Dvorák arrived with his family in New York City on September 27, 1892. They arrived only days before an extended three day city-wide celebration of Columbus’ Discovery of America, a celebration which Dvorák viewed from his hotel balcony. In June 1893, the Dvorák family traveled to Iowa for an extended summer vacation. In August he was at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. On August 12th he personally conducted a gala “Bohemian Day” concert, which included the premier performance of his American String Quartet by members of the Chicago Symphony.

One of the most popular exhibits at the Exposition was a life-size reproduction of Christopher Columbus’ three ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. The theme of Columbus’ discovery of the New World was central to the entire Exposition, and four months after performing at the Chicago Exposition Dvorák would premier his New World Symphony in New York City.

In some ways, the example of Dvorák underscores that the American Republic—as McKinley understood—is an ongoing composition, one in which each new generation must take up the task to continue its development—never complete, but ever more perfect, always striving to fulfill past promises and to build for the future.

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[Father Joseph Neri’s Magneto-Electric Machine]

July 4, 1876―the Centennial of American Independence―witnessed the greatest celebrations in American history. In Philadelphia a fair of unprecedented proportions showcased American scientific and technological progress, made possible by that great Declaration a hundred years earlier. Abraham Lincoln, speaking in Gettysburg only 13 earlier, had defined America as government OF, BY and FOR the People, but had asked whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated could long endure. In 1863 the answer to that question was not certain, but by 1876 the answer was affirmed. The Civil War was won; the slaves were freed and became citizens with the right to vote. In 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad finally united the west with the rest of country, bringing us the continental nation we had long sought. The Republic, the hope of mankind, had not only survived; it was triumphant. America’s 100th birthday was truly a day to celebrate, and celebrations took place in every city across America, without exception.

Here we look at only one of those celebrations. In San Francisco the Centennial Celebration was called “a Grand Jollification Time” by the Daily Alta California, which reported for weeks on the preparations and the events. The Governor declared a three day holiday. Banks and businesses were closed. American flags and bunting were draped over every doorway and balcony. Huge paintings of Revolutionary War heroes appeared all over the city. Ministers gave centennial themed sermons. Catholic churches held a special High Mass. Re-enactments of Revolutionary War battles took place on land and water to exuberant crowds. The San Francisco Bulletin boasted, “Such patriotic enthusiasm and lavishness to decorative display has not been exhibited probably by any other city.”

The Daily Alta California, reporting day after day on the build up to the events, said, “Never before has our city been so gaily decorated, and every one of our citizens seems fully alive to the importance of this most patriotic occasion. The spirit of the revolutionary sires is revived in their sons; and if the old veterans, who established our liberties, can peer through the invisible veil between the departed and the living it would be difficult to conceive of what greater recognition they could desire for themselves and their services than they are about to receive from their descendants.” The DAC’s editors called it “a Grand Jollification Time.”

On July 3rd, the festivities began, with mock battles in Revolutionary War garb, boat races and many other attractions. At the close of the day, about 11:30 pm, a drum and band corps of 75, followed by the Fusileer Guard, and at least 4,000 German-Americans, with fireworks and large lanterns marched from Kearny and Post to California Street. This was the Zapfenstreich―a torchlight parade of German-Americans―featuring the singing of American, German and French national hymns. The marchers continued to City Hall, arriving at midnight, where they sang Hail Columbia, Yankee Doodle and the Star Spangled Banner and were lustily cheered. They marched on up Washington to Stockton, to Union, to Powell to Washington and back to Kearny, reaching the triumphal arch erected by the French citizens at the corner of Sutter where they halted and played the Marseillaise. This was reported as most pleasing, demonstrating that the Franco-German war hostilities could be reconciled by the Spirit of America.

Father Neri’s Electrical Exhibition

One day prior to the main festivities, something truly remarkable transpired, a demonstration that seemed almost miraculous. This became known as Father Neri’s Electrical Exhibition. For weeks anticipation had been building that Father Joseph Neri, the “Electrician” of St. Ignatius College (later the University of San Francisco), was preparing an electrical illuminating apparatus, to be run on a scale never before seen in America.1 The Daily Alta California reported:

“There will be three illuminating points, equal in intensity to the light of 3000 candles. . . The electrical light will be so powerful that persons many blocks distant will necessarily behold the sight. . . the electricity for the occasion will be provided by the mammoth magnetic-electric machine, which is run by a four-horsepower steam engine, and by two very large batteries at 60 Brumsen cells each. . .”

Father Joseph Neri, SJ (1836-1919) had arrived in the U.S. from Italy in 1858, fleeing anti-Catholic persecution in Turin. He relocated to California in 1860 and became the organist and choir leader at St. Ignatius Church and College. By 1870 he was the Chairman of the natural sciences department. He conducted many electrical experiments and many public lectures and demonstrations. He built the city’s first storage battery, a peroxide of lead combination with 30 plates. His exhibitions of electric lights in the 1870s drew large crowds, beginning in 1871 when he showed an amazed crowd an electric arc light from a window of the college facing Market Street in what was the first known use of electricity in San Francisco.

The machine that gave Neri the ability to conduct those electric experiments was a large electro-magnetic device (called the Alliance Machine) that had been used in the second Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Neri had acquired the magneto-electric machine from Paris and had been improving and demonstrating it to enthusiastic audiences for several years.

At sunset, July 3, on the roof of St. Ignatius College on Market St., Father Neri pulled a lever. All along Market Street, between 4th and 5th Streets, over the parade route, “a stream of soft yellow light” glowed from the arc lights, Foucault lamps and reflectors strung to the other side of the street. The light was visible to the Ferry Building, six blocks away. San Francisco was lit by electricity for the first time, three years before Edison’s incandescent bulb. Neri’s device would then become the featured demonstration at the upcoming Mechanics Fair, and would lead to San Francisco being the city with the largest electric street light system in the world within a few years.

In August and September of 1876, Neri’s demonstrations were the highlight of the Eleventh Annual Industrial Exhibition of the San Francisco Mechanics Institute. While there were hundreds of scientific, industrial and agricultural exhibits at the fair, the biggest attraction, by far, was the Mammoth magneto-electric machine; with 56 magazines of magnets and 96 induction coils, used in producing the light shown in the Pavilion, and revolved by a ten-horse power steam engine. There also was a portable magneto-electric machine, equivalent to eight Bunsen cells, revolved by a one-horsepower steam engine.

Following the fair, a report was written in the Pacific Rural Press, entitled “A Magneto-Electric Machine,” which begins,

“Great has been the advance of the knowledge of electricity since Franklin struck the key note. The dread dart from the cloud has been harnessed and made to do work for man. It has come to be produced by a machine and is fairly in hand for useful purposes.”

The article proceeds to review the principles of electricity, and report on the demonstrations by Father Neri at the Mechanics’ fair. It describes the machine, its working parts and how it produces electric light in some detail, but then after noting the failures, or only partial successes, of similar machines in Europe, it goes on to discuss Neri’s improvements which resulted in success:

“(Father) Neri’s improvement consists in coiling around the extremities of the magnets insulated copper wire and passing currents through them to strengthen the magnetism and thereby intensify the action. As the currents are in proportion to the intensity of the magnetism of the magnets and the wire increases the power of the magnets, the effect is proportionately increased by the use of the insulated wire. . . Over 5,000 feet of wire are used in wrapping the magnets and it is estimated that the light produced is equal to the power of from 10,000 to 12,000 candles The current can be turned off or on the coils of the wire at pleasure.”

The Fourth

Returning to the Centennial Celebration, on July 4th ferry after ferry carried crowds to San Francisco from around the Bay until 400,000 were present, overwhelming the city of 150,000. (The total population of California was only about 700,000 at that time). On July 5th, the Daily Alta California reported:

“By 10 am the streets were lined with men, women and children, thronging the sidewalks, sitting on curbs and stoops; every balcony and window along the parade route was filled with fair faces and expectant eyes, every room filled by friends and acquaintances to witness the grand procession. Never, since the triumphant march of the Caesars into Rome, has there been such a magnificent display of decorations, and probably not then. The enthusiasm and patriotism of the people has never been so active and true since the Republic had an existence . . . The procession was the largest in numbers and most imposing pageant yet witnessed in our city . . . it contained more original and patriotic features than were ever seen here. . . upwards of 10,000 were in the parade.”

The Advance consisted of 4 mounted officers and a platoon on foot, national guardsmen and other military companies, followed by all of the elected officials, the Governor, the Mayor, Congressmen, Supervisors, every foreign Consulate, the poet of the day, the Declaration of Independence reader, and the Orator of the Day, to name just a few. The Divisions following are too numerous to itemize. Every nationality and profession was represented. The 12th Division was headed by the Swiss Philharmonic Band. The 13th by the Portuguese Benevolent Association and Dairies, led by “Pretty maidens followed by milkmen, a cow in a wagon looking gaily in national colors, the milkmen’s union and 25 wagons filled with milk cans . . .” The German Turnverein doing acrobatics followed, and so on and so on.

At 2:30 all had reached the Pavilion and the program began with the band playing several national airs. Presiding over the event was General James Coey, a Civil War hero, who briefly spoke, pointing out that the world had seen more advancement in the last 100 years than any other 500 years on record, claimed for this country the proud distinction of having been the impelling cause.

The Prayer was offered, in which thanks was given to God for the gift of this “fruitful continent, for our home and support; for our many educational and religious privileges, our civil liberty, public peace and for the manifold mercies whose anniversary we commemorate today. . .” and asking God to bless the President, Congress and people and direct their consultations to the advancement of his glory, the good of his church, the safety, honor and welfare of his people, “that all things may be so ordered and settled by their endeavors upon the best and surest foundations, that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among them for all generations. . .”

The chorus sang “America,” the Declaration of Independence was read, and the Star Spangled Banner was sung. Then came the Oration by Rev. Horatio Stebbins, successor to Thomas Starr King at First Unitarian Church.

The Oration

Rev. Stebbins began with a lengthy review of the history of human progress, the settlement of the continent, the story of the Revolution, the “Idea of our Government,” and the theory of free government. It is notable for its historical depth and devout content. A few excerpts:

“The round world as it lay in the serene imagination of Columbus, is one of the most striking illustrations of the power of an idea that history records. His heroism to obey the idea, and contrary to the opinions of his age, to follow it across the trackless deep, gives him an undisputed rank in the hierarchy of faith, and an immovable pedestal in the temple of earthly fame. Those masterly achievements of fidelity to a thought that characterize the discovery of the New World, were fit precursors of the fortunes of that New World, destined as it was, to be the field of new principles, in which the majority of mankind did not believe.

“It is enough for us today to take counsel of our principles and reaffirm them as the profound conviction of our minds, attested by the experience of a century. It was announced a hundred years ago, by the founders of the Government, that all men are free and equal. We have read it today from the famous Declaration, and it will be read by those who shall come after us down the rolling tide of centuries. . . It is no contrivance of extemporaneous advice; it is no rule for the exigency of the moment, cheap subterfuge of tyrants. It is the eternal nature of truth, and things, and men, and God. It is as old as the heavens, and as new as today, and we claim for it that immortality that belongs to essential truth. Neither is it any vagary or “glittering generality” in our minds, but of clear, decided import and energy.

“We affirm and declare today, as the Fathers did in 1776, that all men are free and we mean by it that fundamental fact of human nature by virtue of which man is man, endowed by heaven with the power to choose between good and evil, and to direct his course toward those ends that seem to him best: we mean that the office of government is to protect that freedom, and not to encroach upon it. . .

“We affirm and declare today, as the Fathers did in 1776, that all men are equal! Hear it, O Heaven! And give ear unto it, O Earth! We mean by it the identity of that nature whose inspirations of reason and conscience are the same in their eternal quality and divine essence! We man that reason is reason, that conscience is conscience, that imagination is imagination, and that the progress of mankind is grounded in this common nature of man. On this we base our hope of human progress, and our faith in human destiny!”

Saluting the Governor, Stebbins continues, “One hundred years ago the foundations of this city were laid by the ancient monarchy of Spain. It was reserved for another age and another race to carry forward the civilization which you now witness, and which you have the honor to represent. If the principles which I have rehearsed are true; if the attainments that have been made under them are a just expression of their wisdom and power, we may take pride and gratitude in our citizenship, and renew our vows to the freedom and equality of men. Let mighty salvos proclaim it. Let banners wave in proud homage and triumphant joy! Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof! Let us bid the future generations, hail! Hail ye happy races yet unborn that shall receive such an inheritance! Let the people lift up their voice: Te Deum Laudamus!”

At the Conclusion of the event, The Centennial, a new song of 4 stanzas, composed for the occasion, was sung. The Refrain of each stanza is:

Rejoice! Rejoice!

For the year of jubilee.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

The Centennial of the free,

That the States are all united

And the Nation newly plighted

To Freedom, Independence and Union!

Film Review

A Great Awakening

Released by Sight & Sound Films

Directed by Joshua Bennert; Written by Jeff Bender, Produced by Steve Buckwalter

Starring John Paul Sneed as Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Blair as George Whitefield

This film is currently in theaters. Its American premier was April 3rd, and its premier in the Bay Area, where I live, was today, Easter Sunday, April 5th. I was one of the first to see it. I urge everyone to find a location where it is playing and rush out to view it.

The plot of this film revolves entirely around the personal relationship between Benjamin Franklin and the evangelical minister George Whitefield. As someone who has studied both of these men, particularly Franklin, I can attest that, with a few quibbles that are too insignificant to even mention, the film is highly historically accurate.

The production values are very high, the directing of Mr. Bennert is excellent, and both John Paul Sneed and Jonathan Blair are superb in their roles.

But of course, good acting and directing does not necessarily make for a good movie, and it is the content of this film that is a true revelation.

The film opens with the infirm 81-year-old Franklin at the contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. It vividly portrays Franklin’s deep worry that the Convention might fail, that the sacrifices of the Revolution might prove to have been in vain. It then cuts quickly to brief — and revelatory — scenes from the boyhoods of both Franklin and Whitefield, including Franklin’s first youthful “kite experiment,” before returning to Franklin in 1787.

One evening at home, during the Convention, Franklin is speaking with his grandson, who comes across an old letter from George Whitefield. The grandson asks Franklin questions about Whitefield, culminating with the query, “Did he have anything to do with the Revolution?” Without hesitation, Franklin answers, “George Whitefield was the Revolution.”

From there, the film becomes the story of the Franklin-Whitefield friendship, beginning with their first meeting in Philadelphia in 1739 and lasting until Whitefield’s death in 1770. The film portrays this essentially as the “Man of Science” meets the “Man of God,” and although, again, one might quibble with the writer’s and director’s knowledge of Franklin’s life, it is all done very sympathetically, and the conversations and arguments between the two men all carry the ring of truth. Although these intimate conversations were invented by the screen-writer Jeff Bender, it is clearly evident that Mr. Bender and probably others involved in the production must have studied the extensive correspondence between Whitefield and Franklin, which still exists.

George Whitefield was a fierce enemy of the Anglican Church and he wrote works attacking the Archbishop of Canterbury and other church leaders. Originally ordained as an Anglican minister, he broke away and became an independent evangelical preacher. He preached in many churches and public halls, but he became famous for his open air preaching. He visited America seven times, and he preached in all 13 colonies, in dozens upon dozens of cities and towns. It is estimated that by 1770, 80 percent (!) of the people living in the colonies had attended one or more of his sermons. In the larger cities, crowds of 20 to 30 thousand were common. For example, in Philadelphia, which then had a population approaching 30,000, when Whitfield spoke in 1739, more than 20,000 were in attendance.

Whitefield’s attacks on the Anglican Church and his emphasis on freedom through Christ’s love had a deeply profound effect on the people in America in the pre-Revolutionary War decades. Deeply profound. This is a chapter of American history almost unknown today.

The film ends with Benjamin Franklin’s speech to the Constitutional Convention on God, religion and prayer, wherein he says:

“I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth — that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that “except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.”

The speech is delivered in its entirety in the film.

“A Great Awakening” is thought-provoking, inspiring and very well executed. Go and see it.

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Today, when most people hear the word “protectionism, or even its lesser used but more accurate cousin “protection,” they tend to immediately think of the word “tariffs,” as if the two were simple synonyms. But this is not really the case. Today, “Protectionism,” i.e., tariffs, are portrayed as a narrow pragmatic policy and often derided by Ivy League pedagogues as anachronistic, counter-productive and the product of simple minds. Such are the techniques of modern-day sophists.

In reality, tariffs are a tool, and their adoption and usage were always intended to advance the Constitutional Principle of “Protection,” a term which encompasses a broad range of policy initiatives, all for the purpose of protecting, furthering and advancing the well being of the American people, both in the present and for future generations. It is the policy and Principle of Protection which is primary, and tariffs a powerful but secondary means to secure such protection.

Consider the Preamble of the United States Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Many incompetent “experts” in Constitutional Law make the claim that the Preamble to the Constitution, is a mere “introduction” to that document, and that it has no legal standing in a court of law as defining the constitutionality of any particular law or government action. The opposite is the case. The Preamble defines the principles and the very nature of our Republican government and charges government officials with the responsibility to uphold those principles. What follows in the individual Articles of the Constitution must be understood as subservient to the command in the Preamble to “provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” That command provides the proper approach to understand the word “Protection.”

The elected government of our Republic, chosen by the people, must act to protect and promote the well-being of the people, both for “ourselves and our posterity.” This is, perhaps, the most fundamental core principle of our Constitution, and it must guide the actions of the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary branches in everything they do.

Thus, President Trump’s war against the Drug Cartels is properly understood as Protection. As is Abraham Lincoln’s creation of the Land Grant Colleges, or Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification project—all designed to secure the “Blessings of Liberty” for the American People, all intended to protect and promote the General Welfare. Protection—as much as Freedom of Speech or Freedom of Religious Worship—is a core Principle of our Republic.

Tariffs – in a Nutshell

A brief history and discussion of American tariffs is in order:

• Hamilton/Washington

  1789 first protective tariff (the Hamilton Tariff) - Charges up to 15 percent were imposed on selected manufactured and agricultural goods, including “steel, ships . . . and cloth.” Reach 30 percent by 1796 and almost 40 percent by 1800. Then reduced gradually after 1801 under Jefferson and Madison

• John Quincy Adams

  1828 Tariff (known in the south as the Tariff of Abominations) - rate of about 45 percent

• Andrew Jackson

  1829-1841 - under Jackson and Van Buren, tariffs reduced to lowest level since 1789. 1841-1861 - tariff rates average about 15 percent

• Abraham Lincoln

  1861 - Morrill Tariff - rate of 45 to 50 percent

  1861-1901 - “Era of Protection” - rates generally about 40 percent

• William McKinley

  1890 McKinley Tariff - rate of about 45 percent

  1897 Dingley Tariff Act - rate of about 50 to 55 percent

• Woodrow Wilson

  1913 - Underwood Tariff drastically cuts tariffs to below 15 percent. Rates generally very low to 1930. Rates pushed up by Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930

• Franklin Roosevelt

  1945 - tariff rates still about 25 to 30 percent

• Harry Truman

  1948 - GATT. Tariff rates reduced to 10 percent

• Clinton-Bush-Obama

  Tariff rates fall to less than 5 percent, the lowest in American history. 1994 - NAFTA treaty. 2001 - China joins the World Trade Organization (WTO). Era of “free trade” - 1989 to 2017

• Trump

  Tariff rates pushed up to between 25 and 28 percent

Note that the extended periods of high tariff rates—including under Washington, Quincy Adams, Lincoln and McKinley—coincided with explosive growth of productive economic activity in the nation. New inventions, new technologies, growth in manufacturing and trade, modernization and expansion of agriculture all skyrocketed under the umbrella of Protection. These were decades which emphasized investment in the productive economy and the creation of skilled productive jobs. Conversely, periods of low tariffs witnessed the disappearance of productive activity, the dumping of cheap imported goods into the country, the suppression of wages and an emphasis on speculative financial investment as opposed to long term credit for productive growth.

Protection and Revenue

In 1789 James Madison introduced the nation’s first tariff bill into the House of Representatives. It was a small “revenue” tariff, designed to raise a modest amount of revenue to deal with the staggering Revolutionary War debts. The bill, however, was hijacked by allies of Alexander Hamilton, and rates were raised substantially, particularly on steel, iron and manufactured goods. Hamilton’s idea was to use the tariff to help launch an industrial and technological boom in the new nation, while simultaneously tripling and quadrupling the revenue. In 1790, Hamilton personally drafted a second tariff bill which raised the rates even more and provided increased protection for American manufacturing. The result of all of this is that between 1789 and 1800, 87 percent (!) of the Federal government’s revenue came from import duties. At the same time, new industries sprang up everywhere, new towns were created and U.S. exports flourished.

This controversy of a “protective tariff” versus a “revenue-only tariff” festered and became a point of intense conflict between the northern (and later mid-west) states and the southern cotton-economy states in the decades leading up to Civil War, but the way in which it is sometimes portrayed is erroneous. The reality is that under Hamilton, John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln (and later William McKinley) the “protective” tariffs raised far more in revenue than the paltry sums generated by the “revenue” tariffs imposed by the south when they were in power. At the same time, the protective tariffs created the conditions and opportunities for a Renaissance in American manufacturing.

For Hamilton, there was no conflict between revenue and protection. It is very clear, as Hamilton discusses in his 1791 Report on Manufactures, that he viewed tariffs as an indispensable tool for the overall economic advancement of the nation. It was not the only tool he employed, and the tariffs must be understood as an adjunct to his creation of a system of National Banking and a nation-wide Public Credit System. All of this was designed to unleash the productive potential of the nation, and it simultaneously generated enormous sums in revenue.

Abraham Lincoln was of the same view. In a speech delivered at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 15, 1861. Lincoln endorsed the proposed high tariff, saying:

“The tariff bill is as I now read, that while providing revenue for the support of the general government by duties upon imports, sound policy requires such an adjustment of these imposts as will encourage the development of the industrial interest of the whole country; and we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to working-men liberal wages, to agriculture fair prices, to mechanics and manufacturers adequate reward for their skill, labor, and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence.”

By 1864, the Lincoln-backed Morill Tariff was providing 43 percent of all Federal income, and the nation had begun the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

The success of this approach is manifest, also, in the administration of William McKinley. The 1890 McKinley Tariff had increased the average tariff rate up to about 45 percent, and the 1897 Dingley Tariff, adopted during McKinley’s first year as President, had increased rates even more. Note that these were average tariff rates. Many items were exempt, and others taxed at a lower rate. But some tariffs on manufactured items were at 100 percent, or even higher. To give one example of the benefits of this, in 1889 there were zero mills in the United States manufacturing tinplate. As a result of the 1890 and 1897 tariffs, by 1891 there were 20 tinplate mills, by 1896 75 mills and by 1900 200 tinplate mills, producing 13 million pounds of tinplate per year. This did not cost the U.S. government a dime, but it created an entirely new industry, employing tens of thousands of Americans in productive labor.

For McKinley, as for Hamilton, Revenue and Protection were two sides of the same coin. By 1900, 60 percent of all Federal Revenue came from tariffs. Tariffs financed the government. But at the same time, the 1897-1901 McKinley Presidency was the apex of the scientific and manufacturing boom that had begun with Abraham Lincoln in 1861. One measure of this was the number of patents issued by the U.S. government, which went from 4,600 in 1864 to 13,000 in 1880 to 36,000 in 1907. This was the era of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Ransom Olds, George Westinghouse and Alexander Graham Bell. All under the umbrella of Protection.

Overcoming the Irrational Fear of High Prices

The “progressive” commentators of CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times can be heard in a chorus today, shrieking about how Trump’s tariff policies are driving up prices and injuring low and middle income Americans. Before considering those falsehoods, it is necessary to point out that the exact (almost verbatim) words were used to attack the high tariffs of Hamilton, Lincoln and McKinley. It wasn’t true then, and it is not true now.

Take just one example:—the aforementioned tin-plate mills. The 1890 McKinley Tariff imposed a 50 percent tariff on imported tinplate (largely from Great Britain). Subsequently, the price of tin-plate dropped from $6.75 for a box of tin-plate in 1880, to $3.87 in 1895 and then to $2.99 in 1898. The same was true for steel, iron and coal, as well as many finished manufactured products. New domestic industry, driven by capital investment in advanced technology, machine tools and production methods, resulted in more modern and more efficient forms of production. George Westinghouse and Henry Ford are premier examples of this approach.

More insidiously, free trade results in a brutal suppression of wages. As cheap imported good flood the U.S. markets, thousands of domestic manufacturing plants and farms are driven out of business, resulting in mass unemployment. At the same time, American producers, forced to compete against inexpensive imports, are compelled to cut costs, including layoffs and wage cuts. Free Trade=Wage Suppression. Today, millions of Americans can no longer afford the high-quality products which were standard in American homes 60 years ago, but are relegated to shopping at Walmart—or even Grocery Outlet and 99 cent stores (where everything is imported)—because it is all they can afford.

Meanwhile, the almost complete financialization of the U.S. economy has resulted in the skyrocketing cost of housing, medical care and almost everything else. All of this is a result of unbridled financial speculation, the opposite of a Hamiltonian Public Credit System.

McKinley Speaks

“Protection builds up; a revenue tariff tears down. Protection brings hope and courage to heart and home: free trade drives them from both. Free trade levels down; protection levels up.”

—At Ann Arbor, Michigan, May 17, 1892

“England wants free trade, demands it—not for our good but for hers; for she is more anxious to maintain her old position of supremacy than she is to promote the interests and welfare of the people of this republic, and a great party in this country voices her interest. . . She would manufacture for us, and permit us to raise wheat and corn for her. We are satisfied to do the latter, but unwilling to concede to her the monopoly of the former. . .

—Speech in Congress, 1882

For McKinley, protectionism was all about the people, the well-being and future of the people. In a speech at the University of Pennsylvania, he said:

“They say ‘everything would be so cheap’, if we only had FREE TRADE. Well, everything would be cheap and EVERYBODY would be cheap. I do not prize the word ‘cheap’. It is not a word of hope; it is not a word of comfort; it is not a word of cheer; it is not a word of inspiration! It is the badge of poverty; it is the signal of DISTRESS; and there is not a white-haired man in the audience, who, if he will let his memory go back, will not recall, then when things were the cheapest, men were the poorest. . . Cheap? Why, cheap merchandise means cheap men, and cheap men mean a cheap country; and that is not the kind of Government our fathers founded, and it is not the kind their sons mean to maintain. If you want cheap things, go where you can get them. . . We want labor to be well paid.”

And in an 1885 speech he said,

“Reduce the tariff and labor is the first to suffer. . . He who would break down the manufactures of this country strikes a fatal blow at labor. It is labor I would protect. We do not want fifty-cent labor.”

One of McKinley’s best extended defenses of protectionism is from a speech at a Lincoln Banquet, in Chicago, 1896:

“We are faithfully wedded to the great principle of protection by every tie of party fealty and affection, and it is dearer to us now than ever before. Not only is it dearer to us as Republicans, but it has more devoted supporters among the great masses of the American people, irrespective of party, than at any previous period in our National history. It is everywhere recognized and endorsed as the great, masterful, triumphant American principle— the key to our prosperity in business, the safest prop to the Treasury of the United States, and the bulwark of our national independence and financial honor.

“The question of the continuance or abandonment of our protective system has been the one great, overshadowing, vital question in American politics ever since Mr. Cleveland opened the contest in December, 1887. The fight will go on—and must go on—until the American system is everywhere recognized, until all nations come to understand and respect it as distinctly, and all Americans come to honor or love it as dearly, as they do the American flag. God grant the day may soon come when all partisan contention over it is forever at an end.”

An amusing paean to McKinley’s protection policy can be heard in the 1896 campaign song, “McKinley’s Protection,” which can be found at https://www.marketplace.org/story/2017/08/11/protectionism-major

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WE BEGIN with a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” a lecture he first delivered on April 6, 1858, and then repeated several times over the next 18 months:

“All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.

“The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various ‘leads’ from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny. . .

“Fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things, are not miners, but feeders and lodgers, merely. Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better now, than they did, five thousand years ago. Ants, and honey-bees, provide food for winter; but just in the same way they did, when Solomon referred the sluggard to them as patterns of prudence.

“Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions. . .”

Lincoln, the Builder

In 1834, the 25-year old Abraham Lincoln was elected to the Illinois State Legislature, precisely at the time that the Erie Canal was transforming the development of the nation. During the next eight years, Lincoln would emerge as the leader of a project to radically upgrade the productive power of the Illinois economy. What was undertaken became known as the “Illinois System,” and it included the construction of canals, railroads, schools and other projects designed to increase the productive power of the Illinois economy and to improve the condition of the people of the state.

The first project that Lincoln championed was the construction of a canal from Beardstown, on the Illinois River, to the Sangamon River, forty miles away. The purpose of the canal was to prevent flooding in the spring and allow farmers to transport their produce to market. Next he led the fight for the Illinois & Michigan Canal, connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. This project held for Illinois an importance comparable with that of the Erie Canal for New York, and Lincoln said that his ambition was to become “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” In 1837, Lincoln then developed one of the most ambitious plans for railroad construction in the nation. This included a north-south railroad, the Northern Cross, running from Chicago to the Kentucky border, and a second railroad, the Illinois Central, running east-west across the state, through the capital at Springfield.

Twenty-five years later, in 1862, during his first year in the Presidency and in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. The intention was to build a 1,928 mile railroad from Omaha, Nebraska to Alameda, California, crossing rivers, deserts, mountains and prairies. Nothing like this had ever been accomplished in all of human history. Many people were involved in this, including the great Theodore Judah and Lincoln’s friend Grenville Dodge, but it was Lincoln’s leadership that made the Transcontinental Railway project a reality.

To finance the project, a series of actions were taken, including the sale of 30-year U.S. government bonds, direct loans to the railroads and land grants. It should be noted that by 1899, when the last of the railroad loans were retired, and additional federal land had been sold to private interests for the purpose of new towns, farms and industry, the construction costs had been completely paid off. The entire area, more than a thousand miles in length, was open for settlement and economic development. The railroad was completed in 1869, and America became a united nation. [See Part 6 of this series - “On the 200th Birthday of Theodore Judah: The Greatest Project of All Time - The Transcontinental Railroad”]

Lincoln’s Revolution

On December 3, 1861 Lincoln delivered an address to Congress, wherein he put forward his own economic and financial plan for the nation. This included:

• The issuance of a national paper currency. This currency, which became popularly known as Greenbacks, would be Constitutionally issued by the U.S. Treasury and would be legal tender for all purchases and debts, both public and private. By 1865 more than $400 million in Greenbacks had been introduced.

• The establishment of a regulated National Banking System, which would end fraudulent speculative practices and serve as the vehicle for the circulation of the government-issued Greenbacks, creating a conveyer belt of cheap credit for industry and agriculture.

• The marketing of government bonds directly to the American people. More than $1.3 billion of so-called 5:20 government bonds (redeemable in 5 years, reaching maturity in 20 years) were eventually sold by the Treasury, mostly to individual citizens but also to member banks of the National Banking System.

• The adoption of the (protective) Morrill tariff, which raised the average tariff rates on imports from 17 percent to 26 percent (and after subsequent legislation to 40 percent), leading to an explosive growth of domestic manufacturing.

Lincoln was determined to bring the nation’s banks under federal oversight. In addition to wildly speculative and fraudulent practices, the private banks functioned under the thumb of the powerhouse City of London financiers, and the major New York banks were outright treasonous, conspiring with London to bankrupt the U.S. government and force it into letting the south secede.

Through Lincoln’s personal efforts two pieces of legislation were passed by the Congress: the first National Bank Act (known as the National Currency Act) on Feb. 25, 1863, and the second National Bank Act on June 3, 1864. These laws established a new Constitutional National Banking System, under the complete sovereign control and supervision of the U.S. Treasury. A few of the particulars of the enabling legislation include:

• The Acts established the Office of Comptroller of the Currency. No member bank of the national system could start a business without a certificate of authorization from the Comptroller. He could at any time appoint investigators to look into the affairs of any national bank.

• Regulations were imposed covering minimum capitalization and reserve requirements. Other measures to protect the safety of depositors were adopted.

• Every bank director had to be an American citizen, and three-quarters of a bank’s directors had to be residents of the state in which the bank did business.

• Usury was outlawed. Each bank was limited, in the interest rate it could charge, by local state usury laws, but no bank was allowed to charge more than 7 percent, regardless of individual state laws.

To be a member of the national banking system, an individual bank was required to purchase U.S. bonds equal to one third of its total capital, and then turn around and deposit those same bonds with the U.S. Treasury. In return the Treasury would give to the banks an equal dollar amount of government-printed Greenbacks, which the bank could circulate as money. Thus, in order to qualify for a federal charter, the banks would have to lend the government substantial sums for the war effort, while at the same time, a sound currency would be circulated through the banks to the public for an expanding economy.

Under this arrangement, the banks would act as investors in the future wealth of the United States, first through the initial purchase of 20-year Treasury Bonds and then, by serving as the medium for the circulation of the new Greenback currency, including the issuance of long-term, low-interest loans to manufacturers, farmers and other productive enterprises. This policy was identical to the approach defined in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton:— sovereign debt would be the basis for public credit for physical economic development.

Thus, with these actions by Lincoln, a NATIONAL CREDIT SYSTEM was established. Rather than the government bonds serving merely as a source for speculative gain, the arrangement was designed to foster the circulation of legal tender government currency for the purpose of investment into the productive economy. The creation of NEW PRODUCTIVE WEALTH was the goal.

Greenbacks and Public Credit

In 1861, at the urging of President Lincoln, Congress authorized the issuance, by the U.S. Treasury, of $50 million of what were called “Demand Notes.” Then, in 1862, $200 million more in sovereign paper currency was issued. These became popularly known as Greenbacks. By the end of the Civil War, more than $450 million of Greenbacks were in circulation.

This was a revolutionary action, and it was undertaken entirely on the initiative of Abraham Lincoln, not his Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase. The new currency was “uttered” by the national government, not borrowed from the New York “Associated Banks” or from foreign lenders in London, Paris or Amsterdam. At first, the Greenbacks were vital in financing the Union’s war effort; in fact the WAR COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WON WITHOUT THE ISSUANCE OF THE GREENBACKS. After the passage of the National Banking Acts in 1863 and 1864, however, the Greenbacks played a central role, under the direction of the U.S. Treasury, in capitalizing the new, tightly regulated, national banking system and acting as an engine of national economic development. The deployment of the Greenbacks through the National Banking System, accomplished a mobilizing of public and private credit for the development of the nation. This is precisely a Sovereign Public Credit System identical in its intent and nature to what Hamilton had created 70 years earlier.

The Greenbacks were a Sovereign Currency, independent of the monetarist rules of the British Gold Standard. The original Act which created the Greenbacks specified that they be accepted as Legal Tender in all payments and for all debts, public and private, and that any attempt to make them redeemable in gold would be prohibited. Unfortunately, under pressure from New York bankers August Belmont and James Gallatin (Rothchild’s American agent) Congress, acting against Lincoln’s wishes, made one change in the law. They stipulated that although U.S. government bonds could be purchased with Greenbacks, the government must redeem them in Specie (gold). This had no immediate effect, but it set the stage for the post-war vendetta to abolish the Greenbacks.

Nevertheless, during the war years, the Greenbacks’ success was spectacular, and they functioned exactly as Lincoln had intended. The Greenbacks capitalized the National Banking System, and together with the high Civil War tariffs, this resulted in an explosion of industrial and agricultural production. Thousands of factories, new inventions, new railroads and prosperous farms. As Lincoln’s economic advisor stated in his 1865 “How To Outdo England Without Fighting Her”:

“The Greenback has fallen on the country as the dew falls, bringing with it good to all and doing injury to none.”

Fighting the British Financial Empire

On July 21, 1861 the first major battle of the Civil War—the Battle of Bull Run—was fought. Lincoln had issued several calls for hundreds of thousands of volunteers. The choice was to fight or to submit to the dismemberment of the Republic. But the coffers were bare; where was the money to pay soldiers and purchase arms and ammunition to come from? At that precise moment, all of London’s major banks organized an international credit boycott, including banks in Paris and Amsterdam, cutting off all funding sources to the U.S. government. This was, in real terms, a declaration of financial war against the United States. A desperate Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase turned to the New York Associated Banks, negotiating a loan of $150 million in gold coin (specie). The proposal also granted the banks a monopoly on the right to market these U.S. bonds (known as 7:30 bonds) in England with the Barings and Rothschilds, putting the credit of the United States at the mercy of the British aristocracy.

Lincoln vetoed the agreement negotiated by Chase, and at that point bankers went nuts. The “Associated Banks of New York and New England,” suspended specie payment to the U.S. government, and they also suspended payment of gold owed to their depositors. They stopped transferring to the government the gold which they had pledged for the earlier purchase of government bonds, illegally reneging on those obligations. The banks of other cities immediately followed suit, unleashing a chain-reaction payments crisis. This suspension of specie payments by the New York Associated Banks plunged the entire banking system of the nation into chaos and insolvency.

With paralysis spreading in the banking institutions, the U.S. Treasury was forced to suspend gold payment on all government debt obligations—domestically and internationally—effectively taking the United States off the international gold standard. Legally, at least according to the “rules of the marketplace,” the U.S. government was bankrupt.

Then James Gallatin, the head of the Associated Banks, issued the Wall Street’s final ultimatum. In a meeting with Lincoln, he presented a list of non-negotiable demands:

• Pay for the war effort through a massive increase of direct taxation of the population and basic industry.

• Deposit all U.S. government gold in the private New York banks. The banks would pay the government’s suppliers with checks, keeping the gold on deposit for the use of the bankers, at their own discretion.

• The government will sell high-interest bonds to these same banks, for them to resell to the European banking syndicate (primarily bonds to be sold in London).

• Withdraw all government-issued paper currency, so that only gold and private bank notes would circulate as currency.

• Eliminate all U.S. government oversight over the private banks.

Lincoln listened to Gallatin and then showed him—and the team of bankers who were with him— the door. He rejected every one of their demands. His answer was put forward in the policies enumerated in the above section “National Banking and Sovereignty.” A regulated National Banking System, hundreds of millions of Legal Tender paper currency (Greenbacks), and a high Protective Tariff, which would reach over 40 percent by the War’s end. The U.S. Government would not be dictated to by private bankers, be they in New York, London or elsewhere. It would not play by the oligarchical rules of a rigged “free market.” Lincoln’s actions were a declaration of National Economic Sovereignty.

Lincoln and Hamilton

Our Constitution demands that our elected government must defend the General Welfare of ALL of her citizens, but a defense of the General Welfare is impossible without true economic sovereignty. But what does sovereignty actually mean? It is not the commonplace notion of “nation versus nation.” Real sovereignty is based in Lincoln’s concept of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Sovereignty means, that the Republic recognizes no higher, outside, or pre-existing entity—no private or public financial or geo-political entity—whose interest is allowed to take precedence over the defense of the General Welfare.

National Banking is the sine qua non of National Sovereignty. Negatively, without the a National Bank the nation is left at the mercy of the private financiers, and from 1829 to 1865 this meant being at the mercy of the immense imperial financial power squatting in London, Paris and Amsterdam. The intention of the sovereign American System is explicitly defined in Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures. Manufacturing, technology, science and invention will be fostered—consciously and deliberately—as a means to both increase the productive power of the sovereign nation, as well as the vehicle through which the population as a whole will advance in wealth, happiness and knowledge.

Alexander Hamilton’s genius lies in that he created an economic system coherent with the creative nature of human beings. He invented it; he was the first to implement it. That system rejects the supremacy of imperial finance and imposes a Sovereign Public Credit System to manage the physical economic development of the nation, one which will generate rapid industrial, technological and scientific advances for the benefit of the Republic and ALL of her citizens.

Beginning with his Report on a National Bank and Report on Manufactures, Hamilton defines the sovereign role of the Republic in promoting human progress. The People, through their elected representatives, will steer the economic development of the nation.

This precisely what Lincoln did between 1861 and 1865. He revived—and he advanced—the American System of Economics. And he saved the Republic.

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“In a Railroad to the Pacific, we have a great national work, transcending, in its magnitude, and in its results, anything yet attempted by man. By its execution, we are to accomplish our appropriate mission, and a greater one than any yet fulfilled by any nation. . . to establish our empire on the Pacific, where our civilization can take possession of the New Continent and confront the Old.” — Henry V. Poor, editor of American Railroad Journal, 1858

The above aptly encapsulates the sentiment of patriotic and future thinking Americans in the decades leading up to the construction of the great transcontinental railroad. Since the first railroads were built in the 1830s, Americans began dreaming about a railroad to the Pacific. Treaties with Britain and Mexico in the 1840s consolidated the continental nation we had sought. But how to develop all that land? The Oregon trail was long and brutal, as was the passage to California around Cape Horn, or through the jungles of Panama. Many did not survive the ordeal. But building such a railroad involved staggering physical, financial and political problems.

Far sighted people began to build a drumbeat. Abraham Lincoln, for one, was a railroad advocate from his earliest political interventions. In 1831, running for Illinois legislature, he made an impassioned speech on the urgency of building a railroad from the Illinois River to Springfield. He was 23 years old and had never seen a railroad. Later, in 1859 he met a young engineer named Grenville Dodge at a campaign event at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and after being told Dodge knew more about the route for a transcontinental railroad than anyone alive, engaged him in an intense discussion of everything he knew.

Dodge and his friends attended the Republican National Convention the following year to help nominate Lincoln, and got a plank inserted in the platform, “That a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country; that the Federal Government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction. . .”

When Lincoln was elected Dodge visited him at the White House to strategize on the railroad. A month later the war broke out and Dodge enlisted in the Army. But it would not be the end of the matter for either of them.

Theodore Judah

Our story will focus on a man who probably did more to make the Transcontinental Railroad a reality than any other. Theodore Dehone Judah, born March 4, 1826 was the son of an Episcopal minister, who grew up in Troy, NY where he graduated from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a degree in engineering. For ten years he worked on railroad and canal projects all over New York and New England, in 1847 marrying Anna Ferona Pierce, who would become his constant companion and assistant. Anna was well educated and a talented artist, who sketched and painted landscapes on his various explorations.

While in Buffalo working on the Erie Railroad in March 1854 he was summoned to a meeting with the Governor, where he was asked if he would go to California to build a railroad. He telegraphed his wife, “Be home tonight; we sail for California April 2.” He told Anna, “I am going to California to be the pioneer railroad engineer of the Pacific coast. It is my opportunity.”

While hired by the Sacramento Valley Railroad to build the first real railroad west of the Missouri River, a railroad from Sacramento to Marysville, his sights were already set much higher. He had been studying and talking about the problem of building a transcontinental railroad for years, and was determined it would be built and he would have something to do with it.

The clamor had been building for a railroad, especially since the gold rush and admission of California as a state in 1850. In California, party conventions passed resolutions demanding Congressional action, as did the state legislature. In 1853 Congress appropriated $150,000 for use by Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, to explore routes from the middle west to the Pacific Ocean. Five expeditions set out later in the year on five separate routes.

However, all of this effort did not demonstrate the practicability of any route, did not show surveys, elevations, profiles, grades or estimates of the costs. Not surprisingly, the future Confederate President recommended the Southern route—New Orleans to Los Angeles. He even ordered a corps of camels to be imported to work the desert, and $10 million was spent for the Gadsden purchase.

No free state Congressman would accept that route. Neither would Judah. And no southern politician would vote for the northern routes.

By 1856, Judah’s energy turned entirely toward the great project. He was a man with a mission. He was obsessed. People called him Crazy Judah.

He and Anna spent a good deal of the next several years lobbying in Congress, making at least four trips there from California. He wrote a 38 page pamphlet, dated January 1, 1857, which he distributed to every Congressional office and every Administrative department. Titled, “A Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad,” it is a tour de force of every aspect of the issue. An extended excerpt follows:

• “The project for construction of a great Railroad through the United States of America, connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific ocean, has been in agitation for over fifteen years.

• It is the most magnificent project ever conceived.

• It is an enterprise more important in its bearings and results to the people of the United States, than any other project involving an expenditure of an equal amount of capital.

• It is an indissoluble bond of union between the populous States of the East, and the undeveloped regions of the fruitful West.

• It is a highway which leads to peace and future prosperity. An iron bond for the perpetuation of the Union and independence which we now enjoy.

• Many projects for the prosecution of this enterprise have been presented, and various schemes for the fulfillment of these projects have been devised.

Our wisest statesmen, most experienced politicians, scientific engineers, and shrewdest speculators, have each and all discussed the subject in nearly every point of view, and given the results of their wisdom and experience to the world.

Yet–

• Their projects have proved abortive.

• Their schemes have failed

• This project has not been consummated.

• Its practicability has not been established.

• A survey has not been made.

He then proposes:

• To build the Pacific Railroad

• To accomplish it in 10 years

• To raise the capital therefore”

To accomplish this he proposes a partnership between the federal government and private capital. He proposes government land grants along the chosen route as the only way to ensure the permanence of the project, but he also insists that all construction, the choosing of specific local routes, the choosing of grades, the location of tunnels, bridges and river crossings, the hiring of the labor force, etc., would be left in the hands of the private investors. Judah insists that no other approach will work.

The Report is remarkable in discussing in detail precisely how the railroad can be built, but Judah’s visionary outlook is also expressed in his discussion of the speed of the railroad:

“Is 50 miles per hour the limit to speed? No—we dare not admit the principle. We wish to go as fast as we can. . . we are only at a way station . . . we do not travel fast enough, nor will we, until a speed of 100 miles per hour is attained with as much ease and as little risk , as at present.”

He goes on to articulate all of the issues to be addressed - the length of the road, maps and profiles with alignments and grades, how much of what kind of excavations, how many tunnels and what kind, how much masonry and where are the stones, how many bridges, river crossings, culverts, timber and fuel, what is the cost estimate, what will be its effect on travel and trade, every kind of employee and their salaries.

And paints a picture of the stunning progress in transportation of the last 30 years as against all human history.

Judah’s 1857 Report proposal was discussed in Congress at length, but in the end no action was taken. The elephant in the room was whether the eastern terminus should be in a free or slave state. President Buchanan, a Democrat controlled by the slave interest, insisted on a southern route, or he would veto any Railroad bill. This was essentially the story with every Railroad bill introduced in Congress through the 1850s.

Seeing that action in the East was stymied, Judah decided to attack the problem from the other coast, and he returned to California.

The Pacific Railroad Convention of 1859

On April 5, 1859, the California legislature passed a resolution calling for a convention on the Pacific Railroad to be held September 20, 1859 in San Francisco with delegates from every California county and Oregon, and Territories of Washington and Arizona, “to insure the protection and security of those states and territories. . . and especially to consider the refusal of Congress to take efficient measures for the construction of a Railroad from the Atlantic States to the Pacific, and to adopt measures whereby the building of said Railroad can be accomplished. . .”

Judah likely authored that resolution, and he became the prime mover of the convention itself. In a letter to the Sacramento Union, Judah articulated his two objectives, namely to implement “a proper survey of the line or lines, so as to enable us to speak understandingly of the relative merits, length and cost of various routes, and enable us to determine the proper route or line,” and “Second was to decide on the manner in which the Federal Government could properly extend her aid in the construction of the road, calling upon her emphatically to respect the views of the convention on this subject, as an expression of the view and opinion of the people of the whole pacific coast.”

Among other things he proposes to leave the decision of the route up to the investors, relieving Congress of the stickiest issue, then discussed a financing proposal which would attract investors, such that “private capital will seek it – it will not have to seek capital.”

The Convention formally memorialized Congress to lend its aid by granting lands, by guaranteeing interest on the bonds of the roads through the territories, and by remitting the duties on railroad iron for the entire distance.

A series of resolutions and recommendations were passed, and Judah was appointed agent of the Convention to convey the memorial to Congress. He and Anna sailed for Washington October 20. On board the steamer, he met the new California Congressman John Burch, and spent the trip in extensive discussions with him on the proposals. Burch agreed to sponsor the bill. Senator Lane of Oregon was also on board and supportive.

In Washington, Judah met with the California Senators and with President Buchanan. Burch arranged for a room in the Capital to be used as a “Pacific Railway Exhibit.” This was then visited by Congressmen, other government officials and the public. Judah and Anna manned the booth and spoke to people coming in. Anna had brought all of Judah’s maps and charts, plus ore samples, minerals and fossils she had gathered on their Sierra expeditions, and her own sketch books and paintings.

Despite these efforts, Congress, hopelessly divided, again failed to act on the Railroad Bill. In response, the Judahs went on a tour to “endeavor to awaken as much interest as possible in our efforts.” This took them to New York, Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Chicago and Cincinnati.

The Central Pacific Railroad

Undeterred by Congress’ failure to act on the recommendations of the 1859 Convention, Judah set out on his new task:— laying out a railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountains.

His idea now was that rather than ask Congress again to make an offer to some hypothetical company, which should later choose its own route, the company itself should first be organized, and should present to Congress accurate and definite surveys of a particular route, ready to commence construction immediately. In the fall of 1860 he was in the mountains, and made preliminary examinations and barometric reconnaissance of three possible routes. Anna later wrote that “he made up his mind that he would never go to Washington again till he had been over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, made a survey, and would go back with his maps, profiles, estimates, etc. for a railroad across them.”

When he determined with certainty the most feasible route over the mountains, Judah set to work canvassing the field to obtain stock subscription agreements for a railroad across the Sierra to be known as the “Central Pacific Railroad.” He wrote and published a new 18 page pamphlet, detailing the results of their investigations, called “Central Pacific Railroad Company of California,” San Francisco November 1, 1860.

The group of San Francisco investors he approached turned him down flat, one calling him an enthusiastic lunatic. He then organized a meeting in Sacramento. Thus was the beginning of the “Big Four”:—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker. Thus did the terminus become Sacramento and not San Francisco.

Judah reported to them on the results of his 23 explorations crossing the Sierra, and the route he was convinced would work, the Dutch Flat route. He asked for financial backing to make a careful instrumental survey. June 28, 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad of California was formally incorporated with a capital of $8,500,000 divided into 85,000 shares of $100 each.

Funds were now available for an actual instrumental survey of the line. Anna responded by saying, “It is about time somebody else helped.”

By October 1, 1861 results of this survey were reported, crucial for continued support. The route mapped was essentially what became the ultimate route. He compared grades with eastern railroads, discussed snow problems and 18 tunnels. The summit was 7000 feet above Sacramento, 81 miles from base of mountain. Forests with wood for ties were available. He estimated the costs to the state line of $88,428 per mile and provided many more in depth details.

Now he was ready for the campaign to secure selection by Congress of this route and this company. Maps, surveys and information were compiled and he was off to Washington with Anna in October 1861. On this trip newly elected Republican Congressman Aaron Sargent was on board. Judah spent the entire trip laying out maps, detailing and discussing plans. Sargent agreed to sponsor the bill. Also on board Judah prepared a report of the Sierra surveys for publication and upon arrival in New York published 1000 copies, and distributed them among railroad men, President Lincoln, heads of Departments and Senators and Representatives in Congress. Railroad journals published the report and it was widely circulated before Congress met.

In January Sargent made a speech in Congress on the Pacific Railroad as a military necessity and pointed to Judah’s new true survey. Judah managed to be appointed as Secretary of the Senate Pacific Railroad Committee, Chaired by Senator James McDougall of California, and on Sargent’s motion was made clerk of the new House Subcommittee. Later he became Clerk of the main House Committee. This gave him semi-official standing before Congress; without it the bill would not have gone through. He now had charge of all the committee papers and documents, as well as the privilege of the floor of both Senate and House.

The bill was hotly debated in the House and almost got put over to next session again. Some thought it should wait until the war was over. Nevertheless, on May 6, 1862 the Pacific Railroad bill was carried in the House by a vote of 79-49. On June 20 it passed the Senate 35-5, and Lincoln signed it into law July 1, 1862.

The Act provided for the two companies from east and west. A right of way 200 feet wide on either side of the middle line, together with necessary lands for stations and other buildings, was granted from public lands. Upon completion of first 40 miles of road, six per cent 30-year bonds of the United States were to be issued in the amount of $16,000 for the easily constructed sections, $48,000 for the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountain sections and $32,000 for the land in between.

Returning to California, he prepared a full report and planned for the next steps, surveying the 300 mile line into Nevada and Utah.

The Break with the Big Four and Judah’s Epitaph

Friction between Judah and the Big 4 had been brewing even before the Act was signed. Judah did not like the way they did business, and in September he set sail for the east with the intention of recruiting investors to buy them out. He never made it. While crossing the isthmus he caught a Panama fever. He died on November 2, 1863 at the age of 37.

His great project survived. Huge obstacles lay ahead, but ultimately were overcome, and the last spike was driven at Promontory Utah May 10, 1869, uniting the nation at last. Judah had estimated the project would take seven years. It was done in six. While many bold, imaginative and hard working individuals contributed to the effort, without the enthusiasm, vigor, talent and undying determination of Theodore Judah it would not have been accomplished anywhere close to that time.

His devoted wife later wrote:

“Everything he did from the time he went to California to the day of death was for the great continental Pacific railway. Time, money, brains, strength, body and soul were absorbed. It was the burden of his thought day and night, largely of his conversation, till it used to be said, ‘Judah’s Pacific Railroad crazy,’ and I would say, ‘Theodore, those people don’t care,’ ‘you give your thunder away.’ He’d laugh and say, ‘But we must keep the ball rolling.’”

Former Congressman John Burch later put it:

. . . T D Judah, who not only conceived the idea of the early and speedy construction of the Pacific Railway, but by unrepulsed and unwearying exertion and perseverance in the field, in the library and drafting room, before public meetings, in committees and with individuals, did more than any one man in the achievement of this one of the greatest works of civil engineering accomplished in this the nineteenth century; ever memorable as it is destined to be in the world’s history for its vast works of wonderful internal improvements.” – address to Association of Territorial Pioneers of California, April 13, 1875

As one Poet put it,

The great Sierras, reared their ramparts high,

With canyons stretching deep and dark between;

A roadless, towering steep whose vast demesne

The art of man had never dared defy.

When Judah looked with steady, piercing eye

Upon the Abysmal wonders of the scene,

Until he saw with vision grandly keen

The certain path for him to glorify.

And now along the way his genius traced

The locomotive plies, all fears outfaced,

The world of commerce in its arms to bear;

And as its song of triumph man still hears,

All blent with it a paean thrills the air

In praise of him our Prince of Engineers.

-Edward Robeson Taylor, lawyer, doctor, poet, Mayor of San Francisco 1907-10

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“Alexander Hamilton was a British Agent.”

“Alexander Hamilton was a tool of the Rothschilds.”

“Hamilton’s Bank was the first Central Bank in America.”

“The Federal Reserve is the same as Hamilton’s National Bank.”

Many of you have probably heard one or more of the statements listed above. Such are just a few of the STUPID, uninformed opinions that one hears today concerning Hamilton. They are repeated again and again, particularly among certain circles of what are loosely called “libertarians,” but many others have been duped into such opinions by their university professors, Wikipedia or the New York Times.

Take note, that if you believe any of this tripe, you are a fool; i.e., you are acting very foolishly. You have been led astray and are actually doing the bidding of America’s enemies today.

In reality, present-day slanders against Hamilton all emanate from London. There are several sources for these slanders, but, unquestionably, a primary agent responsible for these lies is an organization named the Mont Pelerin Society. Some very foolish people hold that Society in high esteem, but from the beginning it was, pure and simple, a vehicle to push British imperial economics. The Mont Pelerin Society is not an American institution. It was founded in Switzerland in 1947, and its creation was bankrolled almost entirely by the Bank of England, at the urging of leading aristocrats in Britain, particularly Baron Grantchester of Knightsbridge. Britain’s MI-6 was also heavily involved.

Today, the Mont Pelerin Society is known as the guardian of the “sacred writings” of the mis-named “Austrian School of Economics.” But there is no such thing as the “Austrian School.” Read the works of the “Austrians” Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Who do they praise?—William Gladstone; Lord Acton; Richard Cobden; Adam Smith; James and John Stuart Mill; and similar British aristocrats. All members of the Royal Privy Council or employees of the British East India Company. There are no Austrians here; they are all agents of the British Empire.

In his book The Road to Serfdom, Hayek openly proclaims the pre-1900 era of British laissez faire economics to be the “golden age of mankind.” Hayek has no words of praise for George Washington, nor Abraham Lincoln, nor Henry Carey—and certainly not Alexander Hamilton, an individual he considers a tyrant. His heroes are all British, i.e. British imperialists. Born in Austria, Hayek moved to London and actually gave up his Austrian citizenship to become a British subject. Later, although he moved to America and lived 20 years there, he never applied for U.S. citizenship. His loyalty was always to London. Until his dying breath.

The Mont Pelerin Society is but one of several Anglophile organizations operating today on behalf of the City of London. Others include: the Adam Smith Institute, the Henry Jackson Society, the Atlantic Council, the International Churchill Society, and of course the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House—which recently sponsored the anti-Trump Mike Pence). All of these associations are dedicated to preserving the “Anglo-American Alliance,” i.e., keeping America subservient to the interests of the City of London. They are all enemies of the Trump Presidency. The Mt. Pelerin Society is merely one component—albeit a very important component—of these British-directed attacks on America. Its British free-trade economics is nothing but a foreign bacillus which has invaded the minds of too many gullible American “conservatives.”

The Big Lie about Hamilton’s National Bank

The limited scope of this article does not permit an in-depth discussion of all of the “stupid, uninformed opinions” that slander Alexander Hamilton, but let us look at only one of them: “The Federal Reserve is the same as Hamilton’s National Bank.” Many of you have probably heard this.

Such a view belies woeful ignorance. A Hamiltonian National Bank and an oligarchical Central Bank have nothing in common. As I say in my book National Banking, they are as different as Honey and Vinegar. Statements to the contrary are simply not true. There are many, many technical differences between Hamilton’s Bank of the United States and the present-day Federal Reserve; among them I will mention only five (there are many others):

1. Hamilton’s National Bank functioned as a commercial bank and made loans to manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and other useful enterprises. The Federal Reserve does not do this.

2. Hamilton’s Bank was prohibited from purchasing (monetizing) U.S. Government Debt. The Federal Reserve does this as a matter of routine, acting as an engine for growing U.S. indebtedness.

3. The U.S. Treasury regularly audited the books of Hamilton’s Bank and the Treasury was empowered to intervene into the Bank to deal with irregularities or unsound practices. None of this is allowed with the “independent” Federal Reserve.

4. The National Bank did not act as a lender of last resort, nor did it set monetary policy. This latter power was reserved exclusively for the Congress and the U.S. Treasury.

5. The Federal Reserve unconstitutionally prints its own money (Federal Reserve Notes). Hamilton’s bank was prohibited from doing this and had to operate on the basis of money issued under the Constitution by the U.S. Treasury.

Those are just a few examples. More examples could be listed, but what has been said is sufficient to make the point. More important—far more important—is the intent of the two institutions. The Federal Reserve operates today to serve the interest of the major Wall Street banks, and working with other Central Banks from around the world to perpetuate the current British financial empire of money. If you read Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, you find an opposite intention. Hamilton is very, very explicit: to use the credit-generating power of the National Bank to foster science, technology, industry, agriculture and other productive activity; activity which benefits the people of the nation, which builds the nation.

Hamilton created (out of the blue) a new system of Sovereign Public Credit. In one sense this can be seen as a “conveyor belt” of credit flowing from the U.S. Treasury, through the National Bank, into productive investment—manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and infrastructure. Hamilton’s idea was to use the sovereign power of the Constitutional Republic—not the “free market” controlled by London and New York financial speculators—to foster productive economic development on behalf of the General Welfare of all of the People. Hamilton’s writings are also replete with repeated attacks on usury and financial speculation. The goal was Credit for productive development, not the amassing of monetary wealth.

People should stop listening to the slanders against Hamilton. He was George Washington’s loyal partner in developing the nation. More important is the urgent requirement today that our current banking and financial system must be reorganized to embrace the principles enunciated by Hamilton in order to fulfill Donald Trump’s mandate to “Build, Baby, Build.”

What Hamilton Wrought

In conjunction with his establishment of a National Bank, Hamilton authored his Report on Manufactures. There is no way to fully grasp the intention, the purpose, of the National Bank without studying this Report. For those who blindly slander Alexander Hamilton, but have not read his Report on Manufactures, my admonition is that you are simply not qualified to contribute anything useful to this discussion. First, you must carefully study Hamilton’s Report. It might open your eyes. For other readers—those with an open and un-biased mind, read on.

In appointing Hamilton as Treasury Secretary, George Washington described him as a man of “probity and Sterling virtue,” and he placed in his hands the responsibility to rescue the nation from bankruptcy and economic disintegration. In 1791 the total debt of the federal and state governments was $77.1 million, a staggering amount for a small bankrupt nation. Hamilton’s strategy was simple: consolidate all of the debt into one pile, fund the federal debt at par, and assume all the state debts. Tariffs and excise taxes would be implemented to fund the debt, and a National Bank established to manage all investments and payments at the federal level.

This plan worked beautifully, and between 1791 and 1801 U.S. sovereign debt was reduced (paid-off) dramatically. At the same time, as the debt was now secure, it was placed on deposit in the National Bank—as an asset guaranteed by the Federal Government—where it became the backing for the issuance of new loans into manufacturing and other productive investments. Hamilton’s plan was to reduce the debt, but at the same time use the existing debt as “collateral” for economic development. It worked. [Note, however, that the debt began to rise again in 1801, during Jefferson’s first year as President, reaching a total of $130 million by the end of his second term.]

Let us consider a little more Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures. In that work he delineates a plan of Protective Tariffs, Bounties and Premiums, all designed to spark scientific and industrial growth. At the insistence of both Washington and Hamilton, the nation’s first protective tariff was adopted. Then in 1790, a more aggressive tariff, authored personally by Hamilton, was adopted, raising the tariff rate from 5 percent to between 7 and 10 percent. The additional twin initiatives of Bounties and Premiums involved using a small portion of the tariff revenue to fund the work of scientists and inventors involved in technological breakthroughs. Hamilton also proposed that the National Government use two percent of the national debt to finance the creation of a “National Manufactory,” which would serve as a laboratory and testing facility for advancements in industry and technology.

In 1791 Hamilton helped found the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, which established an in-depth industrial complex in Paterson, New Jersey. This was, in a sense, a pilot project for public-private partnerships in developing the nation. Despite a rocky start and some poor local leadership, the Patterson works became for a time the largest manufacturing center in America and continued in operation for 150 years, beginning with cotton processing for textiles and clothes and later becoming a leading center of iron production.

Other initiatives by Hamilton have already been discussed in this author’s previous article on George Washington, including the construction of Lighthouses along the eastern seaboard and the 1790 creation of the U.S. Merchant Marine and Coast Guard, both at Hamilton’s urging. As a result of both the tariffs and the creation of the Merchant Marine, during the eight years of the Washington Presidency, the registered tonnage of American ships engaged in foreign trade increased by 384 percent. Ship-building boomed, spurred on by the credit policies of the National Bank.

A key concept that must be grasped in understanding all of this is “Sovereignty.” Under Hamilton, American economic and monetary policy would not be controlled by “private” financial oligarchs, be they in London, Paris or New York City. The Constitutional commitment to develop the nation for the benefit of the people would be paramount. As per the Constitution, the U.S. Government would coin (or print) its own sovereign currency, determine how that currency would be put into circulation, and identify the priorities for investment as to the building up of the nation. Actual societal wealth would flow precisely from this commitment.

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In the summer of 1787 representatives from 12 of the 13 U.S. states gathered in Philadelphia, at a time of great crisis, to address the reality that the Articles of Confederation had failed and the country was sinking into chaos and economic collapse. The end result of those deliberations was, of course, the signing of a new Constitution for the American Republic.

How many Americans today are aware that the prime instigator of that initiative was George Washington, and that to a significant degree Washington’s motivation flowed from his efforts to develop the new nation economically, specifically through the creation of a great water project? That a canal project was the spark for what became the United States Constitution?

Only 12 months after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War, in September 1784 George Washington conducted a personal tour of the Ohio territory and lands west of the Allegheny Mountains. Traveling through wilderness, the trip covered 680 miles. One of the primary goals of the inspection was to determine the best route for building a canal connecting the Potomac and James rivers with western waterways.

The Potomac River was the shortest potential route between the Virginia tidewater and the headwaters of the Ohio River, with access to the western frontier. This project was at the forefront of Washington’s determination to open the west for settlement and develop the productive power of the young American economy.

Three months after his western journey, Washington organized a meeting, at Alexandria, where he and other Virginia commissioners met with their counterparts from Maryland, to discuss his proposed water project. Unfortunately, the Alexandria conference broke down due to rivalries between the Virginia and Maryland delegates. Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government was prohibited from building major infrastructure projects, and as Washington discovered trying to get agreement among individual “sovereign” states for such a project was near impossible.

Undeterred, Washington organized a second conference, this at his home at Mt. Vernon, from March 21 to March 28, 1785. Washington chaired the conference, and under his direction the delegates from Virginia and Maryland agreed to establish a joint company—the Patowmack Company—to improve the Potomac River between its headwaters and the tidewater at Georgetown. They also agreed to establish uniform tariffs, joint operation of lighthouses and several other economic initiatives.

The Mt. Vernon delegates formed a new “Patowmack Company,” Washington was elected the president, and by early 1785 the company began work, hauling rocks out of the upper river to create a shipping channel.

All of this was illegal! Under the Articles of Confederation, individual states were strictly forbidden to form treaties or agreements among themselves for such projects. Washington dismissed these restrictions, describing the Articles of Confederation as “a half-starved, limping Government that appears to be always moving upon crutches, and tottering at every step.”

The creation of the Patowmack Company was not Washington’s end goal. At Mt. Vernon several delegates proposed inviting Pennsylvania and Delaware to join the canal project. Instead, Washington proposed a conference which would include all of the 13 states, and he persuaded the Virginia legislature to send out an invitation to all of the states to attend a general convention at Annapolis in September 1786. This was the beginning of the chain-of-events that led to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787.

Washington initiated and led this fight, and the Mount Vernon Conference has rightly been named as the true birthplace—some have called it the “Cradle”—of the United States Constitution.

During the Spring and Summer of 1786, Washington wrote numerous letters to leading individuals—notably an intense dialogue with Alexander Hamilton— urging support for the upcoming Annapolis Conference. In one letter—this to John Jay—he explained the necessity of replacing the Articles of Confederation:

“Your sentiments, that our affairs are drawing rapidly to a crisis, accord with my own. What the event will be, is also beyond the reach of my foresight. . . . I do not conceive we can exist long as a nation, without lodging somewhere a power which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the State governments extends over the several States. To be fearful of investing Congress, constituted as that body is with ample authorities for national purposes, appears to me the very climax of popular absurdity and madness. . . What then is to be done? Things cannot go on in the same train forever. It is much to be feared, as you observe, that the better kind of people, being disgusted with these circumstances, will have their minds prepared for any revolution whatever. We are apt to run from one extreme into another. To anticipate and prevent disastrous contingencies would be the part of wisdom and patriotism.”

Despite Washington’s efforts, delegates from only five states attended the Annapolis Convention. At this point Alexander Hamilton authored the Annapolis Resolution, sent both to the national Congress as well as to all of the state governors, calling for the convening of a national convention. It is very clear that during all of this it was Hamilton, not James Madison, who functioned as Washington’s most trusted lieutenant in pushing this project forward.

The Father of the Constitution

Washington’s leadership in the fight to create a unified sovereign Republic actually precedes these events. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, in June 1783, he authored a Circular Letter to the States, sent to all 13 state governors and reprinted in newspapers throughout the nation. In part it read:

“This is the favorable moment to give such a tone to the federal government, as will enable it to answer the ends of its institution; or, this may be the ill-fated moment for relaxing the powers of the union, annihilating the cement of the confederation, and exposing us to become the sport of European politics, which may play one State against another, to prevent their growing importance, and to serve their own interested purposes. For, according to the system of policy the States shall adopt at this moment, they will stand or fall; and, by their confirmation or lapse, it is yet to be decided, whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse:—a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.”

When the delegates assembled in Philadelphia in May 1787, Washington was elected unanimously as the President of the Convention. Despite falsified stories to the contrary, Washington did not just “preside” over the Convention, his role was decisive. He stayed at the home of Robert Morris, leader of the Bank of North America; his co-lodger was Gouverneur Morris who would author the Preamble to the Constitution. His chief lieutenant on the floor of the Convention was, again, Alexander Hamilton. As the endless bickering at the Convention went on week after week, Washington became extremely frustrated, and in a July 10 letter he sent to Hamilton (then in New York), he wrote that:

The situation at the Convention is, “if possible, in a worse train than ever; you will find but little ground on which the hope of a good establishment can be formed,” and “I am almost despaired of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings of the Convention,” and he attacked the “men who oppose a strong and energetic government,” calling them “narrow minded politicians who are under the influence of local views.”

One example of Washington’s resolve occurred on June 18, when he turned over the agenda to Alexander Hamilton, who delivered a 6-hour impassioned speech on the need to create a strong sovereign national government capable of carrying out urgent economic development. Hamilton and Washington had held a lengthy private discussion the day before the speech, and it is clear, as it was clear at the time to the other delegates, that on June 18 Hamilton spoke as much for Washington as for himself.

In the end, Gouverneur Morris’ Preamble, committing the Republic to defend the General Welfare” of ALL OF THE PEOPLE carried the day, and the final Constitution contained powerful clauses empowering the government to pursue economic, scientific and technological progress.

Public and Private Initiatives

The story of Washington’s support for Alexander Hamilton’s 1789-1793 initiatives to create a National Credit System for nation-wide economic development will be covered in the next installment of this series. Here we look at just a sampling that indicates his intention in that direction.

During his first year in the Presidency, Washington succeeded in creating the United States Lighthouse Establishment as an agency under the control of the Department of the Treasury. All private and state U.S. lighthouse ownerships were transferred to the national government, and funding was secured to begin construction of new lighthouses at critical coastal sites. The first of these was the 1792 Cape Henry Lighthouse. This was the first national public works project in American history. Note that there is no “enumerated power” in the Constitution authorizing the Government to do this; it was carried out through the power of sovereign government on behalf of the General Welfare.

Other actions taken by Washington include: Washington’s signing of the Copyright Act of 1790, protecting individual inventors and encouraging their work, and the 1790 creation of the U.S. Merchant Marine and Coast Guard. These organizations maintained the lighthouses, protected the coastline and enforced tariff laws; and the Tariff Law of 1789 that established tonnage rates favorable to American carriers by charging them lower cargo fees than those imposed on foreign ships. Coastal trade was reserved exclusively for American flag vessels.

All of this was designed to promote rapid expansion of manufacturing, agriculture and other productive activity. During the Washington Presidency, the registered tonnage of American ships engaged in foreign trade increased by 384 percent. In 1790, a new tariff, written by Hamilton, was adopted. This increased the average rate of tariff from 5 percent to between 7 and 10 percent, and added other items to the list subject to tariffs.

In his private life, Washington became a pioneer in the development of modern science-driven agriculture. As early as 1760, Washington began to shift almost all of the agricultural production at Mt. Vernon out of tobacco and into grains, including wheat, oats, rye and barley. Over the next 20 years he studied and mastered the most advanced ideas in agricultural science, and in a manner not dissimilar to Benjamin Franklin, he conducted hundreds of experiments in a wide array of new farming methods such as crop rotation, the use of different fertilizers, developing new plant hybrids and new breeds of livestock.

He also transformed Mt. Vernon into the nation’s first agro-industrial complex, introducing new equipment, new inventions and new methods of production, including semi-automation of various tasks such as milling and threshing. Washington became the recognized leader for agricultural change in America.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, Washington was the leading wheat farmer in America. His wheat and flour were sold under his own label—stamped “G. Washington”—and shipped to all thirteen colonies. “Washington’s Wheat” became famous, and he became the first exporter of wheat in the United States.

Washington also expanded into fisheries, dairy farming, textiles and other areas. His fishery processed over 1 million fish per year. What Washington built at Mount Vernon was an “agro-industrial village,” the likes of which existed nowhere else in America.

Sponsoring Science and Technology

When the Patowmack Company began construction of the Potomac Canal, Washington hired as the Chief Engineer a man named James Rumsey. But Rumsey was not just an engineer, he was an inventor, and simultaneous with his canal-building responsibilities he was engaged in developing what would become the first steam-powered boat in America. Rumsey showed Washington a working model of his boat, and Washington enthusiastically agreed to help him. To secure investors, Washington gave Rumsey a certificate as follows:

“I have seen the model of Mr. Rumsey’s boat, constructed to work against the stream, examined the powers upon which it acts, been the eye witness to an actual experiment in running water of some rapidity and give it as my opinion, although I had but little faith before, that he has discovered the art of working boats by mechanism and small manual assistance against rapid currents: that the discovery is of vast importance: may be of the greatest usefulness in our inland navigation, and if it succeeds, of which I have no doubt, that the value of it is greatly enhanced by the simplicity of the works; which when seen and explained, may be executed by the most common mechanic.”

Washington, together with Benjamin Franklin, also became backers of another pioneer in steam-powered boats, a man named John Fitch, who initiated the first commercial steamboat service in America. Fitch later built a “prototype of a practical land-operating steam engine,” meant to operate on tracks—in other words, a steam locomotive.

A third inventor protégé of Washington’s was Col. John Stevens. In 1776, at age 27, Stevens was appointed a captain in Washington’s army in the Revolutionary War, and he developed a personal relationship with Washington. After the War, Washington supported and encouraged Stevens in his scientific work. Much later, in 1806, Stevens built the first steamship to navigate the open ocean, and in 1812 he issued a pamphlet—Documents Tending to Prove the Superior Advantages of Rail-ways and Steam Carriages over Canal Navigation—arguing for railroads. Note that in 1812 there were no steam-powered locomotives in existence. Three years later, Stevens built a circular railroad track on his property in Hoboken, and began operating a full-size steam-powered engine.

Scientific Progress, manufacturing, modern agriculture, the development of the nation,—these were all things that Washington sought to secure through the creation of a sovereign Republic. A Nation built on upward progress.

For an in depth picture of Washington’s life and career, see this author’s Washington’s Republic: the American Revolution of 1775-1796

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From the beginning the American Experiment was intimately linked to the fight to develop a productive economy, a productive future for its citizens.

In 1630 John Winthrop led a flotilla of ten ships and 800 passengers into Boston Harbor. In 1642, Winthrop’s son, John Winthrop the Younger, organized the founding of “The Company of Undertakers for the Iron Works in New England.” Four years later, the New World’s first ironworks opened in Braintree, Massachusetts. The General Court promised the company a 20-year monopoly on iron production, provided it produced finished bar iron, and on the condition it would only be allowed to export that portion that was not needed for the economic development of New England.

The new iron works began operations in 1646. Then, in 1647, the iron works was relocated to a more suitable site at Saugus-the famous Saugus Ironworks-and within one year, it was producing a ton of iron per day! By 1650, the works consisted of a blast furnace for producing pig iron and gray iron (which was poured into molds to make pots, pans, kettles, skillets and other products), a forge where pig iron was refined into wrought iron, a quarter-ton hammer that was used to make iron bars, which were sold to blacksmiths for manufacture into finished products, and a rolling and slitting mill that could be used to manufacture nails, bolts, horse shoes, wagon wheels, axes, saw blades, and other implements. It was one of the most technologically advanced iron works in the world.

It is astonishing to contemplate that by 1650, American colonists had established one of the most advanced iron manufacturing industries in the world, producing finished goods for domestic usage, on land that only 20 years earlier had been utter wilderness.

Man in the Image of God the Creator

It is of critical importance to recognize that the amazing accomplishment of John Winthrop the Younger and his allies, described above, was not simply a pragmatic economic intervention. The motivating impulse is to be found in the intention to create a productive society, an impulse grounded in the deeply held religious beliefs of the original Pilgrim and Puritan settlers. At the heart of this is the belief in the God-given creative and agapic nature of the human identity.

John Robinson, the spiritual guide of the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth, defined this outlook in a sermon, titled “Of Faith, Hope, and Love, Reason and Sense,” saying:

“Reason is that wherein man goes before all other earthly creatures and comes after God only. . . . For whereas God and nature hath furnished other creatures, some with hoofs, others with other instruments, and weapons both defensive and offensive, man is left naked, and destitute of all these, but may comfort himself in that one endowment of reason, and providence, whereby he is able to govern them all.”

Man may comfort himself “in that one endowment of reason, and providence, whereby he is able to govern them all.” Thus, Robinson distinguishes the creative and productive nature of Man—the ability to create something new and beneficent—from the bestial impulses of the lower animals.

In that same sermon, Robinson links this creative human nature-irrevocably-to the motivating emotion of Agapē—love of God and love of our fellow Man, saying:

“To love God is to become godly, and to have the mind, after a sort, deified, ‘being made partakers of the divine nature’. . . He that loves not his brother whom he sees, how can he love God whom he sees not?. . . And so natural to Christians is this brotherly love as that the apostle makes account he need not write to the churches, to teach them that which God taught them so many ways. . . to love as we ought, is a very happy thing, wherein we resemble God.”

It is also very revealing to note that, unlike the other European colonies in the Americas—Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and including the English settlement at Jamestown—the Pilgrim and Puritan settlements were made up of families. When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620 with 102 colonists, that number included 48 men, 24 women and 30 children. The other European colonies were comprised almost exclusively of young men, and their purpose was to transmit loot back to London, but what the Pilgrims brought to Plymouth were families. Their intention was to establish a colony which would create an entirely new type of society, grounded in human freedom. This is precisely the intent enunciated in John Winthrop’s proclamation for establishing a “City Upon a Hill” in Boston.

Science and Discovery

John Winthrop the Younger had a long history as an inventor and scientist, even before he left England to join his father in Boston. He intensively studied both chemistry and medicine, and he wrote papers on a wide variety of subjects, including on the motion of tides, the refining of gold, the making of pitch, tar, and pot-ashes, the planting of timber, the building of ships in North America and many other topics. In one letter written to the Royal Society in London, he hypothesized the existence of a fifth moon of Jupiter—a discovery not confirmed until 1892. This was based on observations he made with a telescope he built and later donated to Harvard College.

Winthrop was, in fact, a talented astronomer. He had studied the writings of Johannes Kepler, and in the 1670s he carried out a scientific correspondence with the young Gottfried Leibniz.

One of John Winthrop Sr.’s closest allies was a man named Richard Mather, a Congregationalist minister. Richard’s son, Increase Mather, would in turn become a close associate and collaborator of Winthrop the Younger. Increase too had studied Kepler, and he wrote several works on astronomy, including one titled A Discourse Concerning Comets. In 1680 Increase founded the Boston Philosophical Society, a direct forerunner of Benjamin Franklin’s later American Philosophical Society.

Increase’s chief concern in these writings is to demonstrate a coherence between scientific thought and religious belief, and it was during this period that he delivered a sermon, “The Light of Reason is the Work of God; the Law of Reason is the Law of God; the Voice of Reason is the Voice of God.” He was combating the increasingly influential empiricist theories, coming out of England and Scotland, mechanistic theories that essentially posited a dead universe, without God, governed by purely mathematical laws.

Increase Mather’s son, Cotton, also became the leading scientist in the American colonies. His last two major works were The Angel of Bethesda and The Christian Philosopher. The former is a work on medicine and disease, based on Cotton’s work in developing a smallpox inoculation, and the latter deals with botany and living systems, examining the divine principles that underlie the scientific laws which govern Living processes.

Credit for Development

The Boston, Plymouth and slightly later Connecticut settlers exhibited both determination and ingenuity in the economic development of those colonies. But they confronted a huge obstacle-the shortage of money, or to put it more precisely, the lack of Credit for development. There were no banks in the colonies and no legal monetary authorities. Hard specie, i.e., circulating coins, were in very short supply. The small minority involved in export trade to England were able to secure payment for their wares, but the bulk of the people had no means to raise capital for productive investment.

In the earliest days of the Boston settlement there were a handful of private individuals who functioned as money-lenders, but their practices were not dissimilar from what today we would call “loan sharks.” John Winthrop, Sr. attacked these practices, denouncing the exploitation of the common people through usurious lending:

“Thou must observe whether thy brother hath present or probable, or possible means of repaying thee, if there be none of these, thou must give him according to his necessity, rather than lend him. . . If he hath present means of repaying thee, thou art to look at him, not as an act of mercy, but by way of commerce, wherein thou art to walk by the rule of Justice.”

John Cotton, the leading religious leader of the colony, also stated:

“No increase to be taken of a poor political brother or neighbor, for anything lent unto him.”

To deal with this problem, in 1652, the Massachusetts government took a crucial step and decided to create its own mint, from which the colony would issue its own currency, the Pine Tree Shilling. This step short-circuited the attempts by London creditors to impose a financial stranglehold on the colony, and provided the needed capital for economic development.

This experiment, however, did not last long. In 1684, British King Charles II revoked the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay colony, transforming Massachusetts into a Royal colony. By this act, the minting of coins in the colony was outlawed. Additionally, the colony no longer had sovereign powers to issue subsidies for the development of mining and manufacturing, regulate its trade, and enforce its prohibitions against usury. All of these measures had been integral to the impressive rates of economic growth in republican Massachusetts.

Increase Mather led the fight against this, and the elder Mather authored a work, titled “New England Vindicated from Unjust Aspersions,” wherein he argued that Massachusetts must have authority to control its own currency and credit, and direct its own capital into the development of mining and manufacturing.

The actions by the British Crown produced a profound economic crisis in New England. At this point, Cotton Mather intervened, authoring a 1691 proposal, titled “Some Considerations on Bills of Credit,” arguing for the issuance of government-backed paper currency. This work was, without question, the first rigorous argument to appear in America on the scientific principle of Public Credit, and the coherence of the argument presented by Mather with later writings by Benjamin Franklin is very clear. The concept of Public Credit, as a generative principle designed to increase productive economic activity—in opposition to John Locke’s notion of purely monetary wealth—would ultimately find its fruition in Alexander Hamilton’s invention of his system of National Banking and Public Credit.

An excerpt from Mather’s 1691 proposal reads:

“I cannot a little wonder at the great indiscretion of our Countrymen who Refuse to accept that, which they call Paper-money, as pay of equal value with the best Spanish Silver. What? Is the word Paper a scandal to them?. . . Is it not as valuable as so much Silver or Gold, supposing the Security of payment be sufficient? Now what is the Security of your Paper-money less then the Credit of the whole Country. If the Countries Debts must be paid (as I believe they must, and I am sure in justice they ought) whatever change of Government shall come, then the Country must make good the Credit, or more Taxes must be still Raised, till the public Debts be Answered. I say, the Country, and not the Gentlemen who Administer the Government, who are but the Countries Agents in this Affair. All the Inhabitants of the Land, taken as one Body are the Principals, who Reap the Benefits, and must bear the Burdens, and are the Security in their Public Bonds.

“Sir, you and I have had some former Discourse about the Nature of Money, that it is but a Counter or Measure of men’s Proprieties and Instituted mean of permutation. As metal, indeed, it is a commodity, like all other things, that are Merchantable. But as Money it is no more than what was said. . . Do not Bills transmit to Remote Parts, vast sums without the intervention of Silver? Are not Taxes paid and received by mutual Credit between the Government and the People, the Government requiring the Country to give them Credit to pay the Country’s Debts, and then again receive the same Credit of the Country as good pay? Tis strange that in the meanwhile; between the Government paying the People, and the People paying the Government: The Government’s (or rather the Country’s) Bills should not pass between Man and Man.

“Upon the Difficulties and Necessities which the Country hath been brought into, a better way could not well be thought upon, then the CREDIT now passing (or that should be so) among us. Silver we have not enough in the Country to do which must be done, more being usually Exported than is Imported. . . What is the use of Coined Silver? but to furnish a man with Credit, that he may obtain from his Neighbors those Commodities, which he hath occasion for?”

Mather is very explicit as to the purpose of his proposed paper currency-to finance investment in useful projects which will expand productive economic activity to the benefit of all. It should be noted that in 1714, when a Land Bank was organized in Boston, Mather vigorously opposed this. Rather than an institution of Public Credit for the common good, the Land Bank was a scheme by speculators and corrupt merchants to line their own pockets. Mather charged that by the private usurious practices of the Land Bank “We are reduced to [Thomas] Hobbes’ state of Nature.”

Human Development and Happiness

Cotton Mather’s greatest work was his 1710 Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good, and all of his economic and scientific writings are coherent with that essay’s message to “those who desire. . . to Do Good while they live.” All of the advances achieved in Massachusetts-in manufacturing, navigation, surveying, and crucial scientific work in astronomy, physics and botany-contributed to the rapid development of a free, literate and skilled citizenry, unhindered by oligarchical control.

What was set into motion by the Winthrops, the Mathers and other early pioneers was a process of creating an anti-oligarchical culture, one coherent with the principle which Gottfried Leibniz later termed “Happiness.” This effort proceeded through stages, with many reversals and crises, but in 1776 the call went forth—as a self-evident truth—that “All men are created equal,” and in 1789 a new Republic was formed, pledged to defend the General Welfare and secure the “Blessings of Liberty” for future generations.

What we are discussing here is the “Idea of America,” the well-spring from which all later great developments flowed. Martin Luther King possessed a profound moral grasp of this issue, and Lyndon LaRouche battled for this ideal, this vision, throughout his life.

The Empire Says No!

In 1750 the British Government enacted the Iron Act. That Act prohibited the construction of iron manufacturing in the American colonies, including the building of steel-making furnaces, iron mills and forges, and other facilities to make finished iron products. Americans would only be allowed to produce raw pig and bar iron, which would then be exported to Britain.

This Act was a major contributing factor leading to the American Revolution, but the policy of prohibiting various kinds of manufacturing in the colonies began much earlier. In 1699 Parliament had prohibited the exportation of finished or semi-finished woolen products from all of the colonies. Additionally, the colonists were not only prevented from exporting finished goods, they were prohibited from producing such goods for themselves.

Many, many types of “finished” manufactured goods were outlawed. For example, the manufacture of hats was criminalized, and all hats had to be imported from England, despite the fact that the raw materials to produce the hats were abundant in America. The intention of the British masters was to force the American colonists to accept a subservient role as a supplier of raw materials and unfinished goods to the manufacturing interests in Great Britain. Numerous laws were passed in Parliament, decrees were issued by the Board of Trade and pronouncements came from the British monarch himself—all designed to prohibit manufacturing in the colonies.

In reality, however, the intention was even worse. In 1660, leading members of the British oligarchy established the Royal Africa Company (RAC), under the direction of future King James II. Its purpose was to clone the highly lucrative Jamaica/Barbados slave-labor “model” on to the colonies in North America. Between 1672 and 1689 the RAC shipped more than 100,000 slaves into the 13 colonies, and these shipments not only continued, but escalated after 1700. The policy of London was to enforce an economic model of slavery, low wages and raw-material production on the 13 colonies.

This imperial policy could only lead to Revolution, because America, from the beginning, had been founded on different principles, different conceptions as to the type of society the early colonists fought to develop. The American Revolution was not a “tax revolt.” It was a fight to create a more productive and happier future.

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by Robert Ingraham

As a consequence of both slander and incompetent historiography, today Benjamin Franklin is viewed as almost a humorous curiosity. He flew a kite in a lightning storm; he invented the character of the clownish Poor Richard; and he spent most of his time in London and Paris chasing young women. Or so the story goes.

Hopefully, this brief article will aid in the rehabilitation of Franklin’s reputation. The theme of this current series of articles is “The American System Unleashed,” and to fully understand that subject it is critical to recognize Franklin’s towering role in shaping America’s future as a productive nation, grounded in scientific and technological progress. Here, we shall focus on only a few of the most important of Franklin’s initiatives, including his overall vision of an upwardly progressive society, based on free labor and human inventiveness; his connection to the expansion of manufacturing; and his repeated interventions on the issue of Public Credit.

In 1743 Ben Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society. The catalyst for the formation of the society was an essay which Franklin authored that same year, titled “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America.” In the opening paragraphs of that document, Franklin states:

“The first drudgery of settling new colonies, which confines the attention of people to mere necessaries, is now pretty well over. And there are many in every province in circumstances that set them at ease, and afford leisure to cultivate the finer arts and improve the stock of knowledge. To such as were of a philosophical turn of mind, curiosity and insight must from time to time produce discoveries to the advantage of some or all of the British plantations, or to the benefit of mankind in general.”

The American Philosophical Society was not intended as some “ivory tower” of academic philosophical speculation, but rather a vehicle for investigations into Useful Knowledge, which will benefit human society. This is very explicit in the curriculum and areas of study which he proposes:

“That the subjects of the correspondence be. . . new-discovered plants, herbs, trees, and roots, their virtues, uses, &c., methods of propagating them; . . . new methods of curing or preventing disease; new-discovered fossils in different countries, as mines, minerals, quarries, &c.; new discoveries in chemistry, such as improvements in distillation, brewing, and assaying of ores; new mechanical inventions for saving labor, as mills and carriages, and for raising and conveying of water, draining of meadows, &c., all new arts, trades, and manufactures, that may be proposed or thought of; surveys, maps and charts of particular parts of the seacoast or inland countries, course and junction of rivers and great roads, situation of lakes and mountains, nature of the soil and productions; new methods of improving the breed of useful animals; new improvements in planting, gardening, and clearing land; and all philosophical experiments that let light into the nature of things, tend to increase the power of man over matter. . .” [emphasis added]

The word “Useful,” as it was employed by Franklin, has a different meaning from how it is popularly understood today. By “useful,” Franklin meant those valid scientific discoveries which revealed new universal principles that would lead to an increase in human power over nature, creating a more productive society for future generations. The question Franklin continues to ask himself is: Will it benefit Mankind? Will it contribute to further Human Progress, to advancing Human Civilization?

During his lifetime Franklin investigated electrical phenomena, magnetism, botany, minerals, navigation, the gulf stream, heat, light, and many other physical processes,—always for the purpose of unlocking the principles and secrets governing these processes, and always with the intention of increasing the productive power of society. For Franklin the subject of economics and finance was always subsumed within this intention for upward human development.

In 1751, Franklin authored another essay, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries.” This was written in direct response to the passage by Parliament of the Iron Act of 1750, which prohibited all new iron mills and steel furnaces in the colonies. The “Observations” is both an argument in favor of rapid industrial and technological development, and simultaneously an argument against what would later be called “Malthusian” notions on limits to population. Franklin demonstrates that industrial expansion and scientific progress go hand-in-hand with rapid increases in population, and he goes on to demonstrate that rather than this increase in population leading to widespread poverty, the increased “productive power” and upward development of the colonies would result in full employment, accompanied by high wages.

More human beings did not mean “more mouths to feed,” or the dividing up of the “economic pie” into smaller and smaller pieces; rather, it meant more creative human minds, each with the potential to contribute new discoveries, new interventions which will increase the upward productivity of society.

This is the “secret” of what is called the American System of Economics. It is not simply a recipe involving banking, money, tariffs and manufacturing. It begins, as Franklin understood, with a recognition of the creative and agapic nature of the human individual.

Manufacturing

Benjamin Franklin was a printer by trade, and he never built or owned a factory. Yet, from his earliest days in Philadelphia, his life and his scientific work were intimately connected to colonial manufacturers. This began early, through his long association with James Logan. Logan was the owner of the Durham Ironworks, located about 40 miles north of Philadelphia, which was the largest and most productive ironworks in Pennsylvania. Earlier, the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn, had actively encouraged manufacturing in the colony, and the first iron forge had been built by a blacksmith named Thomas Rutter in 1716. A second forge was opened in 1718 by a Quaker named Samuel Nutt. Logan’s Durham works surpassed all of these earlier efforts, with a state-of-the art forge and blast furnace. It became the premier iron foundry of its day.

Franklin’s scientific work, as well as his various inventions, required a very close collaboration with Logan and other manufacturers. For example, when he developed the Franklin Stove in 1744, this was done with input from the iron manufacturer Robert Grace, a member of Franklin’s Junto and a co-founder of the Library Company of Philadelphia. The first stoves were produced, according to Franklin’s specifications, by a man named William Branson who operated an ironworks in Reading. As sales of the stoves increased, production was then shifted to Logan’s Durham works.

This symbiotic relationship between Franklin and the iron manufacturers extended to many other products that flowed from Franklin’s mind, with the invention and production of Franklin’s lightning rods being perhaps the prime example. This was the birth of advanced engineering in the colonies, and with engineering there came science. In a number of locations, like the valley of the Schuylkill River, small clusters of technology arose, and Franklin led the way in an explosion of scientific research. By the middle of the 18th century, Pennsylvania, together with neighboring Maryland, possessed the greatest productive power in the American colonies. By 1750 there were three notable American inventions that were produced in sizable numbers:—the Franklin Stove, the Conestoga wagon and the Pennsylvania long rifle, all built with iron and steel from the foundries and blast furnaces in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Franklin also became a major sponsor for the building of what would have been the first navigable canal in North America. In 1731 a proposal was put forth to build a canal from Durham Creek to the Delaware River, which would have allowed for large scale exports of both Durham iron and finished goods. Benjamin Franklin, then the owner of the Pennsylvania Gazette, became a vocal champion of this project. Although the proposal eventually came to naught, the scheme was a visionary foretaste, looking forward to the age of the Erie Canal, almost a century later.

Franklin as an Economist

Franklin is not known today as an economist, and even in his own time, he would probably not have claimed expertise in that field. Yet, the underlying principle of what became known in the 19th century as the “American System” of economics is already the paramount approach that is to be found in Benjamin Franklin’s writings on this subject. The uniquely “American” understanding about economics is all there, and it is very clear.

For Franklin, economic policy must obey his axiomatic command “To Do Good.” Banking, monetary policy, trade and tariffs must all have as their unshakable goal the advancement of the conditions of life and opportunities of the people. Productive growth, be it manufacturing, agriculture or infrastructure, is the priority. For Franklin the issue was always about development. The sole purpose of a banking and financial system is to foster just such productive economic growth. Banks, financial institutions and monetary emissions exist only to serve those ends and have no other legitimate independent purpose.

Franklin never wrote a major treatise on economics, but over the course of his lifetime, he authored numerous shorter pieces, covering a multitude of economic subjects. These writings include:

• A Modest Inquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency (1729)

• A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America (1743)

• Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries (1751)

• Remarks and Facts relative to the American Paper-money (1764)

• The Legal Tender of Paper Money in America (1767)

• On the Laboring Poor (1768)

• Positions be Examined Concerning National Wealth (1769)

• Great Britain and the United States compared as regards a Basis of Credit (1777)

• Paper Money of the United States (1781)

• Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (1782)

• The Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages which will be occasioned in Europe by the American Revolution (1783)

• The Internal State of America (1786)

None of these writings are merely “theoretical.” Each one was published as an intervention at a specific moment of crisis, to address critical decisions that must be made. Over the span of almost six decades, there are refinements and re-thinking of certain specifics, but on principles Franklin’s outlook never wavers:—anti-empire; pro-development; pro-science; a commitment to Public Credit and opposition to useless financial speculation; the proclamation that all human progress flows from human creative intervention; and a determination to lift the poor out of their miserable condition and provide opportunities for a better future.

Science and Progress

Modern-day biographies and history books tend to denigrate Franklin as a scientist, some even portraying him as a mere—if clever—“tinkerer,” but that is not the way he was viewed during his lifetime. The 1751 London publication of his Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia created an absolute sensation, and after the French scientist Dalibard duplicated Franklin’s results, Franklin was widely proclaimed as the greatest living experimental scientist in the world. When Franklin arrived in England in 1757, scientists from throughout Europe flocked to London to meet and confer with the Great Man.

His international fame had nothing to do with his political career in America, but flowed entirely from his revolutionary scientific experiments,—experiments which shattered the diktats of “Newtonian” orthodoxy. This recognition of Franklin was particularly evident during his trip to Germany in 1766, when he was hosted and lauded by Abraham Kästner, Gerlach von Münchhausen, Rudolph Erich Raspe and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, key German collaborators and students of Gottfried Leibniz.

As we see in the founding of the American Philosophical Society, however, for Franklin new discoveries were useful only if they contributed to improving the human condition. We see this same link between science and advanced manufacturing in Franklin’s collaboration with Matthew Boulton and William Small in England immediately prior to the American Revolution. Although the honors for the invention of the Steam Engine must be given to Boulton and James Watt (with recognition for the earlier pioneering work by Denis Papin), what is almost unknown today is the input of Franklin in developing a working steam engine. From 1764 through 1770 Boulton and William Small were in constant communication with Franklin, who studied their blueprints, suggested changes in design, and proposed specific experiments to test certain approaches. By 1771 Boulton and Small had created an advanced iron-manufacturing facility powered by steam engines, and Franklin toured the facility that same year. Later, after his return to America, Franklin would help finance the development of steam-powered boats in America.

Public Credit

In 1723, the Pennsylvania legislature authorized the issuance of £35,000 of paper currency. This was a direct response to the shortage of circulating coins and the strangulation of investment by London financiers. In many of the colonies money had literally disappeared, and a significant portion of day to day business was conducted in barter (in tobacco, beaver furs and similar commodities).

In 1729, as the economic depression in Pennsylvania worsened, a bill was introduced into the legislature, authorizing a larger emission of bills of credit, with a lower interest rate and a longer term for retirement. Both the colonial governor and many among the “moneyed interest” in the colony strongly opposed this. It was at this point that the 23 year-old Benjamin Franklin intervened.

On March 27, he published in the American Weekly Mercury a piece titled “Busy Body, No 8,” wherein, he delivers a very humorous lesson on the difference between productive and non-productive investment. Next, on April 3, he presented a pamphlet on the subject of paper currency—The Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency. In the pamphlet, Franklin begins by stating:

“Those who are Lovers of Trade, and delight to see Manufactures encouraged, will be for having a large Addition to our Currency: For they very well know, that People will have little Heart to advance Money in Trade, when what they can get is scarce sufficient to purchase Necessaries, and supply their Families with Provision. Much less will they lay it out in advancing new Manufactures; nor is it possible new Manufactures should turn to any Account, where there is not Money to pay the Workmen, who are discouraged by being paid in Goods, because it is a great Disadvantage to them.

“A Plentiful Currency will be so great a Cause of advancing this Province in Trade and Riches, and increasing the Number of its People.”

Note both the central role that Franklin gives to how abundant credit will advance manufacturing, as well as his emphasis on the effect productive growth will have on the well-being of the people. This essay is not a mathematical monetary analysis, but a thorough discussion about what constitutes actual value in society. He further states:

“For many Ages, those Parts of the World which are engaged in Commerce, have fixed upon Gold and Silver as the chief and most proper Materials for this Medium; they being in themselves valuable Metals for their Fineness, Beauty, and Scarcity. By these, particularly by Silver, it has been usual to value all Things: But as Silver itself is of no certain permanent Value, being worth more or less according to its Scarcity or Plenty, therefore it seems requisite to fix upon Something else, more proper to be made a Measure of Values, and this I take to be Labour. . .

“In order to make a true Estimate of the Value of Money, we must distinguish between Money as it is Bullion, which is Merchandise, and as by being coined it is made a Currency: For its Value as a Merchandise, and its Value as a Currency, are two distinct Things; and each may possibly rise and fall in some Degree independent of the other.

“The Riches of a Country are to be valued by the Quantity of Labour its Inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the Quantity of Silver and Gold they possess.”

It is important to note here the agreement in principle between this 1729 writing by Franklin and the earlier 1691 proposal by Cotton Mather, titled Some Considerations on Bills of Credit, arguing for the issuance of state-backed paper currency.

By the 1760s London’s economic rape of the colonies was reaching a crescendo. One of the most egregious actions came in 1764, when Parliament outlawed all colonial paper currency, with the passage of the Currency Act of 1764. Franklin, then residing as an American agent in London, responded with two new essays. The first was The Legal Tender of Paper Money and the second was Remarks and Facts Relative to the American Paper Money.

Franklin begins The Legal Tender of Paper Money with a pointed reminder that the American colonies were entirely at the mercy of Britain in regard to economic, trade and financial matters. The shortage of coined money in the colonies was a direct consequence of the outward flow of money to London to pay for the continued dumping of British goods in America, while the colonies were prohibited by Parliament from manufacturing their own goods, or even taxing these British imports. All of the gold and silver coin was being sucked out of the colonies, leaving them no recourse but to print their own Bills of Credit or Paper Money in order to sustain local economic activity.

Franklin insists on a plentiful stable circulating currency, backed by tax revenue and officially recognized as legal tender. The intention is to promote physical economic development which will benefit the people. Franklin says:

“The People in America are so sensible of these Truths, that it is thought no Assembly, unless in Cases of the greatest Necessity, will make Paper Money that is not to be a legal Tender.”

Franklin’s second essay, Remarks and Facts Relative to the American Paper Money is addressed to the oligarchical Board of Trade, which was empowered to stamp out all colonial paper currency. The Board had issued a report which stated that “Every Medium of Trade should have an intrinsic Value, which Paper Money has not. Gold and Silver are therefore the fittest for this Medium, as they are an Equivalent, which Paper never can be.” Franklin responds to this with an extended discussion on the proper role of Gold and Silver versus the concept of sovereign “Legal Tender” currency.

In 1768 and 1769 Franklin published two more short pieces, both in London, wherein he continued to hammer away at the fundamental issue of what actually constitutes National Wealth. In the first, On the Laboring Poor, he describes how in Britain, whose rulers proclaimed that they had created the most liberal and charitable “poor laws” in all of Europe, the actual effect of these laws had been to create a permanent underclass, a large class of poor families, subsidized in generally miserable conditions but excluded from any upward opportunity as a result of British financial and taxation policies.

The second of these papers, Positions to be Examined Concerning National Wealth, contains a further elaboration by Franklin on his labor theory of value, including the inter-connectedness of advances in agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce.

On the subject of banking, well into the 1770s Franklin opposed all proposals to establish a “finance bank” in Philadelphia. He was not anti-bank, but he recognized that any Pennsylvania bank, operating within a British colony, would be subservient to the City of London and quickly develop into a vehicle to carry out British financial policy in the colony. Later, after the Declaration of Independence, when Robert Morris established the Bank of North America, Franklin became an enthusiastic supporter of that institution, defending it repeatedly against its critics.

The final two writings by Franklin to be noted here are his 1782 essay Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, where Franklin is looking ahead to the glorious future that awaited the conclusion of the war. Almost simultaneous, he published a piece titled Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages which will be occasioned in Europe by the American Revolution. In this second essay he takes direct aim at the parasitical “free-market” precepts then hegemonic in the City of London, particularly the idea that manufacturing development will necessitate low wages. Franklin refutes this by showing how capital investment in both men and machines, including “using improved machinery; employing intelligent and active workmen; and a judicious division of labor,” will benefit all. He says:

“High wages attract the most skillful and most industrious workmen. Thus the article is better made, it sells better, and in this way the employer makes a greater profit than he could do by diminishing the pay of the workmen.”

Thus we have a brief synopsis of Ben Franklin:— scientist, nation-builder, economist, and in many ways the true father of the American System of Economics.

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The Erie Canal: America’s Renaissance Project

This article is the first of a series, which will appear under the unifying title of “Unleash the American System.” These articles will document the historical evidence of how Manufacturing, Technology, Engineering and Science have been embedded in both the American Republic and American Culture from the beginning. This is the story of true American Progress, a dynamic now being revived under President Donald Trump after decades of economic decay and decline. In future installments, we shall look at the Presidencies of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, and we shall explore the great contributions those individuals made to the betterment of America.

* * * *

In 1367 a meeting was held among the city elders of Florence, Italy. At that meeting a decision was made to finish construction of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral, a project that had been abandoned after the arrival of the Black Death in 1348. The city fathers announced a competition for applicants to submit architectural design plans to finish the Cathedral. The winning application, by a man named Neri di Fiorvanti, was revolutionary. He proposed to eliminate all of the original Gothic designs and to construct a massive un-buttressed Dome. The most shocking thing about this proposal is that at the time it was adopted, no such Dome existed anywhere in the world, and no one, including, Neri, knew how to build it. Thus a Great Challenge was issued to the citizens of Florence. The completion of the Dome would require new discoveries, and the creativity of yet unborn generations would be the resource to make this possible. This would finally be achieved in 1456 under the direction of Filippo Brunelleschi.

This story of Renaissance Florence is the proper way to understand the Erie Canal. It was first proposed by founding father Gouverneur Morris in 1777, at a meeting with Army officers after the abandonment of Fort Ticonderoga and during the retreat before Burgoyne’s Army—i.e., during the fight for freedom. Later that year Morris wrote a letter, wherein he announced his vision for a canal from Albany to Lake Erie:

“‘As yet, we only crawl along the outer shell of our country. The interior excels the part we inhabit in soil, in climate, in everything. The proudest empire in Europe is but a bubble compared to what America will be, must be, in the course of two centuries, perhaps of one.”

Like Brunelleschi’s Dome, nothing like what Morris proposed had ever been built before in European and Mediterranean history—not by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks or Romans, nor the modern nations of Europe, and not even by the various Central Asian, South Asian and Islamic Empires. Only the ancient Grand Canal of China could be compared with Morris’ vision, but the existence and history of that great project was little more than a myth for most Europeans and Americans in 1777.

There were canals in Europe, most notably the Languedoc Canal in France, built in 1681, but the proposed Erie Canal would be 2 ½ times longer and built over much more treacherous terrain. None of the English canals even came close to what Morris proposed. The Bridgewater Canal (41 miles), the Manchester Canal (36 miles) and the Birmingham Canal (29 miles) were all only about 10 percent of the projected length of the Erie Canal.

Morris’ proposed Erie Canal bore another striking resemblance to Neri’s proposed Florentine Dome. No one in America had the slightest idea how to build it. The Canal was to travel across New York State for 363 miles. The elevation of the canal would drop 568 feet between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, but in some areas it would climb to an elevation 100 feet higher than Lake Erie. It would cross deep and wide gorges, cross rivers and cut through deep swamplands. Eighty-three locks would have to be built to overcome these differences in height. Additionally, numerous elevated aqueducts would have to be built to go over rivers, swamps and gorges. Many of the locks would have to be dug out of solid rock.

No one in America knew how to do any of this. In 1800 there was not a single engineer in America with experience in building canals; in fact there was not a single American with professional training as a construction engineer. Not one. When the Erie Canal Commission was formed in 1810, they selected as the Chief Engineers two New York lawyers, Benjamin Wright and James Geddes, neither of whom had ever built anything. Their only previous experience had been a little bit of surveying work they had done in connection with legal work. Later, the Commission added two more “engineers”: Charles Broadhead, a judge, and Nathan S. Roberts, a school teacher. None of these four “engineers” had ever even seen a canal.

In essence, the Erie Canal Project became America’s first school of engineering. They learned as they went along. This included many new inventions, new tools, new construction methods and newly acquired skills. One obstacle after another was met and overcome.

From an Idea to a Project

Gouverneur Morris resided in Europe from 1789 to 1798. When he returned to America, he turned his attention immediately to the construction of the Canal. In 1800 he submitted a detailed plan to the N.Y. State Legislature to build a canal from “the Hudson River to Lake Erie.” In 1801 Morris conducted a personal tour which took him to both Lakes Ontario and Erie. In 1802 and 1803 he held extended discussions with Simeon De Witt, the Surveyor General of New York State, arguing for a Lake Erie route. Initially highly skeptical, De Witt was won over, and years later he would write “The merit of first starting the idea of a direct canal between Lake Erie and the Hudson River unquestionably belongs to Gouverneur Morris.”

After 1800, two other individuals emerged as major backers for the project: Jonas Platt, a Federalist Congressman from the area around Utica, and Jesse Hawley, a bankrupt flour merchant, who authored a series of 14 widely-read essays under the pen-name Hercules, polemicizing for a canal to Lake Erie. Initially, with Morris, Platt and others, the Erie project was seen as a Federalist proposal, but by 1809 Morris and Platt had drawn New York Mayor De Witt Clinton into the fight. Others were soon recruited, among whom several would later perform vital roles. These included Stephen Van Rensselaer, Canvass White (who developed the hydraulic cement used to build the locks), Thomas Eddy (the Director of the Lock Navigation Company) and the young John Jervis who began as an assistant surveyor and ended up as Chief Superintendent of the Eastern Division of the Canal. Again, not an engineer in the bunch.

In 1810 De Witt Clinton convinced the Legislature to create the Erie Canal Commission. The first Chairman of the Commission was Gouverneur Morris, and he would be succeeded in 1813 by Clinton. The first action of the Commission was to deploy a team to explore potential routes for the projected Canal. Departing from Albany in June, the team included Gouverneur Morris, Stephen Van Rensselaer, Simeon De Witt, De Witt Clinton and Thomas Eddy. For three months, the Commissioners traveled by small boats, carriages, stages and on horseback all the way from Albany to Buffalo. . . and back. Most of the trip proceeded through what was then wilderness. It was an extremely arduous journey, over very rugged terrain.

On March 2, 1811 Gouverneur Morris appeared before the State Senate to read the report of the Canal Commissioners. In his testimony he ruled out completely a canal to Lake Ontario and insisted on a route to Lake Erie. He urged the legislators to act, saying:

“When the records of history shall have been obliterated, and the tongue of tradition have converted the shadowy remembrance of ancient events into childish tales of miracle, this national work shall remain. It shall bear testimony to the genius, the learning, the industry and intelligence of the present age.”

The legislature responded by authorizing the Commissioners “to make application on behalf of New York State to Congress to cooperate or aid in the undertaking of building the canal,” and “to employ surveyors and engineers” to devise a plan for the Canal’s construction.

On April 8, Robert Fulton, who had recently initiated steamboat service between Albany and New York City, was added to the Canal Commission, lending more political weight to the project. Morris, Clinton and Fulton launched an all-out campaign, crisscrossing the state and speaking at many public events. Simultaneous with this, under the pen-name Atticus, Clinton issued a series of pro-Canal letters which appeared in the New York Evening Post. Then, in January 1812, Gouverneur Morris and De Witt Clinton traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with members of Congress and President Madison for the purpose of securing federal backing of the Canal Project. Madison turned them down flat, stating that federal financing for “internal improvements” was unconstitutional. This rebuff was a major contributing factor that led Clinton to challenge Madison in the 1812 Presidential election.

With the outbreak of the War of 1812, Madison’s stooge Governor Tompkins acted to kill the Canal, as all the financial resources of the state were directed into the war mobilization. In April, 1814, Tompkins convinced the state legislature to repeal the Canal Act and strip the Canal Commissioners of all of their power. By the autumn of 1814 the Canal Project was dead.

The fight to resurrect the Canal Project began in 1815/1816, and the honor for that effort lies almost entirely with De Witt Clinton. Clinton began a tour of the state, speaking in numerous towns and cities. His topic everywhere was the urgent need to build the Canal. This culminated in a mass meeting in Manhattan on December 3rd, where Clinton’s speech was published and reprinted in thousands of copies that circulated throughout the state. Gouverneur Morris died on November 6, 1816, and henceforth it would be Clinton who would spearhead the fight.

In 1816 a bill to authorize funds for the construction of the Canal was introduced in the legislature by Peter Augustus Jay, the son of John Jay and lifelong friend of James Fenimore Cooper. Tompkins and Democratic-Republican party boss Martin Van Buren blocked it, but this led to another initiative by Clinton. Together with Thomas Eddy, Clinton founded the Bank for Savings in the City of New York. By the end of the year the bank had deposits of over $150,000, of which more than $40,000 was invested in canal stock. By 1821 the bank held over half a million dollars in canal stock, comprising nearly 30 percent of all outstanding canal loans.

In early 1817, at Clinton’s urging, both houses of Congress passed a bill for national funding for the construction of the Canal, using funds from the newly re-chartered National Bank. Madison vetoed it. Clinton then took the next step, announcing his candidacy for Governor of New York. Over the fierce opposition of Tompkins and Van Buren, he won the election and was inaugurated on July 1, 1817. Three days later construction began on the Erie Canal at Rome, New York.

Building the Canal

Gouverneur Morris—and initially Jesse Hawley—had proposed a canal of free-flowing “inclined slopes,” a type of canal that Morris had witnessed in Europe. Given the reality of the upstate terrain, however, this concept was jettisoned. Also quickly abandoned was the idea of using existing rivers as part of the Canal. This would be a man-made Canal, utilizing locks and aqueducts throughout its 363 mile route.

In mid-1817, Clinton persuaded the state legislature to authorize loans of $7 million for canal construction. This was almost blocked, but the deciding vote was cast by James Kent, a former protégé of Alexander Hamilton and one-time participant in Elihu Hubbard Smith’s and Charles Brockden Brown’s New York City “Friendly Club.” The route that was chosen ran alongside the Mohawk River from Troy to Utica and then diverged, going west across the state. The channel was to be forty feet wide at the surface, and twenty-eight feet at the bottom; the water in the channel would be four feet deep. The Canal was projected to be completed by 1827, and Benjamin Wright was appointed Chief Engineer.

Space prohibits a full description of the monumental challenges that confronted the Canal builders. Tens of thousands of trees had to be felled. Solid rock had to be dug through. Swamplands had to be crossed. Rivers had to be crossed. Near vertical cliffs had to be overcome. Along with these tribulations, an unexpected foe almost killed the project. Swarms of malaria-bearing mosquitos attacked the workers throughout the summer months, and in one particularly hazardous location known as the Montezuma Marshes work stopped completely and there was talk about giving up the whole project. Hundreds died and thousands abandoned the work camps. Again, human initiative saved the day, as one of the work-crew’s physicians devised a method to extract quinine from a type of tree bark, saving many lives. Eventually, an aqueduct 1,300 feet long was built over the marsh.

Who were the workers who built the Canal? Overwhelmingly they were very young men, including many boys. During the course of the project, more than 50,000 took part. At least a third of them were recently arrived immigrants, particularly from Ireland. Recruiters were sent to New York City, to meet the immigrant boats as they docked. The recruiters told the men, as they stepped off the ship, “We’re digging a canal upstate. Would you like a job?,” offering wages of 80 cents a day, more than triple what they had been earning in Ireland. Thousands signed up on the spot and by the next day they were headed north.

The Project was divided into three sections, Eastern, Central and Western. The Central portion—from Little Falls to Syracuse—was built first because it was largely over level ground with far fewer obstacles. The Eastern and Western sections were far more challenging. Much of the Western section was through dense wilderness, and major rivers and gorges had to be crossed. Even more daunting, at both the Western terminus (Buffalo/Lockport) and the Eastern Terminus (Albany/Schenectady) precipitous drops in elevation would require the construction of massive lock-works. Nothing like what was needed existed anywhere in the world. For example, 53 locks had to be constructed in the hundred-mile stretch between Albany and Schenectady. At the western terminus the project directors faced the biggest challenge of all—how to get the canal up the steep rock face at Lockport.

The aqueducts were also truly amazing works. 32 of them were built. Three of the aqueducts were architectural marvels. The one below Schenectady—1,188 feet long, contained 26 six stone piers. The one at Rochester was the longest stone-arch bridge in the world when built: it was 802 feet long and had 11 Roman arches which soared high above the turbulent Genesee River. The aqueduct at Little Falls was 744 feet long and spanned the river with three huge stone arches thirty feet high.

A dizzying array of new tools, new techniques and new inventions were introduced to build the Canal. These included the aforementioned invention of a new type of hydraulic cement, new machines to speedily uproot trees, new types of explosives, new types of shovels, wheelbarrows, plows, cutting tools and many other implements. Perhaps most revolutionary was the dual lock system at Lockport, with a series of two locks, in opposite directions, traversing, step-by step, a near vertical cliff-side.

By October 1823 the eastern section of the Canal was complete and joined to middle section, with through traffic from Albany to Syracuse, about 280 miles.

It was at this moment of near-triumph that the project was nearly sabotaged. In 1823 the Democratic-Republican Party dumped Clinton as their nominee for Governor and replaced him with Joseph Yates, a Van Buren stooge. In early 1824 both Clinton and Rensselaer were fired from the Canal Commission.

Undaunted, Clinton mounted an independent campaign, under the banner of the People’s Party, and turned the 1824 Gubernatorial race into a referendum on the Canal. In November he was swept back into office by the voters and, once sworn in 1825, he pressed relentlessly to complete the Canal.

The difficulty of the Lockport lock system was solved by the young school teacher Nathan Roberts. With no one to help him, and no guidance except a few books, he designed a double set of five locks one set for eastbound and another for westbound travel. This was the only place on the Erie where there were two sets of locks. The locks were cut out of solid rock. Lockport’s amazing system of locks was completed in June of 1825.

On October 26, 1825 the full Canal was officially opened. It had taken only eight years to complete (two years ahead of schedule). 363 miles long. 83 locks. 32 aqueducts. The longest canal in the world ever built, with the exception of the Grand Canal in China. A stupendous celebration was organized, including a flotilla of boats that traversed the entire length of the Canal (with the firing of cannon at each city along the route) and culminating in a huge festivity in New York Harbor where De Witt Clinton poured a barrel of Erie Lake water into the harbor, signifying the “joining of the waters.”

The Impact

“My ambition is to be the De Witt Clinton of Illinois.”

— Abraham Lincoln, 1834

Following the completion of the eastern section of the Canal, in 1824 Stephen Van Rensselaer founded the Rensselaer School in Troy, just north of Albany. Created directly out of the Erie Canal project, this was the first engineering school in the United States. It would become the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the premier school of science and engineering, for generations to come.

In the years following the completion of the canal, economic and population growth exploded along its route. Between 1820 and 1860, Albany went from a population of 12,000 to 62,000, Troy from 5,000 to 39,000, Utica from 2,900 to 23,000, Rochester from 1,500 to 48,000 and Buffalo from only 2,100 to 81,000, making it the tenth largest city in the United States. But that growth was not restricted to New York. Cleveland, Ohio’s major lakeport on Lake Erie, went from only 606 residents in 1820 to 43,000 by 1860, and with the opening of a second canal from the Ohio River to Lake Erie in 1830, Ohio’s population exploded in growth, such that by 1860 it was the third most populous state in America. Further west, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and many other cities experienced exponential growth as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, New Englanders and European immigrants poured westward through the Canal.

Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and many other cities became major manufacturing centers. Rochester became the largest producer of wheat flour in the world. By the late 1830s twenty-four mills would ship half a million barrels a year, all down the Erie Canal. In addition, boat-building, iron furnaces, paper mills, woolen mills, machine shops and a plethora of other industries sprang up everywhere.

As for the young men who had built the Canal, many of the most skilled became premier engineers for the future projects of the nation, including other canals but also in the creation of railroad lines and the building of water projects, such as the Croton Aqueduct in New York, where the one-time Erie Canal surveyor John Jervis became the Chief Engineer and designer.

The Canal was quickly overwhelmed by the volume of traffic, and in 1836 the state began a twenty-six-year program of enlarging and improving the waterway. The work proceeded fitfully due to political obstacles, but upon it completion in 1862, the Canal had been reborn as a channel 70 feet wide at the surface, 56 feet wide at the bottom, and 7 feet deep. All of the locks were enlarged, most of them doubled to allow two-way traffic. As a result of these improvements, steam-powered vessels could now operate unhindered on the entirety of the Canal.

Epilogue

In 1829, an individual named William E. Stone reflected on two trips he had made across western New York State, the first in 1820 and the second in 1829 after the Canal had been in full operation for four years. Stone’s remarks about Syracuse were typical of his amazement at the changes he found:

“I looked about upon the village as I stept upon shore with still more astonishment than at Utica. ‘Another enchanted city,’ I exclaimed, as I glanced upwards and around upon splendid hotels and rows of massive buildings in all directions crowded, too, with people all full of life and activity! Nine years before, I had passed a day here among some five or six scattered tenements . . . the whole being surrounded by a desolate, poverty-stricken, woody country, enough to make an owl weep to fly over it.”

Not only was Syracuse transformed, but the nation as a whole was irreversibly changed—from New York all the way to Chicago and even further west. Great new industries and enterprises were created, but far more important was the settlement of this vast area by a free and industrious people, a people steeped in scientific and technological progress, a people committed to the rights of free labor—and a region that would give the nation Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, George Westinghouse and later many of the Apollo astronauts who would walk upon the moon. This was the American Renaissance.

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