John Steele Gordon’s new book An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power traces the growth of a young America into the world’s dominant economic power. His work chronicles the people, technologies and industries that propelled this rags to riches transformation.
He attributes the USA’s famous get-up-and-go approach to our ancestors who “are descended from those who got and came. Those who chose to leave all they had ever known and come to a strange and distant land came to pursue their own ideas of happiness.”
Gordon relates how early clusters such as ship building, textile mills, railroads, etc. helped to develop more diversified communities than were found on monoculture plantations. One interesting side note is his relating of the first railroad locomotive which zoomed along at 18 miles per hour, “Several of the passengers brought along paper and pencil and wrote down coherent sentences to disprove the then widely held belief that people’s brains couldn’t function at such speeds.” It reminded me of why my hometown didn’t have an Illinois Central rail line. Those German farmers were convinced that the “Big Iron Horse” was going to sterilize their soil and fought to keep the rail line from coming thru town.
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