THE MEN WHO UNITED THE STATES
America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
Simon Winchester
Harper; 463 pages; $29.99
On July 4, 2011, the British-born historian Simon Winchester took an oath to become an American citizen. It was a startling decision for someone Queen Elizabeth herself had made an officer of the Order of the British Empire not so long ago. Why the move? Mr Winchester, it seems, was in love. But it wasn't a woman who captured his heart. Mr Winchester had fallen for an entire nation.
Mr Winchester's self-described "love affair" with America began when he hitchhiked across the country as a footloose kid. When he finally got his passport he felt moved to write a history of the quality that most entranced him: America's improbable, at times incomprehensible, unity. How was it, he asked, that people of such wildly different backgrounds share a "near-mystical concord" - how can such an eclectic assortment of peoples "enjoy the same rights and aspirations, encapsulated in their shared ability to declare so simply, I am an American?"
His tour mixes popular history with a contemporary travelogue. This frustrates attempts to tell the story as a conventional history, as do the many eclectic stories he narrates. Mr Winchester solves the problem by dividing his book into five sections that correspond to the five "classical elements" in the Chinese philosophical tradition known as the wu hsing: wood, earth, water, fire and metal. Each corresponds to a different unifying force: early land surveys (wood), geological surveys (earth), canals and waterways (water), and so forth.
Chinese cosmology aside, much of what Mr Winchester covers in these sections is familiar, particularly in the early chapters. Thomas Jefferson's Land Ordinance of 1785 - which effectively laid down a system by which unsettled territory might be surveyed, settled and united with the rest of the country - gets prominent treatment, as does Lewis and Clark's voyage of exploration. But other, less famous figures make lengthy appearances, like Thomas Hutchins, the first Geographer of the United States, who implemented Jefferson's vision.
Thanks to these surveys, Americans could visualise the country's borders and boundaries; the next step was to map the details of the land itself. But maps were not in themselves sufficient. "For an American in Maine to feel true kinship with a brother American in Arizona," Mr Winchester claims, "people and the things they made needed to be able to move with speed and ease from one corner of the nation to another." That meant canals and railroads promoted by memorable characters like John Stevens.
Mr Winchester believes that while a modern transportation infrastructure was essential to forging an enduring union, so, too, was the communications revolution that began with Samuel Morse's telegraph.
Perhaps, but this ignores the fact that the telegraph - never mind the adoption of steamboats, canals and railroads - coincided with the disintegration of the country over the issue of slavery. Improvements in infrastructure didn't prevent the outbreak of war; in fact, they may have accelerated it. From the steamboats and trains that carried pro- and anti-slavery settlers to "Bleeding Kansas" to the telegraph lines that reported every angry exchange in Congress, the nation's infrastructure intensified the conflict. Moreover, the very westward expansion Mr Winchester celebrates was a catalyst for conflict, as new territories applied for admission to the union, threatening the balance between free and slave states.
In the end, unity was maintained at a staggering cost of over half a million dead, and the physical integration of the country continued apace into the 20th century. Mr Winchester is at his strongest here, profiling Theodore Dehone Judah, the eccentric promoter of the transcontinental railroad, and reprising the early career of Dwight Eisenhower, whose experience accompanying the Army's Transcontinental Motor Convoy left him impressed with the need for a national road system.
Most fascinating of all is his account of Thomas MacDonald, known as Chief, the humourless but brutally effective head of the Bureau of Public Roads from 1919 to 1953. MacDonald, who gave the country its first modern road system, also paved the way - literally - for the Interstate highways. Yet he remains "forgotten, overlooked and dismissed in just about all the places he managed to bring together."
Mr Winchester's real passion is for the unsung architects of electromagnetic unity: Morris Llewellyn Cooke, the engineer behind the New Deal's Rural Electrification Administration; Joseph Licklider, who first conceived of the Arpanet, forerunner of the Internet; and William Siemering, the driving force behind the National Public Radio.
All of this is fascinating. But is the "connective tissue" of the US really a matter of building highways, whether travelled by cars or electrons? Putting people in touch with one another doesn't magically yield unity. As citizens from one part of the country communicate and mingle with people different from themselves, they do not automatically feel a kinship. These encounters can confirm existing prejudices and intensify half-formed hatreds.
So why doesn't the US fly apart at the seams? James Madison may have had it right when he argued that a large, decentralised republic spread over a vast territory was more likely to survive than one confined to a much smaller landmass. A sprawling, diverse nation like the US would necessarily encompass so vast a variety of people that no single group could consistently impose its will on the others. In Madison's pragmatic if paradoxical vision, our very differences would keep us together. The nation would remain united because no bloc or faction can command sufficient political power to divide it and destroy the union.
Today, the nation is rarely, if ever, united on any single political issue. Our loyalties are too divided, too fractured and too unpredictable. Our diversity divides us, but in the process, guarantees that the larger union endures.
America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
Simon Winchester
Harper; 463 pages; $29.99
On July 4, 2011, the British-born historian Simon Winchester took an oath to become an American citizen. It was a startling decision for someone Queen Elizabeth herself had made an officer of the Order of the British Empire not so long ago. Why the move? Mr Winchester, it seems, was in love. But it wasn't a woman who captured his heart. Mr Winchester had fallen for an entire nation.
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Mr Winchester's self-described "love affair" with America began when he hitchhiked across the country as a footloose kid. When he finally got his passport he felt moved to write a history of the quality that most entranced him: America's improbable, at times incomprehensible, unity. How was it, he asked, that people of such wildly different backgrounds share a "near-mystical concord" - how can such an eclectic assortment of peoples "enjoy the same rights and aspirations, encapsulated in their shared ability to declare so simply, I am an American?"
His tour mixes popular history with a contemporary travelogue. This frustrates attempts to tell the story as a conventional history, as do the many eclectic stories he narrates. Mr Winchester solves the problem by dividing his book into five sections that correspond to the five "classical elements" in the Chinese philosophical tradition known as the wu hsing: wood, earth, water, fire and metal. Each corresponds to a different unifying force: early land surveys (wood), geological surveys (earth), canals and waterways (water), and so forth.
Chinese cosmology aside, much of what Mr Winchester covers in these sections is familiar, particularly in the early chapters. Thomas Jefferson's Land Ordinance of 1785 - which effectively laid down a system by which unsettled territory might be surveyed, settled and united with the rest of the country - gets prominent treatment, as does Lewis and Clark's voyage of exploration. But other, less famous figures make lengthy appearances, like Thomas Hutchins, the first Geographer of the United States, who implemented Jefferson's vision.
Thanks to these surveys, Americans could visualise the country's borders and boundaries; the next step was to map the details of the land itself. But maps were not in themselves sufficient. "For an American in Maine to feel true kinship with a brother American in Arizona," Mr Winchester claims, "people and the things they made needed to be able to move with speed and ease from one corner of the nation to another." That meant canals and railroads promoted by memorable characters like John Stevens.
Mr Winchester believes that while a modern transportation infrastructure was essential to forging an enduring union, so, too, was the communications revolution that began with Samuel Morse's telegraph.
Perhaps, but this ignores the fact that the telegraph - never mind the adoption of steamboats, canals and railroads - coincided with the disintegration of the country over the issue of slavery. Improvements in infrastructure didn't prevent the outbreak of war; in fact, they may have accelerated it. From the steamboats and trains that carried pro- and anti-slavery settlers to "Bleeding Kansas" to the telegraph lines that reported every angry exchange in Congress, the nation's infrastructure intensified the conflict. Moreover, the very westward expansion Mr Winchester celebrates was a catalyst for conflict, as new territories applied for admission to the union, threatening the balance between free and slave states.
In the end, unity was maintained at a staggering cost of over half a million dead, and the physical integration of the country continued apace into the 20th century. Mr Winchester is at his strongest here, profiling Theodore Dehone Judah, the eccentric promoter of the transcontinental railroad, and reprising the early career of Dwight Eisenhower, whose experience accompanying the Army's Transcontinental Motor Convoy left him impressed with the need for a national road system.
Most fascinating of all is his account of Thomas MacDonald, known as Chief, the humourless but brutally effective head of the Bureau of Public Roads from 1919 to 1953. MacDonald, who gave the country its first modern road system, also paved the way - literally - for the Interstate highways. Yet he remains "forgotten, overlooked and dismissed in just about all the places he managed to bring together."
Mr Winchester's real passion is for the unsung architects of electromagnetic unity: Morris Llewellyn Cooke, the engineer behind the New Deal's Rural Electrification Administration; Joseph Licklider, who first conceived of the Arpanet, forerunner of the Internet; and William Siemering, the driving force behind the National Public Radio.
All of this is fascinating. But is the "connective tissue" of the US really a matter of building highways, whether travelled by cars or electrons? Putting people in touch with one another doesn't magically yield unity. As citizens from one part of the country communicate and mingle with people different from themselves, they do not automatically feel a kinship. These encounters can confirm existing prejudices and intensify half-formed hatreds.
So why doesn't the US fly apart at the seams? James Madison may have had it right when he argued that a large, decentralised republic spread over a vast territory was more likely to survive than one confined to a much smaller landmass. A sprawling, diverse nation like the US would necessarily encompass so vast a variety of people that no single group could consistently impose its will on the others. In Madison's pragmatic if paradoxical vision, our very differences would keep us together. The nation would remain united because no bloc or faction can command sufficient political power to divide it and destroy the union.
Today, the nation is rarely, if ever, united on any single political issue. Our loyalties are too divided, too fractured and too unpredictable. Our diversity divides us, but in the process, guarantees that the larger union endures.