-->
Early parts from Dawn of Innovation:
Finally, political and economic power
shifted decisively away from society's traditional elites, as the
world's first true middle class seized control of the political
apparatus. The archetypal American was almost a new species,
literate and numerate, shrewd and confident, an unvarnished striver,
swimming through a delightful chaos where money and opportunity were
for the grasping on every side. As the United States became the
world's dominant power in the twentieth century, that model of
society, albeit much adapted and trammeled, became the norm in
advanced countries.
The country was just too productive,
too entrepreneurial, too inventive, too original not to burst into
the front rank of world powers, almost regardless of its leadership.
The story of American development can
be charted as an evolution from local to regional and finally to
national networks. Strong regional economies emerged in the
Northeast in the first quarter of the century. By the 1820s, rural
New England and the Middle Atlantic region were hotbeds of
industrialization, with farms and forges working cheek by jowl and
the self-subsistent farm family already an anachronism.
Since interior transportation was
virtually nil, there evolved a pellet economy of little
self-sufficient towns clustered on riverbanks. The breakthrough was
the development of the western steamboat by Henry Shreve and Daniel
French. It was a cunningly adapted craft that could carry massive
loads on shallow, swift water, blithely steaming upstream againt
rapids.
Within a decade the region's great
grain, lumber, and meat animal enterprises were centralizing in
Cincinnati, as a tight-knit riverine economy took shape within the
Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi valleys.
The United States emerged as a world
economic powerhouse in the 1840s and 1850s, when the railroads
finally linked the Northeast and the Midwest, as it was now called,
into an integrated commercial and industrial unit. The heavy
industry of the Midwest flowed from its resource endowment – coal
and iron, food processing, a mechanized lumber industry – as well
as derivatives from steamboat building, like engines, furniture, and
glass. In the Northeast, its traditional industries like clocks,
textiles, and shoes grew to global scale, along with big-ticket
fabrication businesses like Baldwin locomotives, Collins steamships,
Hoe printing presses, and the giant Corliss engines.
The South, in the meantime, slipped into
the position of an internal colony, exploiting its slaves and being
exploited in turn by the Northeast and Midwest. Boston and New York
controlled much of the shipping, insurance, and brokerage earnings
from the cotton trade, while earnings left over went for midwestern
food, tools, and engines shipped down the Mississippi and its
branches.
Few Britons even noticed, as one
sharp-eyed civil servant put it, that in the United States, almost
all industries were “carried on in the same way as the cotton
manufacture of England, viz., in large factories, with machinery
applied to every process, the extreme subdivision of labour and all
reduced to an almost perfect system of manufacture.”
Destructive though it was, the Civil
War broke the slaveocracy's power to obstruct an American development
agenda. In one of the darkest years of the war, the Republican
congress passed the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College Act – no
other country had conceived the possibility of educating its farmers
and craftsmen – and the Transcontinental Railroad Act. The rise of
a new world economic hyperpower was virtually assured.
