The Power To Prosper

 

“Founder's Fire

 

By Arthur Herman

 

Center Street, 352 pages, $32

 

This year is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States. Most historians are concentrating on the birth itself, when 13 disparate colonies along the east coast of North America declared their intention to separate from Great Britain. That, to be sure, is quite a story, one without previous precedent. So is the story of the Constitutional Convention a few years later, which produced what is now the world's oldest constitution of a complex sovereign state, amended only 27 times.

 

In "Founder's Fire" Arthur Herman -- whose books of popular history include "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" (2001) -- gives these stories their due. But Mr. Herman sees a bigger picture here.

 

He argues, in this entertaining and enlightening book, that the spirit -- the fire -- that drove the Founding Fathers to risk everything to establish something very new has animated this country ever since. As he points out, the first English settlers in America "were rebels and misfits who didn't fit in their own time and place, and who traveled across an ocean to create their own 'city upon a hill.' "

 

This propensity to take risks, Mr. Herman argues, has been passed down from generation to generation. In the early 19th century, this spirit came to be called the Young America movement. "The spirit of Young America," said Rufus Choate, a senator from Massachusetts from 1841 to 1845, "will not be satisfied with what has been attained, but plumes its young wings for a higher and more glorious flight."

 

While Young America emphasized internal improvements and westward expansion, the spirit carried over into the "American system" of manufacturing.

 

Both the Industrial Revolution and the steam engine that powered it were invented in England.

 

But it was the fully realized concept of interchangeable parts and the mechanization of production that made possible the huge increases in industrial production in America during the decades after the Civil War.

 

By 1900, the American economy was the largest in the world, a position it has held since.

 

That explosion could not have happened without men willing to risk everything to doggedly pursue an idea to ultimate success. Henry Ford's first two automobile-manufacturing companies foundered before the Ford Motor Co. opened in 1903, changing the world with Ford's dream of an automobile that the average American family could afford. That dream made Ford one of the world's richest men.

 

The vast fortunes created by men such as Ford have long disquieted many intellectuals and journalists. As early as 1859 the New York Times associated Cornelius Vanderbilt with the idea of the medieval robber baron, thus tarnishing the image of the country's biggest shipowner. But, as Mr. Herman points out, Vanderbilt's success was due to cutting fares, not raising them. And in an age when many steamboats, cheaply built and poorly maintained, did, in the words of one contemporary, "a wholesale business in human slaughter," Vanderbilt never lost a ship to fire, explosion or shipwreck.

 

Mr. Herman subscribes fully to the words of James J. Hill -- whose Great Northern Railway, which did so much to settle and develop the upper Midwest, was built without federal subsidies: "It really seems hard, when we look at what we have done, that we should be compelled to fight political adventurers who have never done anything but pose and draw a salary."

 

"Founder's Fire" is no uncritical paean to the greatness of this country. Mr. Herman spends considerable space dealing with two men he calls "refounders": Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. After the nation tore itself apart over the issue of slavery, Lincoln saved the Union and freed the slaves. And Lincoln recalled to us, in the peerless prose of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, what the Founding Fathers had given us and which still lies at the heart of this nation: freedom. But until King, in the 1950s and '60s, led the nation to confront the evil legacy of Jim Crow, that freedom was only for some.

 

Earlier, in "Freedom's Forge" (2012), Mr. Herman told the story of how, during World War II, the United States drafted the entire American economy to become, in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's words, the arsenal of democracy. The author briefly recounts that history here: Instead of having the government run the U.S. economy, which failed disastrously in World War I, Roosevelt appointed William Knudsen, the president of General Motors, to, in effect, be the chief executive of the American economy. The government would be kept out of economic affairs, other than to provide the needed capital. The results were spectacular. During World War II, the U.S. economy nearly doubled in size as a war economy was built on top of the civilian one.

 

After the war, however, when the U.S. had about half the world's gross domestic product, the fire that had driven so many innovators seemed to wane as managers with MBAs took over corporate America. Mr. Herman's prime example is Robert McNamara, the president of Ford who became the secretary of defense. McNamara's quantitative cost-benefit-analysis approach to business had righted Ford's postwar problems but proved disastrous when he tried to apply it to the Vietnam War.

 

Two new technologies have reignited the "founder's fire": the microprocessor and the internet. A new generation of innovators, such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Gordon Moore, have already improved the everyday lives of millions while making for themselves fortunes that have put those of the Gilded Age to shame. Meanwhile Elon Musk has cut the cost of space travel by at least an order of magnitude with the reusable rocket.

 

Mr. Herman knows how to tell a story, and in "Founder's Fire" he tells this one well, making a strong argument for the ultimate source of American greatness: the freedom to pursue one's dreams.

 

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Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power."” [1]

 

1. The Power To Prosper. John Steele Gordon.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 May 2026: A15.