The Men Who United The States

Simon Winchester “The Men Who United The States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible” Harpercollins, 2013, 440 pps  

Think about it: 48 contiguous areas, most comparable or larger than any European country—just what are the odds of consolidating and keeping this as one democratic nation? Just who are the people most responsible?  That is what this book is about: Lewis & Clark, canal and railroad builders, inventors of telegraph and radio, as well as the creators of the interstate highway system and the electrification of rural America.

The role of the government in unifying the nation in creating the necessary infrastructure is clearly documented: Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, Railroad land grants, land-grant universities (whose faculties’ research would transform agriculture and then various industries, from computers to medicine), and the Homestead Act (which distributed more than 270 million acres to its citizens in 70 years, including my Grandpa on my Mother’s side).  

My Notes:

Pg. 9:  In 1774, Thomas Jefferson published a pamphlet in which he denounced King George III’s plan that American colonists on the far side of the Appalachians would live in a feudal arrangement, with the king owning the land and his tenants obliged to pay their feu* to his court.  Jefferson maintained that this was a formula for studied inequity, based on a fiction of kingly and ecclesiastical privilege that had been developed in Britain a thousand years before by the Norman conquerors.  He declared that the concept that only kings, churches, and the aristocratic mighty could own land would not be allowed to infect the ownership practices for the vast tracts of real estate in the colonies.  (His ideas were later incorporated in the Land Ordinance Act of 1785).

*feu: a feudal tenure of land for which rent was paid in money or grain instead of by the performance of military service

Pg. 13:  The survey system then developed (late 1700s) has endured as a model for many of the world’s great surveys.  It called for the creation of townships, six miles square, stacked north and south in what were called ranges.  Each township was divided into thirty-six numbered sections of one square mile each (640 acres).  The sections were divided into half sections (320 acres), quarter sections (160 acres), and quarter-quarter sections (40 acres), which led to such phrases as ‘the lower forty’.  This system—ranges, townships, sections, and subsections—is now woven deep into the fabric of modern American life. 

Pg. 16:  On April 30, 1803, Jefferson bought from France 820,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi from for $3 million in gold and $12 million in bonds.  Congressional authorization for funding an exploration were sought and approved: $2,500 for Lewis & Clark and an additional $690 set aside for gifts to the natives.

Pg. 96:  Starting in the 1840s, there were three principal westbound trails, each determined by geology: one for those bound for California, a second that turned southward toward Santa Fe, and then the Oregon Trail (the best known).  Between 1840 and 1869, as many as four hundred thousand people made this journey.

Pg. 137: In 1872 President Grant signed into law the Yellowstone Park Act. (For some reason, I always thought Theodore Roosevelt was responsible).  By the 1890s all of the U.S. had been surveyed and the frontier was no more.

Pg. 227:  Over its 2,300 miles, the Mississippi deviates just a little over five degrees in longitude between source and sea; only the Nile is straighter, at 4 degrees.

Pg. 248:  Steam occupies 1,600 times the volume of the water from which it is made. 

Pg. 255…:  By 1870, the railroad industry had become the country’s second-biggest employer, after agriculture.  Within only thirty years of the Civil War, the American East and Midwest had been knit together by twenty-seven thousand miles of iron rails (later made of steel which is seventeen times more durable).  July 1, 1862 Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act authorizing a transcontinental Railroad.  On May 10, 1869 a rail line connected the Atlantic to the Pacific.  (It would be four more years before a bridge was thrown across the Missouri).  Ninety-six percent of Americans, when they went anywhere in the late nineteenth century, went by train.

Pg. 280: In 1919, Dwight Eisenhower journeyed with an army convoy (made up of seventy-nine vehicles) along the stuttering web of highways that existed between D.C. and San Francisco. The journey took sixty-two days and alarmed the military in the discovery of how long it would take to deploy troops to the West coast. 

Pg. 304: In 1937 FDR instructed MacDonald, his chief of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, to investigate the construction of cross-country interstates, both north-south and east-west.  MacDonald did not totally agree with FDR’s plan, especially FDR’s desire for tolls. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act approving the building of this vast new highway system which took thirty-five years to complete.  There would be forty-one thousand miles of highway, with the longest, I-90, running without a single traffic light the 3,020 miles between Seattle and Boston.   The “Yellow Book” of maps MacDonald had prepared was invaluable in choosing routes. 

Pg. 396:  The oldest radio station in the nation is in Madison, Wisconsin.  The station, known at its beginnings in 1914 by the call sign 9XM, first transmitted weather forecasts to farmers in Morse code, mercifully switching over to voice broadcasts three years later.  In 1920 Radio Corporation of America launched the station in Pittsburgh known by its all-letter call sign, KDKA (the Madison station then became WHA in 1922).   

Pg. 400:  In the late 1940s the commercial broadcast industry was mainly interested in promoting AM radio and the new medium of television.  Their lack of interest in FM allowed the small number of educational stations to band together and successfully petition the government to reserve the left-hand side of the FM radio dial, frequencies 88.1 to 91.9 MHz; this reservation of these FM frequencies remains to this day.