-Caveat Lector- from: http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/prometh1.htm <A HREF="http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/prometh1.htm">American Prometheus -*The American System</A> --[1a]-- The American Promethus, Part I: Who Made the United States A Great Power? by Anton Chaitkin Printed in The American Almanac, 1989. First printed in New Solidarity Newspaper, August 1, 1986. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In the Aeschylus play, Prometheus explains his battle with the Olympian gods-perhaps these gods stand for the aristocratical families who wished the mass of men to live in darkness, or to be slaughtered and replaced by some new "superior" race: "Soon as even he had seated himself on his father's throne, [Zeus] forthwith assigned to the deities their several privileges and apportioned unto them their proper powers. But of wretched mortals he took no heed, but desired to bring the whole race to nothingness and to create another, a new one, in its stead. "Against this purpose none dared make stand save I myself-I only had the courage; I saved mortals so that they did not descend, blasted utterly, unto the house of Death. Therefore am I bent by so grievous tortures, painful to suffer, piteous to behold. ."..I caused mortals no longer to foresee their doom.... I caused blind hopes to dwell within their breasts.... and besides it was I that gave them fire.... and therefrom they shall learn many arts."' Plato, speaking through Protagoras, says that "Prometheus ... found the other animals well off for everything, but man naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed ... Prometheus therefore ... stole from Hephaestus and Athena the gift of skill in the arts, together with fire-for without fire it was impossible for anyone to possess or use this skill-and bestowed it on man. In this way man acquired sufficient resources to keep himself alive, but had no political wisdom.... But into the dwelling shared by Athena and Hephaestus, in which they practiced their art, he penetrated by stealth, and carrying off Hephaestus' art of working with fire, and the art of Athena as well, he gave them to man."' [1] The twin gifts of Prometheus have always been inseperable: political wisdom (republican statecraft), and command of the knowledge of nature's fires. Prometheus once found a congenial home in America, and may yet again. At the end of the American Civil War, General of the Army Ulysses S. Grant sent troops under General Philip Sheridan to the Texas-Mexican border. Supplying the Mexican patriot forces of President Benito Juarez with military equipment, Grant thus helped expel the Europeans whose armies had invaded Mexico in 1862, who had imposed the Hapsburg "Mexican Emperor" Maximilian. U.S. Grant's aide, Adam Badeau, described the relations between the General and Matias Romero, Juarez's ambassador to the United States: "Romero, though of the Latin blood, was an American and a republican, the representative of a country that had been attacked at the same time, and, as Grant believed, in the same interest as the Union.... When Grant arrived in Washington, after the surrender of Lee, Romero promptly called on him, and Grant informed the Minister of the purport of his orders to Sheridan ... From this time the Northern soldier and the Southern diplomatist worked in harmony. Grant ... was extremely annoyed at the delay in the action of our own Government and thought the French Emperor should have been notified at once to withdraw his troops from Mexico. He had many conferences with the Mexican Minister on the subject; even expressing a desire to go at the head of an army himself and assist the Mexicans in driving out the invader.... "I [Badeau] was present at many of the conversations of these allies, and had especial charge of those of their papers which Grant was unwilling to expose to ordinary official inspection... Romero furnished Grant with constant information from his own Government and country, and many an intercepted dispatch have I translated, predicting or discussing events in Europe as well as Mexico ... and even the intrigues in the United States which complicated our own politics with those of Mexico. "When at last the end of the feeble empire came Grant often told me his views. He was very stern, and thought that the pretender to a throne should be punished as severely as any other traitor. Because Maximilian was of royal blood did not lessen his offense.... He more than once said in my hearing that Maximilian ought to die; and he told me that he made the opinion known to Romero, who he supposed found means to communicate it to his Government; not of course in official documents, for diplomatists are not in the habit of entrusting such secret matters to public dispatches; they have other channels than those accessible to Congressional resolutions. But although neither Grant nor Romero chose to commit himself by recorded expressions, Grant always believed that his tacit condemnation of the invader had its weight.... Grant believed it necessary to show European monarchists that they could not with impunity attempt to set up institutions on this continent menacing to our own; he thought the blow offered to Mexico was in reality meant for this country; and he considered that no such effectual lesson could be taught imperial enemies of this republic and of all republics, as the punishment of a princely offender."[3] President Lincoln had been murdered at the war's end, and Secretary of State William H. Seward was no longer under Lincoln's restraining hand. Seward now worked for a British-allied New York and Boston political faction representing all that Lincoln had fought against. Mexican Ambassador Romero had suspected treachery from Seward and had worked directly with Lincoln when possible during the war; now General Grant worked directly and secretly with the Mexican republicans. The New York Times screamed bloody murder at the news of Maximilian's execution in 1867: "There is not a man anywhere, with a spark of honorable feeling in his nature, who will bear this news without emotion,-without sympathy for this noble and gallant young prince, and detestation for the monsters who have glutted their vengeance in his blood."[4] The principal owner of the Times, Leonard Jerome, had long been a personal friend and admirer of the Hapsburgs. The Times had called for the annexation of Mexico, as a "compensation" for the secession of the South from the Union in 1860, which the Times would allow to be a permanent secession: "Ignorant and degraded as they are, the Mexicans ... [neverthe- less] would regard the people of the free North as benefactors and deliverers from anarchy and revolution."[5] William Seward had meanwhile counseled President-elect Lincoln to let the South go in peace. Lincoln chose instead to fight for the Union. The mobilized Americans defeated the plans of European imperialists for a worldwide Plantation System, which was supposed to embrace Asia, Africa and the Western Hemisphere; a system of Peasants, in various forms of slavery, and Lords. The leaders of secession also vainly attempted "filibusters," the armed conquest of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The United States was to have been an overseer in this slave system, or it was to have been crushed. Victorious industrial republicanism would demonstrate to the imperial enemies what free men could accomplish. In the twenty years following the Civil War, the victors launched technological innovations of a sweeping and unprecedented nature, calculated to benefit mankind. Since we have made no similar progress since the end of that extraordinary period; since what they did must, for mankind's future, be repeatable today; it should be instructive to inquire into the lives of some key figures in this republican industrial revolution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Railroad as the Driver General William Tecumseh Sherman, who with General Grant had planned and achieved the Union's military victory, was shifted West at the war's end to command the Division of the Mississippi. For the next four years, Sherman's chief responsibility was to inspect, oversee and protect the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific. President Lincoln had signed the law organizing this national project, which Sherman himself had previously long promoted. It was paid for with huge grants of federal land and more than $50 million of government money, while private investors bought in with about $4 million. Many of the railroad workers had served under Sherman, and still wore their Union uniforms; many of the railroad's executives had been Sherman's officers. The chief engineer, retired General Grenville M. Dodge, had been Lincoln's advisor as to the route the first Pacific line was to take. Sherman now constantly conferred with Dodge on the progress of the road. At odds with the government over its punitive Reconstruction policy, Sherman in 1867 criticized the movement of troops into the defeated South, a transfer which depleted the railroad guard force. [6] Yet Sherman met with the western Indians and on the whole maintained peace with them, aided by General Philip Sheridan, now shifted from his earlier pre-Juarez duties on the Rio Grande. Sherman contributed greatly to the settlement of the Navajos, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Arapahos and Comanches onto reservations in the 1870s. Western railroad construction lay at the heart of republican postwar strategy for American industrial development. In 1867, a very optimistic, eager 30-year-old retired general named William Jackson Palmer, and his 21-year-old chief assistant Edward Hibbard Johnson, headed a survey team along the 32nd and 35th parallels. General Palmer was the construction manager for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, mapping routes through New Mexico and Arizona to the Pacific coast, several times leading his men to dodge or lightly skirmish with hostile Indians. In 1868 he reported on the vast resources of the southwestern U.S. The Kansas Pacific route ran southward of the pioneer Union Pacific. It was an enterprise of the Pennsylvania Railroad, whose president J. Edgar Thomson had sent Palmer and his assistant Johnson out west. Under Gen. Palmer's direction the Kansas Pacific was extended from Kansas City, Missouri, reaching Denver, Colorado, in August, 1870; the last 150 miles were completed in 150 days. William J. Palmer was born in Kent County, Delaware on Sept. 18, 1836. The state of Colorado celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth this year, for he is well known there as one of the greatest of that state's founders. Given the shameful hold of anti-technological political forces over present-day Colorado, however, it might be fairer for them to forego any celebration, leaving a remembrance of Palmer to those actively seeking industrialization-such as the Mexicans, for whom Palmer's life holds great meaning. Palmer grew up amongst his Quaker compeers in Philadelphia. At eighteen he joined an engineering group surveying for the location of the Hempfield railroad in Washington County, Pennsylvania, just southwest of Pittsburgh. On behalf of relatives in the railroad business, Palmer went to England in 1856 to study British railroad and mining operations. His letters back home show a growing excitement about the possibilities of utilizing new rail, iron and, especially, coal technologies in the United States. He was also disgusted with British labor practices. He toured the Cornish mines, ankle deep in scalding water: "Ten steps further, when every step seems to be a measure of your life. There is a little hollow in the rock. That... is where [a] little boy [miner] laid down and died.... Strangers visiting the depths very generally lose 5 or 6 lbs. weight. The miner not so much, because he is used to it. But he can never work in any other mine, or at the surface again-he is tied down to 1,500 feet. 35 is an average of their life. Their wages averages 62 1/8 cents a day." Palmer wrote to his parents: "I shall return to your shores a ten-fold better American (as such) than I left it, and with fuller confidence in the principle of human equality and Republicanism generally than, I think, I should ever have felt had I never visited aristocratic England."[7] Palmer had met Pennsylvania Railroad president J. Edgar Thomson in England-Thomson was also spying out the latest British technology. Young Palmer explained to Thomson that coal could replace wood as the railroad's fuel source. The PRR was then in an "ecological" crisis, burning 60,000 cords of wood per year and rapidly stripping the right-of-way of all trees. Palmer promised that he would devise a box to take most of the smoke out of coal combustion. The thankful Thomson hired Palmer as his private secretary in 1857, and the Pennsylvania became the first American railroad to convert to coal. Over the next four years, Palmer was most concerned with the problems of efficiency and power in combustion. Among his collaborators in experimental industrialism were the PRR vice president Thomas A. Scott; Scott's assistant Andréw Carnegie, an immigrant from Scotland one year older than Palmer, who had learned from his avidly republican family to love the poet Robert Burns and the U.S.A.; and Evan Pugh, just back from a European education which included Göttingen University and some study under Justus Von Liebig, the father of German and American bio-chemistry. A relative of Palmer's studying in Freiburg, Saxony, had written him a glowing introduction to Evan Pugh as a genius whose experience could aid Palmer materially. Pugh and Palmer worked together on furnace layouts and coal chemistry. Pugh was meanwhile building up the "Farmers' high school" (founded in 1855) of which he was president. Thomson and the PRR financially underwrote Pugh's school and backed it in the state legislature with the railroad's substantial lobbying clout. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Land Grant College bill; Pugh's school was awarded the state's federal grant money by the legislature, and it was rechartered as the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania. President Evan Pugh raised the school, renamed Pennsylvania State College in 1874, into one of the premier centers of American technology. Only in recent years has Penn State fallen under the sway of Malthusian, anti-technology radicals. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Franklin Legacy Benjamin Franklin had created, in colonial Pennsylvania, many institutions devoted to the spread of Augustinian civilization. His American Philosophical Society and his Pennsylvania Society for Manufacturing and the Useful Arts sought to develop America's industrial skills and, ultimately, its national power. Franklin's political economy expressed the role of America as the outpost and vanguard of human progress: he called for high wages, plentiful cheap credit and maximum industrial enterprise. During the Revolution, Franklin wrote to the Irish about tariffs as a protection of national sovereignty. His world renown as an experimental and theoretical scientist was coupled with his role as America's grand political strategist. In Franklin, the world saw scientific progress and republican statecraft as one and the same thing. Franklin's nationalist outlook was carried forward by Alexander Hamilton into the new Federal Government, with the Bank of the United States (located in Philadelphia), increasing protectionist tariffs and public works. Franklin's Philadelphia remained the center of the republican faction, not only for the U.S.A. but in many respects for the untire world. Irish revolutionary emigre Mathew Carey, after serving as a printer in Franklin's French headquarters, was sponsored in business by the Marquis de Lafayette and President George Washington. Carey's Philadelphia publishing house was the first and for a long time the largest in America. A Roman Catholic, Mathew Carey published the first Catholic Bible in America. Philadelphia was the U.S. capital from 1790 to 1800. Around Carey and his fellow publisher William Duane there gathered in that city a growing number of Ibero-American statesmen and diplomats, concerned to build free nations in the Catholic regions south of the U.S. border. Among them were supporters of the 1810 Mexican revolution of the Catholic priest-republicans Hidalgo and Morelos. The most famous in this group was Manuel Torres, a Spanish nobleman and an emigre from Colombia whose national cause he had adopted. Following the second U.S. war with England (1812-1815) Torres, Duane and Carey educated American republicans including President James Monroe, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Speaker of the House Henry Clay on the viability of independent republics in South America. They warned of the danger of British and other European intervention in this hemisphere. William Duane, an Irishman with important Erasmian Catholic connections in England, had been arrested and thrown out of India by the British authorities for printing attacks on the East India Company. Having been born in the American colonies, which had since revolted against that same East India Company oppression, Duane had returned to America and taken up journalism in Philadelphia. Duane's newspaper Aurora exposed British intentions in Spanish America, describing the London-based imperialist "revolutionaries" Aaron Burr and Francisco Miranda. Burr was in exile after his arrest by President Thomas Jefferson, having been charged with treason for trying to set up a new British-backed empire comprising Mexico and half the U.S.A. Miranda had proposed a similar new empire to William Pitt in the 1790s. Duane continually warned of British encouragement of hostility between the United States and Spanish America. In opposition to the British, Duane, Carey and Torres foresaw the emergence of powerful free republics throughout the Western Hemisphere, allied and economically and militarily invincible. In 1822 President Monroe accorded U.S. recognition to five Spanish-American nations, and received Duane's and Carey's friend and guest Manuel Torres as charge d'affaires from Colombia, the first official diplomatic representative of any lbero-American nation. The following year the President proclaimed his anti-colonial, anti-British Monroe Doctrine. Meanwhile Mathew Carey launched a systematic attack on the economic outlook of Adam Smith, the Free Trade policies preferred by the British East India Company, and the murderous anti-population theories of Thomas Malthus. Carey's political economy, adopted by his student Henry Clay and dubbed by Clay the "American System," revived the dirigistic measures of Hamilton, and now comprehended the industrial, scientific and cultural development of free republics throughout the Western Hemisphere. German economist Friedrich List studied under Mathew Carey in Philadelphia for many years, then returned to Germany to build the republican movement and the Customs Union, the first step toward German nationality. The American System briefly held power in the 1820s with President John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State Henry Clay, ambassador to Mexico Joel Poinsett, and Nicholas Biddle as president of the Philadelphia-based Bank of the United States. In the 1830s and 1840s, a succession of rotten Democratic presidents, and two quickly dead Whigs, repeatedly reduced the nation to chaos and depression. But Philadelphia's Franklin tradition remained strong. Mathew Carey's son Henry C. Carey wrote economics books and pamphlets from a Christian humanist standpoint, pressing the attack against Malthus and British imperial looting policies in India and Ireland, against the British opium trade, against the spread of negro slavery, proposing the harmony of interests of capital and labor, and of North and South. Illinois Whig politician Abraham Lincoln, a follower of Henry Clay's hemispheric American System ideas, studied Henry Carey's texts and had Carey write the economic core of the 1860 Republican Party platform, on which Lincoln ran for the presidency. Around Henry Carey there gathered the Philadelphia group of republican industrial, financial and literary collaborators, preparing themselves for a revival of American industrial creativity. There was banker Jay Cooke. There was ironmaster Joseph Wharton, head of the American Iron and Steel Institute, lobbying for protective tariffs. And there was the Pennsylvania Railroad, by the time of the Civil War America's largest corporation. Typical of this Philadelphia faction, PRR President J. Edgar Thomson committed all available financial resources to construction, maintenance and development of the railroad and allied enterprises. He did not play games with stocks and bonds, and would not tolerate any of his associates or employees doing so. At his death in 1874, Thomson controlled about one billion dollars in corporate entities; yet his personal net worth was in the hundreds of thousands. There was no paper pyramid-he had plowed it all back into construction and development. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Philadelphia at War When the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in 1860, William J. Palmer was 23 years old, and private secretary to the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. During the previous year, pro-slavery thugs had threatened to set fire to a meeting of a Philadelphia lecture club organized by Palmer. He and his friends had put their lives on the line to defend their freedom of speech. Rioters clashed with the 600 police outside; Palmer as bodyguard for the invited speaker, and club-wielding Judge William Kelly (later Henry Carey's main ally as Congressman "Pig Iron Kelly") as chairman subdued the thugs inside. In August 1860, Palmer was elected Secretary of the Philadelphia Young Men's Re- publican Club. His close friend Isaac Clothier, later the founder of the Strawbridge and Clothier department store, described the campaign in a retrospective letter: "Thousands of young Republicans all over the North formed associations under the general name of Wide Awakes, and wearing oil-cloth caps and carrying torches marched in military array to the political meetings of the times. These Clubs ... helped to infuse a spirit into the Republican movement which perhaps contributed largely to its success. Many a night ... Palmer and I marched in uniform with the local Philadelphia body-the Republican invincibles-to meetings held in Philadelphia and different points within fifty miles of the city, where we went by train, returning home often in the early morning.... Those uniformed and marching companies were the precursors of the regiments which, carrying musket and bayonet instead of the torch, sprang into being six months later at Lincoln's call." The following March 4, 1860, President-elect Lincoln passed through Philadelphia and raised the flag over Independence Hall, on the way to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. But PRR operations chief Thomas A. Scott advised Lincoln to change his plans. Intelligence reports showed that the Baltimore Sun was whipping up an anti-Lincoin mob, egging them on to a possible assassination when Lincoln's train was to pass through Baltimore. Scott proposed that Lincoln go back to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and travel from there, in disguise, directly to Washington, to arrive before the press knew what had happened. Lincoln followed this plan, and his inauguration was guarded by 15,000 soldiers and police. The Baltimore Sun changed its editorial line slightly, from attacking Lincoln as dangerous and worthy of death, to branding him a lunatic, and criticizing his security precautions as cowardly! Perhaps this is the model for the current press coverage of Lyndon LaRouche's presidential campaign. The Pennsylvania Railroad was now placed at the disposal of the Union. Lincoln chose Thomas A. Scott as Assistant Secretary of War in charge of Transportation and Communication; Scott brought his assistant Andréw Carnegie to Washington with him. Their first job was to move troops to the defense of Washington through Maryland, where secessionist mobs had destroyed most of the rail lines. Carnegie was injured while replacing some sabotaged telegraph wires, and arrived on the first troop train into Washington with blood streaming down his face. Scott and Carnegie built the rail and telegraph lines and the bridges linking Washington D.C. with Virginia, securing the capital city and allowing Union troops to operate on the offensive southward. Carnegie organized the Union telegraph office, using mostly Pennsylvania Railroad personnel for operators. He then returned to Pittsburgh to direct the western Pennsylvania war operations of the PRR. Thomas Scott remained as Assistant War Secretary, running some of the crucial movements of Union troops in 1862 and 1863. William J. Palmer recruited and trained the elite Pennsylvania 15th Regiment cavalry corps, who moved in advance of Union armies, scouting, spying, crashing through enemy camps. In this manner he prepared the Union forces' intelligence at Antietam in 1862. He was afterwards captured behind Confederate lines, imprisoned and nearly executed as a spy. Exchanged, he rejoined the fighting and led his regiment at Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. Palmer's regiment made a unique contribution to the success of Sherman's march towards Atlanta: General Palmer was responsible for: "examining and mapping out the country in advance of the army ... [for which] he was peculiarly fitted by his early training as a civil engineer. In this scouting service nothing escaped his vigilant eyes: the character of the soil upon which the roads were made; their general directions; the strength of the bridges, the depth of the streams, all were carefully noted and sketched, and were absolutely reliable. Every officer in the regiment was directed, yea compelled, to be thus observing." [8] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Building a New World At the close of the war, General Palmer was sent west, along with his assistant and chief telegrapher Edward H. Johnson. For four years Palmer and Johnson were to map out and construct the PRR subsidiary, the Kansas Pacific Railroad. The Philadelphia republican faction, centered around the Pennsylvania Railroad, was now engaged in a mammoth project of nation-building. Lincoln had given them the green light for devel- opment. In the face of continual British trade war, protective tariffs were set at around 50%, allowing steel mills to be built for the first time in America. Railroad companies were given large land grants to assure long term investment in their construction. After Lincoln's murder, his easy-credit policy had been partially maintained, despite outraged cries from international financiers. The Public was still reading two wartime pamphlets printed by banker Jay Cooke and written by Henry Carey's disciple, Treasury Statistician/tariff expert William Elder, on the benefits of credit expansion for industrial development. By 1871, J. Edgar Thomson and his financial partners Scott, Carnegie and Palmer controlled the Union Pacific Railroad, the first transcontinental line which had been completed with the Golden Spike two years before. Andréw Carnegie's Keystone Bridge company was replacing wooden railroad bridges with new iron ones. Between 1868 and 1874, Carnegie, Thomas Scott and J. Edgar Thomson combined to build the first bridge across the Mississippi River, at St. Louis; the partners built at least two other Mississippi bridges, giant pioneering enterprises at the time, together with the rails and equipment to connect them to existing rail lines. The Pennsylvania railroad grew at a furious pace. President J. Edgar Thomson poured money into the purchase of the new American steel rails, in the long run cutting maintenance costs compared to the old iron rails. The PRR underwrote the establishment of young George Westinghouse's Air Brake Company in 1869, and immediately contracted for the new automatic technology for all the line's cars. They could now run much longer trains at higher speed, without sending brakemen across the top of moving trains to screw down brake levers car by car. Pennsylvania railroad tonnage doubled between 1870 and 1873; by the time of Thomson's death in 1874, the line and its subsidiaries comprised 6,000 miles, running from New York to Chicago, down to Washington and through much of the Midwest and South. The partners' banker, Jay Cooke, was building the second transcontinental line chartered by Congress, the Northern Pacific, from Duluth, Minnesota on Lake Superior, out to Puget Sound, on the Pacific coast in Washington State. Jay Cooke had sold nearly three billion dollars worth of small denomination U.S. bonds during the four years of the Civil War, appointing 2,500 subagent salesmen. He had outflanked the Wall Street and London financiers who tried to blackmail President Lincoln for war credits (they wouldn't sell U.S. bonds-after all, might there soon be no United States?) It had been an un- precedented "sales drive" appealing with great success to the patriotism of the average citizen. Cooke now began to use similar methods, raising loan capital from public subscription, in order to open up a vast area of undeveloped territory. With his railroad, the northern great plains, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific northwest could be occupied by settlers under Lincoln's free homstead and industrial land grant programs. Upon the completion of the Kansas Pacific Railroad line through to Denver in 1870, meanwhile, William J. Palmer, backed by PRR president J. Edgar Thomson, quit the Kansas Pacific and launched a bold new venture. He created the Denver and Rio Grand Railroad, proposing to build it from Denver, Colorado, in the American Rockies, south to El Paso, Texas, and through to Mexico city. In 1871, Palmer, his Kansas Pacific fellow executive Josiah Reiff, and Philadelphian George Harrington, formerly Lincoln's Assistant Treasury Secretary, set up the Automatic Telegraph Company. It was to compete with the monopoly Western Union Company, which was a political intelligence front for anti-American international financiers. Palmer sent his assistant Edward H. Johnson back east to supervise the Automatic's work, and they hired the 24-year-old Thomas Alva Edison to invent their technology. This was Edison's first serious financial backing as an inventor. We will return later to the story of Edison's sensational achievements, the victory of New World republicans against European oligarchs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Joint Development -- or None at All The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad was designed to launch simultaneously the economic development of the American west and of Mexico. The D & R G's first annual report, published in 1873, stated in unmistakable terms Palmer's strategic purposes with respect to Mexico: "It has been a part of the plan of this company, from the inception, to extend its line southward from El Paso along the Rocky Mountain plateau to the City of Mexico and the tropical plantations of the adjacent coasts. "The heart of that republic with its nine millions of people was as naturally and surely our objective point, as the Pacific slope of the United States with its 700,000 population was the proper objective of the Pacific Railroad when it started across the plains from the banks of the Missouri River. "En route, the development of the rich mines of Chihuahua, Durango, Guanjuato ... and the State of Mexico, of the ... wine and cotton district of northern Mexico, of the tin and iron deposits of northern Durango, of the pineries of the Sierra Madre, of the great wheat field of Central Mexico, as large as that of California, is sure to furnish a large local trade of itself, sufficient to warrant the extension of the road. "But when the connection is made, an enormous through traffic will spring up between the heart of Mexico, with its harbors on two oceans, and the Rocky Mountain country of the United States-Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, California; indeed, the greater part of that vast and rapidly growing region lying between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean, to which this trunk north and south line, and the several Pacific railroads crossing it, will render it accessible. The Mexican tropics are the only tropics reachable by railroads from the United States. To reach all others, the sea must be crossed. "Our New West will get its sugar, coffee, tobacco, rice, rum, molasses, indigo, olive oils, drugs, nuts, and spices, gums, tropical fruits of all kinds, cotton, cocoa, coquito for oil, cochineal, india-rubber, mahogany and a great variety of other hard and precious woods, ropes, tarpaulins, matting and paper (made of the maguey fibre), oysters and fish, dye-woods, soap, leather and saddles, salt and saltpetre, the ornamental Mexican earthenware and statuettes, seeds of all kinds to exchange for northern varieties, cheap horses and mules, and bullion, from Mexico; and, in return, will send back a thousand articles of domestic and agricultural use now unknown to the Mexicans-iron plows, shovels, cooking-stoves, grates, ranges; also mining machinery and implements of all kinds, sugar, cotton, and woolenmills and brick machines, wagons and carriages, general hardware, and all sorts of tools, bar-iron and steel, wire, guns and pistols, pipe, furniture, butter, hams, cheese, lard, grapes, apples, bush and other temperate fruits, not to be had there, wines and brandies from the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, ice, choice stallions and bulls, etc., to improve their degenerate breeds, cotton and woolen goods, and innumerable other necessities and luxuries from which the people of Mexico have been almost entirely cut off, in consequence of their topographical isolation. The manufactured part of this list, and articles of s#ill generally, will at first come by this route from Chicago and St. Louis, but in a few years from the works at Canon City, Denver, Pueblo, and Albuquerque, in Colorado and New Mexico. "In the course of time, as the artisans of Mexico become skilled, as capital there takes a manufacturing turn, as coal mines are opened, and iron works and a more complex kind of manufactures are established, many things will be made there which, for the first few years, must be imported; but, by that time, the very growth which this would indicate will render necessary an interchange manifoldly larger......" Financing for the D & R G's United States construction came from Palmer's allies in Philadelphia and Colorado, and from sympathetic small capitalists in England. No outside banking house was involved. In the summer of 1871, Gen. Palmer acquired 10,000 acres at the foot of Pikes Peak, and on this site built the city of Colorado Springs. For no particular religious reason, but to prevent his city from degenerating into violence and disorder like many prairie towns, saloons were banned. Palmer explained, "My theory for this place is that it should be made the most attractive place for homes in the West, a place for schools, colleges, science, first class newspapers, and everything that the above imply." [10] Beauty, order and culture were Palmer's objectives in Colorado Springs. The results have been permanent. Palmer was the principal founder there of Colorado College, and Colorado Springs is today the home of the North American Air Defense Command Headquarters and the United States Air Force Academy. Palmer envisioned the Colorado of the future as rivalling Pittsburgh and Chicago in industrial power, and the best European cities for beauty. As the D & R G was built, Palmer's Central Colorado Improvement Company opened up many coal and iron mines along its route. The steel mills he set up in Pueblo began providing rails for his construction. Such heavy industry as has been built in Colorado is largely due to his efforts. Rather than collapsing into a post-Civil War depression, the United States had been freed to expand its industries and agriculture in a way the world had never before seen. In this remarkable period: •the yearly production of Lake Superior iron ore went from 193,000 tons (1865) to 1,195,000 tons (1873); •pig iron production, at 823,000 tons in 1865, was no better than it had been in 1847!-but by 1872 it had reached 2,548,000 tons; •rails produced went from 318,000 (1865) to 893,000 tons (1872); •coal increased from 24 million (1865) to 58 million tons (1873); •the number of patents, which had been stable in the range of 3-4000 per year from 1858-1864, rose to 6,099 in 1865, to 12,201 in 1867, remaining at about that level until 1881; •the freight rate for a bushel of wheat sent from Chicago to New York was $22 by water vs. $44 by rail in 1867, $24 by water vs. $33 by rail in 1872; further progress dropped the rail freight price down to $14 by 1881, so the competing water price fell to $8; •immigration averaged 385,000 per year from 1869 to 1873, compared to 168,000 per year from 1855 to 1865; •the average hourly wage in the United States rose by about 19 percent between 1865 and 1872, while basic commodities such as coal, copper, com and cotton receded in price from wartime to approximately prewar levels". --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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