480 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0060093624
John Steele Gordon’s An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power is a gem of a book for anyone that wants a backstage pass to how the US-of-A arose from a provincial colonial backwater to the greatest and freest economic powerhouse the world has ever known (be advised, though, for it was published in 2004 and can seem rather dated at times. Sadly). Time and again history has shown how one brilliant discovery or a single mechanical invention can and does revolutionize a nation, not only in the field for which it was developed, but also in other, neighboring fields as its original application is expanded beyond its first precepts and adapted to wider uses. Want an example? ‘kay: steam engines had been around for centuries before they were adapted in the late 17th Century to be used as water pumps, where they were adapted again in the early 18th Century into the atmospheric engine, where it evolved into high pressure engines in the late 18th Century, before becoming the stationary steam engine used to power factories and mills, whence it transformed yet again to power first land, and then water, craft, which led to the invention of the locomotive and thence to the steam turbine. There is a plethora of examples I could use, but let’s end at steam.
If economics are not you thing, fear not, for Gordon has pulled off the remarkable feat of making this stultifying subject interesting. No, really: what is normally the driest of dry subjects is, in Gordon’s hands, transformed into a kind of adventure story in which bankers and industrialists are the heroes (I mean, can you imagine?). Perhaps it is the author’s background as a journalist that allows him to find the most intriguing aspects of economic history and explain its more difficult and opaque concepts in a manner that is quickly grasped by the layman; I found time and again that he was able to get to the heart of an economic idea without dragging along a lot of pedantic baggage. His writing is excellent, and the raw historical material he mines is seamlessly synthesized with consummate professionalism. By wrapping his discussion of larger economic themes around the impact that invention, infrastructural development and politics had on the burgeoning American nation, Gordon makes his history that much more accessible to the average (that is, Me) reader. Examples include the Erie Canal, road and railroad building, the cotton gin, the Bessemer furnace and many others, besides.
I’ve often said (take my word for it) that the best teachers are those whose ideological underpinnings are difficult to discover. Using my own criteria, Gordon would fail my test, as it is rather obvious that he falls squarely into the free-market pro-deficit camp; Gordon is not, however, simplistic or dogmatic, as he freely acknowledges that while unregulated capitalism is indeed “red in tooth and claw”, on the other hand labor unions have overstepped their bounds. Nobody is innocent. Or that while the monopolies and oligopolies that dominated post-Civil War America led to fantastical development and expansion, it was at the price of economic and developmental freedom for many millions of average Americans, which then led to popular movements that tried to defang this raw capitalism (movements that are, sadly, still with us) and that always failed to produce the economic and societal panaceas so keenly hoped-for. Even after centuries of data and the examples of failed nations all over the globe, some bad, bad ideas just keep getting regurgitated and repeated, and people still have the unmitigated gall to be shocked, shocked, that failed ideas keep failing.
An Empire of Wealth, then, is a joy to read and educational, to boot. Gordon manages to turn an unpopular subject into a rollicking adventure and, though a little dated here and there, serves as a reminder that, left to their own devices, Americans have it within themselves to make America great again (somebody outta turn that into a slogan).
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