What is America, to the World?By Anton Chaitkin

antonchaitkin@gmail.com

1) The Creation of Modern TimesThe advent of the Trump administration may offer us a chance to alter our suicidal policies. I

believe the possibility of our success in making the necessary changes may depend on gaining a betterappreciation of who we are as a people, as a nation.

We Americans might now break with the course given us by our neoliberal leaders in the trans-Atlantic financier oligarchy: Western-sponsored terror and Western counter-terror; perpetual wars forregime change; budget austerity dictated by billionaire speculators; helplessness and mass poverty basedon backwardness and industrial disinvestment.

Instead of the conflict with Russia and China, that leads to global homicide in nuclear war, might wenow join with those countries to build up a modern, secure and prosperous world?

The political sphere has heretofore been dominated by lies justifying the present insane course, andby screaming, and threats, to block rational discussion. The power structure demonizes its critics asconspiracy theorists; it demonizes Russia and China with its own conspiracy theories about theirbehavior and aims, as our supposed enemies.

The population is increasingly unsatisfied with this mental and moral slavery.

But in the noise and confusion that degrades our public thought process, could we reallyfundamentally change course? Or is America intrinsically incapable of taking action towards progressand an optimistic future?

We urgently need a new light on our national character, our identity.

Some say, that we should see ourselves as others sees us.

For example, many civilized people disagree with the USA paying Islamic insurrectionists to run agenocidal war on the pretext of overthrowing the Syrian government, and calling it a crusade for “humanrights”!

This criticism is certainly healthy.

But we are stuck in impotent fury if we wrongly see America’s current course as representing ourinterests, or as typical of our historical character. That is after all precisely what our enemies claim: theLondon-Wall Street Establishment in praising the current American policy, and the Isis crazies incondemning America.

The whole structure of neoliberal logic pivots on the perverse notion, which is now drilled into our

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school-children, that that our high living standards and national power are due to selfishness and cruelty.

This rotten lie is widely accepted. Some say defensively that it is our right to act as beasts, eatingothers. Others, such as radical Greens, argue for low living standards and extreme depopulation, to cureour sin by wiping ourselves out.

To escape this dilemma, we must step outside the news trap; outside the stupid liberal-conservativespectrum; and above all, outside the confines of that discredited imperial Economics which is based onthe assumption that mankind is evil and wealth can only be stolen.

We must rather assert, and demonstrate, that the United States built its industry and its high materialstandards by a policy of unparalleled generosity, using strong government intervention to promotemaximum individual creativity and technical innovation.

We must further show that the USA introduced modern times and high living standards to manyparts of the world, spreading our economic nationalism to our foreign partners so that every countrymight demand and win sovereignty, industrial development and modern living conditions as their humanrights.

This is a question of historical fact, not a useless argument with those who equate men and beasts.We must simply disprove the criminal financiers’ wildly false claim that they, and their monetarism, builtus up. Wall Street built no industries. They took over and ruined industry, and then poisoned thepopular mind against building industry, and against the pride we should feel in having improved theworld.

2) Industrial Revolution Began, and was ImprisonedModern industrial capabilities have been gained in very specific historical transformations. These

advancements can easily be identified as to their time of occurrence. When we investigate these specificchanges, we see -- contrary to the Adam Smith or Marxist narratives -- that the leadership and policieswhich accomplished them were exclusively republican in character, never imperialistic.

The “Industrial Revolution” may be seen as certain developments occurring from the 1760s to the1880s, with important enhancement in the 20th century up through the 1960s.

The crucial action began in England, but the Empire crushed the Promethean character of theresulting industry, and the scene of strategic innovation shifted afterwards to the USA.

A circle of British republicans, closely associated with Benjamin Franklin and in sympathy with theAmerican Revolution, built infrastructure and invented machines and processes that multiplied humanpower and used the Earth’s resources to enrich society.

Among the central activists were Matthew Bolton and his employee James Watt -- steam enginedevelopers, advised directly by Franklin; John Wilkinson -- pioneer modern iron producer, he developedborers, the first machine tools, which made the pistons for steam engines; Franklin’s protégé JosephPriestley -- Wilkinson’s brother-in-law, who discovered oxygen and its plant-animal energy cycle;

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Josiah Wedgwood -- master potter, who built canals that developed coal-mining and facilitated industry;and Edmund Cartwright -- power loom inventor, whose brother John Cartwright formed the Society forConstitutional Information with Wedgwood and published Tom Paine’s works.

The first modern English enterprises paid relatively good wages. Living standards began to rise, asclothing and other efficiently produced goods could be bought by ordinary families.

The imperial oligarchy, the Crown/City of London/East India Company combination, looked withterror on the suddenly popular notion, potentially fatal to the thieving Empire, that improvement waspossible for everyone, and was everyone’s right. This was becoming the common inspiration ofEnglishmen, as it was of American colonists and of their allied insurgent nationalists in Ireland andIndia.

During the American Revolution, English industrial pioneers Matthew Bolton and John Wilkinsonworked quietly with Benjamin Franklin and his partner Pierre Beaumarchais inside France, developingthe artillery manufacture whose output went over to the French fleet supporting George Washington’stroops at Yorktown.

Once the oligarchs saw that American independence was likely, their efforts turned to blocking thenew USA from transforming itself from a mere raw-materials supplier into an industrial powerhousewith a large skilled population.

Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations warned the revolting Americans that such a deliberatenational power upgrade under government sponsorship and protectionism would be both undesirable andimpossible, that it would infringe on the priority and absolute freedom for pure money-making (“FreeTrade”) which was allegedly necessary for prosperity.

At the war’s end, British cheap good were dumped into the USA to prevent startup of Americanfactories.

And the imperial enemy engaged in a political war to prevent nationalists led by Franklin,Washington and Alexander Hamilton from launching immediate industrialization.

At that juncture, the British Interest was exerted in three channels.

The slave-owning South, still intimately bound to English imperialism through exports, credit andneo-feudal aristocratic pretenses, threatened secession.

Thomas Jefferson, espousing British “liberal” Free Trade doctrines, represented the slave-owners inopposing Hamilton’s nationalist measures.

Wealthy merchants in the Northeastern U.S., closely tied to England as importers and tories, andopenly pro-British, built up public sympathy for Jefferson by attacking him while pretending to supportHamilton.

These efforts allowed the enemies of industry to block vigorous government economic policy andthus prevent the American Founders from industrializing the new republic for an entire generation afterthis had been technically feasible. Though the Washington Administration established the Bank of the

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United States, and Hamilton clearly defined the necessary credit, protective and infrastructure policies,these measures were not effectively implemented until revived nationalist politics were to make thatpossible a half-century after Independence.

The Empire meanwhile changed the whole character of the industrial revolution within Britain,consciously crushing out optimism and social progress.

The oligarchs incorporated the new technologies into the imperial system, degrading the clothingfactories into tubercular hell-holes, spreading unemployment and slum squalor amidst new riches. Theydevastated India and Ireland by shutting their native industries, extracting their wealth and making themslaves, as the City of London apparatus had done all along in Africa.

A certain segment of British industrial workers did gain relatively improved living conditions, as dida part of the population in a middle class tied to imperial trade.

But the British Empire made war on the spread of industrial power to anywhere else in the world.They officially outlawed the export of technical knowledge. They dumped cheap-labor-made goodseverywhere, particularly clothing and finished metal goods, in exchange for cheap raw materials fromcolonies or permanently semi-colonial countries.

By this exchange, Britain’s trade partners were kept permanently backward, their people in thestatus of farm animals. Through the East India Company-employed economist Thomas Malthus, theEmpire proclaimed a doctrine to justify their crimes: that Man is incapable of overcoming naturalscarcity to sustain a growing population, so that poverty and starvation are supposedly inevitable, ratherthan a consequence of imperialism.

3) The Strategy for U.S. IndustrializationBy the first years of the 19th century, Americans were still mostly confined to the Atlantic coast.

Our population was only about half that of Great Britain. We had no real inter-city roads, no machinesmade of metal, no professional engineers, scientists or armed forces. There was no steam power in ourprimitive factories, though steamboats, burning only wood instead of coal, were introduced beginning in1807.

The Declaration of Independence had claimed that the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitledour country to assume a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth.

But our imperial opponents and their subordinate partners within our society – the great slave-plantation owners and the importers and brokers of the transatlantic trade – sought rather to break downAmerica’s great-power ambitions, to keep us a rural backwater, on our knees to Mother London.

Britain had prohibited manufacturing and westward settlement to the American colonists. SinceIndependence, Free Trade’s reliance on imported products and the stupor of plantation life had combinedto constrict American credit and prevent industry and transport facilities.

Beginning around the time of Abraham Lincoln’s birth (1809), a new political movement arose with

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a strategy for the industrialization and peaceful enlargement of the United States. Its advocates pointedto the Founders’ vision of progress. They cited the accomplishments of post-Renaissance Europe andancient Asia, Egypt and Greece; as heirs of Franklin they were stirred by recent European marvels ofclassical arts and natural science.

The new movement’s leaders had been personally associated with the pro-national leaders of theRevolution and the early republic, and revived their aborted development program.

In the years leading up to and through the War of 1812 versus Britain, Henry Clay, Mathew Carey,John Quincy Adams, Nicholas Biddle, DeWitt Clinton and their friends argued that America could onlydefend against the Empire’s military and economic aggression by a vast construction program, creatingmanufacturing plants and building modern transport to populate a great continent-wide power.

To accomplish this, they said, the government must enact protective tariffs, fund infrastructure, issueproductive credit through national banking, and broadly encourage science, invention and new technicalskills.

The political program was largely Hamilton’s, brought back only a few years after he was killed.But the new movement was at the outset emphatically non-partisan, outside of the corrupt two-partyframework that had crippled the early republic.

This, in brief, was the nature of the economic nationalist tendency that guided the industrializationof the United States in two phases, the 1820 and 1830s, and from the 1860s to the 1880s. This 19thcentury American nationalism was a continuous political phenomenon, involving in its second phasenotably Abraham Lincoln (whose mentors were Clay, Quincy Adams and Clinton) and Lincoln’seconomic advisor, Henry Carey (son of Mathew). As will be explained below, this movement spreadfrom America throughout the planet. And its 19th century goals and victories inspired the broad aims ofthe great, fighting, 20th century American nationalists, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy,though their measures of implementation differed on specifics such as tariffs.

When the 19th century nationalists rallied support for the startup of modern industry, the 1790sdebate between Jefferson and Hamilton was fresh in the public mind. The essential matter in dispute hadbeen Jefferson’s stated opposition to manufacturing – a way of life that both sides understood wouldoverpower and sweep away the plantation system.

In the decade (1815-1824) immediately following the second U.S. war against Britain, governmentwas given new tools to transform America’s economic character. The lapsed Bank of the United Stateswas revived. The Bank went into action for national progress once the nationalist strategist NicholasBiddle was made its president.

The U.S. Military Academy was upgraded into a center of engineering skill, and the President wasgiven authority to assign Army officers to design civil works.

Congress enacted a seriously protective tariff.

The prospective increase in national wealth brought support to these measures from enlightened

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Southern leaders, in alliance with the North and West. New York State’s Erie Canal from the Atlantic tothe Great Lakes, constructed during this politically fruitful decade, was completed in 1825. As the take-off of industry began, all the states, Southern included, pushed ahead with their own very popularinfrastructure projects.

John Quincy Adams (President 1825-1829) assigned Army engineers to design the first Americanrailroads, which were quasi-private firms subsidized by government (state and city, then Federal).Political nationalists including Biddle, Carey and West Point leaders, organized the first large-scalemining of coal, which entered commerce through government-sponsored canals and railroads. The samecircle of nationalists started up iron forges under the new tariff protection.

Statistics from these three areas tell the tale.

U.S. railroad tracks in place grew from 3 miles in 1827, to 576 miles in 1833 [Fred J. Guetter,Statistical Tables Relating to the Economic Growth of the United States, Philadelphia, 1924, McKinleyPublishing Company]. As of 1840, the USA had about 2,800 miles of railways in operation, ascompared to 1,800 miles in all of Europe, including Britain. By 1840 we had 4,000 miles of rails [U.S.Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789-1945, Washington, 1949, U.S.Government Printing Office]

State and local governments provided more than half of the capital invested in early Americanrailways, and private sources would typically only make railroad construction loans when the stategovernment guaranteed repayment. The New York stock exchange played no significant role.

Commercial coal output went from virtually none in 1820, to 70,000 tons in 1823, to 320,000 tonsin 1830, to 1.2 million tons in 1837.

As of 1820 nationwide iron production was at about the same level as in the colonial era. It thentripled between 1820 and 1823, from 20,000 up to 61,000 tons. Iron output then doubled to 130,000tons by 1828, and leveled off at 200,000 tons in 1832. New forges stopped being built underJackson/Van Buren Free Trade in the 1830s. But when Henry Clay put through the sharply higher 1842tariff, output quadrupled to 800,000 tons in the next five years. The first metal machines finallyappeared in U.S. factories only in this period.

The anti-nationalists then repealed protection and froze the growth of our forges, substitutingimported cheap-labor British iron for American, while a flood of British steel blocked any U.S. millsfrom being built. U.S. industry was stagnant under the rule of Southern planters, New York speculatorsand British traders in the decades just prior to the Civil War.

President Abraham Lincoln and his nationalist allies sharply raised tariffs, built great railroads, andemitted a sea of Federal credit for productive investment [The first transcontinental line had $60 millionof Federal investment, private capital put in $4 million].

In this spectacular second phase of its industrialization, the U.S. suddenly overtook Britain as theworld’s greatest power.

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We built our first ever steel mills, whose output rose from 20,000 tons in 1867 to 3,339,000 in 1887.Our factories suddenly produced vast arrays of modern agricultural machinery, heavy ploughs to breakthe deep plains soil, and steel rails.

Railroads grew from 39,000 miles in 1867 to 149,000 in 1887.

In those same 20 years, coal output grew from 31 million tons to 131 million.

The world’s first petroleum production, begun in Pennsylvania in 1859, grew to 9 million barrels by1876 and 30 million by 1882.

Inventor Thomas Edison began work on electric lighting in 1878, sponsored and guided byPhiladelphia nationalists. Within a year he had made the first commercially viable incandescent lamp,and soon designed hundreds of devices to allow the world’s first public use of electricity.

Wall Street tried to sabotage it. J.P. Morgan, after paying for one small-scale power station, blockedany new power plant construction and prevented production of light bulbs. Edison and his backersstaged a stockholders’ revolt against Wall Street control of bulbs. They reached out to municipalities,which issued their own bonds to construct the first generation of America's central power stations – 12by 1884, 58 by 1886.

Those fundamental advancements to human power in which Americans led the way in the 20thcentury, particularly nuclear energy and space travel, will be considered below.

4) Generosity at the Heart of American NationalismAmerica’s seemingly miraculous transformation from rural backwardness to industrial greatness

was characterized by a national spirit of generosity.

The advance to skilled factories and machine-work brought the world’s highest wages. The politicalsponsors of the industrial progress themselves promoted the creation of labor unions, to protect workersfrom financiers’ inevitable cruelty.

Our statesmen strategized for westward expansion by keeping land prices in reach of settlers.Lincoln gave free land to new farmers, and free public colleges, and built railroads to their farms.Refugees from European misery – and Blacks fleeing from Southern poverty -- immigrated intoindustrial jobs in cities like Chicago and Detroit, with their great public schools, cheap electric transit,symphony orchestras, libraries and parks.

By design, we elevated a large proportion of our population to be scientific farmers and skilledurban workers, homeowners, independent citizens who could sustain a republic.

This national progress all came from political victories over the oligarchs who ran slavery, slumsand sweat shops, who massacred the Cherokees, who usurped control over the inventions and heavyindustry built by others, who monopolized and looted the railroads, who controlled utilities andconstricted the growth of public electricity use.

Against this internal and transatlantic opponent, we persisted in making a better world for ourselves,

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and for foreign peoples struggling with the same international opponent.

What follows is an extremely brief summary of the action in some of the countries aided byAmerican self-development and anti-imperial policy.

Germany: Its national formation and rise to power was in large measure due to the partnership ofGerman and American strategists, from the 1780s through the 1880s. (Because of this unique bi-nationalhistory, a separate timeline is provided in the box, included below). British-influenced German royalsfired Bismarck and blundered into World War I. Wall Street and London sponsored fascism in the 1920sand 1930s. After World War II, the U.S. led the rebuilding of Germany as our friend.

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U.S. and German strategists created modern Germany.

1785: The Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed, recognizing our new nation.

1795-1820s: Schiller’s sponsor Johann Cotta published the great works of Weimar Classicism beginningwith die Horen, edited by Schiller with Goethe, Herder and the Humboldt brothers in its pages.

1797-1801: John Quincy Adams as U.S. Minister to Prussia renewed the Prussia-American Treaty.

1814: U.S. publisher Mathew Carey, whose German agent was Johann Cotta, authored The OliveBranch to unify American patriots around revived economic nationalism. Clay, Carey, Biddle and J.Q.Adams then led this movement to power.

1815-1820s: Cotta was an influential member of the Wurttemberg parliament, sponsoring and mentoringthe young economist and parliamentarian Friedrich List. Cotta and List aimed to unify the variousGerman principalities under a single government which could industrialize Germany. At the bidding ofthe British and Habsburg empires, List was imprisoned and then exiled.

1825: Encouraged by the Marquis de Lafayette, List emigrated to Pennsylvania. List joined Carey andClay in further developing the American System of Economics, the system from Franklin and Hamilton,in opposition to the British imperial Free Trade system.

1830s: List operated back in Germany as a U.S. Consul, with backing from Alexander von Humboldtwithin the Prussian government.

1834: List’s unification program was largely realized when Prussia joined with other German states inthe Zollverein or Customs Union. He proposed a Leipzig-Dresden railway to begin a national railwaygrid. Saxony formed this line and completed it in 1839 -- the first German long-distance railway, thefirst one steam-powered, with the first German rail tunnel.

1860s: Bismarck, admiring Lincoln’s fight for the American Union, strengthened the Germanconfederation behind Prussia. The unified German nation was proclaimed in 1871.

1870s: German followers of Henry C. Carey (Mathew’s son) prevailed upon Bismarck to adopt strongeconomic nationalism, ditching Free Trade. Government sponsored the rise of great industries, newtechnologies, national infrastructure and social welfare protection. In return Bismarck's representativeshelped fund America's Northern Pacific, the second of the Lincoln-planned transcontinental railways;Bismarck, North Dakota, was named to honor Germany’s role in the enterprise.

1880s-1890s: Thomas Edison’s German partner, Emil Rathenau (and his son Walther) built the greatGerman Edison company, electrified Germany and much of Europe and South America, introduced theelectrical industry to Russia and worked with Count Witte to promote Russian tariff protection toindustry.

Russia: Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln andAmerican protectionism were deeply influential in forming Russia’s resolve to become a modernindustrial nation. Adams as U.S. Minister (1809-1814) proposed that inventor Robert Fulton should setup his steamboats in Russia rivers to begin a national transport grid–-the plan was blocked by the U.S.War of 1812 with Britain. The Czar hired former U.S. Army engineer George Washington Whistler inthe 1840s to build Russia’s first railroad, from Moscow to St. Petersburg. President Lincoln sent CassiusClay (Henry Clay’s cousin), as ambassador to Russia, loaded with Henry C. Carey’s nationalist books forthe country’s leaders; Russia meanwhile parked its naval fleet for a time in New York and San Franciscoto warn Britain and France away from menacing the Union during our Civil War. Chemical pioneerDmitri Mendeleev got intensive industrial and political briefings in 1876 from Philadelphia nationalistswho had developed the petroleum industry and were at war with monopolist John D. Rockefeller;Mendeleev returned home to build up Russian chemical and mining industry and to promote the tariffprotection vital to industrialization. The vast trans-Siberian line, echoing Lincoln’s project, was builtwith Pennsylvania rails and locomotives, and counsel from the Union Pacific builder, Gen. GrenvilleDodge.

A Baldwin Locomotive Works advertisement circulated in Russia, approximately 1880.

Japan: During and after the American Civil War, pro-Americans and followers of Henry C. Careycreated the political forces which overcame British influence and overthrew the feudal regime. With thehelp of American engineers and economists, they drove Japan quickly to full industrialization, railroads,

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precision engineering, chemical science. Britain later muscled into a military alliance with Japan, andencouraged Japanese imperial aggression against Russia (knocking Russia into Revolution) and againstAsia. After World War II, the U.S. led the rebuilding of Japan as our friend.

Peru: President Lincoln reopened relations with Peru that slave-owner influence had cut off.American engineers began working with Peru, which was ambitious to industrialize all South America.President Manuel Pardo (1868-72) hired Henry Meiggs to build a rail line across the Andes, designed tolink up with Brazil for a continental system (it remained the world’s highest railway until China’s recentQinghai–Tibet line). Britain backed Chile to make war on Peru. U.S. President James Garfield sidedwith Peru, Garfield was assassinated, Peru was crushed, British bondholders took over Peru and abortedthe railroad construction before it reached Brazil.

The best of the American national character was beautifully shown in the skilled workers at theBaldwin locomotive plant in Philadelphia, and in those workers who went abroad to deliver and set uptheir product in a developing country in South America or Asia. A man’s job might have begun as ayouth in the apprenticeship program, where he learned from the world’s best craftsmen. He took pridethat he could take apart and put back together the locomotive’s thousands of parts, in a foreign countryas well as back home. The world was astonished by his status as a workingman.

Wikimedia Commons/Milan Suvajec Above: Steam locomotive DL&G #191, manufactured by Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia in 1880. It is the oldest steam locomotive in the Colorado Railroad Museum. In the nineteenth century, Baldwin's production for the U.S. railways, as well as shipments toRussia, Japan, China, and other nations, were used by Henry Carey's political faction to promote world economic development.

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Public Domain

Above: The Erecting Floor of Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1895.

Mexico: Lázaro Cárdenas conducted his Presidency (1934-1940) in parallel to Roosevelt’s NewDeal. Cárdenas seized the petroleum holdings of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil and Britain’s Royal DutchShell, offering payment only for the meager amount they had invested, not what the properties wereworth, since the foreigners were producing little and giving only a pittance to Mexico. Through the anti-imperialist U.S. ambassador, Josephus Daniels, President Roosevelt responded by backing Cardenas.Mexico broke relations with furious Britain, but stayed allied to Roosevelt and the U.S. in the comingWorld War II.

Ghana: Kwame Nkrumah, born in the British colony called the Gold Coast, went over to the USAat age 26 in 1935 to attend the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He was impressedby Roosevelt’s TVA hydroelectric projects, which were pulling the American South out of poverty asmight be done in an independent Africa. Nkrumah imbibed the W.E.B Dubois legacy working withAmerican civil rights leaders. In 1945 he went to England and planned with anti-colonial socialists toset up a free United States of Africa. He led his country, renamed Ghana, to be the first African nationindependent of British rule. As Ghana’s President, Nkrumah was the first foreign head of state to visitJohn F. Kennedy’s White House in 1961. JFK was building American dams as FDR had done, and hearranged financing for Nkrumah’s visionary Akosombo dam project on the Volta River, for cheapelectricity to power the industrialization of West Africa. Kennedy’s friend Edgar Kaiser supervisedconstruction; he had led teams building the Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams. Kennedy wasassassinated during the Ghana construction. A group of London-based Ghanaian military plottersoverthrew Nkrumah in 1966, a month after the dam was dedicated with a plaque honoring the martyredKennedy.

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China and Russia Replace USA in Aiding Ghana’s Development

Clockwise from top left: U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah meet March 8, 1961. Kennedy backed Nkrumah’s plan for a dam to electrify West Africa.

Akosombo Dam, built under U.S. sponsorship, was completed in 1966. But after JFK’s death, America surrendered its own great industries and withdrew from world development.

Bui Dam, built under China’s sponsorship, was completed in 2013, beginning to alleviate Ghana’s electricity shortfalls.

Ghana and Russia plan to build a nuclear power plant and a center for nuclear science and technology in Ghana. Emmanuel Bombande, Ghana’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, and Evgeny Kiselev, Head of Russia’s Federal Agency for Mineral Resources, signing agreement September 26, 2016. Photo by Porcia Oforiwaa Ofori.

5) Roosevelt, Kennedy, and American MemoryThis republican legacy, this national achievement, is unknown to the general public today. Hamilton

is depicted as a cartoon, with “identity politics.” Lincoln is stripped of his nationalist biography, his corephilosophy. A large popular majority hates Free Trade, but they know nothing of its dramatic historicalcontext. Since industry is confused with the oligarchs who grabbed it and ground it down -- and theGreens say good riddance to it -- its history has become a matter of public disinterest.

Sadly, we and our children are now instructed that Love and Charity are incompatible with Power,

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though they are identical in the universe and have together raised humanity to its greatest heights.

Two 20th century Presidents stand out in public memory, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.Their image is cherished. But their actual strategic and moral standpoint is lost to public view with thatof the earlier American nationalist leaders.

FDR and JFK each had a decisive break with the oligarchic views of his family: FDR, versus hiscousin Teddy Roosevelt, during his 1920s recovery from polio; JFK, versus his father Joe Kennedy,during his World War II service.

In the end, they shared with Franklin, Hamilton, J.Q. Adams, Clay, the Careys and Lincoln, apassion for Man’s improvement, an excitement at how their own leadership could vault the worldforward in the fight with society’s illicit overlords. The republican history they had each intenselystudied was live in their minds as the stage on which they played their political roles.

The American people accepted the 1963 JFK assassination without protest. Only riots, and nopolitical counteraction, followed the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, and the assassination of RobertF. Kennedy two months later brought only a depressed silence. The world applauded America’ssuccessful 1969 moon landing, but the nation that had accomplished this was itself being murdered; andthe deep space program was soon ended.

Americans stood by numbly as freedom to make a crooked fortune, freedom to be a slave to dope, tohave heartless sex, were substituted for achievement, for the human right to truly useful and high-payingemployment. Liberals and conservatives have impotently argued over this counterculture ever since,without understanding and lamenting the creative way of life we had lost, or fighting to restore it.

The USA had brought light and electricity to the world, and had demonstrated the political meansfor each country to stand up with its own full set of modern productive powers. Franklin Roosevelt hadcome to power after decades of Wall Street bullying and theft had ended in Depression. FDR extendedelectrical use to the areas Wall Street had frozen out of it, and planned to bring the TVA system out tofinish electrifying the world.

And as earlier generations had done, 20th century America also brought before the worldfundamentally new technologies with dramatic promise to achieve peace and to raise living standards,namely, nuclear energy and space travel.

Both of these were of course associated with the possibility of mass extermination, with ballisticrockets carrying nuclear weapons. But whether these tools would be employed for Man’s murder orexaltation depended on the course America would follow.

At the outset of World War II, Roosevelt ordered a crash program to implement the first large-scalenuclear fission, for the purpose of making nuclear bombs (the Manhattan Project), in response to theperceived threat that Hitler Germany might do it before we did.

Yet at that time, the world was fully aware of the potential use of atomic power for the improvementof human life.

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For example: on May 5, 1940, under the headline, “Vast Power Source in Atomic Energy Openedby Science,” the New York Times reported that uranium, “a natural substance found abundantly in manyparts of the earth, now separated for the first time in pure form, has been found in pioneer experiments tobe capable of yielding such energy that one pound of it is equal in power output to 5,000,000 pounds ofcoal or 3,000,000 pounds of gasoline.” A neutron can split an atom into two parts, “liberating200,000,000 volts of atomic binding-energy,” while freeing more neutrons for a chain reaction with theother million billion billion atoms in a pound of the fuel. A small chunk of fuel could power electricturbines, and drive ships many times around the Earth.

The author of this optimistic Times article, William L. Laurence, was later appointed the officialhistorian of the Manhattan Project. Because the whole enterprise was top secret, the President did notpublicly disclose his own views on the promise of atomic power. But his philosophy on this questionmight be surmised from what he had said about the building of America in a speech 6 years earlier:

“It has been a fight against Nature. From the time that the settlers started to clear the landuntil now, they have been compelled to assert the power of their brains and courage over the blind powers of the wind and the sun and the soil. They have paid no heed to the reactionaries who would tell them that mankind must stand impotent before the forces of nature. Year after year, as science progressed and mastery of the mysteries of the physical universe increased, man has been turning nature, once his hard master, into useful servitude.”

[Franklin Roosevelt speech at Green Bay, Wisconsin, August 9, 1934]

FDR’s enemies, the men of Wall Street and London, moved into power immediately after his death.President Truman decided to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Yet Truman was said to oppose peaceful useof nuclear energy, on the grounds that it would increase productivity, the more-efficient workers wouldhave too much free time on their hands and would get into mischief. The Bomb’s horror spread fear ofthe Atomic age, which blended with the Cold War against Soviet Russia to poison the public mindagainst the idea of world progress. President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program proclaimed thebenefits of universal use of nuclear energy; but the Anglo-American Cold War policy frameworkseverely limited any American sympathy or help to uplifting the world’s poor countries.

John F. Kennedy made his mark in politics with attacks on Truman Democrats and DullesRepublicans alike. He said we were wrongly joining with and emulating the British empire to opposethe aspiration of Third World countries, betraying our Revolutionary, anti-colonial heritage.

“Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, . . . Africa is going through a revolution . . . .Africans want a higher standard of living. Seventy-five percent of the population now lives by subsistence agriculture. They want an opportunity to manage and benefit directly from the resources in, on, and under their land . . . . The African peoples believe that the science, technology, and education available in the modern world can overcome their struggle for existence, . . . that their poverty, squalor, ignorance, and disease can be conquered . . . . [The] balance of power is shifting . . . into the hands of the two-thirds of the world's people who want to share what the one-third has already taken for granted. . . .”

[John F. Kennedy Stanford University speech, 1960]

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Nuclear energy was understood as essential to raising global living standards. As a Senator in 1957,Kennedy called for "a Middle Eastern Nuclear Center, similar to the Asian Nuclear Center alreadyproposed, which could bring untold benefits in energy utilization to former deserts and wasteland. Theseprojects would be developed and administered under the auspices and control of the nations in the region. . . . [T]he benefits . . . would be mutual." [Kennedy, The Strategy for Peace, (New York, PopularLibrary, 1961, p. 151]

Kennedy saw the U.S. failing, in competition with the Communists for the favor of world publicopinion, because we had abandoned our historic role as the catalyst for progress. When he becamePresident, JFK emphasized that restoring U.S. industrial and scientific preeminence (and thus ourmilitary strength) and spreading new industrial power to a host of countries, was the best way to ensureour peace and safety. After firing Allen Dulles, he sought a non-confrontational approach to the Soviets.How he would have ridiculed today’s hysterically provocative anti-Russian propaganda, now a quartercentury after the end of the Communist system!

JFK pushed the full nuclear cycle, reprocessing and breeders. According to his program, by the endof the 20th century, half of America’s electricity was to be nuclear-generated, and thereafter virtually allnew electric power installations would be nuclear. He brought about nuclear research reactors inVietnam and Indonesia. He reorganized the Atomic Energy Commission to promote nuclear-poweredseawater desalination, pivoting on joint U.S. work with Russia, Mexico, Israel, Egypt, and several otherArab countries, featuring joint Arab and Israeli nuclear water projects as the basis for peace.

The Kennedy space program aimed for manned landings on Mars by the 1980s. Nuclear rocketsessential for this journey were being developed during Kennedy's administration at the Rover project testsite in Nevada.

As he negotiated for a ban on testing nuclear weapons, Kennedy shifted the concept of our spaceprogram from competition with the Soviets to cooperation. He proposed that our first Moon landing be ajoint operation of Russia and America. Shortly afterwards he was murdered.

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It would seem that, aside from simple corruption, it is mainly naked fear of the murderousEstablishment, the Wall Street-London axis, that prevents Americans in public life from speaking outagainst hysterical policies so obviously ruinous to our country, the punitive sanctions, the regime-changeterrorism, the Malthusian Green agenda, Washington as the Goldman Sachs playground.

By Russia’s insistence on national sovereignty, and China’s leadership in infrastructure andindustrial construction, those countries stand today in world history in the place formerly occupied soproudly and so successfully by the USA. I would gently suggest that when a few voices are heardsaying, “Let us recall our former greatness, let us lead the world of the future,” our present shame andfear will begin to dissipate, and we may survive and flourish.

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