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Article Excerpt
Discussed in this essay:
An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, by John Steele Gordon. HarperCollins, 2004. 460 pages, $26.95.
Briskness, desirable in all long books, is a leaven of mercy in a work of economic history. Nearing a discussion of the gold standard, you silently plead with the author, Please, make this fast. John Steele Gordon hears you. Briskly, he disposes of arid topics; and with anecdote, color, detail, and in the droll voice he displays as a commentator on public radio's Marketplace, casts them in an entertaining glow. Nothing in The Epic History of American Economic Power resists his terse lucidity. Credit--how a banker "turn[s] the dead capital of fixed assets into living ... capital"--inflation, deflation, stagflation, "call money," even gold, yield up their mysteries to him.
The author of popular books on American business and financial leaders, Gordon does the quick sketch well. To the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Morgans, he adds such newcomers as Stephen Girard, a French-born Philadelphia merchant. Told by Albert Gallatin, James Madison's secretary of the treasury, that a loan of "$8,105,800 needed to be subscribed that day" or the government would go bankrupt in the middle of the 1812 war with Britain, Girard "immediately" agreed to subscribe. Gordon lends even bit players a dab of personality: Andrew Carnegie's mother gets a line, and the old girl delivers. During a family luncheon in New York, with the coal baron Henry Clay Frick in attendance, Andrew, "who loved surprises, suddenly proposed a merger of their companies." Dick was speechless. "The silence that ensued was finally broken by what is perhaps the most famous instance of maternal concern in American business history. 'Ah, Andra,' said Mrs. Carnegie in her broad Scots accent, 'that's a very fine thing for Mr. Freek. But what do we get oot of it?'" No wonder Carnegie spoke of his mother as a "heroine" and lived with her as an adult for almost twenty years, marrying only after she was gone.
Frictionless prose helps Gordon keep things moving. Just as he takes history as he finds it, sacrificing analysis, argument, and interpretation for narrative glide, so he does not strain at originality of expression. In his pages cities grow "by leaps and bounds" and Jefferson fights Hamilton "tooth and nail" (the very bicuspids and cuticles with which labor, hundreds of pages later, attacks the Taft-Hartley Act). Gold, inadvisably, is "the heart and soul of the nineteenth-century world monetary system." President Grant is "hopelessly naive," speculators "notably indifferent," unemployment "stubbornly high." The United States might have joined the League of Nations but for President Wilson's "stubborn refusal." Within twelve pages we marvel at New York City's "vast garment trade," board Vincent Astor's "vast yacht," and grow anxious over FDR's "vast new powers" until, with a "vast" audience, we hear the president's reassuring voice on the radio delivering his first fireside chat. Indeed, cliche is "the heart and soul" of briskness.
For John Steele Gordon we live in an economic golden age, and his complacency about the present lightens his portrait of the past. An Empire of Wealth glances at poverty, slavery, and child labor, but the author rations his indignation over them. He begins on a Rotarian note: "At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the position of the United States in world affairs has no equivalent in history." And ends on a Rumsfeldian one: "No one thought the war [on terror] would be easy.... But all, except perhaps for a few of [the country's] enemies, blinded by ideology, thought that the United States would prevail.... As Cicero had explained in the final days of the Roman Republic two thousand years...
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