Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia

Napoleon Bonaparte began his ill-fated 1812 invasion of the Russian Empire with 422,000 men.  With each step further into Russian territory, more and more soldiers died or deserted.  By the time it reached Moscow, Napoleon’s army had dwindled to 100,000 men–already less than a quarter the size it had been at the start.  During their disastrous retreat out of Russia, temperatures plunged to −37.5 °C.  Nearly half the remaining survivors of the invasion were killed during the botched crossing of the Berezina River.  Of the 422,000 men who set out on the invasion, barely 10,000 of them returned alive.

All this information is readily visible in the chart above, created by the French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard, which ingeniously combined both a map of the campaign and a visual representation of the number of men remaining in Napoleon’s doomed army.  The thickness of the line is proportional to the number of men in the army (one millimeter equalling 10,000 men), with the beige section representing the offensive toward Moscow, and the black line the retreat.  Below, Minard also included a second chart showing the temperature on various days during the retreat (Minard used the Réaumur scale for his temperatures, as was commonplace at the time.  Converted to Celsius, this makes the coldest part of the retreat a whopping −37.5 °C).  For a large view of the chart, click on the picture above.

Although Minard includes a description above his chart, it is almost completely unnecessary; all the pertinent information is readily apparent from a close examination of the chart itself.  Minard was a master at the production of maps such as these that combined tremendous amounts of data with geographic representations.  Edward Tufte, an expert in the visual display of quantitative information, has called this chart “probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”  More of Minard’s works will undoubtedly be featured here in time.

It’s also important to note why, on a blog about maps, the first post is in actuality more of a chart.  Although the most striking feature of the chart is the thinning line of soldiers, the map in the background plays an important role, showing the cities and rivers the army traversed on its way into and out of Russia.  This chart demonstrates how, with good planning a design, maps can operate in concert with many other types of information to create stunning displays of information.

GENGHIS KHAN BUT YOU CAN’T

There is a one in two hundred chance you are related to Genghis Khan.

It doesn’t matter that your surname is not Khan. His DNA may be in you somewhere.

This is one of the delightful snippets I found when researching Silk Road.

I could never use it in the book. Genghis’s sex life had to go in my trash bin.

But what a guy.

Here was the man who made Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Underachiever.

His empire was twice the size of Rome’s and included large parts of modern day China, Mongolia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Moldova, South Korea, North Korea and Kuwait. All the Stans and then some.

Genghis Khan’s empire at the time of his death. Kill as many as you like, there’s still lots left.

His real name was Temujin; Genghis Khan is an honorific meaning ‘Universal Ruler’ and he took that on when he united the fractious Mongolian tribes at his coronation in 1206.

Other titles included Lord of the Four Colors and Five Tongues, Lord of Life and Emperor of all Men.

He was also known as Mighty Manslayer and Scourge of God.

And that was on a good day.

And I quote: “The greatest pleasure in life is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”

A sensitive new age guy, then.

For twenty years he led his pony-mounted armies on a whirlwind of rape and slaughter unmatched before or since.

By some estimates he killed 35 million people.

Over two decades, that’s one person killed every twenty seconds.

He hardly had time for lunch.

Northern China is thought to have lost about three- quarters of its population.

Some historians estimate he massacred so many Persians that Iran’s population did not reach its pre-Mongol levels again until the mid-20th century.

His army was the most efficient war machine ever assembled at that time, a juggernaut that swept all before it.

Merv in Persia was regarded as the greatest seat of learning in all Asia. Genghis razed it to the ground, overseeing one of the greatest genocides in history.

It took the survivors two weeks just to count the bodies.

‘ Oh God sergeant – not raping detail again!’

In Russia he conquered an army four times the size of his own. Their leader, Prince Romanovitch of Kiev, along with his generals, were tied up and laid flat; he then built a wooden platform on top of them for himself and his officers to sit on while they divided the spoils.

The Prince and his officers were crushed to death underneath them.

He once even diverted a river to erase a rival emperor’s birthplace from the map.

No act of spite or sadism was too much trouble.

But Genghis wasn’t all bad; he was just drawn that way.

He is also credited with bringing the Silk Road under one political administration which allowed trade as well as cultural exchange between the East and West. He was tolerant of all religions. He instituted a system of meritocracy in his government at a time when the West was still largely feudal.

He was a lover as well as a fighter.

the last of the red hot lovers

In 2007 researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences analyzed tissue samples from people living in those areas approximating Genghis’ ancient empire.

They found an identical Y-chromosomal lineage is present in about 8% of the men. (That’s half of one per cent of the world’s population!)

Apparently this spread is inconsistent with the theory of genetic drift, and the most likely scenario is that all these people are male line descendants of the Manslayer.

In Mongolia alone as many as 200,000 of the country’s 2 million people could be mini Manslayers.

It is calculated that Genghis Khan now has around 16 million male descendants across Asia and the Middle East. In fact it could be argued that he almost made genocide a self sustainable industry.

For every two people he killed, he created one.

His seduction technique was, however, suspect.

Genghis had a rating system: he kept the nines and tens and anything with a lower rating went to his officers.At the victory feasts he and his commanders would sit in their tent and tear at lumps of raw and bloody horsemeat with their teeth while captive beauties were paraded in front of them.

He had a personal harem of two to three thousand women – plus girlfriends I suppose – and his sons had comparably sized harems, but 16 million male descendants is still impressive, especially with the pressure of having to kill someone every twenty seconds.

‘Hurry up, we haven’t killed anyone for almost 3 minutes!’

Genghis died in 1227, while campaigning in north-western China. It is reported that he fell from his horse, exhausted.

However a legend persists that he was actually killed by a captured Chinese princess, a perfect ten, who herself rated Genghis a perfect 0 and castrated him with a concealed knife before running off into the dark.

No disrespect; but you’d like to think so.

SILK ROAD available in the US for the first time. 

Napoleon and Josephine, Love Letters and Angst !

(Napoleon at the Pont d’Arcole, 1801, Image: Wikipedia)

Many a person has undoubtedly expressed their love for someone in their life. Sometimes love is out of reach, but often it is within grasp. Love is expressed in countless forms, but the most timeless way love has been expressed throughout history is in the written form of the classic love letter. The love letter can be brief and to the point or a long and winding rollercoaster of feelings and emotions from devotion, elation, impatience to resignation. Of course, a love letter could also be written as a sonnet or another form of poem.

In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte set in motion a coup d’etat and instated himself as First Consul. Then in 1804, armed with the support of the French people, Napoleon was proclaimed emperor of France. This was the calculated, ruthless and ingenious side of one of the most famous and influential men in history. However, this is not the story we are about to follow or learn about today. We will delve more personally into the benevolent side of his character which happened to produced the many interesting love letters he wrote to Josephine. In his letters we will see a side of him in words that express his love of life, strengths, anger and weaknesses.

As a young general on the rise, his successes were spectacular. However, he was still unhappy and desired a greater ambition to rule. His ambition or impassioned desire to marry was also upmost in his mind. In October 1795, with the encouragement of French politician Barras, he met Josephine de Beauharnais, nee Marie-Josephe Rose Tasher de La Pagerie, who was six years his senior and a widow with two children. (Her husband was sentenced to death by guillotine. He was considered an “enemy of the revolution” after he was accused of poorly defending Mainz in the siege against a coalition of Prussian, Austrian and Germans against the revolutionary French forces in 1793.) He was interested in Josephine, but he wasn’t sure if she was the ideal choice for marriage. To entice him into an “arrangement”, she wrote him a letter.

“You no longer come to see a friend who is fond of you…You are wrong because she is tenderly attached to you…Come to lunch with me tomorrow. I need to see you and chat with you about your interests.”

(Josephine de Beauharais, Image: Wikipedia)

After their lunch date, Napoleon was apparently so captivated by her “courtly love” that he went back to see her night after night for the next five months. Early on in their courtship he wrote her this passionate letter in December 1795.

“I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses. Sweet, incomparable Josephine, what a strange effect you have on my heart. Are you angry? Do I see you sad? Are you worried? My soul breaks with grief, and there is no rest for your lover; but how much the more when I yield to this passion that rules me and drink a burning flame from your lips and your heart? Oh! This night has shown me that your portrait is not you! You leave at midday; in three hours I shall see you. Meanwhile, my sweet love, a thousand kisses; but do not give me any, for they set my blood on fire.”

(Napoleon Bonaparte 1801, Image: Wikipedia)

On the 9th of March 1796, Napoleon and Josephine were married. Though all was not as enchanting as it might have seemed. There had been opposition to them getting married from the very beginning from friends and family. More importantly, Josephine motives for marrying Napoleon were sketchy. Did she really love him ? There is evidence that suggests she did not. During the early days of the French Revolution, women often had to save their necks at the expense of their reputation. Morality was low (Josephine was a women of considerable sexual experience by the time she had met Napoleon) and so were standards if you didn’t want to be at the end of the guillotine. She was happy enough it seemed to settle with a man, who was almost penniless, who lacked social grace and was a lousy lover, to possibly to protect herself and her two children. In spite of that and her infatuation with a General named Hoche, who would not leave his wife for her, the Napoleon and Josephine story had begun.

(This love letter from Napoleon was apparently found in a basement laundry after the death of a secretive collector )

Now that Napoleon had achieved one of his most personal ambitions of marrying, he set off to pursue his other unfulfilled desire of conquest.  He departed for Italy two days after marrying Josephine, where he would command the Army of Italy. From his command position throughout the campaign in Milan, he begged Josephine to join him. An exchange of letters back and forth, revealed a range of emotions of a ‘love sick ’ Napoleon. In April 1796 he writes,“I have your letters of the 16th and 21st. There are many days when you don’t write. What do you do, then? No, my darling, I am not jealous, but sometimes worried. Come soon; I warn you, if you delay, you will find me ill. Fatigue and your absence are too much. Your letters are the joy of my days, and my days of happiness are not many…”

It seems at the time, she did not miss him.  She was busy living a life of charm and grace through her many social connections. Also, almost immediately after Napoleon had left for Italy, she had begun an affair with a light calvary lieutenant called Hippolyte Charles. Nevertheless, she would join him as he begged her to, arriving in the company of her lover Hippolyte Charles and other officers who had brought her down to Italy, though Napoleon was not aware of her affair. Not yet, anyway.

By the middle of July 1796, Napoleon is found writing letters to Josephine again who had return to Paris, where she was content carrying on with her illicit affair with the young lieutenant. “Since I left you, I have been constantly depressed. My happiness is to be near you. Incessantly I live over in my memory your caresses, your tears, your affectionate solicitude….”

From Verona, he adds how he had noticed that her letters to him have become less frequent. Joy had left him and he became increasingly frustrated. Occasionally, he wrote in the third person, possibly, for effect and reaction from Josephine. But was it all in vain ? “Without his Josephine, without the assurance of her love, what is left him upon earth? What can he do?” Napoleon writes.

By the third week of November 1796, Napoleon began to hear rumours of Josephine explicit liasons with most probably Hippolyte Charles. Like many people deeply in love with their partners, he believed that the rumours were simple just rumours. It couldn’t be true he thought. He responded more passionately than ever through his letters showering her with love and loyalty, explicitly recalling the things he loves doing best to her! “I am going to bed with my heart full of your adorable image… I cannot wait to give you proofs of my ardent love… How happy I would be if I could assist you at your undressing, the little firm white breast, the adorable face, the hair tied up in a scarf a la creole. You know that I will never forget the little visits, you know, the little black forest… I kiss it a thousand times and wait impatiently for the moment I will be in it. To live within Josephine is to live in the Elysian fields. Kisses on your mouth, your eyes, your breast, everywhere, everywhere.”

Days before the end of November 1796, he returns to be with his love Josephine , only to find that she is not at her Milan apartment on the Italian front. She left for Genoa and did not return for over a week, which put suspicious thoughts again in the mind of Napoleon. He writes again with great contempt for her. He is angry, sad, alone and desperate. One can only imagine the rush of thoughts going through his mind. He is devoted to her body and mind, yet she gallivants around Italy.

“I don’t love you anymore; on the contrary, I detest you. You are a vile, mean, beastly slut. You don’t write to me at all; you don’t love your husband; you know how happy your letters make him, and you don’t write him six lines of nonsense…”

It is finally in 1798 that the truth catches up with Josephine surrounding her extramarital affairs. At first, in the middle of March, Napoleon is told by his brother of the mounting evidence against Josephine of her affair. It is here that he explodes with anger, only for Josephine to continue and deny everything, telling him that if he believes in such rumours, maybe he should divorce her. A very shrewd move on her part. But eventually in July, while on his expedition to Egypt, he is informed again of her infidelity. Here, in Egypt, his deep love and affection for Josephine is destroyed forever. Upset, vengeful, and alone, he begins an affair of his own with a junior officers wife. The young woman would come to be known as Napoleon’s Cleopatra by the officers of the French army. It is in Egypt that he finally plots to divorce Josephine on his return to Paris. He also writes to his brother of his sadness, “The veil is torn…It is sad when one and the same heart is torn by such conflicting feelings for one person… I need to be alone. I am tired of grandeur; all my feelings have dried up. I no longer care about my glory. At twenty-nine I have exhausted everything.”

This letter is unfortunately intercepted by British agents and subsequently published in British newspaper to embarrass and humiliate Napoleon. It succeeds and in so doing, also embarrasses and notifies Josephine that the game is over. On his return to Paris in 1799, he orders her belongings to be taken away and refuses to see her. After many hours of pleading, begging and crying, she promises to never take another lover again. Whether he truly forgives her is up for debate, though what we do know is that he doesn’t carry out his threat for divorce, not yet anyway, but he frees himself to do whatever he sees fit and begins a multitude of affairs. He even flaunts his mistresses in Josephine’s face. Ironically, Josephine now falls in love with Napoleon and even travels faithfully around on campaign with him. But to Napoleon it was too late.

“I am not a man like others and moral laws or the laws that govern conventional behavior do not apply to me. My mistresses do not in the least engage my feelings. Power is my mistress.”

(Empress Josephine de Beauharais, Image: Wikipedia)

By 1804, Napoleon and Josephine are crowned Emperor and Empress of France, but an incident shortly prior to the coronation threatened to derail their marriage of convenience. Napoleon had yet again threatened to divorce her this time for her inability in producing him an heir. They reconciled their difference, but in 1809, Napoleon’s desire for an heir become too great and he tells Josephine he is finally divorcing her. Josephine is absolutely devastated and for a short while behaves gracefully in public. On January 10th, 1810, on a grand and solemn occasion they are divorced.

(Divorce letter from Josephine to Napoleon, 1809, Image: Wikipedia)

Josephine would live out the rest of her days at the Chateau de Malmaison, near Paris. She would unfortunately die of pneumonia four years after their divorce in 1814. Napoleon would remarry Marie Louise of Austria and she would finally deliver the long awaited heir (son) to Napoleon. Napoleon, himself would later live out a life in exile and finally die in 1821. (His story and legacy as a great commander and Emperor will have to wait for another day to be told.) Nevertheless, when Napoleon learned of Josephine death, while in exile on Elba, he was shattered. Despite his many affairs, divorce and remarriage, it is claimed that he said to a friend on St. Helena (in exile again) that he truly loved her, but in the end he lost all respect for her. One might wonder if Josephine had been faithful to Napoleon, things could have been truly different ?

The Two Shoe Salesmen

One of the most famous motivational stories on the lecture circuit is that of the two salesmen from competing companies who are sent to a foreign country to assess the market for shoes.

Salesman One scouts around for a few days and then goes to the telegraph office to contact company headquarters.  He writes:  "Research complete.  Unmitigated disaster.  Nobody here wears shoes."

Likewise, Salesman Two does his research and heads for the same telegraph office.  Once there, he composes the following: "Research complete.  Glorious opportunity!  Nobody here wears shoes."  

How motivating is that?  Doesn't it make you feel like you can see the possibility in any business situation?  Think way outside the box?  Aren't you feelingentrepreneurial?!

What you probably don’t know is that late last year, a librarian at the BritishMuseum found, in a forgotten file buried in the basement archives, a short manuscript.  It turns out—if you can believe it—that the story of the two shoe salesman was more than myth. 

Last week I had a chance to read a copy of the manuscript that a friend who works at the Museum sent me.  Here is a quick summary of part two to this classic story, as written by a daughter of one of the salesmen.

Salesman One returned on the next steamer to London.  He was an aggressive young man who had saved the company from a disastrous venture in a terrible market.  His reward was to oversee the newly-formed sales territory in France, a large territory that included Paris.  Salesman One went on to build a wonderful, booming business in ladies’ dress shoes.  He became wealthy and comfortable.  A fixture on the Parisian social circuit, he met and married a French heiress.  Though he might have retired then, he never lost his love of selling shoes, only concluding his career well into his 70s shortly after the start of WWII. 

Salesman Two built an office and warehouse, ordered a boatload of shoes from his home office, and hired a team of hard-charging salesmen.  He estimated the sale of 15,000 pairs of shoes in his first year of business.  The home office was ecstatic.

The end of the first year came and Salesman Two and his team had sold less than 100 pairs of shoes.  The home office ordered layoffs.  Funding for payroll was cut.  Threats of abandoning the market were made.  The staff was often anxious and sometimes depressed.  Aggressive, optimistic Salesman Two could but conclude one thing: He had made a serious mistake.  This was, indeed, the worst market in the world for shoes.

Wait, I'm thinking?!  This is supposed to be a story about hope and seeing the possibility and being entrepreneurial.  This is supposed to be motivational.  Instead, it's more like the conference room of a venture capital firm.  What the heck happened?

Since the time of these two salesmen, of course, we have learned two important things about successful entrepreneurs: They innovate, and they persevere.  And when they don’t innovate, they still persevere.  That’s the reason that investors will tell you they’d rather back an average business plan with a great team than vice versa.

So, in the immortal words of Paul Harvey, here comes the rest of the story:

Salesman Two had not met his first year forecast, but, after a year of intensive selling, he knew more about the market than any person alive.  For example, he knew that some of his potential buyers liked the idea of shoes (protecting their feet) but felt claustrophobic in them, and did not want to have to stop and dump sand out of them all the time.  So he imported a small number of sandals to test.

Salesman Two had also concluded that some large part of his market would likely never wear shoes, at least in his lifetime.  But they all still hurt their feet occasionally on rocks and debris.  So, he found a lotion made by a German firm that, applied to the soles at night, toughened them up.  He imported cases of it.

Finally, Salesman Two discovered that most everyone, shoes or not, walked long distances during the day.  All got hot and many got sunburned.  So, he imported a line of wide-brimmed straw hats and walking sticks. 

Meanwhile, he continued to send encouraging messages to the home office, never giving up, and managed to secure (just barely) the funds for year two.

The hats became an immediate sensation.  The sandals did less well, but gained a niche following.  He could not keep enough of the lotion in stock.  And, in year 2, he sold 1,000 pairs of shoes—still a small number, but much better than the 100 pair in year one. 

Year 2 was breakeven.  Year 3 better.  After seven long years of hard work, trial and error, sleepness nights and one ulcer, Salesman Two became a millionaire, buying the business from his company.  In fact, he became so famous throughout his adopted country that a song was written about him.

Now we’re back to having a pretty good story, right?  Just not quite what you expected.  None of that doe-eyed optimism and happily ever after stuff.  In the entrepreneurial world, of course, there rarely is.  Not never--just rarely.  More often than not the right product in the perfect market is a seven-year (plus) odyssey of trail and error, constant adjustment--and endless perseverance.

But wait--there was an Epilogue:

Sometime in the mid-1950s the two salesmen met, quite by accident, in London.  Both in their eighties, they were introduced, somehow made the connection to that long ago time and place, and chuckled about it over a pint at a club just off Berkeley Square.

Salesman Two asked, “After you left the country and returned to Europe, did you enjoy your career?”

“Very much,” exclaimed Salesman One.  “Life in Paris suited me well.  Of course, I never could have become as rich as you selling shoes, so I had to do it the old fashioned way!”

They both laughed.

“How about you,” asked Salesman One.  “Did you enjoy your career?  You must have—you became famous, and a multimillionaire.”

Salesman Two smiled.  “I did enjoy it,” he said, “though not quite in the way you mean.  Funny thing, I became so famous they even wrote a song about me.”

“Did they,” chuckled Salesman One.  “Was it called ‘The Shoe King?’”

“No,” said a wistful Salesman Two.  “It was called ‘Straw Hats and Walking Sticks.”

“Hmmm.”  Salesman One looked puzzled.  “An aria?  A show tune?”

Salesman Two stared off into space.  “More like a blues.”  Then he looked at the barkeep and said, “Another pint for me, and one for my friend.”

I always did enjoy a story that ends with a beer.

The Greatest Migration of All

Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.  Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from

A Jack Delano photo of migrants
heading north from Florida, 1940.

World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.  Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.

In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.

Still, there has been another kind of Great Migration in America, less dramatic, but in some ways the steadiest and perhaps most influential. It also has great bearing upon one of today’s hottest political issues, immigration policy, and helps explain why Silicon Valley is so vested in the bill currently making its way through Congress.

"The Puritan Migration to America, 1620-1640."
From Bedford/St. Martin's MapCentral.

Brooke Hindle (1918-2001) was the historian emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History when he, along with (current) Brown University’s Steven Lubar, authored Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860. It’s a beautiful book that emphasizes the material aspects of innovation (later reinforced in Hindle’s excellent Emulation and Innovation). It also answers in a very simple way a very profound question: How did a nation of farmers stage their own Industrial Revolution and by 1851 stun the world with their technological prowess at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition?

One answer, of course, is theft and industrial espionage. If good ideas can be stolen and copied, from Samuel Slater’s work in duplicating an Arkwright-type spinning factory at Pawtucket, to Francis Cabot Lowell’s study of English power looms, then revolution is possible. Indeed, even Eli Whitney—who all good Americans know invented the cotton gin—relied upon a millennium of global cotton gin technology (and not very well, Angela Lakwete’s Inventing the Cotton Gin tells us). One wonders if the talk in 19th-century Parliament about Americans wasn’t roughly akin to that of today’s U.S government and its recent indictment of China’s military for stealing industrial technology.

A second answer is that Jefferson’s virtuous farmer also just happened to be conversant with machines of all kinds; a healthy farm required that cams, ratchets, escapements, pistons, and even (or especially!) whiskey stills be in good working order. Lubar and Hindle quote one New Jersey farmer-tavern keeper, who told an astounded visitor not long after the Revolution, “I am a mover, a shoemaker, furrier, wheelwright, farmer, gardener, and when it can’t be helped, a soldier. I make my bread, brew my beer, kill my pigs; I grind my axes and knives; I built those stalls and that shed there; I am barber, leech, and doctor.” 

Finally—and here’s the Great Migration aspect—America (with a few notable decades excepted) has long been a welcome destination for skilled artisans. Dutch and Polish glassworkers, Italian silk reelers, and German sawyers arrived in Jamestown, the authors tell us, at the invitation of the Virginia Company. England, itself a destination for German miners, Flemish weavers, and French glassworkers and horologists, in turn transferred those technologies to America as skilled artisans crossed the Atlantic.

As early as 1754, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a pumped and piped water supply courtesy of Moravian Germans. The famous Pennsylvania rifle and Conestoga wagon evolved from German prototypes. The sawmill, so important to America’s growth, was brought by artisans from Hamburg. England passed along navigational and mathematical instruments, clockmaking, gunnery, and coal-fuel industries. In the 1830s and 1840s when the steam engine pushed the geographic center of industry from New England to Pennsylvania, it was English, Scottish, Welsh, and Cornish miners and ironworkers who brought their skills to bear. “The leading cities—Philadelphia, Boston, and New York—received a continuing stream of artisans,” Hindle and Lubar write, “most of them from London, quickly making available the skills and newer developments of the British metropolis.”

Occupational portrait of a skilled worker,
ca. 1850. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

There seems more than a casual relationship between the fact that, from 1824 to 1831, more than 1,000 Englishmen classifying themselves as “machinists” immigrated to the United States, and by 1860 American machinists were among the best in the world.

Like a modern CEO warning his engineers that they will surely fail if they adopt a “not invented here” mentality, George Washington told his countryman in his first address to Congress that “the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad” could be as valuable as those created by the “skill and genius” of Americans. Those kinds of “foreign entanglements” were ones that the Commander in Chief appeared to welcome.

While Hindle and Lubar focus on cutting edge technology, we also know that sometimes the sort of “artisan talent” that migrated to America came in the form of incredible persistence and sheer ambition. In The Maritime History of Massachusetts, Samuel Eliot Morison tells us that conditions on whaling vessels became so abysmal that American citizens refused to serve; this left opportunity for “Kanakas, Tongatabooras, Filipinos, and even Fiji cannibals like Melville’s hero Queequeg” to make their way in America. By taking jobs that Americans would not, these hearty immigrants supported an enormously profitable global trade and enriched their adopted country.

It’s a powerful historical reminder that this Great Migration of skills that advanced America’s innovation economy over the last 300 years sprang from both the most advantaged and the least advantaged immigrant groups.

Why Were Tariffs Politically Important in Late 19th-Century America?

After the Civil War, new industries brought Americans not just new products, but also more spending money and leisure time than any generation had ever had before. Far flung railroad, oil, and steel

President Grover Cleveland humiliated by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act.

operations, along with those of every other business, needed middle managers who could oversee production and sales and then report back to business owners. These new “white collar” workers had steady incomes and free time. They bought nice clothing and novels, and went to the theater; their wives played lawn tennis and their children had ice cream to eat and toys to play with at newfangled parties given just for them on their birthday.

Big business brought comfort and entertainment to many Americans, but it also brought grinding poverty to many others. Workers sweating near factory furnaces and entrepreneurs forced out of markets by monopolists resented the power of industrialists. By 1880 they focused their anger on the fact that American industry held its extraordinary position because it was protected by a law that kept foreign goods out of America. That law was called a tariff.

Tariffs were essentially taxes on products coming into America. They meant that foreign goods could not compete with American products because, no matter how cheaply they could be produced, the addition of tariff fees to their selling costs would make them more expensive than American goods. Since American producers did not have to worry about foreign competition, the leaders in an industry could work together and set whatever prices they wished.

People squeezed in the new economy resented the fact that tariffs kept prices artificially high. It didn’t seem fair that laws should prop up business while workers barely scraped by on pennies and industrialists like J. D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt lived in mansions in New York City and built 70-room “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island.

No one really knew what to do about the huge fortunes and great poverty of the post-Civil War years. When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, no one could envision those sorts of extremes of wealth. Many late 19th-century Americans urged government to stop industrialists from joining together to set the high prices that made them so rich. Others pointed out that the Constitution had given government no power to break combinations of businessmen.

The Constitution did, though, give Congress the power to regulate the tariff. So, beginning in the 1880s, when the problems of industrialization began to become apparent, Americans who didn’t like the rise of big business clamored for Congress to lower the tariffs that kept foreign products out of the country. Foreign competition, they thought, would break the monopolies that American businessmen used to control the economy.

For the rest of the century, the tariff was the central issue in American politics. Debates over the tariff were really fights over whether the government should protect business or workers when it developed economic policy. Republican congressmen backed a high tariff because they insisted that protecting business would guarantee a healthy economy in which workers could find jobs. Democratic congressmen wanted to lower the tariff, because they insisted that the economy would collapse if people couldn’t afford to buy very much.

Republicans had invented the nation’s system of extensive tariffs in 1861 to develop new businesses and to raise money to pay for the Civil War. After the war, the tariff became their signature issue. Republicans controlled every branch of the national government from 1861 to 1875, but in that year, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives. Republicans got nervous. For the rest of the century, they focused all their energy on staying in power so they could keep the tariff high. They insisted that, if elected, Democrats would destroy the economy by lowering tariffs.

Republicans managed to protect their system of tariffs until 1913, when Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and a Democratic Congress finally lowered the tariffs and replaced the lost revenue with taxes. The fight over the government’s role in the economy switched for a struggle on tariffs to a fight over taxes, and few Americans even remember now why tariffs were so important to the late 19th century. But to people who lived after the Civil War, tariffs symbolized a much larger struggle between rich and poor, employers and workers, capital and labor. Tariffs were at the very heart of the questions raised by the new era of industry.

A version of this post will appear in COBBLESTONE’S upcoming Captains of Industry issue, which examines the role of industry and industrialists in American history.

Was Santa White?

Pundits have sunk their teeth into a fight recently over whether or not Santa was white. After Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly declared Santa’s whiteness was a given, some called up the history of the original St. Nicholas (the patron saint of scholars, as well as children, by the way) to point out that the historical figure was Greek and therefore probably not light-skinned. Others have responded by noting that “Santa” is a universal and timeless figure who should not be bound by any physical characteristics.

But there is a different story worth noting in this odd debate. In fact, America has its own, very specific version of “Santa” who arrived during a particular moment in American history. That moment was the 1880s, a time when the nation appeared to be reaching some kind of healing after the deep wounds of the Civil War.

By the 1880s, Americans North, South, and West, had reached a political equilibrium, and that calm appeared to be driving a healthy economy. Politicians had ceased to fight over reconstruction. Northerners had come to accept that white Democrats would control the South; northern leaders turned to new western territories to make up the electoral votes they needed to continue to hang onto national power.

After a terrible financial crash in 1873, the economy had begun to pick up again by 1878, and by 1880, Americans were feeling flush and optimistic again. They began to celebrate significant events with parties and gifts. Weddings were no longer small affairs in someone’s front parlor; now they were elegant occasions in a decorated church with a reception afterward. For the first time, parents held parties for their child’s birthday, and those invited brought gifts for the guest of honor. Thanksgiving became a major holiday, marked with feasts of turkeys, ducks, or geese.

Nothing showed this change more clearly than the arrival in 1881 of cartoonist Thomas Nast’s iconic Santa. Printed in Harper’s Weekly before Christmas that year, the image was one of American prosperity. Santa was fat, warmly dressed, and smiling. He carried an armful of children’s toys, including a belt with a buckle embossed with the letters “US.”

As Nast’s Santa showed, the new prosperity was uniquely American.

But the success Nast celebrated was uniquely American in a negative sense, too. It belonged only to the sort of people who read Harper’s Weekly: white, well-off, and well-represented in government. These were the nation’s new white-collar workers, middle men for the new corporations. They, and their wives and children, had more money and more time than Americans had ever had before. They had time to plan parties for their children, and to tell them stories of a well-fed man who would give them toys for Christmas—just because they were loved. These men were secure. Government economic policies guaranteed that the booming economy would continue to put money into their pockets, enabling them to continue to coddle their children (who would go on to be the first generation to go through high school and then college).

But most Americans did not share this prosperity. In the 1880s industrial factories were growing while workers fell behind. Wages dropped and working conditions deteriorated. Farmers, too, were ground into poverty as overproduction depressed the prices of farm commodities. The economic dislocation of the era was terrible for white workers and farmers, but adding racial and ethnic discrimination into the mix made the lives of most African Americans, immigrants, and Indians horrific. At the same time, Congress sternly refused to consider any policies that might help these Americans. Living in dirt poverty, working when they could, their only experience with the prosperity of the 1880s was being blamed for their inability to participate in it. There was no jolly Santa Claus to bring toys to the children of southern sharecroppers, Polish steelworkers, Chinese laundrymen, or reservation-bound Lakota and Cheyenne.

Thomas Nast’s American Santa was indeed white. But that’s not something we should celebrate.