Category: Economic History

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Saving America’s Forests?

It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”[1]

George Vanderbilt (grandson of the “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue.

Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on land that included about 125,000 acres of forest, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage the lands around the Biltmore estate,  with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck,  to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.

“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]

But Wait!

Continue reading “Saving America’s Forests?”

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Why Not Start a Charitable Foundation? History Gives Us the Answer

You’ve probably heard that Henry Ford II resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation because it had veered far away from its donor’s intent.  In his 1976 resignation letter, Ford (grandson of Ford Sr.) wrote:

“In effect, the foundation is a creature of capitalism—a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the. foundation does.

“It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the foundation’s grant programs.”[1]

What had the foundation been doing? Essentially it had gone rogue. Continue reading “Why Not Start a Charitable Foundation? History Gives Us the Answer”

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Wood Wars on the Susquehanna

This is a guest column by Jay Schalin, senior fellow at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Born in Pennsylvania, he responded to my request for “state stories.”

The uplands of northern Pennsylvania were a wild and wooly place in the early years of our nation. Rough men carved out large fortunes—or eked out bare livings—by extracting its natural resources, with violence occasionally erupting from their endeavors. Sometimes, the triggers for violence were the treatment of workers, as occurred in the eastern coal fields, pitting the pro-union Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society, against coal baron Franklin Gowen and his Pinkerton Detective Agency allies (the theme of a 1970 movie starring Sean Connery).

Another case of industrial violence resulted from a clash between competing technologies. It featured small independent entrepreneurs attacking the purveyors of more efficient, larger-scale methods. This is somewhat reminiscent of the violence wrought by English textile workers known as “Luddites” against more efficient factories in the early 19th century. Continue reading “Wood Wars on the Susquehanna”

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Is State History Dull? Not in Real Life

If you grew up in the United States, you probably took a course in middle school or junior high about your state’s history. I don’t remember a thing about my class except a frantic late-night scramble to finish my “Missouri Scrapbook,” full of notes, photographs, postcards, mementos, etc.

My guess is that you didn’t learn a lot from state history classes, either. Am I wrong?

But state history has much to be said for it. Americans who move from state to state can find vivid confirmations of the themes of American history. I’m thinking of the frontier, our wars of independence—the American Revolution and the Civil War—, the destruction of American Indian tribes, the struggles to build infrastructure, etc.

Local sites may not rise to the fame of, say, the Trail of Tears, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, or the Boston Tea Party, but they help build the story of our past.

Each state’s history offers surprises. Here are a few examples from places I’ve lived in. I welcome you to send me others (for publication).

Continue reading “Is State History Dull? Not in Real Life”

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Is Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Worth Another Look?

Late Medieval Market Scene

When I was growing up, I noticed that the educated adults in my St. Louis suburb had strong faith in three big ideas—Darwinian evolution, Freudian psychology, and the Protestant ethic.

Since then, Darwinian evolution has held its own, but Freud has given way to other psychologies, and the Protestant ethic—the subject of this column—is rarely to be seen.

The German sociologist Max Weber developed the idea of the Protestant ethic, first in essays written in 1904 and 1905 and then in his 1920 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.[1]

In a sense, “ascetic Puritans,” primarily Calvinists, transferred the mystical spiritual  asceticism of Catholic saints to a less stringent but more productive real-world discipline, making possible a dynamic capitalistic world, according to Weber.

Puritans were supposed to work, even make money—but not for the sake of enjoying it. “[T]he pursuit of wealth as an end in itself [was]  highly reprehensible; but the attainment of it as a fruit of labour in a calling was a sign of God’s blessing.” [2] Among other things, wealth would indicate that one was among the “elect,” that is, predestined to go to heaven. Continue reading “Is Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic Worth Another Look?”