What Should a First-Time Visitor to America Read?

A friend recently posed this question: “If you had to recommend one book for a first-time visitor to the U.S. to read, to understand our country, what would it be and why?”...

If the goal is an education, we could recommend Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s Growth of the American Republic, a two-volume history that used to be required reading...

Huckleberry Finn may be the greatest American novel... But there is no single novel, no matter how great, that can do the job alone.

Consider instead the great American essayists who invented a new style of writing in the 1920s and founded The New Yorker. E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat is the finest such essay collection... Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel is nearly as great...

Teddy Roosevelt’s short book The Strenuous Life, which opens with his 1899 speech by that name, is an explanation of America’s view of itself — a view that greatly shaped the 20th century. It was the peculiar marriage of power and prosperity together with a sense of moral urgency. Roosevelt demands an active life, a life of struggling for personal and national virtue. He commends a triad of strength in body, intellect, and character — of which character is the most important. America must meet its moral obligations vigorously, he tells us: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”...

The origin of that moral urgency was America’s most important spiritual crisis. It is best expressed in a single speech, rich in Biblical imagery and contemporary prophecy: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which is the greatest of all American writing. It is a tone-poem or photograph of the American soul. A complete understanding, in just 697 words.

That is indeed a fake quote. It's curious how many fake quotes still survive and are circulated on the Internet.

FWIW Here is an interesting review-article that deals with some of the topics that come up in these Civil War arguments:

Allen C. Guelzo: "Slavery All the Way Down"
Book Review by Allen C. Guelzo
Slavery All the Way Down The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist. Basic Books, 498 pages, $35
CRB Spring 2015

The quotes about half-way down show how little interest Southern planters had in industrializing. That's not to say that there were no factories in the old South, but the culture didn't encourage it the way it did in the North.

Also, for all the wealth the big planters had, many cotton growers were caught in a cycle of debt. They borrowed to expand operations, got into debt, and then struggled to get out of it. Fluctuating cotton prices and unsafe banks didn't help many cotton growers much.

I can't claim to understand the process, but here's somebody's thesis if any of you are interested.

Failure's Frontier: Ambition, Indebtedness, And Insolvency In Antebellum Alabama by Franklin C. Sammons.

DiogenesLamp on the word "slavocracy" : "I merely pointed out that the construction of the word doesn't make any sense, because it implies that the Slaves are the rulers.
Even the Etymology dictionary said the construction is "irregular" (meaning wrong) and it's origin was from the 1840s. "

There were many colorful political words from those days, of which some get repeated here, on occasion.

"Negro President" was said of Jefferson after his 1800 victory over John Adams thanks to the Constitution's 3/5 rule.
"Black Republicans" because of their support for abolition.
"Slave power" again referring to the 3/5 rule.
"Slavocracy" referring to Democrats' Southern leadership.
"Doughfaced" Northern Democrats who eagerly submitted to Southern domination.
In 1858 Lincoln called Stephen Douglas the biggest Doughface of them all.
"Fire Eaters" Southern secessionists before 1861.
"Copperheads" Civil War Northerners sympathetic towards Confederates.
"Ape" Lincoln referring to his, what, hands?
And more...

DoodleDawg: "Having adopted their own constitution which protected slavery far more than the Corwin amendment did, why would the Southern states accept half a loaf? "

Thanks for making that excellent point.
It turns the arguments from FLT-bird and DiogenesLamp on their heads.
They claim Corwin proves secession was not about slavery since Confederates "rejected" the Corwin "offer".
In fact, as you point out here, it proves that secessionists would accept nothing less that full 100% legalization of slavery at all times in all places, which is what the new Confederate constitution gave them.

In contrast, Corwin still allowed for restrictions on slavery in territories and gradual state-by-state abolition.
Lincoln said he took that to be the old Constitution's meaning already and so did not oppose it.

But for secessionists the new Confederate constitution was a far better offer, so they took it.

DiogenesLamp: "You would have us believe that they controlled the Congress, and had a total commitment to slavery, but for some reason didn't bother voting on a law to extend it to the territories?
Either they didn't have a "commitment" or they didn't have "control." "

But they did, it was the 1850 Compromise which, among other things, defeated the Wilmot Proviso which would have outlawed slavery in US territories.

Of course slavery was an emotional issue which could sometimes override partisan loyalties.
But more mundane Washington matters such as specific tariff rates, government spending allocations or navigation rules were more subject to regular order and the power of Southern committee chairmen, the finance committee for example.

I think for you, it was ad nauseum when you heard there was another side. You don't want there to be another side, you want one side to be accepted by everyone because you like believing that the side you have been told were the "good guys" won.

It's comforting. It restores man's faith in the orderliness of the Universe.

But let me put a bug into your garden of Eden. It is something I had forgotten, but of which I was reminded on another thread yesterday. (Also about Lincoln.)

If Lincoln was doing "God's Work", then why was his own personal life so tragic? One would think that a man doing what God wanted done, would be given some peace in his life.

It has always bothered me that Lincoln's son died, and that his wife went insane, because I couldn't square the one thing with the other. It made no sense that a man doing this great work for freedom and justice would be so badly treated.

Needless to say, it makes more sense to me now then it did when I was young. Maybe it will bother you the way it bothered me, and thereby lead you to looking at things in a different way.

DiogenesLamp: "This whole allegation about 'expansion' I now think was just a load of propaganda. "

Well first of all, your map (reproduced below) is yet another crock of nonsense:

This map has nothing whatever to do with 1860 except possibly show where future slavery may have expanded, i.e., west Texas, Arizona and California.

A look at 1860 actual production is more like this:

DiogenesLamp: "Expanding it into the Caribbean (it was already there) or Mexico, would have been outside the prerogative of the US to control anyway, so is therefore irrelevant."

Such an odd thing to say since Southerners made numerous efforts, called "filibusters", to do just that, and even supported Federal government efforts to, for example, purchase Cuba.

Slave holders clearly had their eyes on any and all possibilities for expanding slavery beyond its 1850s limits.

He did and secessionists cited slavery as their number one reason, if not their only reason.

All four of them. Or was it only three? I forget. I know it wasn't all 11 states, but in our modern discussions of this, it has become common place to accept that this minority of states represents the majority. Dishonest, that.

Civil war started not over slavery but over Federal properties and restoring the Union.

"Federal Properties" is just the token excuse. Fort Sumter was useless, and never served the nation's interest in any fashion other than as an excuse to start a war with people cutting the money stream to New York and Washington. Fort Sumter was only manned for a very short time after the war, only to maintain the pretense that it had some kind of value or importance to the USA. Eventually they realized it was no longer worth the trouble to keep up the pretense, and so they just stopped, and it has been basically abandoned ever since.

"Federal Properties" my @$$. It always was just an excuse.

Today's Lost Cause mythologizers just can't get over slavery, secession, rebellion, emancipation, abolition & full citizenship so they spend endless hours caterwauling cockamamie cognitive confusion about "power & money" over tariffs & "unfair spending".

And here is where you just smear people because they are whipping your @$$ in the raw facts of the debate. I don't give a sh*t about full citizenship for freed slaves, and I contend that was going to eventually happen anyways. What bothers me is the fact that some Plutocracy that is still running Washington DC today, launched a war over money that killed 750,000 people directly, possibly another 2 million indirectly, destroyed the relationship between the States and the Federal government which the Founders had established, and created the gargantuan borrow and spend monster that is currently eating us alive today.

You want to keep the topic on slavery, because it is the only possible way to pretend the civil war was not a horrible disaster, which it was, and it is also the only moral justification of which anyone can think for what was done. The problem is, it's just wrong. It isn't supported by the facts, and the Corwin amendment alone should make that clear to any objective person.

This is an odd map which greatly understates European Union GDP and commercial centers while exaggerating the relative size of the New York metropolitan area.

It isn't the New York metropolitan area. It's the New York/Washington DC corridor. Government and Billionaire corporation owners colluding together since the 1860s.

Perhaps this map is more to your liking?

Today's US GDP is about $20 trillion, of which the entire Boston to DC corridor represents roughly 15%.

And what percent of the land mass is it?

DiogenesLamp: "I'm not the one needing to get into the statistical weeds to disprove it. It fits well on the face of it. "

Proving yet again that it's much easier for a propagandist to make outrageous claims than it is to refute them in detail.

But I note the words you've quoted are essentially correct:

"...more than one half the whole is exclusively Southern origin."

Sure, but not necessarily Deep Confederate Southern origin.

"...of those articles common to all sections one-half goes directly from the South."

Sure, but "goes from" does not equate to "produced in", especially not to "produced in the Deep South".

"...of Northern manufactures much of the raw material is also of Southern origin."

Referring to raw cotton, a few million dollars of the total.

Your author does seem to recognize the difference between Deep South cotton and all other exports, but does not seem to realize that those other exports were not at all necessarily "Southern".

I note from your link the poster spent some effort to track down & "verify" this quote, but I don't believe it.

You don't want to believe it, because it is saying exactly what I have been telling you. Our current corrupt crony/capitalist monster came from Lincoln and the Civil War.

The man is correct. That passage appears in Jack London's 1908 book "The Iron Heel", and Jack London attributes it to Lincoln, so if it's fake, it's been a fake for a very long time. (Use Control "F" and enter the term "corruption.")

The Iron Heel

If you wish to create an account, you can verify it as a Lincoln quote directly. This is where the man says he eventually found the statement. http://www.worldcat.org/title/lincoln-encyclopedia-the-spoken-and-written-words-of-a-lincoln-arranged-for-ready-reference/oclc/445398&referer=brief_results

And lastly, the man provides a similar quote by Lincoln, which is a matter of public record.

“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.”
speech to Illinois legislature, Jan. 1837.

All depends on your definitions of "North", "South" and "total exports".

I used to think it did, but I eventually realized that it didn't matter. We don't know exactly how Kettle characterized what was "southern" and what was "northern", but we don't really need to know.

Those producers who would benefit from direct Trade with Europe would have eventually done what was in their economic best interest, so even if his "Southern origin" included the slave states that remained in the Union, once they saw others reaping far greater profits than they, they would have been of a mind to join that other coalition.

The threat to New York's money stream was the same, the only question was one of timing. It may have happened sooner, or it may have taken a little longer, but New York's (and Washington's) money stream was going to get interrupted absent a war to stop it.

This was proved conclusively in 1861

Nothing can be proven by 1861 and subsequent years, because everything was in upheaval and the natural market had been destroyed. With Federal gunboats steering trade back to New York, and prohibiting Southern trade that would otherwise have occurred, it became a "captured market" in a very different meaning from the usual economic term.

Without the interference with Trade, the Union numbers would be much worse, and the Confederate numbers would be much better. It is dishonest to pretend they represented what would have happened absent the conflict.

on 2% of its land.

So there's the answer to that question. 2% of the land accounts for about 4 trillion dollars per year. They must grow ambrosia there or something.

Further, there's no particular reason to lump everybody living between Washington, DC, and Boston as just one big megalopolis, and as soon as you start to consider those metropolitan areas individually, then they are no more intimidating than many other similar all over the United States.

And what does "Washington DC" produce to make it such a large part of GDP? While we're at it, i'm not recalling having used too many products manufactured in New York City. Sure, i've seen products manufactured in New York State, but not so many from New York city itself.

What exactly are they doing in New York city that "creates" so much money for them to spend?

DiogenesLamp: "Another key fact is that most of this money would have disappeared from their control if the South traded directly with Europe.
They wouldn't get what they had come to regard as 'their cut.' "

But about half of US cotton did ship directly from New Orleans to European & Northeastern customers.
Much or most of the rest shipped from smaller ports like Mobile, Galveston, Tallahassee, Savanah & Charleston.

So your argument makes no sense.
Your complaint, apparently, is that when those ships returned with import goods, they stopped first in major ports like New York to offload their imports to bonded warehouses until they could be sold and the duty paid.
You claim that if they were forced to take those imports to smaller ports like Charleston or Savanah, that would be more economical.
But it wouldn't because those imports, once sold, would still have to ship to the majority of customers up North, increasing both freight and tariff costs -- so they wouldn't do it.
Their alternative in, say, 1861 would be to find other sources for US exports, especially cotton, which is what they soon enough did.

No matter how you look at it, it doesn't add up.

DiogenesLamp: "We have here a towering motive called "Money" but gullible people prefer to believe it had some other cause than that, though uninvolved observers on the other side of the Atlantic pretty much nail the cause as a dispute over money, nor morals."

I think you've long since confessed that "money, money, money" was the secessionists' motive, even more than slavery, you claim.

So your purporting to see a "money" motive for "starting war" in people who expressed very different ideas seems more a matter of your own little "inner Democrat" doing what Democrats often do, projecting their mind states onto others -- i.e., "Russia collusion".

50% (about $200 million) of 1860 US exports ($400 million) were Deep South cotton, that's all.

You've been shown, again and again, and you simply ignore the facts provided by official US government sources, and keep trying to play your own tune.

"Value of Total U.S. Exports ..........$278,902,000"

"Total Southern Contribution ....................$252,000,000"

So would loss of Confederate exports hurt the Union economy?

And here you deliberately misstate the situation again. It is the loss of European trade that would hurt the Union. This loss did not occur *ONLY* because the Union put warships around Southern ports to stop the Southern trade with Europe.

Having no choice but to trade with the North, the Europeans did so, but without those warships, the Europeans would have chosen to trade instead with the South, and that would have absolutely wrecked the financials of various Northern businesses.

You keep running away from the point, because you can't think of a single manner to address the point honestly. When looked at honestly, the North was in a great deal of financial trouble, and badly needed a war to prevent it.

DiogenesLamp: "You go to great lengths to deny the significance of the export value because you realize what it looks like if the true contribution of the South is acknowledged. "

You go to great lengths to avoid confessing that a huge portion of "Southern products" could be and were produced outside the Deep South.

DiogenesLamp: "But does it not occur to you it still looks bad even using your deliberately minimized figures?
20 Million people in the North producing only 50% of the export value while 5 Million in the South are producing the other 50%? "

But does it not occur to you that Union states produced not only about half of US total exports but also $200 million they "exported" to the South and several times that they consumed themselves?

DiogenesLamp: "Going all out to drop the real number from 34-25% does not suddenly make the point disappear.
It still doesn't make any sense at your lowball number of 50%. (I've got SoCalPubbie up to 65%)
You think your 25-34% reduction in the number exculpates?
It doesn't."

Exculpation is what DiogenesLamp is trying to do here for the slave-power's declarations of secession and war against the United States.
You desperately hope to focus enough attention away from "slavery, slavery, slavery" in the South and onto "money, money, money" up North, so people will just... sort of... forget, right?

DiogenesLamp: "Also I don't care what the modern shipping patterns are now, they are irrelevant to what was going on in 1860."

But you'll use any modern data that supports your own case, right?

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