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Ebook America as second creation: Part 2

(BQ) Part 2 book "America as second creation" has contents: The route of superior desolation, water monopoly - federal irrigation and factories in the field, conquered rivers are better servants than wild clouds, progress, or entropy. | 7 “Let Us Conquer Space” Let us . . . bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals. Let us conquer space. —John C. Calhoun, 18171 The age has an engine, but no engineer. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 18532 These remarks suggest the beginning of a third foundation story and its critique. Calhoun was speaking in Congress as an advocate of internal improvements. Calling upon his fellow legislators to act, he saw himself as a leader who could shape history. Half a lifetime later, the changes Calhoun called for were rapidly being accomplished. The United States had built an extensive system of roads and canals, supplemented by a growing system of railroads. The conquest of space and time had also been furthered by the telegraph. The republic was more closely linked than ever before. But the “us,” the sense of collective agency, was missing. Sectional animosity had increased, not disappeared. Calhoun himself had sharply curtailed his support of federal funding for internal improvements by the late 1820s, for these were Whig Party policies. The canals and railroads were central parts of the infrastructure of industrialization that had increased tension between classes and begun to make cities less appealing places to live for the wellto-do. Urban elites used the railroad to move their families into suburban enclaves, and by the middle of the century the coincidence of political and economic power in one urban location was disappearing.3 With such unexpected consequences in mind, Emerson wrote the sentence quoted above in his journal. Machinery proliferated more rapidly than the political 148 Chapter 7 means to govern it. Indeed, as early as 1839 Emerson wrote in his journal: “This invasion of Nature by Trade with its Money, its Credit, its Steam, its Railroad, threatens to upset the balance of man, & establish a new Universal Monarchy more tyrannical than Babylon or Rome.”4 The contrast between Calhoun and Emerson suggests the difference between a .