Posted By: Kristofer Cowles on Friday, June 26, 2009 @ 10:06 PM

Never in the history of the world has the growth of a people in their social, political, technical, intellectual and entrepreneurial pursuits been so phenomenal as what has happened on this continent in the last 150 years, built on the four centuries previous to that and the 2000 generations preceding the time of a Genoan explorer. Whether Chian, Alexandrian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman, these cultures are mere sentinels in history, watching their very shadows eclipsed by the blossoming of a land, culture, and idea unique to our time and meant for the ages.

In that brief sesquicentennial, man has travelled from the speed of a horse relegated to terra firma to 22 times the speed of sound a hundred miles above the planet – and walked on a celestial body once believed to be a god. Communication has gone from the speed of that same horse on the Pony Express to instantaneously global. Comfort and ease have gone from candlelight and open flame to finite manipulation of light, heat, humidity and cooking.

The 1700s were the time of the smoothbore musket, accurate to maybe 100 yards in the hands of a marksman, who might be able to manually load and fire five times a minute, to the nuclear weapons that can be delivered precisely in a matter of minutes halfway around the world.

The efficient and conscientious use of soil, wind, plant and animal life, rivers, seas and fossil fuels has provided comfort and prosperity while requiring a deliberate plan to allow their harvesters to continue to have something over which to exercise dominion for time immortal. A task history shows this people uniquely qualified to accomplish.

Yes, other countries and cultures, in many forms, helped establish a foundation from which this people would emerge like a volcano from the foam, the most causative and impacting developments and creations of the last century and a half have occurred here.

How has this happened? Why did this evolution happen here? What were the threads that brought about this tapestry? There is no simple, pat answer for something so complex yet ordered, but there are identifiable forces and agents that have woven this canvas upon which we constantly paint the next scene.

Though the harsh, restrictive tenets of Calvinism promulgated by 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans no longer hold sway, Puritanical adherence to the ethics of hard work and self-reliance remains an essential, foundational aspect of the American credo and ethos. The down-home sense of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard in his Almanacks of 1732 – 1757 maintained and promoted the natural law that hard work would be rewarded. Popular writers of every time, Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Twain and Horatio Alger extended this American ideal even further.

Out of the block, this was a land where idleness was disdained. Even a century after our birth as a nation and hundreds of centuries after our birth as a people (for what is the epitome of refusing idleness than to follow the herds across a great bridge of land over a forbidden northern sea?), the spirit of self-reliance was proclaimed from those with everything to those just starting out with freedom in our land. When General Gordon Grainger announced the physical freedom conferred upon slaves in Galveston in 1865, his words of emancipation ended with these:

The freemen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness, either there or elsewhere.

Idleness disdained indeed! What better setting for ingenuity and risk, progress and development, growth and prosperity? This national self-confidence locked arms with the inbred infallibility and rightness of our national goals and aspirations, so often and correctly dubbed “The American Dream.” When the Puritans set foot on this land, they believed, unwavering, that this country and specifically they were the recipient’s of the divine intervention of Providence. They knew that this was their “Citty upon a Hill,” a jurisdiction protected, consecrated, and designed by God. Puritan historian Edward Johnson penned in 1650 the sentiment that God had “sifted a whole nation to plant his choice grain” in this continent’s fertile soil. Two hundred years later the refrain continued. Herman Melville declared that “we Americans are the peculiar chosen people, the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world.”

From its inception and the first steps of man on its soil tens of thousands of years ago, the irresistible force of human ingenuity would subdue a continent fueled by confidence, optimism…and faith in its destiny.

[Part Two continues here]

Tags: american, bouncing ball, capitalism, entrepreneur, faith, founding fathers, history, providence, radical, victory

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