Power grabs are nasty, brutish, and quick.

They’re intended to overwhelm and surprise the victims. To cause confusion. To frustrate your enemies’ abilities to mount counterattacks.

What we’ve been watching unfold at the University of Virginia during the last two weeks is a nothing less than a coup, carefully planned and staged when nobody was in town and when nobody was watching.

I have no original reporting to add, and I think Timothy Burke nailed it in his post about the incredible ham-handedness of the Board of Visitors as a horde of micro-managers who are either treating UVA in a way they’d never treat their own private businesses, or who are so inept that they’re walking proof that wealth is mainly based on luck in marriage and genetics.

What’s striking to me is how familiar this should be to historians. We’ve seen appointments of ‘midnight judges,’ a Saturday night massacre, a night of the long knives. We’ve seen Bush-Gore, Hayes-Tilden, Adams-Jefferson.

When he learned that UVA Rector Helen Dragas – a real estate executive – had gone to UVA’s President Teresa Sullivan on the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend to tell her that 8 of the 15 members of the university’s board were prepared to demand her resignation, a friend of mine thought it couldn’t have been true. Eight of fifteen was “bare majority” and “nobody” would run a university like that. It was too divisive. It flew in the face of everything a liberal education was supposed to stand for at Thomas Jefferson’s school.

Yet some people do operate that way; some just did.

We’re not used to thinking that the bare-knuckle power plays which are routine in politics, corporate boardrooms, and statecraft could be so portable. It’s shocking to think that one rector, weeks before the expiration of her term, would do something like this. Sullivan was in her second year, and by press accounts, Dragas and several members of the university’s business school community began working on what they called the “project” to have her fired. Who knows if Sullivan suspected that Dragas was telephoning board members individually, holding meetings to dodge open records laws and evade other board members who would expose her sleazy m.o. Dragas timed the meeting with Sullivan to coincide with the holiday weekend, after students had left town, when many faculty were away and several big money donors on the board were either overseas or – in one case – recuperating from surgery. To this day, she has offered no clear account of why Sullivan was removed. No specific complaints, no particular flaws or faults. Nothing.

There was a protest on the university’s famed Lawn yesterday. The faculty senate had a meeting with Dragas at which she gave no clear explanation for Sullivan’s removal. They held an overwhelming ‘no confidence’ vote in Dragas soon after.

What’s interesting to me is that Dragas doesn’t care. Just look at this portion of the statement she issued late in the day yesterday:

We recognize that, while genuinely well-intended to protect the dignity of all parties, our actions too readily lent themselves to perceptions of being opaque and not in keeping with the honored traditions of this University. For that reason, let me state clearly and unequivocally: you – our U.VA. family – deserved better from this Board, and we have heard your concerns loud and clear.

In case you’re not fluent in Bullshit, that statement is what it looks like when you extend your middle digit in the direction of your iPhone and ask Siri to transcribe it. Dragas has no intention of explaining her reasons. It doesn’t matter to her whether we, or the students, or the faculty, or the alums, or the other members of the Board don’t know why this was hatched.

We’ve been lulled into thinking that a university operates on a consensus model, and maybe we’re about to witness why it should. But my hunch is that trustees will learn from this. Dragas acts like this because she can, and as long as she can, she will. It doesn’t matter to her whether the faculty senate is upset, because right now the faculty senate seems to have no legal standing to do much of anything except pass resolutions with no binding authority or quit their posts.

We like to think that we can rely on the good intentions of board members whose ostensible and historical role has been to serve as caretakers. But we are ill-equipped to deal with a board that goes rogue. By some media accounts, Dragas and her cabal want UVA to start closing departments and to begin shifting 1st- and 2nd-year instruction to an online format. Why? Because several of her conspirators are invested in an online education provider and want that company to be given a preferential role in transforming UVA’s curriculum.

If you wanted to have a discussion about the goals of online ed or the structure of departments, you’d have that conversation with people who work in academia. But if you wanted to just grab some revenue streams for your pals, this is how you’d do it, because at the end of the day you don’t really care about the content or the consequence for the faculty, students, or university – you only care about the money pipeline.

I keep hoping that some rich member of the UVA Board of Visitors is going to step forward and publicly call for Dragas to resign and for Sullivan to be reinstated.

But that hasn’t happened, and even if it did, it would only paper over the enormous problem that’s been exposed during the last two weeks:

Faculty governance institutions, as they are currently constituted, are far too weak to stand up to board members who see the university as an oil deposit or a copper vein. I suspect that Dragas’ enemies on the board know they’ve been beaten. I hope that the smarter ones among them are taking the time to learn the ins and outs of the university’s rulebooks and the Virginia statutes concerning higher ed. I hope the Faculty Senate is lawyering up for a fight.

Remember how we used to wonder how we were going to answer the argument that the university should be run like a corporation?

It turns out that you can just skip over the conversation part.

If this can happen at UVA – and, let’s just say it – IT DID – we should all feel the fierce urgency of now. We’re not used to thinking of ourselves collectively – in practice, many of us are Mugwumps and anti-Federalists – but we’d better start.

The people coming after our institutions, our students, and our jobs are organized, committed, and highly motivated. The rules matter, and if we’re going to survive as a profession, we’d better learn how to play hardball and start figuring out ways to make it impossible for future Helen Dragases to unravel 200 years of traditions in service of a crassly self-interested self-enrichment scheme.

Before I say anything, I want to make sure I’m not stepping on Jeff’s post about university presses and state and local history. I hesitate to even click “post” before everyone in this profession reads what he has to say.

And following that, I should say hello again. I haven’t posted since 2010, about a week after my wife and I learned we were expecting a child. What followed was a rush to “finish” a manuscript, a bathroom renovation, a semester of teaching, and a bunch of the usual things. Blogging fell by the wayside in this fanatical effort to manage time and maximize productivity before the bambino arrived, and the last 10 months have been an exercise in seeing what I still care about now that I feel like an adult. Suddenly, the ‘blog it’ bar got harder to clear, and the ‘do I have time to read this?’ question became far more urgent.

But here I am, thanks to David Brooks.

I know it’s a bit of a parlor game to bash Brooks, the New York Times in-house conservative columnist. In general, Brooks strikes me as a guy trying to do a good job in a tough situation: the cheese slid off the cracker in the conservative movement, to the point where we’ve got a birther-curious GOP nominee who will say anything and a House Republican caucus that looks like a circus (did you ever watch special orders speeches at night on CSPAN? Oh my.) The kinds of Republicans Brooks really wants to respect are dead, retired, or Democrats. And yet he has this grating habit of embracing false equivalency, following in the vapid tradition of David Broder of proposing superior ‘centrist’ policies that equate and dismiss the ideological commitments and organized constituencies of both major political parties.

If you read his May 28 column, “The Role of Uncle Sam,” you know exactly what I mean.

But what interested – and irked – me was that the centrism Brooks proposes for the country he’s rebranded as “Hamiltonian.” As in Alexander Hamilton. Yes, the bank guy.

Brooks thinks the U.S. government has gotten way too big. He doesn’t specify what that means exactly, but his opening line is that “Government promoted industrial development in the 18th century, transportation in the 19th, communications in the 20th and biotechnology today.” Within that frame, “the federal role has historically been sharply limited” and our guy Hamilton was “the man who initiated that role” He was “a nationalist” whose  “primary goal was to enhance national power and eminence, not to make individuals rich or equal.”

You should read the column yourself and not take my word for it, but in short, Brooks posits that:

• *The Hamiltonian tradition has been followed by “Whigs, early Republicans, and early progressives”
• *People in the Hamiltonian tradition “reject efforts to divide the country between haves and have-nots”
• *“generations of leaders [in this tradtion] assume that there is a rough harmony of interests between capital and labor”
• *Everything was going great until progressives, the New Deal, and LBJ came along
• *The so-called Tea Party was a culminating outcome of a decades-long festering revulsion among conservatives who were becoming anti-government

And finally Brooks’ conclusion asks:

 Does government encourage long-term innovation or leave behind long-term debt for short-term expenditure? Does government nurture an enterprising citizenry, or a secure but less energetic one?

Never mind the shoddy history of political parties in the 20^th century, or the false choices and false equivalencies posed in those last two sentences.

(By the way, can someone explain why secure people aren’t enterprising? Would we all be more productive if we were being chased by lions or sleep better if we took the batteries out of smoke detectors?)

I’ve been reading Hamilton in a serious this-is-my-career way for the last 10 years, and what’s striking about the Brooksian verision of the “Hamiltonian tradition” is how utterly ahistorical these claims are. That’s not surprising from a pundit, but David Brooks is no ordinary pundit. He’s a Very Serious Person – a public intellectual. Yet he seems to be profoundly unfamiliar with the contours of Hamilton’s career in government and politics – one that was, need I remind you, very short and very learnable.

Look, I’m intrigued by Hamilton. I hope to make a career and sell literally dozens of books by writing about Hamilton and some of the institutions he guided. But once you know anything about Hamilton’s politics, you know that’s why he should not be looked to as a guide to anything you want to describe as centrist or moderating. Hamilton was not representative of majority opinions at the Convention in 1787, and by the time he was through Washington and Adams, he was – with complete sincerity – regarded as a monarchist by many of the Republicans of 1800.

I could spend 2000 words rebutting David Brooks’ claims one-by-one, but I find it utterly perplexing that in an age when you can find many of Hamilton’s papers on Google Books for free, that you would say that Hamilton’s goal wasn’t to make people “rich or equal, that he rejected a politics of “haves” vs. “have-nots,” and that Hamiltonians think of capital and labor as equally-weighted forces in political life.

Let’s be clear.

Banking politics was contentious precisely because it was about winners and losers, the exclusivity of membership in networks of credit, and the privileging of capital over labor. The aggregation of political power within banks was what Hamilton’s opponents understood to be their most powerful argument against the multiplication of banks in general and the existence of the Bank of the United States in particular.

Yes, “nationalists” cared about roads, bridges, and schools. But so did Hamilton’s opponents, who we also have to call “nationalists,” too. And contrary to Brooks’ claim, Hamilton and his successors cared a great deal about jobs, employment, and security – it was why the U.S. had a tariff. In fact, the early American tariff is often cited in modern macroeconomic textbooks as a case where a tariff is justified – you’re protecting infant industries in your domestic economy that would wither under the pressure of competitive disadvantages if left unprotected.

And those long-term infrastructure projects that the “Hamiltonians” loved? At some point, they had to have been the near-term projects that Brooks detests. Glaciers and laser cannons didn’t carve out the Erie Canal – it was a debt-financed state project that paid workers for their hard labor over many years. Wizards didn’t lay train tracks or build bridges and maintain roads. You only get to do long-term projects by engaging in near-term planning, execution, and financing. At some point, the question is called, votes are cast, and the nasty business of politicking begins to become public policy.

I guess what’s surprising about Brooks’ columns – this one and others preceding it – is that the man seems so insistent on dismissing 21st century liberalism as little more than a basket of blind demands for spending and regulation that he has to carve out this absurd definition of Hamilton’s politics. It’s why he can write a column about Hamilton without mentioning the word “bank” (yes, really).

I’m not sure how useful Hamilton is to 21st century political thought. He was only in power for 12 years (unofficially) and killed in 1804. He never saw the Erie Canal. Never saw the steamboat Clermont, or the telegraph, or the steam locomotive, or had time to contemplate the effects of the cotton gin, or Louisiana land, California gold, and the industrial revolution. He never even got to savor Aaron Burr’s downfall, let alone think about the needs of modern powers.

My guess, though, is that Brooks might not be so keen on Hamilton if he knew that he hated speculators, was in favor of highly-regulated banks, state-supported industry, a tariff, and a sweeping definition of the Commerce Clause. The real Hamilton would have laughed someone out of the room who claimed a corporation was entitled to free speech rights as a “person.”

And the real Hamilton, I suspect, would find David Brooks’ “Hamiltonian” politics utterly unrecognizable.

Diego Gutierrez map of Western Hemisphere, 1562 (Library of Congress)

If the recent Omohundro Institute conference on the topic is any indication, the answer appears to be: it depends on whom you ask.

The unfailingly elegant and insightful J.H. Elliott offered a sweeping survey of the period in his opening keynote address, in which he explored the growing understanding of the economy’s centrality to politics (and thus the origins of the term “political economy”) from the sixteenth-century writings of Giovanni Botero through the Age of Revolution. However, the papers that followed did not always heed Elliott’s call to consider the precise historical meanings of our broadest and most commonly invoked analytic and conceptual vocabularies. (Nor did they echo his emphasis on the global orientation of early modern imperial thought: the conference remained decidedly Western European—and particularly Anglo—in focus.)

In fact, the diversity of approaches and interests presented at the conference served primarily to underscore the capaciousness of the term “political arithmetic” and to highlight its shifting and wide-ranging significance from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Rich papers from intellectual historians on the influence of Samuel Hartlib and William Petty, to social and cultural historians of Caribbean islands and the slave trade shed light on the multitude of people and places contributing to and transformed by the evolving “political arithmetic” of the era.

But what about the meaning embedded in the term “political arithmetic” itself? It was commentator Phil Withington who perhaps offered the clearest articulation of the questions at the heart of the conference: how do we parse the phrases “political arithmetic” and “political economy” into meaningful parts? To what extent was the political arithmetic of the era a product of the encounter between Renaissance and Reformation culture? What was the impact of political arithmetic not only on enslaved humans, but also on those responsible for rendering the trade profitable? Are there “national” traits of political arithmetic? What about the influence of non-national sites of counting, such as trading companies and laities? What role did early modern warfare and urban growth play in the rise of numeracy across Europe? Although a variety of distinct papers on topics ranging from biblical scholarship to accounting practices, and from art to the slave trade, considered the impact of increased numeracy in distinct arenas, the conference in large part approached the era’s political arithmetic with a close lens.

The need to bring this type of precision to the broad terms employed in discussions of the era was raised by a number of comments over the course of the conference. Marcy Norton urged us to consider the complex composition of imperial political economies, rather than to address each sphere separately. What role did the environment play in the rise of industries that would transform the Atlantic world? How did domestic improvement projects relate to overseas imperial goals? How can we talk meaningfully about the relationship between labor and state power over multiple centuries, when the state itself is constantly changing?

Peter Thompson gently critiqued the “rather free-floating definitions of subjecthood” in circulation at the conference, and he urged us to consider the complex relationship between individuals and the emerging state with his reminder that citizenship was more tightly regulated by state apparatus than subjecthood. Holly Brewer echoed this point when she brought up the relationship between religious affiliation and subjecthood, and the importance of considering peoples’ access to the channels of power that allowed them to participate in debates over their relationship to the state.

In his comments, Steven Pincus echoed the call for specificity in thinking about the nature and construction of power on micro and macro levels. Two of his clearest points were his injunction to consider the role played by institutions in the construction of state power and his reminder that increased numeracy lent itself to abstraction as well as precision. His own interest in exploring the surprising connections in the political economy of eighteenth-century England were evident in his key note address, which addressed the sudden decline in anti-slavery legislation between 1710-1730 and Jonathan Swift’s denunciation of  “modern” colonies at the end of Gulliver’s Travels.

In general, I would say, this conference suffered somewhat from the blind-men-and-the-elephant syndrome: there was a great deal of insight into the political arithmetic of component parts of the early modern Atlantic World, but far less discussion of how these component parts fit together.

Molly Warsh is an NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, VA, and assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on the British and Spanish empires, trade, and the Atlantic world during the early modern period.

I'll read what he's reading.

Sometimes it seems that each time society, culture, and technology move forward through either innovation or evolution, they take a longing glance backwards to see if there are any useful ideas to poach.

In other words, in this first decade of the twenty-first century we’re seeing an efflorescence of eighteenth-century concepts.

Today’s example comes from Adrian Teal, a British cartoonist who’s at work on a graphic novel entitled The Gin Lane Gazette based on a fictionalized eighteenth-century newspaper. In this case, the content is a coincidence. What’s striking is the reason for the publicity: rather than seek a contract with a traditional publishing house, Teal is publishing the book through an outfit called Unbound by subscription. As I noted on Twitter a few days ago, it’s an eighteenth-century solution for a twenty-first century problem.

Publishing by subscription was one of the most common means by which printers, publishers, and booksellers overcame their usual dearth of capital in the eighteenth century. If you could round up people willing to pay in advance, you could assure that you’d break even on a project. Publishers used it for everything from pamphlets to novel reprints to editions of the Bible.

And if you go to the site for The Gin Lane Gazette, you’ll see that Teal and Unbound have adopted another earlier technique by offering to publish the names of subscribers in the volume when it appears. For eighteenth-century publishers, this was particularly crucial, because you would try to round up the most popular, important, and famous men and women you could to subscribe as a mark of how successful your publication would be.

To offer just one example: Mathew Carey, perhaps the most important publisher in the early Republic (until I take up residence in Worcester in Febraury, anyway), used subscriptions to great effect in his career, and eagerly sought celebrity endorsements. For his American Museum, a magazine published from 1787-1792, he obtained subscriptions from George Washington, John Dickinson, and New Jersey Governor William Livingston. But not all his attempts met with success. In fact, just yesterday afternoon I was reading some of his fawning attempts to get Benjamin Franklin to subscribe in the hope that it would improve the publication’s prospects (it probably didn’t help matters that he mentioned that having Washington already was probably just as good, if not better, than old Ben).

In the United States in the 1780s, Washington and Franklin were the ultimate celebrity endorsers, and as such were swamped with dozens, if not hundreds, of requests to subscribe to books, pamphlets, and magazines. As Michael Jordan was to sneakers and Peyton Manning is now to, well, everything, so Washington, Franklin, and several other Founders were to every species of print.

There’s no indication whether Teal has enlisted any members of the royal family, former Beatles, or Manchester United midfielders to headline his subscription list. While I don’t have a stake in the outcome of the project, I must admit to some curiosity about whether this innovative return to the past will succeed.

As I’ve argued in other spaces, and as J.L. Bell commented on my post last Friday, Congress has asked the Postal Service to do the impossible: act as a monopoly universal provider and make a profit. It’s taken a while, but postal officials are finally starting to put things in those terms:

“We are in a deep financial crisis today because we have a business model that is tied to the past,” Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe said during a speech last month. “We are expected to operate like a business, but we do not have the flexibility to do so. Our business model is fundamentally inflexible. It prevents the Postal Service from solving problems and being effective in the way a business would.”

This is an unsustainable model for the long term. I would also stipulate that a major problem for the postal service is the massive obligations it is under for its pension system, though the problem runs far deeper (and therefore I won’t discuss it). Most importantly, I think the Postmaster General is underselling the issue. The key question is whether, as I noted on Friday, the government has a vested interest (i.e., a reason to fund) in providing a means to communicate by paper and packages throughout the country. The problem is and has been that Congress hasn’t asked that question. People want to privatize it or “rescue” it, but with little examination of the underlying question of whether society’s interest in the circulation of information in this manner is worth an expenditure.

The question is deeply vexed and has a long history. The 1710 Post Office Act of Parliament established the Post Office in North America (with headquarters in New York) for the purpose of facilitating communication but also with the explicit assumption that it would produce revenue that could accrue to the Treasury. (The revenue was initially to go for the support of the royal family.) It didn’t make money until the 1760s, when Benjamin Franklin as Deputy Postmaster General for North America instituted a series of reforms that streamlined and improved service. As I noted previously, the post office was important enough that it was one of the first actions of the Second Continental Congress, and it is also one of the few government agencies that Congress is explicitly authorized to regulate in the enumerated powers clause of the Constitution. Questions of revenue generation continued into the nineteenth century, when the Post Office made an enormous profit. And of course the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which converted the Post Office Department into an independent government agency as the U.S. Postal Service, focused on ways to make the Post Office profitable again.

It’s also important to consider that the communication that flows through the postal system has changed dramatically. At its inception, the Post Office was a means to circulate political information (through newspapers and other publications), official mail, and commercial information, and rates were set accordingly. Alexis de Tocqueville, on his tour of the United States in 1831, noted with wonder how thorough information circulated in the nation:

I travelled along a portion of the frontier of the United States in a sort of cart, which was termed the mail. We passed, day and night, with great rapidity, along the roads, which were scarcely marked out through immense forests. When the gloom of the woods became impenetrable, the driver lighted branches of pine, and we journeyed along the light they cast. From time to time, we came to a hut in the midst of the forest; this was a post-office. The mail dropped an enormous bundle of letters at the door of this isolated dwelling, and we pursued our way at full gallop, leaving the inhabitants of the neighboring log-houses to send for their share of the treasure.

The post office was, as Richard John has demonstrated, the branch of the federal government most present in the lives of Americans, and served as an outlet for encouraging informed political debate (or at least that was the ideal). Not until the 1840s and 1850s did Congress lower the price of sending a letter to a level that encouraged mass use of the genre, which led to the development of new forms of mail, including the valentine and advertising circulars. Now, as the New York Times piece cites, junk mail–that is, unsolicited advertising–constitutes a major component of the Post Office’s revenue stream. We no longer get our newspapers, as Tocqueville once noted, through the post office. We no longer send personal letters.

At some point, therefore, the ideal of government-sponsored communications channels fell by the wayside. What I hope Congress and the media will pick up on is the question of whether society and government have an interest in guaranteeing this sort of service, and if so, how. Whether that leads to the demise of the Post Office is up to Congress.

UPDATE (12/6, 9:31am): Just found that Richard R. John did a study for the Postal Regulatory Commission in 2008 entitled, History of Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly. Provides a good background with quite a bit more detail than I’ve provided here.

Tenured Radical, writing at The Chronicle, has inspired me to finally offer something in this space. After a recent visit to her local post office, she speculates that it “may … simply disappear as an institution in my lifetime.” She found a business both antiquated and in tatters: the post office could not accept credit cards, and had a diagram up for children about how to properly address and stamp an envelope that seems silly to most adults. I love the post office, but I’m guessing she’s probably right about its impending demise, at least as far as a public (or really quasi-public) postal service is concerned.

What’s striking me at the moment about that likelihood is the implication of a potential closure of the post office. It will mean that, for the first time in its history (one that predates independence), the state will have left the public information business. The Post Office was one of the first institutions established by the Continental Congress in July 1775. The only institutions that predated it as representatives of the united colonies were Congress itself and the Continental Army—that’s it. The Post Office is older than the Navy, older than the Marine Corps, older than the Presidency and the Supreme Court. The first Federal Postmaster General, Samuel Osgood, was a member of Washington’s Cabinet.

Why? Information is (or was) important to the state. Keeping the channels through which information flowed open was a vital state matter, and made the post office a central player in creating an informed citizenry to participate in American democracy. (Especially prior to the Revolution, it was also a tool of state surveillance and censorship, lest I appear too Whiggish.)

Since the eighteenth century, the United States has had a more ambiguous relationship to new information technologies. As Richard John recently showed, Congress declined to take ownership of Morse’s telegraph lines, and likewise stayed out of the telephone industry. In the 1960s, DARPA, an agency within the Department of Defense, created the Internet (possibly with the assistance of an earnest Harvard government concentrator). That too, however, is now primarily in private hands.

The post office is all that’s left, and even that is really not quite public. The United States Postal Service operates independently, though it maintains universal service and meets other mandates set by Congress. But if and when it goes the government will no longer play any role in guaranteeing for its citizens the ability to transmit information. Some in the Senate seem more concerned that we should be sending more love letters, but I find the larger question far more troubling, even taking into account the real and dire financial situation in which the USPS finds itself.

But even more impressive than the physical structure, I think, is the fact that it was built at all. I can’t imagine that happening today. Building new bridges and public transportation systems seems like a thing of the past, made impossible by legions of nitpickers, privatization evangelists, politicians afraid of being blamed for added expenses, and people who have somehow decided that our governments are supposed to function like our households.

The project cost the state of New York $7 million in 1817, which was about 1% of the nation’s GNP at the time. In a smaller and agricultural economy, this figure looms even larger. Plus, the 363-mile-long route crosses an upstate New York region that was – and still is – fairly empty, to reach Lake Erie and a thinly settled territory toward the west.

Just think about the scope! The percentage of the federal budget that today goes toward transportation and infrastructure projects is 3% – a fraction many in Congress want to cut. Yet even that federal figure is smaller than the relative expense of the state-funded canal. If we invested 1% of our GNP in a single project today, that would be a $140 billion piece of work.

That’s just less than the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo moon program.

No wonder they named so many things after DeWitt Clinton! But he of course didn’t act alone – the sums speak volumes about the under-appreciated state legislatures of the early republic, where we find frequent bi- and multi-partisan consensus in favor of infrastructure projects, and a high tolerance for debt-financed economic development.

Compare that with the country’s current inability – and unwillingness – to address $2 trillion in infrastructure needs that result in the occasional bridge collapse, blackout, and routine, epic traffic jams.

This legacy casts an even more unflattering light on politicians like N.J. Gov. Chris Christie, who recently killed a Hudson River rail tunnel that would have been the first built in the New York City area in more than a century. The N.Y.-N.J. Port Authority and the federal government each were kicking in $3 billion for the $8.7 billion project, and N.J. was responsible for the remaining $2.7 billion. Basing his decision in estimates of potential – yet not probable – cost overruns, Christie trashed the project’s sponsors and the unions who were already at work on the site, and announced his intention to keep the federal money. Instead, he has to give it back, with interest, and may have put his state on the hook for $600 million already spent the groundbreaking.

What’s baffling about these decisions is that the country’s population isn’t getting smaller. At peak hours, the existing Hudson River tunnel has a train passing through every few seconds. It is already at capacity. Expanded rail access would not only serve the region’s growing population by reducing commuting times and expanding transit access; it would also raise property values – one study pegged the boost at an average of $19,000 per home for a total of more than $18 billion. If you captured that gain in real estate taxes, it would pay for the debt service on the tunnel’s bonds. This project would pay for itself in one of the densest populated corridors in the developed world, and the money could be borrowed during a period of record-low interest rates and paid back over 35 years.

When New Yorkers planned the Erie Canal, they hoped for federal support. When they didn’t receive any, they built it anyway, borrowing the funds at 6% per year. They didn’t spend their time searching for reasons to abandon the project, and unlike Christie and his ilk, they didn’t see a popular project as some kind of albatross.

We have an unemployment rate of almost 10% and more than $2 trillion in needed projects. We have students who have invested heavily in their own educations entering the weakest labor market since the Great Depression. And we have international competitors boldly investing in their futures – drawing provocative comparisons to the 19th century U.S.

What a contrast to 2010, when 75% of our national budget is promised to the military and retirees, and when we see firsthand how financial downturns can turn politically regressive. There was a time, until fairly recently, when politicians competed to outdo each other in support of public infrastructure projects. Most of the Interstate Highway Act, believe it or not, passed the Congress on a voice vote.

Compare that to the buzzworthy announcement that the northeastern United States will have high-speed rail by…. (wait for it) 2040.

I have long been fascinated by the Lead Rush that took place in the mid-Mississippi Valley in the early 19th century. I gather there were actually several of these, and what interested me about them (besides the fact that such a thing could exist) was their total lack of Gold Rush-style romance. The early lead mines, which were worked by the French and Indians before the Usonians (U.S. Americans) came along, were known as “diggings” because they involved scraping around the surface for chunks of promising earth and then heating them to melt and extract the lead. Lead was valued for ammunition-making and various other industrial purposes, but it does not seem to have been valued all that much. Lead mines were more a case of scratching out some moderate prosperity than striking it rich.

The Lead Rushes brought out a rather eclectic set of hard-up entrepreneurs. Alexander Hamilton’s son William ended up out in Wisconsin Territory; they called him “Uncle Billy” in the squalid encampment where he and his rather dodgy crew of workers lived. Somehow I don’t think anyone who worked for William Hamilton’s father was in the habit of calling him “Cousin Al,” but I guess you never know. [See Juliette Kinzie's memoir of life as an Indian agent's wife on the Wisconsin frontier for a sad vignette of the downwardly mobile life of the upwardly mobile Founder's son.]

The Missouri lead belt attracted a Connecticut Yankee named Moses Austin whose previous bid for moderate success had been roofing the state capitol and mining the lead for it in Virginia. When the Virginia venture faltered, Moses initiated a family tradition of entrepreneurial expatriation, gaining the lead-mining concession in Spanish Louisiana and heading out for foreign territory where relatively few Anglo-Americans had yet ventured, at least with anything other than hunting or the Indian trade in mind. Austin did well enough to build himself a short-lived lead-mining empire, including a mansion called Durham Hall and the ambitiously named town of Potosi, after the silver mines that funded the Spanish Empire. Henry R. Schoolcraft’s View of the Lead Mines of Missouri will fill you in on the all the opportunities Austin was trying to seize.

While it’s not clear that Moses Austin was ever truly secure in Missouri, U.S. control of the area brought trouble for him. The Missouri lead business was ironically devastated by the coming of the War of 1812, and Austin’s control of his little empire, and his manhood, were challenged by the vicious competition and just plain bullying of heavily armed migrants from the U.S. South led by one John Smith T (for Tennessee, from which he hailed). Smith T was believed to have killed some 15 men on the field of “honor” and otherwise.  Though intimidation, legal chicanery, and some outright theft and violence, Smith T tried to take Austin’s land titles, frighten off his workers, and seize the Austin holdings for himself. Austin was not precisely defeated by Smith T, but by the end of his life he had largely given up the Missouri venture and turned his attention toward a new expatriation scheme in Mexico’s northernmost provinces, which his son Stephen would be the one to carry out. Moses Austin’s whole Missouri story reads kind of like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance if the John Wayne and Lee Marvin characters had joined forces to wipe out Jimmy Stewart and take the town for themselves, civilization be damned. To put it another way, Moses Austin needed John Wayne for a neighbor and got Lee Marvin instead.

Since Potosi was sadly devoid of overt Moses Austin shrines, we continued east to Missouri Mines State Historic Site in Park Hills, MO. The museum is located in an impressively nasty-looking old lead mill sitting on a top of a mine and amidst some hills that appeared to be giant piles of mine waste.  After a lifetime of consciousness raising on the dangers of lead paint, Isaac handled the omnipresence of the feared substance pretty well, with a lot of discussion on my part about how spending a few hours in an old lead mine as a 15-year-old (on a rainy day) was not the same thing as ingesting refined lead over a long period of time as a toddler. Nevertheless, at one point during our tour, Ike blurted out, “I think can feel the effects [of lead poisoning] already.” Ah, the safety-conscious youth of today.

Unfortunately, Missouri Mines State Historic Site did not really address my lead belt western scenario. I did learn that I did not know much about “modern” lead mining. The diggings of Moses Austin’s day stopped at the bedrock. Around the time of the Civil War, the lead industry turned to deep rock mining, punching thousands of miles of tunnels as much as 400 feet deep into the Earth. By World War II, the main method of getting men in and ore out was an electric railroad system — the main line was 300 miles along at just this one site. Before that, the ore cars were pulled by good-old fashioned Missouri mules. I must say that the only thing worse than eating lead dust all day would be mixing it with the aroma of mule crap, but apparently the work paid well by Ozark standards. The long distances that the miners had to travel underground to reach the ore seems to have led the St. Joseph Lead Co. to create a task-based wage system I had not heard of. Every miner had to dig out a quota or “score” of a certain number of tons of ore each day to earn their pay, after which they could go home or stay and earn extra.

The museum displays and our docent were quite insistent that lead poisoning or other health effects had not been a problem in the area, though they did admit that smelting plants could cause problems. You hope they are right for the sake of the Lead Belt’s population, because lead was and possibly still is literally a part of growing up there.  Check out “Chat Dumps of St. Francois County” for pictures of children playing, Boy Scouts hiking, and town Christmas trees standing on the gigantic piles of mine waste (chat) that once loomed larger over the towns of the Lead Belt than the surrounding Ozark hills.

Finally, coming home from the Lead Belt on U.S. 50, we went through one of Missouri’s many strangely named burgs. The state has a quite a line in misspelled and/or mispronounced foreign capitals, but perhaps more distinctively, there are several towns named after qualities that their founders presumably prized or thought their settlements embodied. Economy and Peculiar are two we had noticed before, but Useful, MO, was new to us. I started laughing and immediately made the comment that I hoped there was a Useful Cemetery. Lo and behold, it immediately appeared. I was driving too fast to stop without needing to use the cemetery ourselves, but I also knew that someone must have put such a sight on the Internet already. I was not wrong. (Click the picture for an even artier one.)

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Now playing: Whiskeytown – Mining Town
via FoxyTunes

Here’s what Girard did in the latter case, in an excerpt from the very thorough site linked above:

After many attempts to shore up the finances of the Treasury Department, all of them failing, it became obvious to all government officials and Stephen Girard, that the United States would lose the war with the British unless a large infusion of money was made to the U.S. Treasury. In early 1813, the fears became fact: the U. S. Treasury had run out of money. Stephen Girard was the only one with the necessary cash to make the Treasury solvent once more. John Jacob Astor and a few other lesser financiers had committed to a part of the sum needed to help the Treasury, but their commitment fell far short of the sum needed to finance the war.

Without demanding the concessions from the government, concessions that he could readily have obtained, Girard displayed the courage and the patriotism that few others could or would. He risked his entire fortune in granting a loan to the Treasury in excess of eight million dollars. When his country was down and out, Girard came to the rescue.

Anyway, here’s a birthday salute to Stephen Girard’s millions, and Ben, of course, whose looks are holding up better than Girard’s.

P.S. It’s also the lovely and talented Dolley Madison’s birthday, as Ben points out, and Cher’s, whatever adjectives you want to use for her.

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Now playing: The Welcome Wagon – Sold! To the Nice Rich Man