America

"Jefferson spent most of his time working. America and Spain kept debating Louisiana’s boundaries, and the president kept elbowing for more. His administration feuded with Irujo, and the Spanish diplomat complained bitterly about Lewis and Clark. (Of course, he never mentioned their Spanish shadows, Vial and Jarvet.) There were rumors that Jefferson would purchase Florida. Allies like Mitchill begged him to think bigger. Jefferson believed the Louisiana territory ended at the Rockies. What if it didn’t? What if, in Mitchill’s words, it stretched “beyond that chain, quite to the Pacific Ocean”?"

"During his visit, they handed Coboway a document. The captains had scaled back their diplomacy on the Columbia—because of their discomfort, but also because they believed this region occupied a different place on Jefferson’s timeline, a place further in the future. The document showed they were still thinking about that future. It listed the members of the Corps, including Sacajawea and York, and it explained their route “by way of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers.” On the back, the captains added a map. They hoped Coboway would give it to “some civilized person.” Lewis and Clark gave copies to other Native leaders. They pasted a copy on the wall of their room at Fort Clatsop. All winter, they’d heard rumors about other traders and posts. That was not what they wanted for the Corps of Discovery—the point was for people to know. Even if disaster struck on the way home, one day this document would buttress America’s preemption claims to the Pacific Northwest. It was a step toward publication. It was also a step toward colonization, if you could even separate the two."

"MORE THAN TWO years had passed since Lewis left Washington. The city had changed. The nation had changed. Jefferson had won a landslide reelection, lifted by a strong economy and the growing acclaim for the Louisiana Purchase. In his first inaugural address, he’d imagined America as “a rising nation.” In his second, he imagined it as a sprawling one. A few Americans, he said, still worried that “the enlargement of our territory would endanger its union.” The president wasn’t one of them: “Who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively?”"

"When Jefferson learned Lewis was gone, he was devastated. He called it, in a letter to Madison, “the catastrophe of poor Lewis.” But Jefferson never offered to help with the book—even though he was now retired at Monticello, and even though he’d asked Lewis about it constantly. (“Everybody is impatient,” he wrote in the last letter he ever sent to his friend.) Jefferson didn’t even help with smaller problems, like the West Point professor who failed to finish the math for Lewis’s astronomical data. Clark dealt with all of it. He was devastated, too, but he wanted to honor his co-captain and the sacrifices of everyone in the Corps. Clark didn’t have to do anything with Sheheke; Lewis’s second escort got him home. He found a lawyer named Nicholas Biddle to finish the book. It was less ambitious than Lewis’s version, with Biddle cutting almost all of the scientific material. Clark had to finish his big map without the extra astronomical data. But the map remained a cartographic masterpiece, and the book—along with its international media coverage, and the international media coverage of the expedition itself—had an enormous impact. It proved that America could produce explorers. It showed that the government could play a vital role in expansion. It made the West feel reachable and real. Jefferson sent copies to his scientific contacts. He planted the seeds of Arikara beans in the fields of Monticello and found them delicious. If those seeds made him think about Piahito and his map, or if they made him think about the consequences of his delegations, Jefferson never mentioned it. He watched as a new generation of politicians picked up his ideas about expansion and removal. “Why do we attempt to treat with a savage tribe,” asked a young Andrew Jackson, “that will neither adhere to treaties, nor the law of nations?”"

"ON JULY 3, 1803, the news reached Washington—and this time, it was good. Indeed, it was astonishing. Monroe and Livingston had bought not just New Orleans but the entire Louisiana territory, for $15 million. That price tag, and the idea that America had instantly doubled in size, distorted more than it revealed. America had not purchased France’s land; it had purchased France’s preemption rights. Louisiana still teemed with Native nations, and any before-and-after map missed the people who lived there, owned most of the land, and held most of the power. The Louisiana Purchase was only the first chapter in an uncertain story, and it would take decades—and more than $400 million in 1803 dollars—for the federal government to acquire the actual land. Still, the news transformed the expedition into that story’s second chapter. Jefferson grasped this, instantly and ecstatically. Louisiana’s preemption rights were one tool he could use. The expedition was another. In both cases, the goal remained constant. Only the timeline had changed."

"Jefferson borrowed the next part of his plan from Gallatin. For only the second time in his presidency, he wrote a secret message to Congress. This choice hinted at his urgency, but Jefferson focused the text on a popular and bipartisan policy, a policy he wanted Congress to continue: Native trading posts. These posts, he wrote, provided America with a peaceful way to acquire land, “which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for.” They could even help with New Orleans by lining the Mississippi’s American side with “the means of its own safety.”"

"That changed with a surprising job offer. In the election of 1800—an ugly and polarizing affair, with Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans facing off against John Adams and the Federalists—Jefferson won the presidency. Before his inauguration, he wrote to Lewis and asked him to be his private secretary. Jefferson admired Lewis’s “knowledge of the western country, of the army and of all its interests.” Mostly, though, he needed someone he could trust. America remained angry and divided. When a Federalist senator learned that a sympathetic Supreme Court justice was sick, he responded with partisan calculation: “God grant him a life as long as Jefferson.” Outrage and ideological fracture cropped up everywhere. Politics was almost certainly the cause of the argument that led to Lewis’s court-martial."

"The fur trade seemed simple enough. Traders wanted furs they could sell for a profit, including beaver and buffalo. Native people wanted manufactured goods, including metal tools and metal weapons. But complications lurked around every riverbend. A Native nation might want to block its rivals from getting gunpowder and bullets. A European nation might want to encroach on another’s network. America needed to know more. It needed information."

"Although Chinese people believed that in America the only way forward was teaching and research, who said I could not be a pioneer and blaze another trail? After rejecting transferring to another school for a PhD, the remaining choice—for me the only choice—was: to find a job."

"In 1949, the United States stood at the pinnacle of prestige and authority. Only four years had passed since the end of World War II; it was the most important victorious nation, and also the only country whose homeland had not been destroyed during the war. Militarily, America’s army, navy, and air force had already displayed their might across battlefields around the world during the war, and it was also the only country to possess the atomic bomb. Economically, although its population accounted for only 5% of the world, its gross national product accounted for 40% of the world’s total. The standard of living of the American people at that time was unmatched by any other country: a U.S. worker’s wages for a few months could buy a car, and in two or three years could buy a house. Almost every household had a refrigerator and a washing machine, and many families were also purchasing the rapidly emerging television sets of that era. Employment among married women was still not common, so most families had only one working person, yet even a single salary could enable the whole family to enjoy a fairly comfortable material life."

"Just as in my naive thinking before choosing to study mechanical engineering, machines are used everywhere. But places that use machines do not necessarily need mechanical master’s graduates, and the prospects for mechanical engineering graduates are not necessarily better than those of other engineering departments. At that time, America’s rising aircraft industry and enormous automobile manufacturing industry employed large numbers of mechanical engineers; the steel industry and machine tool industry, which had begun to decline, also employed quite a few mechanical engineers."

"Early on we were predominantly European, with two thirds of our profits coming from this large, sophisticated market. Germany, Belgium, Norway and France led the way. We struggled with competitiveness in Italy and withdrew. The UK has been a disappointment. Skills are not what they were, energy is expensive, unions have been aggressive (unlike Germany, where the unions focus on encouraging employers to invest for future growth), although to be fair they have been much more constructive and willing to engage in proper discussions about the genuine health of our businesses over the last ten years, and the government has been uninterested or lacklustre at best. America has been resurgent on the back of world-beating energy costs and frankly fine management. Whereas Europe has slowly squeezed the life from much of its manufacturing base with carbon taxes, complex legislation, high labour and social costs, America has gone into overdrive."

"My parents never considered themselves poor or oppressed or downtrodden. Why should they have? They had ambition. They had hard work. They had each other. And they also had me, their first and only child, a brand-new generation to carry their dreams forward. America was the land of opportunity. Lucky for us, we were here."

"Go to North America to be a free man. Get a decent, nice job and earn a lot of money. If you have money, the world is yours; you can travel, live decently and enjoy arts, and you can further improve yourself. You can achieve these only if you live in a completely free country like America."

"Audacity, the principal ingredient in most informal and thus evolving organizations, is nowhere more evident than in guer- rilla warfare, which carries not knowing your place to the ulti- mate. Yet in every situation where guerrilla forces have been victorious because of the aggressiveness of local commanders— from colonial America to modern-day China, Algeria, Cuba— the next stage is so woefully predictable it has become a cliché: a hierarchy is formed, frozen in time, and fixed in place. While"

"André gave the character a voice, made him practice every sport, every profession, every clownish act. He inflated or deflated at will, smoked cigars, danced the waltz, transformed into a puppet, spoke in front of a blackboard. He conducted an orchestra in London, entered the arena in Spain, or participated in a rodeo in America. Always good-natured, full of humor, in dazzling form—thanks to the Michelin Exerciser—and devilishly pedagogical."

"“And since then, Keynes’s thought has continued to impregnate the entire liberal economy. Whereas in reality, Keynes had rendered the worst of services to America and the world. By artificially creating purchasing power, the link between the act and the consequences has been broken, and we have become accustomed to living in perpetual ‘cavalry.’"

"“And since then, Keynes’s thought has continued to impregnate the entire liberal economy. Whereas in reality, Keynes had rendered the worst of services to America and the world. By artificially creating purchasing power, the link between the act and the consequences has been broken, and we have become accustomed to living in perpetual ‘cavalry.’"

". Even if things go smoothly, China’s economy is likely to overtake America’s as the world’s largest, which will surely prompt more people to ask: *How did they do it? How did China advance so quickly, particularly in such complex areas as advanced electronics?* Some portion of the disquieting answer is that Apple taught them. Year in, year out, Apple took the most cutting-edge designs, processes, and technical understandings from around the world and scaled them in China. One supply chain expert even adopts the language of a crime scene as he considers the whodunit at the heart of China’s advances in electronics. Look around, he says, “There’s Apple DNA everywhere.”"

"In his seminal work, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the Austrian-American economist and social theorist pessimistically predicted that the leaders of the free market would allow themselves to be converted to a creed hostile to their own existence because they would be unable to articulate a moral basis for free enterprise. In Washington, I became convinced that Schumpeter was right. America’s leading colleges and universities—the training ground for America’s leaders—were increasingly pro-socialist, pro-government regulation, and anti-capitalist in their philosophy, direction, and mission"

"Luxottica becomes the largest user of New York's John Fitzgerald Kennedy airport, where planes loaded with frames arrive from Italy to be immediately distributed to every corner of America."

"“This is a sympathetic film about a communist, and while you may think it’s amusing for a capitalist company to do this, I work for a protocapitalist, Charles Bluhdorn. I don’t talk to Charlie about decisions to make a movie or not make a movie, but for this one I have to. I can’t put Gulf + Western in a position of being taken by surprise by the controversy this film will cause.” We were still very much in the Cold War with the Soviet Union (it would be ten more years before it would collapse). When the idea was put to Bluhdorn, he surprised us by saying that of course Gulf + Western would support the movie. He said the greatest thing about America is its tolerance, even encouragement, of open discussion on any subject."

"“There was always a latent desire to do something on my own, to spend an interesting life. During my student days in America, I happened to see an enlarged photo of a computer chip in a science magazine."

"Jay Gatsby, however, discovers too late that only America's hereditary aristocracy can ignore the rules."

"The US launch has given the company’s staff a boost in confidence. Less than a week later, the first store in Spain opens. Over the following years, Stefan Persson cuts ribbons at new H&M stores in countries including Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. H&M now sells more than five hundred garments per minute worldwide. And Stefan Persson has fulfilled his promise of reaching America."

"The way Middelhoff acquired the American publisher Random House for Bertelsmann is a legend in itself: Middelhoff flew to New York and delivered a powerful speech to the Jewish owners of the publisher. Almost like Heinz Berggruen when selling his collection to Germany, he built a "bridge of reconciliation" between America and Germany to seize a new historical opportunity: "That a German corporation will in the future take care of the legacy of Jewish literature and current Jewish writers.""

"The day after the press presentation, the planes were full. America was immediately won over: it was this battle that Dior wanted to win. If he had not made this bold move, the transatlantic market risked being lost. During the five years of war, the bridges had been broken between Paris and American fashion."

"They thought it was possible, but that it would be pretty hard. Importantly, however, they couldn’t see any complete show-stoppers. I thought, bugger it, my marriage is finished, I’ve got nothing much to do with my time, oh heck, I may as well have a decent go at this. If this invention is going to be useful anywhere, the obvious place is America. They’ve got the money, plenty of water and a love of freedom. So, almost straight away, in early April 1997, I hopped on a plane and flew to Detroit. I pulled out the Yellow Pages, found a joker who knew something about the car industry to be my guide and spent three months interviewing engineering consulting firms to develop this thing."