The French in the Heart of AmericaFinley, John H. (John Huston)
History
The French in the Heart of America
Finley, John H. (John Huston)
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); French -- North America; Mississippi River Valley -- History
With their companion open-hearth converters and attendant furnaces and
mills, they not only hold the site of the old fort but make a circle of
glowing fortresses around the valley--in Buffalo, in Birmingham, Alabama,
and in the "red crags" of the Rockies at Pueblo, beneath Pike's Peak. And
within ten years a whole new city, [Footnote: Gary, Indiana.] not far from
Chicago, on Lake Michigan, has been made to order. A river was turned from
its course, a town was moved, and an entirely new city was constructed
with homes for nearly twenty thousand workmen near a square mile of
furnaces and mills.
The attention of the world has been centred upon the millionaires whom
this mighty trade has made. The very book which I have quoted so literally
carries as its luring subtitle, "The Story of a Thousand Millionaires." "A
huge, exclusive preoccupation with dollar-getting," says H. G. Wells. But
an occupation that finds the red earth and the white earth, carries it
hundreds of miles to where the coal is stored or the gas is ready to be
lighted, assembles the labor from Europe, and converts that red earth,
with almost human possibilities, into rails and locomotives (that have
together made a republic such as the United States possible), into forty-
story buildings and watch-springs, into bridges and mariners' needles,
into battle-ships and lancets, into almost every conceivable instrument of
human use, can hardly be rightfully called a preoccupation with dollar-
getting, though it has brought the perplexing problem that has so much
disturbed the hopes of democracy, dreaming of such masterful children,
producers, and poets, yet dreading the very inequalities that their
energies create.
There comes constantly the question as to how all this initiative which
has been so titanic is to be reconciled with the general good--a world-
wide and insistent problem, which will be more serious there when the
neighborliness is not so intimate. But the new neighborly element will be
found, we must believe, as an element has been found for the strengthening
of steel.
I was told by a chemist, when visiting the mills in Pittsburgh, that every
steelmaker knows that a little titanium mixed with the molten iron after
its boiling in air multiplies its tensile strength immeasurably, though no
one knows just why it is so. Perhaps, in the plans for the new cities of
Pittsburgh and Chicago, we have sign of the social titanium that will
increase the tensile strength of democracy in the places where the stress
and strain are greatest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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