Internal Improvement

John Lauritz Larson. Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

The first sentence of Larson's book is "Why create the American republic?" (1) Early Americans grappled with this question for decades. Repeated failures to create a comprehensive, national transportation network--which can b attributed to neither geography nor logistical challenges, but rather ideological barriers--demonstrate the degree to which this question was never clearly resolved.

 For roughly a century, Americans struggled to reconcile a sincere desire to live up to classical republican notions of disinterested public virtue with the demands and desires of an increasingly self-interested, market-oriented electorate. In Larson's telling, the rhetoric of republican virtue increasingly became a trap from which nationally-minded plans for internal improvement could not escape. Voters wanted a robust transportation infrastructure but feared the political mechanisms by which it could be built.

George Washington famously worried about the problems of western settlement without strong economic bonds between the seaboard East and the trans-Appalachian West. His support for a canal along the Potomac was national in scope; yet even he was unable to completely separate self-interest (his own landholdings would have benefited from such a project, if successfully implemented) from public-minded civic duty. And the Jeffersonian Republicans--quick to sniff out the slightest hint of hypocrisy from any Federalist less venerated than Washington (i.e., all of them)--were soon able to undo any notions of top-down internal improvements carried out by a natural aristocracy operating on some variant of noblisse oblige.

Which left the Republicans and eventually their Jacksonian heirs with the quandary of an electorate primed to fear "consolidation" and "corruption"--both of which would be easy to find in any government-controlled infrastructure project--in the abstract, yet desirous of internal improvements that local communities couldn't pay for.

In the end, the country stumbled out of the internal improvements era and into the Railroad Age--complete with robber barons like Jay Gould who achieved a level of "consolidation" and "corruption" far beyond the wildest schemes of Henry Clay--without realizing how it happened, or appreciating their own role in making that consequence inevitable.