What did the president know and when did he know it? This was a question that figured big in the investigation of the Watergate break-in during the Nixon administration. Since it did, it has popped up in later political matters. The historian Daniel Walker Howe, of both Oxford University and UCLA, makes clear that canals, steam-powered boats, railroads and the telegraph made a very big difference in American and later world life. So, it is not just the president and politics, it is love, family, business, community life, all human life is strongly affected by what we know and when we know it.
Just think of those Japanese soldiers on various islands in the Pacific who thought WWII was still on decades after it had ended. Daniel Walker Howe makes clear that the battle of New Orleans and perhaps even the whole war of 1812 were strongly affected by the slow speed of news crossing the Atlantic and traveling from one part of the US to another. Living with more or less instantaneous communication between us all today, it is difficult to imagine that it could take weeks to learn some important fact, such as a war ending or an invention working.
It is not just knowing. It is also being here or there. Travel matters, too. Here is Daniel Walker Howe:
Late in 1833, a twenty-seven-year-old French engineer named Michel Chevalier arrived in the United States. American canals, bridges, steamboats, and railroads fascinated him. During his two-year tour of the country, he concluded that improvements in transportation had democratic implications. In former times, he remarked, with roads rough and dangerous, travel required "a long train of luggage, provisions, servants, and guards," making it rare and expensive . "The great bulk of mankind, slaves in fact and in name," had been "chained to the soil" not only by their legal and social status but also "by the difficulty of locomotion." Freedom to travel, the ability to leave home, was essential to the modern world and as democratic as universal suffrage, Chevalier explained: To improve the means of communication, then, is to promote a real, positive, and practical liberty; it is to extend to all the members of the human family the power of traversing and turning to account the globe, which has been given to them as their patrimony; it is to increase the rights and privileges of the greatest number, as truly and as amply as could be done by electoral laws. The effect of the most perfect system of transportation is to reduce the distance not only between different places, but between different classes. As Chevalier realized, improved transportation and communications facilitated not only the movement of goods and ideas but personal, individual freedom as well. Americans, a mobile and venturesome people, empowered by literacy and technological proficiency, did not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity provided (as he put it) to turn the globe to their account.
Howe, Daniel Walker (2007-09-29). What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) (Kindle Locations 4182-4195). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
