The Massachusetts Miracle: How America's Industrial Spirit Was Born

This article is the second of a series, which will appear under the unifying title of “Unleash the American System.”  These articles will document the historical evidence of how Manufacturing, Technology, Engineering and Science have been embedded in both the American Republic and American Culture from the beginning.  This is the story of true American Progress, a dynamic now being revived under President Donald Trump after decades of economic decay and decline.  In future installments, we shall look at the Presidencies of George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy, and we shall explore the great contributions those individuals made to the betterment of America. 

From the beginning the American Experiment was intimately linked to the fight to develop a productive economy, a productive future for its citizens.

In 1630 John Winthrop led a flotilla of ten ships and 800 passengers into Boston Harbor.  In 1642, Winthrop’s son, John Winthrop the Younger, organized the founding of “The Company of Undertakers for the Iron Works in New England.”  Four years later, the New World’s first ironworks opened in Braintree, Massachusetts.  The General Court promised the company a 20-year monopoly on iron production, provided it produced finished bar iron, and on the condition it would only be allowed to export that portion that was not needed for the economic development of New England.

The new iron works began in 1646.  Then, in 1647, the iron works was relocated to a more suitable site at Saugus—the famous Saugus Ironworks—and within one year, it was producing a ton of iron per day!   By 1650, the works consisted of a blast furnace for producing pig iron and gray iron (which was poured into molds to make pots, pans, kettles, skillets and other products), a forge where pig iron was refined into wrought iron, a quarter-ton hammer that was used to make iron bars, which were sold to blacksmiths for manufacture into finished products, and a rolling and slitting mill that could be used to manufacture nails, bolts, horse shoes, wagon wheels, axes, saw blades, and other implements.  It was one of the most technologically advanced iron works in the world.

It is astonishing to contemplate that by 1650, American colonists had established one of the most advanced iron manufacturing industries in the world, producing finished goods for domestic usage, on land that only 20 years earlier had been utter wilderness.

Man in the Image of God the Creator

It is of critical importance to recognize that the amazing accomplishment of John Winthrop the Younger and his allies, described above, was not simply a pragmatic economic intervention.  The motivating impulse is to be found in the intention to create a productive society, an impulse grounded in the deeply held religious beliefs of the original Pilgrim and Puritan settlers.  At the heart of this is the belief in the God-given creative and agapic nature of the human identity.

John Robinson, the spiritual guide of the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth, defined this outlook in a sermon, titled “Of Faith, Hope, and Love, Reason and Sense,” saying: 

“Reason is that wherein man goes before all other earthly creatures and comes after God only. . . . For whereas God and nature hath furnished other creatures, some with hoofs, others with other instruments, and weapons both defensive and offensive, man is left naked, and destitute of all these, but may comfort himself in that one endowment of reason, and providence, whereby he is able to govern them all.”

Man may comfort himself “in that one endowment of reason, and providence, whereby he is able to govern them all.”  Thus, Robinson distinguishes the creative and productive nature of Man—the ability to create something new and beneficent—from the bestial impulses of the lower animals.

In that same sermon, Robinson links this creative human nature—irrevocably—to the motivating emotion of agapē—love of God and love of our fellow Man, saying: 

“To love God is to become godly, and to have the mind, after a sort, deified, ‘being made partakers of the divine nature’. . .  He that loves not his brother whom he sees, how can he love God whom he sees not?. . .  And so natural to Christians is this brotherly love as that the apostle makes account he need not write to the churches, to teach them that which God taught them so many ways. . . to love as we ought, is a very happy thing, wherein we resemble God.”

It is also very revealing to note that, unlike the other European colonies in the Americas—Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and including the English settlement at Jamestown—the Pilgrim and Puritan settlements were made up of families.  When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620 with 102 colonists, that number included 48 men, 24 women and 30 children.   The other European colonies were comprised almost exclusively of young men, and their purpose was to transmit loot back to London, but what the Pilgrims brought to Plymouth were families. Their intention was to establish a colony which would create an entirely new type of society, grounded in human freedom. This is precisely the intent enunciated in John Winthrop’s proclamation for establishing a “City Upon a Hill” in Boston.

Science and Discovery

John Winthrop the Younger had a long history as an inventor and scientist, even before he left England to join his father in Boston.  He intensively studied both chemistry and medicine, and he wrote papers on a wide variety of subjects, including the motion of tides, the refining of gold, the making of pitch, tar, and potashes, the planting of timber, the building of ships in North America and many other topics.  In one letter written to the Royal Society in London, he hypothesized the existence of a fifth moon of Jupiter—a discovery not confirmed until 1892.  This was based on observations he made with a telescope he built and later donated to Harvard College.

Winthrop was, in fact, a talented astronomer.  He had studied the writings of Johannes Kepler, and in the 1670s he carried out scientific correspondence with the young Gottfried Leibniz.

One of John Winthrop Sr.’s closest allies was a man named Richard Mather, a Congregationalist minister.  Richard’s son, Increase Mather, would in turn become a close associate and collaborator of Winthrop the Younger.  Increase too had studied Kepler, and he wrote several works on astronomy, including one titled “A Discourse Concerning Comets.”  In 1680 Increase founded the Boston Philosophical Society, a direct forerunner of Benjamin Franklin’s later American Philosophical Society.

Increase’s chief concern in these writings is to demonstrate a coherence between scientific thought and religious belief, and it was during this period that he delivered a sermon, “The Light of Reason is the Work of God; the Law of Reason is the Law of God; the Voice of Reason is the Voice of God.”  He was combating the increasingly influential empiricist theories, coming out of England and Scotland, mechanistic theories that essentially posited a dead universe, without God, governed by purely mathematical laws.

Increase Mather’s son, Cotton, also became the leading scientist in the American colonies.  His last two major works were The Angel of Bethesda and The Christian Philosopher.  The former is a work on medicine and disease, based on Cotton’s work in developing a smallpox inoculation, and the latter deals with botany and living systems, examining the divine principles that underlie the scientific laws which govern Living processes.

Credit for Development

The Boston, Plymouth and slightly later Connecticut settlers exhibited both determination and ingenuity in the economic development of those colonies.  But they confronted a huge obstacle—the shortage of money, or to put it more precisely, the lack of Credit for development.  There were no banks in the colonies and no legal monetary authorities.  Hard specie, i.e., circulating coins, were in very short supply.  The small minority involved in export trade to England were able to secure payment for their wares, but the bulk of the people had no means to raise capital for productive investment.

In the earliest days of the Boston settlement there were a handful of private individuals who functioned as moneylenders, but their practices were not dissimilar from what today we would call “loan sharks.”  John Winthrop, Sr., attacked these practices, denouncing the exploitation of the common people through usurious lending:

“Thou must observe whether thy brother hath present or probable, or possible means of repaying thee, if there be none of these, thou must give him according to his necessity, rather than lend him. . . If he hath present means of repaying thee, thou art to look at him, not as an act of mercy, but by way of commerce, wherein thou art to walk by the rule of Justice.”

John Cotton, the leading religious leader of the colony, also stated:

“No increase to be taken of a poor political brother or neighbor, for anything lent unto him.” 

To deal with this problem, in 1652, the Massachusetts government took a crucial step and decided to create its own mint, from which the colony would issue its own currency, the Pine Tree Shilling.   This step short-circuited the attempts by London creditors to impose a financial stranglehold on the colony and provided the needed capital for economic development.

This experiment, however, did not last long.  In 1684, British King Charles II revoked the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay colony, transforming Massachusetts into a Royal colony.  By this act, the minting of coins in the colony was outlawed.  Additionally, the colony no longer had sovereign powers to issue subsidies for the development of mining and manufacturing, regulate its trade, and enforce its prohibitions against usury. All these measures had been integral to the impressive rates of economic growth in republican Massachusetts. 

Increase Mather led the fight against this, and the elder Mather authored a work, titled “New England Vindicated from Unjust Aspersions,” wherein he argued that Massachusetts must have authority to control its own currency and credit, and direct its own capital into the development of mining and manufacturing.

The actions by the British Crown produced a profound economic crisis in New England.  At this point, Cotton Mather intervened, authoring a 1691 proposal, titled “Some Considerations on Bills of Credit,” arguing for the issuance of state-backed paper currency.  This work was, without question, the first rigorous argument to appear in America on the scientific principle of Public Credit, and the coherence of the argument presented by Mather with later writings by Benjamin Franklin is very clear.  The concept of Public Credit, as a generative principle designed to increase productive economic activity—in opposition to John Locke’s notion of purely monetary wealth— would ultimately find its fruition in Alexander Hamilton’s invention of his system of National Banking and Public Credit.

An excerpt from Mather’s 1691 proposal reads: 

“I cannot a little wonder at the great indiscretion of our Countrymen who Refuse to accept that, which they call Paper-money, as pay of equal value with the best Spanish Silver.  What?  Is the word Paper a scandal to them? . . .  Is it not as valuable as so much Silver or Gold, supposing the Security of payment be sufficient?  Now what is the Security of your Paper-money less than the Credit of the whole Country.  If the Countries Debts must be paid (as I believe they must, and I am sure in justice they ought) whatever change of Government shall come, then the Country must make good the Credit, or more Taxes must be still Raised, till the public Debts be Answered.  I say, the Country, and not the Gentlemen who Administer the Government, who are but the Countries Agents in this Affair.  All the Inhabitants of the Land, taken as one Body, are the Principals, who Reap the Benefits, and must bear the Burdens, and are the Security in their Public Bonds.

“Sir, you and I have had some former Discourse about the Nature of Money, that it is but a Counter or Measure of men’s Proprieties and Instituted mean of permutation.  As metal, indeed, it is a commodity, like all other things, that are Merchantable.  But as Money it is no more than what was said. . .  Do Bills not transmit to Remote Parts, vast sums without the intervention of Silver?  Are not Taxes paid and received by mutual Credit between the Government and the People, the Government requiring the Country to give them Credit to pay the Country’s Debts, and then again receive the same Credit of the Country as good pay?  Tis strange that in the meanwhile; between the Government paying the People, and the People paying the Government:  The Government’s (or rather the Country’s) Bills should not pass between Man and Man.

“Upon the Difficulties and Necessities which the Country hath been brought into, a better way could not well be thought upon, then the CREDIT now passing (or that should be so) among us.  Silver we have not enough in the Country to do which must be done, more being usually Exported than is Imported. . . What is the use of Coined Silver? but to furnish a man with Credit, that he may obtain from his Neighbors those Commodities, which he hath occasion for?”

Mather is very explicit as to the purpose of his proposed paper currency—to finance investment in useful projects which will expand productive economic activity to the benefit of all.  It should be noted that in 1714, when a Land Bank was organized in Boston, Mather vigorously opposed this.  Rather than an institution of Public Credit for the common good, the Land Bank was a scheme by speculators and corrupt merchants to line their own pockets.  Mather charged that by the private usurious practices of the Land Bank “We are reduced to [Thomas] Hobbes’ state of Nature.”

Human Development and Happiness

Cotton Mather’s greatest work was his 1710 Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good, and all of his economic and scientific writings are coherent with that essay’s message to “those who desire. . . to Do Good while they live.”  All of the advances achieved in Massachusetts—in manufacturing, navigation, surveying, and crucial scientific work in astronomy, physics and botany—contributed to the rapid development of a free, literate and skilled citizenry, unhindered by oligarchical control.

What was set into motion by the Winthrops, the Mathers and other early pioneers was a process of creating an anti-oligarchical culture, one coherent with the principle which Gottfried Leibniz later termed “Happiness.”  This effort proceeded through stages, with many reversals and crises, but in 1776 the call went forth—as a self-evident truth—that “All men are created equal,” and in 1789 a new Republic was formed, pledged to defend the General Welfare and secure the “Blessings of Liberty” for future generations.

What we are discussing here is the “Idea of America,” the well-spring from which all later great developments flowed.  Martin Luther King possessed a profound moral grasp of this issue, and Lyndon LaRouche battled for this ideal, this vision, throughout his life.

The Empire Says No!

In 1750 the British Government enacted the Iron Act.  That Act prohibited the construction of iron manufacturing in the American colonies, including the building of steel-making furnaces, iron mills and forges, and other facilities to make finished iron products.  Americans would only be allowed to produce raw pig and bar iron, which would then be exported to Britain.

This Act was a major contributing factor leading to the American Revolution, but the policy of prohibiting various kinds of manufacturing in the colonies began much earlier.  In 1699 Parliament prohibited the exportation of finished or semi-finished woolen products from all of the colonies.  Additionally, the colonists were not only prevented from exporting finished goods, but they were also prohibited from producing such goods for themselves.

Many, many types of “finished” manufactured goods were outlawed.  For example, the manufacture of hats was criminalized, and all hats had to be imported from England, even though the raw materials to produce the hats were abundant in America.  The intention of the British masters was to force the American colonists to accept a subservient role as a supplier of raw materials and unfinished goods to the manufacturing interests in Great Britain.  Numerous laws were passed in Parliament; decrees were issued by the Board of Trade and pronouncements came from the British monarch himself—all designed to prohibit manufacturing in the colonies.

However, the intention was even worse.  In 1660, leading members of the British oligarchy established the Royal Africa Company (RAC), under the direction of future King James II.  Its purpose was to clone the highly lucrative Jamaica/Barbados slave-labor “model” on to the colonies in North America.   Between 1672 and 1689 the RAC shipped more than 100,000 slaves into the 13 colonies, and these shipments not only continued, but escalated after 1700.  The policy of London was to enforce an economic model of slavery, low wages and raw-material production on the 13 colonies.

This imperial policy could only lead to Revolution, because America, from the beginning, had been founded on different principles, different conceptions as to the type of society the early colonists fought to develop.  The American Revolution was not a “tax revolt.”  It was a fight to create a more productive and happier future.