mrchristiandpierce

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  • Trump and the British Monarch

    It is a striking coincidence that on the very day I signed my name to join the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, King George III’s descendant—King Charles III—was welcomed with great ceremony in Washington, D.C. More than two centuries have passed since the American Revolution, and as we mark its 250th anniversary, it is worth remembering the men who sacrificed their lives to establish the Republic we inhabit today.

    King Charles III may be a genial figure, but his ancestor George III was, in the eyes of the revolutionaries, a tyrant who sought to suppress the very freedoms—such as free expression—that I now exercise on this blog. Yet 250 years later, under the 47th President of the United States, the world has changed so dramatically that the grandson of that “tyrant” is honored with state dinners. To illustrate the strangeness of this reversal, some commentators have suggested that it would be unimaginable for Israel to host Adolf Hitler’s grandson at a state dinner 250 years after World War II had Germany emerged victorious.

    The American revolutionaries never marched on London to abolish the monarchy; instead, the young United States found itself invaded again in 1812. But the former colonies—now the United States—repelled British forces at places like New Orleans and Detroit, demonstrating that future invasions from Canada would be futile.

    President Trump has repeatedly criticized NAFTA, the treaty that removed trade barriers with Canada, the United States’ largest trading partner. His tariff policies moved even further toward dismantling the agreement, insisting that Canada should pay for the privilege of trading with the world’s largest economy. Under Commonwealth arrangements, the King of England remains Canada’s Head of State, even though Canada gained the authority to conduct its own foreign policy after World War I—a reward, as some historians note, for its loyalty to the Crown during the conflict.

    This creates a diplomatic paradox. The man being received in Washington—King Charles III—is, constitutionally, the Canadian Head of State. British commentators often describe him as an apolitical figure, yet his presence raises questions. If he cannot discuss politics because he is unelected and above partisan matters, then with whom does the United States discuss its political relationship with Canada? The Canadian Prime Minister is the Head of Government, not the Head of State. This division may help explain why U.S.–Canadian relations have become increasingly strained, especially on economic matters, since Charles III cannot engage in political dialogue with President Trump.

    After winning reelection in 2024, President Trump intensified his tariff strategy, targeting both Canada and Mexico for what he described as unfair economic practices. Critics on the Left, including former President Biden, argued that these actions damaged relations with long-standing allies. Supporters on the Right countered that the previous administration had already weakened the nation.

    A year and a half after the tariffs were imposed—and after the American President threatened to annex Canada or make it the “51st state”—the Canadian Head of State, King Charles III, has remained silent on the diplomatic tensions. Because he is constitutionally barred from political engagement, he cannot address the issues directly. This creates a potentially unstable situation: a Head of State who cannot discuss matters of state with another Head of State.


    This highlights one of the advantages of the American system established in 1776. In the United States, the Head of State and the Head of Government are the same person. The President cannot avoid political responsibility at home or abroad. By contrast, how can a Head of State like King Charles III be formally received by the United States while lacking the authority to discuss critical trade issues involving Canada—a nation of which he is also the Head of State?

  • The Civil War: The Battle of the Wilderness

    The Civil War: The Battle of the Wilderness

    The Opening of Grant’s Overland Campaign
    On March 9, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and placed in command of all Union armies. Almost immediately, he began shaping a new strategy aimed at defeating Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and capturing Richmond. This plan would become known as the Overland Campaign.

    For the first time in the war, the Union coordinated its major armies in a synchronized offensive. As William T. Sherman advanced toward Atlanta, Grant and George G. Meade would push directly toward Lee, while Benjamin Butler and Franz Sigel launched supporting operations. Grant intended for the Army of the Potomac to keep pressing the Confederates relentlessly fighting until something finally broke.



    Crossing the Rapidan and Entering the Wilderness
    Grant began the campaign camped north of the Rapidan River. With 115,000 men, he crossed the river unopposed. His goal, much like Joseph Hooker’s at nearby Chancellorsville the year before, was to force Lee out of his fortified positions. But Grant’s long supply train lagged behind, and on March 4 he halted the march to let it close the gap. That pause left his army tangled in the dense, unforgiving terrain of the Wilderness.

    Grant positioned his forces along the Orange–Fredericksburg Turnpike and the Orange Plank Road—routes he expected Lee to use.

    May 5: The Battle Erupts
    At dawn on May 5, Confederate General Richard Ewell’s corps, moving along the turnpike, collided with Gouverneur Warren’s V Corps. Fighting escalated quickly. Grant rushed John Sedgwick’s corps forward and ordered Winfield Scott Hancock’s troops—already ahead of the main army—to double back.

    Lee, though outnumbered, had no intention of letting the Union army escape the Wilderness without a brutal fight.

    Confederate Countermoves
    Lee planned to strike with two corps advancing on parallel roads:

    • Ewell on the turnpike
    • A.P. Hill on the Orange Plank Road
      Both would hit the Union army at right angles to its line of march. Lee hoped to delay major action until James Longstreet’s corps arrived, but the intensity of the Union attacks forced his hand.
    • Brigadier General Charles Griffin pushed Ewell’s men back, but the thick underbrush caused confusion and exposed Union flanks. Ewell counterattacked, regained lost ground, and—still under orders to avoid a full engagement—dug in to wait for Longstreet.
    • On the Plank Road, A.P. Hill faced Hancock’s aggressive assault. The fighting seesawed violently until nightfall, with the dry woods catching fire and filling the battlefield with choking smoke.

      May 6: Longstreet Arrives
      At 5 a.m. on May 6, Grant renewed the offensive. Ewell’s corps suffered heavy losses but held the turnpike. On the Plank Road, Hancock’s attack nearly shattered Hill’s exhausted troops—until Longstreet’s corps arrived dramatically on the field.
    • Rallied by Lee himself, Longstreet’s men slammed into the Union left, exploiting a gap and driving the Federals back. Union General James Wadsworth was mortally wounded in the chaos. Moments later, Longstreet was accidentally shot by his own men, abruptly halting the Confederate momentum. Lee paused to reorganize.

      Burnside Enters the Fight
      Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps soon attacked, breaking the lull. Lee stabilized his lines and pushed Burnside back toward the Union breastworks along Brock Road. Those log defenses caught fire, and the flames briefly helped the Confederates drive the Federals out. But fresh Union reinforcements arrived and ultimately forced the Confederates back for good.

      Aftermath
      By the next day, the fighting had ceased. Both armies rested amid staggering losses: Grant had lost more than 17,500 men, Lee around 8,000—numbers reminiscent of Chancellorsville. But this time, the Union army did not retreat across the Rapidan.
    • Instead, Grant ordered the army to march south. When the troops realized they were advancing rather than withdrawing, cheers erupted. The Overland Campaign—and a new, relentless phase of the war—had begun.

  • A Dissertation About the Vietnam War and Soviet Military Aid

    Scholarly debate surrounding the history of the Vietnam War includes several key issues. A central approach to writing its history by orthodox historians not long after the end of the war was that, it was unnecessary to fight and the policies that led to it were foolhardy.1 These writers were followed by revisionists who wrote about the war differently emphasizing that it was a good cause that failed to contain communism, but it was defeated by civil unrest and political conflict at home.2 Post-revisionism focused upon the actions of the Vietnamese doing the fighting, and it wrote about the complications and unexpectedness involved in the war.3 Recently, writers have taken the approach of examining the war from Vietnamese and global perspectives.4

    This dissertation focuses upon how Soviet military aid influenced North Vietnamese strategy. It employs the use of archival evidence that is predominantly contained within recently declassified documents in American scholarly databases and research institutions. Most archives from Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi are limited since the current regime has not made sources from the Vietnam War publicly available (e.g., the Party, the Military, the Foreign Ministry).5 Some writers gained access to good sources at the Ministry of the Interior in Vietnam. This dissertation makes good use of archival evidence involving Soviet military aid that are in United States repositories.

    The topic of this dissertation fits into the recent historiographical efforts to explain the war from the vantage point that America was defeated by North Vietnam. It encompasses the strategy that secured victory for the North and its allies. Research on Soviet military aid yields evidence that the Soviets increased their aid after the Americans undertook Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965.6 The U.S. also attacked Hanoi in 1972 during Operation Linebacker II. Hanoi was heavily defended by Soviet provided antiaircraft missiles (SA-2s) or SAMs, and the North Vietnamese employed the use of Soviet advisers and radar systems. Many American B-52s were used during these bombing campaigns of North Vietnam, and these bombers were often defended by fighter jets to protect them. Some jets would precede the bombers, fly the same course and, try and eliminate the North Vietnamese antiaircraft installations before the B-52s arrived.7 The defense of Hanoi was a central strategic victory for the North (forced the U.S. to the negotiation table after Linebacker II) even though in many wars the strategic value of the capital city is not necessarily so essential that its loss leads to defeat. General George Washington lost the battle of Brandywine, which determined control of Philadelphia, to the British. However, he did not make a strong effort to defend the city, as he believed other areas held greater strategic value.

    This dissertation analyzes archival documents that contain information about Soviet aid shipments. Intelligence memoranda from the Vietnam War era are examined in the archives, and accounts of attacks of both sides are used to explain not only the sources of military hardware and advisers but also how effectively the hardware performed. For example, were Soviet made antiaircraft systems devastating American aircraft trying to bomb the North or is this overplayed and U.S. aircraft managed to succeed in crippling the North’s economy and Hanoi’s war effort? The amounts and types of weapons provided by the Soviet Union are important to answering this dissertation’s questions along with which weapons were having the most devastating effect on American aircraft.8 Another question is, how did North Vietnam employ the military aid they were receiving?


    North Vietnam made intense efforts to keep authority within their own sphere, and they did not want to fight the war how China or the Soviets wanted them to. They knew accepting Soviet aid would lead to the Soviets pressuring them to enter a ceasefire with the U.S. The North Vietnamese communist regime made many strategic decisions independently, including key attacks on the South (e.g., Tet Offensive, Easter Offensive). These actions ultimately enabled them to unite all of Vietnam under communism after Southern forces collapsed roughly two years following the American withdrawal under the 1973 ceasefire agreement. Did Soviet aid play a key factor in the capitulation of the South, or did it have no appreciable effect? One way to analyze this is to examine when the Soviet aid shipments were cut back and if this led to greater American or South Vietnamese military victories.9

    The defense of Hanoi from American strategic bombers could not have been effectuated without Soviet military equipment. Many historians believe the U.S. bombing attacks on Hanoi failed or the objective was unmet. This dissertation expounds upon that idea and further examines not only how Soviet aid enabled the North to sustain its war effort successfully, but also how that aid was a central factor in the United States’ eventual defeat in the war.

    Christian Pierce is a PhD student at Liberty University. He has a master’s degree in military history and, has experience researching and writing about many American wars, including Vietnam. His strengths include a comprehension of military strategy, in addition to a solid grasp of military history throughout the ages.

    1. Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 6th ed.New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013. ↩︎
    2. Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2009. ↩︎
    3. Gaiduk, Ilya V. The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. ↩︎
    4. Nguyen, Lien-Hang T. Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. ↩︎
    5. Ibid., p.5. ↩︎
    6. Central Intelligence Agency, “Patterns and Trends in Soviet Military Assistance in Vietnam,” declassified memorandum, April 17, 1972. CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room. Accessed November 9, 2025, https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/pattersn-and-trends-soviet-military-assistance-vietnam. ↩︎
    7. Drenkowski, Dana, and Lester W. Grau. 2007. “Patterns and Predictability: The Soviet Evaluation of Operation Linebacker II.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 20 (4): 559–607. doi:10.1080/13518040701703096. ↩︎
    8. Memorandum, “Value of Soviet Military Aid to North Vietnam,’ September 3, 1965. Johnson Library, NSF, Country File, Vietnam, Special Intelligence Material, vol. VII, box 50. ↩︎
    9. “Soviet Arms Aid to Hanoi is Down,” The New York Times, April 13, 1972. Accessed Nov. 2, 2025. NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE RE: SOVIET ARMS AID TO HANOI IS DOWN ↩︎

  • Discovering your Ancestors

    When researching your genealogy, the process can initially feel daunting, especially when census records are difficult to find. With persistence, however, the effort often pays off, and a researcher may uncover ancestors they never expected to be connected to. That was the case for my father before he passed away. Like many people, he was simply curious about the identities of the forebears who had settled in the United States, in some cases centuries earlier. He had long wondered whether he had Mayflower lineage, and he was not surprised when he eventually confirmed that he was descended from Richard Warren, who arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts aboard that historic vessel.

    As he continued his research, the process became easier, especially once he reached the period when record keeping in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had become more systematic and reliable. Tracing his mother’s ancestry further back, he eventually discovered that he was related to a veteran of the Revolutionary War. The revelation was all the more striking because the man from whom he was directly descended was Brigadier General Ebenezer Learned.

    Discoveries like this can lead a researcher down entirely new paths, especially when they uncover an illustrious ancestor such as General Learned. The experience is exhilarating, and it sparks a deeper curiosity about the life and character of someone you never knew you were connected to. Many people have had similar experiences, and they often find community in heritage organizations such as the Society of the Cincinnati.

    General Learned was raised in Oxford, Massachusetts, where his grandfather had been among the town’s earliest settlers. His father, Ebenezer Learned Sr., rose to the rank of colonel in the Massachusetts militia. It was his son, however, who distinguished himself during the American Revolution, leading his regiment with notable valor at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. Under the overall command of General Horatio Gates, the Continental Army defeated British General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, capturing an entire British force for the first time in the war and marching them from the field as prisoners of the United States.

    The victory at Saratoga proved to be a decisive turning point in the Revolution. It convinced France that the American cause had a genuine chance of success, prompting the French to enter the conflict as allies—an alliance that fundamentally reshaped the balance of power against their long‑standing British rivals.

    This American war hero was also the first man to enter Boston on March 17, 1776, after the British evacuated the city following the Battle of Dorchester Heights. General George Washington ordered him to take the lead because Learned had already survived smallpox and therefore could not contract the disease again—a crucial consideration in the contagion‑ridden capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He led a battalion of 500 men into the city to begin clearing the devastation the British left behind. Earlier, while still a colonel, he had commanded a company of minutemen en route to Boston when he received news of the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775.

    There is comparatively little research material available to historians on the colonial militia prior to the American Revolution, but one notable work does mention the young Captain Ebenezer Learned during his service in the French and Indian War. In A People’s Army, historian Fred Anderson observes, “Fortunately, Rufus Putnam’s memoirs offer a superb portrait of such an officer: Putnam’s first company commander, Captain Ebenezer Learned.”1 But there is a telling irony in the story, too: its main event is a desertion, which Learned very capably led.

    Discovering that we had relatives like General Learned in our family tree was deeply rewarding, and it underscores how genealogical research can reshape—and even deepen—your understanding of yourself.

    1. Anderson, Fred. A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984 ↩︎

  • Christianity and the Slave Trade

    “Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?”
    Romans 6:16

    Christianity teaches believers that sinners’ souls become enslaved through their disobedience to God. In the United States, legal slavery persisted until 1808—more than twenty years after the Constitution was ratified by the original thirteen states. Some early Americans likened the new nation to the Hebraic Republic described in Deuteronomy, where Moses establishes the Ten Commandments as divinely ordained law. The Israelite Sanhedrin was even invoked by some as a conceptual model for the United States Senate, a comparison strengthened by the phonetic resemblance of the names.1 The Old Testament also contains the well‑known account of Moses liberating the Israelites from Egyptian bondage.

    Anthony Benezet, a French‑born American abolitionist, lived in Philadelphia and joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) while residing in London in 1727 as a Huguenot refugee. He immigrated to America in 1731 and soon became outspoken in condemning slavery as incompatible with the Christian faith.2 In his Notes on the Slave Trade &c., Benezet recounts an unsuccessful slave rebellion in 1749 aboard a ship on which he was traveling. The vessel was transporting 170 enslaved Africans from Guinea, purchased by traders from one of the so‑called “Negro Kings.”3 After two weeks at sea, the captives “formed a design of recovering their natural right, liberty, by rising and murdering every man on board; but the goodness of the Almighty rendered their scheme abortive.”⁴4 The sailors discovered the plot, suppressed it, and executed the ringleader through brutal torture.

    Benezet’s Notes reveal a man in deep moral and religious reflection, particularly on the sinfulness of mistreating others whose souls, he reminds his readers, are “immortal as your own.” Quakers had already become a nonviolent sect, in part because some of their members had been executed by the ostensibly “Christian” authorities of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Benezet rebukes slave traders directly, urging them to abandon the practice. He warns, “Then will the great God deal with you, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands.”5 This short abolitionist work exemplifies how an eighteenth‑century Quaker invoked Christian doctrine to persuade others to oppose slavery, grounded in his belief that God would ultimately repay cruelty with divine justice.

    Benezet employs the theological concept of retribution to encourage moral behavior. In his view, slave traders accumulate guilt even when they delegate violence to others and merely finance the shedding of blood. He insists, “Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right…”6 Opposition to the African slave trade thus resonated with the principles later invoked by the revolutionaries at Lexington and Concord, reflecting a broader Christian theological foundation for early American arguments against tyranny and bondage.




    1. Shalev, Eran. American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. Yale University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bmxz. ↩︎
    2. Armistead, Wilson. Life of Anthony Benezet. Philadelphia: Sherman and Company ↩︎
    3. Benezet, Anthony. Notes on the slave trade, &c. [Philadelphia?]: n.p., [178?]. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926 (accessed May 30, 2025). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CY0101205784/SABN?u=vic_liberty&sid=bookmark-SABN&xid=242c314d&pg=3 ↩︎
    4. Ibid. ↩︎
    5. Ibid. ↩︎
    6. Ibid. ↩︎

  • The Cause and Recovery of the Great Depression; The Austrian School and its Adherents

    Economic downturns have deleterious effects on a nation’s well-being and, can spread to other nations like a tornado wreaking havoc as it goes. The United States economy collapsed in 1929, and economists today describe it as a dramatic turn of events (rather than merely a recession) due to the totality of its results which included the numbers of lives impacted and how much money people lost.

    These periods of decline in economies are analyzed statistically in the modern world and, they are often described as related to ‘boom-bust’ cycles. The graphical (x/y axes) representation of economic events in capitalist societies show a line that progresses chronologically and indicates upswings and downswings (otherwise known colloquially as peaks and valleys) of some sort of variable plotted on the y axis (e.g., GDP, unemployment) compared to months or years on the x axis.

    Historians rely on economic data to allow them to compare time periods so they can describe past events accurately. There are many different theories that try and explain the causes and recovery of the Great Depression that occurred during the late 1920s and early 1930s. One economic school of thought that does this is called the Austrian School of Economic Theory. Carl von Menger (died 1921) was a Viennese Economist, and he was the founder of this School. He tutored Crown Prince Rudolf (committed suicide with his mistress) who was the heir to the Habsburg throne in Vienna. His seminal work was Principles of Economics (1871).1



    Two of the leading theorists in that school are Ludwig von Mises, who wrote The Theory of Money and Credit (1924), and Friedrich von Hayek, who wrote Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933).2 Both of these economists lived through the Great Depression and well beyond. Both had ancestors who were German/Austrian Royals since we see “von” in their surnames. Von Hayek fought for the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War One and was a professor for a time at the University of Chicago (before that he analyzed Federal Reserve and American economic data with Professor Jenks at New York University when he was an assistant there).3 Von Mises emigrated to the United States and lived there until his death (1973) after having fled the Nazis (he was Jewish). Hayek shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974 with Gunnar Myrdal.

    There is no consensus about the causes of the Great Depression. The end of the use of the gold standard (during World War One) in the United States and Europe is often held liable for contributing to the economic problems during the Interwar Years. There is another popular belief that the Stock Market Crash in 1929 caused the Depression. Most economists hold that neither of these two concepts could have been blameworthy.

    The Austrian School of Economics focuses upon several fundamental ideas that can be applied to an analysis of the causes of the Great Depression and its subsequent recovery. Mainly, it supports the concept that business cycles go through ‘booms’ and ‘busts’ due to government manipulation of interest rates (The Federal Reserve System). Too many low interest loans are allocated using lower credit worthiness standards. This profligate, wasteful lending fuels a ‘boom’ that cannot be sustained and the economy at some point later ‘busts.’ This is due to the fact that artificially lowered interest rates (not done by the market) fool investors into believing good investment opportunities exist, especially in capital goods. The Austrian School called this ‘malinvestment.’ At this point capital needs to be reallocated and liquidated (sold off) since the malinvestment creates poor allocation of resources.

    The Austrian School theory of the causes of the Great Depression is referred to as ‘heterodox’ by modern economists since it is not considered mainstream (e.g., Keynesian or Monetarist Theory). Keynesians take a demand driven approach (consumption and investment were reduced by a lack of demand) while Monetarists see the Depression having been at first a typical recession that became exacerbated by a serious shrinking of the money supply.

    According to Fred E. Foldvary in, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, “The Austrian business cycle theorem begins with the interest rate. In
    Austrian thought, the rate of interest is based on ‘time preference.’ As a fundamental premise of economics in general, time preference is the proposition that most people usually prefer to obtain goods sooner rather than later.”4 Included in this idea is that there is a ‘natural interest rate’ that is a correlate of time. It is common sense that if a purchase is delayed because a consumer has no access to money there would not be any interest paid at all. If they do not want to delay their purchase and they want a product immediately, but have no way to pay for it, they borrow money to do it. Hypothetically, with no central bank in a market that is entirely ‘free,’ the interest rate would reflect the value of the ‘real interest rate’ that people would pay based upon how much value they would receive by buying the good now rather than in the future.

    The Austrian School believes that it is the inappropriate meddling with this interest rate in an artificial manner that causes recessions and depressions. Basically, money is lent ineffectively in the above scenario, and the real economy (rather than an imaginary one) gets adversely impacted with price and spending distortions. Hayek put it best when he said, “[t]he cause of cyclical fluctuations is that because of the elasticity of the value of money, the rate of interest is not always equal to the equilibrium rate but is in the short run determined by banking liquidity.”5 The Austrian School Economists believe the American Great Depression was caused by a distortion in the previous ‘boom’ in the 1920s due to the lowered interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve (prior to 1929). Ultimately, they held the economy recovered not by the actions of the American Government’s stimulus policies (they did not enact any), but it recovered on its own.

    1. Menger, Carl. Principles of Economics. Trans. by James Dingwell and Bert Hoselitz. New York: New York University Press, 1976. ↩︎
    2. Mises, Ludwig von. The Theory of Money and Credit. trans. by H.E. Batson. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1924.; Hayek, Friedrich von. Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle. Trans. by N. Kaldor and H. Croome. New York; Augustus M. Kelley, 1933. ↩︎
    3. A.J. Tebble. F.A. Hayek. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010, p., 4-5. ↩︎
    4. Foldvary, Fred E. “The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 74, no. 2 (2015): 278–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43818666. ↩︎
    5. Hayek, Friedrich von. Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle. Trans. by N. Kaldor and H. Croome. New York; Augustus M. Kelley, 1933. ↩︎

  • Rags to Riches: A Narrative Tale of Henry Ford.

    Often described as the “father of the American automobile” Michigan’s son, Henry Ford, emerged from modest economic roots and only an eighth-grade education to become one of the wealthiest men in the United States. He was born in the midst of the American Civil War and, was raised in the Midwest in present day Detroit where the international megacorporation he founded is still headquartered today. Yet, the contribution he made to automobile manufacturing in the U.S.A. was not achieved in a skyrocketing fashion without any failure. His first venture, Detroit Automobile Company founded in 1899, was a disaster for himself and his investors. They lost $86,000 and only built twenty vehicles. 1 As the old adage goes, “if at first you don’t succeed try, try, again” and Mr. Ford did, and then some. He dusted himself off to the tune of a net worth in today’s money of $200 billion at the time of his death.

    World War One (1914-1918) plunged the nation into a disastrous struggle where an acceptable practice in the nation’s economy was collectivism. According to Murray Rothbard in, The Costs of War; America’s Pyrrhic Victories, “Militarism, conscription, massive intervention at home and abroad, a collectivized war economy, all came about during the war and created a mighty cartelized system that most of its leaders spent the rest of their lives trying to recreate, in peace as well as war.”2 A central debate surrounding the Progressive Era in American economic history is over “political capitalism.”

    Controversial theorists such as Gabriel Kolko in, The Triumph of Conservatism, suggested that industrial leaders virtually conspired with governmental leaders to create legislation that led to the lessening of laissez-faire economics so the large industrial concerns could eliminate the small businesses and control the market.3 Kolko’s scholarship has been greatly questioned by some including Bradley and Donway in, The Independent Review . 4 These authors found his research and fundamental premise to be flawed in several ways. His emphasis on railroads, for example, as a model for his ideas of big business and big government being connected to eliminate competition of smaller firms was considered erroneous since railroads from the beginning were understood by all as being special entities that were partially government controlled.5

    Kolko in, The Triumph of Conservatism, makes the statement that, “The automobile industry is an excellent example of a fundamental technological innovation that led to a proliferation of wealth in new hands and the creation of new centers of power in the economy.”6 Henry Ford in the first decade of the 20th century was engaged in a bitter struggle with some major companies at the time (Packard Motor Company and Olds Motor Works) over the patent (Seldon) on the combustion engine. These large automobile manufacturers appeared to be engaging in what Kolko accused big business of doing, namely trying to eliminate smaller businesses, such as Ford’s, through charging royalties on cars made that were infringing the patent.

    The Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (1903) charged a one and a quarter percent royalty on the retail price of any newly made automobiles. They would not give Henry Ford a license and it became a contentious legal battle that Ford eventually won on appeal even though he had been ignoring the patent and manufacturing cars anyway. The court broke up the Seldon association instead. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce was formed in 1915 to assist all manufacturers in licensing routine patents amongst themselves. This helped stimulate competition within the auto Industry.7 A staggering output figure from the time is that in 1904, there were 19,000 automobiles manufactured nationwide, but by 1919, there were 1,557,000 cars made.

    Henry Ford began manufacturing the Model T in 1908, and it was considered the first mass produced car aimed at affordability for Middle-Class Americans. Ford pioneered the assembly line style in his Detroit Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, and this mass-produced cars so efficiently he was able to offer his, “Tin Lizzie,” at only $290 in 1924, which was a significant savings compared to the 1910 price which was $780. By 1927 Ford Motor Company had manufactured 15,000,000 of the Model T and they all had interchangeable parts.8

    Ford’s Model T had an inline four-cylinder engine with a mere 20 horsepower compared to today with 200 hp being ubiquitous. The car achieved a fuel economy of between 13-21 mpg and it could reach a top speed of 42 mph.9 Topping that, it not only ran on gasoline, but it was also able to run on kerosene or ethanol if the owner saw fit. Ford moved the steering wheel to the left and this soon became the industry standard with all other manufacturers following suit. The automobile wizard applied for a patent for his new transmission (both engine and transmission were enclosed), and it was awarded in 1911. These entrepreneurial designs in manufacturing and in innovation made his cars very popular as they were a joy to tool around town in back in the early Twentieth Century.

    As wealthy as the great industrialist Henry Ford became, he is still noteworthy historically for having pioneered “welfare capitalism.” In 1914, the world was stunned when he announced he would more than double his workers’ wages with a $5 daily wage ($157 in 2025). This proved to significantly improve turnover rates in his company as well as attract top notch talent.10 He was a model of an extremely successful Progressive Era capitalist whose leadership developed his company into one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers. That reputation continues today evidenced by the fact that its Ford F150 truck remained the highest selling vehicle model in the United States for almost fifty years until the Toyota RAV4 took that title away in 2024.

    1. Cabadas, Joe. River Rouge: Ford’s industrial Colossus. Motorbooks, MBI Publishing ↩︎
    2. Rothbard, Murray. The Costs of War; America’s Pyrrhic Victories. “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.” ed. John Denson. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999. ↩︎
    3. Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism; A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916. New York: The Free Press, 1963. ↩︎
    4. Bradley,Robert L.,,Jr and Roger Donway. “Reconsidering Gabriel Kolko: A Half-Century Perspective.” The Independent Review 17, no. 4 (Spring, 2013): 561-76, https://go.openathens.net/redirector/liberty.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/reconsidering-gabriel-kolko-half-century/docview/1335077884/se-2. ↩︎
    5. Ibid. ↩︎
    6. Kolko. Triumph. p., 43. ↩︎
    7. Ibid. p.,44. ↩︎
    8.  Hounshell, David A. (1984), From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 978-0-8018-2975-8, LCCN 83016269, OCLC 110481011 ↩︎
    9. “Ford Model T Specs.” Retrieved April 10, 2025. ↩︎
    10. Nevins, Allan. Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1954. ↩︎

  • Growth in the Postbellum Economy: The Comparison of Two Sectors

    One aspect of the postbellum economy that has interested scholars is agricultural productivity growth. Any outside observer (non-economist) interested in the labor component to the Civil War struggle (liberation of slaves-agricultural workers in the South) would concern themselves naturally with whether the War’s outcome resulted in an increase in agricultural productivity across the nation as a whole. Two sectors (number of agricultural workers versus number of non-agricultural workers) of the economy can be analyzed to aid in determining whether agricultural output had risen. The historiography of the topic must also include the efforts of economists as it is a question relevant to economic history.

    Prior to 1966, the consensus amongst scholars was that agricultural productivity increased throughout the 19th Century steadily. Marvin Towne and Wayne Rasmussen (1960) published findings on gross farm product that corroborated this. However, Stanley Lebergott published data in 1966 that caused a debate concerning this and his figures suggested agricultural productivity growth was actually slower after the Civil War compared to before. Now it appeared postbellum productivity was not as previously thought and was surprisingly lower than before the War. Yet, Thomas Weiss in 1993 questioned the Lebergott data and was found to be accurate.

    The method used to analyze agricultural output is simply the number of workers in the agricultural sector. This is designated by the United States Census Bureau, and these tables can be examined for the postbellum period. In this blog, the study’s purpose is to compare the increase or decrease of agricultural workers to nonagricultural workers and show that both sectors grew thus there was more productivity in both. The statistics show that in the postbellum period, agricultural output (measured by number of workers gainfully employed in that sector) grew. Concomitantly, other sectors (or industries) had an increase in the number of workers. This analysis is not meant to show findings that indicate the agricultural output of the nation was higher after the War than before as Weiss concluded. It is merely meant to compare two sectors of the postbellum economy to each other concerning growth.

    The Census bureau changed the form used after 1910 to allocate the number of farm workers. These figures gleaned from that data can be applied to the data from earlier years that may not have included specific breakdowns on the census form of laborers who may have been farm workers. Statistical techniques can be used, such as logistic regression analysis, to determine to what degree certain characteristics may have affected the data after 1910. This can be applied to the postbellum period where the data is lacking, and it sheds insight on the gaps of knowledge that affect the data (how many “laborers” on the old census form were farm workers).

    According to Freedman, in Statistical Models and Shoe Leather, regression modeling can be suspect. He does not believe regression can provide answers in a causal argument. In this journal article, he believed, correlation is not the same as causation. A proper kind of theory or empirical validation is necessary, or conclusions cannot be trusted using linear or multilinear models of regression when applying these statistical tools to a causal argument. This study in this blog, is not engaging in speculation of causation. It is merely trying to compare two sectors of the postbellum economy concerning the growth of those sectors using data of numbers of workers.

    According to Weiss in 1880 there were 8,302,000 agricultural workers and then in 1900 there were 10,496,000. In nonagricultural work, according to the same researcher, there were 9,088,000 workers in 1880 and 18,574,000 in 1900. These figures clearly indicate that in the last two decades of the 19th Century there was growth in both sectors of the economy.

    Alfred Chandler wrote “Organizational Capabilities and the Economic History of the Industrial Enterprise,” which appeared in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (1992). He suggests the modern business entity first appeared in the 1880s. This was an era he describes as the Second Industrial Revolution. Modern transportation and communication networks (railroads, telegraph, steamships, cable systems) revolutionized deliveries of goods and services. Examining the labor statistics for this study we notice the significant growth in both sectors of the economy that were compared (agricultural and nonagricultural). Applying Chandler’s depiction of that highly significant time period economically, it gives a good backdrop to envision how the growth rates measured by the numbers of workers looked the way they did.

    Comparisons in economic history can be done using statistical data in a variety of ways. Data can be less reliable the further back researchers go in history due to unreliable archival results. New methods of compiling data surface as we see here when Weiss’ results contradicted Lebergott’s and the two researchers had different opinions on agricultural growth before and after the U.S. Civil War. Comparisons of data can be a valuable tool that aids historians trying to write narratives about the past. This comparison study using the numbers of workers in two different sectors of the economy shows how the American economy grew in the postbellum period. One tentative conclusion that can be made is that many ex-slaves may have remained in agricultural roles, and they may have stayed in that sector if and when they migrated to the North after the struggle.