The Society for Useful Knowledge (28 page)

For Coxe, the wholehearted embrace of technology, including the improved steam engine recently developed by Scottish inventor James Watt, was vital. “Factories, which can be carried on by watermills, windmills, fire, horses and machines ingeniously contrived, are not burdened with any heavy expense of boarding, lodging, clothing and paying workmen, and they multiply the force of hands to a great extent without taking our people from agriculture,” he argued in a keynote address in the summer of 1787 to the new Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts, a number of whose members also took part in the Society for Political Inquiries.
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“In short,” Coxe concluded, “combinations of machines with fire and water have already accomplished much more than was expected from them by the most visionary enthusiast.”
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New labor-saving devices, assisted by inevitable technological innovation, would effectively inoculate America against the very social ills that Jefferson and many others feared—the creation of a large laboring underclass, dangerous and unhealthy conditions in the factories, and the diversion of manpower and other resources directed toward agriculture. Prudent deployment of technology would allow America to reap the full potential of its rich natural resources without endangering the republican vision Coxe had belatedly embraced.

Others were floating similar ideas, including the Boston financier James Swan. Another outspoken advocate of industry was Rittenhouse's nephew and biographer William Barton, who invoked Franklin's predictions that the American population would double every twenty-five years. “What, then, is to become of this vast increase of the inhabitants of our towns? They cannot be all laborers; and but a small part can engage in husbandry, the learned professions, or merchandize: consequently, the greater part must apply to trades and manufactures, or starve,” wrote Barton, now chairman of the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts.
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The Irish immigrant printer Matthew Carey, another in a long line of Franklin protégés, used the pages of his
American Museum
magazine to advance the cause of manufactures as fundamental to national independence.

But it was Tench Coxe in particular who brought together these different strands and forged what the critic Leo Marx has called a “prophetic vision of machine technology as the fulcrum of national power.”
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Unlike his warring patrons—Hamilton, who wanted to imitate and eventually challenge Great Britain, and Jefferson, who sought to withdraw for as long as possible into the deep pastoral recesses of the continent—Coxe saw that America was uniquely suited to the wholesale introduction of the machine. By the early years of the fast-approaching nineteenth century, such an idea would become as commonplace as it is today.

Coxe's own education at the College of Philadelphia had been cut short by the war, but his approach to knowledge was fully compatible with that of Franklin, Rittenhouse, Rush, and other American virtuosi. The son of a wealthy merchant family with roots among the early settlers, young Coxe had enjoyed easy access
to a range of books. As an adult his library overflowed with works on philosophy, history, grammar, and agronomy. But he was far more interested in the useful and practical than the theoretical or speculative, and his true métier lay with the comforting order provided by rows and columns of financial ledgers, industrial facts and figures, tables of agricultural production, customs forms, and the like. “To him what was useful was good, and what was good could best be described by incontrovertible statistical data,” concludes the only modern study of the man.
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In order to unleash America's enormous potential, Coxe advocated a strong, centralized government; protections from unfair foreign competition, particularly British dumping of cheap goods on the postwar market; settlement of the outstanding wartime debt to support a national currency and a workable credit regime; and the encouragement of cotton cultivation in the South and textile manufactures in the North. Most of all, he called for the unabashed application to industrial production of power technologies—steam, water, draft animals, or fire—and machines.

Residual doubts surrounding Coxe's political loyalties complicated his role as a spokesman for the manufacturing lobby, at a time when the real debate was not so much about specific policies as it was about two competing futures for America. Yet he was able to assert his views through his collaboration with Hamilton on the Treasury Department's Report on Manufactures, sent to Congress in December 1791. Many of the arguments in the report bear the distinctive hallmark of Coxe, who by then was serving as Hamilton's chief deputy. However, the document's outright refusal to acknowledge the concerns of the Jeffersonian Republicans, even rhetorically, and its assertion that manufacturing powers were in all ways superior to agrarian states were surely the work of the more pugnacious Hamilton.
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This American struggle over the proper place of manufactures was caught up in the wider “problem” of luxury, which has long troubled social thinkers. “Is not the Hope of one day being able to purchase and enjoy Luxuries a great Spur to Labor and Industry?” Franklin wondered in 1784, sounding much like his old coffeehouse interlocutor, the “facetious” Bernard Mandeville, who had scandalized Europe with its assertion that private vices fueled public benefits. “May not Luxury therefore produce more than it consumes,” asked Franklin, “if without such a Spur People would be as they are naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent?”
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Over the years, Franklin had gradually shed his opposition to American manufactures. As tensions mounted with the Crown in the late 1760s and early 1770s, he had begun to advocate the inalienable right of Americans to produce finished goods on a large scale, even those that competed directly with British industrial products, such as glass, china, and nails.
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Inspired by the nonimportation movements, Franklin asked why his countrymen should support the opulent lifestyles of British businessmen grown fat on exports of “flimsy manufactures.” Rather, he wrote from London in 1769, “we should disdain the thralldom we have so long been held in by this mischievous commerce, reject it forever, and seek our resources where God and Nature have placed them WITHIN OUR SELVES.”
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This represented a direct challenge to the entire British colonial system, not unlike Franklin's earlier assault on the economy of knowledge whereby Europe's virtuosi created “science” from American raw materials provided by the likes of John Bartram, Alexander Garden, and John Clayton. It was also an important step toward political and economic autonomy, and it explains Franklin's later interest in Tench Coxe, the apostle of American manufacturing and technological innovation.

The activist Hamilton, intent on the swiftest possible transformation of the new, untested federal structure into a permanent edifice of government, sought to direct the creative powers of the mechanics, inventors, and entrepreneurs toward this goal. “There is, at the present juncture, a certain fermentation of mind, a certain activity of speculation and enterprise which, if properly directed, may be made subservient to useful purposes,” Hamilton argued before Congress. Success in such a venture was, he assured his skeptical audience, a matter of national security, particularly in the event of war, and would ultimately guarantee the nation's true independence.
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As others had done before him, Hamilton turned to the indefatigable Coxe for assistance. So intent were the two men on their shared vision that they were seemingly prepared to beg, borrow, or steal their way to this industrial promised land. Coxe had already launched a private campaign of industrial espionage against the British, in an attempt to join private gain with public benefit. Likewise, Hamilton began to enrich his closest political cronies and business partners, if not himself, through shady land deals and other questionable transactions in support of private industry and the banks. And together, Hamilton and Coxe hatched a secret plan to create a “national manufactory” from scratch
in what was then the wilds of New Jersey—a scheme, they reckoned, that would set America on course for rapid and irreversible industrialization and generate considerable profits for them and their fellow insiders.
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Coxe formed a discreet partnership in 1787 with Andrew Mitchell, an expatriate Englishman, who agreed to return home, purchase or steal models and patterns of England's best industrial technology, and then smuggle them back to America in violation of strict British export controls. As a side venture, Mitchell would make a stopover to sell a copy of the plans to French textile interests, just as eager as the Americans to undermine British industrial superiority.
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According to a contract between Coxe and Mitchell, the scheme was “to procure for their joint and equal benefit and profit, and for the good of the United States, models and patterns of a number of machines and engines now used in the Kingdom of Great Britain … for manufacturing cotton.”
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However, Mitchell may well have swindled his American partner. He later informed Coxe that the British authorities had prevented his departure with the pirated materials after he had spent considerable amounts of his American partner's money to obtain them. A suitcase full of models that Mitchell claimed to have left behind for safekeeping was never found. Similar plans were clearly afoot as early as 1783, when a pair of British sympathizers in Philadelphia, including one of the early proponents of the American Philosophical Society, snapped up a British spinning machine that had been smuggled out of the country and returned it safely to England.
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Coxe and Hamilton also arranged for bounties to be paid to skilled British workmen, ideally plant foremen or other supervisors, who brought with them the secrets of modern textile technology, in particular the closely guarded designs of the engineer and inventor Richard Arkwright. In one such case, Coxe collaborated successfully with George Parkinson, an English weaver now living in Philadelphia, to introduce the latest British methods of spinning flax, hemp, and wool to the American market.

Even Jefferson, whose office of secretary of state then oversaw U.S. patents, set aside his general disapproval of manufactures and granted the assignment of intellectual property rights to Parkinson in 1791 for what was clearly a
purloined version of Arkwright's latest spinning machine.
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Meanwhile, an Arkwright employee, Samuel Slater, emigrated to Rhode Island, where he helped set up a successful enterprise using his former boss's system, known as the water frame, for harnessing moving water to power textile mills.

For Hamilton and Coxe, industrial piracy was only a stopgap measure. They were confident that in the long run America's technological advances could best be addressed by homegrown inventors such as Rittenhouse, master of the mechanical planetarium and other useful devices, rather than through outright theft. “On the subject of mechanism America may justly pride herself,” crowed Coxe. “Every combination of machinery may be expected from a country, a NATIVE SON of which, reaching this inestimable object at its highest point, has epitomized the motions of the spheres, that roll throughout the universe.”
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Coxe's utilitarian cast of mind, combined with his overweening ambition and ardent desire to restore the family fortune, impelled him to cut corners in pursuit of his political and personal goals. In this way, he represented the perfect partner for the equally striving figure of Hamilton, for whom the failure of his economic vision was unimaginable. “As to whatever may depend on enterprise, we need not fear to be outdone by any people on earth,” Hamilton later declared in defense of his policies. “It may almost be said that enterprise is our element.”
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Working together at the Treasury Department, Hamilton and Coxe pooled their organizational skills, business connections, and rhetorical talents to create what was in effect a test bed for their radical notions of state-backed industrialization and technological development.

The sheer ambition of the complex, to be known as the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, or SUM, was breathtaking. The project boasted an authorized capital of one million dollars, almost certainly greater than the total of all investment at the time in America's joint stock manufacturing enterprises and equivalent to around 2 percent of the nation's public debt.
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The Society would deploy some of the latest technology to power textile machines, sawmills, printing presses, and other industrial applications, including the dubious Parkinson patent and the water frame drive mechanism “borrowed” from Arkwright's original design. Hamilton even contracted with Pierre L'Enfant, the original architect of the new federal city under construction in Washington, to create a glorious national capital of industry.

Financial and political considerations dictated that the SUM be located near both Philadelphia, still the seat of the federal government, and New York, already a major center of commerce and finance. Hamilton was certain that he knew just the spot. In July 1778, as General Washington's aide-de-camp, he had enjoyed a brief respite from the war during a picnic on the banks of New Jersey's Passaic River in the company of his commander and other staff. The military men lunched on cold ham, tongue, and biscuits, washed down by “some excellent grog.” A freshwater spring bubbled underfoot, and the air was bathed in the cool mists thrown up by the nearby Great Falls, which sent plumes of water crashing over a rocky lip and into a basin carved into the basalt more than seventy feet below.
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