This book charts the development of North America as we know it. Through its pages, author Simon Winchester reveals how that great land was discovered, mapped and tamed, and in particular he celebrates the cumulative achievements of the men who modelled it, from Thomas Jefferson, that visionary founding father determined to settle his people beyond the rippling Appalachians, to the blue-light techies crouched over screens on today’s Google server farms. Throughout, Winchester’s made-for-television style is immensely pleasurable.
The author sets out to answer the question, “How has America’s uniquely stable union been achieved?”, and in doing so he examines what he nicely calls “the strands of connective tissue that have allowed America to achieve all it has, and yet to keep itself together while doing so”.
Winchester arranges his material into five parts around the so-called classical elements – wood, earth, water, fire and metal – each with a time frame. Wood covers 1785 to 1805; Metal, 1835 to “Tomorrow”. Winchester tells much of his story via a series of engaging biographies of explorers, surveyors, scientists and engineers. John Wesley Powell, geologist and first explorer of the Grand Canyon, worked without most of his right arm, as it had been shot off at the Battle of Shiloh. Powell was already famous; many of the characters discussed in these pages are less well known.
Winchester pioneered the genre of popular narrative history. His many previous books include the bestselling The Surgeon of Crowthorne, about the men who compiled the Oxford English Dictionary. Born an Englishman, Winchester now lives in Massachusetts. His admiration for his adopted homeland, and respect for those who forged it, shine out from every page of The Men Who United the States, as does the author’s genuine feeling for the landscape as he criss-crosses the country, following his subjects from the boundaries of the Great Plains to the breakers of Northern California. At one point he stays with a family named Angel in a town called Paradise.
Winchester understands that specificity is what counts, as it always does in writing. He ably conjures the dusty creak of wagons on the rutted Oregon Trail, or the glint of new snow on the Rockies’ Wind River Range, spotted by a pioneer standing on the Continental Divide. His style is colloquial and easy, and one is inclined to forgive a weakness for cliché, and some slapdash prose (“he manned up and returned to face the music”; “But all this cut no ice with Eisenhower”).
Although there is little that is new in these pages, Winchester has found a fresh way of knitting his material together. In a meditation on Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous (or infamous) “frontier thesis”, Winchester writes convincingly that “the frontier mentality, if such a thing truly exists, still plays a nourishing and controversial role at the intellectual roots of much of today’s American foreign policy”. The author has read prodigiously, and has pounded the trail with equal diligence. In his book he quotes widely and judiciously from primary sources.
At times, Winchester’s five-part division can feel tendentious. That said, it was pleasing to read of first after first: crossings, fordings, maps, telegraph poles, telephones. The description in the Water section of the introduction to America of the canal is gripping. Winchester writes about the South Hadley Canal in Central Massachusetts. Built in 1792, and only a couple of miles long, it bypassed the rapids on the fall line of the Connecticut River by deploying a vast water-filled iron bath on wheels, a thing called a “caisson” in which ships floating serenely inside could be winched on iron rails up the slope by a pair of gigantic chains, the whole ensemble powered by waterwheels.
Although Winchester acknowledges that atrocities perpetrated against America’s indigenous peoples run “entirely contrary to the thesis of this book”, there is little information or analysis of this topic. Similarly, not much is said of the women who made things happen behind the scenes. But even an author as nimble as Winchester could not cover everything.
Of course, the railroad turned out to be the most dramatic development of all. As Winchester says, support for the extension of the railway lines developed into a “mania”, and remained so, with breaks only for the Civil War (1861-65) and, later, the Great Depression. Within 30 years, 27,000 miles of rail became operational in America. Winchester is very good on all that. Mechanisation, he shows, turned into an unstoppable trajectory. He goes on to deal adroitly with the Interstate Highway System: “the greatest engineering project in world history”.
I can imagine Winchester now, striding across the screen, telling his story with aplomb. “The electron”, he writes in his Metal chapter, “would take over from the spur, the saddle, and the hammered iron shoe, and matters would never be the same again.” He concludes with the information age: “The internet was formed in America, based in America, a godchild of all the earlier technologies born or first used in America that helped to connect its people and landscape as one, and now its business is in connecting the world."
William Collins, 471 pp, Telegraph offer price: £23 plus £1.35 p&p (RRP £25). Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk