Charles R. Morris Quotes

It's clear that North took some original steps in that direction, but Hall probably had the most complete approach and should get the most credit. But for Hall, unfortunately, the data are all impressionistic - what people said. None of his machinery survived. His patents were all lost in the Patent Office fire.

I think it was the occasion of the final psychological break with Great Britain, in a way that had clearly not happened to that date, especially in New England and to som degree in the South.

I would speculate that a critical mass of the population has to internalize a middle class outlook first. International aid experience has demonstrated many times that just building railroads doesn't get you there. You need people ready to sue them.

The paradigm of the development of natural resource-based industry - meatpacking, lard, timber, iron and coal, grain. Cincinnati's lard processing plants looked a lot like JDR's oil refineries thirty years later.

The evolution was always to greater scale and speed. Other countries did that here and there - GB in textiles, Germany in steel - but we went in that direction almost across the board.

The Transcontinental Railroad Act is the first step in creating a continental common market.

My neck is too arthritic to snap around. The big shift in my perspective that happened in the writing process, however, was the paramount importance of the "West" epitomized by Cincinnati.

I've been in China enough to know that you shouldn't opine on it unless you speak Chinese and have lived there for twenty years. I wasn't pretending to be a China expert in that final chapter. I was just pointing, first to the parallels between Chinese behavior toward us and ours toward GB when we were at the same stage of development, and secondly to how much harder their development path is than ours was.

After I finished the Tycoons - on post-Civil War development - I realized how much I didn't know about the first half of the century, even though there had obviously been an enormous amount of development, so I read about and thought about that for a couple of years before I decided I was ready for a book.

For just a few dollars registration, you got temporary possession of a good piece of land. Live on it for five years, build a house, and farm it, and it was yours. What a brilliant economic stimulus!

The kind of precision manufacturing epitomized in the armories, while it was important, was only a small share of the economy until quite late in the century. Large-scale natural resource development and processing was the name of the game.

N truth, we don't know a whole lot of what Simeon North did. He did manage to match John Hall's ability to make interchangeable parts, but it's not clear how much of that came from Hall and how much was original with North.

The War of 1812 perhaps the least remembered of American wars because it was fought in such a left-handed slapdash manner on both sides.

John D. Rockefeller was certainly the first to create a consumer product that was sold literally throughout the entire world. Those blue 5-gallon cans showed up in some of the remotest parts of the world.

It wasn't openly talked about very much, in the sense that people said they wanted to beat GB at this or that, but there would however be sidelong comparisons frequently in press commentary. And it was also pretty quickly obvious that no other countries were developing the kind of technological depth of industry as were the US and the UK.

No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.

Credit is the air that financial markets breathe, and when the air is poisoned, there's no place to hide.

By 18th century standards, they [Great Britain] were the freest, most dynamic, most willing to challenge tradition and authority. They had the highest wages and highest living standard, and probably the most engagement between the populace and the government of any country. Then the United States took those same qualities to the nth degree, and the British were suddenly appeared stodgy and tradition-bound.

Merica was middle-class for the very start - the people who came first were hyper-strivers from England. There were no vested interests, no ranks, no classes, it was very lightly populated, there were unlimited natural resources - for free essentially - if you failed, you could always start over.

Business schools tend to focus on topics that are suitable to blackboards, so they overemphasize organization and finance. Until very recently, they virtually ignored manufacturing. I think of lot of the troubles of the 1970s and 1980s, and now more recently the 2000s can be traced pretty directly to the biases of the business schools.