Post Scripts: America’s love affair with bigness

I remember getting into a scuffle with a classmate one day in school. He was bigger than I was but the fight ended early when Miss Bertha Baker, our principle at Kensington elementary school, pulled us apart. I felt Miss Baker liked me because she told me later she thought I held my own quite nicely.

I don’t know why we are so enthralled with bigness, but the facts are America’s love affair with bigness began when Thomas Jefferson made a quick deal with Napoleon and nearly doubled the nation’s size with the Louisiana Purchase. This deal stretched young America from the Mississippi river to the Rocky Mountains. The Iran-Contra scandal was a picnic compared to the mess Jefferson created back then.

There is an explanation. Jefferson’s dilemma was at the time the fact the border of the U.S. ended at the Mississippi and the port of New Orleans was controlled by Spain. Upland American farmers were blocked from exporting their products by the way of the Appalachian Mountains to the east. Then Napoleon enters the picture and forced Spain to cede Louisiana to France. Jefferson was horrified, worried that the French army might show up at America’s back door.

It really gets complicated, friends. Jefferson’s response was to send James Monroe to France with authority to buy New Orleans for $2 million. Napoleon needed cash and offered to sell the entire Louisiana Purchase. The price was $15 million – the whole thing – for four cents an acre. This was an offer Monroe couldn’t refuse even at a time when the annual income of our government was about $8 million annually.

Even though newspapers were few and far between at that time, and CNN wasn’t even a dream, the word got back quickly to the United States that the big deal had been signed, and was about to be delivered by Monroe. Almost overnight the size of the United States doubled. Bigness is something of an addiction, but it was 26 years later that Jackson acted on America’s desire for more land.

Jackson was thinking westward and was determined to annex Texas. He cleared the way for the settling of land in the east and ordered all the Indians be moved west of the Mississippi river. This was ethnic cleansing of the worst order but something the history books don’t dwell on in detail.

Anyway, that’s how America got bigger. By 1900 half a billion acres had been disposed of and, wouldn’t you know, only 16 percent of that land went to the little guys for whom they were intended. Surprise! Politics hasn’t changed much.