Trade Secrets by Doron Ben-Atar

Author:Doron Ben-Atar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Flirting with Official Sponsorship of Technology Piracy

Shortly before taking office as the first president of the United States, Washington outlined to Thomas Jefferson, his future secretary of state, who was still in France, the goals of his administration. The promotion of American manufacturing and the development of inland navigation, Washington wrote his fellow Virginian, were “the greatest and most important object of internal concern.” He reported a discussion he recently had at Mount Vernon with “an English Gentleman, who has been many years introducing those [cotton] manufactures into France” in which they agreed that the young nation had great manufacturing potential that would materialize upon the introduction of efficient modern industrial technologies. The “introduction of the late-improved Machines to abridge labor,” he informed Jefferson “must be of almost infinite consequence to America.” The president’s first State of the Union Address was equally explicit. “I cannot forbear to you the expediency of giving effectual encouragement as well to the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad.”21

Washington had been a proponent of importing European technology since the end of the Revolutionary War. In the 1780s, determined to make the Potomac a major commercial artery in the economic life of the new nation, he tried to recruit a French engineer to come to Virginia and employ modern technology to dig a system of canals linking the river to the commonwealth’s plantations. He had supported James Rumsey’s efforts to develop a steamboat as part of the Potomac canal works.22 And in his public addresses the president articulated the expectations of proponents of American industrialization.

Washington was voicing the widespread expectation that the federal government would devote its energies to industrial development. The president and captains of industry set the tone by symbolic acts. In the fall of 1789 Washington traveled through the New England states in a highly celebrated affirmation of federal legitimacy. The people of the region showered him with joyous orations, parades, and dinners. Washington, in turn, made a point of wearing clothes made at the Hartford Woolen Manufactory. “I hope it will not be a great while,” he wrote, “before it will be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress.”23 Hartford’s entrepreneurial elite was naturally delighted that the “President expressed great satisfaction at the progress which had been made in that useful undertaking,” for it demonstrated the “prospects of happiness that we are becoming as independent of the Manufactures of Great Britain.”24 Ironically, revolutionary republican criticism of British society was redirected in the 1790s toward the importation of English know-how to the republic. The prewar rhetoric about British oppression was replaced with talk of making political independence real by replacing industrial dependence on England with home manufacturing. Industrial undertakings, both private and public, were fused into the newly imagined notion of national interest. Addressing the technology gap between the two nations assumed great national importance.

When the first Congress convened in New York in 1789, disagreements between the future leaders of the Federalists and Jeffersonians surfaced almost immediately. The crux of the disagreement centered on relations with Great Britain.

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