The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream

by David M. Rubenstein

For instance, in 1824, you had Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court decision that affirmed that the right to regulate interstate commerce belongs to the federal government. The Erie Canal, for instance, was a project that was entirely financed by bondholders in the state of New York. It was guaranteed by the state itself. It opens up the Great Lakes, connects the American interior to the Eastern Seaboard, the Atlantic Ocean.

Once you start stripping away the mythology and ideology and you really dive into the letters and financing documents leading up to the Mayflower’s voyage, for instance, you see they’re not talking about God as much as they’re talking about contractual terms. It’s a commercial negotiation.

Based on data from slave auctions, we know that the value of the average slave across age and gender was about $700 or so in 1859. The 4 million slaves in America were declared to have a value of $3 billion. One of the southern states even cited this exact dollar value in their reasons for secession.

Electricity took some time to really take hold in the home, primarily because you had cheap alternatives. You had gas infrastructure in a lot of the major cities and urban environments, and you had plenty of oil from Standard Oil. So electricity as infrastructure for the home didn’t take off until maybe 1910, 1920.

But there is one thing that World War I really moved forward—the income tax. The income tax required a constitutional amendment. In 1895, the Supreme Court had ruled such a tax unconstitutional, because it could put a disproportionate burden, on a per capita basis, on certain states versus other states. The Sixteenth Amendment is what made the income tax possible when it was ratified by the states in 1913. With the income tax, it soon became clear that you could use it to finance the American entry into World War I.

Radio was the first time in human history when you had millions of people doing something, listening to a hit show or a World Series game, for instance, at the exact same time.

Punch-card computing can almost be traced back to the eleventh census of the United States, all the way back to 1890.

While the computer’s forerunner was actually invented by a British woman, Ada Lovelace, in the nineteenth century, the computer was improved and enhanced dramatically by a number of large American companies, principally IBM in the 1950s and ’60s. But the computer, initially quite large and cumbersome by today’s standards, spawned—most especially in the newly named Silicon Valley area of Northern California—a whole variety of products that revolutionized the business world as well as life itself.

There are two interrelated traits that are common to all the innovators I’ve written about. The first of these is curiosity—pure and passionate and playful curiosity about everything. Like Benjamin Franklin, as a teenager, going over to England for the first time and measuring the water in the ocean because he’s trying to figure out how does the Gulf Stream work. Or Leonardo da Vinci, my favorite, who in his notebooks writes things in the margins like “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.”

Ingrained in the DNA of our country is that the people who came here were either pioneers or refugees. They were the second and third children who had to strike out on their own. They were people escaping oppression and looking for freedom. They were going on an errand into the wilderness. They are people who are used to uprooting, changing their minds, and being part of a frontier. Whether that was the literal frontier that existed until around 1900 or things like the electronic frontier, people in the United States were more willing to uproot from their Old World and take the risks of embarking on an errand into the wilderness.

But the genius in America is that right after World War II, leaders like Vannevar Bush came up with the concept that we had to have science as the next frontier. They said that there was going to be a three-way partnership between universities, government, and corporate America, that the new types of labs for computers weren’t going to just be done in the government, the way the atomic bomb was done with the Manhattan Project.

What distinguished the United States in its digital revolution from other places is that great entrepreneurs snatched computing power from the big corporations and turned it into personal computers. The advent of personal computers enabled creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation in garages and garrets and dorm rooms around America from then on.

What allows Bell Labs to invent the transistor is that it was a place that mixed everybody from theorists, to practical engineers who had come back from the war, to experimentalists, to pole climbers with grease under their fingernails who strung

One of the distinguishing things about U.S. antitrust law and patent law is that it incents a big corporation, like the Bell system, to take a patent but license it out rather freely so that they wouldn’t be accused of an antitrust violation. Everyone from Fairchild Semiconductor to Texas Instruments, which originally was an oil field company, decides to license the transistor.

The subtle but huge breakthrough is that instead of just making this as a special-purpose chip, like for a calculator for a specific company, Intel made it so that those chips could be reprogrammed. You could take a chip that had all these components on it and program it to do whatever you want. That becomes a microprocessor, which is the kernel of a computer.

As soon as Bill Gates saw that on the cover of Popular Electronics, he and his friend Paul Allen said, “We’re going to create software for this Altair.” In the meantime, at the Homebrew Computer Club up near Palo Alto, people like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were hanging out. They said, “We can use this tiny microprocessor from Intel and we’ll build our own computer.” And they built the Apple I and then the Apple II.

The professors do what they always do. They delegate that task to their graduate students. About thirty of them joined together to invent what becomes known as ARPANET, the predecessor to what is now the Internet. It was based on a system called packet-switching, which meant that, unlike Minitel in France and unlike the phone company in the United States, there were no central hubs in which the information was controlled by whoever ran the system.

When Mark Andreessen was at the University of Illinois, a big, corn-fed Iowa guy, he does what great innovators do. He combines a feel for technology, because he was a great computer coder, with a feel for the humanities. He knew how people interface with great products. He created the Mosaic browser, which had wonderful technical features and was done in a smart way. It was made public. It was made free. It was almost as if it were more open-source than proprietary.

Al Gore gets made fun of, but the most important innovation in the early ’90s was the Gore Act [the High Performance Computing Act of 1991] and a subsequent act the following year [the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act of 1992], which opened up the Internet to people who want to dial in and use it for personal or commercial reasons. He invents things like the “.com” address, which means that you don’t have to be at the university or a major corporation to get on the Internet. You can create your own business.

But as remarkable as that accomplishment was, it seems just as remarkable that the Wright brothers were unable to convince the U.S. government to support their efforts or, later, even to affirm their success. Indeed, it was the French government that lured the Wright brothers to Paris to show their feat, and it was there that they demonstrated their invention to large French crowds, who were utterly amazed. Acceptance in the U.S. came a bit later, a bit to the brothers’ chagrin.

They would not accept failure—but for reasons unrelated to a desire for fame or money. Those were of no real interest to them. They simply wanted to prove humans could build and safely fly planes. David suggests, though, one other reason for their success. They loved to read. They had grown up with books and were always reading. And they were reading the classics of literature and history. David suggests that this informal liberal arts education the brothers gave themselves, in both their youth and their adulthood, produced manned flight as much as did their self-taught engineering and mechanical skills.

He wanted to go to college, he wanted to go to Yale, and he almost certainly would have. But all talk of college ended, and it was a swerve in his life that caused him to start reading about, among other things, ornithology and aviation. While it was the most painful and demoralizing blow in his life, and the swerve was something totally unexpected, it was what set him on the path to what he did with his life. Their father raised them to have purpose in life, have a mission, a quest, to accomplish something worthy, to make the world a little better than it was before you came along. This was all heading in that direction.

Wilbur gave a perfect analogy. He said, “There are two ways to tame a wild horse. One is to sit on the fence and study its every motion and write notes about it, then retire to a comfortable chair at home and write a thesis on how to tame a wild horse. The other way, which is our way, is get on a horse and ride it.”

The notebooks of their observations of soaring birds are extraordinary. One of the great lines in Wilbur’s book is, “No bird ever soared in a calm.”

The first one they built cracked. Instead of saying, “Well, I guess it won’t work,” they said to Alcoa, “Another one.” And the other one did work, and not only did it work, it supplied more horsepower even than they expected. That’s what made possible the first flight, on December 17, 1903.

Yes. If you read how long the flight was and how much time it consumed, you’ll think, “Oh, come on”—120 feet in twelve seconds. But they knew they’d done it. It was a bitterly cold day, December 17, wind blowing. Langley had just done the nose dives of his machine into the Potomac River, so it was up to them to show they could do it.

It wasn’t really until 1905 that they had a plane that could take off, land, bank, turn, fly in a circle, fly in a figure eight, skim along eighteen inches or two feet above the grass, with perfect control. They were brilliant pilots. They were like acrobats or star athletes, and could perform with that machine as nobody on earth could perform. Still, our government here took no interest. None. They wouldn’t send anybody out to see what they were doing. This was all going on in a cow pasture outside of Dayton. It’s still there, by the way, exactly as it was.

And on August 8, 1908, the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year, the world saw, for the first time, that human beings can fly. At Le Mans, the racetrack town southwest of Paris. There were only about two or three hundred people, maybe not even that many, in the little grandstand at the racetrack that day. But within a very few days thousands of people were coming from all over France and all over Europe, and Wilbur became the hero of the day.

They never got full of themselves. That wasn’t how they were raised. You don’t get too big for your britches. They remained exactly as they’d always been all their lives, no matter how famous or how wealthy they became. But when they knew they had achieved this high purpose they’d set out to achieve, they decided to stage a hometown air show, and invited anybody in Dayton that wanted to come out to Huffman Prairie to come see them fly. Thousands came out to witness it. Beautiful day.

The first human being to take off in an airplane, Orville Wright, and the first human being ever to set foot on the moon, Neil Armstrong, both came from the same section of southwestern Ohio. Think of that. Another wonderful point is that when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he was carrying a little swatch of the canvas from the original plane that flew at Kitty Hawk.

They wouldn’t give up, no matter how many setbacks. We don’t talk much about failure with our young people today. There’s all kinds of ways to go through failure. One is you get knocked down, you lie there, you cry and you whimper and you lapse into self-pity or you blame other people. The other is you get up on your feet again and you learn from your failure. What went wrong? How can we fix that? Let’s do it again, only this time let’s do it right.

The attitude was one that the future was exciting and the possibilities were infinite. The spirit of the country was high. That’s what we need to recover. We need leadership that will lift the spirits of this country, lift the spirits patriotically.

But at one point, I said, “Mr. Armstrong, in the days leading up to Apollo 11, did you ever just go out and look at the moon, and think, ‘My God, I’m going to be standing there looking down at blue-green marble Earth?’ ” And he said, “No.” That was the extent of it. He wasn’t being difficult, he just didn’t think like that. It was a mission, something to be accomplished, and he accomplished it.

Neil Armstrong wrote those words and invented the words himself—the famous “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He test-marketed the phrase at a kitchen table with his brother. And his brother said, “Wow, pretty hard to beat that.”

So von Braun decided to cut a deal with America. He sent his little brother, Magnus von Braun, out on a bicycle. A private in the army from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, ended up training a gun on him, and Magnus said, “My brother is the great rocketeer Wernher von Braun.” Army intelligence checked it all out, and they found out it was true. Under a thing called Operation Paperclip, we brought all of those Nazi German rocket scientists to live in Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, as prisoners of peace, and to start building rockets for the U.S. Army out there, working in West Texas and New Mexico.

John F. Kennedy did not like losing. He was a cold warrior. He never lost a political election in his life. He won Congress in 1946, ’48, ’50. He won in the Senate in 1952 and ’58, and he won the presidency in ’60. In one story, when he’s playing chess with an aide of his, Kennedy is about to get checkmated and he knocks the whole table over and says, “I guess we’ll never know who won.”

Jack Kennedy’s brother Joe Kennedy died in World War II in a navy aviation accident as a hero. They took a B-17 plane and flew it over the English Channel, aiming to go into France to blow up places where we thought V-1, V-2, and V-3 parts were. Instead Kennedy’s plane blew up in the sky. He basically died taking out von Braun’s hardware. And here it is 1953. Jack Kennedy and Wernher von Braun are judges for Time’s Person of the Year together in New York, and they get along fabulously. Kennedy didn’t hold his Nazi past against him, because they were twentieth-century men. Kennedy trusted in von Braun, and von Braun said, “We can go to the moon.”

Kennedy would go all over giving speeches about spin-off technology, including in medicine—things like CAT scans, MRIs, affordable walkers, kidney dialysis machines, heart defibrillators. The technology that spun off from funding NASA hit the medical sector.

It’s also an adventure, it’s also like a detective story. Scientific discovery is one of those amazing moments where you learn something that nobody knew before, and that’s such a rush. You don’t get to have that experience in a lot of other professions.

“Here in the United States, hopefully, what we’re building are not just pyramids, are not icons to one pharaoh. What we’re building is a culture and a way of living together that we can look back on and say, [This] was good, was inclusive, was kind, was innovative, was able to fulfill the dreams of as many people as possible.” —Barack Obama, “Exit Interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin,” September 21, 2016

Jazz is our national art form. As such, it objectifies a lot of our basic principles.

Now, suffice it to say that everything in the music ties into things that we do, down to the three branches of government. How to amend the Constitution is like adding to an arrangement. I could go on and on.

That’s the improvisation part. You have a lot of latitude to do things. That’s like the way Americans conduct business—all the innovations we have, the freedom we have to speak, the fact that we think we can step into a space and use our personality to transform a tradition.

Most importantly, it gives you tremendous pride in being American. We didn’t have to denigrate or cut anybody down or do anything negative to anybody to create this. It’s a nonpredatory form. It’s a symbiotic form. You can be as rich as you want to be in jazz and nobody else has to be poor. I’m going to do this till I die if I can, the Good Lord willing, if people will have me. I’ve been blessed to do something and get unbelievable support from people.

I would like people to think of me only in one way: she never gave up. Perseverance.

My advice to young artists is to understand that they’re a 1099 employee and not a W-2. You have to be responsible for setting up your studio and retirement and everything. It’s on you.

One thing my dad and my parents and other people have taught me is never take anything personally. That’s one of the greatest things you can teach somebody. I’m very big on forgiveness, because that allows you to move on. If you take things personally, it just hinders your life.

This is when the idea of the melting pot is in the air. There’s a sense that there’s some assimilation, but there was also a feeling that these people were too different. They couldn’t be assimilated. There needed to be restrictions to protect America’s identity and, by that measure, ethnic identity. So they begin to pass ethnic quotas in the ’20s to stop this big migration from southern and eastern Europe.

When we came to the United States, people said, “We’re so sorry your country has been taken over by a terrible system. You’re welcome here. What can we do to help you, and when will you become a citizen?” My father said, “That is what made America different from every other country.”

I recently was at a dinner and had to describe myself in six words, and I said, “Worried optimist problem solver grateful American.” And really I am a grateful American.