If you find, as I do, your professional career to be a series of ongoing battles to champion new ideas, then you’ll have to read, as I will, Harold Evans’ new book They Made America.
Tim Manners of Reveries, spotted an essay by Harold Evans in The Wall Street Journal this morning which I would have missed because I seldom read the opinion pages. You’ll have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but here are some of my favorite excerpts:
…the U.S. has been — and remains — the source of most of the innovations that created our modern world, and many of them have sprung from a desire to serve rather than steal.
Charles Goodyear was the very opposite of the left’s stereotype of the grasping American capitalist. A Dickensian hero going nobly into a world of cynics and thieves, he was typical of many innovators in America’s advance. More of them were (and are) fired by an ambition to be remembered for achieving something worthwhile than for making money.
The innovator has to bring the brainwave to market, and that, more than invention, is the distinctive characteristic of America.
I’ve excerpted some pretty generalized remarks, but the essay contains many meaty examples, and I hope to find even more in the book. Harold Evans last book was the bestseller The American Century.
QVIews 
Leave a comment