Tom Paine's Bridge

Tom Paine's Iron Bridge: Building a United States addresses a lesser known aspect of Thomas Paine's (Common Sense)  career.  The wider economic aspects of Paine's career was touched upon by Eric Foner's work (1970s, with a later edition with a new introduction), including his support of the Bank of North America.  The book here argues that Paine saw his iron bridge as a necessary means to unite the nation. 

The story of his bridge efforts, which in the end failed though his model influenced a British effort, is fairly interesting.  This effort, however, suggests that there is not really enough for a full book, even a book that is only two hundred pages long.  The book is really a Paine biography with the bridge stuff mixed in.  Which is basically fine, though early on the writing to me was a bit of a drudge, but it comes off like those repackaged compilation tapes with less new content that meets the eye.  

Plus, there is the basic point that the whole thing doesn't come to much.  After the Revolutionary War, Paine played around with his bridge idea in the mid-1780s.  Failing to get Pennsylvania to sign him on, he took his model to France and Britain, first to get France to bless the technical and then England to help him build and promote the thing.  Then, he got mixed in with the French Revolution. He tried to go back to the whole thing in the late 1790s, and then in the U.S. after the turn of the century, to no avail.  He then died in obscurity.

While he was in France, an iron bridge apparently based on his model was built, but having been convicted of seditious libel and all, defending his patent didn't work out.  And, the book argues that the United States early on didn't really need to use an iron bridge, having enough wood (unlike let's say British Jamaica) and being a young and impatient sort of place that was willing to rely on short lived models. Iron bridges -- unclear how much like his version -- would come later on.  

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To go back to Eric Foner (best known, perhaps, for his book on the Reconstruction of the American South, after the Civil War).  One interesting discussion in his book is on the usage of terminology, which is getting a bit of attention of late with Sen. Mike Lee saying we live in a "republic, not a democracy," something basically used to justify our shoddy Senate and Electoral College and the like.  To show how language changed, up to newspaper wars during the Revolutionary War, even "republican" or "republic" was used in a negative fashion.

The term "democracy" was particularly used negatively:

In the political language of the eighteenth century, "democracy" had not yet acquired its modern meanings -- it applied only to those states in which the entire people participated directly in the conduct of government, and it implied anarchy and perpetual turbulence.

As Foner noted: groups in time "redefined the meaning of the word 'democracy,' using it simply as a synonym for republicanism, a government based on the will of the people."  Democracy was not anarchic rule of the entire people and representative government was preferable to direct democracy only because it was more convenient.  We see, therefore, that even in the late 18th Century that the terms have a mixed meaning, often overlapping.  This is suggested by the usage of the "Democratic-Republican Party" in various sources.