Reviews for The fireproof building

The average rating for The fireproof building based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-25 00:00:00 Mitra Conroy The narrative of regional competition and national economic development is insightful. Bensel makes three major claims: 1. The Republican Party after Reconstruction pursued tariffs in the Congress, and the House in particular. Tariffs negatively affected the South and West, where farmers had to pay more for foreign goods, but the GOP used tariffs to fund Civil War pensions, which were popular in the North. The tariff wasn't essential to national development, but it stuck around, as it benefitted the mills and corporate factories in the Northeast. This was where most of the corporations and capital in America existed. The Democrats in the South, West, and even New York City would have preferred free trade, which would have redirected some money flows from the Northeast to the rest of the country. 2. The Republicans pursued the gold standard to tie America to international monetary standards. Financiers in New York, an "entrepot" (point of entry) for foreign money, could more easily collaborate with their peers in London and other European capitals. The GOP used the presidency to defend this policy. Secretaries of the Treasury who disliked gold before taking office wound up supporting it. Even a Democratic president in this period, Grover Cleveland, favored gold and hard currency. These policies angered groups throughout the country, but primarily in the South, Plains, and West, that wanted inflation and alternative currencies to gold. The Democrats tended to support silver currency, but the party didn't become fully committed to this "insurgent" position until 1896, when William Jennings Bryan seized upon this point in his presidential campaign. Bryan appropriated Populist rhetoric; the Populists and their predecessors (Greenbackers, Farmers' Alliance members) wanted silver currency, which would benefit farmers and small businessmen in the regions other than the North. The Greenbackers also endorsed paper currency as a supplement or replacement to gold. Yet the gold standard endured because of the Executive Branch. 3. The Republicans supported a national market with few corporate regulations and little union activity. Democrats and some Progressives made attempts at corporate regulation (mostly laws reigning in the railroad conglomerates, plus the Sherman Anti-trust Act and the Interstate Commerce Commission). Populists in the South and West supported railroad and grain warehouse regulation b/c these policies again taxed small farmers. However, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court repeatedly upheld corporate activity across state lines. The result was a growing national economy, with capital based in Eastern corporations. The money flowed from the West and South to the East. People in the South (Florida, primarily) and the West did receive a decent number of patents in this period, but again most of the innovation happened where the factories were — the North and industrial Midwest. By 1900, the GOP had succeeded in creating its national and global economy, which arguably was necessary to create a "modern" level of industrialization. It is unfortunate that industrialization disadvantaged so many farmers around the country, though. This book shows that there have been debates about large versus small government in America for centuries, but at the same time the economic motives of past Americans were so different from issues today. In 1890, the GOP was pro-large govt. and big business, and the Democrats were pro-small govt and pro-small business. The GOP wanted tariffs, while the Democrats wanted free trade. In 2017, these positions and the goals politicians want to achieve with them are totally different. Yeah, I thought about this book a lot, haha. So why only two stars? Despite the enormity of Bensel's research, the book has zero literary qualities. None. It is a dull, dry read. He masterfully lays out his argument in the preface, introduction, and conclusion, but the rest of the book goes into such detail that it's nearly impossible to keep sense of a narrative. That's partly why I'm writing this long review — to parse out the key points of this behemoth. I think Bensel should have thought more about what specific details matter most to the modern reader, rather than calling up so many points from the past that readers like me aren't sure what's important. Never touching this one again, if I can help it.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-26 00:00:00 Tsewang Samkhar Richard Bensel's The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 explores the relationship between political institutions and economic development. Pointing out that Chandler had tacitly assumed features of the American economy which were politically constructed, especially the existence of a unified national market which allowed integration and consolidation, Bensel traced the developments of the Gilded Age as the outcome of interrelated economic and political forces. Noting the relative rarity that democracy and rapid industrialization have gone hand in hand, Bensel identified three policies supportive of rapid industrialization which were politically contested in the last decades of the nineteenth century: the Gold Standard, the national market and the tariff complex. From an analysis of county level economic development data, voting patterns and political platforms, Bensel draws the conclusion that the Republican party was the crucial agent in mediating and reconciling political and economic demands in a way that facilitated the emergence of the United States as a leading industrial power. Essentially, political support for the party was generated by the tariff complex which protected key economic interests, funded benefits such as Union veteran’s pensions, and facilitated the accumulation of capital by manufacturers at the expense of agrarian producers. Rooted in flexible Congressional coalitions, the tariff regime could be flexibly tweaked to accommodate changing political winds, buying support for the less popular legs of the development policy tripod – maintenance of the Gold Standard by the President, which simplified the investment of European capital and protection of an unregulated national interstate market by the Supreme Court. These policies had victims. The exploitation of industrial worker was enforced by legal and military means during the waves of strikes, lockouts and work stoppages that gripped the North. In the West and the South agrarian interests were harmed by the tariff that made their inputs expensive and their products cheap, by the deflationary influence of the Gold Standard which made it harder to pay off northeastern creditors, by local manufactures which were undercut by more efficient northeastern competitors, and by the unfavorable terms on which they were forced to transport their crops to distant markets. While the dexterity of the Republican Party explains half of the maintenance of voter support for policies that resulted in gross wealth inequalities, the regional character of exploitation fills in missing puzzle pieces for Bensel. Support within the emerging industrial core of the northeast could be muted by the accruing local benefits and the fierce political loyalties ingrained during the Civil War. In the defeated South Bensel conceptualized the process of disfranchisement following the end of Reconstruction as the reinstatement of regional political autonomy by ex-Confederate nationalists, a process which both muted challenges to northeastern capital and made it difficult for the South to partner effectively against it. Only in the West, with the Populist Party and then Bryan’s 1896 campaign, did a clear political challenge emerge, because class conflict and regional exploitation aligned in a politics that supported yeoman farmers against the northeastern financial and transportation interests which mediated their connection to the national economy. Bensel suggests that following Bryan’s decisive defeat by William McKinley, the pattern of American industrialization was set.