States Rights’ Was Really About The Elephant In The Room!

I’m deep into an excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton, the only founder of this nation who was emphatically and unequivocally opposed to slavery.  Born and raised in the West Indies, he had witnessed the inhumanity first hand.

The war that began 150 years ago last week has intrigued me from my youth and often been reframed as being a struggle over states’ rights and manufacturing vs. agrarian economies.  A Westerner until moving to Durham, North Carolina more than two decades ago, I do understand the cultural differences ( I know, to Southerners, anyplace else is the North.)

But it is clear from reading biographies of the founders of this nation that slavery was the “elephant in the room” and the unfinished business that festered for another seventy-four years after the Constitution was ratified. States’ Rights and debates about agrarian vs. manufacturing economies, while important discussions, were in the end euphemisms.

But just as the Revolutionary War did not complete the task of nation-making, the Civil War did not complete the task of emancipation.

African-Americans were horrifically victimized by slavery but the issues that still hold so many back cannot be resolved by reinforcing a culture too often centered on enabling people to hide behind that history.  Nor will just the threadbare-safety nets suffice as so many on the right condescendingly leave dangling.

Slavery is still permitted and enabled today as much through unlivable wages as through prostitution and other forms.  The indignation about the size of government is misplaced by tea partiers.  Even liberals, both the nation’s founders and those today, are defiant about limited government.

Hamilton was not only the chief architect of the Constitution but he parlayed his close war-time friendship with George Washington to persuade him to stand for election as the nation’s first President.

As the biographer I’m reading notes, Hamilton though, didn’t create America’s market economy as he is often credited, so much as he almost single-handedly “fostered the cultural and legal setting in which it flourished.”

But Hamilton also viewed a strong government as a means to balance the dangerous potential of capitalism devolve into greed and to “promote self-fulfillment, self-improvement, and self-reliance,” something the programs of the left have forgotten and the “I did it my way” right fails to acknowledge.

I’m highly recommending the biography of Alexander Hamilton and I’m glad I read it after reading A. Lincoln and before moving on to the author’s now Pulitzer-prize winning biography of George Washington.

And for detailed information on the role of my adopted hometown in the Civil War, click here.

Luck Finds “Doers”

I was deep into a recent biography of Alexander Hamilton when I read two posts by Dilbert Creator Scott Adams.  I never was much into cartoons beyond a certain age but coinciding with the Durham phase of my now concluded career I rarely missed reading Dilbert.

The first post is a blog this week entitled The Education Complexity Shift .  It made some excellent points but at the expense for some readers of reinforcing stereotypes about the value of studying history.

Its value is not in memorizing dates and facts but in providing perspective and context for understanding current and future events.  Self-styled tea partiers could better hone the current meat-cleaver approach by reading beyond the events from which they took their name.

The greatness of this country rose from people like Hamilton, Lincoln, both Roosevelts and Eisenhower who understood the importance of a limited (something upon which both the left and right can agree) but robust and energetic Federal Government to paraphrase Conservative columnist and author David Brooks.

The issue we should be dealing with is about reinvigorating the Federal Government to fuel social mobility like was done with things like capital markets, public education, the homestead act, land grant colleges, canals and railroads, environmental conservation, research and the Interstate Highway system to name just a handful.

A few days earlier Adams published an funny and informative op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and well worth a read at this link.

Adams finishes the op-ed by detailing the seven important lessons below.  One of my favorites is the fourth one down, about attracting luck:

“Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It's unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it's easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you'd be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn't work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Attract Luck. You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It's not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.”