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July 7, 2023

Although the first person killed in the American Revolution was a black man with Native American blood—Crispus Attucks—the reality is that every man who signed the Declaration of Independence and was involved with crafting the Constitution was white. Simply put, there would be no United States without white men.

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After almost 250 years, however, the life of the average American is not directly affected by what those white men did in Philadelphia. Indirectly, however, we experience daily a world built upon the foundations they laid…and they created that foundation thanks to the inventions and innovations of other white men.

If you woke up this morning and did anything other than work on a farm, you can thank Cyrus McCormick. When he invented the mechanical reaper in 1831, farming hadn’t changed in a thousand years. The standard was that one man with a scythe and two helpers could harvest two acres of grain a day.

McCormick’s early reaper allowed a man to double that, and his later reapers multiplied that many times. His innovative payment plans made his machines the workhorses of a dramatic increase in farming efficiency.

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When McCormick introduced his reaper, 80% of America’s population was either directly or indirectly involved in farming. Today that number is closer to 2%. In essence, Cyrus McCormick freed up almost 80% of the population to go out and do pretty much anything else…from becoming entrepreneurs to florists to baseball players to scientists to plumbers to Instagram models and, yes, sadly, professional race grifters and activists.

Image of Cyrus McCormick by Vince Coyner

Another white guy who had an extraordinary impact on America today was Henry Ford. Many people think Ford invented the automobile. He didn’t. But his auto manufacturing production line brought the car from a luxury item only the rich could afford to a product that tens of millions, and eventually billions, of people around the world could afford.

With that unprecedented access to cars, the universe opened up for Americans. Transportation limits on where they could work, live, or go to school evaporated. Suddenly, they could drive anywhere they wanted without being limited by public transportation or a horse’s inability to walk more than a certain distance per day. Today 250 million Americans drive three trillion miles a year, six times the distance the Earth travels around the sun!

There’s also Willis Carrier, the man who invented modern air conditioning. Every summer, as temperatures soar across the country, scorching everything in their path, most Americans can retreat to their homes and relax in air-conditioned comfort or enjoy a movie theater or restaurant that would otherwise feel like a sweatshop.

The degree to which the air-conditioned office spaces changed the face of America is hard to exaggerate. While manufacturing steel or working on a farm might not be greatly affected by air conditioning, many of the things Americans do for work would be much more difficult, if not impossible, without it—things like medical research and high-tech manufacturing or more mundane things like computer programming or working in a superstore or busy restaurant.

Then there is Elisha Otis, who invented the safety elevator. Take a look at the skyline of any American city, and you’ll see buildings that stack 30 or 50, or even 100 floors high. Of the tallest skyscrapers—40 floors or more—New York City alone has 250, and there are almost a thousand across the country. None of those buildings, or the tens of thousands of buildings that are just 10 or 20 stories high, would be possible without Otis’s safety elevator. His presentation at the 1853 New York World’s Fair helped usher in the advent of skyscrapers by giving much of the public the confidence to ride in elevators.