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to the United States. By the early nineteenth century, textile mills based on the Slater model were operating throughout America. Around the same time, Massachusetts’ Francis Cabot Lowell, after several years of “touring” the factories of Glasgow and Manchester, invented a machine that allowed all stages of textile production— carding, spinning, weaving—to take place in a single factory. Within a few years, the world's first integrated cotton mill began operation in Waltham, Massachusetts. By the 1820s, America's manufacturing productivity had closed in on Britain's, and its textile technology was already in many ways more advanced.”

Many other immigrants further infused young America with vital technological secrets and know-how. Irénée Du Pont, an immigrant from France, brought gunpowder technology to the United States. He also founded E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, today one of the largest chemical companies in the world. Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen and made major breakthroughs in electricity. (The inventor of carbonated water, Priestley has also been called the father of soda pop.) These and countless other “brain drains” from Europe helped transform nineteenth-century America from a technological backwater to one of the world's premier industrial powers.

American tolerance was essential to all this. Of course, the vast majority of these highly skilled and inventive immigrants were not fleeing religious or political persecution. They were seeking economic opportunity. But a vital part of what made the United States a land of opportunity was its relative openness and pluralism. The countries of Europe were not “nations of immigrants” in the way America was. For the most part, throughout the nineteenth (and even much of the twentieth) century, the ability of poor but enterprising Europeans to leave their homes and find success in another European country was burdened by a host of barriers, including historic religious enmity, cultural chauvinism, social rigidity, and linguistic differences. By comparison, America—with its religious pluralism, social fluidity, and polyglot communities—was remarkably open to talent and entrepreneurial drive from every European background. In America, relatively speaking, the sky was the limit.

Immigrants could and did ascend to the highest levels of early American society, politically and economically. Albert Gal-latin, a brilliant financier from Switzerland, served as Jefferson's secretary of the treasury; it was Gallatin who arranged for the purchase of the Louisiana Territory and funded Lewis and Clark's explorations. John Jacob Astor, a German, started off in the New World selling musical instruments. Before long, he founded the American Fur Company and became the wealthiest man in pre-Civil War America. Marcus Goldman, a German Jew, began as a peddler in a horse-drawn cart. Soon he was buying and selling promissory notes. By 1906, Goldman Sachs & Co. had $5 million in capital. (The firm's market capitalization in June 2007 was around $100 billion.) In 1847, a penniless twelve-year-old Scot named Andrew Carnegie emigrated to Pittsburgh with his family. Fifty years later, having founded the company that would become U.S. Steel, he was the world's richest man.12

THE GREAT ATLANTIC MIGRATION AND THE

RISE OF AMERICA AS A REGIONAL POWER

European immigrants did not bring just know-how and entrepre-neurialism to America. They also brought sheer manpower. Throughout the nineteenth century, America had an almost insatiable demand for labor to cultivate its land, build its railways, populate its interior, and expand its frontiers. As Abraham Lincoln put it in 1863, “There is still a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals.”

Without the millions flooding in from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and later Italy and eastern Europe, America's continental expansion would have been impossible. Irish immigrants built the Erie and Ohio canals (sometimes getting paid