Gilpin, Geopolitician

The fulfillment of a master role in the history of civilization can no more be evaded by the United States than it could be by their prototype, the Roman republic. [The U.S. and Russia] are among the largest and strongest . . . civilized powers . . . and both are growing larger and stronger while the other powers of Christendom are falling into decay. Build (a) railway between them, and America-and Russia may join hands against the rest of the world on any issue. . . .

These words were spoken just 70 years ago, by a now-forgotten U.S. citizen named William Gilpin.* Last week Bernard De Voto, Harper's Easy Chair editor, dug this early geopolitician out of the dusty stacks of U.S. history, showed him to be the author of some amazingly prophetic geopolitical ideas.

Gilpin, a rich Quaker's dynamic son, was educated in England, at the University of Pennsylvania and West Point. He was a soldier, lawyer, Indian fighter, editor, land-speculator, explorer (with Freemont), rancher and briefly Governor of the Territory of Colorado. He developed his geopolitical theories in the course of a long, active career helping expand U.S. frontiers.

American Advantages. His key notion was that human destiny centered in a world-girdling belt of the Northern Hemisphere which he called the Isothermal Zodiac (see cut). In this area lived 95% of the white race, and here, where climate and topography were most favorable, had flourished the greatest empires and highest civilizations.

Gilpin noted an important distinction between the North American and other sections of this belt. North America was a huge concave bowl, sloping into the central Mississippi Valley. This made communication easy, helped trade, brought people together, promoted harmony, made for a fundamental geographical unity. The result, he predicted, would be an immense growth in U.S. wealth, an eventual population of more than a billion.

Europe and Asia, on the other hand, were inverted bowls, sloping off from the central Alps and Himalayas. In Gilpin's view these geographical facts doomed the two continents to division, jealousy, rivalry and constant warfare. Russia, however, was the Eurasian exception: in topography and resources it was more like the U.S. Gilpin thought the U.S. and Russia would follow the same pattern of growth --the U.S. moving westward to the Pacific, Russia eastward to the Pacific.

Cosmopolitan Railway. Arguing that sea power would decline as railroads grew, Gilpin proposed to join the peoples of the Isothermic Zodiac, minimize wars and "transcend the disharmony of world geoggraphy" by means of a globe-girdling "Cosmopolitan Railway." It would run through the three continents, cross the Bering Strait by car ferry.

Editor De Voto, discounting some of Gilpin's "deuces-wild science," believes that "Gilpin's reading of the American experience is essentially sound" and observes that many of the predictions about the U.S. have been fulfilled. He notes further that geopoliticians who followed Gilpin "groping among inscrutables to make out the shape of the future, all ended by deciding that Russia would be momentous in it."

*No kin to famed "John Gilpin" of Cheapside, England, whose wild ride was celebrated by Poet William Cowper.

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