MARCH 30th - The Value of Land



On this day in 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward authorized the purchase of Alaska from Russia for a little over 7 million dollars and everyone thought he was an idiot. The prevailing wisdom was that Alaska was a big, barren block of ice that was utterly worthless. The purchase even became known as Seward’s Folly. For the first 30 years of the state’s history, it looked as if those people might be right, but in 1898 a precious little metal called gold was discovered in Alaska, ultimately making Seward a freaking genius who got a steal. Maybe he just lucked into it, but he bought land. At two cents an acre. Real estate. Movie Lex Luthor, both the Gene Hackman version and the Kevin Spacey version, knew that land is always the most precious of commodities. I mean Gene Hackman Lex Luthor was an opportunistic egomaniacal nutter, but he understood that wiping out Cali would make the Nevada land he owned quite fruitful. He knew the value of land. Kevin Spacey Lex Luthor was a straight sociopath who wanted to create a barren wasteland of Krypton on Earth, which unlike Alaska, probably would have been void of any natural resources to sustain human life and most likely would have doomed all of humanity. But even in his sociopathic convoluted plot he knew that land was important. I realize that being compared to movie versions of a comic book super villain may not be the most flattering for a servant of the people, but I think we can all safely assume that Seward didn’t have some nefarious plot to gain land by killing a bunch of people. And if you take out the egomaniacal, sociopathic tendencies of the different incarnations of Lex Luthor, and also cut out their propensity for surrounding themselves with nincompoops, then you are left with a really smart guy. And really smart guys buy land on the cheap. So Seward’s Folly was really Seward’s Being Smarter than Everyone Making Fun of Him. And isn't that what everyone wants.

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