A celebration of consumerism. So what?

Americans boast about the wrong stuff. Their industrial heritage, in particular, they underplay. I put it down to Kurt Vonnegut, who writes of one of his characters in the great novel, Slaughterhouse-Five: “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

Ouch. Americans’ respect for Steve Jobs and men like him exists in a modern world in which true admiration for what he achieved — and the environment that created him — is not so boundless.

Teenagers glued to technology may be mourning his death in a manner more associated with a pop star, as Facebook pages will attest - but these days consumerism is anything but king.

Americans are taught to be ashamed of their relentless desire for stuff. Substitute Apple stores for gift shops, and Vonnegut still wounds.

So, if you ask Americans what they are proudest of, they tend to play it safe: the constitution and the military. Wars are out of bounds now, but they certainly have a heck of a way with elections, as George Bush might have said. Their democracy is vigorous and steeped — many Americans believe — in too much cash, but it suits them.

Good things for the massesMy case is that this focus on democracy is both right and wrong. They are right to focus on the democratic urge — but its finest manifestation is not in elections and the constitution; it is to be found in the world of business and, in particular, in the genius Americans have for making good things available to many people.

Let me take you on a journey away from America’s West Coast, which has so obsessed us since the news of Steve Jobs’s death. We need to head east, to Cleveland, Ohio. This is where we need to go to find the real “vibe” that created Steve Jobs, and will create in years to come a thousand new Jobs and, perhaps, a million new jobs.

Real American democracy — the genius of the place — is on view in the kind of American spirit that built the city of Cleveland. It is the drive to bring the fruits of mankind’s imagination and endeavour to the greatest number.

I focus on Cleveland because it’s great days were in the rush to pre-eminence that gathered pace throughout the 19th century and left America poised to take on the world.

Among the Cleveland success stories of that time was one of the greatest, or ghastliest, of Steve Jobs’s predecessors: John D Rockefeller. His creation, Standard Oil, brought petrol and petrol products to the masses. He did it with a brutality that shocked even late 19th-century America and in the end Standard Oil became so mighty that the federal government broke it up.

Rockefeller’s view of his wealth? “God gave me my money," he used to say. And he would quote John Wesley: “Gain all you can, save all you can and give all you can."

Steve Jobs was a former hippy and a practising Buddhist, so he probably didn’t put it quite like that. He was still reckoned to be worth $7 billion at his death.

It takes relentless driveThomas Edison is another of Jobs’s predecessors whose experiences are directly linked to the Apple phenomenon. Edison, as you may know, did not invent the light bulb. The light bulb had been developed by various inventors but none before Edison made one that could be commercially successful. Edison nailed it. And then vowed: “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles." In other words, he would bring his achievement to the masses. That was where his heart was. With Jobs it was the same. He was not content for Apple to be a niche. He wanted to rule.

And do not be fooled by the Edison line on pricing; he wanted to make it cheap to destroy his competitors and sell even more of his product. This is a man who sanctioned the electrocution of animals (including an elephant) to try to prove that a rival power system was more dangerous than his. Steve Jobs burned no bunnies but, behind the scenes, Apple was and is a focused, secretive and tough organisation.

Jobs was also heir to a tradition of remaining aloof from politics while having a pretty firm view of the world and how it should be run. Apple (at least when I was based in the US) spent little of its considerable corporate cash in Washington. It could have filled the city with lobbyists and fundraisers and probably bought itself some favours. But Jobs chose not to.

Triumphant Democracy was the name of the book steel man Andrew Carnegie  produced — an attack on monarchies and a defence of the American way. I suspect Jobs would be similarly keen to try to rescue the essence of American politics from the lobby-infested mess that Americans currently think it is. Jobs on politics was never much heard (he endorsed Obama), but he would have been heard more had he lived, and that loss is a sad one for America.

Above all, what places Jobs firmly in America’s great industrial history is the restlessness of the man. They were all a bit batty, his predecessors. The energy that has always driven America, drove them faster and many crashed. But in America you can crash, get out of the vehicle, hitch a ride and start again. This attitude worked for Rockefeller and Edison and Getty and Ford and Carnegie and it worked for Jobs. He is one of the greats, worthy of a place in the pantheon of American industrialists.

Modern yes, but rooted in a tradition 200 years old.

(Justin Webb is the author of Notes on Us and Them)