Success Quote by John Moody

American bigness, sold as destiny, is doing quiet work here. Moody isn’t just offering a geography lesson; he’s pitching a mindset that turns land into proof of national inevitability. By stacking France and England like measuring cups, he translates the northern tier of the United States into a familiar European scale, then dwarfs it. The point isn’t precision. It’s emotional calibration: feel how small the old world is, feel how roomy the new one must be.

Coming from a businessman, the subtext is unmistakably commercial. “Could contain” reads like a prospectus: capacity equals opportunity, emptiness equals upside. In the early 20th-century imagination, the border states from the Great Lakes to the Pacific weren’t just remote; they were inventory - timber, minerals, rail corridors, ports, wheat, hydroelectric power. Moody’s rhetorical move turns distance into an asset and sparsity into potential, reassuring investors and boosters that scale itself will deliver growth.

There’s also a geopolitical flex tucked into the calm tone. The northern border was a line facing Canada and the broader Atlantic world; emphasizing sheer area signals strategic depth, a continental moat. Yet the boast depends on a convenient erasure: the region was hardly “room to spare” for the people already living there, especially Indigenous nations pushed aside by settlement and resource extraction.

So the sentence works as a kind of corporate nationalism: expansion recast as spaciousness, history as real estate, and power as a matter of square mileage.