Cronon on Turner
01/29/2010 11:06
William Cronon
“Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner”
The Western Historical Quarterly
18:2, April 1987
Synopsis: Cronon reviews the historiographical impact of Turner (especially, but not only his frontier thesis), and reevaluates its implications. He suggests that the flaws in Turner’s ideas can be ignored, and a core set of ideas remain that inform new (especially environmental) approaches to American history.
Cronon defines the frontier thesis using Turner’s words: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner combined Darwin and Haekel (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) “evolution to narrate “an evolution which recapitulated the development of civilization itself, tracing the path from hunter to trader to farmer to town,” and forming “a special American character...marked by fierce individualism, pragmatism, and egalitarianism.” (157) This formulation is problematic, Cronon says, because its “fuzzy language conferred on Turner’s argument the illusion of great analytical power only because his central terms...were so broad and so ill-defined.” (158) I’d also suggest that the Darwinian paradigm is not a perfect fit for historical development, recapitulation is attractive but ultimately false, and that even if the frontier experience fostered individualism, pragmatism, and egalitarianism generally, it’s crucial to understand how these traits were expressed and distributed. Clearly everyone didn’t have them all in equal quantities. How and why some people became radically egalitarian while others became radically libertarian seems like it should be a central concern in western histories.
Cronon says Turner’s critics have pointed out that “westerners looked to the East,” and that “Among the eastern institutions dominating western life have been the Federal government, the corporation, and the city.” (158) He calls attention to the “urban character of much western settlement,” (169) especially in “rising urban centers whose growth was central to frontier expansion itself.” (like Chicago in NM, 1992. 173) The impact of these points, for me, is that they break the smooth flow of the westward teleology (just as they break the static von Thünen model). Western (or any regional) history should challenge the idea that the story “of any given American place could be written in terms of a progressive sequence of different economic and social activities [and] embodied in representative figures who might serve as ‘types’.” (166) Cronon suggests that in place of Turner’s narrative arc (which he admits “set American space in motion and gave it a plot,” 166), historians could focus on changes in “People’s notions of abundance and scarcity--of wealth and poverty.” (172) “Among the deepest struggles in American western history,” he says, are “those among peoples who have defined abundance--and the ‘good life’--in conflicting ways.” (175) New histories might “discover a subtler periodization...[and] create a finer-grained sense of movement that will reflect interconnections between regional diversity and the shifting dialectic of scarcity and abundance.” (174)
Historians these days appreciate tightly-focused, evidence-based, bottom-up narratives, but they seem to miss the big, sweeping histories of the nineteenth century. In his most recent book (which I’m in the middle of reading) Kulikoff says he’s bringing back the master narrative (we’ll see). My question is, how to put together a history that will drill down into the details of specific people’s experiences in particular places and times, and at the same time suggest (if not prove) a “big” point about the relationship between country and city? Turner’s use of “great men” as representative “types” was racist and nineteenth-century, but it highlights the problem of believing any particular story can claim to be a general, representative view. Maybe a series of well-chosen microhistories can be sewn together into something that resembles a wide view. Doing this rural history, I might look more closely at the idea of cores and peripheries, which may show unexpected interactions between east and west. I might find cycles of growth and decline that follow different trajectories from Turner’s. Cronon has already told a story of the simultaneous growth of a center and periphery, but more might be said about the people living in the shadow of a “Chicago” (or maybe a Minneapolis). There must be ways rural people’s lives remained unaffected, just as there are ways they were never free of the fact of the city’s existence. And Cronon’s final question is a good one to keep in mind: “To what extent has the peculiar nature of American class consciousness and republican government been shaped by the shifting resource base of our economic and social life? How do nature and humanity transform each other?” (175) This question might help break an exclusive focus on the city-country binary, to focus on the changing ways rural areas relate to their environments in American history, and how that can be much different from the way cities do. This might go a long way toward a story of how culture, class consciousness, and politics developed the way they did in rural America. Comparing these to the stories city-Americans have always wanted to tell themselves about the character and qualities of their rural neighbors, might help explain how we got to where we are.
“Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner”
The Western Historical Quarterly
18:2, April 1987
Synopsis: Cronon reviews the historiographical impact of Turner (especially, but not only his frontier thesis), and reevaluates its implications. He suggests that the flaws in Turner’s ideas can be ignored, and a core set of ideas remain that inform new (especially environmental) approaches to American history.
Cronon defines the frontier thesis using Turner’s words: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” Turner combined Darwin and Haekel (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) “evolution to narrate “an evolution which recapitulated the development of civilization itself, tracing the path from hunter to trader to farmer to town,” and forming “a special American character...marked by fierce individualism, pragmatism, and egalitarianism.” (157) This formulation is problematic, Cronon says, because its “fuzzy language conferred on Turner’s argument the illusion of great analytical power only because his central terms...were so broad and so ill-defined.” (158) I’d also suggest that the Darwinian paradigm is not a perfect fit for historical development, recapitulation is attractive but ultimately false, and that even if the frontier experience fostered individualism, pragmatism, and egalitarianism generally, it’s crucial to understand how these traits were expressed and distributed. Clearly everyone didn’t have them all in equal quantities. How and why some people became radically egalitarian while others became radically libertarian seems like it should be a central concern in western histories.
Cronon says Turner’s critics have pointed out that “westerners looked to the East,” and that “Among the eastern institutions dominating western life have been the Federal government, the corporation, and the city.” (158) He calls attention to the “urban character of much western settlement,” (169) especially in “rising urban centers whose growth was central to frontier expansion itself.” (like Chicago in NM, 1992. 173) The impact of these points, for me, is that they break the smooth flow of the westward teleology (just as they break the static von Thünen model). Western (or any regional) history should challenge the idea that the story “of any given American place could be written in terms of a progressive sequence of different economic and social activities [and] embodied in representative figures who might serve as ‘types’.” (166) Cronon suggests that in place of Turner’s narrative arc (which he admits “set American space in motion and gave it a plot,” 166), historians could focus on changes in “People’s notions of abundance and scarcity--of wealth and poverty.” (172) “Among the deepest struggles in American western history,” he says, are “those among peoples who have defined abundance--and the ‘good life’--in conflicting ways.” (175) New histories might “discover a subtler periodization...[and] create a finer-grained sense of movement that will reflect interconnections between regional diversity and the shifting dialectic of scarcity and abundance.” (174)
Historians these days appreciate tightly-focused, evidence-based, bottom-up narratives, but they seem to miss the big, sweeping histories of the nineteenth century. In his most recent book (which I’m in the middle of reading) Kulikoff says he’s bringing back the master narrative (we’ll see). My question is, how to put together a history that will drill down into the details of specific people’s experiences in particular places and times, and at the same time suggest (if not prove) a “big” point about the relationship between country and city? Turner’s use of “great men” as representative “types” was racist and nineteenth-century, but it highlights the problem of believing any particular story can claim to be a general, representative view. Maybe a series of well-chosen microhistories can be sewn together into something that resembles a wide view. Doing this rural history, I might look more closely at the idea of cores and peripheries, which may show unexpected interactions between east and west. I might find cycles of growth and decline that follow different trajectories from Turner’s. Cronon has already told a story of the simultaneous growth of a center and periphery, but more might be said about the people living in the shadow of a “Chicago” (or maybe a Minneapolis). There must be ways rural people’s lives remained unaffected, just as there are ways they were never free of the fact of the city’s existence. And Cronon’s final question is a good one to keep in mind: “To what extent has the peculiar nature of American class consciousness and republican government been shaped by the shifting resource base of our economic and social life? How do nature and humanity transform each other?” (175) This question might help break an exclusive focus on the city-country binary, to focus on the changing ways rural areas relate to their environments in American history, and how that can be much different from the way cities do. This might go a long way toward a story of how culture, class consciousness, and politics developed the way they did in rural America. Comparing these to the stories city-Americans have always wanted to tell themselves about the character and qualities of their rural neighbors, might help explain how we got to where we are.
Transatlantic radical connections
01/28/2010 17:02
Colin Bonwick
English Radicals and the American Revolution
1977
Synopsis: Bonwick traces the influence of the Revolution on two groups of British radical, which he calls Commonwealthmen and new radicals. The commonwealth or “real whig” tradition was based on “the doctrine of the ancient constitution,” while the new radicals based their movement on “pure and self-justifying natural rights,” derived from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (esp. Part II). Bonwick identifies two other strains of British radicalism: Bentham’s utilitarianism, as described in his 1776 Fragment on Government, and Wilkes’ movement in the 1760s and 1770s, which “provided a bridge between the commonwealth tradition and the artisan radicals of the 1790s.” (xiv) Bonwick narrates a detailed chronology that highlights connections between Americans and British radicals.
Bonwick mentions Christopher Wyvill early in the story, but keeps him in the background. More prominent is Major John Cartwright, whose “first reform tract, Take Your Choice! (published in 1776) advocated universal manhood suffrage and...anticipated the Chartists by more than fifty years.” (6) Granville Sharp and Thomas Brand Hollis were acquaintances of John Adams, and corresponded with him and other Americans after Adams returned to America. Catharine Macaulay was one of the few early radicals who did not soften her position as time went on.
Before fighting broke out, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee made significant contributions to British radical thought, Bonwick says. Lee wrote newspaper articles he signed as “Junius Americanus,” which he compiled in The Political Detection: On the Treachery and Tyranny of Administration Both at Home and Abroad. In 1774, he published An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain as “An Old Member of Parliament;” which he followed a year later with a Second Appeal and A Speech Intended to Have Been Given in the House of Commons. Franklin wrote under his own name, and his articles were reprinted as “Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces” by his friend Benjamin Vaughan. (41-2) The Declaration of Independence “arrived in England in August 1776 and immediately was reprinted in almost every newspaper, as a broadsheet, and in the various documentary collections.” (42)
Friendships and personal connections were at least as important as publications. When Franklin arrived in Paris in 1775, he asked Joseph Priestley to relay to their friend Richard Price his observation that “Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head...during the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America.” (83) After the war ended, the Americans‘ prestige with radicals only increased, says Bonwick. “Whereas Franklin had been admitted to the radical circle [including the Lunar Society and the Royal] initially as a scientist, Adams was welcomed as an American.” His elitist Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which he hoped would communicate his Federalist ideals to “some of the Enlightened Friends of Liberty here,” was embraced by the more conservative Commonwealthmen as a rational and very recognizable approach to government. (174) Older radicals like Brand Hollis clung to the idea that America had taken a step away from complete democracy, Bonwick says, especially after 1789. “Priestley thought that the Americans were imitating the English civil constitution and adopting a form of government similar to the British.” (184) “Adams arguments brought the American model closer to the structural forms of English constitutionalism...Radicals... believed...the American example demonstrated the feasibility of political reform in their own country.” (187)
“Catharine Macaulay [was] the only English radical to have visited the United States since its independence.” (182) She stayed with the Washingtons, and corresponded with them after her return. “After reading some Antifederalist pamphlets sent by Mercy Warren here reservations grew stronger” that America had retreated too far from “the rights for which Americans had fought.” Only her faith in Washington convinced her that as president he would safeguard those rights.
The French Revolution changed everything. In Bonwick’s narrative, it caused Commonwealth radicals to reevaluate their reform agenda, even as it sparked a new radical generation that expanded much more widely into the artisan communities of London and other cities. Many older radicals “continued to attach greater importance to [America’s] libertarianism,” Bonwick says, while “the new men were particularly impressed with the egalitarianism they believed to be inherent in American society.” (217) Bonwick is unclear exactly what the difference between these two positions is; the only significant difference seems to be that “When the Birmingham Society for Constitutional Information told readers of a broadsheet, ‘You have rights equal to all,’ they were saying nothing that was in itself new, what was remarkable was that they were addressing workmen.” (218)
“The new generation of radicals was born in December 1791...[when] a group of artisans formed a Constitutional Society in the new industrial town of Sheffield...Shortly afterward, and partly in emulation...the London Corresponding Society (LCS), ‘composed chiefly of tradesmen and shopkeepers,’ was founded.” (217-8) “Thomas Hardy, shoemaker, secretary, and organizer of the LCS, had read extensively in the earlier tracts of the SCI (given him by Brand Hollis) and pamphlets by Sharp, Cartwright, Jebb, and Price.” (220) While the older radicals like Hollis and Sharp continued corresponding with John Adams and Benjamin Rush, the younger men focused on Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow of Connecticut. Barlow had arrived in London in 1788, shortly after his pamphlet The Vision of Columbus. In 1792, Barlow “reached prominence” with the publication of Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, which discussed “principles enunciated by Price in his notorious Discourse on the Love of Our Country.” (225)
Paine “arrived in England with a ready-made reputation based on Common Sense and had quickly made contacts with a wide range of politicians from Edmund Burke...[to] Brand Hollis.” (226) Quoting E.P. Thompson, Bonwick says Paine gave English people “a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ and which penetrated the subpolitical attitudes of the urban working people.” (227) “The second part of Rights of Man was an even greater success than its predecessor. It circulated with extreme rapidity among the radical groups in Manchester, Sheffield, Norwich, and elsewhere and was warmly welcomed as a work of the highest importance...A proclamation against seditious writings was intended to suppress the pamphlet, but had the opposite effect, and when Paine learned that a prosecution was immanent he arranged for the publication of a cheap edition” and moved to France. “Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold within a few years. To supplement them, five editions and ten variants of Common Sense were published between 1791 and 1793, and the SCI distributed twelve thousand copies of his Letter to Secretary Dundas.” (231)
So, the American Revolution remained very present in the minds of British radicals, although there was wide variation in their response to it. LCS co-founder John Thelwall, “who claimed to speak for the desperately poor...remarked that the American people had too much veneration fro property, religion, and law.” (231) Joseph Gerrald, a leading LCS “theoretician,” saw “a garden of Eden...whose structure and values were the antithesis of...England.” (232) “By the middle of the [1790s] many old radicals were appalled by the ‘horrible excesses‘ of the French Revolution [and] used American experience to redress these extremist tendencies.” (234) “Christopher Wyvill...strongly disapproved of the prosecution of Paine but feared that the extremists would take over the SCI...Cartwright shared some of Wyvill’s suspicions and worked hard to counteract Paine’s republicanism, while Brand Hollis denied rumors that he saw Rights of Man prior to publication and reportedly refused Paine financial help when he was in difficulties.” (235) “Commonwealthmen saw America in light of their own needs...following the Adams model in preference to the Pennsylvania model of a unicameral legislature.” But “shortly before her death Catharine Macaulay told Washington that she had abandoned her preference for the American system in favor of the French unicameral model.” (237)
English Radicals and the American Revolution
1977
Synopsis: Bonwick traces the influence of the Revolution on two groups of British radical, which he calls Commonwealthmen and new radicals. The commonwealth or “real whig” tradition was based on “the doctrine of the ancient constitution,” while the new radicals based their movement on “pure and self-justifying natural rights,” derived from Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (esp. Part II). Bonwick identifies two other strains of British radicalism: Bentham’s utilitarianism, as described in his 1776 Fragment on Government, and Wilkes’ movement in the 1760s and 1770s, which “provided a bridge between the commonwealth tradition and the artisan radicals of the 1790s.” (xiv) Bonwick narrates a detailed chronology that highlights connections between Americans and British radicals.
Bonwick mentions Christopher Wyvill early in the story, but keeps him in the background. More prominent is Major John Cartwright, whose “first reform tract, Take Your Choice! (published in 1776) advocated universal manhood suffrage and...anticipated the Chartists by more than fifty years.” (6) Granville Sharp and Thomas Brand Hollis were acquaintances of John Adams, and corresponded with him and other Americans after Adams returned to America. Catharine Macaulay was one of the few early radicals who did not soften her position as time went on.
Before fighting broke out, Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee made significant contributions to British radical thought, Bonwick says. Lee wrote newspaper articles he signed as “Junius Americanus,” which he compiled in The Political Detection: On the Treachery and Tyranny of Administration Both at Home and Abroad. In 1774, he published An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain as “An Old Member of Parliament;” which he followed a year later with a Second Appeal and A Speech Intended to Have Been Given in the House of Commons. Franklin wrote under his own name, and his articles were reprinted as “Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces” by his friend Benjamin Vaughan. (41-2) The Declaration of Independence “arrived in England in August 1776 and immediately was reprinted in almost every newspaper, as a broadsheet, and in the various documentary collections.” (42)
Friendships and personal connections were at least as important as publications. When Franklin arrived in Paris in 1775, he asked Joseph Priestley to relay to their friend Richard Price his observation that “Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and fifty Yankees this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a head...during the same time sixty thousand children have been born in America.” (83) After the war ended, the Americans‘ prestige with radicals only increased, says Bonwick. “Whereas Franklin had been admitted to the radical circle [including the Lunar Society and the Royal] initially as a scientist, Adams was welcomed as an American.” His elitist Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which he hoped would communicate his Federalist ideals to “some of the Enlightened Friends of Liberty here,” was embraced by the more conservative Commonwealthmen as a rational and very recognizable approach to government. (174) Older radicals like Brand Hollis clung to the idea that America had taken a step away from complete democracy, Bonwick says, especially after 1789. “Priestley thought that the Americans were imitating the English civil constitution and adopting a form of government similar to the British.” (184) “Adams arguments brought the American model closer to the structural forms of English constitutionalism...Radicals... believed...the American example demonstrated the feasibility of political reform in their own country.” (187)
“Catharine Macaulay [was] the only English radical to have visited the United States since its independence.” (182) She stayed with the Washingtons, and corresponded with them after her return. “After reading some Antifederalist pamphlets sent by Mercy Warren here reservations grew stronger” that America had retreated too far from “the rights for which Americans had fought.” Only her faith in Washington convinced her that as president he would safeguard those rights.
The French Revolution changed everything. In Bonwick’s narrative, it caused Commonwealth radicals to reevaluate their reform agenda, even as it sparked a new radical generation that expanded much more widely into the artisan communities of London and other cities. Many older radicals “continued to attach greater importance to [America’s] libertarianism,” Bonwick says, while “the new men were particularly impressed with the egalitarianism they believed to be inherent in American society.” (217) Bonwick is unclear exactly what the difference between these two positions is; the only significant difference seems to be that “When the Birmingham Society for Constitutional Information told readers of a broadsheet, ‘You have rights equal to all,’ they were saying nothing that was in itself new, what was remarkable was that they were addressing workmen.” (218)
“The new generation of radicals was born in December 1791...[when] a group of artisans formed a Constitutional Society in the new industrial town of Sheffield...Shortly afterward, and partly in emulation...the London Corresponding Society (LCS), ‘composed chiefly of tradesmen and shopkeepers,’ was founded.” (217-8) “Thomas Hardy, shoemaker, secretary, and organizer of the LCS, had read extensively in the earlier tracts of the SCI (given him by Brand Hollis) and pamphlets by Sharp, Cartwright, Jebb, and Price.” (220) While the older radicals like Hollis and Sharp continued corresponding with John Adams and Benjamin Rush, the younger men focused on Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow of Connecticut. Barlow had arrived in London in 1788, shortly after his pamphlet The Vision of Columbus. In 1792, Barlow “reached prominence” with the publication of Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, which discussed “principles enunciated by Price in his notorious Discourse on the Love of Our Country.” (225)
Paine “arrived in England with a ready-made reputation based on Common Sense and had quickly made contacts with a wide range of politicians from Edmund Burke...[to] Brand Hollis.” (226) Quoting E.P. Thompson, Bonwick says Paine gave English people “a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ and which penetrated the subpolitical attitudes of the urban working people.” (227) “The second part of Rights of Man was an even greater success than its predecessor. It circulated with extreme rapidity among the radical groups in Manchester, Sheffield, Norwich, and elsewhere and was warmly welcomed as a work of the highest importance...A proclamation against seditious writings was intended to suppress the pamphlet, but had the opposite effect, and when Paine learned that a prosecution was immanent he arranged for the publication of a cheap edition” and moved to France. “Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold within a few years. To supplement them, five editions and ten variants of Common Sense were published between 1791 and 1793, and the SCI distributed twelve thousand copies of his Letter to Secretary Dundas.” (231)
So, the American Revolution remained very present in the minds of British radicals, although there was wide variation in their response to it. LCS co-founder John Thelwall, “who claimed to speak for the desperately poor...remarked that the American people had too much veneration fro property, religion, and law.” (231) Joseph Gerrald, a leading LCS “theoretician,” saw “a garden of Eden...whose structure and values were the antithesis of...England.” (232) “By the middle of the [1790s] many old radicals were appalled by the ‘horrible excesses‘ of the French Revolution [and] used American experience to redress these extremist tendencies.” (234) “Christopher Wyvill...strongly disapproved of the prosecution of Paine but feared that the extremists would take over the SCI...Cartwright shared some of Wyvill’s suspicions and worked hard to counteract Paine’s republicanism, while Brand Hollis denied rumors that he saw Rights of Man prior to publication and reportedly refused Paine financial help when he was in difficulties.” (235) “Commonwealthmen saw America in light of their own needs...following the Adams model in preference to the Pennsylvania model of a unicameral legislature.” But “shortly before her death Catharine Macaulay told Washington that she had abandoned her preference for the American system in favor of the French unicameral model.” (237)
Stylized isn't that obsessive
01/25/2010 21:16
Mark Garvey
Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style
2009
Actually, the title promises more than it delivers by way of quirkiness. The book is partly a look at the history of The Elements of Style, partly a glimpse at the interactions of E.B. White with a number of people including William Strunk and the Macmillan editors and managers who made the book possible. The book obsession elements seem like they were inserted at the behest of an editor, to add a little quirkiness to an otherwise pretty straightforward story.
Part of the appeal of Stylized is the glimpse it gives the reader of New York literary culture during the years when White was one of its bright lights. In this sense, it reminds me a bit of One Drop, Bliss Broyard’s book about discovering her father was black. Anatole Broyard was a critic for the New York Times in the seventies and eighties. The difference is, Garvey is right: “few books of any size, have had the impact on American literary culture and thought that The Elements of Style has.” White’s ability to abstract (a little, not obsessively) from writing to life (“it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong”) probably accounts for much of the appeal of The Elements. That, and the fact it helps people write.
Garvey gives White credit for having “that straightforward prose that was exceptionally polished...without giving the impression of labor.” (33) In one of the professional writers’ comments (I can’t find it -- more about this in a moment), someone makes the point that White creates a “myth” of simple prose and clear thinking. Garvey falls into this myth headfirst, taking several opportunities to attack postmodernism. He disparages theory, and even belittles attempts to make language more gender-inclusive. In drafting Strunk and White into his crusade, he’s probably oversimplifying the positions they would have taken, which would have been both more nuanced and more humorous than Garvey’s pedantic rants.
I couldn’t find the author of the part I just paraphrased, because the book is organized in such a jumble. Garvey apparently had conversations with several authors. They give their opinions on The Elements and reflections on how it has influenced their work. Some of these are interesting, some simply reinforce points Garvey has already made well enough, and pad the pages. The real problem, though, is that Garvey or his editors chose to break these comments up, and intersperse them throughout the text. In some cases, this may hide the fact that people repeated themselves quite a bit. My objection is, many of these short blurbs come, complete with their own little boxes like textbook sidebars, in the middle of the story. They completely break the flow, and I frequently found myself paging back, to see what Garvey had been saying, before he so rudely interrupted himself.
Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style
2009
Actually, the title promises more than it delivers by way of quirkiness. The book is partly a look at the history of The Elements of Style, partly a glimpse at the interactions of E.B. White with a number of people including William Strunk and the Macmillan editors and managers who made the book possible. The book obsession elements seem like they were inserted at the behest of an editor, to add a little quirkiness to an otherwise pretty straightforward story.
Part of the appeal of Stylized is the glimpse it gives the reader of New York literary culture during the years when White was one of its bright lights. In this sense, it reminds me a bit of One Drop, Bliss Broyard’s book about discovering her father was black. Anatole Broyard was a critic for the New York Times in the seventies and eighties. The difference is, Garvey is right: “few books of any size, have had the impact on American literary culture and thought that The Elements of Style has.” White’s ability to abstract (a little, not obsessively) from writing to life (“it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong”) probably accounts for much of the appeal of The Elements. That, and the fact it helps people write.
Garvey gives White credit for having “that straightforward prose that was exceptionally polished...without giving the impression of labor.” (33) In one of the professional writers’ comments (I can’t find it -- more about this in a moment), someone makes the point that White creates a “myth” of simple prose and clear thinking. Garvey falls into this myth headfirst, taking several opportunities to attack postmodernism. He disparages theory, and even belittles attempts to make language more gender-inclusive. In drafting Strunk and White into his crusade, he’s probably oversimplifying the positions they would have taken, which would have been both more nuanced and more humorous than Garvey’s pedantic rants.
I couldn’t find the author of the part I just paraphrased, because the book is organized in such a jumble. Garvey apparently had conversations with several authors. They give their opinions on The Elements and reflections on how it has influenced their work. Some of these are interesting, some simply reinforce points Garvey has already made well enough, and pad the pages. The real problem, though, is that Garvey or his editors chose to break these comments up, and intersperse them throughout the text. In some cases, this may hide the fact that people repeated themselves quite a bit. My objection is, many of these short blurbs come, complete with their own little boxes like textbook sidebars, in the middle of the story. They completely break the flow, and I frequently found myself paging back, to see what Garvey had been saying, before he so rudely interrupted himself.
2 views of agrarian radicalism
01/22/2010 13:29
Alfred F. Young, ed.
Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism
(1993)
Allan Kulikoff, “The American Revolution, Capitalism, and the Formation of the Yeoman Classes”
As you’d expect from the title, Kulikoff argues that there was class-consciousness among yeomen farmers, separating them not only from aristocrats and merchants, but also from capitalist farmers. Kulikoff has written extensively on farmers and the revolutionary period, and I’ll need to look at his books to discover whether his claims are supported, because he doesn’t provide any primary evidence in this article (this is frustrating, and may be a warning to me, never to write an article without evidence, regardless how retrospective I think it is). He defines yeoman farming as being based solely on family labor, and although sometimes selling surpluses in the market, primarily oriented toward self-sufficiency and survival (he does not use the word competency, but that seems to be the idea). There’s an intermediate group of commercial farmers, who sometimes employ wage labor and credit, and who produce for the market. And finally, there are capitalist farmers, who are completely committed to the market. Kulikoff does not provide any concrete examples of these types (which is clearly a problem, for me).
I've written my thoughts about Kulikoff's argument in italics, as it goes. This seems most useful to me, and hopefully will make sense to readers.
Kulikoff says “These Virginia yeomen, who constituted three-fifths of the white heads of families in the colony, owned land and knew that freeholding land tenure was their only claim to political participation, their only security against impoverishment...To gain votes in the 1790s and beyond, gentlemen, especially Jeffersonian Republicans, placed this yeoman self-image at the center of their message, thereby legitimating and co-opting the political rhetoric of the sturdy yeoman.” (81-2) While I find the idea that politicians used (and partly manufactured) this yeoman image, partly to the detriment of the actual farmers, plausible, I think Kulikoff’s argument is strained and too heavily informed by theory.
“Yeomen,” he says (his italics), “were small, producing farmers who owned land and participated in markets to sustain familial autonomy and local exchange. [in other words, they were philosophically committed to local, barter exchange within the community? Where? When?] Practicing ‘safety first’ agriculture, they grew much of the food they consumed and tried to procure the rest through trade with neighbors. [others put safety second? Doesn’t this really mean they had families to feed, they were living at a subsistence level, and the only people around to trade with were their neighbors, because there was no effective transportation to distant markets?] Avoiding entangling debts, they retained the independence needed to make virtuous political decisions. [they did this on purpose? Or were they living in a remote, rural, subsistence economy where they were unable to get credit, and would have had no use for it anyway. The Jeffersonians said this was virtuous -- are we falling for the same political line they sold to the yeomen?] Yeoman farmers can be contrasted with capitalist farmers, who sought greater market embeddedness, concentrated on staple crops, and on occasion bought financial instruments. Unlike yeomen, they often hired wage laborers to increase their output and profits. [am I being cynical, or do they have to use “financial instruments” and wage labor, and the yeomen have to be innocent of that sin, or the predetermined structure Kulikoff is building for us doesn’t work?] They became part of a capitalist economy, one where profits were divided between the original producers (farmers, artisans, small urban capitalists, wage laborers) and a class of capitalists who owned and controlled the means of production and who expropriated part of the value of goods every producer made. [how’s that again? Who are these über-capitalists? How do they expropriate this surplus value? No, not in theory -- on the ground! Who and where are they??]” (84) The citation at the end of this paragraph actually directs the reader to Kulikoff’s own book, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, which I’ve been meaning to read.
“Repudiating feudalism,” Kulikoff says, these American yeomen “rarely held property in common; disliking capitalism, they nonetheless espoused private property in land, and the land markets, economic interdependence, and capitalist development they disliked inevitably followed.” (85) Brian Donahue challenges the claim that commons were uncommon. And again, development of land markets (and speculation, etc.) is ironic, but is it inevitable? Is theory filling in for evidence?
Kulikoff says events like the resistance of Hudson Valley tenants in the 1760s “led yeomen to greater self-definition as a class,” (88) and this is fine as far as it goes. But so what? What did they do? What happened as a result? A “yeoman class ideology can be traced to justifications of their right to land when either gentlemen or native Americans threatened...To legitimate their rights to land, yeomen embraced a labor theory of value, one they had carried over with them from England, but that lay dormant until conflict broke out.” (90) This is really frustrating, because Kulikoff’s determination to make these guys into little proto-Marxists almost obscures some really interesting ironies. The “labor theory” these yeomen were using was the idea that unimproved land, which (deliberately?) misunderstanding the Indians‘ agricultural and hunting techniques, they believed the frontier to be, couldn’t be owned. The irony is that they had to appeal to the “gentlemen” in charge of the government for protection against these Indians, even as they tried to maintain their claims to the land and their autonomy. “Indians, John Winthrop...insisted, ‘enclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame cattle to improve the Land by,’ and therefore had no right to retain ownership of it. Only human labor improved the land, thereby bestowing ownership rights upon it.” (90) Okay, in the first place, Winthrop said this over a hundred years before the story Kulikoff is telling about the revolution. It’s unclear how much of this Winthrop believed, and how much was a justification drawn from Locke. Winthrop actually says (and Kulikoff neglects to quote) “...nor any tame cattle to improve the Land by, and soe have no other but a Naturall Right.” But in any case, this passage does not prove the yeomen espoused a labor theory of value. Based on the quote, Winthrop could as easily have been arguing for a “Cattle” theory of value, or less ridiculously for “habitation” as a basis for land title. This is a claim squatters would later make, along with the improvement argument, when defending their farms against landlords from the cities.
“Whig leaders,” says Kuliloff, “came to understand that to gain support of white property holders they had to appeal to the lived experience of the yeomen, to their fears of losing their land.” (94) The implication is that urban Committees of Correspondence deliberately crafted their message to their rural audience, to play on fears the city-folk didn’t share. But “wherever yeomen (or would-be yeomen among tenants) saw Whig gentlemen as enemies, they joined the British or stayed neutral.” This is an interesting argument, especially if it led to the Whigs promising (or hinting at) a revolutionary settlement they had no interest in or intention of supporting, once the war was won.
After the war, in the period leading up to the Constitution, Kulikoff says the Whig delegates to the Philadelphia convention “sought a stronger national government, with the power to tax, regulate commerce, suppress internal conflict, and encourage economic development. They uniformly opposed agrarian laws, a term used to imply the redistribution of wealth and the leveling of property.” This is interesting. I’d love to know what some of these “agrarian” law proposals were. Franklin also suggested it might be a good idea to limit the accumulation of capital and land -- but he was ignored. Who would be able to vote and hold office went right to the taxation and representation claims the revolutionaries had made against England. “In pushing for greater freeholder democracy in the 1780s and 1790s,” Kulikoff says, “yeomen became more conscious of themselves as a political class, distinct from gentlemen and merchants.” (104) Again, okay -- but to what degree was somebody else (Democratic Republicans fighting the Federalists) trying to form that group consciousness in them, to lead them into the party?
“White settlers in the Ohio Valley welcomed the military campaigns of the 1790s that ultimately ended what they saw as the Indian menace.” (105) Heavy irony here: these sturdy individualist yeomen are appealing to the state to conquer the Indians, so they can have lands they will subsequently claim are theirs by natural right and not subject to taxation or competing claims by gentlemen who have the backing of that same state. Maybe the continuing presence of the Indian issue prevented these yeomen from ever really coming together to form a “party.”
Kulikoff admits that “older [yeoman] strategies of communal self-sufficiency in food [quickly became] difficult, if not impossible.” He continues, “These yeoman ideals influenced the political leaders who created a powerful ideology that historians have commonly called ‘Jeffersonian agrarianism’...Agrarian realists like Thomas Jefferson contended that the best possible society was one dominated by small, independent producers. Only widespread distribution of land could prevent usurpation of power and destruction of the republic by the wealthy.” Again, the implication is that this was a political position rather than a sincere philosophy. It’s an attractive idea, and I wish he’d provided evidence. But, in the long run, for my purposes, does it matter whether Jefferson believed or not?
“The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture illuminates the improving spirit that animated capitalist farmers. Founded in 1785 by merchants, doctors, and gentlemen (including Benjamin Rush and Robert Morris), nearly all of whom opposed Pennsylvania’s democratic constitution of 1776 and applauded the federal Constitution of 1787, the society gave its first prize...to George Morgan, a gentleman farmer from Princeton, New Jersey.” (106) This is interesting: if they are really like Kulikoff says, are they a little proto-Country Life Movement? Kulikoff concludes that the “defeat of yeoman popular democracy in the revolutionary era was only the first stage in the struggle of yeomen to maintain their communal social order. On every frontier yeomen reinvented their class and remade a world of patriarchal family government, food-producing farms, and communal self-sufficiency. As capitalist farmers expanded on the northern frontiers, conflicts with yeomen ensued...only the radical legacy of the Revolution sustained yeomen democracy for so long, nurturing the yeomanry through their protracted struggles of the nineteenth century.” (108) This is just not true. Agricultural settlers did NOT face the same conditions, did not go out west to get away from the market economy (especially after the railroads), and certainly didn’t aspire to utopian communalism except in rare instances. But it’s a strong myth, that probably draws a lot of its strength from Turner, and a lot from the desire of historians to tell a story like this. A continuous struggle, of a self-conscious class. Maybe that’s the real central question: can people be part of a continuous class, based solely on their self-association with a myth, regardless of the fact that their life experience completely invalidates that association? Obviously, I need to plan a chapter on the myth of the yeoman farmer, and its effect on rural history/historiography (both what happened, and what’s been said about what happened).
Alan Taylor, “Agrarian Independence: Northern Land Rioters after the Revolution”
In contrast to Kulikoff, Taylor’s article is full of references to particular people and events. He quotes “Liberty-Men” who he says were “defending their notion of the American Revolution against betrayal by the Great Proprietors”:
“Who can have better right to the land than we who have fought for it, subdued it & made it valuable which if we had not done no proprietor would ever have enquired after it...Wild land ought to be as free as common air. These lands once belonged to King George. He lost them by the American Revolution & they became the property of the people who defended & won them. The General Court did wrong & what they had no right to do when they granted them in such large quantities to certain companies & individuals & the bad acts of government are not binding on the subject...”
This was a sentiment, Taylor says, that was shared by “the Wild Yankees of Pennsylvania, the Anti-Renters of New York, and the Liberty-Men of Maine...that communities must resist laws that traduced the Revolution’s meaning. This was not what General Know wanted to read.” (224) Taylor gives us two groups, with wildly different world-views and expectations of the Revolution. “As gentlemen of property and standing,” he says, “Timothy Pickering, Philip Schuyler, and Henry Know fought a war for national independence, a war intended to place America’s government in their own hands and to safeguard their extensive property from arbitrary parliamentary taxation. They expected the new order to safeguard pre-revolutionary legal contracts, especially large land grants...But those agrarians perceived Pickering, Schuyler, and Knox as de facto Tories, greedy betrayers of the American Revolution’s proper meaning.” Why did the agrarians expect this? Who told them this is what they were fighting for? Thomas Paine, for one. How much did they know, going in, that this was not the idea the rich were fighting for? How much were they hoping to push it farther? Depending on democracy to give them that chance?
Agrarians, he says “sought an American Revolution that maximized their access to, and secured their possession of, freehold land on which they could realize their labor as their own private property. This meant minimizing the levies of the ‘great men’: taxes, rents, land payments, and legal fees.” (225-6) This expression seems much more nuanced and reasonable than Kulikoff’s. The agrarians “sought” a Revolution, after the fact. They realized that in increasingly technological, capital-intensive, and even cooperative enterprises, they lose some of the title to their labor, which they retain in subsistence agriculture. This is a sophisticated distinction. And they realize that society creates the ownership, legal, and power relationships that allow “great men” to enrich themselves. If true, this is very cool.
These agrarians were not seen as kooks -- at least not by everyone. In 1803, Robert H. Rose said of the Pennsylvania rebels: “They can not pay at present. They are a very industrious set of people, & such as make the best first settlers in a country like this; but the difficulty of clearing the land is so great that some years expire before a man can raise a subsistence for his family from it.” (231) This indicates an understanding that different people and personalities were needed, to settle a frontier, and presumably that there was some type of ongoing social contract with these people, even after the pioneer phase ended. Migration to the frontier “redistributed most of the population increase in the United States to new counties virtually unpopulated by whites in 1760...at the same moment that the Revolution discredited received authority and legitimated confronting rulers who imperiled ‘natural rights.’” (232) The fact that extralegal violence had been sanctified by the Revolution clearly complicated the issue for those trying to impose order from above.
Taylor suggests that “leading men” in remote agrarian communities helped the rebels, until Jefferson’s party gave them a way out of their tight spot between their neighbors and the aristocrats. “Jeffersonianism sapped resistance by winning over the leading men,” both with less draconian policies toward the rebels and with the prospect of acceptance into a slightly broader elite society. (236) After the “Revolution of 1800,” the authorities “simultaneously legislated against extralegal resistance while establishing institutional mechanisms to set compromise prices.” (235) These included a 1799 Pennsylvania “Compromise Act” paired with an 1801 stiffening of the 1795 “Intrusion Act.” Jeffersonians’ propaganda extolled the virtues of the agrarians, which may have mitigated the rebels’ frustration with compromise; but they were practical farmers who were probably by this point more interested in providing for their families than fighting for principle. Taylor concludes that the Jeffersonians’ compromises, and the general belief that this was the best deal anyone would ever get, helped the leading men sell their neighbors on ending the resistance, so that “over time, the social mobility of a strategic few shrank the contested, marginal, autonomous districts that had temporarily expanded after the Revolution.” (237) It’s tempting to think these leading men betrayed their neighbors. But the resolution of these conflicts left many of the rebels with the land they wanted, and in exchange for some autonomy allowed them to stop being marginal. Notwithstanding Kulikoff’s ideal of the self-sufficient yeoman, I think many agrarian families welcomed an opportunity to participate in the market to some degree. So, to some degree, this was a victory for them, which they would never have achieved had they not stood up to the aristocrats in the cities.
Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism
(1993)
Allan Kulikoff, “The American Revolution, Capitalism, and the Formation of the Yeoman Classes”
As you’d expect from the title, Kulikoff argues that there was class-consciousness among yeomen farmers, separating them not only from aristocrats and merchants, but also from capitalist farmers. Kulikoff has written extensively on farmers and the revolutionary period, and I’ll need to look at his books to discover whether his claims are supported, because he doesn’t provide any primary evidence in this article (this is frustrating, and may be a warning to me, never to write an article without evidence, regardless how retrospective I think it is). He defines yeoman farming as being based solely on family labor, and although sometimes selling surpluses in the market, primarily oriented toward self-sufficiency and survival (he does not use the word competency, but that seems to be the idea). There’s an intermediate group of commercial farmers, who sometimes employ wage labor and credit, and who produce for the market. And finally, there are capitalist farmers, who are completely committed to the market. Kulikoff does not provide any concrete examples of these types (which is clearly a problem, for me).
I've written my thoughts about Kulikoff's argument in italics, as it goes. This seems most useful to me, and hopefully will make sense to readers.
Kulikoff says “These Virginia yeomen, who constituted three-fifths of the white heads of families in the colony, owned land and knew that freeholding land tenure was their only claim to political participation, their only security against impoverishment...To gain votes in the 1790s and beyond, gentlemen, especially Jeffersonian Republicans, placed this yeoman self-image at the center of their message, thereby legitimating and co-opting the political rhetoric of the sturdy yeoman.” (81-2) While I find the idea that politicians used (and partly manufactured) this yeoman image, partly to the detriment of the actual farmers, plausible, I think Kulikoff’s argument is strained and too heavily informed by theory.
“Yeomen,” he says (his italics), “were small, producing farmers who owned land and participated in markets to sustain familial autonomy and local exchange. [in other words, they were philosophically committed to local, barter exchange within the community? Where? When?] Practicing ‘safety first’ agriculture, they grew much of the food they consumed and tried to procure the rest through trade with neighbors. [others put safety second? Doesn’t this really mean they had families to feed, they were living at a subsistence level, and the only people around to trade with were their neighbors, because there was no effective transportation to distant markets?] Avoiding entangling debts, they retained the independence needed to make virtuous political decisions. [they did this on purpose? Or were they living in a remote, rural, subsistence economy where they were unable to get credit, and would have had no use for it anyway. The Jeffersonians said this was virtuous -- are we falling for the same political line they sold to the yeomen?] Yeoman farmers can be contrasted with capitalist farmers, who sought greater market embeddedness, concentrated on staple crops, and on occasion bought financial instruments. Unlike yeomen, they often hired wage laborers to increase their output and profits. [am I being cynical, or do they have to use “financial instruments” and wage labor, and the yeomen have to be innocent of that sin, or the predetermined structure Kulikoff is building for us doesn’t work?] They became part of a capitalist economy, one where profits were divided between the original producers (farmers, artisans, small urban capitalists, wage laborers) and a class of capitalists who owned and controlled the means of production and who expropriated part of the value of goods every producer made. [how’s that again? Who are these über-capitalists? How do they expropriate this surplus value? No, not in theory -- on the ground! Who and where are they??]” (84) The citation at the end of this paragraph actually directs the reader to Kulikoff’s own book, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, which I’ve been meaning to read.
“Repudiating feudalism,” Kulikoff says, these American yeomen “rarely held property in common; disliking capitalism, they nonetheless espoused private property in land, and the land markets, economic interdependence, and capitalist development they disliked inevitably followed.” (85) Brian Donahue challenges the claim that commons were uncommon. And again, development of land markets (and speculation, etc.) is ironic, but is it inevitable? Is theory filling in for evidence?
Kulikoff says events like the resistance of Hudson Valley tenants in the 1760s “led yeomen to greater self-definition as a class,” (88) and this is fine as far as it goes. But so what? What did they do? What happened as a result? A “yeoman class ideology can be traced to justifications of their right to land when either gentlemen or native Americans threatened...To legitimate their rights to land, yeomen embraced a labor theory of value, one they had carried over with them from England, but that lay dormant until conflict broke out.” (90) This is really frustrating, because Kulikoff’s determination to make these guys into little proto-Marxists almost obscures some really interesting ironies. The “labor theory” these yeomen were using was the idea that unimproved land, which (deliberately?) misunderstanding the Indians‘ agricultural and hunting techniques, they believed the frontier to be, couldn’t be owned. The irony is that they had to appeal to the “gentlemen” in charge of the government for protection against these Indians, even as they tried to maintain their claims to the land and their autonomy. “Indians, John Winthrop...insisted, ‘enclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame cattle to improve the Land by,’ and therefore had no right to retain ownership of it. Only human labor improved the land, thereby bestowing ownership rights upon it.” (90) Okay, in the first place, Winthrop said this over a hundred years before the story Kulikoff is telling about the revolution. It’s unclear how much of this Winthrop believed, and how much was a justification drawn from Locke. Winthrop actually says (and Kulikoff neglects to quote) “...nor any tame cattle to improve the Land by, and soe have no other but a Naturall Right.” But in any case, this passage does not prove the yeomen espoused a labor theory of value. Based on the quote, Winthrop could as easily have been arguing for a “Cattle” theory of value, or less ridiculously for “habitation” as a basis for land title. This is a claim squatters would later make, along with the improvement argument, when defending their farms against landlords from the cities.
“Whig leaders,” says Kuliloff, “came to understand that to gain support of white property holders they had to appeal to the lived experience of the yeomen, to their fears of losing their land.” (94) The implication is that urban Committees of Correspondence deliberately crafted their message to their rural audience, to play on fears the city-folk didn’t share. But “wherever yeomen (or would-be yeomen among tenants) saw Whig gentlemen as enemies, they joined the British or stayed neutral.” This is an interesting argument, especially if it led to the Whigs promising (or hinting at) a revolutionary settlement they had no interest in or intention of supporting, once the war was won.
After the war, in the period leading up to the Constitution, Kulikoff says the Whig delegates to the Philadelphia convention “sought a stronger national government, with the power to tax, regulate commerce, suppress internal conflict, and encourage economic development. They uniformly opposed agrarian laws, a term used to imply the redistribution of wealth and the leveling of property.” This is interesting. I’d love to know what some of these “agrarian” law proposals were. Franklin also suggested it might be a good idea to limit the accumulation of capital and land -- but he was ignored. Who would be able to vote and hold office went right to the taxation and representation claims the revolutionaries had made against England. “In pushing for greater freeholder democracy in the 1780s and 1790s,” Kulikoff says, “yeomen became more conscious of themselves as a political class, distinct from gentlemen and merchants.” (104) Again, okay -- but to what degree was somebody else (Democratic Republicans fighting the Federalists) trying to form that group consciousness in them, to lead them into the party?
“White settlers in the Ohio Valley welcomed the military campaigns of the 1790s that ultimately ended what they saw as the Indian menace.” (105) Heavy irony here: these sturdy individualist yeomen are appealing to the state to conquer the Indians, so they can have lands they will subsequently claim are theirs by natural right and not subject to taxation or competing claims by gentlemen who have the backing of that same state. Maybe the continuing presence of the Indian issue prevented these yeomen from ever really coming together to form a “party.”
Kulikoff admits that “older [yeoman] strategies of communal self-sufficiency in food [quickly became] difficult, if not impossible.” He continues, “These yeoman ideals influenced the political leaders who created a powerful ideology that historians have commonly called ‘Jeffersonian agrarianism’...Agrarian realists like Thomas Jefferson contended that the best possible society was one dominated by small, independent producers. Only widespread distribution of land could prevent usurpation of power and destruction of the republic by the wealthy.” Again, the implication is that this was a political position rather than a sincere philosophy. It’s an attractive idea, and I wish he’d provided evidence. But, in the long run, for my purposes, does it matter whether Jefferson believed or not?
“The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture illuminates the improving spirit that animated capitalist farmers. Founded in 1785 by merchants, doctors, and gentlemen (including Benjamin Rush and Robert Morris), nearly all of whom opposed Pennsylvania’s democratic constitution of 1776 and applauded the federal Constitution of 1787, the society gave its first prize...to George Morgan, a gentleman farmer from Princeton, New Jersey.” (106) This is interesting: if they are really like Kulikoff says, are they a little proto-Country Life Movement? Kulikoff concludes that the “defeat of yeoman popular democracy in the revolutionary era was only the first stage in the struggle of yeomen to maintain their communal social order. On every frontier yeomen reinvented their class and remade a world of patriarchal family government, food-producing farms, and communal self-sufficiency. As capitalist farmers expanded on the northern frontiers, conflicts with yeomen ensued...only the radical legacy of the Revolution sustained yeomen democracy for so long, nurturing the yeomanry through their protracted struggles of the nineteenth century.” (108) This is just not true. Agricultural settlers did NOT face the same conditions, did not go out west to get away from the market economy (especially after the railroads), and certainly didn’t aspire to utopian communalism except in rare instances. But it’s a strong myth, that probably draws a lot of its strength from Turner, and a lot from the desire of historians to tell a story like this. A continuous struggle, of a self-conscious class. Maybe that’s the real central question: can people be part of a continuous class, based solely on their self-association with a myth, regardless of the fact that their life experience completely invalidates that association? Obviously, I need to plan a chapter on the myth of the yeoman farmer, and its effect on rural history/historiography (both what happened, and what’s been said about what happened).
Alan Taylor, “Agrarian Independence: Northern Land Rioters after the Revolution”
In contrast to Kulikoff, Taylor’s article is full of references to particular people and events. He quotes “Liberty-Men” who he says were “defending their notion of the American Revolution against betrayal by the Great Proprietors”:
“Who can have better right to the land than we who have fought for it, subdued it & made it valuable which if we had not done no proprietor would ever have enquired after it...Wild land ought to be as free as common air. These lands once belonged to King George. He lost them by the American Revolution & they became the property of the people who defended & won them. The General Court did wrong & what they had no right to do when they granted them in such large quantities to certain companies & individuals & the bad acts of government are not binding on the subject...”
This was a sentiment, Taylor says, that was shared by “the Wild Yankees of Pennsylvania, the Anti-Renters of New York, and the Liberty-Men of Maine...that communities must resist laws that traduced the Revolution’s meaning. This was not what General Know wanted to read.” (224) Taylor gives us two groups, with wildly different world-views and expectations of the Revolution. “As gentlemen of property and standing,” he says, “Timothy Pickering, Philip Schuyler, and Henry Know fought a war for national independence, a war intended to place America’s government in their own hands and to safeguard their extensive property from arbitrary parliamentary taxation. They expected the new order to safeguard pre-revolutionary legal contracts, especially large land grants...But those agrarians perceived Pickering, Schuyler, and Knox as de facto Tories, greedy betrayers of the American Revolution’s proper meaning.” Why did the agrarians expect this? Who told them this is what they were fighting for? Thomas Paine, for one. How much did they know, going in, that this was not the idea the rich were fighting for? How much were they hoping to push it farther? Depending on democracy to give them that chance?
Agrarians, he says “sought an American Revolution that maximized their access to, and secured their possession of, freehold land on which they could realize their labor as their own private property. This meant minimizing the levies of the ‘great men’: taxes, rents, land payments, and legal fees.” (225-6) This expression seems much more nuanced and reasonable than Kulikoff’s. The agrarians “sought” a Revolution, after the fact. They realized that in increasingly technological, capital-intensive, and even cooperative enterprises, they lose some of the title to their labor, which they retain in subsistence agriculture. This is a sophisticated distinction. And they realize that society creates the ownership, legal, and power relationships that allow “great men” to enrich themselves. If true, this is very cool.
These agrarians were not seen as kooks -- at least not by everyone. In 1803, Robert H. Rose said of the Pennsylvania rebels: “They can not pay at present. They are a very industrious set of people, & such as make the best first settlers in a country like this; but the difficulty of clearing the land is so great that some years expire before a man can raise a subsistence for his family from it.” (231) This indicates an understanding that different people and personalities were needed, to settle a frontier, and presumably that there was some type of ongoing social contract with these people, even after the pioneer phase ended. Migration to the frontier “redistributed most of the population increase in the United States to new counties virtually unpopulated by whites in 1760...at the same moment that the Revolution discredited received authority and legitimated confronting rulers who imperiled ‘natural rights.’” (232) The fact that extralegal violence had been sanctified by the Revolution clearly complicated the issue for those trying to impose order from above.
Taylor suggests that “leading men” in remote agrarian communities helped the rebels, until Jefferson’s party gave them a way out of their tight spot between their neighbors and the aristocrats. “Jeffersonianism sapped resistance by winning over the leading men,” both with less draconian policies toward the rebels and with the prospect of acceptance into a slightly broader elite society. (236) After the “Revolution of 1800,” the authorities “simultaneously legislated against extralegal resistance while establishing institutional mechanisms to set compromise prices.” (235) These included a 1799 Pennsylvania “Compromise Act” paired with an 1801 stiffening of the 1795 “Intrusion Act.” Jeffersonians’ propaganda extolled the virtues of the agrarians, which may have mitigated the rebels’ frustration with compromise; but they were practical farmers who were probably by this point more interested in providing for their families than fighting for principle. Taylor concludes that the Jeffersonians’ compromises, and the general belief that this was the best deal anyone would ever get, helped the leading men sell their neighbors on ending the resistance, so that “over time, the social mobility of a strategic few shrank the contested, marginal, autonomous districts that had temporarily expanded after the Revolution.” (237) It’s tempting to think these leading men betrayed their neighbors. But the resolution of these conflicts left many of the rebels with the land they wanted, and in exchange for some autonomy allowed them to stop being marginal. Notwithstanding Kulikoff’s ideal of the self-sufficient yeoman, I think many agrarian families welcomed an opportunity to participate in the market to some degree. So, to some degree, this was a victory for them, which they would never have achieved had they not stood up to the aristocrats in the cities.
Surprises in English history
01/21/2010 12:39
Michael T. Davis, ed.,
Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848
(2000)
H.T. Dickinson, “‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American Revolution,”
“In 1775 Lord North admitted to George III that ‘the cause of Great Britain is not yet sufficiently popular’, and Lord Camden claimed that ‘the common people hold the war in abhorrence and the merchants and tradesmen, for obvious reasons, are likewise against it’, and he told the House of Lords: ‘You have not half of the nation on your side.’ Benjamin Franklin believed that ‘the body of the English people are our friends.’ In August 1775, John Wesley...was alarmed that the bulk of the people were ‘dangerously dissatisfied’ and highly critical of the King himself...Temple Luttrell, having returned from a tour of England, told the House of Commons ‘that the sense of the mass of the people is in favor of the Americans.’” (2-3) But what does this mean? In the first place, are these descriptions all accurate, or are they being made by people with an agenda? And in the second place, what of it? Englishmen had relatives in America, and they probably thought of the colonists as people like themselves. They could be against coercion (how does this compare to their reaction to Irish coercion?) on general principle, without being pro-American. And, they could be against war. And then, when the war became one against France and Spain, they could become patriotic.
“In London, Arthur Lee and William Lee, the brothers of the Virginia merchant Richard Henry Lee, and Richard’s trading partner, Stephen Sayre, were very active in the American cause, with others including Benjamin Rush...Arthur Lee became influential in radical circles in London. He wrote pamphlets and a series of newspaper articles as ‘Junius Americanus’...in 1769 he persuaded the radicals to include the government’s American policy in their list of grievances...William Lee...and Stephen Sayre were elected as the two sheriffs of London in 1773 and they both unsuccessfully contested parliamentary seats in the general election of 1774.” (5) This is interesting -- we don’t normally think of the American revolutionaries holding positions of authority in England. It’s a good reminder that they were rich, influential Englishmen right up to the last moment.
“Benjamin Franklin was deeply involved with a group of radical thinkers (many of whom were Dissenters) who belonged to the Club of Honest Whigs in London.” (Joseph Priestley was a member) (6)
“Failure in the American war also encouraged a major revival of radicalism. From 1779 Christopher Wyvill began to organize a nationwide association movement committed to economical and moderate parliamentary reform...The American patriots...had shifted the debate to a prolonged discussion about who could vote and in favor of the conclusion that all taxpayers should be directly represented in the legislature.” (21)
Carlile’s Deist included writings by American Elihu Palmer. How did these get to Carlile?
Michael Durey, “The United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment, 1798-1807”
“In 1807 the old Federalist leader Rufus King was defeated when he stood for election to the New York assembly on a nativist “American ticket’. Significant opposition to him was raised by a number of Irishmen who had recently settled in New York city and who were able to manipulate the considerable Irish voting bloc in the state. Among these new Americans were Thomas Addis Emmet, William James MacNeven, William Sampson and George Cuming, all former United Irish leaders, who in 1798, among a large group of state prisoners, had reached an accommodation with the Irish government...According to the state prisoners, their desire to emigrate to the United States in 1798 had been thwarted by an unholy alliance between Rufus King, then American ambassador to the court of St. James, and the Irish and British governments.” (96) Durey says this story they told is substantially untrue, but it’s interesting that they were in New York and able to use this story to influence American politics.
Paul Crook, “Whiggery and America: Accommodating the Radical Threat” starts to explore some of the disillusionment with nineteenth century America.
“Disillusioned by the actions of Americans in Texas and Oregon, appalled by accounts of slavery and political corruption...[Nassau] Senior found little in the American example to confound his pessimistic analysis of democracy.” (200) One could ask, what was he really looking for? Sounds like he managed to confirm his prejudices. But, there’s a point in this, too.
“As Chartist clamour rose for America’s ballot and universal suffrage...some of the old Whigs became positively anti-American in their efforts to oppose change...Even [Edinburgh Review editor Francis] Jeffrey conceded that in America everything depended on the suffrage and favor of the sovereign people: ‘and accordingly, it would appear that they are pampered with constant adulation...so that no one will venture to tell them of their faults, and moralists...dare not whisper a syllable of their prejudice.’” (198)
Iain McCalman, “Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution”
McCalman mentions that in the 1780 Gordon Riots, “that had visited more destruction on London in a week than Paris experienced throughout the Revolution,” (207) Dickens understood “it was precisely Lord George Gordon’s blending of religious enthusiasm and enlightenment rationality that made him so dangerous. Edmund Burke, himself a target of the rioters in June 1780, made the same diagnosis...forced to defend his family and house with a drawn sword...He reflected in 1796: ‘had the protentous comet of the Rights of Man...crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried...into all the vices, crimes, horrors and miseries of the French Revolution.’” (220) This tends to mitigate my response to Burke as Paine’s antagonist, and explain the shift between the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1796. Why have I never heard of the Gordon riots before?
Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848
(2000)
H.T. Dickinson, “‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American Revolution,”
“In 1775 Lord North admitted to George III that ‘the cause of Great Britain is not yet sufficiently popular’, and Lord Camden claimed that ‘the common people hold the war in abhorrence and the merchants and tradesmen, for obvious reasons, are likewise against it’, and he told the House of Lords: ‘You have not half of the nation on your side.’ Benjamin Franklin believed that ‘the body of the English people are our friends.’ In August 1775, John Wesley...was alarmed that the bulk of the people were ‘dangerously dissatisfied’ and highly critical of the King himself...Temple Luttrell, having returned from a tour of England, told the House of Commons ‘that the sense of the mass of the people is in favor of the Americans.’” (2-3) But what does this mean? In the first place, are these descriptions all accurate, or are they being made by people with an agenda? And in the second place, what of it? Englishmen had relatives in America, and they probably thought of the colonists as people like themselves. They could be against coercion (how does this compare to their reaction to Irish coercion?) on general principle, without being pro-American. And, they could be against war. And then, when the war became one against France and Spain, they could become patriotic.
“In London, Arthur Lee and William Lee, the brothers of the Virginia merchant Richard Henry Lee, and Richard’s trading partner, Stephen Sayre, were very active in the American cause, with others including Benjamin Rush...Arthur Lee became influential in radical circles in London. He wrote pamphlets and a series of newspaper articles as ‘Junius Americanus’...in 1769 he persuaded the radicals to include the government’s American policy in their list of grievances...William Lee...and Stephen Sayre were elected as the two sheriffs of London in 1773 and they both unsuccessfully contested parliamentary seats in the general election of 1774.” (5) This is interesting -- we don’t normally think of the American revolutionaries holding positions of authority in England. It’s a good reminder that they were rich, influential Englishmen right up to the last moment.
“Benjamin Franklin was deeply involved with a group of radical thinkers (many of whom were Dissenters) who belonged to the Club of Honest Whigs in London.” (Joseph Priestley was a member) (6)
“Failure in the American war also encouraged a major revival of radicalism. From 1779 Christopher Wyvill began to organize a nationwide association movement committed to economical and moderate parliamentary reform...The American patriots...had shifted the debate to a prolonged discussion about who could vote and in favor of the conclusion that all taxpayers should be directly represented in the legislature.” (21)
Carlile’s Deist included writings by American Elihu Palmer. How did these get to Carlile?
Michael Durey, “The United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment, 1798-1807”
“In 1807 the old Federalist leader Rufus King was defeated when he stood for election to the New York assembly on a nativist “American ticket’. Significant opposition to him was raised by a number of Irishmen who had recently settled in New York city and who were able to manipulate the considerable Irish voting bloc in the state. Among these new Americans were Thomas Addis Emmet, William James MacNeven, William Sampson and George Cuming, all former United Irish leaders, who in 1798, among a large group of state prisoners, had reached an accommodation with the Irish government...According to the state prisoners, their desire to emigrate to the United States in 1798 had been thwarted by an unholy alliance between Rufus King, then American ambassador to the court of St. James, and the Irish and British governments.” (96) Durey says this story they told is substantially untrue, but it’s interesting that they were in New York and able to use this story to influence American politics.
Paul Crook, “Whiggery and America: Accommodating the Radical Threat” starts to explore some of the disillusionment with nineteenth century America.
“Disillusioned by the actions of Americans in Texas and Oregon, appalled by accounts of slavery and political corruption...[Nassau] Senior found little in the American example to confound his pessimistic analysis of democracy.” (200) One could ask, what was he really looking for? Sounds like he managed to confirm his prejudices. But, there’s a point in this, too.
“As Chartist clamour rose for America’s ballot and universal suffrage...some of the old Whigs became positively anti-American in their efforts to oppose change...Even [Edinburgh Review editor Francis] Jeffrey conceded that in America everything depended on the suffrage and favor of the sovereign people: ‘and accordingly, it would appear that they are pampered with constant adulation...so that no one will venture to tell them of their faults, and moralists...dare not whisper a syllable of their prejudice.’” (198)
Iain McCalman, “Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution”
McCalman mentions that in the 1780 Gordon Riots, “that had visited more destruction on London in a week than Paris experienced throughout the Revolution,” (207) Dickens understood “it was precisely Lord George Gordon’s blending of religious enthusiasm and enlightenment rationality that made him so dangerous. Edmund Burke, himself a target of the rioters in June 1780, made the same diagnosis...forced to defend his family and house with a drawn sword...He reflected in 1796: ‘had the protentous comet of the Rights of Man...crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried...into all the vices, crimes, horrors and miseries of the French Revolution.’” (220) This tends to mitigate my response to Burke as Paine’s antagonist, and explain the shift between the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1796. Why have I never heard of the Gordon riots before?
INCREDIBLE Mobility
01/12/2010 17:38
Stephan Thernstrom and Peter R. Knights
“Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth- Century America”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1970)
Synopsis: Thernstrom (UCLA, later Harvard) and Knights (Illinois, later York) agree with Joseph Kennedy, the Superintendent of the 1852 Census, that “the roving tendency of our people” is given too little attention by historians (7, quoting this). Rural mobility, they say, has been done by Malin 1935, Curti 1959, and Coleman 1962. But the point they make about urban population change may apply equally to rural. Recorded “net population changes from census to census,” they say, “though often dramatic, pale into insignificance by comparison with the actual gross volume of in and out movement.” (10) “Even in the most stable small or medium size community which has yet been examined approximately half of the population was transient within a relatively brief span of years.” (11)
To illustrate their point, the authors examined Boston documents to find “the proportion of the city’s 1890 residents who had moved into Boston in the preceding decade [when the city’s population rose from 363,000 to 448,000] was...fully one third.” In fact, they say, because people were constantly leaving the city, “Nearly 800,000 people moved into Boston between 1880 and 1890 to produce the net migration increase of 65,179.” (17) The turnover of the Boston population means that just about 700,000 people left the city in ten years. (18) These people all went somewhere.
The 1880s were not unique in this regard. Between 1830 and 1890, when population increased from 61,000 to 448,000, “the number of migrants entering Boston...was an amazing 3,325,000, eight and a half times the net population increase.” (22) Again, that means nearly three million people left Boston and went someplace else. Where did they go, and when they got there, did they stop moving about? There’s apparently no reason to suppose they did.
“Returning to the same dwelling after the passage of only 365 days, the city directory canvasser had less than a fifty-fifty chance of finding its former inhabitants living there,” the authors say. Of course the rich, who owned businesses and real estate, were much more persistent than the poor. Thernstrom and Knights even speculate that transience might be higher than they can measure, because many poor workers may not have stayed long enough to be counted.
A political consequence of short tenancy was disenfranchisement. This may have led, the authors speculate, to a widespread feeling of alienation from the political process and a corresponding inability to organize effective dissident organizations. It may also have contributed to the growth of regional voluntary organizations (and even the Knights of Labor) that could offer people some continuity in spite of their movements. Bruce Laurie mentions Thernstrom several times in Artisans to Workers, but the extreme mobility of poor people and unskilled workers doesn’t really impact his story of the skilled tradesmen unionized by the AF of L. It might help explain the “ruralization” of the K of L, though...
If true, this high-mobility “floating proletariat” (31) challenges Robert Wiebe’s image of “a nation of loosely connected islands,” (32, quoting Search for Order) because they would have been moving constantly between these islands. Or (gasp!) between the urban islands and the rural sea. Taking ideas and attitudes with them as they travelled from place to place. This could have huge implications for popular culture...
Mentioned by:
Howard Chudacoff (Brown) paraphrases and cites as first note in his article, “A Reconsideration of Geographical Mobility in American Urban History,” (1994) taking Thernstrom’s thesis pretty much as proven. David Ward, writing on American ethnic ghettos in the 1982 Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, also cites this article as proof that Irish immigrants were highly mobile. Edward Pessen cites the article in 1972 to explain why the poor did not become involved in antebellum urban politics.
“Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth- Century America”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1970)
Synopsis: Thernstrom (UCLA, later Harvard) and Knights (Illinois, later York) agree with Joseph Kennedy, the Superintendent of the 1852 Census, that “the roving tendency of our people” is given too little attention by historians (7, quoting this). Rural mobility, they say, has been done by Malin 1935, Curti 1959, and Coleman 1962. But the point they make about urban population change may apply equally to rural. Recorded “net population changes from census to census,” they say, “though often dramatic, pale into insignificance by comparison with the actual gross volume of in and out movement.” (10) “Even in the most stable small or medium size community which has yet been examined approximately half of the population was transient within a relatively brief span of years.” (11)
To illustrate their point, the authors examined Boston documents to find “the proportion of the city’s 1890 residents who had moved into Boston in the preceding decade [when the city’s population rose from 363,000 to 448,000] was...fully one third.” In fact, they say, because people were constantly leaving the city, “Nearly 800,000 people moved into Boston between 1880 and 1890 to produce the net migration increase of 65,179.” (17) The turnover of the Boston population means that just about 700,000 people left the city in ten years. (18) These people all went somewhere.
The 1880s were not unique in this regard. Between 1830 and 1890, when population increased from 61,000 to 448,000, “the number of migrants entering Boston...was an amazing 3,325,000, eight and a half times the net population increase.” (22) Again, that means nearly three million people left Boston and went someplace else. Where did they go, and when they got there, did they stop moving about? There’s apparently no reason to suppose they did.
“Returning to the same dwelling after the passage of only 365 days, the city directory canvasser had less than a fifty-fifty chance of finding its former inhabitants living there,” the authors say. Of course the rich, who owned businesses and real estate, were much more persistent than the poor. Thernstrom and Knights even speculate that transience might be higher than they can measure, because many poor workers may not have stayed long enough to be counted.
A political consequence of short tenancy was disenfranchisement. This may have led, the authors speculate, to a widespread feeling of alienation from the political process and a corresponding inability to organize effective dissident organizations. It may also have contributed to the growth of regional voluntary organizations (and even the Knights of Labor) that could offer people some continuity in spite of their movements. Bruce Laurie mentions Thernstrom several times in Artisans to Workers, but the extreme mobility of poor people and unskilled workers doesn’t really impact his story of the skilled tradesmen unionized by the AF of L. It might help explain the “ruralization” of the K of L, though...
If true, this high-mobility “floating proletariat” (31) challenges Robert Wiebe’s image of “a nation of loosely connected islands,” (32, quoting Search for Order) because they would have been moving constantly between these islands. Or (gasp!) between the urban islands and the rural sea. Taking ideas and attitudes with them as they travelled from place to place. This could have huge implications for popular culture...
Mentioned by:
Howard Chudacoff (Brown) paraphrases and cites as first note in his article, “A Reconsideration of Geographical Mobility in American Urban History,” (1994) taking Thernstrom’s thesis pretty much as proven. David Ward, writing on American ethnic ghettos in the 1982 Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, also cites this article as proof that Irish immigrants were highly mobile. Edward Pessen cites the article in 1972 to explain why the poor did not become involved in antebellum urban politics.
Pork Packing
01/08/2010 19:05
Margaret Walsh
The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry
1982
Synopsis: Walsh follows up on her 1972 book, The Manufacturing Frontier, with a look at the transition (between 1840-1870 more or less) of pork processing from a local, part-time activity to an industry. She says “pork packing is a good tool of analysis because agricultural processing early disseminated an industrial experience to newly settled farming country.” (ix) But also, it seems obvious, because primary processing is industry. I wonder if similar work has been done yet on flour milling, lumber, tanning, cooperage, and especially brewing and distilling? By 1870, Walsh says, the midwest was already “responsible for 27 percent of the nation’s value added.” (3) Cronon notwithstanding, a lot of that took place outside Chicago.
(the rest of it -- and references -- here)
The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry
1982
Synopsis: Walsh follows up on her 1972 book, The Manufacturing Frontier, with a look at the transition (between 1840-1870 more or less) of pork processing from a local, part-time activity to an industry. She says “pork packing is a good tool of analysis because agricultural processing early disseminated an industrial experience to newly settled farming country.” (ix) But also, it seems obvious, because primary processing is industry. I wonder if similar work has been done yet on flour milling, lumber, tanning, cooperage, and especially brewing and distilling? By 1870, Walsh says, the midwest was already “responsible for 27 percent of the nation’s value added.” (3) Cronon notwithstanding, a lot of that took place outside Chicago.
(the rest of it -- and references -- here)
Artisans Into Workers
01/06/2010 18:11
Bruce Laurie
Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America
1989
Synopsis: The introduction begins with Werner Sombart’s 1906 question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” Laurie defines the socialism of the question as “both class consciousness and a socialist party speaking for the working classes.” (3) After tracing the high points of labor historiography (repeated in greater detail in a final, bibliographic essay), he suggests that “the ideology of radicalism persisted longer than in any continental nation” and that this “durability of radicalism...[which] never completely repudiated the old republican axiom that active government was corrupt government...inhibited the transition to socialism.” (12) Laurie’s radicalism is admittedly ambiguous: “it harbored both individualism and collectivism and before the 1850s it was the universal language of skilled workers on both sides of the Atlantic.” (13) The transatlantic nature of radicalism is rendered even more interesting by Laurie’s claim to find both it and “capitalism in the countryside as well as the city.” (14)
(the rest of this, including references, on my Radical Field List page)
Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America
1989
Synopsis: The introduction begins with Werner Sombart’s 1906 question, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” Laurie defines the socialism of the question as “both class consciousness and a socialist party speaking for the working classes.” (3) After tracing the high points of labor historiography (repeated in greater detail in a final, bibliographic essay), he suggests that “the ideology of radicalism persisted longer than in any continental nation” and that this “durability of radicalism...[which] never completely repudiated the old republican axiom that active government was corrupt government...inhibited the transition to socialism.” (12) Laurie’s radicalism is admittedly ambiguous: “it harbored both individualism and collectivism and before the 1850s it was the universal language of skilled workers on both sides of the Atlantic.” (13) The transatlantic nature of radicalism is rendered even more interesting by Laurie’s claim to find both it and “capitalism in the countryside as well as the city.” (14)
(the rest of this, including references, on my Radical Field List page)
Nature's Metropolis
01/05/2010 19:05
William Hays, The Herd on the Move (1862)
William Cronon
Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
1991
Synopsis: The basic thrust of most of Cronon’s writing is that nature and humanity (ecology and economy, country and city) are are not merely two sides of the same coin, but are parts of a whole that has been obscured and hidden by both market and anti-market (romantic) forces. Nature’s Metropolis uses the history of Chicago to illustrate this point. Beginning and ending with his personal story of a childhood journey from New England to Wisconsin that took him through the city, Cronon concludes “We fool ourselves if we think we can choose between [country and city], for the green lake and the orange cloud are creatures of the same landscape.” (385) The text is a series of increasingly fine-grained illustrations of this point.
The most important feature of Nature’s Metropolis is Cronon’s story of the actual historical rural and urban development of the middle west (rather than an abstract or theorized rural and urban world) as a single, interdependent process. While earlier Eastern settlement may have followed a different path, the growth of the middle west as a single unit is crucially important; especially when evaluating the politics and cultural construction of rural/urban relations in the Populist and Progressive eras.
(the rest of this review is posted on my Rural Field List page)
