Wilderness and Class
10/26/2009 21:45
Cronon says the popular reaction to the idea of wilderness owes much to the two related concepts of “the sublime and the frontier.” (9) The sublime is “one of the most important expressions of that broad transatlantic movement we today label as romanticism,” (9-10) but maybe we should unpack it a little and separate the elements that go into it. Cronon does not, and this leaves him only a vague ground to stand on, when he wants to talk about secular responses to the “sublime.” He observes that in order to gain the power it has “the concept of wilderness had to become loaded with some of the deepest core values of the culture that created and idealized it: it had to become sacred.” (10) This is true in more than just a metaphorical way, but Cronon doesn’t go far enough unpacking these ideas. A closer look at them might help us understand some of the problems carried over from this religious frame of mind, that get in the way of straightforward responses to environmental issues.
The frontier myth, Cronon says, allows Americans to believe that because they were pioneers in a “virgin” land, white Europeans “reinvented direct democratic institutions” and “reinfused themselves with vigor, an independence and a creativity that were the source of American democracy and national character.” (13) We’re squarely in the territory of myth, here; it would be easy to argue that these famous results of frontier life were as mythical as the life itself. But it’s easy to agree that “to protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin” in the minds of many conservationists.
Cronon says nostalgic conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt and Owen Wister (author of The Virginian) showed an “ambivalence, if not downright hostility, toward modernity.” (14) But it was a modernity that had served them both very well. Politician and popular author warned men against emasculation by the “feminizing tendencies of civilization,” but their status as wealthy, elite intellectuals probably put them in more danger than the fact they lived in cities. Only men like them had the leisure time or the inclination to worry about their masculinity, which is why only the “wealthiest citizens” were found “seeking out wilderness for themselves.” (15)
The fact that most early enthusiasts were rich men might also help explain the otherworldliness of the wilderness ethic. The “quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism” rest on a “flight from history.” (16) Unlike the experience of farmers, miners, or other workers whose jobs or lives gave them contact with the natural world, for these men “wilderness embodie[d] a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural.” (17) Extending this idea to the present, Cronon suggests that our supposed isolation from nature retards environmental progress. To the “extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness...we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead.”
Worse yet, Cronon says modern deep ecologists’ “wilderness premise that nature, to be natural, must also be pristine,” actually distracts society from important issues and opportunities for change. “We need an environmental ethic,” he says, “that will teach us as much about using nature as about not using it.” (21) Otherwise, the “long affiliation between wilderness and wealth” will be continued. (20) Only the wealthy are able to see wilderness, and then retreat to another place where they can be separate from it. Everywhere else, “too many other corners of the earth become less than natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to care much about their suffering or their fate.”
Cronon argues that humanity must abandon environmental dualism and “bipolar moral scales” (nice allusion!). The myth of wilderness, “that we can somehow leave nature untouched by our passage” or that we can wall off pieces of the environment and save them from human contamination, is absurd. “The dilemma we face,” Cronon concludes, “is to decide what kinds of marks we wish to leave.” This is a more realistic choice, and one that is open to everyone.
The Adirondacks
10/24/2009 17:34
The first section, on the Adirondack State Park, was most interesting to me. Jacoby highlights what he calls the “hidden history of American Conservation, by which he means the consolidation of state power, the systematic denigration of rural land use (Jacoby calls this “degradation discourse”), and the elimination of local customs regarding commons with top-down state and national laws designating “wilderness” areas. Jacoby suggests this wilderness is “not some primeval character of nature but rather an artifact of modernity.” (198) Jacoby also agrees with William Cronon’s suggestion (in “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 1996) that the idea of wilderness conservationists “tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others,” and betrays “the long affiliation between wilderness and wealth.” (Cronon, 20-22)
Jacoby introduces his subject with a reference to E.P. Thompson. He says he wants to provide a “moral ecology...a vision of nature ‘from the bottom up.’ ” (3) Jacoby agrees rural commoners had a different response to their environments than the “appreciation of wilderness” Roderick Nash found in the “minds of sophisticated Americans living in the more civilized East.” (quoting Nash, “The Value of Wilderness,” 1977. 2) But their response was not primitive or rapacious, as portrayed by George Perkins Marsh at the beginning of the conservation movement and historians like Marsh ever after. In many cases, Jacoby says local resistance faced by conservationists was due to the fact that “for many rural communities, the most notable feature of conservation was the transformation of previously acceptable practices into illegal acts.” (2) Reading this introduction, I wondered was reminded of the “hares and rabbits” controversy in England. Jacoby gets to this point, I found -- but not directly and not as strongly as I might have liked. Which is nice, because he leaves something for me to do in a research paper.
The Adirondacks are the source of the Hudson river, and are nearly worthless as farmland. These are both important points, as is the forest’s location, close to Albany. Marsh’s Man and Nature attracted attention in New York, and I should take a closer look at this and the other contemporary writing Jacoby mentions. For me, the most interesting feature of the story is the proliferation of “private parks,” which seem very much like the enclosed, aristocratic hunting lands of Britain. “By 1893,” Jacoby says, “there were some sixty parks in the Adirondacks, containing more than 940,000 acres of private lands, including many of the region’s best hunting and fishing grounds, at a time when the state-owned Forest Preserve contained only 730,000 acres.” Jacoby quotes Forest and Stream, which observed in 1894 that “‘Private parks in the Adirondacks today occupy a considerably larger area than the State of Rhode Island.’ ” (39) By 1899, the New York legislature was debating the monopolization of land and exclusion of poor local people from hunting. References were made to British aristocratic land enclosure, and the prosecution of “poachers.” In 1903, locals murdered Orrando Dexter, a park owner who had prosecuted several trespassers.
I think there’s a lot more to this story. Jacoby is more interested in the evolution of conservation, and tends to see these conflicts as being between conservationists and their opponents. I see it more as a conflict between locals and outsiders. The Albany conservationists have more in common with robber-baron (and some politician) park owners than with any of the locals. It’s no coincidence that they tend to overlook tree theft by the timber industry and illegal (or obscenely excessive legal) hunting by the park owners, while prosecuting locals for “squatting” on ancestral lands, taking deer or fish out of season to feed their families, and cutting non-commercial hardwood species for firewood. Jacoby tends to see this from the authorities’ point of view; I think this could be treated differently. I’m really curious, for example, about the locations of those sixty parks. How much of the very best land did they take? How many towns did they hem in, or restrict rights of way to? How much of that land is still privately owned? (according to Wiki, in 1900, the park’s area was 2.8 million acres, of which 1.2 million was state owned. In 2000, the park had grown to 6 million acres, of which 2.4 million is state owned. After deducting for the area of towns, lakes, and small lots, that leaves about 3 million acres in private ownership. That's about the size of Connecticut. Hmm... Has anybody ever really looked at the distribution of land in America? How it was distributed initially? Who owns it now?)
Imagined Civil War
10/18/2009 12:52
“The real war will never get in the books.” Walt Whitman 1882 (1)
Fahs says our division of texts into elite and “trash” is a way of “organizing cultural authority…that readers, writers, and publishers would not have recognized at the time.” (3) It’s also interesting, how there were not only “shared rhetorics” in Northern and Southern war writing, but common practices stemming from a shared “commercial literary culture.” (6) In the popular sphere, the commercial nature of writing and printing is (perhaps) more influential than in high literature.
“Conventions of popular literature shaped many Americans’ expectations when war began,” Fahs says. (7) To what degree did the recent shared print experience of the Mexican War (1846-8) influence this? She describes a trajectory of group allegiance leading ultimately to “nation-based individualism,” but it’s hard to distinguish this from an ongoing reaction against the tug of the mainstream. As nationalism grows, and some writers “celebrate the nation as a newly abstract entity,” others begin to assert an individual’s position relative to this new center of gravity. (11) The “felt tension between the needs of the nation and the needs of the individual,” and a “culture-wide sense that all stories were valuable” could both be a response to the overwhelming of individualism and crushing of individual stories that took place in a military camp, a battlefield death, and a mass grave. “As the mass movements of armies increasingly defined the war and the outcome of battle was increasingly mass slaughter, sentimental literature often explicitly fought against the idea of the mass, instead singling out the individual soldier as an icon of heroism.” (94) In this sense, we have a birth of the modern, and a scene-setting for the mythology of the West.
Fahs early on comments on the change produced by technology, but she doesn’t take it far. “Both north and south,” she says, “war became not just an obsessive, all-consuming subject but also a mode of perception and a way of life.” (18) “Newspapers suddenly became an urgent necessity of life,” (a deliberate nod to Gilmore?) satisfying “the public’s desire for news on an hourly, not just daily, basis.” (19) Railroads and telegraph moved mail and information like never before. But this benefit accrued more to the North, which was much better wired. Oliver Wendell Holmes called the result “perpetual intercommunication,” suggesting writers were well aware with the change.
Fahs reports that southern critics claimed “Had a Southern novelist truly painted in as engaging a style” as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, popular opinion would have been swayed and America would have finally understood “the real workings of out Biblical system of labor, and its truly Christianizing and elevating effects on the slave.” (27) It’s unclear, from her presentation, however, whether this is a widely-held view, or just the ravings of a few critics at the Southern Monthly, who may or may not have believed it themselves. Certainly, no novelist seems to have stepped forward to carry that torch, which probably says something about different the opinions of artists and critics.
There are several more interesting points along the way. Southern papers were regularly indignant over the fact “old patrons of the Yankee weeklies and monthlies would buy them at any price.” (41) At least in more elite literary circles, the political break between north and south doesn’t seem to have created the hoped-for (at least among editors) cultural divide. Fahs also mentions that “the issue that especially exercised the letter writers was [Harpers Weekly’s] assertion that the war would ‘inevitably sooner of later become a war of emancipation.’” This claim apparently cost Harpers some of their ongoing southern readership – it would be interesting to know how much of the heat came from northerners who’d been hoping it just wouldn’t go that far.
Fahs says “the median age of soldiers was 23.5. Yet imagining soldiers as ‘boys’…suggests a distinct cultural unease with the idea of soldiers as full-grown men separated from the maternalist culture of home.” (109) But maybe the atrocities both sides were able to perpetrate on the other is the real source of this “unease.” Whereas in both north and south, “early wartime poems imagined women renouncing men who would not be soldiers,” (128) maybe neither side was so happy, getting what they’d asked for.
In the book’s fifth chapter (one of the issues with The Imagined Civil War is that it seems a little like a series of essays, each briefly exploring an area that in the future might support a wider treatment. This is typical of groundbreaking books, though, so maybe that’s a good problem to have.) Fahs explores the changing descriptions of black men in these “low” print media. She reports that some southern propagandists continued to predict a massive return of runaway slaves, as they realized how good they’d had it on the plantations. Northerners were somewhat ambivalent to portraying black men (and it was nearly always MEN) as heroes, until the “aftermath of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth’s fight at Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863.” (169) Even then, northern whites seemed most comfortable when heroic, armed black men died at the end of their stories. Whites persisted in “refusing to imagine the continuing lives of black men.” (171) W.E.B. Du Bois commented on the irony of black men achieving status in the minds of whites only when they killed white men. Even Louisa May Alcott, who published a story of an inter-racial relationship in Moncure Conway’s radical Commonwealth in 1864, seems to have felt “a fundamental discomfort” with ideas like “black soldiers killing whites they had known.” (173) Fahs doesn’t compare this with portrayals, in the same types of media, of whites killing their neighbors and even relatives. So it’s unclear whether the discomfort was primarily racial, or more a more general feature of coming to grips with the fratricidal nature of the war.
In a chapter on war humor, Fahs raises some interesting questions about the “critical distance” of satirists, who “emphasized the fear, incompetence, cupidity, avarice, and racism of those involved in the war effort.” (201) Between the lines, she hints at a growing class division, as humorists “puncturing prevailing heroic ideas of war,” begin to question the logic that has “so long made all peoples the ready military sacrifices of some people.” (quoting Robert Henry Newell writing as Orpheus C Kerr in the 1861 New-York Mercury, 204). This type of sharp satire was apparently widespread. Fahs describes Lincoln reading satire to his Cabinet, and mentions that Charles Farrar Brown (Artemus Ward) became editor of Vanity Fair in May 1861.
The final two chapters didn’t seem as gripping (or didn’t correspond to my own interests as much), but raised one really significant point, about the shift in story-telling about the war, toward spotlighting individual experiences. It seems as if the increasingly anonymous ways in which Civil War soldiers fought and died spurred a reaction in popular consciousness. The Civil War did not produce the (high) literary response of World War I, possibly because the rich and literate didn’t volunteer for service the way educated Englishmen like Ford Madox Ford went to the trenches. So maybe Fahs exploration of “low” print culture opens the door for an exploration of the birth of American modernism in the Civil War. I hadn’t ever really noticed that Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage was published thirty years after the war, by a young man who hadn’t even been born until 1871! There’s a lot more to explore here – Alice Fahs has opened a Pandora’s Box that probably contains many more surprises.
