A New Introduction to American Studies

Howard Temperley, Christopher Bigsby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317867371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A New Introduction to American Studies provides a coherent portrait of American history, literature, politics, culture and society, and also deals with some of the central themes and preoccupations of American life. It will provoke students into thinking about what it actually means to study a culture.

Ideals such as the commitment to liberty, equality and material progress are fully examined and new light is shed on the sometimes contradictory ways in which these ideals have informed the nation's history and culture.

For introductory undergraduate courses in American Studies, American History and American Literature.

CHAPTER 1

The human and natural environment

Peter Coates

Rediscovering nature in American Studies

The ‘fresh green breast of the new world’ that F. Scott Fitzgerald conjured up at the end of The Great Gatsby (1925) – a lost world that ‘once pandered to the last and greatest of human dreams’ – is more than a vision of innocence, promise and yearning. America is a physical and biological place – a material place – consisting not just of the trees superseded by lavish mansions like Gatsby’s but also of rocks, soil and water and creatures great and small. America the place is more than a setting for the real action of American life. American history and culture are profoundly shaped by the interplay between people and the non-human world of nature.

As Alfred J. Crosby reminded us in The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972), ‘Man is a biological entity before he is a Roman Catholic or a capitalist or anything else’. As well as situating human affairs within a wider biological context – which embraces the human impact on the rest of nature as well as environmental influences on humanity – we need to examine the cultural history of ideas about nature and representations of nature. The third aspect of the dialogue between Americans and their environment covered in this chapter is the phenomenon of conservation and environmentalism, which has constituted one of the most influential social movements and vibrant areas of reformist activity in the United States over the past century and a half.

By studying American relations with the natural environment, we can deepen our understanding of many central ingredients of the American experience: colonisation; material abundance; the perils of prosperity; notions of property; the tension between individual rights and social responsibilities; the impact of technological innovation, industrialisation and urbanisation; popular protest; the regulatory state; and the nature of national identity. Not least, the study of nature and environment reconnects the American experience with that of other ‘new’ worlds. For Walter Prescott Webb, the United States belonged to a ‘Great Frontier’ of British/European expansion that also embraced Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the southern parts of Africa and South America. In The Great Frontier (1951), the Texan historian highlighted the common features of processes that operated wherever European settlers invaded so-called empty regions stuffed with natural resources.

Creating America: ecological imperialism and biological exchange

Examining interactions between Americans and non-human nature properly begins with the nation’s core experience. In British India and the late nineteenth-century European empires of sub-Saharan Africa, a European minority ruled over a native majority. In what became the United States – and other settler colonies planted across the world’s temperate zones – the ratio of rulers and aboriginals was reversed. The intrusive society took over demo-graphically as well as politically and economically. Appreciating the character of colonialism in North America thus requires a biological perspective.

Sheer force of numbers and superior firepower (not to mention qualities such as avarice and brutality) are insufficient to explain the speed and extent of takeover. Europeanisation was also facilitated by a phenomenon that Crosby dubbed ecological imperialism. In Asia, despite centuries of contact, Europeans had to deal on fairly equal terms with peoples enjoying comparable military, political, technological and commercial skills. Moreover, Asians – and Africans – already shared Europe’s epidemics and it was usually the Europeans who succumbed in a tropical environment. In the Americas, however, Europeans encountered peoples that had developed in almost total isolation since their ancestors migrated across the Bering Land Bridge at the tail end of the last ice age. In fact, Native Americans had been more cut off from the rest of humankind – and for longer – than any other group. Most of the main communicable killer diseases – such as smallpox, measles, chicken pox, bubonic plague, typhoid and scarlet fever – were endemic to Europe and regularly contributed between 3 and 10 per cent of all deaths. But most Europeans contracting them survived. Few of these diseases, however, are native to the Americas. Besides, the frigid cold of Siberia and Alaska killed off any germs that may have accompanied the first Americans.

According to Plymouth Colony’s governor, William Bradford, Indians died ‘like rotten sheep’. A single European could infect entire villages. By far the worst disease was smallpox, which cut some tribal populations by half and claimed up to 95 per cent mortality in certain villages. During the nineteenth century, further west, repeated assaults crippled the Kiowa of the Great Plains, who developed a story recounted in Alice Marriott and Carol Rachlin’s American Indian Mythology (1968). The tribe’s legendary hero, Saynday, meets a stranger in missionary garb, who opens the conversation:

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Saynday … Who are you?’

‘I’m smallpox.’

‘Where do you come from and what do you do and why are you here?’

‘I come from far away, across the Eastern Ocean. I am one with the white man – they are my people as the Kiowa are yours. Sometimes I travel ahead of them, and sometimes I lurk behind. But I am always their companion and you will find me in their camps and in their houses.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I bring death. My breath causes children to wither like young plants in the spring snow. I bring destruction. No matter how beautiful a woman is, once she has looked at me she becomes as ugly as death … The strongest warriors go down before me.’

Initially, Europeans may not have understood what was killing them off, but interpreted mass die-offs as a providential sign.

Survivors were weakened by hunger and the entire socio-economic edifice of villages collapsed. Squanto, who helped the Pilgrim Fathers survive their first winter, was the sole survivor of his ravaged community. Pathogens also eroded the credibility of religious beliefs and practices. It came as a profound shock to Indians that even their medicine men were struck down, and, for many, was an affirmation of the English God’s superior spiritual power. Depopulation cleared the way for the English appropriation of Indian lands. Most early Puritan settlements occupied abandoned village sites and fields: Plymouth Colony was rooted where Indians had raised corn (maize) just four years earlier, on the eve of the smallpox epidemic of 1616. (So much for settler claims that they were rehabilitating an unimproved wilderness. The notion of a ‘virgin’ land undisturbed prior to European arrival is a romantic conceit: all cultures are dynamic and modify their physical habitats.) The impact is even more staggering given that the pre-contact population was bigger than once thought. Southern Africa’s demographic profile and history would have been very different if its native peoples – whose technological capacities were not that dissimilar to Native Americans – had fallen to ‘virgin soil’ epidemics in like style.

Diseases arrived inadvertently, but a familiar floral world was deliberately transplanted. The first Spaniards were horrified by the absence of grapes, olives and wheat. For civilised existence was unimaginable without wine, olive oil and bread. Columbus brought various seeds, cuttings and fruit stones to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola on his second voyage (1493), and American agricultural development has revolved around the acclimatisation of exotic plants. When Thomas Jefferson listed his contributions to his nation, his horticultural achievements overshadowed his better-known political accomplishments. ‘The greatest service which can be rendered any country’, he announced, ‘is to add a useful plant to its culture’. Today, the only significant commercial crops native to the territory that became the United States are cranberry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sunflower and tobacco.

Meanwhile, unwanted plants (weeds) slipped in. Some entered mixed with straw used for packing crockery that was then recycled as livestock bedding and eventually tossed out on to fields. In 1870 Russian Mennonites brought Russian thistle seeds to South Dakota in hand-threshed flax. The flax never flourished but the thorny plant better known as tumbleweed – that rolling emblem of Western movies – spread across the entire region by the 1930s, clogging railroad tracks and forcing homesteaders to move out. Capitalising on the absence of their customary checks and balances, non-native weeds directly displaced native flora.

Of all the animals commercially raised in the United States today, only the turkey is indisputably native. With the exception of the dog, there were no domesticated animals in pre-Columbian North America. So, on his second voyage, Columbus also brought chicken, sheep, goats, cattle, horses and pigs. They all prospered in an environment comparatively free from pathogens and predators. Pigs, like European people, proved particularly adaptable to a wide range of climates and environments. Proliferating spectacularly, they ran amok among settlers’ crops. One solution was to banish swine to the coast, where they devastated Indian shellfish gathering sites. As such, the pig was an unwitting ally in the conquest. The horse, a useful instrument of warfare as well as a beast of burden, quickly made itself at home too. European people, microbes, plants and animals thus moved into new areas together, as part of what Crosby calls a ‘mutually supportive’ biotic ‘team’. Sometimes, however, the new biotic order also empowered certain natives. Acquisition of feral horses (mustangs) facilitated occupation of the continent’s grassy heartlands by the early eighteenth century, allowing these tribes to exploit buffalo more extensively and intensively. Moreover, the interior’s horse-powered Indians could resist white incursion more effectively than their earlier counterparts back east.

Ecological imperialism, though, was part of a wider biotic exchange. People who remained in Europe benefited as much from the export of American food staples as those who left gained from the transplantation of their regular dietary staples (cheap and abundant animal protein was a considerable inducement to emigration). Rising population pressure in Europe that fuelled emigration partly reflected advances in medical science and hygiene. The most important single factor, however, was superior nutrition thanks to the availability of New World crops (chiefly maize, potatoes and beans) that supplemented their familiar wheat, barley and oats. Maize was a tremendous success throughout Europe’s warmer regions, becoming a basic foodstuff comparable to its status in parts of the Americas. By the late eighteenth century, polenta (maize mush) dominated the northern Italian peasant’s diet. The potato, originating in the Andes, was even better suited to a diversity of climates and altitudes, as well as a range of tools and land plots. In Ireland, the peasantry’s dependence became almost total within a century of the plant’s arrival in the late 1500s. (Ironically, when an American parasitic blight finally caught up with its original American host, devastating the Irish crops of the 1840s, millions fled to the potato’s ancestral continent.)

The wealth of nature

Even without introductions like livestock and wheat, North America would still have been a peerless land of plenty. In a New Yorker cartoon, a Pilgrim explains to an Indian at a Thanksgiving feast: ‘Actually, the attraction wasn’t freedom from religious persecution but, rather, the all-you-can-eat buffet’. Despite images of a beckoning cornucopia, however, nature’s bounty did not always fall into the colonist’s mouth like a ripe plum. Hard work was usually required and – especially in the early phases of colonization – settlers were frequently at nature’s mercy. Some were poisoned by unfamiliar plants, and deer might raze their painstakingly cultivated crops. Meanwhile, wolves could snatch their lambs. Settlers were tough on nature because nature was tough on them.

Practical threats were complemented by other menaces. The forest primeval that early nineteenth-century poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would celebrate was the arch-enemy of social order and morality, a place of regression into brutish savagery. The wilderness, a cursed land of thorns, thistles and drought, was where Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. So clearing the forest for cultivation was partly a redemptive spiritual act. Puritan settlers strove to bring everything wild – be it wolves, Indians or their own passions – under firm control. Triumphal accounts of paradise regained trumpet the blessed transformation of ‘the close, clouded woods into goodly cornfields’ (though these forests were often less dense than accounts of impenetrable wastes would suggest – even modest tree cover would have impressed settlers from East Anglia). Two basic methods prepared woodland for cropping. Girdling – the Indian practice of stripping off a ring of bark – prevented leaf formation and, eventually, killed the tree. Meanwhile, settlers planted corn underneath to absorb the sun and light that now reached the ground. As they rotted, trees were hauled out. This process was too drawn out, however. By the early 1700s, felling by axe in late summer was standard. The following spring, the toppled tree was burnt and corn planted in the ash-enriched soil.

Most things made of stone in timber-scarce Britain were fashioned from wood in colonial America. In addition, the white pine, the tallest tree in the New England forest, supplied the Royal Navy’s masts. Deforestation had various environmental repercussions. Trees reduced wind force and moisture loss through evaporation. Forming a canopy, they also moderated the climate. Bare soil became drier and, unprotected by tree cover, warmer in summer and colder in winter. Snow melted faster on bare ground, but the loss of snow’s insulating quality meant that soil froze to a greater depth than in the forest. Roots and leaf litter also retained water; their absence aggravated spring run-off, resulting in more flooding and stream desiccation. As topsoil washed away, watercourses silted up. Soil depletion was exacerbated by demanding mono-cropping. For British observers, the failure to extend soil fertility by applying manure typified American agriculture’s wastefulness. But, as Jefferson explained (1793), ‘we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one’.

So settlers cleared more forest and turned spent land over to pasture. Cattle provided the basis for a flourishing trade in fresh meat with growing urban areas (also in salted meat with Caribbean sugar islands). Yet grazing prevented seedling regeneration. Large herds and flocks also sealed the fate of the wolf, bear and lynx, which resorted to calves and lambs as deer and elk were appropriated by market hunters who supplied white settlements. A bounty was slapped on the wolf’s head and swamps drained to eliminate their habitat. The beaver’s demise at the hands of the fur trade provided additional agricultural opportunities. The collapse of disused beaver dams drained ponds, exposing acres of silt, leaves and other organic debris. These old pond bottoms provided an ideal seed bed for hay meadows.

Subduing the savage wild was such a deeply ingrained American ethos by the mid-nineteenth century that free blacks readily exported it to West Africa, where they created their own frontier in Liberia. A budding African- American frontiersman from Massachusetts, Augustus Washington, regarded Africa as a potentially valuable wilderness yearning for consummation. As he explained to a friend in a letter (1851), subsequently published in the Journal of Negro History (1925), Liberia was:

Lying waste for want of the hand of science and industry. A land whose bowels are filled with mineral and agricultural wealth … The providence of God will not permit a land so rich … to remain much longer without civilized inhabitants.

In fact, a future-oriented ethos that sought to remould strange lands imbued all colonisation enterprises at this time, regardless of whether the settler’s destination was a brash young nation going it alone, its clone in Africa or one content to maintain ties with the motherland. In Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (1921), Herbert Guthrie-Smith – a Scotsman who emigrated to New Zealand’s North Island in the 1880s – where he devoted his adult life to improving the pasturage of a vast sheep station, insisted that:

There is no fascination in life like that of the amelioration of the surface of the earth … to make a fortune by the delightful labour of your hands – to drain your swamps, to cut tracks over your hills, to fence, to split, to build, to sow seed, to watch your flock increase – to note a countryside change under your hands from a wilderness … How pastoral! How Arcadian! – the emerald sward that was to paint the alluvial flats, the graded tracks up which the pack team was to climb easily, the spurs over which the fencing was to run … the glory of the grass that was to be.

On emerging from the forested regions of western Missouri after the Civil War, the American farming frontier encountered its most arduous environment to date. The 98th meridian separates lands with adequate rainfall from the standpoint of temperate zone farming from those with insufficient precipitation. West of this divide, water, wood and rivers were in short supply. So the onward march depended on railroads, barbed wire, windmills, a dogged refusal to accept natural restraints and a capacity to recover from a bevy of natural hazards, including hail storms, late autumn and early spring blizzards, withering summer winds, wild fire, tornadoes and insect plagues of biblical proportions. In one of her ‘Little House on the Prairie’ novels, On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), Laura Ingalls Wilder recalled the hordes of sunlight-obscuring grasshoppers (locusts) that descended on ripening wheat in Minnesota in the early 1870s. These traumas were overshadowed, however, by events on the Great Plains in the 1930s. As the Great Depression hit the region, drought combined with relentless winds to blow topsoil on to the decks of ships far out in the Atlantic. Newborn calves suffocated and adults wore their teeth down to the gums...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 The human and natural environment Peter Coates
• 2 From settlement to independence Colin Bonwick
• 3 American political culture Adam I. P. Smith
• 4 Slavery and secession Howard Temperley
• 5 Native Americans Gail D. MacLeitch
• 6 Revisiting the American West Margaret Walsh
• 7 American immigration Axel R. Schäfer
• 8 Nineteenth-century American literature Allan Lloyd Smith
• 9 Industry and technology Christopher Clark
• 10 The twentieth-century American novel John Whitley
• 11 Twentieth-century American poetry Daniel Kane
• 12 Twentieth-century American drama Christopher Bigsby
• 13 America and war Brian Holden Reid
• 14 American women Elizabeth J. Clapp
• 15 Popular culture Nick Heffernan
• 16 America at the millennium Richard Crockatt
• Maps
• Notes on the contributors
• Index