Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  SPECTRE OF PLACELESSNESS

  From the 1790s on, indifference to place has been a hallmark of American life. “An American changes his residence ceaselessly,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835. Twenty years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne observed that “no people on earth have such vagabond habits as ours.”8 Whole populations swarmed across the continent, enticed by fantasies of paradise; by hopes of freedom and individual liberation; by great reserves of mostly unoccupied public lands; by government policies (subsidies to railroads, homestead laws, eviction of Indians from their homelands) that made it easy for people to move; by the treatment of land as property to sell and speculate on rather than as community to live in; and, most of all, by prospects of unlimited wealth.

  In the 1840s and fifties these goads and pressures caused the biggest internal migration of people up to that time in American history. Some pioneering men from the Old South, impelled by an ebullient demand for cotton, migrated with their slaves (numbering in the hundreds of thousands) as far west as the Texas plain and Arkansas; together, slave and master, one coerced, the other willing, settled a wilderness that bears their imprints to this day.9 Other migrants traveled in family groups much further west, but often only the men left; at the end of the 1840s, men (again, in the hundreds of thousands, some, too, with their slaves) took part in the great California Gold Rush, journeying by land on foot or in wagons, and by sea in ships as far down as Panama, then up again along the Pacific Coast to the foothills of the Sierras, east of San Francisco, not very far from what would become Silicon Valley.10 Nothing better than this search for gold expressed the febrile spirit of American life at midcentury, making men rich, but in the process, separating them from their wives, families, and friends, and frequently crippling the communities they left behind.11

  Such was the American way. Unlike most Europeans, who rarely moved far from where they were born (unless, of course, they were forced by economic change to migrate to cities or to emigrate, a pattern I will discuss below), Americans often decided to migrate whenever prospects elsewhere looked brighter. The very size of the country, of course, with its untapped resources, dictated much of this mobility. But after 1850, as the country grew more urbanized and seemed to invite more settlement, Americans still displayed the same propensity to move, to get out.12

  At the same time, moreover, that people were going from place to place within the United States in the 1840s and fifties, they were also moving into it in unprecedented numbers, looking for work and land. Dislocated by economic turmoil and political chaos, nearly 2.75 million Irish and Germans sailed to America between 1845 and 1855, usually on rickety packet ships under savage conditions. It was the greatest single wave of newcomers relative to the size of the population in American history.13

  After 1885, this migratory stream swelled as the country moved out of a phase of settling and pioneering into an era of unshackled industrial growth. Immigration achieved record levels, accelerated by the invention of safer high-powered steamships, by the absence or removal of any significant legal or political restrictions (aside from Chinese exclusion) and by the demands of the American economy.14 By 1900 mass migration concentrated largely in the cities of the northeast, causing “a geographic displacement of native northeastern workers to the west.”15 At the same time, immigration touched not only the cities but towns and villages everywhere. By 1920, North Dakota had a greater proportion of immigrants in its population than New York did, Minnesota more than New Jersey, and Utah more than Pennsylvania.16 This influx brought a great variety of peoples, at once enriching and threatening the existing culture. For millions of native-born Americans with “roots in farms and small towns,” it aroused by 1910 what historian John Higham called “a mounting sense of danger—even dispossession.”17

  But it was not immigration that decentered America so much as American industrial and financial capitalism, which formed the critical impetus behind this migratory flow. By the turn of the century, American industry was immersed in a global capitalist system even more interrelated than it is today. Despite the bias toward protectionism that marked the economies of most developed nations, minimal controls existed over international financial business and capital flows. Information, too, traveled easily from country to country. Only two countries—Russia and Turkey—required passports.18

  In this open climate, American manufacturers championed immigration because competitive success depended upon a reliable, flexible pool of cheap labor to tend the new continuously operating factory machines, to dig the new tunnels, and to erect the new skyscrapers.19 At the turn of the century, industry had such a pool, which contained both immigrants and native-born Americans, most largely unorganized and unprotected. And despite an upsurge in craft union strength between 1898 and 1905, which by the 1910s had succeeded in getting the eight-hour day for many workers, labor unions had to contend with business’s top-down imposition of management controls and scientific efficiency, with its rigid clock-driven work patterns. Such changes much diminished the power of labor to shape the production process.20 From the 1870s to World War I, moreover, federal and state troops were regularly called up to crush labor dissidence.21 Factories or farms employed (and exploited) large numbers of women and children; casual work, the kind of work we now call temporary and which was least able to foster stability and settlement, was pervasive and typical.

  The new economy, however, relied on more than labor pools. It also produced a class of global capitalists who spent years outside the United States in quest of fortune. Among them was Herbert Hoover. Before he entered government service and was elected president (in 1928), Hoover had been abroad longer than any other man to hold that office before or since. For nearly twenty-five years, after his graduation from Stanford University with a degree in engineering, he was out of the country, one of thousands of nomadic American mining engineers whose expertise was sought after by businesses and governments.22 Hoover managed a coal mine in China, a copper mine in Burma, a gold mine in Siberia, and a zinc mine in Australia. In Australia he set up the Zinc Corporation, one of the world’s first multinationals. He then worked for sixteen years in London as a financier, underwriting stock flotations and assisting other wealthy businessmen in the creation of giant corporations.23

  Industrial capitalism at the turn of the century yielded one more significant centrifugal outcome: it laid the foundation for what Americans would come to know as “mass consumer society.” This society promised to give all people (not just the select few) material well-being and luxury; it gave birth, after 1880, to all those institutions we have come to associate with mass consumption—department stores, chain stores, mail-order houses, and a flood of available credit.24 But American business did more than strive to inspire a desire for goods and to create a new institutional landscape to sustain it; it also changed the way Americans looked at and understood place. Consumer capitalism, in other words, was not just shopping. Intrinsic to it was the cult of the new, the need to overturn the past and begin again, and to disregard all kinds of attachments in the interest of getting the “new and improved,” whether goods, jobs, entertainment, or places.

  A cardinal feature was the desire to improvise or simulate place, to make up or invent places that people had only dreamed of but never thought possible to inhabit. This desire was shared by many Americans who had left the past behind and were therefore free to imagine any place they wished, to mix medieval with modern, Paris fashion with the Taj Mahal. Only Americans displayed such a high degree of passion for themed theatrical environments—in amusement parks, on the theatrical stage, in movie palaces and on the screen, and even in department stores around the country after 1895—that invoked anywhere while at the same time being unimpressed by real places. No attitude was more subversive to taking seriously a sense of place, or the world people actually lived and died in.

  Many people at the time worried about the makeshift comings and goings of Americans, prominent among them the Harvard philosopher Jo
siah Royce. Like Veblen, Royce led a transient life. He ended up in a place (Massachusetts) far away from where he was born (California). His own parents had been “pioneers of 1849,” stricken by the gold fever, daring to traverse the Sierras.25 He wrote many books, including a history of California; whereas most historians of the day remembered the gold rush as an heroic episode, Royce condemned it for its “semi-barbarism.”26 In 1902, while at Harvard, he observed the many “sojourners and newcomers” in America, not only those from other countries but the many from within the country, on the move, traveling from one place to another, never in one community long enough to acquire a love for it. “Such classes,” he wrote, “even in modern New England, are too large. The stranger, the sojourner, the newcomer, is an inevitable factor in the life of most American communities.”27 Royce was pained to confess his own newcomer status to his lecture audiences: “I myself, as a native of California, now resident of New England, belong to such a class.”28 He lamented the ease with which many people ended relations with their hometowns and their country, even with their families, as they struggled to pursue or protect their own personal interests.29 “We as a nation,” he wrote in 1908, “have been forgetting loyalty.”30 All kinds of commitments “have lost their meaning for many people, simply because people have confounded loyalty with mere bondage to tradition, or with mere surrender of individual rights and preferences.”31 In America today, “nobody is at home.”32

  COUNTERVAILING TRENDS

  There is another side to this history, a countervailing side that offset the nearly anarchical trend of the country’s economy and culture. Even as the nation seemed to spin about, it was also crystalizing as an historical entity, with clear geographical boundaries and a powerful sense of national identity. The very thing that tended to weaken local communities also helped to strengthen the national identity, as people abandoned their older neighborhoods or regions, mixing with other newcomers in new places, ignoring or forgetting the differences among them. Royce also observed this pattern in California, where “Americans from the North and South” mingled and “came to understand one another as Americans.”33 At the same time, the courage that often inspired people to move also led them to stay put and build new cities and communities, as well as a nation.

  This countervailing side of place-making has not gotten its historical due, although some historians have begun to pay more attention to those who “stayed behind” and “put down roots” than to those who “moved on.”34 From the mid-1800s on, just as the country seemed in constant turmoil, there were those who refused to migrate. One of these was Henry Thoreau, who, after years of living in Concord, Massachusetts, made this 1858 entry in his journal: “Think,” he observed,

  of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here. Here are all the friends I ever had or shall have, and as friendly as ever.… How many things can you go away from? They see the comet from the northwest coast just as plainly as we do, and the same stars through its tail.… Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are.… What more do you want? Bear it away then! Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else.35

  Another countervailing feature of this earlier time was the tremendous sense of Americanness felt by many people, by those who remained behind as well as by those who sweated their way to California and Oregon, or, later on, migrated to the teeming cities in the East and Midwest. This sense of Americanness distinguished all those who had fled the Old World to build a new one, on their own, practically from scratch (the Indians notwithstanding, and African slaves always the tragic exceptions, although blacks, when emancipation came, often freely embraced an American identity). Americans did not simply inherit the world they lived in but created it themselves and often under great duress. It was this sense of making something new, and of choosing to do so as free individuals “without bootlicking,” that bound diverse—and often very mobile—individuals together into a people.36 It was this sense, too, that greatly mollified or checked what divided them (and I mean here religious, ethnic, and class differences), and that laid the bulwark for a lasting patriotism, a patriotism that often surprised (and annoyed) foreigners when they encountered it. “The American,” wrote Tocqueville, “taking part in everything that is done in his country, feels a duty to defend anything criticized there, for it is not only his country that is being attacked, but himself.… Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of Americans.”37

  American patriotism was often distorted by nationalist fervor, which twisted pride into aggression; and it could be (and was) repeatedly exploited or degraded to serve the interests of selfish business groups or imperialist, sanctimonious politicians.38 But it was nevertheless real and deep (even if it did not always take the healthy or benign regional form Royce described) and it would be rekindled again and again over the years—after the Civil War, later in the twentieth century during the world wars, and also in the midst of the Great Depression. It gave life to a powerful single narrative that, however much it might have obscured and even denied underlying inequities, held the country together.

  This tremendous sense of American identity brought with it an experience of the country as a civic entity, as a commonweal, as one whole public (as opposed to private) realm with historic boundaries that called for stewardship and protection. It was in the interest of this public realm that the government created after 1890 the national forests and park reserves, withholding well over 100 million acres of land from private circulation (no other country had dared to carry reform that far). These reserves were set aside primarily to ensure the supply of water and wood, but many Americans also agreed with George Perkins Marsh, pioneer preservationist, that “the wise use of nature’s bounty [provides] man with permanent, fixed values in a changing world.” “It is time,” Marsh said in his landmark book, Man and Nature, “for some abatement in the restless love of change which characterizes us, and makes us almost a nomad rather than sedentary people.”39

  Public well-being was served by the passage of the child-labor laws and by the anti-trust laws (however little they did finally to prevent oligopoly). It was also served—if with much harshness—in the treatment of the Indians at the end of the century, a treatment that did not tolerate any measure of tribal autonomy and that attempted to force assimilation.40 A broader public interest also lay behind immigration policy, which demanded assimilation, and when that seemed to fail, outright restriction in the 1920s. To the sadness and fury of many, this restriction cut off the vast stream of migrants from Europe but it fostered assimilation by “depriving the ethnic minorities of constant, large-scale reinforcements.”41

  In all these ways, from the creation of forest reserves to immigration restriction, the federal government imposed limits, defining the public realm, even as the public realm appeared to many to be unraveling.

  By 1965 more Americans felt like Americans, not as German-Americans or Italian-Americans or American Indian, than ever before in our history. Even racial discrimination and hierarchy, despite all the bitterness caused by them, seemed beatable as an obstacle to the making of a convincing, widely shared American identity. As a result of constant intermixings of ethnic groups, probably a majority of whites (as well as a majority of blacks, though for partly tragic reasons) had no knowledge of their non-American ancestors. Nor did they give a damn. The pain suffered for so many years over religiously and ethnically mixed marriages seemed, for most people, a thing of the past. Some Americans were a jumble of as many as twelve or more groups, so who could know, in any case, exactly “where they came from.”42

  “For every Greek or Hungarian,” wrote journalist Peter Schrag, Jewish emigré from Vienna, in 1969, “there are a dozen American-Americans who are past ethnic consciousness.”43 Traveling around the country in the early sixties, novelist John Steinbeck learned that “for all our interwoven breeds dr
awn from every part of the world, we are a nation, a new breed.… It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English.… The American identity is an exact and provable thing.”44 Such a state of things did not mean that all Americans had become alike (many differences would remain, often far deeper and more divisive than any shaped by ethnicity or race). What it did mean was that Americans had discovered themselves in a common past. This situation, in its own right an extraordinary historical achievement, was so much the case by 1970 that, according to historian Arthur Mann, most white college students had so lost the idea of “ethnicity” as to “have a hard time getting hold of the concept.” “The melting pot did happen.”45 Black or white, most people saw themselves as coming not from some foreign land but from the states, cities, and regions within the country.46

  Other matters as well engendered a greater sense of place. Between 1930 and 1970, partly as a result of immigration restrictions, the labor movement achieved some of its greatest successes, the standard of living rose for all Americans, and disparities of wealth and wages were greatly diminished.47 Workers, both skilled and unskilled, were protected and able to settle down without fear.48 Furthermore, the exploitation of children and adolescents for the most part declined, as millions of them were taken out of the labor market and sent to school. Many American women—above all, white American women—stayed at home to rear their children. Without question, many of these women—isolated, often lonely, shut out from wider experience, or simply ill equipped to bring up children—suffered under these conditions; the culture was wrong to have imposed on them burdens they were unable to bear. Others, however, from the 1920s into the late 1960s, remained as anchors of their communities, continuous and stable presences in the lives of their families and neighborhoods.