American Dreams of Technology's Power

This week I've continued reading America as Second Creation, and continue to learn about the more complicated history of the technology that helped America realize what it touted as its "manifest destiny"--to populate the continent "from sea to shining sea."  What seems to be the author's message is that none of these technologies delivered the promise they made summed up by that familiar phrase, "the American dream."  Each time technology was introduced to "improve" the landscape to make it habitable for white European-American settlers, consequences followed that were not foreseen or not deemed important by those promoting the "improvements."

And what may be the most surprising, yet sadly, the most predictable outcome of building all the saw mills, railroads, irrigation systems, canals and factories throughout the 19th century was that the technologies tended to concentrate wealth in a few hands instead of creating a more egalitarian society where prosperity was shared across a broad sprectrum of Americans.  We still believe in that foundation narrative: that all a person needs is the right tools and the right opportunity and he can make a good life for himself and his family.  Freedom and the free market system are supposed to provide these things without even trying--innovation comes as a result of competition and freedom from too much government intervention.  Or that's the "America as second creation" myth, anyway.

But Nye makes it clear that even in the "good old days" when the country was new and there was so much potential for development (once those pesky Indians were shipped off to reservations), it just didn't work that way.  Each time a new technology made it possible for people to move to an area of the country that was undeveloped, only a few people ended up being wealthy.  The rest got something, but certainly not what the ads and promoters had promised.

For instance, one of the ways the west got developed was through railroad companies building railroad lines through undeveloped country, while at the same time planting towns along the route to make the route profitable.  The railroads didn't pay for the land to build the railroads or the towns--they were granted it by the federal government.  Once they established the town (typically with a crew of railroad workers), they could then sell the land to people who came to live there.  Oh, there might be homestead claims at first, but there were stipulations attached to those claims--people had to live on them and farm them for a certain number of years (five, for instance), regardless of whether or not the land was good for farming.  And if they didn't have good weather or good luck, they might not make a living from the land.  They'd end up having to get a job in town just to make ends meet, and then their families had to live on the claim while the man worked in town.  If they lost the farm, it would go back to the railroad, who would then sell it to someone else for a high price.

The result was that the railroad companies got rich while many of the hopeful homesteaders lost out, having perhaps spent their savings or taken out loans from the banks or the railroad companies to pay for seed or provisions or livestock.  And later on, when mills and factories were built in these new towns, the would-be farmers had to settle for exploitative wages and poor working conditions.

Once again I see that our nostalgia for the past--the good old pioneer days--is misplaced.  Things aren't different now; they're the same as they were, with some people benefitting from free markets and technological advances, but many more people not benefitting from what seemed like a wonderful opportunity, a can't-lose proposition: They're giving us free land! All we have to do is work hard and we'll be rich! Except that the land might be very difficult to farm and there was nothing to fall back on when adverse circumstances wiped out the crop. The bet was much riskier than they were led to believe, but they didn't find that out until it was too late.

The counter-narratives have always been there, but were discounted by those who believed they had an easy path to prosperity.  But they also were discounted by those who profited from others' misplaced hopes.  Now as then, those who didn't make it were painted as lazy or not sufficiently motivated. After all, everyone knows that if a person would just work hard, use a little self-denial, he'd meet with success.  But the successful have often times gotten ahead as a result of other people's bad decisions. What would have happened to the railroads, for instance, if no one had come to live in the towns they built?  They would own land they couldn't get rid of, and there'd be no people to buy the goods that were to be shipped via the railroad.  They would've lost big, ultimately, having had no means to recoup the money spent on putting the railroad through.  That people failed at farming was part of what made the business profitable for them.

It's no surprise, then, that this book by David Nye is itself a counter-narrative, albeit a tad too late for those who risked everything in the nineteenth century.  It's not too late, however, for those of us today who might still believe a foundation narrative of America: the American dream can be yours; you just have to be willing to work hard and keep your nose to the grindstone. I mean, look at Mitt Romney!

I suspect I'll finish this book this week, and then it's on to the next reading adventure!
Stay tuned.

Narratives of Human Struggle

The last two weeks I've read a mystery by Nevada Barr, The Rope, a novel by Chicano writer Victor Martinez, Parrot in the Oven , and begun a scholarly book on the history of technology, America As Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings, by David E. Nye.

Nevada Barr is a great mystery writer, and she gets better with every book.  The Rope was a prequel to her sleuth Anna Pigeon's career as a National Park Ranger, detailing what happened to make a recently widowed Broadway stage manager decide to become a park ranger.  It made me like Anna Pigeon even more than I already did.  I recommend it to all mystery lovers.

The second novel, Parrot in the Oven, was a story of a boy's struggles with poverty, an alcoholic father, a mother trying to cope, problems of various siblings and the difficulties of adolescence and emerging manhood.  The title refers to the story of a parrot who is happy in the oven because he doesn't know he's in the oven and about to be cooked. It was well written, though sad and at times irritating.  Things work out okay in the end, but you feel as if they will go bad again in the near future.  The boy seems capable of getting through it though, and that gives the reader hope. I would recommend it.

The book I'm currently reading, America As Second Creation, I got from the library.  I wanted to read it because it pertains to the Little House books I've been reading to my mother for the past several months.  Reading all those stories of life on the American frontier, I got to thinking about common themes of such narratives, and I wondered what critics had to say about them.  This book talks about those narratives and the importance of technology to the "progress" they chronicle.

The book is very good, well written and enlightening.  I'm about 1/4 the way through and so far the writer, David E. Nye, has talked about the importance of a handful of technologies to the post-Revolutionary stories of settling the west: the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam.  For example, the axe was central to cutting down trees and building a log cabin and the furniture to go in that cabin. 

Nye also talks about other innovations of the 19th century, such as the decision to survey the unsettled areas and then set up parcels of land based on a grid, rather than allowing the parcels to conform to land features such as streams or hills.  The land was simply divided into squares according to lattitude and longitude, with no consideration for what terrain the boundaries might encompass.  This made for some rather strange settlement claims, with people having some good land and some not so good land in the same 64-acre plot.  The reason for it, says Nye, was to allow people to buy the land sight unseen.  Easterners eager for virtually free land would be told exactly where their land was and what its exact dimensions were.  Anyone who's ever been to or even flown over the Midwest knows what this arrangement looks like--you can still see the original grid-like design of prairie towns and homesteads and easily pick out all four points of the compass.

As you can imagine, the fate of all those people who were already living on the supposedly empty prairie was not discussed or even considered in what the author calls "foundation" narratives of the creation of America and the fulfilling of its manifest destiny.  But the effects of the settlement of the west were expressed in what Nye refers to as "counter-narratives" that were also being written during the 19th and 20th centuries and somewhat mitigated the triumphant tone of the dominant stories of the period.

Chapters ahead discuss water mills, pollution, railroads and canals, irrigation and factories.  Should be interesting! I'll keep you posted.