Place in Time (Part III)

The following post is part of a series on the role of regionalism in U.S. history. Previous posts are below.

The United States began as a group of colonies launched by people from a series of countries – England, of course, but also Ireland the central European region of Germany, which until 1870 lacked political or geographic continuity even as it had a cohesive regional culture.  The U.S. became a nation with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was formally recognized as a state in 1783, when its territorial boundaries were drawn as part of the Treaty of Paris. We think of the “nation” part of this equation as stable, largely because the U.S. has been a republic governed by a Constitution since 1789. (Before that it was more a federation of states.) But even that was tenuous; until the Civil War, people spoke of the U.S. as plural – “these United States” – rather than singular. Many foreigners, perhaps reflecting their own experiences, still do, referring to the U.S. as “the states.”

For a long time, the most obvious feature of the United States was its shifting frontier boundary. Indeed, a century ago a lot of people thought this was the most significant thing about it. A big part of the reason why was a gifted historian by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner, who in an 1893 delivered a speech at an American Historical Association conference in Chicago that distilled his (and a lot of other people’s) thinking into a single sentence: "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

Here in the 21^st century, it may be hard to appreciate just how unusual an assertion this really was. Turner, born in 1861 was a native of Wisconsin – which is to say he was from the edge of the American world – got his doctorate (among the first people to ever get one) at Johns Hopkins, where he was taught the then-dominant "germ" theory, which argued that western civilization owed its origins to the forests of Germany, out of which emerged a Teutonic seed that brought down the Roman empire, spread across western Europe, jumped to America, and now dominated the world. Like so much academic thought of the time, this approach to history was modeled on science, both in its emphasis on primary source research and its use of a biological model—more specifically a (Social) Darwinian model—to explain historical change.

 Turner embraced a process-driven approach to History—colleagues and students remember him as an obsessive collector of data and maps—and he too embraced scientific ideas. But when it came to evolution, Turner was decidedly on the environmental side of the Darwinian equation: he was fascinated not by the fixed, but rather the adaptable. The frontier was a place that did something to people, he said: it made them Americans. Which is to say it turned them into something new. And that's because they had lots of room to evolve through a renewable cycle. First would come the scouts, who explored a new region, wrangling with the natives as necessary.  They would be followed traders (think furs), and then farmers, and tradesmen. Once an area got settled, a new wave of scouts would push west, and the whole process would repeat in a new location. The process continued until 1890, Turner said, by which point the frontier as Americans had known it had disappeared. (They would have to come up with new frontiers, like a space program.)

Over the course the next fifty years or so, the Turner Thesis became common sense. Textbooks at the time gave more space to western expansion than they do today, describing the settlement of places like Tennessee and Arkansas. Even a historian like Charles Beard, who in fact was skeptical of Turner’s ideas and had his own about that nature of American history (one rooted in class conflict) still gave a chapter to the rise of new states in his classic 1927 book The Rise of American Civilization. These days, when textbooks do talk about western expansion, they almost always mention that the addition of new states, whose voting rules opened them up to mass participation (at least for white men) pressured older states to follow suit.

But in the second half of the century the Turner thesis came under increasing attack. Some scholars questioned Turner's data, others his findings, especially his assertions that the frontier was the engine of U.S. democracy. The most serious challenge came from those historians, notably the modern historian Patricia Limerick, who rejected the assumptions underlying the very idea of the frontier and Turner’s tendency to describe land as "empty" when he really meant it didn’t have white people on it. To Limerick, Turnerism was little more than a racist fantasy, at one point joking that for her and like-minded scholars the frontier had become “the f-word.”

Besides, there were other things – immigration, industrialization, efforts for social reform in ways that ranged from votes for women to rights for workers – that seemed more obvious in terms of determining the real boundaries of the United States. Whatever considerable regional or political differences remained in the nation in the decades following the Civil War, it still seemed to be inexorably stitching together. Nothing did a better job of this than the World Wars, which promoted mass migration (especially black people to Northern cities), the growth of industry in previously remote areas (like Los Angeles, but also places like Nevada and New Mexico), and a sense of national identity in combating the challengers like Communists or Nazis across the globe. Never before or since was the federal – which is to say, national, or central – government stronger.

But I want you to pay attention to that word “federal,” which I’m actually using for the first time in this conversation. It’s a word that has a lot of different meanings, but at the heart of all of them is some kind of alliance or partnership among a set of entities. In the U.S., as in many nations, there are subdivisions in the form of provinces, or in our case, fifty states, each of which has a measure of political autonomy. Those states, in turn, are subdivided into counties, cities, villages.

But there is another kind of geographic unit in the United States that doesn’t often make it onto maps, even though it might help explain ourselves to ourselves better than most maps do. This unit is closer to the concept of country than it is nation or state, because it reflects a set of attitudes and practices of large sets of people independent of whatever political system happens to be in place, or wherever state or municipal boundaries that happen to be drawn. Unlike some places where country/nation/state may once have been aligned, these never managed to gain recognition as discrete entities in North America. We know them as “regions” or “sections,” and give them names like “New England,” “the Midwest,” and “the South.”

Next: Continuity and Change in American regions

The independent communitarian

 The following post is part of a work-in-progress. Comments welcome at jcullen@ecfs.org

To put it most simply, the main difference between the stage and film versions of The Crucible is in the way the latter underlines the degree to which Proctor was an outside man. This was true in fact: the real Proctor, who was about 60 in 1692, lived on the Farms, where he operated a tavern. Yet he was apparently not comfortable attending church services there, instead going to town, in effect making him doubly marginal. Proctor appears to have been a local iconoclast: he was among the first to ridicule the proceedings; allegedly beat his servant, Mary Warren, who confessed to witchcraft and accused others; and stood up for Elizabeth, who was his third wife. This may be why he was the first male to be accused of witchcraft, and why he was hanged for it. He unsuccessfully challenged the legitimacy of the judges and sought government intervention from Boston while awaiting his death. In the play, Miller draws heavily on the documentary record but scrambles it by compressing characters and positing imagined situations, like a sexual relationship between Proctor (who is closer to thirty than sixty) and Williams. He also includes a real estate conflict with Thomas Putnam, which is not documented but is certainly in keeping the widely accepted belief that unresolved financial and legal conflicts played a role in who was accused of witchcraft. (The real Putnam and his wife were pivotal allies of Reverend Parris and in promoting the trials.)

 But the movie version of The Crucible, exploiting the possibilities of the medium, makes Proctor an outside man in a much more literal sense as well. Our first view of him, about ten minutes into the film, shows him threshing wheat in a field with his sons. The imagery seems to come straight from a Winslow Homer painting: big open spaces, water in the distance, brilliant blue sky. The camera rotates from the inlet to the interior (east to west?) to reveal Elizabeth Proctor calling John. This establishing shot of a family idyll outdoors was not incidental. In describing the search for locations in the audio commentary version of the film, director Hytner said “it became clear to us that the real authentic landscape of the first Puritan settlers of America was integral, very, very important not just to the world of the story but the story itself.” Noting that Salem was not the forbidding landscape of Maine or Nova Scotia, he described the sets on Hog Island – a mere few miles away from Salem – as “a land that promised everything,” one which offered the Proctors “a hard-won life, but a life infinitely better, more rewarding than their ancestors would have been enjoying in England.”

Over the course of the movie, a remarkable allegory unfolds: Proctor is pulled into ever-darker interiors. That first summons from Elizabeth begins his descent. Over the course of the next hour we see him in his house, where he is trying to repair his rocky relationship with his wife in the aftermath of his infidelity, and where it is clearly darker but where light still streams in. We also see him at various locations in town. At first, these interiors do not really diminish him. Although he’s not a large man (unlike the real Proctor), he nevertheless commands attention from all around him, something easy to accept when the Proctor in question is played by Daniel Day-Lewis. In part, this is a matter of costume; he arrives in town for the first time dressed in a rugged coat and hat, looking like the direct ancestor of Davy Crockett. He’s got a scraggly beard, but he seems like he’s illuminated from within – those grayish-blue eyes bore into you – and he’s confident in his conduct with residents, whether in his friendliness with Rebecca Nurse (Elizabeth Lawrence), whose flinty saintliness will cost her, and in his willingness to confront Reverend Parris (Bruce Davison), whose political maneuvering will intensify the crisis.

Significantly, his first two encounters with Abigail take place outside. In the first, early in the movie, he runs into her outside a building on a cloudy day, and while the wild spirit that led to his transgression briefly resurfaces with a kiss, he wills himself back from the brink and informs her he’d sooner cut off his arm than have sex with her again. Their second meeting, in which Proctor warns Abigail to cease her accusations of Elizabeth, takes place in the woods. It’s sunny, but the two characters are dappled in shadow. When they meet a final time, when Proctor is in prison, both characters are engulfed in darkness.

Indeed, literally and figuratively, the walls close in on John Proctor. Elizabeth is arrested at night. He goes to argue for her release in a low-ceilinged chamber amid a downpour outside. Desperate, he decides to confess in open court about his relationship with Abigail, which will make clear her vendetta against Elizabeth at the cost of his own reputation. The increasingly defensive and Machiavellian Judge Thomas Danforth (Paul Scofield) is unwilling to accept this, and summons Elizabeth to corroborate his story, refusing to let Proctor talk with her first. Seeking to protect her husband, Elizabeth lies on his behalf – and in a moment of irony suggesting how this world has been turned upside down, a shaft of light streams through a courtroom window. When a series of new accusations leads to pandemonium in the courtroom, Proctor storms outside, the changeable New England weather has suddenly cleared. In bright sunlight, standing in an inlet that evokes the baptism of the adult Christ, Proctor angrily declares that God is dead, which appears to be the final nail in his coffin. He is tried, convicted, excommunicated and sentenced to death.

But there remains a ray of hope. Elizabeth Proctor is pregnant, and will not be executed while an innocent soul would also perish. Amid growing doubts surrounding the trials, Proctor is offered a deal: a pardon in exchange for a confession. (This is Arthur Miller’s nod toward the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, which were fueled by precisely this tactic, though it was not an option available to Proctor, or indeed most confessed witches, some of whom were still executed.) Elizabeth is summoned to convince her husband to accept the transaction; she makes no promises but is allowed to confer with him on the freezing, windy coast.

 To my mind, at least, this is the most moving scene in the movie, and one of the most moving scenes of marital love ever depicted in a Hollywood movie. Two ravaged people, braving the freezing wind of a New England autumn, confess their weaknesses to each other. Elizabeth admits that her severity about her husband is rooted in doubt about her own worthiness as a plain woman; John fears that his refusal to confess to witchcraft makes him feel fraudulent, guilty of the sin of pride: in his admitted sinfulness he lacks the true nobility of characters like Rebecca Nurse – or Elizabeth herself.  John decides for the sake of his wife and children, one as yet unborn, he will “confess.” If anything, the town officials are even more relieved than the Proctors. But not everyone is. “Oh John,” a heartbroken Rebecca Nurse, who is among those summoned to witness it in the vain hope they too will confess, cries out in disappointment.

But Danforth, overplaying his hand, is not content to get Proctor’s signed confession. He also demands that Proctor, in the parlance of the Communist witch hunts, name names. But this is where Proctor digs in. He will plead guilty privately, but not allow the authorities to nail his confession to church door or use it as a cudgel against others. When Danforth insists, over the objection of his colleagues, merely signing the confession in their presence is insufficient, Proctor tears up his confession. He will go to his death a redeemed man. “He have his goodness now,” Elizabeth tells the Reverend John Hale (Rob Campbell), once a believer but now a critic of the trials, who is desperately trying to end the process. “God forbid I take it from him.” The final scene of the movie shows Proctor and other recalcitrants mounting the gallows for the outdoor execution scene. They recite the Our Father; the final image of the movie shows a rope against the sky, suggesting the thread of guilt and obligation that connects us to him.

In art and life, the Salem Witch trials were a disaster wrought by Puritans. But in art and life, they were a disaster ended by Puritans. John Proctor was among a growing chorus of critics of the trials and their reliance on spectral evidence (i.e. unsubstantiated charges that people had seen others consorting with Satan), and this growing tide of critics in Salem and the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the end of 1692 led to the end of the process. (London did not get involved, as indeed it had recently done in the reorganization of the colony, including an insistence on greater religious tolerance of other sects, which had accompanied the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution in 1688.) The death of nineteen people and the concomitant misery that resulted was byproduct of the social conformity implicit in the communitarian character of Puritanism. But one of the many paradoxes of Puritanism is that this communitarian impulse was accompanied by another, individualistic one, that was at least as powerful. The Puritans had always placed great value on the primacy of the individual conscience; the belief that one’s own relationship to God mattered more than what Pope or King might say is precisely what brought them to America.

This libertarian strand of DNA drifted across the ocean and found a hospitable climate that allowed it to grow. As Frederick Jackson Turner would later write in “Significance,” “the frontier is productive of individualism.” Turner would often define the “antipathy to control” in the frontier mentality in opposition to the Eastern establishment, but as he well knew, that establishment was itself the product of the frontier, and could never entirely control it. In an obvious and irrefutable sense, John Proctor is a tragic figure. But as embodied by Daniel Day-Lewis in this movie, he is a fierce and willful figure whose intensity cannot be contained by his death. His children, literal and figurative, will conquer a continent.

              

  

The significance of "Significance"

A few observations from the post-Frontier frontier


The following post represents notes toward an essay on Daniel Day-Lewis, meant to be part of a larger work-in-progress.

Much to my surprise, I've been thinking a lot about Frederick Jackson Turner lately. Turner is to the historical profession what Sigmund Freud is to psychology: an emergent figure in the late nineteenth century who dominated the first half of the twentieth, but a figure whose ideas are now consciously rejected by just about everybody in their professions -- and unconsciously absorbed by just about everybody else. Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is probably the single most important piece of historical scholarship ever published in the United States. Written as a time when the modern research university was just emerging in the United States, it was an example of a literary genre -- the analytic essay  -- that was just coming into its own. Turner was one of the founding fathers of the American Historical Association (AHA) and its journal, the American Historical Review, which remains at the apex of the discipline.

A Wisconsin native, Turner first delivered "Significance" at an AHA meeting in Chicago, held amid the fabled World Columbian Exposition held in that city to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in America. It seems almost comical to imagine the 32-year old Turner (then, as now, young for a historian) standing in the front of a room talking to an indeterminate number of scholars while thousands of his fellow Americans were taking amusement park rides, surveying the huge temporary stucco buildings of the so-called White City, and watching the "exotic" foreign exhibits (like the "hootchy-kootchy dance of a Syrian performer named "Little Egypt") at a site which was artificially lit thanks to the technological innovations of the Westinghouse Corporation. Yet the so-called "Turner Thesis" unveiled in Chicago would prove to be more durable than any of these fleeting material realities, in large measure because it was so succinctly stated at the end of the first paragraph of his paper: "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

From the vantage point of over a century later, it may be hard to appreciate just how edgy an assertion this really was. Turner had been trained back east at Johns Hopkins, under the tutelage of the legendary Herbert Baxter Adams. Adams was a proponent of the then-dominant "germ" theory, which argued that western civilization owed its origins to the forests of Germany, out of which emerged a Teutonic character that swept western Europe, jumped to America, and now dominated the world. Like so much academic thought of the time, this approach to history was modeled on science, both in its new emphasis on empirical research and its use of a biological model -- more specifically a (Social) Darwinian model -- to explain historical change. Like his predecessors, Turner embraced a process-driven empirical approach to History (colleagues and students remember him as an obsessive collector of data and maps), and invoked science as fact and metaphor. But Turner's own inclinations were decidedly on the environmental side of the Darwinian equation: he was fascinated not by fixed destiny, but protean adaptability. America was a place that did something to people, he said: it made them Americans. Which is to say it turned them into something new and unique in historical experience. And that's because they had lots of room to evolve through a renewable cycle of scouts giving way to traders, farmers, and capitalists in scattershot sequences that stretched from sea to shining sea.

Over the course of ensuing decades, the Turner Thesis itself evolved from maverick idea to common sense, ratified by Turner's appointment at Harvard in 1910. By mid-century, it had a wide impact on subsequent historians, like Walter Prescott Webb, an early environmental historian who drew on Turner's ideas. But in the second half of the century the thesis came under increasing attack on a variety of fronts. Some scholars questioned Turner's data; others its implications, particularly his assertions that the frontier was the engine of U.S. democracy. The most serious challenge came from those historians, notably Patricia Limerick, who rejected the racial assumptions underlying the very idea of the frontier and the implicit omissions involved in discussing "empty" land that was in fact inhabited by multicultural populations. Turnerism was little more than a racist fantasy.

I think I know two things at this point. The first is that these people are surely right that Turner made some serious omissions in formulating his theory, omissions that reflect his limited perspective and limitations that now make it impossible to accept it at face value. The second is that it's only a matter of time before Turner makes a comeback in one form or another, because that's just the way these kinds of arguments go, particularly one in which questions of nature versus nurture figure in some way, as they clearly do here. But I'm less interested in whatever objective truth there may be in the thesis than its cultural power: how Turner described the frontier, what it meant to him, and how his conception of it entered the bloodstream of our national life.

The first point to be made in this context is something people don't recognize about "Significance": it's a gorgeous piece of writing deeply imbued love, an emotion that's not supposed to surface in academic writing but which is lifeless without it. "Significance" is a document with over 50 footnotes that cite a variety of scholarly sources, but its dominant mode is poetic. Take, for example this stretch of prose, in which I hear Whitmanic accents:

The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. 

Turner's acute visual sensibility is also evident in an ecological analogy: "As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves traces behind it." And in a bibliographic one: "The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution . . . Particularly in eastern states this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming." Turner's frontier is a living thing: it "leaped" over the Allegheny Mountains, "skipped" over the Great Plains; "pushed" into Colorado, with "tongues of settlement" reaching into the wilderness. Ever situated in specific locations, it is ever restlessly moving forward, recreating itself in what Turner called "this perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life." My favorite expression in this regard is Turner's evocation of the Mississippi River: "On the tide of the Father of Waters, North and South mingled into a nation."

Turner did not consider the frontier an unalloyed good. While he viewed it a truly nationalizing phenomenon -- people living near frontiers tended to cast their lot together, while those far from it took on stronger regional identities -- as well as a wellspring of democracy, he also recognized that a frontier mentality tended to resist even benevolent forms of outside control and foster a grasping materialism. It also led to a lax approach to government that fostered the creation of a spoils system. Moreover, Turner clearly understood, even if he didn't dwell on it, that the extension of the frontier was a matter of conquest for which he used the correct imperial term of "colonization."

But the biggest problem Turner has with the frontier in 1893 is that it's dead. He makes this clear in the first sentence of "Significance," which discusses recently updated information from the U.S. Census Bureau indicating the disappearance of an unbroken line in the American West, which he described as "the closing of a great historic moment." What the Mediterranean was the the Greeks, the frontier had been to the Americans, he concluded. "And now," he wrote in a closing sentence laced with melancholy, "four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history." The Turner Thesis, in effect, was the frontier's obituary.

What would take its place? Turner did not say. As Richard Hoftstader, himself a distinguished historian, would write 75 years later, the latent pessimism of the frontier thesis was in sharp contrast to the ebullient optimism attributed to frontier communities. But while Turner never offered an alternative -- indeed, he had considerable trouble writing books, and while he eventually articulated an influential view on the role of sections in American history, he never quite realized the huge potential suggested by "Significance" -- his politics were considered generally consonant with his friend and colleague Woodrow Wilson, who of course became the President of the United States and a leader of the Progressive movement. Turner himself has long been considered a Progressive historian in the mold of his contemporaries Charles Beard and Vernon Parrington, which generally meant an empirically-minded, skeptical approach to inherited intellectual constructs and a belief in the power of ideas to improve society.  For such people, the frontier was less a living reality -- as it had been for the previous generation of political reformers, the Populists -- than a metaphor that denoted opportunity on a large scale in a new domain. When, following the death of his wife in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt went out the the Dakota Territory to play the role of a cowboy, he proved to be a financial failure as a cattle rancher. But the episode paid vast dividends in advancing his own political career as a maverick in the nation's capital. Roosevelt, for his part, praised Turner in 1893 for "having put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around rather loosely."

The frontier remained fertile symbolic terrain for much of the twentieth century, nowhere more obvious than in the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, whose slogan was "The New Frontier." But its appeal went a good deal beyond politics, evident in the rhetoric of the space program as well as that of the Internet. Nowhere, however, was its appeal more evident than in U.S. cultural life. Turnerism is the bedrock of assumptions for the whole genre of the Western, for example, and the Western, in turn is the seedbed of other cultural genres stretching from sci-fi to hip-hop. Along with the legacy of slavery, the frontier is what makes American culture American.

But if the people of the early twentieth century experienced what they considered the transformation of the frontier from reality into myth, we are presiding over the transformation of myth into memory. Now the belief in the frontier as a living symbol is itself receding in our imaginations. The proximate cause is our current economic situation, which has cast doubt on the upward mobility that so many of us have considered our birthright so long, and which is so deeply intertwined with our sense of a frontier. This sense of doubt is not new; it has recurred periodically throughout American history, as did in the Great Depression and amid the political scandals and economic stagflation of the 1970s. But that it is part of a larger narrative of geopolitical decline has become a perception of our moment that has become increasingly impossible to ignore.

But I am speaking in terms of elusive abstractions now. A notion of decline is surprisingly slippery, subject to multiple definitions and conflicting data. Nor is it necessarily an objective reality; I'm more interested in a perception of decline as a historical artifact than I am in ascertaining its accuracy (and its maddeningly elusive timing). In recent years my apprehension of it has gradually taken shape through a set of six films about American history that have been released in the last twenty years. The threat that connects them is British-born, adoptively Irish actor named Daniel Day-Lewis.

More to come.