A Place in Time (VI--final)

This is the final installment of a series of posts on regionalism in U.S. history. (Previous posts below.)

What does all this talk of regional identity  mean for you? That of course depends at least a bit on who “you” are, i.e. where you’re coming from in some literal or figurative way. (I, for my part, am the grandson of an Italian immigrant whose extended family, much of it Irish, is almost exclusively Mid-Atlantic by birth. But by marriage, education, and temperament, I am decidedly a Yankee in cultural affiliation.) Insofar as these regional themes I’m talking about have any reality, they include plenty of exceptions. You can find Chinese food in Tulsa (maybe not good Chinese food), and hear good bluegrass music in Manhattan (maybe not real bluegrass). Even overwhelmingly Republican Texas has Democratic pockets – which may soon become more than pockets as the racial complexion of the state changes. There are plenty of reasons, and ways, the nation-state will hold. Like our motto says, e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”).

On the other hand, there’s no reason to think the borders of the United States will remain permanent. Considered solely as a matter of topography, there’s nothing particularly cohesive about a stretch of continent that’s marked by large stretches of forest, plains, desert, and mountains, and which over the course of the last few thousand years has been the home of a wide variety of peoples who interacted with each other was well as lived in relative isolation. And many of our state boundaries – consider the rectangles that constitute the Dakotas, for example – are really matters of fictive convenience. Should the pressures, internal or external, become great enough, different pieces of the nation could break off or recombine in ways that are hard to foresee, but not exactly random, either.

Does that thought sadden you? At times it saddens me, though I’ll confess I find myself exasperated enough with the kinds of things I hear or see coming out of South Carolina and find myself thinking our lives would be a lot easier if we went our separate ways. I get annoyed at the way Idahoans complain about the intrusiveness of the federal government, even as they depend on it for the roads, jobs, and markets that keep it afloat. In recent years I’ve heard secessionist noise coming out of Texas, to which I feel inclined to say, “erring sisters, go in peace,” especially since I regard the circumstances by which Texas entered the Union to be highly dubious. On the other hand, I’m not sure any of the rest of the nation was much, if any, less so as a matter of moral legitimacy.

The real point of this particular conversation is less about making predictions or arguing for the value of one part of the country over the other than it is asking you to consider what you consider important about your national identity. What do you think it means to be an American? Is it a landscape, a set of habits, or a series of ideas? Are the things you value rooted more in one part of the continent than another? How bad would you feel if some part of it were to break off? And lastly, and more importantly: where – and how – do you want to live? If you’re lucky, you may have some choice in the matter. Try and exercise it wisely.

Place in Time (Part IV)

The following post is part of a series on the role of regionalism in American history. Preceding posts are below.

Because they’ve never been formally codified the way the boundaries of an American state like Wyoming or Alabama has, their number, size and shape have been contested. Some observers have made distinctions, for example, between the Tidewater south (the lowlands along the coast) and the Piedmont south (the hillier land leading to the Appalachian mountains), or distinguished between the West (an area that spans from about Colorado to California) and the Pacific Rim (a narrow strip along the coast that encompasses San Diego and Seattle). These regions or sections are not respecter of state or even national boundaries – Canadian Vancouver in many ways has more in common with coastal Portland than it does the province of British Columbia to which it belongs. Nor is demography isn’t the only misleading thing about our state boundaries. Many of us associate Colorado with the Rocky Mountains, for the very good reason that they are indeed a dominant feature of its landscape. But eastern Colorado is as flat as Kansas. So is eastern Montana. Texas has arid plains, a tropical coast, and blazing desert.

We all understand that lots of different kinds of people – different races, different sexual orientations, different classes, different politics – live in these places, and that in the United States it’s relatively easy to move between them temporarily or permanently. But we also know that there are relatively stable traits associated with them: accents, cuisine, and local celebrations. And that they tend to vote alike in elections. New England, for example, has pledged its allegiance to different political parties over the course of the last two centuries. But it almost always votes as a bloc. So does the Deep South. There are places that vary in their allegiance – these days, we call them swing counties or states. But as we’ll see, that’s because they’re places where regional cultures overlap (and cross borders). So it is, for example, that southern Ohio has more in common with Indiana than it does the rest of Ohio.

As I think we all understand, geography is a major factor in shaping the behavior of people living in the United States. Living in a place that doesn’t have a lot of water, for example, reduces population density, which means the people who live in such are place are going to be spread out and tend to believe in value, even necessity, of self-sufficiency in their everyday lives. On the other hand, different groups of people can impose their values on any given landscape, which can often support more than one lifestyle. The Eastern Woodlands of North America worked pretty well for the Algonquin peoples who inhabited them for centuries, as it has for their Euro successors. Yes, those Euros altered those woodlands, rather dramatically, but did the Algonquins. (Actually, much of the region has more trees now than it did in the nineteenth century, when large tracts of which were cleared for farming – Indians would recognize at least part of the region more easily today than they did 150 years ago.) Human beings, for better and worse, are always colonizing land in one way or another within limits that nature sometimes imposes in gradual or spectacular ways. But whatever the cause and effect, like-minded people tend to live together, reinforcing habits and folkways, even in highly mobile societies. Sometimes this seems to transcend geography – American cities, however far apart they may be, often have more in common with each other than the countryside around them. But regional accents never disappear entirely.

One of the people who realized all of this most acutely was our friend Frederick Jackson Turner. As I mentioned, Turner became vastly influential for a theory that emphasized the primacy of the West in American history, depicting it the frontier a process of that seemed to transcend place in favor of a process of democratization and development. But toward the end of his life Turner began paying attention to what he called the sectional dimension of American history, and the way the persistent traits of older sections of the national state affected the development of newer ones. Turner understood that even in his time, the forces of modernization seemed more important than older regional patterns. Still, he said, “Improvements in communication, such as the automobile, the telephone, the radio, and movie pictures have diminished localism rather than sectionalism.”

Next: Surveying the regions of North America

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