Country of Exiles (2 page)

In a rage, Veblen picked up a hatchet and hacked at the shack, smashing every window and terrifying the companions who had made the trip with him. A friend later remarked that he went “at the matter with a dull intensity that was like madness, the intensity of a physically lazy person roused to sudden
activity. If there was dispute over ownership, he wanted to make sure that the place would be uninhabitable.” He had made the original cabin with his own hands. “He belonged there,” Duffus recalled. “He belonged on that mountain.… I am not sure he ever belonged in any city.”
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Veblen nailed a sign to the battered cabin, saying “this property belongs to Thorstein Veblen,” then drove back down the mountain with his friends in a strained silence, until one friend had the courage to ask him what the title of his next book might be. “Absentee Ownership,” Veblen responded. (The book took three years to write and would memorialize his act of destruction.) By absentee owners, he meant those real estate brokers, investment bankers, and transnational industrialists who owned property at a distance but never worked it, never were “on the ground” (as he put it) to tend it, except as a source of revenue; these men hired others to manage their properties while they did business elsewhere, always alert to new opportunities. Veblen also meant by absentee owners “the American people,” whom, by the 1920s, he thought, longed to be “absentee owners” themselves, getting “something for nothing.” Finally, Veblen meant himself, for he too owned property at a distance and—what may have galled him most—had failed to protect it. He had hoped that by some kind of magic it would have been saved so that he might someday live there. Veblen had been absent, living clear across the country, in New York City, so far from a place he wanted to keep that he had let it slip away (or so he thought).
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This story shows how much Veblen, an exile or outsider practically all his life, experienced the significance of place, how much he wanted to claim a place as his own. Duffus remembered how stirred Veblen became when he spoke of Norway, how “lands [there] had been in the same peasant family for a thousand years.” At the end of the twentieth century many
Americans feel this same longing, this same need for continuity and stability, and for confident attachment to a place to be from.

But many Americans also feel something of the same rage that overtook Veblen, as well as his longing for place. Like him, they feel betrayed. Like him, they can imagine the ground slipping away. They can fantasize forces and institutions acting ceaselessly, indifferent to their welfare, hammering stability into instability, the fixed into the flexible, the rooted into the rootless.

In the last two decades, we have returned to a world that Veblen might have recognized but on a scale, perhaps, that he could not have imagined. The place-indifferent bankers and money managers, whom Veblen feared, have asserted themselves on a global canvas. So, too, a system of transportation has appeared, featuring a dizzying profusion of highways, gateways, and vehicles—all helping to create a worldwide economic interdependence while challenging the integrity of local places. A vast landscape of the temporary has arisen, peopled with thousands of floating executives and countless numbers of part-time and temporary workers, all unable or unwilling to make long-term connections to their communities. A service economy, whose key industries are tourism and gambling, has grown up to threaten the settled character of towns, cities, and regions. A system of great research universities also belongs to this universe, fostering transnational mobility and a disposition to think and live beyond America.

This book, which I offer more as an informed reflection than as a scholarly history, examines the impact of these changes on the American sense of place. It deals with the weakening of place as a centering presence in the lives of ordinary people. It is animated by the premise that the well-being
of most Americans rests on a healthy connectedness to place, and that a wearing away of such a relationship is dangerous.

I do not equate place with community because in recent years community has come to mean practically any group of people joined together by almost any shared characteristic (corporate, academic, racial, ethnic, sexual, and so forth). Community has been transformed into a transparent condition, barely related to concrete geographical places with histories. I also want to distinguish my approach to place from the one espoused by such nature writers as poet Gary Snyder. Snyder considers land or nature as critical to the meaning of place, at the cost of disregarding culture, history, and tradition, or the country as a part of any notion of place. Land and nature are very important, but Snyder writes of the “non-nationalistic idea of community, in which commitment to pure place is paramount” and in which no one can be excluded. There is, I believe, no such thing as a “pure place,” and someone, at one time or another, is always excluded.
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Finally, I do not think of place as property because the transformation of land into property has done as much to destroy a sense of place as to empower and engage it.

Place, of course, may contain or signify all these things—community, nature, property—in some measure, but its meaning is bound to a geographical reality both historical and profoundly lasting. I mean by place in part what landscape writer J. B. Jackson has said of it. Place “is something we ourselves create in the course of time”; it involves the “same timetable” we all share, “the same work hours, the same religious observances, the same habits and customs.”
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At its best, it is the collective outgrowth of our control over our own lives and destinies.

Place has a layered quality for those people who feel it. For
most it has taken the form of the country, of the provincial or regional areas of the country (and these provincial areas can exist in cities as well as in rural towns), and of specific hometowns and neighborhoods, each with its own history, its own store of common memories and traditions, its smells and sounds that never wholly disappear from memory. All of these, too, at their best, have been joined together by a common tissue, providing people with a manifold sense of connection and achievement.

Today this tissue is stretched and torn. Although we have extended life chronologically through medical invention and intervention, we have also impoverished the cultural-psychic richness of the world around us. We live longer but emptier, without those nurturing habitats or places which remind us where we came from and, therefore, who we are. Despite the aging of the population and rising levels of debt (both of which should have the effect of slowing people down or making them think twice about “getting out” or “moving on”), many people seem more at sea than they have ever been.

In many ways, of course, this is an old story. From the late colonial period on, Americans have been advocates and captives of the need to move, to get out of town, to end up far from the spot where they began. At the same time, a contending pattern was taking shape, one that encouraged Americans to settle down, domesticate themselves, and forge a coherent identity. The first pattern we might call centrifugal, because it thrust outward and cared little for boundaries and centers; the second we might call centripetal, because it favored centers and boundaries and cultivated a sense of place. Until recent times, the two patterns have worked together, reaching some kind of equilibrium or tension, to create America. After the 1970s, however, this balancing act—itself not always just or
fair—has been put in jeopardy, with the centrifugal trend taking over and spilling into every area of life.

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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By 1900 mass migration
concentrated largely in the cities of the northeast, causing “a geographic displacement of native northeastern workers to the west.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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From the 1870s to World War I, moreover, federal and state troops were regularly called up to crush labor dissidence.
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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.
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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.
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