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“Whatever Be the Truth Regarding European History, American History

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“Whatever Be the Truth Regarding European History, American History Cover Illustration: Wolfgang Büchs, www.wbworks.de Cover Design: idealclima, www.idealclima.de For my parents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Professor Volker Bischoff of the American Studies department at Philipps- University Marburg for supporting me with his academic advice and guidance; Dr. Nader Maleki for giving me time when I needed it; Phil Olson for always encouraging me to do this; my wife Katja for all her support and patience; and my parents Paul and Marita for everything. CONTENTS 0. Introduction 1 I. From Wilderness to Environment – Western American History’s First Century 7 I.1 Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and the Birth of Western American History 17 I.2 Between Tradition and Reorientation: Western American History after Turner 34 I.3 The American Environmental Movement, Environmental History, and the Revival of Western American History 55 II. The Revision of the American West in the New Western History 69 II.1 The New Western History: Emergence, Issues, and Agenda 69 II.2 The New Western History as Environmental History 91 II.3 The New Western History and Its Critics: Summary of a Debate 110 III. Case Study: Donald Worster’s Environmental Theory of the American West 129 III.1 ‘Antimaterialistic Materialism:’ Donald Worster’s Theory of American Capitalism 129 III.2 The Hydraulic Mode of Production: Donald Woster’s Theory of Water and Power in the West 142 III.3 The Pastoral Mode of Production: Donald Worster’s Criticism of American Agriculture on the Great Plains 174 IV. The Order of Nature: Problematizing Donald Worster’s Concept of ‘Nature’ in the Context of Postmodernism and Ecology 207 V. Conclusion 237 Bibliography 258 About the Author 311 “The history of any land begins with nature, and all histories must end with nature.” Frank J. Dobie Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest O. Introduction Like no other western country, the Unites States of America locates the core of its national identity in the relationship of its people to their natural environment. According to the American myth of origins, this special relationship towards nature is grounded in the self-perception of the American nation as a people of European descent that regenerated themselves in the American wilderness into a model civilization. The transformation of the continent’s nature—from the Puritan survival in the American wilderness to the establishment of a new civilization that eventually turned into the world’s super power—is thus the quintessential American narrative. At the heart of this narrative is a positive concept of ‘progress’ as an agent of environmental transformation. “From the beginning,” American Studies scholar Leo Marx notes, “the arriving Europeans perceived the underdeveloped environment of the ‘New World’ in the context of their collective power to transform it” (“Environmental” 327). This positive concept of ‘progress’ is rooted in the Puritan perception of American nature as a “hideous and desolate wilderness,” a hostile, chaotic, and lawless environment that threatened the order of Puritan society and thus needed to be overcome (Bradford, Plymouth 62). For Puritans, the American wilderness symbolized the very antithesis to the divine order of the Garden of Eden and ‘nature’ is thus from the beginning of American cultural history defined as an entity to be transformed. The concept of ‘wilderness’ as an entity to be transformed did not emerge from within the colonies, but was rather part of the cultural baggage Puritans took with them on the voyage to the New World. As Carolyn Merchant points out in Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, the Puritan concept of ‘wilderness’ was embedded in the tradition of the Judeo- Christian ‘recovery narrative,’ a religious doctrine that maintained that human redemption could be achieved by recovering the lost order of the Garden of Eden. According to Merchant, this recovery narrative is at the heart of Western culture: The Recovery of Eden story is the mainstream narrative of Western culture. It is perhaps the most important mythology humans have developed to make sense of their relationship to the earth. Internalized by Europeans and Americans alike since the seventeenth century, this story has propelled countless efforts by humans to recover Eden by turning wilderness into garden. (Reinventing 2) 1 Merchant outlines that the Judeo-Christian recovery narrative portrays human history as a cycle of fall and recovery in which nature plays a central, symbolic role. After humankind’s expulsion from Paradise, the recovery narrative goes, nature is in a post-Edenic, chaotic state. To reverse the fall, nature has to be transformed back to its original, orderly state. The recovery narrative, first in religious terms and in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in the language of Western science and capitalism, thus legitimizes the human domination and exploitation of the earth. Accordingly, the Puritan mission to transform the American wilderness has to be seen in the larger context of Judeo-Christian attitudes towards nature. Translated to an American context, the recovery narrative turns the Puritan project into a divine mission to create a new society to serve as a model for the whole world and to fail the mission is thus to fail before God and all of humankind.1 “For wee must Consider,” John Winthrop described the Puritan mission, “that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us” (qtd. in Miller, “Errand” 11). The transformation of ‘wilderness’ into ‘civilization’ thus has originally a strong religious connotation in American culture. From its European, Judeo-Christian origins, the ‘wilderness’ eventually developed into a main symbol of American culture, representing the roots of American selfhood in the American wild. As Roderick Frazier Nash summarizes in Wilderness and the American Mind, wilderness is “the basic ingredient of American culture. From the raw materials of the physical wilderness, Americans built a civilization. With the idea of wilderness they sought to give their civilization identity and meaning” (xi). In the centuries following the early Puritan experience, nature remained the key referent of a quickly growing American civilization. While nineteenth-century Americans moved ever further westward, settled the continent, and laid the foundation for the emergence of the United States as the world’s super power in the century to follow, America’s leading minds simultaneously interpreted nature to be at the core of the national experience. Whereas wilderness had been perceived by Puritan culture as a brutal, life-threatening force, the protagonists of American romanticism now celebrated the sublime landscapes of the North- American continent as the birthplace of a new sturdy nation of independent, freedom-loving Americans. “The sublime wilderness,” historian William Cronon notes, “had ceased to be a place of satanic temptation and become instead a sacred temple” (“Trouble” 69). Drawing from Rousseau’s concept of the ‘noble savage’ and a romantic glorification of primitivism as the antidote to European over-civilization, American artists like James Fenimore Cooper or Albert Bierstadt now pointed towards nature as the corner stone of the American 1 For an introduction to Puritan culture, see Perry Miller’s classic Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1956). 2 national experience and depicted the landscapes of the American wilderness as the source of national identity. America, these artists suggested, was ‘nature’s nation.2 However, while the continent was being transformed at a breathtaking speed, American artists simultaneously expressed a strongly ambivalent attitude towards the notion of progress. Although civilization’s march westward across the continent was generally celebrated as the quintessential American story during the second half of the nineteenth century, critical voices at the same time outlined civilization as an ambiguous force that erased the sublime landscapes around which the origin story of American identity had been shaped. Explorers, writers, poets, and painters like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Albert Bierstadt now drew attention to the decline of pristine nature and proclaimed their concern for the preservation of untouched wilderness. This romantic impetus to protect pristine nature as a source of national identity later also influenced the emergence of the conservation movement, the first wave of American environmentalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, the American definition of ‘nature’ as expressed in the concept of ‘wilderness’ oscillated between two opposing poles during the second half of the nineteenth century: A romantic celebration of pristine wilderness as the cradle of American identity and the simultaneous celebration of progress and civilization as the antidotes to the wilderness condition. As Perry Miller notes, the nineteenth-century interpreters of the American origin story “present us with the problem of American self-recognition as being essentially an irreconcilable opposition between Nature and civilization” (“Nature” 208). Accordingly, it is not one coherent, genuinely American definition of ‘nature’ that serves as the main concept in the American myth of origins, but rather an ambiguous tension between two opposing forces, between civilization and nature, or, as Leo Marx phrases it, the machine and the garden.3 This Ur-American narrative about a new civilization being built in the wilderness is essentially a story of initiation, whose plot is set in the mythic region of the American West. In the American cultural imagination, no other region represents the mythic struggle between civilization and wilderness as strongly as the West. “This nation has made the American West the center stage for our drama of technological conquest over 2 The phrase ‘nature’s nation’ is borrowed from Perry Miller. For Miller’s analysis of the meaning of ‘nature’ in American cultural history, consult especially his essay “Nature and the National Ego,” Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1956): 204-16.
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