Stephen Crane 26-255
New York Times Book Review 2/23/86 p. 43
Street Scene Poverty is a rich subject for writers. In "Cities Perceived" (Columbia University), Andrew Lees quotes Stephen Crane's tongue-lashing of metropolitan slums. "From a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from fire-escapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners.
A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street.
The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowls."
II. Sandburg- Chicago
From Sanders, Gerald Dewitt & John Herbert Nelson, eds. Chief Modern
Poets of England and America. New York: Macmillan Co., 1929.
455, Carl Sandburg, 1914, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, published
Chicago
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
and they tell me you are crooked and I answer:
Yes, it is true I have
seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is:
On the faces of women
and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunder.
And having answered do I turn once more to those who sneer at this
my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to
be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here
is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage
pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs whohas never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under
his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player
with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
III. Discussion outline, notes from Cronon
Preface:
xv not a history of
Chicago, but a history of the relationship between Chicago and the
West:
xvi "Although this book takes Chicago and the Great West as its immediate
focus, its broader ambtiion is to explore century-old economic and
ecological transformations that have continued to affect all of North
American and the rest of the world besides"
one central belief, city an dcountry have a common history, so their
stories are best told together.
Does not deal with architecture, labor struggles, poliitcal machines,
social reformers, cultural instutions, etc.; only merchants appear;
understands why Bessie Louise Pierce never finished her history of
Chicago
really dealing with the Frontier in American History;
xix deepest intellectual agenda in this book is to suggest that the
boundary between human and nonhuman, natural and unnatural, is profoundly
problematic."
first nature (original prehuman nature) second nature (artificial
nature that people erect)
human presence in nature ambiguous
shaped by Michael Conzen's remarkable work on the historical geography
of metropolitan dominance [local Chicago Historian]
begins with quote from Frank Norris, the Pit, 1903, interesting use
of Titanic (which gains another meaning in 1912- ironically April 14-15)
5:
Prologue, William Archer, smoke of Chicago, 1900
7:
"Chicago represented all that was most UNnatural about human life.
Crowded
and artificial, it was a cancer on an otherwise beautiful landscape."
9:
no other city has grown so large so quickly
9:
Cityward journey of Garland, Frank, Sullivan, Herrick; Rose Dutcher,
Garland's farm girl, 10,000 tons of burning coal sent soaring skyward
on jet black wings; cloud eagle;
15:
Herrick- vision of Chicago, dark, sees city liberated from the
Natural world;
17:
"In Herrick's Chcago, by taking dominion so completely over servile
nature, humanity had declared its freedom but lost its birthright:
to see human passions as the beginning and end of existence was to
blaspheme against creation and humanity itself.
To see one's world
as a self-created place opened the doorway to heroic achievement,
but finally denied any other Creator, be it Nature or God."
18:
argues that nature and the city need each other? "The urban-rural,
human-natural dichotomy blinds us to the deeper unity beneath our
own divided perceptions.
must be sure not to miss the "extent to
which the city's inhabitants continue to rely as much on the nonhuman
world as they do on each other. cannot escape to wild nature; We are
in this together.
19; architect Anne Spirn:
"the city is a granite garden, composed
of many smaller gardens, set in a garden world. ... The city is part
of nature."
[in effect must see the City as an inextricable part of the whole,
essential to the whole?]
I. Dreaming the Metropolis
A: Intro
24:
country-side:
"Chigagou,
"the wild-garlic place."
discusses the natural setting
25:
an yet none of these patterns matter tohuman history until we
ask how the people whose lives they touched understood their significance."
25:
indian removal-
27:
conflict of concept of
bounded property, not understood by leader
of Kickapooo Indians, Black Hawk, 1832 war,
28:
unleashed development
of the city;
(importance of the treaty of 1833;
unleashed a wildness-- lots at $33 in 1829, going for $100,000
by 1836.
29:
"Only wild hopes for the future could lead people to pay so much
for vacant lots in a town where the most promising economic activity
consisted of nothing more substantial than buying and selling real
estate."
B. 31: Booster dreams
Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis about the
Frontier [why does Cronon have to deal with it so early on in his
book?-- problem of his sequence,
Darwinian sequence... .
'natural
progression from indian world to bustling city; advanced his thesis
at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 fits poortly with the 1830s world
of
Chicago.
32; have to read Turner backwards-
why?
City begins with an urban
dream in a wilderness pushed by speculators and boosters who make
it happen by sheer willpower, bravado, and suckering peole into investing
capital in the most unlikely
of places:
the wetlands and the banks
of the sluggish Chicgo river-"the wild
garlic place"
33:
what is one of the vehicles for promoting Chicago in the minds
of Americans?
Niles Register published in Baltimore, early as 1814
calling for a canal to make the city
33:
entrepreneur example:
Charles Butler- careful to give him too
much credit, arrives one month before the treaty is signed and begins
to hype the site
35:
Jesup W. Scott:
"I shall assume that a city is an organism springiing
from natural laws as inevitably as any other organism, and governed,
invariably, in its origin and growth by these laws." boosters imply
that human labor less important than nature in spurring city's growth."
Scott boosted Toledo;
41; Nature provides the engine for growth, climate, resources, maps
prove it, boosters promote it;
C. Metropolis and Empire
41:
Jessup and Scott,
boosters future of the WEST inseparable from
that of the Central City.
Turner on his head:
the West is created
in part by the City.
Empire centered in the city
C. 46:
Reading Turner backwards
47:
for Turner, cities appear only after a long period of rural agricultural
growth.
Cities mark the end of the frontier.
For boosters, they
grow in tandem.
47:
[what then is the chief difference between the boosters and Frederick
Jackson Turner (who by the way, began his studies of the West here
at Hopkins at about the same time his contemporary, Woodrow Wilson
was studying the City here.]
"the chiefe difference between turner
and boosters hinges on a seemingly minor point:
Turner's chicago rose
to power only as the frontier drew to a close, whereas the boosters'
Chicago had been an intimate part of
frontier settlement almost from
the beginning."
D:
48:
Central Place Theory, arguments of Johann Heinrich von Thunen,
Isolated State, 1826.
50:
"Von Thunen radically smplified his landscape to demonstrate what
the ninenteenth cnetury boosters knew intuitively, and what modern
central place theorists have confirmed with formal mathematics.
Where
human beings organize their economy around market exchange, trade
between city and country will be among the most powerful forces influencing
cultural geography and environmental change.
The ways people value
the products of the soil, and decide how much it costs to get those
products to market, together shape the landscape we inhabit."
Thus we have a new way of understanding the history of colonization
n the Great West and elsewhere (p. 50).
51:
"Turner's frontier, far from being an isolated rural society,
was in fact the expanding edge of the boosters' urban empire.
Seen
from the midst of the city, grain farmers, intensive truck gardeneers,
and urban manufacturers -- look like nothing so much as the zones
of von Thunen's isolated State.
Frntier and metropolis turnout to
be two sides of the same soin."
two points:
city and country are inextricably connected, market relations
mediate between them;
Von Thunen fails to include time as a factor;
keys to sucdess-
52:
captal and removal of a differing theory of occupation and use
(Indians)
II. Rails and Water.
need to raise the city out of the MUD
create artificial corridors of transporation to make the city viable
first canals (Illinois and Michigan Canal, 1848), expands hinterland
southward to the Mississippi just above St. Louis (p.65)
1848- Railroads,
67:
"The Railroads centered on Chicago, not becasue nature ordained
that they had
to do so, nature made no such pronouncements, but because
investors and everyone eles who acted on booster theories proclaimed
thathey should do so."
By 1852 over 1/2 wheat arrives by rail, Galena
and Chicago Union
6*:
rapid rail exapnsion of the 1850s- see map
70:
Caroline Kirkland, 1858:
open sesame spoken through the railroad
whistle
72:
thesis- Railroads represent a second nature, appear natural yet
man-made, even appear supernatural;
73:
" It was a human invention at the heart of an equally human economic
system. " Nature," wrote one booster who came closer than most to
this perspective, "built chicago througher artificer, Man."
74:
Railroad Time:
power of the railroad companies, controlled by
Easter Capital, meant they could regularize and control what?
TIME
92:
and thus as Marx wrote 9p.92) annihilate space by time".
This
new geography meant that the marketing of goods, the products of
nature and human labor could be accelerated and regularized giving
"new hope of fulfillling the great 19th-century booster dream of material
progress for city and country alike.
Such speed and organization in itself raised problems; requried much
higher
levels of trade, production, and resource consumption for
its own sustenance (ist own inertia?), let alone its impoeratives
toward growth.
The city thus drives the
ever accelerating exploitation
of the West and "Like von Thunen's isolated city, Chicago was [geographcially]
remote from all these events. And yet no place is more central to
understanding why they occured.]
Cronon 2
Chapter 3 Pricing the future:
Grain
97:
Prairie into Farm:
The Train did not create the city by itself.
go-between whose chief task was to cross the boundary between city and country.
"Chicago wwas just the site of a country fair, abeit the grandest, most spectacular country fair the world had ever seen."
98:
grains themselves products of human experimentation and technology
99:
needed new technology- Steel Plow, to work the land
effects:
retreat of the grasses caused by planting of corn and wheat;
100:
Cyrus McCormick and the Reaper, from Chicago Factory- met major need of the farmer [while the court system and the political world protected his invention; no clearer indication of the interweaving of the rural interests and the city interests than in the patent infringment cases brought by McCormick against his would be competitor-
Edwin Stanton, and the down state lawyer, Abraham Lincoln; meant that those who made money in the City could find legal ways to keep it; concentration of capital in the city]
effects of exploiting natural resource:
prairie lands- rereat of grasses, demand for new technology, but also demand for what the prarie did not have:
101:
Lumber
101; "Even where no trees grew, wooden fences and buildings stood as silent reminders that those who inahbited the farm landscape survived by mingling the products of the forest with those of the prairie."
102:
land system [as important to the rise of the city as the interaction with the countryside in its development was the land system on which both the development of the countryside and the city was based:
Land ordinance of 1785:
Jefferson's view of how land should be divided and subdivided in a grid pattern meant easily laying out of land to be sold and subdivided and easy management of the sales, while reinforcing individual property rights and rigidly defining the geographical limits, the boundaries of those property rights]
"By imposing the same abstract and homogoenous grid pattern on all land, no matter how ecologically diverse, government surveyors made it marketable. As happened during Chicago's land craze of the 1830s, the GRID turned the prairie into a commodity, and became the foundation for all subsequent land use."
1/4=160 acres; economies of scale;
problems:
not all land equal- drainage etc. [apart from RR, the rivers of the prairie were its highways]
who peopled the land?
104:
from almost everywhere, although foreign migrants went to the cities {12.5% of ILL foreign born in 1850, but almost half in Cook county concentrated in Chicago}
II. A Sack's Journey
104:
importance of the country storekeeper (Rebecca Burlend on storekeepers)
105:
introduction of his example of country storekeeper:
John Burrows of Davenport, Iowa; 1844 effort to profit from potatoe market:
ever present possibility of bankruptcy
105:
main point- Storekeepers in a world where cash was short, credit essential, "merchants served as traslators between the world of rural barter and world of urban money."
[form the essential communication linck between town and country]
106:
compares St. Louis and Chicago re:
trading grain prior to RR
107-8:
essential point:
grain to sack to market is changed by pooling of grain and standardizing grading of grain in common bins called grain elevators.
in order to understand the role of the city you must understand the mechanisms of the market viz the major commodities:
initially the market is a sack based market where the ownership of the grain is owned by the farm family until it reached its final destination.
109:
"A farm family sending a load of wheat from Illinois to New York could still have recovered that same wheat packed with a bill of lading inside its original sacks, in a Manhattan warehouse several weeks later."
[for the city to experience accelerated growth, concentration of capital, the mechanism for marketing the principal commodities would have to be changed.
Ways would have to be found to separate "grain as a priced commodity from the grain that had so recetnlty clung to yellow stalks on the windy hillsides of former prairies." p. 109]
III. The Golden Stream-
109:
Railroads changed everything; grain re-routed easily from waterways and sacks to centralized storage, managed grading systems which pooled all incoming grain and dissolved the private ownership bonds that tied the farmer to his sacks of grain.
110:
results:
explosion of shipments of grain to Chicago
111:
Joseph Dart, Buffalo warehouseman, 1842:
steam-powered elevator [important point- all good ideas do not have to originate in the city where they are put to best use]
1848, Robert C. Bristol elevator;
"within less than a decade the the largest elevators in Chicago -- all either owned by or closely affiliated with major railroads-- were almost ten times bigger than Bristol's"
112; by 1857 Chicago could store more grain that St. Louis could ship;
more labor intensive in St. Louis (description of laziness of dock workers from booster paper in Chicago):
difference- St. Louis added more labor to make their system work; Chicago developed economies of scale (113)
113:
dissolved the bond of ownership between shipper and the physical grain, but achieving that point not easy- role of Chicago Board of Trade, 1848- most important role, internal self-regulation of its membership
114:
"collective consensus about their own best interests"
115:
[standardization- e.g. bushel size, always a problem]
[So what makes for success in Chicago?
Helps the fight for standardization and the move away from the sack based shipment of grain?
As is true with the growth of any city, it is not just the relationship with the hinterland that is important but the total market that the city serves which really counts.
CRIMEAN WAR- influence of World demand for grain.
It is this demand that in the first decade and half of the 19th century that makes Baltimore (Napoleonic Wars disrupting supply of grain in Europe, giving great opportunity to the city in the re-export trade (not only of grain but of goods as well)]
115:
wheat exports double in volume, triple in value, 1853-54
116:
board of trade proposes system of regulation in 1856; designate 3 categories of wheat, white winter, read winter, spring, set standards of quality for each;
117:
problem of diry, mixed, generally low quality grain 118:
national depression, 1857 plays as much role in accelerating change towards standards, economies of scale, centralizationof marketing as does the demand of world markets.
119:
Board's standards written into law in 1859 by State Legislature ,making Board of Trade a quasi-judicial entity with substantial legal powers to reglate city's trade
IV. FUTURES
120:
by 1859- three key institutions:
elevator warehouse, grading system, central market governed by the privately run Board of Trade
downside:
grain becomes an abstraction; speculation in grain not yet planted,
made possible by---the Telegraph, i.e. mass communication
121:
"As markets became more efficient, their prices discounted local conditions and converged with regional, national, and even international price levels." [first telegraph tried out between Washington and Baltimore, May 24, 1844] 122:
problem- information could travel fast, but grain could not
124; to arrive contracts; futures contracts become such a problem that after the Civil War, formal rules adopted by Board of Trade regulating futures contracts
125:
Rothstein:
futures market- men who don't own something selling that something to men who don't really want it."
Futures market was a market in the price of grain, not grain.
127:
1868- year of the corners; 131, notes the Leiter Corner of 1896 immortalized by Frank Norris in novel THE PIT.
132:
most important point- "Corners were an almost inevitable result not just of the futures contract but of grain grading and elevators as well:
all three derived from the same artificial partitioning of the economic landscape, the same second nature." [important to remember that the human reaction to such dehumanizing of the marketing of rural produce is the granger movement, is the organized resistance to the sinful dehumanization of the rural world by the exploiters in the city]
V:
Boundary Disputes
133:
Elevator operators become the common enemy- easy to identify, isolate-
135- Elevator fraud, collusion with the Railroads;
137:
In the abasence of effective means for regulating and policing the elevaors, little could be done to prevent such abuses-... fraudulent grading, dishonest weighing, mixing grades, restricting competition, hiding storage information, issuing false receipts."
137:
raises questions about who should have the power to set boundaries of behavior:
Important to note that it is the Chicago Papers, the Board of Trade, NOT THE FARMERS who lead the attack on the Grain Elevators.
[The City makes the countryside aware of problems, or at minimum helps organize the opposition in its own best interest-- important to maintain boundaries or a partitioned market and at same time protect that market.
138:
issue moved to the larger arena of the State Legislature
140:
"If, as many farmers believed, Chicago was the font of corruption in the grain trade, the city also pointed the way to its own redemption."
140-141:
1870 Constition, 1871 Railroad and Warehouse commission; Finally moves to national scene,
142:
1877, MUNN v. ILLINOIS, moves the elevators into the public sector, as "clothed with public interst" and could not escape staet regulation."
[When the functioning of the economy becomes an abstract far removed from first nature, then the public operating in a regulatory way through its representatives, must find ways to assess the consequences and prevent the wholesale loss of elements of the natural world essential to that economy.
Not an easy task]
VI:
Necessary Fictions
142; The City helps foster a definition of what is meant by "Public Interest"
Self interest and reform
is the tension, the dynamic at work in the city.
145:
"If the chief symbol of the earlier marketing system was the sack whose enclosure drew boundaries around crop and property alike, then the symbol of chicago's abandonment of those boundaries was the golden torrent of the elevator shute."
146:
the city imposes a new kind of order on nature- creates a world of second nature in which grain is a commodity independent (almost) of grain as a crop.
Chapter 4, The Wealth of Nature:
Lumber
[If grain was an intrusion into nature brought by man, lumber was a necesssity for that intrusion that did not exist where it proved easiest for man to plant his grain]
149:
labor theory of value does not explain the astonishing accumulation of capital that accompanied Chicago's growth.
Fertility of the Prairie made consumption possible, realm less of production than of consumption.
150:
F.J. Turner key insight:
"Unexploited natural abundacne was the central meaning of Turner's frontier."
[In other words the accident of geography, the natural wealth that existed there before man was exploited, consumed by man driven by the support it derived from the technology, market facilities, etc. provided by the city]
151; "Much of the capital that made the city was nature's own."
I. From Forest to Prairie
151:
lake allows exploitation of much needed lumber, RR's deliver it.
155:
"Ecology and economy had converged:
the city lay not only on the border between forest and grassland but also on the happy margin between supply and demand."
[happened everywhere- story of the exploitation of PA woods for demand in Baltimore and elsewhere- Stranahan]- 159:
mentions boom companies in Maine and PA also:
[consequences:
silting shoaling; ravaged landscape.]
II. The business of Lumber
159:
"No place was more important in coordinating this massive movement of water, men and wood than Chicago."
162:
uses careers of Charles and Nathan Mears, lumberman, [inexhorably drawn to the city]
City ideal place to purchase provisions for company stores; find wage labor
163; $100-200 per year wages;
164; Chicago set wage rates,;
family men best-- why? brought underpaid female labor as a bonus
166:
frontier enterprises like lumber under capitalized;
Important point:
Nature plays a key role in governing the success/failure of lumber trade:
weather, etc.; abnormal cycling of the natural year;
168:
dangers of business cycle compounded by the business cycle
III. Cargo Market-
169:
Chicago in 1850s single greatest lumber market in the world:
credit, cheap construction & fires;
Chicago helped even out the vicisitudes of the seasonal and credit markets.
170:
"probably the only place in the United States where traders conducted a wholesale market in unsold shiploads of lumber throughout the warm months of the year."
171:
Chicago's nearest competitor- Milwaukee:
bottom line:
could always sell a cargo in Chicago; prices might be low but merchants willing to strike some sort of deal. 173:
1850-1880 heyday ow wholesalers, largest most important between applachians and Sierra Nevada
177:
"In effect, the enormous concentration of supply in Chicago's lubmeryards encouraged its dealers to attempt the same abstraction of a natural resource that occurred in the city's grain market."
Never Happened, standards came from Mississippi Valley, not Chicago, yet lumber of standard dimensions became popular because of :
178:
Augustine D. Taylor, St. Mary's Catholic Church, 1833, balloon frame-invisible danger, fire of 1871
179:
decades after 1850 balloon frame triumphed, Chicago supplied the wood
180:
IV Buying by Rail
geography of capital as essential as the gegoraphy of nature in bringing sellers and buyers todgether. Railroads provided the iron and steel rail gateway to the western prairies.
181:
by 1860, 220 million board freet of lumber, 85% by rail;
1880 one billion board feet, 95% by rail
182:
by 1884 primacy of Chicago seems 'natural'' price differentials established by arbitration; by sheer size and thus dominance of trade, Chicago's role seems 'natural.' Geography of capital insinuates itself into the geography of nature (183)
V:
Lost hinterland
183; just at the point where it all seemed natural, nature failed; paradox Chicago's success is the root of its decline;
efforts to 'drum' up business;
186:
drummers and scalpers
187:
"If anything proved the centrality of Chicago's role in the western lumber trade, this was it:
a Chicago-based journal seeking to unite dealers in chicago's hinterland to resist the power of Chicago wholesalers in Chicago's market."
188:
NALD
191:
Chicago becomes the focal point of a vicious circle:
undercapitalization caused overproduction, which in turn kept prices low and accelerated the destruction of the northern forest.
193:
RR's themselves defeat central marketing at Chicago by changing rate policies, by 1877 disastrous for Chicago wholesalers; RR gave them a break, then took it away;
196:
also new source of supply:
The South, from White pine floors to yellow pine floors;
198:
by 1880s glory years over:
"The same railroad that had given the city its dominance no took it away, driving " beyond every spatial barrier' toa chieve "the annihilation of space by time" to repeat Marx's phrase.
Second nature shifts from centralized wholesaling to mills along the RR elsewhere, yet RR controlled from the City. 200:
VI The Cutover;
bottom line:
"Chicago lost its lumber trade because the forest was finally exhausted by the effort to bring it to market."
200:
James S. Little, 1876, lumberman- wrote about preserving the forest. official organs of the industry decried warnings of the Census bureau (1880) [instance of the government created to regulate excess, telling the truth and having it denounced as lies-- major premise of the deregulating efforts of the Reagan/Bush administration was to denounce truth as lies]
202- Man's intrusion into nature not all intentional exploitation- white pine blister rust accidentally brought from Europe.
203:
consequences in the north- faster growing trees, rise of paper industry injecting a whole new problem for the environment:
massive pollution by paper mills of the watersheds, although this was a post 1900 phenomena
important point, City itself created a market for consumption of wood, if its wholesalers lost out to Southern competition [City growth creates markets within as well as without] see chart on p. 204
205; "And what of the ravaged pinelands to the north? What was their relationship to this new vision of urban harmony and grandeur? Presumably those Chicagoans who though about it, like most other Americans, saw the vanished forests as a worthy scrifice to the cause of civilization."
[part of the problem stemmed from the agrarian myth that clearing the forest was beneficial to mankind.
By default, the city proved this not to be true in a very short period of time (say 100 years)]
206:
"A sizable shre of the new city's wealth was the wealth of nature stolen, consumed, and converted to human ends."
"Perhaps the greatest irony was that by surviving the forests that had nurtured its growth, Chicago could all too easily come to seem a wholly human creation."
10-06-93
10_192.038 Cronon 3
5 Annihilating Space:
Meat
207:
other great institution wheree western nature met the Chicago market?:
stockyards
208 Kipling's woman:
"She looked curiously, with hard, bold eyes, and was not ashamed.""
Cronon:
"few who heard that squal (Sinclair's hog-squeal of the Universe)coul avoid wondering what it might signify about animals, death, and the proper human relationship to both.
210:
what accelerated Chicago becoming the centralized hogbutcher to the world?
Civil War 1864- central stockyard.
211:
economic alchemy, disassembly line pioneered in Cincinnati, perfected in Chicago
212:
what was the impact on nature?
enormous ecological changes intricate new connections among grain farmers, stock raisers, butchers, creating a new coporate network- long term, basic change in American diet, growing interdependency between city and countryside.increasing corporate control over landscape, space and the natural world leading to these corporations ultimately abandoning the center and dependence on any one single locationkey:
alienation from the act of killing and from nature itself slaughterng the Bison brought on by the massive expansion of the RR s after the Civil War spurred on by technology- Philadelphia tanners perfect turning bison hides into supple and attractive leather (p. 216) 217, dramatic end of Bison hunt in 1883; Indian wars wars of necessity with Indians facing starvation
218 Open Range and Feed Lot:
disappearance of Bison prelude to complicated changes in the the Great Plains Ecology and Economy; other cities pioneered the technology, but Chicago benefited most from the slaughter- followed by the cattle of the prairie- got rid of natures beasts and substituted man's importation
219 great cattle drives of the 1860s, 70s and 80s, best known, etc. of American Frontier Icons.
"The cowboy was the agent who tied von Thunen's livestock-raising zone to its metropolitan market. "far from a loner or rugged individualist"
a wage earner tied to shipping meat to Chicago
technology ( 1870, Joseph Glidden's barb wire- 1873; substitute grasses (KY blue grass)
223:
As grassland gave way to pasture, and pasture to feedlot, the general tendency was for people to replace natural systems with systems regulated principally by the human economy."
gone were old migratory pattersn; unidirectional movement of cattle took their place;
224:
" Considered abstractly, it was a landscape in which the logic of capital had remade first nature and bound together far-flung places to produce a profound new integration of biological space and market time."
everything accelerated and economized; production of corn to fatten cattle; no interruption to the steady accumulation of future cash in well-muscled flesh;
225:
preserving and marketing the flesh:
role of pork packers; what role did a second tier city like Cincinnati play?
Buffalo give Chicago the grain elevator and Cincinnati piooneered the manufacturing techniques for butchering pork on a grand scale.
229:
disassembly line worked out in Cincinnati, but Civil War demand for pork to feed the troops called for massive centralization; sixfold increase in production (230) from 59/60 -62/63
230:
Storing the Winter- massive capital investment meant having to find a way to keep the work going year round-
how?
Rail-shipped ice;
led to a major innovation stolen from Detroit- 233:
Gustavus F. Swift comes to Chicago in 1875:
helps move the cattle trade (where live animals shipped to local butchers to a revolutionary approach to the marketing of meat:
233 refrigerator cars on the railroad; Philip Armour, competitor
234:
"the refrigerated railroad car, like the grain elevator, was a simple piece of technology with extraordinarily far-reaching implications."
235:
Triumph of the Packers:
complex problmes in marketing their products which were?
needed to convince the public they did not need nor want the local butcher:
"The real genious of the refrigerator car had more to do with marketing than with technology." advertising; deceptive marketing practices (dumping to gain market and then raising prices)most serious hurdle was--the RRs; great investment in stockyards; would lose freight business;
RR used 'evener' system, got cattle re-directed from ST. Louis and elsewhere to Chicago where the vast quantities of beef on the hoof in turn encouraged the dressed beef industry; worked by a rebate system where there were guaranteed shipments of cattle and the RR in turn gave back $15 for every carload shipped eastSwift found a RR happy to ship his beef:
Grand Trunk 1884 Cooley award, ratio 57%, % of meet obtained from a living steer, but dressed meat packers won out; dramatic rearrangement of trade resulted (242);
243:
packers did anything to gain market share; hometown butchers lost out in l
`
sxe th` 10 years;
244:
by late 1880s Chicago packers dominate much of American meat supply (exceptions were special markets- Kosher in NYC); 4 companies control 90 %
246:
Farmers not happy; investigations begin of meat packers in the 1880s when cattle market collapses;
247:
economic earthquate taken place with epicenter at Chicago;
Unremembered Deaths:
"deepest and sublest meaning pertained to nature itself"
results:
247:
alterned landscapes "newly partitioned ecosystem that was now managed toward new human ends."
Philip Armour moves from flesh to fruit.
End result:
Gigantic concentration of economic power- cites Armour;
used everything in the hog except its squeal (249); diversified into grain;
suggests that the progressive reformers were only following in the footsteps of the packers who worshiped "at the alter of efficiency, seeking to conserve economic resources by making a war on waste."only by selling by products did packers prosper. p. 251; sold produ ts people would never have purchased or eaten in their original form, p. 252reform comes in 1906, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair; Pure Food and Drug act;
253:
"For those like Upton Sinclair who saw in the city all that was most evil in capitalism, Packingtown represented the decline of coporate morality and the end of an earlier, more familiar and trustworthy way of life."
254:
but the achivements were not necessarily that evil
255:
"Nothing in Chicago at the end of the nineteeth century better symbolized the city's profoundly transfored relationship to the natural world than its gigantic meat-packing corporations."
why?
greatest break with nature; great impersonal corporations disembodying the mind of mankind from the reality of nature; meat becomes a product of human artifice;
loss of a sense of connection; forgetfulness major contribution of the mechanization of meat packing 257:
In forgetting the animal's life one also forgot the grasses and the pairie skies and the departed bison herds of alandscape that seemed more and more remote in space and time." [ reform of the practices that led to tainted meat and the awful smell of pollution did nothing to change the estrangment from nature].
259:
in the end the Diesel truck did centralization in; by 1960 grass began to grow among the ruins of the stockyard
"In losing control of its corporate meat-packing hinterland, chicago's stockyard fulfilled the logic of its own birth."[centrifugal and centripital forces at work] Time had conspired with capital to annihilate space.
PART III The Geography of Capital
263:
6 Gateway City, mapping capital
city remaking the countryside after its own image.
264:
1) forgetfulness, split asunder the rural and the urban 2) second constructed nature, twin birth of cityand hinterland266:
Von Thunen's isolated state;
first nature, people closer to the rythem of nature; second nature is artificial and insenstive to whole sale destruction of natural resources;
267 shif tform local ecosystem to regional hinterland and global economy;
269:
drawing a map of second nature means coming to terms with capital itself
turns to Bankruptcy records:
271:
seems to ignore the investment of the Conn insurance company in the Sawmill thus not giving the role of Eastern Capital investment its due]
273:
1873 panic
278:
how does Cronon modify Von Thunen's simplistic model?
look at maps on
275-277;
279 Urban hierarchy:
1890, Chicago surpasses Philadelphia to become second largest city, only 3 in nation with pop greater than 1 million
center of wholesale trade (281); Von Thunen's one great flaw, as with Central place theory:
profoundly static and a historical
(p. 282)
283:
because of unique transportation advantages, Cicago emerged as a metropolis strongly linked to the East before its western hinterland expanded dramatically;
283:
Chicago made in part by NY capital and in turn makes the WEST
283/4:
what is meant by gateway city?:
map p. 291 really showing that the city is capitalized by more than just Easterners:
more subtle and complex; hop scotches by rail; also via vast publication/information distribution network ... the mails
bankruptcy (p. 295) reveals a widespread network of finding capital/credit
GATEWAY RIVALRY:
Chicago & St. Louis
notes advantages to inertia of being at the top:
p. 295;
city system reflects more shifting geography of capital than underlying geography of nature [but surely it reflects more the shifting geography of confidence; effective promotion; continued delivery of goods, fulfilment of promises]
capital made the railroads and thus fostered the competition that diminished in time ST. Louis and made Chicago supreme, p. 296 Rock Island line;
thus transport technology in part explains shifting importance of two towns, but city system helped too:
partners for St. Louis:
Philadelphia and New Orleans, lack the capital resources available to Chicago;
300:
1857 St. Louis linked by rail to Baltimore; but timing horrible:
civil war intervenes and New Orleans is blocked; Doeflinger model of growth on adversity comes into play and Chicago thrives on the fate of its competitor;
302:
St. Louis declined because of
complaceny and dependence on water but only partial reason; Chicago was able to draw upon more capital resources in NE than Chicago
(p. 303) [fate of having Southern ties? engendering distrust among Yankees?]
Chicago could command more credit; had a greater financial hinterland (305)
307:
Cronon's major thesis:
gateway city serves a credit communication link with the areas in the undeveloped hinterland that are in the process of being exploited.
That credit or capital can get there no other way;
"compared with that of a typical central place sharing its high rank, the gateway city's economy was much more committed to long-distance transportation and wholesaling, and for a simple reason:
it was the principal colonizing agent of the western landscape."
307; Gateway metropolis represented a revolution in political economy, a complex transformation of culture, and an ecological watershed all at the same time;
308-309:
only NY comopeted so effectively over so wide an area
central places eventually filled out; but state like Iowa never had a major metropolis
Chicago as gateway promotes the creation of central cities (except in Iowa)
The boxes of Omaha now read Chicago and not St. Louis.
By the 1870s Chicago was perched to make a new and even more profound intrusion into the hinter land:
the ordinary markets of daily life [as opposed to grain, lumber, pork and beef]
10-13-93
10_192.039 Cronon 4
310:
7 the Busy Hive
310:
Reaping the Factory's Harvest
follow the seller, follow the buyer, by opening the boxes?
311; by 1880 15% of all people in Chicago labored in its factories
1860-180:
rise of diversified secondary-manufacturing sector that did much more than just process natural resources
312:
RRs support Chicago's growth as a manufacturing cneter
313:
returns to McCormick and move to Chicago in 1847:
"luck? Shrewd booster timing?"
remains a mystery
315:
shrewd advertising campaign but machinery heavy; needed RRs
316-17 maps showing sales of reapers
318:
Merchant's World:
Pre-Railroad
John McDowell Burrows of Davenport Iowa- came rrom Cincinnati in 1838 as grocer
320:
capital flowed from the urban hierarchy, crucial to sustaining a merchant's business; problem of good information
321:
returns to ill-fated shipment of potatoes to New Orleans; winter locks up capital
322 New York exchange notes effectively competed with by Chicago exchange notes but credit more important
323:
Family credit; credit generally most important to sustain business; goods needed to be stocked
324:
Merchant's world Post railroad
[note he focuses on one state where there are no real cities, Iowa]
325:
"The rialroad brought country and city closer together.
It elaborated the urban hierarchy by proliferating towns and villages beneath the emerging metropolis of Chicago, but also brought the layers of the hierarchy together."
326:
result was striking reduction nt he capital costs of doing business; dealers did not have to rent, hire labor to the degree they had formerly; Burrows fails
327:
geographical reorientation so subtle, easily missed; uses dry account books to document:
Charles Brewster, Iowa; Potter Palmer, of Palmer house fame;
329:
Chcago wholesale merchants famous for use of drummers, forced eastern drummers out
331:
wholesaling geography?
332:
most important phenomenon that wholesalers and retailers illustrate is that in the "postrailroad world one could buy in a small hinterland town many of the products offered in the regional metropolis of Chicago."
City and county growing closer together
333:
most significant development "Fast Mail" on RRs "It is almost the annihilation of distance"
333:
Catalogs on Kitchen Tables:
[Annus Mirabulus] 1872 Aaron Montgomery Ward
334:
"founded a new marketing institution that in many ways represented the logical culmination of the merchandising techniques that Chicagoans like Cyrus McCormick and Potter Palmer had been exploring since the middle of the century."
marketing techniques:
money back guarantee; sought Grange market;
336:
1880:
540 pages
1900:
1,200 pages
"firm's yearly postal money order business was greater than that of entire cities like Cincinnati, New Orleans, or San Francisco."
337:
immense new building on Michigan Avenue "A Busy Bee-Hive" 338:
catalogues brought city and country together; RFD in 1896 helped (massive Federal Subsidy of Urban Marketing)
339:
"The mail order catlog was only the purest expression of this much broader cultural tendency [geography of capital about connecting people to make new markets and remake old landscapes].
Even more than an ordinary piece of cartography, it offered its readers amap of capital, of second nature.
In its pages, these relationships all came together, so one can read in its advertisements the ties between metropolis and hinterland, the flow of debt and credit, the assembly of labor and natural resources into manufactured goods, the movement of commodities and information, and the structure of the distribution system system as a whole." most remarkable point, thoroughly obscures the relationships; seen as a whole, not as separate parts;
[does not address the problem of greed, self-satisfaction which such marketing feeds on]
340:
Just as one could eat an Armour ham without remembering the act of killing, you could buy from Montgomery Ward without reflecting on the "web of economic and ecological connections that stretched out in all directions from oneself and busy hive."
paradox:
web conceals itself:
"Hive and catalog were different sides of the same coin, and yet it was second nature not to see them upon their common landscape, as links in a long chain stretching from metropolis to hinterland and finally to nature itself."
[Cronon's meaning?]
341:
White City Pilgrimage
asserts Chicago reached climax in final decade of 19th century.
[did it?]
342:
first time he notes worker unrest:
"At a time when the national economy was wracked by depression, when farmers were organizing mass protest movements, and workers were marching in the streets, the Columbian Exposition stood as a remarkably self-assured reminder that the nineteenth century was after all the greatest era of civilized progress the world had ever seen."
[what Cronon ignores is that although people did not fully understand the links to nature and what they were in effect contributing to in the rape of nature by being a part of a 'second nature' whole that obscured the consequences of their consumption; people did
react against the depersonalization.
Charlie Chaplin does not get around to making Modern Times until 1936, but the American spirit was troubled by the consequences of industrialization emanating from the cities, long before that.]
343:
12 million people visited the Columbian exposition; fair reminded people that it was the metropolitan vision that measured their cultural worth
344:
Henry Adams and William T. Stead troubled by what they saw:
ADAMS:
"Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving."
better to note that they did not yet know what they were driving either.
Adams:
Chicago first expression of American thought as unity at a time when [in his view, the steady course of history was from unity to diversity; from unity to chaos]
345:
Miracle of the Phoenix
returns to the great fire of October 8-9, 1871; Patrick O'Leary's barn, 137 De Koven Street
346:
von Thunen's market in space operated within the city- meaning that city went up as well as out
347:
massive suburban growth- greater than any american city (1873?)
Riverside, Frederick Law Olmsted, 1868
348:
Country plus city conveniences; "parasitical landscape that required two kinds of life.
had much in common with the fair; people did not realize the destructive aspect of what the move to the suburbs represented
349:
1893 fair hid most of what the fire supposedly created; secluded itself from the horse manure of the city;
350:
Metropolitan vice, Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and the Family at the Great Fair by Charles M. Stevens, Quondam, p. 351 352; Sporting and Club Hosue Directory for the seamier side; [helped reinforce rural distrust of the City]
357:
The Moral Economy of City and Country
360:
rural virtue; money in the city
363:
Grange cooperatives fail; ignored or failed to believe in central place hierarchy; defeated by the City adopting effectively what they wanted to do:
Montgomery Ward example
364:
City and Country as a Unity
366:
Chicago encourages 'Anomie" [collapse of the social structure]
Henry Blake Fuller, 1893, The cliffdwellers; characters from Chicago had no sense of any relation to the community.
367:
"If the city was to locate its civic heart, it would first have to recover its rural roots"
368:
how?
Parks?
city and countryside had "each created the other, so their mutual transformations in fact expressed a single system and a single history."quotes Henry Adams again (Education, p. 1034)
[where do you go from where Cronon has led you?
Back to better understanding the people, as long as your realize two things:
humans cannot not be forever taking from and remaking first nature without dire consequences
humans are smart enough to realize that self discipline in the end does more for more people than self agrandizement]
[If we are capable of completely reshaping our world in pursuit of personal satisfaction, no matter how elusive, surely we are capable of reording that world so that exploitation is minimized and what resources we have are both allocated equitably and conserved effectively for the foreseeable future, to the next ice age at least.
To do so requires a return to the center, to the central city, a reversal of the trend so feared by Henry Adams, a move from diversity to centrality WITHOUT destroying the positive elements of cultural differences.]
372:
Epilogue:
Where We were driving-
quotes Aldo Leopold, 1949, Sand County Almanac:
"Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land .... Is history taught in this spirit?
It will be, once the concept of land as a community really penetrates our intellectual life."
372:
argues Diseconomies of scale began to hamper enterprise in Chicago
Chicago itself contributes to its decline by not remaining competitive
375:
"If the railroad was force for centralization, the diesal truck and the automobile would be forces for de centralization."
grain, lumber, meat, move out of the city;
gateway cities lose out:
377, move from gateway to regional marketing centers;
378:
one ending to this story, is about the rise and fall of a gateway city of the Great West
"imposed on the land a new geography of second naturein which the market relations of capital reproduced themselves in an elaborate urban-rural hierarchy that would henceforth frame all human life in the region."
[return to centripetal and centrifugal forces]
380:
second ending personal:
pastoral retreat of his family
[suggests that the city can save the countryside if care is exercised in creating pastoral retreats and overdevelopment does not destroy rather than preserve.]
385:
like orange smoke, 19th century cloud raises questions about the city's alienation from nature:
"We fool ourselves if we think we can choose between them, for the green lake and the orange cloud are creatures of the same landscape.
Each is our responsibility.
We can only take them together and, in making the journey between them, find a way of life that does justice to them both."
Reviews:
Peter Colcanis
Reviews in American History, March 1992, vol. 20, no. 1, pp14-20