complex of many forces. In some respects it is the latest manifestation
of the same forces that brought on the crisis of 1837 in the earlier
region of pioneer exploitation. That era of over-confidence, reckless
internal improvements, and land purchases by borrowed capital, brought a
reaction when it became apparent that the future had been
over-discounted. But, in that time, there were the farther free lands to
which the ruined pioneer could turn. The demand for an expansion of the
currency has marked each area of Western advance. The greenback movement
of Ohio and the eastern part of the Middle West grew into the fiat
money, free silver, and land bank propositions of the Populists across
the Mississippi. Efforts for cheaper transportation also appear in each
stage of Western advance. When the pioneer left the rivers and had to
haul his crops by wagon to a market, the transportation factor
determined both his profits and the extension of settlement. Demands for
national aid to roads and canals had marked the pioneer advance of the
first third of the century. The "Granger" attacks upon the railway
rates, and in favor of governmental regulation, marked a second advance
of Western settlement. The Farmers' Alliance and the Populist demand for
government ownership of the railroad is a phase of the same effort of
the pioneer farmer, on his latest frontier. The proposals have taken
increasing proportions in each region of Western Advance. Taken as a
whole, Populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the
native American, with the added element of increasing readiness to
utilize the national government to effect its ends. This is not
unnatural in a section whose lands were originally purchased by the
government and given away to its settlers by the same authority, whose
railroads were built largely by federal land grants, and whose
settlements were protected by the United States army and governed by the
national authority until they were carved into rectangular States and
admitted into the Union. Its native settlers were drawn from many
States, many of them former soldiers of the Civil War, who mingled in
new lands with foreign immigrants accustomed to the vigorous authority
of European national governments.
But these old ideals of the American pioneer, phrased in the new
language of national power, did not meet with the assent of the East.
Even in the Middle West a change of deepest import had been in progress
during these years of prairie settlement. The agricultural preponderance
of the country has passed to the prairies, and manufacturing has
developed in the areas once devoted to pioneer farming. In the decade
prior to the Civil War, the area of greatest wheat production passed
from Ohio and the States to the east, into Illinois, Indiana, and
Wisconsin; after 1880, the center of wheat growing moved across the
Mississippi; and in 1890 the new settlements produced half the crop of
the United States. The corn area shows a similar migration. In 1840 the
Southern States produced half the crop, and the Middle West one-fifth;
by 1860 the situation was reversed and in 1890 nearly one-half the corn
of the Union came from beyond the Mississippi. Thus the settlers of the
Old Northwest and their crops have moved together across the
Mississippi, and in the regions whence they migrated varied agriculture
and manufacture have sprung up.
As these movements in population and products have passed across the
Middle West, and as the economic life of the eastern border has been
intensified, a huge industrial organism has been created in the
province,--an organism of tremendous power, activity, and unity.
Fundamentally the Middle West is an agricultural area unequaled for its
combination of space, variety, productiveness, and freedom from
interruption by deserts or mountains. The huge water system of the Great
Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce. The Sault Ste. Marie
Canal, although open but two-thirds of the year, is the channel of a
traffic of greater tonnage than that which passes through the Suez
Canal, and nearly all this commerce moves almost the whole length of the
Great Lakes system; the chief ports being Duluth, Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland, and Buffalo. The transportation facilities of the Great Lakes
were revolutionized after 1886, to supply the needs of commerce between
the East and the newly developed lands of the Middle West; the tonnage
doubled; wooden ships gave way to steel; sailing vessels yielded to
steam; and huge docks, derricks, and elevators, triumphs of mechanical
skill, were constructed. A competent investigator has lately declared
that "there is probably in the world to-day no place at tide water where
ship plates can be laid down for a less price than they can be
manufactured or purchased at the lake ports."
This rapid rise of the merchant marine of our inland seas has led to the
demand for deep water canals to connect them with the ocean road to
Europe. When the fleets of the Great Lakes plow the Atlantic, and when
Duluth and Chicago become seaports, the water transportation of the
Middle West will have completed its evolution. The significance of the
development of the railway systems is not inferior to that of the great
water way. Chicago has become the greatest railroad center of the world,
nor is there another area of like size which equals this in its railroad
facilities; all the forces of the nation intersect here. Improved
terminals, steel rails, better rolling stock, and consolidation of
railway systems have accompanied the advance of the people of the Middle
West.
This unparalleled development of transportation facilities measures the
magnitude of the material development of the province. Its wheat and
corn surplus supplies the deficit of the rest of the United States and
much of that of Europe. Such is the agricultural condition of the
province of which Monroe wrote to Jefferson, in 1786, in these words: "A
great part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near
Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and the Illinois
consists of extensive plains which have not had, from appearances, and
will not have, a single bush on them for ages. The districts, therefore,
within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of
inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy."
Minneapolis and Duluth receive the spring wheat of the northern
prairies, and after manufacturing great portions of it into flour,
transmit it to Buffalo, the eastern cities, and to Europe. Chicago is
still the great city of the corn belt, but its power as a milling and
wheat center has been passing to the cities that receive tribute from
the northern prairies. It lies in the region of winter wheat, corn,
oats, and live stock. Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati are the
sister cities of this zone, which reaches into the grazing country of
the Great Plains. The meeting point of corn and cattle has led to the
development of the packing industries,--large business systems that send
the beef and pork of the region to supply the East and parts of Europe.
The "feeding system" adopted in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, whereby the
stock is fattened from the surplus corn of the region, constitutes a
species of varied farming that has saved these States from the disasters
of the failure of a single industry, and has been one solution of the
economic life of the transition belt between the prairies and the Great
Plains. Under a more complex agriculture, better adapted to the various
sections of the State, and with better crops, Kansas has become more
prosperous and less a center of political discontent.
While this development of the agricultural interests of the Middle West
has been in progress, the exploitation of the pine woods of the north
has furnished another contribution to the commerce of the province. The
center of activity has migrated from Michigan to Minnesota, and the
lumber traffic furnishes one of the principal contributions to the
vessels that ply the Great Lakes and supply the tributary mills. As the
white pine vanishes before the organized forces of exploitation, the
remaining hard woods serve to establish factories in the former mill
towns. The more fertile denuded lands of the north are now receiving
settlers who repeat the old pioneer life among the stumps.
But the most striking development in the industrial history of the
Middle West in recent years has been due to the opening up of the iron
mines of Lake Superior. Even in 1873 the Lake Superior ores furnished a
quarter of the total production of American blast furnaces. The opening
of the Gogebic mines in 1884, and the development of the Vermillion and
Mesabi mines adjacent to the head of the lake, in the early nineties,
completed the transfer of iron ore production to the Lake Superior
region. Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin together now produce the ore
for eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States. Four-fifths of
this great product moves to the ports on Lake Erie and the rest to the
manufactories at Chicago and Milwaukee. The vast steel and iron industry
that centers at Pittsburgh and Cleveland, with important outposts like
Chicago and Milwaukee, is the outcome of the meeting of the coal of the
eastern and southern borders of the province and of Pennsylvania, with
the iron ores of the north. The industry has been systematized and
consolidated by a few captains of industry. Steam shovels dig the ore
from many of the Mesabi mines; gravity roads carry it to the docks and
to the ships, and huge hoisting and carrying devices, built especially
for the traffic, unload it for the railroad and the furnace. Iron and
coal mines, transportation fleets, railroad systems, and iron
manufactories are concentrated in a few corporations, principally the
United States Steel Corporation. The world has never seen such a
consolidation of capital and so complete a systematization of economic
processes.
Such is the economic appearance of the Middle West a century after the
pioneers left the frontier village of Pittsburgh and crossed the Ohio
into the forests. De Tocqueville exclaimed, with reason, in 1833: "This
gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky
Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge
of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God."
The ideals of the Middle West began in the log huts set in the midst of
the forest a century ago. While his horizon was still bounded by the
clearing that his ax had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental
conquests. The vastness of the wilderness kindled his imagination. His
vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the great lake to the
lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the
rank, grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain; beyond the harsh
life of the log hut and the sod house to the home of his children, where
should dwell comfort and the higher things of life, though they might
not be for him. The men and women who made the Middle West were
idealists, and they had the power of will to make their dreams come
true. Here, also, were the pioneer's traits,--individual activity,
inventiveness, and competition for the prizes of the rich province that
awaited exploitation under freedom and equality of opportunity. He
honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the
strongest in this contest: it was "every one for himself."
The early society of the Middle West was not a complex, highly
differentiated and organized society. Almost every family was a
self-sufficing unit, and liberty and equality flourished in the
frontier periods of the Middle West as perhaps never before in history.
American democracy came from the forest, and its destiny drove it to
material conquests; but the materialism of the pioneer was not the dull
contented materialism of an old and fixed society. Both native settler
and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the
frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank, and to rise to
a higher plane of existence. The pioneer was passionately desirous to
secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of
these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for
this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province.
Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life.
The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province, is to-day the field of
industrial resources and systematization so vast that Europe, alarmed
for her industries in competition with this new power, is discussing the
policy of forming protective alliances among the nations of the
continent. Into this region flowed the great forces of modern
capitalism. Indeed, the region itself furnished favorable conditions for
the creation of these forces, and trained many of the famous American
industrial leaders. The Prairies, the Great Plains, and the Great Lakes
furnished new standards of industrial measurement. From this society,
seated amidst a wealth of material advantages, and breeding
individualism, energetic competition, inventiveness, and spaciousness of
design, came the triumph of the strongest. The captains of industry
arose and seized on nature's gifts. Struggling with one another,
increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the
resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed themselves,
they were forced to accept the natural conditions of a province vast in
area but simple in structure. Competition grew into consolidation. On
the Pittsburgh border of the Middle West the completion of the process
is most clearly seen. On the prairies of Kansas stands the Populist, a
survival of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions to his
old ideals.
The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man
are deep rooted in all the Middle West. The frontier stage, through
which each portion passed, left abiding traces on the older, as well as
on the newer, areas of the province. Nor were these ideals limited to
the native American settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into
the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith. These
facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic
transformation of the province upon its democracy. The peculiar
democracy of the frontier has passed away with the conditions that
produced it; but the democratic aspirations remain. They are held with
passionate determination.
The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast
economic organization of the present. This region which has so often
needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its
training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and
culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The
democracies of the past have been small communities, under simple and
primitive economic conditions. At bottom the problem is how to reconcile
real greatness with bigness.
It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this; the future
of the Republic is with her. Politically she is dominant, as is
illustrated by the fact that six out of seven of the Presidents elected
since 1860 have come from her borders. Twenty-six million people live in
the Middle West as against twenty-one million in New England and the
Middle States together, and the Middle West has indefinite capacity for
growth. The educational forces are more democratic than in the East,
and the Middle West has twice as many students (if we count together the
common school, secondary, and collegiate attendance), as have New
England and the Middle States combined. Nor is this educational system,
as a whole, inferior to that of the Eastern States. State universities
crown the public school system in every one of these States of the
Middle West, and rank with the universities of the seaboard, while
private munificence has furnished others on an unexampled scale. The
public and private art collections of Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Paul, and
other cities rival those of the seaboard. "World's fairs," with their
important popular educational influences, have been held at Chicago,
Omaha, and Buffalo; and the next of these national gatherings is to be
at St. Louis. There is throughout the Middle West a vigor and a mental
activity among the common people that bode well for its future. If the
task of reducing the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the uses
of civilization should for a time overweigh art and literature, and even
high political and social ideals, it would not be surprising. But if the
ideals of the pioneers shall survive the inundation of material success,
we may expect to see in the Middle West the rise of a highly intelligent
society where culture shall be reconciled with democracy in the large.
FOOTNOTES:
[126:1] With acknowledgments to the _International Monthly_, December,
1901.
[129:1] 1901.
[132:1] See F. J. Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary
Era," in _Am. Historical Review_, i, pp. 70 _et seq._
V
THE OHIO VALLEY IN AMERICAN HISTORY[157:1]
In a notable essay Professor Josiah Royce has asserted the salutary
influence of a highly organized provincial life in order to counteract
certain evils arising from the tremendous development of nationalism in
our own day. Among these evils he enumerates: first, the frequent
changes of dwelling place, whereby the community is in danger of losing
the well-knit organization of a common life; second, the tendency to
reduce variety in national civilization, to assimilate all to a common
type and thus to discourage individuality, and produce a "remorseless
mechanism--vast, irrational;" third, the evils arising from the fact
that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep
across the nation.
Against these surges of national feeling Professor Royce would erect
dikes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of separate sections
each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspirations. "Our national
unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation so
paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, evils, have become so
intensified," he says, that we must seek in the province renewed
strength, usefulness and beauty of American life.
Whatever may be thought of this philosopher's appeal for a revival of
sectionalism, on a higher level, in order to check the tendencies to a
deadening uniformity of national consolidation (and to me this appeal,
under the limitations which he gives it, seems warranted by the
conditions)--it is certainly true that in the history of the United
States sectionalism holds a place too little recognized by the
historians.
By sectionalism I do not mean the struggle between North and South which
culminated in the Civil War. That extreme and tragic form of
sectionalism indeed has almost engrossed the attention of historians,
and it is, no doubt, the most striking and painful example of the
phenomenon in our history. But there are older, and perhaps in the long
run more enduring examples of the play of sectional forces than the
slavery struggle, and there are various sections besides North and
South.
Indeed, the United States is, in size and natural resources, an empire,
a collection of potential nations, rather than a single nation. It is
comparable in area to Europe. If the coast of California be placed along
the coast of Spain, Charleston, South Carolina, would fall near
Constantinople; the northern shores of Lake Superior would touch the
Baltic, and New Orleans would lie in southern Italy. Within this vast
empire there are geographic provinces, separate in physical conditions,
into which American colonization has flowed, and in each of which a
special society has developed, with an economic, political and social
life of its own. Each of these provinces, or sections, has developed its
own leaders, who in the public life of the nation have voiced the needs
of their section, contended with the representatives of other sections,
and arranged compromises between sections in national legislation and
policy, almost as ambassadors from separate countries in a European
congress might make treaties.
Between these sections commercial relations have sprung up, and economic
combinations and contests may be traced by the student who looks beneath
the surface of our national life to the actual grouping of States in
congressional votes on tariff, internal improvement, currency and
banking, and all the varied legislation in the field of commerce.
American industrial life is the outcome of the combinations and contests
of groups of States in sections. And the intellectual, the spiritual
life of the nation is the result of the interplay of the sectional
ideals, fundamental assumptions and emotions.
In short, the real federal aspect of the nation, if we penetrate beneath
constitutional forms to the deeper currents of social, economic and
political life, will be found to lie in the relation of sections and
nation, rather than in the relation of States and nation. Recently
ex-secretary Root emphasized the danger that the States, by neglecting
to fulfil their duties, might fall into decay, while the national
government engrossed their former power. But even if the States
disappeared altogether as effective factors in our national life, the
sections might, in my opinion, gain from that very disappearance a
strength and activity that would prove effective limitations upon the
nationalizing process.
Without pursuing the interesting speculation, I may note as evidence of
the development of sectionalism, the various gatherings of business men,
religious denominations and educational organizations in groups of
States. Among the signs of growth of a healthy provincialism is the
formation of sectional historical societies. While the American
Historical Association has been growing vigorously and becoming a
genuine gathering of historical students from all parts of the nation,
there have also arisen societies in various sections to deal with the
particular history of the groups of States. In part this is due to the
great distances which render attendance difficult upon the meetings of
the national body to-day, but we would be short-sighted, indeed, who
failed to perceive in the formation of the Pacific Coast Historical
Association, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and the
Ohio Valley Historical Association, for example, genuine and spontaneous
manifestations of a sectional consciousness.
These associations spring in large part from the recognition in each of
a common past, a common body of experiences, traditions, institutions
and ideals. It is not necessary now to raise the question whether all of
these associations are based on a real community of historical interest,
whether there are overlapping areas, whether new combinations may not be
made? They are at least substantial attempts to find a common sectional
unity, and out of their interest in the past of the section, increasing
tendencies to common sectional ideas and policies are certain to follow.
I do not mean to prophesy any disruptive tendency in American life by
the rejuvenation of sectional self-consciousness; but I do mean to
assert that American life will be enriched and safe-guarded by the
development of the greater variety of interest, purposes and ideals
which seem to be arising. A measure of local concentration seems
necessary to produce healthy, intellectual and moral life. The spread of
social forces over too vast an area makes for monotony and stagnation.