I
For a hundred years or so after its settlement, there lived and
flourished in America a type of community which was rapidly
disappearing in Europe. This community was embodied in villages and
towns whose mummified remains even today have a rooted dignity that the
most gigantic metropolises do not often possess. If we would understand
the architecture of America in a period when good building was almost
universal, we must understand something of the kind of life that this
community fostered.
The capital example of the medieval tradition lies in the New England
village.
There are two or three things that stand in the way of our seeing
the life of a New England village; and one of them is the myth of
the pioneer, the conception of the first settlers as a free band of
“Americans” throwing off the bedraggled garments of Europe and starting
life afresh in the wilderness. So far from giving birth to a new life,
the settlement of the northern American seaboard prolonged for a
little while the social habits and economic institutions which were
fast crumbling away in Europe, particularly in England. In the villages
of the New World there flickered up the last dying embers of the
medieval order.
Whereas in England the common lands were being confiscated for the
benefit of an aristocracy, and the arable turned into sheep-runs for
the profit of the great proprietors, in New England the common lands
were re-established with the founding of a new settlement. In England
the depauperate peasants and yeomen were driven into the large towns
to become the casual workers, menials, and soldiers; in New England,
on the other hand, it was at first only with threats of punishment and
conscription that the town workers were kept from going out into the
countryside to seek a more independent living from the soil. Just as
the archaic speech of the Elizabethans has lingered in the Kentucky
Mountains, so the Middle Ages at their best lingered along the coast
of Appalachia; and in the organization of our New England villages one
sees a greater resemblance to the medieval Utopia of Sir Thomas More
than to the classic republic in the style of Montesquieu, which was
actually founded in the eighteenth century.
The colonists who sought to establish permanent communities--as
distinct from those who erected only trading posts--were not a
little like those whom the cities of Greece used to plant about the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea littoral. Like the founders of the
“Ancient City,” the Puritans first concerned themselves to erect an
altar, or rather, to lay the foundations for an edifice which denied
the religious value of altars. In the crudest of “smoaky wigwams,” an
early observer notes, the Puritans remember to “sing psalms, pray, and
praise their God”; and although we of today may regard their religion
as harsh and nay-saying, we cannot forget that it was a central point
of their existence and not an afterthought piled as it were on material
prosperity for the sake of a good appearance. Material goods formed the
basis, but not the end, of their life.
The meeting-house determined the character and limits of the community.
As Weeden says in his excellent Economic and Social History of New
England, the settlers “laid out the village in the best order to attain
two objects: first, the tillage and culture of the soil; second,
the maintenance of a ‘civil and religious society.’” Around the
meeting-house the rest of the community crystallized in a definite
pattern, tight and homogeneous.
The early provincial village bears another resemblance to the early
Greek city: it does not continue to grow at such a pace that it either
becomes overcrowded within or spills beyond its limits into dejected
suburbs; still less does it seek what we ironically call greatness by
increasing the number of its inhabitants. When the corporation has a
sufficient number of members, that is to say, when the land is fairly
occupied, and when the addition of more land would unduly increase the
hardship of working it from the town, or would spread out the farmers,
and make it difficult for them to attend to their religious and civil
duties, the original settlement throws out a new shoot. So Charlestown
threw off Woburn; so Dedham colonized Medfield; so Lynn founded Nahant.
The Puritans knew and applied a principle that Plato had long ago
pointed out in The Republic, namely, that an intelligent and socialized
community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit
and keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must
cease, or the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic
thing. Economically, this method of community-development kept land
values at a properly low level, and prevented the engrossing of land
for the sake of a speculative rise. The advantage of the Puritan method
of settlement comes out plainly when one contrasts it with the trader’s
paradise of Manhattan; for by the middle of the seventeenth century all
the land on Manhattan Island was privately owned, although only a small
part of it was cultivated, and so eagerly had the teeth of monopoly
bitten into this fine morsel that there was already a housing-shortage.
One more point of resemblance: all the inhabitants of an early New
England village were co-partners in a corporation; they admitted
into the community only as many members as they could assimilate.
This co-partnership was based upon a common sense as to the purpose
of the community, and upon a roughly equal division of the land into
individual plots taken in freehold, and a share of the common fields,
of which there might be half a dozen or more.
There are various local differences in the apportionment of the land.
In many cases, the minister and deacons have a larger share than the
rest of the community; but in Charlestown, for example, the poorest
had six or seven acres of meadow and twenty-five or thereabouts of
upland; and this would hold pretty well throughout the settlements. Not
merely is membership in the community guarded: the right of occupying
and transferring the land is also restricted, and again and again, in
the face of the General Assembly, the little villages make provisions
to keep the land from changing hands without the consent of the
corporation; “it being our real intent,” as the burghers of Watertown
put it, to “sitt down there close togither.”
These regulations have a positive side as well; for in some cases the
towns helped the poorer members of the corporation to build houses,
and as a new member was voted into the community, lots were assigned
immediately, without further ado. A friend of mine has called this
system “Yankee communism,” and I cheerfully bring the institution
to the attention of those who do not realize upon what subversive
principles Americanism, historically, rests.
What is true of the seventeenth century in New England holds good for
the eighteenth century in the Moravian settlements of Pennsylvania;
and it is doubtless true for many another obscure colony; for the same
spirit lingered, with a parallel result in architecture and industry,
in the utopian communities of the nineteenth century. It is pretty
plain that this type of pioneering, this definite search for the good
life, was conducted on an altogether different level from the ruthless
exploitation of the individual muckers and scavengers who hit the trail
west of the Alleghanies. Such renewals of the earlier European culture
as the Bach Festival at Bethlehem give us a notion of the cultural
values which the medieval community carried over from the Old World to
the New. There is some of this spirit left even in the architecture of
the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New York, which was built as
late as the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the New England village-community was the trading post.
Of this nature were the little towns in the New Netherlands which were
planted there by the Dutch West India Company: the settlers were for
the most part either harassed individuals who were lured to the New
World by the prospects of a good living, or people of established rank
who were tempted to leave the walks of commerce for the dignities and
affluences that were attached to the feudal tenure of the large estates
that lined the Hudson.
The germs of town life came over with these people, and sheer necessity
turned part of their energies to agriculture, but they did not develop
the close village-community we find in New England; and though New
Amsterdam was a replica of the Old World port, with its gabled brick
houses, and its well-banked canals and fine gardens, it left no decided
pattern on the American scene. It is only the country architecture
of the Dutch which survives as either a relic or a memory. These
trading posts like Manhattan and Fort Orange were, as Messrs. Petersen
and Edwards have shown in their study of New York as an Eighteenth
Century Municipality, medieval in their economy: numerous guild and
civic regulations which provided for honest weight and measure and
workmanship continued in force within the town. In their external
dealings, on the other hand, the practice of the traders was sharp,
and every man was for himself. Beginning its life by bargaining in
necessities, the trading post ends by making a necessity of bargaining;
and it was the impetus from its original commercial habits which
determined the characteristics of the abortive city plan that was laid
down for Manhattan Island in 1811. Rich as the Dutch precedent is in
individual farmhouses, it brings us no pattern, such as we find in New
England, for the community as a whole.