Modern industrialism began to take root in America after the War of
Independence, and its effect was twofold: it started up new villages
which centered about the waterfall or the iron mine and had scarcely
any other concern than industry; at the same time, by cutting canals
which tapped the interior, it drew life away from the smaller
provincial ports and concentrated commerce and population in great
towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In New England, as in
the English Cotswolds from Whitney to Chalford, the mechanical regime
was humanized by the presence of an older civilization, and the first
generation of factory hands were farmers’ lads and lasses who neither
lost nor endangered their independence; but where the factory depended
upon paupers or immigrants, as it did in the big towns and in some
of the unsettled parts of the country, the community relapsed into a
barbarism which affected the masters as well as the hands. There was
more than a difference in literary taste between the Corinths and
Bethels named by an earlier generation and the Mechanicsvilles that
followed them.
The chief watchwords of the time were progress and expansion. The
first belonged to the pioneer in industry who opened up new areas for
mechanical invention and applied science; the second, to the land
pioneer; and between these two resourceful types the old ways, were
they good or bad, were scrapped, and the new ways, were they good or
bad, were adopted. Both land pioneering and industrial pioneering were
essentially subdivisions of one occupation, mining; and, following the
clue opened by Messrs. Geddes and Branford, one may say with Professor
Adshead that the nineteenth century witnessed “the great attack of the
miner on the peasant.”
Mechanical industry owes its great development and progress to the work
of the woodman and the miner: the first type of worker takes the bent
sapling and develops the lathe or “bodger” which is still to be found
in the remote parts of the Chiltern Hills in England, while from the
mine itself not merely comes the steam engine, first used for pumping
out water, but likewise the railway. The perpetual débris amid which
the miner lives forms a capital contrast with the ordered culture, the
careful weeding and cutting, of field and orchard: almost any sort of
habitation is an advance upon the squalor of the pithead; and it is
not a mere chance that the era devoted to mining and all its accessory
manufactures was throughout the western world the dingiest and dirtiest
that has yet befouled the earth. Choked by his own débris, or stirred
by the exhaustion of minerals, the miner’s community runs down--and he
departs.
The name pioneer has a romantic color; but in America the land pioneer
mined the forests and the soil, and the industry pioneer almost as
ruthlessly mined the human resources, and when the pay-dirt got sallow
and thin, they both moved on. Longfellow’s allusion to the “bivouac of
life” unconsciously points to the prevailing temper; for even those who
remained in the older American centers were affected by the pioneer’s
malaise and unsettlement; and they behaved as if at any moment they
might be called to the colors and sent westward.
Beside the vivid promises of Mechanical Progress and Manifest Destiny
the realities of an ordered society thinned into a pale vapor. In many
little communities Mechanical Societies were formed for the propagation
of the utilitarian faith: industrialism with its ascetic ritual of
unsparing work, its practice of thrift, its renunciation of the arts,
gathered to itself the religious zeal of Protestantism. The erection
of factories, the digging of canals, the location of furnaces, the
building of roads, the devising of inventions, not merely exhausted a
great part of the available capital; even more, it occupied the energy
and imagination of the more vigorous spirits. Two generations before,
Thomas Jefferson could lay out and develop the estate of Monticello;
now, with many of Jefferson’s capacities, Poe could only dream about
the fantastic Domain of Arnheim. The society around Poe had no more
use for an architectural imagination than the Puritans had for
decorative images; the smoke of the factory-chimney was incense, the
scars on the landscape were as the lacerations of a saint, and the mere
multiplication of gaunt sheds and barracks was a sign of progress, and
therefore an earnest of perfection.
Did ever so many elements of disintegration come together at one time
and place before? The absence of tradition and example raised enough
difficulties in Birmingham and Manchester and Lyons and Essen; but in
America it was accentuated by the restless march of those pioneers who,
in the words of a contemporary economist, “leave laws, education and
the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them.”
What place could architecture fill in these squatter communities? It
could diminish the hardships of living; it could grease the channels of
gain; and it could demolish or “improve” so much of the old as it could
not understand, as Bulfinch’s Court House in Newburyport was improved,
and as many a fine city residence was swept away under the tide of
traffic.
These were the days when the log cabin flourished; but it did not
remain long enough in place to become the well-wrought and decorative
piece of rustic architecture that the better sort of peasant hut, done
with the same materials, became in Russia. A genuine architectural
development might have led from a crude log cabin to a finished one,
from a bare cabin to an enriched and garnished one, and so, perhaps,
in the course of a century or so, to a fine country architecture and
a great native art of wood carving comparable to that of the Russian
sculptors today. In America, however, the pioneer jumped baldly from
log cabin to White House, or its genteel and scroll-sawed equivalent;
and the arts inherent in good building never had a chance to develop.
With the animus of the miner in back of everything the pioneer
attempted, the pioneer’s architecture was all false-work and scantling.