In this lovely bit of writing, Robert Kaplan talks about the central United States, in particular "The Great Plains". This excerpt is an example of one of Robert Kaplans' many themes: that geography is destiny. In his book Balkan Ghosts, he is pretty much all about that. The landscape of Hungary formed the people, their outlooks, their way of being. The landscape of Montenegro created a completely different kind of culture. Geography as destiny. In this excerpt, Kaplan looks at the Great Plains of America, and their role in forming a part of the American character, and also the important role the plains played in the Civil War.
Kaplan writes
The central United States is divided into two geographical zones: the Great Plains in the west and the prairie in the east. Though both are more or less flat, the Great Plains -- extending south from eastern Montana and western North Dakota to eastern New Mexico and western Texas -- are the drier of the two regions and are distinguished by short grasses, while the more populous prairie to the east (surrounding Omaha, St. Louis, and Fort Leavenworth) is tall-grass country. The Great Plains are the "West"; the prairie, the "Midwest".
Like the sea, the Great Plains are exposed to the strongest, steadiest winds in America. (The average wind velocity in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles is twelve to fourteen miles per hour. The only higher average velocities in the lower 48 states are off the coast of Washington State). Also like the sea, the Great Plains are subject to moods, depending on the time of year and the degree of cloud cover. "The plain has moods like the sea," wrote the early twentieth century poet Hamlin Garland in Prairie Songs. In winter, under a leaden sky, this sea of wilted buffalo grass evokes the desolation of a lifeless planet; yet in the summer sunshine the brilliant yellow-green iridescence of the cereal fields seems almost manically happy. If you study the Great Plains long enough, you will see great distinctions in color and terrain. The expanse of buffalo grass, for instance, achieves a luxurious autumn texture if dotted with yucca cactus and Kentucky bluestem, as in western Oklahoma.
The Great Plains are not truly flat. Flatness, here, soon becomes relative. After driving for several days in western Oklahoma, for example, I began to notice choppy seas composed of the tiniest of hills, as well as slight rises and declivities in the landscape, like the movements of the wind on a lake. The very extent of these plains made the world seem beyond remote.
For two decades I have been a foreign correspondent, yet in the Great Plains I lost interest in the foreign news I could hear on the BBC shortwave service. Such was the effect of this landscape: a veritable dry-land ocean in midcontinent where even the East and West Coasts of the United States, to say nothing of Europe or Asia, seem far away even as they grow closer. Isolationism is not an American character failing; it is an adaptation to terrain.
The Great Plains, even more so than the tall-grass prairie to the east, are America's isolated center, where social and cultural tremors emanating inland from the two coasts -- upheavals both good and bad -- either peter out or arrive years later in diluted form.
It is the Great Plains again, even more than the prairie, that provide the nation with its perception of immense, inviolable space. Much of the Midwest prairie has now become urban and suburban, but in the Great Plains rural life has held out longer.
Most of all, the Great Plains -- the heart of the "Great American Desert" until underground aquifers were discovered and exploited in the 20th century -- constitute the nation's unalterable geographical fact. Walter Prescott Webb, in his classic 1931 study, The Great Plains, argues impressively that the geography of the plains, more than Lincoln or even the Civil War itself, defeated slavery.
The small farms, free labor, and industry of the North and the slave plantations of the South were in place following the War of 1812. The question then became which system could expand faster into the West, for it was western settlement that ignited the Civil War: the North and the South might have existed side by side, however uneasily, had there been no new territory to settle one way or the other. Though much of the West was opened to slavery, the South, Webb explains, could not occupy the Great Plains because its economic system of water-intensive cotton agriculture based on slavery was circumscribed by climate and water resources. In the West, aridity stopped the slave economy in its tracks just as cold weather did in the North.
Vast, waterless desert spaces required individual initiative, rather than forced, uncreative labor for development. (Ironically, the future president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, had a similar view of how the Great Plains would fundamentally change America. Davis, the US secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce in the 1850s, saw how great and arid distances must affect the army. Rather than occupy the Great Plains the way it did the transapplachian region, Davis thought the army should deal with the nomadic Plains Indians the way the French were then dealing with Arab tribes in Algeria: by putting garrisons near the edge of white civilization and making forays into Indian territory as required, to inflict retribution or to escort settlers.)
When the Great Plains prevented the South from dominating the Union, the South seceded rather than acquiesce. And since a weak, divided American continent would have been easily dominated by the European powers, Lincoln knew that war was necessary: that an expanding, industrialized economy of scale required a landscape of scale.
Posted by sheila