My history bookshelf. Onward.
Next book on this shelf is called An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future
Kaplan travels through America – this book was published in 1998 – He starts at Fort Leavenworth – goes up to Omaha – then over to St. Louis – and down to Little Rock and then Vicksburg – back up – then he traveled down through the Southwest and into Mexico – and back up – traveling into the Northwest – Bozeman, Spokane, Seattle … and then down the California coast to Tijuana. He’s interested in borders. Of course. This would probably be a different book if it had been published post-September 11 – but it is still extremely relevant. Kaplan is trying to get at some important truths, and truths that a lot of people just do not want to look at. The blurb on the back of the book describes Kaplan thus: “Never nostalgic or falsely optimistic, bracingly unafraid of change and its consequences …” That’s my main response to Kaplan. If the only constant in this world is that nothing stays the same … then how is America changing? If you know nothing stays the same, then the question is: what form will America take in 20 years? 100 years? How are these forces of change at work right now? A lot of people respond to these questions by putting their hands over their ears, and shouting, “LALALALALA”. Or they have some kneejerk response – but it’s all so silly. If you know anything about history then you know what empires rise and empires fall. We refuse to admit that at our peril. Kaplan kind of just wanders around – oh, and again: he travels by bus – his observations about class in this country are fascinating – and only when you travel by bus do you truly experience the reality of our class structure (uhm – having taken the bus many times, I can only shout how true this is!!) – and talks to people – he wants to see what the culture is like in Omaha, St. Louis, Little Rock, Seattle … He tries to see his own country as though he is an outside observer.
The following excerpt is one of my favorite sections of the book. He writes about the Great Plains.
From An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future
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. Whereas the East Coast attracted blacks from the Deep South, as well as Italians, Jews, and others from southern and eastern Europe; and whereas the West Coast drew Asians; the Southwest, Mexicans; and the prairie of Illinois, Iowa, and the eastern halves of the Dakotas, German and Scandinavian immigrants, the Great Plains, until recently, have been home to mainly Anglo-Saxon stock. 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. 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.
Geography, as I would continue to learn — particularly when I go to the Pacific Northwest — will be as crucial to our future as it has been in our past.
