Natures Metropolis – Chicago & the Great West (Paper): Chicago and the Great West

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Chicago exploded onto the world in the mid-19th century, rising in a few decades from a lonely frontier outpost to an economic behemoth that, except for New York, exerted more influence and flexed more power by far than any other American city. The most powerful testament to the power of railroads over time and space is the adoption of standard time. By 1883, the railroad adopted standard time doing away with the local times along the rail routes. On November 18, 1883 the railroads established 4 time zones. This standardization brought greater safety by allowing improved coordination of rail traffic. With standardization of time just one of the daunting management tasks which the railroad owners faced, the management of railroads accelerated the concentration of capital and ownership of a wide range of infrastructure including "land, rails, locomotives, cars and stations, not to mention the labor and fuel that kept everything moving." (p. 139) Coordination of all of these assets required increasing professionalization of management and ultimately led to new hierarchies of power that impacted the entire US economy and shaped American society. Lccn 90040835 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary_edition Taking its current form in 1830s, Chicago made a noteworthy mark in capital and credit flows in less than half a century. These linkages, as investigated through the legal records, offer insights into the industry specific flow and outreach. In this context, the Urban Hierarchy as theorized by Johann Heinrich von Thünen in 1826 as Central Place Theory seems to offer many tangents for insights. Though in one respect Chicago spatial patterns confirmed the economic uses of land over a factor of distance, the stark boundaries of the model now seem to be far more diffused into each other. The case of Chicago could not possibly be explained by Central Place Theory because it did not develop as like a gradual market evolution but rather through a gargantuan influence of second nature. A wholesale market that made its place in Chicago gave birth to a number of other inventions as mentioned before. Another example is the service industry of delivery of goods which seems too good to be true when it started. But it was the invention of the time and the quality of the service made its market (Cronon 1991, 260–340).

These same Eastern investors fueled the first wave of land speculation in Chicago when, in the 1830s, city lots were sold to raise money to pay for the construction of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. William Cronon: I think it was part of a number of works that began to break down the boundaries between city–nature and rural, or wild, nature. I’m of the conviction that one of the wonders of environmental history is that it opens up a space of exploration where anything and everything in the human past can be looked at in terms of how human actions are embedded in a material world that is only partly of human making, and that nature doesn’t end at the Bob Marshall Wilderness. It doesn’t end in a wheat field in southeastern Washington state. It’s right here. It’s right inside my body. Nature’s Metropolis looks at the city–country, human–nature interface at a particular regional scale, which is both its strength and its weakness. There are almost no people in Nature’s Metropolis. And almost no lived, textured reality of classed, gendered, raced people. They’re just not in there. J. M. D. Burrows with his potatoes going down the Mississippi River is probably the most poignant human being in that entire book.This is what is routinely overlooked in histories of Chicago as well as histories of the settling of the Great West. This, and the cost that was paid — and is still being paid — in animal lives. So, clearly, the deus ex machina of the book is the railroad. Remember the railroad is not a technology, it’s a cultural system. It’s a set of human relations, a set of power relationships that get articulated through what seems like a machine but is in fact an enormous social system. So one answer to your question is you’d have to look for other places that had the potential, through the railroad, to control larger areas of hinterland space. And that did in fact happen: that’s Atlanta. It emerges as the railroad hub of the American Southeast and had nothing like the significance prior to the railroad that it did after. In Canada, it’s very clear to me that Winnipeg is the Chicago equivalent for Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In many ways, the Winnipeg story is the Chicago story for that very rich grain-producing region of Canada.

So how does this apply to Cronon’s work? Nature’s Metropolis seeks to undermine the difference between “urban” and “rural”, instead showing how through painstaking economic history the city of Chicago operated as a central hub that shaped the natural world. He distinguishes between “first nature” and “second nature” to show how trees become lumber and wheat becomes grain. Cronon emphasizes the connectedness between all things - that neither Chicago nor the “West” could exist without each other. The lake, the harbor, the river, and the canal might by themselves have made Chicago the most important city in northern Illinois, but they would never have made it the interior metropolis of the continent. Water routes would help shape the railroads — by competing with them, by sharing business with them, not least by influencing where they would be built — but the last quarter of the century saw these waterways become ever more marginal to the city’s economy. Nature's Metropolis is that rare historical work which treats nature and the moral force we derive from it seriously…The roots of the modern environmental predicament are plainly visible in the economic dynamism that brought about the rise of Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century, which is a captivating story in its own right." The New Yorker - Verlyn Klinkenborg

Yet, despite the booster conception of Chicago as being extraordinarily favored by nature, the story of the city’s growth and impact is, as Cronon makes clear, much more complex.

One of my beliefs as a writer and a teacher is that if I’m going to argue against something, it’s morally incumbent upon me to be able to articulate the thing I’m arguing against so that a person who holds that view recognizes that I’ve done justice to their point of view and could respond, “I couldn’t have said that better myself.” Then we can begin to enter into a dialogue about other ways of thinking. Lccn 90040835 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL1880327M Openlibrary_editionWC: I never got that [criticism] from my editor, who was very tolerant of all sorts of things about this particular book. One of my passions as a writer, and as a scholar and a teacher, is taking boring things that people pay no attention to that matter enormously in their lives but go unnoticedand trying to figure out how we can narrate those things, embedding them in a series of natural and geographical contexts (as well as time contexts) so that things that you’ve been walking by your entire life without ever seeing come alive. And although telling stories about people is one way of doing that, I’m actually more intrigued more often than not—at least in this book—by how you take dead, inert stuff and make it become really intriguing. One of my missions in life is to take boring stuff and make it un-boring. Completed in 1848, “the canal brought striking changes to the regional economy,” writes Cronon. Suddenly, Chicago was an alternative market for Downstate farmers who, previously, had relied on natural water routes to get to and from the trading center of St. Louis. This is a very thought-provoking book. It seems limiting to place it in the context of the increasingly dysfunctional American political discussion, but even if you must do that there is a lot to chew on. The author has a view of the fake rural vs. urban dichotomy which strikes me as very Obama-first-term-acceptance-speech (it is about Chicago after all). It's not rural American or urban America, it's all of America. Still, the implications of his argument resonate. The description of how the "Great West" was rapidly converted into Chicago's hinterland (he uses that word a lot) reminded me a lot of the current idea of the Anthropocene Epoch (a comparison the author does not explicitly make). The argument made by free market and growth-oriented climate change contrarians that the activities of little old Man could never have such a strong impact on "nature" starts to look very pallid indeed. More fun example: Chicago's market dominance in the railway era led to the peculiar fact that Iowa, an area with rich agricultural land and a burgeoning population, never developed a large population center to market its goods - by the time of Iowa's growth, rail links to Chicago stretched across the entire state and any merchandise from wheat to live hogs could be in Chicago within 18 hours. And not only Americans. The transformation of the U.S. way of life which hinged in so many ways on the city on Lake Michigan has spread and continues to spread across the globe.

So important were schedules to the railroads that, in 1883, they imposed a redefinition of time on North America — dividing the continent into four time zones. He draws reader’s attention to a strikingly odd dilemma that when humans today wish to ‘preserve’ nature, they unconsciously affirm an inherent belief that we ourselves are unnatural. Nature is the place where we are not (Cronon 1991, 18). Yet this is exactly what he problematizes in his work by asserting that city is part of nature. While a city usually is filled with stories of shaping the nature in controlling ways, the city is affected by the nature in return at many other instances. Therefore it is illogical to understand the city without considering it a part of the nature.

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Cronon’s main argument is that the rise of a great metropolitan city like Chicago cannot happen without the support of a vast, tributary rural empire feeding resources and services into the city, an area he calls the “hinterland”. At the same time, however, all the small rural, farming communities of that make up that hinterland could never exist without a great metropolitan city in which to sell their goods. In essence, the whole idea that a city and the rural communities around it could exist as separate, individual entities is wrong. They are all part of a single, economic system in which both parts are vital. “A rural landscape which omits the city and an urban landscape which omits the country are radically incomplete as portraits of their shared world.” (51) To prove his point, the author focuses on the economic commodities of grain, lumber, and meat, as well as lines of credit. The flow of these commodities between Chicago and its hinterland show how interconnected and, ultimately, how reliant all these communities were on each other. All were about buying and selling, about city and country confronting each other to discover their common ground in the marketplace. All were about capital, which was itself not a thing but a relationship. The geography of capital was about connecting people to make new markets and remake old landscapes.