Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  Josiah Royce warned in 1907 that unless Americans acquired or cultivated a stronger sense of “provincial loyalty” as well as a livelier tie to their country (as opposed to the “nation” which, distinct from the country, projected abstract, insensitive institutional power), then they would have only themselves to blame when the national state intervened to take over those tasks the people could not do for themselves. The absence of provincial ideals, he said (and by this he did not mean “sectionalism”), opened the way for governmental meddling and management of all kinds. Without such ideals, “further centralization of power can only increase the estrangement of our national spirit from its own life.” “History shows that if you want a great people to be strong, you must depend upon provincial loyalties to mediate between the people and the nation.”78

  Since Royce’s day, many Americans have often felt the need to promote a sense of place. Novelist Wallace Stegner has written that “our migratoriness has hindered us from becoming a people of communities and traditions, especially in the West. It has robbed us of the gods who make places holy.” Critic Wendell Berry has observed that “our present ‘leaders’—the people of wealth and power—do not know what it means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy, for its own sake, of love and study and careful work. They cannot take a place seriously because they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of power and wealth in the modern world, to destroy any place.”79

  Boundary and space, place and freedom—these things do not contradict each other but go together. People need to feel a bond to a concrete reality larger than the self, a reality that gives deeper meaning to existence.80 They need to be stewards of the concrete places (not the world place or planet) in which they live, because to lose that stewardship is to lose faith in oneself and in one’s own society. Historically this concrete reality has taken the form of the country, the province, and the hometown because these have carried much particular meaning—from individual hopes and ideals to the very smell of the earth itself, the very curve or fullness of a particular landscape—that have enriched the lives of most ordinary people and helped them reach and think beyond themselves. People require a firm sense of place so they can dare to take risks. A society whose common store of memories has been beaten down or shattered is open to further disruption; for such a society cannot defend or protect itself from the stronger incursions of those who know what they want and how to get it.

  Years ago, Thorstein Veblen, after hacking away at his cabin, descended from his mountaintop to write Absentee Ownership, an account of those people who viewed their properties only in money terms or as the means to profit and wealth. In the past twenty-five years, many Americans are still absentee in the sense Veblen meant, investing in a shadow world of concentrated wealth from which they hope to reap untold riches. But they are absent in other ways as well, absent from their children’s lives, absent from their communities and country, willing more than ever to delegate to others—by choice or by necessity—those responsibilities they once carried out themselves. The reasons for this are complex, but let me begin with highways and gateways, place-makers and destroyers.

  One

  Intermodal Highways and Gateways, Visible and Invisible

  In the summer of 1995, I visited the towns in Arkansas where Bill Clinton was born and grew up. To get to Hope from Hot Springs, I had to drive many miles down Interstate 30, a long, wide, four-lane highway that stretched to Dallas and beyond. Somewhere near Friendship, Arkansas, the highway grew jammed with trucks on all four lanes; the foothills of pine timber on either side of the road, so unrelieved in their thick greenness, took a back seat to a spectacle of movement. At one point, on a bridge over the Ouachita River, near Arkadelphia, I pulled over to the side of the road to stretch my legs and to look at a river I would likely never see again. A mist hovered over the black water. In that moment, I felt a terrible rush of sucking air. The bridge shook, as truck after loaded truck barreled through.

  This road was inhospitable to anything but trucks. It was a passageway for trucks with goods on their way to Texas, and deeper into Mexico. On this day, the vehicles might have been more than forty-eight feet long (ten years earlier, such lengths were rare), many in double-trailer combinations. The cargo was equally impressive, ranging from pesticides and logs to automobiles and watermelons. In 1980, the total intercity freight moved by truck in the United States was about 2 billion tons. In 1995, when I visited Hope, the figure had risen to 3.4 billion. By 1997 nearly 4 billion tons of raw materials and goods were being carried by trucks to domestic markets.1

  The tonnage, the trucks, the road—all these revealed the new sweep of American trade. Since the 1950s, the American economy has reconnected with the international economy of the late nineteenth century. In those pre-1914 days, when few controls held back the movement of money, goods, and people, “only a madman would have doubted that the international economic system was the axis of the material existence of the race,” as economic historian Karl Polanyi observed over fifty years ago.2 Yet that system did almost grind to a halt after World War I, as governments struggled to manage markets and as ideologies divided nations. Such post-twenties conditions, which many people took for granted and understood as irrevocable, lasted until around 1970, when the international economic order finally regained its ascendancy.

  As never before, business has pierced through both national and international frontiers, a sign of which has been a new world of transport, with its highways on land, sea, and in the air, its gateways of entry and exit, and its almost bewildering diversity of vehicles. This world of movement has been conceived by enterprising businessmen in trucking, rail, and shipping; by technological innovations and government policies; and by the greatest corporate merger mania in American history. An intermodal system of mobility has been erected to link up many modes of transport into a “seamless whole.” It has ushered into life centers of commerce (such as the great ports of Long Beach/Los Angeles in California and Newark/Elizabeth in New Jersey, to say nothing of the spectacular marine terminals in Texas, Virginia, southern Louisiana, and Oregon). And it has helped both to re-create the nature of place and to undermine it as well.

  HIGHWAYS AND GATEWAYS: LAND, AIR, AND SEA

  Throughout history, many Americans have longed to “eliminate all barriers between goods and people,” to quote Herbert Hoover.3 The dream of defeating time and space through transport and communication, in fact, has had more followers in America than in any other country. This is ironic, for even as Americans have seen roads and gateways as avenues of freedom, they have also arranged them into a system meant to discipline that freedom—a trap as well as an escape.4

  The history of U.S. transport began in the early nineteenth century with the first turnpikes and canals, followed by the railroads, which bound the economy and country into a single unified market and which many Americans viewed as the principal source of economic as well as civic and moral improvement (a view still alive today).5 By mid-century, the first steam ships carried great numbers of people and goods across oceans with unheard-of speed and safety.

  After 1920, cars, trucks, and airplanes were added to this empire of movement. At the same time, Americans much extended a distinct set of parallel roads—one national, the other local. Some time ago, the landscape writer J. B. Jackson distinguished between these two road systems. The national one he called “centrifugal,” or “palace,” because it reflected the interest of ruling elites, surged outward, and ignored boundaries. The local system, on the other hand, was “centripetal,” or “vernacular,” formed for ordinary people and to draw them into their neighborhoods; it was “the bane of long-range travelers and of a government wanting to expedite military or commercial traffic.”6 In the 1950s, with the passage of the Interstate Highway Act, the federal government opted radically in behalf of the palace roads, betting on the success of an arterial network of paved interstate highways, and converting national road-building into a Faustian enterprise, t
he greatest public-works project in history.7

  In the 1980s and nineties, every aspect of the national system took new form, visible and invisible. It took invisible form with the first electronic computer highways in the mid-1980s. By 1993, fifty million Americans were using computers at work, on average three times as many workers as in Japan, twice as many as in Germany.8 Computers allowed business to monitor and track the flow of goods, money, labor.9 Electronically transmitted, data of all kinds, as well as capital, overshot frontiers and created the illusion that borders did not exist.

  The expansion of the visible paths of movement, with their railroads, airplanes, trucks, and ships, was even more dramatic. After years of decline, freight railroads returned in force, covering one-third more revenue-tonnage-miles in 1995 than in the 1980s, and 50 percent more than in the 1950s.10 By the mid-nineties there were 5,500 air carriers in operation (nearly double the sum in 1980) and more than 18,000 airports (public and private), a figure the rest of the world’s nations put together could hardly match.11 “All around the country,” complained an industry critic in 1998, “there are too many airports.”12

  By the nineties, the United States had twenty-four million miles of paved roads, half of which had been added since 1965 and all of which equaled the combined miles of all the paved roads in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Poland, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, Italy, and China.13 Along these roads, moreover, moved a river of registered trucks (from single-unit vehicles to giant combinations), which carried more than 80 percent of American domestic freight and whose numbers had risen fourfold between 1970 and 1995, from 14.2 million to nearly 58 million.14 Between 1990 and 1997 alone, the number of trucks on city and town roads increased by 50 percent, clogging the streets from San Diego to tiny Woodstock, Vermont.15 Fifteen thousand trucks a day, flowing in from the New Jersey Turnpike and its corridor roads, converged at Port Elizabeth/Newark in New Jersey alone, to pick up or dispatch their goods.16

  Think of all those moving billboards, ever more garish and childlike in their colors, and ever longer too. In 1984 only 1 percent of trailers were over forty-eight feet in length; fifteen years later, fifty-three-footers had become the national standard. Despite the imposition of a federal freeze on truck lengths in 1991, many states found ways to bring longer trucks, even triple trailer combines, to the roads.17 Single, privately owned rigs, costing upwards of $150,000, had room enough for kitchens, exercise machines, and full-size bed closets.18

  Elsewhere in the world, many governments—France and Germany included—have banned the use of triple trailers, limited the size of doubles, and restricted overall the size of individual vehicles; in the United States, regulations have been much less onerous.19

  The increase in the number of trucks has caused, in turn, an increase in the number of truckers, with six-hundred-thousand new drivers on the road between 1990 and 1997. A giant army of more than three million people—mostly white men but one-fifth minority and the largest percentage of women ever (5.3 percent)—drove heavy-duty trucks by day and night, mostly alone and harried by deadlines, and sometimes confused about what part of the country they were in. The demand for new drivers skyrocketed by 1998 and companies recruited gay truckers as well as women, tailoring truckstops to suit their needs. Even the federal government pledged $1 million to help train “dislocated” unemployed Americans to drive the big trucks.20 What occupant of a passenger car has not felt the buffeting of the eighteen-wheelers, the giant tractor-trailer rigs and turnpike-doubles, as they rip across the landscape?

  Along with the trucks were the ships, coming from all points on the compass, across the Pacific from Asia, through the Gulf of Mexico, and across the Atlantic. By the mid-1990s American oceanborne commerce had reached nearly $520 billion, a stunning increase from the $45 billion in 1970.21 The Pacific Asian trade, which before 1975 passed mostly through the Panama Canal to Gulf and eastern ports, now went straight to California, packing the big western marine terminals with everything from Chinese plastics to Peruvian seafood.22 The Suez Canal, after years of fading use, also returned (if unsteadily) as a major avenue for goods from South Asia, energizing in some degree such eastern port cities as Baltimore and Norfolk.23

  Most of this trade was not carried by U.S. ships; by the 1980s, American-owned carriers accounted for less than 14 percent of international ocean commerce, a steep fall from the days of World War II, when American shipping led the world. Yet however much nationalists might have regretted it, the decline in commercial seapower had no effect, one way or the other, on the growth of American international trade, which had risen nearly 100 percent since 1970.24 Since the late 1980s, a new generation of mammoth container-vessels were on the seas, most owned by Asian and European companies. Like the tractor semitrailers, they were far bigger than the ships of the recent past. They carried twenty-foot and even forty-foot-long containers shaped like boxcars, standardized to hold practically any kind of commodity, from cars to boots. Uniform and dull, the newest ships were too big to navigate the Panama Canal.25

  In 1996 Maersk, the Danish-owned carrier, together with partner Sea-Land, an American firm and the top container line in the world, launched the largest containership of them all, the Regina Maersk. Driven by the world’s largest diesel engine, it was half a mile long, with capacity to carry 6,000 twenty-foot containers arranged in five tiers, above and below the deck, aft and stern. Fully automated and computerized, it had only a skeletal crew of thirteen who met only at meals and otherwise communicated by walkie-talkie. To traverse the deck by day was like being in a monster hotel at night with no one around.26 In July of 1998, the Regina Maersk sailed for the first time into the New York harbor but only with difficulty since that harbor, like every other harbor on the East Coast, was too shallow to accommodate it. Its presence excited intense interest, and even a congressional hearing dwelled on the challenge it posed to American shipping. By all accounts, Regina Maersk was the wave of the future and unless New York and other ports increased the depth of their harbors, Maersk, the third most powerful containership line, threatened to take its business elsewhere.27

  Super-containerships have changed the seascape. They have brought to life huge ports, the deeply dredged gateways where the different highways of the world (rail, road, ocean, and, to some degree, air) intersect to form the key axes of international trade. Among these ports is the Port of Long Beach in southern California, which, along with its nearby neighbor, the Port of Los Angeles, forms one continuous harbor in the San Pedro Bay and constitutes the busiest port complex in the United States.28 Emerging over the past fifteen years, Long Beach has become in every way, physically, politically, and economically, a monument to the international circulation of goods.

  In physical terms, the Port of Long Beach has undergone constant change since its beginnings as a single little dock in 1912. To look down on it from its highest point (the Harbor Square administration building) is to see a vast commercial choreography—the many piers with their berths that hold the incoming and outgoing ships; the crane gantries, as tall as twenty-story skyscrapers, hoisting cargo off and on the ships; the sloping, raised highways leading into and around the piers; the two long rail lines starting at the docks and then reaching far back into downtown Los Angeles; the giant container yards; and the trucks, the thousands of trucks in their lollypop colors (red, green, blue, yellow, even maroon, purple, and pink), pouring onto the port ramps and through the port gates, lining up by the hundreds, ready for the day’s business.29

  The Port of Long Beach, however, is also fascinating for its political character. Although authorized “into existence” by the State of California, it has, for years, inhabited the shadow world of public authorities, a world largely beyond the scrutiny and control of the American public, or any other body, for that matter.30 Governed by a board of five commissioners (plus a president) appointed by the city, the Long Beach Port Authority functions as a big landlord, renting properties (berths and terminals) to the w
orld’s ocean carriers. It has the power to finance, build, and manage capital projects; to issue tax-exempt bonds; and to contract with local, state, and federal governments, as well as with foreign governments. It controls all salaries, appointments, contracts, and budgets.31 Its authority, to be sure, is hardly total, though one trade analyst at the port saw fit in 1997 to boast that “we are accountable to no one.”32 Environmental and state laws, for one thing, confine development along the shore, often to the great frustration of the port management. Nevertheless, like the one hundred other similar marine or port terminals in the country (including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, prototype of all such ports), the Port of Long Beach resembles a semi-sovereign city-state. Technocratic and outside ordinary democratic political life, it has the power nearly equal to that of any state government to affect the way we live.33

  It is as a hub in the circuitry of global commerce that this semi-sovereign port holds the most interest. Before the 1970s, when international trade played just a small part in the U.S. economy, few Americans beyond southern California thought much about the Port of Long Beach. Since the mid-eighties, however, the port itself has become a dynamic agent in its own right, with its own Washington lobbyist, in arguing for the opening of America to foreign commerce. Since 1980 it has offered berths to more than twenty shipping lines, mostly Asian (and these owned principally by Korean, Japanese, and Chinese firms), each leasing a terminal for several million dollars annually.34 In 1990 the combined ports of Long Beach/Los Angeles handled 100 million tons of cargo; five years later, Long Beach alone was carrying this volume, or 25 percent of America’s international waterborne trade.35