Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  Most Americans, it could be argued, want or need some kind of bond to the country (or region in the country) they know and have grown up in, some larger sense of place among all places to admire, love, and defend.

  Today, many people look on cosmopolitan consumerism as a good thing, the best we have or can expect to have, because it keeps people to themselves in their pursuit of wealth and forces them to live peaceably with others and to withhold judgment. But market cosmopolitanism, unchecked by any countervailing power, is the most exclusionary of all cosmopolitanisms. Whole worlds that do not have market value are exiled as more “places” are contained within the reach of the invisible hand. Thus, in the name of freedom and choice, market cosmopolitanism tends to exclude those things that give the most meaning to life for most people—the fullest possible sensual experience of the world; vocation; spiritual life; pursuing a goal or truth regardless of costs; friendship, family, children; and, of course, place itself.81 The profit motive may facilitate innovation, but unfettered markets merely extend the shrinking of choice—more goods and money but fewer real choices—to a wider canvas.

  The market world of choice boils down to this: on the micro level, it does mean, as Kanter says, that consumer choice rules; but on the macro level, it means that those with the capital and the agenda create the context, the boundaries, the entire culture within which ordinary people make their choices. Most Americans, in other words, have little control over the larger arena in which they choose their goods and services. In the mid-sixties, sociologist Milton Gordon wrote that educated Americans talked constantly about universal man when in fact the world was extremely diverse. Today, conversely, we babble on about diversity when, in fact, we are all becoming more and more alike, especially in global cities where the capitalist market exerts its fullest impact.82

  It is in this context, then, that the liberal, left-wing forms of cosmopolitanism seem to be playing their most significant historical role, for by denigrating place and fostering everything connected to mobility and choice, they actually fortify the context for more market expansion, cheer on the strategies of opportunistic migrants, and mop up after unscrupulous developers and politicians have bulldozed neighborhoods, regions, and whole countries.

  Current cosmopolitanism seeks a world in which long-lived attachments (to family, home, town, city, country) mean little or nothing and must be swept away or tailored to suit the tourist industry. Is this the kind of cosmopolitanism to which we are all now heir, not one animated by one civilization but driven by many civilizations, the fluid mentality of everywhere and nowhere?

  But there can be no culture built under unstable protean conditions, mainly at the borders, or by strangers. Any culture that hopes to endure, to say nothing of thrive, must be formed and sustained at the centers not at the edges. America cannot be reimagined out of the materials spawned by geographical frontiers and urban edges, because it is at those very edges and frontiers where the world’s pimps and con artists congregate the most and where the market forces are most Darwinian, most virulent, and most subversive to the making of any kind of decent, collective life.

  Conclusion:

  Veblen Revisited

  The building of highways and gateways, the rush of trucks and trains, the spread of temporariness in work and life, the reliance on such service industries as gambling and tourism, the place-hostile activities of universities and government, and the rise of a new cosmopolitanism have all come at the cost of ties to towns, cities, and regions, and to the country itself.

  Many valuable things we take for granted and which give to life much that makes it worthwhile, however, cannot flourish without a sense of place. Artistic creativity, for instance, requires it. While artistic performance of the highest quality can happen anywhere, the best of art has been created by people living in a particular place. The examples of this are so legion—from Yasunari Kawabata to Johannes Brahms—that they hardly bear reciting. Can world art or world music be art or music in any way that matters?1 Novelist William Trevor, in his Excursions in the Real World, writes that “fiction insists on universality, then equally insists that a degree of parochialism can often best achieve this.” One hundred years ago, Alice James, recluse sister of William and Henry James, put the same matter another way, if more roughly, in her diary: “The paralytic on his couch can have, if he wants them, wider experiences than Stanley’s slaughtering savages.” These are commonsensical notions, but in today’s climate they might pass as profundities as well as warnings.2

  A strong sense of place, along with the boundaries that shape it and give it meaning, not only fosters creativity but also helps to provide people—especially children—with an assurance that they will be protected and not abandoned. In our time, many people are riveted by the worst kinds of sexual predation, by child abuse especially. But in a society or culture bent on dismantling boundaries as a regular fact of life and inclined to exalt a borderless mentality, no one should be surprised that other boundaries—especially those shielding children—should provide so little power to defend. Yet it is indisputable that children need a sense of place (along with an acceptance of boundaries that define and establish the safeness of place) in order to become self-reliant. This sense of place should be ideally created by parents (not by state authorities or by police), who care for and love their children and who give to place the feeling of “indestructibility” which every child needs. “Where firm boundaries are needed to give meaning to content and control to spontaneity, and do not hold,” observed child analyst D.W. Winnicott, “there will be an increase in the number and power of antisocial individuals, tipping the balance against the mature in society.”3

  Without a sense of boundaried place, finally, there can be no citizenship, no basis for common bonds to others, no willingness to give to the commonweal or to be taxed, even lightly, in behalf of the welfare of others. To be sure, the boundaries of place may, in the nature of things, “exclude the outsider or stranger,” as J. B. Jackson once observed in The Necessity for Ruins. But as Jackson also observed, boundaries “stand for law and permanence,” “create neighbors,” and “transform an amorphous environment into a human landscape.”4 A living sense of a boundaried place, some kind of patriotism beyond love of abstract principles, is the main condition for citizenship.

  This living sense always has a provincial character. It takes shape first as connections to families and friends, then to neighborhoods, towns, and regions, and finally, to the nation and the world. It is through the formation of this sense of place, beginning with the home and parents, that people develop their loyalty to place, but it is only after the earliest concrete ties are formed that the bigger connections can be forged; the process cannot begin the other way around.

  Cosmopolitan thinkers who believe that the real threat to the planet comes from the failure on part of ordinary people to break loose from their provincial roots and to embrace “the stranger” and the “world at large” have got it backwards. The real threat arises from the spread of powerful global forces indifferent to provincial needs, forces that have ripped to shreds local commitments and have forced millions of souls into unwanted dispossession and exile. The real threat does not come from strong provincial commitments: it comes from their absence. People strong in their sense of place possess the conviction to decide how they will live; at the same time, they are often more able and willing to include others because they have little or nothing to fear from outsiders or foreigners. It is only fragile boundaries—or the feeling that people have no control over their own world—that produces the worst forms of exclusionism, that eats away at citizenship, and that leads, finally, to reliance on centralized state power to manage, dictate, order, or forbid.

  “Centralization of state power in the national government,” said Josiah Royce in 1908, “without a constantly enriched and diversified provincial consciousness, can only increase the estrangement of our national spirit from its own life. On the other hand history shows th
at if you want a great people to be strong, you must depend upon provincial loyalties to mediate between the people and the nation.”5 In America of the 1990s the bureaucratic state has become more invasive than it has ever been (despite vaunted congressional attempts to cut it back in the interest of freeing up the “free market”). On the other hand, the cultural center of the country, with all its various places and historical associations, has grown ever more atomized and vulnerable.

  Everything I have discussed in this book, from the market gateways and highways and the big research universities to the cosmopolitanism of business and the academy, has contributed to the destruction of a sense of place and to the transformation of America into a country of exiles. If the process continues with the same degree of intensity, we can only expect greater reliance on state power—more prisons, more police, more attempts to manage or manipulate minds—to compensate for the failure of Americans to remember and protect their places.

  Thorstein Veblen had provincial loyalty inside his own name. He was named for his mother’s father, Thorstein Bunde, who, in turn, was named for his farm, Bunde, in Norway.6 To own a farm was a great achievement in Norway, for a farm possessed a worth that went well beyond its commercial value. It imparted high status which the place-name signified; by custom, farmers attached it to their ordinary Christian names and patronymics. But not only did Veblen carry the place-name of his grandfather, he also bore the memory of his grandfather’s dispossession. After relying on lawyers for some costly litigation, Thorstein Bunde was unable to pay them back and they took his farm. To lose one’s farm was the greatest humiliation any man could have suffered at the time, and Thorstein Bunde, defeated by the loss, died at the age of thirty-five.

  Veblen’s father, Thomas Anderson, grew up as a tenant on the farm of Veblen, after his own father, too, had his property taken from him. Impoverished, he immigrated to the United States in 1847, determined to establish his own farmstead. With help from a friend, he gained access to forty acres of land in Wisconsin but was forced off his claim by “Yankee speculators,” whom he would despise for the rest of his life. A superb craftsman as well as an innovative farmer, he acquired another farm (though inadequate to meet his needs) and built a house in Cato, Wisconsin, where his son Thorstein was born (and which stood for more than one hundred years).7 In 1865 he moved for the final time, to Minnesota, where he got the land he dreamed of, more than two hundred acres of it. He farmed, planted orchards, kept bees, and built the barns and dwellings. (His wife, Kari Bunde Veblen, on the other hand, drove the reaper, made the butter, cheese, and soap, wove cloth, sewed garments, and carded wool.) Until 1864, he was known as Thomas Anderson, but in the year he purchased his new Minnesota land, he reasserted the farm name of Veblen. He went to court to have his name changed to Veblen, and he made the deed out in the Veblen name. In Norway, he was a tenant on Veblen, bearing the burden of his own father’s dispossession. In America, he owned Veblen, reclaiming the reputation and respect his father—and his father-in-law—had lost.

  Thorstein Bunde Veblen’s name, then, contained memories of displacement and loss, of determination to find and then stay put, and of a dignity and pride in ownership that surpassed all commercial ambition. It reminded him always of his obligation to connect with some place and to stay there. It was also like tinder, ready, under the right conditions, to ignite a fury in him—against himself as well as against others. In 1920, when he visited his cabin in California, he faced not only what he thought to be an act of dispossession by a greedy landlord but also his own failure to take responsibility for his property, his own place; the result was a violent act of destruction far out of proportion to the gravity of the cause.

  Very few Americans have names that resonate with such history, names which might remind them of their own need to connect to the places in which they live. Many of us have been overtaken by conditions that obscure why places (and the past in them) should matter. Some of us prefer not to remember the past at all. It would be a good thing if we did.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION: VEBLEN IN SILICON VALLEY

  1. R. L. Duffus, The Innocents at Cedro: A Memoir of Thorstein Veblen and Some Others (New York: Macmillan, 1944).

  2. Author’s visit, May, 31, 1997. On the Silicon Valley rich, see Business Week, August 25, 1997, pp. 66–69, 126, 130 (the entire issue is devoted to high-tech industries); “Hot Young Companies, New Millionaires Fuel Silicon Valley Boom,” Wall Street Journal (hereafter WSJ), October 8, 1996, p. 1; “Two Friends Hunting for Gold in Silicon Valley,” BusinessWeek, August 10, 1998, p. B1. According to BusinessWeek, there were 186,511 millionaires in Silicon Valley in 1996 (p. 126).

  3. Duffus, The Innocents at Cedro, p. 159. For this discussion, I have drawn on Duffus, pp. 93, 130–32, 154; Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York: Viking, 1935), pp. 271–74, 455–57, 496–98; Peter C. Allen, “The Cottage by the Creek,” Sandstone and Tile 9:3 (spring 1985), pp. 1–10.

  4. Duffus, The Innocents at Cedro, p. 131; Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America, pp. 455–56.

  5. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York: B. W. Huebsch Inc., 1923), pp. 33–36, 51–59, 135.

  6. See Gary Snyder, A Place in Space (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), pp. 222–23. For another discussion of place, see Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995). But Hayden’s arguments are burdened by an ideological commitment to multicultural group theory; thus, all groups—ethnic and racial groups, workers, women—should have what Hayden calls their “territorial histories.”

  7. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 151, 160. Edward S. Casey, a philosopher at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, also has many informative things to say about place and, generally, takes a position similar to Jackson’s. See his Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

  8. Quoted in George W. Pierson, The Moving American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 117. A hundred years later Thornton Wilder wrote, without regret, that “from the point of view of the European an American is a nomad in relation to place.” An American is “differently surrounded; he has no fixed abode but carries his home with him; his relations are not to place but to everywhere, to everyone …” (Ibid., p. 117). The Tocqueville quote appears in Witold Rybczynski, City Life (New York: Scribners, 1995), p. 109. For a synthetic treatment of the literature on the mobility trends of the mid-nineteenth century, see Peter A. Morrison and Judith P. Wheeler, “The Image of ‘Elsewhere’ in the American Tradition of Migration,” in William H. McNeill and Ruth S. Adams, eds., Human Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), pp. 75–84.

  9. For the impact of the “ebullient” demand for cotton (the word is Gavin Wright’s) on western migration, see Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 15–24; and for population figures, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), vol. 2, p. 307.

  10. Josiah Royce, California (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948; orig. pub. 1886), pp. 185–94. For three excellent books on these migrations, see Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); John D. Unruh, The Plains Across (London: Pimlico, 1992), pp. 58–65; and John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 45–52.

  11. Rohrbough, in Days of Gold, has emphasized the frequency with which communities were undermined by this migration (pp. 58, 62, 83). On land speculation, see historian Paul Gates, who long ago showed how it dominated American society and economy in the nineteenth century. In the years 1835–38, 38 mi
llion acres of public lands were sold, 29 million of which were acquired through speculation, much of it purchased by bankers and banks; the peak years, however, were 1854–58, when speculators confiscated and resold Indian lands. See Paul Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development” (orig. pub. 1942), in Allan C. Bogue and Margaret Beattie Bogue, eds., The Jeffersonian Dream: Studies in the History of American Land Policy and Development (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), pp. 6–22.

  12. See, on this, Rybczynski, City Life, pp. 15–34, 109, 110–30; and on patterns of European mobility, see Charles Tilly, “Migration in Modern European History,” in McNeill and Adams, Human Migration, pp. 48–68; and Hagen Schulze, Germany: A New History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 120–36.

  13. David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 62; Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), pp. 23–44; Roger Daniels, Coming to America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), pp. 121–265. For a good account of the terrible passage to America on packet ships, see David Hollett, Passage to the New World (Great Britain: P. M. Heaton Publishing, 1995), pp. 121–90.

  14. Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 6–9.

  15. Timothy J. Hutton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 165–74.

  16. Arthur Mann, The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 77.

  17. John Higham, Send These to Me (New York: Atheneum, 1975), p. 48.

  18. On protectionism, see Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., Opening America’s Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), esp. chapter 4, pp. 59–99; on passports, see David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 73; on the absence of controls on financial transactions, see Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 3; and Doug Henwood, Wall Street (New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 106–14. On the full international character of the age, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 1–200.