"We all live in the city. We all live in the country."

Nature’s Metropolis is a story of commodity flows in and out of Chicago, a subject the author admits may seem impersonal and “off-putting.” However, Cronon insists that in order to understand city and country together, he must reconstruct “the linkages between the commodities of our economy and the resources of our eco-system.” In great detail and with astounding clarity, he writes of grain, lumber, meat, railroads, credit, and the web they formed between Chicago and its western hinterland (Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, even Nebraska and the Dakotas).

But Nature’s Metropolis aims to be more than a history of Chicago. As Cronon explains in his epilogue, it is also “a book about The City, in its largest, most mythic sense as a place somehow separate from that other key human landscape, The Country.” So Cronon sandwiches his three commodity chapters—grain, lumber, and meat—between theoretical considerations. The first chapter introduces central place theory and Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s Isolated State, along with Frederick Jackson Turner’s conception of the frontier and nineteenth-century Chicago boosters’ “surprisingly coherent model of urban and regional growth.” Chapter Two introduces Cronon’s own ruminations on first and second nature as they relate to transportation by water or railroad. The closing chapters return to central place theory and Turner’s frontier, the alienation of first and second nature, and to the hidden unity of city and country, in that order. Cronon adds yet another layer with his prologue and epilogue, which recount his childhood impressions of Chicago (except for the museums, entirely negative) and how his views on city and country have changed. It is a heady four hundred pages.

Cronon manages to hold it all together, however, and not only because of his sonorous narration. A few favorite themes appear in almost every chapter. The first is Cronon’s insistence that city and country are to be taken as a symbiotic unit. Too often, he argues, urban and rural are pitted against one another. Rural residents abhor or admire the city; urbanites despise or long for the country. Neither will do for Cronon. “We fool ourselves,” he urges, “if we think we can choose between them.” The commodities flowing in and out of Chicago, according to Cronon, reveal the intricate connections of city and country. To a great extent Chicago created the farms, ranches, and logging operations of the Midwest; these producers, in turn, fueled Chicago’s precipitous growth.

Related to this urban-rural dichotomy is another that Cronon dislikes, that of humans and nature. Cronon deals with this dualism by speaking of “first nature” (pre-human) and “second nature” (constructed by humans). Economically speaking, first and second nature correspond respectively to the geography of natural resources and the geography of capital: rivers are first nature; canals are second. Chicago’s phenomenal growth in the late nineteenth century owed as much to soil and forests (first) as it did to railroads and eastern capital (second). This point is much belabored in Nature’s Metropolis.

Another prominent theme for Cronon is the effect of the market on the environment. The “new capitalistic logic” that accompanied the expansion of the railroad would profoundly alter the ecosystems of the Great West: elimination of tallgrass prairie, destruction of the bison, and deforestation of the northern woodlands, to name a few of the more notable changes. Combined with technologies like the grain elevator and the refrigerated railroad car, this logic also encouraged a kind of ideological shift, a “forgetfulness that split asunder the rural and the urban, separating the field from its grain, the forest from its lumber, the rangeland from its meat.” Commodities were abstracted, even alienated from their sites of production.

Cronon’s concern here is ethical. The widening gap (geographically and mentally) between consumption and production would, according to Cronon, make it “harder and harder to keep track of the true costs and consequences of any particular product.” Cronon makes clear, for example, that he considers Chicago’s lumber boom a gigantic burglary. The burned out forests of Wisconsin and Michigan “would continue to serve as reminders, like the gray stones in an abandoned churchyard, that the city and its hinterland had originally been the products of a kind of theft that few now wished to remember.” Cronon’s tale of cattle ranching on the Great Plains and the destruction of the bison that preceded it is tinged with a similar sadness. Whether in the city or the country, Cronon contends, we must still “do right” by nature.

The final theme that needs to be addressed is Cronon’s revision of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier. Turner’s original thesis—that the frontier was a sparsely settled cradle of democracy—is turned on its head in the case of Chicago, where the frontier represented a pattern of metropolitan expansion. The “central meaning of Turner’s frontier,” for Cronon, is the “unexploited natural abundance” that “offered to human labor rewards incommensurate with the effort expended in achieving them.” Cronon also rejects the abstract arguments of central place theory—which on his account seeks to explain the hierarchical arrangement of human settlement (village, town, city, metropolis)—with a kind of Turnerian twist. Chicago was not a central metropolis but a “gateway city”—a term he appropriates from A.F. Burghardt, not the creation of small towns but “the principal colonizing agent of the western landscape.”

It is at this point that Nature’s Metropolis has the most in common with Richard White’s western history; indeed, the urban character of the West plays an even more prominent role in White’s work. “It’s Your Misfortune” is a synthesis—a textbook, really—that aims to tell the story of the American West in its entirety. At well over six hundred pages of text, it is an ambitious undertaking, particularly considering that one of his most significant works, The Middle Ground was published in the same year.

Unlike Nature’s Metropolis, which is explicitly topical, White’s story is almost dialectical in its movement. The West’s development as a region required the oversight and capital of national corporations and the federal government. The national economy and political climate that has come down to the present is in turn the product of the West’s development. In other words, the “bureaucratic revolution” that defined the West in the early twentieth century—the proliferation of agencies, the millions of dollars in federal spending—has come to define the entire nation.

White defines the West geographically as the region west of the Missouri, created when Europeans took it upon themselves to conquer the existing residents. He starts, then, with New Mexico, “a fragment” (13) of the Spanish empire that nevertheless represented a powerful ecological incursion in the form of disease and horses. Gradually, the U.S. superseded its European competitors in the region as the primary economic and then political influence.

This sets the stage for the second section, which highlights the role of the U.S. federal government in conquering, exploring, and governing Western lands and peoples. The government leads the way in White’s account, attracting the farmers, workers, and entrepreneurs that appear in the third section, “Transformation and Development.” The fourth part, “The Bureaucratic Revolution in the West” is the story of the federal government’s assertion of “permanent public ownership” of public lands and the accompanying supervisory agencies: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and others. White rounds out his survey with sections on the Depression and World War II and “The Modern West.” Here he considers the extent to which the metropolitan West—Dallas, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, and above all, Los Angeles—influences the nation, as well as the extent to which it actually stands for the West as a whole.

Throughout the text, as most of its reviewers have pointed out, neither Frederick Jackson Turner nor “the frontier” are mentioned. In place of the frontier is the West as a “set of relationships” between Indians, Hispanics, Asians, Africans, and, most fatefully, Anglo-Americans. In White’s account, the power of the Anglo-American federal government and their corporations—not the cowboys, nor the Indians—receives most of the credit for shaping the West. “The government did not pursue pioneers west,” White observes, “it more often led them there.”

While the federal government does not play a prominent role in Natures’ Metropolis—and there are good reasons for this—on economic power Cronon and White appear to be in full agreement. White describes a western economy that “instead of advancing in carefully calibrated stages from subsistence to commercial production . . . rushed headlong into the world markets.” This is the same pattern that Cronon lays out for Chicago, which in a very short time became the “western outpost” of the world economy.
Like Cronon, White is also careful to point out the ecological costs and limits of this market-based expansion. Anglo-American migrants saw nature as “a collection of commodities,” according to White. “They valued plants, animals, and minerals according to their utility,” whereas Indians and Hispanics held gentler views. The economy that developed in the West under Anglo-American rule was “primarily an extractive economy.”

Along with ecological disruption, however, White also attends to the ways in which this extraction “disrupted . . . existing human communities.” Indeed, he argues, “the two processes were intertwined.” It is to the former process—curiously absent from Nature’s Metropolis—that the bulk of his book is devoted. From the start, which pictures a “black man leading a white man among the Indians,” White is most attentive to what he characterizes as the “diverse, complex West.” As other reviewers have pointed out, his is a “bleak history” marked by “lament and regret.”

In the end, then, White has his eye on the little people. “Even in the midst of what increasingly seems common misfortune,” he writes, “the various peoples of the rural West seek their own separate solutions.” His chastened tribute to the left-behind of the American West contrasts with Cronon’s very different conclusion as to the entangled fates—the unity, however ambivalent—of city and country.

Both books are unquestionably essential reading for American historians. If I were forced to recommend just one, Nature’s Metropolis would win out, mostly because of how it is framed. In synthetic works like White’s, concepts and topics sometimes get lost in the vast sea of information. Cronon’s work is largely synthetic as well—the bankruptcy maps of Chapter Six represent the only major original research of the volume—but its geographic and temporal focus contain his argument nicely.

But what problems do the books raise? Peter Coclanis, Cronon’s harshest reviewer, describes Nature’s Metropolis as a “misanthropic book.” Cronon, says Coclanis, lacks empathy for man’s “desire for material gain” and always values “the blue stems and soft woods” over men and women. White’s rendering of the West could also be characterized as anti-capitalistic, concerned as it is with the lives of the people passed over, cast out, and ruined by Anglo-American economic interests. Surely White would agree that the book is informed by present concerns like race, class, gender, and the environment, just as Cronon’s is unabashedly about “our” present-day relationship with the land. And Cronon especially is guilty of some rhetorical overkill. To compare a burned out forest to a church graveyard, as he does, reveals much about his presuppositions.

Coclanis’ complaints, however, are out of proportion to Cronon’s crimes. Cronon may romanticize the “hybrid cultural universe” that preceded Chicago’s rapid rise, but there is nothing to suggest that he wants to “return” to that state. Indeed, his tone when describing the inner workings of capital is not so much disgust as it is ambivalence, even at times a grudging respect. His pastoral preferences to the contrary, Cronon concludes: “We all live in the city. We all live in the country.” Even from a purely economic standpoint, the wastefulness that has characterized much of Anglo-American settlement is tragic. Not to recognize this as a present-day historian would suggest a certain blindness or even pretense.

The same goes for White. Writing how Anglo-American migrants remembered the early West as a place of great possibilities, he is quick to note that they “had come as conquerors.” While they saw their movement in terms of “personal betterment,” White sees it as a conquest. A more sympathetic judgment of the Anglos would be preferable here. But to say so does not take away the injustices in the development of the West, crimes that White rarely fails to point out. His reliance on more recent secondary sources—few of his recommended readings are older than fifty years—may shorten the usable life of his book. But I suspect that this trade-off is made willingly since the New Western History is, among other things, new.

So even if their efforts leave a little to be desired, Cronon and White are to be thanked for writing innovative, readable history that has some application to present day concerns. Whether or not one agrees with their conclusions, at least their arguments have provoked some debate. And perhaps these debates will also inspire some sincere reflection on our place in the landscape and our relationships with one another. One hopes so.

NOTES
Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
Cronon, xvi, xvii.
Cronon, 384.
Cronon, 34.
Cronon, 385.
Cronon, 81.
Cronon, 264.
Cronon, 340.
Cronon, 206.
Cronon, 385.
Cronon, 150.
Cronon, 307. See also note 24 on page 449.
White, 392.
White, 13, 18.
White, 391.
See, for example, Richard W. Etulain’s review in The American Historical Review 98, no. 1. (Feb. 1993), 260-261; and Glenda Riley’s in The Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 2 (May 1992), 223-225.
White, 537.
White, 58.
White, 236.
Cronon, 60.
White, 212.
White, 243.
White, 212.
White, 4.
Richard Lowitt, in The Pacific Historical Review 62, no. 1. (Feb. 1993), 90; Glenda Riley, in The Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 2 (May 1992), 224.
White, 634.
Peter A. Coclanis, “Urbs in Horto”, Reviews in American History 20 (1992), 18.
Coclanis, 16, 18-19.
See Cronon’s prologue and epilogue, especially pages 18 and 385.
Cronon, 206.
Cronon, 29; Coclanis, 18.
Cronon, 385.
White, 181.
White, 182.