frederick turner frontier thesis

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

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Frontier Thesis

Article by D.R. Owram

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited December 16, 2013

The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. In Canada the frontier thesis was popular between the world wars with historians such as A.R.M. LOWER and Frank UNDERHILL and sociologist S.D. CLARK , partly because of a new sense of Canada's North American character.

Since WWII the frontier thesis has declined in popularity because of recognition of important social and cultural distinctions between Canada and the US. In its place a "metropolitan school" has developed, emphasizing Canada's much closer historical ties with Europe. Moreover, centres such as Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa had a profound influence on the settlement of the Canadian frontier. Whichever argument is emphasized, however, any realistic conclusion cannot deny that both the frontier and the ties to established centres were formative in Canada's development.

See also METROPOLITAN-HINTERLAND THESIS .

Recommended

Laurentian thesis.

Metropolitan-Hinterland Thesis

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner

Title: The Frontier in American History

Author: Frederick Jackson Turner

Release Date: October 14, 2007 [eBook #22994]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY***

E-text prepared by Fritz Ohrenschall, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Transcriber's notes:.

A few typographical errors have been corrected. They have been underlined in the text. Position your mouse over the word to see the correction. A complete list of changes follows the text.

On page 45, the original has the words "co[=m]ander" and "su[=m]e". [=m] represents the letter m with a macron. It is a shortcut indicating that the word should have two m's in succession.

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To see an image of the original page, click on the page number in the right margin.

THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY

Frederick jackson turner.

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1921

  [ ii ]

Copyright , 1920 By FREDERICK J. TURNER

[ iii ] TO CAROLINE M. TURNER MY WIFE

In republishing these essays in collected form, it has seemed best to issue them as they were originally printed, with the exception of a few slight corrections of slips in the text and with the omission of occasional duplication of language in the different essays. A considerable part of whatever value they may possess arises from the fact that they are commentaries in different periods on the central theme of the influence of the frontier in American history. Consequently they may have some historical significance as contemporaneous attempts of a student of American history, at successive transitions in our development during the past quarter century to interpret the relations of the present to the past. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the various societies and periodicals which have given permission to reprint the essays.

Various essays dealing with the connection of diplomatic history and the frontier and others stressing the significance of the section, or geographic province, in American history, are not included in the present collection. Neither the French nor the Spanish frontier is within the scope of the volume.

The future alone can disclose how far these interpretations are correct for the age of colonization which came gradually to an end with the disappearance of the frontier and free land. It alone can reveal how much of the courageous, creative American spirit, and how large a part of the historic American ideals are to be carried over into that new age which is replacing the era of free lands and of measurable isolation by consolidated and complex industrial development and by increasing [ vi ] resemblances and connections between the New World and the Old.

But the larger part of what has been distinctive and valuable in America's contribution to the history of the human spirit has been due to this nation's peculiar experience in extending its type of frontier into new regions; and in creating peaceful societies with new ideals in the successive vast and differing geographic provinces which together make up the United States. Directly or indirectly these experiences shaped the life of the Eastern as well as the Western States, and even reacted upon the Old World and influenced the direction of its thought and its progress. This experience has been fundamental in the economic, political and social characteristics of the American people and in their conceptions of their destiny.

Writing at the close of 1796, the French minister to the United States, M. Adet, reported to his government that Jefferson could not be relied on to be devoted to French interests, and he added: "Jefferson, I say, is American, and by that name, he cannot be sincerely our friend. An American is the born enemy of all European peoples." Obviously erroneous as are these words, there was an element of truth in them. If we would understand this element of truth, we must study the transforming influence of the American wilderness, remote from Europe, and by its resources and its free opportunities affording the conditions under which a new people, with new social and political types and ideals, could arise to play its own part in the world, and to influence Europe.

Frederick J. Turner.

Harvard University , March, 1920.

The Significance of the Frontier in American History [1:1]

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!" [2:1] So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with [ 3 ] the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the "settled area" of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of [ 4 ] most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.

In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced up the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the "fall line," and the tidewater region became the settled area. In [ 5 ] the first half of the eighteenth century another advance occurred. Traders followed the Delaware and Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the first quarter of the century. [5:1] Gov. Spotswood, of Virginia, made an expedition in 1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter of the century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans up the Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. [5:2] The Germans in New York pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats. [5:3] In Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement. Settlements soon began on the New River, or the Great Kanawha, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad. [5:4] The King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763, [5:5] forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic; but in vain. In the period of the Revolution the frontier crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled. [5:6] When the first census was taken in 1790, the continuous settled area was bounded by a line which ran near the coast of Maine, and included New England except a portion of Vermont and New Hampshire, New York along the Hudson [ 6 ] and up the Mohawk about Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, Virginia well across the Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas and eastern Georgia. [6:1] Beyond this region of continuous settlement were the small settled areas of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Ohio, with the mountains intervening between them and the Atlantic area, thus giving a new and important character to the frontier. The isolation of the region increased its peculiarly American tendencies, and the need of transportation facilities to connect it with the East called out important schemes of internal improvement, which will be noted farther on. The "West," as a self-conscious section, began to evolve.

From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier occurred. By the census of 1820 [6:2] the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half of Louisiana. This settled area had surrounded Indian areas, and the management of these tribes became an object of political concern. The frontier region of the time lay along the Great Lakes, where Astor's American Fur Company operated in the Indian trade, [6:3] and beyond the Mississippi, [ 7 ] where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier conditions. The Mississippi River region was the scene of typical frontier settlements. [7:1]

The rising steam navigation [7:2] on western waters, the opening of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton [7:3] culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: "It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress." [7:4]

In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present eastern boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country. [8:1] Minnesota and Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions, [8:2] but the distinctive frontier of the period is found in California, where the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adventurous miners, and in Oregon, and the settlements in Utah. [8:3] As the frontier had leaped over the Alleghanies, so now it skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in the same way that the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghanies had caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains needed means of communication with the East, and in the furnishing of these arose the settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still another kind [ 9 ] of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The United States Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory.

By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.

In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: the "fall line;" the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.

At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of religious [ 10 ] and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. The American student needs not to go to the "prim little townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive frontiers. [10:1] He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the Sierras, [10:2] and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new States has found in the older ones material for its constitutions. [10:3] Each frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as will be discussed farther on.

But with all these similarities there are essential differences due to the place element and the time element. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The geologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the newer. It would be a work worth the historian's labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there result a [ 11 ] more adequate conception of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history of society.

Loria, [11:1] the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial life as an aid in understanding the stages of European development, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifications. "America," he says, "has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history." There is much truth in this. The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system. [11:2] This page is familiar to the student of census statistics, but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in eastern States this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet it had been a wheat area, and still earlier the "range" had attracted the cattle-herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing manufacture, is a [ 12 ] State with varied agricultural interests. But earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain-raising, like North Dakota at the present time.

Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any adequate attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these social areas and changes? [12:1]

The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur-trader, miner, cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader's frontier, the rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, and the farmer's frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders' pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.

Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent? What effects followed from the trader's frontier? The trade was coeval with American discovery. The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani, Hudson, John Smith, all [ 13 ] trafficked for furs. The Plymouth pilgrims settled in Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was of beaver and lumber. The records of the various New England colonies show how steadily exploration was carried into the wilderness by this trade. What is true for New England is, as would be expected, even plainer for the rest of the colonies. All along the coast from Maine to Georgia the Indian trade opened up the river courses. Steadily the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and Clark, [13:1] Frémont, and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased fire-arms—a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome to the trader. "The savages," wrote La Salle, "take better care of us French than of their own children; from us only can they get guns and goods." This accounts for the trader's power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to the Indian increased power of resistance to the farming frontier. French colonization was dominated [ 14 ] by its trading frontier; English colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antagonism between the two frontiers as between the two nations. Said Duquesne to the Iroquois, "Are you ignorant of the difference between the king of England and the king of France? Go see the forts that our king has established and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night."

And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader's "trace;" the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the South, the Far West, and the Dominion of Canada. [14:1] The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature; and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the [ 15 ] wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. [15:1]

The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the Albany congress of 1754, called to treat with the Six Nations, and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of the plan proposed by the congress reveals the importance of the frontier. The powers of the general council and the officers were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous coöperation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that day to this, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.

It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. Travelers of the eighteenth century found the "cowpens" among the canebrakes and peavine pastures of the South, and the "cow drivers" took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. [16:1] Travelers at the close of the War of 1812 met droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Philadelphia market. [16:2] The ranges of the Great Plains, with ranch and cowboy and nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of to-day. The experience of the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension of the rancher's frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied.

The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance of the farmer's frontier, with tongues of settlement pushed forward and with indentations of wilderness. In part this is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of attraction may be mentioned the following: fertile and favorably situated soils, salt springs, mines, and army posts.

The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement. [16:3] In this [ 17 ] connection mention should also be made of the government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clark. [17:1] Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in western advance.

In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn [17:2] has traced the effect of salt upon early European development, and has pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the form of administration. A similar study might be made for the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. Writing in 1752, Bishop Spangenburg says of a colony for which he was seeking lands in North Carolina, "They will require salt & other necessaries which they can neither manufacture nor raise. Either they must go to Charleston, which is 300 miles distant . . . Or else they must go to Boling's Point in V a on a branch of the James & is also 300 miles from here  . . Or else they must go down the Roanoke—I know not how many miles—where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear." [17:3] This may serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to the coast. [17:4] This proved to be an important educational influence, since it was almost the [ 18 ] only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the East. But when discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha, and the Holston, and Kentucky, and central New York, the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was in part the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains.

From the time the mountains rose between the pioneer and the seaboard, a new order of Americanism arose. The West and the East began to get out of touch of each other. The settlements from the sea to the mountains kept connection with the rear and had a certain solidarity. But the over-mountain men grew more and more independent. The East took a narrow view of American advance, and nearly lost these men. Kentucky and Tennessee history bears abundant witness to the truth of this statement. The East began to try to hedge and limit westward expansion. Though Webster could declare that there were no Alleghanies in his politics, yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor.

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the farmer's frontier. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. Daniel Boone, the great backwoodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle-raiser, farmer, and surveyor—learning, probably from the traders, of the fertility of the lands of the upper Yadkin, where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way to the Indians, left his Pennsylvania home with his father, and passed down the [ 19 ] Great Valley road to that stream. Learning from a trader of the game and rich pastures of Kentucky, he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region. Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a landmark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks, and trails, and land. His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and his party are said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver. His grandson, Col. A. J. Boone, of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the government. Kit Carson's mother was a Boone. [19:1] Thus this family epitomizes the backwoodsman's advance across the continent.

The farmer's advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck's New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, occurs this suggestive passage:

Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the "range," and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a "truck patch." The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or "deadened," and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the [ 20 ] owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preëmption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he "breaks for the high timber," "clears out for the New Purchase," or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.

The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, school-houses, court-houses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life.

Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, [ 21 ] luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on.

A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society.

The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the West. Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners. [21:1]

Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly. Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, [ 22 ] and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the census of 1890 shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These States have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture. A decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward.

Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for.

First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the case from the early colonial days. The Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans, or "Pennsylvania Dutch," furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier. Governor Spotswood of Virginia writes in 1717, "The inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as servants, and, being out of their time, settle themselves where land is to be taken up and that will produce the necessarys of life with little labour." [22:1] Very generally these redemptioners were of [ 23 ] non-English stock. In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. Burke and other writers in the middle of the eighteenth century believed that Pennsylvania [23:1] was "threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in language, manners, and perhaps even inclinations." The German and Scotch-Irish elements in the frontier of the South were only less great. In the middle of the present century the German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German state out of the commonwealth by concentrating their colonization. [23:2] Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into a belief that the stock is also English.

In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England. The coast, particularly of the South, lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a dependence on the Northern colonies for articles of food. Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, writes in the middle of the eighteenth century: "Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little money and bills we could gather from other places for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with, which are settled with very industrious and thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a detriment to us." [23:3]

Before long the frontier created a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies directly to the consumer's wharfs, and carry away staple crops, and staple crops began to give way to diversified agriculture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier action upon the northern section is perceived when we realize how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore, to engage in rivalry for what Washington called "the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire."

The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the Civil War slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. But this does not justify Dr. von Holst (to take an example) in treating our constitutional history in its formative period down to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title "Constitutional History of the United States." The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his "History of the United States since the Compromise of 1850," has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle.

This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects. Over internal improvements occurred great debates, in which [ 25 ] grave constitutional questions were discussed. Sectional groupings appear in the votes, profoundly significant for the historian. Loose construction increased as the nation marched westward . [25:1] But the West was not content with bringing the farm to the factory. Under the lead of Clay—"Harry of the West"—protective tariffs were passed, with the cry of bringing the factory to the farm. The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier.

The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the government. The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the Ordinance of 1787, need no discussion. [25:2] Administratively the frontier called out some of the highest and most vitalizing activities of the general government. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. Lamar explained: "In 1789 the States were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the States."

When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale and disposal of the public lands we are again brought face to face with the frontier. The policy of the [ 26 ] United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. John Quincy Adams was obliged to confess: "My own system of administration, which was to make the national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing internal improvement, has failed." The reason is obvious; a system of administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land. Adams states the situation as follows: "The slaveholders of the South have bought the coöperation of the western country by the bribe of the western lands, abandoning to the new Western States their own proportion of the public property and aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands into their own hands." Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West. Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system. At the same time he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the States of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed both Houses of Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December, 1832, formally recommended that all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the States in which the lands are situated. [26:1]

"No subject," said Henry Clay, "which has presented itself to the present, or perhaps any preceding, Congress, is of greater magnitude than that of the public lands." When we [ 27 ] consider the far-reaching effects of the government's land policy upon political, economic, and social aspects of American life, we are disposed to agree with him. But this legislation was framed under frontier influences, and under the lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson. Said Senator Scott of Indiana in 1841: "I consider the preëmption law merely declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers."

It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff, and internal improvements—the American system of the nationalizing Whig party—was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs. But it was not merely in legislative action that the frontier worked against the sectionalism of the coast. The economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism. The men of the frontier had closer resemblances to the Middle region than to either of the other sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed-plot of frontier emigration, and, although she passed on her settlers along the Great Valley into the west of Virginia and the Carolinas, yet the industrial society of these Southern frontiersmen was always more like that of the Middle region than like that of the tide-water portion of the South, which later came to spread its industrial type throughout the South.

The Middle region, entered by New York harbor, was an open door to all Europe. The tide-water part of the South represented typical Englishmen, modified by a warm climate and servile labor, and living in baronial fashion on great plantations; New England stood for a special English movement—Puritanism. The Middle region was less English than the other sections. It had a wide mixture of nationalities, a varied society, the mixed town and county system of local government, a varied economic life, many religious sects. In short, it was a region mediating between New England and the South, [ 28 ] and the East and the West. It represented that composite nationality which the contemporary United States exhibits, that juxtaposition of non-English groups, occupying a valley or a little settlement, and presenting reflections of the map of Europe in their variety. It was democratic and nonsectional, if not national; "easy, tolerant, and contented;" rooted strongly in material prosperity. It was typical of the modern United States. It was least sectional, not only because it lay between North and South, but also because with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East and West as well as between North and South. Thus it became the typically American region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from the frontier by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way. [28:1]

The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South finally broke down the contrast between the "tide-water" region and the rest of the State, and based Southern interests on slavery. Before this process revealed its results the western portion of the South, which was akin to Pennsylvania in stock, society, and industry, showed tendencies to fall away from the faith of the fathers into internal improvement legislation and nationalism. In the Virginia convention of 1829-30, called to revise the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water counties, declared:

One of the main causes of discontent which led to this convention, that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the sentiments [ 29 ] of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal car.

It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the War of 1812, the West of Clay, and Benton and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson, shut off by the Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a solidarity of its own with national tendencies. [29:1] On the tide of the Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled into a nation. Interstate migration went steadily on—a process of cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle of the sections over slavery on the western frontier does not diminish the truth of this statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. It was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: "I believe this Government can not [ 30 ] endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all of one thing or all of the other." Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effect reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World.

But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article, [30:1] has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.

The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise became essential. It was western New York that forced an extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 1821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide-water [ 31 ] region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide-water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good and with all of its evil elements. [31:1] An interesting illustration of the tone of frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in the Virginia convention already referred to. A representative from western Virginia declared:

But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants. They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians ; and the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and uncontaminated.

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region whence emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency. [32:1] The West in the War of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of States. Thus each one of the periods of lax financial integrity coincides with periods when a new set of frontier communities had arisen, and coincides in area with these successive frontiers, for the most part. The recent Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a State that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the State. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest importance. [32:2]

The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic tributaries and allowed the "savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade should decrease." This called out Burke's splendid protest:

If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You can not station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with their habits of life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible [ 34 ] cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must, be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and blessing of Providence, "Increase and multiply." Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.

But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater Virginia [34:1] and South Carolina [34:2] gerrymandered those colonies to insure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest; Jefferson would reserve from settlement the territory of his Louisiana Purchase north of the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. "When we shall be full on this side," he writes, "we may lay off a range of States on the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply." Madison went so far as to argue to the French minister that the United States had no interest in seeing population extend itself on the right bank of the Mississippi, but should rather fear it. When the Oregon question was under debate, in 1824, Smyth, of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of States beyond the Mississippi, complaining that the seaboard States were being drained of the flower of their population by the [ 35 ] bringing of too much land into market. Even Thomas Benton, the man of widest views of the destiny of the West, at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge of the Rocky mountains "the western limits of the Republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down." [35:1] But the attempts to limit the boundaries, to restrict land sales and settlement, and to deprive the West of its share of political power were all in vain. Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World.

The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier came through its educational and religious activity, exerted by interstate migration and by organized societies. Speaking in 1835, Dr. Lyman Beecher declared: "It is equally plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West," and he pointed out that the population of the West "is assembled from all the States of the Union and from all the nations of Europe, and is rushing in like the waters of the flood, demanding for its moral preservation the immediate and universal action of those institutions which discipline the mind and arm the conscience and the heart. And so various are the opinions and habits, and so recent and imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse are the settlements of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in their utmost perfection and power. A nation is being 'born in a day.' . . . But what will become of the West if her prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of power, while those great institutions linger which are necessary to form the mind and the conscience [ 36 ] and the heart of that vast world. It must not be permitted. . . . Let no man at the East quiet himself and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the West. . . . Her destiny is our destiny." [36:1]

With the appeal to the conscience of New England, he adds appeals to her fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The New England preacher and school-teacher left their mark on the West. The dread of Western emancipation from New England's political and economic control was paralleled by her fears lest the West cut loose from her religion. Commenting in 1850 on reports that settlement was rapidly extending northward in Wisconsin, the editor of the Home Missionary writes: "We scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our settlements. While we sympathize in whatever tends to increase the physical resources and prosperity of our country, we can not forget that with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter corners of the land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and less." Acting in accordance with such ideas, home missions were established and Western colleges were erected. As seaboard cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore strove for the mastery of Western trade, so the various denominations strove for the possession of the West. Thus an intellectual stream from New England sources fertilized the West. Other sections sent their missionaries; but the real struggle was between sects. The contest for power and the expansive tendency furnished to the various sects by the existence of a moving frontier must have had important results on the character of religious organization in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The religious aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which needs study.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; [37:1] that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the [ 38 ] frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

[1:1] A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, July 12, 1893. It first appeared in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, with the following note: "The foundation of this paper is my article entitled 'Problems in American History,' which appeared in The Ægis , a publication of the students of the University of Wisconsin, November 4, 1892. . . . It is gratifying to find that Professor Woodrow Wilson—whose volume on 'Division and Reunion' in the Epochs of American History Series, has an appreciative estimate of the importance of the West as a factor in American history—accepts some of the views set forth in the papers above mentioned, and enhances their value by his lucid and suggestive treatment of them in his article in The Forum , December, 1893, reviewing Goldwin Smith's 'History of the United States.'" The present text is that of the Report of the American Historical Association for 1893, 199-227. It was printed with additions in the Fifth Year Book of the National Herbart Society , and in various other publications.

[2:1] "Abridgment of Debates of Congress," v, p. 706.

[5:1] Bancroft (1860 ed.), iii, pp. 344, 345, citing Logan MSS.; [Mitchell] "Contest in America," etc. (1752), p. 237.

[5:2] Kercheval, "History of the Valley"; Bernheim, "German Settlements in the Carolinas"; Winsor, "Narrative and Critical History of America," v, p. 304; Colonial Records of North Carolina, iv, p. xx; Weston, "Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina," p. 82; Ellis and Evans, "History of Lancaster County, Pa.," chs. iii, xxvi.

[5:3] Parkman, "Pontiac," ii; Griffis, "Sir William Johnson," p. 6; Simms's "Frontiersmen of New York."

[5:4] Monette, "Mississippi Valley," i, p. 311.

[5:5] Wis. Hist. Cols., xi, p. 50; Hinsdale, "Old Northwest," p. 121; Burke, "Oration on Conciliation," Works (1872 ed.), i, p. 473.

[5:6] Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," and citations there given; Cutler's "Life of Cutler."

[6:1] Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxviii, pl. 13; McMaster, "Hist. of People of U. S.," i, pp. 4, 60, 61; Imlay and Filson, "Western Territory of America" (London, 1793); Rochefoucault-Liancourt, "Travels Through the United States of North America" (London, 1799); Michaux's "Journal," in Proceedings American Philosophical Society , xxvi, No. 129; Forman, "Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1780-'90" (Cincinnati, 1888); Bartram, "Travels Through North Carolina," etc. (London, 1792); Pope, "Tour Through the Southern and Western Territories," etc. (Richmond, 1792); Weld, "Travels Through the States of North America" (London, 1799); Baily, "Journal of a Tour in the Unsettled States of North America, 1796-'97" (London, 1856); Pennsylvania Magazine of History, July, 1886; Winsor, "Narrative and Critical History of America," vii, pp. 491, 492, citations.

[6:2] Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxix.

[6:3] Turner, "Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin" (Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series ix), pp. 61 ff.

[7:1] Monette, "History of the Mississippi Valley," ii; Flint, "Travels and Residence in Mississippi," Flint, "Geography and History of the Western States," "Abridgment of Debates of Congress," vii, pp. 397, 398, 404; Holmes, "Account of the U. S."; Kingdom, "America and the British Colonies" (London, 1820); Grund, "Americans," ii, chs. i, iii, vi (although writing in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew out of western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck, "Guide for Emigrants" (Boston, 1831); Darby, "Emigrants' Guide to Western and Southwestern States and Territories"; Dana, "Geographical Sketches in the Western Country"; Kinzie, "Waubun"; Keating, "Narrative of Long's Expedition"; Schoolcraft, "Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi River," "Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley," and "Lead Mines of the Missouri"; Andreas, "History of Illinois," i, 86-99; Hurlbut, "Chicago Antiquities"; McKenney, "Tour to the Lakes"; Thomas, "Travels Through the Western Country," etc. (Auburn, N. Y., 1819).

[7:2] Darby, "Emigrants' Guide," pp. 272 ff; Benton, "Abridgment of Debates," vii, p. 397.

[7:3] De Bow's Review , iv, p. 254; xvii, p. 428.

[7:4] Grund, "Americans," ii, p. 8.

[8:1] Peck, "New Guide to the West" (Cincinnati, 1848), ch. iv; Parkman, "Oregon Trail"; Hall, "The West" (Cincinnati, 1848); Pierce, "Incidents of Western Travel"; Murray, "Travels in North America"; Lloyd, "Steamboat Directory" (Cincinnati, 1856); "Forty Days in a Western Hotel" (Chicago), in Putnam's Magazine , December, 1894; Mackay, "The Western World," ii, ch. ii, iii; Meeker, "Life in the West"; Bogen, "German in America" (Boston, 1851); Olmstead, "Texas Journey"; Greeley, "Recollections of a Busy Life"; Schouler, "History of the United States," v, 261-267; Peyton, "Over the Alleghanies and Across the Prairies" (London, 1870); Loughborough, "The Pacific Telegraph and Railway" (St. Louis, 1849); Whitney, "Project for a Railroad to the Pacific" (New York, 1849); Peyton, "Suggestions on Railroad Communication with the Pacific, and the Trade of China and the Indian Islands"; Benton, "Highway to the Pacific" (a speech delivered in the U. S. Senate, December 16, 1850).

[8:2] A writer in The Home Missionary (1850), p. 239, reporting Wisconsin conditions, exclaims: "Think of this, people of the enlightened East. What an example, to come from the very frontier of civilization!" But one of the missionaries writes: "In a few years Wisconsin will no longer be considered as the West, or as an outpost of civilization, any more than Western New York, or the Western Reserve."

[8:3] Bancroft (H. H.), "History of California," "History of Oregon," and "Popular Tribunals"; Shinn, "Mining Camps."

[10:1] See the suggestive paper by Prof. Jesse Macy, "The Institutional Beginnings of a Western State."

[10:2] Shinn, "Mining Camps."

[10:3] Compare Thorpe, in Annals American Academy of Political and Social Science , September, 1891; Bryce, "American Commonwealth" (1888), ii, p. 689.

[11:1] Loria, Analisi della Proprieta Capitalista, ii, p. 15.

[11:2] Compare "Observations on the North American Land Company," London, 1796, pp. xv, 144; Logan, "History of Upper South Carolina," i, pp. 149-151; Turner, "Character and Influence of Indian Trade in Wisconsin," p. 18; Peck, "New Guide for Emigrants" (Boston, 1837), ch. iv; "Compendium Eleventh Census," i, p. xl.

[12:1] See post , for illustrations of the political accompaniments of changed industrial conditions.

[13:1] But Lewis and Clark were the first to explore the route from the Missouri to the Columbia.

[14:1] "Narrative and Critical History of America," viii, p. 10; Sparks' "Washington Works," ix, pp. 303, 327; Logan, "History of Upper South Carolina," i; McDonald, "Life of Kenton," p. 72; Cong. Record, xxiii, p. 57.

[15:1] On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of migration, see the author's "Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin."

[16:1] Lodge, "English Colonies," p. 152 and citations; Logan, "Hist. of Upper South Carolina," i, p. 151.

[16:2] Flint, "Recollections," p. 9.

[16:3] See Monette, "Mississippi Valley," i, p. 344.

[17:1] Coues', "Lewis and Clark's Expedition," i, pp. 2, 253-259; Benton, in Cong. Record, xxiii, p. 57.

[17:2] Hehn, Das Salz (Berlin, 1873).

[17:3] Col. Records of N. C., v, p. 3.

[17:4] Findley, "History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Year 1794" (Philadelphia, 1796), p. 35.

[19:1] Hale, "Daniel Boone" (pamphlet).

[21:1] Compare Baily, "Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America" (London, 1856), pp. 217-219, where a similar analysis is made for 1796. See also Collot, "Journey in North America" (Paris, 1826), p. 109; "Observations on the North American Land Company" (London, 1796), pp. xv, 144; Logan, "History of Upper South Carolina."

[22:1] "Spotswood Papers," in Collections of Virginia Historical Society, i, ii.

[23:1] [Burke], "European Settlements" (1765 ed.), ii, p. 200.

[23:2] Everest, in "Wisconsin Historical Collections," xii, pp. 7 ff.

[23:3] Weston, "Documents connected with History of South Carolina," p. 61.

[25:1] See, for example, the speech of Clay, in the House of Representatives, January 30, 1824.

[25:2] See the admirable monograph by Prof. H. B. Adams, "Maryland's Influence on the Land Cessions"; and also President Welling, in Papers American Historical Association, iii, p. 411.

[26:1] Adams' Memoirs, ix, pp. 247, 248.

[28:1] Author's article in The Ægis (Madison, Wis.), November 4, 1892.

[29:1] Compare Roosevelt, "Thomas Benton," ch. i.

[30:1] Political Science Quarterly , ii, p. 457. Compare Sumner, "Alexander Hamilton," chs. ii-vii.

[31:1] Compare Wilson, "Division and Reunion," pp. 15, 24.

[32:1] On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation, see Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, ch. iii.

[32:2] I have refrained from dwelling on the lawless characteristics of the frontier, because they are sufficiently well known. The gambler and desperado, the regulators of the Carolinas and the vigilantes of California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of advancing civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous organs of authority where legal authority was absent. Compare Barrows, "United States of Yesterday and To-morrow"; Shinn, "Mining Camps"; and Bancroft, "Popular Tribunals." The humor, bravery, and rude strength, as well as the vices of the frontier in its worst aspect, have left traces on American character, language, and literature, not soon to be effaced.

[34:1] Debates in the Constitutional Convention, 1829-1830.

[34:2] [McCrady] Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas, i, p. 43; Calhoun's Works, i, pp. 401-406.

[35:1] Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, i, 721.

[36:1] Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 11 ff.

[37:1] Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them. Compare Sumner, "Alexander Hamilton," p. 98, and Adams, "History of the United States," i, p. 60; ix, pp. 240, 241. The transition appears to become marked at the close of the War of 1812, a period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the West was noted for restless energy. Grund, "Americans," ii, ch. i.

The First Official Frontier of the Massachusetts Bay [39:1]

In the Significance of the "Frontier in American History," I took for my text the following announcement of the Superintendent of the Census of 1890:

Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, the westward movement, etc., it cannot therefore any longer have a place in the census reports.

Two centuries prior to this announcement, in 1690, a committee of the General Court of Massachusetts recommended the Court to order what shall be the frontier and to maintain a committee to settle garrisons on the frontier with forty soldiers to each frontier town as a main guard. [39:2] In the two hundred years between this official attempt to locate the Massachusetts frontier line, and the official announcement of the ending of the national frontier line, westward expansion was the most important single process in American history.

The designation "frontier town" was not, however, a new one. As early as 1645 inhabitants of Concord, Sudbury, and [ 40 ] Dedham, "being inland townes & but thinly peopled," were forbidden to remove without authority; [40:1] in 1669, certain towns had been the subject of legislation as "frontier towns;" [40:2] and in the period of King Philip's War there were various enactments regarding frontier towns. [40:3] In the session of 1675-6 it had been proposed to build a fence of stockades or stone eight feet high from the Charles "where it is navigable" to the Concord at Billerica and thence to the Merrimac and down the river to the Bay, "by which meanes that whole tract will [be] environed, for the security & safty (vnder God) of the people, their houses, goods & cattel; from the rage & fury of the enimy." [40:4] This project, however, of a kind of Roman Wall did not appeal to the frontiersmen of the time. It was a part of the antiquated ideas of defense which had been illustrated by the impossible equipment of the heavily armored soldier of the early Puritan régime whose corslets and head pieces, pikes, matchlocks, fourquettes and bandoleers, went out of use about the period of King Philip's War. The fifty-seven postures provided in the approved manual of arms for loading and firing the matchlock proved too great a handicap in the chase of the nimble savage. In this era the frontier fighter adapted himself to a more open order, and lighter equipment suggested by the Indian warrior's practice. [40:5]

The settler on the outskirts of Puritan civilization took up the task of bearing the brunt of attack and pushing forward the line of advance which year after year carried American settlements [ 41 ] into the wilderness. In American thought and speech the term "frontier" has come to mean the edge of settlement, rather than, as in Europe, the political boundary. By 1690 it was already evident that the frontier of settlement and the frontier of military defense were coinciding. As population advanced into the wilderness and thus successively brought new exposed areas between the settlements on the one side and the Indians with their European backers on the other, the military frontier ceased to be thought of as the Atlantic coast, but rather as a moving line bounding the un-won wilderness. It could not be a fortified boundary along the charter limits, for those limits extended to the South Sea, and conflicted with the bounds of sister colonies. The thing to be defended was the outer edge of this expanding society, a changing frontier, one that needed designation and re-statement with the changing location of the "West."

It will help to illustrate the significance of this new frontier when we see that Virginia at about the same time as Massachusetts underwent a similar change and attempted to establish frontier towns, or "co-habitations," at the "heads," that is the first falls, the vicinity of Richmond, Petersburg, etc., of her rivers. [41:1]

The Virginia system of "particular plantations" introduced along the James at the close of the London Company's activity had furnished a type for the New England town. In recompense, at this later day the New England town may have furnished a model for Virginia's efforts to create frontier settlements by legislation.

An act of March 12, 1694-5, by the General Court of Massachusetts enumerated the "Frontier Towns" which the inhabitants were forbidden to desert on pain of loss of their lands (if landholders) or of imprisonment (if not landholders), unless permission to remove were first obtained. [42:1] These eleven frontier towns included Wells, York, and Kittery on the eastern frontier, and Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable, Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough, [42:2] and Deerfield. In March, 1699-1700, the law was reënacted with the addition of Brookfield, Mendon, and Woodstock, together with seven others, Salisbury, Andover, [42:3] Billerica, Hatfield, Hadley, Westfield, and Northampton, which, "tho' they be not frontiers as those towns first named, yet lye more open than many others to an attack of an Enemy." [42:4]

In the spring of 1704 the General Court of Connecticut, following closely the act of Massachusetts, named as her frontier [ 43 ] towns, not to be deserted, Symsbury, Waterbury, Danbury, Colchester, Windham, Mansfield, and Plainfield.

Thus about the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century there was an officially designated frontier line for New England. The line passing through these enumerated towns represents: (1) the outskirts of settlement along the eastern coast and up the Merrimac and its tributaries,—a region threatened from the Indian country by way of the Winnepesaukee Lake; (2) the end of the ribbon of settlement up the Connecticut Valley, menaced by the Canadian Indians by way of the Lake Champlain and Winooski River route to the Connecticut; (3) boundary towns which marked the edges of that inferior agricultural region, where the hard crystalline rocks furnished a later foundation for Shays' Rebellion, opposition to the adoption of the Federal Constitution, and the abandoned farm; and (4) the isolated intervale of Brookfield which lay intermediate between these frontiers.

Besides this New England frontier there was a belt of settlement in New York, ascending the Hudson to where Albany and Schenectady served as outposts against the Five Nations, who menaced the Mohawk, and against the French and the Canadian Indians, who threatened the Hudson by way of Lake Champlain and Lake George. [43:1] The sinister relations of leading citizens of Albany engaged in the fur trade with these Indians, even during time of war, tended to protect the Hudson River frontier at the expense of the frontier towns of New England.

The common sequence of frontier types (fur trader, [ 44 ] cattle-raising pioneer, small primitive farmer, and the farmer engaged in intensive varied agriculture to produce a surplus for export) had appeared, though confusedly, in New England. The traders and their posts had prepared the way for the frontier towns, [44:1] and the cattle industry was most important to the early farmers. [44:2] But the stages succeeded rapidly and intermingled. After King Philip's War, while Albany was still in the fur-trading stage, the New England frontier towns were rather like mark colonies, military-agricultural outposts against the Indian enemy.

The story of the border warfare between Canada and the frontier towns furnishes ample material for studying frontier life and institutions; but I shall not attempt to deal with the narrative of the wars. The palisaded meeting-house square, the fortified isolated garrison houses, the massacres and captivities are familiar features of New England's history. The Indian was a very real influence upon the mind and morals as well as upon the institutions of frontier New England. The occasional instances of Puritans returning from captivity to visit the frontier towns, Catholic in religion, painted and garbed as Indians and speaking the Indian tongue, [44:3] and the half-breed children of captive Puritan mothers, tell a sensational part of the story; but in the normal, as well as in such exceptional relations of the frontier townsmen to the Indians, [ 45 ] there are clear evidences of the transforming influence of the Indian frontier upon the Puritan type of English colonist.

In 1703-4, for example, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered five hundred pairs of snowshoes and an equal number of moccasins for use in specified counties "lying Frontier next to the Wilderness." [45:1] Connecticut in 1704 after referring to her frontier towns and garrisons ordered that "said company of English and Indians shall, from time to time at the discretion of their chief co[=m]ander, range the woods to indevour the discovery of an approaching enemy, and in especiall manner from Westfield to Ousatunnuck. [45:2]  . . . And for the incouragement of our forces gone or going against the enemy, this Court will allow out of the publick treasurie the su[=m]e of five pounds for every mans scalp of the enemy killed in this Colonie." [45:3] Massachusetts offered bounties for scalps, varying in amount according to whether the scalp was of men, or women and youths, and whether it was taken by regular forces under pay, volunteers in service, or volunteers without pay. [45:4] One of the most striking phases of frontier adjustment, was the proposal of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton in the fall of 1703, urging the use of dogs "to hunt Indians as they do Bears." The argument was that the dogs would catch many an Indian who would be too light of foot for the townsmen, nor was it to be thought of as inhuman; for the Indians "act like wolves and are to be dealt with as wolves." [45:5] In fact Massachusetts passed an act in 1706 for the raising and increasing of dogs for the better security of the frontiers, and [ 46 ] both Massachusetts and Connecticut in 1708 paid money from their treasury for the trailing of dogs. [46:1]

Thus we come to familiar ground: the Massachusetts frontiersman like his western successor hated the Indians; the "tawney serpents," of Cotton Mather's phrase, were to be hunted down and scalped in accord with law and, in at least one instance by the chaplain himself, a Harvard graduate, the hero of the Ballad of Pigwacket, who

Within the area bounded by the frontier line, were the broken fragments of Indians defeated in the era of King Philip's War, restrained within reservations, drunken and degenerate survivors, among whom the missionaries worked with small results, a vexation to the border towns, [46:3] as they were in the case of later frontiers. Although, as has been said, the frontier towns had scattered garrison houses, and palisaded enclosures similar to the neighborhood forts, or stations, of Kentucky in the Revolution, and of Indiana and Illinois in the War of 1812, one difference is particularly noteworthy. In the case of frontiersmen who came down from Pennsylvania into the Upland South along the eastern edge of the Alleghanies, as well as in the more obvious case of the backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee, the frontier towns were too isolated from the main settled regions to allow much military protection [ 47 ] by the older areas. On the New England frontier, because it was adjacent to the coast towns, this was not the case, and here, as in seventeenth century Virginia, great activity in protecting the frontier was evinced by the colonial authorities, and the frontier towns themselves called loudly for assistance. This phase of frontier defense needs a special study, but at present it is sufficient to recall that the colony sent garrisons to the frontier besides using the militia of the frontier towns; and that it employed rangers to patrol from garrison to garrison. [47:1]

These were prototypes of the regular army post, and of rangers, dragoons, cavalry and mounted police who have carried the remoter military frontier forward. It is possible to trace this military cordon from New England to the Carolinas early in the eighteenth century, still neighboring the coast; by 1840 it ran from Fort Snelling on the upper Mississippi through various posts to the Sabine boundary of Texas, and so it passed forward until to-day it lies at the edge of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean.

A few examples of frontier appeals for garrison aid will help to an understanding of the early form of the military frontier. Wells asks, June 30, 1689:

1 That yo r Hon rs will please to send us speedily twenty Eight good brisk men that may be serviceable as a guard to us whilest we get in our Harvest of Hay & Corn, (we being unable to Defend ourselves & to Do our work), & also to Persue & destroy the Enemy as occasion may require

2 That these men may be compleatly furnished with [ 48 ] Arms, Amunition & Provision, and that upon the Countrys account, it being a Generall War. [48:1]

Dunstable, "still weak and unable both to keep our Garrisons and to send out men to get hay for our Cattle; without doeing which wee cannot subsist," petitioned July 23, 1689, for twenty footmen for a month "to scout about the towne while wee get our hay." Otherwise, they say, they must be forced to leave. [48:2] Still more indicative of this temper is the petition of Lancaster, March 11, 1675-6, to the Governor and Council: "As God has made you father over us so you will have a father's pity to us." They asked a guard of men and aid, without which they must leave. [48:3] Deerfield pled in 1678 to the General Court, "unlest you will be pleased to take us (out of your fatherlike pitty) and Cherish us in yo r Bosomes we are like Suddainly to breathe out o r Last Breath." [48:4]

The perils of the time, the hardships of the frontier towns and readiness of this particular frontier to ask appropriations for losses and wounds, [48:5] are abundantly illustrated in similar petitions from other towns. One is tempted at times to attribute the very frank self-pity and dependent attitude to a minister's phrasing, and to the desire to secure remission of taxes, the latter a frontier trait more often associated with riot than with religion in other regions.

As an example of various petitions the following from Groton in 1704 is suggestive. Here the minister's hand is probably absent:

1 That wharas by the all dessposing hand of god who orders all things in infinit wisdom it is our [ 49 ] portion to liue In such a part of the land which by reson of the enemy Is becom vary dangras as by wofull experiants we haue falt both formarly and of late to our grat damidg & discoridgment and espashaly this last yere hauing lost so many parsons som killed som captauated and som remoued and allso much corn & cattell and horses & hay wharby wee ar gratly Impouerrished and brought uary low & in a uary pore capasity to subsist any longer As the barers her of can inform your honors

2 And more then all this our paster mr hobard is & hath been for aboue a yere uncapable of desspansing the ordinances of god amongst us & we haue advised with th Raurant Elders of our nayboring churches and they aduise to hyare another minister and to saport mr hobard and to make our adras to your honours we haue but litel laft to pay our deus with being so pore and few In numbr ather to town or cuntrey & we being a frantere town & lyable to dangor there being no safty in going out nor coming in but for a long time we haue got our brad with the parel of our liues & allso broght uery low by so grat a charg of bilding garisons & fortefycations by ordur of athorety & thar is saural of our Inhabitants ramoued out of town & others are prouiding to remoue, axcapt somthing be don for our Incoridgment for we are so few & so por that we canot pay two ministors nathar ar we wiling to liue without any we spand so much time in waching and warding that we can doe but litel els & truly we haue liued allmost 2 yers more like soulders then other wise & accapt [ 50 ] your honars can find out some bater way for our safty and support we cannot uphold as a town ather by remitting our tax or tow alow pay for building the sauarall forts alowed and ordred by athority or alls to alow the one half of our own Inhabitants to be under pay or to grant liberty for our remufe Into our naiburing towns to tak cer for oursalfs all which if your honors shall se meet to grant you will hereby gratly incoridg your humble pateceners to conflect with th many trubls we are ensadant unto. [50:1]

Forced together into houses for protection, getting in their crops at the peril of their lives, the frontier townsmen felt it a hardship to contribute also to the taxes of the province [ 51 ] while they helped to protect the exposed frontier. In addition there were grievances of absentee proprietors who paid no town taxes and yet profited by the exertions of the frontiersmen; of that I shall speak later.

If we were to trust to these petitions asking favors from the government of the colony, we might impute to these early frontiersmen a degree of submission to authority unlike that of other frontiersmen, [51:1] and indeed not wholly warranted by the facts. Reading carefully, we find that, however prudently phrased, the petitions are in fact complaints against taxation; demands for expenditures by the colony in their behalf; criticisms of absentee proprietors; intimations that they may be forced to abandon the frontier position so essential to the defense of the settled eastern country.

The spirit of military insubordination characteristic of the frontier is evident in the accounts of these towns, such as Pynchon's in 1694, complaining of the decay of the fortifications at Hatfield, Hadley, and Springfield: "the people a little wilful. Inclined to doe when and how they please or not at all." [51:2] Saltonstall writes from Haverhill about the same time regarding his ill success in recruiting: "I will never plead for an Haverhill man more," and he begs that some meet person be sent "to tell us what we should, may or must do. I have laboured in vain: some go this, and that, and the other way at pleasure, and do what they list." [51:3] This has a familiar ring to the student of the frontier.

As in the case of the later frontier also, the existence of a [ 52 ] common danger on the borders of settlement tended to consolidate not only the towns of Massachusetts into united action for defense, but also the various colonies. The frontier was an incentive to sectional combination then as it was to nationalism afterward. When in 1692 Connecticut sent soldiers from her own colony to aid the Massachusetts towns on the Connecticut River, [52:1] she showed a realization that the Deerfield people, who were "in a sense in the enemy's Mouth almost," as Pynchon wrote, constituted her own frontier [52:2] and that the facts of geography were more compelling than arbitrary colonial boundaries. Thereby she also took a step that helped to break down provincial antagonisms. When in 1689 Massachusetts and Connecticut sent agents to Albany to join with New York in making presents to the Indians of that colony in order to engage their aid against the French, [52:3] they recognized (as their leaders put it) that Albany was "the hinge" of the frontier in this exposed quarter. In thanking Connecticut for the assistance furnished in 1690 Livingston said: "I hope your honors do not look upon Albany as Albany, but as the frontier of your honor's Colony and of all their Majesties countries." [52:4]

The very essence of the American frontier is that it is the graphic line which records the expansive energies of the people behind it, and which by the law of its own being continually draws that advance after it to new conquests. This is one of the most significant things about New England's frontier in these years. That long blood-stained line of the eastern frontier which skirted the Maine coast was of great [ 53 ] importance, for it imparted a western tone to the life and characteristics of the Maine people which endures to this day, and it was one line of advance for New England toward the mouth of the St. Lawrence, leading again and again to diplomatic negotiations with the powers that held that river. The line of the towns that occupied the waters of the Merrimac, tempted the province continually into the wilderness of New Hampshire. The Connecticut river towns pressed steadily up that stream, along its tributaries into the Hoosatonic valleys, and into the valleys between the Green Mountains of Vermont. By the end of 1723, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted,—

That It will be of Great Service to all the Western Frontiers, both in this and the Neighboring Government of Conn., to Build a Block House above Northfield, in the most convenient Place on the Lands called the Equivilant Lands, & to post in it forty Able Men, English & Western Indians, to be employed in Scouting at a Good Distance up Conn. River, West River, Otter Creek, and sometimes Eastwardly above the Great Manadnuck, for the Discovery of the Enemy Coming towards anny of the frontier Towns . [53:1]

The "frontier Towns" were preparing to swarm. It was not long before Fort Dummer replaced "the Block House," and the Berkshires and Vermont became new frontiers.

The Hudson River likewise was recognized as another line of advance pointing the way to Lake Champlain and Montreal, calling out demands that protection should be secured by means of an aggressive advance of the frontier. Canada [ 54 ] delenda est became the rallying cry in New England as well as in New York, and combined diplomatic pressure and military expeditions followed in the French and Indian wars and in the Revolution, in which the children of the Connecticut and Massachusetts frontier towns, acclimated to Indian fighting, followed Ethan Allen and his fellows to the north. [54:1]

Having touched upon some of the military and expansive tendencies of this first official frontier, let us next turn to its social, economic, and political aspects. How far was this first frontier a field for the investment of eastern capital and for political control by it? Were there evidences of antagonism between the frontier and the settled, property-holding classes of the coast? Restless democracy, resentfulness over taxation and control, and recriminations between the Western pioneer and the Eastern capitalist, have been characteristic features of other frontiers: were similar phenomena in evidence here? Did "Populistic" tendencies appear in this frontier, and were there grievances which explained these tendencies? [54:2]

In such colonies as New York and Virginia the land grants were often made to members of the Council and their influential friends, even when there were actual settlers already on the grants. In the case of New England the land system is usually so described as to give the impression that it was based on a [ 55 ] non-commercial policy, creating new Puritan towns by free grants of land made in advance to approved settlers. This description does not completely fit the case. That there was an economic interest on the part of absentee proprietors, and that men of political influence with the government were often among the grantees seems also to be true. Melville Egleston states the case thus: "The court was careful not to authorize new plantations unless they were to be in a measure under the influence of men in whom confidence could be placed, and commonly acted upon their application." [55:1] The frontier, as we shall observe later, was not always disposed to see the practice in so favorable a light.

New towns seem to have been the result in some cases of the aggregation of settlers upon and about a large private grant; more often they resulted from settlers in older towns, where the town limits were extensive, spreading out to the good lands of the outskirts, beyond easy access to the meeting-house, and then asking recognition as a separate town. In some cases they may have been due to squatting on unassigned lands, or purchasing the Indian title and then asking confirmation. In others grants were made in advance of settlement.

As early as 1636 the General Court had ordered that none go to new plantations without leave of a majority of the magistrates. [55:2] This made the legal situation clear, but it would be dangerous to conclude that it represented the actual situation. In any case there would be a necessity for the settlers finally to secure the assent of the Court. This could be facilitated by a grant to leading men having political influence with the magistrates. The complaints of absentee proprietors which find expression in the frontier petitions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century seems to indicate that [ 56 ] this happened. In the succeeding years of the eighteenth century the grants to leading men and the economic and political motives in the grants are increasingly evident. This whole topic should be made the subject of special study. What is here offered is merely suggestive of a problem. [56:1]

The frontier settlers criticized the absentee proprietors, who profited by the pioneers' expenditure of labor and blood upon their farms, while they themselves enjoyed security in an eastern town. A few examples from town historians will illustrate this. Among the towns of the Merrimac Valley, Salisbury was planted on the basis of a grant to a dozen proprietors including such men as Mr. Bradstreet and the younger Dudley, only two of whom actually lived and died in Salisbury. [56:2] Amesbury was set off from Salisbury by division, one half of the signers of the agreement signing by mark. Haverhill was first seated in 1641, following petitions from Mr. Ward, the Ipswich minister, his son-in-law, Giles Firmin, and others. Firmin's letter to Governor Winthrop, in 1640, complains that Ipswich had given him his ground in that town on condition that he should stay in the town three years or else he could not sell it, "whenas others have no business but range from place to place on purpose to live upon the countrey." [56:3]

Dunstable's large grant was brought about by a combination of leading men who had received grants after the survey of 1652; among such grants was one to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and another to Thomas Brattle of Boston. Apparently it was settled chiefly by others than the [ 57 ] original grantees. [57:1] Groton voted in 1685 to sue the "non-Residenc" to assist in paying the rate, and in 1679 the General Court had ordered non-residents having land at Groton to pay rates for their lands as residents did. [57:2] Lancaster (Nashaway) was granted to proprietors including various craftsmen in iron, indicating, perhaps, an expectation of iron works, and few of the original proprietors actually settled in the town. [57:3] The grant of 1653-4 was made by the Court after reciting: (1) that it had ordered in 1647 that the "ordering and disposeing of the Plantation at Nashaway is wholly in the Courts power"; (2) "Considering that there is allredy at Nashaway about nine Families and that severall both freemen and others intend to goe and setle there, some whereof are named in this Petition," etc.

Mendon, begun in 1660 by Braintree people, is a particularly significant example. In 1681 the inhabitants petitioned that while they are not "of the number of those who dwell in their ceiled houses & yet say the time is not come that the Lord's house should be built," yet they have gone outside of their strength "unless others who are proprietors as well as ourselves, (the price of whose lands is much raysed by our carrying on public work & will be nothing worth if we are forced to quit the place) doo beare an equal share in Town charges with us. Those who are not yet come up to us are a great and far yet abler part of our Proprietors . . ." [57:4] In 1684 the selectmen inform the General Court that one half of the proprietors, two only excepted, are dwelling in other places, "Our proprietors, abroad," say they, "object that they see no reason why they should pay as much for thayer lands as we do for [ 58 ] our Land and stock, which we answer that if their be not a noff of reason for it, we are sure there is more than enough of necessity to supply that is wanting in reason." [58:1] This is the authentic voice of the frontier.

Deerfield furnishes another type, inasmuch as a considerable part of its land was first held by Dedham, to which the grant was made as a recompense for the location of the Natick Indian reservation. Dedham shares in the town often fell into the hands of speculators, and Sheldon, the careful historian of Deerfield, declares that not a single Dedham man became a permanent resident of the grant. In 1678 Deerfield petitioned the General Court as follows:

You may be pleased to know that the very principle & best of the land; the best for soile; the best for situation; as lying in y e centre & midle of the town: & as to quantity, nere half, belongs unto eight or 9 proprietors each and every of which, are never like to come to a settlement amongst us, which we have formerly found grievous & doe Judge for the future will be found intollerable if not altered. O r minister, Mr. Mather . . . & we ourselves are much discouraged as judging the Plantation will be spoiled if thes proprietors may not be begged, or will not be bought up on very easy terms outt of their Right . . . Butt as long as the maine of the plantation Lies in men's hands that can't improve it themselves, neither are ever like to [ 59 ] putt such tenants on to it as shall be likely to advance the good of y e place in Civill or sacred Respects; he, ourselves, and all others that think of going to it, are much discouraged. [59:1]

Woodstock, later a Connecticut town, was settled under a grant in the Nipmuc country made to the town of Roxbury. The settlers, who located their farms near the trading post about which the Indians still collected, were called the "go-ers," while the "stayers" were those who remained in Roxbury, and retained half of the new grant; but it should be added that they paid the go-ers a sum of money to facilitate the settlement.

This absentee proprietorship and the commercial attitude toward the lands of new towns became more evident in succeeding years of the eighteenth century. Leicester, for example, was confirmed by the General Court in 1713. The twenty shares were divided among twenty-two proprietors, including Jeremiah Dummer, Paul Dudley (Attorney-General), William Dudley (like Paul a son of the Governor, Joseph Dudley), Thomas Hutchinson (father of the later Governor), John Clark (the political leader), and Samuel Sewall (son of the Chief Justice). These were all men of influence, and none of the proprietors became inhabitants of Leicester. The proprietors tried to induce the fifty families, whose settlement was one of the conditions on which the grant was made, to occupy the eastern half of the township reserving the rest as their absolute property. [59:2]

The author of a currency tract, in 1716, entitled "Some [ 60 ] Considerations upon the Several Sorts of Banks," remarks that formerly, when land was easy to be obtained, good men came over as indentured servants; but now, he says, they are runaways, thieves, and disorderly persons. The remedy for this, in his opinion, would be to induce servants to come over by offering them homes when the terms of indenture should expire. [60:1] He therefore advocates that townships should be laid out four or five miles square in which grants of fifty or sixty acres could be made to servants. [60:2] Concern over the increase of negro slaves in Massachusetts seems to have been the reason for this proposal. It indicates that the current practice in disposing of the lands did not provide for the poorer people.

But Massachusetts did not follow this suggestion of a homestead policy. On the contrary, the desire to locate towns to create continuous lines of settlement along the roads between the disconnected frontiers and to protect boundary claims by granting tiers of towns in the disputed tract, as well, no doubt, as pressure from financial interests, led the General Court between 1715 and 1762 to dispose of the remaining public domain of Massachusetts under conditions that made speculation and colonization by capitalists important factors. [60:3] When in 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of townships in the Berkshires to the highest bidders (by whole townships), [60:4] the transfer from the social-religious to the economic conception [ 61 ] was complete, and the frontier was deeply influenced by the change to "land mongering."

In one respect, however, there was an increasing recognition of the religious and social element in settling the frontier, due in part, no doubt, to a desire to provide for the preservation of eastern ideals and influences in the West. Provisions for reserving lands within the granted townships for the support of an approved minister, and for schools, appear in the seventeenth century and become a common feature of the grants for frontier towns in the eighteenth. [61:1] This practice with respect to the New England frontier became the foundation for the system of grants of land from the public domain for the support of common schools and state universities by the federal government from its beginning, and has been profoundly influential in later Western States.

Another ground for discontent over land questions was furnished by the system of granting lands within the town by the commoners. The principle which in many, if not all, cases guided the proprietors in distributing the town lots is familiar and is well stated in the Lancaster town records (1653):

And, whereas Lotts are Now Laid out for the most part Equally to Rich and poore, Partly to keepe the Towne from Scatering to farr, and partly out of Charitie and Respect to men of meaner estate, yet that Equallitie (which is the rule of God) may be observed, we Covenant and Agree, That in a second Devition and so through all other Devitions of Land the mater shall be drawne as neere to equallitie according to mens estates as wee [ 62 ] are able to doe, That he which hath now more then his estate Deserveth in home Lotts and entervale Lotts shall haue so much Less: and he that hath Less then his estate Deserveth shall haue so much more. [62:1]

This peculiar doctrine of "equality" had early in the history of the colony created discontents. Winthrop explained the principle which governed himself and his colleagues in the case of the Boston committee of 1634 by saying that their divisions were arranged "partly to prevent the neglect of trades." This is a pregnant idea; it underlay much of the later opposition of New England as a manufacturing section to the free homestead or cheap land policy, demanded by the West and by the labor party, in the national public domain. The migration of labor to free lands meant that higher wages must be paid to those who remained. The use of the town lands by the established classes to promote an approved form of society naturally must have had some effect on migration.

But a more effective source of disputes was with respect to the relation of the town proprietors to the public domain of the town in contrast with the non-proprietors as a class. The need of keeping the town meeting and the proprietors' meeting separate in the old towns in earlier years was not so great as it was when the new-comers became numerous. In an increasing degree these new-comers were either not granted lands at all, or were not admitted to the body of proprietors with rights in the possession of the undivided town lands. Contentions on the part of the town meeting that it had the right of dealing with the town lands occasionally appear, significantly, in the frontier towns of Haverhill, Massachusetts, [ 63 ] Simsbury, Connecticut, and in the towns of the Connecticut Valley. [63:1] Jonathan Edwards, in 1751, declared that there had been in Northampton for forty or fifty years "two parties somewhat like the court and country parties of England. . . . The first party embraced the great proprietors of land, and the parties concerned about land and other matters." [63:2] The tendency to divide up the common lands among the proprietors in individual possession did not become marked until the eighteenth century; but the exclusion of some from possession of the town lands and the "equality" in allotment favoring men with already large estates must have attracted ambitious men who were not of the favored class to join in the movement to new towns. Religious dissensions would combine to make frontier society as it formed early in the eighteenth century more and more democratic, dissatisfied with the existing order, and less respectful of authority. We shall not understand the relative radicalism of parts of the Berkshires, Vermont and interior New Hampshire without enquiry into the degree in which the control over the lands by a proprietary monopoly affected the men who settled on the frontier.

The final aspect of this frontier to be examined, is the attitude of the conservatives of the older sections towards this movement of westward advance. President Dwight in the era of the War of 1812 was very critical of the "foresters," but saw in such a movement a safety valve to the institutions of New England by allowing the escape of the explosive advocates of "Innovation." [63:3]

Cotton Mather is perhaps not a typical representative of the conservative sentiment at the close of the seventeenth century, but his writings may partly reflect the attitude of Boston Bay [ 64 ] toward New England's first Western frontier. Writing in 1694 of "Wonderful Passages which have Occurred, First in the Protections and then in the Afflictions of New England," he says:

One while the Enclosing of Commons hath made Neighbours, that should have been like Sheep, to Bite and devour one another . . . . Again, Do our Old People, any of them Go Out from the Institutions of God, Swarming into New Settlements, where they and their Untaught Families are like to Perish for Lack of Vision ? They that have done so, heretofore, have to their Cost found, that they were got unto the Wrong side of the Hedge , in their doing so. Think, here Should this be done any more? We read of Balaam, in Num. 22, 23. He was to his Damage, driven to the Wall, when he would needs make an unlawful Salley forth after the Gain of this World. . . . Why, when men, for the Sake of Earthly Gain, would be going out into the Warm Sun, they drive Through the Wall , and the Angel of the Lord becomes their Enemy.

In his essay on "Frontiers Well-Defended" (1707) Mather assures the pioneers that they "dwell in a Hatsarmaneth," a place of "tawney serpents," are "inhabitants of the Valley of Achor," and are "the Poor of this World." There may be significance in his assertion: "It is remarkable to see that when the Unchurched Villages, have been so many of them, utterly broken up , in the War , that has been upon us, those that have had Churches regularly formed in them, have generally been under a more sensible Protection of Heaven." "Sirs," he says, "a Church-State well form'd may fortify you wonderfully!" He recommends abstention from profane swearing, furious [ 65 ] cursing, Sabbath breaking, unchastity, dishonesty, robbing of God by defrauding the ministers of their dues, drunkenness, and revels and he reminds them that even the Indians have family prayers! Like his successors who solicited missionary contributions for the salvation of the frontier in the Mississippi Valley during the forties of the nineteenth century, this early spokesman for New England laid stress upon teaching anti-popery, particularly in view of the captivity that might await them.

In summing up, we find many of the traits of later frontiers in this early prototype, the Massachusetts frontier. It lies at the edge of the Indian country and tends to advance. It calls out militant qualities and reveals the imprint of wilderness conditions upon the psychology and morals as well as upon the institutions of the people. It demands common defense and thus becomes a factor for consolidation. It is built on the basis of a preliminary fur trade, and is settled by the combined and sometimes antagonistic forces of eastern men of property (the absentee proprietors) and the democratic pioneers. The East attempted to regulate and control it. Individualistic and democratic tendencies were emphasized both by the wilderness conditions and, probably, by the prior contentions between the proprietors and non-proprietors of the towns from which settlers moved to the frontier. Removal away from the control of the customary usages of the older communities and from the conservative influence of the body of the clergy, increased the innovating tendency. Finally the towns were regarded by at least one prominent representative of the established order in the East, as an undesirable place for the re-location of the pillars of society. The temptation to look upon the frontier as a field for investment was viewed by the clergy as a danger to the "institutions of God." The frontier was "the Wrong side of the Hedge."

But to this "wrong side of the hedge" New England men continued to migrate. The frontier towns of 1695 were hardly more than suburbs of Boston. The frontier of a century later included New England's colonies in Vermont, Western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut Reserve, and the Ohio Company's settlement in the Old Northwest Territory. By the time of the Civil War the frontier towns of New England had occupied the great prairie zone of the Middle West and were even planted in Mormon Utah and in parts of the Pacific Coast. New England's sons had become the organizers of a Greater New England in the West, captains of industry, political leaders, founders of educational systems, and prophets of religion, in a section that was to influence the ideals and shape the destiny of the nation in ways to which the eyes of men like Cotton Mather were sealed. [66:1]

[39:1] Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, April, 1914, xvii, 250-271. Reprinted with permission of the Society.

[39:2] Massachusetts Archives, xxxvi, p. 150.

[40:1] Massachusetts Colony Records, ii, p. 122.

[40:2] Ibid. , vol. iv, pt. ii, p. 439; Massachusetts Archives, cvii, pp. 160-161.

[40:3] See, for example, Massachusetts Colony Records, v, 79; Green, "Groton During the Indian Wars," p. 39; L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England," p. 58.

[40:4] Massachusetts Archives, lxviii, pp. 174-176.

[40:5] Osgood, "American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, " i, p. 501, and citations: cf. Publications of this Society, xii, pp. 38-39.

[41:1] Hening, "Statutes at Large," iii, p. 204: cf. 1 Massachusetts Historical Collections, v, p. 129, for influence of the example of the New England town. On Virginia frontier conditions see Alvord and Bidgood, "First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region," pp. 23-34, 93-95. P. A. Bruce, "Institutional History of Virginia," ii, p. 97, discusses frontier defense in the seventeenth century. [See chapter iii , post .]

[42:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxx, 240; Massachusetts Province Laws, i, pp. 194, 293.

[42:2] In a petition (read March 3, 1692-3) of settlers "in Sundry Farms granted in those Remote Lands Scituate and Lyeing between Sudbury, Concord, Marlbury, Natick and Sherburne & Westerly is the Wilderness," the petitioners ask easement of taxes and extension into the Natick region in order to have means to provide for the worship of God, and say:

"Wee are not Ignorant that by reason of the present Distressed Condition of those that dwell in these Frontier Towns, divers are meditating to remove themselves into such places where they have not hitherto been conserned in the present Warr and desolation thereby made, as also that thereby they may be freed from that great burthen of public taxes necessarily accruing thereby, Some haveing already removed themselves. Butt knowing for our parts that wee cannot run from the hand of a Jealous God, doe account it our duty to take such Measures as may inable us to the performance of that duty wee owe to God, the King, & our Familyes" (Massachusetts Archives, cxiii, p. 1).

[42:3] In a petition of 1658 Andover speaks of itself as "a remote upland plantation" (Massachusetts Archives, cxii, p. 99).

[42:4] Massachusetts Province Laws, i, p. 402.

[43:1] Convenient maps of settlement, 1660-1700, are in E. Channing, "History of the United States," i, pp. 510-511, ii, end; Avery, "History of the United States and its People," ii, p. 398. A useful contemporaneous map for conditions at the close of King Philip's War is Hubbard's map of New England in his "Narrative" published in Boston, 1677. See also L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England," pp. 56-57, 70.

[44:1] Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England," pp. 90, 95, 129-132; F. J. Turner, "Indian Trade in Wisconsin," p. 13; McIlwain, "Wraxall's Abridgement," introduction; the town histories abound in evidence of the significance of the early Indian traders' posts, transition to Indian land cessions, and then to town grants.

[44:2] Weeden, loc. cit. , pp. 64-67; M. Egleston, "New England Land System," pp. 31-32; Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, pp. 37, 206, 267-268; Connecticut Colonial Records, vii, p. 111, illustrations of cattle brands in 1727.

[44:3] Hutchinson, "History" (1795), ii, p. 129, note, relates such a case of a Groton man; see also Parkman, "Half-Century," vol. i, ch. iv, citing Maurault, "Histoire des Abenakis," p. 377.

[45:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, pp. 4, 84, 85, 87, 88.

[45:2] Hoosatonic.

[45:3] Connecticut Records, iv, pp. 463, 464.

[45:4] Massachusetts Colony Records, v, p. 72; Massachusetts Province Laws, i, pp. 176, 211, 292, 558, 594, 600; Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, pp. 7, 89, 102. Cf. Publications of this Society, vii, 275-278.

[45:5] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 290.

[46:1] Judd, "Hadley," p. 272; 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections, ii, p. 235.

[46:2] Farmer and Moore, "Collections," iii, p. 64. The frontier woman of the farther west found no more extreme representative than Hannah Dustan of Haverhill, with her trophy of ten scalps, for which she received a bounty of £50 (Parkman, "Frontenac," 1898, p. 407, note).

[46:3] For illustrations of resentment against those who protected the Christian Indians, see F. W. Gookin, "Daniel Gookin," pp. 145-155.

[47:1] For example, Massachusetts Archives, lxx, p. 261; Bailey, "Andover," p. 179; Metcalf, "Annals of Mendon," p. 63; Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 504-519. Parkman, "Frontenac" (Boston, 1898), p. 390, and "Half-Century of Conflict" (Boston, 1898), i, p. 55, sketches the frontier defense.

[48:1] Massachusetts Archives, cvii, p. 155.

[48:2] Ibid. , cvii, p. 230; cf. 230 a.

[48:3] Massachusetts Archives, lxviii, p. 156.

[48:4] Sheldon, "Deerfield, " i, p. 189.

[48:5] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, 46-48, 131, 134, 135 et passim .

[50:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, p. 107: cf. Metcalf, "Mendon," p. 130; Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 288. The frontier of Virginia in 1755 and 1774 showed similar conditions: see, for example, the citations to Washington's Writings in Thwaites, "France in America," pp. 193-195; and frontier letters in Thwaites and Kellogg, "Dunmore's War," pp. 227, 228 et passim . The following petition to Governor Gooch of Virginia, dated July 30, 1742, affords a basis for comparison with a Scotch-Irish frontier:

We your pettionours humbly sheweth that we your Honours Loly and Dutifull Subganckes hath ventred our Lives & all that we have In settling ye back parts of Virginia which was a veri Great Hassirt & Dengrous, for it is the Hathins [heathens] Road to ware, which has proved hortfull to severil of ous that were ye first settlers of these back woods & wee your Honibill pettionors some time a goo petitioned your Honnour for to have Commisioned men amungst ous which we your Honnours most Duttifull subjects thought properist men & men that had Hart and Curidg to hed us yn time of [war] & to defend your Contray & your poor Sogbacks Intrist from ye voilince of ye Haithen—But yet agine we Humbly persume to poot your Honnour yn mind of our Great want of them in hopes that your Honner will Grant a Captins' Commission to John McDowell, with follring ofishers, and your Honnours' Complyence in this will be Great settisfiction to your most Duttifull and Humbil pettioners—and we as in Duty bond shall Ever pray . . . (Calendar of Virginia State Papers, i, p. 235).

[51:1] But there is a note of deference in Southern frontier petitions to the Continental Congress—to be discounted, however, by the remoteness of that body. See F. J. Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era" ( American Historical Review , i, pp. 70, 251). The demand for remission of taxes is a common feature of the petitions there quoted.

[51:2] Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 506 ff.

[51:3] Ibid. , xliii, p. 518.

[52:1] Connecticut Colonial Records, iv, p. 67.

[52:2] In a petition of February 22, 1693-4, Deerfield calls itself the "most Utmost Frontere Town in the County of West Hampshire" (Massachusetts Archives, cxiii, p. 57 a).

[52:3] Judd, "Hadley," p. 249.

[52:4] W. D. Schuyler-Lighthall, "Glorious Enterprise," p. 16.

[53:1] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 405.

[54:1] "I want to have your warriours come and see me," wrote Allen to the Indians of Canada in 1775, "and help me fight the King's Regular Troops. You know they stand all close together, rank and file, and my men fight so as Indians do, and I want your warriours to join with me and my warriours, like brothers, and ambush the Regulars: if you will, I will give you money, blankets, tomahawks, knives, paint, and any thing that there is in the army, just like brothers; and I will go with you into the woods to scout; and my men and your men will sleep together, and eat and drink together, and fight Regulars, because they first killed our brothers" (American Archives, 4th Series, ii, p. 714).

[54:2] Compare A. McF. Davis, "The Shays Rebellion a Political Aftermath" (Proceedings American Antiquarian Society, xxi, pp. 58, 62, 75-79).

[55:1] "Land System of the New England Colonies," p. 30.

[55:2] Massachusetts Colony Records, i, p. 167.

[56:1] Compare Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England," i, pp. 270-271; Gookin, "Daniel Gookin," pp. 106-161; and the histories of Worcester for illustrations of how the various factors noted could be combined in a single town.

[56:2] F. Merrill, "Amesbury," pp. 5, 50.

[56:3] B. L. Mirick, "Haverhill," pp. 9, 10.

[57:1] Green, "Early Records of Groton," pp. 49, 70, 90.

[57:2] Ibid.

[57:3] Worcester County History, i, pp. 2, 3.

[57:4] J. G. Metcalf, "Annals of Mendon," p. 85.

[58:1] P. 96. Compare the Kentucky petition of 1780 given in Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," ii, p. 398, and the letter from that frontier cited in Turner, "Western State-Making" ( American Historical Review , i, p. 262), attacking the Virginia "Nabobs," who hold absentee land titles. "Let the great men ," say they, "whom the land belongs to come and defend it."

[59:1] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, pp. 188-189.

[59:2] These facts are stated on the authority of E. Washburn, "Leicester," pp. 5-15: compare Major Stephen Sewall to Jeremiah Dummer, 1717, quoted in Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England," ii, p. 505, note 4.

[60:1] Compare the Virginia system, Bruce, "Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century," ii, pp. 42, 43.

[60:2] For this item I am indebted to our associate, Mr. Andrew McF. Davis: see his "Colonial Currency Reprints," i, pp. 335-349.

[60:3] Hutchinson, "History of Massachusetts" (1768), ii, pp. 331, 332, has an instructive comment. A. C. Ford, "Colonial Precedents of Our National Land System," p. 84; L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England," pp. 82 ff.

[60:4] J. G. Holland, "Western Massachusetts," p. 197.

[61:1] Jos. Schafer, "Origin of the System of Land Grants for Education," pp. 25-33.

[62:1] H. D. Hurd (ed.), "History of Worcester County," i, p. 6. The italics are mine.

[63:1] Egleston, "Land System of the New England Colonies," pp. 39-41.

[63:2] Ibid. , p. 41.

[63:3] T. Dwight, "Travels" (1821), ii, pp. 459-463.

[66:1] [See F. J. Turner, "Greater New England in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century," in American Antiquarian Society "Proceedings," 1920.]

The Old West [67:1]

It is not the oldest West with which this chapter deals. The oldest West was the Atlantic coast. Roughly speaking, it took a century of Indian fighting and forest felling for the colonial settlements to expand into the interior to a distance of about a hundred miles from the coast. Indeed, some stretches were hardly touched in that period. This conquest of the nearest wilderness in the course of the seventeenth century and in the early years of the eighteenth, gave control of the maritime section of the nation and made way for the new movement of westward expansion which I propose to discuss.

In his "Winning of the West," Roosevelt dealt chiefly with the region beyond the Alleghanies, and with the period of the later eighteenth century, although he prefaced his account with an excellent chapter describing the backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies and their social conditions from 1769 to 1774. It is important to notice, however, that he is concerned with a backwoods society already formed; that he ignores the New England frontier and its part in the winning of the West, and does not recognize that there was a West to be won between New England and the Great Lakes. In short, he is interested in the winning of the West beyond the Alleghanies by the southern half of the frontier folk.

There is, then, a western area intermediate between the coastal colonial settlements of the seventeenth century and the trans-Alleghany settlements of the latter portion of the eighteenth century. This section I propose to isolate and discuss under the name of the Old West, and in the period from about 1676 to 1763. It includes the back country of New England, the Mohawk Valley, the Great Valley of Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Piedmont—that is, the interior or upland portion of the South, lying between the Alleghanies and the head of navigation of the Atlantic rivers marked by the "fall line." [68:1]

In this region, and in these years, are to be found the beginnings of much that is characteristic in Western society, for the Atlantic coast was in such close touch with Europe that its frontier experience was soon counteracted, and it developed along other lines. It is unfortunate that the colonial back country appealed so long to historians solely in connection with the colonial wars, for the development of its society, its institutions and mental attitude all need study. Its history has been dealt with in separate fragments, by states, or towns, or in discussions of special phases, such as German and Scotch-Irish immigration. The Old West as a whole can be [ 69 ] appreciated only by obliterating the state boundaries which conceal its unity, by correlating the special and fragmentary studies, and by filling the gaps in the material for understanding the formation of its society. The present paper is rather a reconnaissance than a conquest of the field, a program for study of the Old West rather than an exposition of it.

The end of the period proposed may be placed about 1763, and the beginning between 1676 and 1700. The termination of the period is marked by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and the royal proclamation of that year forbidding settlement beyond the Alleghanies. By this time the settlement of the Old West was fairly accomplished, and new advances were soon made into the "Western Waters" beyond the mountains and into the interior of Vermont and New Hampshire. The isolation of the transmontane settlements, and the special conditions and doctrines of the Revolutionary era during which they were formed, make a natural distinction between the period of which I am to speak and the later extension of the West.

The beginning of the period is necessarily an indeterminate date, owing to the different times of colonizing the coastal areas which served as bases of operations in the westward advance. The most active movements into the Old West occurred after 1730. But in 1676 New England, having closed the exhausting struggle with the Indians, known as King Philip's War, could regard her established settlements as secure, and go on to complete her possession of the interior. This she did in the midst of conflicts with the exterior Indian tribes which invaded her frontiers from New York and Canada during the French and Indian wars from 1690 to 1760, and under frontier conditions different from the conditions of the earlier Puritan colonization. In 1676, Virginia was passing through Indian fighting—keenest along the fall line, where the frontier lay—and also experiencing a social revolt which resulted in the defeat of the [ 70 ] democratic forces that sought to stay the progress of aristocratic control in the colony. [70:1] The date marks the end of the period when the Virginia tidewater could itself be regarded as a frontier region, and consequently the beginning of a more special interest in the interior.

Let us first examine the northern part of the movement into the back country. The expansion of New England into the vacant spaces of its own section, in the period we have chosen for discussion, resulted in the formation of an interior society which contrasted in many ways with that of the coast, and which has a special significance in Western history, in that it was this interior New England people who settled the Greater New England in central and western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut Reserve of Ohio, and much of the prairie areas of the Old Northwest. It is important to realize that the Old West included interior New England.

The situation in New England at the close of the seventeenth century is indicated by the Massachusetts act of 1694 enumerating eleven towns, then on the frontier and exposed to raids, none of which might be voluntarily deserted without leave of the governor and council, on penalty of loss of their freeholds by the landowners, or fine of other inhabitants. [70:2]

Thus these frontier settlers were made substantially garrisons, or "mark colonies." Crowded into the palisades of the town, and obliged in spite of their poverty to bear the brunt of Indian attack, their hardships are illustrated in the manly but pathetic letters of Deerfield's minister, Mr. Williams, [70:3] in 1704. Parkman succinctly describes the general conditions in these words: [70:4]

The exposed frontier of New England was between two and three hundred miles long, and consisted of farms and hamlets loosely scattered through an almost impervious forest. . . . Even in so-called villages the houses were far apart, because, except on the seashore, the people lived by farming. Such as were able to do so fenced their dwellings with palisades, or built them of solid timber, with loopholes, a projecting upper story like a block house, and sometimes a flanker at one or more of the corners. In the more considerable settlements the largest of these fortified houses was occupied in time of danger by armed men and served as a place of refuge for the neighbors.

Into these places, in days of alarm, were crowded the outlying settlers, just as was the case in later times in the Kentucky "stations."

In spite of such frontier conditions, the outlying towns continued to multiply. Between 1720 and the middle of the century, settlement crept up the Housatonic and its lateral valley into the Berkshires. About 1720 Litchfield was established; in 1725, Sheffield; in 1730, Great Barrington; and in 1735 a road was cut and towns soon established between Westfield and these Housatonic settlements, thus uniting them with the older extensions along the Connecticut and its tributaries.

In this period, scattered and sometimes unwelcome Scotch-Irish settlements were established, such as that at Londonderry, New Hampshire, and in the Berkshires, as well as in the region [ 72 ] won in King Philip's War from the Nipmucks, whither there came also Huguenots. [72:1]

In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found their frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the sites of Keene, of Charlestown, New Hampshire (Number Four), Fort Shirley at the head of Deerfield River (Heath), and Fort Pelham (Rowe); while Fort Massachusetts (Adams) guarded the Hoosac gateway to the Hoosatonic Valley. These frontier garrisons and the self-defense of the backwoodsmen of New England are well portrayed in the pages of Parkman. [72:2] At the close of the war, settlement again expanded into the Berkshires, where Lennox, West Hoosac (Williamstown), and Pittsfield were established in the middle of the century. Checked by the fighting in the last French and Indian War, the frontier went forward after the Peace of Paris (1763) at an exceptional rate, especially into Vermont and interior New Hampshire. An anonymous writer gives a contemporary view of the situation on the eve of the Revolution: [72:3]

The richest parts remaining to be granted are on the northern branches of the Connecticut river, towards Crown Point where are great districts of fertile soil still unsettled. The North part of New Hampshire, the province of Maine, and the territory of Sagadahock have but few settlements in them compared with the tracts yet unsettled. . . .

I should further observe that these tracts have since the peace [ i. e. , 1763], been settling pretty fast: farms on the river Connecticut are every day extending beyond the old fort Dummer, for near [ 73 ] thirty miles; and will in a few years reach to Kohasser which is nearly two hundred miles; not that such an extent will be one-tenth settled, but the new-comers do not fix near their neighbors, and go on regularly, but take spots that please them best, though twenty or thirty miles beyond any others. This to people of a sociable disposition in Europe would appear very strange, but the Americans do not regard the near neighborhood of other farmers; twenty or thirty miles by water they esteem no distance in matters of this sort; besides in a country that promises well the intermediate space is not long in filling up. Between Connecticut river and Lake Champlain upon Otter Creek, and all along Lake Sacrament [George] and the rivers that fall into it, and the whole length of Wood Creek, are numerous settlements made since the peace. [73:1]

For nearly a hundred years, therefore, New England communities had been pushed out to new frontiers in the intervals between the almost continuous wars with the French and Indians. Probably the most distinctive feature in this frontier was the importance of the community type of settlement; in other words, of the towns, with their Puritan ideals in education, morals, and religion. This has always been a matter of pride to the statesmen and annalists of New England, as is illustrated by these words of Holland in his "Western Massachusetts," commenting on the settlement of the Connecticut Valley in villages, whereby in his judgment morality, education, and urbanity were preserved:

The influence of this policy can only be fully appreciated when standing by the side of the solitary settler's hut in the West, where even an Eastern man has degenerated to a boor in manners, where his children have grown up uneducated, and where the Sabbath has become an unknown day, and religion and its obligations have ceased to exercise control upon the heart and life.

Whatever may be the real value of the community type of settlement, its establishment in New England was intimately connected both with the Congregational religious organization and with the land system of the colonies of that section, under which the colonial governments made grants—not in tracts to individuals, but in townships to groups of proprietors who in turn assigned lands to the inhabitants without cost. The typical form of establishing a town was as follows: On application of an approved body of men, desiring to establish a new settlement, the colonial General Court would appoint a committee to view the desired land and report on its fitness; an order for the grant would then issue, in varying areas, not far from the equivalent of six miles square. In the eighteenth century especially, it was common to reserve certain lots of the town for the support of schools and the ministry. This was the origin of that very important feature of Western society, federal land grants for schools and colleges. [74:1] The General Courts also made regulations regarding the common lands, the terms for admitting inhabitants, etc., and thus kept a firm hand upon the social structure of the new settlements as they formed on the frontier.

This practice, seen in its purity in the seventeenth century [ 75 ] especially, was markedly different from the practices of other colonies in the settlement of their back lands. For during most of the period New England did not use her wild lands, or public domain, as a source of revenue by sale to individuals or to companies, with the reservation of quit-rents; nor attract individual settlers by "head rights," or fifty-acre grants, after the Virginia type; nor did the colonies of the New England group often make extensive grants to individuals, on the ground of special services, or because of influence with the government, or on the theory that the grantee would introduce settlers on his grant. They donated their lands to groups of men who became town proprietors for the purpose of establishing communities. These proprietors were supposed to hold the lands in trust, to be assigned to inhabitants under restraints to ensure the persistence of Puritan ideals.

During most of the seventeenth century the proprietors awarded lands to the new-comers in accordance with this theory. But as density of settlement increased, and lands grew scarce in the older towns, the proprietors began to assert their legal right to the unoccupied lands and to refuse to share them with inhabitants who were not of the body of proprietors. The distinction resulted in class conflicts in the towns, especially in the eighteenth century, [75:1] over the ownership and disposal of the common lands.

The new settlements, by a process of natural selection, would afford opportunity to the least contented, whether [ 76 ] because of grievances, or ambitions, to establish themselves. This tended to produce a Western flavor in the towns on the frontier. But it was not until the original ideals of the land system began to change, that the opportunity to make new settlements for such reasons became common. As the economic and political ideal replaced the religious and social ideal, in the conditions under which new towns could be established, this became more possible.

Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth. In 1713, 1715, and 1727, Massachusetts determined upon a policy of locating towns in advance of settlement, to protect her boundary claims. In 1736 she laid out five towns near the New Hampshire border, and a year earlier opened four contiguous towns to connect her Housatonic and Connecticut Valley settlements. [76:1] Grants in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to old towns, the proprietors of which sold them to those who wished to move.

The history of the town of Litchfield illustrates the increasing importance of the economic factor. At a time when Connecticut feared that Andros might dispose of the public lands to the disadvantage of the colony, the legislature granted a large part of Western Connecticut to the towns of Hartford and Windsor, pro forma , as a means of withdrawing the lands from his hands. But these towns refused to give up the lands after the danger had passed, and proceeded to sell part of them. [76:2] Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to assert possession, and the matter was at length compromised [ 77 ] in 1719 by allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance with the town grants, while the colony reserved the larger part of northwestern Connecticut. In 1737 the colony disposed of its last unlocated lands by sale in lots. In 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of entire townships in the Berkshires to the highest bidders. [77:1]

But the most striking illustration of the tendency, is afforded by the "New Hampshire grants" of Governor Wentworth, who, chiefly in the years about 1760, made grants of a hundred and thirty towns west of the Connecticut, in what is now the State of Vermont, but which was then in dispute between New Hampshire and New York. These grants, while in form much like other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly to speculators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of land-seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green Mountain region.

It is needless to point out how this would affect the movement of Western settlement in respect to individualistic speculation in public lands; how it would open a career to the land jobbers, as well as to the natural leaders in the competitive movement for acquiring the best lands, for laying out town sites and building up new communities under "boom" conditions. The migratory tendency of New Englanders was increased by this gradual change in its land policy; the attachment to a [ 78 ] locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing emphasis by New England upon individual success, greater respect for the self-made man who, in the midst of opportunities under competitive conditions, achieved superiority. The old dominance of town settlement, village moral police, and traditional class control gave way slowly. Settlement in communities and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring influences in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it was in this Old West, in the years just before the Revolution, that individualism began to play an important rôle, along with the traditional habit of expanding in organized communities.

The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than before, the capability of New Englanders to become democratic pioneers, under characteristic frontier conditions. Their economic life was simple and self-sufficing. They readily adopted lynch law (the use of the "birch seal" is familiar to readers of Vermont history) to protect their land titles in the troubled times when these "Green Mountain Boys" resisted New York's assertion of authority. They later became an independent Revolutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many respects their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to that of settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in assertion of the right to independent self government and in a frontier separatism. [78:1] Vermont may be regarded as the culmination of the frontier movement which I have been describing in New England.

By this time two distinct New Englands existed—the one coastal, and dominated by commercial interests and the established congregational churches; the other a primitive [ 79 ] agricultural area, democratic in principle, and with various sects increasingly indifferent to the fear of "innovation" which the dominant classes of the old communities felt. Already speculative land companies had begun New England settlements in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on the lower Mississippi; and New England missions among the Indians, such as that at Stockbridge, were beginning the noteworthy religious and educational expansion of the section to the west.

That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south to north, along the river valleys, should not conceal from us the fact that it was in essential characteristics a Western movement, especially in the social traits that were developing. Even the men who lived in the long line of settlements on the Maine coast, under frontier conditions, and remote from the older centers of New England, developed traits and a democratic spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite of the fact that Maine is "down east" by preëminence. [79:1]

The frontier of the Middle region in this period of the formation of the Old West, was divided into two parts, which happen to coincide with the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. In the latter colony the trend of settlement was into the Great Valley, and so on to the Southern uplands; while the advance of settlement in New York was like that of New England, chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River.

The Hudson and the Mohawk constituted the area of the Old West in this part of the eighteenth century. With them were associated the Wallkill, tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Valley near the Mohawk, along the sources of the Susquehanna. The Berkshires walled the Hudson in to the east; the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the west. Where the Mohawk Valley [ 80 ] penetrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois Indians were too formidable for advance on such a slender line. Nothing but dense settlement along the narrow strip of the Hudson, if even that, could have furnished the necessary momentum for overcoming the Indian barrier; and this pressure was lacking, for the population was comparatively sparse in contrast with the task to be performed. What most needs discussion in the case of New York, therefore, is not the history of expansion as in other sections, but the absence of expansive power.

The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made beginnings of settlements at strategic points near the confluence of the Mohawk. But the fur-trader was not followed by a tide of pioneers. One of the most important factors in restraining density of population in New York, in retarding the settlement of its frontier, and in determining the conditions there, was the land system of that colony.

From the time of the patroon grants along the lower Hudson, great estates had been the common form of land tenure. Rensselaerswyck reached at one time over seven hundred thousand acres. These great patroon estates were confirmed by the English governors, who in their turn followed a similar policy. By 1732 two and one-half million acres were engrossed in manorial grants. [80:1] In 1764, Governor Colden wrote [80:2] that three of the extravagant grants contain,

as the proprietors claim, above a million acres each, several others above 200,000. * * * Although these grants contain a great part of the province, they are made in trifling acknowledgements. The far greater part of them still remain [ 81 ] uncultivated, without any benefit to the community, and are likewise a discouragement to the settling and improving the lands in the neighborhood of them, for from the uncertainty of their boundaries, the patentees of these great tracts are daily enlarging their pretensions, and by tedious and most expensive law suits, distress and ruin poor families who have taken out grants near them.

He adds that "the proprietors of the great tracts are not only freed from the quit-rents, which the other landholders in the province pay, but by their influence in the assembly are freed from every other public tax on their lands."

In 1769 it was estimated that at least five-sixths of the inhabitants of Westchester County lived within the bounds of the great manors there. [81:1] In Albany County the Livingston manor spread over seven modern townships, and the great Van Rensselaer manor stretched twenty-four by twenty-eight miles along the Hudson; while still farther, on the Mohawk, were the vast possessions of Sir William Johnson. [81:2]

It was not simply that the grants were extensive, but that the policy of the proprietors favored the leasing rather than the sale of the lands—frequently also of the stock, and taking payment in shares. It followed that settlers preferred to go to frontiers where a more liberal land policy prevailed. At one time it seemed possible that the tide of German settlement, which finally sought Pennsylvania and the up-country of the South, might flow into New York. In 1710, Governor Hunter purchased a tract in Livingston's manor and located nearly fifteen hundred Palatines on it to produce naval stores. [82:1] But the attempt soon failed; the Germans applied to the Indians on Schoharie Creek, a branch of the Mohawk, for a grant of land and migrated there, only to find that the governor had already granted the land. Again were the villages broken up, some remaining and some moving farther up the Mohawk, where they and accessions to their number established the frontier settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in the Revolution, Herkimer led these German frontiersmen to stem the British attack in the battle of Oriskany. They constituted the most effective military defense of Mohawk Valley. Still another portion took their way across to the waters of the Susquehanna, and at Tulpehockon Creek began an important center of German settlement in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania. [82:2]

The most important aspect of the history of the movement into the frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was the evidence which it afforded that in the competition for [ 83 ] settlement between colonies possessing a vast area of vacant land, those which imposed feudal tenures and undemocratic restraints, and which exploited settlers, were certain to lose.

The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a region for settlement, which not even the actual opportunities in certain parts of the colony could counteract. The diplomacy of New York governors during this period of the Old West, in securing a protectorate over the Six Nations and a consequent claim to their territory, and in holding them aloof from France, constituted the most effective contribution of that colony to the movement of American expansion. When lands of these tribes were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the Revolution (in which New England soldiers played a prominent part), it was by the New England inundation into this interior that they were colonized. And it was under conditions like those prevailing in the later years of the expansion of settlements in New England itself, that this settlement of interior and western New York was effected.

The result was, that New York became divided into two distinct peoples: the dwellers along Hudson Valley, and the Yankee pioneers of the interior. But the settlement of central and western New York, like the settlement of Vermont, is a story that belongs to the era in which the trans-Alleghany West was occupied.

We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old West which is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migration which occupied the Southern Uplands, and before entering upon this it will be advantageous to survey that part of the movement toward the interior which proceeded westward from the coast. First let us observe the conditions at the eastern edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process and the significance of the movement may be better understood.

About the time of Bacon's Rebellion, in Virginia, strenuous efforts were made to protect the frontier line which ran along the falls of the river, against the attacks of Indians. This "fall line," as the geographers call it, marking the head of navigation, and thus the boundary of the maritime or lowland South, runs from the site of Washington, through Richmond, and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Carolina. Virginia having earliest advanced thus far to the interior, found it necessary in the closing years of the seventeenth century to draw a military frontier along this line. As early as 1675 a statute was enacted, [84:1] providing that paid troops of five hundred men should be drawn from the midland and most secure parts of the country and placed on the "heads of the rivers" and other places fronting upon the Indians. What was meant by the "heads of the rivers," is shown by the fact that several of these forts were located either at the falls of the rivers or just above tidewater, as follows: one on the lower Potomac in Stafford County; one near the falls of the Rappahannock; one on the Mattapony; one on the Pamunky; one at the falls of the James (near the site of Richmond); one near the falls of the Appomattox, and others on the Blackwater, the Nansemond, and the Accomac peninsula, all in the eastern part of Virginia.

Again, in 1679, similar provision was made, [84:2] and an especially interesting act was passed, making quasi manorial grants to Major Lawrence Smith and Captain William Byrd, "to seate certain lands at the head [falls] of Rappahannock and James river" respectively. This scheme failed for lack of approval by the authorities in England. [84:3] But Byrd at the falls of the [ 85 ] James near the present site of Richmond, Robert Beverley on the Rappahannock, and other frontier commanders on the York and Potomac, continued to undertake colonial defense. The system of mounted rangers was established in 1691, by which a lieutenant, eleven soldiers, and two Indians at the "heads" or falls of each great river were to scout for enemy, [85:1] and the Indian boundary line was strictly defined.

By the opening years of the eighteenth century (1701), the assembly of Virginia had reached the conclusion that settlement would be the best means of protecting the frontiers, and that the best way of "settling in co-habitations upon the said land frontiers within this government will be by encouragements to induce societies of men to undertake the same." [85:2] It was declared to be inexpedient to have less than twenty fighting men in each "society," and provision was made for a land grant to be given to these societies (or towns) not less than 10,000 nor more than 30,000 acres upon any of the frontiers, to be held in common by the society. The power of ordering and managing these lands, and the settling and planting of them, was to remain in the society. Virginia was to pay the cost of survey, also quit-rents for the first twenty years for the two-hundred-acre tract as the site of the "co-habitation." Within this two hundred acres each member was to have a half-acre lot for living upon, and a right to two hundred acres next adjacent, until the thirty thousand acres were taken up. The members of the [ 86 ] society were exempt from taxes for twenty years, and from the requirements of military duty except such as they imposed upon themselves. The resemblance to the New England town is obvious.

"Provided alwayes," ran the quaint statute, "and it is the true intent and meaning of this act that for every five hundred acres of land to be granted in pursuance of this act there shall be and shall be continually kept upon the said land one christian man between sixteen and sixty years of age perfect of limb, able and fitt for service who shall alsoe be continually provided with a well fixed musquett or fuzee, a good pistoll, sharp simeter, tomahawk and five pounds of good clean pistoll powder and twenty pounds of sizable leaden bulletts or swan or goose shott to be kept within the fort directed by this act besides the powder and shott for his necessary or useful shooting at game. Provided also that the said warlike christian man shall have his dwelling and continual abode within the space of two hundred acres of land to be laid out in a geometricall square or as near that figure as conveniency will admit," etc. Within two years the society was required to cause a half acre in the middle of the "co-habitation" to be palisaded "with good sound pallisadoes at least thirteen foot long and six inches diameter in the middle of the length thereof, and set double and at least three foot within the ground. "

Such in 1701 was the idea of the Virginia tidewater assembly of a frontiersman, and of the frontier towns by which the Old Dominion should spread her population into the upland South. But the "warlike Christian man" who actually came to furnish the firing line for Virginia, was destined to be the Scotch-Irishman and the German with long rifle in place of "fuzee" and "simeter," and altogether too restless to have his continual abode within the space of two hundred acres. Nevertheless there are points of resemblance between this idea of societies [ 87 ] settled about a fortified town and the later "stations" of Kentucky. [87:1]

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the engrossing of the lands of lowland Virginia had progressed so far, the practice of holding large tracts of wasteland for reserves in the great plantations had become so common, that the authorities of Virginia reported to the home government that the best lands were all taken up, [87:2] and settlers were passing into North Carolina seeking cheap lands near navigable rivers. Attention was directed also to the Piedmont portions of Virginia, for by this time the Indians were conquered in this region. It was now possible to acquire land by purchase [87:3] at five shillings sterling for fifty acres, as well as by head-rights for importation or settlement, and land speculation soon turned to the new area.

Already the Piedmont had been somewhat explored. [87:4] Even by the middle of the seventeenth century, fur-traders had followed the trail southwest from the James more than four hundred miles to the Catawbas and later to the Cherokees. Col. William Byrd had, as we have seen, not only been absorbing good lands in the lowlands, and defending his post at the falls of the James, like a Count of the Border, but he also engaged in this fur-trade and sent his pack trains along this trail through the Piedmont of the Carolinas, [87:5] and took note of the rich [ 88 ] savannas of that region. Charleston traders engaged in rivalry for this trade.

It was not long before cattle raisers from the older settlements, learning from the traders of the fertile plains and peavine pastures of this land, followed the fur-traders and erected scattered "cow-pens" or ranches beyond the line of plantations in the Piedmont. Even at the close of the seventeenth century, herds of wild horses and cattle ranged at the outskirts of the Virginia settlements, and were hunted by the planters, driven into pens, and branded somewhat after the manner of the later ranching on the Great Plains. [88:1] Now the cow-drovers and the cow-pens [88:2] began to enter the uplands. The Indians had by this time been reduced to submission in most of the Virginia Piedmont—as Governor Spotswood [88:3] reported in 1712, living "quietly on our frontiers, trafficking with the Inhabitants."

After the defeat of the Tuscaroras and Yemassees about this time in the Carolinas, similar opportunities for expansion existed there. The cattle drovers sometimes took their herds from range to range; sometimes they were gathered permanently near the pens, finding the range sufficient throughout the year. They were driven to Charleston, or later [ 89 ] sometimes even to Philadelphia and Baltimore markets. By the middle of the century, disease worked havoc with them in South Carolina [89:1] and destroyed seven-eighths of those in North Carolina; Virginia made regulations governing the driving of cattle through her frontier counties to avoid the disease, just as in our own time the northern cattlemen attempted to protect their herds against the Texas fever.

Thus cattle raisers from the coast followed the fur-traders toward the uplands, and already pioneer farmers were straggling into the same region, soon to be outnumbered by the tide of settlement that flowed into the region from Pennsylvania.

The descriptions of the uplands by contemporaneous writers are in glowing terms. Makemie, in his "Plain and Friendly Persuasion" (1705), declared "The best, richest, and most healthy part of your Country is yet to be inhabited, above the falls of every River, to the Mountains." Jones, in his "Present State of Virginia" (1724), comments on the convenience of tidewater transportation, etc., but declares that section "not nearly so healthy as the uplands and Barrens which serve for Ranges for Stock," although he speaks less enthusiastically of the savannas and marshes which lay in the midst of the forest areas. In fact, the Piedmont was by no means the unbroken forest that might have been imagined, for in addition to natural meadows, the Indians had burned over large tracts. [89:2] It was a rare combination of woodland and pasture, with clear running streams and mild climate. [89:3]

The occupation of the Virginia Piedmont received a special impetus from the interest which Governor Spotswood took in the frontier. In 1710 he proposed a plan for intercepting the French in their occupation of the interior, by inducing Virginia settlement to proceed along one side of James River only, until this column of advancing pioneers should strike the attenuated line of French posts in the center. In the same year he sent a body of horsemen to the top of the Blue Ridge, where they could overlook the Valley of Virginia. [90:1] By 1714 he became active as a colonizer himself. Thirty miles above the falls of the Rappahannock, on the Rapidan at Germanna, [90:2] he settled a little village of German redemptioners (who in return for having the passage paid agreed to serve without wages for a term of years), to engage in his iron works, also to act as rangers on the frontier. From here, in 1716, with two companies of rangers and four Indians, Governor Spotswood and a band of Virginia gentlemen made a summer picnic excursion of two weeks across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Sic juvat transcendere montes was the motto of these Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe, as the governor dubbed them. But they were not the "warlike christian men" destined to occupy the frontier.

Spotswood's interest in the advance along the Rappahannock, probably accounts for the fact that in 1720 Spotsylvania and [ 91 ] Brunswick were organized as frontier counties of Virginia. [91:1] Five hundred dollars were contributed by the colony to the church, and a thousand dollars for arms and ammunition for the settlers in these counties. The fears of the French and Indians beyond the high mountains, were alleged as reasons for this advance. To attract settlers to these new counties, they were (1723) exempt from purchasing the lands under the system of head rights, and from payment of quit-rents for seven years after 1721. The free grants so obtained were not to exceed a thousand acres. This was soon extended to six thousand acres, but with provision requiring the settlement of a certain number of families upon the grant within a certain time. In 1729 Spotswood was ordered by the Council to produce "rights" and pay the quit-rents for the 59,786 acres which he claimed in this county.

Other similar actions by the Council show that large holdings were developing there, also that the difficulty of establishing a frontier democracy in contact with the area of expanding plantations, was very real. [91:2] By the time of the occupation of the Shenandoah Valley, therefore, the custom was established in this part of Virginia, [91:3] of making grants of a thousand acres for each family settled. Speculative planters, influential with the Governor and Council secured grants of many thousand acres, conditioned upon seating a certain number of families, and satisfying the requirements of planting. Thus what had originally been intended as direct grants to the actual settler, frequently became grants to great planters like Beverley, who promoted the coming of Scotch-Irish and German [ 92 ] settlers, or took advantage of the natural drift into the Valley, to sell lands in their grants, as a rule, reserving quit-rents. The liberal grants per family enabled these speculative planters, while satisfying the terms of settlement, to hold large portions of the grant for themselves. Under the lax requirements, and probably still more lax enforcement, of the provisions for actual cultivation or cattle-raising, [92:1] it was not difficult to hold such wild land. These conditions rendered possible the extension of a measure of aristocratic planter life in the course of time to the Piedmont and Valley lands of Virginia. It must be added, however, that some of the newcomers, both Germans and Scotch-Irish, like the Van Meters, Stover, and Lewis, also showed an ability to act as promoters in locating settlers and securing grants to themselves.

In the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, lay part of the estate of Lord Fairfax, some six million acres in extent, which came to the family by dower from the old Culpeper and Arlington grant of Northern Neck. In 1748, the youthful Washington was surveying this estate along the upper waters of the Potomac, finding a bed under the stars and learning the life of the frontier.

Lord Fairfax established his own Greenway manor, [92:2] and divided his domain into other manors, giving ninety-nine-year leases to settlers already on the ground at twenty shillings annually per hundred acres; while of the new-comers he exacted two shillings annual quit-rent for this amount of land in fee simple. Litigation kept land titles uncertain here, for many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton, represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his [ 93 ] associates on condition of placing the proper number of families on the tract. [93:1] Thus speculative planters on this frontier shared in the movement of occupation and made an aristocratic element in the up-country; but the increasing proportion of Scotch-Irish immigrants, as well as German settlers, together with the contrast in natural conditions, made the interior a different Virginia from that of the tidewater.

As settlement ascended the Rappahannock, and emigrants began to enter the Valley from the north, so, contemporaneously, settlement ascended the James above the falls, succeeding to the posts of the fur-traders. [93:2] Goochland County was set off in 1728, and the growth of population led, as early as 1729, to proposals for establishing a city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the upper James, as on the Rappahannock, speculative planters bought headrights and located settlers and tenants to hold their grants. [93:3] Into this region came natives of Virginia, emigrants from the British isles, and scattered representatives of other lands, some of them coming up the James, others up the York, and still others arriving with the southward-moving current along both sides of the Blue Ridge.

Before 1730 few settlers lived above the mouth of the Rivanna. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at the eastern opening of its mountain gap, and here, under frontier conditions, Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 near his later estate of Monticello. About him were pioneer farmers, as well as foresighted engrossers of the land. In the main his country was that of a democratic frontier people—Scotch-Irish [ 94 ] Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects, [94:1] out of sympathy with the established church and the landed gentry of the lowlands. This society in which he was born, was to find in Jefferson a powerful exponent of its ideals. [94:2] Patrick Henry was born in 1736 above the falls, not far from Richmond, and he also was a mouthpiece of interior Virginia in the Revolutionary era. In short, a society was already forming in the Virginia Piedmont which was composed of many sects, of independent yeomen as well as their great planter leaders—a society naturally expansive, seeing its opportunity to deal in unoccupied lands along the frontier which continually moved toward the West, and in this era of the eighteenth century dominated by the democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies of slaveholding planters. As there were two New Englands, so there were by this time two Virginias, and the uplands belonged with the Old West.

The advance across the fall line from the coast was, in North Carolina, much slower than in Virginia. After the Tuscarora War (1712-13) an extensive region west from Pamlico Sound was opened (1724). The region to the north, about the Roanoke, had before this begun to receive frontier settlers, largely from Virginia. Their traits are interestingly portrayed in Byrd's "Dividing Line." By 1728 the farthest inhabitants along the Virginia boundary were frontiersmen about Great Creek, a branch of the Roanoke. [94:3] The North Carolina commissioners desired to stop running the line after going a hundred and seventy miles, on the plea that they were already fifty miles beyond the outermost inhabitant, and there would be no need for an age or two to carry the line farther; but the [ 95 ] Virginia surveyors pointed out that already speculators were taking up the land. A line from Weldon to Fayetteville would roughly mark the western boundary of North Carolina's sparse population of forty thousand souls. [95:1]

The slower advance is explained, partly because of the later settlement of the Carolinas, partly because the Indians continued to be troublesome on the flanks of the advancing population, as seen in the Tuscarora and Yemassee wars, and partly because the pine barrens running parallel with the fall line made a zone of infertile land not attractive to settlers. The North Carolina low country, indeed, had from the end of the seventeenth century been a kind of southern frontier for overflow from Virginia; and in many ways was assimilated to the type of the up-country in its turbulent democracy, its variety of sects and peoples, and its primitive conditions. But under the lax management of the public lands, the use of "blank patents" and other evasions made possible the development of large landholding, side by side with headrights to settlers. Here, as in Virginia, a great proprietary grant extended across the colony—Lord Granville's proprietary was a zone embracing the northern half of North Carolina. Within the area, sales and quit-rents were administered by the agents of the owner, with the result that uncertainty and disorder of an agrarian nature extended down to the Revolution. There were likewise great speculative holdings, conditioned on seating a certain proportion of settlers, into which the frontiersmen were drifting. [95:2] But this system also made it possible for agents of later migrating congregations to establish colonies like that of the Moravians at Wachovia. [95:3] Thus, by the time settlers [ 96 ] came into the uplands from the north, a land system existed similar to that of Virginia. A common holding was a square mile (640 acres), but in practice this did not prevent the accumulation of great estates. [96:1] Whereas Virginia's Piedmont area was to a large extent entered by extensions from the coast, that of North Carolina remained almost untouched by 1730. [96:2]

The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730, settlement had progressed hardly eighty miles from the coast, even in the settled area of the lowlands. The tendency to engross the lowlands for large plantations was clear, here as elsewhere. [96:3] The surveyor-general reports in 1732 that not as many as a thousand acres within a hundred miles of Charleston, or within twenty miles of a river or navigable creek, were unpossessed. In 1729 the crown ordered eleven townships of twenty thousand acres each to be laid out in rectangles, divided into fifty acres for each actual settler under a quit-rent of four shillings a year for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid after the first ten years. [96:4] By 1732 these townships, designed to attract foreign Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers of the colony. As they were located in the middle region, east of the fall line, among pine barrens, or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony, they all proved abortive as towns, except Orangeburg [96:5] on the North Edisto, where [ 97 ] German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered hardships; as did the Swiss who, under the visionary leadership of Purry, settled in the deadly climate of Purrysburg, on the lower Savannah. To Welsh colonists from Pennsylvania there was made a grant—known as the "Welsh tract," embracing over 173,000 acres on the Great Pedee (Marion County) [97:1] under headrights of fifty acres, also a bounty in provisions, tools, and livestock.

These attempts, east of the fall line, are interesting as showing the colonial policy of marking out towns (which were to be politically-organized parishes, with representation in the legislature), and attracting foreigners thereto, prior to the coming of settlers from the North.

The settlement of Georgia, in 1732, completed the southern line of colonization toward the Piedmont. Among the objects of the colony, as specified in the charters, were the relief of the poor and the protection of the frontiers. To guard against the tendency to engross the lands in great estates, already so clearly revealed in the older colonies, the Georgia trustees provided that the grants of fifty acres should not be alienated or divided, but should pass to the male heirs and revert to the trustees in case heirs were lacking. No grant greater than five hundred acres was permitted, and even this was made conditionally upon the holder settling ten colonists. However, under local conditions and the competition and example of neighboring colonies, this attempt to restrict land tenure in the interest of democracy broke down by 1750, and Georgia's land system became not unlike that of the other Southern colonies. [97:2]

In 1734, Salzburgers had been located above Savannah, and [ 98 ] within seven years some twelve hundred German Protestants were dwelling on the Georgia frontier; while a settlement of Scotch Highlanders at Darien, near the mouth of the Altamaha, protected the southern frontier. At Augusta, an Indian trading fort (1735), whence the dealers in peltry visited the Cherokee, completed the familiar picture of frontier advance. [98:1]

We have now hastily surveyed the movement of the frontier of settlement westward from the lowlands, in the later years of the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century. There is much that is common in the whole line of advance. The original settlers engross the desirable lands of the older area. Indented servants and new-comers pass to the frontier seeking a place to locate their headrights, or plant new towns. Adventurous and speculative wealthy planters acquire large holdings in the new areas, and bring over settlers to satisfy the requirements of seating and cultivating their extensive grants, thus building up a yeomanry of small landholders side by side with the holders of large estates. The most far-sighted of the new-comers follow the example of the planters, and petition for increasing extensive grants. Meanwhile, pioneers like Abraham Wood, himself once an indented servant, and gentlemen like Col. William Byrd—prosecuting the Indian trade from their posts at the "heads" of the rivers, and combining frontier protection, exploring, and surveying—make known the more distant fertile soils of the Piedmont. Already in the first part of the eighteenth century, the frontier population tended to be a rude democracy, with a large representation of Scotch-Irish, Germans, Welsh, and Huguenot French settlers, holding religious faiths unlike that of the followers of the established church in the lowlands. The movement of slaves into the region was unimportant, but not unknown.

The Virginia Valley was practically unsettled in 1730, as was much of Virginia's Piedmont area and all the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. The significance of the movement of settlers from the North into this vacant Valley and Piedmont, behind the area occupied by expansion from the coast is, that it was geographically separated from the westward movement from the coast, and that it was sufficient in volume to recruit the democratic forces and postpone for a long time the process of social assimilation to the type of the lowlands.

As has been pointed out, especially in the Carolinas a belt of pine barrens, roughly eighty miles in breadth, ran parallel with the fall line and thus discouraged western advance across this belt, even before the head of navigation was reached. In Virginia, the Blue Ridge made an almost equally effective barrier, walling off the Shenandoah Valley from the westward advance. At the same time this valley was but a continuation of the Great Valley, that ran along the eastern edge of the Alleghanies in southeastern Pennsylvania, and included in its mountain trough the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys. In short, a broad limestone band of fertile soil was stretched within mountain walls, southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern Virginia; and here the watergaps opened the way to descend to the Carolina Piedmont. This whole area, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania, was rendered comparatively inaccessible to the westward movement from the lowlands, and was equally accessible to the population which was entering Pennsylvania. [99:1]

Thus it happened that from about 1730 to 1760 a generation of settlers poured along this mountain trough into the southern uplands, or Piedmont, creating a new continuous social and economic area, which cut across the artificial colonial boundary [ 100 ] lines, disarranged the regular extension of local government from the coast westward, and built up a new Pennsylvania in contrast with the old Quaker colonies, and a new South in contrast with the tidewater South. This New South composed the southern half of the Old West.

From its beginning, Pennsylvania was advertised as a home for dissenting sects seeking freedom in the wilderness. But it was not until the exodus of German redemptioners, [100:1] from about 1717, that the Palatinate and neighboring areas sent the great tide of Germans which by the time of the Revolution made them nearly a third of the total population of Pennsylvania. It has been carefully estimated that in 1775 over 200,000 Germans lived in the thirteen colonies, chiefly along the frontier zone of the Old West. Of these, a hundred thousand had their home in Pennsylvania, mainly in the Great Valley, in the region which is still so notably the abode of the "Pennsylvania Dutch." [100:2]

Space does not permit us to describe this movement of colonization. [100:3] The entrance to the fertile limestone soils of the Great Valley of Pennsylvania was easy, in view of the low elevation of the South Mountain ridge, and the watergaps thereto. The continuation along the similar valley to the south, in Maryland and Virginia, was a natural one, especially as the increasing tide of emigrants raised the price of lands. [100:4] In [ 101 ] 1719 the proprietor's price for Pennsylvania lands was ten pounds per hundred acres, and two shillings quit-rents. In 1732 this became fifteen and one-half pounds, with a quit-rent of a half penny per acre. [101:1] During the period 1718 to 1732, when the Germans were coming in great numbers, the management of the lands fell into confusion, and many seated themselves as squatters, without title. [101:2] This was a fortunate possibility for the poor redemptioners, who had sold their service for a term of years in order to secure their transportation to America.

By 1726 it was estimated that there were 100,000 squatters; [101:3] and of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and 1740, it is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without grants. [101:4] Nevertheless these must ultimately be paid for, with interest, and the concession of the right of preëmption to squatters made this easier. But it was not until 1755 that the governor offered land free from purchase, and this was to be taken only west of the Alleghanies. [101:5]

Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsylvania, the lands of that colony were in competition with the Maryland lands, offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty shillings sterling per hundred acres, which in 1738 was raised to five pounds sterling. [101:6] At the same time, in the Virginia Valley, as will be recalled, free grants were being made of a thousand acres per family. Although large tracts of the Shenandoah Valley had been granted to speculators like Beverley, [ 102 ] Borden, and the Carters, as well as to Lord Fairfax, the owners sold six or seven pounds cheaper per hundred acres than did the Pennsylvania land office. [102:1] Between 1726 and 1734, therefore, the Germans began to enter this valley, [102:2] and before long they extended their settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas, [102:3] being recruited in South Carolina by emigrants coming by way of Charleston—especially after Governor Glenn's purchase from the Cherokee in 1755, of the extreme western portion of the colony. Between 1750 and the Revolution, these settlers in the Carolinas greatly increased in numbers.

Thus a zone of almost continuous German settlements had been established, running from the head of the Mohawk in New York to the Savannah in Georgia. They had found the best soils, and they knew how to till them intensively and thriftily, as attested by their large, well-filled barns, good stock, and big canvas-covered Conestoga wagons. They preferred to dwell in groups, often of the same religious denomination—Lutherans, Reformed, Moravians, Mennonites, and many lesser sects. The diaries of Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania, who visited them, show how the parent congregations kept in touch with their colonies [102:4] and how intimate, [ 103 ] in general, was the bond of connection between this whole German frontier zone and that of Pennsylvania.

Side by side with this German occupation of Valley and Piedmont, went the migration of the Scotch-Irish. [103:1] These lowland Scots had been planted in Ulster early in the seventeenth century. Followers of John Knox, they had the contentious individualism and revolutionary temper that seem natural to Scotch Presbyterianism. They were brought up on the Old Testament, and in the doctrine of government by covenant or compact. In Ireland their fighting qualities had been revealed in the siege of Londonderry, where their stubborn resistance balked the hopes of James II. However, religious and political disabilities were imposed upon these Ulstermen, which made them discontented, and hard times contributed to detach them from their homes. Their movement to America was contemporaneous with the heavy German migration. By the Revolution, it is believed that a third of the population of Pennsylvania was Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated, probably too liberally, that a half million came to the United States between 1730 and 1770. [103:2] Especially after the Rebellion of 1745, large numbers of Highlanders came to increase the Scotch blood in the nation. [103:3] Some of the Scotch-Irish went to New England. [103:4] Given the cold shoulder by congregational Puritans, they passed to unsettled lands about Worcester, to the frontier in the Berkshires, and in southern New Hampshire at Londonderry—whence came John Stark, a frontier [ 104 ] leader in the French and Indian War, and the hero of Bennington in the Revolution, as well as the ancestors of Horace Greeley and S. P. Chase. In New York, a Scotch-Irish settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry Valley. [104:1] Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk, [104:2] where they followed Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the Revolution.

But it was in Pennsylvania that the center of Scotch-Irish power lay. "These bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when challenged for titles that we had solicited for colonists and they had come accordingly," [104:3] and asserting that "it was against the laws of God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant lands, especially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and remained in spite of efforts to drive them off. Finding the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they planted their own outposts along the line of the Indian trading path from Lancaster to Bedford; they occupied Cumberland Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the Juniata somewhat beyond the narrows, spreading out along its tributaries, and by 1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country to avoid Indian trouble. By the time of the Revolution, their settlements made Pittsburgh a center from which was to come a new era in Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch-Irish and German fur-traders [104:4] whose pack trains pioneered into the Ohio Valley in the days before the French and Indian wars. The messengers between civilization and savagery were such [ 105 ] men, [105:1] as the Irish Croghan, and the Germans Conrad Weiser and Christian Post.

Like the Germans, the Scotch-Irish passed into the Shenandoah Valley, [105:2] and on to the uplands of the South. In 1738 a delegation of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent to the Virginia governor and received assurances of security of religious freedom; the same policy was followed by the Carolinas. By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches extended from the frontiers of New England to the frontiers of South Carolina. This zone combined in part with the German zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow the valleys farther toward the mountains, to be the outer edge of this frontier. Along with this combined frontier stream were English, Welsh and Irish Quakers, and French Huguenots. [105:3]

Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into the Piedmont, in the middle of the eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone, John Sevier, James Robertson, and the ancestors of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett, while the father of Andrew Jackson came to the Carolina Piedmont at the same time from the coast. Recalling that Thomas Jefferson's home was on the frontier, at the edge of the Blue Ridge, we perceive that these names represent the militant expansive movement in American life. They foretell the settlement across the Alleghanies in Kentucky and Tennessee; the Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's transcontinental [ 106 ] exploration; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the War of 1812-15; the annexation of Texas; the acquisition of California and the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier democracy in its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. It was a democracy responsive to leadership, susceptible to waves of emotion, of a "high religeous voltage"—quick and direct in action.

The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern uplands is illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of North Carolina, that in the summer and winter of 1765 more than a thousand immigrant wagons passed through Salisbury, in that colony. [106:1] Coming by families, or groups of families or congregations, they often drove their herds with them. Whereas in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in Orange and the western counties of North Carolina, there were in 1753 fully three thousand, in addition to over a thousand Scotch in the Cumberland; and they covered the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and Fayetteville to the mountains. [106:2] Bassett remarks that the Presbyterians received their first ministers from the synod of New York and Pennsylvania, and later on sent their ministerial students to Princeton College. "Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this region knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or Edenton." [106:3]

We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some of the results of the occupation of this new frontier during the first half of the eighteenth century—some of the consequences of this formation of the Old West.

I. A fighting frontier had been created all along the line from New England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French [ 107 ] and Indian attacks and gave indispensable service during the Revolution. The significance of this fact could only be developed by an extended survey of the scattered border warfare of this era. We should have to see Rogers leading his New England Rangers, and Washington defending interior Virginia with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French and Indian War. When all of the campaigns about the region of Canada, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York (Oriskany, Cherry Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois), Wyoming Valley, western Pennsylvania, the Virginia Valley, and the back country of the South are considered as a whole from this point of view, the meaning of the Old West will become more apparent.

II. A new society had been established, differing in essentials from the colonial society of the coast. It was a democratic self-sufficing, primitive agricultural society, in which individualism was more pronounced than the community life of the lowlands. The indented servant and the slave were not a normal part of its labor system. It was engaged in grain and cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a partial means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries which it shipped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already pushing farther on; the cow-pens and the range were giving place to the small farm, as in our own day they have done in the cattle country. It was a region of hard work and poverty, not of wealth and leisure. Schools and churches were secured under serious difficulty, [107:1] if at all; but in spite of the natural [ 108 ] tendencies of a frontier life, a large portion of the interior showed a distinctly religious atmosphere.

III. The Old West began the movement of internal trade which developed home markets and diminished that colonial dependence on Europe in industrial matters shown by the maritime and staple-raising sections. Not only did Boston and other New England towns increase as trading centers when the back country settled up, but an even more significant interchange occurred along the Valley and Piedmont. The German farmers of the Great Valley brought their woven linen, knitted stockings, firkins of butter, dried apples, grain, etc., to Philadelphia and especially to Baltimore, which was laid out in 1730. To this city also came trade from the Shenandoah Valley, and even from the Piedmont came peltry trains and droves of cattle and hogs to the same market. [108:1] The increase of settlement on the upper James resulted in the establishment of the city of Richmond at the falls of the river in 1737. Already the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the lowlands were finding rivals in the grain-raising area of interior Virginia and Maryland. Charleston prospered as the up-country of the Carolinas grew. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, explained the apparent diminution of the colony's shipping thus: [108:2]

Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little money and bills that we could gather from other places, for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with which are [ 109 ] settled with very industrious and consequently thriving Germans.

It was not long before this interior trade produced those rivalries for commercial ascendancy, between the coastwise cities, which still continue. The problem of internal improvements became a pressing one, and the statutes show increasing provision for roads, ferries, bridges, river improvements, etc. [109:1] The basis was being laid for a national economy, and at the same time a new source for foreign export was created.

IV. The Old West raised the issues of nativism and a lower standard of comfort. In New England, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians had been frowned upon and pushed away by the Puritan townsmen. [109:2] In Pennsylvania, the coming of the Germans and the Scotch-Irish in such numbers caused grave anxiety. Indeed, a bill was passed to limit the importation of the Palatines, but it was vetoed. [109:3] Such astute observers as Franklin feared in 1753 that Pennsylvania would be unable to preserve its language and that even its government would become precarious. [109:4] "I remember," he declares, "when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in one or two counties;" and he lamented that the English could not remove their prejudices by addressing them in German. [109:5] Dr. Douglas [109:6] apprehended that Pennsylvania would "degenerate into a foreign colony" and endanger the quiet of the adjacent provinces. Edmund Burke, regretting that the [ 110 ] Germans adhered to their own schools, literature, and language, and that they possessed great tracts without admixture of English, feared that they would not blend and become one people with the British colonists, and that the colony was threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign. He also noted that "these foreigners by their industry, frugality, and a hard way of living, in which they greatly exceed our people, have in a manner thrust them out in several places." [110:1] This is a phenomenon with which a succession of later frontiers has familiarized us. In point of fact the "Pennsylvania Dutch" remained through our history a very stubborn area to assimilate, with corresponding effect upon Pennsylvania politics.

It should be noted also that this coming of non-English stock to the frontier raised in all the colonies affected, questions of naturalization and land tenure by aliens. [110:2]

V. The creation of this frontier society—of which so large a portion differed from that of the coast in language and religion as well as in economic life, social structure, and ideals—produced an antagonism between interior and coast, which worked itself out in interesting fashion. In general this took these forms: contests between the property-holding class of the coast and the debtor class of the interior, where specie was lacking, and where paper money and a readjustment of the basis of taxation were demanded; contests over defective or unjust local government in the administration of taxes, fees, lands, and the courts; contests over apportionment in the legislature, whereby the coast was able to dominate, even when its white population was in the minority; contests to secure the complete separation of church and state; and, later, [ 111 ] contests over slavery, internal improvements, and party politics in general. These contests are also intimately connected with the political philosophy of the Revolution and with the development of American democracy. In nearly every colony prior to the Revolution, struggles had been in progress between the party of privilege, chiefly the Eastern men of property allied with the English authorities, and the democratic classes, strongest in the West and the cities.

This theme deserves more space than can here be allotted to it; but a rapid survey of conditions in this respect, along the whole frontier, will at least serve to bring out the point.

In New England as a whole, the contest is less in evidence. That part of the friction elsewhere seen as the result of defective local government in the back country, was met by the efficiency of the town system; but between the interior and the coast there were struggles over apportionment and religious freedom. The former is illustrated by the convention that met in Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1776, to petition the States of Massachusetts and New Hampshire to relieve the financial distress and unfair legislative representation. Sixteen of the border towns of New Hampshire sent delegates to this convention. Two years later, these New Hampshire towns attempted to join Vermont. [111:1] As a Revolutionary State, Vermont itself was an illustration of the same tendency of the interior to break away from the coast. Massachusetts in this period witnessed a campaign between the paper money party which was entrenched in the more recently and thinly-settled areas of the interior and west, and the property-holding classes of the coast. [111:2] The opposition to the constitutions of 1778 and 1780 is tinctured [ 112 ] with the same antagonism between the ideas of the newer part of the interior and of the coast. [112:1] Shays' Rebellion and the anti-federal opposition of 1787-88 found its stronghold in the same interior areas. [112:2]

The religious struggles continued until the democratic interior, where dissenting sects were strong, and where there was antagonism to the privileges of the congregational church, finally secured complete disestablishment in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But this belongs to a later period. [112:3]

Pennsylvania affords a clear illustration of these sectional antagonisms. The memorial of the frontier "Paxton Boys," in 1764, demanded a right to share in political privileges with the older part of the colony, and protested against the apportionment by which the counties of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia, together with the city of Philadelphia, elected twenty-six delegates, while the five frontier counties had but ten. [112:4] The frontier complained against the failure of the dominant Quaker party of the coast to protect the interior against the Indians. [112:5] The three old wealthy counties under Quaker rule feared the growth of the West, therefore made few new counties, and carefully restricted the representation in each to preserve the majority in the old section. At the same time, by a property qualification they met the danger of the democratic city population. Among the points of grievance in this colony, [ 113 ] in addition to apportionment and representation, was the difficulty of access to the county seat, owing to the size of the back counties. Dr. Lincoln has well set forth the struggle of the back country, culminating in its triumph in the constitutional convention of 1776, which was chiefly the work of the Presbyterian counties. [113:1] Indeed, there were two revolutions in Pennsylvania, which went on side by side: one a revolt against the coastal property-holding classes, the old dominant Quaker party, and the other a revolt against Great Britain, which was in this colony made possible only by the triumph of the interior.

In Virginia, as early as 1710, Governor Spotswood had complained that the old counties remained small while the new ones were sometimes ninety miles long, the inhabitants being obliged to travel thirty or forty miles to their own court-house. Some of the counties had 1,700 tithables, while others only a dozen miles square had 500. Justices of the peace disliked to ride forty or fifty miles to their monthly courts. Likewise there was disparity in the size of parishes—for example, that of Varina, on the upper James, had nine hundred tithables, many of whom lived fifty miles from their church. But the vestry refused to allow the remote parishioners to separate, because it would increase the parish levy of those that remained. He feared lest this would afford "opportunity to Sectarys to establish their opinions among 'em, and thereby shake that happy establishment of the Church of England which this colony enjoys with less mixture of Dissenters than any other of her Maj'tie's plantations, and when once Schism has crept into the Church, it will soon create faction in the Civil Government."

That Spotswood's fears were well founded, we have already seen. As the sectaries of the back country increased, dissatisfaction with the established church grew. After the Revolution came, Jefferson, with the back country behind him, was able finally to destroy the establishment, and to break down the system of entails and primogeniture behind which the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the coast was entrenched. The desire of Jefferson to see slavery gradually abolished and popular education provided, is a further illustration of the attitude of the interior. In short, Jeffersonian democracy, with its idea of separation of church and state, its wish to popularize education, and its dislike for special privilege, was deeply affected by the Western society of the Old Dominion.

The Virginian reform movement, however, was unable to redress the grievance of unequal apportionment. In 1780 Jefferson pointed out that the practice of allowing each county an equal representation in the legislature gave control to the numerous small counties of the tidewater, while the large populous counties of the up-country suffered. "Thus," he wrote, "the 19,000 men below the falls give law to more than 30,000 living in other parts of the state, and appoint all their chief officers, executive and judiciary." [114:1] This led to a long struggle between coast and interior, terminated only when the slave population passed across the fall line, and more nearly assimilated coast and up-country. In the mountain areas which did not undergo this change, the independent state of West Virginia remains as a monument of the contest. In the convention of 1829-30, the whole philosophy of representation was discussed, and the coast defended its control as necessary to protect [ 115 ] property from the assaults of a numerical majority. They feared that the interior would tax their slaves in order to secure funds for internal improvements.

As Doddridge put the case: [115:1]

The principle is that the owners of slave property must be possessed of all the powers of government, however small their own numbers may be, to secure that property from the rapacity of an overgrown majority of white men. This principle admits of no relaxation, because the weaker the minority becomes, the greater will their need for power be according to their own doctrines.

Leigh of Chesterfield county declared: [115:2]

It is remarkable—I mention it for the curiosity of the fact—that if any evil, physical or moral, arise in any of the states south of us, it never takes a northerly direction, or taints the Southern breeze; whereas, if any plague originate in the North, it is sure to spread to the South and to invade us sooner or later; the influenza—the smallpox—the varioloid—the Hessian fly—the Circuit Court system—Universal Suffrage—all come from the North, and they always cross above the falls of the great rivers ; below, it seems, the broad expanse of waters interposing, effectually arrests their progress.

Nothing could more clearly bring out the sense of contrast between upland and lowland Virginia, and the continued intimacy of the bond of connection between the North and its Valley and Piedmont colonies, than this unconscious testimony.

In North and South Carolina the upland South, beyond the pine barrens and the fall line, had similar grievances against the coast; but as the zone of separation was more strongly marked, the grievances were more acute. The tide of backwoods settlement flowing down the Piedmont from the north, had cut across the lines of local government and disarranged the regular course of development of the colonies from the seacoast. [116:1] Under the common practice, large counties in North Carolina and parishes in South Carolina had been projected into the unoccupied interior from the older settlements along their eastern edge.

But the Piedmont settlers brought their own social order, and could not be well governed by the older planters living far away toward the seaboard. This may be illustrated by conditions in South Carolina. The general court in Charleston had absorbed county and precinct courts, except the minor jurisdiction of justices of the peace. This was well enough for the great planters who made their regular residence there for a part of each year; but it was a source of oppression to the up-country settlers, remote from the court. The difficulty of bringing witnesses, the delay of the law, and the costs all resulted in the escape of criminals as well as in the immunity of reckless debtors. The extortions of officials, and their occasional collusion with horse and cattle thieves, and the lack of regular administration of the law, led the South Carolina up-country men to take affairs in their own hands, and in 1764 to establish associations to administer lynch law under the name of "Regulators." The "Scovillites," or [ 117 ] government party, and the Regulators met in arms on the Saluda in 1769, but hostilities were averted and remedial measures passed, which alleviated the difficulty until the Revolution. [117:1] There still remained, however, the grievance of unjust legislative representation. [117:2] Calhoun stated the condition in these words:

The upper country had no representation in the government and no political existence as a constituent portion of the state until a period near the commencement of the revolution. Indeed, during the revolution, and until the formation of the present constitution, in 1790, its political weight was scarcely felt in the government. Even then although it had become the most populous section, power was so distributed under the constitution as to leave it in a minority in every department of government.

Even in 1794 it was claimed by the up-country leaders that four-fifths of the people were governed by one-fifth. Nor was the difficulty met until the constitutional amendment of 1808, the effect of which was to give the control of the senate to the lower section and of the house of representatives to the upper section, thus providing a mutual veto. [117:3] This South Carolina experience furnished the historical basis for Calhoun's argument for nullification, and for the political philosophy underlying [ 118 ] his theory of the "concurrent majority." [118:1] This adjustment was effected, however, only after the advance of the black belt toward the interior had assimilated portions of the Piedmont to lowland ideals.

When we turn to North Carolina's upper country we find the familiar story, but with a more tragic ending. The local officials owed their selection to the governor and the council whom he appointed. Thus power was all concentrated in the official "ring" of the lowland area. The men of the interior resented the extortionate fees and the poll tax, which bore with unequal weight upon the poor settlers of the back country. This tax had been continued after sufficient funds had been collected to extinguish the debt for which it was originally levied, but venal sheriffs had failed to pay it into the treasury. A report of 1770 showed at least one defaulting sheriff in every county of the province. [118:2] This tax, which was almost the sole tax of the colony, was to be collected in specie, for the warehouse system, by which staples might be accepted, while familiar on the coast, did not apply to the interior. The specie was exceedingly difficult to obtain; in lack of it, the farmer saw the sheriff, who owed his appointment to the dominant lowland planters, sell the lands of the delinquent to his speculative friends. Lawyers and court fees followed.

In short, the interior felt that it was being exploited , [118:3] and it had no redress, for the legislature was so apportioned that [ 119 ] all power rested in the old lowland region. Efforts to secure paper money failed by reason of the governor's opposition under instructions from the crown, and the currency was contracting at the very time when population was rapidly increasing in the interior. [119:1] As in New England, in the days of Shays' Rebellion, violent prejudice existed against the judiciary and the lawyers, and it must, of course, be understood that the movement was not free from frontier dislike of taxation and the restraints of law and order in general. In 1766 and 1768, meetings were held in the upper counties to organize the opposition, and an "association" [119:2] was formed, the members of which pledged themselves to pay no more taxes or fees until they satisfied themselves that these were agreeable to law.

The Regulators, as they called themselves, assembled in the autumn of 1768 to the number of nearly four thousand, and tried to secure terms of adjustment. In 1770 the court-house at Hillsboro was broken into by a mob. The assembly passed some measures designed to conciliate the back country; but before they became operative, Governor Tryon's militia, about twelve hundred men, largely from the lowlands, and led by the gentry whose privileges were involved, met the motley army of the Regulators, who numbered about two thousand, in the battle of the Alamance (May, 1771). Many were killed and wounded, the Regulators dispersed, and over six thousand men came into camp and took the oath of submission to the colonial authorities. The battle was not the first battle of the Revolution, as it has been sometimes called, for it had little or no [ 120 ] relation to the stamp act; and many of the frontiersmen involved, later refused to fight against England because of the very hatred which had been inspired for the lowland Revolutionary leaders in this battle of the Alamance. The interior of the Carolinas was a region where neighbors, during the Revolution, engaged in internecine conflicts of Tories against Whigs.

But in the sense that the battle of Alamance was a conflict against privilege, and for equality of political rights and power, it was indeed a preliminary battle of the Revolution, although fought against many of the very men who later professed Revolutionary doctrines in North Carolina. The need of recognizing the importance of the interior led to concessions in the convention of 1776 in that state. "Of the forty-four sections of the constitution, thirteen are embodiments of reforms sought by the Regulators." [120:1] But it was in this period that hundreds of North Carolina backwoodsmen crossed the mountains to Tennessee and Kentucky, many of them coming from the heart of the Regulator region. They used the device of "associations" to provide for government in their communities. [120:2]

In the matter of apportionment, North Carolina showed the same lodgment of power in the hands of the coast, even after population preponderated in the Piedmont. [120:3]

It is needless to comment on the uniformity of the evidence which has been adduced, to show that the Old West, the interior region from New England to Georgia, had a common grievance against the coast; that it was deprived throughout most of the region of its due share of representation, and neglected and oppressed in local government in large portions of [ 121 ] the section. The familiar struggle of West against East, of democracy against privileged classes, was exhibited along the entire line. The phenomenon must be considered as a unit, not in the fragments of state histories. It was a struggle of interior against coast.

VI. Perhaps the most noteworthy Western activity in the Revolutionary era, aside from the aspects already mentioned, was in the part which the multitude of sects in the Old West played in securing the great contribution which the United States made to civilization by providing for complete religious liberty, a secular state with free churches. Particularly the Revolutionary constitutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia, under the influence of the back country, insured religious freedom. The effects of the North Carolina upland area to secure a similar result were noteworthy, though for the time ineffective. [121:1]

VII. As population increased in these years, the coast gradually yielded to the up-country's demands. This may be illustrated by the transfer of the capitals from the lowlands to the fall line and Valley. In 1779, Virginia changed her seat of government from Williamsburg to Richmond; in 1790, South Carolina, from Charleston to Columbia; in 1791, North Carolina, from Edenton to Raleigh; in 1797, New York, from New York City to Albany; in 1799, Pennsylvania, from Philadelphia to Lancaster.

VIII. The democratic aspect of the new constitutions was also influenced by the frontier as well as by the prevalent Revolutionary philosophy; and the demands for paper money, stay [ 122 ] and tender laws, etc., of this period were strongest in the interior. It was this region that supported Shays' Rebellion; it was (with some important exceptions) the same area that resisted the ratification of the federal constitution, fearful of a stronger government and of the loss of paper money.

IX. The interior later showed its opposition to the coast by the persistent contest against slavery, carried on in the up-country of Virginia, and North and South Carolina. Until the decade 1830-40, it was not certain that both Virginia and North Carolina would not find some means of gradual abolition. The same influence accounts for much of the exodus of the Piedmont pioneers into Indiana and Illinois, in the first half of the nineteenth century. [122:1]

X. These were the regions, also, in which were developed the desire of the pioneers who crossed the mountains, and settled on the "Western waters," to establish new States free from control by the lowlands, owning their own lands, able to determine their own currency, and in general to govern themselves in accordance with the ideals of the Old West. They were ready also, if need be, to become independent of the Old Thirteen. Vermont must be considered in this aspect, as well as Kentucky and Tennessee. [122:2]

XI. The land system of the Old West furnished precedents which developed into the land system of the trans-Alleghany West. [122:3] The squatters of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas [ 123 ] found it easy to repeat the operation on another frontier. Preemption laws became established features. The Revolution gave opportunity to confiscate the claims of Lord Fairfax, Lord Granville, and McCulloh to their vast estates, as well as the remaining lands of the Pennsylvania proprietors. The 640 acre (or one square mile) unit of North Carolina for preemptions, and frontier land bounties, became the area awarded to frontier stations by Virginia in 1779, and the "section" of the later federal land system. The Virginia preëmption right of four hundred acres on the Western waters, or a thousand for those who came prior to 1778, was, in substance, the continuation of a system familiar in the Old West.

The grants to Beverley, of over a hundred thousand acres in the Valley, conditioned on seating a family for every thousand acres, and the similar grants to Borden, Carter, and Lewis, were followed by the great grant to the Ohio Company. This company, including leading Virginia planters and some frontiersmen, asked in 1749 for two hundred thousand acres on the upper Ohio, conditioned on seating a hundred families in seven years, and for an additional grant of three hundred thousand acres after this should be accomplished. It was proposed to settle Germans on these lands.

The Loyal Land Company, by order of the Virginia council (1749), was authorized to take up eight hundred thousand acres west and north of the southern boundary of Virginia, on condition of purchasing "rights" for the amount within four years. The company sold many tracts for £3 per hundred acres to settlers, but finally lost its claim. The Mississippi Company, including in its membership the Lees, Washingtons, and other great Virginia planters, applied for two and one-half million acres in the West in 1769. Similar land companies [ 124 ] of New England origin, like the Susquehanna Company and Lyman's Mississippi Company, exhibit the same tendency of the Old West on the northern side. New England's Ohio Company of Associates, which settled Marietta, had striking resemblances to town proprietors.

These were only the most noteworthy of many companies of this period, and it is evident that they were a natural outgrowth of speculations in the Old West. Washington, securing military bounty land claims of soldiers of the French and Indian War, and selecting lands in West Virginia until he controlled over seventy thousand acres for speculation, is an excellent illustration of the tendency. He also thought of colonizing German Palatines upon his lands. The formation of the Transylvania and Vandalia companies were natural developments on a still vaster scale. [124:1]

XII. The final phase of the Old West, which I wish merely to mention, in conclusion, is its colonization of areas beyond the mountains. The essential unity of the movement is brought out by a study of how New England's Old West settled northern Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Adirondacks, central and Western New York, the Wyoming Valley (once organized as a part of Litchfield, Connecticut), the Ohio Company's region about Marietta, and Connecticut's Western Reserve on the shores of Lake Erie; and how the pioneers of the Great Valley and the Piedmont region of the South crossed the Alleghanies and settled on the Western Waters. Daniel Boone, going from his Pennsylvania home to the Yadkin, and from the Yadkin to Tennessee and Kentucky, took part in the whole process, and later in its continuation into Missouri. [124:2] The [ 125 ] social conditions and ideals of the Old West powerfully shaped those of the trans-Alleghany West.

The important contrast between the spirit of individual colonization, resentful of control, which the Southern frontiersmen showed, and the spirit of community colonization and control to which the New England pioneers inclined, left deep traces on the later history of the West. [125:1] The Old West diminished the importance of the town as a colonizing unit, even in New England. In the Southern area, efforts to legislate towns into existence, as in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, failed. They faded away before wilderness conditions. But in general, the Northern stream of migration was communal, and the Southern individual. The difference which existed between that portion of the Old West which was formed by the northward colonization, chiefly of the New England Plateau (including New York), and that portion formed by the southward colonization of the Virginia Valley and the Southern Piedmont was reflected in the history of the Middle West and the Mississippi Valley. [125:2]

[67:1] Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1908. Reprinted with the permission of the Society.

[68:1] For the settled area in 1660, see the map by Lois Mathews in Channing, "United Stales" (N. Y., 1905), i, p. 510; and by Albert Cook Myers in Avery, "United States" (Cleveland, 1905), ii, following p. 398. In Channing, ii, following p. 603, is Marion F. Lansing's map of settlement in 1760, which is on a rather conservative basis, especially the part showing the interior of the Carolinas.

Contemporaneous maps of the middle of the eighteenth century, useful in studying the progress of settlement, are: Mitchell, "Map of the British Colonies" (1755); Evans, "Middle British Colonies" (1758); Jefferson and Frye, "Map of Virginia" (1751 and 1755).

On the geographical conditions, see maps and text in Powell, "Physiographic Regions " (N. Y., 1896), and Willis, "Northern Appalachians," in "Physiography of the United States" (N. Y., 1896), pp. 73-82, 169-176, 196-201.

[70:1] See Osgood, "American Colonies" (N. Y., 1907), iii, chap. iii.

[70:2] See chapter ii , ante .

[70:3] Sheldon, "Deerfield" (Deerfield, Mass., 1895), i, p. 288.

[70:4] Parkman, "Frontenac" (Boston, 1898), p. 390; compare his description of Deerfield in 1704, in "Half Century of Conflict" (Boston, 1898), i, p. 55.

[72:1] Hanna, "Scotch Irish" (N. Y. and London, 1902), ii, pp. 17-24.

[72:2] "Half Century of Conflict," ii, pp. 214-234.

[72:3] "American Husbandry" (London, 1775), i, p. 47.

[73:1] For the extent of New England settlements in 1760, compared with 1700, see the map in Channing, "United States," ii, at end of volume.

[74:1] Schafer, "Land Grants for Education," Univ. of Wis. Bulletin (Madison, 1902), chap. iv.

[75:1] On New England's land system see Osgood, "American Colonies" (N. Y., 1904), i, chap. xi; and Egleston , "Land System of the New England Colonies," Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies (Baltimore, 1886), iv. Compare the account of Virginia, about 1696, in "Mass. Hist. Colls." (Boston, 1835), 1st series, v, p. 129, for a favorable view of the New England town system; and note the probable influence of New England's system upon Virginia's legislation about 1700. See chapter ii , ante .

[76:1] Amelia C. Ford, "Colonial Precedents of our National Land System," citing Massachusetts Bay, House of Rep. "Journal," 1715, pp. 5, 22, 46; Hutchinson, "History of Massachusetts Bay" (London, 1768), ii, p. 331; Holland, "Western Massachusetts" (Springfield, 1855), pp. 66, 169.

[76:2] "Conn. Colon. Records" (Hartford, 1874), viii, p. 134.

[77:1] Holland, "Western Massachusetts," p. 197. See the comments of Hutchinson in his "History of Massachusetts Bay," ii, pp. 331, 332. Compare the steps of Connecticut men in 1753 and 1755 to secure a land grant in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, for the Susquehanna Company, and the Connecticut governor's remark that there was no unappropriated land in the latter colony—"Pa. Colon. Records" (Harrisburg, 1851), v, p. 771; "Pa. Archives," 2d series, xviii, contains the important documents, with much valuable information on the land system of the Wyoming Valley region. See also General Lyman's projects for a Mississippi colony in the Yazoo delta area—all indicative of the pressure for land and the speculative spirit.

[78:1] Compare Vermont's dealings with the British, and the negotiations of Kentucky and Tennessee leaders with Spaniards and British. See Amer. Hist. Review , i, p. 252, note 2, for references on Vermont's Revolutionary philosophy and influence.

[79:1] See H. C. Emery, "Artemas Jean Haynes" (New Haven, 1908), pp. 8-10.

[80:1] Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, p. 110.

[80:2] "N. Y. Colon. Docs," vii, pp. 654, 795.

[81:1] Becker, in Amer. Hist. Review , vi, p. 261.

[81:2] Becker, loc. cit. For maps of grants in New York, see O'Callaghan, "Doc. Hist. of N. Y." (Albany, 1850), i, pp. 421, 774; especially Southier, "Chorographical Map of New York"; Winsor, "America," v, p. 236. In general on these grants, consult also "Doc. Hist. of N. Y.," i, pp. 249-257; "N. Y. Colon. Docs.," iv, pp. 397, 791, 874; v, pp. 459, 651, 805; vi, pp. 486, 549, 743, 876, 950; Kip, "Olden Time" (N. Y., 1872), p. 12; Scharf, "History of Westchester County" (Phila., 1886), i, p. 91; Libby, "Distribution of Vote on Ratification of Constitution" (Madison, 1894), pp. 21-25.

For the region of the Wallkill, including New Paltz, etc., see Eager, "Outline History of Orange County, New York" (Newburgh, 1846-47); and Ruttenber and Clark, "History of Orange County" (Phila., 1881), pp. 11-20. On Cherry Valley and upper Susquehanna settlements, in general, in New York, see Halsey, "Old New York Frontier," pp. 5, 119, and the maps by De Witt and Southier in O'Callaghan, "Doc. Hist. of N. Y.," i, pp. 421, 774.

Note the French Huguenots and Scotch-Irish in Orange County, and the Scotch-Irish settlers of Cherry Valley and their relation to Londonderry, N. H., as well as the missionary visits from Stockbridge, Mass., to the upper Susquehanna.

[82:1] Lord, "Industrial Experiments" (Baltimore, 1898), p. 45; Diffenderfer, "German Exodus" (Lancaster, Pa., 1897).

[82:2] See post .

[84:1] Hening, "Va. Statutes at Large" (N. Y., 1823), ii, p. 326.

[84:2] Ibid. , p. 433.

[84:3] Bassett, "Writings of William Byrd" (N. Y., 1901), p. xxi.

[85:1] Hening, iii, p. 82. Similar acts were passed almost annually in successive years of the seventeenth century; cf. loc. cit. , pp. 98, 115, 119, 126, 164; the system was discontinued in 1722—see Beverley, "Virginia and its Government" (London, 1722), p. 234.

It is interesting to compare the recommendation of Governor Dodge for Wisconsin Territory in 1836—see Wis. Terr. House of Reps. "Journal," 1836, pp. 11 et seq.

[85:2] Hening, iii, pp. 204-209.

[87:1] Compare the law of 1779 in "Va. Revised Code" (1819), ii, p. 357; Ranck's "Boonesborough" (Louisville, 1901).

[87:2] Bassett, "Writings of Byrd," p. xii; "Calendar of British State Papers, Am. and W. I.," 1677-80 (London, 1896), p. 168.

[87:3] Bassett, loc. cit. , p. x, and Hening, iii, p. 304 (1705).

[87:4] [See Alvord and Bidgood, "First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region."]

[87:5] Bassett, "Writings of Byrd," pp. xvii, xviii, quotes Byrd's description of the trail; Logan, "Upper South Carolina" (Columbia, 1859), i, p. 167; Adair describes the trade somewhat later; cf. Bartram, "Travels" (London, 1792), passim , and Monette, "Mississippi Valley" (N. Y., 1846), ii, p. 13.

[88:1] Bruce, "Economic Hist. of Va." (N. Y., 1896), i, pp. 473, 475, 477.

[88:2] See descriptions of cow-pens in Logan, "History of Upper S. C.," i, p. 151; Bartram, "Travels," p. 308. On cattle raising generally in the Piedmont, see: Gregg, "Old Cheraws" (N. Y., 1867), pp. 68, 108-110; Salley, "Orangeburg" (Orangeburg, 1898), pp. 219-221; Lawson, "New Voyage to Carolina" (Raleigh, 1860), p. 135; Ramsay, "South Carolina" (Charleston, 1809), i, p. 207; J. F. D. Smyth, "Tour" (London, 1784), i, p. 143, ii, pp. 78, 97; Foote, "Sketches of N. C." (N. Y., 1846), p. 77; "N. C. Colon. Records" (Raleigh, 1887), v, pp. xli, 1193, 1223; "American Husbandry" (London, 1775), i, pp. 336, 350, 384; Hening, v. pp. 176, 245.

[88:3] Spotswood, "Letters" (Richmond, 1882), i, p. 167; compare Va. Magazine , iii, pp. 120, 189.

[89:1] "N. C. Colon. Records," v, p. xli.

[89:2] Lawson, "Carolina" (Raleigh, 1860), gives a description early in the eighteenth century; his map is reproduced in Avery, "United States" (Cleveland, 1907), iii, p. 224.

[89:3] The advantages and disadvantages of the Piedmont region of the Carolinas in the middle of the eighteenth century are illustrated in Spangenburg's diary, in "N. C. Colon. Records," v, pp. 6, 7, 13, 14. Compare "American Husbandry," i, pp. 220, 332, 357, 388.

[90:1] Spotswood, "Letters," i, p. 40.

[90:2] On Germanna see Spotswood, "Letters" (index); Fontaine's journal in A. Maury, "Huguenot Family" (1853), p. 268; Jones, "Present State of Virginia" (N. Y., 1865), p. 59; Bassett, "Writings of Byrd," p. 356; Va. Magazine , xiii, pp. 362, 365; vi, p. 385; xii, pp. 342, 350; xiv, p. 136.

Spotswood's interest in the Indian trade on the southern frontier of Virginia is illustrated in his fort Christanna, on which the above references afford information.

The contemporaneous account of Spotswood's expedition into Shenandoah Valley is Fontaine's journey, cited above.

[91:1] See the excellent paper by C. E. Kemper, in Va. Magazine , xii, on "Early Westward Movement in Virginia."

[91:2] Compare Phillips, "Origin and Growth of the Southern Black Belts," in Amer. Hist. Review , xi, p. 799.

[91:3] Va. Magazine , xiii, p. 113.

[92:1] "Revised Code of Virginia" (Richmond, 1819), ii, p. 339.

[92:2] Mag. Amer. Hist. , xiii, pp. 217, 230; Winsor, "Narr. and Crit. Hist. of America," v, p. 268; Kercheval, "The Valley" (Winchester, Va., 1833), pp. 67, 209; Va. Magazine , xiii, p. 115.

[93:1] "William and Mary College Quarterly" (Williamsburg, 1895), iii, p. 226. See Jefferson and Frye, "Map of Virginia, 1751," for location of this and Borden's manor.

[93:2] Brown, "The Cabells" (Boston, 1895), p. 53.

[93:3] Loc. cit. , pp. 57, 66.

[94:1] Meade, "Old Churches" (Phila., 1861), 2 vols.; Foote, "Sketches" (Phila., 1855); Brown, "The Cabells," p. 68.

[94:2] Atlantic Monthly , vol. xci, pp. 83 et seq. ; Ford, "Writing of Thomas Jefferson" (N. Y., 1892), i, pp. xix et seq.

[94:3] Byrd, "Dividing Line" (Richmond, 1866), pp. 85, 271.

[95:1] "N. C. Colon. Records," iii, p. xiii. Compare Hawks, "Hist. of North Carolina" (Fayetteville, 1859), map of precincts, 1663-1729.

[95:2] Raper, "North Carolina" (N. Y., 1904), chap. v; W. R. Smith, "South Carolina" (N. Y., 1903), pp. 48, 57.

[95:3] Clewell, "Wachovia" (N. Y., 1902).

[96:1] Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, pp. 120, 121, citing Bassett, in "Law Quarterly Review," April, 1895, pp. 159-161.

[96:2] See map in Hawks, "North Carolina."

[96:3] McCrady, "South Carolina," 1719-1776 (N. Y., 1899 ) , pp. 149, 151; Smith, "South Carolina," p. 40; Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, pp. 117-119; Brevard, "Digest of S. C. Laws" (Charleston, 1857), i, p. xi.

[96:4] McCrady, "South Carolina," pp. 121 et seq. ; Phillips, "Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt" (N. Y., 1908), p. 51.

[96:5] This was not originally provided for among the eleven towns. For its history see Salley, "Orangeburg"—frontier conditions about 1769 are described on pp. 219 et seq. ; see map opposite p. 9.

[97:1] Gregg, "Old Cheraws," p. 44.

[97:2] Ballagh, loc. cit. , pp. 119, 120.

[98:1] Compare the description of Georgia frontier traders, cattle raisers, and land speculators, about 1773, in Bartram, "Travels," pp. 18, 36, 308.

[99:1] See Willis, "Northern Appalachians," in "Physiography of the U. S." in National Geog. Soc. "Monographs" (N. Y., 1895), no. 6.

[100:1] Diffenderfer, "German Immigration into Pennsylvania," in Pa. German Soc. "Proc.," v, p. 10; "Redemptioners" (Lancaster, Pa., 1900).

[100:2] A. B. Faust, "German Element in the United States."

[100:3] See the bibliographies in Kuhns, "German and Swiss Settlements of Pennsylvania" (N. Y., 1901); Wayland, "German Element of the Shenandoah Valley" (N. Y., 1908); Channing, "United States," ii, p. 421; Griffin, "List of Works Relating to the Germans in the U. S." (Library of Congress, Wash., 1904).

[100:4] See in illustration, the letter in Myers, "Irish Quakers" (Swarthmore, Pa., 1902), p. 70.

[101:1] Shepherd, "Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania" (N. Y., 1896), p. 34.

[101:2] Gordon, "Pennsylvania" (Phila., 1829), p. 225.

[101:3] Shepherd, loc. cit. , pp. 49-51.

[101:4] Ballagh, Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1897, pp. 112, 113. Compare Smith, "St. Clair Papers" (Cincinnati, 1882), ii, p. 101.

[101:5] Shepherd, loc. cit. , p. 50.

[101:6] Mereness, "Maryland" (N. Y., 1901), p. 77.

[102:1] "Calendar Va. State Papers" (Richmond, 1875), i, p. 217; on these grants see Kemper, "Early Westward Movement in Virginia" in Va. Mag. , xii and xiii; Wayland, "German Element of the Shenandoah Valley," William and Mary College Quarterly , iii. The speculators, both planters and new-comers, soon made application for lands beyond the Alleghanies.

[102:2] In 1794 the Virginia House of Delegates resolved to publish the most important laws of the state in German.

[102:3] See Bernheim, "German Settlements in the Carolinas" (Phila., 1872); Clewell, "Wachovia"; Allen, "German Palatines in N. C." (Raleigh, 1905).

[102:4] See Wayland, loc. cit. , bibliography, for references; and especially Va. Mag. , xi, pp. 113, 225, 370; xii, pp. 55, 134, 271; "German American Annals," N. S. iii, pp. 342, 369; iv, p. 16; Clewell, "Wachovia; N. C. Colon. Records," v, pp. 1-14.

[103:1] On the Scotch-Irish, see the bibliography in Green, "Scotch-Irish in America," Amer. Antiquarian Soc. "Proceedings," April, 1895; Hanna, "Scotch-Irish" (N. Y., 1902), is a comprehensive presentation of the subject; see also Myers, "Irish Quakers."

[103:2] Fiske, "Old Virginia" (Boston, 1897), ii, p. 394. Compare Linehan, "The Irish Scots and the Scotch-Irish" (Concord, N. H., 1902).

[103:3] See MacLean, "Scotch Highlanders in America" (Cleveland, 1900).

[103:4] Hanna, "Scotch-Irish," ii, pp. 17-24.

[104:1] Halsey, "Old New York Frontier" (N. Y., 1901).

[104:2] MacLean, pp. 196-230.

[104:3] The words of Logan, Penn's agent, in 1724, in Hanna, ii, pp. 60, 63.

[104:4] Winsor, "Mississippi Basin" (Boston, 1895), pp. 238-243.

[105:1] See Thwaites, "Early Western Travels" (Cleveland, 1904-06), i; Walton, "Conrad Weiser" (Phila., 1900); Heckewelder, "Narrative" (Phila., 1820).

[105:2] Christian, "Scotch-Irish Settlers in the Valley of Virginia" (Richmond, 1860).

[105:3] Roosevelt gives an interesting picture of this society in his "Winning of the West" (N. Y., 1889-96), i, chap. v; see also his citations, especially Doddridge, "Settlements and Indian Wars" (Wellsburgh, W. Va., 1824).

[106:1] Bassett, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1894, p. 145.

[106:2] "N. C. Colon. Records," v, pp. xxxix, xl; cf. p. xxi.

[106:3] Loc. cit. , pp. 146, 147.

[107:1] See the interesting account of Rev. Moses Waddell's school in South Carolina, on the upper Savannah, where the students, including John C. Calhoun, McDuffe, Legaré, and Petigru, were educated in the wilderness. They lived in log huts in the woods, furnished their own supplies, or boarded near by, were called to the log school-house by horn for morning prayers, and then scattered in groups to the woods for study. Hunt, "Calhoun" (Phila., 1907), p. 13.

[108:1] Scharf, "Maryland" (Baltimore, 1879), ii, p. 61, and chaps. i and xviii; Kercheval, "The Valley."

[108:2] Weston, "Documents," p. 82.

[109:1] See, for example, Phillips, "Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt," pp. 21-53.

[109:2] Hanna, "Scotch-Irish," ii, pp. 19, 22-24.

[109:3] Cobb, "Story of the Palatines" (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1897), p. 300, citing "Penn. Colon. Records," iv, pp. 225, 345.

[109:4] "Works" (Bigelow ed.), ii, pp. 296-299.

[109:5] Ibid. , iii, p. 297; cf. p. 221.

[109:6] "Summary" (1755), ii, p. 326.

[110:1] "European Settlements" (London, 1793), ii, p. 200 (1765); cf. Franklin, "Works" (N. Y., 1905-07), ii, p. 221, to the same effect.

[110:2] Proper, "Colonial Immigration Laws," in Columbia Univ., "Studies," xii.

[111:1] Libby, "Distribution of the Vote on the Federal Constitution," Univ. of Wis. Bulletin , pp. 8, 9, and citations. Note especially "New Hampshire State Papers," x, pp. 228 et seq.

[111:2] Libby, loc. cit. , pp. 12-14, 46, 54-57.

[112:1] Farrand, in Yale Review , May, 1908, p. 52 and citation.

[112:2] Libby, loc. cit.

[112:3] See Turner, "Rise of the New West" (Amer. Nation series, N. Y., 1906), pp. 16-18.

[112:4] Parkman, "Pontiac" (Boston, 1851), ii, p. 352.

[112:5] Shepherd, "Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania," in Columbia Univ. Studies , vi, pp. 546 et seq. Compare Watson, "Annals," ii, p. 259; Green, "Provincial America" (Amer. Nation series, N. Y., 1905), p. 234.

[113:1] Lincoln, "Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania" (Boston, 1901); McMaster and Stone, "Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution" (Lancaster, 1888).

[114:1] "Notes on Virginia." See his table of apportionment in Ford, "Writings of Thomas Jefferson," iii, p. 222.

[115:1] "Debates of the Virginia State Convention, 1829-1830" (Richmond, 1854), p. 87. These debates constitute a mine of material on the difficulty of reconciling the political philosophy of the Revolution with the protection of the property, including slaves, of the lowland planters.

[115:2] Loc. cit. , p. 407. The italics are mine.

[116:1] McCrady, "South Carolina, 1719-1776," p. 623.

[117:1] Brevard, "Digest of S. C. Laws," i, pp. xxiv, 253; McCrady, "South Carolina, 1719-1776," p. 637; Schaper, "Sectionalism in South Carolina," in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1900, i, pp. 334-338.

[117:2] Schaper, loc. cit. , pp. 338, 339; Calhoun, "Works" (N. Y., 1851-59), i, p. 402; Columbia (S. C.) Gazette , Aug. 1, 1794; Ramsay, "South Carolina," pp. 64-66, 195, 217; Elliot, "Debates," iv, pp. 288, 289, 296-299, 305, 309, 312.

[117:3] Schaper, loc. cit. , pp. 440-447 et seq.

[118:1] Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 50-52, 331; Calhoun, "Works," i, pp. 400-405.

[118:2] " N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. xiv-xvii.

[118:3] See Bassett, "Regulators of N. C." in Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1894, pp. 141 (bibliog.) et seq. ; "N. C. Colon. Records," pp. vii-x (Saunder's introductions are valuable); Caruthers, "David Caldwell" (Greensborough, N. C., 1842); Waddell, "Colonial Officer" (Raleigh, 1890); M. De L. Haywood, "Governor William Tryon" (Raleigh, N. C., 1903); Clewell, "Wachovia," chap. x; W. E. Fitch, "Some Neglected History of N. C." (N. Y., 1905); L. A. McCorkle and F. Nash, in "N. C. Booklet" (Raleigh, 1901-07), iii; Wheeler, "North Carolina," ii, pp. 301 et seq. ; Cutter, "Lynch Law," chap. ii. and iii.

[119:1] Bassett, loc. cit. , p. 152.

[119:2] Wheeler, "North Carolina," ii, pp. 301-306; "N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. 251, 699.

[120:1] "N. C. Colon. Records," viii, p. xix.

[120:2] Turner, in Amer. Hist. Review , i, p. 76.

[120:3] "N. C. Colon. Records," vii, pp. xiv-xxiv.

[121:1] Weeks, "Church and State in North Carolina" (Baltimore, 1893); "N. C. Colon. Records," x, p. 870; Curry, "Establishment and Disestablishment" (Phila., 1889); C. F. James, "Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia" (Lynchburg, Va., 1900); Semple, "The Virginia Baptists" (Richmond, 1810); Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Papers," ii, p. 21; iii, pp. 205, 213.

[122:1] See Ballagh, "Slavery in Virginia," Johns Hopkins Univ. "Studies," extra, xxiv; Bassett, "Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina," Id. , xiv, pp. 169-254; Bassett, "Slavery in the State of North Carolina," Id. , xvii; Bassett, "Antislavery Leaders in North Carolina," Id. , xvi; Weeks, "Southern Quakers," Id. , xv, extra; Schaper, "Sectionalism in South Carolina," Amer. Hist. Assoc. "Report," 1900; Turner, "Rise of the New West," pp. 54-56, 76-78, 80, 90, 150-152.

[122:2] See F. J. Turner, "State-Making in the West During the Revolutionary Era," in American Historical Review , i, p. 70.

[122:3] Hening, x, p. 35; "Public Acts of N. C.," i, pp. 204, 306; "Revised Code of Va., 1819," ii, p. 357; Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," i, p. 261; ii, pp. 92, 220.

[124:1] Alden, "New Governments West of the Alleghanies" (Madison, 1897), gives an account of these colonies. [See the more recent work by C. W. Alvord, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, 1763-1774" (1917).]

[124:2] Thwaites, "Daniel Boone" (N. Y., 1902); [A. Henderson, "Conquest of the Old Southwest" (N. Y., 1920), brings out the important share of up-country men of means in promoting colonization].

[125:1] Turner, in "Alumni Quarterly of the University of Illinois," ii, 133-136.

[125:2] [It has seemed best in this volume not to attempt to deal with the French frontier or the Spanish-American frontier. Besides the works of Parkman, a multitude of monographs have appeared in recent years which set the French frontier in new light; and for the Spanish frontier in both the Southwest and California much new information has been secured, and illuminating interpretations made by Professors H. E. Bolton, I. J. Cox, Chapman, Father Engelhart, and other California and Texas investigators, although the works of Hubert Howe Bancroft remain a useful mine of material. There was, of course, a contemporaneous Old West on both the French and the Spanish frontiers. The formation, approach and ultimate collision and intermingling of these contrasting types of frontiers are worthy of a special study.]

The Middle West [126:1]

American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once "the West" described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies; but the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of settlement has broken down old usage, and as yet no substitute has been generally accepted. The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the public, but for the purpose of the present paper, it will be applied to that region of the United States included in the census reports under the name of the North Central division, comprising the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the old "Territory Northwest of the River Ohio"), and their trans-Mississippi sisters of the Louisiana Purchase,—Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. It is an imperial domain. If the greater countries of Central Europe,—France, Germany, Italy, and Austro-Hungary,—were laid down upon this area, the Middle West would still show a margin of spare territory. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo constitute its gateways to the Eastern States; Kansas City, Omaha, St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Duluth-Superior dominate its western areas; Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to [ 127 ] the Middle West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi, with the Ohio and the Missouri as laterals, constitute the vast water system that binds the Middle West together. It is the economic and political center of the Republic. At one edge is the Populism of the prairies; at the other, the capitalism that is typified in Pittsburgh. Great as are the local differences within the Middle West, it possesses, in its physiography, in the history of its settlement, and in its economic and social life, a unity and interdependence which warrant a study of the area as an entity. Within the limits of this article, treatment of so vast a region, however, can at best afford no more than an outline sketch, in which old and well-known facts must, if possible, be so grouped as to explain the position of the section in American history.

In spite of the difficulties of the task, there is a definite advantage in so large a view. By fixing our attention too exclusively upon the artificial boundary lines of the States, we have failed to perceive much that is significant in the westward development of the United States. For instance, our colonial system did not begin with the Spanish War; the United States has had a colonial history and policy from the beginning of the Republic; but they have been hidden under the phraseology of "interstate migration" and "territorial organization."

The American people have occupied a spacious wilderness; vast physiographic provinces, each with its own peculiarities, have lain across the path of this migration, and each has furnished a special environment for economic and social transformation. It is possible to underestimate the importance of State lines, but if we direct our gaze rather to the physiographic province than to the State area, we shall be able to see some facts in a new light. Then it becomes clear that these physiographic provinces of America are in some respects [ 128 ] comparable to the countries of Europe, and that each has its own history of occupation and development. General Francis A. Walker once remarked that "the course of settlement has called upon our people to occupy territory as extensive as Switzerland, as England, as Italy, and latterly, as France or Germany, every ten years." It is this element of vastness in the achievements of American democracy that gives a peculiar interest to the conquest and development of the Middle West. The effects of this conquest and development upon the present United States have been of fundamental importance.

Geographically the Middle West is almost conterminous with the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains; but the larger share of Kansas and Nebraska, and the western part of the two Dakotas belong to the Great Plains; the Ozark Mountains occupy a portion of Missouri, and the southern parts of Ohio and Indiana merge into the Alleghany Plateau. The relation of the Provinces of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the rest of the United States is an important element in the significance of the Middle West. On the north lies the similar region of Canada: the Great Lakes are in the center of the whole eastern and more thickly settled half of North America, and they bind the Canadian and Middle Western people together. On the south, the provinces meet the apex of that of the Gulf Plains, and the Mississippi unites them. To the west, they merge gradually into the Great Plains; the Missouri and its tributaries and the Pacific railroads make for them a bond of union; another rather effective bond is the interdependence of the cattle of the plains and the corn of the prairies. To the east, the province meets the Alleghany and New England Plateaus, and is connected with them by the upper Ohio and by the line of the Erie Canal. Here the interaction of industrial life and the historical facts of settlement have produced a close relationship. The intimate connection between the larger part [ 129 ] of the North Central and the North Atlantic divisions of the United States will impress any one who examines the industrial and social maps of the census atlas. By reason of these interprovincial relationships, the Middle West is the mediator between Canada and the United States, and between the concentrated wealth and manufactures of the North Atlantic States and the sparsely settled Western mining, cattle-raising, and agricultural States. It has a connection with the South that was once still closer, and is likely before long to reassert itself with new power. Within the limits of the United States, therefore, we have problems of interprovincial trade and commerce similar to those that exist between the nations of the Old World.

Over most of the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains the Laurentide glacier spread its drift, rich in limestone and other rock powder, which farmers in less favored sections must purchase to replenish the soil. The alluvial deposit from primeval lakes contributed to fatten the soil of other parts of the prairies. Taken as a whole, the Prairie Plains surpass in fertility any other region of America or Europe, unless we except some territory about the Black Sea. It is a land marked out as the granary of the nation; but it is more than a granary. On the rocky shores of Lake Superior were concealed copper mines rivaled only by those of Montana, and iron fields which now [129:1] furnish the ore for the production of eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States. The Great Lakes afford a highway between these iron fields and the coal areas of the Ohio Valley. The gas and oil deposits of the Ohio Valley, the coal of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and eastern Kansas, the lead and zinc of the Ozark region and of the upper Mississippi Valley, and the gold of the black Hills,—all contribute underground wealth to the Middle West.

The primeval American forest once spread its shade over vast portions of the same province. Ohio, Indiana, southern Michigan, and central Wisconsin were almost covered with a growth of noble deciduous trees. In southern Illinois, along the broad bottom lands of the Mississippi and the Illinois, and in southern and southwestern Missouri, similar forests prevailed. To the north, in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, appeared the somber white pine wilderness, interlaced with hard woods, which swept in ample zone along the Great Lakes, till the deciduous forests triumphed again, and, in their turn, faded into the treeless expanse of the prairies. In the remaining portions were openings in the midst of the forested area, and then the grassy ocean of prairie that rolled to west and northwest, until it passed beyond the line of sufficient rainfall for agriculture without irrigation, into the semi-arid stretches of the Great Plains.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the forested region of this province was occupied by the wigwams of many different tribes of the Algonquin tongue, sparsely scattered in villages along the water courses, warring and trading through the vast wilderness. The western edge of the prairie and the Great Plains were held by the Sioux, chasing herds of bison across these far-stretching expanses. These horsemen of the plains and the canoemen of the Great Lakes and the Ohio were factors with which civilization had to reckon, for they constituted important portions of perhaps the fiercest native race with which the white man has ever battled for new lands.

The Frenchman had done but little fighting for this region. He swore brotherhood with its savages, traded with them, intermarried with them, and explored the Middle West; but he left the wilderness much as he found it. Some six or seven thousand French people in all, about Detroit and Vincennes, and in the Illinois country, and scattered among the Indian villages [ 131 ] of the remote lakes and streams, held possession when George Washington reached the site of Pittsburgh, bearing Virginia's summons of eviction to France. In his person fate knocked at the portals of a "rising empire." France hurried her commanders and garrisons, with Indian allies, from the posts about the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi; but it was in vain. In vain, too, the aftermath of Pontiac's widespread Indian uprising against the English occupation. When she came into possession of the lands between the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes, England organized them as a part of the Province of Quebec. The daring conquest of George Rogers Clark left Virginia in military possession of the Illinois country at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War; but over all the remainder of the Old Northwest, England was in control. Although she ceded the region by the treaty which closed the Revolution, she remained for many years the mistress of the Indians and the fur trade. When Lord Shelburne was upbraided in parliament for yielding the Northwest to the United States, the complaint was that he had clothed the Americans "in the warm covering of our fur trade," and his defense was that the peltry trade of the ceded tract was not sufficiently profitable to warrant further war. But the English government became convinced that the Indian trade demanded the retention of the Northwest, and she did in fact hold her posts there in spite of the treaty of peace. Dundas, the English secretary for the colonies, expressed the policy, when he declared, in 1792, that the object was to interpose an Indian barrier between Canada and the United States; and in pursuance of this policy of preserving the Northwest as an Indian buffer State, the Canadian authorities supported the Indians in their resistance to American settlement beyond the Ohio. The conception of the Northwest as an Indian reserve strikingly exhibits England's inability to foresee the future of the [ 132 ] region, and to measure the forces of American expansion.

By the cessions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, the Old Congress had come into nominal possession of an extensive public domain, and a field for the exercise of national authority. The significance of this fact in the development of national power is not likely to be overestimated. The first result was the completion of the Ordinance of 1787, which provided a territorial government for the Old Northwest, with provisions for the admission of States into the Union. This federal colonial system guaranteed that the new national possessions should not be governed as dependent provinces, but should enter as a group of sister States into the federation. [132:1] While the importance of the article excluding slavery has often been pointed out, it is probable that the provisions for a federal colonial organization have been at least equally potential in our actual development. The full significance of this feature of the Ordinance is only appreciated when we consider its continuous influence upon the American territorial and State policy in the westward expansion to the Pacific, and the political preconceptions with which Americans approach the problems of government in the new insular possessions. The Land Ordinance of 1785 is also worthy of attention in this connection, for under its provisions almost all of the Middle West has been divided by the government surveyor into rectangles of sections and townships, by whose lines the settler has been able easily and certainly to locate his farm, and the forester his "forty." In the local organization of the Middle West these lines have played an important part.

It would be impossible within the limits of this paper to detail the history of the occupation of the Middle West; but the larger aspects of the flow of population into the region may [ 133 ] be sketched. Massachusetts men had formed the Ohio Company, and had been influential in shaping the liberal provisions of the Ordinance. Their land purchase, paid for in soldiers' certificates, embraced an area larger than the State of Rhode Island. At Marietta in 1788, under the shelter of Fort Harmar, their bullet-proof barge landed the first New England colony. A New Jersey colony was planted soon after at Cincinnati in the Symmes Purchase. Thus American civilization crossed the Ohio. The French settlements at Detroit and in Indiana and Illinois belonged to other times and had their own ideals; but with the entrance of the American pioneer into the forest of the Middle West, a new era began. The Indians, with the moral support of England, resisted the invasion, and an Indian war followed. The conquest of Wayne, in 1795, pushed back the Indians to the Greenville line, extending irregularly across the State of Ohio from the site of Cleveland to Fort Recovery in the middle point of her present western boundary, and secured certain areas in Indiana. In the same period Jay's treaty provided for the withdrawal of the British posts. After this extension of the area open to the pioneer, new settlements were rapidly formed. Connecticut disposed of her reserved land about Lake Erie to companies, and in 1796 General Moses Cleaveland led the way to the site of the city that bears his name. This was the beginning of the occupation of the Western Reserve, a district about as large as the parent State of Connecticut, a New England colony in the Middle West, which has maintained, even to the present time, the impress of New England traits. Virginia and Kentucky settlers sought the Virginia Military Bounty Lands, and the foundation of Chillicothe here, in 1796, afforded a center for Southern settlement. The region is a modified extension of the limestone area of Kentucky, and naturally attracted the emigrants from the Blue Grass State. [ 134 ] Ohio's history is deeply marked by the interaction of the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies within her borders.

By the opening of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon's cession brought to the United States the vast spaces of the Louisiana Purchase beyond the Mississippi, the pioneers had hardly more than entered the outskirts of the forest along the Ohio and Lake Erie. But by 1810 the government had extinguished the Indian title to the unsecured portions of the Western Reserve, and to great tracts of Indiana, along the Ohio and up the Wabash Valley; thus protecting the Ohio highway from the Indians, and opening new lands to settlement. The embargo had destroyed the trade of New England, and had weighted down her citizens with debt and taxation; caravans of Yankee emigrant wagons, precursors of the "prairie schooner," had already begun to cross Pennsylvania on their way to Ohio; and they now greatly increased in number. North Carolina back countrymen flocked to the Indiana settlements, giving the peculiar Hoosier flavor to the State, and other Southerners followed, outnumbering the Northern immigrants, who sought the eastern edge of Indiana.

Tecumthe, rendered desperate by the advance into his hunting grounds, took up the hatchet, made wide-reaching alliances among the Indians, and turned to England for protection. The Indian war merged into the War of 1812, and the settlers strove in vain to add Canadian lands to their empire. In the diplomatic negotiations that followed the war, England made another attempt to erect the Old Northwest beyond the Greenville line into a permanent Indian barrier between Canada and the United States; but the demand was refused, and by the treaties of 1818, the Indians were pressed still farther north. In the meantime, Indian treaties had released additional land in southern Illinois, and pioneers were widening the bounds of the old French settlements. Avoiding the rich [ 135 ] savannas of the prairie regions, as devoid of wood, remote from transportation facilities, and suited only to grazing, they entered the hard woods—and in the early twenties they were advancing in a wedge-shaped column up the Illinois Valley.

The Southern element constituted the main portion of this phalanx of ax-bearers. Abraham Lincoln's father joined the throng of Kentuckians that entered the Indiana woods in 1816, and the boy, when he had learned to hew out a forest home, betook himself, in 1830, to Sangamon county, Illinois. He represents the pioneer of the period; but his ax sank deeper than other men's, and the plaster cast of his great sinewy hand, at Washington, embodies the training of these frontier railsplitters, in the days when Fort Dearborn, on the site of Chicago, was but a military outpost in a desolate country. While the hard woods of Illinois were being entered, the pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri Valley. The French lead miners had already opened the southeastern section, and Southern mountaineers had pushed up the Missouri; but now the planters from the Ohio Valley and the upper Tennessee followed, seeking the alluvial soils for slave labor. Moving across the southern border of free Illinois, they had awakened regrets in that State at the loss of so large a body of settlers.

Looking at the Middle West, as a whole, in the decade from 1810 to 1820, we perceive that settlement extended from the shores of Lake Erie in an arc, following the banks of the Ohio till it joined the Mississippi, and thence along that river and up the Missouri well into the center of the State. The next decade was marked by the increased use of the steamboat; pioneers pressed farther up the streams, etching out the hard wood forests well up to the prairie lands, and forming additional tracts of settlement in the region tributary to Detroit and in the southeastern part of Michigan. In the area of the [ 136 ] Galena lead mines of northwestern Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin, and northeastern Iowa, Southerners had already begun operations; and if we except Ohio and Michigan, the dominant element in all this overflow of settlement into the Middle West was Southern, particularly from Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina. The settlements were still dependent on the rivers for transportation, and the areas between the rivers were but lightly occupied. The Mississippi constituted the principal outlet for the products of the Middle West; Pittsburgh furnished most of the supplies for the region, but New Orleans received its crops. The Old National road was built piecemeal, and too late, as a whole, to make a great artery of trade throughout the Middle West, in this early period; but it marked the northern borders of the Southern stream of population, running, as this did, through Columbus, Indianapolis, and Vandalia.

The twenty years from 1830 to 1850 saw great changes in the composition of the population of the Middle West. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 was an epoch-making event. It furnished a new outlet and inlet for northwestern traffic; Buffalo began to grow, and New York City changed from a local market to a great commercial center. But even more important was the place which the canal occupied as the highway for a new migration.

In the march of the New England people from the coast, three movements are of especial importance: the advance from the seaboard up the Connecticut and Housatonic Valleys through Massachusetts and into Vermont; the advance thence to central and western New York; and the advance to the interior of the Old Northwest. The second of these stages occupied the generation from about 1790 to 1820; after that the second generation was ready to seek new lands; and these the Erie Canal and lake navigation opened to them, and to the [ 137 ] Vermonters and other adventurous spirits of New England. It was this combined New York-New England stream that in the thirties poured in large volume into the zone north of the settlements which have been described. The newcomers filled in the southern counties of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern countries of Illinois, and parts of the northern and central areas of Indiana. Pennsylvania and Ohio sent a similar type of people to the area adjacent to those States. In Iowa a stream combined of the Southern element and of these settlers sought the wooded tributaries of the Mississippi in the southeastern part of the State. In default of legal authority, in this early period, they formed squatter governments and land associations, comparable to the action of the Massachusetts men who in the first quarter of the seventeenth century "squatted" in the Connecticut Valley.

A great forward movement had occurred, which took possession of oak openings and prairies, gave birth to the cities of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, as well as to a multitude of lesser cities, and replaced the dominance of the Southern element by that of a modified Puritan stock. The railroad system of the early fifties bound the Mississippi to the North Atlantic seaboard; New Orleans gave way to New York as the outlet for the Middle West, and the day of river settlement was succeeded by the era of inter-river settlement and railway transportation. The change in the political and social ideals was at least equal to the change in economic connections, and together these forces made an intimate organic union between New England, New York, and the newly settled West. In estimating the New England influence in the Middle West, it must not be forgotten that the New York settlers were mainly New Englanders of a later generation.

Combined with the streams from the East came the German migration into the Middle West. Over half a million, mainly [ 138 ] from the Palatinate, Würtemberg, and the adjacent regions, sought America between 1830 and 1850, and nearly a million more Germans came in the next decade. The larger portion of these went into the Middle West; they became pioneers in the newer parts of Ohio, especially along the central ridge, and in Cincinnati; they took up the hardwood lands of the Wisconsin counties along Lake Michigan; and they came in important numbers to Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan, and to the river towns of Iowa. The migration in the thirties and forties contained an exceptionally large proportion of educated and forceful leaders, men who had struggled in vain for the ideal of a liberal German nation, and who contributed important intellectual forces to the communities in which they settled. The Germans, as a whole, furnished a conservative and thrifty agricultural element to the Middle West. In some of their social ideals they came into collision with the Puritan element from New England, and the outcome of the steady contest has been a compromise. Of all the States, Wisconsin has been most deeply influenced by the Germans.

By the later fifties, therefore, the control of the Middle West had passed to its Northern zone of population, and this zone included representatives of the Middle States, New England, and Germany as its principal elements. The Southern people, north of the Ohio, differed in important respects from the Southerners across the river. They had sprung largely from the humbler classes of the South, although there were important exceptions. The early pioneer life, however, was ill-suited to the great plantations, and slavery was excluded under the Ordinance. Thus this Southern zone of the Middle West, particularly in Indiana and Illinois, constituted a mediating section between the South and the North. The Mississippi still acted as a bond of union, and up to the close of the War [ 139 ] of 1812 the Valley, north and south, had been fundamentally of the same social organization. In order to understand what follows, we must bear in mind the outlines of the occupation of the Gulf Plains. While settlement had been crossing the Ohio to the Northwest, the spread of cotton culture and negro slavery into the Southwest had been equally significant. What the New England States and New York were in the occupation of the Middle West, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were in the occupation of the Gulf States. But, as in the case of the Northwest, a modification of the original stock occurred in the new environment. A greater energy and initiative appeared in the new Southern lands; the pioneer's devotion to exploiting the territory in which he was placed transferred slavery from the patriarchal to the commercial basis. The same expansive tendency seen in the Northwest revealed itself, with a belligerent seasoning, in the Gulf States. They had a program of action. Abraham Lincoln migrated from Kentucky to Indiana and to Illinois. Jefferson Davis moved from Kentucky to Louisiana, and thence to Mississippi, in the same period. Starting from the same locality, each represented the divergent flow of streams of settlement into contrasted environments. The result of these antagonistic streams of migration to the West was a struggle between the Lake and Prairie plainsmen, on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on the other, for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the crucial part of the struggle between the Northern and Southern sections of the nation. What gave slavery and State sovereignty their power as issues was the fact that they involved the question of dominance over common territory in an expanding nation. The place of the Middle West in the origin and settlement of the great slavery struggle is of the highest significance.

In the early history of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, a modified [ 140 ] form of slavery existed under a system of indenture of the colored servant; and the effort of Southern settlers in Indiana and in Illinois to reintroduce slavery are indicative of the importance of the pro-slavery element in the Northwest. But the most significant early manifestation of the rival currents of migration with respect to slavery is seen in the contest which culminated in the Missouri Compromise. The historical obstacle of the Ordinance, as well as natural conditions, gave an advantage to the anti-slavery settlers northwest of the Ohio; but when the Mississippi was crossed, and the rival streams of settlement mingled in the area of the Louisiana Purchase, the struggle followed. It was an Illinois man, with constituents in both currents of settlement, who introduced the Missouri Compromise, which made a modus vivendi for the Middle West, until the Compromise of 1850 gave to Senator Douglas of Illinois, in 1854, the opportunity to reopen the issue by his Kansas-Nebraska bill. In his doctrine of "squatter-sovereignty," or the right of the territories to determine the question of slavery within their bounds, Douglas utilized a favorite Western political idea, one which Cass of Michigan had promulgated before. Douglas set the love of the Middle West for local self-government against its preponderant antipathy to the spread of slavery. At the same time he brought to the support of the doctrine the Democratic party, which ever since the days of Andrew Jackson had voiced the love of the frontier for individualism and for popular power. In his "Young America" doctrines Douglas had also made himself the spokesman of Western expansive tendencies. He thus found important sources of popular support when he invoked the localism of his section. Western appeals to Congress for aid in internal improvements, protective tariffs, and land grants had been indications of nationalism. The doctrine of squatter-sovereignty itself catered to the love of national [ 141 ] union by presenting the appearance of a non-sectional compromise, which should allow the new areas of the Middle West to determine their own institutions. But the Free Soil party, strongest in the regions occupied by the New York-New England colonists, and having for its program national prohibition of the spread of slavery into the territories, had already found in the Middle West an important center of power. The strength of the movement far surpassed the actual voting power of the Free Soil party, for it compelled both Whigs and Democrats to propose fusion on the basis of concession to Free Soil doctrines. The New England settlers and the western New York settlers,—the children of New England,—were keenly alive to the importance of the issue. Indeed, Seward, in an address at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1860, declared that the Northwest, in reality, extended to the base of the Alleghanies, and that the new States had "matured just in the critical moment to rally the free States of the Atlantic coast, to call them back to their ancient principles."

These Free Soil forces and the nationalistic tendencies of the Middle West proved too strong for the opposing doctrines when the real struggle came. Calhoun and Taney shaped the issue so logically that the Middle West saw that the contest was not only a war for the preservation of the Union, but also a war for the possession of the unoccupied West, a struggle between the Middle West and the States of the Gulf Plains. The economic life of the Middle West had been bound by the railroad to the North Atlantic, and its interests, as well as its love of national unity, made it in every way hostile to secession. When Dr. Cutler had urged the desires of the Ohio Company upon Congress, in 1787, he had promised to plant in the Ohio Valley a colony that would stand for the Union. Vinton of Ohio, in arguing for the admission of Iowa, urged the position of the Middle West as the great unifying section of the [ 142 ] country: "Disunion," he said, "is ruin to them. They have no alternative but to resist it whenever or wherever attempted. . . . Massachusetts and South Carolina might, for aught I know, find a dividing line that would be mutually satisfactory to them; but, Sir, they can find no such line to which the western country can assent." But it was Abraham Lincoln who stated the issue with the greatest precision, and who voiced most clearly the nationalism of the Middle West, when he declared, "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."

So it was that when the civil war in Kansas grew into the Civil War in the Union, after Lincoln's election to the presidency, the Middle West, dominated by its combined Puritan and German population, ceased to compromise, and turned the scale in favor of the North. The Middle West furnished more than one-third of the Union troops. The names of Grant and Sherman are sufficient testimony to her leadership in the field. The names of Lincoln and Chase show that the presidential, the financial, and the war powers were in the hands of the Middle West. If we were to accept Seward's own classification, the conduct of foreign affairs as well belonged to the same section; it was, at least, in the hands of representatives of the dominant forces of the section. The Middle West, led by Grant and Sherman, hewed its way down the Mississippi and across the Gulf States, and Lincoln could exult in 1863, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great Northwest for it, nor yet wholly to them."

In thus outlining the relations of the Middle West to the slavery struggle, we have passed over important extensions of settlement in the decade before the war. In these years, not only did the density of settlement increase in the older portions of the region, but new waves of colonization passed [ 143 ] into the remoter prairies. Iowa's pioneers, after Indian cessions had been secured, spread well toward her western limits. Minnesota, also, was recruited by a column of pioneers. The treaty of Traverse de Sioux, in 1851, opened over twenty million acres of arable land in that State, and Minnesota increased her population 2730.7 per cent in the decade from 1850 to 1860.

Up to this decade the pine belt of the Middle West, in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota had been the field of operations of Indian traders. At first under English companies, and afterward under Astor's American Fur Company, the traders with their French and half-breed boatmen skirted the Great Lakes and followed the rivers into the forests, where they stationed their posts and spread goods and whiskey among the Indians. Their posts were centers of disintegration among the savages. The new wants and the demoralization which resulted from the Indian trade facilitated the purchases of their lands by the federal government. The trader was followed by the seeker for the best pine land "forties"; and by the time of the Civil War the exploitation of the pine belt had fairly begun. The Irish and Canadian choppers, followed by the Scandinavians, joined the forest men, and log drives succeeded the trading canoe. Men from the pine woods of Maine and Vermont directed the industry, and became magnates in the mill towns that grew up in the forests,—millionaires, and afterwards political leaders. In the prairie country of the Middle West, the Indian trade that centered at St. Louis had been important ever since 1820, with an influence upon the Indians of the plains similar to the influence of the northern fur trade upon the Indians of the forest. By 1840 the removal policy had effected the transfer of most of the eastern tribes to lands across the Mississippi. Tribal names that formerly belonged to Ohio and the rest of the Old Northwest [ 144 ] were found on the map of the Kansas Valley. The Platte country belonged to the Pawnee and their neighbors, and to the north along the Upper Missouri were the Sioux, or Dakota, Crow, Cheyenne, and other horse Indians, following the vast herds of buffalo that grazed on the Great Plains. The discovery of California gold and the opening of the Oregon country, in the middle of the century, made it necessary to secure a road through the Indian lands for the procession of pioneers that crossed the prairies to the Pacific. The organization of Kansas and Nebraska, in 1854, was the first step in the withdrawal of these territories from the Indians. A period of almost constant Indian hostility followed, for the savage lords of the boundless prairies instinctively felt the significance of the entrance of the farmer into their empire. In Minnesota the Sioux took advantage of the Civil War to rise; but the outcome was the destruction of their reservations in that State, and the opening of great tracts to the pioneers. When the Pacific railways were begun, Red Cloud, the astute Sioux chief, who, in some ways, stands as the successor of Pontiac and of Tecumthe, rallied the principal tribes of the Great Plains to resist the march of civilization. Their hostility resulted in the peace measure of 1867 and 1868, which assigned to the Sioux and their allies reservations embracing the major portion of Dakota territory, west of the Missouri River. The systematic slaughter of millions of buffalo, in the years between 1866 and 1873, for the sake of their hides, put an end to the vast herds of the Great Plains, and destroyed the economic foundation of the Indians. Henceforth they were dependent on the whites for their food supply, and the Great Plains were open to the cattle ranchers.

In a preface written in 1872 for a new edition of "The Oregon Trail," which had appeared in 1847, Francis Parkman said, "The wild cavalcade that defiled with me down [ 145 ] the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances, and shields, will never be seen again." The prairies were ready for the final rush of occupation. The homestead law of 1862, passed in the midst of the war, did not reveal its full importance as an element in the settlement of the Middle West until after peace. It began to operate most actively, contemporaneously with the development of the several railways to the Pacific, in the two decades from 1870 to 1890, and in connection with the marketing of the railroad land grants. The outcome was an epoch-making extension of population.

Before 1870 the vast and fertile valley of the Red River, once the level bed of an ancient lake, occupying the region where North Dakota and Minnesota meet, was almost virgin soil. But in 1875 the great Dalrymple farm showed its advantages for wheat raising, and a tide of farm seekers turned to the region. The "Jim River" Valley of South Dakota attracted still other settlers. The Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railway thrust out laterals into these Minnesota and Dakota wheat areas from which to draw the nourishment for their daring passage to the Pacific. The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, Burlington, and other roads, gridironed the region; and the unoccupied lands of the Middle West were taken up by a migration that in its system and scale is unprecedented. The railroads sent their agents and their literature everywhere, "booming" the "Golden West"; the opportunity for economic and political fortunes in such rapidly growing communities attracted multitudes of Americans whom the cheap land alone would not have tempted. In 1870 the Dakotas had 14,000 settlers; in 1890 they had over 510,000. Nebraska's population was 28,000 in 1860; 123,000 in 1870; 452,000 in 1880; and 1,059,000 [ 146 ] in 1890. Kansas had 107,000 in 1860; 364,000 in 1870; 996,000 in 1880; and 1,427,000 in 1890. Wisconsin and New York gave the largest fractions of the native element to Minnesota; Illinois and Ohio together sent perhaps one-third of the native element of Kansas and Nebraska, but the Missouri and Southern settlers were strongly represented in Kansas; Wisconsin, New York, Minnesota, and Iowa gave North Dakota the most of her native settlers; and Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and New York did the same for South Dakota.

Railroads and steamships organized foreign immigration on scale and system never before equaled; a high-water mark of American immigration came in the early eighties. Germans and Scandinavians were rushed by emigrant trains out to the prairies, to fill the remaining spaces in the older States of the Middle West. The census of 1890 showed in Minnesota 373,000 persons of Scandinavian parentage, and out of the total million and one-half persons of Scandinavian parentage in the United States, the Middle West received all but about three hundred thousand. The persons of German parentage in the Middle West numbered over four millions out of a total of less than seven millions in the whole country. The province had, in 1890, a smaller proportion of persons of foreign parentage than had the North Atlantic division, but the proportions varied greatly in the different States. Indiana had the lowest percentage, 20.38; and, rising in the scale, Missouri had 24.94; Kansas 26.75; Ohio 33.93; Nebraska 42.45; Iowa 43.57; Illinois 49.01; Michigan 54.58; Wisconsin 73.65; Minnesota 75.37; and North Dakota 78.87.

What these statistics of settlement mean when translated into the pioneer life of the prairie, cannot be told here. There were sharp contrasts with the pioneer life of the Old Northwest; for the forest shade, there was substituted the boundless prairie; the sod house for the log hut; the continental railway [ 147 ] for the old National Turnpike and the Erie Canal. Life moved faster, in larger masses, and with greater momentum in this pioneer movement. The horizon line was more remote. Things were done in the gross. The transcontinental railroad, the bonanza farm, the steam plow, harvester, and thresher, the "league-long furrow," and the vast cattle ranches, all suggested spacious combination and systematization of industry. The largest hopes were excited by these conquests of the prairie. The occupation of western Kansas may illustrate the movement which went on also in the west of Nebraska and the Dakotas. The pioneer farmer tried to push into the region with the old methods of settlement. Deceived by rainy seasons and the railroad advertisements, and recklessly optimistic, hosts of settlers poured out into the plains beyond the region of sufficient rainfall for successful agriculture without irrigation. Dry seasons starved them back; but a repetition of good rainfalls again aroused the determination to occupy the western plains. Boom towns flourished like prairie weeds; Eastern capital struggled for a chance to share in the venture, and the Kansas farmers eagerly mortgaged their possessions to secure the capital so freely offered for their attack on the arid lands. By 1887 the tide of the pioneer farmers had flowed across the semi-arid plains to the western boundary of the State. But it was a hopeless effort to conquer a new province by the forces that had won the prairies. The wave of settlement dashed itself in vain against the conditions of the Great Plains. The native American farmer had received his first defeat; farm products at the same period had depreciated, and he turned to the national government for reinforcements.

The Populistic movement of the western half of the Middle West is a complex of many forces. In some respects it is the latest manifestation of the same forces that brought on the crisis of 1837 in the earlier region of pioneer exploitation. [ 148 ] That era of over-confidence, reckless internal improvements, and land purchases by borrowed capital, brought a reaction when it became apparent that the future had been over-discounted. But, in that time, there were the farther free lands to which the ruined pioneer could turn. The demand for an expansion of the currency has marked each area of Western advance. The greenback movement of Ohio and the eastern part of the Middle West grew into the fiat money, free silver, and land bank propositions of the Populists across the Mississippi. Efforts for cheaper transportation also appear in each stage of Western advance. When the pioneer left the rivers and had to haul his crops by wagon to a market, the transportation factor determined both his profits and the extension of settlement. Demands for national aid to roads and canals had marked the pioneer advance of the first third of the century. The "Granger" attacks upon the railway rates, and in favor of governmental regulation, marked a second advance of Western settlement. The Farmers' Alliance and the Populist demand for government ownership of the railroad is a phase of the same effort of the pioneer farmer, on his latest frontier. The proposals have taken increasing proportions in each region of Western Advance. Taken as a whole, Populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the native American, with the added element of increasing readiness to utilize the national government to effect its ends. This is not unnatural in a section whose lands were originally purchased by the government and given away to its settlers by the same authority, whose railroads were built largely by federal land grants, and whose settlements were protected by the United States army and governed by the national authority until they were carved into rectangular States and admitted into the Union. Its native settlers were drawn from many States, many of them former soldiers of the Civil War, who mingled in new [ 149 ] lands with foreign immigrants accustomed to the vigorous authority of European national governments.

But these old ideals of the American pioneer, phrased in the new language of national power, did not meet with the assent of the East. Even in the Middle West a change of deepest import had been in progress during these years of prairie settlement. The agricultural preponderance of the country has passed to the prairies, and manufacturing has developed in the areas once devoted to pioneer farming. In the decade prior to the Civil War, the area of greatest wheat production passed from Ohio and the States to the east, into Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin; after 1880, the center of wheat growing moved across the Mississippi; and in 1890 the new settlements produced half the crop of the United States. The corn area shows a similar migration. In 1840 the Southern States produced half the crop, and the Middle West one-fifth; by 1860 the situation was reversed and in 1890 nearly one-half the corn of the Union came from beyond the Mississippi. Thus the settlers of the Old Northwest and their crops have moved together across the Mississippi, and in the regions whence they migrated varied agriculture and manufacture have sprung up.

As these movements in population and products have passed across the Middle West, and as the economic life of the eastern border has been intensified, a huge industrial organism has been created in the province,—an organism of tremendous power, activity, and unity. Fundamentally the Middle West is an agricultural area unequaled for its combination of space, variety, productiveness, and freedom from interruption by deserts or mountains. The huge water system of the Great Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce. The Sault Ste. Marie Canal, although open but two-thirds of the year, is the channel of a traffic of greater tonnage than that [ 150 ] which passes through the Suez Canal, and nearly all this commerce moves almost the whole length of the Great Lakes system; the chief ports being Duluth, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. The transportation facilities of the Great Lakes were revolutionized after 1886, to supply the needs of commerce between the East and the newly developed lands of the Middle West; the tonnage doubled; wooden ships gave way to steel; sailing vessels yielded to steam; and huge docks, derricks, and elevators, triumphs of mechanical skill, were constructed. A competent investigator has lately declared that "there is probably in the world to-day no place at tide water where ship plates can be laid down for a less price than they can be manufactured or purchased at the lake ports."

This rapid rise of the merchant marine of our inland seas has led to the demand for deep water canals to connect them with the ocean road to Europe. When the fleets of the Great Lakes plow the Atlantic, and when Duluth and Chicago become seaports, the water transportation of the Middle West will have completed its evolution. The significance of the development of the railway systems is not inferior to that of the great water way. Chicago has become the greatest railroad center of the world, nor is there another area of like size which equals this in its railroad facilities; all the forces of the nation intersect here. Improved terminals, steel rails, better rolling stock, and consolidation of railway systems have accompanied the advance of the people of the Middle West.

This unparalleled development of transportation facilities measures the magnitude of the material development of the province. Its wheat and corn surplus supplies the deficit of the rest of the United States and much of that of Europe. Such is the agricultural condition of the province of which Monroe wrote to Jefferson, in 1786, in these words: "A great [ 151 ] part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had, from appearances, and will not have, a single bush on them for ages. The districts, therefore, within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy."

Minneapolis and Duluth receive the spring wheat of the northern prairies, and after manufacturing great portions of it into flour, transmit it to Buffalo, the eastern cities, and to Europe. Chicago is still the great city of the corn belt, but its power as a milling and wheat center has been passing to the cities that receive tribute from the northern prairies. It lies in the region of winter wheat, corn, oats, and live stock. Kansas City, St. Louis, and Cincinnati are the sister cities of this zone, which reaches into the grazing country of the Great Plains. The meeting point of corn and cattle has led to the development of the packing industries,—large business systems that send the beef and pork of the region to supply the East and parts of Europe. The "feeding system" adopted in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, whereby the stock is fattened from the surplus corn of the region, constitutes a species of varied farming that has saved these States from the disasters of the failure of a single industry, and has been one solution of the economic life of the transition belt between the prairies and the Great Plains. Under a more complex agriculture, better adapted to the various sections of the State, and with better crops, Kansas has become more prosperous and less a center of political discontent.

While this development of the agricultural interests of the Middle West has been in progress, the exploitation of the pine woods of the north has furnished another contribution to the commerce of the province. The center of activity has migrated [ 152 ] from Michigan to Minnesota, and the lumber traffic furnishes one of the principal contributions to the vessels that ply the Great Lakes and supply the tributary mills. As the white pine vanishes before the organized forces of exploitation, the remaining hard woods serve to establish factories in the former mill towns. The more fertile denuded lands of the north are now receiving settlers who repeat the old pioneer life among the stumps.

But the most striking development in the industrial history of the Middle West in recent years has been due to the opening up of the iron mines of Lake Superior. Even in 1873 the Lake Superior ores furnished a quarter of the total production of American blast furnaces. The opening of the Gogebic mines in 1884, and the development of the Vermillion and Mesabi mines adjacent to the head of the lake, in the early nineties, completed the transfer of iron ore production to the Lake Superior region. Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin together now produce the ore for eighty per cent of the pig iron of the United States. Four-fifths of this great product moves to the ports on Lake Erie and the rest to the manufactories at Chicago and Milwaukee. The vast steel and iron industry that centers at Pittsburgh and Cleveland, with important outposts like Chicago and Milwaukee, is the outcome of the meeting of the coal of the eastern and southern borders of the province and of Pennsylvania, with the iron ores of the north. The industry has been systematized and consolidated by a few captains of industry. Steam shovels dig the ore from many of the Mesabi mines; gravity roads carry it to the docks and to the ships, and huge hoisting and carrying devices, built especially for the traffic, unload it for the railroad and the furnace. Iron and coal mines, transportation fleets, railroad systems, and iron manufactories are concentrated in a few corporations, principally the United States [ 153 ] Steel Corporation. The world has never seen such a consolidation of capital and so complete a systematization of economic processes.

Such is the economic appearance of the Middle West a century after the pioneers left the frontier village of Pittsburgh and crossed the Ohio into the forests. De Tocqueville exclaimed, with reason, in 1833: "This gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God."

The ideals of the Middle West began in the log huts set in the midst of the forest a century ago. While his horizon was still bounded by the clearing that his ax had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental conquests. The vastness of the wilderness kindled his imagination. His vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the great lake to the lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the rank, grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain; beyond the harsh life of the log hut and the sod house to the home of his children, where should dwell comfort and the higher things of life, though they might not be for him. The men and women who made the Middle West were idealists, and they had the power of will to make their dreams come true. Here, also, were the pioneer's traits,—individual activity, inventiveness, and competition for the prizes of the rich province that awaited exploitation under freedom and equality of opportunity. He honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the strongest in this contest: it was "every one for himself."

The early society of the Middle West was not a complex, highly differentiated and organized society. Almost every family was a self-sufficing unit, and liberty and equality flourished [ 154 ] in the frontier periods of the Middle West as perhaps never before in history. American democracy came from the forest, and its destiny drove it to material conquests; but the materialism of the pioneer was not the dull contented materialism of an old and fixed society. Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank, and to rise to a higher plane of existence. The pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province. Little by little, nature pressed into her mold the plastic pioneer life. The Middle West, yesterday a pioneer province, is to-day the field of industrial resources and systematization so vast that Europe, alarmed for her industries in competition with this new power, is discussing the policy of forming protective alliances among the nations of the continent. Into this region flowed the great forces of modern capitalism. Indeed, the region itself furnished favorable conditions for the creation of these forces, and trained many of the famous American industrial leaders. The Prairies, the Great Plains, and the Great Lakes furnished new standards of industrial measurement. From this society, seated amidst a wealth of material advantages, and breeding individualism, energetic competition, inventiveness, and spaciousness of design, came the triumph of the strongest. The captains of industry arose and seized on nature's gifts. Struggling with one another, increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed themselves, they were forced to accept the natural conditions of a province vast in area but simple in structure. Competition grew into consolidation. On the Pittsburgh border of [ 155 ] the Middle West the completion of the process is most clearly seen. On the prairies of Kansas stands the Populist, a survival of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions to his old ideals.

The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man are deep rooted in all the Middle West. The frontier stage, through which each portion passed, left abiding traces on the older, as well as on the newer, areas of the province. Nor were these ideals limited to the native American settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith. These facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic transformation of the province upon its democracy. The peculiar democracy of the frontier has passed away with the conditions that produced it; but the democratic aspirations remain. They are held with passionate determination.

The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast economic organization of the present. This region which has so often needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The democracies of the past have been small communities, under simple and primitive economic conditions. At bottom the problem is how to reconcile real greatness with bigness.

It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this; the future of the Republic is with her. Politically she is dominant, as is illustrated by the fact that six out of seven of the Presidents elected since 1860 have come from her borders. Twenty-six million people live in the Middle West as against twenty-one million in New England and the Middle States together, and the Middle West has indefinite capacity for [ 156 ] growth. The educational forces are more democratic than in the East, and the Middle West has twice as many students (if we count together the common school, secondary, and collegiate attendance), as have New England and the Middle States combined. Nor is this educational system, as a whole, inferior to that of the Eastern States. State universities crown the public school system in every one of these States of the Middle West, and rank with the universities of the seaboard, while private munificence has furnished others on an unexampled scale. The public and private art collections of Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Paul, and other cities rival those of the seaboard. "World's fairs," with their important popular educational influences, have been held at Chicago, Omaha, and Buffalo; and the next of these national gatherings is to be at St. Louis. There is throughout the Middle West a vigor and a mental activity among the common people that bode well for its future. If the task of reducing the Province of the Lake and Prairie Plains to the uses of civilization should for a time overweigh art and literature, and even high political and social ideals, it would not be surprising. But if the ideals of the pioneers shall survive the inundation of material success, we may expect to see in the Middle West the rise of a highly intelligent society where culture shall be reconciled with democracy in the large.

[126:1] With acknowledgments to the International Monthly , December, 1901.

[129:1] 1901.

[132:1] See F. J. Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era," in Am. Historical Review , i, pp. 70 et seq.

The Ohio Valley in American History [157:1]

In a notable essay Professor Josiah Royce has asserted the salutary influence of a highly organized provincial life in order to counteract certain evils arising from the tremendous development of nationalism in our own day. Among these evils he enumerates: first, the frequent changes of dwelling place, whereby the community is in danger of losing the well-knit organization of a common life; second, the tendency to reduce variety in national civilization, to assimilate all to a common type and thus to discourage individuality, and produce a "remorseless mechanism—vast, irrational;" third, the evils arising from the fact that waves of emotion, the passion of the mob, tend in our day to sweep across the nation.

Against these surges of national feeling Professor Royce would erect dikes in the form of provincialism, the resistance of separate sections each with its own traditions, beliefs and aspirations. "Our national unities have grown so vast, our forces of social consolidation so paramount, the resulting problems, conflicts, evils, have become so intensified," he says, that we must seek in the province renewed strength, usefulness and beauty of American life.

Whatever may be thought of this philosopher's appeal for a revival of sectionalism, on a higher level, in order to check the tendencies to a deadening uniformity of national [ 158 ] consolidation (and to me this appeal, under the limitations which he gives it, seems warranted by the conditions)—it is certainly true that in the history of the United States sectionalism holds a place too little recognized by the historians.

By sectionalism I do not mean the struggle between North and South which culminated in the Civil War. That extreme and tragic form of sectionalism indeed has almost engrossed the attention of historians, and it is, no doubt, the most striking and painful example of the phenomenon in our history. But there are older, and perhaps in the long run more enduring examples of the play of sectional forces than the slavery struggle, and there are various sections besides North and South.

Indeed, the United States is, in size and natural resources, an empire, a collection of potential nations, rather than a single nation. It is comparable in area to Europe. If the coast of California be placed along the coast of Spain, Charleston, South Carolina, would fall near Constantinople; the northern shores of Lake Superior would touch the Baltic, and New Orleans would lie in southern Italy. Within this vast empire there are geographic provinces, separate in physical conditions, into which American colonization has flowed, and in each of which a special society has developed, with an economic, political and social life of its own. Each of these provinces, or sections, has developed its own leaders, who in the public life of the nation have voiced the needs of their section, contended with the representatives of other sections, and arranged compromises between sections in national legislation and policy, almost as ambassadors from separate countries in a European congress might make treaties.

Between these sections commercial relations have sprung up, and economic combinations and contests may be traced by the student who looks beneath the surface of our national [ 159 ] life to the actual grouping of States in congressional votes on tariff, internal improvement, currency and banking, and all the varied legislation in the field of commerce. American industrial life is the outcome of the combinations and contests of groups of States in sections. And the intellectual, the spiritual life of the nation is the result of the interplay of the sectional ideals, fundamental assumptions and emotions.

In short, the real federal aspect of the nation, if we penetrate beneath constitutional forms to the deeper currents of social, economic and political life, will be found to lie in the relation of sections and nation, rather than in the relation of States and nation. Recently ex-secretary Root emphasized the danger that the States, by neglecting to fulfil their duties, might fall into decay, while the national government engrossed their former power. But even if the States disappeared altogether as effective factors in our national life, the sections might, in my opinion, gain from that very disappearance a strength and activity that would prove effective limitations upon the nationalizing process.

Without pursuing the interesting speculation, I may note as evidence of the development of sectionalism, the various gatherings of business men, religious denominations and educational organizations in groups of States. Among the signs of growth of a healthy provincialism is the formation of sectional historical societies. While the American Historical Association has been growing vigorously and becoming a genuine gathering of historical students from all parts of the nation, there have also arisen societies in various sections to deal with the particular history of the groups of States. In part this is due to the great distances which render attendance difficult upon the meetings of the national body to-day, but we would be short-sighted, indeed, who failed to perceive in the formation of the Pacific Coast Historical Association, the [ 160 ] Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and the Ohio Valley Historical Association, for example, genuine and spontaneous manifestations of a sectional consciousness.

These associations spring in large part from the recognition in each of a common past, a common body of experiences, traditions, institutions and ideals. It is not necessary now to raise the question whether all of these associations are based on a real community of historical interest, whether there are overlapping areas, whether new combinations may not be made? They are at least substantial attempts to find a common sectional unity, and out of their interest in the past of the section, increasing tendencies to common sectional ideas and policies are certain to follow. I do not mean to prophesy any disruptive tendency in American life by the rejuvenation of sectional self-consciousness; but I do mean to assert that American life will be enriched and safe-guarded by the development of the greater variety of interest, purposes and ideals which seem to be arising. A measure of local concentration seems necessary to produce healthy, intellectual and moral life. The spread of social forces over too vast an area makes for monotony and stagnation.

Let us, then, raise the question of how far the Ohio Valley has had a part of its own in the making of the nation. I have not the temerity to attempt a history of the Valley in the brief compass of this address. Nor am I confident of my ability even to pick out the more important features of its history in our common national life. But I venture to put the problem, to state some familiar facts from the special point of view, with the hope of arousing interest in the theme among the many students who are advancing the science of history in this section.

To the physiographer the section is made up of the province of the Alleghany Plateaus and the southern portion of the [ 161 ] Prairie Plains. In it are found rich mineral deposits which are changing the life of the section and of the nation. Although you reckon in your membership only the states that touch the Ohio River, parts of those states are, from the point of view of their social origins, more closely connected with the Northwest on the Lake Plains, than with the Ohio Valley; and, on the other hand, the Tennessee Valley, though it sweeps far toward the Lower South, and only joins the Ohio at the end of its course, has been through much of the history of the region an essential part of this society. Together these rivers made up the "Western World" of the pioneers of the Revolutionary era; the "Western Waters" of the backwoodsmen.

But, after all, the unity of the section and its place in history were determined by the "beautiful river," as the French explorers called it—the Ohio, which pours its flood for over a thousand miles, a great highway to the West; a historic artery of commerce, a wedge of advance between powerful Indian confederacies, and rival European nations, to the Mississippi Valley; a home for six mighty States, now in the heart of the nation, rich in material wealth, richer in the history of American democracy, a society that holds a place midway between the industrial sections of the seaboard and the plains and prairies of the agricultural West; between the society that formed later along the levels about the Great Lakes, and the society that arose in the Lower South on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico. The Alleghanies bound it on the east, the Mississippi on the west. At the forks of the great river lies Pittsburgh, the historic gateway to the West, the present symbol and embodiment of the age of steel, the type of modern industrialism. Near its western border is St. Louis, looking toward the Prairies, the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, the land into which the tide of modern colonization turns.

Between these old cities, for whose sites European nations contended, stand the cities whose growth preëminently represents the Ohio valley; Cincinnati, the historic queen of the river; Louisville, the warder of the falls; the cities of the "Old National Road," Columbus, Indianapolis; the cities of the Blue Grass lands, which made Kentucky the goal of the pioneers; and the cities of that young commonwealth, whom the Ohio river by force of its attraction tore away from an uncongenial control by the Old Dominion, and joined to the social section where it belonged.

The Ohio Valley is, therefore, not only a commercial highway, it is a middle kingdom between the East and the West, between the northern area, which was occupied by a greater New England and emigrants from northern Europe, and the southern area of the "Cotton Kingdom." As Pennsylvania and New York constituted the Middle Region in our earlier history, between New England and the seaboard South, so the Ohio Valley became the Middle Region of a later time. In its position as a highway and a Middle Region are found the keys to its place in American history.

From the beginning the Ohio Valley seems to have been a highway for migration, and the home of a culture of its own. The sciences of American archeology and ethnology are too new to enable us to speak with confidence upon the origins and earlier distribution of the aborigines, but it is at least clear that the Ohio river played an important part in the movements of the earlier men in America, and that the mounds of the valley indicate a special type of development intermediate between that of the northern hunter folk, and the pueblo building races of the south. This dim and yet fascinating introduction to the history of the Ohio will afford ample opportunity for later students of the relations [ 163 ] between geography and population to make contributions to our history.

The French explorers saw the river, but failed to grasp its significance as a strategic line in the conquest of the West. Entangled in the water labyrinth of the vast interior, and kindled with aspirations to reach the "Sea of the West," their fur traders and explorers pushed their way through the forests of the North and across the plains of the South, from river to lake, from lake to river, until they met the mountains of the West. But while they were reaching the upper course of the Missouri and the Spanish outposts of Santa Fé, they missed the opportunity to hold the Ohio Valley, and before France could settle the Valley, the long and attenuated line of French posts in the west, reaching from Canada to Louisiana, was struck by the advancing column of the American backwoodsmen in the center by the way of the Ohio. Parkman, in whose golden pages is written the epic of the American wilderness, found his hero in the wandering Frenchman. Perhaps because he was a New Englander he missed a great opportunity and neglected to portray the formation and advance of the backwood society which was finally to erase the traces of French control in the interior of North America.

It is not without significance in a consideration of the national aspects of the history of the Ohio Valley, that the messenger of English civilization, who summoned the French to evacuate the Valley and its approaches, and whose men near the forks of the Ohio fired the opening gun of the world-historic conflict that wrought the doom of New France in America, was George Washington, the first American to win a national position in the United States. The father of his country was the prophet of the Ohio Valley.

Into this dominion, in the next scene of this drama, came [ 164 ] the backwoodsmen, the men who began the formation of the society of the Valley. I wish to consider the effects of the formation of this society upon the nation. And first let us consider the stock itself.

The Ohio Valley was settled, for the most part (though with important exceptions, especially in Ohio), by men of the Upland South, and this determined a large part of its influence in the nation through a long period. As the Ohio Valley, as a whole, was an extension of the Upland South, so the Upland South was, broadly speaking, an extension from the old Middle Region, chiefly from Pennsylvania. The society of pioneers, English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and other nationalities which formed in the beginning of the eighteenth century in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania and its lateral extensions was the nursery of the American backwoodsmen. Between about 1730 and the Revolution, successive tides of pioneers ascended the Shenandoah, occupied the Piedmont, or up-country of Virginia and the Carolinas, and received recruits from similar peoples who came by eastward advances from the coast toward this Old West.

Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century a new section had been created in America, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania between the falls of the rivers of the South Atlantic colonies on the one side and the Alleghany mountains on the other. Its population showed a mixture of nationalities and religions. Less English than the colonial coast, it was built on a basis of religious feeling different from that of Puritan New England, and still different from the conservative Anglicans of the southern seaboard. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians with the glow of the covenanters; German sectaries with serious-minded devotion to one or another of a multiplicity of sects, but withal deeply responsive to the call of the religious spirit, and the English Quakers all furnish [ 165 ] a foundation of emotional responsiveness to religion and a readiness to find a new heaven and a new earth in politics as well as in religion. In spite of the influence of the backwoods in hampering religious organization, this upland society was a fertile field for tillage by such democratic and emotional sects as the Baptists, Methodists and the later Campbellites, as well as by Presbyterians. Mr. Bryce has well characterized the South as a region of "high religious voltage," but this characterization is especially applicable to the Upland South, and its colonies in the Ohio Valley. It is not necessary to assert that this religious spirit resulted in the kind of conduct associated with the religious life of the Puritans. What I wish to point out is the responsiveness of the Upland South to emotional religious and political appeal.

Besides its variety of stocks and its religious sects responsive to emotion, the Upland South was intensely democratic and individualistic. It believed that government was based on a limited contract for the benefit of the individual, and it acted independently of governmental organs and restraints with such ease that in many regions this was the habitual mode of social procedure: voluntary coöperation was more natural to the Southern Uplanders than action through the machinery of government, especially when government checked rather than aided their industrial and social tendencies and desires. It was a naturally radical society. It was moreover a rural section not of the planter or merchant type, but characterized by the small farmer, building his log cabin in the wilderness, raising a small crop and a few animals for family use. It was this stock which began to pass into the Ohio Valley when Daniel Boone, and the pioneers associated with his name, followed the "Wilderness Trace" from the Upland South to the Blue Grass lands in the midst of the Kentucky hills, on the Ohio river. In the opening years of the Revolution these [ 166 ] pioneers were recruited by westward extensions from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. With this colonization of the Ohio Valley begins a chapter in American history.

This settlement contributed a new element to our national development and raised new national problems. It took a long time for the seaboard South to assimilate the upland section. We cannot think of the South as a unit through much of its ante-bellum history without doing violence to the facts. The struggle between the men of the up-country and the men of the tide-water, made a large part of the domestic history of the "Old South." Nevertheless, the Upland South, as slavery and cotton cultivation extended westward from the coast, gradually merged in the East. On the other hand, its children, who placed the wall of the Alleghanies between them and the East, gave thereby a new life to the conditions and ideals which were lost in their former home. Nor was this all. Beyond the mountains new conditions, new problems, aroused new ambitions and new social ideals. Its entrance into the "Western World" was a tonic to this stock. Its crossing put new fire into its veins—fires of militant expansion, creative social energy, triumphant democracy. A new section was added to the American nation, a new element was infused into the combination which we call the United States, a new flavor was given to the American spirit.

We may next rapidly note some of the results. First, let us consider the national effects of the settlement of this new social type in the Ohio Valley upon the expansion and diplomacy of the nation. Almost from the first the Ohio valley had constituted the problem of westward expansion. It was the entering wedge to the possession of the Mississippi Valley, and, although reluctantly, the Eastern colonies and then the Eastern States were compelled to join in the struggle first to possess the Ohio, then to retain it, and finally to enforce [ 167 ] its demand for the possession of the whole Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes as a means of outlet for its crops and of defense for its settlements. The part played by the pioneers of the Ohio Valley as a flying column of the nation, sent across the mountains and making a line of advance between hostile Indians and English on the north, and hostile Indians and Spaniards on the south, is itself too extensive a theme to be more than mentioned.

Here in historic Kentucky, in the State which was the home of George Rogers Clark it is not necessary to dwell upon his clear insight and courage in carrying American arms into the Northwest. From the first, Washington also grasped the significance of the Ohio Valley as a "rising empire," whose population and trade were essential to the nation, but which found its natural outlet down the Mississippi, where Spain blocked the river, and which was in danger of withdrawing from the weak confederacy. The intrigues of England to attract the Valley to herself and those of Spain to add the settlements to the Spanish Empire, the use of the Indians by these rivals, and the efforts of France to use the pioneers of Kentucky to win New Orleans and the whole Valley between the Alleghanies and the Rocky Mountains for a revived French Empire in America, are among the fascinating chapters of American, as well as of Ohio Valley, history. This position of the Valley explains much of the Indian wars, the foreign relations, and, indirectly, the domestic politics of the period from the Revolution to the purchase of Louisiana. Indeed, the purchase was in large measure due to the pressure of the settlers of the Ohio Valley to secure this necessary outlet. It was the Ohio Valley which forced the nation away from a narrow colonial attitude into its career as a nation among other nations with an adequate physical basis for future growth.

In this development of a foreign policy in connection with the Ohio Valley, we find the germ of the Monroe doctrine, and the beginnings of the definite independence of the United States from the state system of the Old World, the beginning, in fact, of its career as a world power. This expansive impulse went on into the War of 1812, a war which was in no inconsiderable degree, the result of the aggressive leadership of a group of men from Kentucky and Tennessee, and especially of the daring and lofty demands of Henry Clay, who even thus early voiced the spirit of the Ohio Valley. That in this war William Henry Harrison and the Kentucky troops achieved the real conquest of the northwest province and Andrew Jackson with his Tennesseeans achieved the real conquest of the Gulf Plains, is in itself abundant evidence of the part played in the expansion of the nation by the section which formed on the Ohio and its tributaries. Nor was this the end of the process, for the annexation of Texas and the Pacific Coast was in a very real sense only an aftermath of the same movement of expansion.

While the Ohio Valley was leading the way to the building of a greater nation, it was also the field wherein was formed an important contribution of the United States to political institutions. By this I mean what George Bancroft has well called "federal colonial system," that is, our system of territories and new States. It is a mistake to attribute this system to the Ordinance of 1787 and to the leadership of New England. It was in large measure the work of the communities of the Ohio Valley who wrought out the essentials of the system for themselves, and by their attitude imposed it, of necessity, upon the nation. The great Ordinance only perfected the system. [168:1]

Under the belief that all men going into vacant lands have the right to shape their own political institutions, the riflemen of western Virginia, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee, during the Revolution, protested against the rule of governments east of the mountains, and asserted with manly independence their right to self-government. But it is significant that in making this assertion, they at the same time petitioned congress to admit them to the sisterhood of States. Even when leaders like Wilkinson were attempting to induce Kentucky to act as an independent nation, the national spirit of the people as a whole led them to delay until at last they found themselves a State of the new Union. This recognition of the paramount authority of congress and this demand for self-government under that authority, constitute the foundations of the federal territorial system, as expressed in congressional resolutions, worked out tentatively in Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, and finally shaped in the Ordinance of 1787.

Thus the Ohio Valley was not only the area to which this system was applied, but it was itself instrumental in shaping the system by its own demands and by the danger that too rigorous an assertion of either State or national power over these remote communities might result in their loss to the nation. The importance of the result can hardly be overestimated. It insured the peaceful and free development of the great West and gave it political organization not as the outcome of wars of hostile States, nor by arbitrary government by distant powers, but by territorial government combined with large local autonomy. These governments in turn were admitted as equal States of the Union. By this peaceful process of colonization a whole continent has been filled with free and orderly commonwealths so quietly, so naturally, that we can only appreciate the profound significance of the [ 170 ] process by contrasting it with the spread of European nations through conquest and oppression.

Next let me invite your attention to the part played by the Ohio Valley in the economic legislation which shaped our history in the years of the making of the nation between the War of 1812 and the rise of the slavery struggle. It needs but slight reflection to discover that in the area in question, the men and measures of the Ohio Valley held the balance of power and set the course of our national progress. The problems before the country at that time were problems of internal development: the mode of dealing with the public domain; the building of roads and digging of canals for the internal improvement of a nation which was separated into East and West by the Alleghany Mountains; the formation of a tariff system for the protection of home industries and to supply a market for the surplus of the West which no longer found an outlet in warring Europe; the framing of a banking and currency system which should meet the needs of the new interstate commerce produced by the rise of the western surplus.

In the Ohio Valley, by the initiative of Ohio Valley men, and often against the protest of Eastern sections, the public land policy was developed by laws which subordinated the revenue idea to the idea of the upbuilding of a democracy of small landholders. The squatters of the Ohio Valley forced the passage of preëmption laws and these laws in their turn led to the homestead agitation. There has been no single element more influential in shaping American democracy and its ideals than this land policy. And whether the system be regarded as harmful or helpful, there can be, I think, no doubt that it was the outcome of conditions imposed by the settlers of the Ohio Valley.

When one names the tariff, internal improvements and the [ 171 ] bank, he is bound to add the title "The American System," and to think of Henry Clay of Kentucky, the captivating young statesman, who fashioned a national policy, raised issues and disciplined a party to support them and who finally imposed the system upon the nation. But, however clearly we recognize the genius and originality of Henry Clay as a political leader; however we recognize that he has a national standing as a constructive statesman, we must perceive, if we probe the matter deeply enough, that his policy and his power grew out of the economic and social conditions of the people whose needs he voiced—the people of the Ohio Valley. It was the fact that in this period they had begun to create an agricultural surplus, which made the necessity for this legislation.

The nation has recently celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of Fulton's invention of the steamboat, and the Hudson river has been ablaze in his honor; but in truth it is on the Ohio and the Mississippi that the fires of celebration should really burn in honor of Fulton, for the historic significance to the United States of the invention of the steamboat does not lie in its use on Eastern rivers; not even in its use on the ocean; for our own internal commerce carried in our own ships has had a vaster influence upon our national life than has our foreign commerce. And this internal commerce was at first, and for many years, the commerce of the Ohio Valley carried by way of the Mississippi. When Fulton's steamboat was applied in 1811 to the Western Waters, it became possible to develop agriculture and to get the Western crops rapidly and cheaply to a market. The result was a tremendous growth in the entire Ohio Valley, but this invention did not solve the problem of cheap supplies of Eastern manufactures, nor satisfy the desire of the West to build up its own factories in order to consume its own products. The Ohio Valley had [ 172 ] seen the advantage of home markets, as her towns grew up with their commerce and manufacturers close to the rural regions. Lands had increased in value in proportion to their nearness to these cities, and crops were in higher demand near them. Thus Henry Clay found a whole section standing behind him when he demanded a protective tariff to create home markets on a national scale, and when he urged the breaking of the Alleghany barrier by a national system of roads and canals. If we analyse the congressional votes by which the tariff and internal improvement acts were passed, we shall find that there was an almost unbroken South against them, a Middle Region largely for them, a New England divided, and the Ohio Valley almost a unit, holding the balance of power and casting it in favor of the American system.

The next topic to which I ask your attention is the influence of the Ohio Valley in the promotion of democracy. On this I shall, by reason of lack of time, be obliged merely to point out that the powerful group of Ohio Valley States, which sprang out of the democracy of the backwoods, and which entered the Union one after the other with manhood suffrage, greatly recruited the effective forces of democracy in the Union. Not only did they add new recruits, but by their competitive pressure for population they forced the older States to break down their historic restraints upon the right of voting, unless they were to lose their people to the freer life of the West.

But in the era of Jacksonian democracy, Henry Clay and his followers engaged the great Tennesseean in a fierce political struggle out of which was born the rival Whig and Democratic parties. This struggle was in fact reflective of the conditions which had arisen in the Ohio Valley. As the section had grown in population and wealth, as the trails changed into roads, the cabins into well-built houses, the clearings into broad farms, the hamlets into towns; as barter [ 173 ] became commerce and all the modern processes of industrial development began to operate in this rising region, the Ohio Valley broke apart into the rival interests of the industrial forces (the town-makers and the business builders), on the one side and the old rural democracy of the uplands on the other. This division was symbolical of national processes. In the contest between these forces, Andrew Jackson was the champion of the cause of the upland democracy. He denounced the money power, banks and the whole credit system and sounded a fierce tocsin of danger against the increasing influence of wealth in politics. Henry Clay, on the other hand, represented the new industrial forces along the Ohio. It is certainly significant that in the rivalry between the great Whig of the Ohio Valley and the great Democrat of its Tennessee tributary lay the issues of American politics almost until the slavery struggle. The responsiveness of the Ohio Valley to leadership and its enthusiasm in action are illustrated by the Harrison campaign of 1840; in that "log cabin campaign" when the Whigs "stole the thunder" of pioneer Jacksonian democracy for another backwoods hero, the Ohio Valley carried its spirit as well as its political favorite throughout the nation.

Meanwhile, on each side of the Ohio Valley, other sections were forming. New England and the children of New England in western New York and an increasing flood of German immigrants were pouring into the Great Lake basin and the prairies, north of the upland peoples who had chopped out homes in the forests along the Ohio. This section was tied to the East by the Great Lake navigation and the Erie canal, it became in fact an extension of New England and New York. Here the Free Soil party found its strength and New York newspapers expressed the political ideas. Although this section tried to attach the Ohio River interests to itself by canals [ 174 ] and later by railroads, it was in reality for a long time separate in its ideals and its interests and never succeeded in dominating the Ohio Valley.

On the south along the Gulf Plains there developed the "Cotton Kingdom," a Greater South with a radical program of slavery expansion mapped out by bold and aggressive leaders. Already this Southern section had attempted to establish increasing commercial relations with the Ohio Valley. The staple-producing region was a principal consumer of its live stock and food products. South Carolina leaders like Calhoun tried to bind the Ohio to the chariot of the South by the Cincinnati and Charleston Railroad, designed to make an outlet for the Ohio Valley products to the southeast. Georgia in her turn was a rival of South Carolina in plans to drain this commerce itself. In all of these plans to connect the Ohio Valley commercially with the South, the political object was quite as prominent as the commercial.

In short, various areas were bidding for the support of the zone of population along the Ohio River. The Ohio Valley recognized its old relationship to the South, but its people were by no means champions of slavery. In the southern portion of the States north of the Ohio where indented servitude for many years opened a way to a system of semi-slavery, there were divided counsels. Kentucky also spoke with no certain voice. As a result, it is in these regions that we find the stronghold of the compromising movement in the slavery struggle. Kentucky furnished Abraham Lincoln to Illinois, and Jefferson Davis to Mississippi, and was in reality the very center of the region of adjustment between these rival interests. Senator Thomas, of southern Illinois, moved the Missouri Compromise, and Henry Clay was the most effective champion of that compromise, as he was the architect of the [ 175 ] Compromise of 1850. The Crittenden compromise proposals on the eve of the Civil War came also from Kentucky and represent the persistence of the spirit of Henry Clay.

In a word, as I pointed out in the beginning, the Ohio Valley was a Middle Region with a strong national allegiance, striving to hold apart with either hand the sectional combatants in this struggle. In the cautious development of his policy of emancipation, we may see the profound influence of the Ohio Valley upon Abraham Lincoln—Kentucky's greatest son. No one can understand his presidency without proper appreciation of the deep influence of the Ohio Valley, its ideals and its prejudices upon America's original contribution to the great men of the world.

Enough has been said to make it clear, I trust, that the Ohio Valley has not only a local history worthy of study, a rich heritage to its people, but also that it has been an independent and powerful force in shaping the development of a nation. Of the late history of this Valley, the rise of its vast industrial power, its far-reaching commercial influence, it is not necessary that I should speak. You know its statesmen and their influence upon our own time; you know the relation of Ohio to the office of President of the United States! Nor is it necessary that I should attempt to prophesy concerning the future which the Ohio Valley will hold in the nation.

In that new age of inland water transportation, which is certain to supplement the age of the railroad, there can be no more important region than the Ohio Valley. Let us hope that its old love of democracy may endure, and that in this section, where the first trans-Alleghany pioneers struck blows at the forests, there may be brought to blossom and to fruit the ripe civilization of a people who know that whatever the glories of prosperity may be, there are greater glories of the [ 176 ] spirit of man; who know that in the ultimate record of history, the place of the Ohio Valley will depend upon the contribution which her people and her leaders make to the cause of an enlightened, a cultivated, a God-fearing and a free, as well as a comfortable, democracy.

[157:1] An address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association, October 16, 1909.

[168:1] See F. J. Turner, "New States West of the Alleghanies," American Historical Review , i, pp. 70 ff.

The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History [177:1]

The rise of a company of sympathetic and critical students of history in the South and in the West is bound to revolutionize the perspective of American history. Already our Eastern colleagues are aware in general, if not in detail, of the importance of the work of this nation in dealing with the vast interior, and with the influence of the West upon the nation. Indeed, I might take as the text for this address the words of one of our Eastern historians, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who, a decade ago, wrote:

The Mississippi Valley yields to no region in the world in interest, in romance, and in promise for the future. Here, if anywhere, is the real America—the field, the theater, and the basis of the civilization of the Western World. The history of the Mississippi Valley is the history of the United States; its future is the future of one of the most powerful of modern nations. [177:2]

If those of us who have been insisting on the importance of our own region are led at times by the enthusiasm of the pioneer for the inviting historical domain that opens before [ 178 ] us to overstate the importance of our subject, we may at least plead that we have gone no farther than some of our brethren of the East; and we may take comfort in this declaration of Theodore Roosevelt:

The states that have grown up around the Great Lakes and in the Valley of the Upper Mississippi, [are] the states which are destined to be the greatest, the richest, the most prosperous of all the great, rich, and prosperous commonwealths which go to make up the mightiest republic the world has ever seen. These states . . . form the heart of the country geographically, and they will soon become the heart in population and in political and social importance. . . . I should be sorry to think that before these states there loomed a future of material prosperity merely. I regard this section of the country as the heart of true American sentiment. [178:1]

In studying the history of the whole Mississippi Valley, therefore, the members of this Association are studying the origins of that portion of the nation which is admitted by competent Eastern authorities to be the section potentially most influential in the future of America. They are also studying the region which has engaged the most vital activities of the whole nation; for the problems arising from the existence of the Mississippi Valley, whether of movement of population, diplomacy, politics, economic development, or social structure, have been fundamental problems in shaping the nation. It is not a narrow, not even a local, interest which [ 179 ] determines the mission of this Association. It is nothing less than the study of the American people in the presence and under the influence of the vast spaces, the imperial resources of the great interior. The social destiny of this Valley will be the social destiny, and will mark the place in history, of the United States.

In a large sense, and in the one usually given to it by geographers and historians, the Mississippi Valley includes the whole interior basin, a province which drains into nearly two thousand miles of navigable waters of the Mississippi itself, two thousand miles of the tawny flood of the Missouri, and a thousand miles of the Ohio—five thousand miles of main water highways open to the steamboat, nearly two and a half million square miles of drainage basin, a land greater than all Europe except Russia, Norway, and Sweden, a land of levels, marked by essential geographic unity, a land estimated to be able to support a population of two or three hundred millions, three times the present population of the whole nation, an empire of natural resources in which to build a noble social structure worthy to hold its place as the heart of American industrial, political and spiritual life.

The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history was first shown in the fact that it opened to various nations visions of power in the New World—visions that sweep across the horizon of historical possibility like the luminous but unsubstantial aurora of a comet's train, portentous and fleeting.

Out of the darkness of the primitive history of the continent are being drawn the evidences of the rise and fall of Indian cultures, the migrations through and into the great Valley by men of the Stone Age, hinted at in legends and languages, dimly told in the records of mounds and artifacts, but waiting still for complete interpretation.

Into these spaces and among the savage peoples, came France and wrote a romantic page in our early history, a page that tells of unfulfilled empire. What is striking in the effect of the Mississippi Valley upon France is the pronounced influence of the unity of its great spaces. It is not without meaning that Radisson and Groseilliers not only reached the extreme of Lake Superior but also, in all probability, entered upon the waters of the Mississippi and learned of its western affluent; that Marquette not only received the Indians of the Illinois region in his post on the shores of Lake Superior, but traversed the length of the Mississippi almost to its mouth, and returning revealed the site of Chicago; that La Salle was inspired with the vision of a huge interior empire reaching from the Gulf to the Great Lakes. Before the close of the seventeenth century, Perrot's influence was supreme in the Upper Mississippi, while D'Iberville was laying the foundations of Louisiana toward the mouth of the river. Nor is it without significance that while the Verendryes were advancing toward the northwest (where they discovered the Big Horn Mountains and revealed the natural boundaries of the Valley) the Mallet brothers were ascending the Platte, crossing the Colorado plains to Santa Fé and so revealing the natural boundaries toward the southwest.

To the English the great Valley was a land beyond the Alleghanies. Spotswood, the far-sighted Governor of Virginia, predecessor of frontier builders, grasped the situation when he proposed western settlements to prevent the French from becoming a great people at the back of the colonies. He realized the importance of the Mississippi Valley as the field for expansion, and the necessity to the English empire of dominating it, if England would remain the great power of the New World.

In the war that followed between France and England, we [ 181 ] now see what the men of the time could not have realized: that the main issue was neither the possession of the fisheries nor the approaches to the St. Lawrence on the one hemisphere, nor the possession of India on the other, but the mastery of the interior basin of North America.

How little the nations realized the true meaning of the final victory of England is shown in the fact that Spain reluctantly received from France the cession of the lands beyond the Mississippi, accepting it as a means of preventing the infringement of her colonial monopoly in Spanish America rather than as a field for imperial expansion.

But we know now that when George Washington came as a stripling to the camp of the French at the edge of the great Valley and demanded the relinquishment of the French posts in the name of Virginia, he was demanding in the name of the English speaking people the right to occupy and rule the real center of American resources and power. When Braddock's axmen cut their road from the Potomac toward the forks of the Ohio they were opening a channel through which the forces of civilization should flow with ever increasing momentum and "carving a cross on the wilderness rim" at the spot which is now the center of industrial power of the American nation.

England trembled on the brink of her great conquest, fearful of the effect of these far-stretching rivers upon her colonial system, timorous in the presence of the fierce peoples who held the vast domain beyond the Alleghanies. It seems clear, however, that the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlement and the patenting of lands beyond the Alleghanies, was not intended as a permanent creation of an Indian reservation out of this Valley, but was rather a temporary arrangement in order that British plans might mature and a system of gradual colonization be devised. Already our greatest leaders, [ 182 ] men like Washington and Franklin, had been quick to see the importance of this new area for enlarged activities of the American people. A sudden revelation that it was the West, rather than the ocean, which was the real theater for the creative energy of America came with the triumph over France. The Ohio Company and the Loyal Land Company indicate the interest at the outbreak of the war, while the Mississippi Company, headed by the Washingtons and Lees, organized to occupy southern Illinois, Indiana, and western Kentucky, mark the Virginia interest in the Mississippi Valley, and Franklin's activity in promoting a colony in the Illinois country illustrates the interest of the Philadelphians. Indeed, Franklin saw clearly the possibilities of a settlement there as a means of breaking up Spanish America. Writing to his son in 1767 he declared that a "settlement should be made in the Illinois country . . . raising a strength there which on occasions of a future war might easily be poured down the Mississippi upon the lower country and into the Bay of Mexico to be used against Cuba, the French Islands, or Mexico itself." [182:1]

The Mississippi Valley had been the despair of France in the matter of governmental control. The coureurs de bois escaping from restraints of law and order took their way through its extensive wilderness, exploring and trading as they listed. Similarly, when the English colonists crossed the Alleghanies they escaped from the control of mother colonies as well as of the mother country. If the Mississippi Valley revealed to the statesmen of the East, in the exultation of the war with France, an opportunity for new empire building, it revealed to the frontiersmen, who penetrated the passes of the Alleghanies, and entered into their new inheritance, the sharp distinctions between them and the Eastern lands which they [ 183 ] left behind. From the beginning it was clear that the lands beyond the Alleghanies furnished an opportunity and an incentive to develop American society on independent and unconventional lines. The "men of the Western Waters" broke with the old order of things, subordinated social restraint to the freedom of the individual, won their title to the rich lands which they entered by hard fighting against the Indians, hotly challenged the right of the East to rule them, demanded their own States, and would not be refused, spoke with contempt of the old social order of ranks and classes in the lands between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic, and proclaimed the ideal of democracy for the vast country which they had entered. Not with the mercurial facility of the French did they follow the river systems of the Great Valley. Like the advance of the glacier they changed the face of the country in their steady and inevitable progress, and they sought the sea. It was not long before the Spaniards at the mouth of the river realized the meaning of the new forces that had entered the Valley.

In 1794 the Governor of Louisiana wrote:

This vast and restless population progressively driving the Indian tribes before them and upon us, seek to possess themselves of all the extensive regions which the Indians occupy between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Appalachian Mountains, thus becoming our neighbors, at the same time that they menacingly ask for the free navigation of the Mississippi. If they achieve their object, their ambitions would not be confined to this side of the Mississippi. Their writings, public papers, and speeches, all turn on this point, the free navigation of the Gulf by the rivers . . . which empty into it, the rich [ 184 ] fur trade of the Missouri, and in time the possession of the rich mines of the interior provinces of the very Kingdom of Mexico. Their mode of growth and their policy are as formidable for Spain as their armies. . . . Their roving spirit and the readiness with which they procure sustenance and shelter facilitate rapid settlement. A rifle and a little corn meal in a bag are enough for an American wandering alone in the woods for a month. . . . With logs crossed upon one another he makes a house, and even an impregnable fort against the Indians. . . . Cold does not terrify him, and when a family wearies of one place, it moves to another and settles there with the same ease.

If such men come to occupy the banks of the Mississippi and Missouri, or secure their navigation, doubtless nothing will prevent them from crossing and penetrating into our provinces on the other side, which, being to a great extent unoccupied, can oppose no resistance. . . . In my opinion, a general revolution in America threatens Spain unless the remedy be applied promptly.

In fact, the pioneers who had occupied the uplands of the South, the backwoods stock with its Scotch-Irish leaders which had formed on the eastern edge of the Alleghanies, separate and distinct from the type of tidewater and New England, had found in the Mississippi Valley a new field for expansion under conditions of free land and unrestraint. These conditions gave it promise of ample time to work out its own social type. But, first of all, these men who were occupying the Western Waters must find an outlet for their surplus products, [ 185 ] if they were to become a powerful people. While the Alleghanies placed a veto toward the east, the Mississippi opened a broad highway to the south. Its swift current took their flat boats in its strong arms to bear them to the sea, but across the outlet of the great river Spain drew the barrier of her colonial monopoly and denied them exit.

The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history at the opening of the new republic, therefore, lay in the fact that, beyond the area of the social and political control of the thirteen colonies, there had arisen a new and aggressive society which imperiously put the questions of the public lands, internal communication, local self-government, defense, and aggressive expansion, before the legislators of the old colonial régime. The men of the Mississippi Valley compelled the men of the East to think in American terms instead of European. They dragged a reluctant nation on in a new course.

From the Revolution to the end of the War of 1812 Europe regarded the destiny of the Mississippi Valley as undetermined. Spain desired to maintain her hold by means of the control given through the possession of the mouth of the river and the Gulf, by her influence upon the Indian tribes, and by intrigues with the settlers. Her object was primarily to safeguard the Spanish American monopoly which had made her a great nation in the world. Instinctively she seemed to surmise that out of this Valley were the issues of her future; here was the lever which might break successively, from her empire fragments about the Gulf—Louisiana, Florida and Texas, Cuba and Porto Rico—the Southwest and Pacific coast, and even the Philippines and the Isthmian Canal, while the American republic, building itself on the resources of the Valley, should become paramount over the independent republics into which her empire was to disintegrate.

France, seeking to regain her former colonial power, would use the Mississippi Valley as a means of provisioning her West Indian islands; of dominating Spanish America, and of subordinating to her purposes the feeble United States, which her policy assigned to the lands between the Atlantic and the Alleghanies. The ancient Bourbon monarchy, the revolutionary republic, and the Napoleonic empire—all contemplated the acquisition of the whole Valley of the Mississippi from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains. [186:1]

England holding the Great Lakes, dominating the northern Indian populations and threatening the Gulf and the mouth of the Mississippi by her fleet, watched during the Revolution, the Confederation, and the early republic for the breaking of the fragile bonds of the thirteen States, ready to extend her protection over the settlers in the Mississippi Valley.

Alarmed by the prospect of England's taking Louisiana and Florida from Spain, Jefferson wrote in 1790: "Embraced from St. Croix to St. Mary's on one side by their possessions, on the other by their fleet, we need not hesitate to say that they would soon find means to unite to them all the territory covered by the ramifications of the Mississippi." And that, he thought, must result in "bloody and eternal war or indissoluble confederacy" with England.

None of these nations deemed it impossible that American settlers in the Mississippi Valley might be won to accept another flag than that of the United States. Gardoqui had the effrontery in 1787 to suggest to Madison that the Kentuckians would make good Spanish subjects. France enlisted the support of frontiersmen led by George Rogers Clark for her attempted conquest of Louisiana in 1793. England tried to win support among the western settlers. Indeed, when we recall that George Rogers Clark accepted a commission as [ 187 ] Major General from France in 1793 and again in 1798; that Wilkinson, afterwards commander-in-chief of the American army, secretly asked Spanish citizenship and promised renunciation of his American allegiance; that Governor Sevier of Franklin, afterwards Senator from Tennessee and its first Governor as a State, Robertson the founder of Cumberland, and Blount, Governor of the Southwest Territory and afterwards Senator from Tennessee, were all willing to accept the rule of another nation sooner than see the navigation of the Mississippi yielded by the American government we can easily believe that it lay within the realm of possibility that another allegiance might have been accepted by the frontiersmen themselves. We may well trust Rufus Putnam, whose federalism and devotion to his country had been proved and whose work in founding New England's settlement at Marietta is well known, when he wrote in 1790 in answer to Fisher Ames's question whether the Mississippi Valley could be retained in the Union: "Should Congress give up her claim to the navigation of the Mississippi or cede it to the Spaniards, I believe the people in the Western quarter would separate themselves from the United States very soon. Such a measure, I have no doubt, would excite so much rage and dissatisfaction that the people would sooner put themselves under the despotic government of Spain than remain the indented servants of Congress." He added that if Congress did not afford due protection also to these western settlers they might turn to England or Spain. [187:1]

Prior to the railroad the Mississippi Valley was potentially the basis for an independent empire, in spite of the fact that its population would inevitably be drawn from the Eastern States. Its natural outlet was down the current to the Gulf. New Orleans controlled the Valley, in the words of Wilkinson, "as the key the lock, or the citadel the outworks." So long [ 188 ] as the Mississippi Valley was menaced, or in part controlled, by rival European states, just so long must the United States be a part of the state system of Europe, involved in its fortunes. And particularly was this the case in view of the fact that until the Union made internal commerce, based upon the Mississippi Valley, its dominant economic interest, the merchants and sailors of the northeastern States and the staple producers of the southern sea-board were a commercial appanage of Europe. The significance of the Mississippi Valley was clearly seen by Jefferson. Writing to Livingston in 1802 he declared:

There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eights of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half of our inhabitants. . . . The day that France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her within her low-water mark. It seals the union of two nations who in conjunction can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation . . . holding the two continents of America in sequestration for the common purposes of the united British and American nations. [188:1]

The acquisition of Louisiana was a recognition of the essential unity of the Mississippi Valley. The French engineer Collot reported to his government after an investigation in 1796:

All the positions on the left [east] bank of the Mississippi . . . without the alliance of the Western states are far from covering Louisiana. . . . When two nations possess, one the coasts and the other the plains, the former must inevitably embark or submit. From thence I conclude that the Western States of the North American republic must unite themselves with Louisiana and form in the future one single compact nation; or else that colony to whatever power it shall belong will be conquered or devoured.

The effect of bringing political unity to the Mississippi Valley by the Louisiana Purchase was profound. It was the decisive step of the United States on an independent career as a world power, free from entangling foreign alliances. The victories of Harrison in the Northwest, in the War of 1812 that followed, ensured our expansion in the northern half of the Valley. Jackson's triumphal march to the Gulf and his defense of New Orleans in the same war won the basis for that Cotton Kingdom, so important in the economic life of the nation and so pregnant with the issue of slavery. [189:1] The acquisition of Florida, Texas, and the Far West followed naturally. Not only was the nation set on an independent path in foreign relations; its political system was revolutionized, for the Mississippi Valley now opened the way for adding State after State, swamping the New England section and its Federalism. The doctrine of strict construction had received a fatal blow at the hands of its own prophet. The old conception of historic sovereign States, makers of a federation, [ 190 ] was shattered by this vast addition of raw material for an indefinite number of parallelograms called States, nursed through a Territorial period by the Federal government, admitted under conditions, and animated by national rather than by State patriotism.

The area of the nation had been so enlarged and the development of the internal resources so promoted, by the acquisition of the whole course of the mighty river, its tributaries and its outlet, that the Atlantic coast soon turned its economic energies from the sea to the interior. Cities and sections began to struggle for ascendancy over its industrial life. A real national activity, a genuine American culture began. The vast spaces, the huge natural resources, of the Valley demanded exploitation and population. Later there came the tide of foreign immigration which has risen so steadily that it has made a composite American people whose amalgamation is destined to produce a new national stock.

But without attempting to exhaust, or even to indicate, all the effects of the Louisiana Purchase, I wish next to ask your attention to the significance of the Mississippi Valley in the promotion of democracy and the transfer of the political center of gravity in the nation. The Mississippi Valley has been the especial home of democracy. Born of free land and the pioneer spirit, nurtured in the ideas of the Revolution and finding free play for these ideas in the freedom of the wilderness, democracy showed itself in the earliest utterances of the men of the Western Waters and it has persisted there. The demand for local self-government, which was insistent on the frontier, and the endorsement given by the Alleghanies to these demands led to the creation of a system of independent Western governments and to the Ordinance of 1787, an original contribution to colonial policy. This was framed in the period when any rigorous subjection of the West to Eastern rule [ 191 ] would have endangered the ties that bound them to the Union itself. In the Constitutional Convention prominent Eastern statesmen expressed their fears of the Western democracy and would have checked its ability to out-vote the regions of property by limiting its political power, so that it should never equal that of the Atlantic coast. But more liberal counsels prevailed. In the first debates upon the public lands, also, it was clearly stated that the social system of the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue. Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the Atlantic States and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor supply were met by the answer of one of the representatives in 1796:

I question if any man would be hardy enough to point out a class of citizens by name that ought to be the servants of the community; yet unless that is done to what class of the People could you direct such a law? But if you passed such an act [limiting the area offered for sale in the Mississippi Valley], it would be tantamount to saying that there is some class which must remain here, and by law be obliged to serve the others for such wages as they please to give.

Gallatin showed his comprehension of the basis of the prosperous American democracy in the same debate when he said:

If the cause of the happiness of this country was examined into, it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants, which their citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions.

Out of this frontier democratic society where the freedom and abundance of land in the great Valley opened a refuge to the oppressed in all regions, came the Jacksonian democracy which governed the nation after the downfall of the party of John Quincy Adams. Its center rested in Tennessee, the region from which so large a portion of the Mississippi Valley was settled by descendants of the men of the Upland South. The rule of the Mississippi Valley is seen when we recall the place that Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri held in both parties. Besides Jackson, Clay, Harrison and Polk, we count such presidential candidates as Hugh White and John Bell, Vice President R. M. Johnson, Grundy, the chairman of the finance committee, and Benton, the champion of western radicalism.

It was in this same period, and largely by reason of the drainage of population to the West, and the stir in the air raised by the Western winds of Jacksonian democracy, that most of the older States reconstructed their constitutions on a more democratic basis. From the Mississippi Valley where there were liberal suffrage provisions (based on population alone instead of property and population), disregard of vested interests, and insistence on the rights of man, came the inspiration for this era of change in the franchise and apportionment, of reform of laws for imprisonment for debt, of general attacks upon monopoly and privilege. "It is now plain," wrote Jackson in 1837, "that the war is to be carried on by the monied aristocracy of the few against the democracy of numbers; the [prosperous] to make the honest laborers hewers of wood and drawers of water . . . through the credit and paper system."

By this time the Mississippi Valley had grown in population and political power so that it ranked with the older sections. The next indication of its significance in American [ 193 ] history which I shall mention is its position in shaping the economic and political course of the nation between the close of the War of 1812 and the slavery struggle. In 1790 the Mississippi Valley had a population of about a hundred thousand, or one-fortieth of that of the United States as a whole; by 1810 it had over a million, or one-seventh; by 1830 it had three and two-thirds millions, or over one-fourth; by 1840 over six millions, more than one-third. While the Atlantic coast increased only a million and a half souls between 1830 and 1840, the Mississippi Valley gained nearly three millions. Ohio (virgin wilderness in 1790) was, half a century later, nearly as populous as Pennsylvania and twice as populous as Massachusetts. While Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina were gaining 60,000 souls between 1830 and 1840, Illinois gained 318,000. Indeed, the growth of this State alone excelled that of the entire South Atlantic States.

These figures show the significance of the Mississippi Valley in its pressure upon the older section by the competition of its cheap lands, its abundant harvests, and its drainage of the labor supply. All of these things meant an upward lift to the Eastern wage earner. But they meant also an increase of political power in the Valley. Before the War of 1812 the Mississippi Valley had six senators, New England ten, the Middle States ten, and the South eight. By 1840 the Mississippi Valley had twenty-two senators, double those of the Middle States and New England combined, and nearly three times as many as the Old South; while in the House of Representatives the Mississippi Valley outweighed any one of the old sections. In 1810 it had less than one-third the power of New England and the South together in the House. In 1840 it outweighed them both combined and because of its special circumstances it held the balance of power.

While the Mississippi Valley thus rose to superior political [ 194 ] power as compared with any of the old sections, its economic development made it the inciting factor in the industrial life of the nation. After the War of 1812 the steamboat revolutionized the transportation facilities of the Mississippi Valley. In each economic area a surplus formed, demanding an outlet and demanding returns in manufactures. The spread of cotton into the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Plains had a double significance. This transfer of the center of cotton production away from the Atlantic South not only brought increasing hardship and increasing unrest to the East as the competition of the virgin soils depressed Atlantic land values and made Eastern labor increasingly dear, but the price of cotton fell also in due proportion to the increase in production by the Mississippi Valley. While the transfer of economic power from the Seaboard South to the Cotton Kingdom of the lower Mississippi Valley was in progress, the upper Mississippi Valley was leaping forward, partly under the stimulus of a market for its surplus in the plantations of the South, where almost exclusive cultivation of the great staples resulted in a lack of foodstuffs and livestock.

At the same time the great river and its affluents became the highway of a commerce that reached to the West Indies, the Atlantic Coast, Europe, and South America. The Mississippi Valley was an industrial entity, from Pittsburgh and Santa Fé to New Orleans. It became the most important influence in American politics and industry. Washington had declared in 1784 that it was the part of wisdom for Virginia to bind the West to the East by ties of interest through internal improvement thereby taking advantage of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire.

This realization of the fact that an economic empire was growing up beyond the mountains stimulated rival cities, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, to engage in a struggle [ 195 ] to supply the West with goods and receive its products. This resulted in an attempt to break down the barrier of the Alleghanies by internal improvements. The movement became especially active after the War of 1812, when New York carried out De Witt Clinton's vast conception of making by the Erie Canal a greater Hudson which should drain to the port of New York all the basin of the Great Lakes, and by means of other canals even divert the traffic from the tributaries of the Mississippi. New York City's commercial ascendancy dates from this connection with interior New York and the Mississippi Valley. A writer in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine in 1869 makes the significance of this clearer by these words:

There was a period in the history of the seaboard cities when there was no West; and when the Alleghany Mountains formed the frontier of settlement and agricultural production. During that epoch the seaboard cities, North and South, grew in proportion to the extent and fertility of the country in their rear; and as Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia were more productive in staples valuable to commerce than the colonies north of them, the cities of Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah enjoyed a greater trade and experienced a larger growth than those on the northern seaboard.

He, then, classifies the periods of city development into three: (1) the provincial, limited to the Atlantic seaboard; (2) that of canal and turnpike connected with the Mississippi Valley; and (3) that of railroad connection. Thus he was able to show how Norfolk, for example, was shut off from the enriching currents of interior trade and was outstripped [ 196 ] by New York. The efforts of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and Savannah to divert the trade of the Mississippi system to their own ports on the Atlantic, and the rise or fall of these cities in proportion as they succeeded are a sufficient indication of the meaning of the Mississippi Valley in American industrial life. What colonial empire has been for London that the Mississippi Valley is to the seaboard cities of the United States, awakening visions of industrial empire, systematic control of vast spaces, producing the American type of the captain of industry.

It was not alone city rivalry that converged upon the Mississippi Valley and sought its alliance. Sectional rivalry likewise saw that the balance of power possessed by the interior furnished an opportunity for combinations. This was a fundamental feature of Calhoun's policy when he urged the seaboard South to complete a railroad system to tap the Northwest. As Washington had hoped to make western trade seek its outlet in Virginia and build up the industrial power of the Old Dominion by enriching intercourse with the Mississippi Valley, as Monroe wished to bind the West to Virginia's political interests; and as De Witt Clinton wished to attach it to New York, so Calhoun and Hayne would make "Georgia and Carolina the commercial center of the Union, and the two most powerful and influential members of the confederacy," by draining the Mississippi Valley to their ports. "I believe," said Calhoun, "that the success of a connection of the West is of the last importance to us politically and commercially. . . . I do verily believe that Charleston has more advantages in her position for the Western trade, than any city on the Atlantic, but to develop them we ought to look to the Tennessee instead of the Ohio, and much farther to the West than Cincinnati or Lexington."

This was the secret of Calhoun's advocacy in 1836 and 1837 [ 197 ] both of the distribution of the surplus revenue and of the cession of the public lands to the States in which they lay, as an inducement to the West to ally itself with Southern policies; and it is the key to the readiness of Calhoun, even after he lost his nationalism, to promote internal improvements which would foster the southward current of trade on the Mississippi.

Without going into details, I may simply call your attention to the fact that Clay's whole system of internal improvements and tariff was based upon the place of the Mississippi Valley in American life. It was the upper part of the Valley, and especially the Ohio Valley, that furnished the votes which carried the tariffs of 1816, 1824, and 1828. Its interests profoundly influenced the details of those tariffs and its need of internal improvement constituted a basis for sectional bargaining in all the constructive legislation after the War of 1812. New England, the Middle Region, and the South each sought alliance with the growing section beyond the mountains. American legislation bears the enduring evidence of these alliances. Even the National Bank found in this Valley the main sphere of its business. The nation had turned its energies to internal exploitation, and sections contended for the economic and political power derived from connection with the interior.

But already the Mississippi Valley was beginning to stratify, both socially and geographically. As the railroads pushed across the mountains, the tide of New England and New York colonists and German immigrants sought the basin of the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi. A distinct zone, industrially and socially connected with New England, was forming. The railroad reinforced the Erie Canal and, as De Bow put it, turned back the tide of the Father of Waters so that its outlet was in New York instead of New Orleans for a large part of the Valley. Below the Northern zone was the [ 198 ] border zone of the Upland South, the region of compromise, including both banks of the Ohio and the Missouri and reaching down to the hills on the north of the Gulf Plains. The Cotton Kingdom based on slavery found its center in the fertile soils along the Lower Mississippi and the black prairies of Georgia and Alabama, and was settled largely by planters from the old cotton lands of the Atlantic States. The Mississippi Valley had rejuvenated slavery, had given it an aggressive tone characteristic of Western life.

Thus the Valley found itself in the midst of the slavery struggle at the very time when its own society had lost homogeneity. Let us allow two leaders, one of the South and one of the North, to describe the situation; and, first, let the South speak. Said Hammond, of South Carolina, [198:1] in a speech in the Senate on March 4, 1858:

I think it not improper that I should attempt to bring the North and South face to face, and see what resources each of us might have in the contingency of separate organizations.

Through the heart of our country runs the great Mississippi, the father of waters, into whose bosom are poured thirty-six thousand miles of tributary streams; and beyond we have the desert prairie wastes to protect us in our rear. Can you hem in such a territory as that? You talk of putting up a wall of fire around eight hundred and fifty thousand miles so situated! How absurd.

But in this territory lies the great valley of the Mississippi, now the real and soon to be the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world. The sway of that valley will be as great as ever [ 199 ] the Nile knew in the earlier ages of mankind. We own the most of it. The most valuable part of it belongs to us now; and although those who have settled above us are now opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale. They are ours by all the laws of nature; slave labor will go to every foot of this great valley where it will be found profitable to use it, and some of those who may not use it are soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the sunny plains of the South to bear the products of its upper tributaries to our Atlantic ports, as it now does through the ice-bound North. There is the great Mississippi, bond of union made by nature herself. She will maintain it forever.

As the Seaboard South had transferred the mantle of leadership to Tennessee and then to the Cotton Kingdom of the Lower Mississippi, so New England and New York resigned their command to the northern half of the Mississippi Valley and the basin of the Great Lakes. Seward, the old-time leader of the Eastern Whigs who had just lost the Republican nomination for the presidency to Lincoln, may rightfully speak for the Northeast. In the fall of 1860, addressing an audience at Madison, Wisconsin, he declared: [199:1]

The empire established at Washington is of less than a hundred years' formation. It was the empire of thirteen Atlantic states. Still, practically, the mission of that empire is fulfilled. The power that directs it is ready to pass away from those [ 200 ] thirteen states, and although held and exercised under the same constitution and national form of government, yet it is now in the very act of being transferred from the thirteen states east of the Alleghany mountains and on the coast of the Atlantic ocean, to the twenty states that lie west of the Alleghanies, and stretch away from their base to the base of the Rocky mountains on the West, and you are the heirs to it. When the next census shall reveal your power, you will be found to be the masters of the United States of America, and through them the dominating political power of the world.

Appealing to the Northwest on the slavery issue Seward declared:

The whole responsibility rests henceforth directly or indirectly on the people of the Northwest. . . . There can be no virtue in commercial and manufacturing communities to maintain a democracy, when the democracy themselves do not want a democracy. There is no virtue in Pearl street, in Wall street, in Court street, in Chestnut street, in any other street of great commercial cities, that can save the great democratic government of ours, when you cease to uphold it with your intelligent votes, your strong and mighty hands. You must, therefore, lead us as we heretofore reserved and prepared the way for you. We resign to you the banner of human rights and human liberty, on this continent, and we bid you be firm, bold and onward and then you may hope that we will be able to follow you.

When we survey the course of the slavery struggle in the United States it is clear that the form the question took was due to the Mississippi Valley. The Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise, the Texas question, the Free Soil agitation, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Dred Scott decision, "bleeding Kansas"—these are all Mississippi Valley questions, and the mere enumeration makes it plain that it was the Mississippi Valley as an area for expansion which gave the slavery issue its significance in American history. But for this field of expansion, slavery might have fulfilled the expectation of the fathers and gradually died away.

Of the significance of the Mississippi Valley in the Civil War, it is unnecessary that I should speak. Illinois gave to the North its President; Mississippi gave to the South its President. Lincoln and Davis were both born in Kentucky. Grant and Sherman, the northern generals, came from the Mississippi Valley; and both of them believed that when Vicksburg fell the cause of the South was lost, and so it must have been if the Confederacy had been unable, after victories in the East, to regain the Father of Waters; for, as General Sherman said: "Whatever power holds that river can govern this continent."

With the close of the war political power passed for many years to the northern half of the Mississippi Valley, as the names of Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley indicate. The population of the Valley grew from about fifteen millions in 1860 to over forty millions in 1900—over half the total population of the United States. The significance of its industrial growth is not likely to be overestimated or overlooked. On its northern border, from near Minnesota's boundary line, through the Great Lakes to Pittsburgh, on its eastern edge, runs a huge movement of iron from mine to [ 202 ] factory. This industry is basal in American life, and it has revolutionized the industry of the world. The United States produces pig iron and steel in amount equal to her two greatest competitors combined, and the iron ores for this product are chiefly in the Mississippi Valley. It is the chief producer of coal, thereby enabling the United States almost to equal the combined production of Germany and Great Britain; and great oil fields of the nation are in its midst. Its huge crops of wheat and corn and its cattle are the main resources for the United States and are drawn upon by Europe. Its cotton furnishes two-thirds of the world's factory supply. Its railroad system constitutes the greatest transportation network in the world. Again it is seeking industrial consolidation by demanding improvement of its vast water system as a unit. If this design, favored by Roosevelt, shall at some time be accomplished, again the bulk of the commerce of the Valley may flow along the old routes to New Orleans; and to Galveston by the development of southern railroad outlets after the building of the Panama Canal. For the development and exploitation of these and of the transportation and trade interests of the Middle West, Eastern capital has been consolidated into huge corporations, trusts, and combinations. With the influx of capital, and the rise of cities and manufactures, portions of the Mississippi Valley have become assimilated with the East. With the end of the era of free lands the basis of its democratic society is passing away.

The final topic on which I shall briefly comment in this discussion of the significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history is a corollary of this condition. Has the Mississippi Valley a permanent contribution to make to American society, or is it to be adjusted into a type characteristically Eastern and European? In other words, has the United States itself an original contribution to make to the history of society? [ 203 ] This is what it comes to. The most significant fact in the Mississippi Valley is its ideals. Here has been developed, not by revolutionary theory, but by growth among free opportunities, the conception of a vast democracy made up of mobile ascending individuals, conscious of their power and their responsibilities. Can these ideals of individualism and democracy be reconciled and applied to the twentieth century type of civilization?

Other nations have been rich and prosperous and powerful, art-loving and empire-building. No other nation on a vast scale has been controlled by a self-conscious, self-restrained democracy in the interests of progress and freedom, industrial as well as political. It is in the vast and level spaces of the Mississippi Valley, if anywhere, that the forces of social transformation and the modification of its democratic ideals may be arrested.

Beginning with competitive individualism, as well as with belief in equality, the farmers of the Mississippi Valley gradually learned that unrestrained competition and combination meant the triumph of the strongest, the seizure in the interest of a dominant class of the strategic points of the nation's life. They learned that between the ideal of individualism, unrestrained by society, and the ideal of democracy, was an innate conflict; that their very ambitions and forcefulness had endangered their democracy. The significance of the Mississippi Valley in American history has lain partly in the fact that it was a region of revolt. Here have arisen varied, sometimes ill-considered, but always devoted, movements for ameliorating the lot of the common man in the interests of democracy. Out of the Mississippi Valley have come successive and related tidal waves of popular demand for real or imagined legislative safeguards to their rights and their social ideals. The Granger movement, the Greenback movement, the Populist [ 204 ] movement, Bryan Democracy, and Roosevelt Republicanism all found their greatest strength in the Mississippi Valley. They were Mississippi Valley ideals in action. Its people were learning by experiment and experience how to grapple with the fundamental problem of creating a just social order that shall sustain the free, progressive, individual in a real democracy. The Mississippi Valley is asking, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

The Mississippi Valley has furnished a new social order to America. Its universities have set new types of institutions for social service and for the elevation of the plain people. Its historians should recount its old ambitions, and inventory its ideals, as well as its resources, for the information of the present age, to the end that building on its past, the mighty Valley may have a significance in the life of the nation even more profound than any which I have recounted.

[177:1] Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association for 1909-10. Reprinted with the permission of the Association.

[177:2] Harper's Magazine , February, 1900, p. 413.

[178:1] Roosevelt, "The Northwest in the Nation," in "Proceedings of the Wisconsin Historical Society," Fortieth Annual Meeting, p. 92.

[182:1] "Franklin's Works," iv, p. 141.

[186:1] [See the author's paper in American Historical Review , x, p. 245.]

[187:1] Cutler's "Cutler," ii, p. 372.

[188:1] "Jefferson's Works," iv, p. 431.

[189:1] [See on the Cotton Kingdom, U. B. Phillips, "History of Slavery"; W. G. Brown, "Lower South"; W. E. Dodd, "Expansion and Conflict"; F. J. Turner, "New West."]

[198:1] "Congressional Globe," 35th Congress, First Session, Appendix, p. 70.

[199:1] "Seward's Works" (Boston, 1884), iv, p. 319.

The Problem of the West [205:1]

The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. A glance at the map of the United States reveals the truth. To write of a "Western sectionalism," bounded on the east by the Alleghanies, is, in itself, to proclaim the writer a provincial. What is the West? What has it been in American life? To have the answers to these questions, is to understand the most significant features of the United States of to-day.

The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears, the "West" proper passes on to a new frontier, and in the former area, a new society has emerged from its contact with the backwoods. Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions, and assimilates itself to the type of the older social conditions of the East; but it bears within it enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the East. The history of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing; it is [ 206 ] a history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the origin of new political species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a constructive force of the highest significance in our life. To use the words of that acute and widely informed observer, Mr. Bryce, "The West is the most American part of America. . . . What Europe is to Asia, what America is to England, that the Western States and Territories are to the Atlantic States."

The West, as a phase of social organization, began with the Atlantic coast, and passed across the continent. But the colonial tide-water area was in close touch with the Old World, and soon lost its Western aspects. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the newer social conditions appeared along the upper waters of the tributaries of the Atlantic. Here it was that the West took on its distinguishing features, and transmitted frontier traits and ideals to this area in later days. On the coast, were the fishermen and skippers, the merchants and planters, with eyes turned toward Europe. Beyond the falls of the rivers were the pioneer farmers, largely of non-English stock, Scotch-Irish and German. They constituted a distinct people, and may be regarded as an expansion of the social and economic life of the middle region into the back country of the South. These frontiersmen were the ancestors of Boone, Andrew Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, and Lincoln. Washington and Jefferson were profoundly affected by these frontier conditions. The forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character.

In the Revolutionary days, the settlers crossed the Alleghanies and put a barrier between them and the coast. They became, to use their phrases, "the men of the Western waters," the heirs of the "Western world." In this era, the backwoodsmen, [ 207 ] all along the western slopes of the mountains, with a keen sense of the difference between them and the dwellers on the coast, demanded organization into independent States of the Union. Self-government was their ideal. Said one of their rude, but energetic petitions for statehood: "Some of our fellow-citizens may think we are not able to conduct our affairs and consult our interests; but if our society is rude, much wisdom is not necessary to supply our wants, and a fool can sometimes put on his clothes better than a wise man can do it for him." This forest philosophy is the philosophy of American democracy. But the men of the coast were not ready to admit its implications. They apportioned the State legislatures so that the property-holding minority of the tide-water lands were able to outvote the more populous back countries. A similar system was proposed by Federalists in the constitutional convention of 1787. Gouverneur Morris, arguing in favor of basing representation on property as well as numbers, declared that "he looked forward, also, to that range of new States which would soon be formed in the West. He thought the rule of representation ought to be so fixed, as to secure to the Atlantic States a prevalence in the national councils." "The new States," said he, "will know less of the public interest than these; will have an interest in many respects different; in particular will be little scrupulous of involving the community in wars, the burdens and operations of which would fall chiefly on the maritime States. Provision ought, therefore, to be made to prevent the maritime States from being hereafter outvoted by them." He added that the Western country "would not be able to furnish men equally enlightened to share in the administration of our common interests. The busy haunts of men, not the remote wilderness, was the proper school of political talents. If the Western people get power into their hands, they will ruin the Atlantic [ 208 ] interest. The back members are always most averse to the best measures." Add to these utterances of Gouverneur Morris the impassioned protest of Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, in the debates in the House of Representatives, on the admission of Louisiana. Referring to the discussion over the slave votes and the West in the constitutional convention, he declared, "Suppose, then, that it had been distinctly foreseen that, in addition to the effect of this weight, the whole population of a world beyond the Mississippi was to be brought into this and the other branch of the legislature, to form our laws, control our rights, and decide our destiny. Sir, can it be pretended that the patriots of that day would for one moment have listened to it? . . . They had not taken degrees at the hospital of idiocy. . . . Why, sir, I have already heard of six States, and some say there will be, at no great distant time, more. I have also heard that the mouth of the Ohio will be far to the east of the center of the contemplated empire. . . . You have no authority to throw the rights and property of this people into 'hotch-pot' with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed, though more respectable, race of Anglo-Hispano-Gallo-Americans who bask on the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi. . . . Do you suppose the people of the Northern and Atlantic States will, or ought to, look on with patience and see Representatives and Senators from the Red River and Missouri, pouring themselves upon this and the other floor, managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles, at least, from their residence; and having a preponderancy in councils into which, constitutionally, they could never have been admitted?"

Like an echo from the fears expressed by the East at the close of the eighteenth century come the words of an eminent Eastern man of letters [208:1] at the end of the nineteenth century, in [ 209 ] warning against the West: "Materialized in their temper; with few ideals of an ennobling sort; little instructed in the lessons of history; safe from exposure to the direct calamities and physical horrors of war; with undeveloped imaginations and sympathies—they form a community unfortunate and dangerous from the possession of power without a due sense of its corresponding responsibilities; a community in which the passion for war may easily be excited as the fancied means by which its greatness may be convincingly exhibited, and its ambitions gratified. . . . Some chance spark may fire the prairie."

Here, then, is the problem of the West, as it looked to New England leaders of thought in the beginning and at the end of this century. From the first, it was recognized that a new type was growing up beyond the seaboard, and that the time would come when the destiny of the nation would be in Western hands. The divergence of these societies became clear in the struggle over the ratification of the federal constitution. The up-country agricultural regions, the communities that were in debt and desired paper money, with some Western exceptions, opposed the instrument; but the areas of intercourse and property carried the day.

It is important to understand, therefore, what were some of the ideals of this early Western democracy. How did the frontiersman differ from the man of the coast?

The most obvious fact regarding the man of the Western Waters is that he had placed himself under influences destructive to many of the gains of civilization. Remote from the opportunity for systematic education, substituting a log hut in the forest-clearing for the social comforts of the town, he suffered hardships and privations, and reverted in many ways to primitive conditions of life. Engaged in a struggle to subdue the forest, working as an individual, and with little specie [ 210 ] or capital, his interests were with the debtor class. At each stage of its advance, the West has favored an expansion of the currency. The pioneer had boundless confidence in the future of his own community, and when seasons of financial contraction and depression occurred, he, who had staked his all on confidence in Western development, and had fought the savage for his home, was inclined to reproach the conservative sections and classes. To explain this antagonism requires more than denunciation of dishonesty, ignorance, and boorishness as fundamental Western traits. Legislation in the United States has had to deal with two distinct social conditions. In some portions of the country there was, and is, an aggregation of property, and vested rights are in the foreground: in others, capital is lacking, more primitive conditions prevail, with different economic and social ideals, and the contentment of the average individual is placed in the foreground. That in the conflict between these two ideals an even hand has always been held by the government would be difficult to show.

The separation of the Western man from the seaboard, and his environment, made him in a large degree free from European precedents and forces. He looked at things independently and with small regard or appreciation for the best Old World experience. He had no ideal of a philosophical, eclectic nation, that should advance civilization by "intercourse with foreigners and familiarity with their point of view, and readiness to adopt whatever is best and most suitable in their ideas, manners, and customs." His was rather the ideal of conserving and developing what was original and valuable in this new country. The entrance of old society upon free lands meant to him opportunity for a new type of democracy and new popular ideals. The West was not conservative: buoyant self-confidence and self-assertion were distinguishing traits in its composition. It saw in its growth nothing less [ 211 ] than a new order of society and state. In this conception were elements of evil and elements of good.

But the fundamental fact in regard to this new society was its relation to land. Professor Boutmy has said of the United States, "Their one primary and predominant object is to cultivate and settle these prairies, forests, and vast waste lands. The striking and peculiar characteristic of American society is that it is not so much a democracy as a huge commercial company for the discovery, cultivation, and capitalization of its enormous territory. The United States are primarily a commercial society, and only secondarily a nation." Of course, this involves a serious misapprehension. By the very fact of the task here set forth, far-reaching ideals of the state and of society have been evolved in the West, accompanied by loyalty to the nation representative of these ideals. But M. Boutmy's description hits the substantial fact, that the fundamental traits of the man of the interior were due to the free lands of the West. These turned his attention to the great task of subduing them to the purposes of civilization, and to the task of advancing his economic and social status in the new democracy which he was helping to create. Art, literature, refinement, scientific administration, all had to give way to this Titanic labor. Energy, incessant activity, became the lot of this new American. Says a traveler of the time of Andrew Jackson, "America is like a vast workshop, over the door of which is printed in blazing characters, 'No admittance here, except on business.'" The West of our own day reminds Mr. Bryce "of the crowd which Vathek found in the hall of Eblis, each darting hither and thither with swift steps and unquiet mien, driven to and fro by a fire in the heart. Time seems too short for what they have to do, and the result always to come short of their desire."

But free lands and the consciousness of working out their [ 212 ] social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence. They promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East. Where everybody could have a farm, almost for taking it, economic equality easily resulted, and this involved political equality. Not without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal, and it goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West to-day.

Western democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The frontiersman was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal authority. If there were cattle thieves, lynch law was sudden and effective: the regulators of the Carolinas were the predecessors of the claims associations of Iowa and the vigilance committees of California. But the individual was not ready to submit to complex regulations. Population was sparse, there was no multitude of jostling interests, as in older settlements, demanding an elaborate system of personal restraints. Society became atomic. There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the land. Substantial justice, secured in the most direct way, was the ideal of the backwoodsman. He had little patience with finely drawn distinctions or scruples of method. If the thing was one proper to be done, then the most immediate, rough and ready, effective way was the best way.

It followed from the lack of organized political life, from the atomic conditions of the backwoods society, that the individual was exalted and given free play. The West was another name for opportunity. Here were mines to be seized, fertile valleys to be preëmpted, all the natural resources open to the shrewdest and the boldest. The United States is unique in the [ 213 ] extent to which the individual has been given an open field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order, or of scientific administration of government. The self-made man was the Western man's ideal, was the kind of man that all men might become. Out of his wilderness experience, out of the freedom of his opportunities, he fashioned a formula for social regeneration,—the freedom of the individual to seek his own. He did not consider that his conditions were exceptional and temporary.

Under such conditions, leadership easily develops,—a leadership based on the possession of the qualities most serviceable to the young society. In the history of Western settlement, we see each forted village following its local hero. Clay, Jackson, Harrison, Lincoln, were illustrations of this tendency in periods when the Western hero rose to the dignity of national hero.

The Western man believed in the manifest destiny of his country. On his border, and checking his advance, were the Indian, the Spaniard, and the Englishman. He was indignant at Eastern indifference and lack of sympathy with his view of his relations to these peoples; at the short-sightedness of Eastern policy. The closure of the Mississippi by Spain, and the proposal to exchange our claim of freedom of navigating the river, in return for commercial advantages to New England, nearly led to the withdrawal of the West from the Union. It was the Western demands that brought about the purchase of Louisiana, and turned the scale in favor of declaring the War of 1812. Militant qualities were favored by the annual expansion of the settled area in the face of hostile Indians and the stubborn wilderness. The West caught the vision of the nation's continental destiny. Henry Adams, in his History of the United States, makes the American of 1800 exclaim to the foreign visitor, "Look at my wealth! See these solid [ 214 ] mountains of salt and iron, of lead, copper, silver, and gold. See these magnificent cities scattered broadcast to the Pacific! See my cornfields rustling and waving in the summer breeze from ocean to ocean, so far that the sun itself is not high enough to mark where the distant mountains bound my golden seas. Look at this continent of mine, fairest of created worlds, as she lies turning up to the sun's never failing caress her broad and exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk for her hundred million children." And the foreigner saw only dreary deserts, tenanted by sparse, ague-stricken pioneers and savages. The cities were log huts and gambling dens. But the frontiersman's dream was prophetic. In spite of his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist withal. He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He had faith in man, hope for democracy, belief in America's destiny, unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams come true. Said Harriet Martineau in 1834, "I regard the American people as a great embryo poet, now moody, now wild, but bringing out results of absolute good sense: restless and wayward in action, but with deep peace at his heart; exulting that he has caught the true aspect of things past, and the depth of futurity which lies before him, wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has scarcely begun to dream of. There is the strongest hope of a nation that is capable of being possessed with an idea."

It is important to bear this idealism of the West in mind. The very materialism that has been urged against the West was accompanied by ideals of equality, of the exaltation of the common man, of national expansion, that makes it a profound mistake to write of the West as though it were engrossed in mere material ends. It has been, and is, preëminently a region of ideals, mistaken or not.

It is obvious that these economic and social conditions were [ 215 ] so fundamental in Western life that they might well dominate whatever accessions came to the West by immigration from the coast sections or from Europe. Nevertheless, the West cannot be understood without bearing in mind the fact that it has received the great streams from the North and from the South, and that the Mississippi compelled these currents to intermingle. Here it was that sectionalism first gave way under the pressure of unification. Ultimately the conflicting ideas and institutions of the old sections struggled for dominance in this area under the influence of the forces that made for uniformity, but this is merely another phase of the truth that the West must become unified, that it could not rest in sectional groupings. For precisely this reason the struggle occurred. In the period from the Revolution to the close of the War of 1812, the democracy of the Southern and Middle States contributed the main streams of settlement and social influence to the West. Even in Ohio political power was soon lost by the New England leaders. The democratic spirit of the Middle region left an indelible impress on the West in this its formative period. After the War of 1812, New England, its supremacy in the carrying trade of the world having vanished, became a hive from which swarms of settlers went out to western New York and the remoter regions.

These settlers spread New England ideals of education and character and political institutions, and acted as a leaven of great significance in the Northwest. But it would be a mistake to believe that an unmixed New England influence took possession of the Northwest. These pioneers did not come from the class that conserved the type of New England civilization pure and undefiled. They represented a less contented, less conservative influence. Moreover, by their sojourn in the Middle Region, on their westward march, they underwent [ 216 ] modification, and when the farther West received them, they suffered a forest-change, indeed. The Westernized New England man was no longer the representative of the section that he left. He was less conservative, less provincial, more adaptable and approachable, less rigorous in his Puritan ideals, less a man of culture, more a man of action.

As might have been expected, therefore, the Western men, in the "era of good feeling," had much homogeneity throughout the Mississippi Valley, and began to stand as a new national type. Under the lead of Henry Clay they invoked the national government to break down the mountain barrier by internal improvements, and thus to give their crops an outlet to the coast. Under him they appealed to the national government for a protective tariff to create a home market. A group of frontier States entered the Union with democratic provisions respecting the suffrage, and with devotion to the nation that had given them their lands, built their roads and canals, regulated their territorial life, and made them equals in the sisterhood of States. At last these Western forces of aggressive nationalism and democracy took possession of the government in the person of the man who best embodied them, Andrew Jackson. This new democracy that captured the country and destroyed the ideals of statesmanship came from no theorist's dreams of the German forest. It came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest. But the triumph of this Western democracy revealed also the fact that it could rally to its aid the laboring classes of the coast, then just beginning to acquire self-consciousness and organization.

The next phase of Western development revealed forces of division between the northern and southern portions of the West. With the spread of the cotton culture went the slave system and the great plantation. The small farmer in his log [ 217 ] cabin, raising varied crops, was displaced by the planter raising cotton. In all except the mountainous areas the industrial organization of the tidewater took possession of the Southwest, the unity of the back country was broken, and the solid South was formed. In the Northwest this was the era of railroads and canals, opening the region to the increasing stream of Middle State and New England settlement, and strengthening the opposition to slavery. A map showing the location of the men of New England ancestry in the Northwest would represent also the counties in which the Free Soil party cast its heaviest votes. The commercial connections of the Northwest likewise were reversed by the railroad. The result is stated by a writer in De Bow's Review in 1852 in these words:—

"What is New Orleans now? Where are her dreams of greatness and glory? . . . Whilst she slept, an enemy has sowed tares in her most prolific fields. Armed with energy, enterprise, and an indomitable spirit, that enemy, by a system of bold, vigorous, and sustained efforts, has succeeded in reversing the very laws of nature and of nature's God,—rolled back the mighty tide of the Mississippi and its thousand tributary streams, until their mouth, practically and commercially, is more at New York or Boston than at New Orleans."

The West broke asunder, and the great struggle over the social system to be given to the lands beyond the Mississippi followed. In the Civil War the Northwest furnished the national hero,—Lincoln was the very flower of frontier training and ideals,—and it also took into its hands the whole power of the government. Before the war closed, the West could claim the President, Vice-President, Chief Justice, Speaker of the House, Secretary of the Treasury, Postmaster-General, Attorney-General, General of the army, and Admiral of the navy. The leading generals of the war had been [ 218 ] furnished by the West. It was the region of action, and in the crisis it took the reins.

The triumph of the nation was followed by a new era of Western development. The national forces projected themselves across the prairies and plains. Railroads, fostered by government loans and land grants, opened the way for settlement and poured a flood of European immigrants and restless pioneers from all sections of the Union into the government lands. The army of the United States pushed back the Indian, rectangular Territories were carved into checkerboard States, creations of the federal government, without a history, without physiographical unity, without particularistic ideas. The later frontiersman leaned on the strong arm of national power.

At the same time the South underwent a revolution. The plantation, based on slavery, gave place to the farm, the gentry to the democratic elements. As in the West, new industries, of mining and of manufacture, sprang up as by magic. The New South, like the New West, was an area of construction, a debtor area, an area of unrest; and it, too, had learned the uses to which federal legislation might be put.

In the meantime the Old Northwest [218:1] passed through an economic and social transformation. The whole West furnished an area over which successive waves of economic development have passed. The State of Wisconsin, now much like parts of the State of New York, was at an earlier period like the State of Nebraska of to-day; the Granger movement and Greenback party had for a time the ascendancy; and in the northern counties of the State, where there is a sparser population, and the country is being settled, its sympathies are still with the debtor class. Thus the Old Northwest is a region where the older frontier conditions survive in parts, and where [ 219 ] the inherited ways of looking at things are largely to be traced to its frontier days. At the same time it is a region in many ways assimilated to the East. It understands both sections. It is not entirely content with the existing structure of economic society in the sections where wealth has accumulated and corporate organizations are powerful; but neither has it seemed to feel that its interests lie in supporting the program of the prairies and the South. In the Fifty-third Congress it voted for the income tax, but it rejected free coinage. It is still affected by the ideal of the self-made man, rather than by the ideal of industrial nationalism. It is more American, but less cosmopolitan than the seaboard.

We are now in a position to see clearly some of the factors involved in the Western problem. For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a check. That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries, are indications that the movement will continue. The stronghold of these demands lies west of the Alleghanies.

In the remoter West, the restless, rushing wave of settlement has broken with a shock against the arid plains. The free lands are gone, the continent is crossed, and all this push and energy is turning into channels of agitation. Failures in one area can no longer be made good by taking up land on a new frontier; the conditions of a settled society are being reached with suddenness and with confusion. The West has been built up with borrowed capital, and the question of the stability of gold, as a standard of deferred payments, is eagerly agitated [ 220 ] by the debtor West, profoundly dissatisfied with the industrial conditions that confront it, and actuated by frontier directness and rigor in its remedies. For the most part, the men who built up the West beyond the Mississippi, and who are now leading the agitation, [220:1] came as pioneers from the old Northwest, in the days when it was just passing from the stage of a frontier section. For example, Senator Allen of Nebraska, president of the recent national Populist Convention, and a type of the political leaders of his section, was born in Ohio in the middle of the century, went in his youth to Iowa, and not long after the Civil War made his home in Nebraska. As a boy, he saw the buffalo driven out by the settlers; he saw the Indian retreat as the pioneer advanced. His training is that of the old West, in its frontier days. And now the frontier opportunities are gone. Discontent is demanding an extension of governmental activity in its behalf. In these demands, it finds itself in touch with the depressed agricultural classes and the workingmen of the South and East. The Western problem is no longer a sectional problem: it is a social problem on a national scale. The greater West, extending from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, cannot be regarded as a unit; it requires analysis into regions and classes. But its area, its population, and its material resources would give force to its assertion that if there is a sectionalism in the country, the sectionalism is Eastern. The old West, united to the new South, would produce, not a new sectionalism, but a new Americanism. It would not mean sectional disunion, as some have speculated, but it might mean a drastic assertion of national government and imperial expansion under a popular hero.

This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of heterogeneous materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals [ 221 ] and social interests, having passed from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the continent, is now thrown back upon itself, and is seeking an equilibrium. The diverse elements are being fused into national unity. The forces of reorganization are turbulent and the nation seems like a witches' kettle.

But the West has its own centers of industrial life and culture not unlike those of the East. It has State universities, rivaling in conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any other part of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the East, than do Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its industrial development will bring it more into harmony with the East.

Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power, and is the battlefield on which these issues of American development are to be settled. It has more in common with all parts of the nation than has any other region. It understands the East, as the East does not understand the West. The White City which recently rose on the shores of Lake Michigan fitly typified its growing culture as well as its capacity for great achievement. Its complex and representative industrial organization and business ties, its determination to hold fast to what is original and good in its Western experience, and its readiness to learn and receive the results of the experience of other sections and nations, make it an open-minded and safe arbiter of the American destiny.

In the long run the "Center of the Republic" may be trusted to strike a wise balance between the contending ideals. But she does not deceive herself; she knows that the problem of the West means nothing less than the problem of working out original social ideals and social adjustments for the American nation.

[205:1] Atlantic Monthly , September, 1896. Reprinted by permission.

[208:1] Charles Eliot Norton.

[218:1] The present States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

[220:1] [Written in the year of Mr. Bryan's first presidential campaign.]

Dominant Forces in Western Life [222:1]

The Old Northwest is a name which tells of the vestiges which the march of settlement across the American continent has left behind it. The New Northwest fronts the watery labyrinth of Puget Sound and awaits its destiny upon the Pacific. The Old Northwest, the historic Northwest Territory, is now the new Middle Region of the United States. A century ago it was a wilderness, broken only by a few French settlements and the straggling American hamlets along the Ohio and its tributaries, while, on the shore of Lake Erie, Moses Cleaveland had just led a handful of men to the Connecticut Reserve. To-day it is the keystone of the American Commonwealth. Since 1860 the center of population of the United States has rested within its limits, and the center of manufacturing in the nation lies eight miles from President McKinley's Ohio home. Of the seven men who have been elected to the presidency of the United States since 1860, six have come from the Old Northwest, and the seventh came from the kindred region of western New York. The congressional Representatives from these five States of the Old Northwest already outnumber those from the old Middle States, and are three times as numerous as those from New England.

The elements that have contributed to the civilization of this region are therefore well worth consideration. To know the States that make up the Old Northwest—Ohio, Indiana, [ 223 ] Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin—one must understand their social origins.

Eldest in this sisterhood was Ohio. New England gave the formative impulses to this State by the part which the Ohio Company played in securing the Ordinance of 1787, and at Marietta and Cleveland Massachusetts and Connecticut planted enduring centers of Puritan influence. During the same period New Jersey and Pennsylvania sent their colonists to the Symmes Purchase, in which Cincinnati was the rallying-point, while Virginians sought the Military Bounty Lands in the region of Chillicothe. The Middle States and the South, with their democratic ideas, constituted the dominant element in Ohio politics in the early part of her history. This dominance is shown by the nativity of the members of the Ohio legislature elected in 1820: New England furnished nine Senators and sixteen Representatives, chiefly from Connecticut; New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, seventeen Senators and twenty-one Representatives, mostly from Pennsylvania; while the South furnished nine Senators and twenty-seven Representatives, of whom the majority came from Virginia. Five of the Representatives were native of Ireland, presumably Scotch-Irishmen. In the Ohio Senate, therefore, the Middle States had as many representatives as had New England and the South together, while the Southern men slightly outnumbered the Middle States men in the Assembly. Together, the emigrants from the Democratic South and Middle Region outnumbered the Federalist New Englanders three to one. Although Ohio is popularly considered a child of New England, it is clear that in these formative years of her statehood the commonwealth was dominated by other forces.

By the close of this early period, in 1820, the settlement in Ohio had covered more or less fully all except the northwest corner of the State, and Indiana's formative period was well [ 224 ] started. Here, as in Ohio, there was a large Southern element. But while the Southern stream that flowed into Ohio had its sources in Virginia, the main current that sought Indiana came from North Carolina; and these settlers were for the most part from the humbler classes. In the settlement of Indiana from the South two separate elements are distinguishable: the Quaker migration from North Carolina, moving chiefly because of anti-slavery convictions; the "poor white" stream, made up in part of restless hunters and thriftless pioneers moving without definite ambitions, and in part of other classes, such as former overseers, migrating to the new country with definite purpose of improving their fortunes.

These elements constituted well-marked features in the Southern contribution to Indiana, and they explain why she has been named the Hoosier State; but it should by no means be thought that all of the Southern immigrants came under these classes, nor that these have been the normal elements in the development of the Indiana of to-day. In the Northwest, where interstate migration has been so continuous and widespread, the lack of typical State peculiarities is obvious, and the student of society, like the traveler, is tempted, in his effort to distinguish the community from its neighbors, to exaggerate the odd and exceptional elements which give a particular flavor to the State. Indiana has suffered somewhat from this tendency; but it is undoubted that these peculiarities of origin left deep and abiding influences upon the State. In 1820 her settlement was chiefly in the southern counties, where Southern and Middle States influence was dominant. Her two United States Senators were Virginians by birth, while her Representative was from Pennsylvania. The Southern element continued so powerful that one student of Indiana origins has estimated that in 1850 one-third of the population of the State were native Carolinians and their children [ 225 ] in the first generation. Not until a few years before the Civil War did the Northern current exert a decisive influence upon Indiana. She had no such lake ports as had her sister States, and extension of settlement into the State from ports like Chicago was interrupted by the less attractive area of the northwestern part of Indiana. Add to this the geological fact that the limestone ridges and the best soils ran in nearly perpendicular belts northward from the Ohio, and it will be seen how circumstances combined to diminish Northern and to facilitate Southern influences in the State prior to the railroad development.

In Illinois, also, the current of migration was at first preponderantly Southern, but the settlers were less often from the Atlantic coast. Kentucky and Tennessee were generous contributors, but many of the distinguished leaders came from Virginia, and it is worthy of note that in 1820 the two United States Senators of Illinois were of Maryland ancestry, while her Representative was of Kentucky origin. The swarms of land-seekers between 1820 and 1830 ascended the Illinois river, and spread out between that river and the Mississippi. It was in this period that Abraham Lincoln's father, who had come from Kentucky to Indiana, again left his log cabin and traveled by ox-team with his family to the popular Illinois county of Sangamon. Here Lincoln split his famous rails to fence their land, and grew up under the influences of this migration of the Southern pioneers to the prairies. They were not predominantly of the planter class; but the fierce contest in 1824 over the proposition to open Illinois to slavery was won for freedom by a narrow majority.

Looking at the three States, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, prior to 1850, we perceive how important was the voice of the South here, and we can the more easily understand the early affiliation of the Northwest with her sister States to the south [ 226 ] on the Western waters. It was not without reason that the proposal of the Missouri Compromise came from Illinois, and it was a natural enthusiasm with which these States followed Henry Clay in the war policy of 1812. The combination of the South, the western portion of the Middle States, and the Mississippi Valley gave the ascendancy to the democratic ideals of the followers of Jefferson, and left New England a weakened and isolated section for nearly half a century. Many of the most characteristic elements in American life in the first part of the century were due to this relationship between the South and the trans-Alleghany region. But even thus early the Northwest had revealed strong predilections for the Northern economic ideals as against the peculiar institution of the South, and this tendency grew with the increase of New England immigration.

The northern two in this sisterhood of Northwestern States were the first to be entered by the French, but latest by the English settlers. Why Michigan was not occupied by New York men at an earlier period is at first sight not easy to understand. Perhaps the adverse reports of surveyors who visited the interior of the State, the partial geographical isolation, and the unprogressive character of the French settlers account for the tardy occupation of the area. Certain it is that while the southern tier of States was sought by swarms of settlers, Wisconsin and Michigan still echoed to Canadian boating-songs, and voyageurs paddled their birch canoes along the streams of the wilderness to traffic with the savages. Great Britain maintained the dominant position until after the War of 1812, and the real center of authority was in Canada.

But after the digging of the Erie Canal, settlement began to turn into Michigan. Between 1830 and 1840 the population of the State leaped from 31,000 to 212,000, in the face of the fact that the heavy debt of the State and the crisis of [ 227 ] 1837 turned from her borders many of the thrifty, debt-hating Germans. The vast majority of the settlers were New Yorkers. Michigan is distinctly a child of the Empire State. Canadians, both French and English, continued to come as the lumber interests of the region increased. By 1850 Michigan contained nearly 400,000 inhabitants, who occupied the southern half of the State.

But she now found an active competitor for settlement in Wisconsin. In this region two forces had attracted the earlier inhabitants. The fur-trading posts of Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and Milwaukee constituted one element, in which the French influence was continued. The lead region of the southwest corner of the State formed the center of attraction for Illinois and Southern pioneers. The soldiers who followed Black Hawk's trail in 1832 reported the richness of the soil, and an era of immigration followed. To the port of Milwaukee came a combined migration from western New York and New England, and spread along the southern tier of prairie counties until it met the Southern settlers in the lead region. Many of the early political contests in the State were connected, as in Ohio and Illinois, with the antagonisms between the sections thus brought together in a limited area.

The other element in the formation of Wisconsin was that of the Germans, then just entering upon their vast immigration to the United States. Wisconsin was free from debt; she made a constitution of exceptional liberality to foreigners, and instead of treasuring her school lands or using them for internal improvements, she sold them for almost nothing to attract immigration. The result was that the prudent Germans, who loved light taxes and cheap hard wood lands, turned toward Wisconsin,—another Völkerwanderung . From Milwaukee as a center they spread north along the shore of Lake Michigan, and later into northern central Wisconsin, following the belt [ 228 ] of the hardwood forests. So considerable were their numbers that such an economist as Roscher wrote of the feasibility of making Wisconsin a German State. "They can plant the vine on the hills," cried Franz Löher in 1847, "and drink with happy song and dance; they can have German schools and universities, German literature and art, German science and philosophy, German courts and assemblies; in short, they can form a German State, in which the German language shall be as much the popular and official language as the English is now, and in which the German spirit shall rule." By 1860 the German-born were sixteen per cent of the population of the State. But the New York and New England stream proved even more broad and steady in its flow in these years before the war. Wisconsin's population rose from 30,000 in 1840 to 300,000 in 1850.

The New England element that entered this State is probably typical of the same element in Wisconsin's neighboring States, and demands notice. It came for the most part, not from the seaboard of Massachusetts, which has so frequently represented New England to the popular apprehension. A large element in this stock was the product of the migration that ascended the valleys of Connecticut and central Massachusetts through the hills into Vermont and New York,—a pioneer folk almost from the time of their origin. The Vermont colonists decidedly outnumbered those of Massachusetts in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and were far more numerous in other Northwestern States than the population of Vermont warranted. Together with this current came the settlers from western New York. These were generally descendants of this same pioneer New England stock, continuing into a remoter West the movement that had brought their parents to New York. The combined current from New England and New York thus constituted a distinctly modified New England stock, [ 229 ] and was clearly the dominant native element in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The decade of the forties was also the period of Iowa's rapid increase. Although not politically a part of the Old Northwest, in history she is closely related to that region. Her growth was by no means so rapid as was Wisconsin's, for the proportion of foreign immigration was less. Whereas in 1850 more than one-third of Wisconsin's population was foreign-born, the proportion for Iowa was not much over one-tenth. The main body of her people finally came from the Middle States, and Illinois and Ohio; but Southern elements were well represented, particularly among her political leaders.

The middle of the century was the turning-point in the transfer of control in the Northwest. Below the line of the old national turnpike, marked by the cities of Columbus, Indianapolis, Vandalia, and St. Louis, the counties had acquired a stability of settlement; and partly because of the Southern element, partly because of a natural tendency of new communities toward Jacksonian ideals, these counties were preponderantly Democratic. But the Southern migration had turned to the cotton areas of the Southwest, and the development of railroads and canals had broken the historic commercial ascendancy of the Mississippi River; New Orleans was yielding the scepter to New York. The tide of migration from the North poured along these newly opened channels, and occupied the less settled counties above the national turnpike. In cities like Columbus and Indianapolis, where the two currents had run side by side, the combined elements were most clearly marked, but in the Northwest as a whole a varied population had been formed. This region seemed to represent and understand the various parts of the Union. It was this aspect which Mr. Vinton, of Ohio, urged in Congress when he made his notable speech in favor of the admission of Iowa. He [ 230 ] pleaded the mission of the Northwest as the mediator between the sections and the unifying agency in the nation, with such power and pathos as to thrill even John Quincy Adams.

But there are some issues which cannot be settled by compromise, tendencies one of which must conquer the other. Such an issue the slave power raised, and raised too late for support in the upper half of the Mississippi Basin. The Northern and the Southern elements found themselves in opposition to each other. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," said Abraham Lincoln, a Northern leader of Southern origin. Douglas, a leader of the Southern forces, though coming from New England, declared his indifference whether slavery were voted up or down in the Western Territories. The historic debates between these two champions reveal the complex conditions in the Northwest, and take on a new meaning when considered in the light of this contest between the Northern and the Southern elements. The State that had been so potent for compromise was at last the battle-ground itself, and the places selected for the various debates of Lincoln and Douglas marked the strongholds and the outposts of the antagonistic forces.

At this time the kinship of western New York and the dominant element in the Northwest was clearly revealed. Speaking for the anti-slavery forces at Madison, Wisconsin, in 1860, Seward said: "The Northwest is by no means so small as you may think it. I speak to you because I feel that I am, and during all my mature life have been, one of you. Although of New York, I am still a citizen of the Northwest. The Northwest extends eastward to the base of the Alleghany Mountains, and does not all of western New York lie westward of the Alleghany Mountains? Whence comes all the inspiration of free soil which spreads itself with such cheerful voices over all these plains? Why, from New York westward of [ 231 ] the Alleghany Mountains. The people before me,—who are you but New York men, while you are men of the Northwest?" In the Civil War, western New York and the Northwest were powerful in the forum and in the field. A million soldiers came from the States that the Ordinance, passed by Southern votes, had devoted to freedom.

This was the first grave time of trial for the Northwest, and it did much eventually to give to the region a homogeneity and self-consciousness. But at the close of the war the region was still agricultural, only half-developed; still breaking ground in northern forests; still receiving contributions of peoples which radically modified the social organism, and undergoing economic changes almost revolutionary in their rapidity and extent. The changes since the war are of more social importance, in many respects, than those in the years commonly referred to as the formative period. As a result, the Northwest finds herself again between contending forces, sharing the interests of East and West, as once before those of North and South, and forced to give her voice on issues of equal significance for the destiny of the republic.

In these transforming years since 1860, Ohio, finding the magician's talisman that revealed the treasury of mineral wealth, gas, and petroleum beneath her fields, has leaped to a front rank among the manufacturing States of the Union. Potential on the Great Lakes by reason of her ports of Toledo and Cleveland, tapping the Ohio river artery of trade at Cincinnati, and closely connected with all the vast material development of the upper waters of this river in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Ohio has become distinctly a part of the eastern social organism, much like the State of Pennsylvania. The complexity of her origin still persists. Ohio has no preponderant social center; her multiplicity of colleges and universities bears tribute to the diversity of the [ 232 ] elements that have made the State. One-third of her people are of foreign parentage (one or both parents foreign-born), and the city of Cincinnati has been deeply affected by the German stock, while Cleveland strongly reflects the influence of the New England element. That influence is still very palpable, but it is New England in the presence of natural gas, iron, and coal, New England shaped by blast and forge. The Middle State ideals will dominate Ohio's future.

Bucolic Indiana, too, within the last decade has come into the possession of gas-fields and has increased the exploitation of her coals until she seems destined to share in the industrial type represented by Ohio. Cities have arisen, like a dream, on the sites of country villages. But Indiana has a much smaller proportion of foreign elements than any other State of the Old Northwest, and it is the Southern element that still differentiates her from her sisters. While Ohio's political leaders still attest the Puritan migration, Indiana's clasp hands with the leaders from the South.

The Southern elements continue also to reveal themselves in the Democratic southwestern counties of Illinois, grouped like a broad delta of the Illinois River, while northern Illinois holds a larger proportion of descendants of the Middle States and New England. About one-half her population is of foreign parentage, in which the German, Irish, and Scandinavians furnish the largest elements. She is a great agricultural State and a great manufacturing State, the connecting link between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. Her metropolis, Chicago, is the very type of Northwestern development for good and for evil. It is an epitome of her composite nationality. A recent writer, analyzing the school census of Chicago, points out that "only two cities in the German Empire, Berlin and Hamburg, have a greater German population than Chicago; only two in Sweden, Stockholm and Göteborg, have more [ 233 ] Swedes; and only two in Norway, Christiana and Bergen, have more Norwegians"; while the Irish, Polish, Bohemians, and Dutch elements are also largely represented. But in spite of her rapidity of growth and her complex elements, Chicago stands as the representative of the will-power and genius for action of the Middle West, and the State of Illinois will be the battle-ground for social and economic ideals for the next generation.

Michigan is two States. The northern peninsula is cut off from the southern physically, industrially, and in the history of settlement. It would seem that her natural destiny was with Wisconsin, or some possible new State embracing the iron and copper, forest and shipping areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota on Lake Superior. The lower peninsula of Michigan is the daughter of New York and over twelve per cent of Michigan's present population were born in that State, and her traits are those of the parent State. Over half her population is of foreign parentage, of which Canada and England together have furnished one-half, while the Germans outnumber any other single foreign element. The State has undergone a steady industrial development, exploiting her northern mines and forests, developing her lumber interests with Saginaw as the center, raising fruits along the lake shore counties, and producing grain in the middle trough of counties running from Saginaw Bay to the south of Lake Michigan. Her state university has been her peculiar glory, furnishing the first model for the state university, and it is the educational contribution of the Northwest to the nation.

Wisconsin's future is dependent upon the influence of the large proportion of her population of foreign parentage, for nearly three-fourths of her inhabitants are of that class. She thus has a smaller percentage of native population than any other of the States formed from the Old Northwest. Of this foreign element the Germans constitute by far the largest part, [ 234 ] with the Scandinavians second. Her American population born outside of Wisconsin comes chiefly from New York. In contrast with the Ohio River States, she lacks the Southern element. Her greater foreign population and her dairy interests contrast with Michigan's Canadian and English elements and fruit culture. Her relations are more Western than Michigan's by reason of her connection with the Mississippi and the prairie States. Her foreign element is slightly less than Minnesota's, and in the latter State the Scandinavians take the place held by the Germans in Wisconsin. The facility with which the Scandinavians catch the spirit of Western America and assimilate with their neighbors is much greater than is the case with the Germans, so that Wisconsin seems to offer opportunity for non-English influence in a greater degree than her sister on the west. While Minnesota's economic development has heretofore been closely dependent on the wheat-producing prairies, the opening of the iron fields of the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges, together with the development of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Duluth and West Superior, and the prospective achievement of a deep-water communication with the Atlantic, seem to offer to that State a new and imperial industrial destiny. Between this stupendous economic future to the northwest and the colossal growth of Chicago on the southeast Wisconsin seems likely to become a middle agricultural area, developing particularly into a dairy State. She is powerfully affected by the conservative tendencies of her German element in times of political agitation and of proposals of social change.

Some of the social modifications in this State are more or less typical of important processes at work among the neighboring States of the Old Northwest. In the north, the men who built up the lumber interests of the State, who founded a mill town surrounded by the stumps of the pine forests [ 235 ] which they exploited for the prairie markets, have acquired wealth and political power. The spacious and well-appointed home of the town-builder may now be seen in many a northern community, in a group of less pretentious homes of operatives and tradesmen, the social distinctions between them emphasized by the difference in nationality. A few years before, this captain of industry was perhaps actively engaged in the task of seeking the best "forties" or directing the operations of his log-drivers. His wife and daughters make extensive visits to Europe, his sons go to some university, and he himself is likely to acquire political position, or to devote his energies to saving the town from industrial decline, as the timber is cut away, by transforming it into a manufacturing center for more finished products. Still others continue their activity among the forests of the South. This social history of the timber areas of Wisconsin has left clear indications in the development of the peculiar political leadership in the northern portion of the State.

In the southern and middle counties of the State, the original settlement of the native American pioneer farmer, a tendency is showing itself to divide the farms and to sell to thrifty Germans, or to cultivate the soil by tenants, while the farmer retires to live in the neighboring village, and perhaps to organize creameries and develop a dairy business. The result is that a replacement of nationalities is in progress. Townships and even counties once dominated by the native American farmers of New York extraction are now possessed by Germans or other European nationalities. Large portions of the retail trades of the towns are also passing into German hands, while the native element seeks the cities, the professions, or mercantile enterprises of larger character. The non-native element shows distinct tendencies to dwell in groups. One of the most striking illustrations of this fact is the [ 236 ] community of New Glarus, in Wisconsin, formed by a carefully organized migration from Glarus in Switzerland, aided by the canton itself. For some years this community was a miniature Swiss canton in social organization and customs, but of late it has become increasingly assimilated to the American type, and has left an impress by transforming the county in which it is from a grain-raising to a dairy region.

From Milwaukee as a center, the influence of the Germans upon the social customs and ideals of Wisconsin has been marked. Milwaukee has many of the aspects of a German city, and has furnished a stronghold of resistance to native American efforts to enact rigid temperance legislation, laws regulative of parochial schools, and similar attempts to bend the German type to the social ideas of the pioneer American stock. In the last presidential election, the German area of the State deserted the Democratic party, and its opposition to free silver was a decisive factor in the overwhelming victory of the Republicans in Wisconsin. With all the evidence of the persistence of the influence of this nationality, it is nevertheless clear that each decade marks an increased assimilation and homogeneity in the State; but the result is a compromise, and not a conquest by either element.

The States of the Old Northwest gave to McKinley a plurality of over 367,000 out of a total vote of about 3,734,000. New England and the Middle States together gave him a plurality of 979,000 in about the same vote, while the farther West gave to Bryan a decisive net plurality. It thus appears that the Old Northwest occupied the position of a political middle region between East and West. The significance of this position is manifest when it is recalled that this section is the child of the East and the mother of the Populistic West.

The occupation of the Western prairies was determined by forces similar to those which settled the Old Northwest. In [ 237 ] the decade before the war, Minnesota succeeded to the place held by Wisconsin as the Mecca of settlers in the prior decade. To Wisconsin and New York she owes the largest proportion of her native settlers born outside of the State. Kansas and Nebraska were settled most rapidly in the decade following the war, and had a large proportion of soldiers in their American immigrants. Illinois and Ohio together furnished about one-third of the native settlers of these States, but the element coming from Southern States was stronger in Kansas than in Nebraska. Both these States have an exceptionally large proportion of native whites as compared with their neighbors among the prairie States. Kansas, for example, has about twenty-six per cent of persons of foreign parentage, while Nebraska has about forty-two, Iowa forty-three, South Dakota sixty, Wisconsin seventy-three, Minnesota seventy-five, and North Dakota seventy-nine. North Dakota's development was greatest in the decade prior to 1890. Her native stock came in largest numbers from Wisconsin, with New York, Minnesota, and Iowa next in order. The growth of South Dakota occupied the two decades prior to the census of 1890, and she has recruited her native element from Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and New York.

In consequence of the large migration from the States of the Old Northwest to the virgin soils of these prairie States many counties in the parent States show a considerable decline in growth in the decade before 1890. There is significance in the fact that, with the exception of Iowa, these prairie States, the colonies of the Old Northwest, gave Bryan votes in the election of 1896 in the ratio of their proportion of persons of native parentage. North Dakota, with the heaviest foreign element, was carried for McKinley, while South Dakota, with a much smaller foreign vote, went for Bryan. Kansas and Nebraska rank with Ohio in their native percentage, and they [ 238 ] were the center of prairie Populism. Of course, there were other important local economic and political explanations for this ratio, but it seems to have a basis of real meaning. Certain it is that the leaders of the silver movement came from the native element furnished by the Old Northwest. The original Populists in the Kansas legislature of 1891 were born in different States as follows: in Ohio, twelve; Indiana, six; Illinois, five; New York, four; Pennsylvania, two; Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine, one each,—making a total, for the Northern current, of thirty-two. Of the remaining eighteen, thirteen were from the South, and one each from Kansas, Missouri, California, England and Ireland. Nearly all were Methodists and former Republicans. [238:1]

Looking at the silver movement more largely, we find that of the Kansas delegation in the Fifty-fourth Congress, one was born in Kansas, and the rest in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maine. All of the Nebraska delegation in the House came from the Old Northwest or from Iowa. The biographies of the two Representatives from the State of Washington tell an interesting story. These men came as children to the pine woods of Wisconsin, took up public lands, and worked on the farm and in the pineries. One passed on to a homestead in Nebraska before settling in Washington. Thus they kept one stage ahead of the social transformations of the West. This is the usual training of the Western politicians. If the reader would see a picture of the representative Kansas Populist, let him examine the family portraits of the Ohio farmer in the middle of this century.

In a word, the Populist is the American farmer who has kept in advance of the economic and social transformations [ 239 ] that have overtaken those who remained behind. While, doubtless, investigation into the ancestry of the Populists and "silver men" who came to the prairies from the Old Northwest would show a large proportion of Southern origin, yet the center of discontent seems to have been among the men of the New England and New York current. If New England looks with care at these men, she may recognize in them the familiar lineaments of the embattled farmers who fired the shot heard round the world. The continuous advance of this pioneer stock from New England has preserved for us the older type of the pioneer of frontier New England.

I do not overlook the transforming influences of the wilderness on this stock ever since it left the earlier frontier to follow up the valleys of western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, into western New York, into Ohio, into Iowa, and out to the arid plains of western Kansas and Nebraska; nor do I overlook the peculiar industrial conditions of the prairie States. But I desire to insist upon the other truth, also, that these westward immigrants, keeping for generations in advance of the transforming industrial and social forces that have wrought so vast a revolution in the older regions of the East which they left, could not but preserve important aspects of the older farmer type. In the arid West these pioneers have halted and have turned to perceive an altered nation and changed social ideals. They see the sharp contrast between their traditional idea of America, as the land of opportunity, the land of the self-made man, free from class distinctions and from the power of wealth, and the existing America, so unlike the earlier ideal. If we follow back the line of march of the Puritan farmer, we shall see how responsive he has always been to isms , and how persistently he has resisted encroachments on his ideals of individual opportunity and democracy. He is the prophet of the "higher law" in [ 240 ] Kansas before the Civil War. He is the Prohibitionist of Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out against German customs as an invasion of his traditional ideals. He is the Granger of Wisconsin, passing restrictive railroad legislation. He is the Abolitionist, the Anti-mason, the Millerite, the Woman Suffragist, the Spiritualist, the Mormon, of Western New York. Follow him to his New England home in the turbulent days of Shays' rebellion, paper money, stay and tender laws, and land banks. The radicals among these New England farmers hated lawyers and capitalists. "I would not trust them," said Abraham White, in the ratification convention of Massachusetts, in 1788, "though every one of them should be a Moses." "These lawyers," cried Amos Singletary, "and men of learning and moneyed men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly to make us poor illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves! They mean to get all the money into their hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folk, like the Leviathan, Mr. President; yea, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah."

If the voice of Mary Ellen Lease sounds raucous to the New England man to-day, while it is sweet music in the ears of the Kansas farmer, let him ponder the utterances of these frontier farmers in the days of the Revolution; and if he is still doubtful of this spiritual kinship, let him read the words of the levelers and sectaries of Cromwell's army.

The story of the political leaders who remained in the place of their birth and shared its economic changes differs from the story of those who by moving to the West continued on a new area the old social type. In the throng of Scotch-Irish pioneers that entered the uplands of the Carolinas in the second quarter of the eighteenth century were the ancestors of Calhoun and of Andrew Jackson. Remaining in this region, [ 241 ] Calhoun shared the transformations of the South Carolina interior. He saw it change from the area of the pioneer farmers to an area of great planters raising cotton by slave labor. This explains the transformation of the nationalist and protectionist Calhoun of 1816 into the state-sovereignty and free-trade Calhoun. Jackson, on the other hand, left the region while it was still a frontier, shared the frontier life of Tennessee, and reflected the democracy and nationalism of his people. Henry Clay lived long enough in the kindred State of Kentucky to see it pass from a frontier to a settled community, and his views on slavery reflected the transitional history of that State. Lincoln, on the other hand, born in Kentucky in 1809, while the State was still under frontier conditions, migrated in 1816 to Indiana, and in 1830 to Illinois. The pioneer influences of his community did much to shape his life, and the development of the raw frontiersman into the statesman was not unlike the development of his own State. Political leaders who experienced the later growth of the Northwest, like Garfield, Hayes, Harrison, and McKinley, show clearly the continued transformations of the section. But in the days when the Northwest was still in the gristle, she sent her sons into the newer West to continue the views of life and the policies of the half-frontier region they had left.

To-day, the Northwest, standing between her ancestral connections in the East and her children in the West, partly like the East, partly like the West, finds herself in a position strangely like that in the days of the slavery struggle, when her origins presented to her a "divided duty." But these issues are not with the same imperious "Which?" as was the issue of freedom or slavery.

Looking at the Northwest as a whole, one sees, in the character of its industries and in the elements of its population, it is identified on the east with the zone of States including [ 242 ] the middle region and New England. Cotton culture and the negro make a clear line of division between the Old Northwest and the South. And yet in important historical ideals—in the process of expansion, in the persistence of agricultural interests, in impulsiveness, in imperialistic ways of looking at the American destiny, in hero-worship, in the newness of its present social structure—the Old Northwest has much in common with the South and the Far West.

Behind her is the old pioneer past of simple democratic conditions, and freedom of opportunity for all men. Before her is a superb industrial development, the brilliancy of success as evinced in a vast population, aggregate wealth, and sectional power.

[222:1] Atlantic Monthly , April, 1897. Published by permission.

[238:1] For this information I am indebted to Professor F. W. Blackmar, of the University of Kansas.

Contributions of the West to American Democracy [243:1]

Political thought in the period of the French Revolution tended to treat democracy as an absolute system applicable to all times and to all peoples, a system that was to be created by the act of the people themselves on philosophical principles. Ever since that era there has been an inclination on the part of writers on democracy to emphasize the analytical and theoretical treatment to the neglect of the underlying factors of historical development.

If, however, we consider the underlying conditions and forces that create the democratic type of government, and at times contradict the external forms to which the name democracy is applied, we shall find that under this name there have appeared a multitude of political types radically unlike in fact.

The careful student of history must, therefore, seek the explanation of the forms and changes of political institutions in the social and economic forces that determine them. To know that at any one time a nation may be called a democracy, an aristocracy, or a monarchy, is not so important as to know what are the social and economic tendencies of the state. These are the vital forces that work beneath the surface and dominate the external form. It is to changes in the economic and social life of a people that we must look for the forces, that ultimately create and modify organs of political action.

For the time, adaptation of political structure may be incomplete or concealed. Old organs will be utilized to express new forces, and so gradual and subtle will be the change that it may hardly be recognized. The pseudo-democracies under the Medici at Florence and under Augustus at Rome are familiar examples of this type. Or again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. In all these changes both conscious ideals and unconscious social reorganization are at work.

These facts are familiar to the student, and yet it is doubtful if they have been fully considered in connection with American democracy. For a century at least, in conventional expression, Americans have referred to a "glorious Constitution" in explaining the stability and prosperity of their democracy. We have believed as a nation that other peoples had only to will our democratic institutions in order to repeat our own career.

In dealing with Western contributions to democracy, it is essential that the considerations which have just been mentioned shall be kept in mind. Whatever these contributions may have been, we find ourselves at the present time in an era of such profound economic and social transformation as to raise the question of the effect of these changes upon the democratic institutions of the United States. Within a decade four marked changes have occurred in our national development; taken together they constitute a revolution.

First, there is the exhaustion of the supply of free land and the closing of the movement of Western advance as an effective factor in American development. The first rough conquest of the wilderness is accomplished, and that great supply of free lands which year after year has served to reinforce [ 245 ] the democratic influences in the United States is exhausted. It is true that vast tracts of government land are still untaken, but they constitute the mountain and arid regions, only a small fraction of them capable of conquest, and then only by the application of capital and combined effort. The free lands that made the American pioneer have gone.

In the second place, contemporaneously with this there has been such a concentration of capital in the control of fundamental industries as to make a new epoch in the economic development of the United States. The iron, the coal, and the cattle of the country have all fallen under the domination of a few great corporations with allied interests, and by the rapid combination of the important railroad systems and steamship lines, in concert with these same forces, even the breadstuffs and the manufactures of the nation are to some degree controlled in a similar way. This is largely the work of the last decade. The development of the greatest iron mines of Lake Superior occurred in the early nineties, and in the same decade came the combination by which the coal and the coke of the country, and the transportation systems that connect them with the iron mines, have been brought under a few concentrated managements. Side by side with this concentration of capital has gone the combination of labor in the same vast industries. The one is in a certain sense the concomitant of the other, but the movement acquires an additional significance because of the fact that during the past fifteen years the labor class has been so recruited by a tide of foreign immigration that this class is now largely made up of persons of foreign parentage, and the lines of cleavage which begin to appear in this country between capital and labor have been accentuated by distinctions of nationality.

A third phenomenon connected with the two just mentioned is the expansion of the United States politically and [ 246 ] commercially into lands beyond the seas. A cycle of American development has been completed. Up to the close of the War of 1812, this country was involved in the fortunes of the European state system. The first quarter of a century of our national existence was almost a continual struggle to prevent ourselves being drawn into the European wars. At the close of that era of conflict, the United States set its face toward the West. It began the settlement and improvement of the vast interior of the country. Here was the field of our colonization, here the field of our political activity. This process being completed, it is not strange that we find the United States again involved in world-politics. The revolution that occurred four years ago, when the United States struck down that ancient nation under whose auspices the New World was discovered, is hardly yet more than dimly understood. The insular wreckage of the Spanish War, Porto Rico and the Philippines, with the problems presented by the Hawaiian Islands, Cuba, the Isthmian Canal, and China, all are indications of the new direction of the ship of state, and while we thus turn our attention overseas, our concentrated industrial strength has given us a striking power against the commerce of Europe that is already producing consternation in the Old World. Having completed the conquest of the wilderness, and having consolidated our interests, we are beginning to consider the relations of democracy and empire.

And fourth, the political parties of the United States, now tend to divide on issues that involve the question of Socialism. The rise of the Populist party in the last decade, and the acceptance of so many of its principles by the Democratic party under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, show in striking manner the birth of new political ideas, the reformation of the lines of political conflict.

It is doubtful if in any ten years of American history more [ 247 ] significant factors in our growth have revealed themselves. The struggle of the pioneer farmers to subdue the arid lands of the Great Plains in the eighties was followed by the official announcement of the extinction of the frontier line in 1890. The dramatic outcome of the Chicago Convention of 1896 marked the rise into power of the representatives of Populistic change. Two years later came the battle of Manila, which broke down the old isolation of the nation, and started it on a path the goal of which no man can foretell; and finally, but two years ago came that concentration of which the billion and a half dollar steel trust and the union of the Northern continental railways are stupendous examples. Is it not obvious, then, that the student who seeks for the explanation of democracy in the social and economic forces that underlie political forms must make inquiry into the conditions that have produced our democratic institutions, if he would estimate the effect of these vast changes? As a contribution to this inquiry, let us now turn to an examination of the part that the West has played in shaping our democracy.

From the beginning of the settlement of America, the frontier regions have exercised a steady influence toward democracy. In Virginia, to take an example, it can be traced as early as the period of Bacon's Rebellion, a hundred years before our Declaration of Independence. The small landholders, seeing that their powers were steadily passing into the hands of the wealthy planters who controlled Church and State and lands, rose in revolt. A generation later, in the governorship of Alexander Spotswood, we find a contest between the frontier settlers and the property-holding classes of the coast. The democracy with which Spotswood had to struggle, and of which he so bitterly complained, was a democracy made up of small landholders, of the newer immigrants, and of indented servants, who at the expiration of their time [ 248 ] of servitude passed into the interior to take up lands and engage in pioneer farming. The "War of the Regulation," just on the eve of the American Revolution, shows the steady persistence of this struggle between the classes of the interior and those of the coast. The Declaration of Grievances which the back counties of the Carolinas then drew up against the aristocracy that dominated the politics of those colonies exhibits the contest between the democracy of the frontier and the established classes who apportioned the legislature in such fashion as to secure effective control of government. Indeed, in a period before the outbreak of the American Revolution, one can trace a distinct belt of democratic territory extending from the back country of New England down through western New York, Pennsylvania, and the South. [248:1]

In each colony this region was in conflict with the dominant classes of the coast. It constituted a quasi-revolutionary area before the days of the Revolution, and it formed the basis on which the Democratic party was afterwards established. It was, therefore, in the West, as it was in the period before the Declaration of Independence, that the struggle for democratic development first revealed itself, and in that area the essential ideas of American democracy had already appeared. Through the period of the Revolution and of the Confederation a similar contest can be noted. On the frontier of New England, along the western border of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and in the communities beyond the Alleghany Mountains, there arose a demand of the frontier settlers for independent statehood based on democratic provisions. There is a strain of fierceness in their energetic petitions demanding self-government under the theory that every people have the right to establish their own political institutions in an area which they have won from the wilderness. Those [ 249 ] revolutionary principles based on natural rights, for which the seaboard colonies were contending, were taken up with frontier energy in an attempt to apply them to the lands of the West. No one can read their petitions denouncing the control exercised by the wealthy landholders of the coast, appealing to the record of their conquest of the wilderness, and demanding the possession of the lands for which they have fought the Indians, and which they had reduced by their ax to civilization, without recognizing in these frontier communities the cradle of a belligerent Western democracy. "A fool can sometimes put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him,"—such is the philosophy of its petitioners. In this period also came the contests of the interior agricultural portion of New England against the coast-wise merchants and property-holders, of which Shays' Rebellion is the best known, although by no means an isolated instance.

By the time of the constitutional convention, this struggle for democracy had affected a fairly well-defined division into parties. Although these parties did not at first recognize their interstate connections, there were similar issues on which they split in almost all the States. The demands for an issue of paper money, the stay of execution against debtors, and the relief against excessive taxation were found in every colony in the interior agricultural regions. The rise of this significant movement wakened the apprehensions of the men of means, and in the debates over the basis of suffrage for the House of Representatives in the constitutional convention of 1787 leaders of the conservative party did not hesitate to demand that safeguards to the property should be furnished the coast against the interior. The outcome of the debate left the question of suffrage for the House of Representatives dependent upon the policy of the separate States. This was in effect imposing a property qualification throughout the nation as a whole, and it [ 250 ] was only as the interior of the country developed that these restrictions gradually gave way in the direction of manhood suffrage.

All of these scattered democratic tendencies Jefferson combined, in the period of Washington's presidency, into the Democratic-Republican party. Jefferson was the first prophet of American democracy, and when we analyse the essential features of his gospel, it is clear that the Western influence was the dominant element. Jefferson himself was born in the frontier region of Virginia, on the edge of the Blue Ridge, in the middle of the eighteenth century. His father was a pioneer. Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia" reveal clearly his conception that democracy should have an agricultural basis, and that manufacturing development and city life were dangerous to the purity of the body politic. Simplicity and economy in government, the right of revolution, the freedom of the individual, the belief that those who win the vacant lands are entitled to shape their own government in their own way,—these are all parts of the platform of political principles to which he gave his adhesion, and they are all elements eminently characteristic of the Western democracy into which he was born.

In the period of the Revolution he had brought in a series of measures which tended to throw the power of Virginia into the hands of the settlers in the interior rather than of the coastwise aristocracy. The repeal of the laws of entail and primogeniture would have destroyed the great estates on which the planting aristocracy based its power. The abolition of the Established Church would still further have diminished the influence of the coastwise party in favor of the dissenting sects of the interior. His scheme of general public education reflected the same tendency, and his demand for the abolition of slavery was characteristic of a representative [ 251 ] of the West rather than of the old-time aristocracy of the coast. His sympathy with the Western expansion culminated in the Louisiana Purchase. In short, the tendencies of Jefferson's legislation were to replace the dominance of the planting aristocracy by the dominance of the interior class, which had sought in vain to achieve its liberties in the period of Bacon's Rebellion.

Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson was the John the Baptist of democracy, not its Moses. Only with the slow setting of the tide of settlement farther and farther toward the interior did the democratic influence grow strong enough to take actual possession of the government. The period from 1800 to 1820 saw a steady increase in these tendencies. The established classes in New England and the South began to take alarm. Perhaps no better illustration of the apprehensions of the old-time Federal conservative can be given than these utterances of President Dwight, of Yale College, in the book of travels which he published in that period:—

The class of pioneers cannot live in regular society. They are too idle, too talkative, too passionate, too prodigal, and too shiftless to acquire either property or character. They are impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality, and grumble about the taxes by which the Rulers, Ministers, and Schoolmasters are supported. . . . After exposing the injustice of the community in neglecting to invest persons of such superior merit in public offices, in many an eloquent harangue uttered by many a kitchen fire, in every blacksmith shop, in every corner of the streets, and finding all their efforts vain, they become at length discouraged, and under the pressure of poverty, [ 252 ] the fear of the gaol, and consciousness of public contempt, leave their native places and betake themselves to the wilderness.

Such was a conservative's impression of that pioneer movement of New England colonists who had spread up the valley of the Connecticut into New Hampshire, Vermont, and western New York in the period of which he wrote, and who afterwards went on to possess the Northwest. New England Federalism looked with a shudder at the democratic ideas of those who refused to recognize the established order. But in that period there came into the Union a sisterhood of frontier States—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri—with provisions for the franchise that brought in complete democracy.

Even the newly created States of the Southwest showed the tendency. The wind of democracy blew so strongly from the West, that even in the older States of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia, conventions were called, which liberalized their constitutions by strengthening the democratic basis of the State. In the same time the labor population of the cities began to assert its power and its determination to share in government. Of this frontier democracy which now took possession of the nation, Andrew Jackson was the very personification. He was born in the backwoods of the Carolinas in the midst of the turbulent democracy that preceded the Revolution, and he grew up in the frontier State of Tennessee. In the midst of this region of personal feuds and frontier ideals of law, he quickly rose to leadership. The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor of Congress was an omen full of significance. He reached Philadelphia at the close of Washington's administration, having ridden on horseback nearly eight hundred miles to his destination. Gallatin, himself a Western man, describes [ 253 ] Jackson as he entered the halls of Congress: "A tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular; his manners those of a rough backwoodsman." And Jefferson testified: "When I was President of the Senate he was a Senator, and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly and as often choke with rage." At last the frontier in the person of its typical man had found a place in the Government. This six-foot backwoodsman, with blue eyes that could blaze on occasion, this choleric, impetuous, self-willed Scotch-Irish leader of men, this expert duelist, and ready fighter, this embodiment of the tenacious, vehement, personal West, was in politics to stay. The frontier democracy of that time had the instincts of the clansman in the days of Scotch border warfare. Vehement and tenacious as the democracy was, strenuously as each man contended with his neighbor for the spoils of the new country that opened before them, they all had respect for the man who best expressed their aspirations and their ideas. Every community had its hero. In the War of 1812 and the subsequent Indian fighting Jackson made good his claim, not only to the loyalty of the people of Tennessee, but of the whole West, and even of the nation. He had the essential traits of the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier. It was a frontier free from the influence of European ideas and institutions. The men of the "Western World" turned their backs upon the Atlantic Ocean, and with a grim energy and self-reliance began to build up a society free from the dominance of ancient forms.

The Westerner defended himself and resented governmental restrictions. The duel and the blood-feud found congenial soil in Kentucky and Tennessee. The idea of the personality of law was often dominant over the organized machinery of [ 254 ] justice. That method was best which was most direct and effective. The backwoodsman was intolerant of men who split hairs, or scrupled over the method of reaching the right. In a word, the unchecked development of the individual was the significant product of this frontier democracy. It sought rather to express itself by choosing a man of the people, than by the formation of elaborate governmental institutions.

It was because Andrew Jackson personified these essential Western traits that in his presidency he became the idol and the mouthpiece of the popular will. In his assault upon the Bank as an engine of aristocracy, and in his denunciation of nullification, he went directly to his object with the ruthless energy of a frontiersman. For formal law and the subtleties of State sovereignty he had the contempt of a backwoodsman. Nor is it without significance that this typical man of the new democracy will always be associated with the triumph of the spoils system in national politics. To the new democracy of the West, office was an opportunity to exercise natural rights as an equal citizen of the community. Rotation in office served not simply to allow the successful man to punish his enemies and reward his friends, but it also furnished the training in the actual conduct of political affairs which every American claimed as his birthright. Only in a primitive democracy of the type of the United States in 1830 could such a system have existed without the ruin of the State. National government in that period was no complex and nicely adjusted machine, and the evils of the system were long in making themselves fully apparent.

The triumph of Andrew Jackson marked the end of the old era of trained statesmen for the Presidency. With him began the era of the popular hero. Even Martin Van Buren, whom we think of in connection with the East, was born in a log [ 255 ] house under conditions that were not unlike parts of the older West. Harrison was the hero of the Northwest, as Jackson had been of the Southwest. Polk was a typical Tennesseean, eager to expand the nation, and Zachary Taylor was what Webster called a "frontier colonel." During the period that followed Jackson, power passed from the region of Kentucky and Tennessee to the border of the Mississippi. The natural democratic tendencies that had earlier shown themselves in the Gulf States were destroyed, however, by the spread of cotton culture, and the development of great plantations in that region. What had been typical of the democracy of the Revolutionary frontier and of the frontier of Andrew Jackson was now to be seen in the States between the Ohio and the Mississippi. As Andrew Jackson is the typical democrat of the former region, so Abraham Lincoln is the very embodiment of the pioneer period of the Old Northwest. Indeed, he is the embodiment of the democracy of the West. How can one speak of him except in the words of Lowell's great "Commemoration Ode":—

The pioneer life from which Lincoln came differed in important respects from the frontier democracy typified by Andrew Jackson. Jackson's democracy was contentious, individualistic, and it sought the ideal of local self-government and expansion. Lincoln represents rather the pioneer folk who entered the forest of the great Northwest to chop out a home, to build up their fortunes in the midst of a continually ascending industrial movement. In the democracy of the Southwest, industrial development and city life were only minor factors, but to the democracy of the Northwest they were its very life. To widen the area of the clearing, to contend with one another for the mastery of the industrial resources of the rich provinces, to struggle for a place in the ascending movement of society, to transmit to one's offspring the chance for education, for industrial betterment, for the rise in life which the hardships of the pioneer existence denied to the pioneer himself, these were some of the ideals of the region to which Lincoln came. The men were commonwealth builders, industry builders. Whereas the type of hero in the Southwest was militant, in the Northwest he was industrial. It was in the midst of these "plain people," as he loved to call them, that Lincoln grew to manhood. As Emerson says: "He is the true history of the American people in his time." The years of his early life were the years when the democracy of the Northwest came into struggle with the institution of slavery which threatened to forbid the expansion of the democratic pioneer life in the West. In President Eliot's essay on "Five American Contributions to Civilization," he instances as one of the supreme tests of American democracy its attitude upon the question of slavery. But if democracy chose wisely and worked effectively toward the solution of this problem, it must be remembered that Western democracy took the lead. [ 257 ] The rail-splitter himself became the nation's President in that fierce time of struggle, and armies of the woodsmen and pioneer farmers recruited in the Old Northwest made free the Father of Waters, marched through Georgia, and helped to force the struggle to a conclusion at Appomattox. The free pioneer democracy struck down the slave-holding aristocracy on its march to the West.

The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former experience. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to coöperation and to governmental activity. Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast public [ 258 ] domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to States for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation lines.

Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy. The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, coöperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.

Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade have marked the West.

Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those preëminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:—

Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free [ 260 ] opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the world has a democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic conditions.

But the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under the conditions of free competition furnished by the West, has produced the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under such conditions can survive. For the old military type of Western leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison have been substituted such industrial leaders as James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.

The question is imperative, then, What ideals persist from this democratic experience of the West; and have they acquired [ 261 ] sufficient momentum to sustain themselves under conditions so radically unlike those in the days of their origin? In other words, the question put at the beginning of this discussion becomes pertinent. Under the forms of the American democracy is there in reality evolving such a concentration of economic and social power in the hands of a comparatively few men as may make political democracy an appearance rather than a reality? The free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western influence upon democracy in our own days.

Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after his will." Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is [ 262 ] unmistakably present. Kipling's "Song of the English" has given it expression:—

This was the vision that called to Roger Williams,—that "prophetic soul ravished of truth disembodied," "unable to enter into treaty with its environment," and forced to seek the wilderness. "Oh, how sweet," wrote William Penn, from his forest refuge, "is the quiet of these parts, freed from the troubles and perplexities of woeful Europe." And here he projected what he called his "Holy Experiment in Government."

If the later West offers few such striking illustrations of the relation of the wilderness to idealistic schemes, and if some of the designs were fantastic and abortive, none the less the influence is a fact. Hardly a Western State but has been the Mecca of some sect or band of social reformers, anxious to put into practice their ideals, in vacant land, far removed from the checks of a settled form of social organization. [ 263 ] Consider the Dunkards, the Icarians, the Fourierists, the Mormons, and similar idealists who sought our Western wilds. But the idealistic influence is not limited to the dreamers' conception of a new State. It gave to the pioneer farmer and city builder a restless energy, a quick capacity for judgment and action, a belief in liberty, freedom of opportunity, and a resistance to the domination of class which infused a vitality and power into the individual atoms of this democratic mass. Even as he dwelt among the stumps of his newly-cut clearing, the pioneer had the creative vision of a new order of society. In imagination he pushed back the forest boundary to the confines of a mighty Commonwealth; he willed that log cabins should become the lofty buildings of great cities. He decreed that his children should enter into a heritage of education, comfort, and social welfare, and for this ideal he bore the scars of the wilderness. Possessed with this idea he ennobled his task and laid deep foundations for a democratic State. Nor was this idealism by any means limited to the American pioneer.

To the old native democratic stock has been added a vast army of recruits from the Old World. There are in the Middle West alone four million persons of German parentage out of a total of seven millions in the country. Over a million persons of Scandinavian parentage live in the same region. The democracy of the newer West is deeply affected by the ideals brought by these immigrants from the Old World. To them America was not simply a new home; it was a land of opportunity, of freedom, of democracy. It meant to them, as to the American pioneer that preceded them, the opportunity to destroy the bonds of social caste that bound them in their older home, to hew out for themselves in a new country a destiny proportioned to the powers that God had given them, a chance to place their families under better conditions and [ 264 ] to win a larger life than the life that they had left behind. He who believes that even the hordes of recent immigrants from southern Italy are drawn to these shores by nothing more than a dull and blind materialism has not penetrated into the heart of the problem. The idealism and expectation of these children of the Old World, the hopes which they have formed for a newer and freer life across the seas, are almost pathetic when one considers how far they are from the possibility of fruition. He who would take stock of American democracy must not forget the accumulation of human purposes and ideals which immigration has added to the American populace.

In this connection it must also be remembered that these democratic ideals have existed at each stage of the advance of the frontier, and have left behind them deep and enduring effects on the thinking of the whole country. Long after the frontier period of a particular region of the United States has passed away, the conception of society, the ideals and aspirations which it produced, persist in the minds of the people. So recent has been the transition of the greater portion of the United States from frontier conditions to conditions of settled life, that we are, over the large portion of the United States, hardly a generation removed from the primitive conditions of the West. If, indeed, we ourselves were not pioneers, our fathers were, and the inherited ways of looking at things, the fundamental assumptions of the American people, have all been shaped by this experience of democracy on its westward march. This experience has been wrought into the very warp and woof of American thought.

Even those masters of industry and capital who have risen to power by the conquest of Western resources came from the midst of this society and still profess its principles. John D. Rockefeller was born on a New York farm, and began [ 265 ] his career as a young business man in St. Louis. Marcus Hanna was a Cleveland grocer's clerk at the age of twenty. Claus Spreckles, the sugar king, came from Germany as a steerage passenger to the United States in 1848. Marshall Field was a farmer boy in Conway, Massachusetts, until he left to grow up with the young Chicago. Andrew Carnegie came as a ten-year-old boy from Scotland to Pittsburgh, then a distinctively Western town. He built up his fortunes through successive grades until he became the dominating factor in the great iron industries, and paved the way for that colossal achievement, the Steel Trust. Whatever may be the tendencies of this corporation, there can be little doubt of the democratic ideals of Mr. Carnegie himself. With lavish hand he has strewn millions through the United States for the promotion of libraries. The effect of this library movement in perpetuating the democracy that comes from an intelligent and self-respecting people can hardly be measured. In his "Triumphant Democracy," published in 1886, Mr. Carnegie, the ironmaster, said, in reference to the mineral wealth of the United States: "Thank God, these treasures are in the hands of an intelligent people, the Democracy, to be used for the general good of the masses, and not made the spoils of monarchs, courts, and aristocracy, to be turned to the base and selfish ends of a privileged hereditary class." It would be hard to find a more rigorous assertion of democratic doctrine than the celebrated utterance, attributed to the same man, that he should feel it a disgrace to die rich.

In enumerating the services of American democracy, President Eliot included the corporation as one of its achievements, declaring that "freedom of incorporation, though no longer exclusively a democratic agency, has given a strong support to democratic institutions." In one sense this is doubtless true, since the corporation has been one of the means by [ 266 ] which small properties can be aggregated into an effective working body. Socialistic writers have long been fond of pointing out also that these various concentrations pave the way for and make possible social control. From this point of view it is possible that the masters of industry may prove to be not so much an incipient aristocracy as the pathfinders for democracy in reducing the industrial world to systematic consolidation suited to democratic control. The great geniuses that have built up the modern industrial concentration were trained in the midst of democratic society. They were the product of these democratic conditions. Freedom to rise was the very condition of their existence. Whether they will be followed by successors who will adopt the exploitation of the masses, and who will be capable of retaining under efficient control these vast resources, is one of the questions which we shall have to face.

This, at least, is clear: American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West. Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals. In the later period of its development, Western democracy has been gaining experience in the problem of social control. It has steadily enlarged the sphere of its action and the instruments for its perpetuation. By its system of public schools, from the [ 267 ] grades to the graduate work of the great universities, the West has created a larger single body of intelligent plain people than can be found elsewhere in the world. Its political tendencies, whether we consider Democracy, Populism, or Republicanism, are distinctly in the direction of greater social control and the conservation of the old democratic ideals.

To these ideals the West adheres with even a passionate determination. If, in working out its mastery of the resources of the interior, it has produced a type of industrial leader so powerful as to be the wonder of the world, nevertheless, it is still to be determined whether these men constitute a menace to democratic institutions, or the most efficient factor for adjusting democratic control to the new conditions.

Whatever shall be the outcome of the rush of this huge industrial modern United States to its place among the nations of the earth, the formation of its Western democracy will always remain one of the wonderful chapters in the history of the human race. Into this vast shaggy continent of ours poured the first feeble tide of European settlement. European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American wilderness, and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained them in adaptation to the conditions of the New World, to the creation of new institutions to meet new needs; and ever as society on her eastern border grew to resemble the Old World in its social forms and its industry, ever, as it began to lose faith in the ideals of democracy, she opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies in her most distant domains with her material treasures and with the ennobling influence that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that came from hewing out a home, making a school and a church, and creating a higher future for his family, furnished to the pioneer.

She gave to the world such types as the farmer Thomas Jefferson, with his Declaration of Independence, his statute for religious toleration, and his purchase of Louisiana. She gave us Andrew Jackson, that fierce Tennessee spirit who broke down the traditions of conservative rule, swept away the privacies and privileges of officialdom, and, like a Gothic leader, opened the temple of the nation to the populace. She gave us Abraham Lincoln, whose gaunt frontier form and gnarled, massive hand told of the conflict with the forest, whose grasp of the ax-handle of the pioneer was no firmer than his grasp of the helm of the ship of state as it breasted the seas of civil war. She has furnished to this new democracy her stores of mineral wealth, that dwarf those of the Old World, and her provinces that in themselves are vaster and more productive than most of the nations of Europe. Out of her bounty has come a nation whose industrial competition alarms the Old World, and the masters of whose resources wield wealth and power vaster than the wealth and power of kings. Best of all, the West gave, not only to the American, but to the unhappy and oppressed of all lands, a vision of hope, and assurance that the world held a place where were to be found high faith in man and the will and power to furnish him the opportunity to grow to the full measure of his own capacity. Great and powerful as are the new sons of her loins, the Republic is greater than they. The paths of the pioneer have widened into broad highways. The forest clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths. Let us see to it that the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin shall enlarge into the spiritual life of a democracy where civic power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement for the common good.

[243:1] Atlantic Monthly , January, 1903. Reprinted by permission.

[248:1] See chapter iii .

Pioneer Ideals and the State University [269:1]

The ideals of a people, their aspirations and convictions, their hopes and ambitions, their dreams and determinations, are assets in their civilization as real and important as per capita wealth or industrial skill.

This nation was formed under pioneer ideals. During three centuries after Captain John Smith struck the first blow at the American forest on the eastern edge of the continent, the pioneers were abandoning settled society for the wilderness, seeking, for generation after generation, new frontiers. Their experiences left abiding influences upon the ideas and purposes of the nation. Indeed the older settled regions themselves were shaped profoundly by the very fact that the whole nation was pioneering and that in the development of the West the East had its own part.

The first ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was his task to fight with nature for the chance to exist. Not as in older countries did this contest take place in a mythical past, told in folk lore and epic. It has been continuous to our own day. Facing each generation of pioneers was the unmastered continent. Vast forests blocked the way; mountainous ramparts interposed; desolate, grass-clad prairies, barren oceans of rolling plains, arid deserts, and a fierce race of savages, all had to be met and defeated. The rifle and the ax are the symbols of the backwoods pioneer. They meant [ 270 ] a training in aggressive courage, in domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness.

To the pioneer the forest was no friendly resource for posterity, no object of careful economy. He must wage a hand-to-hand war upon it, cutting and burning a little space to let in the light upon a dozen acres of hard-won soil, and year after year expanding the clearing into new woodlands against the stubborn resistance of primeval trunks and matted roots. He made war against the rank fertility of the soil. While new worlds of virgin land lay ever just beyond, it was idle to expect the pioneer to stay his hand and turn to scientific farming. Indeed, as Secretary Wilson has said, the pioneer would, in that case, have raised wheat that no one wanted to eat, corn to store on the farm, and cotton not worth the picking.

Thus, fired with the ideal of subduing the wilderness, the destroying pioneer fought his way across the continent, masterful and wasteful, preparing the way by seeking the immediate thing, rejoicing in rude strength and wilful achievement.

But even this backwoodsman was more than a mere destroyer. He had visions. He was finder as well as fighter—the trail-maker for civilization, the inventor of new ways. Although Rudyard Kipling's "Foreloper" [270:1] deals with the English pioneer in lands beneath the Southern Cross, yet the poem portrays American traits as well:

This quest after the unknown, this yearning "beyond the sky line, where the strange roads go down," is of the very essence of the backwoods pioneer, even though he was unconscious of its spiritual significance.

The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one area would not do for a new frontier; that the scythe of the clearing must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make old tools serve new uses; to shape former habits, institutions and ideas to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled against the conventional.

Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint. He came from a civilization based on individual competition, and he brought the conception with him to the wilderness where a wealth of resources, and innumerable opportunities gave it a new scope. The prizes were for the keenest and the strongest; for them were the best bottom lands, the finest timber tracts, the best salt-springs, the richest ore beds; and not only these natural gifts, but also the opportunities afforded in the midst of a forming society. Here were mill sites, town sites, transportation lines, [ 272 ] banking centers, openings in the law, in politics—all the varied chances for advancement afforded in a rapidly developing society where everything was open to him who knew how to seize the opportunity.

The squatter enforced his claim to lands even against the government's title by the use of extra-legal combinations and force. He appealed to lynch law with little hesitation. He was impatient of any governmental restriction upon his individual right to deal with the wilderness.

In our own day we sometimes hear of congressmen sent to jail for violating land laws; but the different spirit in the pioneer days may be illustrated by a speech of Delegate Sibley of Minnesota in Congress in 1852. In view of the fact that he became the State's first governor, a regent of its university, president of its historical society, and a doctor of laws of Princeton, we may assume that he was a pillar of society. He said:

The government has watched its public domain with jealous eye, and there are now enactments upon your statute books, aimed at the trespassers upon it, which should be expunged as a disgrace to the country and to the nineteenth century. Especially is he pursued with unrelenting severity, who has dared to break the silence of the primeval forest by the blows of the American ax. The hardy lumberman who has penetrated to the remotest wilds of the Northwest, to drag from their recesses the materials for building up towns and cities in the great valley of the Mississippi, has been particularly marked out as a victim. After enduring all the privations and subjecting himself to all the perils incident to his vocation—when [ 273 ] he has toiled for months to add by his honest labor to the comfort of his fellow men, and to the aggregate wealth of the nation, he finds himself suddenly in the clutches of the law for trespassing on the public domain. The proceeds of his long winter's work are reft from him, and exposed to public sale for the benefit of his paternal government . . . and the object of this oppression and wrong is further harassed by vexatious law proceedings against him.

Sibley's protest in congress against these "outrages" by which the northern lumbermen were "harassed" in their work of what would now be called stealing government timber, aroused no protest from his colleagues. No president called this congressman an undesirable citizen or gave him over to the courts.

Thus many of the pioneers, following the ideal of the right of the individual to rise, subordinated the rights of the nation and posterity to the desire that the country should be "developed" and that the individual should advance with as little interference as possible. Squatter doctrines and individualism have left deep traces upon American conceptions.

But quite as deeply fixed in the pioneer's mind as the ideal of individualism was the ideal of democracy. He had a passionate hatred for aristocracy, monopoly and special privilege; he believed in simplicity, economy and in the rule of the people. It is true that he honored the successful man, and that he strove in all ways to advance himself. But the West was so free and so vast, the barriers to individual achievement were so remote, that the pioneer was hardly conscious that any danger to equality could come from his competition for natural resources. He thought of democracy as in some [ 274 ] way the result of our political institutions, and he failed to see that it was primarily the result of the free lands and immense opportunities which surrounded him. Occasional statesmen voiced the idea that American democracy was based on the abundance of unoccupied land, even in the first debates on the public domain.

This early recognition of the influence of abundance of land in shaping the economic conditions of American democracy is peculiarly significant to-day in view of the practical exhaustion of the supply of cheap arable public lands open to the poor man, and the coincident development of labor unions to keep up wages.

Certain it is that the strength of democratic movements has chiefly lain in the regions of the pioneer. "Our governments tend too much to democracy," wrote Izard, of South Carolina, to Jefferson, in 1785. "A handicraftsman thinks an apprenticeship necessary to make him acquainted with his business. But our backcountrymen are of the opinion that a politician may be born just as well as a poet."

The Revolutionary ideas, of course, gave a great impetus to democracy, and in substantially every colony there was a double revolution, one for independence and the other for the overthrow of aristocratic control. But in the long run the effective force behind American democracy was the presence of the practically free land into which men might escape from oppression or inequalities which burdened them in the older settlements. This possibility compelled the coastwise States to liberalize the franchise; and it prevented the formation of a dominant class, whether based on property or on custom. Among the pioneers one man was as good as his neighbor. He had the same chance; conditions were simple and free. Economic equality fostered political equality. An optimistic and buoyant belief in the worth of the plain people, [ 275 ] a devout faith in man prevailed in the West. Democracy became almost the religion of the pioneer. He held with passionate devotion the idea that he was building under freedom a new society, based on self government, and for the welfare of the average man.

And yet even as he proclaimed the gospel of democracy the pioneer showed a vague apprehension lest the time be short—lest equality should not endure—lest he might fall behind in the ascending movement of Western society. This led him on in feverish haste to acquire advantages as though he only half believed his dream. "Before him lies a boundless continent," wrote De Tocqueville, in the days when pioneer democracy was triumphant under Jackson, "and he urges forward as if time pressed and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions."

Even while Jackson lived, labor leaders and speculative thinkers were demanding legislation to place a limit on the amount of land which one person might acquire and to provide free farms. De Tocqueville saw the signs of change. "Between the workman and the master," he said, "there are frequent relations but no real association. . . . I am of the opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever existed in the world; . . . if ever a permanent inequality, of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter." But the sanative influences of the free spaces of the West were destined to ameliorate labor's condition, to afford new hopes and new faith to pioneer democracy, and to postpone the problem.

As the settlers advanced into provinces whose area dwarfed that of the older sections, pioneer democracy itself began to undergo changes, both in its composition and in its processes [ 276 ] of expansion. At the close of the Civil War, when settlement was spreading with greatest vigor across the Mississippi, the railways began their work as colonists. Their land grants from the government, amounting altogether by 1871 to an area five times that of the State of Pennsylvania, demanded purchasers, and so the railroads pioneered the way for the pioneer.

The homestead law increased the tide of settlers. The improved farm machinery made it possible for him to go boldly out on to the prairie and to deal effectively with virgin soil in farms whose cultivated area made the old clearings of the backwoodsman seem mere garden plots. Two things resulted from these conditions, which profoundly modified pioneer ideals. In the first place the new form of colonization demanded an increasing use of capital; and the rapidity of the formation of towns, the speed with which society developed, made men the more eager to secure bank credit to deal with the new West. This made the pioneer more dependent on the eastern economic forces. In the second place the farmer became dependent as never before on transportation companies. In this speculative movement the railroads, finding that they had pressed too far in advance and had issued stock to freely for their earnings to justify the face of the investment, came into collision with the pioneer on the question of rates and of discriminations. The Greenback movement and the Granger movements were appeals to government to prevent what the pioneer thought to be invasions of pioneer democracy.

As the western settler began to face the problem of magnitude in the areas he was occupying; as he began to adjust his life to the modern forces of capital and to complex productive processes; as he began to see that, go where he would, the question of credit and currency, of transportation and distribution in general conditioned his success, he sought [ 277 ] relief by legislation. He began to lose his primitive attitude of individualism, government began to look less like a necessary evil and more like an instrument for the perpetuation of his democratic ideals. In brief, the defenses of the pioneer democrat began to shift, from free land to legislation, from the ideal of individualism to the ideal of social control through regulation by law. He had no sympathy with a radical reconstruction of society by the revolution of socialism; even his alliances with the movement of organized labor, which paralleled that of organized capital in the East, were only half-hearted. But he was becoming alarmed over the future of the free democratic ideal. The wisdom of his legislation it is not necessary to discuss here. The essential point is that his conception of the right of government to control social process had undergone a change. He was coming to regard legislation as an instrument of social construction. The individualism of the Kentucky pioneer of 1796 was giving way to the Populism of the Kansas pioneer of 1896.

The later days of pioneer democracy are too familiar to require much exposition. But they are profoundly significant. As the pioneer doctrine of free competition for the resources of the nation revealed its tendencies; as individual, corporation and trust, like the pioneer, turned increasingly to legal devices to promote their contrasting ideals, the natural resources were falling into private possession. Tides of alien immigrants were surging into the country to replace the old American stock in the labor market, to lower the standard of living and to increase the pressure of population upon the land. These recent foreigners have lodged almost exclusively in the dozen great centers of industrial life, and there they have accented the antagonisms between capital and labor by the fact that the labor supply has become increasingly foreign born, and recruited from nationalities who arouse no [ 278 ] sympathy on the part of capital and little on the part of the general public. Class distinctions are accented by national prejudices, and democracy is thereby invaded. But even in the dull brains of great masses of these unfortunates from southern and eastern Europe the idea of America as the land of freedom and of opportunity to rise, the land of pioneer democratic ideals, has found lodgment, and if it is given time and is not turned into revolutionary lines it will fructify.

As the American pioneer passed on in advance of this new tide of European immigration, he found lands increasingly limited. In place of the old lavish opportunity for the settler to set his stakes where he would, there were frantic rushes of thousands of eager pioneers across the line of newly opened Indian reservations. Even in 1889, when Oklahoma was opened to settlement, twenty thousand settlers crowded at the boundaries, like straining athletes, waiting the bugle note that should start the race across the line. To-day great crowds gather at the land lotteries of the government as the remaining fragments of the public domain are flung to hungry settlers.

Hundreds of thousands of pioneers from the Middle West have crossed the national boundary into Canadian wheat fields eager to find farms for their children, although under an alien flag. And finally the government has taken to itself great areas of arid land for reclamation by costly irrigation projects whereby to furnish twenty-acre tracts in the desert to settlers under careful regulation of water rights. The government supplies the capital for huge irrigation dams and reservoirs and builds them itself. It owns and operates quarries, coal mines and timber to facilitate this work. It seeks the remotest regions of the earth for crops suitable for these areas. It analyzes the soils and tells the farmer what and when and how to plant. It has even considered the rental [ 279 ] to manufacturers of the surplus water, electrical and steam power generated in its irrigation works and the utilization of this power to extract nitrates from the air to replenish worn-out soils. The pioneer of the arid regions must be both a capitalist and the protégé of the government.

Consider the contrast between the conditions of the pioneers at the beginning and at the end of this period of development. Three hundred years ago adventurous Englishmen on the coast of Virginia began the attack on the wilderness. Three years ago the President of the United States summoned the governors of forty-six states to deliberate upon the danger of the exhaustion of the natural resources of the nation. [279:1]

The pressure of population upon the food supply is already felt and we are at the beginning only of this transformation. It is profoundly significant that at the very time when American democracy is becoming conscious that its pioneer basis of free land and sparse population is giving way, it is also brought face to face with the startling outcome of its old ideals of individualism and exploitation under competition uncontrolled by government. Pioneer society itself was not sufficiently sophisticated to work out to its logical result the conception of the self-made man. But the captains of industry by applying squatter doctrines to the evolution of American industrial society, have made the process so clear that he who runs may read. Contests imply alliances as well as rivalries. The increasing magnitude of the areas to be dealt with and the occurrences of times of industrial stress furnished occasion for such unions. The panic of 1873 was followed by an unprecedented combination of individual businesses and partnerships into corporations. The panic of 1893 marked the beginning of an extraordinary development of corporate combinations into pools and trusts, agreements and [ 280 ] absorptions, until, by the time of the panic of 1907, it seemed not impossible that the outcome of free competition under individualism was to be monopoly of the most important natural resources and processes by a limited group of men whose vast fortunes were so invested in allied and dependent industries that they constituted the dominating force in the industrial life of the nation. The development of large scale factory production, the benefit of combination in the competitive struggle, and the tremendous advantage of concentration in securing possession of the unoccupied opportunities, were so great that vast accumulations of capital became the normal agency of the industrial world. In almost exact ratio to the diminution of the supply of unpossessed resources, combinations of capital have increased in magnitude and in efficiency of conquest. The solitary backwoodsman wielding his ax at the edge of a measureless forest is replaced by companies capitalized at millions, operating railroads, sawmills, and all the enginery of modern machinery to harvest the remaining trees. [280:1]

A new national development is before us without the former safety valve of abundant resources open to him who would take. Classes are becoming alarmingly distinct: There is the demand on the one side voiced by Mr. Harriman so well and by others since, that nothing must be done to interfere with the early pioneer ideals of the exploitation and the development of the country's wealth; that restrictive and reforming legislation must on no account threaten prosperity even for a moment. In fact, we sometimes hear in these days, from men of influence, serious doubts of democracy, and intimations that the country would be better off if it freely resigned itself to guidance by the geniuses who are mastering the economic forces of the nation, and who, it is alleged, would work [ 281 ] out the prosperity of the United States more effectively, if unvexed by politicians and people.

On the other hand, an inharmonious group of reformers are sounding the warning that American democratic ideals and society are menaced and already invaded by the very conditions that make this apparent prosperity; that the economic resources are no longer limitless and free; that the aggregate national wealth is increasing at the cost of present social justice and moral health, and the future well-being of the American people. The Granger and the Populist were prophets of this reform movement. Mr. Bryan's Democracy, Mr. Debs' Socialism, and Mr. Roosevelt's Republicanism all had in common the emphasis upon the need of governmental regulation of industrial tendencies in the interest of the common man; the checking of the power of those business Titans who emerged successful out of the competitive individualism of pioneer America. As land values rise, as meat and bread grow dearer, as the process of industrial consolidation goes on, and as Eastern industrial conditions spread across the West, the problems of traditional American democracy will become increasingly grave.

The time has come when University men may well consider pioneer ideals, for American society has reached the end of the first great period in its formation. It must survey itself, reflect upon its origins, consider what freightage of purposes it carried in its long march across the continent, what ambitions it had for the man, what rôle it would play in the world. How shall we conserve what was best in pioneer ideals? How adjust the old conceptions to the changed conditions of modern life?

Other nations have been rich and prosperous and powerful. But the United States has believed that it had an original contribution to make to the history of society by the production [ 282 ] of a self-determining, self-restrained, intelligent democracy. It is in the Middle West that society has formed on lines least like those of Europe. It is here, if anywhere, that American democracy will make its stand against the tendency to adjust to a European type.

This consideration gives importance to my final topic, the relation of the University to pioneer ideals and to the changing conditions of American democracy. President Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation has recently declared that in no other form of popular activity does a nation or State so clearly reveal its ideals or the quality of its civilization as in its system of education; and he finds, especially in the State University, "a conception of education from the standpoint of the whole people." "If our American democracy were to-day called to give proof of its constructive ability," he says, "the State University and the public school system which it crowns would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which it could offer."

It may at least be conceded that an essential characteristic of the State University is its democracy in the largest sense. The provision in the Constitution of Indiana of 1816, so familiar to you all, for a "general system of education ascending in regular gradations from township schools to a State University, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all," expresses the Middle Western conception born in the days of pioneer society and doubtless deeply influenced by Jeffersonian democracy.

The most obvious fact about these universities, perhaps, lies in their integral relation with the public schools, whereby the pupil has pressed upon him the question whether he shall go to college, and whereby the road is made open and direct to the highest training. By this means the State offers to every class the means of education, and even engages in propaganda [ 283 ] to induce students to continue. It sinks deep shafts through the social strata to find the gold of real ability in the underlying rock of the masses. It fosters that due degree of individualism which is implied in the right of every human being to have opportunity to rise in whatever directions his peculiar abilities entitle him to go, subordinate to the welfare of the state. It keeps the avenues of promotion to the highest offices, the highest honors, open to the humblest and most obscure lad who has the natural gifts, at the same time that it aids in the improvement of the masses.

Nothing in our educational history is more striking than the steady pressure of democracy upon its universities to adapt them to the requirements of all the people. From the State Universities of the Middle West, shaped under pioneer ideals, have come the fuller recognition of scientific studies, and especially those of applied science devoted to the conquest of nature; the breaking down of the traditional required curriculum; the union of vocational and college work in the same institution; the development of agricultural and engineering colleges and business courses; the training of lawyers, administrators, public men, and journalists—all under the ideal of service to democracy rather than of individual advancement alone. Other universities do the same thing; but the head springs and the main current of this great stream of tendency come from the land of the pioneers, the democratic states of the Middle West. And the people themselves, through their boards of trustees and the legislature, are in the last resort the court of appeal as to the directions and conditions of growth, as well as have the fountain of income from which these universities derive their existence.

The State University has thus both a peculiar power in the directness of its influence upon the whole people and a peculiar limitation in its dependence upon the people. The [ 284 ] ideals of the people constitute the atmosphere in which it moves, though it can itself affect this atmosphere. Herein is the source of its strength and the direction of its difficulties. For to fulfil its mission of uplifting the state to continuously higher levels the University must, in the words of Mr. Bryce, "serve the time without yielding to it;" it must recognize new needs without becoming subordinate to the immediately practical, to the short-sightedly expedient. It must not sacrifice the higher efficiency for the more obvious but lower efficiency. It must have the wisdom to make expenditures for results which pay manifold in the enrichment of civilization, but which are not immediate and palpable.

In the transitional condition of American democracy which I have tried to indicate, the mission of the university is most important. The times call for educated leaders. General experience and rule-of-thumb information are inadequate for the solution of the problems of a democracy which no longer owns the safety fund of an unlimited quantity of untouched resources. Scientific farming must increase the yield of the field, scientific forestry must economize the woodlands, scientific experiment and construction by chemist, physicist, biologist and engineer must be applied to all of nature's forces in our complex modern society. The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle in this new ideal of conquest. The very discoveries of science in such fields as public health and manufacturing processes have made it necessary to depend upon the expert, and if the ranks of experts are to be recruited broadly from the democratic masses as well as from those of larger means, the State Universities must furnish at least as liberal opportunities for research and training as the universities based on private endowments furnish. It needs no argument to show that it is not to the [ 285 ] advantage of democracy to give over the training of the expert exclusively to privately endowed institutions.

But quite as much in the field of legislation and of public life in general as in the industrial world is the expert needed. The industrial conditions which shape society are too complex, problems of labor, finance, social reform too difficult to be dealt with intelligently and wisely without the leadership of highly educated men familiar with the legislation and literature on social questions in other States and nations.

By training in science, in law, politics, economics and history the universities may supply from the ranks of democracy administrators, legislators, judges and experts for commissions who shall disinterestedly and intelligently mediate between contending interests. When the words "capitalistic classes" and "the proletariate" can be used and understood in America it is surely time to develop such men, with the ideal of service to the State, who may help to break the force of these collisions, to find common grounds between the contestants and to possess the respect and confidence of all parties which are genuinely loyal to the best American ideals.

The signs of such a development are already plain in the expert commissions of some States; in the increasing proportion of university men in legislatures; in the university men's influence in federal departments and commissions. It is hardly too much to say that the best hope of intelligent and principled progress in economic and social legislation and administration lies in the increasing influence of American universities. By sending out these open-minded experts, by furnishing well-fitted legislators, public leaders and teachers, by graduating successive armies of enlightened citizens accustomed to deal dispassionately with the problems of modern life, able to [ 286 ] think for themselves, governed not by ignorance, by prejudice or by impulse, but by knowledge and reason and high-mindedness, the State Universities will safeguard democracy. Without such leaders and followers democratic reactions may create revolutions, but they will not be able to produce industrial and social progress. America's problem is not violently to introduce democratic ideals, but to preserve and entrench them by courageous adaptation to new conditions. Educated leadership sets bulwarks against both the passionate impulses of the mob and the sinister designs of those who would subordinate public welfare to private greed. Lord Bacon's splendid utterance still rings true: "The learning of the few is despotism; the learning of the many is liberty. And intelligent and principled liberty is fame, wisdom and power."

There is a danger to the universities in this very opportunity. At first pioneer democracy had scant respect for the expert. He believed that "a fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him." There is much truth in the belief; and the educated leader, even he who has been trained under present university conditions, in direct contact with the world about him, will still have to contend with this inherited suspicion of the expert. But if he be well trained and worthy of his training, if he be endowed with creative imagination and personality, he will make good his leadership.

A more serious danger will come when the universities are fully recognized as powerful factors in shaping the life of the State—not mere cloisters, remote from its life, but an influential element in its life. Then it may easily happen that the smoke of the battle-field of political and social controversy will obscure their pure air, that efforts will be made to stamp out the exceptional doctrine and the exceptional man. Those who investigate and teach within the university walls must respond to the injunction of the church, " Sursum corda "—lift [ 287 ] up the heart to high thinking and impartial search for the unsullied truth in the interests of all the people; this is the holy grail of the universities.

That they may perform their work they must be left free, as the pioneer was free, to explore new regions and to report what they find; for like the pioneers they have the ideal of investigation, they seek new horizons. They are not tied to past knowledge; they recognize the fact that the universe still abounds in mystery, that science and society have not crystallized, but are still growing and need their pioneer trail-makers. New and beneficent discoveries in nature, new and beneficial discoveries in the processes and directions of the growth of society, substitutes for the vanishing material basis of pioneer democracy may be expected if the university pioneers are left free to seek the trail.

In conclusion, the university has a duty in adjusting pioneer ideals to the new requirements of American democracy, even more important than those which I have named. The early pioneer was an individualist and a seeker after the undiscovered; but he did not understand the richness and complexity of life as a whole; he did not fully realize his opportunities of individualism and discovery. He stood in his somber forest as the traveler sometimes stands in a village on the Alps when the mist has shrouded everything, and only the squalid hut, the stony field, the muddy pathway are in view. But suddenly a wind sweeps the fog away. Vast fields of radiant snow and sparkling ice lie before him; profound abysses open at his feet; and as he lifts his eyes the unimaginable peak of the Matterhorn cleaves the thin air, far, far above. A new and unsuspected world is revealed all about him. Thus it is the function of the university to reveal to the individual the mystery and the glory of life as a whole—to open all the realms of rational human enjoyment and achievement; to [ 288 ] preserve the consciousness of the past; to spread before the eye the beauty of the universe; and to throw wide its portals of duty and of power to the human soul. It must honor the poet and painter, the writer and the teacher, the scientist and the inventor, the musician and the prophet of righteousness—the men of genius in all fields who make life nobler. It must call forth anew, and for finer uses, the pioneer's love of creative individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting ways. It must check the tendency to act in mediocre social masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity and politics. In short, it must summon ability of all kinds to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual enrichment of society. It must awaken new tastes and ambitions among the people.

The light of these university watch towers should flash from State to State until American democracy itself is illuminated with higher and broader ideals of what constitutes service to the State and to mankind; of what are prizes; of what is worthy of praise and reward. So long as success in amassing great wealth for the aggrandizement of the individual is the exclusive or the dominant standard of success, so long as material prosperity, regardless of the conditions of its cost, or the civilization which results, is the shibboleth, American democracy, that faith in the common man which the pioneer cherishes, is in danger. For the strongest will make their way unerringly to whatever goal society sets up as the mark of conceded preëminence. What more effective agency is there for the cultivation of the seed wheat of ideals than the university? Where can we find a more promising body of sowers of the grain?

The pioneer's clearing must be broadened into a domain where all that is worthy of human endeavor may find fertile [ 289 ] soil on which to grow; and America must exact of the constructive business geniuses who owe their rise to the freedom of pioneer democracy supreme allegiance and devotion to the commonweal. In fostering such an outcome and in tempering the asperities of the conflicts that must precede its fulfilment, the nation has no more promising agency than the State Universities, no more hopeful product than their graduates.

[269:1] Commencement Address at the University of Indiana, 1910.

[270:1] [Printed from an earlier version; since published in his "Songs from Books," p. 93, under the title, "The Voortrekker." Even fuller of insight into the idealistic side of the frontier, is his "Explorer," in "Collected Verse," p. 19.]

[279:1] Written in 1910.

[280:1] Omissions from the original are incorporated in later chapters.

The West and American Ideals [290:1]

True to American traditions that each succeeding generation ought to find in the Republic a better home, once in every year the colleges and universities summon the nation to lift its eyes from the routine of work, in order to take stock of the country's purposes and achievements, to examine its past and consider its future.

This attitude of self-examination is hardly characteristic of the people as a whole. Particularly it is not characteristic of the historic American. He has been an opportunist rather than a dealer in general ideas. Destiny set him in a current which bore him swiftly along through such a wealth of opportunity that reflection and well-considered planning seemed wasted time. He knew not where he was going, but he was on his way, cheerful, optimistic, busy and buoyant.

To-day we are reaching a changed condition, less apparent perhaps, in the newer regions than in the old, but sufficiently obvious to extend the commencement frame of mind from the college to the country as a whole. The swift and inevitable current of the upper reaches of the nation's history has borne it to the broader expanse and slower stretches which mark the nearness of the level sea. The vessel, no longer carried along by the rushing waters, finds it necessary to determine its own [ 291 ] directions on this new ocean of its future, to give conscious consideration to its motive power and to its steering gear.

It matters not so much that those who address these college men and women upon life, give conflicting answers to the questions of whence and whither: the pause for remembrance, for reflection and for aspiration is wholesome in itself.

Although the American people are becoming more self-conscious, more responsive to the appeal to act by deliberate choices, we should be over-sanguine if we believed that even in this new day these commencement surveys were taken to heart by the general public, or that they were directly and immediately influential upon national thought and action.

But even while we check our enthusiasm by this realization of the common thought, we must take heart. The University's peculiar privilege and distinction lie in the fact that it is not the passive instrument of the State to voice its current ideas. Its problem is not that of expressing tendencies. Its mission is to create tendencies and to direct them. Its problem is that of leadership and of ideals. It is called, of course, to justify the support which the public gives it, by working in close and sympathetic touch with those it serves. More than that, it would lose important element of strength if it failed to recognize the fact that improvement and creative movement often come from the masses themselves, instinctively moving toward a better order. The University's graduates must be fitted to take their places naturally and effectually in the common life of the time.

But the University is called especially to justify its existence by giving to its sons and daughters something which they could not well have gotten through the ordinary experiences of the life outside its walls. It is called to serve the time by independent research and by original thought. If it were a mere recording instrument of conventional opinion and [ 292 ] average information, it is hard to see why the University should exist at all. To clasp hands with the common life in order that it may lift that life, to be a radiant center enkindling the society in which it has its being, these are primary duties of the University. Fortunate the State which gives free play to this spirit of inquiry. Let it "grubstake" its intellectual prospectors and send them forth where "the trails run out and stop." A famous scientist holds that the universal ether bears vital germs which impinging upon a dead world would bring life to it. So, at least it is, in the world of thought, where energized ideals put in the air and carried here and there by the waves and currents of the intellectual atmosphere, fertilize vast inert areas.

The University, therefore, has a double duty. On the one hand it must aid in the improvement of the general economic and social environment. It must help on in the work of scientific discovery and of making such conditions of existence, economic, political and social, as will produce more fertile and responsive soil for a higher and better life. It must stimulate a wider demand on the part of the public for right leadership. It must extend its operations more widely among the people and sink deeper shafts through social strata to find new supplies of intellectual gold in popular levels yet untouched. And on the other hand, it must find and fit men and women for leadership. It must both awaken new demands and it must satisfy those demands by trained leaders with new motives, with new incentives to ambition, with higher and broader conception of what constitute the prize in life, of what constitutes success. The University has to deal with both the soil and sifted seed in the agriculture of the human spirit.

Its efficiency is not the efficiency which the business engineer is fitted to appraise. If it is a training ship, it is a training [ 293 ] ship bound on a voyage of discovery, seeking new horizons. The economy of the University's consumption can only be rightly measured by the later times which shall possess those new realms of the spirit which its voyage shall reveal. If the ships of Columbus had engaged in a profitable coastwise traffic between Palos and Cadiz they might have saved sail cloth, but their keels would never have grated on the shores of a New World.

The appeal of the undiscovered is strong in America. For three centuries the fundamental process in its history was the westward movement, the discovery and occupation of the vast free spaces of the continent. We are the first generation of Americans who can look back upon that era as a historic movement now coming to its end. Other generations have been so much a part of it that they could hardly comprehend its significance. To them it seemed inevitable. The free land and the natural resources seemed practically inexhaustible. Nor were they aware of the fact that their most fundamental traits, their institutions, even their ideals were shaped by this interaction between the wilderness and themselves.

American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier. Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire.

To-day we are looking with a shock upon a changed world. The national problem is no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest; it is how to save and wisely use the remaining timber. It is no longer [ 294 ] how to get the great spaces of fertile prairie land in humid zones out of the hands of the government into the hands of the pioneer; these lands have already passed into private possession. No longer is it a question of how to avoid or cross the Great Plains and the arid desert. It is a question of how to conquer those rejected lands by new method of farming and by cultivating new crops from seed collected by the government and by scientists from the cold, dry steppes of Siberia, the burning sands of Egypt, and the remote interior of China. It is a problem of how to bring the precious rills of water on to the alkali and sage brush. Population is increasing faster than the food supply.

New farm lands no longer increase decade after decade in areas equal to those of European states. While the ratio of increase of improved land declines, the value of farm lands rise and the price of food leaps upward, reversing the old ratio between the two. The cry of scientific farming and the conservation of natural resources replaces the cry of rapid conquest of the wilderness. We have so far won our national home, wrested from it its first rich treasures, and drawn to it the unfortunate of other lands, that we are already obliged to compare ourselves with settled states of the Old World. In place of our attitude of contemptuous indifference to the legislation of such countries as Germany and England, even Western States like Wisconsin send commissions to study their systems of taxation, workingmen's insurance, old age pensions and a great variety of other remedies for social ills.

If we look about the periphery of the nation, everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing. On the streets of Northeastern cities like New York and Boston, the faces which we meet are to a surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe. Puritan New England, which turned its capital into factories and mills and drew to its shores an army of [ 295 ] cheap labor, governed these people for a time by a ruling class like an upper stratum between which and the lower strata there was no assimilation. There was no such evolution into an assimilated commonwealth as is seen in Middle Western agricultural States, where immigrant and old native stock came in together and built up a homogeneous society on the principle of give and take. But now the Northeastern coast finds its destiny, politically and economically, passing away from the descendants of the Puritans. It is the little Jewish boy, the Greek or the Sicilian, who takes the traveler through historic streets, now the home of these newer people to the Old North Church or to Paul Revere's house, or to Tea Wharf, and tells you in his strange patois the story of revolution against oppression.

Along the Southern Atlantic and the Gulf coast, in spite of the preservative influence of the negro, whose presence has always called out resistance to change on the part of the whites, the forces of social and industrial transformation are at work. The old tidewater aristocracy has surrendered to the up-country democrats. Along the line of the Alleghanies like an advancing column, the forces of Northern capital, textile and steel mills, year after year extend their invasion into the lower South. New Orleans, once the mistress of the commerce of the Mississippi Valley, is awakening to new dreams of world commerce. On the southern border, similar invasions of American capital have been entering Mexico. At the same time, the opening of the Panama Canal has completed the dream of the ages of the Straits of Anian between Atlantic and Pacific. Four hundred years ago, Balboa raised the flag of Spain at the edge of the Sea of the West and we are now preparing to celebrate both that anniversary, and the piercing of the continent. New relations have been created between Spanish America and the United States and the world [ 296 ] is watching the mediation of Argentina, Brazil and Chile between the contending forces of Mexico and the Union. Once more alien national interests lie threatening at our borders, but we no longer appeal to the Monroe Doctrine and send our armies of frontiersmen to settle our concerns off-hand. We take council with European nations and with the sisterhood of South America, and propose a remedy of social reorganization in place of imperious will and force. Whether the effort will succeed or not, it is a significant indication that an old order is passing away, when such a solution is undertaken by a President of Scotch Presbyterian stock, born in the State of Virginia.

If we turn to the Northern border, where we are about to celebrate a century of peace with England, we see in progress, like a belated procession of our own history the spread of pioneers, the opening of new wildernesses, the building of new cities, the growth of a new and mighty nation. That old American advance of the wheat farmer from the Connecticut to the Mohawk, and the Genesee, from the Great Valley of Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley and the prairies of the Middle West, is now by its own momentum and under the stimulus of Canadian homesteads and the high price of wheat, carried across the national border to the once lone plains where the Hudson Bay dog trains crossed the desolate snows of the wild North Land. In the Pacific Northwest the era of construction has not ended, but it is so rapidly in progress that we can already see the closing of the age of the pioneer. Already Alaska beckons on the north, and pointing to her wealth of natural resources asks the nation on what new terms the new age will deal with her. Across the Pacific looms Asia, no longer a remote vision and a symbol of the unchanging, but borne as by mirage close to our shores and raising grave questions of the common destiny of the people [ 297 ] of the ocean. The dreams of Benton and of Seward of a regenerated Orient, when the long march of westward civilization should complete its circle, seem almost to be in process of realization. The age of the Pacific Ocean begins, mysterious and unfathomable in its meaning for our own future.

Turning to view the interior, we see the same picture of change. When the Superintendent of the Census in 1890 declared the frontier line no longer traceable, the beginning of the rush into Oklahoma had just occurred. Here where the broken fragments of Indian nations from the East had been gathered and where the wilder tribes of the Southwest were being settled, came the rush of the land-hungry pioneer. Almost at a blow the old Indian territory passed away, populous cities came into being and it was not long before gushing oil wells made a new era of sudden wealth. The farm lands of the Middle West taken as free homesteads or bought for a mere pittance, have risen so in value that the original owners have in an increasing degree either sold them in order to reinvest in the newer cheap lands of the West, or have moved into the town and have left the tillage to tenant farmers. The growth of absentee ownership of the soil is producing a serious problem in the former centers of the Granger and the Populist. Along the Old Northwest the Great Lakes are becoming a new Mediterranean Sea joining the realms of wheat and iron ore, at one end with the coal and furnaces of the forks of the Ohio, where the most intense and wide-reaching center of industrial energy exists. City life like that of the East, manufactures and accumulated capital, seem to be reproducing in the center of the Republic the tendencies already so plain on the Atlantic Coast.

Across the Great Plains where buffalo and Indian held sway successive industrial waves are passing. The old free range gave place to the ranch, the ranch to the homestead and now [ 298 ] in places in the arid lands the homestead is replaced by the ten or twenty acre irrigated fruit farm. The age of cheap land, cheap corn and wheat, and cheap cattle has gone forever. The federal government has undertaken vast paternal enterprises of reclamation of the desert.

In the Rocky Mountains where at the time of Civil War, the first important rushes to gold and silver mines carried the frontier backward on a march toward the east, the most amazing transformations have occurred. Here, where prospectors made new trails, and lived the wild free life of mountain men, here where the human spirit seemed likely to attain the largest measure of individual freedom, and where fortune beckoned to the common man, have come revolutions wrought by the demand for organized industry and capital. In the regions where the popular tribunal and the free competitive life flourished, we have seen law and order break down in the unmitigated collision of great aggregations of capital, with each other and with organized socialistic labor. The Cripple Creek strikes, the contests at Butte, the Goldfield mobs, the recent Colorado fighting, all tell a similar story,—the solid impact of contending forces in regions where civic power and loyalty to the State have never fully developed. Like the Grand Cañon, where in dazzling light the huge geologic history is written so large that none may fail to read it, so in the Rocky Mountains the dangers of modern American industrial tendencies have been exposed.

As we crossed the Cascades on our way to Seattle, one of the passengers was moved to explain his feeling on the excellence of Puget Sound in contrast with the remaining visible Universe. He did it well in spite of irreverent interruptions from those fellow travelers who were unconverted children of the East, and at last he broke forth in passionate challenge, "Why should I not love Seattle! It took me from the slums [ 299 ] of the Atlantic Coast, a poor Swedish boy with hardly fifteen dollars in my pocket. It gave me a home by the beautiful sea; it spread before my eyes a vision of snow-capped peaks and smiling fields; it brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I love it! If I were a multi-millionaire I would charter freight cars and carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern cities and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in our vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life really is!" And my heart was stirred by his words and by the whirling spaces of woods and peaks through which we passed.

But as I looked and listened to this passionate outcry, I remembered the words of Talleyrand, the exiled Bishop of Autun, in Washington's administration. Looking down from an eminence not far from Philadelphia upon a wilderness which is now in the heart of that huge industrial society where population presses on the means of life, even the cold-blooded and cynical Talleyrand, gazing on those unpeopled hills and forests, kindled with the vision of coming clearings, the smiling farms and grazing herds that were to be, the populous towns that should be built, the newer and finer social organization that should there arise. And then I remembered the hall in Harvard's museum of social ethics through which I pass to my lecture room when I speak on the history of the Westward movement. That hall is covered with an exhibit of the work in Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours of work, the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the gathering of the poor of all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that center of American industrial energy and vast capital that is a social tragedy. As I enter my lecture room through that hall, I speak of the young Washington [ 300 ] leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men, "carving a cross on the wilderness rim," were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge furnaces belch forth perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a brutal and degraded life. Irresistibly there rushed across my mind the memorable words of Huxley:

"Even the best of modern civilization appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express the opinion that, if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion over Nature, which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation, among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable consummation."

But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as we come to realize these changes, to strong men and women there is challenge and inspiration in them too. In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored. Let us hold to our attitude of faith and courage, and creative zeal. [ 301 ] Let us dream as our fathers dreamt and let us make our dreams come true.

What were America's "morning wishes"? From the beginning of that long westward march of the American people America has never been the home of mere contented materialism. It has continuously sought new ways and dreamed of a perfected social type.

In the fifteenth century when men dealt with the New World which Columbus found, the ideal of discovery was dominant. Here was placed within the reach of men whose ideas had been bounded by the Atlantic, new realms to be explored. America became the land of European dreams, its Fortunate Islands were made real, where, in the imagination of old Europe, peace and happiness, as well as riches and eternal youth, were to be found. To Sir Edwin Sandys and his friends of the London Company, Virginia offered an opportunity to erect the Republic for which they had longed in vain in England. To the Puritans, New England was the new land of freedom, wherein they might establish the institutions of God, according to their own faith. As the vision died away in Virginia toward the close of the seventeenth century, it was taken up anew by the fiery Bacon with his revolution to establish a real democracy in place of the rule of the [ 302 ] planter aristocracy, that formed along the coast. Hardly had he been overthrown when in the eighteenth century, the democratic ideal was rejuvenated by the strong frontiersmen, who pressed beyond the New England Coast into the Berkshires and up the valleys of the Green Mountains of Vermont, and by the Scotch-Irish and German pioneers who followed the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into the Upland South. In both the Yankee frontiersmen and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the South, the Calvinistic conception of the importance of the individual, bound by free covenant to his fellow men and to God, was a compelling influence, and all their wilderness experience combined to emphasize the ideals of opening new ways, of giving freer play to the individual, and of constructing democratic society.

When the backwoodsmen crossed the Alleghanies they put between themselves and the Atlantic Coast a barrier which seemed to separate them from a region already too much like the Europe they had left, and as they followed the courses of the rivers that flowed to the Mississippi, they called themselves "Men of the Western Waters," and their new home in the Mississippi Valley was the "Western World." Here, by the thirties, Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the faith of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his own place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government. But while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights, it was also loyal to leadership as the very name implies. It was ready to follow to the uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were frontier fighter or president, and it even rebuked and limited its own legislative representatives and recalled its senators when they ran counter to their chosen executive. Jacksonian democracy was essentially rural. It was based on the good fellowship and genuine social feeling of the frontier, in which [ 303 ] classes and inequalities of fortune played little part. But it did not demand equality of condition, for there was abundance of natural resources and the belief that the self-made man had a right to his success in the free competition which western life afforded, was as prominent in their thought as was the love of democracy. On the other hand, they viewed governmental restraints with suspicion as a limitation on their right to work out their own individuality.

For the banking institutions and capitalists of the East they had an instinctive antipathy. Already they feared that the "money power" as Jackson called it, was planning to make hewers of wood and drawers of water of the common people.

In this view they found allies among the labor leaders of the East, who in the same period began their fight for better conditions of the wage earner. These Locofocos were the first Americans to demand fundamental social changes for the benefit of the workers in the cities. Like the Western pioneers, they protested against monopolies and special privilege. But they also had a constructive policy, whereby society was to be kept democratic by free gifts of the public land, so that surplus labor might not bid against itself, but might find an outlet in the West. Thus to both the labor theorist and the practical pioneer, the existence of what seemed inexhaustible cheap land and unpossessed resources was the condition of democracy. In these years of the thirties and forties, Western democracy took on its distinctive form. Travelers like De Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, came to study and to report it enthusiastically to Europe.

Side by side with this westward marching army of individualistic liberty-loving democratic backwoodsmen, went a more northern stream of pioneers, who cherished similar ideas, but added to them the desire to create new industrial centers, to build up factories, to build railroads, and to develop the [ 304 ] country by founding cities and extending prosperity. They were ready to call upon legislatures to aid in this, by subscriptions to stock, grants of franchises, promotion of banking and internal improvements. These were the Whig followers of that other Western leader, Henry Clay, and their early strength lay in the Ohio Valley, and particularly among the well-to-do. In the South their strength was found among the aristocracy of the Cotton Kingdom.

Both of these Western groups, Whigs and Democrats alike, had one common ideal: the desire to leave their children a better heritage than they themselves had received, and both were fired with devotion to the ideal of creating in this New World a home more worthy of mankind. Both were ready to break with the past, to boldly strike out new lines of social endeavor, and both believed in American expansion.

Before these tendencies had worked themselves out, three new forces entered. In the sudden extension of our boundaries to the Pacific Coast, which took place in the forties, the nation won so vast a domain that its resources seemed illimitable and its society seemed able to throw off all its maladies by the very presence of these vast new spaces. At the same period the great activity of railroad building to the Mississippi Valley occurred, making these lands available and diverting attention to the task of economic construction. The third influence was the slavery question which, becoming acute, shaped the American ideals and public discussion for nearly a generation. Viewed from one angle, this struggle involved the great question of national unity. From another it involved the question of the relations of labor and capital, democracy and aristocracy. It was not without significance that Abraham Lincoln became the very type of American pioneer democracy, the first adequate and elemental demonstration to the world [ 305 ] that that democracy could produce a man who belonged to the ages.

After the war, new national energies were set loose, and new construction and development engaged the attention of the Westerners as they occupied prairies and Great Plains and mountains. Democracy and capitalistic development did not seem antagonistic.

With the passing of the frontier, Western social and political ideals took new form. Capital began to consolidate in even greater masses, and increasingly attempted to reduce to system and control the processes of industrial development. Labor with equal step organized its forces to destroy the old competitive system. It is not strange that the Western pioneers took alarm for their ideals of democracy as the outcome of the free struggle for the national resources became apparent. They espoused the cause of governmental activity.

It was a new gospel, for the Western radical became convinced that he must sacrifice his ideal of individualism and free competition in order to maintain his ideal of democracy. Under this conviction the Populist revised the pioneer conception of government. He saw in government no longer something outside of him, but the people themselves shaping their own affairs. He demanded therefore an extension of the powers of governments in the interest of his historic ideal of democratic society. He demanded not only free silver, but the ownership of the agencies of communication and transportation, the income tax, the postal savings bank, the provision of means of credit for agriculture, the construction of more effective devices to express the will of the people, primary nominations, direct elections, initiative, referendum and recall. In a word, capital, labor, and the Western pioneer, all deserted the ideal of competitive individualism in order to organize [ 306 ] their interests in more effective combinations. The disappearance of the frontier, the closing of the era which was marked by the influence of the West as a form of society, brings with it new problems of social adjustment, new demands for considering our past ideals and our present needs.

Let us recall the conditions of the foreign relations along our borders, the dangers that wait us if we fail to unite in the solution of our domestic problems. Let us recall those internal evidences of the destruction of our old social order. If we take to heart this warning, we shall do well also to recount our historic ideals, to take stock of those purposes, and fundamental assumptions that have gone to make the American spirit and the meaning of America in world history.

First of all, there was the ideal of discovery, the courageous determination to break new paths, indifference to the dogma that because an institution or a condition exists, it must remain. All American experience has gone to the making of the spirit of innovation; it is in the blood and will not be repressed.

Then, there was the ideal of democracy, the ideal of a free self-directing people, responsive to leadership in the forming of programs and their execution, but insistent that the procedure should be that of free choice, not of compulsion.

But there was also the ideal of individualism. This democratic society was not a disciplined army, where all must keep step and where the collective interests destroyed individual will and work. Rather it was a mobile mass of freely circulating atoms, each seeking its own place and finding play for its own powers and for its own original initiative. We cannot lay too much stress upon this point, for it was at the very heart of the whole American movement. The world was to be made a better world by the example of a democracy in which there [ 307 ] was freedom of the individual, in which there was the vitality and mobility productive of originality and variety.

Bearing in mind the far-reaching influence of the disappearance of unlimited resources open to all men for the taking, and considering the recoil of the common man when he saw the outcome of the competitive struggle for these resources as the supply came to its end over most of the nation, we can understand the reaction against individualism and in favor of drastic assertion of the powers of government. Legislation is taking the place of the free lands as the means of preserving the ideal of democracy. But at the same time it is endangering the other pioneer ideal of creative and competitive individualism. Both were essential and constituted what was best in America's contribution to history and to progress. Both must be preserved if the nation would be true to its past, and would fulfil its highest destiny. It would be a grave misfortune if these people so rich in experience, in self-confidence and aspiration, in creative genius, should turn to some Old World discipline of socialism or plutocracy, or despotic rule, whether by class or by dictator. Nor shall we be driven to these alternatives. Our ancient hopes, our courageous faith, our underlying good humor and love of fair play will triumph in the end. There will be give and take in all directions. There will be disinterested leadership, under loyalty to the best American ideals. Nowhere is this leadership more likely to arise than among the men trained in the Universities, aware of the promise of the past and the possibilities of the future. The times call for new ambitions and new motives.

In a most suggestive essay on the Problems of Modern Democracy, Mr. Godkin has said:

M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence, [ 308 ] in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy; that democracy is generally content with mediocrity. But where is the proof of this? The incentive to exertion which is widest, most constant, and most powerful in its operations in all civilized countries, is the desire of distinction; and this may be composed either of love of fame or love of wealth or of both. In literary and artistic and scientific pursuits, sometimes the strongest influence is exerted by a love of the subject. But it may safely be said that no man has ever labored in any of the higher colleges to whom the applause and appreciation of his fellows was not one of the sweetest rewards of his exertions.

What is there we would ask, in the nature of democratic institutions, that should render this great spring of action powerless, that should deprive glory of all radiance, and put ambition to sleep? Is it not notorious, on the contrary, that one of the most marked peculiarities of democratic society, or of a society drifting toward democracy, is the fire of competition which rages in it, the fevered anxiety which possesses all its members to rise above the dead level to which the law is ever seeking to confine them, and by some brilliant stroke become something higher and more remarkable than their fellows? The secret of that great restlessness which is one of the most disagreeable accompaniments of life in democratic countries, is in fact due to the eagerness of everybody to grasp the prizes of which in aristocratic countries, only the few have much chance. And in no other [ 309 ] society is success more worshiped, is distinction of any kind more widely flattered and caressed.

In democratic societies, in fact, excellence is the first title to distinction; in aristocratic ones there are two or three others which are far stronger and which must be stronger or aristocracy could not exist. The moment you acknowledge that the highest social position ought to be the reward of the man who has the most talent, you make aristocratic institutions impossible.

All that was buoyant and creative in American life would be lost if we gave up the respect for distinct personality, and variety in genius, and came to the dead level of common standards. To be "socialized into an average" and placed "under the tutelage of the mass of us," as a recent writer has put it, would be an irreparable loss. Nor is it necessary in a democracy, as these words of Godkin well disclose. What is needed is the multiplication of motives for ambition and the opening of new lines of achievement for the strongest. As we turn from the task of the first rough conquest of the continent there lies before us a whole wealth of unexploited resources in the realm of the spirit. Arts and letters, science and better social creation, loyalty and political service to the commonweal,—these and a thousand other directions of activity are open to the men, who formerly under the incentive of attaining distinction by amassing extraordinary wealth, saw success only in material display. Newer and finer careers will open to the ambitious when once public opinion shall award the laurels to those who rise above their fellows in these new fields of labor. It has not been the gold, but the getting of the gold, that has caught the imaginations of our captains of industry. Their real enjoyment lay not in the [ 310 ] luxuries which wealth brought, but in the work of construction and in the place which society awarded them. A new era will come if schools and universities can only widen the intellectual horizon of the people, help to lay the foundations of a better industrial life, show them new goals for endeavor, inspire them with more varied and higher ideals.

The Western spirit must be invoked for new and nobler achievements. Of that matured Western spirit, Tennyson's Ulysses is a symbol.

[290:1] Commencement Address, University of Washington, June 17, 1914. Reprinted by permission from The Washington Historical Quarterly , October, 1914.

Social Forces in American History [311:1]

The transformations through which the United States is passing in our own day are so profound, so far-reaching, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the birth of a new nation in America. The revolution in the social and economic structure of this country during the past two decades is comparable to what occurred when independence was declared and the constitution was formed, or to the changes wrought by the era which began half a century ago, the era of Civil War and Reconstruction.

These changes have been long in preparation and are, in part, the result of world-wide forces of reorganization incident to the age of steam production and large-scale industry, and, in part, the result of the closing of the period of the colonization of the West. They have been prophesied, and the course of the movement partly described by students of American development; but after all, it is with a shock that the people of the United States are coming to realize that the fundamental forces which have shaped their society up to the present are disappearing. Twenty years ago, as I have before had occasion to point out, the Superintendent of the Census declared that the frontier line, which its maps had depicted for decade after decade of the westward march of the nation, [ 312 ] could no longer be described. To-day we must add that the age of free competition of individuals for the unpossessed resources of the nation is nearing its end. It is taking less than a generation to write the chapter which began with the disappearance of the line of the frontier—the last chapter in the history of the colonization of the United States, the conclusion to the annals of its pioneer democracy.

It is a wonderful chapter, this final rush of American energy upon the remaining wilderness. Even the bare statistics become eloquent of a new era. They no longer derive their significance from the exhibit of vast proportions of the public domain transferred to agriculture, of wildernesses equal to European nations changed decade after decade into the farm area of the United States. It is true there was added to the farms of the nation between 1870 and 1880 a territory equal to that of France, and between 1880 and 1900 a territory equal to the European area of France, Germany, England, and Wales combined. The records of 1910 are not yet available, but whatever they reveal they will not be so full of meaning as the figures which tell of upleaping wealth and organization and concentration of industrial power in the East in the last decade. As the final provinces of the Western empire have been subdued to the purposes of civilization and have yielded their spoils, as the spheres of operation of the great industrial corporations have extended, with the extension of American settlement, production and wealth have increased beyond all precedent.

The total deposits in all national banks have more than trebled in the present decade; the money in circulation has doubled since 1890. The flood of gold makes it difficult to gage the full meaning of the incredible increase in values, for in the decade ending with 1909 over 41,600,000 ounces of gold were mined in the United States alone. Over four [ 313 ] million ounces have been produced every year since 1905, whereas between 1880 and 1894 no year showed a production of two million ounces. As a result of this swelling stream of gold and instruments of credit, aided by a variety of other causes, prices have risen until their height has become one of the most marked features and influential factors in American life, producing social readjustments and contributing effectively to party revolutions.

But if we avoid those statistics which require analysis because of the changing standard of value, we still find that the decade occupies an exceptional place in American history. More coal was mined in the United States in the ten years after 1897 than in all the life of the nation before that time. [313:1] Fifty years ago we mined less than fifteen million long tons of coal. In 1907 we mined nearly 429,000,000. At the present rate it is estimated that the supply of coal would be exhausted at a date no farther in the future than the formation of the constitution is in the past. Iron and coal are the measures of industrial power. The nation has produced three times as much iron ore in the past two decades as in all its previous history; the production of the past ten years was more than double that of the prior decade. Pig-iron production is admitted to be an excellent barometer of manufacture and of transportation. Never until 1898 had this reached an annual total of ten million long tons. But in the five years beginning with 1904 it averaged over twice that. By 1907 the United States had surpassed Great Britain, Germany, and France combined in the production of pig-iron and steel together, and in the same decade a single great corporation has established its domination over the iron mines and steel manufacture of the United States. It is more than a mere accident that the United States Steel Corporation with its [ 314 ] stocks and bonds aggregating $1,400,000,000 was organized at the beginning of the present decade. The former wilderness about Lake Superior has, principally in the past two decades, established its position as overwhelmingly the preponderant source of iron ore, present and prospective, in the United States—a treasury from which Pittsburgh has drawn wealth and extended its unparalleled industrial empire in these years. The tremendous energies thus liberated at this center of industrial power in the United States revolutionized methods of manufacture in general, and in many indirect ways profoundly influenced the life of the nation.

Railroad statistics also exhibit unprecedented development, the formation of a new industrial society. The number of passengers carried one mile more than doubled between 1890 and 1908; freight carried one mile has nearly trebled in the same period and has doubled in the past decade. Agricultural products tell a different story. The corn crop has only risen from about two billion bushels in 1891 to two and seven-tenths billions in 1909; wheat from six hundred and eleven million bushels in 1891 to only seven hundred and thirty-seven million in 1909; and cotton from about nine million bales in 1891 to ten and three-tenths million bales in 1909. Population has increased in the United States proper from about sixty-two and one-half millions in 1890 to seventy-five and one-half millions in 1900 and to over ninety millions in 1910.

It is clear from these statistics that the ratio of the nation's increased production of immediate wealth by the enormously increased exploitation of its remaining natural resources vastly exceeds the ratio of increase of population and still more strikingly exceeds the ratio of increase of agricultural products. Already population is pressing upon the food supply while capital consolidates in billion-dollar organizations. The "Triumphant Democracy" whose achievements the iron-master [ 315 ] celebrated has reached a stature even more imposing than he could have foreseen; but still less did he perceive the changes in democracy itself and the conditions of its life which have accompanied this material growth.

Having colonized the Far West, having mastered its internal resources, the nation turned at the conclusion of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century to deal with the Far East to engage in the world-politics of the Pacific Ocean. Having continued its historic expansion into the lands of the old Spanish empire by the successful outcome of the recent war, the United States became the mistress of the Philippines at the same time that it came into possession of the Hawaiian Islands, and the controlling influence in the Gulf of Mexico. It provided early in the present decade for connecting its Atlantic and Pacific coasts by the Isthmian Canal, and became an imperial republic with dependencies and protectorates—admittedly a new world-power, with a potential voice in the problems of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

This extension of power, this undertaking of grave responsibilities in new fields, this entry into the sisterhood of world-states, was no isolated event. It was, indeed, in some respects the logical outcome of the nation's march to the Pacific, the sequence to the era in which it was engaged in occupying the free lands and exploiting the resources of the West. When it had achieved this position among the nations of the earth, the United States found itself confronted, also, with the need of constitutional readjustment, arising from the relations of federal government and territorial acquisitions. It was obliged to reconsider questions of the rights of man and traditional American ideals of liberty and democracy, in view of the task of government of other races politically inexperienced and undeveloped.

If we turn to consider the effect upon American society and [ 316 ] domestic policy in these two decades of transition we are met with palpable evidences of the invasion of the old pioneer democratic order. Obvious among them is the effect of unprecedented immigration to supply the mobile army of cheap labor for the centers of industrial life. In the past ten years, beginning with 1900, over eight million immigrants have arrived. The newcomers of the eight years since 1900 would, according to a writer in 1908, "repopulate all the five older New England States as they stand to-day; or, if properly disseminated over the newer parts of the country they would serve to populate no less than nineteen states of the Union as they stand." In 1907 "there were one and one-quarter million arrivals. This number would entirely populate both New Hampshire and Maine, two of our oldest States." "The arrivals of this one year would found a State with more inhabitants than any one of twenty-one of our other existing commonwealths which could be named." Not only has the addition to the population from Europe been thus extraordinary, it has come in increasing measure from southern and eastern Europe. For the year 1907, Professor Ripley, [316:1] whom I am quoting, has redistributed the incomers on the basis of physical type and finds that one-quarter of them were of the Mediterranean race, one-quarter of the Slavic race, one-eighth Jewish, and only one-sixth of the Alpine, and one-sixth of the Teutonic. In 1882 Germans had come to the amount of 250,000; in 1907 they were replaced by 330,000 South Italians. Thus it is evident that the ethnic elements of the United States have undergone startling changes; and instead of spreading over the nation these immigrants have concentrated especially in the cities and great industrial centers in the past decade. The composition of the labor class and its relation to wages and to the native American employer have been deeply influenced [ 317 ] thereby; the sympathy of the employers with labor has been unfavorably affected by the pressure of great numbers of immigrants of alien nationality and of lower standards of life.

The familiar facts of the massing of population in the cities and the contemporaneous increase of urban power, and of the massing of capital and production in fewer and vastly greater industrial units, especially attest the revolution. "It is a proposition too plain to require elucidation," wrote Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury, in his report of 1827, "that the creation of capital is retarded rather than accelerated by the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface of soil." [317:1] Thirty years before Rush wrote these words Albert Gallatin declared in Congress that "if the cause of the happiness of this country were examined into, it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants which their citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions." Possibly both of these Pennsylvania financiers were right under the conditions of the time; but it is at least significant that capital and labor entered upon a new era as the end of the free lands approached. A contemporary of Gallatin in Congress had replied to the argument that cheap lands would depopulate the Atlantic coast by saying that if a law were framed to prevent ready access to western lands it would be tantamount to saying that there is some class which must remain "and by law be obliged to serve the others for such wages as they pleased to give." The passage of the arable public domain into private possession has raised this question in a new form and has brought forth new answers. This is peculiarly the era when competitive individualism in the midst of vast unappropriated opportunities [ 318 ] changed into the monopoly of the fundamental industrial processes by huge aggregations of capital as the free lands disappeared. All the tendencies of the large-scale production of the twentieth century, all the trend to the massing of capital in large combinations, all of the energies of the age of steam, found in America exceptional freedom of action and were offered regions of activity equal to the states of all Western Europe. Here they reached their highest development.

The decade following 1897 is marked by the work of Mr. Harriman and his rivals in building up the various railroads into a few great groups, a process that had gone so far that before his death Mr. Harriman was ambitious to concentrate them all under his single control. High finance under the leadership of Mr. Morgan steadily achieved the consolidation of the greater industries into trusts or combinations and effected a community of interests between them and a few dominant banking organizations, with allied insurance companies and trust companies. In New York City have been centered, as never before, the banking reserves of the nation, and here, by the financial management of capital and speculative promotion, there has grown up a unified control over the nation's industrial life. Colossal private fortunes have arisen. No longer is the per capita wealth of the nation a real index to the prosperity of the average man. Labor on the other hand has shown an increasing self-consciousness, is combining and increasing its demands. In a word, the old pioneer individualism is disappearing, while the forces of social combination are manifesting themselves as never before. The self-made man has become, in popular speech, the coal baron, the steel king, the oil king, the cattle king, the railroad magnate, the master of high finance, the monarch of trusts. The world has never before seen such huge fortunes exercising combined control over the economic life of a people, and such [ 319 ] luxury as has come out of the individualistic pioneer democracy of America in the course of competitive evolution.

At the same time the masters of industry, who control interests which represent billions of dollars, do not admit that they have broken with pioneer ideals. They regard themselves as pioneers under changed conditions, carrying on the old work of developing the natural resources of the nation, compelled by the constructive fever in their veins, even in ill-health and old age and after the accumulation of wealth beyond their power to enjoy, to seek new avenues of action and of power, to chop new clearings, to find new trails, to expand the horizon of the nation's activity, and to extend the scope of their dominion. "This country," said the late Mr. Harriman in an interview a few years ago, "has been developed by a wonderful people, flush with enthusiasm, imagination and speculative bent. . . . They have been magnificent pioneers. They saw into the future and adapted their work to the possibilities. . . . Stifle that enthusiasm, deaden that imagination and prohibit that speculation by restrictive and cramping conservative law, and you tend to produce a moribund and conservative people and country." This is an appeal to the historic ideals of Americans who viewed the republic as the guardian of individual freedom to compete for the control of the natural resources of the nation.

On the other hand, we have the voice of the insurgent West, recently given utterance in the New Nationalism of ex-President Roosevelt, demanding increase of federal authority to curb the special interests, the powerful industrial organizations, and the monopolies, for the sake of the conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of American democracy.

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary federal activity in limiting individual and corporate freedom for the benefit of society. To that decade belong the conservation [ 320 ] congresses and the effective organization of the Forest Service, and the Reclamation Service. Taken together these developments alone would mark a new era, for over three hundred million acres are, as a result of this policy, reserved from entry and sale, an area more than equal to that of all the states which established the constitution, if we exclude their western claims; and these reserved lands are held for a more beneficial use of their forests, minerals, arid tracts, and water rights, by the nation as a whole. Another example is the extension of the activity of the Department of Agriculture, which seeks the remotest regions of the earth for crops suitable to the areas reclaimed by the government, maps and analyzes the soils, fosters the improvement of seeds and animals, tells the farmer when and how and what to plant, and makes war upon diseases of plants and animals and insect pests. The recent legislation for pure food and meat inspection, and the whole mass of regulative law under the Interstate Commerce clause of the constitution, further illustrates the same tendency.

Two ideals were fundamental in traditional American thought, ideals that developed in the pioneer era. One was that of individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for the resources of a continent—the squatter ideal. To the pioneer government was an evil. The other was the ideal of a democracy—"government of the people, by the people and for the people." The operation of these ideals took place contemporaneously with the passing into private possession of the free public domain and the natural resources of the United States. But American democracy was based on an abundance of free lands; these were the very conditions that shaped its growth and its fundamental traits. Thus time has revealed that these two ideals of pioneer democracy had elements of mutual hostility and contained the seeds of its dissolution. [ 321 ] The present finds itself engaged in the task of readjusting its old ideals to new conditions and is turning increasingly to government to preserve its traditional democracy. It is not surprising that socialism shows noteworthy gains as elections continue; that parties are forming on new lines; that the demand for primary elections, for popular choice of senators, initiative, referendum, and recall, is spreading, and that the regions once the center of pioneer democracy exhibit these tendencies in the most marked degree. They are efforts to find substitutes for that former safeguard of democracy, the disappearing free lands. They are the sequence to the extinction of the frontier.

It is necessary next to notice that in the midst of all this national energy, and contemporaneous with the tendency to turn to the national government for protection to democracy, there is clear evidence of the persistence and the development of sectionalism. [321:1] Whether we observe the grouping of votes in Congress and in general elections, or the organization and utterances of business leaders, or the association of scholars, churches, or other representatives of the things of the spirit, we find that American life is not only increasing in its national intensity but that it is integrating by sections. In part this is due to the factor of great spaces which make sectional rather than national organization the line of least resistance; but, in part, it is also the expression of the separate economic, political, and social interests and the separate spiritual life of the various geographic provinces or sections. The votes on the tariff, and in general the location of the strongholds of the Progressive Republican movement, illustrate this fact. The difficulty of a national adjustment of railway rates to the [ 322 ] diverse interests of different sections is another example. Without attempting to enter upon a more extensive discussion of sectionalism, I desire simply to point out that there are evidences that now, as formerly, the separate geographical interests have their leaders and spokesmen, that much Congressional legislation is determined by the contests, triumphs, or compromises between the rival sections, and that the real federal relations of the United States are shaped by the interplay of sectional with national forces rather than by the relation of State and Nation. As time goes on and the nation adjusts itself more durably to the conditions of the differing geographic sections which make it up, they are coming to a new self-consciousness and a revived self-assertion. Our national character is a composite of these sections. [322:1]

Obviously in attempting to indicate even a portion of the significant features of our recent history we have been obliged to take note of a complex of forces. The times are so close at hand that the relations between events and tendencies force themselves upon our attention. We have had to deal with the connections of geography, industrial growth, politics, and government. With these we must take into consideration the changing social composition, the inherited beliefs and habitual attitude of the masses of the people, the psychology of the nation and of the separate sections, as well as of the leaders. We must see how these leaders are shaped partly by their time and section, and how they are in part original, creative, by virtue of their own genius and initiative. We cannot neglect the moral tendencies and the ideals. All are related parts of the same subject and can no more be properly understood [ 323 ] in isolation than the movement as a whole can be understood by neglecting some of these important factors, or by the use of a single method of investigation. Whatever be the truth regarding European history, American history is chiefly concerned with social forces, shaping and reshaping under the conditions of a nation changing as it adjusts to its environment. And this environment progressively reveals new aspects of itself, exerts new influences, and calls out new social organs and functions.

I have undertaken this rapid survey of recent history for two purposes. First, because it has seemed fitting to emphasize the significance of American development since the passing of the frontier, and, second, because in the observation of present conditions we may find assistance in our study of the past.

It is a familiar doctrine that each age studies its history anew and with interests determined by the spirit of the time. Each age finds it necessary to reconsider at least some portion of the past, from points of view furnished by new conditions which reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the previous generation. Unquestionably each investigator and writer is influenced by the times in which he lives and while this fact exposes the historian to a bias, at the same time it affords him new instruments and new insight for dealing with his subject.

If recent history, then, gives new meaning to past events, if it has to deal with the rise into a commanding position of forces, the origin and growth of which may have been inadequately described or even overlooked by historians of the previous generation, it is important to study the present and the recent past, not only for themselves but also as the source of new hypotheses, new lines of inquiry, new criteria of the perspective of the remoter past. And, moreover, a just public [ 324 ] opinion and a statesmanlike treatment of present problems demand that they be seen in their historical relations in order that history may hold the lamp for conservative reform.

Seen from the vantage-ground of present developments what new light falls upon past events! When we consider what the Mississippi Valley has come to be in American life, and when we consider what it is yet to be, the young Washington, crossing the snows of the wilderness to summon the French to evacuate the portals of the great valley, becomes the herald of an empire. When we recall the huge industrial power that has centered at Pittsburgh, Braddock's advance to the forks of the Ohio takes on new meaning. Even in defeat, he opened a road to what is now the center of the world's industrial energy. The modifications which England proposed in 1794 to John Jay in the northwestern boundary of the United States from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, seemed to him, doubtless, significant chiefly as a matter of principle and as a question of the retention or loss of beaver grounds. The historians hardly notice the proposals. But they involved, in fact, the ownership of the richest and most extensive deposits of iron ore in America, the all-important source of a fundamental industry of the United States, the occasion for the rise of some of the most influential forces of our time.

What continuity and meaning are furnished by the outcome in present times of the movements of minor political parties and reform agitations! To the historian they have often seemed to be mere curious side eddies, vexatious distractions to the course of his literary craft as it navigated the stream of historical tendency. And yet, by the revelation of the present, what seemed to be side eddies have not seldom proven to be the concealed entrances to the main current, and the course which seemed the central one has led to blind channels and stagnant waters, important in their day, but cut off like [ 325 ] oxbow lakes from the mighty river of historical progress by the mere permanent and compelling forces of the neglected currents.

We may trace the contest between the capitalist and the democratic pioneer from the earliest colonial days. It is influential in colonial parties. It is seen in the vehement protests of Kentucky frontiersmen in petition after petition to the Congress of the Confederation against the "nabobs" and men of wealth who took out titles to the pioneers' farms while they themselves were too busy defending those farms from the Indians to perfect their claims. It is seen in the attitude of the Ohio Valley in its backwoods days before the rise of the Whig party, as when in 1811 Henry Clay denounced the Bank of the United States as a corporation which throve on special privileges—"a special association of favored individuals taken from the mass of society, and invested with exemptions and surrounded by immunities and privileges." Benton voiced the same contest twenty years later when he denounced the bank as

a company of private individuals, many of them foreigners, and the mass of them residing in a remote and narrow corner of the Union, unconnected by any sympathy with the fertile regions of the Great Valley in which the natural power of this Union, the power of numbers, will be found to reside long before the renewed term of the second charter would expire.

"And where," he asked, "would all this power and money center? In the great cities of the Northeast, which have been for forty years and that by force of federal legislation, the lion's den of Southern and Western money—that den into [ 326 ] which all the tracks point inward; from which the returning track of a solitary dollar has never yet been seen." Declaring, in words that have a very modern sound, that the bank tended to multiply nabobs and paupers, and that "a great moneyed power is favorable to great capitalists, for it is the principle of capital to favor capital," he appealed to the fact of the country's extent and its sectional divergences against the nationalizing of capital.

What a condition for a confederacy of states! What grounds for alarm and terrible apprehension when in a confederacy of such vast extent, so many rival commercial cities, so much sectional jealousy, such violent political parties, such fierce contests for power, there should be but one moneyed tribunal before which all the rival and contending elements must appear.

Even more vehement were the words of Jackson in 1837. "It is now plain," he wrote, "that the war is to be carried on by the monied aristocracy of the few against the democracy of numbers; the [prosperous] to make the honest laborers hewers of wood and drawers of water through the credit and paper system."

Van Buren's administration is usually passed hastily over with hardly more than mention of his Independent Treasury plan, and with particular consideration of the slavery discussion. But some of the most important movements in American social and political history began in these years of Jackson and Van Buren. Read the demands of the obscure labor papers and the reports of labor's open-air meetings anew, and you will find in the utterances of so-called labor visionaries and the Locofoco champions of "equal rights for all and [ 327 ] special privileges for none," like Evans and Jacques, Byrdsall and Leggett, the finger points to the currents that now make the main channel of our history; you will find in them some of the important planks of the platforms of the triumphant parties of our own day. As Professor Commons has shown by his papers and the documents which he has published on labor history, an idealistic but widespread and influential humanitarian movement, strikingly similar to that of the present, arose in the years between 1830 and 1850, dealing with social forces in American life, animated by a desire to apply the public lands to social amelioration, eager to find new forms of democratic development. But the flood of the slavery struggle swept all of these movements into its mighty inundation for the time. After the war, other influences delayed the revival of the movement. The railroads opened the wide prairies after 1850 and made it easy to reach them; and decade after decade new sections were reduced to the purposes of civilization and to the advantages of the common man as well as the promotion of great individual fortunes. The nation centered its interests in the development of the West. It is only in our own day that this humanitarian democratic wave has reached the level of those earlier years. But in the meantime there are clear evidences of the persistence of the forces, even though under strange guise. Read the platforms of the Greenback-Labor, the Granger, and the Populist parties, and you will find in those platforms, discredited and reprobated by the major parties of the time, the basic proposals of the Democratic party after its revolution under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, and of the Republican party after its revolution by Mr. Roosevelt. The Insurgent movement is so clearly related to the areas and elements that gave strength to this progressive assertion of old democratic ideals with new weapons, that it must be regarded as the organized refusal [ 328 ] of these persistent tendencies to be checked by the advocates of more moderate measures.

I have dealt with these fragments of party history, not, of course, with the purpose of expressing any present judgment upon them, but to emphasize and give concreteness to the fact that there is disclosed by present events a new significance to these contests of radical democracy and conservative interests; that they are rather a continuing expression of deep-seated forces than fragmentary and sporadic curios for the historical museum.

If we should survey the history of our lands from a similar point of view, considering the relations of legislation and administration of the public domain to the structure of American democracy, it would yield a return far beyond that offered by the formal treatment of the subject in most of our histories. We should find in the squatter doctrines and practices, the seizure of the best soils, the taking of public timber on the theory of a right to it by the labor expended on it, fruitful material for understanding the atmosphere and ideals under which the great corporations developed the West. Men like Senator Benton and Delegate Sibley in successive generations defended the trespasses of the pioneer and the lumberman upon the public forest lands, and denounced the paternal government that "harassed" these men, who were engaged in what we should call stealing government timber. It is evident that at some time between the middle of the nineteenth century and the present time, when we impose jail sentences upon Congressmen caught in such violations of the land laws, a change came over the American conscience and the civic ideals were modified. That our great industrial enterprises developed in the midst of these changing ideals is important to recall when we write the history of their activity.

We should find also that we cannot understand the land [ 329 ] question without seeing its relations to the struggle of sections and classes bidding against each other and finding in the public domain a most important topic of political bargaining. We should find, too, that the settlement of unlike geographic areas in the course of the nation's progress resulted in changes in the effect of the land laws; that a system intended for the humid prairies was ill-adjusted to the grazing lands and coal fields and to the forests in the days of large-scale exploitation by corporations commanding great capital. Thus changing geographic factors as well as the changing character of the forces which occupied the public domain must be considered, if we would understand the bearing of legislation and policy in this field. [329:1] It is fortunate that suggestive studies of democracy and the land policy have already begun to appear.

The whole subject of American agriculture viewed in relation to the economic, political, and social life of the nation has important contributions to make. If, for example, we study the maps showing the transition of the wheat belt from the East to the West, as the virgin soils were conquered and made new bases for destructive competition with the older wheat States, we shall see how deeply they affected not only land values, railroad building, the movement of population, and the supply of cheap food, but also how the regions once devoted to single cropping of wheat were forced to turn to varied and intensive agriculture and to diversified industry, and we shall see also how these transformations affected party politics and even the ideals of the Americans of the regions thus changed. We shall find in the over-production of wheat in the provinces thus rapidly colonized, and in the over-production of silver in the mountain provinces which were contemporaneously exploited, important explanations of the peculiar [ 330 ] form which American politics took in the period when Mr. Bryan mastered the Democratic party, just as we shall find in the opening of the new gold fields in the years immediately following, and in the passing of the era of almost free virgin wheat soils, explanations of the more recent period when high prices are giving new energy and aggressiveness to the demands of the new American industrial democracy.

Enough has been said, it may be assumed, to make clear the point which I am trying to elucidate, namely that a comprehension of the United States of to-day, an understanding of the rise and progress of the forces which have made it what it is, demands that we should rework our history from the new points of view afforded by the present. If this is done, it will be seen, for example, that the progress of the struggle between North and South over slavery and the freed negro, which held the principal place in American interest in the two decades after 1850, was, after all, only one of the interests in the time. The pages of the Congressional debates, the contemporary newspapers, the public documents of those twenty years, remain a rich mine for those who will seek therein the sources of movements dominant in the present day.

The final consideration to which I ask your attention in this discussion of social forces in American life, is with reference to the mode of investigating them and the bearing of these investigations upon the relations and the goal of history. It has become a precedent, fairly well established by the distinguished scholars who have held the office which I am about to lay down, to state a position with reference to the relations of history and its sister-studies, and even to raise the question of the attitude of the historian toward the laws of thermodynamics and to seek to find the key of historical development or of historical degradation. It is not given to all to bend the bow of Ulysses. I shall attempt a lesser task.

We may take some lessons from the scientist. He has enriched knowledge especially in recent years by attacking the no-man's lands left unexplored by the too sharp delimitation of spheres of activity. These new conquests have been especially achieved by the combination of old sciences. Physical chemistry, electro-chemistry, geo-physics, astro-physics, and a variety of other scientic unions have led to audacious hypotheses, veritable flashes of vision, which open new regions of activity for a generation of investigators. Moreover they have promoted such investigations by furnishing new instruments of research. Now in some respects there is an analogy between geology and history. The new geologist aims to describe the inorganic earth dynamically in terms of natural law, using chemistry, physics, mathematics, and even botany and zoölogy so far as they relate to paleontology. But he does not insist that the relative importance of physical or chemical factors shall be determined before he applies the methods and data of these sciences to his problem. Indeed, he has learned that a geological area is too complex a thing to be reduced to a single explanation. He has abandoned the single hypothesis for the multiple hypothesis. He creates a whole family of possible explanations of a given problem and thus avoids the warping influence of partiality for a simple theory.

Have we not here an illustration of what is possible and necessary for the historian? Is it not well, before attempting to decide whether history requires an economic interpretation, or a psychological, or any other ultimate interpretation, to recognize that the factors in human society are varied and complex; that the political historian handling his subject in isolation is certain to miss fundamental facts and relations in his treatment of a given age or nation; that the economic historian is exposed to the same danger; and so of all of the other special historians?

Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a place on the historian's page.

The economic historian is in danger of making his analysis and his statement of a law on the basis of present conditions and then passing to history for justificatory appendixes to his conclusions. An American economist of high rank has recently expressed his conception of "the full relation of economic theory, statistics, and history" in these words:

A principle is formulated by a priori reasoning concerning facts of common experience; it is then tested by statistics and promoted to the rank of a known and acknowledged truth; illustrations of its action are then found in narrative history and, on the other hand, the economic law becomes the interpreter of records that would otherwise be confusing and comparatively valueless; the law itself derives its final confirmation from the illustrations of its working which the records afford; but what is at least of equal importance is the parallel fact that the law affords the decisive test of the correctness of those assertions concerning the causes and the effects of past events which it is second nature to make and which historians [ 333 ] almost invariably do make in connection with their narrations. [333:1]

There is much in this statement by which the historian may profit, but he may doubt also whether the past should serve merely as the "illustration" by which to confirm the law deduced from common experience by a priori reasoning tested by statistics. In fact the pathway of history is strewn with the wrecks of the "known and acknowledged truths" of economic law, due not only to defective analysis and imperfect statistics, but also to the lack of critical historical methods, of insufficient historical-mindedness on the part of the economist, to failure to give due attention to the relativity and transiency of the conditions from which his laws were deduced.

But the point on which I would lay stress is this. The economist, the political scientist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the geographer, the student of literature, of art, of religion—all the allied laborers in the study of society—have contributions to make to the equipment of the historian. These contributions are partly of material, partly of tools, partly of new points of view, new hypotheses, new suggestions of relations, causes, and emphasis. Each of these special students is in some danger of bias by his particular point of view, by his exposure to see simply the thing in which he is primarily interested, and also by his effort to deduce the universal laws of his separate science. The historian, on the other hand, is exposed to the danger of dealing with the complex and interacting social forces of a period or of a country, from some single point of view to which his special training or interest inclines him. If the truth is to be made known, the historian [ 334 ] must so far familiarize himself with the work, and equip himself with the training of his sister-subjects that he can at least avail himself of their results and in some reasonable degree master the essential tools of their trade. And the followers of the sister-studies must likewise familiarize themselves and their students with the work and the methods of the historians, and coöperate in the difficult task.

It is necessary that the American historian shall aim at this equipment, not so much that he may possess the key to history or satisfy himself in regard to its ultimate laws. At present a different duty is before him. He must see in American society with its vast spaces, its sections equal to European nations, its geographic influences, its brief period of development, its variety of nationalities and races, its extraordinary industrial growth under the conditions of freedom, its institutions, culture, ideals, social psychology, and even its religions forming and changing almost under his eyes, one of the richest fields ever offered for the preliminary recognition and study of the forces that operate and interplay in the making of society.

[311:1] Annual address as the president of the American Historical Association, delivered at Indianapolis, December 28, 1910. Reprinted by permission from The American Historical Review , January, 1911.

[313:1] Van Hise, "Conservation of Natural Resources," pp. 23, 24.

[316:1] Atlantic Monthly , December, 1908, vii, p. 745.

[317:1] [Although the words of these early land debates are quoted above in Chapter VI, they are repeated because of the light they cast upon the present problem.]

[321:1] [I have outlined this subject in various essays, including the article on "Sectionalism" in McLaughlin and Hart, "Cyclopedia of Government."]

[322:1] [It is not impossible that they may ultimately replace the State as the significant administrative and legislative units. There are strong evidences of this tendency, such as the organization of the Federal Reserve districts, and proposals for railroad administration by regions.]

[329:1] [See R. G. Wellington, "Public Lands, 1820-1840"; G. M. Stephenson, "Public Lands, 1841-1862"; J. Ise, "Forest Policy."]

[333:1] Professor J. B. Clark, in Commons, ed., "Documentary History of American Industrial Society," I. 43-44.

Middle Western Pioneer Democracy [335:1]

In time of war, when all that this nation has stood for, all the things in which it passionately believes, are at stake, we have met to dedicate this beautiful home for history.

There is a fitness in the occasion. It is for historic ideals that we are fighting. If this nation is one for which we should pour out our savings, postpone our differences, go hungry, and even give up life itself, it is not because it is a rich, extensive, well-fed and populous nation; it is because from its early days America has pressed onward toward a goal of its own; that it has followed an ideal, the ideal of a democracy developing under conditions unlike those of any other age or country.

We are fighting not for an Old World ideal, not for an abstraction, not for a philosophical revolution. Broad and generous as are our sympathies, widely scattered in origin as are our people, keenly as we feel the call of kinship, the thrill of sympathy with the stricken nations across the Atlantic, we are fighting for the historic ideals of the United States, for the continued existence of the type of society in which we believe, because we have proved it good, for the things which drew European exiles to our shores, and which inspired the hopes of the pioneers.

We are at war that the history of the United States, rich with the record of high human purposes, and of faith in the destiny of the common man under freedom, filled with the promises of a better world, may not become the lost and tragic story of a futile dream.

Yes, it is an American ideal and an American example for which we fight; but in that ideal and example lies medicine for the healing of the nations. It is the best we have to give to Europe, and it is a matter of vital import that we shall safeguard and preserve our power to serve the world, and not be overwhelmed in the flood of imperialistic force that wills the death of democracy and would send the freeman under the yoke. Essential as are our contributions of wealth, the work of our scientists, the toil of our farmers and our workmen in factory and shipyard, priceless as is the stream of young American manhood which we pour forth to stop the flood which flows like moulten lava across the green fields and peaceful hamlets of Europe toward the sea and turns to ashes and death all that it covers, these contributions have their deeper meaning in the American spirit. They are born of the love of Democracy.

Long ago in prophetic words Walt Whitman voiced the meaning of our present sacrifices:

Shortly before the Civil War, a great German, exiled from his native land for his love of freedom, came from his new home among the pioneers of the Middle West to set forth in Faneuil Hall, the "cradle of liberty," in Boston, his vision of the young America that was forming in the West, "the last depository of the hopes of all true friends of humanity." Speaking of the contrast between the migrations to the Mississippi Valley and those of the Old World in other centuries, he said:

It is now not a barbarous multitude pouncing upon old and decrepit empires, not a violent concussion of tribes accompanied by all the horrors of general destruction, but we see the vigorous elements—peaceably congregating and mingling together on virgin soil—; led together by the irresistible attraction of free and broad principles; undertaking to commence a new era in the history of the world, without first destroying the results of the progress of past periods; undertaking to found a cosmopolitan nation without marching over the dead bodies of slain millions.

If Carl Schurz had lived to see the outcome of that Germany from which he was sent as an exile, in the days when Prussian bayonets dispersed the legislatures and stamped out the beginnings of democratic rule in his former country, could he have better pictured the contrasts between the Prussian and the American spirit? He went on to say:

Thus was founded the great colony of free humanity , which has not old England alone, but the world for its mother country. And in the colony [ 338 ] of free humanity, whose mother country is the world, they established the Republic of equal rights where the title of manhood is the title to citizenship. My friends, if I had a thousand tongues, and a voice as strong as the thunder of heaven, they would not be sufficient to impress upon your minds forcibly enough the greatness of this idea, the overshadowing glory of this result. This was the dream of the truest friends of man from the beginning; for this the noblest blood of martyrs has been shed; for this has mankind waded through seas of blood and tears. There it is now; there it stands, the noble fabric in all the splendor of reality.

It is in a solemn and inspiring time, therefore, that we meet to dedicate this building, and the occasion is fitting to the time. We may now see, as never before, the deeper significance, the larger meaning of these pioneers, whose plain lives and homely annals are glorified as a part of the story of the building of a better system of social justice under freedom, a broader, and as we fervently hope, a more enduring foundation for the welfare and progress under individual liberty of the common man, an example of federation, of peaceful adjustments by compromise and concession under a self-governing Republic, where sections replace nations over a Union as large as Europe, where party discussions take the place of warring countries, where the Pax Americana furnishes an example for a better world.

As our forefathers, the pioneers, gathered in their neighborhood to raise the log cabin, and sanctified it by the name of home, the dwelling place of pioneer ideals, so we meet to celebrate the raising of this home, this shrine of [ 339 ] Minnesota's historic life. It symbolizes the conviction that the past and the future of this people are tied together; that this Historical Society is the keeper of the records of a noteworthy movement in the progress of mankind; that these records are not unmeaning and antiquarian, but even in their details are worthy of preservation for their revelation of the beginnings of society in the midst of a nation caught by the vision of a better future for the world.

Let me repeat the words of Harriet Martineau, who portrayed the American of the thirties:

I regard the American people as a great embryo poet, now moody, now wild, but bringing out results of absolute good sense; restless and wayward in action, but with deep peace at his heart; exulting that he has caught the true aspect of things past and the depth of futurity which lies before him, wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has scarcely begun to dream of. There is the strongest hope of a nation that is capable of being possessed with an idea.

And recall her appeal to the American people to "cherish their high democratic hope, their faith in man. The older they grow the more they must reverence the dreams of their youth."

The dreams of their youth! Here they shall be preserved, and the achievements as well as the aspirations of the men who made the State, the men who built on their foundations, the men with large vision and power of action, the lesser men in the mass, the leaders who served the State and nation with devotion to the cause. Here shall be preserved the record of the men who failed to see the larger vision and worked [ 340 ] impatiently with narrow or selfish or class ends, as well as of those who labored with patience and sympathy and mutual concession, with readiness to make adjustments and to subordinate their immediate interests to the larger good and the immediate safety of the nation.

In the archives of such an old institution as that of the Historical Society of Massachusetts, whose treasures run to the beginnings of the Puritan colonization, the students cannot fail to find the evidence that a State Historical Society is a Book of Judgment wherein is made up the record of a people and its leaders. So, as time unfolds, shall be the collections of this Society, the depository of the material that shall preserve the memory of this people. Each section of this widely extended and varied nation has its own peculiar past, its special form of society, its traits and its leaders. It were a pity if any section left its annals solely to the collectors of a remote region, and it were a pity if its collections were not transformed into printed documents and monographic studies which can go to the libraries of all the parts of the Union and thus enable the student to see the nation as a whole in its past as well as in its present.

This Society finds its special field of activity in a great State of the Middle West, so new, as history reckons time, that its annals are still predominantly those of the pioneers, but so rapidly growing that already the era of the pioneers is a part of the history of the past, capable of being handled objectively, seen in a perspective that is not possible to the observer of the present conditions.

Because of these facts I have taken as the special theme of this address the Middle Western Pioneer Democracy, which I would sketch in some of its outstanding aspects, and chiefly in the generation before the Civil War, for it was from those [ 341 ] pioneers that the later colonization to the newer parts of the Mississippi Valley derived much of their traits, and from whom large numbers of them came.

The North Central States as a whole is a region comparable to all of Central Europe. Of these States, a large part of the old Northwest,—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin; and their sisters beyond the Mississippi—Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota—were still, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the home of an essentially pioneer society. Within the lifetime of many living men, Wisconsin was called the "Far West," and Minnesota was a land of the Indian and the fur traders, a wilderness of forest and prairie beyond the "edge of cultivation." That portion of this great region which was still in the pioneering period of settlement by 1850 was alone about as extensive as the old thirteen States, or Germany and Austria-Hungary combined. The region was a huge geographic mold for a new society, modeled by nature on the scale of the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, the upper Mississippi and the Missouri. Simple and majestic in its vast outlines it was graven into a variety that in its detail also had a largeness of design. From the Great Lakes extended the massive glacial sheet which covered that mighty basin and laid down treasures of soil. Vast forests of pine shrouded its upper zone, breaking into hardwood and the oak openings as they neared the ocean-like expanses of the prairies. Forests again along the Ohio Valley, and beyond, to the west, lay the levels of the Great Plains. Within the earth were unexploited treasures of coal and lead, copper and iron in such form and quantity as were to revolutionize the industrial processes of the world. But nature's revelations are progressive, and it was rather the marvelous adaptation of the soil to the raising of corn and wheat that drew the pioneers to this land [ 342 ] of promise, and made a new era of colonization. In the unity with variety of this pioneer empire and in its broad levels we have a promise of its society.

First had come the children of the interior of the South, and with ax and rifle in hand had cut their clearings in the forest, raised their log cabins, fought the Indians and by 1830 had pushed their way to the very edge of the prairies along the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, leaving unoccupied most of the Basin of the Great Lakes.

These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and live stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had at first small interest in town life or a share in markets. They were passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which assumed that under free conditions in the midst of unlimited resources, the homogeneous society of the pioneers must result in equality. What they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own career without fear or favor. What they instinctively opposed was the crystallization of differences, the monopolization of opportunity and the fixing of that monopoly by government or by social customs. The road must be open. The game must be played according to the rules. There must be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity, no closed doors to the able, no stopping the free game before it was played to the end. More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real feeling, that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able to achieve preëminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter of pride and to the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the less successful.

If this democracy of Southern pioneers, this Jacksonian [ 343 ] democracy, was, as its socialist critics have called it, in reality a democracy of "expectant capitalists," it was not one which expected or acknowledged on the part of the successful ones the right to harden their triumphs into the rule of a privileged class. In short, if it is indeed true that the backwoods democracy was based upon equality of opportunity, it is also true that it resented the conception that opportunity under competition should result in the hopeless inequality, or rule of class. Ever a new clearing must be possible. And because the wilderness seemed so unending, the menace to the enjoyment of this ideal seemed rather to be feared from government, within or without, than from the operations of internal evolution.

From the first, it became evident that these men had means of supplementing their individual activity by informal combinations. One of the things that impressed all early travelers in the United States was the capacity for extra-legal, voluntary association. [343:1] This was natural enough; in all America we can study the process by which in a new land social customs form and crystallize into law. We can even see how the personal leader becomes the governmental official. This power of the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common end without the intervention of governmental institutions was one of their marked characteristics. The log rolling, the house-raising, the husking bee, the apple paring, and the squatters' associations whereby they protected themselves against the speculators in securing title to their clearings on the public domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp, the vigilantes, the cattle-raisers' associations, the "gentlemen's agreements," are a few of the indications of this attitude. It is well to emphasize this American trait, because in a modified [ 344 ] way it has come to be one of the most characteristic and important features of the United States of to-day. America does through informal association and understandings on the part of the people many of the things which in the Old World are and can be done only by governmental intervention and compulsion. These associations were in America not due to immemorial custom of tribe or village community. They were extemporized by voluntary action.

The actions of these associations had an authority akin to that of law. They were usually not so much evidences of a disrespect for law and order as the only means by which real law and order were possible in a region where settlement and society had gone in advance of the institutions and instrumentalities of organized society.

Because of these elements of individualistic competition and the power of spontaneous association, pioneers were responsive to leadership. The backwoodsmen knew that under the free opportunities of his life the abler man would reveal himself, and show them the way. By free choice and not by compulsion, by spontaneous impulse, and not by the domination of a caste, they rallied around a cause, they supported an issue. They yielded to the principle of government by agreement, and they hated the doctrine of autocracy even before it gained a name.

They looked forward to the extension of their American principles to the Old World and their keenest apprehensions came from the possibility of the extension of the Old World's system of arbitrary rule, its class wars and rivalries and interventions to the destruction of the free States and democratic institutions which they were building in the forests of America.

If we add to these aspects of early backwoods democracy, its spiritual qualities, we shall more easily understand them. [ 345 ] These men were emotional. As they wrested their clearing from the woods and from the savages who surrounded them, as they expanded that clearing and saw the beginnings of commonwealths, where only little communities had been, and as they saw these commonwealths touch hands with each other along the great course of the Mississippi River, they became enthusiastically optimistic and confident of the continued expansion of this democracy. They had faith in themselves and their destiny. And that optimistic faith was responsible both for their confidence in their own ability to rule and for the passion for expansion. They looked to the future. "Others appeal to history: an American appeals to prophecy; and with Malthus in one hand and a map of the back country in the other, he boldly defies us to a comparison with America as she is to be," said a London periodical in 1821. Just because, perhaps, of the usual isolation of their lives, when they came together in associations whether of the camp meeting or of the political gathering, they felt the influence of a common emotion and enthusiasm. Whether Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, Baptist, or Methodist, these people saturated their religion and their politics with feeling. Both the stump and the pulpit were centers of energy, electric cells capable of starting widespreading fires. They felt both their religion and their democracy, and were ready to fight for it.

This democracy was one that involved a real feeling of social comradeship among its widespread members. Justice Catron, who came from Arkansas to the Supreme Court in the presidency of Jackson, said: "The people of New Orleans and St. Louis are next neighbors—if we desire to know a man in any quarter of the union we inquire of our next neighbor, who but the other day lived by him." Exaggerated as this is, it nevertheless had a surprising measure of truth for the Middle West as well. For the Mississippi River was the great [ 346 ] highway down which groups of pioneers like Abraham Lincoln, on their rafts and flat boats, brought the little neighborhood surplus. After the steamboat came to the western waters the voyages up and down by merchants and by farmers shifting their homes, brought people into contact with each other over wide areas.

This enlarged neighborhood democracy was determined not by a reluctant admission that under the law one man is as good as another; it was based upon "good fellowship," sympathy and understanding. They were of a stock, moreover, which sought new trails and were ready to follow where the trail led, innovators in society as well as finders of new lands.

By 1830 the Southern inundation ebbed and a different tide flowed in from the northeast by way of the Erie Canal and steam navigation on the Great Lakes to occupy the zone unreached by Southern settlement. This new tide spread along the margins of the Great Lakes, found the oak openings and small prairie islands of Southern Michigan and Wisconsin; followed the fertile forested ribbons along the river courses far into the prairie lands; and by the end of the forties began to venture into the margin of the open prairie.

In 1830 the Middle West contained a little over a million and a half people; in 1840, over three and a third millions; in 1850, nearly five and a half millions. Although in 1830 the North Atlantic States numbered between three and four times as many people as the Middle West, yet in those two decades the Middle West made an actual gain of several hundred thousand more than did the old section. Counties in the newer states rose from a few hundred to ten or fifteen thousand people in the space of less than five years. Suddenly, with astonishing rapidity and volume, a new people was forming with varied elements, ideals and institutions drawn [ 347 ] from all over this nation and from Europe. They were confronted with the problem of adjusting different stocks, varied customs and habits, to their new home.

In comparison with the Ohio Valley, the peculiarity of the occupation of the northern zone of the Middle West, lay in the fact that the native element was predominantly from the older settlements of the Middle West itself and from New York and New England. But it was from the central and western counties of New York and from the western and northern parts of New England, the rural regions of declining agricultural prosperity, that the bulk of this element came.

Thus the influence of the Middle West stretched into the Northeast, and attracted a farming population already suffering from western competition. The advantage of abundant, fertile, and cheap land, the richer agricultural returns, and especially the opportunities for youth to rise in all the trades and professions, gave strength to this competition. By it New England was profoundly and permanently modified.

This Yankee stock carried with it a habit of community life, in contrast with the individualistic democracy of the Southern element. The colonizing land companies, the town, the school, the church, the feeling of local unity, furnished the evidences of this instinct for communities. This instinct was accompanied by the creation of cities, the production of a surplus for market, the reaching out to connections with the trading centers of the East, the evolution of a more complex and at the same time a more integrated industrial society than that of the Southern pioneer.

But they did not carry with them the unmodified New England institutions and traits. They came at a time and from a people less satisfied with the old order than were their neighbors in the East. They were the young men with initiative, with discontent; the New York element especially was [ 348 ] affected by the radicalism of Locofoco democracy which was in itself a protest against the established order.

The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a mass of old habits and prepossessions. Said one of these pioneers in a letter to friends in the East:

If you value ease more than money or prosperity, don't come . . . Hands are too few for the work, houses for the inhabitants, and days for the day's work to be done. . . . Next if you can't stand seeing your old New England ideas, ways of doing, and living and in fact, all of the good old Yankee fashions knocked out of shape and altered, or thrown by as unsuited to the climate, don't be caught out here. But if you can bear grief with a smile, can put up with a scale of accommodations ranging from the soft side of a plank before the fire (and perhaps three in a bed at that) down through the middling and inferior grades; if you are never at a loss for ways to do the most unpracticable things without tools; if you can do all this and some more come on. . . . It is a universal rule here to help one another, each one keeping an eye single to his own business .

They knew that they were leaving many dear associations of the old home, giving up many of the comforts of life, sacrificing things which those who remained thought too vital to civilization to be left. But they were not mere materialists ready to surrender all that life is worth for immediate gain. They were idealists themselves, sacrificing the ease of the immediate future for the welfare of their children, and convinced of the possibility of helping to bring about a better [ 349 ] social order and a freer life. They were social idealists. But they based their ideals on trust in the common man and the readiness to make adjustments, not on the rule of a benevolent despot or a controlling class.

The attraction of this new home reached also into the Old World and gave a new hope and new impulses to the people of Germany, of England, of Ireland, and of Scandinavia. Both economic influences and revolutionary discontent promoted German migration at this time; economic causes brought the larger volume, but the quest for liberty brought the leaders, many of whom were German political exiles. While the latter urged, with varying degrees of emphasis, that their own contribution should be preserved in their new surroundings, and a few visionaries even talked of a German State in the federal system, what was noteworthy was the adjustment of the emigrants of the thirties and forties to Middle Western conditions; the response to the opportunity to create a new type of society in which all gave and all received and no element remained isolated. Society was plastic. In the midst of more or less antagonism between "bowie knife Southerners," "cow-milking Yankee Puritans," "beer-drinking Germans," "wild Irishmen," a process of mutual education, a giving and taking, was at work. In the outcome, in spite of slowness of assimilation where different groups were compact and isolated from the others, and a certain persistence of inherited morale , there was the creation of a new type, which was neither the sum of all its elements, nor a complete fusion in a melting pot. They were American pioneers, not outlying fragments of New England, of Germany, or of Norway.

The Germans were most strongly represented in the Missouri Valley, in St. Louis, in Illinois opposite that city, and in the Lake Shore counties of eastern Wisconsin north from Milwaukee. In Cincinnati and Cleveland there were many [ 350 ] Germans, while in nearly half the counties of Ohio, the German immigrants and the Pennsylvania Germans held nearly or quite the balance of political power. The Irish came primarily as workers on turnpikes, canals and railroads, and tended to remain along such lines, or to gather in the growing cities. The Scandinavians, of whom the largest proportion were Norwegians, founded their colonies in Northern Illinois, and in Southern Wisconsin about the Fox and the head waters of Rock River, whence in later years they spread into Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota.

By 1850 about one-sixth of the people of the Middle West were of North Atlantic birth, about one-eighth of Southern birth, and a like fraction of foreign birth, of whom the Germans were twice as numerous as the Irish, and the Scandinavians only slightly more numerous than the Welsh, and fewer than the Scotch. There were only a dozen Scandinavians in Minnesota. The natives of the British Islands, together with the natives of British North America in the Middle West, numbered nearly as many as the natives of German lands. But in 1850 almost three-fifths of the population were natives of the Middle West itself, and over a third of the population lived in Ohio. The cities were especially a mixture of peoples. In the five larger cities of the section natives and foreigners were nearly balanced. In Chicago the Irish, Germans and natives of the North Atlantic States about equaled each other. But in all the other cities, the Germans exceeded the Irish in varying proportions. There were nearly three to one in Milwaukee.

It is not merely that the section was growing rapidly and was made up of various stocks with many different cultures, sectional and European; what is more significant is that these elements did not remain as separate strata underneath an established ruling order, as was the case particularly in New [ 351 ] England. All were accepted and intermingling components of a forming society, plastic and absorptive. This characteristic of the section as "a good mixer" became fixed before the large immigrations of the eighties. The foundations of the section were laid firmly in a period when the foreign elements were particularly free and eager to contribute to a new society and to receive an impress from the country which offered them a liberty denied abroad. Significant as is this fact, and influential in the solution of America's present problems, it is no more important than the fact that in the decade before the Civil War, the Southern element in the Middle West had also had nearly two generations of direct association with the Northern, and had finally been engulfed in a tide of Northeastern and Old World settlers.

In this society of pioneers men learned to drop their old national animosities. One of the Immigrant Guides of the fifties urged the newcomers to abandon their racial animosities. "The American laughs at these steerage quarrels," said the author.

Thus the Middle West was teaching the lesson of national cross-fertilization instead of national enmities, the possibility of a newer and richer civilization, not by preserving unmodified or isolated the old component elements, but by breaking down the line-fences, by merging the individual life in the common product—a new product, which held the promise of world brotherhood. If the pioneers divided their allegiance between various parties, Whig, Democrat, Free Soil or Republican, it does not follow that the western Whig was like the eastern Whig. There was an infiltration of a western quality into all of these. The western Whig supported Harrison more because he was a pioneer than because he was a Whig. It saw in him a legitimate successor of Andrew Jackson. The campaign of 1840 was a Middle Western camp meeting on a [ 352 ] huge scale. The log cabins, the cider and the coonskins were the symbols of the triumph of Middle Western ideas, and were carried with misgivings by the merchants, the bankers and the manufacturers of the East. In like fashion, the Middle Western wing of the Democratic party was as different from the Southern wing wherein lay its strength, as Douglas was from Calhoun. It had little in common with the slaveholding classes of the South, even while it felt the kinship of the pioneer with the people of the Southern upland stock from which so many Westerners were descended.

In the later forties and early fifties most of the Middle Western States made constitutions. The debates in their conventions and the results embodied in the constitutions themselves tell the story of their political ideals. Of course, they based the franchise on the principle of manhood suffrage. But they also provided for an elective judiciary, for restrictions on the borrowing power of the State, lest it fall under the control of what they feared as the money power, and several of them either provided for the extinguishment of banks of issue, or rigidly restrained them. Some of them exempted the homestead from forced sale for debt; married women's legal rights were prominent topics in the debates of the conventions, and Wisconsin led off by permitting the alien to vote after a year's residence. It welcomed the newcomer to the freedom and to the obligations of American citizenship.

Although this pioneer society was preponderantly an agricultural society it was rapidly learning that agriculture alone was not sufficient for its life. It was developing manufactures, trade, mining, the professions, and becoming conscious that in a progressive modern state it was possible to pass from one industry to another and that all were bound by common ties. But it is significant that in the census of 1850, Ohio, out of a population of two millions, reported only a thousand [ 353 ] servants, Iowa only ten in two hundred thousand and Minnesota fifteen in its six thousand.

In the intellectual life of this new democracy there was already the promise of original contributions even in the midst of the engrossing toil and hard life of the pioneer.

The country editor was a leader of his people, not a patent-insides recorder of social functions, but a vigorous and independent thinker and writer. The subscribers to the newspaper published in the section were higher in proportion to population than in the State of New York and not greatly inferior to those of New England, although such eastern papers as the New York Tribune had an extensive circulation throughout the Middle West. The agricultural press presupposed in its articles and contributions a level of general intelligence and interest above that of the later farmers of the section, at least before the present day.

Farmer boys walked behind the plow with their book in hand and sometimes forgot to turn at the end of the furrow; even rare boys, who, like the young Howells, "limped barefoot by his father's side with his eyes on the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare."

Periodicals flourished and faded like the prairie flowers. Some of Emerson's best poems first appeared in one of these Ohio Valley magazines. But for the most part the literature of the region and the period was imitative or reflective of the common things in a not uncommon way. It is to its children that the Middle West had to look for the expression of its life and its ideals rather than to the busy pioneer who was breaking a prairie farm or building up a new community. Illiteracy was least among the Yankee pioneers and highest among the Southern element. When illiteracy is mapped for 1850 by percentages there appears two distinct zones, the one extending from New England, the other from the South.

The influence of New England men was strong in the Yankee regions of the Middle West. Home missionaries, and representatives of societies for the promotion of education in the West, both in the common school and denominational colleges, scattered themselves throughout the region and left a deep impress in all these States. The conception was firmly fixed in the thirties and forties that the West was the coming power in the Union, that the fate of civilization was in its hands, and therefore rival sects and rival sections strove to influence it to their own types. But the Middle West shaped all these educational contributions according to her own needs and ideals.

The State Universities were for the most part the result of agitation and proposals of men of New England origin; but they became characteristic products of Middle Western society, where the community as a whole, rather than wealthy benefactors, supported these institutions. In the end the community determined their directions in accord with popular ideals. They reached down more deeply into the ranks of the common people than did the New England or Middle State Colleges; they laid more emphasis upon the obviously useful, and became coëducational at an early date. This dominance of the community ideals had dangers for the Universities, which were called to raise ideals and to point new ways, rather than to conform.

Challenging the spaces of the West, struck by the rapidity with which a new society was unfolding under their gaze, it is not strange that the pioneers dealt in the superlative and saw their destiny with optimistic eyes. The meadow lot of the small intervale had become the prairie, stretching farther than their gaze could reach.

All was motion and change. A restlessness was universal. Men moved, in their single life, from Vermont to New York, [ 355 ] from New York to Ohio, from Ohio to Wisconsin, from Wisconsin to California, and longed for the Hawaiian Islands. When the bark started from their fence rails, they felt the call to change. They were conscious of the mobility of their society and gloried in it. They broke with the Past and thought to create something finer, more fitting for humanity, more beneficial for the average man than the world had ever seen.

"With the Past we have literally nothing to do," said B. Gratz Brown in a Missouri Fourth of July oration in 1850, "save to dream of it. Its lessons are lost and its tongue is silent. We are ourselves at the head and front of all political experience. Precedents have lost their virtue and all their authority is gone. . . . Experience can profit us only to guard from antequated delusions."

"The yoke of opinion," wrote Channing to a Western friend, speaking of New England, "is a heavy one, often crushing individuality of judgment and action," and he added that the habits, rules, and criticisms under which he had grown up had not left him the freedom and courage which are needed in the style of address best suited to the Western people. Channing no doubt unduly stressed the freedom of the West in this respect. The frontier had its own conventions and prejudices, and New England was breaking its own cake of custom and proclaiming a new liberty at the very time he wrote. But there was truth in the Eastern thought of the West, as a land of intellectual toleration, one which questioned the old order of things and made innovation its very creed.

The West laid emphasis upon the practical and demanded that ideals should be put to work for useful ends; ideals were tested by their direct contributions to the betterment of the average man, rather than by the production of the man of exceptional genius and distinction.

For, in fine this was the goal of the Middle West, the [ 356 ] welfare of the average man; not only the man of the South, or of the East, the Yankee, or the Irishman, or the German, but all men in one common fellowship. This was the hope of their youth, of that youth when Abraham Lincoln rose from rail-splitter to country lawyer, from Illinois legislator to congressman and from congressman to President.

It is not strange that in all this flux and freedom and novelty and vast spaces, the pioneer did not sufficiently consider the need of disciplined devotion to the government which he himself created and operated. But the name of Lincoln and the response of the pioneer to the duties of the Civil War,—to the sacrifices and the restraints on freedom which it entailed under his presidency, reminds us that they knew how to take part in a common cause, even while they knew that war's conditions were destructive of many of the things for which they worked.

There are two kinds of governmental discipline: that which proceeds from free choice, in the conviction that restraint of individual or class interests is necessary for the common good; and that which is imposed by a dominant class, upon a subjected and helpless people. The latter is Prussian discipline, the discipline of a harsh machine-like, logical organization, based on the rule of a military autocracy. It assumes that if you do not crush your opponent first, he will crush you. It is the discipline of a nation ruled by its General Staff, assuming war as the normal condition of peoples, and attempting with remorseless logic to extend its operations to the destruction of freedom everywhere. It can only be met by the discipline of a people who use their own government for worthy ends, who preserve individuality and mobility in society and respect the rights of others, who follow the dictates of humanity and fair play, the principles of give and take. The Prussian [ 357 ] discipline is the discipline of Thor, the War God, against the discipline of the White Christ.

Pioneer democracy has had to learn lessons by experience: the lesson that government on principles of free democracy can accomplish many things which the men of the middle of the nineteenth century did not realize were even possible. They have had to sacrifice something of their passion for individual unrestraint; they have had to learn that the specially trained man, the man fitted for his calling by education and experience, whether in the field of science or of industry, has a place in government; that the rule of the people is effective and enduring only as it incorporates the trained specialist into the organization of that government, whether as umpire between contending interests or as the efficient instrument in the hands of democracy.

Organized democracy after the era of free land has learned that popular government to be successful must not only be legitimately the choice of the whole people; that the offices of that government must not only be open to all, but that in the fierce struggle of nations in the field of economic competition and in the field of war, the salvation and perpetuity of the republic depend upon recognition of the fact that specialization of the organs of the government, the choice of the fit and the capable for office, is quite as important as the extension of popular control. When we lost our free lands and our isolation from the Old World, we lost our immunity from the results of mistakes, of waste, of inefficiency, and of inexperience in our government.

But in the present day we are also learning another lesson which was better known to the pioneers than to their immediate successors. We are learning that the distinction arising from devotion to the interests of the commonwealth is a [ 358 ] higher distinction than mere success in economic competition. America is now awarding laurels to the men who sacrifice their triumphs in the rivalry of business in order to give their service to the cause of a liberty-loving nation, their wealth and their genius to the success of her ideals. That craving for distinction which once drew men to pile up wealth and exhibit power over the industrial processes of the nation, is now finding a new outlet in the craving for distinction that comes from service to the Union, in satisfaction in the use of great talent for the good of the republic.

And all over the nation, in voluntary organizations for aid to the government, is being shown the pioneer principle of association that was expressed in the "house raising." It is shown in the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Knights of Columbus, the councils and boards of science, commerce, labor, agriculture; and in all the countless other types, from the association of women in their kitchen who carry out the recommendations of the Food Director and revive the plain living of the pioneer, to the Boy Scouts who are laying the foundations for a self-disciplined and virile generation worthy to follow the trail of the backwoodsmen. It is an inspiring prophecy of the revival of the old pioneer conception of the obligations and opportunities of neighborliness, broadening to a national and even to an international scope. The promise of what that wise and lamented philosopher, Josiah Royce called, "the beloved community." In the spirit of the pioneer's "house raising" lies the salvation of the Republic.

This then is the heritage of pioneer experience,—a passionate belief that a democracy was possible which should leave the individual a part to play in free society and not make him a cog in a machine operated from above; which trusted in the common man, in his tolerance, his ability to adjust differences with good humor, and to work out an American [ 359 ] type from the contributions of all nations—a type for which he would fight against those who challenged it in arms, and for which in time of war he would make sacrifices, even the temporary sacrifice of individual freedom and his life, lest that freedom be lost forever.

[335:1] An address delivered at the dedication of the building of the State Historical Society of Minnesota, May 11, 1918. Printed by permission of the Society.

[343:1] See De Tocqueville's interesting appreciation of this American phenomenon.

• Absentee proprietors, 55 , 297
• Achievement, 309
• Adams, Henry, 213
• Adams, J. Q., 26 , 192 , 230
• Agriculture, 314 , 329 ;
• Middle West, 149 , 150
• Agriculture, Department of, 320
• Alamance, 119 , 120
• Alaska, 296
• Albany, 43 , 52
• Albany congress of 1754, 15
• Algonquin Indians, 130
• Aliens, land tenure by, 110
• Alleghany Mountains, 9 , 18 , 67 ;
• as barrier to be overcome, 195
• Allen, Ethan, 54
• Allen, W. V., 220
• American Historical Assoc., 159
• American history, social forces, 311 ;
• survey of recent, 311
• American life, distinguishing feature, 2
• American people, 339
• American spirit, 306 , 336 , 337
• "American System," 171 , 172
• Americanization, effective, 4
• Arid lands, 9 , 147 , 219 , 239 , 245 , 278
• Aristocracy, 250 , 254 , 257 , 275
• Army posts, frontier, 16 ;
• prototypes, 47
• Association, voluntary, 343 , 344 , 358
• Astor's American Fur Co., 6 , 143
• Atlantic coast, as early frontier, 4 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 190 , 191 ;
• Northern, History, 295
• Atlantic frontier, composition, 12
• Atlantic states, 207 , 208
• Augusta, Ga., 98
• Autocracy, 344
• Back country, 68 , 70 ;
• democracy of, 248 ;
• New England, 75
• Backwoods society, 212
• Backwoodsmen, 163 , 164
• Bacon, Francis, 286
• Bacon's Rebellion, 84 , 247 , 251 , 301
• Baltimore, trade, 108
• Bancroft, George, 168
• Bank, 171 , 254 , 325
• Bedford, Pa., 5
• Beecher, Lyman, 35
• Bell, John, 192
• Benton, T. H., 26 , 35 , 192 , 325 , 328
• Berkshires, 60 , 71 , 77
• Beverley, Robert, 85 , 91 ;
• "Birch seal," 78
• Black Hills, 145
• Blackmar, F. W., 238
• Blank patents, 95
• Blood-feud, 253
• Blount, William, 187
• Blue Ridge, 90 , 99
• Boone, A. J., 19
• Boone, Daniel, 18 , 105 , 124 , 165 , 206
• Boston, trade, 108
• Boutmy, E. G., 211
• Braddock, Edward, 181 , 324
• Brattle, Thomas, 56
• British and Middle West, 350
• [ 362 ] Brown, B. Gratz, 355
• Brunswick County, Va., 91
• Bryan, W. J., 204 , 236 , 237 , 246 , 281 , 327 , 330
• Bryce, James, 165 , 206 , 211 , 284
• Buffalo, N. Y., 136 , 150 , 151
• Buffalo herds, 144
• Buffer state, 131 , 134
• Burke, Edmund, 33 ;
• on the Germans, 109
• Byrd, Col. William, 84 , 87 , 98
• Calhoun, J. C., 2 , 105 , 141 , 174 , 206 , 241 ;
• on representation, 117 ;
• policy of obtaining western trade for the South, 196
• California, 8 ;
• Canada, 53 , 226 ;
• barrier between, and the United States, 131 ;
• border warfare, 44 ;
• homesteads, 296 ;
• Middle West and, 128 ;
• wheat fields, 278
• Canadians, 227
• Canals, deep water, 150
• Capital, 276 , 305 , 325 ;
• concentration and combinations, 245 , 261 , 266 , 280 , 305-306
• "Capitalistic classes," 285
• Capitalists, 20 ;
• "expectant," 343
• Capitals, state, transfers, 121
• Captains of industry, 258 , 259 , 260
• Carnegie, Andrew, 260 , 265
• Caroline cow-pens, 16
• Catron, John, 345
• Cattle raising in Virginia, 88 , 89 , 92
• Census, first, frontier at, 5
• Census of 1820, frontier, 6
• Census of 1890, extinction of frontier, 1 , 9 , 38 , 39 , 297
• Center of nation, 222
• Channing, W. E., 355
• Charleston, S. C., 88 , 108 , 196
• Chase, S. P., 104 , 142
• Cherry Valley, 104
• Chicago, 137 , 150 , 151 , 180 , 350 ;
• character, 232
• Chillicothe, 133 , 223
• Cincinnati, 133 , 151 , 162 , 223 , 231 , 232
• Cincinnati and Charleston R. R., 174
• Cities, 297 , 316-317 ;
• northeastern, 294-295 ;
• seaboard, 194 , 195 , 196 ;
• three periods of development, 195
• Civil War, 356 ;
• Middle West and, 142 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 201 ;
• Northwest and, 217
• Clark, G. R., 131 , 167 , 186
• Clark, J. B., 332
• Class distinctions, 280 , 285
• Clay, Henry, 26 , 168 , 171 , 172 , 173 , 174 , 192 , 197 , 206 , 213 , 216 , 226 , 241 , 304 , 325
• Cleaveland, Gen. Moses, 133 , 222 , 257
• Cleveland, 133 , 150 , 223 , 231 , 232
• Clinton, De Witt, 195 , 196
• Coal supply, 313
• Coast, Atlantic, 206 ;
• destiny, 295 ;
• interior and, antagonisms, 110
• Coeducation, 353
• Colden, Cadwallader, 80
• Colonial life, 11
• Colonial system, 127
• Colonization, 312 ;
• English and French contrasted, 13-14 ;
• peaceful, 169
• Colony of free humanity, 337-338
• Columbus, Ohio, 162 , 229
• Combinations of capital and of labor, 245
• Commencement seasons, 290
• Commons, J. R., 327
• Community, "beloved community," 358 ;
• life, 347 ;
• type of settlement, 73 , 74 , 125
• Competition, 154 , 203 , 277 , 308 , 312
• [ 363 ] Compromise, 174 , 198 , 230 , 236 ;
• slavery, 140 , 142
• Concentration of power and wealth, 245 , 261 , 266 , 280
• Concord, Mass., 39
• Concurrent majority, 118
• Congregational church, 74 , 112
• Congress and frontiersmen, 252-253
• Connecticut, frontier towns, 42 , 45 , 53 ;
• land policy, 76
• Connecticut River, 52 , 53 , 72
• Connecticut Valley, 63 , 73
• Conquest, 269
• Conscience, American, 328
• Constitution, U. S., 209 , 244
• Constitutional convention of 1787, 249
• Constitutions, state, 121 , 252 , 352 ;
• reconstruction, 192
• Coöperation, voluntary, 165 , 257 , 258
• Corn, areas, 149 ;
• Corporations, 265 , 328
• Cotton culture, 28 , 139 , 255 ;
• early extension, 7 ;
• transfer from the East to Mississippi Valley, 194
• "Cotton Kingdom," 174 , 189 , 194 , 198
• Coureurs de bois, 182
• Cow pens, 16 , 88
• Crockett, Davy, 105
• Crops, migration, 149
• Currency, 148 ;
• expansion, 210
• Cutler, Manasseh, 141
• Dairy interests in Wisconsin, 234 , 236
• Dakotas, settlement, 145 , 146
• Darien, Ga., 98
• Davis, Jefferson, 105 , 139 , 174
• De Bow, J. D. B., 197
• De Bow's Review , 217
• Debs, E. V., 281
• Dedham, 40 , 58
• Deerfield, 48 , 52 , 58 , 70
• Democracy, 32 , 54 , 306 ;
• doubts of, 280 ;
• established in Old West, 107 ;
• free land and, 274 ;
• frontier, early, 106 ;
• frontier and, 30 , 31 , 247 , 249 ;
• Godkin on, 307 ;
• in early 18th century, 98 ;
• Jacksonian, 192 , 302 , 342-343 ;
• Jeffersonian, 250 , 251 ;
• magnitude of achievement in the West, 258 ;
• Middle West, 154 ;
• Mississippi Valley, 183 ;
• neighborhood, 346 ;
• new type in West, 210 , 216 ;
• Ohio Valley, influence, 172 ;
• Ohio Valley and, 175 ;
• organized, 357 ;
• origin, 293 ;
• outcome of American experiences, 266 ;
• pressure on the universities, 283 ;
• significance of Mississippi Valley in promoting, 190 ;
• Upland South, 165 ;
• Western contributions, 243 ;
• Western ideals, 261 ;
• see also Pioneer democracy
• Democratic party, 327 , 330 ;
• basis, 248 ;
• Middle Western wing, 352
• Democratic-Republican party, 250
• Denver, Colo., 19
• De Tocqueville. See Tocqueville
• Detroit, 135 , 150
• Development, American, 205 , 221 ;
• four changes, 244 ;
• personal, 271 ;
• significant decade, 246-247 ;
• study of, 10 ;
• true point of view, 3 ;
• Western, 218
• D'Iberville. See Iberville
• Discovery, 271 , 293 , 301 , 306
• Doddridge, Joseph, 115
• Dogs for hunting Indians, 45
• Douglas, S. A., 140 ;
• Lincoln debates, 230
• Douglas , William, 109
• Down east, 79
• [ 364 ] Dracut, 111
• Dreams, 301 , 339
• Duluth, 150 , 151 , 234
• Dunkards, 263
• Dunstable, 48 , 56
• Duquesne, Abraham, 14
• Dwight, Timothy (1752-1817), 63 ;
• fears of pioneer class, 251
• East, efforts to restrict advance of frontier, 33 , 34 ;
• fears of the West, 208 ;
• out of touch with West, 18
• Economic forces and political institutions, 243
• Economic historian, 332
• Economic legislation and Ohio Valley, 170
• Education, 282 ;
• Middle West, 156
• Edwards, Jonathan, 63
• Egleston, Melville, 55
• Eliot, C. W., on corporation, 265 ;
• on democracy and slavery, 256
• Emerson, R. W., 353 ;
• on Lincoln, 256
• England, decrease of dependence on, 23 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 180 , 186 ;
• Old Northwest and, 131 , 134
• English pioneers, 270
• English settlers in Michigan and Wisconsin, 226
• English stock and English speech, 23
• Equality, 274 ;
• New England, 61 , 62 , 63 ;
• Western settlers, 212
• Erie Canal, 7 , 136 , 195 , 197
• Europe, American democracy and, 282 ;
• how America reacted on, 3 ;
• Southeastern, 294 , 295 , 316
• Europeans, 267
• Evolution, American, as key to history, 11
• Expansion, 206 , 219 , 304 , 345 ;
• Ohio Valley and, 166 ;
• world politics, 246
• Experts, 284 , 285 , 286
• "Fall line," 4 , 9 , 68 ;
• efforts to establish military frontier on, 84
• Fairfax, Lord, 92 , 123
• Far East, 315
• Far West, 315 , 341
• Farm lands, 297
• Farm machinery, 276
• Farmers, 238 , 239
• Farmer's frontier, 12 , 16 , 18
• Federal colonial system, 168 , 169
• Federal Reserve districts, 322
• Fertility, 129
• Field, Marshall, 265
• Finance, 318 , 325 ;
• pioneer ideas, 148
• Fire-arms and Indians, 13
• Firmin, Giles, 56
• Food supply, 279 , 294 , 314
• Foreign parentage, Indiana and Illinois, 232 ;
• Michigan, 233 ;
• Western States, 237 ;
• Wisconsin, 233-234
• Foreign policy, 168 , 219
• Forest Service, 320
• Forest philosophy, 207
• "Foresters," 63
• Forests, 270 , 293 ;
• Middle West, 130
• Fortified houses, 71
• Fourierists, 263
• France, efforts to revive empire in America, 167 ;
• Middle West and, 131 ;
• western exploration, 163 ;
• Franchise, 249-250 , 252
• Franklin, Benjamin, Mississippi Valley and, 182 ;
• Free Soil party, 141 , 173 , 217
• [ 365 ] French explorers, 163
• French frontier, 125
• French settlers in Michigan and Wisconsin, 226
• Frontier, conservative attitude toward advance, 63 ;
• definition, 3 , 41 ;
• demand for independent statehood, 248 ;
• efforts to check and restrict it, 33 ;
• evil effects, 32 ;
• extinction, 1 , 9 , 38 , 39 , 321 ;
• farmers, 239 , 240 ;
• first official, 39 , 54 ;
• French, 125 ;
• importance as a military training school, 15 ;
• influence toward democracy, 247 , 249 ;
• kinds and modes of advance, 12 ;
• Massachusetts, 65 ;
• military, of Old West, 106-107 ;
• religious aspects, 36 ;
• Spanish, 125 ;
• towns in Massachusetts, 42 , 45 , 53 , 70 ;
• various comparisons, 10
• Frontiersmen, 206 , 209 , 212 ;
• in Congress, 252-253 ;
• Mississippi Valley, 182 ;
• Virginia idea, 86
• Fulton, Robert, 171
• Fur trade, 13 ;
• England after Revolution, 131 ;
• Hudson River, 80 ;
• Southern, Old West, 87
• Gallatin, Albert, 191 , 252 , 317
• Galveston, 202
• Garfield, J. A., 241
• Geographic factors, 329
• Geographic provinces, 158
• Georgia, 174 , 196 ;
• restriction of land tenure, 97 ;
• settlement, 97
• Germanic germs, 3 , 4
• Germans, 263 ;
• in New York in early times, 5 ;
• Middle West and, 137-138 , 146 ;
• Palatine, 5 , 82 , 100 , 109 , 124 ;
• political exiles, 349 ;
• sectaries, 164 ;
• Wisconsin, 23 , 227 , 236 ;
• zone of settlement in Great Valley, 102
• Glarus, 236
• Glenn, James, 23 , 108
• Godkin, E. L., 307
• Goochland County, Va., 93
• Government, 321 ;
• paternal, 328 ;
• popular, 357
• Government discipline, 356
• Government expeditions, 17
• Government intervention, 344
• Government ownership, 148
• Government powers, 307
• Government regulation, 281
• Granger movement, 148 , 203 , 218 , 276 , 281
• Grant, U. S., 142
• Granville, Lord, 95 , 123
• Great Lakes, 128 , 149 , 150 , 173 , 297
• Great Plains, 8 , 128 , 147 ;
• Indian trade and war, 144
• Great Valley, 100 ;
• colonization, 100-101
• Greater South, 174
• Greeley, Horace, 104
• Green Mountain Boys, 78
• Greenback movement, 148 , 203 , 218 , 276
• Greenway manor, 92
• Groseilliers, 180
• Groton, 48 , 57
• Grund, F. J., 7
• Grundy, Felix, 192
• Gulf coast, 295
• Gulf States, 141 ;
• occupation, 139
• Hammond, J. H., on slavery problem in the Mississippi Valley, 198
• Hanna, Marcus, 265
• Harriman, E. H., 280 , 318
• Harrison, W. H., 168 , 173 , 189 , 192 , 213 , 255
• Hart, A. B., 177
• Hartford, 76
• [ 366 ] Haverhill, 51 , 62
• Hayes, R. B., 241
• Henry, Patrick, 94
• Heroes, 254 , 256 ;
• Western, 213
• High thinking, 287
• Higher law, 239
• Hill, J. J., 260
• Historian, 333
• Historic ideals, 306 , 335
• Historical societies, 159-160 , 339
• History, character, 331-332 ;
• new viewpoints, 330
• Holland, J. G., 73
• Holst, H. E. von, 24
• Home markets, 108 , 216
• Home missions, 36 , 354
• Homestead law of 1862, 145 , 276
• Hoosier State, 224
• Housatonic River, 71
• Housatonic Valley, 72
• Houston, Sam, 105
• Howells, W. D., 353
• Hudson River, 53 , 79 ;
• frontier, 43 ;
• fur trade, 80
• Humanitarian movement, 327
• Huxley, T. H., on modern civilization, 300
• Iberville, P. le M. d', 180
• Icarians, 263
• Idealists, America the goal, 261 ;
• social, 349
• Ideals, 239 ;
• American, and the West, 290 ;
• American, loyalty to, 307 ;
• American historic, 306 , 335 ;
• immigrants, 264 ;
• Middle West, 153 ;
• Mississippi Valley, 203 ;
• pioneer, and the State university, 269 ;
• readjustment, 321 , 328 ;
• Western, 209 , 214 , 267 ;
• Western democracy and, 261
• Illinois, composite nationality, 232 ;
• elements of settlement, 225 ;
• settlement, 135
• Illiteracy in Middle West, 353
• Immigrants, 277 ;
• idealism, 264
• Immigration, 146 , 215 , 316
• Indian guides, 17
• Indian policy, 10
• Indian question, early, 9
• Indian reservations, 278
• Indian trade, 6 , 13 , 14 ;
• Middle West, 143 , 144
• Indian wars, 9 ;
• New England and, 69 ;
• Ohio Valley and, 167
• Indiana, character, 232 ;
• constitution, 282 ;
• elements in settlement, 223-224 ;
• settlement, 134
• Indianapolis, 162 , 229
• Indians, buffer state for England, 131 , 134 ;
• congresses to treat with, 15 ;
• effects of trades on, 13 ;
• hunting Indians with dogs, 45 ;
• influence on Puritans and New England, 44 ;
• Middle West and, 133 , 134 ;
• society, 13
• Individualism, 30 , 32 , 37 , 78 , 125 , 140 , 203 , 254 , 259 , 271 , 273 , 302 , 306 ;
• in the Old West, 107 ;
• reaction against, 307 ;
• Upland South, 165
• Industrial conditions, 280 , 281 , 285 ;
• Middle West, 149 , 154 ;
• Mississippi Valley, 194 , 201 ;
• Ohio Valley and, 175
• Industry, captains of, and large undertakings, 258 , 259 , 260 ;
• control, 318
• Inland waterways, 202
• Insurgent movement, 327
• Intellectual life and the frontier, 37
• Intercolonial congresses, 15
• Interior and coast, antagonisms, 110
• Internal commerce, 171 , 188
• Internal improvements, 27 , 28 , 29 , 111 , 170 , 172 , 216 , 257 ;
• [ 367 ] after 1812 to break down barrier to West, 195 ;
• Old West, 109
• Internal trade, Old West, 108 , 109
• Iowa, 141 , 143 ;
• elements and growth, 229 ;
• settlement, 137
• Ipswich, 56
• Iron mines in Middle West, 152
• Iron ore, 313
• Iroquois Indians, 13 , 80
• Irrigation, 258 , 279
• Izard, Ralph, 274
• Jackson, Andrew, 105 , 168 , 173 , 189 , 206 , 213 , 216 , 241 , 252 , 253 , 268 , 326 ;
• personification of frontier traits, 252 , 254
• Jackson, Stonewall, 105
• Jacksonian democracy, 192 , 302 , 342-343
• James River, 84 , 90 ;
• settlement, 93
• Jefferson, Thomas, 93 , 105 , 114 , 268 ;
• conception of democracy, 250 , 251 ;
• on England and the Mississippi, 186 ;
• on the pioneer in Congress, 253 ;
• on the importance of the Mississippi Valley, 188
• "Jim River" Valley, 145
• Johnson, R. M., 192
• Johnson, Sir William, 81 , 104
• Justice, direct forms in the West, 212
• Kansas, 142 , 144 , 146 , 151 ;
• Populists, 238 ;
• settlers, 237
• Kansas City, 151
• Kentucky, 19 , 122 , 162 , 167 , 168 , 169 , 192 , 225 , 253 ;
• slavery, 174
• King Philip's War 40 , 46 , 69
• Kipling, Rudyard, " Foreloper ," 270 ;
• "Son of the English," 262
• Labor, combinations, 245 ;
• composition of laboring class, 316
• Labor theorists, 303 , 326
• Lamar, L. Q. C. (1825-1893), 25
• Lancaster, Mass., 48 , 57 , 61
• Land, 328-329 ;
• abundance, 274 ;
• abundance, as basis of democracy, 191 , 192 ;
• alien tenure, 110 ;
• free, exhausted, 244-245 ;
• free Western, 211 , 259 ;
• fundamental fact in Western society, 211 ;
• "mongering," 61 ;
• see also Public lands
• Land companies, 123 , 347
• Land grants, 9 ;
• for schools and colleges, 74 ;
• to railroads, 276
• Land Ordinance of 1785, 132
• Land policies, 10
• Land system, "equality" principle in New England, 61 , 62 , 63 ;
• Georgia, 97 ;
• later federal, 123 ;
• New England, 54 ;
• New England conflicts, 75 ;
• New York State, 80 ;
• North Carolina, 95 ;
• Old West, 122 ;
• Pennsylvania, 101 ;
• Virginia, 91 ;
• Virginia grants to societies, 85
• La Salle, 180
• Laurentide glacier, 129
• Law and order, 298 , 344
• Leadership, 213 , 291 , 292 , 307 ;
• educated, 286
• Lease, Mary Ellen, 240
• Legislation, 277 , 307 ;
• frontier and, 24 ;
• Leicester, 59
• Leigh, B. W., 115
• Lewis and Clark, 13 , 17
• Liberty, Bacon on, 286 ;
• for universities, 287 ;
• individual, 213 ;
• Western, 212
• Life as a whole, 287
• Lincoln, Abraham, 105 , 135 , 142 , 174 , 206 , 213 , 217 , 225 , 241 , 268 , 304 , 356 ;
• Douglas debates, 230 ;
• [ 368 ] embodiment of pioneer period, 255-256 ;
• Ohio Valley, influence of, 175
• Lincoln, C. H., 113
• Litchfield, 71 , 76 , 124
• Livingston manor, 81 , 82
• Locofocos, 303 , 326 , 348
• Log cabin, 338
• "Log cabin campaign," 173
• London Company, 301
• Loria, Achille, 11
• Louisiana, 180 , 208
• Louisiana Purchase, 25 , 34 , 140 , 167 , 213 , 251 ;
• effect on Mississippi Valley, 189-190
• Louisville, 162
• Lowell, J. R., on Lincoln, 255
• Loyal Land Co., 123 , 182
• Lumber industry, 152 ;
• Wisconsin, 234-235
• Lumbermen, 272 , 273
• Lynch law, 212 , 272 ;
• New England, 78
• McKinley, William, 236 , 237 , 241
• Magnitude, 258 , 260 , 276
• Maine, 52-53
• Maine coast, 79
• Mallet brothers, 180
• Manila, battle of, 247
• Manorial practice in New York, 83
• Marietta, 124 , 133 , 223 , 257
• "Mark colonies," 70
• Marquette, Jacques, 180
• Martineau, Harriet, 214 , 303 , 339
• Massachusetts, attempt to locate frontier line, 39 ;
• frontier, 65 ;
• frontier towns, 42 , 45 , 53 , 70 ;
• locating towns before settlement, 76
• Mather, Cotton, attitude as to advancing frontier, 63
• Mesabi mines, 152 , 234
• Methodists, 238
• Mexico, 295
• Michigan, 135-136 , 137 ;
• development and resources, 233 ;
• settlement, 226 , 228
• Middle region, 27 ;
• in formation of the Old West, 79 ;
• typical American, 28
• Middle West, agriculture, 150 ;
• Canada and, 128 ;
• Civil War and, 142 ;
• early society, 153-154 ;
• education, 282 ;
• elements of settlement—Northern and Southern, 346 , 351 ;
• Europe and, 282 ;
• flow of population into, 132-133 ;
• forests, 130 ;
• Germans and, 137-138 ;
• Germans and Scandinavians, 146 ;
• idealism, 153 ;
• immigrants of varied nationalities, 349 ;
• importance, 126 , 128 ;
• increase of settlement in the fifties, 142-143 ;
• industrial organism, 149 ;
• meaning of term, 126 ;
• nationalism, 142 ;
• natural resources, 129 ;
• New England element, 137 ;
• peculiarity and influence, 347 ;
• pioneer democracy, 335 ;
• settlement, 135 , 342 ;
• slavery question and, 139 ;
• southern zone, 138
• Migration, 21 , 237 , 337 ;
• communal vs. individual, 125 ;
• crops, 149 ;
• interstate, 224 ;
• labor, 62 ;
• New England, and land policy, 77
• Militant expansive movement, 105
• Military frontier, 41 , 47 ;
• early form, 47 ;
• Old West, significance, 106-107 ;
• Virginia in later 17th century, 83 , 84
• Milwaukee, 137 , 227 , 236 , 350
• Miner's frontier, 12
• Mining camps, 9
• Mining laws, 10
• Minneapolis, 137 , 151 , 234
• Minnesota, 143 , 144 , 237 ;
• [ 369 ] economic development, 234 ;
• Historical Society, 335 , 338-339
• Missions to the Indians, 79
• Mississippi Company, 123 , 182
• Mississippi River, 7 , 9 , 142 , 185 , 194 , 345
• Mississippi Valley, 10 , 139 , 166-167 , 324 ;
• beginning of stratification, 197 ;
• Civil War and, 201 ;
• democracy and, 190 ;
• early population, 183 ;
• economic progress after 1812, 194 ;
• England's efforts to control, 180-181 ;
• extent, 179 ;
• French explorers in, 180 ;
• frontiersmen's allegiance, 186-187 ;
• idealism, social order, 203-204 ;
• industrial growth after the Civil War, 201-202 ;
• political power and growth from 1810 to 1840, 193 ;
• primitive history, 179 ;
• question of severance from the Union, 187 ;
• significance in American history, 177 , 185 ;
• slavery struggle and, 201 ;
• social forces, early, 183
• Missouri, 192
• Missouri Compromise, 140 , 174 , 226
• Missouri Valley, 135
• Mohawk Valley, 68 , 82
• Monroe, James, 150
• Monroe Doctrine, 296 ;
• Monticello, 93
• Moravians, 95 , 102
• Morgan, J. P., 318
• Mormons, 263
• Morris, Gouverneur, 207
• Nashaway, 57
• National problem, 293
• Nationalism, 29 ;
• evils of, 157 ;
• Middle West and, 142
• Nationalities, mixture, 27 ;
• replacement in Wisconsin, 235
• Naturalization, 110
• Nebraska, 144 , 145 , 220 ;
• New England, 27 , 301 ;
• back lands, 75 ;
• coast vs. interior, 111 ;
• colonies from, 124 ;
• culmination of frontier movement, 78 ;
• early official frontier line, 43 ;
• economic life, 78 ;
• effect on the West, 36 ;
• foreign element, 294 ;
• frontier protection, 46-47 ;
• frontier types, 43-44 ;
• Greater New England, 66 , 70 ;
• ideas, and Middle West, 348 ;
• Indian wars, 69 ;
• land system, 54 ;
• Middle West and, 347 ;
• Ohio settlement and, 223 ;
• Old West and, 68 ;
• Old West and interior New England, 70 ;
• pioneer type, 239 ;
• streams of settlement from, 215 ;
• two New Englands of the formative period of the Old West, 78-79
• New Englanders in the Middle West, 137 ;
• in Wisconsin and the lake region, 228 ;
• three movements of advance from the coast, 136 ;
• Westernized, 215 , 216
• New Glarus, 236
• New Hampshire, 69 , 72 , 77 , 111
• New Hampshire grants, 77
• New Northwest, 222
• New Orleans, 136 , 137 , 167 , 187 , 188 , 189 , 217 , 295
• New South, 218 ;
• Old West and, 100
• New West, 257
• New York City, 136 , 195 , 318
• New York State, early frontier, 43 ;
• lack of expansive power, 80 ;
• land system, 80 ;
• settlement from New England, 83 ;
• western, 230
• Newspapers of the Middle West, 353
• Nitrates, 279
• Norfolk, 195
• [ 370 ] North Carolina, 87 , 106 ;
• coast vs. upland, 116 ;
• in Indiana Settlement, 224 ;
• public lands, 95 ;
• settlement, 94 , 95 ;
• slavery, 122 ;
• taxation, 118 , 119
• North Central States, 126 ;
• region as a whole, 341
• North Dakota, development, 237
• Northampton, 63
• Northfield, 53
• Northwest, democracy, 356 ;
• Old and New, 222 ;
• see also Old Northwest
• Northwest Territory, 222
• Northwestern boundary, 324
• Norton, C. E., 208-209
• Norwegians, 232
• Nullification, 117 , 254
• Ohio, diversity of interests, 231-232 ;
• elements of settlement, 223 ;
• history, 133-134 ;
• New England element, 223 ;
• Southern contribution to settlement, 223
• Ohio Company, 123 , 133 , 141 , 182 , 223
• Ohio River, 5 , 161
• Ohio Valley, 104 ;
• as a highway, 162 ;
• economic legislation and, 170 ;
• effects on national expansion, 166 ;
• in American history, 157 ;
• influence on Lincoln, 175 ;
• part in making of the nation, 160 ;
• physiography, 160-161 ;
• relation to the South, 174 ;
• religious spirit, 164 , 165 ;
• stock and settlement, 164
• Oil wells, 297
• Oklahoma, 278 , 297
• Old National road, 136
• Old Northwest, 131 , 132 , 136 , 221 ;
• as a whole, 241-242 ;
• defined, 218 ;
• elements of settlement, 222 ;
• political position, 236 ;
• social origin, 222-223 ;
• Southern element in settlement, 223 , 225-226 ;
• turning point of control, 229
• "Old South," 166
• Old West, colonization of areas beyond the mountains, 124 ;
• consequences of formation, 106 ;
• New South and, 100 ;
• summary of frontier movement in 17th and early 18th centuries, 98 ;
• term defined, 68
• Old World, 261 , 267 , 294 , 299 , 344 , 349 ;
• effect of American frontier, 22 ;
• West and, 206 , 210
• Opportunity, 37 , 212 , 239 , 259-260 , 261 , 263 , 271-272 , 342 , 343
• Orangeburg, 96
• Ordinance of 1787, 25 , 132 , 168 , 190 , 223
• Oregon country, 144
• Orient, 297
• Osgood, H. L., 30
• Pacific coast, 168 , 219 , 304
• Pacific Northwest, 296
• Pacific Ocean, 297 , 315
• Packing industries, 151
• Palatine Germans, 5 , 22 , 100 , 109 , 124 ;
• New York State and, 82
• Palisades, 71
• Panama Canal, 295
• Panics, 279-280
• Paper money, 32 , 111 , 121 , 122 , 209
• Parkman, Francis, 70 , 72 , 144 , 163
• "Particular plantations," 41
• Past, lessons of, 355
• Patroon estates, 80
• Paxton Boys, 112
• Pecks "New Guide to the West," 19
• Penn, William, 262
• Pennsylvania, 23 , 27 ;
• [ 371 ] coast and interior, antagonisms, 112 ;
• German settlement, 82 , 100 ;
• Great Valley of, 68 , 164 ;
• land grants, 101 ;
• new Pennsylvania of the Great Valley, 100 ;
• Scotch-Irish, 103 , 104 ;
• settlement Of Old West part, 83
• Pennsylvania Dutch, 22 , 100 , 110
• Perrot, Nicolas, 180
• Philadelphia, 106 ;
• Physiographic provinces, 127
• Piedmont, 68 ;
• Virginia, 87 , 89
• Pig iron, 152 , 313
• Pine belt in Middle West, 143
• Pioneer democracy, lessons learned, 357 ;
• Middle West, 335
• Pioneer farmers, 21 , 206 , 257
• Pioneers, conservative fears about, 251 , 252 ;
• contest with capitalist, 325 ;
• contrast of conditions, 279 ;
• deeper significance, 338 ;
• essence, 271 ;
• ideals and the State university, 269 ;
• Middle West, 146 , 154 ;
• Ohio Valley, 167 ;
• old ideals, 148 ;
• Pittsburgh, 104 , 127 , 136 , 154-155 , 161 , 265 , 299 , 314 , 324
• Plain people, 256 , 267
• Political institutions, 243 ;
• frontier and, 24
• Political parties, 249 , 324
• Polk, J. K., 105 , 192 , 255
• Pontiac, 131 , 144
• Poor whites, 224
• Population center, 222
• Populists, 32 , 127 , 147 , 155 , 203 , 220 , 247 , 277 , 281 , 305 ;
• Kansas, 238
• Prairie Plains, 129
• Prairie states, 239
• Prairies, 218 , 236 , 276 , 348 ;
• settlement, 145 , 147
• Presbyterians, 105 , 106 , 109 , 164
• Presidency, 254 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 192 ;
• Old Northwest and, 222
• Prices, 313
• Princeton college, 106
• Pritchett, H. S., 282
• Privilege, 192 ;
• conflict against, 120 , 121
• Proclamation of 1763, 181
• Progressive Republican movement, 321
• Prohibitionists, 240
• "Proletariat," 285
• Property, 210 ;
• as basis of suffrage, 249
• Prosperity, 281
• Protection. See Tariff
• Provinces, geographic, 158
• Provincialism, desirable, 157 , 159
• Prussianism, 337 , 356
• Public lands, 25 , 132 , 303 ;
• policy of America, 26 , 170 ;
• Western lands, first debates on, 191
• Public schools, 266 , 282
• Puget Sound, 298
• Puritan ideals, 73 , 75 , 78 ;
• German conflict with, 138
• Puritanism, 27
• Puritans and Indians, 44
• Purrysburg, 97
• Pynchon , John, 51 , 52
• Quakers, 105 , 112 , 164 ;
• in settlement of Indiana, 224
• Quebec, Province of, 131
• Quincy, Josiah, 208
• Radisson, Sieur de, 180
• Railroads, administration by regions, 322 ;
• Chicago and, 150 ;
• continental, 247 ;
• in early fifties, 137 ;
• land grants to, 276 ;
• Mississippi Valley, 304 ;
• northwestern, 145 ;
• origin, 14 ;
• [ 372 ] speculative movement, 276 ;
• statistics, 314 ;
• western, 218
• Rancher's frontier, 12 , 16
• Ranches, 9 , 16 ;
• Virginia, 88
• Rappahannock River, 84 , 90 ;
• Reclamation, 298
• Reclamation Service, 320
• Red Cloud (Indian), 144
• Red River valley, 145
• Redemptioners, 22 , 90 , 97 , 100
• Reformers, 281 , 324 ;
• social, 262-263
• Regulation, War of the, 248
• Regulators, 116 , 119 , 120 , 212
• Religion of the Middle West, 345
• Religious freedom of the Old West, 121
• Religious spirit, Ohio Valley, 164 , 165 ;
• Upland South, 164 , 165
• Rensselaerswyck, 80
• Representation, 114 , 117 , 120
• Republican party, 327
• Research, 284 , 287 , 331
• Revolution, American, 30
• Rhodes, J. F., 24
• Richmond, Va., 108
• Rights, equal, 326-327 , 338 ;
• of man, 192
• Ripley, W. Z., 316
• Robertson, James, 105 , 187
• Rockefeller, J. D., 260 , 264-265
• Rocky Mountains, 8 , 9 , 10 , 298
• Roosevelt, Theodore, 202 , 204 , 281 , 319 , 327 ;
• on the Mississippi Valley, 178 ;
• "Winning of the West," 67
• Root, Elihu, 159
• Roxbury, 59
• Royce, Josiah, 157 , 358
• Rush, Richard, 317
• St. Louis, 151 , 161 , 229
• St. Paul, 137 , 234
• Salisbury, Mass., 56
• annual pilgrimage to coast for, 17
• Salt springs, 17 , 18
• Salzburgers, 97
• Sandys, Sir Edwin, 301
• Sault Ste. Marie Canal, 149
• Scalps, Massachusetts bounty for, 45
• Scandinavians, 263 , 350 ;
• Middle West, 146 ;
• Western life, 232-233 , 234
• Schools, early difficulties, 107 ;
• see also Public schools
• Schurz, Carl, 337
• Science, 284 , 330-331
• Scientific farming, 294
• Scotch Highlanders, 104 ;
• Georgia, 98
• Scotch-Irish, 5 , 22 , 71 ;
• migration in Great Valley and Piedmont, 103 ;
• Pennsylvania, 104 ;
• South Carolina, 97 ;
• Virginia, 86 , 91-92
• Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, 105 , 109 , 164
• Scovillites, 116
• Seaboard cities, 194 , 195 , 196
• Seattle, 298
• "Section" of land, 123 , 132
• Sectionalism, 27 , 28 , 52 , 157 , 215 , 220 , 321
• Sections, relation, 159
• Self-government, 169 , 190 , 207 , 248 , 275
• Self-made man, 219 , 318
• Servants, 60 , 353
• Service to the Union, 358
• Settlement, community type, 73 , 74
• Settler, 20
• Sevier, John, 105 , 187
• Seward, W. H., 141 ;
• on the Northwest, 230 ;
• [ 373 ] on the slavery issue in the Mississippi Valley, 199 , 200
• Shays' Rebellion, 112 , 119 , 122 , 249
• Sheffield, 71
• Sheldon, George, 58
• Shenandoah Valley, 68 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 99 , 105
• Sherman, W. T., 142
• Sibley, H. H. (1811-1891), 272 , 273 , 328
• Silver movement, 238 , 239 , 329
• Simsbury, 63
• Singletary, Amos, 240
• Sioux Indians, 130
• Six Nations, 15 , 83
• Slavery question, 24 , 29 , 98 , 111 , 139 , 304 , 330 ;
• compromise movement, 174 ;
• democracy and, 256 ;
• expansion, 174 ;
• Middle West and, 139 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 198 , 201 ;
• Northwest and, 230 ;
• slaves as property, 115 ;
• Virginia and North Carolina, 122
• Smith, Major Lawrence, 84
• Social control, 277
• Social forces, in American history, 311 ;
• mode of investigating, 330 ;
• on the Atlantic coast, 295 ;
• political institutions and, 243
• Social mobility, 355
• Social order, Mississippi Valley, 203-204 ;
• Social reformers, 262-263
• Socialism, 246 , 277 , 307 , 321
• Society, backwoods, 212 ;
• rebirth of in the West, 205
• Soils, 278 , 279 ;
• search for, 18
• Solid South, 217
• South, 27 , 166 , 218 ;
• contribution to settlement of Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), 223 , 225-226 ;
• Ohio Valley and, 174 ;
• solid, 217 ;
• transforming forces, 295 ;
• West and, 196 , 197 ;
• see also Upland South
• South Carolina, 174 ;
• condition of antagonism between coast and interior, 116 ;
• land system, townships, 96 ;
• South Dakota, development, 237
• Southeastern Europe, 294 , 299 , 316
• Southerners and the Middle West, 133-134 , 135 , 138
• Southwest, 297
• Spain, 167 , 181 , 246 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 184 , 185
• Spangenburg , A. G., 17
• Spanish America 181 , 182 , 295
• Spanish frontier, 125
• Spanish War, 246
• Speculation, 319
• Spoils system, 32 , 254
• Spotswood, Alexander, 22 , 88 , 90 , 91 , 113 , 247 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 180
• Spotsylvania County, Va., 90
• Spreckles, Claus, 265
• Squatter-sovereignty, 140
• Squatters, 272 , 343 ;
• doctrines, 273 , 328 ;
• ideal, 320 ;
• Middle West, 137 ;
• Ohio Valley, 170 ;
• Pennsylvania in 1726, 101
• Stark, John, 103-104
• State historical societies, 340
• State lines, 127
• State universities, 221 , 354 ;
• as safeguard of democracy, 286 ;
• peculiar power, 283-284 ;
• pioneer ideals and, 269 , 281
• States, checkerboard, 218 ;
• frontier pioneers' demand for statehood, 248 ;
• groups, 159 ;
• new states vs. Atlantic States, 207 ;
• System of, 168
• Staunton, Va., 92
• Steam navigation, 7 , 135 , 171
• [ 374 ] Steel and iron industry, 152
• Stockbridge, 79
• Stoddard, Solomon, 45
• Success, 288 , 309
• Sudbury, 39
• Suffrage, 192 , 216 ;
• basis, 249 ;
• frontier and extension, 30 ;
• manhood, 250 , 352
• Superior, Lake, 180 , 314 ;
• iron mines, 152
• Swedes, 233
• Symmes Purchase, 223
• Talleyrand, 299
• Taney, R. B., 141
• Tariff, 25 , 27 , 170 , 172 , 197 , 216
• Taylor, Zachary, 255
• Tecumthe, 134 , 144
• Tennessee, 122 , 168 , 187 , 225 , 252 , 253 ;
• democracy, 192
• Tennyson's "Ulysses," 310
• Territories, system of, 168 , 169
• Thomas, J. B., 174
• Tocqueville, A. C. H. C. de, 153 , 275 , 303 , 343
• Toledo, Ohio, 231
• Toleration, 355
• Town meeting, 62
• Towns, legislating into existence, 125 ;
• locating, Massachusetts, 76 ;
• New England and Virginia, 41 ;
• new settlements in New England, 55 ;
• South Carolina, 96 ;
• typical form of establishing in New England, 74 ;
• Virginia, 85 , 86
• Trader's frontier, 12 ;
• effects following, 12 ;
• rapidity of advance, 12 , 13
• Trading posts, 14
• Transportation, 148 ;
• Great Lakes, 150
• Tryon, William, 106
• Tuscarora War, 94 , 95
• Ulstermen, 103
• Unification of the West, 215
• United States, collection of nations, 158 ;
• development since 1890, 311 ;
• federal aspect, 159 ;
• fundamental forces, 311 ;
• original contribution to society, 281-282 ;
• wealth, 312
• U. S. Steel Corporation, 152-153 , 247 , 265 , 313
• Universities, duties, 292 ;
• function, 287 ;
• influence of university men, 285 ;
• need of freedom, 287 ;
• pressure of democracies on, 283 ;
• State and, 286 ;
• see also State universities
• Upland South, 164 ;
• religious spirit, 164 , 165
• Van Buren, Martin, 254 , 326
• Van Rensselaer manor, 81
• Vandalia, 229
• Verendryes, the, 180
• Vermont, 69 , 72 , 77 , 78 , 111 , 122 , 136
• Vermonters in Wisconsin and Michigan, 228
• Vicksburg, 201
• Vigilance committees, 212
• Vinton, S. F., 141 , 229
• Virginia, 301 ;
• early attempt to establish frontier, 41 ;
• Indian wars, 69-70 ;
• inequalities, coast vs. interior, 113 ;
• interest in Mississippi Valley, 182 ;
• land grants, 91 ;
• land grants to societies, 85 ;
• Piedmont, society, 95 ;
• Piedmont portions, 87 , 89 ;
• settlement in latter part of 17th century, 83 ;
• two Virginias in later 17th century, 94 ;
• Western democracy and, 250
• Virginia Convention of 1829-30, 28 , 31
• [ 375 ] Visions, 270 , 331 , 339-340
• Voyageurs, 17
• Wachovia, 95
• Walker, F. A., 128
• War of 1812, 168 , 213
• Washington, George, 92 , 124 ;
• Mississippi Valley and, 181 , 182 , 194 , 196 , 324 ;
• Ohio Valley and, 163 , 167
• Wealth, 213-214 , 219 , 288 , 319 ;
• democracy versus, 192 ;
• in politics, 173 ;
• United States, 312
• Wells (town), 47
• "Welsh tract," 97
• Wentworth, Benning, 77
• West, American ideals and, 290 ;
• beginning of, 6 ;
• center of interest, 327 ;
• constructive force, 206 ;
• contributions to democracy, 243 ;
• factor in American history, 1 , 3 ;
• ideals, 209 , 214 , 267 ;
• indefiniteness of term, 126 ;
• insurgent voice, 319 ;
• main streams of settlement, 215 ;
• mark of New England, 36 ;
• phase of division, 216-217 ;
• population, 35 ;
• problem of, 205 ;
• South and, 196 , 197 ;
• warnings against, 208 , 209 ;
• Middle West; see also Old West ; Old Northwest
• West Virginia, 114
• Westchester County, N. Y., 81
• Western colleges, 36
• Western life, dominant forces, 222
• Western Reserve, 124 , 133
• Western spirit, 310
• "Western Waters," 161 , 206 , 302 ;
• men of freedom and independence, 183
• "Western World," 161 , 166 , 206 , 302 ;
• basis of its civilization, 177
• Wheat, 329 ;
• Whig party, 27 , 173 , 304 , 351
• White, Abraham, 240
• White, Hugh, 192
• Whitman, Walt, 336
• Wilderness, 262 , 269 , 270 , 279
• Wilkinson, James, 169 , 187
• Williams, John (1664-1729), 70
• Williams, Roger, 262
• Windsor, 76
• Winthrop, John, 62
• Wisconsin, 137 , 138 , 218 , 294 , 341 ;
• development and elements, 233-234 ;
• German element, 227 , 228 , 236 ;
• New England element, 228 ;
• settlement, 226 , 227
• Wood, Abraham, 98
• Woodstock, 59
• World's fairs, 156
• World-politics, 246 , 315
• Wyoming Valley, 79 , 124
• Yemassee War, 95
• "Young America" doctrine, 140

The following words appear in the text with and without hyphens. They have been left as in the original.

The following corrections have been made to the text:

page 25—as the nation marched westward.[period is missing in original]

page 40, footnote 40:5—"American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,"[quotation mark missing in original]

page 48, footnote 48:4—Sheldon, "Deerfield,"[quotation mark missing in original]

page 49—your honours [original has extraneous opening parenthesis]we haue but litel laft

page 53—the frontier Towns.[original has extraneous quotation mark]

page 68, footnote 68:1—Powell, "Physiographic Regions[original has extraneous single quote]"

page 75, footnote 75:1—Egleston[original has Eggleston], "Land System of the New England Colonies,"

page 86—at least three foot within the ground."[quotation mark missing in original]

page 96, footnote 96:3—(N. Y., 1899)[closing parenthesis missing in original], pp. 149, 151;

page 117, footnote 117:3—pp. 440-447[original has 440-437]

page 118—it was being exploited,[original has period]

page 118, footnote 118:2—N. C.[original has N .C.]

page 123—Preëmption and preëmptions are hyphenated across line breaks in the original. The diaresis has been reinserted in the rejoined words.

page 163—American backwoodsmen[original has backswoodsmen]

page 167—to add the settlements[original has setlements]

page 171—social conditions of the people whose[original has who] needs

page 236—stronghold of resistance[original has resistence]

page 254—formal law and the subtleties[original has subleties]

page 268—that dwarf [original has extraneous word of] those of the Old World

page 310—to pause, to make an end,[original has period]

page 348—to his own business.[original has extraneous quotation mark]

page 353—at least before [original has extraneous word at] the present day

page 362—Bryan, W. J., 204, 236, 237, 246, 281, 327, 330[original has 329]

page 363, under Democracy—Godkin[original has Gookin] on, 307

page 363—Democratic party, 327, 330[original has 329]

page 363—Discovery, 271[original has 270], 293, 301, 306

page 363—Douglas[original has Douglass], William, 109

page 364—Forest[original has Foreign] Service, 320

page 364, under Germans—Palatine, 5, 82, 100, 109, 124[original also lists page 32 in error]

page 366—Henry, Patrick, 94[original has 95]

page 366, under Indians—hunting Indians with dogs, 45[original has 95]

page 367—Kipling, Rudyard, "Foreloper[original has Toreloper]," 270

page 368—Marietta, 124, 133[original has 132], 223, 257

page 368, under Michigan—development and resources, 233[original has 232]

page 371—Pynchon[original has Pyrichon], John, 51, 52

page 373—Spangenburg[original has Spangenberg], A. G.

Spelling and punctuation errors in quoted material have been left as in the original.

The index entry for James Glenn was after the entry for E. L. Godkin. The two entries were reversed to maintain alphabetical order. Index entries for Leicester and Leigh, B. W., were combined with the Legislation entry. Entries were moved as appropriate.

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Why was the Turner Thesis abandoned by historians

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the American frontier defined the study of the American West during the 20th century. In 1893, Turner argued that “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” ( The Frontier in American History , Turner, p. 1.) Jackson believed that westward expansion allowed America to move away from the influence of Europe and gain “independence on American lines.” (Turner, p. 4.) The conquest of the frontier forced Americans to become smart, resourceful, and democratic. By focusing his analysis on people in the periphery, Turner de-emphasized the importance of everyone else. Additionally, many people who lived on the “frontier” were not part of his thesis because they did not fit his model of the democratizing American. The closing of the frontier in 1890 by the Superintendent of the census prompted Turner’s thesis.

Despite its faults, his thesis proved powerful because it succinctly summed up the concerns of Turner and his contemporaries. More importantly, it created an appealing grand narrative for American history. Many Americans were concerned that American freedom would be diminished by the end of colonization of the West. Not only did his thesis give voice to these Americans’ concerns, but it also represented how Americans wanted to see themselves. Unfortunately, the history of the American West became the history of westward expansion and the history of the region of the American West was disregarded. The grand tapestry of western history was essentially ignored. During the mid-twentieth century, most people lost interest in the history of the American West.

While appealing, the Turner thesis stultified scholarship on the West. In 1984, colonial historian James Henretta even stated, “[f]or, in our role as scholars, we must recognize that the subject of westward expansion in itself longer engages the attention of many perhaps most, historians of the United States.” ( Legacy of Conquest , Patricia Limerick, p. 21.) Turner’s thesis had effectively shaped popular opinion and historical scholarship of the American West, but the thesis slowed continued academic interest in the field.

Reassessment of Western History

In the last half of the twentieth century, a new wave of western historians rebelled against the Turner thesis and defined themselves by their opposition to it. Historians began to approach the field from different perspectives and investigated the lives of Women, miners, Chicanos, Indians, Asians, and African Americans. Additionally, historians studied regions that would not have been relevant to Turner. In 1987, Patricia Limerick tried to redefine the study of the American West for a new generation of western scholars. In Legacy of Conquest, she attempted to synthesize the scholarship on the West to that point and provide a new approach for re-examining the West. First, she asked historians to think of the America West as a place and not as a movement. Second, she emphasized that the history of the American West was defined by conquest; “[c]onquest forms the historical bedrock of the whole nation, and the American West is a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences.” (Limerick, p. 22.)

Finally, she asked historians to eliminate the stereotypes from Western history and try to understand the complex relations between the people of the West. Even before Limerick’s manifesto, scholars were re-evaluating the west and its people, and its pace has only quickened. Whether or not scholars agree with Limerick, they have explored new depths of Western American history. While these new works are not easy to categorize, they do fit into some loose categories: gender ( Relations of Rescue by Peggy Pascoe), ethnicity ( The Roots of Dependency by Richard White, and Lewis and Clark Among the Indians by James P. Rhonda), immigration (Impossible Subjects by Ming Ngai), and environmental (Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster) history. These are just a few of the topics that have been examined by American West scholars. This paper will examine how these new histories of the American West resemble or diverge from Limerick’s outline.

Defining America or a Threat to America's Moral Standing

Peggy Pascoe’s Relations of Rescue described the creation and operation of Rescue Homes in Salt Lake City, the Sioux Reservation, Denver and San Francisco by missionary women for abused, neglected and exploited women. By focusing on the missionaries and the tenants of these homes, Pascoe depicted not just relations between women, but provided examples of how missionaries responded to issues which they believed were unique in the West. Issues that not only challenged the Victorian moral authority but threatened America’s moral standing. Unlike Turner, the missionary women did not believe that the West was an engine for democracy; instead, they envisioned a place where immoral practice such as polygamy, prostitution, premarital pregnancy, and religious superstition thrived and threatened women’s moral authority. Instead of attempting to portray a prototypical frontier or missionary woman, Pascoe reveals complicated women who defy easy categorization. Instead of re-enforcing stereotypes that women civilized (a dubious term at best) the American West, she instead focused on three aspects of the search for female moral authority: “its benefits and liabilities for women’s empowerment; its relationship to systems of social control; and its implication for intercultural relations among women.” (Pascoe, p. xvii.) Pascoe used a study of intercultural relations between women to better understand each of the sub-cultures (missionaries, unmarried mothers, Chinese prostitutes, Mormon women, and Sioux women) and their relations with governmental authorities and men.

Unlike Limerick, Pascoe did not find it necessary to define the west or the frontier. She did not have to because the Protestant missionaries in her story defined it for her. While Turner may have believed that the West was no longer the frontier in 1890, the missionaries certainly would have disagreed. In fact, the rescue missions were placed in the communities that the Victorian Protestant missionary judged to be the least “civilized” parts of America (Lakota Territory, San Francisco’s Chinatown, rough and tumble Denver and Salt Lake City.) Instead of being a story of conquest by Victorian or western morality, it was a story of how that morality was often challenged and its terms were negotiated by culturally different communities. Pascoe’s primary goal in this work was not only to eliminate stereotypes but to challenge the notion that white women civilized the west. While conquest may be a component of other histories, no one group in Pascoe’s story successfully dominated any other.

Changing the Narrative of Native Americans in the West

Two books were written before Legacy was published, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (James Rhonda) and The Roots of Dependency (Richard White) both provide a window into the world of Native Americans. Both books took new approaches to Native American histories. Rhonda’s book looked at the familiar Lewis and Clark expedition but from an entirely different angle. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Native American tribes they encountered. White’s book also sought to describe the interactions between the United States and the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, but he sought to explain why the economies of these tribes broke down after contact. Each of these books covers new ground by addressing the impact of these interactions between the United States and the Native Americans.

Whether or not Rhonda’s work is an example of the New Western History is debatable, but he sought to eliminate racial stereotypes of Native Americans and describe the first governmental attempt to conquer the western landscape by traversing it. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Indians who encountered it. While Rhonda’s book may resemble a classic Lewis and Clark history, it provides a much more nuanced examination of the limitations and effectiveness of the diplomatic aspects of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He took a great of time to describe each of the interactions with the Indian tribes in detail. Rhonda recognized that the interactions between the expedition and the various tribes were nuanced and complex. Rhonda’s work clarified that Native Americans had differing views of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Any stereotypes the reader may have regarding the Native Americans with would have shattered. Additionally, Rhonda described how the expedition persevered despite its clumsy attempts at diplomacy.

Instead of describing the initial interactions of the United States government with the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, White explained how the self-sufficient economies of these people were destroyed. White described how the United States government turned these successful native people into wards of the American state. His story explained how the United States conquered these tribes without firing a shot. The consequence of this conquest was the creation of weak, dependent nations that could not survive without handouts from the federal government. Like Rhonda, White also sought to shatter long-standing stereotypes and myths regarding Native Americans. White verified that each of these tribes had self-sufficient economies which permitted prosperous lifestyles for their people before the devastating interactions with the United States government occurred. The United States in each case fundamentally altered the tribes’ economies and environments. These alterations threatened the survival of the tribes. In some cases, the United States sought to trade with these tribes in an effort put the tribes in debt. After the tribes were in debt, the United States then forced the tribes to sell their land. In other situations, the government damaged the tribes’ economies even when they sought to help them.

Even though White book was published a few years before Legacy, The Roots of Dependency certainly satisfies some of Limerick’s stated goals. Conquest and its consequences are at the heart of White’s story. White details the problems these societies developed after they became dependant on American trade goods and handouts. White also dissuaded anyone from believing that the Native American economies were inefficient. The Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos economies were successful. The Choctaws and Pawnees had thriving economies and their food supplies were more than sufficient. While the Navajos were not as successful as the other two tribes, their story was remarkable because they learned how to survive in some of the most inhospitable lands in the American West. These stories exploded the myths that the Native Americans subsistence economies were somehow insufficient.

The Impact of Immigrants to the West

The American West was both a borderland and a destination for a multitude of immigrants. Native Americans, Spaniards, Mexicans, Anglos, and Asians have all immigrated into the American West. The American West has seen waves of immigration. These immigrants have constantly changed the complexion of its people. Starting with the Native Americans who first moved into the region and the most recent tide of undocumented Mexican immigrants, the West has always been a place where immigrants seeking their fortunes. The California gold rush brought in a number of immigrants who did not fit their American ideal. When non-whites started immigrating to California, the United States was faced with a new problem, the introduction of people who could not become citizens. Chinese immigrants troubled the Anglo majority because they could not be easily assimilated into American society. Additionally, many Americans were perplexed by their substantially different appearances, clothing, religions, and cultures. Anglos became concerned that the new immigrants differed too much from them. In 1924, after 150 years of unregulated immigration, the United States Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, the most restrictionist immigration law in US history. The Johnson-Reed Act was specifically designed to keep the most undesirable races out of America, but immigrants continued to arrive in America without documents. Ming Ngai’s Impossible Subjects addresses this new class of immigrants: illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants began to flow into the United States soon after the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act.

While illegal immigration is not an issue isolated to the history of the American West, the immigrants moved predominantly into California, Texas and the American Southwest. Like Anglo settlers who were attracted to the West for the potential for new life in the nineteenth century, illegal immigrants continued to move in during the twentieth. The illegal immigrants were welcomed, despite their status, because California’s large commercial farms needed inexpensive labor to harvest their crops. Impossible Subjects describes four groups of illegal immigrants (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican braceros) who were created by the United States immigration policy. Ngai specifically examines the role that the government played in defining, controlling and disciplining these groups for their allegedly illegal misconduct.

Impossible Subjects is not a book on the American West, but it is a book that is very much about the American West. While Ngai’s story primarily takes place in the American West she does not appear to have any interest in defining the West because her story has national implications. The American West is relevant to her study only because it was where most of the illegal immigrants described in her story lived and worked. Additionally, it is not a story of conquest and its consequences, but it introduced the American public and scholars to members of the American society that are silent. Limerick even stated that while “Indians, Hispanics, Asians, blacks, Anglos, businesspeople, workers, politicians, bureaucrats, natives and newcomers” all shared the same region, they still needed to be introduced to one another. In addition to being a sophisticated policy debate on immigration law, Ngai’s work introduced Americans to these people. (Limerick, p. 349.)

The Rise of Western Environmental History

Environmental history has become an increasingly important component of the history of the American West. Originally, the American West was seen as an untamed wilderness, but over time that description has changed. Two conceptually different, but nonetheless important books on environmental history discussed the American West and its importance in America. Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon and Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster each explored the environment and the economy of the American West. Cronon examined the formation of Chicago and the importance of its commodities market for the development of the American West. Alternatively, Worster focuses on the creation of an extensive network of government subsidized dams in the early twentieth century. Rivers of Empire describes that despite the aridity of the natural landscape the American West became home to massive commercial farms and enormous swaths of urban sprawl.

In Nature’s Metropolis , Cronon, used the central place theory to analyze the economic and ecological development of Chicago. Johann Heinrich von Thunen developed the central place theory to explain the development of cities. Essentially, geographically different economic zones form in concentric circles the farther you went from the city. These different zones form because of the time it takes to get the different types of goods to market. Closest to the city and then moving away you would have the following zones: first, intensive agriculture, second, extensive agriculture, third, livestock raising, fourth, trading, hunting and Indian trade and finally, you would have the wilderness. While the landscape of the Mid-West was more complicated than this, Cronon posits that the “city and country are inextricably connected and that market relations profoundly mediate between them.” (Cronon, p. 52.) By emphasizing the connection between the city of Chicago and the rural lands that surrounded it, Cronon was able to explain how the land, including the West, developed. Cronon argued that the development of Chicago had a profound influence on the development and appearance of the Great West. Essentially Cronon used the creation of the Chicago commodities and trading markets to explain how different parts of the Mid-West and West produced different types of resources and fundamentally altered their ecology.

According to Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire, economics played an equally important role in the economic and environmental development of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Slope states. Worster argued that the United States wanted to continue creating family farms for Americans in the West. Unfortunately, the aridity of the west made that impossible. The land in the West simply could not be farmed without water. Instead of adapting to the natural environment, the United States government embarked on the largest dam building project in human history. The government built thousands of dams to irrigate millions of acres of land. Unfortunately, the cost of these numerous irrigation projects was enormous. The federal government passed the cost on to the buyers of the land which prevented family farmers from buying it. Therefore, instead of family farms, massive commercial farms were created. The only people who could afford to buy the land were wealthy citizens. The massive irrigation also permitted the creation of cities which never would have been possible without it. Worster argues that the ensuing ecological damage to the West has been extraordinary. The natural environment throughout the region was dramatically altered. The west is now the home of oversized commercial farms, artificial reservoirs which stretch for hundreds of miles, rivers that run only on command and sprawling cities which depend on irrigation.

Both Cronon and Worster described how commercial interests shaped the landscape and ecology of the American West, but their approaches were very different. Still, each work fits comfortably into the new western history. Both Cronon and Worster see the West as a place and not as a movement of westward expansion. Cronon re-orders the typical understanding of the sequence of westward expansion. Instead of describing the steady growth of rural communities which transformed into cities, he argued that cities and rural areas formed at the same time. Often the cities developed first and that only after markets were created could land be converted profitable into farms. This development fits westward development much more closely than paradigms that emphasized the creation of family farms. Worster defines the West by its aridity. While these definitions differ from Limerick’s, they reflect new approaches. Conquest plays a critical role in each of these books. Instead of conquering people, the authors describe efforts to conquer western lands. In Cronon, westerners forever altered the landscape of the west. Agricultural activities dominated the zones closest to Chicago, cattle production took over lands previously occupied by the buffalo, and even the wilderness was changed by people to satisfy the markets in Chicago. The extensive damming of the West’s rivers described by Worster required the United States government to conquer, control and discipline nature. While this conquest was somewhat illusory, the United States government was committed to reshaping the West and ecology to fit its vision.

Each of these books demonstrates that the Turner thesis no longer holds a predominant position in the scholarship of the American West. The history of the American West has been revitalized by its demise. While westward expansion plays an important role in the history of the United States, it did not define the west. Turner’s thesis was fundamentally undermined because it did not provide an accurate description of how the West was peopled. The nineteenth century of the west is not composed primarily of family farmers. Instead, it is a story of a region peopled by a diverse group of people: Native Americans, Asians, Chicanos, Anglos, African Americans, women, merchants, immigrants, prostitutes, swindlers, doctors, lawyers, farmers are just a few of the characters who inhabit western history.

Suggested Readings

• Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History
• Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest
• Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue
• Richard White, The Roots of Dependency
• Nature's Metropolis, William Cronon
• Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster
• Historiography
• Book Review
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The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

Westward Expansion Reader

Primary source: frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

• The American Yawp Reader. Located at : http://www.americanyawp.com/reader.html . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Was Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis Myth or Reality?

Two scholars debate this question.

Written by: (Claim A) Andrew Fisher, William & Mary; (Claim B) Bradley J. Birzer, Hillsdale College

Suggested sequencing.

• Use this Point-Counterpoint with the  Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893  Primary Source to give students more background on individualism and western expansion.

Issue on the Table

Was Turner’s thesis a myth about the individualism of the American character and the influence of the West or was it essentially correct in explaining how the West and the advancing frontier contributed to the shaping of individualism in the American character?

Instructions

Read the two arguments in response to the question, paying close attention to the supporting evidence and reasoning used for each. Then, complete the comparison questions that follow. Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates.

Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people. The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. In his famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that the process of westward expansion had transformed our European ancestors into a new breed of people endowed with distinctively American values and virtues. In particular, the frontier experience had supposedly fostered democracy and individualism, underpinned by the abundance of “free land” out West. “So long as free land exists,” Turner wrote, “the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.” It was a compelling articulation of the old Jeffersonian Dream. Like Jefferson’s vision, however, Turner’s thesis excluded much of the nation’s population and ignored certain historical realities concerning American society.

Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism. The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins. His definition of the frontier, following that of the U.S. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. That effectively meant “where white people were scarce,” in the words of historian Richard White; or, as Patricia Limerick puts it, “where white people got scared because they were scarce.” American Indians only mattered to Turner as symbols of the “savagery” that white pioneers had to beat back along the advancing frontier line. Most of the “free land” they acquired in the process came from the continent’s vast indigenous estate, which, by 1890, had been reduced to scattered reservations rapidly being eroded by the Dawes Act. Likewise, Mexican Americans in the Southwest saw their land base and economic status whittled away after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that nominally made them citizens of the United States. Chinese immigrants, defined as perpetual aliens under federal law, could not obtain free land through the Homestead Act. For all these groups, Euro-American expansion and opportunity meant the contraction or denial of their own ability to achieve individual advancement and communal stability.

Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism. Although plenty of Euro-Americans used the homestead laws to get their piece of free land, they often struggled to make that land pay and to keep it in the family. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. To combat this situation, they turned to cooperative associations such as the Grange and the National Farmers’ Alliance, which blossomed into the Populist Party at the very moment Turner was writing about the frontier as the engine of American democracy. Perhaps it was, but not in the sense he understood. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America. Even cowboys, a pillar of the frontier myth, occasionally tried to organize unions to improve their wages and working conditions. Those seeking a small stake of their own—what Turner called a “competency”— in the form of their own land or herds sometimes ran afoul of concentrated capital, as during the Johnson County War of 1892. The big cattlemen of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association had no intention of sharing the range with pesky sodbusters and former cowboys they accused of rustling. Their brand of individualism had no place for small producers who might become competitors.

Turner took such troubles as a sign that his prediction had come true. With the closing of the frontier, he said, the United States would begin to see greater class conflict in the form of strikes and radical politics. There was lots of free land left in 1890, though; in fact, approximately 1 million people filed homestead claims between 1901 and 1913, compared with 1.4 million between 1862 and 1900. That did not prevent the country from experiencing serious clashes between organized labor and the corporations that had come to dominate many industries. Out west, socialistic unions such as the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World challenged not only the control that companies had over their employees but also their influence in the press and politics. For them, Turner’s dictum that “economic power secures political power” would have held a more sinister meaning. It was the rise of the modern corporation, not the supposed fading of the frontier, that narrowed the meanings of individualism and opportunity as Americans had previously understood them.

Young historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his academic paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago on July 12, 1893. He was the final presenter of that hot and humid day, but his essay ranks among the most influential arguments ever made regarding American history.

Turner was trained at the University of Wisconsin (his home state) and Johns Hopkins University, then the center of Germanic-type graduate studies—that is, it was scientific and objectivist rather than idealist or liberal. Turner rebelled against that purely scientific approach, but not by much. In 1890, the U.S. Census revealed that the frontier (defined as fewer than two people per square mile) was closed. There was no longer an unbroken frontier line in the United States, although frontier conditions lasted in certain parts of the American West until 1920. Turner lamented this, believing the most important phase of American history was over.

No one publicly commented on the essay at the time, but the American Historical Association reprinted it in its annual report the following year, and within a decade, it became known as the “Turner Thesis.”

What is most prominent in the Turner Thesis is the proposition that the United States is unique in its heritage; it is not a European clone, but a vital mixture of European and American Indian. Or, as he put it, the American character emerged through an intermixing of “savagery and civilization.” Turner attributed the American character to the expansion to the West, where, he said, American settlers set up farms to tame the frontier. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” As people moved west in a “perennial rebirth,” they extended the American frontier, the boundary “between savagery and civilization.”

The frontier shaped the American character because the settlers who went there had to conquer a land difficult for farming and devoid of any of the comforts of life in urban parts of the East: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.”

Politically and socially, according to Turner, the American character—including traits that prioritized equality, individualism, and democracy—was shaped by moving west and settling the frontier. “The tendency,” Turner wrote, “is anti-social. [The frontier] produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.” Those hardy pioneers on the frontier spread the ideas and practice of democracy as well as modern civilization. By conquering the wilderness, Turner stressed, they learned that resources and opportunity were seemingly boundless, meant to bring the ruggedness out of each individual. The farther west the process took them, the less European the Americans as a whole became. Turner saw the frontier as the  progenitor  of the American practical and innovative character: “That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these are trains of the frontier.”

Turner’s thesis, to be sure, viewed American Indians as uncivilized. In his vision, they cannot compete with European technology, and they fall by the wayside, serving as little more than a catalyst for the expansion of white Americans. This near-absence of Indians from Turner’s argument gave rise to a number of critiques of his thesis, most prominently from the New Western Historians beginning in the 1980s. These more recent historians sought to correct Turner’s “triumphal” myth of the American West by examining it as a region rather than as a process. For Turner, the American West is a progressive process, not a static place. There were many Wests, as the process of conquering the land, changing the European into the American, happened over and over again. What would happen to the American character, Turner wondered, now that its ability to expand and conquer was over?

Historical Reasoning Questions

Use  Handout A: Point-Counterpoint Graphic Organizer  to answer historical reasoning questions about this point-counterpoint.

Primary Sources (Claim A)

Cooper, James Fenimore.  Last of the Mohicans (A Leatherstocking Tale) . New York: Penguin, 1986.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”  http://sunnycv.com/steve/text/civ/turner.html

Primary Sources (Claim B)

Suggested resources (claim a).

Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds.  Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Faragher, John Mack.  Women and Men on the Overland Trail . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Grossman, Richard R, ed.  The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson.  The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds.  Trails: Toward a New Western History . Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Milner II, Clyde A.  A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West . New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Nugent, Walter.  Into the West: The Story of Its People . New York: Knopf, 1991.

Slotkin, Richard.  The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 . Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Suggested Resources (Claim B)

Billington, Ray Allen, and Martin Ridge.  Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Etulain, Richard, ed.  Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional?  New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Mondi. Megan. “’Connected and Unified?’: A More Critical Look at Frederick Jackson Turner’s America.”  Constructing the Past , 7 no. 1:Article 7.  http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol7/iss1/7

Nelson, Robert. “Public Lands and the Frontier Thesis.”  Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States , Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond, 2014.  http://dsl.richmond.edu/fartherafield/public-lands-and-the-frontier-thesis/

More from this Category

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

In our resource history is presented through a series of narratives, primary sources, and point-counterpoint debates that invites students to participate in the ongoing conversation about the American experiment.

Frontier Thesis

"The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. It was entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The "Turner thesis" or "frontier thesis," as his argument quickly became known, shaped both popular and scholarly views of the West (and of much else) for two generations. Turner stated his thesis simply. The settlement of the West by white people - "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" - was the central story of American history. The process of westward expansion had transformed a desolate and savage land into modem civilization. It had also continually renewed American ideas of democracy and individualism and had, therefore, shaped not just the West but the nation as a whole. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States." The Turner thesis shaped the writing of American history for a generation, and it shaped the writing of western American history for even longer. " (quoted from "Where Historians Disagree: The 'Frontier' and the West" in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Chapter 16)

• Turner thesis text
• Turner biography from The West by PBS

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/103/turner.htm

Turner's thesis can be considered:

• as a reflection of the 1890s,
• as a statement of American expansionism,
• as an idea in American thought,
• as an historical philosophy, and
• as the site of debate over the meaning of the "frontier" in American culture.  

The Frontier in American History

Descripción editorial.

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world. Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility. Discover a piece of history with this digital edition eBook of The Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner. Restored with care and true to the original work, this work has been deemed culturally important by scholars and is a fundamental part of our civilization's knowledge base. Pick up your copy today. Genres: United States – Territorial expansion, United States – History, Frontier and pioneer life – United States, Frontier thesis

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Preferred Citation: Brower, Daniel R.  The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900.  Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4m3nb2mm/

To the memory of my father, Daniel R. Brower, 1905-1987

Acknowledgements

During the years of researching and writing this work I have accumulated a host of debts, both institutional and personal. At an early stage in this book's formulation I found a place of nurturing in a seminar at the Centre des Hautes Etudes of the University of Paris, where professors Louis Bergeron and Marcel Roncayolo broadened their discussion of urban history to include historical trends in distant Russia. I went through a difficult period of reexamination and reconceptualization at about the time Professor Michael Hamm was organizing a research group to study the history of Russia's largest cities in the late imperial period. This fortuitous event, together with Professor Hamm's readiness to include among the participants a scholar without a city of his own, gave my project a much-needed rooting in the expertise of this group of scholars. More recently, colleagues in the Social Theory and Comparative History Colloquium at the University of California, Davis, applied their critical skills to a paper I wrote discussing important themes in Russian urban history. In various verbal and manuscript forms this book has received a thoughtful reception from individual scholars, including Joseph Bradley, Fred Carstensen, Adele Lindenmyer, Reginald Zelnik, Kay Flavell, Ben Eklof, and Michael Hamm. Their interest and assistance have helped my project survive to see the light of day. At the University of California Press, Sheila Levine provided encouragement and sound advice and Jay Plano brought his many talents to bear in giving clarity and coherence to my rough-hewn manuscript.

This book is pieced together in good measure from materials that are accessible only in Soviet historical archives. I was fortunate to be selected

twice by the International Research and Exchange Board to pursue research on this project as a member of the Soviet-American cultural exchange program. During these trips I worked in the Central State Archives of the October Revolution and the Central State Historical Archives in Leningrad. By the count of Soviet archivists I consulted an immoderate number of archival files. For her patience and help Serafima Grigorevna Sakharova is especially deserving of my gratitude. I was able to consult with several Soviet historians, among whom I would particularly like to thank Boris Nikolaevich Mironov, Vera Romanovna Leikina-Svirskaia, Valeriia Antonovna Nardova, and A. S. Nifontov.

Financial support for research and writing has come from a variety of sources, including grants from the University of California, Davis, the American Academy of Learned Societies, and the International Research and Exchange Board.

Parts of this book have appeared in print previously. Permission to use this material has come from the editors of Annales (Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations) ("L'urbanisation russe à la fin du 19e siècle," vol. 32 [January-February 1977]); Russian Review ("Urbanization and Autocracy: Russian Urban Development in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," vol. 42 [October 1983]); and Slavic Review ("Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century," vol. 41 [September 1982]).

Introduction

This history of Russian cities examines the transformation of urban life in the late tsarist period. Specifically, it looks at the changes under way in European Russia in the decades between the reforms of Alexander II and the Revolution of 1905. These years saw innovations in all areas of Russian life, but they also saw debate over the desirability and pace of these trends. Russian urban society was a key part of both developments; it was an arena of reform and a symbol of both the promises and the dangers of reform. The inhabitants of the capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, could not longer lay claim to live in the only civilized cities in the land. Provincial towns were becoming centers of trade, manufacturing, education, and print culture. The past and the future served as points of reference by which urban progress could be measured—from ignorance in the past to enlightenment in the future, from poverty to wealth, backwardness to civilization, and, in very muted tones, servility to freedom. These standards of change were judgmental and inspirational in intent. They were pervasive among educated townspeople and are as important to this history as are the indicators of population growth, economic development, the municipal statutes, and the police regulations. In other words, my study is as much about the changing ideas of the Russian city as it is about the processes of institutional and social change in Russian urban life.

My approach to these topics is informed by what might loosely be termed "the methodology of urban history." Although the city has frequently provided a background for the analysis of particular political, social,

and economic topics, the methodology of urban history is of recent origin. It is best understood not as a distinct discipline but rather as "a strategy for illuminating historical understanding" that is particularly relevant for modern history. [1] The modesty of this claim to scholarly identity is owing to the multiple historical perspectives on the city and to the complex patterns of change occurring in urban centers in modern times. The concept of urbanization, that is, the process of population concentration, is especially popular among scholars who are attracted by the apparent precision and interdependence of the data on the geographical location of towns, population movements, and urban economic activities. It relies heavily on this quantitative material to uncover distinct urban "systems." [2] I use urbanization to refer specifically to the patterns created by changes in urban location, population movements, and the production and distribution of economic resources.

Although useful in defining the demographic and social context of urban history, this particular methodology of urban history neglects topics that are related to the practices and attitudes by which populations give meaning to their urban experience. In an anthropological perspective the city is a cultural creation that is put together through efforts to implement political and social objectives and ideals. The city is also the product of the particular practices, that is, the meaningful actions, by which urban inhabitants make the city in some measure their own place. This cultural approach assumes that urban dwellers understand and shape the city in ways that the American historian Sam Bass Warner has called "multiple urban images." [3] These images are found in policies and plans, in fiction and the urban press, in discourse, and in practices. In my opinion they represent a significant and rewarding manner of understanding the Russian city.

The interplay of urban perceptions and practices defines the concept of urbanism as I employ it in this study. This concept is not a predictive model because it makes no assumptions about the structural determinants that control urban images and functions. As I already suggested, it serves to "illuminate our understanding" of the key actors in the transformation of the Russian city in the nineteenth century. Russian cities included merchants and migrants, the two social types who appeared to typify the

[1] Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, Introduction, to The Pursuit of Urban History , ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (London, 1983), 1.

[2] See, for example, Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

[3] Sam Bass Warner, "Slums and Skyscrapers: Urban Images, Symbols, and Ideology," in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences , ed. L. Rodwin and R. Hollister (New York, 1984), 183.

industrious population and whose activities gave special meaning to the city as a workplace. Russian cities included medical personnel and educators, for whom Western models of the progressive city were the standard by which they judged—usually unfavorably—the qualities of their own towns. And Russian cities also housed tsarist administrators and civic leaders, who assumed in differing degrees power over the urban population and sought to impose public order on the chaotic processes of city building.

In a larger sense urbanism was present as an assumption, which was shared by many educated Russians as well as by officials, that the city ought to develop according to an ideal model. This objective guided tsarist administrators, who elaborated city plans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The character of the ideal model changed in later years but not the intent. Ideal models were also present in other parts of the Western world. A very precise definition and declaration of purpose came from a French colonial administrator who proclaimed "urbanism" to be "the art and science of developing human agglomerations." [4] His belief in the malleability of the city, which was drawn from his work in a colonial territory, is equally applicable to the activities of urban leaders in Russia, many of whom considered their country to be a borderland of Europe.

The European core of nineteenth-century Western civilization plays an important supporting role in the story of Russian urbanism. It was present in the form of markets for Russian goods, whose sale enriched and expanded Russian urban commerce. European standards of sanitation, public health, cleanliness, and hygiene in the cities offered a tangible model for civic leaders in Russia to emulate. Generalized elementary schooling and nearly universal literacy among the urban population were goals for educators in Russian cities. For some, however, the Western city also represented forces of decadence and disorder; depending on the point of view of the observer, these forces ranged from the capitalist factory to the rebellious proletariat, from bourgeois materialism to the urban mob. Whether progressive or destructive, European urban centers epitomized the city of the future and, as such, served as a useful device by which to condemn any conditions in Russian towns that observers found intolerable. Contemporary attitudes toward Russian urbanism reflected, explicitly or implicitly, the positions adopted by Russians toward both the idealized future, or "modernity," and the imaginary past, or "tradition." The bitter conflicts provoked by Russian urbanism revealed how profound this dichotomy was.

[4] Cited by Paul Rabinow, "Representations Are Social Facts," in Writing Culture , ed. J. Clifford (Berkeley, 1986), 260.

In a formal sense the city had a clearly defined place in the laws and regulations of the tsarist state. Its juridical form emerged in statutes that defined the responsibilities and leadership of the municipalities. Its population received rank and status in the system of legal estates ( sosloviia ) that was in existence (although somewhat reformed) until the 1917 revolution. Its economic activities were taxed and regulated by the state, and according to tsarist regulations its migrant population had to possess the proper travel documents and to register with the police. In other words, the state's extensive powers created an "official city" of institutions, residents, and activities.

Tsarist statutes and administrative reports reveal official assumptions and expectations toward the city. However, these documents must be used with caution. They give voice to a statist view of urbanism, and this view is as distant from the practices of the population as are other idealized versions of the city. Gregory Freeze has argued that in the mid nineteenth century the " soslovie system" was "amorphous, plastic, and complex." [5] This observation is a warning that the estates may not be a meaningful way to describe the social identity of the urban population. The questions of whether well-to-do manufacturers and traders viewed themselves as "merchants"—as required by state decrees—and whether urban migrants remained "peasants," as their passports indicated, raise complex issues of social relations and cultural values that cannot be resolved by reference to either formal documentation or the observations of intellectuals. In the same way, municipal statutes reveal only one small part of the civic practices that shaped the public sphere of the city. A struggle over order and domination was an integral part of Russian urban history, and although the state was an important player in this struggle, it was not the only one.

In many respects this study is a work of synthesis. It incorporates economic, political, social, and cultural perspectives on the Russian city and attempts an interdisciplinary interpretation of the history of Russia in those years. Few such broad studies in the field of social history have as yet appeared. My findings are thus necessarily tentative and the chapters that follow might best be read as essays in Russian urban history. In my search for meaningful generalizations I have relied on the abundant tsarist archival and published materials on the cities. In particular, I use the imperial census of 1897 to construct a model of the migrant city, a

[5] Gregory Freeze, "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review 91 (February 1986): 24.

composite portrait based on the similarities of social configuration of the populations in nearly sixty urban centers. My profile is a statistical abstraction but one that finds confirmation in an impressionistic analysis of the evidence on migration and the laboring population in the expanding urban centers. Thus, my use of the term "Russian city" is more than a figure of speech: I seek to enlarge our understanding of social change in late imperial Russia by including the urban population as a whole. My model of the migrant city defines the social profile of the typical city and focuses attention on those urban areas that most closely conform to the pattern uncovered by statistical analysis.

My synthesis of late imperial urban history draws heavily on developments in particular cities in European Russia for which evidence is readily available. But these individual urban histories are significant here only to the extent that they are tied to the trends at work in the country at large. The efforts of the tsarist regime to regulate urban life through statutes and the positioning of administrative units and forces of order—police and army garrisons—made the state a pervasive presence in provincial cities and, to a lesser extent, in industrial settlements and district towns. The development of regional, national, and international markets that were serviced by waterways and rail lines leading to urban centers caused these towns to expand both economically and demographically. A print culture that included commercial newspapers encompassed a growing reading population in the cities and helped to give new meaning to urban life. Common forces were at work in all major urban centers. And at a basic level of intellectual discourse the idea of the city captured the imagination of influential townspeople, intellectuals, and officials.

In recent years a number of valuable studies have appeared on Russian urban history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [6] Most have focused on the growth of individual cities. As urban biographies, they offer the clarity of well-defined borders and a precise center of historical events. The questions they address are inspired partly by the principal issues of Russian historiography, partly by the conceptual perspectives suggested by urban history. They have enriched our knowledge of the complexity and diversity of prerevolutionary Russian social history, which—thanks to these and other studies—has begun to emerge from beneath what Michael

[6] Particularly noteworthy among these studies are Michael Hamm, ed., The City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1986); Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985); Robert Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906-1914 (New York, 1987); James Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976); J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).

Confino calls the "long shadow of the October Revolution." [7] The limitation of these studies, inherent in their approach, is their particularism. If my synthesis of Russian urban history is to prove of value, its contribution will probably be at the middle level of historical generalization, where Russian urban history occupies a place of importance equal to that of rural history and where the city is an essential feature in our understanding of Russia's unique historical experience.

[7] Michael Confino, Issues and Nonissues in Russian Social History and Historiography , Kennan Institute occasional paper no. 165 (Washington, D.C., 1983), 7.

1 Facade Cities and Fugitive Populations

In the mid nineteenth century Russian cities were located on the fringes of European civilization. Occasional neoclassical building facades and formal street plans told of imperial ambitions to impose a Western model of the city on townspeople, most of whom lived in log cabins along muddy, smelly alleys. The shortcomings of tsarist city plans provided one visible measure of the disparity between the ideal and the real city. Throughout this history of Russian urbanism the various idealized visions of the West offer an important perspective on the contradictions and conflicts attendant on rapid urbanization in Russia, where the life of the urban population was a far cry from the plans laid for the city by various urban elites. These plans make clear the European origins of the efforts to control and guide urban development.

Europe was a potent cultural invention that suggested measures of progress (by invidious comparison) by which to judge conditions in Russian cities and to devise plans of action. This device, never openly acknowledged as such, operated elsewhere too. The bacteriologist Paul Koch, called in 1892 to witness the misery and filth of the Hamburg slums, where a cholera epidemic had broken out, summed up for the press his disgust by proclaiming: "Gentlemen, I forget that I am in Europe!" [1] His concern for public health turned a geographical expression into a con-

[1] Cited in Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (New York, 1985), 303.

demnation of the neglect of the urban poor. In a similar sense, tsarist officials and educated Russians in the mid century possessed cultural maps on which they located the border separating civilized Europe and backward Asia within their own country. Its location fluctuated and so too did their sense of urgency to push that border eastward. Catherine II's urban policies resembled a sort of cultural crusade to bring civilization to her empire. Although Nicholas I's reign was a period of relative inaction, it carried forth Catherine's policies and proved to be a time of preparation for another wave of urban reform.

In the tsarist law code a juridical statute gave precise definition to official "cities," no matter what their size, by granting municipal government to their inhabitants. Almost all these official cities were provincial and district centers of tsarist administration because the well-ordered state that Catherine the Great and her successors sought presupposed the collaboration of townspeople in matters of imperial interests. An imposing array of duties and responsibilities were placed on townspeople in these "service cities" by a state that, as J. Michael Hittle reminds us, had great need of their assistance. [2] The empire's efforts to create orderly cities extended throughout European Russia. These efforts constituted a coherent urban strategy that left its mark on the landscape of the city and the activities of the townspeople.

But Russian urbanism also took other forms in those years—as later—and these forms escaped the control of tsarist officials. Behind the facade of imperial might bureaucratic agents of the state coped poorly with the multiple tasks that had been assigned to them, and townspeople conducted their affairs in a manner best calculated to shelter their private lives from public view. The institutional power of Nicholas I's state could ensure the submission of the population, but it could not impose its ideals of public behavior and social practices in municipal and economic affairs on the inhabitants. Resistance to the state largely took the form of passivity and inaction, a practice that I refer to as "fugitive." The conduct of urban daily life escaped tsarist control to such an extent that a few "enlightened bureaucrats" perceived it as a condemnation of Nicholaevan autocracy. The inadequacies of Nicholas's reign appeared in many areas, and the real city that was depicted in the bureaucratic inspections of the 1840s and 1850s contributed to the sense of crisis that was so pervasive among reformers at the beginning of Alexander II's reign. In the decades that followed, the

[2] J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 240.

fugitive practices of the townspeople became an integral part of the life of urban migrants.

This study of Russian urbanism is in part the history of the visions and plans that sought to mold a city that would be worthy, in one way or another, of belonging to the Western world. However, it is also an inquiry into the practices of the urban population. These practices would shape a very different city, a city of migrants.

Cities in the lmperial Style

Although overly ambitious, Catherine II's plans for Russian cities set the framework for urbanism in the following half century. She assumed, as Robert Jones makes clear, that rigorous planning and Western architectural models would turn backward Russian towns into "centers of civilization." [3] Her extravagant rhetorical flourishes proclaimed that cities could be made—or remade—according to ideals that were adopted from the West. Her model exerted an abiding attraction among educated Russians for the nineteenth century. She prophesied that the "glories" ( znamenitosti ) of the architectural and street plan for one town would attract new inhabitants, and that the entire region would acquire a new life and take on a new appearance." [4] In this imperial rendering of the theme of city versus countryside, social progress followed automatically from the implementation of a rational urban plan.

As best we can assess them, the consequences of Catherine's plans in the Russian provinces were unspectacular but substantial. Administrative offices spread to provincial and district centers; garrisons gathered in the central town of each military district; archbishoprics and bishoprics brought the presence of high church dignitaries and the periodic practice of great public ceremonies into urban public life; architectural monuments glorified patriotic achievements; the facades of public and private buildings in town centers imitated the Palladian and baroque styles, albeit in plaster, of the great cities of the West. These elements of imperial urbanism were part of the panoply of autocratic power, a power that used the material and human resources of the empire to construct outposts of a peculiarly autocratic vision of civilization.

[3] Robert Jones, Provincial Development in Russia: Catherine II and Jacob Sievers (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984), 97-98.

[4] Quoted in I. I. Ditiatin, "Russkii doreformennyi gorod," in Stat'i po istorii russkogo prava , by I. I. Ditiatin (St. Petersburg, 1895), 14.

From this imperial perspective the city became synonymous with public order, and urban public space became the visual manifestation of this ideal. The official policy of "public orderliness" ( blagoustroistvo ) gave an autocratic character to public functions. The general supervision of urban affairs lay in the hands of provincial governors, who had the responsibility to ensure that "publicly useful measures" encouraged the "improvement in the well-being" of the townspeople who were placed under their "protection." [5] By Nicholas I's time municipal institutions had become part of the authoritarian ordering of the Russian city. For example, the governor of Vladimir province explained in the early 1840s that municipal rule had to be introduced in the new textile center of Ivanovo "for the strict enforcement of order and submission" among the town's fifteen thousand workers, who, "more than others, [are] prone to disorder." [6] The governor was little concerned with self-rule; rather, he focused on the expansion of the urban police force and the creation of municipal institutions through which the state would exercise direct control over the turbulent laboring populations of the settlement.

The visible manifestations of tsarist urbanism were embodied in city plans and in the regulations governing urban construction and public activities. The responsibilities of governors—and of the police—extended to the "orderliness and cleanliness of the streets, squares, and markets," the good condition of public buildings, street paving, and the enforcement of "the approved [city] plan and rules for building facades." [7] Architecture was to be the symbolic representation of public order, and St. Petersburg was the superlative embodiment of this urban vision. In the solemn eighteenth-century language of His Majesty's Imperial Building Commission, the architecture of St. Petersburg was to convey "a dignified appearance and grandeur [ paradnost' ]." [8] This directive was subsequently implemented using a variety of architectural styles; the last stage came in the 1840s when the railroad intruded on the capital's public space. Again following the model provided by Western Europe, the tsarist authorities hid the railroad station behind a neo-Renaissance facade. Unlike the West, however, the Petersburg version of facade planning was inserted within the larger polit-

[5] Ibid., 22.

[6] Quoted in P. G. Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo v doreformennoi Rossii (Moscow, 1958), 498.

[7] Ibid., 23.

[8] Iu. Egorov, "Zastroika Peterburga," in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva , ed. I. Grabar (Moscow, 1962), vol. 1, pt. 1, 49; see also V. V. Kirillov, "Russkii gorod epokhi barokko (kul'turnyi i esteticheskii aspekt)," Russkii gorod , ed. V. Ianin (Moscow, 1983), 6:127-62.

ical project of tsarist urbanism throughout the empire and was the centerpiece of this policy.

Although the planned development of St. Petersburg was the model for the provinces, this model usually appeared in a diluted form. In new cities in frontier areas on the fringes of the empire tsarist urban objectives and plans succeeded, at least in appearance, in creating the ideal city. In recently settled areas, such as the southern Ukraine, towns like Ekaterinoslav, Potemkin's "Athens of southern Russia," retained its urban character in the mid nineteenth century "thanks solely to its importance as the major administrative point in the province," at least in the opinion of the town leaders. [9] The array of administrative offices was extensive in border cities such as Astrakhan, whose town elders listed with some pride the following governmental entities: "the port authority and admiralty of the Caspian fleet, Customs, the Salt Administration, the Committee for the Transportation of State Supplies, the Commission on Fisheries, the Military Administration of the Astrakhan Cossacks, and provincial educational institutions such as the gymnasium [and] the boys' and girls' district schools." [10] In the imperial urban vision state functions merged with the social order: symmetrical, harmonious building facades fronted on streets laid out with geometrical precision, usually radiating out from central squares, where troops from the garrison paraded and around which were located the imperial administrative buildings, the Orthodox cathedral, and the central market place. Whether on the borders or in the hinterland, these cities were frontier posts of autocratic power and European civilization.

Frequently, however, the plan of a particular city remained a paper project that was filed away with the elaborate documentation required by the ministry. Established towns, whose central areas were filled with older buildings and narrow, often tortuous streets, defied the ambitious planners and were never completely remade in the imperial style. The reconstruction of streets and reordering of building facades entailed enormous capital expenditures, to which neither the state nor the municipalities consented unless forced to do so by exceptional circumstances. Fires proved a useful tool of urban renewal: Moscow was substantially rebuilt following the

[9] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Ekaterinoslavskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie gorodskikh poselenii evropeiskoi Rossii v 1861-1862 g. , (St. Petersburg, 1863), 1: 4-6; these summaries of urban economic conditions were part of reports compiled by committees of local notables in 1862 in response to the request by the Ministry of Internal Affairs for information that would be used to consider municipal reform.

[10] "Soobrazhenie," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv [abbreviated TsGIA], fond [abbreviated f.] 1287, opis' [abbreviated op.] 37 (1862), delo [abbreviated d.] 2131, 10-11; these "Considerations" contain the complete reports of the committees discussed in n. 9.

devastating fire of 1812. The Moscow Building Commission received specific orders to be "guided by the plan of 1775 and carefully to ensure that all the streets and sidestreets preserve their legal dimensions." [11] The destruction of Kostroma by fire in 1773 was so complete that this old Volga trading town reemerged in the following decades in the new imperial style, an outpost of orderly, baroque city planning, standing as Catherine had intended like a "beacon of civilization" on the bluffs overlooking the river.

When not aided by natural catastrophes, the plans lost much of their force. Their implementation confronted urban poverty and the unwillingness of municipal officials to undertake any measures outside the narrow economic interests and needs of town traders and manufacturers. They had substantial justification for their lack of cooperation. One state report of 1853 warned that "expenses for upkeep and construction of public buildings" were impoverishing town budgets. [12] As required by the state, the municipality of Nizhny Novgorod devoted 10 percent of its total yearly funds to keep the six hundred oil street lamps functioning ten months of the year (and then only eighteen nights a month). Neither paving nor lighting existed in the city outskirts. [13] In these conditions public buildings, whose upkeep was a municipal responsibility, often fell into disrepair, and streets conceived on a grand scale became grandiose eyesores. Plaster fell off imitation granite walls, revealing the plain bricks beneath; in rainy weather mud rendered unpaved central squares and streets virtually impassable.

In these circumstances imperial urbanism depended on the broad authority that was granted to provincial governors both by custom and by statute. When inspired to do so, they could make the implementation of the city plan a matter of great urgency. The governor-general of the Kharkov region, S. A. Kokoshkin, an official cut to the authoritarian model so favored by Nicholas I, assumed his position in the early 1850s after a long military career. On his arrival Kharkov was a city with an expanding economy and a rapidly growing population. Its city plan, approved in 1837, had remained a dead letter until that time. Kokoshkin used his authority to rapidly construct several monumental public buildings. He kept within the letter of the law by setting out on street inspections but went far beyond the spirit of the law when he ordered wooden shanties in the town center to be torn down regardless of the fate of the inhabitants. Brick buildings with suitable classical facades appeared, and, in the place of the shanties, here and

[11] I. Grabar, "Arkhitektura Moskvy," in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva , vol. 8, pt. 1, 188.

[12] "Doklad," TsGIA, f. 869, op. 1, d. 308, 2.

[13] "Soobrazhenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 264, 1-2.

there even sidewalks were constructed. Kokoshkin exiled the mayor for daring to oppose his plan to construct a new trading center, but even the governor's powers had limits. [14] The mayor became a hero to the townspeople and the number of brick buildings remained relatively few. Most important, Kharkov's expansion beyond the central area was creating a new city that Kokoshkin's imperial plan and political authority were powerless to contain.

By mid century the strict ordering given to buildings, streets, and urban space in general was doomed because the success of such plans depended on social stability and demographic stagnation. The imperial planners envisioned an urban world of order, not growth. Louis Mumford, an unsympathetic critic of all baroque planners, suggests that the spirit of such work excluded a sense of time, which proved to be detrimental to their ideal of "uniformity and standardization." [15] In the Russian plans this frame of mind led to town limits appearing on official city maps two-and-a-half miles apart as a rule. The Russian planners took little heed of local conditions or future expansion. [16] Outside the town centers the use of urban space was largely in the hands of the townspeople. When the population remained stable, enforcement posed few problems, but any rapid influx of migrants or expansion of business overwhelmed the meager resources for enforcing the regulations, and the regulations ceased to have any meaning.

In the mid nineteenth century most provincial capitals remained small, but here and there rapid population growth was already occurring. The capitals set the pace: Moscow had grown by 50 percent in the previous quarter century. A few other towns such as Saratov and Odessa expanded even more rapidly. [17] A trip in the 1840s from the center of Moscow to the newer wards quickly left behind the well-ordered city center to reach, in the words of one contemporary writer, "the area of simple, ideal existence—no paving, nothing resembling luxurious urban living, no trading enterprise. The little houses are entirely made of wood, one-story, and built according to the rules of free [i.e., unplanned] architecture." [18] The same conditions

[14] D. Bagalei and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (Kharkov, 1912), 2:50-51, 284-85.

[15] Louis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York, 1938), 104, 127.

[16] Robert Jones, "Urban Planning and the Development of Provincial Towns in Russia, 1762-1796," in The Eighteenth Century in Russia , ed. J. G. Garrard (Oxford, 1973), 325; the plans, it should be noted, were compiled largely by provincial and local authorities, who followed "generally accepted and representative concepts" laid down by the St. Petersburg Commission. See R. M. Gariaev, "Iz istorii pereplanirovki russkikh gorodov," Istoriia SSSR (November-December 1986):146.

[17] Population figures are found in Thomas Fedor, Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1975), 183-202.

[18] I. T. Kokorev, Moskva sorokovykh godov (Moscow, 1958), 176-77.

were evident wherever urban populations had begun to swell because of migration. The resulting jumble of houses, gardens, and streets, which "nowhere take the direct businesslike direction," turned Moscow into a vast "suburb or village," in the opinion of one Westerner. Unable except in the very center of the city to find "an assembly of human dwellings pressed closely together," he concluded that "Moscow is not a city." [19] His bewilderment provides a useful perspective from which to evaluate the state's urban plans. These plans relied on Western architectural models and imposed little coherence on the layout of Russian towns. Yet the depiction of Moscow as a "big village" is a disparaging exaggeration, drawn as it was (as in the above testimony) from the scornful views of outsiders, both officials and foreigners, for whom the life of the lower orders was alien and exotic. Urbanization in Russia bore little resemblance to preconceived notions of either Westerners or tsarist urban planners.

The maintenance of public order in the cities was in the hands of the tsarist police and the military. In mid century the state had not yet designated a special state agency to police urban centers. An edict of 1802 created a state police force, organized by district ( uezd ) units, that was responsible for both urban and rural areas. The state police were incorporated directly into the tsarist administration: they were subordinated to provincial governors but not to the municipalities. Nonetheless, municipalities had to rely on the district force to implement their statutes as well as to maintain public order, and they were obligated to fund the police assigned to their territory. [20]

The presence of two internal military forces, the Corps of Internal Guard and the gendarmerie, identified particular provincial cities as tsarist outposts. The Internal Guard, numbering nearly 150,000 soldiers in the 1840s, was distributed among eleven regional command centers and charged with "putting down acts of insubordination and riotous behavior." Peasant revolts were the unstated but obvious target of this internal army. The gendarmerie was small and active principally in surveillance, although it also operated a small cavalry force. [21] Despite the existence of these two internal forces, disorders among the urban population did not loom large in tsarist concerns. With the major exceptions of St. Petersburg and Moscow,

[19] J. G. Kohl, Russia-St. Petersburg and the Interior of the Empire (London, 1844), 213.

[20] E. Anychin, Istoricheskii obzor razvitiia administrativno-politseiskikh uchrezhdenii v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1872), 224-25.

[21] John Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874 (Oxford, 1985), 313-14.

policing the cities was an incidental affair within the broad tsarist concept of public order.

The police had originally received a somewhat paternalistic mandate toward the urban population. In her well-ordered city Catherine II conceived a universalistic role for her police: they would encourage the husband to "care for and protect his wife, the wife to be faithful in love and obedience to her husband, the parent to be imperious [ vlastitelen ] toward [his or her] children, and children to be submissive toward [their] parents." [22] However, her Germanic sense of police paternalism failed in subsequent decades to set the tone of police supervision, which was increasingly drawn to administrative duties.

In the mid nineteenth century urban police were largely concerned with enforcing the facade regulations of the city plans and looking out for their own livelihood. Their responsibilities were as broad and as ill-defined as those of the governors. They were charged with ensuring that all regulations on building construction, trade, and manufacturing were obeyed, that the streets were kept clean and passable, that temporary migrants possessed the proper documents, that army conscripts were called up when their time came, and so on. One physician serving in a provincial town recalled that the police enjoyed discretionary powers to enforce or neglect "a mass of various kinds of laws and regulations, unknown to almost everyone" and in doing so were able to hold the townspeople "in complete dependence." [23] His testimony, like that of many educated Russians in those years, was strongly colored by an abiding suspicion of all police action. For such witnesses autocratic rule and police power in the cities went hand in hand.

In mid century urban police forces were both small and poorly paid. They were woefully understaffed for the multitude of tasks that were assigned them. Understaffing was particularly acute in growing cities such as Kharkov, which had a population of nearly fifty thousand at mid century but a police force of only fifty men. Underadministered in this domain as in most others, the state continued to require that the urban population assume such petty police duties as that of night watchman. With the exception of the police chiefs (or captains in small towns) the police received miserly levels of pay. Because of their low salaries they often took advantage of their considerable powers to ensure themselves immediate personal profit. They used requests for temporary travel permits, navigation permits to boats on rivers and canals, the right to open taverns, and similar trans-

[22] Ditiatin, "Russkii doreformennyi gorod," 15-16.

[23] A. A. Sinitsyn, "Iz vospominanii starogo vracha," Russkaia starina 154 (June 1913): 498.

actions as occasions for accepting bribes. The physician previously cited observed that town traders and artisans, surrounded by administrative "unpleasantness that can trap them at every step," had the habit of "bribing everyone who shouts at them." [24]

As defined by police practices, public order in the cities was both capricious and selective. To critics of the tsarist system, it appeared to be yet another manifestation of that arbitrariness ( proizvol ) so characteristic of the autocratic regime. Nikolai Gogol included the town police chief among the inner circle of corrupt administrators in his play "The Inspector General"; the brutal policeman Derzhimorda ("the strangler," in a loose translation) belonged to the outer circle. In the more elegant language of the Voronezh municipal commission of 1862, the police "violate the urban peace and order that it is their duty to enforce." [25]

In these circumstances complaints about police behavior came from both tsarist authorities and municipal activists. Even the most zealous provincial officials could not overcome the inadequacies of the police. Similarly, municipalities objected not only to police abuses but also to insufficient policing of economic activities. The commerce of the port town of Rostovon-Don was increasing rapidly in the mid 1800s, and its 1862 town commission judged its police work "far below the needs of the urban population and the business that they conduct." [26] Although state officials and civic leaders had differing priorities and assumptions about public order, they both agreed that the police were incapable of controlling the turbulent laboring population that was arriving in increasing numbers to search for work. Thus, limitations of tsarist urban planning were paralleled by the inadequacies in the ways the police enforced urban regulations.

Both the ambitious objective of creating public orderliness in the cities and the inadequacies of tsarist provincial institutions led the state to rely on the assistance of the urban population. Catherine II's Charter of Rights and Privileges Granted the Cities, issued in 1785, was conceived in a style similar to the city plans: "rights and privileges" were obligations placed on the urban electorate, designated the "city society," who were expected to participate actively in municipal affairs. Hittle's sanguine reading of this reform attributes the formation of a "new corporate basis for city society" to the charter. [27] Citizenship was determined by urban residence. The char-

[24] Ibid., 498.

[25] "Soobrazhenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2146, 25.

[26] Ibid., d. 2152, 212.

[27] Hittle, The Service City , 228.

ter grouped the population into six separate categories (on the basis of estates, property, and occupation) for representation on the municipal council and included in the city society all propertied adult males over twenty-five, who were responsible for electing the mayor. However, the municipality fell directly under the authority of the tsarist provincial administration and its responsibilities were only those local tasks that the regime itself could not undertake, which included the regulation of commerce, building inspection, lodging garrisons, sanitation, and street paving. [28] The charter remained in effect until 1870, but the actual conduct of municipal affairs bore little resemblance to its regulations.

Until the period of the Great Reforms the role of municipalities in the urban communities was dominated by two related trends. On the one hand, the electorate, together with the pool of municipal leaders, shrank to minute proportions. On the other hand, the tsarist administration intervened increasingly in municipal affairs, undercutting the very notion of municipal autonomy and "privileges," both of which had been problematical from the start. Tsarist intervention was stimulated by the apathy of townsmen, who were discouraged by authoritarian practices from seeking to improve urban conditions. When local initiative received semiofficial sanction in the 1860s, civic activism quickly emerged in many cities. Until then municipal government operated primarily to fulfill, in the words of a nineteenth-century historian of municipal politics, "the specific demands, needs, and requirements emanating from state administrative institutions." [29] The failure of municipal governments to do so successfully created the crisis of mid-century urban rule.

The urban electorate that was to constitute the basis for corporate municipal life never came into existence. As a result, the city society itself atrophied, disappearing from municipal activities and leaving no at-large voting procedure. Of the six groups designated for representation, only three took any part at all in elections—the merchantry, the artisanry, and the petty bourgeoisie. Each sent representatives to the municipal councils in an apparently haphazard manner to fill the six seats specified in the charter. Other groups avoided participation altogether. Having no recognized place in municipal affairs, nobles and state bureaucrats boycotted elections (and also avoided municipal service), which had the effect of removing from urban affairs groups that some urban reformers of the 1860s would refer to wistfully as "the best and most honored members" of the urban

[28] The provisions of the charter are examined in Hittle, The Service City , 220-29.

[29] Ditiatin, "Russkii doreformennyi gorod," 23.

community. [30] At the other end of the social ladder peasants with legal urban residence refused to be registered in the city society. Representatives to town councils were chosen by meetings of the three urban estates, among whom only a handful of members bothered to participate. For example, when Yaroslavl chose a new council in 1842, only 100 of the 1,500 members of the town's bourgeoisie appeared at the elections. [31] An even smaller proportion of Moscow's merchants (120 out of 4,000) joined in elections in 1860. [32] Elections for mayor took place most often within the merchantry, the one estate society with some influence in town affairs. In 1840 the merchant elders in Kharkov invited members of the lower estates to join in choosing a new mayor but only twenty-four appeared. [33] The "well-ordered police state" of the Germanic monarchies of Central Europe relied on corporate and municipal collaboration in urban police affairs, but neither element was apparent in the autocratic state of Nicholas I.

The missing town citizenry had little reason to come forth in those years. Municipal affairs provided no inducement for civic endeavor because they consisted exclusively of obligations imposed by provincial administrators. The notion of a "self-governing community," which the reformers of the 1860s would glorify, had no place in the authoritarian political world of the preceding decades. One of these aspiring activists, examining the miserable state of public urban life on the eve of what he hoped would be a new era, complained bitterly that "the majority of the inhabitants of our cities have no consciousness of social needs," by which he meant public service. He provided, albeit disapprovingly, a key reason for their woeful failing when he added that they "consider these [public] affairs to be something completely alien to them that do not affect their personal interests, a burdensome pastime that takes them away from their own affairs." [34] Their urban world was a private, not public ( obshchestvennyi ), place. The civic duties that called for public participation were fulfilled in a chaotic, haphazard manner by tsarist fiat and private initiative. Imperial decrees regulated town affairs, and by this standard all municipalities managed their policies in an extralegal, if not illegal, manner.

Municipal politics made a mockery of Catherine's vision of city society,

[30] "O dozvolenii dvorian," October 5, 1862, TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2004 (1859-65), 61.

[31] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 406, table 50.

[32] B. V. Zlatoustavskii, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie v period reformy 60-kh godov XIX veka." ( Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1953), 147.

[33] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:252.

[34] "Mnenie Komissii naznachennoi Permskim gorodskim obshchestvom," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2171, 5.

turning orderly procedures into a caricature of self-rule. In the absence of large numbers of voters, electoral methods bore no resemblance to free choice and majority rule. Either voters had to be rounded up without regard to proper electoral procedures or meetings turned into brawls between small groups seeking to dominate the elections. In either case elections were manipulated affairs. The reformist critic cited in the preceding paragraph painted a cruel portrait of the citizenry, "brought in almost by force," voting "as though they were carrying out a formality they could easily do without and that had been dreamed up only Heaven knows why." [35] The chaos was most apparent among the lower urban orders. The petty bourgeois society in Saratov appeared to one inspector in 1842 to be in a state of "complete disorder" where "the most important affairs" were in the hands of a few individuals. [36] Throughout the country tsarist provincial administrators and emissaries from St. Petersburg noted that only a small number of townspeople carried out the provisions of the charter, and these people did so reluctantly.

Municipal leaders came primarily from the merchant estate, the members of which were most visible and therefore most vulnerable to tsarist pressures to participate in public service. For merchants municipal office appears to have been an onerous duty that was avoided by whatever means possible. One governor from central Russia noted in 1842 that "the lack of benefits from service" leads merchants to "decline election to office . . . in almost all cities. [37] In theory some public service was obligatory, but the facade of regulations hid another world of devious private stratagems to subvert the rules. One merchant wrote that municipal service was a "trap" for his colleagues, who judged it "extremely unpleasant and dangerous" and were prepared "to pay up in order not to be elected to any sort of duties." A sufficient bribe would ensure that "a person with power could bypass all laws and regulations so that [he] would not be disturbed and would not be called to serve." [38] Merchants of the lower ranks (the second and third guilds) lacked the wealth and influence necessary to buy favors and seem to have provided the bulk of the recruits for town offices.

One consequence of this distortion of the ideal of public service was the use of municipal office for private profit. The incidence of corruption in

[35] Ibid., 6.

[36] "Po obozreniiu Saratova," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39 (1843), d. 78, 93.

[37] "Po otchetam i zapiskam nachal'nikov gubernii o nedostatkakh nyneishnego ustroistva," ibid., op. 37, d. 120, 8.

[38] N. Vishniakov, Svedeniia o kupecheskom rode Vishniakovykh (Moscow, 1911) 3:93; a history of Kharkov recounts a similar situation; see Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova , 2:255.

urban administration was notorious; for example, it was the key satirical element in Gogol's play The Inspector General , which Nicholas I himself applauded. From the perspective of reluctant public servants the opportunities for personal profit through corruption were the only tangible reward for their onerous duty. Venality and favoritism were widespread, reflecting the private interests of officials and their "families" of supporters and protectors. Although trading fees and property taxes were insignificant affairs from the point of view of outsiders, they represented important economic considerations to local traders, artisans, and manufacturers.

The tenacity and skill of petty officials in manipulating these responsibilities were impressive to judge by the reports of the inspectors sent by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the early 1840s. For example, by controlling fees on stalls for traders in the Tambov city market, the municipality favored local traders at the expense of peasants seeking to penetrate the urban commercial network. The inspector complained that the peasants "suffered real oppression at the hands of these middlemen" and added that the higher prices on produce" made the townspeople suffer as well." The governor sought to equalize the fees, and the police chief "tried several times to stop the abusive action of the middlemen and to establish order at the market." Both failed, however, because they were blocked by the skillful actions of the mayor and his backers. According to the inspector the mayor, who was a local miller, proved his unfitness for his position by diverting a stream running through town in order to provide water for his mill. His spirit of enterprise left "a swamp to form where the river previously ran." [39] Such actions were commonplace. Saratov's tax on commerce was set by the traders themselves, who, according to another inspector, declared "very low prices on their products" when fixing the tax rate. [40]

Property taxes, the principal source of municipal revenues, became a focal point of conflict. Tsarist officials demanded that municipalities pay various obligatory expenses, which necessitated higher tax rates, but propertied townspeople sought to keep tax rates at the lowest possible level. To avoid bitter conflict, municipalities sought as their "sole aim . . . to collect as quickly and as painlessly as possible the maximum amount of money. They consider all means to this end to be acceptable." [41] The inspectors, who brought to these affairs their "enlightened" sense of order and rational method, were deeply offended by the officials' proizvol; for their part they appeared intruders and trouble-makers to the protective family circles of

[39] TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39 (1843), d. 43, 58-61.

[40] Ibid., d. 78, 159.

[41] Ibid., d. 72, 103.

the municipal officials. The gulf between these two groups was as great as the disparity between the orderly city plans and the run-down, sprawling appearance of most towns, the grandiose vision of the civilizing city and the reality of the poor townspeople.

The gap between municipal duties and municipal deeds originated not only in the absence of "civic consciousness" but also in the prevalent perception among private interests in the towns that they received no benefits from their burdensome tax assessments. The need to fulfill obligatory tsarist tasks pushed municipal revenues up by 50 percent between 1840 and 1853. [42] Complaints by the townspeople that their taxes were excessively burdensome cannot be dismissed as self-serving. Ministry inspectors recognized the validity of excessive taxation. The Voronezh property tax, raised to 2 percent to cover growing expenses, exceeded the means of so many townspeople that "municipal officials went without their salaries for several months." [43] Once the state-imposed expenses for police, billeting troops, maintaining official buildings, and so on, were covered, very little was left over for the needs of the towns themselves. Street lighting and paving existed only in town centers, if at all. Bridges consisted of little more than logs. One tsarist inspector reported that in Tambov the bridges were so hazardous that they constituted a peril to travelers: carriages fall into the river or mud and there are "so many drowned horses [that] they are impossible to count." [44] Even allowing for some exaggeration, his lurid picture appears to have captured the condition of public services in provincial centers. Only in the capitals was there extensive paving and gas lighting along the streets. When residents of the capitals or Western visitors ventured outside St. Petersburg and Moscow, they quickly concluded that they were beyond the pale of European modernity. In terms of public life they certainly were.

Lacking both the means and the incentives to deal with urban needs, the municipalities operated primarily as inferior branches of state administration. Looking back on the prereform years, a Petersburg mayor observed that municipal officials "for many decades were free from responsibility," and, as a result, "they had long since acquired the habit of waiting for initiative and aid from the state administration, whose supervision and approval preceded every step in the activities of municipal government." [45]

[42] "Obzor svedeniia," ibid., f. 869, op. 1 (1858), d. 262, 1.

[43] TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39, d. 65, 77.

[44] Ibid., d. 43, 65-66.

[45] M. M. Stasiulevich, Desiat' let Sanktpeterburgskogo obshchestvennogo upravleniia (St. Petersburg, 1884), v.

This situation was compatible with the authoritarian style of many tsarist officials, who were accustomed to assuming all important initiatives and who suspected insubordination in the initiatives of lower-ranking officials and citizens. In the mid 1870s P. P. Durnovo, the governor of Moscow province, deeply regretted the passing of the time when the Moscow municipality was "completely subordinated to the provincial authorities, who supervised all [of the municipality's] actions and without whose permission [the municipality] had no right to either lower or raise municipal expenses." To him effective urban public administration required that municipal officials should be "obligated carry out unquestioningly all orders from the provincial administration." [46]

The disorder of Russian municipal rule had deeper roots in the privatization of urban life in the prereform period. An official report on Moscow municipal activities pointed to "the multitude of ancient customs and institutions that bring profits and privileges to various estates and that hide illegal actions and violations by city officials" and "block state authorities at every step." [47] In other words, a clandestine network of local officials functioned in the shadow of, and as a sort of mirror image of, tsarist authoritarianism and rationalist public order. Its purpose was to serve economic interests but these interests cannot be defined solely as "merchant" interests because the wealthy members of that estate zealously avoided any entanglement in town affairs. Merchant factions might occasionally compete for control of municipal institutions because profits were a reward for ingenious political stratagems. Family circles flourished in this environment. They provided valuable protection from higher powers and created a privatized context within which public affairs were transformed into private interests.

The Fugitive Urban Society

Tsarist policies to turn the city into the image of state power had their parallel in the social sphere in the decrees regulating rank and privileges among urban estates. The influence of tsarist officialdom, the respect accorded the hereditary nobility, and the wealth of the few first-guild merchants ensured that these groups would be preeminent within mid-century urban society. The pattern of urban social relations in the mid nineteenth century bears out Gregory Freeze's argument that in those years the " sos-

[46] "Vsepoddaneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1281, op. 7, d. 82 (1875), 19.

[47] Quoted in Zlatoustavskii, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie," 107.

lovie system" had reached its peak of "group identity" and "social cohesion." [48]

Public life in the provincial capitals provided a stage for the display of uniforms and medals, the visual marks of standing within the small urban elite. The dignity and privileges associated with the merchantry (and the far smaller group of professionals who were recognized as "honorary citizens") were the autocratic model of productive, orderly, and loyal townspeople. Although the state's efforts to impose a well-defined, coherent, and stable hierarchy of power and prestige were somewhat successful, the state could not regulate the lives of the poor townspeople, much less the migrants who were beginning to swell the populations of various cities. The analogy between the state's social scheme and the tsarist urban political order can be carried one step further. In both cases the superficial appearance of compliance hid an extraordinary degree of disarray and disregard for both legal norms and state-imposed regulations. The social history of nineteenth-century Russian urbanism encompasses both a caste-like hierarchical order and disorder.

A social profile of the mid-century Russian city must rely largely on official reports, which attempted to take account of urban activities within the context of tsarist regulations on residence, estate membership, and so on. The apparent precision of the information in these reports is misleading: too often they offered the fallacious precision of Chichikov's "dead souls." Police reports contributed to the appearance of social order by providing precise figures for individual estates and total population in each town. They constitute the sole measure of urban population trends until the imperial census of 1897. At best these police reports are crude approximations, but their demographic data are useful in suggesting the modest level of mid-century urbanization. Only three cities had populations of over one hundred thousand (St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa) and only fifty (of the six hundred urban areas officially classified as cities) were over twenty thousand. [49] Because almost all of the towns in the latter group were provincial capitals one can conclude that in the preindustrial era city size was largely a function of proximity to tsarist administrative activities, on which much of the population depended directly or indirectly for their livelihood. With respect to population size as well as other characteristics, then, the Russian city of that time was a tsarist outpost.

Official reports included figures for both "permanent" residents, en-

[48] Gregory Freeze, "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review 91 (February 1986):24.

[49] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 369, table 43.

rolled in the proper corporate organization ("society") of their estate, and the "temporary" residents, primarily peasants but also townspeople of the lower orders (artisans and the petty bourgeoisie) who were born outside the town limits. The mobility of the lower orders in the cities defied accurate police supervision. Moscow's passport office registered 142,000 temporary residents in 1859, nearly two-thirds of whom were peasants. [50] Most temporary residents were otkhodniki , migrants seeking short-term jobs. In 1859 otkhodniki made up over one-fourth of the total recorded population of Moscow, and by the 1870s they increased to nearly two-thirds of the city's inhabitants. The apparent precision of these police reports, however, did not signify that the entire population was properly registered. Occasional official complaints tell another story of missing "souls" who lived beyond the pale of tsarist regulations.

Black Sea ports, in growing need of stevedores for loading grain shipments, constituted a vast area of meager surveillance. The lure of work created a chaotic labor market where, even in conditions of serfdom, extralegal migration often occurred. Odessa police reported capturing 4,500 "fugitives" between 1849 and 1852, but one may assume that many more went undiscovered. The police prefect ( gradonachal'nik ) of Taganrog, on the sea of Azov, complained about the poor work of his police in this area. He was aware that illegal migration was a problem of large dimensions but unimpressed by the figures supplied by his police, whose "catch" ( ulov ) of unregistered migrants was far too low in his judgment. His solution was to request more police. [51] I assume that other areas such as Moscow and St. Petersburg had a similar hidden migrant society. In Moscow one uncontrolled migrant community existed thanks to the ingenuity of the Fedoseevtsy, an Old Believer group whose bonds were forged over generations of persecution. They cared for needy, undocumented brethren by making use of the "dead souls" that Nikolai Gogol found so intriguing. Purchasing the documents of dead petty bourgeois Muscovites, they transferred the names to their own fugitives, who automatically enrolled in that estate corporation. [52] Thus, ingenuity combined with venality and insufficient staffing to create another hidden dimension to the supposedly orderly cities of statutes and plans.

The motive for the risky violation of police regulations was uniformly

[50] B. N. Kazantsev, Rabochie Moskvy i Moskovskoi gubernii v seredine XIX veka (Moscow, 1976), 61.

[51] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 357-58.

[52] P. G. Ryndziunskii, Utverzhdenie kapitalizma v Rossii, 1850-1880 (Moscow, 1978), 472-74.

similar: the desperate search for work on the part of the mass of poor laborers, both urban and rural. Urban impoverishment was general throughout European Russia, although it was probably most acute in the cities and towns in the Pale of Settlement. During Nicholas I's reign the contraction of the boundaries of the Pale and the restrictions placed on Jewish employment in rural areas put enormous pressures on the urban labor market and led Jewish townspeople to avoid registration by all possible means. Official documentation meant fees and taxes, and to avoid making these payments an unknown number of Jewish families preferred legal nonexistence.

The absurdities of the police regulations were apparent to observers outside the Jewish community. When census time came, apartments and houses were missing their Jewish residents, whose presence the police conveniently overlooked in return for suitable bribes. Birth records in the 1850s reveal a sudden fall in Jewish births after a thirty-kopek registration fee was introduced. As a result of this fee, in Vilna almost twice as many Jews officially died in the following years as were born. One tsarist official commented ironically that "if, God forbid, this [trend] should continue, in 1875 Vilna will have no Jews." On a more serious note another official complained in 1861 that "it is no less difficult to ascertain the number of Jews today than in the time of King David." [53]

In these conditions the legal precision of legally defined urban estates and functions bore little resemblance to social reality. In the opinion of one historian the lowest merchants' guild appeared large only because so many traders falsified their figures of working capital to meet the criterion for admission. Merchant honors were not what mattered; rather, they were making a desperate effort to spare their sons twenty-five years of military service, which was not imposed on merchants. When this law was changed in the 1860s, the sudden fall in merchant membership suggested to one historian that perhaps two hundred thousand individuals had paid their merchant fees solely for this purpose. [54]

Among the lower orders the petty bourgeoisie (the approximate translation of the Russian term meshchanstvo ) acquired a reputation among educated Russians for servility and obscurantism; its members were thought to be the epitome of all that defied the hopes of educated Russians for a civilized city that would be a beacon of Western culture. In the opinion of one critic of the autocratic system the petty bourgeoisie was the refuge

[53] Quoted in Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825-1855 (Philadelphia, 1983), 161-62.

[54] I. I. Ditiatin, Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii (Iaroslavl, 1877), 2:228-29.

of retired soldiers, beggars, bankrupt merchants, and all others "for whom there was no assigned place in that cursed caste society [ v zakoldovannom soslovnom gosudarstve ]. [55] The disdain he showed for this estate was shared by tsarist administrators, who were empowered to apply to them "all the restrictions on mobility from place to place that applied to peasants." [56] The members of the petty bourgeoisie, which also included those who belonged to the smaller artisan estate, constituted about one-half of the population of provincial towns, and the "typical" townsperson of mid-century Russia was from this estate.

The salient characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie were the constant struggle with poverty and the desperate search for work. In certain respects it closely resembled the peasantry. Its members, placed in a semiservile status in terms of taxes, conscription, and passport requirements, took whatever trades or employment they could find to keep body and soul together, including working as farm laborers. Unlike the enserfed peasantry, its members might hope to escape by economic enterprise or state service, but in reality these opportunities were open to very few. Their lives were given over to work, and from the perspective of their practices the city was a work place, a pattern that was reinforced later by the massive influx of peasant migrants. The readiness of the members of the petty bourgeoisie to move in search of work was obvious to the urban leaders, who repeatedly cited the official figures of migration out of their towns to illustrate the impoverishment of their populations. The city commission of the upper-Volga town of Tver noted that in 1862 over one thousand petty bourgeois residents took out passports, which permitted absences of six months to a year. This massive departure, they explained laconically, was "indispensable even though the petty bourgeois [migrants] earn no more than thirty rubles a year" because "the petty bourgeois [residents] here live in extreme poverty and cannot even pay their taxes." [57]

Despite their appearance of castelike rigidity, estate regulations did not define precise limits to the activities of these lowly townspeople. The efforts of the state to isolate the artisanry as a separate corporate unit proved futile. The restrictions failed to control handicraft operations or to ensure proper employment to artisans. When a state inspector visited the town of Tula, he found such "absurd" variations in the registered number of guild

[55] S. V. Bakrushin, Maloletnie nishchie i brodiagi v Moskve: Istoricheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1913), 17.

[56] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 23.

[57] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Tverskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:4-5.

masters from one year to the next (variations of over 100 percent) that he concluded that a "conspiracy [ zlonamerenie ] to hide the truth" must exist. [58] In less moralistic terms his findings suggest that urban artisans functioned in large measure outside the purview of the legal corporations. This phenomenon was most evident in the cities of the Pale. In Minsk the president of the artisan society complained that "affairs are such that any Jew hardly knowing his business calls himself a master, taking on work and apprentices." Adopting the official tone of a tsarist official, he warned that "disorder is spreading, for no one trusts anyone else." [59] Thus, tsarist efforts to construct their cities on the foundation of public orderliness could not overcome the human obstacles put in their way by the working population.

Poverty was the overriding concern of the petty bourgeoisie, and tsarist regulations could not contain their struggle for livelihood. Estate regulations on artisan activities were largely irrelevant. Many handicrafts were operated by "temporary artisans," that is, people from other estates. Few hereditary guild members actually practiced a trade. Three-fourths of the 12,600 artisans registered in the corporate society of St. Petersburg worked "as a rule in domestic service, as guards, errand boys, dispatch boys, etc." [60] In the quieter provincial centers any work at hand constituted the daily life of the urban poor.

In these circumstances the official barrier separating rural and urban estates dissolved at the level of daily life. Peasants sought employment legally and illegally in the city, competing as traders as well as laborers, and poor townspeople sought work in the fields on either private land around towns or estates. The reports from the 1862 urban commissions frequently noted the importance of rural labor as a source of livelihood for urban workers. The tsarist administration itself recognized the vital role that cultivated lands around provincial towns played in sustaining the urban population. The city of Saratov had an abundance of surrounding farm land, and the poor townspeople turned to agricultural work by choice because in the words of one observer, they judged their legal right to trade and artisanry a "burden" and valued land as their best income. [61] In other, less fortunate urban centers, members of the petty bourgeoisie relied even

[58] "Po revizii," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39 (1945), d. 72, 39-40.

[59] Cited in A. F. Vishnevskii, "Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoe razvitie gorodov Belorussii v period krizisa feodal'izma" (Kandidat dissertation, State University of Minsk, 1973), 67.

[60] K. A. Pazhitnov, Problema remeslennykh tsekhov v zakonodatel'stve russkogo absoliutizma (Moscow, 1952), 125-26.

[61] I. A. Gan, O nastoiashchem byte meshchan Saratovskoi gubernii (St. Petersburg, 1860), 27.

more heavily on farming. In the opinion in 1842 of the minister of finance, without access to city land, "they would die from hunger." [62]

Poverty was only one explanation that the authorities used to explain the existence of the fugitive urban community. Outsiders who ventured into the provinces or even into the poorer neighborhoods of the major cities claimed to be overwhelmed by the stench ( zlovonie ) and the squalor ( griazn' ) that assailed their senses in streets and courtyards. Encouraged by the contemporary medical theory of "miasma," officials and observers easily associated these peculiar and repugnant qualities of poor townspeople with the prevalence among the population of infectious diseases. St. Petersburg itself, whose official death rate in those years was forty-seven per thousand, had the reputation of being one of the most unhealthy cities of Europe. [63] Most frightening to contemporaries were the cholera epidemics, the first of which occurred in 1830-31, the second in 1848. These epidemics struck the urban areas with special virulence, attacking, in the words of an English physician, "the lower classes of people, the ill-fed, ill-clothed, living in low and damp houses." [64] This description, which was drawn from his observations in Moscow, fit any of the mid-century towns.

The differences in social standing between the well-to-do and the poor townspeople appeared not only in official discrimination between privileged and unprivileged but also in a cultural language of disorder, disease, and misery that located the urban poor beyond the limits of Western urban civilization. These townspeople were absent from urban public life, without voice in municipal elections, and beyond the borders of the meager print culture of these towns. Urban disorder and poverty were important indicators of backwardness to educated Russian contemporaries, who judged their cities by Western cultural standards. Their awareness of the squalor and stench of the living conditions of the urban poor was typical of contemporary Western thought on the danger posed by urbanization. [65] Their manner of explaining these dismaying conditions, however, was peculiarly Russian. Heeding Western comments and their own admiration for Western civilization, they concluded that conditions among the urban population in their country were so inferior to those in the West that these places ought not—except for formal police and administrative reasons—to be labeled cities. One tsarist report of the early 1860s examining the statutes

[62] Cited in Ditiatin, Ustroistvo , 340.

[63] Statisticheskii ezhegodnik Sanktpeterburga (St. Petersburg, 1888), 130.

[64] F. B. Hawkins, History of the Epidemic Spasmodic Cholera of Russia (London, 1831), 215.

[65] See Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), esp. chap. 9.

governing the artisans in the country concluded that "in our country cities are distinguished from villages purely by formal, official differences." [66] This oft-quoted judgment, which was intended to spur reforms for urban development, used the image of the village both to criticize facade planning and to lament the level of urban life in the empire.

Although the association of towns with villages proved a tenacious rhetorical device among educated Russians, it ignored the practices that made mid-century towns distinctly urban places on the country's social map. Urban life contained its peculiar type of misery. The pervasive instability of everyday life permeated economic and social relations. One Russian author of the 1840s, seeking to give his fiction a suitably realistic tone, plunges his readers into the world of the laboring population in his hometown, Saratov. In his grim inversion of estate privileges poverty is "hereditary." The tale centers on a petty bourgeois family living in "the poorest section of town filled with little houses, hovels, and cabins scattered here and there" in an atmosphere of "stench and foul gases." Their cottage, which resembles a decrepit log cabin, houses the father, an unskilled laborer working as a stevedore at the port, the mother, who finds summer work in the truck gardens, and six children. Their furnishings consist of a stove, benches, and wooden chairs. The family's story turns into a tragedy when the father drowns while working at the port, and, shortly thereafter, the mother and five children die in the cholera epidemic. At the end of the story the one surviving son confronts a future as bleak as the one his parents faced before him. [67] This author's imaginary city is a timeless place of labor; property, privileges, and estate honors belong to another world.

From this perspective the best the city could offer was a slight measure of personal security, embodied in personal possessions and property. Vissarion Belinsky captured the tangible immediacy of this private world when he wrote of his native Moscow that "the dream of every Muscovite is to have his own house, even if it is only one with three windows [i.e., the poorest dwelling]. It may be poor, but it is his own, and with a courtyard he may be able to raise chickens and even a calf. But the most important thing is that under this little house is a cellar—what more could he wish for?" [68] Belinsky's picture fits any town in European Russia. For the townspeople this dream embodied the essence of their idealized city. They rele-

[66] Quoted in P. G. Ryndziunskii, Krest'ianskaia promyshlennost' v poreformennoi Rossii (Moscow, 1966), 70.

[67] S. A. Makashin, "Nasledstvennaia bednost'," in Rasskazy o starom Saratove , by S. A. Makashin (Saratov, 1937), 165-79.

[68] V. Belinskii, "Peterburg i Moskva," in Fiziologiia Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1845), 1:40-41.

gated grandiose palaces and public orderliness to the domain of state power and privilege. The satisfaction of immediate needs and a modest level of private wealth were the limits of their hopes for the future.

The ownership of a hut or cottage represented an element of stability but was beyond the means of about half the urban population. The official records of housing, which were compiled for tax purposes, suggest that even those who owned a humble dwelling were privileged. In the early 1860s the city of Saratov counted six thousand houses for a population of about sixty-five thousand. Of these six thousand houses, one-third were too poor to be included in the tax roles. [69] The remaining four thousand housed the town's relatively well-to-do traders, manufacturers, and privileged townspeople. Below the house owners was a laboring population with so few abiding ties to the orderly society of estates that they formed a separate, fugitive city. This picture fits one characterization of petty bourgeois society in Shuia, a textile town in northern Russia: its "very poor" petty bourgeois population lived in families of "five to seven members," most of whom were "without their own home." [70]

The prevalence of such conditions, however, did not turn these areas into large villages masquerading as towns; the lives of these townspeople were focused on their own private concerns and local affairs. In mid century the outer limits of the urban world of the lower classes followed the contours of the neighborhood; in the neighborhoods the figures of authority were the parish priest and the police. Activities there revolved around the market, the tavern, the church, and the public bath (which by mid century had become accessible to the common people). [71] The carnival gatherings of holidays ( gulian'ia ) offered simple but tangible images of other lives both within and beyond the city.

By comparison with the countryside literacy was relatively high in the city. Lacking direct data, our conclusions depend on estimates based on the 1897 census. By these calculations probably half of the men and one-fourth of the women in mid-century towns could read and write. [72] Although literacy levels were far below those of Western cities, literacy had a definite place in the functional and liturgical practices of Russian townspeople. For

[69] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Saratovskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:4.

[70] Cited in B. N. Vasil'ev, "Formirovanie fabrichno-zavodskogo proletariata tsentral'nogo promyshlennogo raiona Rossii, 1820-1890" (Doctoral dissertation, Novocherkassk Pedagogical Institute, 1972), 1:161-62.

[71] M. G. Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda: Gorozhane, ikh obshchestvennyi i domashnii byt (Moscow, 1978), 131-32.

[72] B. N. Mironov, "Gramotnost' v Rossii, 1797-1917 gg.," Istoriia SSSR (July-August 1983):149.

all but the small group of officials and intellectuals print culture consisted of the practical affairs of commerce and the spiritual matters of faith. The need for education could not be met by the state's network of district elementary schools, which consisted of only one or two small schools in the provincial capitals. Rather, education was achieved informally through a network of schools that owed nothing to the regime. For example, although the district school in the Volga town of Rybinsk taught only a handful of boys, almost all the town's merchant and petty bourgeois adult men were literate. [73] Presumably, their skills were acquired through informal instruction by priests or, more often, deacons in the so-called free schools, which taught reading, the prayers, the Psalter, numeracy, and writing. [74] Literacy was useful in urban commerce and reassuring to the faithful. Its role in city life did not extend beyond the narrow horizons of work and Christian dogma, or so we may presume, for example, from Gorky's portrait of his grandfather, who was born in the 1820s or 1830s. Although lettered in the Orthodox prayers, the old man appeared to Gorky to be incapable of even understanding their meaning. [75] No penny press existed in the mid century to provide townspeople with lurid stories of urban adventures, tragic or comic. Chapbooks on religious themes remained the predominant reading besides the Bible. In this respect urban practices bore some resemblance to those of the villages, where far fewer adults (perhaps one in ten) were literate. But the readiness of townspeople to create their own system of instruction, which was indicated by their higher literacy rates, was a special mark of the city. Town dwellers developed what one sociologist has termed a "scriptural economy," adapting learning to their own perceived needs and daily lives without regard to either the state's criteria of public education or the standards of enlightenment propounded by the "thick journals" of the intellectuals. [76]

The criteria by which one might define what was uniquely urban in the practices and conditions that were prevalent in mid-century Russian towns are varied and complex. Facile references to administrative decrees on civic duties only repeat the wishful thinking of the tsarist administrators; equally simplistic references to towns as "villages" make an invidious comparison between Russia and a somewhat idealized West, which is also mis-

[73] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 405.

[74] Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda , 274.

[75] Maxim Gorky, Autobiography , trans. I. Schneider (New York, 1949), esp. 11-22, 69-73.

[76] The concept of distinct "scriptural economies" is contrasted to the general category of "culture" in M. de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 131-33.

placed. Both standards are based on the experience and perceptions of an elite for whom the fugitive city of the mid century was an alien territory. Although we should not accept either of these elite views of the Russian city in their entirety, neither should we reject them out of hand. The preoccupation of intellectuals and administrators with Western models set a standard for urban cultural and civic development, and their own activities helped to spread these ideals. St. Petersburg and Moscow provided a refuge for people like Belinsky, and in small ways the provincial capitals felt the influence of the national capitals.

Similarly, one should not ignore the impact of tsarist activities and investments on urban life because both brought the power and resources of the autocracy to the urbanism of facade planning. For example, the state's capital investments in transportation were a key part of the commercial life of the urban population. These expansionist policies operated within strict limits. Nicholas's finance minister, Count Kankrin, had serious reservations regarding the disruptive social impact of railroads, warning at one point of the dangers of increasing "the mobility of an already insufficiently settled population" and thereby undermining the "indispensable social hierarchy." [77] His argument was intended to restrain state spending, but also revealed his awareness that social stability and economic development were incompatible objectives.

State policies and Western models were still feeble in the face of obstacles that in some respects resembled those that characterize so-called Third World cities in the twentieth century. Private capital was in short supply, and the skills associated with industrial enterprise were rare. Labor was overabundant, which led to endemic underemployment among the urban workforce. The life of the laboring population was extremely insecure. Also, the meager educational system contributed to the creation of many formidable cultural barriers. These conditions confounded tsarist efforts to impose its rigid estate system on urban society. Industriousness and enterprise were present, but they were constrained by the instability and insecurity of daily life. Work of whatever sort, wherever it might be located, found many ready laborers, who accepted employment at a pittance. The need for minimal literacy was met by the services of clerics in free schools (or by the Jewish elders among the Yiddish-speaking population in the Pale). Traditional religious beliefs, mixed with popular superstition, held sway over the fugitive population; deference to the powerful and

[77] Cited in A. M. Solov'eva, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1975), 39.

wealthy was the rule. "Squalor" and "stench" marked recognizable barriers, as effective as estate regulations on rank and honor in separating the laboring population from the elite.

Although urban misery was ever-present in mid century, the city was not a static world of unrelieved despair. The movement of migrants from village to town and from city to city pointed to the potential opportunities that the urban labor market presented. The economic historian Olga Crisp has emphasized the importance of the role, despite serfdom and state mercantilist regulations, of enterprise and innovation in the mid-century Russian economy. [78] Her observation applies particularly to urban Russia. The mobility of the population was becoming increasingly important to the economic livelihood of the country's urban centers and in certain areas had created an established network. The 1862 commission in the upper Volga city of Yaroslavl noted that "as many or more townspeople leave for work elsewhere as there are migrants arriving, and almost all who leave know what [occupations] are needed in one or another part of Russia." One-tenth of the town's adult men had obtained travel documents the previous year. [79] A similar trend was apparent among the province's peasants, who were already making a name for themselves as innkeepers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The regularity in the moves of the fugitive population suggests that ambition as well as desperation were responsible for the migration. Although limited in scope, economic expansion was causing cities to grow.

Commerce was the principal motor of economic life in urban areas, and to the end of the century it remained the sector that was most responsible for the expansion of the Russian urban economy. Its importance was apparent in the findings of the first tsarist survey of urban conditions, which was launched in the early 1840s. One inspector in the upper Volga region calculated that in the town of Yaroslavl "local manufacturing and 'local handicrafts' account for only one-tenth of the income of the residents." His dubious efforts at statistical precision aside, his findings suggest that regional commerce was crucial to the economic livelihood of the city. [80] In 1857 a correspondent for the Imperial Geographical Society noted that in Orel "most city dwellers engage in petty trade, buying up from peasants farm goods and rural handicraft products for sale at a small profit to the

[78] Olga Crisp, Studies in Russian Economic History (London, 1976), esp. 70-72, 92-95.

[79] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Iaroslavskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:6-7.

[80] Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo , 228, table 18.

local inhabitants." [81] However, competition was keen with peasant traders, who, if one can believe the bitter report of the Briansk commission of 1862, were "wealthier than third-guild merchants." [82] This complaint hints at the substantial rewards open to enterprising traders, for whom estate regulations were apparently largely irrelevant.

Although small-scale trade and manufacturing provided work for most urban inhabitants, the expansion of urban economic activity depended above all on regional and national opportunities. By mid century urban leaders were already thinking of their towns in the context of the potential national transportation network, which if inaccessible to their traders, condemned their economic affairs to stagnation. The 1862 reports on urban economic conditions repeatedly lamented inadequate transportation links to national markets. This factor was the explanation the Voronezh commission used to explain their town's miserable level of trade despite the area's richness "in grain products and, generally, in agricultural production." The report noted that the Moscow road, "begun thirty years ago, is still not completed," and the town's exclusion from the "proposed network of railroads" promises "unfortunate effects on the future." [83] The Voronezh commission's perception of economic needs was clearly changing, and at the heart of their vision of the future was the necessity to forge links between the city and larger markets in their country and beyond its borders.

In mid century the routes to the distant emporiums were the country's waterways. A growing network of canals provided key connections among rivers and with bordering seas. The sole important rail line in operation in the early 1860s was the Moscow-Petersburg railroad. Railroad construction represented a major capital investment, one that the state could ill afford, particularly at a time when it was already engaged in important investments in water transportation. The major south-to-north shipping route in Russia passed from the Volga through a series of canals and locks to St. Petersburg. An earlier waterway through Tver had become obsolete and inadequate for commercial needs. Count Kankrin financed a new route, the Mariinsky system, which linked Rybinsk on the Volga with the Neva below Lake Ladoga. This system was capable of accommodating deep-water barges. [84] Even though it quickly proved insufficient, when it opened in

[81] Quoted in Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda , 40.

[82] "Soobrazhenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37 (1863), d. 1267, 121.

[83] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Voronezhskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:4.

[84] F. M. Listengurt, "Rol' ekonomichesko-geograficheskogo polozheniia v istoricheskom razvitii gorodov Iaroslavlia, Kalinina i Rybinska" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow Pedagogical Institute, 1960), 115-20.

1852 it represented a substantial incentive to commerce and opened new opportunities in bulk trade to ambitious traders.

The new trends in urban commercial activity were apparent principally in a few towns along the southern seaports and the Volga river. By mid century the grain trade in these places was beginning to take on a magnitude that promised a great future to the urban business elite. The enthusiastic tone of the 1862 Saratov commission's report cannot be explained simply as boosterism; the report claimed that "everyone trades here who has the money to pay the fee for a market stall or for a boat or who has strong arms and some rubles to spend." The authors, aware of a basic change in economic relations, explained that this trade was not the product of periodical local fairs, whose revenues "over the past twenty years" had been "diminishing regularly." [85] Rather, Europe was the key factor in the increased grain trade. The market for agricultural produce was spreading far beyond the confines of urban Europe. It reached as far as the traders in cities such as Saratov and held out the lure of commercial operations and profits that were far beyond their previous experience. In ports such as Odessa major Western grain firms had already founded their own offices; further inland Russian dealers assumed the role of middlemen for this international market. On a note of capitalist modernity Saratov's town leaders claimed in 1862 that their city was entering "the ranks of those cities that constitute the links in a vast network uniting all the important manufacturing areas in a European-wide trade network."

The basis of this economy was grain, which was brought in from the surrounding hinterlands in winter and milled in the town's fifty flour mills or stored in over three hundred grain warehouses, then either shipped upstream to the capitals or, more commonly, south to the Sea of Azov. [86] Saratov's scale of trade was exceptional among inland cities in those years, but the expansion of national trade was already notable. The best indicator of this trend is the turnover of goods at the yearly fair in Nizhny Novgorod, whose total revenues in 1862 exceeded one hundred million rubles, a record level and over four million rubles greater than the previous year. [87] The economies of cities scattered over European Russia were on the verge of rapid expansion and diversification, and the principal force for this

[85] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Saratovskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 2:6, 8.

[86] Ibid., 4-6.

[87] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Nizhegorodskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:5.

event was commercial exchange such as that moving up and down the Volga.

Trade still came to most towns on a seasonal basis; in the summertime it brought traders, boatmen, and laborers in great numbers throughout the river network. Key transshipment points such as Rybinsk on the upper Volga were for a few months transformed by the arrival of so many boats that, as the town's 1862 commission claimed, the river is "almost entirely covered with ships from one side to the other, and at times it is possible without much trouble to cross the Volga as though across a bridge." A small town of eleven thousand permanent inhabitants, its population swelled each year with the arrival of forty thousand migrants, principally seasonal dock workers but also merchants. Traders and shippers conducted their affairs in the local taverns, not in the new commodity exchange building. The laborers were not provided any facilities for living by the town, so they formed a fugitive port city of their own. [88] Observers did not recognize that these temporary urban dwellers and their activities belonged to an urban way of life. The summertime presence of these workers had none of the permanence that was attached to the corporate city; rather, it resembled the encampments of nomads gathered briefly before dispersing again across the steppes.

Largely missing from mid-century Russian urban economic activity were industry and a factory labor force. A few industrial settlements that resembled European textile towns had begun to emerge in Moscow province, where over half of the country's textile factory workers lived. In Vladimir province, northeast of Moscow, the new factory settlement of Ivanovo Voznesensk had forty-five textile factories in 1850, and nearby Shuia possessed seventeen factories and 4,300 workers. [89] These centers, which were important to the early process of industrialization, were exceptional among the empire's towns. At this time (as later) commerce, not industry, was the most powerful motor in reshaping economic relations and the social dynamics of Russian urban expansion.

By mid century the ranks of merchants had grown; enrollment in this estate was a business necessity as well as a mark of standing within the community. A few entrepreneurs in Moscow and elsewhere had succeeded in amassing fortunes in the textile industry, creating family dynasties (for example, the Krestovnikov, Guchkov, Khludov, and Morozov families)

[88] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Iaroslavskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie , 2:34-35.

[89] Vasil'ev, "Formirovanie," 280, table 32; see also Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Vladimirskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:64-66.

whose rise to wealth is emblematic of Russia's early capitalist class. Alfred Rieber suggests that they were not representative of the merchant class, which in those years remained "trapped in traditional patterns of behavior." [90] His judgment makes "tradition" a form of invidious comparison between Russian merchants and Western bourgeois and reiterates the social stereotype of the Russian merchant that was shared by Russian nobles and intellectuals. One may better understand trading and manufacturing practices by examining the economic and social constraints and obstacles that confronted the protoindustrialists.

The condemnation of the merchant represented a manner of judging the shortcomings of the mid-century city that implicitly took a Western and elitist perspective. The memoirs of the Moscow nobleman V. Golitsyn stressed the barriers dividing Muscovites. His most abiding image of the prereform era was one of the "isolation" of the noble and merchant elite and their disdain for the "lower" ranks of the petty bourgeoisie and the artisans. Speaking from his perspective as a nobleman, he explained that the estates were divided by "mutual distrust, diffidence, a certain envy of one another, and fear of compromising oneself by familiar relations with people from another estate." [91] A similar judgment appeared in literary form from Vissarion Belinsky, who suggested that the most appropriate image of the Moscow merchant was a house with a walled courtyard "similar to a fortress, ready to withstand a long siege." Behind those walls "family solidarity [ semeistvo ]" mattered most. "Nowhere," he concluded, "is the city visible." [92] Looking for a literary and civic society, he judged the mid-century Russian city by Western standards of urbanism.

Social barriers were perhaps less impenetrable, but no less perceptible, among the lesser urban ranks. Although estate rank meant little in everyday urban life among the laboring population, it retained the full force of tsarist statute and constituted a formidable barrier to legal advancement in society. The admission into Moscow's petty bourgeois corporate society of six thousand peasants in a fifteen-year period in the mid century suggests that even this lowly estate was attractive to peasants. [93] Similarly, a small measure of status and economic security was accessible to the few townspeople who were successful in entering the state bureaucracy. In those years the principal importance of urban public schools appeared to be as

[90] Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), 24.

[91] V. Golitsyn, "Moskva v semidesiatykh godakh," Golos minuvshego (May-December 1919): 119-20.

[92] Belinskii, "Peterburg i Moskva," 45.

[93] Zlatoustavskii, Moskovskoe gorodskoe samouprovlenie , 147.

paths into state service. One correspondent for the Imperial Geographical Society remarked, somewhat disdainfully, that "a certain group of townspeople put their children in schools because the boys from these schools sometimes become clerks in state offices and thereby receive without examination the lowest administrative rank." [94] Social exclusiveness operated even within the schools. The two Voronezh district schools catered to two distinct publics. In one, the sons of merchants and petty bourgeois predominated in a student body of forty-seven; in the other, one-half of the sixteen pupils were sons of state bureaucrats. [95] The small number of youth enrolled in these schools was typical for most district schools. It reminds us that the opportunities for advancement were insignificant and that any expectations for an escape from the poverty and insecurity that were typical of urban life were largely illusory.

The idea of another city of equality of conditions and opportunity only existed in the dreams—or nightmares—of a few visionary Russians such as Belinsky. The potential impact of the expansion of schooling and of business interests on social rank was profoundly unsettling. This prospect filled one observer with dismay. A participant in the urban survey of 1862 in his Belorussian town of Mogilev, he prepared a separate report that warned of dire consequences if conditions in the Russian city became such that "wealth and education give greater rights than [official] privilege. Presently, we see many merchants and petty bourgeois who enjoy greater advantages and esteem from society than nobles. We see nobles placed in the midst of poor petty bourgeois and other ranks; [the nobles are] in no way superior to them and [they are] denied any honors." [96] His fears of the subversive influence of "wealth and education" were in large measure a projection of the Western trend toward a democratic society (a term not used in his essay but arguably one that was very much on his mind) in which estate ranks would no longer segregate privileged from unprivileged townspeople. The presence of déclassé nobles living among the urban "rabble" was deeply offensive to conservatives, for whom the social disorder and administrative chaos evident in the towns of the empire represented isolated failings of a valid autocratic system.

This inconsistency, however, was an affair of great importance to critics

[94] Cited in Rabinovich, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda , 280.

[95] "Obozreniia obshchestvennogo khoziaistva goroda Voronezha," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 39. d. 65, 62-63.

[96] "Mnenie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 1262, 60; excerpts were included in the Ministry of Interior's compilation of provincial reports: Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Materialy otnosiashcheisia do novogo obshchestvennogo ustroistva v gorodakh imperii (St. Petersburg, 1877), 1:42-43.

of the old order such as the inspectors from the Urban Affairs Section of the Ministery of the Interior. The vision of the idealized city implicit in their reports assumed that municipal governance and urban economic expansion, if undertaken by men of talent and reason (regardless of rank), would make the Russian city the center of progress in the country. While shifting the criteria of public orderliness from the implementation of facade planning to the provision of extensive urban services, they also turned the specter of the mingling of ranks into a call for reform. These critics were certainly not aware of the full extent of economic growth and social upheaval that lay ahead. They understood urbanism in terms of culture and public service, but economic expansion was creating a very different pattern of urban relations. The history of Russian urbanism in the last half of the nineteenth century is a story of conflicting urban ideals and the social and economic transformation of urban life.

2 Railroads, Merchants, and Migrant Cities

In the decades following the Great Reforms the Russian city expanded beyond the activities of tsarist administrators, the civilizing pretensions of Petersburg's neoclassical facades and geometrical spatial order, and the economic leadership of a few wealthy merchants. The differences between the provincial towns and the capitals gradually dwindled. In the latter half of the century the expansion of commerce and manufacturing and the influx of migrants into certain towns enormously enlarged the sphere of economic operations and the diversity of the population. Urban growth appeared to be less and less a product of state activity and increasingly a social creation, the work of an industrious, mobile population that was adapting economic and social practices to their needs and to the opportunities of town life.

Models for a new-style urbanism emerged from industry, science, and technology as well as from new Western concepts of the civilized city. Russian imperial urban plans became anachronistic when the public embodiment of progress took the forms of the steam engine and the municipal sewage system. The promoters of the latter, striving for a Russian variety of the sanitized city, were a part of the civil society that was emerging around municipal government (a subject I discuss in the next chapter); the supporters of technological progress came from new groups of entrepreneurs and professionals. This modernistic image took concrete form in national exhibitions of science and industry, a latter-day capitalist rendering of the imperial urban plans. This version of the city

beautiful had little in common with the lives of the petty artisans, traders, and manufacturers and was far removed from the world of migrant laborers. The gap was readily visible to the visitors to Moscow's All-Russian Industrial Exhibition of 1882 who cared to view the city's notorious labor market and slums of Khitrovka. Russian urban economic development was crucial to the transformation, both idealized and real, of the Russian city.

In historical perspective the conjuncture of commercial and manufacturing activity and urban growth in Russia closely fits the trends usually grouped under the labels of industrialization and urbanization. Machine technology, the intensification of the market economy, and capitalist enterprise were all present in late-century urban areas of Russia, whose rate of population expansion rivaled that of another borderland of the Western world, the United States.

In Russia, however, these trends evolved in a manner that was significantly different than in the United States or other Western lands. First, economic historians generally agree that the industrial revolution did not come to Russia before the mid nineteenth century and perhaps arrived decades later. [1] For this reason the economic foundations of Russian urbanization were shaped, much more than in the West, by the era of industrialization. Second, the expansion of manufacturing activity in Russia coincided with a rapid intensification of market relations. Previously, these two phenomena had been far more limited in their scope and intensity than in the West, where the so-called commercial revolution of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries had deeply penetrated the national and local economies. Olga Crisp has concluded that in the last half of the nineteenth century "the most significant aspect of the [economic] development in Russia was the erosion of the self-sufficiency of peasant households and the growth of a money economy." The characteristic pattern of Western economic growth in modern times was not repeated in Russia, where "the development of a market was part of the process of industrialization. [2] This belated commercialization placed some towns at the center of national and international markets, while others with little access to markets became "backwaters" in the overall pattern of economic exchange in the late century and in the eyes of their inhabitants. Thus, the creation of the new railroad network fixed the economic fate of towns throughout

[1] See P. G. Ryndziunskii, Utverzhdenie kapitalizma v Rossii, 1850-1880 (Moscow, 1978), esp. 185-228.

[2] Olga Crisp, "Labor and Industrialization in Russia," The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 7, pt. 2, 350.

the country. It represented the harbinger of progress to its proponents and the pathway to the city for urban migrants.

Railway Journeys and Urban Travelers

By the 1860s business interests in Russia's trading towns spoke of the railroad as an instrument of salvation. The extensive canal-and-river system remained hostage to the forces of nature, but access to rail lines meant freedom from these constraints and for the towns located away from the waterways a chance at last to compete in national and even international markets. The town leaders of Feodosia, in mid century still a minor seaport on the Sea of Azov, wrote in 1861 that the "fate" of their city "depends on whether or not it will be linked by railroad with the interior provinces of Russia." [3] The grain trade was the prize they sought; they assumed its rewards would benefit the entire town population. The railroad appeared to be the key to both personal profit and town prosperity. An appeal to the Russian state was implicit in their statement; a rail line would only reach them with the encouragement and approval of the government.

An awareness of the importance of this revolutionary new means of transportation to the country's economy and to urban growth came gradually to the tsarist government. The Main Society of Russian Railroads, formed in 1857, looked to railroads "to facilitate foreign exports and to assure transportation for internal production," but it lacked a concrete plan of action and proved incapable of negotiating successful contracts with Western entrepreneurs. [4] What was missing in the Main Society, in addition to effective action, was strong backing from the government, which was still unpersuaded of the necessity for rapid railroad construction. A forceful and persuasive argument in favor of railroads came in an 1863 report to the imperial cabinet from the minister of state domains, A. Zelenoi. Its subject was "the mapping [ nachertanie ] of a network of railroads in Russia." He argued that railroad transportation was the path to progress: "The number of rail lines has become a sort of measure by which one may judge in the most accurate way the wealth of a country, the level of its manufacturing and trade, activity, even its civilization." He judged that the

[3] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del. "Tavricheskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie gorodskikh poselenii evropeiskoi Rossii v 1861-1862 g. (St. Petersburg, 1863), 2: 24-25.

[4] Quoted in A. M. Solov'eva. Zheleznodorozhnyi transport vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow, 1975), 66.

new form of transportation was "indispensable not only for the expansion of internal manufacturing and trade in Russia and a more correct and equitable distribution of prices on basic consumer goods but also for the lowering of these prices through more rapid, convenient, and inexpensive distribution of the workforce at those points in the country where the greatest need exists." [5] These developments implied a profound transformation of urban centers. His emphasis on consumer prices, manpower, and production amounted to an economic plan for the capitalist development of Russia.

Zelenoi made urbanization an integral part of economic growth. His proposed network of lines included "all the most populous and manufacturing cities of Russia" as well as towns "located on the navigable rivers," thus linking railroads with "the steamship lines for passengers and commercial goods." Certain urban centers would become transshipment points for the movement of agricultural products from the south and southeast of the country to seaports; northern cities, "often in need of agricultural produce," would be served by "the shortest lines" to grain-growing regions. Zelenoi's plan incorporated considerations of internal order as well; it ensured that rail lines would reach the "greatest number of provincial capitals." [6]

Government approval of this network of railroads remade the economic map of the country. From the mid 1860s the state's concessionary policy of railroad construction became an effective means of promoting the rapid emergence in European Russia of a nexus of key rail lines that were owned and operated by private companies that were subsidized by the state through low-interest loans. [7] Construction proceeded rapidly, with as much if not more profiteering by railroad entrepreneurs as in the United States. By the mid 1870s the basic network emerged, covering a total distance of nearly twelve thousand miles.

The importance of these rail lines to the towns along their path cannot be exaggerated. A certain number of urban areas experienced a transportation and marketing revolution. Mosow became the center of a radial grid of lines opening access to markets and facilitating the influx of agricultural produce and labor throughout central and northern Russia. From north to south and east to west the central regions were linked to seaports and the

[5] "O nachertanii seti zheleznykh dorog v Rossii," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (abbreviated TsGIA), f. 207, op. 3, d. 162 (1861-64), 86-87.

[6] Ibid., 138-40.

[7] A meticulous, detailed account of state railroad policy may be found in I. S. Bliokh, Vliianie zheleznykh dorog na ekonomicheskoe sostoianie Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1878), vol. 1.

West. The southern ports of Odessa and Nikolaev on the Black Sea and Taganrog on the Sea of Azov could tap the produce of the Central Blackearth region through Kharkov. Voronezh became a gathering point for grain to be shipped to the southern port of Rostov-on-Don.

Other major lines cut across the principal river systems to carry goods between eastern and western lands. Rail lines competed with the Volga waterways by offering service from northwestern Russia to the regions around Tsaritsyn, Saratov, Samara, and Kazan, a territory that quickly became one of the principal suppliers of marketed grain the country. The central area received access to the Baltic port of Riga via Orel and Smolensk, and commerce through Kiev reached into the German and Austro-Hungarian empires through Brest. Somewhat later, the Donets line extended across the southern steppes, where high-grade coal and iron ore deposits were located, to lay the foundations for the Ukrainian metallurgical industry. Despite ostensible state controls, the introduction of rail transport occurred in conditions as chaotic as anywhere in the West. Reports in the 1860s and 1870s of remarkably slow, erratic, and often dangerous rail travel added an aura of adventure to travelers' tales and provoked official investigations of incompetent and corrupt management. The spread of railroads opened a new dimension of public life that mingled power and profits, mobility and opportunity in ways never before experienced by Russian townspeople.

Medium-sized and small towns that had once existed largely as administrative centers or as transshipment points between land and waterways found within a few years vast markets for the purchase and sale of agricultural produce and manufactured goods. By the late 1870s railroads occupied the central place in transportation, a fact that drastically altered the practices of Russia's large-scale urban traders. The possibilities for economic opportunity expanded in tandem with railroad construction into promising territories. In a petition similar to many others sent to tsarist authorities, Samara's municipal elite begged at the end of the 1870s for the government to extend the rail lines from their city toward the northeast, where they claimed to behold visions of yet another "new granary" for the empire—and profits for Samara's grain wholesalers. They based their forecast on fact, not fantasy: the new line to the southeast through grain lands to the city of Orenburg, near the Urals, was already carrying twice as much freight as projected in the original plans. [8] Their eagerness to include still more agricultural territory within the scope of their trading activity was an

[8] "Reviziia senatora Shamshina," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1, d. 23 (1880), 12-13.

affair of entrepreneurial ambition. It placed their city at the hub of a regional commercial economy.

This new perspective on the position of cities in the Russian economy entailed not only calculations of profit and freight movement but also estimates of the economic importance of railroads to towns whose economic livelihood was coming to depend on distant markets. Urban commercial and municipal leaders involved in railroad affairs were prepared to deal with rail companies either directly on their own or indirectly through the state. Rumors that wealthy Berdichev citizens had paid an enormous bribe to bring the Kiev-Brest rail line to their town (far off the most direct route the tracks could have taken) might have resulted from anti-Semitism. But they received credence because of the widely understood value of the railroad to any town's economic livelihood. [9] When the Southeastern Railroad company threatened to move its headquarters from Kiev unless it received municipal land for new buildings, the municipality gave in with scarcely a fight. [10]

Administrative reports from the provinces increasingly reflected the importance of railroads to urban growth and to the new economic practices of enterprising townspeople. In turn, new priorities that arose from the economic interests of the state and the population made some impression on the ponderous machinery of tsarist policy-making. Appeals from urban leaders and municipalities for greater access to rail transport, which in mid century had little discernible impact, often received a favorable reply from state officials in later years. In the 1870s governors' reports began to take account of urban economic needs for the first time. An investigation into railroad mismanagement, a serious concern by the late 1870s, appeared necessary to the state not only in response to the complaints of the army but also to satisfy "the interests of entire communities" that were suffering from the inefficiency and chaos that accompanied these early years of Russia's iron age. [11]

The Baranov commission, appointed to study and rectify these problems, set the issue of rail transportation in the context of national growth and the "numerous interests of the country," including the "interests of entire localities." [12] Its definition of national interest took the form of a sort of balance sheet of the country's productive wealth that was opened by rail-

[9] Novoe vremia , 14 December 1899.

[10] Michael Hamm, "The Emergence of Modern Kiev," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. M. Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1985), 86.

[11] V. V. Salov, Istoricheskii ocherk uchrezhdeniia Komissii dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnogo dela v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1909), 6-8.

[12] Ibid., 9.

road transportation. In the territories of European Russia that were served by the various rail lines the commission established precise estimates of economic resources, which were expressed as the total agricultural surplus and the value of manufacturing production to which the railroads provided access. [13] The prospects of commercial growth contained in its statistical tables set urban economic activities in the new context of commerce and productivity. Although the report had little short-term effect on policies, it revealed that the tsarist administration was aware that railroads were having a nationwide impact. In the 1870s the state had begun to use freight rates as a device to influence internal commerce, but only in the 1890s did it implement a policy of satisfying "urban needs" for cheap bread through lowered short-haul rates on grain to northern cities. [14] Beyond these measures the Baranov commission's vision of productivity under state guidance had no apparent consequences. The state remained a remote presence in the reordering of commercial activities that was being sparked by rail transportation.

Although far less spectacular, the expansion of water transport during these decades also strengthened the ties among urban economies and enlarged the field of activities of migrant laborers and traders. Animal and human motor power was replaced by steam technology on rivers and canals. As on land, the consequences were increased speed for transportation and lowered costs, which together were sufficient to make river transport competitive with—when it was not complementary to—railroad transport. The number of steam boats on Russia's waterways grew from one hundred in 1850 to five hundred in 1866 and reached three thousand in 1898. [15] The water and rail systems became the channels through which goods poured into and out of key urban centers. Maps prepared by the Ministry of Transportation at the end of the century presented a vivid schematic picture of the flow of raw materials across Russia by rail and water. The Volga remained the most important commercial waterway, accounting in the 1890s for one-half of all water transportation. The paths of water and rail transport marked out by the mapmakers pinpointed certain transport hubs, such as Minsk in the west and Samara in the east, that were vital to

[13] These tables appeared throughout Trudy vysochaishei uchrezhdennoi Komissii dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnogo dela v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1879), vol. 2, pt. 1, 84-104; pt. 2, 134-39, 154-77.

[14] A. L. Shaulov, Zheleznodorozhnaia tarifnaia politika tsarizma v 60-90 godakh XIX veka (Kandidat dissertation, Rostov-on-Don University, 1977), 121; see also T. M. Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia Rossii, 1875-1914 gg. (Leningrad, 1978), 181-82.

[15] Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia, Aperçu statistique des chemins de fer et des voies navigables de la Russie (St. Petersburg, 1900), 112.

regional, national, and even international trade. [16] By implication, such schematic renderings of transportation suggested how important marketing had become in the economic affairs of Russia's townspeople. In old port cities and new rail centers the population was increasingly involved in trade; the economies of these places were largely dependent on the income earned from occupations that involved the transshipment of goods.

The transportation revolution diminished the cultural isolation of provincial towns. It brought the capitals and their far-flung commercial hinterlands into close contact and offered more opportunities than ever before for city and countryside to collaborate. The iron rail was a lifeline for rapidly growing urban centers scattered across European Russia. Moscow in many ways was exemplary of the new city emerging in these conditions: its railroad stations were the funnels through which poured goods and people. In a somewhat idealized form it symbolized the new Russia of the late nineteenth century. In the literary imagery of Anton Chekhov the railroad passing near the cherry orchard was an inevitable victor over the gentle ways of landlords and dreamers; it brought the town to the countryside and turned the orchard into a suburban housing development. Rail transportation was crucial to the emergence of the new city. It expanded grain trade, increased the availability of foodstuffs in urban areas, quickened commercial growth, and intensified the movement of migrants into and through certain cities.

The rail lines brought new economic activities to towns in agricultural areas, both by opening up rapid bulk trade with grain growers and by providing access to national and foreign markets. Through the last half of the century the impact of the railroads gradually grew in scope and intensity. In a report written in 1907 local officials from the Volga city of Simbirsk recalled a somber, distant past before the time in the 1890s when "with the completion of the Moscow-Kazan railroad Simbirsk became directly connected with the entire railroad network and with the most distant parts of Russia." Their new town history was a story of commerce because the arrival of the railroad meant that the "grain trade particularly increased." [17] We know little of the provincial grain traders, many of whom were acting as agents for foreign commercial firms and who followed the rail lines in search of grain for European markets (which accounted for 60

[16] The most grandiose of these visual renderings of Russia's new commercial activities was provided by the mapmakers who were charged with illustrating the volume on transportation that was prepared for the Russian pavilion at the 1900 Paris world's fair; see "Dvizhenie tovarov po zheleznym i vnutrennim vodnym putiam evropeiskoi Rossii," in Ministerstvo putei soobschcheniia, Aperçu statistique , endpages. (See figure 4.)

[17] "Statisticheskie svedeniia po gorodam," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 240 (1907-9), 15.

percent of rail grain shipments in 1889). [18] Rail connections increased the dependence of Simbirsk's economy on outsiders at the same time that these connections opened new markets. The city's businessmen adjusted their trading practices to fit the new conditions of the railroad era.

In many ways the transportation revolution determined the evolution of the urban economy in the last half of the nineteenth century. Invariably, reports on economic conditions in individual towns and cities referred to the railroad in explaining the fate of the author's local economy. Whether accurate or not, traders, shippers, manufacturers, and even those whose world was limited to a local market believed that their success or failure depended on the presence—or absence—of the railroad. The reason why the town of Kaluga, located south of Moscow, had "lost significance as a central trade point for its region" appeared clear to city officials in 1907. The province's rail line to Moscow had undermined local business because it allowed the rural counties to "obtain all their goods directly from major centers." [19] The assumption that the urban economy was dependent on transportation appeared in a report that same year from Chernigov, a city in the northern Ukraine. "The absence of a broad-gauge rail line and any suitable means of transportation," the authors noted, was the cause of "poor trade and manufacturing affairs." [20] Whether accurate or not, the centrality of the railroad in observers' explanations of the economic condition of their towns suggests how crucial rail links to the outside world had become to urban elites throughout Russia.

Where rail connections had expanded and intensified, local assessments of urban affairs sounded a note of general well-being. So great were the opportunities created by the railroad in Minsk, which was located in a poor region of western Russia, that the city was "tranformed from an ordinary provincial town into a fairly strong commercial center," at least in the opinion of one traveler in the 1880s. [21] A quarter of a century before, the Minsk town fathers, in reply to a query from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, had noted glumly that "Minsk is insignificant in trading and manufacturing relations, less important than certain district towns." [22] The new Minsk was created by the railroad. It was located on the main line between the northern Ukraine and the Baltic, and its operations required supplies

[18] V. A. Zolotov, Khlebnyi eksport Rossii cherez Chernogo i Azovskogo morei v 60-90 godakh XIX veka (Rostov-on-Don, 1966), 40.

[19] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 234 (1907), 143.

[20] Ibid., 272.

[21] A. P. Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti (St. Petersburg, 1888), 1:8.

[22] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, "Minskaia guberniia," in Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie 1:4.

and labor. "The shipment of grain provides work for very many," and "work is constantly available for suppliers, contractors, people supplying ties, firewood, etc." As a result, the town's population had doubled in the previous quarter century, "developing so quickly" that in the author's opinion its dynamism was comparable "only to [that of] new cities and a few of the railroad junctions in other regions." [23] This new city was the outcome of a commercial boom, the demand for labor, and a population explosion: its rapid transformation was attributable largely to the railroad.

The railroad was redrawing the map of urban Russia in the last decades of the century. A few cities exerted a power of attraction far beyond their borders, drawing in trade, manufacturing, and labor to expand their economic activities. This shift was apparent to the governor of Saratov province, who in 1897 observed that thanks to its newly developed rail connections and expanded river transport, Tsaritsyn was becoming "the trade center" for a vast southeastern territory. [24] Many thousands of migrant laborers were lured to such cities by an awareness of economic opportunity; although their labor was indispensable to transport and commerce in this new city, it also appeared to be threatening to high officials. That same year the governor warned the minister of internal affairs of the dangers posed to Tsaritsyn by "migrant laborers, generally undisciplined and extremely inclined to drunkenness and disorder." [25] His fears of social unrest were as important to his views of the city as were his visions of vast trading hinterlands.

The impact of the railroads was tangible in economic activities and the dynamics of urban growth. The shifting pattern of trade made itself felt by the 1880s at the yearly national fair at Nizhny Novgorod. In the opinion of a Soviet historian the decline of the fair, which began that decade, was primarily the result of "the development of railroad lines," which permitted manufacturers "to send their goods directly to the place of demand." [26] The speed with which these changes occurred was by contemporary standards extraordinary, particularly in those rural areas where the appearance of the railroad signaled the sudden creation of new towns. This aspect of urbanization was most apparent in the central Ukraine. The Ekaterinoslav railroad, running from the Donets coalfields in the east to the Dnepr river at Ekaterinoslav and, from there, to the Krivoi Rog iron ore fields, began

[23] Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti, 9-10.

[24] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet Saratovskogo gubernatora za 1897," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1898), d. 300, 23-24.

[25] Ibid., 21-22.

[26] V. Ia. Laverychev, Krupnaia burzhuaziia v poreformennoi Rossii, 1861-1900 (Moscow, 1974), 19.

full operations in the middle of the 1880s. Industrial settlements grew along its line in areas where cattle had recently grazed; the town of Ekaterinoslav, once an administrative town with virtually no economic activity, became a major industrial center with large metallurgical plants and a new community of traders, many of whom were Jews from the Pale of Settlement. This mingling of populations, which exacerbated ethnic tensions and quickly led to anti-Semitic riots, was a direct outcome of urban migration along the rail line.

The railroads also made food supplies available to town populations with greater regularity and more abundance than ever before. The opportunity to hold down urban food costs was politically important as a means to curtail economic hardship and social unrest among the urban laboring population. Thus, it is not surprising that in the early 1890s the state ceased using transport rates to subsidize grain growers in the distant southeastern territories and instead adopted a policy that was intentionally calculated to lower charges on short hauls. The move was a direct benefit to urban populations in European Russia, whose food shipments traveled relatively short distances. [27] This policy, coupled with increased grain marketing and the transportation revolution, kept the urban cost of living down despite rapid population growth and ensured, even in the famine year of 1891-92, that townspeople had adequate food supplies. These conditions served the needs of employers, who were eager to keep wages low, and reassured tsarist officials, who were anxious to avoid food riots. They also helped to make these cities a magnet for migrants. The railroad became the lifeline of Russia's cities.

The regularization and expansion of shipments along rail lines and waterways were paralleled by increased passenger travel by rail. The custom of the temporary migration of labor ( otkhodnichestvo ) turned into mass migration under the pressure of rural hardship, the lure of urban labor markets, and the availability of train travel. Distant destinations became accessible, even if the conditions of travel appeared intolerable to well-to-do Russians, who were accustomed to comfort. As the rail network grew, the number of Russians traveling by train increased even more rapidly. The old roads continued to attract many laborers, especially those whose destinations were the new southern and eastern grain fields. But urban migrants by the last decade of the century were largely train travelers.

The migrants' passage from village to city occurred in the cheap third-class coaches, where wooden benches accommodated an indiscriminate mix-

[27] Quoted in Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia , 191.

ing of social ranks. One traveler judged it "a barbarous means of transporting laborers," which was done "in crowded, dirty, dark coaches." [28] Disdained by Russians of privilege and rank, third class was a "democratic" place where estates and wealth had little meaning (hence it was welcomed by the repentant aristocratic hero of Leo Tolstoi's novel Resurrection ). It attracted four-fifths of all passengers throughout the late nineteenth century. [29] According to official statistics, on average passengers traveled relatively short distances—eighty miles at the end of the century—but their numbers grew rapidly. The railroads transported twenty-four million passengers a year in the first years of the 1870s; by 1897 (after a significant fare reduction in 1894) they transported seventy-five million. [30]

The transition to mechanized travel was made less abrupt by both the notoriously slow pace of Russian trains and the moderate distances that passengers traveled. Still, the cumulative effects of growing numbers of travelers, regularized rail service, and the social promiscuity of travel in the popular third class created a collective experience that had a subversive social and psychological impact on the way that the lower classes, urban and rural, might view the Russia of estates, ranks, and order. The railroad also created among Russian travelers a new sense of space and time and a new measure of speed to compete with a man's pace or a winter sleigh. Traveling from town to town enhanced the notion of an urban Russia identifiable to passengers as their own destination points. In the opinion of a German historian the cultural novelty of a rail journey was to bring departure and arrival points into "immediate vicinity," thereby transforming the "traveling space" perceived by travelers into small, continuous temporal moments. [31] Although the subjective meaning that Russian travelers gave to their experience is still poorly understood, by the end of the century a rail journey had become a notable part of the cultural imagery and social relations of the urban population.

The impact of the railroad on personal mobility was most visible in the Central Industrial region of the north, where from the railroad's inception the scale of passenger movement was greater than elsewhere. A railroad commission in the late 1870s reported that along the northern lines "di-

[28] A. P. Subbotin, Volga i Volgari: Putevye ocherki (St. Petersburg, 1894), 7.

[29] Such was already the case in southern Russia in the 1870s, as reported in Komissiia dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnykh del, Passazhirnoe dvizhenie: Doklad Khar'kovskoi podkomissii (St. Petersburg, 1880), 3; figures for the entire network at the end of the century are in Maksim Kovalevsky, ed., La Russie à la fin du 19e siècle (Paris, 1900), 861-62.

[30] Aperçu statistique , 27.

[31] The comment, directed to the impact of rail travel in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, appears even more apt to a country as large as Russia. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journal , trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford, 1980), 44.

rectly adjoining centers of manufacturing, a great mass (up to one hundred thousand on the Nizhny Novgorod line) of laborers and craftsmen work in factories in Moscow and the Moscow area." These passengers are "for the most part peasants from . . . the provinces closest to Moscow, to whom the third-class ticket is not a big expense and who very rarely travel on foot." [32] The scale of this movement reached such proportions that the smaller towns around Moscow such as Serpukhov, through which migrants had previously passed "around the time of holidays and for summer work," saw trade "fall severely" when these laborers turned to the two nearby rail lines to carry them to and from the great metropolis. [33] The city and the countryside were drawn much closer together for these migrants. The railroad brought a form of modernity into the ordinary experience of the masses of urban laborers from the countryside; it made the move from village life to city existence more rapid than ever before and created a unique transitional experience between rural and urban residence. The intensification of contact between the village and the city was perhaps the most profound human consequence of railroad journeys on Russian urbanism.

Railroad transport and passenger movement changed the very organization of urban space. They were the principal forces freeing urban growth from state tutelage. In the 1860s and 1870s imperial urban plans ceased to be effective guides to urbanization; their disappearance met with little resistance even though civic-minded reformers objected to the destructive effects of the railroad on urban order. One Soviet historian observed with obvious regret that "the location of railroad stations and railroad lines in a city often took place without regard to established urban plans for development." Land speculation and "a sharp reduction in state supervision of private building" rendered planning obsolete and inoperable. [34] Visions of the utopian city did not disappear from Russian cultural life, but the new forces of urbanization profoundly shaped the configuration of urban models in the late nineteenth century. The railroad station both symbolized and embodied the new urbanism in Russian cities; it did so to the same extent that it did in another continental-sized state, the United States.

The effects of the railroad were particularly dramatic in Russian urban areas because railroad engineers and topographers largely replaced the state in giving shape to the city. Their decisions on the location of rail lines (even

[32] Komissiia dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnykh del, Doklad iugo-vostochnoi podkomissii ob usloviiakh perevozki passazhirov (St. Petersburg, 1880), 43.

[33] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 195 (1903), 139.

[34] M. Il' in and E. Borisova, "Arkhitektura," in Istoriia russkogo iskusstva , ed. I. Grabar (Moscow, 1962), vol. 9, pt. 2, 258.

though subject to political supervision and, perhaps now and then, bribery) had an immediate effect on nearby towns. "The location of the station," concludes a Soviet historian, "determined the further construction of urban areas and produced a concentration of industrial enterprises there." The presence of a station distant from the old center of urban economic life shifted commercial and industrial activities toward the outlying station, creating at times a second town. Even when the stations were nearby, the effect was to "emphasize the contrast between town center and outskirts." [35]

In Moscow the presence of the railroad terminals of several major railroad lines produced a city "with a completely new appearance" in the eyes of a contemporary observer in the 1870s. "All the areas around the stations, which were constructed on the outskirts of town, acquired new buildings, and endless rows of two-story wooden buildings were constructed to house railroad employees and travelers." [36] The Khitrovka area, by the 1870s one of the most notorious of Russian urban slums, first appeared as a labor market for migrants, many of whom arrived in Moscow at the nearby train stations. The chaotic urbanization that the railroad brought about made no provision for city plans and public orderliness. If there was any order at all, it was the work of the railroad entrepreneurs and the architects who were responsible for the new railroad stations, the focal point of the new city.

Although distances between cities were increasingly measured in the amount of time it took to travel on the railroad, travel within towns still proceeded at the slow pace of horse and foot power. As in the West, horse-drawn trams were the first improvements in urban transport; by the end of the century they had spread to all major towns and most provincial capitals. Moving scarcely faster than a pedestrian (three miles per hour was the average speed of horse-drawn trams in Moscow), they mostly attracted townspeople of modest means, from clerks to washerwomen; neither the wealthy elements nor the poor laborers used them. Moscow's trams carried forty-five million passengers in 1895, and over two-thirds traveled in first class, where passengers could distance themselves visibly from the less fortunate. [37] By the turn of the century only a few municipalities had undertaken the construction of electric streetcar lines. The tsarist state intentionally brought them to Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 to exemplify

[36] Ibid., 260.

[37] "Moskovskie konno-zheleznye dorogi," in Sbornik statei po voprosam otnosiashchikhsia k Zhizni russkikh gorodakh 5 (1897):50-51.

(together with the national exposition) the spread of industrial progress to provincial cities. [38] Critics blamed short-sighted municipal leaders for the supposed lag throughout Russia in streetcar construction. However, a more general and persuasive reason was inadequate municipal budgets, which were held down by state-imposed expenditures and by the resistance of the mercantilist town elites to higher property taxes.

The lack of cheap urban transportation meant that the neighborhood remained the spatial center of most townspeople's lives, and as a rule housing for workers had to be located within reasonable walking distance from their workplace. [39]

For townspeople of some means horse-drawn cabs remained the quick means about town. The numbers of such cabs swelled each winter to provide sleight rides down the snowy or icy streets. Many of the drivers were seasonal workers who worked their fields in the growing season and earned supplementary income as teamsters and cabbies in the winter months. Their numbers and visibility reinforced the impression of many observers that peasants were everywhere in the city. The increased movement of people into and within the city heightened the need for cabbies, who were a visible sign of old Russia juxtaposed alongside the new railroad stations. At the end of the century a newspaper correspondent from the western town of Viazma, a "rather large trading city located at the junction of three rail lines," hinted at his dislike of villagers when he warned of the dangers that Viazma's cabbies posed to the townspeople. "There exists no surveillance of cabbies," he complained, "the majority of whom are crude, coarse, and obey no rules while driving." [40] To many observers the cabbies' undisciplined habits and uncomfortable vehicles were an unavoidable relic of backward city life. According to a journalist in Kiev gynecologists warned their patients never to take a cab. [41] Thus, those Russians who envisaged orderliness, civility, and efficiency as their ideal of urbanism had one more reason to believe that progress had scarcely touched their cities.

The Merchant City

By tsarist statute and public expectation the economic and social leadership of urban society belonged to the merchant estate. Legal rights and

[38] Information on urban public transportation appears in the 1904 survey of Russian towns. See Goroda Rossii v 1904 g. (St. Petersburg, 1907).

[39] One geographer's graphic concept of this typical "journey" in St. Petersburg of the 1860s is found in James Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), 123-39.

[40] Moskovskii listok , 23 January 1899.

[41] Kiev v 80-kh godakh: Vospominaniia starozhila (Kiev, 1910), 10.

obligations had been ascribed to this estate since Peter the Great's time, and these regulations underwent only slight modification in Alexander II's reign. As in the past, all trade and manufacturing above a specific level of capitalization belonged to the merchants in the first or second guilds (the difference between these two guilds depended essentially on income). In the opinion of some contemporary observers as well as that of certain historians, the permanence of the merchant estate's legal preeminence in economic affairs contributed to an attitude of social conservatism. Alfred Rieber, in his very thoughtful study of the nineteenth-century merchant estate, argues that in the late 1800s "the bulk" of these traders and manufacturers remained firmly attached to "the old ways." In reaching this conclusion, however, he suggests that the model of social modernity for Russia's middle classes could only have been "the classical bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Europe." In his judgment successful Russian entrepreneurial activity in that period was eccentric and exceptional. [42] One might object to Rieber's conclusion on the grounds that the socioeconomic evolution of Russia's urban propertied classes was embedded in a cultural context unlike that of Western Europe. Rieber's evaluation of the merchant estate, and other evaluations like it, reveal the extent to which images of the West inform our assessments of Russia's social history. However, such images do not make clear the changes in either the role or the identity of urban traders and manufacturers in the postreform years.

The records of the number of "merchants" (both individuals and, in a very small proportion, joint-stock enterprises) tell a precise but misleading story. By 1898 there were 6,500 first-guild merchants and 138,000 second-guild merchants in the entire country. Many of these individuals had become merchants solely to meet legal requirements for economic activity, remaining at the same time enrolled in their estate of origin (as permitted by the reforms of the 1860s). In Moscow, arguably the city with the greatest entrepreneurial opportunities, over half of the merchants had combined estate titles. For over 20 percent this meant that merchants were also "trading peasants." [43]

Apparently, by the end of the century merchant status was largely irrelevant as a mark of social standing. In 1899 the great majority of enterprising Russians abandoned their membership in the merchant estate when the opportunity to do so arose. The 1898 revision of trading and manufacturing regulations permitted people from any estate to purchase

[42] Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), xxiv, 83-88, 33-35.

[43] Ibid., 89, table 3.1.

business certificates without enrolling in the merchant estate. The following year the number of second-guild merchants suddenly fell to thirty-eight thousand, and the number of first-guild merchants shrank to four thousand. [44] The continued visibility of a few conservative merchant families obscured what one might call a flight from merchant identity.

Nonetheless, images of the traditionalist merchant remained pervasive in popular and political discussions of Russia's present and future society. They emerged in debates over the primacy of the nobility, whose supposed paternalistic care of their laborers was contrasted to the cruelty and crudeness of "merchant values." These images were echoed by foreign entrepreneurs in Russia, especially Germans, who disdained their "backward" Russian competitors. They also emerged in contemporary literary and popular writings, including Ostrovsky's plays and the stories of Maxim Gorky, where the merchant and the petty bourgeois ( meshchanin ) were equated with the philistine. Writers for the new penny press often used the merchant stereotype to illustrate the confusion of urban social roles that was created by new wealth in the hands of those unfit for preeminence. By the end of the century the old-fashioned merchant appeared primarily in the guise of either a comical character or a "provincial merchant," who was damned by one observer for his "feeble initiative" and "ancestral" economic operations. [45]

The tenacity of this stereotypical portrait drawn from the Russian past suggests more than a nostalgia for an imagined patriarchal past or a dramatized moral confrontation between the forces of progress and backwardness. The conduct of urban entrepreneurs drew heavily on past experience in confronting difficult economic conditions. The studies of the economic historian Fred Carstensen reveal that there were many substantial reasons—financial, technological, and cultural—for Russian businessmen to be cautious about innovation and to avoid risk-taking, even in circumstances when substantial profits rewarded successful entrepreneurial daring. [46]

The paths of new economic activity moved in predictable and visible directions across the urban landscape of the country. Those cities with

[44] A. Bokhanov, "Rossiiskoe kupechestvo v kontse XIX-nachale XX veka," Istoriia SSSR (June-August 1985):107.

[45] O.F., "Nashe russkoe kupechestvo," Moskovskii listok , 6 April 1899.

[46] See Fred Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Singer and International Harvester in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), esp. 101; see also Gregory Guroff and Fred Carstensen, eds., Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (Princeton, 1983), esp. the essay by Thomas Owen, "Entrepreneurship and the Structure of Enterprise in Russia, 1800-1880," 59-83.

access to agricultural markets and manufacturing opportunities became centers of enterprise, investment, and employment; by contrast those towns isolated from the new economy appeared backward and stagnant. In the public eye Moscow epitomized the former; the latter retained the pejorative title "provincial" and included places like Gorky's fictional creation, "the little town of Okurov," which was a bitter, satirical portrait based on the author's personal experience in exile in a Kazan district town. In these places life seemed to have stopped.

Two traits of the urban economic expansion are of particular importance to Russian urbanization in the late ninteenth century. The first characteristic is the remarkably rapid rise of trade in agricultural produce that moved through the commercial and transportation networks of certain cities. In part this trade fed the urban population, but to a far greater extent it was part of the export market for Russian farm products. The activities associated with these commercial affairs turned an increasing number of urban centers into transshipment points. The sales from agricultural marketing in these cities stimulated the internal market for goods, increasing the demand for essential consumer goods, which were produced in part by the urban manufacturing economy. Although these cities began to thrive on the basis of agricultural trade, they did so at the price of dependence on the vagaries of the Russian harvest. The close links between urban economic well-being and agriculture became a source of concern for tsarist administrators. In 1891 the Moscow provincial governor noted that urban trade suffered that year because "the bad harvest in the grain-growing regions" had "significantly curtailed the buying power of the population." [47] Although the city had established its distinct and vital role in national economic development, it drew its material wealth largely from the countryside.

The second important characteristic of the urban economy was the multiplication of the number of occupations that were necessary to sustain and enrich urban life. These trades filled the city with a multitude of petty enterprises and laborers—the cabbies already mentioned being among the most visible—whose availability varied with the seasons, the state of the urban economy, and the level of rural hardship.

The urban entrepreneurs and traders who made their livelihood in these new or expanded sectors remain for the most part a scarcely visible segment of the urban population. The most successful left their mark on Russian public life, playing out roles not unlike those of the captains of industry in the United States who moved into the cultural world to become great

[47] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 152 (1892), 8.

patrons of the arts. One such successful industrialist, Savva Mamontov, turned from railroad building to the support of artists and musicians. These activities earned him a condescending accolade from an aristocratic acquaintance: "Merchant, kulak, petty tyrant, and to the fullest extent a self-starter. . . . [Savva Mamontov is] handsomely gifted with mind and talent." [48] The great majority of Russia's men of affairs could not possibly fit this mold. The traces of their presence are to be found only in the practices that marked their ventures, which most often were modest and liable to failure. These traces are most easily discernible in the domain of trade.

In the early postreform period the rhythm of the annual fairs still set the pattern of urban trade. These gatherings were ephemeral affairs. A few, however, operated at an intense level of activity. Of the total of sixty-five hundred fairs in the 1860s that one Soviet historian counted, thirty-three produced over one million rubles in transactions. [49] The most illustrious and lucrative fair was the one held each summer along the banks of the Volga in Nizhny Novgorod. In scale and variety it dwarfed all other fairs; its growth through Alexander II's reign suggests the relative unimportance of year-round urban trading at this time. In the early 1860s its business activity entered a period of remarkable prosperity, reaching an average of 116 million rubles by the end of the decade and rising to its greatest level of 243 million rubles in 1881 (in the late 1840s yearly turnover had amounted to only forty-seven million rubles). [50] Its operations changed during those years in response to industrialization; textiles became the major commodity, and the ease of telegraphic communication made sales increasingly a matter of quick agreements that linked trade representatives and owners at the fair with their enterprises. [51] But the great days of that fair were passing. Business would never again reach the 1881 level; by the early 1890s the average yearly turnover was down to 150 million rubles. The same decline occurred at the major Ukrainian fair at Poltava.

These fairs scarcely disrupted the daily routine of life in the city because the fair's sellers, clients, and products appeared and disappeared within a few days or weeks. Urban traders traveled regularly about the country to conduct their business whenever and wherever a major fair was held. Their

[48] Khudozhnik ushedshei Rossii (New York, 1955), 39.

[49] P. I. Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva (Moscow, 1948), 1:483.

[50] "Ekonomicheskoe znachenie Nizhnego Novgoroda," in Sbornik statei po voprosam (1896), 3:225.

[51] An excellent general history of the evolution of the fair in the nineteenth century is found in Anne L. Fitzpatrick, "The Nizhnii Novgorod Fair, 1840-1890" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1980), esp. chap. 2.

residence was located in one or another town; their economic activity was as itinerant and sporadic as the fairs themselves. Despite the growth of the Nizhny fair through the 1870s, this manner of organizing urban economic activity offered fewer opportunities in commercial affairs than year-round business. To those Russians who were persuaded that the economic future belonged to technology and the productive city, the fair symbolized the peculiar customs and narrow horizons that they associated with the stereotypical Russian merchant.

The regularization of trade required a place of central operations. For the bulk of traders this place was a provincial urban center. Warehouses provided a regular supply of wholesale goods; prices increasingly were set by weekly and daily trading; the distribution of goods occurred along the rail lines at urban centers where stores could meet the demand for goods thanks to the telegraph and rail transport. Moscow was the hub of this new network and the epitome of the Russian mercantile city; it was most closely linked to the national market and it was the home of some of the greatest trading houses. Its advantages included its location in the major manufacturing region of the country, its access to most major rail lines, and its proximity to major markets—including its own booming population. In the early twentieth century the statistical office of the Moscow municipality noted a fact of economic life in the previous decades, namely, that Moscow was "the most important center of manufacturing and trade [in the country]. Therefore, the prices on all manufactured goods are set by Moscow, not only for the Nizhny fair but also for the East." [52] Trade had become a regularized business, and the practices of the Russian traders involved in the national market differed greatly from the personalized, ephemeral routine of the traditional merchant.

Trade in agricultural produce constituted the single most important sector in the new Russian urban economy. By the 1880s the movement of marketed grain, both by rail and water, involved a network of wholesale and transportation firms with links to towns and cities throughout the grain-growing regions and into the northern urban centers that were dependent on food imports from the south and east. Shipments of grain to the international market (roughly half of the total by the 1880s) were in the control of major Western firms such as the French company of Louis Dreyfus; Russian middlemen, who were the links to the grain growers in the countryside, gathered around these foreign firms.

The dominance of large companies in the grain trade was most visible in

[52] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5 (1910), d. 195, 10.

the Black Sea ports, through which passed one-third of Russia's grain exports. In the north, where the internal market was as important as foreign shipments, wholesale firms remained relatively small in size and were dispersed throughout the provincial urban centers. In all parts of Russia inequality between the buyers and the wholesale enterprises was a common characteristic. Because of the large volume of their purchases the major firms passed on to the "buyers" and "agents" ( ssypshchiki ) the task of gathering the surplus at small market points and sending it to the regional and national transport centers. [53] The profits, which were relatively small and dependent on commissions on purchases, represented the difference between ruin and prosperity for these traders.

Operating from international ports such as Odessa and regional centers such as Saratov, small operators fanned out into the countryside. Although written in the early twentieth century, a report from a town in Tambov province suggests that the origins of the pattern of urban commercial operations dated from several decades earlier. The author describes how "forty to fifty buyers, mostly from the petty bourgeoisie, of whom only a very few are well-to-do" worked with two or three employees, who earned on average fifteen to thirty rubles per month, to purchase crops, which were paid for with bank loans. [54] They conducted their affairs on a slim margin of security and were easy prey to ruin from sudden price movements of the commodities. They and outside traders gathered the produce for shipment to Russian or foreign markets. From one "grain-trade point" in Kazan province a local official reported that these middlemen "store their supplies in warehouses and send it to Rybinsk and St. Petersburg twice a year: in spring as soon as navigation opens and in the fall." [55]

The volatile grain market, the difficulty of obtaining bank credit, and the slim margin of profit lent an aura of petty profiteering and ruthless greed to the entire operation. The world of speculative trade in food products had little to attract the sympathy of either the intelligent or the tsarist official, each of whom for different reasons was prone to view trade and credit as parasitic. However, by the 1890s even provincial governors had to take note of what the Saratov governor termed the successful commercial operations of "very important firms" with "extensive trade" with Moscow and St. Petersburg. [56] All along the Volga such activities made trade in agricultural

[53] A good survey of this increasingly complex commercial network is found in Kitanina, Khlebnaia torgovlia , 60-65.

[54] "Statisticheskie svedeniia," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5 (1910), d. 243, 79-80.

[56] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 176 (1894), 14.

produce a source of wealth for some businessmen and employment for large numbers of laborers and employees.

In the late nineteenth century the dominance of agricultural trade in the urban economy was evident in the southern ports on the Azov and Black Sea, including Odessa, Taganrog, Nikolaev, Mariupol, Feodosia, and the river port of Rostov-on-Don. The traders of Feodosia, whose complaint to the state in 1861 I cited earlier, acquired rail communications with the eastern Ukraine. The sleepy naval port of Nikolaev, with neither railroad nor maritime commerce in the 1860s, became the principal outlet for grain from the southern Ukraine. By the 1870s all these cities possessed port facilities, all had extensive rail links with a productive agricultural hinterland (and several had good river transport as well), and all were the seat of large grain exporting companies, most of which were foreign owned. In Rostov-on-Don, for example, three firms controlled two-thirds of the grain exported in 1898. Odessa remained the center of operations of the major international grain companies in Russia. Between the late 1870s and the late 1890s the average yearly grain shipments from these ports doubled, amounting to over two-thirds of the country's total grain exports. [57]

The trading operations of the small concessionaires that worked for these companies depended not only on the harvest but also on accessible credit. A Soviet study has shown that funds came from "banks and other credit institutions, the [grain] exporters themselves, and railroad companies." [58] The speculative nature of these transactions was repugnant to Odessa's city prefect of the mid 1890s: he condemned what he called the compelling desire for "quick profit" among townspeople. His dislike of the city's mercantile character was strongly colored with anti-Semitism. It also revealed his own assumptions regarding urban public life: he blamed business for the absence of "normal civic consciousness." [59] Competition and profit-seeking determined the difference between wealth and poverty for Odessa's traders, but for the governor these activities represented moral defects.

The volatility of the export market, both in quantity and prices, reflected its dependence on harvests and on international grain markets. Exports of produce, not imports, set the pace of Odessa's economic activity. The ban

[57] An excellent survey of this southern grain trade is Zolotov, Khlebnyi eksport , esp. 185-99.

[58] Ibid., 227-28; the shortage of operating capital, which necessitated these loans, was one of the most debilitating obstacles confronting Russian enterprises, both large and small. See Fred Carstensen, "Numbers and Reality: A Critique of Foreign Investment Estimates in Tsarist Russia," in La position internationale de la France: Aspects économiques et financiers (XIXe-XXe siècles) (Paris, 1975), 281-82.

[59] Cited in Frederick Skinner, "Odessa," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 228.

on grain exports in 1892, which followed the bad harvest and famine in northeastern Russia the previous year, brought hardship to business and labor in Odessa. The city prefect reported a sudden rise in "major bankruptcies" that was accompanied by a rash of fires in business premises to double the normal rate. His suspicion that arson was the cause—and insurance repayment the goal of desperate businessmen—appeared correct after a sudden decline in fires when he warned that arsonists would be tried by military court. The sudden loss of work by dockers and day laborers—the city prefect estimated that thirty thousand lost their jobs—led the authorities to provide municipal soup kitchens and public work for three thousand. [60] The municipality, seeking to ease the crisis of unemployment among white-collar workers, begged traders to show "'the most elementary sense of moral responsibility' by retaining their employees." [61] The economic collapse that year represented only the most extreme example of Odessa's dependence on agricultural marketing. In the 1880s, from one year to the next the volume of exports oscillated as much as 50 percent, and prices varied by 10-20 percent. [62] In the period between the 1870s and 1900 the long-term trends were a gradual fall in grain prices and a remarkable expansion in the volume of grain exports.

Urban commercial operations expanded throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century. Moscow's role as a trade center arose as a result of its position in the national manufacturing and transportation network. The type and scale of its commercial operations reflected this growing activity and diversity of demand. By the late 1880s trading activity was becoming rationalized as a result of the "increased application of modern methods of credit and accounting in both mercantile and banking operations," which were replacing the "traditional habits of trade such as enormous markups on small inventory." [63] The clothing trade shifted toward the production and sale of ready-made items and one journalist wrote that "in the last ten to fifteen years" the production of these items had concentrated "in Moscow more than in any other city." [64] Salesmen began to span out from the major urban centers. In the judgment of a Kharkov reporter, by the 1890s traveling salesmen had undermined the trading activity of small shopkeep-

[60] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 180 (1892), 3.

[61] Cited in Lewis Siegelbaum, "The Odessa Grain Trade: A Case Study in Urban Growth and Development in Tsarist Russia," Journal of European Economic History 9 (Spring 1980): 137.

[62] Reports by the Odessa city prefect made specific mention of such oscillations from year to year. See TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 116 (1887), 167 (1888), 156 (1889).

[63] Thomas Gohstand, "The Shaping of Moscow," in The City in Russian History , ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington, Ky., 1976), 177.

[64] Moskovskii listok , 18 July 1903.

ers and traders in the area. They "travel around to places in Russia where previously even the police had rarely appeared. . . . [They] carry with them the entire range of goods that rural traders offer and fill orders more cheaply. Also, they offer the same credit as the old general trader." [65] One consequence of this trend was that trading operations began to be concentrated in urban areas. The city and the countryside were becoming distinct economic spheres.

Agricultural marketing brought manufacturing as well as trading activities into urban economies. The processing of farm products gave a new industrial dimension to urban business. The first census of Kiev, conducted in 1874, found 10 percent of the active population in trade and transportation and 20 percent in manufacturing, and food processing was the principal manufacturing sector. [66] Twenty years later the provincial governor reported that the city had become "one of the major points for the grain trade . . . in the entire southern region." He also emphasized the emergence of the city's food processing industry, which produced sugar from the region's sugar beet crop and flour from the area's grain. [67] In these commercial and industrial enterprises the state obtained an important source of new tax revenues and the population found a major source of livelihood.

Industrial production was at the center of urban economic activity only in the older Urals manufacturing towns and in the industrial settlements of northern Russia and the Ukraine. Industrialization, although profoundly altering the country's economic development, remade the urban landscape only in these regions. Mechanized textile factories dominated the skyline of some new towns, but more frequently they created distinct factory communities on the outskirts of older cities. The shift to mechanization had a major impact in urban manufacturing centers. In these cities cottage industry did not have the same marginal advantage it had in rural areas, where it remained a major part of textile manufacturing until the turn of the century. By the early 1880s Moscow's cotton textile industry included fifty-nine enterprises with 11,500 workers, and its machine construction factories employed eight thousand workers; to the northeast the new textile plants of Ivanovo Voznesensk had 13,400 workers. The author of the most thorough study of industrialization in northern Russia estimates that by

[65] Ibid., 26 January 1896.

[66] Cited in "Zapiska Senatora A. Polovtsova o sostoianii obshchestvennogo upravleniia v gorodakh Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova , (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2, pt. 2, 10-25. Michael Hamm offers detailed evidence of this trend in "Change and Continuity in Late Imperial Kiev," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 85.

[67] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 176 (1894), 14.

this time twenty-nine urban areas in this region had become centers of "major factory industry" where almost eight hundred enterprises operated with 170,000 workers. Cotton spinning factories contained twenty-five thousand power looms but also made use of twenty thousand hand looms, a good measure of the intermingling of handicraft and mechanization in and around urban manufacturing at that time. [68]

Observers reported that the new industrial settlements of the Ukraine resembled urban frontier communities. Areas that were once sparsely settled grazing and grain lands with a few administrative centers were transformed by the appearance of towns along railroad lines that linked coal and iron ore deposits. Important factories emerged around quiet provincial capitals such as Ekaterinoslav, Prince Potemkin's "Athens of southern Russia." In the 1880s this city reemerged as a Ukrainian Pittsburgh: iron foundries began operations, and the population jumped from thirty-two thousand to seventy thousand. In 1890 the provincial governor remarked that "several hundred new houses have been built [in Ekaterinoslav and] new markets have opened." In his opinion these boomtown conditions were the result of the "grandiose iron bridge" just completed over the Dnepr river, the three new iron mills, and the expanded coal mining in the region. [69] Writing later in the decade, the governor argued that the human impetus for the town's economic development came from a fever of speculation among "all the local inhabitants." With lyrical exaggeration he described a "trading and industrial class" that seeks out "risky enterprises in the hopes of great income—and these hopes often come true . . . ; yesterday's pauper is today's self-supporting individual, sometimes becomes a very wealthy man; land worth nothing today is sold almost on the city streets in anticipation of the construction of a factory or a railroad line." [70] Where industrial resources and business enterprise—foreign or Russian—met, the face of the city was transformed.

The presence of captains of industry was much less important for urban employment than the activities of small manufacturers. Conditions in the city of Kharkov, for example, were closer to the norm for towns with extensive manufacturing. In 1904 its statistical bureau reported that enterprises with between fifty and two hundred workers constituted the largest category of factory in the city, but workshops ( masterovye ) that employed

[68] Vasil'ev, "Formirovanie fabrichno-zavodskogo proletariata tsentral'nogo promyshlennogo raiona Rossii, 1820-1890" (Doctoral dissertation, Novocherkassk Pedagogical Institute, 1972), 2:24, table 6.

[69] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 189 (1891), 3.

[70] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 255 (1899), 7-8.

between five and nine workers were an even more important source of jobs than factories. The total work force in manufacturing was considerably smaller than that in handicrafts (including master artisans and their workers and apprentices), which totaled 22,500, or one-tenth of the entire population of the city. [71] These quantitative measures of economic activity suggest the extent to which the Russian city remained the domain of small enterprise, even when the character of production gave a gloss of industrialization to the urban economy. [72]

Large-scale commercial enterprises and manufacturing operations were surrounded by what one historian, referring specifically to Moscow, has termed the "institutions of barter, haggle, and street vending." [73] Although these "institutions" retained all the color and exotic character of the prereform city, their pervasiveness and middle-class clientele made them an integral part of the new urban economy. The numbers and miserable conditions of the small traders and artisans, many classified by tsarist statute as petty bourgeois, provided tangible evidence of the isolation of wealthy entrepreneurs in the merchant town.

Most trade and handicraft businesses were extremely small in scale, especially in the western towns of the Pale of Settlement. Tiny shops abounded in towns such as Minsk, where there was one store for every twenty inhabitants (the norm for all Russian cities was one store for every one hundred to two hundred inhabitants). Competition in these cities was keen and profits small. [74] The city of Vilna, one of the largest in the Pale, had three times the number of artisans as distant Saratov even though the two cities were roughly the same size. One economist reported that too many small handicraft enterprises created "fierce competition [that] reduces pay for work to the lowest possible level." [75] Such conditions perpetuated and even increased the number of families living at subsistence levels.

[71] Cited in D. Bagalei and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (Khar'kov, 1912), 2:550-51.

[72] This issue is the subject of a battle of correlation coefficients (based on urban employment statistics) between historical geographers. One side has concluded that a high relationship between urbanization and industrialization did not exist in late-nineteenth-century Russia, but this conclusion is contested by the other side. See Roger Thiede, "Urbanization and Industrialization in Pre-revolutionary Russia," Professional Geographer 25 (February 1973): 16-21; Robert Lewis and Richard Rowland, "A Further "A Further Investigation of Urbanization and Industrialization in Pre-revolutionary Russia," Professional Geographer 26 (May 1974): 177-82.

[73] Joseph Bradley, "Moscow: From Big Village to Metropolis," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 19.

[74] Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti , 1:9-10.

[75] R. M. Blank, Rol' evreiskogo naseleniia v ekonomicheskoi zhizni Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1908), 20-21.

In the opinion of one observer, over half of the population of Berdichev, one of the cities of refuge for Jews who were expelled from villages in the Pale, was living "from day to day." [76]

The impoverished artisans and traders were numerous throughout Russia and were dependent for survival on the commercial, manufacturing, and administrative fortunes of the new city. In St. Petersburg in the early 1890s the police prefect judged that only one-fourth of its artisans were "more or less prosperous economically." [77] It is unlikely that the level of wealth in any other city surpassed that of the capital. The poverty among the bulk of the sixteen thousand "hereditary guild artisans" of Moscow was such that it excluded over 90 percent of them from the right (which was defined by a minimum payment of tax on property) to participate in the artisan society's elections. [78] Little distinction existed between handicraft work and trade: artisans sold their own wares, and traders at times sold goods of their own making as well as those that they bought. Secondhand products were as salable as new ones. Some poor townspeople eked out a miserable income trading used items that had been passed on from hand to hand. [79] As in the mid 1800s, rural employment remained common for many of the urban poor. Farm labor was an attractive alternative where agricultural estates required hired hands, as in the Saratov region. In 1893 the Saratov governor commented on the decline in the number of artisans in his province, which was caused by a good harvest that made "field labor . . . more profitable than artisanal pursuits." [80]

Poor townspeople, even those with some skills, were forced by economic necessity to take whatever work was available. Artisans often moved in search of a better place of work; a survey of artisans in several provincial towns in the mid 1890s found that a large majority were born elsewhere. Owners usually employed one or two workers and one apprentice and operated on a very small scale. Their hours were long—twelve to thirteen were the average—and most did not even own their place of work. [81] This profile was probably typical of what we might loosely term the urban "underclass" of the Russian city at the end of the century.

[76] Subbotin, V cherte evreiskoi osedlosti , 2:121-22.

[77] "Vsepoddanneishi otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 200 (1893), 33.

[78] Moskovskii listok , 25 June 1892.

[79] Two Soviet ethnographers explore this aspect of petty commerce in the town of Kaluga in the late nineteenth century in L. A. Anokhina and M. N. Shmeleva, Byt gorodskogo naseleniia srednei polosy RSFSR v proshlom i nastoiashchem (Moscow, 1977), 72.

[80] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 176 (1894), 46.

[81] This survey, from which I extract data for only a sample of artisans from four towns (Aleksandrovsk, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, and Kremenchug), was never published. The manuscripts are found in TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 37 (1893).

As before, the hereditary estate divisions were virtually meaningless among these petty entrepreneurs. The Saratov Artisan Society, official organ of the hereditary artisan estate, numbered nine hundred masters in 1881 at a time when the municipality counted three thousand artisans, most of whom belonged to the category of "temporary artisan." As in earlier years, a large number of the "master artisans" of the society in fact came from other estates; half were from the petty bourgeoisie, almost 20 percent were peasant, and 3 percent belonged to the nobility. [82] In Moscow the famous Yaroslavl peasant tavern keepers were one visible reminder of the mobility (and regularity) of movement across estate borders.

One reason that the merchant city of Russia differed substantially from the Western capitalist model was that the Russian network of banks and credit institutions was inadequate and underfuned. Only in the 1860s did a stature appear offering "full freedom of operations in all Russia" to private banks. From that time on they were able to tap private capital funds that had previously had no regular outlet for investment. [83] Financial opportunities grew as the demand for credit expanded in the second half of the century. By 1875 there were over 350 private and municipal banks in Russia, and private reserves amounted to 1.5 billion rubles, twenty times the credit reserves fifteen years before. [84] This expansion proved excessive and risky in the unstable economic conditions of the 1870s. According to the provincial governor, in Kiev the commercial banks were "giving out easy but expensive credit," and bad loans and corruption suddenly brought "extemely tense conditions on the money market." [85] One might rephrase his bureaucratic view by suggesting that inexperience and a precarious urban economy led to the contraction of much-needed credit.

The situation became more threatening in the economic recession of the mid 1880s. Municipal banks were particularly hard hit because they operated with lower reserves and less security than the commercial banks. In the 1860s and 1870s over eighty municipalities had tried their hand at banking. The municipality of Tambov had benefited substantially from the operations of its bank, obtaining several million rubles yearly in profits. Municipal public services had expanded and local businesses had obtained relatively easy access to credit. But agriculture was the basis of the municipality's banking enterprise, and a poor harvest and lower grain prices in

[82] "Otchet po revizii Saratovskogo remeslennogo upravleniia," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1 (1880-81), d. 145, 50-51.

[83] I. I. Levin, Aktsionernye kommercheskie banki v Rossii (Petrograd, 1917), 1:20-21.

[84] Liashchenko, Istoriia narodnogo khoziaistva , 2:108-9.

[85] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet." TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 69, d. 435 (1877), 3.

1883 brought this golden age to an end. Bankruptcies spread and the bank's risky loans collapsed. Even the secret police paid attention; in his yearly report the provincial gendarme officer noted ominously that "the bank is rocking on its foundations [ shataetsia ] and has almost stopped making loans." [86] Many municipal banks folded in the 1880s as a result of the economic instability of their towns and rural hinterlands. For example, the Moscow provincial governor anticipated that nothing could save two banks in district towns because they had each lost over half of their small reserves and held very "questionable loans." [87] The instability of the municipal banks was both a cause and an effect of the fragility of the local economy.

The prosperous times in the 1890s proved a boom period for banking as well as for the economy as a whole. The commercial banks increased their provincial branches from 94 in 1893 to 274 in 1900. [88] By the 1890s a variety of other financial institutions such as credit societies were able to provide small loans to their customers. More numerous facilities and abundant funds created the possibility for more varied financial operations, including a modest boom on the stock market as companies sought public funding. A note of capitalist exuberance was evident in the comment of one banker that "almost all major cities and even small towns" participate in stock trading, some with their own stock exchanges and many more with "little stock exchanges" that are located in "almost all . . . provincial branches and bank offices." [89] The opportunities for speculative investment also included urban real estate. In some cities municipal officials and landlords worked together to promote land development and quick profits. One reporter for a Kharkov newspaper sounded a well-known Western theme when he complained of housing that was "built only to give a satisfactory return on invested capital, neglecting the basic needs and conveniences of the apartment dwellers." [90] Landlords and rentiers did not figure alongside the great manufacturers in the pantheon of civic leaders, but they represented an updated counterpart to the traditional merchant in the sense that they sought to find a safe place in the new urban economy.

The shortage of credit remained a serious problem for small-scale producers. Tula metalworking artisans complained in the mid 1890s that the "principal brake on production came from the complete absence of

[86] Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okt'iabrskoi revoliutsii (TsGAOR), f. 102 (tret'e deloproizvodstvo ), d. 89, chast' (chap.) 55 (1884), 5.

[87] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 219 (1890), 52-54.

[88] I. F. Gindin, Gosudarstvennyi bank i ekonomicheskaia politika tsarskogo pravitel'stva, 1861-1892 (Moscow, 1960), 87.

[89] Levin, Aktsionernye kommercheskie banki 1:263-64.

[90] Quoted in Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:77.

credit." [91] Only in the 1890s did small credit institutions such as mutual credit societies and municipal pawn shops begin to serve petty traders and artisans. Only very small sums were loaned—nine rubles on an average—and demand far exceeded available loans. When it opened in 1891, Kharkov's municipal pawnshop exhausted its fifty thousand ruble loan credits in three months; it had to turn to the municipal bank to obtain a two hundred thousand ruble loan. [92]

The concentration of wealth in the hands of a very small urban mercantile and propertied elite that lived in the capitals and a few provincial cities was one of the most notable features of Russian urban growth in the postreform years. By one Russian geographer's count, in the early twentieth century nearly one-third of the officially designated cities (227 of 761) did not even produce one hundred thousand rubles yearly from trade and industry. [93] However, a relatively small number of towns presented their inhabitants with a wide range of economic opportunities and employment.

Thanks to the municipal statute of 1870 we possess an approximate profile of the distribution of propertied and commercial wealth in the cities. The male electorate was divided into three curiae according to taxes on trade, manufacturing, and taxed real estate. Each curia had to contribute an equal share of the total taxes, which divided the three curiae into groups whose members possessed about the same taxable wealth. The overall range in taxes was enormous. The minimal payments (which were primarily made by small artisans and traders) were twenty kopeks in Nizhny Novgorod's third curia in 1890; members of the second curia paid between twenty and two hundred rubles; the highest tax in the third curia that year (presumably the commercial and manufacturing leaders of the city) was seventeen hundred rubles. [94]

By this crude measure of taxed wealth the elite numbered only a handful. In Kiev in 1879 a total of 120 individuals (3 percent of the city's 4,200 enfranchised male residents) belonged to the first curia, among whom slightly over half were officially classified as merchants; even with the addition of the second curia, well-to-do Kievans totaled only 600. Kiev's third curia had twice as many merchants as the first two curiae combined, but they were intermingled with the more numerous petty bourgeois and

[91] Quoted in Moskovskii listok , 7 January 1896.

[92] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:569-70.

[93] V. P. Semenov-Tianshanskii, "Gorod i derevnia v evropeiskoi Rossii," Zapiski po otdelu statistiki Imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva 10 (1910):73-77.

[94] N. N. Baidakov, "Vvedenie Gorodovogo polozheniia 1870 g. v Nizhnem Novgorode i vybory v 1870-90-kh gg.," Uchenye zapiski Gor'kovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, seriia gumanitarnykh nauk 105 (1969):77.

"privileged" (noble) electors. [95] Urban economic growth during the 1870s and 1880s increased the isolation of the wealthy voters in the first two curiae as the middle ranks of the propertied and trading townspeople swelled. In Moscow in 1872, 2,400 voters belonged to the first and second curiae and 15,000 to the third; fifteen years later the numbers of voters in the first two curiae had shrunk to 1,600, and the third curia had grown to 18,000. [96] Although opportunities for small-scale enterprise abounded in cities such as Moscow, the path to substantial wealth was accessible only to a few.

The array of municipal electoral statistics, although they make no distinction between productive and nonproductive wealth, suggests more clearly than contemporary memoirs and official reports the limits to economic enterprise in what I term the merchant city. To the extent that this label is meaningful it refers not to one but to two spheres of urban economic activity. On the one hand, the typical occupations of propertied townspeople involved both "haggle and barter" urban trade and retail and wholesale commerce that was dependent largely on marketing agricultural produce. This world was one of risky affairs without substantial financial rewards, enterpreneurial glory, or technical sophistication. On the other hand, the captains of Russian trade and industry were a tiny social elite far above the masses of propertied townspeople. Presumably, they embodied a way of life that was respected and admired by the small-scale traders and manufacturers but that was largely unattainable both because of the constraints of the urban economy and the instability of commercial affairs. Thus, the term merchant city should be most closely identified with petty enterprise and a modest level of wealth.

To those who were repelled by the rough-hewn economic traits of the Russian city, the West offered beguiling models of sophisticated and successful enterprise. The English writer Samuel Smiles served up the most highly touted formula for middle class success in his book Self-Help . It turned the Protestant admonition that "God helps those who help themselves" into an ethical prescription that was suitable to the industrial age. Translated into Russian in 1866, it must have found a large audience, for it went through eight printings in the next fifteen years. [97]

In visual form a model for the ideal city of industry and science was

[95] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," vol. 2, pt. 1, 95, table 41.

[96] E. A. Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie v 70-80-kh godakh XIX veka" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1956), 49, 57.

[97] The publishing record of the Russian editions of Self-Help is found in the "alphabetical service catalogue" ( sluzhebnyi alfavitnyi katalog ) of the Leningrad Saltykov-Shchedrin library.

ready at hand. From the time of the French Revolution, expositions had been used in Western Europe to bring artifacts of national progress to the public eye. Pride in the industrial economy and concern with the prestige of nations found their most spectacular visual forms in the many world's fairs that were held in Western Europe, starting with the London Exposition of 1851 and occurring frequently in subsequent decades. Taken in isolation, each exposition's individual displays and separate pavilions laid out the wares of manufacturers, the resources of nature, and the achievements of science and technology in the Western world. The enormous dimensions and planned activities of these fairs attracted millions of visitors to specially designed buildings, gardens, and walkways that the planners had turned into a sort of utopian city of the future. One anthropologist has argued that nineteenth-century world's fairs created "idealized consumer cities within their walls. They presented a sanitized view of the world with no poverty, no war, no social problems, and very little nature. World's fairs promulgated a whole view of life." [98] To the Russians who were attracted by the power and prestige of the industrialized nations and by the cultural and economic dynamism of Western cities, these grandiose events represented an encapsulated vision of Russia's path to progress.

Gradually the scope and contents of the Russian expositions took on the shape of miniature cities. Small-scale replicas of Western expositions, monumental in concept but constrained by a lack of vision of the future and by paltry funding, had appeared periodically in St. Petersburg and Moscow from the 1820s. They were attractive principally to manufacturers seeking to promote new products. Sponsored by either the St. Petersburg or the Moscow municipality with some support from the state (particularly the Ministry of Finance), the "expositions of manufacturing" resembled the great fairs in the West only in miniature. Decorated in palatial style and displaying a limited selection of luxury and industrial products, such public gatherings were intended for a small elite. The "luxury and glitter" of the 1861 exposition in St. Petersburg brought the somewhat wistful thought to one visitor that he might be in Paris or London. He reminded his readers and himself that "in Russia people also know how to live, there is a demand for refined, elegant [products], and there are those who can satisfy these needs." [99] Neither he nor the organizers of the exposition thought of its displays of manufacturing skills and wealth as a unified model of civic progress.

[98] Burton Benedict, "The Anthropology of World's Fairs," in The Anthropology of World's Fairs: San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition , ed. Burton Benedict (Berkeley, 1983), 5.

[99] M. Ia. Kittary, Obozrenie vystavki 1861 goda (St. Petersburg, 1862), 7.

Twenty years later, however, the Moscow exposition of 1882 assumed the trappings of a major national event and its grounds assumed the form of a minicity. For the first time, land on the outskirts of the city was set aside for a complex of buildings to house the displays. The exposition site was linked to the central city by special transportation—a horse-drawn carriage line—and a railroad spur that permitted passenger coaches from the main lines to reach the edge of the exposition. To emphasize its importance in Russian life the organizers gave the exposition the title "All-Russian Artistic-Manufacturing Exposition" and added agriculture to the fourteen fields they judged to be suitable for display. When completed, its array of buildings bore no resemblance to the pseudopalaces of the earlier Russian manufacturing fairs. Its central hall of metal and glass was an imitation of London's Crystal Palace.

Incongruities in tone between the modern and the traditional appeared to remind the visitors that the exposition represented an unusual event in Russian public life. The festivities on opening day mixed two Russian societies. The Russia of orders and titles was present in the persons of the metropolitan of Moscow, Grand Prince Vladimir Alexandrovich, and the Moscow governor-general. Merchant Russia was represented by the leaders of the Moscow stock exchange and merchant society and the minister of finance, for whom the exposition had a specifically economic purpose. The opening ceremonies included an orchestral performance for the elite that was followed by popular festivities ( gulian'e ) for the people. By the time the exposition closed at the end of the summer it had attracted an estimated one million visitors. It offered both an escape from and an alternative to the Moscow of taverns and slums, beggars and migrant laborers, factories and shanties.

The promise of a new city, hinted at rather than proclaimed openly, appeared repeatedly in the evaluations and reports of the fair. In part such documents reflected their authors' public or official positions, but they were also serious efforts to capture the meaning—if not the actual content—of the fair as a major public event. Three aspects of the fair suggested that it presented an idealized urban model. First, for the exhibitors it constituted a sort of giant store that "accurately represented" the achievements of Russian manufacturing and "acquainted the public" with the many items for sale. [100] In other words, the exposition was a marketplace. Second, the entire organization and disposition of the buildings, the displays (educa-

[100] Soobrazhenie Kievskogo vspomogatel'nogo komiteta po ustroistvu Vserossiiskoi vystavki (Kiev, n.d.), 1.

tional and artistic as well as economic), and the orderly movement of people was an example of a collective endeavor that was intended to be on a par with the best attainments of the West. In the self-serving words of the final report: "The outstanding order reigning at the exposition makes Russia appear to be a fully European country, enlightened and well-ordered [ blagoustroenno ]." [101] The ephemeral city of the exposition brought the borders of Europe to the Russian merchant city.

Third, the very shortcomings of the exposition were noteworthy of the labors remaining to be undertaken. Although the objects on display typified the best Russia could create, in the judgment of one observer the Russian "public" appeared to be on a cultural level far below the exposition itself. He considered the viewers to be typical of "intellectually backward [Russians], who have inadequate means of communication, insufficient awareness [ glasnost '], and little precise information about Russia." [102] Such language could easily have appeared in any educated Russian's description of the typical townsperson. For educated Russians, then, the idealized city of the exposition was not of one piece. The criteria of excellence established by those who constructed the exposition discredited the very population whom it was intended to instruct and enlighten. How could the city be the source of productivity and progress in the face of such obstacles? The organizers had few answers to that question.

The sense of a special urban vocation, embodied in a national exposition, appeared even more prominently in the next (and last) all-Russian fair, held in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. The element of symbolic meaning was obvious to officials and observers, who pointedly commented on the fair's quest to demonstrate the spread of modernity from the capitals to the provinces, and from the core of Westernized Russia to a city located on the borderlands of Asia. A few cities, for example, Kazan and Ekaterinburg, had attempted ambitious expositions on their own in the intervening years, but only the Nizhny Novgorod event received the political patronage and public attention inevitably associated with a national event. For the occasion the city itself became exemplary, installing (at state expense) electric streetcar lines and street lighting. The lighting turned the city, in the words of an exuberant young newspaperman named Maxim Gorky, into "a hill of lights, as though it had been sprinkled with stars from heaven." [103]

[101] B. P. Bezobrazov, ed., Otchet o Vserossiiskoi khudozhestvenno-promyshlennoi vystavki, 1882 g. (St. Petersburg, 1883), 6:7.

[102] Ibid., 11.

[103] Odesskie novosti , 11 June 1896.

The exposition itself was constructed on land at the junction of the Oka and Volga rivers not far from the site of the traditional annual trading fair. To underline its essential difference from the crowded, ramshackle buildings of the trade fair, it was laid out in a vast "garden city" that was twice the size of the Moscow exposition. Its main pavilions incorporated elements of the latest Western architectural style (labeled by Russians as "style moderne"). They displayed models of modern industry and technology, cultural and educational materials, exhibits of "progressive" municipalities, and even artifacts from the exotic Russian borderlands of Siberia and Central Asia. Nicholas II's much heralded visit to the exposition that summer brought the highest possible imprimatur to the efforts of the modernists (the most important of whom was Minister of Finance Sergei Witte) to make this artificial "city on a hill" the symbol of national economic and cultural progress. It constituted the major public event in Russia that year and attracted nearly one million visitors (despite complaints of poor rail connections and weeks of rain).

Like the Moscow exposition fourteen years before, the Nizhny Novgorod exposition proved an occasion for observers to assess the gap between the ideal and the real city, between technological progress and the old merchant ways. The decision of the organizers to locate the fair in a provincial town was a daring act because it broke with the assumption of the Westernizers that Russia beyond the capitals was uniformly backward, even "Asiatic." The organizers hoped to make clear to the country that European civilization, in its Russian variant, was moving eastward into Asia and that urban modernity had spread far beyond the borders of St. Petersburg and Moscow. The official guide claimed that provincial cities such as Nizhny Novgorod "have acquired 'meaning' as industrial and education centers in Russia." [104] In their judgment the traditional Nizhny Novgorod fair no longer typified urban economic practices, and the exposition, with the old fairgrounds nearby for contrast, proved the point.

The opinions of the visitors, for whom we have only the words of contemporary journalists and writers, may have been less sanguine. The perfection and glitter of the exhibits contrasted sharply with the poverty of the workers at the exposition; the modernity of the electric lights and street cars in the town did not penetrate the dirty, dark side streets. The exhibits were "extremely visible," one writer remarked sarcastically, "amidst our provincial order where nothing dims their contours" and where "the level of knowledge . . . stands at a point one hundred years behind that repre-

[104] "Ustroistvo vystavki," in Opisanie Vystavki , ed. V. Kovalevsky (Moscow, 1896), 2.

sented" in the exposition. [105] His culturist view that modernity was a human quality that was largely defined by education and Western learning assigned the typical provincial townsperson to the ranks of the backward and benighted (summed up in the scornful Russian term obyvatel '). More tolerant social critics such as Maxim Gorky, however, took the economic meaning of the fair very seriously. To him the fair was a "fairy-tale" world of "miracles of technology" that served as "publicity" for manufacturers and that masked the "imperfections of human life." [106] Whether viewed from either the culturist or the technological perspective, the exposition city did not represent a tangible or attainable reality.

The duality of the merchant city in those decades emerges vividly in the visual ambiguity and critical judgments of the Nizhny Novgorod exposition. In one sense the contradictions of Russian urbanism emerged most clearly in the provinces because the livelihood of the expanding economies of provincial Russian towns depended heavily on trade with the countryside and on the harvests. The perfection of modern crafts and industrial machinery, which was the main attraction of the exposition, represented industrial modernity in cities such as St. Petersburg, but it was irrelevant in the lives of the small traders and manufacturers who made up the propertied business groups of the provincial urban centers.

Taken separately, the exhibits had the specific intent of promoting the products of those few entrepreneurs with the incentive, in the form of capital, markets, and skills, to adopt the most advanced industrial and technological tools. Taken altogether, however, the exposition served the larger goal of promoting a rational, productive ordering of public activities in a modern city. From the perspective of Russian urbanization in those years this vision was so unattainable that it was an urban utopia drawn to the measure of the Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte. Although urban economic practices had evolved far beyond those of the mid-century merchant estate and bore little resemblance to the government's formalistic estate regulations, they were also distant from the model of technology and science that the Westernizers proposed in the idealized city of the national exposition.

Urban Migrants and Migrant Cities

Visitors to the Moscow Exposition of 1882 could quickly travel between the fairgrounds and the center of Moscow on a new tramway. If they chose,

[105] N. Iakobson, Chto takoi byla Nizhegorodskaia vystavka? (St. Petersburg, 1897), 3.

[106] Odesskie novosti , 21 June 1896.

they could pass through the notorious slum neighborhood of Khitrovka. The contrast between the fair's images of urban modernity and the misery of the Khitrovka dwellers illustrates another duality embedded in Russian urbanism in those decades: the slum had no place in the dreams of civic leaders, public-spirited intellectuals, and progressive entrepreneurs. It represented a grim reminder of the depths to which any townsperson could fall when misfortune struck. The deeper meaning of the slum, one that applied to all the growing urban centers of the country, lay in the presence of thousands of migrant laborers who congregated there seeking work. Their attire and mannerisms identified them as strangers in the city. Writing at the end of the century, one Moscow journalist identified the arrival each spring of this "enormous mass of laborers" as a sort of invasion. "They fill Khitrov square to overflowing, . . . and drink, eat, and even sleep right on the pavement." [107] The appearance of crowds of migrants in the city was a visual reminder that the country's urban growth was bringing the countryside to the city.

This trend troubled contemporaries and remains a perplexing issue confronting historians of Russian society in the late tsarist years. Did this migration constitute a sort of "peasantization" of the cities or, on the contrary, were many of the new arrivals rapidly adapting to urban culture? Was the expansion of the urban population an indication of the beginning of a profound process of integration of Russian society or did it mark a trend toward social turmoil that would further accentuate the division between "society" and "the people?" From the urban perspective the experience of the migrants has two historical dimensions: first, the practices of the new and temporary residents in Russia's urban areas; second, the perception of this event by outsiders—tsarist officials, municipal activists, intellectuals—with their own programs for urban development and their own appreciations of the place of the masses in urban society. [108]

The census of 1897 tells a dramatic tale of the rapid surge of the population of the country's cities. In absolute figures the urban population doubled in size in the last half of the nineteenth century, rising from 5.2 million in 1856 to 12.2 million in 1897. [109] We can appreciate the human

[107] "Khitrovka i ee obyvateli," Russkoe slovo , 27 May 1897.

[108] In the wide array of studies touching on migration two recent works that look closely at the experience of urban migrants are Robert Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), and Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985). A statistical study based largely on aggregate, provincial-level data is Barbara Anderson, Internal Migration during Modernization in late Nineteenth-Century Russia (Princeton, 1980).

[109] These data are conveniently grouped in the appendix to Thomas Fedor, Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1975), 179-216.

dimensions of the urban migration by noting three trends: the increase in city populations came largely from new settlers, it touched a relatively small number of urban areas, and it resulted as much or more from a rapid turnover of migrants as from permanent settlement in the city. First, settled townspeople were responsible for only a small part of urban growth; a decline of birth rates among this segment of urban dwellers is apparent in the last decades of the nineteenth century. [110] Thus, the impression of contemporary urban observers that they were undergoing an invasion of outsiders is more than a vivid figure of speech. In sheer numbers these strangers were overwhelming the native townspeople.

Second, the destination of most of the new urban dwellers was a limited number of cities scattered across European Russia. The spectacular expansion of the capitals is only the most vivid evidence of the bias the migrants showed in choosing their cities of temporary residence. Their choices played a decisive part in establishing Russia's pattern of urbanization. Unfortunately, only the all-Russian census of 1897 contains the demographic data we need to construct a profile of these cities; even this source gives reliable information only on migrants for cities with a population above twenty thousand. [111] With these limitations a statistical examination of the census results reveals the outlines of a cluster (or "family") of urban centers so strongly shaped by migration that I have labeled them "migrant cities." These towns constituted the locus of urban growth in the last half of the nineteenth century, and epitomized, both demographically and socially, the "new city" of late tsarist Russia.

The essential features of these new cities are apparent when we examine the urban centers in 1897 where over half the inhabitants were—in the language of the Central Statistical Committee—"born outside their place of residence." Nearly sixty migrant towns of over 15,000 population had emerged in European Russia by the end of the century (see table 1), and on average they had doubled in population since the 1860s. They ranged in size from Moscow, which grew from 350,000 to over one million between 1856 and 1897, to new industrial settlements like Ivanovo Voznesensk, which had expanded from a village of one thousand to a city of 54,000, and

[110] M. B. Kurman, "Vosproizvodstvo naseleniia dorevoliutsionnogo krupnogo goroda (po primera Khar'kova)," in Brachnost', rozhdaemost' i smertnost' v Rossii i v SSSR, ed. A. G. Vishnevskii (Moscow, 1977), 239-40.

[111] B. V. Tikhonov, Pereselenie v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka po materialam perepisi 1897 g. i pasportnoi statistiki (Moscow, 1978), 54-55, table 7; the author discovered that in towns with populations of less than twenty thousand the census takers classified both those born in the city and those born in the surrounding district as urban "local born."

provincial commercial centers like Saratov, which grew from 61,000 to 137,000. The rapid growth of the migrant cities stood in sharp contrast to those towns in which in 1897 over one-half of the inhabitants were locally born. Typically, their populations had declined in the two decades before the census.

Although urban expansion had begun in some areas in the first half of the nineteenth century, it assumed nationwide proportions in the reform era. Kiev, whose experience was probably similar to that of many other migrant cities, reached a population of nearly one hundred thousand by 1874 (the year of its first comprehensive census). In that year only 28 percent of its inhabitants were born in the city. Similarly, nearly three-fourths of Moscow's population in 1882, when its first city census was held, were migrants (that is, born elsewhere), a proportion that was sustained in 1902 when the municipality conducted its second census. In simple demographic terms the migrant city is characterized by the predominance of outsiders. [112]

In the descriptions of observers the migrant invariably appeared in peasant garb. The 1897 census gave substance to these impressions when it reported that the typical migrant belonged to the peasant estate. The emphasis on the rural laborer, repeated often in contemporary literature and historical studies, is somewhat misleading, however, because it suggests that movement only occurred between town and countryside. The censuses reveal that a substantial proportion of migrants belonged to estates other than the peasantry. The migrant cities were a social magnet for the entire population. Among those who belonged to the urban and privileged estates of Kiev (petty bourgeois, merchant, noble) in 1874, at least half had moved to the city from elsewhere. This proportion appears to have remained relatively constant to the end of the century. Although not as detailed as the Kiev census, the 1897 census suggests that it held true for migrant towns throughout the country (see table 1). Privileged and unprivileged, relatively well-to-do merchants and poor traders and artisans, peasants and petty bourgeois were all engaged in the creation of migrant cities.

Third, the population was remarkably mobile. Migrants came and went from the migrant towns, as did townspeople. The apparent incremental character of urban growth is belied by data that indicate the moves of migrants within and between towns. Seasonal laborers ( otkhodniki ) were the most visible new arrivals who soon left for other destinations (in their

[112] "Zapiska o sostoianii Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2, pt. 1, 10-25; on Moscow see also Anderson, Internal Migration , 83, table 4.3.

case, usually back to their villages). Bradley's careful study of the Moscow censuses of 1882 and 1902 shows that at the time of both censuses about one-fifth of the migrants had resided in Moscow for less than two years. In the ten-year period at the turn of the century that separated the two Petersburg city censuses, over half of the locally born dwellers had departed, a situation that James Bater refers to as "itinerant residence." By contrast, slightly over two-fifths of Moscow residents in 1882 and 1902 had lived there for over ten years, long enough perhaps to identify themselves as Muscovites. [113]

These figures tell us nothing about the subjective meaning of social mobility and stability to urban dwellers. They suggest, however, that we should pay less attention to the peasant as migrant and more attention to the conditions created by urban migration. In mid century urban commissions across the country reported the high rate of temporary migration of the lower urban estates in search of employment (see chapter 1). Decades later, the scale of this population movement had increased dramatically, and a familiar array of practices that linked at least some of the urban laboring population with the peasant migrants remained in existence. For all their shortcomings the census data reveal the extent to which these migrant cities were places that were occupied by and, in some areas, appropriated by a transitory population. The impression that the migrant cities were growing in an absolute sense is based in part on a statistical mirage: the increasing turnover of migrants. This mirage, however, seemed like a reality for contemporary observers. However short and transitory their stay in any one city, the migrants left a strong imprint on the social complexion of Russian urban areas.

Any inquiry into Russian nineteenth-century urbanization needs to pay close attention to the demographic peculiarities of the process, which can be gleaned through a statistical analysis of the 1897 census. Despite its imperfections, this census is the only source with which to construct a picture of the typical migrant city in European Russia. [114] When the numerical totals compiled by census takers for the populations of Russia's towns

[113] James Bater, "Transience, Residential Persistence, and Mobility in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900-1910," Slavic Review 39 (June 1980):240-42; see also Robert Johnson, "Peasant Migration and the Russian Working Class: Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century," Slavic Review 35 (December 1976):659; Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 137, table 2.

[114] On the problems of the census see A. Kotelnikov, Istoriia proizvodstva i razrabotki vseobshchei perepisi naseleniia 1897 g . (St. Petersburg, 1907); Barbara Anderson's study of urban migration ( Internal Migration during Modernization ) groups census data primarily by provinces, a very different demographic perspective from the one that I have adopted.

(which must be restricted only to those of over twenty thousand inhabitants) are reduced to percent values, they can be used to identify the unique characteristics of the cities of high migration. The method known as "discriminant" analysis, explained in the appendix, identifies a cluster of social traits that are shared by all the migrant cities and, conversely, that are absent from the towns where a majority of the population is locally born. When statistically defined, these traits are historically meaningful and suggest the substantial outlines of the social profile of the migrant city (see appendix, table A-1).

The traits most strongly related to migrant cities fit a pattern one might intuitively have expected to find in a type of city inhabited largely by a transient population, namely: comparatively few large households (defined as those with over five members); a large percentage of adults of working age (twenty to forty years old); a relatively high level of people of the urban and peasant estates from distant regions (beyond the province in which the town was located); and a significant proportion of people living in communal ( artel' ) housing. In the abstract terms of statistical values this social profile contains the characteristics of a family of cities whose single outstanding human characteristic is adaptability to sustained labor. Migrants often supported a large, extended family, but it was left behind. Communal living was favored because of its low costs to the laborers, who, in addition to living expenses, had to pay taxes and, often, the expenses of a distant family out of their meager income. The migrants' hopes for employment focused on particular cities that were accessible by railroad, even if they were located far from home. Thus, labor and a way of life that was appropriate to long- or short-term urban employment appear to be the salient qualities that shaped the migrant cities. From the point of view of the incoming population these cities were primarily work places.

Observers of this transformation of the city attempted to make sense of the experience in terms that reflected their own understanding of Russia's social order and economic future. To tsarist provincial administrators and municipal leaders urban migration represented a phenomenon of growing political importance that challenged their sense of social and public order. Seasonal laborers were the most visible of the migrants, and their presence was profoundly disturbing to officials because to them these newcomers personified poverty and disorder. The "thousands of workers" whom a tsarist inspector found in the Volga port town of Samara in 1880 "waiting on the squares to find work" were living "on the edges of the river with only the sky as a roof." He noted that their situation was particularly terrible in bad weather: most were "terribly poor, not even owning a

coat." [115] He was shocked at the indifference that the municipality displayed toward these migrants, not only because his sense of moral and patriarchal justice demanded that the authorities accept responsibility but also because he, as other officials, feared the presence of the urban mob.

The impersonality of the urban labor market meant that employment was at the mercy of economic cycles and the whim of employers or foremen. This impersonality and the conditions it produced seemed a new and threatening social problem to conservative Russians, and it was one to which tsarist social policies had no easy solution. What sense could the authorities make of situations such as the one reported by a gendarme officer in Rostov-on-Don in 1884, when, as a result of an economic recession, a "mass of local and migrant workers, without any occupation, roam the streets and fill the taverns"? [116] In the well-ordered estate society these unemployed, even if local workers, were out of place because they had no fixed abode. To tsarist authorities they were a public burden that had to be dealt with by the municipalities and the police. But they could not be contained, both because of their numbers—the reports invariably cited "thousands" or "tens of thousands" of migrants in these commercial centers—and because so many were temporarily uprooted.

The official status of most urban migrants was doubly uncertain. They were not living in their ascribed place of residence (which for the lower ranks, both urban or rural, was fixed as the place of birth and could only be moved with great difficulty) and were often in violation of the regulations on internal travel. In theory the passport system gave legal standing to temporary migration, but it attempted to draw a distinction between short-term travel, regulated by "certificates," and year-long absences requiring special passports. In practice migrants often appear to have dispensed with proper documentation. The challenge that urban migration posed to officials was not simply one of laborers lacking proper documentation. By the 1880s the rising tide of migrants was beyond the capacity of the police to take account of the new arrivals. Official reports continued to claim some awareness of the scope of violations, but they were unconvincingly precise in their descriptions of the problem. For example, Tsaritsyn's police asserted that of the ten thousand seasonal laborers who arrived during the 1887 navigation season, one-fourth lacked passports. [117] More revealing was

[115] "Reviziia Senatora Shamshina," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1, d. 23, 4.

[116] "Politicheskoe sostoianie Ekaterinoslavksoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 59, ch. 27 (1885), 20.

[117] "Otchet o sostoianii Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223 (1888), d. 168, 18.

the admission of the Nizhny Novgorod governor at the end of the century that the "enormous influx of temporary inhabitants, most of whom belong to the lower classes and find lodging in flophouses, empty municipal lands, and on the piers," was so great that the police could not keep track of the "overflow." [118]

This flood of migration was not always considered to be inherently threatening to public order. In certain instances officials used their powers with some discretion, replacing the bureaucratic formalism of the tsarist state with a more flexible understanding of the condition of these newcomers. According to one investigation of the capital's "lower depths," the Petersburg police and justices of the peace collaborated in selective law enforcement among the "thousands" of passportless inhabitants whom they captured. They punished only those who were judged "harmful" and permitted the "harmless" ones to stay, even providing some with temporary residence permits until their passports reached them. [119] This relative flexibility—or laxness—operated within the context of state surveillance of the outsiders: the authorities judged whether they were fit or unfit for residence in the city. The arbitrariness of this process opened the door to bribe taking. There is an abundant record that bribes were taken and that in their own way they made the police accomplices in opening the city to the undocumented migrants. To the extent that this unofficial policy existed in other cities it represented a subtle means to ensure that the laboring population remained available to the urban economy and that it was also reminded of its menial place in urban society.

The human face of the newcomer was easily overlooked, both by the authorities and by the ordinary townspeople. Often the newcomers were greeted by ethnic or social prejudice. Hostility was clearest toward the Jewish migrants, who in the 1860s and 1870s began to move out of the western areas of the Pale of Settlement into the new and expanding towns of the central and eastern Ukraine. In 1880 Kiev's mayor asserted that "the city is overcrowded [ perepolen ] with people who lack the right to live here, . . . of whose existence the police know nothing." [120] He thought that the Jewish settlers were such a menace that, if they continued to pour into the city, they would "end the historical life of Kiev." [121]

The same view, expressed in similarly threatening language, came from

[118] "Otchet o Nizhegorodskoi gubernii," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1902), d. 545, 845.

[119] V. Mikhnevich, Iazvy Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1886), 55.

[120] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova o Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2. pt. 2, 353.

[121] Ibid., pt. 1, 53-54.

the Ekaterinoslav provincial governor a decade later. His fears centered on the influx of "migrants from many areas," who were moving to new industrial settlements in such numbers that there existed "no chance of registration of the population." His principal concern was what he termed the "Jewish invasion." "At first, one or two" Jews settled in places that he called "the most turbulent points," and they were quickly followed "by others even from other provinces." [122] He was particularly concerned about public order, but his preoccupation with Jewish migration echoes in a mild form the popular anti-Semitic prejudice that was becoming increasingly evident—and violent—in those years.

These threatening images of invasions and floods created an imaginary wall around the city, whose defenses were meager. The authorities recognized that there was a place—and a need—for the migrant worker but often seemed to classify him as a disreputable and immoral type. One governor wrote that the population of southern boomtowns consisted of a "mass of people who were unbelievably hungry for quick wealth." [123] The array of migrants included "various sorts of speculators and adventurists" alongside "large numbers of working people," who the Odessa police prefect claimed in 1873 were drawn to his city by its "great trade position." [124] According to Laura Engelstein contemporary medical discussions identified migrants as undesirables, blaming them for the diffusion of certain dangerous diseases. Some doctors, faced with an apparent epidemic of syphilis, speculated that the disease was spread by the male migrant and female prostitute (who was often assumed to be a migrant who had abandoned domestic service). The migrant's marginal position between townsperson and villager supposedly made him a prime candidate for "sexual license and the propagation of sexually defined disease." [125]

Another trait of the migrant as a threatening outsider was drunkenness. Warnings about its ominous role in the outbreak of urban riots revealed growing concern about the ill effects of vodka and a profound unease at the presence of transient workers on the fringes of urban life. In this view migrant practices were a combination of "indiscipline, drunkenness, and riotousness [ buistvo ]," terms that the Saratov provincial governor used in

[122] "Otchet o sostoianii Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii za 1895 g.," TsGIA, f. 1263, op. 2, d. 49 (1896), 10-12.

[123] "Otchet o sostoianii Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii za 1898 g.," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1899), d. 3255, 7.

[124] "Otchet gradonachal'nika," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 69 (1874), d. 150, 10-11.

[125] Laura Engelstein, "Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890-1905," Representations , no. 14 (Spring 1986):181-83.

the mid 1890s to describe the laborers in Volga port cities. [126] The stereotypical migrant was drunken, diseased, disorderly, and without legal papers. It is not surprise that many thought him to be a menace to public order.

Although we have many descriptions of migrants in the reports of tsarist officials, the migrants' experience is much more difficult to understand in their own terms. Historians have written extensively about the movement in recent centuries of populations from country to country and from countryside to city because these phenomena are some of the fundamental features of modernity and the emergence of industrial economies. These studies usually make commonsense assumptions about the economic motivation of migrants, who are most often portrayed as disadvantaged or impoverished peasants seeking refuge in the city. The experience of the Russian migrants, however, should be viewed in the context of their own cultural background.

Mobility, labor, and urban residence formed the central features of the migrants' collective and personal histories. With few firsthand accounts to counterbalance those of officials and educated observers, the historian who seeks to analyze urban migration from "within" must rely on fragmentary information that suggests rather than makes explicit the actors' views and behavior. The conclusions can only be tentative. Not surprisingly, historical studies explain the migrant experience from both an economic and a social perspective. One debate has centered on the polarities of peasant and worker and asks whether to place the migrant close to one or the other pole. Another line of inquiry has focused on the life cycle of the migrants in terms of their age, family, and social ties. [127] These approaches are complementary, not exclusive, and tend to emphasize narrowly defined dimensions of the migrants' experiences.

To move the issue of migration into the context of urbanization shifts the perspective from structure or process to social context. The central issue that I propose to address is the manner in which migrants occupied urban space for their own purposes, and used, in the words of the French writer Michel de Certeau, "spatial practices" to become, however briefly, a part of

[126] "Otchet o sostoianii Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 20 (1898), 21-22 (the specific context of his remarks was the thirty thousand seasonal workers in the port city of Tsaritsyn).

[127] A recent study by P. G. Ryndziunskii gave new life to the Soviet investigation of this subject: see Krest'iane i gorod v kapitalisticheskoi Rossii vtoroi poloving XIX veka (Moscow, 1983). In the West, Robert Johnson has undertaken a thorough examination of the problem in Peasant and Proletarian . The implications of migration for women and the family have been explored in Barbara Engel, "The Woman's Side: Male Out-Migration and the Family Economy in Kostroma Province," Slavic Review 45 (Summer 1986): 257-71.

that alien urban territory where they chose to reside. [128] This approach assumes that even if these migrants were urban outsiders in terms of their cultural background, social bonds, and skills, they were nonetheless aware of their new surroundings and were capable of inventing behavioral skills to deal with the strangeness of the city. [129] The urban experience of the migrants represents a third approach to the problem of urban migration. It separates the migrants from both the communities they had left—and to which many were still bound and to which they would probably return—and the urban community to which they found themselves.

This separation bears some similarities to the cultural condition that the anthropologist Victor Turner has defined as a "liminal period." [130] Although it is usually associated with tribal rites of passage and symbolic rituals of departure and return to the group, the concept of the liminal period has been applied to other collective human experiences of dramatic separation and cultural discontinuity and provides a fruitful perspective on the experience of Russian migrants. In the context of Russian urbanization it appears particularly helpful in studying the condition of the temporary migrants, the otkhodniki , who were separated from their village and who worked in one or more urban centers during that time. As I noted before, the temporary migrants made the most forceful impression on observers, although we should keep in mind that migration also included other towns-people. In the case of the petty bourgeoisie the pattern of temporary migration strongly resembled that of the peasantry: it included separation from family, the move to distant centers in search of work, and periodic return to the place of birth and legal residence.

The issues pertinent to the concept of liminality are similar to those that are often addressed in other studies of migration: separation, companionship, status, cultural adaptation, and vulnerability. However, these issues assume a new meaning when the key problem is the emergence of new urban communities in migrant cities. The historical issues raised by the presence of the migrants focus on cultural discontinuity and its effect on the migrants' sense of identity.

The questions of who the migrants were and where they came from are

[128] M. de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 93.

[129] In the lexicon of geographers this manner of making cultural sense of a geographical place is termed "environmental perception" and entails the processes by which "people form images of other places" and "how these images influence decisions" (Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps [Baltimore, 1974], 17).

[130] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, 1969), 94-97; see also A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1972), 39, 177-78.

usually approached through the documentation that they were in theory required to obtain. As with so many other tsarist tabulations, however, these figures are only useful for comparative purposes. In the 1880s one zemstvo study of peasants who left their villages in search of work made every effort to avoid the appearance of an official inquiry but was still incomplete because the population feared unpleasantness with the police. One of the zemstvo workers noted that the reason the peasants feared the police was that "a majority [of the migrants] are without passports; they only have a travel certificate and some lack even that." [131] The figures on the issuance of passports, which the state required of both petty bourgeois and peasants when they moved, give only a very approximate notion of the scale and rate of growth of population movement, and they provide no indication of destination. These figures do, however, suggest an extraordinary surge of internal migration, which more than tripled between the 1860s and 1880s (reaching 3.5 million at the end of this period). Short-term certificates, which were in far greater demand than the passports, grew at a similar rate. By the last decade of the century they were issued at the rate of 177 per thousand population in the northern provinces, and 74 per thousand in the southern lands (the Ukraine, the blackearth region, and the middle Volga). [132] According to the Soviet historian P. G. Ryndziunskii, by the last years of the century the combined totals of all travel documents for nonblackearth and blackearth provinces had attained 450 per thousand. [133] The impact of this massive movement on the communities from which migrants departed (and to which they periodically returned in most cases) is a key and little explored issue in Russian social history.

The very existence of a city under these conditions seemed problematical in the late century. The educated elite used the term "village" to indicate their dismay at the pervasive presence of a population of rural origins in the city. But language and practice also revealed the importance of the sense of community that the migrants carried into the city from their places of birth. Once the most visible form of village migrant association, the cooperative work gang ( artel' ), dwindled in importance in the cities as the century came to a close, but it endured as a sort of semicommunal living and eating arrangement and provided an effective means for builders to organize construction gangs. [134]

[131] Quoted in Ryndziunskii, Krest'iane i gorod , 92.

[132] Boris Tikhonov, Pereselenie v Rossii , 211-12, tables 12 and 13.

[133] Ryndziunskii, Krest'iane i gorod , 105-6 (including a discussion of the dangers of reading these statistical aggregates as if they told life histories).

[134] Ibid., 119-20.

The ties of village or regional "fellowship" conveyed by the term zemliak were a powerful and enduring bond that was practiced and understood within urban migrant groups. Robert Johnson points out that migrants expected to establish themselves in their new place with the help of earlier arrivals from their home territory, who would aid them in finding work and a bed in which to sleep and who would offer companionship in an alien environment. [135] The zemliachestvo established the close ties that sociologists have found at work in other countries, ties that "establish a relationship between the migrant and the receiving community." [136] The migrants assisted in this manner were not likely to experience the anomie that urban sociologists once thought accompanied the shift from rural community to urban society. Still, the migrants' entrance into the zemliachestvo , as transient in its composition as was their own stay in the city, was an indication of their distance from both their villages and the urban communities surrounding them.

This state of social discontinuity of the urban migrants became integrated into their everyday practices. It appeared in the modest family ritual that marked the departure of a youth on his first trip, for example, the "small ceremony" of a father's prayers, blessing, and moral exhortation that marked one sixteen-year-old's day of departure for work as an apprentice in Moscow. [137] It emerged over a period of months or years in the changed appearance of the migrants: they were proud of their city clothes and manners, and on returning home the young women of the village singled them out from those they had left behind, at least if the observations of one village doctor on life in Kostroma province are typical. [138] Social discontinuity was also embodied in the gender isolation of the lives of the migrants. Boys and men left their families and entered a largely male community of laborers. We know little of the women migrants. Their conditions of work—most often they were domestic servants—largely determined their place in the city. Their remoteness from their homes was probably even greater than that of the men. [139]

However, the migrants brought with them, or quickly acquired, an array of practices that they could share with the urban laboring population.

[135] Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian , 67-75.

[136] C. Tilly and C. Brown, "On Uprooting, Kinship, and the Auspices of Migration," in An Urban World , ed. C. Tilly (Boston, 1973), 111.

[137] S. I. Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov , trans. and ed. Reginald Zelnik (Stanford, 1986), 6.

[138] D. N. Zhbankov, Bab'ia storona (Kostroma, 1891), 15, 27.

[139] The issue of gender among Moscow migrants is examined in Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 134-38.

Vodka had a privileged place in their rituals of work and leisure. Collective fistfights brought men and boys from factories or neighborhoods together in a common and bloody form of leisure time activity. Neither of these bonds was unique to migrants. At neither end of the migrant's path were the social boundaries impenetrable. A large proportion of temporary migrants ultimately reestablished village residence; others found satisfying work and joined the ranks of the townspeople. The instability of employment that most migrants confronted represented a deeply unsettling element in their lives. Municipalities offered only occasional, short-term aid for the unemployed. The sudden loss of work meant a return home or, at its worst, a descent into the marginal life of beggars in the cities.

Home ties were a substantial obstacle to establishing urban residence. One Moscow-based artisan, bringing suit in court in the 1880s against his home community ( rodina , presumably a village), argued that he had "no ties [ osedlosti ] whatsoever [to his community] and no place to return." Even so, he was still bound to pay an exorbitant sum to that community for his passport. He believed himself to be a Muscovite, but the records do not reveal whether the court agreed. [140] For reasons presumably of both financial interest and personal identity, he chose to consider himself a townsman who was being unjustly obstructed by greedy rural officials. These officials probably believed that they were defending their "closed corporate community," in Ben Eklof's words, and its fiscal needs. [141]

The marginality of the migrants was a temporary affair, and liminality was a problematic condition, one that perhaps best characterizes a period in the life of migrants. Even in these terms, however, the growing size of the migrant population through the last decades of the nineteenth century meant that this marginal group always constituted a substantial presence within migrant cities.

Was the migrants' experience accompanied by an awareness of separateness within the urban community? The evidence is meager but sufficiently compelling to give a tentative answer to the question. The discontinuity between the old home and the future place of reenty—whether a new city or the old community—was a function of the distance, real and perceived, separating the migrants from their places of origin and of the social borders of the urban community within which they found themselves. Factory employment was the goal of some urban migrants, but the data collected by Johnson reveal that in Moscow (and undoubtedly in other migrant towns as

[140] Cited in Tikhonov, Pereselenie , 119.

[141] Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy 1861-1914 (Berkeley, 1986), 15-16.

well) only a small proportion (15 percent) of the migrants found factory employment. [142] The migrants in the city were not stationary, either in work or in residence (although the newly constructed outskirts tended to house a high proportion of migrants). They were physically inseparable from the city, but in most cases they were without a fixed place of residence. Their sense of transience made the city a place of passage, both literally for transitory migrants and figuratively for those living on the margins between the city and their distant home.

The separate identity of the migrant, as perceived by educated observers and perhaps by many of the migrants themselves, took on specific shape and color in Moscow's Khitrovka slum. With the help of journalists like Giliarovsky and publicists like Lev Tolstoi, Muscovites tended to view Khitrovka as a place so alien that it resembled "darkest Africa." To incoming laborers it was a refuge—a place of hire and perhaps a gathering point for comrades from home. In a literal sense it was a place of passage from which workers might leave for better quarters, go to other towns, or return to their home communities. Its tangible, harsh, yet ephemeral place in their lives suggests that what most marked the migrant identity in urban communities was not its "savagery," as authorities readily assumed, but its very marginality. It offered some hope of employment and security, but it also threatened hunger, cold, and even death to the unfortunate. The "lower depths" that Maxim Gorky imagined to be both the physical and moral abyss of the urban poor were close to, but not a part of, the migrant's existence. Khitrovka was both a "skid row" and a labor market, and these two aspects of its identity were easily confused by outsiders. To the migrants, crossing the imaginary line separating the two represented, perhaps even more than returning to their village or town empty-handed, the failure of their endeavor.

The new city of railroads, merchants, and migrants was both a physical place and a cultural creation. These three elements are key to the processes of urbanization of late imperial Russia; they also present three distinct faces of the image of Russian urbanism in those years. The economic dynamism that distinguished urban Russia from earlier times owed its existence in large measure to the pattern of economic exchange between city and countryside and to the facilities of transportation, both of which largely depended on the railroad. The economic hinterlands of the commercial centers expanded enormously, and the territory from which migrants could travel to seek urban employment also expanded. The new vistas of prosperity and

[142] Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian , 34.

progress, which were given ideal form in the national expositions of Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, emerged as much from this new urban economic life as from the flights of fancy of Westernized bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance.

Although wealthy townspeople were a very small group within the city, their stereotypical embodiment—the merchant—enjoyed a place of prominence, whether derided or proclaimed a hero of Russian enterprise. His presence was inseparable from that of the other stereotypical member of the new city, the migrant. The migrants came from diverse origins, worked in many different occupations, and stayed in the city for various lengths of time, but they had a place there and an identity of their own. I argue that we should think of the migrants not only as protoworkers or transplanted peasants but also as urban outsiders. Their humble condition and poverty placed them among the urban poor, and their cultural condition between town and country and their transitory situation located them on the margins of the city. In taking the form of the migrant city Russian urbanism defied the very concept of the city as a place of settled townspeople.

3 Russian Municipal Reform and Urban Civil Society

The institutions of urban self-government in Russia acquired increasing importance in the last decades of the nineteenth century. New economic practices, expanding migrant communities, and conflicting perceptions of justice and private interests made the urban public arena a place of struggle for political influence and social control. Municipal autonomy raised fundamental questions of order and disorder, self-rule and discipline, and those questions were expressed in a language that ascribed exalted roles to the various actors. "State" and "society" made their voices heard in municipal government, and "society," which included tax-paying citizens and educated Russians, confronted the "people" in a well-defined but constantly expanding arena. Until mid century the city, in its principal architectural and institutional forms, represented the power of the imperial state. Although autocratic power remained a pervasive presence in later years, new actors and activities gave municipal government a separate and increasingly visible part to play in public affairs.

The reasons for the newfound importance of municipal government lie partly in new imperial policies and partly in the dynamic growth of the migrant city. The reforms of Alexander II's regime included the mobilization of public leaders, who were called on to take an active role in addressing social problems. Municipalities, together with regional assemblies ( zemstva ), had a designated place in the reformed autocracy. The spread of a protoliberal sense of public service and the pressures that increased economic activity created were as important as state initiatives in raising the

issue of social needs. In this complex intermingling of the state, the public, and the private, areas of conflict and cooperation were not consistent and uniform. Provincial governors at times supported and at times opposed municipal policies and activists; business interests and educated, publicminded leaders agreed on some local priorities and fought bitterly over others. A small segment of the enfranchised voters honored and deferred to their "betters" in municipal elections; the large majority, however, proved indifferent to public affairs. Specialists with technical training such as statisticians and physicians offered authoritative opinions to the state and to municipalities on how to order and to sanitize, for the good of everyone, the urban areas occupied by the impoverished masses.

The meaning and implications of these developments become clear if we examine the political vocabulary in Russia at that time that was inspired by Western European liberalism. Political conditions in eighteenth-century France-and nineteenth-century Germany as well-bore a strong resemblance to late-nineteenth-century Russia (hence the popularity in Russia of the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, somber prophet of monarchical apocalypse, revolution, and democracy). Western European precedents were very much on the mind of Russians—some to decry the trends of the day, others to welcome them—and theories of power derived from the West European experience help to interpret the nature of the conflict and the manner in which some Russians perceived the issues.

Throughout the late nineteenth century political opposition to the autocracy was identified in public discussions not in institutional but in cultural terms. The chairman of the Council of Ministers, Peter Stolypin, used this language in a speech in 1907 that called for reform in order to end the "confrontations between public life and state life [ mezhdu obshchestvennosti i gosudarstvennosti ]." [1] His description of a sort of "dual power" recognized the success of an oppositional public ( obshchestvennost ') in creating a separate political identity. In sense and derivation the use of this term (or the alternative term "society"— obshchestvo ) resembles the German term bürgerliche Gesellschaft ("civil society"). Friedrich Hegel employed this term in his political writings to designate a key mediating force, based on economic interest, between the family and the state. [2] It was a vital concept in Hegel's theoretical endeavor to reconcile power and freedom in the modern state.

[1] Quoted in Robert Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906-1914 (New York, 1987), 184.

[2] See Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 141-47.

The theoretical and historical implications of civil society have been refined in a recent work by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. He has proposed the term "civil public sphere" ( bürgerliche offentlichkeit , translated alternatively as "bourgeois public sphere") to identify that arena of independent public activity between the state and society that the bourgeoisie opened in the eighteenth century. In Habermas's interpretation of the emergence of political liberties the key factors are critical reasoning—found in literature—and autonomous action—found in commercial c capitalism. The bourgeoisie uses these two factors to challenge the authority of the absolutist state. [3] Hegel's concept of civil society gives him a theoretical model to associate the rise of the bourgeoisie with the development of rational state power. Like Hegel's concept, Habermas's civil public sphere interprets the reordering of power in modern Western society in terms of social practice but places particular stress on two things: the accessibility of the public sphere to groups besides the bourgeoisie, and the public sphere's essential quality of the "publicity" of public affairs, that is, the emergence of public opinion in opposition to the absolutist state's monopoly of power. This manner of explaining the origins of a politically powerful public sphere minimizes the institutional and legalistic issues central to the liberal or Whiggish historical school.

Habermas's theory is germane to the study of Russian public life in the late nineteenth century. It suggests that opposition to absolutism arises in the opening of a public domain that is legitimated by rationalism, more or less rooted in pragmatic political practice and discourse, and defended by writers and politically active representatives of influential social groups—urban business groups, landed gentry—that are convinced of the legitimacy of their own public action. I use Habermas's theory to interpret the origins and development of the activities and rhetoric of Russian municipal affairs. These affairs were explicitly recognized as autonomous in the municipal reform of 1870; implicitly, they occupied a separate sphere from tsarist administration to the extent that they constituted distinct functions of urban public life.

The usefulness of Habermas's (and Hegel's) theory to the history of Russian urbanism lies particularly in its attention to political practice and participation. From the Russian political perspective in the late nineteenth

[3] Jürgen Habermas, L'espace public: Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension de la société bourgeoise , trans. Marc de Launay (Paris, 1978), esp. chap. 3. The original title is Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Darmstadt, 1962). I am indebted for this source to Benjamin Nathans, "Habermas's 'Public Sphere' in the Era of the French Revolution" (Unpublished paper, Dept. of History, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1988).

century the West offered a reservoir of models of political action. The example of Western municipal liberties in itself tended to strengthen the significance of municipal activities to Russians of a liberal persuasion. Vocal intelligenty added their voices—either in chorus or in opposition—to commercial and manufacturing interests to define the proper content and role of municipal practices in a Russian civil public sphere. The practice of municipal power, when legitimated by a belief in its value and importance, enhanced the role of municipalities as political entities distinct from the state. The very intensification of municipal "small deeds," even though restricted largely to the migrant cities, gave the urban elite a sense of autonomous governance. This dimension to the story of nineteenth-century Russian urbanism encompasses both the institutions of municipal power and the practice of that power within the context of rapid economic development and the massive influx of migrants. It is also important to understand the limits to the arena of municipal activism, in terms of both power and participation. Civic activists, tsarist administrators, and townspeople differed widely in their attitude toward the municipal public sphere. The nature and origins of that diversity of views suggest the extent to which Russian urbanism acquired a meaningful political role in public life by the end of the century.

The State and the Municipalities

In the early years of Alexander II's reign the city assumed a special place in administrative as well as in public discussions of political reform. The Urban Affairs Section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs assigned a new role in public affairs to the country's towns, and it defined this role in ways that were fundamentally at variance with the Nicholaevan facade model. Provincial governors drew inspiration from the "spirit of the age" to urge the municipalities to undertake new initiatives. Outside town councils, voices spoke out from the once silent nobility, requesting a part in urban public service. The state's decision in 1858 to cease meddling in urban architectural affairs was symptomatic of the new mood. The decision ended the requirement that private buildings adhere to the model facades that were officially authorized by state agencies. [4] The city of this new age had to demonstrate its inspirational influence not by image but by deed, not through orderly town plans and neoclassical facades but through public service to promote worthy causes.

[4] V. N. Ivanov, ed., 'Obraztsovye' proekty v zhiloi zastroike russkikh gorodov XVIII-XX vv. (Moscow, 1961), 184.

The eagerness of certain Petersburg administrators in the ministry's Urban Affairs Section to reform and activate municipalities inspired them to take unprecedented initiatives. In the previous fifteen years they had conducted investigations into the problems of Russian urban life. This work had persuaded them that they possessed a clear sense of the role of the Russian city as a setting for constructive public activity. They realized that urbanism did not appear "by renaming a settlement a 'city,'" as they emphasized in a memorandum written in early 1860. Their understanding of the "character" of the city was multitiered and encompassed the urban economy as well as municipal policies and priorities. It incorporated a profile of the "real conditions of the urban population," which included commercial affairs, rural occupations, migration, availability of work, and property-holding. These factors in turn determined "local needs," on which was predicated the proper "form of self-rule [ obshchestvennoe upravlenie ]." Convinced that they were in a position to act on the problems confronting the Russian city, they prepared instructions that year for a nationwide survey of political and economic conditions in urban areas. The purpose of this survey was "to familiarize [the ministry] with the peculiarities of the cities" and to obtain "accurate indications of [their] real needs." For these "enlightened bureaucrats" cities contained a vast amount of essential information that special local commissions made up of "deputies of all urban estates" would collect and that the Urban Affairs Section would analyze and interpret. [5] Their goal was quick action on municipal reform. Their enthusiasm was not shared, however, by the Council of Ministers, which judged that emancipation and the reform of rural administration were highest priorities. In April 1860 it declared that the creation of the commissions was "premature." [6] Two years later it finally authorized the call to begin work on municipal reform.

The discussions on municipal affairs in these years offer intriguing insight into the expectations of tsarist reformers for local self-rule. These officials proposed a new definition of urbanism. The pressure behind municipal reform was clearly instrumental: it was motivated by a sense of crisis in local and provincial governance. In the judgment of an 1860 memo

[5] Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie gorodskikh poselenii evropeiskoi Rossii v 1861-1862 g. (St. Petersburg, 1863), 1:v-vi. This introduction spells out the principles that inspired the 1860 initiatives taken by the Urban Affairs Section.

[6] "O sostavlenii soobrazhenii otnositel' no uluchsheniia obshchestvennogo upravleniia v gorodakh," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (abbreviated TsGIA), f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2137, 124.

the cities would remain unable "to solve many current needs as long as municipal self-government remains in its current condition." [7]

In 1863 the local commissions submitted their "considerations" on economic, social, and administrative conditions in their cities. From these reports the urban affairs officials tendentiously drew the conclusion that "all [cities] unanimously explain the deficiencies of the existing order by their lack of autonomy [ samostoiatel' nost' ] in all major actions of urban welfare and economy." [8] The reformers were prepared to carve out a sphere of municipal action separate from the tsarist administration on the assumption that "public self-government" [ obshchestvennoe samoupravlenie ] was the solution to the decay of the cities, which they perceived to be emblematic of the decay of the country as a whole.

The role that the urban affairs officials assigned to municipal self-rule did not intentionally encompass the creation of a civil public sphere. In their estimation an urban elite was needed to accomplish certain tasks unworthy of the tsarist administration. Nikolai Miliutin, a key figure in the early discussions of the zemstvo reforms, emphasized in a memo written in 1863 the importance for the central government to "focus on the most notable state affairs." He believed that local bodies, which by implication included the municipalities, ought to concern themselves with "a wide range of local interests, mostly petty, that are unimportant to the central government but that represent real needs for the local population." [9] He failed to explain what might happen if the local institutions did not or could not cope with these needs. His view, which was one generally shared by reform bureaucrats, assumed that a revival of previously moribund local institutions on the basis of self-rule would result in a remarkable improvement in initiative and effectiveness.

Implicit in his reasoning was a second key assumption, namely, that the cities contained an abundance of human talent waiting for the opportunity to serve the public good. In his call in 1862 for the formation of the local urban commissions the minister of internal affairs, Count Valuev, included an appeal that was more than a rhetorical flourish for the participation of "the most experienced and outstanding people" from all estates. [10] In Miliutin's memorandum, cited earlier, such public-spirited citizens were char-

[7] Ibid., 19.

[8] Materialy otnosiashcheisia do novogo obshchestvennogo ustroistva v gorodakh imperii (St. Petersburg, 1877), 1:84.

[9] TsGIA, f. 1275 (Sovet ministrov), d. 33, 105. Excerpts of this memorandum are cited in S. Frederick Starr, The Politics of Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 250-52.

acterized no less grandiloquently as "the best and most educated people." They would find a "practical direction" for their idealism in opportunities for local reform (and presumably would not choose the alternative model of "new people" that was proposed that year by Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his novel What Is To Be Done ). [11]

As in other periods of rapid reform, the Russian state relied as much on the sudden mobilization of committed, talented, and loyal subjects as on major institutional changes for the success of its measures. Like the models of technical ingenuity and social progress that had been singled out for emulation at the national expositions, the appeal for public support revealed the extent to which the reformers' plans idealized public life in the city. The experience of a century of municipal self-rule had taught the public to expect officials to dominate public life. But suddenly townspeople were to believe that local power lay in their hands. This dubious assumption informed much of the discussion of municipal reform. For example, it appeared in the "considerations" drawn up by the town leaders of Perm. After chastising their fellow townspeople for treating civic duties as a "formality that they could easily do without, dreamed up only God knows why," the authors promised that their "apathetic" and "disorderly" municipality would be transformed into a "free, self-governing community" if only arbitrary state intervention were eliminated. [12] Why and how, after decades of mediocre municipal leadership, men of extraordinary ability would suddenly emerge represented a dilemma that the reformers could not resolve.

One group had already laid claim to the title of "best people" in urban affairs. Between 1859 and 1860 numerous petitions reached St. Petersburg from provincial and district noble assemblies, backed at times by the governors, that called for special representation for the nobility in municipal dumas. The reformed St. Petersburg municipality of 1846 was their model. In St. Petersburg deputies representing personal nobles (largely state officials who had risen to a rank conferring on them the title of noble) and those representing hereditary nobles each had their own separate curia; hence they could potentially dominate the merchant estate, which was the sole active public force in most towns. In the province of Penza a delegation of landed nobles and bureaucrats presented their petition to the governor, whose supporting message to the capital explained that these groups could bring "real aid" to urban affairs thanks to "their education and proper

[11] "O sostavlenii soobrazhenii otnositel' no uluchsheniia obshchestvennogo upravleniia v gorodakh," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2137, 176.

[12] "Mnenie o soobrazhenii," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2171, 5.

knowledge of the laws." [13] Through their district assembly the members of the Moscow nobility petitioned to participate in the public affairs of their city. Count Stroganov, the governor of Moscow province, officially baptized the local nobility as the "best people" and added that they would end municipal "disorder [ rasstroistvo ]." [14] Odessa's nobles followed suit. Although the petitions adapted the nobility's political role to the reform spirit of the times, the legitimating principle behind this appeal for local leadership was the legal preeminence that the tsarist regime granted to the noble estate.

The reasons for the sudden outburst of noble interest in exercising municipal leadership are hidden beneath the rhetoric of the petitions. Perhaps the convocation of the consultative noble committees on serf emancipation and their subsequent dismay at the growing power of the state bureaucracy in controlling the decisions on emancipation inspired nobles to consider the potential benefits of occupying a dominant place in municipal affairs. The petitions came to a quick end—probably dampened by official disapproval—but the issue of a special place for nobles in the new self-governing municipalities remained in public view for several years. Although Minister of the Interior Valuev may have had his doubts, he heeded the tsar's favorable reception to the Moscow petition. In 1862 he approved a new Moscow statute that was modeled on the St. Petersburg statute. The next year Odessa also received a new municipal statute, which did not, however, recognize separate representation for nobles; rather, it created a new curia for large property owners who did not belong to the urban estates (primarily nobles). [15] In a few major cities the doors to urban civic activity were opened to the highest estate of the empire.

Although noble leadership might have seemed anachronistic to those familiar with Western European municipal rule in those years, in the 1860s some Russian nobles assumed an active part in urban affairs. In both Moscow and Odessa the mayoral position passed into the hands of aristocrats, presumably as a consequence of the reforms. Count Shcherbatov, Moscow's mayor from 1863 to 1869, conducted his affairs from the point of view of noblesse oblige, at least if we go by the spirit of his summary report to "urban society" at the end of his term. Wishing to be true to the new principle of "openness" ( glasnost' ), he presented Muscovites with a

[13] These petitions are discussed in "O sostavlenii soobrazhenii otnositel' no uluchsheniia obshchestvennogo upravleniia v gorodakh," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2137, 2-12.

[14] TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2004 (1859-65), 38-39.

[15] Frederick Skinner, "City Planning in Odessa" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1973), 210-13.

full account of the activities of the municipality that would enable them to make "a correct and dispassionate judgment [about] whether their chosen representatives carried out their duties." [16] One of his colleagues in the duma from the merchant estate, I. A. Liamin, proclaimed that same year the dawn of a new era of social brotherhood in municipal public life. In his opinion the "mutual distrust and alienation of estates" in previous decades had given way to the "rapprochement and union of the so-called upper urban classes." He attributed this situation to the new spirit of cooperation in the duma, where there now existed "a whole, strong, and integral society." [17] His flowery rhetoric suggests the existence, at least in his imagination, of a Muscovite version of civil society.

The reality of municipal life in the reform years is more prosaic and less benign than Liamin's description implies. First, the meager evidence we possess does not reveal an outpouring of civic ardor on the part of the newly empowered urban nobility. In St. Petersburg, where members of the urban nobility had received special electoral rights twenty years earlier, they proved even less zealous in voting than the merchants. [18] As was the case for the urban estates, only a handful of members of the nobility turned out to be civic-minded. Second, the municipal activities of even this small urban elite was narrowly confined by administrative demands and fiscal limitations. Shcherbatov's principal message to Moscow's "urban society" was the heavy burden of obligatory state expenditures—a doubling of funding for the municipal police, repairs on state buildings, etc. [19] When major projects were undertaken, they came about either because the duma accepted new taxes—the case in Moscow—or because the tsarist administration set a high priority on capital improvements in particular cities. For example, Odessa's municipality was able to launch a development program of street paving, lighting, water supply, and harbor improvements thanks to the encouragement and financial backing of the state. [20] In general, the deeds necessary to make the city the symbol of progress entailed both state support and new civic leadership.

In fact, the presence of nobles among the urban elite appeared to be

[16] Otchet Moskovskoi gorodskoi golovy Kniazia Shcherbatova o deiatel' nosti Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy (Moscow, 1869), 1.

[17] Cited in B. V. Zlatoustavskii, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie v period reformy 60-kh godov XIX v." (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1953), 200-201.

[18] I. I. Ditiatin, Ustroistvo i upravlenie gorodov Rossii, vol. 2, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie (Iaroslavl, 1877), 494.

[19] Otchet Kniazia Shcherbatova, 9-12.

[20] Frederick Skinner, "Trends in Planning Practices: The Building of Odessa," in The City in Russian History, ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington, Ky., 1976), 149-51.

incidental to the activation of civic initiative. Previously moribund municipalities became infused with the spirit of the reform period without any enlargement of their constituency. In Kharkov the city acquired the "appearance of self-government" owing to the encouragement of the new governor-general. The replacement of the Nikolaevan martinet by an activist administrator set the stage for the municipal duma to consider town schooling, gas lighting, a new railroad station, and much more. All these changes were made by the established merchant leaders, whose transformation seemed like "a miracle" to the townspeople. [21] All was not changed as if by magic, however. When the new mayor of the port city of Rostovon-Don, chosen in 1862 by the unreformed duma, set an activist agenda of paving, municipal banking, and schooling, he encountered such disorder and indifference that he concluded that a spirit of "anarchy" reigned there. [22] Such conditions, whether exaggerated or not, suggested to urban activists that they had to form their own faction. They believed that they had been entrusted by default with leadership responsibilities; they also believed that they were endowed with the vision and dedication necessary to build a new city, both literally and figuratively. Although conceiving of a civic sphere of vast proportions and significance, municipal leaders found that their circle of supporters was small and their powers still circumscribed by the indifference or skepticism of townspeople. These unresolved problems were the result of decades of municipal inaction and provincial officials jealously defending tsarist prerogatives.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that municipal leadership from the nobility made its most visible impact in public conflicts with the state. The reform period brought changes in power relations that transcended urban affairs, where questions of power, prestige, and ideology were acted out in a setting that was incidental to the underlying issues. When in 1865 the new mayor of Odessa, Count Aleksandr Stroganov, discovered what he believed to be deceitful action by the minister of finance in dealings with the municipality, he used a duma meeting to accuse the minister of "lying" and called for a public investigation. "There never has been such a speech in the entire existence of the duma," noted an enthusiastic duma member in his diary, "or in all Russia!" A courtly aristocrat could claim liberties of which townspeople had no experience. Unfortunately for Odessa and Stroganov, the tsar saw in Stroganov's speech an act

[21] D. Bagalei and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar' kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (Kharkov, 1912), 2:2.

[22] A. M. Baikov, Obzor deistvii Rostovskogo (na Donu) gorodskogo khoziaistvennogo upravleniia za 1863 g. (Odessa, 1864), 2.

of defiance. The municipality lost the right to publish its duma proceedings, and Stroganov's career as mayor came to a quick end. [23]

In 1870 the same outcome ensued when the Slavophile mayor of Moscow, V. A. Cherkasskii, tried to turn his duma into the voice of the Russian people. He obtained from his deputies, among whom were several ardent Slavophile nobles like himself, approval of a motion that stressed the "mutual unshakable ties between the tsar and the people." The motion pointedly lauded the venerable medieval tradition of the gathering of the estates of the land, the zemskii sobor . [24] The tsar was not pleased because Cherkasskii was obviously trying to raise Moscow's duma to a national political role. In words that undoubtedly echoed Alexander II's disdain, Moscow's governor-general later denied the duma's "authority or competence" even to represent "all the inhabitants of Moscow, much less the entire Russian people." [25] His definition of the reformed autocracy left no room for an autonomous public sphere either in the municipalities or in the zemstva , the other forum for oppositional Russian nobles.

Despite these conflicts, the reform of 1870 still retained the municipal autonomy that the reform bureaucrats had defended a decade previously. The "golden words" of the municipal statute accorded a municipality the right to function "autonomously [ samostoiatel' no ] within the limits of the authority granted to it." [26] Although its language was somewhat ambiguous, this legislation recognized "public self-government" for the municipalities, something not accorded the zemstva . Perhaps the reason for the exceptional treatment of the municipalities can be found in their relative political insignificance. Despite the disputes I cited earlier, the real institutional base of the nobility in the reformed autocracy lay in the zemstva . Still, in the tsarist universe of those years the "needs" of the city placed it in a new and different institutional context, one that we might describe as "Western" in the same sense that the judicial reform of 1865 adopted in legal form the Western principle of judicial independence. In the historical schema adhered to by tsarist officials progress retained a European imprint.

The Western character of the reform is probably the main reason why the principle of estate representation, which led to noble preeminence,

[23] V. A. Nardova, "Periodicheskie izdaniia gorodskikh dum v 60-kh godakh XIX v.," Vospomogatel' nye istoricheskie distsipliny 6 (1976):226-31.

[24] V. A. Nardova, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie v Rossii v 60-kh-nachale 90-kh godov XIX v. (Leningrad, 1984), 155.

[25] Ibid., 175.

[26] Walter Hanchett, "Tsarist Statutory Regulation of Municipal Government in the Nineteenth Century," in The City in Russian History, ed. Michael Hamm (Lexington, Ky., 1976), 103; Hanchett provides a detailed discussion of the 1870 municipal statute (98-103).

vanished from the new municipal statue. The model of curial elections by estates that was used in the Petersburg and Moscow dumas disappeared. It was replaced by a tripartite schema that was based on the contributions of tax-paying townspeople, both property owners and those merely assessed commercial fees. Because total contributions, not the number of contributors, determined the membership in the three curia, this mode of representation accorded exceptional electoral influence to the handful of residents in each town whose preponderant share of municipal taxes placed them in the first and second curia.

The model of this reform was the Prussian municipal (and legislative) electoral system, which the Urban Affairs Section studied closely in preparation for the reform. The principle behind this procedure of enfranchisement was the presumed responsibility and competence of the propertied and productive classes, which the Russian reformers identified, using Western precedent, as the prime source of the cities' "best people." Late in 1861 Count Valuev gave his approval to this bourgeois principle. He explained to the state council that "those inhabitants personally concerned with these [public] affairs through ownership of urban real estate, trade [permits], and the fulfillment of various obligations" ought properly to receive the right to vote. He acknowledged inequality in wealth (in the form of real estate or trade) but not inequality of social rank in reconstructing urban public life. [27] Although enthusiasm for reform waned later in the decade and conservative warnings about the danger of introducing pernicious Western institutions dominated the political debate (Valuev himself lost his position of minister of the interior in the process), the principle of municipal enfranchisement by property ownership or trade remained at the heart of the reform project.

The 1870 municipal statue was only one ingredient in the transformation of the Russian city in the late nineteenth century. The economic forces of industrialization and the social pressures exerted by migration and population growth had a more profound impact on the direction and shape of urban life. These trends indirectly influenced municipal activities, reshaping the electoral constituency, bringing tsarist officials into urban affairs in spite of the legal autonomy that ostensibly protected municipal self-government, and forcing civic leaders in migrant cities to undertake an activist agenda even when they had little commitment to reform. Municipalities had begun to address the social and cultural needs of their cities even before

[27] "Po proektu polozheniia obshchestvennogo upravleniia goroda Moskvy," 22 December 1861, TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2004, 15-16.

the 1870 statute went into effect, and they continued to do so after a new statute, wiping out the broad electorate and ending municipal autonomy, went into effect in 1892. The fixation of historians on Russian institutional history has tended to exaggerate the importance of tsarist policy on public practices and ideological perceptions. In the process it has turned the contemporary images of "liberal" and "conservative" policies and groups into objective criteria by which to interpret changing power relations. Viewed from within the urban context, however, municipal practices played a shadowy but key part in creating a civic constituency that the state was unable to repress.

The meaning of the 1870 municipal statute lies less in its details of electoral procedures, selection of councils and mayors, fiscal sources, and responsibilities for "local needs" than in its implicit creation of a civic public sphere and its recognition of a civil society. Both creations were very severely restricted and rudimentary. The recognition of autonomy in the statute, however, enhanced the importance that civic-minded Russians had already begun to attach to urban affairs. It forced tsarist officials, even when violating the autonomy provision, to acknowledge the new character of power relations within the city. Similarly, the encouragement given to propertied townspeople to participate in public affairs, even though disregarded by most, strengthened the ideal that estate distinctions would be replaced by commonalities of culture, ideology, and action. Legal definitions of electoral rights played only a minor role in the formation of a civic elite, but they created an institutional context in which that elite could find space for action. The city was a rapidly expanding territory that challenged the elite's sense of public service and tempted them to introduce their own methods of "civilizing" the mass of migrants. In this manner the municipal reform slowly gave shape and substance to a civil public sphere in the Russian city.

Municipal Oligarchs and the Civil Public Sphere

After the introduction of the 1870 municipal statute the search for the "best people" and the efforts to get municipalities to confront their own civic needs essentially became affairs of local political elites, local practices, and local programs. In the next decades municipal histories would reveal both the potential for the creation of a civil public sphere and the severe limits that tsarist authoritarianism and public indifference placed on that

sphere. Political factions coalesced around personal leaders and divisive issues. Leadership and new policies became the source of bitter conflicts, but they also became the points around which emerged consensus about allies and enemies, political priorities and common practices. Smaller, less economically dynamic towns clung to the old habits of deference to local power cliques, conservative leadership, and little municipal action. Migrant cities, however, were an arena of active municipal politics.

Who should speak for the city and what were municipal priorities? Tsarist officials tended to blame the slow pace of action in the major cities and the inaction of small towns on the urban mob and stingy merchants. Municipal activists employed similar rhetorical epithets to chastise their rivals and to portray themselves as "educated," "enlightened," and "progressive" civic leaders. Increasingly, these activists dominated the politics of the migrant cities. Often their pompous language tended to gloss over the prosaic side of their actions and the small size of their constituency. Before 1892 municipal leaders were subject to informal tsarist reprisals and after that year they were subject to sanctioned controls. In addition, they were hamstrung by limited fiscal resources that were never adequate to deal with the needs of a rapidly growing urban population. In other words, municipal autonomy remained a problematical creation.

As a consequence of both the provisions of the 1870 statute and the social conditions of urban centers, the Russian city could not duplicate the mass politics of the English or German municipalities in that period. The legally enfranchised citizenry included only a fraction of the adult male population. To qualify as a voter a citizen had to have one year of residency and either possess real estate subject to tax assessment, or pay municipal commercial fees. Recent migrants, even if possessing property, were excluded from the franchise, as were the owners of the untaxed hovels in which many poor townspeople lived. All renters, whether rich or poor, professionals, laborers, and anyone else not engaged in some form of commerce were also excluded. These restrictions cut severely into the voting population of the migrant towns, with the highest proportion of the disenfranchised among migrants, renters, and the very poor. In these urban areas probably no more than one-fourth of the adult males enjoyed the right to vote.

Further curtailing voting powers was the division of the electorate into curiae according to their tax payments. The handful of wealthy townspeople who contributed two-thirds of municipal revenues controlled the town duma because they elected two-thirds of the deputies. As wealth flowed into the migrant cities in the 1870s and 1880s, the size of the electorate

grew principally because of the expansion of the membership of the lowest, third curia. The first curia, composed of those paying the largest tax burden, scarcely grew at all or stagnated and in some cases even declined (see chapter 2). Nizhny Novgorod, probably typical of the provincial migrant cities, counted a total of approximately sixty voters in its first curia in both 1872 and 1890; its third curia, however, expanded in those two decades by 50 percent (from 2,100 to 3,200). [28] The bulk of the Russian city's enterprising and propertied citizens, gathered from every estate of the realm, were found in the third curia. It was most representative of the male population of the city. As such, the third curia quickly became the epitome of the urban plebe and its members were thought to represent either ignorance or democracy, depending on the social views of municipal activists, intellectuals, and tsarist officials.

The dynamics of municipal elections were more a function of cultural values and social bonds than of legislative statute. The process by which enfranchised townspeople participated in the selection of their best people resembled the workings of a private club for the first two curiae and the confusion of a mass meeting for the third. The Ministry of Internal Affairs kept close watch over elections (of which there were five before a new statute altered procedures). The data, carefully tabulated by statisticians in the Urban Affairs Section, uncovered a high degree of abstention, suggesting pervasive apathy and disinterest, especially in the third curia. Among the "patriarchy" of the first two curiae one-half to one-third of the voters participated; in the third curia the rate of participation fell from about 20 percent in the early 1870s to 5-10 percent in the late 1880s. Only in exceptional cases such as Odessa, where bitter ethnic conflicts were beginning to emerge, did participation reach 30 percent. [29] In terms of voter interest in municipal affairs, the new era very closely resembled the old one.

To the extent one can generalize from limited statistical data the social profiles of the absent voter included both the privileged and the plebe. Our most detailed information comes from a senatorial inspection of the southwestern provinces in 1880, including a number of medium-sized towns as

[28] N. N. Baidakov, "Vvedenie Gorodovogo polozheniia 1870 g. v Nizhnem Novgorode i vybory v 1870-90-kh gg." Uchenye zapiski Gor'kovskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta, seriia gumanitarnykh nauk 105 (1969): 76-77.

[29] Figures on elections in the early and the mid 1870s are collected in "Vvedenie Gorodovogo polozheniia v deistvie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 1290 (1878), 56-63; the last elections (1888-89) were examined in incomplete returns in "Statisticheskie svedeniia ob uchrezhdenii gorodskogo obshchestvennogo upravleniia po piatoi chetyrekhletii," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 38 (1892), d. 2336, 2337, 2338; extensive data on municipal voter participation are found in Nardova, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie , 61-70, tables 1-6.

well as Kiev. In Kiev the greatest proportion of abstention (over 90 percent) was among the nobility-bureaucracy, which constituted nearly one-half of the eligible third-curia voters. [30] Their uninterest carried forward the social disdain they had shown for civic affairs in earlier years. And according to Kiev's mayor their uninterest was reinforced by the chaotic voting procedures of the third curia, which were so "debilitating" they were fit only for "the mass of illiterate [townspeople] and for fraudulent voters." [31] His reference to illiterate masses was based on cultural prejudice, not dispassionate observation. The same senatorial inquiry found that almost all illiterate voters (estimated to represent one-third to one-half of the electorate) never participated in elections. [32] Resembling one another only in the minimal tax payments they made, the missing nobles were probably drawn from the ranks of petty property owners and the illiterate voters from poor artisans and traders. Their absence from municipal voting suggests that the borders to this protocivil society to a great extent excluded those townspeople who were marginal to the urban economy.

The abstention of nobles and illiterates made the political voice of the townspeople of the middle ranks more influential than their place among the enfranchised would indicate. The ministry's voting records and the reports of the senatorial inspection left no doubt that the city voter was most likely to belong to one of the urban estates—merchants in the first two curiae and merchants and petty bourgeois in the third. The motives that drew these voters to municipal elections were discussed in contemptuous and patronizing terms by both provincial governors and municipal activists. The comments of both these groups tell us more about their own lofty self-images than they do about the electorate. Many petty bourgeois voters continued to follow the old municipal tradition of cliques and factions, especially in those towns where the forces of commercial and industrial change were little felt. After reviewing senatorial reports on municipal affairs the Kakhanov commission concluded in 1883 that "a few influential people" could control the "subservient [ nesamostoiatel'nye ] petty traders." The commission blamed these traders for "the improper conduct of elections, which are often affairs of chance and even corruption." [33]

The Kharkov governor-general gave a contemporary twist to this theme

[30] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 2:95, table 41; 3:60-61, table 26; 120-21, table 40,

[31] Ibid. 2:138-40.

[32] Ibid., 3:29, table 12, 33, table 14.

[33] M. V. Islavin, Obzor trudov vysochaishe utverzhdennoi, pod predsedatel'stvom statssekretaria Kakhanova, osoboi komissii , vol. 2, Gorodskoe i zemskoe upravlenie (St. Petersburg, 1908), 16.

that was suitable to his provincial capital, where commerce and manufacturing were creating a boom economy. He accused "powerful capitalists" of using the new municipal statute to manipulate "petty homeowners, traders, and shop assistants" by means of "promises, intimidation, vodka, and outright bribes of a very miserly sum." [34] Perhaps he had heard rumors from Kiev about the directors of the Mutual Credit Society, that city's principal home mortgage bank, who reputedly brought pressure on their clients to vote for the directors' political faction. [35] For the Kharkov governor-general, the presence of traders, artisans, and merchants in public life necessarily arose from their personal greed and corruption. By implication they stood for class interests and represented intruders in civic life.

His judgment needs to be set against the evidence that ministry officials collected on voting. This evidence points to another possible reading of urban politics, one that suggests that in the 1870s and 1880s electoral practices incorporated private interests and public needs in a manner that provided, at least in the major cities, a local leadership responsive to both practical issues and social welfare. In other words, an ethos of public service was not incompatible with massive abstentions, the indifference of most petty nobles, and the continued influence of the city's business community among municipal electors. Electoral tabulations, which cited only estate membership in their classification of candidates, reveal a selection of duma deputies that voting based on economic interests would not predict.

Although proportions shifted slightly during these twenty years, estate representation in municipal dumas remained essentially unchanged. The deputies from the upper urban estates—the merchants and honorary citizens (a rank that included both professionals and established entrepreneurs from commerce and manufacturing)—held the majority, and petty bourgeois deputies were but a small minority. Only in small district towns that were little touched by economic and social change was the petty bourgeoisie likely to dominate. In the major provincial and economic centers of the country the urban business elite held up to two-thirds of the seats. [36] There was some justice to the conclusion of one Moscow journal in 1876 that "on the basis of current electoral laws the duma is formed mainly of the

[34] TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 1296, 18-19.

[35] Kiev v 80-kh godakh: Vospominaniia starozhila (Kiev, 1910), 70-71.

[36] The sources for these figures are the official surveys cited earlier: "Vvedenie Gorodovogo polozheniia v deistvie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 1290 (1878), 56-63, and "Statisticheskie svedeniia ob uchrezhdenii gorodskogo obshchestvennogo upravleniia po piatoi chetyrekhletii," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 38 (1892), d. 2336, 2337, 2338; see also, L. F. Pisar'kova, Moskovskoe gorodskoe obshchestvennoe upravlenie: Avtoreferat (Moscow, 1980), 11, table 2.

patriarchs." [37] Nobles and bureaucrats (who were grouped together in ministry statistical tables) occupied an unexpectedly large place in municipal dumas. These two groups accounted for one-third of total duma representation generally, and in some provincial capitals, such as Kiev, they numbered up to one-half of the representatives. Thus, these privileged segments of the urban population had a role in municipal politics that far exceeded their insignificant presence among voters. To this extent, the merchants did not monopolize municipal representation.

The electoral data from throughout the country suggest that, at this modest level of political activism, municipal voters turned to socially as well as economically distinguished townspeople for leadership. By law, each curia had a fixed number of deputies to elect (which depended on the size of the city), but its choices were not restricted to men from the same curia. In other words, the pool of deputies in each town included all eligible voters, whose ambitions, talents, or social ties might earn them a seat in the duma from any curial bloc. Incomplete returns from the 1890 elections, primarily from the provincial centers and larger cities, offer our best insight into these obscure electoral processes. Table 2 provides the estate background of each curia's elected representatives; table 3 indicates the estate

[37] Cited in E. A. Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie v 70-80-kh godakh XIX veka" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1956), 57.

background of the deputies arranged by their curial membership. In these elections about one-fifth of the total number of deputies were from the first curia and nearly half (45 percent)_of the deputies were from the third curia. Wealthy town citizens tended to avoid serving as deputies, choosing in their place townsmen who were distinguished either by birth or by public repute but not by their wealth. If in fact a patriarchy of merchants dominated the dumas, they frequently preferred to exercise their influence indirectly through less distinguished deputies.

Although one can only infer political attitudes from these statistics, they suggest that economic interests and social deference were not the only factors at work in choosing a municipal leadership. The post-1870 dumas did not duplicate the narrow merchant representation of the Nicholaevan municipalities. A substantial group of deputies was of noble rank and did not possess great wealth. A "delegation of powers" seems to have occurred from the prosperous commercial and propertied citizens to deputies not noted for their business activities. In Moscow only 7 percent of the first curia representatives were from that body. The education and occupation of the deputy seemed most noteworthy to these electors. The biographical record of the nonmerchant deputies from the upper curiae often included secondary or advanced education and some form of professional work.

The patriarchs of Moscow's first two curiae chose, alongside their merchant-honorary citizen representatives, a sizable number (nearly one-third) from the nobility-bureaucracy. Almost all of these men were by the fiscal

measures of municipal ranking from the "plebeian" third curia. [38] By other standards, however, some were quite distinguished. They included people such as V. I. Ger'e, a noble by birth and a professor of history at Moscow University, and the lawyer I. N. Mamontov. Their willingness to participate in municipal politics implies that they were ready to serve for what they understood to be the public interest, not for private profit. To the extent they were typical of groups of deputies in other migrant cities, their presence suggests the existence of a civic elite that was distinguished to some extent by an ethos of public service. Their presence was particularly important for the emergence of a civil public sphere in the city.

Their activity became especially significant because of the low level of participation within the dumas. Duma leadership tended to fall into the hands of small political factions, whose views of municipal needs set the tone for public debate and whose quarrels fixed the public image of municipal politics. Reports from the capitals and the provinces in the years after the reform repeated a common theme of half-empty duma meetings. The senatorial survey of the southern provinces in 1880 concluded that generally only one-half of the deputies participated regularly. As a result, "the same small group of deputies becomes the only activists who take a real part in urban affairs by their participation in the various issues associated with municipal administration." [39] There was no pronounced tendency for one particular group of deputies to abandon their municipal duties; the reports refer indiscriminately to wealthy merchants, poor nobles, and humble petty bourgeois in identifying the missing representatives. Noncommercial groups—nobles, bureaucrats, priests—predominated in the duma of the central Russian city of Tambov, where the 1880 inspection discovered that "meetings of the duma are conducted by a few people, most often by the mayor himself." [40] Despite the broad suffrage of the 1870 reform, municipal power had, as in the early part of the century, fallen into the hands of relatively few townspeople.

Because of their own interest in urban affairs and because of the indolence of most electors the members of this elite tended to become the stalwarts of municipal life over a long period. In the mid 1880s the interior ministry's statisticians found that longevity in office was a characteristic of deputies in all curiae. Not surprisingly, it was most pronounced in the first,

[38] Pisar'kova, Avtoreferat , 10-11, table 1.

[39] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Chernygovskoi gubernii," in Trudy knomissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 3:247-57, 566-67.

[40] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Tambovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 6:58.

nearly 60 percent of whose deputies had won reelection in three out of the four elections. In the third duma, one-fourth were in their third or fourth terms. [41] These long-serving deputies were the leaders of municipal affairs and the regular duma participants. Such was the case, for example of Moscow's Professor Ger'e, whose term lasted from 1876 to the turn of the century and who made social welfare his special field of municipal expertise. [42] The fact that he subsequently became active in national politics suggests that in his case, as in many others, the possibility for civic activism had political implications that tsarist reformers did not intend.

Despite voter abstention and deputy indifference, post-1870 municipal dumas were far more active than prereform dumas. With considerable pride—and perhaps exaggeration—government urban affairs statisticians revealed in 1879 that duma meetings were occurring throughout the empire with remarkable frequency. By their count, in the first five years after the introduction of the 1870 statute eighteen thousand meetings had taken place and only 10 percent of these had been canceled for lack of a quorum. [43] The vitality that the statisticians claimed to have uncovered was perhaps a product of the heightened expectations for reform that were already apparent in the 1860s. By this measure of activism municipalities were establishing an institutional framework for the civil public sphere. At the same time, however, the social diversity of the deputies and the pressure of local needs made duma activities a subject of growing controversy. Perceived needs, personal ambitions, and social animosity combined to generate bitter debates that often obscured the real issues.

Municipal politics became an arena of conflict between activists, who sought extensive civic programs, and conservatives, who disapproved of what they thought of as spendthrift policies and instead advocated fiscal frugality. The activists, far more vocal, portrayed these controversies as being driven by the ignorant, selfish members of the urban estates who were blind to the ideals of public welfare, enlightenment, and commitment to public service. Estate stereotypes became a convenient weapon in their hands. The activists, together with the tsarist officials, proclaimed that the merchants and the petty bourgeois had a backward, tribal understanding of the city, that is, a fatalistic view of urban life and a proprietary sense of control of urban society. For example, in the late 1870s the activist mayor

[41] G. I. Shreider, Nashe gorodskoe obshchestvennoe upravlenie (St. Petersburg, 1902), 18.

[42] Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie," 104.

[43] "Vvedenie gorodovogo polozheniia v deistvie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 1290 (1878), 112-13.

of Tambov explained the ineffectiveness of his municipality by pointing to the deputies he referred to as "half-literate merchants and petty bourgeois." [44] His culturist language permeated the discussions of both urban activists and government officials who were hostile to commercial factions in municipal government. The police chief of the Volga port town of Kuznets, a stalwart tsarist official, explained the inaction of his municipality by referring to its lack of "any cultural aspirations." He noted that this deficiency was the cause of the city's "narrow concern for personal interests" and its unwillingness to do anything that would "disrupt the usual peaceful conditions of life." [45]

The mayor of a south Russian town (who was a university graduate, a gymnasium teacher, and an unsuccessful campaigner for more municipal elementary schools) provided a detailed literary portrait of his ignorant enemies. He regretted the presence in municipal politics of "an unskilled worker whose hovel has neither a brick nor a stone floor" and of "someone who does not even have a simple wax candle or kerosene lamp and gets his light from kindling wood, and even then for economy's sake sits part of the evening in the dark." From such as these, he disparagingly remarked, one could not expect support for improvements in street paving or lighting. He called for the elimination of "illiterates" from municipal affairs. This portrait made his own culturist view of public life quite clear; in fact, all the deputies of his town claimed some level of education. [46] In effect he accorded no public awareness whatsoever to his parsimonious townspeople, whose petty lives and "personal interests" by definition excluded them from his ideal civil society.

The many criticisms of the backwardness of the urban estate deputies tells us a great deal about the educational background, cultural views, and civic ideals of the municipal activists. They adopted a vocabulary that ennobled their aspirations and reforms and demeaned the objectives of their rivals. Their portrayal of urban politics does not, however, constitute a fair characterization of the civic priorities and social outlook of municipal factions. The so-called merchant party, at least in the large towns, usually had a concrete program and was not blind to issues of urban needs. Some factions defended their views by citing traditional practices, others by referring to higher civic goals. The key issues involved the problems of

[44] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Tambovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 6:69.

[45] TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 28, 104.

[46] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Chernygovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 3:162.

inadequate resources and, in the migrant towns, burgeoning demands for basic social and public services. All factions addressed these problems to a greater or lesser extent. None had a monopoly on civic action. Each municipal faction claimed in effect to be the voice of the city and sought to occupy the central position in civic affairs.

In the small group of activists "literacy" was both a code word for public service and an indication of a strongly perceived difference between the members of this group and the town public. The isolation of many councils and mayors from their urban constituency was both cultural and political. The figures from the mid 1870s indicate that the estate membership of the mayors and town councillors strongly resembled that of their fellow deputies. In large and small towns alike, merchant councillors were in a majority. [47] There was a substantial difference, however, in the level of education of the councillors. Information is incomplete, but it consistently reveals that the councillors and especially the mayors were men of some advanced educational training. The senatorial investigation of 1880 found that the councillors usually had some secondary education. This tendency was particularly strong in larger towns and cities. The Kiev city council included three merchants with secondary education, an engineer, a professor from the theological academy, and an officer with advanced military training. [48] Mayors also tended to possess an education considerably above that of the average deputy. A mid 1880s survey of thirty-two large towns and cities found that three-fourths of the mayors belonged to the first curia, 60 percent had a secondary or higher education, and over half were employed in some type of state service. By contrast, the same investigation found that only one-third to one-fourth of the deputies had a comparable education. [49] At a time when educated Russians were reordering "society" in their own minds by elevating the "intelligentsia" above estate ranks and honors, the educational level of urban leaders apparently earned them genuine stature and authority in municipal political life.

Whether validated by official degrees or claimed by force of lofty language, educational attainment became a key ingredient in the dynamics of municipal politics. A mayor's language immediately revealed his perception of himself in this ideal world of civic eminence. Tambov's mayor resigned in 1879 after only one year in office because of the "fruitlessness" of his

[47] "Vedomost' o sostave gorodskikh dum i uprav," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2190, 147-48.

[48] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 2:190.

[49] Shreider, Nashe gorodskoe obshchestvennoe upravlenie , 19-20.

attempts to implement the reforms he judged to be "excellent and necessary for the good of the city." He blamed the "semiliterate merchant and petty bourgeois deputies" for the failure of his efforts. [50] When mayors lacked these ennobling qualities themselves, officials found an easy explanation for municipal inadequacy. The secret yearly reports of provincial gendarme officials repeatedly referred to an ideal of the "best people" that incorporated the intellectual qualities associated with education. In the new industrial region of the western Ukraine the mayors of the mid 1870s were, in the opinion of one officer, "absolutely unsuitable for their duties because of their low native intelligence and their lack of any education." [51] At this level description was equivalent to condemnation. In characterizing the mayor of the Moscow province town of Kolomna as "an uneducated former peasant, owner of a local tavern, who takes more care of the tavern's needs than the town's," the district gendarme officer encapsulated his own social, cultural, and political agenda for civilizing the city. [52] The similarity of the language that municipal activists and tsarist officials used when judging municipal inadequacies suggests that both groups believed that intellectual (and moral) eminence was essential to the enterprise of making the city a center of progress.

The implicit assumption that education was the key to virtuous and progressive municipal leadership was self-serving and misleading, however. It is not clear, for example, how essential intellectual attainments were to the politics of the Kiev municipality, whose council's educational distinction was noted earlier. The city's mayor of the late 1870s and early 1880s, Gustav Eisman, was professor at St. Vladimir university—and an extremely wealthy man. His power rested on a political "machine" that was adept at using proxy votes from the clients of a major bank to elect loyal deputies, many of whom were presumably from among the well-educated nobles who constituted the majority in the duma.

If we can believe the memoirs of a local journalist, Eisman's faction and his backers in the Mutual Aid Society included property speculation and development in their agenda. These policies were as much a potential benefit to noble as to merchant or petty bourgeois property owners. In one affair the owner of a large commercial and residential building petitioned the duma to be permitted to construct a church on a nearby town square.

[50] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Tambovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 6:69.

[51] "Politicheskii obzor," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okt'iabrskoi revoliutsii (TsGAOR), f. 102, d. 9, ch. 21 (1887), 45.

[52] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, d. 88, ch. 35, 46; ch. 20, 29.

On investigation, the reporter discovered that the petitioner stood to profit financially as well as spiritually. The presence of a church would end an outdoor market on the square, forcing traders to rent shops in nearby buildings, whose rental value would soar. Our muckraking journalist concluded, in terms that echo other judgments of less prestigious municipalities in those years, that "the majority of deputies . . . exclusively [seek] to obtain personal profit." [53] On a more prosaic level the pervasive practice of setting a low value on town real estate indicated that private interests were at work behind the scenes. This practice reduced taxes and resulted in the loss of municipal revenues. In the late 1880s the Moscow provincial zemstvo conducted its own assessment of urban property; it doubled and tripled the values that had been fixed by the municipalities. [54] This disparity is one crude measure of the inherent contradiction between the objectives of tsarist leaders (and of urban activists), which were to find the best people and to resolve local needs, and the economic and social conditions of the migrant city.

Social and cultural stereotypes reveal a great deal about the perceptions that different groups employed to make sense of the encounter between self-government and the townspeople in the postreform years. However, stereotypes could also obscure the municipal practices that emerged in that period. For example, in early 1892 a newspaper dispatch reported that Kharkov politics was split between the "old" merchant bloc and the "new" intelligent faction. However, the journalist only classified the latter's candidate for mayor with the "new" faction because his daughter was married to a pharmacist. [55] Official reports on backward municipalities occasionally revealed other dimensions to public inaction besides ignorance and greed; in particular, they pointed to pervasive impoverishment. A gendarme report on towns in Moscow province complained that the municipalities showed "no effort to improve the well-being of the people" but then noted that they were constrained by "a miserly budget resulting from the poverty of the population." [56] Under these conditions "indifference" to public welfare was less a function of cultural sloth than an effect of hardship; it was a condition that resembled the situation in prereform municipalities. Where new wealth flowed through urban economies, civic leaders, whether shaped in the culturist mold or not, could undertake public works beyond the dreams of those in poor municipalities.

[53] Kiev v 80-kh godakh: Vospominaniia , 80, 92.

[54] TsGIA, f. 1149, op. 11, d. 38 (1892), 296-97.

[55] Moskovskii listok , 14 April 1892.

[56] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 88, ch. 35, 41.

This expanding fiscal base was the singular advantage of the migrant cities. It was the obverse side of the glaring social hardships and constantly growing demands on public services that economic development and the influx of migrants created. Moscow stood out in this respect as the exemplary city. In the years when Nikolai Alekseev was mayor, its politics brought out the new forces in the public life of the city. In his conduct Alekseev combined the traits of his merchant forebears and the qualities of a civic leader (for example, he was educated in a secondary commercial school). To one Muscovite intellectual-activist (and former mayor) Alekseev was a man "born to command and to order." [57] He was both a leader of his business community and a political activist who was elected to the provincial zemstvo and to the Moscow duma, which chose him in 1885 to be city mayor even though he was only thirty-three years old. His ambitious program of public works entailed enormous expense, which led him to launch a program of municipal loans. Part of his duma and the tsarist administration resisted this program. His manner of conducting municipal affairs displeased the tsarist administration because he operated, in the words of one gendarme report, "on too grand a scale and almost without supervision." [58] Until his assassination by a disgruntled municipal employee in 1893, he was a municipal activist whose political ethos bore little resemblance to the stereotypical images of merchants and intellectuals. His example suggests the complexity of the conflicts, political and social, that were contained in the small public sphere of municipal life.

The social rank of municipal voters, deputies, and leaders is of little use in understanding the debates and factional divisions in the body politic of the city. One might expect that the social customs outside the duma would be reflected within its walls, but these customs do not adequately explain municipal politics. When Professor Ger'e pointed to the petty bourgeois deputies' habits of "bowing humbly to 'eminent merchants,'" "preferring silence" in debates, and "voting as their leaders indicated," he was in effect proclaiming his allegiance to the "educated" duma group. [59] The key point is that municipal politics operated in a very small world where debates over local needs confronted the immediate issues of municipal taxes and expenditures. The success or failure of municipalities in resolving these issues is not explainable by praising the self-styled "best people" and singling out the "worst people." One Moscow activist claimed that his city's duma of those years was a remarkable "merging of estates" that was brought about

[57] B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1934), 182.

[58] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152, ch. 35 (1893), 12.

[59] Cited in Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie," 104.

by work "in common municipal tasks." Such a phenomenon, he exclaimed, was "previously completely unknown in the social structure of Moscow." [60] In his optimistic reading of municipal politics the mingling of social ranks was the essential condition for the appearance of a sense of collective endeavor and, by extension, the emergence of civic activism in the city. However, his vision of a new public order was as idealized as the one put forth at Moscow's national exposition of 1882.

The new agenda of municipal reform was subject to very divergent definitions. A large number of deputies were reluctant to approve a substantial enlargement of municipal services and, as a consequence, were branded "semiliterates" by their opponents. Their opposition stemmed in part from their own economic insecurity and their resistance to municipal expenditures and in part from their reluctance to define the city in any terms other than minimal services and economic operations. Similarly, the commercial and manufacturing interests of the city tended to view the municipality as a vehicle to bolster their economic and social activities. For these interests, labeled in public debates as "merchants," the public sphere occupied a minor place in urban affairs.

The term "local needs" was understood either as public service to higher causes such as good health, cleanliness, participatory democracy, and learning, or as concern for the immediate needs of traders, manufacturers, or other local interests. This latter, "merchant" program did not call on an ethical commitment to social welfare or to the commonweal; rather, it relied primarily on an awareness among its backers of pressing local problems. The activist approach to municipal politics, by contrast, depended for success on the leading role of a civic elite. In the migrant towns, however, both the merchant and the activist perceptions of public needs led to some degree of political activism. One might refer to these two approaches as "conservative" and "liberal," but these labels suggest differences in political philosophy that were less meaningful in Russian urban affairs than were certain political and social forces.

State officials, on the one hand, and the urban masses, on the other, placed special demands on municipalities. Local factions were deeply divided on the social responsibility that the city had toward the migrant population, but all shared the belief that the city was a place where the laboring population could be disciplined and "civilized." Both state authorities and activists conceived of public service as crucial to the work of

[60] V. Golitsyn, "Moskva v semidesiatykh godakh," Golos minuvshego (May-December 1919): 119-20.

municipal self-rule. However, these two groups were profoundly divided on the latitude to be accorded municipal action.

The "golden words" in the 1870 statute on municipal autonomy pointed to the key area of conflict between activists and the tsarist administration. The principal reason for the disputes lay in the pervasive autocratic habits of domination and supervision. Provincial officials continually claimed in their reports to the capital that urban "improvements" occurred, as the Ekaterinoslav gendarme commander asserted, "only because of the energetic demands of the administrative authorities." [61] All important personnel moves, particularly the election of mayors in major cities, came under close scrutiny from tsarist officials. The new governor of Moscow province, P. P. Durnovo, forced Moscow's mayor out of office in 1873 because the mayor failed to demonstrate proper "respect." Durnovo dismissed the mayor with the scornful comment that he was "still a merchant, even if he has the title of state councillor." [62] The governor denied the municipalities any authentic place in public life, describing the deputies two years later as "a group of people without mutual ties and general interests [who are] morally irresponsible." [63] To officials such as Durnovo, the proper role for municipalities was to be "obligated to carry out unquestioningly all orders" from officials, who would "supervise all their actions." [64]

Had Durnovo's attitude been implemented in the daily conduct of municipal affairs, there would have been no need to reform the 1872 statute to satisfy the reactionary views of Alexander III. The reformist spirit of the 1860s, however, remained to put occasional restraints on administrative intervention. An interior ministry report of the late 1870s regretted that "several governors" had intervened unjustifiably in municipal matters of "public need and benefit to the city" and reiterated the statutory provision that gubernatorial authority did not include "administrative instructions" to municipalities. [65] Although respect for this statute weakened in the 1880s, it still provided the grounds for municipal appeals to the Senate.

More important than official calls to order was the expansion of municipal responsibilities, which came to form a complex web of affairs over which even the most authoritarian governor was incapable of exercising close supervision. Repeated complaints from provincial officials about municipal "inaction," which usually meant the municipalities' failure to im-

[61] "Politichestkii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152 (1893), ch. 11, 6.

[62] Quoted in Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie," 119.

[63] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 69, d. 126 (1876), 13.

[64] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1281, op. 7, d. 82 (1875), 19.

[65] "Vvedenie gorodovogo polozheniia v deistvie," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 1290, 86-87.

plement the governors' instructions, reveal the extent to which the governors' powers were limited. We need not accept the governors' accusation, as Richard Robbins appears to do in his excellent history of the "tsar's viceroys," that municipalities were derelict in their concern for "local needs." [66] Perspectives on municipal needs, financial resources, and the ideal city varied greatly. Governors added their powerful voices to the ongoing debates on policy within the municipalities, not necessarily effectively but certainly obtrusively.

The governors succeeded, however, in suppressing overt claims by municipal activists to any higher competence beyond local needs. Only rarely did civic leaders seek publicly to enlarge their sphere of action to national dimensions. In 1870 Moscow's municipal leadership unsuccessfully attempted to lay claim to a voice in the affairs of the nation. A somewhat similar claim came again from Moscow in the early 1880s. The origins of this audacious move lay in the atmosphere of crisis of those years, which was sparked by the terrorist movement. In 1880 Moscow public figures prepared a memorandum that challenged the claim (typical of officials like Durnovo) that "a state as vast as Russia may be run almost exclusively by bureaucrats." Its message was an appeal for "public participation in government" at all levels. [67]

In the uncertain early period of Alexander III's reign, the new Moscow mayor, Boris Chicherin, used his prominent position to restate this claim to some form of popular voice in national affairs. By his own admission this eminent historian and political liberal had been chosen to be mayor by a small clique of duma leaders. Still, speaking to the country's mayors at the time of the tsar's coronation, he presented his views as those of "public self-government." He extolled "public initiative" and proclaimed the readiness of elected officials to aid in the struggle against "internal enemies" when "the state takes note of our collaboration." [68] In the reactionary mood of those years, even these few assertive words provoked the anger of the tsar, who forced Chicherin to resign from his post as mayor.

The affair did not end so simply, however. In its repercussions and consequences it was an exemplar of the conflict between the tsarist administration and urban civic society and of the tensions among the municipal elite. One of Chicherin's supporters, angry at the refusal of the duma to

[66] Richard Robbins, The Tsar's Viceroys: Russian Provincial Governors in the Last Years of the Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1987), 168-71.

[67] Cited in P. A. Zaionchkovsky, The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878-82 , trans. and ed. Gary Hamburg (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1979), 127-28.

[68] Chicherin, Vospominaniia , 166, 235-36.

vote a protest motion after the mayor's resignation, blamed the petty bourgeois "black hundreds" (that is, reactionaries) of the third curia for this failure. [69] In his memoirs the ex-mayor himself scornfully explained that "civic courage" in this crisis was unthinkable from "merchants and petty bourgeois, . . . [who were] accustomed for ages to render obeisance to authority [ prekloniat'sia pered vlast'iu ]." [70] His scorn was self-serving and somewhat misplaced. In fact, the "supine" deputies launched at that time a semipassive protest, similar to the tactic other municipalities adopted when governors refused to approve their choices for mayor. For over a year after Chicherin's resignation the deputies did not elect a new mayor. Finally, they picked Nikolai Alekseev over the governor's protest. In the next municipal elections Chicherin was elected as a deputy. [71] These largely symbolic gestures did not weaken the authoritarian pretensions of tsarist officials, particularly in that era of reaction, but they did often force the administration to compromise. These actions also bolstered an awareness of municipal activism among the urban elite, activism that was created in part by its opposition to tsarist intervention in municipal affairs.

The resistance on the part of municipalities to tsarist meddling is a more concrete explanation for the debate over municipal self-rule than such labels as liberal and conservative. The monarchist and patriotic mayor of Kiev, Eisman, justified municipal insubordination when he attributed conflict to "the governors' fears that they might lose authority in the eyes of the population" and to official "hatred for anything that carries even a shadow of autonomy and independence from the bureaucracy." [72] His emphasis on the issues of tsarist authority and municipal autonomy pointed to the substantial institutional role of municipalities in the new power relations of the reformed autocratic regime. Historians, such as Alfred Rieber, who dismiss the political activities of the Russian merchants, have overlooked this relatively quiet but still rapid emergence of an authentic ethos of civic activism among the urban elite. [73] Without either explicit ideological positions or the power of mass support municipal practices were nonetheless forming a new public sphere in the city.

[69] S. A. Muromtsev, "Moskovskaia duma," Vestnik Evropy (February 1885): 847.

[70] Chicherin, Vospominaniia , 256.

[71] Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie," 144, 149; these semisubterranean municipal conflicts with the administration are described in Nardova, Gorodskoe samoupravlenie , 178-80.

[72] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," Trudy komissii Kakhanova , vol. 2, pt. 2, 456.

[73] See Alfred Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), esp. 99-103; Robert Thurston offers a more nuanced interpretation of municipal "liberalism" in the Moscow municipality in the early twentieth century; see his Liberal City, Conservative State , 9.

The authority that gradually accrued to municipal leaders led in the 1880s to tsarist opposition to the very principles of the 1870 statute. The specter of "popular democracy" figured occasionally in the complaints of tsarist officials, but the key issue was the legitimacy of the civil public sphere of the city. In his yearly report of 1887, the governor of Moscow province defined the essence of the problem as follows: the "widening circle of [municipal] activities . . . strengthens the importance of municipal administration and thereby lessens the significance of the [state] administration." [74] In 1885 the tsar had already sealed the fate of the statute when, in a marginal notation on a gubernatorial report, he expressed his "doubts" about the "appropriateness of the [1870] reform based on the principle of self-rule without state supervision [ kontrol ']." [75] In other words, municipal autonomy had become a defiance of the principles of autocracy.

The revision of the municipal statute dragged on for several years, an affair (as in the 1860s) of less importance to tsarist leaders than the reorganization of the zemstva . Once again the discussion within the central government turned to the problem of identifying the "best people." The interior minister now sought to incorporate in municipal affairs only the "most reliable elements" by excluding from the electorate "petty traders and salesmen, [who are] deprived by their economic position of any independence." [76] The argument echoed the earlier comments of provincial governors; it assumed that well-to-do townsmen, if isolated from the urban "plebes," would form a municipal leadership that would be susceptible to tsarist "supervision." His reasoning was seriously flawed, however, because it completely overlooked the roots of political activism arising from the new conditions within the migrant cities.

As expected, the 1892 reform deleted all references to municipal autonomy. It explicitly authorized tsarist officials to annual any municipal action that they judged to be unacceptable "either for state needs or for the interests of the local population." It also severely cut back the size of the electorate by setting high minimum property valuations (from three hundred rubles in district towns to three thousand in the capitals). [77] By tsarist fiat the municipality, as legally defined, shrank in both power and size. Yet the scope of its responsibilities for local needs remained unchanged.

Although the 1892 reform was reactionary in intent, municipal self-rule

[74] "Vsepoddenneichii otchet za 1887," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 165 (1888), 17-18.

[75] TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2196, 232.

[76] Cited in E. N. Kuznetsova, "Kontrreformy 80-90-kh godov XIX veka v Rossii" (Kandidat dissertation, Leningrad State University, 1977), 94-95.

[77] The new statute is summarized in Walter Hanchett, "Tsarist Statutory Regulations," in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), 109-12.

was only partially reestablished within its pre-1870 limits. The franchise was restricted to an elite, but the elite was one of wealth, not estate. Municipal autonomy was gone, but civic leaders were still expected to devote their energies to improving public services and addressing social problems. The "widening circle of activities" that had been of such concern to the Moscow governor could not be narrowed because the city was an increasingly important presence in Russian public life. Perhaps more than elsewhere, in the city autocracy and modernity proved irreconcilable forces. Reactionary municipal reform was an anachronism.

Tsarist nostalgia for a golden age of restrictive statutory regulations could not undo the accumulated practices of two decades. The reduction in the size of the electorate cut down the municipal constituency but had little effect on the composition of the town elite. Poor voters had had the chance to participate in elections, but massive voter abstention had effectively reduced the electorate years before the 1892 reform. Although the less well-to-do townspeople could not vote after 1892, they could still be elected to the duma, which was open to any tax-paying municipal resident. As a result, this new tsenzovoe obshchestvo ("taxed society," that is, the electorate) bore a remarkable resemblance to the old one in terms of voter participation and elected leadership. Over half of the voters abstained from elections after 1892, and those who voted favored their earlier deputies. When Nizhny Novgorod voters gathered to choose their new municipal leadership, they turned as before to their commercial community; over half of the deputies were members of the local stock exchange or their supporters. Three-fourths of these deputies had previously been elected under the old statute. Presumably, some of them had lost the right to vote under the provisions of the new statute. The small town leadership that had previously dominated municipal life continued to do so. As a local paper remarked, "the spirit of the new duma remains the same as before." [78] Throughout the country the dumas were new in name only; generally, only 10-30 percent of the deputies were new. [79]

In migrant cities the municipal leadership was increasingly composed of entrepreneurial and professional groups even though a handful of activists continued to conduct duma affairs. As before, very wealthy townsmen avoided municipal leadership, leaving civic activism to what by then could properly be called the middle classes. In Moscow throughout the 1890s

[78] "O vvedenii gorodovogo polozheniia," TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 38, d. 2636, 20.

[79] Shreider, Nashe gorodskoe obshchestvennoe upravlenie , 81.

"most [duma] members continued to be those who had earlier belonged to the third curia." [80] The Moscow deputies who were classified as "merchants and honorary citizens," who accounted for fully two-thirds of the total by the late 1890s, included directors in manufacturing enterprises (thirty-two in 1897 compared with only twenty at the end of the 1880s) and many professionals. The old trading merchants occupied a minor place. The label "merchant" duma was becoming as anachronistic as membership in that estate. Secondary or higher education figured in the backgrounds of most deputies—by the end of the decade two-thirds of the deputies had reached this level. As one Soviet historian notes, "the changes in the composition of the duma were based less on the new municipal statute of 1892 than on the economic and political development of the country." [81] These changes, however, did not lead to increased participation in duma affairs. As before, many deputies did not attend regularly. Even in St. Petersburg, only about seventy members (one-half of the total) took an active part in duma meetings. The others, in the opinion of the police prefect, had "an extremely meager interest in public affairs." [82] As a consequence, power and influence gravitated, as under the previous statute, into the hands of a small group of activists.

The changes under way in the migrant cities accentuated the pressures on municipalities to undertake extensive public works. The previous conflicts between those who supported civic improvements and those favoring fiscal prudence seemed to become less pronounced under the new municipal regime. In Kharkov, the elections of 1893 saw the "decisive defeat" of the curiously named "noble party," which was described by a local journalist as "intellectuals united on a program of educational, humanitarian, and progressive aspirations." The victors that year were the members of the merchant party, whom the same journalist characterized as defenders of "frugal administration in the old style, without waste." [83] In the next years, however, the Kharkov municipality undertook a major program of civic improvements, belying the merchant party's reputation for frugality. Local needs demanded increasingly ambitious municipal projects. The activism evident in the civil public sphere of the migrant cities was largely a product of the very social and economic conditions created by rapid urbanization.

[80] Pisar'kova, Avtoreferat , 12.

[81] Ibid., 14; 12, table 3; 13, table 4.

[82] "Otchet za 1900 god," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 332 (1901), 94-95.

[83] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova , 2:307.

Local Needs and the Sanitized City

The municipalities experienced the migrant city as an ever expanding territory that generated imperative and increasingly complex local needs. The perception of these needs, however, varied greatly from the merchant to the activist factions. The response of the so-called merchant group to the problems associated with migration was to define their city as a workplace whose public areas required municipal investment to facilitate commercial and manufacturing operations. In effect, the merchant party delimited the borders of their city around the places of economic activity. The activists defined their city borders to include all inhabited places that required attention to health, housing, education, and welfare. From both perspectives the lower urban classes needed to acquire orderly habits that were suitable to a civilized, Western-type city. By the end of the century the activist agenda was increasingly the rule among migrant cities.

Among the concerns of the activists public health seems to have been paramount. By identifying and condemning insalubrious urban conditions, medical experts promoted expectations of a healthy, "sanitized" city that was far different from the reality of poor water, filth, and stench. Although many townspeople still referred to "God's will" in order to explain endemic contagious diseases and high mortality, public health officials, state bureaucrats, and an increasingly influential group of civic leaders insisted that major public works projects that focused on preventive measures were absolutely necessary.

The potential improvements to urban life included far more than short-term benefits such as a reduction in mortality rates. The introduction of public health measures removed Russian urban areas from the category of "Asian" city, where epidemics raged uncontrolled, as Koch had reminded the leaders of Hamburg. Public lighting brought the Russian city closer to the "cities of light" of Western Europe. Street paving promised the efficient transportation of goods as well as better health conditions. Municipal public works, in other words, were part of a progressive agenda shaped by Western models of the city. In addition, municipal actions on problems such as clean water, education, and sanitation were the substance and meaning of the "widening circle of activities" that filled the civic public sphere of the city.

The heightened concern for local needs was the product of a new awareness of the public interest, increasing respect for scientific discoveries in areas such as public health, and the threat that mass urbanization posed to

public order. In the reform years, visions of urban progress in Russia emerged from this new understanding of environmental, health, and public needs. Tsarist officials were increasingly concerned about conditions in their provincial towns. In 1869 the governor-general of Orenburg province explained that "paved streets, sidewalks, and a water main" had become "real and unavoidable requirements." The recent economic growth and sudden population expansion of the provincial capital had created "needs" that had been "impossible to anticipate several years ago." [84] He omitted any mention of facade planning; rather, he redefined public orderliness [ blagoustroistvo ] to mean vital urban services. His redefinition greatly enlarged the possible array of municipal activities.

In this perspective Russia's urban centers were even less worthy of comparison with Western cities than in the earlier period of facade planning. By the new standards the civilized city was noteworthy not by its public monuments and ceremonies or neoclassical facades and geometrical street plans but by its infrastructure of services for everyday life—paved streets, lighting, water, etc. Any comparison with Europe on those terms could only be invidious. Even more emphatically than before, contemporary judgments condemned the miserable conditions of Russia's cities in the postreform decades. A municipal agenda for remedial action was imposed by the desire for a better future. Public discussions about the backwardness of Russian cities appeared in municipal and state reports, and by late in the century they even appeared in newspaper accounts of urban life. This new manner of writing about Russian urban history in order to criticize contemporary shortcomings to some extent offered an excuse for the inadequacies of public services. For example, Kharkov's governor-general, lamenting the city's meager accomplishments at the end of the century, admitted that "everything possessed by the cities in the form of basic property . . . was created by the efforts and sacrifice of the last two to three generations." [85] Even so, the contrast between past and present cast a somber light on what municipal activists and observers considered to be Russia's intolerable urban conditions.

These woes became a kind of litany that many observers used in reference to "the provinces," a vast and ill-defined territory beyond the pale of progressive (that is, Western-inspired) municipal self-rule. The provincial gendarme commander of the northern province of Vladimir decried the "terrible desolation" of his provincial capital, where streets were "always

[84] "Otchet za 1869 g." TsGIA, f. 1287, op. 37, d. 2139, 299-300.

[85] "Otchet Khar'kovskoi gubernii za 1900," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 444, 4.

covered with dirt or deep in mud, depending on the time of the year," a "terrible stench" overwhelmed passersby near any courtyard, and "filth" fouled the city's drinking water. The conditions to which he objected were all very tangible: they could be smelled, seen, touched, and tasted. Yet he claimed to be alone in his distress: "The people treat the needs of the city with indifference." [86]

In his awareness of these problems he was a product of the "perceptual revolution" that the French historian Alain Corbin argues had appeared in early nineteenth-century France. In Corbin's opinion the standards by which one judged the "intolerable" in cities were redefined in those years to incorporate "noxious" smells, which ranged from putrid drains and stagnant water to body odors. These criteria of acceptable and unacceptable odors were part of a process by which the authorities circumscribed those places and people for which remedial action was required. Typically, these areas were inhabited by the poor laboring population. In medical debates over public health, the cause of the spread of contagious disease was thought by one influential school to be "miasma," which was easily recognizable by its foul smell. [87] Corbin's theory of the essential changes in the "social imagination" of odors fits well with the judgments of Russian officials and urban leaders and makes clear one underlying reason for the importance attached in the late century to the issue of local needs in the cities. For example, newsworthy information in the Moscow popular press included the lament of one special correspondent from the central Russian town of Voronezh that in summer "an enormous cloud of white dust hangs constantly over the city." Blown up from the roads, the dust impeded breathing and irritated the eyes. [88] The condition was not new, but the implication that something ought to be done about it was.

The agenda for municipal public services potentially involved all aspects of Russian urban life in those decades. Commerce became an important inducement for paving when goods could not be moved through towns in fall and spring because mud made the streets impassable. Walking through ankle-deep mud in areas where sidewalks could easily be built offended the proprieties of educated townspeople; travel in winter by sleigh or on foot across mounds of unswept snow that resembled small hills was equally offensive. An urban outdoors whose only lighting at night consisted of moonlight, tavern signs, and a few faint kerosene streetlights was a threatening place, especially when crowds of migrants filled the city. Most urgent

[86] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 89, ch. 43 (1888), 11.

[87] Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 55-57.

[88] Moskovskii listok , 17 June 1896.

of all, the dangers of overcrowding and the lack of sanitation stirred concern about health.

It is tempting to attribute the pressures for public services to the members of the new urban middle classes. They were in a good position, both through their reading the urban press and in their daily lives, to become critical of conditions in their cities and to be aware of Western models of progressive urbanism. Their public-spirited leaders had access to civic forums where they could demand that their municipalities create the public services that were imperative for a clean, sanitized city. However, they were not the only townspeople to be aware of and offended by noxious sights and smells and, to judge by their rate of electoral abstention, many of them were indifferent to reform. Although the views of the town poor were missing in such discussions, it is fair to assume that they too had at least some stake in turning urban public space into a useful and healthy place to live and work.

The voices advocating public health reforms spoke for the entire population and did so with the authority of scientific analysis. The public health movement had emerged in Western Europe in the early nineteenth century. It combined new measures by government administrators for the struggle against epidemic diseases, particularly cholera, which first spread across Europe in the 1830s, and medical expertise that could be applied to infectious diseases and to the social conditions that scientists judged were responsible for the spread of these epidemics. The new science of statistics strengthened the claims of these authorities to extensive knowledge of the city. Statisticians applied quantitative measures to compile comprehensive information on urban living conditions (especially in the slums), birth and death rates, and the spread of disease. [89]

By mid century a body of Western literature and an array of policies had come into existence that made public health a new mark of social progress. When examined by educated Russians in the reform years, the writings and official policies in Europe provided models for both analysis and action. In the 1870s Russian medical specialists formed the Society for the Protection of Public Health, and one of its sections specifically focused on urban sanitation. At about the same time Russian medical societies began to appear in provincial cities. [90] Public health officials in the Ministry of In-

[89] See, for example, R. A. Lewis, Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement (London, 1952); Catherine Kudlick, "Disease, Public Health, and Urban Social Relations: Perceptions of Cholera and the Paris Environment, 1830-1850" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1988).

[90] E. I. Lotova, Russkaia intelligentsiia i voprosy obshchestvennoi gigeny (Moscow, 1962), 11-13.

ternal Affairs were particularly influential because of their work in compiling a comprehensive picture of the most serious threats to public health in Russian cities. Their observations, together with those of municipal health officials, uniformly damned urban health conditions.

Their reports drew a detailed picture of the insalubrious city: polluted lakes and streams were sources of drinking water; winter accumulations of filth rotted in the streets and courtyards each spring; stagnant ponds collected the water from uncleaned streets and unemptied cesspools and gave off an "intolerable stench"; public squares filled with the refuse that accumulated over periods of months; butcher shops and private slaughter houses dumped their garbage into the streets. In 1880 the medical inspector of Voronezh province recorded a conversation with the mayor of a district town, who "naively explained that the cleanliness of his town was maintained by pigs devouring all the piles of filth." The two parties to this conversation were divided by a cultural gulf. The mayor viewed his town as a villagelike place where acts of nature and the "will of God" decided the conditions of life; the inspector expected civic leaders to take action to enforce sanitary standards that would ensure cleanliness and public health. Using some literary license, a tsarist official summed up the case against the municipalities by concluding that "all the cities of the province are drowning in filth." [91] He very likely shared the judgment of Paul Koch (cited in chapter 1) that such befouled places did not belong within the borders of civilized Europe.

That polluted water, unremoved filth, stench, and dirt were related to infectious diseases and high urban mortality rates was an essential truth among public health specialists and their followers. The government assiduously collected death rates and although the statistics were of dubious precision, they nonetheless reveal great divergences in mortality rates between the better maintained central areas of towns and the dirtier—and poorer—outskirts, between the laboring people and the well-to-do, between infants and adults. Gendarme and gubernatorial reports began to assume a connection between the municipal neglect of local needs and disease, citing medical data to back up their demands for action. Where did the source of this appalling backwardness lie? In the mid 1890s St. Petersburg's so-called medical police compiled a comprehensive list of the ills of the capital. The authors started their analysis by discussing the absence of clean water and sewage removal and proceeded to the topics of overcrowded

[91] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Voronezhskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 3:10.

housing and poor food for the "mass of working people," whom they specifically distinguished from the "educated [ intelligentnye ] strata." They concluded that a number of "artificial factors resulting from the necessity for an enormous number of people to gather in a disproportionately small territory distort all the conditions of existence of the individual." [92]

Such descriptions established an agenda for social reform. They raised issues that were debated with particular vehemence in the Society for the Protection of Public Health in the 1880s and 1890s when its members confronted the implications of the "bacteriological revolution." Pointing to the evidence on water-carried germs, some specialists argued for immediate measures to filter drinking water rigorously. The "localist" school argued that public health was attainable only through extensive social welfare. The localist program implicitly pointed to the reform of the tsarist regime itself, which it judged to be ultimately responsible for these ills. [93] On one side of this debate, then, the sanitized city was a sort of metaphor for political revolution.

Within the confines of municipal action, however, the larger implications that these debates over local needs raised never emerged in public view, in part because of tsarist surveillance but, more important, because most civic leaders had a much narrower conception of public needs and responsibilities. To judge by the comments of tsarist officials, many municipalities had no conception of a public sphere of action. The benign neglect espoused by the mayor of the district town in Voronezh province that I cited earlier had its counterpart all across the country. The police chief of Kuznets claimed, probably with considerable inventiveness, that the elders of his minor Volga trading center shared the opinion that "sanitary-hygienic qualities [ svoistva —i.e., public works] were simply an unnecessary, frivolous distraction that disrupted the normal quiet conditions of life." On a more sober note, he observed that the principal objection to bringing clean water to town by building a water main was that it represented "an unnecessary, unproductive expense." [94] Where the prevalent attitude assumed that a city was a collection of families and private enterprise, this argument carried great weight.

The police chief's observations omitted one vital consideration, namely, the miniscule income of these small municipalities. The pervasive poverty

[92] I. Eremev, ed., Gorod Sanktpeterburg s tochki zreniia meditsinskoi politsii (St. Petersburg, 1897), i, iii.

[93] Lotova, Russkaia intelligentsiia , 64-66, 76-77; for a general view of the politics of the Russian medical profession at the turn of the century see Nancy Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856-1905 (Princeton, N.J., 1981), esp. chaps. 7-8.

[94] TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5, d. 238, 104.

of the trading and laboring populations was a general condition throughout the country. Saratov's campaign in 1880 against tax dodgers collapsed when it discovered that 90 percent of the miscreants "for the most part proved to be artisans in extreme misery and without work," so needy that the municipality had to arrange charitable contributions. [95] When a relatively prosperous property-owning and business community is absent, one senatorial survey into provincial life concluded, urban centers "do not have, and will not have in the foreseeable future, the possibility to improve their public services." [96] Officials and other critics from the outside tended to discount provincial claims of hardship as self-serving, a point underlined by the Saratov governor when he noted in 1895 that duma deputies "may be accused of stinginess but not wastefulness." [97] Municipal parsimony owed its attractiveness as a policy not only to ignorance, superstition, and sloth but also to the slender margin of livelihood of the large majority of townspeople.

Although forceful and persuasive voices in provincial centers and migrant cities spoke out in favor of municipal activism, they confronted another major obstacle to the realization of extensive public services: the tsarist state placed a considerable financial burden on cities to contribute to state operations. Since Peter the Great's time Russia's vast, underadministered empire had turned local self-government into a device for obligatory assistance in administering, and more often simply financing, state-ordered functions. For major towns and cities the most onerous of these in the mid nineteenth century were the quartering of military garrisons and paying for municipal police. Other responsibilities were gradually added in later years. Part of the tsarist reaction to political terrorism in the late 1870s entailed the expansion of the municipal police forces, the cost of which fell, as in the past, on the municipalities. Kiev's mayor complained to the senatorial investigators that his townspeople believed the new municipal self-government meant more taxes and fewer benefits because the "taxes are increasing not for the welfare of the city but for the payment of those state functions that are obligatory and increasing in scope." [98]

The complaint echoed similar hostile comments of earlier decades, and the evidence suggests that the tsarist regime was making the cities pay heavily. Kiev's cost for the municipal police force doubled in the period

[95] Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 4 (1880):91.

[96] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Saratovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 4:544.

[97] "Otchet Saratovskoi gubernii za 1895," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 23, d. 28, 18.

[98] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), vol. 2, pt. 2, 293.

from the mid 1860s to the early 1880s. Moscow's obligatory expenses, which had declined from one-half to one-quarter of the budget between 1860 and 1878 rose again in the following years, with police expenses mounting to 20 percent of its total expenses. [99] Under these circumstances attacks from tsarist administrators on the municipalities' neglect of public services appeared at best hypocritical and at worst a device to shift responsibility onto powerless and impecunious civic leaders.

The principal improvements in municipal finances came about as a result of the economic expansion of certain cities or through the inventiveness of civic leaders. In both cases the locus was the migrant cities. Although the ingenuity of particular leaders was an affair of talent as well as circumstances, increased taxes were the result of urban economic growth. New financial sources included the development, beginning in the 1870s, of revenue-earning municipal enterprises—somewhat on the model of German "municipal socialism" of that period—ranging from slaughterhouses to banks and public transportation. All such enterprises entailed serious financial risks, especially in the depression years of the 1880s. In cities such as Odessa and Moscow they began to return substantial profits by the 1890s. A second innovation was extensive borrowing. Like municipal enterprises, it was largely the prerogative of the provincial capitals and migrant towns, presumably because these cities were both better risks and better governed. By the end of the century the level of municipal debt in those cities averaged 7,000 rubles per capita. In the small towns per capita debt was far lower—2,500 rubles. [100] Municipal borrowing aroused bitter criticism from frugal deputies and townspeople. Moscow's conservative "public opinion," as reported from a tavern gathering in 1892 by one journalist, complained that "future generations will have to answer" for mayor Alekseev's years of heavy borrowing. In an editorial rebuttal the newspaper pointed to Alekseev's program of municipal improvements. "He who hasn't seen the city in fifteen years," the editor boasted, "will not recognize it now." [101]

The editor's civic boosterism suggests that an urban constituency was taking shape behind the activist municipal leadership. By the 1890s many

[99] Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe uprovlenie," 180.

[100] These figures are drawn from the comprehensive statistical survey Goroda Rossii v 1904 g . (St. Petersburg, 1907); "small" towns are defined as all those without appreciable population growth, that is, with more than half of its residents locally born.

[101] Moskovskii listok , 3 May 1892; a very different point of view came from a state duma survey in 1907 that concluded that municipal indebtedness in Russian towns (measured as a proportion of annual revenues) was less than half that of Western European municipalities; see Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State , 47.

municipalities were enjoying a substantial increase in available revenues. Even taking their rapidly expanding population into account, by the end of the century they disposed of twice the per capita income of the small towns. [102] The increase in revenues also outpaced the rise in obligatory expenses, which in Moscow fell to 18 percent of the budget by 1900. [103] However, to say that revenues in these cities were increasing is only to suggest that the needs of the local population could be addressed in part and that the vision of a "civilized" city, whatever this term was understood to mean by competing factions, could be realized in some small measure. Throughout the last decades of the century complaints continued to echo the observation of senators inspecting provincial affairs in 1880, namely, that "all the towns complain of the paucity of their income by comparison with the rapidly growing needs brought out by the spirit of the times." [104] The bitterness of civic debates involved the issue of who was to enjoy the benefits of public services.

By the turn of the century one answer to the question of who would benefit from municipal expenditures was that the urban elite cared for the needs of its own constituency. A map of the location of public services coincided to a remarkable extent with the residential distribution of the well-to-do and entrepreneurial townspeople. A special correspondent for a Moscow paper reported that in the Volga town of Rybinsk the "conveniences from municipal services" were far more accessible to the "owners of brick houses located in the central streets of town . . . than to house-owners whose [wooden] buildings are located on the outskirts." Among these "conveniences" were "more or less acceptable street lighting, relatively decent [paved] streets and sidewalks, [and] more or less vigilant police surveillance." As for the poor inhabitants on the edges of the town, they experienced "impassable mud in the streets and complete darkness after sunset." [105] This physical ordering of the city gave tangible form to central areas, but there was little in the underrepresented (and unrepresented) urban fringes that, by contemporary (ideal) standards, deserved the name of "civilized" urban life.

The reasons for the inequitable distribution of municipal benefits lay in part in the conscious priorities of municipal deputies and councils. But it

[102] The source and method of calculation are identical to those used in footnote 100.

[103] L. Pisar'kova, "Deiatel'nost' Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy v oblasti meditsiny, narodnogo obrazovaniia i obshchestvennogo prizreniia posle 1862," Problemy istorii SSSR 7 (1978):130.

[104] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Voronezhskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 6:1.

[105] Moskovskii listok , 20 April 1899.

was also the result of the very dynamism of these migrant cities, which were constantly enlarging their settled areas and pushing their outskirts further and further away. Voices from the town center were heard much more easily than those from the urban fringes (with the exception of the occasional factory owner). For example, Tambov's mayor could count on a sympathetic hearing from his trading constituency when he warned in the late 1870s that the central streets in his "swampy" town were "absolutely impassable in fall and spring." Paving these streets was a business necessity in a city where commerce in agricultural commodities was becoming increasingly important. [106] In 1893 Kharkov's merchant party demonstrated no reluctance to spend municipal funds on a major program of street construction, the paving of all town squares, and lighting as far as the outlying districts. [107] These investments brought tangible benefits to the "solid citizens" and to vital urban economic activities.

Such programs were also visible evidence of substantial civic achievement. Both economic and cultural considerations were probably behind the Ministry of Finance's decision in the mid-1890s to subsidize an extensive program of paving, electric lighting, and electric streetcar construction in central Nizhny Novgorod. The city was on display for the national exposition of 1896 and that urban "hill of light," which so impressed Maxim Gorky, was a part of the ministry's proselytizing effort as well as a convenience for the visitors to the exposition. The town's back streets, however, still belonged to the migrants and the poor and were a territory that, to urban activists, was as much in need of public works as the center.

The less visible services that were needed for public health and sanitation required more sophisticated justifications. Public health publications presented arguments about the connection between infectious diseases and tainted water, filth, and stench; they relied on reason and scientific authority to challenge the received wisdom of traditional practices. In this area in particular activist reformers were critical of their "illiterate" and "half-educated" opponents who were less prepared to accept the major expenses that capital improvements like municipal water mains and sewage systems required.

In Moscow the principal political leader pushing for major investment in water mains was the mayor, Nikolai Alekseev, who held impeccable merchant credentials. He won the fervent backing of the editor of Moscow's first penny press, N. Pastukhov (himself a former tavern keeper), who

[106] "Gorodskoe khoziaistvo Tambovskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 6:68.

[107] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:307-8.

foresaw that a beautiful city would emerge "when the sewer is built . . . and the river water becomes clean." He promised that "instead of the stench from filth Moscow's inhabitants will breathe fresh, clean air, and half the infectious disease will disappear." [108] Such arguments proved sufficiently persuasive to win municipal backing in most migrant cities and provincial capitals by the end of the century. An official medical report of the early 1890s found that sixty cities possessed water mains providing "good water, judging by appearance and taste." [109] In these cities a substantial part of the population enjoyed in their daily lives the benefits of their municipalities' "widening circle of activities."

The mortality records of these cities indicate that the investments in sanitation produced tangible improvements in public health. The reliability of the urban mortality figures is dubious for reasons that involve both population turnover and imperfect data collection, but comparisons of data over time provide a fairly reliable picture of the overall trend. When filtration of public water began in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the death rates in the areas served by the mains suddenly dropped; by contrast, in the newer districts inhabited mainly by the laboring population the rate remained unchanged. [110] Similar changes occurred in other cities that were provided with water mains. The figures for death caused by typhus had declined sharply by the 1890s, and the major urban centers were spared the cholera epidemic early in that decade.

In the outlying, newly settled areas of these cities and in towns lacking these sanitary services epidemics remained a critical problem. Public medical care became more widespread through the construction of municipal hospitals, but it was never adequate to the demand (in either the countryside or the city). Critics of municipal public health measures pointed to the inequalities in mortality figures between the central districts and the city outskirts and to the evidence suggesting that mortality in Russian cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, remained higher than in the countryside. [111] The point is not that some cities suddenly became sanitized islands in a sea of infectious diseases. By the end of the century municipal politics in the migrant cities had created a consensus on policies of public

[108] Moskovskii listok , 3 April 1982.

[109] "Otchet Meditsinskogo departamenta za 1892 g.," Vrach' 24 (1896):10.

[110] Sanitarnoe sostoianie gorodov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1899), 40-42.

[111] The story of St. Petersburg's "deadly districts" is described in James Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (London, 1976), 342-52; Moscow's improved conditions are discussed in Thomas McGivney, "The Lower Classes in the City of Moscow, 1870-1905" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978), 185-86. The most searching statistical inquiry into urban and rural mortality rates is S. A. Novosel'skii, O raslichiiakh v smertnosti gorodskogo i sel'skogo naseleniia Evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1911).

health reform; their impact and the visible improvements that these reforms made to the urban environment gave civic leaders tangible evidence of their own substantial contribution to the construction of a modern city.

The Russian city was also becoming a place of care for the needy. Venerable religious tradition sanctioned private charity. The idea of public responsibility for alleviating the effects of poverty, however, encountered open hostility from frugal civic leaders, who argued that such efforts confronted an endless stream of poor migrants. Housing was the most acute problem in the growing cities: many migrants moved in and out of urban areas depending on the season and lived on an extremely low income that provided for only the most miserable housing or, in some cases, no housing at all. Many municipal leaders, however, approached the housing problem with the attitude that it was entirely the affair of the workers themselves. For example, when a government inspector charged the municipality of Samara with being derelict in caring for the housing needs of its seasonal dock workers, its mayor, after blaming inadequate revenues and insufficient help from the district zemstvo , added that the stevedors "usually work loading grain and, receiving a very substantial income, have every possibility to rent lodgings in apartments." [112] His roseate assessment was a convenient justification for municipal inaction.

The issue of welfare raised questions about the social role of the city that were as central as the issues posed by public health. Were the conditions of daily life the affair of individuals only? Should the industrious and enterprising be accorded, and the lazy and incompetent be deprived of, such items as adequate food and housing on the basis of individual competition? Were measures to alleviate social inequities a moral imperative for civic leaders or did public order only require minimal efforts to provide palliatives and then only when hardships threatened social unrest? Such questions were asked in cities throughout the West as well, but the scale of the problem in Russia was arguably greater than elsewhere. Poverty was acute, the resources to address the problem very meager, and municipal leaders and provincial officials were deeply divided on the issues. The various ways of addressing the problem rested on different assumptions of urban life and, by extension, of the nascent civil public sphere.

The tsarist administration gave its own authoritative answer to these questions. It conceived of the problem of urban welfare from the point of view of public order. In the early 1870s Odessa's police prefect, adopting a policy typical of other officials, took the problem of unhoused migrants

[112] "Reviziia komissii Kakhanova," TsGIA, f. 1391, op. 1, d. 23, 4.

very seriously. He ordered the police to open four public shelters to house six hundred people "at the expense of private charity." He justified his arbitrary intervention in municipal affairs by citing the "disease and depravity" allegedly rampant in private flophouses and the ease of "police surveillance" of public shelters. [113] In this disciplinary perspective housing regulation and assistance were inseparable from control of the laboring population. In the mid 1860s the Moscow police chief recommended that the municipality provide lodging for the poor and close slum housing. A municipal commission replied to this advice by asserting that his real intent was to enhance police "vigilance" against "idleness, vagrancy, pauperism, depravity, theft, and other crimes in the city." [114] Tsarist paternalism supported urban public welfare but with a strong element of administrative control. In this respect the municipalities were expected to do part of the work of the police.

Although municipal leaders also viewed the laboring masses from a great distance, they did so from a different perspective than tsarist officials. The concept of civil society is particularly useful in interpreting the welfare policies of Russian municipalities because the presence of a small commercial and manufacturing electorate created a cultural and social barrier between the municipal elite and the urban poor. Arguably, this barrier was even stronger in Russia than in Western countries. Party machines did not mobilize the poor to exchange favors for votes, as in cities in the United States; and no socialist parties could force a social welfare agenda on municipalities, as in German cities. Both Russian municipal statutes of the late nineteenth century identified social welfare as a "facultative" municipal activity and the dumas placed it very low on their agendas. One Russian doctor accused the dumas of failing to "hear the voice of the needy" who were for him a substantial collective presence in the city. [115] The response of dumas to poverty suggests that instead of hearing the "voice" of the masses, they continued in the style of the Samara mayor to view the migrants as laborers who were fit to earn their keep; they relegated the needy poor to charitable institutions. Seen in this light, poverty was essentially a social disorder and a private philanthropic concern. Supporters of public welfare, seeking to win municipal support, at times even presented the problem in terms of "dangerous classes." One appeal for municipal action argued that "hundreds of thousands become corrupted by begging, commit crimes, threaten public safety, and ultimately land in prison and

[113] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 67, d. 165 (1875), 9.

[114] Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 282.

[115] Quoted in Frieden, Russian Physicians , 237.

cost several times more than the most expensive cases of relief." [116] The argument was ingenious but could make converts only where poverty assumed mass proportions in the migrant cities.

The appeal for public welfare, whether understood in terms of public order, parsimony, or spiritual duty, brought some action. Moscow's aid, which has been studied by Joseph Bradley, was the most extensive, but it failed to cope with the influx of migrants. In its regulated approach to "misery" it could not make a serious impact on the world of the poor. Characteristically, Khitrovka remained essentially untouched at the end of the century. [117] Short-term crises caused by recession or sudden increases in food prices produced ad hoc measures such as soup kitchens and temporary shelters. In the 1880s and 1890s an increasing number of municipal pawnshops competed successfully with loan sharks by offering inexpensive credit to those with items to pawn. [118] This type of municipal self-help was compatible with the idea of the city as workplace, which was part of the agenda of the merchant parties as well as the economic practices of townspeople. However, the array of policies to cope with widespread urban poverty remained insignificant in comparison with the obvious need.

Under the circumstances it is not surprising that municipal leadership lacked real vision and failed to occupy a major role in the public life of the country. What is impressive is that despite the serious political and administrative obstacles, municipal public life came to occupy a substantial place in the Russian city. Its importance was primarily a result of the activities that grew in response to local needs. The significance attributed to these activities in public debates was grounded partly in an idealized vision of the city as a civilized place and partly in a practical sense of the economic role of the city as a workplace. The factions that coalesced in municipal politics articulated these competing views, neither of which directly challenged autocratic power and neither of which widened civic life beyond the narrow constituency of a municipal elite. Although the accomplishments of the municipalities in the last decades of the nineteenth century fell far short of the goals of the activists, they were nonetheless both substantial and tangible.

Observers tended to describe the urban elite in disparaging terms of

[116] E. Maksimov, "Statisticheskie i finansovye voprosy obshchestvennogo prizreniia," Novoe slovo (April 1896):8, cited in Adele Lindenmyer, "Why Did They Give? Social Influences on the Motives of Russian Philanthropists" (Paper presented at the AAASS national convention, November 1986), 15.

[117] Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , chaps. 6-7.

[118] "Lombardy russkikh gorodov," Isvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 10 (October 1891), pt. 4, 1-4.

patriarchy or oligarchy. Still, the actual autonomy of Russian urban civic leadership supports the view that municipal politics in the postreform period supported the emergence of a civic public sphere in the cities of the land. The world of the municipalities was small because it was confined by both tsarist authoritarianism and the social conditions of the very migrant city within which it emerged. Although urban "society" and the "people" shared a common territory that was delimited by city outskirts and the urban environment, the two groups were separate communities divided by social practices and cultural perceptions. Civic life and municipal services appeared unable to bridge this social gulf, which the growth of the migrant cities made increasingly visible.

Figure 1. The bucolic planned city: The Town Square of a Russian Provincial City, approx. 1850. E. Krendovskii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 8, pt. 2, 238.

Figure 2. A mid century Volga river port: Kostroma, approx. 1850. Unknown artist. Hoover Institution; Russian Pictorial Collection.

Figure 3. Railroads and Russian cities: "Carte des voies de communications de la Russie." Aperçu statistique des chemins de fer et des voies navigables de la Russie (St. Petersburg, 1900), endpiece.

Figure 4. Schematic flow chart of river and rail shipments of goods, 1897. "Mouvements des marchandises par chemins de fer et voies navigables de la Russie d'Europe en connexion avec l'importation et l'exportation par les ports et douanes frontières d'après les données de 1897." Aperçu statistique des chemin de fer et des voies navigables de la Russie (St. Petersburg, 1900), endpiece.

Figure 5. The imperial planned city: "Modern Plan of Iaroslavl." Iaroslavl' v ego proshlom i nastoiashchem:{nbIstoricheskii ocherk. Putevoditel' (Iaroslavl, 1913), endpiece.

Figure 6. The fair as planned city :"Plan of All-Russian Industrial-Artistic Exhibition." Ukazatel' vserossiiskoi promyshlenno-khudozhestvennoi vystavki 1882 goda v Moskve (Moscow, 1882), following 160.

Figure 7. The migrant laborer and his sweetheart: On the Boulevard, 1886-87. V. Makovskii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 9, pt. 1, 345.

Figure 8. The lower depths: The Flophouse, 1889. V. Makovskii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 9. pt. 1, 341.

Figure 9. The metropolis: Nevskii prospekt, 1887. I. Repin. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 9, pt. 1, 554.

Figure 10. The city of popular entertainment: Mardi Gras Carnival on Admiralty Square in St. petersburg. 1869. K. Makovskii. Istoriia russkogo iskusstva, ed. E. Grabar (Moscow, 1964), vol. 8, pt. 2, 256.

Figure 11. Popular images of the city (1): "The Return of the Son, Waiter in the City, to His Peasant Family," 1875. Chapbook illustration. Print Collection, Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library, Leningrad.

Figure 12. Popular images of the city (2): "Two Migrant Workers in a Tavern," 1878. Chapbook illustration. Print Collection, Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library, Leningrad.

4 Sobriety, Squalor, and Schooling in the Migrant City

In its ideal form the Russian city of the late nineteenth century was to be both an enlightened and an orderly place. Although facade planning disappeared, the impulse to impose some ideal ordering of public life on the chaotic migrant city did not. Tsarist authorities and many civic leaders possessed a vision of the city as a place that, in one form or another, had to be created—or recreated. They were the heirs of Peter I and Catherine II. The reasons for this common approach to the Russian city are rooted in both Russian authoritarian social practices and culturist views that measured Russian society against Western models. When compared with the West, Russia still seemed to be a borderland and its cities outposts where cultural ideals directly confronted a harsh social reality. The decision of the Ministry of Finance to locate the second national exposition in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 affirmed the principle that any major Russian city was a place of learning. In this context, enlightenment meant proselytizing for technology, industry, and capitalism in the spirit of Witte's program for national development. It also meant finding a language by which to communicate this message to a diverse and deeply divided population.

The impoverished, poorly educated, and mobile character of most of the urban population challenged the best efforts of those who sought an enlightened city. The problem of cultural change in the city can best be approached in the manner proposed by the sociologist Lyn Lofland. Her conceptual perspective relies heavily on psychology and cultural anthropology. She views the city in modern times as a "problematic world of

strangers" in which groups and individuals that are unknown to one another become aware of one another's existence through encounters in public spaces. On the one hand, the responses to this situation involve efforts to create a place for oneself—to "privatize public space." On the other hand, the responses also engage urban dwellers in a process of learning in which they attempt to acquire skills for living among strangers and for placing these strangers in a familiar, knowable order. [1] Lofland devotes little attention to the importance of power in the ways that these "strangers" interact. Logically, one might expect that those who claim authority and are committed to a reordering of the city would use their positions to try to incorporate the strangers into their own ideal city. Her approach suggests that those who study the history of Russian urbanism must pay close attention to the struggles inherent to the transformation of urban culture. Rival agendas for cultural integration competed against each other, and the proponents of each agenda attempted to communicate with and persuade the migrant masses of the rightness of their cause. "Strangeness" was a barrier to the emergence of a new city.

The encounter between elite and popular cultures was strongly influenced by tsarist suspicion of spontaneous cultural activities, a culturist definition of progress among educated Russians, and by the assumption—shared by both the business and laboring population—that the city was essentially a workplace. Perceptions of strangeness varied greatly and the attempts to deal with this condition can be examined from several points of view. One important dimension is gender. Relations between laboring men and women in the migrant cities were deeply marked by the mobility of the population and the numerical insignificance of settled families. A social dimension is readily visible in the multiplication of voluntary associations among educated townspeople, who turned their attention to opening channels of communication and to spreading learning among the uneducated. An economic element is apparent in the support that municipal dumas and merchant societies lent to the creation of schools to raise the educational level of the urban workforce. The political concerns of Russian conservatives emerged in the campaign to organize officially approved public programs of learning and knowledge that were directed at spreading sobriety and piety among the laboring population. Finally, the cultural ramifications of the encounters among strangers brought a fascination with the exotic "squalor" of the slum-dwellers. In popular literature Khitrovka acquired

[1] Lyn Lofland, A World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space (New York, 1973), esp. 15-22.

junglelike qualities and became a sort of "darkest Moscow." The awareness among townspeople that these vast cultural differences existed brought added support for a sustained campaign to spread literacy into those little-known fringes of urban society. The Russian migrant city of the late nineteenth century contained a multitude of competing movements to incorporate the population into an integrated culture. In this chapter I focus on those activities that were directed at the "migrant stranger."

Tavern and Church

The presence of migrants was the dominant social reality of urban Russia. It caused civic leaders and officials to search for the means by which to bring enlightenment and order to their migrant city. Although they often claimed to know the "people," they were aware of a cultural gulf between "society" and the "people" that bred suspicion and made any form of communication a difficult endeavor. The label "migrant" subsumed a variety of social conditions. The occupations of the newcomers varied widely, as did the length of their residence in the city. Although descriptions of housing offer a one-dimensional image of the laboring poor, they provide a general indication of the private places that these strangers occupied in the city. To the extent they can be perceived in contemporary reports, these living conditions help to describe how the world of the migrants was circumscribed with respect to the settled townspeople and how the migrants' efforts to "privatize public space" evolved.

The great disparity between the comfortable housing of the few well-to-do townspeople and the squalid quarters of the poor can be measured using the data gathered in official studies. The distance between the houses in Kiev's center that were classified as "expensive" and the "crowded houses, more like hovels stuck together with mud" (as one medical inspector observed in 1890) on the city's outskirts, where "petty artisans, traders, [and] day laborers" lived, was at once spatial and social. [2] There was no territorial border, however, to separate "decent" from "squalid" rental lodgings; both often existed in the same neighborhood or even next to each other. When in the 1890s the Ministry of Finance introduced a tax on urban renters, it estimated that the floor of the tax on the most "inexpensive" taxable residences excluded three-fourths of all lodgings. [3] This administrative decision gives an indication of the size of the urban poor.

[2] "Sanitarnyi nadzor v Kieve v 1890 godu," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 12 (December 1891):2.

[3] Gosudarstvennyi kvartirnyi nalog (St. Petersburg, 1903), 69 n. 1, 108.

The structures that the fiscal agents left off the tax roles included the ready-made shacks that one traveler found in Volga port cities that landlords constructed to house laborers in the navigation season. He saw "small lots on the outskirts of town that were so crowded" with these structures that "they represent a serious danger in case of fire." [4] In this domain, as in others, the lives of the poor were beyond the reach of official regulations. Building violations could easily be dismissed with a bribe to the neighborhood police officer, who was the only authority to enforce the municipal statutes. A particularly characteristic form of housing for the poor was the "cot-and-corner" ( koechno-kamorochnaia ) apartment, which was a residence sublet into as many cots and corners as the market and physical space would permit. At the turn of the century a Moscow survey estimated that such lodgings housed nearly 175,000 people (one-sixth of the total population). [5]

In these conditions the borders between public and private space were difficult to discern. The desperate need for cheap housing was the paramount concern. Observers reported that crowding, fetid air, and the stench from courtyard latrines set these areas apart as places of terrible squalor. Gorky's "lower depths," which he used at the end of the nineteenth century to shock his educated audience, were located in a cellar "cot-and-corner" apartment. The term trushchoba ("slum") had emerged by the mid nineteenth century to designate the areas where this squalid housing was concentrated—at first the streets around Haymarket Square in St. Petersburg, then also the Khitrovka neighborhood of Moscow. Soon it was used to identify places of visible poverty in any town. The term also conveyed a secondary meaning similar to the usage of the word "slum" in the United States in the late nineteenth century: to middle-class Americans, slums were "strange, novel, large places that people visited as a foreign territory." In America as in Russia, the inhabitants of these places became "slum people." [6] In this manner the language of educated Russians identified a different social world within the migrant cities.

[4] E. I. Ragozin, "Puteshestvie po russkim gorodam," Russkoe obozrenie 4, no. 7 (July 1891):255-56.

[5] Moskovskie vedomosti , 14 November 1902; the report was published in Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 23 (October 1899). This subterranean housing world (I use the term both figuratively and literally because many such apartments were located in cellars) is explored in detail in Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite (Berkeley, 1985), 211-13.

[6] Sam Bass Warner, "Slums and Skyscrapers," in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences , ed. Lloyd Rodwin and Robert Hollister (New York, 1984), 187. The Russian term, which originally designated a thicket in a forest, first appeared in literary works in the 1840s and had a pejorative social meaning; at that time it designated the St. Petersburg slums. See Slovar' sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1965), 15:1063.

For the residents of these poor neighborhoods such living conditions were part of a network of relations by which they organized their lives in the city. Where peoples of different languages gathered in the same city, ethnic differences to some extent determined the borders between neighborhoods. In Odessa, for example, the ethnic segregation of Russians and Jews led most Jews to reside in the central areas. Russians congregated in the outlying factory districts. [7] Because residential segregation highlighted the cultural barriers that divided Jews and Gentiles (Russians and Ukrainians), they had the effect of turning certain neighborhoods into targets for mobs when anti-Semitic pogroms erupted.

Residential areas of migrant laborers in Russian cities principally housed working-age men who were living apart from their families. According to Joseph Bradley, in Moscow in the early 1880s between one-half and two-thirds of these men were not living with their families, and we can assume that the same condition existed in the other migrant cities. [8] Urban labor was largely male. In the last decades of the nineteenth century most men no longer moved about as part of a work gang ( artel' ), but they still frequently changed jobs and residence. They kept the company of fellow migrants both in work and, just as important for their sense of place in the city, in their lives away from work. Thus, places that we might call a "man's world" occupied a visible and important area in the migrant city.

The urban centers where the migrants gathered were "privatized" by their new residents in the sense that Lofland suggests: they sought to find space in the city for their own way of life. In the mid 1890s one young villager, Semen Kanatchikov, entered this world under the protection of his father's village friend, who was a migrant factory worker bringing his own son to Moscow at the same time. In many ways Kanatchikov's story, which he later told in his autobiography, is typical of the migrant laborer. He lived with fifteen other men, who were employed at different trades and worked in different parts of the city; they shared a communal apartment that they collectively rented and for which they hired a cook. He took his meals at the apartment and spent his leisure time in the company of the other migrants who lived there. He ran to fires, read the penny press, joined in collective fistfights, and at payday visited neighboring taverns and brothels. [9] Our

[7] Robert Weinberg, "Worker Organizations and Politics in the Revolution of 1905 in Odessa" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1985), 84-85.

[8] Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 217-19.

[9] S. I. Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia , trans. and ed. Reginald Zelnik (Stanford, 1986), 9-13; see also Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 196-211.

meager records suggest that these collective living arrangements, which were termed a residential artel' , were common. According to the 1897 census, in the typical migrant city 6 percent of the population lived in "households without family ties," and this figure is probably artificially low.

Artel' residents came and went; new arrivals at times came from the workplace of one of the members or from the neighborhood. At times the village (or regional) connections provided by the members' zemliachestva furnished new residents. Experienced migrants assisted the move from the village and initiated the newcomer into the ways of the city. Kanatchikov, presumably like many other new arrivals, soon moved on to separate quarters and found comrades in other places. However, at a key moment of transition in his life the artel' had become for him both a refuge and a school in urban living; in personal terms it was as important as his place of work.

The customs and living practices provided by shared housing and comradeship gave migrants, both those employed in factories and those who found work elsewhere, special skills and knowledge that they needed to make some small part of the city their own. The significance that the French writer Michel de Certeau attributes to the everyday practices of residents of modern cities is equally pertinent to the experience of these Russian urban migrants, who were also able to incorporate in the practices of their daily lives "ways of making use of the confining order" in which they found themselves. [10] The large group of married workers in an apartment-commune in St. Petersburg knew that they belonged in the city and their wives and families belonged in the villages. Their life as "temporary bachelors" was forced on them, they explained to a visitor, by their urban transience: "'Today we're here, but God knows where we'll be tomorrow. So that's how we live—each by himself."' [11] But instead of living in disordered solitude, their way of life gave them a special collective place in the city.

The migrant way of life was in many respects repugnant to both civil society and official Russia. The bonds that united the laborers' society were solidified by rituals in work and leisure; these bonds were cemented by regular and heavy consumption of vodka, by masculinity that was proven in organized fistfights, and by casual sex with prostitutes. Educated Russians and workers who aspired to respectability regarded temperance (or at most moderate drinking) as a mark of cultural development. But in the

[10] Michel de Certeau, The Practices of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 76.

[11] P. Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskii rabochii? (St. Petersburg, 1906), 13-14.

male brotherhood of laborers, the use of vodka was an essential sign of membership. It celebrated entry into a workplace, it was a reward for a job well done, it commemorated the holidays, and it turned strangers into comrades in the neighborhood tavern. Its use, in the words of one censorious provincial governor, initiated young migrants into the "different style of life of the workers." From his official perspective vodka was the first step toward creating a "riotous" laboring population, which appeared so threatening to public order. [12] If we can believe the tabulations of the municipal statisticians, who were zealous record-keepers of the well-ordered city, in the migrant cities at the turn of the century there were nearly as many taverns per capita as there were churches. Whether it was justified or not, the Russian laborers' reputation of drunkenness made the tavern ( traktir ) a particularly odious symbol of squalor and depravity to educated Russians. As in the West, it was the common target of the temperance movement and respectable workers, both of whom held up high standards of moral behavior by which to reform the laboring population.

The prevalence of casual sex in the laboring community added another dimension to the "strangeness" of their part of the city. In this respect the workers in Russian cities resembled those in Western metropolitan centers earlier in the century. Alain Corbin describes what he calls the "quantitative sexual poverty" that labor migration created in large French cities in that period. In these urban centers the "sexual activity of laborers appeared virtually synonymous with prostitution." [13] The tsarist state, like other European states, attempted to regulate prostitution, which according to its problematic records was the occupation of young, female, peasant migrants who either abandoned or were forced out of domestic service. [14] Officials recognized that "secret prostitution" was probably far more prevalent than the legal form. Women in trades such as seamstress, where unemployment was endemic, often turned to prostitution to escape destitution. The evidence that casual sex was widespread in the city is indicated by the far higher rate of illegitimate birth in migrant cities than in the countryside. [15] The assumption among educated observers that laborers were promiscuous helps explain why medical writings tended to attribute the cause of the syphilis epidemic to this particular segment of the urban population. The

[12] "Vsepoddanneishii otchet Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii za 1898," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (abbreviated TsGIA), f. 1282, op. 3, d. 3255 (1899), 10.

[13] Alain Corbin, Les filles de noces: misère sexuelle et prostitution au 19e et 20e siècles (Paris, 1978), 276-77.

[14] Prostitutsiia y Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1890), xii-xxxvi.

[15] A. G. Vishnevskii, "Rannie etapy," in Brachnost', rozhdaemost' i smertnost' v Rossii i v SSSR , ed. A. G. Vishnevskii (Moscow, 1977), 115, table 3.

evidence of male laborers' sexual behavior and the male stereotype to which it gave rise contributed to an image of the migrant city that was very troubling to respectable urban society.

In addition to drunkenness and sex, manliness in the migrant setting found its expression in fighting. Violent behavior among the laboring population assumed a variety of forms, some erupting in deadly earnest but others assuming a spirit of play. As best we can determine, the participants in urban riots were a cross section of the urban laboring population: unskilled laborers and factory workers, shopkeepers and artisans, migrants and townsmen. Similar confusion surrounds the question of who participated in the collective fistfights that were a common affair on the outskirts of major cities and in laboring sections of towns at least until the end of the century. A centuries-old custom, they were banned by the state in the 1832 law code, which stated that "collective fistfights are a harmful pastime and are absolutely forbidden as a violation of public order." [16] Nonetheless, they continued to occur wherever large numbers of male laborers gathered. They pitted neighborhoods against neighborhoods, factories against factories, or workers against peasants. Any holiday was appropriate for this entertainment, although winter Sundays and Christmas and Easter seemed particularly favored moments.

The fights followed a simple, ritualized scenario that new arrivals could easily recognize. Two sides formed "walls" of skirmishing lines to struggle for control of a disputed no-man's-land. The participants relied largely on their fists, although rocks and knives were occasionally used as weapons as well, and fought until one team fled the field. The event usually began with a "young" wall of teenage boys, who were still learning the skills of battle; they were followed by grown men until up to five hundred fighters were present. Enthusiastic onlookers gathered and some placed bets on the outcome. A few well-to-do fight lovers became patrons of champion fighters. The degree of violence occurring in these fights appeared barbaric to both outsiders and those who had passed through this school of manly training before suppressing their fighting skills to adopt respectable behavior. One Moscow businessman later recalled that the fights he participated in as a young man were events where "passions built up [and] men turned into animals; [they] broke each other's ribs, arms, and legs and beat [their opponents'] faces to a bloody pulp." [17] His lurid account probably added

[16] V. Lebedev, "K istorii kulachnykh boev na Rusi," Russkaia starina 44 (August 1913): 337.

[17] I. A. Slonov, Iz zhizni torgovoi Moskvy (Moscow, 1914), 23-24.

more gore to the event than was usually the case; the fights were to him a barbaric remnant of old Russia and had no place in a civilized city.

At the end of the century militant workers also sought to distance themselves from these wild customs. In the opinion of one Marxist worker these fights were the result of cultural backwardness, which stemmed from the fact that "the majority of the factory workers were illiterate and lacked intelligent entertainment in their free time." [18] To any Russian for whom culture meant learning and rational discourse, the fights epitomized the uncultured and backward aspects of popular life. A provincial correspondent for a Moscow paper summed up his report on one collective fistfight in his town by damning the activity as a "form of Asian barbarism [ tatarshchina ] that has lost all sense in our time." [19]

What outsiders judged to be uncivilized had a very different meaning to the laboring population. In the conditions of the migrant city the long history of these battles made them a familiar activity to newcomers and residents alike. In the laboring man's world of the late nineteenth century this ritualized conflict was, like the other forms of social conflict studied by the sociologist Lewis Coser, "a means to 'test' and 'know' the previously unknown . . . stranger, [who] may become familiar through one's struggle with him." [20] Although they were bloody and brutal, the collective fistfights created bonds of comradeship that helped the migrants to form a community to which they could turn in times of need; this community gave the migrants a sense of belonging to a place of their own in the city. [21] Thus, the migrants adapted past practices to the needs of their new lives in the city. In doing so, they created another visible indication of the gulf that divided them from the urban elite.

For this reason, in the last decades of the nineteenth century the Moscow slums of Khitrovka acquired a great power of fascination and revulsion for educated Russians. The concentrated misery, squalor, and—to the outsider—depravity in Khitrovka made it emblematic of the conditions in all migrant cities. Lev Tolstoy's traumatic encounter with the Khitrovka area, which occurred while he helped in the 1882 municipal census, inspired him to meditate in general on human misery, although he placed his meditations in what he called the "different world" he had discovered in Moscow's

[18] I. I. Smirnov, "Brianskie zavody v 80-90-kh godakh," Letopis' revoliutsii 4 (1923): 88.

[19] Moskovskii listok , 16 January 1882.

[20] Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York, 1956), 122-23.

[21] A thoughtful study of this social and cultural world of working men and women is found in Anne Bobroff, "Working Women, Bonding Patterns, and the Politics of Daily Life: Russia at the End of the Old Regime" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1982).

slums. [22] The strangeness of Khitrovka's population and its repellent sights, sounds, and smells led writers to use images of exotic and dangerous places to describe their reaction.

In the last decade of the century popular newspapers regularly sent journalists to Khitrovka to write titillating and censorious "eyewitness" accounts. One writer compared it to an "Indian kingdom" in North America's Far West. [23] Exotic comparisons with distant lands, however, were less frequent than those that evoked images of Christian damnation; one popular writer borrowed from Dante in warning his readers that Khitrovka's motto was "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." [24] The journalist Vladimir Giliarovsky, who made something of a profession escorting educated "tourists" into the slums, wrote of the denizens of Khitrovka as if theirs was an anti-society in which the hierarchy, rituals, and honors were a gruesome caricature of respectable society. He portrayed a hierarchy that included lowly beggars and "fences" at the bottom and the lords of the land, that is, the thieves, at the top—all residing in murky taverns or repellent flophouses. Perhaps inspired by thoughts of Hades and the river Styx, he turned Khitrovka's district police sergeant into a sort of border guard who regulated passage between the underworld of the slum and legitimate society beyond. [25] In these popular accounts the masses of migrant workers who gathered at the labor market went unmentioned; they could not satisfy the writers' fascination with depravity and lawlessness. Public interest in Khitrovka was in large measure the result of the implicit challenge that its apparently barbaric ways posed for urban civilization.

The cultural dynamics of Russian urbanism were as contested as the civil public sphere that emerged in the activities of the municipalities. Not one, but several conflicting "common mental pictures" of the city existed among Russian urban dwellers. The "single physical reality" of the urban landscape was interpreted differently by different groups in the population. [26] The public images that civic leaders, intellectuals, and tsarist officials held of urban popular culture made invidious comparisons with an ideal city. For them such comparisons represented a call to action. Tolstoy's encounter with Khitrovka's "different world" is an example of one such moment. Even the penny press, whose commercial needs provided an incentive to take a less activist and more entertaining approach to everyday life in the

[22] L. Tolstoi, What Then Must We Do? trans. Aylmer Maude (London, 1935), 10.

[23] "Khitrovtsy i ee obyvateli," Russkoe slovo , 7 May 1897.

[24] A. Pazukhin, "Khitrovtsy," Moskovskii listok , 18 April 1892.

[25] V. Giliarovskii, Moskva i Moskvichi (Moscow, 1955), 29-30; these writings date from the 1890s.

[26] Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 7.

city, was drawn into these cultural debates, although its moralizing never satisfied disdainful intellectuals or suspicious tsarist officials.

Learning assumed many forms as the urban population adapted to its needs, real or presumed. Townspeople who identified themselves as enlightened relied on formal education and scientific knowledge in organizing cultural activities for the laboring population. It is tempting to adopt their point of view and to assume that their work alone reshaped Russian urban culture. However, I have sought to avoid this assumption. The public images by which urban dwellers gave meaning to their lives were not the sole product of civic activists. Learning emerged from behavior as well as from texts. In other words, the way of life of the laboring population offered an understandable model to the "strangers," who needed to make a place for themselves in the migrant city. Khitrovka, besides being a den of iniquity, was also a place where migrant laborers learned of work opportunities, found the means if necessary to avoid police patrols, and could hope to establish ties with zemliaki . Similar places existed in other migrant cities. Their practices were not sure protection from misery in an urban world where finding work remained the essential condition for survival. Still, these practices were far more easily learned by the newcomers to the city that the symbolic language and learning of those who defined enlightenment in literary and artistic terms.

The processes of acculturation operated at times independently and at times in competition with the organized programs of instruction. Some cultural activists promoted what they understood to be Russia's traditional order. Others worked within narrowly defined cultural fields. Still others sought to begin a profound, revolutionary reordering of public life. The migrant cities were the principal arena where these programs could be introduced and tested. In cultural activities the Russian city was the principal symbol of the country's future.

Traditional popular rituals associated with Orthodoxy and the autocracy continued to be observed in the postreform years. It is difficult to judge from contemporary reports whether their message of patriotism and piety retained a strong hold over the urban population. Provincial governors invariably stressed the public enthusiasm that greeted official receptions, the canonization of bishops, and celebrations of tsarist holidays, which they extolled as "triumphal" and "magnificent" spectacles. Nicholas II's coronation in 1896 made the union of the Orthodox church and the tsarist state visible in all cathedral towns, where celebrations were held on the designated day of the Moscow pageantry. The bishop of Saratov described with satisfaction the "triumphant bell ringing" in that city that opened the

ceremonies in honor of the tsar's coronation. It was followed by public prayers in the cathedral square, which was "filled by a large crowd of common people, military, and civil servants," and ended with a religious procession. He noted that all schools held their own ceremonies, which were accompanied by "religious and patriotic songs." [27] It would be a mistake to minimize the importance of these popular ceremonies. They had monopolized the public life of Russian cities for generations and continued to figure prominently in urban practices. For example, the movement of pilgrims through religious centers such as Kiev involved hundreds of thousands of people yearly.

Major religious processions ( krestnye khody ) occurred regularly in large and small towns as part of Orthodox activities. A Russian ethnographer concludes that such ceremonies were the principal "forms of public activity available to the common people." [28] Some townspeople had recourse to such traditional religious rituals for protection against diseases. In 1892 a Simbirsk physician sarcastically reported that a "large crowd" participated in a religious procession on a hot summer day to appease "God's wrath," which had been manifested in the cholera epidemic that year. Not unexpectedly, at the end of the ceremony the thirsty participants rushed to drink untreated river and well water. The result, he claimed, was a disastrous rise in the number of cholera cases. [29] His obvious disapproval may well have been shared by other urban dwellers who were more inclined to rely on medical expertise than priestly intercession in their daily lives. But the evidence of anticholera riots that year suggests that medical science could not claim to have numerous converts among laborers in provincial towns.

One indication of the decline in the presence of the state and the church in the Russian migrant city is provided by the architectural reordering of urban space. In Alexander II's reign tsarist authorities abandoned the effort to impose a classical order on streets and buildings of the central city. Parade grounds and administrative buildings remained symbols of autocratic magnificence and power, but after the rapid expansion of the migrant cities they held a diminished place in urban life. As business developed and new residential and manufacturing districts appeared on the city outskirts,

[27] "Otchet o sostoianii Saratovskoi eparkhii za 1896," TsGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 1639 (1897), 2.

[28] L. A. Anokhina and M. N. Shmeleva, Byt gorodskogo naseleniia srednei polosy RSFSR v proshlom i nastoiashchem (Moscow, 1977), 259.

[29] Cited in Nancy Frieden, "The Russian Cholera Epidemic, 1892-93, and Medical Professionalization," Journal of Social History 10 (June 1977): 546.

the centers of tsarist and church activities ceased being the focal point of the city.

Contemporary writers and artists are eloquent witnesses to the new architectural identity of the city. For Fedor Dostoevsky the effort to make the city conform to a plan represented a product of alienated intellectuals such as Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment . Living in the Haymarket, Petersburg's worst slum, Raskolnikov dreamed of a "Napoleonic utilitarian plan for rebuilding the city" that would correct the deplorable behavior of the inhabitants. [30] In his journalist's writings of the 1870s the novelist celebrated the "increasingly dynamic life of the city," whose essential qualities were "intensive street movement," crowds, and "an abundance of signs and posters." [31] In words that might be read as the epitaph of the imperially planned city, the poet Vasily Briusov remarked late in the nineteenth century that "because architecture cannot fight life, it must submit to it." [32]

By the close of the century some church leaders were aware that their religious rituals and messages had little influence on the population of the migrant city. Orthodox piety confronted a way of life that was dominated by the workplace and the tavern. Certain Orthodox bishops made this note a prominent feature of their yearly reports to the Holy Synod. The bishop of Ekaterinoslav, one of the industrial centers of the Ukraine, proclaimed in 1902 that "urban civilization" was the enemy. Although he was concerned about those he called "depraved workers," he was particularly outraged at the people who, "calling themselves educated [ intelligentnye ], treat questions of faith and related duties often with complete indifference and treat the priesthood with scorn and even hatred." [33]

Vituperative judgments such as his were a condemnation of the social forces that were remaking the city. The 1890 report of the bishop of Kherson province, whose capital was Odessa, portrayed the Russian city in the lurid colors of Sodom and Gomorrah; it was a place where "church holidays, family life, and work" were all neglected. His philippic identified the cause of the decline of Christian morality and social virtue in the very conditions of life in the migrant city, where the "lower [classes], lacking a permanent place of residence," are drawn to "countless numbers of taverns, restaurants, beer halls, [and] bars, [which were all] open until late at

[30] See Adele Lindenmyer, "Raskolnikov's City and the Napoleonic Plan," Slavic Review 35 (March 1976): 46.

[31] E. A. Borisova, Russkaia arkhitektura vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow, 1979), 166.

[33] "Otchet o sostoianii Ekaterinoslavskoi eparkhii za 1902," TsGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 1951, 14.

night." [34] From his spiritual perspective a secular popular culture had become an integral and very undesirable part of the new city. By implication, his message called for new measures of cultural control. Among these measures, schooling occupied first place.

Schooling in the Migrant City

One mark of modernity in the late-nineteenth-century Russian city was literacy, and schooling was the principal tool for its achievement. The assumption that a modern city, in order to function, needed a population that had ready access to print culture was a generally shared culturist attitude among Russian elites. [35] City dwellers occupied a special position in educational affairs because literacy was so closely associated with urban employment and urban cultural activities. In contrast to squalor and drunkenness the urban school represented sobriety and industriousness. In the midst of poverty and insecurity it held out the promise of an improved living and a better social position. In cities that were deeply divided between the Westernized culture of the elites and the folk culture of the migrants, the school appeared to be the means both to open channels of communication between these two cultures and to form a common set of beliefs by which the urban population (or a substantial portion thereof) could find common cause.

Despite fears of the subversive effects of popular schooling, tsarist officials gave strong support to urban elementary and secondary education. Intellectuals volunteered considerable time and effort to spread literacy among the laboring population. The merchant and activist municipal factions, although deeply divided on other issues, united on the urgent need to finance elementary public schooling. This consensus emerged in a Moscow duma motion in 1863. It proclaimed that "there is not a single public need that can compare with the need for public education. Every other need

[34] "Otchet o sostoianii Khersonskoi eparkhii za 1890," TsGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 1369, 28-29.

[35] The meaning I give to Russian culturism closely resembles the definition proposed by Jeffrey Brooks, who emphasizes the importance of "shared literary values" in defining a "cultural identity" among educated Russians. For educated Russians service to the people necessarily meant the diffusion of these values and this identity into whatever social context their work took them; see Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, 1985), 317-18. My focus on urbanism places special stress on the contentious role of culturism when confronted with other modes of cultural representation in the urban community.

can be postponed for a time in view of the unsatisfactory state of municipal revenues, but this need is not deferable." [36]

In a country where elementary schooling had remained a low priority in public affairs until the mid nineteenth century and where the laboring population of the cities was expanding at a rapid rate, the success of the campaign for mass schooling depended on considerable financial and human investments. In the next half-century the results of urban education did not meet the high expectations of educators. However, we ought to measure the success of this endeavor in terms of popular need as well as in terms of culturist hopes. Efforts to expand and improve urban schooling began in the reform years in both the Ministry of Education and the municipalities. Tsarist urban educational policies changed dramatically in the reign of Alexander II. Under the 1785 statute, municipalities had had the right to fund district schools, but a lack of interest in the inflexible and formalistic study program had made these schools solely a state affair. Urban literacy instruction was carried out in the so-called free schools or by tutoring. These informal measures appear to have been relatively effective in spreading learning among the commercial classes, but could not meet the needs of migrant cities in the industrial age.

Two factors altered this situation in the reform years. First, the Ministry of Education prepared a new statute on urban elementary education. Introduced in 1872, it permitted the formation of several types of schools, which were intended, in the words of the minister, to "satisfy the needs of the local urban population." These schools varied widely in academic rigor and in the number of teachers. The range extended from "one-class" schools offering the most basic program of instruction to the advanced (and expensive) "four-class" schools. The choice of program was intentionally flexible to allow municipalities "in the large and rich cities" to form schools with "a greater number of classes and in the poor and small towns fewer classes." [37] In addition, the ministry proposed that the municipalities assume the funding of the state's schools. Curricular decisions remained the prerogative of the ministry but by comparison with the prereform era the municipalities enjoyed far greater flexibility in choosing the type of elementary school that they judged to be appropriate to their community. In effect, the ministry sought to enroll the best people of the cities in support

[36] Quoted in Walter Hanchett, "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study in Municipal Self-Government" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1964), 430.

[37] "Otchet ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia," TsGIA, f. 733, op. 167, d. 62 (1870), 94-96; the discussions leading to the 1872 statute are examined in Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dimitry Tolstoi (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 215-25.

of its campaign for schooling and expected these people to find the means to pay for that campaign. The ministry also had need of the participation and funds of other groups, both private and public. In addition to the municipalities, the financial patrons of regular schools included merchant societies, factory owners, and individual businessmen. In the 1880s and 1890s the state made a particular effort to develop the parish schools that were run by the Orthodox church. Culturist critics condemned the elementary schooling of the church for its mediocrity, but it did become a real force in the campaign to spread urban learning. [38]

Second, in the 1860s a spontaneous movement for the expansion of formal elementary schools appeared in provincial towns throughout the country. Even before the ministry altered its statute on urban education, municipalities had begun to fund a large number of new elementary schools; most of these schools were the basic one-class variety; their numbers increased at a rate of thirty to forty per year. The readiness to expand urban schooling continued to the end of the century, although the movement slowed appreciably as a result of the 1880s depression. On average fifty to sixty new one-class schools were added each year (see chart 1). [39] Moscow had fifty-five municipal schools by 1882 and Saratov had a total of twenty. The numbers increased in the late 1890s but comprehensive data are not available for the years after 1893. Kharkov's merchant party, elected in 1893, doubled the number of elementary schools. Saratov's duma, which the provincial governor claimed was filled "primarily with trading people," transformed most of its schools into the elaborate four-class variety and enrolled 4,500 pupils. At the end of the decade one local writer affirmed that 90 percent of school-age children were in the town's schools. [40] Once a distant dream, universal schooling became the official goal of Moscow's duma: in 1896 it passed a resolution in support of universal primary education for the city's children.

The impulse behind the drive for urban schooling was both visionary and practical. By the close of the nineteenth century elementary education appeared to be an essential part of reshaping popular urban culture. In the mid 1890s a Moscow school inspector could hope for widespread support for his call for universal literacy. He claimed that popular ignorance was no

[38] The only balanced study of the parish school movement is Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools (Berkeley, 1986), chap. 6.

[39] The trend for other types of elementary schools would probably vary, but the measure provided by the growth of one-class schools represents the most comprehensive common indicator of increased municipal involvement in public schooling.

[40] "Nachal'noe narodnoe obrazovanie v Saratove," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 21 (1899):52-53.

Chart 1. Growth of Urban Schooling: Number of New Municipal One-Class Schools, 1860-93 Note: In 1856, there were 492 schools; in 1893, 2,227. Source: F. A. Fal'bork and V. I. Charnoluskii, eds., Nachal'noe narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1900), l:x, table 1.

longer nourished by "sorcerers, magicians, religious dissenters, [and] wanderers [ stranniki , that is, religious zealots]" but warned that it had found new sources in "the taverns, the village kulak, the factory, the inn, and other products of contemporary economic relations." The result, he warned, was "degeneration and decay." [41] His apocalyptic version of modernity echoed the uneasiness among elites in the West and in Russia at the consequences of industrialization and urbanization. As much as the Kherson bishop or the visitors to Khitrovka, this Moscow educator was very aware and fearful of the strangeness of the city that was taking shape about him.

Moscow's duma, like those of other migrant cities, heeded this and similar calls (although we need not presume that it accepted the doomsday part of the argument). Smaller towns, however, lacked the resources and the commitment to undertake an educational crusade. In 1890 the Ministry of Education admitted that nearly half of the old district schools (approximately four hundred) had not been taken over by municipalities. It attributed this failure primarily to the "insufficiency of funds" of many towns. [42] It omitted to mention that the relatively ambitious curriculum of the district schools entailed an expense that the leaders of small towns judged to be an extravagance. The old informal methods, or the simple one-class level of schooling, sufficed for these town elders and presumably for their small electoral constituency.

In the migrant towns, however, economic opportunities provided a powerful incentive for expanded elementary education. There was a strong demand for free public (or parish) schooling. One simple indicator of this demand was the number of unsatisfied school applications in large urban centers. Although the evidence is incomplete, the figures suggest that the interest in elementary schooling was growing rapidly, more so than the financial support that municipalities were willing or able to commit to this activity. In Moscow in 1877 there were six hundred more admission requests than there were openings, and in 1890, despite a sevenfold rise in municipal expenditures on schooling, there were 2,600 excess admission requests. At the end of the 1890s Kharkov's schools, which had doubled

[41] Cited in Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 108; as Robert Nye has pointed out, in the late nineteenth century in Western Europe "degeneration" became a very fashionable code word to decry the conditions of the urban masses; see Robert Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, 1984), esp. 330-32.

[42] Otchet ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia za 1890 (St. Petersburg, 1894), 190-91.

in number since 1893, still had to refuse admission to five hundred children. [43]

The testimony of school directors and instructors, which was collected in a survey by the Petersburg Literacy Committee in 1894-95, reveals the social pressures behind the increase in the number of requests for public schooling. In words that echoed those of many other reports a Moscow priest who directed a large parish school concluded that "the huge demand for the creation of free schools" was caused by the "great size and the poverty of the parish's population." [44] The unstated expectation of the parents who sought to enroll their children was that the basic numeracy and literacy taught by these schools would serve to open access to employment for their offspring. For these parents the city was a place of work, harsh competition for well-paying jobs, and new opportunities for the educated. Second-guild merchants claimed that their "large families and extreme poverty" made financial aid indispensable from their merchant society, to whom they sent many petitions requesting support. [45] Their appeals reveal more about their eagerness for formal learning for their sons than about their standard of living. Their alleged "extreme poverty" bore no resemblance to that of the migrant laborers.

Unsatisfied demands for schooling and appeals for aid are indicators that the settled urban population had new hopes for the future and that these hopes centered on their children's educational preparation for work. Such sentiments probably had more influence on decisions to expand the number of urban schools than the dramatic warnings from the educated elite of the dire effects of ignorance. The combination of popular support and official encouragement brought action from municipal dumas. By the turn of the century several thousand elementary schools (primarily of the one- and two-class variety) with over one-half million pupils existed in urban Russia. [46]

The manner in which learning worked its way from classrooms and instructors into popular culture depended less on curriculum and adminis-

[43] E. A. Pavliuchenko, "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie v 70-80-kh godakh XIX veka" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1956), 217, 255; Novoe vremia , 18 December 1899.

[44] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f., 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 321.

[45] Cited in V. I. Laverychev, Krupnaia burzhuaziia v poreformennoi Rossii, 1861-1900 (Moscow, 1974), 65.

[46] Nachal'noe narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii , ed. F. A. Fal'bork and V. I. Charnoluskii (St. Petersburg, 1900, 1:vii; this four-volume publication summarized the essential quantitative results of the survey (based on over thirty thousand replies) but omitted the perceptive comments of the respondents, which were often included in the completed forms.

trative regulations than on the social dynamics of urban society. Ben Eklof, who has studied Russian peasant schooling, reminds us that the acquisition of literacy and formal schooling are separate phenomena, that the ability to learn is not identical with basic reading, and that parents as well as teachers are influential actors in setting the content and the extent of school learning that is transmitted to the pupils. [47] I take these warnings seriously in examining urban schooling even though there were substantial differences in the social and economic contexts of urban and rural schooling. Our knowledge of the concerns of pupils and parents comes largely from the testimony of teachers and the statistical data that the Ministry of Education collected. The extensive survey of elementary education, which was conducted by mail in 1894 by the Petersburg Literacy Committee, permitted instructors throughout the country to make clear their own ambitious plans as well as the support or opposition they encountered within their communities. These somewhat random clues indicate that at the level of elementary schooling educational authorities and urban parents had substantially different expectations.

Urban schoolteachers were both agents of the tsarist educational system and, to some extent at least, proselytizers in their own right. They created a set of sometimes contradictory objectives for their pupils. Echoes of the values of the Russian intelligentsia sounded in the words of one Moscow school instructor who was an avowed enemy of scholasticism. He defined the goal of teaching, which he presented as the true ambition of his pupils, as "a level of development necessary for an understanding of the surrounding world [ priroda ] and for a critical [ soznatel'nyi ] understanding of books." [48] His idealism, which supposed that his pupils would become participants in an interactive cultural environment, bore only a remote resemblance to the prescribed curriculum of these schools. It reflected the view, which was widespread in Russia and the West, that cultural uniformity was desirable. Confronting popular dialects and urban jargon, the teachers hoped, in the words of a Moscow girls' school teacher, to teach uncultured youth not only "to speak and write Russian correctly" but also "to understand literary Russian speech." [49] In this sense elementary schooling and literacy meant basic acculturation into the world of the intellectuals.

At another level the teachers' proselytizing sought a unity based on

[47] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , esp. chap. 1.

[48] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 158.

[49] Cited in Christine Hinshaw, "The Soul of the School: The Professionalization of Urban Schoolteachers in St. Petersburg and Moscow" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1986), 123.

national identity. This political mission, which was also common to public schooling in Western nations, assumed special importance to authorities in the Russian cities because of their fears of social conflict and political subversion. The school curriculum invariably included Orthodox teaching and, usually, elementary Russian history; these were the means to transmit the two official virtues of piety and patriotism. They constituted the essence of learning for the instructor—cleric in a Kiev parish school. He affirmed his commitment to teaching his pupils the "national language" and to conveying to them that "the most holy duty of a well-raised person is faith in God, lofty patriotic sentiment toward the throne and the fatherland, [and] the spirit of love toward one's neighbors and one's family." [50] His language, which sounds stilted and arrogant to our skeptical era, echoed the official nationalism of the tsarist government. Although backed by the power of state and the authority of tradition, it was as remote from the mechanical exercises involved in numeracy and literacy as was the cultural idealism of the Moscow instructor.

Urban social conditions played a decisive role in determining the impact of elementary learning. Schools were part of a community whose members were deeply divided by rank and wealth. Powerful voices among tsarist educators spoke in favor of schooling according to social standing. It was evident in the comments of the director of a Voronezh one-class school, who was convinced that "because almost all the pupils belong to families of artisans and peasants, the students of the school fully satisfy them." [51]

These varied educational objectives provide one indication of the competing cultural agendas for the Russian city. Schooling proposed language skills and basic concepts with which educated Russians (in their capacity as officials, intellectuals, or radicals) could hope to form a common discourse with an urban population whose social conditions and awareness of their own place in society were in rapid flux. At the same time it provided, at a very basic level, practical and vocational skills that offered immediate occupational rewards in economically dynamic urban centers. For many Russian townspeople these two objectives were of unequal importance.

The indirect evidence we possess on popular educational goals suggests that none of these authoritative opinions expressed the dominant attitude of townspeople toward elementary education. When the opportunity arose to place their offspring in more advanced schools, parents seized the chance—very different behavior than most rural families, who appear to

[50] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 445, 82.

[51] Ibid., d. 321, p. 19.

have been convinced for both cultural and economic reasons that only the most essential learning was desirable. [52] By the 1890s a skeletal framework of a "ladder" of urban education was in place. Indicating the openings for his graduates, a Kiev teacher in a one-class school cited an array of possibilities that included "the two-class school, the artisan school, the medical orderly school, and, for the best students, the realshule [technical] secondary school]." [53] That these schools represented real opportunities to townspeople is apparent in the enrollment figures. One of the best networks of secondary technical schools were the railroad institutes: over thirty of these institutes were founded in the 1870s and 1880s. The director of the Kiev railroad school, proud of the fact that all his teachers were gymnazium graduates, remarked in 1894 that every year his institution of 250 pupils had to turn away from fifty to one-hundred applicants. [54]

These figures, although minute in proportion to the population of youth in a city like Kiev, suggest that families in the migrant cities were aware that education promised economic and social advancement. At some level economic need and social constraints led parents to set a limit to such hopes. A note of fatalism appears in the judgment of a Moscow director, whose pupils' future beyond his school appeared determined by the urban world to which they belonged. "The poor parents," he forecast, "will place their boys in apprenticeship, traders will put their boys in commerce, and the well-off [ sostoiatel'nye ] will put their children in other educational institutions." [55] Prospects for new and better jobs were present in the migrant cities thanks to the multiplication of public services and economic activities. The inspirational motto for this open door to the future was the urban intellectual's exhortation to his son to "study or you won't find decent work" (at least such was the analysis of a rural schoolteacher contrasting rural and urban attitudes toward schooling). [56] Popular literature imitated and shaped reality in this respect. The success of the Russian translation of Smiles's inspirational book, Self-Help , is one indication. Another indication is found in the popular novels of the late century, which contained, in Jeffrey Brooks's careful reading, a prominent theme of "education for concrete practical aims." [57]

The hope that successful pupils would find "decent jobs" was under-

[52] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 440-41.

[53] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 445, 15.

[54] Ibid., 174-75.

[55] Ibid., d. 575, 193.

[56] Cited in Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 253.

[57] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read , 282.

mined by social conservatism and cultural prejudice. Anti-Semitism restricted to a handful the number of pupils from the Yiddish elementary schools in the Pale of Settlement who could hope to enter more advanced (Russian) public institutions. Urban schooling was as diverse as the population that was moving into and through the cities and was as much subject to these influences as it was a force in its own right. By the late century the composition of urban elementary schools resembled the social profile of the typical migrant city; among the 8,500 pupils in Moscow's schools in the mid-1880s nearly 40 percent came from the petty bourgeoisie and almost as many came from the peasantry. [58] Both families and teachers set clear limits to the formal learning of children from these groups. One cleric-instructor claimed in the mid 1890s that, because his new parish school experienced an "enormous influx of parents seeking to enroll their children," the "common people" [ prostoi narod ] were aware of "the necessity of studies." [59] Implicit in his observation was the expectation that education would not alter the lowly social standing of his pupils.

Cultural conservatism and poverty meant that the restrictions on learning for girls were more confining than those for boys. In the mid-1890s Moscow's school population included as many girls as boys, but girls remained tightly bound to the family and there were few occupations for which elementary education could prepare them. An Ekaterinoslav instructor of a one-class girl's school explained that her "poorer" graduates "satisfy themselves with this level of education" but added that those who entered the advanced school in town "take the special sewing section." [60] Employment in positions such as seamstress, governess, or instructor in a girl's school was the best that girls could hope for. The genteel poverty offered by these trades was a more dignified status in the community than that of their families—most schoolgirls were from the petty bourgeoisie—but it represented a paltry reward by comparison to the possibilities increasingly available to boys. Gender was an obstacle to schooling itself; girls continued to assume special family responsibilities. In the opinion of one Moscow teacher, the girls were frequently absent from class because they lacked "warm clothes and [because they had] to replace their mothers in caring for younger brothers and sisters." Another teacher attributed their responsibilities at home to "sick or drunk adult members of the

[58] "Vedomost' o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 3-4 (1886):154-55.

[59] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 211.

[60] Ibid., d. 371, 22.

family." [61] Boys were spared this duty because they were not constrained by the family domain.

The indifference on the part of many parents toward "higher culture" set the limits to the boys' contact with formal schooling. Eklof argues that the low percentage of graduates from rural schools was not the result of the need for child labor but because the full program of studies was irrelevant to peasant occupations. [62] Ironically, a similar condition emerged in the cities, albeit in a very different context and to a lesser degree. Although urban schools were able to attract a large and growing proportion of school-age children, at the end of the century they were nonetheless unable to hold more than half of them until graduation. However, the situation appears to have been an improvement over the 1870s. In 1878 a Ministry of Education survey of urban schools found that the schools in the major cities lost three to six times as many pupils as they graduated. [63] The result was that the large majority of pupils, whose ages clustered between eight and eleven, were in the class sections that covered the first two years of study. In that period they acquired what an educator from the southern Russian town of Rostov-on-Don called "the rudiments of reading and writing." [64] Thus, for many Russian townspeople the urban print culture signified little more than the acquisition of basic numeracy and literacy.

Undoubtedly, parents' decisions to limit their children's education involved calculations of relative opportunity costs. In explaining the high dropout rate, educators and pupils often referred to poverty, but this explanation carried with it the parents' perception of their current needs and the future prospects of their offspring, on whom they relied for security in their old age. When asked why they did not complete their schooling, a majority of young Moscow workers polled at the turn of the century referred to a parental decision; at times they explained the decision on the basis of "poverty," but more often they associated it with the parents' will. [65] As in rural areas, formal elementary schooling in the cities did not by itself disrupt family and social patterns of behavior and attitudes. As a consequence, both the critical reading faculties that the Moscow factory

[61] Ibid., d. 575, 128, 157.

[62] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , chaps. 11, 12.

[63] "Otchet ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia," TsGIA, f. 733, op. 117, d. 68 (1878), 311: the end-of-the-century data come primarily from my reworking of the archival data in the 1894 survey for urban schools in Moscow, Ekaterinoslav, Kiev, and Voronezh provinces.

[64] Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 25 (January 1903):69.

[65] Cited in Rashin, Formirovanie rabochego klassa Rossii (Moscow, 1958), 592.

instructor sought and the elaborate piety and patriotism that the cleric-teacher preferred had little chance of shaping the malleable minds of their young pupils.

Having acquired the rudiments of reading and writing, town youths had an increasingly diverse and rich print culture available to them. To the extent that publications in the cities were accessible to this minimally educated public—a topic I discuss later—a close tie existed between the learning conveyed by formal schooling and the urban literary culture in the cities. The culturist aspirations of educators worked their influences on youths in school, but an increasingly varied array of readings outside the classroom were also important. When one instructor noted that many of the parents of the pupils in his factory school "subscribe to magazines and newspapers," he unwittingly identified a key explanation for the presence of those pupils in his class. [66] Urban schooling was a part of a larger process of cultural adaptation to the new city. Those families with newspaper and magazine subscriptions had found one means by which to expand their own horizons as well as those of their children. In their own way they had entered the world of print culture; by sending their offspring to the factory school, they were ensuring that their children would be part of that world too.

Those who placed their hopes for the future in an enlightened city promoted cultural activities that made education accessible to adults. The movement for literacy schools, which was directed at the laboring population, was funded and led by volunteers. Like other popular causes in those decades, this movement attracted educated Russians who were aware that their cultural activities were pathetically meager when compared with both the need for action and their own idealistic language. An easy target for cruel satire, their work reveals a great deal about the efforts to reshape urban culture. Volunteer cultural work attracted some of the civic activists, particularly in the field of teaching the skills associated with basic literacy. This area served as a test of the commitment of educated Russians to social progress. In the early 1860s, when municipal support for elementary schooling first appeared, a movement for adult literacy schools also emerged.

This first period of volunteer schooling revealed the traits that would characterize the movement throughout its existence. The campaign was the product of a cultural vision that, in the words of one young idealist, literacy

[66] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 574, 232.

would let a "beneficial light" shine on the people. [67] Just what this light would reveal depended on the political persuasion of the volunteers. Some were openly hostile to the tsarist regime. In 1862 this hostility led the tsarist government to ban the movement it had authorized just two years previously.

During their brief existence the two hundred literacy schools sustained the hope of their own organizers and teachers that this form of idealism met popular needs and united the urban masses and educated society. One of the women teachers recalled later that volunteer teaching of basic numeracy and literacy constituted "the very first outlet for our aspiration for work, the public good, [and] contacts with the people." [68] Although her vision drew no distinctions between classes of people, literacy schools served the laboring population of the capitals and the provincial centers. They met on workers' one free day of the week and received the title of Sunday schools. For their part, the pupils fixed the goal of this schooling as the acquisition as quickly as possible of the "rudimentary skills" for life in the city. The disparity between the idealism of many teachers and the vocational objectives of the students was enormous.

Despite tsarist fears of political subversion, the authorities were not prepared to ban entirely volunteer efforts to raise urban literacy levels. In 1874 the government reauthorized the literacy schools; its readiness to take this step suggests that the tsarist regime placed a high priority on the diffusion of basic literacy skills among the population. The Ministry of Education reorganized the rules on the organization of the schools to control the suspicious enthusiasm of the volunteer teachers while still tolerating their presence. The hostility of the authorities remained a serious obstacle to volunteer schools; in 1889 Moscow's authoritarian governor-general, for reasons that are not clear, forced the city duma to close nine of the existing fifteen adult schools. [69] Sporadic tsarist repression did not dissuade the volunteers, and in fact it may have encouraged them. Both the government and the volunteers shared a conviction that a literacy movement was a necessary part of the campaign to spread elementary education among the population.

Although tsarist regulations made no distinction between city and coun-

[67] TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 1, d. 74 (1862), 191; see also Reginald Zelnik," The Sunday-School Movement in Russia, 1859-62," Journal of Modern History 27 (June 1965): 151-70.

[68] Z. Bazileva, "Arkhiv semei Stasovykh," in Revoliutsionnaia situatsiia (Moscow, 1965), 439.

[69] L. F. Pisar'kova, "Deiatel'nost' Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy v oblasti meditsiny, narodnogo obrazovaniia i obshchestvennogo prezreniia posle 1892," Problemy istorii SSSR 7 (1978): 137.

tryside, the centers of volunteer work were once again the provincial capitals. At times factory owners promoted adult education for their workers, but most often literacy committees took the initiative. The leader (until its forced reorganization in 1895) was the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee. By the end of the century there were almost three hundred schools in seventy-five cities, and total enrollment was estimated to be fifty thousand pupils. St. Petersburg and Moscow were the most active centers of the literacy movement, each with over twenty schools. [70] The literacy campaign, although numerically small in comparison to public schooling, played a significant role in raising urban literacy and in encouraging hopes for an enlightened urban population.

Idealism was once again a powerful motivation for the organizers and teachers. If the attitude of one participant in the Kharkov literacy committee is representative, to become a volunteer was to prove one's rightful place among "the best representatives of the intelligentsia." In his opinion, "Among former and present inhabitants of Kharkov [every name] known for scientific or public activities" was present on the list of members. [71] The Kharkov committee's membership had known both lean and prosperous years. The latter came at the beginning of its existence and at the end of the century, when it counted almost seven hundred members. [72] Its activities, which were typical of the provincial centers, included the founding of both a men's and a women's school. The women's school was specifically intended for girls working in clothing enterprises "because a large portion of the girls of the poor urban population choose the sewing trade." [73] This type of activity was "small deeds" without bureaucratic interference; it was visible evidence that intellectuals and the urban poor could find a common cause.

The lofty ideals of the organizers of the adult literacy schools were far removed from the practical concerns of the pupils. The evidence suggests that most of the adult pupils shared the same single-minded concern for the acquisition of rudimentary skills that the school children in elementary public schools exhibited. The 1894 survey cited earlier contacted some of these schools. The director of one Moscow women's literacy school made the somewhat disabused judgment that "very many [pupils] are satisfied with acquiring the ability to read 'any' little book, to write notes, to cal-

[70] L. M. Ivanov, "Ideologicheskoe vozdeistvie," in Rossiiskii proletariat: Oblik, bor'ba, gegemoniia , ed. L. Ivanov (Moscow, 1970), 331-32.

[71] A. Didrikhson, Istoricheskii obzor deiatel'nosti Khar'kovskogo obshchestva rasprostraneniia v narode gramotnosti (Kharkov, 1911), 9.

[72] Ibid., 243.

[73] Ibid., 59.

culate bills, [and] to do arithmetic; [they] leave school after one or two years." He also noted that his two hundred pupils were largely migrants (three-fourths belonged to the peasant estate), some working in factories, others in workshops, and that they possessed the rudiments of learning before joining his school. [74] For the migrants, schooling was part of an effort to find for themselves as secure a place as possible in their new urban world. The great majority of the pupils in the literacy schools were young; in the mid 1880s only 15 percent were over seventeen years old. [75] The effort to create an integrated urban literate culture reached those whose first priority was to acquire early in life the skills that would be most useful for a successful career in the city.

The encounter with the volunteer teachers left an abiding impression on a few of the pupils. One worker, who recalled that most of his young Petersburg factory friends preferred recreation to learning, recorded his own astonishment that "people of another world [ sreda ]" would "teach for free, that is, solely for the sake of bringing knowledge to the people." [76] In that encounter his search for enlightenment led him into the Marxist revolutionary movement. In the same spirit, another Petersburg worker noted in a school essay that as a result of his education he was able to see "with more open eyes how people of other lands live and work." [77] He expected that this understanding would become a guideline to social and political action. It was a hope that some of their teachers were more than willing to satisfy. These cultural ambitions exceeded by far the goal of most pupils to learn to read "any little book." But both objectives were capable of remaking, in different ways, urban popular culture.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Russian migrant cities were centers of intensive educational activity. The spread of formal schooling was the most important part of this process. Officials, civic activists, and intellectuals endeavored—albeit with very different goals—to incorporate the largest possible proportion of townspeople into a print culture. The goals of those who organized the campaigns to spread the basic skills of learning are relatively easy to discern. However, it is far more difficult to assess the impact of the acquisition of these new cultural tools on millions of individuals. The subject, one that extends far beyond the scope of this study, is explored very thoughtfully in Eklof's examination of rural school-

[74] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 575, 2-9.

[75] "Vedomost' o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 3-4 (1886): 158-59.

[76] I. V. Babushkin, Vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1925), 35-36.

[77] Cited in I. A. Shuster, Peterburgskie rabochie (Leningrad, 1976), 54-55.

ing. He points out the problematical significance of the simple measure of literacy (that is, the ability to read) in assessing the significance of changes in literacy rates. Nonetheless, literacy figures remain the only quantitative indicators that are capable of summarizing such a massive process.

These indices suggest that by century's end the majority of the urban population had access to some form of print culture. The 1897 census found that 60 percent of the population of migrant cities was literate, a substantial increase from the mid century. Literacy varied enormously among age and social groups. Many adult migrants were illiterate and, especially in the reform years, the intensive migration from the countryside to the cities had undoubtedly slowed the increase in literacy levels. There is good reason to believe, however, that by the close of the nineteenth century rural families understood that basic literacy and numeracy were a valuable skill for urban migration, and many found schooling for their offspring. [78] To judge by the conscription reports and by the factory records of young workers (most of whom were migrants), by the 1890s literacy had spread among almost all young men in the cities. [79] The migrant cities in these crude terms were becoming places where the printed word could reach most of the adult population.

Whether or not this access to the world of print culture entailed a fundamental change in beliefs and learning skills is a question that cannot be answered with certainty. The evidence is scanty and contradictory. Urban daily life offered both practical and leisure-time inducements for the urban population to use the rudimentary skills that they acquired in elementary education. Scholars have subsequently confirmed what firsthand experience revealed, namely, that "achievement in handling the tools of reading and writing is one of the most important axes of social differentiation in modern societies." [80] The retention of literacy and numeracy was a perennial problem among the rural population, but it does not seem to have been an issue among the urban population. The return to the village of the successful urban migrant was potentially an ample reward for literacy. In the city, proof that literacy and numeracy were rewarded in both work and leisure was everywhere available. In this sense cultural modernity was present among the urban population.

Tsarist officials, religious leaders, and educators were deeply divided on

[78] Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools , 268.

[79] "Gramotnost' i stepen' obrazovaniia prizyvnykh," Sbornik statei po voprosam otnosiashchimsia k zhizni russkikh gorodov 11 (1901): 258-61; S. V. Bernstein-Kogan, Chislennost', sostav i polozhenie Peterburgskikh rabochikh (St. Petersburg, 1910), 66.

[80] Jack Goody, "The Consequences of Literacy," in Literacy in Traditional Societies , ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 58.

the question of the moral efficacy of schooling and literacy. No educated Russian aware of the migrant strangers in their city would mourn the decline of superstition as a result of education (if indeed such were the case), but what was its effect on religious faith? Formal learning had its own practical rewards, but could it counteract the forces of the tavern and the brothel to instill the desirable personal traits of sobriety and industriousness? The debates about learning and popular culture in the cities touched on issues of personal conduct, labor relations, and public morality. Although some cultural leaders found hope in the spread of schools and popular reading materials, others sounded a somber note. They worried that "decay and decadence" would overwhelm their crusade for enlightenment.

More sanguine observers, however, stressed the spiritual benefits of learning. The bishop of Saratov seemed to have constructed his own ideal "city on a hill" when in 1896 he contrasted the "simple, childlike faith" of the "rural, illiterate population" and the heightened "level of religious knowledge" of the Bible, the liturgy, and church ritual that he attributed to the "literate [urban] population." [81] In personal accounts of the impact of schooling on urban youth, some instructors echoed this optimistic view. According to the cleric-instructor in one southern town, the parents of pupils in the parish school were "very pleased that their children can read and sing at church services, and [they] require them to read at home." [82] Thus, learning and urban religious practice were compatible. One instructor of a factory school in a provincial town in Moscow province noted in the 1894 survey that schooling appeared to him to "diminish drunkenness" and to augment his students' interest in "reading more books on religious subjects." [83]

Whatever the veracity of such judgments, they reflected a deeply embedded assumption about print culture. Like the radical intellectual who brought socialist doctrine to pupils in a literacy school or the factory manager who was convinced that literacy, sobriety, and industriousness formed a single personality type, no one spoke out against education; all assumed that the processes of learning were part of the transformation of urban culture as a whole. They were as preoccupied with the moral impact of education as they were concerned about the strange, threatening world

[81] "Otchet o sostoianii Saratovskoi eparkhii za 1896," TsGIA, f. 796, op. 442, d. 1636, 20.

[82] "Anketnye svedeniia o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh," TsGIA, f. 91, op. 3 (1894), d. 448, 3-4.

[83] Ibid., d. 574, 227-28.

of ignorance and decadence in slums such as Khitrovka. Despite evidence that the cultural values and social relations among the urban population could not be controlled, other movements in addition to the campaign for schooling attempted to guide cultural change in the Russian migrant cities.

Sobriety, Learning, and the Penny Press

Although the warnings that a cultural crisis existed in the Russian city of the late nineteenth century were exaggerated, they reflected a widespread consensus that action was necessary. The agreement among cultural activists on the desirability to expand efforts to promote schooling and literacy was in large part produced by these fears. Laments about drunkenness, ignorance, and immorality fit well with contemporary stereotypes of both the "barbarism" of a backward land and the decadence produced by industrialization. The tavern, whose presumed life summed up the nature of the crisis, was the enemy of those who defended godliness, enlightenment, and industriousness. The nascent penny press also appeared to be a nefarious influence on popular culture. Many educated Russians thought that its sensationalist accounts of local events and its emphasis on the "human interest" aspects of urban life were crass commercialism that pandered to base popular tastes. Because of these apprehensions an officially sponsored movement to use the tools of print culture to promote sobriety, moral behavior, and industriousness received strong support in provincial cities. These culturist activities found an audience among the urban population and all to some extent helped to reshape urban culture.

In the last half of the nineteenth century the commercial press became an active cultural force in its own right in the cities. As in Western cities earlier in the century these publications included a national and a penny, or "boulevard," press. Both were commercial operations. The national press, however, set ambitious cultural objectives: it offered an encapsulated version of a "newsworthy" world that extended far beyond the mundane events and ordinary practices of the migrant city. Appealing to a relatively well-to-do public, the commercial success of the national press was assured if it attracted a substantial number of subscriptions, for its sales price was relatively high. The so-called penny press thrived on the commercial formula of low prices, mass sales, and advertising. As a result, it drew its

inspiration from and depended for survival on a large urban reading public. [84]

Both the national and the penny presses were cultural innovations whose essential conditions for survival appeared only in the reform years. In the last half of the nineteenth century, urban education and effective literacy were sufficiently widespread in towns throughout European Russia to create a large market for publications. Public interest in social and political events in Russia was stimulated by the reforms themselves. The government was aware of the need for public and unofficial daily publications, which were conceivable only if they enjoyed relatively few administrative restraints. For all its defects the new censorship statute of 1865 permitted the daily press to become a public forum. Although it set strict limits on the types of events that could be reported, it did not repress the rapid flow of information. It did this in a spirit of what contemporaries called "openness" ( glasnost' ). Newspapers could request the right to publish without "preliminary censorship," but remained subject to various penalties (the most potent of which was a temporary ban on public sales) if censors judged articles to be unacceptable. At about the same time the spread of the railway network opened up a larger market: the speed of distribution was crucial to make daily news salable. In effect readership followed the rail lines beyond the city of publication. Finally, the openness instituted by the tsarist reforms made abundant information on public happenings accessible to journalists. The national press created its own blend of news for its propertied, respectable public. The penny press found greater rewards in unusual daily events such as crimes, fires, and collective fistfights. Scorned by the elite, these stories were the kind of titillating and sensational news that attracted a mass audience.

The migrant cities were both the market for the boulevard and national papers and the source of much of the information out of which the editors created their daily text. In their social diversity, economic dynamism, and multitude of personal stories of work, success, and social ambition, the migrant cities became a sort of theater of everyday drama that was often unfamiliar and unsettling, but potentially enthralling for a public that was curious to learn more about the world by means of these immediate daily events. The ways that newspaper stories satisfied their readers is a problem to which historians of urbanization have no definitive answers. Gunther Barth, studying "city people" in the United States in the nineteenth cen-

[84] The distinction between the national and the penny presses is discussed in detail in Louise McReynolds, "News and Society: Russkoe slovo and the Development of a Mass-Circulation Press in Late Imperial Russia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1984), chap. 1.

tury, argues that the market for newspapers was created by "the longing of urban masses for identity." This psychological theory rests on the dubious assumption that the city destroyed both personal and collective identities. The "need for information about a bewildering place" that he finds among U.S. readers can be more readily explained by the cultural unfamiliarity of the peoples and the places that the migrants encountered in the city. In Russia, as in the United States, the movement of migrants into the cities was largely a collective endeavor that involved the assistance of family, fellow villagers, and countrymen. The migrants were nonetheless strangers in the sense that beyond the few known locations of neighborhood, taverns, and workplace they confronted unknown places and people in the city. Similarly, established townspeople observed the rapid growth and transformation of their cities, which offered them a strange spectacle of vast human proportions. In this sense, one might agree with Barth that "modern city life" was potentially "the greatest news story of the nineteenth century." [85]

Finding the subjects and style of these stories was the work of the pioneering editors of the new national and penny presses. The national press took shape in papers such as Novoe vremia (New Times) and Birzhevye vedomosti (Stock Gazette). These papers found a large circulation by appealing to educated readers and to members of the business community in St. Petersburg, where both were published, and beyond. Besides an emphasis on business news, Birzhevye vedomosti also included extensive coverage of European events and even occasional articles titled "What they are thinking and doing in the provinces." Its contents fitted the interests of its national audience so well that by the end of the century its circulation reached 100,000, the first Russian paper to do so.

The national press became a key ingredient in setting the tone of public opinion ( obshcestvennost' ). All positioned themselves on a political spectrum from conservative to liberal. In this respect their cultural voices helped to create, in Habermas's terms, a literary public sphere in the same decades that the municipalities and other official and informal institutions were contributing to the rise of a civic public sphere. [86]

The national newspapers were also commercial enterprises whose contents and readers were found largely in the merchant city. Their editors sought to sell a cultural product by appealing to the tastes and interests of the propertied and educated public. Thus, some of the stories were cultural

[85] Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1980), 59.

[86] Jürgen Habermas, L'espace public , trans. Mare de Launay (Paris, 1978), 189-93.

creations that involved an "imaginary city" in which the readers believed themselves to be at home. This skill in making the city a known place appears clearly in another genre of popular writing that emerged in those decades, namely, the city guides.

The authors of city guides were in their own way engaged in creating an imaginary city. In their case the city was a place of known, tangible locations with which the readers easily identified. They were responding to the practical needs of a reading public that lived in and traveled to the major Russian cities. Implicit in their collection of factual information was a model of the city with concrete spatial and temporal dimensions. [87] Their books provided "mental maps" for readers with the reading skills demanded by such guides, the money to purchase such relatively inexpensive items, and the powers of imagination to locate the city in space and time. The guides were specifically intended to turn the city into a recognizable location for its residents and, particularly, for outsiders. With a guide in hand, its owner would cease to feel like a stranger in the city.

When the guides began to appear in substantial numbers in the 1860s and 1870s, their content and style were calculated to appeal to a public in need of knowledge. Baedeker's series of guides, which had originated earlier in the century, provided the model. The Russian authors repeatedly stressed the importance of the reader in choosing relevant material. As one guide to Moscow stressed, the reader's verdict" will determine the future of the series." Claiming to contain "all necessary information for travelers," this guide contained the "indispensable addresses" to public agencies and services, the "notable sites" where the city's glorious history could be seen, and a special chapter on the marvelous future that the technical and manufacturing exposition, which was being held at the time of publication, promised. [88] The guides became available for an increasing number of provincial cities later in the century. They gave a cultural and "businesslike" description of urban space. They told dramatic historical stories, assigning to cities their own significant role in the national epic. For example, an Odessa guide stressed its rise from a "half-savage Tatar village" to "progressive" city in less than a century. [89] Travel across the territory that separated these Westernized centers presented a real challenge. A guide to the Volga basin warned its readers that "the development of civilization" in

[87] My interpretation of these city guides is inspired by Iurii Lotman, "K probleme prostranstvennoi semiotiki," in Semiotika prostranstva i prostranstvo semiotiki , ed. I. Lotman, Trudy po znakomym sistemam , no. 19 (Tartu, 1986), 1-16.

[88] V. Dolgorukii and V. Anofriev, Putevoditel' po Moskve i ee okrestnostiam (Moscow, 1872), vi.

[89] Putevoditel' po Odesse (Odessa, 1867), 5.

this area, although unlike "southern Africa," had not brought conditions up to the level of Western Europe or the United States. [90] Although somewhat redefined by Russia's entry into the age of steamboats and railroads, the province remained an exotic, backward territory within which the cities were islands of refuge and comfort.

The practical knowledge necessary to survive and prosper in the merchant city assumed an increasingly important place in the guides. By the end of the century the literary-historical themes had dwindled in importance. The city's role in history mattered less to the readers of those years than its sites of administrative and business affairs. The editor of a new guide to Odessa set a businesslike tone to his work by informing his readers that "following the rule that time is money, I tried to avoid wordiness." His book was intended to be a handbook to daily affairs, for its contents were "prepared on the basis of everyday experience" and provided" a rapid familiarization with the city." [91] It omitted any mention of historical events or monuments, for Odessa's time had become businessman's time. For his public, real and imagined, the city's present and future mattered more than its past, and its official and workday practices were more important than the hallowed symbols of cultural glory.

Unlike the earlier fairs, the 1896 national exposition in Nizhny Novgorod was the subject of several guides. They incorporated everything needed for the traveler, including railroad timetables and glowing accounts of the exhibition park, the buildings, and the exhibits. These publications were as important as the reports of journalists in creating an aura of reality around an event that sought to bring the future to the present by constructing an artificial Volga city of technology and industry. Although the guides were perhaps illusory in their depictions, their language of productivity and technology represented only an extreme version of a theme that was of growing importance in other urban guides of the time. For the reading public of these guides the Russian city as workplace assumed the shape and color of industrial modernity.

The intended audience for these guides, like that of the national press, belonged to the Westernized cities of business and public affairs. It was quite different from the presumed readers of the penny press. The images of the city created on the pages of the guides or in the daily articles of the elite newspapers explicitly or implicitly honored the ideals of civilization and enlightenment. In spirit and content they maintained ethical standards

[90] Ia. Kuchin, Putevoditel' po Volge (Saratov, 1865), 1.

[91] Odessa v karmane na 1896 (Odessa, 1896), 1.

of patriotism and propriety. Their writing belonged to the cultural domain of literary Russia; it was satisfying to those educated Russians with a culturist agenda for the new city.

The penny press belonged to a different cultural world. The distinction that Jeffrey Brooks draws between "edifying or instructive publications" and "popular commercial literature" can be applied to the journalistic genres of the national and the penny presses. [92] For boulevard newspapers as for popular fiction, salability largely determined both form and content. Certain writers moved back and forth between the penny press and popular literature because they shared with editors an overriding concern to exploit the topics and themes that would capture a mass reading audience. The boulevard newspapers created a panoramic picture of urban daily life that bears more than a passing resemblance to the issues that emerged in the debates of the municipal dumas. At times their writers and editors addressed civic affairs, speaking in the name of the city and its people. However, publishers put sales before sermonizing. The penny press combined commerce and knowledge in a way that was often judged as scandalous by tsarist officials and urban reformers alike.

Like similar papers in Western cities, the Russian boulevard press represented a new and problematic cultural venture. Their editors abandoned the familiar world of the intellectual and business communities. By seeking to appeal to the popular urban reader, they were forced to invent on the pages of their papers a way of representing the Russian city for which there was no precedent. As in the West, the popular newspaper had to "create itself" before "creating its public." [93] Educated observers saw the triumph of vulgarity over culture in the unintellectual character of these newspapers. When the first one appeared in St. Petersburg in the 1860s, a critic considered it to be an outright rejection of the culturist "heavy journals" that set the tone of intellectual debate in those years. Employing the formulaic social distinctions of urban activists, he explained that "obviously" the literary language and complex subjects of the heavy journals were beyond the grasp of "petty bourgeois, artisans, and the poorest townspeople, who, if they read anything, buy cheap newspapers." [94]

For its commercial survival the penny press had to discover and appeal to the tastes and interests of a large public. Many of its readers probably possessed a level of education not much above the rudimentary knowledge

[92] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read , 296-97.

[93] Olga Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story (New York, 1940), 7.

[94] Knizhnyi vestnik 13 (1865):254; cited in "Russkaia gazeta vtoroi poloviny XIX veka," by B. Esin (Doctoral dissertation, Moscow State University, 1973), 1:296.

of reading and writing that urban youth sought in primary schools. Social context defined the content and style of the penny press. In the years when a culturist movement was organizing public readings on suitably respectable subjects for a population that the Minister of Education referred to as the "worker estate and the lower levels of society," the penny press was attempting to sell a very different form of print culture to that same public.

In doing so it incorporated into its selection of newsworthy information many scenes from daily life and presented its articles in popular, idiomatic speech. Sometimes, these human interest stories became the centerpiece of the daily news, continuing a practice that editors of culturist publications had already baptized as the fel'eton . Following the model of the French feuilleton , this rubric appeared in the national press in the form of literary criticism or witty stories. In the 1870s Dostoevsky published his Diary of a Writer in a fel'eton format. [95] It reemerged in the penny press in a somewhat new form to designate human interest stories (and occasionally serialized popular fiction) that was written in a "folksy" manner. It avoided the appearance of serious news, using titles such as Mezhdu prochim (Among Other Things) or Tsentki (Little Incidents) and signed with absurd pseudonyms such as "Not I" (the modest writer's ready reply to the query of who had written such trash). The authors adopted an unassuming, "natural" pose; they selected very ordinary but lively topics that were drawn from everyday life and they wrote their stories in an unliterary style. Their articles bore no resemblance to serious literature. Maxim Gorky, who began his writing career in his mid-twenties as a fel'etonist for a provincial paper, soon had moral qualms about this manner of pandering to popular tastes. He later accused such writers of "encumbering the memory of people with the trash of photographic images of their lives." [96] Yet it was just this type of entertaining account of daily life that could assure the commercial success of a boulevard newspaper.

Human interest stories were literary creations that made use of a strong does of imagination and that suspended standards of accuracy to give dramatic significance to their subjects. The formula that produced these stories proved to be very effective, and by the 1890s the fame and commercial success of Russian popular newspapers depended partly on the skill of their fel'etonisty . The authors of the fel'eton were sufficiently influential to shape, as well as to reflect, the views of the mass reading public. In the

[95] Dostoevsky's feuilleton writings are examined from a literary point of view in Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Tradition of Literary Utopia (Austin, Tex., 1981), esp. 14-17.

[96] Maksim Gorkii, "Chitatel'," Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1949), 2:202.

opinion of one American sociologist, similar writers in the American penny press were able to lead their readers "through the human interest in a personal story toward an acquaintanceship with a simplified and trivialized but wider world." [97] In late-century Russia, that wider world was primarily the readers' own city, which was presented to them in a dramatic, imaginative but identifiable form.

The recourse of the penny press to items that respectable society judged to be scandalous made it especially objectionable to critics. By comparison with later boulevard papers, the news that appeared in the first penny press publication. Peterburgskii listok (founded in 1865), was deferential to authority and sober in tone. However, the efforts of its editor to include incidents from the city's daily life, its crimes, and the abusive treatment of its less fortunate population earned the paper the reputation for yellow journalism. The editor was frequently brought to court by readers who accused him of defamation. Most serious of all, the Petersburg Censorship Committee subjected his paper to constant harrassment, periodically banning street sales (once for five years). The committee's hostility seemed to be based as much on its fear of the reading masses as on the paper's content. One censor condemned the editor because he allegedly sought "above all to pander to the crude tastes" of the "Petersburg demimonde [ polusvet ]." In the category of "demimonde" the censor included "artisans, tradesmen, and various types of petty individuals [ melkie liudi ]" who lacked a "well-developed revulsion against crime." [98] Those who shared the censor's conservative outlook preferred to keep the urban scandals hidden from view. But the penny press needed to keep the city's lower depths on the pages of their papers in order to attract readers.

Despite tsarist censorship, the Petersburg paper proved by the late 1870s that the steady production of popular and scandalous news was a formula for commercial success. Its reading public learned on its pages of both a known and an unknown city. The stories that the paper told relied to a certain extent on popular stereotypes: the drunker trader, the helpless wife, the dangerous tramp, and the greedy Jew. But the paper also told of the new railroads, of curious Western customs, and of a cleaner, healthier city that would be constructed in the future. Its urban drama was both an oft-told tale and an account of the new city.

In the 1880s boulevard newspapers sprang up in other cities, first in Moscow and then in the provinces. The fame—and notoriety—of Mos-

[97] Hughes, News , 277.

[98] "Zhurnal zasedaniia soveta Glavnogo upravleniia po delam pechati," 6 January 1872, TsGIA, f. 776, op. 2, d. 10, 586.

kovskii listok surpassed other similar papers from the time of its founding in 1881 until the last years of the century. Like its Petersburg cousin, it drew its material from the city and the surrounding region, with occasional notes "from the provinces." The politics and diplomacy of European affairs occupied a very small place on its pages, and the affairs of the tsarist state appeared only to the extent that political exigency required. As Jeffrey Brooks emphasizes, the credit for its effectiveness as "the first model of the Moscow street press" belonged to its colorful, self-made editor, N. A. Pastukhov. [99] Although its articles exploited and dramatized events in the daily lives of Muscovites, its popularity among that public assured its commercial success. By transforming the sensational and ephemeral events of the city into a sort of daily street theater, Pastukhov and his writers turned the paper into the popular voice of the migrant city.

Within the limits set by tsarist censorship Moskovskii listok portrayed a city that was divided into, on the one hand, a familiar, and often humorous, cast of characters that consisted largely of propertied, settled Muscovites and, on the other, a violent, sometimes tragic, and sometimes threatening world of the other Moscow of migrants. Its police chronicle offered an ongoing tale of theft, murder, and mayhem from Moscow's taverns and slums. Pastukhov himself entered the ranks of the fel'etonisty when he decided in 1882 to write a serialized bandit story that was drawn from the life of a local worker turned robber. The events contained in the police record, which were uncovered by a young journalist cum research assistant, Vladimir Giliarovsky, bore only a remote resemblance to the fictionalized epic that the author recounted at great length. The tale, Razboinik Churkin (The Bandit Churkin), which was presented in serialized form, gave a brutal yet sympathetic portrait of the hero. Ultimately, the authorities—identified in various accounts as Moscow's governor-general, the censor, or the conservative editor M. N. Katkov—put pressure on the editor-author to bring his hero and tale to a speedy end. [100]

At times the newspaper's tone veered from the comic and adventuresome to the tragic. In May 1882, when a major fire destroyed worker barracks in the nearby textile town of Orekhovo-Zuevo, Pastukhov sent Giliarovsky to write a first-hand account of what the paper would call the "terrible spectacle" and to report the casualties ("at least" fifteen dead and thirty injured). The town's factory owners complained to the authorities that the report provoked the anger of the workers against their bosses. The

[99] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read , 119-23.

[100] Ibid., 123-25.

specter of urban riots brought the wrath of Moscow's governor-general, Dolgorukii, down on Pastukhov. Summoning the editor to his office, Dolgorukii threatened (or so Giliarovsky later claimed) to have the reporter arrested and exiled. Only Pastukhov's cleverness in hiding his source allegedly spared his young reporter. [101] Tales of fires, banditry, and everyday trivia made Moskovskii listok a commercial success and its editor a millionaire. Urban culture proved to be a very salable commodity.

Despite the risks of censorship and the scorn of many educated Russians, provincial editors sought to imitate the penny press of the capitals. They could not rival the excitement and color of the metropolitan papers, but they made a place for themselves by mixing genres and content. At times they adopted the serious approach of the national press, but invariably they also incorporated the popular feature of the fel'eton stories. By the end of the century three hundred daily newspapers existed in European Russia, a relatively small number by comparison with Western lands but a remarkable increase for a country that had only twelve dailies just forty years before. [102] Their growth provides one indication of the emergence of a mass print culture in Russia.

The editors of the penny press kept clearly in mind the types of readers for whom their papers were destined. In this sense, the reading public was a figment of their imagination, which employed an array of social stereotypes to describe that public. We should be very careful before we accept uncritically their observations in characterizing the actual newspaper readers. For example, Pastukhov is reported to have rejected a manuscript for Moskovskii listok because he found it unsuitable for his paper's supposed reading public of "janitors and shopkeepers." In effect, Pastukhov was inventing an imaginary reader whose essential qualities were rudimentary literacy and unsophisticated cultural tastes. [103] He had no interest in defining precisely the real social identity of his customers. However, he was vitally concerned with defining that public's taste in news. Like other editors of the penny press, he understood that the financial survival of his paper depended on attracting as wide a general public as possible. For two decades Pastukhov was remarkably successful at finding a mass audience.

[101] Written under the pseudonym Svoi chelovek (My own man), the account appeared in the paper on 4 June 1882; in his memoirs Giliarovskii wrote somewhat romanticized accounts of his various adventures with Pastukhov and in "Moi skitaniia" included his own version of the events surrounding the story of the fire; see V. A. Giliarovskii, Izbrannoe (Moscow, 1958), 1:231-32.

[102] Publication figures are found in Daniel Balmuth, Censorship in Russia, 1865-1901 (Washington, D.C., 1969), 113-14.

[103] Cited in Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read , 128.

His paper held pride of place in popular taverns, and his tale of the bandit Churkin was read aloud in factory barracks and the housing communes of laborers.

These editors were aware that the subject of urban squalor was very popular with their public; readers were both repelled by and attracted to the city's lower depths. In 1892 Pastukhov sent one of his star reporters to write about Khitrovka's denizens. Subsequently, provincial papers sought fel'etonisty with similar talents. Gorky developed the theme of squalor while working as a cub reporter for a Samara paper in the mid 1890s. In Rostov-on-Don a young vagabond-journalist named A. Svirskii made a national reputation with tales written for a local paper on what he would later call his urban "slum world." [104] The public that read such articles believed itself to be above the slum dwellers of these squalid places.

Journalistic portraits of the city could arouse a powerful response from the readers, but not the sort that would gratify the culturist elite of urban Russia. Although scorned by intellectuals as a "petty urban intelligentsia [ obyvatel'skaia intelligentsiia ]," readers of the boulevard papers were as capable as more sophisticated townspeople of conjuring up an imaginary city whose actors played out a social drama in which justice and injustice each found their emblems. One such example is the memoirs of the worker-militant, Petr Moiseenko, who in the mid 1880s used Pastukhov's "Bandit Churkin" to raise the social consciousness of textile workers in the provincial factory town of Orekovo-Zuevo. He sensed the resonance that this tale of robbery and murder by a worker turned bandit enjoyed among working-class readers and listeners. He overestimated, however, his ability to define the ideological lesson of the tale for his audience. After listening to the tale his audience concluded that because the factory owners "plundered us," the workers ought "to plunder" them. [105] In this reading Churkin became a mixture of Robin Hood and Stenka Razin.

Thus, the authorities were not far wrong in their fears that the sensationalism of the penny press could unwittingly—or intentionally—feed an undercurrent of urban violence. These papers created simplified portraits of social types that included anti-Semitic stereotypes as well as comical figures of merchants. The simplistic official view made scant distinction between information and incitement to action. A police report on Pastukhov's paper

[104] A. Pazukhin, "Khitrovtsy," Moskovskii listok , 18 April 1892; A. Svirskii, Mir trushchobnyi (Rostov, 1898). Svirskii's writings are discussed in Joan Neuberger, "Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1985), 118-40.

[105] P. Moiseenko, Vospominaniia starogo revoliutsionera (Moscow, 1966), 70.

warned that its articles "with information about all kinds of criminal and bloody events in Moscow, the provinces, and other parts of the empire" might spread unrest. The report concluded that these "scandalous elements of the paper undoubtedly have a harmful effect" on "petty traders and the lower levels of society." [106] That the penny press was in close touch with the lower levels of society was a common assumption of censorship and police reports. This thought worried and offended authorities. Because they were a potential menace, the urban masses became the target for a culturist campaign whose goals were orderliness and enlightenment.

When the project first appeared, it bore the marks of an effort to mobilize public support behind an essentially conservative tsarist policy to discipline the lower social orders in the city. In 1872 at the initiative of the St. Petersburg police prefect, the tsar authorized the formation of a commission for public readings. The measure originated in official concern about worker unrest in St. Petersburg. The capital's swelling labor population and sporadic factory disorders were visible signs that the capital had ceased to be only the center of power and a showcase of imperial grandeur. In a spirit reminiscent of the founders of the Salvation Army (which had been founded in London in the previous decade) the city prefect, General A. A. Trepov, advocated public readings of suitably uplifting literature as a means to promote "the struggle against drunkenness, the elimination of coarse manners, and the improvement of the moral and intellectual level of the people." [107]

In his paternalistic manner Trepov attempted to promote culture through the diffusion of officially approved inspirational and entertaining learning. It was never clear how public readings might incite sobriety. The establishment of public readings was an admission that the church lacked the moral authority to combat the tavern and other destructive cultural forces. The boulevard press was proving that print culture was a potent means to reach the masses, and some authorities believed that its scandalous contents called for some official rejoinder. The readings were intended to be attractive educational public gatherings that would win converts to respectability. The organizers of the readings sought to introduce some of the dramatic features that had long been a part of the popular carnival ( gulian'e ). Centuries old, the carnival was evolving in the nineteenth cen-

[106] "Politicheskii obzor Moskovskoi gubernii," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okt'iabrskoi revoliutsii (abbreviated TsGAOR), f. 203, d. 59, ch. 45 (1883), 9.

[107] Ocherk deiatel'nosti postoiannoi komissii narodnykh chtenii, 1872-1892 (St. Petersburg, 1897), 3, cited in L. Ivanov, "Ideologicheskoe vozdeistivie," 323; this essay contains a detailed study of the history of public readings.

tury through the addition of new attractions, such as the "Petrushka" puppet theater and simple vaudeville shows on patriotic themes. [108] Tsarist authorities closely supervised the public readings. When they began, they included "magic lantern" illustrations to enliven the stories, which were often on historical and patriotic subjects. In this manner, they bore some resemblance to the content of the carnivals. At the same time, however, the readings also sought a tone of moral righteousness and seriousness that was similar in tone to the national theater.

By choice and necessity the audience consisted of townspeople. Setting the guidelines for the choice of readings, the Minister of Education D. M. Tolstoi explained that they should be "adapted to the needs and level of understanding of the people of the worker estate [ sic ] and, in general, [to that] of the lower levels of society." [109] The number of authorized readings slowly increased until by the late 1880s some three hundred booklets had been approved by the three central public reading commissions. The printings totaled approximately three million copies. Mainly "religious and informational," the subjects ranged from the discussion of natural phenomena such as thunder to a biography of Peter the Great and an inquiry into the role of women in Christianity. [110] A mixture of old piety, modern nationalism, and rationalist science, the readings tried to embody a form of schooling that would be useful for literates and illiterates alike. The readers of such works spoke from a sort of secular pulpit, attempting to inspire their audience with the virtues of morality and sober living.

That public readings were a means to a much larger end became apparent in the next decades. By the 1890s Trepov's call for a struggle against drunkenness had entered the list of officially supported good causes. So important was this goal that in 1890 the government approved a program for the partial prohibition of alcohol consumption through the opening of state liquor stores and the closing of taverns that sold hard liquor. The campaign, which gradually went into effect over the next decade, was largely the work of the Ministry of Finance. Its responsibilities included the creation of provincial "guardianships of popular sobriety," which were intended to offer cultured alternatives to the tavern. Among these activities were the opening of tearooms ( chainiki ) whose strongest beverage was kvass, the sponsorship of decorous carnivals, and, in the spirit of Trepov's stress on

[108] The evolution of the carnivals is the subject of A. F. Nekrylova, Russkie narodnye gorodskie prazdniki, uveseleniia i zrelishcha: Konets XVII-nachala XX veka (Leningrad, 1984).

[109] "Otchet ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia za 1872," TsGIA, f. 733, op. 117, d. 62, 135-36.

[110] Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read , 312-13.

officially sponsored learning, the dissemination of enlightenment through the establishment of reading rooms and the holding of public readings.

The reasons for the prominence of sobriety as a goal are not clear. Nothing in the records suggests that demon liquor had suddenly become a devastating plague. Perhaps an important issue was reducing worker drunkenness on the job in a period of rapid economic expansion. In its immediate political context the crusade against liquor fit well with tsarist efforts to shore up the institutional and ideological foundations of conservatism, giving it (consciously or unconsciously) an up-to-date, "modern" character in keeping with contemporary cultural ideals of industriousness and decorum. Just how popular this crusade was is not clear from the records. With state funding and official patronage a network of "hundreds" of committees (if official claims are to be believed) spread throughout urban Russia. [111] Its members came not only from official and church circles but also from business and intellectual groups. In some cases the local organization grew to an impressive size. The Kazan committee had over 2,500 members by the turn of the century; it had opened a tearoom, a public shelter, and a clinic for alcoholics; and it had also organized a reading room and public readings. [112]

Even if much of the success of the temperance movement was the result of official sponsorship, the vision of a sober, patriotic, industrious, and knowledgeable population attracted many educated Russians. Fears of squalor, ignorance, and decadence aroused widespread concern, especially in urban areas. Drunkenness was only the most visible social evil that was presumed to arise in these conditions of social and cultural backwardness. The program of the temperance movement was formulated in a manner that addressed this larger problem. It struck a responsive chord among the members of the urban elite, who were preoccupied with an ethical campaign in defense of culture in the city.

State patronage remained a factor in public readings and related cultural endeavors, but it became relatively insignificant when voluntary groups became active. Although the choice of nonofficial initiatives was limited by tsarist regulations, in the last decades of the century many such associations emerged in provincial towns. Largely the work of the urban middle classes, their activities ranged from charitable work and artistic endeavors to consumer cooperatives and mutual aid. [113] The character of these organizations

[111] Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy 24 (May 1902):113.

[112] "Statisticheskie svedeniia po gorodam Kazanskoi gubernii," TsGIA, f. 1290, op. 5 (1904), d. 190, 8.

[113] The question of the importance of these associations in Russian history is addressed in Joseph Bradley, "Voluntary Associations" (paper presented at the conference on Russian Obshchestvennost' , Purdue University, September 1987).

varied enormously. On the one hand, they included groups close in spirit and organization to official Russia, such as the temperance guardianships and the parish brotherhoods. The tsarist government authorized the formation of the brotherhoods in the 1870s and by the end of the century they numbered over one hundred. [114] They were often sponsored by bishops and numbered among their members both monastic and secular clergy. However, secular volunteers constituted the majority of the membership. These people were prepared to participate in charitable activities as well as public readings and the camaign against drunkenness. A few, such as Yaroslavl's Brotherhood of Saint Dmitrii, included several hundred members. Its membership rolls revealed that most volunteers belonged to the petty bourgeois and peasant estates, a fact that suggests that the brotherhood was a fairly representative cross-section of the population of the town. [115]

On the other hand, many of the voluntary associations had no direct ties at all with official Russia. The literacy committees represented one of the most influential movements not so much for their size as for their social prominence and their ability to make visible their activities in their communities. They took a particular interest in finding buildings to house the growing array of urban literary and cultural undertakings. These centers were called "people's clubs" ( narodnye doma ) but the leading role played there by culturist activists turned them into urban temples of enlightenment. Creating such centers did not come easily in some cases. At the end of the century Kharkov's committee still lacked a people's club even though they already existed in cities such as Odessa and Tambov. Its chairman prodded his members by conjuring up a vision of Kharkov as a new city. "Is it possible," he asked, "that Kharkov, the center of enlightenment, trade, and industry in southern Russia, is not capable of erecting a building for a people's club?" [116] In his circle of cultural activists, a center of urban culture had as much importance in the life of the city as the presence of a university or the railroad.

The significance of voluntary work was far greater than these small deeds would suggest. Through their activities the voluntary associations contributed to the public life of their towns and, indirectly, to the urban civil public sphere. Some of the activists, together with certain officials, were conscious of the potential anti-tsarist implications of the associations'

[114] A. A. Papkov, Tserkovnye bratstva: Kratkii statisticheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1893), 11.

[115] Otchet Bratstva Sviatitel'ia Dmitriia za 1888 (Yaroslavl, 1889).

[116] Cited in Didrikhson, Istoricheskii obzor , 215.

work. The political connection appeared in what might seem very unusual places, such as Saratov's Society of Lovers of the Fine Arts, which became active in the 1880s. The provincial gendarme officer left a detailed if tendentious description of the society: Its official purpose was to enlarge the community of "the lovers of fine arts" by promoting musical performances, literary readings, and plays that were performed by local talent. Its modest but exalted culturist agenda attracted idealists who were spiritual kin to Chekhov's three sisters. It also provided temporary refuge for radicals such as the populist Mark Natanson, who joined after his return from Siberian exile. The gendarme officer took a very suspicious view of the entire society. He warned his superiors of the possibility that political subversives would exploit their membership in the group in order to "enlarge at will the circle of their acquaintances and entice new people into their movement." [117] Natanson may well have shared the officer's expectation. In this respect, police officials had grounds for concern. The voluntary associations were becoming so prevalent that in their daily affairs they were beyond the control of the authorities.

These cultural activities tell us more about visionary hopes for the city than they reveal about the transformation of urban popular culture. No matter how impressive (and inflated) their statistical claims to success, the public readings were largely an exercise in preaching to the converted. In the mid 1890s the Moscow reading commission claimed that it organized 1,600 readings yearly for approximately three hundred thousand people but noted that at first its public thought the gatherings were "new entertainment where for two or three kopeks they could see a magic lantern show." [118] Moscow was one of the three centers for the writing and distribution of approved materials for public readings. The provinces were less rich in volunteers and financial backing to conduct these public activities. Saratov's readings, which began in 1877, depended on school teachers and the local church brotherhood. They offered a mixture of spiritual tales and "useful knowledge of a secular character." [119] In Saratov the public readings created more intellectual dissonance than clarity.

In the last years of the century the public readings were a regular feature of life in all provincial centers. Their success in those years, however, was in good part the result of the funds that came from the Ministry of Finance

[117] "Politicheskii obzor Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152 (1887), ch. 35, 4.

[118] "Deiatel'nost' Komissii po ustroistvu v Moskve publichnykh narodnykh chteniia," Sbornik statei po voprosam otnosiashchimsia k zhizni russkikh gorodov 4 (1896):104.

[119] "Svedeniia po Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 67 (1881), 1-2.

through the temperance societies; their audiences were relatively small. Although the campaign sought to reach the laboring population, there is little evidence that either the readings or the other culturist offerings in the cities proved attractive to them. Perhaps in cities such as St. Petersburg a portion of the skilled, urbanized workers were drawn to these alternative leisure activities, but in newer industrial centers in areas such as south Russia, police reports in the mid 1880s noted the "absence of the common and working classes of the population" from the audience. [120] An organizer of the Kharkov literacy committee's readings observed that attendance at the gatherings was "not large" but consisted of "a permanent contingent of listeners who did not miss a single reading." [121] With such a faithful audience frequent readings appeared to reach an impressive number of townspeople. But the frontier between the respectable townsfolk and the "uncultured" laboring population was not bridged when the readings reached the same townspeople time after time.

The popular resistance to state restrictions on the use of vodka was symptomatic of the problems that activists faced when they tried to influence the lives of the urban masses. Although a greater number of places of relaxation may have attracted some laborers away from taverns, greater choice did not necessarily lead to the reduced consumption of vodka. One skeptical traveler through the provinces concluded that frequenting a tearoom might "more often than not" save "the worker several kopeks on tea and snacks [and] give him the chance to drink an extra glass of vodka." [122] Closing taverns hindered the customary social drinking of the former patrons, but in the opinion of St. Petersburg's police prefect it merely moved the drunks into the streets. He found no evidence in the capital that the temperance movement had had any significant effect on drunkenness. He did, however, note a rise in serious wounds to the palms of drinkers' right hands, which was caused when their vigorous efforts to pop corks out of bottles broke the bottle instead. [123] The "men's world" of migrants and laborers did not abandon its customs in the face of idealistic crusades.

The array of educational and preventive measures, however, helped to establish a model of urban "respectability" that stressed sobriety, learning, and industriousness. The distinction was similar to that which in England made clear the difference between the urbanized worker and the "rough"

[120] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 59, ch. 27 (1885), 11-12.

[121] Cited in Didrikhson, Istoricheskii obzor , 204.

[122] A. P. Subbotin, Volga i Volgari: Putevye ocherki , 15.

[123] "Otchet za 1902," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1902), d. 545, 105.

laborer. [124] It was, however, only one among many paths to urban acculturation. A model of "petty bourgeois urbanity" [ meshchanskaia svetlost' ] also existed. It promised that fine clothing, dancing, and drinking would turn the young migrant into a real city dweller. In a very different spirit, militant workers drew a clear distinction between unpoliticized "gray" fellow workers and "conscious" comrades like themselves. They envisioned a sort of ideal type of proletarian that conveyed what Reginald Zelnik has called "a universalistic though, paradoxically, class-based vision of the future." [125] The migrant city was a world of both learning and work. The voices of those who promoted one form or another of enlightenment—some buttressed by claims to tradition, others by appeals to utopia—had only limited success among an audience that was either indifferent to or suspicious of their message.

By the end of the century learning and schooling had altered both the practices and the culture of the migrant city. The opportunities for economic advancement and social respectability had spread, and the ideals of sobriety and industriousness were a meaningful alternative to the man's world of the migrant laborers. Both tsarist officials and urban activists used a measure of progress that placed special emphasis on orderliness and enlightenment, but their understanding of these goals differed greatly. For each of these groups the world of the migrant represented a challenging and threatening presence that they were scarcely able to touch. The state remained a force for authoritarian control and repression. Its temperance and reading campaigns represented a timid but idealistic attempt to encourage and inspire cultural bonds among the population. Civic activists shared the tsarist officials' fears of the lower orders but were deeply committed to voluntary campaigns to create cultural bonds in urban society. The success of the penny press was not reassuring to those who judged that scandal, crime, and sensationalism were marks of decadence. An underlying current of violence, which was sensed by authorities and intellectuals alike, remained a deeply troubling reality. Like Khitrovka, the inner life of the migrant city remained a mysterious place to those who hoped to guide its future course.

[124] Brian Harrison, "Pubs," in The Victorian City , ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London, 1973), 1:181.

[125] Reginald Zelnik, "Passivity and Protest," Journal of Social History 15 (Summer 1982):504.

5 Policing the Riotous City

The growth of the cities and the advent of new economic and social practices fundamentally altered the understanding of what public order was at the same time that these developments were undermining the foundations on which that order had rested. The "public orderliness" ( blagoustroistvo ) of the city, which had been embodied in prereform city plans, architectural monuments, and municipal regulations assumed the primacy of the state in civilizing the Russian city. Until the 1860s the tsarist regime judged that the repression of urban disorders was a secondary affair, both because the official policy toward urban crime was ill-defined and because the countryside, not the towns, was thought to be the locus of social unrest. The official vocabulary implicitly associated uprisings and disorders with peasant revolts. Until the 1870s the reports of provincial gendarme officers virtually ignored urban conditions and subsumed the urban working population under the category of the peasantry. Until the reform years Russian cities continued to function as outposts of tsarist rule, housing provincial and district administrators and providing quarters for military forces.

Migration, economic growth, and political rebelliousness altered the tsarist view of public orderliness in the cities from the domain of culture to the domain of power. These processes led to both greater state regulation of the urban population and the redefinition of the concept of order by those in positions of authority. In part the story is a familiar one that includes the rise of collective violence in the cities, particularly in the form

of riots and pogroms. It also touches on the radical movement's urban activities, which included organizational and propaganda work among the laboring population. With the example of the 1848 revolutions still fresh in their minds tsarist officials came to view public order in their cities in a new context. They began to focus attention on the threat that the urban masses posed for collective action that would be capable of overthrowing the state itself.

The expectations about the role of the police—and of the proper domain of "policing"—altered among both educated townspeople and tsarist authorities. Although the authorities continued to consider the urban police to be a regulatory body, they assigned it increasing responsibilities to repress collective violence in the cities. At a time when the state was calling for increased popular initiative in local municipal and educational affairs, tsarist officials were becoming increasingly involved in the problems of urban public order: property rights and employers' responsibility toward their workers; the protection of individual life; and relations between police and townspeople. The state retained sole authority to define and enforce urban public order, but its powers were limited. The Russian migrant city was a place of struggle between the laboring population and the state long before the outbreak of the twentieth-century revolutions.

Cities and the Policed Society in the Reform Years

Policing the city became a tsarist priority even before municipal reform was placed on the political agenda. Thirty years after London obtained its own urban police force, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs decided to give the major cities of the country a special agency for the enforcement of public order. The example of urban disorders and the police reforms of Western Europe may have played some part in the origins of this reform, but the ineffectiveness of the old police system was also an important factor. The concept of specialization was already apparent in the decision in the mid 1850s to abolish the last remnant of communal self-policing: municipalities were freed of the responsibility for assigning townspeople to be night watchmen. The old system was unfit to cope with the tasks that were created by economic growth and migration. Reports from provincial towns, collected in preparation for the municipal reform, added their own lists of grievances to those of the central authorities. The members of Rostovon-Don's commission placed first on their list the police's failure to meet

"the needs of the urban population." [1] Town leaders and tsarist officials shared a common concern for reform even though the two sides had different interests and objectives.

The police reform of the early 1860s bore the statist imprint of the central bureaucracy. The new urban police remained under the control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Their jurisdiction was only extended to the major cities of European Russia, including the capitals, the provincial centers, and the cities under special police prefects (such as Odessa). [2] Towns that lacked an administrative character, even though they might be expanding at a rapid rate, remained in the ranks of district ( uezd ) towns or settlements. In those places the police were still few in number and were responsible, as in the past, for a vast rural area as well as the urban areas. In the cities that the new police staffed, however, their presence became a tangible factor in the daily lives of the townspeople.

The reforms entailed an expansion in the number of police and an increase in their salaries; both actions were paid for by the municipalities. Even so, the police forces remained relatively underpaid and understaffed in view of the multitude of tasks they performed. Although the state set an ideal ratio of police to population as one in five hundred, the actual ratio often fell to below one in seven hundred. This shortage meant that there were few police posts on the city outskirts, where the concentration of laboring migrants was highest. [3] In the first years after the police reform the state brought staffing levels up to or above the ideal size, even though in doing so it provoked municipal leaders to make loud outcries against the additional expense. Kharkov, with a population in the 1860s of over fifty thousand, increased the size of its police force from fifty to over two hundred; Moscow's force grew to over one thousand. Because of municipal tax constraints and bureaucratic routine the number of police expanded very slowly. Occasionally, however, when urban disorders occurred, this slow growth was punctuated by sudden spurts in staffing and equipping the urban police. Official criticism of the inadequacies of the police usually neglected to mention the increasingly complex demands that were being placed on this force. Once in a while, however, it hinted at the pressures

[1] "Po predstavleniiu gubernskim nachal'stve," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (abbreviated TsGIA), f. 1287, op. 37 (1834-62), d. 2152, 212.

[2] E. Anuchin, Istoricheskii obzor razvitiia administrativno-politseiskikh uchrezhdenii v Rossii (St. Petersburgh, 1872), 224-37; see also "Obzor deiatel'nosti i reorganizatsii uchrezhdenii politsii ispolnitel'noi s 1862 po 1880 g.," Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okt'iabrskoi revoliutsii (abbreviated TsGAOR), f. 109, op. 3, d. 866, 16-17.

[3] Neil Weissman, "Regular Police in Tsarist Russia, 1900-14," Russian Review 44 (January 1985): 48-49.

that urbanization was creating. For example, in the late 1860s Saratov's provincial governor complained that the province's urban police forces were "inadequate and insufficient in relation to the number of inhabitants and to the local conditions." [4]

In addition to the increasing responsibilities that resulted from urbanization, the police faced a much deeper problem: underfunding seriously weakened the quality of their personnel. In the past, because of the poor pay, retired soldiers were the primary pool for recruitment by the state police. These recruits were survivors of twenty-five years of military service; their exposure to the draconian regime of military command and their habit of obedience constituted their only training to be lowly agents of the tsarist state. Despite the new political climate and the police reform in the 1860s, the police forces seem to have improved very little according to the reports of provincial administrators and gendarme officers. Although few complaints were made about the full officers ( nadzirateli ), whose pay rose to 600 rubles a year, the same was not true of their subordinates. The lower ranks constituted the bulk of the urban police—300 in a regular force of 350 in Saratov at the end of the century—and their yearly pay rarely exceeded 150 rubles.

Official reports often contained critical observations of the poor quality and high rate of turnover of the regular policemen in both large and small towns. Conditions in the turbulent port city of Tsaritsyn were extreme but they were still indicative of the staffing problems in other migrant centers. In this city in 1887 resignations occurred at the rate of almost one per day; as a result, three hundred new policemen had to be appointed that year to maintain a force of just sixty. [5] Summer was apparently a time of great turnover because in all towns in which agricultural commodities were traded actively the demand for seasonal labor in good years sent wages soaring far above those of the police. The police prefect of Odessa noted that his police abandoned their work regularly every shipping season because "they do not value their . . . very difficult, inconvenient, demanding service" and instead preferred dock work, where they earned wages three times higher. [6] Retired soldiers remained the main source of recruits, and even they considered police work as a temporary post until better employment became available. At the very end of the nineteenth century St. Petersburg's police prefect praised the pool of recruits from the army, whom he judged to be "impressive, disciplined, and literate." He com-

[4] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1281, op. 7, d. 82 (1869), 17.

[5] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 168 (1888), 19.

[6] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 69, d. 341 (1878), 19.

plained, however, that they remained only briefly because such men "are needed everywhere" and easily find "more rewarding positions." [7] Although the police were essential agents of state power, police personnel proved to be as much a product of the migrant city as were the laborers.

Despite the obvious weaknesses and shortcomings of the urban police forces, in theory they had a key role to play in the state's new policy of maintaining public order in the cities. Nicholas I's Corps of Internal Guards disappeared in the reform years, and its duties were assigned to the police, who were backed by the regular army garrisons stationed in each military district. [8] The army forces remained substantial. As it had in Nicholas I's time, St. Petersburg gave the appearance of a garrison city, with a total military force of eighty thousand. In the 1870s Kharkov, a provincial and industrial center that was also a headquarters for a military region, had a garrison of three thousand troops. [9] This relatively modest level was the norm in the provinces to the end of the century. The rules that authorized civilian authorities-urban police officials or governors-to use army units were set in the late 1870s. The conditions under which provincial officials could call on the military included the prevention or repression of popular disorders and the maintenance of order at public assemblies. Troops were the ultimate recourse for the authorities when urban unrest overwhelmed the police forces.

The presence of military garrisons was far less tangible to townspeople than were their daily encounters with the police. Implicitly, the tsarist regime had come to accept the desirability of a "policed society," that is, the delegation of authority to a special agency that was empowered to exercise direct coercive powers over the population in the course of its work in maintaining order. [10] The police now had to deal with aspects of public conduct that they had previously disregarded (the collective fistfights for example). The potential for the police to abuse their powers was great. The possibility of an increase in confrontations with crowds was also great if the new police activities were judged by urban dwellers to be either unjustified or illegitimate. The organization of the urban police force and the enlargement of its responsibilities involved the police much more closely than in the past in the affairs of the population but did not ensure an improvement

[7] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 545 (1901), 99.

[8] John Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874 (Oxford, 1985), 313-14.

[9] D. Bagalei and D. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (Kharkov, 1912), 2:177.

[10] Allan Silver, "The Demand for Order in Civil Society," in The Police , ed. D. Bordua (New York, 1967), 7-8.

in the enforcement of the laws or greater popular respect for the police. One might agree with a historian's observation that by the turn of the century the city police had become "the most important link tying the citizens to the government." [11] That link was not, however, a guarantee of public orderliness.

In the process of redefining public order the police assumed important new criminal tasks in addition to the old duties of enforcing the municipal and tsarist regulations. In the 1870s special investigative branches took charge of crimes against persons and property. [12] The importance of criminal work was particularly great in the turbulent migrant cities, but these new responsibilities were not accompanied by a reduction of administrative duties. On the contrary, at the end of the century the Ministry of Internal Affairs reiterated its commitment to use the regular police "to care for the universal welfare of the people [and] the peace, quiet, and good order of the whole empire." [13] This policy was not only anachronistic but also far beyond the capacity of the urban police. The municipal statutes requiring police action added a further load to the state's administrative edicts until the police could not possibly deal with all the regulations. For example, in 1880 the Kiev police were responsible for a total of forty-six thousand official orders. [14] The results, if the report of the mayor of the town of Chernigov is representative, offered little satisfaction to townspeople. He noted sarcastically that his citizens expected to find police "on a few of the populous streets and in public meetings" but they were were "absolutely not accustomed to think of the police as an institution that was established mainly to serve their interests." As for the inhabitants on the outskirts of town, he was certain that they "literally never see the police in their areas." [15]

Under these circumstances law enforcement remained fitful and capricious, ideal conditions by which to sustain the public's perception—which was often enough accurate—that the police were inefficient and arbitrary. Frequently, law enforcement practices assumed the customary form of protection for those with the means to pay. In the 1880s the Odessa police prefect complained that the owners of bars and taverns regularly violated

[11] T. Hasegawa, "The Formation of the Militia in the February Revolution," Slavic Review 32 (June 1973):303.

[12] See Robert Abbott, "Crime, Police, and Society in St. Petersburg, 1866-1878," Historian 40 (November 1977):80-82.

[13] Cited in Robert Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State (New York, 1987), 86.

[14] "Otchet po Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 2:3.

[15] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 3:552.

official regulations by "corrupting the low-ranking police," whose "salaries are inadequate for the satisfaction of basic needs," which leads them "to succumb easily to temptations and financial gifts." [16] These practices turned law enforcement into favoritism. As a consequence, civic leaders in the municipalities were generally skeptical regarding tsarist promises of a policed society in their communities. The Chernigov mayor spoke for his respectable citizenry when he concluded in 1880 that "it is the general conviction of the masses that the police serve government officials and institutions, not the city and its inhabitants." [17] This opinion was shared by the senatorial inspector of southeastern Russia. He acknowledged that the police were zealous in enforcing regulations for "the external cleanliness of the central parts of the city, [and] filling out forms for official registers." In his judgment their failure was evident in that fact that they provided "no real police surveillance of the population." [18]

He raised the key issue of which people belonged in the migrant city and which groups posed a threat either to public order or to other townspeople. The question focused on the "lower orders," particularly on the presence of the transients and beggars, who defied official regulations and the expectations of the respectable citizens. The specter of dangerous classes in Russia often appeared in the guise of vagrants. By the 1860s their increasing numbers in the central city confronted townspeople with the sight of abject poverty. Charity was a public virtue, but the migrant city increased the scale of demands and placed the problem of social inequality in an economic context in which townspeople thought that labor was a better solution. Although vagrancy remained an offense that was punishable by forced return to place of origin, the regulations proved more and more difficult to enforce. In the 1860s Moscow's police chief confronted major problems of "crime, pauperism, vagrancy, and idleness." He had to admit that "the level of vagrancy and idleness . . . grows and grows and those expelled from Moscow reappear within a few months"—some returning ten times or more. [19]

In the following decades the police sporadically enforced these regulations. Toward the end of the century they began sending vagrants to new workhouses that had been created as part of the welfare program of the

[16] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 113 (1883), 14.

[17] "Zapiska Senatora Polovtsova," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 3:552.

[18] "Otchet po Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 2:3.

[19] "Doklad ob ustroistve," Doklady Moskovskoi gorodskoi upravy (Moscow, 1866), 2-3, cited in Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite (Berkeley, 1985), 271-72.

municipalities. Still, the censorious voices continued to complain of police inaction. In the 1880s one reporter, speaking for respectable society, lamented what he called the invasion of Moscow by vagrants who crowded the city boulevards. In his opinion the problem existed solely because the police were "paying no attention to beggars." [20] To such townspeople, the police were at fault for not ridding their cities of this disreputable crowd. Other educated Russians, however, defended what one critic who studied the beggars of Moscow referred to as the "street proletariat" that suffered from "inescapable need." [21] In other words, both sides blamed the police.

The authorities did not draw a clear distinction between vagrants and migrants lacking proper papers. New arrivals in the city had to register and, beginning at the end of the 1870s, obtain residence permits ( vid na zhitel'-stvo ). Under the vagrancy laws, if their papers were not in order, migrants who found employment could still be convicted and sent back to their villages. They might, however, be given temporary papers by the justice of the peace (the case in St. Petersburg, as discussed in chapter 2) until they were properly registered. One indication of the degree of surveillance of migrants is found in the statistics on convictions for passport violation in St. Petersburg: in every year in the 1870s the number of convictions totaled between six and nine thousand. [22] These figures do not make clear how stringently the regulations were being applied, but they do prove that the police were sporadically enforcing the law.

In the cities in the Pale of Settlement the presence of a large numbers of Jews added a strong tone of anti-Semitism to the treatment of migrants. In 1880 Kiev's mayor made the police his scapegoat when he complained that his city was "overflowing with people lacking the right to live here," but "the police know nothing of their existence." [23] Unofficially, some policemen were very knowledgeable, turning their authority into a source of considerable profit according to a Kiev journalist of the 1880s. He claimed that they traded bribes from Jews for new residence permits and even proposed that the legally settled first-guild Jewish merchants "hire" a variety of "salespeople" and "servants" in exchange for a substantial payment. [24] Throughout the country the regulations governing the pres-

[20] Moskovskii listok , 3 February 1882.

[21] "K voprosu o nishchenstve," Sbornik statei po voprosam otnosiashchimsia k zhizni russkikh gorodov 3 (1896):87; Moscow's problem of vagrancy is discussed in Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite , 250-57.

[22] Abbott, "Crime, Police, and Society," 74, table 1.

[23] "Otchet po Kievskoi gubernii," in Trudy komissii Kakhanova (St. Petersburg, 1884), 2:353.

[24] Kiev v 80-kh godakh: Vospominaniia starozhila (Kiev, 1910), 29.

ence of migrants in the city were irregularly and often abusively enforced and created great opportunities for bribery.

Not surprisingly, observers concluded that the real income of police officials was far greater than their lowly wages. One provincial gendarme officer estimated that Rostov police clerks "lived on their [illegal] income from passport registration, earning 30 rubles a month." More significant than the alleged amount of illicit income (the accuracy of which is seriously open to question) is the fact that the officer did not judge the situation out of the ordinary; within his circle of tsarist officials, police bribery was accepted as a fact of life. [25]

Opinions varied regarding the treatment that the police meted out to the town population. Tsarist officials and municipal leaders believed that the police operations in urban areas were ineffective and inadequate. The head of the gendarmes judged that the district police lacked "even the possibility to organize any police surveillance at all of localities with heavily populated manufacturing centers." As a consequence, the police became "passive spectators of the criminal acts that are committed there and are accused of inactivity." Perhaps their most grievous shortcoming in his eyes was that their actions "undermine the people's trust in them." [26] Laws were enforced selectively and in some places not at all. This condition was as true for the migrant city as it was for the factory settlement. In its own way Moscow's Khitrovka area was a sanctuary from the law. The gendarme chief was arguing, in bureaucratic terms, for a policed society that would bring order and discipline to those urban areas where industrialization and migration were undermining state authority.

Police attitudes toward authority and society also helped to determine their role in the city. The ethos of autocracy reached to the level of the precinct. In the 1880s one policeman gave a lesson in public order to a rebellious young worker in Kazan. Maxim Gorky vividly recalled the words of a Kazan police sergeant, who described in his own popular imagery his understanding of the power and authority with which he believed himself endowed. He thought himself a part of an "invisible thread like a spider's web" extending from the emperor through his ministers and governors "and down the ranks to me and even the soldier in the ranks. Everything is bound together by this thread. In this invisible strength the kingdom of the tsar is held together for all time." Recalling these words many years later, Gorky concluded that the policeman's explanation made "the ma-

[25] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 88, ch. 4 (1884), 24.

[26] "Mnenie Shefa Zhandarma," TsGIA, f. 1149, op. 8, d. 96 (1874), 167-68.

chine of the state and its processes" clearer than did all the pronouncements of his teachers. [27]

To the extent that Gorky's policeman was typical, the police supplemented expediency and profiteering with a sense of legitimacy when they confronted decisions regarding possible illegal activities. The police judged criminality according to customary practices as well as personal convenience and administrative statute. For example, although collective fistfights had long been forbidden, the police turned a blind eye to them and to the personal injuries they caused. This custom carried into the migrant cities, although civic spirit and the culturist ideals of civilization set new borders there to the free fight zones. The police did not allow popular mayhem to occur in the central city, where respectable society gathered. In 1882 when some artisans and laborers organized a fight in the middle of Moscow during the Easter holidays the police immediately intervened to stop the battle and arrest the culprits. One of the participants recalled later that "the police showed such zeal only because the setting was the city center; on the outskirts such fights occurred without interference." [28] The fistfights were newsworthy events in the popular press, which reported only the most spectacular battles. The survival of the collective fistfights into the twentieth century suggests that police had chosen to draw socio-geographical borders to separate the laboring-class districts from the "bourgeois" parts of the city. On the outskirts of towns personal injury and even death created no official difficulties. Fight patrons bribed the police to ensure that casualities were listed as "sudden street death." [29] In the domain of the laboring population the police of their own choosing let custom override tsarist statute.

The police were very active, however, in the area of passport regulations and registration. Frequent arrests represented a form of sporadic harassment of migrants. Ostensibly, enforcement was directed at the migrants lacking proper documents. However, corrupt police turned the regulations into a means of extracting bribes. The extent of police powers over the migrants was apparent in the exploits in the mid 1880s of the district police officer in the southern mining town of Iuzovka. The regional gendarme officer, a hostile source but apparently well informed, claimed that an enterprising policeman in this settlement regularly threatened even legally

[27] M. Gorkii, Detstvo. V liudiakh. Moi universitety (Moscow, 1948), 484-85.

[28] E. I. Nemchinov, "Vospominaniia starogo rabochego," in Na zare rabochego dvizheniia v Moskve (Moscow, 1933), 158.

[29] D. A. Pokrovskii, "Kulachnye boi," Ushedshaia Moskva , ed. N. Anushkin (Moscow, 1964), 158.

registered migrants with forced return to their villages unless they paid the appropriate bribe. After several years in his post he allegedly boasted that he could retire, "having put aside 20,000 rubles." [30] Such brutal treatment was less likely to occur in urban areas with a regular city police force, but even there the poorer outlying neighborhoods were kept under much harsher police surveillance than the central districts.

In their daily operations the police often appeared to be the enemy of the laboring population. The way the police treated the lower classes in St. Petersburg at the end of the nineteenth century was close to the norm in other cities. One worker recalled that the precinct police "treated any poorly dressed person crudely [ grubo ]." He listed abuses that ranged from simple insults to the beating of prisoners. [31] In retaliation for real or rumored abuses workers, individually or in mobs, occasionally attacked the police near factories or in the streets. The potential for serious confrontations grew as the migrant cities expanded and the police increased their controls of the population. For example, the arrest in 1872 in Kharkov of two workers sparked two days of mob action in which crowds looted and destroyed two police stations. [32] Mob violence revealed most forcefully the undercurrent of hatred toward the police among laborers. A decade later the gendarme officer in the southern factory town of Lugansk described random violence against police there, which he claimed was the work of "wandering groups of young workers who walk the streets always armed with revolvers and [who] fire at [police] patrols." [33] As among the peasantry, the hostility of the urban lower classes extended to other figures of authority, but it focused with particular intensity on the police because they were the visible agents of the tsarist regime. Semen Kanatchikov, a young metalworker in the 1890s, recalled that Petersburg workers disliked "factory management, police, and priests" with equal intensity but added that they considered beating or even killing a policeman to be a "victory." [34]

The violence directed at the police was a product of the migrants' precarious place in the city and of the centuries-old popular hostility toward authority, not from incipient revolutionary consciousness. Kanatchikov noted that his Petersburg workers would tolerate no criticism of the tsar or

[30] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 9, ch. 21 (1887), 58-59.

[31] A. S. Shapalov, V bor'be za sotsializm: Vospominaniia starogo Bol'shevika (Moscow, 1934), 46.

[32] Bagalei and Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar'kova 2:472-73.

[33] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 9 (1887), ch. 21, 43.

[34] S. I. Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia , trans. and ed. Reginald Zelnik (Stanford, 1986), 153.

God, legitimizing their verbal and physical abuse of officials by quoting the proverb: "Break the cup but don't touch the samovar." [35]

The result of such conflicts was endemic unrest resembling latent civil war. Kanatchikov's description of his "gray," that is, politically apathetic, comrades makes clear that even though workers retained a residual veneration for God and the tsar, they turned the police into a proximate enemy. According to one student who became a factory worker at the end of the century, arbitrary police treatment of the laboring population perpetuated the conviction among workers that "laws do not exist." [36] As Neil Weissman suggests, confrontations between urban mobs and the police remained a constant threat as long as the policing of the city remained in popular perception as well as in reality the imposition of "the personal power of a capricious state police force upon the largely autonomous operation of traditional social groups." [37] Under the impact of print culture and the migrant experience, traditional behavior was giving way to a new awareness of personal dignity and social justice. Because of this trend conflicts between the police and the laboring classes became more dangerous than before.

Urban unrest and riots in the 1870s gave a clear warning that the police were inadequate to the task of maintaining public order. These riots indicated the new directions that urban violence was to take in the coming decades. The outbreak of labor conflict, beginning with the Petersburg strikes of 1870, undermined what Reginald Zelnik describes as "the old official optimism about Russia's immunity from the labor question." [38] Labor unrest had ample precedent in Western countries in the midst of industrialization, and tsarist officials recognized that the factory disturbances in their own cities were similar.

No modern Western European parallels existed, however, for the violence that was directed against the Jewish populations in Russian towns and cities. Anti-Semitism had a long history in Eastern Europe. The events of the 1870s revealed that Russia's migrant towns had become the locus of anti-Jewish violence. The origins of these events defy simple explanations. Political, social, and ethnic enmity pitted laboring people against officials, workers against traders, employers against laborers, and Christians against Jews. The major anti-Jewish riots were concentrated in the cities of the

[36] P. Smidovich, Rabochie massy v 90-kh godakh (Moscow, 1930), 13; these memoirs were written in 1901.

[37] Weissman, "Regular Police," 66.

[38] Reginald Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (Stanford, 1971), 331.

Pale, but disorders erupted in later years wherever Jewish migrants appeared. Cultural and ethnic stereotypes triggered an outburst of hatred against these outsiders, who were often accused of exploiting the laboring population. The Jews of Russia's cities were often scapegoats for the tensions of the larger world of police, employers, and traders.

Social tensions were apparent in the major rioting against Jews that erupted in Odessa at Eastertime 1871. By this time the city had become a booming port and commercial center that mixed Jewish and Gentile migrants, wealthy traders and poor laborers. The origins of the rioting and the pattern of violence were so similar to subsequent anti-Jewish riots that they stand as the archetype of the pogrom. Popular religious enthusiasm, at its peak in the Easter season, turned to anti-Semitic hatred when, according to police reports, rumors circulated Jews were undertaking "some sort of torturing and mutilation of Russians." The rumors set off disturbances directed against Jews and Jewish property that quickly became a massive urban riot that lasted three days. The mob appeared to be recruited at large from the poor laboring population of the city. The rioters looted and destroyed hundreds of stores, taverns, and houses and overwhelmed the police, over one hundred of whom were injured. Belatedly (and setting a precedent for later official actions) the authorities called out troops and Cossacks to suppress the rioters. [39] There is no evidence of official complicity in the pogrom, but the police forces were neither eager nor sufficiently prepared to put down the rioting.

The authorities had their own peculiar anti-Semitic explanations for the violence. Their suspicion of merchants and traders in general gave a simplistic social veneer to their stereotype of the Yiddish-speaking population. In a report written shortly after the pogrom the governor-general of southeast Russia blamed the "special status and privileges" of Odessa's Jews for the violence, an argument that conveniently ignored the poverty of most of the Jewish inhabitants of that city. [40] The renewal of anti-Semitic rioting at the end of the decade in the southern cities of Kiev, Nezhin, and Elizavetgrad was accompanied by complaints from authorities that "the Jews have grabbed all the trade." These riots mingled old and new elements of ethnic hostility. The role of rumor and the easy credence that many Russians gave to supposed Jewish ritual practices against Christians suggest how important cultural stereotypes and abiding prejudice were in fomenting the actions of the anti-Semitic rioters.

[39] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 67, d. 180 (1872), 7-9.

[40] Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1986), 128.

By the late 1870s these events and reports on the shortcomings of the existing urban police forces obliged the central government to review its policies for public order in the cities. Authoritarianism remained the guiding principle for new measures to instill orderliness into the urban population. The discussions that preceded the reforms as well as the reforms themselves reveal that the tsarist authorities took the problem of urban violence very seriously. The special state conference that recommended new legislation stressed the difficulties that the police confronted in "quickly and energetically putting down street disorders and, especially in the capitals, preventing [the formation of] or dispersing hostile crowds," which often "get the upper hand." [41] This report repeated the conclusions of the many previous official discussions of the inefficiency of the urban police. The search for more repressive powers represented an old formula in dealing with an urban population that at times took on the terrible features of a riotous mob.

To deal with urban unrest, in 1878 the government created a new cavalry force of two thousand men that was to be stationed in the major provincial capitals of European Russia. In effect, this decision revived Nicholas's Internal Guards Corps, but now in police uniforms. A few years later similar cavalry units were assigned to factory settlements. In 1878 the government also increased the number of regular police and equipped them with improved firearms. [42] At the same time, it extended its controls over the migrant population by imposing the requirement of residence permits ( vid na zhitel' stvo ) on urban dwellers. These permits had to be obtained from police officials. The trend toward new central controls continued in the panic that followed Alexander II's assassination in 1881. The regulations permitting the declaration of "intensified security" or "emergency security" brought urban public agencies as well as individuals under close police and administrative surveillance. These regulations were extended to the cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa, their respective surrounding areas, and several other important urban centers. [43] The emergency measures were directed at the terrorist movement but their exceptional powers supplemented the other repressive measures that were intended to maintain public order. For state officials, submission to authority and popular tranquility defined the essential nature of urban public order-

[41] "Zhurnal Osobogo soveschaniia," TsGAOR, f. 109, op. 163, d. 502, 1:252.

[42] I. V. Orzhekhovskii, "Vnutrenniaia politika rossiiskogo samoderzhaviia v 1866-1878 gg" (Doctoral dissertation, Leningrad State University, 1974), 72-73.

[43] P. A. Zaionchkovsky, The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878-82 , trans. and ed. Gary Hamburg (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1979), 256-59.

liness. By this measure state policies in the next two decades proved a failure. They were incapable of preventing social conflict from erupting into riots or of persuading the public that the state exercised effective control over the urban population. Violence seemed to be intrinsic to the Russian city.

Riotous Cities

Urban disorders had profound political and social implications for tsarist Russia. Many historians focus on the political dimensions of this unrest from the perspective of the revolutionary events of the early twentieth century. The social character of the disorders, however, points to issues that are central to the nature of Russian urbanism. The key problem for contemporaries was to diagnose the origins of the disorders. In the urban setting collective violence was a threat to all who had visions of progress, no matter what their political persuasion. Both educated Russians and revolutionary activists regarded rioting in the same way that they viewed fistfights, namely, as manifestations of a backward society. Like the French intellectual Gustave Le Bon, "by summoning up the nightmare of the crowd, [educated Russians could] reaffirm their own superiority and explain their impotence." [44] They were deeply aware of the threat that urban disorders posed to their hopes of progress and their vision of a civilized city.

As in the 1870s, anti-Semitism remained the most potent force behind urban violence in the last two decades of the century. The level of hostility toward Jews appeared to grow as the century waned. The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 triggered a wave of rioting. One study of the spread of violence concludes that it was "essentially an urban phenomenon," the work of workers and migrants. "As a rule the pogroms moved from large towns and townlets to nearby villages, and along railroad lines, major highways and rivers to towns and villages further away." [45] That summer the Saratov governor was deluged with telegrams from the capital urging special measures to keep the city calm. He kept part of his troops quartered in their city barracks even though he was concerned not to arouse "potential rumors among the local population by taking unusual and exceptional measures of a preventive nature." [46] Soldiers were his last line of

[44] Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1981), 192.

[45] I. Michael Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia," Russian Review 39 (January 1980): 26.

[46] "Politicheskii obzor Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 67 (1881), 8-9.

defense, and the population of Saratov itself represented in his eyes the principal source of rioting, which the slightest rumor could ignite. To such officials, the disorders presented dramatic confirmation of their fears that the police were unable to control the urban population.

As a rule, the reports that came from the provincial governors and gendarme officers in the following years had ready explanations for such violence. I have been cautious about relying on official judgments, however, because the authorities made use of their own social stereotypes when they diagnosed what they viewed as a collective pathology. They did have access to information on social conditions in the provincial cities and the district towns. Despite their own anti-Semitic prejudices, their authority was seriously weakened whenever riots occurred. Thus in explaining the disorders in their reports to the tsar, they had to attempt to give a comprehensive, dispassionate picture of events. If studied critically, their accounts provide clues to the character and origins of the violence.

The authorities never precisely identified the rioters. They tended to refer to an anti-Semitic laboring population that was thought to be liable at any time to mobilize for a pogrom. They tended to blame migrants, laborers, the unemployed, and poor townspeople in general. The migrants attracted the greatest attention perhaps because many lived in evident misery and tended to congregate in particular areas of the city. In 1883 the presence in Ekaterinoslav of fifteen hundred construction workers building the railroad bridge across the Dnepr river prompted the governor to conclude that this city confronted "a very dangerous situation for public order and peace." He considered the workers to be rootless migrants "from various parts of Russia." All were "inclined to violence and disorder." As evidence, he pointed to the anti-Jewish riots of that September, which had been started by rumors that Jews had ritually murdered a young Christian girl. A mob of over six hundred, fortified with vodka seized from a tavern, attacked Jews and burned and looted property until the governor called out troops and Cossacks. The mob action left "several victims" and extensive damage to property. [47] From his perspective the very growth of the cities was the key to the outbreak of riots because it brought together crowds of laborers prone to violence and ready to form a mob when unpredictable rumors spread through taverns and workplaces. Official reports also noted that rioters usually looted stores, hinting that they were undertaking a crude sort of social retribution against traders and shopkeepers.

[47] "Politicheskii obzor Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 185, ch. 11 (1883), 1-2, 20-21.

The authorities emphasized that the crowds emerged from a laboring population beyond the borders of educated, respectable urban society. At the end of the century the governor of Saratov province drew the attention of St. Petersburg to Tsaritsyn, whose summer river traffic attracted tens of thousands of "migrant laborers [who were] generally undisciplined and . . . extremely inclined to drunkenness and disorder." In his opinion a mere rumor about the "evil deeds" of Jews would immediately launch them on a riot. [48] The fact that there were very few Jews in the Volga ports was an irrelevant consideration to the laborers. Jews were scapegoats no matter how few in number. The danger of a pogrom was great when unemployment spread hardship among the population. To the Rostov-on-Don gendarme officer the source of the disorders in his city during the early 1880s was the "mass of unemployed local and migrant workers wandering about the streets and filling the taverns." In his opinion they were responsible for attacks on both Jews and the police "in a sort of common occurrence." [49] His account is noteworthy because he located this "mass" of unemployed workers in public places—streets and taverns—where they could form a crowd at any time. It is also revealing because the victims of mob action were police as well as Jews. The rioters were acting out a communal drama of ethnic hatred (Christians versus Jews), but they were also attacking the urban police, symbols of tsarist power.

Although officials often referred to the riotous public as strangers and outsiders, this explanation was facile. The association of uprootedness and disorder, like the implicit identification of the migrant with peasant, neatly fits the stereotype of the "dark people" of the villages. Observers, however, recognized the presence of townsmen among the rioters. In 1884 Maxim Gorky made this discovery when he watched the inhabitants of his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod participate in a pogrom. To him it seemed as if social identity lost all meaning when people became like animals whose uproar "merged into one heinous and gloating sound." [50] Using less color and making a greater effort to fix the circumstances when the rioting might occur, a gendarme officer of the southern factory town of Bakhmut pinpointed the holiday gatherings of the men of the town. It seemed to him that "efforts to arouse the population against the Jews always occur during the holidays when the petty bourgeois, having become drunk, gathered at

[48] "Otchet Saratovskogo gubernatora za 1897," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1898), d. 300, 21-22.

[49] "Politicheskii obzor za 1884," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 59 (1885), ch. 27, 20; and d. 89 (1888), ch. 12, 7-8.

[50] This short sketch, published at the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, is translated in Filia Holtzman, The Young Maxim Gorky, 1868-1902 (New York, 1968), 69-72.

the stream for fistfights." [51] Vodka and holiday leisure were the setting for the organized mayhem of the fistfights. With the addition of anti-Semitic rumors the gatherings became the crucible for pogroms.

In the volatile atmosphere of ethnic and social antagonism, leadership was a scarcely visible but still essential factor in the origins of the riots. A sort of language of rioting was well known to the lower-class population as a whole. But the riot itself required voices to transform the anger triggered by the rumors into action and to select the targets of the mob. Rioters too needed leaders, as the governor of Nizhny Novgorod was convinced. In 1886 he punished the presumed riot leaders even before they could act, assuming that when his power was made manifest it would dissuade violence. He claimed to have learned by his mistakes in failing to act decisively in the 1884 riot (witnessed by Gorky). Two years later, he reacted immediately when the police informed him of new rumors of a pogrom. He had the ringleaders, whom the police identified, ruthlessly and illegally flogged. Claiming to have blocked the riot and receiving the tsar's approval, he had no reason to doubt the efficacy of repression. [52]

When and how these lurid rumors appeared were questions no one could answer. They seemed to emerge as naturally from the cultural nexus of Christian popular mythology and the communal antagonism of Russians and Ukrainians toward Jews as did the rumors of land distribution that moved periodically through the countryside and ignited peasant disorders. These rumors found their audience among a poor population that lived in miserable, unstable social conditions, but social hardship could not explain what made the messages so credible that now and then they crystallized into mob action.

Prejudice was not the monopoly of the illiterate, and the elements of the print culture of the cities could become a new source of anti-Semitic rumor. The penny press appealed directly to a mass readership and its audience extended into the laboring population. "Creating a public" with an anti-Semitic coloring sold some newspapers and satisfied the prejudice of some journalists and editors. The Odessa police prefect warned that local papers that printed "sensationalist [and] often false information" could "arouse the population against the Jews" and provoke "major street disorders of crowds moving against the property and person of the Jews." [53] The possibility of press-inspired rumors added a new and disturbing element to the official view of collective violence; it suggested that the "riotous classes" of

[51] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 9 (1887), ch. 21, 42.

[52] Richard Robbins, The Tsar's Viceroys (Ithaca, N. Y., 1987), 212.

[53] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 29 (1896), 4-5.

the cities consisted of more than just the ignorant, backward, rootless, and impoverished. Newspaper articles with their own claims to anti-Semitic "truth" multiplied the potential for pogroms and made the problem of policing the city even more complex.

In the drama of the pogrom the visage of the enemy strangers included traders and bosses, Jews and police, and even medical personnel. In times of epidemics this last group assumed the appearance of the police. The onslaught of cholera created the atmosphere for rioting, even at the end of the century when physicians could claim the authority of science. The authorities dealt with epidemics as "social diseases." The resulting measures of isolation and quarantine provoked an outburst of hostility among laborers in some towns that was comparable only to the pogroms—and produced a similar amount of bloodshed. In the cholera epidemic of the summer of 1892 a mob in Astrakhan destroyed the cholera hospital, crying "this is where they bury the living" before being dispersed when Cossacks and police opened fire. [54] Seeking an explanation for the rioting that same year in the Volga town of Khvalynsk, the gendarme officer looked beyond "absurd rumors" and the "panicky fear" of the mob to underlying social conflicts in the town. In the previous years he claimed that the mayor had antagonized poor townspeople by raising rents on city land that they had farmed and that at the same time he and his supporters had enriched themselves at the town's expense. When the riot was over, he (and the district doctor) had lost their lives to the mob. Cholera panic had turned into a type of mob justice. [55] What at first sight had been blind rage  on closer view assumed the dimensions of a social crime in which the victims were the representatives of a repressive authority and economic exploitation.

This mixture of wild destruction and social retribution also appeared in rioting in factory settlements. In 1892 in the Ukrainian mining center of Iuzovka the fears aroused by the isolation of cholera victims sparked widespread violence that took on the proportions of a revolt. The mob, which was called into being by the factory whistle, was estimated in the official report to number fifteen thousand. Before troops moved in the rioters had destroyed, by official count, one hundred eighty stores, twelve taverns, seven houses, and the Jewish synagogue. For all its irrationality and wild force the police did not believe that the disorder was an isolated, inexplicable incident. The victims all had a place in a diabolically twisted but still

[54] Moskovskii listok , 30 June 1892.

[55] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152, ch. 55 (1893), 1-2.

coherent cosmology of persecution that identified an array of enemies from doctors and foremen to traders and Jews. The official report noted that "disorders at Iuzovka settlement are repeated every year to a greater or lesser extent." It attributed the origins of the violence to "the exploitation in the broad sense of the word of workers by all mine owners without exception and by the Jewish traders and innkeepers." [56] At this level of collective violence there was little distinction between cholera riots, pogroms, and labor protests. The report bears the mark of Russian officialdom, which was prone to blame capitalists and Jews when popular unrest broke out. Still, its glib reasoning points to popular attitudes, which turned riots into acts of social vengeance.

Police reports from the 1880s and 1890s suggest that disorders were increasing in scope and number. The question of the nature and incidence of urban collective violence is itself open to controversy both because of the absence of comprehensive, reliable data and because of the ideological assumptions that contemporaries and, subsequently, historians made about worker behavior. Officials tended to report events of importance but to omit those "disorders that were repeated every year." They associated disruptive behavior with the unsettled existence of the urban poor. For example, at the end of the century the Vladimir governor concluded that the unemployed and the migrants were "the two most dangerous elements of the population." [57] The historical logic of the argument rested on the prescriptive judgment that social position determined the proclivity toward orderly or disorderly behavior.

Given a dialectical twist, a similar logic informed the opinions of the Marxist radicals. For them it was conceptually impossible to imagine that workers' riots were the affair of an industrial proletariat. A pamphlet issued in the mid 1890s by the Moscow Workers' Union admitted that "the period of 'riots' has still not ended" but reassured its readers that "the time has come in our country when strikes are emerging on a level with [ naravne ] 'riots.'" [58] This argument was self-serving because their theory of the rise of the working class required that mob action dwindle as strikes increased. Soviet historians repeat this assertion, and Western studies of the Russian

[56] "Politicheskii obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152, ch. 11 (1893), 11-12; see also Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke (Moscow, 1961) vol. 3, pt. 2, 207-13. This massive riot is the subject of a special study by Theodore Friedgut, "Labor Violence and Regime Brutality in Tsarist Russia," Slavic Review 46 (Summer 1987): 245-65.

[57] "Otchet," TsGIA, f. 1263, op. 3, d. 5387 (1899), 790.

[58] "Stachki i ikh znachenie dlia rabochikh," Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 4, pt. 1, 78-79; the unease experienced by the authors in referring to collective violence is revealed in their use of quotes to bracket the term bunt (best translated in this context as "riot," although it can also refer to "rebellion").

laboring population have tended to ignore the issue by focusing instead on the organized working-class movement and strike action. [59]

The spread of collective violence in Russian cities is understandable without recourse to deterministic social theories. The models of the worker of the future, which were created by officials and radicals, embodied their idealized views of social progress in a new city. Tsarist authorities searched for the qualities of sobriety, industriousness, and submissiveness; the radicals substituted class consciousness for submissiveness. Both confronted evidence that appeared to contradict their social program, and both explained the contradiction by constructing an "anticity" of uprooted migrants and Lumpenproletariat . It was not difficult to find supporting evidence, but certain events suggested that the actual practices of the laboring population of the cities did not follow either model. My view of the urban migrant community suggests that the violence found among the lower classes represented an adaptation of well-established customary behavior. The language and practices of protest indicate that the migrants brought a mode of violent behavior and an adversarial conception of society into the city. They identified new enemies and adopted new forms of action. Many workers, both among migrants and settled townspeople, rejected this mode of behavior, some to seek private rewards, others to take up the cause of social and political justice. Both were found principally among the educated and the relatively skilled laborers. Within the laboring population violence was a distinct and potent manifestation of social and cultural hostility that appeared to increase as the migrant cities expanded.

Increasingly, official reports and observers' accounts tended to focus on collective actions, rioting as well as strikes, that erupted in and around factories. The distinction between an anti-Semitic pogrom and an anticapitalist riot was often blurred. The prominence of factory disorders seems to have resulted in part from the ease with which officials could identify and respond to this type of unrest (as opposed to urban mobs) and in part from the zeal of labor militants in recording their experiences. However, context is also important because the factories frequently had a large labor force and were potentially the locus for massive disorders.

Southern Russia represented the area of greatest factory unrest. In the

[59] For example, Robert Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), whose table on labor unrest in Moscow province (126, table 7.1) provides one indication of the relative weights of "strikes" and "disturbances." His source is the Soviet documentary collection Rabochee dvizhenie , which may in a variety of ways understate worker collective violence (see Daniel Brower, "Labor Violence in Russia," Slavic Review 41 [September 1982]: 418-19, 450-51).

south living conditions around the factories were particularly harsh, and the concentration of migrants was higher there than in other urban settlements. The 1892 cholera riots at Iuzovka were one example of this unrest; so, too, were the disorders in Ekaterinoslav later in the decade. In 1898 rioting workers at the new Briansk metallurgical factory so frightened the provincial governor that he proclaimed the violence to be "the wild consequences of the awakened mob on the march." The rioting at Ekaterinoslav began when a plant guard killed a worker in a dispute over pilfering. An estimated two thousand rioters quickly gathered and burned factory buildings. Then, "in a nearby village, in one hour [they] destroyed twenty-four houses of people who had no ties to either the factory or the workers." [60] On close examination, one finds in this riot the same nexus of ethnic hatred, economic hostility, and blind rage as in Iuzovka. The burning and looting included the stores, homes, and synagogue of the nearby Jewish community, whose livelihood came largely through trade with the workers. Eyewitness accounts suggest that the rioters were largely young workers; older workers, who were usually skilled, either stayed away or fought the rioters to protect their workplaces. [61] The workers' community was not a unified group in such protests. Like the pogroms, worker protests expressed the complex, contradictory characteristics of a particular culture of violence and social antagonism as well as the grievances arising from working and living conditions. The worker riots were a product of both the factory and the migrant city.

Contemporary reports stressed that urbanized factory settlements and the industrial outskirts of towns were the major centers for unrest. Industrialization was a key ingredient in creating conditions for the disorders, but urbanization was also essential. Worker disturbances in rural manufacturing centers—the "settlements" of several thousand people and their factories—were far less frequent and massive than in the major industrial communities—for example, Iuzovka in the south and Orekhovo-Zuevo in the north, each of which was a large town by the 1890s—and around urban centers such as Ekaterinoslav or even Moscow. As the cities expanded and manufacturing centers multiplied, incidents of urban unrest and strikes also multiplied. A count of the use between the 1870s and 1890s of troops to repress civil disorders (including both strikes and riots) found a notable increase in military intervention, an indication that the specter of the ri-

[60] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 3255 (1899), 10-11.

[61] Charters Wynn, "Donbass Labor Unrest: General Strikes and Pogroms in the 1905 Revolution" (paper presented at the Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 1984), 5-9.

otous city had concrete meaning to the authorities. [62] My own incomplete study, which is based on a sampling of the available archival reports, indicates that in the 1880s and 1890s riots among the laboring population waxed and waned in phase with other protest actions. They were particularly frequent in the period 1887-88 and again in 1896-98. Riots were the most dramatic indication of the potential for disorder in the migrant cities. A careful examination of the origins and dynamics of these riots reveals the extent to which disorders had undermined public order in urban areas.

The origins of the disturbances were closely linked to employer-worker relations, the network of trade around the factories, and the actions of police forces. A poorly developed commercial network, particularly in the new urban centers of the south, placed workers at the mercy of the small traders. The workers' low pay—and customary drunken celebrations on paydays—led many to fall deeply in debt to the traders or to the managers of the company stores, which were more often found in the northern factory settlements. An investigation into the origins of the 1892 Iuzovka riot indicated that owners and traders collaborated to collect the workers' debts directly from the enterprise. As a result, the report noted that "most workers (many without passports) never receive their full wages, just a page of accounts, including purchase of goods (for example, tea and sugar) at very high prices." [63] Stores offered a visible—and vulnerable—target for the workers' anger and frustrations, particularly if the traders were Jewish. The laboring population placed shopowners as much as employers in the category of enemy outsiders. Their attitude toward trading and traders rested on assumptions of a sort of "moral economy" in which high prices were the sign of the enemy.

The contrast between worker and boss did not appear as readily as that between worker and trader. The typical small enterprise in the city was a very different workplace compared with the large factory. In many respects manufacturing plants, large and small, reproduced within their walls the conditions of economic dependence and paternalism that the laborers experienced in their relations with the tsarist authorities. Wages were fixed according to the rule "as much as the master wishes." The economic power of the boss was reinforced by the frequently arbitrary fines deducted from workers' pay, the beatings at the hands of foremen or owners, the arrests that occurred at the whim of the owner, whose word was sufficient for the local police, and the sexual abuse of women workers. In these conditions the

[62] William Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881-1914 (Princeton, 1985), 89-90.

[63] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152 (1893), ch. 11, 11-12.

potential for sudden outbursts of violence was great. Still, scattered reports suggest that patriarchal authority was a substantial barrier to resistance. Although the "exploitation of workers by manufacturers is very great," noted a gendarme officer from a northern industrial region, the workers would "easily support and kind of oppression from small manufacturers" if they had risen from the laboring class. In these circumstances the domination of the owner rested on the workers' conviction that "'He is one of us.'" [64] Patriarchal authority in the factory manifested itself at its crudest in the physical beating of workers; yet one metalworker, writing in 1906, recalled that in the early years workers "respected a well-paying foreman even if he used his fists." [65] His authority and power to control the work force resembled that of the authoritarian provincial official.

Where enterprises were large and factory relations more impersonal, this social connection was broken. The style of command, however, was not substantially different. In the mid 1890s one Moscow factory inspector drew up a list of abuses that he judged to be "common occurrences in our factory life." These included "crude, demeaning insults by foremen and even owners . . . who use their fists on workers of all ages and both sexes, [and] the rape of young and married women . . . and the dismissal of those women who do not submit." Despite laws against these "abusive powers [ samoupravstvo ]," the inspector concluded that factory authorities persevered "without fear of legal action." [66] Gendarme authorities, revealing their nostalgia for a vanishing past, lamented the inability of foremen and owners, especially in the foreign-owned enterprises with Westerners in charge, to establish the same moral authority over workers as that enjoyed by the Russian owners of smaller manufacturing establishments. In the late 1880s, when disorders were increasing in number and violence, the gendarme commander of Vladimir province regretted "the inability of the factory administration to communicate with the workers and to guide them." [67] His complaint rested on the assumption that factory owners could exercise disciplinary power in the same manner that noble landlords dominated peasant villagers.

The weakness and lack of authority of the urban police were particularly apparent. In the capitals the very size of the forces of order, which included

[64] "Politicheskii obzor Dmitrovskogo uezda," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 88, ch. 35 (1885), 53.

[65] P. Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskii rabochii? (St. Petersburg, 1906), 97-98.

[66] Cited in V. F. Kut'ev, "Dokumental'nye materialy Moskovskih gosudarstvennykh arkhivov po istorii rabochego klassa goroda Moskvy v 90-kh gody XIX veka" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1955), 117-18.

[67] N. I. Voronov, Zapiski o sobytiiakh Vladimirskoi gubernii (Vladimir, 1907), 25. Voronov served in the province gendarmerie between 1886 and 1900.

large garrison forces and Cossacks as well as regular police, was a major deterrent to public disturbances. Even in the capitals, however, the police exercised little influence among the workers in the daily course of events. Their power protected the owners, and their activities were limited to enforcing certain laws and requiring conformity with the administrative regulations concerning passports. As the Moscow gendarme commander remarked in the late 1880s, "the local police cannot stop workers when disorders are beginning [because] the workers do not trust the police, considering them—and not without reason—to be in the pay of the factory owners and therefore always on the side of the owners." [68] By implication, the officer claimed that enlightened officials like himself could act in the role of both mediator and repressive agent in the disorders. Many workers accepted this claim to special authority.

The socialist militants who sought to organize a working-class movement dismissed both rioting and worker reliance on the tsarist authorities as backward and misguided. In its pamphlet of 1896 on "Strikes and Their Meaning for Workers" the Moscow Workers' Union emphasized that the riots were senseless. In its opinion these disorders revealed that the workers "poorly [understood] the causes of their worsening condition; they blame the heartless owner or foreman for their bitter fate or think that their troubles are caused by machinery." The workers "poured out their pent-up rage on innocent machinery and smashed factory buildings to get even with the owner." [69] Worker activists and socialist militants both did their utmost to build a disciplined working-class movement by promoting strike action. They sought to organize and lead orderly work stoppages, training the workers in the fundamentals of class solidarity and protest action. Sometimes their message found a receptive audience. During the 1896-97 textile strikes in St. Petersburg one militant overheard by a police spy explained to a workers' gathering "how to behave in the forthcoming strike: the intelligent recommended that the workers shun rowdiness [ skandal ], breakage of machinery and windows, and so on." [70] The message, however, was only effective on certain occasions and for reasons that suggest that the Moscow Marxists were giving a tendentious explanation of the role that riots played.

Laborers sometimes turned violent protest into a ritualized appeal for official intervention. Behind their animosity toward the factory management and the police rioters hid an unexpressed expectation that the tsarist

[68] "Iz politicheskogo obzora za 1888," Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 649-50.

[69] "Stachki i ikh znachenie dlia rabochikh," Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 4, pt. 1, 75-76.

[70] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 4, pt. 1, 583.

authorities would right the wrongs. The hidden meaning of riots was apparent to the few militants present in factory settlements when strikes and rioting erupted. The socialist activists used a language of class struggle, but the workers understood it in their own way. Ivan Babushkin was agitating among the metallurgical workers in Ekaterinoslav shortly before the 1898 disorders at the Briansk factory. He noted later in his memoirs that the pamphlets he distributed made clear the "undesirability of riots," which "bring the workers nothing but harm." But the reaction of the workers was in "absolute contradiction" to this message; they concluded: "They're ordering us to organize a riot." He concluded that "the old traditions of struggle were so strong that the workers could not imagine the possibility of a strike without beating up a foreman or destroying the [factory] offices. . . . Talk of former riots always led to the urge to organize a 'good riot."' [71] Babushkin found the answer to his contradiction in the traditions of the past, implicitly reassuring himself that strikes belonged in the future.

Ten years earlier Petr Moiseenko had discovered a more complex set of attitudes when he was organizing workers in 1884 at the Morozov textile factory in the settlement of Orekhovo-Zuevo. He attempted to stimulate discussion of class conflict in his audience by reading them the new novel The Bandit Churkin , which as mentioned earlier aroused images of plunder for the workers and led them to thoughts of rioting. One worker remarked that "the Morozov factory has a spell protecting it from riots. Morozov is a sorcerer; otherwise there would have been a riot long ago." Another announced that "we've got to have a riot; without that nothing will happen." [72] Perhaps their reference to the "diabolical" boss was a figure of speech. Still, it brought a mythological sense of good and evil to matters of economic injustice and power, a sense not unlike the workers' attitude toward the Jews. If fear of sorcery had previously protected Morozov, it ceased to do so a few months after this incident. In 1885 a strike broke out in the factory, and within two days it turned into a riot. Tsarist authorities estimated the total damage at over three hundred thousand rubles. They also proclaimed that the workers' complaints of unjust treatment were correct and demanded rectification from the owners. Abusive fines by the owner were canceled and a foreman to whom the workers objected was dismissed. [73] The violence resembled that at other factories. Workers without visible leadership responded to a provocative incident by a rampage of violence in which the targets included not only surrounding buildings and

[71] I. V. Babushkin, Vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1925), 86.

[72] P. Moiseenko, Vospominaniia starogo revoliutsionera (Moscow, 1966), 70.

[73] Voronov, Zapiski, 7; Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 25-26.

at times factory personnel and traders but also the very buildings and machines where they worked. What possible purpose could this violence have? Moiseenko pointed to one answer: the fear of retribution from the authorities, who were viewed at times in folk terms as "sorcerers," was broken by the violence itself.

The impulses behind such a workers' riot resembled those that propelled the mobs that cried, "They're burying the living," to burn the cholera infirmary or that incited pogroms in which the rioters proclaimed, "They killed a Christian child." In these cases crowds responded to a mythic world of mysterious and evil forces with violence and bloodshed, defying these powers and destroying their physical manifestations. In the villages sorcery might be conjured away by the community or families; in the urban areas the actions of mobs was a substitute act of conjuring. The results in the two locales were very different, because far more quickly than in the countryside urban crowd action turned into a riotous confrontation with the forces of order.

The targets of the violence were chosen from the visible adversaries of the laboring population in the migrant towns and settlements. Signs of rational calculation in the rioting appeared alongside the mythic elements. The destruction of factory records wiped out the administrative-police documents of the migrant workers. The burning and looting of stores revealed the anger of poor laborers at the practices of traders. The attacks on town leaders, doctors, foremen, and factory police released the hostility of the laboring population toward arbitrary and oppressive authority. We need not employ the discredited term "crowd psychology" to find in the actions of these urban mobs a form of violent social protest that laid bare the gulf of incomprehension and distrust that separated them from "society." This cultural chasm had long set the context for popular protest; it took on a new form in the cities and evolved into a more dangerous assault on the tsarist order as the century came to a close. The complaints of tsarist officials that both police and factory personnel lacked authority over the workers suggest that the institutional relations of power, embedded in culture as much as in the instruments of repression, were shifting in those decades. Despite increased police and garrison forces and new, augmented administrative powers, the laboring population of the migrant towns lived beyond the control of the state. Labor violence, like strikes, had a history of its own.

The riots followed a recognizable logical progression from their outbreak to their repression by the authorities. The records are most explicit for the 1890s and tell primarily of conflicts in textile factories, which were concentrated in northern Russia and staffed by workers who frequently moved

from one factory to another. The evidence is of limited significance, and we can only presume to extend the interpretation by analogy to the larger world of urban factory life. Often the conflict between workers and management began with public protest over harsh work conditions such as long hours, night work, unjustified and exaggerated fines, and abusive treatment of workers. Such was the case at the Khludov textile plant in Egorovsk. Twice in 1893 it was the center of rioting. The story itself is well known. What is important here are the clues it provides to the attitudes of workers toward the authorities. The immediate targets of the workers were the plant managers and the stores in the vicinity of the factory. Both times troops repressed the riots. After the first outbreak of violence the provincial governor personally intervened to demand that the factory owners rectify the worst abuses. The reluctance of the owners to respond was the crucial factor in the outbreak of the second riot several months later. [74] Both times retribution and social antagonism played a part in the selection of targets. As important to the logic of the worker action, however, was the fact that the workers launched the second riot after official action to redress their grievances had failed.

Worker expectations of intervention by tsarist officials appeared in many other riots during the 1890s. Perhaps workers turned with similar intentions to violent protest and strikes. In the typical scenario a small conflict, usually coming after an accumulation of grievances, provoked a work stoppage in some part of a factory. In the hours that followed a crowd would gather, unorganized but with individuals formulating complaints and even negotiating with factory authorities. After the negotiations failed workers would begin the attack on the factory. Frequently, the rioters obtained vodka by threatening tavern owners or by looting. Drunkenness became the catalyst that turned the group of protesters into a violent crowd, welding the individuals together into a mob of terrifying force against which the police were powerless. So common was the connection between drunkenness and rioting that workers and radicals who sought to control a work stoppage invariably tried to close all taverns in the vicinity of the factories immediately following the outbreak of a strike. The destructive phase usually dissipated within a day, and the riot often had run its course before Cossack or army units arrived.

Repression, however, was not the end of the drama. Soldiers often beat protesters and arrested the presumed ringleaders. As a rule, a government investigation also occurred. In it government authorities—factory inspec-

[74] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 2, 310-16.

tors, gendarme officers, and even the provincial vice governor or governor—requested the satisfaction of some of the workers' demands. At this point they became, to use Richard Robbins's term for describing the governor at the Egorevsk riot, "mediators in the dispute." [75] This two-pronged policy of repression and appeasement had been in existence ever since the government first confronted large-scale worker protest in the 1860s. [76] One provincial gendarme commander of the 1890s recalled, somewhat complacently, his method of pacifying rioters. "Most important," he noted, "everything depended on concessions and agreement from the factory owners, who rarely refused to cooperate; without their cooperation we could do nothing." [77] The way in which he conceived of his role reveals a deeply rooted official paternalism. By pursuing this policy of concessions the tsarist authorities became, despite their repressive measures, party to the riotous protest.

The evidence suggests that the workers themselves were aware of a kind of official complicity. To the extent that they expected that their rioting would lead to an official investigation of their grievances, they were using violence as a form of communication. Although in a very chaotic manner, their actions were a sort of ritual whose meaning was clear to both them and the authorities. [78] Such a message was conveyed to the Bakhmut district gendarme officer by the miners near Iuzovka who had rioted in May 1887. They complained of inhuman working conditions and exploitation by mine owners and traders. In the words of the officer, "Not knowing where to turn for help and protection, the workers decided to protest together, not separately . . . ; they presume that they will be punished for the disorders but at the very least others will understand their situation and improve it, even if just a little." [79] If, as is likely, the source of the officer's information was the testimony of the worker delegates, they were implicitly calling on him for help.

The attitudes revealed in his account of the encounter were deeply embedded in customary relations between tsarist officials and their subjects. The workers had good reason to claim powerlessness and to admit guilt, thereby appealing implicitly to official clemency. Their attitude bears some resemblance to that of the peasants, whom Daniel Field has called "rebels in the name of the tsar." To revolt and then to appear as the tsar's repentant

[75] Robbins, The Tsar's Viceroys , 209.

[76] Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia , 164-68, 367.

[77] Voronov, Zapiski , 22.

[78] See Natalie Davis's work on sixteenth-century religious riots, "The Rite of Violence," in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 152-87.

[79] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 503.

subjects was a protest technique that the peasantry had learned earlier. [80] For his part the officer assumed the flattering role of judge and mediator; he could appease the people while chastising the ruthless capitalists. In those years anticapitalism and anti-Semitism were prominent themes in many of the reports from gendarme officers, who took a populistlike stance in condemning the new industrial and commercial interests. [81] The paternalism of the two-pronged policy linked workers and the state's emissaries: repentance after the fact sanctioned the workers' collective protest; the repression of the disorder entailed state intervention in defense of the workers. In this mutual dependence violent protest was the one sure signal for action.

Early in 1887 miners in an industrial settlement in Ekaterinoslav province, deprived of their wages for several months, had openly threatened to riot to obtain assistance. "A day was even set for the violence [ razgrom ]," reported the gendarme provincial commander, "if the authorities did not help them in their 'rightful cause'." Help came quickly from "on high." It brought the miners their pay by means that were, if not quite legal, at least expeditious. [82] The fact that the miners were migrants helps explain their capacity to organize their protest so effectively; like urban migrants, their action was shaped and their expectations set by the power they could exert in a new social setting in which crowd action had a dramatic impact and where the authorities could be expected to step in immediately. The rioting workers of the 1880s and 1890s wanted not only retribution or vengeance but sometimes also state intervention and the rectification of injustice. Therefore, the authorities had some reason to reassure themselves that, as one report on an 1887 textile factory riot remarked, the disorders had "no antigovernment aims." [83]

Collective actions by workers were shaped partly by economic conditions and partly by the cultural symbols by which the laboring population gave meaning to their new lives. The destruction of property and even the very factory installations where the rioters worked suggested the blind fury and irrational nature of the mob. In the first period of Western European industrialization earlier in the century, the destruction of machinery had a different meaning. Even the Luddites in England had specific goals in mind:

[80] Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (New York, 1976).

[81] The most forceful of these attacks is found in the report of a Moscow province officer in the late 1880s; see "Politicheskii obzor Bogorodskogo uezda za 1886," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 9 (1887). This report is cited extensively in Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 717-35.

[82] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 487-88.

[83] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 89, ch. 19 (1888), 9.

they attacked the weaving machinery that threatened their livelihood as hand weavers. [84]

The studies of Western urban disorders offer an interpretation of collective violence that is applicable to the case of Russian worker riots. Eric Hobsbawm's picture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "city mob" in Western Europe bears a close resemblance to the urban and worker disorders in tsarist Russia. He argues that the mob used "direct action—riot or rebellion" to obtain the distribution of food supplies or other necessities in times of shortage. Although "inspired by no specific ideology," the mob expected that its violence would bring results because "the authorities would be sensitive" to the people's grievances and would "make some sort of immediate concession." Hobsbawm referred to such groups as "primitive rebels" because their violent protest was not directed against the existing social and political order. [85]

By employing a form of ritualized violence the Russian workers were in effect adapting the techniques of a less complex age to the social conditions of industrialization and urbanization. The policies of the paternalistic, autocratic state contributed to the expectations of both retribution and redress and the state and its emissaries became thereby both hostile outsiders and agents of reform.

In the last years of the nineteenth century a new pattern began to appear in the workers' protests. The challenge to authority was becoming more openly political. Both the wave of strikes in the 1890s and the new character of worker collective violence, at least in the major urban centers, could be read in this light. The change was visible in the appearance of a new type of worker with a sense of "personal dignity," whom one Petersburg metalworker thought to be the activists responsible for the resistance to "insults to workers by foremen." He asserted that these conflicts were at the heart of "many of the strikes and riots of recent years." [86] One young apprentice from that period later vividly recalled the "type of worker who . . . in every way protested against evil and the existing order of things." He remembered them to be "good workers and people of great willpower" who moved frequently in groups from factory to factory and as a matter of course "sought release in vodka." They resembled the typical migrant laborer in their respect for the person and authority of the tsar but were bitterly hostile to lesser officials: they would beat up a foreman who "tried

[84] See Malcolm Thomas, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton-Abbot, England, 1970), 75-78.

[85] Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York, 1965), 108, 110-11.

[86] Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskii rabochii? 98.

to abuse his power [ pokazat' svoiu vlast ']." [87] The readiness of such workers to act made them natural leaders of riots, but the anger they felt left no room for the ritual of repentance and redress by the authorities.

Official reports at the end of the century revealed an awareness of the decline of the old ritual of mob action and an increase in social hostility. Writing in the mid 1890s a Moscow factory inspector pointed to the explosive situation created by "the immunity from legal punishment factory authorities enjoy" and by the workers' "silent hatred, which gradually grows and spreads and ultimately erupts in terrible mass disorders that threaten the property and even the lives of the guilty authorities." [88] In 1896 the Moscow police chief issued a warning to district police on the growing number of "disorders" ( volneniia ) in manufacturing and factory enterprises in the city. He blamed "purely local conditions, primarily the discontent of the workers with one or another factory regime" and considered that the consequences of these conditions for public order in the city were ominous. [89] Strikes and riots together posed an unprecedented challenge to the Moscow police. I would suggest that the implications for the authorities of the riots were far more serious than earlier riots because they challenged the social order as well as the public order. They introduced into the world of the workers a rebelliousness that undermined the power of the state itself.

The issue of social disorders became an issue of public concern at the end of the century for a different but closely related reason. In the major cities growing fears of crimes against persons and property shifted the locus of violence from city outskirts to the town center. Riots occurred infrequently and largely in outlying neighborhoods where the laboring population was concentrated. Official intervention came relatively quickly and kept the confrontation from moving outside the factory district. These disturbances involved the state and manufacturers on one side and laborers on the other. Only the Jews were seriously at risk and their insecurity was of little moment to most townspeople. Attacks on individuals, however, could not be so readily localized and their randomness threatened all areas of the city. Crime stories were first spread by the popular press in order to attract and to entertain readers. But by the turn of the century, crime assumed more menacing dimensions when reports of street disorders of a random character began to appear. As dramatized in the press, these incidents pitted aggressive "hooligans" against defenseless members of respectable society.

[87] K. Mironov, Iz vospominanii rabochego (Moscow, 1906), 4-5.

[88] Kut'ev, "Dokumental'nye materialy," 118.

[89] Ibid., 442.

It is difficult to separate fact from fancy in what quickly became a public cause célèbre. Statistics from various cities on crime rates in the 1890s did not indicate a significant worsening of serious crimes. Occasional reports in newspapers, however, decried indiscriminant attacks of laborers and youth on peaceable citizens. Moscow's tradesmen in the Okhotnyi Riad area, which was located near Moscow University, had long made demonstrating students targets for beatings. But these attacks were explainable in political terms of patriotic (or reactionary) traders versus radical youth. In the 1890s the violence witnessed by Maxim Gorky in the provincial town of Samara had no such easy explanation. In 1894 Gorky used his newspaper column to decry the beating of students in secondary schools by gangs of "toughs" ( gorchichniki ). Their brutality toward the students suggested to Gorky that they hated "everything that in some way or other suggests culture." [90] The violence was no longer an encounter between cohorts of laborers in mass fistfights; rather, it represented a very ominous invasion of the streets by hostile and aggressive gangs that were bent on attacking peaceful townspeople.

At the turn of the century Gorky's "toughs" reemerged in the press of the capitals as "hooligans." They were embellished with more lurid colors and fearsome garb but their activities appeared to express the same anticulturism that Gorky had perceived. The reports from the capitals emphasized that the target for indiscriminate attack were the upper classes (similar to the violence in England, where the press had popularized the term "hooligan" to identify the attackers). In 1903 the violence appeared sufficiently serious to the St. Petersburg police prefect that he issued regulations that banned "the carrying of knives, daggers, and other dangerous weapons" as well as "intentional gatherings of people on the streets of the city." [91] Although the history of Russian "hooliganism" goes far beyond the scope of this study, the emergence of a public debate on this issue is evidence of a moment of transition from the urban conflicts of the late nineteenth century to the revolutionary events of the early twentieth century.

The extent to which the hooligan attacks represented a real public danger is debatable. The press and, presumably, its readers took the threat very seriously, as Joan Neuberger makes clear in her study of Russian hooliganism. [92] The explanation for their fears lies in the threat that this

[90] M. O. Chechanovskii, ed. Gor'kii v Samare (Moscow, 1938), 199-200.

[91] "Otchet gradonachal'nika," TsGIA, f. 182, op. 3, d. 545 (1902), 105-6.

[92] Joan Neuberger, "Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1985); see also Joan Neuberger, "Stories of the Street: Hooliganism in the St. Petersburg Popular Press, 1900-1905," Slavic Review 48 (Summer 1989): 177-95.

violence posed to the widespread hopes that had emerged in previous decades for the creation of cities of orderliness and enlightenment. The vision of a civilized city, which educated Russians and officials had espoused, had made an obvious mark on urban life—in the new schooling, the public readings, and the civic improvements that the urban civic elite had promoted. The existence of dangerous places and social violence did not appear to threaten respectable society seriously because these things belonged to a barbaric past and were the product of a backward people. Although we can now see that this attitude was a sorry illusion, the urban elite shared a fundamental conviction that the future belonged to reason and orderliness.

The hooligan disrupted this mode of isolating urban violence. In his public persona he embodied familiar traits that had previously been used to characterize the dissolute and depraved individuals among the laboring population. He was drunken, not sober, preferred the company of prostitutes, and turned his leisure time into exploits of mayhem and violence. One Petersburg paper presented its ongoing accounts of street violence in the capital under the title of "savage customs." The most violent events were labeled "the law of the knife." [93] These customs of "darkest Russia" were no longer restricted to the laboring sections of the city; they now reached into such eminently respectable areas as Nevsky Prospect. Violence among the laboring population was no longer limited to encounters with the police or other fistfighters but now involved peaceful townspeople. One Moscow writer warned that the hooligan acted with "systematic premeditation" in attacking upper-class townspeople. [94] In other words, the hooligan was an updated, modern menace, not an urbanized version of the "dark masses." Thus, he was a perverse link between the migrant city and the images of modernity that had been associated in the previous decades with Russian urbanism. He was inseparable from the city, but his presence subverted the very ideals of orderliness, enlightenment, and civilization, of which the Russian city was to have been the embodiment.

[93] Joan Neuberger, "Crime and Culture," 48-53.

[94] A. Pazukhov, "Khuligany," Moskovskii Listok , 17 August 1903.

The search for clues to the origins of the revolutionary turmoil of the early twentieth century in Russia has tended to dominate the historiography of the late tsarist period. It has lent an apocalyptic atmosphere even to studies of subjects that are far removed from revolutionary history. The inquiry into the background of the revolution is part of the study of the Russian city. In 1905 urban areas were the arena of strikes and confrontations between workers and tsarist troops. These events confirmed that the decades of tsarist efforts to propagate piety and patriotism and to inculcate orderliness into the urban population had been a failure. It is easy to dismiss the various policies that the tsarist officials introduced as feeble and antiquarian. Although official reports stressed the danger that the migrant city posed to social order and political stability, the state was unable to come to grips with the problem.

Municipal reforms opened an institutional path for the implementation of the urban improvements that civic activists and business interests desired. After 1870, however, the "best people," who were to implement these much needed local reforms, proved to be few in number and deeply divided on the agenda for civic action. Nonetheless, administrative domination ceased to be the rule and municipal responsibilities were no longer an estate obligation or something that a handful of townspeople undertook to achieve personal benefits. In the last decades of the century an active civic leadership took numerous initiatives that were designed to shape and guide the growth of the migrant cities. The social bonds and the ethos that these

various municipal practices created were the key ingredients in the emergence of a civil public sphere that had the effect of giving urban affairs an important place in the public life of the country.

Public opposition to the autocracy was a missing motif in municipal debates before 1905. Its sudden emergence that year suggests that it was present earlier but masked by ostensibly benign activities. Volunteer and semiofficial movements, along with municipal activities, had contributed to expanding the urban public sphere. In 1905 its political implications appeared in the public proclamations voted by municipalities in support of the liberal movement and in the incidents that revealed the intimate connection between urban welfare and oppositional politics. One such incident was the meeting in early January 1905 of the Saratov Temperance Guardianship. It was scheduled to hold a literary reading in its cafeteria-reading room but instead hosted a meeting of fifteen hundred people who heard Marxist workers denounce capitalist exploitation and who voted a resolution, passed unanimously, calling for liberty in Russia. [1] For a brief time this organization was part of the revolutionary movement.

In the late decades of the nineteenth century the periodic confrontations between laborers and the tsarist state hinted at the potential for revolutionary upheaval in the cities. The leadership of radical intellectuals and worker militants gave some degree of discipline to popular agitation, but riots and pogroms were also potent forces of popular mobilization in the revolutionary years. The ritualized violence in which the workers appealed to the tsarist officials appears to have vanished. But the practices of communal violence and the images of diabolical forces in urban conflicts added the ugly dimension of ethnic hatred to the solidarity of revolutionary action in 1905. The unity evident among urban populations in the early months of 1905 quickly dissolved in conflict and distrust as municipalities lost their aura of progressive leadership and social conflict undermined political solidarity. With hindsight one finds ample evidence that these tensions had grown and deepened in the previous decades.

To the many Russians attuned to Western precedents the economic expansion of the urban areas seemed to make their cities the center of social and cultural progress. The spread of literacy and learning encouraged them to hope that urban print culture would coalesce around the culturist models of educated Russians. These trends strengthened a tradition, whose origins lay in tsarist city plans, of giving progress an urban face. It took a variety

[1] Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okt'iabrskoi revoliutsii (abbreviated TsGAOR), f. Departament politsii, d. 1250 (1905), 3:50-51.

of forms but remained deeply marked by its statist origins. Although Catherine II's hope of turning her capitals and provincial centers into outposts of civilization proved largely illusory, in the next century its heritage shaped official policies and the ideals of educated Russians. Explicit and implicit references to models of the civilized city in municipal reports, the writings of doctors and scientists, and tsarist plans were more than rhetorical tricks and figures of speech. The national expositions of Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, which were idealized and tangible versions of urban modernity, bore only a very remote resemblance to existing conditions in Russian cities, but in their remoteness they remained faithful to Catherine's precedent. Their shaping of an ideal urban setting around technology and industry reflected a capitalist as well as a statist understanding of urban progress. This understanding was compatible with the hopes of the commercial elite of the country but not with the level or character of most urban economic practices.

One measure of urban crisis in the early twentieth century was the disparity between the vision of what I have termed the "sanitized city" and continued rapid urbanization. The dislocations occasioned by population growth and industrialization differed only in degree from earlier decades; what had changed, however, was the readiness of the urban population to condemn civic leaders for their supposed incompetence and servility. One observer, writing in the early twentieth century, was convinced that "almost all [Russian] cities bear the stamp of neglect, wild growth, and the absence of systematic leadership." [2] His point of view revealed the disillusionment of the reformers, who equated "wildness" with decadence and who believed that leadership was the source of progress. This disillusionment is a prominent theme in the historical literature on the origins of the revolutionary upheaval. It is echoed in Leopold Haimson's theory of the "stability" of the cities, where, as in the past, the privileged estates confronted the hostile laboring population that was moved by the age-old "spirit of buntarstvo ," that is, rebelliousness. Describing the city as a place of "psychological chasms" that divided "Russia's society of estates," he characterizes urban social relations in a manner more suitable to the mid-nineteenth-century town. [3] At the turn of the twentieth century the cultural and social divisions in the city were profound. Their roots lie, however, not in the stagnation of urban society but in the confrontation

[2] D. Protopopov, "Sud'ba russkikh gorodov," Gorodskoe delo (15 December 1911):1713.

[3] Leopold Haimson, "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1914," Slavic Review 23 (December 1964):635-36; 24 (March 1965):21.

between the visionaries and the business elite, on the one hand, and the migrant city, on the other.

In another idealized version, the city became a place of culture and learning. The formal and informal campaigns to spread schooling in urban areas reflected both the practical needs of the population and the hopes and expectations of educated Russians. That these campaigns did not achieve their goals is a measure of the obstacles they confronted as well as their own shortcomings. The hopes and disappointments of the Russians who participated in the voluntary associations offered abundant inspiration for literary satire. Chekhov's writings remain a forceful reminder of the great gap that existed between the real and the ideal in the culturist view of society. We may also think of the culturist hopes for enlightenment and technological wonders as a utopian vision of the triumphant city. This perspective reemerged in the imagined cities of Soviet science fiction. The cities were marvels of engineering and social control in these works, but they were nightmarish in Evgeny Zamiatin's novel We . His warning that this vision contained destructive intellectual flaws was an implicit criticism of the idealism of previous generations of urban dreamers.

For the agents of planned or visionary urbanism the ideal city looked to the West for its model. In its own way the history of Russian urbanism captures the tensions that Russia's position on the cultural borderland of Europe created. The exaggerated hopes that Russians placed in the civilizing mission of urban centers are best understood if we recall that they believed that the territory beyond the city represented what was variously described as backwardness or barbarism. This manner of constructing a cultural map of the country created invidious comparisons between the capitals and the provinces and the city and the countryside as well as between cultured and uneducated groups. It entailed a broad vision of progress in which the cities had a major role. The Nizhny Novgorod exposition of 1896 and St. Petersburg's Nevsky Prospect, whatever their differences, were bound together by these cultural expectations.

Another form of urbanism was also constructed from popular daily practices in the cities. The accounts of the ways in which the city was incorporated into the lives of the inhabitants, both new arrivals and settled residents, tell a story as significant as those of the proclamations and statutes of officials or the visions of educated Russians. At this level of interpretation the historian confronts two major difficulties. First, our evidence of popular urbanism is largely filtered through the views and assumptions of the officials and intellectuals who compiled written records. Second, much in Russia's urban history is unrecorded because urbanization in the

last half of the nineteenth century extended over a vast territory and touched the lives of millions of people. Even the census of 1897 fails the test of comprehensiveness. Still, it offers the only foundation on which to build a general interpretation of Russian urbanization. The model of the migrant city that emerges from a quantitative analysis of the census data reveals that the role of the migrants was crucial in fixing the social profile of the cities.

Two paradigms emerge from the study of nineteenth-century Russian urbanism. One paradigm consists of the idealized visions of tsarist officials and educated Russians; these visions were diverse and even contradictory in substance but all had one thing in common: they were remote from the experience of the population. The other paradigm was apparent wherever economic expansion emerged in urban areas and wherever urban migrants made their presence felt. It focuses on the popular practices, aspirations, fears, and conflicts that were created in the city. It conceives of the city as a place of old customs and new human endeavors where industrialization and temporary migration developed side by side. This amalgam of urban practices is the lived, not the idealized, migrant city. It is an arena of movement and transience and railroad stations and taverns; it is a place where entrepreneurs appeared in the guise of merchants and a city's electric lighting created a "hill of stars" that hid its filth and stench. In this city the townspeople conceived of educational opportunities in a way that suited their expectations of rewards, which were largely determined by the work place and not by elitist culture or tsarist programs of patriotism and piety. Also, the penny press moved into the print culture with messages that appealed to a mass readership and with lurid and colorful accounts of crime and petty affairs.

The domain of the laboring and migrant population bore the cultural and social imprint of their peasant origins. Their relative isolation within the city was a source of their hostility toward the propertied, the cultured, and the powerful. We can partly understand their social animosity as a reaction to the authoritarianism and deep inequalities in wealth and standing that they found in the urban population. But it was also an expression of their own manner of identifying friends and enemies in a world that they defined by their own places—the tavern, factory, and neighborhood—and their own bonds and practices—labor experience, collective fistfights, and the drinking culture. The "fugitive" townspeople of the mid 1800s eventually gave way, at least in part, to an assertive laboring population, some of whom were close to the model proletarian in their social identity and activities but many more of whom were part of the community of migrants,

that is, distant from their rural origins but also strangers to respectable urban dwellers. They created their own urban world. In their city the outsiders were those with plans and utopian visions as well as Jews, traders, tsarist officials, and police. The migrant city was a deeply divided place by the end of the nineteenth century: elite fears of popular violence confronted the social antagonism of the laboring population. The gulf separating Moscow's 1882 exposition and the Khitrovka slums remains an abiding symbol of these divisions.

In this history of Russian urbanism tradition and modernity stand as the points of reference by which the Russians gave meaning to the city. The two terms represented temporal markers by which to understand events in a rapidly changing urban world. In the form of custom and myth the past shaped the behavior and attitudes of townspeople, migrants, and laborers. The future, in the shape of dreams and ideals, inspired hopes for learning, visions of technological wonders, and dreams of personal achievement and social justice. The migrant city juxtaposed the old and the new not only in visible, tangible forms but also in the perceptions and expectations of its inhabitants. In this sense the migrant city was a subversive presence. It was not built to any ideal model and it nurtured forces of violence and destruction as well as development and opportunity. In its ambiguities and contradictions the migrant city is a symbol of Russia itself in the late tsarist years.

Appendix Discriminant Analysis and Migrant Cities

For the social historian the census of 1897 is an invaluable source with which to explore the characteristics of urban society in late imperial Russia. Although it employs a bureaucratic definition of the term "urban"—essentially the definition used by the Ministry of Internal Affairs—the census provides a detailed picture of the urban population of several hundred towns. The categories of enumeration include a large number of socioeconomic variables, including place of birth (in table A-1 I differentiate between "migrant," "intermediate," and "stagnant" towns on the basis of the proportion of the population that was born outside the city of residence at the time of the census), legal estate, household size, age distribution, literacy, and economic status (that is, self-supporting or dependent).

For the purposes of comparing towns with widely varying populations, these data have to be reduced to percentage values that are calculated on the basis of the appropriate population for a particular city-for example, the total inhabitants-in order to calculate the percent locally born. In the form of percentages the resulting urban profiles are susceptible to statistical analysis to ascertain the characteristics of the typical urban center as well as the characteristics of significant types of urban centers, as grouped by region, size, and-most important for this study-proportion of migrants "born outside their town of residence."

The search for traits that are shared by clusters of towns is particularly important to this study of Russian urban history. In my investigation I make a number of assumptions that affect the manipulation of the data.

The first assumption is that the urban development of Russia is best understood through the pattern-or patterns-of evolution of the cities in general. Moscow and St. Petersburg contained 18 percent of the total urban population of European Russia, but, despite their prominence, they did not by themselves define urbanization in Russia. Although containing no single center rivaling the capitals, the provinces were a vast arena in which the peculiar pattern of Russian urban growth unfolded.

At the other end of the urban spectrum there existed a mass of small towns that, even in the aggregate, represented only a minor presence in the history of the Russian city. The second assumption of this work is that the contribution of these small towns to urban history was so small that for the purposes of statistical analysis they can be excluded from the study. In the initial data collection I only tabulated the urban population for those towns-a total of 144-whose population exceeded fifteen thousand (the procedure previously adopted by Lewis and Leasure in their demographic study of Russia). [1] Even with this restricted group the total population numbered over six million.

Simple descriptive statistical tests (mean, median, range) reveal a wide disparity in social conditions among these urban centers. Although the population of the typical town (median value) was local born by a slight majority, the proportion of local born ranged from 90 percent to 17 percent. As indicated in the text, a Soviet demographic historian has discovered that in fixing the place of birth the census compilers classified an urban area itself as the "local" place only for those cities above twenty thousand population (they included the outlying rural districts in the "local" limits of smaller towns). [2] Although this idiosyncrasy does not distort other variables, it restricts precise study of migrant towns to those centers of over twenty thousand population.

On the borderlands of the empire where non-Russian populations predominated, the social and cultural conditions of the cities were in large part a product of their ethnic composition. They developed in a manner substantially different from the Russian lands. [3] The third assumption of this work, which is important in the statistical analysis as well as in the overall study, is that European Russia represented an area in which urban society

[1] Robert Lewis and J. W. Leasure, Population Changes in Russia and the USSR: A Set of Comparable Territorial Units (San Diego, 1966).

[2] B. V. Tikhonov, Pereselenie v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX veke po materialam perepisi 1897 g. i pasportnoi statistiki (Moscow, 1978), 54-55.

[3] Studies of several major borderland cities are in The City in Late Imperial Russia , ed. Michael Hamm (Bloomington, Ind., 1986).

was shaped by a set of forces that was sufficiently different from the borderlands to merit separate treatment. Administrative divisions determine the boundaries of this territory; the census takers followed these guidelines in their own classification, situating Poland, most of the Baltic lands, Transcaucasia, and Siberia in separate regions. All of these are excluded from my analysis.

This statistical study thus examines a relatively restricted group of towns. Even so, the diversity that existed among these centers extended into many areas of urban life. The population range was enormous, from St. Petersburg's 1.2 million inhabitants to 15,000 in Ranenburg in Tambov province. There was also great economic diversity, from the agricultural community and rail hub of Borisogleb in Kharkov province to the textile center of Ivanovo Voznesensk in Vladimir province. However, a cursory examination of the averages (see table 1) reveals that there were basic similarities underlying this diversity among urban areas. The most notable similarity is that when the proportion of migrants was high, so too were several other social characteristics such as the proportions of self-supporting residents, small households, and hired labor.

This impressionistic observation suggests that as the populations of Russian cities swelled through the influx of migrants, their overall social configuration altered as well. The similarities cannot be explained by a single factor such as migration. Too many forces were at work in the towns to permit such a simple explanation. A more reasonable working hypothesis seems to be that a particular cluster of attributes determined the presence of a distinct type of migrant town. [4] Similarly, the distinctions among the types of towns appears not to be absolute because one might easily shade into another; rather, these types of towns reveal the tendencies for traits that are grouped together in a very approximate manner to appear more or less strongly across a broad social spectrum. The assumption that by the end of the nineteenth century Russian towns had evolved toward identifiable types of population centers, one of which included a large proportion of migrants, led me to undertake a statistical analysis of the census data to uncover the demographic profile of these urban types. The final assumption on which I base my statistical study is that quantitative analysis is a proper tool to uncover "a range of cities formed and functioning under shared

[4] In sociological terms the hypothetical groupings do not resemble "monothetic groups," defined such that "the possession of a unique set of attributes is both sufficient and necessary," as much as they resemble "polythetic groups," defined as "a set of attributes such that each entity [in this case, the migrant city] possesses most of the attributes and each attribute is shared by most of the entities." Peter Burke, Sociology and History (London, 1980), 36.

circumstances," a grouping that one urban historian has baptized as a "city family." [5]

The initial test of the hypothesis is provided by bivariate correlations that compare the variation in values first for all the cities, then for particular subgroups, across the array of variables compiled from the census. The strength of association, that is, the degree to which two variables are related, is measured by a correlation coefficient whose maximum value is either + 1 or - 1 (+ 1 if the values move in an identical direction across the array of observed units and -1 if they move in opposite directions). The test reveals that a high level of migrants is strongly associated with a number of other traits, especially those mentioned earlier, but also including high literacy rates of the urban estates. The pattern of association is positively correlated among all these variables (the lowest value is .50). In other words, simple bivariate correlation reveals a statistically significant nexus of variables whose strength of association suggests in schematic form a type of urban population—the migrant city—among the 144 towns I studied. The results point to the importance of an urban profile that is closely linked to migration and economic expansion. Statistics confirm what common sense has previously supposed, a reassuring preliminary observation.

The next step in testing the statistical significance of the hypothesis is factor analysis. Having isolated a series of related variables, computer analysis permits the search for a configuration ("factor") to which all these variables are strongly related; computer analysis also makes it possible to determine statistically how well this configuration explains the variance in values of these variables. In factor analysis no one variable is assumed to depend on the others; all are supposed to vary independently from each other. As expected, this test strongly supports the migrant city hypothesis. The variables of age, household size, literacy, migration levels, and percentage of self-supporting population define a factor explaining 70 percent of the variance when all 144 cases (cities) are used.

The final and most meaningful step for historical interpretation is to ascertain whether the individual cities (restricted to those above twenty thousand in population) can themselves be assigned to identifiable urban types that are differentiated by proportion of migrants. Discriminant analysis is a powerful statistical tool to verify similarities among grouped cases as well to classify cases according to the group they most closely resemble. [6]

[5] S. G. Checkland, "An Urban History Horoscope," in The Pursuit of Urban History , ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (London, 1983), 460-61.

[6] See William Klecka, Discriminant Analysis (Beverly Hills, 1980), 8-11.

Because place of birth appears to be most strongly associated with other variables and identifies relatively distinct groups, I use it as the "discriminant" variable to classify the cases (cities). As I indicated earlier, the cities have values that range from very high to very low proportions of local born (and, conversely, of migrants). No particular value categorically differentiates one group of cities with more or less locally born from another. It seems logical to start from the premise that the common configuration of traits of the "migrant town" grows stronger or weaker as the proportion of local born declines or rises. I therefore separate the cities into three groups that include two "extreme" types, one that is characterized by a high level of local-born inhabitants (above 55 percent) and the other by a low level (below 45 percent). Between these two groups I establish an intermediate group of cities; the level of locally born of the towns in this third group falls in between the values of the other two groups.

Discriminant analysis requires the identification of "discriminating variables" to determine ("predict") how many cases in each assigned group will fit a particular preselected configuration within that group. This procedure permits the precise calculation of the power of the discriminating variables to isolate these unique types. In this case it permits a concrete test of the grouping among certain social characteristics of Russian towns that are selected according to their proportion of migrants.

Discriminant analysis classifies by calculating functions based on the discriminating variables, which in turn provide the values for the calculation of group means. Each case (city) is assigned a value based on its score as measured by the discriminating variables. It is then placed in that group to which its mean value is closest. Correlation coefficients identified the best variables to use. Table A-1 presents the results of this analysis. Discriminant analysis reveals that of the thirty-seven migrant cities, thirty (81 percent) are correctly classified by the discriminating variables and seven are assigned to the intermediate group; of the thirty-eight nonmigrant cities, thirty-one (82 percent) share the unique properties that are isolated by the variables to be classified in this group; only seven are classified among the intermediate group and none with the migrant cities. In the intermediate group twenty-six of the thirty towns are correctly classified, the remaining four falling in the group of migrant cities. Most important to the migrant city model is the fact that no city from either of the two polar groups proves in its overall social configuration to resemble the urban centers in the other group. Overall, 83 percent of the grouped towns fall in the assigned group, a sufficiently high proportion to confirm the presence (in a statistical sense) of two distinct urban types at the polar extremes of a spectrum that is defined by levels of migration.

A second advantage to this statistical test is its capacity to assign to specific variables particular values based on their strength of association with the principal discriminant function. The higher the value, the more closely is a variable associated with that function. The most powerful function (indicated by its canonical correlation coefficient—the relatedness be-

tween the groups and the function—of .98) includes a cluster of three variables that are related to the demographic profile of the towns: (1) the proportion of large households—smaller in the migrant cities, larger in stagnant towns; (2) the presence of working-age residents (ages twenty to forty) among town residents—higher in migrant towns, lower in nonmigrant towns; and (3) the proportion of residents living in communal ( artel' ) housing—again, higher in migrant cities, lower elsewhere. In addition, other significant variables point to characteristics that I identify with the urban centers that were more or less attractive for outsiders seeking jobs—the proportion of distant and local migrants and the proportion of salaried workers. The statistical findings appear to challenge common sense in one particular respect: the test does not isolate the variable that measures the proportion of peasant migrants that are born in the same province as the city to which they migrate is located in. One might hypothesize that peasant migration into provincial urban centers was a phenomenon so pervasive throughout Russia that in itself it operated regardless of the other factors in urban development.

Two less obvious but significant observations should be pointed out here. First, although the proportion of peasants in these towns is greater than that of any other estate, the migrant city's uniqueness is defined by characteristics that are not specifically associated with peasant demographic traits. Second, in the migrant city model there are no specific indicators of occupations in either manufacturing or trade (these variables are calculated using census employment figures as a proportion of the total self-supporting population). Rather, the significance of economic activity is apparent in the proportion of work-age inhabitants and wage labor in migrant towns. In these quantitative terms late nineteenth-century urbanization was not the result of industrialization.

Regional analysis would present a modified picture. Table 1 indicates the extent to which the cities of the Central Industrial region were distinguished by the importance of manufacturing (which was not limited to factory labor) and by other measures of economic enterprise, particularly the literacy of the urban estates and the proportion of self-supporting residents among the townspeople. Clearly, however, the urban centers of that region did not set the pattern for the rest of the country. Rapid growth marked urban centers in other areas, where opportunities for employment were much less concentrated in manufacturing. The domestic and service jobs available in commerce, manufacturing, and private households, which required no training and employed as many women as men, were particularly prominent in migrant towns. These jobs did not delimit the only

important occupational sectors, and their prominence is symptomatic of the diversity of economic activities that distinguished all the migrant cities. In this statistical analysis these cities appear to be primarily centers of an industrious population, the product of decades of urban migration and economic growth.

Selected Bibliography

The array of works, published and unpublished, that is relevant to the study of Russian urbanism in the late tsarist period is vast and tends to vary according to the topic emphasized. My list is intentionally idiosyncratic, indicating the materials that proved either stimulating or useful in my own inquiry.

I. Unpublished Sources

Archival materials.

Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Okt'iabrskoi revoliutsii (TsGAOR) (Central State Archives of the October Revolution)

f. 102 Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Departament gosudarstvennoi politsii (Yearly reports from provincial gendarme officers).

f. 109 Tret'e otdelenie (Records of police reform).

Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (TsGIA) (Central State Historical Archives of the USSR)

f. 91 Imperatorskoe vol'noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo (Records of the elementary school survey conducted by the Petersburg Literacy Committee in 1894).

f. 207 Glavnoe upravlenie putei soobshchenii (Governmental discussions and plans for the location of railroad lines).

f. 573 Ministerstvo finansov, Departament okladnykh sborov (Records of the 1906 survey of urban real estate).

f. 733 Ministerstvo narodnogo prosveshcheniia (Ministerial reports on the conditions and the development of urban schools).

f. 796 Kantseliariia Sinoda (Yearly reports from the bishoprics of the Orthodox Church).

f. 1149 Gosudarstvennyi sovet, Departament zakonov (Discussions of police reform in the 1870s).

ff. 1263, 1281, 1282, 1284 Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del, Departament obshchikh del (Yearly reports from provincial governors).

ff. 1287, 1290 Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Khoziaistvennyi departament (Reports on municipal reforms, elections, and taxes).

f. 1297 Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, Meditsinskii departament (Reports on sanitary conditions of cities).

ff. 1356, 1391 Gosudarstvennyi senat (Reports of the senatorial investigation of provincial administration of 1880-81).

Dissertations

Bobroff, Anne. "Working Women, Bonding Patterns, and the Politics of Daily Life: Russia at the End of the Old Regime." Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1982.

Bol'shov, V. V. "Kakhanovskaia komissiia (1881-85): K voprosu o vnutrennei politike samoderzhaviia pervoi poloviny 80-kh gg. XIX v." Kandidat dissertation, Moscow University, 1977.

Desjean, Mary Frances. "The Common Experience of the Russian Working Class: The Case of St. Petersburg, 1892-1904." Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1978.

Esin, B. I. "Russkaia gazeta vtoroi poloviny XIX veka." 2 vols. Doctoral dissertation, Moscow University, 1973.

Hanchett, Walter. "Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study in Municipal Self-Government." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1964.

Hinshaw, Christine. "The Soul of the School: The Professionalization of Urban Schoolteachers in St. Petersburg and Moscow." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1986.

Kut'ev, V. F. "Dokumental'nye materialy moskovskikh gosudarstvennykh arkhivov po istorii rabochego klassa goroda Moskvy v 90-kh gody XIX veka." Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1955.

Listengurt, F. M. "Rol' ekonomichesko-geograficheskogo polozheniia v istoricheskom razvitii gorodov Iaroslavlia, Kalinina i Rybinska." Kandidat dissertation, Moscow Pedagogical Institute, 1960.

McGivney, Thomas. "The Lower Classes in the City of Moscow, 1870-1905." Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1978.

McReynolds, Louise. "News and Society: Russkoe Slovo and the Development of a Mass-Circulation Press in Late Imperial Russia." Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1984.

Neuberger, Joan. "Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914." Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1985.

Pavliuchenko, E. A. "Moskovskoe gorodskoe upravlenie v 70-80-kh godakh XIX veka." Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1956.

Pisar'kova, L. F. "Moskovskoe gorodskoe obshchestvennoe upravlenie s seredina

1880-kh godov do pervoi russkoi revoliutsii." Kandidat dissertation, Moscow University, 1980.

Varaksin, N. B. "Formirovanie belorusskikh gorodov vo vtoroi polovine XIX-nachale XX v." Doctoral dissertation, Minsk Institute of Architecture, 1965.

Vasil'ev, B. N. "Formirovanie fabrichno-zavodskogo proletariata tsentral'nogo promyshlennogo raiona Rossii, 1820-1890." 2 vols. Doctoral dissertation, Novocherkassk Pedagogical Institute, 1972.

Weinberg, Robert. "Worker Organizations and Politics in the Revolution of 1905 in Odessa." Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1985.

Zlatoustavskii, B. V. "Moskovskoe gorodskoe samoupravlenie v period reformy 60-kh godov XIX veka." Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1953.

II. Published Sources

Primary sources.

Alabin, P., and T. Konovalov. Sbornik svedenii o nastoiashchem sostoianii gorodskogo khoziaistva v glavneishikh gorodov Rossii. Samara, 1889.

Alchevskaia, Kh. D. Polgoda iz zhizni voskresnoi shkoly. St. Petersburg, 1895.

Ashukin, N. S., ed. Ushedshaia Moskva: Vospominaniia sovremennikov o Moskve vtoroi poloviny XIX v. Moscow, 1964.

Astov, N. I. Vospominaniia. Paris, 1940.

Babushkin, I. V. Vospominaniia. Leningrad, 1925.

Baikov, A. M. Obzor deistvii Rostovskogo (na Donu) gorodskogo khoziaistvennogo upravleniia za 1863 g. Odessa, 1864.

Bakhrushin, S. V., ed. Moskovskii krai v ego proshlom: Ocherki po sotsial'noi i ekonomicheskoi istorii. Moscow, 1928.

Belousov, I. A. Ushedshaia Moskva. Moscow, 1929.

Buryshkin, P. A. Moskva kupecheskaia. New York, 1954.

Chicherin, B. N. Vospominaniia: Zemstvo i Moskovskaia duma. Moscow, 1934.

Dolgorukii, V., and V. Anofriev. Putevoditel' po Moskve i ee okrestnostiam. Moscow, 1872.

Elpat'evskii, S. Ia. Vospominaniia za piat'desiat let. Moscow, 1929.

Eremev, I., ed. Gorod Sanktpeterburg s tochki zreniia meditsinskoi politsii. St. Petersburg, 1897.

Fal'bork, F. A., and V. I. Charnoluskii, eds. Nachal'noe narodnoe obrazovanie v Rossii. 4 vols. St. Petersburg, 1900-1905.

Gerasimov, V. G. Zhizn' russkogo rabochego: Vospominaniia. Moscow, 1959.

Giliarovskii, V. A. Izbrannoe. 3 vols. Moscow, 1958.

Goroda Rossii v 1904 g. St. Petersburg, 1907.

Gvozdov, S. Zapiski fabrichnogo inspektora. Moscow, 1911.

Kanatchikov, S. I. A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov. Translated and edited by Reginald Zelnik. Stanford, 1986.

Kiev v 80-kh godakh: Vospominaniia starozhila. Kiev, 1910.

Kokorev, I. T. Moskva sorokovykh godov: Ocherki i povesti o Moskve XIX v. Moscow, 1958.

Komissiia dlia issledovaniia zheleznodorozhnykh del. Trudy. 4 vols. St. Petersburg, 1880-81.

———. Doklad o passazhirskom dvizhenii. St. Petersburg, 1881.

Krestovnikov, N. Semeinaia khronika. 3 vols. Moscow, 1903-4.

Kuchin, Ia. Putevoditel' po Volge. Saratov, 1865.

Leikin, N. A. Apraksintsy: Tseny i ocherki. St. Petersburg, 1904.

Makashin, S. A. Rasskazy o starom Saratove. Saratov, 1937.

Ministerstvo putei soobshcheniia. Aperçu statistique des chemins de fer et des voies navigables de la Russie. St. Petersburg, 1900.

Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del. Ekonomicheskoe sostoianie gorodskikh poselenii evropeiskoi Rossii v 1861-1862 g. 2 vols. St. Petersburg, 1863.

———. Materialy otnosiashcheisia do novogo obshchestvennogo ustroistva v gorodakh imperii. 6 vols. St. Petersburg, 1877-83.

———. Sanitarnoe sostoianie gorodov Rossiiskoi imperii v 1895 g. St. Petersburg, 1899.

Mironov, K. Iz vospominanii rabochego. Moscow, 1906.

Moskovskoe gorodskoe obshchestvennoe upravlenie. Deiatel'nost' Moskovskogo gorodskogo obshchestvennogo upravleniia po narodnomy obrazovaniiu. Moscow, 1896.

———. Otchet o deiatel'nosti gorodskikh vrachei. Moscow, 1899.

Naidenov, N. A. Vospominaniia o vidennom, slyshennom i ispytannom. 2 vols. Moscow, 1903-5.

Nikiforov, D. I. Vospominaniia iz vremen imperatora Nikolaia I. Moscow, 1903.

———. Moskva v tsarstvovanii Aleksandra II. Moscow, 1904.

Nikitin, V. N. Proidokha: Vospominaniia kuptsa starogo vremeni. St. Petersburg, 1900.

Novikov, A. Zapiski gorodskogo golovy. St. Petersburg, 1905.

Osobaia komissiia dlia sostavleniia proektov mestnogo upravleniia. Trudy komissii Kakhanova. 6 vols. St. Petersburg, 1884.

Pushkarev, U. U. Putevoditel' po Sankt-Peterburge i okrestnostiam. St. Petersburg, 1848.

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Alekseev, Nikolai, 117 , 121 , 132 , 134 -35

Alexander II, 99 , 101 -2, 201 , 202

Alexander III, 120 , 122

Anti-Semitism:

and Jewish migration, 50 , 83 -84, 144 , 195 ;

and pogroms, 199 -200, 202 -5

Architecture, 9 -10, 12 -13, 52 , 151 -52

Artisans, 26 -27, 65 -67, 89

Associations, voluntary, 183 -84;

for literacy, 164 -66, 184 ;

for public readings, 182 ;

for public sobriety, 182 -83

Astrakhan, 11 , 206

Babushkin, Ivan, 213

Baedeker's travel guides, 173

The Bandit Churkin , 178 , 180 , 213

Banking, 61 , 67 -69

Barth, Gunther, 171 -72

Bater, James, 80

Belinsky, Vissarion, 29 , 37

Birzhevye vedomosti (newspaper), 172

Bradley, Joseph, 80 , 138 , 144

Briusov, Vasilii, 152

Brooks, Jeffrey, 153 n.35, 175 , 178

Brotherhood of St. Dimitrii, 184

Brotherhoods, parish. See Orthodox church

Carnivals, popular ( gulian'e ), 30 , 72 , 181 -82, fig. 10 ;

and temperance guardianships, 182

Carstensen, Frederick, 56

Catherine II:

urban reforms of, 9 , 15 -16, 224

All-Russian, 80 , 168 , 226 , 229 ;

Moscow, 79 -80;

St. Petersburg, 80

Certeau, Michel de, 85 -86, 145

Charter of the Rights and Privileges Granted the Cities, 16 -17

Chekhov, Anton, 47

Cherkasskii, V. A., 102

municipality of, 113 ;

police, 193 -94;

and railroad, 48

Chernyshevsky, Nikolai:

What Is To Be Done? 98

Chicherin, Boris, 120 -21

Cholera, 28 -29, 128 , 135 , 151 , 206

Civil public sphere:

defined, 94 ;

and municipal activists, 101 , 104 , 111 ;

and municipal responsibilities, 121 , 124 -25, 139 ;

in reformed municipalities, 95 , 97 , 222 -231;

and urban print culture, 172 ;

and voluntary associations, 184 -85.

See also Municipalities

Civil society:

defined, 93 -94;

emergence of, 107 , 120 ;

and municipalities, 100

agricultural, 59 -62;

and fairs, 35 , 49 , 58 -59;

and merchants, 55 -56;

and railroads, 44 -45, 48 -49;

and traders, 65 -66;

urban, 33 -36, 41 , 57 -58, 62 -63.

See also Nizhny Novgorod

Confino, Michael, 5 -6

Corbin, Alain, 127 , 146

Corps of Internal Guards, 14 , 192 , 201

Coser, Lewis, 148

Crime, 137 , 219 -21;

in penny press, 171 , 178 ;

and police, 149 , 193 , 197 -98

Crisp, Olga, 33 , 41

defined, 153 n.35;

in municipal politics, 113 , 141 ;

and print culture, 170 -72, 175 , 180 -81, 185 ;

and schooling, 159 -60, 169 , 224 ;

social, 148

Decadence, 149 , 157 , 169 , 170 , 224 ;

and degeneration, 157 n.41;

and Orthodox church, 152 -53

Discriminant analysis, 81 , 232 -35

Disease, 28 , 127 , 129 , 146 .

See also Cholera

Disorders, 84 -85, 137 -38, 147 -48, 198 -99, 204 -6, 223 ;

and factories, 208 -19;

and penny press, 180 -81;

and "primitive rebels," 218 ;

state response to, 188 -89, 201 , 202 -3, 205 -6, 215 -17.

See also Pogroms

Dolgorukii, V. A., 179

Dostoevsky, Fedor:

Crime and Punishment , 152 ;

Diary of a Writer , 176

Drunkenness, 84 , 89 , 146 -47;

and disorders, 203 , 204 -5, 215 .

See also Vodka

Durnovo, P. P., 22 , 119

Economic growth, 33 -36, 62 -64;

and agriculture, 59 -62;

and industrial revolution, 41 -42;

and money economy, 41 ;

and municipal enterprises, 105 -6, 115 ;

obstacles to, 56 , 61 n.58, 68 -69

elementary, 37 -38, 153 -63;

girl's, 162 , 166 ;

and literacy schools, 164 -67;

in prereform era, 31 , 37 -38;

popular interest in, 157 -59, 161 -63, 169 ;

and pupils, 160 -64;

and teachers, 159 -61, 164 , 167 , 169

Egorovsk, 215

Eisman, Gustav, 115 , 121

Ekaterinoslav, 11 , 64 ;

disorders in, 203 -4

Eklof, Ben, 89 , 159 , 163 , 167

Estates ( sosloviia ), 4 ;

and social standing, 23 , 37 -38, 100 , 117 -18

city guides to, 173 -74;

and expositions, 171 -75;

and municipal liberties, 93 -95;

urban model of, 3 , 7 -8, 28 , 32 , 102 -3, 225

Expositions, national, 41 , 70 -75, 174 ;

Moscow, 72 -73, fig. 6 ;

Nizhny Novgorod, 73 -75

Fairs, 58 -59.

See also Expositions, national; Nizhny Novgorod

Fedoseevtsy, 24

Feodosia, 42 , 61

Feuilleton ( fel'eton ), newspaper, 176 -77

Field, Daniel, 216

Fistfights, 197 , 205 ;

and migrants, 89 , 145 , 147 -48

Flophouses, 137 , 143 , fig. 8

Freeze, Gregory, 4 , 22 -23

Garrisons, army, 14 ;

and disorders, 192 , 200 , 202 -3, 209 -10

and factory disorders, 212 , 216 -17

Ger'e, V. I., 111 -12, 117

Giliarovsky, Vladimir, 90 , 149 , 178 -79

Gogol, Nikolai, 24:

The Inspector General , 16 , 20

Golitsyn, V., 37

Gorky, Maxim, 31 , 57 , 90 , 134 , 143 ;

as journalist, 176 , 180 , 220 ;

and Nizhny Novgorod exposition, 73 -75;

and pogrom, 204

Governors, provincial:

and prereform municipalities, 10 , 12 -13, 21 -22;

and reformed municipalities, 101 -2, 119 -20;

and urban disorders, 202 -3, 205 , 216

Guardianships of popular sobriety. See Temperance Guardianships

Guides, city, 173 -75

Habermas, Jürgen, 94 , 172

Haimson, Leopold, 224

Hegel, Friedrich, 93

Hittle, J. Michael, 16

Hobsbawm, Eric, 218

Hooligans, 219 -21

Housing, 28 -30, 37 , 136 -37, 142 -45, 149 , 180 ;

communal ( artel' ), 81 , 87 , 144 -45;

slum, 143 -44, 143 n.6.

See also Flophouses

Illegitimacy, 146

Industrial revolution, Russian, 41

Intellectuals, in municipal leadership, 110 -15, 116 , 123 -24

police, 197 -98;

disorders in, 206 -7, 210

Ivanovo Voznesensk, 10 , 63 , 77

Jews, 25 , 83 -84, 144 ;

migration of, 50 , 65 -66

Johnson, Robert, 69

Kanatchikov, Semen, 144 , 198 -99

Kankrin, Count, 32

Katkov, M. N. 178

literacy committee of, 184 ;

municipality of, 18 , 68 -69, 124 , 126 , 134 ;

police, 190 , 192 ;

prereform, 12 -13, 15 ;

schooling in, 155 , 157 , 166

Khitrovka, 53 , 76 , 90 , 138 , 143 ;

in newspapers, 148 -50, 196

Khvalynsk, 206

Kiev, 45 , 67 , 69 -70;

Jewish residents of, 195 ;

migrants in, 83 ;

municipality of, 107 -8, 115 , 131 -32;

pilgrims in, 151

Koch, Paul, 7 -8, 125 , 129

Kokoshkin, S. A., 12 -13

Kolomna, 115

Kostroma, fig. 2 ;

state plan for, 12

Kuznets, 113 , 130

and disorders, 10 , 203 -4, 208 -19;

in factories, 36 , 52 , 62 -64, 90 , 180 , 210 -16;

and penny press, 178 -80;

and police, 197 -99;

as "primitive rebels," 218 ;

and public readings, 182 -83, 186 ;

and respectability, 186 -87;

schooling of, 165 , 167 ;

and temperance movement, 183

Le Bon, Gustave, 202

Liamin, I. A., 100

Liberalism:

European, 93 ;

in municipal government, 95 , 120

Lighting, municipal, 12 , 21 , 73 , 125 , 127 , 133 , 134

Literacy, 30 -31, 155 , 163 , 164 -65, 167 -69

Literacy Committees:

Kharkov, 184 ;

Petersburg, 158 , 166

Literacy Schools. See Education

Lofland, Lyn, 140 -41, 144

Luddites, 217 -18

Main Society of Russian Railroads, 42

Mamontov, I. N., 111

Mamontov, Savva, 58

Manufacturing:

industrial, 63 -65;

prereform, 36

Medical personnel, 128 -29, 206

Merchant city, 63 , 67 , 70 ;

guides to, 173 -74;

and newspapers, 172

Merchants, 2 -3;

estate of, 25 , 54 -56, 69 ;

image of, 37 , 55 -56, 91 ;

in prereform municipalities, 17 -19, 22 , 36 -37;

in reformed municipalities, 100 , 107 -10, 113 -15, 117 -18, 124 , 125 , 134 , 138

Methodology, urban history, 1 -2

"Miasma," perception of, 28 , 127

Middle classes, 128

Migrant city, 4 -5, 140 -42, 146 , 187 , 226 -27;

demographic profile of, 77 -79, 80 -81;

and municipalities, 125 , 136 -38;

in penny press, 178 -80;

statistical tests for, 229 -35;

and "strangers," 141 -42

Migrants, 2 -3, 76 , 85 -87, 89 -90, 145 -49, 226 -27;

and disease, 84 ;

and disorders, 203 -4, 207 -8;

housing of, 30 , 81 , 87 , 143 -45;

and "liminality," 86 , 88 -89;

literacy of, 168 ;

and passport regulations, 82 -83, 89 , 195 , 197 , 201 ;

from peasantry, 79 , 85 , 87 ;

and police, 195 -96;

and railroad, 50 -52;

women, 88 .

See also Laborers

illegal, 82 -83, 87 ;

in late century, 77 -81, 142 -45;

at mid century, 24 , 26 , 33 , 36

Miliutin, Nikolai, 97

Ministry of Education:

and urban schooling, 154 -55, 157 , 165

Ministry of Finance, 182

Ministry of Internal Affairs:

and police reform, 189 -90, 201 ;

Urban Affairs Section of, 39 , 95 -97, 103 , 106

Minsk, 48 -49

Modernity, 3 ;

in city guides, 174 ;

and education, 153 , 157 ;

and municipalities, 123 ;

and national expositions, 74 -75, 224

Moiseenko, Petr, 180 , 213 -14

Mortality, 28 , 129 -30

economy, 59 , 62 -63, 66 ;

exposition of 1882, 72 -73;

migrants in, 24 , 76 , 144 ;

municipality of, 18 , 99 -100, 102 , 123 -24, 132 , 137 , 153 ;

newspapers, 177 -79;

police, 190 , 194 , 197 ;

population, 13 , 77 , 79 ;

railroads, 43 , 47 , 53 ;

schooling, 155 , 157 ;

social groups, 24 , 37 , 55 , 70 , 143 ;

state plan for, 11 -12

Moskovskii listok (newspaper), 177 -79

Mumford, Lewis, 13

Municipal statutes:

of 1785, 8 ;

of 1870, 94 , 96 -98, 102 -3;

of 1892, 122 -23

Municipalities:

autonomy of, 97 , 102 , 122 ;

corruption in, 19 -20, 108 , 115 -16;

elections in, 18 -19, 106 -8, 123 ;

electorate of, 17 -19, 98 , 100 , 102 -3, 105 -8, 122 -23;

leadership of, 19 , 105 , 108 -16, 125 ;

prereform, 12 , 16 -22;

public schooling in, 153 -58, 161 ;

public works in 21 , 100 , 114 , 118 , 124 , 125 -28, 133 ;

social welfare in, 82 , 89 , 136 -38;

state obligations of, 20 -21, 100 , 131 -32;

taxation in, 20 -21, 116 -17, 130 -33.

See also Liberalism; Public Health; Sanitation

Mutual Credit Society, Kiev: 108 , 115

Natanson, Mark, 185

Neuberger, Joan, 220

Newspapers:

boulevard, 149 -50, 170 -71, 175 -81, 205 ;

and censorship, 171 , 177 , 179 ;

national, 170 -72;

readers of, 5 , 171 -72, 177 , 179 -80.

See also Print culture

Novoe vremia (newspaper), 172

Nicholas II, 150 -51

Nizhny Novgorod:

exposition of 1896, 53 -54, 73 -75, 134 , 174 ;

fair, 35 , 49 , 58 -59;

municipality of, 106 , 123 , 134 ;

pogrom in, 204 -5;

wealthy electorate of, 69

in municipal government, 17 , 98 -102, 107 , 109 , 110

Odessa, 44 , 84 , 144 ;

commerce, 61 -62;

municipality of, 99 -102, 106 ;

pogroms in, 200 ;

police, 191 , 193 -94;

social welfare in, 136 -37

Orderliness, public ( blagoustroistvo ), 10 , 126 , 188 , 201 -2

Orekhovo-Zuevo, 178 , 180 ;

and Morozov factory strike, 213 -14

Orenburg, 126

Orthodox church, 9 , 150 -51, 152 -53;

and parish brotherhoods, 184 -85;

and urban schooling, 31 , 155 , 169

Pale of Settlement, 25 , 27 , 83

Passport regulations. See Migrants

Pastukhov, N. A., 132 , 134 -35, 178 -80

Patriotism:

and police, 196 -97;

popular, 198 -99;

rituals of, 9 , 150 -51;

in schooling, 159 -60, 182

Pawnshops, 138

Peasants, 27

Penny press. See Newspapers

People's clubs, 184

Petersburg Censorship Committee, 177

Peterburgskii listok (newspaper), 175 , 177

Petty bourgeois ( meshchane ):

estate of, 25 -28, 29 , 37 -38, 60 ;

in municipalities, 18 , 108 -11, 117 , 122

Pilgrimage, 151

Planning, urban, 3 , 9 -13

Pogroms, 199 -200, 202 -6, 214 .

See also Disorders

and corruption, 15 -16, 83 , 193 -98;

and crime, 149 , 193 -94, 197 ;

and disorders, 200 -201, 212 ;

district, 15 , 190 , 197 -98;

and Jews, 195 , 200 ;

and laborers, 149 , 212 ;

and migrants, 149 , 195 -96;

and municipalities, 131 , 189 -90;

popular attitude toward, 15 , 193 -94, 196 , 199 , 212 ;

prereform, 10 , 14 -16;

reform of, 189 -92, 201 ;

staffing of, 15 , 190 -92, 201 ;

and vagrancy, 194 -95

"Policed society," 192 -93, 196

Population, 23 -25, 76 -77

Poverty, 28 -30, 62 , 66 , 133 ;

and migrants, 76 , 90 ;

and schooling, 161 -62;

and slums, 143 , 148 -49;

and vagrancy, 194 -95;

and welfare, 136 , 138

Print culture:

and city guides, 172 -73;

and literacy, 167 -69;

and penny press, 175 -77;

and schooling, 163 -64.

See also Newspapers

Prostitution, 84 , 145 -47

Public health, 125 -30, 134 -35

Public readings, 181 -83, 185 -86.

See also Literacy committees

Radicals, 165 , 185 , 201 , 202 ;

Marxist, 207 , 212

Railroads, 5 , 34 , 42 -46, 49 -50, figs. 3 and 4 ;

passenger travel on, 50 -52

Real estate, 13 -14, 29 -30, 68 , 115 -16, 142 -43

Regional auspices ( zemliachestvo ), 88 , 145 , 150 .

See also Migrants

Rieber, Alfred, 37 , 55 , 121

Riots. See Disorders; Pogroms

Robbins, Richard, 120 , 216

Rostov-on-Don, 16 , 44 , 82 , 101 , 204

Rybinsk, 36 , 133

Ryndziunskii, P. G., 87

St. Petersburg:

drunkenness in, 186 ;

economy, 66 ;

migrants, 83 , 195 ;

municipality of, 98 , 100 , 124 ;

newspapers, 172 , 177 ;

police, 191 -92;

state plans for, 10 ;

strikes in, 212

Samara, 44 , 81 -82, 136

Sanitation, 28 , 29 , 127 , 128 -29, 134 -35

Saratov, 30 , 66 -67, 79 , 131 , 150 -51, 155 , 185 ;

disorders in, 202 -3;

economy, 35 , 60

Seasonal labor ( otkhodnichestvo ), 24 , 36 , 79 -82, 86 , 89 .

See also Migration

Shcherbatov, Count, 99

Simbirsk, 47 -48, 151

Slavophiles, 102

Smiles, Samuel:

Self-Help , 70

Society for the Protection of Public Health, 128 , 130

Society of Lovers of Fine Arts, 185

city plans of, 4 -5, 9 -13, 95 ;

culturist activities of, 181 -84;

and local needs, 100 -102, 105 , 118 -19;

and municipal reform, 15 -16, 95 -98, 122 -23;

prereform authoritarianism of, 13 , 21 -22;

and reformed municipalities, treatment of, 120 -21, 126 , 130 ;

transportation policy of, 32 , 42 -43, 45 -46.

See also Police; Gendarmes; Governors

Statisticians, municipal, 128 , 146

Stolypin, Petr, 93

Strikes, 207 , 210 , 213 , 218 ;

and disorders, 208 , 208 n.59

Stroganov, Count Aleksandr, 99 , 101 -2

Svirskii, A., 180

Tambov, 20 -21, 67 -68, 111 -12, 113 -14, 134

Taverns, 146 , 182 , 186 , fig. 12

Tearooms ( chainiki ), 182 -83, 186

Temperance Guardianships, 145 , 182 -83, 223 ;

and public readings, 181 , 186

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 93

Tolstoi, D. M., 182

Tolstoi, Lev, 90 , 148 -49;

Resurrection , 51

Traders, 65 -66;

and disorders, 203 , 210 .

See also Commerce a1Tradition, defined, 3 , 227

Transportation, 34 -35, 46 , 53 -54, fig. 4

Trepov, A. A., 181 -82

Tsaritsyn, 49 , 191 , 204

Turner, Victor, 86

Urbanism, 2 -3;

civic, 94 -95, 125 , 138 ;

imperial, 96 -98, fig. 5 ;

industrial-technological, 40 -41, 47 , 70 -75;

practice of, 8 , 29 -31, 90 -91, 140 -41, 150 , 226 ;

progressive, 38 -39, 75 , 149 , 202 , 224

Urbanization, 2 ;

demographic, 76 -80, 226 ;

and disorders, 209 -10;

and economic growth, 52 , 57

Vagrants, 194 -95.

Valuev, Count, 97 , 99 , 103

Vilna, 25 , 65

Vladimir, 126 -27

Vodka, social function of, 89 , 145 -46, 186 .

See also Drunkenness

Voronezh, 34 , 38

Wealth, 36 -37, 58 , 69 -70

Weissman, Neil, 199

Welfare, 136 -38, 194 -95.

Witte, Sergei, 74 -75

Workers. See Laborers

Workers, militant, 145 -46, 148 , 180 , 212 -14

Workers' Union, Moscow, 207 , 212

Yaroslavl, 18 , 33

Zamiatin, Evgenii:

Zelenoi, A., 42 -43

Zelnik, Reginald, 187 , 199

Compositor: Braun-Brumfield

Text: Aldus

Display: Helvetica

Printer: Braun-Brumfield

Binder: Braun-Brumfield

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Theses & Dissertations Archive

On This Page:

• Masters Theses
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All Geography Theses & Dissertations from UW Libraries .

Masters Theses, 1928-Present

• Hubert Anton BAUER  Tides of the Puget Sound and Adjacent Island Waters [1928]
• Wallace Thomas BUCKLEY  The Geography of Spokane [1930]
• Carl Herbert MAPES  The History and Function of the Map in Relation to the Science of Geography [1931]
• William Bungay MERRIAM  Geonomics of the Rogue River Valley [1933]
• James Allan TOWER  The Oasis of Damascus [1933]
• Vera C. CASS [Sawyer]  The Port of Stockton [1934]
• William Haskell PIERSON  A Regional Study of Texas [1934]
• Leonard Clarence EKMAN  The Geography of Occupance in the Skykomish Valley [1937]
• Harold Ellsworth TENNANT  The Columbia Basin Project [1937]
• Margaret TAYLOR [Carlstairs]  Intensification of Agriculture in Sub-tropical Japan [1939]
• Russel SHEE MCCLURE  The Hudson Bay Wheat Road [1939]
• Burton W. ATKINSON  The Historical Geography of the Snohomish River Valley [1940]
• Elmer ANDERSEN  The Eden-Farson Reclamation Project of Wyoming [1940]
• Woodrow Rexford CLEVINGER  The Southern Appalachian Highlanders in Western Washington [1940]
• Tim Kenneth KELLEY  The Geography of the Wenatchee River Basin [1940]
• Gertrude Louise MCKEAN [Reith]  Industrial Tacoma [1940]
• Chester Frederick COLE  Land Utilization on Vashon Island [1941]
• Violet Elisabeth RYBERG  Oasis Agriculture in Tacoma, Argentina [1942]
• Ernestine Annamae HAMBURG [Gavin]  Geography of Pen Oreille County Washington [1943]
• Enid Lorine MILLER [Stevens]  A Geographic Study of Jefferson and Clallam Counties Washington [1943]
• Marion E. MARTS  Geography of the Snoqualmie River Valley [1944]
• William Ross PENCE  The White River Valley of Washington [1946]
• Willert RHYNSBURGER  A Critical Bibliography of African Topographic Maps [1946]
• Richard M. HIGHSMITH, Jr.  Irrigation Agriculture in the Yakima Valley [1946]
• Herman Walter BURKLAND  The Yokohama Waterfront: A Study in Port Morphology [1947]
• Michael Perry MCINTYRE  Geography of the New Hebrides [1947]
• Elbert Ernest MILLER  Geography of Grant County, Washington [1947]
• Frederick William BUERSTATTE  The Geography of Whidbey Island [1947]
• Howard John CRITCHFIELD  The Geography of Boundary County, Idaho [1947]
• Oliver Harry HEINTZELMAN  The Urban Geography of Longview Washington [1948]
• Stanley Alan ARBINGAST  The Industrial Geography of Duluth, Minnesota [1948]
• Douglas Broadmore CARTER  The Sequim-Dungeness Lowland. A Natural Dairy Community [1948]
• Robert Nelson YOUNG  Geography of the Okanogan Valley [1948]
• John Olney DART  The Geography of the Roslyn-Cle Elum Coal Field [1948]
• Harold Ray IMUS  Land Utilization in the Sumas Lake District, British Columbia [1948]
• Donald Otto BUSHMAN  The Geography of Orcas Island [1949]
• Constance Demange CROSS  The Geography of Clackamas County, Oregon [1949]
• Roger Edward ERVIN  The Economy of Central Costa Rica [1949]
• Edward Clarence WHITLEY  Agriculture Geography of the Kittitas Valley [1949]
• Brian Henry FARRELL  The Study of an Evolving Habitat: Ahuriri Lagoon, New Zealand [1949]
• Keith Westherad THOMSON  The Manawatu Lowland of New Zealand [1949]
• Will F. THOMPSON, Jr.  Resources of the Western Aleutians [1950]
• Dale Elliot COURTNEY  Bellingham: An Urban Analysis [1950]
• Donald William MEINIG  Environment and Settlement in the Palouse, 1868-1910 [1950]
• Forrest Lester MCELHOE, Jr.  Physical Modifications of Site Necessitated by the Urban Growth of Seattle [1950]
• Clarke Harding BROOKE, Jr.  The Razor Clam Siliqua Patula of the Washington Coast and Its Place in the Local Economy [1950]
• Herbert Lee COMBS, Jr.  The Historical Geography of Port Townsend, Washington [1950]
• Wilfred Gervais MYATT  Urban Geography of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan [1950]
• Elaine May BJORKLUND  Changing Occupance in Davis County, Utah [1951]
• Francis William ANDERSON  The Urban Geography of Everett, Washington [1951]
• John Albert CROSBY  The Problem of Relief Representation on Maps [1951]
• Theodore HERMAN  The Manufacture of Aluminum Products in the State of Washington, as of June 30, 1950 [1951]
• Elizabeth SCHREIBER OXFORD  Phoenix: An Oasis in the Great American Desert [1951]
• Anthony SAS  The Coal Mining Industry in South Limburg, Netherlands [1951]
• Eva Kathleen DEKRAAY  Geography of Routt County, Washington [1951]
• John Richard HOWARD  Wichita – An Urban Analysis [1951]
• James Eugene BROOKS  Wahkiakum County, Washington: A Case Study in the Geography of the Coast Range Portion of the Lower Columbia River Valley [1952]
• Hazel Loraine LAUGHLIN  The La Connor Flats of Western Washington [1952]
• Gene Ellis MARTIN  Population and Food Production in the Philippine Province of Antique [1952]
• Dave Victoria GRAVES  A Geographical Study of Olympia, Washington [1952]
• William Reed HEAD  A Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation of the Areal Arrangement of Retail Business in Communities and Neighborhoods in Portland, Oregon [1952]
• Harold Earl BABCOCK  The Historical Geography of Devils Lake, North Dakota [1952]
• Jack Allen HARRISON  An Evaluation of Mackinder’s Heartland Theory in Light of Selected Pre-War Economic Developments in the Soviet Union [1952]
• Joseph LOTZKAR  The Boundary Country of Southern British Columbia. A Study of Resources and Human Occupance [1952]
• Thomas Edward STEPHENS  Temperatures in the State of Washington as Influenced by the Westward Spread of Polar Air Over the Rocky and Cascade Mountain Barriers [1952]
• Charles Dennis DURDEN  The Road System of San Juan County [1953]
• Harold Glenn LUNTEY  An Analysis of the Economic Benefits of Irrigation to Twin City Falls County, Idaho [1953]
• Francis E. SHAFER  Tourist Flow to the San Juan Islands [1953]
• Neil Collard FIELD  The Amu-Darya: Problems and Implications of Soviet Plans for Water Resource Development. An Application of Systematic Geographic Principles to Regional Research in the Soviet Field [1954]
• Burton Francis KELSO  Flow Pattern Changes in the Canadian Petroleum Industry. A Case Study in the Impact of Increased Oil Production Upon Petroleum Transportation in Canada [1954]
• Raymond Success MATHIESON  The Industrial Geography of Seattle, Washington [1954]
• Rodney STEINER  An Investigation of Selected Phases of Sampling to Determine Quantities of Land and Land-Use Types [1954]
• Fred Patrick MILETICH  The Historical and Economic Geography of Port Angeles, Washington [1954]
• William Angus ERWIN, Jr.  Medford as an Urban Economic Unit [1954]
• Willis Robertson HEATH  Limitations on Settlement in a Baja California Village – San Jose de Comodu [1955]
• Howard K. ALBANO  An Analysis of the Crop Production Potential of the Mongolian People’s Republic [1956]
• Ralph Edward BLACK  Maps and Mapping Agencies in Washington State – A Selective and Analytical Bibliography [1956]
• Howard Edward VOGEL  Maps and Maping Agencies in Washington State – A Selective and Analytical Bibliography [1956]
• William Robert Derrick SEWELL  The Conflict of Fish and Power: A Problem in the Water Resource Development of the Pacific Northwest [1956]
• Duane Francis MARBLE  The Spatial Structure of the Farm Business [1956]
• William Richard SIDDALL  I. Seattle and the Hierarchy of Central Places in Alaska; II. Wholesale-Retail Trade Ratios as Indices of Urban Centrality; III. A Historical Study of the Yukon Waterway in the Development of Interior Alaska [1956]
• Brian Joe Lobley BERRY  Geographic Aspects of the Size and Arrangement of Urban Centers: An Examination of Central Place Theory with an Empirical Test of Hypothesis of Classes of Central Places [1956]
• Rajanikant Nilkanthrao JOSHI  The Cotton Textile Industry of Bombay City. A Locational Analysis [1956]
• Chen WANG  I. The Role of Irrigation Ponds in the Agricultural Development of the Taoyuan Tableland, Taiwan; II. Irrigated Agriculture in Imperial Valley, California; III. Ch’ientao: An Irrigation Region of Northwestern China [1956]
• Robert Martin BONE  The Development and Significance of Tea Cultivation in the Soviet Union [1957]
• Carlos B. HAGEN  The Azimuthal Equidistant Projection [1957]
• Richard Leland MORRILL  An Experimental Study of Trade in Wheat and Flour in the Flour Milling Industry [1957]
• John David NYSTUEN  Locational Theory and the Movement of Fresh Produce to Urban Centers [1957]
• Richard Ellis PRESTON  I. Wenatchee, Washington: A Study in Community-Industry Relations. II. Java: A Study in Population and Settlement Geography [1957]
• Waldo Rudolph TOBLER  An Empirical Evaluation of Some Aspects of Hypsometric Colors [1957]
• William Frank KOHLER  An Investigation of the Feasibility of Making a Preliminary Classification of Soils from Aerial Photos and An Exploratory Field Investigation of the Soils, Vegetation and Terrain of the Copper River Martin-Bering Glacier Lowland of Alaska [1957]
• Ruth Ellen Marken KROMANN  Rural Settlements: Form and Function, with Southern Jutland, Denmark as an Example [1957]
• Nancy Houts NEWTON  The Evolution of Manufacturing in the Central Industrial Region of the U.S.S.R. [1957]
• Arthur Jacob DIENO  The Geography of the Southern Okanogan Valley of ritish Columbia [1957]
• Michael Francis DACEY  The Minimum Expectation Method for Computation of the Service Component of the Urban Economic Base [1958]
• Roger E. PEDERSON  The Procurement of Fruits. An Empirical Evaluation of the Factors of Fruit Procurement [1958]
• John Francis KOLARS  The Development and Use of Coal in Relation to the Turkish Energy Base [1958]
• Ernest LUCERO  Suggested Examination of Acculturation Aspects of Milpa Agriculture as Related to Resistance to Change [1958]
• Jeremy Herrick ANDERSON  The Agricultural Development of Yakutia [1959]
• John Graham RICE  Ideological Theory Underlying the Distribution of Industry in the U.S.S.R. [1959]
• Richard Louis EDWARDS  A Survey of Cotton Production on the Irrigated Lands of Soviet Central Asia [1959]
• Julian Vincent MINGHI  The Conflict of Salmon Fishing Policies in the North Pacific [1959]
• Charles Buckley PETERSON III  The Evolution of the Politico-Territorial System of the Ukraine Since January 1917 [1960]
• Richard William KEPPEL  Attitude Measurement as a Function of Map User Requirements Analysis [1960]
• John James SOUTHWORTH  Alternative Routes for the Great Slave Railroad: Some Geographical Considerations [1960]
• Visvaldis SMITS  Impact of Collectivization on Latvian Agriculture [1960]
• Eugene Thomas WEILER  I. Cost Determinants of River Basin Development: The Columbia River Power System Case; II. An Illustration of the Use of the Basic-Service Ratio in Seattle, Washington [1961]
• William James SHAW II  The Classification and Graphic Representation of Railroad Data [1961]
• George Kazuo SAITO  An Investigation of Some Visual Problems of Cartographic Lettering [1962]
• Robert G. JENSEN  Competition for Land in the Humid Subtropics of Soviet Georgia [1962]
• Ronald Everett SHOEMAKER  Screen Gray Value Uses for Cartographic Representation [1962]
• Donald Wesley PATTEN  The Air Traffic Patterns of the Seattle-Tacoma Hub [1962]
• Dexter Alden ARMSTRONG, Jr.  Loss of Detail in Halftone Reproduction of Aerial Photographs: An Investigation [1962]
• George Harold HAGEVIK  Locational Tendencies and Space Requirements of Retail Business in Suburban King County [1963]
• Richard Waldo WILKIE  Cartography as an Effective Tool in the Study of Social Change [1963]
• John Edward George BOYMAN  Alaska’s External Trade 1951-58: Some Characteristics and Developments [1963]
• Yun CHA  Political-Geographical Appraisal of Divided Korea [1963]
• Michael Iwan ANDERSON  Rangoon: A Study of Changing Functions of a Southeast Asian City [1963]
• Ladd JOHNSON.  The Cowlitz River Development: History, Effects, and Implications [1963]
• Keith Way MUCKLESTON  The Function of the Volga as Route of Transportation [1963]
• Robert Philip WRIGHT  The Russian Empire and the U.S.S.R.: A Cartographic and Tabular Presentation of Population: 1897-1959 [1964]
• Harris Henry HAERTEL  Irrigation, Mosquitoes, and Encephalitis: A Problem of Water Resource Development [1964]
• Paul Daniel MCDERMOTT  A Preliminary Investigation of the Suitability of Aerial Photographs for Developing Visualization and Comprehension of Map Symbols in the First, Second, and Third Grades [1964]
• James Robert HENDERSON  Depressed Areas and Location Theory Case Study: Cambridge, Ohio [1964]
• Frederick Joseph NAMMACHER  The Nineteenth Century Basic Ferrous Metallurgical Industry of South Russia: A Geographical Appraisal [1964]
• Roger Lee THIEDE  The Nineteenth Century Basic Ferrous Metallurgical Industry of South Russia: A Geographical Appraisal [1964]
• Marvin Alan STELLWAGEN  Housing Expenditure Patterns in Seattle 1950-1960 [1964]
• Per Sur HENRIKSEN  The Faroe lslands: A Political Geographic Case Study [1965]
• Kerry Josef PATAKI  Shifting Population and Environment Among the Auyana: Some Considerations and Phenomena and Schema [1965]
• Khalida Nuzhat QURESHI [Nasir]  The Political-Geographical Implications of “Pukhtoonistan” [1965]
• Evan DENNEY  Economic Development, A Case Study of the Caroni River Region, Venezuela [1965]
• Frederick Abraham HIRSH  Spatial Distribution of the Electronic Industry in the United States [1965]
• Richard Owen MERRITT  Land Use Allocation for Military Purposes: The U.S. Marine Corps at Pickel Meadows, California [1965]
• Stephen Keith NEWSOM  A Computer Program Which Constructs Interrupted Cylindric Map Projections [1965]
• Frank James QUINN  National Involvement in a Small International River Valley: The Okanogan, British Columbia and Washington [1965]
• Huibert VERWEY  The Problem in the Development of the Kulunda Steppe [1965]
• Kenji Kenneth OSHIRO  Jiwari Seido in the Central and Southern Ryukyus [1965]
• Harry Holman MOORE  Standardization of Geographic Names [1965]
• Philip Rust PRYDE  A Locational Analysis of the Cotton Textile Industry of the U.S.S.R. [1965]
• Philip Patrick MICKLIN  Electric Power Development in the Angaro-Yenisey Region of the U.S.S.R. [1966]
• Elisabeth Warriner PUTNAM  An Analysis of the Spatial Variation in Selected Agricultural Practices in the Georgia Piedmont [1966]
• Jack Francis WILLIAMS  China in Maps, 1890-1960. A Selective and Annotated Cartobibliography [1966]
• Allen Ralph SOMMARSTROM  The Impact of Human Use on Recreational Quality: The Example of the Olympic National Park Backcountry User [1966]
• David Lloyd STALLINGS  Automated Map Reference Retrieval [1966]
• Ernest Harold WOHLENBERG  Some Spatial Aspects of the Wood Pulp Industry in the United States and Canada [1966]
• Alan Anthony DELUCIA  SEMSID: An Automated System for Graphic Display of Series Map Status Information [1966]
• Daniel Benjamin Scott PRATHER  The Cities of the Soviet Second Metallurgical Base: A Study of the Origin and Distribution [1967]
• Barbara Mary BRERETON [Haney]  Viticulture and Viniculture in the U.S.S.R. [1967]
• Geoffrey John Dennis HEWINGS  Persistence of Precipitation and No Precipitation Described by a Markov Chain Probability Model: Case Studies from Selected Stations in Washington State [1967]
• Everett Arvin WINGERT  Tonal Enhancement and Isolation in Aerial Photographic Interpretation [1967]
• Donald Allen OLMSTEAD  Trend-Surface Analysis of Geographical Data Surfaces [1968] [Sherman]
• Alice Bent THIEDE  An Examination of the Map as a Conveyor of Propaganda [1967] [Sherman]
• Kenneth Joseph LANGRAN  The Political and Administrative Control of Water Pollution in International River Basins [1968] [Cooley]
• Joshua David LEHMAN  The Problem of Freeway Noise in Urban Areas [1968] [Ullman]
• Dennis Gene ASMUSSEN  I. Railway Timber Flows in the Soviet Union; II. The Conservation Commission: An Alternative Beginning for the Creation of Effective Environmental Policy; III. Wild and Scenic Rivers: Private Rights and Public Goods [1969] [Jackson]
• Thomas Pierce BOUCHARD  Politics and Environment: The Struggle for Wild and Scenic Rivers [1969] [Cooley]
• Lawrence E. GOSS Jr.  The Rise and Fall of Downtown Tacoma: Its Causes and Consequences [1969] [Boyce]
• Charles Edwin GREER  Chinghai Province: The Transformation of a Cultural Frontier [1969] [Chang]
• Dean R. LOUDER  Non-Urban Stagnation in a Regional Setting: The Case of the Pacific Northwest [1969] [Morrill]
• Victor Lee MOTE  Some Factors in Siberian Development: With Emphasis Upon the Western Siberian Butter Industry [1969] [Jackson]
• George Franklin SHERWIN Jr.  Automobile Ownership Patterns: A Study of Variables Affecting Automobile Ownership in Seattle [1969] [Boyce]
• Richard Robert SLOMON  The Hohsi Region Within the Han Frontier System : An Historical Geographic Approach [1969] [Chang]
• Dona Shirlene STROMBOM  The Kirkland Business District: A Case Study of the Discrepancy Between Potential Trade Area and Retail Responses [1969] [Boyce]
• Daniel Perry BEARD  Expansion of Outdoor Recreation Facilities: Two Case Studies Financed Under the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act in Washington State [1969] [Cooley]
• Philip Stephen KELLEY  Control of the Ocean Floor: A Conflict Between Reality and Idealism [1969] [Sherman]
• Cristine Jenner CANNON  Mapping Western North America and Puget Sound [1969] [Sherman]
• Robert James BARNES.  The Structural-Functional Approach to Socio-Spatial Organization [1970] [Cooley]
• Edward Fisher BERGMAN  Politics and the Geography of Transportation [1970] [Jackson]
• James Jefferson KYLE  The Nisqually Delta Controversy [1970] [Cooley]
• Paul J. MCCRAW  I. Determinism and Possibilism in the Case of China’s Economic Development; II. China’s Industrial Process and Reorientation in Foreign Trade [1970] [Chang]
• Barbara Ann WEIGHTMAN  Commercial Fertilizer Manufacturing in Communist China: An Analysis of the Development Process and Growth Pattern of a Newly Emerged Industry [1970 ][Chang]
• Larry Martin SVART  Field Burning in the Willamette Valley: A Case Study of Environmental Quality Control [1971] [Cooley]
• David A. MUNGER  A Survey of the Western Red Cedar Shake Industry of the Pacific Northwest [1970] [Marts]
• John Robert BRADEN  An Analysis of Models of Investments in Urban Outdoor Recreation Facilities [1971] [Beyers]
• Gerald Ray PETERSEN  A Survey of the Growth and Nature of Medical Geography with Special Emphasis on Its Content, Methods and Relationships to the Health Sciences [1971] [Sherman]
• Eugene James TURNER  The Functional Role of Animation in Cartography [1971] [Sherman]
• Randolph James SORENSEN  Indian-American Land Tenure Conflict: A Case Study of the Shoshone- Bannock Fort Hall Indian Reservation, Fort Hall, Idaho [1971] [Jackson]
• Olen Paul MATTHEWS  American Indian Cultural Change and Government Policy [1971] [Velikonja]
• Marilyn L. CAYFORD  Transportation in Micronesia [1971] [Fleming]
• Werner Johann LINDEMAIER  A Basic Study of an Endangered Natural Resource: The Ocean Shoreline of Washington State [1971] [Marts]
• Arnold Lee TESSMER  Transport Development in Thailand; Strategic Requirements and Economic Growth [1971] [Ullman]
• Kenneth Allan POPP  Gaming and the Evaluation of Population Forecasts. [1972] [Morrill]
• Saud H. RAAD  Towards an Assessment of Environmental Impact of Urban Mass Transit and Political Integration in Lebanon [1972] [Jackson]
• David William BAYLOR  Silver, Lead, and Zinc in the Economic Development of Shoshone County, Idaho [1972] [Thomas]
• Michael Lee TALBOTT  Movements of Soviet Oil and Gas Since World War II [1972] [Jackson]
• Philip ANDRUS  At Home in Tuwanasavi: The Perceived Integrity of the Hopi Environment [1972]
• Roger Earl DOBRATZ  A Special Theory of General Systems in Geography [1972] [Ullman]
• Lawrence Laird NYLAND  The Scandinavian Experiment: An Analysis of Various Aspects of Scandinavian Social Space Within the Confines of Western Europe [1972] [Fleming]
• Art CHIN  The Economic Regionalization of Hainan Island South China (1950-1965) [1973] [Chang]
• Leon C. JOHNSON  Black Migration, Spatial Organization and Perception in Philadelphia’s Urban Environment, 1638-1930 [1973] [Boyce]
• Fedva DIKMEN  Patterns of Turkish Migration [1972] [Morrill]
• Diane Lynn MANNINEN  The Role of Compactness in the Process of Redistricting [1973] [Morrill]
• Charles Everett OGROSKY  New Approaches to the Preparation and Reproduction of Tactual and Enhanced Image Graphics for the Visually Handicapped [1973] [Sherman]
• Gerald Ray JEWETT  Changing Social Objectives and the Columbia Basin Project: Past, Present, Future [1973] [Marts]
• James Robert BUCKNELL  The Impact of Avalanches in Three Selected Areas of the Cascades: A Study of Avalanches as Natural Hazards [1974] [Marts]
• William Redford ALVES  Three Papers on the Spatial Dynamics of Development: I. Critique of an Urban System Diffusion Model: Hudson’s (1969) Diffusion in a Central Place System. II. Decentralization of Manufacturing Location Theory of the Firm III. The Commuting Field and Its Spread Effects: Seattle, 1960-1970 [1974] [Beyers]
• John Philip KING  The Global Pattern of Wide-Body Jet Routes: A Study of Network Determination [1974] [Fleming]
• Moses Pui-Chuen LAI  Coal Industry in Mainland China: An Analysis of Its Changing Pattern of Growth and Distribution [1974] [Chang]
• Kathleen Elizabeth O’BRIEN [Braden]  The Petroleum Resource of West Siberia [1974] [Jackson]
• James Albert BUSS  Grouping, Regionalizing, Classifying: An Introduction [1974] [Morrill]
• John Timothy GRIFFIN  Uncertainty and the Strategy of Flexibility in the Space-Economy [1975] [Beyers]
• George Herbert HARMEYER  Rhine River Basin Water Pollution Problem [1975] [Fleming]
• Robert Graham MITTELSTADT  Landscape Realization in the Cinema: The Geography of the Western Film [1976] [Fleming]
• Jerome R. BROTHERS  The Subway Network in the Evolution of the Tokyo Mass Transit System [1976] [Velikonja]
• Kathryn Lynn ERICKSON  Land Settlement in Tropical Africa for Population Pressure and Agricultural Development [1976] [Velikonja]
• Thomas Randall REVIS  Geographic-Economic Problems and Development of a Soviet Population Policy [1976] [Jackson]
• Lawrence Alvin WOODWARD  International Influence Fields: A Study in Political Geography [1976] [Jackson]
• Hazel Lynn SINGER [Griffith]  The Spatial Distribution of Federal Funds for Research and Development [1976] [Thomas]
• Joseph P. CHURCHILL  Skid Row in Transition [1976] [Boyce]
• Diana DENHAM  Gypsies in Social Space [1976] [Velikonja]
• Jean CULJAK SHAFFER  An Evaluation of Fare-Free Transit in Downtown Seattle [1976] [Boyce]
• Lawrence Leonard MANSBACH  An Investigation of Locational Behavior as Viewed Through the Processes of Firm Growth [1976] [Krumme]
• David Alan FANSLER  Downtown Retailing: A Quarter-Century of Decline [1977] [Hodge]
• Sallie Ann MILLER [MacGregor]  Nonmetropolitan Growth as an Expression of Residential Preference [1977] [Morrill]
• George D. COOK  The Presentation of Two Algorithms for the Construction of Value-By-Area Cartograms [1977] [Youngman]
• David Paul BEDDOE  An Alternative Cartographic Method to Portray Origin-Destination Data [1978] [Sherman]
• John Henry BANNICK Jr.  Unbalanced Product Specialization and the Location of Branch Plants [1978] [Morrill]
• Donna Lee KLEMKA  Pacific Northwest Electrical Energy Planning. Problems of Institutional Redesign [1978] [Marts]
• Michael Kay MELTON  A Study of the Visual Perception of Analytical Hill-Shading Technique [1978] [Youngman]
• Paula Noel TWELKER  Ethnic Communities in Western Settlement [1978] [Velikonja]
• Masami HASEGAWA  Depopulation: Recent Trends in Rural-Urban Migration in Japan [1978] [Kakiuchi]
• Valerie Jeanette LEACH [HODGE]  Upfiltering and Neighborhood Change in the Madrona Area of Seattle, Washington [1978] [Hodge]
• Lawrence John KIMMEL  Siberian Development and Its Implications for the U.S.S.R. [1978] [Jackson]
• Wendy Terra PRODAN  Wilderness Review Procedures: Evaluating Alaska’s Wildlands [1979] [ZumBrunnen]
• Philip George HIRTES  Orienteering and Orienteering-Mapping: Implications for Geography and Cartography [1979] [Sherman]
• Francis Eugene SHERIDAN  The Gentrification of the Capitol Hill Community of Seattle in the 1970’s [1979] [Morrill]
• Lynn Phyllis WEINER [Anderson].  A Spatial Analysis of Regional Economic Change in the United States Between 1967 and 1975 [1979] [Beyers]
• Tamer KIRAC  Formulating Regional Input-Output Models. A Case Study of Turkey [1979] [Beyers]
• Chris Edward LAWSON  Hardrock Mineral Development Policy for National Forest Land [1979] [Beyers]
• Bridget TRUPIANO [Diekema]  Spatial Variation in Soviet Living Standard: 1959-1975 [1979] [ZumBrunnen]
• Jody Hamaka Matsubu YAMANAKA  The Geography of the U.S. Air Cargo Industry [1979] [Fleming]
• Nangisai Nason Kudzirozwa GWARADA  Historical Development and Future Aspects of Agriculture in Zimbabwe [1979] [Hodge]
• Elizabeth Carol HOLLENBECK  Open Space at the Urban Periphery [1979] [Mayer]
• Della Geneva O’CONNOR  Port Development in the People’s Republic of China: A Geographical Perspective [1979] [Chang]
• Craig Smith CALHOON  Population Redistribution and Regional Economic Structure in the System of U.S. Metropolitan Regions, 1965-1975 [1980] [Beyers]
• Kent Hughes BUTTS  Alberta’s Energy Resources: Their Impact on Canada [1980] [Jackson]
• James William HARRINGTON  Tan-Zam: Economic, Technological, and Political Perspectives on a New Transport Route [1980] [Thomas]
• Peter Haynes MESERVE  Convergence: The Unsummoned Response [1980] [Jackson]
• Claudia Ann SWEENY  The Effects of Equity Policies on Agricultural Mechanization in the People’s Republic of China [1980] [Chang]
• Paul WOZNIAK  Zoning in Urban Expansion and Its Urban Form Implications [1980] [Hodge]
• Christopher L. DOUM  Maps for Promotional Purposes: The Map in Travel [1980] [Sherman]
• Holly Jeanne MYERS-JONES  A Geographical Analysis of Political Opposition to Busing in Seattle [1980] [Morrill]
• Howard John TIERSCH  Network and Schedules: A Look at Airline Strategies. [1980] [Mayer]
• Sheila Jo MOSS  Stress, Change and A Sense of Place: Some Thoughts on Providing Care for Cancer Patients [1980] [Mayer]
• Jacob Henry SCHNUR  The Geographic Implications of Federally Established Fair Market Rents: Case of Seattle, Washington [1980] [Hodge]
• James Scott MACCREADY  Technological Processes and Geographical Dimensions of the Product Life Cycle [1981] [Thomas]
• Michael Robert SCUDERI  An Examination of the Spatial Behavior of Wilderness Uses, With Special Reference to Campsite Selection – A Case Study in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks [1981] [Beyers]
• Mary Elizabeth MONSCHEIN  Color in Cartography and Landsat Image Comparison for Land Use Change Detection: A Feasibility Study [1981] [Youngman]
• Mary Ann CIUFFINI  The Discriminability of Textures as Area Symbols on Tactual Maps and Graphics for the Visually Handicapped [1981] [Sherman]
• Laura Lee MCCANDLESS  Two Studies in Cartography: A Review of Color Perception Research and the Design of Maps in Travel Advertising [1981] [Sherman]
• Terry Lynn STORMS  The Crossed-Slit Anamorphoser: An Analysis of Its Characteristics and Utility in Cartography [1981] Sherman]
• John Michael MACGREGOR  Spatial Equity of Mass Transit Service: The Seattle METRO [1981] [Hodge]
• John Brady RICHARDS  Technology Transfer from Japan to the Transportation Sector of the Soviet Far East, 1970-1980 [1981] [Jackson]
• Richard Terry CAMPBELL  Industrial Growth and Regional Development in Japan: The Case of the Electric Power Industry [1981] [Kakiuchi]
• David WOO  Maps as Expression: A Study of Traditional Chinese Cartographic Style [1981] [Sherman]
• Patrick Henry BUCKLEY  A Study of Migration in India: Regionalization of India Based Upon 1961, 1971 Migration Streams [1982] [ZumBrunnen]
• Michael William CORR  The Lake Biwa Watershed: Problems of Agricultural and Industrial Pollution [1981] [Morrill]
• Larry Allen DIEKEMA  Spatial Variations of Defense Contract Awards by DOD Contractors [1981] [Beyers]
• Marjorie Beth PALMER  Residential Woodfuel Use in Western Washington, Estimated 1980 Consumption and Year 2000 Forecast [1981] [Beyers]
• Richard Arthur SNYDER  Regional Variations in Air Passenger Variations [1981] [Mayer]
• Matthew Okpani ALU  Cartography as an Essential Tool in Regional Planning and Development [1982] [Fleming]
• John Arthur BOWER Jr.  The Pacific Northwest Power Supply System: the Present and Future Operation of a Power Pool [1982] [Beyers]
• Lori Etta COHN  Residential Patterns of the Jewish Community of the Seattle Area, 1910-1980 [1982] [Mayer]
• Marilee G. MARTIN  The Geographical Distribution of Federal Civilian Employment, 1967-1978 [1982] [Beyers]
• Charles Robert ROSS, Jr.  Agricultural Land Conversion: A National Perspective and a Local Level Multiple Objective Planning Application [1982] [ZumBrunnen]]
• Janet E. FULLERTON  Transit and Settlement in Seattle, 1871-1941 [1982] [Velikonja]
• Elizabeth KOHLENBERG  Geography and the Demand for Mental Health Services [1982] [Mayer]
• Karen Louise MCFAUL  Municipal Annexation: A Study of the Urban Political Geography of King County, Washington, 1970-1980 [1982] [Hodge]
• Gene Edward PATTERSON  The Effects of Oil-Field Pollution on Residents in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Area [1982] [ZumBrunnen]
• Judith PEFFERMAN  The Evolution of Land Transportation in Pre-Modern Japan [1982] [Kakiuchi]
• Stanley Winfield TOOPS  The Political Integration of Yunnan [1983] [Chang]
• Dean Lee HANSEN  The Newly Industrialized Countries. Industrialization Strategies and Geographical Trade Dependence [1983] [Fleming]
• Anjan BANERJEE  Structural Comparison of Three Regional Economies: A Case Study of Georgia, West Virginia and Washington [1983] [Beyers]
• Garret Harold ROMAINE  Analysis of the Creation of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument [1983] [Beyers]
• Ahmed Eid AL-HARBI  Maps and Mapping Activities in Saudi Arabia; Annotation and Cartobibliography [1983] [Sherman]
• Mirko BOLANOVICH  I. Role of the Enterprise Zone in the Formation of Growth Poles in the Inner City. II. The Relationship of Race as an Identifiable Submarket to Housing Demand [1983] [Hodge]
• Richard Taber HAND  On the Value of Estuaries as Public Goods [1983] [Beyers]
• Jay Richard LUND  Living Aboard as an Element of an Urban Landscape [1983] [Mayer]
• Suzette Lorraine CONNOLLY  Geography of the Northwest Wine Industry: Development and Outlook [1983] [Beyers]
• Lydia M. HAGEN  Landscape Perceptions and Changes. A Case Study: The Journal of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood [1984] [Jackson]
• Elizabeth Starnes SELKE  The Geographical and Seasonal Characteristics of Suicide in Washington State, 1973-1977 [1984] [Mayer]
• John Stewart SNOW  A Microcomputer Based Stereophotogrammetry System [1984] [Sherman]
• Mary Ellen BURG  Habitat Change in the Nisqually River Delta and Estuary Since the Mid-1800’s [1984] [ZumBrunnen]
• Michael Gerhard PARKS  Intra-Metropolitan Residential Mobility: A Simulation Approach [1984] [Hodge]
• Andrew Campbell DANA  An Evaluation of the Yellowstone River Compact: A Solution to Interstate Water Conflict [1984] [Marts]
• Peter N. V. SAMPLE  CHROMA: An Interactive Choropletic Mapping Package for Analysis in Geography [1984] [Hodge]
• Glenn Eric SIEFERMAN  The Location of Veterinary Services in the United States; and: Health and Development [1985] [Mayer]
• Frederick Ross TILGHAM  The Prospect for High-Speed Passenger Trains in the United States [1985] [Fleming]
• Becky Johnston REININGER  POLYMAP: A Microcomputer Based Geographic Information Display System [1985] [ZumBrunnen]
• Jon A. BOYCE.  Tsunami Hazard Mitigation: The Alaskan Experience Since 1964 [1985] [Marts]
• Peter Reppert GALVIN  The Private Plot in Transition. Recent Development in Soviet Private Agriculture [1985] [Jackson]
• Frank William LEONARD  A Study in Creating Multi-Level Tactile Maps and Graphics for the Blind Using Liquid Photopolymer [1985] [Sherman]
• Thomas M. PERRY  A Cognitive Approach to Instructional Techniques and Color Selection in Mapping [1985] [Sherman]
• Jana Claire HOLLINGSWORTH  Maps for the Fun of It: Tourist Maps and Map Use by Recreational Travelers [1986] [Sherman]
• Nancy Lee HUTCHEON  Automation in Municipal Planning Agencies: A Case Study [1986] [Hodge]
• Jonathan Kent VAN WYK  Spatial Variation in the Heavy Truck Market: A Study in Marketing Geography [1985] Krumme]
• Ric VRANA.  Electronic Atlases: Expanding the Potential for Graphic Communication [1985] [Hodge]
• Victoria B. ADAMS  The Effects of Recreational Development on Rural Landscapes and Communities [1986]
• Susan C. DANVER  The Historical Geography of Misty Fiords National Monument and Wilderness and Its Relationship to the Economy of Ketchikan, Alaska [1986] [Marts]
• Marcy A. FARRELL  Rural Alaskan Native Participation in Alaska’s Coastal Management Program [1986] [Sherman]
• Marjorie Beth RISMAN  An Examination of Peak-Season, Single-Family Residential Water Consumption in Seattle, Washington [1986] [ZumBrunnen]
• Elizabeth Leverett TAYLOR  Causation and Extent of Indian Tribal Influence on Environmental Protection in Washington State [1986] [Marts]
• Edward J. DELANEY  A Geographic Perspective on Invention [1986] [Morrill]
• R. Gordon KENNEDY  A Search for Definitions of Cartographic Accuracy [1986] [Sherman]
• John J. GRUBER  Potential for Automobile Energy Conservation in the United States: A Simulation Approach [1986] [ZumBrunnen]
• Robert Matthew RUDERMAN  The Role of Programming Languages and Cartographic Data Structure in Computer-Assisted Cartography [1987] [Hodge]
• Corrin M. CRAWFORD  The Utility of Cartographic Devices in Market Research [1987] [Sherman]
• Kathleen A. EVANS  Regional Administrative Centralization of Water Management Authority in the United States: Ideal or Impossibility? [1987]Morrill]
• Kenneth Riley HERRELL  Natural Language Processing of Spatial References for Cadastral Cartography [1987] [Nyerges]
• Jacqueline KROLLOP KIRN  The Skagit River – High Ross Dam Controversy: A Case Study of a Canadian-U.S. Transboundary Conflict and Negotiated Resolution [1987] [Marts]
• Douglas O. STRANDBERG  Oil and Gas Transport System of the North Sea [1987] [Fleming]
• Gardner PERRY III  Size as Related to Efficiency in United States Counties [1987] [Sherman]
• Joan TENG  The Evolution of the Chinese Seaport System [1987] [Fleming]
• Eileen ARGENTINA  Growth Management in King County: The King County Comprehensive Plan [1987] [Hodge]
• Brooke U. KENT  Central City – Suburban Variation in Female and Male Earning in the United States [1988] [Hodge]
• Andrew C. ROSS  A Spatial Analysis of the Residential Histories of Hodgkin’s Disease Cases [1988] [Mayer]
• Daniel EWERT  Public Policy and Race Relations in Malaysia: Some Geographical Dimensions [1988] [Jackson]
• Theodore HULL  The Filter-Down” Process of Nonmetropolitan Industrialization: A Case Study Approach [1988] [Krumme]
• Anne FAULKNER  Development, Women’s Status, and the Nature of Work: The Incorporation and Marginalization of Women In the Ecuadorian Economy, 1974 to l982 [1988] [Lawson]
• Steven W. LARSON  A Proposed Strategy for the Incremental Development of Geographic Information System Technology in King County, Washington [1988] [Chrisman]
• Kathyrn Y. MAURICH  Private Land in Lake Chelan National Recreation Area: An Integrative Approach to Landscape Protection for Stehekin, Washington [1988] [Beyers]
• Carlyn E. ORIANS  School Desegregation and Residential Segregation: The Seattle Metropolitan Experience [1988] [Morrill]
• Thomas J. NOLAN  A Land Information System Network for the Puget Sound Region [1988] [Nyerges]
• Charles P. RADER  A Functional Model of Color in Cartographic Design [1989] [Hodge]
• Nancy Kopsco RADER  Determining Lateral Boundaries for River Conservation Areas: The Case of the Upper Delaware River [1989] [ZumBrunnen]
• D. Timothy LEINBACH  Factors Affecting the Adoption of Transferred Technologies in Less Developed Countries: Some Theoretical Considerations [1989] [Thomas]
• Dan WANCURA  A Transportation Cost Approach to Integrated Freight Transportation [1989] [Fleming]
• Thomas W. CHOW  An Explanation of High-Tech Activities in Britain [1989] [Fleming]
• Amanda WHELAN  Geographic Aspects of Obstetrical Care in Washington State [1989] [Mayer]
• Sophia EBERHART  Assessing the Transfer of Technology to Developing Countries: Nigerian Palm Oil Industry Case Study [1989] [Thomas]
• Michael T. WOLD  After the Boldt Decision: The Question of Inter-Tribal Allocation [1989] [ZumBrunnen]
• Terri Lynne CARL  Residential Property Values In Seattle Neighborhoods [1990]
• Patricia Ortiz CHALITA  Meditacion en el Umbral (Meditation on the Brink): The Woman-Headed Household in Urban Latin America as Possibility and Constraint [1990] [Lawson]
• Julianna SISSON FORMAN  Is Money All That Matters? A Study of Recycling in Seattle [1990] [Morrill]
• George Walker HORNING  Information Integration for Geographic Information Systems in a Local Government Context [1990] [Nyerges]
• Frank W. MATULICH  Financial Transactions As Geographic information. [1990] [Nyerges]
• James Ethan BELL  Ideology and the Built Environment: Evolving Socio-Spatial Structures in Tashkent [1990] [Jackson]
• William Samuel ALBERT  The Use of Behavioral Data in a Geographical Information System for Transportation Planning [1990] [Nyerges]
• Kevin Patrick McCOLLISTER  Two-paper option: 1. Disease Ecology and Human Landscape Alteration: The Case of Lyme Disease in the United States; 2. Ecological Scale and Conceptions of Disease Causation in Urban Areas: The Example of AIDS in the United States [1990] [Mayer]
• Robert A. ROOSE  The Geographic Variables of Language Mobiliation: The Case of Belgium [1990] [Jackson]
• Curt NEWSOME  Transboundary Marine Water Pollution in the Puget/Vancouver Basin [1990] [Jackson]
• Teresa Anna KENNEDY  An Analysis of the Impact of Traffic Congestion on King County Employers and Possible Mitigation Measures [1990] [Hodge]
• Alice Marie QUAINTANCE  People Without Places: The Response of Capitol Hill Churches to the Homeless [1991] [Hodge]
• Marcus Kalani LESTER  Two paper option: 1. A Conceptual Model of Multidimensional Times for Geographic Information Systems; 2. A Comparison of Two Methods for Detecting Positional Error in Categorical Maps [1991] [Chrisman]
• Samuel Gary SHAW  Infrastructure, Development and the Mexican Border: A New Synthesis [1991] [Lawson]
• Thomas EDWARDS  Virtual Worlds Technology as an Interface To Geographical Information [1991] [Chrisman]
• Joseph EMMI  Japanese Economic and Spatial Change In Theoretical Perspective: A Case Study in the Execution, Results and Implications of Neo-Schumperterian Development Policy [1991] [Thomas]
• Timothy OAKES  The Spatial Constitution of Ethnicity and Tourism in Southwest China: An Appeal for a Theoretically Rejuventated Cultural Geography [1991] [Lawson]
• Trudy SUCHAN  Useful Categories: A Cognitive Approach to Land Use Categorization Systems [1991] [Chrisman]
• Meredith FORDYCE  Two-paper option: 1. Medical Geography: Its Practical and Philosophical Contexts; 2. The Utility of Small Area Analysis in Identifying Variations in Utilization of Hospital Services and the Implications of Those Variations [1991] [Mayer]
• Laurie L. ASMAR  What Are We Doing? The Actions and Perceptions of Service Providers Assisting the Suburban Homeless [1991] [Hodge]
• Joseph C. SPARR  Shaping Urban Growth: Urban Containment and Urban Concentration in Portland, Oregon [1991] [Hodge]
• Carrie S. ANDERSON  A GIS Development Process: Preparing an Organization For The Introduction of GIS Technology [1991] [Nyerges]
• Alan N. FORSBERG  The Cocaine Trade: Exploitation and Social Change Amongst the Bolivian Peasantry [1992] [Lawson]
• Nedra J. CHANDLER  The Search for Community Vision: Between Collective Lying and Learning [1992] [Hodge]
• Rose MESEC  A Gender and Space Analysis of Seattle’s Lesbian and Gay Communities [1992] [Hodge]
• Jon Hofheimer NACHMAN  Sex, Race and Role in World Geography Textbooks: Representations of Africans South of the Sahara and Americans of the United States [1992] [Fleming]
• Keeley S. WELFORD  The Construction of a Framework for Studying Home Based Work in Advanced Economies [1992] [Beyers]
• Charles K. DODD  Siting Hazardous Facilities in the Soviet Union: The Case of the Nuclear Power Industry [1992] [ZumBrunnen]
• Delia C. ROSENBLATT  Black Gold in Western Siberia: The Oil Industry and Regional Development [1992] [Jarosz]
• Cedar C. WELLS  The Ranking of Puget Sound Watersheds for Nonpoint Pollution Control: A Policy Analysis [1992] [ZumBrunnen]
• Brian D. LUDERMAN  A Geography of Financial Centers [1992] [Fleming]
• Michael MOHRMAN  Primary Health Care In Seattle, 1950-1990 [1992] [Mayer]
• Katherine HARRIS  Spatial Patterns of Helping Neighbor Networks for the Elderly: A Case Study [1992] [Mayer]
• Charles VAVRUS  The Intersection of Class and Ethnicity: Land Tenure and Indian Community in Colonial Oaxaca, 1519-1821 [1992] [Lawson]
• Gabriel GALLARGO  Urban-Spatial Behavior of Hispanic Immigrants [1992] [Hodge]
• Christine ROBERTS  Asthma Mortality in Washington State, 1980-89 [1992] [Mayer]
• Rachel SILVEY  Changing Migration Patterns of Women in Java: A Multiscale Analysis [1992] [Hodge]
• Irina GUSHIN  Trihalomethanes in the California State Water Project: A Study of Their Geography, Chemistry and Public Policy Implications [1992] [ZumBrunnen]
• Mary NEUBERGER  The Exodus To Oregon. The Emigration of Russo-Ukranian Pentecostals to the American West, 1988-93 [1993] [Velikonja]
• Ivan GATCHIK  A Topological Data Model and Some Algorithms for Three Dimensional GIS [1993] [ZumBrunnen]
• David BARBER  Understanding Jobs-Housing Balance: Implications On Affordable Housing Needs and Employment Accessibililty For the Urban Poor in King County, Washington [1993] [Hodge]
• Robert HOIBY  Congestion Pricing: The Effects of the Toll Ring in Oslo, Norway [1993] [Hodge]
• Craig DALBY  A Plan For the Implementation of GIS in the National Park Service, Pacific Northwest Region [1993] [Chrisman]
• Dion MATHEWSON  The Impacts of Economic Restructuing on Woman-Headed Households, 1980-1990: Connections Between Employment and Housing [1993] [Lawson]
• Nicole DEVINE  The Metropolis In Transition: Gender, Urban Restructuring and Residential Communities [1993] [Hodge]
• Terrance L. ANTHONY  Approaching Development: The Necessity Of Multiscalar Analysis [Beyers]
• Are BJORDAL  Hydrologic Modeling With Smallworld GIS. An object-oriented approach [1994] [Chrisman]
• Peter Sterling HAYES  Value Out, Value In: The Bone River and Wilapa Watersheds, 1854-1994 [1994] [Beyers]
• Rita ORDONEZ  Land Use Conflict and Sacred Space: Blackfeet Indians and the Badger-2 Medicine [1994] [Jackson]
• Jonathan SMITH  Cultural Change and Depopulation in the Americas [1994] [Mayer]
• Charles HENDRICKSEN  (two paper option). 1) A Model of the Migration Process; 2) Prescriptive Models in A Spatial Decision Support System: Intelligent Agents and Workflow Procedures [1994] [Nyerges]
• Deborah OHMANN  Social and Economic Change in Rural Pacific Northwest Communities [1994] [Beyers]
• Frederick ROWLEY  Urban Restructuring and the Spatial Redistribution of Men’s and Women’s Work Opportunities [1994] [Hodge]
• Joshua SKOV  Retail Firm Behavior In Global Food Systems [1994] [Jarosz]
• Brigit R. BAUR  Pronasol: Decentralization and Democratization of Development [1995] [Lawson]
• Renee F. GARBER  (two-paper option). 1. A New Approach to Introductory Courses in Undergraduate Geography Education 2. The Israeli Health Care System and the Arab Minority [1995] [Mayer]
• Lena Lynn HERON  Wandering the Wilderness Between Plan and Market: Contemporary Land Reform and Agricultural Restructuring in Russia [1995] [Jarosz]
• Stacy Lyn BIRK-RISHEIM  Digital Data for the 1994 Central California Environmental Sensitivity Index [1995] [Nyerges]
• Aaron Patrick GILL (two-paper option)A GIS data dictionary to support the site selection decision process & map displays to support the site selection decision process [1995] [Nyerges]
• Jeffrey Brandt MILLER  Concepts for Group Spatial Decision Support Systems for Political Campaigns [1995] [Nyerges]
• Sarah M. HILBERT  Revitalization of identity and place: The Zapatista Rebellion and the challenge to Mexican nationalism [1995] [Lawson]
• Mary Katherine GOODWIN  A locational analysis of abortion in Washington State [1996] [Mayer]
• Peter Alexander CLITHEROW  An analysis of factors affecting recent household travel behavior in the Puget Sound region [1996] [Morrill]
• Richard Allen MOORE  World Wide Web tools for collaborative development of a geographic information system database for the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) [1996] [Nyerges]
• Lise Kirsten NELSON  Neoliberalism as contested ideological terrain: State practices and peasant agencies in Michoacan, Mexico [1996] [Lawson]
• Peter Birger NELSON  The what and why behind the “West at War.” An empirical and theoretical analysis of migration to nonmetropolitan areas in the Pacific Northwest [1996] [Beyers]
• Gregory Paul SEGAS  The evolution of a hydraulic state: The case of Uzbekistan [1996] [ZumBrunnen]
• Douglas Grant MERCER  Rural Women founders of business service firms: New questions about old spaces [1996] [Beyers]
• Robert Alfred NORHEIM  Is there an answer to mapping old growth? Examination of two projects conducted with remote sensing and GIS [1996] [Chrisman]
• Terri L. SUZUKI  Towards a more complete understanding of poverty: examination of life stages, gender, and race from a geographic perspective [1996] [Morrill]
• Monica Weiler VARSANYI  Proposition 187: Xenophobia, the feminized immigrant, and public spaces of reproduction in a transnational era [1996] [Mitchell]
• Matthew James BARRY  Multiple Perspectives in Multimedia Maps [1996] [Nyerges]
• Susan Elizabeth GRIGSBY  GIS Applications in a Coho Salmon Habitat Study of the Stillaguamish Watershed [1996] [Nyerges]
• Martha Steinert COMPTON  Data models and the worlds they create: A comparison of remotely sensed riparian zones and GIS delineated riparian reserves in Canyon Creek watershed [1997] [Chrisman]
• Lara Anne DETWEILER  Alaskan surimi, the `Other, Other White Meat’: Globalization, migration, fish production, and modernity on the last frontier [1997] [Morrill]
• Caroline Archibald LANGE  Intermarriage on the medieval frontier: Undermining and defining the Anglo-Scottish border and technology, sexuality, and frontiers: Historical and geographic perspectives on Western pornography [1997] [Mayer]
• Yuko MERA  International labor migration trends in Asia. [1997] [Chan]
• Jessica Louise PETERS  Casinoization of native American cultures: Destruction or creation of the “authentic” Indian? [1997] [Jarosz]
• Cheryl Lynn CRANE  Therapeutic landscapes: A cast study of feminist health care [1998] [Jarosz]
• Brian David HAMMER  Circular migration in poverty countries in China [1998] [Chan]
• Charles Rene TOVARES  Is everybody going to San Antone? A metropolitan scale analysis of Chicano and Anglo migration to Texas [1998] [Hodge]
• Margaret Dickinson HAWLEY  (two paper option) 1.Filipino World War Two Veterans and Social Theory: A Critique of Racial Formation in the US and Immigrant Acts (“Racial Formation in the US” and “Immigrant Acts” should both be italicized, since they are book titles); 2.’Would you like rice with that?”: Globalization, Cultural Heirarchies and Filipina American Food Service Workers [1998] [Jarosz]
• Charles Malcolm O’DONNELL  Initiative 676. An attempt to reduce firearm violence in the State of Washington [1998] [Mayer]
• Mary Katherine KAEHNY  Citizen representation in growth management: An evaluation of Seattle’s neighborhood planning process [1999] [Hodge]
• Eugene W. MARTIN  Conservation geographic information systems in Ecuador: An actor-network analysis [1999] [Chrisman]
• Samuel ADAMS  GIS on the Rez: A Case Study of GIS Implementation On the Colville Indian Reservation, WA, USA [1999] [Nyerges]
• Chris DAVIS  Urban Stream Habitat Restoration: Thinking At A Landscape Scale [1999] [Beyers]
• Desiree DESURRA  Women’s Labor Resistance and Transnational Organizing: New Frameworks for Resistance and Theory [1999] [Lawson]
• Richard HEYMAN  Geographical Thought, Ideology, and the University: The Humboldt Brothers and Daniel Coit Gilman [1999] [Jarosz]
• Joanna SURGEONER  The North: Dissociation, Intimacy, and Beyond [1999] [Jarosz]
• Catherine VENINGA  The Political Economy of New Urban Space: A Case Study of Northwest Landing [1999] [Mitchell]
• Lili Catherine HEIN  The Location of Foreign Direct Investment In China [2000] [Chan]
• Xiaohong HOU  Experimenting with Migration Flow Representation Using GIS Software Components [2000] [Chrisman]
• David A. JESCHKE  A Carbon Cycle Model of Forestry in the Russian Far East [2000] [ZumBrunnen]
• Shawn Kenneth MCMULLIN  Trade Area Assessment and Customer Prospecting: A Case Study Utilizing Geographic Information Technologies [2000] [Harrington]
• Brigg Bromley NOYES  Human/Nature: Exploring Individual Interactions with American Wilderness [2000] [Jarosz]
• Daniel Alejandro REYES  Between County and State Data: Nuances of Archaeological Database Consolidation for GIS Modeling [2000] [Chrisman]
• Carolina KATZ  Remapping Rights and Responsibilities: A Legal Geography of the 1996 Welfare and Immigration Reforms [2000] [Sparke]
• Molly VOGT  Data Tiles in a Checkerboard Forest: Challenges of Data Integration with GIS [2000] [Chrisman]
• Hilary Nagle MCQUIE  Boomtown & busts: Unlayering Seattle’s “drugscapes” [2000] [Jarosz]
• Walter D. SVEKLA  Representation in GIS-based simulation model integration: A case study of earthquake loss estimation and mitigation [2002] [Nyerges]
• Linda Bich-Kieu WASSON  Exploring discursive constructions of contemporary Vietnam in the context of tourism and economic development [2001] [Lawson]
• Kristen Sedley SHUYLER  Telling salmon stories: A narative analysis of Nooksack struggles for treaty fishing rights in Washington State [2001] [Jarosz]
• Colleen Moira DONOVAN  Negotiating protest and practice: Development, rural livelihoods, and the Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) [2001] [Lawson]
• Maria E. FANNIN  Birth as a spatial process: Themes of control, safety, family and natural in “homelike” birthing rooms [2002] [England]
• Maureen Helen HICKEY  On “The Beach”. Travelers’ dreams, Hollywood magic, and development dilemmas in Southern Thailand [2002] [Lawson]
• Manija SAID  Cultivating the forbidden flower: War, vulnerability, and the geopolitics of opium in Afghanistan [2002] [Jarosz]
• M arcia Rae ENGLAND  Who’s afraid of the dark? Not Buffy! A feminist examination of the paradoxical representations of public and private space in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [2002] [Brown]
• Angela K. LEUNG  The role of technology and knowledge in foreign direct investment and regional economic development: a case study of Shenzhen in China [2002] [Chan]
• Joseph A. MILLER  Scales of Quality: a multilevel approach to coronary artery bypass grafting in New York state [2002] [Mayer]
• Dana MORAWITZ  All bare permanently or all bare fleetingly? Tracking land cover conversions and forestry practices through time by comparing spectrally unmixed remote sensing data with forest practice act data: a case study on the urban forestry [2002] [Chrisman]
• Joseph  LLOBRERA  Nutrition and the infant formula controversy: A case study of maternal dietary diversity and infant feeding practices in the Philippines [2002] [Jarosz]
• Joshua P. NEWELL  Land use and land cover on an urbanizing fringe: policy drivers and implications for conservation and forests of Russia’s far east: Rising threats of corruption and consumption [2002] [ZumBrunnen]
• Nandini Narayani VALSAN  Conceptualization and perpetuation of identity among middle class Indian women in Washington state [2002] [Withers]
• Christopher FOWLER  Missing the boat: The role of transportation networks in shaping global economic relations [2003] [Ellis]
• Jonathan GLICK  Neighborhood catch-22? Considering the place(s) of revitalization in the gentrification of Washington, D.C. [2003] [Withers]
• Andrew James WENZL  Consumption side up: The importance of non-earnings income as a new economic base in rural Washington state [2003] [Beyers]
• Robert Ian DUNCAN  Beneath Transition: Dialogic Landscapes of Modernisms and the St. Petersburg Subway [2004] [Brown]
• Chris CHAMBERLIN  Nationalism and development in the Indonesian census [2004] [Ellis]
• Steven GARRETT  (2 paper option) (1) Coming back to the foodshed: Geographic imagination, pedagogy and social action. (2) Short, thin or obese? Comparing growth indexes of children from high- and low-poverty areas [2004] [Jarosz]
• Caroline FARIA  Gendering roles and responsibilities: Privileging prevention in the Ghanaian fight against HIV/AIDS [2004] [Jarosz]
• Joseph EGGER  A political ecological analysis of the emergence of epidemic dengue/dengue hemorrhagic fever in Trinidad [2004] Mayer]
• Kevin RAMSEY  Stakeholder involvement and complex decision making: A case study into the design and implementation of a GIS for supporting local water resource management [2004] [Nyerges]
• Antonia BENNETT  (two paper option) (1) A review of new evidence for the aging and the dying processes. (2) Floating migrants in Guangdong: The invisible numbers behind China’s economic growth [2004] [Chan]
• Dominic CORVA  Localization, Globalization and the World Social Forum: Towards a Process Geography of Counterhegemonic Mobilization [2004] [Sparke]
• Derik ANDREOLI  Fuzzy Concepts and Fuzzy Borders: An interactions-based approach to defining the geography of industrial clusters [2004] [Beyers]
• Steve HYDE  Discursive strategies of displacement: a revisionist History of the anti-Chinese movement in the Puget Sound region of North America, 1885-1886 [2004] [Beyers]
• Naheed Gina AAFTAAB  Developing educated Afghan women: a critical case study [2004] [Jarosz]
• Anne WIBERG-ROZAKLIS  The educational gaze: the public classroom and competing national discourses post-September 11th [2005] [Mitchell]
• Erin GAULDING  Locating the gap between academic and school geographies: a study of truth in middle and high school social studies textbooks [2005] [Brown]
• Matthew W. WILSON  Implications for a public participation geographic information science: analyzing trends in research and practice [2005] [Nyerges]
• Elise BOWDITCH  The significance of geography in the transition to adulthood: the significance of geography for adult outcomes in intergenerational mobility [2005] [Withers]
• Ann BARTOS  Through a pink lens: the geographical imaginations of “Code Pink” [2005] [Brown]
• Dawn COUCH  From public works to the projects: a regulationist perspective on public housing [2005] [Ellis]
• Victoria BABBIT  Embodying borders: trafficking, prostitution and the moral (re)ordering of Sweden [2005] [Herbert]
• Megan TONEY  Media representations of women and credit card debt: a context analysis of two Seattle newspapers [2005] [England]
• Erica SIEBEN  Patterns of racial partnering of mixed-race individuals [2005] [Ellis]
• Jeff MASSE . Pure is Elsewhere: Bottled Water and the Geography of  Lack  [2006] [Jarosz]
• Sarah IVES  Contesting ‘National’ Space: Soap Operas in Post Apartheid South Africa [2006] [Jarosz]
• Serin HOUSTON  Spatial Stories: The Racial Discourses of Mixed-Race Households in Tacoma, Washington [2006] [Ellis]
• Rowan ELLIS  “Dravida Nadu for Dravidians”: Discourse on place and identity in early and mid-twentienth century Tamil Nadu [2006] [Mitchell]
• Cale BERKEY. Neoconservative Ideology and Geospatial Homeland Security at the City of Seattle [2006] [Nyerges]
• Doris OLIVERS. Neoliberal articulations: methodologies for the study of globalization and Counter-hegemonic dispersions: The World Social forum model [2006] [Sparke]
• David JENSEN. Homeless1@ spl.org : taking the bus to the Internet [2007] [Beyers]
• (Charles) Todd FAUBION. HIV/AIDS Care in South Africa: Examining Treatment Possibilities and the Context of Regressive Social & Health Policies Post-Apartheid [2007] [Mayer]
• Michalis AVRAAM. Geographic foundations as an interdisciplinary framework [2007] [Nyerges]
• Rebecca BURNETT. Relocating the welfare mother: Neoliberal discourses on women in the culture of poverty [2007] [Lawson]
• Heather DAY. Competing visions for the hemisphere: the role of the Hemisphere Social Alliance in constructing alternatives to the FTAA [2007] [Lawson]
• Juan GALVIS. The state and the construction of territorial marginality: The case of the 1961 land reform in Colombia [2007] [Jarosz]
• David MOORE. Equity: Environmental justice and transportation decision-making processes [2007] [Withers]
• Tricia RUIZ. Exploring the links between school segregation and residential segregation: A geographical analysis of school districts and neighborhoods in the United States, 2000 [2007] [Withers]
• Charu VERMA. Spatial tactics and protest zones: The zoning of dissent since 9/11 [2007] [Herbert]
• Anneliese STEUBEN. Segregated pedagogies in an era of standardization: Stories of progressive teaching in the Seattle metropolitan area [2007] [Mitchell]
• Jesse AYERS. Valuing natural amenities in spatially variable contexts, an hedonic pricing study in King County, WA [2007] [Beyers]
• Elizabeth UNDERWOOD-BULTMANN. Enforcing behavior: Transgression and spatial politics of zoning [2008] [Herbert]
• Zhong WANG. On-line public participation: Formalization and implementation [2008] [Nyerges]
• Michelle BILODEAU. Place-Based Suicide: The ‘Scene’ and the Unseen Meanings of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge [2008] [Mayer]
• Anna MCCALL-TAYLOR. Care, Gender, and Households’ Pursuit of Employer-Based Health Insurance [2009] [Withers]
• Jack NORTON. Rethinking First World Political Ecology: The Case of Mohawk Militancy [2009] [Jarosz]
• TIM STILES. The Social Construction of Geospatial Technology and Sustainability in the Private Sector [2009] [Elwood]
• MILISSA ORZOLEK. Understanding Recovery: Belonging and Responsibility in Post-Katrina New Orleans [2009] [Elwood]
• Patricia LOPEZ. An Historically Situated Case For Children’s Right To Health: The Birth of the Model Cities Clinic of Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic [2009] [Mitchell]
• Gary SIMONSON. Forgotten Stayers: The Impacts of Gentrification on Long-term Working-class Residents in Columbia City [2009] [Brown]
• Mike BABB. Filling in the Blanks: Missing Data in the US Census and the Race Question [2009]  [Ellis]
• Kathryn GILLESPIE . Killing with Kindness? Reconceptualizing Humane Slaughter [2010] [Jarosz & Lawson, co-chairs]
• Josef ECKERT.  Tropes 2.0: Strategic Mobilizations of Geoweb Participation [2010] Herbert]
• Cindy GORN . “A Place Like This”: Producing Psychiatric Disablement In Adult Homes [2010] [Brown]
• Tiffany GROBELSKI . The Dynamics of Scale in EU Environmental Governance: A Case Study of Integrated Permitting in Poland [2010] [ZumBrunnen]
• Amy PIEDALUE.  Solving Violence Through Development: India’s National Family Health Survey-3 and the Framing of Domestic Violence [2010] [England & Lawson, co-chairs]
• Margaret RAMIREZ .  Food as an Engine: Race, Privilege and the Transformative Potential of Food Justice Work in Seattle [2011] [Lawson]
• Allison SCHULTZ.  (Re)Placing ‘The Fattest Americans’: A Critical Geography of Obesity and Diabetes Among the Akimel O’otham [2011] [Jarosz]
• Theron STEVENSON  . Balkan Ghosts in Heavenly Gardens: How Nature Parks and Tourism are Making a European Croatia [2011] [Sparke]
• Christopher LIZOTTE . The Children of Choice: Public Education Reform and the Evolution of Neoliberal Governance [2011] [Mitchell]
• Monica FARIAS.  Embodying Economic “Crisis”: Argentina’s Middle Classes and the Cultural Politics of Difference [2011] [Lawson]
•   Stefano BETTANI .’Queering’ Straightness: Heterosexual Experiences of Homonormative Spaces in Seattle [2012] [Brown and England]
• Elyse   GORDON . Cultivating Good Workers: Youth Gardening, Non-Profits and Neoliberalization  [2012] [Elwood]
• Skye NASLUND . Portraits of Parasites: Geographic Imaginaries in the Production of Health Knowledge [2012] [Mayer]
• Natalie WHITE.  Who is Transnational? Considering Ideologies of Return in Guatamalan Origin Communities  [2012] [Lawson]
• Jason YOUNG.  Selecting a Conceptual Basemap: Critical GIS and Political Theory [2012] [Elwood]
• Lynda TURET . Building Transformative Place-Making: Lessons From Washington Hall [2013] [Mitchell]
• Yolanda VALENCIA.  Leyes Crueles – Lugares Violentos: Mexican Women’s Testimonios Along the Migration Journey’ [2014] [Lawson]
• William MCKEITHEN .Governing Pet Love: ‘Crazy  Cat Ladies,’ Cultural Discourse, and the Spatial Logics of Inter-Species Intimacies [2014] [Brown]
• Annie   CRANE.  Uncaring Systems and the Production of Trans* Subjectivities: Exploring Digital Spaces of Trans* Care [2014] [Brown]
• Lila GARCIA.  The Revolution Might Be Tweeted: Digital Social Media, Contentious Politics and the Wendy Davis Filibuster [2014] [England]
• Kidan ARAYA.  Examining Claims of Food Justice in the Oxfam International’s Agenda: A Case Study of the GROW Campaign  [2015] [Jarosz]
• Meredith KRUEGER.  Care and Capitalist Crisis in Anglophone Digital landscapes: The Case of the Mompreneur [2015] [Lawson]
• Key   MACFARLANE.  “Noisy Sphere”: Sonic Geographies in the Era of Globalization [2015] [Mitchell]
• Margaret WILSON.   Ebola Exceptionalism: On the Intersecting Political and Health Geographies of the 2014-2015 Epidemic [2015] [Sparke]
• Phillip NEEL. Logistics Cities: Poverty, Immigration and Employment in Seattle's Southern Suburbs [2016] [Bergmann]
• Lee FIORIO. Neighborhoods Neighboring Neighborhoods: Adjacency, Sprawl and Tract-level Racial Change in the U.S., 1990 to 2010 [2016] [Ellis]
• Robert ANDERSON. From Non-native "Weed" to Butterfly "Host": Knowledge, Place and Belonging in Ecological Restoration [2017] [Biermann]
• Olivia HOLLENHORST. A Rights Based Approach to Humanitarian Data Protection Policies [2017] [Mayer]
• Edgar Sandoval. "Being Undocumented and Gay, Just Like Death, Means Having to Navigate Two Worlds": Geographies of Disidentifications and UndocuQueer as World-Making [2017] [Ybarra]
• Rebecca STUBBS. Place, Policy, and Parity: Examining Spatial and Socioeconomic Contributions to Hospital Charge Markup and MapSuite: An R Package for Thematic Maps [2017] [Ellis]
• Rod PALMQUIST. Does the NGO Sector Undermine National Health Providers? How to Measure Migrations of Health Workers Between Public and NGO Care Providers on a Cross-Country Basis [2017] [Sparke]
• Maeve DWYER. Urban Citizenship, Quality Domesticity, and the Queer Precarity of Rural Migrants in Beijing [2018] [Chan]

NON-THESIS M.A. (Special Projects)

• Jonathan Ferns MOULTON  Boundary & Arcedit. [1985]
• David Kenney BALTZ  Micro CENMAP: A Microcomputer Mapping Program for Census Data. [1986]
• John Hall GRIFFITH III  “SAGIS” User’s Guide. [1987]
• Jerome J. CORR  Proportional Symbols Program. [1988]
• Philip Michael CONDIT  Quality Report For Three Components of Seattle’s Geographic Base File. [1990]
• Ernest Moore  The Evolution of a GIS: Case of Thurston County, Washington. [1991]

Doctoral Dissertations, 1930-Present

• Hubert Anton BAUER  The Tide as an Environmental Factor in Geography. [1930]
• Albert Lloyd SEEMAN  The Port of Seattle. A Study in Urban Geography. [1930]
• James Allen TOWER  Land Utilization in Mason County, Washington. [1936]
• Carl Herbert MAPES  A Map Interpretation of Population Growth and Distribution in the Puget Sound Region.[1943]
• Arch Clive GERLACH  Precipitation of Western Washington. [1943]
• Willis Bungay MERRIAM  Thew Rogue River Valley and Associated Highlands.[1945]
• Tim Kenneth KELLEY  The Commercial Fishery of Washington. [1946]
• John Clinton SHERMAN  The Precipitation of Eastern Washington. [1947]
• Lucile CARLSON  Human Energy, Physical and Emotional, Under Varying Weather Conditions. [1948]
• John Henry THOMPSON  Geography of the Truckee and Carson River. [1949]
• Edna Mae GUEFFREY  Historical Geography of New Zealand (850 A.D. – 1840 A.D.) [1950]
• Richard Morgan HIGHSMITH, Jr.  Agricultural Geography of the Eugene Area. [1950]
• Clark Irwin CROSS  Geography of the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming [1951]
• Elbert Ernest MILLER  Agricultural Geography of Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho [1951]
• Howard John CRITCHFIELD  The Agricultural Geography of Southland, New Zealand [1952]
• Oliver Harry HEINTZELMAN ; The Dairy Economy of Tillamok County, Oregon. [1952]
• Willert RHYNSBURGER  The Puget Sound Drift Plain: Land Resources of Human Occupance. [1952]
• Albert William SMITH  The Development of the Kauri-Gum Industry and Its Role in the Economy of Northland, N.Z. [1952]
• Manuel John LOEFFLER  Phases in the Development of the Land-Water Resource in an Irrigated River Valley, Colorado. [1953]
• John Olney DART  The Renton-Sumner Lowland of Western Washington. [1953]
• Donald William MEINIG  The Walla Walla Country: 1805-1910. A Century of Man and the Land. [1953]
• Keith Westhead THOMSON  The Dairy Industry of England and Wales Since the Establishment of the Milk Marketing Board. [1953]
• Theodore HERMAN  An Analysis of China’s Export Handicraft Industries to 1930 [1954]
• William Rodney STEINER  An Investigation of Selected Phases of Sampling to Determine Quantities of Land and Land-Use Types.[1954]
• Woodrow Rexford CLEVINGER  The Western Washington Cascades: A Study of Migration and Mountain Settlement. [1955]
• Midori NISHI  Changing Occupance of the Japanese in Los Angeles County, 1940-1950.[1955]
• Charles Dennis DURDEN  Some Geographic Aspects of Motor Travel in Rural Areas – Empirical Tests of Certain Geographical Concepts of Location and Interaction.  [1955]
• Stanley Alan ARBINGAST A Geographic Study of the Pattern of Manufacturing in Texas.[1956]
• Robert Martin TAYLOR  International Mail Flows: A Geographic Analysis Relating Volume of Mail to Certain Characteristics of Postal Countries. [1956]
• Neil Collard FIELD  The Role of Irrigation in the South European U.S.S.R. in Soviet Agricultural Growth: An Appraisal of the Resource Base and Development Problem.& [1956]
• Burton Lawrence ANDERSON  The Scandinavian and Dutch Rural Settlements in the Stillaguamish and Nooksack Valleys of Western Washington [1957]
• James Eugene BROOKS  Settlement Problems Related to Farm Size in the Columbia Basin Project, Washington [1957]
• Douglas Broadmore CARTER  The Relation of Irrigation Efficiency to the Potential Development of Irrigated Agriculture in the Pacific Northwest. [1957]
• Francis William ANDERSON  Functional Interrelationship of Urban Centers[1958]
• Brian Joe Lobley BERRY  Shopping Centers and the Geography of Urban Areas. A Theoretical and Empirical Study of the Spatial Structure of Intraurban Retail and Service Business. [1958]
• Clyde Eugene BROWNING  The Structure of the Mexico City Central Business District: A Study in Comparative Urban Geography. [1958]
• Willis Robertson HEATH ; Maps and Graphics for the Blind; Some Aspects of the Discriminability of Textural Surfaces for Use in Areal Differentiation. [1958]
• John Doneric CHAPMAN  Land Classification in British Columbia. A Review and Appraisal of the Land Utilization Research and Survey Division. [1958]
• Dale Elliot COURTNEY  Problems Associated with Predicting Land Use in Low Latitude Humid Regions: A Case Study of the San Sebastian-Rincon Area, Puerto Rico. [1959]
• John Albert CROSBY  A Geographical Analysis of Seattle’s Wholesale Trade Territory. [1959]
• Duane Francis MARBLE  Transport Inputs at Urban Residential Sites. A Study in the Transportation Geography of Urban Areas.  [1959]
• Richard Leland MORRILL  A Normative Model of Trade Areas and Transportation: With Special Reference to Highways and Physicians’ Services.[1959]
• William Richard SIDDALL  Idiographic and Nomothetic Geography: The Application of Some Ideas in the Philosophy of History and Science to Geographic Methodology. [1959]
• Fleming Stanley MOORE  The Role of Floriculture in the Agriculture of Florida. [1959]
• John David NYSTUEN  Geographical Analysis of Customer Movements and Retail Business Locations: (1) Theories; (2) Empirical Patterns in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and (3) A Simulation Model of Movement [1959]
• William Wheeler BUNGE Jr.  Theoretical Geography. [1960]
• Michael Francis DACEY  Identification of Patterns on Maps with Special Reference to Data Reduction for Systems Analysis.  [1960]
• Robert Charles MAYFIELD  An Analysis of Tertiary Activity and Consumer Movement: The Spatial Structure of Ludhiana and Jullundur Districts, Punjab, in Terms of Central Functions and the Range of a Central Good. [1961]
• Ronald R. BOYCE  Comparative Central City Spatial Structure: Trends in the Location and Linkage of Selected Commercial Activities. [1961]
• Waldo Rudolph TOBLER;  Map Transformations of Geographic Space.  [1961]
• Sen Dou CHANG  The Chinese Hsien Capital: A Study in Historical Urban Geography.  [1961]
• Arthur GETIS  A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry into the Spatial Structure of Retail Activities.  [1961]
• Julian Vincent MINGHI  Some Aspects of the Impact of an International Boundary on Spatial Patterns: An Analysis of the Pacific Coast Lowland Region of the Canada-United States Boundary.  [1962]
• Robert D. PICKER  Industrial Development in Central Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan: A Study of a Third Metallurgical Base in the Soviet Union.  [1962]
• Astvaldur EYDAL  Some Geographical Aspects of the Fisheries of Iceland.  [1963]
• Louis HAMILL  A Preliminary Study of the Status and Use of the Forest Resources of Western Oregon in Relation to Some Objectives of Public Policy.  [1963]
• Robert Allen LEWIS  Early Irrigation in West Turkestan.  [1964]
• Andrew Lee MARCH  Landscape in the Thought of Su Shi (1036-1101).  [1964]
• Robert Granville JENSEN  Soviet Agricultural Regionalization and Price Zonation.  [1964]
• Deane Richard LYCAN  Defense-Space Research and Development Contraction Expenditures: Analysis and Some Implications of Their Areal Patterns.  [1964]
• William Marvin ROBERTS, Jr.  Soviet Economic Regionalization in the Pre-Plan Period.  [1964]
• Jeremy Herrick ANDERSON  The Soviet Corn Program: A Study in Crop Geography.  [1964]
• Anne BUTTIMER  Some Contemporary Interpretations and Historical Precedents of Social Geography: With Particular Emphasis on the French Contributions to the Field.  [1964]
• William Robert Derrick SEWELL  Economic and Institutional Aspects of Adjustment to Floods in the Lower Fraser Valley.  [1964]
• Robert William MCCOLL  The Rise of Territorial Communism in China 1921-1934. The Geography Behind Politics.  [1964]
• John Lynden KIRBY  A Geography of Han China (206 B.C. – A.D. 221) According to the  Shi Chi , the  Han Shu , and Related Texts.  [1964]
• Bob Randolph O’BRIEN  The Yellowstone National Park Road System: Past, Present and Future.  [1965]
• Douglas Knowles FLEMING  Coastal Steel Production in the European Coal and Steel Community 1953 to 1963.  [1965]
• Elmer A. KEEN  Some Aspects of the Economic Geography of the Japanese Shipjack-Tuna Fishery.  [1965]
• Calvin Gus WILLBERG  Problems in Establishing an Automated Mapping System.  [1965]
• Gunter KRUMME  Theoretical and Empirical Analyses of Patterns of Industrial Change and Entrepreneurial Adjustments: The Munich Region.  [1966]
• Harold BRODSKY  Location Rent and Journey-to-Work Patterns in Seattle.  [1966]
• Guy Perry Frederick STEED  A Framework for the Study of Manufacturing Geography: With a Consideration of the Nature and Process of Manufacturing Changes in Northern Ireland 1950 to 1964.  [1966]
• John Brian PARR  Regional Development and Public Policy: North-West England and the Post War Period.  [1967]
• William Bjorn BEYERS  Technological Change and the Recent Growth of American Aluminum Reduction Industry.  [1967]
• Marvin Alan STELLWAGEN  An Analysis of the Spatial Impact of Federal Revenue and Expenditures; 1950 to 1960.  [1967]
• Ihor STEBELSKY  Land Tenure and Farm Holding in European Russia on the Eve of Collectivization.  [1967]
• David Williams WILCOXSON, Jr.  The Economic Geography of the Contemporary Steel Industry in the American West.  [1967]
• Robert Michael PEARCE  Land Tenure and Political Land Authority: The Process of Change and Land Relations and Land Attitudes in Vietnamese Villages of the Mekong Delta Since 1945.  [1968]
• Warren Emil HULQUIST  The Geographic Structure of the Soviet Sugar Industry.  [1968]
• David STRAUSZ  Specialty Crop Agriculture in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Hops: A Case Study.  [1968]
• Harvey Eric HEIGES  Intra-Urban Residential Movement in Seattle, 1962-1967.  [1968]
• Gregory Lloyd SMITH  The Functional Basis of the ZIP code and Sectional Center System.  [1968] [Morill]
• Robert EARICKSON  A Behavioral Approach to Spatial Interaction: The Case of Physician and Hospital Care. [1968] [Morrill]
• Gerald Lee GREENBERG  Map Design for Partially Seeing Students: An Investigation of White Versus Black Line Symbology.  [1968] [Sherman]
• Richard Waldo WILKIE  On the Theory of Process in Human Geography: A Case Study of Migration in Rural Argentina.  [1968] [Morrill]
• Hans-Joachim MEIHOEFER  The Use of the Circle in Thematic Maps: A Study in Visual Perception of Cartographic Symbol.  [1968] [Sherman]
• Frederick Abraham HIRSCH  Geographical Patterns of Inter-Metropolitan Migration in the United States 1955 to 1960.  [1968] [Morrill]
• Geoffrey John Dennis HEWINGS  Regional Industry Models Using National Data: The Structure of the West Midlands Economy.  [1969] [Fleming]
• Neil Robert Michael SEIFRIED  A Study of Changes in Manufacturing in Mid-Western Ontario 1951-1964.  [1969] [Thomas]
• Philip Rust PRYDE  Natural Resource Management and Conservation in the Soviet Union.  [1969] [Jackson]
• John CAMPBELL  The Relevance of Input-Output Analysis and Digraphg Concepts to Growth Pole Theory.  [1969] [Thomas]
• James B. CANNON  An Analysis of Manufacturing as an Instrument of Public Policy In Regional Economic Development: Canadian Area Development Agency Program 1963-1968.  [1969] [Thomas]
• Charles Buckley PETERSON III  Geographical Aspects of Foreign Colonization in Prerevolutionary New Russia.  [1969] [Jackson]
• Roger James CRAWFORD, Jr.  Factors Affecting the Location of Bank Facilities.  [1969] [Boyce]
• Jacek Ignacy ROMANOWSKI.  Factors of Location of Fresh Vegetable Production in Poland.  [1969][Jackson]
• Robert Walter TESHERA  The Territorial Organization of American Internal Governmental Jurisdiction.  [1970] [Jackson]
• Evan DENNEY  Urban Impact on Rural Environment: A Case Study of San Juan County, Washington.  [1970] [Cooley]
• Allan Ralph SOMARSTROM  Wild Land Preservation Crisis: The North Cascades Controversy.  [1970] [Cooley]
• Malcolm Algernon MICKLEWRIGHT  The Geography of Development in Northern Ireland.  [1970] [Thomas]
• Nangisai Nason Kudzirozwa GWARADA  Historical Development and Future Aspects of Agriculture in Zimbabwe. [1979]
• Ernest Harold WOHLENBERG  The Geography of Poverty in the United States: A Spatial Study of the Nations’s Poor.  [1970] [Morrill]
• Frank James QUINN  Area-0f-Origin Protectionism in Western Water.  [1970] [Cooley]
• Murray Thomas CHAPMAN  Population Movement in Tribal Society: The Case of Duidui and Pichahila, British Solomon Islands.  [1970] [Morrill]
• Siim SOOT  Changes in the Socioeconomic Spatial Structure of Milwaukee and Journey-to-Work Patterns.  [1970] [Boyce]
• Thomas Walter POHL  Seattle 1851-1861: A Frontier Community.  [1970] [Baron]
• Roger Lee THIEDE  Town and Function in Tsarist Russia: A Geographical Analysis of Trade and Industry in Towns of New Russia, 1860-1910.  [1970] [Jackson]
• Keith Way MUCKLESTON  The Problem of Implementing the Federal Water Project Recreation Act in Oregon.  [1970] [Marts]
• Phillip Patrick MICKLIN  An Inquiry into the Caspian Sea Problem and Proposals for Its Alleviation.  [1971] [Jackson]
• Jonathan Jung-Hui LU  The Demand in the United States Rice: An Economic-Geographic Analysis.  [1971][Morrill]
• Barbara Mary HANEY  Western Reflections of Russia, 1517-1812.  [1971] [Jackson]
• Paul Yvon VILLENEUVE  The Spatial Adjustment of Ethnic Minorities in the Urban Environment.  [1971] [Morrill]
• Dennis Gene ASMUSSEN  Children’s Cognitive Organization of Space.  [1971] [Baron]
• Edward Fisher BERGMAN  Metropolitan Political Geography.  [1971] [Jackson]
• Joseph Alan BRUFFEY  The Impact of the Super-Carrier upon Ocean Cargo Flows, Routes and Port Activity.  [1971] [Fleming]
• Ronald Richard SCHULTZ  The Locational Behavior of Physician Establishments: An Analysis of Growth and Change in Physician Supply in the Seattle Metropolitan Area, 1950-1970.  [1971] [Boyce]
• Victor Lee MOTE  Air Pollution in the Case U.S.S.R.  [1971] [Jackson]
• Marwyn Stevart SAMUELS  Science and Geography: An Existential Appraisal.  [1971] [Jackson]
• Hyun Kil KIM  Land Use Policy in Korea: With Special Reference to the Oriental Development Company.  [1971] [Jackson]
• Kenji Kenneth OSHIRO  Dairy Policies and the Development of Dairying in Tohoku, Japan.  [1972] [Kakiuchi]
• Stephen Miles GOLANT  The Residential Location and Spatial Behavior of the Elderly: A Canadian Example.  [1972] [Morrill]
• Clifford E. MAYS  The Dynamics of Retail Growth: An Investigation of the Long-Run and Short-Run Adjustments of Activities in the Growth and Decline of Retail Nucleations.  [1972] [Boyce]
• William Michael ROSS  Oil Pollution as a Developing International Problem: A Study of the Puget Sound and Strait of Georgia Regions of Washington and British Columbia.  [1972] [Marts]
• Kazuo Z. NINOMIYA  A View of the Outside World During Tokugawa Japan: An Analysis of Reports of Travel by Castaways, 1636 to 1856.  [1972] [Kakiuchi]
• Barbara Ann WEIGHTMAN  Study of the Indian Social Milieu in an Urban Environment.  [1972] [Chang]
• Dean R. LOUDER  A Distributional and Diffusionary Analysis of the Mormon Church 1850-1970.  [1972] [Morrill]
• John Richard KILCOYNE  Pictography Symbols in Cartography: A Study of Efficiency in Map Reading.  [1972] [Sherman]
• Rodney Allen ERICKSON  The “Lead Firm”; Concept and Economic Growth: An Analysis of Boeing Expansion, 1963-1968.  [1973] [Thomas]
• Daniel Perry BEARD  Electric Power Plant Siting Legislation: A Review.  [1973] [Marts]
• Peter HARRISON  The Land Water Interface in an Urban Region: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis of the Nature of Significances of Conflicts Between Coastal Uses.  [1973] [Thomas]
• Richard LE HERON  Productivity Change and Regional Economic Development: The Role of Best-Practice Firms in the Pacific Northwest Plywood and Veneer Industry, 1960-1972.  [1973] [Thomas]
• Glen VANSELOW  Spatial Imagery and Geographic Scale.  [1973] [Morrill]
• Everett Arvin WINGERT  Potential Role of Optical Data Processing in Geo-Cartographic Spatial Analysis.  [1973] [Sherman]
• John Griffith SYMONS, Jr.  An Inquiry into Efficiency, Spatial Equity, and Public Facility Location.  [1973] [Morrill]
• Laurence E. GOSS, Jr.  Wholesale Trade in New England: A Study of a Central Place Function.  [1973] [Ullman]
• Charles Gilbert SMITH  Spatial Structure of Industrial Linkages and Regional Economic Growth: An Analysis of Linkage Changes Among Pacific Northwest Steel Firms, 1963-1970.  [1973] [Thomas]
• Larry Martin SVART  Natural Environment Preferences and Interregional Migration.  [1973] [Ullman]
• Roger HAYTER  An Examination of Patterns of Geographical Growth and Locational Behavior of Multi-Plant Corporations in British Columbia.  [1973] [Krumme]
• Kwawu Yao AGBEMENU  The Pattern of Growth in the Manufacturing Industry in Ghana, 1958-1969.  [1974] [Thomas]
• Marjorie Nanette RUSH  The Precession Wave of Urban Occupance: Conversion of Rural Land to Urban Use.  [1974] [Boyce]
• O. Fred DONALDSON  “To Keep Them in Their Place”: A Socio-Spatial Perspective on Race Relations in America.  [1974] [Morrill]
• Virginia R. HETRICK  Factors Influencing Voting Behavior in Support of Rapid Transit in Seattle and Atlanta.  [1974] [Morrill]
• Alan Anthony DELUCIA  The Map Interpretation Process: Its Observation and Analysis Through the Technique of Eye Movement Recording.  [1974] [Sherman]
• William H. FREEMAN, Jr.  An Analysis of Military Land Use Policy and Practice in the Pacific Northwest: 1849-1940.  [1974] [Marts]
• Richard Ivan TOWBER  The Locational Responses of Soviet Agriculture to Central Decision Making.  [1974] [Jackson]
• Russell Nozomi HORIUCHI  Chiseigaku: Japanese Geopolitics.  [1975] [Kakiuchi]
• David Lloyd STALLINGS  Environmental Cognition and Land Use Controversy: An Environmental Image Study of Seattle’s Pike Place Market.  [1975] [Morrill]
• Nathaniel H. BRYANT  Urbanization and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Environmental Pollution.  [1975] [Kakiuchi]
• Charles E. GREER  Chinese Water Management Strategies in the Yellow River Basin.  [1975] Chang]
• Thomas Edward STEPHENS  Selected Geographic and Economic Aspects of the United States Railroad Freight Forwarding Industry with Recommendations for Procedures to be Used in the Selection of an Optimum Terminal Site Location.  [1975] [Boyce]
• Betsy Rose GIDWITZ  Political and Economic Implications of the International Routes of Aeroflot.  [1976] [Jackson]
• David Charles JOHNSON  The Population Age Structure of an Urban Area: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Change.  [1977] [Boyce]
• Eugene James TURNER  The Use of Shape as a Nominal Variable on Multipattern Dot Map.  [1977] [Sherman]
• Steven Anthony CARLSON  Land-Use Planning: A Rural Focus.  [1977] [Beyers]
• Philip Stephen KELLEY  Information and Generalization in Cartographic Communication.  [1977] [Sherman]
• Charles Everett OGROSKY III  The Ordinal Scaling of Point and Linear Symbols for Tactual Maps.  [1978] [Sherman]
• Yehuda HAYUTH  Containerization and the Load Center Concept.  [1978] [Fleming]
• Thomas Pierce BOUCHARD  Environmental Decision Making. The Wisconsin Environmental Policy Act and the Department of Natural Resources.  [1978] [Marts]
• Michael Lee TALBOTT;  Development of North Sea Oil and Gas.  [1978] [Jackson]
• Richard Akira TAKETA  Structure and Meaning in Map Generalization.  [1979] [Youngman]
• Gail Ann CHRISTENSEN KLEIN  The Expansion of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wimpy in South Africa: A Study in the Diffusion of Innovation.  [1979] [Morrill]
• Maureen MCCREA  Evaluation of Washington State’s Coastal Management Program Through Changes in Port Development.  [1980] [Marts]
• Olen Paul MATTHEWS  Legal Elements in Mineral Development with Special Reference to Idaho.  [1980] [Velikonja]
• Dianne Lynn MANNINEN  Labor Forces Migration Associated with Nuclear Power Plant Construction.  [1981] [Morrill]
• Robert Houston ALEXANDER  Adaptation of Land Use to Surficial Geology in Metropolitan Washington, D.C.  [1981] [Marts]
• Kathleen Elizabeth BRADEN  Technology Transfer to the USSR Forest Product Sector.  [1981] [Jackson]
• Charlette Kay HIATT  The Function of Color Legibility of Linear Symbology on Maps for Partially Blind.  [1982] [Sherman]
• Barbara Jeanne DOWNING  Nonmetropolitan Migration in the Context of Cultural Change and Social Structure.  [1983] [Morrill]
• James William HARRINGTON  Locational Change in the US Semiconductor Industry.  [1983] [Thomas]
• Lance Douglas WERNER  Socio-Economic Development and the Growth of Pre-School Services: A Geography of Socialist Construction in Peripheral Soviet Republics, 1959-1970.  [1983] [Jackson]
• Barbara Lynn BRUGMAN  A Spatial Perspective on the Process of Technological Innovation in Technology-Intensive Industry.  [1983] [Thomas]
• Godfrey Emmanuel CHISANGA  The Wood Products Industry of the Lower Columbia Region: Technological Change, Evolution and Its Role in Regional Economic Development.  [1983] [Thomas]
• Godfrey Goliath MUYOBA  Labor Recruitment and Urban Migration: The Zambian Experience.  [1983] [Chang]
• Barbara Pfeil BUTTENFIELD  Line Structure in Graphic and Geographic Space.  [1984] [Sherman]
• Thomas James KIRN  Service Sector Growth and Regional Development in the United States: A Spatial Perspective.  [1974] [BEYERS]
• Jois Catherine CHILD  Creating a World: The Poetics of Cartography.  [1984] [Sherman]
• Arthur William LEON  Place Image Choice: The Central Place of Images in Migration Decision Making.  [1984] [Morrill]
• Sherry Lynn MCNUTT  An Analysis of Remote Sensing Information for Ice Forecasting Models in the Eastern Bering Sea.  [1984] [Sherman]
• Kent Huges BUTTS  Resources Geopolitics: U.S. Dependence on South African Chromium.  [1985] [Jackson]
• Anne Jeanne OSTERRIETH  Space, Place, and Movement: The Quest for Self in the World.  [1985] [Morrill]
• Randolph SORENSEN  Waterways and the State in Imperial China. [1985] [Chang]
• Lawrence Gary HART  Geographic Variations in Medical Resource Use During Office Encounters with Family Physicians.  [1985] [Morrill]
• Barney Louis WARF  Regional Transformation and Everyday Life: Social Theory and Washington Lumber Production.  [1985] [Beyers]
• Nasser Mohammed SALMA  The Selection, Allocation, and Arrangement of Arabic Typography on Maps.  [1986] [Sherman]
• Nancy A. FISHER-ALLISON  Urban Path to Health: Spatial Organization, Everyday Life, and the Use of Primary Care Service.  [1986] [Mayer]
• John Brady RICHARDS  Changing Patterns in Taiwan’s Aquaculture, 1957-1983.  [1986] [Fleming]
• James Conrad EFLIN  Technology and Social Power: Social Action, Intentional Technology and the Social Basis of Space-Time Autonomy.  [1987] [Hodge]
• Eric A. FRIEDLI  Competition Among Equals: A Study of Interstate Conflict, Public Policy Making, and Job-Growth Policy.  [1987] [Hodge]
• James Edward RANDALL  Household Production in an Industrial Society.  [1987] Beyers]
• Holly Jeanne MYERS-JONES  Power, Geography, and Black Americans: Patterns of Black Suburbanization in the U.S.  [1988] [Morrill]
• Peter MESERVE  Boundary Water Issues Along the Forty-Ninth Parallel: State and Provincial Legislative Innovation.  [1988] [Jackson]
• Patrick ALDWELL  Technological Rejuvenation and Competitiveness in the Washington State Woodpulp Industry, 1960-1985: A Global Perspective.  [1988] [Thomas]
• Janos L. WIMPFENN  International Transport Regimes and Contiguous Countries: Goods Movement Between the United States and Canada.  [1988] [Morrill]
• Marc-Andre L’HUILLIER  The Metropolitan Concentration of Minorities in the United States and Britain.  [1988] [Morrill]
• Joseph NOWAKOWSKI  Itinerary Choice Among Korean Periodic Market Traders: A Cultural, Economic, Social and Time-Geographic Analysis.  [1989] [Krumme]
• Gail LANGRAN  Time In Geographic Information Systems.  [1989] [Chrisman]
• John COURTNEY  Canadian Grain Exports To the Soviet Union: A Case Study In Spatial Interaction.  [1989] [Jackson]
• Lynn STAEHELI  Public Services and the Reproduction of Social Sedge-Baed Structured Modeling: An Application to Stream Water Quality Management.  [1989] [Hodge]
• Erick J. HOWENSTINE  Misperception of Destination Encouraging Migration of Mexican Agricultural Labor to Yakima Valley, Washington.  [1989] [Morrill]
• Iain M. HAY  Lo(o)sing Control: Money, Medicine and Malpractice in American Society.  [1989] [Mayer]
• Robert PAVIA  Appropriate Technology for Community Control of Hazardout Chemical Accidents.  [1989] [ZumBrunnen]
• Elizabeth KOHLENBERG  Friends in Places: Friendship in Country, Town and City [1989] [Mayer]
• John A. BOWER  The Hydrogeography of Yakima Indian Nation Resource Use.  [1990] [Beyers]
• Neil SORENSON  Airline Competitive Strategy: A Spatial Perspective.  [1990] [Fleming]
• Stanley TOOPS.  The Tourism and Handicraft Industries in Xinkiang: Development and Ethnicity in a Minority Periphery.  [1990]Jackson]
• Dean L. HANSEN  Acquiring High Technology: The Case of the Brazilian Computer Industry.  [1990] [Krumme]
• Edward Joseph DELANEY  New Firms’ Innovative Search In A New-Technology Industry: Evaluation of Biotechnology Firms.  [1991] [Thomas]
• Rowena AHERN  International Strategic Alliances: The Use of Cooperation by Canadian Firms.  [1991] [Krumme]
• Raguraman KRISHNASAMY  Understanding International Air Travel Choice: A Case Study of the Singapore – Western U.S.A. Route.  [1991] [Fleming]
• Eugene PATTERSON  Sense of Place In an Emerging Home Area: Investigations In the Bear Creek Area of King County, Washington.  [1992] [Jackson]
• Susanne TELTSCHER  Informal Trading in Quito, Ecuador: Economic Integration, Internal Diversity, and Life Chances.  [1992] [Lawson]
• Kurt ENGELMANN  The Introduction of Market Forces and Structural Changes In Command Economies: A Linear Programming Analysis of Irrigated Agriculture in Uzbekistan.  [1993] [Jackson]
• Timothy Roger STRAUSS  Spatial Assessments of Infrastucture: The Importance of Space in Analyses of the Relationship Between Public Capital and Economic Activity.  [1994] [Hodge]
• Frank NORRIS.  Spatial Diffusion of Intermodal Rail Technologies.  [1994] [Mayer]
• Mike PIRANI  Understanding the Effects of Small Hospital Closures on Rural Communities.  [1994] [Mayer]
• Ilya Naumovitch ZASLAVSKY  Logical Inference About Categorical Coverages in Multi-Layer GIS.  [1995] [Chrisman]
• Jesse Harrison BROWNING  Regional Development, Technological Paradigms and Policies: A Framework for Conceptualizing Socioeconomic Processes.  [1995] [Thomas]
• Eric Hugh LARSON  Geographic Variation in the Risk of Poor Birth Outcome in the Non-Metropolitan Population of the United States, 1985-1987.  [1995] [Mayer]
• Daniel Bruce KARNES  A Dynamic Model of the Land Parcel Network.  [1995] [Chrisman]
• Timothy Steven OAKES  Tourism in Guizhou, China: Place and the Paradox of Modernity.  [1995] [Chan]
• Francis James HARVEY  Geographic Information Integration and GIS Overlay.  [1996] [Chrisman]
• Delia Clare ROSENBLATT  A Political Economy of the Russian Oil Industry: Can Western Capital, Technology and Management Facilitate Change?  [1996] [Jarosz]
• James Ethan BELL  A place for community? Urban social movements and the struggle over the space of the public in Moscow.  [1997] Lawson]
• David James ALLEN  The effects of language and economic restructuring and electoral support for sovereignty in Qeubec, 1976-1995.  [1997] [Morrill]
• David Persson LINDAHL  New frontiers of capital. A geography of commercial real estate finance.  [1997] Beyers]
• Edward Donald MCCORMACK  A chained-based exploration of work travel by residents of mixed land-use neighborhoods.  [1997] [Nyerges]
• Patricia Lynn PRICE  Crafting meaning from economic chaos: Low-income urban women and neoliberal reform in Mexico.  [1997] [Lawson]
• Christine ROBERTS  A process of community action: Vashon-Maury islanders and the local nursing home.  [1997] [Mayer]
• Linda BECKER  Invisible Threads. Skill and the Discursive Marginalization of the Garment Industry’s Workforce.  [1997] [Lawson]
• Mark HUYLER  Redefining Civic Responsibility: The Role of Homeowner Associations and Neighborhood Identity.  [1997] [Hodge]
• Rachel SILVEY  Placing the migrant: Gender, Identity, and the Development in South Sulawesi, Indonesia.  [1997] [Lawson]
• Ric VRANA.  Monitoring Urban Land Use Transition with Geographic Information Systems.  [1998] [Chrisman]
• Joan Aileen QAZI  The hands behind the apple. Farm women and work in North Central Washington. [1998] [Jarosz]
• Debra Ruth OHMAN  Understanding change on the Ocean Coast: Restructuring and the meaning of property, nature, and development. [1999] [Beyers]
• Haihua YAN  The impact of rural industrialization on urbanization in China during the 1980’s [1999] [Chan]
• Peter NELSON  Hegemony and the Rural: Economic and Cultural Perspectives on Restructuring in the Rural West. [1999] [Beyers]
• Douglas Grant MERCER  The Nature of Fairness: What the Biggest Cleanup Effort in History Has to Say About the Culture of American Environmental Management. [1999] [Beyers & Mitchell, co-chairs]
• Alexander Sergeievich PEREPECHKO  Spatial Change and Continuity in Russia’s Political Party System(s): Comparison of the Parliamentary Elections in 1917 and 1995. [1999] [Chrisman & ZumBrunnen, co-chairs]
• David ABERNATHY  Bound to succeed: Science, territoriality and the emergence of disease eradication in the Panama Canal zone [2000] [Mayer]
• Harold FOSSUM  Formation and function of industrial districts in the rural northwest: Two cases. [2000] [Beyers]
• Gabriel GALLARDO  The socio-spatial dimensions of ethnic entrepreneurship: Business activities among African-American, Chinese, Korean and Mexican persons in the Seattle metropolitan area [2000] [Hodge]
• Wonho LEE  Industrial reform, ownership structure and labor market segmentation: understanding a changing inequality in the post-reform China. [2000] [Lawson]
• Lise Kirsten NELSON  Remaking gender and citizenship in a Mexican indigenous community. [2000] [Lawson]
• Li ZHANG  The state and urbanization in China: A systemic perspective. [2000] [Chan]
• Evelynes Kawango AGOT  Widow inheritance and HIV/AIDS interventions in sub-Saharan Africa: Contrasting conceptualizations of “risk” and “spaces of vulnerability”. [2001] [Jarosz]
• Alana Bridget BOLAND  Transitional flows: State and market in China’s urban water supply.[2001] [Chan
• So-Min CHEONG  Korean fishing communities in transition: Institutional change and coastal development.[2001] [Harrington]
• Jackson Tyler ZIMMERMAN  Re-mapping transborder environmental governance: Sovereign territory and the Pacific Salmon Treaty. [2001] [Sparke]
• Ta LIU Internal migration in socialist China: An institutional approach. [2002] [Chan
• Christina Helen DREW . The decision mapping system: Promoting transparency of long-term environment decisions at Hanford. [2002] [Nyerges]
• Kim D. VAN EYCK  Neoliberation and democracy? The gendered restructuring of work, unions and the Colombian public sphere. [2002] [Lawson
• Charles S. HENDRICKSEN  The Research Web: Asynchronous collaboration in social scientific research [2002] [Nyerges]
• Judith Marie BEZY  Driving behavior in a stratified sample of persons aged 65 years and older: Associations with geographic location, gender, age and functional status. [2003] [Morrill]
• Nicholas HEDLEY  3D geographic visualization and spatial mental models. [2003] [Nyerges]
• Karin Elena JOHNSON  Bordering on health: Origins and outcomes of the idea of global health. [2003] [Mayer]
• James PEET  Measuring equity in terms of relative accessibility: An application to Seattle’s Duwamish Corridor seaport facilities.[2003] [Nyerges]
• Pervin Banu GOKARIKSEL  Situated modernities: Geographies of identity, urban space and globalization. [2003] [Mitchell]
• David Michael PASCHANE  A theoretical framework for the medical geography of health service politics. [2003] [Mayer]
• Barbara Shepherd POORE  Blue lines: Water, information, and salmon in the Pacific Northwest. [2003] [Chrisman]
• Charles TOVARES  Race and the Production of Public Space [2003] [Mitchell]
• Clare NEWSTEAD  (Dis)entangling the politics of regional possibility in the post-colonial Caribbean. [2004] [Lawson]
• Joanna SURGEONER  Books and worlds: A literary study of the Canadian North. [2004] [Jarosz]
• Scott MILES  Participatory assessment of a comprehensive areal model of earthquake-induced landslides. [2004] [Nyerges]
• Carolina KATZ-REID  Achieving the American dream: A longitudinal analysis of the homeownership experiences of low-Income families [2004] [Withers]
• Meredith REITMAN  Race in the workplace: Questioning whiteness, merit and belonging.[2004] [Ellis]
• Sarah WRIGHT  Harvesting knowledge: A study of the contested terrain of intellectual property rights in the Philippines. [2004] [Lawson]
• Richard HEYMAN  Locating civil society: Knowledge, pedagogy and the production of public space. [2004] [Sparke]
• Amy FREEMAN  Contingent Modernity: Moroccan women’s narratives in “post” colonial perspectives. [2004] [Lawson]
• Hyung-Joo (Julie) KIM  IT goes to school: Interactions between higher education institutions and information technology companies in U.S. metropolitan areas. [2004] [Harrington]
• Deron FERGUSON  An event-historic analysis of short-term U.S. regional employment adjustment, 1975-99. [2004] [Harrington]
• Barbara TEMPALSKI.  The uneven geography of syringe exchange programs in the U.S.: need, politics and place.[2005] [Mayer]
• Catherine VENINGA  The transgressive geographies of integration: school desegregation in Seattle. [2005] [Brown]
• Enru WANG  Retail restructuring in post-reform urban China: the case of Beijing. [2005] [Chan]
• Jamie GOODWIN-WHITE  Placing progress: contextual inequality, internal migration and immigrant incorporation. [2005] [Ellis]
• Brian HAMMER  New Urban Spaces for a Twenty-First Century China [2005] [Mitchell]
• Meredith FORDYCE  An evaluation of the Consistency of Selected County-Level Rural Typologies in Determining Rate and Risk: the Case of Inadequate Prenatal Care [2005] [Mayer]
• Nathaniel TRUMBULL  The environmental impacts of transition: water resources planning in the urban environment. [2005] [ZumBrunnen]
• Maria FANNIN  Birthing subjects: midwifery and the politics of self-determination [2006] [England]
• Elizabeth BROWN. Crime, culture and the city: political geographies of juvenile justice [2006] [Herbert]
• Matt SOTHERN. “the extraordinary body” and the limits of (neo)liberalism [2006] [Brown]
• Jessica GRAYBILL. Contested space in the periphery: Perceptions of environment and resources on Sakhalin Island [2006] [ZumBrunnen]
• Darrin MAGEE. New energy geographies: powershed politics and hydropower decision making in Yunnan, China [2006] [Chan]
• Joseph HANNAH. Local Nongovernmental Organizations in Vietnam: Development, Civil Society and State-Society Relations [2007] [Jarosz]
• Britt YAMAMOTO. A Quality Alternative?  Quality Conventions, Alternative Food and the Politics of Soybeans in Japan [2007] [Jarosz]
• Chris FOWLER. From lived experience to economic models: a mixed methods analysis of competitive policies in Gioia Tauro and Genoa, Italy [2007] [Ellis]
• Greg SIMON. Brokering development: Geographies of meddiation and energy sector reforms in Maharashtra, India [2007] [ZumBrunnen & Jeffrey, co-chairs]
• Jie WU. Artifact management and behavioral discourse in the software development process for a large Public Participatory Geographic Information System [2007] Nyerges]
• Joshua NEWELL. Studies in foreign direct investment in the Eastern Russia, urban water infrastructure in US Cities, and global buyer-driven furniture chains [2007] [ZumBrunnen]
• Nicholas VELLUZZI. Fermenting Growth: Institutions, Agency and the Competitive Foundations of Localized Learning in the Walla Walla Wine industry [2007] [Harrington]
• Andrew WENZL. Wealth, consumption, and regional economic development in the United States [2008] [Beyers]
• Sunil AGGARWAL. The Medical Geography of Cannabinoid Botanicals in Washington State: Access, Delivery, and Distress [2008] [Mayer]
• Mona ATIA. Building a House in Heaven: Islamic Charity in Neoliberal Egypt [2008] [Mitchell]
• Anne BONDS. Placing the Prison: The politics of prisons, poverty, and neoliberal restructuring in the rural American Northwest [2008] [Lawson]
• Astrid CERNY. In Search of Greener Pastures: Sustainable Development for Kazak Pastoralists in Xinjiang, China [2008] [Chan]
• John CARR. The Political Grind: The Role of Youth Identities in the Municipalities of Public Space [2008] [Herbert]
• Courtney DONOVAN. Ideology and Identitiy in France: An Examination of Prenatal Health Care Choices Among Immigrant Women [2008] [Brown]
• Kris ERICKSON. Hacker Mentality: Risk, Security and Control in the Information Society [2008] [Herbert]
• Sarah STARKWEATHER. Defining Extraterritorial Citizenship: the Case of Americans Living Abroad [2008] [England]
• Guirong ZHOU. Ontology, Sensemaking and Architecture of an Online Participatory Geographic Information System [2008] [Nyerges]
• Jonathan GLICK. Household Benefits From the Housing Boom: Expanding Gains and Reconcentrating Wealth in the United States 1995-2005 [2008] [Withers]
• Tony SPARKS. As Much Like Home As Possible: Geographies of Homelessness and Citizenship in Seattle’sTent City 3 [2008] [Sparke]
• Matthew WILSON. Coding Community [2009] [Nyerges]
• Kevin RAMSEY. Adapting (to) the “Climate Crisis”: Urban Environmental Governance and the Politics of Mobility in Seattle [2009] [Nyerges]
• Rowan ELLIS. Civil Society, Savage City: Urban Governance and the Liberalizing State in Chennai, India [2009] [Mitchell]
• Amber PEARSON. Health and Vulnerability: Economic Development in Ugandan Pastoralist Communities [2009] [Mayer]
• Caroline FARIA. Imagining a New Sudan: The Diasporic Politics of Body and Nation [2009] [Jarosz]
• Jean CARMALT. Geographic Perspectives on International Law: Human Rights and Hurricane Katrina. [2010] [Herbert]
• Maureen   HICKEY. Driving Globalization: Bangkok Taxi Drivers and the Restructuring of Work and Masculinity in Thailand [2010] [Lawson]
• Sarah PAIGE. Social, Behavioral and Spatial Dimensions of Human Health and Primate Contact in Western Uganda [2010] [Mayer]
• Stephen YOUNG. The Global Redline: Mapping Markets and Mobilities In the Financialization of India. [2010] [Sparke]
• Dominic CORVA . The Geo-politics of Narco-Governance in the Americas: A Political Economy Approach [2010] [Lawson & Sparke)
• Ann E. BARTOS. Remembering, Sensing and Caring for their Worlds: Children’s Environmental Politics in a RuralNew Zealand Town [2011] [Brown]
• Jaime KELLY. Pilgrims of Modernity: Beijing Luxury Hotel Workers in Pursuit of an Urban Future [2011]  [Chan]
• Kacy MCKINNEY. Seeding Whose future? Exploring Entanglements of Neoliberal Choice, Children’s Labor, and Mobility in Hybrid Bt Cotton Seed Production in Western India [2011] [Jarosz]
• Todd FAUBION. Discourse, Power and Policy:  Constructing AIDS Treatment Access in South Africa [2011] [Jarosz]
• Juan Pablo GALVIS.   Managing the Living City: Public Space and Development in Bogota [2011] [Lawson]
• Michalis AVRAAM. Improving Designs of Online Participatory Decision Support Systems [2011] [Nyerges]
• Tricia RUIZ. Separate and Unequal? Exploring the Racial Geographies of School Quality and Student Achievement [2011] [Ellis]
• Ron SMITH. Occupation “from the river to the sea”: Subaltern Geopolitics of Graduated Incarceration in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories”. [2011] [Sparke]
• Arnisson Andre ORTEGA . Building the Filipino Dream:  Real Estate Boom,  Gated Communities and the Production of Urban Space [2011] [Withers]
• Man WANG. Dynamics of Housing Attainment in Urban China: A Case Study of Wuhan [2011] [Chan]
• Elise BOWDITCH.   Youth Rights, Truancy and Washington State’s Becca Bill [2012] [Withers]
• Dena AUFSEESER. ‘” Managing” Poverty: Care and Control in the Everyday Lives of Peruvian Street Children [2012]  [Lawson]
• Hong CHEN . “Villages-in-the-City” and Urbanization in Guangzhou, China. [2012] [Chan]
• Leonie NEWHOUSE . South Sudan Oyee! : A Political Economy of Refugee Return Migration to Chukudum, South Sudan [2012] [Mitchell]
• Agnieszka LESZCZYNSKI.  Thinking the Geoweb: Political Economies, ‘neo’geographies, and Spatial Media[2012 ] [Elwood]
• Muthatha RAMANATHAN.  Repoliticizing Development: Tracing Spatial Technology in the Rural Development Landscape of South India [2013] [Jarosz]
• Rebecca BURNETT . From Safety Net to Tightrope: New Landscapes of Welfare in the US [2013] [Lawson]
• Robert Ian DUNCAN . Therapeutic Landscapes and the Public Health Conceptualization of Alcohol-Related Illness in Moscow, Russia [2013] [ZumBrunnen]
• Guilan WENG.  Moving Towards Neoliberal(izing) Urban Space? Housing and Residential Segregation in Beijing [2014] [Chan]
• Kathryn GILLESPIE.   Reproducing Dairy: Embodied Animals and the Institution of Animal Agriculture [2014] [Brown]
• Patricia LOPEZ .  Disease and Aid: 100 Years of US (de)Construction of Health Citizenship in Haiti [2014] [Mitchell and Sparke]
• William BUCKINGHAM.  Assembling the Chinese City: Production of Space and the Articulation of New Urban Spaces in Wuhan, China [2014] [Chan]
• Wilawan THANATEMANEERAT . Geodesign for Water Quality Management [2015] [Nyerges]
• Srinivas CHOKKAKULA.  Politics of Interstate Water Disputes in India    [2015] [Sparke]
• Brandon DERMAN.  Making Climate Justice: Social Natures and Political Spaces of the Anthropocene [2015] [Herbert]
• Ryan BURNS.  Digital Humanitarianism and the Geospatial Web: Emerging Modes of Mapping and the Transformation of Humanitarian Practices [2015] [Elwood]
• Michelle DAIGLE. Embodying Self-determination: Re-placing Food Sovereignty Through Everyday Geographies of Indigeous Resurgence [2015] [Sparke]
• Spencer COHEN. Geography of Local Political Economy and Land in China [2015] [Chan]
• Amy PIEDALUE. Geographies of Peace & Violence: Plural Resistance to Gender Violence and Structural Inequalities in Hyderabad and Seattle [2015] [Lawson]
• Stefano BETTANI. Religion and Religious Places: Rethinking Hybridity [2016] [Brown]
• Yanning WEI. Under Chinese Rural-Urban Dual System: The Crisis of Rural-Hukou Children [2016] [Chan]
• Eloho BASIKORO. Pathologies of Patriarchy: Death, Suffering, Care and Coping in the Gendered Gaps of HIV/AIDS Interventions in Nigeria [2016] [Sparke]
• Monica FARIAS. Transformative Political Spaces? Asambleas Populares, Identity, Alliances, and Belonging in Buenos Aires [2016] [Lawson]
• Tiffany GROBELSKI. Becoming a Side: Legal Mobilization and Environmental Protection in Poland [2016] [Herbert]
• Chris LIZOTTE. French Secularism, Educational Policy and the Spatial Management of Difference [2017] [Mitchell]
• Magie RAMIREZ. Decolonial Ruptures of the City: Art-Activism Amid Racialized Dispossession in Oakland [2017] [Lawson]
• Andrew CHILDS. Bound But Determined: Reproduction and Subversion in Seattle's, Folsom's, and IML's Gay Leather Communities [2017] [Brown]
• Elyse GORDON. Social Justice Philanthropy as Poverty Politics: A Relational Poverty Analysis of Alternative Philanthropic Practices [2017] [Elwood]
• Jason YOUNG. Encounters Across Difference: The Digital Geographies of Inuit, the Arctic, and Environmental Management [2017] [Elwood]
• Megan BROWN. The Geographies of $15 Wage Movement: New Union Campaigns, Mobility Politics, and Local Minimum Wage Policies [2017] [England]
• Arianna MUIROW . Exploring the Online Farmers' Market: Neoliberal Venture Capital Meets the Alternative Food Movement [2017] [Jarosz]
• Jesse MCCLELLAND . Planners and the Work of Renewal in Addis Ababa: Developmental State, Urbanizing Society [2018] [Herbert]
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