My family and I visited Promentary Point where my fourth grade history told me that it was the place that the last spike was placed in1869 to connect the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and so create a continental railroad. It was quite an accomplishment, indicated, as we drove past, by how long were the graded stone bedways so that the train would not have to rise or fall too quickly as well as all those ties and rails. A marker at the exhibit showed that the information of the event was sent by telegraph to Omaha and points East, including President Grant in Washington, D.C. I was also impressed by the arid land. It was desolate and windy and with vast vistas. Not a task without hardy people and careful planning. I also remembered in the fourth grade, where I seem to have learned a lot of things, the quick development of communications. The Pony Express had lasted for eighteen months so people could travel in 1860 and 1861 from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. The continental telegraph system, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., was completed in 1861 in Salt Lake City and the pinnacle of these three amazing developments in the Eighteen Sixties was the continental railway itself, which I have heard was not significantly interfered with by the Indians because by that time the Indians in the area were largely pacified.
A complaint raised about contemporary education is that there is not sufficient attention to the Westward Expansion, whether it is thought of as the crossing of the Mississippi at St. Louis and elsewhere or the crossing of the Missouri at Omaha, Nebraska. The great expanse of the plains and mountain states, from the 1840’s to the 1890’s, was historically as well as geographically in the heartland of America because there arose a homogeneous population dedicated to hard work and high moral and political principles that defined the American identity and has stayed with it as being sensible and moderate, and or so the Turner Thesis thinks: the West was pragmatic as well as devoted to equality because of the hearsh lands these people had to conquer. The two coastal plains, on the other hand, indulge themselves with ideology and ethnic conflict. The people in the heartland are smaller in number than those in the East or the West, but they are America’s truist people.
I see America differently, as a tale of four cities, all of them as ports on the East Coast. These introduced the key strands of American history that remain with us ever since.There was the settlement in Jamestown, in Virginia, in 1607, and the introduction of slavery in 1619, and that has tainted slavery ever since. The Virginia planters raised rice and tobacco, The land was endless and so cheap; the crops were easily raised and there were markets to sell in Great Britain. The only problem was labor because the malarial swamps killed many workers and so needed to ever resupply an ample worker population and slaves seemed the most efficient way of doing it, this practice remaining prevalent in custom and because of the investment in the slave population, even though slavery was not a very efficient form of agriculture, the farms of Pennsylvania much more prosperous than was the case in the Confederacy as was aware by those of the Rebels when theywent through in Pennsylvania on their way to Gettysburg. Moreover, the Cavalier tradition treated aristocracy as an inevitable condition of society, even if Jefferson posed to style it as “a natural aristocracy” chosen by character and ability rather than parentage.
The second arrival was in 1620 at Plymouth Rock and then onto Boston. These were sectarians that did not do well with people who were at all heretical. They were also entrepreneurial: hard working and preferring, as Weber would say, to reinvest their profits rather than to engage in luxuries. They expanded quickly throughout Massachusetts and reduced the local Indians so that the land was all their own. This religious righteousness also has a lasting claim: recurrent religious uprisings, wide ranging trading from John Hancock’s warehouse, and a tendency against compromise, as was clear from the Abolitionist stirrings in Boston and the surrounding area.
The third arrival was in 1624 in New Amsterdam. They were also entrepreneurial and hard driving, but the Dutch had a sense of tolerance and political accommodation. Russell Shorto explains how in its earliest times the people of New Amsterdam were diverse. New York was a financial market long before the Erie Canal had opened the port as a way past the Alleghenies. There was a Stock Exchange in the early Eighteenth Century and the Jewish patriot, Hyam Solomon, had bought and sold notes in the New York coffee houses so as to maintain some value for the continental dollars. New York has a distinctive political philosophy: well ordered government directed at solving problems, as is clear from Hamilton and the two Roosevelts. When there is a problem, invent a new institution, whether a National Bank, a Constitution, TR’s “Square Deal”, and FDR”s alphabet agencies.
The fourth city is Philadelphia, founded in 1682, and notable for the early development of a grid for its streets. The Quakers were more tolerant than the Bostonians. Ben Franklin, a decided iconoclast, decided to settle there as a printer. But I do not think Philadelphia’s distinctive contribution did not come until 1776, when Jefferson, originally in its remoteness in Charlottesville, invoked a fresh idea of the concept of right as something that is unalienable even as the freedom to rebel is not because there is a right to do so but only because it was a prudent thing to do given how insufferable it seemed was the previous regime. These themes remain alive and controversial. People wonder whether there is a right to an education or health because we think such things as unalienable because nobody is a full human being unless they have their health cared for and can get as much education as a person can manage, the government paying for health insurance if otherwise not able, or supporting community colleges so that they can learn a trade that provides a living wage.
The great heartland of America tends to disparage each of these four traditions. Slavery did not take hold in the heartland, perhaps because slavery was not suited to other than plantations, though James MacPherson tells me that there were attempts to use slave labor in Nevada and California, slaves suitable in mining. So there is no history of guilt as there is in the South and in the Northern cities where African Americans migrated from the South to Chicago, New York and elsewhere. What the South had sowed, the North reaped. Hispanics in the heartland have not as a group been as turbulent. The western expanse, for the most part, also did not experience the religious turbulence that defined Massachusetts, with the singular and spectacular exception of the Mormons, whose Biblical travel across to Utah was inspired by the Easterner Joseph Smith at the time of the Great Awakening in the 1830’s. But what was a distinctive American religion, which is how Thomas O’Dea put it, was sacrificed to politics in that the Mormons gave up polygamy so as to get statehood, one of those sexually experimental religious movements of the mid nineteenth century. The New York experience, for its own part, had been a counter culture to the heartland, which spurned the flagrant money powers of Wall Street and the ever teeming shores of the immigrants who came from Central and Eastern Europe to the United States in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. Rather, there was heartland iron and wheat to confront the money and manufacture in the East and what was amazing was that there was no Civil War between the two, this the conflict which Barrington Moore, Jr. thought might have ended the experiment in American democracy.
The main challenge of the heartland is to the ambivalent heritage of the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution, both created in Philadelphia. Heartland people are independent sorts who expect people to manage their own lives and not to intrude on government-- except, of course, in the way of farm crop subsidies. But these sacrosanct documents are ever expansive in their definitions. The Westerners believe in negative liberty in that you are freed to do what you please without governmental intrusion except that it might interfere in other people’s rights. You aren’t free to shoot someone. But wouldn’t that mean people who aren’t wearing masks are endangering other people and so should be constrained? Whether you get someone else sick is a statistical rather than a certain matter, but it is nonetheless real and so subject to constraint, though as I have suggested common courtesy rather than a rule of law seems sufficient to make people wear masks. What about Isaiah Berlin considered rights to do something or allow something rather than rights to avoid government interference? You are constrained to have auto insurance or zoning permits so that the people affected all do better off. Damages to drivers are compensated by people who wreck their cars because the government insures a minimum insurance policy so as to drive a car. Zoning regulations will make sure that a chicken coop, with all its fumes, are not built in a residential area. We are all interdependent rather than only independent, and it seems the tendency in America is to expand rather than restrict these arrangements in the public interest. That may be why decent souls may disdain Trump’s obvious shortcomings but will vote for him because Trump says, at least, that people want to have their liberties. The coastlands and the heartland stand separated.