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Show LI Lit VUAliXi X . Aerial view of freeway, Los Angeles. Urbanization in the 20th . and has separated our places of residences from our places of century has broken our traditional relationships with the land work. (UPl-Compix) flM(.lSflkJ ISSUES FORUM America The Landscape of Work This is the eighth in a series of 18 articles written for the nation's Bicentennial and exploring ex-ploring themes of the American Americ-an Issues Forum. In this article Professor Jackson describes how traditional relationships to the land were transformed to meet the growing demand for greater production and efficiency. COURSES BY NEWSPAP ER was developed by the University of California Extension, Exten-sion, San Diego, and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Humanit-ies. Copyright by the regents of the University of California. By John B. Jackson When Jefferson and his colleagues devised the grid system with its square townships town-ships and school sections, they envisioned a landscape of small, self-sufficient farms, their owners all actively engaged in local concerns. But as we have seen this ideal landscape did not materialize. The preference for privacy worked against formation of small, politically active communities com-munities and produced a pattern of scattered settlement still typical of much of the urban as well as the rural aspect of the United States. The sudden availability of so much potentially valuable land gradually destroyed the traditional tradit-ional relationship to land. Men or corporations bought large tracts of land not for use but for purposes of future sale. The very poor w ho went west were often obliged to work for others as tenant farmers. Land as a Commodity Do these changes in land use and ownership signify that land had become merely a commodity? Horace Greeley sadly concluded that it was no longer an essential clement in a man's identity, but rather, as he put it, "A mere merchandise merchand-ise like molasses and mackerel." macker-el." But although land speculation specul-ation was widespread throughout through-out the 19th century, thousands thous-ands of Americans identified land with productivity and growth. They worked hard and sometimes ruthlessly to make their own fragment of the landscape productive and efficient. ef-ficient. This could lead to ovcr-cxploitation ovcr-cxploitation and mismanagement. mismanage-ment. Yet the possessors (or occupants) of land in ante-bellum America were responding to an apparently insatiable demand for all the products which farmers could send to market. Industries in the Northeast and Midwest demanded de-manded raw materials and coal and iron; expanding railroads used immense quantities quan-tities of timber for tics and fuel and rolling stock. The new factory towns had to be fed. the cities (w hen almost all urban traffic was horse-drawn) constantly supplied with hay and corn. Indeed, at the time of the Civil War hay was the second largest crop in the United States. Transforming Rural America These ever growing demands de-mands could never have been met by the self-sufficient farm with its slow routine and primitive methods. The whole rural landscape had to be transformed for greater production pro-duction and efficiency by planning and engineering. As the farmer acquired more horse-drawn mechanical cqii- ipment, he was obliged to organize his work to develop mechanical skills, and (most important of all from the landscape point of view) to accommodate his whole farm to this new machinery. Fences disappeared, fields became larger, hillsides were allowed to revert to second growth. The barn became more spacious spac-ious and better planned for work. Wretched country roads had to be improved if crops were to reach the railroad station in time. And finally, with greater dependence on urban markets the farmer tended to neglect the nearby town and its limited services, to isolate himself from the local community and to think in terms of engineering engineer-ing efficiency. A Farming Industry Not until after the Civil War did the new engineer-inspired rural landscape first attract attention. The immense corporate cor-porate bonanza wheat farms, with fields sometimes larger in extent than Manhattan Island, sensationally demonstrated how the organization of work and time, first developed by factory cnginners. could be successfully imitated in the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota, and a few-years few-years later in the Central Valley of California. In the lKHO's western ranching gradually grad-ually ceased to be a matter of exploiting the open range and became a complicated industry, indus-try, closely related to railroad expansion and the commodity markets of the liast. Large -scale cotton plantations, temporarily tem-porarily destroyed by the Civil War. reappeared, larger and more efficient than before. Inevitably the visible aspect of the landscape changed as the landscape of small, self-sufficient self-sufficient farmers yielded to a less pkturcsiiie one. This was a landscape of specialized kinds of farming - wheat or cotton or dairying or livestock -I large in scale, orderly and monotonous to view, but immensely productive and efficient by the standards of the time. Did the average American resist this shift? Was he compelled to change his w ay of life simplv because of economic econom-ic pressures? Many students of the landscape believe so. But it w as really not unnatural for the American countryman to aspire to be an efficient worker-producer, a small-scale engineer. After the Civil War the industrial engineer had become the single most powerful, most prestigious visible environmental force in the United States. It was the engineer who first urged America to conserve energy and to use it wisely: energy derived from water or coal or gas or oil or wood, energy in the form of steam and electricity, and ultimately energy en-ergy in the form of human labor. That is why the wider landscape came to reflect the engineer philosophy, not only in such visible traits as railroads and coal mines and oil wells and hydro-electric dams and the multitude of factories and factory towns, but in standards of economy and health and work. Urban Engineering Between 1850 and the eve of World War II. the urban landscape reflected the acceptance accep-tance of these engineering standards even more visibly than the rural. It was the citv or town that totally rejected the traditional relationship between men and land. Only a favored minority of city dwellers dwel-lers owned the houses thev occupied; the majority worked away from home, and great fortunes (and great power) came to those who owned land and leased it out to others. The separation between place of work and place of residence is, of course, characteristic charac-teristic of every large town or city, but it is a relatively modern characteristic, and it is part of that radical change in our identity as human beings. It is also part of another aspect of the modern city: the growth of places or districts or buildings with highly specialized special-ized uses. The village common or green or central square had been used for grazing cows or holding fairs or drills or for parking wagons during church. Now such open spaces are called parks and dedicated exclusively to recreation. Likewise, in the olds days you could use your land in town for whatever you liked; tanneries and livery stables and stores stood side by side with dwellings and schools. But by the time of the Civil War this mixture of functions was frowned upon, for the engineer philosophy correctly saw the need for the concentration concen-tration of special uses, and for better sanitation. So little by little our towns and cities developed those sections and neighborhoods we are familiar with. Most of us today have broken our ties with the rural landscape and pretty well forgotten the role that land had once played in the formation of national character and identity. This is not to say that the new industrial urban way of life always meant a lowering in the quality of the environment for the average American. Many small farmers farm-ers were only too happy to exchange their exhausted acres ac-res and squalid houses for less strenuous work in a factory or behind a counter, and for a rented home in a city or company town. A less happy consequence was that almost all significant experiences, good or bad, took I place in the company of strangers, at prescribed times and in environments for which the average citizen did not and could not feel any personal attachment, such as sports and recreation areas. New American Landscapes By the end of the first half of the 20th centurv the break between land and the averap. urbanized American was d ft mplete. The old covenant ' once thought essentia for 'H fulfillment of men and women had been annulled. Gone was the processional of seasonal work, the centuries-old attach- -ment to some place within a community. '- Few changes in our Americ- an culture have been so '" profound as this one, and we T are not yet entirely adjusted to ' ' it. But we should not exagger. ''x ate the consequences of this alienation and loss of visibUity T : We continue, must continue ''i to redefine ourselves, and hi the process to create new landscapes. We are beginning to see that most valuable human qualities, like hydro- ponic vegetables, somehow ' manage to flourish even when they have no roots in the soil. '.'1 New relationships evolve with the natural world and ' " with our fellow beings. And '!. that is what is happening now: ' Another landscape is taking ' form here in American, under fit our eyes. COURSES BY NEWSPAP ER is distributed by the National Newspaper Associat- ion. . NEXT WEEK: Prof. John B. Jackson discusses the evolution evolut-ion of a new social landscape, "The Landscape of Ecology." 1 |