Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Harvard Paperback, HP 21)

An excellent book on several levels. I highly recommend it for all of those interested in American History, Cultural Studies and Sociology.The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the development of the American myth of the "Garden of the World". Smith argues (persuaively) that the idea of the American continent as a garden: fertile, lush and tamed(or tameable), deeply influenced the course of American history.As Leo Marx said in his similarly awesome "The Machine in the Garden", the brillance of this book lies in how Smith demonstrates how ideology drives action (or, alternatively: how ideas drive behavior).Smith divides "Virgin Land" into three parts. Part One "Passage to India" describes the initial path westward and the philosophy of the individuals who pushed for westward expansion (Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Hart Benton, Asa WHitney, William Gilpin and Walt Whitman). By way of a prologue, Smith notes that the idea of "Manifest Destiny" did not develop as soon as the settlers arrived, but rather was developed by American Philosophers and Politicans (and land speculators). In the first Part, Smith describes how the initial push westward was justified via the idea that a passage west would increase trade with the Orient. Smith notes that this idea dervied from 18th century Mercantilist economic theory and was therefore "archaic" (a favorite term of Smith's in this book) from the very beginning.The Second part of the book ("The Sons of Leatherstocking") uses the literary character of Leatherstocking as an entry point for a discussion of the development of the western hero figure in literature.A highlight of the book comes in Chapter Ten when Smith discusses the "Dime Novel Heroine". I found his discussion illuminating.In the third and final part of the book, Smith lays out the characterstics of American Agarianism which would come to define westward expansion after the Civil War. Smith outlines the conflict between Southern Pastoralism and Nort/Western "Yeoman" Agarianism and notes how the Homestead Act was singularly influenced by this second conception of American settlement. He also documents how this same philosophy of agarianism prevented later reform of the Homestead Act even after it became clear to many that the Homestead Act had failed miserably in its goals.Smith also discusses the struggle by authors to develop authentic western "characters" and relates that struggle to the emegerence of the "Garden of the World" symbol.This really isn't the forum to tease out all the different issues presented, thoughtfully, in this classic book. I recommend it highly.

Henry Nash Smith's Harvard University dissertation , published a year later in 1950, as "Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth", marks the birth of American Studies as a reaction to the exclusively literary focus of the new critics, created by the narrowing of disciplinary boundaries in English and American literature departments in the 1940s. This work exemplifies how American Studies will make the study of American culture its primary focus, in a broader inter-disciplinary orientation, which brings together the methods of literature, history and the social sciences. Nash Smith uses social history, popular literature, political tracts, correspondences, journals, diaries, and a path breaking paper by Frederick Turner Jackson, to relate how the symbol of the American West, "the pull of a vacant continent"(3), has fashioned the collective subjective American consciousness and molded a distinct American culture.When the colonies along the Atlantic seaboard congealed along the socio-economic fault lines of the hierarchical culture of the old world in late eighteenth century, the perennial quest to determine what an American is, in the early intellectual history of the United States, reasserted itself in a question posed by Crevecouer, "What is an American?". This question is addressed variously in the subsequent works of Emerson, Lincoln, and Whitman, but finds an important synoptic response in Henry Nash Smith's history of how the American West, as a symbol, has molded new conceptions of democracy and citizenship.As America widens its western frontier to the shores of the Pacific, two enduring symbols of the American West will create the myth of "re-birth" and "re-generation" in American culture: "The Passage to India" and "The Garden of the World". The promise of wealth that once drove Columbus to America, in his hope of finding a "passage to India", the epicenter of world trade, continues as a symbol to guide a young nation in search for economic autonomy and a new cultural identity. This Columbian search for a path to the East Indies is revived in the Lewis and Clark expedition to create the first passage through the American wilderness to the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast. The lure of trade with the East Indies will also be the driving force in the subsequent creation of the first transcontinental railroad.The quest for a "Passage to India", however, also lays the ground for "civilizing" a vast nation, of taking possession of an untapped virgin land. Thus another symbol of the American West, emerging from Franklin's and Jefferson's agrarian ideal, is "The Garden of the World", to lure settlers from the Atlantic coast to "tame" the wilderness in increments and in the process set up a new classless society of independent farmers. The "Yeoman farmer" will join the pantheon of American mythological figures, the mountain men, the pathfinder, the explorer, the Western hero, to create, in small incremental steps, the "safety valve" for displaced workers from the east, to settle in the hinterlands and fashion a new conception of American self-hood and nationhood. The "primitive" and "savage" elements of the American wilderness along with the pastoral landscapes of the American West will decisively fashion the emerging new ideals of what it means to be an American.Henry Nash Smith briefly brings up the consciousness of dissent in the artistic imagination that exists in tension with this expansionist project and this "civilizing" march through the wilderness. He briefly discusses the idea of "Manifest Destiny" as it is expressed in the ideals of brotherly love and peace in Whitman's "Leaves of Grass". Nash Smith will briefly extend this discussion in his account of how Thoreau, Melville, and Charles Webber, extol the savage and the primitive as a vital foundation of American life. But he stops short of taking stock of the transcendental conceptions of nature in Emerson, as F.O. Mathiessen has shown, its distinct consciousness of nature that is hugely influential on American culture. This strain of the American literary consciousness offers a striking contrast to the grasping and pillaging attitude towards nature that becomes a dominant narrative in Nash Smith's history.These conceptions of nature, in the intellectual history of the period, are not only meant to be projections of the transcendental cast of the New England Mind, but as the representative American vision of nature. The important strain in the intellectual history of the period keeps the worth of nature separate from economic value. Thus the sources used for this historical study do not make much room for this resistant strain of thinking in American consciousness to the larger plunder of nature that is traced in this history. The intellectual tradition of conceiving the American West poetically is somehow lost early in Nash Smith's history. Emerson's epigram: "America is a Poem in our eyes", as an aspect of American literary history, with a profound impact on America's artistic consciousness, is given short shrift in Nash Smith's historical account. Discounting this story of the literary imagination in "Virgin Land", with its deeper and more harmonious connection to nature, gives the Lockean enterprise of ownership and appropriation of the "untouched" land, and the plunder that ensues, a much more pronounced role in this historical narrative.The myth underlying the symbol of the American West, this story of expansionism and quest for American cultural autonomy, renders invisible the cultural claims of the flourishing native civilization found within the American west. The American consciousness traced in this history imagines the American West as untouched "Virgin land" only because the culture that this consciousness creates cannot imagine "civilizations" divorced from economic desire. "Civilization", as a historical conception, develops out of a Lockean conception of nature, where land is to be claimed as property, as infinite resources to plunder, and as means to promote free enterprise and trade. It is within this democratic capitalistic cultural ethos that a civilization that lives in harmony with nature is largely rendered as "savage". The only real point of meeting with the native cultures is when the worth of the native Americans is translated within the capitalistic rubric, as value to be obtained from fir trade. Nash Smith's history makes transparent the culture of imperialism that has been underway for a couple of centuries. But what it leaves opaque is the history of displacement and dispossession of the native cultures in the wake of an acute narrowing of the American mind, brought on by a collective subjective American experience that is utterly consumed by economic desire.