Book Review

Canada and the United States

Among the first advocates of long-range planning in the industrializing republic, Frederick Law Olmsted was often seen as extravagant, impractical, and slow. In his defense, his patron Reverend Henry Bellows argued that Olmsted was "long-headed," a man who looked to the future and saw greater economies to come from present investments. Olmsted's patient concern with the future is the central argument of Witold Rybczynski's book. Although sometimes impatient with Olmsted's wide range of interests and projects, Rybczynski endorses Lewis Mumford's praise of Olmsted's years of travel, observation, and practical experience—supplemented by reading—as the best American education. Olmsted's meandering career, from scientific farmer and critic of the slave South through service to the Union war effort and, finally, work as a landscape architect, pioneer environmentalist, and city planner unfolded like a puzzle with apparently mismatched pieces lying about. But the pieces eventually fell into place, revealing an unmatched preparation for a man whose life work was building the parks—beginning with New York's Central Park—that would civilize American cities.

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One could hardly find a better starting point for understanding American civilization in the nineteenth century than this remarkable figure. Son of a Hartford patrician who was part of a regional elite in a decentralized republic, Olmsted became an energetic proponent and charter member of a new national intellectual elite. Like so many heirs of the American Revolution, Olmsted worried that his countrymen lacked the character necessary to live up to that legacy. But unlike many pessimists, Olmsted committed himself to the creation of democratic culture, of which his parks would become a central element.

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