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Book Review
| America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings. By David E. Nye. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. x + 371 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.
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| David Nye's engaging America as Second Creation is a wonderful book, broad in scope, rich in detail, superb in analytical verve. The jacket blurbs suggest that Second Creation "reworks" Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden. David Nye goes beyond Marx's path-breaking study to consider the way in which not only literary works but political treatises, economic analyses, and such artistic endeavors as woodcuts and landscape art were commentary on the place of technology in America. He interweaves in his historical discussion of foundation narratives of such artifacts as the ax, log cabin, mill, and railroad prescient observations about the contemporary costs of establishing control over nature. |
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Nye's book is organized around several themes: assimilation of nature, the mastery of space, the mastery of power, and the transformation of unproductive land (desert) into gardens. For each theme, Nye discusses the place of a technology, e. g., the ax, in nature and society, including aspects of class conflict and conflict between indigenous peoples and settlers. The ax was the first technology of the second creation. Americans did not see their axes as tools of conquest. Rather, in foundation stories the Native Americans were the aggressors, and were marginalized in the stories. Other iron technologies (sickles, scythes, cooking vessels, wedges, saws, and drills), draught animals (horses and oxen) and European seeds contributed to conquest. |
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In the section on the mastery of space, Nye describes, among other things, how federally supported programs contributed to the conquest of the vast regions of the interior figuratively imposing Cartesian grids on maps, and thereby literally upon the land. The government established roads (e. g., the National Road to Wheeling on the Ohio River), gave subsidies to steamboat travel, and through generous land grants facilitated rapacious land speculation by the railroads. With the railroad a transient proletariat of sorts developed: Populations of workers, then saloonkeepers, prostitutes, and others followed the track. Chinese workers suffered the most at the hands of unscrupulous railroad magnates. |
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Foundation narratives were based on the belief that greater access to technology empowered every individual and democratized wealth. Underlying this belief was the sense that geometric space was virtually unbounded, that the Indians might be pushed aside because of the natural abundance of the land. There were no limits; leaders and most citizens rejected counternarratives that raised concerns about environmental degradation and exploitation of laborers. To this day, as Nye implicitly and explicitly indicates, government leaders and business people recognize that mastery of space is facilitated by technology. America's heavy subsidization of highways, airlines, cattle ranching, and oil and gas exploration as "natural virtue" come to mind. |
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Nye's discussion of counternarratives that raised concerns about the destruction of nature and the exploitation of humans is a welcome addition to this literature. We see these counternarratives in the texts of Native Americans, in the paintings of the Hudson River school, whose leading artists questioned the virtue of technology and the pushing back of the wilderness in their canvases, in the work of George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature, which addressed directly the abuse of nature through its industrialization, and even in reports of the Census Bureau. |
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In other counternarratives authors spoke about the deleterious effects of mills and other waterway "improvements" on migratory fish and fishing communities. The first counternarratives rarely referred to social costs because of the belief that mill owners would not create a proletariat. Yet soon writers advanced both an environmental critique for despoiling the environment and social critique for exploiting the worker. Such state-funded projects as irrigation systems also generated such counternarratives as John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. This and other narratives pointed to the human costs of irrigation and focused on the gap between "rhetoric of family homesteading and the reality of agri-business based on huge land-holdings" (p. 234). |
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This book is appropriate for courses with advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Historians of the United States, of technology, and environmental historians will find much of value in America as Second Creation. Its comprehensiveness, incisive analysis, ease of reading, and appeal to contemporary issues will make this a standard work. |
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Paul Josephson teaches Russian and Soviet history, history of technology, and environmental history. He is the author of several books, including Industrialized Nature (Island Press, 2002). |
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