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Book Review
| Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm. By Thomas J. Campanella. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xii + 228 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $38.00.
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| John Muir famously quipped that when you "Tug on anything at all ... you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe." Undoubtedly Muir had the natural world in mind, but in this intriguing book, Thomas J. Campanella demonstrates that Muir's dictum also applies to nature-culture connections. At every turn, Republic of Shade reveals yet another compelling interaction between Ulmus americana and New Englanders. Some connections are old chestnuts—the Romantics' infatuation with nature as God's handiwork. Others are novel—elms that survived the colonial land-clearing era later became "old Titans" to compete with Europe's antiquities. Still others are surprising (you will have to read the book). |
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Republic of Shade is neither an ecological nor policy history, although these concerns are addressed. Rather it is a wide-ranging, cultural examination of the slow rise, rapid decline, and possible resurrection of the American elm in the American landscape. In a brief introduction, Campanella argues that the American elm deserves attention because "no tree loomed larger in American history" (p. 5). It is the tree of the American Dream, and like the other material elements of that dream, the village townscape and home, it moved west from the Northeast, bringing an identifiable rhythm to much of the American landscape. |
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The first four chapters explore how the elm emerged as a notable New England feature before the early nineteenth century. The first colonists looked for the occasional forest elm because it indicated good agricultural land. Farmers soon cleared most trees for building and firewood or because they blocked cultivation, but left many of the widely spaced elms because, being "trash trees," they were "hardly worth the sweat of felling them" (p. 17). At the same time, elms grew well and quickly on these cleared lands, so farmers sometimes planted them as shelters for livestock and occasionally as domestic ornaments. Independence only added to this list of uses. Following the loss of their European connections, New Englanders turned to American elms to bolster their identity. The trees, unlike the people, were clearly native and often the oldest objects around, so were redefined as beloved witnesses to a distinctly American history. |
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Building on this base, Campanella uses the next three chapters to detail the rise of a regional icon. Elm planting became systematic during the 1840s as the village improvement movement swept New England. Activists, most notably Andrew Jackson Downing, promoted elms because they improved a town's attractiveness—hopefully reducing youthful emigration while attracting tourists—and were thought to improve moral order. Soon, New England's urban improvement groups were also promoting elms. As cities grew and the countryside receded, urban improvers hoped to reconnect with nature and "rural values" through American elms in yards and along streets. By 1900, municipalities managed urban forests to maximize their benefits and minimize costs. Since the American elm generally was regarded as the optimal urban tree, extensive stands were planted, something no city would do today. |
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Concluding this section, Campanella rightly points out that tree planting was part of a larger effort to pastoralize American cities, including the cemetery movement and romantic landscape parks and suburbs, but that tree planting came first. The late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, unfortunately, were not kind to the American elm. In the final chapter we learn that urban-infrastructural development decimated plantings and greatly increased stress on the still densely planted survivors. This situation was ideal for insects and diseases, which merely pestered the elm until a true plague, "Dutch Elm disease," arrived in 1931. Millions of New England's elms soon died, leaving a ravaged landscape by the 1970s and a westward-spreading disease. Nevertheless, Campanella notes in his epilogue, the tree retains its grip on the New England imagination. Refusing to give up their tree, Americans have a variety of efforts, ranging from breeding to drugs, underway to resurrect the American elm and restore it to its former glory. |
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Republic of Shade is an outstanding book—carefully researched, engagingly written, well illustrated (although with too few maps), and finely crafted. It should be read by everyone interested in the region or the intersection between nature and the culture of American settlements. Additionally, it could be well paired with Gayle Brandow Samuels's Enduring Roots (Rutgers, 2001) in a course. |
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Terence Young is an assistant professor of geography at the California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. He is the author of Building San Francisco's Parks, 1850–1930 (Johns Hopkins, 2004) and is doing research for a book on American camping. |
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