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To Pass on a Good Earth: The Life and Work of Carl O. Sauer
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Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136
work of Willie Smyth. Readers with little knowledge of Ireland will undoubtedly benefit from a full or selective reading of this magnum opus, and others more expert will benefit equally. At the Anvil is a clear representation of many facets of Irish historical geography. The general spirit is one of accommodation, rather than prescription, of an acceptable range of approaches and theories, each of the self-contained essays largely setting or taking as read its own terms of reference and contexts, but most addressing one or other of many problems challenging the researching and writing of Ireland’s historic pasts that can be identified in the research and publications of Willie Smyth. As Patrick Duffy puts it, ‘Historical geography as expressed in the work of Willie Smyth and his generation has been a well-established tradition in Ireland for the past half-century. The future of historical geography in Ireland will be shaped by the younger contributors to this collection. We believe that Willie Smyth will be gratified that his festschrift has produced such a range of scholarship from contributors both within and outside the island of Ireland. It is a fitting meitheal for one who has always proclaimed the co-operative venture’ (p. xxvi). I hope, too, that Willie Smyth’s and related work will continue well into the future. May he, and the historical geography of Ireland, go from strength to strength: Go dté sé ó neart go neart. Robin Butlin University of Leeds, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.008
Michael Williams. with David Lowenthal and William M. Denevan, To Pass on a Good Earth: The Life and Work of Carl O. Sauer. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2014, 288 pages, US$45 hardcover. The four geographers Carl Sauer nominated ‘for full biographical inquiry’ were Friedrich Ratzel, Eduard Hahn, Vaughan Cornish, and George Perkins Marsh. Until now, only Marsh received the full treatment. Would Sauer who once, in mock modesty, called himself ‘a minor sort of scholar’ be surprised that he himself would one day be the subject of just such an inquiry? Not at all, for Sauer knew his own worth. Indeed, how could he not for he received more honors than any other geographer of his time. Michael Williams’s biography of Sauer is a wonderful read, especially for this reviewer for he was a graduate student in the Berkeley department between 1951 and 1957, the last years of Sauer’s headship. Any reader of the book would want to know what Sauer’s contributions were and how they stood the test of time. The book more than satisfies that curiosity. Even those who have heard of Sauer may not know the different hats he wore in the world of scholarship. Sauer the geomorphologist? He wrote two monographs, one on the land forms of the Peninsula range of California (1929) and the other on the basin-and-range forms in the Chiricahua area (1930), followed by a study of gullying in the piedmont region (1936). Sauer the linguist and demographer? There was his reconstruction and mapping of tribal languages between the Gila River in Arizona and the Rio Grande de Santiago, a tour de force of meticulous scholarship that made a historian declare Sauer to be the true founder of the Berkeley school of demographic history. As for the themes for which Sauer is most widely known, they are all there in the book, and include the domestication of plants and animals, the entry of Native Americans into the continent, the
transformation of forest and prairie into cropland and pasture, the spread of agriculture from its original hearths, European conquest followed by an entrepreneurial ingenuity and vigor that created prosperity but also led to environmental degradation and the loss of cultural diversity. What gives Williams’s book unique interest is the way he places these themes in the intellectual and social climate of the time. But to those who were Sauer’s students, or the students of his students, and so are familiar with these themes, the real interest e no, the fascination e of the book lies in the life of this ‘Great God West of the Sierras,’ as the awed geographer, Richard Hartshorne, put it. Williams’s research into the Sauer archives in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library yielded a picture of the man that, until now, could only have been known to a few intimates. I will leave Sauer’s publications to reviewers who are better equipped to appraise them. Instead, I turn to his life, for it is his life, as told by Williams, that helps us understand the intellectual paths he followed with such stunning success, sometimes against all odds, but also with failures, the result of the same stubbornness, only wrongly directed. Above all, the life helps us understand Sauer’s love of homestead, community, and folkways, and his distaste for the bustling modern city and a future dominated by commerce and technology. Although not specially emphasized in Williams’s biography, any discerning reader will be struck by certain contradictions in Sauer’s personality. Of course, no human being is all of a piece but, given Sauer’s partiality for quiet reflection as distinct from busy-body research, it is noteworthy that he was not himself more fully aware of the contradictions. A lover of folkways, he also had a head for business and taught a very successful course on business geography at Ann Arbor; aversive to the making of money, he nevertheless sought to invest in the produce of his Missouri farm and, later, in Arizona’s copper mines. Distasteful of all things modern, he nevertheless owned a Mercedes-Benz and his Berkeley home was equipped with all the comforts and conveniences of modern life. As a graduate student, the first course I took from Sauer was ‘Conservation’. The year was 1952. He walked into the classroom with a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and announced that Sir Julian Huxley, the director of Unesco, had arrived in the Bay Area. We students all expected Sauer to praise Sir Julian who, after all, was a distinguished biologist and we all knew how Sauer favored those who labored in that field. But no, he criticized Sir Julian for being interested only in systematics, and not in the particularities of plant life in a specific region. Instead, Sauer praised Sir Julian’s brother, the novelist Aldous Huxley. And, of course, a novelist’s calling was and is to make individuals and places vividly distinctive and real. ‘Conservation’ required two term papers, one on a resource and the other on a general topic. For my resource paper I chose ‘phosphate’. For my general paper, I wrote on progress, praising it and so expected the great man to give me a failing grade, for we students all knew that Sauer dismissed the idea of progress as mere Western technological arrogance. My grade? An A! I was a little disappointed to learn later that Sauer never read my paper, nor that of any other student’s. They were all read and graded by his teaching assistant. Not only progress but universalism is also a bad word in Sauer’s lexicon. To him, there is no single God; rather there are many gods, each the lawgiver to his own people. Sauer never declared himself a relativist, but his disowning of universal moral laws, acknowledging only mores, in the manner of anthropologists, leads e it seems to me e down that path. Local gods presiding over local places result in cultural diversity, one of Sauer’s great passions.
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136
Cultural diversity enables native plants and animals to survive, and their survival guarantees the maintenance of a productive Earth, which can be passed on to future generations. Is this all that we human beings can hope for e pass our genes and folkways from one generation to the next till the sun swallows up the Earth? Sauer, who gave up Christianity as a teenager and who sometimes uttered the word ‘philosophy’ as if it were an armchair indulgence, would surely say ‘Yes’. This review may not seem like one. Where are the chapter encapsulations? On the other hand, it is a review in the sense that it is what one reader got out of the book e and what I got out of the book is not only an exceptionally talented scholar but also a captivating personality. It is strangely true that, with the passage of time, the scholarly discoveries become less and less relevant, the personality more and more so. Carl Sauer is my role model even if several of his cherished ideas are no longer valid. He is such because of his daring and far-ranging mind, his disdain for the mere purveyor of other people’s findings. I wish to end by expressing my gratitude to Michael Williams for making so vividly present the professor whose question to me when I first entered his lair (Westher Hess’s expression) was, ‘How’s your Latin?’ and his second question was, ‘Do you like milk?’ I confessed that I didn’t know Latin, not realizing at the time that Sauer did know Latin, a language he picked up in his two years of schooling in Germany. And, no, I didn’t like milk. Did that admit me to his circle of acceptable students? For Sauer was drawing the ‘milkless line’ in preparation for his lectures on agricultural origins and dispersals, and I, a Chinese, belonged to the barnyard culture south of that line and so was supposed to be lactose intolerant. Yi-Fu Tuan University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.025
Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800e1868. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012, 334 pages, US$45 hardcover. The history of the iron and steel industry in nineteenth century America has two parts. In the first, which extends through the Civil War and slightly beyond, the United States struggles but fails to copy and overtake Great Britain as the world leader in iron production; in the second, associated with ore from the Great Lakes and the discovery of how to make cheap steel, the United States becomes by 1900 the world leader. Although the second part of the story is well known, the first has almost retreated from popular memory, and it is this, the neglected first part of the story, that Anne Kelly Knowles explores in Mastering Iron. The central question she asks is simple: ‘Why did it take most of the nineteenth century for the United States to match the British iron industry’s scale of production?’ (p.5). Her answer, in a nutshell, is that British iron and coal were more homogeneous than American iron and coal, were located close to each other, unlike the American resources, were closer to markets than American iron, and were produced by a more easily managed and therefore cheaper labor force. Knowles emphasizes the diversity of American methods and the near-ubiquitous dispersion of American production by carefully analyzing J. Peter Lesley’s The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide, an 1859 directory compiled by Lesley, his younger brother, and a nephew. The three spent a combined total of 443 days in the field,
129
interviewing all the ironmasters they could find as they traveled, often separately, from Philadelphia up to Rutland, down to Montgomery, and over to St Louis. The resulting Guide tabulates information about 770 blast furnaces, 224 rolling mills, and 497 forges or bloomeries. Lesley’s Guide was deliberately impersonal, but Knowles goes beyond its statistics by mining the letters sent home by the men while traveling. ’How improved everything is!’ Peter writes in 1856. ‘The Rail Road has changed all’ (p. 19). The railroad does not go everywhere, however, and from Wilkes-Barre he writes, ’The moment one lets go of a railroad, one is in a wilderness’ (p. 20). It is a cultural as well as physical wilderness. Brother Joseph writes from North Carolina, ’They want Yankees or Pennsylvanians to come & show them how’ (p. 26). Working from the Guide, Knowles has compiled a set of maps, much more informative and legible than the monochromatic ones of the Guide itself. One map shows all the rolling mills and blast furnaces the team knew of. Another shows the fuels they used (anthracite in eastern Pennsylvania, coke in southwestern Pennsylvania, coal in eastern Ohio). A third and fourth show furnace abandonments by 1848 or 1858. A fifth shows pig-iron shipments, the longer ones mostly by water (as from East Tennessee to New Orleans or from Philadelphia to Boston), and a sixth shows the sources of iron used in rolling mills (those on the east coast relying heavily on imported iron, while those inland were more likely to use iron made on the spot). Knowles discerns and maps six iron-making regions (New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Western Pennsylvania and the Upper Ohio Valley, Virginia, and the Appalachian South), and her map of production shows that among these regions Pennsylvania was dominant, though other clusters appear on the Hudson, the Scioto, and lower Tennessee. Almost all of the furnaces, she writes, were within ten miles of the ore they used, and as late as 1858 over 80 percent of the furnaces were fired with charcoal, which could not be shipped long distances without disintegrating and whose production deforested the peripheral countryside. Knowles reminds us that although writers and painters often saw these mills as outposts of Hell, many workers took pride in their work: a fine example is James J. Davis, who rose from puddler’s helper to secretary of labor for presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Her concern with labor leads her to create a taxonomy of iron communities ranging from plantations (complete with slave labor) to hamlets, villages, company towns, and cities large and small. It leads her as well to several detailed case studies. Two are of failures. They include the highly capitalized Lycoming Coal Company of Farrandsville, Pennsylvania, which Knowles calls the ‘most audacious attempt to replicate the Welsh model’ (p. 119) but which failed chiefly because of poor management. Another failure, though initially more successful, was the George’s Creek Coal and Iron Company at Lonaconing, Maryland, a victim of a market crash. She reviews success stories, too. One is the Lehigh Crane Iron Works, which was fortunately managed by David Thomas, who, coming from Wales, knew how to generate the intense heat needed to make iron with anthracite. Another success story is the Trenton Iron Works, owned by Peter Cooper. Starting out as a rolling mill supplied with pigs from Lehigh Crane, the Trenton mill developed its own furnaces 50 miles upstream at Phillipsburg. These success stories, Knowles writes, were each a ’hub of best practices’ (p. 178). Knowles writes at length about the Civil War and the disadvantages of the South, which began the war with an iron-making capacity only a quarter as great as that of the North, and where major works, such as Shelby Iron, in Alabama, were ’ripped apart by Yankee raids’ (p. 207). Although a postwar Southern steel industry would rise at Birmingham, the North was by then racing ahead. Perhaps the critical moment in its ascent came with the 1867 visit
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136
work of Willie Smyth. Readers with little knowledge of Ireland will undoubtedly benefit from a full or selective reading of this magnum opus, and others more expert will benefit equally. At the Anvil is a clear representation of many facets of Irish historical geography. The general spirit is one of accommodation, rather than prescription, of an acceptable range of approaches and theories, each of the self-contained essays largely setting or taking as read its own terms of reference and contexts, but most addressing one or other of many problems challenging the researching and writing of Ireland’s historic pasts that can be identified in the research and publications of Willie Smyth. As Patrick Duffy puts it, ‘Historical geography as expressed in the work of Willie Smyth and his generation has been a well-established tradition in Ireland for the past half-century. The future of historical geography in Ireland will be shaped by the younger contributors to this collection. We believe that Willie Smyth will be gratified that his festschrift has produced such a range of scholarship from contributors both within and outside the island of Ireland. It is a fitting meitheal for one who has always proclaimed the co-operative venture’ (p. xxvi). I hope, too, that Willie Smyth’s and related work will continue well into the future. May he, and the historical geography of Ireland, go from strength to strength: Go dté sé ó neart go neart. Robin Butlin University of Leeds, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.08.008
Michael Williams. with David Lowenthal and William M. Denevan, To Pass on a Good Earth: The Life and Work of Carl O. Sauer. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2014, 288 pages, US$45 hardcover. The four geographers Carl Sauer nominated ‘for full biographical inquiry’ were Friedrich Ratzel, Eduard Hahn, Vaughan Cornish, and George Perkins Marsh. Until now, only Marsh received the full treatment. Would Sauer who once, in mock modesty, called himself ‘a minor sort of scholar’ be surprised that he himself would one day be the subject of just such an inquiry? Not at all, for Sauer knew his own worth. Indeed, how could he not for he received more honors than any other geographer of his time. Michael Williams’s biography of Sauer is a wonderful read, especially for this reviewer for he was a graduate student in the Berkeley department between 1951 and 1957, the last years of Sauer’s headship. Any reader of the book would want to know what Sauer’s contributions were and how they stood the test of time. The book more than satisfies that curiosity. Even those who have heard of Sauer may not know the different hats he wore in the world of scholarship. Sauer the geomorphologist? He wrote two monographs, one on the land forms of the Peninsula range of California (1929) and the other on the basin-and-range forms in the Chiricahua area (1930), followed by a study of gullying in the piedmont region (1936). Sauer the linguist and demographer? There was his reconstruction and mapping of tribal languages between the Gila River in Arizona and the Rio Grande de Santiago, a tour de force of meticulous scholarship that made a historian declare Sauer to be the true founder of the Berkeley school of demographic history. As for the themes for which Sauer is most widely known, they are all there in the book, and include the domestication of plants and animals, the entry of Native Americans into the continent, the
transformation of forest and prairie into cropland and pasture, the spread of agriculture from its original hearths, European conquest followed by an entrepreneurial ingenuity and vigor that created prosperity but also led to environmental degradation and the loss of cultural diversity. What gives Williams’s book unique interest is the way he places these themes in the intellectual and social climate of the time. But to those who were Sauer’s students, or the students of his students, and so are familiar with these themes, the real interest e no, the fascination e of the book lies in the life of this ‘Great God West of the Sierras,’ as the awed geographer, Richard Hartshorne, put it. Williams’s research into the Sauer archives in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library yielded a picture of the man that, until now, could only have been known to a few intimates. I will leave Sauer’s publications to reviewers who are better equipped to appraise them. Instead, I turn to his life, for it is his life, as told by Williams, that helps us understand the intellectual paths he followed with such stunning success, sometimes against all odds, but also with failures, the result of the same stubbornness, only wrongly directed. Above all, the life helps us understand Sauer’s love of homestead, community, and folkways, and his distaste for the bustling modern city and a future dominated by commerce and technology. Although not specially emphasized in Williams’s biography, any discerning reader will be struck by certain contradictions in Sauer’s personality. Of course, no human being is all of a piece but, given Sauer’s partiality for quiet reflection as distinct from busy-body research, it is noteworthy that he was not himself more fully aware of the contradictions. A lover of folkways, he also had a head for business and taught a very successful course on business geography at Ann Arbor; aversive to the making of money, he nevertheless sought to invest in the produce of his Missouri farm and, later, in Arizona’s copper mines. Distasteful of all things modern, he nevertheless owned a Mercedes-Benz and his Berkeley home was equipped with all the comforts and conveniences of modern life. As a graduate student, the first course I took from Sauer was ‘Conservation’. The year was 1952. He walked into the classroom with a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and announced that Sir Julian Huxley, the director of Unesco, had arrived in the Bay Area. We students all expected Sauer to praise Sir Julian who, after all, was a distinguished biologist and we all knew how Sauer favored those who labored in that field. But no, he criticized Sir Julian for being interested only in systematics, and not in the particularities of plant life in a specific region. Instead, Sauer praised Sir Julian’s brother, the novelist Aldous Huxley. And, of course, a novelist’s calling was and is to make individuals and places vividly distinctive and real. ‘Conservation’ required two term papers, one on a resource and the other on a general topic. For my resource paper I chose ‘phosphate’. For my general paper, I wrote on progress, praising it and so expected the great man to give me a failing grade, for we students all knew that Sauer dismissed the idea of progress as mere Western technological arrogance. My grade? An A! I was a little disappointed to learn later that Sauer never read my paper, nor that of any other student’s. They were all read and graded by his teaching assistant. Not only progress but universalism is also a bad word in Sauer’s lexicon. To him, there is no single God; rather there are many gods, each the lawgiver to his own people. Sauer never declared himself a relativist, but his disowning of universal moral laws, acknowledging only mores, in the manner of anthropologists, leads e it seems to me e down that path. Local gods presiding over local places result in cultural diversity, one of Sauer’s great passions.
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 46 (2014) 113e136
Cultural diversity enables native plants and animals to survive, and their survival guarantees the maintenance of a productive Earth, which can be passed on to future generations. Is this all that we human beings can hope for e pass our genes and folkways from one generation to the next till the sun swallows up the Earth? Sauer, who gave up Christianity as a teenager and who sometimes uttered the word ‘philosophy’ as if it were an armchair indulgence, would surely say ‘Yes’. This review may not seem like one. Where are the chapter encapsulations? On the other hand, it is a review in the sense that it is what one reader got out of the book e and what I got out of the book is not only an exceptionally talented scholar but also a captivating personality. It is strangely true that, with the passage of time, the scholarly discoveries become less and less relevant, the personality more and more so. Carl Sauer is my role model even if several of his cherished ideas are no longer valid. He is such because of his daring and far-ranging mind, his disdain for the mere purveyor of other people’s findings. I wish to end by expressing my gratitude to Michael Williams for making so vividly present the professor whose question to me when I first entered his lair (Westher Hess’s expression) was, ‘How’s your Latin?’ and his second question was, ‘Do you like milk?’ I confessed that I didn’t know Latin, not realizing at the time that Sauer did know Latin, a language he picked up in his two years of schooling in Germany. And, no, I didn’t like milk. Did that admit me to his circle of acceptable students? For Sauer was drawing the ‘milkless line’ in preparation for his lectures on agricultural origins and dispersals, and I, a Chinese, belonged to the barnyard culture south of that line and so was supposed to be lactose intolerant. Yi-Fu Tuan University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.07.025
Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800e1868. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012, 334 pages, US$45 hardcover. The history of the iron and steel industry in nineteenth century America has two parts. In the first, which extends through the Civil War and slightly beyond, the United States struggles but fails to copy and overtake Great Britain as the world leader in iron production; in the second, associated with ore from the Great Lakes and the discovery of how to make cheap steel, the United States becomes by 1900 the world leader. Although the second part of the story is well known, the first has almost retreated from popular memory, and it is this, the neglected first part of the story, that Anne Kelly Knowles explores in Mastering Iron. The central question she asks is simple: ‘Why did it take most of the nineteenth century for the United States to match the British iron industry’s scale of production?’ (p.5). Her answer, in a nutshell, is that British iron and coal were more homogeneous than American iron and coal, were located close to each other, unlike the American resources, were closer to markets than American iron, and were produced by a more easily managed and therefore cheaper labor force. Knowles emphasizes the diversity of American methods and the near-ubiquitous dispersion of American production by carefully analyzing J. Peter Lesley’s The Iron Manufacturer’s Guide, an 1859 directory compiled by Lesley, his younger brother, and a nephew. The three spent a combined total of 443 days in the field,
129
interviewing all the ironmasters they could find as they traveled, often separately, from Philadelphia up to Rutland, down to Montgomery, and over to St Louis. The resulting Guide tabulates information about 770 blast furnaces, 224 rolling mills, and 497 forges or bloomeries. Lesley’s Guide was deliberately impersonal, but Knowles goes beyond its statistics by mining the letters sent home by the men while traveling. ’How improved everything is!’ Peter writes in 1856. ‘The Rail Road has changed all’ (p. 19). The railroad does not go everywhere, however, and from Wilkes-Barre he writes, ’The moment one lets go of a railroad, one is in a wilderness’ (p. 20). It is a cultural as well as physical wilderness. Brother Joseph writes from North Carolina, ’They want Yankees or Pennsylvanians to come & show them how’ (p. 26). Working from the Guide, Knowles has compiled a set of maps, much more informative and legible than the monochromatic ones of the Guide itself. One map shows all the rolling mills and blast furnaces the team knew of. Another shows the fuels they used (anthracite in eastern Pennsylvania, coke in southwestern Pennsylvania, coal in eastern Ohio). A third and fourth show furnace abandonments by 1848 or 1858. A fifth shows pig-iron shipments, the longer ones mostly by water (as from East Tennessee to New Orleans or from Philadelphia to Boston), and a sixth shows the sources of iron used in rolling mills (those on the east coast relying heavily on imported iron, while those inland were more likely to use iron made on the spot). Knowles discerns and maps six iron-making regions (New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Western Pennsylvania and the Upper Ohio Valley, Virginia, and the Appalachian South), and her map of production shows that among these regions Pennsylvania was dominant, though other clusters appear on the Hudson, the Scioto, and lower Tennessee. Almost all of the furnaces, she writes, were within ten miles of the ore they used, and as late as 1858 over 80 percent of the furnaces were fired with charcoal, which could not be shipped long distances without disintegrating and whose production deforested the peripheral countryside. Knowles reminds us that although writers and painters often saw these mills as outposts of Hell, many workers took pride in their work: a fine example is James J. Davis, who rose from puddler’s helper to secretary of labor for presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Her concern with labor leads her to create a taxonomy of iron communities ranging from plantations (complete with slave labor) to hamlets, villages, company towns, and cities large and small. It leads her as well to several detailed case studies. Two are of failures. They include the highly capitalized Lycoming Coal Company of Farrandsville, Pennsylvania, which Knowles calls the ‘most audacious attempt to replicate the Welsh model’ (p. 119) but which failed chiefly because of poor management. Another failure, though initially more successful, was the George’s Creek Coal and Iron Company at Lonaconing, Maryland, a victim of a market crash. She reviews success stories, too. One is the Lehigh Crane Iron Works, which was fortunately managed by David Thomas, who, coming from Wales, knew how to generate the intense heat needed to make iron with anthracite. Another success story is the Trenton Iron Works, owned by Peter Cooper. Starting out as a rolling mill supplied with pigs from Lehigh Crane, the Trenton mill developed its own furnaces 50 miles upstream at Phillipsburg. These success stories, Knowles writes, were each a ’hub of best practices’ (p. 178). Knowles writes at length about the Civil War and the disadvantages of the South, which began the war with an iron-making capacity only a quarter as great as that of the North, and where major works, such as Shelby Iron, in Alabama, were ’ripped apart by Yankee raids’ (p. 207). Although a postwar Southern steel industry would rise at Birmingham, the North was by then racing ahead. Perhaps the critical moment in its ascent came with the 1867 visit