The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917
Journal article by Susan E. Gray; Journal of Social History, Vol. 32, 1999
Journal Article Excerpt
The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830-1917 by Susan E. Gray By Jon Gjerde (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. xiii plus 426pp. $39.95). The title of Jon Gjerde's work comes from sermons delivered in 1849 by Albert Barnes, a Presbyterian clergyman, on the ramifications for the future of the United States of the "heterogeneity of 'minds' " - or cultures - then being transplanted to the West. (p. 1) For Barnes, and even more for Gjerde, this heterogeneity was most evident in the contrast between the "Puritan" and "foreign" minds, between Protestant, republican culture and European traditions of church and state. Barnes saw the West both as a site of conflict between the minds and as a place where the foreign-born could be transformed into citizens of the republic. This notion of the West as "a promise and a threat" is the central theme of The Minds of the West. For Gjerde, the "critical relationship" in the development of the region that he designates the Upper Middle West (encompassing the states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and North and South Dakota) was the "juxtaposition of cultural patterns - the minds - and environmental possibilities in a region diverse in cultural traditions and rich in resources - the West - that was replete with tension, conflict, even paradox." (p. 3) The Minds of the West is divided into four parts. In "Part One. The Region," Gjerde elaborates American views of the West, emphasizing the admixture of enthusiasm for a vast expanse of "free" land, mainstay of a republican citizenry, and fear of foreign domination. In contrast, Europeans celebrated their ability to reconstruct imported cultural traditions in the West, a freedom that paradoxically cemented their loyalty to the United States. Turning, in "Part Two. The Community," to the peopling of the region, Gjerde shows how chain migration created homogenous communities within a culturally diverse landscape. Localized homogeneity lessened the friction between cultures while opening the door to conflict within communities, particularly within churches. Immigrants discovered that the same freedom to recreate European religious institutions encouraged dissent from them. Gjerde begins "Part Three. The Family" by describing the impact of market integration and technological innovation on the household mode of production in which farming families remained enmeshed in the second half of the nineteenth century. He then explores white, native-born American (or "Yankee") and European-American systems of household organization as "cultural typologies" predicated upon radically different conceptions of authority and hierarchy. Having embraced capitalism, a liberal state, and evangelical Protestantism, Yankees based their households on contractual relations between husbands and wives and parents and children. In contrast, the "spiritual and economic patriarchy" characteristic of European-American households subordinated individuals to the male household head (p. 163). The cultural typologies shaped a wide range of behavior, including inheritance strategies, women's work roles, and relations among family members. Nor was their impact confined to the family, as Gjerde shows in "Part Four. The Society." Because the family served as a model for society for both Yankees and European-Americans, they viewed the relationship of the state to the family and community in very different terms. The arena for this disagreement was partisan politics. By the late nineteenth century, the Upper Middle West was rife with conflicts over public schools, temperance, and women's suffrage reflecting the ideological divide between the liberal Yankee and corporatist European-American cultures. The Minds of the West is a major contribution to immigration and Midwestern history. It is, however, more successful in tracing the evolution of shared cultural predilections of immigrant groups than in sustaining its central conceit of Puritan and foreign minds. For a book of such scope, The Minds of the West is unevenly contextualized. Despite Gjerde's emphasis on the interaction of the minds with what he variously terms the environment, the West, the Middle West, and the Upper Middle West, he pays far more attention to how people migrated than to when and where. All regional definitions, of course, are somewhat arbitrary, but Gjerde's designation of Upper Middle West belies the analytical weakness of the concept of the Puritan mind.When antebellum Americans like Albert Barnes pondered the outcome of westward migration, they were as interested in the "Southern mind" as they were in its Puritan, or New England, or Yankee equivalent. Native-born migration streams flowed to their West - then primarily the Old Northwest - along lines of latitude until roughly 1870. Settlers of "little Egypt" in southern Illinois would have ... |
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