The New North
Daniel J. Elazar
Sections and Myths
American history has been a history of "westering," that is to say, looking, aspiring, and moving westward from the East, so much so that it has been difficult for other sections of the country to attract attention to the same degree. American "westering" is the foundation of the American national myth and the West, especially the trans-Mississippi West including the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Pacific Coast, has been the heartland of that myth, having captured the American imagination early and kept its hold on it until today. The myth has undergone adjustments as cultural styles have changed in the United States, but has remained a western myth. Indeed, John Steinbeck in his great short story, "The Red Pony," describes the frustrations of Americans who through "westering" reached the Pacific Coast and had no place else to go.
It is not that other sections of the United States do not have mythic images that have made their impression on the American people. The South, the land of slavery, secession and the civil rights struggle, is a region imbedded in tragedy; one tragedy or another punctuated by periods of hopefulness of which we are in one today. Now with the civil rights struggle over except for the mop-up, Americans, black and white, can appreciate the South for its opportunities as well as its tragedy, for its comforts as well as its oppressions, and its landscape as well as its traditions.
Up until the beginning of this century, New England also had a sectional persona based on Puritans, Yankees, and immigrants, particularly Irish, moralistic piety and business shrewdness, great religion, great literature, and great intellect. Later on, corrupt politics was added. But that myth has been transformed into a myth of the past and does not sustain itself in the present.
The dominant twentieth century myth was that of the big-city Northeast, the crowded, teaming cities of immigrants from all parts of Europe, then later of blacks trying to escape the oppressiveness and poverty of their native South, and, more recently, of Hispanics and Asians looking for opportunity of the kind that America has always had to offer, even if it is accompanied by initial pain. That myth persists even though the urban Northeast which it represents is now very much a declining part of the United States.
The Midwest, too, has its mythic status, one that in part overlaps with some of the mythic elements of the West. It is the land of the "real America" where people are open, friendly and honest; where the predominant feature on the landscape is the small town and the predominant accent is standard American. The Midwestern myth, which in reality began to end as the Northeastern myth took on its full power, continues to influence Americans, including Midwesterners, as we saw this summer in the local response to the terrible problem of flooding in the upper Mississippi Valley and its peripheries.
Each of these myths is based on a kernel of very real truth and, however exaggerated, that truth remains to keep both the myths and the sections alive.
Furthermore, behind the myths are very real sections of the country inhabited by very real people who are in part shaped by the myths of their sections and who have had special problems which tend to recur only or especially in their sections as well. For most of the sections, these problems have intensified since the beginning of a new generation in the progression of generations in American life, in the mid-1970s. The urban Northeast has been very hard-hit as has much of the Midwest. The West continues with its pattern of boom and bust. The South has continued to become more prosperous, in a reversal of an old role.
The Emergence of the North
We may also be witnessing the emergence of a new sectional division in the United States, the emergence of a Far North, a section that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean past the northern Rockies to the northern extension of the Great Basin, whose two most important characteristics may be harsh climate and ingenious people, and whose present situation may involve continued out-migration to warmer and more attractive climes and, with the exception of pockets here and there, economic depressions ("busts") periodically overcome by the people's ingenuity ("booms") but always coming back.
Given the American "pitch" toward the South and West, there has never been a section of the United States known as the Far North. It is true that at one time a third to half of the country became the North in contrast to the South, and, as such, fought a victorious war to preserve the Union. It is also true that there have been sections such as New England and the Northeast, the interior Northwest or Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, but this country has had no unified Far North, both east and west.
The Far North as a Region
It is very hard for Americans, accustomed for so many centuries to looking from east to west, to conceive of such a long and diverse strip running from the far east to the far west as having a common sectional identity. To get a sense of what we mean we must go back to that old stalwart, Alexis de Tocqueville, the great early nineteenth century French commentator on the United States who, through those comments, established himself as a great theoretician of modern democracy, a profound observer of human affairs, and a systematic philosopher easily the equal of Karl Marx in his construction of a system and methodology that can and should serve late twentieth century people in conceiving of the world in which they live. In Democracy and America, Tocqueville, unencumbered by the conventional American experience of "westering," looked at North America from north to south. Consider what he had to say:
North America has striking geographical features which can bee appreciated at first glance. Land and water, mountains and valleys, seem to have been separated with systematic method, and the simple majesty of this design stands out amid the confusion and immense variety of the scene.
The continent is divided into two vast and almost equal regions. One region is bounded by the North Pole and the great oceans to east and west, while to the south it stretches down in an irregular triangle to the Great Lakes of Canada.
The second start where the other ends and covers the rest of the continent.
(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, eds. J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner [New York, Evanston and London: Harper & Row Publishers])
While used at times for analytic purposes, Tocqueville's conceptualization got lost in the rush westward in the nineteenth century and has stayed lost in the twentieth. (Perhaps the only "practical" American of the nineteenth century to perceive it and try to act on it was William Gilpin who made his career in the area between Lake Michigan and the Rockies, primarily in Colorado, and sought to capitalize on the central place of that region on what he saw as the world scene, to build a great international railroad from Denver across the Bering Straits and Siberia, to Paris and London, a grand dream that did not get very far.)
Let us go back to Tocqueville's perspective. Following that perspective with regard to the United States, we see New England, normally treated as part of the American Main Street, where American civilization was born and from where it moved westward, as a region now on the country's northern peripheries, becoming increasingly peripheralized as the center of U.S. population continues to move westward and southward. New Englanders actually began to feel that way as early as the early nineteenth century, from the time of the War of 1812 as they saw their political power fading as the consequence of the same population movements, but the slavery controversy, the coming of the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution halted the impact of that tendency and reasserted the importance of New England in the American polity and the economy.
The Original East to West Pattern
Indeed, the continuing frontier of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries actually reinforced the patterns of American "westering." As I have described elsewhere (see Cities of the Prairie, by Daniel J. Elazar, Basic Books, 1970) the classic American rural land frontier gave way in New England after the War of 1812 to the urban-industrial frontier, and the cities of southern New England both grew in size and became centers of capital formation and investment for the development of the greater West and South. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the urban-industrial frontier had completed its course and began to give birth to suburbanization, which after World War II became the basis for the metropolitan-technological frontier, the third stage of America's continuing frontier.
It is only in the fourth stage of that continuing frontier, with the emergence of a rurban-cybernetic frontier, that the east-west pattern is being replaced by a far more scattered one inaugurated by the very nature of that fourth frontier stage itself. The vital cybernetic and telecommunications base of this fourth stage no longer requires the kinds of concentration that led, in the American base, to an east-west progression of each frontier, but rather can manifest itself anywhere now that the basic telecommunications infrastructure has been extended throughout the country as a result of actions on earlier frontiers. The obverse of this release from the earlier tides of geo-historical location has been a further depression of the fundamental bases of the economies of the northern states as people, in their freedom to seek more comfortable places of settlement and business head to warmer climates, thus pushing New England as well as other parts of the North into a peripheral position, a vacation land for more southern areas rather than a moving force.
Meanwhile, as part of the settlement of the West in the nineteenth century, New Englanders fanned out along northern paths which they pioneered, to settle in relatively concentrated blocks in what was for a long time a kind of greater New England, beginning with upper New York state, continuing along the southern shore of the Great Lakes in northern Ohio, into Michigan, which became another New England state, and on into Wisconsin and Minnesota which did the same, including northern Illinois and Iowa and on across the Plains through the Dakotas, Montana, and northern Wyoming, to the Pacific Northwest, with branches forming pockets of greater New England in northeastern Colorado, Utah, southern California, and elsewhere. (I have described all of this in Cities of the Prairie.)
Those New Englanders who settled outside of the heartland of greater New England underwent various kinds of transformations in their new environments, but wherever New Englanders settled en mass and founded new societies in their image, those new societies acquired the characteristics of nineteenth century New England and developed from there, supported in every case by physical environments that were reasonably close to the original. If the rural land frontier began to empty old New England and the urban-industrial frontier gave old New England and parts of greater New England new opportunities, the metropolitan-technological frontier greatly increased the strength of the South and West, transforming them from colonial regions dependent in almost every respect on the greater Northeast, into centers of economic, political and social development in their own right, weakening not only old New England but, after the initial burst of postwar prosperity from 1946 to the mid-1960s, also the heartland of greater New England from Cleveland to the Rockies.
The South to North Reversal
That bleeding of what many saw as an economically obsolete part of the country which lost political and social power as it lost economic strength, was to some extent reversed with the opening of the rurban-cybernetic frontier, because just as most people sought greater comfort in the South and West, small minorities were especially attracted to the more rigorous lifestyles of the Far North, repopulating parts of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Twin Cities metropolitan area in Minnesota, and now south central Montana around Bozeman and the Flathead Valley west of the Continental Divide in that state, mostly with pioneers of this new frontier, either those who had succeeded elsewhere and wanted to enjoy the environments of the Far North or those who brought the new frontier to the Far North. Thus the Far North is acquiring a new personality of its own on the peripheries of national development away from the most visible cutting edges along the countries three coasts and particularly in the South, Southwest, and Pacific Coast, but one that has its own following, however different they may be from the majority, and who find in northern climes, the environment that they are seeking socially, culturally, climactically, and politically as well.
As political power passed to the South and West at the end of the metropolitan-technological frontier, first to southern and western Republicans and now increasingly to Democrats from that part of the country as well, the Far North has had to undergo further retrenchment. But the American federal system not only keeps them in the game, but allows the northern states to become even more representative of their new constituencies as the latter grow larger. We have seen this in a spate of gubernatorial races from the Atlantic to Idaho in recent years where the synthesis of the descendants of the old Yankees with their moralistic political culture, the descendants of the old European immigrants who have acquired much of that political culture, and the new settlers who are attracted to the section and who seem to share that political culture and find it one of the region's attractions, have generated a visibly distinct political base in the new Far North.
A New Section?
What is the sum of all of this? A new section is emerging, that stretches westward from the North Atlantic Ocean, embracing the six New England states, perhaps with a strip embracing the northern one-third to one-half of New York state, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana, extending southward into Wyoming where the same northern characteristics prevail in the Wyoming mountains, and westward into the Idaho mountains, and perhaps still including southern anchors in Utah and the sparsely-populated mountainous parts of Colorado. For the most part it is peripheral to the main thrust of American society and culture, but every bit as authentically American in itself, it is a section that may soon come to realize that its peripheralization is a gain in most respects. The coming into being of this new section represents a reversal of the historically dominant east-west direction of American development and the beginning of its replacement by a north-south division of the kind not seen since the Civil War years and perhaps far more broadly, if less ideologically based, today.
Today, there is more in common between Maine and Montana than there is between Maine and New Jersey or Montana and its western neighbors along the Pacific Coast. This is a new section and a new phenomenon that bear watching. As the United States becomes further integrated into the world, as all of North America moves toward becoming a common market, these may become two of the new phenomena that offer another way of life in an increasingly interdependent yet also heterogeneous world.
What are the principal unifying environmental characteristics of the New North that generate its other characteristics?
1. A harsh climate that is livable only through the application of substantial intelligence and relatively advanced (in a world-wide comparison)habitation technologies.
2. Extremely low temperatures in the winter in many places, coupled with extremely high temperatures in the summer, again, requiring hardiness and relatively sophisticated technologies to make the region habitable.
3. A geology whose dominant feature is the lower extension of the Canadian or Lauorentian shield and the glaciated lands south of it -- in other words, land form shaped by the last Ices Ages and their glaciation that left rocky landforms, soil unsuitable for agriculture and plentiful lakes and forests.
4. Extensive non-deciduous forests with the accompanying flora and fauna. All of this is framed on either coast by mountain ranges that offer spectacular beauty and rugged coast lines where the land meets the oceans.
This environment is inhabited almost perforce by hardy people, people who have chosen to live in the section, originally as new immigrants to the North American wilderness or later to the United States from Northern Europe and the Scandinavian countries who sought reasonably familiar environments, or their descendants who did not opt for California or Florida for climatic reasons, but chose to stay in the far north. Every generation, that self-selection is made by the children of the inhabitants and new people who move to the region for reasons of employment opportunities who either find it to their liking and stay or move one.
The idea of a new far northern section will require other adjustments in Americans' thinking. For New Englanders, raised in the tradition that Boston is at the center of the universe and that intellectually the Boston-Cambridge area stands at the center of American civilization, the idea that Massachusetts may have more in common in certain respects with Montana or even Michigan will have its wrenching character, the acceptance of a peripheral role in American national development even more so; yet the reality is there.
But there is another reality. As the North American Free Trade Area takes shape, the American Far North is given the possibility to attain a new centrality, at least for those people who like the varieties of ways of life that it offers. Part of the new world geography is that it is becoming ever more difficult to find centers and peripheries. At most one can talk about more central or less central zones in the era of the rurban-cybernetic frontier, but within that new framework the North once again acquires certain advantages of position, if not of place. If the people of Massachusetts can identify sufficiently with Montana and the people of Montana sufficiently with Massachusetts or at least with Maine, they all may benefit.
The idea of a new far northern section will require other adjustments in Americans' thinking. For New Englanders, raised in the tradition that Boston is at the center of the universe and that intellectually the Boston-Cambridge area stands at the center of American civilization, the idea that Massachusetts may have more in common in certain respects with Montana or even Michigan will have its wrenching character, the acceptance of a peripheral role in American national development even more so; yet the reality is there.
But there is another reality. As the North American Free Trade Area takes shape, the American Far North is given the possibility to attain a new centrality, at least for those people who like the varieties of ways of life that it offers. Part of the new world geography is that it is becoming ever more difficult to find centers and peripheries. At most one can talk about more central or less central zones in the era of the rurban-cybernetic frontier, but within that new framework the Far North once again acquires certain advantages of position, if not of place. If the people of Massachusetts can identify sufficiently with Montana and the people of Montana sufficiently with Massachusetts or at least with Maine, they all may benefit.
Given the American pitch toward the South and West, there has never been a section of the United States known as the North. It is true that at one time a third to half of the country became the North in contrast to the South, and fought a war to preserve the Union. It is also true that there have been sections such as New England and the Northeast, the interior Northwest and the Pacific Northwest, but this country has had no unified North.
