To H-Rural: Here is my report on the session "Creating Communities: Gender,
Region, and Progress in Three Small Towns," which took place at the
Organization of American Historians meeting, Thursday, March 28, 1996.
--David Blanke
Loyola Univ. of Chicago
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Nicole Etcheson (University of South Dakota) is concerned with
the three to five thousand New England settlers that came to the
tumultuous Kansas territory from 1854 to 1865. Etcheson shows how
these Yankees used a communal history of the "founding fathers,"
both the Separatists and the Revolutionaries, to contrast their
"civilized" settlement in the town of Lawrence to those founded
by Southerners. Exhibiting linguistic and other cultural
folkways, this population came to see their struggle to promote
New England education, religion, and town government in the West
as the continuation of a historical dedication to "freedom,
tolerance, and courage." The intensifying discord between Yankees
and other Kansas settlers brought about by the temperance and
abolition movements animated the cultural heritage of many New
England settlers. As Etcheson concludes, by 1858 many Yankee
immigrants considered themselves to be actual revolutionaries,
not merely the descendants of them.
Tamara G. Miller (Rutgers University) also focuses on Yankee
settlers, this time in antebellum Marietta, Ohio. Miller contends
that male and female settlers differed in their understanding and
implementation of their shared cultural heritage. For example,
men were quick to transplant their New England roots to the
native soil. They boosted Marietta as a place that faithfully
reproduced the political, economic, and cultural traditions of
their homeland. As in Kansas, they differentiated their efforts
with the "savage" behavior by local Indians and backwoodsmen.
Miller maintains that Yankee men "continuously cultivated the New
England village" in their adopted homes. By contrast, women were
less able to transport their cultural history across the
mountains. Miller contends that females expressed their legacy
not in terms of the individual but rather through extended
kinship networks. Accordingly, it took a generation before Yankee
women began to see themselves as New England "Buckeyes" rather
than easterners simply living in Ohio. One gets the sense from
Miller's paper that real, if subtle cultural conflict is only
beginning to arise following this transformation (ca. 1825).
Phillip G. Payne (Institute of Industrial Technology) offered a
more straight-forward thesis in regard to the formation of
community in the Middle West. Payne details the rise and fall of
Ironton, Ohio. As the name implies, the local iron mills founded
by John Campbell acted as a sort of communal totem to workers,
owners, and recent settlers. Payne focuses on Campbell's dream of
fashioning Ironton into a moral, political, and economic
commonwealth. Yet the reality of rapid technological change
during the Gilded Age, to say nothing of other social riptides
during this era, undermined the stabilizing presence of the
works. In the end, Campbell's "industrial commonwealth" proved to
be as impotent and fragile in the face of market capitalism as
the time-honored traditions of the iron master.
Commentator Andrew R. L. Cayton (Miami University) effectively
summarized the common themes coursing through these studies. He
notes that the control and use of history was central to the
formation and maintenance of community by these Midwesterners.
Contemporaries, particularly those represented in the papers by
Etcheson and Miller, consciously sought out historical parallels
to their own experience. In all three examples, the collective
idea of community was maintained through a popular "dialogue."
The failure of this social conversation, best exemplified in
Payne's treatment, delegitimized the established community.
I am hesitant to critique these works given the limits of
the oral format. All three papers are grounded in primary sources
and offer compelling narrative accounts related to the formation,
maintenance, and failure of communal solidarity. While the larger
historical context was often neglected, this was probably due to
the limits of the format rather than the historians'
understanding of their subjects (who hasn't edited out whole
sections of "background" material from a lengthy article in order
to reach the infernal "ten to fifteen pages" requested by most
RFPs). With this said, it was unclear in Miller and Payne's
presentations just what role they believed community played in
Midwestern development. Is "community" simply a construction for
our current historical usage? From their presentations I can
conclude that these authors believe that it is something deeper.
Yet the papers failed to show the conflicts and modifications
that inevitably accompany such a grand social construction.
Undoubtedly their positions would be clearer in a more expansive
format. Each of the studies successfully demonstrate that the
formation of a community involves an active and often raucous
debate. I look forward to their more detailed accounts which will
add many of the missing voices in this contest.
David Blanke
Loyola University Chicago
April 4, 1996
Dpblanke@aol.com