# Crosscurrents **URL:** **Published:** June 1, 1994 --- “William Cronon on Chicago and its hinterland, and Vedder and Gallaway on the relationship between government efforts to prop up real wages and high unemployment.” ## The Market, the City, and the Great American West William Cronon, former professor of United States history at Yale and now Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has graced the scholarly profession with his tome, _Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West_ (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991). This intellectually immense book touches Western American/frontier history, economic/business history, environmental history, urban history, and social history. The author covers the nineteenth century development of Chicago and its hinterland. More specifically, Cronon chronicles and analyzes the economic and environmental relationship between town and country. He accomplishes this rather foreboding task with keen wit and an engaging writing style. Virtually every paragraph contains an intellectual gem. One should not, the author argues, consider the city as unnatural and the countryside as natural. Only degree separates the plowed field from the paved street. Rather, the city and countryside enjoy an essentially symbiotic relationship. Hence the title, _Nature’s Metropolis:_ the countryside supplied the raw materials for the creation of the city, but, in doing so, the city remade the countryside. Chicago, to nineteenth century minds, confirmed the prevailing belief in Natural Law; humans spontaneously saw advantages provided by the Divine, and, under the guidance of the Smithian invisible hand, profited themselves and their country through the creation of this urban center. As America expanded westward, the linkages between country and city grew more extensive, becoming intertwined and virtually indistinguishable. Americans of the last century perceived Chicago as a wonder of the Republic and the end of a “Darwinian sequence” (31). Cronon’s analysis of Chicago sheds light on the creation of all nineteenth-century American settlements. Boosters promoted the cities; geography, the result of past glacial movements, determined the best areas of settlement. Chicago, because of its natural advantages—rich soil and its proximity to woodlands, Lake Michigan, and local rivers—epitomized such an area. When the land lacked a necessary natural feature, capitalists compensated with “improvements.” Every booster searched for the great city. The find could mean immense wealth. Once the beginnings of a city occur, people move into the hinterland to supply the goods needed in that city. Profit motive and opportunity drive them. This, the “invisible hand”, Cronon argues, created the “Great West.” The market served as the prime mover and oversaw the relationship of town and country. “The nineteenth century saw the creation of an integrated economy in the United States,” Cronon argues, “an economy that bound city and country into a powerful national and international market that forever altered human relationships to the American land” (xvi). What Cronon calls the “logic of capital” affected every part of American life. The author notes, “Even those of us who will never trade wheat or pork bellies on the Chicago futures market depend on those markets for our very survival. Just as important, the commodities that feed, clothe, and shelter us are among our most basic connections to the natural world” (xvii). At once intimidating and impressive, Cronon demonstrates— with the aid of commodity market and bankruptcy records—a profound understanding of economics throughout the book. While Cronon, an ardent environmentalist, recognizes the power of the unrestrained market, he does not always look favorably upon its consequences. This is especially true in the case of the environment—over which he laments the passing of biologically rich and diverse grasslands and forests of the Midwest and the bison of the Great Plains. The “logic of capital” saw more profit in single-strain crops, hardwood lumber, and domesticated cattle. Cronon, using Hegelian terminology, labels the former “first nature” and the latter “second nature.” Cronon details the development of the transportation economy from wagons to boats to railroads. Each new form of transportation altered the perceptions of time—maybe time itself he hints—and further intertwined the city to its hinterland. Information—the price of a product—acted as the life blood of the economy and proved vital to expansion. With faster transportation, goods arrived more quickly. The speed of goods delivered was gradually catching up with the information needed. Cronon also analyzes the grain, lumber, and meat markets in a similarly comprehensive fashion. At each step, private business attempted to decrease its waste and prices to increase its competitive advantage in the market. The author’s other works, neither as economically centered as _Nature’s Metropolis_, include his path breaking _Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England_ (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); and, edited with George Miles and Jay Gitlin, _Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past_ (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), a compilation of essays by various historians of the United States West. ## Out of Work Informed by an “Austrian” perspective, Richard K. Vedder and Lowell E. Gallaway in _Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth Century America_ (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), explore a causal relationship between governmental policies to prop up real wages and high unemployment. Although written by well-respected economic historians, _Out of Work_ is user friendly for scholars in other disciplines. It provides an informative and clear introduction not only to Keynesian and Austrian views of unemployment. This is not just a work of theory, however. Vedder and Gallaway back up their case with solid empirical research and show an obvious mastery of the historical literature. At the same time, they avoid drowning readers with econometric jargon or equations. Their discussion of the origins of the post-war economic expansion is easily worth the price of the book. It uncovers serious flaws in traditional Keynesian explanations which stress the release of “pent-up demand” after the war. According to Vedder and Gallaway, the boom already was well underway before any noticeable rise in consumption. Instead of a Keynesian success story, it was, they assert, very much a supply-side recovery which resulted from a temporary fall in artificially high real wages. Significantly, the economic expansion, which began in 1945 and 1946, coincided with large doses of political decontrol and massive retrenchment in governmental debt, taxes, and spending. These policies were antithetical to those recommended during the war by leading Keynesians, such as Alvin Hansen. In nearly every case, Keynesians had predicted that cutbacks in governmental spending in peacetime would set off another depression. Ironically, once the decline failed to materialize, the failed prophets speedily, and successfully, claimed credit for the boom as the logical result of Keynesian doctrine. ## E-mail Thanks to Internet, IHS has entered into the world of on-line communication. We are using electronic mail to communicate with our friends and colleagues everywhere from down the street at George Mason University to around the world in Australia.