Pies and Puddings:The Promise of North America By Jenni Calder ‘In America,’ said a steerage passenger on the Anchor Line’s SS Devonia, ‘you get pies and puddings.’ Thus was the vision of the land of opportunity sustained, as reported by Robert Louis Stevenson, who crossed the Atlantic from Greenock in August 1879, fuelled by notions of an invigorating democracy and the American frontierswoman he was hoping to marry. The idea of the USA as ‘a sort of promised land’ was severely dented by his experience of crossing the American continent by emigrant train: pies and puddings were in short supply, and the emigrants were herded and hassled like beasts. ‘Equality,’ he wrote in The Amateur Emigrant (1895), ‘though conceived very largely in America, does not descend so low as down to an emigrant.’ Nor did it descend to Native Americans, Chinese or blacks. Like many Scots, Stevenson had grown up with a belief in America as an environment where men and women lived free of the ‘restraint and tradition’ that constricted life in Europe. Life in America had not yet ‘narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, forms of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial’. Over 100 years earlier, the rebellion of American Patriots had excited huge interest in Scotland, many in condemnation but others inspired by republican possibilities. Scots were impressed also by something that was almost as revolutionary: the idea that ordinary people, people who had for centuries been thirled to land which they would never own, could possess their own acres. From its earliest intimations, the New World nourished the imagination of Scots. It was, after all, not so very far away – closer to Scotland’s west coast than to any other piece of Europe excepting Ireland. Stand on any western Outer Hebridean shore and you have a powerful sense of what lies on the far side of the Atlantic. Add to that connection a perception of an empty land, virgin soil, prolific vegetation, abundant birds and beasts that could
be freely hunted, an absence of political and class restraint, and opportunities for making money, and it was a heady brew. From it individuals, depending on background, intrepidity and networking skills, could pick their own ingredients and, maybe, manufacture their own utopia. For the vast majority of those who found themselves replanted in that ‘empty’ land, there was, of course, little choice of destination or occupation. But it helped that their new country received a sufficiently positive press to keep the dream alive. There were plenty of negative reports: one Gaelic settler wrote home that ‘in the gloom of the forest none of us will be left alive, with wolves and beasts howling in every cranny’. Another asserted that not one in 1,000 of the ‘deluded people’ who left Scotland would not after a year ‘wish themselves at home again’. But there was a stream of literature that painted a very different picture, before and after the birth of the republic. ‘Hasten across the Atlantic,’ exhorted one anonymous pamphlet writer in 1773. Nearly half a century later another pamphlet providing Information to Emigrants confidently stated: ‘Liberty and plenty have induced many of our countrymen to seek more benign skies, and a more bountiful soil; they have found them in America …’ With the passing of another half century Edward Delaven, a businessman from New York, could still convincingly deliver the same message, speaking in Glasgow of ‘a boundless inheritance in the west’. The scope for manipulating the attractions of opportunity was almost limitless. In Scotland, landlords desperate to get rid of tenants and politicians convinced that population levels were unsustainable could persuade themselves (if they felt the need) that they were sending families off to a better life. In America, land speculators, railway magnates and industrialists, eager for settlers to take up their land and work in their factories, could exploit existing perceptions. ‘Ho! For Texas!’ proclaimed an advertising brochure for the Houston and Texas Central Railway distributed in Scotland, ‘The Garden of Eden of America’. Never mind that much of the land was semi-desert and that local Apaches did not
the drouth
49
take kindly to being confined to reservations (one Scot who gave up an attempt to ranch in Texas after being raided by Apaches was Robert Cunninghame Graham), emigrants could have their quarter-sections on easy terms and be beholden to no one but the mortgage company. Scots themselves were in the forefront of US banking and mortgage lending, some never setting foot outwith Britain. Paradise was accessible without the effort of entering its gates. However, perhaps the most consistent theme of literature aimed at potential emigrant Scots was that they could do well if they applied themselves. Eneas Mackenzie visited the US in 1818, and wrote a book intended for: The industrious labourer, the mechanic, the farmer, the man of moderate capital, and the father of a family who feels solicitous about settling his children; in short all those who are prepared to encounter the numerous privations and inconveniences of emigration, in order to enjoy the great and acknowledged advantages which America offers to adventurers. This suggests a very Calvinist version of utopia – you have to earn it. The tone is reinforced by Mackenzie’s disapproval of much of what he encountered in the US, especially in New York where he found people bad mannered and indifferent, a consequence he believed of the American brand of populist democracy. Political freedom had its downside, an opinion echoed by several 19th-century Scottish travellers. There was extensive and acerbic comment on slavery. An 1816 Emigrant’s Guide asked: ‘Can this be the seat of freedom where a million human beings groan beneath the scourge of slavery?’
50
the drouth
For the people of a small country which was wealthy – as Scotland was in the second half of the 19th-century – but at times convinced it was overpopulated, the prospect of endless space on the other side of the Atlantic was powerfully enticing. It pulled not just the land-hungry, but rich adventurers such as William Drummond Stewart who hunted across the Great Plains and consorted with mountain men in the Rockies, and Charles Augustus Murray who took part in Pawnee buffalo hunts and relished the freedom of what he called ‘true republican equality’. For both, the 1830s were too late for utopia in the eastern states. Only in the Far West, where institutions had not yet taken hold, was it possible to live in an unfettered relationship with the environment and other people. When in 1849 John Muir as a small boy left Dunbar to settle with his family in Wisconsin, he was overcome with excitement to be heading for ‘the wonderful schoolless bookless American wilderness’: No more grammar, but boundless woods full of mysterious good things; trees full of sugar, growing in ground full of gold; hawks, eagles, pigeons, filling the sky; millions of birds’ nests, and no gamekeepers to stop us in all the wild, happy land. The reality of homesteading on the Wisconsin frontier, the dispiriting, back-breaking work involved – no more school, indeed, but cutting trees, splitting logs, fencing, carrying water, ploughing barefoot from dusk to dawn at the age of 12, hoeing, harvesting, threshing – did not erode Muir’s equating of wilderness with paradise. Somehow he and his brother David found time to immerse themselves in the wild: Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the
dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness. He spent the rest of his life on a quest for more glorious wild country. Utopia for him was less an ideal society constructed by humanity as an ideal place protected by and from humanity. When Muir explored the High Sierras in the 1870s he found abandoned mine workings and the next wave of encroachment – sheep and loggers – well advanced. The dreams of the gold prospectors had moved on to Colorado, Montana and the Dakotas. But whether its source was on the ground or under it, money was key to the American dream, and the consummate icon of the dream was, of course, a Scot. Andrew Carnegie’s family left Dunfermline at around the same time as Muir’s left Dunbar. The Carnegies were radicals who believed that the US could offer them, not utopia perhaps, but a better life. It did. By the time Andrew was in his twenties he was a rich man, thanks partly to opportunities offered by the Civil War. Carnegie relished the good life. He did not aspire to create a good society, but he believed that given a chance individuals could – and should – create their own success.Yet his success was built on the backs of the very people he hoped to help with the provision of libraries and concert halls. While Carnegie was asserting that ‘the interests of capital and labour are one’, Thomas Crawford, an employee at Carnegie’s Homestead Steel Works, was asking, ‘After working 12 hours, how can a man go to a library?’ There wasn’t much living space in industrial Pittsburgh, where Carnegie found his capitalist feet. US urban slums and overcrowding developed with the same speed as its remarkable transformation into a leading world producer, and were pretty much like the European slums many of their inhabitants had left. But there was always the promise of space further west. The frontier was, famously, a safety valve: the slum-dwellers and the tillers of exhausted soil could up stakes and go west. The vision of paradise remained. A B Guthrie captures it in his novel The Way West (1949): ‘Free men, brave men in a great, new nation. A new way of things. Soil good. Hunting good. Climate good. No fever. Hurrah for Oregon!’ Guthrie’s hero calls out to his wife: ‘Get your breeches on, Becky … We’re goin’ to Oregon.’ The American frontier was pronounced closed in 1890, but the paradigm of space, and its resonance,
remained. It was the bedrock of ‘a new way of things’. Space was more than land for physical survival; it was room for political freedom – freiheitsraum as well as lebensraum. From the 17th-century Scots were going to America for political reasons (often forced into exile rather than choosing a land of freedom). The eponymous hero of John Galt’s Laurie Todd (1830) is based on Grant Thorburn, a radical who in 1794 fled Scotland for the infant United States of America. The Carnegies were one family of many who left Scotland in the wake of the failed Chartist movement. Another radical who left at around the same time, with the law hot on his heels, was Allan Pinkerton, who founded a Chicago detective agency which made its name through, among other things, the pursuit of radicals. Freedom of thought as well as freedom of movement appealed to Scots, nourished by the climate of Enlightenment as well as by Presbyterian egalitarianism. It appealed also to those in search of religious freedom. Quakers, Episcopalians and Catholics all responded. The Mormons recruited successfully, particularly in the Glasgow area, and several thousand Scottish Latter-day Saints migrated eventually to Utah. The combination of space to experiment with space to build attracted several Scottish-inspired attempts to create ideal communities. The best known is probably New Harmony in Indiana, the child of Robert Owen, his sons William and Robert Dale Owen, and William Maclure, which was founded in 1825. Owen’s model mill and village at New Lanark inspired a number of American communities, with varied success. His hope for New Harmony was that it would be instrumental in changing society ‘from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between individuals’. But it proved, in the words of Owen’s sons, ‘a bold and hazardous attempt’ which was ‘premature’. Most of its residents drifted away. Fanny Wright, firebrand freethinker from Dundee, visited New Harmony and was moved to set up her own community of Nashoba on Tennessee’s Wolf River, not far from Memphis. Her plan was to create a refuge for freed black slaves who would live side by side with whites in mutual respect. In spite of Wright’s tireless efforts at fund raising, the financial basis of the community was shaky from the start, and it, like New Harmony, collapsed. It didn’t help that one of Wright’s associates, James Richardson, another Scot, was living openly with a black woman and proclaimed his belief in free love. This wasn’t a freedom too far for Fanny, who lectured all over the US condemning organised
the drouth
51
religion and conventional morality and calling on the United States to return to its true revolutionary values, but it shocked many potential supporters. There were other attempts at communitarian living. Glasgow in Wisconsin was founded in 1859, and joined by people from the west of Scotland. The Revd John Kerr, a Congregational minister originally from Kilmarnock, set up a temperance community in Minnesota, but unaccountably failed to attract much interest. These experiments may not have lasted long, but they reinforced the belief that in America anything was possible. Whether your pies and puddings were political, religious or social, you could bake them on your own terms and consume them as and when you pleased. R L Stevenson didn’t set much store by utopia, yet he, like probably most Scots, found the notion of a vast land not yet fully explored, a society without class if not without prejudice, a country developing at breath-taking speed but still with scope for adventure, immensely exhilarating. When he arrived in New York for the second time, in September 1887, the success stories of Scots in America were well known and he was about to reinforce them with his own, thanks to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The popular image of the US as a destination for those desperate for jobs or impatient at the restraints of a class-bound society was as potent as ever. Thousands of Scots worked in America’s mines, mills, factories and shipyards. Scottish quarrymen were much in demand. After the Civil War, Scots homesteaded west of the Missouri, and became cattle ranchers and sheep farmers. Scots were in the forefront of American banking and insurance. A huge amount of Scottish money was invested in the cattle business, in land, in mining and in railroads. The United States of America was as invigorating as ever as the nursery of dreams of freedom to move, to think, to worship, to create, to make money. For Stevenson himself, disillusioned though he was by his first visit, America proved in the end a true land of opportunity. But the legacy of America’s earliest colonies of Europeans was contradictory, unlike that of its original colonisers whose survival depended on collaborative living. Co-operation was vital for the survival of the first white settlers, yet the
52
the drouth
territory seemed to cry out for individual initiatives and provided scope for extremes of all kinds, of faith and hope, of endurance, of adventure, of production and consumption. (It is salutary to compare white settlers breaking out of European constraint with Native Americans breaking out of the reservations into which they were herded by Europeans.) The notion of an ideal society implies communitarian values, but North America was offering the possibility of individual success – the US much more than Canada: although plenty of Scots were stunning achievers in Canada, it was generally against a background of mutual support and responsibility. Many 19thcentury Scottish travellers in the US commented on the greed and competitiveness they encountered, especially in New York and New England: Thomas Hamilton in the 1830s found ‘a population wholly devoted to money-getting’. From the beginning, the aspirations of the venturesome individual were at war with the imperatives of civic society and this contradiction moved west with the frontier. Utopia required their reconciliation, but it was always possible that it could happen across the next river or on the far side of the next range of mountains. The possibility of ‘milk and honey on the other side’ deeply imprinted American culture and American values at every level. One way of keeping utopia alive, whatever brand it carries, is to insist that it remains achievable, as long as you think and act correctly. ‘Get your breeches on, Becky … We’re goin’ to Oregon.’