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 CIVILIZATION IN TRANSIT
AV
 of a century ago Edward Eggleston published a
volume whose title set the reader thinking before he turned the cover,

V  V V V V  V VV V
V
  
V  ’ Americans, then, did not invent their
culture, but had to bring its elements from Europe bit by bit, however
much they might be modified by transplantation’ The thoughtful
reader, setting side by side before his mind's eye a picture of the
shaggy wilderness the colonists had to conquer and that of the
age-old communities they had left behind, might readily presume
that, though the individuals were hardly conscious of it, the process
which the book would trace was neither short nor simple’ What
Eggleston considered was not the fundamental economic problem of
staying alive in a new country, but the saving and carrying forward of
arts and sciences, those refinements and specializations which come
from intelligently living together’ The transit, quite obviously, was
not completed in the seventeenth century, nor is it yet complete; and
when a given institution of practice reached the western shores of the
Atlantic it yet had far to go’ Few men could have realized this more
vividly than Eggleston himself, who had spent the years of his
young-manhood as a circuit rider in southern Indiana and the farther
West and been a herald and exemplar of civilization in the
backwoods’
Much has been written of the man with the axe, slowly cutting
back the forest, fighting off malaria and mortgages as well as wild
beasts and Indians and horse-thieves and establishing American
ideals of energy and self-reliance’ These men and women of the
cabin did the basic work; they cleared the way and built foundations’
At the beginning of the nineteenth century they constituted more than
nine- tenths of our population’ But if all had been of this type who
made their way across the sea and across American hills and valleys
it would have taken many centuries to build a great civilization’ In
their wake followed pioneers of ideas and special competence, quite
as brave and worthy’ As the woodsman-farmer with his axe and hoe
took a risk, whether untamed nature would let him live, so these men
with the book, the scalpel, the compass, to say nothing of the
microscope and test-tube, took a risk, whether the social soil was
deep and rich enough to sustain their specialties’ How professional
competence was transplanted to America makes an interesting study’

(753)
754 ÷


Let us begin with a well-known figure, the family doctor’ The
herbalists and leeches who came over during the first century were
certainly not highly skilled, even when they made healing the sick
their chief concern and not merely a side-line of the Christian minis-
try’ But their obvious usefulness at last stirred certain native youth to
equal or surpass them, not through mere apprenticeship but by resort
to the original sources of instruction in Europe’ In 1734 young
William Bull, of Charles Town, returned with his M’ ’ from the
University of Leyden, and six years later Isaac ubois, of New York,
could claim the same distinction ; during the thirty-five years that
followed scores of young men undertook the arduous journey with
the same ambition, most of them taking up their study in Edinburgh’
Two so graduated, rs’ William Shippen and John Morgan, returned
to Philadelphia in the seventeen-sixties prepared to set up formal
courses of instruction’ " The time was ripe "', and from their efforts
grew the medical school of that city, soon rivalled by a second at
King's College in New York’ In both cases the staff was largely of
British training and the methods closely imitative, even to the printed
doctor's thesis, oftentimes in Latin, solemnly defended before the
assembled faculty’ In time it was loudly boasted, and finally believed,
that one might become a first-rate doctor without going to Europe,
and by the early years of the nineteenth century these and other
medical schools were staffed with their own product’ It had taken
about two centuries to transfer medical science to America’
The major phenomena of the transit are well illustrated by this
type example’ Four stages are discerned: first, when foreign prac-
titioners of the specialty are received by the pioneer community;
second, when the native youth go to the old country to attend upon
instruction; third, when institutions of the special learning are estab-
lished in the new land, though still dependent on the metropolis for
the equipment of their teachers; fourth, when the institutions have
sufficiently developed to maintain themselves’
He who applies this key to others of the older professional
specialties will be surprised to see how well it works’ It enables us to
see the present stage of transit in various concerns’ In great music we
are still to a considerable degree in the first stage²so obviously true
is this that certainV  sprung from old American village stock,
like Mme’ Nordica and Ricardo Martin, have thought it added to their
personal prestige to Europeanize their names’ In pictorial and plastic
art we are emerging from the second stage into the third’ In university
scholarship we reached the fourth stage only at the end of the last
century; it was not long ago that a German Ph’ ’ was deemed
essential to a first-class professor’ In dentistry we have  the
process to the third stage; in architecture, in some forms of applied
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science, and perhaps in business organization, we have reversed it to
the second’ After these reflections we may, perhaps, propose a
generalization applicable to the normal conditions of modern history:
professional competence rises through provincial to metropolitan
status by the process of reception, attendance, dependent or-
ganization, and self-maintenance’ If we were to stifle our sense of
humor we might even call this a " law At least it has the two major
requisites of a sociological law, in that when baldly stated it is so
ponderously cryptic as to be unintelligible, and when explained it is
so obvious that it need not have been stated at all’
It must be understood that in this use of the word " provincial "
there is no reference of necessity to political dependence’ Metropolis
and province may change places without regard to politics; ideas
flowed from France into England in the Norman days, and from
England into France during the first half of the eighteenth century’
Sometimes, indeed, the victors adopt the culture of their victims, as
when in the phrase of Horace:
Greece, conquered Greece, her conquerors subdued
And clownish Latium with her arts imbued’
The importation of culture has oftentimes been artificially stimulated
by autocrats²assumption by fiat²as is recalled by mention of the
names of Peter the Great and Mustapha Kemal, to say nothing of the
ministers of Mutsuhito’ And the export has been stimulated quite as
well’ Christian missions have been a most important agency in
carrying secular culture abroad as well as religious, if, indeed, the two
can be sharply distinguished’ Many patriotic Frenchmen, for
example, who believe the Catholic faith a silly superstition contribute
to its propagation beyond the seas, proud that " backward areas " are
thus becoming Gallicized’ Publications of hyphenate societies sup-
ported at least in part from the old home-land abound in many places’
But the process has worked normally without artificial aid’ Cata-
clysms may stimulate it, as when in the seventeen-nineties theV
V from France and Santo omingo brought French opera,
cotillions, and fine cooking to America’ r’ Samuel Latham Mitchill,
in a discourse delivered in 1821, declared that European wars had
been the cause of a quickened transit of books from the Old World to
the New, that some distinguished refugees had brought their libraries,
that booksellers, deprived of markets at home, had brought their
stocks in increasing number: " The storm from the east has wafted, in
short, an abundance of precious things to these regions’" But, again,
the process can not be generally explained as a concomitant of great
disturbance in the metropolis’
754 ÷


The operation in particulars, indeed, seems strikingly accidental,
and this not only in the professions but in the trades as well, where, of
course, the first stage merges directly into the last’ Naturalists tell us
that in the islands of the South Sea the wind and flying birds carry
spores and seeds from one land-area to another, where if the soil
conditions are propitious a plant springs up and a part of the flora is
thus reproduced beyond the water’ Almost as fortuitous seem the
circumstances by which carriers of civilization have been transferred
to America’
Take, for example, the case of Samuel Slater, in 1789 an ap-
prentice spinner in the employ of Richard Arkwright's partner in
Belper, England’ Learning by chance at the age of twenty-one, when
his term of service had expired, that there was some curiosity in
America as to Arkwright's patents, he resolved to try his fortune
overseas’ But the statute of 22 George III’, chapter 60, framed ac-
cording to old mercantilist doctrine, forbade the taking out of Eng-
land of any machinery, models, or mechanical drawings and, indeed,
the migration of artisans’ So young Slater by a feat of concentration
memorized the entire series of wheels and bands and rollers with
precise dimensions and, disguised as a countryman, slipped by the
English customs officers without their once suspecting the illicit
cargo that he carried in his mind’ On arriving in New York he heard
that Moses Brown, a Rhode Island Quaker, had made some trials at
cotton spinning, and wrote him a letter setting forth what he could
do’ The answer came quite promptly: " If thee canst do this thing, I
invite thee to come to Rhode Island, and have the credit of introduc-
ing cotton manufacture into America’,, Thereupon he went to Paw-
tucket, the one most fortunate place in the country, where water-
wheels and ships were found within the same small town, and there
he built his frames and did become what Moses Brown had prophe-
sied’ The seed had landed on good soil’
It is somewhat puzzling to the reader of industrial statistics to
account for the concentration of the brass manufacture in the Nauga-
tuck Valley in Connecticut’ There is neither copper, nor zinc, nor
coal found in that vicinity, nor is it exceptionally well placed for
transportation; why, then, should eighty-five per cent, of America's
brass be made there? The answer is, the accident of the carrier’ In
1820 an artisan named Crofts left a Birmingham brass-works as an
emigrant’ On landing in America he drifted about and finally into
Waterbury’ Here he found some humble manufacturers mak-
 V V  V V
ing notions for tin-peddlers, among other things a few brass
buttons from old copper kettles and ship bottoms and imported zinc’
Hiring out as a hand he showed his new employers better methods,
was made a partner, and was sent back to Birmingham some seven or
eight times to recruit more skilled workers; on the basis of this skill the
brass business was established’
If one works through the records of any branch of human effort in
America, one comes upon these carriers, individual men and women
more or less conscious of the function they perform’ In 1805 one
Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler came from Switzerland to Philadelphia,
bringing with him some books and mathematical instruments’
Through the good offices of Secretary Gallatin, his compatriot, and
the interest of President Jefferson, he was given a place as a teacher at
West Point, and thus brought the knowledge of analytical geometry to
America; he advised the government as to a method of charting the
coastal waters, was sent abroad to buy more instruments, and on his
return began the United States Coast Survey’ The man with the special
competence had happened to meet the special need’ About the same
time, in 1816, there came to the military academy Claude Crozet, who
had been schooled at the Polytechnique in Paris²and thus began the
study of descriptive geometry in this country; having been an engineer
under Napoleon and having had the severe training in higher
mathematics that most of our practitioners sadly lacked, after seven
years' teaching he became an employee of Virginia and gave the state
a system of roads which made it for that time a model’ This was the
contribution of two Europeans to American mathematics’ English
books were usually the seeds of early American architecture, but there
were human carriers too, that we can recognize, like Richard Upjohn,
who in 1829 brought to New England the ideas of the Gothic revival,
later to flower in his Trinity Church in New York City’ Similar stories
could be told for almost every branch of art and science’
But some have transferred to the province parts of the metropolitan
environment itself’ In 1714 the ablest young thinkers of Connecticut
were spinning out dry dichotomies of dry ideas²working knowledge
out of their own heads, as the Reverend Samuel Johnson wrote in
reminiscence’ Then there came to Yale a library which Jeremy
ummer, the colonial agent, had sent from the old country, and for the
first time New England came into contact with John Locke and Isaac
Newton and modern thought’ The effect, as Johnson writes of it, was
sudden and tremendous; he himself and other clergymen left
Calvinism and stirred the religious thinking of the
754 ÷


Puritan colonies as it had not been stirred before²all because of a
library’ In 1796, or thereabouts, r’ Adam Seybert, of Philadelphia,
brought back from Europe a cabinet of minerals, the second in the
country; it was to this collection that young Benjamin Silliman, of
New Haven, brought a little box of stones for comparison and
identification, and thus was started on his way to be the first great
American master of geology, and it was the elaborate cabinet which
Colonel George Gibbs brought across the water that aided Silliman to
make Yale the centre of such studies’ In 1794 r’ avid Hosack
returned with a duplicate collection of plants from the herbarium of
Linnaeus, and shortly afterward brought in seeds, slips, and shrubs to
form his botanical garden, specimens from which made up the core of
the great establishment in Bronx Park; such new advantages made the
study of botany by Americans a very different thing from what it had
been before’
The fine art of Europe was started westward only when American
wealth had sufficiently accumulated to secure it’ There were collec-
tions as early as the seventeen-nineties, like that brought to Boston by
James Swan, and that to Philadelphia by William Hamilton, but they
had little cultural value while shut within a few private houses’ It was
not until the latter half of the nineteenth century, about 1870, to be
exact, that private fortune seriously took up the task of educating the
public taste by transferring European art to open galleries in this
country’ Notable collections of Italian primitives and other pieces
were given to the New York Historical Society by Thomas Jefferson
Bryan and to Yale by James J’ Jarves; William W’ Corcoran in 1869
endowed a museum in Washington to receive his importations; in
1870 one group of philanthropists organized the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston and another the Metropolitan Museum in New York City’
Such benefactions though conspicuous for scale were not different in
spirit from earlier and more modest transfers like that accomplished
by aniel Wadsworth and his associates for Hartford in 1842 and that
by the Reverend A’ W’ Freeman who brought copies to the Indiana
colleges in the 'sixties and 'seventies’ By reason of such
establishments artists could see something of the legacy of bygone
centuries without leaving their own soil’ The process was continued
by Morgan, Frick, and a host of others, until now, apparently,
American purchasers are so much the reliance of those who market
the historic art of Europe that collections, like that of Lord
Leverhulme, are moved here intact for the auctioneer’ Thus, in the
transit of civilization one factor has been the removal of environment
itself’
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The transit as a whole, apparently, was speeded by the Revolution,
which for a time so developed the sentiment of nationalism that it
irked us to depend on Europe for anything’ The audience at the John
Street Theatre, New York, on April 16, 1787, applauded the prologue
of Royall Tyler's play,V
V  with its announcement of an
innovation:
Exult each patriot heart²tonight is shewn
A piece which we may fairly call our own ;
Where the proud titles of " My Lord! Your Grace ! "
To humble Mr’ and plain Sir give place’
Our author pictures not from foreign climes
The fashions or the follies of the times;
But has confin'd the subject of his work
To the gay scenes²the circles of New York’
In the introduction to her novelV  V 
V   (1801),
Madam Wood, of Portland, echoed the same sentiment: "Hitherto we
have been indebted to France, Germany, and Great Britain, for the
majority of our literary pleasures’ Why we should not aim at
independence, with respect to our mental enjoyments, as well as our
more substantial gratifications, I know not’ Why must the amuse-
ments of our leisure hours cross the Atlantic ? ’ ’ ’ The following
pages are wholly American ; the characters are those of our own
country’"
The customary deference and dependence, it is true, were not
easily thrown off’ In colonial days many whose ancestors had lived
here for a hundred years and who themselves had never left our
shores still spoke wistfully of England as " home "’ William un- lap,
the leading theatrical manager at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, was not a little irritated by the general distrust of American
playwrights;V
V  itself was none too successful’ The New
YorkV   praising a new play in 1819, was impressed with
its own courage: " We advance this opinion without waiting for the
fiat of an English audience, or an English review/' Fenimore Cooper,
the following year, did not dare confess the American authorship of
his first novel and sent it out more safely as the work of an
anonymous Englishwoman’ The highest encomium his later admirers
could pronounce was to call him the American Scott; many, however,
thought this hardly in good taste, not because it indicated undue
deference to British standards, but because the comparison seemed
presumptuous’ Nevertheless, the national consciousness was coming’
Most Americans were extremely sensitive when British critics
dismissed us as provincial’ The bitter vehemence of C’ J’ Ingersoll,
Robert Walsh, and Paulding, who tried to prove that we were not, was
perhaps in itself a telling bit of evidence that we still were; but, for all
that, there was a growing sentiment that it was time for Americans,
754 ÷


even in concerns outside of government, to assume " the separate and
equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God
entitled them
The science of botany gives an interesting example’ Since it did
not reach the status of a specialized profession in Europe until far on
in the nineteenth century, it can not well be subjected to our " law Yet
it had an interesting process of its own in transition’ First came
European explorers, like Mark Catesby and Peter Kalm; then, some-
what overlapping, Americans who were the correspondents of great
scholars in the old countries, such as John Clayton, who sent collec-
tions to Gronovius, and John Bartram, who supplied the English
Quaker, Peter Collinson’ But the amateur botanists of the United
States, mostly doctors of medicine or of divinity, resented foreign
domination, especially such European christening of American
plants’ " We ought wrote the most distinguished of them, the
Reverend Ǿ’ E’ Muhlenberg, in 1811, " we ought to be jealous for our
American names’ Why should we have the trouble of finding, and
other nations the honor ? " In this concern, as in many others,
patriotism spurred us to catch up with Europe’ Sometimes the cultural
self- reliance was encouraged by the old country; the American Board
of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810) and the American
Bible Society (1816) were formed because English organizations not
unnaturally refused to undertake the administration of American
philanthropy’ But generally the new nation insisted on becoming as
free as possible in every way’
Every circumstance that favored this great enterprise was heartily
welcomed’ Every discovery of materials in America²of some min-
eral useful in the arts, some root or bark that could contribute to our
pharmacopoeia²was hailed as an amendment to the eclaration of
Independence’ When in 1810 the first trained veterinary surgeon
landed in New York, Americans expressed their gratification that the
transit of that science had begun; the naturalization of merino sheep
was applauded like a victory on the battle-field’ When in 1807 Joel
Barlow's epic poem was published in Philadelphia, patriots deplored
that it had been found necessary to make the illustrations in England,
while the first volume of Alexander Wilson's handsomeV
 
 V was welcomed the following year with special
satisfaction because in type, ink, paper, engraving, and binding it was
American²everything except the reds and blues used in the coloring
of the birds, which had to come from France’ But we were not to be
made free from
European skill as promptly as we thought’ There is now nearing
completion the sumptuous six-volume work of Mr’ I’ N’ Phelps
Stokes,V
V  
V V!
 V   which traces the
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physical growth of New York City, or at least its principal borough,
during the three hundred years since its foundation by the utch’ It is
a striking circumstance that much of the paper and the fine engraving
has had to be imported from Holland’ New York is, then, in some
slight degree, still New Netherland’
Our emancipation has indeed been gradual, every step painfully
worked out’ In our texts of learning we have risen slowly from Noah
Webster's spelling book, which supplanted the English il- worth, to
the latest American treatise for advanced collegiate study; our first
college text-book in economics was a mere adaptation of the Scottish
McCulloch; our American texts in the classics were slightly
rearranged from European editions; our greatest achievement in
mathematics up to 1830 was Bowditch's translation of Laplace’ In
1894 Professor Florian Cajori published a general history of mathe-
matics’ The reader notices that he mentions but few Americans²
none until the eighteen-seventies, the time of Benjamin Peirce’ The
patriotic American in his chagrin ascribes this omission to ignorance
of what had been achieved on this side of the Atlantic; then he finds
that the professor had four years before published a history of
mathematics in the United States, a book of four hundred pages’ He
who well knew the contribution of America in this branch of higher
learning could see, when called upon to take the broad view, how
negligible it was’
In chemistry, physics, and other fields, despite the rapid strides of
recent years, the story is still much the same’ In the list of winners of
the Nobel Prize for research in pure science America does not figure
brightly’ It is the office of our epartment of Commerce to watch our
national expenditures; in a recent address Secretary Hoover pointed
out that we are spending ten times as much for cosmetics as for
advancing scientific knowledge’ This is not true, he observes, of
older civilizations’ We still have much to learn from Europe; the
transit of civilization to America is by no means complete’

Let us turn, however, to follow it from the Atlantic shore’ To

illustrate our law of transit let us look for a moment at the South’ In
the colonial period it was more truly a cultural province than the
North, which was well advanced in the third stage when the South
was in the middle of the second’ The Revolution cut it off somewhat
from the metropolis across the water and it became a cultural
province of the North’ First, there were young Northerners who went
South to practise their professions, like Abraham Baldwin, the
Connecticut lawyer, who is called the " Father of the University of
Georgia"’ The New England Society of Charleston, formed in 1819,
had prominent professional men upon its rolls’ There were many in
754 ÷


later times who thus went South to teach, men like Eli Whitney,
William H’ Seward, William Ellery Channing, Sergeant S’ Prentiss,
Amos Kendall, and Jared Sparks’ Overlapping with this stage, the
Southerners began in much greater number to send their sons to
college in the North, and in the early decades of the nineteenth
century from ten to thirty per cent, of the attendance at Yale and
Princeton was from that section’ M’ Moreau de Saint Mery, visiting
the latter college in 1794, remarked the surprising number of young
men from Virginia and the Carolinas’ In the professions the tendency
was even more impressive; for a long time Georgia led the states
outside Connecticut in attendance at the Litchfield Law School, with
South Carolina as a close competitor; about half the students at the
medical school of the University of Pennsylvania were from the
South’ When news of the Richmond Theatre fire of 1811 reached
Philadelphia, scores of Virginians then enrolled²one incredulous
reporter said more than a hundred²met to listen to a memorial
sermon’
Meanwhile the third stage had begun’ Many collegiate institu-
tions were established, but they were staffed by men of Northern
training’ In 1804 the president of the University of Georgia was
Josiah Meigs, of Middletown, Connecticut, who had studied at Yale
and taught there; the president of the College of South Carolina was
Jonathan Maxcy, of Attleborough, Massachusetts, who had studied at
Brown and taught there; the president of the University of North
Carolina was Joseph Caldwell, of Lammington, New Jersey, who
had studied at Princeton and taught there’ The upland colleges were
most of them heavily indebted to Princeton’ Jefferson, who con-
templated importing directly the whole faculty of the University of
Geneva for his institution in Charlottesville, was an exception’ Up to
1830, at least, the South was a cultural province of the North’ Then
came the explosions that began the rift between the sections² the
abolition movement, the ominous slave rebellion, the tariff con-
troversy, Webster's reply to Hayne; the South became painfully self-
conscious, declared her cultural independence and developed a litera-
ture of her own’ It will be remembered that J’ P’ Kennedy'sV V
"  the South's first novel of importance, appeared in 1832, Poe's
first story in 1833, Simms'sV#V in 1834, and theV 
 V
$V!  in 1835’
The seaboard South, when political independence was achieved,
was a settled country and a fairly well-defined geographical area’ But
" the West " throughout American history, until recently, has been a
relative term, a phenomenon of movement, a degree of settlement ;
what was the west of one generation was the east of the next, when
the procession of the Indian, the hunter, the trader, the cattleman, the
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pioneer farmer, had passed by and thriving towns and cultivated
countryside developed in its wake’ In tracing civilization from east to
west within our country we follow a transit from an organized society
to one of rude beginnings, quite as obviously as in tracing the transit
from Europe to America’
It is necessary first to notice, somewhat gloomily, that civilization,
generally speaking, declines when it strikes the frontier’ This might
almost be advanced as the second law of transit’ Compare the intel-
lectual tone of New England in the sixteen-forties with that at the end
of the century, and the contrast is depressing’ We may quote from the
unpublished autobiography of President Samuel Johnson, of King's
College, writing of his student days in New England about 1714:
"The condition of learning (as well as everything else) was very low
in these times, indeed much lower than in the earlier time while those
yet lived who had had their education in England and first settled the
country’ These were now gone off the stage and their sons fell greatly
short of their acquirements, as through the necessity of the times they
could give but little attention to the business of education’" The
concentrated light of local history reveals this falling off; the late
Henry R’ Stiles in his minute review of   V %   for
example, observed that the second generation did not fill the places of
the fathers’ The earlier leaders had been trained in Cambridge,
England, the later in Cambridge, Massachusetts ²and there was a
difference’ It is easy to forget the quiddities of the library and
drawing-room when living in a forest, and even in the extreme
instance to relapse into barbarism as " squaw men
In 1840, to advance somewhat more than a century in time and
less than a thousand miles in space, the percentage of illiteracy in
Indiana was fourteen; ten years later it was twenty-two’ Appreciation
of special training fell apace’ Neither the Indiana frontier, nor any
other, developed any overpowering respect for the professional man;
it must be remembered that it was Andrew Jackson who de-
professionalized the civil service of the country’ In 1817 the Indiana
legislature, made up of men who had come from older communities,
laid down careful rules for examination by the courts of all candidates
for the bar; in accordance with procedure slowly worked out by
centuries of experience, the judges in the cases tried before them ex-
pounded the law, leaving to the jury the decision of the facts’ But the
constitution of 1851 permitted any citizen of ordinary decency to
practise law, and allowed the jury, however ignorant, to determine
what rules of law should be applied’ The legal standards for medical
practice were likewise relaxed in the frontier environment to make
way for the botanical practitioners and other short-schooled doctors’
754 ÷


In fact, it must be confessed that medical standards in general
declined for a time after their transit to America’
The delicate plant can not immediately take root in a wilderness’
Men and women of refinement can not easily become frontiersmen,
as the colony of Napoleonic exiles at emopolis, in Alabama, sadly
illustrates’ If one such could, he would soon find that his mind was
starving’ The frontier can not furnish an environment of sympathy’
Many Europeans later known throughout the world as great masters
have in their youth contemplated a removal to America’ Robert
Boyle and Comenius thought seriously of following the suggestion of
their friend John Winthrop, jr’, and crossing to Connecticut, but had
they set up in our half-won countryside would one have become the
father of modern chemistry and the other the father of modern edu-
cation ? Goethe planned to come, but as an American would he have
writtenV &? Coleridge and Southey had a romantic project of
starting new careers in the upper Susquehanna Valley, but had they
done so in the seventeen-nineties would they rank to-day among the
great figures of literature? Whatever momentum such men might
have had upon arrival their mental energy would have spent itself
without sympathy, constructive criticism, and the stimulus of
competition’ The frontier can not furnish support for its own
distinguished minds; generally they must reach development in the
metropolis’ " It is certainly remarkable observed the writer of an
article on Lindley Murray in theV $V !  for January,
1804, " that the natives of America who have arrived at eminence in
arts and letters have done so in a foreign country’" Really it was not
remarkable at all’ Would Benjamin West have become a painter of
world renown if he had stayed in Pennsylvania? Would Benjamin
Thompson have discovered the laws of heat as a citizen of Woburn,
Massachusetts ? But we can not too closely limit Omnipotence;
miracles may happen and genius flourish in an unpromising
environment²there was Franklin, for example’
The frontier is handicapped by lack of leisure and by the migra-
toriness of its life, as well as its distance from the centres of culture’
But while it forgets its heritage somewhat, its equalitarian standards,
resulting from the homogeneity of its population, lead it to diffuse
whatever it retains’ It stands hopefully for mass education and
therefore lays a broad, firm basis for culture as it may be imported
and developed’ Leisure as it comes is rather evenly distributed and
Culture, written with a large C, becomes everybody's business’ The
woman's club of the modern type was born in the Middle West in the
eighteen-fifties’
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But this culture, as we have seen, is constantly modified, or, if you
will, increased, by contacts with the outside world’ There are con-
stantly presented new modes from which the community may choose
for imitation’ The accidental carriers, the " Typhoid Marys " of ideas,
are sometimes effective and sometimes not; probably the carrier's
influence is most immediate when he is not much unlike the mass he
touches’ Indiana was mentioned, a few lines back, as a typical frontier
society a hundred years ago, and perhaps the Hoosier State will serve
as well as any other for our illustrations’ Robert Owen's " boatload of
knowledge " that pushed up the Wabash to New Harmony in 1826
was doubtless of considerable consequence to the little world of
political theorists, but not much to Indiana’ An elaborate history of
the state has been written without mentioning the socialistic
experiment which happened to take place upon its soil but which had
small part in its development’ It would be difficult, indeed
impossible, to trace the course of the myriad unconscious carriers
who were effective’ Perhaps most culture, though seldom the highest,
has been transmitted by such means’ But many of the carriers are
conscious, resolute, and constructive, yet fully sympathetic with the
frontier; we may call them the civilizers’ It has taken splendid
courage to assume and carry through this role’ In the early days it
took physique’ Could the circuit rider thrash the rowdies, the "
scorners ", who stood ready to break up the meeting ? Could the
school-teacher's digestion endure the ordeal of boarding around a
neighborhood devoted to a hog-and-hominy cuisine? Could the con-
scientious doctor survive the forty-mile rides through the wintry
forest ?
But quite apart from these raw perils patent to the sense, the
civilizer always took a risk’ Could he hew a way to the light through
the thicket of ignorance and prejudice, as the previous pioneer had
chopped his way through oak and cypress, or would he succumb and
shamefully settle down to live like others in a mental shade? Was the
frontier yet ready for him? There comes to mind the case of Baynard
R’ Hall, the first functionary in the higher education of
Indiana’ Indiana wanted him, but only moderately; education was not
yet its ruling passion, and it paid him but two hundred dollars for a
year's instruction’ It was not the money that thrilled him, however, and
held him to his purpose of building a state university, but the thought
that he was, as he said, " the very first man since the creation of the
world to read Greek in the New Purchase It was pleasing to his vanity,
no doubt, to reflect that he was the man²young professional men
have often been moved to go west by the thought that they would seem
more important there than at home²but I think, as a whole, the
civilizers have thought as much of civilization as of themselves’ The
754 ÷


material compensation probably did not tempt them’ The circuit riders
got an annual payment of from fifty dollars to two hundred, and that
would have been better if it had not so often been paid in " dicker ", in
beef, corn, butter, potatoes, leather, buckwheat flour, feathers,
coon-skins, and the like’
It took courage, too, to carry to the frontier the instruments of
civilization such as the printing press’ This is not the tool of a man, but
of a community; and to sustain it the community must be literate,
moderately well-to-do, and with an economic life sufficiently organ-
ized to need an advertising medium’ There was certainly a risk in
taking it to the frontier’ The covered wagon is familiar to us all as an
epic theme, but behind it have come other arks and vehicles and beasts
of precious burden, freighted with as fine a hope and driven by as stout
a courage, carrying, indeed, the instruments and records of the human
mind’ Across the screen of memory toils the Cones- toga-wagon team
over the Alleghanies, in 1786, to the shabby little river town at the
forks of the Ohio, laden with the press, the type, the ink, the paper that
were to make up John Scull's Pittsburgh #; then from here a
short year later there sets out the flat- boat of John Bradford with
another rude printing press and some type cut out of dogwood, which,
after being jolted into sad confusion on the rough wood-way from the
river down to Lexington, does full part to build the fame of that "
Athens of the West "'; and then in 1804, when seventeen years of
effort have driven the pioneer's axe deep into the old Northwest, Elihu
Stout, a printer on this paper, supported by the same faith, straps a
press and type athwart pack- horses and threads the path to far-away
Vincennes’ The advance of civilization byV#'
In the pageant of the arts and sciences these humble equipages
have their place, and the men who guided them’ It was a desperate
enterprise’ Take, for example, the first newspaper in the capital of
Indiana, the IndianapolisV# printed on a clumsy Ramage press
in 1822, a year after the city's foundation, in a one-room log cabin, "
part of which was occupied for a family residence The nearest
post-office was sixty miles away, so that President Monroe's message
delivered in the first week of ecember was prime news in February’
The picture can be reproduced a hundred times in American history’
The paper-making frontier crossed the Alleghanies not long after that
of the press; it was only six years behind in Kentucky and five in the
Western Reserve; but it was not till 1820 that the first type foundry
was established in the Mississippi Valley’ Meanwhile, books were
published, especially at Cincinnati’ It had taken the printing business
in all its essentials thirty-five years to cross the mountains, but in the
colonial period it had taken a hundred and thirty-three years to cross
the sea’
 c
  

 
x 55
Herbert Spencer's famous law was that life proceeds from
homogeneity to heterogeneity, from the simple to the complex’ On
the frontier one can actually watch the evolution of social species’ In
New England during the eighteenth century there were few clergy-
men, doctors, or lawyers but did some farming; certainly this was
true in the early days of Indiana’ Consider the case of the Reverend
John M’ ickey, in Washington County in 1815, as it is reported: "
Mr’ ickey ’ ’ ’ aided the support of his family by farming on a small
scale, teaching a singing class, and writing deeds, wills, and ad-
vertisements’ He also surveyed land and sometimes taught school’"
But this clergyman-schoolmaster-lawyer was already on the way to
specialization, as apparently he did not practise medicine’ Seven-
teenth-century ministers, even important ones like Giles Firmin and
Gershom Bulkeley, had cured the body with the soul, exhibiting, as
Cotton Mather said, an " Angelical conjunction "’ It would be in-
teresting for a state historical survey to trace graphically on the map
the moving frontier of the professional family doctor in its state, to
see how far he was behind the thin edge of the population mass; then
to see the line of first throw-off from that stem, the trained
apothecary; then the line of the second branch, the dentist; then that
of the third, the modern surgeon ; then those of successive
specialties’ History is an enterprise in space as well as in time, and
such maps we now recognize as an important part of its records’ No
one can tell what deductions might be made if such a series were £et
before a scholar; for the map reveals as well as illustrates’ It must be
remembered that it was in examining the census maps of 1890 that
Professor Frederick J’ Turner saw in many phases the significance of
the frontier in American history’
V
VV V V
We speak as if this march of civilization were the stuff of history
alone, yet a journey from one ocean to the other would reveal how it
proceeds to-day’ Where is the public library frontier in 1927? The
picture gallery frontier? The chamber-music frontier? What is passing
into New Mexico ? Montana ? Arkansas ? Quite obviously it is not
wholly a matter of East and West’ In each region throughout the
country there is a centre which as a provincial town, relatively
speaking, receives its culture, and as a metropolis transmits it in every
direction to its countryside’ Each province profoundly modifies the
culture it receives; each metropolis is affected by its provinces, which
throw back challenges as well as contributions in the shape of their
ambitious youth, who in their energy and more equalitarian standards
tend to break up old stratifications²but all this is another story’ It is
enough here to remember that civilization is still in transit; as we move
754 ÷


about we are all carriers in greater or less degree, and each can say
with Tennyson's Ulysses, " I am a part of all that I have met
÷  VV  V