Historians, both famed and anonymous, have developed theories that try to explain the course of history. The “Whig theory” of steady progress was widely shared until the horrors of the twentieth century demolished it. Marx’s theory of one class replacing another had a long run. The “Great Man” theory (now, Great Person theory) still has some adherents.
I too am trying to develop a theory of history, but not a grandiose one. I’m trying to figure out if there are consistent ways to better understand certain historical outcomes. Why was St. Louis an “also-ran” to Chicago? Why did so many orphans work in the early factories of the Industrial Revolution? Was soil exhaustion a contributor to the Civil War?
In answering such questions, I borrow tools from my friends the economists. Economists don’t spend a lot of time digging into the past but when they do they come up with surprising findings. When Deirdre McCloskey explained the scattered private fields in medieval England, she solved a mystery that had stumped historians for decades, and Eric Edwards and Walter Thurman just revealed an explanation for the U. S. Corn Belt that historians have largely ignored.
It is a truism of American history: The farmland of the Midwest was so rich that when the railroad and mechanical farm equipment arrived the region became the breadbasket of the nation.
Yes, the “amazing fertility of the prairies” provides food for the entire country—and much of the world.[1]
However, it took more than railroads and the McCormick reaper.
In his book Nature’s Metropolis historian William Cronon hints at the problem facing a pioneering farmer in Missouri or Illinois in the early 19th century. “[The] flatness of the prairies subjected lowland areas to bad drainage and flooding.” An 1831 guide for newly-arrived farmers warned them to select their land carefully—flat land that looked good in the dry season could become a swamp when the rains came.[2]
In other words, what we romantically call wetlands (and often try to preserve) were the bane of the agricultural pioneer in the Midwest. “Farmers tried to settle far enough from floodplains and wet prairies to avoid bad drainage, but they also needed to be near enough to a stream course to obtain supplies of wood and water,” writes Cronon. [3]
As long as there was a lot of land for sale, farmers could cope—often it “was cheaper to buy a new farm than to drain the farm one already owned,” one historian wrote in 1909. [4]
In 1772, Joseph Haydn and his musicians were spending a long summer performing at the country retreat of Hungary’s Prince Esterhazy. The musicians were restless and wanted to go home, but Esterhazy expected them to stay there as long as he did.
To change the prince’s mind, Haydn wrote a symphony. In the finale, each player, one by one, ends his music, snuffs out his candle, and exits—until only two violinists are left (one being Haydn) to quietly end the piece. Now known as the Farewell Symphony, it persuaded Esterhazy to release the troupe. [1]
The prince’s failed effort to control the musicians was about as heavy-handed as European governments got with respect to music in those glorious days between, say, 1700 and 1820. (Think, from Vivaldi and Telemann to Mozart and Beethoven.) The results were magnificent.
Over that period musical performances were enriched and diversified on multiple dimensions. The piano replaced the harpsichord, the cello replaced the bass viola da gamba, Bach brought the organ’s sounds to new heights—to mention just a few changes. Ways to share music—orchestras, quartets, sonatas, concertos, oratorios, and operas—proliferated. The styles we know as Baroque, Classical, and Romantic began to solidify, and the stunning masterpieces that we love today emerged.
“The veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep,” wrote the historian Victor Davis Hanson in a recent essay on the Russia-Ukraine war.[1]
Russia’s brutal destruction of civilians illustrates how thin the veneer of civilization is. There are many other examples—from the Holocaust in a country that had achieved a peak of intellectual sophistication to the protection of slavery in a country founded on the concept of freedom. And more.
So, are we barbarians or civilized? We are both.
While I can’t explain why barbarity must involve war and torture, I can offer some understanding of why our veil of civilization is often so tattered.
My source is Friedrich A. von Hayek (1899–1992). Although Hayek received a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, he is known mostly to people of a libertarian bent, like me. To us, he is the greatest. Continue reading “The Skull Beneath the Skin”
Urban historians sometimes puzzle over why one city grows and its competitors do not. One rivalry, between St. Louis, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois, is particularly interesting.
In 1840, St. Louis was a thriving part of the “urban frontier,” with a population of 35,979. It managed a rich fur trade, was a major transfer point for goods coming upriver from New Orleans (the nation’s third-largest city at the time), and its two major rivers enabled it to send grain from Midwestern prairies down the Mississippi for shipment east. Indeed, as one historian noted,
“Perhaps no American city was born under such favorable auspices as St. Louis, Missouri. It was located at the confluence of navigable water courses which drained over a million square miles of the continent, and it was built by a number of big businessmen (“big” for that time, which was 1764) who knew precisely what they were doing.”[1]
In contrast, Chicago was a hamlet of 4,470 people.
