The Three-Dimensional Location of the United States

The American Mosaic, Chapter One

Daniel J. Elazar

The Importance of Location

There is a popular story about a man who returned to his home to find an intruder hiding in his closet. Turning to the intruder in outrage, the householder bellowed, "What are you doing here?" The intruder, a meek little man replied, "Everybody has to be somewhere." The truth of this truism should be so obvious that it need hardly be stated. Recent efforts to explain human behavior, however, have too often neglected or overlooked the factor of location. Everybody does, indeed, have to be somewhere, and where one is plays a crucial role in determining who and what one is and what one does (or, in other words, how one behaves). What is true of individuals is equally true of groups, societies, peoples and nations.

Even when we do think of location, we tend to think of it simply as a spatial matter--as a matter of being some place. In fact, location has three critical dimensions: spatial, temporal, and cultural. All human beings and groups are located in a particular space, in a particular time, and in a particular culture. It is necessary to understand all three facets of location in order to understand how people behave and why they behave as they do. It is not sufficient to think of the United States as being geographically located between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, bounded by Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico on the south and Canada on the north. It is also necessary to understand that the United States is historically located in the modern epoch that opened at the beginning of the 17th century and culturally located within what we generally term western civilization. As a result of the first, it has no premodern history of political consequence which does much to explain its difficulty in understanding the driving forces behind "old world" societies that have to modernize. As a result of the second, it has been able to focus cultural inheritance particularly conducive to the development of an energetic, even aggressive, competitive entrepreneurial society. All of these are crucial bench marks for focusing in upon the location of any particular element in the United States and for understanding the behavior of its people and its political system.

Biologically, humans are tied to all three locational dimensions. People, in common with all other animals, are severely bounded by time, which, like space, they can manipulate only to a certain degree. People live in particular times and each person is allotted a particular measure of time. Living in particular times means that people begin their lives with an inheritance of times gone by and must maneuver within their own times in light of the limitations and possibilities imposed by what has gone before. In the case of one's own time span, a person may extend or contract his or her life expectancy partially through his or her efforts (e.g., by eating or smoking habits) and may determine how time is used within very real limits.

In any given period people are constrained by the limits of knowledge and the habitual practices available at that particular time. There is also a sense in which time runs out before people become aware of potential dangers, before new knowledge can be developed to meet new problems, or before individuals, statesmen and societies can complete new projects. We do not, for example, have sufficient knowledge to make solar energy economically viable now or enough technical skill available to make nuclear energy comfortably safe, especially with regard to radioactive wastes. As the same time, the "spirit of our time" calls for a continuing increase in the use of energy in order to maintain the style of life to which Americans have become culturally accustomed. The domestic and international political problems raised by worldwide energy needs became apparent during the 1970s. While that immediate crisis was overcome, the larger issue remains with the American people as the world moves toward the twenty-first century.

In another vein, we often speak of the frustrations and opportunities that arise for individuals or groups who are "behind the times" or "ahead of their time." Political reformers especially experience the latter feeling, while regarding others as being "behind the times." Finally, in terms of day-to-day political life, the timing of action in one of the most important skills of a successful political leader.

In recent years, intensive investigations have been made into human territoriality (the human need to have ties to a particular place). They have demonstrated that all living beings have such a need which shapes their orientations toward space. While humans have greater opportunities to maneuver than animals, there are limits to the degree to which they can manipulate their territorial instincts, even as they organize and reorganize space to meet their needs with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Political boundaries represent one major way in which people seek to organize space for their use. Territorial boundaries, whether they be national boundaries or household property lines, sort people out in space so as to help minimize conflict and aggression and organize competition and cooperation among people. The political importance of territory is heightened by the universal tendency of individuals and like-minded individuals to differentiate themselves from one another. Territory helps to provide individuals and groups with a sense of security and with a place in which they can work out their own identities and destinies. We might also keep in mind the fact that individuals occupy multiple territories -- from personal space, to household, neighborhood, village or city, county, state, region, section, nation, continent, hemisphere and perhaps even planet. Each of these "places" has different meanings and different purposes for people. In at least one respect, then, politics can be understood as the way on which humans impose their own order upon both space and time, which are otherwise differentiated only by natural processes or characteristics. That order is imposed, first and foremost, through human culture.¹

In its simplest sense, culture may be regarded as the "way of life" of a people. The concept of culture refers to the explicit and implicit or overt and covert patterns of shared beliefs, values and traditions about life held by a particular people. It consists of a set of rules, common symbols and common sentiments which are learned by individuals as they grow up within the group. In this way culture tends to become "second nature" affecting behavior without self-conscious reflection. Culture separates humans from animals. Anthropologists have taught us that all people, groups, and societies are located within particular cultures whose own basis is so intertwined with man's biological base that it is impossible to draw any precise or even imprecise line separating the two. We are all inheritors of a culture which we can, to some degree, continue to shape but which is, in some respects, as much beyond the reach of our influence as the land forms upon which we live or the inexorable march of time from the beginning to the end of our lives.²

Political culture can best be understood in terms of the framework it sets for individual and group political behavior -- in the political thoughts, attitudes, assumptions, and values of individuals and groups and in the range of permissible or acceptable action that flows from them. Political culture as such, directly determines behavior in relatively few situations or in response to relatively few particular issues.³ Instead, its influence lies in its power to set reasonably fixed limits on political behavior and to provide subliminal direction for political action in particular political systems. These limits and direction are all the more effective because of their antiquity and subtlety, whereby those limited are often unaware of the limitations placed upon them.

Culture and Civil Society⁴

Some General Propositions About Culture

The study of political culture is related to the study of culture as a whole. Consequently, we shall begin our exploration with some propositions about the nature of culture as a whole. Culture refers to a way of life combining a totality of experience. Referring to culture as a "way" of life highlights its dynamic character; every culture is located in a particular time and space. Indeed, the handling of time and space are major concerns of every culture. Significantly, culture is based on communication (a term related to communis, "common") which involves sharing "ways" of perception and understanding within a community.

It is equally significant that the term culture is related to cultivation, for culture is, in the last analysis, learned behavior. Culture is more than custom; it is a way of thinking, feeling, and believing that is not only learned but involves selective learning. Yet, culture is so much a part of man's life that it can be best understood as second nature. It is the aspect of his behavior that man takes for granted, believing it to be universal (if it is part of his culture) or idiosyncratic (if it is part of another's). Culture, like nature, is at least partly concealed. It is almost a truism that nay particular culture is most concealed from those who share in it. People must make a particular effort to understand their own culture precisely because all cultures are both explicit and implicit (in Clyde Kluckhohn's terms) or overt and convert (in Ralph Linton's).

In his thought-provoking book The Silent Language, the anthropologist Edward Hall sees culture as having three manifestations; formal, informal, and technical.⁵ According to Hall, a culture's formal manifestations are to be found in its implicit rules; the core of culture is second nature. Its informal manifestations represent learned behavior that has passed out of the awareness of those who have been acculturated into it, while the technical manifestations of a culture are those found at the highest levels of consciousness. Hall's formulation is particularly useful in developing an understanding of political culture which, by its very nature, generates subconscious patterns of political behavior.

The Biological Basis of Culture

It has become increasing recognized that culture has a biological basis. Culture channels biological processes and modifies biological functioning. For example, "territoriality" which as been shown to have biological roots, has been culturally transmuted into such diverse manifestations as the migratory range of nomadic tribes on the Asian steppes, the thrust toward ownership of detached, single-family dwellings in the United States, and the drive for "Lebensraum" (living space) on the part of the German Reich in the twentieth century. The development from biological demands to culture can be simply portrayed in the following manner:

biological demands---------infrastructure------------culture

Each culture shapes the biological demands of its members in its own particular image, establishing a "social heredity" and thereby uniting nature and culture (although there is no general agreement as to the relative strength of nature and culture in shaping behavior).

Theoretically, it is possible to isolate the "natural" components behind culture but, as much as they may reveal about mankind in general, unmodified, these natural components reveal little about particular human beings or groups. In these respect, the Greek idea of "nature" which implies an underlying pattern of behavior fixed by the cosmos for every species is less useful for understanding man as a social being than the Hebrew idea of "way" which implies that each group as well as each species moves (or develops) within a context that combines biological and cultural aspects into a single individual package. Such phenomena as cities, architecture, myths, and ideologies create sensory screens through which men live in and perceive the world among them. Similarly, sight, sound, and smell are biological devices that regulate cultural perceptions even as they are, themselves, culturally attuned in particular directions. Hence different cultures create different kinds of visual, auditory, and olfactory space for those who are within them.

Language and Culture

Although culture involves both verbal and nonverbal communication, language is man's "program" through which he registers and structures external reality; hence language is a major element in the creation of different sensory worlds and the formation of thought. Political language is a major factor in the formation of political thinking even in its most elementary forms. Political culture differences often are reflected in different political terminologies, while different subcultures within the same overall political culture frequently infuse the same terminologies with differences in meaning. Every political culture has its own special political terms (such as open primary, public servant, nonpartisanship, good government, American way of life in the American culture) with their special meanings that are not transferable to any other culture. Similarly, what are to us common political terms such as democracy, freedom, the people, and politics, have special meanings in different political cultures if they exist within them at all. Any or all of these terms will have different shades of meaning in the various subcultures within a particular political culture.

"Define your terms" is a favorite intellectual game, often played with these or similar words. Sooner or later we all learn that for some terms every precise definition begets a different and equally precise one. This is a reflection of the difficulties of definition even within the same culture. In fact, such terms are actually value concepts that are infused with meaning through the culturally defined imagery which they provoke within the minds of those who use them, not because of any agreement as to their precise definition. Value concepts are terms whose use evokes importance in shaping the attitudes and beliefs of the participants in that culture. As terms, their meaning is connotative or suggestive; precise definitions invariably fail to convey their full meaning, no doubt because value concepts get at the heart of a culture and therefore must be as dynamic as the culture itself, while full definition actually denies them their fullness.⁶ One of the keys to understanding a particular culture is the identification and understanding of its value concepts.

Culture, Society, and Personality

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, another anthropologist, sees culture as having three aspects: a set of rules (both counsels and precepts), common symbols -- necessary for communication -- with common meanings attached to those symbols, and common sentiments. In this connection, it is important to note the distinction between culture and society (in the largest sense). "Society" may be defined as an organized group of people who interact more with each other than they do with other people, cooperating with one another for the attainment of certain ongoing ends, while "culture" may be defined as the distinctive way of life of any society produced by shared experiences filtered through culturally predetermined perspectives. Culture represent "the organized repetitive responses of a society's members" (Linton) or the force for the standardization of the behavior of individuals and the "fitting together" of society (Radcliffe-Brown). In sum, culture is the integrating factor in society.

Just as culture is the integrating factor in society, personality is the integrating factor in the individual. Culture is the major determinant of basic personality structure; different cultures develop different personality norms. Socialization of personality traits leads cumulatively to the development of specific-psychological biases in the culture of the world.

Culture and Religion

At this point, it is important to note the extraordinary influences of religion (broadly defined to include the so-called secular religions of the modern world as well as the tradition ones) on culture as creator and legitimizer or social and political norms, patterns, and goals. Religion may well be the major catalyst of cultural change. Strong historical evidence assigns this role to religions or quasi-religious movements, whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Communism in the West, or Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto in the East. At the same time, it seems that particular cultures. Why, for example, did the Calvinist and Reformed churches become dominant in societies that have adopted or experimented with federal modes of political organization? Religion even plays a role in the creation and diffusion of language and linguistic patterns, for example, the role of Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, with its emphasis on reading the Bible, in spreading literacy and certain value concepts first in Europe and more recently in Asia and Africa.

Culture and Subcultures

The more complex the society, the more there are likely to be subcultures within it. Subcultures represent the interaction of nuances of differences within it. Subcultures represent the interaction of nuances of differences within larger cultures, separable to a degree but always within the framework of the overall culture. The subtleties of subcultural variations add spice to the study of political culture.

Cultural and Justice

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown has argued persuasively that all societies are built around the integrating structural principle of justice which he presents as culturally defined.⁷Justice involves both just retribution and equivalent return (the law of retaliation, the principle that benefits must be compensated for by benefits, and indemnification for injury). Differences in the conception of justice are rooted in cultural differences.

In this respect, at least, Radcliffe-Brown brings modern social science around full circle to rediscover the architectonic nature of politics accepted without questions by the Greeks. All societies are ultimately civil, or political, societies because they involve the development and maintenance of shared principles of justice through accepted authoritative arrangements. The shared principles of justice in a given society are, in large measure, a function of its culture and, to a considerable degree, of its political culture.

Political Culture and Political Behavior

Political Culture may be defined, for our purposes here, as the particular pattern of orientation to political action in which each political system is imbedded. It is an element in general culture that is separable for some purposes. The study of political culture requires that distinctions be made regarding:

a. Sources of political culture, such as race, ethnicity, religion, language and life experiences

b. Manifestations of political culture, such as political attitudes, symbols, and style

c. Effects of political culture, such as actions, institutions and policies

*   *   *

Religion, Culture and Political Life

All signs point to religious movements -- those great surges of human self-definition based on certain perceived transcendent and enduring truths embodied within some institutional framework -- as being the keys to cultural development and survival. Religious movements have been central to cultural continuity and the transmission of cultural modes to succeeding generations or foreign populations, to transcending old ethnic or national divisions or creating new ones, and to fundamental changes within particular cultures leading to the emergence of new cultures or subcultures. Culture is transformed through religious experiences ranging from the Jews' experience at Mount Sinai to the American Indians' ghost dance movement of the 1890s, from the Protestant Reformation to the spread of Communism as a kind of secular religion.

Although religious experiences may be generated by a host of factors, once an experience takes hold among particular people, it becomes a force promoting fundamental change and then continuity. The potency of religion is reflected in the way that it is found among all people in all times and places and in the staying-power of particular importance to political thinkers, whether that be Plato or Machiavelli attempting to use religion as a way of cementing or changing the life of a polity; or Locke trying to separate religion and politics by making religion a private, voluntary affair; or Marx trying to "liberate" humanity from the "false consciousness" induced by this "opium of the people."

Three corollary points should also be noted. Specific religious movements, even as they change culture, are generally most successful among groups already culturally predisposed toward their fundamental tenets. Thus, Calvinistic Protestantism found its strength among peoples with a common cultural heritage along the shores of the North Sea. Their American descendants created Yankee Puritanism. Mormonism was founded by Yankees in upstate New York (1830) during a period of religious ferment and revival. It has had the most success in proselytizing among the same peoples who were originally attracted to Calvinism plus the Scandinavians who come from a similar cultural milieu.

Second, the impact of religion on society and politics is not limited to the influence of those who formally participate in its institutional manifestations. Instead, the approaches to life embodied in particular religions tend to infuse culture as a whole, thereby continuing to influence, however subtly, even those who have formally strayed from the fold.

Third, a decline in the force of a particular pattern of religious belief and experience within the culture it has molded invariably leads to a cultural crisis of the first magnitude. This usually leads to a search for religious substitutes to overcome the crisis. The Roman Empire, for instance, underwent such an experience after the first century of the Christian era, and there are strong indications that the Western world is experiencing a similar crisis today.⁸

*   *   *

Political culture, qua political culture, can be studied only through its manifestations. To study the sources is not to study the political culture itself. Almond and Powell are quite correct when they assert that: "Political culture is not a residual explanatory category. [That is to say, it is not something that only explains what other factors cannot explain.] It involves a set of phenomena which can be identified and to some degree measured."⁹

The manifestations of political culture may be broken down for analytic purposes into at least two levels and two kinds of patterns. Just as there are two patterns of cultural manifestations on the individual level, there are two kinds on the community level. Patterns of individual and community belief are manifested in a variety of political symbols by which the individual or the community as a whole expresses its values, its self-understanding, its goals, etc. Similarly political style involves community-wide patterns of action different from the personal behavior of particular actors.¹⁰

Political culture is not simply the aggregate of the four component manifestations. In addition, we must consider the various patterns of interaction among the four component parts. Individual beliefs concerning the meaning of community symbols and the meaning attached to those same symbols by the community as a whole are also important aspects of the political culture. Similarly, it is important for understanding political culture to remember the disjunctures between community symbols and individual beliefs on one hand and individual behavior and the community's style of politics on the other.

Cultural Themes and Their Political Cultural Equivalents

Clyde Kluckhohn has posited six themes that must find expression in every culture. As we have already seen in the case of the first -- language -- these themes can be adapted to suggest political cultural equivalents. By making the adaptations, we are better able to define the potential scope and content of the study of political culture. Aesthetic Expression, Kluckhohn's second theme, embodies such elements of political styles, individual and general, and their aesthetic appeal in particular political cultures; changes in political style, temporal and regional; political symbols and symbolization; and what makes certain political styles or myths, traditional or ideological, aesthetically appealing in particular political cultures.

Standardized Orientation to the Deeper Problems of Life and Death, the third theme, has its equivalent in questions of political life and death. Political life can be understood as referring to such questions as what is acceptable and desirable for attaining office or acquiring political power. Hence this theme deals with the political cultural aspects of political recruitment, political socialization (learning what political actors can and cannot do), and political projections of individuals (personal appearance, public image, and the range of acceptable campaign tactics). Political death refers to the effective ending of political career possibilities. Hence this theme is also concerned with the nature of political death, factors causing political death (age, defeat, change of residence, certain kinds of controversy), and the functional utility of political death in the maintenance of political systems or the introduction of political change.

The fourth theme, the Means to Perpetuate the Group and Its Solidarity (including its norms), deals with the character of political institutions, the institutional channels of political communication, and the common modes of political socialization as shaped by political cultural factors. Meeting Individual Demand or an Orderly Way of Life is the fifth theme. It is concerned with the nature of such demands (commonly held theories of government and society) within particular political cultural frameworks, the accepted "price of politics", and the accepted ways of organizing to meet those demands.

The final theme, Meeting Individuals' Biological/Survival Needs, involves the cultural definition of those needs, the ways of organizing politically to meet those needs, and ultimately, the definition of who is a person or citizen, which determines who gets what in the way of protection of life and rights.

Every civil society expresses these cultural themes in its own way and build its own synthesis of those expressions into a cultural whole. The themes and the synthesis, like all cultural phenomena, and dynamic, changing over time in response to changing conditions, but always within a context that preserves the continuity of the culture as a whole. While cultural change is normal and even accelerated in the modern era, only occasional social traumas of the most intense kind can later the fundamental character of the culture itself. Tracing the cultural constants in a world of change is one of the tasks of the study of political culture.

In a slightly different vein, Edward Hall has suggested studying culture through what he terms primary message systems, separate but interrelated kinds of human activity stemming from biological bases and reflecting the cultural accretions that form the building blocks of specific cultures. Combined with the cultural themes as adapted above, they enable us to penetrate further into the study of political culture. Interaction, the first of the ten primary message systems, is the central core of the PMS approach because it is the basis of communication. For our purposes, it leads us to recognize the kinds and patterns of political communication as shaped by particular political cultures. Association leads to the consideration of the forms of political organization produced by particular cultures. Subsistence opens up the topic of the relation of political phenomena to economic life in particular political environments. Similarly, Bisexuality opens up consideration of the relation of political to family life in particular political cultures. Territoriality suggests the need to deal with the location and spread of political subcultures in space just as Temporality does in time. Temporality also provides us with a way to examine political cultural change. Learning leads us to study individual socialization and cultural adaptation while Play leads to an understanding of the nature and rules of the "game of politics." Defense leads to the analysis of the ways and means of protecting political cultural patterns devised in every group. Finally, Exploitation (of materials) suggests consideration of political, culturally directed thrusts and the limits imposed on political management of the environment.

We can sum up this brief introduction to the study of political culture by outlining the significant questions that must be dealt with in a systematic analysis of the political culture of any particular political system. The first is the question of relation to authority (government and the political system). It includes the identification of adaptive behavior in interaction with authority, personal and group ideologies, and central conception of the relationship of authority and self that underlie, and are reflected in, behavior and ideology. In this regard, it is important to distinguish between perceived differentiations in kinds of authority and the differentiation in responses to same. Related to a person's culturally determined sense of relation to authority is the second question of conception of self in relation to authority and to civil society as a whole, both as a member of civil society (citizen) and as a political actor.

The question of the culturally requisite social and individual bases for maintaining inner equilibrium as a political system is third. It is closely connected with the fourth question regarding the major forms of political anxiety within a particular cultural set, including perceived threats to the ego structure and expected consequences of value violation. Both are linked with the fifth one regarding the primary political dilemmas or conflicts and ways of dealing with them. It may, indeed, be possible that whole political systems are organized in terms of one or a few primary dilemmas that are built into their political cultures (for example, the tension between liberty and equality in the United States) and play out their history through a series of accommodations of those dilemmas.

The study of political culture is also concerned with four more questions, namely those dealing with modes of cognitive functioning, styles of expressive behavior, handling of major dispositions (aggression, dependency, curiosity, and so forth), and types of social (political) sanctions. Finally, there is the question of the extent of political involvement sanctioned for various individuals and groups within particular political cultures. Here we must be concerned with both the degree and direction of involvement.

A specific political culture may or may not coincide with a particular political system or civil society, since patters of orientation to politics frequently overlap beyond the boundaries of specific political systems. At the same time, precisely because culture is so central to human existence and politics so important in shaping human society, every political system must create some kind of cultural synthesis within its boundaries, at least for those who actively participate in politics. Historically, cultural conflict, in part because of its ties to religion, has been among the most divisive experienced within and between polities.

One aspect of the development of American civilization has been the emergence of an American political culture created more or less simultaneously on a sectional basis as well as countrywide. The nation as a whole, every state, and most local communities have created, synthesized or adapted their own variations of this common political culture in response to the phenomena including the interaction of geohistorical location, demographic streams, and patterns of general culture, plus the influence of the national political process.

The study of politics concerns itself with three dimensions--political structure, political processes, and political culture. Political structure relates to the institutions of political life. Political processes deals with political behavior and political culture deals with the norms of politics and governance. As such, political culture is an independent variable with a dynamic of its own. In this book, it is my intention to present a case for the place of culture, and more particularly political culture, as one of the three elements or benchmarks of human location. In my previous work on the subject I have, for the most part, concentrated, as have others, on political culture as a dynamic variable in shaping political behavior.

At the same time, there is another dimension to culture in general and political culture in particular which I refer to here as the locational aspect. In causal conversation, we talk about the people and their institutions being embedded in particular cultures. This manner of speaking reflects a reality which requires proper exploration by social scientists. Indeed, the exploration of the phenomenon of location gives us the possibility of placing our behavioral studies in a proper context to avoid the problem of overgeneralization from "snapshot" research. Proper consideration of location in all of its dimensions, then, is necessary for a three dimensional political science.

Each of the three dimensions has its own properties of permanence or lack thereof. Spatial or geographic location taken alone is fixed. By the same token, temporal or historic location is constantly changing. Cultural location falls somewhere in between; it appears fixed but actually changes in a gradual way. Taken separately, each has its own dynamic but, taken together, a different pattern emerges.

In fact, there is no such thing as location in one without location in the others. Thus, location is fixed, geo-historical location is not. The very passage of time brings with it locational change that is geographic as well as historical. So, for example, spatially the United States has been where it is since the founding of the republic. But, whereas in the 19th century that meant its geo-historical location was peripheral to the great events of world affairs, one of isolation from the old world, in the 20th century, that isolation disappeared as a result of technological change, giving it a new geo-historical location at the center of the world stage, by every new measure close to the "action" on every continent. Or, to take a more localized example, from the 1760s to the early 19th century Pittsburgh was considered the gateway to the west, but as the land frontier moved westward, it lost that geo-historical locational characteristic and was instead enveloped by the advancing urban-industrial frontier. By the time Abraham Lincoln visited the city on his way east in February 1861 to be inaugurated President, he felt it appropriate to use Pittsburgh as a platform from which to address those who were part and parcel of the new urban industrial age. A century later, Pittsburgh was commonly referred to as being located in the rustbelt, an economic backwater tied down by a decaying urban industrial plant and an inability to compete in world markets. Thus, its geo-historical location has regularly changed since its founding.

In this connection, culture acts as a mediating force responding to changes in geo-historical location or their consequences in such a way that enables people confronted by those changes to live with them, maintaining continuity yet absorbing change.

Political culture plays a significant role in all of this. As I have noted in my earlier research, political culture similarities often provide useful assistance in bridging general cultural gaps between groups (although) in some cases the reverse is true: i.e., political cultural differences will exacerbate cultural divisions). It is precisely because culture differs from style in that the former reflects deeper orientations to existence while the latter consists of more superficial manifestations of accepted behavior that political culture serves as a steadying force.

The distinction between political culture and political style has been blurred in recent years. For example, the new political orientations influencing American urban politics are often mistakenly referred to as political cultures. They are, rather, political styles or, perhaps, ideologies.

At the same time, expressions of political culture change as geo-historical location shifts. For example, it has been demonstrated that Minneapolis, Minnesota has purely a moralistic political culture as one is likely to find. Between World War I and the 1960s, this meant that the city was dominated by rather straight-laced views with regard to what are defined in American cultural politics as moral issues (e.g. gambling, prostitution, obscenity and pornography, abortion). After the "revolution" of the 1960s, most of that older political style fell by the wayside. Once those "illicit" activities were redefined as expressions of personal freedom, the cultural pacesetters in Minneapolis embraced the notion that they should be protected with moralistic fervor. Prostitution and displays previously considered obscene or pornographic were particularly allowed to flourish because they were now recognized as protected speech. It was only after the massage parlors and escort services became obvious breeding grounds form crime that there was again a shift in attitude toward them. While these shifts in style were apparent to the naked eye, what was not always apparent was the degree to which they were absorbed within the same political culture in each case, the overt changes were a result of a shift in the temporal location of the city.

Consequently, one of the major difficulties in the study of political culture is to distinguish between culture and style. Here, too, it should be apparent that the factor of geo-historical location can be of help in this regard. Shifts in location are first likely to result in shifts in style which may or may not ultimately induce cultural change.

In this book we will try to show how location in the three dimensions of space, time and culture, is an important factor in shaping American political life. We will emphasize geo-historical location as the location of a civil society in time (history) and space (geography) together. Location establishes the raw physical and ecological conditions with which settlers must come to terms; shapes the territorial limits of the society; orders the flow of human migration; and influences the forms of political institutions which are created to make use of the land. Each location is shaped by the deposits of peoples and cultures who settle it and by the varying ways they use the land over time. Although we can speak of national geo-historical location, what is notable about the United States is the rich diversity of geo-historical locations resulting from the variety of geographies, peoples, cultures and settlement periods within the nation. One's particular location also shapes the way one looks at the nation as a whole.

The Rhythm of the Generations

The rhythm of the generations is the central aspect of the time element in geo-historical location. It is a way of organizing the flow of history and of understanding the patterns of political events in terms of the human life cycle. While in many societies the beginnings of the generations have been lost in the mists of time, in the United States it is possible to know their foundings and to trace the subsequent generational cycles from those points. Since the settlement in America there have been twelve generations ranging in length from 26 to 43 years. This is roughly the period during which most people experience the productive phase of their life cycles. Each generation shares a common heritage and set of experiences and challenges which give it a distinct identity. At the beginning of a generation the challenges of the times are introduced as political issues. The issues are debated and when raised to the level of nationwide concerns, the generation undertakes a period of response to the issues followed by a period of consolidation which sets the stage for the next generation.

The generation born after World War II, for example, is faced with the task of maintaining a 200-year-old federal democracy in a vastly new historical order marked by the rise of new nations demanding a greater share of world resources, by new ideologies demanding new national and international political arrangements, and by the proliferation of nuclear weapons capable of rendering human life extinct. These, in turn, have affected the geo-historical location of the United States. The oceans are no longer a defense barrier, but instead, act as cover for submarines armed with nuclear weapons. World War II opened the skies as perhaps the most lethal new battleground.

The richness of the American continent in terms of agriculture, energy and minerals which allowed the United States to become the world's most affluent civilization and to handle many problems of justice by expanding the economic pie will take on new importance for the next several generations. both domestic and international politics will be affected by the degree to which America's standard of living will require external sources of natural resources like energy. New territorial disputes have broken out over off-shore boundaries and the exploitation of seabed resources. American agricultural abundance will, for better or worse, play an important political role in a world marked by widespread hunger. Finally, the need to preserve the environment and conserve resources will pressure American cultural habits and perhaps require new political policies capable of dealing effectively with issues of social justice and international peace in a time of rising expectations and uncertain solutions.

In the following chapters we will focus on the spatial, temporal and cultural aspects of location to see how they help shape American political behavior.¹¹

Location and Change

Every civil society has its own particular location in space and time. That location can be seen as resting on earlier locational "strata" which continues to influence contemporary life. In that sense, every polity may be said to rest upon its own "geological" base. The geology of each polity plays a fundamental role in dictating the context in which its political and social systems must operate, the broad limits of its discretion, the structuring of its political concerns, and the continuing character of the political interaction within it. In this chapter we will review some familiar history of American settlement but from a new perspective -- looking at old materials with new eyes.

While the cumulative effects of location in space and time are limiting in may ways, the very passage of time in a civilization oriented to change, such as that of the United States, also represents the opening of new opportunities. In one sense, at least, this is a new phenomenon. The opening of the modern age in the 17th century, which coincided with the settlement of English-speaking North America and the foundation of American civilization, not only initiated an epoch of change, but initiated a chain reaction that has accelerated the process of change. The result has been the virtual institutionalization of change in all modern societies, and most particularly in the United States. As change became institutionalized, the time lost its static character which, in premodern times, made its passage well-nigh imperceptible from generation to generation. Now it has become an almost visible force, opening new frontiers for human development in every generation.¹²

Brought down to concrete terms, the dynamics of geohistorical location (that is, location in space and time) change the effective positioning of every civil society, virtually every generation. No polity or community ever really "stands still." Changes in location make it necessary for American local communities to perpetually reconstitute themselves politically much as they must reconstruct themselves economically and physically. In that sense, the American novelist, Thomas Wolfe, was right when he wrote" "You can't go home again." Indeed, such changes can transform previously prosperous communities into depressed ones through no apparent fault of their own, especially in the case of communities that rely heavily on one type of economic activity which becomes outmoded by time.

The ghost town is a familiar feature in American history. A ghost town is one which lives off of a particular economic function for a few years or even a generation and then is emptied with it becomes obsolete because of economic or technological changes. In terms of its geographic position, it remains in the same place; but its temporal location shifts with disastrous consequence. It did not "keep up with the times." Hence "the times passed it by" and its inhabitants moved elsewhere, either for greater opportunity or simply in order to survive. We think of ghost towns as primarily associated with the mining industry, some of which became ghost towns because the mines played out. But the change in the price of gold, copper, or iron or the discovery of deposits more easily or cheaply mined elsewhere often played the same role.¹³

The other primary examples of ghost towns in the United States are the agricultural towns and villages that grew up in the nineteenth century to serve the surrounding farms and which were made outmoded by changing transportation and merchandising technologies in the twentieth century. Once the automobile came along it was no longer necessary for there to be a town within an easy walk or horseback ride of every farm. People could travel further in the same amount of time to secure supplies, while rising levels of prosperity and merchandising meant that there had to be larger concentrations of people to provide the new levels of consumer goods and services sought. Times changed and whole communities died out, becoming ghost towns in their own right.

The big cities of the United States are presently undergoing similarly drastic transformations, also as a result of changing times. Densely populated cities developed when there was a need for larger concentrations of workers to man industrial and commercial enterprises, while transportation technology required that those workers live relatively close to work sites, or at least to the railroad and streetcar lines that took them to work. Masses of new immigrants to the cities, just starting out, were willing to put up with conditions of population density and limited space or had no alternative but do do so. As people prospered and the automobile made it possible to travel longer distances to work, big cities lost population to the suburbs. Then cybernetic technology made even the necessity of gathering together less important in a growing number of fields. Each of these changes effectively changed the geohistorical location of the big cities as similar changes had transformed the position of mining and agricultural towns.¹⁴

Conversely, temporal changes of this nature also make it possible for backwater communities to transcend the limitations of past location by capitalizing on new potentialities. The mining towns of Colorado, for example, were on the cutting edge of the frontier in the late nineteenth century. Then the mines played out or became uneconomic. If they survived at all, they survived as backwaters for the first half of the twentieth century. After World War II, the new leisure-time activities of skiing and mountain recreation, coupled with the new developments in telecommunications, put them again on the cutting edge of American development, at least sufficiently to become vibrant if still small communities once again.¹⁵

The "historical geology" of social phenomena is such that there is some "beginning" or founding in every social order at the point where space and time are first linked in the life of a particular social system. The bedrock upon which the subsequent strata of human activity are deposited is located at the point where particular people first begin to function in systematic relationship to one another on a particular territory. The continued effects of that first linkage and their modification by the deposits of later human activity, the upheaval of subsequent events, and the simple erosion of time provide the framework within which social systems develop and, as such, constitute basic matter for social investigation.

Alexis De Tocqueville accurately described the importance of foundings in civil society and how studying the history of the United States of America offers us the opportunity to learn the whole story of a particular country and people:

When a child is born, his first years pass unnoticed in the joys and activities of infancy. As he grows older and begins to become a man, then the doors of the world open and he comes into touch with his fellows. For the first time notice is taken of him, and people think they can see the germs of the virtues and vices of his maturity taking shape.

That, if I am not mistaken, is a great error.

Go back; look at the baby in his mother's arms; see how the outside world is first reflected in the still hazy mirror of his mind; consider the first examples that strike his attention; listen to the first words which awaken his dormant power of thought; and finally take notice of the first struggles he has to endure. Only then will you understand the origin of the prejudices, habits, and passions which are to dominate his life. The whole man is there, if one may put it so, in the cradle.

Something analogous happens with nations. Peoples always bear some marks of their origin. Circumstances of birth and growth affect all the rest of their careers.

If we could go right back to the elements of the societies and examine the very first records of their histories, I have no doubt that we should there find the first cause of their prejudices, habits, dominating passions, and all that comes to be called the national character. We should there be able to discover the explanation of customs which no seem contrary to the prevailing mores, or laws which seem opposed to recognized principle, and of incoherent opinions still found here and there in society that hand like the broken chains still occasionally dangling from the ceiling of an old building but carrying nothing. This would explain the fate of certain peoples who seem borne by an unknown force toward a goal of which they themselves are unaware. But up till now evidence is lacking for such a study. The taste for analysis comes to nations only when they are growing old, and when at last they do turn their thoughts to their cradle, the mists of time have closed round it, ignorance and pride have woven fables round it, and behind all that the truth is hidden.

America is the only country in which we can watch the natural quiet growth of society and where it is possible to be exact about the influence of the point of departure on the future of a state.

At the time when Europeans first landed on the shores of the New World, features of national character were already clearly shaped; each nation had a distinct physiognomy; and since they had by then reached the state of civilization inducing meant to study themselves, they have left us a faithful record of their opinion, mores, and laws. We know the men of the fifteenth century almost as well as our own contemporaries. So America shows in broad daylight things elsewhere hidden from our gaze by the ignorance or barbarism of the earliest times.¹⁶

The United States provides one the very best settings available for the study of social and political systems from the geo-historical point of view because of its character as a "new-society." It is one of the few countries in which the interaction between space-time, political systems, and political processes can be traced "from the beginning" with reasonable accuracy and within a manageable time span. We possess detailed information about the development of this country from the days of the first settlers, and the entire process has taken place within a span of less than four centuries (or less than twelve generations). Scholars and scientists who study social phenomena in the United States are thus given an unparalleled opportunity to develop a multi-dimensional analysis of a society from its first foundations with a thoroughness that can be duplicated in few other parts of the world.

Frontier and Section:
The Political Geography of the United States

The American landscape including its lands, waters, topography, and climate has played an important part in the working out of the American experience.

1. by creating the conditions which the settlers of the land and subsequent generation have been able to exploit or have had to overcome through the conquest of successive frontiers.
2. by influencing the territorial limits of the United States.
3. by influencing the flow of migration across the land.
4. by influencing the shape of political institutions developed
5. to organize the land for human use.

The first settlers came to North America with the germ of what was to become a great political idea, but they brought that idea to a particular land. The character of that land; the way its rivers flow and the pattern of its mountain ranges; the quantity of rainfall in its various sections; the intensity of heat and cold; and the distribution of forest, prairie and desert; the abundance of its raw materials, flora and fauna; the richness of so much of its soil shaped the way those settlers, their children and those who came to join them, occupied the land and organized it socially and politically into the first continental nation-state in world history.

The Federalist put it in these terms:

It has often given me pleasure to observe, that Independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide-spreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions and watered it with innumerable streams for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters form a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities.¹⁷

Look at a map of North America and think a moment of how Americans perceive their land. Most Americans look at the land from east to west, a habit instilled by studying the history of settlement of their country which was essentially a movement from east to west. Americans who live on the west coast, however, look at the land from west to east, which significantly enough, parallels the way in which the western third of the country was settled after the initial arrival of the settlers from the east coast. Alaskans, a small but hardy breed, look southward to "the lower 48," just as Hawaiians look to "the mainland." Proverbially, the New Yorker sees the United States as 80 percent the five boroughs of the Big Apple, another 10 percent the surrounding suburban counties of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, and the remaining 10 percent divided more or less generally between the Wild West with Florida, California and Las Vegas looming large.¹⁸

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville already saw the United States (which at that time did no extend west of the Rocky Mountains or southwest of the Arkansas River) as an integrated whole. As a Frenchman looking at a map he did not begin with the cultural preconceptions that Americans bring with them. He could see North America falling into two roughly equal natural divisions, one encompassing the territories from which the waters flowed northward, i.e., the Hudson's Bay - Arctic Ocean - St. Lawrence River basins which became the nucleus of Canada and the other encompassing the southward, principally the Mississippi - Missouri - Ohio Rivers basin with the respective coasts attached to each. Based on this understanding, he predicted fifteen years in advance that the Americans would acquire the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to the Gulf of California, and what were then the northernmost territories of Mexico, now Texas and the American southwest. He believed that because those relatively empty lands which were part of a natural geographic extension of the Mississippi Valley, they could not long remain in the possession of another nation.

De Tocqueville was right. The force of American expansion absorbed those vast territories before the mid-century mark through purchase, annexation and the Mexican War. The country's response to the Mexican war itself was determined to a large extent by geography. New Englanders, who were most detached from the geographic situation, generally took a moral stand in opposition to the war as unnecessary and unjust. The settlers of the Mississippi Valley, north and south, with a few notable exceptions (including Abraham Lincoln), saw the war as absolutely necessary to secure their flanks. They saw the absorption of the new land as the most natural thin in the world.¹⁹ Standing in St. Louis, at approximately the point where the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers meet, one is likely to get a different sense of the coherence of things than when standing in Boston.

What was (and is) it about the land that had the most potent consequences for its settlement and political organization? First of all, there was its vastness. For Europeans, especially people from the British Isles, the sheer size of the continent was impressive. In 1783, when the United States and Britain signed the peace treaty ending the Revolutionary War, the territory that came under the American flag (888,655 square miles) was already larger than the twelve member European community established two hundred years later -- the British Isles plus all of Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, Italy and Greece put together. by 1819, after the Louisiana Purchase and the acquisition of Florida, the still infant republic was larger than all of Europe excepting European Russia and Romania. Today the United States is approximately the same size as all of Europe -- from the Atlantic to the Urals, as the expression goes.

Wyoming is larger than all of Great Britain; Texas is larger than France; California is larger than both Germanies combined; Indiana is larger than Austria, and smallish West Virginia is considerably larger than Switzerland. The United States now extends over eight time zones. When it is 1 PM in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Island, it is 6 AM in western Alaska. Only Russia has a larger expanse.

The land that was to become the United States was not only vast but open, that is, accessible from without and within. Indeed, it may be more than coincidence that the United States, which is the preeminently "open society," benefited first from geographic openness. Its Atlantic coast has many good deep-water and ice-free harbors and the coastal area is penetrated by many navigable rivers. The central part of the country is drained by the world's mightiest river system, that of the Mississippi and its tributaries, most of which were navigable in the 19th century when settlers first entered the basin in large numbers. While the country is divided by three major mountain systems, the Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevadas, all three are broken by broad passes as crucial points. Ease of movement, then, has been a hallmark of American geography.

A third geographic element in the shaping of American society is the country's diversity. Because of its geographic situation, the United States embraces every kind of climate from Arctic cold to sub-tropical and even tropical heat; from rain forests to the most rain free deserts, with almost every conceivable variety of land form and vegetation. This aspect contributed to the availability of and abundance of the many diverse resources needed to create a large, modern civilization and also provided a geographic undergirding to the human diversity which continues to characterize American society.²⁰

The shape of the land substantially influenced the way the settlers occupied it. Until 1759, North America was divided among four great powers: France, Britain, Spain and Russia. Geography shaped the role of each. The French had entered the continent through the broad St. Lawrence Gulf founding Quebec in 1608. Using the Great Lakes, they rapidly penetrated into the interior to link up with the Mississippi River system and acquire the entire Mississippi Valley down to the Gulf of Mexico during the 17th century. While the French established outposts wherever they raised their flag, the main attraction of the land to them was its capacity to produce furs. Consequently, their wide penetration, which in the 18th century sent them as far west as the Great Plains, did not lay the foundation for permanent settlement even though it gave them the major share of the continent. Thus, when the British were able to capture Quebec and Montreal, the two key centers of French Canada, the entire French empire in North America collapsed.²¹

The Spanish, who had established their empire in the central and southern parts of the western hemisphere in the early 16th century, turned northward from central Mexico and established their presence in what is now the American southwest by the end of that century. They consolidated their presence in the 17th, but did little more than establish outposts at the farthest end of the empire. In one last burst of energy, at the time of the American Revolution, they also settled California, partly in an effort to forestall the expected British and Russian moves in the same direction. Barely more than a generation later, they were to be displaced by the revolt of the indigenous inhabitants of greater Mexico.²²

Russian North America, today the State of Alaska, represented the culmination of another great pioneering sweep of modern times, the eastward movement of the Russians across Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries. After acquiring the vast Siberian lands for the Czar, the intrepid Russian explorers and pioneers crossed the Bering Strait and planted settlements on the North American continent which they would hold until 1867.²³

The farthest Russian penetration into North America was Fort Ross, approximately 90 miles north of San Francisco, on the Pacific coast (today Fort Ross State Park). It represented the culmination of four thousand years of western movement. In the 1820s, Fort Ross was the southern-most Russian outpost in North America. For a brief moment, it reflected the expansionist ambitions of certain Russian leaders, who saw in the still politically chaotic Pacific coast of North America of the early nineteenth century a chance to extend Russian hegemony southward in the face of rival British, American and Spanish claims. The Russian effort was brief and unsuccessful. It had no real support from Moscow and was confronted by intense opposition from the rival claimants. The Russians abandoned the fort in the 1830s withdrawing to Alaska where they were to sit for another thirty years until Secretary of State William Seward arranged to purchase that territory for the United States. Today, Fort Ross is a collection of restored log structures whose piquant history attracts visitors to a lovely section of the California coast.

In one sense, however, Fort Ross is far more significant than its brief history would indicate. In effect, it was at that point that the convergence of various elements of what we generally define as Western civilization brought to a culmination four millennia or more of expansion that ultimately embraced the whole globe.

Five thousand years before the founding of Fort Ross, the West Asian civilizations out of which western civilization was to spring, were reaching their height in the fertile crescent from the Nile to the Tigres and Euphrates valleys. A millennium and a half later, Israel emerged on the scene at the very western end of that region to give birth to Judaism which became the religious foundation of western civilization. Shortly thereafter, the Greeks, much influenced by the great civilizations of ancient West Asia, began the development of what was to become western philosophy and science, first in Asia Minor and then in southeastern Europe. Between the Semitic peoples of the Mediterranean coast and the Hellenic peoples of the Greek isles, what became western civilization was spread throughout the Mediterranean Basin during the course of the millennium immediately prior to the rise of Christianity.

Two thousand years ago, Christianity was born out of the Jewish people and within its first millennium synthesized its understanding of Jewish religious thought with the contributions of Greek civilization and spread throughout Europe. The energies of the West thus organized and released, the following millennium saw the Christianized Russians move eastward and the Christianized Spanish, French and British peoples move westward away from their European heartlands to colonize vast new territories and implant western civilization within them. The eastward movement of the Russians and the westward movement of the other European nations finally met after having girdled the globe in northern California at Fort Ross, thereby completing literally millennia of migration, settlement and cultural transformation whose consequences became quite apparent in the twentieth century as the entire globe acquired at least the external elements of western civilization.

Finally, there was British North America, territorially the smallest segment of the continent before 1759, but the most thoroughly settled and the most fully organized politically. Here, geography and politics intersect. For France, Spain and Russia, their North American possessions were outposts of empire, far removed from the centers of power in the mother country and not even of great interest to the centers of settlement in the colonial areas which had served as springboards for their advance. This was not so in the case of the settler who came to British North America. For them, the new continent became a vast frontier of expansion. The Atlantic coastal colonies were a natural extension of the British Isles. Moreover, instead of being settled as commercial or strategic outposts of a mother country, they were settled by people who came to stay and make their homes. For them, America was the center of the world, not London. Moreover, they were organized politically into what were, in effect, self governing dominions, linked with the mother country in a kind of imperial federation, not as in the case of the other possessions, mere colonies, politically dependent upon the motherland in every respect.²⁴

This combination of geography and politics proved irresistible. The British, significantly assisted by the British North Americans, brought about a culmination of two generations of struggle between Britain and France by eliminating the French as a significant presence in North America. While the Americans then proceeded to eliminate the British, they did so on a basis that so consolidated their own position that in the course of the next century, as they expanded westward, they proceeded to eliminate the French, Spanish and Russians in turn, leaving North America north of the Rio Grande essentially an English-speaking preserve. In this effort we see one important facet of politics -- the ability of people to use politics to concentrate their will and impose it upon vast territories and great people.

A century after the elimination of the French, the gross political boundaries of North America were essentially fixed. Even the boundaries of the sub-units of much of the continent were established with political configurations already outpacing the spread of settlement in certain areas. On the eve of the Civil War, sectionalism, the expression of social and political differences along geographic lines was a powerful political force.

The three original sections, New England, the Middle States and the South, had expanded westward as a result of the migration of their sons and daughters. The heirs of the Puritans had established a greater New England in upper New York State, northern Pennsylvania, the northern third of Ohio, Michigan, the northern corners of Indiana, northern and northwestern Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the northern two thirds of Iowa, northeastern Kansas, and Western Oregon with outposts in western Washington, and southern California.²⁵ The sons and daughters of the Middle States had occupied central Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, southern Iowa, northern Missouri, southwestern Wisconsin, eastern Nebraska, and the settled parts of central California.²⁶ While these two streams were often separated in their patterns of local settlement, in most cases they found themselves within the same states, a phenomenon that was repeated on the east coast as New Englanders began to settle in New York City in great numbers, attracted by the commercial possibilities of that metropolis. Thus, over time, they had grown together to become the North despite the internal differences that still divided them. As the North, they had established a west of their own including the old northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin) and the still barely settled trans-Mississippi west.

Meanwhile, the Southerners pushing due westward had established two wests of their own -- the old southwest (Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi) and the trans-Mississippi southwest. Both were tied tightly to the sold South through slavery, "the peculiar institution" which created a cohesiveness in the South, unequalled north of the Mason-Dixon line or the Ohio River.²⁷

Settlement from both the north and the south had leaped over the central sections of the trans-Mississippi west, still known then as "the great American desert," to establish chains of settlements on the Pacific coast. The great area in the middle, barely penetrated by permanent settlers in 1861 (except for the Mormons in Utah) and a few gold-seekers in Colorado, was to be settled essentially after the Civil War by a mixture of northerners and southerners quite different from that common to the pre-Civil War efforts.

Over a hundred years later, the end product of the first thrust of American settlement is still very visible. The South most clearly retains its identity as a separate section while, as we shall see, the North has three components -- the old northeast; the north's original west, that is to say those states settled after the adoption of the Constitution but before the Civil War, and the post-Civil War west. In the intervening century, the change in pattern of settlement was not simply the filling in of the vacant areas of 1861, but the transformation of the American population into an urban and then a metropolitan one, with all the essential political boundaries drawn and apparently fixed. Over 25 years have passed since then. While the nationwide pattern is generally the same, Americans have continued to move, in many cases along tried and true lines. At the same time, it was during these years that the migration to the Sunbelt became a flood, with so many northeasterners and midwesterners moving to Florida, the Gulf Coast, Texas, the southwestern desert states, California, and the Pacific Northwest. While slowed by the economic downturn in the oil-producing states in the early 1980s, the flow from Frostbelt to Sunbelt has continued overall.

At the same time, the centrifugal movement away from central cities continued into the countryside to create belts of rurban development, where very urbanized people settle in small towns or in the rural areas around them. A series of National Geographic maps prepared for the bicentennial of American independence graphically describe the results.

State and Local Parallels

Each state and locality has gone through a similar process of development conditioned by its own particular geographic characteristics. Take for example, the State of Illinois, located at the geo-historical crossroads of the United States, where North and South, East and West, and all the migratory streams meet. It first appears in the pages of Western history, in the mid-17th century as what the French called the Illinois country after the Indian tribe of that name which inhabited the land between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River along the banks of the Illinois River.²⁸

A land which sits astride the heart of the country's principal river system, where the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers meet, the outlines of its future borders can be seen in the rivers themselves (although only in retrospect, since the use of any particular set of "natural" boundaries is a matter of human choice). The rivers represent one of the two distinguishing features of the flat-to-gently rolling Illinois country. The other is the line separating the wooded areas of the southern and eastern United States from the prairies that mark the beginning of the greater West.²⁹

Looking at a map, the keen observer notes immediately how open Illinois is -- the very acme of openness in a country noted for openness. Rivers penetrate its every segment. To the northeast, the portage between the Great Lakes - St. Lawrence River system and the Mississippi River system is short and over a range of barely perceptible hills. It is no wonder that it became one of the main avenues of French exploration of the North American interior or that a century later it would become the jumping off point for the great western expedition, beginning with that of Lewis and Clark (1803-06). Yet in the hundred years between the time the French began their explorations and the state's conquest by Virginians during the Revolution, little had been done to settle the open Illinois country nor had any boundaries been fixed to give it meaning other than as a geographic term.

The Americans who came to settle and organize the land were the first to impose boundaries upon it. Illinois became part of the Indian Territory. In 1809 it became a territory in its own right, take the French corruption of the name of the principal Indian nation that had been located within its new borders. Finally in 1818, Illinois became a state. In each case, the change in political status was accompanied by a redefinition of boundaries. With statehood came the most successful negotiation of Illinois' history. The territory's representative in Congress was able to secure a northern boundary for the new state that gave it an outlet on Lake Michigan, essentially the area that is today metropolitan Chicago. this entitled it to fulfill its vital role as a bridge between east and west, north and south.

By 1818, the immigration to Illinois was in full tide. Politically, because of the Ohio River, Illinois is a northern state (which in its earlier days meant that slavery was prohibited within its boundaries by Congress regardless of local preference). Geographically, however, southern Illinois is due west of Virginia, hence the first waves of migration came into the new state's southern reaches and were mostly southerners. The rest of the state was settled between 1818 and 1861. Until the mid-1820s, southerners were the most prominent immigrants to Illinois. Then for a decade people from the middle states were dominant. After 1835, the opening of lands in northern Illinois (a result of the Black Hawk War) led to an influx of New Englanders. Thus in no more than 50 years all three major native population segments of the United States had entrenched themselves in the state, making its internal political life quite as complex as that of the United States as a whole, but within a much smaller territory.

The political life within those boundaries had to reflect the various differences. The history of the establishment of its 102 countries encapsulizes its internal political development. New counties were erected to give new migrants a chance to control their own local affairs. Within those counties where New Englanders settled, townships were established (though the state constitution had to be changed to allow it, in a compromise struck between the Yankees and the southerners in 1848). Otherwise the counties were governed as units without the benefit of such sub-division.

One hundred and twenty years later, Illinois exhibits the impact of urbanization and metropolitanization within an already completely settled and politically organized civil society. The pattern of the Chicago metropolitan area shows this in greater detail, particularly in the way that territorial divisions can be used to achieve political goals, in this case the goals of local self-government on a scale deemed appropriate by the decision-makers involved.

The smallest communities and the most comprehensive civil societies are alike in that they are shaped by their geohistorical location. No understanding of American politics in any arena -- national, state, or local -- is possible without taking that into consideration. In the following chapters we will have occasion to explore the full meaning of this in detail.

Summary

Location, understood as location in space, in time and in culture, is the critical concept to be explored in this book. It is argued that the beginning of understanding of a polity and its political system is understanding its three-dimensional location. Particular attention is paid to cultural location and its relationship to society and the individual personality. Special attention is paid to the relationship between culture and religion, and ethnicity.

The changing pattern of this tri-dimensional location is to be found in the rhythm of the generations, a theme also introduced in this chapter. A theory of the generational rhythm is presented and outlined. With this in place we turn to look at the relationship between location and change, in general, and more specifically in the United States where the combined influence of the continuing American frontier and American sectionalism play a special role in shaping the changing location of the United States.

The chapter concludes with an outline of these patterns at work in the United States and in the State of Illinois, a good example of a state located at the cultural and geohistorical crossroads of the country.

Notes

1. See, for example, Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966); William Etkin, Social Behavior from Fish to Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Stanform M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott, "Territoriality: A Neglected Sociological Dimension," Social Problems, 15 (Fall 1967); Jean Gottman, "The Evolution of the Concept of Territoriality," Social Science Information, 14 (1975), 29-47.

2. See also Richard Kluckhohn, ed., Culture and Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1962); A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, 1963); Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), and The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).

3. Cf. Harry Eckstein, "A Culturalist Theory of Political Change," American Political Science Review (September 1988).

4. Adapted from Daniel J. Elazar and Joseph Zikmund II, eds., The Ecology of American Political Culture (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), Introduction.

5. Edward Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).

6. See Max Kadushin, Organic Thinking: A Study in Rabbinic Thought (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1938).

7. See A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Nature of a Theoretical Natural Science of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1948).

8. For some important social science discussions of religion in America, see Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor (New York: Doubleday, 1963); Rodney Stark, Religion and Society in Tension (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965); Andrew M. Greeley, Unsecular Man (New York: Dell 1972); William C. McCready with Andrew M. Greeley, The Ultimate Values of the American Population (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976); Theodore Caplow, et al., All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown's Religion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trail (New York: Seabury, 1975); Robert S. Billheimer, ed., Faith and Ferment: An Interdisciplinary Study of Christian Beliefs and Practices (Minneapolis: Augusburg, 1983); Davison Hunter, American Evangelicalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rugers University Press, 1983); Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); A Nation of Believers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1959); Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1984); Religion and Republic: The American Circumstance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Religion and Social Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: The Dial Press, 1970).

9. Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 51.

10. For an analysis by political scientists of the national political culture in comparative setting, see Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). Also see Daniel J. Boorstein, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965); Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Louis Hartz, The Foundings of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964).

11. See also Elsworth Huntington, Mainsprings of Civilization (New York: Wiley, 1945), for a discussion of influences of location and climate on social organization.

12. See Kevin Lynch, What Time is This Place? (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1972); Daniel J. Boorstein, The Republic of Technology: Reflections On Our Future Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, The Arrow of Time (London: W.H. Allen, 1990).

13. On the decline of mining and agricultural towns, see Lewis E. Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966); Carle Clark Zimmerman, Outline of American Rural Sociology (Cambridge, Mass.: Phillips Book Store, 1946); Robert Athearn, The Mystic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); Marshall Sprague, Money Mountain: The History of Cripple Creek Gold (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953).

14. See Daniel J. Elazar, Building Cities in America (Lanham, Md.: Hamilton Press, 1987).

15. See, for example, From Peak to Peak, the bimonthly magazine on the Front Range communities, most of which went through this cycle. The author also noted this phenomenon in unpublished field notes.

16. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Schocken Books, 1961).

17. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist, No. 2., Clinton Rossiter, ed. (New York: Mentor, 1961).

18. The New Yorker and other publications have published classic "maps" showing these different perspectives. See also Lynch, What Time is This Place; E. Relph, Place and Placenessness (London: Pion, 1976); Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of Sections in American History (New York: Holt, 1932); Charles O. Paullin, Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie, 1932); Ramesh D. Dikshit, "Geography and Federalism," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 61 (March 1971), 97-115.

19. O.B. Faulk and J.A. Stout, Jr., eds., The Mexican War: Changing Interpretations (Chicago: Sage Books, 1973); Nathaniel W. Stephenson, "Texas and the Mexican War," from Chronicles of America, vol. 24 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921).

20. David M. Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).

21. See Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, 9 vols., several editions (Boston, 1867-92); James P. Gibson, ed., European Settlement and Development in North America: Essays on Geographical Change in Honor and Memory of Andrew Hill Clark (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1901); Louise P. Kellog, Early Narratives on the Northwest (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1959).

22. On Spain in early America, see Arthur P. Whitaker, The Spanish American Frontier, 1783-1795 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927); French Ensor Chadwick, The Relations of the United States and Spain (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1941); Arthur P. Whitaker, Spain and the Defense of the West: Ally and Liability (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).

23. On Russia in early America, see Howard I. Kushner, Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975); Ronald J. Jensen, The Alaska Purchase and Russian-American Relations (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).

24. On the British settlement of North America and the American colonial experience, see Parkman, France and England in North America; S.E. Johnson, A History of Emigration from the United Kingdom to North America, 1763-1912 (London, 1913); Thomas Brindley, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the American Economy (Cambridge, England, 1954); Rowland T. Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America 1790-1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953).

25. On the Yankee migration, see Steward H. Holbrook, The Yankee Exodus (New York: Macmillan, 1950); James P. Gibson, ed., European Settlement and Development in North America; Merle Curti, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier Country (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1959); Louis K. Matthews, Expansion of New England (New York: Russell and Pursell, 1936); Arnold M. Rose, "The Mormon Church and Utah Politics: An Abstract of a Statistical Study," American Sociology Review, VII (1942); James D. Holmquist, ed., They Chose Minnesota: A Survey of the State's Ethnic Groups (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1981) p. 56; T.J. Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy: The Founding of American Civilization (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1947); W. Lloyd Warner, et al., "Yankee City" series, The Social Life of a Modern Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1941), The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1945).

26. On the Middle States migration, see Eric F. Goldman, "The Middle States Regionalism and American Historiography: A Suggestion," in Eric F. Goldman, ed., Historiography and Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941); A.B. Hollingshead, Elmtown's Youth (New York: J. Wiley, 1949); John R. Seely, et al., Community Chest (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957); T.J. Wertenbaker, The Founding of American Civilization: The Middle Colonies (New York: C. Scribner, 1938); William Lloyd Warner, Democracy in Jonesville (New York: Harper, 1949); Curti, The Making of an American Community.

27. On the Southern states migration, see W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960); L.C. Gray, "History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860" in Contributions to American Economic History, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., Carnegie Institute, 1933); T.J. Wertenbaker, The Old South: The Founding of American Civilization (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1942); James W. Silver, Mississippi: A Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963); Warner, Democracy in Jonesville.

28. Ray Billington, "The Frontier in Illinois History," in Journal of th Illinois Historical Society (Spring 1950); Theodore C. Pease, The Story of Illinois (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947); Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide, originally compiled and written by the Federal Writers' Project for the State of Illinois, revised 1946 (Chicago: Munsell, 1936); Illinois Centennial Commission, The Centennial History of Illinois, Clarence W. Alvord, ed. (Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1918); Daniel J. Elazar, Cities of the Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1970); Paul M. Angle Here I Have Lived: A History of Lincoln's Springfield 1821-1865 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1950).

29. On Illinois geography, see Edward L. Mullin and Ronald R. Boyce, ed., Geography and Spatial Interaction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980); Ronald R. Boyce and Seymour Z. Mann, Urbanism in Illinois: Its Nature, Importance and Problems (Carbondale, Ill.: Public Affairs Research Bureau, Southern Illinois University, 1965).

Elazar Papers Index / JCPA Home Page / Top of Page