In Natures Metropolis, author William Cronon argues against Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier thesis in favour of a new con

First and Second Nature in William Cronons Natures Metropolis

Chris Watt

HIST 256

2004

In Natures Metropolis (1991), historian William Cronon argues against Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis in favour of a new conception of the growth of Chicago, its hinterland, and the Great West. How did Chicago become Natures Metropolis? What does Natures Metropolis mean? It is first necessary to understand what Cronon means by first nature and second nature. The crux of Cronons argument lies in the interplay of first nature: the upper Midwests natural endowment of resources, waterways and climatic zones that virtually pre-ordained Chicagos rise to metropolitan prominence, according to many of the citys deterministic 19th century boosters, and second nature: the artificial human economy, of which the city was the most visible expression, that was superimposed on the natural environment through the spread of associated transportation, communication, and commercial networks and relationships. The fusion of first and second nature promoted the growth of Chicago, which, in turn (in contrast to the Frontier Thesis), both promoted and fed off the growth of Chicagos hinterland. While the natural environment played a critical role in Chicagos growth, the logic of capital, which was the thrust behind the metastasis of second nature that incorporated city and hinterland, also linked Chicago to the Eastern commercial world. Chicago didnt become the continents central metropolis, as its boosters had hoped; instead, Cronon argues that Chicago became a conduit for the exchange of Western resources and Eastern money, the peripheral site where the boundaries of two systemson small scale, Chicago and its outlying regions; on a larger scale, American Northeast as city and the American West as frontierbecame a single grand-scale ecological and economic unit. Chicago acted as a hub, facilitating the flow of traffic between hinterland and city, between first and second nature, thus influencing production and consumption from Iowa to Europe.

Hidden beneath the higher-order second nature rail, grain and meat institutions for which Chicago acted as a production and transport hub were the first nature natural advantages that attracted early land speculators and provided a subject for booster rhetoric. Boosters, who often had a financial interest in trumpeting the natural virtues of their city, believed that climate, soils, vegetation, transportation routes and other features made some cities destined for urban greatness. A great Western city would emerge, American boosters believed, but where? In 1880, Chicago newspaper editor William Bross captured the booster spirit well, and praised Chicago as the one. Nature, it is believed, or, to speak more reverently, He who is the Author of Nature, selected the site of this great cityand hence her future will not be subject to those causes which have paralyzed or destroyed many of the cities of past ages.

According Jesup Scott, a Chicago booster, the citys access to the Great Lakes put it in a prime position, for the lakes seemed to have been designed by no less an architect than God with the utmost availability for the purposes of trade in mind; their waters extend[ed] from the heart of the continent and the northern limits of agriculture to the great markets of the Atlantic. The regions forests, meadows and geological characteristics all pointed to Chicagos future wealth. The second group of regional characteristicstransportation routes and the potential for access to marketsunderscored the ultimately utilitarian concerns of the boosters: Chicagos claim to natural transportation lay principally in its harbor and canal corridor. But as Cronon points out, if water-based transportation routes alone dictated what Midwestern city would become Natures Metropolis, then St. Louis would earn the title, for it was located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, in a position to draw on resources to its north and west, while Chicagos water geography was comparatively anemic. Environmental challenges to economic growth are important for understanding the critical merger of first and second nature that fed Chicagos growth and brought its rural surroundings under the citys influence, and will be discussed in greater detail below.

The point regarding Chicagos boosters, according to Cronon, is that they saw the growing settlement not as it was but as it could be. A second characteristic was identifiable in the rhetoric and economic theories issued by many of Chicagos promoters and prophets: while the optimism of booster rhetoric may have championed the impression that Natures Metropolis would almost build itself regardless of human influence, the boosters also pointed out that regional resources presented only the potential for economic development and urban growth. Thus, the burden of fulfilling Chicagos metropolitan destiny was partially conferred on the builders who heeded the boosters call; it was understood that nature would combine with the progress of human population to call forth a great metropolis to lead the Great West. The stakes were high, because the future of the Great West was seen as inseparable from the growth of its first great metropolis; the relevant metaphor was the empire of classical antiquity, radiating from Rome. Booster rhetoric thus serves an important purpose for Cronon: while Turner saw the city as a final expression of the frontier energiescities being the end of the frontierthe boosters recognized not just that the citys growth was fueled by a regions rural resources, but that urban markets made rural development possible. So, the prophecies of Chicagos boosters provide a historical analogue for Cronons chosen theoretical contextvon Thunens Isolated Statewhich exerts far-reaching market forces on the hinterland that surrounds the city. While the Isolated State surely neglects to take into account the sheer expansiveness and complexity of the second nature networks that merged East and West in Chicago, according to Cronon, 19th century Chicago and its hinterland bore an uncanny resemblance to von Thunens ringed model of interregional zones, which were connected by their mutually-supportive economic functions. In von Thunens Isolated State, a ring of intensive agriculture encircles a city; beyond this ring is another ring, dedicated to extensive agriculture; and then a zone for livestock and lumber; and finally, the zone of the hunters, where, in the case of Chicago and the Great West, the wholesale slaughter of the bison population created space for the introduction of cattle, to say nothing of farmers, miners, and lumbermen. In applying von Thunens abstraction to the real history of Chicago and the Great West, Cronon points out that the origins of the ecological characteristics that defined each zone were found in the ecosystems that had assigned pine trees to the north woods and bison to the Great Plains; that is, in first nature. But, each was no less affected by its distance from the city and its ability to pay the transport costs of getting there; that is, by the intricate and rapidly expanding web of the second nature human economy. The community on Lake Michigan began as a fringe settlement located in an outer zone centered by the metropolitan cities of the American Northeast and Europe, but booster rhetoric fired capital investment in Chicago, and continent-wide commerce allowed the city to command its own set of regional zones and become the metropolis of the frontier-turned-hinterland over the last 70 years of the 19th century.

How did the builders of Chicagos railroad, grain, and livestock institutions contribute to the transformation of a given resources real, first nature identity into an abstract identity centered on the resources final value as a commodity? For the destiny of Natures Metropolis to be realized, it was first necessary for Chicagos builders to overcome local natural deficiencies with second nature ingenuity. Cronon points to other lakeside cities with comparable transportation advantages, such as Cleveland, Toledo, and Milwaukee. But in Chicago in the 1830s and 1840sbefore the railroads were laid down in the regionthe basic advantages offered by the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal and the Hudson River were undermined by a first nature that at times seemed unwilling to cooperate. South-flowing currents in Lake Michigan led to silt accumulation in the Chicago River that limited navigation of the river to all but the smallest boats and inhibited efforts to maintain an adequate harbour. Land-based transportation was no less problematic: while glaciation had left Illinois flat, it also left the region poorly drained. Poor drainage, the natural cycle of the seasons, and the limited volume of land-based trade meant wagons offered few economies of scale, and so set well-defined limits to how far [and how often] one could afford to travel in them. Conditions for commercial exchange in the city itself were far from immune from the sometimes-negative effects of first nature: people from the country never thought of coming to Chicago during the reign of mud, except for very urgent reasons.

Boosters, builders, and other market actors may have favoured Chicagos water-based transportation advantages in spite of the harbours inadequacies, but the associated mud and land-based transportation disadvantages, in addition to other then-insurmountable inevitabilities of the seasons, limited the full commercial exploitation of these locational factors by hindering access to and from the market. First, Chicago attempted to improve the harbor in 1835 by cutting a channel across the sand bar that blocked access to the Chicago River, protecting the harbour with piers that extended hundreds of feet into the lake. In addition, Chicago combated the citys drainage problems by laying down wooden planks on streets that were prone to clogging by mud. In an even greater feat that testified to the faith in second nature to re-order the landscape of first nature, in 1849 Chicago initiated an effort to overcome the flooding problems caused by the high water-table level on which the city was built by launching a decades-long effort to raise the city itself.

While Chicagos access to Lake Michigan ensured low prices for eastern goods and high prices for western goods, the Chicago would have become a metropolis had the regions builders not sought other ways of re-ordering the landscape through the creation artificial commercial corridors. The most important form taken by these artificial corridors was the railroad, which crisscrossed the region and further linked hinterland to Chicago and Chicago to the East, thereby becoming the unnatural instrument of a supposedly natural destiny. While a complete review of Cronons assessment of the railroads impact on the Great West is beyond the scope of this review, it is important to note certain aspects of the influence had on the Great West by this most critical example of second nature. First, the railroad liberated market actors from geography and shrank the perceptual universe of North America. Whereas trade once ground to a halt between November and April, the railroad ensured that regular year-round access to the market could be had by anyone with financial wherewithal or goods to sell. The speed with which the railroad moved goods and people from point to point within the region and throughout the continent altered conceptions of how long it took to travel between these points; railroads increased the cost of time, volume of trade and expectations of the reliability of transportation services while decreasing the cost of distance. In tandem with the development of the telegraph, the lines of which often followed those of the railroad, the railroad virtually eliminated the imperatives of first nature by replacing it with a system that required standardized time in the form of the mechanical clock and which seemed to bring the Great West, Chicago and New York closer together. According to Cronon, the end result was that railroad passengers and market actors came to expect the safety and clockwork regularity of an artificial universe. The logic that created and sustained this universe was the logic of capital - capital that was invested in rail on an unprecedented scale and concentrated in the hands of an emerging set of corporate barons before gradually proliferating through the entire economy. While an extensive discussion could be held regarding the causes of and advantages enjoyed by Chicago-based railroads due to its favourable rate structures, suffice it to say that the relationship between fixed costs and variable costs and competition between rail and lake transportwhich was not only cheap enough to serve as an inducement for shippers to select Chicago rail instead of the few, more expensive railroads that bypassed Chicago and its harbour altogether, but also minimized prices of east-bound rail out of Chicago as wellcombined to give Chicago price advantages over other Midwestern cities. Railroads high fixed costs meant that operators benefited more from the sale of longer fares than shorter ones; New York was the terminus of most of the east-bound roadsmany of which were owned by eastern investorsthat passed through Chicago. East of the city, the low-cost, high-volume roads were known as trunk lines, and followed a tight corridor across the 900 miles to New York. But to the west, the roads radiated from Chicago in myriad directions before resuming their western course. Fan lines found their eastern terminals in Chicago, and trunk lines their western. Locational and capital-related factors made Chicago the peripheral entrepot for the movement of goods and money between two different economic systems, both of which had a vested interest in access to each others markets. The differences between trunk and fan lines dictated that Chicago acted as a collection point for east-bound goods of a western origin and a distribution point for west-bound goods of an eastern origin. According to Cronon, the intersection of trunk and fan was the essential geographic fact of Chicagos location. But it was also a critical example of second, constructed nature, fuelled by capital investment, that complemented first nature so well that the very constructed nature of this human imposition on the natural environment became natural, or second nature, to those who lived and worked in the areas that were growing under its expanding influence. As the midcontinents primary wholesale market for eastern and western goods, Chicago became the railroad capital of the world during the 19th century. And the railroad became the chief instrument for introducing the logic of capital that would propel greater linkages and growth between hinterland, Chicago, and the East by instituting further abstract, second nature changes in the grain and livestock industries.

The grain and livestock industries added intricate detail to the artificial, second nature universe whose first corridors were laid down by the railroad. Two developments provide the best indications of these changes. With respect to grain, the grain elevator and grading systems shuttled crop into the symbolic realm of capital so that the first nature origins of the object became obscured not by the rapid transaction of grain itself, but by speculation on future grain prices. This necessary fiction bound east and west to the same symbolic order, centered by Chicago and its Board of Trade, and remade the agricultural landscape of the Great West. Secondly, the rise of the Chicago-based meat industry, whose focal point was the stockyards, had much in common with the grain trade in that the meat industry too sought to systematize product and market, thus liberating it from geography and nature.

While water-based transportation of cereal crops in sacks sustained ownership rights of the grower until the final sale partly because the produce itself remained symbolically owned by first nature, the railroad elaborated the second nature grid-based order and commodification of the prairie by lowering transportation costs and by encouraging new settlements in the areas they serviced, resulting in an explosion in Chicagos receipt of grain. But in order to handle the influx of grain, new methods of grain-trade management and technologies were required. The grading system emerged out of efforts to centralize the Chicagos actual physical market in the form of the Board of Trades Exchange, and restructured the purchase and sale of cereals by providing a uniform set of regulations that categorized grain not by its unique characteristics or the farm from which it originated, but by the application of abstract labels that stood for obstensibly homogenous categories. The sheer volume of grain that passed through Chicago made operators fairly certain they could honor the receipts that were issued in place of regular payment for grain, thus the receipts themselves came to stand as a form of currency. Whereas sacks were the key to the water-based transportation system, the first nature of grain merged with, and became subsumed by, second nature at Chicagos grain elevators, which allowed grain and corn to behave not like physical objects of nature, but like liquids: golden streams that flowed like water.

To bring this to a point, the artificial partitioning that made grading systems and grain elevators work also made futures trading, perhaps the most artificial aspect of Chicagos grain institution, possible; and futures trading brought the east and Chicagos hinterland into a market that was progressively distancing itself from nature. Telegraphic information increased the efficiency of regional markets by giving traders through the country speedier access to the same news; as a result, a new market geography that had less to do with the soils or climate of a given locality than with the prices and information flows of the economy as a whole, was further inscribed on the continental landscape.

The grain trade and meat industry were predicated on partitioning. On a theoretical level, second nature meant breaking down first nature into parts that were virtually unrecognizable from their whole. On a practical level, the logic of capital also dictated that this partitioning would be followed by a sort of economic alchemy that recombined a given product of nature into its most marketable form. With respect to the meat industry, the location at which this took place was Chicagos stockyards: the ultimate meeting place of country and city, West and East, producer and consumerof animals and their killers.

A full discussion of the influence had by market forces on the Great Plains might show here how the extermination of the regions bison population created space for ecological changes which turned grassland into prairie that was more hospitable to cattle, or how, in turn, the feedlot system grew out of this first intersection of first and second nature and enabled farmers to improve efficiency and the speed with which they brought their livestock to the market for slaughter. But, while Chicagos rise to prominence was reinforced by strategies that made it easier for stock raisers to direct their business toward Chicago, the city became the greatest and most integrated meat market the world ha[d] ever seen on the strength of a strategic turn to dressed beef by Chicagos packers, which went beyond grain and lumber in proliferating the logic of the market, and which brought the entire nationand Great Britain as wellinto Chicagos hinterland.

Again, the principle strategy here was partitioning. The historical precedent for the logic behind dressed beef was supplied by the disassembly line, which was first used in Cincinnati and was later perfected in Chicago. Disassembly lines required the division of human labour: each worker attended to a particular step in the process of cleaning and gutting a pig, which hung from one eight points on a large horizontal wheel. The primary benefit of the division of labour was that it allowed packers to accelerate the rate at which workers handled hogs, and led to specialized ways of dealing with each constituent body part. As a result, formerly wasted body parts became commercial products: lard, glue, brushes, candles, soaps. Chicagos railroads enabled the city to create a vast pork hinterland that extended all the way across the corn region of Illinois and Iowa, and the city surpassed Cincinnati in pork packing during the winter of 1861-62. During the 1860s, capital investment by Chicagos pork packers grew 400%, but seasonal variations in pork packing became more apparent as firms built factories that elaborated upon the first steps taken towards mechanization through processes like the disassembly line. The construction of specialized factories meant that capital sat idle during the warmer months when pork packing was impractical. However, Chicagos railroads and geographical location eventually allowed the citys pork packers to mitigate the effects of nature by exploiting the regions growing ice trade: ice came to the city by rail from lakes surrounding the city in Illinois and Indiana, and between the years preceding the Civil War and the 1880s, Chicagos July pork receipts rose from a tenth of Decembers receipts, to over one half.

Refrigerated railroad cars, the next step in the merger of first and second nature, made possible the continent-wide distribution of Chicagos dressed beef, and contributed to the further systematization of an industry that liberated animal flesh from nature and geography. According to Cronon, beef dressed in Chicago was cheaper than beef that was shipped live and slaughtered in the east for two reasons: first, refrigeration eliminated the problems associated with shipping live animals, like death or weight loss in transit; second, refrigeration meant that shippers could fill their cars with nothing but meat, thus eliminating the surcharge paid on the transport of a live steer, of which some 45% was unusable. Dressed beef had a competitive advantage because it generated less freight charges. This competitive advantage had far-ranging implications and effectively led to the artificial and abnormal centralization of Americas meat packing industry: by 1889, four Chicago firms controlled the 90% of the beef slaughtered in Chicago, and the spread of Chicagos dressed beef hinterland cut into New Yorks market share. At one end of the equation, the refrigerated car bore a resemblance to the grain elevator in that it partitioned a natural material into a multitude of standardized commodities, like Chicagos No. 1 cattle, which were raised in Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, and Indiana, and No. 2, from Colorado and Montana. At the other end, Chicagos price advantage and the refrigerated car made it cheaper, for example, for a Long Island butcher to purchase meat from a Chicago-affiliated branch warehouse than from a wholesale slaughterhouse in nearby New York City.

Again, the break with nature that began with partitioning resulted in the recombination of natural material by economic alchemy that transformed waste into marketable forms. The economies of scale enjoyed by Chicagos large-scale meat packers allowed firms to propel the disassembly line toward its most elaborate development, turning a single creaturea hog or a steerinto dozens and then hundreds of commoditieslike oleomargarine, bouillon, brushes, combs, gut strings, stearin, pepsin, and even canned pork and beans. Because no small butcher could afford the capital investment required to work on such a small level, and because the low price of dressed beef meant that profit was earned from the sale of these by-products, the dominance of Chicagos packers was reinforced. Not only did Chicagos packers annihilate space by clearing room for their beef in otherwise far-flung markets brought into the fold of Natures Metropolis, they also influenced consumption by selling products which consumers would never have purchased, let alone eaten, in their original form.

Thus we return to Cronons crucial notion of forgetting. While city and hinterland were brought closer together by capital, fueling growth and changing landscapes, the corporate linkages and integration that brought ecosystems and communities together also obscured the act of killing, and thus obscured the act of birth: meat became a neatly wrapped package one bought at the market. Nature did not have much to do with it. For Cronon, the most significant expression of forgetting occurred in mail-order catalogues for Chicago-based retail outlets. This purest expression of the products and messages for sale in Chicago fostered a common culture across a common landscape while also obscuring the first nature origins of the thousands of products contained within its pages. Catalogues issued by Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck underscore the two critical, associated features of Cronons argument. If the metropolis is a human construction, and nature is of the world that the metropolis banished from memory, than how can we resolve the apparent contradiction in the title of Natures Metropolis that Cronon bestows on Chicago, a contradiction that seems to point to the very Frontier Thesis that Cronon seeks to refute? The answer, of course, lies in the intersection of first and second nature. Natures Metropolis was not a testament of victory over savagery; rather, it was the expression of relationships that connected people in city and hinterland and attached new significance to the places in which they livedoften with mixed consequences. Cronons interpretation suggests that the mail-order catalogue may ultimately be read as a map of capital, of second nature. The catalogue is, in its own right, an example of the partitioning and recombination of constituent parts, intrinsic to the economic order imposed on the landscape by the logic of capital. But if each permutation of second nature is accompanied by a new degree of forgetfulness, Cronons argument is more significant than first imagined. Cronon is not a didactic historian; his argument is not an indictment of capitalism. But by locating both the tendency to grow and the tendency to forget in the logic that spawned Chicago, his argument serves as an act of remembrance that applies to the whole world that was Chicagos hinterland, and resolves for his readers the contradiction of Natures Metropolis by dissolving that which disguises the long chain stretching from metropolis to hinterland and finally to nature itself.

William Cronon, Natures Metropolis, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) p. 55, 73, 264. Cronons idea of forgetfulness, which is a product of second nature that obscures the symbiotic relationship between first and second nature, will be discussed at the conclusion of this essay.

Ibid, p. 264.

Ibid, p. 269.

Ibid, p. 35-37.

Ibid, p. 35.

Ibid, p. 35.

Ibid, p. 35.

Ibid, p. 37.

Ibid, p. 34.

Ibid, p. 41.

Ibid, p. 41.

Ibid, p. 48

Ibid, p. 265.

Ibid, p. 265.

Ibid, 266.

Ibid, p. 266

Ibid, p. 56-57.

Ibid, 57-59.

Ibid, p. 58.

Ibid, p. 58.

Ibid, p. 58

Ibid, p. 73.

Ibid, p. 74-76.

Ibid, p. 76-79. Perhaps the most striking and pervasive, yet subtle second nature re-ordering of original first nature conceptions of time occurred in 1883, when the railroad countries carved up the continent into four time zones, thus replacing the hundreds of local times that communities used to set clocks with standard time. Also, in addition to allowing passengers to break free from the travel and trade limitations imposed by geography, the railroad also served as yet another major example, after the steamboat, of the power of human ingenuity to overcome the restrictive relationship between energy sources and movement. (80) An important comparison can be made between the displacement of animal or human-based energy as a source for transportation in favour of the more efficient fossil fuel, and the removal of grain or animal products from the natural realm through the imposition of abstract grading systems and the drive towards maximum efficiency in the preparation of diverse livestock-related goods for sale.

Ibid, p. 81.

Ibid, p. 84-87.

Ibid, p.90.

Ibid, p. 83.

Ibid, p. 90.

Ibid, p. 90.

Ibid, p. 85.

Ibid, p. 145-147.

Ibid, p. 259.

Ibid, p. 102, 109-110, 114.

Ibid, p. 116.

Ibid, p. 113.

Ibid, p. 121.

Ibid, p. 212.

Ibid, p. 219-224.

Ibid, p. 247, 238.

Ibid, p. 228-229.

Ibid, p. 230.

Ibid, p. 230.

Ibid, p. 231.

Ibid, p. 259.

Ibid, p. 236.

Ibid, p. 238.

Ibid, p. 244, 247.

Ibid, p. 236, 244.

Ibid, p. 250-251.

Ibid, p. 251.

Ibid, p. 252.

Ibid, p. 256-257

Ibid, p. 340.

Ibid, p. 339.

Ibid, p. 340.