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The Fertile Verge: Creativity in the United States

By Daniel J. Boorstin

FOR THE SECRET ALCHEMY OF INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY - the mystery which opens the Book of Genesis - we are not likely to nd a formula in this, the rst meeting of the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress. But of the several kinds of creativity, the least secret, the most public, the most discussible is social creativity. The assignment given me this evening creativity in the United States - while much vaster than creativity in Mark Twain, William James, Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollack, or Aaron Copland, is more open to our scrutiny. I have chosen to focus on some remarkable creations of community - institutions that have been given a new life here.

American creativity, I will suggest, has ourished on what I called the Fertile Verge. A verge is a place of encounter between something and something else. America was a large of verges - all sorts of verges, between kinds of landscape or seascape, between stages of civilization, between ways of thought and ways of life. During our rst centuries we experienced more different kinds of verges, and more extensive and more vivid verges, than any other great modern nation. The long Atlantic coast, where early colonial settlements ourished, was, of course, a verge between land and sea. Every movement inward into the continent was a verge between the advanced European civilization and the stone-age culture of the American Indians, between people and wilderness. The earliest ourishing of a new American civilization was in New England and in Virginia - both enjoying the commerce of the sea.

As cities became sprinkled around the continent, each was a new verge between the ways of the city and those of the countryside. As immigrants poured in from Ireland, Germany,

and Italy, from Africa and Asia, each group created new verges between their imported ways and the imported ways of their neighbors and the new-grown ways of the New World. Each immigrant himself lived the verge-encounter between another nation's ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, and living and the American ways.

In ancient, more settled nations, uniformity was idealized. The national pride of Englishman, Frenchman, German, or Italian was a pride in the special genius of his own kind. "Outside" inuences might spice the culture, might spark renaissances, might stir it to fulll itself in new ways. But the promise of the nation in the long run lay in the fulllment of this one particular genius. The organic image was apt. For the French aimed at the "owering" of a pure French spirit. Grandeur and vitality came somehow from within, from purity, from a refusal to fulll any other people's destiny.

The American situation was different. The creativity - the hope - of the nation was in its verges, in its new mixtures and new confusions. At least until the middle of the twentieth century, the United States remained rich in verges. The expansion of empires from the fteenth through the nineteenth century did provide European nations with their remote verges - far-off colonies in Africa or Asia or America or Oceania. But for our United States, the verges were within, the most fertile part of us.

The brilliant historian Frederick Jackson Turner did us a great service by reminding us of "The Signicance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). He directed historians' attention away from the genealogy-ridden, overworked chronicles of the Atlantic seacoast to the novelties of westward-moving peoples. Describing the frontier as "the hither edge of free land," he surveyed the characteristic American ways of thinking and governing, strewn across the continent as that frontier line moved toward the Pacic. Turner also did us a disservice. For he overcast the whole American experience with what he called the

"Frontier" experience, the special character of only one of our stages. He gave a new vividness and a new name to the whole drama. But he obscured the fact that the encounter of European civilization with a wilderness - what he called "the outer edge of the wave - the meeting point between savagery and civilization," was only the First Act. Turner took his clue, of course, from the Census of 1890, which reported that in the newly populated American West there was no longer a "frontier line." Therefore, he said, the frontier habitat had disappeared.

Turner thought he was describing the archaeology of American life. Actually, he was describing its physiology. His example dazzled and delighted historians desperately seeking a theme. Yet the kind of encounter of which Turner described one example had myriad counterparts. The creative, American encounter was a much less local phenomenon than any physical frontier with Old World connotation of fortied borderlands, or nineteenthcentury imperial overtones of the contrast between civilization and savagery. At the outer edge of the free mind American creative energies were continually refreshed.

ON THESE VERGES - gifts of our geography, our history, our demography - we nd three characteristic ways of thinking and feeling. First, there is our exaggerated self-awareness. On the verge we notice more poignantly who we are, how we are thinking, what we are thinking, what we are doing. Second, there is a special openness to novelty and change. When we encounter something different we become aware that things can be different, our appetite is whetted for novelty and its charms. Third, there is a strong communityconsciousness. In the fact of the different and the unfamiliar, we, the similars, lean on one another. We seek to reassure one another as we organize our new communities and new forms of community. These three tendencies are all both opportunities and temptations sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory. Creativity in our United States has been a harvest of these hypertrophied American attitudes stirred on the Fertile Verge.

This evening I will remind us of only a few of the kinds of Fertile Verges dramatized in our nation's history.

GEOGRAPHIC VERGES. The rst English settlements in America called themselves "plantations." We lose the avor of their experience in the modern word colony. Today we think of a colony as an outpost or a subordinated part of an empire. The early English usage of colony had come from the Latin, meaning a farm or an estate in the country. The word plantation suggested something quite different. Francis Bacon's essay "Of Plantations" (1625) underlined the difference. "Planting of countries," he wrote, "is like planting of woods. For you must make account to lose almost twenty years' prot, and expect your recompense in the end. For the principal thing that hath been the destruction of most plantations hath been the base and hasty drawing of prot in the rst years. It is true, speedy prot is not to be neglected, as far as it may stand with the good of the plantation, but no farther." A plantation, then, was a place of risk and of calculation. Its success required a sharpened self-awareness. You had to know what you were doing. "If you plant where savages are," Bacon prescribed, "do not only entertain them with tries and gingles (i.e. rattles), but use them justly and graciously, with sufcient guard nevertheless. And do not win their favour by helping them to invade their enemies. . . send off of them over to the country that plants, that they may see a better condition than their own, and commend it when they return."

Two decades later, William Bradford called his classic chronicle a history "Of Plymouth Plantation" (1651) and his fellow planters were aware of a higher balance sheet. On the Arbella, John Winthrop made a familiar declaration of self-awareness for his community, who would be as a "City upon a Hill." For the rst time in modern history, large numbers of Europeans transplanted themselves to a place of mystery and emptiness. Of course, there were a few million of native Americans spread thinly. But it was the encounter with raw,

uninhabited nature, with its unpredictable climate, its strange plants and animals, that sharpened their consciousness of where they were and what they were doing.

In the eighteenth century, American settlers came to be struck less by Divine Providence and more by the providential wealth and novelty of their new world. No longer could they follow the familiar routines of Old World agriculture. New crops - Indian corn (maize), tobacco, cotton, and others equally strange - offered new challenges, with a new need to become informed, to notice how and when to plant. "Natural History," as it was then called, ourished here. In 1743 Benjamin Franklin, alerting his fellow Americans and enlisting their energies (in what was to become the American Philosophical Society), described as the special arena of their interests what might now be called the whole American "environment," which for quite other reasons still arrests our attention. The concerns shared by Franklin's group, announced in his circular letter, were all sorts of items "new-discovered" (plants, herbs, trees, roots; fossils, mines, minerals, quarries), "new methods," "new mechanical inventions," "new arts," and "new improvements" of every kind. Americans of lively mind became naturalists. Europeans eager to enlarge their catalogs of nature, disciples and ambassadors of Linnaeus surveyed the strange American scene and explored the exotic American landscape. Peter Kahn and others came from Sweden, William Bartram set out from Philadelphia, and Haiti-born John James Audubon came, via France, to Kentucky and the fecund Mississippi Valley.

Not that Americans needed reminding - but the great European naturalists of the age still kept telling them that American was different. A delightful allegory of this inevitable American self-awareness was enacted one evening just outside Paris at the end of the American Revolution. For the American Peace Mission Benjamin Franklin was giving a dinner party at Passy, where half of those invited were French, the other half Americans. Among the French was the Abbe' Raynal, a sprightly Jesuit-trained historian. Raynal steered

the conversation to his theory, popular in France at the time, that all species of animals (including man) tended to degenerate and become smaller in the inhospitable American climate. Franklin, seeing how the guests were seated at the table (all Americans on one side, and all the French on the other), proposed that they test the theory then and there. "Let both parties rise," he said, "and we will see on which side nature has degenerated." The Americans (including Franklin, who was not a tall man) towered over their French opposites - and it happened that the smallest of all was Raynal himself.

Even among our helpful French allies, Americans could not fail to be aware of countless still undiscovered consequences of being American. The City upon a Hill nourished cities in the wilderness. City-founding required an especially lively and informed awareness of what you were doing. In the Old World you were born into your city or onto the anciently settled countryside. Here, from the beginning, you had to help mark off where you and your children would be living. The colonial period was replete with town- plans - still visible on the street-maps of Savannah and Philadelphia, among many others. "Main Street" was a signicant Americanism long before Sinclair Lewis gave it a sour connotation. "Main Streets," so-called, bore witness all across the continent that our towns and cities were planned by self-aware Americans. The very rst paid job undertaken by the Father of our Country, George Washington, as his assignment, at the age of sixteen, to work as assistant surveyor of a new town to be called Alexandria, just a dozen miles up the river from Mount Vernon.

When we think back on the situation of British North America at the time of the early settlements, it is quite conceivable that the cartographic ignorance and the vastness of the continent, its heart of darkness, the mountain ranges along both ocean coastlines, and the courses of the great rivers - all these might have impelled Americans to huddle along the seaboard. They might have clustered together in the rst clearings to solidify, fortify, and

populate areas already familiar. That was the settlement pattern of Africa, Australia, and elsewhere. It is not what happened here. Instead, the vastness, the mystery, the variety, the mountain and river and desert obstacles themselves became enticements. The center of population of the United States would be not far from mid-continent. Going West, where increasing numbers of Americans risked their lives and fortunes, meant willingness to face the unknown, to go out to the verge.

The United States, then, became a civilization of more miscellaneous verges than we can count - river towns and prairie villages, mining camps and missions. Vitality of agriculture, commerce, industry, language, education, and folklore sparked where one place or people touched another. American civilization grew by getting people out to the edges and by getting people and messages back and forth across the verges. This yen for the verges gave a newly dominating signicance to technologies of transportation. American railroads, within only a few decades of their invention, were bringing thousands from Europe and the eastern United States out to the edge of the unknown. Much to the astonishment of Old World railroad experts, American railroads developed with no deliberate speed and reached beyond the reasonable needs of existing settlements.

In England, for example, railroads were solidly built, to run from London to Birmingham or Manchester or Edinburgh. In the United States, by contrast, the railroads seemed to run "from Nowhere-in-Particular to Nowhere-at-All." They went out to the verges and beyond. They were built hastily, sometimes imsily - not so much to serve a population as to attract it, not so much to keep the wheels of old industries turning as to nd new materials for new industries. And also to create new settlements to consume the products. When the centers of growth were on the verges - in the Clevelands and Chicagos and Kansas Citys and Omahas and Denver and Tulsas - the way to keep the whole nation vital

was to keep it in touch with the outskirts. By the mid-nineteenth century the United States had catapulated into primacy with the greatest railroad mileage in the world. The same parable could be told of the American automobile, which also quickly outran the highways and the reasonable needs of existing settlements. By the mid-nineteenth century the United States had catapulated into primacy with the greatest railroad mileage in the world.

The same parable could be told of the American automobile, which also quickly outran the highways and the reasonable needs of existing settlements. By 1970 Americans were spending billions to send a few of their number as far into space as they could reach. The desire to keep in touch and the momentum of technology gave a boost for communications. Once again Americans were tempted to exceed their existing needs. Thoreau, retreating to his New England pond where others were adventuring out to more distant verges, missed the point. "We are in great haste," Thoreau complained (in Walden in 1854) in one of his most-quoted jeremiads, "to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." Thoreau's fellow Americans condently assumed that two such different distant places as Maine and Texas would sooner or later have something to say to each other. Might not the telegraph encourage them to nd out what that was? Every later advance in the technology of communication - the telephone, the radio, and now television - has ourished here before Americans knew what they should say over it. These too grew on the Fertile Verge of emptiness.

POLITICAL VERGES. Self-awareness breeds self-government and self-government breeds selfawareness. On board the Mayower, even before arriving here, the Pilgrim Fathers noticed that if they were to have a government on landing, they would have to create it for themselves. The Mayower Compact was dated November 11, 1620, and signed by fortyone passengers - all the heads of families, adult bachelors, and hired men-servants. It was a declaration that they all intended to live under a rule of law, that they would be governed and would shape a government for their special needs. Of course there had been so-called "church compacts" or "church covenants" often before, when a group of men and women decided to set up a new church. But now the Mayower passengers extended their covenant to create a full civil government.

History and geography again and again sharpened Americans' awareness of the role that people played in shaping their own political institutions. The success of the American Revolution provided a vacuum which had to be lled by a new frame of government. The federal tradition (nurtured in the old "British" colonial system) required a nice awareness of the nuances of jurisdiction. Hypersensitized by the Revolution, Americans remained alert to the distinction between a constitution and mere legislation. This drama of political selfawareness was reenacted all across the continent. Old empires had made the government of colonies simple problems of bureaucracy, of extending the jurisdiction of some colonial ofce. But the spread of self-governing states into the American West was quite another matter. It required constitutional conventions and the making of new constitutions. Even in their transient communities of westward-moving wagon trains, Americans remained aware of the responsibilities of self-government. En route they took the trouble to frame constitutions for the government of their company during the transcontinental trek.

The multiplication of self-governing States, each with its bicameral legislature, multiplied legislation. Every law was a community's recognition of a problem, another sharpener of

self-awareness. The United States was to proliferate legislatures and legislators, laws and legal decisions, without precedent in modern history. Our nation had been born in the politics of verges. "These united States" came into being from the difculty of dening the bounds between the authority of the government in London and the authority of the governments in each of the colonies. The verges between state governments and the national government, the main battleground in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, have remained foggy into our own time. There grew the great political and constitutional issues, and over them the nation fought the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century. On the verges between state and nation, the issues of interstate commerce, civil rights, revenue sharing, offshore oil, education, welfare, and taxing power dominated the nation's political, legislative, and judicial life into the twentieth century.

While these verges have been battlegrounds, they have also been arenas of experiment and of progress. Each State legislature, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was fond of reminding us, was a laboratory. In the limbo between State and national powers appeared some of the most ingenious and controversial entities, including the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and countless others. Explicit and repeated public declarations of the extent and the boundaries of their government reinforced the American obsession with limiting government (rooted in bitter colonial experience) and had unexpected by-products. The public conscience of private citizens ourished on the verge. There appeared a characteristic American frontier for private and voluntary institution and for mixed public and private institutions - in areas which in the Old World had been sharply dened by law and tradition and reempted by the state. This included higher education, and museums, (There in Chicago my family and I enjoyed the Museum of Natural History, a benefaction of Marshall Field.) and libraries. (I exploited the research treasures of the library endowed by a certain Walter J. Newberry.) These are examples of private, voluntary benecence without close counterpart in Western Europe.

TECHNOLOGICAL VERGES. As early as the mid-eighteenth century American technological verges bore fruit and stimulated the appetite for novelties. The so-called "Kentucky rie," earlier known here as the "Pennsylvania rie," was a good example. When Germans and German Swiss settled in western Pennsylvania, the German rie, which had developed for Alpine uses, was still clumsy, heavy, and short barreled. But here in America, hunting, Indian ghting, and skirmishes in the backwoods encouraged improvements. The Pennsylvania rie became longer and more slender, with a smaller bore and using a ball weighing only about half the weight of that used in the German model. It was quicker to re, became quicker to load, had less recoil, and offered more range and accuracy. By the time of the American Revolution this weapon, still practically unknown in England and found only among a few hungers in the mountain fastnesses of Europe, had become common in our backwoods. Americans became the best marksmen in the world. Revolutionary commanders encouraged troops to dress in the fringed buckskin of the backwoods to frighten their red-coated enemies. All this was possible because here on the edge - the Fertile Verge between expert and layman - German and Swiss gunsmiths could break traditional patterns.

And then American factories appeared in the wilderness. Just as with the rie, the basic inventions and mechanized technology of the textile factory had been developed abroad, this time in England. But new things happened when they were brought here to the verge. After an adventurous young Englishman, Samuel Slater, managed to memorize and smuggled the secrets out of England to New England, a new era opened. Factories sprang up in the backwoods - on the new England rivers - in Waltham and Lowell - against a strange background of virgin countryside and tree-covered New England hills. Even Charles Dickens, who knew the English milltowns and who was not famous for his sympathy to anything American, could not restrain his enthusiasm in 1842 for these factories on the verges. The most important American technological innovation of the early nineteenth century - the so-called System of Interchangeable Parts, which became known as the

"American System" - also was a by-product of the verge. The scarcity of gunsmiths offered the opportunity, which Eli Whitney seized.

CULTURAL VERGES. This most familiar of American verges is expressed in countless cliches - "A Nation of Nations," "the Melting Pot," The Mixing Bowl," etc., etc. But the cliches must not dull us to the extraordinary nature of what happened here. In our unexpected mix of peoples, people discovered things about themselves and about others which they could not have known or noticed in their more homogenous places of origin. Of course there was nothing new in mere juxtaposition of peoples of different histories and languages and traditions. What was novel here was not the to-be-expected ethnic islands but the everywhere-verges. A special American creativity would be found not within the enclaves but on the borders between them. Here the borders were omnipresent and (with a few exceptions) were more open than they had been anywhere else. Unpredictable cultural verges appeared on the prairies, in mining camps, in cities, in churches and schools. And there was very little cultural extraterritoriality. Everyone shared the jurisdiction of the same government. The "Balanced Ticket" proved that all were expected to take part.

Perhaps the least appreciated by product of American self-awareness on the verges of our national life is our American language. Of the widespread modern languages no other has more effectively allowed a whole people - literati included - to be continually alerted to colloquial enrichment. For the French language the authoritative dictionary is that edited and revised by the Acad*mie Fran*aise, an elite group of forty "immortals" who certify words by the usage of the best authors. What happens at the meetings of this legislature for the French language? On of the members, Francois Mauriac, recently explained quite simply, "We watch ourselves grow old." The Oxford English Dictionary, the counterpart of the dictionary of the Acad*mie for the English language, is a monument of gargantuan

scholarship. It too holds up as the mirror of linguistic propriety the published writings of the best authors.

But the spoken language is where the action is. And for our American language there is no single authoritative legislative source. H. L. Mencken's classic American Language is essentially an adventure story of what happened to the respectable, virginal English when she encountered so many uncouth peoples in various places. The several standard unabridged dictionaries of our American language - Merriam-Webster, Random House - and the most widely used desk-dictionaries - American Heritage, New World, and others - are also distinctively different from those in French of English. Our American dictionaries hold up the mirror to our daily, ever-changing, colloquial usage. Others have tried to conne their sources to respectable literary matter. Our American lexicographers welcome the testimony of all speakers - gossips, athletes, reporters, businessmen, labor leaders, country-music singers, and all comers. Broken English is our true national dialect. When a New England Brahmin, proud of his Mayower ancestry, objects to kibitzing, I hear what happens on the Fertile Verges of language. Our dictionaries keep us promptly aware of how our fellow Americans are speaking - so we can understand them and ("hopefully," "at this point in time"!) imitate them. In our language, then - thanks to our lack of prestigious domineering academies and to the enterprise and alertness and docility of our own dictionary-makers and our writers-unlike the members of Mauriac's French Academy, "We watch ourselves grow young."

GENERATIONAL VERGES. American circumstances created new verges between youth and age, between the generations. Self-government, as Thomas Jefferson again and again insisted, meant the sovereignty of the present generation. "We may consider each generation as a distinct nation," Jefferson wrote, "with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none of bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country."

But every community includes relics of earlier generations, as well as scions of the next. Still, Jefferson express a characteristic American concern. Few other countries have been so preoccupied with the youthfulness of youth.

Immigration itself, for most of American history, deepened the sense of difference between the older and the younger generation - between parents and their children. While in longsettled countries the universal process was the parent instructing and acculturating the child, among millions of newly arrived immigrants in the United States the process was reversed. Parents spoke only German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, or Yiddish. Their children, learning colloquial American English in the public schools, at home became instructors in the American language and in American ways. Mary Antin's Promised Land (1912) is a classic account of how a little immigrant Jewish girl from Russia became an American - and then taught her father how to speak and behave like an American. She reports her father's sentiments when he took her for her rst day in the New York City public school: If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshipped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them. He could send his children to school to learn all those things that he knew by fame to be desirable. The common school, at least, perhaps high school; for one or two, perhaps even college! His children should be students, should ll his house with books and intellectual company; and thus he would walk by proxy in the Elysian Fields of liberal learning.

Parents enjoyed their children's rapid rise. But the increasing gap between parent and child often produced heartaches. Today's American enthusiasm for youth may have roots in the peculiar American immigrant experience of children seeming wiser (or at least more acculturated) than their parents. All this, of course, was reinforced by speedy technological progress which bred admiration - or at least tolerance - for new models of everything, including Americans. In our own time, we see some perils in the traditional verges. The self-

awareness, the City-upon-a-Hill syndrome threatens to become mere self-consciousness, conceit, or even self-agellation. Old cultural verges threaten to become islands of ethnic or racial or pseudo-racial chauvinism. The appetite for novelty threatens to become the disease of "Presentism," obsession with the recent and the present, when we displace history by social studies, classic by best-sellers, heroes by celebrities. Community consciousness, the concern of the Mayower passengers for all their fellows may become an obsession with the shifting currents of public opinion. The symptoms are demagoguery in politics, timid conformity in private life, and imitativeness in our writers, artists, and architects.

The Fertile Verges of the next stages of American life are bound to be somewhat different. American successes of the last two centuries have created unprecedented new verges. Perhaps these lie along the rim of creative dissatisfaction. Some living witnesses are our American institutions for teaching and learning, our American advertising industry, and our thriving enterprises of research and development.

OUR INSTITUTIONS tell us that the Fertile Verges of our time are still on the outer bounds of the free mind. There is always more ignorance than knowledge, and on that boundary, which no Census can ever report closed, we nd the verge which we must keep open, and which will always be fertile. We must be reminded not only of what we know, what we can do, but of what we do not know, what impossibilities still remain to be accomplished, or at least tried. Our task is to remain aware of these verges and to keep the borders open to a competitive world of new ideas, new products, new arts, new institutions. The frontier metaphor will no longer serve us. The verges of science and literature and art and technology, documented and illustrated here in the Library of Congress, will be explored by our Council of Scholars, which meets for the rst time here today. Surely we are not the last New World. The creativity of our nation will depend on our nding and exploring the verges between our new world and the next.
Copyright 1980 by Daniel Boorstin

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