Wild Thing ( You Make My Heart Sing )

History is the art of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, the historian Hayden White has famously proposed, which seems a far more ambitious use for history than the usual suspects: “to learn from our mistakes,” “to celebrate our heritage” or “to know where we came from.” Historians can take a 7th century concept that sounds profoundly foreign and rebuild the past to make that concept superbly logical. As Witold Rybczynski has done so beautifully, in such books as “Home” and “Waiting for the Weekend,” they can show us that familiar pieces of our lives--”home,” “weekend,” “leisure”--are in fact ideas invented by specific people at specific times. History urges us to see ourselves askew--and anew.

Few topics are more in need of this sorcery than North American nature and landscape. Wild places--from Central Park to national forests to Yosemite--often seem like they’ve always been wild. From Thomas Jefferson to deep ecologists, Americans tend to hew to ideas about nature not as if they are human inventions but as if God decreed them.

No one knew better how to create “natural” landscapes than Frederick Law Olmsted, the great 19th century American landscape architect and the subject of Rybczynski’s latest book. To construct the hills and vales and vistas of Central Park, Olmsted drained, blasted, flooded, razed, planted, carved and rock-piled a site where the city had evicted 1,600 people from shantytowns and hog farms. He assiduously planned the location of every tree and patch of grass.

As Rybczynski tells us, no one has influenced American landscape traditions more. Olmsted designed all or parts of the Capitol Grounds, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Yosemite, Niagara Falls and Boston’s famed “Emerald Necklace” park system. He created the watery parkland of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, down to the color of the ducks. He defined the urban park, invented the city parkway, fought for city planning and re-imagined the design of American suburbs. His sons went on to write national parks legislation and design Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park and green spaces in Seattle, Pittsburgh, Boulder and New Orleans.

Olmsted was an original thinker who grappled brilliantly with how to use and manage nature to make cities more livable. He was an artist, ecologist and social engineer. He converted the Boston mudflat of sewage into a picturesque scene that doubled as a drainage and purification system. It’s heartbreaking, after 125 years of more haphazard, ecologically impoverished urban design, to read Rybczynski’s accounts of elegant plans that San Francisco, Tacoma and so many other cities rejected. (In the 1920s, Los Angeles scrapped his sons’ plans for an emerald necklace of its own.)

Though Olmsted is best remembered as a landscape architect (a term and profession he invented), he was before that a surveyor, store clerk, seaman, farmer, New York Times correspondent o the antebellum South, arms dealer for the Kansas Free-Soilers, anti-slavery author and editor and publisher of a major New York literary magazine. In 1858, Olmsted designed his first landscape: Central Park. After that, he ran the U.S. Sanitary Commission (now the Red Cross), managed a California gold mine and co-founded and edited the Nation. He was a whirlwind force in 19th century America.

“A Clearing in the Distance” is an unremittingly heroic account, which focuses on Olmsted’s life work. Rybczynski’s rationalizations for why Olmsted always did the right thing--why it was OK to underestimate costs on Central Park, or why he married his brother’s widow--often make this biography feel too much like spin.

Rybczynski is surprisingly short on ideas about such an epic life. He concludes that Olmstead taught himself to be a planner after an undisciplined youth and went on to plan and build remarkable landscapes for the future--which left me wanting to know more about how Olmsted’s life, and the life of the times, infused his landscapes. The book tells us a lot about how furious Olmsted got with Leland Stanford over plans for Stanford University but not much about how the architect reacted to the deaths and institutionalizations of several of his six children. Olmsted was a devoted family man, Rybczynski tells us, but Olmsted’s wife Mary remains a shadow in the book. Rybczynski recounts Olmsted’s many major bouts of depression and anxiety--which is intriguing--but doesn’t remark on them at length.

And the passionate ideas behind Olmsted’s work seem to resist Rybczynski’s proven knack for tying ideas to a particular time and place. He seems to agree with every idea Olmsted had, however Victorian. Olmsted held fiercely to the 19th century values of industry, self-improvement, thrift, taste and refinement--summed up as “civilization”--and Rybczynski champions all of them. Nature, Olmsted preached, would teach Americans of all classes to be “civilized,” and Rybczynski calls this an “important insight.” But the idea sounds less like an insight than middle-class, old-fashioned and very typical of the 1860s.

Olmsted was a farsighted thinker with many remarkable ideas about nature, but he was also a 19th century man. Rybczynski mentions, briefly, a list of rules that Olmsted posted to assure that people enjoyed Central Park’s “civilizing” properties--no walking on the grass, no concerts, no commercial vehicles, no indecent language. Many working-class New Yorkers stayed away for the first decade, until the rules relaxed and the “public park” grew more public.Some of what Olmsted did and thought should seem strange and quaint now.

There’s no strangeness at all in John Warfield Simpson’s big, ambitious history of “American landscape values” in “Visions of Paradise.” He tours the warhorses of intellectual and political history: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, Great Plains bison, Thoreau, John Muir, Olmsted, Manifest Destiny. Simpson favors the popular argument that our values are utilitarian and Judeo-Christian, that our ideas of nature are in all essential ways identical to those of Jesus Christ, St. Francis, Queen Elizabeth and Adam Sandler. Our values, Simpson concludes, are essentially the same land-as-property values with which English emigrants stepped off the Mayflower and eyed Plymouth Rock. He sees merely a “softening” of values from outright hostility to appreciation.

But the past is less static, less vague and far more interesting than that. He gathers useful information here, especially on land laws--and offers an enlightening discussion of how federal policies on transportation and housing have fueled the suburbs’ growth and economic dominance over cities. Pleasures do abide in the reading: Muir’s mechanical wizardry, the news that Charles Darwin studied Olmsted,[ and the always poetic urgings by Aldo Leopold: “to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.” Simpson seems rightly outraged that the Land Ordinance of 1785 divided trans-Appalachian North America--in an ecologically blind act of abstraction--into a grid of identical 640-acre squares that dictated that property lines and roads follow straight lines regardless of the terrain.

But Simpson has not asked how one moves from Jefferson and the Land Ordinance to “the American mind”--the sort of question on which historians have expended enormous energy in the last 30 years. This history is populated by just two kinds of people--Native Americans and Americans. But hardly an American woman appears. Or an African American of either gender, or a Native American after 1820. Surely women and men, young and old, urban and rural, rich and poor, immigrant and native, Southern and Northern, slave and free, landowner and tenant experienced the American landscape differently? Surely their values reflect different places, histories, work lives, hopes, passions, disappointments?

Take Edward Hicks (1780-1849), who lived in Pennsylvania and painted the “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings. Probably the most celebrated American folk painter, he’s the subject of Carolyn Weekley’s essay in the lavish, glossy catalog for a Hicks exhibit at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in colonial Williamsburg, Va. A carriage and sign painter by trade, Hicks was also a Quaker minister. In a detailed, readable essay, Weekley describes how Hicks’ devout Quaker ideas of peace--and the controversy between authoritarian English and democratic American Quakers--infused his “Peaceable Kingdom” landscapes (more than 60 versions) in which the lion, lamb and child try for peaceful coexistence in a dark, leafy New World. He’s an American and Judeo-Christian. But there must be significant corners of his heart and mind that the 1785 ordinance and Manifest Destiny can’t explain.

The “American mind” is more Byzantine--as John Stilgoe and other historians whom Simpson uses in “Visions” have shown. At many points, Simpson rejects rationality, utilitarianism, science, economics, myth and emotions as guides to valuing landscape. It’s hard to imagine any other guides--so it’s not surprising that he ends up arguing, at other points, for more science, more myth, more reason. He boxes himself in by asking whether people should use reason or myth at all. Rather, what economics, reason, science and myths should people cultivate? And statements such as “few of us draw delight and inspiration from the land” are unpersuasively broad (and wrong, one has to hope). Simpson’s approach is a lot like the landscape grid he criticizes so doggedly: It imposes sharply defined squares on a past that is by nature varied, messy and complex.

If history is a dance between the strange and the familiar, it’s also a kind of tango between the detailed and the sweeping. You can recover details without the big picture but not vice versa. Histories that think globally are the most exciting kind, but only once they’ve wallowed in the messy and strange specifics. The quest to understand the American landscape has always had sweep and passion. But nature needs more history.*