Trading Places: Griffith, Patten and Agricultural Modernity

O nly three cities in the United States have been awarded fictional attention enough to merit the designation, ‘story cities’, Frank Norris informs us in an early text: New York, New Orleans and Boston. ‘Imagine,’ scoffs the future author of The Pit, ‘a novel of Chicago’. In the case of Chicago, wheat and meat materialized as the stuff of which fictions were made. Commodities shipped by rail formed part of a global network of operation, a complex, integrated, simultaneously magical and dispiriting mechanism at the heart of modernity, as evidenced by the most renowned Chicago novels: Norris’ posthumous The Pit (1903) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). Magical metaphors flourished when awestruck commentators, in language sometimes messianic, sometimes cataclysmic, sought to elucidate the momentous cultural upheaval wrought by new means of transportation and communication. ‘Railroads are talismanic wands’, opines an early Chicago historian: ‘They have a charming power. They do wonders – they work miracles. They are better than laws; they are essentially, politically and religiously – the pioneer, and vanguard of civilization.’ In an adage tailored from the same discursive fabric, Ralph Waldo Emerson, before his initial enthusiasm cooled off, writes: ‘Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.’ Sixty years later, Henry Adams, in a text on acceleration, appraised the impact of the liberated energies and concluded: ‘The railways alone approached the carnage of war.’ The traffic moved in both directions, and so did the metaphors as farmers turned consumers and spent money on goods and luxuries shipped by rail from the cities and from the mail-order houses in, for instance, Chicago. The dramatic results of these changes greatly alarmed an oft-quoted observer from the 1870s who foresaw a cultural disaster in the wake of the cancerous metropolitan sprawl of values that threatened to derail Republican ideals in the absence of new mental scaffoldings. ‘Our former rural civilization, with its simple manners, moderate desires, and autonomous life,’ he claimed, ‘has as good as disappeared; the country is now just the suburb of the city.’ Since no new ruling order had been ushered in to accommodate these changes, ‘disorders increase, oppressions multiply; the nation is plundered in pocket, imperilled in morals’. Gauging the relation between farmand cityscape from the perspective of 1908, Herbert N. Casson found a fully integrated ‘New Farmer’: ‘The Railway, the trolley, the automobile, and the top buggy have transformed him into a suburbanite. In fact, his business has become so complex and many-sided, that he touches civilisation at more points and lives a larger life than if he were one of the atoms of a crowded city.’ For purposes of discursive convenience, abstraction and acceleration – framing not only the traffic in commodities, magical or not, but a vast span of economic and cultural processes – can Film History, Volume 17, pp. 39–65, 2005. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America