Ox Cart to Automobile: Social Change in Western New York (review)

Ox Cart to Automobile is a history—economic, environmental, and social—of Allegany County, New York, from the time of European settlement to the present. According to Rasmussen, “two central organizing ideas, central place theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma, illuminate 200 years of rural western New York history” (11). He chronologically organizes his material into chapters that cover the major phases of the county’s economic history. He makes interesting use of geographical information systems (gis) analysis to show how physical distance from larger market villages and land elevation affected initial settlement patterns. He relies heavily on demographic and economic data from federal and state censuses from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Rasmussen also demonstrates the importance of getting a firsthand look at the evidence available outdoors, walking the streets and hillside trails, examining the changing architectural styles, and searching out the old pasture trees amidst the new growth forest—preferably with a camera. The book has around sixty photographs, about half of them taken by the author. Its integration of multiple kinds of evidence and analysis into a short, clear, comprehensive narrative make it a model for other county histories.

Rasmussen’s use of the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a framing and explanatory device might prove controversial. Although he acknowledges the obvious problems, he argues, “Assuming that humans pursue their individual self-interest simplifies complex reality to get to essential regularity in human behavior in many different settings in many different times” (9). One can certainly quibble, but his well-chosen examples manage to sustain this assertion. Rasmussen does not fully explore how cultural values complicate, and even contradict, the patterns of self-interest, but he does not ignore them either. However, he relies to a great extent on standard conclusions from the secondary literature to provide this context. Some aspects of culture get less attention than they deserve. Readers familiar with nineteenth-century upstate New York will wonder why religion does not occupy a more prominent place.

Although Rasmussen’s examination of the relationship between county and state after 1950 is insightful, his depiction of Allegany County’s residents as economic rather than political actors contains an unresolved ambiguity. The Prisoner’s Dilemma makes their economic behavior seem more rationally self-interested than their behavior as voters. Rasmussen leaves unexplained, however, the county’s unvarying commitment to the Republican party, an attachment impervious even to the Great Depression and the welfare-state transfer payments that enable many to live in the region today, despite a dearth of economic opportunities. County voters, for reasons that Rasmussen does not explore in depth, have shown more interest in “hot button” values issues than matters more self-evidently tied to material or economic self-interest.

Nonetheless, Ox Cart to Automobile is a splendid county history. It serves as a reminder of how impoverished the United States remains in the kind of local coverage that the Victoria county histories gave to the United Kingdom. Such a cumulative impression could well turn out to be depressing, given the preponderance of rural counties in the United States. Rasmussen resists the temptation to embrace a narrative of decline, but it is impossible to read his last two chapters—involving the collapse of dairy farming and cheese making, the erosion of manufacturing, the closing of the railroad, and the lack of an interstate highway— without some sadness. One wishes that the loyalty of those people to this place (and Rasmussen duly notes the not inconsiderable compensations that remain) were not so precarious.