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[ 10 ] “Thus in the beginning all the world was America.” John Locke’s statement from his Second Treatise of Government (1690) exemplifies the pervasive European and Anglo-American perception of the New World, and especially its western reaches, as a tabula rasa. Not knowing what the West in fact contained, Europeans and Anglo-Americans have often been disposed to imagine the best-possible scenarios for this blank slate. So first Estevánico and then Coronado, in the late 1530s and early 1540s, toured the Southwest in search of the seven cities of Cíbola—the first utopias in the Southwest to seduce the nonnative imagination. And so Thomas Jefferson, in advising André Michaux in 1793 what to look for during a proposed exploration of the northern Rockies in search of the Northwest Passage, instructed the French naturalist to head up the Missouri River because “it would seem by the latest maps as if a river called the Oregon [today’s Columbia] interlocked with the Missouri for a considerable distance, and entered the Pacific Ocean not far southward of Nootka Sound.”1 What could have encouraged Jefferson to conceive that two river systems would miraculously “interlock”? How could Coronado have imagined seven golden cities on the desert and plains, each wealthier than the Aztec capital at Mexico City? Why did Locke construe the precontact Americas as a vacuum? Wishful thinking. This chapter concerns one particular manifestation of wishful thinking. As blank slates, America in general and the West in particular have been especially attractive to those Europeans and Anglo-Americans bearing plans to create model communities. Puritans, proposing in the early seventeenth century to erect “a city upon a hill,” helped to set a precedent of blending westward migration with The Wishful West j o h n m . f i n d l a y t h e w i s h f u l w e s t [ 11 ] attempts at radical improvement to forms of community. Later groups saw blank slates not just in the regional environs but also in large swaths of urban fabric; wishful thinking applied to new towns as well as to new worlds. Since the 1840s utopian practice and utopian rhetoric defined the West as the most promising region in the country for implementing plans to perfect Americans’ ability to live in communities. Bringing scholarship on American utopianism into conversation with scholarship on the urban West helps account for why utopian practice and utopian discourse have been constants west of the Missouri River, while also exploring how western utopianism developed in stages after 1840. Note the distinction between utopian practice and utopian rhetoric. On the one hand, the West has hosted more than its share of America’s utopian colonies. That is, the region became home to a disproportionate number of experimental communities , many conceived as models by which the larger society would be transformed . In most instances, these utopian colonies were located at some distance from cities, so it would be mistaken to claim that their influence on the urban West was always direct and forceful. Utopian discourse, on the other hand, permeated thinking about western towns of all sizes. This discourse grew out of a long European tradition of imagining perfected forms of community, often rendered in literature about the future. Cities in the American West, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, have been frequently conceived and reconceived—by boosters, planners, inhabitants, and others—in terms of such high expectation that the language about them has echoed that surrounding utopian colonies. These two strains of western utopianism were not isolated from one another, although they are singled out here for analytical purposes. Utopian ideas and utopian colonies intersected in many ways, often in the same individuals, even though they represented divergent approaches to the project of perfecting society. It must be added that the decisive majority of utopian practice and discourse, in the United States as a whole and the West in particular, has been the product of white, mostly well-educated men. These utopians have advanced specific proposals for women, children, and people of color, but utopianism as described here (and primarily as found in the secondary literature) has largely been the product of relatively privileged people in American society. Even so, this particular form of wishful thinking has exerted a striking amount of influence on the West. And the West has had a significant influence on American utopianism. [3.136.154.103] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 17:43...

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