America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings (review)

Nye has imaginatively reframed the story of the origins of the United States as a series of narratives and counter-narratives about the impact of technology. Beginning in the years after the Revolution, Americans began telling each other stories to explain and justify their growing dominion over an expanding new nation. Sometimes these narratives were fully articulated by writers of prominence or were encoded in newspaper snippets and diary entries. A representative passage from George Washington leaps from a recognition of God's favors to man's responsibilities: "Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them!" (154). Nye's argument that these narratives were secular versions of the creation stories that Native Americans told each other is an odd lapse in otherwise thoughtful readings. Many of these stories were deeply religious at their heart, as Nye's evidence and title recognize, calling men to a duty to improve upon "first creation."

Nye's achievement is to have expanded and updated Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964). Both writers, a generation apart, share a deep interest in the cultural tensions and contradictions provoked by technology. Both share a common politics. Marx hoped for a world where the "middle landscape" between civilization and nature could be more than a dream of powerless and alienated individuals—like Virgil's evicted shepherd. Nye seeks a multicultural America where technologies are not "tools of control" but means of "sustainable development" (302). He hopes for "new stories" that move beyond narratives of "second creation"; Marx sought the similar goal of "new symbols of possibility" reconciling garden and machine. Both share a common methodology, but whereas Marx brilliantly explored these tensions within the works of leading writers, Nye seeks to juxtapose competing narratives from a broader array of sources while making the obligatory bows to multiculturalism.

Nye offers four distinct narratives—each with counter-narratives of varying coherence. The first, "The Ax," is the core story of settlement. The second, "The Mill," is a tale not just of harnessing water power but of building communities and local economies. "The Canal and the Railroad," which forms the third narrative, is a story of conquering space. The fourth, "Irrigation," is the epic of irrigating the West. Nye constructs his counter-narratives from the usual sources—Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry Adams—but he also ranges widely if disconcertingly to contemporary writers such as Louise Erdich and Edward Abbey.

Underlying these narratives of second creation is Nye's argument that four perceptions separated the new nation from its colonial past: The geometrical grid replaced a division of land more attentive to topography; free markets prevailed over regulated prices; a belief in abundance trumped a psychology of scarcity; and a quantifiable notion of causality overcame a reliance on "mysterious, spiritual forces."

Two problems are evident. First, it is not at all clear that these large generalizations matter to the narratives that Nye deftly and impressively analyzes, and, second, they are all, to a greater or lesser extent, wrong. Think only of the layout of Philadelphia and the Second Great Awakening's decisive triumph over the Enlightenment. The wastefulness of Americans was a core theme of eighteenth-century European travelers, and a free market had sunk deep roots, not everywhere, but in many places and from an early date. Such false steps aside, Nye's ambitious and broadly synthetic work favorably compares with The Machine in the Garden.