In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • What's Wrong With Synthetic Trees?
  • Jared Farmer (bio)
Eric Rutkow , American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation. New York: Scribner, 2012. 406 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.00.

A 1774 British cartoon often reproduced in U.S. history textbooks, "The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man" by Philip Dawe, shows revolutionaries forcing tea down the throat of an already tarred and feathered royal tax collector. In the background, additional turncoats dump boxes of tea into the harbor. Yet the artist places less emphasis on the Tea Party than a tree—an American elm—that looms above the mob attack. Engraved upon its bark are the ironic words "Liberty Tree"; its main branch sports a noose. Today, most Americans would connect the image of a tree-bound noose with the history of slavery rather than freedom; few outside academia recall the symbolic importance of the Liberty Tree—once as famous as Plymouth Rock—and its emblematic outgrowths, liberty poles. In collective memory, the Boston Tea Party has supplanted Boston's Liberty Tree.

"Trees are the loudest silent figures in America's complicated history," writes Eric Rutkow (p. 9). Despite the manifest importance of forests, trees, and wood in the development of the United States, it is surprising that no historian until now has attempted an overview for a popular readership. Previously, the closest thing was Gayle Brandow Samuels' Enduring Roots (1999), a book of essays that oddly doesn't appear in the bibliography of American Canopy. One must admire the ambition and brio of Rutkow—currently a Ph.D. candidate at Yale—for attempting a synthesis, a genre generally reserved for mid- and late-career scholars. But therein lies the problem. The historiography of American trees, though voluminous, is uneven, incomplete, often dated and slanted. Although Rutkow wants to present U.S. history in a new way, he ends up replicating a familiar approach.

American Canopy is less a synthesis than a chronological compendium of "pivotal moments." Rutkow is a capable if sometimes heavy-handed writer, and the stories go down easy. You might think of this as a "dad book" or "NPR book"—the perfect gift for a male history buff of a certain age. Academic historians may find Rutkow's presentation and analysis unoriginal, yet his tome is a goldmine, containing dozens of excellent short narrative summaries [End Page 418] of lecture-ready episodes. Chances are you don't have time to read Thomas J. Campanella's Republic of Shade (2003), Douglas Cazaux Sackman's Orange Empire (2005), or Susan Freinkel's American Chestnut (2007). Rutkow does it for you, summarizing the tale of trees in the United States from colonial times—when Richard Hakluyt realized that American greatness would derive from wood—through international global warming conferences. He covers, among other subjects, New England's white pine masts; John Bartram's cataloging of native flora; George Washington's arboretum by the Potomac; John Chapman's disseminated apple seed; and manifold products made from trees—from cider to Kleenex.

As the nineteenth century progressed, Americans used ever more wood—for housing, fuel, tannin, turpentine, railroad ties and trestles. Lumbermen moved the center of production from New York to Maine to the Lake States. The Great Peshtigo Fire demonstrated the dangerous waste of early industrial logging. Some timber bosses moved on to the longleaf pine country of the Deep South, establishing giant mills, company towns, and union-busting policies. Others, including Frederick Weyerhaeuser, moved shop to the Pacific Northwest's expanses of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine, and began practicing rudimentary forestry, starting with fire control.

Seeds for a tree-based conservation movement were sowed by Thoreau's transcendental botanizing, Olmsted's Central Park, and Marsh's Man and Nature. J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska inaugurated Arbor Day; Congress incentivized tree-planting in the West; and New York lawmakers, inspired by Charles Sprague Sargent, set a proactive example by protecting the Adirondack forest. In the Sierra Nevada, John Muir called for the federal preservation of giant sequoias and other natural wonders. The first German-trained American forester, Gifford Pinchot, got the ear of Theodore Roosevelt, who took advantage of the Forest Reserve Act and, with...

pdf

Share