Centropolis: William Gilpin, Nature, and the City of the Future

Of all the reasons to love Kansas City, the nineteenth-century booster William Gilpin chose climate. Humid midwestern weather is rarely held up as the national ideal, but the big-thinking Gilpin disagreed. The region’s climate, he wrote in 1853, “is of that exact medium which the white races in all ages and countries have found most congenial.” Gilpin promoted climate congeniality as the means to highlight the unbounded potential of young Kansas City. Of course, potential was all he had. The town, a few muddy streets clustered on the Missouri River, had only recently incorporated, and its 2,500 citizens still waited for the most basic services. Sited at the intersection of several important overland trails, Kansas City’s most distinctive feature, it appeared, was the number of residents headed someplace else. If anyone cared about this western outpost, it was only because of the disturbing—and deadly—guerrilla raids then dividing the region. Despite this sectional crisis and a looming Civil War, Gilpin insisted that the promise of this future capital of America’s great inland empire transcended all social ills. The city was “so fertile in soil, gentle in climate, and so adorned by nature” that the mere sight of the region’s “exquisite romantic beauty” threw the population of the “old sterile Thirteen states” into fits of jealous rage. Providence blessed Kansas City with an unrivaled natural inheritance. Gilpin was certain that the city would one day be the center of all things.¹

Gilpin drifted toward the zealous, even the extreme, but his views on Kansas City were more in line with prevailing views on American growth than his hyperbolic language suggests. In an optimistic age, many citizens embraced the values and virtues of Manifest Destiny. Equal parts American exceptionalism, defiant nationalism, and utopian romanticism, the political philosophy of Manifest Destiny encouraged a century of Americans to dream of an expansive continental domain of liberal politics and free markets. Conventional wisdom held that God gave America a special mission. It was the nation’s divine right to fill North America, spreading the benefits of liberty in the process. Often used as the primary justification for an expansionist mindset that was understood as necessary and benevolent, Manifest Destiny is as close to a national creation mythology as America can claim. And Gilpin ate it up. “The untransacted destiny of the American people,” he wrote, “is to subdue the continent.” With characteristic drama (and no hint of irony), Gilpin continued, it is our mission,

to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean—to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward—to set the principle of self-government at work—to agitate these herculean masses—to establish a new order in human affairs—to set free the enslaved—to regenerate superannuated nations—to change darkness into light—to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries—to teach old nations a new civilization—to confirm the destiny of the human race—to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point—to cause a stagnant people to be re-born—to perfect science—to emblazon history with the conquest of peace—to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind—to unite the world in one social family—to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity—to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!²

Grand dreams indeed. Manifest Destiny animated American history and gave the nation’s narrative movement and direction. This belief would expand into foreign policy and international economics but at base, Manifest Destiny was a continental endeavor with the West at its core. Boosters held the promise of the West—of places like Kansas City—as self-evident, especially given the apparent stagnation of the East. To promoters like Gilpin, the Atlantic seaboard grew increasingly stale and derivative but the West, by contrast, was the future. Westward moving pioneers “conquered” wilderness, removed the Native “threat,” and built a progressive republic marked by prosperity and democracy. True, the nation had already accomplished...