Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution

FOREWORD

FOREWORD The purpose of this foreword is to strengthen the science of geography so that we can write more books of service to society. A two year delay between completion and publication of this book was due to difficulty in obtaining a publisher for such a "controversial " geography. Many fellow geographers from various backgrounds helped: Gilbert White, chairman of the Geography Department at the University of Chicago and the head of the American Friends Service Committee; William Warntz, the conservative geographer and steady friend of academic freedom from Harvard; and most vigorously, Ronald Horvath, the humanist geographer from Michigan State University. The publication of the book became some sort of geographic cause and ultimately Ronald Horvath became the book's "agent" and, at William Warntz's suggestion, moved the team toward Alfred S. Schenkman, the President of Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., who was understanding of the needs of geographers for maps and photographs and eccentric sizes and formats and, most of all, of the geographers ' need to describe the human landscape as they freely see it. This team effort finally allowed me to publish a book about my country in my country. The problem of structuring the book was originally conceived as being a problem of mixing three media: the author's conceptions, the interviews, and the visuals (photographs, graphs and maps). This "problem of the media" proved false as the patient re-working of the types of materials led to their blending. It became clear that the real problem of the book's structure was the need to present tremendous numbers of facts without interrupting the flow of the story. Many devices were used throughout the book to make this separation, but the most important are the "clusters" of facts, set off from the text bya border, so that the reader can easily skip them to rush on with the wisdom of the story, but at the same time can feel confident that the story is true. The "knowledge," or facts, are conceived as telephone poles holding up the wires of "wisdom." Without the telephone poles of facts, the theories are airy, unsupported and unbelievable. One of the more important knowledgewisdom dualities, the map of the farms in the early part of the century found in the front cover fold, was impossible to complete because of exhausted resources. It was to have two portions, a portion of facts and a portion of visual landscape reproduction. Only the fact portion, the "skeleton map," was completed. Perhaps some day another artistic cartographer will complete the other side of George Shenkar's map, the "life map." If so, the picture of the farms in the University of Detroit Archives should be used as aids. The rationale of the complete map, the "skeleton map," on one side and the "life map" on the other, is as follows: Maps attempt to integrate over time, that is, maps assume an average span of time. This means that nothing that moves is mapped, and therefore property is inherently preferred over humans. Thus, a search for "scientific accuracy " has led again to a disaster for reality, since science is generality, not accuracy. Science is a search for truth, not naked and disconnected facts. In order to restore truth to the map it is therefore necessary to achieve a fiction of accuracy through an assumption, namely, that the map is drawn at an exact instant of time. In this case, the time is June 20,1915 at 2 p.m. on a sunny day. This fiction freezes the men and horses on the roads, the strawberry pickers in the fields, as well as the crops in rotation and the animals in the pasture. This restores life to the dead map of property. In order to pay as little a price in accuracy as possible, several precautions were taken when constructing the skeleton map. The period from the turn of the century till the farms were consumed by the city was one of relatively little change so that facts compressed in time over that span represent relatively comparable data, data from the same population. Every scrap of information that could be found was used, especially interviews with ex-farmers and scrutiny of their photographs. Maps drawn by these ex-farmers were compiled and compared in painstaking detail. Each photograph was fully identified and coded and, where possible, the exact spot and angle of the camera mapped. Copies of all photographs from all sources were deposited in the University of...