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CHAPTER 1
Wires in the Garden, 1844–1882
Samuel Morse completed an experimental, 40-mile telegraph line in 1844. By 1853, eighty-nine long-distance connections covered 23,261 miles. In 1866 Western Union made a lasting transatlantic connection, introduced the first telegraph stock ticker, and took control of a vast 76,000-mile transcontinental network. During these unstable decades of development, to watch workers erect wooden posts and pull copper or iron wire was to watch a place be figuratively tied to the United States. To travel through the wilderness and suddenly come upon a series of wired poles in an otherwise vacant landscape was to see the direction where American settlements had been or would soon follow.
Scholarly discourse of technology and American landscape has primarily overlooked telegraph infrastructure. For example, Leo Marx's seminal study The Machine in the Garden includes a single passage specific to telegraph lines. In 1850 an English visitor to the United States expressed surprise that lands recently occupied by "wild beasts, and still wilder Indians" had been "traversed in perfect security by these frail wires." The comment reinforces racist divides between "wild" nonwhites and a widespread apparatus for enforcing "perfect security." In addition, Marx suggests, the anecdote implies that in America "progress is a kind of explosion." Such a reading conforms to Marx's overall argument that between the late eighteenth century and early twentieth century, the seemingly sudden appearance of new, innovative machines framed the American pastoral and restructured the "landscape of the psyche." Marx reads this restructuring through the treatments of the mill, the steamboat, the factory, the combustion engine, and especially the railroad by writers, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.
Closer attention to the creative renderings of telegraph lines can enhance our understanding of nineteenth-century technology and landscape, but these representations do not exactly support Marx's thesis. For example, Marx quotes from Walt Whitman's "Passage to India" (1869) — "In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal / The New by its mighty railroad spann'd, / The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires" — to show the "buoyant power" evoked by "the machine's [i.e., the railroad's] motion across the landscape." Whitman's vision of the expressive wires on the seafloors is less buoyant but no less critical in the material links between old world and new.
Lewis Mumford helps to explain the missing thread in Marx's argument. In the early twentieth century people overlooked the power utility and infrastructure because, he said, "attention is directed more easily to noisier and more active parts of the environment." The same was, and is, true of telegraph lines. The static, gentle wire that connected communities and traversed land and sea was not the locomotive beast that chugged coal, shrieked its whistle, and spewed smoke through the garden; it was the corresponding vine that crept through it.
During the first decades of telegraph development, the telegraph line, or simply "the wire," entered a synecdochic relationship with the practice of widespread, seemingly instantaneous communication. Meanwhile, telegraph lines sent conflicting messages through the landscape. Many Americans embraced the telegraph line as a wondrous miracle sent to "annihilate space and time," and in such readings the line signaled industrial and cultural advancement. Others resisted telegraphy, worrying that the iconic, visible web would tangle everything and everyone within its reach. A few individuals registered the infrastructure's subtler effects. Wind playing over the wires, or what is now called the "Aeolian effect," produced a discordant whistling sound that Thoreau said was "fairer news than the journals ever print." As telegraph lines stretched in Western Territories, they connected the farthest extremities of Anglo settlement to the rest of the United States. These nerves, homesteaders and armies learned, could be touched and also broken.
American Landscape, Charged without Wires
Samuel F. B. Morse personifies the crossovers and tensions between electrified landscapes and electric technologies in the mid-nineteenth century. He is most often remembered for his role in the technological revolution. In 1845, when Morse was fifty-three, a law clerk wrote a poem declaring Morse as the one who "yoke[d] the lightning to his rapid car" and would have his name etched "on the same tablet with our Franklin." During the next decades the telegraph lines became colloquially referred to as "Morse lines." In 1871, a year before Morse's death, the poet William Cullen Bryant declared, "Every telegraph wire strung from post to post, as it hums in the wind, murmurs his eulogy." However, in his late thirties, long before Morse lines made their vague, meandering mark on the visible terrain, the painter and professor worked fervently to make his mark as an artist and, as part of these efforts, helped give rise to the genre referred to as "American landscape." For the rest of the nineteenth century painters and poets celebrated both wild and pastoral environments as repositories of organic, electric forces. These celebrations preceded, and then paralleled, the development of telegraph networks.
The genre of American landscape, the first significant school in American painting, might be traced back to 1826, when Morse, Thomas Cole, and Asher Durand founded the National Academy of Design in New York City. Morse was elected as president of the new artist organization, and, in March and April 1826 he delivered a series of lectures at Columbia College titled "On the Affinity of Painting to the Other Fine Arts." Morse defined landscaping as the process of "hiding defects by interposing beauties; of correcting the errors of Nature by changing her appearance." For Morse the main objective for the landscape gardener, architect, or painter was to "select from Nature all that is agreeable, and reject or change all that is disagreeable." This aesthetic approach is displayed in Morse's three major landscape paintings: The View from Apple Hill (1828–29), Allegorical Landscape of New York University (1832–33) (fig. 4), and Niagara Falls from Table Rock (1835).
Morse's belief that the artist should reject or correct nature's "errors" ran contrary to the emerging trend in American painting, poetry, and fiction. For instance, Morse's Allegorical Landscape shows a formalist selection of nature's parts that follows his belief that the artist corrected errors and created an ethical message: nature, virtuous and tame. Cole, Durand, and other now-famous American artists and writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Walt Whitman embraced the bare, unruly, and abundant wilderness: nature, red in tooth and claw.
In 1831, after traveling abroad with Thomas Cole to paint pastoral scenes in Italy and France, Morse stopped in Paris and stayed with James Fenimore Cooper and his family to finish his most ambitious painting, Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33). Cooper had arrived in the French capital in 1826, on the heels of his most successful novel, Last of the Mohicans (1826). Cooper stayed overseas to write three more novels in the five-part Leatherstocking Tales, each featuring the trapper-turned-frontiersman Natty Bumppo. With these novels Cooper successfully packaged American ruggedness for European audiences; with Gallery of the Louvre, a massive painting re-creating thirty-eight masterpieces in a single canvas, Morse wanted to bring European taste to the United States.
As Morse painted in Paris, Durand and Bryant organized a picture book in New York City that they titled The American Landscape (1830). Durand and Bryant claimed their collaboration was the first to offer Americans "accurate views" of places such as the Delaware Water Gap, Catskill Mountains, and "Winnipiseogee Lake" (Winnipesaukee Lake). The collection of faithful drawings, historical allegory, and poetic illustrations crucially lacked those "tamings and softenings of cultivation" that "change the general face of the landscape" and "break up the unity of its effect." The absence of civilization would remain crucial to the idealized American landscape. Meanwhile, formal landscape aesthetics may have been developed in Europe and epitomized by some of the paintings Morse copied in the Louvre, but the "perception of [nature's] charms is not less quick and vivid among our countrymen." For the American artist a perceptive eye and adventurous spirit can compensate for any lack of aesthetic training or long-standing tradition. Therefore, sharing such charming, rugged landscapes with fellow Americans, Bryant explained, is a means to "promote the success of an experiment hitherto untried, and perhaps hazardous." In other words, the experiment initiated by breaking free from European control and forming the United States gave rise to an experimental view of the North American continent. If landscape was a verb, then capturing and promoting the raw, wild, untamed American landscape was an act of patriotism.
Notwithstanding Morse's own corrosive politics (he was a paranoid, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant politician and a rabid conspiracy theorist), the professor had an ardent desire for public appreciation — and funding. Morse spoke about the difficult life of the starving artist on the first anniversary of the National Academy's formation in 1827. As its president and the self-appointed champion of "Public Taste" in the United States, Morse, in his speech, stressed the artists' collective need to raise the general level of appreciation for the arts and to create a market for American paintings and sculptures. If artists could teach the general public about the true value of art, then patrons may begin to pay for it. Educating the unruly masses about the finer qualities of art would be difficult. In fact, Morse painted a rather dim picture of the art market and then asked his fellow artists: "Why do I speak to you of difficulties? For they are the glory of genius, without which its energy and its brilliancy would pass unnoticed away, like the electric fluid which flows unobserved along the smooth conductor, but when its course is thwarted, then, and only then, it bursts forth with its splendor, and astonishes by its power."
Some of the more talented and resilient artists listening to Morse's National Academy speech, such as Cole and Durand, were able to tap into the forces that "flowed unobserved" through nature and help them "burst forth" with beauty and splendor on the canvas. The electric qualities of plein air painting appear in Cole's "Essay on American Scenery" of 1836. Far from the city, Cole feels "the quickening spirit" of nature. He says that during one moment of sublimity, "such as I have rarely felt," he feels the rocks, wood, and water "brooded the spirit of repose," and "the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths." Pure, unfettered energy captivates the artist, who then transmits the electric experience onto the canvas.
Morse curated and promoted artists who visualized untamed nature's electrifying effects; Emerson verbally conducted electric landscapes. In "Literary Ethics" (1838), for example, Emerson said the American artist will someday, "like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all beholders." Morse used a controlled, technological image (smooth conductor), and Emerson offered an effervescent, natural image (charged cloud), but both implied that when American painters and poets do achieve greatness, their work will be like sparks erupting from a circuit or bolts tearing across the sky.
Although Emerson's fascination with electricity and electric thinking has been well documented, these ideas are also germane to his treatment of landscapes. Solitary, titillating sensations suffuse Emerson's experiences with the outdoors, especially his seminal text, "Nature." Landscape appears four times in that essay, more often than the words God (3), poet (3), mind (3), or beauty (2). The only words Emerson repeats more often are nature (13) and man (12). The various inflections of Emerson's "landscapes" merge in his most electric, transcendental experience. Walking across the barecommon, he declares: "I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." These invisible, circulating currents and particles seem to underlie Emerson's earlier reference to the "charming landscape" made of lands owned by farmers — "none of [whom] owns the landscape." The emotional transfer between self and environment lingers in the "tranquil landscape" and the "contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend." Landscape for him is an attractive, unstable, invisible force that charms a sensitive perceiver. It is also like a light beam that the individual can project onto nature. For Emerson the most powerful landscapes, like electricity, are fusions of matter and spirit, of human and nature.
In 1844, the same year Morse sent his inaugural message, Emerson declared that "the Poet" had a "power transcending all limit and privacy" and was thereby a "conductor of the whole river of electricity." Inflections of Emerson's poet-as-conductor and popular beliefs in animal magnetism — the theory that some individuals could control electric forces and thereby hypnotize or sexually attract others — collide in Whitman's famous "I Sing the Body Electric" from Leaves of Grass (1855). In Whitman's poem the electric rhetoric is conveyed through evocative, erotic images: "Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching, / Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice." The electric juice flows body to body — no wires required. Significant attention has also been called to Whitman's idea of the "body electric," but acknowledging how Whitman's language of electricity (conductor, current, shock) entwines with his depictions of landscape (field, scene, vista) enhances such readings. In "Song of Myself," for example, Whitman feels the currents of the masses coursing through him and boasts: "I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop / They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me."
Approximately forty lines later, Whitman's electric, licentious sensations dissipate. As the energy that flowed in seems to ebb away, Whitman "stand[s] by the curb" and bears witness to "prolific and vital, / Landscapes projected masculine, full-sized and golden." Like Thoreau, who states in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), "Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly," Whitman suggests landscape is more of a quality than an object, something that can be generated from within and radiated outward. To create this kind of esoteric, electric landscape, the poet draws the current pulsing through nature into her body and projects it back onto the environment.
Morse's contributions to American art and culture deserve recognition, especially his portraits, his efforts to organize and educate aspiring artists, and his introduction of the daguerreotype to the United States. However, whereas his fellow painters and poets such as Emerson and Whitman embraced the wild, vulnerable, and electrifying, Morse continued to push for the refined, elevated, and conservative. Eventually, Morse abandoned his artistic pursuits. He earned wealth and fame from his telegraph, but he remained bitter about his artistic failures. He wrote in a letter to Cooper years later, "Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been a cruel jilt to me." Morse's art was unable to channel and transmit invisible, all-pervasive electric forces in the sublime and untamed; instead, he invented a telegraph that lined American landscapes with wires.
Electric Binds
In approximately two decades telegraphy changed American politics, journalism, finance, commerce, and war. These effects corresponded to the lines that Americans envisioned and saw stretched through the material landscape.
In June 1844, weeks after the inauguration of the nation's first telegraph line and before plans for further lines had materialized, the New York Herald predicted that telegraph would "bind together with electric forces the whole Republic" and thereby "do more to guard against disunion" than any patriotic government. National cohesion and the flow of people, goods, and information would be facilitated with "this great, subtle, wonder-working element of electricity everywhere ready to do our bidding." The telegraph would not work alone, but it would provide "the soul of the vast framework" of roads, rivers, ports, and railroads. Such comments follow Morse's claim that the telegraph would make "one neighborhood of the country" and also foreshadow ensuing assertions that the telegraph represented the "manifest destiny" of Anglocentric advance.
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Excerpted from "Power-Lined"
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