Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest 0816677506, 9780816677504

Citation preview

Barnstorming the Prairies

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Barnstorming the Prairies How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest

J a s o n We e m s

u n ive r s i t y o f m i n n e s ota p re s s minneapolis • london

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MM

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association. The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance provided for the publication of this book from Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists.

Portions of chapter 2 were previously published in “Interpreting a 1930s Aerial Survey Photograph: The Artfulness of Technological Images,” History and Technology 27, no. 2 (July 2011): 223–­33, and in “Aerial Views and Farm Security Administration Photography,” History of Photography 28, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 266–­81. The University of Minnesota Press gratefully recognizes the work of Edward Dimendberg, editorial consultant, on this project. Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, mn 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Weems, Jason. Title: Barnstorming the prairies : how aerial vision shaped the Midwest / Jason Weems. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2015032473| isbn 978-0-8166-7750-4 (hc) | isbn 978-0-8166-7751-1 (pb) Subjects: lcsh: Middle West—Description and travel. | Regionalism—Middle West—History—20th century. | Landscapes—Middle West—History—20th century. | Middle West—Aerial photographs. | Aerial photography—Social aspects—Middle West—History—20th century. | Airplanes—Social aspects—Middle West—History—20th century. | Social change—Middle West—History—20th century. | Middle West— Social conditions—20th century. | Middle West—In art. | bisac: art / History / Modern (late 19th century to 1945). | art / American / General. | history / United States / 20th century. Classification: lcc f354 .w44 2015 | ddc 917.704—dc23 lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015032473

Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 20  19  18  17  16  15         10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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Contents

Introduction  Aeriality and Midwesternness vii

1 Pioneering Visions  The Midwestern Grid, the Atlas, and an Aerial Imagination 2 Managerial Mosaics  New Deal Aerial Photography and the Marshaling of Rural America



3 Adaptive Aeriality  Grant Wood, the Regional Landscape, and Modernity 4 Jeffersonian Urbanism  Frank Lloyd Wright, Aerial Pattern, and Broadacre City

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1 45 127 185

Conclusion  Over the Rainbow

251

Acknowledgments

265

Notes

267

Bibliography

301

Index

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Introduction Aeriality and Midwesternness

Near t he be g i n ning of the 195 0s, aviation giant Trans World Airlines (TWA) produced a full-­page illustrated magazine advertisement to promote its expanding service. Designed to excite Americans about the possibilities for aerial travel, the ad combined complementary levels of image, cartography, and text (Figure I.1). In the upper half of the page appeared a close­up view of a silver-­haired businessman eagerly peering out of the pressurized airplane cabin onto the landscape below. Gazing through a metal-­framed oculus and past the protruding wing of the aircraft, the man takes the measure of a landscape that most viewers would have recognized as a typical midwestern scene—­a pastel topography of rectangular fields punctuated at intervals by the diminutive buildings of small farms. Granted the power to perceive everything below him, the traveler devotes himself to the exercise of this new perspicacity as he presses forward against the glass, hand to chin, to take in all that he can. “This view point has changed an old point-­of-­view,” the accompanying text avows, followed by the exhortation: “If you still think of travel in earthbound terms, why not see what a TWA Skyliner can do to those old ideas?” At the bottom of the page, a horizontal map suggests more ramifications of the new viewpoint, its cat’s cradle of transworld flight routes implying that, via aviation, fliers and passengers could easily access the entirety of global space. Glancing over our shoulders from the twenty-­first century, more than one hundred years after the Wright brothers’ first flight and amid a culture suffused with aerial visions, the TWA traveler’s excitement seems quaint. How many times, after all, have we refused the view below by pulling down the blinds of an airliner window in order to nap or to peruse a few pages of a hastily purchased magazine? That we now perceive as commonplace a mode of perception that sixty years ago was celebrated as “a brand-­new look” raises questions about the place of aerial viewing in American culture. We might wonder, for example, about the technological developments that enabled aerial vision and the historical processes by which aerial looking became an integral component of American visuality. We

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Figure I.1. “This view point has changed an old point-­of-­view.” Advertisement for Trans World Airlines, 1951.

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i n t ro d u c t i o n ix

might also think about the impact of these views, whose ubiquitous character we now take for granted, on everyday American life, and especially on a body of early twentieth-­century experience that we have come to call “modernity.”1 Perhaps most intriguing, we might question the midwesternness of the advertisement, specifically the choice of a rural, agrarian environment as the centerpiece for the era’s most cutting-­edge technology and vantage point. Why, from among the bevy of exciting locales diagrammed in the flight-­route map, did TWA’s admen choose to depict this particular landscape as the focus of the businessman’s aerial fascination? During the 1920s and 1930s, the agricultural landscape, particularly the vast gridded spaces of the American Midwest, came into sight as a locus for the construction of new cultural outlooks that were intricately tied to emergent practices of aerial looking and thinking. In the relatively short span of the interwar years, participants both inside and outside the region undertook one of the greatest recodings of a landscape and of a way of life in twentieth-­century America, transforming the image of the prairie from that of a patchwork of rugged Jeffersonian pioneers to that of a homogeneous grid for industrial agriculture. From electrification and the mechanization of rural labor to the displacement of small farmers and the consolidation of landownership, a new modern mentality began to shape agrarian production. The effects of these changes rippled through regional culture, as the outlines of midwestern identity shifted to accommodate, incorporate, and at times resist the growth of new visions and imperatives. The idea of the Midwest became a site of negotiation where different groups of people, from government technocrats and capitalists to local inhabitants and artists, vied with one another in the creation of a new functional and symbolic image for the region. Although scholars have studied the transformation of the midwestern countryside in terms of economics, politics, and literary expression, few have sought to understand the impact of vision on the reshaping of midwestern identity.2 Yet it is in the realm of the visual that new modes of modern thought and experience exerted their most formative impact on midwestern culture. This book takes up this challenge by demonstrating how a specific configuration of visual practices, those of aerial seeing and thinking, shaped understandings of the Midwest for its inhabitants and for other, broader audiences. From the first moments of the region’s settlement in the nineteenth century, people employed elevated and bird’s-­eye prospects as a means to overcome the frustrating openness and seemingly featureless uniformity of the prairie topography and to envision the expansive grid of government-­ imposed survey lines that organized settlement activity. In the early twentieth century, these imagined perspectives became linked to a new form of travel and vision—­that of the airplane. When the Wright brothers’ flyer lifted from the beach at Kitty Hawk in 1903, most Americans treated the new technology as a novelty, a mechanical marvel that tempted the imagination yet had little impact on everyday existence. But after World War I aviation gained utilitarian purpose as a means of linking together the continent, and over the next two decades it became an integral component of American

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life. In doing so it also created a new aerial sensibility that opened up new vantage points from which to see the world below. The airplane became an apparatus for new ways of looking: from paintings and photographs to movies and popular media, a plethora of aerial images of landscapes entered the American and, more specifically, the midwestern scene. The new sight lines actualized by aviation composed a new episteme of vision that enabled Americans to reconceptualize their region amid the shifting culture and technology of the early twentieth century—­to see it as a dynamic space where people worked to harmonize the core traditions of America’s agrarian identity with the more abstract forms of modernity. During the interwar years the Midwest underwent a dramatic transformation as modern tech­ nology overwrote the region’s dispersed landscape of farms and towns with unified regimes of production, transportation, and communication. Simultaneously, the texture of rural culture changed significantly as long-­standing Jeffersonian dreams for a society of independent farmers gave way to a new aesthetic of industrial efficiency, economic consolidation, and cultural homogenization. These new forms—­from tractors and electrification to centralized government oversight and commodity culture—­altered the pattern of rural life by redefining relationships between space and time, production and consumption, community and individual. Aerial views emerged as the primary means to visualize this transformation, to make it legible, and to shape its cultural meaning. Shot straight down from distant altitudes, survey photographs captured synoptic visions that enabled viewers to perceive the landscape as something other than a patchwork of alternately isolated and idealized individual homesteads and to recode it instead as a unified grid marshaled for the production of agricultural goods and the standardization of social relations. At the same time, aviation’s mobile and detached sight lines destabilized viewers’ usual horizontal orientations and revealed aspects of their relationship to the land that remained invisible from ground level. From the air things often looked unfamiliar, and such unfamiliarity could be uncanny. Imagine the surprise of a farmer upon seeing his homestead, a place invested with personal meaning, disclosed as part of a vast system in which all farms looked alike. People could not help but see in such images a new order for American life. Although we might imagine this business of rural transformation—­and its visualization—­to have been streamlined and irresistible, history suggests otherwise. Modernization, after all, was not a clean process. Rather, it involved a complicated negotiation between tradition and innovation, the promise of new technologies weighed against the security of old practices. People recognized that as tractors replaced horse-­drawn implements, farmers would be driven to destroy community bonds by expanding their fields and pushing neighbors off the land. Likewise, inhabitants understood that although centralized economic programs such as those of the New Deal might protect them from market volatility, they also replaced individualism with regulation. Responses to aerial vision were similarly dialogic. For some people, aerial perspectives embodied the promise of modernization on a vast and

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systematic scale. To others, such views dissolved traditional patterns of rural life into unrecognizable abstraction. Most significantly, for a surprising number of early twentieth-­century viewers, aerial images gave visual form to the dialectic between tradition and innovation that they were negotiating in their everyday lives. In doing so, such views opened a conceptual space where modernization could be reconfigured through active dialogue with the past, rather than a clean break from it. The following narrative provides one of the first historically and geographically focused investi­ gations into the complex and complementary relationship between, on the one hand, processes of aerial seeing, picturing, and thinking—­a constellation of concerns that we might collectively term “aeriality”—­and, on the other, the development of a uniquely regional sense of space and identity.3 From the moment of its first exploration and settlement, the prairie landscape, with its vast open and undifferentiated topography and its rigidly imposed cadastral grid, resisted conventions of horizontal vision and demanded the invention of elevated prospects from which midwesterners could visually define their relationship to their surrounding terrain. With the advent of aviation, aerial views made it possible to see the region as a unified whole and to understand the relationships that shaped regional life. This book explores the emergence, transformation, and normalization of practices of midwestern aeriality through a series of overlapping visual and historical instances. Beginning with the pre­ aviation elevated modes of prairie vision embodied in the Jeffersonian land survey and its consequent cartographic representations, the narrative will move into the more commanding and vertiginous gazes embodied in modern aerial technology. These range from the omniscient and systematically transformative operations of aerial survey photography and rational planning to the animated and dizzying effects of modern art and popular visual culture. The connections drawn across this span of time and thought highlight not only the persistence and efficacy of aerial vision in the construction of midwestern culture, but also its inventiveness and adaptability as a mode for refiguring understandings of the region. In particular, we will marvel at the ways that midwesterners simultaneously invented, resisted, and engaged with aerial views as they negotiated the changing patterns of prairie life. A e r iali t y Widely recognized as one of the defining perspectives of the twentieth century, aerial vision remains significantly understudied. What scholarship does exist tends to focus on the authoritarian aspects of aerial imagery, and specifically, its role in fueling modernist aspirations to synoptic vision, rational planning, and spatial order. By contrast, this study crosses its theorization of aerial vision’s top-­down function with sensitivity to the particularities of local context and subjectivity. Of course, aerial

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images did serve as tools for the institution of broad systems of authority, and we will see how they operated in that context to enable and even naturalize rural modernization. Yet by crystallizing abstract schemes into tangible images, aerial vision also granted midwesterners the power to be something more than passive observers of the transformations taking place around them. Instead, they could take ownership of modernization and adapt it to their own traditions and practices. Looking carefully at ordinary responses to official images of the land, rural inhabitants were able not only to retain certain aspects of their older identities but also to reassert them in ways that reshaped the era’s broader visual and social discourses. The comprehension of aerial vision’s impact on the rural landscape necessitates a methodology that mixes close visual analysis of individual objects with a more synthetic understanding of the mutually constitutive relationship that exists between the act of vision, its objects and practitioners, and the broader cultural context. To forge such a method, this text builds upon a few foundational theorizations of vision and visuality, especially the epistemic models offered by scholars such as Jonathan Crary.4 Yet one weakness of many such accounts has been their tendency to focus on the structural bases of modern visuality or, alternately, on the avant-­garde artists who consciously work to thwart them. While such studies are invaluable for helping us understand the high-­order operations of vision, they often take shape at the cost of overlooking everyday viewers, whose contributions are left vague and hypothetical or are collapsed into a reactionary category of mass culture. Whenever possible, this text will attempt to reconstruct these viewers’ responses in order to demonstrate their constitutive role in the formulation of visual meaning. Recognizing also that most Americans experienced aerial vision not through cutting-­edge art but, rather, through more accessible kinds of images, the text also highlights the potential for nonart representations to perform critical functions. Doing so will hopefully democratize the reigning discourses of visual modernity by making them more responsive to lived experiences on the ground. The process of understanding aerial vision and its emergence as a modality of modern experience requires the articulation of a visual, historical, and conceptual framework that responds to the new considerations invoked by flight. What were the visual effects and sensations that underlay the experience of looking from above? What bodies of historical practice and conceptual assumptions gave such visions cultural meaning? Finally, how did these new deterrestrialized prospects inflect and/or alter the thoughts and narratives of early twentieth-­century midwesterners? Although we now have come to perceive the airplane as an everyday technology and flight as a common activity, during the period in question aviation was a miraculous accomplishment and a hallmark of modern innovation. Particularly after World War I, flying represented a mesmerizing experience that proffered limitless possibilities for reconceiving human relationships to the world below. As aviation historians such as Joseph Corn and Robert Wohl have documented, people the world over

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and particularly in the United States embraced flight not only as a miracle of technology but also, and more importantly, as an enlightening and transformative experience.5 Not only did people perceive flight as intoxicating and liberating, but they also believed that freedom from the bonds of ground and gravity would usher in new outlooks onto society that would enable a reimagination of its spaces and patterns in a new, utopian form. As Corn outlined, in the United States faith in the airplane became a veritable religion, with flight “portending a wondrous era of peace and harmony, of culture and prosperity.”6 While the cultural history of American flight—­what Corn has termed the “winged gospel”—­is not the subject of this book, it does shape the edges of how midwesterners approached and interpreted the modern experience of aerial vision.7 Like flight itself, the ability to see from the air granted people an unprecedented access to the world below, one that refigured some of the basic assumptions of vision itself. Since the invention of Renaissance perspective, visual experience has been postulated on the model of a horizontal gaze directed into and across space from the viewpoint of a standing human viewer. Sight lines maintain a certain stability because they correlate, albeit to varying degrees of geometric abstraction and extension, to the physical and mental being of a grounded individual. As philosopher Paul Virilio observed, this model of vision assumes the existence of a “faith line” whose axis, no matter how attenuated (he gives the example of the telescope and the astrological observer), always anchors itself to the fixed position of a singular viewer.8 Thus, even when artists imagined broader, more elevated gazes, such as in a bird’s-­eye view or a nineteenth-­century panorama, they ultimately maintained a sense of horizontality. Like a viewer atop a mountain or a rooftop, one looked from above but ultimately still across the scene. As we might anticipate, aviation, with its built-­in detachment and destabilization of the viewing position, dramatically altered visual prospects. Removed from terrestrial space and its requisite horizontal trajectories, those who flew—­and those who digested secondhand the myriad photographs, texts, and other descriptions of flight that proliferated in public discourse—­encountered the landscape from previously unimagined altitudes and radically different vectors. On the one hand, visions of the land captured from airplanes in high level flight directed one’s eye vertically instead of horizontally, perpendicular to the ground. In these “Olympian,” or god’s-­eye views, the beholder looked straight down through empty atmospheric space onto a single, continuous, and often static visual field. On the other hand, views from speeding and swooping aircraft destabilized one’s sense of the horizon as perceptual edge and replaced it with oblique diagonals. Looking down from the vertiginous and uncanny angles created by such dynamic patterns of flight, viewers experienced visual relationships impossible to imagine from the ground. As modernist scholar Jeffrey Schnapp has argued, aerial viewing opened up new ways of seeing that created “new cognitive possibilities” for apprehending the relationships that existed between

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humanity and the inhabited landscape.9 Granted the ability to look vertically down on the landscape from a perch that was physically (and not merely metaphorically) discontinuous with earthly space, high-­altitude images enabled viewers to perceive the structures of the natural and human worlds from the outside—­a position that embodied a new exercise of knowledge and authority. Unlike grounded prospects, in which viewers retained a sense of visual and conceptual continuity with the scene through their real or implied physical presence, the straight-­down aerial view overrode the rules of terrestrial bondage. Projected through an atmospheric space unimpeded by either topographic variations or the shrinking effects of linear perspective, the vertical gaze enabled its viewers to see everything in the landscape, from objects embedded in the deepest valleys to buildings hidden behind high fences. As if the viewer was looking down onto a tabletop, nothing was blocked from sight. At the same time, the breadth of such gazes permitted the eye (or more commonly the camera) to encapsulate vast expanses of terrain as a single image and enabled people to perceive broad, often systemic, relationships among distant places. From a vertical vantage point one could discern not only the pathway of an individual river but also its broader linkage to an entire system of natural drainage. Or, in the case of the Midwest, one saw not only the specific imagery of an individual homestead but also the articulation of that single, discrete place within a vast and abstract pattern of fields, farms, and roadways. This all-­seeing vertical view, which following philosopher Michel Foucault could be described as “panoptic,” proved to be one of the most fascinating, utilitarian, and ideologically loaded components of aerial gazing, and it was often co-­opted by those who sought to exercise authority.10 Vertical views enabled people to perceive and represent the land as an abstract object and, in the process, to exert their will upon it. By facilitating the visual unification of vast tracts of land into a single and continuous image, Olympian views enabled modern planners both to cement preexisting systems of order and, equally important, to envision the implementation of new spatial plans, management initiatives, and social models. At the level of popular consumption, the overwhelming sense of order so often conveyed by vertical images could be employed to convince everyday viewers of the efficacy and even moral rectitude of both human and natural systems. Indeed, when confronting survey photographs, early twentieth-­century viewers were frequently awestruck by the divine, seemingly pre­ ordained order of the natural, and equally often the constructed, world. This was certainly the case in the Midwest, where aerial survey photographs created by the U.S. government during the 1930s enabled bureaucratic planners to invent an array of new policies and spatial relationships designed to reorder agrarian production and repattern cultural life. The will to order that is inherent in the aerial gaze inevitably also comprises an exercise of power. As cultural theorist Donna Haraway observed, all forms of “infinite vision” enact the illusion of a viewing position that encompasses yet also transcends the embedded, material circumstances of the

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world (a condition Haraway described as “the god trick of seeing everything from nowhere”).11 If seeing everything meant that the landscape became objectified, miniaturized, and therefore open to systematic manipulation, it also brought about a powerful sense of disembodiment that enabled the disassociation of the “knowing subject [the viewer] from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power.”12 This sense of unlimited viewing and unfettered being, which in the era of early aviation was often characterized through a terminology of transcendence over both physical laws and subjective limitations, sometimes imbued aerial lookers with an outsized sense of their own command of the world and ability to bring order to it. In the hands of the bureaucrats, planners, architects, artists, and individuals discussed in this book, the aerial gaze was both cause and result of the era’s growing faith (some might say hubris) that natural and human processes could be reshaped through the exercise of knowledge and power. Such was the seductive force of the aerial view that even those who might take issue with the results of such authority often embraced the authoritarian fantasy of the all-­seeing. Faced with aerial photographs that showed not only their farms but also a seemingly transcendent power held by the government to envision and thereby control them, farmers proved surprisingly willing to cede traditional agricultural practices in favor of government-­sponsored modernization. Understanding the relationship between synoptic vertical views and the realization of grand schemes of rational planning and control in the midwestern landscape is one goal of this study. Equally important is an investigation into the embrace of aeriality by individual midwesterners as a part of the category of subjective experience that theorist Michel de Certeau has termed the “practice of everyday life.” Unlike the codifying, top-­down imposition of order through hegemonic power embodied in a panoptic model of aerial viewing, the notion of everyday practice, or “ways of operating” as Certeau also described it, considers how individuals appropriate the forms of an established power structure in order to create alternative possibilities for meaning and experience within the system.13 The aerial view plays centrally in Certeau’s thinking. In one chapter he described the difference between the rational gaze of the planner and the “makeshift creativity” of the inhabi­ tant through an anecdote in which he portrayed two competing visualizations of New York: one seen from the top of the World Trade Center and the other from street level.14 Looking down from above, “out of the city’s grasp,” Certeau asserted that viewers become voyeurs who, because they can perceive the vast geometric plan of city blocks and parallel streets, are suffused with a fictive sense of control and domination. By contrast, when viewers are transported down to the streets below, the experience becomes quite different, as they must make individual choices of direction and encounter. Unlike Foucault’s model, where the order seen from above irresistibly determines the activities of those below, Certeau’s posits that on the ground actual practice often departs from or manipulates the rules embedded in the larger regime. To paraphrase Certeau, at the same time that individuals conform to

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larger spatial orders, they also reinvent them through personal choices (shortcuts, detours, manipulations) that create new, uncontrolled, and at times unexpected encounters and interpretations.15 To be sure, Certeau’s model is one that positions unifying and objectifying viewpoints such as those of the panoptic vertical gaze (as well as the maps, survey photographs, and the like that are derived from them) in strong distinction to the more subjective experience of the grounded individual. Indeed, Certeau noted that the sense of oversight and psychological detachment experienced from on high was ultimately desubjectifying. “Looking down like a god,” he wrote, viewers achieved the “exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge [that] is related . . . to being a viewpoint and nothing more.”16 Thus, to look from above was to gain a “fictional” sense of control, but also to lose sight of the ability to make choices within the world. One’s sense of self became continuous with the panoptic logic illuminated by the viewpoint. Certeau’s critique of the aerial gaze as a tool of order and domination certainly has merit, as many applications of aerial vision (both in the early twentieth century and today) function in the continuation of long-­standing regimes of visual control and political organization. As we will discuss in chapter 2, for example, one of the central purposes of government aerial survey photography in the Midwest during the 1930s was to reiterate and refine the efficacy of the abstract, rectilinear survey grid that had been etched across the landscape more than a century earlier. Yet I have discovered that early twentieth-­century Americans did not perceive the aerial view solely as an instrument of order. Rather, by virtue of its ability to open up previously understood landscapes and to present them in radically new and exciting ways, aerial looking embodied in itself possibilities for a Certeauian detour—­an unexpected perspective and encounter with the land that might give rise to new experiences, ideas, and understandings. The potential of the airplane as an instrument for the realization of an enhanced modernist subjectivity was recognized even in the early twentieth century, as was the power of the aerial view to, somewhat ironically, bring people closer to the landscape. In their study of American aeriality Taking Measures across the American Landscape, aerial photographer Alex MacLean and landscape architect James Corner characterize the aerial view as significantly dualistic in its ability to reveal not only “synoptic rationality” but also the “organic interdependency” that exists among landscape elements.17 As geographer Denis Cosgrove elaborated in an essay included in that volume, seeing from above encouraged a “new sensitivity” to the bonds between humanity and the world, and in doing so created opportunities for synthetic, in addition to analytic, thought.18 By freeing people from the patterns (visual and otherwise) of everyday terrestrial relationships, aerial vision allowed people to see and interpret their world in new ways and to reshape it and themselves in unexpected and at times radical ways. In some instances, the new sensitivity embodied in aerial vision was exercised through vertical imagery that fascinated the public. To see from on high was not only to assume a position of visual

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authority but also to realize a timeless Icarian fantasy of escape from the bonds of gravity and the labyrinth of social order. By making everyday spaces visible at remarkably different scales and from strange orientations, aerial views enlivened conventional ways of seeing with a sense of freedom and inventiveness. From thousands of feet aloft, large structures became miniaturized at the same time that one saw them as rooftops rather than from the side as walls. The “vertical” gaze—­this is how early aerial photographers identified the new straight-­down perspective enacted by aviation and recorded by their cameras—­was unfettered by walls, foliage, and other blockages. This freedom to see into previously inaccessible spaces became another source of synoptic command and voyeuristic pleasure. By granting a view of unexpected scope and penetration, vertical views made it possible for people not only to perceive extended relationships across distant and seemingly disconnected spaces, but also to envision configurations that would have been impossible to imagine from the ground. For example, aerial views offered landowners new ways to measure the proximity of their farmsteads to those of others and to realize that distances were often relative to the routes of travel available. More conceptually, this broad scope often provided new positions from which to understand and critique the grandiose extent of systems of social organization. Such visions could be novel and awe-­ inspiring, but they could also be uncanny and disturbing. Imagine the surprise of midwestern farmers who, on being shown an aerial photograph of their local landscape, suddenly recognized that their individual homesteads—­places imbued with personal meaning—­were mere components of a homogeneous grid system in which all farms looked alike. Equally captivating were the swirling and oblique sight lines enabled by diving and looping aircraft. Whereas the high and fixed altitudes of vertical and long-­distance views maintained a sense of omnipotent stability for the viewer, the dynamic movement embodied in closer-­in diagonal and oblique aerial gazes offered dramatic disjunctions in the relationship between the viewpoint and the viewing body. As airplanes darted in full three-­dimensional movement through the sky, unconstrained (relatively speaking) from the organizing pull of earthly gravity, their occupants found themselves liberated from normal bodily and visual relationships to space. Through a pull of the plane’s joystick—­a term coined early in the twentieth century—­aviators could turn their heading, and their vision, in stunning new directions. Looking ahead toward the horizon at one moment, at the next viewers could unexpectedly find themselves peering straight up or down, diagonally toward the ground, or swirling through a loop. The result of such dynamic shifts of view, as art historian Leah Dickerman has noted in an article on the “radically oblique” photography of Russian artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, was to “set perspective against itself, subverting the unidirectional gaze, the certainty of apprehension, and the penetrability of space” that were assumed in horizontal, terrestrial perspective.19 To a degree equal to that of views taken from incredible altitudes, radical (or in my case aerial) oblique angles, as Dickerman elaborated, “cut the viewing subject’s relation with a stable phenomenal

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space and produced instead a space that the beholder is forced to interpret.”20 The topsy-­turvy experience of flight excised viewers from their normally contiguous linkage to the world and forced (or freed) them to conceive of new, disarticulated relationships to the space below. Such visions could be as exhilarating as a roller-­coaster ride, or as discomfiting as being lost at sea. By deconstructing conceptual parameters of traditional pictorial space, the oblique aerial gaze inspired a range of midwestern image makers, from artists to the producers of mass culture, to represent the world in a new, dynamic form. Such innovation is particularly shown in the work of itinerant aerial photographers, and even more so in the art of regionalist painter Grant Wood, who began to render the landscape of his native Iowa in an increasingly swirling and vertiginous aerial style. Seeing from the air enabled midwesterners to embrace what was perceived as the era’s greatest technological achievement, the airplane, and to participate in and at times control the processes of twentieth-­century modernization. Indeed, as some readers have undoubtedly surmised, aerial vision both reflected and constituted two central, sometimes contradictory, imperatives of twentieth-­century modernity. At one end, synoptic aerial gazes embodied the modern desire to institute unified and rational systems of production, consumption, and belief as a means to create an ordered, progressive society. At the other end, the more dynamic and disturbing visions empowered by aviation propelled people (often via the destruction of older systems of vision and belief ) to formulate new definitions of culture and personal identity in response to the new visual stimuli and social regulations emergent in the technologies, ideologies, and experiences of twentieth-­century life. The following chapters will elucidate how aerial viewing effected these ends of modernity within a specifically midwestern context. One further distinction needs to be drawn. The argument that follows characterizes aeriality as mode of vision and experience deeply tied to processes, ideas, and transformations of modernization and modern life. Doing so will sometimes, but not always, link aerial vision into the discourses prevalent in artistic modernism, a specialized subset of modernity that possessed its own set of formal queries and sociocultural conditions. Certainly, artistic modernism and aerial vision intersected at multiple points, and when this is the case, it will be discussed. Yet modern aeriality and its consequent aesthetic(s) arose in many forms and permutations, and in only some of these instances did it filter directly through the visual processes of modern art. M idwest er nness The agrarian landscapes of the American Midwest will strike some readers as a peculiar focal point for a study devoted to the emergence of a new and highly modern regime of understanding such as aerial vision. After all, modes of elevated representation and aerial gazing had been ubiquitous across a broad span of Western culture both before and after the advent of aviation. In the early twentieth

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century these practices took on a more potent charge as the technological reality of aviation transformed the elevated perspective into a privileged instrument and symbol of modernity. In this way, aerial views did become strongly associated with those spaces—­say the city or the battlefield—­that observers in the interwar years and even still today most readily associate with technological society’s leading edge. The countryside, by contrast, resides under veils of romantic agrarianism. Yet there are few landscapes where aerial looking and thinking exerted a stronger and more continuous influence on the formation of space, culture, and identity than in the American Midwest. From its inception as an organized landscape (at least in a Euro-­American context), aerial views stood at the center of how people perceived, represented, and constructed this topography and the culture they placed upon it. More specifically, aerially inflected notions of midwesternness had emerged as formative concepts in a series of debates over modernization and its effect on the American sense of place and identity during the interwar years. The United States was founded as a nation of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers, but its identity became destabilized by a seemingly inexorable shift from a rural orientation to a new order of modernity marked by urbanism, industrial production, and interconnected consumerism. While most people embraced these changes to one degree or another, they also responded with sensitivity to the real and symbolic uncertainties brought on by cultural transformation. Americans sensed that the national landscape was changing as people vacated farmsteads in favor of cities. They also recognized that these changes on the land shifted the cultural foundations of national life. Because the Midwest, more than any other American landscape, embodied the ethos of Jeffersonianism, people called upon it as an example in debates over the future form of national culture. Yet even in the context of this dialog, the region, and especially its aerial image, proved unexpectedly complex, multivalent, and adaptable. To understand the significance of the Midwest in this debate, one need only think, for example, of the post–­World War II image of the carefully regimented yet democratically conceived American suburban home(stead)s, each with its carefully cropped yard, in order to imagine one extension of a uniquely midwestern system of order and values into the enduring flow of American life. Still, what was (and is) the Midwest? What patterns and practices define it as a landscape, a cultural system, and an aesthetic experience? What differentiates prairie land, culture, and identity from other American spaces, and in what ways does it reflect, embody, and influence American values? Most importantly, how is the idea of midwestern aeriality central to the iteration of visual and cultural modernity in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s? Thinking about these questions requires the establishment of a framework for understanding “the Midwest” that can be built upon and interrogated in upcoming chapters. In the simplest of terms, the Midwest comprises a section of land located in the geographic cen­ ter of the nation—­set between the continent’s eastern and western mountain ranges and woodlands

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and between its northern lakes and forests and southern hills.21 In terms of political boundaries, the region stretches on one axis from the prairies of western Ohio to the plains of eastern Colorado and on the other from the tillable lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas to those of Missouri, Kansas, and even Oklahoma. While none of its boundaries are certain, the defining feature of the lands that constitute the region is that they are composed almost entirely of prairie and plains. The land’s physical profile is typically described as open and flat, though “flat” is a bit of a misnomer, since the prairie topography is often one of rolling hillsides. Yet in comparison with other American geographies, the land appears to be largely without landmarks, promontories, or monumental geological forms. In its natural state the typical ground cover consisted of wild grasses, whose height varied from several feet in Illinois and Iowa to mere inches in the dryer climate and higher elevation of Nebraska or Kansas. Beneath these grasses lie several feet of rich topsoil able to sustain tremendous yearly growth of natural, and later cultivated, vegetation. In the past, wide-­ranging fires, strong winds, and large herds of grazing bison kept the land free of trees, thus suffusing the landscape with an overwhelming sense of openness and expanse. This sense of endlessness was heightened by the flatness of the landscape itself, whose low, uninterrupted horizons stretched for incredible distances. To early explorers and settlers, the region’s unique physical features or, more properly, its unique lack thereof, made the prairie topography unlike any landscape that they had previously encountered. The vast emptiness of the prairie landscape, coupled with settlers’ inability to organize, structure, or even see it, evoked feelings of consternation and uncertainty among many of the region’s first European immigrants. For others, however, the lack of hill or landmark heightened excitement over the land’s potential as a site of agrarian production.22 Indeed, it was the symbolic openness of the prairie terrain that most differentiated the development of the prairies from that of other regional topog­raphies. In particular, the landscape’s planar topography made it a nearly perfect place for the implementation of the most ambitious project of early republican space and ideology: the federal Land Ordinance of 1785. The ordinance required that newly acquired public lands (particularly those of the Louisiana Purchase) be organized into a seamless, abstract grid of individual landholdings. The government planned to distribute these parcels to settlers at a nominal fee. The goal was to create a productive agrarian landscape and, equally important, a homogeneous social order of like-­ minded yet independent middle-­class landowners. Taken together, these two visions of the region—­as an open and undefined space whose lack of features and boundaries oppressed the human spirit and, alternately, as a geography overwritten with an abstract system of republican ideology—­form the bedrock of the region and culture that we have now come to understand as the “Midwest.” By the 1850s, as historians Andrew Cayton and Susan Gray observed, midwesterners (though not yet named as such) had begun to develop a sense of regional identity separate from that of other American places.23 As a group, inhabitants started to

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view their physical environment, and its embedded cultural narrative, as unique. They saw themselves as hardy pioneers in constant battle to tame and reconfigure their monotonous and isolating envi­ ronment and as embodiments of republican virtue and democratic capitalism. Moreover, they began to promote the region as the place where the nation’s most celebrated, and often utopic, ambitions could be actualized. As Cayton and Gray expounded, “Many people saw the Midwest as malleable, as a place of liberation from tradition and a source of enormous energy for change.”24 In other words, the region became a site of invention, where people imagined that they could remake the conditions of their lives through hard work, dedication, and idealism. As late nineteenth-­century economic downturns made clear, these early beliefs were more myth than reality.25 Yet as long as the frontier remained, with its promise of free land and limitless opportunity, so too did the viability of the narratives of the pioneer and the hard-­working yeoman farmer. Until the end of the nineteenth century, when the frontier vanished along with much of its symbolism, the image of the region as a land that promised prosperity in the form of independent agrarianism remained at the center of its people’s homespun sense of self. At the same time, the region saw a rise in its national status, as its idealized landscape of small family farms and independent small-­ town businesses came to be seen as an exemplar of mainstream American politics, productivity, and morality. Such cultural ascendancy reached its apex in the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 in Chicago, where the construction of a classically styled city at the foot of Lake Michigan symbolically relocated the seat of American industry and democracy to the Midwest. Chicago, the fair’s organizers dreamed, would supplant the East Coast as the engine and icon of the nation’s future. Yet as realist writer Frank Norris insightfully demonstrated, the city derived much of its authority from its status as a distribution point for the corn, cattle, and capital that streamed into it from across the prairies and plains.26 The Chicago fair represented the exaltation of a certain mythology of first-­generation midwesternness, but it also foreshadowed new social, economic, and, above all, technological changes that would challenge the grand narrative of prairie progress. As historian William Cronon has elaborated, by the turn of the twentieth century midwestern life had become subject to the imperatives of new, totalizing economies of production and consumption, and the region’s once distinctive rural culture increasingly became viewed as subsidiary to that of the industrial city.27 Innovations in technologies of production and transportation transformed midwestern agriculture almost exclusively to a cash-­ crop monoculture practice, in which farmers planted their entire acreage in one or two crops whose produce was shipped immediately to central markets, where speculators and middlemen reaped most of the profits. At the same time, the enhancement of mercantile connections between rural places and urban centers created new demands among midwesterners, who began to covet the consumer goods churned out by industrial society. As mail-­order catalogs, for example, began to expose people to the

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objects and lifestyles of the modern city, the independent farms and towns of the prairies began to feel more like detached hinterlands than frontiers of progress. Expatriate midwesterners such as Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis not only lamented this new-­felt isolation but also excoriated what they perceived as the barrenness and narrow-­mindedness of midwestern culture as compared to modern cosmopolitanism. By the 1920s—­the same moment when aerial vision began to make its mark on the midwestern imaginary—­the very idea of the Midwest, and of regional identity more generally, was at best uncertain. The expansion of modern industrial and commercial culture, with its will toward unification and its innate disregard for local history or regional distinction, threatened a final leveling of the cultural mythologies that underlay midwestern identity. In spite of a growing conformity with this new industrial order, however, the region’s inhabitants were loath to completely abandon their older beliefs or, more importantly, the social promise embodied within them. Indeed, fears of the forfeiture of midwestern identity—­a loss not just of traditions but also of the promise of Jeffersonian prosperity itself—­became increasingly potent as economic hardship and the industrialization of agricultural practice pushed more and more people from the land. In the face of such displacement, people looked increasingly to their time-­honored beliefs as a source of stability. As historian Robert Dorman has argued, the development of a national regionalist movement during the 1920s and 1930s represented an attempt to “resettle” American culture in order to “reclaim the myths and ideals that had been abandoned and ‘dispersed’ during the centuries-­long march of Americans across the continent and into modernity.”28 This return to the regional gained further prominence during the Great Depression, when the culminating pressures of technological change, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and cultural consolidation forced a new questioning, both inside and outside the Midwest, of what it meant to be both midwestern and modern. While it might be imagined that these pressures manifested in the midwestern mind primarily as changes in the nature of space, they also hypostatized uncertainties in the cultural understanding of time. In the formative moment of settlement, the midwestern landscape had taken shape as a frontier—­a concept reliant not only on limitless space but on an infinite notion of the future. For the land surveyor, speculator, farmer, and booster, temporality was understood in terms of open-­ended possibility, with new opportunities metaphorically (and often in reality) just over the horizon. Yet this sense of frontier as future had begun to erode as early as 1893, when historian Frederick Jackson Turner used 1890 census data to demonstrate that westward migration was ending.29 As expansion gave way to consolidation, time became less projective and linear and instead turned inward. Midwesterners became introspective. They began to reorient their understanding of the region’s temporality from the horizontal to the vertical: time became less a line projecting from present to future and more a static and totalized field that merged present, future, and past. As philosopher Louis

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Marin suggested, the tension between infinity and totality is significant to both space and time, as it replaces the romanticism of the unknown and open-­ended with the rationality of the all-­known and everywhere-­structured.30 There was much at stake for midwesterners in this shift from romance to rationality, not least the displacement of the promise of Jeffersonian individualism. The very grid that had once led settlers to a manifest destiny now appeared to lock them in place. With the future no longer limitless, nostalgia became an inevitable and sometimes productive way of dealing with this new reality. Totalizing in its own right, the aerial gaze became a symbol of this new temporality, yet also (paradoxically) a means to understand and deconstruct it. This book conceptualizes the visual, cognitive psychological processes through which a second generation of twentieth-­century midwesterners created a new symbolic image for their region, one that integrated the beliefs of the past with the conditions of the present. Of particular importance is the dialogue that interwar midwesterners carried on between competing conceptualizations of the rural landscape as space and place, the latter of which Dorman described as an emphasis on “the lived environment as a unique historical, cultural, and physical entity, and as a key to a fully human life.”31 Midwesterners, when faced with the consolidating and homogenizing imperatives of twentieth-­ century modernity—­ideas that resonated the twentieth century’s growing sense of spatial, temporal, and cultural abstraction—­sought to establish a new, or at least stronger, sense of self-­identity by refocusing not only on the terra firma of their home landscape but also on the cultural philosophies by which their ancestors had settled it almost a century earlier. During the Depression especially, a new spatially and temporally complicated image of “midwesternness” arose on the national stage, at least momentarily, as a model for modern identity. The midwestern landscape, with its abstract yet culturally symbolic pattern of farms and towns and its idealized and now nostalgic notion of Jeffersonian frontier futurity, took on renewed relevance as an icon of American life. This time, however, its meaning was more complicated and even self-­contradicting: embodying the forms and ideologies of the Jeffersonian past, yet also incorporating the structures and imperatives of a new and consolidating modernistic order. Poetically, much of the aerial vision’s potency stemmed from its paradoxical ability to capture both these possibilities. I offer some final notes on prairie terminology. The term “Midwest” and its derivatives “midwestern,” “midwesterner,” and so on did not arise until the twentieth century, when the region’s inhabitants first began to differentiate their landscape from other spaces shaped by American western expansion.32 Though initially intended as a means to demarcate a geographical construct, the terms grew to signify not only a specific territory but also the unique culture and practices contingent to it. The idea of cultural “midwesternness” presented throughout this narrative extends this line of thinking and is meant to indicate a body of accreted practices, ideas, and knowledge accumulated by inhabitants of the region. For the purposes of this study, this body of midwestern knowledge is

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anchored to the experience of people who lived and worked on the farms and in the small towns of the nation’s central prairies and plains. In other words, this book concerns those who considered themselves, and their culture, to be predominantly rural and agrarian. While urbanism remains a significant topic of discussion in this history, it enters the following pages mainly at points where it influences, is shaped by, or becomes entangled with rural life. A concentration on the rural serves another function. Far too often, the story of modernity is told primarily as a saga of cities. Yet to fully apprehend the process of American modernization requires understanding that in times of change people often turned to more traditional sites—­such as the midwestern countryside—­to find answers to their cultural questions. It is only by looking at modern regimes of vision in these other places that we can see clearly how new modes of visualizing the world worked with older means of representation to fashion new, hybrid identities for the average person engaged in everyday life. In spite of the important distinctions that biologists and geographers draw between the terms “prairie” and “plains,” this book focuses on the commonalities shared by these two spaces, par­ ticularly their openness, their lack of trees and vertical features, and their consequent suitability to a particular framework of settlement and (agri)cultural practice. In the following pages, I will use the term “prairie” (or “prairies”) to indicate this common landscape, whether prairie or plains. Finally, the term “regionalism” indicates both a generalized notion of processes of thinking anchored in the culture shaped by a specific environment, in this case that of the central prairies, and a more particular set of cultural expressions and political ideals associated with the regionalist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The story of aeriality and midwesternness is a complicated mixture of innovation and continuity. It begins with an assessment of preaviation aerial gazes as a means of seeing, conceptualizing, and constructing prairie space. Faced with the unconventional topography of the prairie in its natural state, the region’s first settlers found traditional horizontally oriented modes of sight insufficiently able to convey an imagery for, or an understanding of, the region. Consequently, the first midwesterners developed an alternative practice of envisioning the region in which imagined bird’s-­eye prospects, coupled with more abstract and cartographically constructed gazes, provided a means to escape the overwhelming openness and relative featurelessness of the terrain and imagine the landscape as organized and hospitable. These practices of aerial looking also exhibited substantial congruence to the broad, rational gaze embedded in the government’s land-­survey grid—­the actual and ideological template by which the region was settled. Chapter 1 underscores the ways that that grid view and aerial imagination came together to fashion a particular, Jeffersonian, image of the region and its inhabitants and a specialized mode of atlas-­oriented prairie description and representation.

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Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for understanding the historically constructed relationship between midwestern identity and aerial representation. Chapter 2 focuses on the impact of aviation-­empowered aerial imagery, particularly aerial photographs, on the modern “revision” of midwestern land and identity during the interwar years. In particular, I focus on three clusters of midwestern aerial photographs: high-­altitude instrumentalist survey views taken by the federal government as a part of New Deal land-­management initiatives; narrative oblique views created by social documentary photographers of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA); and journalistic aerial views created by the era’s preeminent popular magazine, Life. In each case, these images served as both instigator and foil for newly emergent conditions of modern agricultural production and everyday life and thereby elucidate the ways that various hegemonic institutions (from the government to the mass media) employed aerial vision as a means to invent the Midwest in a new, modern aspect. At the same time, the range of responses to the photographs articulates the complex and contradictory ways that, in the eyes of skilled everyday viewers, aerial gazes both envisioned new configurations and buttressed older orders of midwestern experience. Chapter 3 examines the aerialized farmscapes of regionalist artist Grant Wood and the fissure between the old and new iconographies of midwestern culture that erupted in the 1930s. Although Wood painted to express an undeniably personal relationship between himself and his native Iowa topography, his bird’s-­eye landscapes gained acclaim during the 1930s for capturing something essential about the broader character of the land and its inhabitants. Wood’s sense of aeriality veered from the bucolic to the vertiginous as his landscapes morphed, over the course of the decade, from mythic agrarian scenes to somewhat otherworldly, yet also strikingly modern, spaces. The chapter inter­ rogates Wood’s adoption and consequent adaptation of a midwestern aerial sensibility as a means of negotiating the changes that technological and cultural modernity were delivering upon the region. Beginning by identifying Wood’s use of a nineteenth-­century bird’s-­eye iconography as a means to reinsert traditional form and value into the contemporary regional scene, the chapter extends into a consideration of the growing dynamism and increasingly ambivalent modernity of Wood’s later painting. For Wood, the experience of modern aeriality served not only as a tool of modern agrarian recodification, but also as a source for hybrid integration of old and new modes for envisioning the look and idea of the Midwest. Chapter 4 studies the impact of midwestern aerial vision on a broader scope of 1930s landscape representation by demonstrating the central place of midwestern image and ideology in the development of new schemes for democratic and utopian urban life, in particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s plan for Broadacre City. Intended to unite both city and countryside into a single space, Wright’s project created a uniquely American and midwestern template for a new kind of urban landscape—­one that integrated the forms and forces of American industrial modernity with the long-­standing ideologies

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and patterns of Jeffersonian agrarian democracy. In order to bring together these two different understandings of space and culture, Wright leaned heavily on two interconnected practices of midwestern aeriality: the first evident in the deployment of aerial vision as a tool for the rational reordering of both country and city environments, and the second evident in the way Wright and other like-­minded planners explicitly embraced the agrarian landscape as a model for their new visions for urban life. The architect’s ideas and the responses they generated underscore the efficacy of the midwestern landscape as a model for conceiving a much more extensive set of American spatial and cultural revisionings. The book concludes with a speculative glance at two unusual spaces: the fantasy world into which Dorothy plummeted at the beginning of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, and the to some measure equally contrived landscape of individual “homesteads” that made up the post–­World War II American suburb. In different ways, each was indebted to a distinctly midwestern vision of land and culture. For Dorothy, the flight to Oz offered a means to reinvent the constrained world of the gridded Midwest as a vibrant landscape of swirling hills and opulent color. For postwar Americans, the flight to the suburb, with its idiosyncratic mix of regimented spaces, curvilinear layouts, and homogeneously democratic culture (much of it realized through aerial imagery), represented a new incar­ nation of a Jeffersonian society of independent, landowning homesteaders. Although the promise of each flight proved illusory, they both indicate the continued relevance of the midwestern aerial image, which through them became a means to reconfigure not only the modern rural landscape but also the form, ideology, and experience of American social space.

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1

Pioneering Visions

The Midwestern Grid, the Atlas, and an Aerial Imagination

On October 15, 1874, the Anamosa (Iowa) Eureka printed an announcement from publisher Alfred T. Andreas in which he proposed to create a historical atlas of the state of Iowa, should public interest warrant his efforts. The advertisement, situated prominently within the pages of the small-­town newspaper, outlined in compendious fashion the contents of the proposed atlas. to the public , I propose publishing an Atlas of the State of Iowa, containing a map of every County in the State, showing Sections, Timber, Prairie Roads, Railroads, Streams, School Houses, Churches, etc., etc. Fine maps, 14 × 28 inches, of the State of Iowa, United States and Territories, and of both Hemispheres. Plans, with histories of the Cities, Towns, Villages, and Counties of the State. Biographies of a large number of early settlers and prominent men in the State. Also a condensed political history of the State, giving votes, etc. Six maps of Iowa, so colored as to show the Geological and Climatological condition of the State, with also the Congressional, Senatorial and Representative Districts. Sixteen maps of the United States, colored in five fine shades, to show the amount of Wheat, Corn, Hay, Cotton and Tobacco raised in proportion to acres cultivated. Also to show deaths by consumption and other diseases, in proportion to the deaths by all diseases, and to show density of population, and proportion of colored, and various foreign nationalities in the United States. An immense amount of very useful statistical information, covering about 50 feet of closely printed material in every atlas. To the patron of the work is published his name, residence, business, nativity, post office address, and when he came to the State, besides locating name and residence on his land. The whole will be illustrated by fine lithographic views of hundreds of public buildings and private residences in both town and country, and portraits of prominent men.

1

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2 p i on e e r i n g v i s ion s A large force of experienced men will commence immediately an experimental canvass; and if sufficient encouragement is received, I hope to complete the work sometime during 1875.1

As the breadth of the notice shows, the atlas promised to be the most complete collection of imagery and information ever compiled on the state. Within its pages, readers would find city maps and county plats, lithographic views and private portraits, statistical tables and narrative histories, all detailing some aspect of the state. The sheer volume of Andreas’s enterprise—­statistics alone were promised to comprise “about 50 feet of closely printed material”—­was clearly seen as a selling point.2 All of Iowa, it appeared, was to be contained within the weighty tome. As a further enticement, the ad pledged to recognize “patrons” of the work, whose names would be printed in the text and on the maps. Through the act of subscription, an individual could mark his or her place on the land. Two weeks later, on October 29, another article related to the Andreas atlas appeared in the Eureka. The second text, a news piece rather than a solicitation, reported public response to the ongoing subscription drive. According to the paper, the atlas company’s agent for Jones County had “secured orders of a large number of the county’s leading citizens” even though his canvassing was not nearly complete.3 The newspaper’s editors responded favorably to the reported success of the atlas and expressed pleasure that “the people of Iowa appreciate and encourage such an undertaking.”4 Many more enlightened residents, their text insinuated, would surely place orders before the agent left the county. Throughout 1874 and into 1875, similar exchanges cropped up in papers small and large across the state of Iowa. Eventually, nearly twenty-­three thousand Iowans preordered Andreas’s atlas, with the subscribers ranging from rural farmers to city businessmen.5 These numbers do not only attest to the success of Andreas’s promotional efforts; they also tell of a desire among Iowans for what the original ad had promised: a sweeping, commanding, and exhaustive picture—­an overview—­of their state. The hunger of so many Iowans for a commanding and all-­encompassing point of view is striking, as was Andreas’s ability to fulfill it. Both demonstrate the prevalence of modes of vision, understanding, and description that employed elevated and vertical gazes to compose images of the Midwest during the late nineteenth century. In these years between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, Americans not only more fully settled the central prairies and plains (a project that had been ongoing since the early 1800s) but also worked to establish an identity for themselves and for the countryside they had entered, occupied, and were still transforming. Specifically, midwesterners sought the means to imagine their towns and homesteads, and by extension their individual everyday lives, as parts in a larger sphere of shared experience. The envisaging of such communities, as postulated by Benedict Anderson and others, depended upon the ability of dispersed populations and often isolated individuals to discern connections between one another and through these connections

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to assume membership in, and thus constitute, an imagined collective body or shared cultural for­ mation.6 In other words, to construct a sense of regional character, people needed to see that they were all part of the same place and the same story. In the Midwest, elevated views of the landscape played a central role in the visualization of such social ties. Three variations of elevated representation were most commonly seen and used in the settlement of the Midwest: broadscale maps, focused landownership plats, and bird’s-­eye views. For reasons stemming from a combination of the unique topographical character of the region and the systematized methods of its settlement, midwesterners imagined and depicted the visual composite of their landscape in large part in aerial terms. This contention is supported by a close analysis of early maps, bird’s-­eye views, and promotional images of the Midwest alongside a careful consideration of the contemporary texts and ideas that governed its settling. The second and overlapping point is that the particular understanding of the landscape enabled by elevated views, even as it was being established, became itself a constituent element of midwestern identity. In effect, the visual rhetoric of the aerial views first used to represent the prairies soon came to inflect the lives and identities of those who lived in the region. Maps and bird’s-­eye views also appeared in the pages of late-­century illustrated atlases, such as that of Andreas. These texts extended the impact of elevated views by inserting them into systems of description in which the conceptual logic of elevated vision supplemented other “images” of the landscape—­statistics, charts and graphs, landownership records, narrative histories, and individual portraits—­that appeared on the same page or across the binding. Grafted in this way to one another, these different visual, verbal, and numerical descriptions of the countryside exerted a synergistic representational force on the reader, who, encouraged by the atlas’s combinatory layout, juxtaposed different types of knowledge into a complex, multilayered image of the midwestern landscape. Concepts of elevated looking formed the practical and cognitive visual frameworks that enabled midwesterners to imagine that a single cohesive image—­and social structure—­could be forged out of these different physical, representational, and cultural geographies. I nvi s i ble Vi stas By 1875, when Andreas published his atlas of Iowa, elevated views were already well established as an important means of representing American space. As a mode of visual thinking, the history of elevated gazing extended back to the Renaissance. Lacking the ability to achieve real aerial viewpoints, artists and cartographers used imagined bird’s-­eye views to compose images of their cities and the surrounding countryside. Later, in the American context, elevated looking played an important role in the representation and organization of colonial—­and then national—­spaces. In the early

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years, elevated views had been employed to portray eastern cities and to illustrate the developing industry of the new continent. They had also been deployed to depict the land’s most prominent natural features and to situate these icons of wilderness in relation to the process of conquest and settlement. It was, however, the rapid westward expansion of American society in the nineteenth century and the consequent desire to image these new continental-­size spaces that drew practices of elevated gazing and image making to the forefront of American landscape representation. With its complicated brew of ideologies and ambitions, westward expansion highlighted the need to see the American landscape in comprehensive and encompassing terms. The purpose was not only to guide the transformation of the land but also to help form the nation. For an American culture built on the concept and reality of territorial expansion, exerting control over the continent and, equally important, shaping its image were of paramount importance.7 Aerial gazes fulfilled this requirement for visual mastery by enabling a range of image makers, from explorers and mappers to artists, to construct viewpoints that rendered even the broadest and most sublime landscapes into pictures that could be beheld by an embodied viewer in a single glance. Much of the need for such perspectives was practical. Explorers required comprehensive visualizations of the terrain to coor­dinate their movements and communicate their discoveries, and settlers similarly demanded such prospects as a means to occupy otherwise unfamiliar places. The greater impetus for elevated and comprehensive gazing, however, was ideological and psychological. Tying together strands of nineteenth-­century landscape description that range from transcendentalist philosophy to capitalist machinations, art historian Albert Boime argued that the nation’s lexicon of aerial landscapes embodied “the exaltation of a cultured American elite before the illimitable horizon that they identified with the destiny of the American nation.”8 In Boime’s estimation, the elevated “magisterial” gaze was indelibly linked to the exercise of power and privilege, underwriting a nationalist ideology that embedded such patrician desires within a visual aesthetic—­that of all-­seeing openness and availability—­ that also seemed to promise democratic opportunity. While the ideological implications of elevated gazing are undeniable, there are reasons to suspect that such viewpoints did not function cleanly or directly in service to a single class of cultural desires. More recent inquiries into the “panopticism” of elevated looking suggest that such perspectives were instruments for the articulation of broader and more diaphanous structures of organization and control. In this vein, Alan Wallach has observed that in the context of the American landscape, the elevated gaze pushed beyond the implied continuity between the space of the embodied viewer and that of the representation, thus challenging the equation of perspective to the desires of an individualized subject.9 Instead, the aerial prospect denaturalized this relationship by enacting a system that encoded both space and subjectivity as constructions that were beholden to even more abstract structures of knowledge and power. The most common result of this shift in thinking has been to

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understand the aerial gaze as a tool that envelops the spaces it encompasses within a pervasive discourse of control wherein individual agency matters little. While Wallach’s interpretation is persuasive, it leaves little room for creative maneuvering by individual viewers. Another possible interpretation of the effect of the aerial view, somewhat counterintuitive and admittedly optimistic, is to imagine that by challenging the conventions that tie the landscape either to a single viewing subject or alternately to a single framework of knowledge, it opens the possibility for a multiplicity of vantage points. In the context of the expanding nation, such elasticity enabled aerial representations to give rise, in the same moment, to different kinds of viewers and modalities of understanding. The mapmaker could see order; the politician, authority; the capitalist, prosperity; the naturalist, wonder; the settler, opportunity; and the critic, inequity. In line with but also beyond (and above) such national tendencies, practices of aerial viewing proved essential to the visualization of the central prairies and plains, landscapes whose previously unencountered physical form and scale challenged both the visual and the psychological capabilities of its first descriptors. Unlike any landscape previously encountered on this continent or in Europe, the distant horizons and empty spaces of these lands defied conventional understandings of how a landscape should look and what it should contain. Most non–­Native American accounts of the midwestern landscape in the early nineteenth century began, quite properly, with descriptions of the land’s vast and overwhelming flatness and emptiness—­its lack of both topographical variation and natural landmarks.10 As art historian Joni Kinsey detailed in her groundbreaking study on prairie imagery, the settlers’ first reactions to the landscape ranged from horror to delight to boredom.11 The sheer diversity and even contradictions that characterized these reactions to prairie spaces as chronicled by its first explorers, travelers, and settlers testify both to the unique qualities of the topography and to the disruption of conventional expectations—­visual, conceptual, experiential—­it posed for westerners. Examples abound. In 1839, Judge James Hall, an early visitor to (and later settler of ) the Iowa prairies, described the visual encounter with that landscape as something so unusual and striking that it “never failed to cause an exclamation of surprise.” He elaborated, “The extent of the prospect is exhilarating. The outline of the landscape is sloping and graceful. . . . The absence of shade, and consequent appearance of profusion of light, produce a gaiety which animates the beholder.”12 For Hall, the openness of prairie space offered a visual experience unlike anything encountered in the enclosing verdure of the eastern woodlands. By contrast, Caleb Atwater, a contemporary of Hall’s who traveled across the Ohio prairie in 1818, registered a significantly different impression of the open, empty landscape. In his estimation, to the traveler traversing “these prairies and barrens, their appearance is quite uninviting, and even disagreeable. . . . No pleasant valley of hill and dale, no rapidly running brook delights the eye, no sound of woodland music strikes the ear; but in their stead,

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a dull uniformity of prospect, spread out immense.”13 Atwater judged the open spaces to be tedious and unengaging—­horizontal wastelands that failed to stimulate eye or emotion. These two responses typify early impressions of the prairie land and environment. To a first generation of westward-­motivated but eastern-­minded Americans, prairie topography defied conventional aesthetic conventions and expectations. As another early nineteenth-­century traveler, Morris Birbeck, observed, the landscape’s unique combination of sublime open space and verdant beauty proved both delightful and unsettling. Explaining the challenge faced by the first-­time viewer of prairie space, he astutely opined, “There are no organs of perception, no faculties as yet prepared in this country, for the enjoyment of these exquisite combinations.”14 Birbeck extolled the beauty of the land but at the same time admitted that he was unprepared for and even incapable of fully picturing its visual potential. He noted that one element of this inability was physiological: the prairie topography physically overwhelmed the human eye and was simply too broad and seamless to be adequately framed within his field of vision. A second cause, he implied, was cultural: he possessed no previous training, skill, or aptitude—­no “faculty”—­for viewing such scenes that might help him compose the land into a mental image. Variously reconceived and expressed by other authors, Birbeck’s awareness of his limited ability to behold and comprehend the prairie in its natural form is a leitmotif repeated for over half a century of settlement efforts, efforts that began in lands east of the Mississippi and ended on the plains that opened in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas and ran up to the Rocky Mountains. In nearly every instance, the spark behind such accounts was the new, unexpected topography of the prairies themselves. The terrain, especially when viewed from ground level, lacked or hid the visual landmarks and geographic forms by which landscapes were commonly and comfortably understood. For easterners, most of whom understood the American landscape through the aesthetic legacies of the picturesque that informed the artists of the Hudson River school and through the cadastral practices of Anglo-­European settlement, the raw prairies were compositional and conceptual enigmas.15 Unlike the seashores, woodlands, and mountains of the East Coast, whose visual elements could be molded into cohesive, centered, and perspectivally ordered vistas, the prairies dispersed before even the most constructive of gazes. Flat, treeless, and vast, they posited a pure space in which the lack of landmarks made it difficult to discern foreground, middle, and background distances. Moreover, low, straight-­ line horizons often led to the confusion of size and spatial relationships. One commentator remarked that on the prairies a man walking nearby might instead look like a “Goliath” at least a mile away.16 The flattened lay of the land gave people unimpeded views of vast stretches of territory, but this implied a condensing of miles of landscape into small horizontal slivers juxtaposed against huge skies. Both nearby and distant objects often appeared in seemingly irrational relationships of scale and frequently disappeared altogether as one moved from place to place. Such perspectival confusion

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is visually expressed in artist and explorer Alfred Jacob Miller’s 1858–­60 watercolor Prairie Scene: Mirage, in which a set of eerie and Goliath-­like vertical forms stand on the hazy horizon, their size and outline mimicking the figures of the wagon train in the foreground (Figure 1.1). Painted from sketches made by the artist in 1837, when he first visited the unsettled region, Miller’s work captures the visual and psychological uncertainty created by the open terrain. The thick natural grasses that carpeted the land, occasionally growing taller than a standing man, further concealed what scant prairie features there were. Described as “seas of grass,” the prairie natural vegetation undulated in the wind like an ocean. Such a “gracefully waving surface,” as one settler described the prairie in 1839, could be visually stunning but also displacing as it swallowed landmarks and destabilized the terra firma.17 George Catlin, an artist, anthropologist, and inhabitant of the western expanse, captured the natural mobility of the grassland surface in his 1832 image

Figure 1.1. Alfred Jacob Miller, Prairie Scene: Mirage, 1858–­60. Watercolor on paper, 8¾ × 13 ³⁄₁₆ inches. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.

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Nishnabottana Bluffs, Upper Missouri (Plate 1). Catlin pictured the prairie as a sloping field of green, void of objects, whose only evident markings are those of the artist’s paintbrush. Flowing diagonally down the canvas, these strokes reproduce the flat, undifferentiated, undulating, and ultimately dislocating effect of the natural prairie. Raking off the edge of the canvas, they then penetrate the surrounding space, insinuating the viewer into a position within the grasses and re-­creating a prairie experience that the artist characterized in his journals as being “out of sight of land.”18 As Catlin described, viewers are set adrift inside the shifting green of the painting—­a visual experience that highlights the disorienting, abstracting effect of prairie topography. In many ways, these physical and visual indeterminacies served as harbingers of practical uncertainties regarding how and whether such a flat and vacant landscape could be successfully inhabited. Even though the land’s fertility was soon recognized, its lack of natural topographical features threatened and confused early travelers, and the lack of timberlands heightened early fears that large-­scale settlement would be impossible. The construction of farmsteads and fences—­not to mention everyday chores such as cooking, heating, and foraging—­were thought to require substantial woodlands. Such concerns were less pressing on the eastern prairies, which were often edged by forests, but they mounted for lands across the Mississippi, where trees became increasingly rare. Indeed, early accounts of the more western parts of the region often likened the topography to that of a vast desert.19 Though these worries proved unfounded as the land produced bumper crops and supported growing numbers of settlers, myths of the region as a wasteland endured up to the Civil War, especially among eastern populations. Even among midwestern settlers, this rhetoric of barrenness shadowed, at least subliminally, many of their own estimations of their region well into the twentieth century. The early problems of visualizing prairie spaces stemmed from an inability to reconcile the land to certain everyday conventions of description, organization, and knowability. This does not mean that the land was in any way truly invisible, nor that it was sublimely or otherwise unknowable. Rather, it is to say that the modes of visual understanding and representation that proved effective for eastern and, later, far-­western landscapes were in many ways unsuited to the prairies.20 As a result, the region’s early visual culture—­using the term “visual culture” to refer not only to representations of the landscape but also to the perceptual and spatial practices key to its inhabitation—­focused on the development of visual and cognitive prospects, or viewing positions, that people could use to organize the unique topography of the prairies and to orient themselves to it.21 The realization of such prospects relied on processes of abstract and deterrestrialized thinking and on the making of elevated views. More specifically, the hunt for these “prairie prospects” began not in conventional artistic landscape representation but, rather, amid another set of descriptive protocols: those of mapmaking.22 The midwestern landscape, as we have come to understand it, emerged through a creative integration of geographic description and aerial gazing.

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M a r ki ng t he Land The prairies resisted traditional forms of artistic landscape representation, but they bore an uncanny, almost homologous resemblance to what would become the primary vehicle for their representation in the nineteenth century, the map. The very flatness that when viewed from the horizontal minimized the land’s profile proved to be ideally suited to the abstract format and implied vertical viewpoint of cartography. Likewise, the perceived emptiness of the landscape, unsettling to grounded viewers, complemented the fundamental purpose of mapping, which was to overlay real spaces with artificial and consistent systems of order and control. Indeed, the seemingly tabula rasa character of prairie space granted those who settled it uncommon freedom to configure the land prior to and during its domestication.23 Akin to a blank sheet of paper, the land awaited the inscription of its future form. Maps served both literally and figuratively as guides for the region’s transformation into settled land. Maps, as one might expect, performed a number of important functions in an American society motivated by geographic expansion, not the least of which involved providing explorers, travelers, and settlers with visualizations, albeit abstract ones, of what the landscape “looked like.” By identifying and naming rivers, lakes, bluffs, and other geographic features, maps enacted a filling up of the landscape with specific sites. The psychological import of such simple representational actions proved vital to establishing the region’s inhabitability. Equally important, maps provided geographic descriptions of the prairie landscape crucial to the successful settlement of its wide spaces. They served as locating devices, providing early visitors the means to view prairie spaces relationally and to perceive specific sites in what seemed to be an open, endless plain. Maps marked routes, set distances, and located natural features of the prairie landscape. Later, as settlement increased and the land became endowed with new attributes, charts laid out roads and railways, sectional boundaries, and city blocks, thereby delineating and measuring the growing spatial order of prairie modernization. While presenting forms of practical knowledge to aid midwesterners in navigating the frontier and its later settled spaces, maps also insinuated deeper social structures and ideologies that influenced people’s conceptualization of the cultural dimensions of the countryside. A map, after all, is not simply an indexical tracing of a particular landform and its contents; rather, it is an interpretive image that organizes the representation of selected physical and man-­made attributes of a specific topography so as to solicit other meanings, aesthetic, economic, and cultural. It is because of this culturally determining quality, James Corner noted, that the act and import of mapping is prior, not subsequent, to the formation of a landscape as such.24 Space, he wrote, only becomes tangible, knowable, and inhabitable through “acts of bounding and making visible, which are the primary functions of mapping.”25 Thus, maps are not simply guides to the navigation of already established landscapes;

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they are also constructions and formulations, from the outside, of the future form that a landscape may take. This was certainly true of the Midwest, whose settled spaces were conceived from places far beyond its physical boundaries and long before most pioneers had even set foot on prairie soil. In many ways the visual and structural foundations of prairie land and life first arose on America’s eastern shores, products of republican ideals and Enlightenment thinking. More specifically, many scholars have distilled the forms of America’s westward development—­factually, metaphorically, and otherwise—­into the figure of a single, emblematic individual, Thomas Jefferson.26 Briefly stated, Jefferson’s vision for the distribution of America’s western lands hinged on his belief that the viability of a republican society hinged on the development of a Cincinnatan citizenry composed of small independent landowners. In contrast to other statesmen, notably Alexander Hamilton and the federal­ ists, who favored a scheme of large landholdings and heavily populated, industrial cities, Jefferson felt a nation composed of small farms and independent yeoman farmers would better resist the despotic tenant-­and-­landlord relationships that plagued Europe.27 “Our governments,” he wrote, “will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural.”28 A large, homogeneous agrarian class, he further reasoned, was the best vanguard against elitism and would maintain a national ideal of social equality. “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators,” he wrote, “is a phaenomenon [sic] of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.”29 Although incautiously optimistic with regard to the virtues (and even the possibility) of the self-­sufficient farmer as a democratic foundation, Jefferson and his supporters were farsighted in their realization that the North American continent could be best civilized through a political (and spatial) strategy based on a relatively equal and open apportionment of land to an economically diverse group of people. The realization of such a vision, however, required a means to administer the distribution of public lands.30 Drawing on strains of Enlightenment philosophy that permeated American thought at the end of the eighteenth century, Jefferson and others devised a system for dividing the expanding public domain into uniform parcels for sale to individual settlers. Influenced perhaps by Roman centuriation (the grid system by which the Roman Empire administered conquered territories) and certainly by the esprit géométrique of Cartesian philosophy, the government decided to overlay its open lands with a vast, geometric grid of property lines.31 Conceived abstractly and a priori, this grid offered a uniform, rational, and expedient means to convert the nation’s vast and uncontrolled lands into discrete parcels that could be brokered, by the government or its agents, to the people. Such a rational, homogeneous division would be easier to maintain than one determined by older surveying systems, which allowed for topographic and other forms of local variation and the consequent creation of irregularly sized land tracts. Most important, the system would be infinitely expandable or contractive, allowing newly acquired territories (and populations) to be added seamlessly to the grid and enabling later subdivision of larger parcels into different sized but identically shaped plots.

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Passed by Congress in May 1785, the Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing Lands in the Western Territory (or Land Ordinance) became the blueprint for Jeffersonian expansion. The law specified that prior to settlement, government surveyors would divide all open lands into an even grid of townships of identical six-­mile-­by-­six-­mile squares. The system as a whole would be set and trued mathematically using a series of predetermined baselines—­fixed lines of reference adjusted to the curvature of the earth that would be drawn across the continent at regular intervals. All township borders would run in straight lines, regardless of variations in physical topography, and be oriented to the four points of the compass with “the utmost attention to the variation of the magnetic needle.”32 Townships were then broken into smaller but congruent one-­mile-­by-­one-­mile (640-­acre) lots, called sections (Figure 1.2). These sections could in turn be further subdivided into workable, single-­settler homesteads, such as the 160-­acre “quarter section,” which eventually became the standard individual claim. To accomplish this division, the act prescribed that surveying crews take to the land in order to physically measure and mark the boundaries of townships and sections. Working from east to west across the landscape, the surveyors marked the four corners of each township square, and using these coordinates as a diagrammatic base, they then plotted the sectional increments along the township’s outer bounds. All these points were physically inscribed—­staked—­onto the land using standardized equipment and a regularized lexicon of landmarks: from notching trees in the Ohio forests to placing cornerstones and constructing earthen markers on the often-­treeless prairies. The construction of these physical markers, like the activity of measurement, was an exacting matter, as demonstrated by the diagrammatic lexicon of corner designs that appeared in official government-­printed survey manuals for the prairie regions specifically as well as for other parts of the western expanse (Figure 1.3).33 Demonstrating construction standards that may seem unrealistically precise given the rough conditions under which they would be enacted, these diagrams laid out an extensive vocabulary of markers that included wooden stakes, stone blocks, excavations, and earthen mounds. Varying not only in material but also in shape and dimensions, these different markers were to be applied in specific situations and following rigorous specifications. The marker signifying the meeting of two township or section corners, for example, involved a complex configuration of stakes, excavated pits, and piled mounds, all of which had to be situated in an exact pattern. For example, regulations required that a township corner be staked with a post extending exactly twenty-­four inches above the ground and the same number of inches into the earth. The post had to be three inches square, and the surveyor was further required to notch each of the four exposed angles with six notches. As a practicality the top of the post was to be beveled to shed rain and thereby inhibit decay. The surveyor then dug a “quadrangular trench” around the stake that was squared to it and equidistant from it on all sides. He was also required to dig four larger rectangular pits, each eighteen inches from this trench, to establish the marker’s orientation to the overall grid. All excavated cavities,

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Figure 1.2. Diagram illustrating the typical subdivisions of a standard section. From Office of the Surveyor General for the States of Illinois and Missouri, Instructions to Deputy Surveyors of the United States for the District of Illinois and Missouri (St. Louis, Mo.: U.S. Land Office, 1856), 52.

the diagrams imply, were to be judicious in their geometrical shape. A raised earthen cone, the diagram makes clear, was supposed to surround the central stake at a uniform slope with an apex height of exactly twelve inches. The exact placement of each stake on the land was just as important as its precise construction. Each different type of marker—­from those denoting the corners of individual sections to those delineating the meeting point of multiple townships—­were to be placed in specific orientations to and at carefully established distances from the actual township or sectional boundary line they were meant to establish. Such exactitude served an important role, because the orientation of the markers provided specific information about the landscape grid to surveyors, land agents, settlers, and others.

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Figure 1.3. Diagram for the construction of mound, stake, and stone corner boundaries. From Instructions to the Surveyors General of Public Lands of the United States . . . Containing Also . . . Instructions to Regulate Field Operations . . . . (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, public printer, 1855).

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Correct positioning enabled the “readers” of survey markers to quickly identify the cardinal directions and orientation of the grid, to know the significance of a particular marker in relation to the overall system of parcels, and, finally, to predict the type and location of the next marker in the system. The requirement that each marker be constructed and placed according to uniform regulations was not simply an abstract goal but instead a working necessity. For the land surveying and distri­ bution to work effectively, the meaning of each individual stake had to be readily visible and com­ prehensible to the naked and informed eye. The frequent inclusion of exact and realistic diagrams of the various markers in the government’s surveying manuals attests to the importance ascribed to such uniform legibility. Adherence to standards ensured that a skilled observer could not only locate the marks in an otherwise empty landscape but also interpret from the pattern of each mark its relation to the larger survey grid. Taken as a whole, the matrix of corner marks etched into the landscape by the surveyors composed the intractable terrain of America’s western wilderness into a visible and, more important, legible spatial system. They also provided an immediate and tangible set of symbols for homesteaders and others wanting to navigate the terrain, identify and decipher the bounds of individual parcels, and engage in the process of land distribution and development. A good land agent would know that the square pattern diagrammed in the upper-­right corner of Figure 1.3 signified a corner common to four townships or sections. The agent would also understand that other markers could in turn be interpreted relationally to establish the specific parcel types and locations within the grid scheme. By identifying and connecting the dots, individuals could demarcate an individual plot of land from surrounding territory with a fair degree of accuracy and ease. Though this landmark lexicon was not infallible, it was understood and embraced by a surprising number of homesteaders. Indeed, in the sparsest and least developed landscapes, the markings often provided anchor points for the early organization and structuring of settlement. Alfred Brunson, a Methodist circuit rider on a trip through 1835 Illinois, recounted in his journal that the government survey, which was visible on the frontier through the landmarks left by surveyors, seemed to provide the underlying structure of frontier life. He noted that the settlers, “in the absence of all other law, met and made law for themselves” by reading the stakes and extending the system of the original surveyors.34 Staking, however, was only part of the process. As the surveyors etched physical marks into the prairie terrain, they also recorded images of the landscape in cartographic form. For each township, the surveyors made a single-­page plat map that visually recorded the measuring and staking done on the ground. These plats, such as one submitted to the Iowa Land Office in 1844 (Figure 1.4), used a combination of visual graphics and shorthand written notations to establish the boundaries and geometric pattern of each township. They also offered a rough, though often sporadically noted, sense of the land’s natural character. The descriptive system of the plat maps worked both outward

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Figure 1.4. U.S. General Land Office, manuscript plat for Township No. 69N., Range No. 15 West, 5th Mer., 1844. Records of the General Land Office, Record Group 49, Iowa Township Plats, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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and inward: on the one hand, it fixed the individual six-­mile-­by-­six-­mile parcel in relation to the broader system of townships, and on the other, it established the smaller divisions that made up the township interior. For each plat, range number and latitude and longitude coordinates located that township at a specific point within the larger grid. As a practical matter, the plats of adjacent townships were kept next to one another. In this way, several plats could be viewed at once to capture a broader picture of the land. Often during their first foray into an area, surveyors staked out the grid only to the township level, setting its corner markers and marking the one-­mile sectional increments along its four boundaries. To save time and expense, however, the interior grid sectional boundary lines were often not surveyed on the ground. Instead, these demarcations were added later, by draftsmen in the Land Office, who protracted lines from the one-­mile sectional markers at the township boundary to form an interior grid of section-­size parcels that were identified by numbers from one to thirty-­six. These sectionals were quickly staked, and also further subdivided, once settlement started because they were necessary for distributing the land on an individual basis. The federal surveying process and its resultant rectilinear plat maps transposed the natural prairie landscape into a grid of geographic coordinates, linear boundaries, and ordered parcels. Congruence abounded, as the larger figure of the township now held within it the smaller squares of the section and the quarter section, and even smaller denominations of acreage. Right angles, uncommon in the natural world, became elemental components of the landscape, and numerical denomination emerged as the new “natural” language for its description. As settlers moved onto the land, government agents used the plats to officially record, usually in shorthand notations made directly onto the sheet, data regarding the dispensation of the land. Eventually, these sections and their subdivisions would take on additional descriptors: the names of those who had purchased the land and settled it. The prairie topography took on a new visual and symbolic form. In addition to plats, the Land Ordinance also stipulated that surveyors were required to create textual descriptions and qualitative assessments, based on visual observations, of the quality and character of the lands they surveyed. The majority of these texts, which averaged around ten handwritten pages for the state of Iowa, appeared in logbooks that were intended to accompany the plats.35 Many of the comments in these entries simply elaborated the work of the survey by providing full coordinates and more detailed physical descriptions of the township corner markers and their placement. Others, however, attempted to more directly describe the overall or outstanding qualities of a particular location. Such observations might record natural features such as rivers, swamps, salt licks, mill seats, and “other remarkable and permanent things . . . and also the quality of the land.”36 Surveyors maintained a utilitarian eye for detail, often focusing on aspects of agricultural and mineral worth rather than those of scenic or aesthetic value. Judging from these notes, the surveyors had a keen, if generalized, notion of land values, as witnessed in an 1860 survey plat from Kansas. Inscribing a set

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of comments directly within the sectional squares of the map, the surveyors rated the parcels of each township using descriptions like “second rate prairie, no timber, no water” or “good farmland, rolling second rate.”37 Such descriptions offered at least a rough idea of the landscape’s physical character. Yet because the descriptions were themselves organized around—­and sometimes literally inscribed within—­the grid format of the plat, they also contributed to the process of conceptualizing the natural landscape as a geometric system of uniformly delineated spaces. Once completed, surveyors sent the individual township plats to Washington, where they were bound together, copied, and redistributed to territorial land offices where they became available to the public when an area opened for settlement.38 Since most of the lands would be sold sight unseen, these maps and their attendant notations served as a primary means of communicating the particular qualities of the land being offered. Their descriptions provided vital information to potential buyers, helping them determine which parcels of land were available and most desirable. Such specificity was important because the government-­issued deeds granted ownership of specifically defined tracts, unlike earlier colonial land warrants that permitted grantees wide latitude to choose the best land available for settlement.39 A good purchase required that close attention be paid to both the plats and their appended descriptions, especially since other information about the frontier was limited, with what existed consisting mainly of travelers’ impressions and land speculators’ promotions. Yet because the purchasing process often replaced on-­site evaluation of the land with a trans­action that focused on the character of the land as a cartographic image, settlers’ first visualizations of prairies often took form in their minds as abstractions: a mixture of grid lines, acreage amounts, and utilitarian descriptions. The Land Ordinance authors believed their system of mapping, marking, and marketing would not only facilitate the sale of land but also regularize (and thereby regulate) the development of the continent.40 By means of a regime of visual, notational, and textual description, government sur­ veyors produced a discourse that constructed the western lands as a rational, ordered, and therefore inhabitable space. Overwriting the natural landscape with an abstract grid brought a measure of control over the land by retooling it through a universalizing framework that was stable, predictable, and, above all, useful to the expansion of American civilization. Organizationally, the imposition of the grid offered the most expedient means to compartmentalize an otherwise amorphous space into discrete and alienable landholdings that could be sold on the private market.41 In terms of vision, the right angle became a standard component of the new American landscape. On a more ideological level, this layout of identical parcels of land promised to inculcate a broadly homogeneous citizenry whose inherent sameness would be the foundation for egalitarian government. As we shall see, it became a commonplace for Americans to link the visual lexicon of coordinates, angles, and acreages to the cultural language of republican opportunity. As people began to trickle and then to pour

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onto the prairies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the imprint of the survey system was pressed not only onto the landscape but also into the minds of the American population. S i g ht i ng t he G ri d The Land Ordinance survey provided the first incarnation of the visual and conceptual process of midwestern aerial vision. Using plat maps, coordinate systems, and textual descriptions, surveyors created images of the prairie that overrode the invisibility of its flat spaces by subjecting them to a method of representation that reconstituted the land through abstract geometry and disembodied perspectives rather than through the embodied gaze of the traditional grounded viewer. This shift from a horizontal to a vertical visual axis enabled people to reestimate both their optical and their cultural relationships to the prairie terrain. Interpreting the land as a measured grid rather than as empty space, politicians, settlers, and other interested parties who had previously marveled at or decried their inability to “see” the land could now envision and even invent images of the prairies as places of opportunity. Encouraged by the predictability of the gridded view, they set out to fill its patterned spaces with the stable forms of farms and towns. Government land agents often acted as the first interpreters of the survey grid by trying to help settlers envision the extent and location of their homestead claims. It fell to these representatives, dispersed in offices across the frontier, not only to record homestead sales but also to ensure the legibility of the survey system to those seeking land. The commonplace transactions that occurred within these offices, like those seen in an illustration published on the cover of an 1874 issue of the nationally distributed periodical Harper’s Weekly, performed a crucial role in the development of the landscape’s visual image (Figure 1.5).42 Appearing at the height of the land boom on the western plains, the image depicts several men inside a land office in eastern Kansas. In the foreground grouping, three men sit on and around the land agent’s desk, whose surface and shelves are littered with books and papers. Central among them is the land agent, who sets his feet on the desk while around him rest the signifiers of his trade. In the near left, a number of rolled maps spill out of an opened cabinet. Various geological and plant specimens—­from the rocks and ear of corn set on the map cabinet to the fruits and specimen jar with unknown contents on the desk—­testify to his direct, if somewhat taxonomic, knowledge of the land. Pen in hand, the agent casually addresses two men, one nattily dressed and grinning, the other pensively tugging at his beard. In the background a second trio consult a wall-­size map of the county that has been laid out with the sectional markings of the survey. Two men, a grizzled homesteader and a more urbanely attired land buyer, attend to the words of another agent as he points to a specific parcel of land that is the likely subject of their conversation.

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Figure 1.5. Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier, “A Kansas Land-­Office.” Cover of Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, July 11, 1874.

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The mood of the illustration, along with the content of the article that accompanied it, suggests that the land office could be a treacherous place where grinning speculators and self-­motivated agents used their inside knowledge to “shark” uninitiated settlers by manipulating the terms of their land claims. Yet the image also attests to the descriptive vocabularies, both verbal and visual, with which ordinary individuals discussed the land. Most centrally, the large-­scale map—­hung on the wall so as to align its implicit, vertically embedded gaze with the horizontally directed eye of the viewer—­ illustrates the rectilinear forms that underlay both buyers’ and sellers’ understandings of the landscape. Perhaps the agent gestures to a particularly fine parcel of land that is open to be claimed. Or maybe the homesteader has already been out to that site and, having found the survey stakes and measured the boundaries of the parcel, has returned to the land office in order to record his claim on the official plat. Whatever the case, both the agent’s and the claimant’s understandings of the land were shaped as much by a predisposition to conceptualize prairie space as a grid form as by any specific experiences on the land. Moreover, though the claimant’s emotional response to the unsettling expansiveness of the prairie in its natural state might have been quite pessimistic, his estimation of what the land could become (or be worth) when reshaped by the ordered care of a farmer such as himself probably showed much more optimism. In most cases, it is likely that settlers had seen images of the prairie in grid form long before they stepped into a land office to register their claim. Once the government had established the grid system, it became the basic visual language for representing the region. It was also co-­opted by a spectrum of individuals and institutions motivated to place images of the Midwest before the American public. Not least among these were land speculators and regional boosters who invested heavily in the region and pinned their hopes of financial gain on its successful development.43 Some speculators purchased thousands of acres of prairie land in lots from the government with the aim of turning a profit by reselling them privately to settlers at a higher price. Others established towns, hoping to realize their gains from the sale of commercial lots, or alternately through the mercantile trade, should the town be successful. Later in the century, the government granted millions of acres to railroad companies in order to encourage construction of a vast rail system across the prairie.44 These railroads worked hard to settle their lands, both to recoup their initial building costs and to spur the development of farming communities that would eventually fill their train cars with commodities and passengers. For those in the private sector, it was important to present prospective settlers with images and descriptions that painted the prairie as a landscape of individual opportunity. But though the physical profile of the prairies may have daunted early settlers, the imagery of grid survey offered an effec­ tive means to counter such concern and to promote in its place a controlled and egalitarian land system that found its basis in the national rhetoric of westward expansion. As a form and a concept,

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the grid symbolized the promise of an infinite extension and encoded an almost mythic sense of available land and, therein, the promise of an expansive national future. By parceling the landscape into a system of small individual tracts, however, the grid made this national mythos appear to be available on an individual basis. Whereas lone settlers might have been daunted by the prospect of conquering the entire West, they could readily embrace the possibility of claiming and taming their own delimited parcel. In this way, the grid paradoxically expanded and shrank the frontier by reimagining its seemingly infinite horizon with tangible and manageable boundaries. The abstract program of national expansion was thus recoded as deeply and productively individualist. One could look obliquely across the grid and see the possibility of unbounded expansion. Or one could look down on it and by navigating inward find the stability of individual squares, firm boundaries, and marked locations. A hunger for land was often sufficient to propel settlers toward the prairies. As one western newspaper reported, “The people of the East are buying out by wholesale the Territory of the West.”45 Given this great desire to own property, many early promoters of prairie real estate issued simple advertisements announcing what lands were currently available for auction. Printed as broadsheets or in eastern and frontier newspapers or distributed to potential land buyers in the form of promotional sales booklets, these ads were textual and largely without illustrations. Instead of providing readers with images of the land, advertisements like a sales booklet published by the Illinois Central Rail-­Road Company at first relied on narrative descriptions and an abbreviated selection of maps and numeric graphs that detailed the land availability and current crop prices (Figure 1.6). These advertisements usually followed up by directing readers to the government plats or other large-­scale maps for visual descriptions of the land in question. In spite of their abstraction, maps could convey to hopeful viewers ideas that might at first seem beyond the rational, denotative bounds of the cartographic form. Beyond such targeted advertisements, even maps with more general purpose, such as that of the state of Iowa published by Guy Carleton in 1850, can be understood as encouraging midwestern settlement. Laid out evenly and completely before the viewer and delineated by dark boundary lines, this landscape (which only a decade earlier had been largely uncharted) appears on the map to be comfortably contained by a superimposed gridwork of boundaries (Figure 1.7). Survey lines, protracted across much of the state, crisscross the image with a stable matrix of measurement that fills the flat white paper, and by extension the real terrain it symbolizes, with the markers of settlement activity. (Per settlement norms, the prior occupation of the land by indigenous cultures was almost wholly ignored.) Conceptually, these graphic marks insinuate that the landscape is no longer formless and inhospitable but, instead, ordered and civilized. The image even grants viewers the opportunity to take part vicariously in the civilizing process, as the still-­blank areas within the state’s outline

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Figure 1.6. Title page, The Illinois Central Rail-­Road Company Offer for Sale over 2,400,000 Acres Selected Prairie, Farm and Wood Lands, in Tracts of Any Size, to Suit Purchasers, on Long Credits, and at Low Rates of Interest, Situated on Each Side of Their Rail-­Road, Extending All the Way from the Extreme North to the South of the State of Illinois (New York: John W. Amerman, 1855).

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Figure 1.7. Guy H. Carleton, Sectional Map of the State of Iowa, Compiled from the United States Surveys, Also Exhibiting the Internal Improvements, Distances between Towns & Villages, Lines of Projected Rail Roads &c. &c., 1850. Map in four parts, each 35 × 54 cm. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G4150 1850 .C3.

enabled viewers to mentally project the pattern of settlement grid lines into the as-­yet-­unsurveyed corners of the state. The government and other land sellers would have encouraged such participatory fantasies as yet another means to link people to the ideology of Manifest Destiny. The blank spaces on the map implied that much unclaimed land remained, awaiting eventual settlement. In doing so, it amplified the mythology of the frontier as a place of open-­ended possibility. As settlement progressed throughout the century, the promotional efforts of both government and nongovernmental enterprises became more refined and widespread. Private land dealers, and particularly the many railroad companies founded in the second half of the century, sought to drive up demand for land, thereby increasing its sale value. To do so, they needed to convince prospective

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settlers not only that land on the prairies was cheap and plentiful but also that it was easily and comfortably habitable. Such acts of persuasion, already complicated by the prairie’s unfamiliar topog­ raphy, grew even more difficult when the frontier pushed into the more arid trans-­Missouri plains. Advertisers learned that the descriptive regime of the survey provided only part of the visual vocabulary necessary to project the sorts of idealized, artistic images that could convince people of the land’s beauty, or more appropriately, its habitability. Indeed, eastern America already possessed a deep, European-­based tradition for painting scenes of agrarian land and life. This practice of rural representation, as art historian Sarah Burns has noted, shaped the way people imagined an agrarian countryside should look, even on the prairies.46 If the prairie topography did not fully conform to the norms of eastern landscape painting, neither did the modern grid form comply with eastern-­ based agrarian ideals and preconceptions. Settlers may have understood the coldly geometrical spatial order and the synoptic, objectified gaze of the survey plats to be an embodiment of Jefferson’s agrarian philosophy, but to their more intimate eye, the grid did not convey a full sense of their more conventional emotional and aesthetic expectations. Prairie promoters looked to suture the divide between the imagery of the surveyor’s grid and the more humanized agrarian landscapes and genre scenes of eastern visual culture by integrating specific, conventional landscape views with the implicitly elevated viewpoint of the geometrical survey. Some of the most successful (or at least the most prolific) attempts at such visual combinations appeared in the advertising pictures and pamphlets of the railroads. The Union Pacific Railroad, as part of its campaign to promote the sale of its lands in eastern and central Nebraska, commissioned a multiple-­page guide composed of maps, engraved illustrations, textual descriptions of the land, practical advice, and even railroad time schedules.47 Thick and comprehensive, the guide encapsulated (or at least claimed to) the entire experience of homesteading, from traveling to the region to registering a claim and breaking the land. Following a cover illustration of a toylike locomotive chugging across a picturesque countryside and a poetic verse celebrating the “human sea” of pioneer settlement, the first pages of the pamphlet presented the reader with comprehensive maps of the U.S. rail system as well as more-­focused cartographic views of the company’s lands, sequenced to provide a diagrammatic framework for homesteading activities. The first map, showing the width of the continent, opens the land imaginatively to the viewers’ investigations, allowing them to visualize how they will journey to the prairies (Figure 1.8). Its Spartan visual form, black lines over white space, at least momentarily simplifies the trip through a graphic clarity of continuous lines that displace the rough scenery, hard seats, and mechanical delays of actual train travel. In a similar but more localized cartographic feint, the map of the railroad’s landholding seems to streamline the process of acquiring a homestead (Figure 1.9). By presenting land as grid, the map implies that locating a home site could be as straightforward as locating coordinates on a graph.

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While post-­Enlightenment viewers put great faith in the accuracy of cartographic images, the abstract and symbolic form of such representations made clear their selective and partial relationship to physical reality. Few land seekers took maps to be direct reflections of the real conditions of prairie land. Nor did most even think of maps as images of real landscapes in the way that they might have characterized a painting or a written description. Recognizing this inadequacy, the guide’s editors included lengthy narrative texts that provided verbal accounts of the lands, methods, and advantages of prairie farming. In flowery, optimistic language, the guide testified to the fertility

Figure 1.8. “Map of the Union Pacific Railroad, Its Connections and Land Grant.” From Union Pacific Railroad, Guide to the Union Pacific Railroad Lands, 5th ed. (Omaha, Neb.: Union Pacific Railroad, 1877), foldout.

Figure 1.9. “Map of the Union Pacific Railroad Land in Nebraska . . . .” From Union Pacific Railroad, Guide to the Union Pacific Railroad Lands, 5th ed. (Omaha, Neb.: Union Pacific Railroad, 1877), foldout.

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of the land and the ease with which it might be developed. These accounts of the countryside and its advantages—­from notes promoting treeless prairies as fields that did not require a “toil of a lifetime” in clearing, to tables outlining the low cost of farming implements—­helped inject material specificity into the abstract spaces outlined in the maps.48 Other land guides and advertisements went further by including artistic renderings of various landscape vistas. A guide to Nebraska lands published by the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad Company, for example, included several engravings of “typical” prairie scenes to complement their charts and text.49 Characteristically, such images pictured a settled, prosperous agrarian countryside presented in a long topographical view in which abundant crops spring from the land while houses and barns cluster about the landscape at regular though expansive distances (Figure 1.10). Undoubtedly idealized, these captivating scenes projected a human scale into the abstract grid. At the same time, however, their tight framing and ordered composition

Figure 1.10. “Boone County, Nebraska.” From Burlington and Missouri River Railroad Company, The Great North Platte Region of B. & M. Railroad Lands: Best Government Lands Still Open for Settlement: Large and Fine Crops, Good Settlers, Cheap Lands, Long Credit and Low Interest (Burlington and Missouri River Railroad Company, 1878), 7.

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are not altogether un-­grid-­like: one can imagine slipping these rectangular images, one by one, into the survey grid of the pamphlet’s maps. It is not surprising that the railroads stood at the forefront of prairie image makers, for they were motivated financially to put the prairies before the public eye. Equally important, the railroads had a large stake in developing an effective means of representing to the public the rational and industrial underpinnings of American expansion. The railroad system, after all, shared a relation to the prairie that was analogous to that of the Land Ordinance, as both “wrote over” the natural topography with an unyielding and interconnected matrix of lines. In doing so it effected a change in the ways that people perceived space by divorcing travel from its contingent relationship to specific environments.50 Track builders leveled hills and spanned rivers in order to maintain constant grade and direction, while locomotives traveling at high speeds shrank long distances and minimized travel times. These conditions, parallel to the breaking-­up of the natural landscape into property by the survey grid, allowed people to manipulate space with far greater freedom than ever before. In doing so, however, they alienated people from older, embedded modes of taking to the land, such as walking in the case of travel, or more organic property selection in the case of the survey. The railroad company’s illustrated guides marked their attempt to represent and explain the new order of spatial experience and to merge it with older established modes of thinking and representation. Perhaps the most effective merger of the cartographic vertical axis and the organic view of the prairie, however, occurred in the form of bird’s-­eye views, which grew in popularity throughout the region, particularly after the Civil War. These views, presented from a perspective characterized as that of a bird in flight, were already common in the eastern regions of the nation, where they were deployed to provide depictions of industrial cities. When urban America moved west alongside rural settlers, bird’s-­eye views offered an effective means to represent and advertise the myriad small towns and larger cities that dotted the midwestern landscape and competed with one another for cultural and economic primacy. On the prairie in particular, as the historian of urban planning John Reps observed, promoters and town boosters commissioned artists to render large-­format single images in which their towns would be depicted as permanent and prosperous outposts of civilization amid the otherwise dispersed, isolated homesteads of the agricultural plains.51 Reps and others have noted that the employment of bird’s-­eye views in the creation and promotion of frontier towns constituted a complex history of optimistic, and at times deceptive, portrayals.52 Though drawn from the actual footprint of the city plan, the views most often represented a clever mixture of cadastral fact and promotional fiction. Their creation itself was a standardized, and often speculative, process. The artist, having arrived on site, began by visiting the town hall or local land office, where he would procure and trace the town plan. He then spent several days or weeks wandering the town, fixing the locations of specific buildings on his map and making sketches of

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houses, storefronts, and other notable structures. Often he simultaneously peddled copies of the soon-­to-­be lithograph to interested townsfolk. Once a sufficient number of images were collected, he returned to the studio, transposed the town plan from a vertical to an oblique orientation, and filled in the details. The completed lithograph was usually very accurate, at least in its diagrammatic layout.53 In terms of rendering a town’s actual contents, however, artists exercised considerable license, often at the behest of local citizens. Artists idealized their subjects, widening streets and penciling in planned but nonexistent structures, especially schools and churches. In a letter to his father, a settler named John James Ingalls noted that the 1857 bird’s-­eye view of Sumner, Kansas, which he had seen in Boston prior to emigrating west, bore little resemblance to the actual town. He complained, “There are no churches in the place, instead of four, as was represented to me. No respectable residences; no society; no women . . . no schools, no children; nothing but the total reverse of the picture that was represented to me.”54 Such “lithographic fictions,” as Ingalls described them, probably delighted local populations even as they frustrated newcomers.55 For most inhabitants of midwestern cities and rural towns, bird’s-­eye views depicted their towns as they would have liked to see them and not as they actually appeared. A typical bird’s-­eye view, such as Albert Ruger’s picture of DeWitt, Iowa, created in 1868, incarnates an image of the town as visually ordered, economically prosperous, and comfortably inhabited (Figure 1.11). Pictured from an imagined aerial prospect located high above the landscape and some distance from the site, DeWitt is entirely encapsulated within the viewer’s broad, oblique gaze. The town’s grid, outlined in the light brown lines of straight and intersecting streets and avenues, forms the framework for the image. Within it, the artist showed buildings clustered on main street at the center of town, houses evenly dispersed in the outer blocks, and trees marshaled in order throughout. To further accentuate the congruence of each property within the city, Ruger limited his use of perspectival recession as he protracted the street lines. Consequently, blocks and buildings pictured at the far end of the town differ only slightly in size from those in the foreground. Gleaned from practices of mapmaking, this evenness was imposed by design, as the maintenance of a constant size enabled Ruger to devote the same level of detail to all the town’s buildings, houses, and inhabitants. Finally, in the immediate foreground, almost pasted onto the landscape and out of orientation with the rest of the image, appears a miniature hillside scene composed of grazing cattle and a farmer behind a plow. Impossibly close, given the angle from which the rest of the town is depicted, this abbreviated rustic scene propagandistically alludes to the bucolic agrarian beauty and prosperity promised by DeWitt and its environs. At the same time, it serves to mediate the impossible height from which the image is depicted by offering viewers a connective bench to the landscape, where they can mentally position themselves in relation to the image. An even more significant bridging occurs at the level of ideology. By creating a footing within the otherwise distanced and self-­contained scene,

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Figure 1.11. Albert Ruger, Bird’s Eye View of the City of De Witt, Clinton Co., Iowa, 1868. Colored map, 50 × 66 cm. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G4154.D26A3 1868 .R8 Rug 55.

the foreground hillside brings the grand and abstract processes of organized settlement back to earth. While the bird’s-­eye prospect communicates the all-­encompassing and programmatic ethos of westward expansion, the hillock humanizes this project and transports it back into a scale that can be measured and inhabited, at least metaphorically, by an embodied subject. Though compositionally awkward, the view’s split between the distant city plan and the tantalizingly intimate rural vignette makes possible a psychological continuity between large-­scale ideology and embodied experience.

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In frontier views such as that of DeWitt, the bird’s-­eye perspective extends the grid sensibility of the land survey into the image of the prairie town and city. In the squared blocks and evenly spaced buildings of Ruger’s work resides the same geometric logic that dominated almost all previous renderings of the regional landscape. The coordinate grid of small-­town streets represents in microcosm the broad order of the prairie survey. It does so, however, with one important difference: it shifts from the vertical, fully diagrammatic representation of the map to an oblique (albeit distanced) perspective that mediates the horizontal, human condition of vision. Unlike basic property grids—­ such as the generic town plan generated by the Illinois Central Railroad seen in Figure 1.12—­the more

Figure 1.12. “Plan Of.” Unsigned, undated standard town plat used by the Illinois Central Associates. Rantoul-­Neal Collection, Library of the Graduate School of Business, Harvard University.

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artistically oriented bird’s-­eye lithographs produced images that better approximated the visual experiences of people on the ground and in the towns.56 Bird’s-­eye views delighted both a town’s pro­ moters and its residents precisely because of this hybrid mixing of map views with more visceral (and more artistic) renderings. Unlike orthogonally oriented maps, which evoked a more detached, rational sensibility, bird’s-­eye views offered a more engaging type of interaction and could be interpreted by viewers as projecting a more personalized experience of space. Townspeople probably embraced views like Ruger’s precisely because they appeared to be more connected to, and even intimate with, the actual landscape.57 The popularity of bird’s-­eye lithographs—­not only in the promotional efforts of prairie developers but also in the businesses and on the parlor walls of town inhabitants—­was due at least in part to the panoramic quality of the views. On the one hand, the broad, elevated visual prospect of the views allowed artists, and by extension viewers, to mark their town sites out from the vastness of the prairies. In Ruger’s DeWitt view, for instance, the city is tightly boxed within its gridded streets and only a few roads and the railroad line break this containment and project into the plains. This rigid delineation of town from country served two purposes: it established the town’s permanence, and it buttressed the settlement (visually, anyway) against the emptiness and isolation of the landscape. In doing so, it represented the town as a central location within an otherwise empty landscape, thus identifying it as a gathering point for rural settlers and a link, via the steaming locomotives of the rail companies, to similar coordinate locations across the landscape. On the other hand, the mixing of artistic effect into an otherwise cartographic view delighted viewers because it enabled them, perhaps for the first time, to symbolize in more readily understood and verifiable ways their personal inhabitation of prairie terrain. The latter, of course, was heavily tied to the notions of progress and to the dreams of the eventual transformation of prairie space into domesticated countryside. Bird’s-­eye views allowed prairie dwellers to imagine, in quasi-­naturalistic rendering, what such a transformation might look like. In doing so, they encapsulated midwesterners’ hopes for a new prairie profile. Atla s and Inhabi tat i o n By the time Alfred Andreas ran his advertisement for the Iowa atlas in the fall of 1874, much of the Midwest was occupied and under cultivation. Settlers had claimed most of the open lands on the eastern and central prairies, filling the survey plats of states like Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota with the names of new landowners. Settlement slowed momentarily when the frontier reached the more arid trans-­Missouri plains, but the promise of free land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862, along with the forwarding of new notions of scientific “dry-­land” farming, spurred the taking of these lands (often to the eventual detriment of settler and environment alike).58 Thus, in the latter part of the

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century, the concerns of prairie settlers shifted from taking up new land to consolidating current holdings. This shift held true across the Midwest as individuals sought to configure new, stable cultural communities amid the isolation of prairie life. Within this context of consolidation, the illustrated historical atlas evolved as a means of encompassing the descriptive regimes and ideological rhetoric of prairie settlement in order to draw them into a unified image of the inhabited midwestern landscape. Like the orthogonal grid or the bird’s-­eye view, the atlas was not itself a new means of representing landscapes. Geographer Michael Conzon has shown that its history can be traced through Renaissance Europe to early America, where the atlas’s combination of the cartographic and book formats became a central means to encapsulate a wide array of knowledge gleaned from encounters with the New World and to convey the colonial transformations enacted on it. Within this context, the property atlas arose as a primary means to record claims of territorial ownership, whether by nations, groups, or individuals. In the United States, Conzon also noted the popularization in the mid-­nineteenth century of a new configuration of the atlas, one whose purpose was to depict the expansion of individual land ownership via the process of Jeffersonian settlement. Conzon dates the first appearance of these “illustrated historical” atlases, marketed specifically to new landowners, to Pennsylvania in 1861.59 As one might expect, the cultural impetus for the development of the illustrated historical atlas stemmed from the basic structure of property relations that girded the nation’s “emancipated agrarian society.”60 This system of land tenure required sets of detailed local maps that could be used to establish boundaries, settle title disputes, and perform other administrative functions. At the same time, it also created among settlers a strong cultural desire for maps that provided actual printed evidence of landownership—­information whose value was as much personal and psychological as it was legal. Because the American government was limited in its ability to produce such maps for public use, individual entrepreneurs filled the void.61 Initially, these mapmakers concentrated their efforts on the creation of county wall maps that could be hung in government buildings and the offices of local businessmen and real estate agents. They soon discovered, however, that by reducing the size of the maps and binding them together with those of neighboring townships and counties, they could create a portable collection of maps that could be marketed to a broader public audience, especially individual landowners. As these atlases became more readily available and were more aggressively marketed, property owners came to desire them not only for their administrative applications but also as personal keepsakes that symbolized their status as landed individuals. Responding to this desire, private atlas makers expanded the scope of their atlases to include landscape illustrations, genre scenes, portraits, textual descriptions, and historical narratives in addition to the basic property plats. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the illustrated atlas had emerged as arguably the preeminent means to depict the nation’s private property. These atlases achieved modest success in the East, where the gerrymandered landscape of private holdings, such as that seen in Griffith Morgan

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Hopkins Jr.’s 1858 Map of Adams Co., Pennsylvania (Figure 1.13), probably seemed more striking in more conventional artistic landscapes than in its complicated and confusing cartographic form.62 Unlike the regulated grids of the trans-­Appalachian West, the landholdings of the eastern states had taken shape more organically and irregularly. On the prairies, by contrast, where inhabitants lacked an artistic tradition through which to construct images of the physical terrain and its emerging rectilinear structure, atlas makers discovered a landscape whose visual and cultural character was well suited to the atlas format. They also discovered a public eager to own such images. Unlike landscape paintings, in which artists composed seamless images from a single visual perspective, illustrated atlases mobilized multiple media and diverse modes of description to represent

Figure 1.13. Griffith Morgan Hopkins Jr., Map of Adams Co., Pennsylvania, 1858. Hand-­colored map, 92 × 129 cm. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G3823.A3 1858 .H6.

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a landscape. This fact is nowhere better expressed than in this chapter’s opening quotation of Andreas’s atlas advertisement, where the promoter’s description of the work’s contents made it appear to be almost unlimited in type and scope. His Iowa atlas provided a bevy of local, national, and inter­ national maps; town and township plats; and maps showing social demographics, agricultural production, the outlines of political districts, and climate charts. Moreover, complementary texts detailed the geographic and political history of the state, and individual biographies of prominent men provided access to the personal histories of those deemed most significant among the state’s population. Lithographic portraits of these men often accompanied the text. Large statistical charts, reproduced from the national census of 1870, provided another, alternative visualization of the landscape, these couched in the concrete analysis of numbers and percentages and expressed through the visual lexicons of analytical graphs and charts.63 Finally, “realistic” lithographic views of individual farms and towns, usually conceived from bird’s-­eye perspectives, were deployed to picture the land in ways more akin to its appearance before the inhabitants’ eyes. By approximating phenomenal visual experience, one assumes, these bird’s-­eye views were intended to mediate the abstraction of much of the other information and, simultaneously, to satisfy the prairie public’s desire for “real” images. Initially, not all atlases were as bold or comprehensive as the statewide tome promised by Andreas in his notice to the Iowa public. Instead, most atlas makers, including Andreas, started out by creating volumes of narrower scope—­usually encompassing only a single county.64 Not only did these more limited undertakings require less work, but they also allowed for a more personalized representation of the land and its people. By focusing at the county level, atlas makers could provide full illustrations of every township and thus record the landholding of nearly every individual. As in the creation of bird’s-­eye town views, atlas designers traced these township images—­such as one from the Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Claire County, Illinois, shown in Figure 1.14—­directly from the government’s official survey plats. It mattered little to the atlases’ patrons that the plats were directly copied, because their most fascinating aspect was not artistic effect but, rather, their content: the litany of landowners’ names inscribed into the individual squares of property. Finding their own names allowed individuals to locate their landholdings within the larger matrix of gridded fields and to measure their farms against those of neighbors and rivals. In terms of individual psychology, the pleasure experienced by the viewer must have been even greater: if inscription signified ownership, then finding one’s name on the map amounted to a virtual reenactment of the original act of claiming and simultaneously testified to the success of that act. Moreover, the map’s process of individual naming affirmed the independence of each landholder and represented it graphically. Each rigorously delineated square, conspicuously bearing the name of its owner, visually instantiated the individuated, freeholding society espoused by Jefferson and enacted by millions of individual settlers.

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Figure 1.14. “Township 1 South, Range 7 West,” plat map. From An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Claire County, Illinois: Compiled, Drawn, and Published from Personal Examinations and Surveys (Chicago: Warner, Beers, 1874), 29.

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Township plats represented only one component of the county atlas’s overall visual program. Adjacent to these maps, often on the facing page, appeared lithographic representations of the homes and farmsteads of individual settlers and local businessmen. Usually smaller than the whole-­page plats (atlases included several views on the same page), these focused compositions offered more naturalistic renderings of the same farms that were represented in abstract geometric form on the plat. Undoubtedly idealized, views like those of two farmsteads pictured in the St. Claire county atlas mentioned above show the individual farms to be well-­ordered and bustling with agrarian activity (Figure 1.15). Focused on the actual farmyard, which was the center of farm life, the images depict well-­ fenced paddocks, large square barns, orchards of well-­grown trees, and prosperous-­looking houses. In both pictures, a multitude of livestock cavort playfully in the yards, while in the background farmers and field hands engage in agrarian labor. In the lower view, a farmer atop a mechanical reaper cuts wheat, while in the upper a crew of hands, aided by a belching steam engine, threshes the crop. In each instance, the use of modern implements demonstrates to viewers that the farmers were sufficiently affluent to own up-­to-­date machinery. Likewise, the train prominently steaming across the fields in the upper image enhances the sense of productivity associated with the landscape and testifies to its high degree of development. To most midwesterners, steel rails and locomotive engines not only provided a means to transport commodities, mail, and passengers but also symbolized the cultural connection of their local landscapes to the world at large.65 In many ways, these accurate but idealized images fed the personal pride of a select group of successful, wealthy individuals. Individualized landscape views were included within the atlas by subscription, meaning that atlas buyers paid additional fees to have their farms or businesses illustrated within the book. Obviously, the atlas company’s artists were motivated to depict their subjects in a positive light because customers surely wanted to have their farms depicted in flattering terms that would communicate their success to other subscribers. Not surprisingly, these idealizations were developed from a toolbox of conventionalized forms that immediately signified wealth to their viewers.66 Taken as a whole, any program of atlas illustrations was replete with these symbols. Across a span of images, for example, one might see numerous depictions of prancing ponies, steaming locomotives, and lavishly decorated Victorian homes. Subscribers recognized the formulaic character of the lithographic views, yet they maintained a conviction that by and large the images nonetheless gave truthful accounts of their subjects. A reporter for the Cedar Rapids Times, for example, wrote of Andreas’s larger state atlas, “The pictures of persons and places are, in the main, correct and truthful, gotten up in excellent taste and style.”67 The public, it seems, was willing to accept a generalized notion of accuracy in the farm views so long as the overall visual effect of the image presented a tasteful and, more important, ostentatious display of their subjects’ prosperity. Atlas makers embraced

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Figure 1.15. Bird’s-­eye views of two farmsteads. From An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Claire County, Illinois: Compiled, Drawn, and Published from Personal Examinations and Surveys (Chicago: Warner, Beers, 1874), 21.

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the conventions not only for their ability to please subscribers, but also because they allowed for the production of images in an efficient and affordable manner. Beyond such conventions of pastoral agrarianism, however, it was the grid form itself, seen from the bird’s-­eye vantage, that most pleased state atlas subscribers. In fact, most of the illustrations employed elevated perspective as a means to show the landscape to best advantage. In doing so, they perpetuated the visual and cognitive imagery through which prairie populations had first been conditioned to see the land. Indeed, the elevated vistas of farmstead pictures, like those appearing in a quartet of Iowa scenes from Andreas’s Iowa atlas (Figure 1.16), seem to reconstitute the geometry of the land survey in figurative terms. Positioned above the landscape, the viewer is able to perceive the grid of land practices that underlay not only the bounds of property ownership but also the construction of fences, the perpendicular and parallel layouts of barns and outbuildings, and even the squared cultivation of planted fields. Looking toward the otherwise vast horizon, the viewer can anticipate the linear projection of the grid and its use in the formation of other similar farmsteads. In another atlas image from Illinois, such an interpenetration of cartographic and naturalistic modes of representation is not only suggested but concretely pictured (Figure 1.17). Here, the more artistically composed view of house and farm gives way to the encroaching squares of the farm’s plat image. As this illustration suggests, at the same time that midwesterners desired three-­dimensional pictures of their home places, they nevertheless retained a sense of their land as an articulation of the survey’s gridded abstraction. Insofar as atlas makers mostly repackaged preexisting types of views and descriptions, they did not create a new perspective that could claim to make up a single, seamless expression of the stubborn prairie landscape. Instead, the innovation produced by Andreas and other such atlas makers was to compile grid maps and bird’s-­eye views (the two dominant modes of picturing the prairie landscape) into the powerfully comprehensive, multiplistic, and synthetic representational format. The result of this union was a multiform type of description that deployed visual and textual juxtapositions in ways that enabled people to grasp an aggregate image of the midwestern landscape. Midwestern atlas production culminated with the state atlas.68 Much larger physically and covering a larger geographic footprint than its county cousin, it was also more visually complex. The makers of county atlases focused on a limited body of township plats, illustrated views, and settlement information. The state atlas built upon, but also radically expanded, this format. In addition to maintaining a concentration on plats (now pictured at the county scale rather than at that of the township) and bird’s-­eye views, the creators of state atlases also expanded the information they conveyed in scope and kind and began to print select elements in lavish color. Andreas’s Iowa atlas offers an example of these new kinds of data and imagery and suggests the way they broadened and enriched the readers’ worldview. Opening with a projection of both hemispheres of the earth, followed

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Figure 1.16. Bird’s-­eye views of four Iowa farmsteads. From Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Atlas Co.; Lakeside Press, 1875. Chromolithographs by Chas. Shober and Co.), 101.

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Figure 1.17. Hybrid view of the residence and stock farm of Col. J. Merriam. From Atlas Map of Tazewell County, Illinois: Compiled, Drawn, and Published from Personal Examinations and Surveys (Davenport, Iowa: Andres, Lyter, 1873), 12.

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immediately by a two-­page map of Iowa, the work starts by placing the reader within a larger context of global and national geography. Several pages of splendidly colored maps follow, each illustrating a topic of pertinent statewide interest, such as a chart assessing soil quality and rainfall averages across the state (Plate 2) and another visualizing the social demographics of settlement. A series of national maps complements these state images, enumerating in color-­coded format such noteworthy 1870 census data as the distribution of ethnic populations throughout the country (Figure 1.18). Displays of this type allowed Iowa atlas readers to solidify their midwestern identity by positioning prairie culture in relation to the rest of the country. In this particular instance, the mapping of national demographic patterns offered Iowans a clean and seemingly verifiable delineation of who they were and, equally important, who they were not. To bolster the patterns visualized by such maps, Andreas also included an impressive collection of text and statistics, including all pertinent portions of the 1870 national and 1875 state censuses and a comprehensive cultural and geographic history of the state written by an eminent Iowan scholar. To fulfill its ambition of creating a comprehensive description of the land and its people, the illustrated atlas exploited the possibilities provided by its format for the juxtaposition of many different types of representations. Through the complementary acts of reading and looking, atlas owners both consciously and unconsciously composed relationships among the multiple representational levels of the book, from the integration of abstract grid lines into more naturalistic depictions of individual farmscapes to the measuring of the surnames of their neighbors against the mapped-­ out ethnic demographics of settlement. By tracing the various expressions of an individual landholder’s name, from its appearance on a plat map to its use as a label for a bird’s-­eye view to its inclusion in a figurative portrait of the individual in a gallery of significant settlers (Figure 1.19), readers developed a multitiered understanding of the relationship among images and descriptions of the settlement system, the landscape, and its inhabitants. In short, the atlas—­with its embedded aerial mentality—­led its readers to realize that in the context of the prairie countryside, all three images represented, by degrees, the same thing. In the opening pages of her 1918 saga of the settlement of the Nebraska prairie, My Antonia, author Willa Cather poignantly describes her protagonist’s initial view of the prairie landscape. “There seemed,” she wrote, “to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. . . . There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”69 Pages (and years) later, having recounted the struggles of a pioneer family to carve a life out of the broad prairie landscape, Cather offers a second vision of the land, a more optimistic vision of a developed land and an emerging culture. Looking out to the horizon, the same individual who had earlier seen nothing now saw a lone plow silhouetted by the setting sun. “There it was,” Cather wrote of the

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Figure 1.18. Map showing population density and demographics based on census data. From Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Atlas Co.; Lakeside Press, 1875. Chromolithographs by Chas. Shober and Co.), 23.

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Figure 1.19. Portraits of prominent Iowans displayed by county. From Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Atlas Co.; Lakeside Press, 1875. Chromolithographs by Chas. Shober and Co.), 133.

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implement, “heroic in size, a picture writing on the sky.”70 This pair of responses helps us charac­ terize the early history of prairie settlement. Initially, the open and empty expanses of the region dismayed settlers, who were practically and psychologically unprepared for them. Through years of work, however, these settlers transformed the region into a habitable and prosperous countryside. In recognition of this toil, Cather elevated the plow, the primary device of the landscape’s transformation, into a hero’s image. Written across the setting sun, it signified a new, man-­made future for the prairie. Less physical but no less graphic, the multiform practices of making cartographic and bird’s-­eye representations provided the tools for conceiving and fixing an image of the unmarked prairie landscape during the nineteenth century. From the first instantiation of an elevated gaze in the administrative framework of the Jeffersonian grid to the later employment of bird’s-­eye views in illustrated atlases, aerial images and, one might say, an aerial mentality informed the basic structure of visualizing the prairie landscape. In their establishment of visual prospects for the countryside, these views also fostered a set of idealized preconceptions about midwestern culture. Through images like those collected in illustrated atlases, in which all farms were envisioned as prosperous properties and all individuals (or at least all those represented) were presented as independent figures of means and determination, prairie image makers made the Midwest appear to be the culmination of Jefferson’s agrarian idealism. In reality, however, the economic pressures of agriculture coupled with the hardships of prairie inhabitation often meant that the conditions of life on the land diverged from the ordered, unified, and optimistic landscape imagery presented in elevated views. Thus, the early practices of elevated view making proved to be central to the development of a mythology that identified the midwestern landscape as the seat of American agrarian virtue. By design, perhaps, these practices tended to overlook and overwrite the circumstances of prairie life that were incongruous with such an auspicious outlook. Paradoxically, a subsequent generation of aerial looking would reveal these harder truths and bring the mythology of prairie prosperity back to earth.

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2

Managerial Mosaics

New Deal Aerial Photography and the Marshaling of Rural America

“Every culture puts its stamp upon the ter rain and creates its own landscape.” So observed Roy Stryker, head of the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), in a 1940 article on documentary photography that he and collaborator Paul Johnstone had delivered the year prior at the American Historical Association (AHA).1 To illustrate the point, Stryker reproduced an aerial survey photograph of rural Illinois created by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (Figure 2.1). “The Middle Western landscape shown in [the] picture,” he wrote, “reveals the independent farmstead, squared fields and highways, with the type of economic and social organization implicit therein.” Few in Stryker’s audience would have argued with his claim. That photograph, taken from thousands of feet above the landscape, offered a synoptic picture of the rural environment. Squarely centered on the crossing of two county roads, it discloses every acre, boundary line, and building available to the lens of the surveyor’s automatic camera. The shaded squares in the image indicate a variety of planted crops: lighter tones convey the bronze stems of ripening wheat, and darker blocks represent the deep green of summer corn or alfalfa. A trained government interpreter working in a well-­equipped office would have seen even more detailed information: the layout of the rows in which farmers had planted their fields, the exact number of acres seeded, and even the machinery used to complete the work. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had commissioned the Illinois photograph, and millions of others like it, in order to collect practical and statistical data on American farming, and it used these images and visual evidence to design and implement a bevy of New Deal farm programs, from soil-­conservation initiatives to acreage quotas and pricing controls. For Stryker, the government’s leading expert on social photography, however, these overtly instrumental images also yielded cultural insight into the makeup of the agrarian countryside. He recognized that the photograph did much more than measure corn and bean production, that it captured something essential about the 45

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Figure 2.1. Aerial survey photograph, Kankakee County, Illinois, c. 1936–­39. Agricultural Adjustment Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture. As reproduced in Roy Stryker and Paul Johnstone, “Documentary Photographs,” in The Cultural Approach to History, ed. Caroline Ware (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), insert between pages 324 and 325.

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conditions of life on the land. The pattern of rectilinear fields recorded by the survey image offered “clues to the social and institutional relationships” that shaped modern life in the midwestern agrarian landscape. In doing so, the photograph offered what Stryker pronounced to be a “revelation of the independent family farm”—­a social and economic form that he, like many early twentieth-­ century Americans, still viewed as the bedrock of American development.2 Moreover, the image complemented the more visceral and emotive documentary images of midwestern people produced on the ground by Stryker’s photographers at the Historical Section. Juxtaposing the aerial photograph with one of a small meeting of government rehabilitation clients from rural Nebraska taken by John Vachon, Stryker marveled at the aerial view’s ability to add meaning to the more personal client picture (Figure 2.2). When set alongside the aerial image, the documentary photograph of FSA clients “becomes an eloquent historical document, for it reveals farmers with this cultural background making a group approach to their farming problems.”3 Contemporary midwesterners might be amused by Stryker’s dramatic estimation of the survey photograph’s power to reveal the physical and cultural forms of the prairie landscape. Today, survey views are so commonplace in midwestern life that most farmers can recognize their lands as easily from the air as from the ground. But Stryker’s sense of the revelatory power in the 1930s of the Illinois image demonstrates the significant changes that the emergence of aerial photography brought to the representation and conceptualization of the prairie landscape. Like the bird’s-­eye views and atlas images of the nineteenth century, aerial photographs offered broad, elevated visions of the land, views that invited people to look beyond the limitations of the region’s flattened topography and to imagine the outlines of new practices of prairie life. Unlike the earlier landscape images, however, aerial photographs presented views that were real rather than imagined, indexical rather than idealistic, recorded rather than composed. The aerial images of the Midwest taken from actual, though ephemeral, points above the landscape far outstripped previous notions of “elevation” and in doing so enabled a variety of institutions and individuals to understand midwestern land and life in a new, modern way. Whereas pioneer-­era bird’s-­eye views constructed optimistic visions of the physical and cultural form that they imagined Jeffersonian settlement would bring to the region, modern aerial survey photographs fixed the land into images (ostensibly factual) that documented its actual state of development. In doing so, the images revealed not only the achievements of the Jeffersonian vision but also its problems and unintended consequences. The photographs became powerful objects: testaments to regional development, templates for future ambitions, and tools for economic, environmental, and social critique. Aerial photography served as a key component in the U.S. government’s interwar efforts to organize and restructure the midwestern landscape. The prospects for prairie society and its representation during these years were dramatically different from those of the previous generation. As early as

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Figure 2.2. John Vachon, “Meeting of Farm Security Administration rehabilitation clients who work out farm and home plans with help of county supervisor and home supervisor. York, Nebraska,” 1938. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­008789-­D. Reproduced in Roy Stryker and Paul Johnstone, “Documentary Photography,” in The Cultural Approach to History, ed. Caroline Ware (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), insert between 324and 325.

the turn of the century, the optimism of first-­generation prairie homesteaders had been undermined by economic crises, environmental tumult, and the uncertainties of mechanization and land consolidation: all problems long in the making. The crash of agricultural commodity prices at the end of World War I and throughout the 1920s—­a crash spurred in large part by the breakneck expansion of production to meet wartime demand—­drove midwestern farmers into debt and further destabilized the already strained Jeffersonian model of independent yeoman agrarianism. Aerial photography

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helped government agencies and the region’s own inhabitants address these problems by providing images of the rural landscape that gave substance to the conditions of rural life and facilitated the formulation of comprehensive and integrated plans and programs for restructuring the landscape and its embedded culture.4 In the context of the New Deal especially, agricultural agents utilized survey views and oblique aerial photographs to assess the landscape and then to devise spatial and social transformations that would return the region to environmental, economic, and cultural sta­ bility. The aerial views that enabled the government to measure the landscape became prescriptive images that enabled the government to mandate crop planting, soil conservation, and other facets of midwestern agriculture and to oversee the uniform implementation of these new regulations across the region’s vast grid of individual farms. The influence of aerial photography as a means of remaking the Midwest, however, was not limited to the work of federal agencies. As the government expanded the survey across the countryside and became reliant on its images, agents began to deploy the images in their everyday interactions with farmers and landowners as a tool for planning farm production on a case-­by-­case basis. Farmers recognized the implications of the aerial survey as a tool for government oversight, influence, and enforcement, and they understood that a central goal of the aerial survey was to remake the practices through which farmers worked the land. More surprising to government agents, however, was midwesterners’ fast and fluid understanding that the synoptic scope and mechanical realism of aerial photography invited them to perceive midwestern culture in new and unprecedented ways. These new visions of the landscape from high altitudes and unexpected angles captivated the region’s inhabitants, but they could also be uncanny and estranging. Unsettling though they might be, this imagery became central to a substantial yet subtle resymbolization of the image of the Midwest in the minds of its people. By crystallizing abstract schemes into tangible images, aerial photography granted midwesterners the power to be something more than passive observers of the transformations taking place around them. Instead, they could take ownership of modernization and adapt it, whenever possible, to their own needs. Th e Develo pm ent o f Aeri al Photog r aphy Even before the advent of modern aviation, people had attempted to create aerial photographs. Carrying cameras aloft by means of balloons, rockets, and even pigeons, photographers managed to make a few photographs that showed the land below from points above. In 1855 French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-­Félix Tournachon (known as Nadar) became the first to patent a process of aerial photography for the purpose of surveying and cartography. In 1858 he produced the first known balloon photograph, a picture of Petit Bicêtre, a village on the fringes of Paris, from a height

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of approximately three hundred feet. Nadar intensified his efforts in aerial photography in the 1860s, with the city of Paris as his main subject (Figure 2.3).5 The first aerial photography of the American landscape was undertaken by photographer James Wallace Black and balloonist Samuel King in 1860. In August of that year the duo had captured a series of images showing Providence, Rhode Island, and its surrounding seaside landscapes. Roughly a month later they completed their most technically successful aerial photograph, a steeply angled oblique view of Boston (Figure 2.4).6 Taken from a balloon tethered at Boston Commons, the image presented the densely built neighborhoods adjacent to the city’s waterfront and piers.7 Pushing the balloon to even greater heights, Black captured an even more comprehensive view of the city (Figure 2.5). Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was among the first to view Black’s aerial plates, and he remarked on them in an article on photography published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863. “Boston, as the eagle and wild goose see it,” he wrote, “is a very different object from the same place as the solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys.”8 The development of balloon photography built upon practices of elevated representation that had existed in mapping and landscape view making for centuries. Its innovation, as was also the case in later airplane photography, stemmed from the balloon’s actualization of viewpoints that were previously imagined and projective. From a purely technological standpoint, however, balloon photog­ raphy offered but a half step in the development of modern aeriality, and such early attempts at air photography met with limited success.9 Given the limitations in flight and camera technology, aerial photography proved in most instances to be impracticable. It took the invention of smaller and more advanced cameras, enclosed film that did not require on-­the-­spot processing, and the airplane to make aerial photography possible on a larger scale.10 When the Wright brothers’ flier lifted off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903, few people thought of the achievement in terms of vision and photography. As aviation technology progressed in the next decade, however, people recognized the power of flight to remake the way they saw and represented the world. In terms of technology, the airplane provided what the balloon could not: a self-­ propelled and directly controlled platform that enabled photographer-­pilots to “slip the surly bonds of earth” and achieve more advanced and systematic forms of aerial photography.11 Almost imme­ diately, pilots began taking commercially available cameras aloft to snap photographs of the landscape below. Soon after, manufacturers designed cameras specifically intended for airplane use. The first of these were intended to be mounted near the cockpit, where pilots or passengers could operate the equipment by aiming it along their own embodied sightlines. Later, more advanced automatic-­ film-­feed cameras with longer-­focus lenses appeared. These devices were designed to be mounted in the belly of the aircraft with the lens protruding through an opening in the fuselage. Aimed straight down (perpendicular to ground), these cameras produced views that were completely shorn of a horizon and presented the earth in a flattened and maplike tableau.

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Figure 2.3. Honoré Daumier, Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of Art, 1862. Published in Le Boulevard, May 25, 1862. Lithograph, 10¹¹⁄₁₆ × 8¾ inches. Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections Department, Brandeis University.

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Figure 2.4. James Wallace Black, Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It, 1860. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 7⁵⁄₁₆ × 6⁹⁄₁₆ inches. Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. www.metmuseum.org.

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Figure 2.5. James Wallace Black, Boston from a Hot-­Air Balloon, c. 1860. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 10¹⁄₁₆ × 7¹⁵⁄₁₆ inches. Robert O. Dougan Collection, Gift of Warner Communications, Inc., 1981. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. www.metmuseum.org.

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The combination of aviation and photography constituted a leap in the perceptual and phenomenal relationships that existed between the landscape and its inhabitants. As an instrument of transport, the airplane stood at the apex of a range of modern machines that had progressively annihilated the experience of space and time throughout the industrial period. Airplanes, like railroads, steamships, and automobiles, reduced the “frictional effects” of the physical landscape, freeing people from the gravitational and geographic contingencies of earthbound movement.12 At the same time, the airplane surpassed the spatial effects of these ground-­based machines through its ability to shift flyers’ bodily orientations to the world from the horizontal to the vertical and the oblique. As a visual medium, photography exercised a similar power over the landscape by fixing images of the land in time while simultaneously liberating them from space. Reproducible and transportable yet indexical and able to capture a visceral feeling of the real thing, what Roland Barthes has called the effect of “having been there,” photographs enabled people to experience far-­off landscapes as if they were present and on-­site.13 Together, photography and aviation allowed people to radically reconceive their ties to the earth by affording them real images of the land from the new elevated viewing positions created by flight. Oblique, or off-­axis, images taken from swooping and low-­flying aircraft disoriented normal horizon­ tal relationships to the landscape, replacing the stable perceptual edge of the horizon with diagonal vectors. Vertical photographs, looking straight down from on high, by contrast, flattened topographic variations into a continuous and seemingly two-­dimensional surface, obscuring elevation and depression and representing the landscape from an uncommon topside perspective. The extension of ground-­ based images was restricted by the power of the human eye (or camera lens) and blocked by physical features such as hills, trees, and eventually the horizon; vertical photographs experienced no such limitations. Instead, the synoptic, god’s-­eye expansiveness of aerial photography united broad—­and to the local eye, unique and variegated—­swaths of land into a single, continuous, and often static visual field. World War I crystallized aerial photography both as a visual practice and as a means of information gathering and combat management. Flying over the battlefields of Europe, military photographers snapped images of the land that disclosed troop movements, the location of fortifications, the extent of battle damage inflicted on enemy terrain, and other tactical and strategic information vital to the conduct of war. At first such photography was crudely practiced, often consisting of little more than pilots holding out cameras, pointing them downward, and taking what pictures they could. As the conflict continued, photographic methods evolved, and aerial surveillance emerged as a technologically precise means to record and interpret embattled landscapes and military movements. Close-­range views, like one of a French infantry attack (Figure 2.6), offered unprecedented visual access to the battlefield and a new synoptic perspective from which to observe, evaluate, and manage

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Figure 2.6. “View of a French attack from an observation airplane whose radiotelegraphy is directing the supporting artillery fire: one of the most remarkable aërial photographs of the war.” Aerial photo of a French infantry attack. From National Geographic, January 1918, 8.

fighting.14 These photographs, shot from low altitudes and focused obliquely, revealed the zigzag trenches and troop placements of the front lines and allowed commanders to make well-­informed tactical decisions about the movements of the enemy and the deployment of their own forces. On a different scale, high-­altitude vertical photographs and carefully assembled sequential images, called photomosaics, afforded sweeping views of entire battlefields and portions of the countryside. A 1918 photomosaic of images taken by American military photographers showing the airport and surrounding countryside of a French village demonstrates the wide view made possible through the

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careful overlapping of several photographs shot from the same altitude (Figure 2.7). The unaligned edges and varied orientations of the individual photographs disclose the lack of control inherent to aerial photography, as buffeting winds and other natural forces made it difficult to fly a mathematically true course. Surveillance officers kept such uncertainty within an acceptable level of error by the overlapping of photographic exposures during the flight and the careful interpretation and assemblage of the printed plates by surveillance experts on the ground. The resulting mosaic, therefore, often

Figure 2.7. Assemblage of photographs showing Ourches Airdrome. Photographic Section, Air Service, American Expeditionary Forces, 1918. Collection of the author.

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conveyed a picture whose scope and accuracy was greater than the sum of its parts.15 Commanders used such broad and detailed images to plot out large-­scale maneuvers, track the movements of opposing forces, and, by comparing similar images taken at different times, determine enemy buildups and the location of even well-­camouflaged troop positions. They could also, by piecing together photographs of dispersed battlefields, cities, and other strategic locations, extend their visual knowledge to include places distant from their headquarters, and even those behind enemy lines. The aerial photographs that became common in military command centers were also introduced to public audiences during the war in the form of propaganda and war reportage. In the United States, the War Department distributed aerial photographs to newspapers and magazines, which published them as an effective way to give the American public a closer and more intimate picture of distant battlefields and bombed-­out villages. They soon became a mainstay of wartime journalism and were frequently reproduced as front-­page illustrations and in rotogravure sections of national and regional newspapers and later in popular magazines.16 To the everyday viewer, which was eager to visualize and understand a war being waged far across the ocean, these photographs both illustrated the specific circumstances of individual battles and anchored them to the often little-­known European landscape. Looking like maps and conveying the kinds of information associated with them, but also bearing witness to actual events in a manner associated with photography, high-­ altitude vertical views laid out the landscapes mentioned in war reports and enabled the public to see abstract and foreign locations as real places. In complement to the verticals, lower-­angle oblique views afforded observers closer-­up representations of the bombardments, attacks, and retreats that animated individual battlefields. The combination allowed American audiences to interpret military activities both in detail and also from a visual and cognitive distance that gave a strategic understanding of the actions of their troops. The dissemination of these wartime images to the public ignited a fascination with aerial photography as a novel means of representing the landscape and its embedded human activity. This interest in aerial views was part of an emergent fascination with the airplane: it expanded the boundaries of American thought and culture and was the key component of a cultural discourse that historian Joe Corn termed America’s “gospel” of aviation.17 In this context, newspaper and magazine editors embraced aerial photographs because they presented new vistas, disorienting perspectives, and unexpected images of distant locations as well as everyday places. Beginning in the early 1920s, national and (to a surprising degree) local newspapers peppered their weekly rotogravure sections with aerial photographs that depicted not only foreign and exotic lands but also more common and nearby sites and features. Likewise, illustrated magazines dedicated more pages to aerial photography. In July 1924, National Geographic celebrated the first nonstop photographic flight across the continental United States by devoting an entire issue to aerial photography. Reproducing a large selection of

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oblique photographs, from eastern cities to the stockyards of the Midwest and the high peaks of the western mountains, the magazine’s editors observed that aerial photography offered a stunning and insightful “new aspect” for perceiving the landscape and exhorted readers to give the images “long and careful study” in order to enrich their understanding of the nation and its image (Figure 2.8).18 In issues published in the following months and years, aerial photographs played a central role in the exploration of diverse national and international spaces, from the city of Philadelphia, the Grand Canyon, and the Midwest to the archaeological ruins of Mesoamerica and the high peaks of the Andes.

Figure 2.8. “The Stockyards of Omaha, Nebraska, Seen from Above.” Aerial photo of Omaha, Nebraska stockyards. From National Geographic, July 1924, 23.

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While aerial images appeared as a new component in the American popular imaginary, they also emerged in more practical ways as planning and development tools for America’s rural and urban spaces. Beginning in the 1920s spatial and social planners embraced the aerial view, with its potential to give them new ways to perceive, evaluate, and remake the natural and human worlds. Architects such as Le Corbusier (Charles-­Édouard Jeanneret) and Frank Lloyd Wright and social critics such as Lewis Mumford proclaimed aerial vision to be a “new basis of sensation” and marveled at the possibilities for using it to conceive new schemes for ordering modern life.19 Even at more basic levels, where planners had more pragmatic and less idealistic goals, aerial photographs and survey views grew increasingly important in managing and manipulating American space. In an article printed in a social science journal, Sherman Fairchild (founder of one of the era’s preeminent aerial survey companies) listed virtually limitless applications for aerial photography—­especially for vertical survey views, which he termed “photographic mapping.”20 His commercially oriented publications on aerial photography were complemented by a bevy of articles, books, and technical manuals that explained the process of aerial photography and interpretation to expert and layman alike.21 In Fairchild’s estimation, aerial survey photography could serve a range of commercial and public interests, including forestry, geological exploration, highway design, city planning, tax assessment, and agricultural land management.22 Single-­exposure views could be used to visualize the footprint of individual locations and structures such as neighborhoods, factories, and private estates, to identify problems and enact changes, and to plan new construction. For broad coverage, composite aerial mosaics could be pieced together from sequences of overlapping photographs taken from an airplane passing at a constant altitude back and forth across the landscape, “furrowing it,” as aerial photography proponent Harry Stewart wrote, exactly as a farmer plows a field (Figure 2.9).23 This metaphor was apt, as the back-­and-­forth linear movement of a plowman across a field effectively described the repetitive courses flown by survey pilots. Moreover, the plow’s preparation of fallow land for planting paralleled the aerial survey’s purpose of transforming the landscape into images that would guide future development. Once the individual photographs were developed, corrected for scale, and accurately assembled by survey technicians, the resulting mosaic could encompass areas ranging from hundreds of acres to hundreds of square miles and could be used in multiple ways. Such was the case with a celebrated photomap of Manhattan that Fairchild created in 1921 (see Figure 4.9). Assembled from one hundred straight-­down photographs taken from an altitude of one thousand feet, the mosaic served as the centerpiece of Fairchild’s early promotional efforts, garnered worldwide attention, and became a cornerstone of the consolidation of Manhattan’s increasingly overbuilt and unmanageable footprint.24 Its real and symbolic success helped fuel the application of aerial surveying to even broader rural and regional landscapes—­spaces whose boundaries were less definite than those of the confined island borough.

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Figure 2.9. “These diagrammatical charts show the method of taking vertical aerial photographs, for use in constructing photographic maps. Planes must be flown at a uniform altitude along a straight line and the pictures taken at such intervals that when developed they overlap each other by one-­half.” Illustration showing the method of taking aerial photographs for photographic maps. From Aero Digest 4, no. 5 (May 1924): 297.

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In the 1930s, as the practices of aerial photography became more technologically refined, such images of the American landscape became increasingly prevalent. Aerial survey became central to the mapping of established landscapes and to the planning of future development. The U.S. gov­ernment’s gradual adoption of aerial photography to take stock of and manage land brought about the greatest transformation of visual and cultural prospects for the American countryside. After the economic crash of 1929, as a cross-­section of Americans questioned the efficacy of the American economic and social system—­and the landscape on which it was written—­aerial views became the government’s means to map the nation anew and to implement a strategy of projects and programs to stabilize and regulate both land and society. This visual intercession took greatest hold in the nation’s agricultural regions, particularly in the Midwest, where land use and social practice were intricately intertwined and where, in many popular estimations, the success or failure of independent small farmers on their square plots of land powerfully symbolized the fate of American democratic ideology. A e r ial Su rvey and t he Manager ia l Mos aic That aerial photography became central to government representations of the midwestern landscape was not surprising. On the prairies, aerial mapping extended the survey practices that had helped establish the landscape and regulate its development. As one aerial survey promoter professed, photo­ cartography fit neatly into a history of American planning that began with mapmaker presidents such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and reached its apex in the Land Ordinance and the consequent rectilinear settlement of the prairies.25 This method for organizing and codifying the undeveloped prairies had enabled settlers to transform its unmarked terrain into a settled landscape. It had done so by allowing them to envisage the seemingly limitless and formless space of the natural prairie in ways that enabled the projection of a rational and inhabitable (by Euro-­American standards) spatial system onto the land, even when no such order yet existed on the ground. When surveyors traveled out onto the landscape to measure the land and establish the grid’s physical markers, they made Jefferson’s conceptual vision into a physical reality that shaped the land and the lives of those who settled it. Decades later, survey photography exhibited striking affinities with this abstract and conceptual cartographic system. By the 1930s, however, the economic and social context for the prairies had changed greatly. In this new context aerial survey helped midwesterners understand how the landscape and their lives upon it differed from those of previous generations. As historian Frederick Jackson Turner observed in his famous paper delivered at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1890 U.S. census showed that the western frontier had closed. The era of pioneer settlement, which had served as the basis for the unprecedented expansion of American culture, was over.26 From that moment, the prospects for life on the prairies had evolved gradually from the

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pioneer’s sense of unlimited promise to hope for stability and consolidation and, finally, to fear of turmoil and uncertainty. By the turn of the century, the prairie landscape was completely and evenly settled, and improved farm technology and increased demand for agricultural products had brought about what historians have termed a golden age of midwestern agriculture.27 As farmers benefited from consistent weather and a strong demand for their crops, they brought more of their land into production and embraced a market-­driven agricultural economy. Midwestern businessmen and towns­ folk, from grain dealers to store owners, shared in this prosperity by building markets and transpor­ tation systems to export farm produce to national and world markets and to import an array of manufactured goods to meet the growing demands of rural consumers. This steady prosperity culminated in the agricultural boom of World War I, when midwestern farmers were called upon to provide the food and other products for American troops and for Europeans whose own bombed-­out agricultural lands had ceased to be productive. With war slogans such as “If You Can’t Fight, Farm: Food Will Win the War!” and “Plow to the Fence for National Defense” spurring them on, farmers brought even their most marginal lands into production and invested heavily in mechanical implements to cultivate their expanded acreages.28 Often possessing limited capital, farmers bought land and equipment on credit with the expectation that prices would remain high and the agricultural bonanza would continue. When the war that led to this unprecedented rise in midwestern fortunes ended, so did prosperity. With the return of European farmers to their fields in the early 1920s, the demand for midwestern produce decreased, as did agricultural profits. Having borrowed heavily, however, most farmers could not cut their own production to stabilize prices. They produced at even greater levels trying to make up for low prices through volume. Those who could not sufficiently increase their production usually ended up selling their land, sometimes remaining on their farms as tenant laborers and working their fields on shares for new absentee owners. Farmers who managed to raise their output often did so at an incredible cost to the land itself. Needing to draw out every possible bushel of grain, they tilled even the most environmentally fragile and least productive fields without regard to the long-­term stability of the soil. They also cultivated their fields more intensively by planting crops thickly and rarely allowing the land to lay fallow. Such practices stripped from the land much of its original fertility. Although farmers knew they were damaging their land, they believed they had to produce to retain ownership. As one government agricultural economist observed in his study of a midwestern community, “Many farmers believed that they were ruining their farms, but thought only about making them produce in order to save them. They argued that it was better to have a run down farm than none at all.”29 Thus, much of midwestern rural culture was already in turmoil at the time of the 1929 stock market crash. The prairie landscape, no longer perceived as a democratic grid that offered a metaphor

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of Jeffersonian promise, now felt overextended, and its people seemed incapable of supporting themselves. The sustained droughts of the early 1930s compounded the sense of disarray as crops were destroyed and wind and water erosion accelerated across the region’s overworked and increasingly fragile agricultural lands. The fullest extent of this environmental calamity occurred on the western plains, where entire regions of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas became giant dust bowls. Even in the less arid eastern prairies, however, soil erosion and the decreasing fertility of cropland caused environmental concern to run high. Midwesterners, many for the first time, began to recognize the damaging effects of unlimited expansion and to reconceive their relationship to the land. On a larger scale, under the auspices of the New Deal, the federal government also turned its attention to reforming midwestern agriculture and rehabilitating the physical landscape. Doing so required the transformation of both the practices and the principles of farming—­a project that midwesterners and government officials initially found hard to understand or to visualize. In many respects, the goals of the New Deal mimicked those of the Land Ordinance: to create order from chaos, to institute systematic control over a broad terrain, and to invest the lives of those who inhabited the prairies with democratic structures and ideals. In other ways, however, the two situations could not have been more different. Whereas the aim of the Land Ordinance had been to overwrite the emptiness of the prairies with a rational geographic order and to provide an optimistic framework for settling the land, New Deal programmers wanted to reform an established landscape whose disintegration, somewhat ironically, was an unintended consequence of earlier beliefs and practices. The survey grid, originally a means by which the government ensured the efficient and egalitarian distribution of new federal lands to eager settlers, had also facilitated processes that damaged the long-­term prospects of the region and its people. By dividing the land into rigid geometric parcels, the survey encouraged farmers, many of whom had little prior experience in agriculture, to cultivate their fields in abstract rectilinear patterns that took no account of the natural slope and quality of the terrain. Farmers plowed up hillsides and across gullies with little thought to how their furrows loosened soil and channeled water. At the same time, the expansive psychology of grid form encouraged farmers—­especially when facing economic pressure—­not only to press all their own land into production but also to expand their holdings by either plowing up previously unclaimed marginal lands or, alternately, coveting their neighbors’ farms. By acquiring the land adjacent to their own holdings and removing fences, landowners created large continuous fields well suited to the increased power and efficiency of modern machinery. But even if the grid form had contributed to many of the Midwest’s environmental and economic problems, it continued as the foundation of prairie life and culture. Government programmers therefore set out to discover how to reform the prairie landscape from within the grid form and how to balance the expansionist ethos of midwestern geometry and the newer imperatives necessary to

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stabilize and modernize the physical and economic landscape. Aerial surveying provided not only the tangible imagery but also the synoptic mentality for envisioning and enacting a region-­wide reformation of the gridded landscape and its agricultural practices. In making aerial photography a cornerstone of the Department of Agriculture’s New Deal initiatives, the federal government inaugurated an effort to reenvision and resymbolize the Midwest, one whose scope was matched only by that of the original Land Ordinance. One of the government’s first tasks was to control the rapid loss of soil fertility caused by erosion. Early in 1933 the Soil Conser­ vation Service (SCS) began commissioning aerial surveys for locations across the prairie, and it used these images to analyze the land and to decide on conservation measures. Three years later, an agency memo identified air surveying as “the very basis of procedure” for conservation work, noting especially that aerial surveys enabled the efficient and economical examination of vast tracts of agricultural land.30 More and more, government-­contracted airplanes appeared over the prairie, methodically crisscrossing the sky as their automatic cameras photographed the landscape below. The resulting images were far more visually instructive than ground surveys (which were limited by the impediments of horizontal vision) and enabled local agents to circumspectly evaluate the land both on a farm-­by-­farm basis and across entire regions.31 Soil-­conservation agents and farmers alike were often astounded by the amount of information that could be gleaned from the photographs and by their remarkable realism. “Instead of having a flat appearance, as one would expect in a photo taken looking straight down,” wrote one midwestern newspaper, “the maps show clearly every gully and slope, even small rises showing up like mountains.”32 The trained soil engineers who examined a high-­altitude photograph of the Coon Creek Drainage Area in rural Wisconsin (Figure 2.10), taken from almost three miles above the earth, could classify the land in terms of its topographic variance, degree of erosion, and tillage techniques: all vital in assessing conservation requirements. Interpreters looking down on the landscape also discerned the natural contour of the land and compared it to the straight lines by which farmers tilled their fields. Through the careful evaluation of gullies and other water routes, which appeared in the photograph as unevenly shaded indentations in otherwise even field surfaces, soil engineers could evaluate the severity of erosion and identify the individual fields, like the heavily abraded plot seen in the upper center of the photo, at greatest risk for soil loss. Moreover, aerial photographs with their broad scope showed the landscape as an integrated system rather than as individual farms and fields. One agricultural agent noted that a gully “photographed from the ground . . . is merely a chasm in the earth. . . . Photographed from the air, the same gully becomes part of an elaborate system of gullies that drain water from the land.”33 Given the ability to trace an eroded creek across several farms, agents perceived the accretive and systematic effects of soil loss. Coupled with other close-­range views—­for example, that of a Nebraska field taken from an altitude of only five hundred

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Figure 2.10. Coon Creek Area, Wisconsin, c. 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, photograph no. 05649. Original negative at National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

feet (Figure 2.11)—­aerial photographs made possible a new understanding of how erosion cut across the boundary lines, creating a systemic rather than an isolated problem. Because conservation agents could view eroded landscapes as unified wholes, the government could in turn synthesize erosion-­control plans that were consistent with the broad natural order of the landscape.34 In aerial views, conservation agents could perceive the organic contour of the prairies and recognize the extent to which the rectilinear squares of the survey conflicted with the land’s

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Figure 2.11. Richard Hufnagle, Deep Gully, Aerial View from 500 Feet, Pawnee City, Nebraska, 1939. Records of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Record Group 114, photograph no. SF-­NEB-­1095, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

natural order. Although agricultural experts had long suspected the destructiveness of plowing uphill and down, that is, against the contour of the land, aerial views made the consequences of this practice strikingly evident, not only to government agents but also to individual farmers.35 To reestablish control over the rapidly eroding straight-­plowed fields, the government aggressively promoted new practices of “farming on the curve,” which meant plowing along rather than against the slope of the land. Often agents carried aerial photographs into the fields when they met with farmers and used them as didactic tools to illustrate the topographic contours of the land and to enable farmers to see the new paths they should follow when working the fields. An SCS image of a farmer plowing his

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field demonstrated the new technique, showing the plow cutting a snakelike path as the man carefully steers the tractor along the slope of the land (Figure 2.12). The photograph symbolizes the farmer’s shift in tillage practice through the placement of two elements: the tractor operator in the foreground and the single tree on the horizon. The rules of perspective encourage the viewer to envision a straight line connecting these two points in the landscape. The curving path of the plow, however, interrupts this linearity with a competing trajectory of organic contour. By disrupting the expected trajectory of vision, the photographer analogized the changes in landscape practice entailed by modern conservation.

Figure 2.12. P. L. Guttebo Farm, Decorah, Iowa, 1939. Records of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Record Group 114, photograph no. P-­IA-­1415, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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This heightened sensitivity to the curvature of the land not only reduced erosion but also radically altered the look of the landscape. New patterns appeared on the land—­for example, curvilinear swaths of corn, beans, and alfalfa, like those seen in an oblique photograph from rural Iowa (Figure 2.13). Slowly, these forms began to challenge the rigid geometrical patterns that midwesterners had once perceived in, and understood as the conceptual basis for, their landscape. Although the rectilinear boundaries remained the fundamental dividing lines between neighboring fields and individual homesteads, new systems of curves within these squared fields symbolized a change in the nature of human interaction with the landscape. But though the new organic patterns suggested a growing sen­ sitivity to the natural form of the land, they also flew in the face of older values. As anthropologist James West observed in his 1945 study of a rural midwestern community, “Men who farm admire a

Figure 2.13. A Complex Strip Cropping System, Decorah, Iowa, 1939. Records of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Record Group 114, photograph no. P-­IA-­1524, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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straight furrow better than anything else in the world. . . . The man that would deliberately plow a crooked furrow is considered insane.”36 In this way, contour farming also underscored the increasing influence of federal planners in the working lives of prairie farmers. One Kansas farmer noted, “When a farmer drove by a field that had contours on it, he immediately knew that that individual farmer had been involved with the federal government.”37 As involvement with the government became more common, the changing look of the land redefined agricultural knowledge and community ties. It divided those who had accepted the modern, federal vision of the land from those who held to more traditional practices. The change also connoted a deeper psychological shift in agrarian culture as it made farmers increasingly aware of their status in relation to the government. The soil was protected, but the notion of the independent yeoman farmer was significantly eroded. The government recognized that farmers might see its conservation programs as intrusions into their familiar working practices and as counter to the ideals of democratic and economic independence they held dear. In a two-­part article from 1935, “No More Frontiers,” Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell answered the charge of government interference by arguing that change was inevitable because the old frontier mentality of land exploitation could not be sustained. Tugwell admonished that three hundred years of “riotous farming” had ravaged the soil, and he warned that “the limitless free lands of the virgin continent which our ancestors found awaiting them when they set foot on this soil have limits now.”38 Whereas earlier generations of pioneer farmers had exploited the land and moved on when its fertility played out, the end of the frontier eclipsed that option. With no virgin lands remaining, Tugwell insisted that farmers would be forced to give up “ignorant, short-­ sighted or greedy” methods and embrace practices that sustained the land. The government intended its programs to aid farmers in this shift and thereby enable them to retain their culture by conserving the land. At the same time, Tugwell was forthright that the changes faced significant resistance. While assigning much of this hostility to the “buccaneers of business and finance,” who resented any limi­ tation to “their opportunities for economic spoliation,” he recognized that farmers and the broader public might also feel uncertain about the restructured look of the land and the disappearance of the frontier mythos.39 Yet he also believed that once the public understood the government’s aims, such uncertainty would quickly dissipate. Tugwell’s decision to use an SCS aerial photograph as his main illustration suggests a belief that such images could be used to reshape public opinion. The nearly vertical photograph focuses on a dark-­hued trapezoidal field “scientifically terraced and planted” following conservation methods promoted by the government (Figure 2.14).40 Shorn of a horizon line, flattened into an abstract pattern, and described with scientific terminology, the photograph linked the landscape to modernity. Tugwell used this iconography of technological innovation to counterbalance the uncertainty fostered by the government’s proposed changes. Indeed, the article’s two other photographs seem to drive this intention home, as they depict the results of poor man­agement from

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Figure 2.14. “Scientifically terraced and planted, America’s rich farm land will resist the ravages of chemical exhaustion and wind and water erosion which now threaten large portions of it in the West.” Image of “scientifically terraced and planted” farmland. From Today: An Independent Journal of Public Affairs 4, no. 9 (June 22, 1935): 2.

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grounded viewpoints that leave the viewer buried in eroding soil (Figure 2.15). The implication is that whereas the horizontal view embodied the destructiveness of traditional practices, the aerial view—­ and government oversight—­brought order and clarity. Aerial views, besides visualizing the transformation of the prairie environment for government agents, also let the government intervene in the region’s economic landscape through production controls. In May 1933 Congress passed an omnibus farming bill, the Agricultural Adjustment Act. This created a new federal agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), under Sec­ retary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. The AAA’s task was to elevate farm commodity prices by regulating crop production and, it was hoped, to thus reestablish economic stability both on individual farms and in the agricultural economy as a whole.41 To accomplish this, the government planned to reduce surplus production (which drove down prices) by limiting crops planted and livestock raised on a farm-­by-­farm basis. According to the plan, farmers (or more correctly landowners; tenant farmers were usually exempt) would contract individually with the government each year, agreeing to produce a predetermined allotment of crops.42 Individuals would work with government agents to determine which lands to place in production and what types of crops to plant. Later, the government made compliance with soil-­conservation programs another requirement of AAA enrollment so that landowners would work their land according to new environmental guidelines. Although farmers could decline to participate in AAA programs and could then produce as much as they chose, those who participated in the program received extra price supports and benefit payments. By paying these subsidies, the government guaranteed farmers adequate incomes, although critics of the program quickly noted that subsidies institutionalized agriculture and insinuated government policies into the daily decisions of individual farmers. AAA programmers anticipated that aerial photographs and especially vertical survey views, which were called “picture-­maps” in one agency press release, would be instrumental in implementing and regulating allotment programs. The most cost-­effective, accurate, and expedient method of measuring the agricultural landscape, aerial surveying also produced images that enabled agricultural agents to picture the land broadly but in exacting detail.43 In the Midwest, where the expansive scale and geometric order of the land was particularly suited to the flattened vertical lexicon of aerial photography, these photographs became a primary instrument of AAA program development. In 1936, after a series of experiments that established standards for producing the views, the agency began systematically composing an aerial survey of the prairies, along with the nation’s other agricultural regions.44 On May 10, 1937, an AAA press release boasted that by the end of the year the agency anticipated “having on hand aerial maps of more than half a million square miles, most of which is farmland.” This number amounted to almost one-­third of the approximately 1.65 million square miles of agricultural acreage in the United States, with much of it in the Midwest.45

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Figure 2.15. Illustrations of “man-­made erosion” and “wind erosion.” From Today: An Independent Journal of Public Affairs 4, no. 9 (June 22, 1935): 4.

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The working images from the survey—­those employed by government programmers in their everyday tasks—­came in two types: individual photographs that showed only a few thousand acres, and larger photomosaics that combined these single views into composite representations that mapped hundreds of square miles. Larger in scale, the photomosaics served as indexes for the individual photographs and also provided agricultural administrators with systematic views that outlined the homogeneous look of the landscape as a whole. One result of this new panopticism was to highlight the countryside’s ubiquitous geometric pattern—­a legacy of Jefferson’s geographic vision of an abstract, gridded settlement.46 This vision, at once cadastral and cultural, exerted a powerful organizational, conceptual, and even aesthetic force on New Deal policy makers. Government programmers reviewing a 1939 composite aerial mosaic map representing the broad agricultural landscape of Grundy County, Iowa (Figure 2.16), for example, could readily understand the homogeneity of the midwestern landholdings, encouraging their belief that they could unite the entire countryside under a single integrated system of agricultural controls. Not surprisingly, it was easy to believe that the geometric symmetry perceived in the large-­scale mosaics would carry into the smaller representations of indi­vid­ual landholdings, whose farmsteads and tilled fields seemed to mirror the form and effect of the larger system. This congruence was important, since a uniform program of farm controls relied on the belief that all farms were equal and interchangeable and therefore likely to benefit democratically from the AAA policy. In representing the Midwest as an undifferentiated and unified agrarian landscape, aerial survey seemed implicitly to justify the broad scale of the government’s initiatives. Operating at a more intimate scale, the individual images that constituted the photomosaic maps, such as that of a small portion of Grundy County landscape (Figure 2.17), allowed agricultural agents unprecedented visual access to the midwestern landscape at a farm-­by-­farm level. Shot from an airplane traveling in high and level flight, the photograph depicts a discrete portion of agrarian landscape. Reproduced from a nine-­inch-­by-­nine-­inch negative and framed at a scale of one inch to 1,660 feet, the photograph recorded every visible surface of the landscape below. Focused by the crosshair-­ like intersection of perpendicular roadways at the center of the image, seemingly every aspect of the rural landscape is opened up to the viewer’s unimpeded gaze. The Jeffersonian grid, which had appeared as a broad abstraction in the mosaic, finds a more human scale in the smaller image, which captures it at the scale of its basic unit: the one-­mile-­by-­one-­mile-­square section. Each of these foundational squares, whose edges are outlined by roads graveled in white limestone, contains 640 acres.47 Typically, sections were further subdivided into four quadrants, colloquially referred to as quarters, of 160 acres each (160 acres was the median size for an Iowa farm during the 1930s). Individual farmsteads appear almost exclusively along the sections’ edges, a sensible location that allowed immediate access to roadways as well as the most efficient use of land. Though this particular photograph appears to

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Figure 2.16. “Aerial Photography Index.” Aerial photomosaic of Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Records of the Farm Service Agency, Record Group 145, item no. BZQ. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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Figure 2.17. Aerial survey view of Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Records of the Farm Service Agency, Record Group 145, photograph no. BZQ-­3-­23. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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concentrate on a specific quartet of sections at its center, the similar squares that are partially visible along the edges of the photograph demonstrate the continuity of the pattern and suggest, in the context of the broader survey, how the entire landscape is mapped over with these forms. The individual survey photographs enabled government agents to make a clear accounting of a farm’s every aspect, because each image unerringly cataloged every acre of land, every farmstead, and every building. In informational terms, the variegated shading of the square fields indexed an array of data, including agronomic variables such as planting or harvest dates, type of crop, and method of tillage, as well as geological factors such as soil type and moisture levels. Finer details of field surface patterns provided even more information on farming practices. A smooth and uniform field surface, for example, indicated evenly seeded crops, whereas parallel lines indicated row cropping. The faint x’s visible here and there denoted recent tillage or hay mowing, with the diagonal lines marking the points where the farmer had disengaged his implement from the ground to change direction as he navigated (often in repetitive square routes) around the field. To decipher the more specialized data embedded in survey photographs usually required the skills of a trained interpreter with enhanced instruments. Yet a great deal of information remained available to the average viewer armed with little more than a magnifying glass or the naked eye. In counterpoint to its role in capturing the prairie landscape as a system of rational geometry, the survey image also recorded other, less regulated and more organic land effects.48 These elements served as signs of the friction that existed between natural and man-­made orders. Most notably, the webs of tendril-­like streambeds and drainages that flow diagonally across the center and lower portions of the Grundy County photograph revealed a competing land pattern shaped by natural forces rather than human actions. Marking out the pathways followed by water as it flowed across the landscape, these lines provided evidence of other natural forces (gravity, geology, climate) that operated independently of humanity’s imposed geometric order. The swelling topography and variegated geological makeup showed the landscape as other than a flat, uniform grid, as even slight changes in elevation or soil type created substantial variation in shading. The prominence of these features—­ as with the drainage lines—­offered a visual counterpoint to the perpendicular demarcations of fields or roads. Cast shadows offered an additional layer of tonal and, by extension, conceptual complexity. One of the most noted effects of aerial survey photography was its elimination of vertical depth.49 Looking straight down onto the landscape transformed the earth into a two-­dimensional tabletop that disabled perception of vertical elements, from fully upright buildings, walls, and tree trunks to sloped surfaces like hillsides. With standing surfaces rendered nearly invisible to direct sight, shadow emerged as an alternative index of vertical dimensionality as well as an additional source of visual pattern. When judged in relation to natural forms such as the grove of trees in the lower right of the image, these shadows project amorphous, seemingly unregulated patterns onto the land. When

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attached to human constructions such as the photograph’s many rectangular barns, however, shadows take on a different effect, acting as visual amplifiers of human order. Once captured, organized, and printed by government labs, the photographs were quickly distributed throughout the AAA and its sister agencies as tools for enacting both the conceptual and the practical elements of new agricultural policy. At a national level, the images became didactic symbols of the government’s centralized and comprehensive vision for managing the agricultural landscape. Within regional and local offices, the views served a similar purpose but also took on practical functions. Treating the photographs as matters of fact, agricultural agents utilized interpretive instruments, including planimeters and stereoscopic viewers, to calculate the exact size of the individual farms and fields depicted within them and to identify the farm operators’ mode of practice (Figure 2.18). Next, agents carried the photographs out into the countryside where, assisted by individual farmers, they collected more detailed information about the landscape and its operations on a farm-­ by-­farm basis. Based on these facts, the agent (often in conjunction with a county association composed of local farmers, such as the one shown in Figure 2.2) determined production allotments for the region’s farms. Then the farmer and agent studied the air view together, making it a tool of communication and, prospectively, a plan for short-­and long-­range scripting of the farmer’s future actions. Indeed, it was common practice to use the aerial photographs as literal blueprints, labeling each field with the crop that would be planted the following year, and to plot out the location for conservation devices.50 Thus, it was likely that the many farmers who, in response to the government program, began plowing curvilinear paths across their fields were often tracing with their tractors the lines that had first been shown to them on aerial photographs. Subsequently, the photographs served as instruments of oversight that agents deployed to measure compliance with government initiatives and interests. Because they enabled agricultural agents to explain large-­scale federal plans to landowners at a more intimate level, aerial survey photographs provided a visual intermediary between the federal government and the individual farmer. Indeed, a government promotional photograph of an agricultural agent on a farm highlights that function (Figure 2.19). Spread over the rear panel of the agent’s (or perhaps the farmer’s) car, the air view is positioned exactly between the farmer and the agent. The agricultural expert gestures to the photograph, evidently explaining an aspect of the farm program; the farmer listens, his gaze intently focused on the view itself. Able to see his land comprehensively in the photograph’s shaded squares with the help of the agent (who was trained to interpret aerial views), the farmer could grasp the order and regularity of the government system and imagine its implementation on his own land. Reduced to a two-­dimensional surface by the aerial view, the land appeared more ordered and manageable than it might from the ground, where its physical character was more viscerally present. Such abstraction probably made it easier for farmers to conceptualize

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Figure 2.18. “One square inch is equal to ten acres on this photo-­map.” Illustration showing the analysis of aerial survey images by a government specialist. From Current History 49, no. 4 (December 1938): 39.

plans for their farms because it highlighted the systematic structure of their gridded fields and suggested their easy adaptability (on paper anyway) to government management. As internal USDA communications suggested, government programmers believed the central value of aerial survey photographs lay in their clarity, accuracy, efficiency, and comprehensiveness.51 The views coalesced the dispersed, isolated, and individual farmsteads of the Midwest into a unified, measurable, and systematic landscape. By doing so through the purportedly objective technologies of

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Figure 2.19. “Farmers find photo-­maps an aid in planning their crops.” Photograph demonstrating the usefulness of aerial survey images in on-­the-­ground planning, From Current History 49, no. 4 (December 1938): 39.

aircraft and camera, they seemed to accomplish this transformation in a manner that downplayed—­ even to the agricultural agents themselves—­the government’s role as an active instigator of change. As a result, the department’s communications consistently expressed faith in the premise that aerial photographs captured truthful pictures of the landscape and therefore could serve as straightforward and benign templates for managerial oversight.52 Indeed, the situation suggests that at least initially the government underestimated (or overlooked) the extent to which aerial survey imagery challenged

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established frameworks of landscape understanding. Guided instead by a political desire to bring modernizing imperatives into rural culture, agricultural programmers often promoted the survey photographs as objects of exciting new technology that nevertheless enabled the perception of long-­ familiar, even traditional, visions of midwestern land and life. Belying such matter-­of-­factness, however, was the more complicated reality that, like most early twentieth-­century viewers, midwesterners did not find the stunning new perspectives of aerial vision or the visions of the landscape revealed therein to be either ordinary or traditional. While the views did in many ways promote visual clarity, their unprecedented sense of verticality reoriented the viewer’s gaze, making once familiar landscapes appear distorted and uncanny. Some reasons for this loss of clarity were environmental and technological. Clouds, of course, created obvious visual obstructions, but even on a clear day normal atmospheric haze tempered the clarity of the image. Photographers could deploy filters to eliminate the haze, but this created a heightened and artificial sense of contrast in the image. Visual distortion became an issue since it was difficult during the often-­bumpy flights to keep the camera lens constantly perpendicular to the horizon. Because survey cameras focused over an extremely long vertical axis—­about 14,000 feet of altitude in the case of the Grundy County photograph and most others like it—­even a slight tilt in angle at the camera point could result in substantial inconsistencies within the photograph. Aware that the success of their programs hinged on gathering accurate data on the land and, equally important, on farmers’ faith in their accuracy, the AAA and other agricultural agencies worked hard to establish “adequate and uniform standards” at all levels of aerial image production: flight, processing, and interpretation.53 For example, the processing of aerial photographs almost always involved substantial optical and trigonometric correction as well as redundant scale checks founded on ground-­based measurement and sampling. Such efforts to establish standards for aerial surveys demonstrated the USDA’s understanding that aerial imagery, in spite of its aura of transparency, still required interpretation and explanation. Quick to recognize that the factual content of aerial photographs was neither guaranteed accurate nor wholly self-­evident, government programmers proved less deft in recognizing that the images were uncertain in other more conceptual ways. Most notably, it seems that government planners were initially unaware of (or at least unconcerned by) the survey views’ cultural and ideological impli­ cations. Department operatives were caught off guard, for example, by the skepticism evoked by the aerial photographs. Frequently, farmers expressed distrust not only of the measurements derived from the photographs but also of the government’s motivations for taking them in the first place. Indeed, rural inhabitants soon began referring to government survey aircraft that appeared overhead as “sky snoops.”54 This should not have surprised government programmers. It is easy to imagine that a Grundy County farmer—­when presented with a photograph that looked down from a seemingly omniscient god’s-­eye vantage disclosing every foot and facet of his farmstead, that had been created

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without his permission (and perhaps without his knowledge), and that was to be used as a template for government oversight of his decisions—­might chafe at the exercise of authority implicit therein. There can be little doubt that the farmers were right. Intended or not, the function of government aerial photography extended beyond the efficient visualization of landscape conditions and the implementation of new technologies and practices and became not only a project of improvement but also an exercise of power. As anthropologist and political scientist James Scott and others have noted, oversight (both figural and, in the case of aerial views, literal) is centrally a means to exert power.55 Because the government was itself an abstract institution, however, the process of exercising authority was more attenuated and complicated than that of simply claiming dominion directly through vision. Instead, the government used the aerial view first to discover what was happening on the land, or, in other words, to collect information. Its agents then collated these data to gain a privileged understanding of the agricultural landscape—­a level of comprehension surpassing the sensibility of any one of the region’s inhabitants. Knowing more about the landscape (or at least claiming to) gave the state a powerful advantage over individual farmers, whose interests could now be painted as limited and even parochial. When packaged in rhetoric of benevolent sharing of knowledge, the state’s authority became hard to resist, and by the time government agents actually stepped onto an individual farm with aerial photographs in hand, the balance of authority had already shifted. Notwithstanding the real value inherent in many of the government’s programs, they were also adept manipulations of knowledge that resulted in the extension of state authority across the boundaries, literal and figurative, of agrarian independence. Farmers who questioned government programs (though it was their right to do so) were often castigated as backward-­thinking, narrow-­minded, and self-­centered. The aerial view in this way resituated the significance of government omniscience from that of imposed authority to one of transcendent knowledge and benevolence. In spite of such concerns over the exercise of authority, farmers were not immune to the alluring omnipotence and aesthetics of the aerial photograph. While sensitive to government usurpation of individual rights of self-­determination, a majority of rural inhabitants welcomed federal intervention into agriculture, especially when it benefited them directly.56 As local agricultural agents observed, farmers not only understood the practical advantages of using aerial views to plot farm programming at both local and national levels but also went further to see in the images evidence of the New Deal’s democratic idealism.57 Specifically, the aerial image’s sheen of mechanical objectivity and its all-­seeing conjuring of the landscape as a divine creation trumped many concerns over the subjectiveness of or motivations behind the imagery. Though the government’s agricultural programming explicitly sought new forms of oversight, the aerial gaze both codified and deflected this reality in ways that enabled people to perceive the government’s role as benign and objective and to accept that the goal of the survey was to understand and improve rather than to interfere and control. Consequently, farmers

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immediately placed faith in aerial photographs as a means to truthfully and fairly assess their land and to institute a uniform system of measurement by which all farms received commensurate allotments and equal subsidy payments.58 Landowners, who distrusted as subjective the evaluations of their farms made by ground-­based government examiners, more readily accepted the accuracy of aerial surveys. The government mobilized this faith in aerial photography by using the images as a central component not only in planning but also in promoting its spatial and economic programs to individual farmers. Looking at the Grundy County photograph, we can perceive how the aerial survey might convey objectivity and an absence of ideology. Unlike images from a horizontal perspective, with their sight lines and spatial recession, aerial images depict the land as everywhere equal and without a specific focus. The particularity of place gives way to the uniformity of a static and seemingly a priori pattern. Though the survey was a tool of control and action, the images it produced gave an overall effect that dispersed focus and erased the ground-­level experience of subjective passage and narration, replacing them with an unanchored, flat gaze that suggested disinterest and inaction. This look characterized the paradoxical vision of a centralized (and hierarchal) yet democratic modernization favored by the New Deal. As agricultural historian Pete Daniel has noted, the Department of Agriculture in particular sought to remake agriculture by de-­individualizing it—­replacing the agency and experience of individual farmers with a uniform model of husbandry enacted through the advice and oversight of a seemingly unobtrusive yet all-­knowing and ever-­present bureaucracy.59 In addition to cultivating a sense of benign oversight, aerial surveys also attracted farmers by appealing to their sense of community. By enabling viewers to extrapolate the prairie’s grid matrix into the fields of adjacent homesteads, survey photographs underscored the interconnectedness of agricultural space and the midwestern economy that depended on it. For commodity controls to work, a majority of farmers had to enroll in allotment programs and agree to limit production. The visual evidence of such continuity may have persuaded some farmers to participate in federal programs. Suggesting that enrollment represented a community responsibility, the Department of Agriculture emphasized the effect of its programs on the commonwealth, as in an SCS photomontage superimposing a local agriculture association meeting onto a collection of newspaper clippings on the implementation of farm programs (Figure 2.20). By showing farmers rather than bureaucrats against the backdrop of news stories, the image implied that citizens themselves controlled government programs. This idealizing of local authority appealed to midwesterners, whose long-­cultivated faith in individualism and local self-­determination tempered their willingness to participate in federal programs. Survey photographs brought about a new working relationship between the prairie landscape and its inhabitants—­one that carried forth the traditional structure and meaning of the survey grid but that also fostered a new sensitivity to the organic form of the land and the economic changes wrought

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upon midwestern agriculture by modernization. The views highlighted the homogeneity of the Midwest’s squared fields and offered visions of the landscape that called upon Jeffersonian form and idealism to justify the broad scale of New Deal agricultural programs. At the same time, aerial vision fostered sensitivity to the natural shape and consistency of the landscape, which had been ignored and overwritten by the grid form—­often with disastrous results. The government used this dual vision to great effect as it worked to stabilize both the economic and the environmental bases of agrarian production. As a consequence, aerial views began to reorient both the conceptions and the practices of midwesterners’ lives on the land. By making visible what historian David Nye termed the

Figure 2.20. Photomontage of farming discussion with newspaper clippings in the background, 1940. Records of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Record Group 114, photograph no. CT-­C6595, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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“total structure” of the landscape, aerial photographs shifted midwesterners’ perception of the countryside from that of an open frontier composed of independent farms to that of a closed and finite system whose prospects depended upon the integration and regulation of human and natural activities.60 This shift in the way the land was perceived affected the management of the agricultural landscape as well as the perceptions of midwestern culture. Bolstered by the sense of control and containment offered by aerial photographs, agricultural agents grew increasingly confident that they could order the landscape through these images. A much deeper belief in modernity itself underlay this confidence—­a faith that rationalized and mechanized operations, visualized and imposed by a central authority, could efficiently and comprehensively reorder the land and its people. In proposing the landscape as a single unified image, the government claimed the power to extend regularized agricultural and cultural practices across the prairies. As Scott has demonstrated, purveyors of twentieth-­ century modernity saw and imposed rational order using remarkably visual and aesthetic terms.61 Flowing down from government agents and bolstered by midwesterners’ own fascination with aerial photography and their experience with older forms of elevated looking, this faith in the power of the image began to alter people’s relationships to the landscape by replacing localized knowledge with a more centralized and technocratic vision of modern life. The government fostered this recoding of the rural landscape through aerial views and documentary photographs that embodied their desired functional and aesthetic order. The government’s imagery of modern everyday life on the prairie (especially in the last part of the decade) echoed the rational, clean-­lined, and unified modern visual aesthetic of the aerial views. In this way, aerial photography crystallized a broad-­ranging New Deal vision of a benevolent state-­managed modernity. Re pat t er ni ng Ru ral Cu lture While helping synthesize a modernist regime for managing the land, aerial photography also created a cultural opening for inhabitants to rework the structure and meaning of their landscape in more individualized ways. Quite unexpectedly, agricultural agents were quickly inundated with requests from farmers for additional copies of the aerial photographs for use as keepsakes and estate portraits.62 Farmers displayed the photographs on the walls of their homes adjacent to portraits of family and friends and other mementos of personal importance—­a practice that continues even today. As the popularity of aerial photographs as keepsakes grew, a new aerial photography business emerged to meet the demand for individual estate views.63 Unlike government aerial surveyors, however, these private photographers eschewed high-­altitude vertical photographs in favor of closer, more intimate, and lower-­altitude oblique views that focused on individual farmsteads. Smaller in scale and less

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psychologically distant than the abstract, high-­altitude vertical views, these images were viewed with great affection by inhabitants. While some aerial photographers worked for large, well-­equipped companies and created images on direct commission from landowners, a significant number of them operated on speculation, shooting images of the farms in a neighborhood and then peddling them door-­to-­door. The psychological resonance of these overtly technological images is not surprising. Though the purpose of aerial photography at first had been explicitly instrumental and informational, to midwesterners the images in many aspects resembled a previous generation’s plat books and settlement maps. In a regional culture that defined itself through land cultivation and ownership, such documents had long operated as indexes and symbols of individual and community identity. To many inhabitants the airplane views gave life to these cartographic abstractions, just as photographic images, seemingly real and objectifying, broke down the division between the world and its representation.64 In such instances, the god’s-­eye realism of the aerial photograph embodied both revelation and testimony. In particular, by creating views that made the Jeffersonian grid a veritable geological feature embedded in the landscape, aerial photographs naturalized the ideology of the independent yet assimilated yeoman farmer and offered a visual analogue to values of square dealing and social cohesion central to that conception of agrarian life. Looking down onto their land, farm owners could not help but appreciate the sharp lines and consistent order of the landscape and to see in it the outline of a cultural system that tied them to their neighbors in common form and purpose. By presenting this social and political accomplishment from on high, the aerial photograph lent a sense of divine providence to the existing social order. By precipitating abstract cultural concepts into a reality seemingly authenticated by photography, aerial surveys made widespread but invisible cultural notions tantalizingly tangible. Yet even as aerial photographs made it possible to perceive such geographic and ideological structures on a broad and systematic scale, those who inhabited the landscape also discerned in the views the shapes of their smaller, individual homesteads. More so than government agents, farmers understood that the checkerboard fields represented not only abstract blocks of tilled acreage but also familiar terrains that were both physically and psychologically invested with individual labor and unique history. Looking down onto the land, those who inhabited it delighted in recognizing their homes and property and enjoyed the opportunity to measure, in all-­encompassing views, the places they traversed on a daily basis. To these farmers, the organization of fields, buildings, and paddocks apparent in the photographs indexed patterns of ownership, labor, and inhabitation that were both social and personal. In fact, so great was the sense of individual identification with the places represented that individuals often strained to see themselves in the photographs. In one newspaper article written on aerial photography, for example, the writer described a farmer whose homestead had been photographed from

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the air as marveling at the image precisely because he spotted himself in it. According to the text, “The farmer bent close in scrutiny of the farm buildings. Then he began to chuckle delightedly. ‘Say,’ he gasped. ‘See that funny little dot there halfway between the house and the barn? Well, that’s me! I remember now when that feller flew over; I was looking for eggs. . . . Well, what do you know about that?’”65 The farmer’s quotation indicates that the shrinking of scale played a key role in the affective power of aerial photographs. By miniaturizing an entire farm into a single image, the aerial photograph shrank the landscape in ways that concentrated meaning, highlighted the significance of detail, and encapsulated the patterns of rural life by making them perceptible in a single glance. These miniaturizing effects, as literary theorist Susan Stuart noted, made the wide, unstable external world appear less daunting and uncertain and, most important, more meaningful at an individual level.66 While the scale of most aerial photography dictated that farmers did not often see themselves directly in the images, the representation of their fields and farmsteads served as a visual and at times visceral stand-­in for their personal accomplishments on the land. The appearance of a newly terraced hillside or a recently expanded barn, for example, offered a potent index of a farmer’s labor and personal investment. The photographs provided mnemonic prompts for recalling significant parts of an individual’s or a farm’s history. Even today, farmers looking at aerial photographs are quick to recognize the former site of a torn-­down ancestral cabin or a stand of trees long ago removed. Through miniaturization, the photographs made it possible for farmers to see the homestead as a world seemingly unto itself. In doing so, the images documented the inhabitants’ smaller-­scale histories and made them appear more important. Beyond such personal attachments, aerial photography’s miniaturization also offered new possibilities for the recognition of community bonds. Along with purchases by individual landholders, aerial photographs of farms became noteworthy items in local media. In 1939 in Jones County, Iowa, for example, the Anamosa Eureka, a weekly newspaper, began a feature it called “Aero Photos” that asked readers to identify farms based on aerial photographs taken by local farmer and “Jones county’s only resident flier” Art Moenck.67 Each week the paper published on its front page an oblique aerial photograph of an unidentified farm or small town taken by Moenck from about six hundred feet in the air. The newspaper gave the pictures headlines such as “Can You Identify This Farm from This Brand-­New Angle” (Figure 2.21), and to aid the reader it also provided textual clues to the farm’s location in the county. Captions also informed readers about the challenges that might arise as they tried to identify the photographs. In some instances, the editors proclaimed that anyone familiar with their local landscape “should be able to identify the place, even though it has never been seen from ‘up here’ before.”68 At other times, they indicated that recognition might be harder and more uncertain, as in this caption to a bird’s-­eye view of a small town: “It is probable that those who have lived

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Figure 2.21. Art Moenck, “Can You Identify This Farm from This Brand-­New Angle.” Anamosa (Iowa) Eureka’s Aero Photo of September 7, 1939. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City.

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here all their lives will not identify the place at first glance.”69 The same photograph would reappear in the following week’s paper along with its identity, the name of the town or, in the case of a farmstead, its owners. The feature’s playful format and the intimacy of the photographs’ low-­altitude point of view captured readers by joining the technological marvel of aerial photography with the bonds of familiarity that tied rural inhabitants to land and community. By showing farms from across the county, each one shrunk into a toylike miniature, the pictures enabled readers to imagine that they held the whole of their local landscape fully in hand. The ability to correctly identify the different farms and their owners confirmed for readers their relationship to the landscape and to the community it supported. Recognition, or naming, also cemented ties between the readers and the individual farm owners. Though inhabitants from different parts of the county might not have known each other personally, the ability to identify a family by naming their land linked them together in a common sense of place and experience. In some instances, however, the commonalities shared between farms and farmers led to misrecognition. In the follow-­up to the photograph shown in Figure 2.21, titled “You’re Right—­It’s Tobiasson’s,” Eureka editors admitted that the prior week’s clues about the location of the farm had been wrong and that numerous readers had caught the mistake.70 The fault belonged to the photographer, who had confused the farmstead with another that looked similar. The editors made light of the mistake, noting that the angle of the photograph had blinded even owner Henry Tobiasson to the farm’s identity. When told by his wife that the picture was his farm, the farmer replied, “’Taint either. It’s clear turned around from our place.” The Eureka writer playfully concluded that the problem lay with Tobiasson, who “had to get himself turned clear around before he could recognize his own home.”71 The playful tone that permeates the feature casts the viewing of aerial photographs as an enlightening and pleasurable experience. Still, it is likely that the inability to recognize pictures of their farmsteads and local communities also served as a source (even if subconscious) of anxiety. The Aero Photo feature may have helped alleviate such feelings by preparing inhabitants to see the land in the ways required by the photographs and, in a broader sense, by modernity. Through forcing farmers to “get [themselves] turned clear around” in order to recognize their farmsteads, the photographs made them aware of more abstract economic and cultural changes that were being enacted on the land. By revealing aspects of the landscape that remained invisible from below or by reconfiguring familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, aerial photography could be estranging and uncanny. Imagine the surprise of a farmer like Tobiasson on seeing his homestead, a place invested with personal meaning, disclosed as part of a vast system where all farms looked alike. Here the aerial gaze not only invoked feelings of personal astonishment but also signaled the transformation of America from an agrarian to an industrial society. In the flatness and visual abstraction of the images, the iconography of Jeffersonian

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order and equality could become confused with concepts of industrial uniformity and systemization, and even modern aesthetics. Before long, farmers began intuitively, and at times grudgingly, identifying in the new aerial photographic visual lexicon the hallmarks of twentieth-­century modernity. Indeed, the Eureka’s publication of an article announcing a new round of federal aerial mapping alongside one Aero Photo feature probably drove this point home for many readers by making manifest the different cultural registers of the aerial photographs: as objects of affection and as instruments of modernization.72 That 1930s farmers perceived multiple meanings in aerial photographs suggests they possessed a visual sophistication that enabled them to see that the images did not record fact; rather, they constructed meaning. Rural inhabitants were not alone in this recognition. New Deal programmers also recognized that the photographs offered a new means to represent the social makeup of midwestern space. By the later 1930s, both the Soil Conservation Service and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration had begun employing aerial photographs not only to institute their policies but also to communicate the positive effects of these management schemes on rural life as a means to encourage support and participation. Aerial photographs appeared as illustrations in federal publications that ranged from technical bulletins and government reports to popular press pieces such as Tugwell’s article “No More Frontiers” or Russell Lord’s 1938 world history of soil cultivation Behold Our Land.73 The USDA’s various agencies also invested heavily in educational filmstrips that were shown to small groups of farmers in order to prompt group community discussion of agricultural conditions.74 Produced by local government offices but backed by resources from Washington, the filmstrips targeted local inhabitants by illustrating conditions specific to the landscape they inhabited. Even though the filmstrips were regionally specific, they followed a common rhetorical formula in which photographic illustrations and frame-­by-­frame textual captions read sequentially to produce a single and continuous narrative. Aerial photographs figured centrally in these filmstrips, where they were used to illustrate the expansive scale of agricultural problems as well as the comprehensive fixes made possible when farmers embraced government intervention. Visual evidence suggests that government agents believed the aerial photographs served as effective intermediaries between the broad and often abstract vision of the government and the smaller-­scale and embedded experiences of local inhabitants. For example, a 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Administration filmstrip entitled Getting the Job Done, made for distribution in the dust bowl region of western Kansas, opened its narrative by juxtaposing an oblique bird’s-­eye photograph of a broad swath of rural countryside with a closely cropped portrait of a farmer (Figure 2.22).75 The single-­sentence caption that accompanies the illustrations addresses the differing national and individual perspectives that were at play in agricultural programming. Located directly above the aerial photograph, the words “In this land of ours . . .” indicate the national scale

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Figure 2.22. “In this land of ours . . . some people don’t think democracy can deal with real tough situations.” Frames 3 and 4 from Getting the Job Done, 35 mm filmstrip, 1938. Records of the Farm Service Agency, Record Group 145, filmstrip no. FS-­12. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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of government efforts. By contrast, the second half of the caption, “some people don’t think democracy can deal with real tough situations,” appears below the farmer, whose confrontational gaze and closed body language signal the reservations many inhabitants felt about the government’s programs. The alignment of the aerial view with an individual inhabitant offers a rhetorical advantage by enabling the government to address such concerns directly and to exert pressure on cynics by highlighting the government’s vision as farsighted, democratic, and seemingly sanctioned by the broad community represented in the landscape photograph. The next frame of the filmstrip exploits this inclusionistic rhetoric with a photograph showing a group of men hunkered down in discussion and the caption “But America’s farmers are proving otherwise.” Thus mobilized, the elevated vantage point encouraged farmers to recognize their place in (and duty to) the agricultural commonwealth. Beyond invoking a shared national identity, Getting the Job Done also used aerial photographs in more explicit ways to refigure the way midwesterners conceptualized the social image of the land. Following the opening sequence, the filmstrip shifts to a series of images that identify the environmental and social erosion wrought by the dust bowl while also diagnosing its causes. In this context, a straight-­down aerial survey photograph conveys the scale of the calamity in a way that could not be matched by the ground-­level photographs of dust-­choked barnyards and displaced farm families that followed it in the narrative. One photograph’s caption states simply and comprehensively “From the air . . . it looked like this.” Once again, the filmstrip juxtaposes the aerial photograph with a horizontal one, this time a worm’s eye-­view of an individual farmer (Figure 2.23). Pictured gazing downward to the left of the image with one leg stepping slightly forward and hands positioned on his hips, the body language of the farmer conveys powerlessness and frustration; the caption, superimposed onto the image, reads, “What a job to be done!” This second comparison of aerial and ground-­level photographs also played to the government’s rhetorical advantage. It implied that while individual farmers were powerless in and frustrated about their local circumstances, USDA specialists could diagnose the degradation of the landscape’s condition via a synoptic and dispassionate gaze. Indeed, the following sequence of images links the power of government control and intervention directly to the aerial gaze by showing a picture of an agricultural agent and a farmer planning conservation measures through the specific use of an aerial photograph. The closing sequence of the filmstrip illustrates the environmental and social good that could be accomplished by government programs and also deploys an aerial photograph. In a vertical survey photograph of successfully implemented conservation and allotment programs (Figure 2.24), the variegated patterns of strip cropping and contour tillage replace the disarray of blown-­over fences and eroded soil pictured by the previous photograph. These new forms symbolize the potency of government management by replacing the amorphous drift of unfixed soil with geometric and curvilinear patterns that instantiate a renewed sense of order and control. Sensing the psychological and

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Figure 2.23. “From the air . . . it looked like this. What a job to be done!” Frames 29 and 30 from Getting the Job Done, 35 mm filmstrip, 1938. Records of the Farm Service Agency, Record Group 145, filmstrip no. FS-­12. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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aesthetic potency of the image, the filmstrip’s makers let this second aerial photograph stand alone above the caption “Aerial pictures look a lot different now.” The following slide does not contain an image, perhaps in an effort to heighten the impact of the aerial photograph, though it does bear a caption, “The job is never-­ending, but now . . .” This text works as a narrative hook into the next picture sequence, which includes photographs of a rural mother sending her sons off to school and a young woman gazing obliquely outward from the image (Figure 2.25). Promising youth, education, and familial continuity, these photographs promise prosperity. This optimism is further highlighted by the caption that completes the previous sentence fragment with “there’s life . . . and hope . . . where

Figure 2.24. “Aerial pictures look a lot different now.” Frame 61 from Getting the Job Done, 35 mm filmstrip, 1938. Records of the Farm Service Agency, Record Group 145, filmstrip no. FS-­12. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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Figure 2.25. “There’s life . . . and hope . . . where once there was despair.” Frames 63 and 64 from Getting the Job Done, 35 mm filmstrip, 1938. Records of the Farm Service Agency, Record Group 145, filmstrip no. FS-­12. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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once there was despair.” The implication is clear: the government’s synoptic sky view of well-­planned fields provided the foundation for an ordered everyday life on the ground. Not only did aerial photographs offer an effective way to communicate new social forms and ideologies to midwestern inhabitants, but they were also useful for disseminating to national audiences information about the government’s efforts. Such nationwide representation was vital since the New Deal faced constant political attacks and relied on public support to ensure its funding. In this broader context aerial photography helped familiarize national audiences with the specific circumstances of modern life in the midwestern countryside. Aerial photographs enabled viewers to capture at a glance the unique geographic makeup of different parts of the country, which in turn made the lives of a region’s inhabitants more graspable and relatable to distant viewers. The photographs also provided insight into the cultural conditions of different regions and landscapes. Just as aerial cityscapes provided prairie farmers with a better understanding of city life, midwestern survey views lent urban audiences insight into the spatial forms that constituted rural life. Coupled with documentary photographs taken by government agents at ground level, aerial views made the national landscape more familiar and the idea of a national identity more palpable. Government image makers believed that a new sense of national community, driven by photographs, would inspire the social empathy and national cohesion necessary to enact its sweeping programs of social and economic modernization. Later, as New Deal programs took effect, the government recognized that photographs illustrating the successful implementation of its programs could be used as evidence of their success. The New Deal’s embrace of social documentary photography was epitomized by the efforts of the Historical Section, which was founded in July 1935 as part of the Resettlement Administration (RA) and was headed by former Columbia University economics student and Tugwell protégé Roy Stryker.76 In 1937 the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture and renamed the Farm Security Administration (which begat the better-­known description “FSA photography”).77 Under Stryker’s leadership, a small stable of photographers crafted a vast archive of images in an effort to comprehensively document the conditions of everyday life across the nation.78 The archive, Stryker noted in an early government document, was intended to “not only [perform] an historical and social function, but also provide, for public information, an accurate and objective testimony of the FSA program, the conditions which make the program necessary, the contemporary accomplishments of the program, and the ends which the program hopes to serve.”79 By providing photographs that could serve as representative views of social life and local circumstances, the archive offered both definable typologies and specific individual examples of American life during the Depression. By offering an immense volume of photographs from all over the nation, it also seemed to offer the chimera of totality—­meeting the government’s hopes for a comprehensive vision of national reality.

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Driven to provide a synoptic visual archive of the nation and its changing social conditions, it is not surprising that Stryker was among the first and most vocal proponents of aerial photography as a means to represent the landscapes and cultural patterns that shaped the mythic beliefs and real circumstances of national and midwestern life during the Depression years.80 As Stryker wrote to one of the government’s aerial survey photographers in 1938, “I am thoroughly convinced that a whole new type of photography is going to be done by your people in the air.”81 That same year Stryker attempted to obtain a salary for a permanent aerial photographer for his Historical Section, at one point arguing his case directly to President Roosevelt.82 Though his bid for an aerial photographer was unsuccessful, Stryker continued to showcase aerial photographs in FSA-­related displays and publications, as well as in his own writing on documentary photography. The examples range from his coauthored 1940 article in Caroline Ware’s edited book The Cultural Approach to History to regional and national presentations of FSA photographs, including the FSA’s signature exhibition How American People Live, which was shown at the 1938 International Photographic Exhibition held at the Grand Central Palace in New York City.83 Stryker also pursued opportunities to engage with aerial photography within the government, including securing himself a seat on the Department of Agriculture’s advisory committee on photogrammetry (aerial survey).84 This influential committee oversaw the management of all USDA aerial-­photography applications. Art historian Sally Stein has argued that Stryker valued aerial survey photographs—­and the midwestern image that he used to illustrate his AHA article in particular (see Figure 2.1)—­because they offered a visual framework for meshing modern notions of social and technological interconnectedness with long-­standing traditions of American rugged individualism.85 With its clean lines and cap­ tivating geometric patterns, the midwestern aerial photograph provided a picture of the region that symbolized Jeffersonian tradition but was also remarkably modern in its conjuring of the landscape as a vision of aesthetic and cultural unity. Stryker’s description of the photograph suggests that he was especially compelled by the aerial perspective’s modernist cleanliness. As indicated in the article, Stryker was delighted by the way the midwestern photograph depicted every field and farmstead and, by extension, every one of the land’s inhabitants as neatly contained within the grid system. Moreover, as a function of the vertical orientations and distances from which they were taken, aerial views shrank the appearance of disorder within the landscape, often rendering it invisible. The images were of too long and severe a focus, for example, to capture the unpainted houses, unkempt yards, eroded fields, and other forms of social and environmental “chaos” that, in Stryker’s words, “stretch[ed] itself along the roads.”86 For Stryker, the capacity of aerial views to reveal the broad patterns of rural culture while shrinking the disorder caused by economic depression made it possible to highlight the stability of midwestern life at a time when economic conditions were uncertain and agricultural modernization was radically altering social relationships, often at the expense of small-­scale independent

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farmers. After 1936, as Stryker felt pressure to produce images that illustrated the success of New Deal programs, the orderliness of aerial photographs probably became especially attractive. Without funding to develop his own program of aerial photography, Stryker was never able to integrate aerial vision fully into his lexicon of documentary practice.87 Given his enthusiasm for that viewpoint, however, it is likely that he would have encouraged his photographers to study aerial images in preparation for their own excursions and to create their own airplane photographs if the opportunity arose. Indeed, the Historical Section’s photography files are peppered with aerial views, many borrowed from other USDA agencies but some produced by Stryker’s photographers, who climbed to vantage points atop hills or structures and in rarer instances found pilots to take them aloft.88 Among the best known of these is a set of aerial photographs taken when Stryker sent FSA photographers Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon to chronicle land and life in rural Grundy County, Iowa. As part of this assignment, Rothstein managed to secure a flight over the landscape and to create a set of oblique aerial views showing the region’s flat agricultural countryside and its adjacent small towns. The resulting combination of aerial and ground-­level photographs taken by the two men begins to demonstrate the “revelatory” potential ascribed to the views by Stryker. Stryker did not explicitly order Rothstein and Vachon to take any aerial pictures in their Iowa assignments. Rather, his directions to both men were in keeping with the Historical Division’s primary role of providing “straight” documentary photographs that could be used to promote New Deal programs and initiatives.89 Consequently, when Stryker first dispatched Rothstein to Iowa in the fall of 1939, he exhorted him to take photographs that showed midwestern farmers benefiting from the government’s management of the agricultural economy, and particularly from programs related to row-­crop production. In a letter to Rothstein that also included a detailed shooting script, Stryker explained, “The main theme of your pictures should be corn,” and he then suggested possible photographic subjects, such as harvesting equipment, empty and full corncribs, farmers in the field, farm families visiting small towns, and so on.90 He also elaborated on the mood the pictures should convey. The project, he wrote, “should be the pictorial type of thing, telling the good life that is built around this good land” and illustrating the solid profitability and social stability available on a “good average corn farm.”91 Steered to Grundy County by an unnamed Iowa newspaper reporter, Rothstein arrived in the region and began taking photographs. Most of his work conformed closely to Stryker’s suggestions. Stable, focused photographs such as that of a robust, older farmer proudly displaying a bushel of corn he has carried out from the field (Figure 2.26) proclaimed the sense of pride farmers garnered from their work. Such images also insinuated the soundness and durability of the rural economy. Standing solidly in the center of the image and anchored to the ground by the heavy basket of grain, the farmer acts as a visual symbol of the traditional agrarian lifestyle that Stryker had exhorted Rothstein to

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Figure 2.26. Arthur Rothstein, Fred Ukro with Corn Husked for Yield Test. Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­028875-­D.

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illustrate. Other images, such as a Saturday evening street scene from the neighboring town of Iowa Falls, captured less mythic and more modern snapshots of rural life (Figure 2.27). Awash in neon light and flowing with the motion of weekend nightlife, this photograph evokes a sense of street energy that contrasts with the more rustic picture. Instead of facing his subject head on, as he did in the portrait of the farmer, Rothstein captured people with their backs to the camera and their attention directed away from the lens. The photograph’s skewed point of view, with the line of the broken curb angling away through the picture plane, creates an uncomfortable recession from the garish glow of the foreground theater front into the shadowy buildings seen further down the sidewalk. The

Figure 2.27. Arthur Rothstein, Main Street on Saturday Night. Iowa Falls, Iowa, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­028066-­D.

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sense of fleeting light and temporality is further punctuated by the diagonal flow of moving pedestrians and even the raised foot of the girl in the center of the photograph, whose attention has been drawn away from the group by the lights of the theater and the movement on the sidewalk. Finally, the cropped appearance of the text fragments “stunt” and “coming man” on the glaring marquee highlights the surprise probably felt by the photographer, many midwesterners, and a majority of national viewers at finding such a modern scene in the middle of rural Iowa.92 Together these two pictures hint at a developing rift between contrasting conceptions of rural culture: one that remained centered on traditions of Jeffersonian agrarianism and another wherein those traditions were being actively transformed by the circumstances of twentieth-­century modernity. By the 1930s, of course, many midwesterners were eagerly and actively embracing modernization. They listened to nationwide radio programming, they electrified their homes and farms with the help of the federal Rural Electrification Administration, and they purchased modern machinery to till their fields and run their homes. At the same time, however, they recognized the deleterious implications that these new cultural forms held for some of their more traditional cultural structures. Tractors, for example, enabled farmers to work much larger acreages than they could with horses, but at a greater financial cost. This drove them to expand their lands in order to make the technology pro­fitable. Such growth, however, often came at the expense of their less efficient neighbors, whose lands they incorporated into their own. Perceiving the destabilizing effect of such changes on their local communities, some midwesterners developed ambivalence toward modernization.93 They desired to be part of a changing America, yet they were reticent to surrender older ways of doing things, which they judged to be key components of their social identity. National audiences also had difficulty comprehending the changing face of rural life since their conceptualization of it was also based on older romantic and frontier narratives. In a decade where back-­to-­the-­land proponents like Ralph Borsodi touted rural life as an antidote to urban concentration, the transformation of America’s heartland by industrial modernity struck down the symbolic value of the countryside as a bastion of simpler and more elemental living.94 The subject matter of Rothstein’s photographs suggests that he, like Stryker, believed that helping Americans make sense of modernization was a defining purpose of the FSA. A significant number of Rothstein’s images from Grundy County presented a culture teetering between present and past. Two photographs of men at work during the harvest, for example, represented the divide that was swelling up on the Iowa prairies between modern and traditional practices for working the land (Figures 2.28 and 2.29). In each photograph, a man is shown bringing in corn from the field. In one, a figure dressed in traditional farming garb sits, reins in hand, atop the worn boards of a horse-­drawn wagon. In the other, an individual wearing an engineer’s cap and carelessly dangling a cigarette from his lips peers out to the camera from a mechanical corn picker. Together these two pictures enacted a

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Figure 2.28. Arthur Rothstein, Hired Hand Brings in Load of Corn. Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­028845-­D.

scene of impending cultural displacement in which the mechanically empowered farmer foreshadows the demise of his less efficient predecessor. Similarly, in a sequence of photographs documenting the shelling of corn, Rothstein created a mininarrative in which ears of corn, though loaded onto a conveyor by human hands, are transformed into a stream of clean grain wholly by machine power (Figures 2.30 and 2.31). At each step in this shelling process, the images become less focused on agrarian labor and more interested in the status of corn as an agricultural product. At the end of the shelling sequence the corn has been reduced to a pure commodity unencumbered by associations with those involved in its production. This fact is impressed on the viewer by Rothstein’s final flatbed

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Figure 2.29. Arthur Rothstein, Mechanical Corn Picker. Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­028784-­D.

photograph, composed of nothing but corn kernels (Figure 2.32). Showing only corn and without any human content, this shot incarnated the disembodied and dislocated status of Iowa farmers and their labor within the modern, mechanical system. At the same time, it bore a striking visual resemblance to the government’s aerial survey photographs of the Midwest. The resemblance of the corn photograph to aerial survey views suggests why the vertical perspective was often seen as innately modernizing. While Rothstein did not explicitly state that connection, it is significant that when he returned to Grundy County a few months later in February 1940, he contacted a local pilot who offered to take the photographer for a flight over the countryside.95 As

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Figure 2.30. Arthur Rothstein, Shelling Corn for Storage in Ever Normal Granary. Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/ OWI Collection, LC-­USF33–­003339-­M3.

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Figure 2.31. Arthur Rothstein, Farmer with Shelled Corn, Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF33–­003340-­M3.

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Figure 2.32. Arthur Rothstein, Shelled Corn. Grundy County, Iowa, 1939. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­028779-­D.

they flew above the snow-­covered landscape, Rothstein snapped shots of many of the same places that he had photographed from ground level during the previous fall. True to Stryker’s assessment of the cultural value of the aerial viewpoint, these photographs offered new insight into the patterns of Grundy County life. In one oblique shot, the landscape takes on geometric form as straight fence lines demarcate the rectangular boundaries of fields while highways cut geometric vectors across the land (Figure 2.33). Farms dot the landscape at regular intervals, stitching the scene with a quilted pattern of homesteads that unfurls continuously, the image insinuates, into and beyond the hazy horizon. In another image, even the livestock appear to be arranged in

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quasi-­geometric formations as they graze among the cornstalks, whose linear rows are barely visible beneath the veil of snow. When the pilot banked closer, Rothstein could snap more-­focused shots; in one photo we see that within a single farmstead buildings stood at right angles to one another and that groves of trees, which appeared as jumbled organic messes from the ground, were in fact growing in good, evenly spaced order (Figure 2.34). Indeed, the only elements in the picture that seem in any way unorganized are the tracks in the snow that record the movements of the farm’s human and animal inhabitants. Even these tracks, however, when interpreted as a visual narrative of the daily activity of farm life, begin to take on a certain logic and even importance.96

Figure 2.33. Arthur Rothstein, Air View, Farmland. Grundy County, Iowa, 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­029420-­D.

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Like the government’s aerial survey photographs, Rothstein’s airplane pictures led viewers to see and, equally important, to create visual order within both the image and the landscape. Granting a more extensive outlook onto the landscape than that offered at ground level, the photographs reminded audiences of the careful planning—­from the surveying of the landscape to the rectilinear laying out of farm buildings and woodlots—­that underlay midwestern space. Yet by encouraging viewers to imagine order in instances that were in fact indeterminate, the photographs had the potential to exaggerate the regularity of life on the land. The tracks in the snow, for example, took form organically as part of the subjective and even idiosyncratic choices that farmers and livestock made as

Figure 2.34. Arthur Rothstein, Air View, Farmland. Grundy County, Iowa, 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­029434-­D.

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part of their everyday movement within the landscape. Yet as viewers traced these trails and drew analogies between them and the broader and more intentional geometric patterns that marked the landscape, it was tempting to imagine that all human activities represented in the photograph were directly determined by the rational form and ideology of the grid. Such assumptions embodied a significant downside of aerial views that was not addressed by Stryker or his photographers. By downplaying elements of disorder in the landscape or concealing them within larger systematic patterns, aerial photographs threatened to divest the landscape’s inhabitants of free will and self-­ determination. Such antidemocratic irony haunted the government’s aerial photographs, New Deal programs, and modernity as a whole. Of course, midwestern farmers may not have seen Rothstein’s aerial photographs with the same sense of abstraction and ideology as did government agents like Stryker or national audiences who were unfamiliar with the intricacies of midwestern life. To inhabitants, Rothstein’s views resonated with the intimacy and playfulness of aerial estate portraits and Moenck’s photographs for the Eureka. Rothstein’s shots allowed viewers to perceive an already known landscape in novel and energizing ways and thus to claim it more firmly as their own. In the national context of New Deal reform, however, the overall effect of the photographs was to reiterate in a more readily comprehensible visual format the same ordered sense of midwestern space that was highlighted by the government’s vertical survey images. In doing so, Rothstein’s aerials helped transform the national perception of the Midwest from one of a landscape divided and ambivalent about modernization (the imagery Rothstein had captured in the fall) into one of a region for whom modernization appeared to be both innate and inevitable. The aerial photographs achieved this through the manipulation not of content but, rather, of form. By downplaying the messiness of everyday life and instead highlighting the landscape’s abstract geometric pattern, Rothstein’s aerial photographs aestheticized the image of the Grundy County countryside. In government aerial photographs, including those of the FSA, the landscape lost a certain degree of its human content and instead came to be perceived as an independent object whose visual form became the basis for evaluating its social content. This contention is bolstered by a final series of photographs taken by Rothstein’s partner photographer, John Vachon, in April 1940. Charged with chronicling the planting season, Vachon created a set of photographs that, though not themselves aerial, bore a striking formal and conceptual resemblance to Rothstein’s airplane views. Stryker’s directions to Vachon for this spring assignment closely resembled those that Rothstein had received for his fall work. Stryker urged Vachon to document the spring routines of farm life and to be especially mindful of scenes concerning the farmyard in spring, soil preparation, and family activities. Unlike Rothstein in his fall assignment, however, Vachon did not place the county’s inhabitants at the center of his imagery. Instead, his decision to focus on the array of geometric patterns he perceived in the landscape suggests that he may have been more influenced by Rothstein’s aerial

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shots, which he had probably studied prior to his departure for Iowa.97 As a result, Vachon directed his camera toward the abstract patterns that were component parts of the visible landscape. Concentrating his efforts on the operations of Fred Coulter’s single-­family farm, Vachon took notice of the lines, shapes, and spaces that delineated rural life. His photograph of the Coulter farmstead (Figure 2.35), for example, highlights the geometric order of the scene. Rectangular barns line up in rank-­and-­ file order, creating a strong horizontal band across the midsection of the picture. Three power lines that stretch across the top of the photo mimic this line. A pristine white gravel driveway cuts a path into the uncluttered, empty farmyard space at the center of the image. Just past a rigid sentinel-­like

Figure 2.35. John Vachon, Barns and Buildings. Fred Coulter’s Farm. Grundy County, Iowa, 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­060623-­D.

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gas pump sits a modern pickup truck. Its empty cab, complemented by the vacant carport located directly ahead of it, underscores the farm family’s absence from the view. The only figures present at all, three diminutive workers emerging from a shed in the background, are made to seem almost incidental to the scene. The infatuation with a geometric aesthetic evident in the farmyard image is not unique, as other shots of Coulter’s farm also concentrated on such patterns. A complementary close-­up of Coulter’s barn was also as much a study of geometric form as it was an illustration of a specific rural content. Focusing on the flattened linear patterns of the barn wall and the repetition of square windows, Vachon appeared more concerned with the farm’s formal symmetries than with its human activity. His embrace of rectilinear form as a guiding element carried into further farmyard views, such as one of Coulter’s decorative fence, in which Vachon focused on capturing the linear recession of the fence line into the interior space of the farm and, by extension, the photograph. Likewise, it is a fascination with aesthetic patterning, rather than a concern with the labor of the farmer, that animates Vachon’s composition of images illustrating spring tillage. In one photograph of a plowed field (Figure 2.36), Vachon framed his shot in such a way as to draw close attention to the straight line that the blade of the plow etched into the soil. In another, shot over the nose of the tractor from where the driver sat (Figure 2.37), Vachon showed how the everyday viewpoint of the farmer was composed of geometric forms, as the cylinders and circles of the tractor’s air intake and headlight are pasted against a rec­ tangular strip of untilled land. Amid Vachon’s engaging but also unyielding sense of geometric order, even the landscape’s human occupants became part of the aesthetic order of the photograph. In one picture, a farmhand operating the tractor becomes an almost decorative shape atop the circular tractor tire (Figure 2.38). Finally, in a portrait of farm owner Fred Coulter, Vachon eschewed a traditional frontal portrait in favor of a rearview image of the crisscrossed bands of stitching on the back of Coulter’s overalls (Figure 2.39). Vachon’s compositions, like Rothstein’s aerial photographs (and certainly like the government’s survey images), focused visual attention on the spatial and geometric patterns that composed the Grundy County landscape. By doing so, all of these photographs contributed to the larger cultural and economic redefinition that was taking place across the Midwest during the 1930s. In the case of Rothstein’s and Vachon’s photographs, and of government photography more generally, aerial viewpoints were mobilized in order to reconfigure the ways that midwestern people looked at and related to their landscapes. By using high-­altitude photographs to direct the way farmers tilled their land, the government encouraged the identification of farms not as individually meaningful homesteads but as abstract patterns of acreage in need of intensive government-­assisted management. Rothstein’s aerial views and Vachon’s farmscape photographs performed a similar administrative function, except that they addressed patterns of rural culture rather than issues of land use. By suggesting that everything

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Figure 2.36. John Vachon, Plowed Sod, Grundy County, Iowa, 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF33-­ T01–­001798-­M4.

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Figure 2.37. John Vachon, Tractor Plowing in Field. Grundy County, Iowa, 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF34–­060680-­D.

fit, visually, into a larger landscape order, the photographers’ aerial-­minded images facilitated the pro­ mulgation of a unified and clean vision of modern rural life at a time when, on the ground, things remained messier and less certain. A Fac to ry fo r Co r n and H ogs Techniques of modern aerial photography provided the federal government with a means to reenvision the Midwest, but they also, on a broader public scale, offered other producers of visual culture

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Figure 2.38. John Vachon, Farm Boy Operating Tractor, Grundy County, Iowa, 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF33-­T01–­001821-­M1.

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Figure 2.39. John Vachon, Overalls on Farmer, Grundy County, Iowa, 1940. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-­USF33-­T01–­001805-­M5.

new vantage points from which to shape the image of prairie life and to insinuate its importance in the modern transformation of American culture. This was especially true in the 1930s, when the emergence of powerful regionalist movements in art and culture sparked renewed interest in the Midwest as a source of American identity. In this context, aerial photographs (from expansive survey images to discrete oblique views) gained cultural currency as a means to reveal the region to national audiences and to use it as a symbol for defining pressing issues of American identity and ideology. Such was the case with popular illustrated magazines, epitomized by Life magazine, which frequently deployed aerial photographs when picturing the region. The brainchild of media mogul Henry Luce, Life stood at the apex of the growing fascination with visual imagery that emerged in American mass media in the 1930s. Indeed, Life represented a

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substantial break with older traditions of journalism by focusing on images rather than text for the majority of its content. As Luce said in his initial proposal for the magazine, he intended to use visual material, mainly photographs, as his primary tool for shaping Americans’ understanding of their nation and the world by allowing them “to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.”98 Aerial photographs played a central role within this context, as they presented viewers with a modern and engaging means to experience the human and natural spaces of the world. Moreover, the magazine’s editors noted in their introduction to the inaugural November 1936 issue that their cameras would go, “as any good camera must these days, up into the air.”99 Aerial photographs regularly appeared in the magazine’s pages and were used to illustrate myriad landscapes and events, foreign or domestic, man-­made or natural, historical or contemporary. Through these photographs, Life’s editors sought not only to captivate American audiences but also to engage in social debate and to mobilize for viewers certain conceptions of their relationship to the everyday world. Landscape imagery figured centrally in the magazine’s presentation of everyday life, both that of America and that of the world at large. Week after week, the magazine published photographs and stories that explored events of human interest, the structures and beliefs that animated life across the globe, and the rapidly changing nature of modern experience. In spite of significant global interests, the magazine’s editors dedicated the most attention to picturing, and celebrating, American life. While they consistently celebrated American cultural tradition, they paid even more attention to representing the possibilities and problems of the nation’s technological and consumerist moderni­ zation and to mediating the impact of such change for their readers. The breadth of imagery devoted to American agriculture during the first years of Life’s publication suggests that the rural landscape was an important locus from which to carry on a debate about the modern transformation of space and its effects on American life. This is not surprising. After all, an agrarian mythology had long been a foundation not only of midwesternness but also of national identity. Yet, as demonstrated by the government’s use of aerial photography, agriculture was fast becoming one of the most extensively technological and systematized modes of production in the United States. The editors at Life wanted to illustrate this transformation and use it as a didactic example to promote a new and integrated modernist identity for the nation. More so than Stryker and his FSA photographers, whose images were positive about modernization but who also remained cognizant of the ambivalence that arose when rural traditions were threatened, the editorial staff at the magazine embraced without qualification the transformation of agrarian life from rugged individ­ ualism to corporatist interconnection. Indeed, a 1938 Life article on the government’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration allotment policy championed the modern remaking of rural identity,

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stating that by unifying the region’s agricultural production into a single program of bureaucratic control, the administration had “destroyed for good the outworn myth of the American farmer’s sturdy independence.”100 Likewise, Life’s editors made a concerted effort to compose a new image of the midwestern landscape by constructing pictorial and textual narratives that highlighted the modern, business-­oriented nature of contemporary agriculture. Nowhere was this editorial—­and ideological—­effort more pronounced than in a six-­page photojournalistic account published by the magazine on September 20, 1937, entitled “The Iowa Farm: A Corn and Hog Business Run by Machinery.”101 As this name makes clear, the article represented an effort to recode the meaning of a “typical” Iowa farm operation as a modern business enterprise rather than a traditional family farm. The article focused on the example of a single tenant farmer, Charles Dewey Woodruff, who did not own the land but instead worked it under contract with the absentee landlord, the John Roach and Sons land company. Not surprisingly, aerial photographs played central roles in the visual structure of the narrative. Indeed, the story opened with a high-­altitude oblique aerial view (Figure 2.40) taken by Life staff photographer Wallace Kirkland, who had contracted an airplane and pilot specifically for the story.102 Encompassing nearly five hundred square miles according to the caption, the photograph underscored the gridded regimentation of the agricultural landscape. The image is depicted in the new but also increasingly recognizable aerial format. The caption explains that the photograph’s lighter patches denote fields where the grain has been cut and darker areas are crops awaiting harvest, forage, or pastures. Within the photograph the land is at every point demarcated and contained; no space falls outside its rigid systemization. Taken at an oblique angle, the image does possess a horizon line, toward which the fields extend in seemingly limitless repetition. The effect of this linear recession is to imply an infinite continuation of the landscape system across a single visual plane, an effect enhanced by the haze that renders the actual horizon line indistinct. By rendering the countryside homogeneous and flattening geographic distinction, the image underscores the imposition of human will on the natural world. In the context of Life’s article, grid form precipitates the landscape to a mechanistic and rational order, not unlike that of a factory, thereby analogizing agricultural production to other forms of industrial output. Moreover, by focusing attention on the homogeneity of the fields, the image highlights the degree to which modern farmers, in the magazine’s words, “carry[ed] factory methods to the extreme” by monocropping their land rather than planting in a diversified manner.103 Overall, the image is a visualization of conquest: the triumph of modern rationality across the entire Iowa landscape. Beginning the article with this particular photograph, the editors at Life had taken a significant political stance by framing their narrative within, and implicitly in support of, an industrial and technocratic vision for American agriculture.

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Figure 2.40. Wallace W. Kirkland, photographer, “The Iowa Farm: A Corn and Hog Business Run by Machinery.” From Life, September 20, 1937, 36.

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The impersonal nature of the high-­altitude photograph abstracted and aestheticized the landscape by replacing local geographic form and content with a network of straight lines and a system of serialized fields. This probably appealed to Life’s editors, as the abstraction of communities into gridded spaces and rectilinear forms weakened the more nostalgic mythologies of the small towns and Jeffersonian landownership that structured older notions of prairie life. Audiences of the 1930s, however, were not yet prepared to accept a wholly industrialized vision of American agriculture. In spite of its stability, its order, and inevitably its novelty, the first image probably did not fully embody the visual models and cultural meanings the average Life reader expected to find in a picture of the Midwest. Specifically, it overaccentuated the totalizing effects of the mechanical system, leaving little space for the mythic, nationalist narratives of the independent pioneer and the hardworking and humble yeoman farmer. Perhaps for this reason, the editors chose to include on the same page a second, less distant aerial photograph. This close-­up of an individual homestead diluted the displacing effects of the first view and allowed for more human-­scaled visual experience. In this second image, the point of view angles down obliquely from just a few hundred feet above the farm, a distance made clear by the treetops that appear to practically brush the bottom of the aircraft. Serving as a mediating position between the previous high-­altitude image and the ground-­ level photographs soon to follow, this middle view initially invites a perception of the land that is less rigidly organized and formally abstract. This invitation, however, proves to be illusory. The force of the opening image is too great, and thus the landscape—­as well as the viewer’s mode of perception—­ becomes deeply imbricated in the concept and aesthetic of industrial organization. As the article proceeds from this starting point, the more traditional and mythic possibilities of rural life begin to unravel. Thus even though the second oblique aerial photograph brings the view back down to human scale, the viewer cannot help but register the visual congruence between the order of the small farmstead and that of the broad landscape. Buildings have been built parallel and at right angles to one another, and the open yards and fenced enclosures of the different barnyard spaces mimic the light and dark geometry of the fields in the image above. Even the most organic element of second aerial view, its arboreal foliage, is brought at least partially under the control of the grid. The stand of trees at the center of the photo appears to create a right angle along the upper edge of their canopy, and even leafage at the bottom of the image seems corralled into a triangle composed by its own natural shape and the sharp bottom edge of the photograph. Overall, the subtle congruence of these two aerial photographs makes them akin to nesting dolls, the diagrammatic, rectilinear organization of the upper photograph translating directly into the smaller image below. Not wanting the point to be missed, the lower picture’s caption bolsters this sense of repetition: it reports that this farm, managed by a land company, is painted according to a regular pattern of white house and orange buildings that was shared by fifty other farms owned by that firm.

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In Life’s presentation of the Iowa landscape, the hegemony of the grid is all encompassing, visible not only through aerial views but also in its many ground-­level images of everyday farm life. Throughout the article, the land and its inhabitants are everywhere imposed upon by the magazine’s pur­ posefully constructed rectilinear sensibility, even in the most mundane and personal views. For example, in a full-­page illustration of a mechanical hay loader appearing a few pages later (Figure 2.41), Kirkland ingeniously injected the geometric quality of the aerial images into an emphatically ground-­ based image. Here the perpendicular welded bars of the steel hay loader offer an industrial and mechanical literalization of the grid pattern. Shot at an upward angle from a camera that the foreground grasses show to be literally at ground level, a worm’s-­eye view, the image offers an unexpected but powerful complement to the aerial views offered earlier. When seen from below, the gridiron body of the machine stretches across the photograph’s surface and frames the sky above. In this way, the heavens themselves—­which are also the realm of the aerial surveyor—­become integrated into Life’s gridded vision for modern Iowa agriculture. The magazine carried this visual program even further. In a sequence of portraits depicting the people involved in the farming operation, Life’s editors used the magazine’s own typically rectilinear layout style as an additional means to impose geometry on farm life (Figure 2.42).104 Appearing on the second page of the article, three portrait photographs and a larger lunchtime scene are divided into two registers by a block of text and captions that stretches across the middle of the page. Above, three symmetrical photographs graphically articulate a gridlike order in their matching size and even spacing from one another. The left image depicts one of the corporate owners of the farm, described in the text as “a smart, hard-­headed man who knows the business of farm management as well as the science of agriculture.” Dressed in white-­collar attire with a cigar clenched between his teeth, he poses before his automobile with an air of confidence and certainty. The middle photograph shows Woodruff’s wife, Blanche, who is described as a “prize-­winning cook” who “runs the house, chickens and vegetable garden, finds time for county fairs, Ladies Aid, Farm Bureau.” Shown in the kitchen, the woman does not return the cameraman’s gaze but instead concentrates on the bread dough she is kneading. The final image represents the hired man, described as “slow-­moving Wilbert Hoppenworth,” who, according to the magazine, “represents Iowa’s labor problem, for Iowa factories now get the pick of the labor supply.” Depicted while taking a simple washtub bath in a farm workroom—­ thus rendered naked, vulnerable, and uncultured—­the hired hand’s portrait drains him of his dignity, marking him as inferior to either landowner or housewife and, as the text implies, a member of what Life viewed as the troubling social category of unskilled labor. As these images indicate, Life’s editors envisioned a specific structure for both the agricultural and the social landscapes—­one that upheld traditional class and gender hierarchies but also transformed them to mesh with the framework of modern industrial agriculture. Highest on the scale is

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Figure 2.41. Wallace W. Kirkland, photographer, worm’s-­eye view of a mechanical hay loader. From Life, September 20, 1937, 38.

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Figure 2.42. Wallace W. Kirkland, photographer, images of the landlord, farmwife, hired man, and a typical midday meal at the Woodruff farm. From Life, September 20, 1937, 37.

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the landowning businessman who, like the government bureaucrat, possessed the broad vision and knowledge necessary to unite many farms together in synchronized production. Next is the farmwife, who maintains her subservient role as organizer of family life while at the same time engaging in community-­building activities outside the farm. Last appears the laborer, whose role in both pro­ duction and society is necessary but marginal. The farmer Woodruff, whose status has been lowered from that of independent landowner to farm manager, appears on the lower half of the page in a photograph depicting the farmworkers’ noontime meal. By situating Woodruff on the page in this way, Life implied that individual farmers were no longer esteemed as foundation pieces in the American economic system. Instead, they were now at best skilled industrial workers and managers whose place in society was beholden to large-­scale businessmen and, more abstractly, to systems of industrialized production and corporate capital. The magazine’s corporatist and technocratic vision of modern rural life is made clearer still by the representations of farm activities that complemented its photographic typology of owner, wife, and worker. The photograph of the farm work crew at lunch offers but one example of the way the magazine deployed single photographs to political ends. Belying its sense of documentary objectivity, the picture constructs a hierarchy of social and gender roles that complemented Life’s corporatist socioeconomic philosophy. Woodruff’s placement at the center of the photograph is emphasized by the strong lighting that falls across his forehead and the vertical rectangle of white wall directly behind him. The circularity of the dinner table, however, links him to the other men, whom the caption identifies as “threshers,” or workers hired during the labor-­intensive harvest season.105 This positioning at the head of but nevertheless among the labor force might seem at first glance as heark­ ening back to traditional midwestern practices of shared labor, wherein family relatives and neighboring farmers united in a community effort to complete the work during this season. Life’s narrative, however, recoded this iconography into a more capitalized industrial relationship by repositioning Woodruff from farmer to manager and workers from community members to hired labor. The maga­ zine’s conservative gender hierarchy is equally pronounced, as a teenager identified by the caption as Woodruff’s daughter is pictured at the upper right, standing in shadow outside the circle of seated workers. She is relegated to the edge of the men’s circle and is shown as serving rather than lunching—­ thus contributing to agricultural production in only a supporting role. This representation of farm women conflicts with the reality of life for many midwestern women, whose hard work alongside men was a well-­established component of agricultural narratives. Rather, the gender hierarchy constructed by Life resonated more with the notion of women as homemakers and consumers, an idea that predominated in many aspects of modern industrial culture. The spaces ascribed to women in Life’s vision of the modern agricultural landscape were typified by the daughter’s situation. Mostly relegated to secondary roles in the process of agricultural production,

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they enjoyed fewer economic and social opportunities than their male counterparts.106 The farm daughter’s subservient and detached placement in the lunchtime photograph was typical of Life’s social outlook. This conservatism was underscored by Kirkland’s photograph of a local quilting party (Figure 2.43), which constituted the article’s only representation of women’s social life. The picture depicts a group of women sitting around a tightly stretched square quilt that fills the photographic plate as well as the church social hall where the gathering was taking place. Peering down at their needlework, the women’s interiorized gazes highlight the closed and mildly claustrophobic character of both the photograph and the space it presents. A group of four women and a child at the back of the room are the only figures who are not focused on the quilt, but even they appear to be inviting a newcomer to join the group, which reinforces the spatial and social closure of the scene. The background windows do not ease this sense of confinement. Though a floating curtain suggests that a breeze is pushing through one window, the glare of exterior light reflecting on the glass makes it impossible to see outside. In this way, windows are comparable to the black chalkboard that appears in the back center of the photograph, in that all three are flat and visually impenetrable. Rather than opening into new spaces or areas of visual interest, the windows and the chalkboard foreclose perspectival expansion and keep attention inside on the quilt. Quilting has a long pedigree as a gendered activity. Though born of utilitarian needs (to put odd-­shaped pieces of cloth to use), quilting parties also fostered social interaction among women who otherwise might have remained isolated on their individual farms. Quilting was a ritual of social cohesion in which women could leave the farmstead and find respite from the responsibilities of their matriarchal and laboring roles.107 It was, in a sense, a space that simulated the social freedom more consistently available to rural men. What is ironic, then, in this image, and what must have made it especially appealing to the editors at Life, is the way the quilt itself resonates with the form and pattern of the landscape grid. Pulled tight across its frame and decorated with a rigid, symmetrical field of cloth diamonds, the picture of the quilt offers a visual analogue to the high-­altitude aerial photograph that opened the article. Deeper still, the process of quilting mimicked the pattern of agricultural labor and transported it into an alternately gendered sphere. The passage of the needle through the fabric and the movement of the stitches across the quilted plane can be understood to symbolize the process of farmers moving in geometric patterns across their fields. While such a visual analogy may have conjured for the magazine’s readers an image of rural cohesion and continuity, it also drew a distinction between agrarian tradition and the agricultural future. Within the pages of Life, a quilting party would have appeared quaint compared to photographs and advertisements for modern consumer goods, just as Jeffersonian agrarianism seemed outmoded in the face of modern agribusiness. Clearly, Life’s editors understood the aerial view’s potential to resymbolize the image of the Midwest. By deploying an aerial photograph to express the broad, systematic expansion of the geometric

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Figure 2.43. Wallace W. Kirkland, photographer, a quilting party at the local church. From Life, September 20, 1937, 42.

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order across the Iowa prairie, the magazine’s editors established a framework for the consideration of their other, agrarian photographs—­one that of course had a long-­standing symbolism within midwestern culture. But whereas a generation earlier the ordinance grid had offered Jeffersonian promise, within the pages of the magazine it was transformed into an icon of systematic production and abstract capital, resonating instead with the technocratic ethos of modern industry and the integrated network of a new consumerist-­oriented America. The photo essay’s text did not just insinuate but instead celebrated the fact that the “Roach–­Woodruff farm is nearly as mechanized as a factory.”108 Its operators had eschewed on-­farm self-­sufficiency in favor of monocrop agriculture (the farm equivalent of factory production), and its ownership had passed from a model of Jeffersonian individualism to one of modernist consolidation. Farm life became shorn of its unique meaning. As Life was quick to point out, the Woodruffs purchased most of their household goods rather than making them at home and relied on the market rather than their land for everyday sustenance. In other words, when managed in ways that made them part of the modern grid highlighted in Life’s aerial photograph, prairie inhabitants became components of a new agrarian vision in which systematized production eclipsed rugged individualism. By radically shifting the orientation and scale of representation and allowing the prairie to be imaged in a more comprehensive and abstract—­or in a word, modern—­aspect, aerial views facilitated a new means to control the midwestern landscape and its image at the institutional and ideological levels. But what of midwesterners themselves, for whom the vision of modernization enabled by aerial viewing represented change not only in perception but also in lived reality? As USDA agronomist (and Stryker’s one-­time coauthor) Paul Johnstone wrote in 1940, “The farmer himself, pushed one way by the impact of the new and pulled the other by the persistence of the old, sensed the cultural conflict that was frequently ignored by professional experts, who were for the most part one-­sided enthusiasts.”109 Such ambivalence characterized rural responses to aerial views. While midwesterners expressed fascination for the images and a desire for some of the possibilities they foretold, they remained skeptical of the politics and, in the case of aerial photography, the aesthetics that underlay perception.

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3

Adaptive Aeriality

Grant Wood, the Regional Landscape, and Modernity

In early 1937 Life magazine printed Grant Wood’s landscape painting Spring Turning as the centerfold to its February 8 issue. Appearing across two facing pages, the image was striking in both its size (reproduced to almost half life-­size, the editors bragged) and its color.1 Alive with smooth greens and earthy browns, the illustration, like the original painting (Plate 3), rehearses one of the traditional moments of American agriculture: the yearly reawakening of the land by the flaying action of the plow. Situated high above the earth, curiously and somewhat uncomfortably airborne, Wood’s viewers peer down onto a scene where three plowmen pace squarely across a vast countryside while their plows fold furrows of sod into square patterns of tilled earth. Shrunk by Wood’s distant viewpoint, the diminutive teams of farmers and horses almost disappear into the enormity of landscape. By contrast, the results of their Lilliputian labors—­the measured squares of overturned soil—­unify the image by bringing the earth’s expansive contours under the comfortable yoke of a patterned Jeffersonian geometry. Round-­cornered brown squares mark out a series of individual fields and set them out against the continuous roll of the land. Precise, evenly spaced fence posts along the edges of these plots establish boundaries of ownership and organization. The clouds floating lightly above the distant horizon mirror the landscape below by assuming the form of billowy white rectangles that float at evenly gridded distances from one another. Appearing seven months prior to Wallace Kirkland’s September 1937 photojournalistic article on the modernization of Iowa farming, Life’s reproduction of Spring Turning shared some notable features with the magazine’s later photographic treatment of rural Iowa. Like the aerial photographs that opened the Kirkland article, Wood’s painting framed the landscape from above and by doing so focused attention on the rational and systematic geometry that composed the midwestern terrain and the lives of its inhabitants. Indeed, Life’s editors presupposed such an interpretation, describing the painting as “mathematic[al],” “methodical,” “painstaking,” and “practical”: a work worthy of 127

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someone they perceived as a no-­nonsense twentieth-­century midwestern artist.2 In other respects, however, Wood’s vision of his native landscape diverged substantially from that presented in Life’s aerial photographs. Less rigid and machinelike than Kirkland’s aerial views, Wood’s painting transformed the flat and abstract grid of midwestern space presented by the photographs into a more modeled image of swelling hills and contoured valleys. Undulating with vitality, the land appeared not only as a system of industrially managed acreage but also as a contoured and fertile body whose surface is massaged into fecundity by its inhabitants. As art historian Wanda Corn proposed, Wood’s landscapes transformed the relationship between midwesterner and earth into a “Wagnerian love duet” in which farmers (and in this instance a painter) composed the land into idyllic and sentimentalized farmscapes.3 Since the 1930s, when Wood reached the apex of his influence and popularity, competing terms have been used to characterize his midwestern landscapes. Words such as “regionalist,” “nativist,” “pastoral,” “charming,” “decorative,” “moderne,” “nostalgic,” “nationalist,” “imaginative,” and even “modern” have been applied to the artist’s unique visualizations of his native land.4 Yet one overarching peculiarity of Wood’s landscape painting has gone relatively unnoticed: his penchant for picturing the land from elevated perspectives. Spring Turning offers but one example of Wood’s aerial orientation; in other paintings Wood’s perspective veers from the intimate to the vertiginous. In his most optimistic canvases, the artist’s aerial sensibility enabled him to conjure landscapes that exuded a mythologized and romanticized picture of rural culture and that tended to comfort his fellow midwesterners by confirming the personalized and affective bonds shared between the land and its inhabitants. In other images, however, the aerial perspective served as the basis for visions that were conflicted, uncertain, and estranging. In paintings like Death on Ridge Road (Plate 4), Wood used the aerial prospect to present more distressing images of his home landscape; dynamic and disconcerting angles invoke larger uncertainties regarding the instability of rural culture in the context of a rapidly modernizing Midwest. Wood’s midwesternness—­his painting, his rural philosophy, and, ultimately, his own rich and conflicted sense of regional character—­took its form from a landscape and cultural identity shaped by the forces of uncertainty and change, as symbolized by their leading edge: aerial vision. Like their pioneer forebears, during the 1920s and 1930s Wood and his neighbors faced the challenge of conceptualizing their relationship to a landscape that was difficult to comprehend. Where their ancestors had been asked to convert open prairie space into settled countryside, however, early twentieth-­ century midwesterners grappled with the more subtle task of reconciling older notions of the region with the modernizing and consolidating imperatives of the twentieth century. Confronted with a shifting paradigm of rural experience yet retaining strong memories of regional tradition and practice, midwesterners struggled to resolve these often-­incompatible cultural frameworks and to invent,

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once again, an identity for their region. Because aerial vision played central roles in both the old and new formulations of the prairie, it made sense that it would provide a visual and conceptual basis for the negotiations of cultural meaning and identity that faced midwesterners during the interwar years. For Wood, who looked empathetically on the prairie people as subjects, patrons, and peers, the aerial view offered a means to work through the forces of tradition and innovation that were at conflict in the landscape and to devise strategies for reshaping regional identity. Like many people in the 1930s, Wood saw the ways that the aerial gaze opened up the landscape for visual and structural reformation. Unlike the era’s more straightlaced modernizers, however, he saw the potential not only for the visualization of technocratic transformation but also for a deeper study of the close and personal bonds that inhabitants developed with their particular landscape—­a set of relationships that today’s geographers and social theorists understand as a concern for “place” rather than “space.”5 Unlike the ordered, abstract, and, above all, visual conceptualization of space favored by state-­ sponsored programs such as the New Deal and instrumentalized by their aerial photographs, the idea of place recognized the “wide variety of mythic, legendary, historical and personal meanings” that developed out of local knowledge and intimate experience of the land.6 Such a personal understanding of landscape also carried within it broader cultural traditions and attachments. These feelings of nostalgia, myth, desire, and anxiety were not just local and regional; they were also national and global in origin. They embodied the threads of many traditions that were brought together by the distinctive conditions of life in a particular place. In the modernizing Midwest, these “senses of place” simultaneously conflicted with, complemented, and coexisted alongside the new economic, social, and aesthetic forms that were remaking the region. Wood’s landscapes accounted for these personal and time-­tested local meanings by reasserting them in complement to and sometimes in the face of more insistent ideologies of modernization.7 Wood’s adaptation of competing discourses of the aerial gaze—­one steeped in midwestern tra­ dition and the other deploying the technologically enhanced sensibility of the modern—­provided the artist with a means to conjure a new and as-­yet-­unseen hybrid image for the region. The development of this picture, however, evolved slowly as the artist vacillated between traditional and modern ways of understanding and depicting the Midwest. In some respects, the aerial view became a means for Wood to differentiate past from present and to critique the more technological and modernizing ambitions of the twentieth century. In other instances, it functioned as a tool that Wood used to bring past and present together. In his most ambitious work, the aerial view opened up the possibility of constructing inventive fictions: paintings that reshaped ideas about rural landscapes, midwestern myth, and ideologies of modernization in ways that confounded all three categories and, in doing so, came closer to expressing the conflicted feelings of midwesterners during the 1930s.

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That the aerial view had such power for Wood was due in part to its long history as a dominant means of picturing the prairies. It also stemmed from the transformative potential attached to the airplane during the interwar years. Because mechanical flight appeared to transcend the rules of reality, people believed it held nearly unlimited possibilities for reimagining human existence. The dynamic flight lines of the airplane became a means to break from the regulating bonds of culture and to reinvent the world, or at least its representation. By examining Wood’s efforts to engage with the new imagery of flight alongside preexisting forms of elevated prairie representation, it is possible to better understand the malleability of aerial looking and the extent to which midwesterners such as Wood used it to invent landscape images that met the specific needs of their moment. F l ig ht and t he Mi dwest er n I magination When Wood began painting his aerial landscapes in the 1930s, both the airplane and its enhanced aerial gaze were becoming established components of prairie vision. As early as the 1920s, aerial photographers (albeit on a limited basis) had begun providing midwestern audiences with high-­altitude images that enabled them to perceive the gridlike order that encompassed their region. Equally important, however, the idea of flight itself had become an animating, spectacular force in reshaping the rural visual imagination. However, unlike the survey photography discussed in chapter 2, whose predominant effect was to fix and codify a broadscale order for the terrestrial landscape, the popular fascination with the experience of flight encouraged other more imaginative estimations of the land. By freeing midwesterners like Wood from the bonds of gravity, sometimes in body but more often in imagination, flight opened new possibilities for perceiving the land that upended traditional horizontal sight lines and encouraged viewers to actively reconceive the reality of prairie experience. In the early twentieth century the airplane stood at the apex of a fascination with velocity and mechanical movement that animated American society. The airplane’s primacy in this culture of speed rested foremost on its capacity to transform the ways people moved through, saw, and thought about physical space. Like trains and automobiles, airplanes enabled people to traverse the world at unprecedented speeds and to behold it in new ways.8 For midwesterners in particular, advances in transportation transformed the world. By decreasing the time of travel, technology made it more feasible for prairie dwellers to move beyond the circumscribed spheres of their local communities to visit relatives, vacation, and conduct business in places far from and unlike home, including large metropolises such as Chicago or New York City. Because trips that once required weeks could now be completed in days, prairie dwellers could visit distant points on the map without worrying that their farms or businesses would suffer from a protracted absence. Psychologically, people felt liberated from the isolation imposed by the geographic breadth and extended settlement patterns of the region.

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Speed dramatically altered the basic phenomenological relationships between traveler and the land. Unlike premechanical transport, whose slow rate and rough travel conditions allowed people to sense every aspect of the land, from bumps in the road to the smell of crops and livestock, machine locomotion lessened these local distinctions. Beginning with the railroads, passage on leveled rights-­ of-­way at high speeds diminished contact with the land. As many travelers related, their relationship to the countryside became wholly visual, or as historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch described it, pano­ ramic.9 The machine apparatus (be it railroad, automobile, or airplane) became a screen that stood between the traveler and the landscape and broke the countryside into a series of visual fragments that were connected solely by the trajectory of travel. For example, glancing out the compartment window at successive moments, train travelers would in a short period see scenes that were great distances apart. As they mentally knit these pieces into a visual narrative, travelers created new visions of the land that were much more expansive (and abstract) than the more fixed views of their local environments experienced at nonmechanical speed. Flight extended the effects of speed, but it also surpassed them. The airplane, after all, did not merely cross the land at great velocity; it thwarted gravity altogether and enabled new ranges of motion and previously unimaginable orientations to the ground below. Unlike balloons, which were either stationary or dependent on wind currents for locomotion, the airplane was self-­powered and fully maneuverable. Airplanes enabled individuals for the first time not only to overcome the pull of gravity but also to navigate the skies with the same self-­directedness of earthbound travel. More remarkable, flying made it possible to move fully in three dimensions—­not only forward and backward and left and right, but also up and down. Pushing the limits of their machines as well as the boundaries of gravity and motion, early pilots swooped, dove, and climbed in ways that seemed to reinvent the possibilities of mechanized movement. Like the roller coasters and Ferris wheels that had begun to appear in turn-­of-­the-­century midways, airplanes enabled people to experience space in ways that wrenched the stomach, exhilarated the senses, and expanded the world.10 At first a technological accomplishment, the airplane’s defiance of gravity soon became a source of sensual and sensory pleasure, not only to the few who flew but also to the millions who began to dream of flying. Like people across the nation, Wood and his midwestern neighbors became smitten with flight and embraced the nation’s growing “airmindedness.”11 The Ohio-­and Indiana-­born Wright brothers, who had also spent a few of their childhood years living in Wood’s hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were celebrated as native sons.12 Scores of tinkering farmers and mechanics began building their own airplanes, and prairie youths such as Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart started to dream of becoming pilots.13 On a larger scale, midwesterners flocked to the aerial exhibitions that were staged across the region.14 By the early 1920s these shows had evolved into dramatic spectacles in which fliers risked their lives by performing death-­defying maneuvers such as wing walking, parachuting, and

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flight acrobatics. Audiences greeted the possibility of accident or death with a mix of horror and fascination. This risk taking added to the mystique of the aviator, who became known as a brave, gravity-­defying hero. Other exhibitions showcased the airplane as a technology, such as a 1914 traveling act in which an airplane raced an automobile around the track at the Iowa State Fair.15 Public exhibitions fueled excitement for aviation across the prairies and shaped midwesterners’ sense of the airplane as a source of exhilaration and innovation. Because the shows were not simply demonstrations of level, controlled flight but, rather, hyperkinetic displays of maneuverability, speed, and daring, audiences were encouraged to focus on the fantastic and even irrational aspects of aviation.16 Promoters hailed the airplane as a machine that not only challenged the rules of gravity but in fact defied and remade them. From the stands audiences traced the paths of the aviators through the skies and experienced as spectators the euphoria of flying. Indeed, the rapid eye movements, upward gazes, and craned necks necessary to watch the shows enabled audiences to mimic the pilots’ ver­ tiginous ride and even to momentarily lose their bearing in relation to the ground.17 One can guess that as midwesterners gazed upward at the antics of performing fliers, they imagined what it might be like to experience their local landscapes from the cockpit of the speeding airplanes. Coupled with the proliferation of aerial photography in newspapers and magazines, air shows positioned flight in the forefront of the region’s cultural imagination. As aviation grew, it seemed that every midwesterner, from small-­town businessman to rural farmer, wanted to be associated with flight. In 1910, for example, the small Iowa town of Walker commissioned a postcard featuring a biplane hovering uncomfortably above its Main Street (Figure 3.1). Even a casual inspection discloses the scene to be a fiction, as the airplane has clearly been pasted collage-­style onto a photograph of the town. Still, such images were in great demand among local residents, who must have proudly mailed them to distant relatives and displayed them in personal scrapbooks and photograph collections. In an instance from 1914, Will Neely of Grinnell, Iowa, self-­ importantly noted that he was the first Iowan to send a letter via airmail. Going further, he explained in the letter, “If this carries all O.K. I will buy me an aeroplane and fly over some evening. You can sure look for me.”18 Undoubtedly written in jest, Neely’s thoughts nonetheless suggest that midwesterners were imagining the ways aviation would change their everyday lives. More than a decade later, prairie newspapers continued to highlight such popular aviation stories, including that of “flying farmer” Ernest LeClere from Coggon, Iowa, who took his honeymoon via airplane and looked forward to the day when “farmers would take to the air when they go into town instead of climbing in their flivvers.”19 Despite such exuberance, airplanes did not replace automobiles as a primary mode of prairie transportation. The idea of flight, however, grew ever more prevalent in midwestern life. Techno­ logical advances in aviation and mass production during World War I made airplanes more useful as

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Figure 3.1. Postcard of Main Street with airplane overhead, Walker, Iowa, undated; c. 1910. Special Collections, State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines.

tools of transport and more readily available for purchase by businesses and individuals. During the 1920s the postal service dramatically increased its airmail delivery, which further elevated the airplane’s profile as a useful and necessary technology.20 Although most letters were not delivered by airplane, the idea of airmail convinced isolated midwesterners that aviation was providing them new access to the world. As newly formed airlines began to provide passenger service during the later 1920s, prairie inhabitants dreamed that they too would be taking off from their small farms and towns on flights to distant metropolises and even exotic locales like Hawaii or Europe. Airline advertising campaigns played to the excitement of flight in ads that outlined their passenger routes on a continental scale, like the one by United Air Lines shown in Figure 3.2. Superimposing a Ford trimotor airplane on a map of the nation alongside the words “Cool! Clean! Fast!,” the airline implied that its aircraft spanned the continent with a frictionless ease.

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Figure 3.2. “Fly with United Airlines.” Advertisement for United Airlines, 1931. Collection of the author.

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These endeavors raised popular estimations of the utility of the airplane and established it in the lives of most midwesterners. As the woodblock print The Mail Plane by Wisconsin artist Frank Utpatel for the Works Progress Administration demonstrated, by the mid-­1930s airplanes had become a harmonious element of the modern midwestern pastoral (Figure 3.3). Located in the upper-­right corner of the print, a small, birdlike silhouette of an airplane complements the dynamic skyline and curvaceous terrain of the landscape below, while one farmer leans on his scythe as he glances upward at the plane. Aviation also asserted its presence in the landscape in other ways. Airports became new features at the outskirts of many towns, and the rooftops of barns and buildings became navigational

Figure 3.3. Frank Utpatel, The Mail Plane, c. 1934. Wood engraving, 8½ × 11½ inches. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WHS-­104859.

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signposts for both local and transcontinental aviators. In a time when pilots determined their location and bearing by following ground markers, it became common practice to paint town names and directional symbols on the roofs of buildings that stood below common flight routes. These skyward-­pointing signs transformed the landscape into a life-­size map that could be read and followed by pilots while also reminding inhabitants on the ground that their lands were being traversed and viewed from above. If the appearance of airplanes in the skies overhead familiarized midwesterners with the idea of flight, the emergence of barnstormers presented them with their first opportunities to go aloft themselves. Flying war-­surplus planes, these “gypsy fliers” traveled the prairie countryside offering airplane rides for a modest fee.21 Unlike the exhibition fliers, who favored large audiences, barnstormers were willing to fly anywhere and for any number of spectators and passengers. These fliers would set down at the outskirts of small towns, on farmers’ fields, country roads, or any other location that was flat enough to accommodate their airplanes yet sufficiently accessible to attract at least a few curious customers.22 As many fliers noted, the Midwest, with its combination of a level topography and a multitude of small rural communities, offered the perfect combination of impromptu landing fields and enthusiastic inhabitants. Charging amounts that ranged from fifty cents to five dollars, pilots found midwesterners eager to experience flight. As barnstormer Art Goeb recalled, even farmers made irate by the furrows cut into their fields by an airplane’s landing were quickly appeased by the offer of a ride.23 The few extant accounts of barnstorming show that the passengers’ experiences were both visual and visceral.24 For Oklahoma youth Robert Johnson, who took his first flight with a barnstormer in 1928, the aerial experience was defined through seeing. Johnson recalled, “Nose glued to the window, eyes wide open and hungry, I stared out and down at the lights so far below us. I could see for miles and miles. . . . I had a feeling of enormous depth, of a vast and endless plain stretching before me.”25 Flight also invoked physical sensations for those midwesterners who went up as well as for those who watched from the ground.26 The topsy-­turvy feeling of swooping and diving and even the less dramatic effects of turbulence during level flight could make a passenger feel ill and disoriented. At the same time, they added a sense of bodily instability that was both exhilarating and disconcerting. Coupled with the daredevil personae assumed by barnstormers and a lingering skepticism of airplane technology, many spectators shied away from taking flight. For others, the decision to go up demanded courage, and some barnstormers told of keeping liquor handy in the cockpit in order to steady the nerves of agitated passengers.27 In other instances barnstormers planted in the crowd friends who would volunteer for the first flight in order to allay the misgivings of local audiences. For some individuals, the new physical sensations of flight suggested a temporary liberation from and perhaps even transcendence of the confining conditions, both physical and social, of the earthly

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landscape. As Lindbergh described it, flight allowed him to “feel that I lived on a higher plane than skeptics on the ground.”28 The visual aspect of flying enhanced this feeling as vertical distance shrank the landscape and provided flyers a sense of omnipotent detachment. At the same time, the unusual perspectives created by airplanes’ looping and diving repositioned the land in a new and unrecognizable way, and in doing so further encouraged people to believe that flight had the power to dissolve the established order of the world below. For others, however, these same deterrestrialized sensations were estranging rather than liberating. The loss of bodily control as well as the uncanny look of newly aerialized landscapes confounded the certainties—­gravitational, visual, and cultural—­that structured their everyday lives. Moreover, the commonality of aerial accidents, like a 1930 crash at the Iowa State Fair that injured eight pilots and audience members, kept many mistrustful of flight.29 Widely publicized by photojournalists, such crashes highlighted the dangers inherent in aerial motion. This sense of uncertainty and doubt became an important feature of popular responses to flying. Even with the popularity of barnstorming, few midwesterners actually took flight during the 1920s and 1930s. Yet through the anecdotes of friends and neighbors who had flown, stories and photographs that appeared in the media, and the aerial spectacles that proliferated at local venues, even the mostly solidly earthbound individuals could not help but imagine the sensation and the vision of flight. Since midwesterners already possessed a relationship with elevated looking that dated back to the region’s settlement, some of this new aeriality tucked neatly into the existing prairie mind-­ set. In other ways, however, the exhilaration of flight surpassed this previous aerial sensibility by providing new stimuli that could not have been anticipated even by those creating the most dynamic of nineteenth-­century bird’s-­eye views. As one national journalist had prophesied in 1908, “Aerial transportation put[s] a greater strain upon the average imagination than any other kind ever undertaken.”30 This “strain” soon contributed to a significant reshaping of the form and meaning of the prairie landscape. Th e A rt i st and t he Ai r plane Artists were foremost among those excited by the airplane’s potential to reconceive the world and its image. Long trained to construct the world through the lens of horizontal Renaissance perspective, they were quick to recognize the challenge that aerial views posed to traditionally constructed modes of seeing. Although aware that the aviator’s vantage point shared some characteristics with the elevated promontories and imagined bird’s-­eye positions of earlier painting and prints, artists also recognized that the airplane destroyed the horizontal mind-­set that had bound centuries of artistic practice and replaced it with new, often radical, orientations toward the land. The world looked different from the air, and those differences revealed new ways of understanding the spatial

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and conceptual relationships that existed among its contents. The rules of vision and representation were redrawn.31 Among artists, it was the cubists, futurists, and other early twentieth-­century modernists who made the first and most aggressive use of the new aerial vision. In France, Robert Delaunay represented the airplane as a central symbol of modernity in his abstract landscapes, and in Russia and Italy artists championed the mechanical order and sensations of flight as the basis for their modernist art and philosophies. In the United States, the embrace of aerial vision by artists was slower and for the most part less formally radical.32 Still, it was not long before the idea of aerial vision gained a toehold in the work of American artists. In a 1919 article entitled “Influence of Aviation on Art,” for example, Stanton Macdonald-­Wright professed that the visual sensations enabled by flight were providing a “new impetus” for artistic practice, one that altered not only the artist’s subject matter but also his “inherent outlook” and his “whole conception of the objective world.”33 An abstract artist and a member of the post–­World War I American avant-­garde, Macdonald-­ Wright believed the aerial view to be a harbinger of the triumph of abstract form over realistic representation and of the end of the “useless illustrative inspirations” of traditional art.34 In some respects he was correct. Aerial views certainly did open up new, dynamic perspectives onto the land, and these changes caused some artists to redefine their basic understanding of the visual elements that composed a landscape. For prairie artists (and inhabitants), however, the transformation was less abrupt. Midwesterners, after all, were already accustomed to elevated perspectives as the basis for understanding their flat landscape. Although they too, like Macdonald-­Wright, were inspired by the possibility of real “physical” entry into an aerial space that before only the “mind of man had been able to penetrate,” they were also well prepared to integrate the new points of view created by aviation into preexisting practices of landscape representation.35 In general, unlike many of the nation’s most modernist painters, the more conservatively trained midwestern artists were not driven to assume that the unprecedented imagery of aerial vision could best be understood through the theories and practices of visual abstraction. Rather, the development of aviation encouraged midwestern artists not only to embrace the new possibilities of aerial representation but also to look with new eyes on the elevated imagery of the past. Among them, it would be the Iowan Grant Wood who most thoroughly explored the artistic possibilities of aerial looking. Wood was well versed in the techniques and implications of modern aerial vision and familiar with its older preflight antecedents. Beginning in World War I and continuing through the interwar decades, he developed a practice of aerial representation that merged long-­standing traditions of elevated picture making with the new modes of dynamic experience embodied by flight. Born in 1891 on a rural homestead near Anamosa, Iowa, Wood came of age in a prairie culture that conditioned its inhabitants to envision their home landscapes through the squared gaze of the

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frontier and the pioneer. These men and women had followed the geometrical layout and implied aerial perspective of the Jeffersonian land survey as guidelines in their effort to settle the land, cultivate it, and build productive communities. Etched broadly onto the land, the straight furrows and evenly spaced fields of late nineteenth-­century agriculture offered the artist his first images of the region. In his unpublished 1936 autobiography, Wood recounted that as a youth he had delighted in the “patchwork effect” created on the landscape by the “unceasing repetition of corn and oats and clover” and by the “sharp, geometric lines” that divided one field from the next.36 As a young boy tagging along behind his father while the older man plowed squares into the land—­the same experience that he would later re-­create in numerous agrarian landscapes—­Wood gained what he described as “a strong feeling for the ground itself.”37 He also experienced a firsthand sense of the unyielding geometric order of the Jeffersonian vision. It is likely that he also came to understand how the repetitive and regulating effects of the grid gave shape to the lives of those who lived on the land. Such was the case for writer Hamlin Garland, a fellow Iowan, whose 1917 autobiography included the observation that he had best come to understand the squared lay of the midwestern landscape and the simple practicality of its inhabitants through the unyielding experience of walking in repetitive squares behind a horse-­drawn plow.38 Growing up, Wood certainly juxtaposed such personal experiences of the landscape with the plethora of cartographic and bird’s-­eye landscape views that circulated throughout midwestern culture. The stories and descriptions in Wood’s autobiography outline the artist’s long-­running fascination with maps and geography and with the region’s rich selection of atlases, plat books, illustrations, and bird’s-­ eye views that made these interests tangible.39 Even if his family did not own such publications (though it is probable that they did), Wood had ample opportunity to encounter geographical descriptions and aerial imagery in the local newspapers and farm journals to which his father subscribed.40 Indeed, the family’s local newspaper, the Anamosa Eureka, had been a main advertising site for the state’s most famous illustrated atlas, Alfred T. Andreas’s 1875 Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa. Bird’s-­eye views were also staples in the agricultural press and in the many farm-­equipment advertisements that appeared in such publications. These promotional illustrations used bird’s-­eye views to showcase the suitability of their implements to the broad square fields of the trans-­Mississippian agricultural landscape. Figure 3.4 is a typical one, a late nineteenth-­century lithograph from the Chicago-­based threshing-­machine manufacturer Cyrus McCormick and Sons, whose caption reads “‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’ with McCormick Reapers in the Van.” McCormick’s advertisement, of course, was a clever and astute allusion to painter Emanuel Leutze’s 1861 vision of Manifest Destiny, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.41 Painted at the apex of westward migration, Leutze’s work situated the bird’s-­eye prospect as an embodiment of American territorial ambitions and cultural destiny. As Albert Boime argued, the McCormick ad complicated

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Figure 3.4. McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, “Westward” advertising poster, c. 1886. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WHS-­2496.

the original artwork’s aura of magisterial power over the landscape with a comple­mentary and more pragmatic sense of cold economics. Boime observed that while some elements of Americans’ faith in their limitless command over nature traced back to the transcendentalism of American philo­ sophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (he might also have added Jefferson), the McCormick image belied such romanticization with a scene of efficient productivity.42 Unlike Leutze’s painting, in which the arriving settlers peered down on a mostly untouched and sublime New World Eden, the McCormick ad offered a gridded plain of American commerce where farmers cut clean lines of wheat from atop their McCormick-­manufactured implements. Encountering images such as these while he leafed through his father’s subscriptions, the young Wood could not

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have overlooked the correlation between the rectilinear organization of the agrarian landscape and the clarity that form took on when pictured from above. He may even have perceived a resemblance between that particular way of ordering the landscape and his father’s thrifty, industrious farmstead. By the end of the nineteenth century, atlas views and bird’s-­eye illustrations were no longer the only aerial experiences available to prairie inhabitants. Although the world’s first airplane remained years away, an interest in flight percolated in the minds of Americans everywhere, and the coming popularity of the airplane was already foreshadowed in other types of aerial demonstrations, particularly those of hot-­air-­balloonists. In another story from his autobiography, Wood recounted that one of the most exhilarating memories from his youth was of witnessing a balloon flight at the county fair. Describing the event, Wood noted that the crowd rippled with anticipation as the silk bubble grew enormous as it was filled with hot air and slowly lifted off the ground. As the balloon caught the wind and swooped upward, the fascinated and somewhat intimidated crowd parted before it like “scared sheep.”43 Once the balloon achieved sufficient altitude, Wood recalled, the pilot, a “slim, athletic daredevil in black tights and a red waist glittering in silver spangles,” lowered himself onto a trapeze swing that he had unfurled. After swinging precariously for several moments the balloonist released his grip and plummeted toward the ground. Suddenly, as Wood described it, “the miracle occurred . . . the parachute blossomed out like a white flower in the sky.”44 It could be that as his family made the long trip home from the fairgrounds to their farmstead, the young Wood dreamed up his own balloon journey above the fields of his neighborhood and over the horizon that marked the limit of his rural world. Even after decades had passed, the balloon flight remained central in his childhood memory. In an interview given to a reporter from the Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette in September 1932, Wood revealed plans to include the balloon flight as part of a series of pictures chronicling the characteristic events of midwestern culture, many of which were derived from Wood’s experiences. The painting, which Wood intended to call “Balloon Ascension at the County Fair,” was to depict the same bustling crowds, mechanical amusement rides, and agricultural displays that had delighted him as a youth.45 The only change the artist envisioned was the replacement of the daredevil black-­clad male balloonist-­parachutist with the softer hue and demeanor of a pink-­clad female trapeze performer. Ultimately Wood did not complete the painting, and the preparatory sketch mentioned in the article is lost. Given the artist’s embrace of aerial prospects in his other Iowa landscapes, however, it is exciting to imagine how the artist might have composed a picture representing an actual flight. Would the view have looked down from the perspective of the balloonist or up from the ground? The death of Wood’s father when the artist was ten years old led to the sale of the family farm. Wood’s mother took her four children to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a regional manufacturing city. The move severed the artist’s direct ties to agricultural life, ties that he would not rebind until he returned

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to midwestern subject matter as the basis of his painting in the late 1920s. While Cedar Rapids was not a major metropolis, the urban culture Wood encountered there differed substantially from that of the country. The broad spacing of farm fields gave way to the condensed gridiron layout that typified most midwestern cities. Factory employment and professionalized middle-­class jobs replaced tillage and husbandry as the predominant occupations. The city also exhibited social configurations not often found in the country or small town, such as ethnically defined working-­class neighborhoods, stratified social orders based on wealth and education, and a greater sense of culture and fashion. Compared to rural Anamosa, Cedar Rapids would have seemed highly cosmopolitan to Wood. But it also would have typified the provincial midwestern cities satirized by midwestern author Sinclair Lewis in his novel Babbitt and studied in earnest by sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd in Middletown, both published in the mid-­1920s.46 And because of its connection to the Wright brothers, Cedar Rapids garnered additional attention as a significant location in the history of aviation, and the city’s own Babbitts ceaselessly promoted this relationship to the airplane. Cedar Rapids enabled Wood to glimpse a Midwest that was faster paced, less insular, and more self-­consciously modern than the rural countryside where he was born. His early artistic training also took place in such urban settings: Wood took studio courses in Iowa City and Minneapolis before decamping to Chicago, where he lived from 1913 to early 1916.47 In Chicago people and goods circulated at a frantic pace, and the value of capital eclipsed the more sentimental connections of land and community in ways that Wood, like many rural immigrants to the city, found shocking. The city teemed with high-­rising steel-­framed skyscrapers, and factory smokestacks belched into the sky. Wood surely sensed the city’s verticality as he craned his neck to gaze upward at the skyline or looked down from rooftops onto the streets below. While exhilarating, these up-­and-­down visual prospects of modern urbanism must have struck a different chord than did the bird’s-­eye views of open fields and small towns that were more familiar to Wood.48 World War I granted Wood his most direct and sustained encounter with the visuality of flight and more specifically with aerial photography. Wood enlisted in the army in early 1918 and was assigned to an engineering division that specialized in camouflage, where he was given duties in a paint-­mixing tent.49 The airplane had dramatically altered the tactics of warfare by opening up new means to attack enemy targets and, more important, new vantage points from which to observe and photograph them. In response to the new threats, military tacticians devised practices of visual concealment, deception, and disruption to obscure the movements of ground-­based armies from the gazes of enemy pilots and cameras above. A 1918 report on camouflage by U.S. Army Lieutenant Homer Saint Gaudens outlined the aerial focus of these efforts.50 According to Saint Gaudens, camouflage served two purposes: first, to “deceive the enemy’s eye” with regard to ground-­based observers, and second, “to deceive interpreters of airplane photographs, who draw dangerous conclusions

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from tracks, shadows, regularity of pattern on the landscape, earthworks and blast marks.”51 The report made clear that the latter was the more important and difficult task. Occlusion of the horizontal gaze could be accomplished in fairly straightforward ways by erecting visual barriers, blending the colors of military materiel with those of the environment, creating dummy forms, and applying patterns that disrupted the usual outline of well-­known objects. Aerial surveillance presented a greater challenge since its combination of synoptic aerial viewpoints and fixed photographic recording outstripped the more readily understood and contingent operations of embodied vision. Saint Gaudens captured the problem succinctly, writing, “We all of us have a fairly accurate conception of the efficiency of our eyes, but very few realize the comprehensive information that can be furnished by the aerial photograph when studied by men expert in its significance.”52 As outlined in several camouflage manuals produced by the U.S. Army during the war (manuals that both informed and developed from the work in which Wood participated), camouflage instruction involved detailed lessons in the techniques and capabilities of aerial cameras alongside explo­ rations of the visual and conceptual changes that were enacted by aerial surveillance photography. For Saint Gaudens, the first lesson was to recognize the all-­seeing capabilities of the aerial camera, whose photographs “will always record something.”53 Even the best camouflage could not make the world invisible to the aerial photographer, especially when its images were subject to enhanced analysis by trained experts. Noting that in most instances “absolute concealment is impossible,” Saint Gaudens explained that the more realistic function of camouflage was to create “a misleading impression as to what the something means.”54 Such deception required a detailed familiarity with the visual and tactile characteristics of the landscape and, more important, an intimate understanding of the forms they presented in a photograph. Making subjects invisible in real time and space was usually secondary; the important thing was to make them unrecognizable in the context of the photograph. Saint Gaudens seemed to recognize the abstraction inherent to the process and at one point defined camouflage as the act of “concealment of the fact that you are concealing.”55 Pattern was the most important formal consideration with regard to thwarting aerial surveillance. Saint Gaudens explained that aerial photographs translated the landscape into a lexicon of legible patterns, whose analysis served as the basis for interpretation by intelligence officers. Camouflage artists were trained to identify the familiar patterns of natural and human forms typical of a variety of different landscapes, from mountain topographies and unsettled woodlands to the agricultural countryside and urban spaces.56 For example, one biography reported that as part of his training Wood constructed three-­dimensional clay models of artillery emplacements.57 Such exercises enabled the soldiers to better understand the relationship between form and pattern on the land. Equally important, however, was the development of an understanding of how the forms’ physical characteristics translated into the two-­dimensional representational language of the aerial photograph. It was

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the features of the aerial photographs more than of actual landscapes that camouflage techniques mimicked and manipulated in order to confuse or mislead intelligence analysts. Summing up current World War I military theory, Saint Gaudens’s report identified four elements as the basic lexicon of aerial photographic representation, ranked in order of importance as form, shadow, texture, and color. Camouflage manuals illustrated how to recognize and manipulate these elements.58 Form signified the man-­made and natural lines, masses, and volumes that composed the landscape, from the contours of hillsides and the organic shapes of tree canopies to the artificial patterns of buildings, roadways, and fields. Environments and activities all possessed their own predictable layouts and visual traces, and camoufleurs relied on the manipulation of those basic regularities to confuse and misdirect interpretation. Regular and repetitive forms were especially conspicuous in aerial photographs, as made clear by a drawing, derived from such photographs, of an infantry camp from a 1918 field manual (Figure 3.5). Because aerial interpreters were trained to look for patterns as a means to locate activity, camoufleurs were taught to hide things by replacing uniformity and rhythm with purposefully irregular arrangements. It was most important, one camouflage report noted, “to distort any straight line or rectangular shape,” since these forms rarely appeared in nature.59 Other camouflage techniques relied on the creation of false forms. A second illustration, also redrawn from an aerial photograph, demonstrated how careful attention to the pattern of the land enabled soldiers to mislead aerial surveillance (Figure 3.6). One method involved building fake structures that conformed to the existing logic of the landscape. Falsehoods such as the dummy battery in the upper-­right corner of Figure 3.6 tricked the eye by exploiting the psychological tendency to perceive and believe regular order. In this instance, troops were trained to determine the most logical placement for an artillery piece and to put a lightly camouflaged fake gun there. They would then periodically man the position to complete the ruse. The actual battery would be placed in a less logical and less predictable location and camouflaged heavily. Another technique exploited regular patterns to hide irregular movements. For example, manuals directed soldiers to walk along field boundaries or in the direction of tillage so that their movement might blend into the formal structure of the landscape as seen via the aerial photograph. Instructions regarding other formal elements likewise focused on visual characteristics easily perceived in aerial photographs. Shadows usually offered the only means to distinguish vertical surfaces in the insistently horizontal and two-­dimensional images. Camoufleurs developed sophisticated tactics to eradicate them by using screens to even out variations in the terrain made by trenches or shell craters or to mask the vertical surfaces of buildings, cannons, and other three-­dimensional structures (Figure 3.7). Disguising a house, for example, required that long sheets of canvas be affixed to the eaves and stretched diagonally to the ground. These new planes prevented the sun’s rays from directly hitting the building’s walls, which diminished the shadow cast on the far side. Such tactics did not

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Figure 3.5. Illustrations of camp organizational schemes for effective camouflaging. From Confidential Notes on Camouflage Prepared at the Engineer School, 84th Division, 1918, 50. Office of Chief of Engineers, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­World War I, Record Group 120, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

eradicate shadow entirely, but they did dissipate it to a lower contrast level that might be missed by the photographic interpreter. Camoufleurs could also manipulate the building’s silhouette by adding surfaces that altered the shape of shadows, usually from the rectangular to something more irregular. This made objects appear in shapes and configurations other than those anticipated by the aerial interpreter. The concern for texture played into that of shadow since the aerial photograph exaggerated the visual effects created by different surface textures. Rough surfaces appeared darker in photographs than smooth ones, and soldiers were taught that patterns of depressed grass—­those left by tents or footprints, for example—­that were barely perceptible at ground level showed with remarkable clarity in surveillance photographs. Differences in texture between man-­made and natural materials also

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Figure 3.6. “Showing how paths should follow the limits of fields to avoid showing in aerial photographs.” Utilizing land patterns to mislead aerial surveillance. From Confidential Notes on Camouflage Prepared at the Engineer School, 84th Division, 1918, 60. Office of Chief of Engineers, Records of the American Expedi­tion­ary Forces—­World War I, Record Group 120, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

presented problems, and the military conducted exhaustive comparative studies to determine the fabrics and coverings that best mimicked the visual characteristics of landscape elements. A test sheet for an experiment on re-­creating foliage texture gives a sense of how this work was conducted. The sheet has a variety of man-­made materials strapped across a set of leaf specimens (Figure 3.8). While a direct, naked-­eye match between the two materials was desirable, the most important arena of comparison was photographic. Therefore, no test was complete until the swatches had been photographed (often from a vertical distance) and examined by experts to determine the extent that textural continuity held up under the scrutiny of the camera lens. These tests revealed the possibility for significant manipulation and subterfuge by camoufleurs, who grew to understand that the strictly detached

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Figure 3.7. Trench and building camouflage schemes for blocking shadows. From Confidential Notes on Camouflage Prepared at the Engineer School, 84th Division, 1918, 49. Office of Chief of Engineers, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces— World War I, Record Group 120, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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Figure 3.8. Test swatch for comparison of manufactured and natural materials in camouflage, 1918. Reports to Lieutenant Colonel Cress, October 21 to November 11, 1918. Office of Chief of Engineers, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­World War I, Record Group 120, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

conditions of aerial observation imposed sensorial limitations that could be exploited. When coated with metallic paint, for example, canvas or burlap provided effective visual substitutes for steel. When properly textured, flat netting could be made to mimic the depth of a standing forest. The use of color in camouflage (as he worked in a paint tent, this was probably Wood’s specialty) was equally complicated. Although surveillance cameras were limited to black-­and-­white film, the reflective characteristics of different hues and paints required careful study. Colors judged by the naked eye to match the surroundings often did not show up in that way when pictured through the camera lens. Indeed, army guidelines suggested that no coloration scheme should be put into

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operation until its effectiveness had been tested through photographic application.60 Color also served as a primary means to create blending effects and disruptive patterns, and camouflage painters were trained not only to mix individual hues but also to invent entire color schemes that sometimes mimicked natural order but in other circumstances manipulated it by replacing the familiar color schemes of objects with strange and unnatural hues and patterns. For example, the color schemes seen in Figure 3.9 are remarkable not only because they might blend with a background landscape but also because they would not conform to the usual coloration of the objects they cover, such as the “Motor Trucks, Trains, Wagons and Tanks” referenced in the caption of the topmost example. Camoufleurs discovered that when colors did not adhere to visual expectations, it became more difficult for surveillance experts to read them in a logical and systematic way. Given his aspirations, Wood certainly could not have missed the many overlaps between camouflage and art. In fact, his assignment to camouflage was not coincidental, as the military sought out those with artistic training especially for such service.61 Wood also could not have overlooked the challenge to conventional practices of artistic representation posed by camouflage techniques: practices derived from the regimes of aerial vision and photography that necessitated them. The obfus­ cation and manipulation of observed reality demanded by camouflage diverged from the ideals of naturalism and mimesis that had long guided artists. The development of systems of looking and compositional techniques that indulged falsehood rather than truth threatened to lay bare the fundamental artifice of representation and to deconstruct the very purpose of depicting the world. Artists had always understood that representation involved invention and composition, but camouflage went further by making dissimulation an explicit goal. Camouflage’s challenge to naturalism embraced and even surpassed the practices of philosophical and artistic abstraction that infused American and European art during the first decades of the century.62 The fact that before-­and-­after photographs of a cannon that Wood had helped camouflage appeared on display for several years at the Smithsonian Institution suggests that he was skilled at the task.63 Thinking ahead to his 1930s landscapes, the implications of Wood’s training in camouflage become richer and more pronounced. The sensitivity to topographic form and landscape patterns required of a camoufleur resonated with the visual sensibilities of Wood’s agrarian upbringing, as did the attention to modes of aerial looking that underlay both aerial surveillance and midwestern settlement. Military training would have brought these modalities of perception, skills that had probably gone unrecognized by the artist, into his conscious thinking. Inversely, camouflage training introduced Wood to a new set of modern possibilities derived from aerial vision, including practices of formal abstraction and, in a more conceptual way, the contingency of representation and meaning. Camouflage demonstrated in concrete and technical ways how the standards of mimesis and naturalism might be set aside and subverted—­and indeed how those standards might themselves be little

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Figure 3.9. Camouflage color schemes. From Confidential Notes on Camouflage Prepared at the Engineer School, 84th Division, 1918, 24. Office of Chief of Engineers, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­ World War I, Record Group 120, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

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more than constructions. It showed at a more psychological level that the divisions between vision and mental projection, between artifice and reality, and between even truth and falsehood could be manipulated through representation. It revealed the ability of the modern artist to engineer the appearance of the landscape and to cover over topographic fact with operational fictions. These fictional landscapes were not detached fantasies kept separate from the real world. Rather, they were laid directly over top of it, both disguising and becoming its reality. While it is tempting to draw causal links between Wood’s camouflage practice and his landscape painting, the artist’s lack of comment on his military training suggests that its influence was more attenuated and indirect. Wood did not immediately begin painting images from aerial perspectives after his discharge at the end of 1918. Nor did he follow the lead of artists like Edward Steichen, whose wartime experiences as commander of aerial surveillance in Europe led him to abandon pictorialist photography in favor of straight photography and modernist abstraction.64 Instead, Wood returned to a more conventional path of artistic training. Upon his return to Iowa he took a job as an art teacher in a local junior high school. He then traveled several times to Europe, where he completed paintings in a mostly conservative, impressionistic, and horizontal manner. He did, however, exhibit in small measures an infatuation with flight and its aerial sensibility. During his first trip to France in 1920, Wood is said to have built a small hot-­air balloon of sticks and tissue paper that he launched, in flames, over the French countryside.65 On a subsequent visit in 1923 he fashioned a Christmas card that featured his grinning visage pasted onto the body of a dapperly dressed birdman with art deco wings soaring from Paris to Rome (Figure 3.10). Such confected flight portraits were wildly popular during the 1920s as a means to demonstrate one’s modernity, and images similar to Wood’s can be found of such artists and aviation enthusiasts as Franz Kafka and Le Corbusier.66 As the Roaring Twenties drew to a close, Wood ceased his European sojourns and gradually jettisoned his ambitions to become a bohemian artist. Instead, he turned toward the history and subject matter of his own home region.67 Making a new commitment to build a life in Cedar Rapids, the artist turned with measured but growing enthusiasm toward what he later termed the “native material” embedded in the midwestern landscape and its people.68 As part of this, the artist cul­ tivated an appreciation for regional writers such as Hamlin Garland, Herbert Quick, Paul Engle, and Ruth Suckow, whose works struggled to address the changing reality of midwestern life and to establish a postfrontier identity. Like these writers, Wood became consumed with developing an image of the region that countered the judgments of critics from the East such as H. L. Mencken, who had characterized the Midwest as closed off and cultureless.69 In response to the critics of “provincial” America, Wood began to highlight the uniqueness of the prairie landscape and the culture etched on it. Not surprisingly, aerial perspectives emerged as a central component in his reenvisioning of the region.

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Figure 3.10. Grant Wood, Christmas Postcard from Abroad, 1924. Courtesy of Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Archive, Scrapbook 18. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

Wood’s aerial lexicon for the Midwest did not take form immediately, nor did it spring out of thin air. Rather, it developed from a sustained and sensitive exploration of multiple possibilities for picturing the region. In a 1925 series of seven paintings of local industrial production commissioned by the J. H. Cherry Company, a Cedar Rapids manufacturer of dairy equipment, Wood adopted a realistic and machine-­centered style not unlike that of American modern painter Charles Sheeler. In this vein, Wood’s attention in a painting entitled Ten Tons of Accuracy to smooth forms, mechanical power, and the workman’s expertise proposed an individuated and celebratory yet also industrialized and urban-­based iconography for the region (Figure 3.11). In addition to searching for an appropriate midwestern content, Wood was also on a quest for an artistic style. Even after he appeared to

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Figure 3.11. Grant Wood, Ten Tons of Accuracy, 1925. Oil on canvas, 22 × 36 inches. Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, on permanent loan from the Cherry Burrell Charitable Foundation. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

have settled on rural subjects, he continued to experiment with his representational technique to find a mode of painting appropriate to the region. His 1929 painting Black Barn captures some of this effort, as Wood applied the loose, expressive brushstrokes and impressionistic application of color he had learned in Europe to the rural landscape. Neither of these approaches—­industrial content nor impressionistic style—­appears to have aligned with Wood’s vision of the Midwest. Art historian Wanda Corn dates the start of Wood’s artistic exploration of the prairie’s landscape subject matter to the 1926–­27 commission from businessman Eugene Eppley to paint murals in four Iowa hotels located in Cedar Rapids, Council Bluffs, Sioux City, and Waterloo.70 Hired to provide decoration for the dining room of each hotel, Wood selected the prairie landscape as his primary subject matter and, with the help of painter friend Edgar Britten, focused his efforts on replicating common scenes of rural life, particularly those of the yearly corn harvest. Wood intended

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his decoration schemes for these “corn rooms”—­which included not only extensive murals but also ornaments such as chandeliers shaped like ears of corn—­to invoke the sensation of being in the midst of the Iowa landscape. A section of the 1926 corn room mural from the Hotel Montrose in Cedar Rapids, for example, exhibits his growing desire to connect with the working practices and visual iconography of Iowa farming (Figure 3.12). Painted in a style that was still beholden to his training in European impressionism, the picture nevertheless invoked the hallmarks of a typically midwestern agrarian content in the evenly spaced pyramids of chopped corn and the linear rows of shocks that recede into the background of the image. The sharp, straight horizon that divides flat earth from expansive sky adds a panoramic effect to the scene by insinuating that the view continues endlessly both beyond the horizon and laterally past the edges of the canvas. Devoid of any arresting landmarks, the painting recalled the vivid yet disoriented descriptions of the flat virgin prairie offered by prairie settlers and leavened them with a more conventional iconography of agrarian romanticism. In the Cedar Rapids mural, Wood demonstrated not only a keen visualization of the flattened profile of prairie topography but also an attunement to the ways prairie inhabitants perceived and interacted with it. In doing so, the painting evinced Wood’s innate sensitivity to the long-­standing modes of perception that had developed out of the unique physical character of the prairie and the uniform ordering of its settlement. The following year, Wood’s mural for the Hotel Chieftain in Council Bluffs took this interest in midwestern symbolism a step further by directly engaging with settlement history. In this corn room, Wood took up the visual lexicons of nineteenth-­century prairie representation, particularly that of the quasi-­cartographic bird’s-­eye view. As in the Hotel Montrose, Wood painted scenes focused on corn and the agrarian landscape.71 To these he added a section of pictures that re-­created the city of Council Bluffs during its first years of settlement (at that time it would have been called Kanesville). Located at the western border of the state on the banks of the Missouri River, the city was a significant location in the history of American expansion. First settled by Potawatomi Indians in 1838 and then by Mormons beginning in 1846, the city emerged as a major river crossing for midcentury settlers, and in the 1860s it became the eastern terminus for the Central Pacific Railroad. By the 1930s, Council Bluffs operated as a transportation hub for the western half of the state. The centerpiece of the Hotel Chieftain’s mural cycle, a multipanel tableau entitled Kanesville (Plate 5) offers the first clear manifestation of Wood’s artistic engagement with early midwestern practices of elevated looking. In this work, Wood self-­consciously re-­created an 1849 bird’s-­eye view of the town that had been produced by traveler George Simmons.72 Borrowing heavily from the earlier picture, Wood’s painting imitates the accurate yet geometrically idealized layout of straight roads, buildings, and fences that had given form to the Iowa countryside in its earliest moments of settlement. Like the bird’s-­eye images of the prior century, Wood’s painting places the viewer in an

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Figure 3.12. Grant Wood, Iowa Corn Room Mural (Unit 1), 1926–­27. Oil on canvas, 80½ × 49¾ × 1¾ inches. Originally located in the Hotel Montrose, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Gift of John B. Turner II. 81.17.1. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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imagined position over the landscape, which unfolds like a panorama before the viewer’s eyes. The penetrating line of the central road draws the viewer’s attention into the village, whose spaces, though sparsely settled, nevertheless adhere to the gridded order common to early town planning. The diminutive, rectangular buildings are depicted in a self-­consciously spare and simplified manner reminiscent of early bird’s-­eye views. Mimicking almost every aspect of the cartographic lexicons followed by the previous generation, Wood even dutifully represented the two keys, shaped like heraldic crests, that identified the most important buildings by name and number. The first of these keys also acknowledged Wood’s appropriation of Simmons’s original work via the inscription “from an old painting dated 1849.” As in surveyors’ plats and settlement atlases, Wood’s painting encouraged viewers to experience Kanesville through a combination of reading and looking. In doing so, Wood succeeded in crafting a picture that recognized mapping and aerial gazing as cornerstones of midwestern representational and cultural practices. Viewed from across the span of Wood’s career, the impact of Kanesville on his painting is striking. In the early modes of bird’s-­eye gazing the artist identified a model of representation that captured the essence of both the rural landscape and the regional identity. Just as in late nineteenth-­century works, elevated vantage points opened up the landscape to broad visions that enabled the artist to recognize, at some level, the unique relationship that existed between its smooth topography, the geometric order imposed by the Jeffersonian survey, and patterns of regional life. Indeed, this relationship between land, map, and man recurred in Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer, a painting the artist began in 1928 that depicts one of his leading patrons (Plate 6). Wood positioned his subject, a successful Cedar Rapids businessman, in front of an 1869 wall map of Linn County, Iowa.73 Showing what the sitter himself described as “two old maps”—­the chart on the wall and Turner’s own worn face—­the painting invoked a metaphorical bond between the map image and the midwestern “pioneer.” Turner’s description proved apt, as his firm rectangular jaw, octagonal spectacles, and wide forehead mirror the sharp geometry and broad spaces of the map. Even the careworn wrinkles of the old man’s face echo lines in the decorative stencils that embellish the homestead scenes along the chart’s border. Wood’s literal use of a nineteenth-­century wall map as the backdrop to the Turner portrait highlighted the centrality of earlier modes of elevated cartographic description to his emerging regional vision of midwestern landscape and character. Although by 1928 the Midwest was no longer populated by pioneers or composed of open lands, the mythology of the region’s frontier past remained at the core of regional identity. Turner’s portrait stressed this relationship between past and present by situating the aged face of the businessman as a symbolic reiteration of the wall map. As young men, entrepreneurs like Turner had helped organize the businesses and define the spaces represented in the map. In turn, they had also been shaped by the land. Thus, Wood insinuated that even a successful,

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well-­dressed, twentieth-­century businessman like Turner—­whose hands, one imagines, were free of the calluses of agrarian labor—­was marked by the cultural heritage of pioneer days, especially as seen in the elevated gazes through which the region was first conceptualized. Midwestern atlas imagery provided a potent inspiration and a rich source of forms and ideas for the artist in the development of his representational style.74 This was particularly true of his Iowa landscapes, which continued to exhibit striking resemblances to the bird’s-­eye imagery of the nineteenth century. In Stone City, Iowa (Plate 7), a 1930 rendering of a small town near Wood’s childhood rural home and the painting that would establish Wood’s own aerial style, the artist sought out a vantage on a hillside above the town in order to compose his view in a consciously elevated fashion. The physical act of looking down into the scene helped Wood visualize the town and its surrounding countryside as a continuous yet unified whole. He then harnessed the techniques traditional to elevated prospect making to compress the town into a stylized, fairy-­tale-­like scene of small houses, rounded trees, and rolling hills. To the far left and only half visible appear a church and its rectory. In the center a white gravel road trails past homes and the local hotel and over a placid river before turning sharply and receding into the horizon. The limestone quarry, for which the town was named, cuts a sharp vertical into the hillside, creating a steep wall and layered floor that provide a theatrical space for the staging of the image. Beyond employing an actual hillside perch to facilitate composition, Stone City also made several remarkably direct references to the 1875 illustrated atlas of Iowa created by artist and entrepreneur Alfred Andreas, a work that the artist may have known from his youth. Wood’s viewing position in Stone City bears a striking similarity to the bird’s-­eye perspectives in Andreas’s atlas, as exemplified by an illustration from the Andreas text in which an artist is depicted atop a foreground hill in the act of sketching the farmstead below (Figure 3.13). Wood also appears to have absorbed more-­subtle visual elements from the atlas view, including a stylized representation of foliage, a concentration on geometrically patterned crops, and the placement of small structures on a distant horizon. More specifically, Wood’s depiction of the quarry mirrored the atlas’s own representation of the site, especially in the verticality of the sheered-­off hillside and the sharp division created between the hill’s natural groundcover and the white limestone of the earth’s interior (Figure 3.14). Wood’s rounded and stylized trees display a strong resemblance to the orb-­like crowns in the forest canopy of the earlier printed view. The similarity between Wood’s painting and the atlas illustration is such that Wood most surely had studied Andreas’s early work and used it as a source for the planning of his own picture. Wood’s incorporation of a traditional midwestern aerial sensibility provided one framework for his landscape practice in the early 1930s. In subsequent paintings of well-­tilled fields and rolling rural landscapes such as Young Corn (1931; Plate 8) and Arbor Day (1932), the bird’s-­eye perspective enabled

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Figure 3.13. “Residence & Stock Farm of Joseph Bobst.” From Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Atlas Co.; Lakeside Press, 1875. Chromolithographs by Chas. Shober and Co.), 23.

him to highlight the fertile natural forms and picturesque patterns of cultivation created by the ordered labor of small farmers. Likewise, in paintings that celebrated places and events of regional significance, such as The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa (1931; Plate 9) or even his fantasy-­ like aerial rendition of founding American lore in The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931), the aerial prospect offered a means to present the cultural iconography of the nation and to suggest the contributions of prairie culture to a broader national identity. Such cultural showmanship was especially

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Figure 3.14. “View of Champion Quarries at Stone City, Jones Co., Iowa.” From Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Atlas Co.; Lakeside Press, 1875. Chromolithographs by Chas. Shober and Co.), 23.

evident in the painting of Hoover’s birthplace, where a diminutive figure is depicted looking skyward at the bird’s-­eye viewer and gesturing proudly to the modest Hoover family dwelling in the upper-­left quadrant of the picture.75 Like most Iowans, Wood was proud that a humble Iowa town had provided the nurturing soil for the young Hoover, whose election to the presidency in 1928 made him one of the state’s most eminent citizens. Through these forays into his region’s aerial past, Wood established aerial looking as a key element in his prairie painting and a metaphor of midwesternness. To see or represent the region from the air became, for Wood, an act of regional identification whose roots stretched back to the beginning of prairie culture. Even as the artist venerated the formal and cultural perspectives generated by

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this visual past, however, he did not replicate them wholly. Amid Wood’s ostensibly nostalgic aerial forms there began to emerge subtle traces of a more modern visual and cultural sensibility. To be sure, the intimate and idealized landscapes of Stone City or Young Corn resonated deeply with traditional ways that midwesterners had represented their region. Yet they also foreshadowed a more modern sense of aeriality—­one that embodied the transformative possibilities of aviation, surveillance, and camouflage. The artist’s trademark sensitivity to the contours of the earth and his eschewal of formal and spatial stability in favor of mobile and undulating patterns are largely without precedent in nineteenth-­century prairie imagery. Yet they coincide tellingly with the sensitivity to ground form and topographic mimicry revealed in the tactics of wartime camoufleurs and the vertiginous flights of barnstormer pilots. Wood’s deployment of curvaceous rather than rectangular lines similarly indicates that in painting the present the artist was not thinking only of the past. A more contemporary set of forms and concerns undergirded Wood’s regional and aerial visions. C u lt u ral Insec u ri t y and Inventive Aer iality Midwesterners faced many questions during the decade in which Wood emerged at the forefront of American painting. As described in chapter 2, the boom-­and-­bust cycle of agriculture in the 1920s, coupled with the degradation of the land as a result of overproduction and misuse, had ushered social, economic, and environmental instability into the region, as had (ironically) many of the modernist solutions proposed by the government to solve them. At the same time, the slow realization that frontier narratives no longer aligned with the realities of prairie life struck at the foundations of midwestern culture.76 Prairie inhabitants had, after all, pinned their early notions of region and self on the dramatic and heroic narratives that pitted resilient Jeffersonian pioneers against the inhospitable and unforgiving expanse of the prairie. The closure of the frontier heralded the end of this story line, and although settlers were able to take pride in their achievement, they found themselves stripped of purpose. Bereft of a frontier horizon, prairie inhabitants hunkered down on their gridded farmsteads and in their cookie-­cutter small towns while national forces of consolidation, urbanization, and cosmopolitanism swirled about them. Although expanding agricultural markets inspired new economic growth, geographic isolation, social homogeneity, and parochial attitudes constrained cultural enlightenment. Fears emerged that the region was becoming a backwater of intransigence, close-­mindedness, and smug self-­satisfaction. Or such was the charge of critics. Beginning in the early twentieth century, a new generation of American writers and culturemongers leveled attacks at the region for what they viewed as a thinness of culture—­a condition that came to be articulated especially as the dominant mythologies of the frontier waned and were challenged. Eastern critics such as H. L. Mencken excoriated the banality

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and small-­mindedness of prairie culture, carping that the region’s insulated demographics and Jeffer­ sonian self-­reliance had made midwesterners reactionary and anticosmopolitan. Expatriate midwestern writers expanded on that charge by using memories of their isolating midwestern upbringings as evidence of the region’s stunted development. In this vein, writers such as Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology, 1914), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio, 1919), and Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, 1920; Babbitt, 1922), satirized rural and small-­town culture with an earnestness reserved for scornful sons. As Lewis wrote in Main Street, a thinly veiled account of the small Minnesota town where he was raised, in the eyes of midwesterners, “Main Street is the climax of civilization. . . . What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.”77 In Lewis’s estimation, the hardscrabble self-­sufficiency of the frontier had given way to narrow-­mindedness and complacency. The Midwest became the whole world to its inhabitants, who saw only threats and little of value outside of it. At the same time that authors like Lewis interrogated small-­town culture, other prairie writers began to deconstruct the long-­accepted and mythic frontier narratives that endured in the minds of many rural inhabitants. In novels such as O Pioneers! (1913) and My Antonia (1918), the Nebraska-­raised writer Willa Cather revealed a stark, empty prairie landscape that had resisted the hand of the farmer and showed the biting isolation of homestead life that destroyed the psyches of many settlers, both men and women.78 The achievements of Cather’s female farmer-­protagonists were not triumphant but, rather, hard-­won and bittersweet. Similarly, Iowa novelist Hamlin Garland picked apart the romantic mythology of agrarian labor, disclosing the constant work that ruled the lives of farm families, as well as the fluctuating natural and economic conditions that reduced many farmers’ existence to a state of perpetual uncertainty and torment. In the author’s 1922 introduction to Main Traveled Roads, his collection of midwestern short stories, Garland lamented the tortured life of his mother. After enduring a life of labor as a pioneer wife, she found herself at the end “imprisoned in a small cabin on the enormous, sunburnt, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever living anywhere else . . . endur[ing] the discomforts of her life uncomplainingly.”79 In another passage, in spite of the formative role he ascribed to his agrarian childhood, Garland denounced the unflagging labor that had made his father’s farmstead seem as much like a prison as a home. Historian Robert Dorman observed that the critiques offered by former midwesterners such as Lewis, Cather, and Garland revealed the recognition by second-­and third-­generation midwesterners of the largely mythological status of Jeffersonian tradition and, by implication, of the gridded landscape.80 Conceived as a means to settle the continent with a democratic society of independent yet like-­minded farmers, Jeffersonian form and philosophy had in the eyes of its critics given rise to a static landscape whose pervasive grid of farms and small towns inculcated self-­interest, conformist

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attitudes, and distain for outside influences. The rectangular survey, whose expansive aerial vision was once taken more positively as an embodiment of American democracy, gained more negative symbolism as a form that stifled the spirits of its inhabitants and homogenized midwestern culture. Added to this, the mechanical regularity of the grid—­and of the lifestyles that it spawned—­was conducive to another modern form of cultural homogenization: mass culture. As the unbridled success of mail-­order catalogs in the region suggests, midwesterners were not immune to the promises of progress or to their own growing consumer appetites. Fatigued by the physical toil of everyday labor and by the dreary isolation of rural life and eager to prove their success through the conspicuous display of store-­bought goods, families longed for factory-­made clothes, washing machines, and the newest Detroit automobiles.81 As Iowan and future New Deal secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace opined in a 1925 issue of his family’s agricultural trade journal Wallace’s Farmer, the midwesterner was caught in an “impossible allegiance” to two contradictory realities: one rooted in the traditional mythology of pioneer agrarianism and the other based in the imperatives of modern industrial and consumerist culture.82 They knew frontier was gone, but if the mythology of Jeffersonian husbandry disappeared, how else could they perceive the prairie landscape except as a systematic industrial space? After all, that future was already being pressed upon them by economic circumstances and government agricultural policy. The anxiety over the eclipse of rural identity in the face of consolidation by mass culture, urbanism, and industrialization inspired much of the “regionalism” that suffused the American countryside during the 1920s and 1930s.83 From New England to the desert Southwest, regional thinkers, artists, and inhabitants responded to these forces by asserting the unique character of local life as an analeptic to the displacing and unfamiliar forms of cosmopolitanism and mass culture. In the Midwest, the reassertion of regional identity came through a variety of forms and responses. Some midwesterners, such as the so-­called local color writers and artists who emerged in the 1920s, retaliated against the perceived siege on rural culture with sentimental works that proudly and transparently celebrated the local geographies and their embedded mythologies of regional and rural life.84 Those who were more ambitiously modernizing, by contrast, called for the disavowal of tradition and embraced a future for the region that was decidedly technological, interconnected, and cosmopolitan. Often, these individuals achieved their aims by leaving the rural Midwest and moving to major industrial cities. A third group, for whom Wood became a symbol and (perhaps somewhat reluctantly) a leader, attempted to conceive a more organic blending of traditional and modern cultural forms. Despite its technocratic leanings, the New Deal government became one source of such efforts, as its farm programs at least attempted to maintain long-­standing beliefs in independent agriculture even as they instituted a systematic and unified vision of agricultural management and production. Innovative

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midwestern artists like Wood and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright became another, as they worked to merge prairie form and content with the newer elements and ideas of modern art, design, and culture.85 Contrary to the charges of its critics (both then and now), the most thoughtful and provocative midwestern (and on the whole, American) regionalism was more integrationist than reactionary. As Wood articulated in his response to a 1937 definition of regionalism produced by the English Department at the University of Iowa, the movement’s revolt was directed not against “industrial civilization” but, rather, against “cultural nationalism” and “the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America.”86 Eager to proclaim the value of regional character in the face of an increasingly urban-­centered and standardized culture, Wood believed the task of the artist was to emphasize the natural forms, histories, and social practices that distinguished one place from another. The 1935 regionalist manifesto that is often ascribed to Wood, Revolt against the City, declares, “Each section has a personality of its own, in physiography, industry, psychology.”87 The artist’s fundamental duty, as Wood saw it, was to capture that essence. Yet Wood also understood the complications involved in creating a unique regional imagery in the midst of a landscape and culture fraught with insecurity. Most significantly, he realized that the intricate and evolving circumstances of regional life could not be captured through the formulaic mythologies and knee-­jerk “anecdotalism” of local color artists.88 The work of a regionalist artist necessitated more than mere replication of a region’s physical attributes, historical foundations, and present circumstances; it demanded the careful analysis and interpretation of those forms. Wood believed that regional painters needed to be “editors” who took the raw materials of regional life, interpreted them in light of present conditions, evaluated them through the lens of their own engrained experience, and finally reshaped them into meaningful and distinct compositions.89 He wrote, “Thinking painters and writers who have passed their formative years in these regions will, by care-­taking analysis, work out and interpret in their productions these varying personalities.”90 Wood cast regionalism as an interpretive and, above all, adaptive enterprise. The crux of Wood’s regionalism lay not simply in highlighting the unique character of local culture but also in working through the tensions between past and present that, in an almost-­Hegelian sense, the artist saw as inherent to modern cultural awareness. For Wood, tapping into regional roots involved not just identifying and embracing tradition but also manufacturing and manipulating it. Wood was no sentimental yearner, and the present had a central place in his outlook.91 Indeed, the artist’s particular sense of nostalgia seemed implicitly to follow the construct of the “usable past,” a mode of relating to national history and incorporating it into cultural life defined in 1918 by literary critic Van Wyck Brooks and embraced by American artists and writers through the interwar decades.92 As the term suggests, Brooks’s idea involved the appropriation of the past—­its forms, styles, and

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ideals—­as source material for present-­day expression. Thus reanimated, the past became a productive counterpoint to the often abstract and universalizing forms and imperatives of interwar modernity. In the process (and paradoxically), however, the past as a concept also became conditioned by modernity: it was reshaped from an inviolable truth into something more akin to a state of dynamic flux. Tradition was no longer to be remembered and described; rather, it was to be invented anew to meet the evolving needs of cultural transformation. With its dual symbolism as an icon both of the midwestern past and of a new modernist way of life, the aerial view brimmed with possibility. Wood’s training in camouflage provided a visual basis for bringing these complementary meanings together. Of course, bird’s-­eye views had always been inventive as well as descriptive. Atlas illustrators had represented the region’s farmsteads and townscapes not literally as they appeared but as prairie audiences desired to see them. Returning to the painting Stone City, Iowa (Plate 7), it becomes apparent that Wood appreciated the potential of the distant bird’s-­eye gaze as a framework for conceiving of a landscape as an open idea rather than a locked fact. In the broadest of terms, the painting offers a geographically accurate rendering of Stone City and its placement in the landscape. It is still possible today to stand on the same hill and take in a countryside whose topography conforms reasonably well, if somewhat impressionistically, to the artist’s rendering. Even Wood’s renditions of the rounded trees—­those of his forms that are most often cited as decorative, stylized, and unnatural—­ display touches of mimetic merit in the degree to which they resemble the rotund arboreal crowns of the trees that frame the valley.93 Wood used the knowledge gleaned from his on-­site experience to create representational forms that distilled the details of the landscape into simplified and reproducible patterns. Here we have the familiarity of an inhabitant filtered through the observational practices of a camoufleur. Moving beyond accuracy, however, Wood made alterations to the scene that refigured it into a vision more constructed than realistic. He played with the location and appearance of a number of the buildings, and in an attempt to deindustrialize the scene, he removed a railroad right-­of-­way that cut across the valley floor. Yet he retained the red-­and-­brown water tank, located near the hotel, that had refilled the steam locomotives that once hauled heavy slabs of stone from the quarry on the now-­absent tracks. He also preserved two roadside billboards, one below the water tank and another facing the sharp turn in the road. Billboards, of course, stemmed from modern automobile culture, and judging from the contemporary imagery of the more prominent of these, which shows a dapper man smoking a Chesterfield cigarette, Wood realized this. Yet the traveler Wood placed on the roadway is decidedly of the past: a rider atop a prancing white horse. This historical disjunction was not accidental. Wood also transformed the blasted hillside of the quarry from a scene of machine-­aided excavation into a softened, almost-­natural geological feature. The heavy machinery

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and human laborers that would have dominated the site have been almost completely effaced, with the exception of a lone crane whose steel booms poke forth from behind the trees at the left center of the canvas. Ironically, these very machines, along with the throngs of workers who operated them, were prominent in a similar depiction of the quarry that appeared in Andreas’s 1875 atlas. Though Wood clearly admired this earlier view, the industriousness and progress of which the atlas was so proud held less importance for Wood, and his painting substituted in their place a fairytale-­like tranquility that displaced—­without entirely effacing—­the ideals on which nineteenth-­century prairie iconography relied. Though Wood valued tradition, the painting suggests that he had little interest in a rote return to the iconography of the past. Rather, he edited regional form and memory to produce a scene that adopted the straightforward and demonstrative aesthetic of the atlas illustration but then camouflaged it under a new and somewhat vertiginous geography of undulating hillsides and irregular features. Under Wood’s brush hillsides became exaggerated plastic forms while barns and homes shrank into diminutive and precious landscape props.94 Though never fully unfixed, the arrangement of Wood’s painting conjured a landscape replete with malleable forms and shifting energies. The conventions of pioneer geometry that Wood had mimicked so carefully in Kanesville and Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer, have warped into a more fantastical medley of undulating lines and billowing patterns. Even where Wood retained geometrical order, such as in roadways and the gridded patterns of growing corn and piled haystacks, straight lines become unexpectedly pliable as they curve and loop in exaggerated ways. The artist seemed to take particular delight in his rendition of the Stone City scene’s foreground cornfield, whose diminutive plants have been seeded in a traditional “cross-­check” pattern that, while still common to midwestern farming, was becoming obsolete. Before the advent of herbicides, farmers wanted to be able to drive tillers through growing corn from both directions to maximize weed eradication. This required that corn be seeded in an evenly spaced checkerboard pattern (generally forty-­two inches apart) rather than in tight rows. True to his rural upbringing, Wood captured this older planting method accurately. But he used its checkerboard pattern to complicate the painting’s lines of perspective, which can be seen to oscillate between different trajectories (down the middle, to the left or right) according to how the viewer lines up the evenly spaced dots of corn (a similar effect can be seen in Young Corn, Plate 8). For many 1930s critics, “traditional” and “nostalgic” appeared to best describe Wood’s landscapes, and many of the artist’s pronouncements abetted such characterizations. Perhaps this kind of agrarian idealism was all that viewers knew to expect from a native painter of rural midwestern scenes. Yet such descriptions oversimplified the experimental nature of Wood’s painting and misunderstood its visual and conceptual complexity. Instead of retreating to the past, Wood’s repertoire of undulating

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hillsides and prism-­like cornfields drew together the threads of memory and modernity that had shaped the artist’s life. The paintings transformed his hybrid experiences into a formal style that captured the shifting profile and fractured psychology of the region. Camouflage training had taught Wood that the world was fungible and could be easily remade. Stone City represents one of his first efforts to bring this lesson to his home landscape: to unfix and animate it by incorporating older notions of pioneer-­era aeriality into the visual and conceptual thinking of the present. Wood was not alone in identifying aerial vision as a means to animate prairie space in ways that transcended the rote forms of agrarian tradition. Such was also the case, for example, in the early animation created by midwestern native Walt Disney beginning in the late 1920s.95 In particular, Disney’s 1928 Plane Crazy, a short animated film starring Mickey Mouse, presents Mickey as a farmer in the act of constructing and flying his own airplane over rural scenery strikingly reminiscent of the Midwest. The action opens in a barnyard, where a menagerie of animals work in bouncy syncopation to construct a flimsy airplane, which in true Rube Goldberg fashion deploys a wound-­up rubber-­ band-­bodied dog as an engine. Rakishly tousling his hair in mimicry of American aviator-­hero Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh, Mickey crashes this first plane without even lifting off the ground. Undaunted, he fashions a second aircraft from a nearby Model T, complete with a tail of feathers plucked from a reluctant turkey. Plopping his amour Minnie in the copilot’s seat, Mickey manages to get this craft aloft through absurd maneuvers that challenge every law of gravity, materiality, and sensibility. Hurtling down a rural road turned runway, the plane bounces over rocks and under cows, careens off telephone poles, flies through the radiator of an approaching automobile, and spins against the horizon line like a deranged gyroscope (Figure 3.15). Things aloft prove no calmer. Freed from the limitations of gravity and horizontality, Mickey pushes the aircraft into ever more maniacal maneuvers as he loops and snakes it in all directions to impress Minnie and earn a kiss. Mickey soon loses control, however, and the plane noses into an uncontrolled vertical plunge. As the film’s gaze shifts to a through-­the-­propeller pilot’s perspective, the last sequence of the flight provides an unexpectedly disorienting and uncanny view of the farmstead below, whose flattened yards, roofs and treetops spiral irresistibly closer as the aircraft nosedives back to earth (Figure 3.16). When the plane finally augers into the canopy of a large tree, the landscape suddenly disappears as the screen goes black, and the animated words “crash” and “bang” serve final notice of the rodent’s calamitous return to the ground. Snapping back to a final horizontal shot, the film ends with Mickey thumping derriere-­first to the ground followed by his lucky horseshoe, which plunks down on his head. Although the wide-­eyed Mickey soon regains his senses, it is clear that he will never see the world in quite the same way again.96 One of the most remarkable effects in Plane Crazy is the way its animated aerial prospect undermines traditional structures of horizontal perception. In one sequence, the straight, flat line of the

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Figure 3.15. Mickey Mouse’s takeoff as the topsy-­turviness of flight destabilizes the prairie horizon line in the animated short Plane Crazy (Disney, 1928).

prairie horizon spins in a full circle on the screen as the plane executes a barrel role. In another moment, fence posts that normally appear perpendicular to the ground jab into the scene from sharp diagonals. Only after the crash, when Mickey’s attempt to escape gravity has ended in failure and the plane has returned to earth, does the landscape again take on stable form in a final shot that shows land and sky once again demarcated by a sure horizon line. This unfixing of perception also leads to other irrational situations. For one sequence during the flight, Mickey is joined in the cockpit by

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Figure 3.16. View from Mickey’s airplane in a spiraling nosedive in Plane Crazy (Disney, 1928).

a cow. Normally an icon of the pastoral landscape, the dislocation of the bovine into the air creates a moment of comedic uncanniness in which the dynamic motion of the airplane not only disorients viewers’ perceptions of the topography but also upsets the meanings of normally stable rural icons. Not only did Disney’s flight represent an escape from the bounds of gravity and the limitations of the horizontally oriented still image, but it also embodied liberation from the strictures of cultural tradition. The topsy-­turvydom of aerial motion provided a symbolic means for audiences to reimagine the world in ways that, according to cinema historian Scott Bukatman, “exceeded the constraints

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of predictable and conservative narrative structures.”97 As barnstormers and flying farmers had foretold, the dynamic vistas enabled by flight so disrupted normative patterns that it became impossible to perceive the world, even one so flat and regimented as the Midwest, wholly in terms of its standard geometries. By unfixing elements of the land from their normal and stable relationships, aerial vision forced viewers to expand their perception of the countryside by enabling them to imagine new, often-­unbelievable juxtapositions between the land’s physical form and its symbolic meaning. As in the image of a flying cow, such visions often played with the line between the real and the imagined, or alternately, between the comfortable and the estranging. Wood may have seen Disney’s vertiginous rendition of the midwestern landscape in a local theater. Even if he had not, he certainly shared Disney’s infatuation with the optics of flight as a means to enliven the land. Akin to Disney’s film, a Wood painting such as Young Corn is remarkable for the ways it animates the landscape through curving lines and bulging hillsides that create an almost-­ vertiginous sense of visual motion. Such a transformation is evident in the hillside in the upper-­ center portion of the painting, where the rounded form of the hill is anthropomorphized into a form that resembles a swelling abdomen and pelvis. Sensual to a point of sexualization, the hillside is too uncanny and loaded with innuendo to stand simply as an extension of the Mother Earth mythologies that had long held sway in agrarian discourse.98 Instead, the painting’s overdeveloped contours disrupt such metaphors by evoking a surplus of sensuality, a surplus that, like the painted form of Wood’s hillside, is near bursting. For some time, scholars have quietly linked such sensuous effects in Wood’s landscapes to uncertainties regarding his own sexual identification. One scholar has triangulated landscape, sexuality, and aerial vision, noting that early twentieth-­century Freudian psychologists interpreted the appearance of flight in dreams as signifying sexual euphoria.99 Perhaps the lessons of camouflage—­particularly that of hiding in plain sight—­are again revealed. More so than any other mode of looking, modern flight had consistently rendered once-­familiar landscapes suddenly mysterious and unsettling to even the most knowledgeable of viewers. Beyond latent sexuality, however, it is another already-­alluded-­to mental construct, that of the uncanny, that best encapsulates the modern psychology of Wood’s landscapes. As Freud defined it in his well-­known essay of 1919, the uncanny signified the potential of long-­familiar objects and places to also appear as unfamiliar and estranging.100 The resulting mental oscillation between what was expected and what was not became an important concept for understanding how modern subjects worked around the regulating structures of the psyche and, in an extended sense, of cultural convention. Wood’s landscapes excelled at this, all the more so for the remarkable subtlety of their effects. His paintings manipulated the forms of midwestern topography, mythology, and cultural practice, but they did so in ways that concealed his efforts almost but not completely beneath the patterns of an idealized past. The aerial viewpoint in Young Corn both empowered and symbolized Wood’s desire

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to convey the many fractures as well as the meaningful durability of prairie culture. Seen one way, the gaze enabled Wood to display the landscape as a living form patterned by the beliefs and practices of the culture that lived on it. Looking down into the valley as if it were a bowl, the view then miniaturized and contained the scene as an intimate possession. Interpreted from another angle, the painting’s irregularities, from exaggerations of topography and stylizations of natural form to the ceaseless undulations and misdirection of its formal elements, render the landscape oddly unrecognizable. From this point of view, the angled perspective into the valley bears a notable resemblance to the spiraling aerial plummet of Mickey’s crash. The vertigo of modern aeriality became a visual form and a metaphor of a new, unsettled midwesternness. While modernist critics lost little time in deriding Wood’s Iowa landscapes for their “frivolity” and “indulgence of fantastic inventiveness,” by the mid-­1930s the artist’s idealizing yet disruptive style had emerged at the forefront of regional and national culture.101 Locally, Iowa newspaper readers waited with anticipation to glimpse each of the artist’s new works, which often appeared soon after their completion in the form of lavish rotogravure illustrations. Accompanying captions attempted to shape viewers’ understandings of the works by highlighting the paintings’ traditional subject matter, their sensitivity to regional pattern, and, most important, their resonance with solid midwestern tradition. Rather less remarked upon (at least by everyday midwestern publications) were the less predictable elements of the paintings: their sense of dynamic movement and visual disruption, their exaggerated and unbelievable forms, and their playfully manipulated subject matter. It was these characteristics, however, that separated Wood’s work from the mundane and celebratory “realisms” of other local color artists and elevated it to prominence. Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that midwesterners—­although they were not quite able to name it—­connected with Wood’s paintings precisely because they were uncanny and fantastical. It is probable that the effects evoked a sense of cultural flux that resonated with midwesterners more than a straight liturgy of midwestern tradition did. Wood’s aerial sensibility enabled him to embrace the comforts that tradition provided while escaping its strictures. It provided a visual and conceptual space where cultural forms became malleable, dynamic, and indeterminate. By hybridizing past and present, Wood’s invented landscapes demonstrated the power of the aerial gaze not only as a device for landscape transformation but also as a strategy for cultural camouflage. The fact that midwesterners embraced Wood’s sensuous and swirling aerial farmscapes amid the turmoil of depression and modernization suggests that the imagery, for all its inventiveness and uncanniness, connected in meaningful ways with their own experiences and desires. It seems that the region’s critics were wrong: the midwestern landscape and its people were exceedingly, if unconventionally, modern.

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Th e B i rd’s-­E ye Vi ew versu s the Survey Photog r a ph Ironically, as the 1930s progressed it was Wood himself who had difficulty keeping faith with the hybrid aerial fictions he had so carefully constructed in his early landscapes. Although he professed no ill will toward industrialization, Wood’s paintings exhibited a consistent undercurrent of ambivalence toward the modernizations, particularly those of industrial agriculture, that had begun to sweep across the prairies. In Stone City and other early 1930s landscapes, the artist’s concern with modernity is evident in his omission of up-­to-­date agricultural machinery and his refusal of the symbolic language of “development” and “progress” that not only underwrote much of settlement-­era visual culture but also, in doing so, foreshadowed current circumstances. Yet as the decade progressed and uncertainties about the future of rural life deepened (or, more aptly, grew more complicated), Wood became less able to harness his own anxieties about the rapidly changing prospects of regional life. The subtle camouflages of his earlier landscapes began to fade away. Not surprisingly, the artist’s growing anxiety became manifest in his methods of aerial representation. Particularly as the 1930s progressed and government aerial survey photography became the dominant instrument for representing and transforming the midwestern landscape, Wood’s use of the aerial view shifted away from balancing the forces of past and present in the landscape. Instead, his landscapes took on a more anxious look as the artist seemed to lose his optimism. As the decade progressed and a full-­scale rural modernization appeared increasingly inevitable, the inventiveness of Wood’s first aerial views gave way to a second vision that was harder and more aggressive, as well as more resigned. An abrupt shift in Wood’s lexicon of rural aeriality first appeared in 1935 in what has proven to be the artist’s most direct and sobering depiction of rural modernization, Death on Ridge Road (Plate 4). Rendered from a remarkably vertiginous aerial perspective, the image allegorized Wood’s growing trepidation over the incursion of modernity into the more pastoral prairie landscape that he idealized. The ominously shaded canvas depicts three vehicles vying for the right-­of-­way on a curving, macadamized rural highway. In the center of the work a sleek black sedan swerves across the lanes as it passes a boxy, outdated Model T. At the top a bright red commercial truck lunges over the crest of the hill, eagerly barreling down on the vehicles below. To the sides the sharpened strands of barbed-­ wire fences slice across the landscape, cordoning off farmers’ fields from the high-­speed space of the highway. In complement to the fences, a pair of rigid power lines cut diagonal vectors across the scene, their clean linearity offering a stark contrast to the softened curve of the hillside and the rounded corner of the planted field. A dark storm cloud in the upper-­right corner completes the image by blocking out sunlight, and the sheet of rain that descends violently to the ground foreshadows the impact of the impending crash between truck, sedan, and farmer’s flivver.

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In Death on Ridge Road, Wood’s aerial perspective veered from inventive to menacing as the painting became the site of an impending crash not just between cars but also between cultures. As such, the painting offered a metaphor for Wood’s growing concern for the fate of rural culture amid the forces of mechanization and commerce.102 The outcome remains disturbingly unclear. The sleek sedan, which might have served Wood as an icon of modern cultural desires, swerves into an inexorable collision with the bounding truck, whose aggressive pose embodies the forces of industrialization. Frozen in a moment of painted anticipation, the image makes it impossible to escape the destruction the crash will certainly bring down. The third element, the slow-­moving Model T that was commonly used by midwestern farmers, is trapped in the middle and appears unlikely to steer clear of the impact. The landscape is likewise implicated in the rending and obliterating transformation to come: its contoured hillsides—­themselves somewhat deflated in comparison to those of Wood’s earlier paintings—­are cut over by the taut diagonals of barbed wire and electrical cables. It is no accident that the painting—­with its fatalist iconography of spiked fences, cruciform electrical poles, and the hearse-­like sedan—­marks the first appearance of such a harsh and systematic geometric rigidity in any Wood landscape. These aggressive lines and rectilinear forms, which are literalized in the painting’s strings of barbed-­wire and electrical cable, in the zigzag of the crop boundary along the right, and especially in the hard right angle created by the play of light and cloud in the sky, are violent markers of the region’s new modern look. Situating the viewpoint uncomfortably above a dark and ominous foreground, as if the viewer were balanced perilously on top of a fence post (though the implied distance is even greater than that), Wood further negated the soft playfulness of his earlier work. Instead of rounded cotton-­candy trees surrounding swelling fields, here viewers see the sharpened end of a spear-­like electrical pole that juts threateningly outward toward the surface of the painting and the external space of its viewers. Their own visual position now seemingly also imperiled, Wood’s audience is forced to share in the impending crash as well as in the dissection of the landscape by the lines that slice tautly across it. Shifting from an inventive yet stable perspective to one that was vertiginous, insecure, and threatening, Death on Ridge Road subverted the mood and message of Wood’s earlier aerial visions. No longer a connecting point to the region’s nineteenth-­century iconography, the aerial viewpoint had become an angle for a seemingly ungoverned sense of dynamism, violence, and destruction. Stunt flying may have offered some inspiration; by the 1930s the crashing of airplanes had become a planned component of modern daredevilry.103 In 1937, for example, the Des Moines Register devoted several pages and numerous illustrations to a report on the performance of a stunt pilot who purposefully dove his plane into a house as a grandstand act at the Iowa State Fair.104 Such spectacles, however, cannot account for the more sinister overtones and heartfelt insecurities embedded in the painting. On the one hand, the darkened foreground and precarious viewpoint establishes psychological distance

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between viewer and scene. Bereft of the swelling foreground hills prevalent in Wood’s earlier works, this painting severs the implied sense of physical and emotional connection those hillsides offered. Instead, viewers experience this scene from a position as outsiders who look down onto the landscape but cannot comfortably establish contact with it. On the other hand, Wood’s shift from swelling sensual shapes to frantic swerves and aggressive diagonals enacted a different sense of visual order for the land—­one that seems to have consciously eschewed earlier inventive patterns for a more stringent, regulated, and geometric composition.105 In this sense, Death on Ridge Road can be understood at least in part in relation to the strict formal geometries invoked by aerial survey photography. As such, the work marks Wood’s recognition of the new modern aesthetic that was being used to reorder the region’s image into a single unified geometry. It also crystallizes the artist’s understanding that the transformation threatened to eradicate many of the less regimented elements of rural culture that he so valued. Wood’s shift to a more severe and dynamic aerial gaze in Death on Ridge Road enabled the artist to compose his most overt critique of midwestern modernization. Not coincidentally, this most politicized of his works appeared at the same moment that government survey photographs began to proliferate across the region. From its outset in 1933 the New Deal administration had steadily ramped up the use of vertical and oblique aerial photographs in its agricultural programs, from soil conservation to production controls. In doing so they inaugurated a new method of perceiving the land, one that was in some ways just as inventive as Wood’s painting but whose visual and cultural aims were significantly different. Whereas Wood’s landscapes sought to playfully animate and enchant the image of the region, the government photography worked to distance, fix, and codify it, to abstract and regularize the rural image under an all-­encompassing and systematic regime of centralized management. Like many midwesterners, Wood probably felt ambivalent about the government’s survey photographs, which he had undoubtedly seen in the mass media and had perhaps encountered during a brief stint as the head of the New Deal Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in Iowa.106 While his prior camouflage experience would have meant that the technology of aerial photography was familiar to him, as a lifelong prairie inhabitant he certainly would have been fascinated by the stunning new visions of the land that these images offered. Given his appreciation of the patchwork patterns of cultivation, he would have shared the amazement expressed by countless midwestern farmers on being able to perceive for the first time the overwhelming extent and regularity of the Jeffersonian grid. Likewise, given his sensitivity to organic topographical patterns, he would have been captivated by extensive rhythmic contours that aerial photographs revealed across the landscape. This last claim is bolstered by Wood’s Stoddard Family Lake McBride Map, a drawing wherein the artist assumed a mapmaker’s (or survey photographer’s) perspective in order to sketch out the topography of a lake

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outside Iowa City (Figure 3.17). The only straight-­down image Wood is known to have completed, the drawing echoes the distance and abstraction of survey photography. Yet the work retains a sense of playfulness, as the artist turned rivers into stylized brocades and even inserted a spouting whale into the inset view of the lake. This last addition aligned the vertical gaze of the image not only with modern surveys but also with a long history of exploration mapping in which illustrators depicted such mythic creatures to emblematize the danger and, more important, the mystery of the unknown. Though it was easy to be fascinated by aerial photography, when faced with such images Wood undoubtedly could have recognized the transformations that they foreboded for midwestern culture. As farmers had quickly realized, the government intended its aerial photographs to serve as templates for the implementation of mechanization and modernization on a vast and systematic scale. From that perspective, survey photographs were another incarnation of the truck atop the hill in Death on Ridge Road—­instruments of a surging and vertiginous modernization, only this time in a form that

Figure 3.17. Grant Wood, Stoddard Family Lake McBride Map (formerly Comic Relief Map of Lake McBride, Iowa, Area), 1935–­40. Pencil, ink, and chalk on paper, 10½ × 17½ inches. Location unknown. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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would meld the region into a single, all-­encompassing system of regulated production and culture that was at once abstract and troublingly standardized. In particular, survey photographs promoted the modern process of agricultural consolidation by highlighting the overwhelming order and con­ tinuity of the cadastral grid. Unlike nineteenth-­century cartographic imagery, the extreme distance and technological abstraction of the aerial photograph did not lend itself to either mythmaking or modern invention. By recasting the land in a unified, rationalized, and, above all, mechanistic aspect, aerial surveys made the agrarian folklore and native inventiveness that Wood purposefully injected into his rural landscapes seem like confections. Under the bureaucratic gaze of the aerial camera, the prairie was laid bare not as an inventive patchwork of independent farmers and animated hillsides but, rather, as a vast system of homogeneous landholdings geared to the production of commodities, not culture. The technological authority of these synoptic yet exacting views, combined with their shocking revelation of the systemic reality that underlay Jeffersonian idealism, made them hard to manipulate even for the most inventive of mythologists and camoufleurs. This recasting of regional life in a markedly modern aerial format disturbed the carefully conceived lexicons of Wood’s earlier rural landscapes. Well aware of the emerging modernized look of the midwestern countryside, the artist must also have sensed the growing shift in cultural authority from Jeffersonian mythology to top-­down structures of power and order. Moreover, as the expansion of government programming fostered the proliferation of a more abstract and technologically enhanced aerial sensibility across midwestern space, the nineteenth-­century component of Wood’s aerial aesthetic—­which he valued deeply—­came to be perceived by some as impractical, naive, and out-­of-­date. Wood’s depictions of intimate farmsteads, sensual hillsides, brocade fields, and stalwart farmers held limited relevance for inhabitants who wanted to be connected with (or were being inevitably drawn into) the expanding networks of commodities and conveniences such as rural electrification, or for farmers who wanted to acquire tractors and expand their fields into broad expanses that could be tilled with utmost mechanical efficiency. Similarly, for those who sought the physical thrill and mental stimulation of swooping airplanes, urban street life, and motion pictures, the stolid patterns and solitary figures of Wood’s invented agrarian countryside might have seemed dull and isolating. To an increasing degree, the artist’s conception of the rural world was out of step with the lived reality of the broader prairie populace, who, by the later 1930s especially, faced a landscape that was shifting explicitly toward the dynamic flux and technocratic order of the twentieth century and away from the older Jeffersonian mythos of independent landholding and labor. Anxious over the growing footprint of modernity on the landscape and disturbed by the creeping marginalization of his idealized paradigm of prairie culture, Wood moved to interrogate the new images of prairie land and culture offered by aerial photography. In 1936, the same year that the government mandated the use of agricultural survey photographs on a nationwide scale, Wood created

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his most modern image of the prairie landscape, Spring Turning (Plate 3). Its subject was mythically midwestern: the springtime plowing of the fields. Yet in spite of his conscious rendition of a rather outdated version of this agricultural rite—­a shrinking number of farmers were plowing with horses in 1936—­Wood’s manipulation of the aerial viewpoint made the image sleek and spare. First, he set aside the mostly square dimensions that had typified his earlier landscape paintings in favor of a longer and narrower panel.107 He then pared down and simplified the pattern of the landscape into two parallel and congruent hillsides whose surfaces are flat, smooth, and for the most part unadorned. He eschewed the multiple and intricate formal elements of earlier paintings. Giving up his usual agricultural panoply of conical haystacks, molded furrows, patterned row crops, and looping hillsides, he invested instead in a single geometric motif consisting of four uniformly square farm fields undergoing tillage. His customary bric-­a-­brac of bulbous trees and miniaturized buildings has likewise been reduced, with only a small barn tucked beneath a hillside on the left of the canvas and a diminished stand of trees and small shrubs on the right edge. Texture is also significantly reduced, as the hillsides take on a uniform and polished sheen of green and brown. Unlike in earlier images, which had often used the aerial prospect to the present landscape in ways that were secluded and intimate, in Spring Turning the view is significantly broader and unlimited, stressing openness and continuity rather than creating a sense of enclosed particularity. While the painting remains somewhat sentimentalized in content, in comparison to his other works it has also become more abstract, rationalized, and formally modern. Audiences immediately noted the change in Wood’s style. Thomas Craven, the acerbic critic of European modernism and champion of regionalism, regularly praised the midwestern landscape as a symbol of American thrift and virtue and promoted Wood as its homespun prophet and truthsayer. Craven was sensitive to the power of the aerial view and seemed also to intrinsically associate that viewpoint with Wood’s work. In one 1935 article, the critic wrote that prior to viewing the Iowa countryside, he had believed that Wood’s paintings “had too neatly re-­arranged and tailored it; that he had given to rural scenes the appearance of formal gardens, or that quaint topographical regularity with which nature, when seen from an airplane, deceives the eye.” Upon experiencing the landscape at firsthand, Craven changed his mind, being “struck with the remarkable realistic truth of his [Wood’s] landscapes, despite the deliberate admixture of fantasy and humor.”108 Counter to Wood’s vision, however, Craven appeared to favor factuality and order over invention and fantasy with regard to both the rural landscape and the artist’s paintings. The critic’s well-­read biographical essay on Wood published in a 1937 issue of Scribner’s gushed of Iowa farms, “[They] are models of modern efficiency; they are also, in their neatness and diagrammatic precision, models of agrarian art.”109 Later in his discussion, Craven encouraged Wood to embrace the modern character of the landscape and forego his overly elaborate “decorative machinery” in favor of a “naked statement of the Iowa

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terrain, a closely studied realistic job without frills or fantasy.” Yet the critic also made clear that in spite of its sharp shift in style, Spring Turning was not such a picture. The painting, Craven opined, had gone to the other extreme and “simplified the country into an abstraction, into immense and vacant and billowy protuberances which do not look like earth but like mechanical forms covered with green pigment.”110 Others also commented on the artist’s change of style in Spring Turning. As previously noted, Life’s caption to its 1937 reproduction of the work heaped praise on its mathematical precision and rationality of form, descriptions that its writers probably would not have found suitable for his earlier works. Modernist critic Henry MacBride went further, calling the painting’s “vast checkerboard squares . . . highly ridiculous” and indicting Wood for “making fun of nature.”111 This critic’s charges probably stung Wood most of all, as he went beyond an analysis of the work’s style and suggested that Spring Turning presented an unconscionable assault on rural life itself. While MacBride found it acceptable to “poke fun” at midwestern characters (he mentioned Wood’s satirical 1932 painting Daughters of Revolution as an example), he proclaimed, “You can’t do that to anything so serious as spring plowing.”112 To a degree not registered by his earlier decorative stylizations, Wood’s more severe rendition of rural life had struck a raw nerve. Even to a critic known for his support of artistic abstraction who was writing in a decade when modernization was everywhere prevalent, Wood’s spare machinelike hillsides did not embody what the agrarian landscape was supposed to look like. What these commentators failed to note (although Craven’s comments on seeing nature from an airplane came tantalizingly close) was the affinity of Wood’s gaze in Spring Turning to the abstracting and modernizing visual prospects of survey photography. In particular, Wood’s more extreme sense of vertical distance, heightened as in Death on Ridge Road by the presence of a deep, ominous chasm in the painting’s foreground, creates a separation between viewer and the land. As in aerial photographs, the landscape is expanded, systematized, and rationalized; it is highly visible but psychologically inaccessible. Spring Turning demands a gaze that is as much rational as it is affective; one perceives the broad order of repetitive squared fields in place of the more personalized patterns of plump trees, anthropomorphic hillsides, and intimately scaled fields. Indeed, for the first time in his practice, the midwestern grid as a systematic form had become the primary subject of Wood’s imagery. It is, after all, the squares of tilled land that predominate in Spring Turning as they are replicated across the canvas—­ just as in the government’s survey photographs. At the same time, flatness emerges here to a degree unprecedented in Wood’s other paintings. The sleek application of pure green across the hillsides coupled with the exacting repetition of earthen squares unites the landscape into a seamless and continuous visual field. The painting transforms the Iowa landscape from a collection of intimate valleys and bowled-­in towns that viewers could seemingly hold in their hands into a standardized network of fields whose production could be best overseen and understood from afar.

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It is important to note, however, that Spring Turning does not fully surrender to the aesthetic of the survey photograph. Wood attempted to mediate the rigidity of the instrumentalist aerial photographic gaze by softening the edges and rounding the corners of his rectilinear fields, inserting at least a modicum of volume into the landscape, and leaving stretches of unregimented green pasture between the squares of tilled earth. He included a meandering roadway that resonates in a small measure with the whimsically looping horse path depicted in Stone City, although its course conforms as much to the rectilinear dictates of the grid as it does to the natural curvature of the land. In spite of these efforts, it was in the band of blue sky along the top of the picture that Wood, either consciously or not, cemented his sense of the inevitable with regard to the aerial survey aesthetic and the new order it heralded. In this sliver of sky atop the distant horizon—­once the symbolic space of frontier hope but now the realm of government survey aircraft—­Wood marshaled even the clouds into a grid configuration that mirrors the geometry of the landscape below. This reduction of the clouds to flat and unbillowy rectangles was the final move that made the entire world a grid and illustrated Wood’s sense of the pervasiveness of aerial vision’s new rational reality. Spring Turning marks a problematic ending to Wood’s inventive and adaptive rural landscapes. Unable to adapt his lexicon of stylized forms and inventive fictions to fit with the modernist aesthetic actualized by the all-­seeing gaze of the survey camera, Wood grew increasingly distressed by the inevitable displacement of his intimate rural ideal by forces of mechanical transformation and cultural standardization. After Spring Turning, Wood did not complete another easel painting until 1939. Instead, the artist retreated to what were for him the less visually and conceptually anxious modes of printmaking and illustration. The more conventionally nostalgic and even stereotypical vignettes of midwestern life that he created on commission for the Association of American Artists, for example, offered Wood a chance to promote his region to middle-­class consumers while also avoiding the harder realities of modernity that had stymied him in Spring Turning. Though these easy-­to-­digest midwestern character studies were not without controversy—­Wood’s depiction of a nude farmer bathing near an outdoor water tank triggered accusations of pornography—­none of them partook of the inventiveness that marked his work prior to 1936.113 Wood’s return to easel painting in 1939 brought back some of the inventiveness of his earlier works, exemplified by the playful artifice of his myth-­bending portrait of Founding Father George Washington in the now-­celebrated painting Parson Weems’ Fable. Wood eventually returned to landscape painting, but never again did he attempt, as he had in Spring Turning, to bring together his invented Iowa landscape imagery with the technologically enhanced and bureaucratic visions of the prairie symbolized by aerial survey photography. Even so, Wood did not fully abandon his effort to come to terms with the conceptual and psycho­ logical implications of modern aeriality, nor did he forget the inventive possibilities of elevated looking. Some years after Spring Turning, he again invoked the distant and all-­encompassing possibilities

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of aerial vision in a drawing for a textile pattern that he entitled Spring Plowing (Figure 3.18). The picture possessed the same long horizontal dimensions of the earlier and similarly titled painting and depicted the same rural iconography of diminutive farmers tilling broad squares onto curved hillsides. In some ways, the geometry of this design eclipses that of Spring Turning, especially in the exacting symmetry of its square pattern. It is tempting to speculate that Wood might have seen the Life magazine article on modern Iowa agribusiness (see chapter 2) and as a result took up the analogy between quilting and cultivation in an effort to reclaim the lost intimacy of agrarian life. But there is no direct evidence to suggest this. From an alternate angle, it is possible that by shifting his approach from one of making a direct picture of the landscape to one of creating a representation of a representation (a design for a textile that resembles a landscape), Wood was recognizing (and perhaps even embracing) the artifice of his painted Midwest in the face of its modern reality. The blank borders and semicircular color swatches at the bottom edge of Spring Plowing highlight this point. By admitting in this way that his landscapes were designed artifices—­the works of a cultural camoufleur—­ Wood surrendered his belief that his painting could in any real way remake the meaning of the land. Similarly, in an otherwise bucolic bird’s-­eye lithograph from 1939 entitled July Fifteenth, Summer Landscape, Wood scarred the central hillside with an anomalous gully (Figure 3.19).114 This wound on the body of the land—­a form of “spot” soil erosion that the government was working to remedy through con­servation programs—­marked one of the few instances in which Wood marred the otherwise

Figure 3.18. Grant Wood, Spring Plowing (textile pattern), c. 1939. Tempera and pencil on paper, 15½ × 37¾ inches. Private collection. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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manicured surfaces of the prairie as seen in his works. As such, it also served as a metaphor for Wood’s recognition of the inefficacy of his Midwest. Complemented by the tilted and off-­kilter building partially visible behind a copse of trees, the erosion became an uncamouflaged wound (reminiscent of a World War I shell crater) that laid bare Wood’s artifice. An even more uncanny embodiment of Wood’s changing perception of the rural landscape appeared in one of his last works, Adolescence, a small allegorical painting depicting three chickens

Figure 3.19. Grant Wood, July Fifteenth, Summer Landscape, 1938. Lithograph, 9 × 12 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift of Park and Phyllis Rinard in honor of Nan Wood Graham. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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perched on the edge of a twilight rural landscape (Plate 10). The artist had first sketched the subject in 1933 but did not complete the canvas until 1940. Wood simplified the rural background into two flattened color fields of diaphanous green earth and shimmering indigo sky. A lone set of boxy red barns float ominously on the break of the horizon. Neither curves nor hillsides breach the insistent planarity of the land. Beguilingly abstract, the painting’s background stands as the artist’s most overt departure from his usual landscape style. Flanked by two full-­bodied and stern-­eyed hens, the painting’s featherless young bird seems to be a transparent allegory of the vulnerability and awkwardness of coming-­of-­age—­a subject Wood had tackled early in his career. In combination with the painting’s uncannily bare, planar, and sterile topography, however, the naked bird becomes a metaphor for Wood’s vision of the midwestern landscape. Laid bare by modern vision and shorn of the artist’s inventive camouflages, the uncertainty of the Midwest in the midst of its transformation is revealed. By the dawn of the 1940s, the circumstances of Wood’s life and the tenor of midwestern culture had changed precipitously. Wood’s status shrank as the popularity of regionalism declined, and, closer to home, the artist faced an array of personal and professional accusations from his colleagues in the Art Department at the University of Iowa.115 On a broader scale, modernization was fast becoming the new standard of midwestern life, and the threat of war in Europe dampened interest in questions of regional identity. Wood’s paintings of this period suggest that amid this shifting of tides, the artist lost faith in the aerial gaze and, on a deeper level, in his philosophy of inventiveness. Of his last major paintings, it was the satirical depiction of the mythic story of George Washington and the cherry tree, Parson Weems’ Fable, that revealed Wood’s most playful yet surprisingly frank deconstruction of the artifice not just of landscape but also of art and tradition (Figure 3.20). By depicting Mason Locke Weems, Washington’s first biographer and the originator of the cherry tree story, in the act of pulling back a curtain and revealing that the myth was in fact an invention, Wood allegorized his own role as manipulator (rather than chronicler or inventor) of national identity. Like the camouflage manuals from his wartime service, Wood’s painting further illustrated the subterfuges he deployed in the construction of his Midwest. The artist’s final Iowa landscapes for the most part embody similar renunciations, no small part of which involved his abandonment of the aerial prospect in favor of more grounded and fixed viewing positions. Two paintings completed in 1939 epitomize the shift. In Haying (Plate 11), Wood descended from his usual aerial prospect to depict a field of recently mowed and windrowed hay from the bottom of a rising hillside. The small water jug at the bottom of the image stands in for the labor of the farmer. It also anchors the viewer to the land, which now looms powerfully over them. Wood’s typical smooth and polished application of paint has also disappeared, replaced by poking stalks of cut alfalfa and sharp crosshatches of color that give a jabbing and violent edge to the curving rows of piled hay. Farm buildings anchor on the high-­up horizon line and redirect attention back to the

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Figure 3.20. Grant Wood, Parson Weems’ Fable, 1939. Oil on canvas, 38 ¹⁄₈ × 50 ¹⁄₈ inches. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

downward slope of the hillside. A mechanical hay loader in the upper left once again echoes the Life magazine article discussed in chapter 2. Another of Wood’s late landscapes, New Road (Plate 12), also makes the viewer captive to the earth below. Painted with the same aggressive crosshatch brushstrokes as Haying, the image depicts a roadway newly cut into the rolling rural landscape. Unlike the perspective of the earlier Stone City or even the similarly themed Death on Ridge Road, this viewpoint is deeply embedded in the land: carved into it like the sharply dug ditches that flank the road. Looking out

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onto the scene from behind a steep and eroded ditch wall in the lower-­right corner of the painting, the view is situated below the level of the land. The cruciform pattern of the road sign posted atop this wall of earth echoes that of the road crossing at the center of the painting. It also implies an eerie sense of mortality. Paired with the truncated vertical form of a sawed-­off tree, the signpost becomes a metaphorical grave marker for the now interred viewer, and perhaps as well for Wood’s aeriality. In spite of Wood’s growing uncertainty about the efficacy of his landscape vision, his image of the Midwest resonated throughout the 1930s. Prairie inhabitants may have been more likely to find an aerial survey photograph hanging on the walls of their neighbors’ homes than a Wood landscape. Yet the combinations of the traditional and the modern made by the artist in his landscapes extended the same process of hybridization that had enabled farmers to find personal significance even in the synoptic abstraction of aerial photographs. By bringing together historical and contemporary modes of aerial representation, Wood created images that were responsive to the complicated and conflicting desires that shaped inhabitants’ understandings of their region. The artist’s engagement with a range of modern experiences and practices, one of these being his aerial sensibility, enabled him to formulate a perspective on the region that spanned several competing visions of midwestern space and culture. Indeed, it was Wood’s sense of modernism that ultimately made his work both relevant and resonant amid the cultural transformations of the 1930s. Wood’s landscapes cut across epochs of history and frameworks of representation. They enabled midwesterners to hold in balance a dual sense of coming and going, and in doing so they better captured the strategies of malleability and adaptation that even everyday midwesterners deployed in their responses to change. While Wood’s subject matter was often of the past, his perspective contained an inventiveness that emerged from, even as it was challenged by, the form of the future.

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4

Jeffersonian Urbanism

Frank Lloyd Wright, Aerial Pattern, and Broadacre City

Grant Wood was not alone in seeing that the aerial vision enabled new possibilities for reinventing rural culture in the context of modernity. Nor was he the only one to perceive in the midwestern landscape a pattern and a way of thinking that might provide a solution to the broad-­ranging cultural uncertainty that wracked the nation during the interwar period. Variously localized and specified, this lack of confidence had at its heart a deep crisis of faith in industrial capitalism. While the 1929 stock market crash and the pursuant Great Depression have been historicized as the main crisis points, the skepticism directed toward the concentrating structures of modern laissez-­faire capitalism and especially toward its insistent centralization of manufacturing, markets, money, and people had become a focus of cultural criticism even in the late nineteenth century. For most Americans, it was the city, rather than the country, that offered the most recognized symbol of a proliferating centripetal modernity. By the 1920s, many Americans embraced the frenetic industry and swirling cosmopolitanism of so-­called modern life, and for them the city became both the primary setting and a potent metaphor for their expressions of enthusiasm. Yet the city also served as an important symbol for those more skeptical of the economic, social, and spatial agglomerations of industrialism. “To look at the plan of any great city,” the eminent American architect Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in his book-­length 1932 manifesto for urban decentralization, The Disappearing City, “is to look at the cross section of some fibrous tumor.”1 This vituperation exemplifies a groundswell of criticism toward the city that erupted in American thinking during the interwar years and especially after 1929. Like the industrialized city’s many proponents, even skeptics such as Wright readily if begrudgingly recognized the metropolis’s position at the center of modern culture. Yet where urban apologists saw potential, Wright and other critics saw problems. In their judgment the city concentrated life into a state of congested abstraction wherein the verticalization of space and social relations replaced regulated patterns of nature with 185

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the ungovernable schemata of centripetal industry. To visualize these sentiments, Wright incorporated four aerial photographs into his text. The first, an oblique airplane view captioned “The Disappearing City,” showed the skyscrapers of Manhattan enveloped in a haze of factory smoke (Figure 4.1). A second image, captioned “Find the Citizen,” captured that same skyline from a lower elevation, with an emphasis on the city’s close and crowded architecture (Figure 4.2). Two further aerial views—­captioned “Futile Pattern. The Present City” (Figure 4.3) and “The Feeder for the Old City” (Figure 4.4)—­were taken from nearly vertical aspects and adumbrated core elements of Wright’s critique of urban agglomeration by fixing the failed forms of centripetal city plans and transportation systems into tangible images. Measured by the aerial sensibility of the architect’s era, his pro­ fession, and his region, the significance of these aerial views ran deeper. Describing the images not as mere illustrations but instead as “interpretive photographs,” Wright highlighted the aerial gaze as an instrument for critique.2 That aerial vision in general captured Wright’s attention is of little surprise; from its ancient beginnings architecture had assumed the elevated prospect as a concept and a tool. The additional technological capacities of modern aerial looking thus extended older practices of city and building design while also envisioning new possibilities for spatial planning at an unprecedented scale. What attracted Wright to these photographs more specifically, however, was their proficiency in capturing and critiquing the form and meaning of that recognized locus of modernity, the city. By the 1920s the American metropolis was itself an aerial phenomenon. It was, after all, the modern city form that had most perceptibly reoriented the American gaze from horizontal to vertical. Skyscrapers and markets soared. Metaphors abounded of urban life as flight. Cameras and canvases pointed upward and downward in the depiction of city scenes. Artists and illustrators, poets and copywriters readily and insistently adopted urban verticality as a sign of triumphant futurity. Yet alongside such promise lurked doubts about the efficacy of the centralized, vertical city. As critics noted, amid the real and symbolic heights of New York’s Wall Street or Chicago’s Loop, the American metropolis had become a towering Babylon of physical congestion, economic disparity, and social tension. The verticality that appeared to some to be an architect’s dream looked to others like a nightmare. The Disappearing City outlined Wright’s negative assessment of the vertically built and economically concentrated metropolis both as architecture and as a social framework. The text also enunciated his vision for a new urban ideal: a horizontally oriented and rectilinearly structured city, attuned to “the soil” and to the “dignity and worth of the individual” and based on the allotment of “a minimum of one acre to a family.”3 He named his idea “Broadacre City” and in 1934–­35 oversaw the production of a scale model that incarnated the concept in a more physical and tangible form (Plate 13). Measuring 122/3 × 122/3 feet and representing a four-­mile-­square footprint, the model delineated an expansive city design composed of intermingled rectangular plots for homes, apartments, factories, schools,

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Figure 4.1. “The Disappearing City.” From Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: William Farquar Payson, 1932), frontispiece.

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Figure 4.2. “Find the Citizen.” From Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: William Farquar Payson, 1932), facing page 18.

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Figure 4.3. “Futile Pattern. The Present City.” From Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: William Farquar Payson, 1932), facing page 34.

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Figure 4.4. “The Feeder for the Old City.” From Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: William Farquar Payson, 1932), facing page 50.

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farms, and centers of administration, commerce, and recreation. Linked together by advanced transportation and communication technologies, the city was designed to institute a dispersed spatial order and invoke therein a return to the American democratic ideals that Wright feared were being lost. It is no accident that the Broadacre City model resembles nothing so much as a nineteenth-­ century midwestern atlas view or, even more, an aerial survey photograph. Visual homologies aside, there are persuasive reasons to link Wright’s Broadacre City to the aerial imagery of the midwestern landscape. First, Wright was himself a lifelong midwesterner. Born and raised in rural Wisconsin, he began his architectural career in Chicago under the tutelage of Louis Sullivan, the “father of the skyscraper,” before returning to Wisconsin in 1912 and residing there until his death in 1959. Throughout his life, Wright continuously cited the midwestern landscape as an inspiration to his practice. Second, Wright’s architectural and personal philosophies were steeped in the ideologies of American agrarianism and particularly those of Thomas Jefferson. During the interwar years, but especially in the 1930s, the Midwest was widely celebrated as a last bastion of Jeffersonian ideology. Third, Wright’s various descriptions, explanations, and representations of the Broadacre project were suffused with references and allusions to aviation and aerial vision. These included his vision of the helicopter-­like “aeroroters” that would one day transport Broadacre denizens, the numerous textual metaphors of flight in The Disappearing City and subsequent texts, his regular deployment of aerial photographs, and, finally, the acutely aerial qualities of the Broadacre plan and model. Fourth, Broadacre’s apparent correspondence with the visual and indeed the cultural patterns of the midwestern agrarian landscape placed Wright at the center of a significant debate among interwar architects, planners, and theorists over the relationship of city to countryside. In the United States, as across the globe, the second industrial revolution had intensified a shift of demographics from rural to urban. As cities condensed people, resources, social activity, and authority, many came to understand the countryside as subsidiary: a feeder of resources but also a hinterland bereft of opportunity. Broadway now vied with Main Street and even with the homestead as the comfortable icon of American promise. This mythology of the metropolis soon earned its critics, however, first in the urban reformers of the turn of the century and later in the back-­to-­ the-­landers, decentralizers, and regionalists of the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas the reformers worked mostly to mitigate the more deleterious aspects of urban centralization, those in the interwar years proposed more radical reconfigurations of the concepts and forms that structured the city. Amid this evolving discourse, a notion of space that we might categorize as country, rural, natural—­or at the very least not city—­served as an important intellectual counterpoint to urban centeredness. That not city space also emerged as a physical site for the articulation of new schemes for a coextensive and more sympathetically integrated urban–­rural society.

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Visions of these new combinatory spaces took competing forms. Binding them together, however, was a growing recognition of the complementary and interdependent complexion of urban and rural spaces and ways of life. Working within and against a polarized characterization of city and country—­an understanding now widely acknowledged as itself one of the core myths of modernity—­ Wright numbered among a cadre of architects, planners, and theorists who looked across the division of these two landscapes in order to define something different.4 As they did so, frequently with the direct use of aerial photographs, Wright and others engaged with forms of aerial thought and rep­ resentation that were the agents of the invention and reshaping of the Midwest. For Wright, the engagement with aeriality had an extensive and determinant midwesternism; his vision for Broadacre City drew specifically on that region’s legacy of spatial idealism as materialized social form and aligned it to the synoptic futurity of machine modernity. For others, such as regional-­planning theorist Lewis Mumford and the designers of the New Deal’s Greenbelt Towns, the aerial influence was less exclusively midwestern. Yet their efforts to infuse the centralizing visions of modern spatiality with a renewed sensitivity to regional particularity and new forms of urban–­rural synthesis gave shape to while also taking cues from similar efforts across the Midwest. A e r i al Vi si o n and Ci t y P lanning The critiques of the city undertaken by Wright and others emerged from a set of ideas, social pressures, and technologies that came into specific alignment at the close of World War I, aerial vision central among them. Their roots, however, trace a much longer history of urban development and representation. Cities, of course, go back to the beginnings of civilization, and efforts to picture them were practically coextensive with their existence. Though architectural drawings and landscape plans are a species of aerial imagery that is as old as the first urban settlements, scholars generally date the emergence of a codified approach to representing cities from on high to the sixteenth century. These first truly deterrestrialized urban representations were not merely elevated, low-­angle views, like a view from a hill or a tower. Rather, they were of a more ambitious scale and emerged in two widely recognized forms: the pictorially oriented bird’s-­eye view and the cartographically imbued orthogonal (perpendicular to the earth’s surface; vertical) plan. The impact of these two prospects on the development of the city was profound. As scholars Hilary Ballon and David Friedman have demonstrated, the bird’s-­eye view “created a new pictorial subject: the city as a complete, self contained, and internally organized entity.”5 The orthogonal plan offered an abstract yet tangible “visible record of measured space” and opened up possibilities for bringing a comprehensive but also exacting knowledge to bear on urban design.6 As these aerial representations coalesced and demarcated the city as a distinct spatial form, they also began to crystallize the notion of its separateness from

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the countryside that surrounded it. Bird’s-­eye and orthogonal plans each delineated the scope and boundary of the city with a representational clarity that was without antecedent in reality (Figure 4.5). Because the view maker’s interest was limited almost exclusively to what lay inside the city, the representation of these internal spaces was thick and detailed. The picturing of outlying lands, by contrast, was often sparse, schematic, and inattentive, with a limited iconography of symbols and motifs standing for the character of rural space. The countryside became ground to the city’s figure. Though depictions of country estates were also prevalent, they did little to upset this imbalance, as they maintained in microcosm the format of developed center and reduced periphery.7 Refined and augmented in the following centuries, the linked configuration of bird’s-­eye view and orthogonal plan became the convention for the systematic representation of city space in Europe and its colonial territories. The efficacy of these projective city views was confirmed in the 1850s with the development of hot-­air-­balloon-­based aerial photography. In spite of the complications asso­ciated with flying balloons over heavily developed spaces, the first aerial photographers in both Europe and the United States nevertheless made cities their primary subjects (see chapter 2). While the first balloon photographs of metropolises such as Paris and Boston served as sources of popular fascination, technological limitations kept these images from becoming major implements of urban planning. Indeed, the period between the first balloon views and the development of aerial photography in

Figure 4.5. Jacopo de’ Barbari, View of Venice, 1500. Woodcut from six blocks on six sheets of paper, 52¼ × 109¼ inches.

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World War I saw only incremental changes to practices of aerial view making. To be sure, aviation and camera technology made tremendous leaps, but as we have seen, it took the war to synthesize them into a functioning representational apparatus. The city, by contrast, underwent momentous transformations in both form and meaning during these years. In particular, as advanced industrialization took hold, cities became sites for unprecedented concentrations of population, capital, production, consumption, administration, governance, technology, and culture. Often largely unregulated, the expansion of the industrial city and the sociospatial issues generated therein made apparent the need for a new order of vigilant and compre­ hensive urban planning.8 In Europe, with its long-­established cities, this turn was emblematized by efforts to transform old European cities through the new spatial rationales of modern order and efficiency, concepts that were in many respects deeply aerial even if not yet based on aviation imagery. To see from above was, after all, to see from outside—­a position that privileged planning and compre­ hensivity over localization and piecemeal development. This reliance on broadscale planning became a guiding tenet of twentieth-­century European architecture.9 The United States faced a somewhat different challenge. As was the case with the American rural landscape, a significant number of American cities and towns had been planned from their inception and so, one could argue, had always carried the mark of modern rationality. (Founded in 1630, Boston was an exception.) In the wake of the 1785 Land Ordinance especially, American urban space had taken shape through an approach to planning that closely complemented the rational, expansive, and speculative methods of land organization that had underwritten the territorial expansions of Manifest Destiny. That places like Chicago, Cincinnati, and even New York (at least the post-­1811 sections) emerged from an idealized and systematic national schema that had been laid out in advance of their actual construction differentiated them from most earlier European cities. It also meant that the concepts and problems of U.S. city planning shared marked affinities with the principles guiding the settlement of the continent, including, most centrally, a reliance on the grid as a foundational pattern. It was no accident, as historian William Cronon observed, that the rectilinear layouts of Chicago and many other American cities echoed the spatial order of the Jeffersonian countryside, albeit in a more concentrated form.10 In spite of such consonance, the development of American urban space inverted in significant ways the processes that had shaped the rural landscape, especially during the rampant industrialization of the later nineteenth century. In particular, whereas modernization led to an inexorable depopulation of the agrarian countryside through the consolidation and mechanization of crop production, American cities saw an explosive influx and concentration of population, both relocated ruralites and immigrants. Initially, the growth of the nation’s industrial cities occurred without significant forethought being given to its long-­term effects. Yet in concert with a massive and largely unregulated

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expansion and centralization of industrial production and consumerist enterprise, the mushrooming of urban populations and activities soon outstripped the capabilities of existing city plans. Modern skyscrapers and factories offered one highly visible example of how such overbuilding occurred, as their multiple steel-­supported stories enabled builders to “manufacture” new square footage from thin air, above the city. This overloading created an urban density that older grid plans were usually ill equipped to handle.11 The serial expansion of the city grid created another means for overdevelopment, as the barely regulated replication of both high-­and low-­density blocks expanded the urban footprint beyond the capabilities of city infrastructures. Under the combined shadow of vertical concentration and horizontal sprawl, industries and populations outstripped their cities’ abilities to support them. Crime, poverty, and economic inequality increased. Carts, trolleys, and automobiles choked the streets. The rapid circulation of people and goods upended the rootedness of everyday life. Zoning, taxation, policing, public health, and other forms of bureaucratic control became increasingly difficult to manage. By the turn of the century, many urban specialists recognized that the American city was nearing a state of crisis. Along with this realization came the understanding that ideologies of unfettered growth, especially as manifest in the urban grid form, required rethinking. Cities could no longer be conceived as patterns for open-­ended and unlimited growth; instead, they needed to be understood as cohesive systems whose present and future forms had to be planned as a whole and balanced within a broad range of social and economic considerations. During the first decades of the twentieth century a new emphasis on comprehensive and integrated urban planning gained support among city thinkers, as demonstrated by the publication of numerous studies on city planning, the founding of organizations such as the American City Planning Institute in 1917, and the creation of a handful of comprehensive new city designs such as Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago.12 Likening the task of reenvisioning Chicago to that faced by Haussmann in Paris, Burnham and Bennett explained that the ethos of the modern city-­planning movement had to find inspiration in “the sense of regarding the city as an organic whole and of developing its various units with reference to one another.”13 “Thoughtful people,” Burnham and Bennett elaborated, “are appalled at the results of progress; at the waste in time strength and money which congestion in city streets begets; at the toll of lives taken by disease when sanitary precautions are neglected; and at the frequent outbreaks against law and order which result from narrow and pleasureless lives. So that while the keynote of the nineteenth century was expansion, we of the twentieth century find that our dominant idea is conservation.”14 The process of untrammeled growth that had shaped Chicago’s streets and, by extension, the grid of westward expansion was not sustainable for the future. Coming from an urban design heavyweight like Burnham, the call for “conservation” and the admonishment to “regard the city as a whole” represented an important shift in the practice of

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American city planning. Most centrally, such an approach required that America’s fast-­growing cities be viewed, evaluated, and planned with a synoptic, integrated, and forward-­thinking mentality. The authors lamented that opportunistic real estate speculators, industrialists, and backward-­looking architects had built Chicago too quickly and haphazardly and without concern for social welfare. The Plan of Chicago, by contrast, took the creation of a balanced and integrated city as its central goal and was shaped by the belief that through comprehensive planning, “the city could be an efficient instrument for providing all its people with the best possible conditions for living.” To devise such a plan, Burnham and Bennett completed a far-­ranging survey of the physical and architectural con­ ditions of Chicago in its present circumstances. (Burnham, of course, already possessed a keen understanding of the Chicago cityscape due to his celebrated work for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and numerous other projects).15 They then embarked on a study to understand how conditions in the city might be improved though the application of an overall plan integrating all facets of the urban landscape, from property configuration, architecture, and design aesthetics to street layout, civic administration, and public works. Finally, they “recorded such conclusions in the shape of drawings and texts” that they hoped would “become a guide for the future development of Chicago.”16 When published, the plan was no simple map; it constituted a book of 164 pages with eight chapters, an extensive appendix, and 143 illustrations—­a majority of which were orthogonal and bird’s-­eye views. Burnham and Bennett’s reliance on aerial imagery testified to the efficacy, and indeed the necessity, of such gazes in the reformation of the nation’s urban spaces. Not only did the aerial gaze enable the panoramic and uninterrupted sight lines required to envision a city (especially one so expansive as Chicago) as a single entity, but they also clearly conveyed the expanded conceptual scope required for comprehensive planning. The frontispiece illustration to the book is a case in point (Figure 4.6). Painted by artist and architectural illustrator Jules Guerin, the image adopts a split aerial perspective to depict Chicago in the context of its extended geographic setting on the shore of Lake Michigan. Situated just below the image’s center point and colored in a burnt orange, the city is shown in what is essentially a straight-­down perspective that, in combination with the high altitude of the viewpoint, flattens it into an abstract plan. Surrounding communities, some of them miles distant, also appear from this straight-­down aspect, as do the radiating roadways that Burnham and Bennett envisioned would serve as arteries between the central city and the contiguous countryside. Oddly, Guerin’s orthogonal rigor waned in his representation of the scene’s more natural areas, such as the curving body of Lake Michigan or the rural woodlands, whose weblike fingers grow increasingly elongated and expressive as they flow toward the upper edge of the image. By seeming to angle across the landscape instead of being placed straight down upon it like the city footprint, these lake and forest forms invoke a more animated bird’s-­eye orientation. In doing so, they accentuate a subtle

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Figure 4.6. “Chicago. Bird’s-­Eye View, Showing the Location of the City on the Shores of Lake Michigan, Together with the Smaller Surrounding Towns Connected with Chicago by Radiating Arteries.” Jules Guerin’s bird’s-­eye view of Chicago. From Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Commercial Club, 1909), plate 1 (frontispiece).

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disconnect between the rational order imprinted by the city and the looser, less specific sensibility that permeates the remainder of the illustration. A prescient image, Guerin’s frontispiece reveals many things. Most explicitly, the view encapsulates the radically expanded panopticism nascent in the era’s new order of comprehensive city planning. As the picture’s immense geographic scope suggests, Burnham and Bennett discovered that in the context of industrial modernity, treating the city as a whole required an approach to planning that not only addressed the city as a discrete subject but also encompassed the contiguous region-­wide geography. It was no longer sufficient, as perhaps it had been in the era of Renaissance city views, to conceive of the city as an isolated and autonomous entity. The same technological and social transformations that had enabled Chicago to become a concentrated center for modern activity had in other ways deepened and complicated the relationship between the city as center and the region as periphery. Advanced transportation delivered distant natural and human resources into the city, yet it also facilitated their rapid dispersal back into the region in the form of manufactured goods and suburban dwellers. Communication technologies enabled financiers to extend the influence of urban markets across broad regions, yet they also empowered the dispersal of economic power into locations farther removed from the city center. For example, business activities that once required travel to the central city could now be conducted from a distance. Burnham and Bennett crystallized such linkages in a spherical diagram that traced the tentacle-­ like paths of the railroad lines that connected Chicago to cities across the Midwest (Figure 4.7). The planners certainly intended the image to illustrate the growing dominance of Chicago over its surrounding region, echoing the vision (if not the critical sentiment) of realist writer Frank Norris.17 Yet they also recognized (albeit in a limited way) that this hierarchy was permeable rather than absolute. They wrote, “There exist between this city and outlying towns within a certain radius vital and almost organic relations. The steam and trolley railways and the automobile have opened to the city workers all varieties of life and have made possible to a large proportion of the people a habitation amid what might be healthful and attractive surroundings.”18 Following this logic, both Guerin’s illustration and the more instrumentalist diagram it was probably modeled on (Figure 4.8) embodied Burnham and Bennett’s efforts to foster and control the interpenetration of urban and rural space. The planners explicitly understood that the adjacent countryside offered something more than mere space for the extension of the city plan. It was an area where the “healthful and attractive surroundings” of the countryside might serve as a release valve for the pressures of urban concentration and an antidote to the illnesses of industrial life. Yet like city neighborhoods, the authors quickly admonished, the rural areas surrounding cities were susceptible to real estate speculators driven “to make every dollar invested turn into as many dollars as possible.”19 An effective plan for Chicago, therefore, required an integrated oversight over both the urban block and the regional acre.

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Figure 4.7. “Chicago. Diagram of Location with Regard to the Seven Central States.” Railroad lines connecting Chicago to cities across the Midwest. From Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Commercial Club, 1909), plate 34, page 31.

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Figure 4.8. “Chicago. General Diagram of Exterior Highways Encircling and Radiating from the City.” Diagram of highways around Chicago. From Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Commercial Club, 1909), plate 40, page 41.

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Guerin’s aerial illustration embodied the synoptic ethos of the new urban planning, but it also signaled the conceptual and representational difficulties inherent in attaining that vision. A comparison of Guerin’s more realistic view with the complementary regional diagram in Figure 4.8 makes manifest the representational incompatibilities that erupted when the planners attempted to move from abstract concept to naturalized vision. Composed of simple unadorned lines on an undiffer­ entiated two-­dimensional surface, the diagram implies visual and spatial continuity from city to region. Its markings simply become less dense and more irregular as they radiate from the city, as in the case of country roadways that depart from straight trajectories to follow the winding pathways of rivers. In Guerin’s work, by contrast, the interface of the two spaces invokes a subtle but salient perspectival misalignment between the orthogonally composed city and the bird’s-­eye countryside. One result of this friction is an imposed sense of visual hierarchy that inscribes the city firmly and flatly at the center of the representation while making the countryside appear to curve around it subordinately. Another is a gradual softening of graphic precision from urban to rural sections. The dissipation becomes most pronounced in the upper-­left quadrant of the picture (the place most distant from the city), where Guerin’s style has dissolved from the firm geometry of the city plan to a hazy and impressionistic indistinctness. Practical considerations and the biases of the age explain some of the representational dissonance that existed both within Guerin’s frontispiece and also between it and the other diagrams. In the first place, it is almost certain that Guerin knew less about the broad and distant countryside than about Chicago itself, and because of this his picture became less focused in those areas. He also probably shared the sentiments of Burnham and Bennett, who, like many early twentieth-­century Americans, identified the metropolis as the region’s cultural center and the source of “those standards of commercial integrity, of taste, and knowledge which are the prerequisites of lasting success, and the only real satisfaction of the human mind.”20 Probing deeper, however, it also becomes apparent that Guerin’s image discloses the inadequacy of traditional visualization strategies in the face of a radically expanded notion of urban space and a more ambitiously comprehensive notion of urban–­rural, or what would come to be called regional, planning. Such broadscale efforts demanded a way of looking that enabled the apperception of a field of urban space encompassing both the city grid and the surrounding landscape, both near and distant. Guerin’s picture reflects the artist’s struggle to interweave the abstract rationality of the orthogonal plan—­which though synoptic and accurate was decidedly notional and nonpictorial—­with the embodied sensibility of bird’s-­eye depiction. The uneven perspective of his picture demonstrates the inadequacy of the available modes of perception and planning conventions to the construction of such a vision. Extrapolated, it also indicates the conceptual challenge of such an attempt to figure the city and the country as complementary and interdepen­ dent spatial and cultural configurations. Bridging this conceptual divide became a central project for

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a new generation of city planners, architects, and theorists. Solving the representational question became a task for new technologies of aerial vision. Previous chapters have demonstrated the profound effects of aerial photography on the rural landscape after World War I. Its impact on urban design and planning was equally robust. Recently returned from the battlefields of Europe, the American Beaux-­Arts architect Paul Cret predicted the influence that wartime developments in aerial photography would exert on architecture. He began by outlining the immediate value of the new views, noting that aerial photographs might provide “a new method of representation of executed work” and help architects in “the study of past efforts,” to which they were “endeavoring to add [their] contributions to suit new conditions, new methods of construction, new esthetic requirements.”21 The analytical advantage of aerial photography to the second task, in Cret’s estimation, arose from the new ability of the airborne camera to merge the photograph’s indexical and also realistic detail with the airplane’s comprehensive downward gaze. “Terrestrial photographs,” as Cret called horizontal views, “show well enough one element only of architecture, the elevation. They are powerless to show the plan on account of perspective distortion.” A viewer of horizontal photographs who wanted to perceive the broader configuration of a building and its surroundings would then have to “resort to the geometrical plan, usually lifeless and without color values and shadows, which are just as important an element in the plan as in the elevation.”22 Traditional hand-­drafted plans, Cret elaborated, were also insufficient in other ways: they generally showed proposed improvements rather than actual conditions, they were made up of small, individually drawn sections that often did not fit together to present a unified urban whole, and they lacked specific detail. In practice, little could be gleaned from them in terms of an “actual aspect of the ground.”23 Aerial photography, Cret suggested, defeated these inadequacies through the symbiotic merger of the diagrammatic plan and the naturalistic view, allowing the possibility of urban views that captured “an absolute plan . . . that is correct in every particular” but still animated with a sense of illusionism that had been but “crudely attempted by the so-­called bird’s-­eye views.”24 Aerial photography, in other words, enabled the architect to experience conceptual schemata in living accuracy. Cret’s optimistic assessment of aerial photography typified a growing enthusiasm for aerial views in architecture and even more so in urban planning during the 1920s. During that decade, articles on the benefits of aerial photography proliferated in professional journals of architecture, city planning, engineering, and municipal governance, and sessions on its many applications became common­ place at professional meetings.25 From the business side, the companies involved in the production of aerial photographs—­particularly that of aerial survey pioneer Sherman Fairchild—­promoted the combination of aircraft and camera as a panacea for almost all urban planning and administration issues. In 1921 the Fairchild Corporation undertook a complete vertical photographic survey of Manhattan (Figure 4.9; also discussed in chapter 2). Composed of one hundred overlapping photographic

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exposures shot at a scale of roughly 833 feet to an inch, the resulting mosaic immediately became the most exacting and comprehensive image of a modern city ever produced. It was reproduced in national newspapers, whose editors and audiences alike could not hide their fascination. In professional circles, Fairchild used the image as a centerpiece of his business promotions, combining fact and hyperbole to outline the advantages of using aerial photography in nearly all facets of urban planning and management. An article authored by Fairchild sales manager Jack Desha from 1923, for example, proclaimed that Manhattan’s commissioner of public works hung a full print of the survey mosaic photograph on his office wall and declared it the “most valuable map of the island of Manhattan in the possession of his department.”26 In addition to being useful in the administration of public works, such survey views, as championed by Fairchild, had additional applications that ranged from local property administration (for example, in taxation, apportionment, zoning, property-­ line determination, and commercial promotion) to more sophisticated functions in areas such as comprehensive mapping, planning, and other efforts at sociospatial configuration. Oblique photographs, Desha continued, provided useful and necessary complements to such survey photographs by enabling planners to view their targets from vantage points more closely aligned with those of everyday looking. Although the Fairchild literature regularly remarked that aerial photography would not replace ground-­based surveying and mapping, it remained optimistic that these older labor-­and cost-­intensive techniques could be made secondary, thus freeing city architects and administrators to concentrate their time and resources on more forwarding-­thinking plans and improvements. As early literature on aerial photography makes clear, many ideas about the medium’s potential developed in response to practical needs. In an era when cities grew faster than municipal authorities could manage and engineer them, aerial photography promised to be an accurate, economical, speedy, and efficient tool. Time and effort, Fairchild and others promised, could be saved at every level by

Figure 4.9. Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, Aerial Survey, Manhattan Island, New York City, 1921. Remote-­sensing image on six sheets, 56 × 253 cm; sheets 56 × 42 cm and 56 × 43 cm. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G3804.N4:2M3A4 1921 .F4.

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aerial photography. Urban maps that once required months to create via ground-­based surveying could now be photographed over a few days and still be far more detailed and realistic. At the other end of the planning spectrum, because the photographic survey resembled older maps and plans, showing “all of the detail that is on the ground . . . in a form that the eye is accustomed to see even though from an unusual angle,” people presumed it would speed public acceptance of planning measures.27 Because aerial photos leveraged the mechanical indexicality of the camera in place of the graphic symbolism of the hand-­drawn map, its images seemed more real and less constructed. Desha proposed that this sense of photographic factuality meant that time would be saved in “convincing boards and organizations of laymen as to the exact changes proposed by the engineer.”28 Moreover, the proponents of the aerial view believed that by adding the illusion of three dimensions via stereoscopic technology, their imagery would soon decrease the conceptual distance between the cityscape and its representation even further. The 1920s and 1930s saw a steady increase in the use of aerial photographs for a variety of practical urban chores. As Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago demonstrated, a growing number of city thinkers had already concluded that the mere improvement of the city layouts already in place was an insufficient answer to the problems of the day. Urban modernization could not be accomplished piecemeal through the management of details; it required comprehensive evaluation and farsighted restructuring. Because such efforts required the visualization of the city and even its region as a whole (as the Chicago plan had demonstrated), aerial photography was soon taken up as a key instrument. American city planner Guy Wilfrid Hayler observed in a 1920 article based on his recent flight over Green Bay, Wisconsin, that comprehensive city planning in the era prior to aviation had required the planner to possess a “rare gift of visualization” and the ability to “construct the picture [of the whole] from a knowledge of its parts.” Faced with such a daunting visual task, Hayler observed that most planners inevitably became mired in the concentrated but tightly focused details of the discrete section or component of the city at the cost of the whole. By contrast, he noted, “the aeroplane does not give that confusion of detail one is so apt to get on the ground; the general plan stands sharply out.” Further differentiating the aerial view from other kinds of “constructed” images, he elaborated, “Maps and drawings cannot give just this result, because they cannot adequately differentiate the old buildings from the new, or, indeed, show anything except in a conventional and mechanical manner.”29 Only the airplane, he concluded, offered the possibility of perceiving the whole of city space with the scope, fine detail, accuracy, and realism necessary to match the comprehensive and trans­ formative aspirations of modern planning. The panoptic yearning of Guerin’s illustration, once only a vision, was now being actualized in photographs like Fairchild’s New York survey. In most respects, Hayler’s prognostication on the practicality of the aerial gaze echoed those of Fairchild and others. Yet as an early proponent of comprehensive city planning and an adherent of

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the turn-­of-­the-­century English New Towns movement, Hayler went beyond Fairchild’s mostly functionalist estimations of aerial photography to crystallize the viewpoint’s more radical design possibilities. His article was among the first to articulate that the aerial gaze enabled planners to see the city not only better but also differently. In particular, he recognized in aerial looking a potent way to perceive and represent the need for a more systematic and integrated conceptualization of urban space. “From the air,” he wrote, “the value of space, fresh air and light are realized much more than on the ground, where one is too near the picture to comprehend it properly. . . . Buildings seen in bulk suggest questions at once—­open space? residences? adequate roads? factory locations? and so on.” One strives to reconcile all these features in the scheme of things.”30 By delineating the typical features of the industrial city as a series of open-­ended provocations, Hayler signaled the inadequacy of these forms—­as they existed currently—­to satisfy more essential human needs. From the air the results of poor planning stood out with a clarity that could neither be denied nor, Hayler implied, answered with half measures. Fortunately, he believed that the distant and unimbricated vantages of the aerial view also provided compelling insight into the new form the modern city needed to take. In this sense, his remark about the aerial view’s disclosure of “the value of space” embodied both an admonishment and a prescription for change. Aerial photography crystallized already incipient beliefs that under the new conditions of modernity, space could no longer be understood simply as a void to be filled by unfettered growth. Rather, space needed to be considered as a foundational and finite resource whose thoughtful shaping and management became vital to the realization of successful cities. Space (land) had always been at the crux of American identity, and the city was no exception. Yet in the rush to urbanism, its primacy as both a shaping condition and a cultural metaphor had been displaced, or at least significantly reduced, by other factors.31 The emergence of comprehensive city planning represented an important reconsideration of space, its formulation, and its meaning in urban discourse, with aerial vision as the primary medium. The configuration that this new urban spatiality needed to take, however, was not immediately clear to planners, social thinkers, or the public. In the context of early twentieth-­century America, after all, space had become an increasingly relativistic concept. The settlement of the frontier had closed it, technology had rescaled and interconnected it, skyscrapers had concentrated it, and aerial vision had objectified it and made it palpable. What did seem clear was that the old spatial concepts and policies of loosely planned and opportunistic expansion offered few solutions and in fact added substantially to the disfunctionality of modern city space and life. Urban planners, and especially architects, set out to create new visions that would not simply mitigate the deleterious conditions of the nation’s overbuilt and outmoded cities, but would instead provide future-­minded templates for a new kind of American urbanism. For the most machine

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minded of city shapers, this meant making cities more free-­flowing and frictionless; greasing the tracks for the circulation of goods, resources, and information; enabling the concentration and projection of authority; and guaranteeing that the mechanisms of modernity—­both real and metaphorical—­achieved ever-­greater heights of productivity and organization. This often meant thinking of cities as machines. For others, the success of the city was better measured by the quality of life it supported. As one influential 1929 urban study concluded, “There is no doubt that the planning movement in America today is a great social movement, rooted in the desire to give to present and future generations a chance to be healthier and happier, a chance to have the inspiration and strength to make a greater contribution to the common welfare while enjoying the balance of work and play which develops individual and social character.”32 Many architects did not see these two visions as opposed or mutually exclusive. To the contrary, the reigning belief seemed to be that the machinic and social ideals of modernity, if properly conceived and articulated, might achieve a perfect balance of technological efficiency and human fulfillment. To accomplish this, however, planners had to relinquish older tendencies to practice city planning in piecemeal and additive ways and, more important, had to forego the ages-­old understanding of cities as distinct and self-­contained entities. They needed to treat cities more like landscapes and less like architecture. Prompted in part by aerial vision, they began doing so. As architectural historian Andrew Shanken has demonstrated, during the interwar years architects began looking beyond their duties as “form-­givers and designers of those discrete art objects called buildings” to imagine themselves as “architect-­planners, world-­makers, and organizers of vast activities, materials, and geographic regions.”33 Architects, in other words, began to reconceive their work in light of the shifting spatial conditions of twentieth-­century life. While some would see ever-­greater buildings as the solution (to the extent of treating individual buildings as microcosmic cities),34 others began to recognize that in the context of an increasingly integrated and interconnected American landscape, the stand-­ alone plan (be it for a building or a city) had limited potential. The concept of the city had to be adapted to this new spatial and social reality, and its form reassessed, reenvisioned, and remade in whole. Fl ig ht, Spat i al Cri t i qu e, and The Disappearing City At first glance, Frank Lloyd Wright was not an obvious candidate to join the new breed of architect-­ planners or to craft one of the most far-­reaching visions for remaking the American city. A generation older than most interwar architects, Wright’s status at the cusp of the 1930s derived primarily from his innovative upper-­class suburban homes and a handful of equally revolutionary commercial and civic buildings. Consisting mostly of free-­standing structures for individual patrons, these realized

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works had little to suggest that Wright identified the entire city as an architect’s proper subject. His writings and drawings, however, tell a different story. By the late 1920s in particular, Wright had become increasingly attentive to the expanding composition—­visual, spatial, and social—­of architecture in modernity.35 Partially articulated in his writings from that time, this awareness fully coalesced in the lengthy discussion that Wright laid out in his 1932 work The Disappearing City. In this book, Wright treated the modern-­day city as a single and unified structure whose categorical failure could only be perceived and overcome through a panoptic critique and an equally totalizing transformation. Like many modernist manifestos, Wright’s text began with a scathing diagnosis of current con­ ditions, in this case the overgrown and parasitic conditions endemic to the industrial metropolis. His opening line, inscribed under the subtitle “On Earth,” immediately establishes the villain of his narrative: centralization. “The value of this earth, as a man’s heritage,” Wright wrote, “is pretty far gone from him now in the cities centralization has built. And centralization has built all of them.” The modern city, he elaborated, had become a “whirling dervish” whose “surge and mechanical roar” had captivated its dwellers while displacing older orders of natural space, “the song of birds, the wind in the trees, animal cries and the songs of [his] loved ones.” The exhilaration of the city as dervish, which in Wright’s estimation was what initially drew people in, was in fact a subterfuge. It concealed the city’s actual and more calculated function as a vortex that swallowed its citizens by orphaning them from nature and stripping them of their creativity, potency, and individual will. Trapped like an animal in a warren, the individual succumbs to the city, whose power is that of abstraction. The citizen is reduced to “a puller of levers, a presser of buttons of vicarious power,” and a “restless tenant” bereft of self-­determination and forced into the lockstep of the “landlord, the moneylord, the machinelord.”36 By Wright’s estimation, what was at stake in the metropolis was nothing less than the free will and individualism that he saw as essential characteristics of a democratic American citizenry. Earnest if grandiose, Wright’s opening salvo set the stage for a multifaceted indictment of modernization and its effects on the American socioeconomic system. Wright was not alone in mounting such a critique, especially in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 1929. Nor was he unique in his identification of the city as the foundation of this system, an association made by a litany of social thinkers, a list that began in the nineteenth century and continued through the 1930s.37 What set The Disappearing City apart from other efforts in both social criticism and planning was Wright’s belief that the disposition of modern American culture was intrinsically, even causally, linked to its spatial form. (This also aligned him with prevailing modernist beliefs). Wright asserted this conviction near the end of the book’s introductory section, where, having pitched his fulmination against the city in social and philosophical terms, he abruptly shifted to a more explicitly formal and spatial language. “Centralization,” he concluded, “is centripetal force beyond control, exaggerated by

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vicarious powers. . . . Natural horizontality is gone and the citizen condemns himself to an unnatural, sterile verticality—­upended by his own success.”38 Wright’s invocation of a directional tension—­specifically the horizontal poised against the ver­ tical—­is rich in implications. As a trope, the supplantation of a “natural” and thereby productive horizontality by a “sterile” verticality represented a shift in cultural beliefs from the expansionist frontier mind-­set that had shaped the American landscape since colonization toward something more constricted. Wright perceived this reversal both in philosophical and historically specific terms. Fundamentally, the architect believed that human instinct produced two cultural possibilities, conser­ vative and fearful “cave dwellers” and mobile and freedom-­loving “wandering tribes.”39 Each group was concerned with propagating its culture: the former, invested in the safety of controlled and bounded spaces, became city builders; the latter, delighting in open space and mobility, became nomads. Though he viewed them as historical constants, Wright believed these two human “natures” had erupted into heightened conflict in the context of America’s rapid urbanization. As the American frontier closed, culture industrialized, and cities grew, the horizontality that Wright saw as intrinsic to the nation’s natural order and culture of individualism gave way to verticality, with its destructive artificiality, abstraction, and depersonalization. Mechanization, which Wright viewed as itself a positive force that unfortunately had been hobbled by those who malignantly deployed it in the service of concentration, only exacerbated the situation.40 As if to emblematize the sense of America as a nation directionally divided, Wright opened his 1932 article “America Tomorrow” (a prelude to The Disappearing City) with a pair of complementary drawings by Ernest Born (Figure 4.10).41 In the ground view, the city appeared as an overlapping wall of ominous skyscrapers. From the air, it emerged as a spacious and geometrically pleasing plane. In some respects, the opening imagery of “America Tomorrow” returns us to the earliest moments of frontier settlement, when the undefined terrain of the prairies frustrated horizontal vision and clarity could be achieved only from above. While a frontier (this time of American modernity) was again at issue, the circumstances were reversed. The problem of the nineteenth century had been that the landscape was too indeterminate, its horizon overly broad and too distant to be contained by the settler’s gaze. Inversely, Wright’s critique of the vertical city held that it was fatally overbuilt: filled with towering structures that blocked the horizon from view and thus condemned inhabitants to congested and constricted lives, blinding them to the democratic rights of freedom and self-­ determination. For Wright, these prerogatives were synonymous with expansive space. Born’s inset drawing of skyscrapers gives visual form to Wright’s critique by presenting the city as a visually impenetrable wall. By contrast, his larger bird’s-­eye view reaffirms a sense of ordered, expansive possibility conveyed by similar bird’s-­eye townscapes of an epoch earlier. Angled down onto the landscape but also pointing toward the horizon, the second view merges the stability of a geometrically

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Figure 4.10. Ernest Born, “Today . . . Tomorrow.” Opening illustration for Frank Lloyd Wright, “America Tomorrow,” American Architect 141, no. 2607 (May 1932): 14–­15.

ordered man-­made landscape with the promise of limitless futurity. Viewers could marvel at the order that oversight has brought to the immediate landscape, yet the purposeful lines of parallel and intersecting roadways also pull attention to the far edge of space. Like his frontier forebears, Wright’s ideal of American development entailed both looking down and spreading out. In the accompanying text, the architect transformed this visual logic into cultural metaphor: “It is in the nature of the auto­ mobile that the city spreads out thus and far away. It is in the nature of flying that the city should disappear.”42 The city as concentrated form, and more importantly as centralized idea, was anathema to Wright’s notion of democratic freedom.

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Beyond metaphor, however, the interplay of vertical and horizontal directionalities also played a more functional role in the development of Wright’s critique of the city. While one might conclude that Wright’s disavowal of modern verticality would also poison him to contemporary modes of aerial vision as a concept and tool, this was decidedly not the case. The verticality that Wright detested was the kind that projected from the ground up: manufacturing real estate out of thin air, concentrating space and authority, fostering material and social abstraction, separating the individual from the land to render him immobile and nearsighted. Aerial vision, Wright understood, had the opposite effect. The airplane offered a sense of spiritual freedom: a modern apotheosis of Wright’s notion of nomadic experience and a new frontier for mobility. It presented a means to escape from the city rather than to become trapped within it. The aerial gaze enacted a similar, albeit visual, liberation in its ability to put the earth back into focus in ways that revealed the order or disarray of American culture’s relationship to it. In a passage on the role that transportation technologies would play in the transformation of urban life, Wright observed, “Facility to roam the sky or ground and yet live with the perfect freedom of vision that will relate him to the ground and all that the ground should mean to him, is already possible.”43 Ranking the airplane ahead of even the automobile, Wright celebrated its mobility, its freedom of vision, and its value as a tool for transforming spatial understanding. His decision to illustrate The Disappearing City almost exclusively with aerial photographs further testified to the deep interrelationship he perceived between visionary planning and aerial thinking. Though there were only six “interpretive photographs” (Wright explicitly abstained from calling them “illustrations”), they enacted a visual narrative that propelled and actualized the architect’s critique of the city as both design and cultural form. Printed in full-­page stand-­alone format and evenly interspersed throughout the text, the pictures incarnate the evaluations and attitudes of the textual passages that surround them. The strategically chosen frontispiece (Figure 4.1) exemplifies the adeptness of Wright’s visual rhetoric. Produced by Fairchild Aerial Surveys, the oblique airplane view shows the New York City skyline enveloped in a smoky industrial haze. Wright deployed the photograph, a literal enactment of the book’s title, The Disappearing City, as both evidence of and indictment against the choking force of concentration and verticality. Given its key placement at the beginning of the book and immediately preceding Wright’s aggressive opening salvo, we can imagine that he considered the image both poignant and damning. In the photograph, skyscrapers—­which Wright viewed as abominations but which others understood as embodiments of modern potency—­appear to be scattered and isolated, as the fabled verticality of the Manhattan cityscape is obscured by the oppressive haze. The street grid with its circulating automobiles, thronging pedestrians, and illuminated facades is similarly negated. In contrast, a limited parting of haze in the lower-­left portion of the image reveals the smokestacks of several factories in striking clarity. Wright probably delighted in

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this element of the picture because it neutralized the romanticism that often adhered to veiling industrial mists, which had become a standard trope in early-­century urban photography. For Wright, the aerial photograph revealed such sentiment as a chimera. This was not a city cloaked in wonder; rather, it was choked and rendered invisible by its own pollution and congestion. Wright used the totalized yet visually occluded status of the view in the Fairchild photograph to display the modern city as systematically compromised. The second photograph in the sequence (Figure 4.2), also of Manhattan, moved to a lower and less distant birds-­eye vantage point in an effort to present an individualized and embedded visual critique of the city’s congested interior. Captioned “Find the Citizen,” the photograph (possibly taken from atop a building rather than from an airplane) lowers its oblique angle in order to better enmesh the viewer in the concentration of the city pattern. Permeated by a light haze, the picture depicts a dark and distinct foreground replete with shorter (but still multistory) structures pressed into a close and unbroken geometric formation. Midlevel buildings of perhaps fifteen to twenty stories occupy the middle ground, and the horizon is a continuous curtain of shadowy grey high-­rises punctuated by occasional skyscrapers. The horizontal striations of the sky offer a soft contrast to the dark verticals of the buildings that project into them. Rather than providing visual outlet, however, the relative openness of the photograph’s upper portion further highlights the overcrowded cityscape below, where the only sliver of open ground—­a broad boulevard—­appears as a diagonal snippet at the extreme right. Acting strategically, Wright inserted this picture into a section of his text where he argued that the individual was the necessary cornerstone of a revitalized modernity.44 By transforming the city into a jumbled and impenetrable field of buildings, one without measurable open space or even visible avenues of circulation, the photograph constructs a vision wherein neither viewers nor, by extension, inhabitants can locate themselves as individuals. In this way, the photograph powerfully reiterated Wright’s critique. Looking from above enabled a ready perception of both the collapse of horizontal mobility and the threat of vertical concentration. Wright’s decision to deploy specifically oblique aerial photographs at the start of his text shrewdly matched his intentions. The closer, bird’s-­eye alignment of the two views to the more usual prospects of everyday on-­the-­ground looking would have made them more easily accessible to the readers of his era, while their palpable photographic realism effectively supplemented the assertions of his text. Yet Wright and his publisher also understood that the straight-­down, aerial-­survey view also possessed symbolic and diagnostic powers that could be used to great rhetorical effect. As his critique of centralization deepened and particularized in the sections that followed, Wright invoked two more vertically oriented photographs. The first (Figure 4.3) appeared at page 38 amid a passage in which the architect had drawn in from a general critique of urban centralization to focus more specifically on the centralization of transportation systems and its ruinous effects on human life, a

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condition that he derisively described as “the traffic problem.” Taken from a high elevation, the photograph depicts a radial, planned European-­style village. In the context of Wright’s argument against concentration, the significance of the image is unmistakable. Like a spider’s web, the radiating roads and pathways direct activity inward and focus it on the town’s circular center, while outlying lands appear bare and unoccupied. In Wright’s estimation, a plan that fostered such con­vergence and centralization was damning both to a society’s transportation logistics and also, more importantly, to its social structure. In functional terms, centralized transportation systems created bottlenecks that inhibited the equal and efficient distribution of goods. As a social structure, the radial form compelled its inhabitants to look and think only toward the center. As a result people lost the understanding of the world as horizon and instead turned inward, piling up human activity rather than dispersing it across the land. The photograph illustrated this critique perfectly; it was the vortex writ small. The caption, “Futile Pattern. The Present City,” proves that Wright judged such inward concentration to be the reigning model for “present” urban organization. It also conveys Wright’s negative estimation of such concentrating schemes, which he viewed as representative of a modern capitalist ideology whose ambitions were little more than warmed-­over monarchism, antithetical to the aims of American democracy.45 Whereas “Futile Pattern,” with its European-­village imagery, seemed to situate concentration as an issue with deep historical roots, a second transportation-­focused image reveals the exponential amplification of the problem in the context of industrial modernity. Placed in a section of text entitled “The Great Traffic Station,” this photograph presents a fully vertical view of a railroad switchyard (probably also European in origin). Located in the midst of a dense industrial landscape whose buildings line its edges, the yard appears as a nearly indecipherable network of individual rail lines branching from a central lower trunk into three smaller flows. Symbolizing traffic on a denser and even more centralized level than the radial village, the image gives visual form to Wright’s assessment of modern and centralized transportation systems as little more than technological conglomerators that stifle the flow of goods through the empowerment of centralized distribution centers. The photograph crystallizes his sentiment by indexing the process through which concentration is achieved and suggesting the exercise of authority inherent to it. By focusing on the point where scores of individual rail lines converge, the photograph demonstrates how the railways draw in material (and value) from the countryside and concentrate it in the hands of a few. In Wright’s estimation, centralized distribution displaced the more efficient and democratic modes of direct, local, and small-­scale exchange. From the air, the centralized railway system no longer appears as a benign technology; it is instead revealed as a vast and artificial system geared to the concentration of materials, people, wealth, and power. Yet rather than attacking the rail technology—­Wright viewed machines as tools that could be applied to either good or bad ends—­he directed his opprobrium toward the schemata

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that guided its use. In Wright’s view, the tendency of many planners to link efficiency to ever-­larger and more concentrated systems locked even the most ambitious modernization efforts into a pattern of abstraction and failure. Correspondence between Wright and the publisher of The Disappearing City, William Payson, shows that both men viewed the aerial photographs as an integral part of the book. While the two oblique views had been on Wright’s mind from the beginning, the use of vertical images required some negotiation.46 An exchange of letters dated in the summer of 1932 shows that on the eve of publication Wright suggested replacing the two “foreign” (by which he probably meant not representing American scenes) vertical photographs with illustrations of his own recent architectural work. Payson disagreed, however, noting, “Although the architectural photographs [of Wright’s work] are intensely interesting it somehow limits the scope of the book if we use so few. Your text matter and the illus­ trations we have are so stimulating to the imagination in a broad way that it seems to me a mistake to get down to cases.”47 In effect, Payson reminded Wright of aerial photography’s efficacy as means to frame the issue of urban form in the most expansive and engaging of terms. Handwritten at the bottom of Payson’s letter, the architect’s speedy acquiescence to the publisher’s statement—­which required the tacit demotion of his own designs in favor of a more universal imagery—­underscored Wright’s own appreciation of the potency of aerial gaze. Wright’s short-­lived proposal to replace the two vertical views may be partially explained as a desire to foreground his own designs. Yet it also reveals important incompatibilities between his own midwestern aerial sensibility and other formulations of urban space, equally comprehensive and ambitious, that emerged during the period. For many modernist architect-­planners, the aerial gaze invoked an almost fever-­pitch desire to streamline, systematize, and verticalize the city. Le Corbusier’s aerially inspired plans for a modernized urban space composed of skyscrapers, centralized transportation, and standardized, machinelike living spaces epitomized this architectural trajectory.48 Wright, whose ideological and architectural disagreements with Le Corbusier first became public in 1928, disparaged such plans as anathema to modern efficiency and, more important, to the human spirit.49 These denunciations carried forward into The Disappearing City, where, rather than naming Le Corbusier specifically, Wright leveled a categorical attack against all architecture of centralization and disindividualization. Yet even if unnamed, Le Corbusier could be easily recognized as a central antagonist. In one derisively tinged passage on the improvements proposed “by modernism,” Wright observed that a plan envisioning “1000 people to the ‘hectare’ is looking not so far ahead. That is, now, 990 too many.”50 More than coincidentally, those numbers represented the exact proportions proposed in Le Corbusier’s 1923 design for the reconstruction of Paris. Wright’s further musing, “But why try to make buildings look as hard as machines?” likewise referred pointedly, if anonymously, to Le Corbusier’s famous (or infamous) description of the modern house as “a machine to live in.”51

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Prickliness aside, Wright’s argument resided not so much with Le Corbusier as an individual but, rather, with the orientation toward modernity that he espoused. As architectural historian Robert Fishman observed, both Wright and Le Corbusier recognized the city as the “natural home of centralized power.”52 Likewise, both believed that existing cities were outmoded and incapable of meeting the technological and social possibilities of the new age. Yet where Wright saw centralization as a threat to individualism and therefore detrimental to modern life, Le Corbusier believed the opposite. He sought to enhance urban centralization through the implementation of systems of rationalized order and technology at a previously unimaginable scale. He imagined that a totalized system of industrial life controlled by concentrated nodal cities would create conditions of harmony and order in which the human spirit might flourish. For Wright, such an approach destroyed individualism by deploying the tools of modernity in ways that consecrated the system (and especially the city) as the determinant form. Its human inhabitants became mere component parts, or as he described it, “unit[s]—­no emphasis on individuality—­compelled to revolve around the common center.”53 Thus, Le Corbusier’s more centralized and vertical hierarchy of spatial and social order clashed with Wright’s more horizontal and democratic notions. It is possible that Wright may have initially balked at the inclusion of the vertical aerial photographs precisely because of their look of mechanistic and objective instrumentalism. Though the views deftly illustrated the causal relationship Wright perceived between centralized spatial designs and verticalized social relations, they did so in a visual format that may have seemed, at least in Wright’s eyes, to authorize these problematic ideas. The Disappearing City’s fifth illustration, a pointedly grounded photograph of a cultivated rural landscape captioned “Beyond the Vortex,” supports such a contention (Figure 4.11). Pictured in portrait format and from a worm’s-­eye perspective, the image foregrounds a bonneted countrywoman on its left edge. Basket in hand, the figure walks along a curving windrow of mowed wheat or oats toward a haystack whose base aligns neatly with the ground line created by the contrasting shades of fore and middle ground fields. The image is angled deftly to give the illusion that a group of figures seated on the haystack also sit atop the distant horizon line. The foreground terrain emerges in sharp and palpable detail, while the middle hillside appears as a darker, striation-­filled horizontal band. The sky constitutes roughly two thirds of the image and is dominated by an immense white cloud that gives way at the top border to a final band of deep hue. In subject matter the photograph asserted ruralism; in composition it espoused horizontality and connection to the ground. To be clear, Wright’s shift in visual perspective from the vertical to the horizontal did not amount to a wholesale repudiation of aerial vision as a tool or a concept. It did, however, represent a powerful statement of spatial and social ideology. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Wright did not use aerial views to envision grand skyscraper architecture or to seed plans that further empowered urban centralization. Instead, aerial perspectives offered the architect a means for reconnecting to the

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Figure 4.11. “Beyond the Vortex.” From Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: William Farquar Payson, 1932), facing page 66.

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horizontality that he saw as essential for understanding the landscape as a natural form and shaping it to the needs of modern human experience. In essence, aerial vision became a means to reincarnate another—­and in Wright’s estimation, all too quickly receding—­model for American spatiality: that of the frontier and Jeffersonian agrarianism, especially as manifest in the rural Midwest. For Wright, the tested spatial patterns and philosophic ideals of democratic agrarianism offered the best prospect for reinventing urban space. The future of the city, Wright’s “Beyond the Vortex” photograph suggests, is to be found in the country. Wright’s ruralism has too often been characterized as naively antiurban and sentimentally antimodernist.54 While some passages of The Disappearing City do cast urban–­rural relations as something like a pitched battle (with the city as a corrupting force), on the whole such an attitude underestimates both Wright’s intellectual program and, in the larger picture, the importance of agrarianism in the development of American modernity.55 As we have already seen, the rural landscape (especially that of the Midwest) emerged from schemes of incredible rationalization and abstraction that suffused its culture with the spatial and social forms of advanced industrialism. What Wright saw in the country­side was an alternative grounding for the development of industrial life—­one basednot in the inward-­directed and concentrating imperatives of the industrial city but, rather, in the dispersed spaces, “organic” planning, and horizontally expansive principles that Wright understood as the core elements of “democracy,” by which he essentially meant Jeffersonianism. The problem of the city and of modernity as vortex emerged directly from its abandonment of democratic agrarianism. Channeling Jefferson, Wright declared in the opening pages of The Disappearing City, “Our own ideal state, Democracy, was originally conceived as some organic unity—­that is to say—­the free growth of many individuals as units free in themselves, functioning together in a unity of their making. This is the natural ideal of democracy we now need to emphasize and live up to in order to regain the ground we have lost to the big cities centralization has built.”56 The physical space of the modern landscape was the explicit material of Wright’s idealism, and time was its invisible essence. Like most machine-­age enthusiasts, Wright was a strong proponent of technology as a means to transform the everyday experience of time: to speed up the production of goods and the movement of people, to make communication instantaneous and direct, and to even out the temporal disparities that had long seemed inevitable between the up-­to-­date urban center and the lagging rural hinterlands. Beyond such direct manipulations of time, however, Wright proposed a more metaphysical reconsideration of modern temporality. Whereas the general ethos of much of early twentieth-­century architecture pointed unbendingly toward the future, Wright understood looking forward to involve a complicated balance of embracing the present while also thinking back.57 A formal modernist, Wright had little love for what he viewed as overly embellished, derivative, and ineffi­ cient architecture of the late nineteenth century. He believed, however, that the American cultural past

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held the formative ideologies and spirit necessary for bringing new clarity to a physically congested and conceptually calcified industrial urbanism. Wright’s modernism (if we choose to call it that) centered on a belief that the time-­tested ideals and patterns of American life could be leveraged alongside contemporary forms to craft an encompassing and effective new design for American space and culture. Wright understood as well as anyone in 1932 America the enduring resonance of Jeffersonian agrarianism as a social and spatial ideal. Born into a family of middle-­class Wisconsin farmers, his childhood had been shaped by his experience as the son and grandson of pioneers. That he published his first autobiography, with its copious references to his midwestern upbringing, in the same year as The Disappearing City demonstrates the degree to which not only rural space but also rural life was on his mind as he formulated his critique of the city.58 Indeed, Wright used his autobiography to naturalize key components of his architectural practice, posing them as discoveries derived from his nineteenth-­ century agrarian childhood. He ascribed the revelation of his core philosophy of organic architecture—­ the belief that design must promote harmony between human experience and the natural environment—­to his rural upbringing.59 He claimed to have worked out defining qualities of his later design work, rhythm for example, through his own experiences laboring on the farm. “Any monotonous task involving repetition of movement has its rhythm. . . . Binding grain and shocking it, or pitching bundles to the wagons and racks. Pitching hay, hoeing, dropping corn with a ‘checker.’ Cultivating corn as the green hills passed regularly four feet apart between shovels—­planted four feet apart each way.”60 Coincidentally perhaps, four by four (miles) later served as the standard of measurement in Wright’s vision for a new urban form that grew out of his The Disappearing City manifesto, Broadacre City. Like most historical writing, autobiography is a way to narrate present concerns through the filter of a formative past. Thus, in an era wracked by uncertainty, Wright’s return to his roots was not necessarily a retreat into sentimentality. Rather, it represented an effort to refigure the problems of the present through the familiar—­and in Wright’s estimation, successful—­forms of the past.61 In this sense, Wright’s telling of the rural genesis of his sense of rhythm in his autobiography is a canny example of using the past as a template for shaping meaning in the present. By resituating repetition—­a trait the architect vilified in the context of the industrial city, as well as in much of artistic modernism—­as a core feature of an agrarian social and spatial ideal, Wright negated one framework of meaning while simultaneously instituting another. Such was the case also with Wright’s engagement with modernist verticality and its prevalent prospect, the airplane view. In Wright’s hands, urbanism ceased to be about growth up and was instead reascribed to the old frontier trope of the horizon. Aerial looking was most valuable not for the way it prompted verticalization but, rather, for the way it encouraged citizens to see far and spread out. Turning the logic of the skyscraper against itself, the architect wrote in The Disappearing City, “Any ride high into the air in any elevator to-­day only shows [the modern subject] how far he can go on the ground. And it is this view of the horizon

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that gives him the desire to go.”62 Here, the visual perspicacity offered by the elevated view provoked a rediscovery of democratic individualism in the form of freedom of movement and, more important, the ability to command one’s own space. For Wright, the building blocks of social order were not to be stacked atop one another but, rather, set out side by side. Community, he believed, would emerge organically as an effect of individual achievement as like-­minded and self-­fulfilled inhabitants came together not all at once as a mass but, rather, in more even and measured ways. Hearkening back to Jeffersonian agrarianism, Wright envisioned the solution to modernity as a grid. Th e Broadac re Plan and Jeff er s onia n Ur banis m Wright was not alone in proposing a return to agrarianism as a means to overcome the social and spatial ills of modern city life. In America, such philosophies traced back at least to the end of the nineteenth century, when they were espoused in works ranging from Turner’s writings on the frontier to the philosophies of “land tax” proponent Henry George.63 Wright firmly believed that the fortunes of American democracy were inextricably linked to issues of the land, and he was among a cadre of American intellectuals—­from back-­to-­the-­land proponents such as Ralph Borsodi to regionalists such as the Southern Agrarians or midwesterner Grant Wood—­who worried that the centralizing imperatives of modernity were the rock against which core Jeffersonian values of self-­ sufficiency and like-­minded individualism would be broken.64 Joining Borsodi and the various rural regionalists (and in a different way, as we shall see, Lewis Mumford), Wright advocated for—­and began designing—­a spatial plan that would reintegrate rural space and values into the machinery of American life. Titles like The Disappearing City and Borsodi’s This Ugly Civilization (1929) and Flight from the City (1933) notwithstanding, the goal was not to expunge modernization altogether, though this charge is often leveled against thinkers and movements that looked toward the rural in the 1930s. Rather, Wright hoped to stem its most damaging aspects through a managed reintegration of time-­ tested rural values into current social and spatial forms. “Industrial civilization,” Borsodi wrote in 1933, “is either on the verge of collapse or of rebirth on a new social basis. Men and women who desire to escape from the dependence upon the present industrial system and who have no desire to substitute dependence upon a controlled state system, are beginning to experiment with a way of living which is neither city life nor farm life, but which is an effort to combine the advantages and to escape the disadvantages of both.”65 Borsodi’s ideas mirrored Wright’s in several aspects: a prediction of the demise of industrial life and a call for a new social basis, a demand for decentralization of power (including the tacit critique of left-­leaning socialist solutions, whose reliance on centralized state authority made them also antithetical to Jeffersonian individualist democracy), and the proposal of a seemingly natural, populist solution in the form of rural–­urban hybridization.

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While the underpinnings for Borsodi’s and Wright’s efforts toward rural–­urban hybridization were cultural and philosophical, the forum for their enactment was decidedly spatial and aerial. In part, this meant hearkening back to a long-­standing American spatial mythology, traced from Jeffer­ son, Emerson, and Thoreau to George and Whitman, who identified nature—­and more specifically the experience of individual landholding and cultivation—­as the basis of harmonious social configurations.66 Yet as architectural historian George Ciucci has demonstrated, the ruralist discourse that emerged in the 1920s was significantly more than a yearning for transcendentalism.67 The desire for modernity among even the most ardent proponents of rurality remained intense, especially when it concerned technology. While Borsodi, for example, thought the antidote to urban centralization was a return to an agrarian model of individual land ownership, self-­sufficiency, and local exchange, he also maintained that technologies held a central place in such a program. He envisioned that machineries of power, mobility, and interconnection would play a key role in decentralization by fostering the development of small-­scale community-­based industries, evening out the distribution of capital and resources, and integrating rural areas into national life. Borsodi’s 1932–­33 study for a new model homesteading community, the Dayton Homesteads, embodied his ideal of Jeffersonian idealism and modern technology drawn together in a unified modern vision.68 Laid out on a 160-­acre plot located near Dayton, Ohio, and scaled to the standard of the individual three-­acre homestead, the community (or “Homestead Unit,” as Borsodi termed it in a telling rhetorical modernization) followed a geometrical pattern that invoked Jeffersonian idealism and rationality but also facilitated systematic interconnection through the automobile, electricity, and advanced communication technology. Because the community would be built close to established cities, links to urban jobs and infrastructure were maintained, but life could be lived free from “congestion, pollution, and parasitic rent.”69 To illustrate the plan, Borsodi included a series of four drawings by the project’s architect and general manager, Kenneth Butler. A combination of two orthogonal views, a bird’s-­eye view, and a mixed-­elevation house plan, the images deployed a pointedly aerialized planning logic. The first picture in the sequence, a map of Dayton and its surrounding countryside, plotted out the fifty homestead units that Borsodi hoped to establish around the city, with the founding unit marked by a star (Figure 4.12). The second drew inward to present a more focused orthogonal plan for the layout of one unit (Figure 4.13). The third shifted to a bird’s-­eye perspective and a more artistic mode of rendering to illustrate the pleasantly ordered gridwork of an individual homestead within the unit (Figure 4.14). The final image took up a split perspective (typical of architectural rendering) to depict a characteristic settlement home in both plan and elevation. The result of this carefully organized resettlement scheme, Borsodi concluded, would be nothing less than the development of “a new frontier . . . to which the enterprising, industrious and ambitious families shipwrecked in some way by the depression can migrate, just as in all the great depressions

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Figure 4.12. “Plan for the Fifty Homestead Units of Thirty-­five to Forty Families, Each to Be Established around Dayton, Ohio. The First Homestead Unit Is Shown by the Star.” Drawing by Kenneth Butler, architect and manager of the first homestead unit, of the plan for the fifty homestead units. From Ralph Borsodi, Flight from the City (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933), insert between pages 160 and 161.

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Figure 4.13. “Plan of the First Homestead Unit.” Drawing by Kenneth Butler, architect and manager of the first homestead unit. From Ralph Borsodi, Flight from the City (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933), insert between pages 160 and 161.

of the past century, they migrated from the industrial east to settle on the old frontier.”70 Borsodi’s comments and the project’s aerial illustrations demonstrate his investment in Jeffersonian agrarian space as a concept. They also reveal his reliance on the specific materialization of those ideals as they occurred in the midwestern landscape. Wright pressed just as hard to situate midwestern spatiality, and aeriality, as the foundation for the modern revitalization of American democratic values. He embraced the spatial ethos of the frontier while also recognizing that the Jeffersonian dream of a nation composed wholly of independent

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Figure 4.14. “A Bird’s-­eye View Visualizing One of the Three-­acre Homesteads.” Drawing by Kenneth Butler, architect and manager of the first homestead unit. From Ralph Borsodi, Flight from the City (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933), insert between pages 160 and 161.

yeoman farmers was no longer viable, if indeed it had ever been.71 Even more than Borsodi, Wright understood that industrial modernity could not be wholly unmade; nor was he interested in doing so. In his estimation, the fault of centralization did not lie with the rationality or instruments of modernity, which he described as “these miracles of technical invention with which culture has had nothing to do.”72 Rather, the trouble emerged from the manner in which these tools had been deployed in the service of centralization and urbanization run amok. Casting aside the concentrated city as irredeemable (even, we can imagine, through reformist efforts such as that of Burnham and Bennett), Wright

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called for the integration of new “machine-­age agencies”—­electrification; motorized transportation; mechanical systems of heating, cooling, and lighting; advanced construction materials; standardized mass production—­into an older notion of agrarian spatiality embodied by the midwestern landscape.73 The result was an expansive, decentralized, and low-­density gridded city plan that Wright named Broadacre City. Although Wright had revealed elements of his Broadacre idea in lectures and articles dating back to at least 1930, his primary purpose in those instances, and to some extent even in the 1932 manifesto, was more the critique of urban centralization and verticality than the articulation of a new vision. Nevertheless, The Disappearing City also represented the architect’s first effort to flesh out his own vision for an alternative city form. Beginning at the level of concept, Wright explained that the Broadacre plan’s basic purpose was to reinstill in American life individuality in an “organic sense,” which to him meant constructing a relationship between the man-­made and the natural orders to create an environment that enabled freedom of movement and self-­determination, equal access to land ownership, and the humane application of machine technology. Like most visionary planners, Wright believed such a transformation could be enacted directly through the wholesale reshaping of space and ideology through design. In Broadacre, this process began with the founding principle that each family deserved at a minimum an acre of land to own and work, a redistribution that Wright saw as the only way of returning modern life to a human scale that moved away from the needs of capital and “the landlord” and back to “man himself as an organic feature of his own ground.”74 As an exercise in both design and ideology, Wright’s ground-­based approach, “architecture and acreage seen as landscape,” put significant focus on horizontality and mobility. In Broadacre, city and citizen alike would align to the horizon, literally turning centralization on its side and redistributing its elements across a planar landscape. Likewise, division of country and city would be eradicated along with its centripetal “feeder” orientation. As Wright detailed in the final section of The Disappearing City, all the specific elements of modern life—­from factory and highway to office, home, farm, and hospital—­were to be dispersed broadly and evenly across space, “integrated yet independent,” with technology providing the connective tissue. Authority was to be likewise distributed, industry would be reconceived at a small to medium scale, and cultural hierarchy would be replaced by a single class of equally enlightened democratic yeomen, whom Wright thought of as pioneers “along a new frontier: decentralization.”75 Only a single figure, the architect, lived outside this leveling horizontality. In Wright’s Broadacre City, the architect (singular) was a designer both of space and also of a wide-­ranging “organic social order.”76 As in the prairies, it still required something of a vertical gaze to imagine and administer a horizontal landscape. Beyond the photographs previously discussed and a final authorial portrait of Wright as visionary planner, The Disappearing City did not contain any illustrations of the Broadacre plan. According to

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architectural historian Anthony Alofsin, Wright’s first visualization of the Broadacre concept appeared in a sketch completed some time after the publication of the book.77 Pictured from a vertical prospect and rendered diagrammatically, the drawing features a single large square that demarcates the form and boundaries of Broadacre City (Figure 4.15). The interior space of this main square is further subdivided into rectilinear plots of various sizes along with a smaller number of nonrectilinear areas. Many of the city’s most important features are labeled in Wright’s difficult-­to-­decipher handwriting. A set of strongly drawn curving lines (one is identified as a rail line; the others are unspecified) emanate approximately from the corners of the square. These bending lines provide the boundaries for a complementary and at times competing register of organically defined forms. The even more heavily inked lines on the left edge of the square signify a main arterial highway. Factories are indicated at the left and right midsection of the square. A set of long rectangles along the bottom and lower right edges are labeled as farms and “tillable land.” The puzzle-­shaped area above them, filled with small squiggled lines (a shorthand for natural foliage) is marked “park and golf.” A grid of squares in the upper-­left quadrant, though unmarked, marks out small acreages for individual families. The contoured space in the upper-­right corner is marked as “residences of more luxurious class on non tillable land,” and it is also noted that the “natural features of the surrounding landscape [should be] developed according to its nature.” More labels and arrows are written in at locations around the main square to identify a variety of other features. Significantly, these textual notes are written at various orientations to the sheet of paper: across, sideways, and upside down. In the upper-­left corner of the sheet appears Wright’s guiding principle “Minimum of one acre to the family.” Aside from a few seemingly extraneous marks in the bottom corners of the sheet, there are no drawn elements outside the main square. The sketch provides important clues to the visual and spatial concepts that guided Wright’s thought process in the invention of Broadacre City. The architect’s careful containment of his drawn lines within the square (as opposed to the labels, which are textual) indicates that in making the diagram he first drew the main square and only after that did he articulate the space within and assign it to specific purposes. By approaching the problem in this way, Wright established the square, a form rich in both modernist rationality and Jeffersonian symbolism, as his core spatial form. Moreover, by outlining the master square with firm boundaries, Wright indicated that he conceived of the city as a self-­contained and integrated whole. The architect allowed only a few lines to extend beyond the edges of the main square, perhaps in a gesture of implied continuity—­either of the grid format, or simply of the architect’s hand as he inscribed the lines. This visual evidence of Broadacre City’s internal cohesion refutes the interpretations of several of the plan’s more committed critics, one of whom remarked in a 1933 review of The Disappearing City that Wright’s vision offered little more than “an endless road town” devoid of any spatial or social cohesion.78 It also once again highlights

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Figure 4.15. Frank Lloyd Wright, Annotated Plan for Broadacre City, not dated; c. 1934. Drawing in ink, pencil, and colored pencil on paper, 9 ³⁄₈ × 8½ inches. Item no. 3402.001. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

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the multidirectional vertical and horizontal tension inherent in Wright’s planning. Although the architect conceived Broadacre as instantiating freedom through horizontality, when it came time to actually compose that vision into an image, his thinking shifted to the vertical. The varied orientations of Wright’s notes on the page serve as a further phenomenological clue to Wright’s orthogonal relationship to the paper. They suggest that as he worked on the drawing, he circulated above and around it: assigning spaces, establishing formats, and otherwise envisioning the city’s form. He addressed himself to both page and concept not as a grounded viewer looking out toward the horizon but, rather, as an elevated, free-­floating manipulator of spatial form.79 In doing so, Wright embraced both the all-­seeing gaze of modernist planning and the long-­standing practices of midwestern aerial looking. That Wright took up the aerial vision of the architect-­planner is not surprising. More striking, however, is the suggestion that he also envisioned Broadacre City through the eyes of a midwesterner, and even a farmer. Wright’s career suggests that this was almost certainly the case. The “prairie-­style” suburban houses that the architect designed at the turn of the century—­which facilitated the formulation of his guiding principle of organic architecture—­evolved out of his deep and subtle knowledge of the midwestern landscape. His interactions with a growing cadre of prairie-­minded architects and landscape planners supplemented his own ideas. In particular, during his years in Chicago Wright worked closely with landscape architect Jens Jensen, who designed the landscaping for several of Wright’s house commissions and numerous Chicago parks. Jensen’s dedicated attention to the prairie topography would have offered Wright a compelling contrast to the hard-­edged order of the Jeffer­ sonian grid.80 Wright’s earliest forays into smaller-­scale urban planning exhibited similar roots, as exemplified by his 1900–­1903 Quadruple Block Plan, which replaced the conventional practice of wall-­to-­wall urban home construction with a pattern that bore a striking resemblance to the midwestern agrarian standard of dispersing homesteads farther apart and along the edges of the sectional grid (Figure 4.16).81 Roughly a decade later, Wright enlarged the premise of this Jeffersonianesque block scheme in his submission to a competition sponsored by the City Club of Chicago, which was seeking new ideas for planning the suburban quarter section, or 160 acres (Figure 4.17).82 Again, Wright’s solution deployed the square pattern of the midwestern grid to create a decentralized yet variegated landscape of upper-­, middle-­, and working-­class dwellings, community buildings, and open spaces. The most convincing evidence for Wright’s agrarianism lies in his design for his personal residence and workshop in rural Wisconsin near his family’s landholdings, an estate he named Taliesin. In 1913 Wright permanently decamped from Chicago and established himself there. During the next two decades, he oversaw the construction of his home and workshop while at the same time laying out and managing the estate’s agricultural lands.

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Figure 4.16. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Quadruple Block Plan for C. E. Roberts. Oak Park, Illinois, Project, c. 1900–­ 1903. Plan (inscribed 1911) in ink, ink wash, pencil, and colored pencil on board, 11 ⁵⁄₈ × 15 inches. Item no. 0309.010. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

Coupled with the rural upbringing described in his autobiography, Wright’s oversight of Taliesin probably heightened his estimation of the farmer’s gaze as a means for modern planning. As owner and manager of a functioning farm, Wright actively performed the tasks that shaped midwestern spatiality: he purchased land and consolidated his estate, designed and constructed a homestead, laid out his fields and managed agrarian production, enacted conservation measures to mitigate the effects of tillage and soil loss, oversaw farm labor, and engaged in agribusiness. Not to be forgotten, he also

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Figure 4.17. Frank Lloyd Wright, Bird’s-­Eye View of the Quarter-­Section, noncompetitive plan for city residential development, Chicago, Illinois, project, c. 1913–­16. Aerial perspective drawing. Location unknown. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/ Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

lived on the land and as a part of the surrounding community (albeit a decidedly atypical one). He thus encountered midwestern aeriality in ethos and in practice. As historian Anne Whiston Spirn has demonstrated, Wright created and made regular use of farm maps, landscape surveys, and aerial photographs in the design and management of Taliesin. “Garden planning at Taliesin,” the in-house newspaper column At Taliesin reported, “is done in the same way as building planning. Using a large map of the farm and box of colored pencils, the entire garden layout is planted.”83 Wright’s farmstead map from the period demonstrates this systematic and comprehensive approach to agricultural management. Bounded by the roads and the straight lines of property fences, the map envisions a landscape whose natural features and agricultural activities are carefully delineated and integrated (Figure 4.18). As was typically the case in the midwestern countryside, the home(stead) and workshop, which are pictured at middle right and upper left, occupy only a small portion of the estate and are located along its edge for easy access to public roads. The map divides the remaining acreage into an assortment of organically shaped fields, each labeled with the crop to be planted; as on the Broadacre sketch

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Figure 4.18. Frank Lloyd Wright, Farm Plan, 1920s–­30s. Pencil and colored pencil on tracing paper, 28¼ × 35 ¹⁄₈ inches. Item no. 3420.009. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

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the words are written from a multitude of orientations. A series of small tributary streams appear horizontally across the image just below its midpoint. Darkly penciled lines run along the edges of the fields, their curving forms also echoing the similarly dark lines in the Broadacre sketch. A variety of graphic marks symbolize the different types of crops and vegetation, with parallel lines indicating seeded oats and row-­cropped corn, small cruciform x’s representing orchard trees, and jagged lines or shapes standing in for natural woodlands and shrubbery. As the curvaceous boundary lines signified, Wright laid out his fields to follow the natural contours of the land. While this feature of Taliesin is usually interpreted as evidence of Wright’s organic principles and his interest in Japanese landscape aesthetics, it also demonstrates a knowledge and appli­cation of modern agricultural practices, particularly the emergence of the erosion-­control methods of contour farming discussed in chapter 2.84 That Wright commissioned aerial photographs of his estate and used them in his planning and administration further confirmed the modernity of his agricultural vision (Figure 4.19).85

Figure 4.19. Aerial photograph of Taliesin home and grounds, c. 1932. Item no. 1169–­014–­16. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

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At Taliesin, Wright dealt at firsthand with the modalities of aerial representation that had shaped and were in the 1930s actively transforming midwestern spatiality from land ownership plats to aerial photographs. These vantage points became his conceptual perch for plotting the city. Almost exactly two years after the publication of The Disappearing City, Wright and his apprentices began construction of his most concrete articulation yet of the Broadacre idea: a large-­scale three-­dimensional model for a city designed to house 1,440 families, or about 7,000 people (Plate 13).86 Measuring 122⁄3 × 122⁄3 feet, the carefully detailed and earth-­hued model transferred the rough concept of Wright’s initial sketch into a more detailed and tangible form. Following the grid spatiality of the Jeffersonian survey, the model depicts a city that measures four miles square (slightly less than the six-­mile Land Ordinance Survey Township) and whose basic design unit is the one-­mile-­by-­one-­mile (640-­acre) section. Within the city, land is regularly, though not identically, parceled to support a variety of different activities and purposes. Symmetry was important to Wright, who considered organically conceived rhythmic patterning as a rational but also a natural and humanizing antidote to the serial repetition and rote standardization espoused by industrial modernity. Not coincidentally, such an “individualized” adap­ tation of the otherwise rationalizing landscape grid also mimicked the spatial ideal of the midwestern countryside, where the Jeffersonian grid provided an overall order but left room for individual homesteaders to develop their landholdings according to their own plans and initiatives. Wright believed that a balanced plan—­one that provided overall order but maintained space for the expression of democratic individualism—­offered the only alternative to the banal standardization and centralized order of the modern city. After all, it was not the skyscraper builder or the industrialist but, rather, the grounded, sensible, and self-­governing yeoman who occupied the compositional heart of Broadacre. As Wright clarified in an index that accompanied the model during its first 1935 exhibition, the four one-­mile units at the center of the city were reserved for education and individual family housing, the most common form being the individual homestead acreage (Figure 4.20; later published in several leading architectural journals).87 This concern for education embodied Wright’s—­and the era’s—­broad investment in public education and at the same time reflected the longer focus on publicly funded education that had been a hallmark of the Jeffersonian land survey since its inception. Moving away from Broadacre’s core of family homesteads, large farms, factories, and orchards were placed in the outer sections, with most industrial activities placed adjacent to the main arterial roadway that is located along the left edge of the model (as it appears in Plate 13).88 Administrative and leisure facilities are grouped in the lower-­right-­hand corner around a managed lake. The upper-­right quadrant is the site for “luxurious homes,” scientific research, and cultural facili­ ties, including a home for the county architect, which Wright labeled as a “Taliesin equivalent.” At the very corner of this quadrant Wright’s spiraling “automobile objective” crowns the crest of the city’s only hillside. Intended as both an architectural monument and a vantage point, the structure

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Figure 4.20. Map with index detailing the features of the Broadacre model. From Architectural Record 77, no. 4 (April 1935): 250–­51.

was accessible to all Broadacre inhabitants and provided a panoramic vista over the city as a whole (Figure 4.21). With the inclusion of the lone hillside and its crowning monument in the otherwise horizontally composed Broadacre model, Wright once again placed a sense of directional tension at the center of his new urban vision. Roughly three-­quarters of the model’s topography took the form of a flat and undifferentiated prairie-­like space. Its foundational single-­family homes stood regularly apart from one another and were oriented so that their multiple windows opened onto broad agricultural fields and their prairie-­style rooflines mirrored the flatness of the land, as suggested by Wright’s scale model of a typical “two-­car” dwelling (Figure 4.22). Glass (which Wright considered a cornerstone of organic

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Figure 4.21. Photograph of the Broadacre model showing the automobile objective in elevation. From Architectural Record 77, no. 4 (April 1935): 248–­49.

architecture as well as a “new agency” of the machine age) was ubiquitous in all Broadacre structures as a way of creating interpenetration between natural and man-­made spaces, and it also enabled long horizontal framings of the view. This horizontality was not limited to the home but also encompassed the more technologized facets of the design. Wright specified, for example, that orchards be planted in rows perpendicular to the arterial highway so that motorists could complement the horizontal projection of the road with equally long sight lines into the interior of the city (Figure 4.23; see especially the orchards in the bottom center of the model).89 He also designed highway access ramps and bridged bypasses to ensure that horizontal movement (and vision) remained uninterrupted by stop-­and-­go intersections (Figure 4.24).

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Figure 4.22. Wright’s model of a “two-­car dwelling.” From American Architect 146, no. 2634 (June 1935): 62.

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Figure 4.23. Bird’s-­eye view of the Broadacre model. Note the arterial highway and perpendicular orchards along the lower edge of the photograph. From American Architect 146, no. 2634 (June 1935): 56–­57.

The automobile objective, by contrast, redirected this horizontal flow vertically by first leading drivers to the top of the landscape and then deploying architecture in the form of a spiraling ramp to further lift viewers onto an artificial platform above the natural topography.90 The monument in effect converted the automobile—­Wright’s most embraced technology of horizontal mobility—­into an ersatz airplane. The transformation was, however, more visual than tactile. From heights above the landscape, Broadacre’s citizens experienced it as a distanced and unified whole; the monument offered them a vision of the city as concept and plan. Wright enabled Broadacre’s denizens to see the city in a totalizing aspect and thereby to better understand the logic and pattern that shaped their own individual activities at the same time that it made them part of a broader vision of democratic modernity.

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Figure 4.24. An ancillary model for a suspension bridge to span the arterial highway in the Broadacre plan and a one-­car dwelling. From American Architect 146, no. 2634 (June 1935): 58.

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In this way, Wright seeded the singular authority of the modernist planner back into the soil of the Broadacre landscape, making each citizen a husband of the plan’s social values. By contrast, his decision to place the architect’s home (the aforementioned “Taliesin equivalent”) on the hillside directly beneath the automobile objective strikes the plan’s most paradoxical note, as it is the one gesture that purposefully elevates one Broadacre citizen above the rest. In doing so, Wright to some extent resurrected the centralized planning and power that he excoriated in his critique of the modern city. In spite of it all, Wright could not help but envision the architect as a benevolent and all-­seeing authority. Perhaps he can be forgiven this lapse, or not. Wright’s Broadacre City model, planning historian Michiel Dehaene argues, is best understood not as a fait accompli but, rather, as an “exercise in urban composition”: an effort to materialize in three dimensions Wright’s paradoxical desire for a unity between unfettered individualism and cohesive communal order.91 Following the American frontier mythos, Wright linked individualism with horizontality as exemplified by the pioneer generations that stood on the ground and oriented their gazes and actions across the wide horizon of the continent. Updated for modernity in Broadacre City, this idealism took form in the model’s flat fields, horizontal architecture, unimpeded mobility, and expansive grid. When he turned his efforts to the visualization of Broadacre as a spatial and social structure, however, Wright shifted his orientation to that of a more distanced vertical view. This enabled him to perceive space in the terms that shaped it in an industrial, postfrontier America: centralization and concentration. The utility of the aerial perspective, as Wright grew to understand in his work on Broadacre City, lay in its ability to open up possibilities for a new form of individualism in the context of a national landscape that no longer had an open edge but existed instead as a closed and systematized whole. Looking down at the Broadacre model, hovering over and around it as he had with his estate maps of Taliesin, Wright visualized democratic individualism in a new aspect, one that, as Dehaene described it, “entailed the development of free space from within.”92 With the inclusion of the conspicuously elevated automobile objective, Wright made the folding of the horizontal into the vertical a crucial operation in his vision for a new urban modernity. That such a vision belonged to the modernist planner and also to the broader American citizenry demonstrated its democracy. The plot belonged to the individual, but the plan belonged to all. By using the aerial gaze to envision his new American city as a space that was once again geared to the horizon, Wright in essence articulated a vision for a return to the American frontier. Broadacre City retooled the inherent decentralization of Jeffersonian settlement into a more condensed and technologically integrated spatial form that was relevant to industrial city life. In short, Wright answered the city problem by making the midwestern farm the basis for the urban homestead. Yet he also adapted rural tradition to the new spatial and social realities of his moment. In an article that accompanied the first exhibition of Broadacre City in 1935, Wright stated that in the context of

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industrial modernity, it was coordination, more than expansion, that provided the key to decentralization. In Broadacre City, he wrote, “all common interests take place in a simple coordination wherein all are employed: little farms, little homes for industry, little factories, little schools, a little university . . . little laboratories on their own ground for professional men. And the farm itself becomes the most attractive unit of the city.”93 Thus coordinated and rescaled, Wright observed, the frontier no longer required vast expanses of open and undeveloped space. Envisioning a time when an even and organic pattern of Broadacre Cities would replace the existing order of centralized and concentrated metropolises, Wright anticipated that the whole of American society could be integrated and thereby drawn together on a new frontier. By containing the world and thereby conceptualizing it, the aerial gaze had granted Wright a new sense of space and order that had in turn laid bare the need for other forms of social and cultural consolidation. Broadacre emerged as Wright’s response to this new perception. It was a renewed Jeffersonian ideal: aerialized, consolidated, and coordinated by and for modernity. D e m o c rat i c Dec ent rali zation and Rur alist Utopia Wright unveiled his fully materialized concept of Broadacre City to the public on April 15, 1935, at the Industrial Art Exposition held at New York’s Rockefeller Center and sponsored by the National Alliance of Art and Industry. With the model as centerpiece, Wright’s display also included two-­ dimensional illustrations, a series of individual building mockups, and an array of supporting wallboard texts (Figure 4.25). The installation received extensive publicity from local and national media both before and during its run; a New York Times article from March 27 declared Wright’s concept nothing less than “a new type of city.”94 The Times later estimated that over the course of the exhibition the Broadacre model had attracted forty thousand viewers (Wright later put the number at fifty thousand). Wright also estimated that ten thousand people viewed the model when it left New York and was reinstalled at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Continuing the tour, the Federal Housing Administration teamed with department store magnate (and Wright client) Edgar Kauffmann Sr. to install the model in Kauffmann’s Pittsburgh store, where an estimated twenty thousand viewers saw it. From there, the model moved to Washington, D.C., and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where Wright hoped to catch the eye of President Roosevelt and his New Deal administration. Unsuccessful in the effort (Wright noted that neither the president nor Eleanor Roosevelt attended), Wright returned Broadacre to Wisconsin, where it was exhibited at local venues and was then set up at Taliesin for study by Wright’s fellowship and guests.95 In 1940 Wright still hoped for larger American exhibitions and a European tour should there, Wright deadpanned in the context of an escalating war in Europe, “be anyone left above ground to see it.”96

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Figure 4.25. The Broadacre City model on display with supporting materials. From American Architect 146, no. 2634 (June 1935): 55.

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In addition to drawing large audiences, Broadacre City also garnered significant attention from the media. On the heels of the unveiling at Rockefeller Center, a leading professional publication, the Architectural Record, published an essay by Wright on the project. Detailing the salient features and benefits of the Broadacre concept, the text was accompanied by photographs of the model and supporting materials provided by the architect.97 Similar pieces appeared in the other major architecture and planning journals, and Wright also took to the radio to promote his vision.98 While reactions by architects were mostly positive, those of planning intellectuals and social theorists were mixed. The harshest critiques followed a line of argumentation that first appeared in a 1933 review of The Disappearing City by Catherine Bauer and that was reiterated in 1935 by Stephen Alexander in The New Masses.99 Both these writers gave Wright credit for his aesthetics and imagination (begrudgingly on Bauer’s part) but ultimately judged his ideas to be romantic, utopian, and thus impractical. Bauer’s response proved the more scathing, tasking Wright for his unreasonable trust in technology, his simplistic view of the relationship between individualism and community, and, finally, his unrealistic faith in rural pattern as an antidote to urban form. “But alas,” Bauer wrote, “it is just not possible to spread the town over the country and preserve the virtues of either.”100 Commenting on the exhibition of the Broadacre model three years later, Bauer’s mentor Lewis Mumford proved more sympathetic.101 A friend and frequent correspondent of Wright’s, Mumford shared the architect’s mistrust of industrial centralization as a basis for social and spatial order and was a strong proponent of decentralization. He also shared Wright’s faith in nature and in the American past as sources for contemporary efforts to design a new national spatiality. As a result Mumford appreciated the transcendentalist and Jeffersonian undertones of Wright’s concept. He noted in his review that the Broadacre model followed in “the tradition of romantic isolation and reunion with the soil” that underwrote American agrarian culture.102 Mumford also shared the architect’s faith that machine-­age technology, when utilized in proper sympathy with natural pattern and human need, held forth the possibility for new and balanced configurations of space and culture, noting that Broadacre embodied not only a “generous dream” but also a “rational plan.” Mumford’s main criticism was of Wright’s insistence on the one-­acre homestead and the single-­family house as the necessary bases of modern space and human dignity. While resistant to totalizing centralization, Mumford maintained that urban concentration, if properly managed, remained a viable alternative to Wright’s stretched and potentially isolating ruralist dispersal. After Wright sent a letter questioning the author on this criticism, Mumford’s response elaborated his point. Noting that Broadacre “is but one of half a dozen potential urban types we can develop,” Mumford explained, “My own scheme of life has a place in it for Romerstadt [a more centralized and socialistic city plan] as well as for Broadacre City, because concentration, when not pushed to the point of congestion, offers certain possibilities of intercourse that dispersion doesn’t.”103 Eleven years later (and after their friendship had

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soured), Mumford pressed his critique of Wright’s dispersive decentralization even further, writing to American poet John Gould Fletcher about the architect’s limitations as an urban planner. Mumford noted, “Apart from the landscape, [Wright] has no sense of the whole. Hence his Broadacre City is a collection of individual buildings on single acre plots: in other words, not a city in any visible sense, even from the air.”104 By invoking the aerial view, Mumford confirmed Wright’s aeriality even as he criticized it. Such aerial sensitivity also provided the basis of Mumford’s own views on modern urbanism, as evidenced by his shaping role in the American discourse on “regional planning” and its guiding organization, the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). Founded in 1923 by a group of architects, planners, and intellectuals that included Mumford, Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Alexander Bing, and Henry Wright, the core tenets of the group both mirrored and influenced Frank Lloyd Wright’s own modern urban vision: a condemnation of centralization and congestion, a belief that life must be reoriented to the natural environment, and a call for decentralization with its requisite integration of city and country spaces. As Mumford set down in a 1925 issue of the social commentary journal Survey Graphic devoted to the RPAA’s theories, “Regional planning asks not how a wide area can be brought forward under the aegis of the metropolis, but how the population and civic facilities can be distributed so as to promote and stimulate a vivid creative life throughout a whole region—­a region being any geographic area that possesses a certain unity of climate, soil, vegetation, industry and culture.”105 Moreover, regional planning also turned inward, dismissing the old idea of the expansive frontier and calling for a new spatiality focused on the amelioration of landscapes that were already shaped and settled. As the profusion of vertical and oblique gazes apparent in the journal’s illustrations suggests, such efforts found their form and inspiration in aerial looking. The opening image of Mumford’s central article, which depicted both the city and the region under a magnifying glass (Figure 4.26), foreshadowed Wright’s own deployment of aerial gaze in The Disappearing City and Broadacre City. On the left side of the illustration, the aerial view is symbolized by a circular mag­ nifying glass that brings a city’s ills into diagnostic focus. On the right, a larger-­scale magnification displaces the city as sole focus and integrates it as a component of a broader region. This sense of the aerial gaze as a tool of regionalization found textual reinforcement in several essays, including that of economist and engineer Stuart Chase, who framed his critique of the nation’s centripetal transportation system from the vantage of “an aeroplane observer with a quite celestial eyesight.”106 In spite of such agreements in principle, in practice the planning vision of the RPAA diverged substantially from that of Broadacre. Implicitly rejecting Wright’s insistent focus on the individual as well as his belief that the centralized metropolis should be wholly abandoned, the RPAA cut a middle route. Where Wright was dedicated to the form of the Jeffersonian Midwest, Mumford and his colleagues filtered their own embrace of “back to the soil” American values through a broad and

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Figure 4.26. Illustration from Lewis Mumford’s article “Regions—­To Live In.” From Survey Graphic 54, no. 3 (May 1, 1925): 151.

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evolving international discourse on city planning, especially that of the English-­inspired “Garden City” and its central designer, Ebenezer Howard. Perhaps incorporating his own formative experience in midwestern spatiality—­Howard had made an unsuccessful attempt to homestead in Nebraska during the 1870s (he had also been in Chicago for the great fire of 1871)—­Howard’s ideal of decentralization did not require a wholesale abandonment of the city as it was; rather, it called for a more systematic and natural integration of many existing city forms and functions, from housing and recreation to industry and commerce, into the larger footprint of a surrounding geographic region.107 At the cornerstone of his concept lay the Garden City, a planned, self-­contained community surrounded by a protective and delimiting greenbelt of forest and undeveloped space.108 Howard envisioned that these smaller, less concentrated, town-­size cities, built at regular intervals around a central metropolis, would act as release valves for the pressures of centralized growth at the same time that they returned modern life to a more livable human scale. Country and city would be integrated not by the spatial logic of the individualist acre but instead by a more synthetic reorganization of industrial, natural, and human elements into something that might be described as a regional community. In 1928 Mumford’s description of his vision for the “Regional City” evoked such communalist principles. “The regionalist city exists to integrate every function that grows out of the fact that men live and learn best . . . in communities.”109 For Mumford, modernity had negated individualism as either a spatial or a social ideology, just as technology had systematically intertwined previously distinct spaces. In this sense, it is probable that Mumford believed Broadacre City lacked the most necessary revelation of modern urban planning: the ability to perceive interconnections between distant and ostensibly opposed spatial and social orders. Whereas Wright deployed aeriality as a means to critique and thereby willfully abandon the present form of industrial urbanism (and several realities of modernity along with it), Mumford’s aerial gaze functioned as a tool for synthesis, enabling the planner to better integrate the industrial structures of the city into the natural pattern and, especially, into the resources of the surrounding region. An attention to environmental equilibrium rather than extraction, Mumford believed, would leaven modernity’s social, cultural, and economic abstraction with a renewed sense of the importance of perceiving culture (and space) as a synthetic and ever-­changing structure. As Mumford later observed in his 1938 classic The Culture of Cities, the integrated region was characterized by a state of “dynamic equilibrium,” a term that signified the balancing of several things: nature and industry, individual expressiveness and communal order, tradition and innovation, country and city. The realization of such plans, in Mumford’s estimation, demanded a strong footing in grounded reality. “Plans that do not rise out of real situations, plans that ignore existing institutions are of course futile: mere utopias of escape.”110 His fellow RPAA member Henry Wright cast this need for reality in more scientific terms, noting, “Planning is a scientific charting and picturing of the thing” and a balancing of that

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“which man desires and which the eternal forces will permit.”111 Though still a key tool, aeriality as envisioned by the RPAA had possibilities that differed significantly from those imagined by Frank Lloyd Wright. Rather than serving as a source of some irresistible and essential new truth about American life, aerial vision instead became a platform for reworking existing forms with new and synthetic oversight. Throughout the next decade, Mumford and the RPAA worked to promote their decentralized regional vision to the American public and to see it realized in material form. Group members published their ideas and designs in professional and popular venues. Two early community housing proj­ ects, Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn Village, brought to life several of their regionalist concepts—­ especially the focus on integrating open space as a means to create environments more conducive to healthful urban living.112 The greatest opportunity to enact their new vision, however, came in 1935 under the aegis of the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration (RA) and its Greenbelt Towns program.113 Devised as part of Roosevelt’s sweeping social welfare initiatives, the official purpose of the program was “[to] provide useful employment for thousands of jobless workmen, to demonstrate a new type of community planning, combining city conveniences with many advantages of rural life and to demonstrate a better utilization of land in suburban areas.”114 With Clarence Stein as their guiding intellectual force, Greenbelt planners proposed meeting these goals through the creation of a new kind of hybrid urban–­rural social space that united aspects of the city, the small town, and the rural countryside.115 Dubbed “Greenbelt Towns” in reference to the surrounding belt of natural and agrarian space that protected them from encroachment and overconcentration, the concept married the ideal of localized intervention to the centralized model of the New Deal and its desire to compel social and environmental reform systematically across a diverse nation. Between 1935 and 1938 the government designed and completed three Greenbelt communities, in Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Like the architect of Broadacre City, Greenbelt planners saw overbuilt vertical cities as a key locus for spatial and social malaise. Unlike Wright, however, the government policy makers also recognized that the state of the agricultural countryside was not much better. They recognized that it would be naive and even disingenuous to act as if rural life were a panacea for current conditions. Nor for that matter could they turn a blind eye to the needs of the industrial economy by advocating, as Wright did, for a total and systematic decentralization. Perhaps because of these qualifications, the Greenbelt Towns represented one of the government’s most innovative efforts to hybridize country and city: bringing together the best features of each without stated preference for either. “A greenbelt town,” RA publicists noted in a heavily illustrated promotional booklet from 1936, “combines the conveniences and cultural advantages of a city with many advantages of life on the land.”116 Smaller in scale and ambition than Wright’s Broadacre or Mumford’s regional vision, the Greenbelt Town instead

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resembled nothing so much as the residential suburb—­albeit one intended not for middle-­and upper-­class Americans but, rather, for the urban and rural poor. “If we are to make any real improvement in housing standards,” Greenbelt programmers wrote, “the great bulk of our new housing should be built directly for families with modest incomes.”117 For the government, the motivation behind the Greenbelt Town program—­and the aerial con­ ceptuality that shaped it—­resonated with the cleansing and consolidating purposes that underlay the administration’s broader vision for a modern and integrated America. Akin to agents working with farmers to implement a new pattern of agricultural practice, Greenbelt planners envisioned the reordering of the physical landscape also as a means to reform society. Seeking to understand and enact such change in visual terms, the government deployed a now-­familiar vocabulary of close­in horizontal and long-­distance aerial views. The Greenbelt booklet epitomizes a narrative cycle in which the inequality, ugliness, and congestion of modern American life are cured through the benevolent oversight of New Deal programming. A section of the booklet entitled “The Penalty of Bad Planning” was devoted to critiquing the current status of industrial housing. It opened with a pair of horizontally composed photographs depicting substandard housing in both the city and the country (Figure 4.27). Such dwellings left much of the American population unsettled and adrift, a condition evoked visually by the subsequent full-­page montage of hard-­working “substantial citizens” whose images sit unanchored and at random on a formless grey background (Figure 4.28). The government’s counter to this up-­close imagery of spatial dissolution and social abstraction took shape through the comprehensive and clarifying perspectives of aerial vision, as in the pamphlet’s opening illustration of the Greenbelt concept (Figure 4.29). Pictured from a high oblique vantage, the image drew a sharp distinction between the jumbled industrial city and the sympathetically planned Greenbelt Town. Projecting upward and outward in a disarray of overlapping grids, disconnected roads, and concentrated commercial and industrial architecture, the city serves as an icon of unplanned growth. Located near but insulated from the disordered city grid, the Greenbelt Town exhibits a careful balance and natural form of government planning. Interposing the organic contour of a topographically responsive city plan within a broadly gridded agricultural landscape, the Greenbelt Town is constructed as a visual and spatial remedy to urban concentration. Yet its proximity to and interconnections with the city strike a balance between separation and inclusion. The Greenbelt community orbits the city but is not subject to it. As represented through the pamphlet’s aerial gaze, the Greenbelt Town existed as a form of its own: visualized, planned, and made whole. Wright, of course, saw Broadacre City as the better solution and would have welcomed a commission from the New Deal to enact it. That government programmers did not pursue Wright’s vision suggests that they recognized in Wright’s design an ideological rigidity—­his categorical condemnation of the modern city and his equally committed embrace of Jeffersonian idealism as the

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Figure 4.27. “The Penalty of Bad Planning.” From U.S. Resettlement Administration, Greenbelt Towns: A Demonstration in Suburban Planning (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), not paginated.

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Figure 4.28. “Substantial Citizens.” Photomontage illustration. From U.S. Resettlement Administration, Greenbelt Towns: A Demonstration in Suburban Planning (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), not paginated.

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Figure 4.29. Full-­page graphic illustration showing the articulation between the Greenbelt Town and the industrial city. From U.S. Resettlement Administration, Greenbelt Towns: A Demonstration in Suburban Planning (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), not paginated.

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only viable foundation for a new ruralist urbanism—­and judged it impracticable. While the New Deal espoused a similar faith in traditional American values, its programming required a more elastic merger of rural and urban forms. Yet Wright’s ideas about the urban and the rural may not have been so inflexible or polarized as people imagined. In The Disappearing City and even earlier, Wright demonstrated an understanding that centralization blighted rural and urban landscapes alike. He knew, in other words, that rural life also had its problems. In the act of reinventing the city, however, Wright had laid out a plan through which the ills that centralization had delivered to the countryside could also be cured. Through the critical and inventive capacities of the aerial gaze, Broadacre City emerged as an all-­encompassing refiguration of the centripetal city, the industrialized agricultural landscape, and, at the farthest edge, modernity at large. In this sense, Wright’s transcendent aeriality mirrored that of the aviator who, elevated high above the ground, began to think of the world as a singular object subject to his or her individual will. As Meyer Shapiro observed in a scathing critique of Wright’s ideas, such “visionary confidence” often came at the cost of “blindness to the facts of social and economic power.”118 The aerial gaze afforded Wright a new perspective, but it also suborned a false sense of potency: the illusion that the architect could stand above it all to reorder the world in a more sympathetic way. For the left-­leaning Shapiro, such faith in top-­down transformation made Wright’s Broadacre naively utopian at best, authoritarian at worst. Dismissed in such a critique, however, is the democratic and even utopian individualism that had long shaped American identity. Like Jefferson, Wright believed that spatial order determined social structure and that any plan therefore directly determined the prospects of each individual who lived within it. As seen from the vista atop the automobile objective, Wright understood Broadacre foremost as a model for both space and being that was democratically available to all, as individuals. Community, regional, national, and even modern identity emerged out of this core of individualism. It comes as little surprise that Wright, undeterred by his critics and adamant in his own vision of the Midwest as America, trudged on with unrelenting faith in Broadacre. From the late 1930s until his death in 1959, the architect rearticulated his ideas in numerous venues and forms—­including two substantially revised versions of The Disappearing City, entitled When Democracy Builds (1945) and The Living City (1958).119 In the last, published a year before his death, Wright included a bevy of new illustrations, including an oblique “typical view” of the Broadacre countryside (Figure 4.30). In this depiction of a decentralized urban ruralist grid, the architect included a bevy of helicopters hovering above the landscape and one that has touched down on a foreground deck. Eschewing the winged airplane—­whose reliance on unidirectional linear motion struck the architect as unduly limiting—­ Wright imagined mechanical flight in terms that embodied individualized mobility. These machines conjure a method of flight in which movement (and vision) is multidirectional and unimpeded,

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Figure 4.30. “Typical view of Broadacres countryside. Patterns of cultivation mingling with good buildings. Helicopter seen in foreground and, beyond, automatic overpass enabling continuous, uninterrupted traffic four ways.” Item no. 5825.002. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. All rights reserved. Reproduced in Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 181.

subject only to the desires of the passenger and, most important, controlled by the individual. The elegant and futuristic helicopters offer another potent metaphor for Wright’s aeriality. Like the Jeffer­ sonian dream buttressing Broadacre City, the architect’s idealized flying machines invoked an experience of American space and culture that never really existed, yet was nonetheless true.

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Conclusion Over the Rainbow

In a now-­f amous sequence from Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the young protagonist Dorothy Gale, having aborted her first attempt to run away from her dreary Kansas home, returns to her aunt and uncle’s rickety house in the midst of a tornado. Unable to force open the door to the underground cellar, Dorothy clambers into her bedroom, where she is knocked unconscious by a blown-­out window. Collapsing onto the bed, the girl becomes a passenger on one of the most iconic aerial voyages of the 1930s as the Gale home shoots rapidly upward into the eye of the tornado. “Awakened” into a dream a moment later, Dorothy glances out her window into the churning maelstrom, which is represented as a flattened, rectangular, and cinematic space. In quick succession, an unexpected array of rural icons fly across this screen: a picket fence, a tree, a chicken coop (complete with scratching chickens), an old lady knitting in a rocking chair, a cow, two men in a rowboat, and finally, the cold-­hearted landlord Almira Gulch—­whose transformation from bicycling prude to broom-­riding witch marks the end of the sequence. Once the house reaches the apex of its flight and tumbles back to earth, Dorothy furtively makes her way to the front door. Emerging slowly, the young Kansan finds herself in a spectacular landscape of swirling hillsides and Technicolor hues—­a fantastic world different from the bleak prairies where she had started. Bedazzled, she hesitantly utters to her small dog Toto, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” For today’s viewers, Dorothy’s aerial journey may seem to be Hollywood kitsch. But midwestern audiences in 1939 could look through Dorothy and out the window of the flying house to see the iconic elements of their home landscape—­from picket fence to scratching poultry—­uprooted and in dis­ array.1 When the house landed, they encountered a world where older patterns of meaning were reconceived in a new and fantastic image of the Midwest, one that nevertheless and in strange ways remained connected to the Kansas countryside that had been left behind. Indeed, what makes Oz so intriguing (both for Dorothy and for the film’s viewers) is the duality of the dreamscape. Gulch has morphed from 251

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landowner to witch, and Dorothy’s new companions are doppelgängers of her aunt and uncle’s hired hands. The Oz landscape, though effusively colorful and sensuous in comparison to the monochromatic Kansas terrain, is also a rural countryside beset by turmoil. Finally, the young protagonist’s goal remains the same in both places: to escape uncertainty and find a place she could recognize as home. The significance of Dorothy’s journey resides in the differences, and similarities, between these two landscapes. The film opens onto a Kansas landscape that is flat, windy, and desiccated, filmed in a monochrome sepia hue. The action begins with the girl fleeing from a threatening landlord down a long and unbending dirt road flanked by barbed-­wire fences. This straight, hemmed-­in path is accentuated by a row of vertical electrical poles that cuts perpendicularly across the middle ground. When Dorothy arrives home, the barnyard set reveals a further array of geometric forms, from the parallel spans of rail fences and the triangles made by the dinner chimes and farm implements to the circle of a tire swing (Figure C.1). At every angle, geometry composes the landscape. An analysis by author and film critic Salman Rushdie contends that this Euclideanism is the key formal feature in the film’s construction of the desolate and depressed Kansas landscape and the girl’s oppressed life within it.2 Resonating the pattern of the Jeffersonian grid, the Kansas setting engages the iconic form of midwestern rural life. Yet, as the film’s monochrome hue and dark narrative suggest, this midwestern countryside has lost its sense of opportunity and promise and has instead become a prison for the young protagonist. In successive shots, Dorothy is constricted by the roadway fences, trapped in a pigsty, and finally cornered by Gulch, who takes possession of Toto—­who had bitten the landlord and, not coincidentally, is the only character seemingly immune to the landscape’s rigid boundaries. Toto later escapes and returns to Dorothy, but the girl’s aunt and uncle (also Gulch’s renters) insist that he must be given over to the spinster. At this point Dorothy attempts for a final time to run away across the landscape. Again her effort is stymied, first by the guilt of abandoning her aunt and uncle and then, once she has decided to return to them, by the bluster of an oncoming tornado. Trapped yet again on the farmstead, Dorothy’s situation appears dire. Unable to lift the hatch to the root cellar where her family and the farmhands wait in safety, the girl retreats to her bedroom and faces the tornado. Instead of bringing death, however, the swirling vertiginous twister provides an unexpected means to escape from the regimented countryside. Powerful and amorphous, the tornado warps and rends the geometry of the land in an obliteration that is both physical and symbolic. Finally it reaches the farmhouse, lifts it up, and delivers Dorothy out of her Kansas confines. As we have seen, the twister also unfixes other objects and carries them aloft to complete the disintegration of the old Kansas. Ripped from the agrarian framework that gave them meaning, these items lose their significance in the swirling flight imposed by the gale. Yet it is precisely this aerialized disarray that enables Dorothy to envision an alternate world, where the symbols of her midwestern home are reconfigured in new arrays of form and meaning.

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Figure C.1. Screen capture showing the geometry of Dorothy’s Kansas homestead in the motion picture The Wizard of Oz (Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1939).

The world that Dorothy steps into at the conclusion of her flight is, as Rushdie elaborates, a landscape formed in the image of the tornado.3 Suffused with brilliant color and bursting with overgrown foliage, Oz swirls with a vibrant and animated energy. Flower stems bow across the screen, circular pools and houses dot the village where she has landed, and rotund munchkins encircle her in the midst of their musical cavorting. The good witch who places the ruby slippers on Dorothy’s feet and sets her on the journey to the Emerald City first appears as a floating orb. Most strikingly, the yellow brick pathway that will lead the girl through Oz begins its route as a tightly wound spiral.

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When Dorothy steps forth to commence her journey, she duplicates the whirling flight that had carried her to Oz in the first place. She also repudiates the confining linearity of the roadway back in Kansas. Moving through Oz, this lexicon of swirling and curving forms differentiates Dorothy’s dream­ scape from the film’s rigid and depressed characterization of real-­world 1930s Kansas. In Oz, everything is alive with unregulated animation: trees hurl apples, witches and winged monkeys dart across the sky, and every bodily motion is danced. Dorothy herself becomes an agent of this condition when she frees the Scarecrow from his post in the cornfield and limbers up the Tin Man, releasing him from his rusty and frozen pose. These characters join her on a syncopated, skipping journey to the Emerald City. As they wind along the road, the landscapes that surround them complement the fantastic energy of the protagonists. Unlike the film’s monochrome and rectilinear nonfictional Midwest, Oz is a countryside filled with a curvilinear quilting of fields that appear to move with the actors as they pass through (Plate 14). The course of the yellow brick road heightens the sense of organic flow by undulating (rather than projecting) toward the horizon, which accentuates the already billowy character of the land. As a symbolic closing point, the 1939 Wizard of Oz draws together the trajectories of aerial vision that cut through the Midwest during the preceding decades. As the instrument that transports Dorothy to Oz, the tornado encapsulates in a few moments the cognitive transformations that aeriality had enacted upon the form and idea of the region. Like the aerial photographs deployed by government soil-­conservation agents, the twister upended the established patterns of the agricultural countryside and replaced them with the new forms of contoured fields and curving tillage. Above these contours sprawled the synoptic gaze of a centralized authority. Ensconced in the distant Emerald City, the “great, all-­seeing” Wizard of Oz provided the organizing force that structured the land and the activities of its inhabitants. Just as the Munchkins looked to Oz to bring order to their world, so too were midwesterners being trained to cast their eyes to Washington, D.C., and to a benevolent, seemingly all-­knowing government to find answers to their individual troubles. Prairie farmers, of course, had always been beholden to interests outside the region, from markets to manufacturers. The New Deal laid bare this reality. In spite of its benevolent aim to preserve the agrarian way of life, the government’s most durable accomplishment was the totalization of the agricultural system and a resultant dissolution of the mythic Jeffersonian ideology it had (perhaps) set out to uphold. In the coming decades, it was Life magazine’s aerial vision that won out in terms of on-­the-­ground agricultural practice. Only a few years later, near the end of World War II, an advertisement for the farm implement manufacturer International Harvester uncannily transposed Oz’s yellow brick road into a curvilinear pathway of golden wheat (Plate 15). Declaring that in the postwar period “power-­farming” would move forward on “pent-­up plans,” the promotion (created by the

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same business that—­under its previous name, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company—­ produced the “Westward” ad, Figure 3.4) represented “farming on the contour” not as fantasy but as a sensible and productive “modern practice.”4 Cultivated by machines and rational knowledge, the future of the midwestern landscape took shape under the systematic oversight of industrial authority. From a cynical standpoint, the dynamic contours of Oz and soil conservation may appear simply as flourishes in an increasingly regimented and systematic modernist agricultural vision. They add visual and practical value to the grid but do not fundamentally alter its form or its purpose. Yet like the Midwest revealed in the preceding pages, the landscapes that Dorothy and the government invented during their aerial journeys should not be simply or directly equated to the perquisites of a totalizing modernity. Outside of the single sequence where Dorothy and her friends are cleaned up by Emerald City beauticians (and in the case of the Tin Man, machinists) in preparation for meeting the Wizard, the Oz landscape makes little reference to the machinery and labor that were a hallmark of the 1930s technocratic vision for a new Midwest. In Oz, fields grow and flowers bloom seemingly without technology or effort. The curvaceous landscape, though animated by cinematic motion, nevertheless evinces a bucolic and lyrical charm. Seen from these angles, Oz’s patchwork fields are not harbingers of a modernist midwestern future but, instead, reassertions of a more open-­ended and romantic set of possibilities for the region. The willful exaggerations of the Oz scenery, from its cartoonish swelling hillsides to its hypertrophied flowers and foliage, demonstrate the inventiveness of this vision. Though less fantastical than Oz, the International Harvester advertisement also marries the new science of soil engineering with the enduring idealism of Jeffersonian culture. Soil-­conservation programming enacted a reconceptualization of agriculture that was at once technical, scientific, and cultural. Tilling on the contour embraced the cutting edge of environmental knowledge and invoked a sense of the interconnectedness of ecological systems that had been gleaned from aerial vision and other forms of systems-­oriented looking. In one way, this suggests that government conservation efforts simply replaced the rational form of the grid with an updated and equally totalizing form of spatial organization. To change the grid, however, also meant altering cultural beliefs, and this proved to be a trickier business. In the context of the Dust Bowl, most farmers understood the need for conservation measures and embraced the knowledge offered by the government in order to improve both their stewardship and their economic prospects. Though mindful of their cultural legacy, farmers were not naively nostalgic for an idealized past. Most understood that older practices of farming by the grid had emerged from a similarly rationalized imposition of state authority. In the 1930s, the difference between the curve and the grid was that of the unknown measured against the familiar. During the preceding decades farmers had both adopted the gridded landscape and adapted it to match their cultural desires. They now required time—­and personal engagement—

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t­o make sense of the new landscape order, improvise new practices, and resymbolize its meaning in ways that matched their own equally fluid outlook. The success of agricultural change depended on thinking through the past to understand the future. It is no accident, therefore, that in International Harvester’s promotion three red-­barned farmsteads dot the background and the tractor functions without emitting any exhaust from its cherry-­red smokestack (an elision also noticeable in Grant Wood’s Stone City, Iowa; see Plate 7). With a practiced eye, the modern adman realized the importance of embracing agrarian tradition and celebrating the jaunty-­hatted farmer as the one who does the work. To this end, it is no surprise that the landscapes of Oz and advertisement look remarkably like the gridded Midwest as camouflaged over with the curvilinear idealism of a Grant Wood landscape.5 This dynamic blending of the modern with the traditional—­the vision of a unified rural space merged with the stylings of an idealized agrarian mythology—­lies at the core of the aerial re-­imaging of the Midwest that occurred during the interwar years. As in Dorothy’s flight to Oz, aerial vision enabled midwesterners to perceive their landscape in ways that altered their understanding not only of how the land looked but also of how they, as inhabitants, shaped it and interacted within it. From the air, people acquired a sharper awareness of the systems of order and rationality that structured the region. They also discovered a heightened sense of their own freedom to imagine new configurations for both space and culture. Encouraged by the new images that inundated them, inhabitants took hold of the aerial gaze as a means to come to terms with and, to the degree possible, to give shape to their lives. Midwesterners looking at high-­altitude photographs of their farmsteads saw the prospect of a new and integrated agricultural system. They also recovered in them elements of yeoman ideology: not as simple nostalgia but, instead, as constitutive parts of a meaningful future. Through the aerial view, the midwestern landscape gained efficacy as a cultural symbol that enfolded the region’s long-­standing democratic ideals and iconography within the new visual forms and centralizing ambitions of a modern, technologically enhanced America. Yet uncertainty inevitably persisted. While Oz had been many things to Dorothy, home was not one of them. From our own twenty-­first-­century standpoint, it has become a commonplace to understand aerial vision almost wholly as a tool and symbol of authority and large-­scale, top-­down manipu­ lation. From this vantage, the force of the aerial viewpoint is one-­sided and the dominance of the seeing entity, usually a state or other equally abstract hegemonic structure, is absolute. While the aerial gaze may be available to all as a representation, its value to everyday viewers is understood as limited to the purposes of fascination, instruction, and testimony. Power remains locked away—­ more irretrievably distant than the prospect itself. People on the ground might see, understand, and even critique the large-­scale plans enabled by aerial vision and enacted through its imagery, but they are relatively incapable of changing them. It is imagined that individual sensibility and local knowledge can find no purchase in visions of abstract order. For this reason, as James Scott argued,

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“authoritarian, high modernist schemes” are often unsuccessful, and are almost always destructive, because “what they ignore—­and often suppress—­are precisely the practical skills that underwrite any complex activity.”6 For Scott, the future of large-­scale planning (if it has one; he is skeptical) hinges on mediating the abstract and totalizing vision of that project with local contingency and individual improvisation. As this discussion and the preceding chapters suggest, the midwestern landscape and its aerial visualization has been more generative of such improvisation and adaptability than most of us have recognized. When we fly over that landscape today and behold its still-­impressive grid pattern, it is true that the overwriting power of large-­scale planning remains at the front of our minds. Yet the Midwest retains efficaciousness as a symbol of American national identity: not only as space transformed by the application of rationalized order and technology, but also as a place where those forces were reshaped to accommodate an evolving yet remarkably steadfast belief in democratic individualism. The Midwest became a site of merger for these opposed but also reciprocal possibilities precisely because people on the ground engaged, interpreted, and adapted to their own needs the visions that came to them from on high. In the 1930s, as still today, the balance of power between all-­encompassing plan and local practice was neither equal nor tension free, but it did allow for important moments of dialectical ingenuity. Through government aerial photographs, farmers perceived the need to embrace conservation. They modified their individualist sense of property rights and Jeffersonian mythology to accommodate a new and systematic model of ecological order and responsibility. Because of efforts like Broadacre City, urban designers shifted their plans to balance the efficiency of centralization with a concern for human space. The formula for aerial looking emerged as a dynamic mix of acquiescence, resistance, and, above all, adaptation of viewpoint, experience, and ideology. The purpose of this book has been to explore in detail the rich matrix of aerial representation within the specific historical circumstances of a midwestern landscape in the throes of an early twentieth-­century transformation. The practices discussed—­from the preaviation aeriality of settlement mapping to New Deal aerial photography, Grant Wood’s painting, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s urban planning—­are all understood as overlapping, complementary, and mutually constitutive. They are also deeply contingent on the technological, representational, and sociocultural matrix of their own moment. Because the impact of aerial vision did not end in 1940, some readers may feel that my selection of this endpoint is a bit arbitrary. It is certainly true that the aerial gaze continues to have an impact on midwestern visual culture—­from late twentieth-­century photography and crop art to the contemporary use of GPS technology in tractors. These phenomena are visually compelling and play important roles in locating midwestern identity in the context of an increasingly globalized postwar culture. Yet amid this historical continuity there is also significant breakage. Aviation his­ torians have long argued that the cultural meaning of flight differed substantially before and after

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World War II. Along with a shift from propeller planes to turbojets and spacecraft, there also arose deeper and more conceptual reconfigurations of the cultural meanings of aviation. It became impossible to maintain the hopefulness that characterized early flight in the wake of Hiroshima and during the Cold War. The ages of Sputnik and Silicon Valley pushed aerial surveillance and global com­ munication beyond the compass of early airmindedness. More broadly, historians and theorists have argued for a similar paradigm shift in the relationship of prewar and postwar American culture—­ one where the optimism of early twentieth-­century modernization succumbed to the constructive cynicism we now describe as the postmodern. The words of the TWA advertisement that opened this book (Figure I.1) appear to hearken to this new reality: “This view point has changed an old point-­of-­view.” From this angle, the Jeffersonian farmscape seen through the portal becomes an anachronism. Or does it? In the following years, especially during the era of expansive corporate and middle-­ class liberalism that followed World War II, the ideal of the Midwest not only endured but also gained new and unexpected importance. The Jeffersonian homestead, which government surveyors established, midwestern settlers adopted, and planners like Frank Lloyd Wright and the Greenbelt Town programmers transmuted, reemerged as a model for American settlement in the form of suburban living. With its congruent properties and systematically planned spaces, suburban design reiterated in the context of postwar liberalism some of the nation’s enduring Jeffersonian forms and ideals. Located outside of city spaces on the broad horizon of the countryside, suburban landscapes once again offered Americans the opportunity to purchase their own land and become part of an independent yet like-­minded democratic citizenry. Like prairie settlers a century earlier, buyers pored over diagrammatic housing-­development maps to select their properties. Once settled, they improved their plots by purchasing furniture for the house, cultivating small yards of grass, and establishing ties to their neighbors and the community. Through such activities, inhabitants created a patterned landscape of adjacent “homesteads” where people were free to celebrate their hardy independence while at the same time engaging in the same common pursuits as those across the fence. As whole townships of prairie farmers had once arisen like clockwork to work their squared fields, so now did whole neighborhoods of suburbanites awaken for the morning commute to work, school, and the shopping mall (another midwestern invention).7 The suburb, of course, did not originate in the Midwest or even in postwar America. As architectural historians Dolores Hayden and Robert Fishman have demonstrated, the suburban idea emerged out of a mixture of pastoral and picturesque landscape aesthetics and Anglo-­American bourgeois utopianism that traces back to early nineteenth-­century Europe.8 Yet both Hayden and Fishman agree that around 1870 the development and symbolism of the suburb as a social form became increasingly and distinctly American.9 While the historical circumstances of this shift have been understood as

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mapping broadly to the nation’s expanding industrial and technological infrastructure, it is more than coincidental that the “American” suburb arose amid the crescendo of Manifest Destiny settlement. Influenced by Jeffersonian ideology to perhaps a greater degree than scholars have understood, the purpose of the suburb slowly shifted away from an escape for the bourgeois elite into picturesque exclusivity and toward a promise of democratic self-­determination through landownership. Though such ideals remained largely unremarked upon by nineteenth-­century suburban designers, the entanglement of suburban form and Jeffersonian mythology became explicit in Wright’s Broadacre City and, to a somewhat lesser degree, in the New Deal’s Greenbelt Towns. These 1930s revisions of the city form into a space symbolically and functionally agricultural—­a landscape of rationalized, technologized, integrated, and decentralized production and social life—­remapped the meaning of the suburbs for the twentieth century. Ironically, it may be that even as the status of rural America shrank, its forms and ideals remained at the frontier of national culture. In the postwar context especially, suburbia can be seen to embody at least in part a continuation of midwestern space, its practices, and its social organization. Yet even as the new patterns of the postwar suburbs drew inspiration from the broad visions of Jeffersonian order constructed in early elevated gazes, they were also responsive to the new sensitivities of form and contour gained through more-­modern aerial imagery. Informed by the aesthetic legacies of the nineteenth-­century picturesque and also by an aerial aesthetic of the kind exhibited in the ground-­saving contours enacted through government measures, the suburban designers created environments that counteracted the mechanistic rigidity of the grid with a more sensitive and organic spatial (and social) pattern. A comparison between International Harvester’s advertisement and an aerial photograph of one of the first large-­scale postwar suburban communities in the United States, at Levittown, Pennsylvania (Figure C.2), demonstrates the remarkable visual and conceptual congruence between the reconceived pattern of midwestern agriculture and the suburban motif of American home life. In each image, the landscape appears as a carefully laid-­out pattern of regular properties and integrated contours. Not only do both visions reflect a desire to systematically order American space, but they do so in a manner that invokes some connection to the form of the natural world. In the countryside alluded to by International Harvester, contour farming was meant to protect against the erosion of the physical landscape caused by insensitive and overly industrialized cultivation. In Levittown, designers imagined that living on the contour would inspire individual liberty and social well-­being by softening the edges of modern life. Since then, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has documented a systematic decrease in soil erosion across the nation’s farmlands. The conservation of American democratic ideology by suburban living remains less certain. As we enter the twenty-­first century, the practices of midwestern aeriality continue to exert influence throughout the region and beyond its boundaries. Following the aerial trajectories charted by

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Figure C.2. Aerial view of housing layout and roadways in Levittown, Pennsylvania. From Architectural Forum 103, no. 2 (August 1955): 61.

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atlas illustrators like Alfred Andreas and painters like Grant Wood, artists continue to embrace aeriality as the quintessential means to represent the region. Informed by the earth art and environmentalist movements of the 1960s, contemporary artists and photographers such as Harold Gregor, Frank Gohlke, Emmet Gowin, and Terry Evans have taken up the aerial prospect to interrogate the natural and cultural patterns of the prairie surface. Like the images of their forebears, their pictures exhibit a self-­evident fascination with the resilient form and enduring iconicity of the Land Ordinance grid. As in the first government survey photographs, the landscape emerges through these artists’ images as both a revelation and a contradiction. In some of them, the figural certainty of the grid is naturalized as a seemingly innate feature of the land. In others, it is exposed as a material and conceptual imposition. Also as in the 1930s views, the artistic photographs lay bare the hubris of midwestern development and become a means for critique and correction. Unlike government specialists in the 1930s (and still today), however, these artist-­photographers are less sanguine about the capacity of modernizing ideology to create either unity or order. At times defying the totalization and abstraction imposed by the aerial gaze, their images often seem obdurately contingent and particular. A condensed and tightly framed vertical photograph of tractor tillage marks across a broad field might speak to systems of productive order and inhabitation. Alternately, these impressions could be perceived—­especially in the vein of poststructuralist criticism that characterizes much of landscape photography after the 1960s—­as temporary and uncertain traces on an equally circum­ stantial field of meaning. The advent of even higher-­altitude and more abstract methods of satellite imaging and geographic information system (GIS) analysis intensifies our fascination in the aerial, but it also creates the potential for greater uncertainty. If these new data-­rich viewpoints represent everything systematically and all at once, is it possible to see anything particular at all? As in the 1930s, new technologies and conceptual possibilities have supplemented and altered the meanings of aeriality and the Midwest. Today, both of these remain fluid and dialectic configurations, together and separately demonstrating the inextricable entanglement of space and place, power and agency, past and future, and aerial and grounded that have marked this study. The 1996 work Iowa Countryside by contemporary crop artist Stan Herd (Figure C.3) exemplifies these complicated visual and conceptual negotiations. Commissioned for the 1996 State of Iowa sesquicentennial, the work consists of an idealized farm image created on a four-­acre field near the Cedar Rapids airport. In homage to his aerial-­artist predecessor Grant Wood, Herd based the work’s style and iconography on those of the earlier painter. As such, Herd’s landscape combines the dueling elements of Wood’s bifurcated aerial sensibility. The foreground rows of corn (each line in the representation consisting of four actual rows of corn—­a standard increment for a small mechanical planter), the puffy trees, and the curving central roadway are reminiscent of Wood’s idealized vision of Stone City, Iowa. The two squared fields in the upper half of the work resemble Wood’s interrogation of the grid in Spring

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Turning. More indirectly, Herd’s manipulation of the material form of the landscape to construct a pictorial illusion is redolent of Wood’s sense of painting and camouflage. Herd’s success in bringing the appearance of three-­dimensionality to the work is particularly impressive, especially given that his challenge was twofold: to overcome both the natural flatness of the terrain and the flattening effect of the aerial viewpoint from which the work would necessarily be seen. Herd’s Iowa Countryside engages with the conceptual discourse of the aerial Midwest at multiple levels. First, the work is itself an aerial representation and as such enunciates Herd’s contemporary

Figure C.3. Stan Herd, Iowa Countryside, 1996. Crop art near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, four-­acre square. Photograph courtesy of Jon Blumb.

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understanding of the aerial view as a foundational midwestern construct. Second, it enters into dialogue with the aerial vision of Wood, adopting and adapting that legacy to create a dual sense of cultural continuity and sentimental parody that the 1930s artist certainly could have appreciated. Finally, Herd’s work communicates with what is at once the oldest and most contemporary form of midwestern aeriality: the landscape grid, which enters Herd’s work both as an idea and as a material, on-­the-­ground reality. After all, Herd’s work does not just overlay but actually consists of the scene it is intended to picture. To view Herd’s artwork is to encounter the landscape simultaneously as a picture and as a physical presence. Drawn together, this triple rendition of midwestern aeriality plows over the distinction between representation and reality and begs the questions of stable time, space, and meaning. It is in this way a remarkably subtle artwork, not the least because it camouflages a complex and open-­ended system of vision and meaning with the alluring simplicity of a timeless agrarian mythos. Because Herd drives the tractor that tills the soil and seeds the crops, he does this work not just as an artist but also as a farmer. As for actual farmers, today aerial photographs still retain their status as the primary method for overseeing and working the midwestern landscape. Since the 1930s, government surveyors have remained vigilant sentries in the skies above, appearing on ten-­year cycles to capture new images with which to regulate agricultural production. Recently, the higher-­altitude and more synoptic gazes of orbiting satellites and GIS computer modeling have replaced these flights. Highly technologized, these images require farmers to contend with the landscape in ever more abstract and specialized configurations. In many instances, the survey image has become merely a background for the overlay of dense packages of data that include soil chemistry, fertilizer application levels, seeding rates, and yield numbers. The picturing of land qua land is replaced by the representation of the scientific and technical manipulations enacted on it. In one image typical of this new paradigm (Plate 16), a color-­ coded pattern of pixilation indicates in real time the varying amounts of grain reaped by the farmer’s combine as it moves methodically across the field. Unlike earlier practices, in which farmers counted bushels of grain wagon by wagon and field by field, this new technology records harvest information on a foot-­by-­foot basis. The availability of such exacting data has had a significant impact on the way farmers plan their activities. No longer privileging their own local knowledge and experience, farmers now base decisions about everything from cultivation to marketing on the new quantitative and data-­rich visions provided through GIS-­enabled analyses. They might consult these images in a home office or, more probably, on a digital readout mounted on board their tractors. Even in the act of guiding their machinery across the landscape, farmers now visualize the land as an abstraction. Delineated as a field of pixels, midwestern agriculture has never appeared more attenuated from its mythological rooting. Indeed, as technology continues to increase the scale of production and as vertical incorporation further diminishes the number of farmers on the land, the prospects of the

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Midwest as a Jeffersonian symbol appear dim. The farmers who remain on the land—­often in the form of corporations—­now commonly describe their chores as agribusiness. Yet they still commission aerial landscape portraits of their farms. Moreover, as chemical fertilizers and genetically modified crops test the limits of agriculture as a natural activity, American consumers have responded with demands for a return to older, less engineered, and more organic farm produce. This new dialogue between technological vision and democratic groundswell will undoubtedly give rise to further adaptation of the image and idea of the Midwest. This is a legacy only the future can decide.

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Acknowledgments

Like a farmer putting in his crops, I have accrued many debts in the cultivation of my topic. This volume offers both a harvest and a repayment. The book emerged out of a dissertation written under the guidance of Wanda Corn, whose visual acumen, historical grounding, and straight-­ talking prose served as its model. Another member of my committee, Michael Marrinan, has been my most constant interlocutor and intellectual confidante, and he deserves much of the credit for my development as a scholar. More recently, Leo Mazow, Stella Nair, Conrad Rudolph, and Joshua Shannon have been essential for their ideas and support. Professor Shannon read the manuscript at pivotal moments, and his insights on representation and modernity, which often ran across the contour of my own ideas, enriched the text immeasurably. Stephanie Fay offered early comments that guided me in restructuring the text. The three anonymous scholars who reviewed the book for the University of Minnesota Press provided meaningful feedback that made the book much better. Two graduate students, Erin Passehl and Margaret Wallace, tenaciously pursued research sources and copyright permissions, and I cannot imagine completing the book without them. The same goes for Teodora Bozhilova at the Visual Resources Collection at the University of California, Riverside, who showed skill, determination, and good humor in putting together (sometimes literally) my illustrations. As the text blossomed, three astute family members, Jed Weems, Della Weems, and Danielle Jungmann-­Weems, weeded it of turgid prose and exuberant punctuation. They also reminded me that big words are not always markers of big ideas. Three farmers, Darrell Weems, Berle Miller, and Steve Hemingway, taught me all I know about agriculture. Many more teachers, colleagues, friends, and institutions contributed during the book’s long growing season. During my Stanford days, John Bender, Scott Bukatman, Carlton Evans, Michael Foster, Matthew Hartford, Alexander Nemerov, Jeffrey Schnapp, Kristin Schwain, Gwendolyn Shaw, and Sally Stein sharpened my implements. At the Smithsonian Institution, my ideas found new shape 265

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in discussions with a cadre of brilliant fellows, and especially through the support of curators Tom Crouch, Pete Daniel, and Bill Truettner. Of numerous wonderful colleagues in American art and visual culture, Janet Berlo, Peter Brownlee, Meredith Davis, Erika Doss, Kenneth Haltman, David Lubin, Angela Miller, Kevin Murphy, Miles Orvell, Jennifer Roberts, Alan Wallach, and Rebecca Zurier all prodded me in useful directions, and I hope they continue to do so. Across the fences of my academic field, I am indebted to Martin Collins, Edward Dimendberg, Daniel Herwitz, Elena Razlogova, Vanessa Schwartz, David Suisman, and members of two informal writing groups for what they planted in (and weeded from) my work. Further appreciation is due to the remarkable archivists and librarians who located the sources I needed and showed me new things that proved even more important. Scholars and students who listened to me speak at conferences and in the classroom also provided useful feedback, for which I am grateful. A special thanks goes to undergraduate Rebecca Quon, who helped me find a particularly well-­hidden image. At the University of Minnesota Press, Kathy Delfosse provided scrupulous copyediting and Denise Carlson composed a thorough index. My editor Pieter Martin was a good neighbor and earned my gratitude for his encouragement, patience, and dedication to the project. Thanks are also due to the many colleagues and friends who, though unnamed, pitched in with advice and support when it was needed. Finally, with regard to any places where my fields appear unkempt, I alone am responsible. Several institutions provided me support, for which I am deeply thankful. Fellowships from the Stanford Department of Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Air and Space Museum, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the College Art Association/Terra Foundation enabled me to plant the seeds. Postdoctoral support from the University of Michigan, Dearborn; the University of Michigan; the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities; the University of California, Riverside; and the Hellman Foundation watered the fields. A teaching term at the University of California’s Washington, D.C., campus allowed me to make a second pass across my archival sources. A Tyson Scholars fellowship at Crystal Bridges and a sabbatical from the University of California, Riverside, gave me the uninterrupted time needed to bring in the crop. The University of Minnesota Press is instrumental in getting it to market. My deepest debt and gratitude is owed to those on my own homestead. Danielle made sure that I was in the field every morning, while Owen and Lyle played among the furrows while I worked. This harvest is for them.

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Not e s

I ntrodu ct io n 1. I discuss “modernity” in more specific terms throughout the pages of this book. As a point of departure, I understand the concept as it is defined in the well-­traveled verse of Marshall Berman, who wrote, “There is a mode of vital experience—­experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—­that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience ‘modernity.’ To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—­and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology; in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all of mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity; it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ ” Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 15. This passage is also discussed at length in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 10–­11. 2. A wealth of scholarship exists on the development of early twentieth-­century midwestern agriculture and society. Two works central to my understanding of midwestern modernization are Donald Kirschner, City and Country: Rural Responses to Urbanization in the 1920s (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970), and David Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–­1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979). 3. I first used the term “aeriality” in my dissertation filed in 2003; see Jason Weems, “Barnstorming the Prairies: Flight, Aerial Views, and the Idea of the Midwest, 1920–­1940” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003). William Fox also made use of the term in his book Aeriality: On the World from Above (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint Press, 2009). 4. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 5. Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900–­1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), and Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–­1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Other works important to my understanding of the cultural impact of aviation include Dominick Pisano, “The Greatest Show Not on Earth: The Confrontation between Utility and Entertainment in Aviation,”

267

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268 no t e s to i n t ro d u c t i o n 39–­74; and Gerald Silk, “Our Future Is in the Air: Aviation and American Art,” 250–­96, both in The Airplane in American Culture, ed. Dominick Pisano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 6. Corn, The Winged Gospel, vii. 7. By limiting my study to the topic of aerial vision, I am excluding a large body of visual imagery devoted to representations of the airplane itself. Thus, I am not concerned with pictures of airplanes or with the popular fascination with the airplane as an aesthetic object. Such treatments of the airplane can be found in the sources listed in note 5, particularly the works of Pisano and Silk. For a broader consideration of the 1930s machine aesthetic, see Jeffrey Meikle, Twentieth-­Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–­1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979). 8. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989), 2–­3. 9. Jeffrey Schnapp, “Propeller Talk,” Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (Winter 1995): 154. 10. As Foucault elaborated in his study of Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-­century panopticon prison, the panoptic gaze represented “a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.” For Foucault, the exercise of power over the lives and thoughts of prisoners rested in the ability of wardens, guards, and other overseers to maintain an environment where every aspect of life was regimented such that prisoners both lived under an umbrella of constant (if implied) surveillance and, equally important, were able to see, if not alter, the structures of order amid which they existed. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1979), 195–­228 passim. 11. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 581. 12. Ibid. 13. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xiv. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 92–­98. 16. Ibid., 92. 17. James Corner, in James Corner and Alex MacLean, Taking Measures across the American Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 15. This book has become the standard text on contemporary understandings of the aerial view in relation to the American landscape. 18. Denis Cosgrove, “The Measures of America,” in Corner and MacLean, Taking Measures across the American Landscape, 4. 19. Leah Dickerman, “The Radical Oblique: Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Camera-­Eye,” Documents 3, no. 12 (Spring 1998): 31. 20. Ibid., 33. In thinking through Rodchenko’s practice of oblique representation, Dickerman relies heavily on Yves-­Alain Bois’s study of the axonometric concepts employed by El Lissitzky. See Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America, April 1988, 161–­80. 21. As geographer James Shortridge’s study of the word “Midwest” has demonstrated, the boundaries of the region are fixed as much by culture as they are by geography and thus are open to interpretation. See Shortridge, The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). 22. Art historian Joni Kinsey offers a convincing account of the dual prospects of topographical emptiness and agrarian optimism by which early settlers understood the prairies. See Joni Kinsey, Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 11–­32.

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23. Andrew Cayton and Susan Gray, “The Story of the Midwest: An Introduction,” in The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History, ed. Cayton and Gray (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 10–­11. 24. Ibid., 10. 25. For an overview of the economic history of nineteenth-­century midwestern agriculture, see Alan Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 26. Frank Norris, The Pit: A Story of Chicago (New York: Doubleday, 1903). 27. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 28. Robert Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–­1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 25. 29. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, ed. John Faragher (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 31–­60. 30. Louis Marin, “Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 406–­7. 31. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 23. 32. See Cayton and Gray, “The Story of the Midwest,” 9–­17.

1 . P ioneerin g Visio n s 1. Anamosa (Iowa) Eureka, October 15, 1874. This advertisement is taken from William Petersen’s 1970 introduction to the Iowa State Historical Society’s reprint of the atlas. See Petersen, “Historical Introduction,” in Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa, reprint ed. (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1970), v; see also Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Atlas Co.; Lakeside Press, 1875. Chromolithographs by Chas. Shober and Co.). 2. Petersen, “Historical Introduction,” v. 3. Anamosa Eureka, October 29, 1874; also cited in Petersen, “Historical Introduction,” v. 4. Anamosa Eureka, October 29, 1874. 5. The figure of almost twenty-­three thousand subscribers is from Petersen, “Historical Introduction,” iv. 6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991). My reading of Anderson has been influenced by proposals in David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 10–­11. 7. The bibliography on the representation of the American landscape is enormous and well documented. With regard to the centrality of landscape in the formulation of a national image and ideology, among the most illuminating of texts is Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–­ 1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 8. Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830–­1865 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 38. 9. Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” in American Iconology, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 83 and passim. Wallach’s conceptualization of the panoptic is indebted to the work of Foucault; see especially Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, first published in French in 1975, which has had substantial impact on American landscape studies. See also Jason Weems, “Looking Up, Looking Down, Looking Out: Visual Angles on American Art,” American Art 25, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 2–­10.

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270 no t e s to c hap t e r 1 10. There is a growing body of scholarly work on images of the prairies created by Native Americans. In relation to this chapter, I have read with interest two essays on the history of Plains Indian mapmaking. See G. Malcolm Lewis, “Indian Maps: Their Place in the History of Plains Cartography,” and James Rhonda, “A Chart in His Way: Indian Cartography and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” which both appear in Mapping the North American Plains: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Frederick Luebke, Frances Kaye, and Gary Moulton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). 11. Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 33–­78 passim. The early descriptive literature of the prairies and plains is too vast to list. Original works cited in or especially influential to this essay include Morris Birbeck, Notes on a Journey in America: From the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois (1818; repr., Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966); Samuel Bowles, Across the Continent: A Summer’s Journey to the Rocky Mountains, the Mormons, and the Pacific States (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1865); John Woods, Two Years’ Residence on the English Prairie of Illinois, ed. Paul Angle (1822; repr., Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, 1968); and John Wright, Letters from the West; Or, a Caution to Emigrants (1819; repr., Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966). Numerous compilations of prairie literature also exist. For a critical interpretation of prairie literature, see Wayne Fields, “The American Prairies and the Literary Aesthetic,” in Kinsey, Plain Pictures, vii–­xvii, as well as Kinsey’s own extensive discussion of the topic, passim. 12. Judge James Hall, 1839, as quoted in Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 11. See also John Madson, Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 14–­15. 13. Caleb Atwater, 1818, as quoted in Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 11. A fuller version of Atwater’s remarks appears in Carol Fairbanks and Sara Brooks Sundberg, Farm Women on the Prairie Frontier: A Sourcebook for Canada and the United States (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983), 8–­9. 14. Morris Birbeck, “Notes from Shawneetown, 1817,” in Prairie State: Impressions of Illinois, 1673–­1967, by Travelers and Other Observers, ed. Paul Angle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 65–­66. 15. On the American tradition in landscape painting during the early and middle nineteenth century, see in particular Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye, passim. 16. Harriet Martineau, “The Prairies and Joliet, 1836,” in Angle, Prairie State, 174. 17. James Hall, from Plumbe’s Sketches, as quoted in a catalog for a Chicago Art Institute exhibition, An Open Land: Photographs from 1852–­1982 (Chicago: Chicago Art Institute, 1982), 83. 18. George Catlin, an early explorer and artist of plains imagery, noted that local folk referred to this effect as being “‘out of sight of land’, i.e. out of sight of anything rising above the horizon.” George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of North American Indians, 2 vols. (1841; repr., New York: Dover, 1973), 1: 218. This quotation also appears in Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 20. 19. Martin Bowden, “The Great American Desert and the American Frontier, 1800–­1882: Popular Images of the Plains,” in Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth-­Century Social History, ed. Tamara Hareven (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992), 49–­79. 20. It is not surprising that many nineteenth-­century artists skipped over the plains and prairies in favor of the more traditionally composed landscapes of the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. For a more detailed speculation on the reasons for such artistic “avoidances” of the prairie topography, see Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 16–­19. 21. Spatial practice, as defined by Victor Burgin, constitutes “the material expression of social relations in space.” See Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 27. Other influential iterations of ideologies of spatial practices include Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Press, 1991); Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

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22. My use of the term “prospects,” with its complex visual and rhetorical relationship to Western exploration and representation, comes from Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 18–­19. 23. Ibid., 17. 24. James Corner, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 225. 25. Ibid. 26. There is vast bibliography on Jefferson and Jeffersonian philosophy. Important to my understanding of Jeffersonian thought is Daniel Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1981). 27. For an account of the differences between Hamiltonian and federalist proposals for the organization and dispensation of the Western lands, see Linda Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980). 28. Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison, 1787, as cited in John Logan Allen, “Imagining the West: The View from Monticello,” in Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West: From Conquest to Conservation, ed. James Rhonda (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997), 19. 29. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 164. 30. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, 1–­10. 31. Hildegard Binder Johnson, “Towards a National Landscape,” in The Making of the American Landscape, ed. Michael Conzon (London: HarperCollins, 1990), 127. 32. Land Ordinance of 1785, as reprinted in C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 12. 33. The uniformity exhibited in the illustrations and diagrams of corner markers that appear across a plethora of government and private survey manuals from the middle decades of the nineteenth century demonstrates the consistency of the survey. In almost all instances, the illustrations accompanied even more rigorous written instructions describing how to make and locate markers. While the total number of surveying manuals is hardly great, those I consulted in the original include U.S. Land Office, Manual of Instructions for the Survey of the Public Lands of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1855); Office of the Surveyor General for the States of Illinois and Missouri, Instructions to Deputy Surveyors of the United States for the District of Illinois and Missouri (St. Louis, Mo.: U.S. Land Office, 1856); J. H. Hawes, Manual of United States Surveying: System of Rectangular Surveying Employed in Subdividing the Public Lands of the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1868); James Pedder, The Farmer’s Land-­ Measurer or Pocket Companion; Showing, at One View, the Content of Any Piece of Land, from Dimensions Taken in Yards (New York: C. M. Saxon, 1856). In addition, many of the key official documents that shaped the operations of the rectangular survey were collected together by government surveyor and historian C. Albert White in his indispensable volume A History of the Rectangular Survey System. Documents from that text that are of special significance to this study include “General Instructions to Deputies for Ohio, Indiana and Michigan” (1833), 291–­300; “General Instructions to Deputy Surveyors in Illinois and Missouri” (1834), 301–­11; “General Instructions to Deputy Surveyors in Illinois and Missouri” (1856), 401–­33; “General Instructions to Deputy Surveyors in Wisconsin and Iowa” (1846), 339–­56; “General Instructions to Deputy Surveyors in Wisconsin and Iowa” (1851), 385–­400; and Manual of Surveying Instructions (1855), 457–­501. For a history of the rectangular survey specific to Iowa and reproducing much original documentation, see J. S. Dodds, Original Instructions Governing Public Land Surveys in Iowa: A Guide to Their Use in Resurveys of Public Land (Ames: Iowa Engineering Society, 1943), and Lowell Stewart, Public Land Surveys: History, Instructions, Methods (Ames, Iowa: Collegiate Press, 1935).

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272 no t e s to c hap t e r 1 34. As quoted in Angle, Prairie State, 163. 35. Both the logbooks and the plat maps may be accessed in the collected records of the General Land Office, where they are indexed by state. Record Group 49, Cartographic Records of the General Land Office, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. 36. Land Ordinance of 1785, 12. 37. U.S. General Land Office, “Plat for Townships 21–­25 South, Ranges 1–­8 West, Kansas” (1860), reproduced in Ronald Grim, “Mapping Kansas and Nebraska: The Role of the General Land Office,” in Luebke, Kaye and Moulton, Mapping the North American Plains, 133. 38. Surveyors would submit their plat maps and notes to the federal government at the completion of seven ranges of townships (a range consisting of a north–­south line of adjacent townships, one township thick). Once these were bound together, the government created two duplicate plat books. The original remained in Washington, and the two duplicates were sent to local and territorial or state land offices. 39. Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–­1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 9. 40. The immediate practical impact of the Land Ordinance is still a subject of scholarly debate. In the ordinance’s first years the government realized far less income than expected, surveying proved costly and fell behind schedule, and private concerns (such as the Ohio Company) were allowed to purchase large tracts of land without working through the ordinance’s framework. Indeed, the ordinance was allowed to lapse and was later reinstituted, in 1796. For instructive accounts of the early bureaucratic history of the system, see William Pattison, Beginnings of the American Rectangular Land Survey System, 1784–­1800, 3rd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State Historical Society, 1970), and Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, passim. 41. Of the thirty-­six sections in each township, thirty-­one were offered for immediate sale, four were saved to the government for future sale, and one was set aside to fund and maintain a public school within the township. Notably, this reservation of a school section constituted the federal government’s first official support of public education. Also, the acreage amounts to be offered for sale were a subject of great debate. Originally the ordinance called for an alternating mode of sale for adjacent townships: one township would be sold as a single block, and then the next would be sold as individual sections. This was done to satisfy the competing interests of the divided Congress: some congressmen advocated the sale of small parcels to individual landholders, and others, doubtful of the viability of such democratic sales, wished to see the land granted at low prices to large companies and wealthy men who would then oversee settlement. Of course, as the nineteenth century progressed, acreage amounts would be gradually shifted downward with the quarter section (160 acres) becoming the predominant size by 1860, although 40-­ and 80-­acre plots would also be offered for sale. 42. Harper’s Weekly, July 11, 1874. 43. Contrary to popular myth, the Land Ordinance and subsequent homesteading bills encouraged, rather than limited, wide-­scale speculation. For more on this, see Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, and Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 44. For a history of the rail system in the United States, see John Stilgoe, Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). On the economic history of prairie railroads in particular, see Paul Wallace Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad System and Its Colonization Work, 2nd ed. (1934; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968). 45. Detroit Democratic Free Press, May 31, 1836, as quoted in Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 246.

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46. Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-­Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). For a consideration of the English landscape tradition, see Anne Birmingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–­1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 47. Beginning in the 1870s, these guides were printed on a yearly (and at times more frequent) basis. These comments are based on my study of several such guides. See, for example, Union Pacific Railroad, Guide to the Union Pacific Railroad Lands, 5th ed. (Omaha, Neb.: Union Pacific Railroad, 1877). 48. Ibid., 12. 49. Burlington and Missouri River Railroad Company, The Great North Platte Region of B. & M. Railroad Lands: Best Government Lands Still Open for Settlement: Large and Fine Crops, Good Settlers, Cheap Lands, Long Credit and Low Interest (Bur­ lington and Missouri River Railroad Company, 1878). The railroad’s promotional text and images overlap significantly with Larence Burch’s promotional book Nebraska as It Is: A Comprehensive Summary of the Resources, Advantages, and Drawbacks, of the Great Prairie State (Chicago: C. S. Burch, 1878). 50. For a foundational text on the experience of railroad travel and modernity, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 51. The exact number of prairie towns pictured through bird’s-­eye views has not been determined. For more general discussions on the development of nineteenth-­century prairie towns, see John Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), and Lewis Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1954). 52. For detailed accounts of the promulgation and deployment of bird’s-­eye views see John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). For a specific study of the use of such views on the developing Kansas frontier, see Lisa Dorrill, “Illustrating the Ideal City: Nineteenth-­Century American Bird’s Eye Views,” Imprint 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1993): 21–­32. 53. John Reps, having compared bird’s-­eye views with fire insurance and other such maps, argues that the views were largely accurate. Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America: Lithographs of Towns and Cities in the United States and Canada. Notes on the Artists and Publishers, and a Union Catalog of Their Work, 1825–­1925 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 71. 54. John James Ingalls, to his father, October 5, 1858, as quoted in Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America, 371. 55. Reps, The Making of Urban America, 371. 56. Ibid., 392–­93. This particular plan served as the basis for the construction of thirty-­three identically laid out towns along the Illinois Central right of way. 57. The description of intimacy in everyday spatial interaction is a topic that deserves greater attention. To understand my theorization of the topic, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 58. On the history of the Homestead Act, see Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” 142–­45. 59. Michael Conzon, “Maps for the Masses: Alfred T. Andreas and the Midwestern County Map Trade,” in Chicago Mapmakers: Essays on the Rise of the City’s Map Trade, ed. Michael Conzon (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1984), 47–­63. In another important essay, Conzon provides a complete developmental history of landownership mapping, or atlas making, in the nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century United States. See Michael Conzon, “The County Landownership Map in America: Its Commercial Development and Social Transformation, 1814–­1939,” Imago Mundi 36 (1984): 9–­31. Conzon’s claim that the first American landownership atlas, Lawrence Fagan’s Map of Berks County, Pennsylvania, was made in 1861 appears on page 17 of this essay. Though this identification of Fagan’s work is helpful in general, examples may exist that predate it.

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274 no t e s to c hap t e r 1 60. Conzon, “The County Land Ownership Map in America,” 9. 61. The government’s inability to perform this function was mostly due to its slender resources. As we have seen in the case of the Land Ordinance, for example, the government initially chose only to survey township boundaries, and not their interiors, as a cost-­saving move. It also had less reason to survey these lands, as they were already settled and were thus privately administered. 62. Sales of illustrated atlases were probably diminished in the East not only because of the prevalence of other, more artistic modes of landscape representation such as painting, but also because the irregular property boundaries of the earlier metes and bounds system could not be quickly or serially reproduced in map form (as was the case, we shall see, with the Land Ordinance landscape). This made the maps harder and more expensive to produce and, coupled with a market thinned by competition from landscape painters, thus less profitable. For a general history of eastern atlas making, see Conzon, “Maps for the Masses,” and Walter Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers: Commercial Cartography in the Nineteenth Century (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1985). 63. For a consideration of graphs and other information displays as aesthetic representations, see Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1983); Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1990); Jacques Bertin, The Semiotics of Graphics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). On diagrams and diagrammatic vision, see especially John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of the Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 64. County-­level representation proved to be a sensible choice, as the county proved the basic administrative unit of prairie life. Farmers, for example, transacted most of their business at the county level, the county seat served as the hub of government, and so forth. 65. For an excellent study of the symbolic relationship between railroads and the American countryside, see Susan Danly and Leo Marx, eds., The Railroad in American Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 66. See Burns, Pastoral Inventions, for an analysis of the invention and deployment of conventional signifiers for agrarian and rural life during the nineteenth century. 67. Cedar Rapids Times, November 11, 1875, as reprinted in Petersen, “Historical Introduction,” 4. 68. A detailed quantitative history on midwestern atlas production has yet to be completed. For a sense of the development of the atlas business and its predominance in the Midwest, see Conzon, “Maps for the Masses.” 69. Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 7. 70. Ibid., 156.

2. Managerial Mo saics 1. Stryker and Johnstone’s lecture, under the slightly different title “Documentary Photography,” was delivered at the AHA meeting in December 1939 in a series of presentations assessing the possibilities for a new, integrated practice of “cultural” history. In these papers, scholars explored the relationships among formerly diverse methodologies, such as those of psychology, anthropology, folklore, and intellectual history, and weighed the implications of interdisciplinary analysis. Stryker and Johnstone spoke on the development of documentary photography as a method for recording and interpreting history. Their lecture was adapted for publication a year later. See Roy Stryker and Paul Johnstone, “Documentary Photographs,” in The Cultural Approach to History, ed. Caroline Ware (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 329. For another consideration of Stryker’s essay, see Sally Stein, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: American Resistance to Photomontage between the Wars,” in Montage

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and Modern Life, 1919–­1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum and Maud Lavin (Cambridge: MIT Press; Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), 178–­79. 2. Stryker and Johnstone, “Documentary Photographs,” 329. Stressing the unique midwestern character of the image in Figure 2.1, Stryker wrote of the photograph, “Its significance as a cultural record may be realized by considering what this landscape would look like if the agrarian culture of the Middle West were organized on the basis of the type of peasant village which characterizes Central Europe, or on the type of land-­holding which has imposed its pattern upon the landscape of the lower St. Lawrence Valley.” Stryker recognized that the power of the photograph was due not only to the unique visual quality of the aerial view but also to the specific character of the midwestern landscape—­and its suitability to aerial photography. 3. Ibid. 4. As James Scott, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, and others have observed, the ability of a state to manipulate its countryside rests in its ability to oversee all its lands and to render them everywhere legible, or visible, both to the state and to its inhabitants. See, among others, James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Foucault, Discipline and Punish; and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. 5. The exact dating of Nadar’s balloon photography remains uncertain. For more information, see Stephen Bann, “Nadar’s Aerial View,” in Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, ed. Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 83–­94. Not coincidentally, the photographer’s efforts came at a moment when Paris was undergoing a shattering physical and conceptual transformation at the hands of civic planner George-­Eugène Haussmann, who in 1852 had begun a comprehensive renovation of that city. Haussmann’s transformation of the landscape was all-­encompassing and required the destruction of old irregular neighborhoods and their replacement with an integrated and standardized system of transportation, sanitation, architecture, and public space. On the visual and sociocultural impact of Haussmannization, see T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 6. While the dating of Black’s Boston photograph is well established, the full scope and timeline of Black’s balloon photography is a topic deserving of further research. 7. Black took eight exposures from this height; the existing photograph was the only successful shot. Although the exact altitude of the balloon during the exposure is not recorded, it was probably several hundred feet. 8. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1863, 12. 9. Holmes immediately recognized the limitations of balloon photography; he wrote of Black’s photograph, “As a first attempt it is on the whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what we may hope to see accomplished in the same direction.” Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” 12. 10. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s (and continuing today), the technological writing on the practice of aerial photography, photogrammetry, and aerial mapping has been both vast and detailed. Early sources consulted for background to this chapter include Herbert Ives, Airplane Photography (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1920); Dache Reeves, Aerial Photographs: Characteristics and Military Applications (New York: Ronald Press, 1927); Willis Thomas Lee, The Face of the Earth as Seen from the Air: A Study in the Application of Airplane Photography to Geography, American Geographical Society special publication no. 4 (New York: American Geographical Society, 1922); Ashley Chadbourne McKinley, Applied Aerial Photography (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1929). I also made use of manuscripts and promotional materials contained in the archives of the Fairchild Aerial Survey Company housed at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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276 no t e s to c hap t e r 2 11. As a phrase, “the surly bonds of earth” first appeared in a 1940 poem by American pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr. For a detailed cultural analysis of the literary descriptions of the landscape written by early aviators, see Tom Crouch, “The Surly Bonds of Earth: Images of the Landscape in the Work of Some Aviator/Authors, 1910–­ 1969,” in The Airplane in American Culture, ed. Dominick Pisano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 201–­19. For an examination of the literary representation of flight in a European context, see Schnapp, “Propeller Talk,” 153–­78. 12. Cosgrove, “The Measures of America,” 4. First iterated in nineteenth-­century discussions of railroad travel, the notion of the “annihilation of space and time” has come to signify the shrinking effects that mobility and speed have exercised upon the human experience of landscapes, in large part due to mechanical technologies. For the conceptual history of this phenomenon, see especially Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–­1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). For a consideration of the effects of speed and technology on understandings of the early American landscape, the classic text remains Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). Another is David Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 13. Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 32–­51. 14. For two theorizations of the cultural effect of aerial surveillance on the practice of war, see Virilio, War and Cinema, and Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” Artforum 14 (December 1975): 26–­35. 15. Manuals detailing the technical processes of aerial photography, including photomosaic production, appeared during and after the war. Those central to this chapter include Ives, Airplane Photography; U.S. War Department, Topography and Surveying: Aerial Photographic Mapping (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1925); Reeves, Aerial Photographs; McKinley, Applied Aerial Photography; James Bagley, Aerophotography and Aerosurveying (New York and London: McGraw-­Hill, 1941); and numerous articles. 16. Andre de Berroeta, “Flying in France,” National Geographic, January 1918, 9–­37. This particular issue of the magazine was devoted entirely to wartime aviation. 17. Corn, The Winged Gospel. 18. “America from the Air,” National Geographic, July 1924, 92. This entire issue of the magazine is devoted to aerial photography, its technology, and views of the American landscape. Other articles of note include John Macready, “The Non-­Stop Flight across America,” 1–­83; and J. R. Hildebrand, “Man’s Amazing Progress in Conquering the Air,” 93–­122. 19. Le Corbusier, Aircraft (New York: The Studio, 1935). Le Corbusier, Wright, and Mumford are discussed in chapter 4. 20. Sherman Fairchild, “Aerial Photography: Its Development and Its Future,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 131 (May 1927), 49–­55. See also Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, Sky Pictures (New York: Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, 1923); Sherman Fairchild, Building Industrial Castles from the Air (New York: Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, 1924); and Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, For Photography from the Air (Woodside, N.Y.: Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, 1925). 21. Items consulted for this chapter include Willis Lee, “Airplanes and Geography,” Geographical Review 10, no. 5 (November 1920): 310–­25; Fred Moffit, “A Method of Aerial Photographic Mapping,” Geographical Review 10, no. 5 (November 1920): 326–­38; Gerald Matthes, “Aerial Photographic Maps,” Tech Engineering News 5, no. 4 (November 1924): 2–­8; Clarence Winchester and F. L. Wills, Aerial Photography: A Comprehensive Survey of Its Practice and Development

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(London: Chapman and Hall, 1928); Earl Church, Topographic Mapping by Aerial Photography (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1930). 22. Fairchild, “Aerial Photography,” 50–­51. These are but a sampling of the listed applications. Of course, Fairchild had an interest in promoting the greatest possible number of uses for his craft, and he proved to be an aggressive champion of aerial photography’s utility as a tool of commerce. Nevertheless, the list begins to suggest the broad optimism of Americans for the use of aerial views. 23. Harry Stewart, “Making Pictures from the Sky Is a New Kind of Job,” American Magazine, October 1924, 80. 24. The company promoted the project through its in-­house publications and also promoted it to newspapers and popular media. For one of the first examples, see “Airplane Camera Maps City Clearly in 69 Minutes,” New York Times, February 26, 1922. 25. Charles E. Emerson, “Surveying with an Eagle Eye,” Open Road, October 1924, 12–­15. 26. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 31–­60. 27. Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 124. On the general prosperity of the Midwest in this period, see also Danbom, The Resisted Revolution, esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 28. Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982), 3. As agricultural historian Theodore Saloutos has noted, over forty million new acres were brought into production during this time, most of it in the prairie and Great Plains states. 29. Edward O. Moe and Carl C. Taylor, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: Irwin, Iowa (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, 1942), 10, cited in Kinsey, Plain Pictures, 124; and Danbom, The Resisted Revolution, 133. 30. W. C. Lowdermilk, acting director of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, to Paul Appleby, assistant director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), June 12, 1936, Records of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Record Group 114 (hereafter NRCS, RG 114), U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARACP). In a later memorandum, Soil Service director Hugh Bennett elaborated on the importance of air views to soil-­conservation practice, noting, “Aerial photographs have been exceedingly valuable in the development and extension of our program to control soil erosion and conserve moisture throughout the country. They have served in a general way to locate definitively areas where erosion is severe and where demonstration projects should be placed for effectiveness in establishing control practices and measures applicable to large problem areas. They have served as base maps for detailed field surveys, which are fundamental to planning the details of conservation operations and proper land use on individual farms. They have been used in making range surveys, planimetric mapping, developing research stations, and in many other ways at a saving of time and expense and an increase in accuracy of the work.” Bennett to Appleby, December 2, 1937, General Correspondence of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, July 1937–­June 1938, Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, Record Group 16 (hereafter SOA, RG 16), NARACP. 31. One agricultural engineer noted after having studied aerial survey images from the state of Ohio that over four-­fifths of eroded land in the counties surveyed was not visible from the state’s roads and probably would have been missed by ground surveyors. G. W. McCuen, chairman of the Ohio State University Agricultural Engineering Department, to David Warner, head of the Ohio Water Conservation Bureau (a copy was forwarded to the SCS), December 22, 1933, Central Files of the SCS, September 1933–­October 1935, NRCS, RG 114, NARACP. 32. “Took Photos from the Air,” Western Advocate, February 1, 1934, 1, cited in Neil Maher, “‘Crazy Quilt Farming on Round Land’: The Great Depression, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Politics of Landscape Change on the Great Plains during the New Deal Era,” Western Historical Quarterly 31 (Autumn 2000): 319–­40.

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278 no t e s to c hap t e r 2 33. G. A. Barnes, SCS information director, to Henry Abbot, March 5, 1937, General Files of the SCS, July 1936–­June 1937, NRCS, RG 114, NARACP. 34. Scholars Denis Cosgrove, E. A. Gutkind, J. B. Jackson, and others have noted the ability of aerial views to “encourage new sensitivity to the bonds that exist between humanity and the natural world.” See Cosgrove, “The Measures of America,” 4. See also E. A. Gutkind, “Our World from the Air: Conflict and Adaptation,” in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, ed. W. L. Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 1–­33, and John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 35. For an insightful characterization of SCS practices at the local level in the Midwest, see Maher, “Crazy Quilt Farming.” For a general history of the service, see Phoebe Cutler, The Public Landscape of the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and R. Burnell Held and Marion Clawson, Soil Conservation in Perspective (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965). 36. James West [Carl Withers], “Plainville, U.S.A.,” in The Psychological Frontiers of Society, ed. Abram Kardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 307. James West was the pseudonym for anthropologist Carl Withers, who completed his field research for the book in Wheatland, Missouri, from 1939 to 1940. 37. Lyle Rightmeyer, cited in Maher, “Crazy Quilt Farming,” 338. 38. Rexford Tugwell, “No More Frontiers—­Part 1,” Today, June 22, 1935, 3. Part 2 of the article was published in the journal the following week (June 29, 1935). The concept of the frontier was much in debate by New Deal administrators. In 1934 Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace wrote a book dedicated to the evolution of the frontier concept and the American mentality; see Wallace, New Frontiers (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934). 39. Tugwell wrote, “There doubtless will be many an objection to any sort of land program, just as our past history has disclosed buccaneers of business and finance who have resented every step taken to interfere with their opportunities for economic spoliation. But for the most part and with the great mass of our people, this opposition will dissipate itself as the broad social and economic aims of the national government are made clear. It will be the constant obligation of the Federal government to clarify, to study and to demonstrate—­and to convince unequivocally our rural folk who are to be aided.” Tugwell, “No More Frontiers—­Part 2,” 23. 40. Tugwell, “No More Frontiers—­Part 1,” 2. 41. For a history of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, see Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal. 42. Overall, Farm Security Administration policy (and allotment programs in particular) benefited landowners almost exclusively and thus offered little support to tenant farmers, renters, or others working on shares. For a consideration of how such class inequalities manifest themselves in FSA photography, see Pete Daniel, “Command Performances: Photography from the Department of Agriculture,” in Official Images: New Deal Photography, ed. Pete Daniel and Sally Stein (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1987), 36–­65. 43. For a cost-­benefit analysis of aerial surveying as compared to ground surveying, see a memorandum submitted to the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture on September 20, 1937: F. J. Settee, special assistant to the secretary of agriculture, to Paul Appleby, September 20, 1937, General Correspondence of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, July 1937–­June 1938, SOA, RG 16, NARACP. 44. Among the controls established were the standard negative size (nine inches by nine inches), the scale of the views (one inch was to equal 1,660 feet, meaning that the airplane had to fly at approximately 14,000 feet), and the standard degree of overlap between sequential images (60 percent), as well as more detailed rules for the

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acceptable allowance for visual distortion and other technical guidelines to be used by air surveyors. These figures are taken from a memorandum from Austin Patrick, acting chairman of the Subcommittee on Aerial Photography, to Paul Appleby, June 7, 1937, General Files of the SCS, July 1936–­June 1937, NRCS, RG 114, NARACP. The federal government published several technical manuals and guides to aerial survey photography during the New Deal years. See, for example, T. Ahrens, The Utilization of Aerial Photographs in Mapping and Studying Land Features (Washington, D.C.: Resettlement Administration Land Use Division-­Land Use Planning Section, 1936); U.S. Department of Agriculture, Notes on Planning of Aerial Photographic Projects. Office of the Administrator, Agricultural Adjustment Administration (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937); and U.S. Department of Agriculture, Manual of Practice: Aerial Photography, SRM-­233 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1938). 45. Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) Press Release, “AAA Plans to Map 350,000 Square Miles of Farm Land from the Air as Part of 1937 Conservation Program,” May 10, 1937, General Correspondence of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, July 1936–­June 1937, SOA, RG 16, NARACP. While much survey photog­ raphy was newly commissioned directly by the AAA, in some instances the agency expanded its archive through the acquisition of imagery from already completed surveys. 46. I use the term “panoptic” to indicate a systematic order of social control through processes that are actuated and emblematized by a panoramic, all-­seeing gaze. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 47. The section was the smallest land division bounded by public roadways throughout much of the Midwest. Most of these roads are still maintained today. 48. My understanding of the aerial photograph’s ability to clarify both industrial and organic order is shaped by Corner and Maclean, Taking Measures, 15–­16. Other influential texts include Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995), and Spiro Kostof, America by Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 49. The early twentieth-­century bibliography on aerial photography is filled with books and technical manuals explaining how to interpret the images; for a contemporaneous example, see Reeves, Aerial Photographs. 50. Ibid. 51. The files of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration are thick with such commentary. A particularly lucid description of the intentions behind the use of aerial survey appears in the transcript of a radio interview conversation between H. R. Tolly, an agriculture adjustment administration administrator, and Morse Salisbury of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of Information, originally broadcast on December 21, 1937; transcript on file at the National Agriculture Library, Beltsville, Maryland. For an insightful history of the Department of Agriculture’s adoption of aerial survey, see Monmonier, “Aerial Photography at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration,” Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 68, no. 11 (December 2002): 1257–­61. 52. For example, a detailed description of how accuracy was assured at every point in the aerial photographic process—­from photography and the assembly of photomosaic maps to scaling, measuring, and interpretation—­ appears in a memo provided to the government in 1935 by L. O. Howard, chief engineer, Whitman County, Washington, Wheat Production Control Association. The memo was published in 1936 in the promotional literature of an aerial-­survey contractor. See L. O. Howard, “Converting Aerial Photographs to Farm Acreage,” in Aerial Mapping as Applied to Agriculture (Spokane, Wash.: Wallace Aerial Surveys, 1936), 28–­30. 53. Monmonier, “Aerial Photography,” 1258. 54. The term “sky snoops” became a ubiquitous phrase for critics of New Deal agricultural policy. For a representative example, see Mark Sullivan, “The New Invasion of Farm Privacy Seen in A.A.A. ‘Sky Snoopers,’” New York Tribune, June 20, 1938. 55. James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 183–­84.

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280 no t e s to c hap t e r 2 56. There were a broad array of economic benefits associated with New Deal agricultural programs, including commodity price supports, loans, soil-­conservation subsidies, rural electrification, and technical advice, to name only a few. For more information, see Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal, passim. For other considerations of the impact of New Deal modernizing programs on the American landscape, see Neil Maher, Nature’s New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); and Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 57. Agricultural Adjustment Administration press release, “AAA Plans to Map 350,000 Square Miles of Farm Land,” May 10, 1937. 58. Ibid. Across the span of government documents viewed in this study, agricultural agents tended to paint a positive picture of farmers’ faith in the accuracy of air views. 59. Daniel, “Command Performances,” 40–­41. 60. Nye, American Technological Sublime, 106. 61. James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 4. 62. Many such requests are archived in the files of the USDA, and one can imagine that landowners and tenants made additional verbal appeals directly to local agents during farm visits. Unfortunately, most of the existing requests consist only of a brief note and do not elaborate upon intended use, although a government press release does note that many farmers “obtained copies of the aerial maps and had them framed” (News Release, May 10, 1937). Indeed, by the fall of 1937, the department began working to establish policy and price guidelines for the dissemination of aerial images to private individuals and organizations. See F. J. Settee to M. S. Eisenhower, head of the USDA Information Division, November 11, 1937, General Correspondence of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, July 1937–­June 1938, SOA, RG 16, NARACP. Subsequently, an official regulation for the private sale of air images was established in August 1938. See “Instruction to Purchase of Aerial Photographic Reproductions,” USDA general announcement, August 11, 1938, General Correspondence of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, July 1938–­June 1939, SOA, RG 16, NARACP. For a useful art-­historical account of the history of estate portraits in the art of Europe and the United States, see Birmingham, Landscape and Ideology. 63. For an example of a how-­to guide to becoming an aerial photographer, see Claud Dry, Aerial Photographs: How to Make and Sell Them (Athens, Ohio: Aircraft Directory Press, 1940). Among the customers to whom prospective aerial photographers might cater, Dry identifies “the farmer who wants in one picture to show his acreage and his home” (15). 64. On the willingness of viewers to perceive photographs and other kinds of mechanical representations as unmediated, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1991): 123 and passim. 65. Of course, the government’s survey photographs were usually of too large a scale to allow for the perception of individuals in the landscape, although with the aid of magnifying devices cars are often visible on the roads, as are implements in the fields. See H. Stewart, “Making Pictures from the Sky,” 33–­34. 66. On the concept of the miniature, see Susan Stuart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 37–­69, and Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 148–­82. On the relationship of miniaturization to modernist ideology and planning, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 257–­61 and passim. 67. “Aero Photos Are a New Weekly Feature of the Anamosa Eureka,” Anamosa Eureka, August 31, 1939. 68. “Can You Identify This Farm from This Brand-­New Angle,” Anamosa Eureka, September 7, 1939. 69. “Aero Photos Are a New Weekly Feature.”

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70. “You’re Right—­It’s Tobiasson’s,” Anamosa Eureka, September 14, 1939. 71. Ibid.; emphasis mine. 72. “Jones County to Be Reflown in Aerial Mapping Plan,” Anamosa Eureka, May 16, 1940. Between 1936 and 1940 the Eureka published seven articles on the federal government’s use of aerial photographs in Jones County. In addition, the newspaper published numerous articles that used aerial photographs to illustrate statewide and national events. 73. Tugwell, “No More Frontiers,” Parts 1 and 2; Russell Lord, Behold Our Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938). Much of Lord’s material for Behold Our Land derived from a commission by the SCS to write a technical bulletin that addressed soil-­conservation measures across the nation, which was also published in 1938; see Lord, To Hold This Soil (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1938). The use of aerial photographs in government publications was widespread throughout the New Deal era but became especially noticeable after 1936. 74. Produced by the USDA’s Information Division, these filmstrips were shown to small audiences during what one agent described as “conversation meetings,” in which agents would “get a farmer to invite several of his neighbors into his house and we throw these pictures on a sheet in the kitchen, dining room, or wherever it is convenient for the farmer. Then we have a general conversation while the pictures are on the screen . . . get[ting] the farmers to discuss what they are doing and what they would like to do.” See “Prepare Your Own Filmstrips,” USDA instructional guide (1938), General Correspondence of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, July 1937–­June 1938, SOA, RG 16, NARACP. 75. Filmstrips became a central means for local and county agents to disseminate and promote USDA policy. While some filmstrips were produced at the national level, others were produced locally and regionally (though still in accordance with federal guidelines). Such filmstrips could be better tailored to the circumstances of specific places and audiences. 76. As a graduate student at Columbia University Stryker worked closely with Tugwell, who was a professor of economics. While at Columbia, Tugwell, Stryker, and Thomas Munro coauthored an influential textbook on modern American economics. See Rexford Guy Tugwell, Thomas Munroe, and Roy Stryker, American Economic Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925). The textbook was considered remarkable for its use of photographs and other visual materials, which were collected by Stryker. On this relationship, see Malcolm Rutherford, The Institutionalist Movement in American Economics, 1918–­1947 (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 247. The classic account of Roy Stryker’s influence on government photography remains F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972). 77. The Historical Section, part of the Division of Information for the New Deal Resettlement Administration, was founded on July 10, 1935, with Roy Stryker as its chief. The RA was incorporated into the Department of Agriculture on January 1, 1937. On September 1, 1937, the Farm Security Administration absorbed most RA activities, including the Historical Section. In 1942 the Historical Section was transferred from the Department of Agriculture to the Office of War Information (OWI), with Stryker still as its chief. In October 1943 the Historical Section was disbanded and absorbed into other OWI divisions, and Stryker resigned from government service. 78. Numerous photographers worked for Historical Section throughout its existence, though never all at the same time. Notable photographers included (in the order they were hired) Arthur Rothstein, Theo Jung, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Walcott, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and Gordon Parks. The Historical Section’s photographic archive is currently housed in the Library of Congress and consists of 175,000 black-­and-­white negatives, 1,600 color negatives, and more than 107,000 photographic prints. Of the last, Historical Section photographers produced roughly 77,000, and about 30,000 (including many aerial photographs) were acquired from other sources.

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282 no t e s to c hap t e r 2 79. Cited in Terry Smith, Making the Modern, 295. 80. As recent scholarship has disclosed, however, both the immediate and lasting impacts of FSA photography were complex and fraught with formal and ideological contradiction. For critical views on FSA photography, see Terry Smith, Making the Modern; James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Lawrence Levine, “The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Documenting America, 1935–­1943, ed. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 15–­42; Maren Stange, Symbols of an Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–­1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); William Stott, Documentary Expression in Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); and Alan Trachtenberg, “From Image to Story: Reading the File,” in Fleischhauer and Brannan, Documenting America, 43–­73. 81. Roy Stryker to J. G. James, no date [filed in a folder from April 1938]; Correspondence, General, 1938, box 2, reel 1, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Textual Records, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (hereafter cited as FSA/OWI). 82. Roy Stryker to J. G. James, June 10, 1938, Correspondence, General, 1938, box 2, reel 1, FSA/OWI. 83. Ibid. For a detailed discussion of the FSA photography at the International Photographic Exhibition, see James Curtis, “Introducing Americans to America: Roy Stryker and the Creation of the FSA Photographic Project,” in Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 6–­20. 84. He was among the first appointees to the committee. Austin Patrick, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Photogrammetry, memorandum to Stryker, July 7, 1938, Advisory Committee on Photogrammetry, 1938, 1939–­ 41, box 1, reel 1, FSA/OWI. 85. Sally Stein, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” 178–­79. 86. Stryker to Jack Delano, November 11, 1940, cited in Sally Stein, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” 178. At the beginning of the New Deal, Stryker had been directed to find such views in order to justify the need for government programs. As New Deal activities came under increasing scrutiny at the end of the decade, Stryker was asked more and more to provide images that demonstrated the “success” of its programs. It was probably in this context that he grew to appreciate the dual ability of vertical views to reveal or to hide the real state of the landscape. 87. After resigning from government service in 1943, Stryker accepted a position in the public relations department at Standard Oil, where he oversaw the production of a photographic archive documenting the place of oil in everyday American life. In this capacity he oversaw the production of many aerial photographs. See Steven Plattner, Roy Stryker, U.S.A., 1943–­1950. The Standard Oil (New Jersey) Photography Project (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). 88. There are numerous photographs in the FSA archives that show self-­conscious efforts by photographers to capture bird’s-­eye oblique views and in rarer instances nearly vertical photographs taken from atop buildings, towers, and farm silos. There are fewer instances in which FSA photographers captured images from airplanes. The FSA collection at the Library of Congress does contain numerous aerial photographs, some vertical survey views but most oblique photographs, which Stryker probably acquired from other government agencies. 89. The term “straight” (or “pure”) photography refers to an approach that seeks to produce objective and unmanipulated photographs. Sadakichi Hartman coined the term in 1904 in a critique of pictorialist photography. It gained a more modernist sensibility in the twentieth century in the artistic photography of Paul Strand, for example, and in documentary practice. 90. Stryker to Arthur Rothstein, August 26, 1939, Series 3, Roy Stryker Papers and Photographic Archives, University of Louisville Special Collections, Louisville, Kentucky (hereafter cited as RSP). Stryker was commonly

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known for providing lengthy “shooting scripts” to his photographers, which detailed the types of shots his photographers needed to take. These scripts described the subject matter, postures, camera angles, and mood desired. Unfortunately, the records do not contain such scripts for Rothstein’s trip, only detailed correspondence. For an example of a shooting script, see Roy Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935–­1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 187–­88. 91. Roy Stryker to Arthur Rothstein, August 26, 1939, Series 4, RSP. 92. For another interpretation of the Iowa Falls image, see Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth, 104. 93. Uncertainty about modernization permeated midwestern artistic and visual expression during the 1930s, epitomized by the artists and writers affiliated with the regionalist movement. In Iowa, artist Grant Wood is a well-­ known example of someone whose artistic production seemed to resist cultural change. Other examples specific to the Iowa local scene include writers such as Herbert Quick or Ruth Suckow, whose quasi-­autobiographical writings elegized the passage of the pioneer culture that had shaped their identities. See Herbert Quick, One Man’s Life (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobb’s Merrill, 1925), and Ruth Suckow, The Folks (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934). Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd also noted the mixed feelings that midwesterners had toward modernization in both a social and a technological sense. The Lynds noted that this condition often led to the willful comingling of old and new ideals: “A man may get his living by operating a twentieth-­century machine and at the same time hunt for a job under a laissez faire individualism which dates back more than a century; a mother may accept community responsibility for the education of her children but not for the care of their health; she may be living in one era in the way she cleans her house or does her washing and in another in the care of her children or in her marital relations.” Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 497–­48. 94. Ralph Borsodi, Flight from the City (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1933). 95. Arthur Rothstein to Roy Stryker, March 1, 1940, Series 4, RSP. 96. As noted in my introduction, Michel de Certeau theorized that the spatial pathways of grounded life take on new visual and structural symbolism when perceived from the air. See Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 91–­110. 97. It is hard to prove that Vachon had seen the Grundy County aerial photographs, but given that Vachon was following up on Rothstein’s earlier trips and that Stryker usually insisted that his photographers consult with one another on overlapping projects, it is safe to postulate that he had. Moreover, FSA photography scholar Miles Orvell contended that Rothstein served as Vachon’s informal mentor at the FSA, which makes it even more likely that Vachon had studied the more experienced photographer’s photographs. Orvell, personal conversation, 2001; see also Orvell, “Portrait of the Photographer as a Young Man: John Vachon and the FSA Project,” in A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States, ed. Townsend Luddington (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 306–­33; and Orvell, John Vachon’s America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 98. Henry Luce, as quoted in Erika Doss, “Rethinking America’s Favorite Magazine, 1936–­1972,” in Looking at Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), 2. Surprisingly, little scholarship exists on the visual program (or even the business history) of Life. For studies addressing the pre–­World War II history of the magazine, see Robert Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923–­1941, 3 vols. (New York: Atheneum, 1968); Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of “Life” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). See also Terry Smith, Making the Modern, which attempts to fit Luce’s practice of photojournalism into the broader context of American visual culture in the 1930s. 99. “Editor’s Introduction,” Life, November 23, 1936, 1.

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284 no t e s to c hap t e r 2 100. “Life on the American Newsfront: Mr. Roosevelt’s Farm Bill and Mr. Remsberg’s Farm,” Life, February 28, 1938, 15. Luce’s political leanings (which provided the ideological basis for the magazine) were complex and sometimes contradictory. As espoused in his famous 1941 essay “The American Century,” Luce held a strong belief in democracy and American exceptionalism. On the whole he supported New Deal initiatives, although he was also highly pro-­business and pro-­capitalist. He was also a great supporter of the development of an integrated, industrial America—­a position founded on his detailed reading of The Federalist Papers (this might explain, to a degree, his distaste for the Jeffersonian “yeoman farmer” ideal.) For a selection of Luce’s polemical writings, see John K. Jessup, ed., The Ideas of Henry Luce (New York: Atheneum, 1969). 101. Wallace W. Kirkland, photographer, in “The Iowa Farm: A Corn and Hog Business Run By Machinery,” Life, September 20, 1937, 36–­43. 102. As Kirkland commented, he did not have an aerial camera, so instead he took the photographs with his regular equipment, “hanging out of the door of the airplane and upside down.” Wallace Kirkland, Recollections of a Life Photographer (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 120. 103. Life, “The Iowa Farm,” 37. 104. Stein has written extensively on the graphic and ideological history of popular media’s use of the grid in 1930s America. See Sally Stein, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” 128–­89. 105. As the magazine’s text elaborates, the image was taken during the late-­summer oat harvest, when farmer-­ operators such as Woodruff hired additional temporary laborers to operate the threshing machinery. Thus, the lunch scene includes workers other than the regular inhabitants of Woodruff’s farm. This contention is verified by Kirkland in his Recollections, 119. 106. The magazine as a whole, throughout its varied topics, presented women in subsidiary cultural roles as wives, consumers, and objects of desire. For an interesting example of Life’s take on the intersection of the feminine sphere with the technology of the airplane, see an article on flight attendants entitled “Boy Meets Girl—­On the Airways,” Life, March 25, 1937, 10–­15. This article provides additional evidence of the magazine’s conservative representation of women’s labor in modernity. 107. For a historical and theoretical consideration of quilt making, see Patricia Mainardi, “Quilts: The Great American Art,” in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 331–­46. 108. Life, “The Iowa Farm,” 39. 109. Paul Johnstone, “Old Ideals versus New Ideas in Farm Life,” in Farmers in a Changing World: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1940 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1940), 161; also cited in Danbom, The Resisted Revolution, 138.

3 . Adapt ive Aerialit y 1. “Grant Wood’s Latest Landscape: Spring Turning,” Life, February 8, 1937, 33–­34. 2. Ibid. 3. Wanda Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 90. 4. The diversity of interpretation inspired by Wood’s art testifies to its complexity. In more recent scholarship, four works have provided the foundation for study of the artist. Wanda Corn’s 1981 exhibition catalog established the artist’s intricate linkages to the midwestern landscape, culture, and mythology. James Dennis’s scholarship locates the artist’s work in relation to American mythology (1975) and artistic modernism (1998). See James Dennis,

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Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975); and Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Stuart Curry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). A 2010 biography by R. Tripp Evans examined Wood’s work in light of gender and sexuality. See Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 5. Kent Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993) 40–­41. The reassertion of personalized notions of “place” as opposed to the modernist concept of rationalized space has emerged as a primary concern of contemporary cultural theory and criticism. Of particular note has been an interest in understanding the ways that individuals particularize and identify with individually significant topographies, as opposed to the anonymity and interchangeability of spaces prescribed by modern enlightenment, industrialism, and consumerism. Texts on this subject influential to my work include Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, eds., Mapping American Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1997); Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Press, 1976); Yi-­Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); and E. V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of Human Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 6. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape, 43. 7. My understanding of a cultural landscape as one based on the concept of accreted experience is based on the ideas of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who understood the construction of social systems as overlapping “webs of signification” in which present practice and past mythology maintained constant operational dialogue. See Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). On theorizing the relationship between local knowledge and regimes of modernity, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State. 8. As both contemporary accounts and later historical studies suggest, the idea of speed served as a guiding concept and a source of fascination for modern mechanical culture. For an insightful introduction to the topic, see Kern, The Culture of Time and Space. 9. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 52. On changes in modern visuality, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 10. For a thoughtful account of the effects of amusement rides on the psyche of modern America, see John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). Other sources on the cultural effects of thrill rides are included in the vast literature on modern world’s fairs. 11. For a detailed history (and historical definition) of the term “airmindedness,” see Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel, 12. 12. Born in 1867 (Wilbur) and 1871 (Orville), the Wright brothers were more than two decades older than Wood. As youths, they had lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, from 1878 to 1881. Moreover, records indicate that Wood wrote at least one personal letter to the Wright brothers during the 1920s. Unfortunately, although this letter is listed in the index of the Wright Brothers manuscript collection at the Library of Congress, it is missing from the file. See Finding Aid, Wilber and Orville Wright Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 13. For background on early midwestern aviation, see John Fitzpatrick, Wings over Tomorrow: A History of Aviation in Iowa (Sergeant Bluff, Iowa: printed by the author, 1979). Earhart later claimed to have seen her first airplane in 1908 at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. 14. Beginning in 1905, for example, the directors of the Iowa State Fair made it a policy to include “the latest and most spectacular features in aviation” as part of its grandstand entertainment. In following years, Iowans were

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286 no t e s to c hap t e r 3 treated to aerial performances that included flying demonstrations, air races, aerial acrobatics, and stunts such as wing walking and parachuting. See “Aviation Features Iowa State Fair 1905–­1926 Inclusive,” not dated, Iowa Aviation Collection, State Historical Society of Iowa (hereafter SHSI), Des Moines. In 1906 and 1907 the fair contracted for the appearance of a dirigible. The year 1911 marked the first performance of a heavier-­than-­air craft in the form of two Wright brothers biplanes. Thereafter, airplanes became a regular attraction. 15. This performance was documented in photographs, one of which appears in the Iowa Aviation Collection, SHSI. 16. See “Aviation Features Iowa State Fair 1905–­1926 Inclusive.” Between 1911 and 1925 aerial performances became increasingly daring. At the Iowa State Fair, for example, shows progressed from simple flight demonstrations to more complex aerial acrobatics, wing walking, and other aerial theatrics. 17. For a consideration of the phenomenology of visual effects, see Scott Bukatman, “The Ultimate Trip: Special Effects and Kaleidoscopic Perception,” in Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press; New York: New Press, 1995), 254–­90. 18. Wallie J. Neely to T. B. West, October 13, 1914, Iowa Aviation Collection, SHSI. 19. “Flying Farmer and Bride of Coggon to Take Their Honeymoon in Airplane,” Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette-­ Republican, June 18, 1927, Iowa Aviation Collection, SHSI. 20. For an overview of the history of airmail and passenger service in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, see Nick Kommons, Bonfires to Beacons: Federal Aviation Policy under the Air Commerce Act, 1926–­1938 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1989). 21. The terms “barnstormer” and “gypsy flier” were common monikers for itinerant performing pilots. On barnstorming, see Martin Caidin, Barnstorming (New York: Duell, Stone and Pearce, 1965); Donald Dwiggins, The Barnstormers: Flying Daredevils of the Roaring Twenties (New York: Gross and Dunlap, 1968); and K. C. Tessendorf, Barnstormers and Daredevils (New York: Atheneum, 1988). 22. Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel, 13. 23. Tessendorf, Barnstormers and Daredevils, 4–­6. 24. The best sources on barnstorming are the accounts authored by barnstormers themselves, which often describe both the pilot’s perspective and the reactions of passengers. Even so, they rarely capture in first-­person terms the responses of individual passengers. For an example, see Leslie Miller, Handsprings for Hamburgers (Hollywood: D. G. Fischer, 1929). 25. Robert Johnson, cited in Tessendorf, Barnstormers and Daredevils, 12–­13. 26. No direct evidence shows that Wood flew in his youth. Given his interest in local spectacles and community events, it is reasonable to assume that Wood attended the flight exhibitions common to the period. It is possible that he may have flown during his military service, though no such flight is documented. The one flight recorded in Wood’s life was a 1940 trip from Iowa to Hollywood on a commercial airplane. This flight was reported in local papers; see “Grant Wood’s New Painting Put on Exhibit,” Daily Iowa City Iowan, May 25, 1940. 27. Tessendorf, Barnstormers and Daredevils, 30. 28. Charles Lindbergh, quoted in Crouch, “The Surly Bonds of Earth,” 201–­19. 29. “Eight Persons Injured in Two Air Crashes at the State Fair,” Des Moines Register, August 29, 1930. 30. Boston Transcript, May 5, 1909, cited in Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel, 43. 31. For an introductory discussions of aviation and the visual arts in the early twentieth century, see Wohl, A Passion for Wings; Kern, “The Cubist War,” chapter 11 in The Culture of Time and Space, 287–­312; and Silk, “Our Future Is in the Air,” 250–­98.

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32. To some degree, a modern aerial aesthetic existed in the work of American artists circa 1900, particularly among members of the so called ash-­can school, who sometimes painted images of industrial cities like New York and Chicago from the tops of skyscrapers, bridges, and other elevated vantage points. These views differed from true aerial views in that they maintained a sense of physical connection that was eclipsed by aviation imagery. 33. Stanton Macdonald-­Wright, “Influence of Aviation on Art: The Accentuation of Individuality,” Ace: The Aviation Magazine of the West, September 1919, 11; also cited in Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel, 36. 34. Macdonald-­Wright, “Influence of Aviation on Art,” 12. 35. Ibid., 11. 36. Grant Wood/Park Rinard, “Return from Bohemia,” unpublished manuscript with handwritten annotations, 204 (the text appears on microfilm as D24, frames/pages 165–­295), Grant Wood Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter abbreviated as GWP). Although the unpublished text is often attributed to the artist himself and bears his name alone, it was actually written by Wood’s personal assistant and confidante Park Rinard, who submitted a nearly identical text as his master’s thesis in creative writing at the University of Iowa. The anecdotes are certainly authentic to Wood, and the annotations to the GWP manuscript are in Wood’s hand. See Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 151, and Evans, Grant Wood, 375. 37. Wood/Rinard, “Return from Bohemia,” 204. Similar sentiments appeared in a biographical essay written by Rinard and Arnold Pyle for the catalog for Wood’s 1935 exhibition at the Lakeside Press Galleries in Chicago. See Rinard and Pyle, Catalog of a Loan Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings by Grant Wood, with an Evaluation of the Artist and His Work (Chicago: Lakeside Press Galleries, 1935), 4–­5. 38. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 81–­86. 39. Wood/Rinard, “Return from Bohemia,” 170–­250, passim. Wood makes numerous references to his fasci­ nation with the topographic contours of the land and with the boundary lines of the rectangular survey. He also recounts the prevalence of geography coursework in his childhood education. 40. Ibid., 176. As Wood recounted, neighbors thought that his father was “sinfully extravagant” in his periodical subscriptions. He subscribed not only to the Anamosa Eureka but also to Wallace’s Farmer and Harper’s Magazine. His personal library also included Thomas Babington Macaulay’s and David Hume’s histories of England and biographies of Abraham Lincoln and William Penn. 41. Albert Boime was the first to discover this relationship between the McCormick advertisement and Leutze’s painting. See Boime, The Magisterial Gaze, 44–­47. 42. Ibid., 38–­39, 43–­47, and passim. 43. Wood/Rinard, “Return from Bohemia,” 252–­53. 44. Ibid. 45. Adeline Taylor, “To Preserve the Past: Disappearing Landmarks,” Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazette, September 1935, in Grant Wood Scrapbook 2, 1935–­1939, Grant Wood Scrapbooks, compiled by Nan Wood Graham, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa (hereafter GWSB). 46. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922). (Incidentally, Lewis’s first book, published in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham, was an adventure story for boys that narrated the exploits of a young pilot; see Sinclair Lewis, Hike and the Aeroplane [New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912]). Lynd and Lynd, Middletown. Middletown was based on field research conducted in Muncie, Indiana. 47. Wood’s early artistic training is well documented, with the most detailed and anecdotal appearing in Darrell Garwood, Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1944), 31–­42. James Dennis also gives

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288 no t e s to c hap t e r 3 Wood’s training scholarly analysis and pays particular attention to the artist’s engagement with the compositional strategies of Ernest Batchelder and Arthur Wesley Dow; Dennis, Renegade Regionalists, 178–­92. 48. Though written several years earlier, novelist Henry Blake Fuller’s 1893 novel The Cliff-­Dwellers captured the mixture of awe and displacement experienced by those drawn from the countryside to Chicago. In one passage, Fuller described a character who was impressed by the physical verticality of the city but also disoriented by it, left with “no sense of any right relation to the community in which he lived.” See Fuller, The Cliff-­Dwellers (1893; repr., New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1973), 32. For an extended discussion of Fuller (including the quotation just mentioned), see Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 366–­67. 49. The exact details of Wood’s military service are difficult to document. The National Personnel Records Center lists his official military personnel records as currently unavailable. (I have maintained an active inquiry into these records since 2011 without successfully accessing them.) Evidence from newspapers and biographical accounts note that in 1917 the draft board labeled Wood as 3C (unfit for combat training), and he was passed over in the first draft call in September. Wood voluntarily enlisted later that winter and was inducted at Camp Dodge, Iowa. From there the army assigned him to camouflage training because of his prior artistic experience. (Wood had probably also requested such an assignment; he later told a reporter of his desire to serve as a camoufleur; see Frederic Newlin Price, “The Making of an Artist: Grant Wood, Iowan, Studied Painting Abroad; Now, Famous, He Has Taken His Art Back Home,” Saint Louis Globe Democrat Sunday Magazine, February 10, 1935). His camouflage training took place in Washington, D.C., at Camp Leach, which was one of the central training locations for American camouflage activity during the war. Garwood’s 1944 biography Artist in Iowa reports that Wood was assigned to the Company B, Ninety-­Seventh Engineers regiment and placed in charge of the paint tent (the Ninety-­Seventh was one of several regiments at Camp Leach doing camouflage work, with the other main unit being the Fortieth Engineers; indirect evidence suggests that Wood may have worked with the latter regiment also). Wood did not deploy to Europe with his regiment (reportedly due to flat feet) and was transferred back to Iowa after the armistice on November 11 and discharged shortly thereafter. See Garwood, Artist in Iowa, 29–­30. See also the compiled files and appendices related to World War I camouflage practices, Record Group 120, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­World War I, NARACP. 50. Homer Saint Gaudens, first lieutenant, Digest of Camouflage Experiences, 1918, 1, Office of Chief of Engineers AEF Historical Report, 1917–­1919, Appendices, Record Group 120, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­World War I, NARACP. Saint Gaudens’s report draws heavily on a similar report produced by the British Army camouflage section; see Report on the Principles and Practices of Camouflage by Lieutenant Colonel Wyatt, Chief of English Camouflage Section, in the same record group. 51. Saint Gaudens, Digest of Camouflage Experiences, 1. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. Elaborating on the value of the aerial photograph as the definitive means to pinpoint the location of emplacements, Saint Gaudens wrote, “It is by means of the photograph taken in the air that positions are definitely located on the map. Therefor the expert who, having the advantage of time and undisturbed concentration which the observer lacks, is able to interpret what is recorded on the photograph, is our chief opponent.” 54. Ibid., 2, 1. 55. Ibid., 1. 56. The greatest efforts, however, were given to the study of landscapes where modern warfare was most likely to take place. During World War I, this meant the rural countryside; industrialized areas such as factory sites and, especially, railroad structures; and, to a lesser extent, cities.

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57. Garwood, Artist in Iowa, 59. 58. Joseph Minturn, lieutenant, U.S. Army. “Confidential Notes on Camouflage Prepared at the Engineer School, 84th Division, 1918,” Office of Chief of Engineers AEF Historical Report, 1917–­1919, Appendices, Record Group 120, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­World War I, NARACP. The U.S. Army produced a number of camouflage manuals and guidebooks during the war; some were comprehensive, and others were limited to specific topics such as camouflage for artillery emplacements, trenches, or vehicles. See also U.S. War Department, Engineer Instruction Manual No. 3: Camouflage (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917), and U.S. Army War College, Camouflage for Troops of the Line (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917). After the war a number of popular books on camouflage techniques were published for the general public. For an example, see Solomon J. Solomon, Strategic Camouflage (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920). 59. Report on the Principles and Practices of Camouflage by Lieutenant Colonel Wyatt, page 7 of manuscript text (report not paginated). 60. Adjusting color application to the conditions of aerial photography was a key concern. One camouflage progress report noted efforts underway to determine the “relative photographic values from the air of various standard colors on burlap.” Report from Experimental Detachment, Fortieth Engineers, Camp Leach, to Lieutenant Colonel Cress, Office of the Chief Engineers, Washington, D.C., October 24, 1918, Office of Chief of Engineers AEF Historical Report, 1917–­1919, Appendices, Record Group 120, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­World War I, NARACP. More generally, camoufleurs also noted the need to study an area to be occupied and camouflaged before such work took place. Such “preliminary study” of aerial photographs ensured that the final result of the camouflage matched the look of the land in its “natural” state. See Report on the Principles and Practices of Camouflage by Lieutenant Colonel Wyatt, first page of manuscript text. 61. A report on the development of camouflage noted that the army typically selected for its camouflage officers men “who were qualified both in the arts and military knowledge and who in civilian life were well known in the architecture profession. The enlisted personnel was no less distinguished in their respective lines.” The report’s review of officers assigned to camouflage operations at Camp Leach showed that many of them had had extensive experience in the arts. See “40th Engineers (Camouflage): A Preliminary Outline,” compiled by Arno Kolbe, captain, January 1919, Office of Chief of Engineers AEF Historical Report, 1917–­1919, Appendixes, Histories, 60th Engineers through 107th Engineers, Record Group 120, Records of the American Expeditionary Forces—­World War I, NARACP. 62. Gertrude Stein recounted Pablo Picasso’s enthusiastic response to camouflage: “I very well remember at the beginning of the war being on the boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is cubism.” Stein, Picasso (1938; repr., Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1984), 11. 63. Garwood, Artist in Iowa, 59. 64. On Steichen and aerial photography, see Patricia Johnson, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 14–­19, and Sekula, “The Instrumental Image,” 14. 65. Garwood, Artist in Iowa, 65. 66. Wohl, A Passion for Wings, 254. 67. The scholarly account of Wood’s turn toward midwestern subject matter is shaped by two studies of the artist. James Dennis’s 1976 study set as its task to “rescue” Wood’s art from neglect by “liberating” it from the regionalist stereotypes that had provincialized Wood in the eyes of art historians. Wanda Corn’s 1983 work, by contrast, sets out to demonstrate that the uniquely “American” value of Wood’s work lay in the artist’s efficacious

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290 no t e s to c hap t e r 3 understanding of the region’s centrality in the construction of American identity during a period (the 1920s and 1930s) when such ideas were open to contestation. See Dennis, Grant Wood, and Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, both passim. Dennis subsequently built on his interpretation by arguing for the reconsideration of Wood as a “modern artist.” See Dennis, Renegade Regionalists. 68. Grant Wood, Revolt against the City, reprinted in Dennis, Grant Wood, 232. This 1935 polemical essay offers Wood’s most complete enunciation of his regionalist philosophy. It was published in Iowa City, Iowa, where Wood was on the University of Iowa fine arts faculty. Corn has argued that the essay’s overstated antiurbanism suggests that the text was ghostwritten by Frank Luther Mott, a University of Iowa journalism professor and a colleague of Wood’s. Dennis confirms this contention. See Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 153n85, and Dennis, Grant Wood, 255n13. Despite the high valuation of the Midwest exhibited in Revolt against the City, Wood’s path to embracing the Midwest during the 1920s was a long one. One 1935 biographical article included a quotation from Wood characterizing his decision to settle in Iowa as a resolution to “adjust myself to the home town of Cedar Rapids and try to get along.” Frederic Price, “The Making of an Artist,” 5. 69. As Wood reached the zenith of his influence in the mid-­1930s, several critics cited Mencken’s criticism of the American hinterlands as a vein of thought that Wood first embraced and later repudiated. See Frederic Price, “The Making of an Artist,” 5, and Thomas Craven, “Scribner’s Examines: Grant Wood,” Scribner’s Magazine, June 1937, 19, GWSB. 70. Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 26. Wood’s mural schemes for the corn rooms were extensive and large scale. The murals themselves were painted on canvas, which was then affixed to the walls of the rooms. To my knowledge, none of the murals remain in their original sites. All sections illustrated in this book are held in public collections. 71. Many of the corn-­related panels from the Hotel Chieftain were painted over or lost in the course of the building’s many renovations. Efforts to locate and conserve them have been ongoing since the 1970s, with a new fragment rediscovered as recently as 2009. 72. Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 26. 73. Dating of the map provided in ibid., 68. 74. Many art-­historical accounts of Wood’s stylistic development ascribe the shift in Wood’s style to the artist’s exposure to traditional German and Flemish masters such as Hans Memling, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Albrecht Dürer, whose work he studied during a 1929 trip to Munich. Indeed, Wood appears to have been complicit with this narrative of his artistic influences. As Wanda Corn argues, Wood’s foray into traditional agrarian style and subject matter predated this trip, and in fact more probably flowed from the artist’s engagement with local Iowan objects and sources. Corn, Grant Wood, 28–­31. 75. In the painting, Hoover’s birth site is actually the small cabin to the rear of the central house. Evans has argued that Wood diminished the significance of the structure in order to assert the artist’s own humble beginnings. See Evans, Grant Wood, 146–­48. 76. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 11–­30 passim. 77. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Signet, 1961), 6. 78. Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913; repr., New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995); Cather, My Antonia. 79. Hamlin Garland, Main-­Traveled Roads (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), xix. 80. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 18–­19. 81. Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd described the consumerist impulses of rural inhabitants as a central feature of midwestern America. See Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, esp. 153–­78. On the specific influences of technologies such as the automobile and radio, see 251–­71.

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82. Henry Wallace, editorial statement in Wallace’s Farmer, August 14, 1925, cited in Kirschner, City and Country, 248. For another historical account of this schism between tradition and mass culture, see Lawrence Frank, “The Family in the Machine Age” (March 1932), reprinted in Culture and Commitment, 1929–­1945, ed. Warren Susman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 203–­8. 83. In recent years, the study of regionalism, both as a historical movement and as a culturally critical position, has emerged in the work of many historians and cultural theorists. Works particularly influential to my conceptualization of regionalism include Edward Ayers et al., All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces. 84. Wood himself was dubious of local color artists, whom he considered to be overly reportorial and content merely to paint “what is typical” of the local landscape. This belief created a controversy when Wood served as judge for the 1935 Indiana Artist’s Exhibition. See “Indiana Artists Defy Critic of ‘Local Color’; Spokesman Slams Grant Wood’s ‘Regionalism,’” Indianapolis Times, February 26, 1935, and “Artist Should Be Editor, Not Reporter, Says Wood,” Indianapolis Times, February 27, 1935, both GWSB. 85. For a sampling of the practice of Iowa’s local color writers, one need only peruse the pages of the region’s predominant literary journal, the Midland, published from 1915 to 1933. By contrast, the work of more modern-­ minded midwestern artists and individuals, such as architect Frank Lloyd Wright, elevated the consideration of prairie landscape and culture to national and international levels. 86. Wood, handwritten notes on a definition of regionalism formulated by members of a class in the English Department of the University of Iowa, 1937, GWSB. 87. Wood, Revolt against the City, as appearing in Dennis, Grant Wood, 234. 88. Wood, handwritten notes on a definition of regionalism, GWSB. 89. “Artist Should Be Editor, Not Reporter, Says Wood.” 90. Ibid. Also cited in Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 43. 91. “The Sentimental Yearner” is the caption of the portrait Wood created of the character Raymond P. Wutherspoon from Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street for a limited edition of the book with illustrations by Wood. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, illustrated by Grant Wood (Chicago: Lakeside Press Limited Editions Club, 1937). 92. Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial, April 11, 1918, 337–­41. 93. Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 72. Wood relied heavily on real observation of the landscapes that he depicted, and he both employed plein air techniques and worked from photographs in order to accurately capture the essence of his subjects. 94. One critic described the artifice of Wood’s paintings in terms that are strikingly, if unintentionally, similar to those used to describe camouflage techniques. “Wood’s landscapes are almost unmitigatedly bad. The soil is modeled so as to resemble carved plaster, and the trees are made of tissue paper, absorbent cotton, and sponge rubber. If that is what the vegetation of Iowa is like, the farmers ought to be able sell their corn for chewing gum and automobile tires.” See “The Art Galleries: A Group of Americans,” New Yorker, May 4, 1935, GWSB. 95. Walt Disney, Plane Crazy (1928; sound version 1929), animated short, 6 minutes, Disney Studios. Disney was born in Hermosa, Illinois, but spent several years of his childhood near the small town of Marceline, Missouri, where his father owned a forty-­acre farm. 96. During the 1920s, aerial sequences and special effects became a favorite subject in popular cinema. Director William Wellman’s war epic Wings (1927), for example, was presented the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Aviation had long been a formative influence on Hollywood, since director and producer Cecil B. DeMille founded his own airfield for the filming of flight sequences and stunt acrobatics and founded his own airline in 1919.

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292 no t e s to c hap t e r 3 97. Bukatman, “The Ultimate Trip,” 261–­62. 98. Numerous critics and scholars have commented on the sexual overtones of Wood’s imagery; the most thorough consideration is that of Evans. 99. Evans, Grant Wood, 239–­44. 100. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17 (1917–­1919) of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-­Analysis, 1955; reprint, 1986), 217–­56; page numbers are to the reprint edition. 101. Craven, “Scribner’s Examines: Grant Wood,” 221–­22. Also quoted in Dennis, Grant Wood, 105. 102. Other insightful readings of this work appear in Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 81–­82; Dennis, Renegade Regionalists, 37–­50; and Evans, Grant Wood, 195–­96. 103. For commentary on the early fascination with aviation accidents, see Wohl, A Passion for Wings, 125–­56. 104. “Risking His Neck Smashing Airplanes Is ‘Just a Job’: 40,000 Jam Grandstands, Paddock for ‘Thrill Day,’ ” Des Moines Register, August 30, 1937. 105. Around 1935 Wood began to doubt his earlier landscape style, especially his penchant for curving and swirling forms. He is quoted as saying that his early work “had too damn many curves. . . . I am having a hell of a time getting rid of these mannerisms.” See “Art: Son of the Soil Masters Painting before Showing N.Y.,” Newsweek, April 20, 1935, GWSB. 106. Wood served as the head of the New Deal PWAP in Iowa from January to June 1934. This position may have afforded him inside access to the USDA’s aerial photography, which was being promoted by all government and agricultural image-­making agencies. 107. The majority of Wood’s landscape paintings are nearly square in their physical dimensions (see illustrations). Spring Turning, by contrast, is a horizontally oriented rectangle. 108. Thomas Craven, quoted in “Art Critic, in Praising Grant Wood, Says There’s Realistic Truth in His Iowa Landscapes,” 1935. This article’s exact publication date and source are unknown (although it probably appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette or the Iowa City Daily Iowan). This citation comes from a copy of the article that appears in the scrapbooks compiled by Nan Wood Graham, GWSB. 109. Craven, “Scribner’s Examines: Grant Wood,” 16. 110. Ibid., 21–­22. 111. Henry MacBride, [Untitled], New York Sentinel, October 1936 (exact date not given), GWSB. As Evans points out, MacBride misidentified the painting as Spring Plowing, though he clearly meant Spring Turning. It was not until three years later that Wood completed an artwork with the former title. See Evans, Grant Wood, 360–­61n244. 112. MacBride, [Untitled]. 113. For more on this controversy, see Evans, Grant Wood, 244–­61. For more on Wood’s interaction with the Association of American Artists, see Wanda Corn, Grant Wood, 49–­56. 114. Corn has also noted Wood’s problematic inclusion of the erosion scar on the landscape. See Wanda Corn, “A Note on Grant Wood’s July Fifteenth,” Cantor Arts Center Journal 2 (2000–­2001): 48–­50. 115. Though not the focus of this study, the embattled position Wood occupied during the late 1930s and early 1940s had a great impact on the artist. In particular, Wood faced relentless pressure from his fellow faculty at the University of Iowa, who labeled his painting style as outdated and who, more significant, publicly named him a homosexual. See Evans, Grant Wood, 282–­87, and Joni Kinsey, “Cultivating Iowa: An Introduction to Grant Wood,” in Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic, ed. Jane Milosch (New York: Prestel, 2005), 27–­32.

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4. Je fferso nian U rbanism 1. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York: William Farquhar Payson, 1932), 26. 2. Ibid., front matter. 3. Ibid., 17–­18. 4. The classic historical discussion of the city-­versus-­country debate remains Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 5. Hilary Ballon and David Friedman, “Portraying the City in Early Modern Europe: Measurement, Representation, and Planning,” in Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward, vol. 3 of The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), part 1, 688. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., part 1, 691–­92. For further background on the representation of early-­modern European country estates, see Dianne Harris, The Nature of Authority: Villa Culture, Landscape, and Representation in Eighteenth-­Century Lombardy (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). 8. As Spiro Kostof has shown, the construction of cities has always involved planning. In the modern era, however, “city planning,” as a unique configuration and as a professional category distinct from that of architecture, appeared only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (New York: Bullfinch Press, 1991). For a useful historical account of the emergence of planning as a practice in the United States, see Theodora Hubbard and Henry Hubbard, Our Cities Today and Tomorrow: A Survey of Planning and Zoning Progress in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 3–­17. For a useful definition of planning as a modern concept and its professionalization, see Andrew Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), esp. 16–­17. 9. For an overview of the development of European modernist architecture, see Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 4th ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007). 10. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis. 11. For a useful account of industrialization and urbanization in late nineteenth-­century America, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). For more contemporaneous accounts of the development of the American city in the early twentieth century, see, for example, Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938). 12. A number of books published during this era demonstrate the new interest in urban planning. They range from aesthetically oriented works, such as Charles Mulford Robinson’s The Improvement of Towns and Cities (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1901), to later and more scientifically based planning volumes, such as Flavel Shurtleff and Frederick Law Olmstead’s Carrying Out the City Plan (New York: Survey Associates, 1914), and Nelson Lewis’s The Planning of the Modern City (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1923). The 1909 plan for the city of Chicago by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett epitomized numerous efforts across the United States to actually implement planning theory. See Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago, ed. Charles Moore (Chicago: Commercial Club, 1909). For more detail on the development of American city planning, see Hubbard and Hubbard, Our Cities Today and Tomorrow, 7–­9. 13. Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 14. The comparison between Paris and Chicago appears on 18. There is some debate on how to weigh the contributions Burnham and Bennett each made to the Chicago Plan, with Burnham often receiving most of the credit. My text sidesteps this debate by referring to both authors as they are listed on the title page.

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294 no t e s to c hap t e r 4 14. Ibid., 32. 15. Plan of Chicago drew inspiration from Burnham’s work on the 1893 Chicago world’s fair, which was also the place where Frederick Jackson Turner presented his famous frontier thesis. Theodora and Henry Hubbard identify the fair, especially the architecture and layout of the fabled White City, as a turning point in the development of American urban planning, Hubbard and Hubbard, Our Cities Today and Tomorrow, 5–­6. 16. Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 8. 17. Norris, The Pit. Norris’s novel focused on the expanding control of the Chicago market over agrarian production in the agricultural regions of the American West and offered a powerful critique of economic centralization. Another such critique pertinent to Chicago as a center for American agricultural production is Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Doubleday, Jabber, 1906). 18. Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 34. 19. Ibid., 35. 20. Ibid., 34. 21. Paul Cret, “Aerial Photography and Architecture,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9, no. 1 (January 1921): 8. 22. Ibid., 8. 23. Ibid., 11. 24. Ibid., 8. 25. A sampling of such articles includes Jack Desha, “Aerial Photography: An Aid to the Municipal Engineer in City Planning,” Municipal Engineers Journal 1 (1923): 32–­56; Gerald Matthes, “Aerial Photographic Mapping,” in International Town Planning Conference. Report, New York, 1925 (Baltimore: Published for the conference by Northern Remington, 1925), 332–­42; Matthes, “Aerial Photographic Maps”; Sherman Fairchild, “Aerial Photographs Aid Tax Assessors,” National Municipal Review 15, no. 7 (1926): 403–­6; Morris Knowles, “The City Engineer and City Planning,” City Planning 2, no. 3 (July 1926): 153–­63; and Fairchild, “Aerial Photography.” 26. Desha, “Aerial Photography,” 42. 27. Ibid., 41. 28. Ibid. 29. Wilfrid Guy Hayler, “The Aeroplane and City Planning: The Advantages of Viewing Cities from Above,” American City 23, no. 6 (December 1920): 577. 30. Ibid., 577–­78. 31. The debates about the changing nature of space and time in the early twentieth century are well documented. See, for example, Kern, The Culture of Time and Space. 32. Hubbard and Hubbard, Our Cities Today and Tomorrow, 9. It is noteworthy that the Hubbards make heavy use of aerial photographs, maps, and bird’s-­eye illustrations. 33. Shanken, 194X, 3. While Shanken persuasively argued that the apotheosis of “planning” in the United States occurred during and after World War II, he acknowledged that the roots of such changes were laid in the interwar years. I am suggesting that this idea could be elaborated even further. 34. Henry Ford’s River Rouge Complex or New York City’s Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center are examples of architecture that was discussed by early twentieth-­century commentators as having the potential to contain a whole world in microcosm. 35. In his important study of Broadacre City, Anthony Alofsin also notes that Wright began shifting his architectural interests toward larger-­scale planning during the 1920s; see Alofsin, “Broadacre City: The Reception of a

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Modernist Vision, 1932–­1938,” Center: A Journal for Architecture in America 5 (1989): 12. Wright’s intellectual interests are discussed widely in the extensive literature on the architect (which is too vast to list here). 36. Wright, The Disappearing City, 3–­4. 37. See, for example, the extensive history of the city provided by Burnham and Bennett in Plan of Chicago or, in another vein, the writings of American literary figures such as Walt Whitman and others. 38. Wright, The Disappearing City, 4. 39. Ibid., 6. 40. Wright wrote in The Disappearing City, “Let us say that before the advent of universal and standardized mechanization, the city was more human. Its life as well as its proportion was more humane” (20). 41. Frank Lloyd Wright, “America Tomorrow,” American Architect 141, no. 2607 (May 1932): 14–­17, 76. 42. Ibid., 16. 43. Wright, The Disappearing City, 40. 44. Ibid., 15–­19 and passim. 45. Ibid., 32. 46. The initial contract between Wright and Payson dated November 17, 1931, had specified that Wright would provide six illustrations. Wright sent two photographs to Payson with the first 1,500 words of the text between December 29, 1931, and February 6, 1932. Further correspondence related to the images took place on the run-­up to publication in June and July of 1932. All correspondence between Wright and Payson is housed at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives held at the Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. 47. William Payson to Frank Lloyd Wright, July 19, 1932, correspondence files, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. Wright’s response to Payson appears at the bottom of the letter in a note handwritten by the architects’s secretary, Karl Jensen. 48. Le Corbusier is also noted for his embrace of aviation as a tool for architecture during the interwar years and the airplane/aerial vision is a constant topic in his writing and designs of the period. See especially Corbusier, Aircraft. 49. Wright’s first published comments on the work of Le Corbusier appeared in a review of Towards a New Architecture, which was first translated into English in 1927; see Frank Lloyd Wright, “Towards a New Architecture,” World Unity 2, no. 6 (Sep 1928): 393–­95. For a more recent English edition of Le Corbusier’s text, see Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover, 1986). The classic analysis of the relationship between the architectural design and social philosophies of Wright and Le Corbusier is Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). Fishman’s book exemplifies a large body of scholarship and criticism comparing Wright and Le Corbusier. 50. Wright, The Disappearing City, 33. 51. Ibid., 34. The statement Wright is alluding to appeared in Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, 4. 52. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, 163. 53. Wright, The Disappearing City, 32. 54. The debate on Wright’s ruralism and political philosophy ranges across the scholarly literature on the architect. The most detailed study of the agrarian roots of his work is Georgio Ciucci, “The City in Agrarian Ideology and Frank Lloyd Wright: Origins and Development of Broadacres,” in The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal, by Georgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, Mario Manieri-­Elia, and Manfredo Tafuri (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979), 293–­375.

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296 no t e s to c hap t e r 4 55. For one of Wright’s most strident statements about the division between country and city, see The Disappearing City, 8. 56. Ibid., 14–­15. As Ciucci and others note, Wright’s agrarian influences range from Thomas Jefferson to transcendentalist writers to late nineteenth-­century social philosophers such as Henry George. 57. I do not mean to suggest that Wright was the only modern architect or planner with a sense of history. For example, Burnham and Bennett had grounded their new plan for Chicago in a long narrative of evolving urban form. Even Le Corbusier, who had significantly less regard for more recent historical articulations of architecture and the city form, nonetheless invoked the designs of the classical period, as exemplified by the architecture of imperial and Renaissance Rome, as a precedent for his theories on modern architectural unity. The difference was the kind of investment in the past. Burnham and Bennett posited architecture as a linear history of innovation. Le Corbusier, by contrast, invoked as inspiration a past that was irretrievably distant and thereby effectively timeless. See Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, 9–­31, and Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (2nd ed., 1931; repr., New York: Dover, 1986), the chapter “The Lesson of Rome” and passim. 58. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 1st ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1932). Wright saw the two texts as deeply interlinked. In 1943 he distilled his thoughts from The Disappearing City into a proposed final new chapter for a revised and expanded edition of his autobiography. Though the chapter was not included in the edition, Wright self-­published it as a stand-­alone text that same year; see Wright, An Autobiography (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), and Wright, An Autobiography: Broadacre City (Spring Green, Wis.: Taliesin, 1943). 59. Wright, An Autobiography (1932), 58. “Nature is organic in Man’s character-­making as in other forms. His instinct was not to criticize her work unless he could know her method and discern her ends: thanks, for this, to the farm.” Wright developed his understanding of “the organic” first from the farm and then through his apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan, as well as from his readings of American writers in the transcendentalist tradition, from his interactions with the sociological theories of Chicago and Hull House, from modern art theory, and from the new agricultural practices developed in the twentieth century and discussed in chapter 2. For another account of Wright’s thoughts on organicism, see Ciucci, “The City in Agrarian Ideology and Frank Lloyd Wright,” 310. 60. Wright, An Autobiography (1932), 39. 61. Ciucci, “The City in Agrarian Ideology and Frank Lloyd Wright,” 331. Ciucci argues that the process of writing the autobiography allowed Wright to reinvent himself. This put him on the path to broadscale planning. 62. Wright, The Disappearing City, 30. 63. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920); Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879; repr., New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1981). Wright references Jackson and George frequently in The Disappearing City and others of his writings. 64. Wright’s relationship to other 1930s regionalist movements, especially that of the midwestern troika of Grant Wood, John Stuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton, is understudied. There are striking resemblances between the ideal society espoused by Wright in The Disappearing City and that attributed to Grant Wood in his 1935 manifesto Revolt against the City (see chapter 3 of this volume). The relationship between these two texts deserves further analysis. 65. Borsodi, Flight from the City, xiii. 66. These authors are referenced regularly by Wright in both The Disappearing City and An Autobiography (1932). 67. Ciucci, “The City in Agrarian Ideology and Frank Lloyd Wright,” 341–­55.

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68. Borsodi’s most succinct description of his idea for the Dayton Homesteads first appeared in an article he published in the April 19, 1933, edition of the journal the Nation. This text was reprinted as a postlude in Flight from the City. See Borsodi, Flight from the City, 154–­61. 69. Borsodi, Flight from the City, 161. 70. Ibid. 71. Wright, The Disappearing City, 14. “The Jeffersonian democratic ideal, inspiring in the beginning, lacked nourishment in culture and so languished” (ibid.). This quote insinuates that Wright understood that the Jeffersonian model, though powerful, was in many ways insufficient to the context of modernity. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 27. 74. Ibid., 43. 75. Ibid., 88. 76. Ibid., 89. 77. Alofsin, “Broadacre City,” 16 and n42. The exact date of the sketch is difficult to ascertain, though it was certainly prior to the fabrication of the three-­dimensional Broadacre model, whose construction began in fall 1934. 78. Catherine Bauer, “When Is a House Not a House?,” Nation, January 26, 1933, 99–­100. 79. Given that Wright’s textual notations appear at various orientations, I take the phrase “Minimum of one acre to the family” as the title of the image, which thereby enables me to identify the top of the drawing. While the architect appears to have made notations from several directions, the majority of them appear to place him in positions at either the bottom or the left side of the image. 80. Jensen’s work deserves more attention than I can give it here. For an introduction to his naturalist prairie aesthetic, see Robert Grese, “Jens Jensen: The Landscape Architect as Conservationist,” in Midwestern Landscape Architecture, ed. William Tishler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 117–­41. 81. Wright published design drawings for his Quadruple Block Plan in 1901; see Frank Lloyd Wright, “A Home in Prairie Town,” Ladies Home Journal, February 1901, 17. For a discussion of the project, see Neil Levine, “Making Community out of a Grid: Wright’s Quadruple Block Plan and the Origin of the Prairie House,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward (New York: Rizzoli Press, 2009), 59–­74. 82. Wright’s entry was submitted noncompetitively; he refused to participate in competitions. The resulting designs were later published in a book; see Alfred Yeomans, ed., City Residential Land Development: Studies in Planning: Competitive Plans for Subdividing a Typical Quarter Section of Land in the Outskirts of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, for the City Club of Chicago, 1916). 83. Given the scope of Wright’s planning, the term “garden” here is extended to include large-­scale field planning. See Anne Whiston Spirn, “Frank Lloyd Wright: Landscape Architect,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Designs for an American Landscape, ed. David Delong (New York: Harry Abrams, 1996), 146. Spirn’s essay is groundbreaking in the attention it devotes to Wright’s landscaping at Taliesin. This essay also first clued me in to the meticulous files kept by Wright regarding agriculture and landscape practices at Taliesin. See, for example, the “Farmland File,” Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. 84. On Wright’s conservation interests, see Spirn, “Frank Lloyd Wright,” 148. 85. It is known that Wright used aerial photographs to lay out roadways at Taliesin, and it is likely that he also used them to plot field boundaries, plantings, and crop rotations. Examples may be seen in the “Farmland File” of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. In other contexts, he also sketched plans directly onto photographs.

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298 no t e s to c hap t e r 4 86. The population number of 1,440 is original to Wright. He envisioned the average family as five or six people, but he also left room for unmarried men (women are not mentioned). It is probable that he based his vision of Broadacre in part on the communal lifestyle he was cultivating at Taliesin during the 1930s. Beginning in 1932, Wright invited young architects to reside at Taliesin as apprentices. This “fellowship” became Wright’s part of an integrated Taliesin community that had Wright at its center. The young architects and artisans also learned from Wright and worked on many of his projects, including the Broadacre City model. 87. The most significant press responses related to the Broadacre model appeared in professional architectural journals. These pieces were often published under the direction of Wright himself. See Frank Lloyd Wright, “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan,” Architectural Record 77, no. 4 (April 1935): 243–­54; Wright, “Broadacre City,” American Architect 146, no. 2634 (June 1935): 57–­62; and Wright, “An Architect Visualizes Broadacre City,” American City 50, no. 4 (April 1935): 85–­86. Wright offered his own summation of the exhibition history of the model and of public responses to it in a dedicated number of his in-­house journal; see Frank Lloyd Wright, ed., “The New Frontier: Broadacre City,” in Taliesin: Publication of the Taliesin Fellowship 1, no. 1 (October 1940): 1–­40. 88. One of the difficulties in describing the Broadacre City model is that it has no fixed top or bottom and can be approached equally from any of its four sides. For purposes of continuity, the photograph of the model in Plate 13 is oriented in the way indicated in Wright’s initial sketch (Figure 4.15). In other circumstances, however, the plan was depicted from different sides. In its April 1935 issue, The Architectural Record depicted Wright’s two-­dimensional map of the Broadacre layout in an orientation flipped 180 degrees from the architect’s initial sketch (Figure 4.20). A photograph of the model, along with another image of Wright’s map published in the June 1935 issue of The American Architect (Figure 4.23) present the plan from a different angle still. While this interchangeability is historically interesting, it may also be frustrating to the present reader. Unless specified otherwise, my descriptions follow what I take as the proper orientation of Wright’s first sketch. 89. Wright, “Broadacre City,” Architectural Record, 249. 90. The automobile objective had originally taken shape in 1925 as a design for a combined planetarium and scenic overlook commissioned by businessman Gordon Strong and intended for a site atop Sugarloaf Mountain in Maryland. Though not realized at that site, Wright incorporated the design as a key feature of Broadacre City. For a detailed history of the project, see Mark Reinberger, “The Sugarloaf Mountain Project and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Vision of a New World,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43, no. 1 (March 1984): 466–­82. 91. Michiel Dehaene, “Broadacre City: The City in the Eye of the Beholder,” Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 19, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 96. 92. Ibid., 94. 93. Wright, “Broadacre City,” Architectural Record, 244. 94. New York Times, March 27, 1935. Also quoted in Alofsin, “Broadacre City,” 18. Alofsin insightfully notes that the newspaper article reads very much like a Frank Lloyd Wright press release. 95. Wright’s attendance figures appear in the self-­published journal Taliesin as part of an issue devoted to Broadacre City. Wright, “The New Frontier: Broadacre City,” special issue, Taliesin: Publication of the Taliesin Fellowship 1, no. 1 (October 1940): 22–­25. 96. Ibid., 25. 97. Wright, “Broadacre City,” Architectural Record, 243–­54. 98. Other professional pieces include those previously mentioned from American Architect and American Planner. The model was also discussed in numerous local and regional newspapers and on radio. See Wright, “The New Frontier,” 22–­37 passim.

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99. Bauer, “When Is a House Not a House?,” and Stephen Alexander, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Utopia,” New Masses 15 (June 18, 1935): 15. See also Henry Churchill, review of The Disappearing City, Architectural Record 73, no. 1 (January 1933): 12, 14. 100. Bauer, “When Is a House Not a House?,” 99. 101. Lewis Mumford, “The Skyline,” New Yorker, April 27, 1935, 63–­65. The essay is reprinted in Mumford, Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s Writings on New York (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 130–­32. 102. Mumford, as quoted in Alofsin, “Broadacre City,” 18. 103. Lewis Mumford to Wright, June 25, 1935, in Wright and Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence, ed. Bruce Pfeiffer and Robert Wojtowicz (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 165. 104. Mumford, letter to John Gould Fletcher, April 10, 1946, in Wright and Mumford, Thirty Years of Correspondence, 189. 105. Lewis Mumford, “Regions—­To Live In,” Survey Graphic 54, no. 3 (May 1, 1925): 151. 106. Stuart Chase, “Coals to Newcastle,” Survey Graphic 54, no. 3 (May 1, 1925): 143–­46. 107. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902; repr., Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965). 108. Clarence Stein identified the accepted definition of the Garden City as “a town planned for industry and healthy living, of a size that makes possible a full measure of social life, but no larger, surrounded by a permanent rural belt, the whole of the land being in public ownership, or held in trust for the community.” Stein, Toward New Towns for America (New York: Reinhold, 1957), 130. 109. Lewis Mumford, “The Theory and Practice of Regionalism (Part II),” Sociological Review 20, no. 2 (April 1928): 133. 110. Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 312. For a useful discussion of the term “dynamic equilibrium,” see also Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 270. 111. Henry Wright, as quoted in Clarence Stein, Towards New Towns for America, 127. 112. For an overview of these two housing projects, see Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 21–­75 and passim. 113. In 1936 the RA was disbanded as a stand-­alone agency and its operations were moved to the USDA and reconstituted as the Farm Security Administration (FSA; see chapter 2). The Greenbelt Towns program became part of the FSA as a result of this shift. 114. “Greenbelt Communities,” 3, a three-­page typewritten report of the Farm Security Administration, June 22, 1938. Records of the Public Housing Administration, Record Group 196, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. The copy I consulted comes from collection 1604, Box 223, YRL Special Collections Boxed Monographs, University of California Libraries, Los Angeles. This statement of official purposes is reiterated in Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 119. 115. The Greenbelt Towns project was established by Resettlement Administration director Rexford Tugwell (see chapter 2). The official head of the Greenbelt Towns Program was J. S. Lansill. Clarence Stein, however, was a key proponent of the program and played an essential role in lobbying for its establishment and setting its architectural and social philosophies. 116. U.S. Resettlement Administration, Greenbelt Towns: A Demonstration in Suburban Planning (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936), fourth page (not paginated). 117. Ibid., eleventh page. 118. Meyer Schapiro, “Architect’s Utopia,” Partisan Review 4, no. 4 (March 1938): 42–­47. 119. The text appeared in a somewhat revised form in 1945 and again in 1958. The illustrations, however, changed radically: The 1945 version was illustrated by photographs of the large Broadacre model and its smaller

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300 no t e s to c o n c l u s i o n ancillary pieces, and the 1958 version was illustrated by a combination of those photographs complemented by a series of visionary Broadacre drawings completed by Wright. See Wright, When Democracy Builds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), and Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958).

Conclu sio n 1. For an insightful interpretation of Dorothy’s bedroom window as a cinema screen, see Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI, 1995), 27–­33. 2. Ibid., 19–­20. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. In 1902 the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company consolidated with several smaller agricultural implement manufacturers and the company took the new name of International Harvester. 5. At least one other art historian has written about the similarities between Wood’s painting and the Oz scenery. See Dennis, Grant Wood, 105. 6. James Scott, Seeing Like a State, 311. 7. The first fully enclosed and large-­scale shopping mall in the United States was Southdale Center. The complex was designed by architect Victor Gruen and is located in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. It opened in 1956. 8. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–­2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), and Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987). There also are instances of more direct interconnections between the development of the suburban concept and the midwestern landscape. For example, in 1868 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux built their first garden suburb (Riverside) on land outside Chicago. Prior to formulating in 1898 his concept of the Garden City, Englishman Ebenezer Howard encountered midwestern landscape organization as a homesteader on the Nebraska frontier (see chapter 4). 9. Hayden, Building Suburbia, 4–­5 and passim; Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias, 14–­16.

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Arch ives Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Richard Dowd Papers Farm Security Administration Selected Records and Photographs Arthur Rothstein Papers Paul Vanderbilt Papers Grant Wood Collection Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York (microfiche available at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California) Iowa State University Library Special Collections, Ames, Iowa Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Sherman Fairchild Collection, Manuscript Division Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Records, Prints and Photographs Division Geography and Map Division Collections Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division Collections Prints and Photographs Division Collections Wilber and Orville Wright Papers, Manuscript Division National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Prints and Photographs Collections Sherman Fairchild Collection Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska Manuscript Collections Prints and Photographs Collections Solomon D. Butcher Collection State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City and Des Moines, Iowa Historical Atlas Collections Iowa Aviation Collection

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322 b i bl iog r a p hy Winearls, Joan, ed. Editing Early and Historical Atlases. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Wohl, Robert. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–­1918. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. ———. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–­1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. With John Fels. New York: Guilford Press, 1992. Wood, Grant. Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings. Chicago: Lakeside Press Galleries, 1935. ———. Revolt against the City. Iowa City, Iowa: Clio Press, 1935. Wood, Nan. My Brother, Grant Wood. Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1993. Woods, John. Two Years’ Residence on the English Prairie of Illinois. Edited by Paul Angle. Chicago: R. R. Donnelly and Sons, 1968. Woodward, David, ed. Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Wright, Frank Lloyd. “America Tomorrow.” American Architect 141, no. 2607 (May 1932): 14–­17, 76. ———. “An Architect Visualizes Broadacre City.” American City 50, no. 4 (April 1935): 85–­86. ———. An Autobiography. 1st ed. New York: Longmans, Green, 1932. ———. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943. ———. An Autobiography: Broadacre City. Spring Green, Wis.: Taliesin, 1943. ———. “Broadacre City.” American Architect 146, no. 2634 (June 1935): 57–­62. ———. “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan.” Architectural Record 77, no. 4 (April 1935): 243–­54. ———. The Disappearing City. New York: William Farquhar Payson, 1932. ———. Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture; Selected Writings 1894–­1940. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941. ———. “A Home in Prairie Town.” Ladies Home Journal, February 1901, 17. ———. The Industrial Revolution Runs Away. New York: Horizon Press, 1969. ———. In the Cause of Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright: Essays. New York: Architectural Record, 1975. ———. The Living City. New York: Horizon Press, 1958. ———, ed. “The New Frontier: Broadacre City.” Special issue, Taliesin: Publication of the Taliesin Fellowship 1, no. 1 (October 1940): 1–­40. ———. An Organic Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970. ———. “Towards a New Architecture.” World Unity 2, no. 6 (September 1928): 393–­95. ———. Truth against the World: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks for an Organic Architecture. Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1992. ———. When Democracy Builds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945. Wright, Frank, and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings on Architecture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Wright, Frank Lloyd, and Lewis Mumford. Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence. Edited by Bruce Pfeiffer and Robert Wojtowicz. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. Wright, Frank Lloyd, Terence Riley, Peter Reed, Anthony Alofsin, Museum of Modern Art (New York), and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect. New York: Museum of Modern Art; distributed by H. N. Abrams, 1994. Wright, Frank Lloyd, and Taliesin Fellowship. “At Taliesin”: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934–­1937. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. ———. Broadacre City: A New Community Plan. New York: s.n., 1935.

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Index

AAA. See Agricultural Adjustment Administration abstraction, xi, xii, xiii, xxiii, 149, 207, 216; of aerial photographs, 77, 88, 108, 118, 174, 175, 183; camouflage, 143; cartographic, 17, 21, 85; of Jeffersonian grid, 38, 73; of knowledge, 4–5; modern, 151, 213, 243, 261; social, 210, 216; urban, 185; visual, 34, 138 aerial gaze: American culture’s relationship to, xviii–xix, 210; Mumford’s, 59, 192, 243; power exercised by, xiv–xv, 170, 175, 176, 213, 249, 268n10; as representation, 8, 156, 256–57; synoptic, xvii, xviii; Wood’s adaptation of, xvii, xviii, 129–30, 171–83, 263; Frank Lloyd Wright’s, 186, 238, 241, 249. See also aerial viewing/views; aerial vision; order: aerial gaze as tool of aeriality, xi–xviii, xxiv; airplanes associated with, viii, 137; inventive, 160–71; midwestern, xv, 228, 254, 259, 263; modern, xviii, 170, 178–79; transformations through, 254; Frank Lloyd Wright’s, 186, 192, 211, 213, 238, 241, 243–44, 249–50, 297n85. See also aerial sensibility aerial photographs/photography, xiv, 79, 95, 254; abstraction of, 77, 88, 108, 118, 174, 175, 183; development of, 49–61, 193–94, 203–4, 277n22; Hubbards’ use of, 294n32; itinerant, xviii; in newspapers and magazines, 57–58, 114–25, 132, 254; of suburbs, 250, 259; survey vs. bird’s-eye views, 171–83; synoptic gaze of, x, 24, 45, 54; technology of, xix, 80, 88, 202;

Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of, 186, 211, 297n85. See also aesthetics of aerial photographs; balloon photography; camouflage; mapping/maps: aerial photography used for; oblique aerial photography; surveillance: aerial; World War I: aerial photography used in aerial photographs/photography, government survey: AAA, 45, 46, 71, 73, 89, 279n45, 279n51; allotment programs’ use of, 71, 73, 76–81, 82; Broadacre City model resembling, 191; cultural effects of, x, 49, 84–112, 125; farm-by-farm level, 73, 76, 77, 280n65; federal publications and filmstrips containing, 89–95, 281n74; government agents’ use of, 79–80, 81–82, 84, 91; grid system marked by, x, xvi, 61, 78, 96, 130, 263; of homesteads, xvii, 82, 85–86, 105, 118; as keepsakes for farmers, 84–85, 107–8, 280n62; meaning constructed by, 47, 89, 91; of midwestern landscape, xiv, 45, 47–49, 61, 71, 102, 112–25, 258; modern paradigm of, 96, 177, 263, Plate 16; objectivity of, 81–82, 122; orderliness highlighted in, 47, 65–66, 107–8, 173; as planning tool, 48–49, 59–84; power of, 49, 54, 81–82, 86, 211, 275n2; of rural areas, 45, 49, 202; as social documentary, 95–112, 282n89; standardization of, 80, 278–79n44, 279n52; as tool for managing land, 61–84, 137–39, 275n4. See also conservation, soil: aerial surveying as tool for; farmers, Midwestern: response to aerial survey photographs

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326 i n dex aerial sensibility, x, 151, 175, 201, 241; Wood’s, xvii–xviii, 128, 130, 137–60, 171–83, 261, 263. See also aeriality aerial viewing/views, 108, 119; authority of, xii, xiv– xvii, 81, 254, 256; culture of, ix–x; landscape, xv, 50, 110, 138, 208–9, 257, 275n2; meaning added by, 3, 47, 164, 245; modernity’s impact on, ix, xii, xviii, xix, 69–71, 88–89, 161; panoptic, xv–xvi; power of, xvi, 176; space reimagined through, xvii, xix, 3–5, 27, 31, 59, 205; synoptic, 143, 149; Wood’s exploration of, 130, 137–60. See also aerial gaze; culture, Midwestern: aerial viewing’s place in; Midwest: aerial views of aerial vision, 138, 268n7; in architecture, 186, 205–6, 295n48; artists’ use of, 138, 161; geometric nature of, xiii, xv, 162; impact on modernization, ix, xii–xiii, 69–71, 80, 95, 102; large-scale, 256–57; midwestern, xxii, 18, 80, 169, 254; power of, xxiii, 256; of prairies, 129, 130, 166; responses to, x–xi, xvi–xvii; rural, ix, 96, 138, 185, 290n81; survey, 162, 163; technologies of, xix, 202; urban planning’s use of, 192–206, 213; in The Wizard of Oz, 213, 251–56; Frank Lloyd Wright on, 59, 210, 214, 216, 217–18, 226, 237. See also aerial gaze aesthetics of aerial photographs, 93, 96, 125, 287n32; farmers’ responses to, 81–82, 88–89; geometric, 110, 112, 118; Wood’s recasting of, 173, 175, 178 agents, government, 71, 254; land sales by, 10, 18–20; and midwestern grid, 12, 16, 18–20; use of aerial photographs, 79–80, 81–82, 84, 91. See also aerial photographs/photography, government survey; government, U.S. agrarianism, xix, 10, 24, 32, 166; corn as symbol of, 97–98; culture of, 45, 47, 69, 240; idealism of, 165, 268n22; independence of, xxi, 81; Jeffersonian, 24, 44, 100, 123, 125, 216–18, 221; mythology of, 115–16, 161, 162, 256; rectilinear organization of, 38, 141; role in modernity, x, 216; transformation to industrial society from, 88–89, 100, 115–16, 123; Wood’s paintings of, 154, 290n74; Frank Lloyd Wright’s belief in, 191, 226. See also agriculture, midwestern; farming; labor: agrarian agribusiness, 123, 125, 179, 227, 264. See also prices, agricultural

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Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), 76–81; aerial survey photography by, 45, 46, 71, 73, 89, 279n45, 279n51; filmstrips by, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94; in Life magazine article, 115–16. See also New Deal agriculture, midwestern, xxi, 139, 259; crises in, 48–49, 62–63, 160; economy of, 48–49, 62, 82, 97, 122, 160; industrialization of, ix–x, xxii, 116, 118, 119, 122, 171; management of, 162–63; modernist vision of, 125, 255–56; modernization of, 96–97, 119, 230; New Deal reformation of, 45, 63–84, 162–63; technology of, xxi, 116, 175, 263–64. See also agrarianism; farming; U.S. Department of Agriculture airmail, 132, 133, 135 airplanes, 133, 268n7, 295n48; artists and, 137–60; invention of, vii–x, xii–xiii, xv; midwesterners’ embrace of, xviii, 130–37, 169; photography from, 50, 54, 282n88, 284n102; as symbol of modernity, xix, 138; technology of, 79, 132, 194; transformative potential of, xvi, 130; urban planning’s use of, 204, 210; vertical views from, 137–38, 202, 217; Walker, Iowa, postcard of, 132, 133. See also aviation; flight; Wright brothers air shows, 131–32, 137. See also barnstormers; Iowa State Fair: stunt flying at Alexander, Stephen, 240 allotment programs, 91, 278n42; aerial survey photographs used for, 71, 73, 76–81, 82 Alofsin, Anthony, 224, 294–95n35, 297n77 Anamosa (Iowa) Eureka (newspaper): advertisements in, 139–40; “Aero Photos” feature, 86–89, 108 Anderson, Benedict, 2 Anderson, Sherwood, xxii, 161 Andreas, Alfred T., Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa, 3, 41, 157, 165; advertisements for, 1–2, 31, 34, 139; illustrations from, 38, 39, 42, 43, 158, 159, Plate 2; illustrators of, 164, 261 architecture, 194, 213, 223, 294n15, 294n34; aerial vision’s role in, 186, 205–6, 295n48; modernity and, 207, 237; prairie-style, 226, 232–33. See also Wright, Frank Lloyd art/artists: aerial vision and, 138, 261; airplanes and, 137–60; camouflage’s overlaps with, 149, 151;

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European, 24, 149, 280n62; landscape paintings, 24, 33–34; local color, 162–63, 170, 291n84, 291n85; midwestern, 138, 162–63, 291n85; modern, xviii, 138, 291n85. See also regionalism; Wood, Grant; and individual artists and art styles ash-can school of art, 287n32 atlases: county, 38; illustrated historical, 31–41, 44, 47, 157, 164, 274n62; property, 32, 273n59; state, 38, 39, 41; Wood’s use of imagery from, 141, 156. See also Andreas, Alfred T., Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa Atwater, Caleb, 5–6 authority, xxi, 175, 206, 223, 237, 255; aerial images as tools of, xii, xiv–xvii, 81, 254, 256 automobile objective, 231–32, 235, 237, 249, 298n90 automobiles, 54, 130, 132, 162, 195, 198, 209 aviation, xiii–xiv, xvii, 57, 160, 257–58, 291n96. See also airplanes; flight; Wright brothers Ballon, Hilary, 192 balloon photography, 131, 141; Black’s, 50, 52, 53, 275n6, 275n7, 275n9; of cities, 193–94; Nadar’s, 49–50, 51, 275n5 Barbari, Jacopo de’: View of Venice, 193 barnstormers, 136–37, 160, 169, 286n21, 286n24. See also air shows; Iowa State Fair: stunt flying at Barthes, Roland, 54 Bauer, Catherine: review of The Disappearing City, 240 Bennett, Edward: Plan of Chicago, 195–201, 204, 222, 293n12, 293n13, 296n57 Bennett, Hugh, 277n30 Bentham, Jeremy, 268n10 Benton, Thomas Hart, 296n64 Berman, Marshall, 267n1 Birbeck, Morris, 6 bird’s-eye views, ix, 201, 273n53, 282n88, 294n32; of Broadacre model, 235; of Chicago, 197, 201, 204, 228; of frontier towns, 27–31, 86–88, 142, 273n51; of grid, 38, 219; of homesteads, 222; in illustrated historical atlases, 34, 37, 38, 39, 44, 157, 164; imagined, xxiv, 3–4; of Kansas, 28, 89–95, 90, 92, 93; of midwestern landscape, 3, 28, 31, 32, 139–40, 142, 164; of New

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i n dex 327 York City, 211; nineteenth-century, xiii, 47, 137, 141; survey photographs vs., 171–83; of towns, 27–31, 86–88, 142, 273n51; urban planning’s use of, 192–93, 195–96, 202–3, 208–9, 219; Wood’s use, 154, 156, 157– 58, 159, 179–80. See also vertical views Black, James Wallace: balloon photography of, 50, 275n6, 275n7, 275n9; Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It, 52; Boston from a Hot-Air Balloon, 53 Boime, Albert, 4, 139–40 boosters, midwestern, 20, 27 Born, Ernest: drawings for “America Tomorrow,” 208–9 Borsodi, Ralph, 100; Flight from the City, 219, 220, 221, 222; This Ugly Civilization, 218 Boston: aerial photographs of, 50, 52, 53, 193, 275n6, 275n7, 275n9 Britten, Edgar, 153 Broadacre City model (Frank Lloyd Wright), 186, 191–92, 217, 223–41, 244–45, 257, 259; exhibition of, 238–41; illustrations of, 225, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 239, 250, 298n88, Plate 13; photographs of, 299– 300n119; sketch for, 249, 297n77, 298n88; Taliesin fellowship’s work on, 298n86. See also automobile objective Brooks, Van Wyck, 163–64 Brunson, Alfred, 14 Bukatman, Scott, 168–69 Burch, Larence: Nebraska as It Is, 273n49 Burlington and Missouri River Railroad Company land advertising booklet, 26, 273n49 Burnham, Daniel: Plan of Chicago, 195–201, 204, 222, 293n12, 293n13, 296n57; work on Columbian Exposition of 1893, 294n15 Burns, Sarah, 24 Butler, Kenneth: Dayton Homesteads drawings, 219, 220, 221, 222 cameras: aerial, 50, 143, 175, 202; indexicality of, 204; surveillance, xvii, 148, 178; technology of, 79, 194 camouflage, 160, 256, 289n62; cultural, 170, 179; flight’s creation of, 169–70; manufactured vs. natural materials for, 146, 148; overlapping with art, 149, 151;

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328 i n dex in Wood’s paintings, 171, 181, 262, 291n94; Wood’s training in, 142–51, 164, 165–66, 173, 181, 288n49; in World War I, 142–51, 289n60, 289n61 capitalism, xxi, 185, 212 Carleton, Guy: map of Iowa by, 21, 23 Cather, Willa, 161; My Antonia, 41, 44 Catlin, George: Nishnabottana Bluffs, Upper Missouri, 7–8, 270n18, Plate 1 Cayton, Andrew, xix, xx–xxi centralization, 257, 294n17; industrial, 195, 240; Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of, 207–8, 213, 222, 223, 231, 237, 249. See also cities/cityscapes: centralization of; consolidation; decentralization Certeau, Michel de, xv–xvi Chase, Stuart, 241 Chicago, 142, 194, 288n48, 294n17; bird’s-eye views of, 197, 201, 204, 228; highways radiating from, 200, 201; Plan of Chicago, 195–201, 204, 222, 293n12, 293n13, 296n57; railroads running through, 198, 199; roadways radiating from, 50, 196, 200, 201. See also Illinois; World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 cities/cityscapes, xxi, 201, 207, 214; centralization of, 185, 191, 195, 211–12, 214, 216, 219, 223, 231; criticism of, 185–86; culture of, 142, 501; homesteads in, 24, 240; industrial, 194, 237–38, 248; integrating rural areas and, 191–92, 198, 201, 249; modern, 185, 186, 204, 218, 237; representations of, 192–93, 204; spaces of, 194, 204, 205–6, 216, 244; transformation of, 194, 210, 237–38, 248, 249; vertical views of, 95, 208–9, 288n48; Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of, 210, 211, 217, 237, 245, 249. See also concentration: urban; cosmopolitanism; Disappearing City, The (Frank Lloyd Wright); life, everyday: urban; skyscrapers; suburbs; urbanism; urban planning Ciucci, Giorgio (George), 219 class: Life magazine’s representations of, 119, 122 color as camouflaging technique, 148–49, 150, 289n60 commerce, American, xxii, 140, 172, 277n22 communication, 77, 258; technologies of, 191, 198, 216, 219 communities, 118, 122, 237; aerial survey photographs’ strengthening bonds of, 82, 86, 88, 95; creating, 32,

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218; Mumford’s promotion of, 243; planned, 32, 243, 244, 299n108, 300n8; Frank Lloyd Wright’s involvement in, 228. See also cities/cityscapes; rural areas; towns concentration: rural, xxiii–xxiv; urban, 100, 194–95, 198, 206, 208, 210–13, 237, 240, 245. See also centralization; consolidation conservation, soil, 45, 49, 227, 255; aerial surveying as tool for, 64–71, 77, 91, 230, 254, 257, 277n30, 281n73. See also erosion; soil, prairie consolidation, x, 59, 62, 125, 160, 175; cultural, xxii, 32, 162; land, ix, 10, 48. See also centralization; concentration consumerism/consumption: expansion of, 162, 195; midwestern, xxi–xxii, 290n81, 300n7; modernization in, 115, 125; unified systems of, xiv, xviii contour farming, 66–71, 77, 91, 230, 255, 259 control, government: aerial photographs as tool of, xv–xvii, 4–5, 56, 91, 110, 125, 230, 277n30. See also panoptic gaze; production, agricultural: controls on Conzon, Michael, 32, 273n59 corn: harvesting, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, Plate 16; photographs of, 97–98, 100–102, 117; planting, 165; Wood’s murals of, 153–56, 290n70, 290n71 Corn, Joseph, xii–xiii, 57 Corn, Wanda M., 128, 153, 284–85n4, 289–90n67, 290n68, 290n74, 292n114 Corner, James, xvi, 9 corners, survey: marking of, 11–14, 16, 271n33. See also grid, midwestern Cosgrove, Denis, xvi cosmopolitanism, xxii, 160, 162, 185. See also cities/ cityscapes Coulter, Fred: Vachon’s photos of his farm, 109–12, 113, 114 Crary, Jonathan, xii Craven, Thomas, 176–78 Cret, Paul, 202 Cronon, William, xxi, 194 crops: aerial views of, 45, 116; controlling production of, 8, 49, 71, 73, 76–84; monoculture planting, xxi, 116, 125; overplanting during World War I, 62–63;

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planting, xxi, 49, 116, 125; strip cropping, 68, 91. See also corn cubism/cubists, 138, 289n62 cultivation, 85, 89, 158, 173, 179, 219, 250. See also farming culture, 9, 208, 243; agrarian, 45, 47, 69, 240; American, xviii–xix, xxii, 4, 61–62, 115, 207, 210, 250, 258; of aviation, 57, 257–58; camouflage, 170, 179; industrial, xxii, 122, 162; landscape, 95, 285n7; mechanical, 240, 285n8; national, xix, 170; regional, xxi, 85, 95, 114, 170; rural, x, 84–112, 128, 161, 172, 173, 185; of speed, 130–31, 285n8; urban, 142, 201; visual, xii, 8, 24 culture, midwestern, xiv, xx–xxiv, 44, 129, 141; aerial photography’s effects on, 49, 84–112, 125; aerial viewing’s place in, vii, ix–x, xviii–xix, 96, 105, 139, 156, 210; insecurities in, 62–63, 160–71, 185; pioneer, 283n93; traditions of, 115, 168–69; transformation of, xix, 84–112, 114, 164, 174, 178, 183, 217; visual, 112–25; Wood’s links to, 141, 284–85n4. See also Jeffersonian­ ism; midwesternness; prairies: culture of Curry, John Stuart, 296n64 Cyrus McCormick and Sons advertisement, 139–40 Daniel, Pete, 82 Daumier, Honoré: Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of Art, 51 Dayton Homesteads (Borsodi and Butler), 219–21, 222 decentralization, 223, 237–50, 241. See also centralization Dehaene, Michiel, 237 Delaunay, Robert, 138 DeMille, Cecil B., 291n96 democracy, American, xix, xxi, 4, 10, 73, 237, 264; ideals of, 61, 69, 81; ideology of, 61, 114, 259; Jeffersonian grid reflecting, 161–62, 216; New Deal concept of, 82, 91, 108; prairie structures as, 62–63; revitalization of, 221–22; Frank Lloyd Wright’s belief in, 191, 207, 209, 218. See also politics Dennis, James, 284–85n4, 289–90n67, 290n68 Desha, Jack, 203, 204 Dickerman, Leah, xvii–xviii Disappearing City, The (Frank Lloyd Wright), 185, 191, 207–18, 240, 241, 249, 296n58, 296n64; Broadacre

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i n dex 329 City plan and, 223–24, 231; photographs used in, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 210–16, 295n46 Disney, Walt, 291n95; Plane Crazy, 166–69, 170 displacement, ix, xxii, xxiii, 101–2, 178, 288n48 Dorman, Robert L., xxii, xxiii, 161 Dreiser, Theodore, xxii Dust Bowl, 63, 91, 255. See also erosion; Great Depression Earhart, Amelia, 131 economy, midwestern: agricultural, 48–49, 82–83, 97, 122, 160; centralized programs for, x; crises in, xxi, xxii, 62–63, 69. See also agribusiness; consumerism/ consumption; Great Depression; New Deal; prosperity efficiency, 143, 194, 257; mechanical, x, 63, 175, 194, 206; modern, 176, 194, 213 elevated views: cartographic, 50, 156–57; geometric nature of, 24, 44; inventive possibilities of, 178–79; of Jeffersonian order, 156, 259; of the land, 4–5, 38, 47, 50, 54; of the Midwest, xviii–xix, 2–3, 8, 47, 137, 138; nineteenth-century, xiii, 156; of prairie topography, ix, xi; representing spaces by, 3–5; Wood’s use of, 128, 154–57; Frank Lloyd Wright on, 218. See also bird’s-eye views; high-altitude views; vertical views Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 140 Empire State Building (New York City), 294n34 Engle, Paul, 151 Eppley, Eugene: Wood’s mural paintings for, 153–56 erosion, 63, 72; aerial photographs used to study and control, 64–71, 230, 277n30, 277n31; Wood’s painting of, 179–80, 292n114. See also conservation, soil; Dust Bowl Europe, xx, 10, 176, 258, 275n2; art in, 24, 149, 280n62; balloon photography in, 49–50, 51, 193–94, 275n5; urban planning in, 193–94, 195, 212, 213, 275n5; Wood’s sojourns in, 151, 153, 154, 181, 288n49; during World War I, 57, 62. See also Paris Evans, R. Tripp, 290n75 Evans, Terry, 261

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330 i n dex factories: Chicago’s, 142; farms run as, 116, 125; in planned cities, 210, 224, 288n56. See also industrial­ ization; mechanization Fagan, Lawrence: Map of Berks County, Pennsylvania, 273n59 Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation: frontispiece to The Disappearing City, 210–11; photomap of Manhattan by, 59, 202–3, 204–5, 277n22, 277n24 farmers, midwestern, 61, 116, 161; associations of, 82, 83; decrease in numbers of, 263–64; flight embraced by, 130–37, 141, 169; and government programs, 68–69, 71, 77–80, 97; responses to aerial survey photographs, xv, 79, 80–82, 84–85, 89, 257, 280n58, 280n62, 280n65; Wood’s depictions of, 158. See also Life magazine: “The Iowa Farm” farmers, midwestern, Jeffersonian yeoman model of: critics of, 161–62; economic crises destabilizing, 48–49, 62–63, 69; end of, x, 221–22; ideology of, 10, 85, 256; narratives of, xix, xxi, 118; Frank Lloyd Wright’s espousal of, 217, 223, 226, 231. See also Jeffersonianism farming, 25–26, 45, 63; modernization of, 102, 127, 254–55; Wood’s murals of, 153–56. See also contour farming; crops; cultivation; production, agricultural Farm Security Administration (FSA), 48, 100, 278n42; How American People Live exhibition, 96; photography projects, 95–112, 115, 282n80, 282n88. See also Historical Section, Farm Security Administration; Resettlement Administration; U.S. Department of Agriculture farms/farmsteads, midwestern, xix, xxii, 47, 118; aerial photographs of, 73, 78–79, 87, 88, 96, 117; aerial views of, vii, x, xiv, xv, 76, 86, 264; as basis of urban homesteads, 237–38; establishment of, 8, 18; fall routines of, 97–108; god’s-eye views of, 80–81; grid pattern in, xvii, xxi, xxii, 38, 119, 161–62, 253; in illustrated historical atlases, 36–38, 39, 40, 44, 164; Jeffersonian, 10, 258; oblique views of, 84–85; spring routines of, 108–12. See also homesteaders/ homesteads; Taliesin estate fertility, soil. See soil, prairie: fertility of

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fields: aerial survey photographs of, vii, xiv, 45, 64–65, 73, 86, 95–96; aerial views of, 116, 118, 142; camouflaging, 146; enlarging, x, 62–63, 277n28; gridded pattern of, 34, 38, 47, 76, 78, 82, 83, 85. See also conservation, soil; contour farming; erosion; plains; prairies; soil, prairie; strip cropping Fishman, Robert, 214, 258 flight: and camouflage, 169–70; conceptual framework invoked by, vii–x, xii–xiii, xvii–xviii; culture of, 57, 257–58; midwesterners’ embrace of, xviii, 130–37, 141, 169; urban life as, 186; in World War I, 142–51; Frank Lloyd Wright on, 191, 209, 249–50. See also airplanes; aviation; barnstormers; Iowa State Fair: stunt flying at; Wright brothers form as camouflaging technique, 143–44. See also camouflage Foucault, Michel, xiv, xv, 268n10, 275n4 Freud, Sigmund: uncanniness concept of, 169–70 Friedman, David, 192 frontier, xxii, 17, 218, 238, 278n38; closing of, 61–62, 69, 160, 162, 294n15; ethos of, 221–22; gaze of, 138–39; Jeffersonian, xxiii, 216; mapping, 9–10; mythology of, 23, 69, 118, 156, 160–61, 237; towns on, 27–31. See also prairies; westward expansion FSA. See Farm Security Administration Fuller, Henry Blake: The Cliff-Dwellers, 288n48 futurists: use of aerial vision, 138 Garden City (planned community), 243, 299n108, 300n8 Garland, Hamlin, 139, 151, 161 Geertz, Clifford, 285n7 gender: Life magazine’s representations of, 119, 122–23, 284n106 geographic information systems (GIS), 261, 263, Plate 16 George, Henry, 218 god’s-eye views, xiii–xiv, xv, xvi, 54, 80–81, 85 Goeb, Art, 136 Gohlke, Frank, 261 government, U.S.: farmers’ response to, 68–69, 71, 77–80, 97; programs instituted by, xiv, 91, 160,

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254–55, 278n39; synoptic gaze of, 24, 45, 91, 95, 96. See also aerial photographs/photography, government survey; agents, government; control, government; New Deal; U.S. Department of Agriculture Gowin, Emmet, 261 Gray, Susan, xx–xxi Great Depression, xxii, xxiii, 61, 62–63, 185, 207. See also Dust Bowl Greenbelt Towns (New Deal), 192, 244–49, 258, 259, 299n113, 299n115 Gregor, Harold, 261 grid, midwestern, xxiii, 33, 218; aerial survey photographs of, x, xvi, 61, 78, 96, 130, 263; bird’s-eye views of, 38, 219; cadastral, xi, 175; continuity created by, 175, 201; coordinate system of, 4, 16, 18; critics of, 162–63; decentralized, 245, 249; economic crises destabilizing, 48–49, 62–63; of farms and farmsteads, xvii, xxi, xxiii, 38, 119, 161–62, 253; of fields, 34, 38, 47, 76, 78, 82, 83, 85; of government survey lines, ix, xvi, xx, xxiv; Jeffersonian, 38, 44, 73, 85, 125, 127, 139, 156, 173, 226, 231, 252; mapping, 10–18, 24, 61; as matrix of homesteads, 82; orthogonal, 31, 32; overwriting natural landscape, 83, 257; rationality of, xxiv, 108; reforming prairie landscape from within, 63–64, 67–68, 255; sighting, 18–31; surveying, 11–18; urban planning’s use of, 142, 194, 195, 201, 226; Wood’s painting of, 177, 178. See also Land Ordinance of 1785: grid system of; landscapes, Midwestern: grid form of; markers, survey; surveys, U.S. government; townships: grid of Gruen, Victor, 300n7 Grundy County (Iowa) photographs, 73–76, 80–81, 82; Rothstein’s, 97–108, 282–83n90, 283n97; Vachon’s, 47, 48, 108–12, 113, 114. See also Iowa Guerin, Jules: bird’s-eye view of Chicago, 196–98, 201, 204 gypsy fliers. See barnstormers Hall, James, 5 Hamilton, Alexander, 10 Haraway, Donna, xiv–xv

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i n dex 331 Harper’s Weekly: illustration of land office transaction, 18–20 Hartman, Sadakichi, 282n89 Harvey, David, 275n4 Haussmann, George-Eugène: redesign of Paris, 195, 275n5 Hayden, Dolores, 258 Hayler, Guy Wilfred, 204–5 Herd, Stan: Iowa Countryside, 261–63 high-altitude views, xiv, xvii, 64, 110, 130, 261; oblique, 55, 57, 84–85, 116, 117, 118. See also bird’s-eye views; vertical views highways. See roadways hired hands: Life magazine’s representations of, 119, 121, 122, 284n105 Historical Section, Farm Security Administration, 45, 47, 95–108, 281n77, 281n78. See also Farm Security Administration Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 50, 275n9 Homestead Act of 1862, 31 homesteaders/homesteads, x, 222; aerial survey photography, xvii, 82, 85–86, 105, 118; claims of, 18, 20; economic crises’ effects on, 48–49; envisioning, 2–3; farmsteads as basis of urban, 237–38; Jeffersonian, 231, 258; surveying, 11, 14; urban, 24, 240. See also pioneers; settlement/settlers, midwestern Hopkins, Griffith Morgan, Jr.: Map of Adams Co., Pennsylvania, 32–33 Hoppenworth, Wilbert, 119 horizontality, xiii–xiv, 245; Frank Lloyd Wright’s preference for, 216, 223, 226, 232–37 horizontal views, x, 71, 82; limitations of, xxiv, 143, 202; Renaissance, xiii, 137. See also vertical views: shifting horizontal to houses/housing: industrial, 245; mixed-elevation, 219; single-family, 109, 232, 234, 236, 240; suburban, 226, 244, 260 Howard, Ebenezer: Garden City designs, 243, 300n8 Howard, L. O., 279n52 Hubbard, Theodora and Henry, 294n15, 294n32 hybridization, 40, 183, 218–19

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332 i n dex idealism: agrarian, 165, 268n22; of horizontality, 237; New Deal, 81–82, 83; political, 61, 69, 81; spatial, 192; of Wood’s landscapes, 256; Frank Lloyd Wright’s, 216–17. See also Jeffersonianism: ideals of identity: American, 2–3, 114, 205, 249, 257, 289–90n67; individual, 85; modern, xviii, xix, xxiii, 115; national, 95, 115, 158, 180; postfrontier, 151; regional, xi, xx–xxi, xxii, 3, 129, 156, 159, 162, 181; rural, 115–16, 162; social, 100. See also midwesternness ideologies, xx, 4, 129, 214, 223; aerial survey photographs communicating, 82, 95; American democratic, 61, 114, 259; bird’s-eye views of, 28–29; capitalist, xxi, 185, 212; Jeffersonian, 85, 191, 256, 259; Manifest Destiny, xxiii, 23, 139–40, 194, 259; mapping, 9, 108 Illinois: aerial survey photographs of, 45, 46, 47; Atlas Map of Tazewell County, Illinois, 40; Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Claire County, Illinois, 34–36, 37. See also Chicago Illinois Central Rail-Road Company: generic town plat used by, 30–31, 273n56; sales booklet by, 21, 22 impressionism: Wood’s technique of, 151, 153, 154 individualism, 21, 125, 231, 237, 243, 249; democratic, 218, 257; Jeffersonian, xxiii, 257; midwestern, 82, 116, 283n93; modern, 96, 214; Frank Lloyd Wright’s espousal of, 207, 208, 223. See also self-determination industrialization, 125, 216, 219; agricultural, ix–x, xxii, 116, 118, 119, 122, 171; cities transformed by, 194, 237– 38, 248; crisis of faith in, 185, 186; culture of, xxii, 122, 162; efficiency of, x; expansion of, 194–95; transformation from agrarianism to, 88–89, 100, 115–16, 123; urban, 217, 243; Wood’s opinion of, 171, 172. See also factories; mechanization; modernity: industrial Ingalls, John James, 28 inhabitants, rural: aerial vision and, 96, 138, 290n81; makeshift creativity of, xv–xvi; midwestern, 9, 290n81; prairie, 125, 154, 160. See also farmers, midwestern; land: inhabitants’ relationship to; rural areas innovation: of aerial photography, xviii, xxiv; dialectic between tradition and, x–xi, 162–63, 164, 183; technological, xii–xiii, xxi, 69

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International Harvester advertisement, 254–56, 259, Plate 15. See also McCormick Harvesting Machine Company (International Harvester) advertisement inventiveness, xi, xvii, 160–71; Wood’s philosophy of, 170–71, 175, 178, 181, 183 Iowa: Cedar Rapids, 142, 151, 152, 154–56; Decorah farms, 67, 68; DeWitt bird’s-eye view, 28–31; Herd’s painting of, 261–63; Iowa Falls photographs, 99–100; Jones County aerial images, 86–89; maps of, 21–23; oblique photographs of, 67, 68; prairies of, 5; Walker postcard with biplane, 132, 133; Wood’s paintings of, xviii, 141, 153–56. See also Anamosa (Iowa) Eureka; Andreas, Alfred T., Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa; Grundy County (Iowa) photographs; Life magazine: “The Iowa Farm” Iowa State Fair: stunt flying at, 132, 137, 172, 285n13, 285–86n14, 286n16 Jefferson, Thomas, 10, 11, 61, 140 Jeffersonianism, xxii, xxiii, 255; agrarian, 24, 44, 100, 123, 125, 216–18, 221; ideals of, 44, 83, 175, 219–20, 221, 238, 245, 255, 258; ideology of, 10, 85, 191, 256, 259; landownership and, 118, 175; Midwest as symbol of, xix, xxiv, 96, 191, 264; mythology of, 161–62, 175; urban, 218–38; Frank Lloyd Wright and, 191, 240, 245, 249. See also farmers, midwestern, Jeffersonian yeoman model of; grid, midwestern Jensen, Jens, 226 J. H. Cherry Company: commissioned paintings by Wood, 152–53 John Roach and Sons land company, 116 Johnson, Robert, 136 Johnstone, Paul, 45, 125; “Documentary Photographs,” 46, 96, 274n1 journalism, 57, 115, 283n98. See also newspapers: aerial photographs in Kafka, Franz, 151 Kansas: bird’s-eye views of, 28, 89–95; land office in, 18–20; plat map from, 16–17; in Wizard of Oz, 253 Kauffmann, Edgar, Sr., 238 King, Samuel, 50

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Kinsey, Joni, 5, 268n22 Kirkland, Wallace, “The Iowa Farm,” 114–25, 179, 182, 284n102, 284n105; photographs from, 117, 120, 121, 124, 127–28 Kostof, Spiro, 293n8 labor, 175, 247, 285n106; agrarian, 36, 85–86, 101–2, 110, 122–23, 157–58, 161–62, 181, 227. See also farmers, midwestern; farming; hired hands: Life magazine’s representations of; industrialization land, 91, 144, 160; advertisements of, 21, 22, 24–27; aerial survey photography as tool for managing, 61–84, 137–39, 275n4; distribution of, xxi, 10, 14, 16; elevated views of, 38, 47, 54; inhabitants’ relationship to, 32, 54, 63, 82–86, 88, 89, 128, 163, 278n34; natural character of, 14, 16–17, 82–83; sales of, 17–31, 25, 26, 273n49. See also contour farming; cultivation; erosion; landscapes; landscapes, midwestern; plains; prairies; soil, prairie land offices, 14, 16–17, 18–20, 27, 272n38 Land Ordinance of 1785, 194, 272n40, 272n43; grid system of, 16, 17, 18, 125, 231, 261, 272n41, 274n61; New Deal compared to, 63, 64; and settlement of the prairies, xx, 11, 61 landownership, 31–41; aerial photographs’ indexing of, 85–86; business of, 122; consolidation of, ix, 10, 48; Jeffersonian, 118, 175; maps of, xx, 3, 32, 33, 273n59; railroads’, 21, 22, 23–27; self-determination through, 219, 259. See also atlases; mapping/maps; settlement/ settlers, midwestern landscapes, 18, 185, 201, 223, 249; aerial views of, xv, 50, 110, 138, 208–9, 257, 275n2, 282n86, 282n88; camouflaging, 143–44, 145–46; cultural, 95, 285n7; Eastern, 24, 32–33, 274n63; elevated representations of, 4–5, 50; rural, xviii, 202, 214; social, 119, 122; Taliesin, 227–30 landscapes, midwestern, xv, 36, 129, 287n38; aerial surveys of, xiv, 45, 47–49, 61, 102, 112–25; agrarian, xviii–xxiv, 154, 216, 221; airplanes’ new orientations to, 137–38; bird’s-eye views of, 3, 28, 31, 32, 139–40, 142, 164; Disney’s depiction of, 169; geometric pattern of, 73, 76, 105–6, 108–12, 127, 178, 252, 253;

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i n dex 333 government representations of, 61–84; grid form of, ix, 21, 83, 85, 116, 119, 123, 130, 139, 141, 223, 245, 259, 263; Jeffersonian form of, 83, 161–62; mapping, 8, 9–18; order in, 65–66, 68, 107, 116, 216; patchwork effect on, ix, x, 139, 173, 175, 255; railroads’, 25, 26; restructuring, 49, 63–64, 129; settlers’ first reaction to, 5–8; and soil conservation, 67–68; transformation of, xix, 128, 170, 172, 257; The Wizard of Oz landscape compared to, 251–56; Frank Lloyd Wright’s, 170, 201, 202, 206, 214, 216–17. See also frontier; grid, midwestern; Life magazine: “The Iowa Farm”; prairies; westward expansion landscapes, midwestern, aerial images of, 73–79, 84–86, 257, 275n2, 282n86; from airplanes, ix–x, xii, xviii, 57; bird’s-eye, 28, 31, 139–40, 164; control of, 125; elevated, 3, 38; government survey, 47–49, 96; Wood’s use of, 127, 171, 177; Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of, 191 landscapes, midwestern, Wood’s paintings of, 172, 176–83, 256, 284–85n4, 289–90n67, 291n93, 292n105; aerial perspective in, 127–30, 137–60, 261, 262; camouflage techniques in, 171, 181, 262, 291n94; Iowa, xviii, 153–56. See also Wood, Grant, paintings by Lansill, J. S., 299n115 LeClere, Ernest, 132 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret), 59, 151, 295n48, 296n57; Frank Lloyd Wright’s disagreement with, 213–14 Leutze, Emanuel: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 139–40 Levittown, Pennsylvania: aerial photographs of, 259, 261 Lewis, Sinclair, xxii, 287n46; Babbitt, 142; Main Street, 161 life, everyday, xv–xvi, 214, 268n10; aerial photographs’ encapsulation of, 86, 88; midwestern, 2–3, 47, 96–97, 115, 162, 181; modern, 185–86, 223; regional, 156, 162, 171, 175; rural, 118, 122, 153–56, 210, 252; urban, 186, 205, 206, 210, 218, 258. See also cities/cityscapes; rural areas Life magazine, 254, 284n100; “The Iowa Farm,” 114–25, 127–28, 179, 182, 284n102, 284n105 Lindbergh, Charles, 131, 137, 166

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334 i n dex Lord, Russell: Behold Our Land, 89 Luce, Henry, 114–15, 284n100 Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell, 283n93, 290n81; Middletown, 142 MacBride, Henry, 177, 292n107 Macdonald-Wright, Stanton: “Influence of Aviation on Art,” 138 MacLean, Alex S., xvi magazines: aerial photographs in. See Harper’s Weekly; Life magazine; National Geographic Manhattan. See New York City Manifest Destiny, xxiii, 23, 139–40, 194, 259 mapping/maps: aerial photography used for, 50, 60, 73–77, 78, 79, 156–57; exploration, 174; hand-drawn, 202, 204; Hubbards’ use of, 294n32; landownership, xx, 3, 32, 33, 273n59; photographic, 59–61; of railroad landholdings, 25, 25, 26; Wood’s use of, 156–57. See also Andreas, Alfred T., Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa; grid, midwestern; plat maps; prairies: mapping of; surveys, U.S. government Marin, Louis, xxii–xxiii markers, survey, 9–18, 20, 61; corner, 11–14, 16, 271n33; sectional, 12, 17, 18. See also grid, midwestern Masters, Edgar Lee, 161 McCormick Harvesting Machine Company (International Harvester) advertisement, 140, 255, 300n4. See also International Harvester advertisement mechanization, ix, 48, 249–50, 276n12; culture of, 240, 285n8; Wood’s concerns over, 172, 174, 178; Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of, 208, 295n40. See also industrialization; technologies Mencken, H. L., 151, 160–61, 290n69 Merriam, J.: farm of, 40 Midwest, 3, 89, 108, 156, 192, 258, 268n21; aeriality in, xv, 228, 254, 259, 263; aerial survey photographs of, xiv, 45, 47–49, 61, 71, 102, 112–25, 258; aerial views of, ix–xi, xxii, 18, 80, 123, 125, 149, 169, 226, 251–56, 263; agrarian landscapes of, xviii–xxiv, 154, 216; artists in, 138, 162–63, 291n85; critics of, 160–62; elevated views of, xviii–xix, 2–3, 8, 47, 137, 138; everyday life in, 2–3, 47, 96–97, 115, 162, 181; government’s reenvisioning

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of, xvi, 64, 112–25; Great Depression’s effects on, 62–63; hybrid image of, 129–30; inhabitants of, 9, 290n81; Jeffersonian image of, xix, xxiv, 96, 191, 264; modernization in, xix, 49, 95, 100, 128–29, 172, 174, 181, 283n93; mythology of, xxi–xxii, 8, 44; order in, xix–xxiv, 96–97, 118, 254; politics of, ix, 34, 125; railroads running through, 36, 198, 199; regional identity of, 3, 162; as source of American identity, 114, 249, 257; spatiality in, 221, 223, 227–28, 231, 243; transformation of, x–xi, 49, 181, 192; use of term, xxiii–xxiv; The Wizard of Oz landscape compared to, 251–56. See also culture, midwestern; grid, midwestern; landscapes, midwestern; landscapes, midwestern, Wood’s paintings of; settlement/ settlers, midwestern midwesterners: aeriality embraced by, xv, 125, 138; debates over modernization, 128–29, 283n93; flight embraced by, xviii, 130–37, 141, 169; individualism of, 82, 116, 283n93 midwesternness, vii–xi, 3, 41, 115, 128, 159, 257; use of term, xxiii–xxiv. See also culture, midwestern; identity: regional Miller, Alfred Jacob: Prairie Scene: Mirage, 7 mobility, 210, 223, 235, 249–50, 276n12. See also auto­ mobile objective; transportation modernism, xvi, xxiii, 160, 178, 282n89; abstraction and, 151, 261; of aerial photography, 96, 177, 263, Plate 16; agricultural vision of, 125, 255–56; artistic, xviii, 138, 291n85; Wood’s sense of, 151, 183, 284–85n4; Frank Lloyd Wright’s espousal of, 213–14, 216–17 modernity: aerial viewing’s impact on, ix, xii, xviii, xix, 69–71, 88–89, 151; agrarianism’s role in, x, 216; airplane as central symbol of, xix, 138; architectural, 207, 237; in Broadacre City, 235, 237; definition of, 267n1; as frontier, 208; industrial, 100, 185–86, 198, 211, 218, 222, 231, 238; interwar, 164; Jeffersonian ideal applied to, 218, 238; mechanisms of, 192, 206; midwestern, xxiii, 84, 255; Mumford on, 243; New Deal vision of, 84, 108; questioning of, xxii; rural, xxiv, 185; urban, 185, 186, 204, 218, 237; Wood’s concern with, 166, 171, 175–76, 178; Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of, 214, 230

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modernization, xviii, 115, 213, 258; aerial vision’s impact on, ix, xii–xiii, 69–71, 80, 95, 102; agricultural, 96–97, 119, 230; government-sponsored, xv, 174; New Deal, 82–83; rural, x–xi, xxiv, 9, 171–83, 194; urban, 204; Wood’s ambivalence toward, 171, 177; Frank Lloyd Wright’s indictment of, 207, 218, 219. See also Midwest: modernization in Moenck, Art: “Aero Photos” feature, 86–89, 108 monoculture planting, xxi, 116, 125 Mott, Frank Luther, 290n68 Mumford, Lewis, 218, 244; aerial gaze of, 59, 192, 243; critiques of Frank Lloyd Wright, 240–41; The Culture of Cities, 243; “Regions—To Live In,” 242, 243 Munro, Thomas, 281n76 mythologies/mythos, 21, 191; agrarian, 115–16, 161, 162, 192, 256; cultural, xxii, 128; frontier, 23, 69, 118, 156, 160–61, 237; Jeffersonian, 161–62, 175; midwestern, xxi–xxii, 8, 44; spatial, 54, 115, 205, 219; Wood’s links to, 284–85n4 Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon): balloon photog­ raphy by, 49–50, 51, 275n5 National Geographic: aerial photographs in, 57–58 naturalism: camouflage’s challenge to, 149, 151 nature, 140, 144, 219; Wood’s treatment of, 176, 177; Frank Lloyd Wright’s faith in, 185–86, 207, 209, 240, 296n59 Nebraska: aerial photographs of, 58, 64, 65, 66; land sales booklets, 24–27, 273n49 Neely, Will, 132 New Deal, 278n38, 279n54; aerial survey photography used by, 49, 64, 89, 108, 129, 173–75, 282n86; democratic concepts of, 82, 91, 108; economic benefits of, 254, 280n56; ideals of, 81–82, 83; Land Ordinance of 1785 compared to, 63, 64; politics of, 80, 85, 95; reforming midwestern agriculture, 45, 63–84, 162–63; social documentary photography used by, 95–112; Wood’s work for PWAP, 173, 292n106. See also Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Farm Security Administration; Greenbelt Towns; Historical Section, Farm Security Administration; Resettlement Administration

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i n dex 335 newspapers: aerial photographs in, 57, 132. See also Anamosa (Iowa) Eureka New York City: photographs in The Disappearing City, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 210–11; photomap of, 59, 202– 3, 277n24; railroads and roadways in, 190, 212–13 Norris, Frank, xxi, 198; The Pit, 294n17 nostalgia, xxiii, 129, 163, 256 Nye, David E., 83 oblique aerial photography, xvii–xviii, 54, 58; of Broadacre countryside, 249, 250; of individual farmsteads, 84–85; New Deal use of, 49, 173; of New York City, 203, 211; in World War I, 55. See also Grundy County (Iowa) photographs Ohio: aerial photographs of, 277n31 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 300n8 Olympian views, xiv. See also elevated views; highaltitude views; vertical views order, 144, 238; aerial gaze as tool of, xiv–xvi, xviii, xxiii, 4–5, 59–61, 71, 76–77, 91, 107–8, 112; aerial survey photography highlighting, 47, 65–66, 107–8; grid form precipitating, 116, 175; Jeffersonian, 88–89, 156, 231, 259; landscape’s natural, 65–66, 68; midwestern, xix–xxiv, 96–97, 118, 254; natural vs. man-made, 76, 208, 209, 223, 278n34; prairie, 9, 30; rational, 84, 214, 256–57; social, 214, 218, 240; spatial, 214, 240, 249; urban, 194, 206. See also centralization; consolidation; grid, midwestern; rationality; social structures: visualization of Ordinance for Ascertaining the Mode of Disposing Lands in the Western Territory. See Land Ordinance of 1785 orthogonal views, 31, 32, 192–93, 196, 201, 219, 226 Orvell, Miles, 283n97 painting. See art/artists; and individual styles of art panoptic gaze, xiv, xv, 4, 73, 198, 268n10, 279n46. See also synoptic gaze panoramas, xiii, 156 parachuting, 131, 141, 285–86n14 Paris, 193, 293n13; Haussmann’s redesign of, 195, 275n5; Le Corbusier’s plan for reconstruction of, 213

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336 i n dex past, the, x, xxiii, 138, 240; cultural, 216–17; in Wood’s paintings, 165–66, 169–70, 183. See also usable past Patrick, Austin, 278–79n44 patterns as camouflaging technique, 143–44, 146 Payson, William, 213, 295n46 Pennsylvania: Map of Adams Co., 32–33; Map of Berks County, 273n59 Petit Bicêtre: balloon photograph of, 49–50 photographers/photography. See aerial photographs/ photography; aerial photographs/photography, government survey photo-maps, 78, 79, 289n62 photomosaics, 55–57, 59, 61–84, 202–3, 279n52 Picasso, Pablo: on camouflage, 289n62 picture-maps, 71. See also vertical views pioneers: culture of, 283n93; Jeffersonian, ix, 160; narratives of, xxi, 118; Wood’s paintings of, 156–57; Frank Lloyd Wright’s identification with, 217, 223, 237. See also frontier; prairies; settlement/settlers, midwestern place: conceptualization of, xvii, xix, xxiii, 129, 285n5 plains, 27, 63, 140; trans-Missouri, 24, 31; traveling across, xx, xxi; use of term, xxiv; vastness of, 5, 6, 9, 136. See also prairies planning, 219, 227, 243–44; aerial survey photographs as tool for, 48–49, 59–84; large-scale, 256–57; rational gaze of, xv–xvi, xviii; regional, 201, 241. See also urban planning plat maps: farm, 38; generic town, 30–31; government survey, 14, 16, 18, 156, 272n38; Kansas, 16–17; landownership, 3, 34, 85; township, 15, 16, 36. See also Andreas, Alfred T., Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa plowing, 44, 127, 176–78, Plate 3 politics: ideals of, 61, 69, 81; of Life magazine article, 116, 122–23; Luce’s, 284n100; midwestern, ix, 34, 125; New Deal, 80, 85, 95. See also democracy, American; Jeffersonianism; regionalism postmodernism, 258. See also modernism power, 214, 237; abstract structures of, 4–5; of aerial gaze, xiv–xvi, 170, 175, 176, 213, 249, 268n10; of aerial photography, 49, 54, 81–82, 86, 211, 275n2

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prairies: aerial vision’s role in, 129, 130, 166; culture of, 41, 47, 63–64, 138–39, 158–61, 170, 175–76, 291n85; farming on, 25–26; image making for, ix, 26, 27, 30, 44, 125, 137, 160, 165; inhabitants of, 125, 154, 160; landscape of, 291n85; as lands of opportunity, 4, 5, 17–18, 20–21; life on, 118; mapping of, 8, 9–18, 20, 27, 61, 71, 73, 178, 208; order on, 9, 30; settlement of, 2–3, 5–8, 44, 61–62; terminology of, xxiii–xxiv; topography of, ix, xi, xx–xxi, xxiv, 5–8, 16, 24, 154, 268n22, 270n20; use of term, xxiv; visualizing, 3–8, 5, 8, 17–18; Wood paintings of, 153–56. See also frontier; plains; representations: prairie prices, agricultural, 21, 48, 62, 71. See also agribusiness production, agricultural: controls on, 8, 49, 71, 73, 76–84, 175, 263, 278–79n44; management of, 125, 162–63; midwestern, xx, 294n17; reordering of, ix, x, xiv, xxi; row-crop, 97; scenes of, 140; technology’s increase in, 116, 175, 263–64, 277n28. See also agriculture, midwestern; farming programs, government. See government, U.S.: programs instituted by; New Deal; surveys, U.S. government property ownership. See landownership prosperity, xxi, 28, 36, 44, 93. See also economy, midwestern Providence, Rhode Island: aerial photographs of, 50 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP): Grant as head of, 173, 292n106 Quick, Herbert, 151, 283n93 quilting, 123, 124, 179 RA. See Resettlement Administration Radburn Village (community housing project), 244 railroads, 130; Chicago, 198, 199; land sales by, 21, 22, 23–27; midwestern, 36, 198, 199; New York City, 190, 212–13; promotional guides published by, 20, 273n47, 273n49; speed and, 27, 130, 131, 276n12. See also transportation ranges, survey grid, 16, 272n38, 277n30. See also grid, midwestern

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rationality: of aerial vision, xvi, 178, 201; of grid form, 108, 116, 216, 219; modern, 84, 116, 194, 222; replacing romanticism, xxiii. See also order regionalism, 114, 218, 241, 244, 283n93; use of term, xxiv; Wood’s philosophy of, 160, 163–64, 289–90n67, 290n68, 296n64. See also identity: regional Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), 241, 244 Renaissance, xiii, 3, 32, 137 representations, xxiv, 57, 73, 125, 179; aerial, 5, 8, 156, 192, 202, 231, 256–57; camouflage’s lexicon of, 143–49; cartographic, 41, 44, 85; elevated, 3, 4; incompatibilities in, 201–2; midwestern, 61, 86, 156; prairie, 8, 9, 18, 25, 38, 47, 130, 154; rural, 24, 214, 216, 219; urban, 192–93, 204; Wood’s style of, 157. See also aerial photographs/photography; art/artists Reps, John, 27, 273n53 Resettlement Administration (RA), 95–97, 244–49, 281n77, 299n113. See also Farm Security Admini­ stration; Greenbelt Towns Rinard, Park: “Return from Bohemia,” 287n36 River Rouge Complex (Dearborn, Michigan), 294n34 roadways: Broadacre City, 250; Chicago, 50, 196, 200, 201; geometrical order of, xiv, 165, 209; New York City, 190, 212; rural, 105, 201 Rockefeller Center (New York City), 294n34 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, xvii–xviii romanticism, xix, xxiii, 100, 128, 140, 154, 211 Rothstein, Arthur. See Grundy County (Iowa) photographs: Rothstein’s RPAA. See Regional Planning Association of America Ruger, Albert: bird’s-eye view of DeWitt, Iowa, 28–31 rural areas: aerial survey photographs of, 45, 49, 202; concentration in, xxiii–xxiv; culture of, x, 84–112, 128, 161, 172, 173, 185; identity of, 115–16, 162; integrating urban and, 191–92, 198, 201, 249; modernization of, x–xi, xxiv, 9, 171–83, 194; representations of, 24, 214, 216, 219; as utopias, 238–50; values of, 218. See also farms/farmsteads, midwestern; life, everyday: rural; Life magazine: “The Iowa Farm”; space(s): rural Rushdie, Salman: on The Wizard of Oz, 252, 253

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i n dex 337 Saint Gaudens, Homer: camouflage report by, 142–43, 144, 288n53 Salisbury, Morse, 279n51 Saloutos, Theodore, 277n28 satellite survey images, 261, 263, Plate 16 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 131 Schnapp, Jeffrey, xiii–xiv Scott, James, 81, 84, 256–57, 275n4 SCS. See Soil Conservation Service sections, survey: grid of, 11–18, 23, 76, 279n47; marking, 12, 17, 18; quarter, 11, 16, 228, 272n41. See also grid, midwestern self-determination, 81, 82, 108, 259. See also individualism settlement/settlers, midwestern, 9–18; government survey lines directing, ix, 11, 14, 16, 61; Jeffersonian model of, 32, 34, 47, 73, 237–38; prairie, 5–8, 17–18, 31–32, 44, 268n22; promoting, 21, 22, 23; suburban, 258–59; visual component of, 3, 137, 149; Wood’s mural of, 154. See also frontier; landownership; pioneers shadows as camouflaging technique, 144–45, 147 Shanken, Andrew, 206, 294n33 Shapiro, Meyer, 249 Sheeler, Charles, 152 shopping malls, 300n7 Shortridge, James, 268n21 Simmons, George, 154, 156 Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle, 294n17 skyscrapers, 142, 186, 195, 205; Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of, 208, 210, 211, 217–18 sky snoops: use of term, 80, 279n54 social structures: visualization of, 3, 9, 212, 249, 285n7. See also order soil, prairie: cultivation of, 70, 89; fertility of, 8, 25–26, 62, 63, 64–71; quality of, xx, 41, Plate 1; science of, 255. See also conservation, soil; erosion; fields; plains; prairies Soil Conservation Service (SCS): photomontage of newspaper clippings, 82, 83; use of aerial photog­ raphy, 64, 69–71, 89, 281n73 Southdale Center (Edina, Minnesota), 300n7 Southern Agrarians, 218

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338 i n dex space(s), 250, 285n5; aerial views’ reimagining of, xvii, xix, 3–5, 27, 31, 59, 205; concept of, xi, xxii–xxiii, 129, 267n1; flight’s reimagination of, xiii, xvii–xviii; midwestern, 107, 108, 175, 183, 227–28, 259; modern transformation of, 54, 115, 205, 219; natural vs. man-made, 233, 257; open, xx–xxii; redesigning, 217, 223, 238, 257; rural, 82, 191, 218, 244, 256; technology intertwining with, 243, 276n12; urban, 194, 204, 205–6, 216, 244. See also cities/cityscapes; frontier; landscapes; landscapes, midwestern; mapping/maps; place; plains; prairies; rural areas spatiality, 192, 205, 240, 249; midwestern, 221, 223, 227– 28, 231, 243; mythology of, 54, 115, 205, 219 speculators, xxi, 17, 20, 272n40, 272n43 speed, 27, 130–31, 276n12, 285n8 Spirn, Anne Whiston, 228, 297n83 Steichon, Edward, 151 Stein, Clarence, 241, 299n108, 299n115 Stein, Gertrude, 289n62 Stein, Sally, 96 Stewart, Harry, 59 Strand, Paul, 282n89, 282–83n90 strip cropping, 68, 91 Strong, Gordon, 298n90 Stryker, Roy, 95–112, 281n76, 282n87, 283n97; as chief of Historical Division, 45, 115, 281n77, 282–83n90; “Documentary Photographs,” 46, 47, 96, 274n1, 275n2; on photogrammetry advisory committee, 96, 282n84, 282n86 Stuart, Susan, 86 stunt flying. See Iowa State Fair: stunt flying at subsidies. See allotment programs suburbs, xix, 198, 206, 226, 250, 259, 300n8. See also cities/cityscapes; Greenbelt Towns; Levittown, Pennsylvania: aerial photographs of Suckow, Ruth, 151, 283n93 Sullivan, Louis, 191, 296n59 Sunnyside Gardens (community housing project), 244 surveillance, 160, 268n10; aerial, 54, 56–57, 143–49, 151, 258; cameras for, xvii, 148, 178. See also aerial photographs/photography; World War I: aerial photography used in

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surveys, U.S. government, 9–31; consistency of, 271n33, 272n38, 287n39; descriptions included in, 16, 17–18, 24; extent of, 274n61; Jeffersonian land, xi, 38, 39, 231; sighting, 18–31. See also aerial photographs/ photography, government survey; grid, midwestern; markers, survey synoptic gaze, xv, xvii; authority of, 175, 254; government’s, 24, 45, 91, 95, 96; planning with, xviii, 201. See also panoptic gaze; panoramas Taliesin estate (Frank Lloyd Wright), 226–31; fellowship of, 298n86; plan of, 228–30, 237, 297n83, 297n85 technologies, 210, 223, 235, 243, 257; aerial photography, xix, 80, 88, 202; agricultural, xxi, 116, 175, 263–64, 277n28; airplane, 79, 132, 194; communication, 191, 198, 216, 219; innovations in, xii–xiii, xxi, 69; modern, 115, 219; photographic, 61, 80; Frank Lloyd Wright’s promotion of, 214, 216–17. See also mechanization temporality. See time texture as camouflaging technique, 145–46, 148 Thoreau, Henry David, 140 time, xxii–xxiii, 54, 100, 216–17, 267n1, 276n12 Tolly, H. R., 279n51 topography: mapping, 9–10; midwestern, 3, 64; personal meaning in, 285n5; Wood’s paintings of, 173– 74, 176, 181, 287n39. See also prairies: topography of Tournachon, Gaspard-Félix. See Nadar towns, 18, 118, 164, 194, 273n56; bird’s-eye views of, 27–31, 86–88, 142, 273n51; envisioning, 2–3; grid pattern in, 156, 161–62 townships: grid of, 11–18, 231, 272n38, 272n41; in illustrated historical atlases, 34, 36; surveys of, 274n61 tradition(s): cultural, 115, 168–69; dialectic between innovation and, x–xi, 162–63, 164, 183; midwestern, 122, 170; modernization’s transformation of, 100, 129; rural, 118; Wood’s approach to, 165–66 transcendentalism, 140, 219, 240 transportation, xxi, 186, 210, 211–12, 241. See also airplanes; automobiles; mobility; railroads Trans World Airlines (TWA) advertisement, vii–ix, viii, 258

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Tugwell, Rexford, 278n39, 281n76, 299n115; “No More Frontiers,” 69, 89 Turner, Frederick Jackson, xxii, 61–62, 218, 294n15 Turner, John B.: Wood’s painting of, 156–57, Plate 6 uncanny, the: Freud’s concept of, 169–70 Union Pacific Railroad: land advertising booklet by, 24–26 United Air Lines advertisement, 133, 134 United States. See frontier; government, U.S.; westward expansion; and individual states and cities urban areas. See cities/cityscapes; towns urbanism, 186, 205–6, 241; culture of, 142, 201; industrial, 217, 243; Jeffersonian, 218–38; ruralist, xxiv, 162, 249. See also cities/cityscapes urbanization, 160, 208, 222 urban planning, 237, 243, 294n15; aerial vision in, xix, 192–206, 210, 213; bird’s-eye views used for, 192–93, 195–96, 202–3, 208–9, 219; European, 193–94, 195, 212, 213, 275n5; origins of, 293n8, 294n33; use of grid in, 142, 194, 223, 226; Frank Lloyd Wright’s, 226, 241. See also Broadacre City model; Chicago: Plan of Chicago; cities/cityscapes; Disappearing City, The; Greenbelt Towns; Paris; planning usable past, 163–64. See also past, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): aerial survey photography done by, 45, 64, 78–80, 292n106; filmstrips produced by, 281n74, 281n75; Getting the Job Done (filmstrip), 89–95; photogrammetry advisory committee, 96, 282n84. See also Agricultural Adjustment Administration; agriculture, midwestern; Farm Security Administration; New Deal Utpatel, Frank: The Mail Plane, 135 Vachon, John. See Grundy County (Iowa) photographs: Vachon’s values, xix–xxiv, 218, 249 Vaux, Calvert, 300n8 verticality: in Broadacre City model, 235, 237; inconsistencies in, 80; urban, 186, 288n48; Wood’s depictions of, 142, 157; Frank Lloyd Wright’s critique of, 208, 210, 217, 223

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i n dex 339 vertical views: from airplanes, 202, 217; of landscapes, 282n86, 282n88; of the Midwest, 2–3; modernizing effect of, 69–71, 102; New Deal’s use of, 108, 173; panoptic, xvi; power exercised by, xiv–xv; SCS use of, 69–71; shifting horizontal to, 18, 20, 27–31, 54, 166–68, 208–10, 211, 223, 226, 237; synoptic, xv, xvii; urban, 95, 208–9, 288n48. See also bird’s-eye views; elevated views; high-altitude views Virilio, Paul, xiii vision. See aerial vision Wallace, Henry, 71, 162, 278n38 Wallach, Alan, 4–5 Ware, Caroline: The Cultural Approach to History, 96 Weems, Mason Locke: Wood’s depiction of, 178, 181, 182 Wellman, William: Wings, 291n96 West, James, 68–69 westward expansion, 4–5, 17–18, 20–21, 24, 154, 195, 208–9. See also frontier; pioneers; settlement/settlers, midwestern Whitman, Walt, 219 Wisconsin: Coon Creek Drainage Area aerial photographs, 64, 65 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 213, 251–55, Plate 14 Wohl, Robert, xii–xiii women, farm: Life magazine’s representations of, 119, 121, 122–23, 124, 284n106 Wood, Grant, 218, 261, 283n93; aerial gaze of, xvii, xviii, 129–30, 171–83, 263; bird’s-eye views used by, 154, 156, 157–58, 159, 179–80; complexity of art, 284–85n4; criticism of, 170, 181, 292n115; elevated views of, 128, 154–57; in Europe, 151, 153, 154, 181, 288n49; and flight, 285n12, 286n26; as head of PWAP, 173, 292n106; on industrialization, 171, 172; influences on, 154, 287n40, 290n74; modernist sense of, 151, 183, 284–85n4; on modernity, 166, 171, 175–76, 178; nature in works of, 176, 177; the past in paintings of, 165–66, 169–70, 183; on verticality, 142, 157; World War I camouflage assignment, 142–51, 164, 165–66, 173, 181, 262, 288n49. See also aerial sensibility: Wood’s

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340 i n dex Wood, Grant, paintings by: Adolescence, 180–81, Plate 10; Arbor Day, 157–58; The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa, 158, 159, 290n75, Plate 9; Black Barn, 153; Christmas Postcard from Abroad, 152; corn murals, 153–56, 290n70, 290n71; Daughters of Revolution, 177; Death on Ridge Road, 128, 171–75, 177, 182, Plate 4; Haying, 181– 82, Plate 11; Iowa Corn Room Mural (Hotel Montrose, Cedar Rapids), 155; July Fifteenth, Summer Landscape, 179–80; Kanesville, 154, 156, 165, Plate 5; The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 158; New Road, 182–83, Plate 12; Parson Weems’ Fable, 178, 181, 182; Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer, 156–57, 165, Plate 6; Spring Plowing, 179, 292n111; Spring Turning, 127–28, 176–78, 179, 261–62, 292n107, 292n111, Plate 3; Stoddard Family Lake McBride Map, 173–74; Stone City, Iowa, 157, 160, 164–65, 166, 171, 178, 182, 256, 261, Plate 7; Ten Tons of Accuracy, 152, 153; Young Corn, 157–58, 160, 165, 169–70, Plate 8 Wood, Grant, writings by: autobiography, 139, 141; “Return from Bohemia,” 287n36; Revolt against the City, 163, 296n64 Woodruff, Blanche, 119 Woodruff, Charles Dewey, 116, 284n105 World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 (Chicago), xxi, 294n15 World War I: aerial photography used in, 54–57, 142– 51, 194, 202, 288n53, 288n56, 289n60; agricultural boom during, 62–63. See also camouflage: in World War I worm’s-eye views, 91, 119, 120, 214 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 163; aerial gaze of, 186, 238, 241, 249; on aerial vision, 59, 210, 214, 216, 217–18, 226,

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237; on agrarianism, 191, 226; belief in democracy, 191, 207, 209, 218; centralization criticized by, 207–8, 213, 222, 223, 231, 237, 249; cities criticized by, 210, 211, 217, 237, 245, 249; disagreement with Le Corbusier, 213–14; faith in nature, 185–86, 207, 209, 240, 296n59; farmers/farming praised by, 217, 223, 226, 231; on flight, 191, 209, 249–50; horizontality preferred by, 216, 223, 226, 232–37; ideals of, 216–17; identification with pioneers, 217, 223, 237; ideology of, 61, 114, 259; individualism espoused by, 207, 208, 223; on Jeffersonianism, 191, 240, 245, 249; landscape representations by, 170, 201, 202, 206, 214, 216–17; large-scale planning by, 258, 294–95n35; on mechanization, 208, 295n40; on modernism, 213–14, 216–17; on modernity, 214, 230; on modernization, 207, 218, 219, 291n85; sense of history, 296n57; skyscrapers critiqued by, 208, 210, 211, 217–18; on verticality, 208, 210, 217, 223. See also aeriality: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wright, Frank Lloyd, works by: “America Tomorrow,” 208–9; autobiography, 217, 227, 296n58; Bird’s-Eye View of the Quarter-Section, 228; Farm Plane, 229; The Living City, 249, 299–300n119; The Quadruple Block Plan for C. E. Roberts, 226, 227; When Democracy Builds, 249. See also Broadacre City model; Disappearing City, The; Taliesin estate Wright, Henry, 243–44 Wright brothers, vii, ix, 50, 131, 142, 285n12. See also airplanes; aviation; flight

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J A S O N W E E M S is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Riverside,

where he teaches American art and visual culture. He grew up on a farm in rural Iowa.

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Plate 1. George Catlin, Nishnabottana Bluffs, Upper Missouri, 1832. Oil on canvas, 11¼ × 14 ³⁄₈ inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison Jr.

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Plate 2. Geological and climatological maps of the state of Iowa. From Alfred T. Andreas, Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Atlas Co.; Lakeside Press, 1875. Chromolithographs by Chas. Shober and Co.), 9.

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Plate 3. Grant Wood, Spring Turning, 1936. Oil on Masonite panel, 24 ³⁄₈ × 46¼ inches. Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston–­Salem, North Carolina. Gift of Barbara B. Millhouse. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

Plate 4. Grant Wood, Death on Ridge Road, 1935. Oil on Masonite panel, 39 × 46¹⁄₁₆ inches. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Gift of Cole Porter (47.1.3). Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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Plate 5. Grant Wood, Kanesville, 1927. Oil on canvas, 6 × 24 feet. Originally located in the Hotel Chieftain, Council Bluffs, Iowa. Collection of the Cedar Rapids Community School District. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

Plate 6. Grant Wood, Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer, 1928–­30. Oil on canvas, 37 × 31¾ inches. Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. Gift of Harriet Y. and John B. Turner II. 76.2.2. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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Plate 7. Grant Wood, Stone City, Iowa, 1930. Oil on wood panel, 30¼ × 40 inches. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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Plate 8. Grant Wood, Young Corn, 1931. Oil on Masonite panel, 24 × 29⁷⁄₈ inches. Collection of the Cedar Rapids Community School District.

Plate 9. Grant Wood, The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa, 1931. Oil on composition board, 29³⁄₈ × 39¾ inches. Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Purchased jointly by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Des Moines Art Center, with funds from the John R. Van Derlip Fund, Mrs. Howard H. Frank, and the Edmundson Art Foundation, Inc. Accession no. 81.105. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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Plate 10. Grant Wood, Adolescence, 1940. Oil on Masonite panel, 20 ³⁄₈ × 11¾ inches. Abbott Laboratories, North Chicago, Illinois. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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Plate 11. Grant Wood, Haying, 1939. Oil on canvas on paperboard mounted on hardboard, 12¹⁵⁄₁₆ × 14¹³⁄₁₆ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

Plate 12. Grant Wood, New Road, 1939. Oil on canvas on paperboard mounted on hardboard, 13 × 14¹⁵⁄₁₆ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Art copyright Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham. Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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Plate 13. Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Fellowship, model for Broadacre City, 1934–­35. Painted wood, 12²⁄₃ × 12²⁄₃ feet. Frank Lloyd Wright drawings courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

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Plate 14. Screen capture showing the curvilinear patterns of the Oz countryside in The Wizard of Oz (Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1939).

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Plate 15. “Modern Farming . . . ‘On the Contour,’ ” advertisement for International Harvester Farm Machinery Company, 1944.

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Plate 16. Real-­time geographic information systems readout of corn-­harvest yield rates overlaid on a satellite survey image from the Steve Hemingway farm near West Branch, Iowa, 2014. Courtesy of Steve Hemingway.

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