SUMMER 2009
controlling influence upon American life, political morality would decline and the republican experiment would be doomed.” Urbanism did not come immediately thereafter for America, but it was not long in arriving. Indeed, it descended in a rush, in tandem with a number of other wrenching changes: the massive waves of immigration, industrialization, mass production, mechanization, and so on, changes that transformed the “walking cities” of Jefferson’s time into the massive and intricately segmented metropolitan areas we know by that name today. Even the most exuberant celebrants of modern cities praise them for qualities that give one pause: as hubs of creative destruction, engines of mobility, oases of anonymity—activities about which no civilized person can be unqualifiedly enthusiastic. Arguably, it was the problematic character of human relations in the city, more than any other single effect of modernization, which became the stimulus and the chief object of the new discipline of sociology. Georg Simmel and other sociologists were fascinated by the new modes of human consciousness and behavior that the modern city made possible, or necessary. The city was the place without roots for people without roots, the place where you came to reinvent yourself . Literary depictions of the city consistently cast it in just this way, as in American novels like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, or in the more general “revolt against the village,” one of the persistent themes of early 20th-century American intellectual and literary life. It is interesting, by way of contrast, to think of the gravamen of a mid-nineteeth-century work like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a work that is also about American self-making, but that goes about it in a strikingly different way. Walden proceeds by way of an isolation and stripping away of the effects of culture and history, in order to uncover and liberate the real and true self, free of the impediments of social life itself. This form of romanticism looks for freedom not to the teeming life of the city, but rather to the vibrant world of nature. The woods is where you go, not to reinvent yourself, but to rediscover what you already are, to get back in touch with the core of yourself. Hence the continuing vitality of the idea of the frontier, and hence the conclusion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, arguably the greatest of American 11