As we begin gearing up for the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, it would be great to have an overarching theme or themes that “explain” New York’s history.
That would be a tall order, given our state’s complex history. But the State Museum and the State Bicentennial Commission attempted it back in 1977. They came up with three themes: materialism, diversity, and change.
In some ways, these may be still be a good fit for New York. In any case, it may be worthwhile to look back at them as documentation of how our predecessors were thinking about the commemoration and as a starting point or insight into how we might precede today.
You will probably see things that seem valid and insightful; others that seem incomplete, inappropriate, or off base.
What follows are excerpts quoted from David R. Gould’s Forces: Three Themes in the Lives of New Yorkers, published by the New York State Museum in 1977.
MATERIALISM
As materialists, New Yorkers have fashioned, used, invented, acquired, lusted after, traded for and aspired to a literally infinite number of material things. Some of the objects in the following categories are exceptionally fine; others plain and utilitarian; all bespeak a prodigious productivity and achievement reflecting a people’s quest for a material definition of success.
American materialism is legendary, and nowhere has it been longer in evidence than in New York. From the beginning, New Yorkers have epitomized the materialistic drive which aroused the wonder and ire of early commentators.
By the 19th century, many were impressed with the achievements and amenities this same drive had possessed. Foreign travelers made particular note of the pleasure and comfort to be found on the State’s canal, steamboat, and railroad systems. Today, New Yorkers remain constant in their search to possess things and use the myriad services provided by this drive for material abundance.
New York lacked the overriding religious rationale of the New England colonies and the nominal religious motivation of Virginia. In 1624, New Amsterdam was established, not to create a Christian commonwealth, or a New Jerusalem in the wilderness, but to make money for the shareholders of the Dutch West India Company. The colonists who settled there did so for the same reason, providing a common economic motive.
Little changed with the English domination in 1664. The region continued to serve as a major trading base for the Indian interior and coastal trades. Following the Revolution, the region’s merchants extended their commerce and invested excess capital in expanding their influence abroad, capturing both the China and European trades.
The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 gave New York merchants a primary position in control of inland commerce. By 1860, the teeming port of New York acted as an entrepôt and broker to the entire continent, far outstripping its rival cities: Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New Orleans.
However, by the close of the 19th century, businessmen began a new activity — investment banking. Moving beyond entrepreneurial capitalism, bankers, exemplified by the kindly Morgan, became not only the dominant power in business, but in domestic and foreign government financing as well. Because of New York’s well-established greatness as a center of imports and exports, the banks of the nation kept reserve deposits there.
This accumulation of funds drew still more capitalists and their wealth, making New York the center for marketing securities. Gradually, businesses with their central offices in New York came to own or control industrial and commercial concerns all over the country.
As the American economy began to shift, so also did the character of enterprise in New York, Gradually, an industrial society, long devoted primarily to the processing of raw materials and the production of capital goods, became increasingly concerned with the manufacture or provision of consumer goods and services. The post-industrial character of the current economy has wrought fundamental changes in the livelihoods of all New Yorkers.
No longer is the State’s economy measured by the production of locomotives in Schenectady or Dunkirk, or the tonnage of steel rolled in Buffalo or cast in Troy. Rather, it depends upon the sales of consumer-oriented auto, electrical appliance, and data processing concerns in Rochester, Binghamton, and Syracuse, and the numbers of employees who work to make and buy these goods.
Nor is it possible to ignore the importance of social services provided by and demanded of federal, state, and local governments, both for the services’ social value and as a source of major employment. This proliferation of commerce, industry, finance, and consumer merchandising, with the role of government as regulator, combines to create the controlling economic focus of New York and, indeed, the nation.
Today, New Yorkers are not so much concerned with the size of private enterprise as with its stability and productiveness. There are far fewer proposals to reform the structure of the economy than suggestions for a more equitable distribution of the enormous wealth produced by it.
New York carries the credentials of an impressive material progress, emulated in the national at large, and often serves as an example for those who would question the gulf between material prosperity and social aspirations.
Yet the response by most New Yorkers is not to redress the disparity through redistribution; rather New Yorkers would choose, like most Americans, simply to create more jobs and more wealth, faithful to the material vision that affluence will outrun need.
DIVERSITY
New Yorkers display an extraordinary diversity. They are diverse in race, ethnicity, ideals, religion, class, and language. Material success among so many different people depends upon toleration. In New York, a spirit of toleration has encouraged even greater diversity.
Since its origins, New York has been noted for its ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. The Dutch West India Company in 1642 needed people to populate the colony and to maintain its services. Its profits depended upon this. Thus the Company permitted Catholics, Jews, Luther and Quakers to set up their business and practice their religions.
Once when Peter Stuyvesant attempted to check this freedom, he provoked one of the most ennobling and generous statements of religious freedom to be found in colonial history — The Flushing Remonstrance (1657).
The practical Flushing settlers send a stirring petition home to the mother company in Holland asking for nothing less than to allow everyone to have his own belief for “…we cannot condemn them in this case, neither can we stretch out our hands against them to punish, ban, or persecute….” and to allow Quakers “…free egress and regress to our town and houses.”
It should be remembered that this astounding request occurred in a time when torture and persecutions were the acceptable means of dealing with religious dissidents, both in Europe, then still under the Inquisition, and in the colonies, which were about to witness the Salem witch trials. The Dutch West India Company understood the beneficial effects of religious freedom and ethnic diversity upon the growth of trade and population, and ordered Stuyvesant to permit religious liberty.
The ideals and opportunities fostered by the American Revolution nurtured a spirit of toleration in New York life and broadly encouraged its growth. As the succeeding waves of immigrants and migrants took their turn in the evolving process of Americanization, the heart of this process what the phenomenon of diversity in close proximity.
The sheer physical necessity of living close upon another gradually compelled diverse cultural groups to interact, to become exposed to and eventually impregnated with each other’s “foreign ideas.” A new identity grew out of the cross-fertilization of customs, ideas, attitudes and values.
This historical phenomenon has been gradual and continuous, and in some parts of the country, it is still going on. But in New York, the intensity of this process has been accelerated. The narrow confines of the thin strip of settlement along the lower Hudson and the tip of Manhattan Island denied the colonists and later immigrants the time necessity to sink roots and nurture their own culture for very long.
From the very outset, New Yorkers were compelled by a common desire for economic gain to deal openly with each other. They were forced to work, live, play, and fight alongside each other, not on an occasional or temporary basis but on a daily, culturally jarring and altering basis. These processes continue today in traditional terms, and in new ways as black and Hispanic citizens interact with the society at large.
Today, New York State cities, towns, and often her countryside reflects a cosmopolitan flavor so broad in scope and depth that the casual viewer is often unaware of the diversity of origin and development. No aspect of daily living patterns is untouched by one or more “foreign” influences in language, diet, apparel, housing and pastimes.
The patterns of upstate farms and villages reflect the values and aspirations of New England Yankee visitors. The streams, mountains, valleys, roads, ad entire settlements of the Hudson-Mohawk corridor are known by the colorful names (Kasterskill or Cats Creek; Claverack or Clover Field; Breakabeen or Rows of Ferns) applied by Dutch and Palatinate German farmers two centuries before the cities of the same region acquired their Irish, German, Italian and Slavic social mix.
In these cities, as elsewhere in the State, it certainly much of the nation, it is not difficult to discover a German restaurant owner by an Irish family, serving an Italian neighborhood that loves baseball, and prefers the German Santa Claus at Christmas time, and American-style pizza with Polish sausage.
These superficial phenomena bespeak a heterogeneous tradition whose roots go back deeply into the nation’s as well as the State’s past, providing the wellspring of human energy from which all else has gained substance.
CHANGE
The ordeal of the Revolutionary War in New York wrought the broadest and most wrenching changes in the history of the State. No other state suffered more for the cause of independence than did New York. Nearly one third of all the major engagements of the war were fought in New York.
Saratoga, the most important of these, belongs in that list of critical battles that have changed world history. Without question, New York was the “cockpit” of the American Revolution. Patriot, Tory, and British forces all recognized that control of New York was the key to North American dominance.
The seven-year struggle ruined the economy. Everywhere, mills, farms, homes and crops were destroyed as rival Patriot and Tory forces and their Indian allies raided each other with increasing ferocity.
Perhaps the most destructive acts occurred as a result of the “scorched earth” policy pursued by the Sullivan-Clinton expedition. This campaign which utter debilitated the once powerful Iroquois, was directed against England’s allies in western New York.
In addition to major battles and British occupation, Manhattan Island suffered two great fires which gutted over one quarter of all its dwellings. During the bleakest years, 1777-1781, the once prosperous province of New York endured only pillage, ambush, and worthless currency.
New York’s social structure was similarly transformed. Over one tenth of the pre-war population, some 30,000 to 40,000 people, were Loyalists. Their personal tragedies in losing loved ones, property, homes and ultimately their cause, was matched only by the State’s loss of their professional, business, and political talents. The bitterness created by Loyalist claims, during and after their exodus, would haunt New York life for well over a generation.
After the war, George Washington toured the upstate region from Fort Ticonderoga to Fort Stanwix. In contrast to the ruins of the fratricidal war, he noted the potential value of the natural system of inland water courses.
Describing the region as the “seat of Empire,” he may have inspired the later unknown enthusiast who named New York “the Empire State.” Washington’s optimism was not wasted, for within two generations, New York would earn a place in population, commerce, and transportation and agriculture second to none.
The transformation of the entire upstate area from primeval forest to farms, mills and nascent cities happened in less than three decades. In 1790, the frontier reached only to present-day Utica, leaving nearly three-fourths of the State’s land unoccupied, heavily forested and nearly trackless, containing only the ruined reminders of vanquished Iroquois. The rapidity of this leap from colonial status to the Revolutionary era produced a fundamental reordering of all aspects of New York life and society.
Change of this magnitude is typical of New York’s past, and is frequently cited as the overriding characteristic of American life in general. The fact of changes has brought with it the expectation and encouragement of change as opposed to its mere acceptance. In New York, from an early date, change has not been simply a result of societal development, but rather a massive motivating force.
In the history of change in America, New York was often the innovator. The creation and perfection of transportation networks was the key to New York’s commercial and industrial triumph.
In quick progression, New Yorkers invented or perfected an impressive list of transportation firsts. These included: turnpikes (Catskill, 1792); a successful steamboat (Clermont, 1807); major inland canal system (Erie, 1825); passenger carrying railway (Mohawk & Hudson, 1831); Whipple Truss bridge (Utica, 1841); plank roads (Central Square, New York, 1844); major trunk line railroads (Erie, 1851 and New York Central, 1853); and the Roebling suspension bridge (Niagara Falls, 1854).
These improvements spread quickly beyond New York’s borders, and everywhere raised property values, stimulated agriculture, commerce, and industry by slashing freight rates and made the settlement of the continent possible.
On the national scene, this process was imitated and broadened. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 mirrored the purpose of the Erie Canal, just as in our own time the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway set an example for the Interstate Highway system.
This rapidity of growth did not slacken in the 19th century but rather was accelerated by the triple forces of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization. In rapid succession, New York’s crossroads and canal towns became industrial cities, drawing the immigrant millions to new factories and slums.
The floodtide of migrating humanity entered mainly at the port of New York. Of the 27 million “new” Americans who entered between 1820-1920, 70 percent learned of America at the foot of Manhattan Island. Their energy fueled the engine of industrial growth. By 1900, in deference to its gigantic transportation, electrical, and manufacturing industries, New York was said to “haul and light the world.”
The physical and economic changes wrought by rapid industrial and urban growth were closely paralleled by the rapid advance of individuals and minority groups up the social ladder. In an egalitarian society which valued skill, endurance, and material success, tradition could not long restrain anyone who seized his or her main chance.
Just as migrant New England Yankees’ traits rapidly shouldered aside the slower Dutch agrarian patterns of the lower Hudson, so did the Irish and Germans avidly pursue the seats of economic and political power.
By the close of the 19th century, they had largely captured control of the new political machines and gained power in commerce and manufacturing. The somewhat less easily assimilated Eastern Europeans are now powerful ethnic forces behind urban politics in New York State, while the long-term struggle of blacks and Hispanic Americans is now approaching a horizon of success. These class and ethnic advances are the sum total of many thousands of individual dramas of immigration, migration, and social and economic struggle.
This two-century long burst of creative energy provided the opportunities and frequent pitfalls for individuals and groups, and prompted technological innovations and untried ideas to be tested, contested, revised, and sometimes cast down.
The succession of this pattern inevitably forced change upon institutions, values, and mores as recent immigrants eventually entered the establishment, and as rural agricultural modes and values were largely superseded by industrial and urban patterns. This characteristic, frenetic change so closely insinuated into New York’s early history has become the pattern of American life at large.
Today, New York State is undergoing a series of wrenching changes and renewals paralleled only by the national experience. Each of her major cities and many of her smaller communities resound to the roar and rush of the urban-renewal bulldozer — phenomena which only superficially suggest still greater and more deeply felt changes in ethnic-political alliances and shifting community standards. The triumph of the shopping mall and expressway over the downtown and central railroad station synthesis of only two decades ago reflects the continual rebuilding so characteristic of the State’s history.
Perhaps more durable changes are afoot, as communities recognize the effects of changing birth rates, increased longevity, shorter work weeks and the plethora of leisure pastimes upon traditional religious, educational, political, and family institutions. Society in flux is not limited to the 20th century, nor is it any stranger to New Yorkers.
Read more about the upcoming 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution.
Illustrations, from above: 1976 Bicentennial New York State Flag Stamp; Bicentennial memorobilia; the July 4th, 1976 Bicentennial celebration in New York Harbor; A Russian dancer in lower Manhattan celebrate American Bicentennial in 1976 (Katrina Thomas, New York Folklore Society); Rubie’s Rubie’s Costume Company’s 1976 bicentennial collection; Delaware & Hudson Railroad’s “Spirit of Freedom” 1976 Bicentennial Locomotive; and a family dressed for the Bicentennial (Long Island 70s Kid).
