Americans and Their Forests: Romanticism, Progress, and Science in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

T he attitudes of Americans toward their country's natural resources were widely disparate as the second half of the nineteenth century began. They continued to be so in the years that followed. Until the midnineteenth century, two major aesthetic and social theories dominated Americans' approaches to their natural environment. Romantic artists and philosophers, and later wealthy tourists, sought sublimity and uplift in the contemplation of nature, linking nature and the divine. On the other hand, the yeoman ideal articulated by Thomas Jefferson emphasized the productive use of nature, specifically the clearing and cultivation of the wilderness, as the foundation of democracy and national prosperity. These viewpoints long molded American policies toward the forests, not according to an understanding of nature's capacities and limitations, but to meet social and political ideals. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the scientific approach, championed by George Perkins Marsh and others, gradually gained acceptance. Realities came to replace egalitarian concepts as the primary factor shaping forest policy. After the turn of the century, contending interests, battling for implementation of mutually exclusive policies, found it increasingly necessary to cast their arguments in rational, scientific terms. Romantic literature and