![]() |
PRINT EDITION
Daily
Calendar
Calendar
Weekend
Sunday
Calendar
Calendar
Columnists
Quick
Takes
![]() Make a
Reservation
Submit
Events
Advertise With
Us
![]()
PARTNERS
![]()
|
|
![]()
BOOK REVIEW
The lengths at which a nation was formed
![*]() Measuring America,
How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the
Promise of Democracy. Andro Linklater, Walker & Co.: 310 pp.,
$26.
| |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![ ]()
![]() |
| |
For bookstores and
other
literary venues:
Antiquarian Cafes Comics
Cultural Institutions Educational Languages Graphic
Novels Rare Religious Specialty Used
Books
Or, by venue
name:
|
|
| |
Signings, lectures
and
talks by date:
Today
This weekend
Next 7
days
Or,
search by keyword:
|
|
|
|
By
Margaret Wertheim
On Jan. 2, 1790, when George Washington stood for
the first time to address the newly formed Congress, he put before his
fellow representatives the matters he thought most urgently in need of
attention. Heading the list, naturally, were defense and the economy; the
third order of business was the need to establish a uniform system of
weights and measures. Acting on Washington's suggestion, the House of
Representatives requested that the new secretary of State draw up a plan
for such a system and that was, consequently, the first job awaiting
Thomas Jefferson when he arrived in New York several months
later.
It was a task to which Jefferson was ideally suited,
combining as it did his dual commitments to rationality and democracy.
Over the next year, he devised from scratch a complete decimal system of
measurements, which he expected to become the standard for the nation.
Jefferson's system preceded the introduction of the French metric system
by half a decade and, as Andro Linklater reveals in his remarkable new
book, "Measuring America," it was, on the whole a more rational system.
Yet ironically, the United States is the one major nation that has not
adopted a decimal system, for on this critical issue, Jefferson, a man so
accustomed to getting his way, did not prevail, and the fledgling nation
devolved instead to reliance on a hodgepodge of antiquated
units.
The linchpin of Jefferson's system was to be his unit of
length, just as the meter is the linchpin of the metric system. The
paramount importance of this unit, as opposed to, say, the unit of weight,
lay in its relationship to land and, more particularly, to the desire of
the newly federated states to sell off the land west of the Mississippi
River. Deeply in debt from the War of Independence, the 13 original states
saw in that vast uncharted territory the solution to their economic woes.
But before this treasure could be sold off, it had to be surveyed and
divided into clearly identified separately titled parcels. As the Founding
Fathers astutely perceived, land could become the engine of a radical new
economy, hence the urgency of Jefferson's task.
In "Measuring
America," Linklater traces with unusual elegance and a keen wit the epic
story of measuring our nation, charting the process by which, with each
length of the surveyor's chain, new states were literally bought
into being. Underlying this process was the transformation of wilderness
into property, for beyond the specifics of America's formation Linklater
also examines the history of the idea that land could be owned like any
other commodity. That concept, so foundational to American
self-perception, was not inevitable; it required "a fundamental shift in
thinking." Though Americans perfected the idea that land ownership raised
private property to the status of a sacred doctrine, enshrining it in the
5th Amendment to the Constitution, we did not invent the concept: The
first settlers brought it with them from England.
Before the 16th
century, almost nobody owned land except European kings and heads of
state. In most tribal societies, land could be owned no more than the wind
or sky. In Europe under the feudal system, everyone beneath the king was a
tenant with only rights of access, not title, to the land. Henry VIII
precipitated the shift toward individual ownership of fields and dales
when, in 1538, he shut down England's monasteries. Their vast land
holdings -- some half-million acres in all -- automatically reverted to
the crown and became available for sale. Ostensibly done in the name of
religious freedom, Henry's closure was in reality a ploy to raise money
for a navy to defend England from the French. For the first time in
history, Linklater tells us, huge tracts were exchanged for cash and
formally became private property.
Eager to know precisely what they
had purchased, the wealthy nobles and merchants who bought these tracts
turned for clarification to the emerging science of surveying. Until the
16th century, what mattered was not the size of land per se, but how much
it would yield and ultimately how many people it would feed. In 1086, when
William the Conqueror instituted the great Doomsday Book survey of
England, his commissioners noted the dimensions of estates in such units
as virgates and hides: a virgate was enough land to support one person, a
hide enough to support a family. Since this varied with the richness of
the soil, the size of a virgate was flexible, being smaller for rich soil.
But "once land was exchanged for cash, its ability to support people
became less important than how much rent it could produce." To ascertain
the value of rent an estate could charge, it was essential to know its
exact size, which called for a uniform measure.
Against this
background, English mathematician Edmund Gunter invented in the early
1600s his indispensable surveyor's tool, the chain, a literal chain of
fixed dimensions whose 22 yards would "become integral not only to the
game of cricket (it is the length of the pitch), but to the town planning
of almost every major city in the United States." When in 1785 Capt.
Thomas Hutchins, first Geographer to the United States, and his team of
surveyors set out from East Liverpool in Ohio to begin the herculean task
of surveying the Midwest, they carried Gunter chains and impressed its
length into the very fabric of the nation. Many of our city blocks are
multiples of this antiquated measure.
Like most traditional units,
Gunter's chain derived from the dimensions of the human body, but the
great survey of America two centuries later was taking place at a critical
moment in the history of ideas when traditional measures were being
challenged by systems based on scientific discoveries. This seminal
transition and its philosophical implications constitute Linklater's
secondary theme, placing the science of measurement into a sweeping story
of social change. In France, the new metric system took its primary unit
from the size of the Earth: Officially a meter is supposed to be one
10-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, although,
because of an error in the original meridian measurements, there is a
fractional deviation from this ideal. The determination of the meter in
the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution and the story of its long
hushed-up error are the subjects of Ken Alder's "The Measure of All
Things," which beautifully complements Linklater's book.
In
contrast to the Earth-based meter, Jefferson proposed a unit of length
from the force of gravity, which, as Linklater notes, was a scientifically
sounder approach. Among the many strengths of this richly textured book is
the illumination Linklater sheds on the scientific side of Jefferson's
character and the degree to which, in his eyes, standardized measurement
was an essential pillar of democracy. Freed from the vicissitudes of local
customs, America's nascent citizens would be protected from devious real
estate speculators and unscrupulous merchants; as Jefferson saw it,
standardized units would serve as a foundation for a truly democratic
marketplace in property, in goods and, finally, in scientific ideas. As
both writers stress, a universal system of measures was as critical to the
project of modern science as any theoretical framework.
There is,
however, a dark side to this triumphal tale, for measurement has also been
one of the chief agents of Western imperialism. As Hutchins' surveyors
advanced across the land, their invisible grid laid the foundation legally
as well as conceptually for the claim of ownership. In Linklater's words:
"The entire edifice of the law -- and with it every sheriff and U.S.
marshal who ever became a white-hatted movie hero -- was on the side of
property." Given that "the Native Americans had nothing to show that they
owned the land," the new Americans felt quite at liberty to take it. "New
England, like the Old, would belong to those who could measure and enclose
it."
Margaret Wertheim is the author of "The Pearly Gates of
Cyberspace: A History of Space From Dante to the Internet."
If you want other
stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
![LATSI]() Click
here for article licensing and reprint options
|
|
| a d v e r t i s e m e
n t |
|
