Abstract
Lisa Goff has written an interesting and engrossing history of the American shanty and shantytown. In it, she examines the historically contingent meaning that the shantytown has held in the United States, from the paragon of hardy self-reliance on the frontier to morally suspect public health and public order nuisance in urban environments. The shanty, she notes at the outset, is a term that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe a range of extremely modest structures, typically single-room shelters, with rough-hewn wooden frames, and slanted roofs giving “the look of a freestanding lean-to” (p. 27).
The book is primarily a cultural history, more of an interrogation of social and cultural interpretations of the shantytown than an analysis of its political economy. One of the major accomplishments of the book is that it appears to be the first extended history of the shantytown in the United States. There is no previous account for Goff to work from or react to, other than the primary sources and the contemporaneous responses she examines.
The central theme that Goff explores in the book is the culturally and politically ambiguous position the shantytown has occupied in American life since the beginning of the nineteenth century (p. 27). The term carried a stigma almost from the beginning. As a form of housing, it is generally regarded as the bottom rung of the housing ladder, and Goff describes the generally denigrative images associated with shanties and the repeated problematizing of shantytowns throughout American history. But, one of the more compelling elements of the book is how she demonstrates that stigma and public acceptance of the shanty have been highly dependent upon who occupies it. That is, there are circumstances under which the shantytown’s typically marginalized status is rehabilitated, and it becomes symbolic of more positive and, in fact, heroic themes of American history.
As a reference to America’s frontier history and a symbol of self-reliant individualism, for example, the shanty becomes one of the signature elements of American history, reflecting the impermanence of pioneer settlement, and the functionalism and lack of pretense generally devoted to living conditions among those pushing Anglo influence farther and farther west. In this context, the shanty is understood as the unpretentious but solid domicile of those doing the “civilizing work” of American expansion. The identical structure in an urban setting, occupied by a low-wage worker, immigrant, or person of color, has not been interpreted in such noble terms.
Goff writes well and has a deft touch when it comes to connecting her story to significant cultural moments in the nation’s history. She focuses on how the shanty has been understood, represented, and interpreted by writers, artists, and journalists of the time from the early nineteenth century through roughly the 1970s. While chapter 1 focuses on Henry David Thoreau, she engages later with the work of James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Margaret Mitchell, and Laura Ingalls Wilder for their representations of shanties and shanty life. She relies on exegesis on several occasions, exploring how several famous purveyors of American culture, through literature, art, music, and journalism, have helped to construct, define, and interpret the shanty. Chapter 5, for example, is almost entirely concerned with a discussion of a single Broadway play, “Squatter Sovereignty,” that debuted in 1882. Chapter 6 describes a range of visual artists who made the shanty the subject of paintings, etchings, and drawings throughout the last half of the nineteenth century.
The book’s opening chapter, in which Goff takes aim at Thoreau and his self-absorbed manifesto of self-sufficiency, Walden, demonstrates the aims of the author in exploring the place of the shantytown in the collective American imaginary. Thoreau, as Goff argues, constructs his cabin in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, but simultaneously constructs a meaning for it reaching far beyond Concord, a meaning that elevates his cabin above its own modest physical characteristics, and celebrates it as a model of environmentally harmonious living. Goff describes the way in which Thoreau used boards from the Concord shanty of James Collins, an Irish railroad worker, to build his cabin on Walden Pond. This literal appropriation of the working man’s shanty for his own purposes is nicely used by Goff in the opening chapter to establish the book’s main dialectic. Structurally indistinguishable from the shanties occupied by laborers in other parts of Concord at the time, shanties that suffered the approbation of “the better elements” of local society, the cabin on Walden Pond is, instead, conceptually constructed by Thoreau as the epitome of virtuous self-reliance, naturalism, and simplicity. As Goff notes, “poor laborers like James Collins did not leave journals or diaries or inventories to explain what they thought of themselves and the nation they were building; their construction of a place to live did not constitute an ‘experiment.’ But the houses they built were as rich in meaning as Thoreau’s famous cabin” (p. 3). Through Thoreau’s deliberate redefinition, she argues, Walden becomes more than an ode to nature, simplicity, and the deliberate life, and it becomes “a how-to manual for class formation” by putting the middle class at the center of the American narrative (p. 3).
Her treatment of other literary figures is a bit more forgiving. In chapter 2, the work of James Fenimore Cooper is used to illustrate the making of the American frontier myth of rugged individualism, where the isolated pioneers rudely constructed, simple one-room shelter is nevertheless, his castle. Although close in meaning to Thoreau’s conception of simplicity and environmental connectivity, Cooper’s frontier cabin engages more heroic themes of self-sufficiency and stoicism.
In chapter 3, Goff’s focus shifts to the “urban frontier,” and Edgar Allen Poe is enlisted for an exploration of how the shanty was generally perceived in or around more densely populated environments. Here, in the urban context, the narrative is different. The clean simplicity of the frontier cabin is swapped out for the mean and shabby shanty. The structure, in this environment, evokes not heroism but instead a moral and physical blight. Here, the residue of the shanty is not virtue and strength but rather cholera and crime.
Goff, who focuses this portion of her history on New York City, documents the repeated attempts by authorities and elites to bulldoze shantytowns, to remove the occupants to more distant and remote locations, sometimes in service to various “public good” causes, such as public health or the creation of Central Park, but also in service to the private pursuit of land profits and development. This is perhaps the context in which most contemporary urbanists understand the shanty. The modern self-built house, the squat, or the slum housing (as defined by the United Nations) of developing countries is typically considered for its reflection of income inequality, precarity, and the endless land-based struggles defined by those inequalities of power and wealth. Goff argues that shantytowns went through an initial period of demolition, forced relocation in the mid-nineteenth century, and in the later years of that century regarded as a plague on the civic body, a festering home to the “dangerous classes” whose existence and living conditions threaten the social order.
Poe, for his part, is a counterpoint to the dominant urban narrative. Like Thoreau and Cooper, his perspective on the shanty is largely positive. His survey of Manhattan Island in the 1830s reports a “sublime” frontier not unlike the landscape faced by Cooper’s pioneers. The island is largely uninhabited to the north of Fourteenth Street, and the shantytowns that Poe encounters were the result of speculators holding the land vacant in search of higher prices. Although Poe’s treatment of the shanties is somewhat sympathetic, the reality he described was of an “archaic, insensible, quaint, and doomed” settlement even in the 1840s (p. 61).
Later chapters look at other areas of New York and describe variations on this theme of the shanty as obsolescence, as a relic of a previous era, ill-suited to the urban world, and, in the end, not tolerated by the forces of urban development. The details of the characters change a bit, but the inhabitants always occupy the margins of American social, political, and economic life, whether laborers dispossessed by industrial economic convulsions, immigrants, or, when Goff turns her attention to the south in chapter 7, African Americans of the post–civil war and Jim Crow eras.
Chapter 8 brings the history forward through the Great Depression. Goff covers the “Hoovervilles” that sprang up across the nation as the economic dislocation of the Depression shunted millions more to the economic margins and into shantytown existence. Goff argues in this chapter that the Depression produced a reconceptualization of the shantytown as a permanent slum, rather than as a transitional settlement, an understanding of the shantytown that she argues was incorrect in its own right. Indeed, Goff maintains that this Depression-era understanding of shantytowns was incorrect on two dimensions. First, they were no more or less permanent than they had ever been. Understanding shantytowns as an enduring part of the American landscape and regarding that as new were based on a misperception of their essential permanence in earlier eras. Second, regarding them as slums “required policymakers to ignore much of what field workers, and journalists had been telling them” about the resilience of shantytown residents (p. 237).
Goff hints that perhaps what was new, in the end, had nothing to do with the essential qualities of the shantytown during the Depression compared to any other era, but rather in the existence of an urban planning profession that gave city governments the institutional structure for the regulation of land, and responsibility for attending to quality-of-life issues in the City. From that point forward, not only did incremental or new development threaten the shantytown, so did large-scale urban renewal and clearance projects, and the schemes of professional planners convinced of their ability to rid the city of urban decay and usher in “revitalization.” It is an interesting suggestion and one worth further investigation. I would have preferred Goff go further down this path but she does not.
Goff’s history largely ends with the Depression. A short epilogue brings the topic up-to-date, with fleeting references to the self-built housing in the Global South and the colonias along the Mexico border, but at a mere three pages, it is only a swift survey that wraps up the book.
Goff leaves us with a solid understanding of the place of the shanty in American culture, if not so much its place in the political economy of the nation. As an urban planner, I might have wished for more sustained attention to the role of the shantytown in the economic and political dimensions of American life. So, too, a greater development of the racial aspects of the story which, though mentioned, are not investigated deeply or in a sustained fashion. But these complaints are a bit like asking the author to write a different book rather than reviewing the one written. In fact, the book Goff has written is both absorbing and rewarding and will be of great interest to urban historians for its attention to a topic not otherwise widely pursued.
