Historical Visions
NATURE AND CULTURE
Historical Visions From the Redwood Coast
Gabrielle Barnett
Between 1870 and 1930, an era of voracious old-growth redwood consumption,
several Americans wrote texts positioning California’s coastal redwoods at a crossroads of
nature and history. Authors with interests as diverse as the poet Walt Whitman, Pacific
Lumber Company publicists, and the preservationist John Merriam all imagined redwoods as
having a special ability to improve human culture, based on the trees’ relationship to both
nature and history.
Whitman’s “Song of the Redwood Tree” anticipates the founding of a new society
on America’s west coast. Speaking alternately as a dying redwood and in his own voice,
Whitman prophesies that clearing the old-growth redwood forest, which he witnessed in
Mendocino county, will produce a civilization that fulfills “the promise of thousands of
years, till now deferred.”1 Penned in 1873, shortly before a massive westward migration of
labor and capital brought industrial-scale logging to Northern California, Whitman’s poem
announces a utopian vision for post-Civil War America. Whitman notes that the poem’s
main theme is the termination of the redwood “race,” who have prepared everything for
their replacement by a great people.2
Pacific Lumber Company (PALCO) invested in an advertising campaign to build its
market for redwood products almost 50 years after Whitman first published “Song of the
Redwood Tree.” When redwood appeared on the national market as a new kind of wood
around the turn of the century, the California Redwood Association and individual lumber
companies began promoting both redwood’s ability to resist change and the lumber’s up-todate look. Many of these advertisements suggest that the mythic immortality of the living
redwood tree would persist in modern redwood products. PALCO, in particular, positioned
its product as a trustworthy bridge between past and future, nature and culture.3
Living redwoods acquired value as important artifacts in the emergent fields of
paleontology and paleobotany during the same era that PALCO advertised the advantages of
redwood lumber. Between 1890 and 1919, paleobotanist John Merriam conducted
pioneering studies of the natural history of the Pacific Basin. The redwoods’ link to the fossil
record fascinated Merriam, who read the trees as evidence of a vital connection between
nature and history, between present moment and distant past. A series of essays and
Walt Whitman, “Song of the Redwood Tree,” in Sculley Bradley and Harold Blodgett (eds.), Leaves of Grass:
Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism (New York: New York University Press, 1973), pp. 206210, line 97.
2 Ibid. p. 206, MS note.
3 Redwood was unknown as a building material outside of California until advertisers appealed to consumers
across the country in the first decades of the 20th century. A number of California Redwood Association
pamphlets, with titles such as “Your Home,” “Your Garage,” and “California Redwood on the Farm,” are
preserved in the archives of Save-the-Redwoods League in the Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley.
1
1
Historical Visions
speeches written by Merriam between 1920 and 1940 promised that preserving some oldgrowth redwoods would help make both nature and history whole.4
To help place this redwood rhetoric in the context of a larger modernist discourse
about nature and history (and to explain important differences among the respective visions
of Whitman, PALCO, and Merriam), I turn to Walter Benjamin’s materialist philosophy of
history: the proposal that, with the advent of modern capitalism, phenomena start passing
through a multi-phased life-cycle driven by society’s appetite for innovation—and
innovation’s shadow, obsolescence. To flesh out this “life-cycle,” Benjamin playfully
switches and combines the semiotic categories of “nature,” “history,” and “myth.” I will
argue that the texts in question provide evidence of how attitudes towards the coastal
redwoods can be understood in terms of the Benjaminian life-cycle.5
In Benjamin’s terminology, nascent “wish-images” mature into “commodity
fetishes” only to ossify as cultural “fossils,” and finally fade away as “ruins.” In the texts I
have selected, redwoods participate in all four stages of this capitalist life-cycle. Whitman
understands the redwood forest in terms of a relationship between nature and history which
Benjamin would call a “wish image.” Pacific Lumber Company’s representation of the
redwoods makes a fetish of the trees, though from today’s vantage point the fetishes of the
1920s are revealed as fossils. Finally, Merriam placed the old-growth redwood forest at an
intersection of nature and history that Benjamin discusses in terms of the ruin.
Foreseeing Modernity
Whitman’s redwoods embody both distant past and nature. Personified as rulers of
the Pacific region, his Redwoods are “century-lasting, unseen dryads,” and “heir of the past
so grand”; the wood spirits leave their “haunts of a thousand years.”6 Perhaps because of the
Redwoods’ great age, Whitman places them outside history, making nature, or the West
coast, a mythic, unchanging realm. The redwoods have known only “Nature’s calm
content.”7 Redwood land “comes from Nature’s long and harmless throes, peacefully
builded thence” because the natural past is “silent, cyclic chemistry/ The slow and steady
See Susan Schrepfer, The Fight To Save the Redwoods (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) for an
overview of the philosophy, science, and personal belief systems influencing the founders of Save-theRedwoods League. In this essay, I limit my focus to the writings of John Merriam, accepting them as
representative of Save-the-Redwoods League as a whole. Save-the-Redwoods League published much of
Merriam’s writings, which contain an extremely interesting blend of popular science writing and preservationist
appeal. The full story of the ideas behind redwood preservation is too complex to examine in this paper. In
short, at times the ideologies of the three founders of Save-the-Redwoods League—John Merriam, Henry
Osborne, and Madison Grant—coincided, while at other times they diverged. Other early spokespersons for
redwood preservation included Stephen Mather, William Kent, Newton and Aubrey Drury, Horace Albright,
and J.D. Grant.
4
See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York:
Schocken, 1969), pp. 155-200; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Hannah Arendt (ed.), ibid., pp. 253264; and “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections. (New York: Schocken,
1986), pp. 146-162. Also see Susan Buck-Morss, “Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the
Revolution,” New German Critique, Vol. 29, 1983, pp. 211-240; The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); and The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press,
1977).
6 Whitman, op. cit., line 77; line 18.
7 Ibid., line 35.
5
2
Historical Visions
ages plodding.”8 Whitman contrasts this picture of natural history with human history; the
region is neither “wan from Asia’s fetiches/ Nor red from Europe’s old dynastic slaughterhouse.”9 Without “murder-plots of thrones,” “wars” and “scaffolds,” the west coast is
“virgin land,” “unreck’d by man.”10 In other words, by ignoring the history of Northern
California including the presence of Russians and Mexicans, as well as U.S. citizens and
indigenous peoples, Whitman constructs redwood country as mythic and purely natural.
Modernity brings change to the these redwoods; Whitman positions modernity as
“arriving” throughout the poem, acknowledging the beginning of change, but deferring its
completion to some time in the future. Whitman explicitly links redwood logging with the
“new” and “modern,” which he connects, in turn, to a vision for American society. The
redwoods yield to “the deities of the modern.”11 Whitman sees “the New arriving,” and “the
genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal/ Clearing the ground.”12 His dying redwood
dedicates the cleared land “To the new culminating man.”13 To make room for “new
society,” the “new empire,” the “hidden national will” and “the true America,” the redwood
spirits ecstatically withdraw from the forests and mountains of the West from “the Cascade
range to the Wahsatch.”14 The passing of their “race” enables the new, modern American to
“build a grander future.” Whitman clearly identifies this future with the early modern age: he
imagines trans-Pacific shipping, “populous cities, latest inventions, the steamers… the
railroads, …[the] farm, with machinery.”15
Whitman acknowledges that the redwood’s song is a death chant, but romanticizes
the relationship between forest and the modern Americans who kill it. Instead of simple
replacement or displacement, he imagines some kind of incorporation, which allows the new
to share the positive qualities of the old. The redwoods clearly abdicate for the “superber
race,” but several obscure lines follow, which suggest that the redwoods (and nature in
general) will become part of the newcomers: “in them ourselves…./ In them [the natural
West]…. /To be in them absorb’d, assimilated.”16 Thus, in the West, people become like the
trees. “Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower proportionate to Nature”; “here
laugh with storm or sun… here fill his time/ To duly fall.”17
By weaving redwoods into his image of an ideal new society, Whitman gives meaning
to the destruction of the old-growth redwood forest ecosystem, and reconciles his animistic
spirituality with faith in progress, modernity, and America’s future. By making the redwoods
into representatives of a mythic, natural past that is absorbed into a utopian, ultra-modern
society which has not yet materialized, Whitman makes them part of a wish image: a “new
world, indeed, but long prepared,” or “The new society at last, proportionate to Nature.”18
According to Susan Buck-Morss, wish images take the form of utopian visions of the future
inspired by images of the distant past. Combining the ultra-new with symbols associated
Ibid., lines 51, 87-88.
Ibid., lines 48-49.
10 Ibid., line 50, 28.
11 Ibid., line 80.
12 Ibid., lines 103-104.
13 Ibid., line 53.
14 Ibid., lines 98, 53, 60, 104, 79.
15 Ibid., line 93.
16 Ibid., lines 40-43.
17Ibid., lines 67-70.
18 Ibid., line 98.
8
9
3
Historical Visions
with prehistory, myth, or nature, they avoid what we usually think of as history—the
chronological, documented recent past. Wish images are symbols that anticipate utopia, or
express utopian desires, particularly a “desire to ‘return’ to a mythic time when human beings
were reconciled with the natural world.”19
Prepared by the mechanisms of nature rather than by cultural, political, social, or
economic history, Whitman’s modernity seems to spring directly from the natural American
West. Metaphorically, its roots bypass recent history to tap soil that has been inhabited only
by giant trees. Throughout the poem, Whitman expresses desire for a society that is peaceful
and stable—qualities Whitman associates with the natural past, rather than the historical
past. He expresses desire for a brand new start with deep roots. And he expresses a desire to
consume nature on a large scale without destroying it, for a reconciliation between the
natural world and progress.
Immortalizing Modernity
PALCO’s redwoods, like Whitman’s, belong to the mythic, unchanging, natural
realm. In one PALCO booklet, a mill-bound redwood refers to itself as “I, who thrived by
nature’s law.” Another catalogue speaks of the “the romance of the trees .., standing
unassailable against fire, flood and insect attack, almost against Time itself.” Redwood is
“impregnated by nature against decay.” An engraving entitled “A Few Historical
Occurrences During the Growth of a California Redwood Tree” aligns the redwood with
nature, which it historicizes by superimposing a vertical timeline on and around a towering
redwood. Images of Hagia Sophia and “the rule of Justinian” sit at the base of the trunk.
Major events in the political history of Western civilization, such as the crowning of
Charlemagne and the signing of the Magna Carta ascend up the trunk. Implicitly, the
redwood lives outside the historical realm. Even though the redwoods are “hundreds or
perhaps thousands of years old,” none of the events depicted represent North Pacific coast
history. The engraver borrows historical references from other parts of the world to mark
the natural passage of time that corresponds to the lifetime of a redwood tree.20
PALCO’s redwood product advertisements accept modernity as a fact of life; they
assume that America has arrived in the modern era and is there to stay. PALCO literature
emphasizes the “modernness” of redwood by comparing it favorably to concrete and other
contemporary building materials. It acknowledges the demand for up-to-date materials and
for a contemporary look: a trim, functional appearance. Other early-century redwood
product advertisements promise redwood’s ability to withstand the instability of modern life,
stressing the wood’s durability in both physical and aesthetic terms. A redwood home would
Buck-Morss, 1990, op. cit., pp. 111-114.
Pacific Lumber Company, Scotia: Home of Redwood (San Francisco: Pacific Lumber Company, 1929);
Hammond Lumber Company, “Choosing the Woodwork For Your Home,” (pamphlet), Los Angeles, no date;
Pacific Lumber Company, “Modern Homes,” (pamphlet), San Francisco, no date; this undated engraving,
copyrighted by PALCO, appears as the frontispiece in J.D. Grant, Redwoods: Ever-Living Memorials (San
Francisco: Save-the-Redwoods League, 1929). I distinguish the image of redwood projected by the lumber
industry literature from the image projected in Merriam’s writing, though in many cases the leadership of SRL
and PALCO shared an understanding of the value of redwoods. In fact, the League had a working relationship
with PALCO management; PALCO sold the 9,000 acres now known as the Rockefeller Forest in Humboldt
Redwoods State Park to Save the Redwoods League after years of negotiation.
19
20
4
Historical Visions
afford security to homeowners in the face of the rapid change associated with modern
culture.21
But where Whitman represents the arrival of modernity in terms of human
resettlement, these advertisements, in more than one instance, use technology to signal
modernity. In the timeline, for example, streaks of script radiating from a lightning bolt that
hovers in the upper right quadrant of the engraving near the Redwood’s crown spell a series
of trade names that stand for technological innovations and their human inventors: Marconi,
Bell, Edison, Morse, Tesla, Roentgen, and Lord Kelvin. The center of the bolt reads “Power
* Light * Heat * Whatnot.” In another document, a poem reminiscent of Whitman’s “Song
of the Redwood Tree” references a similar set of trade names.22 A redwood bound for the
sawmill proclaims:
—now o’er my crest
Etheric songs “Marconi” sings—
Beneath “Bell” talks with busy zest
“Morse” flashes on electric wings—
“Wright’s” planes rush by....
The “Baldwin” horse invades my soil
By daring men and vapor driven.
In this passage, human operators appear only as secondary characters; the phrase “by daring
men and vapor driven” makes people the equivalent of steam, leaving the main action to the
engine.
This technological focus establishes a complex relationship between modernity,
nature, and history. Modernity’s intrusion into PALCO’s redwood region does not displace
nature, as it does in Whitman’s poem. Where Whitman imagines the spirits that animated his
premodern, prehistoric redwood landscape fleeing, Leaver envisions animated technology
joining a personified redwood. Bell talks, Marconi sings, planes rush, the Baldwin horse
invades. In this scenario, inventions like steam power, electricity, and mechanical flight
realize the fantasy that non-living things might move without biological agents pulling or
carrying them. PALCO suggests that machines—“new nature” or “second nature,” to
borrow terms coined by Susan Buck-Morss and members of the Frankfurt School—can coexist with “first nature.”23 Humans have created this new nature by harnessing the energy of
“first nature,” represented in the engraving by lightning, in the poem by “vapor.”
Though modern technology functions here as “new nature,” PALCO literature
recognizes its historical origin. The timeline ignores technology, except as implied by
architectural achievement, from late Antiquity through the Enlightenment. In contrast, as
the timeline arrives in the industrial age, technological developments appear more and more
prominently. “Franklin and the electric spark,” “Fulton’s steamboat,” “Stephenson’s
locomotive” and “Darwin” all compete for space near the Redwood’s crown. Thus, the
See California Redwood Association pamphlets such as “Your Home,” located in the Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.
22 Pacific Lumber Company, 1929, op. cit. This poem is attributed to Mr. Leaver; copyright is owned by
PALCO.
23 Buck-Morss, 1977, op. cit., pp. 52-59.
21
5
Historical Visions
engraving suggests that technology starts to dominate history sometime in the 19th century.
In visual terms, early 20th century technology, positioned in the sky next to the redwood’s
crown, has the same stature as the redwood itself.
The arrival of modernity means change for nature, in PALCO’s vision as well as in
Whitman’s, but the PALCO literature envisions neither displacement nor death. The two
thousand-year-old redwood of the PALCO poem “must yield to puny man’s rough way.”
“Man subdues the lightning to his will” reads the caption under the engraving’s lightning
bolt. In the PALCO scenario, modern man dominates nature and uses his power to operate
machines that allow him to venture further into the natural redwood realm: imagined, in this
case, not just as a geographic region, but also as sky and underground. After yielding to
humans, PALCO’s redwoods become part of human society. But where Whitman
acknowledges death as a prerequisite for this incorporation, PALCO denies both the fact
and significance of the redwoods’ death. In the final verse of the poem the redwood
explains:
E’in then I shall not die—but change
To things of beauty that shall grace
The home, the mart, in widest range
In age-long tenure, worth and place.
Reading death as metamorphosis from natural being to cultural artifact participates
in the same line of thought as the fantasy of the animated machine.24 If modern technology
can animate things, then biological death becomes irrelevant. Animated machines turn trees
into forest products, which can then be re-animated. This association allows PALCO and
redwood consumers to imagine that qualities of immutability, longevity, and durability—
associated with myth and nature as well as living redwoods—will be preserved and
transferred, via the redwood product, into the cultural sphere. Redwood products will last
“in age-long tenure,” unlike ordinary objects which wear out, go out of style, or otherwise
lose their value over time.
The implications of the fantasy of immortal redwood commodities extend to history
itself. The durability of redwood products defies the inherent ephemerality of history, as well
as the natural distinction between life and death. Redwood products bring the eternal
present of nature into the historical sphere, freeing consumers from the historical process of
change. If one understands the arrival of modernity in terms of the particular relationship
between technology, nature, and culture expressed by Leaver’s poem, then the arrival of
modernity means the end of history. History culminates with modernity, and modernity
becomes an eternal present. History becomes mythic, and redwood products function as a
sign of this shift.
In Benjaminian terms, where Whitman constructed a wish image, PALCO makes a
fetish of redwood. Fetishes differ from wish images insofar as they substitute a claim of
arrival for an indication of direction. The very same objects that function as wish images
when read as signs of longing become fetishes when mistaken for literal answers: “symbol
turns into fetish, and technology, the means for realizing human dreams, is mistaken for
Apparently, death was not part of the picture for PALCO management. The company built Scotia, its model
town, without a cemetery. See Hugh Wilkerson and Jon van der Zee, Life in the Peace Zone: An American Company
Town (New York: Macmillan, 1971).
24
6
Historical Visions
their actualization.”25 Whereas a wish image leaves open the question of how people will
transform the material world into its utopian form, a fetish implies that the transformation is
complete. Happiness becomes a matter of owning the right thing. Theorists, from Karl Marx
to Susan Buck-Morss, have regarded fetishized commodities as a problem, because they keep
people, who might otherwise be working towards much-needed social change, in thrall to
capitalism's consumptive compulsion.
The PALCO material provides a particularly instructive example of commodity
fetishism because its assumptions about history, nature, technology, modernity, and
capitalism clearly correspond to those outlined in the theoretical literature. Benjamin built his
concept of the commodity fetish on a foundation laid by Karl Marx, who observed that
inanimate objects seem to acquire animate qualities when separated from their human
producers in the capitalist market. Georg Lukacs extended Marx’s theory by noting that in
the capitalist workplace, humans, and abstract concepts like time, are “reified,” or treated as
extensions of things.26 This confusion of animate and inanimate—a central issue within the
theory of fetishism—runs throughout the PALCO material. Lumber is treated as a
metamorphic stage in the tree’s life cycle. Inanimate technologies acquire animate qualities,
largely because human workers who operate the machines are left out of the picture. The
role of the market is also easy to identify in the PALCO material. The tree becomes a
redwood product: a beautiful and useful commodity with both domestic and market value,
according to Leaver’s poem. Implicitly, Pacific Lumber Company’s milling, advertised as
state-of-the-art technology elsewhere in PALCO literature, is the mechanism by which
nature is transformed into something the market understands.
Susan Buck-Morss elaborates on the relationship between fetish, history, nature, and
myth sketched in the work of Benjamin, associating the fetish with “mythic history” or the
“arrested form of history.” She also correlates mythic history with a dream of eternal nature,
in which the fetish is a “reified form of new nature.”27 By depicting redwood as a building
material which transfers the mythic, eternal present from the realm of nature to culture,
PALCO advertisements make a fetish of it. In this fetishized form, redwood appears to be a
newly discovered, ancient, natural material with the power to transform history, stabilize
culture, and defy death. In short, the wish image of immortality becomes the fetishized
desire that advertises redwood commodities, particularly the redwood home.28 In short, the
PALCO material makes a fetish of redwood products by celebrating the novelties of the
early 20th century as permanent fixtures in the socio-economic landscape. Though the
redwood home advertisements do recognize both historical change and the instability of
consumer fashions, they market redwood as an antidote to this reality. The advertisements
assure consumers that redwood products are different, because of their special nature. They
claim that the nature of redwoods will stop history, arresting it in its early modern form.
Buck Morss, 1990, op. cit., p. 118.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Frederick Engels, ed. (New York: International, 1967), pp. 76-87; Georg Lukacs,
“Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone
( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).
27Buck-Morss, 1990, op. cit., p. 211.
28 This phrase is a play on a sentence by Susan Buck-Morss: “The tremendous power of the new technology
has remained in the hands of the ruling class that wields it as a force of domination, while privately
appropriating the wealth it produces. In this context, dream symbols are the fetishized desires that advertise
commodities.” Ibid., p. 120.
25
26
7
Historical Visions
Benjamin’s scheme of the commodity life cycle reminds us that no product can
remain a fetish for long. Using the image of the fossil to “disclose the essence of ‘new
nature’ [technology] as transient [and] fleeting,” he emphasizes the obsolescence built into
the market.29 By focusing on cultural fossils—products made out-of-date by changes in
fashion or technology—Benjamin reminds us that the material culture of the present
moment, which seems natural to those acculturated to it, has a decaying “prehistory.” But as
fossils, this obsolete material can also function as a sign of hope: as a reminder that history
survives within the present. In the words of Susan Buck-Morss, “fossilized commodity
remains are not merely failed material…, [but also] historical clues. They are signs of the
potential for change as well as signs of extinction and death.30
From the vantage point of the early 21st century, old redwood product
advertisements, as well as old logging equipment and old redwood products themselves, are
fossils. Most of the technological innovations cited in the PALCO literature have become
obsolete, just as the technologies celebrated in Whitman’s poem—bull-team, chain, jackscrew and broad-axe—had been displaced by the Baldwin horse, steam-powered yarding
equipment, and steel cable rigging by the 1920s. Today, of the trade names listed in Leaver’s
poem, only Bell remains in daily use; compact disks, jet engines, automobiles, fiber optics,
and microwave reflectors have replaced the older transportation and communications
technologies. In the logging industry, gasoline-powered chainsaws, tractors, feller bunchers,
helicopters, skidders and yarders took the place of machines fueled by water vapor long ago.
These old advertisements warn us of the danger of fetishizing our own technological
innovations: paperless communication, roadless logging, biotechnology. They can also
provide signs of hope for a different future.
Preserving the Past
John Merriam’s redwoods represent ancient nature within a meta-narrative that
differs significantly from those of Whitman and PALCO. Where the latter associate nature
with stasis, or cyclical change, Merriam associates it with extinction, species succession, and
evolution: expressions of one-directional change. Where Whitman and PALCO contrast
nature with history, Merriam envisions “historical nature”: a natural world shaped by the
same kind of linear trajectory as cultural history. In an essay blending regional natural history
with personal experience, published in 1928 as “Forest Windows,” redwoods figure in his
vision as a “living link in an epic of history.” In this essay, the redwoods enable Merriam to
open up “one of the most fascinating chapters in the story of life.” In this story, driven by
progressive geological and biological change, the redwoods provide rare evidence of
biological continuity. Thus, when Merriam fixates on the redwood species, he understands
their longevity as an exception to nature’s ephemerality, not as the epitome of nature’s
eternal, immortal, cyclical, or unchanging character.31
29Ibid.,
p. 64.
Ibid., p. 160, p. 66.
31 John Merriam, “Forest Windows,” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 83, No. 1928, pp. 733-737, section V, paragraph
9; ibid., III:1. This essay was republished in 1934 in slightly modified form by Save-the-Redwoods League,
under the title “A Living Link In History.” I have cited the earlier version throughout this manuscript, because
most of the changes in the later version are changes of omission or reorganization. Subsequent citations refer
to section and paragraph. In an essay written almost a decade later, Merriam articulated the value of the
redwoods in terms of the primeval, or ancient, rather than the merely primitive, or fundamentally natural. See
30
8
Historical Visions
Merriam works with a different time scale than Whitman and PALCO. To establish
the age of the redwoods, he considers the trees “in the setting of their history” (my italics),
which predates the start of human history, rather than against a setting of Western
civilization.32 Merriam depicts modern redwoods as members “of a splendid race that was
many millions of years in developing to its present majestic stature,” where Whitman
understood the redwoods as inheriting a domain of a mere “thousand years.”33 Fossil
remains and petrified trees considered against evidence of geological activity (such as
volcanic deposits, streambed erosion, and seabed uplift) help Merriam compose a picture of
the Northern California region at an earlier moment on the evolutionary timeline. When the
first flowering plants were spreading over the earth and mammals were “slowly learning to
outwit the dinosaurs,” Merriam’s redwood “tribe” was “widely distributed.”34 Noting that
the ferns in the forest understory have ancestors predating those of the redwoods, reaching
back “not for epochs simply but for eons,” Merriam establishes that the historical era of the
redwoods is not equivalent to a natural, or biological “always,” though it does reach back to
the distant past.35
For Merriam, evidence of prehistory, not modernity, represents novelty. A recently
excavated petrified redwood known as “Monarch of the Forest,” as well as shells and whale
bones exposed where the South Fork of the Eel River cuts through sedimentary rock layers
near Garberville, California, represent the freshly discovered past. Throughout “Forest
Windows,” Merriam tempers the excitement of discovery with a sense of loss; there’s always
a gap, a sense of disconnect, from the distant past on which he focuses. His awareness of
natural history translates into heightened awareness of impermanence; Merriam recognizes
that even the ground on which he stands once lay under ocean; “the immediate spot on
which we stood had lain beneath an ocean whose waves swept smoothly over it….”36 The
record contained in the rocks allows Merriam to chart the dark, impenetrable realm that
serves as metaphor for forest, past, and the unknown throughout the essay. Nonetheless, the
record is clearly incomplete; Merriam works with mere fragments, or traces, of former life.
Despite his enthusiasm for the redwoods and the role they play in reconstructing natural
history, he repeatedly uses phrases like “relics,” “surviving remnant,” “rare examples” and
“just sufficient… to tell us.”37
The Highest Uses of the Redwoods: Messages to the Council of the Save-the-Redwoods League, 1922-1941 (San Francisco:
Save-the-Redwoods League, 1941), pp. 38-39.
32 Merriam, 1928, op. cit., III: 1.
33 Ibid., IV:1.
34 Ibid., V:2.
35 Ibid., V:4. Schrepfer argues that Merriam’s understanding of natural history was typical for an early modern
scientist. Though rival explanations of evolution—natural selection, orthogenesis, and orderly mutation—
dominated and divided the scientific community between 1890 and 1930, all three camps shared the
deterministic assumption that evolution, like history, is inherently progressive. As well as assuming that
evolution is progressive, early interpreters of natural history took adaptive success to be an absolute, rather
than a relative, quality. The ecological concept of natural succession—the mechanism by which over time one
set of life forms succeeds another in physically dominating a given site—reinforced beliefs about the
progressive nature of evolution. This belief gave additional weight to the notion that forms of life that had in
the past evolved into spectacular specimens would also fare better than other forms of life in the future.
36 Merriam, 1928, op. cit., V:3.
37 Ibid., VI:4, IV:1, IV:5, and IV:1.
9
Historical Visions
In the context of this paleontological investigation, living redwoods turn the
prehistoric past from intellectual abstraction into tangible reality. Merriam contrasts touch
with speech to explain the visceral historical connection that living redwoods provide.
“While ancient castles may tell us of other ages… living trees like these connect us as by
handtouch with all the centuries they have known,” he writes. The redwood touch heals the
sense of disconnect, rupture, or loss that characterizes the usual state of affairs for Merriam:
“The time they represent is not merely an unrelated severed past; it is something upon which
the present rests, and from which living currents still seem to move.”38
Merriam relates an anecdote that captures the way his experience of the living
redwood forest completed his vision of both history and nature. When lost in reverie in a
redwood grove, he “almost questioned whether it might not be a wood of early time that
spread itself before me.... it seemed almost that one should search in the ferns for the
moving neck of a dinosaur….”39 When his companions inquire why they should not expect
to find descendants of dinosaurs browsing amongst the redwoods, Merriam’s reason, briefly,
gives way to desire:
I saw clinging to … a great redwood an uncanny shape with lifted head, and tail that
wrapped about the tree. Instead of the carefully stated philosophic answer, I replied: I have
never seen a dinosaur alive—unless I see one now.40
Merriam’s vision of the redwoods was haunted by a creature he knew should not be
lurking about, but which appeared as he lost himself in time and a desire to see what he
knew used to be. The phantom dinosaur completed a mental picture of the wholeness of
nature, and the wholeness of time: a picture in which dinosaurs, as well as redwoods,
survived the ages.
Merriam explicitly articulated the way his experience of the redwoods, combined
with his knowledge of evolution, revealed time and history as continuous whole: “It was as if
in these trees the flow of years were held in eddies, and one could see together past and
present,” he wrote.41 Or, “in swift panorama the history of these trees and of their
surroundings as I knew them passed before me, stage after stage from the remote past.”42
Visits to the redwood forest took Merriam to a place where prehistory and the present
intersected, allowing him to experience time as an unruptured whole.
Though Merriam speaks very little of modernity in his essay, he does identify himself
as the product of the early 20th century. To explain the temporal disorientation he
experiences in the redwood forest, he refers to dislocation produced by travel, which he
assumes will be familiar to his readers: “As on a journey when it is today New York,
yesterday Washington, tomorrow Boston, … you hesitate a moment to be certain whether it
is Washington, New York, or Boston in which you find yourself....”43 This passage lets the
reader know that it was possible, but still unnerving, to visit three major cities of the Eastern
seaboard on successive days. An introductory passage places his first visit to the Eel River
redwoods within the fairly narrow window of time when Highway 1 through the Redwood
Ibid., II:4.
Ibid., V:5.
40 Ibid., V:7.
41 Ibid., II:5.
42 Ibid., V:1.
43 Ibid., V:5.
38
39
10
Historical Visions
region was under construction: “suddenly we swung from the highway … into primeval
redwood timber. The car quieted as its wheels rolled over the leafy carpet.”44 In short,
Merriam takes modernity, and modern travel, as a given. Modernity is clearly part of his
world, but doesn’t warrant the fanfare that PALCO gives it.
Though primarily concerned with reconstructing the past, Merriam does address the
future at the end of “Forest Windows.” In the final paragraph he writes, “You seem to turn
from the clear story of a moving past to see the future rising from it through the miracle of
never-failing light.” Merriam discovers this light which has “poured down” for
“unnumbered eons” when he looks up to the forest canopy and past it. Phrases like “beyond
the forest,” “the world outside,” “the region beyond,” and “looking out” link the temporal
shift to a spatial change of focus. (Like Whitman, Merriam sees the future emerging directly
from the past. Unlike Whitman, Merriam shies away from social prophesy, leaving the future
vague and open-ended.) Merriam envisions the continuity of life (or in more precise
biological terms, the process of photosynthesis): he implies that the light will continue to
descend “to mingle with the clouds of verdure, and build itself into the unfolding life of the
forest.”45
For Merriam, the biological past literally remained alive in living redwoods,
promising a continuum from the past through the present into the future. Thus, where
Whitman imagined that incorporating logged redwood lands into modern society would
maintain a connection between past and future, Merriam, and his colleagues who founded
Save the Redwoods League (SRL) argued for the necessity of protecting living redwoods.
But instead of positioning preserved redwoods as “pure” nature outside culture, SRL
symbolically incorporated them into the socio-cultural fabric through a memorial grove
dedication program. This highly successful program, initiated with the dedication of the
Bolling Grove in 1921(and still active today) identifies discrete groves within forest acreage
purchased for preservation, and dedicates them to individuals, or groups.46
The many memorial grove dedication ceremonies sponsored by SRL in the 1920s
make the symbolic crossover between nature and culture clear. As spectacular individuals,
notable groves, or viable forested watersheds, dedicated living redwoods serve as memorials
to people. The ceremonial dedication process transfers the natural longevity of redwoods
into the realm of cultural history. Once they are named for people, ancient redwood groves
become a sign of the possibility of protecting historical memory—of keeping the spirit, or
memory, of the dead alive. As Merriam suggested at the dedication of the Franklin K. Lane
Memorial Grove (the Lane Grove), the participants hoped that the living presence of the
trees might lend vitality to the spirit of the deceased: “So the memorial … will honor him as
a continuing living force exerted day by day and year by year upon the lives of those who
come to know the message which these trees will carry.”47
Ibid., II:2.
Ibid., VI:4, VI:2-4, VI:4.
46 As well as Susan Schrepfer, op. cit., see J.D. Grant, op. cit. For information on the memorial grove program
today, see “Redwoods… Memorials That Live” (San Francisco: Save-the-Redwoods League, 1988), or a current
issue of Save-the-Redwoods League’s Bulletin, published twice a year. Most of these groves have been
incorporated into the California Redwood State Park System, initiated in 1928 with the State Bond Act.
47 Save-the-Redwoods League, Dedication of the Franklin K. Lane Memorial Grove (San Francisco: Save-theRedwoods League, 1923), p. 5. Franklin Lane served as City Attorney of San Francisco, Secretary of the
Interior under President Wilson, and the first president of Save-the-Redwoods League.
44
45
11
Historical Visions
Merriam’s remarks also attest to the reciprocal influence of people on trees. At the
Lane Grove dedication, he explained that
In dedicating this grove ... we are carrying into the vital personalities of these great trees
some portion of the influence which [Lane] has exerted upon us.... Added to the dignity and
nobility with which nature endowed them, there come now to these members of the forest
the honor and responsibility of carrying into human life. 48
In other words, the ceremonies serve a dual purpose: working against historical amnesia by
reintegrating people into the natural historical continuum, and protecting the future of the
redwood species by integrating trees into cultural history. Through the grove dedication
program, segments of forest are ritually imprinted as cultural markers in order to protect
them as a nature preserves. After a dedication ceremony, these redwoods become emissaries
of the modern era as well as of natural prehistory. They bring evidence of Merriam’s present
into the unknown future, as well as their own message about natural history. As modified by
grove dedication ceremonies, the named grove—often visibly, though unobtrusively, marked
with a dedication plaque—can no longer be mistaken for “primeval” nature.
The dedication ceremonies help prepare both people and the redwoods for an
unknowable future. Unlike Whitman’s future, Merriam’s is neither predetermined nor visible;
“We have faith both in the trees and in the generations of men following us that what is
established here today will continue through time into which as yet our vision fails to reach,”
he proclaimed at the Lane Grove dedication.49 When thinking about the future, Merriam
stresses the need to take action in the present to ensure that the future is not impoverished:
A wide reach of opportunity for accomplishment is open to those who see that, small
though their part may be, they have a place in that progressive movement of the world in
which present links itself to past and future; who … experience the joy of knowing that the
heritage which they pass on is not less than what they have received.50
As an advocate for redwood preservation, Merriam was not content to leave the
future to its historical or natural destiny. He saw a choice between assisting the continuity
between past from future by protecting the redwood species, or bringing about their
extinction.
In some ways, the redwood preservation movement that flourished in the 1920s
appealed to the same association between redwoods and immortality as PALCO’s redwood
product promotions. To sell the idea of redwood preservation to the public, SRL linked
Redwoods’ natural longevity and durability with the desire for cultural stability. Merriam
suggests that people use redwood memorials to link future generations to the past, where
PALCO suggested that people weather the changes wrought by modernization in a redwood
Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid., p. 4.
50 Ibid., p. 5. Merriam repeated this phrase in his 1926 address to the SRL council. See Merriam, 1941, op. cit., pp.
9-10. In his 1929 address, he explicitly links his knowledge of evolution with his belief that people must guide
history, rather than passively follow fate: “As an evolutionist I am well aware of the tendency of human affairs
to move through the ages. I am familiar also with the stereotyped statement that “ ‘things will probably work
out all right in the end.’ ” I am also thoroughly imbued with the idea that… the rate of acceleration of any
human movement depends in large measure upon the extent to which we … secure the maximum advantage in
guiding rather than following in the development of our affairs.”(ibid., p. 14.)
48
49
12
Historical Visions
home. However, Merriam never suggests that redwood preservation will stop the flow of
time, arresting history in an eternal modern present. He hopes to secure a stable future for
both the living redwood forest and the memory of specific human beings as history
progresses into the unknown future. Merriam does not try to use redwood preservation to
stop history, but rather to stop the dissipation of cultural memory and the destruction of
historic nature.
The redwoods don’t form a “wish image” for Merriam because his understanding of
nature, and of the redwoods’ place in nature, are historical. Paleontology undoes the myth of
natural, undifferentiated, cyclical time. And though Merriam’s understanding of the fossil
record informs his interest in the redwoods, he does not read the forest as a fossil in the
Benjaminian sense. The trees are still living and they are still the dominant species in the
forest, not yet outdone by the competition. Unlike both the PALCO publicists and
Whitman, Merriam reads the redwoods within the context of an understanding of the
relationship between nature and history that Benjamin references with the image of the ruin.
Benjamin understood ruins as decaying structures that no longer hold sway over the
collective imagination.51 Both fossils and ruins reference the past, but where the fossil
suggests an old organic form filled in and preserved by something inorganic and solid, the
ruin suggests an old inorganic structure broken down and partly dissipated by the forces of
nature. Where the fossil functions as a sign of the survival power of the past, as well as a
reminder of extinction, the ruin is a sign that everything will decay and dissipate. The ruin is
a reminder that nature will reabsorb the remains of history. The ruin challenges the fetish, or
mythic history, by illuminating history as a process of decay rather than arrival. It challenges
the progressive, positivist, myth of history by reading “history as process of relentless
disintegration.”52
Although Merriam doesn’t overtly share Benjamin’s critique of a positivist
understanding of history, his attempt to use the preservation of old-growth redwoods as a
means of securing a viable connection between past and future does rest on an
understanding of modernity as ruin. Participants in the memorial grove program were
concerned with the dissipation of cultural memory rather than with the decay of material
culture. Preserving redwoods as memorial groves combined the approaches of historic
preservation and monument building; halting the process of decay and dissipation of old
edifices to retain a connection to history on the one hand, and marking transient history with
something permanent, on the other. Moreover, the project focused on monumental oldgrowth trees and “cathedral” groves—the forest’s ancient survivors, valued for their
combination of old age and vitality. In retrospect, it’s tempting to read the memorial grove
approach, which preserved spectacular trees and exceptional groves, rather than a viable
forest ecosystem, as accepting the redwood forest itself as a ruin, in a partial state of
dissipation. Although preserving a large tract of redwood forest as a national park was part
of Merriam’s vision and the initial dream of the League’s leadership, the shorter term goal of
“securing and protecting representative areas of primeval forest,” was where the SRL met its
early success.53
Buck-Morss, 1990, op. cit., p. 159.
Ibid., p. 161.
53 The League envisioned creating a national park as early as 1920, consisting of 64,000 acres in the Klamath
river watershed. See Dewitt, op. cit., p. 13 and Schrepfer, op. cit. In 1922, Merriam referred to the “idea of
creating the larger park system, connected with highways, which represents the dream of the organizers of the
51
52
13
Historical Visions
Conclusion
Different understandings of nature, history, and their relationship shape the various
readings of the redwood presented by Whitman, PALCO, and Merriam. Based on the
redwood’s extraordinary longevity and grandeur, the poet, the capitalist, and the botanist
attribute the species with potential for transforming the modern cultural sphere. For
Whitman the potential is realized through sacrificial death, for PALCO through
commodification, and for Merriam through a preservation program. Some of the differences
between their respective visions might be explained by changes in the condition of the
redwood forest and redwood lumber industry between 1873, when Whitman wrote, and
1928, when Scribner’s Magazine published Merriam’s essay.
In 1873, when Whitman wrote, the axe, hand-saw and bull-team were still the
technologies redwood loggers used. Whitman used the redwoods to link modernity—located
in the foreseeable future—to a distant, natural past that preceded the historical trajectory of
human culture. For Whitman, the historical moment when North Americans began logging
redwoods on a mass scale marked the moment when a utopian, mythic past intersected with
human history. This understanding of nature and history enabled him to rationalize the
physical extinction of the redwoods as necessary for the initiation of a new utopian era.
Fifty years after Whitman published “Song of the Redwood Tree,” the social utopia
Whitman had prophesied was materializing as company towns and suburbs. The
transcontinental nation Whitman had imagined was ruled by the market, which made or
broke king timber, in whose employment his “average spiritual man” risked life and limb.
Though “forests had become less obviously important to most Americans and more distant
from them in their everyday lives,”54 Americans were rapidly absorbing and assimilating giant
redwoods as commodities. Some provided materials for use within the redwood region, but
most were “scattered across America in the form of railroad ties, bridge timbers, silos, posts,
shakes, shingles, sidings, ceilings, [and] doors.”55
That was the era when Pacific Lumber Company advertised redwood products as
part of a vision of technological fetishism. The company positioned modernity—the newly
arrived present—as the end point of cultural history. This company advertised redwood
commodities, and modern technology which produced them, as transcending the ephemeral
nature of history, promising to stop the cycle of innovation and obsolescence that affected
producers and consumers in capitalist society.
It was the same era when Merriam, as a spokesperson for the early Redwood
preservation movement, tempered enthusiasm about modernity with concern about the
losses and ruptures between past, present, and future that modernity implied. For Merriam,
nature, as well as culture, was historical. His visits to the redwood forest took him to an
intersection of prehistory and modernity that made time whole; the idea of redwood
preservation embodied a hope of remaining connected to both the natural and cultural past
League.” See Merriam, 1941, op. cit., p. 5. In 1924, he stressed support of reforestation so that large areas of the
redwoods would be available to future generations, as well as small areas of “primeval forest.”
54 Thomas Cox, et. al, This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. 112.
55 Michael Frome, The Forest Service (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), p. 17.
14
Historical Visions
as history progressed. The redwoods’ representation of both nature and history created hope
for a recognizable future; in our own time, they continue to do so.
15