Commerce and Culture,
The Pattern in Ohio:
An Address
By HARLAN HATCHER *
I extend my most cordial personal
greetings to my fellow
members of the Ohio Historical Society,
with which I had the
pleasure of working for so many years
and which has done me
honor in the past and which has
especially honored me today by
inviting me to come once more and share
in this annual meeting
of our Society. I am pleased indeed to
do so. In fact any reasonable
excuse that brings me back to a place
where I have spent so many
happy years of my life and where I have
so many warm friendships,
I find I tend to seize with some
alacrity; and I always, as I approach
this campus, cast my eye on the little
grove of trees, or what is
left of it, where the new Ohio Union
and now the new law school
are located, because that has come to
be a focal spot for me. The
trees that you see there were planted
in the autumn of 1919 during
my freshman year. I used to watch them
being planted there and
I have watched their growth through the
years--as well as their
removal as time passes on.
I am pleased also to observe that this
year the annual meeting
has centered its attention on the
industrial background and history
of our great state, and the topic upon
which I am now about to
make some observations was suggested by
your committee and
especially by the director, Mr.
Zepp--"Commerce and Culture, the
Pattern in Ohio."
There exists a very close relationship
in any nation between its
* Harlan Hatcher is president of the
University of Michigan. A former vice president
of the Ohio Historical Society, as well
as a former vice president of Ohio State
University, he is the author of half a
dozen books, some factual and some imaginative,
dealing with Ohio and its history.
His address was delivered at the
seventy-second annual meeting of the Ohio
Historical Society, held at the Ohio
State Museum, Columbus, April 27, 1957.
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THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
industry, its agriculture, and its
business on the one hand, and the
nature, the texture, the quality, the
dynamism of the culture which
grows out of that especial society. And
I have observed that it
tends to vary somewhat accurately with
the course of national
development, with the prestige which
the nation enjoys at any
given moment and the position which it
occupies in the world,
and with the general level of
prosperity which it happens to have
reached at the given moment.
I will not at this time dwell upon the
observations that lead me
to the generalization. I might just
remind you, for example, of the
magnificent expression of a national
culture which came out of
Czechoslovakia following the First World
War. It produced some
of the outstanding dramas, literature,
poetry, and general arts that
that nation had seen, reaching its
culmination during its period of
democratic expression and going
tragically down into defeat and
destruction when the legions of Adolf
Hitler marched across the
little country.
I would cite present-day France as a
brilliant example of the
point I am suggesting to you, where, if
I read its history correctly,
in the periods when its national
greatness was unchallenged, when
its prosperity was high, the people who
are volatile and responsive
responded time after time with what
might be called almost golden
eras of their culture. You can read
their psychology now in a very
brilliant book, the most brilliant I
have found on contemporary
France. It is called France Against
Herself. There you can see what
the destruction of a nation's
consciousness of prestige, self-confi-
dence, and sense of movement can do to
its culture as you observe the
state into which French culture has
fallen since the war, with
existentialism and Sartre and that
group being the best they can
offer in this day and age.
Cast your eye over England or over
Greece and you will have
illustration enough, at least for all I
want to say here this after-
noon. There is a direct observable
connection between the quality
of the life, the prestige, the
position, the prosperity, the industrial
confidence of a country and the nature
of the culture which grows
out of that solid base, or, more
accurately put, grows out of that
nurturing soil.
COMMERCE AND CULTURE 271
Here in our own country, in the United
States, and in Ohio,
where we naturally focus attention this
fine spring afternoon, the
reading is to be taken from the
beginning of the journey of the
pioneers from the eastern seaboard to
the great and alluring and
beckoning westland, over the Wilderness
Road or down the Ohio or
along the lakes into this first area
open for development after the
Revolutionary War-the great, glorified,
highly publicized Ohio
country. The people who made the long
and difficult journey into
what was then the wilderness, made it
because they were driven by
motives of personal gain, but even more
by the belief that in this
newly opened territory the great
American dream, which had been
now formulated and placed in the
documents and given movement,
might find complete fruition. We could
build here on virgin soil
a land and a society much nearer to the
heart's desire than anything
we had yet created.
In these easy times it is very
important for us, and I think even
more so for our sons and daughters, to
have some historical per-
spective of what went into that pursuit
of the dream and that first
journey out of the East into this
westland, this Ohio country.
Some degree of culture and some degree
of education had already
been developed on the eastern seaboard.
Much of it is obvious.
Fortunately the restoration of old
Williamsburg has made it a
visible entity now for the present
generation. Our young people
can see there in dramatic form, in a
living museum before their eyes,
the high point in colonial culture
which had been reached on the
seaboard, a culture that was possible
largely because it was on the
seaboard and therefore could bring in
the things needed to sustain
the culture by the easy road of ships.
You won't miss the point,
that the minute you have passed old
Williamsburg or the minute
you have gone a few miles away from the
easy communication of
the James River, you have left the area
of the culture which made
Williamsburg and you are back on the
frontier, with the roughness
of life that was demanded by that era.
It was much easier to bring
things from Great Britain in those
days, all the way to the few
seaport cities, than it was to take
them a hundred miles into the
interior, to say nothing of the six
hundred miles into the Ohio
country, where it was total wilderness.
272
THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Out of that migration there come at
least two points which I
should like to emphasize. The first is,
that when these highly
motivated, energetic, and hopeful
forefathers of ours came into the
Ohio country, they found immediately
not the glorious land
flowing with milk and honey, or the
Garden of Eden, or any of
the other beautiful visions set forth
in the various prospectuses,
they found instead the frontier in its
most challenging form; and
the immediate result was a noticeable
deterioration of the culture
with which these people had already
armed themselves at the
moment of their migration.
The economic distress was most acute.
It is exceedingly touching
to me to go through the records of these
first two or three decades
of the foundation of this state and
observe the mere inescapable
fact of isolation, of being cut off by
the hundreds of miles of forest
from the markets of the East and
communication with the East,
despite the most devoted toil on the
part of those who had come.
The fact that they had no hard money
and no easy way of doing
banking transactions, just those few
elements alone were sufficient
to isolate these people, and for the
first three decades to push them
back instead of carrying them forward.
Every record of the time indicates that
as these first several years
went on, manners deteriorated,
education almost disappeared for a
time, and the living standards became
more and more primitive.
The few things which these people tried
to bring out here generally
got battered to pieces or seriously
broken up on the journey
westward. The dishes got broken, and it
was not uncommon even
in the eighteen hundred twenties, in
areas which now represent
some of the highest centers of our
present state culture, to find
people almost without clothing, dining
with the crudest of kitchen
implements, off makeshift dishes,
cooking out of makeshift pots
and pans.
You can read all about that in this
very building. There are
dozens of such documents here in the
library. If you have not read
recently Peter Parley's Recollections,
I would recommend that to
you, because it is one of the more
interesting examples of it, es-
pecially the picture which he recalls
of Dr. Hand meeting the young
eighteen-year-old boy who had spent
practically all of his life here
COMMERCE AND CULTURE 273
in Ohio, a lout in general appearance
but with all the native ability
that went with the stock which had come
here; and when this
eighteen-year-old learned that Dr. Hand
had come from the East,
he looked upon him as Browning is
supposed to have looked when
he said, "Did you once see Shelley plain, and did
he stop to speak
to you`" "Have you seen the
old Bay State? If I could get back
there I would be willing then to
die." See the great Bay State and
die was the expression of this young
man, unlettered because there
were no schools, crude in clothing
because there was nothing else
to be had. And many of those
characteristics persisted, as you
readers of Charles Dickens well know,
into the eighteen hundred
forties.
The other example I would cite would be
Dr. Hawley's famous
record of his period of service as a
doctor in this early Ohio in the
years eighteen twenty to twenty-one,
where after more than two
decades, almost three now, of
settlement in the northeastern part
of our state, he found the same
conditions prevailing which I have
suggested already. These illustrations
I offer you, at least for our
purposes this afternoon, to emphasize
the inescapable impact of
the social and economic conditions of a
society upon the quality of
its culture.
The second point I would make is one
that is illustrated so
brilliantly and fascinatingly in all
the museums in this state--in
this one, in the Western Reserve museum,
in the beautiful one at
Burton, in the Ross County museum down
at Chillicothe--where
you observe that cut off as they were
from lack of equipment, our
Ohio forefathers brought to bear upon
their circumstances imagin-
ation and talent; and I suppose that if
the phrase, "Necessity is
the mother of invention," had not
already been coined, it could
well have been coined in Ohio in the
first three or four decades
of its existence. You make your own or
you do without!
So you see gathered together in these
museums the first attempts
of our forefathers, most of them not
trained in these handicrafts
at all; but they did very well in
fashioning all kinds of necessary
articles and machinery out of
exceedingly crude materials and with
even cruder tools. And they built what
they needed in the house-
hold and they learned weaving and they
learned tailoring and they
274
THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
learned sewing and they built carriages
and they finally began to
build musical instruments and to
fashion pottery out of the fine
clays in the eastern part of our state.
They made furniture, they
made shoes, they made farm machinery;
and it is possible even now
to observe growing out of these focal
points of pioneering necessity
the little seed which begins to grow
and spread and emerge into
the great industrial pattern which is
the state of Ohio.
Nothing however could move really until
we had solved two of
the most important problems of our
state life--transportation and
commercial banking. Transportation was
the most urgent, is the
easiest to observe, and probably is
sufficiently illustrative for our
purposes here this afternoon. Anybody
who had made the journey
from the East in any possible direction
that would bring him to this
first great section of country opened
after the war, the first of the
settlements of the Northwest Territory,
the gateway to the farther
west--anybody who made that journey had
no difficulty in under-
standing that there would never be any
growth of industry and
commerce and culture in this state till
there could be movement.
We had a little bit of movement because
the Ohio River ran
along the southern edge of our state,
and it is significant to observe
that the earliest settlements and the
first flowering of what you
would be able legitimately to call the
culture of this particular
state, happened to be along the banks
of that river and tended to
center first of all in the vicinity of
Marietta and then at Cincinnati
and finally up the Scioto River at
Chillicothe.
Then with a spurt of energy which is
still inspiring, especially
when viewed in the setting in which it
must be viewed, we built
the National Road right across the
center of this state, linking
it with Wheeling, and we built the
network of canals that bridged
the ridge between the St.
Lawrence-Great Lakes waterway and the
Ohio River, nearly a thousand miles of
it, criss-crossing our state
and linking it in the north with the
Erie Canal; and with those two
simple transportation projects we
opened the interior of Ohio to
connections by easy transport with all
of the rest of the world. From
the very moment of the opening of the
canal to the moment of our
celebrating here in nineteen
fifty-seven, though there have been
some slight dips in it, the curve of
our prosperity based upon our
commerce and industry has steadily
risen.
COMMERCE AND CULTURE 275
I won't go into the banking situation.
I will simply remind you
that even after we had succeeded in
getting a way of moving the
products from this great and
potentially rich state to the rest of
the world, we still had no way of
arranging credit in New Orleans
and in New York and Boston and
Philadelphia for easy exchange.
The story of the rise of a sound and
legitimate and flexible form
of banking is as important to the
growth of our culture as almost
any other single thing that I could
mention.
Almost simultaneously with all of this
growth came the rapid
discovery of the enormous riches which
the state had at its disposal
or which the region had, available to
Ohio over the natural water-
ways, implemented by the transportation
system which our fore-
fathers built. I refer to the great oil
boom which centered in the
northwestern part of this state. I
refer to the discovery of coal and
the uses of coal. I refer to the
discovery of the great iron mines
at the upper lakes, whose product could
be so easily, as it turned
out, brought down over this natural
waterway to our shores at the
north.
The combination of our iron and coal
and our limestone with
these almost ready-made highways,
coupled with the remarkable
talents and resources of the people who
had already indicated their
ingenuity and developed over the years
in this industrial way that
I have just spoken of, made an
association which guaranteed the
industrial greatness and centrality of
the state of Ohio. We found
ourselves squarely in the heartland of
the continent with exactly
the differential that we needed to
assure supremacy.
Now it is interesting to observe, that
as we evolved from this
primitive frontier region of want into
one of the most notable
industrial and business centers of the
world, there was a correlation
and growth and fruition of our culture;
and I should like to say
just a few words about how those have
come about and how they
are co-ordinated.
We have been in many respects a most
contradictory people,
finding it troublesome to make up our
minds on what we believe,
in which direction we are really going.
We have been especially
contradictory, wavering--ambivalent, I
believe, is the proper educa-
tional word for this now--we have been
especially ambivalent as
to whether we really want to see what
we call culture, or whether
276
THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
we want to see what we call the
practical man's life and view of
things. And when you look at our great
national or state heroes,
you will observe that we have tended to
place the greatest degree
of admiration upon those who were the
self-made, unlettered, but
wonderfully shrewd and competent
practical men.
Edison and Ford typify one element of
the American dream.
Mark Twain and Walt Whitman in the
field of letters represent
another phase of this American dream.
But somehow out of this
great soil of ours without benefit of
too much schooling it is pos-
sible for the native genius to fly. And
when we take that line, and
we do so every so often as a people, we
set over against it in con-
trast (we have various names for them)
the intellectuals, the
educated group, most popularized in
recent years under the term,
"the egghead." You see, the
practical man versus the egghead, the
hard, driving practical man as opposed
to the college-trained
engineer kind of man.
I offer as my Exhibit A an interesting
sign of change in the state
which I have the honor, today at least,
to represent and bear
greetings from. You know that the
automotive industry upon which
so much of the culture of the state
which I represent is now based,
has prided itself upon the Fords and
the Sorensons and the hard,
driving, up-from-the-soil kind of
persons. There was a feature
article in the Detroit Free Press some
days ago about the phenomenal
success of the present line of Ford
cars, and it singled out for
amazed tribute the vice president who
is in charge of the Ford
division now, a neighbor and friend of
mine, Mr. McNamara.
And what is the puzzlement about it? He
is not in the tradition at
all. He is a college graduate--he is
even a Phi Beta Kappa and
was upon a time a professor. And while
he was treated with great
respect, and it was recognized that it
was possible to view these
qualities as contributing to the
nation, there was still just a little
bit of that concept, what in the world
are we coming to that a Phi
Beta Kappa former professor can be such
a phenomenal success in
a field where the other tradition is
supposed to dominate.
In this great state of Ohio we
recognized from the very outset
that one of the things we would be
dependent upon, one of the
things we would have to build into this
primarily industrial, prac-
COMMERCE AND CULTURE 277
??cal, business world and culture of
ours, was education. And it is
cerrtainly one of the sources of pride
to anybody from this state to
now that from the beginning there was a
dedication to education
?? all levels, and especially to
education in its higher reaches
represented by our colleges and
universities, Ohio University and
Miami University being two brilliant
examples of the way this idea
as built into the very foundation of
the state, and the Northwest
ordinance being an indication of the
projection of the concept.
??he fact that at least since the
eighteen thirties this state of Ohio
as had more small liberal arts colleges
than any other state in
??e Union and more distinguished ones,
too, is a further illustration.
These institutions have been nourished,
nurtured, cultivated, sup-
ported, and have in turn received the
affection of the very people
??ho at the same time were trying to
build roads and were trying
?? build industrial fabric and
cultivate the great agricultural base
??om which our prosperity so long
stemmed. These people were
??tent upon making our colleges the
expression of a higher reach
?? the dream--the culture which the
industrial base would support.
I do not believe that in nineteen
hundred fifty-seven George F.
??abbitt, beloved old gentleman that he
was in the nineteen hundred
??enties, the inevitable natural
extension of one side of our char-
??ter, is any longer in any sense
characteristic of American business.
??e is not the symbol in fifty-seven
that he was in the early nineteen
hundred twenties, because we have
matured to the point where we
recognize that it is not commerce or
culture but commerce and
culture--and by any measurement that I know how to
bring to it,
??e have made very great progress,
indeed, in this direction. Music,
??t, letters, architecture, the
furniture of our houses, the manners
??our people, all of those, when put in
contrast to any of the pre-
??ding ages, indicate that we have had
a degree of maturity in
??is area. The rise and continued
growth and contribution of our
??ucational institutions indicate to me
the wedding of those two.
??he fact that there is closer
cooperation between them than there has
??er been before in our entire state
history suggests that we have
??me to see that they are not
antithetic at all but are natural
partners in the welfare of our people.
I hope that progress will
continue.
Commerce and Culture,
The Pattern in Ohio:
An Address
By HARLAN HATCHER *
I extend my most cordial personal
greetings to my fellow
members of the Ohio Historical Society,
with which I had the
pleasure of working for so many years
and which has done me
honor in the past and which has
especially honored me today by
inviting me to come once more and share
in this annual meeting
of our Society. I am pleased indeed to
do so. In fact any reasonable
excuse that brings me back to a place
where I have spent so many
happy years of my life and where I have
so many warm friendships,
I find I tend to seize with some
alacrity; and I always, as I approach
this campus, cast my eye on the little
grove of trees, or what is
left of it, where the new Ohio Union
and now the new law school
are located, because that has come to
be a focal spot for me. The
trees that you see there were planted
in the autumn of 1919 during
my freshman year. I used to watch them
being planted there and
I have watched their growth through the
years--as well as their
removal as time passes on.
I am pleased also to observe that this
year the annual meeting
has centered its attention on the
industrial background and history
of our great state, and the topic upon
which I am now about to
make some observations was suggested by
your committee and
especially by the director, Mr.
Zepp--"Commerce and Culture, the
Pattern in Ohio."
There exists a very close relationship
in any nation between its
* Harlan Hatcher is president of the
University of Michigan. A former vice president
of the Ohio Historical Society, as well
as a former vice president of Ohio State
University, he is the author of half a
dozen books, some factual and some imaginative,
dealing with Ohio and its history.
His address was delivered at the
seventy-second annual meeting of the Ohio
Historical Society, held at the Ohio
State Museum, Columbus, April 27, 1957.