ANNALS of the Association of American Geographers Volume 64 June, 1974 Number 2

THE FOURTH DIMENSION OF GEOGRAPHY

CARL 0. SAUER

ABSTRACT. A participant observer notes the manner of entry of Geography into American universities. It was outlined and accepted as an earth science. Its content is concerned with time as well as place, time that is nonrecurrent, ongoing rather than cyclic. Digressions from this substantive orientation lead to nonproductive ends. KEY WORDS: Berkeley school, T . C . Chamberlin, William Morris Davis, Rollin Salis- bury, Time.

T the beginning of this century Geography A was one of the basic subjects in our ele- mentary schools, as it had been for generations. History was taught mainly to instruct the youth in the origin and development of the United States. Geography dealt with the entire world, its physical and cultural diversity expressed in regions, which were most conveniently studied as countries. The political entity as unit of study tended to be eclectic choice of whatever seemed to be its conspicuous aspect of nature and society.

The American Book Company, publishers of McGufieys Eclectic Readers, had Baron von Steinwehr, a cartographer and a general in the Union Army, do a series of Eclectic Geogra- phies that set the pattern of school texts for decades, wel! illustrated by maps and pictures. The school geographies written by a Confed- erate Officer, Matthew Fontaine Maury, stressed physical geography and processes. Neither author has had the deserved attention in the shaping of American school geography.

Geography as taught in the schools came under the criticism that the pupils were drilled

Accepted fo r publication 22 November 1973.

Dr. Sauer is Professor Emeritus o f Geography at the University of California in Berkeley, CA 94720.

in place names and their location, in river sys- tems, the height of mountains, boundaries and capitals of states. The meaning of toponymy was lost in rote memorizing, it was said. Learn- ing place names and their association on maps was a dull matter, perhaps more so for teacher than student. The normal schools, our training centers for school teachers, felt the need of aca- demic guidance for Geography such as History had at universities.

Chairs of Geography had been founded early at Princeton University (for the Swiss Arnold Guyot) and at the University of California (for the geodesist George Davidson, born in En- gland). In 1892 a national committee was formed to inquire into the condition of Geog- raphy in schools. T. C. Chamberlin, then Presi- dent of the University of Wisconsin, was its Chairman, the report largely written by William Morris Davis of Harvard University. Chamber- lin was the countrys most distinguished geolo- gist; Davis was in charge of Physical Geography in the Department of Geology at Harvard. The recommendation was of an inclusive physical earth science, from elementary through sec- ondary schools, to prepare for entry to col- lege and to be represented there.

Chamberlin moved in 1893 to the new Uni- versity of Chicago to form there a great school of geology, taking with him his junior associate,

ANNALS OF THE ,ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS 0 1974 by the Associabon of American Geographers.

Vol. 64, No. 2, June 1974 Printed in U.S.A.

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Rollin Salisbury as Professor of Geographical Geology, to be given opportunity to introduce courses in Geography of university level and to form a Department of Geography. Geography shared the university museum with Geology. For almost three decades the cohabitation con- tinued, Salisbury giving common instruction to all graduate students of Geology and Geogra- phy in physiography, and in dynamic and his- torical geology. Davis continued at Harvard as Professor of Physical Geography in the Depart- ment of Geology.

Geography in the United States was given its academic entry by geologists, who for years remained its sponsors and guides. Some of us started in Geology and were attracted to the new direction of linking study of the face of the Earth to its human occupants. We had a background of observing and identifying land- forms as to kind and origin, in particular those of Pleistocene and Recent geologic time. We were accustomed to go out to see, name, and interpret features of the terrain; we would now learn how to gain understanding of the patterns of mans activities. After a year of graduate work, Professor Salisbury sent me in 1910 to do a study of the Upper Illinois Valley. When asked for guidelines, he answered that I alone would determine manner and range of what I did in the field. That first untutored field sea- son opened inquiries that have continued ever after. We started with some competence in the morphology of the land, which was important. Beyond that we were on our own.

The formative years of academic Geography in the United States were greatly influenced by Davis and Salisbury, men of greatly differing temperaments. To Salisbury the earth sciences were an interdependent field. As I was learn- ing to become a geographer I had the benefit of contact with paleontologists of large insight in paleogeography. Davis, on the other hand, was seeking to establish geography as a disci- pline that was freed of concern with chro- nology of time and change. The geologist dealt with the history of the Earth and named its chapters and paragraphs. Davis formulated a theory of recurrent geographical cycles, of up- lift, erosion, and wearing down to a peneplain, passing through stages of youth, maturity, and old age to rejuvenation in a new cycle. The cycle might be long or short, its length and position in time were irrelevant. Davis was our first and greatest maker of a system that re-

placed the complexity of events by a general order. Theory was illustrated by models, the block diagrams which he drew so well to show his concept of how the modelling of the land should pass from stage to stage. Davis con- tinued to develop and expound the cyclic order that he thought he had discovered.

Meanwhile Ellsworth Huntington introduced climatic change as determining the course of mankind and became an advocate of climatic and other cycles, for which he tried to establish a chronology by tree rings. Another kind of environmental determinism was presented by Ellen Semple, who read history from the recent American past to classical antiquity as per- sistence of environmental advantage or denial. By both talented persons the human past was explained by favor or constraint of the physi- cal environment, to which Huntington added racial selection. When Harlan Barrows at Chi- cago took over Miss Semples lectures on American history and its geographical influ- ences he distinguished between what he called geographic and nongeographic factors, the latter added by man.

I n these formative decades we, the young apprentices, were encouraged to study a se- lected region. We went out to learn what we could with a fair background of landforms and a liking of the landscape. We were expected to gain understanding by observing the relation of man to physical environment. We knew noth- ing of Ratzels travels in the United States during which he became a geographer and re- turned home to write its Kulturgeographie, first of its kind. Cultural geography was an unknown concept, but to some extent we did what he did, stop wherever we found something to engage our attention as significant by being there. By such reconnaissance we tried to describe the geographic pattern of human activity and inter- pret its meaningful assemblage, and began to ask how the things seen came to be together. A first exercise in learning that geography is spa- tial differentiation of nature and culture.

Regional geography was held to be the main concern. The chapter by Professor Davis in Mills International Geography ( 1908 edition) presented the United States as a series of natural regions, distinguished by relief or cli- mate, each having an economy proper to its physical nature. Each was delimited by bound- aries, the whole country being thus subdivided. The natural region was taken as the basic unit

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for the study of human geography. Popular usage provided Davis with most of the regional names; he added more and supplied boundary lines. Professor Davis argued that our political boundaries largely were drawn by compass in advance of settlement, and were improper lines for the geographer. Instead Davis found these in physical divisions, which he set up, largely by a combination of landforms and climatic regions. The regional pattern as outlined was inadequate and improper for the patterns of society and livelihood.

Geographers were and still are most nu- merous in the Midwest. It had been settled within a century by people of European stock, the earlier ones of colonial ancestry, those fol- lowing largely immigrants from overseas. Their descendants lived on farms and in towns that had been occupied at the time of settlement and which retained qualities of their origin. These were evident and remembered, in part also were described in accounts of pioneer times. The then still living past, manifest in homesteads and habits and in place names, such as former groves and prairies, and names of their former homes, provided the historical base of the local geography. Regional studies involved depth of time, at least as far back as pioneer days. The physical background was reshaped by human agency in directions determined by differing cultural options. Human geography was begin- ning to be understood as cultural experience of a particular space, though not as yet so called by us.

At the beginning of the century changes in ways of living were going on with little uprooting of people or habits; we were becoming seden- tary, attached to home place. The First World War brought large and increasing change. A technologic revolution was under way, staffed by engineers, chemists, and efficiency experts. The assembly line replaced the skilled work- man. The gross national product became mea- sure and goal of common commitment. Cities grew mightily and rural population began a decline that has continued to the present. The family farm, which grew diverse field crops by rotation, planted gardens and orchards, and raised livestock and poultry, was beginning to give way to specialized and mechanized agri- culture. Small towns, the centers of rural com- munities, were becoming superfluous unless they developed industries.

During World War I numerous geographers were engaged in wartime services, such as the Shipping Board, which allocated cargoes by specific routes and ports. They dealt with ton- nages of whatever kind from source to destina- tion. They returned after the war to academic life, knowledgeable in the statistics of volume and the monetary value of the items of com- merce. The universities were adding schools of commerce and business that had use for this sort of information, and geographers were avail- able for such courses of instruction. They gath- ered statistical data, drew topical maps, and constructed graphs, all under continuing revi- sion to be kept up to date. Things, people, places were quantitative aggregates to be re- lated. Numbers in their spatial distribution were the common concern, which in the course of time became sophisticated to theories of spa- tial order, independent of real place or time. The new breed had little experience or need of the traditional interests of geography in the physical, biotic, and cultural diversity of the Earth. It was not interested in the past beyond the short run of statistical series, but was con- cerned with projecting the future. The applied geographer attached to the world of business learned the use of statistics to chart the flow of trade. A few were beginning to construe an abstract world of hypothetical space and time.

I n 1923 I moved from Michigan to Cali- fornia to gain experience of a different coun- try, and also to get away from what geographers mainly were doing in the East, which interested me less and less as narrowing professionalism. I had begun to read seriously what German, French, and English geographers were learning about the world as long and increasingly modi- fied by mans activities. The Morphology of Landscape was an early attempt to say what the common enterprise was in the European tradition.

John Leighly came with me to Berkeley to do his doctoral thesis on the historical towns in central Sweden. The third member of the staff was Richard Russell, native Californian, who introduced us to nature and life in Cali- fornia. Loren Post and Peveril Meigs were stu- dents at the university, joined a year later by Fred Kniffen and Warren Thornthwaite, and shortly by others, a young group finding its way into geography as an earth science in which the present became intelligible by knowledge of the past. The fourth dimension, time, was neces-

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sary to understanding and could not be re- placed by stage, cycle, model, or environmental influence. This gradual learning involved read- ing works we had not known, the contributions to cultural geography by such men as George Marsh, Vaughan Cornish, Brunhes, Eduard Hahn, Ratzel, Gradmann, Schliiter, The Cor- ridors of Time by Peake and Fleure. The spread of mankind to the ends of the Earth, Gang der Kultur in Hettners phrase, reached back to re- mote cultural beginnings.

The University of California offered a con- genial place to learn from related scholars. Geol- ogists were engaged in geomorphic studies. Soil science had its origins here and the mapping of soils gave insight into the processes by which the land was formed. A group of naturalists was outlining the distribution and assemblage of the biota in historical depth, in fact historical biogeography. Historians studied the American and Spanish past of California and were well advanced in inquiring into the northern Span- ish borderlands. Above all anthropologists were our tutors in understanding cultural diversity and change. Robert Lowie in particular intro- duced us to the work of such geographers as Eduard Hahn and Ratzel as founders of an anthropogeography that I had not known. (At Chicago the lone anthropologist had been Frederick Starr whose quarters were in our building; we knew him as a pleasant person but not as one from whom we should learn. There was no anthropologist at the University of Michigan. ) Wider horizons were opened to us at Berkeley, perhaps wider than we would have found anywhere else.

California was an extraordinarily good ex-

ample of natural regions of major interest to biologic evolution and survival, and as a pocket in which diverse Indian tribes had lodged. Be- cause it was so well studied we looked beyond it for less known lands. These were nearby, across the Mexican border. Our first expedi- tion was to Baja California, the earlier Cali- fornia described by missionaries and seafarers in Spanish days and since then largely dis- regarded, except by field biologists. We re- turned for a number of field seasons, ranging to the southern end of the long and sparsely inhabited peninsula. It was our field school of physical and human geography, out of which came a variety of studies. Former missions, in part ruins, were guides to reconstruct past con- ditions and thus to include aboriginal life, here and there still existing. Also we began to go south along the Pacific mainland of Mexico, there learning about Indian crops and agricul- ture. By chance we came upon a forgotten pre- historic high culture that extended largely the archeologic limits of Mesoamerica. The pres- ence of man and his works set the limits of human geography. We were learning cultural geography in depth in Mexico, and beyond, in Central and South America.

The dimension of time is and has been part of geographic understanding. Human geography considers man as a geographic agent, using and changing his environment in nonrecurrent time according to his skills and wants. We now know that he is not the master of an unlimited environment, but that his technologic interven- tion in the physical world and its life has be- come the crisis of his survival and that of its coinhabitants.