LEWIS MUMFORD CALLED Olmsted’s combination of travel, shrewd observation, and intelligent reading “American education at its best.” He suggested that Olmsted could be considered representative of a mid-nineteenth-century American type: the self-invented man. Mumford compared Olmsted to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and the economist Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty was one of the best-selling economic books of that time. Mumford could have added Mark Twain and Thomas Edison. All these men came to their calling circuitously. All had little formal schooling and a youth marked by a succession of careers, usually unrelated to their later vocations. Nevertheless, the originality of their ideas was due in no small part to the unconventional course of their early lives.
Olmsted, too, had left school early. Like Melville and George, he had been to sea; like Melville, he had been a clerk and a farmhand; and like Whitman, he was a great reader. But Olmsted differed from his contemporaries in one important respect. He was not forced out into the world by strained family circumstances. Many avenues were open to him. He could have gone into the family business like his half brother Albert. He was a valued employee at Benkard and Hutton and could easily have stayed on. He could have pursued surveying. Despite his later disclaimers, he could have attended Yale. Instead he subjected himself to a variety of experiences. There was nothing planned about it. He simply wasn’t satisfied with the hand that he had been dealt—comfortable though it was. It was as if he had decided to reshuffle the cards—more than once.
A self-invented life need not be without a certain measure of stability, however. Twain, for example, spent about eight years working on Mississippi steamboats. By the time Olmsted was twenty-eight, he had devoted seven years, fully a quarter of his life, to farming. After his return from England in October 1850, he appeared to settle down to his agricultural pursuits. He continued to enlarge his reference library. He wrote to Brace, who was still in Germany, to ask him to send books and pamphlets on corn, soils, and drainage. He was gaining expertise; at the end of the year his produce won several prizes at the County Agricultural Fair. He was involved with the agricultural society and setting up the newly arrived English drainage-tile-making machine, one of the earliest applications in the United States of this technology. He corresponded with Downing and knowledgeably discussed pear cultivation. He was immersed in his burgeoning nursery business and was awaiting the delivery of five thousand pear trees from France. Olmsted took farming seriously, and many years later, looking back on this period, he wrote: “I began life as a farmer, and although for forty years I have had no time to give to agricultural affairs, I still feel myself to belong to the farming community, and that all else that I am has grown from the agricultural trunk.”
But the man who returned from Europe was not the same young farmer who had left. The purpose of the trip had been—as he had proposed to his father—education, not recreation. In that regard the experience turned out to be, if anything, too successful. Travel extended his horizons. Life on Tosomock Farm now appeared tame and inconsequential. “Everybody at home seems to be superficial, frivolous, absorbed in a tide of foam, gas and bubbles,” he wrote to Brace in Germany. “Stay where you are as long as you can.” Travel also awakened in Olmsted a new appreciation of his abilities. Not that he had ever lacked confidence. But he had come to think of himself chiefly as a farmer and nurseryman. Now that was no longer enough. “I am disappointed in the increased power I have over others, as yet,” he confessed to Brace in another letter. “The mere fact of having been to Europe is worth nothing. To me, in looking at another, it always was an expectation of an increased value to the man—rightly so. But I have now this impression that here people do not respect anyone sincerely. Representative only it seems to me they bow to—as clergymen of religion, &c.” Respect, a place in the world, influence over others, even power—this is a new Olmsted!
Politics beckoned. He was invited to stand as the Whig candidate for town clerk and justice of the peace. Olmsted sympathized with the Whig party and its policies of economic nationalism and a strong Union, but he declined the invitation. He had a new avocation: writing. Downing had asked him to write an article for The Horticulturist about his impressions of rural Germany. Olmsted considered himself unqualified for the task; he had not spent long enough in the country, and in any case, he did not speak the language. Instead, he wrote an article about a place he knew well—England—and a subject close to his heart—landscape. Or, more accurately, landscape design, for his subject was a recently built public park in Birkenhead, a suburb of Liverpool.
Birkenhead Park had been laid out in June 1844 by Joseph Paxton.1 The park covered 120 acres. It was bisected by a gently curving city street and circled by a carriageway. There were no formal vistas, no straight lines at all. The picturesque ponds, random clumps of trees, rolling meadows, overgrown hillocks, and meandering footpaths reminded Olmsted of the English countryside, “very simple, and apparently rather overlooked by the gardener.” What impressed Olmsted the most was that the romantic pastoral scenery was wholly man-made—the site had originally been “a flat, sterile, clay farm.” In his article, which appeared in May 1851, he described how a system of underground drains fed water to the ponds, and how earth from the excavations was used to create hills. He included technical details about the construction of the footpaths: six inches of fine broken stone, three inches of cinders, and six inches of fine rolled gravel.
British and European parks were generally estates that had been donated to the city, or private aristocrats’ gardens to which the public was allowed access. Birkenhead Park, by contrast, was designed specifically as a public park. Olmsted pointed out that the park was built and financed entirely by the town. He explained that part of the cost had been recovered by selling lots for private villas around the edges of the park. That citizens might build a park for themselves struck him as admirable. So did the fact that the park was open to all.
I was glad to observe that the privileges of the garden were enjoyed about equally by all classes. There were some who even were attended by servants, and sent at once for their carriages, but a large proportion were of the common ranks, and a few women with children, or suffering from ill health, were evidently the wives of very humble laborers.
Olmsted pointed out the irony that in democratic America there was nothing comparable to what he called the “People’s Park.”
Downing had his own reason for wanting to publish an article on Birkenhead Park. In an editorial postscript, which praised the young author’s “clear and pleasing account,” he regretted that New York had no such public park, “no breathing place, no grounds for the exercise and refreshment of her jaded citizens.” This was Downing’s hobbyhorse. A year earlier he had published an article in which he complained about the paltriness of New York’s squares compared to London’s vast parks. Three months after Olmsted’s article appeared, Downing wrote a lead essay, “The New-York Park,” which spelled out his proposal of a great park for the city. Curiously, he seems to have been unaware of Birkenhead Park before reading Olmsted’s article. Although he had visited England the same year, likewise passed through Liverpool, and even met Paxton himself, the eight “Letters from England” that he published in The Horticulturist did not mention Birkenhead.
Olmsted had discovered Birkenhead Park by accident. Three days after arriving in Liverpool, he and his companions crossed the Mersey to Birkenhead to start their walking tour. They stopped in a bakery to buy buns and talked to the baker about the merits of American versus French flour. As he bid them farewell he mentioned a new park. They decided to visit it and left their knapsacks in the store, for the park was some distance away. When Olmsted saw Birkenhead Park, he immediately realized that “gardening had here reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed of.” He excitedly sought out the head gardener and recorded the details that he would later include in his article.
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Olmsted was not just writing magazine articles; he had decided to write a full-length book. While he had been in Europe, he had kept a diary, parts of which, in the form of letters, he had sent to friends and family. He now gathered these, together with his notes, into a travel book. He was probably emboldened in this attempt by reading the numerous travel letters that Brace was sending from Germany to newspapers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Olmsted was also encouraged by his neighbor George Putnam. Putnam had terminated his partnership with John Wiley two years before and now published chiefly literary titles under his own name. He wanted to include Olmsted’s book in a new series he was planning to launch called “Putnam’s Semi-Monthly Library for Travelers and the Fireside.” Olmsted’s enthusiasm, as well as the vivid letters he already had in hand, had convinced Putnam. In any case, he was not taking a large risk; there was no advance, and the 10 percent royalty was to be paid only after expenses.
The article on Birkenhead Park would become a chapter of Olmsted’s book. Meanwhile, he wrote another article, this time for a prestigious monthly, the American Whig Review. “A Voice from the Sea” is neither an agricultural essay nor an excerpt of the book. It is a spirited account of the sad lot of the working seaman. He had begun the essay while sailing to Liverpool with Charley and John. Olmsted skillfully juxtaposes episodes from that voyage, when he was a passenger, with his earlier experiences as a seaman on the Ronaldson. He includes a vivid description of the brutal flogging of the young boy. The tone is both authoritative and outraged. His condemnation of shipboard working conditions is powerful. He also has ideas on how to improve the situation. He proposes new laws, and paying overtime for longer hours. He suggests establishing schools for mariners that would teach practical skills, which, in turn, would make greenhorns more valuable, hence likely to be better treated. Such schools would also provide continuing education for sailors ashore.
Like Richard Henry Dana, Olmsted sympathized with the sailors. Unlike Dana, however, he was not an idealistic reformer. He admitted that sailors were seldom saints.
Suspicious, distrustful, often dishonest and hard-hearted themselves, the captain is partly right in thinking they would not understand, could not trust, and might fail to reward a worthy, generous and manly command. Trained like brutes, they must be driven yet like brutes. The old wrong has produced the evil, and the evil excuses the present wrong; and thus here, as often elsewhere, both are perpetuated. Such are always the hardest cases for the philanthropist, where heedless, fanatical, impracticable reformers are for ever making mischief.
This underlines the complex nature of Olmsted’s mind. Now twenty-nine, he had grown out of his early, easy enthusiasms. Suspicious of facile solutions to difficult problems, he was developing a rare ability to see both sides of a question, no matter how opposed or contradictory—the test, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would later point out, of a first-rate intelligence.
1. Paxton, a gardener and builder of conservatories, would become famous for the Crystal Palace, which he built for the 1851 International Exhibition in London.