In Laid Waste! The Culture of Exploitation in Early America, John L. Larson offers a breathtaking synthesis of American history spanning three centuries, distilling the typical undergraduate introductory survey, usually taught over two semesters, into a concise 230 pages. While adhering to a standard chronology, the book consists of nine thematic chapters, or “meditations,” as Larson describes them, each focusing on the primary objective of a key period of America's historical development, including early settlers’ anxious search for “Stability” and “Abundance” (chapters 1 and 2), the revolutionary generation's fight for “Liberation” (chapter 4), and the robber barons’ gilded presumptions of “Destiny” and “Mastery” (chapters 7 and 8).
Throughout the book, Larson traces the aggressive, systematic exploitation of people, lands, and natural resources that made possible the ruthless advance of imperialism, settler colonialism, nation-building, industrialization, and westward expansion, with all the violence, upheaval, and destruction they entailed. Out of these processes, he argues, emerged an especially rapacious form of capitalism, driven by self-centered individualism, narrow tribalism, and a shortsighted obsession with maximizing immediate gains at any cost, arrogantly confident in technological fixes and heedless of any negative consequences. This ideology, Larson argues, gave rise in turn to a “culture of exploitation” in the United States, with major negative environmental and human consequences. Indeed, Larson sees this mentality as a major contributing factor in many of our greatest challenges today, including expanding inequality, systemic racism, environmental degradation, and the existential crisis of climate change.
As Larson explains in the book's introduction, he seeks to challenge the popular view that modern capitalism, as we know it today, is somehow natural, inevitable, and integral to supposed American exceptionalism. To the contrary, he reminds us, the eventual dominance of this economic model and its ideological underpinnings were never assured or preordained. Rather, they developed over time as the cumulative result of people's deliberate choices from a range of possible options. During every period, some parties indeed pursued self-interested individualism, but others sought to promote mutual aid, cooperation, and shared investment in their communities in the belief that greater success and prosperity would stem from promoting the general welfare.
In each chapter, Larson astutely hones in on key historical moments when competing private and public interests lay in the balance. By examining the debates that these competing visions elicited and the subsequent actions taken, he highlights how over time the former was selectively emphasized over the latter, eventually becoming more dominant. Whichever of these countervailing forces held sway at any given point in time, however, Larson argues, had significant social, economic, and political consequences, ranging from Puritans’ concerted efforts to realize their idealized commonwealth in New England to the wholesale dispossession of Native peoples from their lands. Only in retrospect, Larson reminds us, were triumphant stories of self-made (white) men—taming a howling wilderness, subjugating Native and African peoples, and building an empire through individual perseverance, ingenuity, and sheer force of will—woven into a popular mythology of America's national origins.
While most of the book incorporates a diverse array of people, the chapters on the mid- to late nineteenth century are significantly lacking from that perspective. Larson makes specific mention of numerous men—politicians, religious leaders, industrialists, writers, philosophers, social critics, and early environmentalists—who either spurred the expansion of unbridled capitalism or pressed back against that tide, such as by promoting “wise use” policies that favored conservation and stewardship of natural resources over voracious consumption. Yet even in their rather cursory discussion of the era's major reform movements, these chapters make scant mention of women or African Americans who tackled capitalism's worst ills and, in many cases, helped achieve profound social transformations—in spite of their own political disenfranchisement. Through courageous resistance, determined activism, and collective organizing, they contributed to ending slavery, improving labor conditions, protecting the welfare of children and animals, securing safer urban housing and cleaner air, water, and food, assisting new immigrants, victims of sexual exploitation, and the poor, and perhaps most importantly, expanding suffrage and breathing life into the nascent concept of universal human rights. If one wishes to find clarion voices that challenged the status quo, it seems a glaring omission to overlook such towering figures as, for example, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Susan B. Anthony.
Apart from that criticism, Laid Waste! makes for a compelling read, illuminating how “the culture of exploitation” was constructed as Americans’ “incremental choices, brick by brick, produced the edifice of modernization, advanced its claims of inevitability, and erased the evidence of people ever having seen another way” (p. 230). Casting his narrative forthrightly as a moral tale, Larson asks readers to reconsider this ethically compromised and increasingly unsustainable mode of life. Part revisionist corrective and part jeremiad, the book provides a timely critique of American capitalism, from its deep roots to its myriad outstretched branches.
