How the grid came to shape the US landscape

Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America Amir Alexander Univ. Chicago Press (2024)

Fly over the United States or walk its city streets and you can’t help but notice the country’s seemingly endless patchwork of rectangular blocks of land. The origins of this ‘grid’ lie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the early US early leaders sent surveyors out to carve up vast tracts of land acquired under treaties and to expand settlement westwards to the Pacific coast.

In Liberty’s Grid, historian of science and mathematics Amir Alexander relates how this rectilinear grid was imposed and how it has fed into the US consciousness. In Alexander’s telling, the grid is grand, ambitious and uniquely American. It is not only a blank, boundless canvas, but also a causal factor of different aspects of the United States’s trajectory and character. And it is in that latter regard that the author both goes so very wrong yet makes his book so compelling.

Landscapes of reason

“Written not on parchment but into the mountains, valleys, and plains of North America, the Great American Grid embodies an ideal of America as a land of unconstrained freedom and infinite opportunity,” Alexander writes. His central thesis is that, although dividing up much of the United States into a geometric grid might seem like a convenient solution to a difficult problem, when viewed from a historian’s perspective it becomes an expression of American exceptionalism and a means to fulfil the idea of the country as an “empire of liberty”.

The early US leaders saw scientific learning as “a shining beacon showing the way to an enlightened, peaceful, and prosperous future anchored in the rule of reason”. Alexander describes how the US statesman Thomas Jefferson viewed these vast lands objectively and abstractly, as “the embodiment of Newtonian space” — limitless, empty and uniform, without history, hierarchy or tradition. Although these ‘empty’ lands were already occupied by Native Americans, as the author correctly points out, the lands came to be viewed by Jefferson as the perfect site for building “a new society, based on universal principles and the free exercise of reason”.

Alexander portrays Jefferson as “America’s Newton”, a devoted student of science and mathematics, whose intent in developing a gridded landscape was not merely to survey the land but to imbue ideas of equality, freedom and prosperity in the people moving to the lands. The blocks of Manhattan, Alexander describes, were purposefully planned to “serve as the grounds on which industrious and enterprising Americans would pursue their ambitions” and create fortunes for themselves as well as for the young nation.

Two-dimensional view

As a scholar engaged in the technological and societal dimensions of energy and the environment in the United States, I often look to historical precedents for insights. Liberty’s Grid has provoked my thinking on US expansion and the environment. And Alexander’s conceptualization of the lands beyond the 13 original colonies and the struggles of early leaders with how to survey those lands and enable population expansion is a distinctive contribution to the scholarship of US history. Nonetheless, I found many of his arguments to be flawed.

The ‘ghost roads’ driving tropical deforestation

First, portraying Jefferson as “America’s Newton” and using this moniker to assert his motivations does a disservice to both, in my view. Although the physicist Isaac Newton did enter politics briefly as a member of parliament for the University of Cambridge, UK, he was foremost a scientist and mathematician. It was other enlightenment scholars, such as philosopher John Locke, that provided the philosophical foundation for seeing these empty Newtonian spaces as perfect for freedom and democracy.

By contrast, Jefferson was a polymath — and a huge collector of stuff — with his library becoming the foundation for the Library of Congress. He is also a complex character, whose intentions are hard to read. Whereas Jefferson drafted the words “all men are created equal” in the US Declaration of Independence, he owned slaves and probably fathered children with one of them, Sally Hemings. Jefferson encouraged farming, but failed at it himself. He championed austerity, yet returned from his one trip to France with more than 100 rolls of wallpaper. And one probably would not have wanted to bring up the subject of mastodons in his presence lest they wanted a whole night spent debating the likelihood of finding one alive. With there being few historical accounts on why Jefferson chose the grid, some of Alexander’s inferences might be questioned.

Second, I disagree with Alexander’s assertion that the rectilinear grid was never a utilitarian choice. The author proposes that this block structure was adopted in opposition to conventions of land ownership and city planning in Europe. Yet, he also offers evidence that grids have been used to define property lines for centuries. In my opinion, there was no viable alternative to the early leaders.

Are we all doomed? How to cope with the daunting uncertainties of climate change

The areas involved were huge — the Louisiana Purchase alone added more than 200 million hectares to the size of the country. Yet, keeping a straight line going across a whole continent proved extremely difficult, as the book describes nicely. But using different rules for surveying different bits of land would have created even more problems, and opportunities for nefarious practices.

Not surveying the land would have stifled the aspirations of Jefferson and others to settle farther west. It would also have prevented mapping of the third Cartesian axis, the z axis, which is forgotten in Alexander’s story. The first US land survey provided the basis for more-comprehensive mapping, including the century-long topographic survey, begun under geologist John Wesley Powell, that culminated in the US Geological Survey’s National Map in 2001.

Third, Alexander’s repeated statements that the imposition of the gridded survey defines the lands as a uniform and monotonous mathematical space turns the lands into a trackless expanse viewed from above. By lumping together the steep canyons and uplands of the Allegheny Plateau, the flat glacial terrain of the Midwest, the arid lands of the Great Plains and the towering peaks and high alpine parks of Inner Mountains West into the “Great Western Grid”, Alexander dismisses two-thirds of the nation as a mere checkerboard.

Whatever it looks like on Google maps, residents of North Dakota would surely disagree that a square of their badlands is indistinguishable from one on the agricultural plains of Nebraska. Perhaps that’s why Nebraska adopted the slogan “honestly, it’s not for everyone” when enticing the flyover crowd to see the landscape from the ground.

Fourth, Alexander goes too far in linking the grid to societal changes, in my view. He often conflates correlation with causation, inferring that disparate events that occurred while the grid was being deployed or on gridded lands were caused by the grid itself. Industrialization, population growth, racism, immigration, wealth disparities and local geographies are more compelling explanations, in my opinion.

For example, in one passage on the forced relocation of Native Americans, the grid becomes an independent actor as opposed to a tool of humans: Indigenous peoples “proved helpless to stop the juggernaut of the grid as it rolled across the West, transforming a living landscape into a blank mathematical space”. He blames the grid for the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 by extremists, glossing over disputes over local land use and the policies of the US Bureau of Land Management.

Liberty’s Grid closes by asserting that the grid is so invisible and its effects so fundamental that they are easily missed. Alexander argues that geometrical constructs introduced millennia ago shape human attitudes, beliefs and lives, and yet are unseen. And, in that way, the author has made this reviewer see the world in a new light.