Review, Michael Cassity, Defending a Way of Life: An American Community in the Nineteenth Century (State University of New York Press, 1989)

Missouri Historical Review, July 1991

Hindsight allows historians of industrialization to assume an air of condescension toward opponents of the process. Because industrialization, and the social and cultural changes it produced, eventually triumphed, many historians view the transformation as inevitable and dismiss resistance to it as parochial and reactionary. In this study of Pettis County, Missouri, in the nineteenth century, Michael Cassity focuses on opponents of the new order and portrays their ideology as a creative, dynamic attempt to protect the preindustrial value of community.

Pettis County’s isolation from the burgeoning market of the early nineteenth century proved to be its major attraction for many settlers. Cassity cites General David Thomson as the best example because, unlike many others, he had alternatives. Already a successful planter in Kentucky, when he moved to Pettis County in 1833, Thomson disliked the growing commercialization of his life in Kentucky and, in moving to Missouri, sought escape from the economy and culture of the market.

Early settlers of Pettis County created a culture based on this determination to avoid the market. Economically, production was for use. Socially, mutual obligations, not individual rights, received emphasis. In fact, Cassity says, the “supreme accomplishment” of the society proved to be its ability to suppress the tension between the individual and the community. The politics of the society remained paternalistic, creating “an equilibrium between the gentry and the people.”

The transformation of Pettis County began in the 1850s and accelerated during and immediately after the Civil War. Led by George R. Smith, Thomson’s son-in-law, a business class developed which sought to end the county’s isolation by bringing in the railroad. Rebuffed by the citizens of Georgetown, the county seat, Smith created Sedalia, which developed as a railroad town. The presence of Union troops during the war, the commercial growth it spawned, and the restriction of the franchise during and after the war proved tremendous boons to the growth of Sedalia, which became the county seat in 1864. The railroad destroyed the isolation of Pettis County and introduced an industrial form of work organization. Cassity separately discusses the effects of the new market economy on workers, farmers, and women.

The author effectively captures the varied, often contradictory, ways people resisted the new industrial order, which broke down the notion of community based on mutual obligations and replaced it with one built on market relations. But the book suffers from poor organization, which causes Cassity to repeat himself, for instance, giving two separate play-by-play accounts of railroad workers’ strikes in 1885 and 1886. And though the book largely avoids the cloying romanticization of preindustrial culture that has marred some similar works, Cassity appears uncomfortable with the implications of his own study. Arguing that the triumph of market society was not complete, he concludes that whenever people joined together on the basis of a shared vision of community they, in fact, created that community. But, as this book shows, such resistance took place within the increasingly narrow parameters allowed by the new market capitalist system.