Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life

by William R. Leach

In Country of Exiles , William Leach, whose Land of Desire was a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the troubling effects of our national love affair with mobility.  He shows us how the impulse to pull up stakes and find a new frontier has always battled with the need to put down roots, and how a new cosmopolitanism has seized our national identity.

Leach takes us across a featureless America, where strip malls homogenize a once varied and majestic landscape, and where casinos displace the Native American spiritual connection to the land. He shows us a culture where everyone, from CEOs to office temps, abandons the notion of company loyalty, and where rootless academics posit a world without borders.  With compelling vision and insight, Leach reveals the profound but often hidden impact of America's disintegrating sense of place on our national and individual psyche.

Genres: History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

William R. Leach is a professor of history at Columbia University. His books include Butterfly People, Country of Exiles: The Destruction of Place in American Life, and Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, which was a National Book Award finalist.

Reviews

[Andrew Figueiredo · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this maybe-lowkey alarmist communitarian piece, Leach makes some really good points but also a few real headscratchers. The book's premise is that American society has lost its notion of a sense of place through market, cultural, and academic forces, leaving it vulnerable to an expanding state and a sense of loss. This claim is well supported and visible in the world around us. For example, when Leach mentioned how the left-wing buying into these ideas of mobility furthers market fundamentalism, I found myself writing "YES" in the margin. This is the core of neoliberalism, and Leach hit the nail on the had. He ties together seemingly diverse ideas to support his central claim, discussing the roles played by intermodal transportation for example but also hitting the gig economy (which has become 110x worse in the 20 years since he wrote "Country of Exiles"). This, I agree with. American consumerist modernity encourages a sense of flexibility that makes us discard our roots. It made me think about other authors like Bauman (whose notion of liquid modernity is particularly applicable) and Lasch, who Leach dedicates this book to. His focus on how important a sense of place is is also something worth considering, particularly because the trends he talked about have only become more entrenched. This is thus an important argument to engage with, and one that merits more discussion, especially in light of populism. I would recommend reading this around the same time as one reads "Working Class Heroes"; it provides a good anecdotal example of how fearing the loss of this sense of place can fuel exclusionary populist sentiment.

Leach also explores how a myopic focus on mobility created new areas of semi-sovereignty represented by large seaports, reservation casinos, and universities. This argument seems a little less directly connected, but remains interesting. I agree that seaports and universities have become hubs for the global, isolated in many ways from the communities around them. However, his claims that native-run casinos undermine some sovereignties while elevating others is a bit confusing and shows a misunderstanding of government-indigenous relations in America. Nonetheless, the idea that globalization and its ideologies create new middle grounds of sovereignty is an evolution of how we look at place.

That's not the head-scratcher. Towards the end of the book, Leach explores how academia destroys older conceptions of place. Sure, the diaspora studies/fluid cosmopolitan approaches do so. But then he argues that multiculturalism scholarship also does so because of a notion of culture more tied to an "essence" than place. I don't know that that's true--in fact, the research I have done on my own community (Portuguese in Montreal) seems to serve as a strong counterexample. In many places, multiculturalism creates a sense of local importance within the community. I think the weakest argument, though, is that the impulse to cross boundaries and unmake place-rootedness will lead to more sexual assault. I was shocked to read this claim; modernity in a lot of ways does create a culture of rape, but this issue has been around for a long time, and to claim that it's an offshoot of modernity is false. I agree that postmodern ideologies might undermine norms and rules, but Leach's claim here is ridiculous. Finally, I remain unconvinced that the seeking of a frontier inherently damages "collective life". Leach doesn't properly deal with the idea that America has always been obsessed with the frontier (Manifest Destiny, breaking the Proclamation of 1763, etc) by treating this as a solely modern phenomenon.

So, while I'm convinced that the overall thrust of Leach's argument is correct, and has been borne out, some of his ancillary arguments are either weakly supported or really off the mark. This detracts from an otherwise readable, enjoyable piece about the damage suffered when we lose a sense of place.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even when William Leach isn't flying his mind at peak levels, he's still a fascinating thinker. And this admittedly muddled but fascinating volume does make a good faith effort to examine the wanderlust mentality among Americans. It remains quite nutty that even with a good chunk of our continental space filled in and even with most of us living in cities, we still possess a need to "start over." Leach ties this in with the immigrant experience, pointing out correctly that numerous studies show that immigrants contribute richly and beneficially to our economy and our way of life. He does get a little side tracked when he starts examines why rich white men need to carve out space given this state of affairs. But this volume remains a solid intellectual panorama of where we were at in the late 1990s.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book to read if you are not paying attention to how the vast majority of Americans are living in late 20th-century early 21stcentury America. I read it years ago, after graduate school when these kinds of things were really important to me. I felt it did matter and I resented the fact that I could be driving around Boston, or Atlanta, or Minneapolis or Seattle - it was all the same. Don't get me wrong, those place do look different geographically, but looking at the minutia of our daily lives those places are interchangeable with each other. This particular situation we find ourselves in has nothing to do with terrorism, or the financial meltdown or climate change for that matter, but perhaps is a contributing factor to all of those maladies. It is about a world without borders that has lost any connection to a place. Is that home? Is that your town? Your city? It is a reflection of how development has been allowed to occur in the US, and to some degree elsewhere in our over-riding desire to have it all and more on top of that. We live in places that really don't matter, because they look like any place else that really does not matter, and when it gets to bad....we move on. We have lost our connection not only to place but to each other in no small way that has profound impacts on how we choose to live. It takes the whole world to do anything of importance since we have moved beyond the local to the global, even though there is that saying, what is it? Oh yes, think globally, act locally. This book was written in 1999. Things have probably only gotten worse.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Las Vegas is a supremely democratic city, made so by money. The casinos exclude no one; the whole spectrum of human life walks Las Vegas Boulevard -- the elderly, children, the crippled, all races, immigrants and tourists from every country, anyone who can pay their airfare to get into the city. That is why the replica of the Statue of Liberty, however absurd it may seem on first sight, belongs in this place." (112)

"But there can be no culture build under unstable protean conditions, mainly at the borders, or by strangers. Any culture that hopes to endure, to say nothing of thrive, must be formed and sustained at the centers not at the edges. America cannot be reimagined out of the materials spawned by geographical frontiers and urban edges, but cause it is at those very edges and frontiers where the world's pimps and con artists congregate and where the market forces are most Darwinian, most virulent, and most subversive to the making of any kind of decent, collective life." (176-7)

"People strong in their sense of place possess the conviction to decide how they will live; at the same time, they are often more able and willing to include others because they have little or nothing to fear from outsiders or foreigners. It is only fragile boundaries -- or the feeling that people have no control over their own world -- that produces the worst forms of exclusionism, that east away at citizenship, and that leads, finally, to reliance on centralized state power to manage, dictate, order, or forbid." (180)

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of the necessity of a sense of place in human existence. I just wish that the author had gone beyond the general in his descriptions of the implications of a loss of that sense.

[Katy Bloom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel the description does a wonderful job at captivating the content of this book. I do, however, have to wonder how Leach would interpret events and attitudes in the last decade and a half since this book was published (I believe that was in '99). I would love to read an update.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some reason I expected a more abstract, philosophical piece but was pleasantly surprised to find Leach wrote a very deep structural analysis to support his idea. Definitely an engrossing read.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

While very well written and researched, I found it difficult to fully grasp what point Leach was trying to make. He certainly despises much about how we have lost a sense of place in America, but offers very little in terms of solutions or positive alternatives. I found his arguments for the need for a sense of place unsatisfying, and he didn't address much of the positives of globalization and other effects he describes.

Overall I appreciated the history lesson, but could have done without the pessimism and judgement if he wasn't going to go all the way with his argument.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book could/should have been much more interesting than it was. i thought that many of the subjects the author chose to focus on in making his arguments for the loss of "sense of place" in america were a little...random? unrelated?...namely indian casinos and multicultural academia, and this choice led to some mildly offensive arguments for a point i think could have been made much more effectively through other means. culturally divers universities lead to homogenization and thus the death of connection to place? um?
there were occasional passages that i thought were quite well done, but in general, i did a lot of skimming. especially through the economic analyses of port cities as...oh, i don't even know what the point of that was...

[Zachariah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was about the decline of our attachment to place. Americans more and more have no sense of home. The author sees this as a bad thing - and I suppose it generally is. He blames intermodalism, Wal-Mart, Las Vegas, among other things.

The author may have had some good points in there, but he lost credibility with me by citing a few things that weren't true.

The biggest problem I had with the book was not its content, but the fact that it was so bland. Dont' read it unless you have to.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this one on a business trip two years ago and when I started reading it, I was in the middle of a chapter about how H-1B visas affect the workforce (basically, different political perspectives about whether what I do all day for a living is good for capitalism or results in giving more-experienced workers less job security). Parts were interesting. Parts about the ways that American society developed.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflections from a historian on how some seemingly unrelated American institutions are all symptoms of a larger culture of globalized rootlessness. The author shows the dark side of cosmopolitanism, usually described as both pro-business and pro-human rights among all the elites in America. Like the film Up in the Air, this is a good tonic for a frequent flyer who is looking to build roots on the ground.

[Patrick]

Recently acquired at the Friends of the Library bookstore for the Laguna Niguel, CA public library.

[Hubert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the type of book that you would typically learn a lot from, but has good information and tidbits related to displacement issues within America.

[Emmett · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author seemed to want to dump everything he'd read into the book, constantly quoting other works and writers. That made it a bit of a tedious read. But, generally a great book.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

About our contemporary relationship to place