Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America

UCLA math historian Alexander (Proof!) sets forth an enthralling exploration of the intellectual battles and ideological motives that led much of America to be arranged along precise mathematical grids. Tracing the origins of the “graph-paper landscape” that defines so much of the U.S. today, from New York City’s tight streets to Iowa’s sprawling but still perfectly perpendicular county roads, Alexander explains how the federal Land Ordinance of 1785, which established that townships would be six by six miles square, was inspired by Enlightenment-era mathematics. René Descartes was the first to propose “that the space of the universe is uniform [and] indefinitely extended,” and Isaac Newton introduced the idea of a vacuum, “an empty space” that “stood for the possibility and opportunity to create a new world however one wished.” These theories formed the ideological background for Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an “Empire of Liberty,” which Alexander contends “reduced the space of an entire continent... into a pure abstraction,” resulting in a theoretically “empty, uniform, limitless, space—a blank slate” for American settlers. Grid promoters, like New York City’s Gouverneur Morris, celebrated its practical advantages, while “anti-grid activists” like Walt Whitman rejected the city’s gridded future, lamenting “our perpetual dead flat.” Alexander’s entertaining survey of this long-forgotten but once heated debate probes at the weird ways science and politics intersect. Readers will be utterly engrossed. (May)