Some more thoughts on Zinn
02/25/2010 10:18
First, it tries to be a one-stop shop, for the general reader. As I recall, from first seeing the book when I was a “general reader,” it does a good job of convincing readers that it’s exposing them to the untold stories of the underside of the American Dream. For many, I think being exposed to the idea that there was an underside was a shock. This may be the biggest contribution of the book.
As I look through the book now, I’m surprised how much attribution Zinn does, right in the narrative. I ignored it before, because I didn’t recognize the names of the historians Zinn is quoting and paraphrasing. Reading it again, I’m as interested in the historiography as in the history.
Zinn says he intends his book to be a companion (and corrective) to the standard American history that we all learn in high school. I think he does a pretty good job on two important fronts. He talks about things the “standard” histories pass by, and he challenges the authority of “standard” historians. This is important, because it’s impossible to put everything into a general history survey text (or course), and a lot has to be left by the wayside. But the general reader doesn’t usually have to think about what gets included, and whose voice is ignored or suppressed. It’s the implication Zinn draws that maybe some voices have been suppressed, and not merely ignored, that makes the book memorable and controversial.
I think I read A People’s History before Matt Damon mentioned it in Good Will Hunting, but I imagine a lot of people first read it as a result of that endorsement. I always liked the mental image of a bunch of working class guys from Southey, talking about the Arawak Indians and how the Wobblies sang Joe Hill songs and scared the shit out of the powers that be. When I loaded trucks for a living (and was a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters), I always had fun talking with guys who had half a clue, but were trying to find out more. Critics of Zinn claim that he riles up the ignorant masses, leading people to believe in conspiracy theories and all kinds of bullshit. But really, who gave them the right to say who’s allowed to know more of the truth?
Zinn said throwing your anger and tears back into the past was a waste of time. His point was that there was a connection between then and now, and that by understanding what happened, we could make better choices in the present for the future. Or at least have a better appreciation for the complexity and moral ambiguity of real people. This seems to be the hope we all secretly share, when we get into history. That’s the “why should I care” test HCR keeps bringing us back to in class. There’s something resonant or instructive about anything we get excited enough about to write a book. At least, we hope so.
I’m a little off track, but I’ve been thinking about the subjects of the story I’m writing. I had a moment of panic last week, when I thought these folks weren’t representative enough, and that their story is too full of contingency. I’ve been reading a lot of histories that leave the individual people out, so they can talk about places, forces, and how “The People” respond. I was nervous that my story would seem trivial, if it was about less than the full sweep of rural history, across the entire country from the beginning until now. Seems kind of silly, when I put it that way. But there you have it. So, A People’s History helped me this week, as an illustration that you can talk about regular people, and still tell a big story.
Who was there and for how long?
02/24/2010 19:33
The 1810 census was a mess! I’m still not sure I got it all -- I’m going to have to search on all the missing names, to make sure they really are missing from the town. Three different census recorders took parts of the town I’m looking at, so my data is appended to the forms for three towns surrounding my target. And the machine transcription on these forms was less than perfect, so it’s a good thing I’m familiar with the family names in this town, or I’d be hopelessly lost.
I don’t want to do JUST a population study of any of these places, but with the info readily available these days, I don't see how you can avoid knowing what happened with the people, as part of the due diligence. Persistence, turnover, where people went, who came to replace them...all go to establishing the character of the place.
Yankee exodus
02/14/2010 22:15
Stewart H. Holbrook
The Yankee Exodus: An Account of Migration from New England
1950
Synopsis: Holbrook believes “Yankees were born with an uncommon urge to see, with their own eyes, if the grass on the other side of the mountain really was greener.” (10) He doesn’t ever completely explain why this urge would be universal, rather than be due to particular motivations like religion or economics. Holbrook does not give any thought to people who may have moved more than once (New Englanders who moved to New York, and then moved on to MIchigan or Oregon). Nor does he distinguish between those who left and those who stayed. This might have complicated his argument (in a good way), especially where families sent some members west, while others stayed home in New England. What Holbrook does provide is a heartfelt personal connection to these old Yankees, and a lot of good details it will be fun to track down someday, when I’m looking for topics to research.
High on the list of things to check into someday are names. Along with Ethan Allen, Holbrook singles out General Rufus Putnam, head of the Ohio Company of Associates. He doesn’t give much information about any one topic, and he doesn’t make many judgements. Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham are simply described as “Two Massachusetts speculators” who “For $100,000...bought preemptive rights to a vast tract in the western part” of New York and began the “Genesee Fever.” (17) A passage outlining the founding of Oberlin College is suggestive. The “new Oberlins” (Hillsdale College in Michigan, Ripon, Northfield/Carelton, Grinnell and Tabor in Iowa could probably figure in a story about the intellectual/social history of the Upper Midwest in its early years. (43)
Lucy Stone was a radical I’d never heard of. (45-6) Another surprise was Vermont’s “Year of Two Winters, the infamous Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death, when snow fell a foot deep in June and was of aid in helping thousands of Yankees to make up their minds.” (48) The story of the Mormons (and of other religious fanatics) recurs throughout the book. I didn’t know Smith had his vision of Moroni near Palmyra, or that Brigham Young lived on a farm in Mendon.
There are several references to Ashfielders, but none that are salient to my research. Hiram Alden arrived in Coldwater, Branch County, MI in about 1834, and became a leading man in the new town. James T. Barber settled in Eau Claire and became a leading lumberman. His “timber stands included yellow pine in Idaho, where the town of Barber is named for him.” (124) Ashfield’s Rev. Samuel Parker wrote a journal of his travels in the Pacific northwest, attracting immigrants to the Oregon territory. (227) And Zebulon B. Taylor went to the Tacoma area. (236) These brief mentions of people who may or may not be historically significant are typical of Holbrook’s approach. The book mentions many people, but rarely goes into depth. Abner Kneeland gets about a page and a half of coverage that includes a mention of The Fruits of Philosophy, but not its author. Kneeland’s 1839 emigration to the Des Moines river in Iowa and his utopian community Salubria, like so many other items in The Yankee Exodus, scream for more attention.
Critics: Generally praised the “rich word-pictures” Holbrook provided, and criticized his lack of documented references and analytical rigor, and his filiopietism.
The Yankee Exodus: An Account of Migration from New England
1950
Synopsis: Holbrook believes “Yankees were born with an uncommon urge to see, with their own eyes, if the grass on the other side of the mountain really was greener.” (10) He doesn’t ever completely explain why this urge would be universal, rather than be due to particular motivations like religion or economics. Holbrook does not give any thought to people who may have moved more than once (New Englanders who moved to New York, and then moved on to MIchigan or Oregon). Nor does he distinguish between those who left and those who stayed. This might have complicated his argument (in a good way), especially where families sent some members west, while others stayed home in New England. What Holbrook does provide is a heartfelt personal connection to these old Yankees, and a lot of good details it will be fun to track down someday, when I’m looking for topics to research.
High on the list of things to check into someday are names. Along with Ethan Allen, Holbrook singles out General Rufus Putnam, head of the Ohio Company of Associates. He doesn’t give much information about any one topic, and he doesn’t make many judgements. Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham are simply described as “Two Massachusetts speculators” who “For $100,000...bought preemptive rights to a vast tract in the western part” of New York and began the “Genesee Fever.” (17) A passage outlining the founding of Oberlin College is suggestive. The “new Oberlins” (Hillsdale College in Michigan, Ripon, Northfield/Carelton, Grinnell and Tabor in Iowa could probably figure in a story about the intellectual/social history of the Upper Midwest in its early years. (43)
Lucy Stone was a radical I’d never heard of. (45-6) Another surprise was Vermont’s “Year of Two Winters, the infamous Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death, when snow fell a foot deep in June and was of aid in helping thousands of Yankees to make up their minds.” (48) The story of the Mormons (and of other religious fanatics) recurs throughout the book. I didn’t know Smith had his vision of Moroni near Palmyra, or that Brigham Young lived on a farm in Mendon.
There are several references to Ashfielders, but none that are salient to my research. Hiram Alden arrived in Coldwater, Branch County, MI in about 1834, and became a leading man in the new town. James T. Barber settled in Eau Claire and became a leading lumberman. His “timber stands included yellow pine in Idaho, where the town of Barber is named for him.” (124) Ashfield’s Rev. Samuel Parker wrote a journal of his travels in the Pacific northwest, attracting immigrants to the Oregon territory. (227) And Zebulon B. Taylor went to the Tacoma area. (236) These brief mentions of people who may or may not be historically significant are typical of Holbrook’s approach. The book mentions many people, but rarely goes into depth. Abner Kneeland gets about a page and a half of coverage that includes a mention of The Fruits of Philosophy, but not its author. Kneeland’s 1839 emigration to the Des Moines river in Iowa and his utopian community Salubria, like so many other items in The Yankee Exodus, scream for more attention.
Critics: Generally praised the “rich word-pictures” Holbrook provided, and criticized his lack of documented references and analytical rigor, and his filiopietism.
Land monopoly? Or is it water?
02/09/2010 12:44
Donald J. Pisani
Chapter 5: Land Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century California
Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920
1996
Synopsis: “In no American state,” Pisani says, “was land monopoly more of a perceived problem than in nineteenth-century California.” Pisani reviews Paul Wallace Gates’ indictment of monopolists, and suggests that “the state’s scarcity of water and the nature of irrigation agriculture contributed even more to the concentration of ownership than venal, shortsighted, and carelessly drawn national and state land land laws.” (86)
Bt 1872, “each of 122 individuals and companies owned more than 20,000 acres” of California farmland. (86) “Perhaps even more alarming, 2,298 people owned more than 1,000 acres, and the 620 largest farms and ranchos in California averaged 22,000 acres. By the 1870s, the state’s easily arable land was gone.” (87)
Gates argued that an 1851 law confirming prior Mexican land grants led to the rapid “grabbing” of most of California’s best land (including a big chunk in San Francisco). Pisani agrees that “The Mexican claims were the wellspring of monopoly,” but adds “Congress did little to reserve California’s remaining public land for bona fide settlers... Given the flood of miners, Congress saw no need to provide special incentives.” (88-9) Pisani speculates that the lack of land may have pushed discouraged 49ers into urban life, but they may not have been the best potential farmers. And their overwhelming presence in the state (and its resulting reputation) may have encouraged farmers to look elsewhere. Whatever the reason, “As early as 1860...21 percent of California’s people lived in communities of 2,500 or more. (Ten years after Ohio statehood only 1 percent of its people lived in towns larger than 2,500, and a decade after Illinois entered the union, that state did not contain a single community that large.)” (92) California certainly developed differently than New England and the midwest (from which concerned citizens and historians drew their models of independent, small-farm development).
Between “1868-1873, when about 6,000,000 acres of public land were taken in California, Homestead Act entries covered only 809,621 acres...California railroads acquired most of their 11,500,000-acre subsidy after 1870.” The small number of family farms, relative to ranches and giant wheat producers in the Sacramento valley, set a pattern for California agriculture, “long before the rise of ‘agribusiness’ as we know it,” or maybe as a model for agribusiness elsewhere. (90)
But the land was dry. “Most land in California’s Central Valley and south of the Tehachapi Mountains had little value without water.” (94) The failure of Californians to envision a public domain for water rights ultimately reinforced monopolistic land ownership and factory farming. “In 1875,” Pisani says, competing capitalists bought up so many small water claims that between them they “claimed 3,000 cubic feet per second from the Kern river, about three times more water than the stream had ever carried.” (94) “The Bakersfield Grange bitterly protested to the legislature,” but the capitalists owned the legislature. (95) To realize short-term, personal gains, and to avoid fighting a losing battle, “Many sold their riparian rights to upstream interests, as California courts abandoned the timeless principle that such rights were inalienable and appurtenant to the land.” (97) During the 1870s, opponents of land monopoly hoped that state ownership or control of water would force large landowners to sell their holdings. In eerily modern “red state” terminology, “arguments...against a comprehensive state water system [said] that the new bureaucracy would build up corrupt political ‘rings,’ [and] that government was essentially wasteful and inefficient.” (98)
Chapter 5: Land Monopoly in Nineteenth-Century California
Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850-1920
1996
Synopsis: “In no American state,” Pisani says, “was land monopoly more of a perceived problem than in nineteenth-century California.” Pisani reviews Paul Wallace Gates’ indictment of monopolists, and suggests that “the state’s scarcity of water and the nature of irrigation agriculture contributed even more to the concentration of ownership than venal, shortsighted, and carelessly drawn national and state land land laws.” (86)
Bt 1872, “each of 122 individuals and companies owned more than 20,000 acres” of California farmland. (86) “Perhaps even more alarming, 2,298 people owned more than 1,000 acres, and the 620 largest farms and ranchos in California averaged 22,000 acres. By the 1870s, the state’s easily arable land was gone.” (87)
Gates argued that an 1851 law confirming prior Mexican land grants led to the rapid “grabbing” of most of California’s best land (including a big chunk in San Francisco). Pisani agrees that “The Mexican claims were the wellspring of monopoly,” but adds “Congress did little to reserve California’s remaining public land for bona fide settlers... Given the flood of miners, Congress saw no need to provide special incentives.” (88-9) Pisani speculates that the lack of land may have pushed discouraged 49ers into urban life, but they may not have been the best potential farmers. And their overwhelming presence in the state (and its resulting reputation) may have encouraged farmers to look elsewhere. Whatever the reason, “As early as 1860...21 percent of California’s people lived in communities of 2,500 or more. (Ten years after Ohio statehood only 1 percent of its people lived in towns larger than 2,500, and a decade after Illinois entered the union, that state did not contain a single community that large.)” (92) California certainly developed differently than New England and the midwest (from which concerned citizens and historians drew their models of independent, small-farm development).
Between “1868-1873, when about 6,000,000 acres of public land were taken in California, Homestead Act entries covered only 809,621 acres...California railroads acquired most of their 11,500,000-acre subsidy after 1870.” The small number of family farms, relative to ranches and giant wheat producers in the Sacramento valley, set a pattern for California agriculture, “long before the rise of ‘agribusiness’ as we know it,” or maybe as a model for agribusiness elsewhere. (90)
But the land was dry. “Most land in California’s Central Valley and south of the Tehachapi Mountains had little value without water.” (94) The failure of Californians to envision a public domain for water rights ultimately reinforced monopolistic land ownership and factory farming. “In 1875,” Pisani says, competing capitalists bought up so many small water claims that between them they “claimed 3,000 cubic feet per second from the Kern river, about three times more water than the stream had ever carried.” (94) “The Bakersfield Grange bitterly protested to the legislature,” but the capitalists owned the legislature. (95) To realize short-term, personal gains, and to avoid fighting a losing battle, “Many sold their riparian rights to upstream interests, as California courts abandoned the timeless principle that such rights were inalienable and appurtenant to the land.” (97) During the 1870s, opponents of land monopoly hoped that state ownership or control of water would force large landowners to sell their holdings. In eerily modern “red state” terminology, “arguments...against a comprehensive state water system [said] that the new bureaucracy would build up corrupt political ‘rings,’ [and] that government was essentially wasteful and inefficient.” (98)
It's not obvious until someone says it.
02/02/2010 14:04
Patricia Nelson Limerick
The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
1987
Cross-posted from my rural history reading list.
Synopsis: In a 1989 review article in The Western Historical Quarterly, Limerick said she “wanted to narrow the widening gap between ‘sophisticated, scholarly history’ and ‘readable, simplified, popular history.’ If you cannot express your findings in terms that an intelligent freshman can understand, I have long felt, then you haven’t yet figured out those findings.” (August 1989, 318) She begins the Preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition by saying “This book...has made me happy.” (1) The significance of that statement becomes more clear, as the reader continues, into a book that, for all its insights and contributions, is filled with heavy irony and a general air of accusation.
This tone may have been inevitable. Limerick wrote in 1987, so she had not only the heroic, Turnerian history of the west to debunk, but the even more wildly out-of-touch Reagan western myth. The attack she mounts on the normal view of the west is split between history and more current events; Limerick advocates for the continuity of western history to the present, and for the use of current newspapers as “primary sources” for that current view. Since most of these issues were particularly intense in the 1970s and 1980s, the reader needs to work a little, to bring them up to date.
But many of the points Limerick makes are suggestive, and have inspired others to expand on them. First is the idea that “the sharp and honest term ‘conquest’” enhances our understanding of the morally ambivalent nature of western expansion. As one of the 1989 panelists remarked, it’s not only the South that Americans need to feel guilty about.
Limerick begins by quoting Turner’s essay on history (not “The Significance of the Frontier”): “The aim of history, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past...the historian strives to show the present to itself by revealing its origin from the past.” (17) This Eliot-esque statement connects historical study with both the present and the public, and shows Turner, like the west itself, was complicated and multidimensional. On the subject of the frontier thesis, Limerick says (paraphrasing Lamar) that it created an artificial barrier between “America’s rural past and its urban-industrial present.” (22) It was so widely adopted, she suggests, because the west had “no watershed comparable to the Revolution or the Civil War.” But it was inherently inaccurate and oversimplified. “One could easily argue,” for example, “that a sudden concentration of population marks the opening stage [of the frontier] and that a population lowered through...the departure of people from a used-up mining region marks the end of the frontier and its opportunities.” Even that complication may not be enough, since many areas go through cycles of growth, decline and regrowth, as conditions, technologies, and human goals change. On a more concrete level, Limerick points out the very important point that in 1890, when the frontier was declared closed, “one-half of the land remained federal property.” (23) She suggests that “If it is difficult for Americans to imagine that an economy might be stable and also healthy,” their addiction to growth may be related to the frontier myth, with its prospect of endless western opportunity. (28) If so, this is doubly ironic, because Turner’s whole point was that the frontier had closed, and America was going to need to find a new way to uphold its individualist, democratic values.
But, as Limerick says, “humans live in a world in which mental reality does not have to submit to narrow tests of accuracy.” Historians should be interested, she says, in not only what happened, via “the keepers of written records,” but in what people believe, via “the tellers of tales.” (35) The discrepancy Limerick is most interested in, is the “idea of innocence.” People moved west, she says, for “improvement and opportunity, not injury to others.” (36) But of course, many others were injured in the process. Limerick highlights the contradictions: “Squatters defied the boundaries of Indian territory and then were aggrieved to find themselves harassed and attacked by Indians.” They “felt betrayed when the rains proved inadequate...Contrary to all of the West’s associations with self-reliance and individual responsibility,” she says, “misfortune has usually caused white Westerners to cast themselves in the role of the innocent victim.” (42) Because the national government was an ongoing player in Western affairs, Limerick says government became a favorite scapegoat. (44) She finds the origins of the “injured innocent” attitude, in the fact that “Having practically destroyed the aboriginal population and enslaved the Africans...the white inhabitants of English America began to conceive of themselves as the victims, not the agents, of Old World Colonialism.” (quoting Carole Shammas, 48)
The generalizations are broad. It’s quite possible to imagine subgroups in both the colonial and western example, who did not necessarily share the same degree of “guilt” as the “agents” mentioned. The rest of the book discusses many of these groups, and the increasing division of wealth and power in the developing west. “‘Power always follows property,’ John Adams said bluntly.” (58) In the west, “The advantage always accrued to the wealthy man of influence, regardless of what the law said.” (quoting Malcolm Rohrbough, 61) A case in point, Limerick says, is William Stewart’s 1866 Mining Law, which established the groundrules for massive accumulation of patent claims. “A great deal of Western property right,” she says, “rested on this narrow margin of timing.” (67) While “Speculation is extremely disillusioning if you are trying to hold onto the illusion that agriculture and commerce are significantly different ways of life,” it might be more accurate to highlight the ways property laws were devised to enable accumulation of vast tracts under the ownership of individuals and corporations.
The contrast between the myth of private enterprise and the reality of federally subsidized railroading, mining, and western state development continues throughout western history. “Western settlers were so abundantly supplied with slogans and democratic formulas,” Limerick says, “that putting our trust in their recorded words alone would be misleading.” (83) The “squatter government” of Sioux Falls turns out to be “agents of a land company, financed and organized by Minnesota Democrats.” (84) States like Wyoming and Colorado received subsidies far exceeding what their taxpayers “sent to a government...considered meddlesome and constitutionally threatening.” (87) And the west regularly got more than its share: “Per capita expenditures of federal agencies in Montana from 1933 to 1939...were $710, while they were only $143 in North Carolina.” (88)
“Despite the promises of the Homestead Act,” Limerick says, “much good land was already in possession of railroads and states, and ‘purchase continued to be the most usual means to obtain a farm after 1865.’” (quoting Everett Dick, 125) The cost of outfitting a farm with “a house, draft animals, wagon, plow, well, fencing, and seed grain could be as much as $1,000,” putting homesteading out of reach to many eastern wage-earners. (125) When grasshoppers wiped out Minnesota farms, governor John Pillsbury argued against state aid. (127-8) One wonders how much state aid, in the form of subsidized railroads, government flour contracts, and the legal fiction of corporate rights, went into the building of Pillsbury’s flour empire?
The “split character” of the farmers’ social position, halfway between workers and businessmen, “curtailed the radicalism of their protests.” (129) This seems like a failure of imagination on the part of radicals, or perhaps a victory for their opponents. Limerick says “The economy of scale required by certain kinds of irrigation confirmed the pattern” of agribusiness. (130) But the assumption that no other arrangement of resource use was possible is anachronistic and avoids confronting the forces that created the victory of global economic concentration over community and regional self-sufficiency. Limerick agrees with Williams that “attribut[ing] ideal values to rural life that reality cannot match” is as old as history, but it would still be useful to critically examine how “rural nostalgia” has been mobilized as a propaganda tool, from Jefferson to the present. (131)
The rest of the book tells the story of the Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and Indian presence in western history, and of the government’s continuing presence, especially in conservation in the era of Pinchot and Roosevelt. Limerick concludes on a hopeful note, suggesting that a closer look at the complex history of the west will help solve some of America’s ongoing problems.
The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
1987
Cross-posted from my rural history reading list.
Synopsis: In a 1989 review article in The Western Historical Quarterly, Limerick said she “wanted to narrow the widening gap between ‘sophisticated, scholarly history’ and ‘readable, simplified, popular history.’ If you cannot express your findings in terms that an intelligent freshman can understand, I have long felt, then you haven’t yet figured out those findings.” (August 1989, 318) She begins the Preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition by saying “This book...has made me happy.” (1) The significance of that statement becomes more clear, as the reader continues, into a book that, for all its insights and contributions, is filled with heavy irony and a general air of accusation.
This tone may have been inevitable. Limerick wrote in 1987, so she had not only the heroic, Turnerian history of the west to debunk, but the even more wildly out-of-touch Reagan western myth. The attack she mounts on the normal view of the west is split between history and more current events; Limerick advocates for the continuity of western history to the present, and for the use of current newspapers as “primary sources” for that current view. Since most of these issues were particularly intense in the 1970s and 1980s, the reader needs to work a little, to bring them up to date.
But many of the points Limerick makes are suggestive, and have inspired others to expand on them. First is the idea that “the sharp and honest term ‘conquest’” enhances our understanding of the morally ambivalent nature of western expansion. As one of the 1989 panelists remarked, it’s not only the South that Americans need to feel guilty about.
Limerick begins by quoting Turner’s essay on history (not “The Significance of the Frontier”): “The aim of history, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past...the historian strives to show the present to itself by revealing its origin from the past.” (17) This Eliot-esque statement connects historical study with both the present and the public, and shows Turner, like the west itself, was complicated and multidimensional. On the subject of the frontier thesis, Limerick says (paraphrasing Lamar) that it created an artificial barrier between “America’s rural past and its urban-industrial present.” (22) It was so widely adopted, she suggests, because the west had “no watershed comparable to the Revolution or the Civil War.” But it was inherently inaccurate and oversimplified. “One could easily argue,” for example, “that a sudden concentration of population marks the opening stage [of the frontier] and that a population lowered through...the departure of people from a used-up mining region marks the end of the frontier and its opportunities.” Even that complication may not be enough, since many areas go through cycles of growth, decline and regrowth, as conditions, technologies, and human goals change. On a more concrete level, Limerick points out the very important point that in 1890, when the frontier was declared closed, “one-half of the land remained federal property.” (23) She suggests that “If it is difficult for Americans to imagine that an economy might be stable and also healthy,” their addiction to growth may be related to the frontier myth, with its prospect of endless western opportunity. (28) If so, this is doubly ironic, because Turner’s whole point was that the frontier had closed, and America was going to need to find a new way to uphold its individualist, democratic values.
But, as Limerick says, “humans live in a world in which mental reality does not have to submit to narrow tests of accuracy.” Historians should be interested, she says, in not only what happened, via “the keepers of written records,” but in what people believe, via “the tellers of tales.” (35) The discrepancy Limerick is most interested in, is the “idea of innocence.” People moved west, she says, for “improvement and opportunity, not injury to others.” (36) But of course, many others were injured in the process. Limerick highlights the contradictions: “Squatters defied the boundaries of Indian territory and then were aggrieved to find themselves harassed and attacked by Indians.” They “felt betrayed when the rains proved inadequate...Contrary to all of the West’s associations with self-reliance and individual responsibility,” she says, “misfortune has usually caused white Westerners to cast themselves in the role of the innocent victim.” (42) Because the national government was an ongoing player in Western affairs, Limerick says government became a favorite scapegoat. (44) She finds the origins of the “injured innocent” attitude, in the fact that “Having practically destroyed the aboriginal population and enslaved the Africans...the white inhabitants of English America began to conceive of themselves as the victims, not the agents, of Old World Colonialism.” (quoting Carole Shammas, 48)
The generalizations are broad. It’s quite possible to imagine subgroups in both the colonial and western example, who did not necessarily share the same degree of “guilt” as the “agents” mentioned. The rest of the book discusses many of these groups, and the increasing division of wealth and power in the developing west. “‘Power always follows property,’ John Adams said bluntly.” (58) In the west, “The advantage always accrued to the wealthy man of influence, regardless of what the law said.” (quoting Malcolm Rohrbough, 61) A case in point, Limerick says, is William Stewart’s 1866 Mining Law, which established the groundrules for massive accumulation of patent claims. “A great deal of Western property right,” she says, “rested on this narrow margin of timing.” (67) While “Speculation is extremely disillusioning if you are trying to hold onto the illusion that agriculture and commerce are significantly different ways of life,” it might be more accurate to highlight the ways property laws were devised to enable accumulation of vast tracts under the ownership of individuals and corporations.
The contrast between the myth of private enterprise and the reality of federally subsidized railroading, mining, and western state development continues throughout western history. “Western settlers were so abundantly supplied with slogans and democratic formulas,” Limerick says, “that putting our trust in their recorded words alone would be misleading.” (83) The “squatter government” of Sioux Falls turns out to be “agents of a land company, financed and organized by Minnesota Democrats.” (84) States like Wyoming and Colorado received subsidies far exceeding what their taxpayers “sent to a government...considered meddlesome and constitutionally threatening.” (87) And the west regularly got more than its share: “Per capita expenditures of federal agencies in Montana from 1933 to 1939...were $710, while they were only $143 in North Carolina.” (88)
“Despite the promises of the Homestead Act,” Limerick says, “much good land was already in possession of railroads and states, and ‘purchase continued to be the most usual means to obtain a farm after 1865.’” (quoting Everett Dick, 125) The cost of outfitting a farm with “a house, draft animals, wagon, plow, well, fencing, and seed grain could be as much as $1,000,” putting homesteading out of reach to many eastern wage-earners. (125) When grasshoppers wiped out Minnesota farms, governor John Pillsbury argued against state aid. (127-8) One wonders how much state aid, in the form of subsidized railroads, government flour contracts, and the legal fiction of corporate rights, went into the building of Pillsbury’s flour empire?
The “split character” of the farmers’ social position, halfway between workers and businessmen, “curtailed the radicalism of their protests.” (129) This seems like a failure of imagination on the part of radicals, or perhaps a victory for their opponents. Limerick says “The economy of scale required by certain kinds of irrigation confirmed the pattern” of agribusiness. (130) But the assumption that no other arrangement of resource use was possible is anachronistic and avoids confronting the forces that created the victory of global economic concentration over community and regional self-sufficiency. Limerick agrees with Williams that “attribut[ing] ideal values to rural life that reality cannot match” is as old as history, but it would still be useful to critically examine how “rural nostalgia” has been mobilized as a propaganda tool, from Jefferson to the present. (131)
The rest of the book tells the story of the Chinese, Japanese, Mexican and Indian presence in western history, and of the government’s continuing presence, especially in conservation in the era of Pinchot and Roosevelt. Limerick concludes on a hopeful note, suggesting that a closer look at the complex history of the west will help solve some of America’s ongoing problems.
