Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West

Preface

xi Preface Regionalism has been an important part of my mental landscape since I moved back East to attend graduate school over twenty-five years ago. I first discovered it as a concept at Brown University under the mentorship of the late John L. Thomas, to whom this book is dedicated. He is ultimately responsible for this book and many others that his students have written about the power of place and what he called the “adversary tradition ” in American history.1 In an earlier book, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945, I depicted western regionalism as one segment of a broader engagement with region that occurred in response to the profound economic and political crises of the interwar years. Southern, midwestern , and New England artists and intellectuals joined with their western counterparts to explore the possibilities of an ideology of regionalism that might restructure American society along more decentralized, pluralistic , and symbiotic lines. The present book is focused more fully on western regionalism, but with an eye to similar developments elsewhere in America and abroad. It has a larger temporal canvas than my previous work, covering the “modern West,” which I define as the late 1800s to the early 2000s. Regionalism has waxed and waned in the West during this period, revealing a greater ideological variety than was apparent in the interwar years, both radical and conservative. This book is also more freewheeling in its definition of culture than Revolt of the Provinces, finding western regional identity and consciousness in evidence across a wide spectrum of expression, including popular magazine articles, government xii • Preface reports, letters, movies, pamphlets, novels, advertisements, paintings, maps, speeches, histories, scientific papers, and sculptures, among others. This book makes no attempt to fix definite boundaries on the West, but tries to show the wide range of answers to that question that have arisen over the years. As students of regionalism have long realized, the region is too ambiguous a concept to provide any final answers about what places are and are not “western.” It would be disingenuous of me, however, not to disclose that I have had a working definition of the West to guide the scope of my research. This is a legitimate use of the region concept, which if nothing else is a tool to organize thought. My definition coincides with one offered several years ago in a major government report, Water in the West: Challenge for the Next Century (1998): “the West is the 17 coterminous states located on and westward of the 100th meridian.”2 This definition differs from, say, the one guiding the coverage of High Country News, a contemporary western magazine that I admire, which excludes the central tier of Plains states from the Dakotas southward to Texas—despite the fact that there is plenty of “high country” in South Dakota’s Black Hills and Texas’s Guadalupe Mountains. But you see how these arguments can get started. My seventeen-state definition roughly outlines in its entirety what I call the nationalist West, an amorphous region that has served as a kind of projection screen for American national identity, yearnings, and ideals. It also encompasses in the same space a much more diverse collection of subregions of every shape and size that I label the localist West. The localist West might be as large as the Columbia River basin or as small as a single pasture; some of its subregions might overlap into Iowa or Missouri, and some into Mexico or Canada. These places were all “the West” for someone . My own portion of the West lies in central Oklahoma, where my family has been farming and ranching for most of the period covered by this book. Indeed, my mother and brothers still operate the cattle ranch that my father established fifty years ago in metropolitan Oklahoma County, where Oklahoma City sprawls. Perhaps growing up on this rural-urban interface explains why regionalism has resonated with me for so long. I gratefully acknowledge the advice and support of David Wrobel and Richard Etulain, two outstanding historians of the West and editors of the Modern American West series for the University of Arizona Press. Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Sarah, a fellow Brown-trained historian and Jack Thomas student, who has always been my best critic. hell of a vision ...