Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West

3. Roll On, Columbia (Valley Authority)

76 chapter three Roll On, Columbia (Valley Authority) Any nation first avails itself of its geography, then at last casts its geography aside; after that, politics. emerson hough, “the settlement of the west” (1901) Caroline Henderson’s farmhouse in Texas County, Oklahoma, sat close to ground zero of the Dust Bowl. From there she surveyed the American Dream in a series of nationally published letters during the mid-1930s. Henderson was the very type of the hardy pioneer stock rhapsodized over by frontier apologists. A native Iowan and Mount Holyoke graduate, she had arrived alone in 1907 out at the far end of No Man’s Land to take up her homestead, and there she remained until her death in 1966. Thus she was believable when she wrote of her deep ties to the land in a 1935 letter addressed to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. “For twenty-seven years this little spot on the vast expanse of the great plains has been the center of all our thought and hope and effort,” she began. “And marvelous are the changes that we have seen and in which we have participated.” Fields stretched where formerly buffalo grass grew, modern homes had replaced dugouts, highways had been laid over trails, and tractors did the work of horse teams. But now as she sat in the midst of the worst environmental catastrophe in US history, “when for hours at a time we cannot see the windmill fifty feet from the kitchen door” because of the swirling dust, Henderson wrote of “our daily physical torture, confusion of mind, gradual wearing down of courage,” such that all the region’s former progress seemed “like a vanishing dream.”1 If the nationalist West of previous decades had embodied the myths of American expansionism, egalitarianism, and individualism, the West of the “Dirty Thirties” became a territory of national anxiety and remorse, with the Great Plains the most visible disaster zone. A map correlating the Roll On, Columbia (Valley Authority) • 77 counties receiving the most federal relief payments with those experiencing “intense drought distress” showed two dark subregional lobes in the northern and southern Plains. During the worst storms, dust from the region blew over the Eastern Seaboard, making the Dust Bowl much more than a faraway event seen on newsreels. As measures for relief and rehabilitation were undertaken by the federal government, the West also beFigure 4 The West as America’s disaster zone. Federal Aid per Capita in the Drought Area 1933–1936, from Areas of Intense Drought Distress, 1930–1936, by Francis D. Cronin and Howard W. Beers, Division of Social Research, Works Progress Administration, 1937. 78 • Hell of a Vision came a stage on which a profound ideological drama played itself out, as overlapping political and economic crises deepened the cultural crisis already manifested in the 1920s: “new” or New Deal liberalism arising to challenge the orthodoxies of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism (or “conservatism,” as it was to be known). Amid this “confusion of mind” in which different political possibilities came and went, regionalism emerged as a tantalizing alternative to both the centralized welfare state and unfettered capitalism—not to mention the once unthinkable ideologies now lurking at the extremes, communism and fascism. The dominant strain of western regionalism exposed social inequalities and environmental degradation in the West and sought more radical forms of New Deal programs, such as tribal governments, rural resettlement, soil conservation, and river basin planning authorities. Many western regionalists literally went to work for the New Deal, and regionalist ideas could be found in many New Deal publications, if not always in actual regulations or legislation. Franklin Roosevelt himself (while governor of New York State) spoke at a national conference on regionalism convened at the University of Virginia in 1931, where he discussed his strong agrarian inclinations and support for planning. This synergy with the New Deal was not reciprocated by all western regionalists, some of whom became virulently anti–New Deal and attempted to revivify frontier-inspired localism and individualism as the best solution to the Depression. Overall, Caroline Henderson, who “did not vote for the New Deal and certainly not for the old one,” captured well the unsettling sense of ferment and yearning for direction that marked the 1930s. As she acknowledged , there were fears of “regimentation” and “loss of liberty” with the advent of government relief programs, but she declared, “No regimentation is more...