Domesticating the West: The Re-Creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class (review)

Domesticating the West unfortunately offers little of use to those interested in interdisciplinary history. The book is in many ways a relentlessly old-fashioned narrative biography of an influential couple in late nineteenth-century eastern Washington, sprinkled with a few problematical fragments of analysis about the era's middle class.

Jackson's discovery of the book's two protagonists holds significant promise. Yet the story of their lives does not come close to fulfilling the promise of the book's subtitle. Thomas and Elizabeth Tannatt became civic leaders in post-frontier eastern Washington; Thomas even served as mayor of Walla Walla. Using Elizabeth's informative journal and a substantial cache of letters as her source foundation, Jackson recreates the Tannatts' lives, from Thomas' military service in the Civil War and his career as a mid-echelon corporate agent for western railroads to Elizabeth's involvement in movements for temperance and historical commemoration. Jackson narrates their story well, although with a curious insularity. She clearly cares so much about her primary characters that she rarely pays any attention to issues that do not directly involve them.

Certain parts of the Tannatts' lives hold general interest, but they can be worthy of sustained attention from scholars only if they are representative of larger social forces or help to rethink important scholarly questions. Jackson claims that the Tannatts "provided the perfect representation of members of the nineteenth-century middle class" (xi). Jackson, however, never tries to sustain such a thesis, largely because it cannot be sustained: No "perfect" icon of any group as large and varied as the nineteenth-century American middle class could possibly have existed. Furthermore, Jackson is dismissive of recent scholarly debates about the definition, composition, and qualities of the middle class. In her prologue, she gestures at engaging some of the scholars who have tried to problematize the imprecise category/concept of "the middle class." Eventually, however, she waves this issue out of bounds by declaring—without any evidence at all—that "the questions, concerns, and indecisions that continue to plague contemporary historians and researchers did not seem to trouble members of the nineteenth-century middle class at all. These individual knew precisely who they were." (4) Jackson maintains that the Tannatts themselves "knew they belonged to the middle class," but she once more fails to provide any evidence that they ever even thought about, much less articulated, such a self-identification (4).

Alas, Jackson's interest in broader analytical issues relating to the middle class fades away almost completely in the main part of the narrative, apart from occasional statements similar to those quoted above, or an even more suspect comment that "dignity, modesty, and high moral character . . . set middle-class post-Civil War immigrants apart from the mass of the great middle class" (127). In any case, the question arises, Were these people even "middle class" at all? Although pigeonholing individuals into class (or other) categories often proves unhelpful in our postmodern age, it is difficult not to see the Tannatts—whose wealth and power allowed them substantial access to national business leaders—as members of a genuine elite, albeit a regional one.