The Geography of Hope Revisited

William G. Robbins and James C. Foster, eds. Land in the American West: Private Claims and the Common Good. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. xi + 222 pp. Index. $20.00.

John L. Thomas. A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land. New York: Routledge, 2000. 256 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, sources, and index. $22.00.

It is fair to say that neither Bernard DeVoto nor Wallace Stegner is a household name in America's current educational culture. A few years ago, the undergraduates to whom I had assigned DeVoto's memorable harangue "The West: A Plundered Province," in which he calls Easterners "interlocking pilfering agencies," kept calling him "Danny DeVito," the name of the popular actor whose irreverence and intelligence at least suited the malapropism. And Wallace Stegner, whose novels are still read in book groups and whose following of avid fans persists, nevertheless fails to make the "top forty" list of great biographical figures impersonated every year by fourth graders in classrooms across the country—unlike, say, Robert Ballard of Titanic-robot fame, or Dian Fossey and her apes. My son went as Alexander the Great, but there was no one running around in a Wallace Stegner costume. These two Pulitzer-Prize-winning writers, who left their imprint on the preservation of public lands in the United States, have made less of an imprint on the narrower landscape of popular national memory.

One would hope that John L. Thomas's A Country in the Mind, an affectionate extended biographical essay on DeVoto and Stegner's environmental advocacy for the American West, might help to change that. Thomas's aim is not biography, or a history of Western lands or the late-twentieth-century environmental movement, but intellectual portraiture—what went on in the heads of these two extraordinary men. "That," says Thomas, meaning not psychology but their writing and intellectual vision, "is where the action is" (p. 7). This is true, when one's subjects are among the best turners-of-phrase ever to write about the American land. There is also plenty of action in the long and brutish history of public land use. Because he is advancing his own heroes and vision of the public good, Thomas sticks to its broad outlines, and the familiar paradigm of environmental history: a morality tale of land spoliation against a more just and desirable land use policy and social order. Exactly what desirable land use may be to a broad array of people, times, and places, however, has recently seen a groundswell of scholarly attention. A sampling of it, the ten essays in Land in the American West: Private Claims and the Common Good drawn from a 1997 symposium at Oregon State University, provide a less personal and more broadly analytical context for DeVoto and Stegner in the long contest over public lands.

Attributing "a country in the mind" to two men who hated Western myths, from the cartoonish Wests and Westerners DeVoto scorned as the glamorous "reverie of adolescents" or the inglamorous misconceptions of a "metropolitan press," to the shallow Western "horse operas" that Stegner repeatedly derided, might seem a precarious business. ¹ "Just one country?" one can imagine them asking. "And in just our minds?" The title sounds disarmingly pastoral and peaceful, an ideal reminiscent of the hobo's paradise in the song "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," the title Stegner chose for his myth-deflating autobiographical novel about the West. "[O]f course, there is no such thing as the American mind," DeVoto wrote in a 1934 Harper's magazine. "And the person who goes in search of the American mind has certain sentiments about it and, usually, wants to say certain things about it." ² One might say the same for a country in the mind. The "country" Thomas proposes is an ideal—the "ideal of a national commons owned and cared for by all the citizenry," some of it, at least, a...