Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West by Jason E. Pierce (review)

In his skillful synthesis, Jason Pierce explores the myriad hopes and fears “white” elites projected upon the American West. Beginning with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, educated Anglos saw conflicting potential futures for the United States as they gazed at the lands beyond the Mississippi River.

Some thought they saw a fertile paradise that guaranteed Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a republic built on the labor of free white yeoman farmers not beholden to corrupt Eastern money interests. Others feared that the West represented a dangerous trap: a tempting land that supposedly would poison Anglo-Saxons with Latin lethargy. “A salubrious climate could be detrimental to racial vigor, and indeed, early Anglo American visitors saw proof of the dangers of a pleasant climate in the allegedly lazy Indians and Hispanics of California and the Southwest,” Pierce says of writers like Richard Henry Dana (52). Finally, another set of thinkers perceived the West as an escape valve allowing “real” Americans (of Western and Northern European heritage) to escape filthy, crowded Atlantic seaboard cities infested with “lesser white” immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Nineteenth-century elites debated whether Anglo-Saxons had been created to thrive only in climates similar to their Northern European homeland and thus faced a natural barrier when they reached what was once called the “Great American Desert,” or whether their supposed superiority suited them to dominate any landscape. Meanwhile, conflicting schemes hatched to exploit the West as a racial dumping ground where American Indians and free African Americans could be exiled from the white-dominated East, even as railroads promoted the Northern European immigration to the western lands they offered for sale.

Pierce’s work relies heavily on the innovative analyses of David Roediger and Richard Slotkin. His innovation is in laying out a clear chronology on how the West evolved as a racial project. He effectively uses the colorful lives and brusque words of writers Charles Fletcher Lummis and Frank Bird Linderman, who both promoted white settlement of the West, to illustrate that evolution. Lummis in particular is a case study of the incoherence of nineteenth-century racial thought, advocating both white racial conquest of the West and protection of the indigenous people and their way of life. Also fascinating is his examination of how Mormons, because of their unconventional attitudes towards polygamy, came to be racialized as inferior whites. This exclusion from whiteness drips with irony given that the Mormons supported slavery and until the late nineteenth century excluded those of African descent from the priesthood because of the so-called Curse of Ham, which marked them forever to be “servants unto servants.” Pierce devotes much of one chapter to the use of violence to draw racial boundaries between whites and American Indians and Mexicans in Texas. Overall, this work is of great use to scholars of Texas history, the West, and the changing meaning of white identity.