America’s West: A History, 1890–1950 by David M. Wrobel (review)

“America developed its West in the nineteenth century, but the West, to no small degree, developed America in the first half of the twentieth” (1). So begins America’s West, and so David Wrobel announces a key theme of his wide-ranging and engaging history of the region from the Gilded Age to the immediate after-math of the Second World War. Tracking the West’s transformations across these decades, Wrobel details how the region shifted from generally imitative to trending innovative in its relationship to national developments.

An eminent cultural historian, who has authored several books about the legacy of the frontier in the American and global imagination in the twentieth century, Wrobel here extends his vision to encompass demographic, economic, and especially political developments. The book particularly spotlights the West’s role in national politics. It tracks changes in the electoral map across the region for each presidential vote and underscores the ways in which the West, through the Senate, though not the House, exercised disproportionate power over the nation’s politics. Wrobel also emphasizes how political power translated into lopsided federal support. When Wrobel takes up the persistent lament by westerners that their region was held in colonial subjugation by Wall Street and Washington, DC, he is armed with ample statistics to refute claims of exploitation, at least as far as the West’s relationship with Washington. Dismissing Bernard DeVoto’s celebrated 1934 article that labeled and lamented the continuing colonial thralldom of the West, Wrobel observes that “by the time the Harper’s article was published, the West . . . was becoming as much a pampered province as a plundered one” (161).

Absent shared grievances aimed at presumed oppressors, readers might well ask, what is left to hold the West together? The book’s answer seems to be “not much.” Indeed, one of the strengths of America’s West is its consistent attention to the diversity of the region. In nearly every section of each chapter, Wrobel breaks the West apart to give careful consideration to the divergent development of California, the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and the Great Plains, with the last often further divided into northern, central, and southern subregions. That allows Wrobel to present a more complex and more accurate portrait of the West in the first half of the twentieth century. But it also suggests the book might have been better titled America’s Wests.