Homesteading in the Age of Plastics

In 1953, over 4,000 people gathered in the center of Rupert, Idaho to see which lucky few among them would be randomly selected and awarded homesteads on the nearby Bureau of Reclamation Minidoka Project. As Brian Q. Cannon describes this and similar events in the West following World War II, festivities surrounded the lottery, and paeans to the American frontier and pioneers abounded in speeches by government officials. With strong preference given to World War II veterans, the federal program to settle homesteaders on Bureau of Reclamation land was compelling on all sorts of fronts—as recompense for the service that soldiers offered in the war, as a way to provide historical continuity with the almost-sacred image of the Western homesteader following the Civil War, and as an effort to put to agricultural use parts of the arid West.

As Cannon points out, it was not a large program: in the end, about 3,000 farms were homesteaded on public lands with the help of the Bureau of Reclamation between 1946 and 1966. But he argues that it is worthy of examination because the program appears, at first glance, to stand in such stark contrast to our understandings of postwar American life, with its embrace of mass production in manufacturing and agriculture and large organizational structures. It pays to remember, even if such a reference relies on a cliché of the 1950s, that, by 1953, when the Minidoka Project was open to homesteading, Tupperware parties were in full glory. (By 1958, Earl Tupper could sell his company for $16 million.) In contrast to these suburban plastic-kitchenware-sale socials, the women who settled with their husbands on the homesteads of the postwar West typically did not even have electricity. One woman recounted that, in those early years of homesteading, she and her husband had three children still in diapers and no bathroom or running water in her house. Another woman described her chagrin of homesteading in Washington and discovering the backwardness of the residents in the area. When two “old-timers” came to visit, she recalled years later, “they set a sack of candy bars on the table and they said, ‘This is for the kids.’ And we looked at it and the candy bars had all gone white. They [were] probably twenty years old’” (p. 108). Clearly, homesteading in the postwar West felt like a trip back in time.

The seemingly anomalous place of a federal homesteading program in mid-twentieth century America is part of the appeal for Cannon. As he notes in the introduction:

At first, these episodic outbursts of homesteading appear to be anachronistic throwbacks to an earlier era, romantic and entertaining sideshows that curiously brought new lands into production at the same time that the government was paying other farmers to withhold land on existing farms from cultivation. . . . [But] the unfolding of a quintessential element of the Old West—homesteading—within an urbanizing modern West created exceptionally vivid contrasts.

Those contrasts, Cannon argues, provide fertile terrain to explore Patricia Nelson Limerick’s thesis—articulated most familiarly in The Legacy of Conquest—that “the continuities in western history override the temporal differences. We can better understand change and continuity in western history by examining the West after World War II through the lens of postwar homesteading” (p. 4).

Cannon sees continuity in the ideological appeal of homesteading to many postwar Americans. Whether the postwar homesteaders on the Minidoka Project and other reclamation homesteading projects had come from a rural past or not, the allure of owning and working the land and of raising a family on a farm, rooted in traditional rural values, was great. However, whereas these values dominated American views of the West through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they now circulated in a changing cultural landscape in the postwar period, as many Americans increasingly understood Western lands as places where recreational, aesthetic, and/or environmental values should reign. In the end...