The American Far West in the Twentieth Century 9780300142679

Citation preview

The American Far West in the Twentieth Century

THE LAMAR SERIES IN WESTERN HISTORY The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general public interest that enhance the understanding of human affairs in the American West and contribute to a wider understanding of the West’s significance in the political, social, and cultural life of America. Comprising works of the highest quality, the series aims to increase the range and vitality of Western American history, focusing on frontier places and people, Indian and ethnic communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and illustrated history of the American West. EDITORIAL BOARD Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Past President of Yale University William J. Cronon, University of Wisconsin–Madison Philip J. Deloria, University of Michigan John Mack Faragher, Yale University Jay Gitlin, Yale University George A. Miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University Martha A. Sandweiss, Amherst College Virginia J. Scharff, University of New Mexico David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University Robert M. Utley, Former Chief Historian National Park Service RECENT TITLES War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War, by Brian DeLay The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen Frontiers: A Short History of the American West, by Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place, by Benjamin Heber Johnson and Jeffrey Gusky Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle, by Matthew Klingle Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory, by Christian W. McMillen The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, by Earl Pomeroy Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands, by Samuel Truett Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment, by David J. Weber FORTHCOMING TITLES The Bourgeois Frontier, by Jay Gitlin Defying the Odds: One California Tribe’s Struggle for Sovereignty in Three Centuries, by Carole Goldberg and Gelya Frank Under the Tonto Rim: Honor, Conscience, and Culture in the West, 1880–1930, by Daniel Herman William Clark’s World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns, by Peter Kastor César Chávez, by Stephen J. Pitti The Spanish Frontier in North America, Brief Edition, by David J. Weber Geronimo, by Robert Utley

The American Far West in the Twentieth Century Earl Pomeroy

Edited by Richard W. Etulain Foreword by Howard R. Lamar

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2008 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Electra and Trajan types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pomeroy, Earl S. (Earl Spencer), 1915–2005 The American Far West in the twentieth century / Earl Pomeroy ; edited by Richard W. Etulain ; foreword by Howard R. Lamar. p. cm. — (The Lamar series in Western history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-12073-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Pacific and Mountain States—History—20th century. I. Etulain, Richard W. II. Title. F718.P66 2008 978'.033—dc22 2008021379 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Contents

Foreword by Howard R. Lamar Preface

vii

xvii

Acknowledgments by Richard W. Etulain ONE The West in 1901

xxv

1

TWO Agricultural Frontiers: New Farms and Family Farmers THREE Agricultural Frontiers: Farming on New Scales FOUR New Forms of Economic Growth

89

FIVE Economic Growth from the 1940s

116

20

53

SIX The Urban Occupation of the West: Rails, Roads, and Cities

149

SEVEN Rails, Roads, and Cities from the Second World War

185

EIGHT Social Relations and Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

225

NINE Social Relations and Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots—Agencies of Acculturation 264 TEN Western Politics

300

ELEVEN Expanding Electorates

338

TWELVE Frontiers of Land and Opportunity: The Variously Far West 376

vi

Contents Notes 405 Supplemental Bibliography by David M. Wrobel Index

549

535

Foreword

It was my good fortune as a historian of the American West to have known Earl Pomeroy both professionally and personally for nearly sixty years. When I was working on my doctoral dissertation, “Dakota Territory: A Study of Frontier Politics, 1861–1889,” Earl’s brilliant first book, The Territories of the United States, 1861–1890: Studies in Colonial Administration, which appeared in 1947 and won the Beveridge Prize, proved to be both a key resource and a model for me, as it was for all who wished to study American territorial history. After having used the vast resources of the then-unpublished papers of the territories of the United States, one of the most neglected key collections of American national history, Pomeroy joined Clarence E. Carter, Paul Wallace Gates, and the Organization of American Historians to persuade Congress to edit and publish the scholarly record of each territory. Congress approved this vast project in 1961, and the impressive volumes, now known as Territorial Papers of the United States, continue to appear down to the present. During those years, Earl enlisted my support; later we met and became regular correspondents. I soon learned that Earl felt that it was inexcusable that western historians had focused their attention almost solely on the frontier period and the nineteenth century, portraying the West as a rural and agrarian region peopled by individualistic American pioneers, but had neglected the twentieth-century American West. Clearly, Earl’s lifelong ambition, as reflected in his subsequent books and essays, was to fill this gap and even to change our perspectives on what were the central themes of nineteenth-century western history. Equally important was the fact that not only was Pomeroy a fifth-generation Californian, born in Capitola in 1915, but he received his A.M. at Berkeley and later completed his Ph.D. there under the guidance of two outstanding scholar-

vii

viii

Foreword

teachers. One was Frederic L. Paxson, a brilliant teacher and an accomplished historian of both the American frontier (who had been Frederick Jackson Turner’s successor at the University of Wisconsin) and recent United States history; the other was Herbert E. Bolton, a powerful teacher and scholar who introduced the profession to the neglected history of the Spanish Borderlands. Pomeroy emerged from his graduate training believing that California was one of the keys to modern western history—both because the state was the largest and most powerful in the Far West and also because it had dominated the economies of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Alaska in their formative stages. In addition, California had an intimate relation to the Hawaiian Islands, China, and Japan (the sources of Asian immigrants to California) and to the Southern Pacific, where the United States Navy sought to secure coaling stations for their vessels to counter Japan’s expansionist policies in the same area. Pomeroy’s second book, Pacific Outpost: American Strategy in Guam and Micronesia published in 1951, turned out to be an insightful analysis of the causes of the war with Japan. Six years later, Pomeroy again startled his fellow historians by writing about a completely different subject in his next book—In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (1957), a pioneering work in social and cultural history praised by one reviewer as “the kind of social history that the best historians would like to produce.” Pomeroy’s fourth major work, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (1965), was the most complex social, political, and economic history of the American Far West states yet written. Meanwhile, Pomeroy, by then a professor at the University of Oregon, was busy training a new generation of excellent western historians, among them Gene M. Gressley, Eckard V. Toy, Jr., Tom Cox, James Hendrickson, Richard Wayne Etulain, and others. It would be difficult to exaggerate the respect and affection these former students have had for Pomeroy. He advised them on every book they wrote and was in constant contact with them throughout his life. So much did Richard Etulain, himself a distinguished professor of western history at the University of New Mexico and author of more than forty books on the West, admire and respect Pomeroy that after he retired from the University of New Mexico, he and his wife moved to Oregon. Pomeroy, by then in failing health, asked Etulain to assist him in the completion of his final and most ambitious work, The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, on which Pomeroy had been working for forty years. Etulain became Pomeroy’s literary executor; after the latter’s death in 2005, Etulain mailed the huge and sometimes rough manuscript to Yale University Press with the message that Pomeroy had wanted Yale to publish it with a foreword by Howard Lamar.

Foreword

ix

Once the manuscript was accepted for publication, based on the enthusiastic recommendations of reviewers, the Press asked Etulain to fill in gaps in the manuscript and clarify passages. Such was Etulain’s commitment to Pomeroy that he spent two years fulfilling this daunting task while making excellent comments on his own about Pomeroy’s work. He reminded the Press, for example, that Pomeroy’s notes were most unusual because he preferred to cite primary rather than secondary sources, which was “true of all his books and essays throughout his career.” Etulain also recommended that editors not amend Pomeroy’s style, for “his was a unique voice, unlike that of any other major scholar in the history of the American West.” Without Etulain’s crucial assistance, The American Far West in the Twentieth Century would have been a lesser book. In this book Pomeroy has covered every state of the West from the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to the West Coast, as well as Alaska and Hawaii, with the exception of Texas. Naturally, this omission troubled some readers of the manuscript. It appears that Pomeroy felt strongly that Texas was seen as southern rather than western in the nineteenth century, and also it had achieved its own nationhood in the traumatic years from 1836 to 1848. Moreover, during the Civil War, Texas actually attempted to seize the American territories of New Mexico, Arizona, and even Colorado for the Confederacy. Texas’s reputation as a western state did not really arise until the early twentieth century. In contrast, the United States had defeated Mexican forces in California, as it did in the lands that later became New Mexico and Arizona. But before California could be organized as a territory, the gold rush of 1848–49 brought a flood of American migrants and led to the instant rise of San Francisco as a major port city and the establishment of other gold rush towns, with the result that almost at once California qualified for statehood and became a mainstream American state. As Pomeroy has noted, the former underpopulated Mexican province had overnight “become American, only more so.” Pomeroy begins his narrative with some arresting factual corrections in a chapter titled “The West in 1901.” He reminds us that in 1850, there were only 178,000 recorded inhabitants of European descent in the Far West, whereas Iowa’s population was 192,000. Ten years later, the Far West had fewer inhabitants than the state of Wisconsin, and as late as 1870, fewer inhabitants than the state of Missouri. In short, the Middle West continued to be more significant in terms of settlement and maturity than the Far West and deserved the attention Turner had given it. Only in the 1880s and 1890s did Oklahoma, Washington, Oregon, and California boom along with the mining states of Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota, but at that time the railroad, eastern industry, and eastern capital continued to dominate the western economy.

x

Foreword

Using the U.S. Census records, Pomeroy traces the ups and downs of each state’s economy along with the warning that each state’s history was slightly or dramatically different. He provides a further unique perspective by noting that more immigrants from Europe chose to stay in the Middle West and the Northeast than in the Far West. The only significant immigrant increase in the West in the 1890s were among the Japanese, while in that period San Francisco lost two-fifths of its Chinese population. For Pomeroy, the significant changes were in the rise of big ranches, the doubling of irrigation lands, and the founding of chambers of commerce and state and county historical societies during the 1890s as evidence of an emerging sense of place. Pomeroy concludes, “If westerners lowered their expectations for development to more nearly national levels, they also regarded themselves more as residents, investing both their money and their loyalties in community and region as most of them had not done as pioneers.” In chapters 2 and 3, Pomeroy turns his attention to “Agricultural Frontiers,” noting that between 1890 and 1920 farmland increased nearly two and one half times as much over the Pacific, mountain, and plains states than in the thirty years preceding. This dramatic impetus came partly from J. J. Hill’s huge promotion of farming in the Pacific Northwest; a boom in Indian land cessions in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, and Washington; and through the promotion of dry farming. Homesteading accounted for the principal movement into western lands. But with his passion for accurate detail, Pomeroy tells the reader when and where the homesteading boomed while noting that many who came were commuters or speculators who never planned to take up residence on the land. In contrast, two thousand women who registered for homesteads in Colorado and Wyoming “proved up” more often than men. Pomeroy writes, “If there is a governing theme or point of focus in the book, it concerns the ways in which people in the West have become—and have not become—westerners and members of their western communities, not merely establishing their economic opportunities, but also redefining their relations with each other and the nation.” Far from stopping there, however, he goes on to trace the transformation of various immigrant groups—the Russians, the Germans, the Czechs, and the Japanese—on the West Coast and in Hawaii. In these chapters, Pomeroy devotes careful attention to changes in farming, the rise of truck farming, the continued expansion of irrigation, and the mechanization of farming between the two world wars. With the introduction of the tractor and combines, farming became larger and soon metamorphosed into corporation farming of which he provides us with incredible case study examples, ranging from the large-scale fruit farmers in California to changes in the

Foreword

xi

production of cotton with the invention of the cotton-picking machine. He also notes the decline of pineapple plantations in Hawaii and their transformation after the Second World War into tourist resorts. During the Second World War, farmers had become one-fourth of the national population, but they now produced 37 percent of all the crops. Pomeroy devotes his next two chapters to new forms of economic growth from the beginning of the century to the 1990s, commencing with the fantastic rebirth of the extractive mining economy with the new gold rushes between 1899 in Alaska and 1910 in Nevada; the rise of the huge copper industry stretching from the Phelps-Dodge operations at Bisbee, Arizona, to Utah’s Bingham Canyon, the second largest producer of copper in the world; and then on to the Anaconda mines in Butte and the Guggenheim mines at Kennecott, Alaska. Yet despite constant technological innovations to make it more profitable, copper mining was hit by imports from abroad and the United States was no longer the largest producer in the world. Other dramatic transitions came when the West, in its search for sources of energy, turned to fossil fuels—coal and oil and waterpower. The logging industry was transformed by exports to Japan and Asia and by the rise of large corporations that turned to pulpwood and plywood as key products. Even with all these changes, the West became a major producer of manufactured goods only during and after the Second World War. Ironically, the motion picture industry was the most conspicuous exception to the general relative decline in manufacturing in the West. Indeed, it became the best known of western industries and one of the few first developed neither on the basis of locally available raw materials nor to sell mainly in local markets. Even so, it was not a huge employer before the Second World War. Continuing his focus on economic growth from the 1940s, Pomeroy stresses the extraordinary impact of the Second World War on California and other states. Gold and silver production increased dramatically only to experience a severe decline after 1945. Kaiser’s and Bechtel’s manufacture of ships and building of shipyards for the war boomed but then declined. Most impressive were the airplane factories, which with 90 percent government financing during wartime created a new capacity for the aircraft industry. Certainly, one of the major impacts of the war years was the recruitment of a vast new labor force from all over the nation to work in defense-related industries, leading to a huge population gain in the West and severe housing and public school crises. What kept the western economy from a severe postwar decline, however, was the role of the military on the West Coast, sustained by the demands of the Vietnam War and the cold war, and in California, by the emer-

xii

Foreword

gence of electronic firms located near universities. By 1993, this market, led by Microsoft and Intel, accounted for half the income of the largest public companies in Silicon Valley. Pomeroy’s sober, factual account reveals that the western economy was as full of ups and downs after the Second World War, as in decades before. In two fascinating chapters on “rails, roads, and cities,” Pomeroy gives full treatment to the urban occupation of the West with a detailed history of the role of railroads. He sees them as crucial to the success of San Francisco, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Phoenix. The coming of automobiles and good roads benefited farmers, cities, and the entire West, and the impact of electric power on both the economy and dramatic liberation of the housewife in the home are also well covered. Perhaps freshest in his coverage of rails, roads, and cities after the Second World War is his account of the rise of large shopping centers and California’s building of high-speed parkways within the cities, of which Los Angeles was the foremost example with the largest urban highway system in the world. Air service boomed all over the West, and in California it soon transported more passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles than trains. Airplanes emerged as the key to Alaska’s transportation, and that state, as a stopover for planes flying to or from Japan, had more air traffic than major cities like Dallas, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Portland. Between 1950 and 1970 air service to Hawaii made tourism the island’s major industry, replacing the raising of sugar and pineapple as the major source of income, and by 1980 Las Vegas was second only to New York City in the number of available hotel rooms. Pomeroy is especially good at describing the economy and cultural life of all the major western cities and the rise of their suburbs. As one reviewer has written, Pomeroy’s account is so insightful “it seems as if he had lived in all of these cities.” In the next two chapters, both titled “Social Relations and Social Attitudes,” Pomeroy addresses a key theme in his book. He quotes a 1903 article by Frederick Jackson Turner concerning the arid lands of the Far West, in which Turner wrote, “No conquest was possible by the old pioneer methods,” and goes on to note that to succeed, settlers had to construct irrigation works and cooperate in securing an adequate water supply. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the “destiny of the new frontier should be social rather than individual.” Pomeroy writes that this socialization was slow to come for there was a love of moving about and, as noted earlier, many homesteaders were actually speculators. In his search for sources of socialization, he finds the nucleus of larger American citizenship in the Irish, Jewish, and Italian families and traces how at

Foreword

xiii

first Mexican American immigrants adjusted more easily when they went into barrios and were more urban oriented, although they were slow to go to American jobs. He finds that whites tended to ignore other ethnic poverty groups, such as American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, and Hawaiians, and that it was not until the Second World War that Indians began to move around and migrate to the cities. But by 1980, Los Angeles not only had the largest urban American Indian population, it had the largest urban Mexican population outside of Mexico City. Never content with an incomplete story, Pomeroy then traces the way African Americans, Mormons, and western labor unions came into the mainstream, each in very different and often limited ways. In describing the agencies of acculturation that eventually led to putting down roots, he finds that although voluntary organizations played a role, those organized on the basis of ethnic and religious origins tended to command more loyalty than did groups formed by economic interests. Most potential westerners came to the new country not to live in new ways, “but rather to acquire the means of living in old ways”; however, they did change: due to competition in the economy, they had to learn new skills if not new trades with the result that “both newcomers and older residents soon found themselves caught up in systems of assimilation that affected everyone, both foreign and native born.” One of the key factors in assimilation was the large circulation of newspapers, like those of William Randolph Hearst, which used sensational stories to attract readers. Other newspapers were boosters for development or for political parties. Many newspaper editors were so influential that they themselves were elected to political office. As the newspapers declined in circulation and influence, they were replaced by radio and television. A second assimilative factor was public education, but its impact on the Far West was more erratic than elsewhere because of the number of private schools, but Pomeroy credits the later rise of junior and community colleges and their huge enrollments with causing a major change. Pomeroy notes how each state and local area began to discover its colorful historic past and to publicize that past to attract tourists, but as it turned out, with the coming of the automobile tourists tended to focus on state and national parks. Tourists did, however, become so economically vital that they eventually accounted for half the outside income in many western states. In chapter 10, Pomeroy turns to what is clearly his favorite subject: western politics. He retraces each state’s territorial origins and eventual admission to the Union, right down to the admission of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959. He notes how the West was safely Republican until the 1890s and how much each territory depended on federal largesse. While this account seems familiar, he has a much

xiv

Foreword

more sober and less complimentary estimate of the so-called successes of the political protest groups—the western Populists and the Socialists—finding that only with the nonpartisan Progressives, such as Hiram Johnson of California, were reforms achieved, candidates became less party-bound, and voters began to move back and forth between major parties as they continue to do today. Pomeroy also gives a sobering account of how slow the farmers were to recognize that by organizing they had the potential clout to become a powerful “farm block” in Congress; but with the rise of the Farm Bureau Federation and its alliance with large farmers, state agricultural colleges, and the Department of Agriculture, they achieved an influence far beyond their numbers. Contrary to popular opinion, he finds that labor unions in the Far West did not have larger political aspirations but instead concentrated on immediate economic interests. Labor fared better in California than the other states, with the exception of Los Angeles, where the powerful conservative newspaper publisher Harrison Gray Otis violently opposed labor unions. In his penultimate chapter, “Expanding Electorates,” Pomeroy observes that over the last third of the twentieth century, fewer working people joined labor unions, and fewer of those who joined brought their membership into their politics. Moreover, labor unions did not represent Native Americans, Mexicans (until César Chávez), or Chinese; rather they represented relatively skilled laborers of predominantly western and northern European antecedents. With impressive thoroughness, Pomeroy follows the progress of ethnic minorities into politics, among them the dramatic coming to power of the Japanese in Hawaii so that by 1974 Asian Americans held all the state elective offices. He then traces the progress of Hispanics, African Americans, Native Americans, and Alaska Natives in politics, as well as the rise of a number of women in state and federal offices. He closes this brilliant all-embracing chapter by observing how changeable political patterns in the West were—Populists, socialist radicals, nonpartisan Progressives, then New Dealers, after which there was a turn to conservatives like Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan of the far western sunbelt. He characterizes the latter as advocates of old age and youth, “the most strident opponents of big government and the most voracious consumers of government subsidies, sometimes in the same person.” He concludes, “If western components of the federal system were approaching lasting equilibrium, they did not clearly foreshadow it.” In his final chapter, “Frontiers of Land and Opportunity: The Variously Far West,” Pomeroy reminds us again that the American West was a sparely occupied land of Native Americans and Hispanics until the 1840s when fertile lands

Foreword

xv

in the Oregon County and the gold rush brought Americans west, but not in large numbers until the coming of the railroads and the latter’s realization that their destiny was not in freight but in land sales and the promotion of towns and farm settlement. Not until then could the region be called a well-occupied West. It was only after the railroads “conquered the West” that going there was cheaper and more people stayed where they went so that westerners came to outnumber easterners and became part of the national economy: “Main Street was everywhere before it declined everywhere.” But changes continued to occur. Plains states began to decline in population after the Second World War and some fell as low as they had been when “whites first came there to stay.” “Over the Far West as a whole, population concentrated most of all in the largest metropolitan areas of most urban states.” Pomeroy, however, records surprises; much of the West depended on information and “the technology of providing it rather than ultimately on natural resources.” As he puts it, “Increasingly jobs came to men rather than men to jobs.” Every city experienced major and often painful changes in its economic history. There were other difficulties in the economy of the plains and a narrowing of opportunities in agriculture. Increased tourism of all forms developed whether it was skiing, gambling in Las Vegas, or dude ranches and the selling of “ranchettes.” Earl Pomeroy, though always cautious about generalizations about the West, concludes: “A century after what some had called the closing of the frontier, the Far West continued to grow and change. From the beginnings of American settlement, it had done both in ways that set it apart from the rest of the United States, including parts also called western in their time, and that set its own parts apart from each other. Most of its inhabitants had at least begun to think of themselves as residents rather than sojourners away from home, and yet like other westerners before them, many of them seemed ready in some sense to move on, whether to another part of the West, the world, or the immediate metropolitan area, watching the fortunes of the community where they slept and paid taxes on the whole with interest and hope but without committing themselves closely to it.” This was what he meant by his chapter subtitle, “The Variously Far West.” One comes away from the monumental and exhaustively researched book fully persuaded by his thesis that the Far West was more shaped and developed in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. As one reader expressed it, this book “is a remarkable synthesis of a century’s development in the arenas of politics, economics, and culture in an area that covers half of the nation’s geographic space.” In his final ailing years, Earl Pomeroy was unable to cite many of the publi-

xvi

Foreword

cations that appeared after 1995. Fortunately, Yale University Press has invited Professor David Wrobel of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to provide an up-to-date bibliography of important works published since 1995. This new bibliography and Pomeroy’s own remarkable notes and listing of statistics—indeed in several chapters, the number of pages of notes equal the number of the pages in the text—will be a resource for students and historians for many years to come. Earl Pomeroy was celebrated in his day as the father of the “federal school of historians,” stressing the crucial role of the American government in developing and governing the West, and as such a learned erudite scholar, he was dubbed the “historian’s historian.” Given the excellence of The American Far West in the Twentieth Century, it seems likely that these titles of respect will continue unabated. I close with a final tribute to Richard Etulain for editing and making Earl Pomeroy’s final work available to American historians and to all persons interested in the American West and in a fuller history of the American nation. Howard R. Lamar Yale University

Preface

In most general accounts as in most courses of instruction, historical studies of the American West have been slow to move into the twentieth century. Historians conventionally have described the rise and fall of the People’s Party in the West in the 1890s as a final assertion of sectional traits and grievances after which westerners, the adventures of pioneering and the privations of pioneer subsistence economies behind them, took their places in the nation socially and economically as well as politically. Yet private owners have taken up more public land through the provisions of the Homestead Act of 1862 and its extensions and successors than before Frederick Jackson Turner noted the end of the traditional frontier line between settled and unsettled land. The westward movement of population has been much larger. Further, even as the West among other regions has approached national norms in density of population and entered more fully into national patterns of politics and trade, it also has accepted and developed regional roles. Although westerners failed to elect a president pledged to buy more silver for coinage, they gained larger markets for other distinctively western exports, including copper, timber, oranges, sunshine, snow, and scenery. In major branches of their economy, in their ways of life, and in the pictures of both that they presented to others and to themselves, they were no less western than before. The story has stopped early in part because most accounts of western American history have concentrated on the processes by which Europeans first occupied and first organized the land. These processes are now mostly over, although new occupants and new organizers repeatedly revise first arrangements and thereby raise questions about what being first means. First dam and highway builders have changed the land more in the twentieth century than first stock

xvii

xviii

Preface

raisers and homesteaders in the nineteenth. Whereas such processes of occupation and organization once were close enough to common experience to figure prominently in national politics, in the course of controversies over claims to western lands, internal improvements, slavery in the territories, and the admission of new states, they have become more and more unsatisfactory as explanations of what Americans have done, thought, or been. Emphasizing the settlement of new land by native-born farmers has made the West seem particularly far from the urban East of immigrant wage earners, although the West has long had its share of immigrants, wage earners, and cities. Settlers on western land became prominent in the American national mythology in a relatively short time, although their prominence follows on ancient strains of European and Judeo-Christian thought. In the early years of the Republic many easterners feared the West, as Thomas Jefferson did. But as leading northeasterners became financiers and manufacturers, and leading southerners became slaveholding planters, the homesteader tilling his patch of corn on the western frontier seemed more fittingly to represent the basic national virtues. Relationships to land in general are so fundamental in American society and social thought that the characteristic social and political system of each American region—its complex of values and institutions—may correspond closely to its system of holding lands, but the essential dependence of the farmer on the soil has given the West a special claim to be the home of the national household gods. It has been the section most removed from Europe not only in physical distance but also in way of life; and the way of life of the western cultivator and herdsman has come to seem wholesome above other ways to a people who have associated it with both the roots of original Christianity and the traditionally most favorable if not requisite conditions of modern republicanism and democracy. The West had achieved its special meaning in American morals and politics only by the first part of the nineteenth century, after settlers had outnumbered traders, Native Americans, and the Spaniards and Frenchmen with whom some westerners proposed to cast their lots during the first years after the American Revolution. The republican image of the West of the territories and states along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes, moreover, was an image established in part by contrast with images of the West beyond the Missouri River, a West not only foreign, in the persons of Spaniards and Mexicans at Santa Fe and beyond, but apparently so novel in climate and terrain that Americans could not live conventional American lives in most of it. At first this new Far West seemed useful only as home for and barrier against a different people—the American Indians—whom advancing farmers displaced from the older West.

Preface

xix

The qualifications of the Far West for incorporation in the image of republican virtue were tarnished further in the eyes of northerners by association with the purposes of slaveholders in the Mexican War, and by the quality of life among the more conspicuous American emigrants to California and the mountain territories, men who incorporated some of the least acceptable tendencies of both East and West, transients rather than settlers, single adventurers rather than members of families, men who liked to call themselves builders of commonwealths but cared for community mainly for what it might contribute to their own fortunes. Given such dramatis personae, it is not unnatural that much of the social history of the nineteenth-century West should be in effect antisocial: miscellaneous examples of individual self-advancement. The shortcomings of society in the mines, or of what passed there for society, appeared strikingly when the government of the United States during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, dedicated to supporting free agricultural settlement, organized only one new western state, Nevada, a mining camp whose inhabitants shortly wandered off after newer strikes; there were fewer of them in 1900 than in 1870. By a tour de force of political rhetoric, the miners were able to incorporate themselves not only politically in the union of states but also ideologically in the image of western rural republicanism, claiming special favors as exponents of a mining agrarianism that equated the excavator with the ploughman as commonwealth builder. They reinforced the equation when for different purposes the miners and wheat farmers joined, in the 1880s and 1890s, in calling for the free and unlimited coinage of silver currency; the miners had succeeded so well in thus improving their reputation that in the eyes of easterners frightened by Populist attacks on banks and railroads during the depression of 1893–96 their unmistakable identity as capitalists helped to balance the extravagances of the farmers. To the extent that a scholar could assuage popular fears, Turner also interpreted Populists of Kansas and Nebraska to their nervous contemporaries by drawing lines of historical perspective from them to Democrats in Kentucky and Tennessee, from the followers of Bryan to those of Shays, Clay, Jackson, and Lincoln. In depicting the western farmer and miner within the experience and understanding of his time, Turner may have removed them from the experience and understanding of our time, making them less accessible to us. Immigrant wage earners in the eastern states seemed so abnormal to many Americans in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth that an interpretation of American history and character that emphasized settlements by native-born farmers was both intelligible and reassuring, though the farmer and the native born were declining, relative to other elements, in the West as in the East. Now more Ameri-

xx

Preface

cans accept themselves as a nation of immigrants, and the traditional dream of independent proprietorship on the land, even as a tradition, has given way to other dreams. As Americans have shifted in their social thought and political character from the assumption that opportunity was available for everyone, slowly from the early years of the twentieth century, more rapidly from the 1930s, they have shifted also in views of their past. The facts of the westward movement in the sense that Turner described it, which once seemed both satisfactorily to mark out the field of western history for analysis and to constitute its main events, now seem to correspond all too conveniently to the nineteenth-century biases of the American individualism of self-reliance, as historian David Potter has called it. To feature them may be to glorify unregulated self-aggrandizement at the expense of the values of the community, the strong over the weak and unaggressive, the many over the few. Therefore in recent years historians have tried to balance the score by looking at some of the same facts or events from the point of view of what Potter called the twentieth-century individualism of nonconformity and dissent, and thus to attend to the problems of rustlers as well as stockmen, bandits as well as settlers; to deplore rather than to celebrate the removal of Indians and the hunting of the buffalo. While such shifts in interpretation have appeared most systematically in the studies of the nineteenth century, they follow naturally on extending western historical narrative beyond it. Not only have Americans come less readily to assume that a decent living is available for those willing to work for it, and that while wealth does not necessarily describe good character, continuing poverty describes lack of it, but over most of the twentieth century farming has declined as basis for general economic opportunity. In popular imagery the sturdy homesteader yields to the itinerant harvest hand and the agribusinessman, who represent neither traditional rural virtues nor traditional rural success. The western farmer appears no longer as symbol of a better living for eastern workingmen but as a businessman who would buy labor from workingmen at low prices and sell food to them at high. As the present-day westerner seems increasingly to approach the condition of the easterner, as city dweller, capitalist, and industrialist, he invites us to ask whether in simpler times he aspired to anything else. He also loses much of his old power to divert attention from others whom we now see as at least equally numerous and virtuous though less fortunate. While the western farmer has come less easily to personify western opportunity, the West as a whole moved toward the social conditions of the nation in the twentieth century. Decade by decade in the census reports and other inventories it tends to approximate other sections of the country in levels of individual

Preface

xxi

income, which were distinctively high in most of the mining states long after the gold rush of 1849, and in distribution of labor among occupations. Socially, except in Alaska, it is no longer distinctively male and unmarried, and as people in other areas have taken to the road, it has become less distinctively transient. Politically it stands out less for interest in third parties, and other sections have adopted some of its nonpartisanship. In its principal changes within the twentieth century, the Far West paralleled and anticipated the courses of older Wests and of the East. With them it has become more urban, more industrial, more mobile, more if not better educated, and more dependent on government and less on itself though sometimes talking more of self-reliance. Whatever the country as a whole has become, the West has become also, whether earlier or later. The price of homogenizing twentieth-century Americans was the acceleration of the restless wandering that brought their ancestors from other continents and, with that wandering, transience of social ties, shallowness of roots and of loyalties to place, person, and institution. The westward migrations of the twentieth century, which comprised far more people than American migrations previously called great (for instance, those of the 1840s before the gold rush, when the Pacific slope recruited immigrants by the thousands, the Middle West by the hundreds of thousands), may seem to have been relatively undemanding in that migrants used efficient and familiar systems of travel. They and their household goods arrived in days rather than months; they could arrange by mail and telephone for accommodations to be ready on their arrival. But the prospect of a move by Pullman car or automobile may have led people to underestimate the costs of moving and to move more often. It probably attracted people who would not have come by oxcart and stagecoach, persuading them that fitting into the new life would be as simple as buying a ticket or driving a car; some of them were physically and psychically unfit for major change. The very fact of larger numbers meant that people were less likely to find cheap land, more likely to get in each other’s way. They had to work more with other people at a time when family and friends moved apart and strangers lacked scarcity value. The strains of fitting into a new community did not necessarily decline as the West lost the unfinished look of the frontier and built roads, grew and sold crops, and achieved statehood. Gaining acceptance in a new home, in fact, may have become especially difficult when communities were old enough so that older residents had settled in, and when the new resident supposed that the way of life would be as familiar as the electric signs of the chain stores on Main Street. Was the tragedy of western history not merely that the Indian and the buffalo had lost what the English-speaking westerner took from them but that he or she also had lost in

xxii

Preface

taking? The major challenge of western social historians may not be merely to extend their horizons from those who succeeded in advancing themselves in the new commonwealth to those who failed, and from tangible and measured forms of advancement to other forms, but also to consider how much either the successful or the unsuccessful was part of a commonwealth in the sense of a body of persons united by common interests beyond those expedient for their individual advancement. There is no generally agreed-on definition of the American Far West in the nineteenth century, let alone in the twentieth or twenty-first. The Bureau of the Census since 1890 has counted as “West” the states and territories of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific slope, excluding all of Texas, though El Paso is farther west than most of Colorado, and adding Alaska and Hawaii only after they became states in 1959. I have chosen to include all the states west of those along the Mississippi River except Texas, which in its southern and agricultural past as well as in its industrial present and in its size stands apart from its neighbors. While the easternmost of these states merged socially with their neighbors along the Mississippi River, all had their booms and their pioneers—even Kansas and Nebraska, which grew less than both the nation and the rest of the West in every decade after 1900, were still finding themselves after the First World War—and all sustained qualities of life distinct from those of the more humid country to the east. At the end of the thirty years of western history that Ray A. Billington treated in his volume The Far Western Frontier, 1830–1860 (1956), the mountain and Pacific states and territories and in addition Kansas and Nebraska had an aggregate population of 759,869, or 2.4 percent of the population of the United States. Half of it was in one state, California; the whole was less than the population of the state of Wisconsin, which was still on the edge of the trapper’s frontier. In 1900 the same areas and Alaska, Hawaii, the Dakotas, and Oklahoma had populations totaling 8,356,844, or 11.0 percent of the population of the United States. In 1970 they had populations of 42,385,492, or 20.9 percent of the population of the United States; in 1980, 51,474,769, or 22.7 percent. The Pacific states alone included 13.0 percent of the population of the United States in 1970 and 14.0 percent in 1980, over four times their percentage in 1900 and more than twice their share of the population of the Far West in 1900. Whereas the United States did not triple its population in seventy years, and Nebraska increased by only about two-fifths, California increased by more than twelve times, and Nevada and Arizona still more than that. The kind of history that a region growing at such an enormous rate invites is far different from the kind of history that naturally develops about pioneering

Preface

xxiii

in the sense of first exploration and settlement. Rates of growth by immigration have been so high in the West that newcomers commonly figured as much in the mix of population in the first half of the twentieth century as they did in the second half of the nineteenth: in California in-migration exceeded half of population in two decades of the twentieth century though in none of the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Adventurers occasionally still moved far beyond established settlements: oil drillers on the north slope of Alaska, fed by jet plane, reenacted some of the experiences of forty-niners, fed by clipper ship. But whereas the preponderant movement of population in older Wests was to rural areas, primarily to farm though after 1848 also to mine, the preponderant movement since 1900 was to cities, which could attract and absorb large numbers as farms and mines no longer could. The new Alaskan prospector was a corporation rather than a latter-day Argonaut. On the historian’s canvas, individual faces easily merge into crowds; the test of economic maturity is no longer the movement of land from public to private ownership and under the plow. The whole idea of economic maturity loses old meanings as agricultural production increases in states that lose population, and as land once thought to be of value only for grazing supports crop agriculture, mining, and oil drilling and urban types of industry, trade, and recreation. Facing fast-growing populations and still faster-growing masses of evidence on them, the historian tries to draw on the writing of others and inevitably follows some of its proportions. Published accounts of travel seldom have the value that they did in earlier times, as skilled observers no longer find unique stories to tell, or demand for their telling, even while the West develops more authentic regional personality than it had had in the days of the first miners and cattlemen. In some states sociologists and economists, publishing in series of the state departments of agriculture and other public agencies, have undertaken studies that one would be glad to find imitated and extended, whereas local and regional historians have scattered their efforts so widely that the product often is incommensurable, while concentrating on traditional themes of pioneering before statehood. While describing at the length possible in a small book the new forms of economic opportunity in the twentieth-century West, I have tried to look more at the changing shape of western society than at increases in production. In the chapters that follow the new technology of agriculture, mining, and manufacturing appears in relation to its implications for laborers, capitalists, government, and the inhabitants of farms and towns. Although often losing sight of individual persons in a survey of larger numbers, a larger area, and a longer period than many of my predecessors have undertaken to describe, I try to give special atten-

xxiv

Preface

tion to values, aspirations, and social relations as well as to the milestones and benchmarks of physical change. If there is a governing theme or point of focus in the book, it concerns the ways in which people in the West have become—and have not become—westerners and members of their western communities, not merely establishing their economic opportunities, but also redefining their relations with each other and the nation.

Acknowledgments

The volume editor is indebted to several persons for help in the final preparation of this book. Martina Armstrong, office manager in the University of Oregon History Department, located the needed Earl Pomeroy manuscripts and computer disks. Jeff Ostler, former chair of the Oregon History Department, provided aid and encouragement. Susan Guilford, daughter of Earl Pomeroy, also helped the project along at several key moments. At the Yale University Press, Lara Heimert, Molly Egland, Margaret Otzel, and especially Chris Rogers and Laura Davulis furnished invaluable direction. Finally, Howard Lamar, friend of all western historians, has been a supporter of this long-delayed book for many years. Richard W. Etulain

xxv

This page intentionally left blank

1

The West in 1901

Toward the end of the nineteenth century when Americans spoke of how the Far West was changing or had changed so much that it was no longer as distinctively western as it once had been, the idea that such changes would occur was about as old as western settlement itself. Settlers had only recently begun to move beyond the states bordering on the Mississippi River when social philosophers began to anticipate what might happen when all land good for farming by the standards of the time was in private hands, if not also private use, and thus, by the assumptions of an agricultural age, when settlement of the Far West was essentially complete. Congress had just established the boundary of the permanent frontier. It did so on the premise that there was enough land east of the great bend of the Missouri River for settlement into the indefinite future, when in 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the crisis that American democracy would face when no more government land remained. John C. Calhoun and Abraham Lincoln agreed essentially on the importance of access to land for American institutions, the one defending it for slave owners, the other for free workers and farmers. By the time Frederick Jackson Turner addressed his fellow historians on the subject in 1893, there was not much for him to do with the argument except to cast it in historical terms, relating ready access to land to the course of American development, and to announce that a time of testing had arrived, that the frontier line that had marked boundaries between areas of occupied and unoccupied land in earlier census reports was gone. Over most of the nineteenth century, westerners looked on the advance of settlement and the changes that it brought with pride and impatience rather than with foreboding. Although, like Daniel Boone, they might grow restless and

1

2

The West in 1901

move on as soon as they saw the smoke of a neighbor’s fireplace, they commonly welcomed the advancing prices for land and labor that encroaching neighbors paid. Even those who were not speculators in land or professional agents of such speculators, as Boone was, typically rejoiced in the transformation of wilderness into farms and towns. Apart from fur traders, a small and transitory breed, wilderness had few advocates. The principal range of opinion in a typical western community was from those who thought that it should and would become like the East (while remaining more virtuous and progressive) to those who argued that in essentials it had already done so. Again, apart from fur traders, there were few defenders of the Indian way of life, as distinguished from defenders of the rights of Indians to live and to enjoy the means of living in a European-American style, and these were likely to be easterners rather than westerners. Biases for “development”—rapid transformation of land not yet divided up for the settled kinds of uses that Europeans understood, that is, into mines, pastures, farms, and towns—were natural when, despite ample publicity, the Far West during its most celebrated rushes and great migrations increased in population far less than the Middle West. The area that later became the sixteen contiguous states north and west of Texas, more than one-half of the continental United States, had fewer recorded inhabitants of European descent in 1850 (178,918) than the state of Iowa (192,214); in 1860 (759,860) than the state of Wisconsin (775,181); in 1870 (1,492,083) than the state of Missouri (1,721,295). Wisconsin increased in population nearly three times as much in the 1840s as California, although many Wisconsin boys went to the gold mines. Since much good land near the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes remained unoccupied, much of the Far West long attracted more adventurers than home seekers. While Americans generally, and westerners more than other Americans, continued to applaud development, over the last third of the nineteenth century, advancing population transformed some of the most remote wilderness so rapidly as to arouse both admiration and concern. In the fifteen years after the Civil War, hunters destroyed twenty to thirty million of the plains buffalo, and with them the livelihood of the Plains Indians; herds of cattle took their place. By the later 1880s, cattlemen were beginning to make way for further changes as they lost free use of open range and as farmers began to plough under the last remaining buffalo grass. The advocates of the national parks, beginning with Yellowstone (1872), were more interested in preserving unusual and especially startling and grotesque examples of nature’s variety—the geysers of the Yellowstone, the big trees of the Yosemite (whose admirers were making considerable progress in destroying them), the Grand Canyon of the Colorado—than in maintaining the experience of living in primitive style or in contact with nature; but they

The West in 1901

3

represented a growing sense that the Far West as it had been was rapidly disappearing and that something of value might go with it. Well before John Muir organized the Sierra Club (1892), whose members at first devoted themselves more to hiking and camping in the wilderness than to defending it, publishers were finding a market for depictions of life in the Wild West, such as those by Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt, whose work even when they first went west in the early 1880s conveyed a strong sense of nostalgia. In the 1880s and still more in the 1890s, much of the Far West seemed both maturing and overextended. Falling prices for wheat, livestock, and silver on world markets and drought on the high plains intensified the effects of the depression of 1893. Instead of occupying more land, many farmers abandoned what they had. Over the West as a whole, the line that census reporters had drawn to set off a zone of sections with no more than two inhabitants per square mile reappeared.¹ Miners and cattlemen could ascribe their troubles to public policies, but the collapse of the boom of the 1880s in Kansas and Nebraska followed droughts so severe and prolonged as to revise judgments of the quality of the land itself. Settlers abandoned towns planned to lead in the occupation of western counties. A cattleman bought an entire deserted town in southeastern Kansas, an editor in Abilene reported. “He stabled his horses in the post office, and his herds were sheltered in the double rooms of a ‘general merchandise emporium.’”² One-fifth of the counties in the state lost population in 1895–1900, more than two-fifths during the next five years.³ In Nebraska, settlers who had remained during three years of drought fled after the “hot wind” of July 1894; children of school age decreased by more than 55 percent between 1890 and 1895.⁴ Yet the Far West as a whole remained a land of opportunity throughout the nineties. Settlers left some farmlands but moved onto others. The rush into Oklahoma, which began in 1889, continued as the government opened successive areas of former Indian lands to homesteading in the 1890s; Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory together gained more than twice as many migrants as the plains states to the north lost. The influx reached more than half a million persons, nearly as many as had moved into Washington, Oregon, and California in the great migrations of the 1880s. All but three of the other fifteen states and territories gained population beyond natural increase;⁵ Idaho and Arizona gained substantially more than in the 1880s, the population of Idaho nearly doubling. Such influxes represented more than flight from misfortune elsewhere. Despite the problems of silver miners, the mining industry as a whole expanded as never before, quite apart from the rushes into the Yukon and Alaska that began in 1897. The big slump in silver was in price rather than production, which increased

C A N A DA WASHINGTON

NEW HAMPSHIRE VERMONT MONTANA

NORTH DAKOTA

IDAHO

OREGON

MAINE

MINNESOTA MASSACHUSETTS WISCONSIN

NEW YORK

SOUTH DAKOTA MICHIGAN WYOMING

NEBRASKA

PENNSYLVANIA

IOWA OHIO ILLINOIS

NEVADA UTAH

COLORADO

NEW JERSEY DELAWARE MARYLAND

INDIANA WEST VIRGINIA

KANSAS

RHODE ISLAND CONNECTICUT

VIRGINIA

MISSOURI

CALIFORNIA

KENTUCKY NORTH CAROLINA TENNESSEE ARIZONA

OKLAHOMA

ARKANSAS

SOUTH CAROLINA

AT L ANT I C OCEAN

NEW MEXICO MISSISSIPPI

PACIFIC OCEAN

ALABAMA

GEORGIA

LOUISIANA TEXAS

Inhabitants per square mile Under 2 2 to 18

FLORIDA

18 to 45 45 to 90 90 and over

Fig. 1.1. Population of the United States and American West in 1900. The demographer’s map in 1900 revealed the thin spread of population in the American West. At the beginning of the twentieth century the West Coast and southwestern edges of the country were gaining the majority of the new settlers, the northern and interior regions lagging behind. Map by Bill Nelson.

The West in 1901

5

after 1894 to levels higher than any before 1890–93. Copper improved in both respects, production more than doubling over the decade and prices exceeding recent predepression levels. Far western employment in mining increased over the decade by more than half (56.3 percent),⁶ with Alaska accounting for less than a seventh of the increase. Still more people moved onto farms than into mines. The labor force in agriculture in the western territories and states increased by 358,989 persons—more than the total for Nebraska and the Dakotas—or nearly two-fifths, while total population increased by slightly more than one-fifth. The increase was second only to that of the boom of the 1880s, and just 42,637 (10.6 percent) less. The number of new farms in the mountain and Pacific divisions was greater than in any previous decade. The ratio of farms to population dropped from 1 to 21.5 in 1890 to 1 to 17.7 in 1900, against ratios of 1 to 13.8 and 1 to 13.3 nationally. The ratio in the Far West in 1890 had been 1 to 25.6. Continuing growth did not mean that the West offered essentially the same kinds and degrees of opportunity as in old Wests, or even that it offered or seemed to offer as much as other sections in the 1890s. Much of the East and the older Middle West still attracted more newcomers than western states with unoccupied land; in the 1890s, for instance, New York received more migrants than Oklahoma, New Jersey more than California. The changes in some older states, particularly changes associated with industrialization and immigration, were so great that fast growing as the West was, it constituted a kind of refuge from unaccustomed change, developing along more traditional lines. The western states, moreover, seemed recently to have crossed some significant thresholds of maturity and to be approaching others. The admission of a state to the Union long had seemed a significant coming of age, in which Congress at once conferred status and privilege equal to those of the older states and recognized that the people of the former territory were numerous, prosperous, experienced, and wise enough to manage their own affairs and to assume the burdens of state government. Simply because of political expediency or prejudice in Washington, statehood might come artificially early or late, as to Nevada, which in 1900 had fewer inhabitants by far than any other state or territory although it had been a state since 1864 after only three years as a territory; or to New Mexico, which after fifty years as a territory had more residents than any of four states, including one of the original thirteen. Nevertheless the historians of a state commonly reserved their most detailed chronicles for territorial times, as if life thereafter moved into standardized national channels. As the twentieth century began, Congress had recently admitted seven new states: North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming

6

The West in 1901

in 1889–90, and Utah in 1896. The three continental territories that remained were as populous and otherwise as mature as some of their neighbors and clearly would not have long to wait for statehood. Oklahoma (admitted 1907), in fact, had more inhabitants in 1900 than any of sixteen states, including six on and near the Atlantic Coast. New Mexico and Arizona, which became the fortyseventh and forty-eighth states in 1912, were forty-third and forty-sixth in population and as territories had had their own legislatures since 1850 and 1863; the governor’s palace at Santa Fe, built in 1610 and still in use, was the oldest governmental building on the continent other than the headquarters of Indian tribes in the same region. Neither Alaska nor Hawaii seemed as close to statehood in 1901 as New Mexico and Utah had seemed when Congress first organized them half a century earlier. Promoters of Alaska claimed that it offered much to farmer-immigrants, then as earlier and later; President Theodore Roosevelt joined them in predicting in Seattle in 1903 that it would be one of the most populous states within the lifetimes of his hearers, supporting as many inhabitants as the Scandinavian peninsula, which then had well over seven million, more than the Pacific, mountain, and northern plains states and territories at the last census.⁷ But when Roosevelt spoke, its inhabitants were fewer than 1 percent as many; they remained so few, scattered, and transient—most of them living by fishing, hunting, and mining (7.1 percent by farming)—that Congress authorized them to elect a legislature only in 1912, and until after the early 1930s they were still fewer than they had been in 1900. Hawaii, in contrast, was growing faster than most of the West, and a larger part of the population lived on farms there than anywhere in the United States outside the lower South, Texas, Oklahoma, and Indian Territory.⁸ It had become more American under the native monarchy than Alaska had been Russian under the tsar. Impatient to get on to Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson had felt “oppressed with civilisation” among the “beastly haoles” of Honolulu when he stopped there in 1889, four years before American missionaries and planters consolidated their control by proclaiming a republic.⁹ But most of the immigrants were male Oriental contract laborers ineligible for citizenship, who depressed levels of wages while the sugar planters who employed them controlled nearly all the arable land. In its economy and in its social structure, dominated by a few large landholders committed to a single crop cultivated by gang labor, it invited comparison with the slaveholding antebellum South rather than the West.¹⁰ “Hawaii is a paradise,” Jack London wrote a few years later, but “a paradise for the well-to-do. . . . For the person without capital, dreaming to start on a shoe-string . . . , Hawaii is the last place in the world. The shoe-string days are past.”¹¹ Congress had established a complete territorial government in 1900

The West in 1901

7

despite the misgivings of leaders of the American minority who, in the words of one of them, did “not want to be swamped by Portuguese and natives.”¹² Although Honolulu recalled the winter resorts of southern California, and Juneau and later Fairbanks the mining camps of the Rockies, neither Hawaii nor Alaska fitted common expectations of westernness. Most Americans, like the governmental agencies that compiled information on them in separate categories, regarded them as distinct from their continental neighbors. The newly admitted states had joined the United States economically no less than politically, as the most distinctively western occupations became less picturesque and at the same time more dependable as employment. As Rodman Paul has said, by the early 1870s, a quarter century after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill, mining in California no longer offered a brave adventure and an equal chance at riches but the set conditions of an eastern factory town.¹³ In the same years metallurgists and mining engineers took direction of the complex ores of the hard-rock mines of Montana, and gold and silver soon were byproducts of the smelters and refineries that fed copper and lead to eastern factories. Even during the Alaskan gold rush that followed the strikes on the Klondike in 1896, American copper exceeded gold in value, as it did until the Depression of the 1930s. In Alaska, miners stood out for several years, approaching a fourth of the local labor force in 1900, a far higher fraction than in any other part of the United States, but amounted to only about a sixth the increase in miners in the rest of the Far West in the 1890s.¹⁴ In the cattle country declining numbers of ranchers continued to move stock from Texas after the hard winters of 1886 and 1887, but the last long drive was in 1897, when barbed wire shut off the remaining highway to the northern ranges.¹⁵ Although limited open-range roundups continued for a few years—as late as 1906 in Montana—most of those cowboys who still roped calves did it chiefly for amusement or for exhibition at rodeos staged as adjuncts to state fairs and other celebrations.¹⁶ The more successful cattlemen stopped fighting settlers and imitated them, buying homesteads, growing hay, and stringing barbed-wire fences. They did not raise stock quite in traditional middle western style, but they were less independent of tradition than they had thought they could be. The West’s coming of age in crop agriculture, no less than in stock-raising, consisted in taking on new ways, in realizing that western climate conveyed new limitations as well as new opportunities, and at the same time in adhering or returning to conventional practices. It had been so at earlier stages. The pioneers of western Kansas and Nebraska in the 1870s and 1880s convinced themselves that old warnings against drought were out-of-date, that the climate had changed, even that rain had followed the plow into the Great American Desert; many of

8

The West in 1901

Fig. 1.2. Family farming in the West. Most westerners at the opening of the twentieth century were involved in agricultural pursuits. As this North Dakota scene reveals, women often helped their farm families in the fields. Photo courtesy State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck. #0090-0005.

them also farmed much as they had farmed in the eastern counties and in Iowa and Missouri in their first years—growing more corn (maize) than wheat.¹⁷ In the early 1890s Mary Elizabeth Lease spoke in the context of the economy of the central Mississippi Valley states when she told Populist farmers to raise less corn and more hell. For many of her hearers in western Kansas, coming to terms with the country included raising more wheat as well, giving up an old preference in crops. Farther north, in the Dakotas, pioneers had imported the enthusiasm for wheat already dominant in Minnesota; some of them had to learn to plant maize and other grains when returns on wheat fell. The best opportunities in the Red River Valley around 1875 seemed to be in bonanza farming, in applying machines to land in enormous assembly lines of wheat production. Both in the Dakotas and in Kansas and Nebraska, drought and pestilence were persuading farmers by the early 1890s to shift to units of more conventional size, to diversify, and especially to grow fodder for livestock, as well as to use new techniques to grow old crops (often new strains). The wheat farmers of the Pacific Northwest suffered no such striking natural reverses, soon adapting to the rolling hills of the Palouse country machinery initially devised for the large-scale operations on the flatlands of the central valleys of California and the Red River Valley; and much of the land opened for settlement in the Oklahoma District of Indian Territory (1889; 1890–1907, Oklahoma Territory) was well enough watered to permit conventional Mississippi Valley farming practices and to attract substantial numbers of refugees from the high plains to the north, some of them in time to face drought again in 1890 and 1894.

The West in 1901

9

The bad times of the nineties prompted new interest in new ways, in particular in strains of wheat resistant to pests and to vagaries in temperature and rainfall; they also seemed to confirm the doubts of the cautious and dislodged many of the most venturesome of recent settlers. Although the worst times passed in 1897–98, and immigration soon increased as prices rose and rainfall increased, the census of 1900 showed changes in the disposition of far western land more striking than the disappearance of the old line between settled and unsettled land in the census of 1890: increases in the extent of unsettled areas of most of the Far West (all continental states and territories but the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Washington).¹⁸ One hundred seventy-six counties in fourteen far western states and territories (all but Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana Territory, Oklahoma, and Wyoming) lost population, most of them farming counties that recently had gained; in three far western states, California, Oregon, and Washington, amounts of improved land in farms declined absolutely, while in ten others percentages of improved land declined.¹⁹ Sixteen counties of California had fewer inhabitants than thirty-nine years earlier, a San Francisco journal lamented (1900), noting “almost complete stagnation of settlement” in “a great young State that could make homes for forty million people and still have room for future growth.”²⁰ In western Kansas, where settlers had increased their plantings during the drought of 1893–96 until they exhausted their working capital, towns established in anticipation of a dense farming population were marked mainly by parallel rows of cellar excavations. “Frame structures of every description have been carried off bodily to distant valleys for use there as ranch buildings,” an employee of the United States Geological Survey reported (1900).²¹ In three high plains states, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, the numbers of farms operated by owners decreased.²² Although farmers retreated from the most marginal areas of the West, they advanced into areas more suited either to conventional agricultural practices or to irrigation, an unconventional means of growing conventional crops. Despite the depression, the labor force in agriculture was greater in 1900 than in any previous census year all over the Far West; the total increase in the sixteen states and territories (including Indian Territory, excluding Hawaii and Alaska) was nearly two-fifths (39.6 percent or 358,989) over 1890. Outside Oklahoma and Indian Territory, it was about half that much (20.8 percent or 185,551). In the mountain and Pacific regions, the increase (106,449), while less than threefifths the increase of the 1880s (179,589), brought the part of the labor force in agriculture closer to the level for the whole country than it had been before, 29.7 percent and 35.6 percent in 1900 (from 26.8 percent and 37.7 percent in 1890). Some of the increase in farmworkers may have followed on the depression in in-

10

The West in 1901

dustry and other urban employment: farm boys could not find jobs in town and therefore stayed at home.²³ Many of those who stayed became tenants, tenancy increasing in the 1890s after declining in the 1880s. Yet west of the high plains, farm ownership grew faster than tenancy: in the mountain and Pacific states as a whole, the increase in farms operated by owners was nearly three times the increase in farms operated by cash and share tenants.²⁴ The highest rate of employment in agriculture west of the prairie states was in Idaho (43.8 percent), which had started as a mining territory, and the gains in Montana, Arizona, and other mining states were large. Since employment in mining was picking up after the disastrous declines in silver in 1893–96, though from a smaller base—by 56.3 percent or 51,676 in the decade—the new farmers ordinarily were not refugees from the mines. Many of them may have been share and cash tenants, accounting for much of the new population on land divided into small farms. But in a country with a chiefly agricultural past, which in 1900 still had over two-thirds more workers on farms than in factories, substantial employment in agriculture was normal, a sign of a stable economy. The Far West had seemed abnormal, economically precarious and socially unhealthy, when in its early years it devoted itself to mining, trapping, and trading. More than any other section, the West had grown up agriculturally and otherwise with the railroads, which transformed treasure hunts into a functioning economy within the normal bounds of trade. Terrain and distance severely limited the uses of wagons, riverboats, and ocean-going vessels in the Far West, and the canal boat had not crossed the Mississippi. Mule and stagecoach had sufficed for gold dust from the placers and for the placer miner’s salt pork and beans, but by hauling machinery in and out, the locomotive opened the hard-rock mines of the interior. It also tapped the commercial dimensions of agricultural markets about the time crop farmers learned that they could harvest fruit on the western deserts early enough in the season to beat easterners in their own markets, wheat late enough to exploit the economies of new farm machinery. Where railroads were ready by the time of first settlement, as in much of Dakota Territory in the 1880s, pioneers skipped the traditional phase of subsistence farming, using machinery to speed the transition from buffalo grass to wheat. By the end of the century, the far westerner typically had depended on the railroad more than the middle westerner, even for moving himself west, because of the greater distances. Far more passengers rode west to the Pacific slope over the new Santa Fe (1881), Northern Pacific (1883), and Oregon Short Line (1884) railroads in their first months than had gone west by ship or wagon train in the entire decade after the discovery of gold in California; and most of them went as settlers rather than

The West in 1901

C A N A D A

Colville

Tri b

es

Spokan

sta l

Co a

WASH.

Coeur d’Alene Yakima

No r th

we st

Columbia R.

Sioux & Assiniboine Blackfeet

Flathead Missouri R. MONTANA Nez Perce

Umatilla IDAHO Warm Spring OREGON Shoshoni & Bannock

CALIFORNIA

Tule River

Moapa River

Ute UTAH TERRITORY . R o ad lor Co

Hopi Mission Hualapai Havasupai ARIZONA Indians Yuma

Sauk & Fox Kickapoo Potawatomi Chippewa & Munsee

COLORADO

Ark ansas R.

Jicarilla Apache

Sauk & Fox MISSOURI

INDIAN TERRITORY

blo Pu e

TERRITORY Zuni Mojave Pima NEW MEXICO Apache TERRITORY Papago Maricopa Mescalero Apache Papago

Ri o

IOWA

KANSAS

Ute

Navajo

i R. sipp

NEVADA

Paiute

WIS. Mi ssi s

Pla Winnebago & Omaha tte R. NEBRASKA

S A I N N T O U

Paiute

MINNESOTA

DAKOTA

Shoshoni & Arapaho

M

Shoshoni & Paiute

WYOMING

Y C K

Sn Bannock ake R.

O

Shoshoni &

Klamath

Anishinaabeg

Mandan, NORTH Hidatsa & DAKOTA Arikara Northern Cheyenne SOUTH Sioux

Crow R

Hoopa Valley

11

Red R.

s

de an Gr

Pec o

TEXAS

PACIFIC OCEAN

Fig. 1.3. Indian reservations in the 1890s. Nearly all Native Americans lived on reservations at the end of the nineteenth century. A majority would remain at these locations until the second half of the twentieth century. Map by Bill Nelson.

as sojourners. (The great migrations of the 1840s and 1850s had been into Iowa and Wisconsin rather than into California, Oregon, and Utah; in the 1880s the Territory of Washington, which had few immigrants and no railroad connections with the states till 1883 but three by 1887, grew nearly as much by migration as California, without benefit of desert sunshine and the evangelism of Los Angeles real estate salesmen.)²⁵ Westerners had come so much to identify development with railroads that the gold rush in the Klondike set off projects for lines into Alaska, and the White Pass and Yukon was ready to carry passengers in the second season (1899).

12

The West in 1901

As access by railroad expanded western settlement and trade, it also redirected them and sometimes stifled even while it stimulated. Before the completion of the line over the Central Pacific and Union Pacific (1869) Henry George had asked, “What is the railroad to do for us?” In answering, his own question predicted more than westerners hoped for: “The locomotive,” he wrote, “is a great centralizer. It kills little towns and builds up great cities, and in the same way kills little businesses and builds up great ones.” Sacramento and Stockton would lose to San Francisco; he might have foreseen losses to larger and more distant rivals.²⁶ Traveling salesmen from Chicago and New York—missionaries of the city spirit, a journalist-historian of the time has called them²⁷—shortly made converts on their circuits over each new line. The merchants of San Francisco and Portland found that while gaining new customers in the interior, they lost old ones to competitors in Minneapolis and Chicago. Eastern capital moved into much of the business that the new lines carried; it also moved out as the lines became efficient conduits for national fluctuations in credit and prosperity. The depression of the 1890s, which made western producers more vulnerable to invading easterners, affected the West earlier and more seriously than earlier depressions, spreading economic warfare as nationally organized railroads and mining industries cut wages and fought unionists who resisted, or simply postponed or cancelled projected construction. Perhaps with larger effects in the long run, it brought eastern capitalists into fuller control of western mines, railroads, and other businesses at bargain prices even while it drove out of the cattle business more of those easterners and foreigners who had survived the collapse of the 1880s. Thus Edward H. Harriman had taken control of the Union Pacific Railroad (1897–98), the Rockefellers came into Amalgamated Copper in Montana (1898–99), and Benjamin Guggenheim extended his hold on smelting and refining in Colorado (1894–1901). The dominance of eastern industry and eastern capital over the Far West had begun before the first transcontinental lines, but it accelerated strikingly in the 1880s and 1890s, when railroads reached all major settled areas. The new railroad systems of 1881–93 had more track in far more territory than the original line of 1869, and much of it was on better land, which promised more rapid development. Seeking to sell their lands and increase their traffic, they cut rates drastically. The competition of the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific for passengers in 1885–87 set off one of the most sensational western booms, in the real estate business of southern California; the reduction in freight rates and the improvement of freight service, as in moving fruit in refrigerated cars at passenger-train speed, had greater though less dramatic economic effect. The Union Pacific Railroad cut its average rates by more than two-fifths in the 1880s.²⁸ The rail-

The West in 1901

13

Fig. 1.4. Competing modes of transportation. In the early 1900s several modes of transportation often competed for dominance. Here a horse-drawn carriage, an early motorized vehicle, and a train provide needed transportation in the small Montana town of Moore in Fergus County. Photo courtesy Montana Historical Society, Helena. PAC 82.–82 Album.

roads, moreover, continued to extend lines during the decade of the depression, anticipating better times and seeking to outflank their competitors; mileage in ten states and territories increased more than 30 percent.²⁹ Shipments of fresh fruit in California rose sharply in the 1890s, bringing the state to first rank as a producer, while crops of grains began to decline, although wheat still led other crops in value and acreage.³⁰ Several long lines remained to be built after 1893 (the western extension of the Milwaukee, 1909; the Western Pacific, 1910; the Great Northern’s extension from the Columbia River into California, 1910 and 1931; the extensions of the Colorado and Southern and its connections with the Burlington system and affiliated Northern lines, especially in 1907–9), although they opened less essentially new territory than their predecessors had. The consequences of expanded rail service and promotions of it were as varied for farmers as for merchants, manufacturers, and miners. The new branch and secondary lines of the Pacific Northwest and the Dakotas in the 1880s and 1890s introduced wheat and the larger numbers of people who raised it into what had been cattle and sheep country as the new lines of the central valleys of Califor-

14

The West in 1901

nia had done in the 1870s and as the refrigerated cars on express trains on new and old lines introduced fruit and still more people into what had been wheat country. But farmers encouraged to seek more distant markets—for wheat at Minneapolis and Liverpool, for fruit at New York—incurred fixed charges for freight and for the services of middlemen, which made them more vulnerable to fluctuations in price that followed on wider competition, especially during the depression. Yet the farmers’ temptations and misfortunes served to spare western agriculture for a few years from the kinds of reorganization of ownership that occurred in railroading and mining. Since even the greatest monopolies could not control output, and prices of commodities sold at great distances depended on weather and other circumstances beyond anyone’s reach, capitalists were content to let farmers take the risks; and farmers found that consolidation and specialization were self-defeating, that diversifying their product made them less vulnerable to drought and pestilence and to sudden changes in the widening markets in which they sold crops and hired labor, and moreover that for most of them the decision to diversify or not to diversify was their own. Grain elevator operators ordinarily were not in positions to forbid them to plant less wheat when wheat was in surplus, compared to southern plantation owners and ginners who forced tenant farmers to concentrate on cotton, which could wait in warehouses for better prices more easily than most western crops. So while dependence on distant markets was a powerful force in industrializing western agriculture, it operated within limits. Concentration of ownership and division of labor sometimes went as far as in the meat-packing houses of Chicago and the steel mills of Pittsburgh—the bonanza wheat farms of the Dakotas were a dramatic example—but seldom for long. As the depression further integrated the West into the national economy, it also brought the West closer to national rates of growth. During the 1880s the Far West had gained 90.7 percent in population, in the 1890s only 27.3 percent, still more than the rest of the country but not so much more (against 25.5 percent and 20.7 percent for the whole of the United States). Net migration (excess of immigrants over emigrants) dropped by more than half, from 1,615,500 to 755,000, while migration into the East and Middle West increased (Illinois alone getting twice as many migrants as in the 1880s, to a total of 340,000). The decline was greatest in some states that recently had sharply gained: Nebraska lost 153,900 (net emigration), more than 1 in 7 inhabitants of 1890, after having gained 362,500 in the 1880s. But while only Nevada lost in total population, because of the decline in silver mining in the 1870s, all states and territories except Oklahoma, Idaho, and Arizona gained less than before.³¹ Migration into

The West in 1901

15

the Dakotas slumped from 243,400 to 64,100 (net migration), into Washington from 205,400 to 80,400. The declines in migration and growth, reflecting declines in the general fortunes and prospects of the West and in the means of those who might have moved west, meant that in large areas fewer westerners could make their livings by activities associated with establishing new settlements.³² In the wheat country especially, there was less business for real estate salesmen, innkeepers, and builders as there was less prospect of gaining simply by investing in land. The population had changed over the decade in what it was as well as in what its opportunities were. It was closer to the national ratio of sexes, with less than thirteen males to ten females in the mountain and Pacific regions, instead of more than fourteen;³³ the shift in ratios represented single men giving way to families, visitors and adventurers to residents. The population also was closer to the national ratio of foreign and native born,³⁴ in large part because of the increase in families. Net migration to the Far West from abroad had fallen off much less than net migration from the states, perhaps because the depression affected potential emigrants in Europe less than it affected native Americans— or, when it affected them after they arrived, because they could less easily return home. But the change in the composition of the population followed chiefly on natural increase, whether of native or foreign stock. And more immigrants from Europe were staying in the Middle West and in the Northeast, which passed the Far West in percentage of foreign born and greatly exceeded it in immigration from southern and eastern Europe. California dropped from 33.9 percent foreign born in 1880 and 30.2 percent in 1890 to 24.7 percent in both 1900 and 1910, while New York rose from 23.8 percent (1890) to 26.2 percent (1890), 26.1 percent (1900), and 30.2 percent (1910). North Dakota still led the nation in foreign born (35.4 percent in 1900), but its Scandinavian and German farmers seemed less exotic to their neighbors than the new Italian and eastern European Jewish immigrants in eastern tenements seemed to theirs. In the West the only foreigners who significantly increased in the 1890s were the Japanese, who at first went so much into rural areas as field laborers as to be relatively inconspicuous elsewhere, while the Asian flavor of western cities declined as elderly Chinese returned home and by act of Congress (1882) few newcomers could replace them. San Francisco, most Asian of American cities, lost more than two-fifths of its Chinese in 1890–1900 (11,879), while gaining only a tenth as many Japanese (1,191).³⁵ As Mexican or Spanish Americans had lost visibility along with title to their lands and then were vastly outnumbered by the new immigration into southern California in the 1880s, what had been one of the most exotic parts of the Far West became one of the most midwestern.

16

The West in 1901

As the West came to stand apart less from older sections during the depression, in social character and in economic prospects, it also began to command more substantial loyalty. Those immigrants most disillusioned in the prospects of the various western booms of the 1880s moved on if they could afford to, whether to older states or to more promising parts of the West. As they moved they left behind stabler populations that, whether they remained by choice or by default, at least had time to become acquainted with each other and with local conditions.³⁶ Some of those who remained joined forces for mutual protection and advancement in ways they had not supposed necessary when buyers in search of new real estate developments arrived on every train from the East. Far westerners had been slow to develop civic spirit extending beyond such immediate interests as jointly promoting the sale of city lots; the frequency of disastrous fires in western cities had followed not only on the use of flimsy frame construction by businessmen intent on immediate returns but also on general unwillingness to support city government or even effective volunteer fire departments. Chambers of commerce and boards of trade had first appeared on a large scale in the United States after the middle of the nineteenth century, when railroads diverted freight from cities on inland rivers, and in the older rather than the newer states.³⁷ Portlanders refused at first to believe that the northern lines would develop terminals at Tacoma and Seattle, or that such upstarts could take traffic from the water-level route of the Willamette and the Columbia. Then from Puget Sound to San Diego, disappointment with the decisions of the railroad builders and with the state of trade after the completion of new lines in the 1880s and 1890s prompted businessmen to work more for general development. When they did, they promoted both publicity—as by advertisements, exhibits, and fairs—and specific projects to increase trade, including development of harbor and terminal facilities. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which organized just after the collapse of the real estate market in southern California, addressed itself particularly to mobilizing support for building a harbor, on which work began in 1899. A chief purpose of the chamber, its secretary recalled, was to reassure people of the city’s future, “not at a distance but at home.”³⁸ San Franciscans defied the depression by holding the Midwinter Fair of 1894;³⁹ the businessmen of Seattle made a remarkable commitment to the community’s future by undertaking a vast program of regrading, for which they sacrificed the Washington Hotel, a showplace and symbol of recovery after the disastrous fire of 1889. Western chambers of commerce multiplied to the point that by 1912 a fourth of chambers in the country were in far western states and territories though only about a seventh of the national population lived there.⁴⁰ While westerners joined forces during the depression to move their commu-

The West in 1901

17

Fig. 1.5. Railroads and western tourists. At the opening of the twentieth century, railroads carried hundreds of thousands of tourists to many sections of the West. Some of these visitors to the Rocky Mountains undoubtedly returned as new settlers in this expanding region. Photo courtesy Lachland McLean Photograph Collection, M709, Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries.

nities forward, they also looked back with nostalgia. Whether because struggling against adversity gave them memories to share and achievements to narrate or because it suggested new respect for old residents who had already succeeded, they were coming, in the 1890s, to be more disposed to honor the past as well as to promote the future. Sometimes they did both at once, featuring pioneer and Spanish costumery in festivals designed to advertise common prospects. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce developed a system of exhibits that other western cities soon imitated, displaying Indian relics and Mexican antiques as well as fruits and flowers.⁴¹ Perhaps westerners had simply become old enough to become preoccupied with their youth and their progenitors, as the old do anywhere. In a time when newness aged badly on many unsuccessful promotions of the recent boom—hotel accommodations waiting for guests who never came, signs posting streets in subdivisions where no one built—perhaps age and ances-

18

The West in 1901

try acquired negotiable value, to impress potential settlers and investors with the solid foundations of the new country. State and county historical and pioneer societies took on new life and membership; regional architecture, such as the Mexican mission style, began to be acceptable rather than embarrassing. In a less speculative spirit than townspeople, western farmers also responded to the depression, investing not so much for quick profit, which they had learned few could expect, as for the long pull. Agricultural expansion in years of bad weather and low farm prices have no simple explanation, but probably the numbers of farmers increased partly by default as elderly couples who normally would have sold out and moved to town could not get their prices, young men could not get jobs in town,⁴² and owners divided large holdings of what had been wheat land rather than take more losses in farming it themselves. Some of the expansion in acreage of farm land corresponded to the changing practices of stockmen, who acquired grazing land that had been in the public domain instead of betting, in effect, that homesteaders would not take it up while they still needed it. New acreage in private ownership increased so much more rapidly than land under cultivation in the northern cattle country that the difference explained much of the sharp decline in the average price of farm land, which fell by 53 percent in Wyoming, by 74 percent in Montana.⁴³ Investments in irrigation works and in irrigable lands likewise grew in the spirit of insurance: as stockraisers anticipated drought by guaranteeing access to pasturage, cultivators anticipated drought by guaranteeing access to surface water. Irrigation more than doubled in the western states into the 1890s, increasing by nearly four million acres of land. Although the total was still small, comprising only 3.3 percent of all far western land in farms in 1899,⁴⁴ willingness to plan for the long term during a depression contrasted strikingly with the reluctance of many western wheat farmers during the 1870s and 1880s to do more than mine the soil, skimping on barns, farmhouses, and other improvements. The increase in irrigation was especially encouraging to advocates of agriculture as a way of life because in two of the major irrigating states, California and Colorado, numbers of irrigators increased more than acreage irrigated.⁴⁵ In the mountain and Pacific divisions, which had lagged notoriously in agricultural development by standards of the Middle West and the plains, numbers of farms grew more than in any previous decade.⁴⁶ Despite the depression of the 1890s, and despite the depletion of arable government land prior to the onset of the depression, the Far West ended the nineteenth century with prospects for continuing opportunity more traditional and apparently sounder than the opportunities of mining rushes and real estate booms during the four decades following the discovery of gold in California in

The West in 1901

19

1848. Competing frantically for traffic and settlers and encouraging western farmers to adopt the specialized methods of large-scale industry, the new transcontinental railroad systems served as powerful leveling forces in equalizing economic and social conditions among the sections. Farmers and stockmen learned that the leverage of high fixed costs in freight could magnify their losses as well as their gains and began to diversify to spread their risks. Merchants, civic leaders, and agriculturists seemed variously to accept their western environments more than in more prosperous times as they celebrated the past and planned the future. If westerners lowered their expectations for development to more nearly national levels, they also regarded themselves more as residents, investing both their money and their loyalties in community and region as most of them had not done as pioneers.

2

Agricultural Frontiers: New Farms and Family Farmers

As westerners exulted in emerging from the depression of the 1890s, many felt that their regional economies would be sounder, less likely to suffer such dislocations, if more of them were farmers. James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, which tapped some of the richest ores and forests of the continent, roamed his territory preaching a gospel of agricultural development; his audiences welcomed it the more readily because it justified them and what they had been telling themselves. “This is pre-eminently an agricultural country,” he told the members of the Agricultural Society of Minnesota, calling on the government to promote settlement and production in the new states beyond the Mississippi River by establishing hundreds of model farms.¹ “The natural growth of the soil of Montana is greater than the wealth of all the mines within her borders—many times greater,” he proclaimed in 1909 at Helena.² Hill saw the destiny of the West in demand for its crops both in the cities of the East and Middle West and in eastern Asia. Having created a surplus of railroad freight cars moving west by opening markets for western lumber in the Mississippi Valley, he proposed to fill them by opening markets for western flour in China and Japan, building a fleet to carry it across the Pacific from terminals on the Columbia River and Puget Sound.³ Hill was less unusual in his vision than in how he tried to realize it. Bureaus of immigration and colonization that western territorial and state governments and railroad companies established had advertised agricultural opportunity for decades. In California, where farmers exceeded miners earlier than in the mountain territories, reformers as diverse as officers of the Southern Pacific Railroad⁴ and Grangers who attacked the railroad for monopolizing both land and trans-

20

New Farms and Family Farmers

21

portation had proposed to divide the great ranches of the central and coastal valleys into family farms in the 1870s and 1880s, while acreage in wheat was still expanding; they predicted a more equable society, a sounder economy, and larger returns on freight. When demand for town lots in southern California collapsed with the boom of 1885–87, the Los Angeles Board of Trade deplored pinning hopes on a few rich men who came merely to build homes, “without producing anything,” and looked for a stabler class of farming people.⁵ Chambers of commerce and other promotional organizations emphasized agricultural products and prospects even at San Francisco, financial and commercial capital of the Pacific slope. “Something must be done with our great areas of thirsty uplands,” insisted Water and Forest (San Francisco), “or California has ceased to grow, and when States cease to grow they begin to decay.”⁶ When the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads established a Community Publicity Bureau (1906) to promote development in their territory, chambers of commerce and city governments collaborated with it in directing propaganda at prospective farmers.⁷ By the beginning of the century such missionaries of rural settlement preached much to the converted. Whereas elsewhere numbers of new farmers declined, an economist observed after the census of 1900, in the West they exceeded beginners in any other field.⁸ Populations on farms had reached their peaks and began to decline throughout the Northeast and the older Middle West as far west as Michigan about 1890, but everywhere farther west with the single exception of Kansas they continued to grow: in Nebraska to 1910, in the Dakotas, Oklahoma, and the mountain and Pacific Coast states into the 1930s.⁹ The new interest in farming followed increases in rainfall, yields, and prices that drove up returns at unparalleled rates, most strikingly where they had been most depressed. The value of the American wheat crop nearly doubled in the ten years after the bottom of the depression, 1894, and again in the ten years following, before the inflation of the First World War; then it more than doubled during and just after the war, 1914–19.¹⁰ “Kansas farmers are rich beyond the fondest dreams,” Harper’s Weekly reported after the harvest of 1902, only six years after William Allen White scolded them for their manners at the depth of the depression in the editorial that made him famous, “What’s the Matter with Kansas.” They were “the richest class of agriculturists in the United States.” They lived like their cousins in town, relying on rural deliveries of mail, ice, and groceries; they joined golf clubs and sent their children to eastern finishing schools.¹¹ A journalist compared returns on wheat farms to returns on steel mills and gold mines.¹² William Jennings Bryan, evangelist of discontent in 1896, made the new

B RI T I S H CO LU M B I A 1871

A L B E RTA 1905 S A S K AT C H E WA N 1905

Vancouver

ON TA R IO 1867

M A N I TOB A 1870

Winnipeg Palliser’s Triangle Seattle Spokane WASHINGTON 1889

OREGON 1859

M I N N E S OTA 1858

N ORT H DA KOTA 1889

M O N TA N A 1890

Portland

I DA H O 1890

SOU T H DA KOTA 1889

Minneapolis

IOWA 1846

W YO M I N G 1890 NEBRASKA 1867

San Francisco

N E VA DA 1864

Oakland

Salt Lake City U TA H 1896

St. Paul

Denver COLORADO 1876

Des Moines

Omaha

Kansas City

KANSAS 1861

M ISSOU R I 1821

Wichita Tulsa

C A LIFORNIA 1850

Long Beach

Los Angeles

Oklahoma City ARIZONA 1912

N E W M E X IC O 1912

San Diego

Ft. Worth El Paso

PACIFIC OCEAN

OKL A HOM A 1907

Dallas

ARK. 1836

LA. 1812

TEXAS 1845

Houston San Antonio

Settled areas (2 or more inhabitants to the square mile) Settled by 1900 Settled 1900–1930 Cities of 100,000 or more in 1930 Dates are of entry into the Union or province into the Dominion of Canada. Boundaries as of 1930.

Fig. 2.1. New frontiers of western settlement, 1900 to 1930. Waves of new settlers to the West in the first three decades of the twentieth century expanded earlier populations and spilled out into new areas. The interior region remained predominantly agricultural, the Pacific Coast areas increasingly urban. Map by Bill Nelson.

New Farms and Family Farmers

23

rural affluence a political symbol in 1902–3 when he built a stately home at his farm on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska, as a western Monticello for future generations of Democrats.¹³ Movement onto farms between the depression of the 1890s and the Second World War amounted to much more than extensions of previous trends, repeatedly extending into new areas and new crops at new rates of increase. Well after the rushes that concentrated populations at mines in California by 1850 and in Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana by 1870, agriculture had remained a less common occupation west of the plains states than over the rest of the country. At the census of 1900 it exceeded the national average in only three of the mountain and Pacific territories and states, and there under different and unusual circumstances: in Idaho by new access to productive wheat and fruit land that early settlers had passed by for mining, in New Mexico in the survival of traditional ways in a cultural backwash that grew more slowly than its neighbors’, and in Hawaii through importation of corporate plantation agriculture and the contract laborers on whom it depended.¹⁴ Most of the new farms outside the South were east of the Missouri and Red rivers in every decade of the nineteenth century with only one exception, the 1880s. In the second half of the century less than a third of the increase outside the South was in the Far West, and over two-thirds of that far western increase was within the five easternmost of the eighteen states and territories, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Oklahoma.¹⁵ Farming was as common an occupation as in Iowa and Minnesota only in these five and in Idaho, New Mexico, and Hawaii. Farmers exceeded farm laborers by as much as they did in the rest of the Middle West only in Oregon, Washington, the four plains states, and the territory of Oklahoma.¹⁶ In the first two decades when free homesteads were generally available, 1860–80, farms and farmland increased more in Pennsylvania than in the eight mountain states and territories; there were over eight times as many new farms and almost as much new farmland in the five states of the Old Northwest, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, as in the eleven mountain and Pacific states and territories. Until the 1880s Iowa added more farms than Nebraska, and until the 1890s Nebraska more than the four mountain states and territories along the Pacific railroad to the west. Population on farms in the eleven Pacific and mountain territories and states, with well over half the area of the forty-eight outside the South, exceeded population on farms in Kansas only by 1890, numbers of farms only in the 1890s. They added more land in farms than the five plains states within a decade only after 1910, although farms west of the plains consistently averaged more than twice the size of farms elsewhere.¹⁷

24

New Farms and Family Farmers

Around the beginning of the century many new farmers reoccupied land abandoned in the 1880s and 1890s. The forty-two westernmost counties of Kansas, where population had declined by nearly two-fifths between 1887 and 1897, again led the state in rate of growth and like the five plains states gained more than they had lost.¹⁸ But both within wheat country and beyond it, pioneering soon reached new scales. Between 1890 and 1920 farmland increased nearly two and a half times as much over the Pacific, mountain, and plains states as in the thirty years preceding; most of that increase followed 1900.¹⁹ Prices of land had fallen more in the Far West than elsewhere during the depression, and they recovered more slowly.²⁰ In 1900 prices of farmland still averaged lower than in 1890 in ten of the sixteen contiguous far western states and territories against only two states of the older Middle West.²¹ Some low statewide averages concealed, as the Bureau of the Census pointed out, “the inclusion in farms of vast areas of cheap land formerly a part of the public domain,” land for which there was little demand in depressed times.²² After 1900, as prices for foodstuffs rose (by 1910 nearly 54 percent above the level of 1896), demand for arable land pressed on supply, while land in farms over the entire country increased by less than 5 percent in the decade 1900–10, less than since the 1860s.²³ Prices of far western farmland increased at more than national rates, more than doubling in every state, in seven states more than tripling.²⁴ The common wisdom was that demand and price reflected disparities between consumption and production of staple crops both within the United States and abroad that could only widen as manufacturing supported larger populations in eastern and midwestern states that raised less food and fiber than in the past. As the United States Industrial Commission of 1898–1902 pointed out, for several years population had grown out of proportion to productive acreage; since apart from fluctuations in weather, agricultural production varied directly with acreage under cultivation, demand soon would make western agriculture still more profitable despite long hauls to markets.²⁵ The author of a treatise on wheat predicted that because of increased consumption in the West alone American farmers would depend less on the vagaries of international demand for wheat.²⁶ Demand for land appeared most dramatically when the government opened Indian reservations to entry in large tracts, as in Indian Territory and Oklahoma between 1889 and 1901. At Blackfoot, Idaho, on the Snake River, in June 1902, thousands raced into the Fort Hall Reservation, where the Bannocks had given up 418,000 acres, with men crowding on tops of coaches and the locomotive of a special train out of Pocatello.²⁷ Facing unmanageable demand, the General Land Office resorted to lotteries to select those who in turn might select claims on the first day of entry. At the first such lotteries, at El Reno and Fort Sill in

New Farms and Family Farmers

25

Fig. 2.2. Oklahoma Land Runs. Dramatic new land runs occurred in Oklahoma in the 1880s and 1890s, including this one in Guthrie in 1889. When Indian lands opened for settlement, non-Native settlers rushed into the former Indian Territory like torrents following a rainstorm. Photo courtesy Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman. Swearingen Collection, #65.

southwestern Oklahoma in 1901, 165,000 persons registered for 13,000 claims on the Wichita and Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservations, more than had competed in the more celebrated run for the Cherokee Outlet in 1893.²⁸ A reporter described men and women camping in open fields and sleeping in dusty streets as they waited for the drawing in a carnival aggregation of palm readers and hawkers. “The land-opening was conducted something like a game of chance, hence it came to be a fad to gamble.”²⁹ The confusion had been so great at the last opening that the government tried to exclude adventurers and speculators, giving preference to applicants with families and excluding those who already had as many as 160 acres. Within a few hours after the drawing, a tent city of ten thousand inhabitants sprang up at the town site of Lawton.³⁰ Ratios of applicants to available claims were even higher at lotteries for land on the Rosebud Reservation in Gregory and Tripp counties, south-central South Dakota, in 1904 and 1908.³¹ In 1909 more than a 100,000 persons registered for claims on the Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, and Spokane reservations in Idaho, Montana, and Washington.³² Still more land became available through lease, as when the Bureau of Indian Affairs opened almost three million acres of the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in north-central South Dakota in 1903.³³

26

New Farms and Family Farmers

Whites took over land that Indians held in severalty more gradually as Indian owners sold it and lost it for debt or nonpayment of taxes. Over much of the northern plains and the Pacific Northwest, sales of land that new railroad lines tapped supplemented the liquidation of tribal holdings. The Northern Pacific Railroad, which had sold large tracts of both timber and agricultural lands to corporations and speculators and leased substantial amounts to stockmen for grazing in the 1890s and early 1900s, announced in 1905 a policy of selling to actual settlers, requiring them to reside on and cultivate their land.³⁴ Establishing experimental farms to promote dry farming, in ten years it sold nearly five million acres³⁵—nearly as much as homesteaders had taken title to in the Dakotas before statehood, in one year, 1913–14—over half a million in Montana alone.³⁶ Although the Burlington had closed its land department in 1905 after selling its last tract in Nebraska, for many years thereafter it maintained an active colonization department, which referred prospective settlers to sellers along its lines and informed them of opportunities to acquire government land.³⁷ But homesteading accounted for the principal movements onto western lands. Into the 1870s most entries had been east of the Missouri River, through the 1880s more in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota than farther west. In 1891– 1900 original entries in the area of the future sixteen contiguous states comprised 46,527,532 acres (155 more with Alaska), nearly three-fourths of the total for the decade, but had declined more than entries to the east since the 1880s. Beginning to increase again in 1897 and 1898, within the next decade, 1901–10, entries more than doubled, to 96,499,547 acres, almost as much as the far western total for the two decades preceding.³⁸ Homesteaders made all-time records in numbers of entries in 1902, in acreage in 1910.³⁹ By 1935, when Congress had sharply curtailed the process of disposing of the public domain, entries in the sixteen and Alaska since 1901 had reached more than twice the area of entries there before then (1863–1900),⁴⁰ more than the combined areas of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, and Idaho.⁴¹ Totals fell off sharply in the 1920s but over the decade (1921-30) exceeded those of the leading decade of the previous century, 1881–90.⁴² “More people now than ever are in the pioneer stage,” wrote Lemuel C. Barnes, a Baptist minister who had worked with rural churches, observing that there had been more final homestead entries in the last five years (1916–21) than in any five before, in the last ten years than in any fifteen.⁴³ Whatever else had ended by 1890, when according to the reporter of the census it was no longer possible to draw a continuous line between occupied and unoccupied land, the occupation of western lands had not.⁴⁴ As entries mounted, rushes at land offices swept through successive areas, in-

New Farms and Family Farmers

27

cluding some previously passed by. The boom in Oklahoma was as brief as it was spectacular, the state leading in area of entries in two years, 1894 and 1902, but falling behind Nebraska over the decades 1891–1900 and 1901–10. Oklahoma set a record of 4,401,090 acres in entries in 1902 that lasted only until Nebraska surpassed it in 1905, Montana in 1910. Entries in Nebraska in 1901–10 approached acreage over all years previous, since homesteading began in 1863, but then fell back sharply, along with entries in North Dakota.⁴⁵ Thereafter most homesteading shifted farther west, Montana, New Mexico, or Wyoming leading in every year but one after 1906, with Colorado close behind.⁴⁶ When Henry Wallace found the western country between Omaha and the Rockies “overrun” with real estate men and boomers in 1909, they stood out especially in Wyoming, meeting all trains with automobiles to show the land.⁴⁷ Entries from 1901 to 1921 in Montana accounted for more than twice the area of entries 1863–90 in Kansas, which had led until Dakota moved ahead in 1883;⁴⁸ in 1910–19 they comprised two-thirds the area of all entries in the state, 1869–1934.⁴⁹ These were times of county-splitting, when growing populations prompted the Montana legislature to create twenty-one counties in eight years.⁵⁰ The boom in Montana and its neighbors coincided with a decade of aboveaverage rainfall and with promotion of colonization by the Hill lines and other railroads.⁵¹ In central and eastern Oregon builders of lines from the Columbia and Snake rivers vied to be first to tap land compared to the wheatlands of central Washington; construction crews of the Hill and Harriman systems fought for the route along the Deschutes River to Bend in 1909–10 as crews had fought for the route along the Arkansas in southern Colorado in the 1870s. Six hundred homesteaders, most of them unmarried, filed in the first four months of 1911 in Crook County, just east of the railroad that reached Bend that October. “Central Oregon has never [seen], and after next summer will never see another such rush,” commented the Silver Lake Leader, “for by that time it will be virtually all gone.”⁵² Demand by homesteaders fed on itself as rainfall increased over much of the Northwest and depletion of available land along new railroad lines assured them that they could sell their claims profitably. “Practically the only desirable free land left in the Northwest is in Northern Montana and in recently opened Central Oregon,” the Great Northern announced in 1911.⁵³ Settlers “are on the last frontier in which good land and cheap land is obtainable,” a reporter wrote, “and they are here prepared to wait.”⁵⁴ How many of them intended to farm the land they filed on was less clear, especially where, as in eastern Montana, prices of land rose substantially but not yields in crops.⁵⁵ The Public Lands Commission of 1903–5 noted sharp in-

28

New Farms and Family Farmers

creases in commutation, by which entrymen got title after fourteen months by paying $1.25 or $2.50 an acre instead of by cultivating their land and living on it for five years. Three-fifths of homesteaders in North Dakota had commuted by 1903, against less than one-tenth before 1899. In one district in northern North Dakota nine-tenths of commuters left as soon as they got title, many obviously by prearrangement with stockgrowers, although the market was so active that such assurance was superfluous for entrymen able to cover their moving and living expenses. Recommending reclassification of public land to limit homesteading to land suitable for development, the commission warned that “the number of patents issued [was] increasing out of all proportion to the number of new homes.” “It has been my experience and observation in ten years of field service,” an officer of the General Land Office commented (1908), “that the commuted homestead is almost universally an entry initiated with a full intent never to make the land a home.”⁵⁶ Homesteading became especially nominal in subhumid areas after prices of crops collapsed in 1920 and 1921. In eastern Montana and Wyoming, Will C. Barnes, inspector of grazing for the Forest Service, reported (1926), “one and all were looking for some stockman to come and buy them out.”⁵⁷ Particularly over the high, dry expanses from the western parts of the plains states to the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada, much of them still predominantly cattle and mining country, romantic and practical purposes merged; a few months on a homestead claim were a fast-vanishing opportunity to sample the experience of the open frontier as well as a promising speculation. Investors and city people interested in owning country homes believed, an agricultural economist observed in 1914, “that the last chance had come to get a farm at any but an exorbitant price.”⁵⁸ Easterners and midwesterners, many of them unmarried, many female, tried their luck in a spirit much like that of the young miners who went to California in 1849; like forty-niners, some recorded their trials, achievements, and pleasures in a new autobiographical literary genre. “Some of the girls we knew talked about ‘going homesteading’ as a wild adventure,” recalled one of two sisters from St. Louis who went to western South Dakota to file a claim in 1907 knowing nothing of conditions they would face. “They boasted of friends or relatives who had gone to live on a claim as though they had gone lionhunting in Africa or gold-hunting in Alaska. . . . Over the Midwest the homestead idea was spreading rapidly to farm and hamlet and city. One heard a great deal about families leaving their farms and going west to get cheap land; of young college men who went out to prove up a quarter-section. The land would always be worth something, and the experience, even for a short time, was a fruitful one in many ways.”⁵⁹ Employees at the General Land Office estimated in 1910

New Farms and Family Farmers

29

Fig. 2.3. Women homesteaders. Women made up a surprising number of the new western homesteaders. In some interior subregions, especially in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Colorado, they ranged from 10 to 30 percent of those filing for homesteads. Photo courtesy Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources, Wyoming State Archives, Laramie. Sub Neg. 15527.

that two thousand women had registered claims in the West, about one in fifty original entries for the year, but later counts indicated that over one-seventh of homesteaders were women in North Dakota after 1900, still more in parts of other states.⁶⁰ Although their neighbors often doubted that they could survive the experience, and skeptical government employees alleged that large groups of women transferred their claims by prearrangement, a survey of samples of women homesteaders in Colorado and Wyoming indicates that they proved up more often than men.⁶¹ Conditions of settlement on much of the land available after the 1890s were novel enough to make specific experience on farms count for less than before: in some respects easier, especially the process of the move, in others harder, especially climate and its corollaries. Homesteaders who came by train could bring all their movable possessions with them and arrive early enough in spring to plant crops; those with cars could more easily supplement their incomes from farming. When two schoolteachers moved to their claim near Fort Benton,

30

New Farms and Family Farmers

Montana, in 1909, they had the railroad leave their furniture within sight of their cabin.⁶² John and Bessie Graham, young Kansans who homesteaded near Cut Bank in northwestern Montana in 1912, loaded a boxcar with seven horses, a brood sow, a milk cow, a new wagon, and (since there was no wood within fifty miles of their land) enough posts of Osage orange to fill the car to capacity, as well as household goods and farm equipment; they arrived early enough to build a three-room frame house that summer. To pay for improvements Graham drilled wells for neighbors, taking part of his pay in sod-breaking, while his wife taught school. In their fifth year they rented a house in Valier, eighteen miles away, where Graham attended high school over the next two years, leaving their son and Mrs. Graham’s parents on the homestead and returning by automobile weekends except when snow blocked the roads. But droughts in 1917 and 1918 forced them to buy hay and feed grain for stock and wheat, oats, and flax for seed; by the next fall half the homesteaders had fled, and the Grahams moved to Washington. Graham concluded that those who sold their claims fared much better than those who tried to farm unsuitable land.⁶³ In 1920 Montana led all states but California in increase in population on farms since 1900; but then it led all in decline, and settlers who remained faced the triple burdens of private and public debt contracted and expenses of new county governments organized in expectation of continuing growth.⁶⁴ The newcomers were assorted lots. After the depression of the 1890s fewer of them than before were experienced farmers, although most newly opened land demanded more in practical skills and staying power than had land previously available, and fewer were married couples. Families more often than single men and women tried to farm and keep their land, but family farmers sometimes were only somewhat better prepared than admitted speculators; some who fared best came late enough to learn from others’ experiences. In southeastern Sheridan County, in the sandhills of western Nebraska, where Mari Sandoz recalled “a long line of homeseekers that passed through our little world” after the government forced out cattlemen who had assembled landholdings fraudulently,⁶⁵ the population increased nearly eight times within the decade, 1900–10. But by 1930 the sandhills had reverted to cattle ranching.⁶⁶ The Kinkaid Act (1904), which authorized claims of 640 acres in twenty-five counties of western Nebraska, attracted homesteaders who repeated the misfortunes of pioneers who had retreated from the same counties in the 1890s although also others who in time developed manageable balances of stock-raising and crop-farming.⁶⁷ The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, which authorized claims half as large in nine states farther west,⁶⁸ invited further rushes onto land where growing seasons at best were short, living conditions bleak. By that time

New Farms and Family Farmers

31

good farmland in the older high plains states and Oklahoma was running out, and even in the Dakotas bona fide settlers who found that 160 acres were too few to support a family were buying out neighbors.⁶⁹ After 1891, when Congress repealed the Preemption Act of 1841 and the Timber Culture Act of 1873, and before it passed the Act of 1909, such purchases were the simplest means by which both crop farmers and stockmen enlarged their holdings to economic sizes. Although in the mid-1920s stockmen could claim a total of about 20,000,000 acres, equivalent in area to two-fifths the state of Nebraska, by provisions of the Grazing Homestead Act of 1916, it averaged under ten head to a section in carrying capacity.⁷⁰ For many families, homesteading in the first two decades of the century was as stark a confrontation with the elements as it ever had been. Recalling his childhood in rural northeastern Colorado in 1910–15, Hal Borland realized that when he and his parents came there from the town in Nebraska where his father had worked as a printer, they returned to the ways of his great-grandfather in western Pennsylvania a century earlier, although in a harsher climate and with more limited prospects even of surviving to establish their claim. The main streams of settlement had left eastern Colorado and western Kansas between the Platte and the Arkansas “virtually untouched by the whole nineteenth century,” he wrote. “In terms of social history I have lived close to 150 years, simply because I grew up on an island of isolation in eastern Colorado.”⁷¹ “The average homesteader in the Dakotas is of limited means,” a member of the Forest Service testified in 1904, noting that families were still arriving in covered wagons. “An invoice of their total possessions would show a team and wagon, a cow, a few household articles, and perhaps a plow, and after paying their filing fee and erecting a shack or sod house they are able to count their dollars upon the fingers of two hands.”⁷² A farmer who homesteaded in the badlands of southwestern South Dakota recalled how in the winter of 1912 he had tried to shut out the cold by piling sod high around his tar-paper shanty, keeping his supply of potatoes behind the stove by day and in his bed by night.⁷³ The lot of women on western farms was like that of a murderer, a former North Dakotan told the United States Industrial Commission in 1915—servitude for life at hard labor without recompense— but without a murderer’s guarantee of enough to eat.⁷⁴ Most twentieth-century homesteaders made their claims farther from any older settlements as well as from their former homes and the homes of relatives than successive generations of pioneers in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys had done; the greater distances took them into unfamiliar climates and landscapes where many of them had to get along without familiar resources in fuel and building materials, even in drinking water, and away from comforts and conveniences that were becoming

32

New Farms and Family Farmers

available in established farming areas. Rural sociologists who studied movement from farms in western North Dakota found (1926) that fewer than one in eight families in recently settled western townships had sinks against nearly two in three in older eastern townships, about one in thirty-four electric lights against nearly two in five.⁷⁵ Many early twentieth-century homesteaders had never worked on farms—in western North Dakota about half those who had left according to the same survey.⁷⁶ They brought less experience in farming than their predecessors to land that was less likely to support twentieth-century standards of living. H. L. Davis recalled the homesteaders he had seen as a boy in eastern Oregon in 1907: a “set of misfits who had come homesteading because they could not be any worse off,” so inexperienced as to plant wheat where sagebrush would not grow, orchards “at an altitude where the fruit froze, every year, before it was thoroughly green.”⁷⁷ An Oregonian whose family homesteaded several years later in Baker County, where mining and stock-raising predominated well after the railroad came through in 1884, later recalled how they “spent 11 years trying to prove you could grow grain with 10 inches of rainfall average yearly on soil suitable for grazing for livestock, jack rabbits and antelope.”⁷⁸ Mari Sandoz remembered settlers who came into western Nebraska for Kinkaid claims as “mostly middle-aged, citysoftened, dependent upon railroads and stores, too often set lone folk: bachelors, widowers, old maids, widows.”⁷⁹ Surveying homesteaders in dry-farming counties of north-central Montana in 1922, M. L. Wilson found that barely more than half of them had been farmers before they came; the thirty-two nonfarmers to twenty-three farmers in one township included two deep-sea divers, a sea-going engineer, two wrestlers, and two milliners.⁸⁰ Those who commuted their claims were even less likely to have lived or worked on farms. According to an officer of the General Land Office in 1909, commuters commonly had been “merchants, professional people, schoolteachers, clerks, journeymen working at trades, cow punchers, or sheep herders.”⁸¹ Settlers on the northern plains included many from central, northern, and eastern Europe who had the advantages of being so many as to constitute their own communities and of having farmed in similar climates on similar terrain: Russian Germans who came as Mennonite or Roman Catholic congregations and promptly planted rye and hard winter wheat rather than the maize that many former residents of the older Middle West first favored. But Harry Turnoy, a Russian Jew who came to find a better life for his family in Burleigh County, North Dakota, in 1904, had been a cheese importer; when winter stopped work at his homestead he mined coal and tended railroad locomotives. When a town was established on a new railroad branch line four miles away, he opened

New Farms and Family Farmers

33

a butcher shop with an Irish American partner; later the family moved there from the farm. Years later, exchanging experiences with old neighbors, one of the daughters found that they also had had to leave their farm after struggling for years to support themselves.⁸² Having to work elsewhere to accumulate the means of improving a claim was a common experience, and one that at best demanded rigorous self-denial and put enormous strains on family life. When Pierce and Anna Waltz claimed a relinquished homestead in Mellette County, South Dakota, in 1913, they had been living about seventy miles away in Burke, where Waltz served as pastor of one of several small town and rural churches; later he took a church at Deadwood, at well over twice the distance, but Mrs. Waltz remained fourteen months in a sodhouse on their claim with her infant daughter before they could rejoin him.⁸³ Sarah Olds, who homesteaded thirty-five miles north of Reno in 1908 when her husband could no longer work as a miner, raised their five children by selling game, mushrooms, and the skins of coyotes and bobcats that her son trapped in Reno and by taking in a schoolteacher as a boarder.⁸⁴ When William and Rose Reed homesteaded north of Harlem, Montana (Chouteau County, close to the Canadian border), in 1910, neither had lived on a farm; Reed had been a barber and operated a store and a restaurant at Enderlin, southeastern North Dakota. After having a house and barn built, they could not find water and a year later moved to another homestead, where Reed learned to farm with the help of a friend; as neighbors gave up and left he enlarged his holdings by buying their claims. Still needing more income to support the family, he resumed barbering at Harlem and established other businesses while his wife stayed on the farm, thirty miles away, a long day’s trip by team before the railroad came in 1928. Later their daughter and Mrs. Reed’s mother lived in town while the daughter attended school.⁸⁵ William Kilgour, whose family homesteaded near Melstone in Yellowstone County, Montana, in 1913, worked on a threshing rig while his father found work in South Dakota, sending money to the family to live on; when their crop failed in 1917, Kilgour went into the army and his mother joined his father. When they returned after the war they found nothing left, even their fences stolen.⁸⁶ Homesteaders in Fort Rock Valley, Oregon, southeast of Bend, worked in Nevada, California, and Idaho and on the Oregon coast while their families remained on the claims.⁸⁷ Less than a third of women homesteaders surveyed in North Dakota had no other occupation; a fourth were schoolteachers.⁸⁸ Settlers persisted at rates that varied as widely as rainfall, crop prices, and their own determination. Some of the winners in the lottery in Oklahoma in 1901 did not even file claims, as if the sight of the thin-soiled land that was the best

34

New Farms and Family Farmers

that was left gave them premonitions of the privations of those who had tried to farm it.⁸⁹ In northern Lake County, south-central Oregon, where about thirteen hundred settlers filed between 1900 and 1920, most of them shortly after the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 and shortly before or after construction of the railroad that reached Bend in 1911, the population rose from 229 in 1900 to 996 in 1910 and a peak of about 1,220 in 1912; after series of normally dry years and short growing seasons, 360 persons remained in 1920, 179 in 1930, 100 in 1940, by which time nearly two-thirds of the land had reverted to the government.⁹⁰ In 1930 the geographer Isaiah Bowman counted twenty-five houses, all empty and boarded up, in a distance of seventeen miles; on the main road across central Oregon to the north, between Bend and Burns, 135 miles, only nineteen of seventy still occupied.⁹¹ “Many honest, hard-working people lost years of their time at the hard labor, and all their capital, trying to make farms out of land that was entirely unsuited for it,” Dr. Urling Coe, who practiced medicine at Bend, later recalled. “Thousands of acres of the finest range were ruined . . . all because the officials in Washington, who knew nothing about the country, thought it was suitable for dry farming, and would not listen to the advice of the old settlers.”⁹² But Alice Pratt, a teacher whose neighbors doubted that she would establish her claim when she located near Prineville, northeast of Bend, in 1911, remained for eighteen years, living in a tent the first winter and walking the three and a half miles to her school.⁹³ When the St. Paul Farmers’ Dispatch recommended in 1921 that farmers in eastern Montana and western North Dakota be removed and their land returned to cattle range, a farmer who had bought a relinquished homestead in Wibaux County, eastern Montana, in 1911 protested that despite the poor crops of the previous four years the region was and could be made productive: “the longer a man has resided here the more faith he has in the region’s agricultural possibilities.” Two years later, having lost the farm as a result of liabilities that he incurred as director of the Wibaux County Bank, he and his wife moved to Bozeman; within five years, 1920–25, the number of full owners in the county fell by more than a third, land in farms by more than a fifth. Describing the family’s experience half a century later, their son commented that the country did not have room for all the people who settled there and that those who remained became successful farmers and ranchers.⁹⁴ By the later 1890s pioneers in newly developing areas felt prepared to do better than their predecessors. Farmers on the plains had learned to plant winter-hardy and drought-resistant strains of winter wheat, mainly Russian in origin, which had proved wonderfully suitable to high, dry country, rather than more vulnerable western spring wheats or maize.⁹⁵ The “Kansans of the seventies and eighties did not know how to choose and plant and harvest so that the rain-fall would occur

New Farms and Family Farmers

35

at the proper season for their crops,” William Allen White wrote in 1904, surveying the changes that followed them. “These things have been known of men in Kansas for nearly ten years now; and since they became well-grounded in the Kansas mind there has been no talk of drouth; it rains enough in Kansas every year; it has rained enough in Kansas probably since the carboniferous period.”⁹⁶ “We have no useless American acres,” James Wilson, the secretary of agriculture, proclaimed in 1905. “We will make them all productive. We have agricultural explorers in every corner of the world, and they are finding crops which have become so acclimated to dry conditions similar to our own in the West that we will in time have plants thriving upon our so-called desert lands.”⁹⁷ An Iowa farmer and former professor of agriculture at the state agricultural college and director of the agricultural experiment station as well as a politician, Wilson shared the optimism of residents of the western Middle West in the first years of the century, including their faith in the fertility of land with less than average rainfall. He also represented the traditions of his department, which was then still concerned mainly with identifying proved methods and products, including new varieties of crops and farm animals, and inducing farmers to adopt them rather than with administering controls, distributing subsidies, and fighting political battles beyond those for its own appropriations.⁹⁸ In contrast to promoters who predicted early and easy returns, the Office of Dry Land Agriculture, which the department established in 1905, advocated techniques of rotating and diversifying crops that had already justified themselves.⁹⁹ Some of the more encouraging innovations that it and other agencies at the department and in the states promoted coincided with increases in rainfall above the low levels of the 1880s and 1890s as well as with new opportunities to try them in land recently made available for homesteading. Rainfall in North Dakota, for instance, was above normal in fifteen of eighteen years between 1899 and 1916, and the three dry years were isolated rather than consecutive, as the dry years of the 1890s had been.¹⁰⁰ While in the older counties of the plains states, many farmers took the tested advice of scientists at the state and national departments of agriculture, newer settlers farther west were more disposed to try experimental methods that promised easier and earlier returns. Hardy Webster Campbell, who had homesteaded in Brown County, in what became northern South Dakota, by the early 1890s had developed out of his own failures and ultimate successes on dry land a system of retarding evaporation by packing the subsoil firmly and maintaining a loose mulch of dust on the surface. Such a relatively simple program, which he claimed would permit farmers otherwise to farm as they had farmed before, growing traditional crops on traditional scales, appealed at a time of widespread

36

New Farms and Family Farmers

interest in proposals to repair nature’s derelictions by watering land artificially. Campbell assured settlers in subhumid areas that instead of bringing water from streams and reservoirs in canals and ditches or hiring professional rainmakers to attract it from the sky they had only to make reservoirs in the soil itself by preparing it carefully for planting. He rapidly won support from railroad companies, the Northern Pacific and the Burlington first paying him to operate model farms and deliver lectures, later the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific engaging him in the Southwest. Representatives of railroads, banks, and real estate interests and other promoters organized the first Dry Farming Congress, at Denver in 1907, whose members accepted much of Campbell’s optimism although not his emphasis on his own system of cultivation. The second congress (1908) compromised by recommending a homestead unit of 320 acres for the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, larger than Campbell preferred although smaller than many scientists proposed.¹⁰¹ Although in some areas dry farming competed with irrigation for popular support—and they were used for different kinds of crops, grains and grasses or fresh fruits and vegetables—they aroused comparable enthusiasm among buyers and sellers of agricultural lands. In times when arable land seemed to have run out along with opportunity for Americans of small means in both country and city, the leading advocates of both methods were promoters, especially promoters of real estate who emphasized returns from farming relatively small units. While Kansans and their neighbors to north and south enjoyed a sequence of years so fat that many of them forgot the lean, residents of the drier mountain and Pacific states beyond looked to still brighter prospects where recently there had been almost no prospects for crop-farming at all. As late as November 1901, Secretary Wilson had warned that public lands with adequate rainfall were gone and that expenditures to irrigate them would “be prohibitive for all except men of considerable means. Because of this,” he said, “the period of rapid [agricultural] progress [in the West] probably has passed, even under the most favorable conditions which can be provided.” But Wilson also called attention to a rush of speculators to land thought to be irrigable,¹⁰² and when Congress passed the Newlands National Reclamation Act of 1902, the promise of publicly financed irrigation works opened new prospects for them. Widely published estimates of irrigable land ran as high as two-fifths the area of continental United States, estimates of the population that it could support to one hundred millions, or more than twice the entire rural population.¹⁰³ A writer on “Our Arid Eldorado” (1903) predicted that land to be irrigated would be worth more than all land then in farms and that revenues from it would be more than enough to endow universal

New Farms and Family Farmers

37

free education.¹⁰⁴ The Southwest had been the American Sahara; now it was to be the American Eden. Both before and after the Newlands Act, the effect of irrigation over most of the West was more to expand and stabilize extensive agriculture, including stockraising and dairy farming, than to make intensive agriculture commercially significant. By stabilizing the water supplies of established farmers, it extended old ways more than it introduced new ones. In 1899 over a fifth of irrigated land was in pasture and unmatured crops, over half in hay and forage. Except in California, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, irrigation ordinarily meant little more than that stockmen might get their herds through unusually dry or cold years by raising forage and that they could get more water for it from behind dams than they could store in earth-lined reservoirs alongside wells. Even in California, where fruit constituted more than two-fifths the value of crops on irrigated land, there was more irrigated land in pasture, over twice as much in hay and forage;¹⁰⁵ and although irrigation and the crops it supported were advancing rapidly, field crops exceeded all others in value until after the First World War.¹⁰⁶ Ranch life had changed more when stockmen shifted from open range to fenced land than when they began to raise forage; it was a long time before most plantings in alfalfa, corn, and sorghum more than supplemented natural grasses. Farmers in Finney County, western Kansas, had diverted water to their fields as early as 1879; they survived the droughts of the late 1880s and the 1890s along the Arkansas River by putting alfalfa under ditch. For a few years, Garden City became the best known center of windmill irrigation on the plains. But the bountiful yields of irrigated truck crops soon saturated local markets,¹⁰⁷ and over most parts of the plains where rainfall fluctuated between amounts sufficient and amounts insufficient for crop-farming, little land was within reach of streams that ran dependably in dry weather. Irrigated acreage in Nebraska increased nearly twelve times, 1889–99, but then during the severe drought of 1899 farmers found many ditches useless and stopped relying on them.¹⁰⁸ Windmills promised to extend agriculture beyond the lengths of canals from rivers as steam engines had extended manufacturing beyond lengths of shafts from waterwheels, but problems in establishing the critical combinations of wind and water close to a market as well as those of paying for mills and wells kept farmers from planting new crops on land hitherto thought not arable. When Henry Wallace visited Finney County in 1909 he found farmers relying on gasoline pumps instead of windmills to fill reservoirs, but their chief crops were alfalfa and sugar beets.¹⁰⁹ Promoters had promised new kinds of development by irrigation from the 1870s, when construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad opened southern

38

New Farms and Family Farmers

California to tourists and settlers and eastern markets to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles basin. Whereas previously most Californians who irrigated their crops had fared reasonably well, like the thrifty Germans who planted vineyards at the colony they called Anaheim on the Santa Ana River, doing it on manageable scales and within their means, many settlers who bought into later more commercial projects and many developers who tried to provide larger amounts of water for them overextended themselves. A boom in largescale irrigated farming in the 1880s and early 1890s subsided as values of irrigated land lagged behind expenses; construction lagged until after the general depression passed.¹¹⁰ The businessmen who organized as the California Development Company to develop what they called the Imperial Valley illustrated the hazards of speculative enterprise when they diverted water from the Colorado River and then lost control of it in disastrous floods in 1905–7 that ruined the company and nearly destroyed the farmlands that it irrigated.¹¹¹ But by the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 the United States government undertook to build irrigation works larger than private investors and state and local governments could undertake and to provide water for farms with no more than 160 acres under ditch—considerably smaller than many western holdings recently planted in sugar beets and other irrigated crops as well as in grain. Advocates predicted that the effects of irrigating more subhumid land would be like those of the Homestead Act of 1862 in opening opportunity for family farmers.¹¹² Much of the support for national reclamation had come from established western farmers, who hoped to get water in dependable quantities, and from railroads and other interests with potentially arable land to sell. The coalition of advocates that promoted the Newlands bill sought to reduce opposition from eastern and midwestern states by assuring industrialists and their employees that settlers on newly irrigated western lands would buy their manufactured goods, and that most farmers would raise new kinds of crops, many of them part time, rather than compete in the same markets. Although Representative Francis Newlands and President Theodore Roosevelt justified limiting use of project water as a safeguard against monopolists, some of the more committed irrigationists claimed that small farmers would have advantages over large. By doing most of their own work they could escape the high cost of hired labor; by emphasizing crops that required personal attention they could command high prices; and once they had planted, say, lemon trees, they could supplement their incomes by working in town. If they acquired more land, they would have to standardize operations, growing crops that required specialized machinery and seasonal hired labor. Large holdings, by this argument, were handicaps: “40 acres is enough, 80 an abundance, 160 a

New Farms and Family Farmers

39

misfortune, and 320 a calamity.”¹¹³ “Irrigation begets small farms,” said Guy E. Mitchell, of the National Irrigation Association, predicting that 160-acre tracts would be subdivided into units of 80, 40, 20, and 10 acres.¹¹⁴ As the troubles of the 1880s and 1890s receded, irrigationist rhetoric shifted from protecting farmers from drought to helping workingmen to live better, escaping urban slums and growing some of their own food. Irrigated small farms, moreover, supported wholesome social relations, beneficial to the community and the nation as well as to farm families. Being able to do so much of the work themselves as to discourage development of a class of servile labor, their owners enjoyed the intimate contact with each other that procuring water and marketing perishable crops required. “Where the very rains cannot fall to fertilize the earth except through the agency of organized and associated man there will be learned, in time, the lessons in human brotherhood for which the world is waiting,” said William E. Smythe, evangelist of what he called the blessings of aridity.¹¹⁵ Professor Frank W. Blackmar of the University of Kansas foresaw ideal democracy developing in communities of small farms: “The socializing process is intense; the common interests bring the people closer together and unite them in social improvement.”¹¹⁶ George H. Maxwell, an authority on water law who founded the National Irrigation Association (1899) and later the first water users’ association in the Salt River Valley (1903) and the American Homecroft Society (1907), like Smythe emphasized the wholesomeness of life on family-sized tracts: “Every child in a garden, every mother in a homecroft, and individual industrial independence for every worker in a home of his own on the land.”¹¹⁷ Mitchell foresaw the “improvement of the social condition of the laboring man through placing him upon a small piece of ground, where he may make his home and from its product become to an extent independent of his daily wage.”¹¹⁸ Arguments of such social returns abounded, and among both conservatives who feared that industrial cities would breed threats to private property and reformers who hoped to synthesize new urban and old rural values. Socialists in Washington, California, and Nevada established cooperative communities of irrigationists that they thought of both as refuges from an unenlightened world that had failed them at the polls and as staging centers for a better social order.¹¹⁹ Soon irrigationists invoked more emotional concerns as they found that some of the settlers who were most interested in becoming farmers were not old-stock Americans but some of the most recent immigrants. Opposing general restrictions on immigration, Smythe at first had foreseen no serious ethnic division among occupants of irrigated land, contending (1905) that there was room for hundreds of millions of immigrants and proposing to exclude only “those Asiatic elements who do not come in good faith to make a home and share the burdens

40

New Farms and Family Farmers

of citizenship, and who cannot be assimilated so as to become an indistinguishable part of our population.”¹²⁰ Smythe’s vague language glossed over circumstances that threatened some of the major premises of the new program of rural settlement before it was fully in operation. Even while numbers of homesteaders made new records, probably no farmers personified rural values and virtues that Americans liked to claim for themselves more than some in the coastal states who could not legally file claims on government land, including that in the new irrigation projects: aliens ineligible for citizenship, most conspicuously the Japanese. Most immigrants who came to the United States after the Civil War concentrated in eastern and midwestern cities, whether because they had enough of rural hardships or because good farm land in the older states was beyond their means.¹²¹ An agent of the Burlington lines observed that of all who arrived in 1913 70 percent stopped east of the Alleghenies and that less than one in a hundred went to farm lands, less than one in two hundred to Nebraska.¹²² But immigrant farmers were both common and generally welcome in the West. At the beginning of the twentieth century the foreign born comprised a larger part of the population of the eighteen states and territories than of the United States (17.7 percent against 13.6 percent in 1900) and less than the national average only in Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico; in the Dakotas, Kansas, Nevada, and Hawaii they were larger fractions of rural than of urban populations. Native whites of native parentage were majorities of rural populations in only nine of the eighteen, against all but three of the thirty-two others.¹²³ Many of the newcomers came from new rather than old ethnic stocks. When the Bureau of the Census surveyed ancestries of the population in 1980, it found that descendants of seventeen of forty groups of European immigrants, including Armenians, Danes, Finns, Norwegians, Portuguese, Swedes, and Yugoslavs, as well as all East Asian and Pacific groups lived in the western census region (Pacific and mountain divisions) in disproportionately large numbers; most of these who came before the Second World War also were disproportionately rural.¹²⁴ In a general way these were conditions of long standing. Although fewer of the new immigrants of the twentieth century than of the old immigrants of the nineteenth had been farm operators in their old homes,¹²⁵ those from continental Europe were more likely to live outside cities than those from the British Isles,¹²⁶ and of those who settled on western farmland in either time, Germans, Czechs, Portuguese, Scandinavians, and South Slavs stood out above the British stocks of the thirteen original states for persisting longer on it. The differences among different groups were analogous to differences between pioneers in the Middle West and in the western counties of eastern colonies and states. Con-

New Farms and Family Farmers

41

trasting populations of different origins in Wisconsin, Joseph Schafer wrote that the German farmer “tended to hold on, through good years and bad years. . . . The Yankee, already given to change in the East, tended in the West . . . to regard land lightly, and to abandon one tract for another.”¹²⁷ According to a rural sociologist in South Dakota during the Depression of the 1930s, many immigrants had come too poor to leave.¹²⁸ Russian Germans, ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled along the lower Volga in the late eighteenth century and who began emigrating a century later, commonly brought little in either material goods or savings to America but often soon established themselves and prospered beyond their neighbors. Coming first to southern Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska in the 1870s, they pushed beyond as their numbers increased, from Texas to the northern plains and Rockies and the Pacific slope. By the early 1900s many were working in towns, on railroads, and as seasonal farm laborers to accumulate savings, as in the sugar beet fields of Nebraska and Colorado. According to a veteran railroad immigration agent, much of western Kansas was settled by Russian Germans who had worked in Topeka; by his account the German population of Topeka by that process had changed every twelve years.¹²⁹ Agents of sugar companies in Colorado recruited Russian Germans from Nebraska as field laborers; within five years most of them in the Arkansas Valley east of Pueblo had bought their own land, and the companies turned to Mexicans.¹³⁰ Other immigrants collected and persisted according to their varying preferences and capacities in large enough numbers to stand out in most parts of the West. Czech pioneers in Nebraska came prepared to buy substantial acreage; long afterward, Colfax County, Nebraska, remained predominantly Czech and the entire state more Czech than other states.¹³¹ Even Oregon and Oklahoma, where old-stock native-born majorities in rural areas were unusually large,¹³² had their enduring enclaves of immigrants including some who had moved west more than they remained near the ports where they arrived on the East Coast: in Oregon, Finns at Astoria, Scandinavians in the Willamette Valley, and Basques in the eastern high desert, as in the sheep-raising counties of Nevada and California; in Oklahoma, in addition to Germans, as in the other contiguous western states, a colony of Czechs around Prague (Lincoln County, east of Oklahoma City), who stood out for thrift and stability in a state where the most celebrated events in agricultural history were rushes onto the land and flights from it.¹³³ Like Chinese in nineteenth-century California¹³⁴ and Russian Germans in Colorado, Japanese immigrants came to agriculture as laborers rather than freeholders, most of them in Hawaii, where sugar planters imported them on contract and small operators had little opportunity to acquire their own land;¹³⁵ many of those on the mainland who contrived to lease small plots continued

42

New Farms and Family Farmers

to work for wages to augment their incomes. Coming chiefly as kaigai dekaseginins, laborers who planned to work abroad temporarily and then return to Japan,¹³⁶ they were slower than Russian Germans to make the commitment of buying or leasing land even when they could still do it legally. They had appeared first as section hands on railroads in Washington and Oregon in 1889 or 1890, and many long continued to work on railroads (perhaps 13,000 of them as late as 1906) and in mines, lumber mills, and salmon canneries despite protests by white laborers. In Oregon most worked on railroads through the 1890s.¹³⁷ Work for wages or in small businesses serving other immigrants in cities seemed at first to serve the purpose of most of them, which was to earn and save enough in several years to establish themselves in business or as independent farmers in Japan. In 1910 only a fourth of the Japanese in the labor force in continental United States were in agriculture, against over three fourths in Hawaii; by far the largest occupational category was domestic and personal service (two fifths, against a tenth in Hawaii).¹³⁸ When the Immigration Commission interviewed Japanese immigrants who had become businessmen, chiefly small shopkeepers, and farmers in 1909 it found that fewer than two-fifths intended to stay; only about an eighth of married wage earners said that their wives were in the United States.¹³⁹ “They are a body of industrial excursionists and form consequently an unusually mobile population,” the Commissioner of Labor reported (1906), referring to those in Hawaii, where more had left than arrived over the previous five years.¹⁴⁰ The Japanese were far from alone in intending to stay in the United States only long enough to prepare for better lives at home and in not attempting at first to acquire land of their own; not only Chinese, Filipinos, East Indians, and Greeks, who commonly lived as transients in rooming houses, but Italians, Scandinavians, eastern European Jews, and others better known for coming as families and rapidly establishing American residence also intended to return soon after they came and did so in large numbers.¹⁴¹ More than most immigrants, however, the Japanese had learned in their old homes to pursue different kinds of economic opportunity. Although nearly two-thirds of the farmers and farm laborers that the Immigration Commission interviewed reported having had similar occupations in Japan, some of them also had lived in two worlds, commercial and industrial as well as agricultural. Well before the changes that followed the accession of Emperor Meiji (1867), urban entrepreneurs had been drawing peasants into cottage industries through putting-out systems that preceded by decades those of early nineteenth-century New England.¹⁴² Examples of the variety of opportunity in a monetary economy were at hand, and the remarkable adaptability of Japanese in America suggests that, like Russian Jews who had developed commercial skills within the pale,

New Farms and Family Farmers

43

Fig. 2.4. Ethnic farmers. Although they were not able to own land, Japanese farmers and their families were notable participants in far western agriculture in the early twentieth century. This Japanese farmer tends a field in Idaho. Photo courtesy the Idaho State Historical Society, Boise. 78–2.90/A.

they brought more than energy and determination to the golden land. Therefore when early in the century influential Japanese in the United States, including the publisher of a Japanese-language newspaper in San Francisco who also was the biggest labor contractor in California, began recommending agricultural settlement as a step to permanent residence, many immigrants and potential immigrants were equipped to act on such advice.¹⁴³ As agriculturists, those Japanese immigrants who came to the mainland soon identified crops and methods of raising them that seemed likely to earn the largest and earliest returns on their efforts. Although at first they ranged as far inland as Arizona and Wyoming as contract laborers for railroads,¹⁴⁴ and beet sugar companies offered leaseholds to induce them to remain in Colorado, Utah, and Idaho,¹⁴⁵ they progressively gravitated from the interior to the coast, especially to California.¹⁴⁶ In 1900, when 71.3 percent of all Japanese in the United States were still in Hawaii, 75.1 percent of the rest were in the three Pacific Coast states; by 1940, 88.5 percent.¹⁴⁷ Their retreat from beets in the mountain states roughly paralleled their retreat from sugar cane earlier in Hawaii, where for lack of better opportunities in agriculture most of them left it altogether for urban occupations.¹⁴⁸ On the coast concentrating on intensive crops that brought them the largest returns on land and labor as they became farm operators, soon aban-

44

New Farms and Family Farmers

doning sugar beets for berries and truck crops, even lettuce for celery,¹⁴⁹ they rapidly expanded their undertakings while yielding most of the market for hired farm labor to Mexicans and, in the 1930s, southern whites, as in Hawaii they had given way to Filipinos. By official counts those in California owned and leased 4,698 acres in 1900, 99,254 in 1910, 323,260 in 1920, when their holdings peaked. At that time, with 2.7 percent of the population of the state (71,952 Issei and 20,814 Nisei), Japanese had 1.2 percent of the agricultural land and 4.4 percent of the farms.¹⁵⁰ They soon dominated production of those fruits and vegetables that they found most profitable and in which they accordingly specialized. When the United States government prepared to evacuate them from coastal areas in 1942, economists estimated that they raised about 30–35 percent of truck crops in California, 75 percent of the celery, 80 percent of the market spinach, 90 percent of the strawberries.¹⁵¹ Most Japanese-operated farms were small, many of them smaller than sizes that the most enthusiastic irrigationists recommended for family farmers. In California they averaged about fifty-five acres, under a fifth the general average, in 1910, when Japanese farmers had not yet concentrated on truck crops there as much as they did later; in Washington, where they already had, their farms averaged under thirty acres.¹⁵² Most began on much smaller scales, some sharing land by arrangements that probably did not get fully into census reports, as in planting crops in orchards until the trees began to bear fruit.¹⁵³ The Immigration Commission found many Japanese farms of one and two acres and less near San Francisco and Los Angeles. Farmers in Los Angeles County, where their holdings averaged under eleven acres, testified that some of them had first leased as few as two, four, and five city lots.¹⁵⁴ Expecting vacant suburban land to gain value, owners were glad to rent such small parcels for short periods.¹⁵⁵ Although Japanese were willing to farm smaller plots of land than whites, they sought the best. The Immigration Commission found that generally they were high bidders, and not because they had to overcome prejudice: owners considered them desirable tenants who often improved land during even a brief tenure, draining and ditching, planting nitrogenous cover crops, and eradicating weeds.¹⁵⁶ In California their farms averaged about a fourth less in total value than other farms in 1910 ($12,505 against $16,447) but nearly three and a half times more in value per acre ($229 against $52).¹⁵⁷ Japanese farmers both followed and departed from main trends in western agriculture. At first their departures attracted more attention. Instead of mechanizing, they relied almost entirely on hand labor, concentrating on crops that demanded intensive care at all stages. Instead of spreading the burden of high fixed charges over large operations, they emphasized methods that offered no

New Farms and Family Farmers

45

economies of scale. Instead of seeking urban comforts and conveniences, they sacrificed time, comfort, and pleasure to maximizing income and savings, often crowding their families into sheds previously used for farm animals or as temporary quarters for migrant laborers and expecting everyone to work in the fields. While some families of European stock that homesteaded in the more remote parts of the high plains may have fared no better in their first years, generally they expected to improve themselves before long and retreated if they concluded that they could not; the Japanese seemed to bring the rude ways of an old-world peasantry to those parts of the West where other rural residents and their urban neighbors had moved furthest into the twentieth century. (In fact, the conditions of life among Japanese immigrant farmers often seemed as uncivilized to them as to their white neighbors. A young bride learned how to cook only when she came to live in a one-room shack near Hood River; in Japan she had studied flower arrangement and other domestic arts. Another who had worn a fashionable pleated overskirt and laced boots later recalled how the wives of farmers on Vashon Island, southwest of Seattle, forgot about using cosmetics as they worked all day in the fields, blackened by the sun. “Even backward Japan was not so bad as this.”)¹⁵⁸ Yet Japanese immigrants and their children moved much in step with the larger society. As in growing what they could sell rather than what they could use themselves, they skipped the once-traditional stage of subsistence agriculture; in choosing to do chiefly truck farming, they joined the great shifts of proprietors over the Pacific and mountain states from extensive to intensive uses of land, including dry-land and irrigation farming, only beginning these methods of farming when they came.¹⁵⁹ Further, they paralleled the vertical integration of much of the rest of coastal agriculture by growers’ cooperative associations (citrus fruits, raisins, walnuts) and by processors (sugar refiners, vintners and distillers, canners) to sell much of their truck crops to ultimate consumers and by moving into distribution and retail sales. In so confirming their role in agriculture they left it, by 1930 becoming more urban than rural in occupation and residence,¹⁶⁰ and when they were free to live and hold land as they chose after the war living, like other Americans, chiefly in cities.¹⁶¹ Over years when the United States and the states where most Japanese immigrants lived still refused to allow them to become citizens and to exercise the rights of citizens, as much as any other group they personified qualities that old-stock Americans liked to claim as peculiarly their own. Although during the Depression of the 1930s (when Japanese farmers in California expanded operations while other farmers contracted theirs)¹⁶² many young Nisei who had aspired to professional and commercial careers continued to help their parents on family farms, there were signs that still

46

New Farms and Family Farmers

greater shifts to urban residence and occupations were coming. Having long excelled academically in public schools, along with children of Jewish immigrants, by 1930 Nisei were going on to college far more than native whites.¹⁶³ On the eve of the evacuation of Japanese from the coastal states in 1942, well under half of them worked on farms, although most of the nearly one-fourth in trade dealt in farm products.¹⁶⁴ Settlers on much newly irrigated land came hoping to live as differently from earlier American farmers as the lemons, dates, and avocados that in time some of them raised were different from wheat, corn, and oats. Many of them had lived in eastern and midwestern cities and tried to locate within reach of the conveniences of urban society and of the fellowship of kindred spirits. Sponsors of national reclamation liked to say that it reopened rural opportunity to a new generation by extending the principle of the Homestead Act of 1862, but they also contrasted the rigors and the isolation of life on conventional farms with comforts and social and economic returns that combined the best features of urban and rural life. The career of William E. Smythe, foremost of the evangelists of the new social order, illustrates how it could appeal to wide ranges of interests, from the speculative and potentially socialistic, in different settings. A native of Massachusetts, he had discovered the cause of irrigation while working on newspapers in Nebraska in 1888–90, a time of extreme drought in the western counties. Visiting New Mexico and California, where long before the American occupation settlers had diverted water from the Rio Grande and the Los Angeles River into crude ditches to serve their household needs and to grow patches of corn, he became interested in tapping the Republican, the Platte, and other streams of the plains. From writing a series of articles on irrigation for the Omaha Bee he went on to become a full-time advocate, organizing a national irrigation congress in 1891 and establishing his own magazine, Irrigation Age, in which he advanced visions of economic and social transformation that he applied to other locales as he moved farther west. “Tell the people of Nebraska that we are going to make homes for millions of men,” he told a reporter for a Lincoln paper in 1894, “that . . . the densely populated agricultural districts of the new Nebraska will have all the advantages of town life and few of its evils, all the charm of country life without its present loneliness.”¹⁶⁵ Nebraskans temporarily lost interest after the middle 1890s, but Smythe attracted wider attention closer to the Pacific Coast, where he found that many other new immigrants also had come from cities and, seeking to import amenities that they had enjoyed there, were more receptive to visions of new arrangements for living and working than plainsmen had been. “The irrigation movement of 1899 was comparatively remote from the great

New Farms and Family Farmers

47

Fig. 2.5. William E. Smythe. A journalist from New England, William E. Smythe, played important roles in the West as an irrigation evangelist and community builder. He wrote about the establishment of irrigation communities in Colorado, Idaho, and California and authored the important book The Conquest of Arid America (1899). Photo courtesy California Faces: Selections from the Bancroft Library Portrait Collection, Identifier: 1, The Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Calif.

heart of the Nation, domiciled in distant deserts,” he wrote later, after moving to San Diego, “while the irrigation movement of 1905 is planted in the heart of populous towns and intimately related to the commerce of the world.”¹⁶⁶ His first projects for settlement had been rural, in Idaho and northern California, but all three colonies of “Little Landers” that he organized later in California (1908, 1913, 1914) were near cities and attracted city people with little or no experience in agriculture; those who ultimately prospered at them did so by dividing their one-acre holdings into city lots.¹⁶⁷ When he organized the Imperial

48

New Farms and Family Farmers

Valley Water Users’ Association in 1904, proposing to develop the part of interior San Diego County west of the Colorado River through the Reclamation Service rather than through the California Development Company, he emphasized the returns that agriculture and commerce would bring to the city of San Diego, and increasingly he directed himself to its interests as a spokesman for the chamber of commerce and appealed to settlers who came from cities.¹⁶⁸ Describing Riverside, first of the southern California irrigation colonies, east of Los Angeles, as a model of what average people who earned their livings by tilling the soil could make of low-grade pasture land in plots of two to ten acres, he predicted that the great western cities would be series of villages connected by electric railroad systems, that their residents would “live close together and enjoy most of the social and educational advantages within reach of the best eastern town. . . . In this scene of intensely cultivated land, . . . it will be difficult for the beholder to say where the town ends and the country begins.”¹⁶⁹ Within several decades after Congress passed the Newlands Act, water had transformed the desert even more fully than Smythe and his fellow prophets foresaw but in different directions. Irrigation agriculture and settlement dependent on irrigation projects developed rapidly as the Reclamation Service began work on twenty projects in fourteen states, including Texas, within its first three years, 1903–5; before the Depression of the 1930s eight more, extending to two more states.¹⁷⁰ Irrigated land in far western states had more than doubled in 1889–99, reaching nearly seven and a half million acres; in 1899–1919, over eighteen millions; by 1978, thirty-six millions, more than all land in farms in the eleven states north of the District of Columbia.¹⁷¹ Moreover, uses of irrigated land more intensive than pasturing stock and raising hay and forage also increased, especially in California, which shortly led both in acreage and value of irrigated crops.¹⁷² As early as 1941, before most of the dams begun in the 1930s were fully in operation, the Bureau of Reclamation claimed to be serving over 4,700,000 persons, more than the populations of the mountain and Pacific states when Congress passed the Newlands Act.¹⁷³ The increase in irrigated western land approximated the area that homesteaders had patented in three or four years of the boom of the 1880s. Over years when population on farms nationally stopped growing (around 1910) and shortly began to decline, in the “reclamation states” it continued to grow until about 1940; it grew faster than general population in the mountain states to about 1920. Much of this growth occurred where grains had been the chief crops, much where, as in Arizona and in California east of the suburbs of Los Angeles and San Diego, until recently there had been little crop-farming of any kind. In California, field crops declined from 64.4 percent of total value of agricultural production in 1899 to 29.0 percent in 1931, before the enormous

New Farms and Family Farmers

49

diversion of water for irrigation from northern counties and from the Colorado River into the southern half of the state that the state and United States governments financed over the next half century, while truck crops increased from 2.8 percent to 22.7 percent.¹⁷⁴ Oranges and melons replaced wheat where several decades earlier wheat had replaced cattle. The Denver Republican had doubted in 1900 that Colorado could produce enough fruit for its own population; six years later it reported shipments of six or seven thousand carloads.¹⁷⁵ Yet the development of irrigated lands and the movement of farm families onto them lagged behind expectations. In 1913, after ten years of federal reclamation, only about half the land with water already allotted to it was in use.¹⁷⁶ A 1924 survey showed that despite investments so massive that only intensive use could justify them, more than half of cropped irrigated land was in hay or forage, only about an eighth in vegetables, fruits, or nuts. Few original settlers remained as water users; population in towns exceeded population on farms on all projects but one, on all projects together by nearly two-thirds.¹⁷⁷ Half a century later (1974) grains had moved past hay as irrigation expanded on the plains, and although acreage in vegetables, fruits, and nuts had grown impressively, grain, hay, and pasture accounted for nearly half irrigated acreage in California, richest of the reclamation (irrigated) states.¹⁷⁸ As such complications developed during the first three decades of national reclamation, advocates of irrigation commonly attributed them to the inexperience of settlers and to underfinancing by the government. But planners and other alleged experts sometimes miscalculated as strikingly as settlers in judging soils and climates. After deferring tests of soil and drainage and then suppressing unfavorable reports of them, the Reclamation Service had to reduce estimates of irrigable land at the Newlands (Truckee-Carson) project in Nevada, one of the first five projects that it proposed, from about 450,000 to 73,000 acres. Although the project drew so heavily from the Truckee River as to reduce the level of Pyramid Lake (into which it flows) by over eighty feet by 1971, the area under cultivation was only about 57,000 acres.¹⁷⁹ The population of the state then approximated the nearly half a million that the statistician of the service had estimated in 1907 as the capacity of the part of the state tributary to the project¹⁸⁰ and more than doubled it in the next fifteen years, but that spectacular growth, fastest in the country from the 1960s, owed little to agriculture; only Rhode Island among the contiguous states had a smaller population on farms. The Wyoming state commissioner of agriculture predicted (1909) that projects under way would sustain a million or more people¹⁸¹ in a state whose entire population threequarters of a century later, after the great mineral booms of the 1970s, was about half that, smallest among the fifty states.¹⁸² At the Klamath project in Oregon,

50

New Farms and Family Farmers

the service drained Lower Klamath Lake, expecting to develop 250,000 acres of irrigable land, only to find the soil unfit for agriculture.¹⁸³ A government expert called the Belle Fourche project in western South Dakota more promising than the valley of the Nile or any other irrigated or irrigable area in the world;¹⁸⁴ forty years later only 37,000 of the 100,000 acres originally planned were irrigated, and they had no advantage over adjacent land where barley and oats grew on natural moisture.¹⁸⁵ A local saying was that the project had broken three generations of irrigators. The tribulations of the Jewish families from New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore who established the colony of Clarion in Sanpete County, Utah, near Gunnison, in 1911 probably were most unusual in that the colonists persisted on their rocky land, never adequately irrigated, for as long as five years.¹⁸⁶ Optimistic predictions encouraged settlers both to underestimate the costs of pioneering and to overestimate profits that they might realize by it. Advertisements and popular accounts stressed the prospects of capital gains to justify the high prices of private land. The promoters knew their prospects, who often were interested in living on raw desert land only long enough to resell it profitably rather than in making their homes in new communities. At Belle Fourche and other projects, many buyers lived in town, farming only part time or not at all, often without building houses and barns.¹⁸⁷ The First World War reinforced early expectations for reclamation, still largely untarnished in 1914–18; it also stimulated new interest in western agricultural settlement and development that extended beyond prospects for irrigated land. William B. Wilson and Franklin K. Lane, secretaries of labor and of the interior, proposed to settle returning veterans in cooperative groups of farms on government land. According to Lane, fifteen to twenty million acres of irrigable land would be available, including half a million acres in the Colorado River basin that needed “only irrigation to make them as fertile as the far-famed valley of the Nile”;¹⁸⁸ there was enough unreclaimed land in the Northwest, seven times the area of the state of Virginia, to give a million men about two hundred acres each.¹⁸⁹ He proposed a National Soldier Settlement bill, by which land would be available on easy terms, with payments at 5 percent interest extending over as many as forty years. Lane’s proposals and comparable proposals in the states attracted widespread support. Irrigationists had been quick to link their cause with that of military preparedness as it emerged over the two years before the United States entered the war, and they welcomed the prospect of veteran colonists. George Maxwell proposed establishing settlements on irrigated land so densely as to leave no land unoccupied to tempt invaders, relying on homesteaders to constitute a military

New Farms and Family Farmers

51

reserve, five millions strong. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the alarms over radical movements in the United States that followed, irrigationists emphasized protection from subversion rather than invasion while continuing to play on anti-Japanese feeling. Wherever revolution has occurred or threatened to occur, Smythe argued, “it has had its root in the question of land ownership.”¹⁹⁰ Rural settlement had “saved France,” said Elwood Mead, then head of the California Land Settlement Board. “It is our way of escape from racial settlements, or a debased and dissatisfied tenantry.”¹⁹¹ “You do not find the man who owns his land . . . joining the ranks of the I.W.W. or the Soviets,” Major F. R. Jeffrey of the American Legion told the Northwest Irrigation and Development Congress. “It is the best insurance policy and the cheapest policy which the United States can buy for its future protection and stability.”¹⁹² Soldiers seemed to be interested in exchanging their guns for plows on western land, as their grandfathers had been during and after the Civil War. After the Armistice, a fourth of those serving in France said that they would like to have government land for farms; the army organized an overseas “khaki college” to provide scientific agricultural training while they waited for transportation.¹⁹³ In March 1920, 3,000 men filed applications for land at Torrington, Wyoming, where 10,000 acres in the North Platte irrigation project were open to veterans, and the state board of immigration reported that in two years, 1918–20, veterans filed on most of 6,619,142 acres of homestead land.¹⁹⁴ Yet since Congress did no more than give them first claim to newly opened public lands and allow them to substitute military service for residence on homesteads, they formed no distinct colonies, and their interest in becoming farmers and the resources of state governments for helping them declined with farm prices. It would have been “but a poor service to the returning hero to invite him to take a share in a failing enterprise,” Smythe wrote in 1921, reviewing the collapse of the “backto-the-land” movement.¹⁹⁵ Three states offered loans to veterans buying farms in addition to states that offered loans also to settlers and farmers generally, but plans for general public assistance and supervision subsided as the costs of new farmers exceeded their expectations, demands on state agencies the resources available to them.¹⁹⁶ A committee that investigated the experience of developing and selling ready-made farms to colonists at Durham (1917) and Delhi (1919), in the Sacramento Valley, recommended in 1925 “that the State of California should never enter into another land settlement scheme”; although eight other far western states adopted comparable policies between 1917 and 1921, only four put them into operation, and with no more satisfactory results.¹⁹⁷ Perhaps the most widely heralded of the colonies that followed the war was a private venture, although one whose organizers hinted at public sponsorship.

52

New Farms and Family Farmers

W. D. Scott, a salesman in Brooklyn, New York, announced plans for 128 families to settle on forty-acre tracts of irrigated land near Buhl, Idaho, west of Twin Falls. A pioneer contingent set out by automobile in July 1921, presented with a replica of a rifle of the late William F. Cody as they left the Brooklyn city hall. “All through the long emigration trip from the East to the West there will be nothing but a round of pleasure—fishing, swimming, game shooting and sports, and a trip through . . . Yellowstone Park,” a New York paper predicted. “It was like a merry party when we started,” a member of the company recalled later. “We sang, danced, and had a wonderful time most of the way.”¹⁹⁸ When they approached their land, the businessmen of Buhl, which as the nearest railhead would handle their business, welcomed them by helping them to build houses, and the Idaho Farm Development Association sent a delegation with teams to clear sagebrush, while representatives of the University of Idaho and the state agricultural extension service assured them of the quality of the soil and prepared to help them to select poultry and dairy cows.¹⁹⁹ Upon arriving at Buhl, the “caravaners” had repudiated reports of discontent, thanking state officials for advice and assistance and declaring that the greatest hardship of the long journey had been the endless rounds of speeches that they had had to listen to. But when they saw the desert land that they had committed themselves to, with a narrow road down and up the six-hundred-foot canyon of Salmon Falls Creek between it and civilization, most of the colonists sold their outfits and returned east.²⁰⁰ As the Idaho Statesman had observed as they approached, the land in fact was fertile and had proved productive under irrigation,²⁰¹ but supplies of water had been overcommitted. The original proposal for a state project according to the terms of the Carey Act of 1894 had been to serve 46,016 acres; the company that recruited the colonists patented 7,934, and ultimately enough water for about 5,000 was available.²⁰² The next year when a larger group of colonists arrived in southern Idaho, Russian Germans from Wyoming, who located on the other side of the Snake River in Jerome County, the Idaho Farmer reported with satisfaction that they were “real farmers . . . accustomed to farming in the west”; they showed their practicality by making the trip by train before time for spring planting, bringing livestock and equipment with them, and renting farms with the expectation of buying land after acquainting themselves with local conditions.²⁰³ Perhaps they represented the requirements of the opportunities that remained for family farmers between the two world wars and after, the New Yorkers the brighter expectations of times for the most part then past.

3

Agricultural Frontiers: Farming on New Scales

While the population of the eighteen states and territories grew by more than a third between the two world wars, the number of farms remained about the same, and for the first time population on farms declined over more than several years. But westerners held more land in farms, farmed more of it, including land that no one had farmed before, and raised more on it. Over the preceding half century most western farmers had pioneered by doing more of what their parents had done rather than by doing it differently. They increased yields and productivity most in minor crops, in celery and strawberries rather than in corn and cotton. But in the 1920s and 1930s farmers both cultivated more land and cultivated it in new ways. Unable for the most part to control markets as some manufacturers, including some of their suppliers, did, often having to sell at low prices while buying at high, they produced more of staple crops after the war while prices fell more than during the war while prices rose. Although farmers and manufacturers fared quite differently and their interests diverged sharply, especially during the 1920s, in some respects they responded similarly to their different situations. Farmers asked government to help them as it helped manufacturers, by making credit more available to them and by closing domestic markets to foreign competitors; they also tried to help themselves by developing agricultural counterparts to the assembly lines of Pittsburgh and Detroit, reducing unit costs and expanding volume. Like progressive industrialists, progressive farmers drew on new technology, especially on the plains and in the irrigated Southwest. Farm traction engines or tractors already had attracted interest during the war. Draft animals, fodder, and seasonal labor were in short supply for even normal operations; equipment that promised to make up for them became more inter-

53

54

Farming on New Scales

Forest, Forage & Specialty Crops

Wheat & Range

Range & Forest

Spring Wheat Range & Forest

Wheat & Range

Range & Irrigation Feed Grains & Livestock

Range & Irrigation Range & Forest

Subtropical Fruit, Truck & Specialty Crops

Winter Wheat & Range

Farming & Forest

Range & Irrigation

PACIFIC OCEAN

Cotton & Forage Cotton & Range

Cash Crops Forest & Livestock

Forest & Truck Crops

Fig. 3.1. Agricultural regions of the modern American West. In the twentieth century these agricultural regions helped shape the demographic profile of the West as well as influence its occupational patterns. Through the decades continuity more than change characterized the locations of these western agricultural regions. Map by Bill Nelson.

esting when crop-farming expanded onto sod too tough for horse-drawn plows to break and prices seemed to justify buying it. At the Third National Power Farming Demonstration, held at Fremont, Nebraska, in 1915, more than 60,000 people—about three times the population of Dodge County—watched trials of eighty-four different tractors.¹ By then models powered by gasoline were replacing models powered by steam, which consumed massive amounts of water and wood or coal and had enormous unwieldy wheels to keep them from sinking

Farming on New Scales

55

into soft earth. (A rancher in the Salinas Valley of California in 1901 had met the problem of weight by anchoring stationary engines on opposite sides of a field to draw a gang plow across it by cables.)² For a few years, experiences with the new tractors were at best mixed: some of the smaller models capsized easily, most required frequent repairs, and many of their manufacturers not only failed to provide service but shortly went out of business, leaving owners without sources of spare parts. Some broke down so often and so inconveniently that owners abandoned them for routine work when they could get enough horses and fodder. Bankers told agents of the Department of Agriculture in 1914–15 that tractors advanced farming by bringing more land under cultivation but were poor investments for farmers.³ In 1917, when at least 260 different companies offered tractors for sale, Farm Implement News noted that some of them were “stock promotion schemes designed to relieve unsuspecting investors of their hard-earned dollars.” At the instance of farmerlegislators, the state of Nebraska established a Tractor Testing Laboratory at the state university in 1919 to test models offered for sale in the state and required manufacturers to provide service for them. In its first year the laboratory tested sixty-seven models from thirty-nine companies, by 1929 only fifteen from ten, seven of which were newcomers.⁴ Improvements soon made tractors more practical and affordable. A manufacturer at Stockton, California, put his engine on treads mounted on endless chains suggesting the crawling motion of a caterpillar and so a new name. With treads replacing drive wheels, even large models moved over mud and irregular terrain as their predecessors had not. Small, low-priced models came on the market toward the end of the First World War; medium-sized⁵ and general-purpose row-crop models made to plant, cultivate, and harvest as well as plow in limited space (1924) and low-pressure rubber tires (1932) followed.⁶ Between the wars improved tractors and equipment used with them became commonplace, and in the West before other regions. Farmers who had grown up around windmills, pumps, automobiles, and trucks soon learned to keep them in running order.⁷ Moreover, by the middle 1920s more than any other kind of farm machinery they approached the adaptability of the Model T Ford car, some of whose early farmer-owners had used it for more than traveling on public roads. Having learned to take power for assorted uses from windmills and water wheels, more recently from axles of cars with their rear wheels jacked up, they immediately recognized the advantages of the power take-off (1922), a splined shaft projecting from the transmission housing of a tractor. A homesteader on the Shoshone Reclamation Project, west of Cody, Wyoming, bought a Ford (1917) instead of a second horse, planning to use it for plowing with a patented

56

Farming on New Scales

attachment; he had no difficulty with it, his wife said, since he had worked with gasoline engines. The next year he bought a used tractor.⁸ Meanwhile tractors became more affordable as well as more usable; the price of the Fordson, which was by far the cheapest when Henry Ford introduced it in 1918, dropped nearly as much as the price of wheat within less than four years.⁹ Although the Fordson itself fell so far short of expectations that Ford stopped making it after only nine years, his reputation as manufacturer of the Model T prepared western farmers to try it and its competitors.¹⁰ In 1915 nearly half of all gasoline tractors were in the Dakotas and Kansas alone, about half the rest in the thirteen other western states.¹¹ Tractors in western Kansas increased from one for eleven farms in 1920 to one for two in 1930, concentrating first where winter wheat predominated.¹² They became standard equipment in the coastal states somewhat later than on the northern plains, but farmers in California and its neighbors depended so much on petroleum fuels for automobiles, trucks, tractors, and pumps that when increased demands for pumped water depleted stocks of fuel during a drought in 1920, oil companies classified them as essential users entitled to full supplies while limiting other automobile drivers to half normal consumption.¹³ Thus they were ready to shift from animal power as soon as models adapted to their needs became available, as on the rolling terrain of the Palouse country of Washington. Farmers on the northern plains adopted powered combine harvesters later than tractors. From before the First World War into the 1920s on the plains as in the Middle West, the cost and mechanical complexity of large threshing outfits as well as their capacity restricted most of them to professional custom threshermen. Custom threshing with combination harvester-threshers expanded from California into the Pacific Northwest shortly after 1900, into the southern plains in 1917–18 and after.¹⁴ Used in Kansas first in 1918, by 1926 combines cut 30 percent of the crop there; in 1930 nearly a third of the combines in the United States were in Kansas.¹⁵ They moved northward and came into more general use as gasoline tractors replaced the teams that still drew most of them in the middle 1920s. By 1936 tractors and combines were used on 75 percent and 80 percent of hard winter wheat farms in the central and eastern counties of the southern plains, on 94 percent and 90 percent in the western counties.¹⁶ Mechanization had gone further in wheat and other small grains in the Northwest and on the plains than in other major crops, an economist concluded in 1939, and over most of those areas the shift to tractors and combines was substantially complete.¹⁷ American agriculture had long continued to draw power chiefly from the muscles of men and draft animals.¹⁸ With other applications of the internal combustion engine, improved gasoline tractors brought agriculture technologically

Farming on New Scales

57

Fig. 3.2. Technology and western agriculture. Technological advancements were powerful agents of change in the modern West. This Ford tractor in an Idaho field, pulling a side-delivery hay rake, prepares windrows of newly mowed hay for a hay baler. Photo courtesy Idaho State Historical Society, Boise. 69–54.12.

much closer to manufacturing and commerce, and in the West before other regions. Powered farm equipment had consequences beyond the most immediate conveniences and economies that it offered: in uses of land, in scales of operations, in division of responsibilities within families, in financing farming itself as well as the acquisition of farm land, in demand for credit and for other services off the farm. The decline in the use of animal power after the decade of the First World War, when it had reached its peak, accounted for more than half the increase in production of food and fiber for human use in the United States over the next twenty years, probably substantially more in western states. The shift to tractors, trucks, and automobiles (after the next war to jeeps) left few horses in use on farms outside cattle, sheep, and dude ranch country.¹⁹ By 1950 the reduction in horses and mules nationally since 1920, by about two-thirds, had freed cropland equivalent to an increase of about a sixth.²⁰ Grain farmers had been putting more land under plow from well before the war of 1914–18, ignoring pronouncements that the great ranchers would have

58

Farming on New Scales

to give way to small family farmers. Powered equipment available even then permitted those who could afford it to expand operations and, once they had invested in it, made small units uneconomic. A reporter in Faulk County, South Dakota, where homesteaders had settled along the Milwaukee Railroad in the 1880s, described (1909) the spectacle of steam traction engines fitted with locomotive headlights with nickel and silver-plated reflectors so that they could operate through the night pulling twelve or sixteen plows.²¹ Some such engines with as many as forty plows turned over seventy-five to ninety acres a day,²² so much that owners who farmed on conventional scales would have to find custom work to pay off the investment. A Kansan, M. M. Sherman, who supervised his foremen by telephone on a cattle ranch of more than 40,000 acres in 1902, ultimately had 10,000 acres under plow.²³ In Oklahoma, the Miller brothers, operators of the 87,000-acre 101 Ranch on the Arkansas River west of Ponca City, had begun with cattle and horses but turned to wheat during the 1890s, later to apples, oil, and show business; they too relied on telephones.²⁴ Dean Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell University, long an advocate of the family farm and chairman of the Commission on Country Life, cited the 8,000-acre Watson Ranch, near Kearney, Nebraska, as a model of diversification, with livestock, field crops, and fruit.²⁵ Enthusiasm for large-scale farming on new principles mounted during and just after the First World War, when high prices, high costs, and shortages of labor as well as improvements in agricultural machinery suggested applying scientific management to raising wheat. New technology increased output per man-hour far more than yield per acre, which in fact averaged less nationally than a century earlier as farmers depleted soils in older states and moved onto drier land farther west; like the horse-drawn machinery introduced over the middle decades of the nineteenth century it invited expanding scales of operations.²⁶ Proposing to cultivate 200,000 acres of land on Indian reservations, Thomas D. Campbell, a graduate engineer who had managed farms in North Dakota and California, borrowed two million dollars from the New York banker J. P. Morgan and others in 1918 to form the Montana Farming Corporation. Relying on Washington as well as Wall Street, he enjoyed the good offices of the Office of Indian Affairs in leasing land on the Crow and Fort Peck reservations.²⁷ Calling himself president and chief engineer, Campbell maintained about fifty tractors, four combine harvesters, and a staff of managers for units of 10,000 acres each. “I am more a manufacturer of wheat than I am a farmer,” he told a reporter who described how he ran his farm “like a modern factory.” “By the use of industrial engineering principles, combined with scientific agricultural practice, . . . we have overcome many of the natural hazards of farming, and we are manu-

Farming on New Scales

59

facturing wheat cheaper than it is made anywhere else in the world.”²⁸ An agricultural agent of the Burlington lines took a dim view of Campbell’s enterprises, warning against his promotional methods and noting that he had prospered at the expense of his creditors, who took heavy losses when they liquidated their investments in 1921,²⁹ but as late as 1935 Fortune published a euphoric appreciation of Campbell by the poet Archibald MacLeish. Calling Campbell “the most portentous plower of plains in the history of the world,” MacLeish described him as driven by his enthusiasm for tractors. “The impact of Tom Campbell upon the grasslands of the Great Plains was the impact of the American passion for power, speed, and the predictable machine. . . . Like the composer whose delight is in the music and not in the pompous ladies for whom it is played, or like the technician to whom a gun is beautiful and its target nothing, Campbell ran his farm for the machines’ sake.”³⁰ Likewise, Simon Fishman, a storekeeper who began planting wheat in Greeley County, western Kansas, in 1919, had 16,000 acres in winter wheat two years later, most of the wheat in the county. Selling land to other farmers as well as farming it himself, he ultimately claimed to have broken nearly half a million acres of virgin sod in western Kansas. “Corporation farming,” he told an audience of Rotarians in 1931, “has been the instrument which brought about the breaking and farming of thousands of acres of land which would still be pasture if left to individual farmers.”³¹ The friendly tone of published accounts of Campbell and other big operators into the 1930s corresponded to new attitudes toward large-scale organization that extended to farmers and their advisers and advocates in government. As Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress had shifted from dissolving monopolies to regulating them, the more articulate and influential farmers became less interested in restricting big business than they had been during the hard times of the 1880s and 1890s, more in profiting by its example.³² As early as 1909 an economist noted that since Grangers called for laws setting railroad rates in the 1870s and 1880s, farmers’ organizations had left the regulation of industry to the old-line political parties, concentrating rather on putting “their own industry on a sound business basis.” Farmers “must emulate other business men,” he wrote in a treatise, Co-operation Among Farmers.³³ Fruit growers in California, who organized first to protect themselves from commission merchants and railroads, became big businessmen in their collective as well as in their individual capacities; their cooperatives were only technically different from corporations, their members operating rural assembly lines that fed other assembly lines in modern industrial style.³⁴ Staffs of departments of agriculture became more persuaded of the advantages of highly capitalized methods no less than farmer-capitalists and their asso-

60

Farming on New Scales

ciates. They had never been so enthusiastic about farming small irrigated tracts as agents of the Reclamation Service, commonly warning of the importance of experience and adequate capital. Developing techniques that large farmers adopted more readily than small ones and working closely with leaders of the new Farm Bureau Federation from its origins as a creature of the Department of Agriculture, they quietly abandoned hope for the small family farm over most of the Far West even while the General Land Office still offered quarter-section and half-section homesteads and Secretary Lane proposed to direct returning veterans to them. Even after postwar surpluses succeeded wartime shortages, many of them, as scientists and technicians, were accustomed to concentrate on improving productivity, which in that time meant expanding scales of operation and the investments in equipment that it required. By 1923 Milburn L. Wilson of the Montana Agricultural College was arguing that because in much of Montana farmers could expect only medium yields of wheat, they must operate on larger scales and at lower unit costs.³⁵ Proposing to help family farmers to climb the agricultural ladder by using new types of machines, he borrowed funds from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to finance the Fairway Farms Corporation (1924), which consolidated as many as eight small holdings into units of one to four sections that tenants might ultimately acquire on easy terms; the corporation provided modern machinery, managerial supervision, credit, and the results of research done on an experimental 3000-acre “tractor farm” near Brockton in northeastern Montana. In the winter of 1929 a fifteen-car special Northern Pacific train carried personnel and equipment from Brockton, demonstrating how family farmers could raise wheat on holdings of 800 to 1800 acres with three- to sixplow tractor outfits and only small amounts of hired labor at costs competitive with those for the cheapest Canadian exports. “The Fairway experimenters,” a reporter wrote in Nation’s Business (1930), “are simply transferring factory methods to the farm.”³⁶ After declining for several years in the early 1920s, land in farms increased to new levels over the two decades after the war—by over a fourth (27.5 percent, nearly 101,000,000 acres)—in every western state and territory except Hawaii while declining in all but seven other states. Much of those additions went to stock-raising, and much represented change in title more than change in operations as established stockmen took advantage of the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 to enlarge their holdings by filing claims or buying others’ claims. The biggest increase was in Wyoming, by over sixteen million acres in the fifteen years, more than 138 percent, nearly all in stock-raising homesteads.³⁷ But western acreages in wheat, declining only briefly after the record-making prices and harvests of 1919, also increased as wheat farmers both bought out their neighbors

Farming on New Scales

61

and broke land in pasture. Harvests in most western states repeatedly made new records in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining static or declining elsewhere: in Montana over a third larger (1927) than the largest during the war (1915).³⁸ Increases in plantings and harvests in the plains states during the war were predominantly in eastern counties,³⁹ but after it they pressed along the outlying limits of crop-farming. In Texas County, in the Oklahoma panhandle, acreage in wheat more than tripled in 1920–29.⁴⁰ The postwar shift to hard red winter wheat was chiefly on what had been pasture and grazing land.⁴¹ Farmers who planted hitherto uncultivated land tended to operate on larger scales and to depend more on machinery, as Secretary Wilson thought they should and as those of their predecessors who could afford to had done, especially at the initial stage of breaking tough prairie sod. In so doing they met some difficulties and made themselves vulnerable to others, especially when unfavorable weather as well as low prices cut their returns. “Owing to the tractor and combine,” an agricultural economist wrote in 1931, “land is being used now for wheat in Montana and western Kansas which could not have been used profitably a few years ago, despite a price for wheat then twice as high as now.”⁴² When farmers who survived the depression of the 1890s bought out their less fortunate neighbors, economists had noted the advantages of limiting size to ranges within which they could diversify efficiently.⁴³ Concentrating on wheat or any one of most other staple crops soon subjected them to the vagaries of unpredictable markets in hired migrant labor as planting or harvesting it within a short span of time became too much for members of their own families with a little help from neighbors. Machinery that custom threshers brought with their own crews or that farmers could buy themselves became an alternative for some crops. But such machinery was so specialized that it tended to confine its owners to a single crop or group of similar crops: the combine harvester, later the corn picker and cotton picker. And even machinery as unspecialized as the steam tractor cost so much as to put pressure on owners to buy enough land to operate it to capacity year after year while they paid for it, and to maintain both land and equipment for future use. As Secretary Wallace noted as late as 1923, when he and others from time to time looked beyond current problems of farm surpluses to entertain Malthusian visions of population ultimately pressing on food supplies, if production shrank in proportion to current needs, farmers might have to reclaim at large expense land that they had abandoned.⁴⁴ Some farmers who were able to cover their outlays both survived the drops in prices of crops after wartime peaks and later expanded holdings and plantings. The movement of wheat westward accelerated in the 1920s, plantings declining in the older states and rising sharply on the plains. Acreage in Kansas increased

62

Farming on New Scales

by two-fifths,⁴⁵ in fourteen southwestern counties by about 175 percent. Some of these were counties where settlement had advanced in 1900–10 and receded in the 1890s and 1910–20 and where it receded again later, in 1935–40.⁴⁶ (The price in 1930 was less than a third of prices in 1917–19, while land harvested in wheat in Montana and Kansas increased by 24 and 13 percent, respectively.)⁴⁷ Since most arable land was already in private hands, new plantings in wheat represented shifts from other uses of land more than advances onto land commonly called virgin or unoccupied. An agricultural economist commented, “The country has been settled; it is now being resettled.”⁴⁸ In Haskell County, where acreage in wheat had increased by 173.1 percent in five years, 1924–29, moving from 58.7 percent to 80.8 percent of cropland, cropland increased by 98.4 percent while pasture declined by nearly half, cattle by more than half;⁴⁹ nonresident owners (sidewalk and suitcase farmers) planted all available land to wheat. Population in the county more than doubled over the decade, 1920–30, although it fell short of the peak of 1887 and then drifted downward as more farm operators—by 1936 close to half—became nonresidents.⁵⁰ Farmers on irrigated land on the Pacific Coast and over large parts of the mountain states fared quite differently from farmers on the still mostly unirrigated high plains between the wars. Changes in demand for farm products in the 1920s raised prices of farmland in California, especially land in orchard and truck crops, while depressing prices in wheat and corn country.⁵¹ The value of harvests in the state fell by only 7.2 percent between 1919 and 1929, far less than the rate of decline in farm prices generally from the inflated levels of 1916–20, which approached a third, against 43.9 percent in the United States, 43.6 percent on the northern plains.⁵² Population on farms grew by over a seventh, more than in any other western state but Arizona.⁵³ For a few years it seemed that farmers in California and its neighbors might escape the misfortunes of farmers in other states while moving into crops that had been more typical of the North and the older Middle West. Into the last years of the nineteenth century the gauntlet of distances between the coast and major cities on both sides of the Atlantic had dictated that the only western crop that commanded substantial markets out of state was wheat: the dry kernels harvested in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys arrived at Atlantic ports by sailing ship in prime condition and at competitive costs while fresh fruit delivered by rail was no more than a symbol of the riches of the lotus land that promoters called “our Italy.” The volume of fresh produce shipped out of state was insignificant until it went in the cars cooled with ice that replaced merely ventilated cars in the 1890s. The numbers of refrigerator cars in service increased as

Farming on New Scales

63

demand developed, more than doubling in 1900–10 and nearly doubling again in 1910–20.⁵⁴ Between the 1890s and the 1920s agriculture in California was transformed. Oranges and lemons were the first products of irrigation to sell out of state in substantial quantities. By 1901 citrus shipments were almost six times as large as in 1890–91; by 1911, over eleven times; by 1921, nearly fifteen times.⁵⁵ Comparable traffic in fresh deciduous fruits developed more slowly: citrus fruit had the advantages of maturing in winter, when it had little competition, and of withstanding hauls of two or three thousand miles better. Although a carload of refrigerated California apricots and cherries had arrived at New York in marketable condition as early as 1888,⁵⁶ at first eastern markets for western deciduous fruit were limited to small quantities from hillside orchards with low content of water and high of sugar early in the spring before growers nearby undersold them. Truck produce followed still later. In general raising vegetables was “incidental to other farming operations,” the reporter of the census commented in explaining the fragmentary record for 1899. “The farmers give but little attention to their cultivation.” Green vegetables raised for sale then accounted for less than 1.7 percent of value of agricultural production in California, fruit 21.5 percent; cereals still led, at 25.6 percent.⁵⁷ By 1929, values of vegetables and fruit were 9.7 percent and 33.3 percent of a far larger total; value of cereals had dropped to 6.9, percent; and California supplied 20.4 percent of the country’s vegetables, 45.2 percent of its fruit.⁵⁸ Moreover, while plantings and harvests increased, average sizes of crop farms long remained small. Into the thirties some Japanese and Italian tenants still rented plots no larger than several acres. In 1950 irrigated land in farms averaged about seventy-one acres (3.2 acres more than in 1909), orchards and vineyards about seventeen acres.⁵⁹ Dates and avocados, both commonly raised on small scales, had joined oranges and lemons as symbols of opportunity for small prospective buyers in the rhetoric of real estate salesmen.⁶⁰ Yet agriculture in California continued to be big business after as well as before orchard fruits and grapes replaced wheat and livestock as principal products around the turn of the century. Some of the smallest holdings were not so much farms as suburban residences where the rich savored the scent of orange blossoms and stabled their riding horses and the poor raised a few chickens and vegetables while escaping high costs of urban housing. Holdings of 1,000 acres and more, comprising 61.9 percent of farmland in the state in 1900,⁶¹ declined slightly in 1900–10, when railroads and communities were making special efforts to encourage intensive operations on small scales. But such large holdings increased

64

Farming on New Scales

thereafter, even when the state government under progressive leadership during the next decade tried to buck the trend both by sponsoring colonies of irrigated farms that it sold on easy terms through a Land Settlement Board (1917) and by promoting cooperation among farmers.⁶² They increased still more later as new forms of intensive agriculture, especially on irrigated land, required access to capital, labor, and means of processing and marketing that small operators could not easily command and as large distributors and processors moved from the later into the earlier stages of production. By 1969, more than half of irrigated land was in holdings of 1,000 acres or more; by 1987, nearly two-thirds.⁶³ Sizes of vegetable farms, which had averaged 13.3 acres in 1919, when many operators were still Japanese and Italian tenants on urban and suburban land, increased at accelerating rates, to averages of 36.8 in 1940, 60.0 in 1950, 470.0 in 1974.⁶⁴ Moreover, while many small operators gave way to large, others who did not nevertheless left so much responsibility to employees, buyers, and agents that they retained little more than that of ownership. From early stages, shippers and processors organized on large scales that increased with the traffic. As a few packers owned the refrigerator cars that began carrying dressed beef from middle western stockyards in the 1870s, a few large firms controlled those that carried produce: first Continental Fruit Express, which a Los Angeles produce dealer, Edwin T. Earl, established to operate the cars that he designed in 1890, later subsidiaries of major western railroads.⁶⁵ By the 1890s commercially operated canneries led all types of manufacturing enterprises in California in value of product. The California Fruit Canners Association, formed when eleven companies merged in 1899, was the largest canning firm in the world. In 1916 it merged into a still larger combination, the California Packing Corporation (later renamed the Del Monte Corporation, after its principal label), which promoted sales by advertising aggressively and expanded horizontally and vertically by acquiring both processing plants and farmland in California and other states and in Guatemala.⁶⁶ Its counterpart as largest producer and shipper of fresh fruit and vegetables was the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation (1920), which began in wholesaling and moved into canning.⁶⁷ When American demand for canned fruits and vegetables leveled off and then slumped as frozen products took over much of the market by the 1970s and 1980s, Del Monte, Di Giorgio, and other big operators both diversified, extending their operations abroad, and merged into larger conglomerates. To compete for rates and service from railroads and to control destructive competition among themselves, other producers had begun combining cooperatively while their business was only beginning, especially those whose crops required relatively little processing and only fairly simple methods of distribu-

Farming on New Scales

65

tion: the first association of orange growers in 1885. Cooperative associations of growers of prunes and apricots, raisin grapes, and walnuts shortly followed. The California Fruit Growers Exchange, founded in 1905 (later renamed Sunkist, after its trademark), a federation of local and district cooperatives of citrus growers, reduced costs by improving handling, negotiating favorable rates for refrigeration and shipping, buying supplies cooperatively, and manufacturing by-products, even by manufacturing its own boxes with wood from its own mills and holdings of timber. It expanded markets by standardizing products and by advertising, promoting consumption of juice to sell more oranges than people ate in solid form and manufacturing its own extractors. Within its first fifteen years it shipped about three-fourths of all citrus fruit.⁶⁸ It had no rivals comparable to the great meat packers that had risen almost simultaneously with early shipments of refrigerated beef in the 1870s and 1880s or to corporate dealers in vegetables and fresh deciduous fruit and processors of canned and packaged foods. Such large growers’ cooperatives closely resembled the giant commercial food shippers and processors in more than scale, complexity, and authority. Members and officers of the exchange included growers large enough to operate their own packing houses, most of them corporations.⁶⁹ Cooperative organization appealed to many such growers and packers chiefly for its advantages under California tax law and as means of restricting competition: with votes proportionate to their size, they could control membership and, in effect, who entered the industry. Unlike Grangers who had organized the first agricultural cooperatives in central and northern California, citrus growers consistently set wages of agricultural workers low. Large growers and associations of growers maintained cheap and stable labor forces by recruiting Mexican immigrants and building segregated housing for them from early in the century. When pickers in Orange County nevertheless struck in 1936, growers who organized as the Associated Farmers of Orange County crushed the union.⁷⁰ Charles Teague, long president of the exchange, who maintained a paternalistic regime for employees of his own lemon company, led a campaign to break a strike of Mexican pickers in Ventura County in 1941.⁷¹ He and his colleagues in the coastal counties were as determined to keep out unions as Di Giorgio and other corporate employers in the central valley. The requirements and consequences of raising and marketing commercial crops, in western as in northern states, and especially wheat, had seemed clear in the nineteenth century, normal precursors of substantial growth in population. But such traditional links eroded when agriculture became a species of engineering, ultimately of chemistry, and when returns on increased produc-

66

Farming on New Scales

tivity exceeded demand. In the 1920s declines in prices of most crops, coinciding with declines in yields of wheat and other staples on marginal land, for the most part put an end to developing and living on bona fide small family farms. Plains states that had led in increases in homesteading, agricultural settlement, and new mortgage debt in the second decade of the century led in rates of foreclosure in the third decade as farmers who had overextended themselves lost what remained of their equities: in 1926–31 more than one in five in Montana and the Dakotas; one in eight in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.⁷² Meanwhile, plantings in wheat and harvests of wheat again increased spectacularly in the 1920s but on fewer, larger farms. Farm-mortgage debt had risen more in Montana before the First World War than in any other state⁷³ as above-average rainfall and bountiful harvests seemed to justify it; acreage in wheat increased nearly thirteen times in seven years, 1910–17. Then droughts in three successive years, 1917–19, cut yields sharply, from more than twice yields in Kansas and other older wheat-raising states to less than half, in dry-farming areas where prospects had seemed brightest to virtually nothing. Over a fourth of farmers in the northern counties of Montana lost their land in 1920–23; over a third kept it only because their creditors could not sell it.⁷⁴ In some counties four-fifths of farmland reverted for taxes.⁷⁵ “You may drive . . . now for forty or fifty miles . . . and seem to see nothing but abandoned towns, abandoned farms,” a reporter wrote (1924); “banks along the road with pieces of white paper pasted on their door panes, and steam tractors sinking in the fields like lost locomotives.”⁷⁶ The Farmer’s Dispatch (St. Paul) recommended (1921) removing farmers in eastern Montana and western North Dakota and returning their land to cattle range. The son of a Wibaux County (northeastern Montana) farmer protested, replying, “The longer a man has resided here the more faith he has in the region’s agricultural possibilities.” Two years later his father lost the family farm when a bank of which he was director failed. By 1929, another dry year, farmers in the county who were full owners had decreased by more than half.⁷⁷ Yet in the state overall, land in wheat increased by over half in the 1920s, land in farms and value of harvests by more than a fourth.⁷⁸ In Sherman County, in northwestern Kansas on the Colorado boundary, acreage in wheat increased by nearly two-thirds, twice as much as population.⁷⁹ In the panhandle of western Oklahoma, where acreage in wheat increased spectacularly over the second and third decades of the century, by 176.4 percent and 153.8 percent, population simultaneously declined.⁸⁰ Population on farms declined particularly in stock-raising and dry-farming country, where it was already lower than in more humid areas where families could more easily survive on homesteads of traditional size and where more in-

Farming on New Scales

67

tensive uses of land sooner followed on new technology. Farm families often had moved to town temporarily while their children attended school. When Bessie Joss started school in 1912 at Govan, eleven miles from the family’s homestead in southwestern Washington, her mother took her and her brother to a rented house in town.⁸¹ By the late 1930s a fifth of farmers on the high plains no longer lived in the open country.⁸² Agents of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics surveying “town farming” in 1941 found that almost two-thirds of the houses in Jordan, northeastern Montana (Garfield County, one of the railroadless areas that the geographer Isaiah Bowman had called the pioneer fringe),⁸³ had come from farms, many of them “homestead shacks” that mothers and children used in winter while the fathers “batched.” As automobiles, trucks, and improved county roads made commuting more practicable, many families left established farms permanently, whether to live in town while operating them or to sell out, and those who remained often moved abandoned houses onto their land for outbuildings, giving conventional farms the aspect of villages.⁸⁴ Even in fruit-raising districts where a quarter section was a substantial holding, as in the Santa Clara Valley of California, absentee operation became common, orchardists driving from residences in town.⁸⁵ By the 1930s the term “sidewalk farmers” described regular commuters by automobile, many of whom stayed in town after their children finished school. In 1950 they farmed a third of cropland in Sherman County, where acreage in wheat had expanded again during and after the war; abandoned farmsteads were conspicuous. “Suitcase” or “satchel” farmers moved greater distances, many of them over state as well as across county lines; relying on trucks and tractors, they could expand operations to more economic scale and move much of their equipment seasonally.⁸⁶ They were a new kind of pioneer, like homesteaders in western parts of the plains states in the 1880s in gambling on rainfall, unlike them in cultivating more land, leaving less in pasture or fallow. Not having to move farm animals, and having invested only minimally in buildings and other improvements, they were freer than residents to move in and out as weather and prices fluctuated and to concentrate their resources on cash crops. Where shortages of water discouraged spending more time on their land than necessary, some families that “camped out” during planting and harvesting seasons used their houses in town as washhouses for the convenience of piped water.⁸⁷ Ordinarily they could count on getting crops to market within the first year, since railroad systems in farming country were essentially complete, by the 1920s about as extensive as they ever would be, and since typically they had their own trucks. Initially esteemed for gambling on the weather and for introducing the latest technology in areas where machinery commanded great interest,

68

Farming on New Scales

suitcase farmers lost caste when they retreated during the droughts of the 1930s. Residents accused them of aggravating erosion by breaking land recklessly and not remaining to list it (plow furrows to catch dust that wind picked up). They returned to the grasslands of western Kansas and eastern Colorado in the 1940s when prices and rainfall increased again and especially when wartime restrictions on selling machinery expired.⁸⁸ Nonresident farm laborers paralleled nonresident farm operators, replacing the neighbors and sons of neighbors who had helped harvest crops on the smaller holdings of simpler times. They came first by rail, on both steam and electric interurban systems. By 1918 some farmers collected harvest hands in town, and some accommodated their regular hired men by taking them there on their days off, but harvest hands also arrived in their own cars. The automobile “didn’t keep the boy and the girl on the farm,” John North Willys of WillysOverland observed, “but it provided the farmer with means for getting people from the town to take their places. It set in motion a counter current from city to country.” According to a writer in Country Gentleman (1919), it was “as much a part of the farm laborer’s equipment as the bag of tools is the carpenter’s.”⁸⁹ Insofar as they continued to live in cities, the new automobile laborers were like sidewalk farmers in moving in opposite directions from rural residents who worked there. Blurring old distinctions between farm and nonfarm population, both tended to distort statistical statements of social and economic change. In every state some people, in some states many people eluded attempts of census takers to classify them neatly by conventional categories, working away from where they lived and dividing their time among different kinds of jobs and residences. Ratios of population to land diverged further from the traditional ratio of a family to a 160-acre homestead as pressures of cost and price and possibilities of new technology on the farm and employment away from it increased. Farmers continued to plant and harvest more in the 1930s, but more to keep solvent than to pursue new opportunities; plantings of wheat made new records both nationally and in Kansas in 1937, at 4.4 percent and 46.6 percent more than in 1919,⁹⁰ just as the government prepared to control overproduction by reducing land under cultivation. Values of crops declined more in the West than nationally over the decade, along with exports and domestic consumption.⁹¹ In 1935 a fifth of farmers in the Dakotas and Montana were on relief.⁹² Mortgage debt averaged higher than nationally in all western states but Oklahoma in both 1930 and 1940; it had increased during the great expansion of the First World War at more than national rates in all western states but Kansas, in California over four times, in Montana nearly seven times, and it remained high despite widespread foreclosures and sales during the 1920s.⁹³ In 1940 ratios of mortgage

Farming on New Scales

69

Fig. 3.3. The New Deal in the West. President Franklin D. Roosevelt chats with North Dakota farmer Steve Brown during the president’s trip west in August 1936. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies greatly influenced western agriculture during the 1930s. Photo courtesy Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. Negative no. 57–651.

debt to value of mortgaged farms in the three northernmost plains states were highest in the country, North Dakota leading at 57.4 percent.⁹⁴ Yet western farmers suffered more than other farmers only relative to what they had had and to what they had expected to gain when they expanded operations in better times. Even after declining sharply in the later 1920s, incomes on western farms in 1932—before the disastrous drought of 1934—were below the national average only in New Mexico and Oklahoma, and in only one of those two, Oklahoma, within southern levels. They averaged more than twice as much in the West as in the South.⁹⁵ But in administering agricultural programs, the government spent and lent disproportionately in far western states: over a third (33.8 percent) in an area with only slightly over a sixth (17.8 percent) of total population on farms.⁹⁶ Meanwhile it began work on reclamation projects, particularly for irrigation and hydroelectric power, on which it spent more heavily and still more disproportionately over the four decades following. Most of these

70

Farming on New Scales

were west of the states of the plains and the western Middle West, whose farmers lost their cattle as well as their crops in the drought of 1934. Although public works projects, loans, and other forms of assistance helped many farmers, especially freeholders, to survive the Depression, some major programs fully affected them only later, merging with the effects of the war. New reclamation projects were so enormous that construction extended into the next generation. Although the government failed to take other land out of production to balance their effects as it had proposed to do,⁹⁷ irrigated cropland harvested in the sixteen states increased by only about 1.2 percent in the decade 1929–39, far less than population; it declined in Colorado, Idaho, and Utah, where farmers had relied heavily on irrigation, and also in South Dakota, where they had not.⁹⁸ The principal development at that time on the Missouri River emphasized flood control and navigation rather than irrigation, and while land irrigated in North Dakota more than doubled, the increase represented only about 0.03 percent of land in farms.⁹⁹ At Grand Coulee Dam, built in 1933–42, military uses preempted power from the first hydroelectric generating plant; construction of irrigation works for the Columbia Basin Project began only in 1947. The Central Valley Project of California, which Congress authorized in 1935, first delivered water for irrigation in 1951. Construction of dams in the Missouri River Basin Project, authorized in 1944, extended from 1946 to 1966.¹⁰⁰ Advocates of the Pick-Sloan plan for the Missouri Basin Project had predicted that it would serve nearly a million acres of new land in South Dakota alone, where the irrigated area was still small and had declined in the 1930s. But while construction was still under way, a committee of the Department of the Interior concluded that engineers had overestimated irrigable acreage by more than a third, and Governor Ralph Herseth contended that development had sacrificed over half a million acres of valuable agricultural lands, about a third more than the total irrigated after sharp increases in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁰¹ Farmers got electricity from central systems at widely varying rates, depending on when it became available and whether they could afford to pay for connection. By 1940, after five years of the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), 82.9 percent of farms in California had service, up from 53.9 percent in 1934, but only 15.5 percent in North Dakota and 15.7 percent in Oklahoma, up from 2.3 percent and 2.6 percent.¹⁰² Further, although numbers with service more than quadrupled in the twelve years after the REA began operation, 1936–48, more were still getting it from power companies than from cooperatives and government agencies.¹⁰³ Over the worst years of the Depression, reclamation affected western states more by providing employment at sites of developing projects and by preparing Kaiser Industries, the W. A. Bechtel Company, and other principal

Farming on New Scales

71

contractors for further undertakings than by changing how farmers lived and worked. Hopes for such returns may partly explain why chambers of commerce and other promotional agencies supported expanding reclamation in the 1930s even though settlers on most projects had been unable to pay off costs of development at scheduled rates in prosperous times and though bringing more land into production would complicate attempts to raise prices by reducing agricultural surpluses.¹⁰⁴ In the 1930s and 1940s scales of agriculture increased at accelerating rates despite predictions that many of the unemployed and many veterans would take up small farms. The new grazing-land policies of the 1930s favored large operators: the advisory committees that recommended allotments of public land, promoted as bases of a new democracy, became instruments of established farmers and stockgrowers who used them to exclude competitors.¹⁰⁵ Like the Greenbelt towns of the Resettlement Administration, the rural communities that M. L. Wilson, as head of the Subsistence Homestead Division (1933), proposed to model after Mormon farm villages became rather suburban adjuncts to metropolitan areas insofar as they survived. The Oklahomans who fled to California in the middle and later 1930s were predominantly small tenant farmers in eastern cotton-growing counties; they were “tractored out” rather than “blown out” when landlords evicted them to qualify for subsidies for reduced plantings, which Congress authorized in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Then landlords bought machinery and fertilizer to improve yields on acreage left under cultivation.¹⁰⁶ Other public programs similarly favored highly capitalized operations. Supporting prices of staple crops encouraged farmers to specialize rather than diversify, and so to depend on expensive specialized equipment.¹⁰⁷ Responding to charges that priorities in agricultural research had driven small farmers out of business, in 1987 a California superior court judge ordered the University of California to assure that public funds chiefly benefited small family farms as Congress had intended.¹⁰⁸ During and shortly after the Second World War, officials predicted that reclamation projects would, in the language of the Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, “open a new frontier of opportunity in the West” (1945), adding nearly 200,000 new irrigated farms.¹⁰⁹ But as appetite for challenging vested interests declined with the worst stresses of the Depression and as Americans looked more to urban than rural opportunities, the ideal of the small family farm corresponded less to economic and political reality. Public agencies gave up trying to support it, accepting arguments that farmers themselves had abandoned it and that enterprises larger and more centralized than the marketing cooperatives that administrations of the 1920s had promoted were more efficient and

72

Farming on New Scales

realistic alternatives. Both the Farmers Home Administration, which replaced the Farm Security Administration in 1946, and postwar tax codes favored large operators.¹¹⁰ By 1982, when Congress abandoned what had become a pretense of enforcing the limitation of 160 acres on land irrigated from reclamation projects, land in holdings of 1,000 acres and more had increased by nearly two-fifths, to 78.2 percent of farmland in the state, including 57.2 percent of irrigated land; most of it was in holdings of more than 2,000 acres (67.8 percent of farmland).¹¹¹ The Bureau of Reclamation acquiesced in a subterfuge by which owners split large irrigated farms into units small enough to qualify for water but managed them collectively.¹¹² The general trend accelerated and became more visible as expanding suburbs displaced prune and apricot orchards south of San Francisco and citrus orchards around Los Angeles after the Second World War. Between 1945 and 1978 Santa Clara County, south of the bay, lost 95,957 acres in orchards and vineyards (88.0 percent) to urban development, while Merced and Stanislaus, directly to the east in the San Joaquin Valley, gained 120,787 acres (127.4 percent); Los Angeles and its southern neighbor, Orange, lost 150,152 (90.9 percent), while Kern (Bakersfield), across the Tehachapi Range to the north, gained 168,824 (542.7 percent).¹¹³ The changes in the coastal and central valleys were latter-day extensions of the shifts in uses of land that had begun under Mexican rule and accelerated after the American conquest: from stock-raising to crop-farming, from grain and forage to fruit, vegetables, and the more intensive field crops.¹¹⁴ But while valley ranchers more than replaced land in orchards and truck gardens lost to the fast-growing communities of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles basin, they also replaced small farms with large. Only about one of seven acres in harvested cropland in Los Angeles County had been in farms larger than 1,000 acres before the war; in Kern County after it the ratios rose from less than one of two to two of five in 1959, over seven of ten in 1978, while the average size of farms rose from 48 to 1,704 acres. Sizes also changed although over narrower ranges to the north as crop-farming declined in Santa Clara County and around the bay and increased in Merced and Stanislaus.¹¹⁵ Owners developed large holdings in fruits and vegetables in the interior less by absorbing small farms than by planting land formerly in pasture and forage and field crops.¹¹⁶ Drawing on subsidized water available from the late 1960s, the west side of the San Joaquin Valley, like newly irrigated counties in Arizona and Florida, passed directly from a pastoral to an industrial-agricultural economy without going through a phase of small- and medium-sized units.¹¹⁷ When Orange County still led the state in raising oranges, many groves were still of

Farming on New Scales

73

residential scale, averaging less than 15 acres in 1950; by 1982, when most of them were gone, their successors in Kern County averaged nearly 200.¹¹⁸ Small farms near cities were paved and built over rather than incorporated into larger units. Some that remained were farms only technically: in southern California “avocado ranches,” whose owners deducted their expenses on their income taxes while waiting to sell them to developers, produced surpluses that prompted frantic proposals to use the farms for other purposes.¹¹⁹ Irrigated crop-farming expanded even more after the war on the plains, and from much smaller beginnings. Through the 1940s most of the irrigated land east of the Rockies was in Nebraska, where the North Platte project, serving Scotts Bluff, Sioux, and Morrill counties and also Goshen County, Wyoming, to the west, was one of the first projects authorized after the Newlands Act.¹²⁰ Kansas farmers had begun to irrigate with surface water earlier but found that it failed them in dry years when they needed it most;¹²¹ using windmills to pump ground water from shallow wells, at first they used it in small amounts, for livestock, steam engines, and domestic purposes. A new era in subhumid agriculture began during the drought of 1952–56 as farmers drilled wells to tap the enormous aquifers that underlay some of the driest parts of the plains. At first most of the land that they began to irrigate was in the Southwest, in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. But over the next two decades Nebraska reached third place, with about two-thirds as much land irrigated as in California by 1978, Kansas sixth place, after only California and Texas.¹²² On the plains, irrigation did not so much change types of crops as stabilize and expand production of crops already established, especially corn, in Colorado also sugar beets, in Oklahoma sorghum.¹²³ Freeing farmers from the uncertainties of surface supplies, it compounded returns on hybrid strains of corn, which were in general use by the 1940s, and on chemical fertilizer, which soon followed.¹²⁴ Harvests more than tripled in Nebraska in 1950–78 and in Kansas more than doubled, in both on less land.¹²⁵ In Finney and Haskell counties, southwestern Kansas, acreage in corn increased (1950–78) from 0.7 percent to 46.3 percent and 54.0 percent of irrigated land, which increased by 494.5 percent and 6,803.7 percent.¹²⁶ Roswell Garst, the Iowa farmer who advised eastern European governments on agricultural technology, urged the Soviet minister of agriculture in 1971 to investigate irrigation in Finney County (Garden City), where he said yields of corn were highest in the world.¹²⁷ This was an area where the fortunes of farmers had alternated between boom and bust with rainfall since the 1880s. Exhausting public resources at the nadir of the Depression forty years earlier, county officials had resorted to soliciting private contributions for

74

Farming on New Scales

relief.¹²⁸ Center-pivot irrigation from revolving sprinklers, introduced in 1952, was peculiarly adaptable to the rolling terrain of the sand hills of north-central Nebraska, where gravity systems drawing on surface water were impractical.¹²⁹ While continuing to raise cattle, irrigating pasture and silage crops for fodder, farmers there grew more corn despite risks of wind erosion.¹³⁰ Over the forty years 1940–80, harvests of corn for grain in the state increased nearly six times, while acreage increased by slightly over two-fifths (41.1 percent).¹³¹ Irrigation of wheat also increased, but for large shares of total acreage only in Pacific and mountain states; on the plains increases in yields of wheat attributable to irrigation were far less than increases in yields of corn.¹³² Prospects that irrigation would stabilize agriculture on the plains soon receded as demands on aquifers exceeded replacement by rainfall percolating from the surface. For a few years, additions to irrigated acreage in the northern plains, especially in Nebraska, which overlay two-thirds of water in storage in the Ogallala aquifer, promised to exceed reductions to the south, but the authors of a study regarded as unrealistically optimistic predicted (1982) that by 2020 more than five million acres of irrigated land would have to revert to dryland agriculture or native vegetation.¹³³ While the supply lasted, moreover, costs rose as farmers had to sink wells deeper to reach water and install larger pumps while paying higher prices for oil from the 1970s and receiving lower prices for farm products. Oil companies, meanwhile, both sold more oil to farmers for pumping and drew on the aquifer themselves for water that they used to recover oil from deposits in Oklahoma and Texas.¹³⁴ Investors who financed installations lost interest when Congress withdrew concessions in taxes that had attracted them (1986). By then land under irrigation was declining in all states where farmers depended importantly on it, but Utah.¹³⁵ In the Pacific and mountain states, prices of fruits and vegetables remained high while exports of grain and dairy products collapsed in the 1980s; and until rainfall declined sharply in 1989–92, irrigators within reach of government dams got cheap water and electricity instead of having to use uncontrolled petroleum products for pumping. In the central valleys of California, they enjoyed high returns despite droughts in two consecutive years, 1976–77.¹³⁶ Nevertheless even where supplies of water and power and costs assessed to users remained economic, they faced serious limitations. The Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge in the San Joaquin Valley, a temporary storage area for the California Water Project, became so badly contaminated within several years that waterfowl attracted to it died from high concentrations of selenium.¹³⁷ In the Imperial Valley, where by 1941 farmers had abandoned more land to “alkali” than they planted in vegetables, by laying thousands of miles of subterranean tile they made the Im-

Farming on New Scales

75

perial Irrigation District a net exporter of salt (1955).¹³⁸ Over the county, plantings in hay after the war increased much more than plantings in vegetables, which were more sensitive to contamination.¹³⁹ While farmers in western counties of the plains states that had been confined to stock-raising and dry farming drew on new technology to grow corn and other grain and forage crops formerly grown chiefly in the older Middle West, their counterparts in innovation on the Pacific slope and in the Southwest extended, in effect, the agricultural frontiers of the American South and southern Europe. The earliest and some of the most drastic changes were in California, facilitated by the inclusion of much of the most arable land in Spanish and Mexican land grants, much larger than holdings ordinarily available through the American land system and encouraged by what promoters called its Mediterranean climate and by the talents of immigrants from Mediterranean countries. The Salinas Valley, in Monterey County, had been cattle range through the first years of American occupation until owners planted grain after the droughts and floods that wiped out most of their herds in 1862–63; after 1888, when the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels leased part of the Cooper-Molera ranch, sugar beets became the fastest-growing crop, and shortly production in the county became largest in the state. Then artichokes replaced beets when the heir to the ranch refused to renew the Spreckelses’ lease in 1922, urged new tenants to plant the new crop, and developed markets beyond the French and Italian communities of northern California in a massive advertising campaign;¹⁴⁰ within the decade plantings increased from 543 to 33,668 acres, exceeding those in all crops other than barley. After methods of shipping under refrigeration improved from the 1930s, lettuce soon took first place among all crops.¹⁴¹ By the 1960s wine grapes were a new agricultural growth stock in coastal California from Monterey to Mendocino; in the 1970s and 1980s viniculturists in Oregon and Washington found that the Willamette, the Columbia, the Walla Walla, and other northwestern valleys were climatic equivalents of the Rhine, and on a small but sharply ascending scale wine promised to surpass mint, dill, and grass seed, which had begun to replace wheat and other traditional crops before the Second World War.¹⁴² Irrigation agriculture developed on much larger scales in the central valleys of California. Farmers from western states began harvesting rice mechanically in Louisiana in the 1880s, growing rice there and in east Texas, according to an agent of the United States Department of Agriculture (1899), like wheat on the bonanza farms of the Dakotas.¹⁴³ Output farther west, then, was no more than experimental, but within seven years after the first commercial plantings in California (1912), harvests exceeded a fifth of American production; on land ex-

76

Farming on New Scales

hausted by wheat growing and thought unsuited for other crops, yields surpassed yields in the South. As growers developed more mechanized methods, planting by airplane from the 1930s,¹⁴⁴ production increased nearly fivefold over the next half century.¹⁴⁵ Cotton moved west of Texas and Oklahoma about the same time, from 1909, at first mostly to Arizona, where the long-staple pima variety dominated irrigated farms in the Salt River Valley during the First World War and immediately after.¹⁴⁶ Soon Acala upland cotton, first grown commercially in California in Kern County, proved so productive that the San Joaquin Valley led Imperial County in acreage and production, California the Southwest after Texas.¹⁴⁷ Within four years, 1932–36, plantings in the state increased more than four times.¹⁴⁸ By 1947 cotton was the most valuable field crop, by the late 1970s first in acreage. The expansion of cotton in California and Arizona and the new ascendancy of those states over older cotton-producing states coincided with increases in outlays for irrigation, fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides as well as machinery.¹⁴⁹ In addition to helping cotton farmers, along with large growers generally, to get water, credit, and labor forces on favorable terms, the state and national governments sponsored work on the specific requirements of the crop at research stations (which some agents left to become major entrepreneurs) and regulated varieties of seed planted. Yields in California in 1925 averaged more than twice yields in Oklahoma (340 against 155 pounds an acre); sixty years later, when cotton in Oklahoma had retreated to counties where farmers had more land and more capital to apply to it, yields in California had more than tripled, to about three times yields in Oklahoma (1,132 against 380 pounds). California produced nearly one-fourth of the American crop, against one-one-hundred-thirty-second in 1925, with Arizona and New Mexico (which grew most of American pima cotton) nearly one-third; Oklahoma had dropped from over one-tenth to about one-forty-seventh.¹⁵⁰ American cotton farmers as a whole had more limited opportunities than American wheat farmers in that exports of cotton after the war never closely approached earlier levels; they commanded contracting rather than expanding shares of world markets. But changes in western cotton farming after the war were as drastic on a smaller scale as earlier changes in wheat and corn farming. While elsewhere operators expanded to sizes appropriate for new technology chiefly by displacing tenants and small owners, in the West they bought land chiefly planted in other crops or used for grazing. In the 1960s and after, construction of a great aqueduct from northern California to the west side of the San Joaquin Valley made suitable land available in tracts large enough to justify

Farming on New Scales

77

using new mechanized technology, while demand for land for other crops encouraged growers to move from smaller plots on the east side.¹⁵¹ Over a century and a half after the cotton gin made short- and medium-staple cotton marketable on a large scale, cotton planters lagged behind growers of other American staple crops in finding alternatives to hand labor for harvesting. The authors of a study, Progress of Farm Mechanization, for the Department of Agriculture in 1947 referred cautiously to mechanical cotton pickers as a “development of keen interest,” predicting, “The next generation may see their successful development, and witness widespread adoption in some cotton areas.”¹⁵² At that time the department reported less than 0.5 percent of far western cotton as mechanically harvested.¹⁵³ Two years later Fortune described how a grower who controlled 86,000 acres in western Fresno County planned to harvest entirely by machine within three years.¹⁵⁴ By then growers in California harvested one-eighth of their crops mechanically, by 1955 two-thirds, far more than in the older cotton states, using mainly a machine (the spindle picker) too large and expensive to be economic on small farms.¹⁵⁵ Although increases in yields so reduced areas over which they could spread their costs that experts estimated (1958) that mechanical picking could be profitable on as few as fifty acres, so small a harvest left more than twothirds of a machine’s capacity unused.¹⁵⁶ Mechanization slackened when the secretary of agriculture ordered growers to reduce plantings in 1954, and for several years they postponed further investments in equipment and enlisted hand labor to maximize harvested yields,¹⁵⁷ but large capacity and high overhead costs continued to favor large-scale operations; growers planted other irrigated crops while awaiting increases in allotments. A geographer noted (1974) that successful cotton farming on the west side of the valley required at least 3,000 acres of crop and four wells; administering domains comparable in size and complexity to Soviet collective farms, most owners resided in cities, some commuting by airplane.¹⁵⁸ W. B. Camp, who as an agronomist for the Department of Agriculture had introduced cotton in the San Joaquin Valley in the 1920s, at first recommended growing small amounts of it in rotation with other crops (1925); half a century later he was raising mainly cotton on a farm of over 8,000 acres.¹⁵⁹ Average acreage per farm in the state meanwhile increased from 61.1 in 1924 to 94.6 in 1959, 286.9 in 1974, 437.2 in 1982;¹⁶⁰ California and Arizona became second and fourth in production of cotton, while Oklahoma dropped from second place (after Texas) to tenth; and the small farms harvested by hand labor that had been common in the West as in the South when former slave owners divided their land among tenants after the Civil War disappeared

78

Farming on New Scales

everywhere. In 1925, when acreage in cotton in Oklahoma reached a new peak, more than five and a quarter million acres, Le Flore County in the southeastern corner of the state, where southern ways of tenant farming and southern poverty prevailed, led in numbers of cotton farms (4,328, averaging 19.3 acres in cotton); the numbers dropped sharply from the 1930s (to 1,097 in 1944, 686 in 1949, 62 in 1959, 6 in 1964), and the last cotton farm (121 acres in 1969, 5 acres in 1974) was gone at the census of 1978.¹⁶¹ Cotton farming became, in the language of a historian of the family farm, both a prime example of change and a catalyst for wider changes in the San Joaquin Valley, in finance, scale, mechanization, the irrigation of former grazing land, and demand for labor, first demanding more and then less unskilled labor and shifting from laborers who lived in camps at farms to smaller numbers who commuted from cities.¹⁶² In Hawaii the circumstances of agriculture deviated at least as much from the rest of the West as other circumstances did, but there also it no longer promised a living and a better life, if it had ever promised either under American control. Farms and farmers in the islands changed more than their counterparts in the continental states rather than in different directions. The rhetoric of classic agrarian reform, as in proposals to divide up concentrations of ownership that had exceeded concentrations on the mainland, persisted after it had subsided elsewhere but never raised prospects of substantial opportunity for bona fide family farmers. The “Big Five,” the great sugar factors, accepted the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921, by which native Hawaiians received leases of public lands, predominantly rough, rocky, and dry and in half-acre house lots, only on condition that the best agricultural land go to planters and ranchers.¹⁶³ A later Land Reform Act (1967) authorized leases on easy terms to suburban householders rather than poor taro growers.¹⁶⁴ (Their counterparts on the mainland were owners of expensive houses at Corona del Mar and Newport Beach, south of Los Angeles, who had chosen to pay ground rent when they might have bought their land outright in the 1960s and realized that they had made the wrong choice when they renewed leases in the 1980s.) Although censuses showed numbers of farms in the islands increasing after the 1960s,¹⁶⁵ agriculture both in its openly recognized branches (that is, apart from crops raised for illegal drugs) and in the aggregate declined precipitously. Pineapple growing had peaked in 1955–57, acreage declining by more than a third in the next eighteen years,¹⁶⁶ by nearly a half in the next twenty-five, with over two-thirds of the total not harvested.¹⁶⁷ By the early 1980s pineapples may have become third crop of the islands in value, after marijuana and sugar.¹⁶⁸ In 1980, agricultural employment had declined by over three-fourths since 1900, more than in any other far western state.¹⁶⁹ (Employment in the whole of the Far

Farming on New Scales

79

Fig. 3.4. Sugar plantation in Hawaii. Work on Hawaiian sugar plantations was especially labor-intensive and demanding. In the 1930s plantation laborers were usually of Asian extraction. Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association Plantation Archives, LSC 28/4. Photo courtesy of the Hawaiian Collection, University of Hawaii at Manoa Library.

West had declined by slightly less than a third [32.8 percent]; it had increased in the mountain and Pacific states taken together, more than doubling in California.¹⁷⁰) When sugar and pineapple still dominated the economy of the islands, the great planters had distributed land for homesteads in no more than token amounts, virtually all of it on the poorest soil and most in plots no larger than about six acres, not to supplement large-scale production off plantation land but to stabilize supplies of labor on it. As an agent of the Department of Agriculture reported (1915), their purpose was not “the development of independent farming but rather the attachment of the plantation laborer to the soil by giving him a small tract of land on which to raise green vegetables, a few fruit trees, and possibly some poultry, a cow, and a few pigs.” Typically women and children tended the family’s garden patch and laborers from the plantation harvested sugar cane on the rest of the land under contract.¹⁷¹ An anthropologist reported that most of the employees on the pineapple plantations of Molakai (1959, shortly before

80

Farming on New Scales

corporate owners shifted from agriculture to the tourist industry) lived on such plots, in relationships more like those of an urban industrial plant than those of a peasant farming community. “The plantation is, in fact, most aptly described as a farm factory or ‘factory in the field,’ an industrial concern whose product is agricultural.”¹⁷² Such conditions had striking effects on the labor force. While in the continental West Japanese moved into agriculture from other occupations and remained in it disproportionately—although as proprietors rather than exclusively as hired field laborers—in Hawaii, they left it when they could, after other opportunities opened to them. Originally recruited on behalf of the sugar planters and constituting nearly three-fourths of the plantation workforce in 1902, thirty years later they had dropped to less than a fifth as they moved into urban occupations.¹⁷³ At the census of 1980 Japanese were employed in agriculture at a rate over a third less than that of the rest of the Hawaiian labor force.¹⁷⁴ As Honolulu and its suburbs expanded and increasing numbers of visitors and newcomers suggested uses for land more profitable than farming, the great companies that dominated the Hawaiian economy began to move into the resort business.¹⁷⁵ Like the heirs of Mexican ranchers in California and manufacturers who invested in service operations and corporate mergers during the deflation of the 1980s, they were able to shift their resources quickly into other enterprises as changing markets and returns suggested. They were the Hawaiian counterparts of the Irvine Company in Orange County, converting pineapple plantations on Maui and Kauai into hotels and condominiums rather than orange groves into amusement parks and planned suburban communities. Whether James B. Dole, who had developed pineapple canning before the First World War, may have intended to stay in the business had become irrelevant when Castle and Cooke, one of the great conglomerate corporations (Big Five), originally primarily sugar factors, that controlled most land and most business in Hawaii, forced him out and began to take control of his company in the 1930s.¹⁷⁶ Although cotton lagged long behind wheat in expanding from the scale of the traditional family farm, the adoption of the picker in the 1950s and after coincided with a general advance in American agricultural productivity in which westerners and crops characteristically grown in the West led again. Through the first three or four decades of the twentieth century farmers tried to meet demand and increase or at least maintain their incomes chiefly by using more land, as long as they could expand operations on land not previously cropped or irrigated. Complaining that the mechanization of agriculture had lagged over the previous forty years, a South Carolinian who testified before the Industrial Commission in 1901 had looked back to “the golden decade of 1850–1860.”¹⁷⁷ By

Farming on New Scales

81

the measure of changes in numbers of persons supplied by one farmworker, agricultural productivity increased less (3.6 percent) in 1900–10 than in any other decade since the 1830s.¹⁷⁸ It increased only slightly more in 1900–40 than in 1860–1900 (55.1 percent against 53.3 percent) but over the four decades following at accelerating rates, altogether by about ten times as much (in 1940–78, by 507.5 percent).¹⁷⁹ Employment in agriculture, however, fell while productivity rose: since demand was relatively inelastic, the price of matching the efficiency of American manufacturing was that most Americans who had remained in farming left it. By the early 1950s population on far western farms had dropped to about the level of 1900, by 1980 to less than had been in Kansas and Nebraska alone; for a few years it had approached half of the total western population (over a fifth more than on farms in the rest of the United States), but in 1980 was slightly over onefortieth, close to parity.¹⁸⁰ Employment in agriculture ran slightly higher than residence on farms in most western states (all except the five high plains states, Wyoming, and Alaska), in large part because much of it was seasonal.¹⁸¹ Yet statistics of both residence and employment understated the decline of farming as a way of life, since most owners of small farms, quarter sections or less, used them as residences rather than principal sources of income. Even the Hispanos of the Rio Grande Valley and the Mormons of the Salt Lake basin, who clung to rural traditions that went back to the earliest settlements of their ancestors, typically became commuters and at most part-time farmers. Agricultural agents in Bernalillo County in the 1960s described how while working farms in outlying areas expanded, farmers near Albuquerque took jobs in town, subdividing their land and growing no more on it than alfalfa for local dairy farms or their saddle horses. In 1968 farms in the valley averaged nineteen acres, “full-time” farms ninety-three.¹⁸² Control of farmland typically became more concentrated after the Second World War. While forms of public policy continued for a few years to enshrine traditional faith in family farming, and enough small farms survived near cities, especially on the Pacific slope, to supply a few specialized markets and to contribute distinctive flavor to suburban landscapes, many of them produced so little that the Bureau of the Census had to distinguish more realistically between rural farm and rural nonfarm populations. Like the mechanized dryland wheat farmers of the 1920s, working farmers both on the plains and in California and the Southwest expanded operations to take advantage of economies of scale that new technology and economic organization promised.¹⁸³ By 1978 nearly threefourths of irrigated land in Kansas was in farms of a thousand acres or more, in Sherman County more than three-fourths.¹⁸⁴ In Kern County, California, where

82

Farming on New Scales

irrigated farms were still larger, much larger than in counties where substantial crop-farming had begun earlier, the average size had more than doubled since 1940.¹⁸⁵ Commodities commonly produced on large scales tended to be characteristically far western (oranges, lettuce, and cotton, all of which had seemed peculiarly the provinces of small operators, as well as wheat and beef cattle), those on small scales middle western and southern (tobacco, corn, hogs, soybeans).¹⁸⁶ Americans traditionally had regarded ownership of large amounts of land suitable for crop-farming as an aberration, a transitional phase if not an unnatural barrier to the normal advances of farm laborers to tenancy and tenants to freehold tenure. But now it seemed inevitable and irreversible as sons and daughters of farmers looked to cities for opportunities more attractive and more affordable than those at home. Although western population on farms had risen above national levels late in the nineteenth century (to 46.1 percent in the sixteen contiguous states and territories against 39.3 percent over the entire country in 1900), it fell below by 1950 (14.5 percent against 15.2 percent); in 1980 (at 1.7 percent against 2.5 percent) numbers on farms in the Far West were less than they had been in Kansas and Nebraska alone in 1900.¹⁸⁷ After changing slowly in most states through the 1950s, thereafter they declined as rapidly as they had increased early in the century. The most and the least agricultural of the eighteen states and territories by the test of employment in 1900 remained so in 1980, with a few conspicuous exceptions: the Dakotas and Nebraska rose from third, fourth, and sixth places to first, second, and third, but Montana rose from fifteenth place to fourth, while Hawaii fell from second to ninth, Oklahoma from first to seventh.¹⁸⁸ While numbers of farmers and farmworkers and residents of farms declined, moreover, employment on farms declined still more; owners and tenants of farms who worked chiefly in cities far outnumbered farmers who commuted from town. By the 1980s a fourth of farm operators in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, most agricultural of western states, depended chiefly on occupations other than farming, nearly half of farm operators over the rest of the Far West.¹⁸⁹ By 1978 less than half of all farms in Nebraska were family farms in the sense of farms whose proprietors did most of the work as well as earned most of their incomes on them; more than a third served mainly as rural residences or retirement homes.¹⁹⁰ As capital costs rose and prospects of lucrative returns on them drew in absentee investor-owners, operation of even relatively small irrigated farms fell increasingly to hired managers, especially custom managers who offered nonfarming services such as real estate brokering and consultation on taxes.¹⁹¹

Farming on New Scales

83

Yet over the West as a whole and in most western states, agricultural production continued to expand while numbers of agriculturists declined. After tripling between the 1890s and the 1920s, wheat harvests in Kansas tripled again by the 1980s, a century after population on farms had peaked.¹⁹² Increases in productivity and yields, especially increases that farmers achieved by applying chemical fertilizers during and after the Second World War, accounted for much growth in output: thus yields of American wheat, which declined in the nineteenth century as repeated cropping depleted virgin soils, remained close to yields of around 1900 through the 1930s, then rose sharply.¹⁹³ But although harvested cropland in plains states other than North Dakota remained below levels of the 1920s (by the widest margins in Oklahoma) while harvests made new records, it increased in all other states except Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Utah.¹⁹⁴ In 1982 cropland in the three coastal states was nearly a third more than in 1929, when it had made new records; in the coastal and mountain states together it was nearly three times as much as in 1900.¹⁹⁵ Additions to cultivated land produced both old crops and new, and in the mostly unirrigated Dakotas as well as in the mostly irrigated Southwest. With less than a fourth of the population of the country (24.0 percent) and slightly more than a fourth of the farms (26.0 percent) in 1987, the eighteen states had nearly three-eighths (37.1 percent) of all American farm operators and nearly half of those whose principal occupation was farming (48.8 percent), and they produced nearly half the crops (47.1 percent).¹⁹⁶ Eleven of the eighteen states still had more farms than at the beginning of the century.¹⁹⁷ Farmers on the plains followed the leads of middle westerners in diversifying into more reliably profitable alternatives to traditional grain crops, such as oil seeds. By so doing they depended less on highly competitive and erratic world markets, specialized services off the farm, and large amounts of seasonal labor. Soybeans became a major crop from the 1950s in eastern Kansas and Nebraska, sunflower seeds from the 1970s in North Dakota, where acreage soon approached acreage in wheat in several wheat counties.¹⁹⁸ In moving into oil seeds and feed grains they acted somewhat in the spirit of the old rule of following ratios of prices of hogs and cattle to prices of corn, although high costs of center-pivot systems and related requirements of the new irrigated agriculture kept them from responding to the market as quickly and freely as when they took their cues from quotations at St. Paul. Stock-raising changed along with crop-farming after the war, bringing these sometimes competing uses of land into new relationships. Although at the beginning of the century stockmen on the high plains fed, watered, and sheltered their herds at home ranches as they had not before the United States government

84

Farming on New Scales

began seriously to enforce land laws in the 1880s, they still depended on unappropriated grazing land. Such land came under new pressure as dry-farming homesteaders advanced on it before the First World War. Will C. Barnes, inspector of grazing at the Forest Service, reported in 1916 that entries since 1909 had taken nearly eighty-six million acres from open range in eleven states, enough for nearly a third of livestock in 1910. Although the industry lost less than proportionately, since homesteaders rented and sold much of their land to ranchers, production of beef dropped temporarily as drought and severe cold coincided with reductions in land available for grazing.¹⁹⁹ By the 1920s stockmen were adjusting by depending less on pasture and more on fodder and by substituting trucks and tractors for draft animals as well as by buying more homesteaders’ claims.²⁰⁰ Shipments of livestock on the Burlington lines increased by more than half between 1910 and 1920, “indicating,” an agent commented, “that as more land comes under the plow the live stock increases.”²⁰¹ Stockmen reorganized still more in and after the 1940s, when many big operators sold out as prices of cattle and land rebounded from the low levels of the 1930s and crop farmers planted land recently left in pasture.²⁰² Since consumers demanded more beef than ranchers could raise on what remained of the western range, and since they came to prefer the beef fattened on grains and concentrates that packers promoted to range-fed beef, producers depended less on pasturage and hay, more on corn, sorghums, and other silage crops both in and beyond irrigation country. The common wisdom had been that gains in weight in feedlots usually cost more than they brought.²⁰³ Traditionally most farmers had fattened livestock for market only in small lots and over short periods in the course of general farming, responding to fluctuating relationships between prices of corn and stock for slaughter even in Kansas and other states where stock-raising accounted for major shares of farm income.²⁰⁴ Now, after a quarter of a century in which few of them had had capital to invest in stock-raising, many revamped operations in both scale and technology.²⁰⁵ In western South Dakota, where rugged terrain, unfamiliar soils, and recurrent drought restricted crop-farming well after homesteaders took over what was still chiefly open range in 1900, roundups continuing as late as 1906, crop-farming and stock-raising changed together. Pioneer settlers in Perkins County, which was organized during the boom that the Milwaukee Road touched off by building beyond the Missouri River in 1907, had never succeeded in growing much corn for grain, as some of them had done in Iowa and Missouri. After the Second World War their successors used more for silage, increasing what they cut from less than 3 percent of acreage in 1949 to nearly 20 percent in 1954, 70 percent in 1964. In 1963 sons of one of the first homesteaders installed automatic augers to feed their calves

Farming on New Scales

85

from glass-lined silos at the site of the sod house that their parents had lived in less than half a century before.²⁰⁶ Larger changes had already begun between the wars, packers looking eastward for more cattle fattened for slaughter as demand for beef rose and the price of corn fell.²⁰⁷ The largest increases in beef cattle after 1945 were east of the Missouri River, especially in the Southeast, which thus reclaimed some of the share of the livestock industry that it had had before cotton planters took over the southern back country early in the nineteenth century.²⁰⁸ Well over half of all cattle on feed were in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Missouri alone, against less than a fifth in Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado through the 1940s,²⁰⁹ when more than five-sixths of cattle and calves slaughtered were still grass-fed.²¹⁰ Although diversified farmers with small herds continued long after the war as before to raise and fatten cattle for slaughter, in regions of adequate rainfall relying heavily on natural pasture (for “grass fat”) and assorted by-product feeds,²¹¹ the industry did not revert to the simplicity of antebellum cowpens. Rather complexes of feedlot operators and packers dominated the fastest growing parts of it by the 1970s. It became the province above all of agribusinessmen whose enterprises in western Kansas and Nebraska and eastern Colorado resembled those developed decades before in the central valleys of California in size and organization as well as in reliance on irrigation. Large industrial feedlots had appeared first in California when chain stores increased their orders of prime cuts of beef during and after the war.²¹² But in the 1960s and 1970s, feeding distinct from general farming increased most on the plains. By 1971 cattle on feedlots in Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado, most of them at least as large as the capacities of the center-pivot irrigation systems on which they depended, exceeded those in Iowa and its middle western neighbors;²¹³ by 1988 they were three times as many, 38 percent of all in the United States.²¹⁴ Cattle slaughtered in the three plains states increased proportionately, from 15.3 percent of the national total (measured in live weight) in 1950 to 39.4 percent in 1988.²¹⁵ After increasing more slowly than population over the first half of the century, total production of dressed beef also rose substantially, increasing nearly one and a half times between 1950 and 1987 while numbers of cattle slaughtered increased less than once, numbers of cattle on farms by less than a third.²¹⁶ Meatpacking meanwhile assumed new shapes parallel to irrigated farming and cattle feeding and increasingly under the same control. The old oligopoly of the great packers had declined as changes in transportation, refrigeration, and retailing, especially from the 1930s, helped new packing firms to take advantage of lower costs away from the principal urban centers and railroad terminals.²¹⁷

86

Farming on New Scales

Fig. 3.5. Omaha stockyards. Stockyards scattered across the West symbolized the major importance of ranching and livestock raising in the region. The sprawling Omaha stockyards remained a notable institution throughout much of the twentieth century. Photo courtesy the Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln. Photograph Collections RG2341, PH/0/412.

The Big Five (later Big Four) packers had controlled the industry by gaining control of the Chicago stockyards and thereby of movements by the principal western trunk lines before the First World War, but even at Chicago deliveries by truck surpassed deliveries by rail by 1940 (at all markets by 1935, earlier at interior markets); ten years before the Chicago yards closed in 1971, Omaha led in total receipts,²¹⁸ only to lose business precipitously in the 1960s and 1970s as more buyers went directly to stock raisers and the big packers curtailed and discontinued operations there.²¹⁹ Although trucks destroyed what remained of the monopolies at railroad terminals that western cattlemen had denounced from the 1880s as well as some of the railroads’ business, a free market economy was at least as elusive as in the time of the meat trust. Attracted by high returns, reductions in taxes, and tax shelters, investors moved into cattle feeding, the new irrigated agriculture,

Farming on New Scales

87

meatpacking, and associated enterprises from the 1960s.²²⁰ Sorghums and other feed grains became particularly profitable because the government supported prices but did not control acreage as for other staple crops; between 1952 and 1971 production of sorghum for feed increased nationally eight times, in Kansas nearly twelve times, in Nebraska fifty-seven times, from one-thirty-seventh to one-seventh of the total.²²¹ Establishing plants in nonmetropolitan areas closer to supplies and farther from pressures for high wages, the major packers contracted for the output of new feedlots and themselves became major feedlot operators, by the 1980s denying supplies of cattle to their small competitors. Ninety percent of fed cattle produced in the plains states and Iowa went directly from feedlots to packers (1984). The four largest packers slaughtered 30 percent of steers and heifers in 1978, 64 percent in 1987; in 1989 the three largest handled more than 80 percent of the boxed-beef market.²²² One of them operated the largest beef-packing plant in the world near Garden City, drawing on the irrigated corn that had become the biggest crop in a subhumid area recently marginal for wheat and on a heavily immigrant labor supply.²²³ A Japanese firm bought a 77,000-acre ranch near Dillon, Montana, in 1988 and invested massively in processing facilities intended for the export market.²²⁴ Although most large corporate feedlot operators rented rather than owned land, moving rather into transportation, distribution, feed manufacturing, packing, and retailing,²²⁵ concern over the growing authority of absentee investors, their threats to local enterprises, and their practices in farming prompted the Nebraska Farmers Union to sponsor a constitutional amendment to forbid nonfamily corporations and limited partnerships organized as tax shelters to buy farm land, fatten beef cattle, and engage in other agricultural enterprises; it passed by a large majority in 1982.²²⁶ Similar shifts occurred over the same years in hog raising and fattening and pork packing. Hog-raising had been chiefly a small operation, becoming largest in cooperatives that raised “feeder pigs” that members fattened for market: in 1901 more than nine-tenths of American farmers raised hogs, in 1959 still over half. The greatest changes came with “confinement production,” by which operators added antibiotics to silage in large feedlots to protect their stock from disease that otherwise might easily spread in close quarters; advantages in taxes and credit attracted nonfarm investors as to cattle feedlots.²²⁷ By the 1980s the three largest beef packers became also the three largest hog slaughterers and main suppliers of cuts and carcasses for small processors.²²⁸ In 1989 the largest hog farm in the country was under construction on 25,500 acres near Greeley, Colorado, site of the cooperative colony that the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune had established nearly twelve decades before.²²⁹

88

Farming on New Scales

Agriculture continued to play larger and more dynamic roles in western economies than statistics of population and employment on farms may suggest. As the number of farm operators and farmworkers decreased, they depended more on nonfarmers ranging from manufacturers of fuel, fertilizer, and machinery to assorted creditors and investors. In that sense more residents of cities became vicarious agriculturists, more residents of farms much like their urban neighbors, even working alongside them. The Department of Agriculture estimated that in 1978 for every person who worked on an American farm, four to five others worked off farms supplying goods and services used in producing, processing, transporting, and selling farm products.²³⁰ The headcounts of census takers thus at once overstated agricultural dimensions of rural life and understated agricultural dimensions of urban life. As western farmers approached the end of the twentieth century, they both exceeded and fell short of the prospects for a better life that they thought they had at the beginning. They irrigated more land, but someday—in some areas soon—they would have to stop irrigating and even cultivating much of it. They produced more of what they raised except the next generation of farmers: for practical purposes, the investment necessary to acquire and operate a family farm had so increased that the only way to acquire one was to inherit it. The crops that increased most were those that once came chiefly from diversified farms small enough for families of modest means to own and operate them on their own terms and near enough to cities so that their operators had easy access to urban markets, to each other, and to amenities of urban life. Yet like stockmen and wheat farmers before them, dairy farmers, truck gardeners, and orchardists came to specialize and capitalize on scales more typical of industrial enterprise than of traditional family farming, and as much beyond the reach of field laborers as those of automobile manufacturing were beyond the reach of assembly-line workers. In turn farmers on both irrigated and unirrigated land found that to take advantage of the economies of scale that new technology permitted and required, to sell enough cotton, wheat, and beef to justify investing heavily in land, machinery, and chemicals, they had to accept the risks along with the profits of markets that depended much on distant changes in weather, politics, business cycles, and exchange rates. Committing themselves to aquifers in Kansas and Nebraska that were as sure to run out within a few decades as veins of gold and silver in California and Nevada had been, they found no more security than the miners that other new farmers had replaced.

4

New Forms of Economic Growth

Americans often congratulated themselves on how much better prepared they were to develop Spanish and Mexican territory than the Spaniards and Mexicans had been. The record of growth seemed to justify them: in 1846, more than three centuries after Europeans first explored what became the American Far West, perhaps 45,000 of them and their descendants lived in it, over half in New Mexico and nearly half the rest in the Oregon Country. By 1900, fifty-four years later, the population exceeded eight million, including inhabitants of territories that Congress was only beginning to organize; by 1990, sixty-one million. Some of the development that increasing numbers described was development foreseen; most was not. Nearly everyone guessed wrong on what and where the best opportunities would be. Expecting to find gold where they expected it in the 1540s, Spaniards found none; expecting none in the 1840s, Americans found enough to bring miners from around the world. Yet both also found what they came prepared for: Spaniards pastures for cattlemen from Aragón, Americans investments for traders and bankers from New York and Boston. They brought successively to the same region elements of economic and social systems that were centuries apart; the economies they developed had little in common other than that they were heavily extractive, based on exporting unprocessed raw materials. The Spaniards’ economy and that of their Mexican heirs continued extractive to the end, the Anglo-Americans’ roughly through their first century. Shortly before the nineteenth century ended, the prophets were confounded again. As plans to irrigate western deserts raised hopes that families would settle on them as on public lands opened to homesteading after the Civil War, prospectors in Alaska, the Yukon Territory of Canada, and southwestern Nevada reenacted the rushes to the placers of California, Colorado, and their neighbors:

89

90

New Forms of Economic Growth

G

G

G

G G

G

S C

G G G

G

G G S C

G M G

M

G S G G

G C

S S C G

G SS

G

S G

M

G S

G G

G

C

CG C

G G G G

G

C C SL C

C

S

Oil Gas G C S L M

Gold Copper Silver lead Mercury

Fig. 4.1. Petroleum and mineral deposits in the West. The abundant petroleum and mineral deposits in the West were notable resources for the development of the industrial might of the United States, as well as the growing strength of the West. Most of these deposits were developed in the twentieth century. Map by Bill Nelson.

to Nome in 1899, Fairbanks and the Tanana Valley in 1904; to Tonopah in 1900, Goldfield in 1903. Alaska nearly doubled in population between 1890 and 1900, Nevada between 1900 and 1910; together they grew about as much as California had grown between the American conquest in 1846 and the first American census in 1850. The strike on Bonanza Creek, near the Klondike River north of Skagway, in August 1896 revised the prospects both of Alaska and the Yukon

New Forms of Economic Growth

91

Territory alongside it and of the United States as a whole, which was at the bottom of an economic depression and at the height of concern over declining gold reserves. The new discoveries encouraged investment that suggested solid, continuing development as well as the evanescence of treasure trove. Alaskans who struggled on foot from salt water up the Chilkoot Pass in 1897 rode a year later to White Pass City by wagon road, two years later to Whitehorse by the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Whereas forty-niners had waited twenty years to cross the Sierra Nevada by rail, prospectors at the new mines of Tonopah and Goldfield had Pullman service in four and two and a half years, respectively, after strikes in 1900 and 1903.¹ “There seems no longer any border-land of civilization,” a reporter for Harper’s Weekly wrote, describing tourists looking in vain for traditional local color in “kid-gloved gold-fields, a mining region de luxe, where millionaires abound and newspapers are printed with gold ink.”² As the pioneer prospectors on the American River had justified the promoters of San Francisco, half a century later those on the Yukon transformed Seattle, and the new Nevadans brought truck farming and electric power to the Owens Valley,³ across the California boundary, as well as a flurry of railroad and highway building. Yet gold mining never regained the place in western and national economies that it had had a few decades before. Gold mined in Alaska reached 1,033,537 ounces ($21,365,100) in 1906, in Nevada 875,437 ounces ($18,873,700) in 1910, against 3,114,735 ounces ($64,374,131) in California in 1853, when the population of the country was less than a third of population half a century later, the population of the future eighteen far western states less than a seventeenth. Total American production increased by no more than about half after the new discoveries, whereas between 1847 and 1853 it had increased over seventy-two times. Further, production of gold both in Alaska and the Yukon Territory and in Nevada soon fell off sharply, and their booms with it. From a population of several hundred as late as 1904, Goldfield became the largest city in Nevada by 1906–7, larger than Reno by a half. But within three years it declined by two-thirds, and the state did not regain the level of 1910 until the 1920s, when miners in copper were many more than in gold and silver and entertaining tourists accounted for more of the economy than mining of all kinds. In Alaska, both population and production lagged below the peaks of the early 1900s until the late 1930s.⁴ In Nevada, production set a record in 1910 that stood until 1983; then by 1987, after new strikes at Ely and northwest of Elko in 1981 and after new technology in extraction, it rose to over three times as large, by 1988 over four times, over half of production nationally.⁵ Opportunity for individual miners declined much more than production.

92

New Forms of Economic Growth

Mining gold from placer deposits and from veins in quartz gave way to recovery from complex ores of base metals, especially copper, as it had done elsewhere from the 1870s, and where it survived as a separate operation it depended on low-grade deposits that required mechanical and chemical processing beyond the means of most small operators. Alaska at first had seemed the great field for individual enterprise, miners washing their gold in Long Toms on the beach at Nome as on the banks of mountain streams in California in 1849 and at some placers dispensing with timbering in small shafts.⁶ But such primitive ways soon gave way to dredging by enormous machines, some of them electrically powered, that ate through alluvial deposits over dry land, floating on ponds that they took with them. Proving themselves at Oroville, north of Sacramento, in 1896, soon they profitably destroyed orange groves to recover metal at rates of seventeen cents and less the cubic yard. By 1909 dredging yielded nearly half the gold in California.⁷ The new cyanide process proved far more efficient than mechanical processes at extracting gold from low-assaying ore; in 1901 the operators of the Homestake Mine, at Lead, South Dakota, greatest gold mine of the hemisphere, began using it to recover concentrates from tailings left from earlier operations. The toast of Senator George Hearst—“Here’s to low-grade ore and plenty of it”—was motto of the Black Hills, a mining engineer observed, describing how mining had become “a common manufacturing business. Fortunes are not acquired in a day. Bonanza ores are the exception.”⁸ Ultimately heap leaching at open-pit mines accounted for most gold, extracting it in particles visible only by electron microscope. By 1988 Newmont Gold, which pioneered in new processes near Ely, surpassed the Homestake as largest producer. But while employment as well as output in mining rose above early twentieth-century levels in Nevada, it remained a far smaller fraction of total employment, under 5 percent of that in private service industries.⁹ As Hearst and others had waited for competitors to take risks at unproved strikes in the 1850s and 1860s, the largest capitalists first left Tonopah, Goldfield, and their neighbors chiefly to speculators, who in three years, 1904–6, may have lost nearly ten times the value of production in the state.¹⁰ But they moved massively into operations where profits were large and sure. For all the popular excitement over gold, output of base metals increased far more in the early 1900s and seemed less likely to fall off as deposits ran out; and the big operators gained both by handling large volumes and by dominating techniques and facilities that required large investments. Copper was a particularly attractive opportunity. Although some old uses had declined, as in sheathing wooden ships, new uses multiplied, especially in electrical applications; and new processes lowered

New Forms of Economic Growth

93

costs of production. The year 1896 was the last when the value of American gold exceeded the value of American copper until industrial demand fell off during the Depression of the 1930s; over the next twenty years production of copper increased more than four times, comprising over half of worldwide production, while production of gold increased by about three-fourths.¹¹ Although some deposits of gold, lead, and zinc invited development at low cost in “poor men’s mines,” the nature and location of the principal bodies of western copper ores favored development on larger scales, with assured access to timber, fuel, power, transportation, and smelters. The costs of mining with pick and shovel and of carrying water, fuel, and ore by burro limited early operators to the richest ores, which often occurred in quantities too small to justify building railroads to take them out. Soon after Phelps, Dodge and Company bought a copper claim at Bisbee, Arizona, in 1881 it saw that cheap transportation would enormously increase the value of its properties and, failing to persuade transcontinental lines to build to them, established its own railroad subsidiaries; the company laid and acquired more than a thousand miles of track.¹² The ores of Montana occurred in systems of veins so complex and unpredictable that developing them on small scales was not practical, especially inasmuch as new methods of extracting, smelting, and refining required enormous outlays of capital. The Anaconda mine at Butte was a silver mine until 1882, when Hearst and associates began exploiting it for copper; by the end of the century it was the greatest producer of copper in the world. To control it and other properties, Henry Huttleston Rogers and associates organized the Amalgamated Copper Company (1898–99). Soon it commanded its own supplies of coal, timber (which it cut at its own sawmill), and phosphate rock, shipping ore over its own railroad to its own smelter at Anaconda rather than to Wales, and producing its own power through the Montana Power Company (1912). In turn, copper mining became gold mining in the larger operations. Electrolytic refining yielded gold among other valuable byproducts at Butte, where the placers had seemed to be exhausted before the silver miners came in 1875–76.¹³ Phelps Dodge announced in 1906 that it would confine itself to copper, but soon it produced gold and silver worth more than its output of copper a few years earlier.¹⁴ In an industry that required enormous investments over many years, wellfinanced operators could profit at the expense of both consumers and other investors. Rogers and his associates had recognized both that copper was undervalued and that they could gain by selling shares in a new combination as well as copper itself. Subscriptions were so heavy that they retained over forty-eight million shares of stock in Amalgamated at a cost of less than thirteen million. Although they could not control copper prices indefinitely, they continued to

94

New Forms of Economic Growth

profit by trading on securities exchanges and maintained their advantages over small producers.¹⁵ Silver-lead mining was big business almost from the beginning. The boom that began at Leadville, Colorado, in 1877 depended on new expertise in smelting and on investments in the smelters that the complex ores required. In 1899, Rogers organized the American Smelting and Refining Company to encompass the principal silver-lead smelters of Colorado; it paid a dividend of over 30 percent in its first year. Its competitor was M. Guggenheim’s Sons of Philadelphia, who had bought a mine at Leadville and then built a smelter at Pueblo (1888) to serve it. When American Smelting offered to buy them out, the Guggenheims took control of it instead (1901). Employing John Hays Hammond, who had directed Cecil Rhodes’s mining interests in Africa, as consulting engineer and general manager, the Guggenheims moved into copper as well, first in Mexico and at a smelter in New Jersey. By 1905, as the Guggenheim Exploring Company, they controlled the principal mines of the Coeur d’Alene district of northern Idaho—like Leadville, originally gold country—and the vicinity of Spokane, then the Utah Copper Company, which the mining engineer Daniel C. Jackling and others had organized (1903) to mine copper south of Great Salt Lake in Bingham Canyon. Jackling and his associates had the expertise but not the capital to exploit the refractory porphyry ores of Bingham, which like the gold and lead-silver sulfides of the same area demanded mechanical and chemical processes incomparably more complex and expensive than the placer gold deposits that prospectors had found there during the Civil War. Introducing openpit methods that made 2-percent ore as profitable as the 30-percent ore of early mines, when the company began full-scale operations in 1907, it had invested eight million in mining equipment, concentrating mill, and smelter.¹⁶ As consumption caught up with the capacity of the industry, Utah and other efficient producers continued to work still lower concentrations profitably. In its first three years the company recovered less copper from ore than it did later in one year from dumps of tailings. By 1935, when it had moved more earth than the builders of the Panama Canal, converting a mountain into a hole in the ground, the Bingham mine had become second largest producer of copper in the world, second largest of gold in the hemisphere, and the company was working ore that averaged 1 percent copper,¹⁷ by 1977 slightly over 0.6 percent.¹⁸ The Guggenheims and other big operators shortly went into Nevada and Alaska, whose deposits required enormous outlays for equipment and transportation. Contracting to operate reduction works for porphyry ores from open-pit mines at Ely, between 1905 and 1910 they took control of the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company (1904); they financed the Nevada Northern Railroad

New Forms of Economic Growth

95

Fig. 4.2. Bingham Canyon, Utah. This huge mine located near Salt Lake City became the country’s largest open pit mine. Dubbed “the richest hole on earth,” the Bingham Canyon mine demonstrated how massive open-pit methods might be used to mine low-grade copper ore. Photo courtesy Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. #2720.

to carry its ore to main line tracks and ultimately to the Guggenheim smelter in New Jersey.¹⁹ A Guggenheim company, Yukon Consolidated Goldfields (1905), brought dredges, flumes, hydraulic apparatus, and electric power to the deep placers of the Yukon; another Guggenheim organization, the Alaska Syndicate (1906), built the Copper River and Northwestern Railway (1908–11) to tap highquality copper ore that prospectors on their way to the Klondike had discovered near Kennecott Glacier, 120 miles inland in the Chugach Mountains south of Fairbanks. The syndicate and its successor, the Kennecott Copper Corporation (1915), prospered and grew long after the gold miners had gone, reaching into fisheries, steamships, and general commerce as well as mining, the Kennecott Corporation becoming the holding company for all the Guggenheim copper interests after exhausting the mines at Kennecott Glacier. Mining corporations had dominated large areas of the West before antimonopolists charged that the Guggenheims and their allies, the Morgans, were taking over Alaska. Butte and Anaconda and, in Arizona and Utah, Bisbee, Globe, and

96

New Forms of Economic Growth

Bingham were company towns; for many years Montana was close to a company state. But even after mineral industries expanded well beyond gold and silver, except over relatively short intervals and in limited areas they accounted for smaller parts of western economies than for decades after the 1850s and 1860s. Between 1900 and 1910, a time of enormous growth in plant and production both in copper and other metals and in petroleum, their share of total employment over the Far West began a decline (from 4.7 percent to 3.7 percent) that became precipitate as hard-rock mining and attendant smelting and refining operations contracted after the booms of the two world wars.²⁰ In Colorado, which led in employment in mining at the beginning of the century, the major smelters successively shut down at Salida (1920), Durango (1930), and Leadville (1961). In Montana, the treasure state, employment in mining fell by nearly two-thirds while population nearly tripled in three-quarters of a century. Calling itself “the greatest mining camp on earth” when the copper kings began digging out the ores under it in the 1880s, Butte claimed 100,000 inhabitants in the early 1900s, less only than Denver between Omaha and the coast; it dropped to fewer than half that by 1980.²¹ The census that year counted miners as 2.8 percent of the employed labor force in the state, down from 15.1 percent in 1900, with only slightly more in Alaska at 2.9 percent (23.0 percent in 1910), and still less in Arizona at 2.2 percent (17.7 percent in 1910) and Nevada at 1.4 percent (21.9 percent in 1910).²² (Curiously, the complex of Guggenheim companies became most widely known during controversies over resources other than copper that were less important to it: although critics of President William Howard Taft and Secretary Richard A. Ballinger accused them of conspiring to give the Guggenheims enough Alaskan coal for the whole nation, production in the territory never became large.²³) The most spectacular retreat of mining as a factor in western economies occurred within several years in the 1980s when copper mines and mills with high costs in Montana, Arizona, and Utah closed as production declined by nearly a third, prices by a half.²⁴ When Anaconda—by then a subsidiary of Atlantic-Richfield Petroleum—discharged its last employees at Butte (1983), leaving the Berkeley Pit to fill with water, there seemed no better prospect for the local economy than attracting tourists to what the National Park Service called a historic landmark; within two years the company almost dropped out of the domestic copper business.²⁵ The Continental Pit reopened in 1986 but only when Dennis Washington, a contractor who had proposed to buy Anaconda properties to salvage discarded equipment, began mining molybdenum, silver, and copper with a small nonunion workforce.²⁶ During the slump, copper producers reorganized, discontinuing inefficient operations, introducing new technology, and further reducing payrolls. By 1989,

New Forms of Economic Growth

97

when Washington had become largest producer in Montana, he was doing so well with 0.31-percent ore that he sold just under a half interest to American Smelting and Refining for several times his investment.²⁷ In Arizona, Phelps Dodge, largest American producer, sold surplus inventory while closing old plants and before opening new ones, substituted a new system of conveyors for hauling by rail, and built new electro-chemical extractive plants, reducing costs of production by nearly a third. It also seized the opportunity of the closure to break unions that had continued to ask for increases in wages while foreign producers invaded American markets, American producers incurred losses, and employment declined (in primary copper mining nationally by 73 percent in twelve years, 1974–86).²⁸ When demand revived in the later 1980s, the company made new records in production and earnings.²⁹ Copper led all other major industries in a survey of increases in output per employee, annual increases averaging 19.1 percent in 1981–86; in twelve years, hours of labor per ton of primary copper processed fell by three-fifths. Employment in metal mining as a whole lagged correspondingly even while production increased as prices rose, in Arizona, which it had dominated a century before, at less than a fourth that in finance in 1988, just over a fifth that in real estate.³⁰ In the West basic manufacturing complexes had never grown with mining as in the older states and in central and western Europe; western copper could bear the cost of railroad freight to established industrial centers more easily than the iron, limestone, and coal on which the classic steel industry and industries associated with it had grown. The big fabricators of western copper, zinc, and silver were in the Middle West and East; although cheap electric power attracted foreign aluminum ore to refineries along the Columbia River from the 1930s, most of the metal reduced from it left the West in ingots.³¹ Profits commonly went heavily to the East and beyond, state and local governments usually recapturing little in taxes while conceding subsidies and other favors, including the power of eminent domain and the use of state militia to keep laborers in line.³² Washington cut his costs at Butte in the 1980s by shipping his copper concentrates to Korea and Japan for smelting, as well as by getting loans from the state and concessions on taxes from local government. However policies affecting title, taxation, and development might have spread out the yield more widely, without substantial investment some types of deposits were virtually valueless: low-assaying porphyry copper ores, for instance, like those at Bingham Canyon, which as John Hays Hammond later said could not have yielded a single ingot without the expenditure of millions.³³ The biases of western governments toward concentrated capital reflected both its power and the common desire to bring it in to get on with development.

98

New Forms of Economic Growth

Probably the new mines served much less than the gold mines of pioneer California and Colorado to open up adjacent areas by attracting prospectors who saw other opportunities on their way and shortly became merchants, farmers, and industrial entrepreneurs. The men they attracted were much more often miners by profession than forty-niners and fifty-niners had been, whether as laborers or as metallurgists and engineers, and there were few opportunities other than mining for them or anyone else. The rushes to Alaska replicated earlier experience more closely than developments in the hard-rock mining country of the Rockies and the Southwest, Seattle feeding on the Alaskan trade like a new San Francisco. Yet Seattle was already ambitious and growing fast before the Alaskans came, and it continued to grow fast after they left, nearly tripling in population in 1900–10 after nearly doubling in 1890–1900. Like the forty-niners, those who settled in Seattle may have spent more than they dug or claimed at the mines. Petroleum and natural gas, rather than precious metals, became the great western mineral bonanza of the century, although to many as elusive as a bonanza. Like gold, often they occurred in areas that Spaniards and then AngloAmericans had been slow to find interesting. But some strikes were accessible from settlements already alert to speculative opportunities other than farming and dealing in farm land: in Kansas (1888) and Oklahoma (1891) near lead deposits that Indians and French trappers had worked early in the nineteenth century, in southern California (on commercial scale, 1892, and still more 1920 and 1921) in Los Angeles and vicinity where real estate salesmen had evangelized their prospects in the 1880s as theatrically as promoters of speculative oil stocks in the 1920s.³⁴ Production rose spectacularly as markets developed for oil from those states and their neighbors (Colorado 1887, Texas 1889, Wyoming 1890), nationally exceeding gold in value first in 1895, by a third in 1907, by twentysix times in 1920, sixty-seven times in 1950, when petroleum and natural gas accounted for more than half the value of American mineral production. The West produced 6 percent of American crude petroleum in 1899, 58 percent in 1909, 81 percent in 1919.³⁵ Like gold and copper bound in refractory ores, western oil offered little to prospectors and small operators. In this respect the oil business was unlike lead mining, which in the tristate area was the principal extractive operation that approximated the scale and simplicity of pioneer enterprise: mines too small and short-lived and too widely scattered to use steam power efficiently depended instead on windlasses and hoists operated by hand and by horsepower. After railroad connections enlarged their markets and electric power permitted using new methods of drilling at them, the larger lead mines came under more professional management, but they remained small by western standards, seldom

New Forms of Economic Growth

99

attracting large investors or more laborers than could sustain in bad times within their districts.³⁶ There were no parallels in the oil fields apart from some tapped in California in and soon after the 1850s, when flows of “bituminous effusions” or “asphaltum” were disappointingly small, and at first no one found better use for them than waterproofing roofs, floors, and pavements before “earth gas” made from petroleum briefly competed with coal gas as an illuminant in San Francisco in 1872–73.³⁷ When profitable uses for western oil developed from the 1880s, it attracted such major capitalists as John D. Rockefeller, who moved into oil in Kansas (1895) and California (1900) as Phelps, Dodge, Hearst, and their successors had moved into western copper and other hard-rock minerals. Operators, investors, and consumers attacked Rockefeller as monopolist and symbol of monopoly as if but for him and men like him they might have had more of the business and the profits from it. Popular antipathy prompted state and national governments to demand and sometimes to provide compensatory advantages for “independents,” which were small only relative to Standard Oil and no more attentive to the public interest: geological services, pipelines, even refineries (in Kansas) and systems of distribution (in North Dakota). C. C. Julian promoted the Julian Petroleum Corporation (1923–27) at Los Angeles by launching flamboyant attacks on monopolists and their allies in publishing and finance as well as the oil business, attacking bankers as “crooks, con men, pawnbrokers.”³⁸ That a few large corporations controlled most oil and gas followed on more than combination and corruption in high places. Often these corporations required larger investments in far western than in Appalachian and middle western fields, which were closer to principal markets: in cracking heavy western crudes; in drilling through complex strata over them, especially after pioneering companies exploited the shallower fields; in connecting them to pipelines because they could not easily bear the cost of moving by railroad. Although “wildcatters”—independents who explored territory that others with more experience had neglected—occasionally opened major fields, often they had to defer to major operators who commanded the necessary equipment, geological expertise, and facilities for marketing. Gushers could be burdens to owners who had to control the flow and appease farmers whose fields they flooded. The small company that tapped the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Field near Bartlesville in 1897 had to cap its well for lack of a market; the area had no railroad until 1899, no pipeline until 1900. Drilling more than their share of “dry holes,” small independents may have subsidized the rest of the industry by exploring unlikely sites. Opportunities for them declined further as demand shifted to gasoline and

100

New Forms of Economic Growth

other products that required more processing than kerosene. Of about sixteen thousand crude oil producers in the United States in 1920, thirty-two produced nearly three-fifths (58 percent) of total yield.³⁹ And although occasionally states adopted measures directed against monopolies, in the course of generally encouraging economic development they favored large corporate operators by leasing and selling state land and mineral rights and taxing corporate equities and incomes on generous terms, as they had favored gold and copper miners, railroads, and agribusinessmen before them, extending terms originally justified as assistance to individual prospectors and family farmers. Although oil and gas were not the symbols of equal opportunity that gold and silver had been, let alone the substance, their uses soon affected how nearly all westerners lived, far more than uses of other minerals, including those few fabricated and otherwise substantially processed in the West as well as simply extracted, reduced to portable form, and exported. Almost from the first European settlements, westerners used and wanted to use more energy than they could command from their own muscles and those of draft animals. Although they found enough wood to heat most houses and public buildings in western Oregon and Washington into the 1930s, enough coal to fire most locomotives in Wyoming and Colorado into the 1950s, increasingly they chose to live and work where supplies of these and other fuels were so short that they had to import most of what they used over considerable distances. Where climate permitted them to use less fuel than elsewhere to warm their houses, distance required them to use more to market their products. Like water, energy soon became a kind of common currency for them, interchangeable with transportation and other goods and services that they valued. Since the steamships that first operated between the two coasts carried much of the coal that they used on the way, the space it left for cargo was small, the cost of carrying it high. Western railroads relied on wood for fuel even after they found coal in the 1880s,⁴⁰ but along most of their routes there was less timber than they needed for ties and trestles, and they had to share it with miners who used vast quantities to shore up shafts and tunnels, smelt ores, and build flumes. Homesteaders on the high plains who cooked and warmed themselves by burning buffalo dung and then cornstalks and corncobs lived in dugouts and sod houses to save fuel as well as building materials. Farming on commercial scales was impracticable for many years over large areas with tantalizingly large resources of surface and ground water but little timber and rainfall. An eighty-horsepower pump at an experimental farm in the Salt River Valley near Mesa, Arizona, in 1900, kept two firemen in attendance to cut wood as well as two engineers.⁴¹ Windmills filled tanks to water live-

New Forms of Economic Growth

101

stock and serve boilers of steam locomotives and tractors, but seldom to irrigate more than kitchen gardens. Even along the Pacific Coast, where water and wood were more abundant than over most of the interior, and where coal came by water, the cost of fuel was a concern of long standing, reinforcing the disposition of early San Franciscans to live in hotels. Southern Californians had more sunshine but still less wood. In Los Angeles, a trade journal reported in 1895, manufacturers burned manure from streets and sweepings from offices.⁴² Speculators planted groves of Australian gum (eucalyptus) trees from the Sacramento Valley to San Diego in the early 1900s; as late as 1909 the wood allegedly was the chief fuel in the southern counties.⁴³ Coming into general use together, fossil fuels and waterpower ultimately transformed the West. As transportation they reduced barriers of distance, which had postponed European occupation of most of the Pacific slope of North America for three centuries; as irrigation and air-conditioning they converted deserts that travelers had regarded as penalty for passage into productive farms and resorts more esteemed than those on the coast. Both were far more flexible than earlier forms of energy, soon far more easily transferred from points of origin to areas of demand; and briefly both seemed almost inexhaustibly abundant. Early uses of petroleum were limited, chiefly in place of wood and coal to fire steam boilers. Railroads began converting locomotives to oil in 1895.⁴⁴ Within the first four decades of the twentieth century petroleum products went chiefly into transportation and into essentially extractive processes at mines, smelters, and sawmills, where they yielded raw materials that went on to other regions and continents for fabrication. As late as 1917, 43.8 percent of the fuel oil used in California went to railroads, and more to steamships (12.4 percent) than to industrial plants of any kind; in Arizona 79.2 percent went to mines and smelters,⁴⁵ replacing wood and coal. High prices of coal brought from as far as Britain and Australia had prompted manufacturers of piped gas to begin making it from oil in the 1880s,⁴⁶ but the market was small, confined to cities and chiefly for lighting and cooking. Although kerosene had replaced the more expensive camphene (turpentine and alcohol) and whale oil on the West Coast as elsewhere, by the time refiners learned early in the century to make a grade from western crudes that did not stink, smoke, and clog lampwicks, they were losing the domestic market for illuminants to electricity.⁴⁷ By 1902 Standard of California sold more fuel oil than kerosene in the West;⁴⁸ by 1909, with less than 5 percent of the country’s population, the Pacific Coast states consumed 41 percent of the fuel oil they produced (against 2 percent in 1899).⁴⁹ As late as 1920, 43 percent of

102

New Forms of Economic Growth

consumption of fuel oil by public utilities in the United States was in California alone.⁵⁰ When western production peaked and declined (in major producing areas other than the Rockies in the 1920s and 1930s), westerners covered their needs with imports. Processing and distributing oil and natural gas fed industrial growth where there had been little before, as in southeastern Kansas.⁵¹ Yet industrial uses developed at widely varying rates even after product pipelines (pipelines carrying gasoline and other refined products, rather than crude oil, straight from the well) extended far enough, from the 1930s, to permit operators in outlying areas to compete in major markets without having to absorb costs of shipping by railroad tank car. “We are wasting our heritage,” a chemist had written in 1901, advising Californians to reserve oil as raw material for chemical processes.⁵² Beginning with plants at Richmond and Los Angeles that made benzol and toluol for explosives (trinitrotoluene or TNT) during the First World War,⁵³ for decades petrochemical industries were concentrated in major urban areas of California and Texas. Even elementary refining lagged behind production, most operators emphasizing simple cracking processes that yielded chiefly gasoline and fuel oil. Until after the Second World War, refined products accounted for less than a twelfth of movements by pipeline;⁵⁴ most refineries were near ultimate markets rather than at producing fields. In 1939 California had less than an eighth (11.9 percent) of American employment in refining, although it produced about a third (33.1 percent) of American oil.⁵⁵ For lack of markets, producers burned most of their natural gas in flares to get rid of it in California until the late 1920s, much later in the mountain states.⁵⁶ While where the West warmed, moved, and lighted itself on large scales it first relied primarily on fossil fuels, at the end of the nineteenth century it turned increasingly to hydroelectric power. Rivers that descended from the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades were natural generators, gradually melting snows at high elevations maintaining flows with little danger of drought or flood. Moreover, by the 1880s and 1890s, when California farmers who protested that debris from hydraulic mining choked streams and covered agricultural land persuaded judges and legislators to restrict it, mine operators and the water companies that served them had built more than eight thousand miles of wooden flumes along mountain canyons that suddenly carried surpluses with little use other than irrigating crops. Advances in technology and invention opened other markets for water from about the same time. Mills driven directly by water wheels, like those that Dr. John McLoughlin built on the Willamette River in 1842 and Captain John Sutter on the American River in 1847–48, had never been so many or indus-

New Forms of Economic Growth

103

trially so significant on the West Coast as in the Northeast. But means of conveying water from mountain streams developed for hydraulic mining permitted combining labor and raw materials more efficiently for other purposes as well, especially through the medium of electric power. New Englanders who had run ditches along the American River in the early 1850s planned a dam and canals that originally they intended both to irrigate orchards and vineyards and to turn waterwheels for mills at the village of Folsom in hope of attracting industrial customers who would make it a western Lowell. When the dam was ready in 1893, the owners instead ran water from it through a dynamo to generate electricity that they transmitted twenty-two miles downstream to Sacramento, where they had laid tracks for trolley cars. The line from Folsom to Sacramento allegedly was the longest high voltage transmission line in the world, but only briefly because other entrepreneurs soon exceeded it, especially on the coast.⁵⁷ Like demand for oil, demand for electricity developed more widely and more rapidly in the West than in older states. In addition to distinctively regional industrial uses ranging from mining and sawing timber to sophisticated computerized applications, it served the dispositions of westerners both to gather in cities and to live and work in suburbs where they expected urban services. Electric lamps in public places were early symbols of enterprise and affluence—at San Francisco throughout the Palace Hotel, the most celebrated hostelry in the West (1878), at San Jose on a 237-foot tower made of gas pipe, briefly the second highest structure in the United States—whose promoters expected them to light city streets (1881), at both cities before central stations produced current for them.⁵⁸ When George Chaffey diverted water from an underground stream to irrigate orchards at the citrus colony that he founded at Etiwanda, California, near San Bernardino, in 1882, he added a dynamo to power an arc light on his ranch house, the first in southern California. Subsequently developers of other “citrus colonies” in California and Arizona almost routinely planned electrical service as by-product of irrigation, symbolizing a new way of life that promised the best of urban and rural society.⁵⁹ As interest in such uses increased, operators of some pioneer utility companies began to meet demand by improvising ways of drawing on systems of power already developed: at Portland installing dynamos first at a sawmill on the Willamette River (1880), then at a boiler at an elevator factory (1884); at Astoria (1885) a dynamo on a shaft from a steam sawmill fired by waste slabwood.⁶⁰ Hydroelectric generation enabled them at once to expand service and to reduce rates. At the beginning of the century the three Pacific states had a fourth of the central-station hydroelectric capacity in the country; California was second only to New York, with more than three-fifths as much, and soon had more. “Modern

104

New Forms of Economic Growth

energy transmission has been born and raised, so to speak, on the Pacific Coast,” Electrical World observed (1912). The coastal states were “the great laboratory of the world in working out the practical details of modern energy transmission.”⁶¹ Even before the national reclamation programs that Congress authorized in the Newlands Act (1902) took effect, electric power from all sources accounted for two to three times as large a fraction of motor service in California, Utah, and Colorado as in the major industrial states of the Northeast, and most transmission systems outside urban areas were in mountain and Pacific states.⁶² Maintaining the lowest rates in the country, western utilities, particularly those publicly and cooperatively operated in the Pacific Northwest, soon expanded sales. By 1930, when Seattle City Light charged less than half the average national rates, householders used nearly twice as much power in Seattle as elsewhere.⁶³ The electric traction systems there and in Spokane, opened in 1889, were first west of the Mississippi; the system in Los Angeles soon was most extensive.⁶⁴ The high cost of illuminating gas made electricity an especially attractive alternative in cities old enough to resent the utility companies that sold it, often adjuncts of railroads and beneficiaries of political machines that railroads controlled. Hydroelectric power promised to break their monopolies after engineers learned to transmit it over progressively lengthening distances and still more after the United States government began both to sell power at low rates to public agencies and to license them to use sites for dams and reservoirs. The Bureau of Reclamation installed generators at most of its river basin projects, whether to operate pumps or simply to pay for dams and reservoirs; at some it probably encouraged settlement more by lighting cities than by watering crops. Sales increased as construction of dams and improvements in generation and distribution permitted reducing rates, which fell by about 40 percent in current dollars between 1914 and 1957 while the general consumer price index nearly tripled, raising hopes that cheap power would galvanize western economies.⁶⁵ In 1938, at the height of enthusiasm for river basin development, the Portland Oregonian observed that immigrants once followed lumber westward, then coal, but now electricity.⁶⁶ The prophets of hydroelectric generation overstated their case. Between 1920 and 1970 developed power in the three coastal Pacific states increased over twenty-six times, over seven times as much as their populations. But even in the Pacific Northwest, it did not approach petroleum as a source of energy for all purposes until major government dams authorized in the 1930s were ready in the 1940s. It was slow to support industrial development at predicted levels, in part because government agencies committed large amounts for extractive operations

New Forms of Economic Growth

105

Fig. 4.3. Grand Coulee Dam. The mammoth Grand Coulee Dam, located in northcentral Washington, was part of the New Deal’s pathbreaking achievements in the West. The dam, completed in 1941, helped develop hydroelectric and irrigation systems that transformed large sections of the Pacific Northwest. Photo courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Seattle, UW 23617.

with few employees, especially aluminum-reduction plants that exported ingots for fabrication elsewhere, in part because domestic consumption of power exceeded expectations, as well as because established producers in other states had advantages simply in being established and in declining costs of shipping their products to western markets that outweighed western advantages in the cost of electrical energy. Shortages developed before the largest postwar immigration, the Pacific Northwest suffering a “brownout” after less-than-normal rainfall in 1947. By the 1960s, demand for power pressed so closely on hydroelectric capacity that utilities and government agencies planned to shift their basic loads to steam plants drawing on the vast coal deposits of Wyoming and Montana⁶⁷ and to nuclear reactors. The Washington Public Power Supply System, which public utility districts formed in 1956–57 to develop hydroelectric projects beyond their separate capacities, planned five nuclear plants between 1970 and 1974. Although doubts about nuclear power prompted the city of Seattle to remain outside the system (1976), construction on all five continued until utilities in

106

New Forms of Economic Growth

Oregon and Washington, facing multiplying costs, stopped paying charges on their debts to it, forcing the system to default on its bonds in turn in 1983.⁶⁸ The trees that covered much of the mountains of the Pacific Coast and the Pacific Northwest corresponded variously to the minerals that underlay much of the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest: as resource that Anglo-Americans exported more than they used it locally, once they had built their first houses and cribbed their first mines; as bounty widely accessible in consequence of occurring where government still held land or recently had disposed of it on generous terms. As a more visible resource, usable in close to its natural form, timber attracted attention earlier; as a bulkier and more widely distributed resource it was slower to attract the labor and capital required to develop it, although conservationists contended that as a renewable as well as exhaustible resource it could support exploitation indefinitely if properly managed. Since Anglo-American settlers were accustomed to building with wood and to judging land by the trees on it, it was no accident that the first of them moved past the treeless plains west of the Missouri River to wooded areas in the Willamette Valley and around Puget Sound, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay. Having more timber than they needed, they cut it for sale. The timber industry was the first American enterprise on the coast to move beyond gathering into manufacturing, in mills built for the markets of Hawaii and California before as well as during and after the gold rush of 1849. Substantial growth in wood products followed developments that extended well beyond timber country; in some respects it paralleled the growth of copper mining, depending much on new demand in a rapidly industrializing American economy and on systems of transportation that moved bulky goods over long distances at low cost. By the end of the nineteenth century midwestern and eastern stands of timber had run out, while demand in markets they served slackened only temporarily during the depression of the 1890s. Western timber sold chiefly in the West, where building cities, shoring up mine shafts and tunnels, and laying railroad track consumed enormous amounts. Breaking into larger markets depended on getting more logs from woods to mills and more sawn timber from mills to buyers despite costs of transportation that had separated major Pacific, midwestern, and eastern markets. By the 1880s western loggers had depleted most of the timber that they could fell directly into water or drag short distances by ox teams along skid roads. Sometimes they floated logs in flumes from high altitudes, as in the Sierra Nevada and the Coeur d’Alenes into the 1930s.⁶⁹ Demand turned them to more adaptable means of moving timber: the donkey engine and the bull donkey or steam skidder, which dragged logs by ropes and cables where oxen could not easily go, and the logging railroad, which reached

New Forms of Economic Growth

107

much farther than stationary engines. Logging railroads in turn connected with trunk lines built into the Pacific Northwest from the Mississippi Valley and from California and Utah in the 1880s and 1890s as well as with salt water nearby. As a Minnesotan and neighbor to Frederick Weyerhaeuser at St. Paul, James J. Hill understood the possibilities of carrying timber east over the Great Northern and Northern Pacific after wheat harvest; when he cut freight rates eastbound shipments doubled between 1900 and 1902.⁷⁰ Like wheat from the coastal states, timber sold outside the regions where it grew only to the extent that low costs of production balanced costs of shipping. As values of land increased—in the Pacific Northwest threefold to tenfold in the decade after the depression of the 1890s, far more thereafter—operators cut wages. According to testimony before the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915, wages in logging camps had declined to about half levels of the 1880s,⁷¹ while consumer prices increased by about a tenth. Most loggers and many millworkers were itinerants, like harvest hands on the plains; work at the mills was still so routine that operators did not fear turnover. They were as heavy-handed in resisting unionization as any in hard-rock mining country.⁷² By the First World War, when the army persuaded operators to make concessions to their employees to maintain output,⁷³ especially of spruce for military aircraft, some of the biggest of them relied on more efficient methods of production to reduce costs. Upon expanding from Minnesota to the West and South, Frederick Weyerhaeuser and his sons had systematically established their supply and refined technology appropriate to it, acquiring nearly two million acres in the Pacific Northwest between 1900 and 1914 at prices that seemed daringly high (initially six dollars an acre) and beginning large-scale manufacturing only after building an electrified mill at Everett, Washington, ready in 1915.⁷⁴ The Long-Bell Company, of Kansas City, which contracted to buy Weyerhaeuser timber in southwestern Washington in 1919–23 as its supplies in Louisiana and Texas ran out, planned an entire community, Longview, alongside what it called the largest mills ever built on the Cowlitz and Columbia rivers; it banked on good living conditions and wages higher than its competitors as means to save by reducing turnover in the labor force and by keeping the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) away.⁷⁵ Especially in newer and larger operations, family men, many of them living in town, replaced bindlestiffs in the woods as well as at the mills. “Paul Bunyan is dead,” a Portland journalist lamented (1926), recalling more colorful times.⁷⁶ In mills built after the Second World War, engineers at electronic consoles replaced roustabouts, cranes, and rollers moving logs like ingots in steel foundries. Yet for many years the industry still spanned enormous ranges in both tech-

108

New Forms of Economic Growth

Fig. 4.4. The Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. The Weyerhaeuser Timber Company became one of the lumber industry’s giants, controlling that endeavor in the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century. Later in the century Weyerhaeuser and other large companies closed some of their sites in the Northwest or relocated to other less costly regions of the United States. Photo courtesy the Oregon Historical Society, Portland. #OrHi 105993.

nology and relations with labor. While maintaining production and improving working and living conditions at camps and mills, the army had so effectively driven out unions in 1917–19 that until Congress established rights of collective bargaining in 1935 employers could stigmatize organized dissent as unpatriotic. When members of the American Legion celebrating Armistice Day at Centralia, Washington, in 1919 battled members of the IWW and mobs lynched their alleged leader, seven Wobblies were convicted of murder, but no charges were brought against their attackers.⁷⁷ The most immediate returns from improvements in plant, as from improvements in relations with labor, were lower costs of production; more gradual returns promised to follow on maintaining supplies of timber while using and selling more logs. Having depleted their own pine forests, timber operators of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley saw the value of old-growth Douglas fir; in the grand style of the metals magnates, the greatest of them could afford to defer collecting profits and invest in the future. The Weyerhaeusers had experi-

New Forms of Economic Growth

109

mented with uses for wastes like midwestern meat packers; by the 1920s they were making insulation from bark, wallboards from chips and sawdust, fireplace logs from dust filtered from the air.⁷⁸ Production of plywood, exhibited as a curiosity at the Lewis and Clark Exposition at Portland in 1905 and used in aircraft during the First World War,⁷⁹ increased by nearly eleven times between 1945 and 1970, while production of sawn timber in the coastal states increased by less than half.⁸⁰ Demand for timber in construction had lagged behind general economic activity since the First World War, the amount in the average American house declining by 18.5 percent during the 1920s;⁸¹ producers accordingly welcomed alternative markets. A San Francisco paper dealer, Isidore Zellerbach, had built a pulp and paper mill near Port Angeles in 1919; in 1931 a mill at Shelton began making pulp for the synthetic cellulose fiber rayon, previously made from cotton, and soon served a growing Japanese market. Well before state governments restricted use of “wigwams”—conical incinerators that lit up the sky like the flares of gas at oil refineries through the 1940s—the larger producers were buying waste from small mills to maintain profits on by-products; relatively steady returns on plywood, fiberboards, pulp, and Kraft paper helped to balance losses on sawn timber. By 1960 pulp exceeded sawn timber in value in Washington.⁸² Conservationists hoped for many years that big owners would, in their own interest, manage their holdings scientifically, whether to stabilize supplies or to induce governments to lower taxes. Leaders of the industry who drafted a code after the National Recovery Act of 1933 agreed to follow accepted methods of forestry (1934);⁸³ although they welcomed the end of NRA, the Weyerhaeusers extended programs of reforestation developed from the 1920s, acquiring as well as retaining cutover land and in 1940–41 establishing the first tree farm.⁸⁴ But little came of the Sustained Yield Forest Management Act of 1944, which authorized the Forest Service to cooperate with owners in managing public and private lands together to stabilize the industry and communities that depended on it;⁸⁵ demand invited more rapid development. Further, new systems of transportation both saved and spoiled: although as loggers cut hitherto inaccessible timber they brought out more of it in usable shape, neighbors downstream from the trucks and tractors that replaced logging railroads and high-lead rigs in the 1920s and 1930s complained of flooding and muddied water supplies.⁸⁶ Concentration of ownership and control increased as the industry became more complex, although much less generally than in copper mining. It had begun early, following on problems of reaching mills and markets and of assuring supplies as well as on the boldness of entrepreneurs and the easy acquiescence of private and public owners of timber in their plans. The Bureau of

110

New Forms of Economic Growth

Corporations reported in 1913 that the Southern Pacific and Northern Pacific railroads and the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company held nearly a fourth of the privately owned timber of the Pacific Northwest and that in addition Weyerhaeuser and other large companies controlled adjacent tracts by monopolizing outlets to market.⁸⁷ As in stock-raising and irrigation country, corporations and speculators who worked with them seized opportunities nominally reserved to settlers, paying entrymen the equivalent of ordinary wages for turning over their claims. Trainloads of schoolteachers from Minnesota who filed on lands in central Oregon transferred title to an investor from Minneapolis.⁸⁸ Responding to complaints that the Southern Pacific had not opened to settlers lands originally granted to the Oregon and California Railroad as the terms of the grant provided, in 1916 Congress reclaimed more than two million acres in Oregon (O. and C. lands), including much choice timberland.⁸⁹ But established interests in the industry had substantial parts in administering these revested lands, as well as often controlling physical access to them. Small operators did not so often succeed to large in the West as in the South, where “peckerwood” mills took over much low-grade second-growth timber, like the Chinese miners who gleaned tailings in the placers in the 1850s and 1860s; instead major corporate owners could afford to wait for new growth, by the 1930s and 1940s with the help of federal agencies that built roads and subsidized reforestation. Some of the largest firms became still larger in the 1940s and 1950s and after. Long-Bell, which had barely survived the Depression of the 1930s after depleting its capital in moving west, concluded that it needed capacity for manufacturing pulp and paper and merged into International Paper in 1956.⁹⁰ Production in the coastal states had fallen more than in other sections, by two-thirds in the early 1930s, then risen still more, Oregon succeeding Washington in first place in 1938 as Washington had succeeded Wisconsin and Minnesota.⁹¹ As demand for Douglas fir increased, more newcomers acquired western plants and reserves. The Georgia Hardwood Lumber Company, which began buying western plywood mills in 1947, shortly bought timberland as well, becoming (1956) the Georgia-Pacific Corporation and moving headquarters to Portland. Officers of the company insisted that its reserves would not run out, that by their policy of “dynamic conservation” they would “actually increase the timber by growing more of it, by getting more out of it.”⁹² It seemed possible that “sustained yield” would succeed as policy as well as public relations, that the industry would keep resource and use in equilibrium rather than deplete western forests and move on as it had moved on from the upper Mississippi Valley. Encouraged by the high and relatively steady returns on processed materials once called by-products,

New Forms of Economic Growth

111

operators learned to waste less and use more; private and public owners replanted rather than abandoned cutover land. But logging and manufacturing increased to new levels, peaking in Douglas fir territory in 1952 and on the entire West Coast in 1973, threatening future supplies both for mills that relied on purchases (“commercial log”) and for the industry as a whole. When orders for construction declined, values fell by fourfifths or more in 1980–82, and operators who had contracted to buy timber at the high prices of the late 1970s persuaded the Forest Service to allow them to delay harvests and then (1984) Congress to release them from their obligations.⁹³ Pressed by fluctuating prices and the burden of debt contracted to buy timberland, operators closed outmoded mills, maintaining and even increasing production while cutting payrolls; productivity in the technologically more advanced branches of the industry, as in veneer and plywood, more than doubled between the 1960s and the 1980s.⁹⁴ Like the midwesterners and southerners who had taken advantage of abundant, low-priced western timber early in the century, Georgia-Pacific and other manufacturers learned to make waferboard or oriented strandboard and other alternatives to plywood from low-priced southern second growth previously used chiefly for pulp; by the early 1980s southern pine outsold Douglas fir, and by the early 1990s strandboard accounted for a fifth of the market that plywood had commanded. Georgia-Pacific returned to Georgia in 1981–82.⁹⁵ Although some firms and some communities suffered disproportionately from such competition, employment generally declined as productivity rose more rapidly than in “good” times when operators had less incentive to abandon inefficient operations and could not so easily hire selectively. In Oregon the number of workers required to process a million board feet declined by a fifth in a decade, 1977–87.⁹⁶ Some communities survived by exporting logs; as exports of softwood logs increased, by over half between 1970–74 and 1985–89, and employment in mills declined, laborers and operators without supplies of their own asked Congress to extend restrictions on exports adopted in response to similar grievances in 1968.⁹⁷ Others asked it and managers of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands to increase sales of old-growth timber above levels established to protect endangered species and prevent erosion and other damage to forests and watersheds, in contrast to operators who during the Depression of the 1930s had asked the government to help restrict production. Especially as general economic decline compounded the troubles of the industry in the 1980s and 1990s, critics charged that corporate operators had brought on their troubles by bad management, especially in expanding reck-

112

New Forms of Economic Growth

lessly and then depleting reserves in order to cover charges on indebtedness, as well as that they had grown beyond concern for employees and communities that depended on them.⁹⁸ But however arbitrarily large operators acted within their immediate domains, however aggressively they obtained concessions from government, they did not approach the authority of the Alaska Syndicate, or of the great mining and smelting conglomerates in the mountain states, or of the Big Five in Hawaii. In the aggregate their holdings were far smaller than those of public agencies,⁹⁹ and concentration in production was never so great as in marketing. Operators of all sizes drew on both public lands and private lands other than their own. Once logs moved out of the woods by truck rather than almost exclusively by rail and ship, independent loggers who owned their own gear worked, bought, and sold alongside employees of the largest corporations. Costs of production varied more with quality of resource, especially sizes of logs and densities of stand, and with ages of mills than with scale.¹⁰⁰ The troubles of millworkers and of communities that depended on the lumber industry paralleled circumstances in other industries and other parts of the West. Long after trade in beaver pelts, cattle hides, and range cattle flourished and collapsed, westerners continued to depend heavily on exporting a few products, which were heavily based on natural resources if not the natural resources themselves, in markets that were distant, limited, and competitive. Per capita consumption of timber in the United States fell even more over the century than per capita consumption of wheat; total consumption never regained the level of 1906, when San Francisco rebuilt after the great fire. Petroleum was the only major western raw material for which demand continued to grow both absolutely and relatively into the 1970s.¹⁰¹ Sales of all of these exported products, as of other major exports, depended increasingly on production and economic conditions abroad even when tariffs, quotas, and changes in exchange rates did not raise technical barriers to exports. Only petroleum promised to grow as much as the West itself, and of all major western exports petroleum seemed most likely to run out. Even as westerners continued to subscribe to the traditional American faith in farming as the soundest basis for society, they also hoped to develop more industrial economic bases along eastern lines. Despite many promotions and predictions, the Far West became a major producer of manufactured goods only during and after the Second World War. Until then, apart from local producers of goods too perishable or too bulky to import, from bread and beer to bricks, its principal industries were those that exported raw and semiprocessed materials at distinct advantages over other regions. The pioneers of the early gold and silver rushes had relied heavily on imported manufactures: they were accustomed to eastern goods; they could pay

New Forms of Economic Growth

113

high prices for them; and they were so mobile and rootless that importing what they knew they could sell in a given present seemed more prudent than preparing to make what they might sell in the future if they and enough others stayed long enough. Then the railroads that crossed most of the West in the 1880s and 1890s killed off infant industries by bringing in low-priced competition more efficiently than they opened wider markets to them. The experience of the First World War briefly suggested how much more the Far West might produce but left old patterns of production and trade essentially intact as established suppliers in the East and Middle West reclaimed old markets after the war. In California, most industrialized of western states, 1910–20 was the only decade of the century before the Second World War when the fraction of the labor force in manufacturing did not decline; and it remained below the national average until the 1960s.¹⁰² Western shipyards had averaged less than a sixth of American merchant tonnage before the war; building at as much as forty times prewar rates, they turned out nearly half (48.4 percent) in 1919. At their peak they hired over one hundred thousand more workers than in peacetime; coming from agriculture and from service industries, many of these were new to manufacturing of any kind.¹⁰³ California became a major producer of high explosives, the increase in production of TNT (trinitrotoluene) at a single plant on San Francisco Bay (at Giant, later Richmond) during the war amounting to nearly a sixth of production nationally.¹⁰⁴ There was no need for such expanded capacity after the war, which left enormous surpluses in merchant shipping and in inventories of explosives as in canned and dried fruit, spruce (for military aircraft), and other western goods. Demand for explosives in peacetime on the coast had already declined as more gold came from dredging and open-pit mining, less from blasting in deep shafts and tunnels. Employment in manufacture of explosives was never large anywhere, in California totaling 972 in 1919, less than in 1900; in two years, 1919–21, it fell by more than half.¹⁰⁵ Only extraordinary need could absorb the ships that had come from western yards, most at high cost, some of uncured wood and reinforced concrete. Tonnage built on the coast dropped below prewar levels despite special protection for the American merchant marine while factories in older states that had produced tanks, trucks, ordnance, and aircraft engines converted to automobiles. With shipbuilding accounting for much of the change, general industrial employment first rose more and then fell more in the coastal states than nationally.¹⁰⁶ Perhaps the most conspicuous exception to the general relative decline in manufacturing was the production of motion pictures. It was both one of the best known of western industries, probably without parallel since gold rush days in transforming impressions of the West and the cultural atmosphere of a region,

114

New Forms of Economic Growth

Fig. 4.5. Hollywood. After 1910, film companies sprang up in Hollywood, located near Los Angeles, and became one of the West’s booming industries. The Keystone View Company was one of the early small film companies in the Hollywood area. Photo courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento. Keystone View Company, #V26385. Negative #28,631.

and one of the few and first developed neither on the basis of locally available raw materials nor to sell mainly in local markets. It began to move to Los Angeles shortly before the First World War, when producers operating on minimal budgets and using the kinds of films and techniques then available could save on building and lighting sets in a mild climate, on wages in a city where labor unions were weak and there were few industrial employers, and on royalties that holders of patents on early cameras might more easily collect on the East Coast

New Forms of Economic Growth

115

than three thousand miles away, let alone across the Mexican border, close by. Although such savings declined shortly as producers learned to dispense with natural lighting and as their experience in making sound pictures prompted them to draw more actors from the legitimate stage, meanwhile the industry and its leaders had developed symbiotic relationships with their new environment as they and the region prospered together. Films made in new settings attracted new residents who in turn modeled their houses, their clothing, their recreation, their restless mobility after new styles that films made popular. Visitors sensed a region become a gigantic film set.¹⁰⁷ “Hollywood,” wrote an anthropologist who explored the reciprocities of illusion and reality (1950), “is engaged in the mass production of prefabricated dreams.”¹⁰⁸ Transcending the disposition of the gold seekers before them to suspend conventional skepticism as they built cities on resources no more marketable than climate, early twentieth-century southern Californians were prepared to embrace the fantasies of the silver screen; in turn the experience encouraged them to take other risks, invest in further innovations. Perhaps in that sense the motion picture industry of the 1920s and 1930s was natural seedbed for the aerospace industries of the 1950s and after, which proposed to build the imaginings of science fiction. Yet in the narrower sense of industrial enterprise, film-making never dominated the economy in southern California as mining did in Alaska and Nevada, farming on the plains. On the eve of the Depression of the 1930s, when it was one of the largest manufacturing industries in Los Angeles, with nearly three times as many employees as in petroleum refining, it accounted for less than 2 percent of employment, less than in canneries and other food processing plants or in automobile agencies and gasoline service stations, less than a third of employment in hotels and restaurants; actors of all kinds accounted for about 0.6 percent of all employment.¹⁰⁹

5

Economic Growth from the 1940s

Although the Far West as a whole grew faster than the rest of the United States throughout the twentieth century, parts of it spectacularly so, until the 1940s most of it grew much as it had grown before. Western economies continued to be predominantly extractive, agricultural, and commercial. As population in the three coastal states more than tripled, they and their neighbors became markets large enough so that major manufacturers of consumer goods established western plants to serve them, especially at and near Los Angeles and Oakland. But even in California, which led the region in manufacturing generally and the nation in a few rapidly growing branches, notably airplanes and motion pictures, western rates of employment in manufacturing still lagged far behind rates in the Northeast and the northern Middle West, even much of the South.¹ Westerners made their own bread, beer, and bricks, among other goods that could not bear costs of shipping over western distances, but imported most of their clothing and portable consumer durable goods, assembling automobiles from parts made in Detroit. The principal manufactures that they exported were goods too heavy or too perishable to sell outside local and regional markets without at least preliminary processing to control costs of shipping, as by refining oil, smelting ore, and canning fruit. The general expectation was that they could do little more until they constituted a market large enough to offer economies of scale to fuller ranges of regional producers. “What this coast needs is more people,” William B. Wells, editor of the Pacific Monthly, had written in 1901. “Manufactures will follow as a natural consequence.”² Then suddenly the Second World War brought changes in employment and corresponding movements of population so great that the San Francisco Chronicle called wartime migration to the

116

Economic Growth from the 1940s

117

coast a “second gold rush” and speculated whether still greater changes would follow.³ The comparison was highly figurative, referring more to magnitude and rate than to quality of change or to a specific industrial sector. Gold and silver mining had revived when the government raised prices of gold and silver in 1933–36, and mines and ores long considered marginal and less suddenly became profitable. By 1940 production of gold had more than doubled, making new records. Then early in 1942, shortly after Congress declared war on Japan, Germany, and Italy, the War Production Board diverted equipment, fuel, labor, and capital from gold mining to uses that it called essential,⁴ and production fell more than it had risen, for the most part to the status of a by-product, for over two years (May 1943 to July 1945) to the lowest levels since 1849. The principal prospectors in what the Department of the Interior called “the greatest treasure hunt the world has ever witnessed” were agents of the United States Geological Survey commissioned to assure supplies of minerals never called precious for military uses.⁵ Most of the Argonauts of the 1940s went west neither on such missions nor as individual adventurers but to work on assembly lines building airplanes and ships for the armed forces or to serve in them. Mobilization for war with Germany and Japan dwarfed public programs affecting the West in the 1930s yet further concentrated outlays within it, especially in the coastal and some of the mountain states. As major ports became staging areas for operations across the Pacific, the military services established and expanded installations to assemble, train, and supply the forces funneled through them. In addition to yards and coastal supply depots at Seattle, Oakland, Mare Island, San Pedro, and San Diego, the navy maintained inland depots at Clearfield, Utah (near Ogden), Spokane, and Barstow;⁶ the army held most stocks of cargo to be shipped out of San Francisco Bay at Ogden but added storage at Hermiston, Oregon, southwest of Spokane, and at Flagstaff and Pueblo while shipping also from Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and (especially to Alaska) Prince Rupert.⁷ For most of the military matériel and supplies that American forces used at western installations and shipped through western ports, military purchasing agencies depended primarily on major industrial centers in the Northeast and Middle West with capital equipment and labor forces that they could convert easily from civilian to military uses. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the government tried to locate new plants established to produce ships, aircraft, and other matériel where they could not be reached as easily as on the coast. But employers in main manufacturing regions soon exhausted not only capaci-

118

Economic Growth from the 1940s 30% or more of BLM control Indian reservation Military reservation

Grand Coulee Dam

National forest or grassland Park, monument, etc.

Seattle WASHINGTON

Bonneville Dam

MONTANA

NO RTH DAKOTA MINNESOTA

ORE GON SO UTH DAKOTA

IDAHO

WYOMING IOWA

San Francisco

NEBRASKA

NEVADA

Denver

UTAH

Glen Canyon Dam

C ALIFORNIA

COLORADO MISSO URI

KANSAS

Hoover Dam

Los Angeles

ARKANSAS

O KLAHO MA

ARIZONA

NEW MEXICO

Phoenix

Dallas

TEXAS LO UISIANA

ALASKA HAWAII

0 0

200 mi

0

200

400 mi

100 mi

Fig. 5.1. Uncle Sam’s West. The federal presence in the American West became increasingly important in the twentieth century. Federally owned lands, Indian and military reservations, and parks and monuments were major symbols of Uncle Sam’s growing influences in the West. Map by Bill Nelson.

ties of plants converted from civilian uses, from making automobiles and tractors to making planes and tanks, and capacities of new plants built for military needs, but also supplies of labor with the skills that they required and supplies of labor experienced in any kind of manufacturing. In contrast, western contractors who had built some of the largest public works in the country in the 1930s had learned to recruit and train their own workforces, and employees in dispensable

Economic Growth from the 1940s

119

western service trades as well as farmworkers, students, housewives, and others outside industrial labor markets were available at the high wages that military contracts permitted. Even western locations that had been too far from major industrial markets suddenly became assets: in the interior they were out of range of enemy planes; on the coast they saved time in deliveries to the western Pacific and Asia, especially after attacks in the Mediterranean cut shipping through the Suez Canal. That the United States fought the Second World War far more in the Pacific basin and at sea and in the air than it had fought the First World War dictated that the West assumed correspondingly more important parts in equipping American and Allied armed forces for it. Shipbuilding had declined everywhere since 1919 and more on the West Coast than anywhere else, western shipyards turning out no merchant vessels between 1920 and 1939. Although naval construction increased sharply when Congress authorized building a two-ocean navy in 1938, two years later employment in shipyards in California was less than a sixth of employment in aircraft plants, which in turn was about a ninth of employment in automobile factories in Michigan.⁸ But older industrial centers were fully occupied, and the government needed ships regardless of cost. As demand for merchant shipping rose in 1940–41, the United States Maritime Commission relied heavily on contractors organized by two resourceful entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, Henry J. Kaiser (1882–1967) and Stephen D. Bechtel (1900–89). Kaiser had built highways in the 1920s, then oil pipelines, and with Bechtel and others as Six Companies, Incorporated, the Hoover or Boulder Dam on the Colorado River in 1931–35. By 1940 in various combinations they also built the bridge from San Francisco to Oakland (1933–36) and the greater parts of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River (1933–43). An experienced eastern firm, Todd Shipyards, headed the group—Todd-California—that contracted to build cargo ships at Richmond for the British government in December 1940, but it depended heavily on Kaiser’s skill at assembling resources larger than its own, beginning with those of the United States government. Most of Kaiser’s and Bechtel’s employees were as new to shipbuilding as the one at Richmond who allegedly asked, “When do we pour the keel?” But they built ships in record time within the next four years, 1,490 at yards that Kaiser controlled.⁹ As orders increased, yards expanded and increased to fill them, from the nine in operation and preparation early in 1941 to twenty-two by 1943: two on Puget Sound, four on the Columbia and Willamette rivers, thirteen within San Francisco Bay, and three at and near Los Angeles. The week after receiving a telegram soliciting bids for new yards in March 1942, Bechtel signed a contract to

120

Economic Growth from the 1940s

build Marinship, at Sausalito, which launched its first ship six months later.¹⁰ By 1945 the Maritime Commission had awarded more than half its contracts to yards on the West Coast, the navy almost a fifth.¹¹ At the peak, in 1943, the western yards produced more than the thirty-five yards on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts¹²—nearly one thousand times the tonnage of the year before. Because, like traditional building construction, shipbuilding had to be done on site, the new and expanded shipyards could not delegate assembly work to plants whose ordinary business had fallen off. They also had to import most of their materials, since the West had no modern integrated steel industry; all mills except one—at Pueblo, over a thousand miles east—depending on scrap and imported slab.¹³ Much of the steel that the western yards used came from a plant that Kaiser built in 1942 at Fontana, east of Los Angeles. The aircraft industry had western roots of long standing and moreover had both grown and concentrated on the coast over the last twenty years, while shipbuilding had declined. Several pioneer firms had started there, whether because, like early motion-picture producers, they found westerners and especially southern Californians more hospitable toward innovative enterprise than residents of other sections or simply because that was where their founders lived:¹⁴ Martin (1912), Douglas (1920), Ryan (1925), Lockheed (1926), Vultee (1932), and Hughes (1934) in southern California, Boeing (1916) at Seattle, although Martin moved to Cleveland in 1917 and the Loughhead brothers (Lockheed) sold out in 1928, resuming operations only in 1932. Donald Douglas had worked with Glenn Martin as chief engineer before he went into business (1920) with a partner who was interested primarily in building a plane that he could use to make the first nonstop transcontinental flight. After incorporating his own company the next year he began work on the prototype for the first DC transport planes at Santa Monica in 1932.¹⁵ Douglas engineers studied and used a wind tunnel at the California Institute of Technology, which had offered instruction in aeronautics since 1917;¹⁶ Boeing drew on graduates of a program at the University of Washington. Claude Ryan, a former army pilot, had progressed from carrying sightseers and charter passengers in war-surplus planes to making his own two years before his engineer modified a high-winged monoplane for Charles Lindbergh to fly from New York to Paris in 1927. Other manufacturers moved established operations to California: North American Aviation to Los Angeles and Consolidated Aircraft to San Diego in 1935. At Wichita, a cluster of manufacturers that emphasized small private planes included Laird (1919; later reorganized as Swallow), Cessna (1927), Stearman (1927; acquired by Boeing in 1929), and Beech (1932). By 1939 California led the states with over a third of employees in the industry, fifteen times as many as in 1929, when it had been

Economic Growth from the 1940s

121

third with a twelfth, although employees in plants that processed fruits and vegetables exceeded them by far; Kansas was eighth with a fiftieth.¹⁷ While leaving production of the matériel that the armed forces required chiefly to private contractors, the government provided most of the capital that went into new plants and additions to old ones either directly by commissioning construction and retaining ownership or indirectly by paying advances on contracts, by making loans or guaranteeing loans at banks, and by making concessions on taxes.¹⁸ It financed more than nine-tenths of new capacity for the aircraft industry, which had served chiefly civilian demand in the later 1920s and 1930s.¹⁹ In some parts of the West it invested more in such expansion in wartime than it had spent in the public works programs of the 1930s; and as in some of those programs it tried to influence the nature and distribution of economic development after the war as well as to increase output during it, locating new aluminum and magnesium reduction plants where they could use power from dams recently built and under construction in the Pacific Northwest and on the Colorado River rather than at the prewar sites of the industry in the South and Middle West. The result was an unprecedented increase in western manufacturing between 1940 and 1944, concentrated around metropolitan centers with nuclei of industrial development. States that previously had produced about 10 percent of American manufactures got about 15 percent of contracts and plants to produce military equipment and supplies.²⁰ Employees of airframe manufacturers in California and Washington increased more than seven times.²¹ By 1943 the aircraft industry accounted for more than two-fifths of employment in manufacturing in Los Angeles, which was second only to Detroit in production for war; at the peak southern California had nearly a third (31.1 percent) of employment nationally despite expansion at higher rates in other regions.²² New factories appeared at Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Omaha, and Kansas City, Kansas, as well as farther east and south, modification centers at Tucson, Phoenix, and Daggett. Concentration on aircraft was still greater at Wichita, around Beech, Cessna, Boeing, and Culver. Industrial mobilization soon demanded more labor as well as more capital. Everywhere employers exhausted sources of skilled labor and turned to novices, including some previously not considered because of age, sex, physical circumstances, or race. Since there was little industry in the Far West that could convert to military production or release employees for it, contractors canvassed the Middle West and South. Kaiser’s agents collected 38,000 recruits in special trains, prompting the largest movement yet of African Americans to the Pacific Northwest. In three years, 1940–43, employment at western yards increased over

122

Economic Growth from the 1940s

twenty-six times, by nearly as much as all employment in manufacturing in the three coastal states.²³ All yards drew heavily on novices. More than nine-tenths of employees at Marinship had not worked in a shipyard.²⁴ At one time they included three-fifths of the members of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. A fitter in a dress shop became a shipfitter. Conventional barriers to employment dropped as personnel officers accepted a man paralyzed on one side, the undersized (able to work in small spaces), the deaf (able to stand noise and to communicate in spite of it), and more and more women—at the Portland-Vancouver yards over a fourth of production workers, at Marinship two-fifths of the welders, although everywhere women lagged far behind men in access to skilled work, and when the war ended they found little demand for skills they had mastered. Kaiser pioneered further in holding his workforce and maximizing its output by establishing Child Service Centers at Portland and a system of general medical care that outlasted the war, the yards, and most of his other enterprises.²⁵ Airframe builders and craft unions that they depended on were slower to break conventional racial and sexual barriers, first bending requirements of age and physique. At Lockheed high school boys worked four-hour shifts; a man without hands became a tool dispatcher.²⁶ The Selective Service helped by using the draft to coerce laborers in fields considered expendable into changing jobs, while contracting agencies covered costs of transporting them; paying them higher wages; and building housing projects, schools, and other facilities for their families. Yet most of the spectacular increases in western industrial employment and output promised to be only temporary, occurring in fields where demand was unlikely to hold up after the war, much of it regardless of whether costs were likely to be competitive in normal markets. Shipbuilding expanded in relation to losses to German and Japanese submarines more than to normal rates and patterns of demand. The Maritime Commission financed enough building berths in California, Oregon, and Washington to nearly triple the western share of total capacity.²⁷ Contractors at Denver ingeniously prefabricated small craft for the navy, which assembled them at Mare Island, although in the main shipyards had to be on salt water or accessible to it.²⁸ Production of aircraft, which had better prospect for growth in peacetime, increased less on the coast than elsewhere. Government agencies put only 9.2 percent of public funds allocated to expand the industry during the war into California, 3.6 percent into Washington,²⁹ while adding massively to facilities at centers of automobile manufacturing in the Middle West. The Middle West, which had only 2.2 percent of employment in the industry in 1940, had 30.1 percent by 1944. California’s share dropped by more than half, from 38.9 percent to 18.9 percent.³⁰ The two-mile-long assembly plant that Ford operated at Willow

Economic Growth from the 1940s

123

Fig. 5.2. Rosie the Riveter. Sharply increasing numbers of women workers, known popularly as Rosie the Riveter, entered the western labor force during the Second World War. Here women work at a North American Aviation plant in Kansas City, Kansas. Photo courtesy of the Wyandotte County Museum, Bonner Springs, Kan. Accession #1982-5-1024.

Run, west of Detroit, cost half again more than all large government-built aircraft plants on the West Coast.³¹ Newcomers at western shipyards and aircraft factories were small parts of a movement of population during the war—most of it in 1942 and 1943—that exceeded previous westward migrations called “great.” Between 1940 and 1945 the coastal states gained about 2,636,000 civilians (27.3 percent), more than their combined populations in 1900, over four and a half times the number of their new shipyard workers. Four southwestern states, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, gained about 180,000. The nine other mountain states and the five plains states together lost about 930,000.³² Of the seven states that gained, only California had grown faster in any decade since 1900–10 (in 1920–30, when the increase was nearly one and a half times as large as the increase in the seventeen other states and territories combined). Similar growth continued after the war,

124

Economic Growth from the 1940s

over the rest of the decade. Adding more population between 1940 and 1950 than all other seventeen states and territories together, California grew by more than half, 53.4 percent. Ten others also grew by more than the national average of 14.5 percent—all mountain and Pacific states except Montana and Idaho. In these eighteen states and territories immigrants exceeded emigrants by more than two and a third million. In coastal areas where demand for labor in war plants was greatest, the government complicated shortages by measures it took in the name of security. Although by the 1940s most Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent had moved to cities, more often working at distributing than at cultivating and harvesting truck crops insofar as they stayed in agriculture, removing them to some of the least arable and most isolated parts of the interior in 1942 so seriously threatened food supplies that the government recruited Mexican farm laborers (braceros). Late in the war it spent more on them than they received in wages, subsidizing their farmer employers with cheap labor as well as cheap water. Ultimately the Mexicans that the government imported exceeded several times the number of Japanese that it had removed. When it permitted the evacuees to leave the camps where they lived under guard in 1944–45, most of them remained in the West or returned to it; at the instance of agricultural employers braceros continued to cross the border from Mexico for nearly twenty years more, through 1964.³³ Many of the civilian newcomers had been interested in moving west before they came, and many joined friends and relatives who had come a few years before, coming predominantly from older states that had accounted for most westward migration in the 1930s and concentrating in the same parts of the West when they went, especially in the urban counties of California.³⁴ But their prospects and their experiences were quite different from those of their predecessors. Competing for housing with comparably large influxes of military personnel, most of them lived in conditions that only high wartime wages and prospects of doing better later made tolerable. At Richmond, Sausalito (“just across the bridge from San Francisco”), Terminal Island (by the resourcefulness of urban imperialists, within the city limits of Los Angeles), and Vanport, on the Columbia River north of Portland, shipyard workers and their families moved into improvised barrack apartments, at Vanport on recently filled land that slowly subsided before the river flooded it in 1948. Over large areas of the more populous states, rural areas and small towns grew even faster than cities but essentially as extensions of them, parts of their metropolitan areas rather than their agricultural hinterlands. While population on farms declined substantially less in California than in most other states in the

Economic Growth from the 1940s

125

Fig. 5.3. Vanport, Oregon. The Second World War and the increasing federal presence in the West spawned new war-related communities. Vanport, Oregon, sprang up near Portland and became primarily a bedroom community for workers in nearby ship-building industries. In 1948 most of the new jerry-built community was washed away in a disastrous flood. Photo courtesy the Oregon Historical Society, Portland. #OrHi 68775.

1940s, that was only partly because the kind of intensive agriculture that had become dominant was slow to mechanize. Many new residents came there to live more affordably and pleasantly than nearer to war plants and military bases, not to return to the soil. Soon the automobiles they bought and the highways they demanded permanently redefined western urban life.³⁵ As Alaska and Hawaii became advance bases for operations against Japan, with more military personnel than civilians, the war, and later the processes of demobilization, affected both of them more than any state on the mainland, but in quite different ways. The population of Alaska was so small that the smallest addition in the West in the 1930s gave it the second highest rate of growth, by over a fifth (22.3 percent). Then in the 1940s it grew over four times as fast (by

126

Economic Growth from the 1940s

94.7 percent), nearly doubling.³⁶ The principal attraction to immigrants was employment on public works supporting military preparations. The Canol project (1942–44), intended to bring and refine oil from Norman Wells, on the Mackenzie River 550 miles northeast of Whitehorse, had no lasting effect, since deliveries had barely begun when the army abandoned it, auctioning the pipeline as junk. But it and the Alaskan Highway (1942) alone cost more than the sum of annual family income in the territory, and while work on them continued they supported employment on new scales.³⁷ In Hawaii more extensive and extended activity had quite different effect: so much of the war and of occupation, demobilization, and reconstruction that followed flowed through the island of Oahu that they preempted most space and supplies that normally would have been available for civilian employment apart from that necessary to provide services at military installations. The economic base expanding insignificantly, the increase in population followed chiefly on the high birth rate; civilian departures exceeded civilian arrivals in three years during the war by almost as much as arrivals exceeded departures over two decades after it, 1950–70.³⁸ Much of the wartime economy on the western mainland declined months before the fighting stopped, even earlier than in the islands, which continued to support operations in the western Pacific while military purchasing agencies cancelled contracts as German forces in Europe retreated and then surrendered. Employment in the aircraft industry had declined by about three-fourths from the peak of 1943.³⁹ Soon employment in shipbuilding declined still more. Americans who recalled the brief general depression and the much longer depression in agriculture after the First World War assumed that something similar would follow now,⁴⁰ that cutbacks at war plants were only prelude to more general decline. In some respects the West promised to fare worse than other regions until it developed consumer-goods industries comparable to those of the Middle West and East that could absorb the newly unemployed. Long accustomed to gauging the economy by the movement of freighters in the bay, San Franciscans noted with foreboding that maritime shipping on the coast dropped below levels of the Great Depression.⁴¹ Most newcomers stayed as war plants cut payrolls and closed as the war ended, and still more came afterward. But few of the industries widely expected to absorb them developed significantly, although unemployment never rose to levels that economists predicted for the first two years of peace. Apparently local economies depended heavily on the savings of former war workers who drew on them to buy goods that had not been available with savings that they had not had time to spend while the war lasted. The more affluent invested in better quarters,

Economic Growth from the 1940s

127

supporting booms in residential construction, which in turn prompted state and local governments to build roads to provide access to it.⁴² Some of the most-discussed prospects for specific industrial development did not get much beyond prophecy and preliminary planning. Despite proposals to dispose of war plants so as to break down monopoly⁴³ and predictions that as labor and materials became available western producers would supply consumer goods previously imported from east of the Mississippi, eastern and midwestern manufacturers quickly prepared to reclaim western markets. In so doing they both reconverted facilities that had been devoted to military production and expanded them, often paying bargain prices for war plants that the government had built or financed.⁴⁴ Through 1945 all but about a seventh of sales of such plants were in middle Atlantic and east-north-central states, which had had about half of the nation’s capacity, only about 1 percent in Pacific and mountain states, which had had about an eighth.⁴⁵ Mobilization for war had little lasting effect on most extractive industries, still less on manufacturing that depended on them. As previously, the military departments got strategic minerals chiefly from established suppliers, which were heavily foreign. (Molybdenum was an exception: the mine at Climax, near Leadville, Colorado, was the largest producer in the world.)⁴⁶ Both planners and some industrialists briefly supposed that the production of light metals for military aircraft and incendiary bombs during the war might prepare for substantial industrial development after it. By 1945, reduction plants that the Defense Plant Corporation located at Vancouver, Longview, Spokane, and Tacoma, Washington, and Troutdale, Oregon, brought capacity in primary aluminum (ingots) in the Pacific Northwest from nothing to 27 percent of the national total, by 1950 to 44 percent. The DPC had also built a magnesium plant at Henderson, Nevada, and financed one that Henry Kaiser built near San Jose.⁴⁷ Soon after the war and even before it ended, however, prospects for substantial regional markets declined. Both magnesium plants closed in 1944. Capacity in primary aluminum continued to increase, the western share remaining close to two-fifths, but western companies controlled less than half of it. At the same time, electrolytic reduction drew heavily on power that planners and promoters had expected to support general industrial development in the Pacific Northwest. Although the government turned new western plants that it had financed over to competitors of the Aluminum Company of America, sole American producer of virgin aluminum until 1940, it and other major operators kept most fabrication and with it most employment east of the Mississippi River.⁴⁸ Well before Henry Kaiser stopped making automobiles, he dropped plans to make them of aluminum; and while Kaiser Aluminum’s reduction plants remained largest

128

Economic Growth from the 1940s

under western control, both their output and their share of total production declined.⁴⁹ Government programs stimulated development of steel more than development of light metals while the war lasted. But in the long run they had less effect on an industry that soon had to depend chiefly on civilian demand. Western blast furnaces and mills could not compete with older producers in a free market once they had, in effect, spent their subsidies. Before the war they had had less than 1.5 percent of national capacity,⁵⁰ most of that at the plant of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) at Pueblo, which served chiefly the Rocky Mountain area and the high plains. Because eastern producers undersold western on the coast, United States Steel had dismantled its tinplate mills at Pittsburg, on Suisun Bay (1937), less than a year before Congress authorized building a twoocean navy.⁵¹ In planning rearmament in 1941 President Roosevelt proposed increasing American capacity in steel by over a sixth, with a third of the increase on the Pacific Coast. The principal new furnaces and mills west of the Rockies were those that the government financed in 1942–43 to supply shipyards on the coast while locating them inland to protect them from attack: United States Steel built and operated the Geneva Steel Works, near Provo, Utah, Henry Kaiser a smaller plant at Fontana, near San Bernardino, California. After the war Kaiser and advocates of full employment and economic diversification favored adding further to capacity in western steel, but older producers opposed it. When Congress debated how to dispose of war plants in 1945–46, Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney of Wyoming argued that steel had been “the measure of our prosperity”; going back to prewar rates of production would mean accepting “some sort of depressed economy.” United States Steel agreed to buy the plant at Geneva to keep it from Kaiser, negotiating a price about a fifth the cost of construction. It would have preferred to locate on San Francisco Bay, where seaborne transportation might have balanced distance from raw materials. Nevertheless both Geneva and Fontana grew more after the war than Pueblo, soon surpassing it, although Kaiser failed to persuade the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to recognize high costs at Fontana and thereby reduce the amount due on the loan it had made for it.⁵² Fontana expanded capacity nearly three times within fifteen years, from less than an eighth of the western total in 1945 to over a third by 1960.⁵³ The western share of national capacity was still small, but it had more than doubled since before the war,⁵⁴ supplying over half of regional needs instead of about a quarter.⁵⁵ Yet western steelmakers failed to hold their gains. Older firms expanded more at Texan and mid-Atlantic sites, where cheap transportation made them more competitive even in markets on the Pacific Coast than Kaiser at Fontana; even

Economic Growth from the 1940s

129

CF&I expanded chiefly in the East.⁵⁶ Moreover, foreign firms, which after the war located new plants more prudently, incorporated more advanced technology in them, and sold in cheap currencies, both reclaimed their traditional territory and moved into American markets. In forty years, 1945–85, American steel dropped from 63.7 percent to 11.1 percent of world production.⁵⁷ Imports from Japan increased nine times in the 1960s. By 1970 imports of steel at Pacific Coast ports were nearly two-thirds as large as production in California, by 1982 imports at Los Angeles alone nearly twice as large.⁵⁸ Discontinuing all operations at Fontana in 1983, Kaiser Steel sold most of its assets to Japanese and Brazilian interests who organized as California Steel Industries (CSI), then (1987) went into bankruptcy.⁵⁹ Soon after new owners who had acquired CF&I permanently shut down most of its capacity for making raw steel at Pueblo in 1983–84, they followed suit (1990).⁶⁰ For several years CSI made finished goods from imported slab at Fontana. But in 1992 a Chinese firm bought a mill that Kaiser had decommissioned only two years after opening it in 1981—one of fourteen American mills obsolete by American but modern by Chinese standards—dismantled it and shipped it to Beijing. CSI discussed building a new electric-arc furnace at the same site to provide its own raw steel.⁶¹ Although American producers had became more competitive as they abandoned obsolete plants and processes and as the dollar lost value against foreign currencies in the 1990s, to the point where Japanese automobile manufacturers used American steel in their American plants, the industry as a whole remained unprofitable,⁶² western producers minor and declining factors in it. One of the difficulties western steelmakers faced was that even when the industry as a whole prospered, regional demand had not developed as they had hoped. Although Henry Kaiser announced plans to make automobiles on the coast in 1945 and briefly operated assembly plants at Long Beach and Portland, he soon found it more practical to use plants in Michigan and Ohio until he abandoned the business in 1955.⁶³ Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler continued to concentrate operations in the Middle West while maintaining assembly plants in California and on smaller scales in Kansas, Oregon, Washington, and Utah; they closed most of these in the early 1980s as sales of wholly American-made cars declined. Within the next decade only two plants operated jointly with Japanese manufacturers survived.⁶⁴ Industrial demand for iron and steel remained concentrated east of the Mississippi River. While mountain and Pacific states (other than Wyoming) continued to grow, produce, and consume beyond national rates, with more than a fifth of American population, on the eve of the turndown in manufacturing for military uses in the 1990s they consumed less than a seventeenth of the scrap and pig iron.⁶⁵ They used steel chiefly in con-

130

Economic Growth from the 1940s

struction. Western steelmakers accounted for an insignificant share of automobiles assembled on the coast—about 6 percent in 1964—most of the parts being shipped from the Middle West.⁶⁶ Other extractive industries that had had large and even dominant shares of national output continued to produce more, some so much and so profitably as to account for booms over entire states. But in the long run, along with agriculture, they accounted for less employment over extended periods and over the West as a whole despite sharp surges during short intervals when they expanded into new areas. Wyoming led in opening oil deposits for two decades after the war, wells drilled in the 1950s increasing by over three times over the 1940s; production more than doubled between 1950 and 1959 while leveling off or declining in the Southwest.⁶⁷ But as development stabilized employment declined. Texan construction workers moved farther north when still greater increases followed in Alaska. Value of oil and natural gas from the Swanson River field south of Anchorage on the Kenai Peninsula, opened in 1957, and from offshore in Cook Inlet shortly surpassed previous records in gold, having just about matched fish and wood products before 1963.⁶⁸ Then exploitation of the fields at Prudhoe Bay on the north slope, estimated to be half again as large as the east Texas field, which had been the largest known in North America,⁶⁹ and construction of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline System (1974–77) revolutionized the Alaskan economy. In three years oil and gas formed over half (55.1 percent) the gross product of the state, against a twelfth in 1973.⁷⁰ The population grew by nearly a third over the decade, Anchorage more than twice as it managed the bonanza while tankers collected the oil at the southern terminus of the pipeline around the Kenai Peninsula at Valdez, on Prince William Sound. Meanwhile developers in the Rocky Mountain states, which like Alaska had begun as mining camps but then harvested other bounties, rushed to exploit other minerals newly in demand. For more than a decade coal rivaled oil as a source of additional energy and focal point of local development. Its prospects had seemed poor when the Union Pacific Railroad, which pioneered production for locomotive fuel in the 1860s and for nearly a century dominated it, converted to diesel power after the war, closing its last mine at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1962.⁷¹ Then demand for low-sulfur western coal to generate electric power opened far larger markets. Between 1960 and 1970 production in Wyoming more than tripled, to the ranges of the 1920s; by 1980 it was over nine times the wartime peak, by 1990 over eighteen times,⁷² filling unit trains that shuttled between the mines and enormous generators nearby and in the Middle West. The Jim Bridger generator, built in the middle 1970s near Rock Springs, was the tallest building in the state, its chimneys rising 500 feet.⁷³ Booms in oil

Economic Growth from the 1940s

131

Fig. 5.4. Oil and gas wells in early Wyoming. The petroleum industry in the northern West never rivaled in size those in Texas, Oklahoma, and California, but the Wyoming field was an important part of that state’s economy. Later, oil and boom towns and the quick influx of mushrooming, disruptive populations in Wyoming led to what was termed the “Gillette Syndrome.” Here primitive gas and oil wells are pictured near Douglas, Wyoming. From the J. E. Stimson Collection, Wyoming State Archives, Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources, Cheyenne. Stimson negative 819.

and coal in the 1970s brought pressures on housing as extreme as those near wartime shipyards but farther from urban amenities and in a severe climate. Two counties much more than doubled in population, Converse (Douglas) and Sweetwater (Rock Springs and Green River); two others almost doubled, Campbell (Gillette) and Platte (Wheatland); and in twenty years, 1960–80, one of these, Campbell, more than quadrupled.⁷⁴ Over two-fifths of the inhabitants of Gillette lived in trailers, others in tents (1974); a psychologist described a “Gillette Syndrome” of disposition to alcoholism, accidents, absenteeism, depression, divorce, and delinquency as concomitant of marginal living conditions.⁷⁵ Prospects of shortages and increases in prices of oil from 1973 prompted major producers to move into coal and uranium and to prepare to recover alternative

132

Economic Growth from the 1940s

hydrocarbon fuels. A boom in the Colorado Rockies echoed the beginnings of the state in rushes after gold and silver. By leasing tracts of deposits of oil shale in northwestern Colorado and adjacent parts of Utah and Wyoming and then financing the Synthetic Fuels Corporation (1980), which granted subsidies to major projects at Parachute, and promising further support to come, the government sanctioned a fever of speculation. Exxon Corporation, which had already established a nuclear subsidiary, announced that in developing shale at Colony, northeast of Grand Junction, it would build 150 plants with as many as 180,000 employees in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties (population in 1970, 19,663) over thirty years. Denver evoked comparison with Houston and Calgary as a new high-energy capital, especially as headquarters for subsidiaries of major oil companies that prepared to mine and refine substitutes for imported petroleum products. A developer estimated (1980) that energy companies leased over half the office space in the city. “We are seeing a decade of change take place every week,” Governor Richard Lamm observed.⁷⁶ Much of the boom in energy collapsed faster than it had developed. Shale plants were still chiefly in the planning stages when the price of oil peaked after more than tripling in three years and began a decline that continued into the 1990s, making them uneconomic. (Retail prices of gasoline in constant dollars had risen by a third in thirty-three years, 1947–80; then they fell by over half in eight.) Exxon abruptly announced that it would terminate the project at Colony, where a town of 17,000 had arisen in less than two years; all work stopped five days later (May 1982). That summer it also sold its interest in uranium properties in southwestern Utah.⁷⁷ A shortage of office space in Denver became a glut.⁷⁸ Booms in western coal lasted longer, sustained by demand for thermal generation as well as temporarily for gasification projects that the Synthetic Fuels Administration promoted by guaranteeing prices. But because highly mechanized strip-mining on gargantuan scales had replaced underground operations in Wyoming as in other western bituminous states, employment at the mines in the 1980s and 1990s ran below the highest levels of the 1920s despite recordmaking production,⁷⁹ while populations in boom areas declined with work on new installations. After increasing in population by over two-fifths in the 1970s, in the 1980s Wyoming barely maintained itself, falling behind Alaska to smallest of the fifty and leading the mountain states in rate of emigration.⁸⁰ The state of Montana had attended more to protests that strip-mining threatened renewable resources on which more dependable forms of development depended, from agriculture to the tourist trade, but more than before Wyomingites looked for alternatives to mineral bonanzas. Casper had become the largest city of Wyoming during the 1970s as it presided over development in oil, coal, and

Economic Growth from the 1940s

133

uranium; between 1980 and 1990 it dropped back to second, losing population over twice as fast as the state. Entrepreneurs from other states moved into cheap industrial space that the declining oil industry had vacated.⁸¹ The boom that oil on the north slope of Alaska ignited lasted longer, sustained before tankers first took cargo in 1977 by construction of the pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. The windfall of payments that oil companies made to the state for leases prompted legislators to repeal the state income tax (1981) and the next year to set up a Permanent Fund that paid out much of it in dividends to residents. Although the price of oil had begun to decline and with it collections of taxes, for more than three years the state continued to spend lavishly on capital projects. Then, in one year, expenditures dropped by nearly half. The largest contributor to growth in individual incomes in the 1980s was expenditures by government, including dividends from the Permanent Fund, $1.7 billions in 1982–88, which for many families exceeded payments in state and local taxes.⁸² The one state where the United States government decisively affected the economy after the war as employer rather than as purchaser and contractor was Alaska, where it accounted for over three-fifths of employment in the 1950s. Before large-scale development of oil fields in the 1970s, the economic base of the state narrowed while population and income increased. Spending for relief and reconstruction after the earthquake of March 1964 extended the government’s role almost until influxes of capital followed strikes of oil on the North Slope four years later, encouraged by the generous terms that national and state governments offered. As high wages attracted immigrants, increases in population thereafter made further records: over a third in the 1960s, nearly a third in the 1970s, over two-fifths in the 1980s. The troubles of fossil fuel industries made hopes for other economic bases especially urgent. Well before automobile makers reconcentrated in the Middle West, technologically more complex manufactures promised to lead and transform the American economy as automobiles had done from the 1920s into the 1960s. In their early stages they were heavily products of military demand. Although with the end of the Second World War in 1945 aviation lost most of the captive military market on which it had grown to industrial sector of first rank during the war, its prospects remained much brighter than they had been earlier. As airlines inherited talent prepared to fly planes, manufacturers inherited plants and talent prepared to make them, concentrated disproportionately in western states where the largest of them kept their headquarters while reducing output elsewhere, and where public support ran well beyond mere openness to novel and speculative undertakings to such tangible assistance as providing airports

134

Economic Growth from the 1940s

and other supporting services. Employment in airframe manufacturing in California, Washington, and Kansas rose from 27.3 percent of the national total in 1944 to 43.5 percent in 1950, close to what it had been in the 1930s.⁸³ Small light aircraft for “personal flying” accounted for much of a brief postwar boom in civilian sales, promising to justify hopes that Americans would take to family planes in the 1950s as they had taken to family cars in the 1920s. But the models offered were both much more expensive and much less adaptable for general use than most automobiles had been. Sales dropped sharply after peaking briefly in 1946, exceeding half as much only once in the next half century (1978).⁸⁴ Fearful of losing one of their best prospects for economic growth, civic leaders asked the government to give manufacturers time to reconvert to more marketable lines of production before settling accounts for operations during the war.⁸⁵ Talk of adapting to predominantly civilian demand become moot as military orders revived. In the decade after 1947, when Congress established the air force as a separate branch, the armed services prepared to operate at distances and speeds that new technology in weaponry and flight permitted, increasing what they spent on matériel faster than what they spent on personnel, and on aerospace equipment faster than on other kinds of military procurement.⁸⁶ The burden of military operations in Asia shifted correspondingly to air power, the weight of explosives delivered by planes and missiles as combat renewed increasing from slightly over a fourth of totals by all means in Atlantic and Pacific theaters combined in 1941–45 to nearly half that in Southeast Asia by 1966–71.⁸⁷ New wars and programs of armament that supported them depended heavily on western factories, bases, and rear services. Communities recently demobilizing took their cues again from military demand. At Tulsa, which had lived chiefly by oil since the first wells nearby came through in 1901, the plant built for Douglas Aircraft in 1940–42 and closed in 1946 reopened in 1951.⁸⁸ Over much of the next four decades, before McDonnell Douglas prepared to close it in 1993 and then merged with Boeing, more Tulsans worked in aerospace industries than in petroleum, and the character of the city changed with them. As the armed forces revived and refitted, the West led in supplying the fastestgrowing and technologically most sophisticated parts of them and of agencies with similar and related missions, such as the National Aviation and Space Administration (NASA), established in 1958. The Pacific Coast states, with a tenth to a seventh of national population, had about a third or more of contracts in missiles and space systems and a fifth or more of all military prime contracts from the 1950s.⁸⁹ In the 1980s nearly two-thirds of contracts for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) went to seven western states, over two-fifths of

Economic Growth from the 1940s

135

them to California.⁹⁰ Contractors for missiles and spacecraft clustered around major installations for military aviation and NASA in the vicinities of Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, Phoenix, and Colorado Springs.⁹¹ Aerospace technology had been distinctively southern Californian from before the war, when the California Institute of Technology opened the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory to military personnel and aircraft manufacturers, at a time when eastern engineers still considered rocketry cousin to science fiction, “Buck Rogers stuff.” Shortly after the United States entered the Second World War, the first director of the laboratory and his associates incorporated to develop rockets for the air force (1942), joining a growing cluster of aerospace contractors east of Los Angeles.⁹² By the 1980s, when a retired air force general had become director of the laboratory, it threatened to overshadow mainline academic operations at the university.⁹³ Although military contracts and sales were smaller both absolutely and relative to national and regional economies after the war than they had been during it, claiming smaller shares of employment, capital expenditures, and gross product, they had changed so much in kind as to have more lasting effects. Making family cars, tractors, and transport planes had been enough like making tanks, jeeps, and bombers so that converting from civilian to military production in 1940–42 demanded changes in scale and pace above all else, unity of purpose in wartime easing personal adjustments from assembly line to boardroom and college campus. Reversing the process when the war ended, reconverting to meet civilian demand, at first seemed practicable, and occasionally it was. At Seattle, a Boeing engineer who had designed B-29 and B-52 bombers for the army air force became chief project engineer for the B-707 passenger transport in 1952–4.⁹⁴ But civilian and military requirements soon diverged both technologically and psychologically, producers of military matériel relying so much on returns assured for confining themselves to specifications under contract that they lost other markets and interest in competing for them. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, expenditures for missiles and spacecraft exceeded those for aircraft in both Pacific and mountain states—in mountain states by more than twice.⁹⁵ Within four years (1988–92) losses of employment on them in California, where by then more than half of it was concentrated, were over three times losses on aircraft and parts, accentuating already serious economic decline in the southern counties.⁹⁶ Within about the same time, from the beginning of war with Germany and Japan in 1937–41 to the end of prospects for war with the Soviet Union in 1985– 91, uses of technology developed for military use proliferated far beyond aircraft, spacecraft, and missiles, with large consequences for the West. Projects of de-

136

Economic Growth from the 1940s

signing and testing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and of producing the plutonium used in it at Hanford ultimately were most visible in that dropping the first bombs ended the war with Japan. But developing microwave technology probably contributed more to winning a war that was moving into the air, as scientists who elected to continue working on it, rather than go to Los Alamos, later concluded;⁹⁷ and soon it contributed more to restructuring and strengthening national and western economies when the war ended and to excelling in industrial rivalries between them. Building on work done in the 1930s especially at Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bell Telephone Laboratories, the principal project based on microwaves aimed at improving newly developed systems of detecting distant metallic objects called radar. From before the new microwave technology became available, atomic bombs and other weapons, the aircraft that carried them, cryptography, radar itself, and other principal instruments of military power increasingly depended on processing electronic data faster and in greater volume than had been possible before. The first digital computers, developed in Great Britain and the United States shortly before the war, promised to meet some such needs despite costs far beyond ordinary civilian means for the thousands of vacuum tubes and the space and maintenance required to modify or rectify current used in them and other electronic equipment. Potential nonmilitary uses for rectifiers more manageable and affordable than vacuum tubes were so extensive, especially in communications, that devising alternative technology had high priority at Bell Laboratories. Two years after the war, a team of physicists there built on work done on semiconductors used for electromagnetic impulses in radar to develop the transistor, which was smaller and more durable, consumed less power, and radiated less heat than the vacuum-tube rectifiers then used in most electronic equipment. At gathering speed over the following decades, applications and extensions of the transistor revolutionized the possibilities of electronic products and processes. As the steam engine freed manufacturing from access to falling water and the dynamo from access to coal, the transistor and circuitry incorporating it freed fast-growing enterprises from requirements in power, space, labor, raw materials, and transportation that often exceeded even military resources. The term “Second California Gold Rush” seemed to describe the influx of population to the urban centers where shipyards, airplane factories, and military installations were concentrated during the Second World War both because it proceeded so rapidly and because it broke so strikingly with prevailing ways of life. Orchards still dominated the landscapes and economy of the Santa Clara Valley when the war ended; into the 1950s the largest industrial employers of metropolitan San Jose canned fruit and equipped canners and growers. Yet in

Economic Growth from the 1940s

137

essential respects, both complexes of economic and social change were natural products of resources and purposes that had approached critical mass when what proved to be precipitating events brought them to fruition. As the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill in 1848 found the speculators who led in the rush that followed already assembled offstage at San Francisco Bay, the technological breakthroughs in the uses of semiconductors that the transistor and applications of it represented found fertile seedbed in the resources in scientific research and education, venture capital, and residential amenities concentrated in and near the same area. When William B. Shockley, leader of the team that invented the transistor at Bell Laboratories, established the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory at Palo Alto in 1956 to develop applications of it, the principal demand for them at the high prices that transistors then commanded was still military. Shockley had neighbors in privately operated electronic research and development alongside the campus of the university, but with two exceptions their plants were still small, their employees at most in the hundreds. The Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, quartered nearby at Moffett Field, financed most early research in semiconductors, some of it through grants and contracts at Stanford. Wider uses of semiconductors rapidly developed when a group that included a recent associate of Shockley devised integrated circuits, or microchips (1958– 61), which were simpler to use, more reliable, and capable of faster and more complex functions in less space than earlier forms. As improved microchips with larger capacity came on the market and their prices fell sharply in the 1960s and after, they became bases for complexes of new industries that transformed San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley as much as the aircraft and aerospace industries transformed southern California. Previously among the least industrialized metropolitan areas of California, they led the state in rate of employment in manufacturing in the 1970s, and in the most sophisticated genres.⁹⁸ For more than two decades new industries that depended on semiconductors promised to transcend the limits of previous western industrial development. Apart from motion pictures, airplanes, and a few processed foods—even as copper, oil, and coal succeeded to gold and silver, wool, beef, wheat, and timber to furs—western exports had been not only predominantly extractive but so massive relative to their value that marketing them depended on declining costs of transportation. The sudden development of products whose value was almost irrelevant to their mass brought some of the hitherto least industrialized parts of the West economically abreast and ahead of parts that recently had seemed more profitable and dynamic. The journalistic term “Silicon Valley” represented some of its most obvious immunities. As one of the two most abundant elements in the

138

Economic Growth from the 1940s

earth’s crust, silicon was inexhaustible, and the quantities of it that went into circuits and the masses of the circuits and of most products built around them were so slight that costs of transporting it and them were inconsequential. Not only over the American West, where promoters in areas whose attractions depended importantly on natural environment had dreamed of smokeless industries, but in industrially older sections and abroad, politicians, economists, educators, and industrialists looked to the valley as a model of economic growth, trying to replicate the conditions of research, innovative talent, and investment that seemed to explain it.⁹⁹ In the 1970s and into the 1980s employment and earnings in semiconductor products and components repeatedly set new records as uses for them developed and increases in volume drove down their prices, while employment and earnings in major sectors of agriculture, mining, and wood products industries declined. The introduction of the microprocessor (1971), an integrated circuit capable of performing all functions of the central processing unit of a computer, reduced circuitry, hitherto practicable only in large laboratories and major industrial and military applications, to the dimensions and costs of a toy. Electronic games, the first of which appeared the next year (1972), became so popular that the U.S. surgeon general warned that spending too much time at them could endanger health; financial journalists predicted returns approaching those on motion pictures.¹⁰⁰ More versatile applications shortly promised to match the popularity of the minicomputer (1965) and the hand calculator (1971), which had rapidly invaded offices where the most sophisticated equipment had been the electric typewriter. Describing a low-priced kit for a small free-standing computer or microcomputer named after a star featured in current cinematic fantasy, Altair, Popular Electronics proclaimed in January 1975, “The era of the computer in every home—a favorite topic among science-fiction writers—has arrived.”¹⁰¹ Although the term “personal computer” soon became generic, the announcement was premature. Hobbyists capable of assembling their own kits tinkered on the fringes of the electronic industries, but their aggregate demand was miniscule. Then the next year two young members of a computer club at Palo Alto assembled fifty computers from parts that they paid for by selling an old car and a calculator and delivered them to a retailer. Choosing “Apple” as a “friendly” name to make their product seem accessible,¹⁰² they called it a “domesticated” computer.¹⁰³ Within months, established manufacturers of scientific, industrial, and office equipment offered competitive versions. But sales of Apple Computer multiplied,¹⁰⁴ and by 1985 it had become one of nine electronic manufacturers in northern Santa Clara County and another just beyond the county line, all among the five hundred

Economic Growth from the 1940s

139

largest American corporations. Until 1961 there had been none there, until 1976 no more than three. Six of the ten were no more than sixteen years old, only two preceded the transistor.¹⁰⁵ Profits soon supported personal spending on fancies as flamboyant and unconventional as underwriting rock music festivals¹⁰⁶ on scales new to an area where the affluent had traditionally indulged themselves more privately. The article in Popular Electronics had prompted two other young entrepreneurs, Paul G. Allen and William H. Gates, to advertise a programming language that would make personal computers more than personal indulgences. Selling versions of it to manufacturers and adopting the name Microsoft, they relocated to a suburb of Seattle, where they had worked on computers since they were in school. Under contract with International Business Machines Corporation in 1980–81, they developed the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MSDOS), which soon defined both most personal computers and the programs used in them. Microsoft became the leading American manufacturer of computer software.¹⁰⁷ A broker estimated that one in five of Microsoft’s American employees had become a millionaire by exercising options to buy stock. Gates led individual Americans in personal wealth (by 1995 private citizens in the world).¹⁰⁸ The four other far western billionaires were Allen; William R. Hewlett and David Packard, graduates of Stanford who had begun developing measuring instruments and other electronic equipment near the campus before the war; and Philip H. Knight, who built an empire in athletic gear and outdoor wear at Beaverton, near Portland, on a running shoe made by his track coach at the University of Oregon.¹⁰⁹ All pioneered in new types of enterprise, and all had located their businesses in the West for no more compelling reason than that they were westerners. Some of the fastest-growing companies and species of new electronic industries soon faltered. Revenues from electronic games peaked in 1982–83.¹¹⁰ Growth in demand for home computers slackened. In 1985 Apple reported its first loss,¹¹¹ and its shares of markets declined despite successive reorganizations through the 1990s as formerly loyal users feared that its products would become incompatible orphans. Problems in marketing like those that plagued Apple coincided with high costs for controlling pollution for some types of production based on semiconductors, especially in manufacturing silicon chips, which had developed by the early 1980s. In 1983–87 firms in Santa Clara County discharged thousands of employees.¹¹² By 1984 Japanese manufacturers had claimed more than half the American market in memory chips, as earlier they had claimed markets in household appliances, calculators, and television sets.¹¹³ By the early 1990s American producers were gaining relative to Japanese over widening sectors,¹¹⁴

140

Economic Growth from the 1940s

Fig. 5.5. Computers and the West. Computers and other similar forms of technology became increasingly important in the West from the Second World War onward. Bill Gates (above right) and Paul Allen (above left) were founders of what later became known as the Microsoft Corporation. Photo courtesy Microsoft Corporation.

including domestic markets for household products, but electronic industries as a whole remained more vulnerable and volatile than they had seemed a few years earlier. Serious trouble extended beyond highly speculative beginners to firms that had invested substantially in research and development while dominating major lines of standard equipment, by the early 1990s for a few years to one of the oldest and largest of them, International Business Machines, which had had a plant at San Jose since 1952, before the transistor. In good times as well as bad, the trajectories of electronics both resembled and differed from those of other western enterprises, including extractive industries dependent on highly leveraged commitments in debt and costs of shipping. More than any other western industry in the century and any other large industry anywhere from the 1960s, the American semiconductor industry led in both technology and pace of growth. Economists compared it to steel in earlier times for its driving role in the national economy, integrated circuits to petroleum as building blocks of new industrial development.¹¹⁵ While mining, wood products, and agriculture also depended on innovative technology, the purposes of such extractive enterprises were not to establish wholly new industries or to develop new products but mainly to compete with established producers elsewhere by adapting to shortages of labor, by reducing bulky and refractory raw materials to

Economic Growth from the 1940s

141

more marketable forms, and by balancing costs of shipping over long distances. All increased productivity impressively. But ranges of returns on innovation in most extractive industries tended to be smaller on average; markets for timber, copper, wheat, and fruit did not grow when producers cut prices as markets for electronic devices did, especially after they incorporated integrated circuits. Production of sawn timber on the West Coast reached about triple that at the beginning of the century by 1959, but the national total fell below levels of 1906–16.¹¹⁶ As builders learned to substitute new materials and use old ones more efficiently, so that consumption per capita declined, the best hopes of producers lay in controlling costs, developing new products, and invading midwestern and eastern markets that later they lost to southern competitors. The shift of wheat westward lasted as the shift of wood products did not, harvests in Pacific and mountain states more than doubling in 1900–21, nearly tripling in 1900–41,¹¹⁷ and making new records thereafter as Californians raised less grain and livestock, more fruits and vegetables. But sales and prices fluctuated widely, depending increasingly on exchange rates, domestic and foreign crops, and governmental policies as more of the American crop went to exports. Domestic demand for wheat lagged only somewhat less than demand for wood products, consumption of flour per capita dropping by about half by 1970.¹¹⁸ Sales of canned fruit and vegetables also declined as sales of fresh and frozen food increased; over two-fifths of cannery workers in California lost their jobs when many canneries closed in 1975–83, and others went on strike when operators proposed to reduce wages to remain in business.¹¹⁹ More than most of their predecessors, semiconductor industries changed both structure and location. With few exceptions, miners and smelters, loggers and wood processors, farmers and canners concentrated both domestic and foreign operations in relatively few and restricted areas, close to the resources they depended on; they could not easily locate elsewhere. Motion picture producers and aircraft manufacturers enjoyed new freedom of choice, seeking mainly affordable space as they began. But at first even space was a minor consideration for the new electronics manufacturers; although they required large amounts of water and power for some operations, in general their physical requirements were minimal. Major firms originated and maintained headquarters in cities as inexperienced in industrial production as Palo Alto and its neighbors, and like aerospace industries, some chiefly because their founders had happened to be there. As they expanded, most semiconductor firms dispersed operations widely, especially in manufacturing. Unlike industries based on resources of mine, field, and forest, they could locate without considering costs of transporting products

142

Economic Growth from the 1940s

that seemed to increase in value as they declined in mass. They first expanded abroad primarily to penetrate markets in western Europe and east Asia: IBM had established a subsidiary in Japan that began making punch cards in 1939 after the Japanese government stopped allowing the company to import them.¹²⁰ But by the 1960s and 1970s firms both established plants overseas and bought components from foreign as well as American manufacturers to reduce costs of production. Hewlett Packard (HP) pioneered by establishing an assembly plant in West Germany in 1959, and Fairchild Semiconductor one at Hong Kong in 1962–63; others soon followed suit, keeping design and the more demanding processes of fabrication at plants in the United States while delegating routine assembly and packaging to plants in eastern Asia, the Philippines, and Latin America.¹²¹ Savings in labor far exceeded costs of exporting silicon wafers bearing large numbers of integrated circuits and then importing chips made from them. Within the United States, firms expanded in different ways. As operations outgrew original sites and administrative frameworks, they tended to locate units emphasizing research and development close to universities with substantial scientific and engineering programs and to the cultural and recreational amenities that scientists and engineers valued. In contrast to manufacturers that went to Colorado in the 1940s and into the 1950s chiefly for the sake of cheap, nonunion labor and local markets, when Hewlett Packard, which became the largest western semiconductor firm, located its first plant outside of California at Loveland in 1959, a prime consideration was proximity to Colorado State University; three years later it added a plant at Colorado Springs, “Newport of the Rockies,” which already had a considerable population of engineers attached to adjacent military and aerospace installations, but only after the governor agreed to put a branch of the University of Colorado there. Similar considerations affected decisions of HP and other firms to build secondary plants in Oregon (where Tektronix had pioneered in 1946 at Beaverton, west of Portland), Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah, well before cities, counties, and states began trying to attract them by offering improved sites and reductions in taxes.¹²² Yet the semiconductor industry was never fully footloose. However organized, like the film and aerospace industries, on simpler levels like the garment trades, within the United States it concentrated geographically more rather than less than industries that depended on natural resources. As technology became more complex, costs of equipment rose spectacularly; even firms that did most of their own manufacturing especially valued easy access to suppliers.¹²³ While large electronics firms continued to disperse routine operations simply for lack of space, in 1990 three-fifths of those with more than 500 employees were in

Economic Growth from the 1940s

143

Santa Clara County and just across the county line.¹²⁴ They included Hewlett Packard, which had surpassed Weyerhaeuser (1984) and then Georgia-Pacific (1990) in value of sales.¹²⁵ At the next census of manufactures (1992) employment in electronic equipment in the county was nearly a third of the total in the United States, more than in any other state.¹²⁶ The spectacular growth of sophisticated industry where recently there had been only orchards and residential suburbs prompted promoters and investors elsewhere to consider whether they might assemble bases of comparable development in their own communities. The Santa Clara Valley, an English geographer wrote (1983), “has brought forth a new economic Holy Grail, of industrial renaissance through high-technology job creation. Every city in the advanced industrial world, it now seems, is struggling to open its science park as the answer to decaying steel mills and rusting automobile plants.” Accounts of beginnings featured Frederick Terman, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, who had begun encouraging students to go into business in the 1930s.¹²⁷ After he served as director of the Radio Research Laboratory at Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the war, he and his students took grants from the Office of Naval Research to work further on microwave electronics, which in addition to its military uses was becoming a focus of electronics industry around the campus. Some former students leased land in the Stanford Industrial Park, which Terman persuaded the university to establish in 1948–51 to accommodate firms exploiting new technology. Forty years later the ninety tenants of the park had more than twice as many employees as the university had students. They included emerging ventures that former students had established, divisions of long-established firms that as early as the 1950s had located near major military and NASA installations to take advantage of demand for electronic matériel, and offshoots of both. (But most of the other twenty-two western universities that had opened research parks after that model in the 1980s attracted few or no tenants.)¹²⁸ As a group high-technology firms in the valley maintained connections as well as proximity to Stanford and its neighbor, the University of California across the bay at Berkeley, giving employees time to enroll, hiring their graduates, and contributing to basic and contract research at them; thus even while seldom looking to faculty members for leadership, they justified much of Terman’s vision of partnership in an extended university community.¹²⁹ While clustering where they could maintain useful connections with military customers, some of the more innovative firms sought to maximize creativity by developing atmospheres of quite unmilitary informality, building plants that looked more like university buildings than ordinary factories. Some organized in semiautonomous units that recalled academic rather than industrial tradi-

144

Economic Growth from the 1940s

tions, or at least decentralized, as IBM, first large electronic employer in Santa Clara County, did when it addressed losses it suffered in the 1980s. The campuslike informality of Apple Computer in its early years was notorious; a journalist called it “the corporation as commune.”¹³⁰ At the frontiers of developing technology, competing firms watched each other jealously, contesting patent rights in the courts and complaining of raids on personnel. But they also valued the free flows and exchanges of ideas and skills in concentrations of enterprise and talent like the Santa Clara Valley, which a trade journal called “a technological critical mass of ideas and businesses,”¹³¹ as well as convenient access to buyers and suppliers. Technically important advances so often came out of small companies, and so much of the best talent left established organizations for them, that profiles of semiconductor firms routinely showed the corporate antecedents of their leaders. Often they were willing to take their chances in new ventures partly because as technology became more complex, doing everything under one corporate roof lost the advantages it had had in older industries, as in the metallurgical sector. Both small and large manufacturers depended on merchant producers that specialized in components, initially primarily to lower their costs but increasingly to draw on technology that they did not choose to wait to develop independently, whether by buying products or services from others, as IBM did in contracting for both microprocessor and operating system for its first personal computers, or by collaborating with suppliers to the point of undertaking joint ventures. As innovative technology blurred distinctions between hardware and software in the shape of operating systems and programs that Gates and others began developing in part to substitute for equipment that they did not have access to, giving rise to the term “virtual computer,” by the 1990s the term “virtual companies” described producers that blurred distinctions between customers, suppliers, and competitors, delegating manufacturing, assembling, and packaging in order to concentrate on design. In many “corporations without walls,” as a management consultant who helped organize some of them observed, the employees had never met in person.¹³² Even competing firms recognized the advantages of fluid relationships both intercorporate and internal that recalled the informality of craft-guild communities.¹³³ Although the largest western semiconductor firms surpassed principal firms in extractive industries in average sales and earnings,¹³⁴ relatively few of them greatly surpassed their neighbors in the marketplace or seemed altogether secure in standing. Having retained rights to the operating system and the microprocessor that they licensed IBM to use, Microsoft and Intel went on to lead in markets for computers, Intel accounting for half the income of the 150 largest

Economic Growth from the 1940s

145

public companies in the valley twelve years later (1993);¹³⁵ but they were exceptional. No one firm dominated the area as Anaconda had dominated Butte and its neighbors, Phelps Dodge, Bisbee; Kennecott, Bingham Canyon; and Boeing, Seattle. A local trade directory (1984) listed 2,223 electronics companies.¹³⁶ Many were short-lived, but large size was both less advantageous and less common in electronics than in wood products, minerals, and airframes. Despite the spectacular growth and resources of such firms as Microsoft, their authority differed qualitatively from that of the industrial giants of the first decades of the century, resting on continuing primacy in process rather than on control of physical resources and corners in commodities. Neither customers nor competitors nor aspiring lieutenants had to submit to them as Daniel Jackling at Utah Copper had submitted to Kennecott and the Guggenheims, finding alternative suppliers or going into business on their own far more easily than in any of the major basic extractive industries. Founders of innovative hightechnology firms in Santa Clara County characteristically drew much of their initial capital from personal savings and from venture capitalists in the area, including some with similar backgrounds.¹³⁷ Such arrangements helped them to maintain the independence for which many of them had left larger firms. Thus even when corporate consolidation directed by outsiders ran rife nationally, and seldom more than when it harvested the bonanzas of western ores, streams, and forests, much emerging western enterprise could escape it. In the early stages of developing new electronic technology, public and especially military patronage was crucial. Some kinds of research exceeded the resources of academic and corporate laboratories, attracting physicists around San Francisco Bay into alliances with government as the bevatron (Berkeley, 1954) and the linear accelerator (Stanford, 1957) followed the synchrocyclotron (Berkeley, 1946). But by the later 1960s, as semiconductor firms developed civilian markets, they relied on their own resources and private investment for research and development more than on contracts and grants.¹³⁸ Although as the war ended westerners reclaimed the civilian markets that, with other Americans, they had abandoned when it began, for more than three decades military spending was the largest source of outside (exogenous) income in the Pacific and mountain areas, leading in Alaska, Hawaii, California, and Utah. By the early 1950s concentration of military prime contracts in the Pacific states was over a third greater than it had been in 1941–45, by the early 1960s over twice as great. By the time of the major buildup of forces in Vietnam in the 1960s, they had over a fifth of American military personnel though only an eighth of national population; the mountain states, with about one-twenty-fifth of the population, had about one-fifteenth.¹³⁹

146

Economic Growth from the 1940s

But for the most part, substantial economic growth and large and continuing immigration followed spending on matériel much more than on personnel. Alaska followed more the pattern of early settlement when the mere presence of military forces was a major factor in frontier economies in that most of what it got came in the form of payrolls.¹⁴⁰ In the 1950s the four counties of California where manufacturers had the largest contracts with military agencies were also those where nearly two-thirds of the new residents of the state settled. Los Angeles County led the state in both of those respects, the nation in addition to population.¹⁴¹ Californians and their neighbors learned to watch appropriations and contracts as they once had watched rainfall and frost. Businessmen and politicians developed close and active symbiotic relations with legislators and administrators who controlled them, importantly affecting how local and regional economies grew and prospered.¹⁴² That governmental expenditures were not unmixed blessings long had been variously evident, if only because government could take away as well as give, and usually attached conditions when it gave. Reductions and prospects of further reductions in military contracts when Soviet control in eastern Europe weakened and then collapsed in 1989–91 aggravated general economic decline already under way, financial crises in state and local governments, and the accumulation of enormous private debt based on easy credit and on expectations that values and profits would continue to rise so much as to erase most of it. In California, which led the country in military procurement contracts, worth over twice as much as in the second state, Texas, they accounted for nearly a sixth of employment in manufacturing (1990).¹⁴³ Yet even before purchases of military equipment and supplies reached the high levels of the 1980s, some major contractors looked to civilian markets at least to balance fluctuations in them. Boeing employed so much of the labor force of Seattle that reducing orders for military aircraft and abandoning plans to subsidize a supersonic transport plane threw the city into depression in 1969– 71. But the company already depended more on civilian than military sales as airlines took long-distance travelers away from ships and railroads and bought chiefly American aircraft to carry them. When the government began in the 1990s to curtail programs of rearmament adopted during the 1980s, other contractors had few alternatives; some seemed as unprepared to adapt to the realities of civilian marketplaces as the obsolete industrial enterprises of eastern Europe. Boeing stationed recruiters at Long Beach to interview newly unemployed Californians interested in moving north.¹⁴⁴ After depending at first on orders from government, manufacturers of new electronic equipment soon had found other markets. In the 1950s and into the

Economic Growth from the 1940s

147

1960s semiconductors went chiefly into systems of guidance for putting missiles, satellites, and manned vehicles into space. Then, as civilian uses developed, sales to governmental agencies fell from nearly half the total in 1960 to less than a tenth in the early 1970s.¹⁴⁵ The government continued to spend massively in the West, particularly in California,¹⁴⁶ and so to feed the economy by transferring income and attracting population from the rest of the country, but it contributed less to innovation with applications beyond increasingly specialized military requirements. Initially it may have stimulated industrial activity by drawing brains into scientific and engineering employment as well as by bringing prices of components down to levels that made nonmilitary uses more practicable, but as physicists who opposed funding manned exploration of space charged, soon it competed for engineering talent and other resources more than it developed them.¹⁴⁷ Thus in addition to having no contingency plans for alternative development ready when it reduced aerospace contracts with firms that typically had never learned to compete in the general marketplace, it also may have made redevelopment more difficult by diverting and absorbing some of its essential factors. Well before the crises of the 1990s, the structure of the electronics industry and its returns within the United States had become as fluid as the markets that domestic and foreign producers competed in over international boundaries. Pioneer semiconductor firms as a group so concentrated research and development at their principal plants that as early as 1960 production workers constituted well under half of all employees in electronic components and equipment in Santa Clara County, by 1970 just over two of five.¹⁴⁸ Wages of production workers in semiconductor industries, almost none of them unionized and disproportionately minority and female, were substantially lower than wages of workers in electric equipment generally and other fields (in 1977 a fifth less than in all manufacturing nationally); wages of assembly-line employees of merchant producers were lowest of all. By the 1980s small plants with heavily immigrant workforces making printed circuits and other components clustered in Orange County and the San Fernando Valley much as comparable shops in the garment trades had clustered in the older industrial district of south-central Los Angeles,¹⁴⁹ while higher paid employees commuted from as far as Riverside and San Bernardino counties to Irvine and Newport Beach. The consequences of innovative economic development had seemed lucrative without limits when aerospace factories first displaced citrus groves around Los Angeles and electronic laboratories prune and apricot orchards around San Jose, and systems of irrigation intended for truck farming watered lawns and filled swimming pools at Phoenix and Tucson. But industrial ascendancy re-

148

Economic Growth from the 1940s

peatedly gave way to international competition, boom to depression. Losses in aircraft and semiconductors could be as sharp as losses in wheat and livestock, leadership as vulnerable. Although by 1990 the inhabitants of the eighteen states were almost as many as the inhabitants of all forty-four had been a century before and far more diversified occupationally, constituting a domestic market so large that they produced relatively less for exportation, they still depended heavily on the rest of the country and the rest of the world for markets and supplies. They still lived much by unexpected fluctuations in sales at substantial distances, including sales of goods that potential buyers could buy elsewhere as well as goods that they could do without. Much of the West meanwhile continued to depend on nonrenewable resources: on old-growth timber, on mineral deposits, on aquifers. The urban nuclei about which new industries clustered thereby in various senses recovered their early status as links in the opportunities and hazards of a fluid and precariously based international economy.

6

The Urban Occupation of the West: Rails, Roads, and Cities

Geography profoundly affected changing western economies throughout the century, as before, both as attraction and as limitation. Westerners have liked to talk more about attractive aspects (the Golden West) that have figured in major changes in economies and population since the discovery of gold in California in 1848, but limiting factors, including especially the limit of distance (the Far West), have stood out over much of human experience with western North America, often dominated it. Distance defined the West for Europeans and Americans of European descent when they first saw it, first by discouraging them from going there to do much more than look at it, and then by limiting the numbers of them who went and what they went for. It put them off so effectively for about three centuries that they did not much address other limits that would later loom larger, such as the limits of subhumid climate. The possibilities of agriculture could be of little practical concern when potential markets were so far away that crops could not bear costs of shipment. Long after they learned how to go there in more manageable time and at more manageable cost, distances within the region still separated those in the West from resources, markets, and amenities that they might otherwise have exploited, and from each other; they did so even when such distances to some extent represented opportunity to do something there in less space elsewhere (the Great West). Different kinds of distance still distinguished the Far West importantly from other parts of the United States called western. Most new settlements east of the Missouri River were so close to each other, to older settlements, and to land attractive to settlers that they tended to grow together as they grew older; farther west even the metropolitan agglomerations of the Pacific Coast, which in time rivaled those of the Northeast in population and in economic intensity, remained discrete urban-

149

150

The Urban Occupation of the West

ized islands scattered over marginally occupied mountain, desert, and plain, as discontinuous as scattered oases of arable farmland around and between them. How much distance kept Europeans out of the West depended on costs that they thought they would incur and on returns that they thought they might collect by going there. Such costs and returns varied among nations as well as over time and place, following especially on differences among national economies and perceptions of economic opportunity. Although Spain colonized the New World more extensively than other European powers, disseminating Spanish blood and culture over more than half of it as she sought other Mexicos, other Perus, she organized her colonial system primarily around centers of preColumbian wealth and power and around ports where her agents collected and transshipped treasure to finance her court and her European wars and maritime routes from them. The Spanish settled only secondarily around colonial populations, least of all around populations as small and as marginal to imperial purposes as those on the western borderlands of what became the United States of America. Spaniards had gone to the valley of the Rio Grande or Río Bravo hoping for mines like those of the Aztecs to the south and so called it New Mexico; they remained there because it commanded the northern approaches to the mines of Chihuahua and Durango along a natural highway that they could not allow foreigners to occupy. At the northern end of a pack-train trail that extended more than sixteen hundred miles to Mexico City and ultimately beyond to the port of Vera Cruz, the Spanish inhabitants of New Mexico concentrated around a few farms, sheep ranches, and garrisons, producing little besides wool that could stand the cost of shipment even within protected markets. More than two centuries after the first of them settled there, they came to no more than about 25,000 persons, although that was five times the Spanish populations of Texas and California. Although the United States and Great Britain began to occupy the western half of North America centuries later than Spain, ultimately they took over most of it within a few decades, in large part because their seafarers were far more skillful than the Spanish, making the long voyages from Europe and across the Pacific faster and more reliably. Distance nevertheless importantly circumscribed the beginnings of British and Anglo-American as well as Spanish and Mexican settlement in western North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Americans emigrated to California and the Oregon country in fast-growing numbers even before they discovered gold, which absorbed the costs of bringing it back so much more easily than the silver of New Mexico and the hides of California had done that it set off rushes of fortune hunters, Argonauts, as those who went in 1849 called themselves, the largest movement

The Urban Occupation of the West

151

of Europeans to far western North America north of Mexico to date. But states and territories of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys added more inhabitants than those farther west until railroads redefined distance for people and goods able to bear their charges. In so doing, they defined much more than possibilities for economic enterprise: settlements, societies, and both attitudes toward environments that they made more accessible and the environments themselves. The mere prospect of railroads had major effects: on politics, since they depended on permission from the United States government to build across the public lands and on subsidies from it and local governments to pay costs of building; on prospective settlers and promoters of settlement, including promoters of cities that they might serve, since costs would be so high that for some time there would be only one transcontinental line with only one terminus. The effects of railroads once they were built varied with their owners’ purposes and policies. At first railroad companies resembled early imperial governments in both their arrogant behavior and the narrowness of their concerns. Their founders profited chiefly by exacting favors from governments and dealing in their own securities; and when they were done with such financial manipulations, carrying freight and passengers over less than intercontinental distances often seemed secondary to grander undertakings. Some of them clung to visions of promoters of the railroad conventions of the 1840s and 1850s, seeing their lines as bridges to China and Mexico and beyond.¹ The Santa Fe abandoned projects south of the Mexican border only when it leased its interest in an unfinished line along the west coast of Mexico to the Southern Pacific (SP) in 1897, later exchanging it with the SP for main line trackage in California (1911). Both James J. Hill and Edward H. Harriman, presidents, respectively, of the Great Northern and Union Pacific railroads, planned intercontinental systems while fighting over the Pacific Northwest. Calling his premier passenger train the Oriental Limited, Hill chartered Japanese ships and built two enormous cargo carriers (1903–5), then the largest vessels afloat, to operate between his termini at Seattle and Astoria (Flavel) and Asian ports.² Controlling the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as president of the Southern Pacific, Harriman agreed with the Japanese government to buy and improve the South Manchurian Railway, planning also to add the Chinese Eastern and to acquire rights over the Trans-Siberian Railroad and other Russian lines to the Baltic; when the Japanese reconsidered, he proposed to cooperate with Chinese interests in building a connection to the Trans-Siberian.³ Officers of the Milwaukee and the Western Pacific railroads, which reached tidewater at Seattle and Oakland, respectively, in 1909 and 1910, hoped to attract traffic between Atlantic and Pacific ports as well as from the longer all-water routes of the Suez and Panama canals (1869, 1914). As late as

152

The Urban Occupation of the West BR I T IS H COL UM B I A

Calgary

Vancouver Victoria

Can adi an P

Everett Olympia

Spokane

I DA H O

St. Paul

Pierre

101

San Francisco Oakland

40

Reno

Carson City Sacramento

20

North Platte

40

Omaha

30

Lincoln

Kansas City

Topeka

Denver

U TA H

COLORADO

Pueblo

89

C A LIFORNIA

IOWA

NEBRASKA

Cheyenne

Salt Lake City

N E VA DA

Minneapolis Sioux City

85

Casper Union Pacific 1869

30

81

S OUT H DAKOTA

Yellowstone Park W YO MI NG

99

Duluth

M I N N E S OTA

Bismarck

Boise

20

2

Fargo

NORT H DAKOTA

Helena 0s fic 188 Northern Paci Billings

Butte

OREGON

Grand Forks Minot

2

M O N TA N A

Salem

Winnipeg

M A N I TOB A

89

Portland

Albany

acific 1880s

Havre Great No rthern 189 0

2

WASHINGTON

101

Regina

A LB E RTA

Seattle

S AS KAT CHEWAN

C A N A D A

Fresno

s– 80s 1870

MO

KANSAS

Wichita Dodge City

Trinidad

81

OKL AHOMA

Atchison Top

66

Los Angeles San Diego

San Benardino Yuma

89

eka & Santa Fe

66

Flagstaff A RI Z O NA

Phoenix 80

Tucson

Tulsa Oklahoma City

Santa Fe Albuquerque 85

Amarillo

NEW M EXICO

Southern P a

cifi

El Paso

Ft. Worth Dallas

80

c1

87 0s _8 0s

Midland

T EXAS

77

Austin

Houston

90

PACIFIC OCEAN

San Antonio

Brownsville

Fig. 6.1. Western railroad and highway grids. The expansion of railroad and highway systems in the American West provided necessary transportation grids for newcomers and for businesses in the region. The major transcontinental railroads were completed by 1900, with other connecting and spur lines established in the early decades of the twentieth century. Freeways expanded earlier state highway grids after the 1950s. Map by Bill Nelson.

1931, when the Great Northern completed the route that Hill had planned from Minneapolis–St. Paul to San Francisco by way of the Deschutes River in central Oregon (linking with the Western Pacific at Bieber), it sent special “silk trains” over it at high speed.⁴ Hopes for developing intercontinental traffic through their coastal terminals were not altogether illusory, at least before the Depression of

The Urban Occupation of the West

153

the 1930s and the warfare in Asia that broke out during it, since American merchant shipping had greatly increased in the Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth century while declining in the Atlantic.⁵ It continued to increase thereafter, by 1917 reaching nearly three times the tonnage of the low point of the depression of the 1890s, by 1920 nearly eight times. While officers of transcontinental railroads continued to look beyond their Pacific terminals to markets in Asia, they also promoted agriculture in their territory as rulers of the Spanish Empire had never done. As Thomas C. Cochran has pointed out, the early western roads had sopped up vast amounts of capital by building in advance of demand; to qualify for subsidies they scattered their resources over large areas, racing to their appointed terminals without much considering what returns they might develop along the way. By advancing more gradually they might have fostered sounder economic growth.⁶ Much of the West was still too thinly settled in the early 1900s (some counties east of the Cascades and west of the Missouri River taking more than fifty years to regain population lost in the 1890s, some only losing most of what they had gained from the 1930s and 1940s) to return costs of lines that competed for its traffic. Three systems between the Mississippi Valley and the coast (the Northern Pacific, Santa Fe, and Union Pacific) had gone into receivership in 1893, one of them (the Northern Pacific) for the third time, while a fourth (the Southern Pacific) barely escaped it. Then in slightly over a decade, western lines completed three major new connections to the coast and, to more significant effect, branched into developing territory, including the wheatlands of the Dakotas and the Columbia basin. The Burlington system built to the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston (1908) and through Wyoming into Montana (by two routes, 1894 and 1914), the Southern Pacific to Mazatlán, on the coast of Sinaloa opposite the tip of Baja California (1909), and along the coasts of California and Oregon (to Los Angeles, 1901; to Eureka, 1914; and to Marshfield [Coos Bay], 1916); and independent lines reached new mining towns in Nevada (1904–7) and connected Los Angeles with Salt Lake City (1905). Mileage in the sixteen contiguous states and territories increased by over two-fifths in 1901–11, more than doubling in Nevada and Oklahoma; between 1893 and 1916, when depression and war interrupted construction, by over two-thirds.⁷ New electrically powered interurban and suburban systems expanded rail service still further beyond main line steam operations. Insofar as they ran where terrain made using standard equipment difficult or volume of traffic made it uneconomic, they were successors to the narrow-gauge systems built from Denver into the Rockies and from San Francisco and Oakland to Monterey Bay in the 1870s and 1880s. Built mainly after the depression of 1893 and before the

154

The Urban Occupation of the West

First World War, they comprised about a fifth of new trackage in Pacific Coast states in those years.⁸ More than roads in other regions, the major far western steam roads built electric interurban systems and acquired them as subsidiaries: (1) the Hill lines (Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and Seattle, Portland, and Spokane), the Oregon Electric; (2) the Western Pacific, the Sacramento Northern; (3) the Southern Pacific, the Pacific Electric and lesser lines. While best known as passenger carriers, interurbans carried much freight, from carload lots to cans of milk; the importance of such traffic appears in the survival of about half their trackage in coastal states after they stopped carrying passengers and in industrial growth along it.⁹ Maps of industrial districts of Los Angeles and other cities into the second half of the twentieth century continued to resemble those of long-defunct carriers.¹⁰ Some of the new lines probably never paid for themselves, anticipating rival systems more than staking out reasonable prospects of revenues as they thrust into thinly settled areas somewhat as Spain, Britain, France, and Russia had anticipated each other from the valley and estuary of the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of Mexico to California and the northwest coast. The Hill and Harriman lines compromised when they found the canyon of the Deschutes River too narrow for both of them to build along it from the Columbia River in 1911, and although Bend as principal railhead became the metropolis of central Oregon, the boom that they had set off moderated as they deferred further construction for nearly two more decades, deflating whatever prospects there may have been of another inland empire comparable to the wheat country over which Spokane presided to the north.¹¹ Jealously guarding the monopoly it maintained over most of Oregon (the “Harriman fence”), the Southern Pacific acquired and terminated or turned to its own uses railroads that threatened to realize developers’ dreams of lines from the coast across eastern Oregon and into Idaho and Utah, taking its time with projects within territory safe from competition even when they promised substantial returns, like the Natron cutoff, across the Cascades between Eugene and Klamath Falls, over twenty-one years under way.¹² But when the Hill lines extended the Oregon Electric up the Willamette Valley to Eugene and Corvallis in 1912 and 1913 (populations 9,009 and 4,552 in 1910), the Southern Pacific, which ran steam trains to California that way, promptly electrified, providing competing electrified service.¹³ Once the railroads built these and more prudently conceived extensions, they tried to maximize revenues by developing traffic-producing enterprises along them. In their early years the transcontinental lines had collected little freight west of the Missouri River; few commodities could absorb charges heavier than those on competing production from the Middle West and East.¹⁴ Wheat and

The Urban Occupation of the West

155

lumber had moved from the Sacramento Valley, the northern California coast between Mendocino and Santa Cruz, the Columbia basin, and Puget Sound by water rather than by rail, while the eastern market for fresh western fruit (appropriately called green fruit in the trade) was insignificant as long as it exchanged flavors en route with the sawdust and barrels in which it traveled. After refrigerator cars developed in the 1880s began to deliver ripe fruit with a recognizable semblance of natural color and flavor and the western roads to post rates that traffic in it could bear,¹⁵ it rapidly became more than symbol of mild western climates. Managements tried to foster shipments of farm products from the mountain and Pacific states comparable to those from the wheat country of the high plains, Hill on imperial scale as he planned to take wheat from Montana and the states of the Columbia basin to Asia. Most major western roads, beginning with Hill’s, organized what amounted to agricultural extension services, developing and promoting improved farming practices; the Harriman lines (Southern Pacific and Union Pacific) established a community publicity bureau that recruited settlers with local governments in the Pacific Northwest.¹⁶ The Denver and Rio Grande Western (D&RG) was an anachronism in that its managers well past 1900 concentrated more on manipulating its finances than on increasing its freight business; they inherited a network of branches that gave the mountains of central and northern Colorado a high ratio of track to population but at fares and freight rates that were excessive even by early western standards, into the 1880s twice those on the Union Pacific, which operated over more direct routes. As a consulting engineer pointed out (1914), it had been built to carry gold and silver ores of high value from long-closed mining camps and had not adjusted charges and service to possibilities of carrying foodstuffs and low-grade ores. Yet even George J. Gould, who milked the D&RG between 1901 and 1917, also improved service while doubling its trackage, although his principal extension, the Western Pacific, which gave him an independent outlet in California in 1910,¹⁷ ran close to the Southern Pacific for half its length through desert that could not support one line. Improved transportation shaped western development especially over expanses of plains and mountains where distances and climatic extremes were greater and exports bulkier, once exportation became possible, than in areas accessible by natural waterways. Railroads between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Coast, even proposals to build railroads, revolutionized prospects of vast regions that had seemed to have almost none since Europeans first inspected them in the sixteenth century; like freeway systems later, they both concentrated and dispersed settlers while advancing settlement, brought business and confined it or took it away. Spain probed what Anglo-Americans later called the

156

The Urban Occupation of the West

Southwest shortly after she seized the Aztec Empire, only to confine herself to a few outposts along its peripheries for nearly three centuries; the United States, the vast area between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean shortly after buying Louisiana from France, but for more than forty years proposed to settle no more than the parts that became the five states on the right bank of the Mississippi, barely more than a fourth of the whole. From when Europeans first saw any of the Far West, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, distances from other parts of the world, especially the most populated parts of the European world, continued to define their relations with it. When those relations developed from merely looking to see what was there to revisiting parts that they had seen before and then to settling as well as visiting, and in time some of the settlements they made grew large enough to have interests of their own, anchorages becoming ports and ports becoming cities, distances from western cities and means of traversing them in turn defined how they developed. Every aspiring far western metropolis pinned its hopes on improved connections with the world outside, by water, railroad, highway, or airline, and then grew around them. In their beginnings, the earlier Spanish and American establishments between the Great Bend of the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean represented the general judgment that the area was unsuited for settlement, although in time some of them took on attributes of conventional urban centers: Santa Fe as northern anchor of an early warning system of defense for the mines of northern New Spain; army posts under the American flag as assurance that whites with legitimate reason to pass over Indian land did no more than that; other outposts originally called forts as rendezvous for fur traders whose livelihoods depended on maintaining populations of beaver and of Indian hunters and trappers that white settlement would threaten. Although the Latter-day Saints distinguished themselves from most of their American contemporaries by intending from the time they came to the Far West to make their homes there, in seeking refuge from the threat to morals and religion that they called Babylon by establishing their Zion on the shores of Great Salt Lake, they showed that they shared the common view that most of the West between it and Missouri was uninhabitable. By the time the United States government began chartering corporations to build railroads to the coast, other settlements had sprung up, some originally mining camps, far enough from established centers on the peripheries of wilderness for some of them to justify their own pretensions to urbanhood; most of the expanses between them were still wilderness. As the statistician Adna F. Weber pointed out, the construction of canals and railroads early in the nineteenth century had concentrated population in east-

The Urban Occupation of the West

157

ern states by bringing them the commerce of the interior and permitting them to shift capital and labor from farming into commerce and manufacturing while importing their food, whereas after 1850, as railroads extended into the Mississippi Valley, they dispersed population there by bringing in settlers and providing outlets for their products.¹⁸ The construction of railroads had still different effects on populations and economies when they penetrated the Far West over the half century from the 1860s. From its beginnings as a part of the United States, the Far West was far more commercial and far less agricultural than the older Middle West to the east, in part because of its natural resources and limitations, in part because of what the rest of the country was and wanted of it, in part because of the systems of transportation that connected them and the beginnings of economic and social structures that those systems importantly defined. Early railroads reinforced its commercial bias by building first to seaports that steamships had been using for two decades or more and by charging fares that city people could best afford to pay. The cities that developed around these ports and railroad terminals were logistical counterparts to Vera Cruz and Acapulco, which custodians of Spanish preserves and Spanish regulated trade had designated as entryways and way stations, although with no Mexico City in the interior to overshadow them, no imperial bureaucracy to circumscribe them. Developing first as remote outposts, ends of line, points d’appui, staging centers for development beyond, they became regional capitals with distinct urban personalities that their increasing populations seemed to reinforce rather than dilute as newcomers chose residences matching their tastes and purposes.¹⁹ Living at first on returns from their immigrant inhabitants and those of tributary mining country rather than on the business of western farmers, who outside the eastern counties of the plains states and the interior valleys of the coastal states were few and marginal in early years, they supported merchant populations, some of which prospered more and extended their jurisdictions farther afield than those of middle western market towns. The railroads had only begun branching into potential farmland in their hinterlands and bringing farmer immigrants to it when they also brought city people who took advantage of such new access by taking urban ways into suburban settings as city people were doing in the East. Soon after the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe connected Los Angeles with the older states, it accordingly became an automobile city and the center of clusters of automobile cities, lacking only the detail of automobiles. In the eyes of early residents and promoters, these urban precursors of more general settlement were predestined to lead independently of the favors of the railroad builders. Yet destiny often lagged behind expectations. Although there were few natural routes for railroads and sites for seaports west of territory that

158

The Urban Occupation of the West

the Confederacy controlled when Congress authorized them and construction began, as the builders of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific recognized in following the California and Oregon trails along the Platte and the Humboldt, and the builders of the Northern Pacific in following the routes of fur traders and freighters along the Missouri, there also was little enough prospect of traffic to justify developing all of these routes at once and so in converting more potential into actual terminals. San Francisco and Portland had already surpassed their rivals on San Francisco Bay and the Willamette and Columbia rivers, becoming the largest cities of the Pacific slope, when the first transcontinental trains reached them (1869, 1883). No other city or site for a city had San Francisco’s combination of salt water port and fertile hinterland, let alone its concentration of wealth and commercial and financial enterprise; there seemed to be no serious question of displacing it as metropolis of western North America. For many years anyone who wanted to go from the East or Middle West to other points on and near the coast—even to Portland, Seattle, and San Diego—ordinarily went to San Francisco first and then the rest of the way by sea. Although in the first decade after the railroad came, the 1870s, San Francisco grew more slowly than before, in two decades, 1870–90, it more than doubled in population, and in 1900 it was still second only to St. Louis west of the Mississippi River, with more inhabitants than all other terminal cities on the coast together, from San Diego Bay to Puget Sound. It was still second for nearly two decades more, until Los Angeles moved slightly ahead by 1920, half a century after the Central Pacific began bringing new residents in 1869. That Portland retained hegemony in the Northwest for less time than San Francisco in California shows how the bases of urban authority varied. Relying on its early start and its location, for decades civic leaders discounted the prospects of its rivals. It “sits today mistress of the North Pacific, and with historic and prophetic reasons for expecting to be the metropolis of the whole Pacific coast,” a clergyman wrote (1901).²⁰ Its circumstances in 1883 when the Northern Pacific reached it were nevertheless far less favorable than San Francisco’s: often dangerous and at best less immediate access from the sea, although a better connection with Spokane and the Middle West and East over what its boosters called the water-level route; smaller edges in population and economic power over its neighbors, three of which shortly had railroad connections of their own. Whereas the closest protected harbor comparable to San Francisco Bay was at San Diego, about five hundred miles south of it and with neither urban populations nor hinterland to support commerce, at half that distance from Portland there were several more accessible ports on Puget Sound. Within the next decade two of them in American territory and one in Canadian outranked Portland as offi-

The Urban Occupation of the West

159

cial transcontinental termini: Tacoma (terminus of the Northern Pacific, 1883), Vancouver (terminus of the Canadian Pacific, 1886), and Seattle (terminus of the Great Northern, 1893, by way of Everett, six years after the Northern Pacific reached it). Tacoma turned out to be the least of Portland’s competitors despite the advantages of a superb harbor on Commencement Bay, level land fronting on it, and the support of the Northern Pacific, which invested in public utilities and a handsome hotel through subsidiaries. After an ambitious start in the 1870s and 1880s, Tacoma grew less than Portland for six decades thereafter. Portland grew more than any of its rivals in the 1890s, but the Northern Pacific had opened a direct route from Spokane to Puget Sound by tunneling through the Cascades in 1888 before the Great Northern reached Seattle five years later; Tacoma grew by less than natural increase. Seattle moved into the lead about the time it acquired another railroad in 1909, although one—the Milwaukee—that tapped relatively little new territory; it owed more to increased trade with Alaska.²¹ From the middle of the nineteenth century, being on a main line railroad, ideally on the coast as both railroad and steamship terminus, seemed so necessary a condition of urban development that leaders of cities still without service differed in estimating whether railroad builders had to be persuaded to come their way rather than how useful their coming would be. Santa Fe, oldest city in the Far West, destination of the American traders who began penetrating Mexican territory overland in the 1820s, still largest city south of the vicinity of San Francisco Bay and west of San Antonio as late as 1860, had been so confident that railroads heading south and southwest from Colorado and Kansas toward Mexico in the 1870s could not afford to pass it by that it refused to pay the subsidies that the Denver and Rio Grande (D&RG) asked for; getting only a branch line connection with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF; 1880), it lost population over the next three decades despite the business of state government and the patronage of artists who discovered it as a picturesque relic in the 1890s.²² Refusing to pay a hundred times as much as it offered for land at Bernalillo, the AT&SF built a station instead (1880) about two miles from the plaza of the old pueblo of Albuquerque on a site that residents and officers of the railroad, organized as a land company, developed as a new town; incorporating with the name of its predecessor, New Albuquerque flourished while Old Town declined.²³ By 1900 it was the largest city in the territory, by 1910 more than twice as large as Santa Fe. Los Angeles invested more in its connections and grew more spectacularly. After first improving on its inland location by buying a railroad to the coast (1868), it presented that and a subsidy of $600,000 (about a hundred dollars for

160

The Urban Occupation of the West

each of its inhabitants) to the Southern Pacific to persuade it to build its main line from San Francisco Bay and Bakersfield that way rather than more directly eastward, then persuaded Congress to build a harbor at San Pedro, which it reached by annexing a connecting “shoestring” strip half a mile wide and sixteen miles long in 1906.²⁴ Sixth city in the state before the Southern Pacific came in 1876, it was second by 1900, first by 1920, having increased nearly a hundred times in fifty years. Reaching substantial size and authority before they or their competitors had connections, Salt Lake City and Denver were exceptional among early major western cities in continuing to grow and prosper without being on the first transcontinental railroad systems. The original overland route ran north of them, through Ogden and Cheyenne, although Denver, like those two cities, developed long before there was significant agricultural settlement in the vicinity. But by the time the D&RG and the Western Pacific gave Denver and Salt Lake City alternative connections with San Francisco Bay in 1910, Salt Lake had connections with Portland and Los Angeles by the Union Pacific, Denver with Chicago by the Union Pacific and three other lines. Denver fed on her connections with the mines of interior Colorado long before the Moffat tunnel (1934) gave her a less-than-roundabout transcontinental route competitive with that of the Union Pacific through Cheyenne. With access to large tributary areas, both cities were regional capitals and centers of distribution, Denver’s commercial dominion extending into Wyoming and Montana, Salt Lake’s into Idaho and Nevada. Other cities, particularly in the Southwest, testified both to advantages of being on a railroad and later to other factors in urban growth. Phoenix had only secondary and branch line rail service until the Southern Pacific rerouted its main line that way in 1926, but shortly after the first trains arrived (1887) on a line that it had subsidized, the city persuaded the legislature to move the state capital there from Prescott, which then had none.²⁵ Prescott’s loss also followed economic changes beyond those from horse-powered to steam-powered transportation: when territorial officials put the capital there (1864), the economic prospects of the new territory seemed to depend so much on gold as to confirm the claims of the promising mining town over Tucson, which was much larger but had erred by showing Confederate sympathies.²⁶ A generation later, as mineral economies rose and fell erratically with the discovery and exhaustion of bodies of ore and the prices of metals, Phoenix seemed to enjoy the advantage of a perpetually replaceable resource—surface water, which early settlers diverted from the Salt River—and reliable and expanding demand for products of irrigation agriculture nearby at Fort Whipple and in markets that improved transportation opened. By 1920, with its supply of water confirmed and expanded by

The Urban Occupation of the West

161

Roosevelt Dam (built 1906–11), it was the largest city in the state, nearly half again as large as Tucson.²⁷ Promoters of San Diego, oldest European settlement in continental United States west of Arizona, looked to main line railroad service to make their fortunes long after John C. Frémont planned a transcontinental line from Norfolk via Memphis, El Paso, and Yuma in 1867–68. After the Santa Fe made Los Angeles its terminus, San Diegans talked of reconciling themselves to waiting for overflows of traffic and capital from their neighbor. Then their old enthusiasms revived with proposals to connect with the Southern Pacific, which had disappointed them by running its main line to El Paso and New Orleans southeast from Los Angeles to cross the Colorado River east of San Diego at Yuma instead of pursuing plans of the Texas and Pacific, which it absorbed in 1875, to build to San Diego.²⁸ Antagonism toward the SP as a political as well as economic monopoly had become general enough in California so that when the sugar and shipping magnate John D. Spreckels announced (1906) plans to build a new line, the San Diego and Arizona (SD&A), from San Diego to a junction with the main line of the Southern Pacific at El Centro as climax of a series of investments in the city, its commerce, and its environs that had begun with the Hotel Coronado (1887), he prudently concealed arrangements for the SP to finance construction.²⁹ Although the SD&A on completion in 1919 enabled passengers from Chicago and New Orleans to debark at San Diego without first coming through Los Angeles, trains ran so slowly and infrequently over its winding route that they saved little or no time; and soon after it opened most new residents of San Diego were coming in their own automobiles rather than by trains over either route.³⁰ When the SP proposed to discontinue passenger service after thirty-one years of operation in 1950, the principal opposition was from the railroad brotherhoods; San Diegans had come to call the SD&A (reorganized as the San Diego and Arizona Eastern in 1932) “slow, dirty, and aggravating.”³¹ An expensive triumph of engineering over spectacularly difficult terrain, it was a poor investment for the SP, which stopped making repairs in 1976 when a hurricane made about half the length of the line unusable and in 1978 agreed virtually to donate it to the Metropolitan Transit Development Board of San Diego. Contracting with short-line operators to take over freight service, the board adapted segments in and near the city into an interurban rapid transit system in 1980–88.³² Mining country had substantial shares of both new lines and new cities. Railroad companies followed more than they led, generally waiting for evidence of substantial deposits before they built. Since few mining camps were within reach of land flat, wet, warm, and low enough for farming, the trunk lines had left

162

The Urban Occupation of the West

those in the less accessible parts of the Rockies to narrow-gauge short lines whose owners set charges so high that only miners and tourists could pay them. Even some of the larger and more solid-looking boom towns were risky investments in twentieth-century Nevada as in nineteenth-century Colorado, declining precipitately as ores gave out and prospectors left for new strikes, like the miners of Idaho, who a pioneer historian had said were like quicksilver, running off “after any atom of gold in their vicinity.”³³ Goldfield was the largest city in Nevada in 1907, with perhaps fifteen thousand inhabitants (some claimed thirty), connections with three major railroads, and through Pullman service, where three years before, a reporter said, there had been nothing but sagebrush, alkali dust, and coyotes.³⁴ But three years later it had lost most of them, dropping to second place (4,838 by the census of 1910). Although a railroad connection remained to 1948, as population dropped further to the hundreds the town survived on the business of county seat.³⁵ Coming from the states by ship and disembarking where automobiles or wagons would have been useless, the gold seekers of Alaska and the Yukon seemed at first to replicate logistical experiences of early Californians more nearly than those of twentieth-century Nevadans. But none of the teeming coastal and river ports from which they moved on to the mines, campgrounds of shacks and tents as innocent of indebtedness to earlier cultural traditions as the San Francisco of the Argonauts of 1849, remained much more than that for long. The Alaskan rushes were too brief to sustain substantial growth in any one of them; moreover, since Seattle, which shortly shipped most of the miners’ supplies, was about as close to the mines of the Yukon, the Tanana, and Nome in travel time in the early 1900s as San Francisco had been to the Mother Lode and the Comstock in the 1850s, there was little to do at way stations farther north. As port for White Pass, Skagway was briefly the most populous municipality in the district, claiming fifteen to thirty thousand inhabitants in 1898, although such terms as “inhabitants” and “settlement” did not fit a place where few who passed through intended to stay longer than they had to. Their numbers dropped precipitately two years later when the White Pass and Yukon Railroad began service to Whitehorse, on the Yukon River, transforming Skagway from “the place to ‘take a drink’ and ‘mush on’” to “the scrap-heap of creation,” as the engineer T. A. Rickard described it. In a few years the population stabilized at around five hundred persons, by the 1920s most of them sustained by tourists who came through in summer to ride the train and recall the boom. “All the frothy quality . . . is gone,” Rickard wrote in 1909. “The town is an ungainly collection of shanties, mostly saloons and gambling houses, now out of business.”³⁶ The population of Dyea, principal rival of Skagway and three miles beyond it

The Urban Occupation of the West

163

at the beginning of Chilkoot Pass, described as “a trading post . . . and a dozen or more Indian shacks” early in 1897, may have approached four thousand the next year, when most of the miners headed for the Yukon came through to use a newly built tramway system along the Dyea or Taiya River. Census takers found 261 inhabitants in 1900, when the railroad had diverted practically all incoming traffic to Skagway, none thereafter; even remains of buildings soon disappeared as a homesteader gradually incorporated the sites in his farm.³⁷ South of Nome on Norton Sound, St. Michael took toll of traffic that came by sea from the states and transferred there to river steamers that went up the Yukon as far as Dawson and Whitehorse; it lost most of its business to the White Pass and Yukon and Alaska railroads when they began year-round service over more direct routes in 1900 and 1915, and correspondingly most of its population.³⁸ In the interior Eagle City enjoyed brief urban eminence as a result of being on the left bank of the Yukon just inside the international boundary. Jack London found the fifty inhabitants “short of grub” and waiting for a steamer to take them upstream to Dawson when he came through in 1898, although enterprising enough to stop a nocturnal game of faro to try to sell corner lots to him and his companions.³⁹ Two years later it became seat of one of three judicial districts, a vast area comprising over half the territory, larger than any state, and shortly terminus of a telegraph line from the coast that brought word that President McKinley had won reelection; it also would have been terminus of a wagon road surveyed in 1904 to provide an all-American route to the Yukon and of a railroad that eastern capitalists proposed to build along the Copper River.⁴⁰ But as the gold seekers flocked west to the coast and then south to the Tanana, Judge Wickersham had so little to do that he followed them to Unalaska and Nome the year after he opened court. The population, perhaps 1,700 in 1898, dropped to 383 in 1900; it was 36 in 1970, shortly before John McPhee made it focus of sketches of life “in the bush.” Fairbanks, where Wickersham moved judicial headquarters in 1904, was the new urban center of the interior, by 1910 of the entire territory, although as its own bonanza passed only fifth in population ten years later.⁴¹ When after decades of such failed expectations Alaska began to keep the population that its prophets had said it should have, its San Francisco followed rather than preceded the decision to build its longest railroad. Anchorage began inauspiciously when Congress passed over decades-old proposals for a railroad from the states along the Seward Peninsula to Bering Strait and a Siberian connection by ferry or tunnel to authorize building inland from a point on the coast well to the east that President Woodrow Wilson designated as Seward, on Resurrection Bay, terminus of an earlier road, the Alaska Northern, in April 1915. Preparing for the construction camp that shortly followed, a tent city sprang up

164

The Urban Occupation of the West

Fig. 6.2. Alaska and Yukon railroads. In the far-off lands of the Alaska and Yukon territories, scattered railroads provided much-needed transportation for settlers and their goods. Here a work crew constructs the Arctic Railroad near the Nome River in Alaska. Photo courtesy the Otto D. Goetze Collection, Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Anchorage. B01.41.377.

on Ship Creek (also known as Knik Anchorage), 114 miles north at the head of Cook Inlet; that summer the residents incorporated as Anchorage. Like construction camps of earlier western railroads, losing population as work moved past it, it dropped from first city of the territory in 1916–17 to a poor third in 1920, although it remained larger than Fairbanks, inland terminus of the new Alaska Railroad (1923),⁴² whose promoters had predicted that it would become a northern Chicago, crossroads of an intercontinental system linking New York and Paris.⁴³ As late as 1939 still no more than half as large as in its second year, Anchorage regained first place only after the army and air force established Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base alongside it in 1940 and 1941, making it headquarters for the defense of the territory during the Second World War. Although Alaska still depended on ships for connections with the rest of the world only somewhat less than Hawaii, there as elsewhere seaports and railroad terminals alone supported urban development less than before, freight and passengers

The Urban Occupation of the West

165

moving quickly through them to other destinations. Until earthquakes destroyed port facilities in 1964, most of the cargo for Anchorage and other points along the railroad came through Seward, which required neither ice-breaking in winter months nor annual dredging to maintain a channel. Valdez was port for a wagon road that preceded the Richardson Highway (improved 1920–27) as principal gateway to Fairbanks and the interior before the Alaska Railroad, briefly becoming fifth in population (1920). By 1977 it handled more tonnage than any other port in the state as terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and only superport in the United States, but although it rose from twentieth to eighth city in the state as its inhabitants more than tripled over the decade, it simultaneously fell further behind the two largest coastal cities, Anchorage and Juneau.⁴⁴ Anchorage surged far ahead of the others as Alaska entered a new era of growth with the discovery of oil on the Kenai Peninsula, just to the south, in 1957 and still more on the North Slope in 1968; by the 1970s it handled more general cargo than any other Alaskan port,⁴⁵ but business at its docks and railroad yards followed more than it supported other economic activity. It had become, an economist said, a transactional city, exercising its power through information-oriented functions.⁴⁶ When steam railroads first came west, like steamships before them, they tended to concentrate development over relatively small areas, especially at the terminals that Congress specified. The builders of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, which divided the overland route, raced to meet on the salt flats north of Great Salt Lake instead of detouring through mountains to the two largest settlements in the interior, Denver and Salt Lake City. By the measures of both current population and foreseeable traffic, the roads west of the Missouri River overbuilt extravagantly while neglecting vast territories where inland and coastal waters could not be the alternatives to steel rails that they had been over much of the Old Northwest and East. Although in all western states but Kansas and Nebraska mileage of track still was small relative to total areas—in Wyoming less than one-fifth as much as the national average, in Nevada about one-eighth as much—it was far above national averages relative to population. Whereas railroads in general could look to business from an average of 392 inhabitants to a mile of track in 1901, in Wyoming the corresponding figure was 77, in Nevada 47.⁴⁷ Overbuilding continued as construction resumed after the slump of the 1890s. Some of the later trunk lines built near predecessors between as well as at their terminals, the Milwaukee paralleling the Northern Pacific much of the way from the Mississippi to Puget Sound, the Western Pacific running so close to the Southern Pacific across Nevada that the two ultimately divided east- and westbound traffic as if they were one double-tracked system.⁴⁸

166

The Urban Occupation of the West

Territory that thus got competitive service commonly was attractive both in presenting fewer difficulties in engineering and in promising more immediate returns than territory that for lack of economic transportation was still largely unsettled, and by the 1890s most new construction was by roads that had little land of their own to develop. In consequence, while railroads tended more than before to allow their officers to invest in towns at sites that they favored in their corporate capacities, at higher levels of corporate decision they favored cities whose prospects seemed already assured, especially at terminals and major junctions and harbors. “In their eager competition for the business of the large towns,” a writer on western real estate booms observed (1898), the railroads “deliberately sacrificed the interests of non-competing points. They practically levied upon the local towns the expense of incessant rate wars, so that no industry could survive in a place having but one railroad, and a removal to a city enjoying cheap rates was a necessity. The phenomenal growth of the large cities was thus due, in great part, to unjustifiable discriminations in their favor.”⁴⁹ In the first years of the transcontinental roads, moreover, when rate structures still favored shippers at terminals and before they extended branches out from the main lines on which they collected land grants and other subsidies, their hinterlands had to offer unusual riches to attract settlers and developers. Even in California, an English traveler had observed (1884), knowledge of the interior declined wherever the railway supplanted wagon freighting.⁵⁰ Nevertheless railroads usually stimulated development, early or late. Roads invading territory that their rivals had monopolized competed at least temporarily by improving terms to shippers and settlers, and nearly everywhere new construction prompted at least bursts of immigration and investment, including investment by the companies and their officials. “The end of the railway in a region of active pioneering,” the geographer Isaiah Bowman wrote in 1931, when most of it had passed, referring to extensions into hitherto underdeveloped territory that he called the pioneer fringe, “is an area of wild speculation. . . . It is only in a simple society that life in the modern world can be maintained acceptably at great distance from the railway. Even so, production must be highly specialized, labor costs low, and land cheap.”⁵¹ Motor truck service had already begun east of the Cascades when Hill began building the Oregon Trunk up the Deschutes River to Bend, and wagon freighting continued for another generation, but at rates averaging twenty-five cents a ton mile in the early 1900s on relatively flat terrain—often ten times as much in the mountains⁵²—farmers away from the tracks were at serious disadvantage relative to those with direct access to railroad freight at rates averaging less than a cent. The saving by rail amounted to fifteen cents a bushel, over a sixth the price of wheat and over a fourth the price of pota-

The Urban Occupation of the West

167

toes. A western railroad found that most of its freight originated no more than five miles from its tracks, and that in counties that it served population grew by nearly two-thirds in twenty years while declining in counties nearby without rail service.⁵³ The common western game of developing town sites thus continued, although under changing auspices and with less at stake. Over long distances even lines that invaded other lines’ territory created more towns than they connected, laying them out in raw wilderness as supply dumps, construction camps, and division points and as trading centers for the occupants of land that they sold, although occasionally recognizing sites already selected by speculators who came to terms with them. The result was successions of towns along the tracks, most of them at intervals as uniform as designs of early station buildings. Maps of early transcontinental systems outside of mining areas closely resembled maps of urban populations as developers tried to guess their routes and moved if they had guessed wrong. While service by one railroad was almost indispensable, service by more than one was still better, permitting shippers to bargain for better terms; competing service was ideal, insuring that the roads could not shift favors to other sites. For the most part the later roads were less successful as town builders than the earlier—the Milwaukee attracting fewer settlers to its sites from the Dakotas to Washington than the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern to theirs,⁵⁴ the Western Pacific fewer in Utah, Nevada, and California than the Southern Pacific—as trading radii increased with sizes of farms and use of automobiles and trucks. Although some of their towns survived as trading centers, others declined as residents who had come to work in construction moved on to similar opportunities elsewhere or to farms. Developing at different times, the two kinds of railroads reflected different purposes and had different effects. When in 1862 Congress fulfilled two of the pledges that the Republican Party had made by simultaneously authorizing railroads to build from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast and settlers to claim homesteads on the public lands that the railroads crossed, it assumed that the two projects would support each other, that farmer-settlers would gain by being able to send their crops to market, railroads by collecting charges for carrying them and by selling land along their rights of way. But the builders of the Central Pacific and its immediate successors expected their roads to foster commerce more than agriculture, their coastal terminals to develop as way stations to Asia and entrepôt for miners, fishermen, and loggers rather than as market towns; and San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle prospered more than their hinterlands. For four decades crop-farming was the principal occupation only in the eastern parts of the easternmost of far western states. By building to port cities on the Pacific

168

The Urban Occupation of the West

Coast that for the most part were already destinations of sail- and steam-powered ships, the transcontinental lines magnified the authority of these cities, further concentrating population at and around them. Omaha, Kansas City, Spokane, and other major junctions and way stations were more nearly western equivalents of such centers of commerce and transshipment as Buffalo, St. Louis, and New Orleans than of eastern and middle western market towns, while Salt Lake City and Denver developed as regional entrepôts in jurisdictions of their own, at first independently of modern transportation. The electric lines built from the 1890s into the 1920s differed from steam lines in the kinds of traffic they carried, the areas they served, their uses to builders and owners, and their social and economic effects as well as in motive power and ordinarily in length. Initially adjuncts to the cable car systems that had spread rapidly over central cities after they began running up and down the hills of San Francisco in 1873, they soon proved themselves where potential passengers were far enough apart so that speed and low costs of construction and operation gave them substantial advantages over other forms of local transportation. They were especially well suited to the citrus colonies established east of Los Angeles from the 1870s, where settlers with tastes for urban society and comforts and the means adequate to satisfy them cultivated plots small enough to justify frequent service, in early years typically ten-acre orchards and one- to five-acre residential lots.⁵⁵ Developing after the last of the land-grant railroads, like their eastern and middle western counterparts at first they served chiefly suburbs of established cities. Instead of locating cities as focal points of commerce, or confirming that some cities already located before they came should develop further as principal commercial centers, they facilitated residential development already under way around them. But some of the largest systems built chiefly into new territory. Owners of western electric railroads soon saw that they could profit more by selling outlying real estate than by carrying passengers and freight. During the depression of 1893, Francis M. “Borax” Smith invested a fortune from mining in streetcar lines in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, east of San Francisco, and in suburban tracts—shortly “additions”—into which he and his associates in a Realty Syndicate extended them and the tracks of an affiliated system of interurban electric trains and ferries, the Key Route. Opening low-priced service to Berkeley in 1903, he proposed to build through intervening farmlands south to San Jose and beyond, financing construction by selling lots as he made them more accessible. Planting gray-green aromatic eucalyptus trees on the bare hills of Oakland and Berkeley, he created more marketable ambience for relatively affluent buyers while preparing to fuel the fires that swept over them in 1923 and 1991. In more modest neighborhoods he accommodated working people who

The Urban Occupation of the West

169

had begun escaping the high rents of San Francisco by taking “nickel ferries” across the bay. When the Southern Pacific failed to reserve trans-bay traffic for itself by keeping Smith’s ferries out of San Francisco, it competed by cutting fares, electrifying lines on which it had used steam locomotives, and adding new lines in districts where he had extended or proposed to extend his. Without the resources of his antagonist, Smith lost control of his enterprises to creditors in 1914,⁵⁶ but he had already revolutionized local transportation and patterns of residence over a metropolitan area that continued to grow as other developers opened new subdivisions long after he retreated to borax mining. As an engineer, whom the city of San Francisco commissioned as it considered expanding its new municipal street railway system, observed (1913), the high rates that the Southern Pacific charged commuters on its steam trains where it monopolized service reserved the foothills along the peninsula south of the city for the rich, while low-priced ferries and electric trains opened the “east bay” to working people who previously could not save on housing by living out of town.⁵⁷ In 1890–1900 Oakland and Berkeley together had added just over three-fifths as many inhabitants as San Francisco; in 1900–10 they added nearly half again more (149.0 percent). Immediately south of San Francisco, San Mateo County, which was smallest in population of the seven bay counties in 1900 and had gained less than any of the other six in the 1890s, picked up slightly when streetcars from the city reached San Mateo in 1903. But it accounted for a significant share of the growth of the Bay Area only after the Bayshore Highway (later Route 101) crossed the county line at Palo Alto in 1931, more effectively breaking what had been a monopoly of the Southern Pacific by opening it to automobile traffic in force.⁵⁸ Growing to substantial size much later than San Francisco and over terrain that imposed few natural barriers, cities in southern California were able to spread farther along and around systems of transportation that moved faster and more flexibly than cable cars within and steam trains outside them. Operators of local electric lines began service from Pasadena to Los Angeles in 1895. Defaulting on bonds as they overextended themselves in building to the coast at Santa Monica, they lost control (1898) to a group of investors that included Henry E. Huntington, nephew of the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Huntington and his associates had larger visions as well as larger resources when they organized the Pacific Electric Railway (PE) in 1901, proposing to build through six counties east to Riverside and San Bernardino, south and east to Long Beach and Santa Ana (briefly also farther south to San Diego and east of it to the Imperial Valley), and north to Santa Barbara. By 1914 the PE had begun service to all of these except San Diego and Santa Barbara and to other points as

170

The Urban Occupation of the West

well. Simultaneously buying ranch land and water rights and developing water and electric power systems along his lines, Huntington opened new subdivisions in time with demand in residential markets, reaping enormous profits by selling real estate while losing on railway operations or at best drawing only modest returns from them, which he put into new construction designed to promote more sales rather than into dividends. The Southern Pacific Company, which took control of the PE in 1910, continued to extend it, by 1926 to its maximum extent at 1,164 miles.⁵⁹ Much of their own kind though Smith, Huntington, and the cities in which they operated were, the interurban systems that they developed resembled in varying degrees others elsewhere in the West and with them differed from systems in other regions. Whereas in the East and the older Middle West, interurbans commonly connected established communities and farms that had already developed close to each other on the bases of intensive agriculture and horse-drawn and river-borne transportation to market, in the Far West they more often facilitated settlement of undeveloped land still available in large tracts at low prices. While the growth of closely spaced suburban communities in the Northeast and Middle West attracted much attention, prompting predictions that the electric car would urbanize a belt from Massachusetts into Virginia, dispersion of population was much greater on the Pacific slope. Even in San Francisco, most eastern of western cities in density of population, the inhabitants were spread more thinly than in Indianapolis, whose growth was widely attributed to the networks of interurbans that served it.⁶⁰ Suburbs and new urban areas grew faster than central cities all over the country even in the first years of the century, before automobiles began seriously to displace streetcars in everyday urban transportation. But after developing first within the United States on the East Coast, following British models, from the late 1800s suburbs grew relatively more in the West than elsewhere,⁶¹ partly because western industries easily fitted into them, partly because the mild climates of the Pacific slope and the Southwest made suburban living more attractive and suburban commuting easier than in other regions, probably most of all simply because by growing much and late the West was able to grow differently. The tendency of western urban settlement to spread out at lower-than-average densities came to national attention when Los Angeles became first of American cities in area in 1919 although only tenth in population at the census a year later, first in the world by 1930, with almost as many inhabitants in the suburbs as within the city limits, extravagant though they were.⁶² As versatile as the narrow-gauge lines that early western railroad builders

North Glendale

Pasadena

Glendale

Monrovia

South Pasadena

Glendora

Covina

Los Angeles

Slauson Ascot Park

Whittier Los Nietos

Watts

Gardena Redondo Willows Long Beach

San Pedro

Wilmington

Orange

aferia Z

Miramar

Alamitos Heights Naples Bay City

Santa Ana

Alamitos Bay

Huntington Beach PACIFIC OCEAN

Newport Beach Balboa

Stops on rail lines

Fig. 6.3. The Pacific Electric Railway. Urban and interurban railroads greatly facilitated core city and suburban expansion in the West. The Pacific Electric Railway, sometimes known popularly as “Huntington’s Big Red Cars,” provided a key transportation matrix for early twentieth-century greater Los Angeles. Map by Bill Nelson.

172

The Urban Occupation of the West

favored for rugged mountainous terrain because building them was cheap and because they negotiated curves and grades easily, the western interurbans were equally adaptable to the requirements of small shippers in town and to those of trunk lines that built—sometimes overbuilt—branches or feeders to stake out territory against competitors. Both in such rural applications and within Los Angeles, Oakland, and other cities, the western electric lines fostered not merely residential but also industrial, commercial, and even agricultural development, carrying freight, express, and mail more than lines in other sections. With less than one-fourteenth of the electrified mileage in the country (1917), lines in the Pacific states brought in well over one-fifth of all income from freight on electric railways.⁶³ Complementing the steam roads, they survived there more than elsewhere: as late as 1960, long after electric passenger equipment had become museum pieces, freight service continued on almost half the mileage once in operation.⁶⁴ In rural farm areas interurbans operated chiefly where distances between towns and farmhouses were relatively short, as in the Santa Clara Valley around San Jose and in the intensively developed irrigation districts near Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay, Great Salt Lake, and the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Columbia, and Boise rivers, some of it already semiresidential rather than strictly agricultural; grazing land and wheatland invited construction only when it was becoming something else, as in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, where the owners of the Irvine Ranch platted and sold pieces of it as demand for residential property justified. By the time electric traction became practicable, irrigators who valued easy access to town and to each other were settling on small tracts in areas as different as the citrus colonies east and south of Los Angeles and the villages of Mormon dairy and truck farmers northeast of Salt Lake City. To missionaries of the gospel of irrigation the new interurban lines were keys to a new social order, while to Huntington and his associates they were efficient means of converting irrigated orange groves into marketable residential lots. “Henry E. Huntington, and his widespread scheme of electric railways, are probably the strongest factors in the evolution of new social conditions throughout a large part of California,” William E. Smythe wrote (1903). “These new electric railways will facilitate the settlement of the country in small farms. . . . With the exception of irrigation, no influence can do more to facilitate close settlement of the land than cheap and rapid transportation.”⁶⁵ Extending well outside interurban territory, the trend to smaller farms in the Pacific and some of the mountain states around that time may have followed more on the development of markets for fruit and fresh vegetables on land recently used for raising livestock, wheat, and sugar beets than on innovations in transportation. But like the interurbans themselves, it blurred

The Urban Occupation of the West

173

old distinctions between rural and urban life, enabling country people to share urban amenities and city people to live outside city limits. Automobiles made it still easier than electric railways for western cities to extend farther and at lower densities than their older eastern counterparts and for their inhabitants to move out of town into less densely populated suburbs; soon requiring no better prepared roadways than horse-drawn stagecoaches and freight wagons, they ranged far beyond distances over which it was practicable to lay track. At first automobiles seemed no substitutes for trains or even for wagons out of town. Early models were so expensive and so vulnerable to rough use that the trade at first concentrated on selling them to salesmen and sportsmen with access to improved roads and repair services. The automobile departments of magazines and newspapers commonly were adjuncts of sections on sports and pastimes.⁶⁶ Pressure for roads suitable for automobiles came first from organizations in cities and in suburbs with substantial numbers of commuters to them. Such “good-roads” clubs owed much of their financing and leadership to bicyclists (who had organized the League of American Wheelmen in 1880, before automobiles were much more than prospects for the future) and to manufacturers and sellers of bicycles, automobiles, and paving equipment and materials. The Lincoln Highway Association, founded in 1912 to promote a transcontinental route, also collected funds from industrial sponsors for construction, agreeing with the Utah State Road Commission in 1917–18 to finance some of the first sections in the state.⁶⁷ Country people suspected with good reason that state and local governments planned to raise taxes for roads primarily to connect cities with each other and with out-of-town resorts rather than farms with markets. When the Great Northern Railway planned a good-roads demonstration train in 1902, farmers showed little interest.⁶⁸ In California, where the state automobile association began as an organization of San Franciscans, voters approved a bond issue for a state highway department in 1910 over the opposition of the rural southern counties.⁶⁹ Nevertheless automobiles soon came into regular use outside cities, serving special needs in remote and thinly populated areas where passengers were willing to pay premium prices for transportation beyond railroad tracks in lieu of horse-drawn stagecoaches; thus while making cities larger and more diffuse they also extended urban ways into the countryside far beyond their jurisdictions as conventionally defined. Touring cars were familiar sights shuttling among the mines of southern Nevada—gasoline camels of the American desert, Harper’s Weekly called them in 1907;⁷⁰ so were wrecks of automobiles and trucks along the road between Goldfield and Bullfrog.⁷¹ An “automobile stage-coach” carried mail and passengers on a regular route between Torrance and Roswell, New

174

The Urban Occupation of the West

Mexico, in 1908.⁷² To eastern tourists who paid Raymond and Whitcomb, the Boston travel agents, to drive them to Pasadena in 1911,⁷³ automobile travel was sport, but in some of the most rugged parts of the West it was routine transportation. Motor truck and auto-stage routes crossed the sage plains and deserts of southeastern Oregon soon after the Oregon Trunk reached Bend in 1911, over roads that recalled the ordeals of travel with Hank Monk in the Mother Lode country in the 1850s. “I doubt,” a traveler wrote in 1913, “if you could experience death in any part of the world more times for twenty dollars than by auto-stage from Bend to Burns.”⁷⁴ Farmers as well as miners and city people quickly began to buy their own automobiles once serviceable and affordable models became available, long before most roads were adequate by urban standards and before their users agreed on who should build and maintain them. The Model T Ford, introduced in 1908 at $825 for the runabout (reduced to $345 in 1916, $290 in 1926, while the general price of other automobiles rose), was less likely than the lower and heavier Cadillac and Buick to sink in mud and more likely to pull itself out if it did;⁷⁵ it soon dominated rural markets.⁷⁶ Surfaced roads outside city limits were exceptional well after Congress began funding construction through the federal highways acts of 1916 and 1920 and after state legislatures learned to tax gasoline to finance their own systems (from 1919, beginning with Oregon).⁷⁷ The Lincoln Highway had sections so formidably impassable as late as 1925, when it became Highway 30, that many drivers shipped their cars past them by rail: west of Salt Lake City thirty-six miles over soft mud flats and five over salt flats regularly under as much as a foot of water.⁷⁸ Even twenty years later (1945), most farms in plains and mountain states were not on all-weather roads.⁷⁹ But as early as 1910 motor vehicles were substantially more common than over the rest of the country in every far western state except Oklahoma. Although at first California, most urban of western states, led in rate of ownership by a substantial margin, others soon caught up, South Dakota leading in 1920 and her neighbors following close behind.⁸⁰ Within Nebraska, which led all the states in the first count of automobiles on farms (1920), ownership ran substantially higher in farming counties than in Douglas County (Omaha),⁸¹ although improved roads were rarities (in 1914 at 0.3 percent, lowest rate in the forty-eight states).⁸² The shift from horses for transportation was fuller than registrations of cars and trucks may suggest, since many farmers depended on trucks that they did not own for hauling, and since while using Model T Fords for farm chores, they also used trucks for personal travel, long before the pickup truck and the camper.⁸³ As the automobile led farmers to the truck, meanwhile the pump, the combine harvester, and other mechanized equipment led them to the automobile.

The Urban Occupation of the West

175

When they saw their first cars, most wheat farmers were already accustomed to operating and repairing machines more formidable than the Model T; distances to towns and the probability that the nearest blacksmiths had developed no higher expertise had been powerful arguments for becoming their own mechanics. They soon added, subtracted, made, and modified automobile parts for their own purposes, which nut-and-bolt construction made practicable; having enlisted horses and stationary engines in varied chores, they used their cars for much besides trips to town, whether on wheels or jacked up and with a belt around a rim. Cars on Kansas farms, a reporter wrote in 1909, were “shelling corn, turning cream separators, . . . do[ing] the family washing, . . . rounding up herds, dragging dirt roads.”⁸⁴ As early as 1912 the Northern Pacific Railway, which had noted that farmers in its territory were traveling less by train, found that ownership of automobiles ran over a quarter higher than over the rest of the country.⁸⁵ Surveying Garfield County, in the dry-farming and ranching country along the upper Missouri River in northeastern Montana, the geographer Isaiah Bowman concluded in 1930, “The whole culture of the dry western grass country is built on gasoline.”⁸⁶ “The universal means of communication is the motor car operating upon 600 miles of graded prairie road when not driven pell-mell across sage brush flats or even across gullies to distant ridge crests.”⁸⁷ Even during the agricultural depression of the 1920s and 1930s, when the Great Plains lagged behind other sections in value of farm dwellings and in incidence of dwellings with electricity and piped water, they were ahead in incidence of automobiles, as of radios and telephones.⁸⁸ Over large areas geography did not permit building dams to enable farmers to come together in space by shifting to intensive irrigated crops and thus mitigate the isolation that often prompted them to move to town; but soon rural sociologists and social philosophers were looking to automobiles to bring them together in time beyond as well as within irrigation country, and far more effectively than electric railroads. “Could every farmer possess an automobile,” Professor John M. Gillette of the University of North Dakota wrote in 1916 in a paper on problems of rural isolation, “the problem of establishing larger and better rural institutions in considerable measure would be solved.”⁸⁹ Even before then, some of the highest rates of ownership were in the predominantly rural and agricultural northern plains states.⁹⁰ When the Census Bureau began counting automobiles on farms in 1920, it found them on 30.7 percent of farms nationally but in 37.6 percent in the mountain and 47.2 percent in the Pacific states, 75.6 percent in Nebraska, more than in any other state, with South Dakota, Kansas, and North Dakota not far behind, although most farms in plains and mountain states were not on allweather roads until well after the Second World War.⁹¹

176

The Urban Occupation of the West

The effects of the automobile on rural society soon became debatable. It may have encouraged farmers to accept consolidated school districts, since they more easily saw the limitations of the one-room school when they drove past it not only to the next crossroads town but to the county seat as well. But while the automobile widened horizons of rural life, automobile owners both lived better on the farm and moved away from it. Abandoned shacks on land as unpromising as the high deserts of Nevada and southeastern Oregon testified to successive waves of failure, but those who succeeded moved as well as those who failed, those who could afford a second home in town as well as those who could not maintain one anywhere. “It is noticeable,” a writer on the movement to cities observed as early as 1912, “that in those communities best provided with modern conveniences the drift cityward is most rapid.”⁹² In the 1920s, as falling grain prices and new technology prompted surviving farmers to buy more land, often planting some of it only every second year, residence on farms lost much of its old meaning. Sidewalk farmers, who lived in town, became commonplace in dry-farming wheat country as well as in irrigated southern California, where the largest operators were typically nonresident.⁹³ Surveying changes in rural Montana, M. L. Wilson of the state agricultural college found families moving to town for better schools and commuting to their farms: “the auto, the truck, graded roads, and the desire to give children graded school, and especially high school facilities, are the things which are utterly destroying the old Montana farm community, not the machine tractor.”⁹⁴ Many families sacrificed in moving, some to sod houses and tar-paper shacks.⁹⁵ In Haskell County, Kansas, where the population was smaller in 1940 than when the county was organized in 1887, wheat growers visited their farms only to work on them.⁹⁶ Most country towns lost out as a consequence of the new rubber-tired mobility of western farmers, how much depending heavily on their connections by rail and highway and their distances from competitors. Especially over the high plains, the Great Basin, and the high desert east of the Cascades, few could persuade farmers to buy and sell there rather than at larger centers that offered wider choices and better terms. Processing and shipping little of the crops raised around them, most—even in productive farming areas—did not grow on the yields of their hinterlands as Cincinnati had grown on pork, New Orleans on cotton, except insofar as farmers spent there what they realized by selling elsewhere. Flour milling, especially, was a case in point: whereas around 1900 market towns in wheat country typically had grist mills although not water power to run them, as milling technology became more efficient and as railroads reduced freight rates on grain but not on flour,⁹⁷ such mills served predominantly

The Urban Occupation of the West

177

Fig. 6.4. Milling cities. At the eastern edges of the West, numerous towns and cities gradually emerged as milling centers for crops grown in nearby areas. Among these important milling operations was the North Dakota State Mill and Elevator in Grand Forks. Photo courtesy State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck. A05075.

farmers who brought in wheat for their own and local consumption, and they soon went the way of small-town breweries and cooperages even while wheat farming continued to advance on the high plains and the Columbia plateau. The elevator and mill that the state of North Dakota opened at Grand Forks in 1922⁹⁸ represented popular resentment against Minnesota millers but did not check the shift of the industry to distant centers of distribution and consumption: by 1930 Buffalo had moved past Minneapolis to lead in producing flour; by 1950 North Dakota milled less than an eightieth of American flour while raising nearly an eighth of American wheat. In Kansas, first of the wheat states, no city approached Kansas City, Missouri, which dominated milling in adjacent states only somewhat less than Minneapolis dominated milling in the Dakotas and the upper Mississippi Valley, although Wyandotte County (Kansas City, Kansas) and its neighbors along and near the Missouri boundary had become minor wheat producers.⁹⁹ Likewise, before the Second World War cattle went to towns in livestock country chiefly on their way to Chicago and Omaha.¹⁰⁰ The fruit and vegetables of the Pacific and some of the mountain states, especially California, were the principal exceptions, towns as large as San Jose and Fresno canning and packaging most of the prunes, apricots, and grapes (for raisins) raised around them, but much produce went directly from fields into the refrigerator cars that took them east.

178

The Urban Occupation of the West

Rather than in packing and processing, most country towns tended to specialize in providing supplies that farmers could most conveniently get nearby, from foodstuffs (which farmers less frequently produced for their own use in much of the Far West than in older sections, especially in livestock and wheat country) to fuel and fertilizer, and governmental and financial services, as conduits between the dominant economy of the world outside and the subordinate economies of their hinterlands. In the words of Thorstein Veblen, who had known such towns as farmer and son of a farmer in Minnesota, around the beginning of the century they had “in appreciable degree fallen into the position of toll-gate keepers for the distribution of goods and collection of customs for the large absentee owners of the business.”¹⁰¹ Real estate and money-lending agencies were particularly conspicuous in the newer towns, courthouses in the older, some of which survived as county seats as nearby farm households declined, trading radii increased, and those farmers who remained took their business farther afield. Early in the century, when over most of the West advancing rural settlement and town building still reinforced each other, many country towns declined as the business that railroad builders and homesteaders brought moved past them and as the builders of new lines advanced competitors in turn. Thus the Oregon Trunk, which set off a boom at Bend when James J. Hill built it up the canyon of the Deschutes River in 1911, destroyed Shaniko, terminus of the jerry-built Columbia Southern a few miles to the east, where farmers had shipped out their wheat as long as they had no alternative.¹⁰² The business that small towns shared fell off further as fewer farmers farmed more land and as farmers who more often owned automobiles and trucks drove farther from home over better roads to shop in larger communities. Rural trading centers increased most in the first decade of the century, when railroads were saturating developing farm states with branches that filled in the interstices between main lines, sometimes new main lines as well, like the Milwaukee and the Soo; in the decade following they declined sharply as highway systems expanded.¹⁰³ They declined further as farms became larger and all-weather roads more common after the Second World War, the League of Kansas Municipalities reporting (1961) that the smaller a town was, the more likely it was to lose population.¹⁰⁴ In Nebraska, where automobiles increased nearly thirteen times in the 1920s, by 1930 only six counties had no all-weather roads; all of these had lost population while the other eightyseven gained.¹⁰⁵ The economies of surviving communities and their patronage varied widely while automobiles were still uncommon outside large cities. After the postal system began rural free delivery (1896), farmers who no longer had to call at the post office for their mail got out of the habit of stopping also at the general

The Urban Occupation of the West

179

store, which shortly lost to the telephone much of what remained of its function as clearinghouse for messages and neighborhood news. Stockmen already had done much of their buying at major shipping points like Cheyenne and Denver in preference to county seats that in grazing country might be barely large enough to staff county government;¹⁰⁶ occasionally they accompanied their stock to Omaha or Chicago. As farmers concentrated on cash crops they developed similar habits, raising less of their own food. Simultaneously farmers came to buy more seed, fertilizer, lime, pesticides, building materials, machinery, and fuel, supplies so bulky that dealers and farm cooperatives in small towns could give them low prices on quantities too large to haul for long distances by car or pickup truck. Small towns accordingly (as studies of business in Nebraska after the Second World War showed) might have fewer merchants but no less trade; they survived by becoming more exclusively agricultural supply centers.¹⁰⁷ When parcel post (1912) supplemented railroad express and freight services, farmers and townspeople were already accustomed to patronizing mail-order houses, including “Chicago tailors” who sent them samples of fabrics and instructions on how to take measurements; when they got their own cars they soon went to large cities for clothing, furniture, and household appliances.¹⁰⁸ Cities that established municipal campgrounds in the early 1920s to attract tourists often found that their principal patrons were farmers who came there to shop.¹⁰⁹ Outside wheat and cattle country, in areas of larger populations both rural and urban, of more intensive agriculture and greater opportunities for employment away from farms, automobiles also mediated between farm and city, and rural and urban life merged. Old distinctions blurred from the beginnings of irrigated horticulture in the coastal states, where to visitors from cities built in traditional style, the business districts of Los Angeles and other major centers seemed little more than adjuncts to the trains and automobiles that took travelers out of town—hotels built, one of them said (1907), “like business blocks . . . for eating and sleeping, nothing more.”¹¹⁰ The suburban towns established in the real estate boom of the 1880s and after did not inherit even the foci of old Spanish plazas. “Redlands and Riverside are put down in the guidebooks as towns of considerable size,” a traveler observed (1904); “I should rather describe them as thickly populated orange groves.”¹¹¹ Some of the orchard “ranches” of southern California, the Santa Clara Valley, and western Oregon and Washington were distinguishable from incorporated areas only by gradually decreasing density of population. As a writer in Country Life put it (1902), the small irrigated farm “reproduces Riverside and Redlands. . . . City lots become acres, and the walk from the church shades off imperceptibly into the silence of larger groves, or the isolation of the farm loses itself unconsciously in city life, with the independence

180

The Urban Occupation of the West

of the one and the polish of the other.”¹¹² In the northwestern apple country, a visitor observed (1909), “Somebody has to tell you that you are out of town, for you would never know it otherwise.”¹¹³ The “fruit communities” of the Pacific Northwest, Collier’s reported (1909), “now bear the appearance of an extended town, or a restructured suburban addition. Here the loneliness of the farmer’s life is gone.”¹¹⁴ In the Wenatchee Valley, east of Seattle, where the average holding was about ten acres, orchardists had “all the advantages of close neighbors, telephones, electric lights, frequent mail deliveries, and indeed all the comforts of a city and rural life combined.”¹¹⁵ There, as on the irrigated orchard land in the vicinities of Los Angeles and San Jose and in the Willamette Valley, settlers who cherished urban services were ready to take the electric cars when the first of them began running.¹¹⁶ Such tastes and habits and western weather and for the most part terrain (despite the canyons of San Diego and the Venetian situations of the cities on San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound) favored automobile driving and predisposed state and local governments to improve roads while farmers in thinly populated areas complained that city people got more than their share of returns from expenditures on them. New suburban styles of farm life extended into some parts of the subhumid interior also, and promised to extend still further. They probably developed earliest in the belt of villages and irrigated farms that stretched from Salt Lake City through Ogden and the fertile Cache Valley east and north of the Great Salt Lake into southern Idaho, joined together by the traditions of the Mormons’ New England ancestors as well as by the requirements of irrigation agriculture and the Mormon religious and social systems and by electric railways.¹¹⁷ At the Salt River project in Arizona, climate and the prospects of speculative profits attracted settlers who did not pretend to be farmers, although Elwood Mead as commissioner of reclamation looked hopefully to the “development of numerous 5 and 10 acre [citrus] groves by individuals in other occupations, who plan[ned] ultimately to engage entirely in citrus raising.” As Mead noted (this in 1930, when the population of Phoenix had risen to 48,118, from 5,544 in 1900, before Roosevelt Dam [built 1903–11]), high-class hotel facilities had attracted many of the residents, and nearly half the settlers on project lands had two acres or less.¹¹⁸ But communities in all the mountain and Pacific states hoped to follow the example of California. The director of the Montana Experiment Station predicted (1906) that farming on forty-acre irrigated tracts could “give to the country resident all the advantages of the urban resident without his disadvantage,”¹¹⁹ and eastern investors engaged Frank Lloyd Wright to design residences and an elaborate clubhouse for apple growers in the Bitterroot Valley, south of Missoula.¹²⁰ An Idahoan predicted (1909) “a dense population resembling a vil-

The Urban Occupation of the West

181

Fig. 6.5. Expanding western suburbs. Even before but especially during and after the Second World War, western cities expanded from urban cores into mushrooming suburbs. The rise of suburbs and the increasing mobility of suburbanites are reflected in this photo of invading moving vans in a Kaiser Community Homes area in southern California. Photo courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections, “Dick” Whittington Collection, 1947, 1–152.

lage” in the Payette Valley, along the Snake River, with ten-acre farms “intercepted by electric railways, power lines, and fine roads.”¹²¹ While farmers increasingly moved into towns and cities, some of them continuing to farm as nonresidents or part-time residents, city people moved onto former farmland, where most of them farmed no more than symbolically. When the Bureau of the Census began separating rural population into rural farm and rural nonfarm categories in 1920, rural farm population exceeded rural nonfarm population by over half nationally. It remained ahead until well after the Second World War in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, as over much of the South and the western Middle West, but farther west farmers were already a minority outside of city limits in 1920. Many rural westerners did not support themselves fully by farming well before

182

The Urban Occupation of the West

the trolley car and the automobile and well outside mining country. In the first years of the twentieth century many newcomers did barely as much farming as homestead laws required while they waited for demand for crops or for the land itself. Costs of moving to much of the land available for homesteading exceeded probable returns from farming it, including land still without railroad service. As the Milwaukee Road extended its main line through southwestern North Dakota in 1907–8, homesteaders worked at grading roadbeds and at building grain elevators. Although some beginners took such jobs as variants on the traditional expedient of working for established farmers to cover the costs of getting started and began to farm as soon as the railroad offered transportation rather than employment, others sold their claims and moved on once the boom in construction passed.¹²² Some women homesteaders who took up land in the rushes into dry-farming and irrigation country before the First World War were women whose husbands worked in town: the wife of a carpenter at Boise, of a teamster at Pocatello.¹²³ But even before automobiles became reliable transportation, new classes of settlers appeared, interested in rural land primarily as residence. Some of the affluent easterners and middle westerners who bought irrigable land in plots of ten or fifteen acres east of Los Angeles, around Pasadena and Riverside, from the 1870s had moved west to retire and shortly withdrew from agriculture as well as from business, profiting pleasantly but incidentally by subdividing their “citrus estates” into city lots. As land became expensive, families of more modest circumstances looked for an acre or two near enough to town so that costs of moving between the two did not exceed savings in original costs, taxes, and vegetables and chickens that they raised for their own tables. For some the new way of life was social philosophy, as among the Little Landers, followers of William E. Smythe, who settled south of San Diego along the Mexican border;¹²⁴ for others it was simply cheap living with access to regular wages. From the 1920s rural nonfarmers and part-time farmers became still more common as it became easier for them to move into and out of town by automobile. By 1939 nearly half the farm operators in western Washington worked off the farm.¹²⁵ For a family from a logging town, a reporter wrote, moving to a “farm” on a piece of cutover land nearby “did not mean a change in occupation; it only meant an additional occupation for evenings.”¹²⁶ The big gains in populations on farms in the state in the 1930s were on small tracts of poor land, population continuing to decline in the rich wheat land east of the Cascades.¹²⁷ Much of the apparent return to the farm during the Great Depression probably was on paper only, by rural residents whom census takers reclassified as farmers when they lost their jobs in town. When they got their old jobs back, during and after the Second World War, many stayed on. In the Kendrick irrigation project, near

The Urban Occupation of the West

183

Casper, Wyoming, in the mid-1960s, most families no longer talked of becoming full-time farmers or of earning more than incidental income at farming. They were there because they “liked country life.”¹²⁸ In the Utah Valley, Mormon farmers remained in the rural environment that they valued by working off the farm, although while they gained the means of paying for improvements, they lost time that they needed to irrigate efficiently.¹²⁹ Outside the fruit-growing suburbs of California and the Pacific Northwest, the rural West came slowly into the twentieth century by the test of conveniences of urban life other than the automobile. Homesteaders on the high plains still lived in sod houses well past the beginning of the century, and although the most prosperous of them might keep warm and well fed and clothed, most still cooked and warmed themselves by wood- or coal-burning ranges, carried their water, and read by oil lamps. Even in areas longer settled, by 1920 the average western farmhouse had not changed so much as its connections with the rest of the world. There was a good chance that an automobile was parked outside, a telephone mounted on the kitchen wall. Farmers in the wheat-growing states of the high plains, where families on the largest crop farms in the country had felt particularly isolated, were more than twice as likely to have telephones as farmers on the coast although not electricity, which was still exceptional on farms while commonly in use in town.¹³⁰ A ranch house with full modern conveniences took extraordinary means, as when Thomas W. Lawson, the Boston financier, presented one to a daughter who was going to live on a section of sagebrush near Prineville in central Oregon (1911–12); it had five bathrooms in three stories under a mansard roof.¹³¹ The big changes indoors came only in the 1940s and 1950s. As late as 1935 California and Utah were the only far western states where more than half the farmers had electricity; Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada joined them by 1940, and all the others by 1950. Piped water was exceptional before the Great Depression outside of California; by the 1950s it was the norm except in the Dakotas. Once a westerner had it, he was more likely than other Americans to install a complete bathroom, as once he had electricity he was more likely to buy a washing machine, a refrigerator, and a freezer.¹³² In the new urbanized economy economic dependence on cities and resort to urban ways often varied more in form than in degree. Crop farmers who worked plots small enough so that they and their families could do most of their own work tended to live close to metropolitan areas or even within them, close enough to the metropolitan market to enjoy at least the illusion of controlling terms of sale, and choosing their outlets and their crops in response to observable demand.¹³³ In contrast, those who moved farthest from cities, even from the mountain streams that cities tapped for their water, the coal for their power, to

184

The Urban Occupation of the West

the most thinly settled land, farthest from the noises and smells that cities exuded and the taxes that they collected, sometimes had to pay the highest levies for capital and submit most to the control of urban wholesalers and processors as they specialized in crops that they sold in distant markets. Part of the price of living in the most spacious, freest-looking parts of the West was to be so far from markets and suppliers as to have to transpose space into time: wheat farmers and stockmen in the high plains and the Rockies, like fishermen and prospectors in Alaska, used airplanes more than truck farmers outside Denver and Los Angeles, not because a big new country bred big new ideas but because the cost of traveling over it by older, more conventional means was unconventionally high. Through the first decades of the twentieth century the growth of western cities confirmed the faith of city builders in the strategies they had used to locate and promote them. As more westerners among other Americans moved to cities, long after trains and ships lost much of their early value and authority in western economies, they continued to move disproportionately to those that had grown around railroad terminals and seaports. In 1950 Los Angeles and San Francisco still were the largest far western cities, as they had been half a century before, although Los Angeles had moved into first place by 1920. Only two others of the ten largest then had not been among the ten largest before, and one of those (Honolulu) had moved from eleventh to tenth place. (The other was San Diego, which although new to high rank was oldest of the ten, older than any European settlement on the West Coast of North America north of the Jesuit missions of Baja California, and which had moved from eighteenth to seventh.) All of the terminals of trunk railroads were among the ten of both years except Salt Lake City and Tacoma, which dropped from eighth and twelfth to thirteenth and fourteenth; the only two of the ten of 1950 not railroad terminals were Honolulu and Long Beach, both major ports and Long Beach in addition as close to the terminal of the AT&SF in Los Angeles as most of Los Angeles was.

7

Rails, Roads, and Cities from the Second World War

As a group, western cities changed more in four years during the war than they had changed in any decade since gold rushes transformed San Francisco and created Denver nearly a century before. Some of the principal changes were changes that the war permitted and prompted, especially in migration from other regions. As high prices for crops and land in the early 1900s had attracted homesteaders who might have come earlier but for the depression of the 1890s, high wages in the early 1940s attracted working people who might have come earlier but for the Depression of the 1930s, assuring them that if they came they would more than recover the cost of coming. But the war had suspended some change in cities among other places as long as it lasted while accelerating other change then and preparing for more later. While agencies and contractors of the United States government accumulated labor forces to meet immediate needs, the people they hired and others who were already there accumulated demand for goods and services that no one met or could meet more than marginally for several years, from housing to the most basic nondurable consumer goods. Long lines in shopping districts that had been developed for small prewar clienteles foreshadowed prospects for postwar enterprise. Suddenly introducing massive new military installations and factories that in various ways enormously complicated civilian life, the government and its agents overloaded basic urban structures and services, only occasionally making improvements that relieved some of the pressure on them or that anticipated pressures from future development, as by expanding airports and water and sewer systems.¹ At San Diego, one of the largest government-sponsored civilian housing projects opened without stores, schools, recreational space, or adequate public services from sewage system to connections to other parts of

185

186

Cities from the Second World War

the city; until the National Housing Agency built a shopping center to accommodate tenants, those without cars had to walk two or three miles and across a canyon to buy food.² The Atomic Energy Commission built a shopping center at Los Alamos, New Mexico, laboratory of the atomic bomb, the Kaiser Company five “commercial centers” at Vanport.³ Some of the principal changes in western urban areas and urban life after the war built on such wartime improvisations, especially those that accommodated dispersed growth beyond old boundaries. Large shopping centers that drew traffic from new residential developments were among the most visible, becoming disproportionately more far western as circumstances of fast-growing communities encouraged developers and merchants to invest in them;⁴ scattering of new industrial installations, which like automobile assembly plants and tire factories before the war, and airplane plants during it, demanded more space and easier access than in older industrial districts; predominance of detached single-family houses, which young families preferred to apartments, especially after living in minimal, sometimes semicommunal quarters during the war, and which liberal terms for mortgages as well as wartime savings and postwar incomes enabled them to buy;⁵ distances of most new housing developments from more conventional retail districts; footloose ways of new householders, who typically had to go more than walking distances to work and had developed no loyalty to merchants in older neighborhoods; increasing dependence on automobiles, especially in areas developed beyond convenient public transportation, which had fallen so far behind increased demand during the war that most who had had to use it were ready for more convenient alternatives.⁶ Finding, moreover, that unusual attractions brought unusual returns, developers of western shopping centers led in adding new features. The first center designed to draw from an area large enough to justify calling it regional rather than neighborhood opened seven miles north of downtown Seattle in 1950. The owners of a department store had decided to build a new unit alongside a new expressway in open country beyond the city limits where there was enough room for other merchants to justify shoppers in coming there, including residents of suburbs who could not easily get through the congestion of the central district; by arranging buildings along a pedestrian corridor or mall they provided ample parking space within walking distance around them. The success of the resulting complex, called Northgate, prompted the owners to expand and later to enclose it, others to imitate it both in gathering assorted retailers around malls and in including at least one major department store among them (shortly indispensable, as “anchor”).⁷ The Stanford Shopping Center at Menlo Park, opened four years later, was counterpart to the Stanford Industrial Park, whose tenants contributed

Cities from the Second World War

187

to its business. Some comparable parks that universities opened in other states also included shopping centers or were near them.⁸ As merchants moved into outlying shopping centers, urban populations and functions spread to and beyond them on new public thoroughfares beyond the systems of interurban trains that had fed earlier suburban growth. When Congress began providing for automobile highways in 1916, it assumed that they would be primarily market roads in rural areas and administered funding through the Department of Agriculture.⁹ But urban businessmen expected the numbered routes that the department designated in the 1920s to bring business to them as once they had looked to steam and electric railroads, and with some justification. Route 66, which promoters persuaded the Bureau of Public Roads to lay out through their cities, including Tulsa, home of the highway commissioner of Oklahoma, supported roadside motels, gasoline stations, and cafes along it from Chicago to Los Angeles.¹⁰ Urban interest in highways had so increased by the 1930s that Congress included them among the public works projects that it financed to relieve urban unemployment through the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933; later President Roosevelt transferred the Bureau of Public Roads from Agriculture to the Federal Works Agency (1939).¹¹ By then, plans for divided roads with limited access were well advanced in California, which called them parkways and expressways. They differed from the parkways and turnpikes that Connecticut and Pennsylvania built in the 1930s in that the first of them ran entirely within Los Angeles and its immediate vicinity rather than between distinct urban areas; since entrances and exits to accommodate local traffic were too many to permit collecting tolls from drivers at them, the state drew on revenue from taxes. A sixmile segment of a winding road through the wooded canyon of the Arroyo Seco between Los Angeles and Pasadena opened in December 1940; originally proposed as “a route of pleasure travel” and called the Arroyo Seco Parkway, later it became the Pasadena Freeway.¹² Counting on a formula for financing highways that gave western states more in federal matching funds than other states, Californians continued to plan them during the war while postponing construction until it ended. In 1947 the state legislature authorized building 14,000 miles of expressways that later became parts of the federal system.¹³ Even before they were ready, among city, county, and state projects, Los Angeles claimed the largest urban highway system in the world, with more than 180 miles of expressways and freeways completed by 1956 and plans for over 300 more.¹⁴ Anticipating needs in future wars and other emergencies, the Department of Defense had proposed expanding the federal highway system to supplement

94

90 90

80 5 70 80 15

70 25 65

35

75 85 95

55 40

30

20

10

Additions of 19 56to 19 47plan Additions to 19 56plan

Fig. 7.1. Western highway grids. Webs of major and connecting highways spread over the West by the Second World War. From the 1950s forward freeways provided newer, extensive, and more direct routes crisscrossing all subregions of the West. Map by Bill Nelson.

Cities from the Second World War

189

Fig. 7.2. The Arroyo Seco Parkway or Pasadena Freeway. One of the earliest freeways in the West, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (which became more popularly known as the Pasadena Freeway) connected Los Angeles with Pasadena. This pioneering freeway encouraged expansion of Los Angeles to the east, toward the mountains. Photo courtesy of the Automobile Club of Southern California Archives. Negative #6223.

railroads in carrying military passengers and freight over long distances. Congress agreed to the extent of calling the new freeways that it authorized in 1956 “Interstate and Defense Highways,” assuming most of the cost of building them and drawing on general revenues as well as returns from taxes on motor fuels to cover it. But it had already (1944) accepted a proposal of the Bureau of Public Roads to subsidize urban “arterials,” highways designed to take fast traffic across centers of cities that the bureau and state and city officials predicted would relieve congestion in them.¹⁵ Instead of having freeways run between and around cities to avoid local concentrations of civilian traffic, as military advisers had expected, now Congress allocated over half the funds to be spent on the new

190

Cities from the Second World War

system over the next decade to urban areas.¹⁶ A California official noted that it would promote construction of all highways by releasing state funds for routes other than those called interstate.¹⁷ Before the new freeways were ready, misgivings about how they would affect cities developed. The authors of a widely quoted report (1956) of the California Division of Highways had argued that business increased more in towns that had freeways than in those that did not.¹⁸ “Businessmen of the major cities generally look to improved highways, particularly freeways, as one of the most potent forces available to help provide accessibility and thus revitalize the city and make it more attractive for visitors, residents, and shoppers,” the Stanford Research Institute reported in 1958.¹⁹ But nine years later, Mayor James D. Braman of Seattle concluded that instead of relieving urban congestion, new highways aggravated it.²⁰ Moreover, they undermined economies of central cities by diverting business from them and destroying neighborhoods where much of their labor force had lived. “The 1913 Easter tornado was not as destructive as is the Interstate Highway,” an Omaha councilman declared (1961), referring to a benchmark disaster that had left 140 persons dead or dying and 2,500 homeless.²¹ Describing how commercial nuclei developed where freeways intersected, a journalist said that the program was “the greatest invitation for land speculation since Congress opened up the old West a century ago with land grants to the railroads.” A geographer (1990) called freeways the new focus of urban growth: “Urban regions have become a galaxy of clusters of economic activities organized primarily around freeway systems.”²² While such extra-urban, post-suburban, polycentric, or galactic systems proliferated everywhere, they developed especially around fast-growing western communities. Doubts about freeways emerged even in southern California, which had embraced automobiles so early and so unreservedly that it experienced some of their more intractable consequences when construction under federal auspices was barely beginning elsewhere. A reporter estimated in 1959 that an automobile took nearly as long to cross Los Angeles at rush hours as a horse and buggy had taken in 1900.²³ But freeways affected much more than the traffic they were designed to carry, dividing neighborhoods and driving out small businesses and low-income residents who had depended on them. “Throughout Los Angeles,” Mayor Sam Yorty told a Senate committee in 1967, “the homogeny of community has been destroyed forever by the unnatural compartmentalizing effects of freeways designed only to move cars.” Governor Ronald Reagan, who ordinarily supported such development, testified that a proposed freeway interchange would displace 2,600 families from the only housing they could afford; this was Watts, in south-central Los Angeles, site of riots in 1965, which the decline of

Cities from the Second World War

191

public transportation had left isolated.²⁴ Several years later, as traffic clogged new freeways, southern Californians asked the state Department of Transportation both to add to them and to develop rail-borne transit, much of it along the routes of abandoned interurban systems.²⁵ By the time a freeway to the Los Angeles airport opened in 1993, critics of plans for it had forced the department to narrow and shorten it, to provide housing for the people it displaced, and to help them to find work.²⁶ Over years when westerners committed themselves more fully to automobiles they also turned to airplanes. Both in expectations entertained of them and in some of their consequences, airplanes were much like the railroads that they ultimately replaced in carrying passengers over long distances. By the 1950s westerners led the nation in traveling within cities by automobile, only San Franciscans continuing to use local rail and bus systems as much as Bostonians, Chicagoans, and New Yorkers. By 1971, when railroads had reduced passenger service to the extent that Congress established the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) to operate trains on a skeletal network of intercity routes, westerners also led in traveling between cities by airplane. But while automobiles, like electric street and interurban railroads, affected chiefly the internal relations of cities and their relations with their immediate neighbors, airplanes, like main line railroads and ships chiefly their larger external relations, their effects overlapped substantially. As city planners had to reckon with both intercity and local automobile traffic on freeways, they had to consider airports as termini of interurban movement; gateways from the outside; and nuclei of commercial, industrial, and residential development clustered around them. Air service may have most decisively affected large resident populations in Arizona and California, long special provinces of the Southern Pacific Company, which lost interest in passenger traffic before other major operators. Within eight years after airlines began offering competitively low fares within California in 1949, more passengers went between San Francisco and Los Angeles by plane than by train.²⁷ Phoenix had grown beyond proportions that housing state government and serving farmers and military personnel in the vicinity justified soon after eastern vacationers began coming by Pullman car in the 1890s; but within thirty years after the Southern Pacific all but discontinued service in the 1960s, when it was sixth city in the West (up from thirteenth in 1950, twenty-third in 1940), it became the second largest city in the West (1994). The footloose ways of new western industries and their employees, which aerial and electronic communication facilitated, suggested opportunities especially at Phoenix and other cities that had had to defer to major seaports and railroad terminals and that now matched them in accessibility from other regions.

192

Cities from the Second World War

Although the United States government promoted aeronautics and airplane transportation over many years, during the two world wars operating most of the planes in the country and training most of the pilots, between the wars subsidizing airmail service before regular airborne traffic in passengers and freight developed over most of the country, until the 1940s it left the establishment and operation of airports for civilian uses chiefly to local resources, which usually yielded more rhetoric than basic airport services. When General William (Billy) Mitchell asked the Tucson Chamber of Commerce to provide an airfield for the Army Air Force in 1919, it established what became the first municipal airport in the United States. Salt Lake City bought land for an airport the next year to accommodate transcontinental mail service but without providing for a hangar; when the Postal Service threatened to route service through Ogden instead, the Commercial Club promptly built one.²⁸ “Not since the war united the country in a fervor of patriotic efforts has any issue taken such hold of public interest in the country beyond the Rockies as has aviation,” a writer in the American City observed (1927), citing plans for airports at coastal cities.²⁹ Hopes ran high even in cities that had grown as rail centers. At Omaha, whose title “the Gateway City” recalled how it began as outfitting center for overland wagon trains and became junction of nine major steam railroad systems, boosters celebrating a new municipal airport proclaimed (1929) that they were “riding the rising tide of aviation.”³⁰ By 1930, when the armed forces maintained 16 airports in eight western states (seven of them in California), the sixteen western states and Alaska had 681 civilian airports, two-fifths of all in continental United States (the forty-eight states and Alaska), although less than a sixth (15.1 percent) of the population. With 158 of the total of 1,708, California, sixth state in order of population, had more than any other.³¹ Half or more of all domestic air travel was within western states.³² Mechanized transportation on land was more limited in Alaska and Hawaii than in other states even after the army built the Alaska Highway and the state of Alaska established the Alaska Marine Highway (the system of automobile ferries that began service from Prince Rupert to southeastern Alaska in 1963),³³ but airplanes began to supplement and even to replace ships in and around both territories, and especially Alaska, when they still had little economic use elsewhere. During the decade after the First World War many people in the contiguous states knew them chiefly as curiosities as their owners, often veterans who had bought them at sales of surplus government property, roamed the country performing at county fairs and taking spectators for rides; but Alaskans soon relied on them as basic transportation for passengers and supplies. “I had an old army plane, and as a gypsy flyer I barnstormed thirty-seven states,” recalled one

Cities from the Second World War

193

who found his vocation as a bush pilot in the territory.³⁴ Although continuing scheduled air service there dated only from 1929,³⁵ and until the 1940s without encouragement from the United States government, dog teams that brought diphtheria antitoxin from Nenana to Nome in five days and seven hours in 1924 were among the last to serve much more than personal and recreational uses.³⁶ An agent of the Department of the Interior commissioned to promote economic development in the territory reported rhapsodically (1929) that the airplane was its “ace in the hole” as it sat atop the globe ready to “trap that new commerce of the skies and oceans which will bring the trade of Siberia and China to New York and London.”³⁷ Civilian “air transport is and has been for some time the lifeblood of Alaska,” a representative of the department testified, when Congress began to subsidize aviation there after the Second World War. “The airplane is accepted in Alaska much as we in the continental United States accept our motor buses or our coastline shipping and our milk trains.”³⁸ By 1939 Alaskans traveled by air at about 23 times and shipped freight at over 800 times national rates; in the 1930s the volume of Alaskan air-freight shipments rose from nearly a third as much as in the rest of the United States to nearly half as much.³⁹ Whereas principal far western railroads began by handling chiefly traffic over long distances, air common carriers in Alaska and other parts of the West first emphasized short trips. Aerial connections between the two outlying territories and continental United States came late and at first on small scales. Ceremonies held when service from Alameda to Honolulu and Manila opened in 1935, with a Wells Fargo Express coach delivering mailbags, suggested a break with the past as momentous as the completion of the Pacific railroad in 1869. But on their first flights the “clippers” carried mail only, at intervals of three weeks. Although passenger service on weekly schedules began two years later, at capacities of twelve persons, the planes first used carried their principal loads in mail,⁴⁰ which staffs of importers at San Francisco rushed to dispatch by “clipper day,” prudently sending duplicates by ship. Hawaiian interisland commercial service had begun in 1929 but without the subsidy of mail contracts in the first decade; high fares left surface carriers dominant. Scheduled service to and from Seattle, begun in 1940, at first operated in summer only.⁴¹ Early air service in Alaska and general reliance on it began without even prospect of the kinds of supporting facilities that became standard elsewhere. When Congress prepared to supplement municipal and other local and private resources for airports in 1947, the Civil Aviation Administration reported more traffic at Anchorage than at Dallas, Fort Worth, Kansas City, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Diego, among other cities; soon it became a major international airport as planes stopped there on the way to Japan. Civilian

194

Cities from the Second World War

airports in the territory had nearly doubled in the 1930s to 125, second only to those in California in the West and a close fourth nationally; such figures understated traffic, since bush pilots had learned to land on ice and tundra.⁴² But improvements were still marginal; the Fairbanks Municipal Airport, second in size and use (“finest in Alaska,” in the words of a resident), by 1929 prepared for zeppelins (which never used it), was a partly graveled sod field that spring rains made an unusable mire.⁴³ In 1939 only two airports were even partly lighted, one in sixty-two against nearly one in three in the lower forty-eight states.⁴⁴ Pilots on early continental routes followed railroad tracks both as navigational aid—the “iron compass”—and for access to supplies and assistance;⁴⁵ in Alaska they had to learn landmarks on largely unmarked terrain. Despite expansive rhetoric, municipal commitments everywhere tended to be tentative and symbolic before the 1940s. “What the choice of a harbor means to a seaport community of the present and past, the selection of a great metropolitan airport means to the community of the future, and even more,” the Inglewood Daily Californian exhorted in 1928, when the Los Angeles city council considered making a small private field the first municipal airport. Although the city took it over that fall, it only leased the land until 1937; through the 1930s flying schools, mechanics, and private pilots were the principal users, until 1946 scheduled airlines (which had begun regular service between San Diego and San Francisco in 1929) relying mainly on fields that manufacturers maintained.⁴⁶ When developers offered high prices for such privately operated fields after the war, most owners chose to sell rather than expand to accommodate increasing traffic, deferring to municipal initiative. But although chambers of commerce argued that improved service would advance local economies, taxpayers were slow to commit public funds and credit.⁴⁷ Phoenix had sold its first municipal airport to a farmer in 1929, only six years later buying a privately operated field to qualify for federal aid; prodded by local businessmen, it finally included an enlarged airport in a program of promoting growth in the 1950s.⁴⁸ In Omaha, where railroad unions opposed subsidizing competing transportation and voters refused to authorize bonds to expand the municipal airport, the city council created an independent airport authority (1959) that received grants and issued bonds.⁴⁹ Municipalities cultivated airlines more unreservedly after Congress deregulated the industry in 1978, when railroads had essentially withdrawn from passenger business. Facing cuts in service, the city of Fresno agreed to build facilities and lease them without charge.⁵⁰ Air service ultimately justified much of the confidence of its advocates, transforming cities and their tributary territory at least as much as ship and railroad service had done earlier. Soon far more passengers came to Honolulu by plane

Cities from the Second World War

195

than had come by ship, by 1976 over sixty times as many as at the peak of surface traffic less than twenty years before. Within two decades, between the 1950s and the 1970s, entertaining tourists replaced raising sugar and pineapple as first industry in Hawaii. Paving the waterfront at Waikiki with skyscraper hotels to lodge them, major airlines dominated the economy of the islands.⁵¹ Over the same years Las Vegas became the fastest-growing metropolitan area of the mountain states after patrons of its casinos began arriving by air. Through the 1920s the Las Vegas that drew tourists had been the one in New Mexico, station stop for hotels that the Santa Fe Railway built at Montezuma Hot Springs; the Nevadan Las Vegas, which the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad established as a division point in 1905, remained little more than that over the next quarter century, barely larger than Elko and Ely until the Hoover Dam project brought more business in 1930–35. When professional gamblers moved in from the late 1930s, they catered to clienteles freer spending than crews of contractors at the dam and tourists on their way to it: motion picture people who followed when the police closed casinos in and near Los Angeles, military personnel from a base opened north of town in 1941. After the war, lavish resort hotels lined the highway south of the city (the Strip) to intercept patronguests driving from California. Receipts at hotels in the metropolitan area were largest in the country by 1972; by 1980, when it ranked twenty-first in population among far western metropolitan areas, it was second only to New York City in number of hotel rooms, and a hotel opened in 1992 was largest in the world.⁵² By 1980 it had more residents than Albuquerque, by 1990 than Tucson. Air traffic increased so fast in the 1960s that Howard Hughes, the former airplane builder, who had bought four major hotel-casinos,⁵³ proposed building a three-hundredmile-an-hour magnetic railroad to a supersonic airport serving both Las Vegas and Los Angeles.⁵⁴ Most visitors came long distances, by the 1980s fewer than a fourth from California; fewer than a third visited other parts of Nevada.⁵⁵ Except for a few well within city limits, airports were more like freeways than railroads, however, in affecting relations of cities to suburbs and in dispersing urban development. Airlines soon required more space than most cities could clear within their jurisdictions. With as much commerce and as little room for it as any western city, San Francisco put its first municipal airport, Mills Field, six miles inside the next county (1927);⁵⁶ more distant sites became common after the war. Although householders complained of noise, peripheries of airports were in demand for both commercial and residential uses. Values of industrial land near the San Francisco Airport increased twelve times within the decade after a new terminal opened in 1954.⁵⁷ The Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) became focus of substantial industrial and commercial development from the

WA MT OR

ND

3

2

ID

SD WY NE

NV

4

UT

CA

CO

KS

OK

AZ

NM

TX AL

1 HI

1 2 3 4

Continuous boom Recent growth states Recent metropolitan growth Lagging metropolitan growth

Fig. 7.3. Western urbanization. This map clearly illustrates the primary trends of western urbanization in the recent twentieth century. Cities along the Pacific Coast and southwestern edges of the West continued to expand, whereas the northern and eastern edges lagged behind in metropolitan growth. Map by Bill Nelson.

Cities from the Second World War

197

1960s, including skyscraper office buildings,⁵⁸ as well as second largest employer in the county.⁵⁹ Hayward, south of Oakland, planned residential, recreational, and retail areas as well as an industrial park next to its airport.⁶⁰ Fresno developed a municipal office park while rentals and real estate values sagged in the central business district.⁶¹ Saudi Arabian capitalists invested $615 millions in the Salt Lake International Center, which they began developing as a business park and residential community on 900 acres west of the Salt Lake City International Airport in 1975.⁶² As systems of transportation by automobile and airplane expanded, they both accommodated growing populations and fed further growth, as politicians and businessmen who promoted them hoped they would, though not always in ways that they had expected. Connecting more cities by the 1950s than railroads had connected at their heyday, soon they carried more traffic over greater distances. (When the last two railroads called transcontinental began service over their main lines in 1909 and 1910, for instance, the Southern Pacific had not yet reached Eureka, principal port between San Francisco and Portland, which was larger than any city in three western states and Alaska.)⁶³ They also helped fast-growing cities to grow more like each other and to do it more completely than over the half-century after the Civil War, when changes in communication, transportation, and distribution had encouraged producers of goods and services from canned fruit to vaudeville comedy to cultivate national markets. Automobiles and their uses and requirements were among the most visible features of developing cities and among those that most defined how they grew. Provisions for them distinguished new from old neighborhoods, postwar developers making garages and houses for postwar cars and postwar families respectively larger and smaller than their prewar counterparts. To the architect Charles Moore, automobiles and tract houses represented the rootlessness of life in new western cities, where people were no more committed to place than their cars. Their houses, he wrote (1965), “are less islands alongside which the cars are moored than little yachts, dwarfed by the great chrome-trimmed dinghys that seek their lees. This is a floating world in which a floating people can island-hop with impunity; one need almost never go ashore.”⁶⁴ Tenants of such garageswith-houses-attached, moreover, commonly worked in different and often changing jurisdictions rather than in a central business district where they and neighbors who also worked there might efficiently go by railroad lines that radiated out from it, sharing a kind of common citizenship by day as well as night. But while cities grew more alike around the automobiles that their residents lived by, they also grew differently, according to how much they grew before and how much after automobiles came into general use and according to what

198

Cities from the Second World War

their residents wanted and were willing to accept. More fully than any of its contemporaries San Francisco had retained the appearance and atmosphere of the era of the cable cars introduced there in the 1870s, when it was busier, more influential, and more attractive than a late nineteenth-century city with a third of a million inhabitants (342,782 in 1900) was likely to be; affection for what the earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed helped reconcile residents to the desires of businessmen to resume normal activities as soon as possible instead of redesigning it as planners and civic leaders had recommended.⁶⁵ Yet other cities surpassed it in population—Los Angeles about 1916, San Diego and Phoenix in 1971–75, San Jose in 1988—as first it gained more slowly, then, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, lost. The four most immediately tributary counties around the bay had less than a fourth more inhabitants in 1940. Although San Francisco gained again in the 1980s, by 1990 they had over four times as many, with Santa Clara County, immediately to the south of them, over six times. Changes in order of population corresponded to changes in economies. Still first among Bay Area counties in employment in manufacturing just after the war, San Francisco fell behind Alameda County, across the bay to the east, in the later 1950s, by 1962 both of them behind Santa Clara County, which had been a poor fourth fifteen years before.⁶⁶ Where commuters had passed twenty miles of prune, apricot, and cherry orchards, the county had three freeways and the highest levels of smog in northern California. By the 1980s less than a tenth of the orchards remained, and the county was second in the state only to Los Angeles County in numbers employed in manufacturing as well as first in rate of employment.⁶⁷ Yet San Jose remained more a bedroom community than most cities of its size, for many years without major corporate and governmental offices or enough theater and music to entertain residents, let alone tourists. “The cultural center of Santa Clara County is the single-family dwelling,” an economist observed in 1964.⁶⁸ Although both the former dependencies of San Francisco and the new aeronautical and military capitals of southern California outnumbered it, the old metropolis maintained much of its traditional social and economic preeminence and varied appeal, continuing disproportionately to maintain a skilled work force and to attract immigrants, especially from Asia and the western Pacific. It also retained much of the West’s freight-forwarding, trading, and especially financing, though little of its manufacturing. Its small area handicapped it in some respects, as when Oakland took over most of its shipping and neighboring counties outvoted it in planning systems of transportation that seriously affected it internally as well as in relations with the region, yet it defied much of what seemed the common fate of its urban contemporaries as most of them

Cities from the Second World War

199

deteriorated economically and socially in the second half of the century. While comparable to Boston in physical arrangements and in politics, among other respects, it succeeded more in redefining its economic base.⁶⁹ Although it no longer dominated domestic banking on the coast as it had when it became headquarters for the twelfth Federal Reserve district in 1914,⁷⁰ falling behind Los Angeles by the measures of checks cleared and loans discounted,⁷¹ it remained second only to New York in international business and international banking into the 1970s, a global city while Los Angeles was only a regional center.⁷² It also was second only to New York (Manhattan) among American counties in rate of employment in finance, which with government and professional services accounted for nearly three-fifths the total.⁷³ Like Manhattan, moreover, San Francisco provided cultural offerings, assorted entertainment, and fashionable shopping for more than a metropolitan area; sharing local pride in the city and its traditions, old residents of much of California and Nevada continued to call it “the city” as if there were no other. It was, Moore wrote in 1965, “California’s one established anchored city.”⁷⁴ Confident in their status, residents were as indifferent to the prospect of being outnumbered as the fast-increasing newcomers of Santa Clara County were to possibilities of planning how their communities grew.⁷⁵ (When the census reported that San Jose had overtaken it in 1989 a San Francisco newspaper columnist observed unconcernedly, “That town . . . has room to grow in every direction except up. Even when it hits a million, San Jose will still be the next 16 exits on the freeway.”)⁷⁶ While politicians and other boosters continued after the war to promote military and especially naval installations in the Bay Area, leading San Francisco businessmen emphasized strategies of building on existing structures of finance and management, leaving industrial development to their neighbors. To accommodate expanding managerial and entrepreneurial personnel, developers drew on subsidies available through programs of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, planning complexes of retail areas, hotels, apartments, and especially multistoried office buildings on sites of allegedly decayed rooming and apartment houses, residential hotels, wholesale markets, and small businesses near the financial district.⁷⁷ By the early 1980s twenty-three new office buildings were higher than any in the city before the war, over a third of all as high in the eighteen states. The ratio of office space to resident population was larger than in any other major American city except Boston, three times as much as in Los Angeles.⁷⁸ But whereas financial and governmental agencies became more conspicuous in other central business districts simply by remaining while other businesses retreated, in San Francisco stores, restaurants, hotels, and theaters continued to flourish.

200

Cities from the Second World War

Since density of population already was unusually high, less only than in four boroughs of New York City, increases in employment put pressure on connections between the city and outlying areas where much of the labor force of the central business district lived (by 1980 over a third of employees in all occupations, over a half in financial services).⁷⁹ Many commuters had been driving to work on the Bayshore Highway since the 1920s and over bridges from Oakland and across the Golden Gate since the 1930s, and more drove as first the ferries stopped (1939) and then the electric trains (1958) and the Southern Pacific Railroad curtailed remaining train service while suburban populations increased. The six immediately suburban counties had more inhabitants than San Francisco by 1910; by 1960 they had nearly four times as many, by 1970 over five times, by 1980 over six. As costs of housing around the bay rose with demand, outlying counties took refugees from the central city and secondary urban centers and over greater distances. Santa Clara County (San Jose), which was fifth in additions to population in the 1940s, led from the 1950s through the 1980s. By then the fastest growing was Solano, northeast of the bay, where major corporate offices had moved to near Vacaville, a small fruit-packing city two-thirds of the way to Sacramento.⁸⁰ As developers extended grids of tract houses over the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley, transforming, in the words of a former county planner, “what so recently had been a beautiful productive garden . . . into an urban anthill,”⁸¹ commuters from widening radii overloaded the freeways that girdled the bay in the 1950s and 1960s. The state highway commission provoked a revolt within less than three years after Congress authorized the interstate system by planning to extend them into and across the city. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors blocked construction over six of nine proposed routes by refusing to clear rights of way (1959); it especially opposed plans to extend a double-decked eight-lane freeway across the foot of Market Street in front of the Ferry Building, obstructing one of the most cherished views along the waterfront.⁸² Two years later it eliminated seven major routes from a master plan for trafficways, and in 1966 it rejected plans for two others.⁸³ Meanwhile the city extended the commitment to public transit that it had made in establishing the Municipal Railway (1909–12).⁸⁴ An underground system that replaced streetcars and buses on principal streets took more residents to work than went in their own cars;⁸⁵ the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART), which voters in San Francisco and the two counties across the bay approved in 1962, carried chiefly commuters, serving the purposes of both the developers and the leaders of the business community who dominated planning in the metropolitan area. As they conceived it, BART was “to encourage the development of

Cities from the Second World War

201

large nucleated, high-intensity business districts” at the center and single-family houses in dispersed suburban areas.⁸⁶ “The end result,” a member of the board of directors later told a reporter, “is that San Francisco will be just like Manhattan.”⁸⁷ As its sponsors had expected, construction of high-rise office space in the central business district and retail and apartment buildings around suburban stations increased sharply even before trains began to run in 1972–74.⁸⁸ The two counties south of San Francisco refused to join the new system, relying on newly built freeways and on trains that the Southern Pacific operated along the peninsula. But when the railroad tried to stop service they joined San Francisco (1980) in financing operation by the state Department of Transportation.⁸⁹ The next year the city began requiring builders to pay a “transit impact fee.”⁹⁰ In spite of the emotions that freeway building aroused, the place of BART in the strategy of early postwar developers, and the unrelenting congestion that daily tides of commuters brought to San Francisco and its suburbs, automobile transportation became a subsidiary issue after the 1950s. In accelerating tempo, the city became battleground for developers and opponents as diverse as retired working people and owners of small businesses in the industrial district that they proposed to displace and “cliff dwellers,” owners of condominiums on the hills above concerned for their views of the waterfront and the bay.⁹¹ By the 1970s as workers priced out of the housing market retreated across the bay, developers and affluent professionals were gentrifying formerly black and workingclass neighborhoods.⁹² The city initially relieved some of the pressure on low and moderately priced housing by using federal subsidies for new construction in the 1970s; when these declined it looked to private funding. The Board of Supervisors and voters adopted progressively more stringent regulations for new construction from 1972. First limiting height and bulk, then requiring builders of new hotels to contribute to a housing fund, in 1980 they began systematically requiring developers to provide for housing, transit, and other amenities and services in return for permission to erect massive skyscrapers that a planner said had all the charm of a display of refrigerators in a wholesale warehouse;⁹³ in a downtown plan (1985), they limited amounts of new office space and specified architectural quality.⁹⁴ (Six years later the city began demolishing the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway, which for thirty-two years had loomed over the waterfront, unusable since an earthquake in October 1989, warning both that behemoth waited in the wings and that it would not age gracefully. “San Francisco can again be the beau ideal of a civilized American metropolis, as it was before the freeway transformed one of the loveliest waterfronts in the world into one of the most obscene,” an architectural critic who had campaigned against it exulted when the supervisors voted to proceed.)⁹⁵ But the victory was far from complete:

202

Cities from the Second World War

while the most visible symbol of Los Angelesization went, the congestion that had suggested it persisted and increased. Denver had developed as a kind of piedmontane San Francisco, gateway to mining camps beyond as well as first of them. It long remained San Franciscan in presiding over much of several states, whose miners and cattlemen gathered at the Denver Club; the Brown Palace Hotel (1891) corresponded to the Palace (1873), pride of the older city, both in arrangement about a stately central court and as symbol of urban authority. Moreover, although the architecture of Denver was even less distinctive than its immediate setting, on flatlands whose scanty water supply limited landscaping, projects of civic improvement commanded broad support from before the First World War; Mayor Robert Speer, the developer who dominated local politics over most of the first two decades of the century, inherited both the beginnings of a substantial park system and enthusiasm for expanding it as he drew what a skeptical journalist called the “garden-club crowd” into coalitions that supported projects for a civic center, parks, and parkways.⁹⁶ Denver overshadowed its immediate neighbors later than most cities of its size, and in spite of natural handicaps in developing transportation that in various forms remained substantial challenges for over a century, it overshadowed most of the Rocky Mountain region as well. Abutting the Rockies south of where the Oregon Trail and the Union Pacific Railroad ascended to cross them at manageable grades and unable at first to get more than an indirect connection with the overland route that local businessmen financed, without direct connection westward to Salt Lake City and beyond until 1934, it was nevertheless second city in the Far West for more than three decades before Seattle moved past it by 1910, still easily third in 1950. It had over twice the population of the four adjacent counties in 1950, still led them in 1960, and continued to add population through the 1960s. Then the proportions reversed, and it lost resident population while the rest of the metropolitan area exceeded it nearly three times (1970–90), although it had more than doubled in area after the war. It maintained much of its vitality as commercial, financial, and administrative capital of the Rocky Mountain region as corporate managements and governmental agencies concentrated in it. The New York developer William Zeckendorf complained (1970) that he and his associates had had to push “the Rip Van Winkle city of Denver into the twentieth century,” that it “had never seen fit to invest in its own possibilities”;⁹⁷ outsiders led in early postwar commercial construction.⁹⁸ But Zeckendorf ’s indictment was both overdrawn and soon out-of-date. Although political leaders after the war were slow to embrace his projects, they were friendlier to growth than their predecessors. They lobbied for extension of a

Cities from the Second World War

203

Fig. 7.4. Denver, Colorado. Early on known as an “instant city” of the West, Denver became the most important urban place in the central West in 1900. In the twentieth century, Denver continued to expand as a trade, transportation, and natural resource hub. Photo courtesy Western History Collection, Denver Public Library. Z 326. Photograph by Tom Pyle.

freeway (I-70) west to Salt Lake City and other federal projects. The city council adopted a master plan for the central district and undertook projects of urban renewal including redevelopment of the civic center (the Downtown Denver Skyline Project, 1967).⁹⁹ The city recaptured some of the excitement of early mining rushes in an interval of projects to make synthetic fuels from oil shale between the rise in the price of oil in 1973 and the fall that made them uneconomic by 1982. The most visible sign of the boom was a rash of new office buildings, which the city had limited to twelve stories until 1952. By 1984 twenty-six were higher; only San Francisco had more. Office space more than doubled in 1970–78, more than tripled in 1979–82.¹⁰⁰ Whether because oil companies remained in force so briefly or because the

204

Cities from the Second World War

geologists and engineers that they brought had their own agendas, changes in employment in Denver coincided with changes in public mores and policy away from the traditional priorities of mining and cattle ranching. As new methods of treatment brought tuberculosis under control and newcomers “with only one lung” no longer formed significant parts of the skilled labor force, climate and scenery continued to attract both visitors and immigrants; major firms moved to Colorado in large part because professional personnel liked living there.¹⁰¹ Whereas Colorado politicians traditionally had opposed restricting exploitation of natural resources, a senior member of the state’s congressional delegation blocking precursors of the Wilderness Act of 1964, by the 1970s forthright conservationists challenged forthright advocates of extractive enterprise: environmental values became major political issues in both city and state. Shifts in political priorities corresponded to shifts in economic base and social concerns. New residents of Denver responded, a visitor noted (1978), to the natural environment rather than to the city itself, which invited few regrets as developers tore it apart.¹⁰² But increasing traffic where the ratio of automobiles to population was second only to that in Los Angeles aggravated congestion and atmospheric pollution, raising doubts about growth.¹⁰³ In 1972 voters in both city and state overwhelmingly rejected proposals to “Sell Colorado” by bringing Olympic games there in 1976.¹⁰⁴ Businessmen and politicians, including the speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives (Robert F. Burford, later director of the Bureau of Land Management, 1981–89) and a leading lobbyist for firms dealing in natural resources (James G. Watt, secretary of the interior, 1981– 83), reacted angrily when the Environmental Protection Agency threatened to impose sanctions for atmospheric pollution in 1979–80, and the legislature went only far enough to retain federal funding.¹⁰⁵ But shortly the city applied some of the most stringent controls in the country.¹⁰⁶ It resembled both Houston and Portland, an architectural critic noted, the one in sprawling out extravagantly, the other in cherishing the natural environment.¹⁰⁷ The collapse of the boom, which left new office buildings and high-rise condominiums without tenants, coincided with new proposals to develop and promote the city. When a conservative mayor reduced the planning department to routine administrative functions (1982), businessmen organized as the Denver Partnership (1955) raised funds virtually to replace it, recruiting planners who did most of the staff work on a downtown area plan (1986). They had the cooperation of a new mayor, Federico Peña, who had promised both to attend to the concerns of neighborhood groups and to promote urban growth, campaigning (1983) with the slogan “Imagine a Great City.”¹⁰⁸ He later called for a controversial new airport, largest in the world, whose supporters compared it to

Cities from the Second World War

205

the coming of the railroad in the previous century while opponents charged that fees and rentals necessary to cover its costs would divert traffic elsewhere, that it would chiefly benefit speculators in land around it.¹⁰⁹ Something of a latter-day San Francisco in achieving metropolitan status on the business of the placers of Alaska and the Yukon Territory rather than on that of an agricultural hinterland, Seattle resembled San Francisco also in developing on a narrow neck of land that many commuters reached by ferry even after a bridge floated on pontoons crossed Lake Washington to east side suburbs in 1940. Like San Franciscans before them, its pioneer businessmen-leaders had torn down hills to clear space for commercial enterprise and extend the shoreline into deep water; like southern Californians, they had curried favor with transcontinental railroads to surpass their competitors. Having grown more before the automobile than most of its major western contemporaries, the city was more densely populated. Its suburbs were later than San Francisco’s in catching up with it, first adding more population in the 1930s and first surpassing it in the 1960s; but newly annexed suburban territory accounted for nearly all the gains of the 1950s.¹¹⁰ While losing population for twenty years until it recovered part of the loss in the 1980s, like San Francisco it maintained sometimes fierce loyalty among its inhabitants for its distinctive setting, amenities, and traditions, which in successive waves of civic promotion and reform they rallied to protect and enhance. Although they had overwhelmingly rejected a comprehensive plan incorporating highways, railroads, and recreational areas focusing on a new civic center that planners and businessmen endorsed as climactic realization of the idea of the city beautiful (1912), much of their objection had been that, as the work of an engineer preoccupied with moving traffic, it took little account of the urban landscape. They repeatedly funded parks from the 1890s and approved extensions of a spectacular system of parks and boulevards thereafter in the spirit of a master plan (1903) that called for a park or playground within half a mile of every family. The city began regulating heights of buildings in 1912 and use of land in 1923.¹¹¹ As traffic choked streets and highways and sewage polluted waterways in and near Seattle from the 1950s, reformers proposed empowering the Municipality of Metropolitan Seattle (METRO) to undertake assorted major capital improvements.¹¹² Civic leaders planned the Century 21 Exposition of 1962 as a step toward rejuvenating the central business district, locating it only a mile to the north on a monorail line that they hoped to extend later and looking to other uses by calling the site Seattle Center.¹¹³ For decades voters balked at the high costs of further mass transit by rail, first for King County alone (1972), then also for Snohomish and Pierce, to north and south (1995). But many of them had

206

Cities from the Second World War

become disillusioned with freeways as an arterial street evolved (1960–66) into an eight-lane interstate route in a trench alongside the central business district that bisected a low-income area and the highway department ignored requests to reserve lanes of freeways for buses.¹¹⁴ City officials charged (1967) that highway engineers planning the principal east-west route, Interstate 90, were “concerned only with the redevelopment of the city to accommodate the freeway and not with the redesign of the freeway to accommodate the community.”¹¹⁵ Over the next several years the city and its neighbors stopped additional projects and forced drastic changes in others. Instead of entering the city through an open cut as much as fourteen lanes wide, Interstate 90 lost half its width and ran under a ten-acre park; the final segment (opened 1989) was the most expensive seven miles in the world.¹¹⁶ When developers began rebuilding the central business district, ultimately nearly tripling office space in the 1980s, they provoked concern at what some in Seattle, as in San Francisco, called Manhattanization. A local architect commented, “They’re turning it into Orange County”; a newspaper columnist promoted the cause of “Lesser Seattle.”¹¹⁷ Responding to well-organized pressure, the city council retreated from a plan for the old business district that an association of business leaders had proposed, instead establishing the Pioneer Square Historic District (1970) to preserve buildings of the 1890s near the waterfront.¹¹⁸ Several blocks away, the Pike Place Public Market had became the rallying point for opponents of plans “to bring the money and brainpower of the best people back into Seattle” by demolishing it and other old buildings to make room for the “higher and better use” of a parking garage and a supermarket; voters approved an initiative to preserve it (1971).¹¹⁹ Twenty years later a reporter called the market “this city’s most cherished and visited institution.”¹²⁰ Repaired rather than redesigned, it attracted business to the neighborhood by defying current conventions of economic development in what admirers called “a finely tuned . . . chaos” where farmers sold their own produce, “an honest place in a phony time.”¹²¹ When the legislature passed the Environmental Policy Act designed to widen discussions of planning, Seattleites responded so actively as sometimes to dismay professional planners. The director of community development commented, “It’s easy to quibble and people here are apathetic about accepting a need for improvement and immediate action.”¹²² A television reporter became mayor in 1978 as champion of neighborhoods against developers and their political allies;¹²³ but in the next decade, resisting proposals for tighter controls, he fell behind public opinion as continuing high-rise construction obstructed cherished views. Prompted specifically by a new complex that briefly was tallest on

Cities from the Second World War

207

the coast, in 1989 critics of what they considered rampant development won approval of an alternate approach, labeled the Citizens Alternative Plan and modeled after requirements in San Francisco.¹²⁴ For three decades after 1960 the central city lost population while the rest of King County gained fifteen times as much, but like San Francisco, the city retained commercial, financial, and cultural leadership over the metropolitan area and loyalties that made environmental values seem politically and economically more affordable than elsewhere. Seattle is now to the West, a Los Angeles reporter wrote (1989), “what San Francisco was in the ’60s and Denver was in the ’70s—the hot, ‘in’ city for young professionals in search of Eden.”¹²⁵ Los Angeles continued to lead western cities in population after the war as before; until the 1970s and again in the 1980s it also led in additions to population.¹²⁶ It was “growing faster than any other place in America,” a newsmagazine reported in 1955: “There has been nothing like this expansion since the early flood tide of European immigration that built New York City.”¹²⁷ The increase of nearly a million in twenty years, 1940–60, was larger than the population of any other city west of Chicago. From over twice as large as San Francisco in 1940 the city grew to over three times as large by 1960, over four times by 1980, when San Diego and Phoenix, newly become second and third western cities, still were only fractionally larger than the old metropolis (by 29.0 percent and 16.3 percent). Whereas all other American cities that had been as much as a third as large as Los Angeles before the war declined afterward, it more than doubled its prewar population by 1982. Fifth American city in 1940, it displaced Chicago as second in 1984. Having an unusual extent to grow in, Los Angeles had been late in growing upward as well as outward. Until 1966, nine years after the city council repealed a height limit of one hundred fifty feet (1905) intended to spare it the congestion of major eastern cities,¹²⁸ at twenty-eight stories the city hall (1926–28) towered over the business district; San Francisco had more tall buildings even after Los Angeles got Library Tower (1989), tallest building west of Chicago. Expecting that an expanded civic center would attract business, planners incorporated both city and county buildings in it from the 1940s, ultimately a music center (opened 1964).¹²⁹ But as retail districts developed along boulevards to outlying residential areas, visitors found no focus. “It’s as if you were going somewhere for a long time, and when you got there you discovered there was nothing there, after all,” the planner Kevin Lynch observed (1960).¹³⁰ “For a long time the idea of a downtown in Los Angeles was only a bit more plausible than a beach in Omaha or a ski slope in Missouri,” Paul Goldberger wrote, describing construction over the next two decades as “a series of skyscrapers, virtually all of which

208

Cities from the Second World War

look as if they had been designed to be somewhere else.”¹³¹ Most were office buildings, which civic leaders hoped would improve the city’s prospects as financial and corporate center, concentrated where freeways made them accessible.¹³² By 1989 the city approached San Francisco in commercial office space, and developers proposed to more than double it.¹³³ Yet like other cities, Los Angeles grew less than its metropolitan fringes, in line with hopes of early planners who favored “the development of various smaller cities and towns . . . rather than . . . the indiscriminate and unbroken expansion of the central urban area.”¹³⁴ Developers preferred to build in suburbs that recently had seemed destined for no more than agricultural, residential, and recreational uses.¹³⁵ Office space in the central business district declined from three-fifths to a third of the total in the metropolitan area between the 1960s and the 1980s. Pasadena became a concentration of financial offices;¹³⁶ the Irvine Company put a financial plaza alongside a shopping center and an industrial park in Newport Beach;¹³⁷ and the Greater Los Angeles World Trade Center at Long Beach, opened in 1988, competed with the older World Trade Center.¹³⁸ Such dispersion into suburbs was consistent with patterns of industrial growth elsewhere since the last century and with wishes of the poor to live more cheaply and the rich to live more pleasantly than at traditional urban densities.¹³⁹ The 1920s were the decade when the city gained most in population (661,375, more than the population of San Francisco). They also were the last when it gained more than the rest of Los Angeles County. The 1950s were the last when the county gained more than the four other counties of the consolidated Los Angeles–Anaheim metropolitan area. In the 1960s Orange County alone gained more than Los Angeles County, population more than doubling; thereafter the largest increases were in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, to the east, where developers still found low-priced land.¹⁴⁰ Denser in population than most large American cities, including all in the Far West outside of California, Los Angeles no longer offered prospects of living on modest incomes in detached houses among orange and palm trees as when its expanding boundaries, enclosing much farmland and no skyscrapers, were national jokes. Five other American cities, two of them western (Anchorage and Oklahoma City), had larger areas,¹⁴¹ and adjacent cities surrounding Los Angeles blocked further annexation. For more than thirty years after the war Orange County was a principal alternative. Over three-fourths of its total area remained in farms through the 1940s, yielding larger harvests as owner-operators shifted to more intensive uses of land, from pasturing cattle to raising oranges; it was still predominantly rural into the 1960s.¹⁴² Then new freeways invited further industrial and commercial development. Selecting a site along the first of them, the Santa Ana Freeway,

Cities from the Second World War

209

in 1955, the motion picture producer Walt Disney opened an amusement park that transformed the residential community of Anaheim, until then still recognizably the creation of German farmers who had planned it as a farm village nearly a century before, into the largest city in the county, turnstile to probably the best-known enterprise in all the West.¹⁴³ (Within the next fifteen years Anaheim increased over ten times in population, nearly twice as fast as the county, twelve times as fast as the state, from sixty-seventh city to eighth; by 1987 the Anaheim–Santa Ana metropolitan area was third in numbers of hotel rooms, midway between San Francisco and San Diego.)¹⁴⁴ When the University of California planned new campuses in Orange and San Diego counties (1958, opened 1964), the Irvine Company, which owned nearly a fifth of the county, donated a thousand acres for a site and engaged the architect who planned it for the university, dividing what recently had been mainly ranchland into complexes of “planned communities.”¹⁴⁵ Faculty members called the campus the company’s “anchor,”¹⁴⁶ equivalent to a department store in a shopping center. Within less than three decades the company and developers transformed the county. Subdividing farmland as the market absorbed it, they brought density of population from about a fourth that in Los Angeles County (1950) to nearly three-fifths more (1990), lower in the state only than the city and county of San Francisco.¹⁴⁷ Acreage in orange groves, which led the state from the 1920s, declined by over half in the 1950s, by about nine-tenths by the 1980s;¹⁴⁸ stockraising retreated to hillsides, crop-farming to remnants of land where no one wanted to live, as alongside the Marine Corps airbase at El Toro.¹⁴⁹ As the neighbors of Los Angeles became more eastern in density of population, they also became more eastern in their economies. Like aerospace manufacturers, new electronics industries located chiefly in the suburbs, where they found the space¹⁵⁰ and the labor that they needed.¹⁵¹ The city had over half (53.4 percent) of employment in manufacturing in the five-county area in 1939, less than a fourth (24.0 percent) by 1987.¹⁵² Personal income and social structure changed with the economy. Immediately after the war Los Angeles County was richer than its neighbors; into the 1970s it also was more expensive, young families commonly seeking space and affordable housing across county lines. Then such disparities reversed. Whereas median family incomes in the county were nearly an eleventh higher than incomes in Orange County in 1960, nine years later they were over a ninth lower.¹⁵³ Prices of houses in Orange County, which remained lower than prices in Los Angeles County through the 1970s, rose sharply above them in the 1980s.¹⁵⁴ As around San Francisco Bay, accelerating development in the suburbs of Los Angeles clogged the freeways that had made it possible and spread out from

210

Cities from the Second World War

them. The architect William Pereira had planned the city of Irvine as a cluster of quiet “walking communities” with wide greenbelts and paths where people walked or rode bicycles short distances to work near the new campus of the university.¹⁵⁵ But two decades later, while bumper stickers proclaimed “Irvine—Another Day in Paradise,”¹⁵⁶ Paul Goldberger found that it had become “a sea of housing developments, interrupted by an occasional freeway, shopping mall, or cluster of high-rise commercial buildings” without the open green space that justified clustering in older housing developments: “the detached houses . . . built so close together that they look like one big building that has roads going through it,” making the “suburban landscape exactly what most of its occupants think they are escaping, which is an urban place.” “Los Angeles, by comparison, seems almost an old-fashioned, traditional city.”¹⁵⁷ As rents rose, people drove long distances to work there, within a decade allegedly over nine-tenths of the workforce, and firms seeking the prestige of addresses at Irvine and Newport Beach settled for a mailbox.¹⁵⁸ In the early 1970s the census recorded losses of population in American metropolitan areas as a class.¹⁵⁹ Eight rural western states that had lost migrants in the 1960s gained instead.¹⁶⁰ At first apparently an exception to these changes, southern California shortly joined in them at rates that increased in the 1980s and 1990s. By 1989 three-fifths of residents of Los Angeles County surveyed, complaining of congestion, pollution, and crime, said that the quality of life had deteriorated, nearly half that they had considered leaving.¹⁶¹ Soon more people left the five-county area than came into it from other parts of the state and the country. Moreover, those who left tended to be more affluent than those who came. While the population of the state continued to increase into the 1990s, charges for moving vans bound for the Pacific Northwest, popular destination for families that realized capital gains on real estate and for young people seeking employment, rose to two or three times charges for vans returning as equipment accumulated north of the border;¹⁶² prices of property in fashionable coastal areas fell by a third to a half while rising in recently depressed neighborhoods.¹⁶³ Even before the government reduced aerospace programs in the early 1990s, the exodus corresponded to shifts in the origins of the population. As late as 1960, the city and the immediate metropolitan area (Los Angeles County) were still overwhelmingly of northern European stock, as they had been since early in the American occupation, and only slightly less white than the rest of the country.¹⁶⁴ Then Latinos, Asians, and Pacific Islanders accounted for most of the large increases over the next thirty years; in Los Angeles city whites not of Spanish origin declined while total population increased, by over a fourth in twenty years from 1970, dropping below half by 1980 (47.8 percent), to slightly over

Cities from the Second World War

211

a third (35.8 percent) by 1990.¹⁶⁵ After increasing by half in the 1960s, African American population in the city leveled in the 1970s (dropping from 17.9 percent to 17.0 percent as other minorities increased) and declined in the 1980s (by 3.1 percent, to 14.0 percent of total population). The outlying southern counties, still with under two-fifths the population of the five-county area, remained predominantly non-Hispanic white, nearly two-thirds, but only immigration and excesses of births over deaths balanced losses in net migration. In Orange County, Asians outnumbered African Americans nearly six to one.¹⁶⁶ Asian businessmen of widely varying means, from small shopkeepers to managers of internationally controlled banks and factories and technicians and engineers employed in their enterprises, were among the most conspicuous of the newcomers. A libertarian journalist predicted that immigrants from eastern Asia would make Los Angeles “the next economic capital of America,” contributing entrepreneurial dynamism and commercial links to Asia and the Third World.¹⁶⁷ But a less visible underclass of sweatshop laborers, predominantly Latin American and Asian, whose poverty recalled late nineteenth-century Lower Manhattan and late twentieth-century Detroit considerably outnumbered entrepreneurs and professionals.¹⁶⁸ In the middle 1980s, when Los Angeles County led the nation in homeless population, a fifth of those in the city were employed; the city had more deaths from hypothermia than New York City.¹⁶⁹ The Los Angeles Times estimated (1987) that about 200,000 residents, many of them illegal immigrants who feared to complain, lived in 42,000 garages, typically without heat, plumbing, or even windows (which would betray them to inspectors), paying rents that reached a third or half full-time legal minimum wages.¹⁷⁰ Most small-scale manufacturing in the central city before the war had been in light industry, such as the garment trades; the newer aerospace, automotive, and machine-tool manufacturers cut costs by buying parts from small local firms as well as by importing them from Asia and Mexico. By 1988, when Mexican immigrants comprised about a ninth of the total labor force in Los Angeles County, they were over two-fifths of workers in apparel factories. Some wages were low even for a traditionally nonunion area. Whereas wages were still higher over the West as a whole than elsewhere, maintaining some of the old differential of the gold rush, by 1982 wages in the garment trades were lower than the national average.¹⁷¹ Since many small employers depended heavily on recent and illegal immigrants, some of them working where outsiders could go only under special escort, government agencies may have overstated levels of wages and understated levels of employment and immigration. A planner suggested that the future of the city might depend on combining first-world management talent and funding with third world labor.¹⁷² As immigration from the Pacific basin and Latin

212

Cities from the Second World War

America made Los Angeles, in the words of a reporter, the newest Ellis Island, with over half again as many new citizens as New York City,¹⁷³ it accounted for most of the increases in population in city and metropolitan area in the 1980s and 1990s. Even before the economic crises of the 1990s Los Angeles and California became symbols of development gone wrong, warnings of what might befall the good life if too many people came to share it. At San Jose after the war, voters had accepted the strategy of a city manager who said that he wanted to make it like Los Angeles, repeatedly approving bond issues to accommodate development that rapidly filled interstices between neighboring communities; a San Francisco planner commented (1970), “Developers have just gone wild without any public restraint.”¹⁷⁴ Fruit trees growing nearby pleased newcomers at first. Soon they complained about spraying and smudging (burning oil to protect trees from frost) and noise from cultivating, while orchardists who began by resisting prices that developers offered for their land changed their minds when their taxes rose with demand for it; development fed on itself.¹⁷⁵ But elsewhere critics of unrestrained growth soon invoked what the author of the plan that voters in Seattle adopted in 1989, a former San Franciscan, called the specter of Los Angelesization, of “what California has come to stand for, the pollution and traffic and crime. You have to see Los Angeles, to see how far downhill life can go, to believe it can happen.” It was, a planner commented (1989), “one city most Americans do not want their home town to emulate.” According to a Seattle newspaper columnist who celebrated opposition to unrestrained growth, “The last person to move up from California [was] the first person to join Lesser Seattle.”¹⁷⁶ Critics of a lavishly financed campaign to bring the winter Olympic games to Denver in 1972 had appealed, “Don’t Californicate Colorado.”¹⁷⁷ By the 1980s southern Californians were questioning both unrestrained growth and systems of transportation that they had assumed it required. Businessmen not in the business of development talked like environmentalists; no longer chief promoter and spokesman for promoters, the Los Angeles Times quoted approvingly a banker who warned that congested traffic and smog threatened the economy.¹⁷⁸ Officials urged Congress to shift funding from freeways to projects for rapid transit.¹⁷⁹ Yet although vehicular congestion and atmospheric pollution had come early to Los Angeles among major cities and soon became the worst, the city was slow to try to control them and to regulate development comprehensively. A pioneer in city planning, first American city to attempt zoning on a broad scale,¹⁸⁰ more recently it had been, a councilman said (1987), “probably the most lenient city when it [came] to reviewing large projects,” commonly exempting developers even from preparing reports on environmental impact.¹⁸¹ Without well-

Cities from the Second World War

213

organized pressure from neighborhood groups as in San Francisco, Seattle, to lesser extent Denver, the city did not condition permission for urban renewal projects and high-rise construction on provision for low-income housing and related facilities, but rather on contributions to a Community Redevelopment Agency and an Arts Trust Fund to build a music center and an art museum and to restore the city library. Planners who had noted (1972) that the central core was “dark and inactive after 5 P.M.” expected such projects to be at once stimulus to business in the central city, focus for cultural activity, and display, “symbol of pride.” But residents who supported a new theater center were reluctant to “brave a trip to Spring Street” when it was ready, in the words of a study of its problems two decades later.¹⁸² Proposals for comprehensively planned development were slow to command firm support. Although most urban renewal projects depleted low-priced housing, working-class voters as well as developers commonly favored them, fearing that controls would both raise prices and curtail employment in the building trades.¹⁸³ Even when candidates who favored slower growth won local offices, government responded most readily to concerns for specific sites and areas. A “slow-growth” initiative measure adopted by a large vote in 1986 affected mainly office and retail development near outlying residential neighborhoods;¹⁸⁴ three years later the city was only beginning to consider a general plan including provisions for reviewing large buildings.¹⁸⁵ After rejecting three proposals for rail transit systems larger than BART (1968, 1974, 1976), voters accepted a fourth in 1980; but when work began in 1986, twenty-six years after the last trains ran on the Pacific Electric, Metro Rail had full authority only for the first 4.7 miles of an 18.6-mile line.¹⁸⁶ “Managing” traffic as alternative to building more freeways seemed justified during the Olympic games in 1984, when about 3 percent of commuters shared rides or changed schedules and the system carried the extra burden of nearly two-thirds of a million spectators at prewar speeds in what the Los Angeles Times called “a kind of automotive nirvana.” But drivers reverted to old ways when the games ended. By the time the city council approved (1989) a plan to close streets to large trucks during two daily three-hour periods, morning and afternoon rush hours had merged on three major freeways,¹⁸⁷ and the city was planning a new freeway in the bed of the Los Angeles River. Perhaps citizens and their leaders had embraced the future so enthusiastically that they could not relinquish it easily even when they felt that it had failed them. Residents of Orange County remained characteristically right of center on social and economic issues as, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “the largest base of conservative votes in the nation,” even when a strategy of financing local government by speculating in bond issues rather than by levying taxes forced

214

Cities from the Second World War

the county into bankruptcy in 1994.¹⁸⁸ But in what a conservative journalist called the liberalism of the privileged, by the 1970s and 1980s voters and local governments had reacted to congestion and rising prices by forcing the Irvine Company and other developers to scale back their plans.¹⁸⁹ When the company announced that it would sharply increase rents on long-term leases in 1981, typically by about 3,400 percent, tenants at Irvine and Newport Beach, which California Magazine called “a plush watering hole for California’s new rich,” forced it to compromise.¹⁹⁰ In the course of twenty-four years of litigation it agreed not to develop most of a valuable coastal strip.¹⁹¹ When Irvine had reached less than a fifth of the goal of half a million population that the company had set for it, voters elected (1986) a city council committed to slow growth that promptly opposed building new freeways. Instead of adding lanes and decks on existing routes the county planned to build toll freeways and finance new construction by collecting fees from developers.¹⁹² Although in general tax measures other than reductions were anathema in Orange County politics—officials refusing to consider any, instead financing county government by speculating in government bonds, which forced them into bankruptcy in 1995—voters had accepted a sales tax to pay for rapid transit lines for commuters (1990).¹⁹³ As one of the fastest growing and most thinly populated of American cities, encompassing expanses of open space that made it seem immune to dangers of overbuilding, San Diego was peculiarly subject to uses and effects of new highways. As it dropped from over two-fifths the population of Los Angeles in 1870, when each hoped to become terminus of a transcontinental railroad, to less than an eighth in 1930, developing little manufacturing before the 1940s, its leaders reconciled themselves to a secondary role in southern California. While they fought aggressively and with striking success to persuade Congress to expand facilities for the Navy and Marine Corps in and near the city, they concentrated on the immediate vicinity, leaving the larger region to their counterparts in Los Angeles, who in the name of assuring supplies of drinking water enhanced the value of agricultural lands that they acquired as far away as the San Joaquin Valley. The city took much of its tone from a remarkable assortment of parks that became some of its chief assets. But most of them, including Balboa Park, which was larger than Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and closer to the central business district, began as projects of philanthropists who supported them before local and state governments took responsibility.¹⁹⁴ George W. Marston, a merchant whose civic causes included comprehensive city planning and a direct outlet to the East by rail, donated land for both Balboa Park and the AnzaBorrego State Park east of San Diego in the Colorado desert and assumed much

Cities from the Second World War

215

of the cost of improvements. A founder of the chamber of commerce, he believed that the city and businesses in it would prosper by fostering the good life. Ellen Scripps, sister of the publisher E. W. Scripps, bought an oasis of rare pine trees on the coast to the north that she maintained until the state accepted it as a state park. Advocates of such environmental causes never dominated the city. When Marston ran for mayor (1917) during the Panama-California Exposition of 1915– 17, whose site in Balboa Park he had in large part prepared, he lost to a financier who campaigned for more industrial development in what newspapers called the geraniums versus smokestacks fight.¹⁹⁵ Maintaining a planning commission in name only for many years,¹⁹⁶ and then overruling it on major issues, the city repeatedly passed over proposals to acquire one of its most valuable scenic and recreational resources. Mission Valley was a wooded pastoral enclave along the San Diego River where cattle grazed and families picnicked close to the central district: “broad and restful,” the city planner John Nolen called it (1908), “with the foot-hills at one end and the Bay at the other.”¹⁹⁷ It seemed so unsuited for commercial development, and San Diegans had so long enjoyed it as it was, that they saw no need to safeguard it. Construction of a state highway along the river and plans to widen it as part of the new federal freeway system (Interstate 8) opened other prospects. C. Arnholt Smith, owner of the local professional baseball team and one of the most aggressive developers, built a stadium in the lower part of the valley (1956); the next year a Los Angeles department store firm proposed to establish the largest shopping center south of Los Angeles on land classified as residential a short distance upstream. The planning department objected, foreseeing a canal, a scenic roadway, and a scenic railway linking the valley with a park along Mission Bay and warning that the river flooded recurrently. But city officials hastened to rezone the site; Mayor Charles Dail suggested “throwing out some of these red-tape ordinances.”¹⁹⁸ The new shopping center opened early in 1961; six years later Smith began developing a second center on the site of his stadium.¹⁹⁹ The valley became a conduit of congestion along a twelve-lane freeway, with four other freeways crossing it within six miles and bustling commercial alternates alongside. Planners who surveyed the region in 1974 called it “an urban trench,” telling the planning commission that the city had squandered a historic resource: “The most dramatic loss was the conversion of historic Mission Valley in the 1950’s into a chaos of highways, parking lots, and scattered commercial buildings. The city should erect an historic monument to that tragic event. It struck a double blow: one directed both at the landscape and at the economy of the center city.”²⁰⁰

216

Cities from the Second World War

The transformation of Mission Valley presaged national shifts in control and directions of urban development. As values of land rose spectacularly after the war, developers who planned office buildings in the central business district and shopping centers and residential subdivisions in outlying areas commanded great prestige. A plan for guided development that the city council proposed in 1965 lost by referendum.²⁰¹ Businessmen lionized Smith, calling him Mr. San Diego for 1961, later San Diego’s Gentleman of Distinction for Business Achievement and Mr. San Diego of the Century. Convicted and imprisoned for fraud after long battles in the courts in the 1970s, Smith appeared in a different light as investors in his enterprises counted their losses and San Diegans lost enthusiasm for how he and other developers were reshaping the city.²⁰² Like Los Angeles a few years earlier, San Diego had spread out so far that it was slow to seem crowded when it became the fastest-growing large city in the country in the 1950s, second largest city in the Far West by 1971. But developers scattered tracts of new houses beyond established neighborhoods without regard to the convenience of residents, the costs of extending urban services to them, and the requirements and opportunities that canyons, mesas, estuaries, lagoons, and wetlands presented. As late as 1964 only one-eighth of the city was residential, against over one-seventh agricultural, nearly two-fifths vacant and undeveloped.²⁰³ One development, Mira Mesa, had 18,000 residents on 10,000 acres in 1971 but no parks or schools, only one food market, and access by only one road that was congested morning and evening, a barren landscape that in the words of the architect and planner Kevin Lynch was “hot, arid, empty, and monotonous.”²⁰⁴ That year the city elected a new mayor, Peter B. (Pete) Wilson, who proposed “to change the trend toward letting developers develop the way they want.”²⁰⁵ When he moved to the United States Senate in 1983 the leading candidates to succeed him promised to extend his policies of “managed growth” (locally a more acceptable term than slow or limited growth) in what a reporter called “the never-ending struggle against becoming another Los Angeles.”²⁰⁶ Through the 1970s and 1980s voters backed mayors and councils on most proposals for restrictions, including a plan to redirect developers into areas that they had skipped (“leap-frogged”) to lower their costs.²⁰⁷ Seeking to revive older neighborhoods, the council helped developers to acquire land and finance construction in and near the central business district; the Metropolitan Transit District established fast electric train service to the south and east; and voters approved (1983) plans for a convention center.²⁰⁸ But insofar as such programs made the city more attractive to businessmen, shoppers, and visitors, by attracting newcomers,²⁰⁹ they also stimulated increases in population over twice as fast as expected in the 1970s

Cities from the Second World War

217

and 1980s.²¹⁰ Moreover, while the developers of a dramatic new mall opened in 1985, Horton Plaza, predicted that it would become “a focal point of activity for a city without one,” it may have done so at the expense of businesses outside it, while redevelopment crowded out housing for tenants with low incomes and residential construction lagged.²¹¹ Traffic on freeways increased nearly two and a half times more than population in the 1980s, while public services and infrastructure lagged despite controls that developers denounced. Surveying the fruits of a decade of managing growth, a planner concluded, “A for effort, C for accomplishment.”²¹² Reformers organized as Prevent Los Angelesization Now proposed requiring developers to pay costs of growth as in San Francisco; although voters rejected such provisions and others (1988) in a campaign in which developers and builders spent lavishly, the next year they elected a council pledged to “managed growth.”²¹³ Especially in the Pacific states and their faster-growing neighbors, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico, other urbanizing areas followed examples of major California cities in soliciting public funds to reconstruct old neighborhoods and variously to repair the strains of rapid growth. Sacramentans failed to persuade the state to reroute a freeway that destroyed part of the old business district along the waterfront and cut off what remained of it from newer sections of the city, although “Old Sacramento” attracted tourists despite the barrier.²¹⁴ Retail sales were moving from central Fresno to the suburbs almost as fast as the population of the city grew, leaving a third of commercial buildings vacant, when the departure of a large chain store in 1956 shocked merchants and property owners into supporting urban renewal on a novel scale. Creating a municipal redevelopment agency, the city engaged Victor Gruen, the architect who had designed the first major suburban shopping mall, near Detroit, and thereafter dedicated himself to what he called redirecting and “taming” automobile traffic. His plan for the Fulton Mall, extending ultimately over eighty-five acres of central Fresno, was, in his words, “probably the most comprehensive . . . of an American city.” When the mall opened in 1964 it also seemed one of the most successful as sales increased and other cities emulated it.²¹⁵ But two years later the city council approved another mall north of Fresno and helped finance it and other centers where major department stores shortly moved from the central business district while Gruen deplored official schizophrenia. In 1988 the Los Angeles Times called the Fulton Mall “a six-block monument to municipal vision and blindness,” a case study in failure.²¹⁶ Whatever leaders of San Diego and Fresno and other cities might have done, the problems that they faced were both more common and more intractable than those of earlier times. Like their predecessors, most of them assumed that

218

Cities from the Second World War

more would be better, that their cities would prosper to the extent that they attracted more trade, industry, investment, and population. Most were slow to recognize that although cities decayed if they did not grow, they also decayed if they did, losing talent and enterprise either to immediate neighbors or to other urban areas. Some cities turned over to developers who promised to save them became as frustrated with the results as nineteenth-century cities that had turned themselves over to railroads only to find that railroad builders had agendas of their own, that while they brought trade and immigration when they came, they also brought monopoly and political corruption. In some ways the twentieth-century cities were worse off. However arbitrarily railroad magnates accumulated and invested their capital, once they committed it to routes and terminals they could not easily reclaim it. In consolidating their power and resources, they merged their interests with those of communities they served more than was always convenient for them, far more, for instance, than operators of airlines, who in a more fluid field of enterprise prudently left responsibility for airports to cities that wanted service enough to subsidize it. A railroad might bribe legislators not to tax and regulate it, but it could not entirely escape their jurisdiction. In the era of hegemony by rail, moreover, parties to major decisions affecting western cities were relatively few and predictable, often unloved but seldom unknown, ordinarily at least representing local elites and outsiders committed to working with them. From the time of the Second World War, authority shifted toward distant agencies of state and national governments and industrial and financial enterprises for which local concerns were less important as they decreed subsidies and contracts and located highways, military bases, factories, shopping centers, and complexes of skyscrapers. The malls and shopping centers that most decisively redefined cities were less often creations of city planning departments and resident entrepreneurs than of outsiders who built some of the largest and busiest ones beyond city limits. By the 1960s major developers were selecting sites far from their home bases by flying over junctions of major highways near fast-growing cities,²¹⁷ and as freeways were much alike so were the shopping centers along them. “All are totally without focus or style,” an architectural critic wrote. “There is no humanity, no sense of place. They look as if they had been dropped by a helicopter flown by a blind pilot, from some giant architectural supermarket in the sky.”²¹⁸ They were fit company for the agglomerations of warehouses and storage yards that mushroomed along freeways and their connections in metropolitan areas, preparing visitors not for the cities within but for Los Angeles and Houston. Prospects of central cities even in some of the fastest-growing areas seemed at best so precarious that local

Cities from the Second World War

219

officials offered substantial inducements to major investors to attract and retain them. Voters and officials debated proposals to manage some types of growth while fostering others, but often in response to changes already too far advanced to stop. Suburbs and sprawling suburban extensions outstripped central cities all over the country, but more in the West than elsewhere, partly because western residential, industrial, and commercial developments easily fitted into them, partly because the mild climates of Pacific and southwestern states made suburban living more attractive and suburban commuting more tolerable than in other regions, probably most of all simply because by growing much and late the West was able to grow differently, in directions of developing contemporary tastes and pressures.²¹⁹ As urban populations and urban activity diffused over larger areas, few long-established central business districts retained anything like their old prestige and vitality in forms interesting to shoppers and tourists—most notably in San Francisco, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. More often they survived as financial and governmental centers. Some of the cities that grew chiefly when automobiles were not only the dominant means of local transportation but for most people the only means had even less identifiable focus than those that had taken shape when streetcar tracks still defined them. An extreme case was Fremont, established when five small towns scattered midway between Oakland and San Jose merged to keep from becoming, in the words of a founder, “a suburban slum dependent upon other cities.” From an aggregate population estimated at less than eight thousand shortly before it incorporated in 1956,²²⁰ within twenty years it became second city east of the bay as builders filled recently agricultural interstices with tract houses. Although originally its residents worked in higher-priced areas where they could not afford to live, especially in semiconductor territory to the south and west, shortly it had factories of its own as employers took advantage of available space and labor. But in its eighth year, already as large as San Jose had been before the war, it was so amorphous that it had to fight to keep the State Highway Commission from running a freeway through the site of a civic center that it had planned for a city of 400,000.²²¹ Seventy-eight years old when the war ended in 1945, Phoenix grew so much more thereafter than before (from a population of 106,818 in 1950, when it was eighteenth city in the sixteen states and two territories, between Berkeley and Pasadena) as to overwhelm what had been the central district of a small market town and winter resort. Led by businessmen-promoters committed to aggressive industrial and residential expansion, it increased its area over thirteen times within two decades, 1950–70. In contrast to other cities whose suburbs surpassed

220

Cities from the Second World War

Fig. 7.5. Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix represents the dramatic urban expansion of the West from 1940 onward. First a trade, transportation, and business center, Phoenix has become increasingly a city of technology and industry. Photo courtesy Arizona Historical Society, Tucson. AHS # MS 1255 F. 123 L.

them, at every postwar census it had a larger fraction of the population of the metropolitan area (Maricopa County) than it had averaged before the war, in 1960 and 1970 over twice as large; and in 1990 the density of population was still less than half as great as before the war. (Los Angeles had peaked at over threefifths the population of Los Angeles County in 1910, dropping to under half by 1950, under two-fifths by 1970; over the fifty years 1940–90 density of population more than doubled.) Although by extending its boundaries Phoenix anticipated developers largely free from public control who threatened to encircle it with “planned communities,”²²² it was slow to take charge of the jurisdiction that it reserved from them. Unlike as closely prescribed (and unincorporated) a suburb as Sun City, which a former building contractor established (1959–60) on land recently planted in cotton, as a planner observed it had “no skeletal framework to help structure growth.”²²³ It developed less as a city than as an aggregation of separately con-

Cities from the Second World War

221

ceived enterprises in real estate, until the 1980s chiefly within the city limits. The diversities of both city and metropolitan area were as great as the differences among the fast-growing populations who collected variously around major aerospace and semiconductor manufacturers, one of the three largest American universities (Arizona State University, at Tempe), compounds of “snowbirds” who came from northern states to vacation or retire, and nodal commercial developments on freeways. Shortly before it replaced San Francisco as third largest in the eighteen states in 1975, the city had 125 shopping centers but only one downtown department store.²²⁴ Metrocenter, largest center in the world when it opened (1973) on recently agricultural land, was first in the country to begin with five major department stores.²²⁵ A journalist called Phoenix (1979) “a developer’s city, the pivot of the Southwest’s growth machine, a builder’s dream come true.” Sprawl might be a misnomer for the growth of the city, he wrote: “There is little to sprawl from or to; the urban expansion process has no center, no ecological boundary point.”²²⁶ Several years later (1982), rebelling against a business elite that ignored neighborhood concerns and specifically against plans for two new freeways, voters approved a reorganization of city government that divided the city into eight “urban villages” around the original central district;²²⁷ the next year they elected the leader of the campaign for the change as mayor.²²⁸ Growing to supermetropolitan scale without even trying to achieve metropolitan focus, larger than most cities that had developed themselves as ports or railroad terminals, Phoenix represented the conflicting purposes of westerners in trying both to maintain space between themselves and their neighbors and to make it more manageable. In growing larger, cities also grew more alike, especially when they grew most at about the same time. If blocks in coastal cities were exchanged, a sociologist wrote shortly after the war, the neighbors would never notice them.²²⁹ Automobiles circumscribed urban growth everywhere more than any earlier means of transportation by land and deferred less to local traditions. As long as they merely supplemented the streetcars, trains, and ferries that still provided much or most local transportation in and around large cities into the 1930s, they were fairly compatible with arrangements of neighborhoods originally designed for pedestrians and horse-drawn wagons and carriages. But by the 1950s and 1960s the streets, freeways, and parking space that they required and the tract houses, office buildings, shopping centers, and warehouses that depended on them were submerging and eroding once-distinctive features of landscape, even of climate. They did so especially in Arizona and Nevada, where development exploded after nearly four centuries when heat and drought had kept intrusion minimal

222

Cities from the Second World War

and where they kept the land from healing over as it did in more humid regions. Yet substantial differences among cities persisted, including cities in subhumid mountain and desert states whose numbers remained less than overwhelming. By the 1960s and 1970s and increasingly thereafter new systems of transportation and communication freed leading industries to grow around physical and cultural environments where valuable employees could live pleasantly rather than around the natural resources on which most earlier major western enterprise had depended. Aside from production of air-conditioning equipment, manufacturing had been insignificant in Arizona before the war, but the electronics manufacturers who came to Phoenix in and after 1949 calculated correctly that the scientists and engineers they wanted to enlist would respond as much to desert sunshine as the affluent retirees who had dominated earlier waves of migration. (“I figured,” an executive recalled later, “the brain-power people . . . we would need would be willing to locate here.”)²³⁰ In Colorado electronics plants similarly attracted engineers to the scenic and culturally attractive environs of Denver, Colorado Springs, and their suburbs, where society that had developed around colleges and fashionable summer resorts already contrasted with the proletarian environment of smelting at Pueblo; in Idaho they built culturally on the traditions of communities that had grown around the state capital and colleges in and near Boise rather than the mines of the panhandle to the north. All over the West, as elsewhere, waves of migrants who headed where friends, relatives, and compatriots had preceded them, often deciding where to go and how long to stay according to such connections and tastes for distinctive cultural traditions as much as for purely economic opportunity, also confirmed, even reinforced local tradition. Sometimes so many of them congregated around friends and relatives that they transformed the larger urban community, constituting new majorities. Those who ultimately made Oakland the most Afro-American city of the West reinforced a nucleus that had been the largest north of Los Angeles while still growing slowly, from 1 in 65 residents in 1900 to 1 in 36 in 1940, until recruits at the shipyards at Richmond and Sausalito reinforced it during the war. Over the next forty years, 1940–80, it increased to nearly 1 in 2, while the black population of San Francisco, about eight miles away, increased from 1 in 131 to 1 in 8.²³¹ On smaller scales Portland had most of the black residents of Oregon, Seattle of Washington, in both states predominantly newcomers. Cities adjusted differently to declines in their economic bases, which, along with opportunities for ethnic groups that adapted at different rates, often changed more than their ethnic proportions. When Omaha lost its railroad terminals and stockyards to changes in transportation and meatpacking and with them its

Cities from the Second World War

223

standing as “crossroads of the nation and . . . capital site of the world’s agriculture,” as a journalist called it in 1949, gains in insurance and telecommunications substantially exceeded losses in railroads and meatpacking.²³² Phoenix not only grew far more after agriculture in the Salt River Valley declined than before but hastened the decline in agriculture by buying water rights from farmers to meet demand for manufacturing and residential development. Electronic factories more than replaced packing houses and canneries at San Jose and its neighbors when developers subdivided the orchards and truck gardens around them. But aerospace manufacturers in southern California were less successful in replacements in manufacturing for civilian markets, especially in developing innovative systems of transportation that might at once absorb suddenly unemployed skilled labor forces and meet local problems of congestion and pollution. The bitter lessons of the dangers of specializing in cyclical enterprises and industries based on exhaustible resources that centers of stock-raising and mining had learned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, centers of military production a century later, made more diversified economies seem desirable, but booms collapsed so suddenly that many cities had little choice. Like others with no better prospects, Butte tried to capitalize on its history when AtlanticRichfield abandoned copper mining. Although no other cities as large as Reno and Las Vegas attempted to live on gambling as they did, by 1993, sixty-two years after Nevada legalized gambling (“gaming”) during the Depression of the 1930s, all states except Utah and Hawaii had followed their example,²³³ variously operating lotteries and taxing casinos and their visitors to meet the fiscal crises of the 1980s and 1990s. The influence of cities followed not only on the goods, services, and associations that they offered, and on the transportation systems, factories, and military bases that they attracted, but also on their ability to represent the interests, aspirations, and spirit of regions that depended on them. Such symbolic functions might have little to do with local color, which was late in developing marketable value over most parts of the West, even as attraction for eastern tourists. Both residents and rural constituents of western cities were prone to boast that they were modern by eastern standards while trying not to match eastern models. Some of the cities that advertised their local settings most had the shallowest roots in region and regional past: although facades of early motels at Las Vegas evoked traditions of cowpunching and mining, the city grew in the 1940s and 1950s essentially as adjunct to the tourist and entertainment businesses of Los Angeles, conveniently removed from the operation of California laws yet close enough to be accessible during wartime shortages of gasoline; advertising its setting in the desert as escape from northern winters, Phoenix looked to the rest of

224

Cities from the Second World War

Arizona for little but the water and electricity that fed its swimming pools and air conditioners. But in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as in gold rush days, differences of city and hinterland in appearance commonly were far greater than their differences with each other. There was little western equivalent to the tension of upstate New York with New York City, or of downstate Illinois with Chicago. Visitors came to Anchorage from the trap lines and oilfields of Alaska, to Cheyenne from the cattle ranges of Wyoming, to Salt Lake City from the farms and mines of Utah and southern Idaho, to San Francisco from the vineyards and orchards of northern California and from most of the Pacific slope, as to a second home. The chances were that they knew it well, having come there before they moved to the hinterland. They were more like their urban neighbors than city and country people were in other parts of the country where the cost of travel from main centers of population was less of a barrier to assorted immigration, or where economic opportunities were more varied. If they farmed or logged or mined rather than banked and traded, the farming, logging, and mining that they did were likely to be kinds that bankers and merchants understood.²³⁴ Growth, prosperity, and improved communications enabled people in different cities to enjoy goods and ways of life once peculiar to their neighbors even if they did not move after them. By the 1950s, sour French bread, lasagna, and tossed salads were available far from San Francisco Bay, salsas and tacos far from the Rio Grande. Mormon bishops marketed their managerial skills well beyond traditional village communities; gentiles learned the Mormon arts of irrigation. But Salt Lake City extended its spiritual authority both by gathering saints to Zion and by trusting them to remain in Babylon; gambling overshadowed other businesses in Las Vegas and Reno as never in pioneer San Francisco and Denver. Hotels and motels all but built over Waikiki, which summarized the attractions of the islands for the buyers of packaged vacations who filled them in rapid rotation, but Honolulu specialized in climate and local color as no other city of its size had been able to do before the airplane. For the most part secure enough in their roles and ranks in regional urban hierarchies so that they no longer regarded their neighbors as threats, as when pioneer promoters staked out more town sites than could become state capitals or railroad terminals, Tucson nevertheless did not easily reconcile itself to Phoenix, or Tacoma to Seattle. Even after Los Angeles no longer feared that San Francisco would infect southern California with trade unionism, San Francisco that Los Angeles would capture its maritime shipping, each disdained qualities of the other, including qualities that it imitated. In their persisting variety as well as in the more general amenities and opportunities that they shared, they continued to represent the region and to dominate western life.

8

Social Relations and Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

When Americans recall how their communities have grown, they usually dwell on the most tangible and measurable aspects of change, such as increases in population and product. Yet physical growth may tell little of social development; pioneers may not easily become settlers or in significant senses settlers become citizens. The circumstances of early settlers in trans-Appalachia that Frederick Jackson Turner saw making them democratic also made them selfsufficient: the West they built was both egalitarian and “anti-social.”¹ Finding good land that was cheap if not free, young families relied on their neighbors as they established themselves less than newcomers in more settled areas commonly did.² On the high plains and beyond, however, Turner noted, settlers needed more than access to the public domain. In passing the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902, Congress recognized that over large areas settlers could enjoy opportunities like those once available in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys only if they worked together and if government supplemented the returns from their efforts. When “the arid lands and the mineral resources of the far West were reached,” Turner wrote, “no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.”³ Yet however organized and supplemented, the resources that settlers in dry country needed did not come together easily. The geographic environment of the new West was an ambiguous heritage. It both invited and limited social development. Sometimes strangers easily saw that they must pool their efforts in

225

226

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

brief encounters, giving help so that they might get help, as when they gathered in wagon trains to cross the plains. But such collaboration usually went no further and lasted no longer than the circumstances that brought them together. The covenants of emigrants expired with their journeys. Expecting to leave within a season, prospectors at mining camps agreed to respect each other’s lives and property, not to organize general government. The social priorities of homesteaders often were only relatively higher even if they planned to remain on their claims for the five years required to take title, their needs so pressing that neighbors concentrated more on asserting immediate individual interests than on maximizing continuing common interest. Touring ranching country in Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, and Oregon in 1921 and 1930, the geographer Isaiah Bowman found western hospitality but also settlers who reserved it for strangers. Growing closer to each other as they occupied available land, they quarreled over fencing, grazing rights, and water among other issues that Turner saw prompting them to work together.⁴ The circumstances of major nonagricultural industries were if anything less auspicious for continuing social relations than crop-farming and stock-raising. Depending on nonrenewable resources, mining and timber cutting were characteristically transient; depending on demand that reflected variables in technology, interregional and international competition, even fashion as well as general economic activity, they were too unpredictable to call cyclical. Moreover, even when resources were so vast that for practical purposes they promised to last forever, employment in some extractive operations declined sharply while production increased, the very prospect of continuing operations justifying investment to save labor. Both operators and employees who knew that they might not stay long therefore limited their commitments to each other and to their neighbors. Without easily transferable skills or access to alternative sources of employment, many working people followed the shifting bases of their industries: in wood products not only from South to West and from tidewater to interior Pacific Northwest but back to South; in oil from Oklahoma and Texas to Wyoming to Alaska. The kinds of employees that major industries attracted often were poor prospects for active citizenship. Facing heavy fixed charges for capital and transportation, mining companies disproportionately recruited laborers without alternatives to low wages and onerous working and living conditions far from home and mixes of immigrants of origins so different that they were unlikely to try to improve themselves by joining in unions. After geologists, foresters, and engineers planned initial operations, most of them moved on to new assignments, while those who stayed often tried to maintain their families in surroundings more

American Indians, Aleuts, Eskimos African-Americans Mex ican and Central Americans Asians, Pacific Islanders

Fig. 8.1. Minorities in the U.S. West. The spread of racial and ethnic minorities in the twentieth-century West illustrates the mounting cultural complexities of the region. Notice particularly the scattered Indian reservations, the Asian communities along the Pacific Coast, and the increasing Hispanic numbers from California to Texas. Map by Bill Nelson.

228

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

congenial than alongside mines, mills, and smelters: at Colorado Springs rather than Pueblo, Salt Lake City rather than Bingham Canyon. The history of large areas that seemed to offer more traditional opportunity refuted the common faith that providing land for farming would bring social and economic stability. An Oklahoman has called his state “land of the drifter,” denied generational roots and sense of place as sojourners moved over successive frontiers of exploitation, both agricultural and mineral.⁵ In territorial Oklahoma, “travelers” wandered about year after year with their herds, living in box wagons. Asked where his children were born, a father gave the names of the wagons.⁶ But in some senses all the West was Oklahoma. Ray Stannard Baker called “floaters” that he saw in the Pacific Northwest “the extreme manifestation of the Western spirit of restlessness, the love of moving about, the conviction that more money is to be made more easily somewhere else.”⁷ Even before homesteaders learned that over much of the plains yields in crops fluctuated widely with rainfall, many of them intended from when they first came to sell their claims rather than live permanently on them. Farmers in Nebraska during the boom of the 1880s had reminded Horace Plunkett of miners by concentrating on the profits of speculation in land, treating their farms like mines rather than homes. “I was in a country,” he wrote later of his life on the plains, “where the rolling stone . . . gathered most moss.”⁸ Hard times brought farmers together in alliances and in parties of protest but also prompted them to limit commitments to schools, churches, and other local undertakings. Although demand for orchard and truck-garden produce raised on irrigated land fluctuated less with world markets than demand for staple grains, it fluctuated more with spending that consumers could forgo. After both prices and rainfall increased in the middle and late 1890s, westerners’ prospects seemed to improve socially as well as economically. A new disposition to put in roots coincided with the new prosperity that followed the nadir of the depression, families investing themselves and their savings in land that they regarded as home and livelihood rather than as futures in real estate. Describing what it called “the West’s Home-Making,” the Independent commented in 1901 that for three decades westerners had felt temporary; now they were becoming homeowners rather than sojourners, establishing title rather than preemptive claim to land and investing in improvements.⁹ In Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, a Kansas editor observed, farmers stayed long enough to hold reunions of old settlers, marking “the beginning of a time when the land [should] be to them a home, not merely a stopping-place.”¹⁰ For a few years a farmer’s son—and more and more often his daughter— could still hope to establish himself (or herself ) without resorting to moneylen-

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

229

ders. Living at home while helping his parents with the daily chores, as his father had done before him, he worked also on other farms, especially at harvest time. Next as a tenant, he might pay his rent from wages earned in such part-time employment as well as from returns on his own crops until he established his own equity, perhaps in the same neighborhood, even on the same land. “The enterprising laborer,” the statistician of the Department of Agriculture wrote in 1901, “usually becomes a tenant and afterwards a farm owner.”¹¹ Correspondents of the department reported (1909) that most laborers and tenants could save enough to buy their own farms.¹² Over most of the West, accepting the obligations of tenancy indicated faith in agricultural opportunity, not the subjection to creditors that made it index to rural poverty in the South. Rates of tenancy were high early in the century on some of the richest and most profitable farmland, in eastern counties of plains states along the right bank of the Missouri River, where often tenants were children who had been living “with the old folks ‘on the place,’” expecting to buy or inherit it, rather than transients who failed to mend fences and control weeds.¹³ Close to half of a sample of tenants surveyed in Nebraska in 1920 were related to their landlords.¹⁴ The tenancy of the younger generation corresponded to the success of the older in retiring in middle age, moving to town to educate their children and take their ease, in the language of a survey for the Department of Agriculture,¹⁵ some of them after postponing retirement through the bad times of the 1890s.¹⁶ Under such circumstances, terms of formal occupancy changed more than populations and social relationships. Rates of tenancy, in contrast, were low in marginal farming areas on the plains and in New Mexico, which perennially was both the poorest western state and the state whose farmers clung most closely to their ancestral homes.¹⁷ But neither the new prosperity nor the new social stability extended everywhere or lasted indefinitely. The newly prosperous farmers of the 1890s and 1900s in the eastern and central counties of northern plains states profited by the mistakes that some of their predecessors had made in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, growing crops better suited to western soils and climates or shifting from crop-farming to stock-raising. Pioneers on higher, drier land farther west resumed testing it and themselves, less often becoming tenants but also less often staying long enough to make permanent improvements or even to qualify as homesteaders. In areas where the government had only recently opened land to settlement, promoters’ talk of homemaking and community building contrasted with the raw look of jerry-built houses, many of them no more than unfinished shacks. Even residents of several years’ standing seemed poised to move on. A visitor to western Kansas in 1906 described settlers camping rather than living

230

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

in minimal quarters, bringing few possessions and neglecting to plant trees and build porches. “Can a family grow up with real home love under these conditions?” he asked. “How can it fail to be moved easily into roaming, seeking for some better location?”¹⁸ While most stockmen who had survived the 1880s hedged against more hard winters by building barns and silos and raising fodder, in remote areas others invested as little as possible in more than their stock, subsisting on government land while moving as markets and sources of forage suggested like the nomadic cattlemen of the southern backcountry before the American Revolution.¹⁹ While in general second and third generations of settlers often profited by mistakes and misfortunes of their predecessors, soon after the boom that the government set off by opening land from Indian reservations to entry, much of Oklahoma had drifted into southern poverty, committed to cotton and to methods of raising it that were backward by western standards and with rates of tenancy far above those in other western states, nearly 55 percent in 1910.²⁰ The Commission on Industrial Relations reported (1915) that charges on tenants’ debts were more burdensome than in Texas, interest on store credit ranging up to 60 percent. According to a physician who saw socialism as their only way out, thousands of tenant families, “helpless, hopeless, industrious slaves,” lived in log pens and “rawhide” houses (built of scraps of warped timber that let in the weather) “in degrading poverty.”²¹ The new prosperity of wheat farmers in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas in the first two decades of the century, in contrast, followed not only on rising prices and increasing rainfall but also on extensive changes in farming practices. Some of these changes seemed to bring back ways of the self-sufficient family farmers of the older Middle West. As stockmen raised more fodder, many grain farmers in the drier western counties of the plains states raised more livestock; families more often took time for such amenities and investments in the future as planting fruit trees as well as potatoes and turnips. But the more essential changes moved in quite different directions: toward more specialization rather than toward more diversification, and toward drawing on returns from economies of scale in order to live in more urban and industrial style. Farmers who cultivated more land tended to put more of it into staple crops,²² and so to live more by the marketplace. Reports of income may have described the pasts of farmers at the top of the ladder more than the futures of those lower down. These reports were slow to reflect changes in the agricultural labor force and in rural society, which were at least as drastic as changes in crops, and intimately related to them. When wheat farmers who were old or middle-aged at the beginning of the century had been

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

231

young, during and soon after the Civil War, much of their crop still came from plantings so small that they and their friends could harvest most of it. But those who planted more and bought the labor-saving machines that large plantings and harvests justified and required, especially during and after the First World War, depended on large supplies of seasonally migrant wage labor as inexorably as southern cotton farmers depended on large supplies of resident tenant labor after the Civil War. An economist who surveyed the small-grain harvest in 1918– 20 found between 150,000 and 200,000 men converging on farms between the Mississippi River and the Rockies each summer.²³ In any one area demand for labor to harvest wheat by modern methods peaked and passed within a few days, greatly exceeding local resources. As harvest hands became strangers imported en masse rather than neighbors who might soon be recruiting their own crews, the quality of rural society changed along with the scale of operations. During the First World War, Hamlin Garland recalled the fellowship of simpler times and how it began to pass in the 1870s and 1880s, when he shared the work on his parents’ farms in Iowa and Dakota Territory before he homesteaded on his own and when threshing time “was becoming each year less of a ‘bee’ and more of a job (many of the men were mere hired hands).” “Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with the passing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand,” he wrote. “There was less and less of the ‘changing works’ which used to bring young men of the farms together.”²⁴ Once-friendly associations became distant, brief, and narrow, the terms of employment transmuted into calculations commensurable with charges for interest, taxes, and freight. Although such old informalities as the traditional obligations of farm families to feed harvest hands who had been chiefly neighbors’ sons persisted for a few years, they sharpened senses of difference as they became more burdensome. Commending the social returns on diversified farming (1902), a North Dakota woman warned farm families that “exclusive wheat raising” meant “taking into their midst as help, travelling transients or ‘Hobos’ four-fifths of whom [were] moral lepers.”²⁵ Demand for hired labor soon declined faster than it had risen as the combine harvester became economic on the southern plains in the 1920s and in the Dakotas in the late 1920s and after. Armies of bindlestiffs no longer followed the wheat harvests in Kansas, Henry J. Allen, editor of the Wichita Beacon, reported in 1927: they were “gone to join the buffalo hunters, the hard-riding cowboys, . . . the herds of wild horses” once in “this wide agricultural country. . . . This year there has been a total absence of [them] in the greater wheat areas which once knew [them] most numerously.” Allen described two women in a Ford car taking the midday meal to three harvest hands, one of them the farmer, who cut and

232

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

Fig. 8.2. Migrant workers in the West. Throughout the twentieth-century West, migrant workers, especially those from Mexico but also from other world areas, have served as laborers in agricultural, industrial, and tourist industries. Their presence and contributions have aided the region economically while they added to the West’s diverse sociocultural legacies. Photo courtesy Idaho State Historical Society, Boise. 76-102.61/B.

hauled a section of wheat where formerly there had been seventeen; and already improved equipment was reducing the three to two.²⁶ “The remaining farm hands [in wheat] are, nowadays, really machinists,” Carey McWilliams wrote a few years later (1942), after the Depression of the 1930s temporarily slowed the pace of mechanization and then the war accelerated it again.²⁷ Demand for hired labor rose in other areas, especially on irrigated land in the Southwest and on the Pacific slope. Farmers in California had raised mainly cereals and other extensive crops as late as 1909. As they shifted to intensive irrigated operations, acreage in vegetables increased nearly seven times over the next twenty-five years, the crop exceeding four times the value of the wheat harvest.²⁸ Numbers

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

233

of hired laborers increased correspondingly into the 1970s, although nationally they had peaked by 1916, man-hours of farm labor by 1920. Then they fell as mechanical harvesting extended from wheat to cotton, tomatoes, nuts, and orchard fruit.²⁹ Although advocates of the dams that the United States government built after 1902 argued that they would make western rural society morally sounder as well as more productive, social returns on irrigation soon became as elusive as the prospect that reclamation projects would recover their costs. Instead of the cooperative spirit that the framers of national reclamation policy foresaw, irrigation seemed to promote more extreme individualism: instead of stabler family farming, either more rapid turnover or, especially on the better land, consolidation. More than 75 percent of pioneer settlers on government projects left within the first three or four years, Frederick H. Newell, former director of the Reclamation Service, admitted in 1915. The glowing advertising of land companies and railroads attracted a new class that he called professional pioneers, “the more restless individuals in the community, especially the men who have not made good at home.”³⁰ He concluded that since few such people had had experience in dryland farming, encouraging them to stay only promoted speculation and postponed the salutary turnover in ownership that brought in farmers who met the peculiar requirements of the land. “Experience has shown,” he wrote in 1923, “that an agricultural community, like a tree, cannot spring into full bearing at once. . . . Many families must come and go before there is a fairly complete adaptation to local surroundings.”³¹ On much of the most productive irrigated land, the more adaptable families that Newell looked for never arrived; original settlers became absentee landlords or, like homesteaders elsewhere, sold or leased their land to larger operators. Rates of tenancy soon rose above levels in areas of traditional midwestern farming. They were especially high on land that speculators held for urban uses near San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle and on reclamation projects, rising from 21 percent in 1912 to 32 percent in 1917–18. By 1910 nonresidents controlled about two-fifths of farm land in the Imperial Valley, and many farmers did not bring their wives and children there; that and the “slipshod appearance of the farm buildings,” a visitor wrote, suggested that “Imperial farmers [were] just ‘sticking it out,’ with a view to selling as soon as they [could].”³² Farmers and politicians soon argued that the units of traditional size (160 acres or less) to which the Homestead Act of 1902 restricted water from government dams were uneconomically small; evasions multiplied; and in 1982 Congress repealed the limit and a requirement that owners of land irrigated with water from reclamation projects live on it.³³

234

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

Both on and off projects, for many years corporate landowners controlled large expanses of irrigated land, some of them in California and the Southwest as successors of Mexican grantees. While they were able to raise the capital that irrigated farming required more easily than small operators could do, areas that they dominated tended to lag both socially and economically. A sociologist who studied the social consequences of agribusiness for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics found residents of a community in the southern San Joaquin Valley living in the sterile atmosphere of a company town.³⁴ While newcomers were slow to gather as farmers and farm laborers, they often did so in other capacities. Both in cities and in the countryside they depended heavily on relatives, friends, former neighbors, emigrants from the same states or countries—Landsleute, paisani—for advice and material assistance or at least the reassurance of familiar speech, faith, and customs. Learning that recruits who came with others like them were likely both to come more readily than those who came singly and to stay longer, labor contractors and agents of territorial and state governments and railroad and steamship companies charged with promoting settlement concentrated on members of distinct national and cultural groups, playing on their inclinations to cluster with their fellows. Early in the century, as before, despite massive advertising campaigns directed at them and accounts of free and cheap western land that symbolized American opportunity, immigrants from Europe to the United States concentrated disproportionately near the East Coast ports where they arrived, whether because many of their compatriots were there or because going farther seemed an extravagance, especially if they expected to stay only temporarily, as most did. Distances overland put off many of them. “Only the more thrifty and those in better circumstances will ever attempt the trip,” a representative of the Southern Pacific Railroad testified (1901).³⁵ In 1900–1910 the increase in foreign-born white (chiefly European) population in the state of New York was a third larger than the increase in all sixteen contiguous western states and territories.³⁶ Over years when western lands seemed especially promising and accounts of free homesteads still interested many Europeans in coming to America, new immigrants less often had means of reaching them, let alone of establishing themselves as farmers.³⁷ An agent of the Burlington lines reported that in 1913 less than 1 percent of European immigrants were destined for farm lands.³⁸ Yet immigrants and children of immigrants formed large parts of western populations. Although by 1900 the Pacific and mountain divisions no longer led the country in foreign-born population, as they had since the 1850s, most western states and territories—fourteen of the eighteen—drew on recent immigrant stock more than the rest of the country. More than half the populations of

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

235

seven of the eighteen had foreign-born parents, against only eight of the thirtytwo older states.³⁹ Moreover, throughout much of the West both foreign-born and native-born populations included large elements that most Americans had not encountered before they went west: Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asians. New Mexico, where first- and second-generation immigrants—most of them of British and German stock—comprised less of the population than anywhere else outside the South, was still heavily Spanish-speaking. Although San Francisco had dropped slightly below New York City in ratio of foreign born to native born since 1890, nearly one in seven of those it had was Chinese or Japanese. (Hawaii led the country in both numbers and proportions of Asians, over half the population of the territory, 56.4 percent, over twice the Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian population, over three times the Caucasian. California had over half the Chinese and Japanese in continental United States, 50.7 percent; Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Nevada, in that order, together had most of the rest.)⁴⁰ Immigrants had been among the first farmers over much of the West, and they soon were some of the most numerous. Everywhere except New Mexico ratios of the foreign born ran higher than in older parts of the country. In North Dakota, led by Norwegians, they outnumbered native born before the First World War.⁴¹ In South Dakota they were “our best farmers as a rule,” M. F. Greeley, editor of the Dakota Farmer, told the Industrial Commission in 1901. “They seem to know what it meant to have a piece of land in the old country, . . . and they seem determined not to be caught a second time without a piece of land in our overcrowded country.”⁴² Immigrants became farmers, however, at varying rates and with varying degrees of success. Some came to America hoping mainly to accumulate the means of providing for better lives for themselves and their families at home and accordingly were reluctant to commit themselves to more than temporary employment as wage earners. The founders of the cooperative Italian-Swiss Agricultural Colony at Asti, in Sonoma County, California, could not persuade immigrant Italian laborers to take shares in it, though climate and terrain were enough like those they had known that promoters often called California “our Italy.” Southern Italians more often had been farmers than northern Italians at home but less often went into agriculture in any capacity in the United States. As the editor of La Tribuna Italiana (Chicago) observed (1901), many of them had had such hard lots on poor land in the mezzogiorno that they left it “with the same pleasure that Hercules had in tearing from his body the shirt of Nessus.” Further, having known the intimate associations of life in villages, they were reluctant to move to isolated homesteads in a strange land. While Americans

236

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

generally were moving from farm to cities, Italian immigrants and their children became farmers more in the second generation than in the first.⁴³ Yet large ethnic concentrations of farmers developed under diverse circumstances as immigrants who had come as landless laborers gradually established themselves, persisting during hard times while their neighbors retreated. Some invested so much in moving that, having come, they were too poor to move on, a rural sociologist in South Dakota reported (1937).⁴⁴ Swedes who settled on tenacre tracts covered with stumps at Venersborg, Washington (near Vancouver), in 1909 cultivated their crops by hand, many of them owning no horses.⁴⁵ Most Czechs came prepared to buy substantial acreage, as in parts of southeastern South Dakota and eastern Nebraska where for decades they were the largest ethnic element.⁴⁶ An agricultural agent in Oklahoma observed (1942) that Czechs there had moved much less than other farmers, during the Depression of the 1930s at a rate of 1.2 percent against rates of 16.5 to 23.1 percent for their neighbors; they were less likely to be tenants and if tenants more likely to be related to their landlords; and more of them belonged to churches and other social organizations than farmers of other stocks.⁴⁷ But Russian Germans, ethnic Germans who had emigrated to escape Russification and military conscription, prospered and persisted far more than their neighbors though they were relatively poor when they came. Having adapted on the steppes of the Volga to climate and terrain much like those of the high plains, they had more to teach there than to learn, introducing not only wheat where neighbors from Iowa and Missouri were still trying to grow corn (maize) but also improved durums and other varieties of winter wheat that resisted cold and drought. Coming first to Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska in the 1870s, they moved beyond from Texas to the northern plains and Rockies and the Pacific slope. Since they brought little in savings and material possessions with them and in later years found most good land already taken, many worked in towns, on railroads, or on older settlers’ farms until they could rent or buy. According to a railroad immigration agent in 1920, the German population of Topeka had changed in that way every twelve years.⁴⁸ Sugar companies in Colorado recruited Germans from Nebraska in the early 1900s; within five years most of them in the Arkansas Valley east of Pueblo had bought their own land, and their employers had turned to Mexicans.⁴⁹ On the West Coast both Italian and Japanese immigrants shifted from employment in construction, the Japanese at first predominantly on railroads, to part-time and then full-time farming, renting small plots of land in and around cities where they sold produce they raised. In depending on help they got within their own community and confirming their loyalties to it as they struggled to survive in a strange land, some immigrants

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

237

Fig. 8.3. European ethnic groups. Late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century, several European ethnic groups settled on the northern Great Plains and became important segments of the region’s agricultural development. Here a large group of Russian Germans gather in North Dakota to attend a wedding celebration. Photo courtesy of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck. C3565.

may have postponed wider experiences. Confining their contacts and loyalties at first chiefly within narrowly delimited circles of compatriots and coreligionists, in the eyes of neighbors who considered foreigners Americanized to the extent that they spoke, ate, dressed, and worshipped like themselves, they remained a breed apart; to the extent that they established themselves as residents, members of their immediate communities, ultimately they may have laid foundation for larger citizenship, but within at least the first generation they seemed suspended in a kind of limbo between nationalities. The relations between persistence on the land and Americanization were complex and elusive. Like most residents of older states who prospected for gold in the placers of California, Colorado, and Alaska and the Yukon, most immigrants intended at first to stay only temporarily. Although those who made the commitment that developing farms involved more often changed their minds than those who mined, deciding not to return to their native lands, they did not decide to abandon ancestral ways. Substantial numbers of Russian Germans, for instance, had emigrated to resist Russification. Under little pressure to use English, some second and third generation immigrants for many years spoke it with noticeable accents.⁵⁰ Yet some who especially cherished their ancestral culture might lose touch with it, clinging to outmoded tradition or reinterpreting old principles and practices in new directions if they could not maintain close contacts with their old homes, especially through continuing immigration, which in farming areas tended to decline as old settlers exhausted supplies of land available for newcomers. Whereas by the nineteenth century transplanted Roman Catholics in Maryland had developed what the church considered American heresies,

238

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

groups of transplanted Lutherans in the West became staunchly orthodox in doctrine and mores within national synods. Even language could lose much of its old meaning. A Washington woman who visited Norway seemed an apparition from the past, speaking in an abandoned dialect and recounting events long forgotten.⁵¹ Yet while cherishing the ways of their kinsmen, many emigrants transcended provincial divisions more than in the old country. Gravitating toward countrymen of diverse origins as they joined the larger society, piemontesi and calabresi celebrated their Italianness, Preussen and Bayern their Germanness. Like most other newcomers, immigrants from western and central Europe clustered with their fellows where they could, and before the tensions of the First World War, few of them offended their neighbors as native-born Mormons had offended theirs in Illinois in the time of Joseph Smith. These newcomers may have been more fortunate than other groups, coming at a time when their skills were in demand and they could find opportunity for themselves without seeming to threaten it for others. Perhaps native-born Americans accepted them because many of them also were slow to commit themselves, to decide to stay longer than they must to get what they had come for; as transients they could tolerate behavior that threatened cultural turf where residents had stakes and responsibilities. Furthermore, early western space was wide enough to insulate different elements from each other, to buffer differences among them, even to suggest that migration into it would help more than the immigrants. Coming disproportionately from parts of the United States that, like the Far West, were unusually commercial in their economies and contacts or unusually diverse in their populations, many old-stock Americans in new western settlements had already known foreigners and foreign ways before they came. But even in less cosmopolitan traditions some immigrants did not stand out alongside Indians, Mexicans, and Asians because they seemed closer to old-stock Americans even in what they cherished most of their heritages. Until the First World War, most felt little pressure to justify themselves by disavowing ancestral tradition. The only concerted violence against white immigrants in San Francisco, which led both in immigration and in xenophobia, had focused on “Sydney ducks” in 1849–56 and Frenchmen in 1865.⁵² While initially sheltering their members from the larger society, by mediating between familiar and unfamiliar cultures and helping outsiders to become materially and psychologically secure, some ethnic communities also prepared them to enter it. Concentrations of Scandinavians and Germans on the plains and of Irishmen and Italians in California became bases of strength in American business, labor, and politics. “Hall socialism” prepared what a Finnish historian has called “a kind of ‘soft landing’ for Finnish immigrant workers in America,”

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

239

socialists moving from Finnish to American socialism and socialist parties more easily than “church Finns” moved from the Finnish state church to American synods. In the course of defining and defending their separate ethnic roles within foreign-language federations, ultimately these groups felt more at home in American trade unionism and politics.⁵³ Some newcomers recommended themselves by contributing capital, labor, and additions to population that were much in demand. Ashkenazi peddlers and merchants rapidly became leading citizens,⁵⁴ esteemed both for serving important needs in sections that lived more by commerce than most of the country and for investing their profits in buildings that testified to their confidence in their communities. As Germans they represented respected cultural traditions; as Jews following Mosaic injunctions to social responsibility (tikkun olom, mending of the world) and as merchants cultivating their customers they led in civic and philanthropic causes. But some other minorities were slower both to qualify themselves to their neighbors and to think of themselves as more than sojourners among them. Because travel was expensive, living conditions in areas of major demand were poor, and much employment was highly seasonal (as in placer mining, building railroads, logging in mountains, harvesting most crops outside parts of the Southwest, fishing off Alaska), laborers chronically were in short supply. Large employers, accordingly, as early as the 1860s recruited contract laborers from Asia, southeastern Europe, Mexico, and islands of the Pacific Ocean who seemed more exotic than westerners in general and initially were more transient than other immigrants in either West or East. More than most European immigrants who planned initially to stay only until they had saved enough of their earnings to justify coming, for many years nearly all from China confirmed and reinforced that intention by both coming and remaining alone, without wives and children. The circumstances of their living and working further isolated them: in Hawaii at sugar plantations; on the mainland first on the main line of the Central Pacific Railroad across the Sierra Nevada and the deserts of the Great Basin, then on wheat ranches in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and at small factories and shops that unions had not organized in ethnic enclaves of cities, all at wages so low as to offend other working people, especially during economic depressions. In Hawaii, they were rapidly leaving the sugar plantations when the United States annexed the islands in 1898, and by the 1930s and 1940s they surpassed Caucasians in some categories of occupation and income.⁵⁵ But on the mainland after Congress stopped practically all immigration from China (1882, 1892, indefinitely in 1902), Chinese nationals gradually retreated

240

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

into marginal expatriate economies, including the few enterprises with nonChinese clienteles that whites had not closed to them.⁵⁶ As losses by death and return to China in old age exceeded gains by birth, until the 1950s they were fewer on the mainland than they had been in 1880.⁵⁷ In the Chinatowns where most of them clustered, more survived by marketing their exotic color to tourists in restaurants and curio shops than by figuring significantly in wider markets for labor. After Congress set a quota for Chinese immigrants (1943) and then stopped limiting immigration by nationality, putting immigrants from all countries on the same basis (1965), newcomers from Hong Kong and Taiwan replaced and vastly outnumbered those from mainland China. By 1990 Chinese of assorted origins had become the largest non-European ethnic minority in San Francisco, a fourth more than Latin Americans, three-fifths more than African Americans; the city was nearly twice as Chinese as it had been when Chinese were scapegoats in politics over a century before.⁵⁸ First coming to the United States in substantial numbers after Congress began restricting immigration from China in the 1880s, Japanese immigrants inherited both kinds of work that Chinese had done and traditions of hostility against them. In general they worked as diligently as older-stock Americans liked to think they themselves did, adapting to demands and opportunities as they found them. Like the Chinese, they entered agriculture as contract laborers after working first on railroads, accepting working and living conditions that few others would consider.⁵⁹ Early in the century they replaced Russian Germans in the beet fields of Nebraska and northern Colorado; sugar companies accordingly encouraged them to lease farmland there and in Idaho and Utah to keep them nearby.⁶⁰ But they soon showed quite un-Chinese ambition to improve their incomes and their fortunes. “The Japanese want to live in a little better style [than the Chinese], and they are more particular about the class of work they do,” a California businessman said in 1901, when most of them had only recently arrived.⁶¹ Soon they left the interior for the expanding markets for produce on the coast, renting small plots of the best land they could find. When the more successful of them sent for their wives, they became as different from the Chinese socially as economically: no longer almost exclusively male (96 percent male in 1900) but within northern European ratios of sexes.⁶² By 1930, women and Americanborn Japanese Americans (Nisei) outnumbered male immigrants by more than two to one.⁶³ Using their hands as freely as white farmers were beginning to use machines and specializing in crops that responded profitably to intensive cultivation, soon they dominated some of the more profitable branches of truck gardening, in 1941 growing a third or more of produce in California, as much as

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

241

nine-tenths of specialty crops.⁶⁴ Doing all the work within the family or paying minimal wages to employees (increasingly Mexicans, who by the 1930s served them as they had served whites),⁶⁵ they competed less with other farmers than their shares of markets might suggest. But while exploiting their opportunities as few other immigrants with limited resources had done so rapidly, the Japanese remained as much outside American society in the eyes of most whites as the Chinese had before them. Feeling against them persisted long after they moved out of the general labor market: among laborers for accepting low wages, among employers for asking for higher and then moving on when they got less than they wanted.⁶⁶ They offended generally by ascending the agricultural ladder to freehold tenure while national and state governments variously subsidized citizens who took up small plots in reclamation and colonization projects and states adopted alien land acts forbidding noncitizens to acquire land (1913–23). The Japanese remained socially isolated as they moved into cities and played larger roles in western economies than as unskilled laborers. As John Higham has suggested, restrictions on immigrants that Congress adopted in 1921 and 1924 may have helped to deflate prejudice against them and their descendants by reducing numbers of newcomers as well as by giving sponsors of restriction the gratification of victory.⁶⁷ Yet restrictions imposed on the Japanese, going much beyond those on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, helped to sustain differences and senses of difference that had prompted Congress and state legislatures to discriminate against them. Being ineligible for citizenship by United States law (which the Supreme Court validated in 1922) and trying to maintain family connections and inherited cultural traditions among their descendants, as foreigners, Japanese immigrants (Issei) stood out by continuing to depend on Japanese consular agents, especially for help with problems that they faced as aliens. Rising Japanese farm operators quickly learned to evade alien land laws, registering land in names of American-born children and of corporations and associations with white officers.⁶⁸ But more than before, Japanese immigrants and their children worked in cities and concentrated there and in California, most urban of western states as well as agriculturally the most productive. (In 1900 slightly more than four in five of Japanese in the United States were in California, by 1920 nearly two of three, by 1940 nearly three of four.) Initially developing small enterprises to serve fellow immigrants, increasingly they moved into the larger economy, at first by selling produce they had raised from wagons and stands. Soon they became packers, shippers, and wholesalers as well as producers and retailers, organizing the equivalent of a major vertically integrated industry in

242

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

Los Angeles and southern California within the ethnic community, and without going to the banks on Spring Street for their capital. The networks of associations that Japanese immigrants brought with them and developed along the lines of those that they had known at home were important in helping them to adapt to new environments, giving them both material and psychological support and opportunity to adopt elements of the dominant American culture as they chose to, gradually and selectively. But in depending on other immigrants they remained apart from the larger society. Their revolving credit associations (tanomoshi or mujin)⁶⁹ did not develop into general financial institutions, as the Bank of Italy under Amadeo P. Giannini developed beyond the scale and scope of storefront banks and check-cashing services in the Italian North Beach district of San Francisco. (The Japanese-held banks of the coastal states after the Second World War were affiliates of banks in Japan.) Japanese businesses outside the produce and nursery trades had few white customers. Perhaps because as consumers Japanese immigrants rapidly discarded some of their more visibly colorful ways, including, as a reporter put it, “any Western banality of dress and custom,”⁷⁰ and because Japan did not have the mythic meanings for Americans that China had had since the eighteenth century, Japantowns seldom attracted tourists as Chinatowns did. For many years even Japanese food did not interest outsiders. When they had full access to American public schools, children of Japanese immigrants soon excelled as students, generally making better records and persisting longer than their Caucasian neighbors, despite the sacrifices that they and their families had to make when they lived away from home and drew on their families’ earnings instead of contributing to them. But legal access often was limited, not only at San Francisco, where the school board attracted national and international attention in 1906–7 by restricting them to a segregated school, but in Hawaii, where until after the Second World War students were admitted to “standard schools” offering academic programs rather than vocational programs designed to prepare them to become farm laborers on the basis of race and facility in English.⁷¹ Young Nisei (children of immigrant Japanese educated in America) moved into professional careers more slowly than they excelled educationally. Many remained within the ethnic economy both because filial loyalty restrained them from leaving family businesses and because they still lived between two cultures as the children of most other immigrants did not. Japanese Americans lagged for many years in cultural and social integration behind members of minorities who, being too few to find friends and mates easily inside their own immigrant communities, developed more frequent contacts outside them. Far fewer

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

243

of both the first and the second generation, Nisei as well as Issei, married outside their own ethnic group than other immigrants, on the mainland as well as in Hawaii.⁷² For all their remarkable development, Japanese communities still were less the nuclei of larger American citizenship that Irish, Jewish, and Italian communities had become. When the United States government removed Japanese immigrants and their descendants in the coastal states to “relocation centers” in interior deserts shortly after Japanese planes attacked at Pearl Harbor in 1941, those who had developed enterprises of their own lost nearly everything. But when they were released, many young Nisei were ready to pursue independent careers. As a group better educated by American standards than both other immigrants and native-born whites,⁷³ many of them with advanced and professional standing went on to new opportunities in other parts of the country.⁷⁴ Immigrant and American-born Japanese (Issei and Nisei) continued thereafter to disperse beyond the coast, although California by 1980 had more of both than any other state.⁷⁵ The Japanese farmer had become a rarity, better known for commanding premium prices from the carriage trade, as near an affluent suburb of San Diego,⁷⁶ than for settling for the margins of subsistence; as the stereotypical Japanese in Hawaii had become a civil servant or a schoolteacher, the stereotypical Japanese in California was becoming an engineer or a banker, while Filipinos and Mexicans met demand for hand labor on farms.⁷⁷ Americans critical of other minorities pointed to Asian and especially Japanese immigrants as models of self-improvement and Americanization. The Spanish speakers of the Pacific and mountain states, who over large areas replaced the Japanese as harvest laborers, seemed both like and unlike them. They were at once one of the oldest of minorities in the persons of some of them, newer only than Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts, and yet in some of their variety one of the newest; even at the beginning of the century one of the most numerous, in New Mexico still a majority, and yet for many years widely underestimated; some distinctively committed to land and neighborhood where their progenitors had lived under Spanish or Mexican rule but others more tentative in attitudes toward the United States and the dominant culture than most other minorities; more unified by common ancestral language than at least two of the largest other minorities, Chinese and Native American, and yet so varied in culture and tradition that they did not agree on what to call themselves and on what their primary loyalty was and should be. All “that remains of California’s picturesque Spanish past,” a foreign journalist wrote in 1928, “is its melodious nomenclature, and the venerable ruins of the Franciscan Missions.”⁷⁸ For more than the first half century of American control, when Anglo-

244

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

Americans in recently Mexican territory were still restlessly spying out the land, Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the broadest senses of the terms (covering everyone whose ancestors came there either from Mexico after the American conquest or from Spain or New Spain before it) were relatively fixed in residence. Until the Mexican War as the majority of nonaboriginal inhabitants they included most of the farmers and ranchers west of the Missouri River other than the Anglo-Americans of the former Texas republic. Like their Indian neighbors, in New Mexico and its neighbors they maintained their rural communities longer than in California, perhaps both because their ties to the land and to each other there were unusually old and close and because others had been slow to displace them. Valuing the intimate associations of neighborhood and family above speculative opportunity, they remained in their villages when they could, many leaving only temporarily and when they must, instead of acquiring land elsewhere. As a historian of Mexican Americans in rural Colorado and New Mexico has pointed out, village life survived more easily on the basis of wage labor than on that of homesteading, which demanded outlays of capital that villagers did not have and sacrifices of traditional associations that they did not want to make.⁷⁹ Some villager-farmers in New Mexico who lost communal holdings by failing to pay taxes did not realize what was happening, since new owners let them stay on the land until it commanded good prices, especially for development under irrigation. Working for wages far from home, many of them no longer used ancestral farmlands and pastures, with or without title. When Vachel Lindsay wandered through Kansas as harvest hand and itinerant poet in 1912, he called Mexicans he saw there “tractable serfs of the Santa Fé.”⁸⁰ By that time they had virtually replaced the Irish and other European immigrants who had built railroads east of the Rocky Mountains. (“The white man in railroad track work has disappeared,” a Topeka newspaper commented.)⁸¹ Then employment on railroads declined, first in construction, by the 1930s even in maintenance. When they found work again, not so much on el traque as on industrialized farms and in factories producing military hardware and supplies during the Second World War, whole families left their villages.⁸² Newcomers mingled with old Mexican Americans. For more than half a century, 1849–1903, immigration from across the border had fallen much below migration from interior Mexico into California and New Mexico before the Mexican War despite talk about influxes of “Sonorans” during the California gold rush; it was less than immigration from Asia as late as 1915.⁸³ Natives of Mexico (that is, the parts of Mexico that the United States had not annexed) in California had reached a peak in the census of 1870, then declined until in 1890 they

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

245

amounted to only 2 percent of the foreign born, under three-fifths of 1 percent of total population; although Los Angeles was nearly twice as Mexican as the rest of the state, it had more natives of Germany, England, China, or France than of Mexico.⁸⁴ Then new influxes crossed the border as changes in the Mexican economy forced small farmers off the land or left them impoverished on it, the first as Japanese immigrants left the seasonal labor market for their own enterprises. By 1920 immigration from Mexico was greater than immigration from any country other than Canada and Italy, and Mexicans were the largest foreign-born minority in Los Angeles, third largest in California.⁸⁵ Such new Mexican immigrants seemed slower than other minorities to advance themselves economically in the larger community or to commit themselves to it fully or in any exclusive sense, especially in establishing residence or citizenship, even in learning English. Most came without resources other than their own labor, after the best free and cheap land was gone and when both what arable land was left and the technology that it required were priced far beyond their reach. Unlike the Japanese, some of whom had worked in cottage industries before they emigrated,⁸⁶ many were strangers to the requirements of a changing monetary economy. Coming individually as seasonal laborers, they remained outside main structures of opportunity and authority as they rode freight trains to harvests. “Mexicans,” one of them said in 1928, “we are but the children of Israel who are passing through our Egypt here in the United States, doing the onerous labors, swallowing our pride, bracing up under the indignities heaped upon us here.”⁸⁷ In the most immediate senses coming from Mexico was easier both physically and psychologically than coming from most other countries. Since the trip could take hours rather than weeks and cost proportionately less than passage by sea, many came seasonally. Shuttling across the border to rejoin relatives after harvests, they maintained old attachments far more easily than most visitors and immigrants from greater distances overseas. Some had worked on irrigated farms that Americans owned south of the border much like those where they found work on the American side. Typically they stayed at least temporarily in barrios or neighborhoods of fellow Mexicans who showed them how to find work and meet their daily needs and who offered the reassurance of familiar speech and food. A barrio at Sacramento where Ernesto Galarza stopped before the First World War, when the new immigration was just beginning, already was a selfcontained community. “Only when we ventured uptown,” he recalled, “did we feel like aliens in a foreign land.”⁸⁸ Yet many newcomers confronted changes and challenges in barrios out of

246

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

proportion to their moves across the border and to differences between work they did and work they had done, beginning with the challenges of living in cities. By 1950 Spanish speakers in the Southwest were nearly two-thirds urban, by 1960 four-fifths (85 percent in California).⁸⁹ More both lived and worked in cities. Even at the outset of the Great Depression less than half of Mexican Americans in the Southwest were farmers or farm laborers, forty years later less than a tenth.⁹⁰ While losing traditional roots to the soil, Mexicans and Mexican Americans in general were slower than European and Asian immigrants to enter mainstreams of urban opportunity. The commitment to traditional values that kept New Mexicans and Coloradoans in their villages while they lost land and water to Texans and other newcomers handicapped them and their immigrant cousins in competitive urban environments. They were so seldom prepared by experience or training for commercial and industrial pursuits and apparently so much less interested than other immigrants in seeking more profitable and congenial ways of life that rural employers welcomed them as distinctively tractable and dependable replacements for the Japanese.⁹¹ For decades they seemed both acceptable and preferable to other immigrants. Initially coming alone, even after they began bringing their families they conveniently disappeared after harvest, whether to villages north or south of the border or to barrios of migrants within cities of border states. Such concentrations of Spanish speakers were often large and self-contained enough to sustain impressions of the United States as an alien land with only secondary claim to the allegiance of newcomers.⁹² Remaining in such cultural limbos and following harvests without regard for school calendars, they were slower to qualify themselves for more remunerative employment.⁹³ In neglecting Mexicans where they did not actively exclude them, for many years school administrators and public authorities generally commonly assumed that they were in the United States only temporarily, that they would return to Mexico before communities developed obligations to them, as employers assumed or hoped that they would return before they learned to ask for higher wages and the assistance of American labor unions and government agencies. American Indians and other Native peoples—Eskimos, Aleuts, and Hawaiians—resembled other western minorities in their poverty, in the disposition of whites to pass over their interests, and in their own ambivalence toward the dominant culture and dominant standards of success. The values, customs, and institutions of their ancestral societies differed from those of the dominant American community more than for most immigrants from Europe and Asia. Yet there could be no question of loyalties beyond American territory among

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

247

peoples whose traditions bound them to it as no others’ did. (Pia Machita, a Papago headman convicted of resisting the draft in 1941, believed that the Papago reservation was a part of Mexico.)⁹⁴ At the beginning of the century, processes of removing Indians from their land, only briefly suspended when the United States government removed nearly all the tribes resident in the organized territory of the United States to what it promised would be their “permanent residence” west of the Missouri River and the Great Lakes in the 1820s and 1830s, accelerated as pressures of white settlement increased. Programs of allotting lands to Indians in severalty rather than in tribal reservations, made general in the Dawes Act of 1887, were especially effective in depriving them of arable land, including nearly all on which families could subsist on tracts as large as they received.⁹⁵ The more isolated peoples of the Southwest suffered continuing and deepening poverty rather than disruptions as drastic as those of tribes on land more suitable for conventional agriculture. Although under pressure from the army, the Navajos had changed their economy drastically, abandoning nomadic ways for stock-raising, and for many years the government left them much to themselves.⁹⁶ They maintained traditional ways and loyalties more than the Sioux of the northern plains, who had had to revise their economic bases repeatedly before successive invasions of traders, miners, stockmen, and farmers,⁹⁷ only to lose over a third of a million acres of their best remaining land to dams on the Missouri River. Yet the desert land where the Indians of Arizona and New Mexico lived was at once so barely adequate for subsistence and so much the focus of their culture that what whites regarded as minor restrictions and concessions could be disastrous for them. From the 1920s the Bureau of Indian Affairs pressed Pueblos, Navajos, and their neighbors to yield rights to water and coal; although after 1933 officials professed new respect for traditional culture, they continued to propose accommodations to development that threatened the most basic resources of people already living marginally. To reduce erosion behind new dams, they forced the Navajos to reduce herds of goats that were their livelihood as well as their pride.⁹⁸ None who came later to the West lived more precariously than most Indians, and none were subjected so systematically to policies whose professed purpose was to assimilate them but that kept them marginal to white society. Whether because of their own handicaps and inclinations or because whites discounted them, in most areas Native Americans were slow to enter the general labor force. Although in parts of the Southwest, where few immigrant laborers were available, railroads and farm operators hired Indians instead, such employ-

248

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

ment tended to be local or regional.⁹⁹ Until late in the twentieth century most Indians remained on or near reservations, men leaving to work or to enter military service. After the Second World War they ranged more widely and more often stayed away permanently, as the Branch of Placement and Relocation in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1951) encouraged them to do. Less than one of nine Indians in the mountain and Pacific states lived in cities in 1950, by 1980 more than half.¹⁰⁰ When three-quarters of the Klamaths voted to withdraw from the tribe in 1958, in accordance with new policies of terminating control of tribal lands, many had already left theirs, drawing rents from stockmen-tenants.¹⁰¹ As Los Angeles had the largest Mexican population outside Mexico City, by 1970 it had the largest urban Indian population in the United States. At 49.8 percent in 1980, Indians were still far more rural than most other western Americans, including principal minorities (Japanese were 88.9 percent urban, Chinese 96.8 percent, African Americans 96.9 percent, the general population 73.7 percent),¹⁰² still more so in the plains and southwestern states, where they comprised the largest fractions of total populations. But everywhere they were moving to cities at accelerating rates, and enough of them to develop new perspectives on their Indianness as well as to transform their economic bases. Like Indians and Mexican Americans, African Americans were one of the oldest of American minorities, and originally one of the most rural. Before the 1940s they were one of the smallest in the West, peaking at 8.3 percent of the population of Oklahoma in 1910. They had increased from only 0.7 percent of far western population in 1850 to 1.7 percent in 1900, 2.0 percent in 1940.¹⁰³ “Negroes did not participate in the settlement of the West,” Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944,¹⁰⁴ apparently equating settlers with farmers while overlooking Oklahoma and Kansas (which had had nearly three-fourths of the black population of the Far West in 1900), as well as black trappers, miners, and cowboys; he foresaw demand for servants and low levels of prejudice attracting more to California. More African Americans had begun to come west when Myrdal wrote, more of them attracted by prospects for employment during the Second World War than forced out by drought and New Deal agricultural programs before it. By 1945, 15 percent of the labor force at the Kaiser shipyard at Vancouver, Washington, was black, in a state where African Americans had been 0.4 percent of population at the last census.¹⁰⁵ After the war they continued to concentrate in major urban centers, between 1940 and 1960 increasing eleven times in the six counties around San Francisco Bay, six times in all of California. By 1970, California, with more than two-thirds of the far western total (7.0 percent, up from 1.8 percent in 1940), had become blackest of the eighteen states, displacing

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

249

Fig. 8.4. African Americans in the West. New influxes of African Americans came to the West during the Second World War and the years immediately following. Some arrived as workers in war-related industries, as did the men and woman pictured above; others came as servicemen and -women; and still others as agricultural laborers. Photo courtesy the Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor. A67.137.42072.3: Dorothea Lange, American Photographer (1895–1965), Shipyard Workers, ca. 1944.

Oklahoma, which had fewer both absolutely and relatively than in 1930 (6.7 percent, down from 7.2 percent). At 1,819,282 (7.7 percent) in 1980 California had more African Americans than any southern state, nearly nine times as many as Oklahoma, more than the combined totals of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, which had contributed especially heavily to the new black westward migration.¹⁰⁶

250

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

When shipyards on the coast closed after the war, many African Americans who had come to work at them were slow to find other employment at comparable wages. Yet others kept moving west, pushed by machines that replaced tenants on southern farms, pulled by visions of opportunity in new settings. As a group they were poorly prepared for more than semiskilled employment in any field. They were handicapped as independent operators by having assimilated to the dominant culture so much that they had not developed arrangements in their own community to furnish distinctively ethnic goods and services (apart from such minor exceptions as barber and beauty shops and mortuaries) but not enough for whites to patronize many black enterprises and professionals. Further, they lacked the tradition of pooling resources within families and ethnic communities that West Indians of African origin in eastern states and many European and Asian immigrants relied on to raise capital,¹⁰⁷ and they were handicapped as employees by both their shortcomings and others’ perceptions of their shortcomings in education. African Americans continued to lag in finding more than low-paid unskilled and semiskilled employment, even after taking advantage of fuller access to systems of public education, seldom being able to make use of professional training except in elementary school teaching and nursing. Lawyers, businessmen, and others more likely to organize and lead African American communities were relatively few and increased barely as much as unskilled laborers and general population until the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁰⁸ Walter A. Gordon, first black graduate of the Boalt School of Law at the University of California (1922) and ultimately a federal judge, was assistant football coach at the university when he was a student and afterward, continuing until Governor Earl Warren appointed him to a state board in 1943.¹⁰⁹ Early in the twentieth century, when hostility to Asians on the coast was highest, the color line applied less to African Americans there than in cities of the Northeast and the older Middle West where most of them who left the South had moved. When James Weldon Johnson, the black lawyer and poet, visited San Francisco in 1905 he found no barriers in places of public entertainment, although hotels and restaurants at Salt Lake City had turned him away; residents told him “that San Francisco was the best place in the United States for a Negro.”¹¹⁰ The parents of Horace Cayton, the black sociologist, lived in a fashionable neighborhood of Seattle. But barriers rose on the coast during and after the First World War;¹¹¹ persisting after the Second World War, they became more offensive as discrimination against immigrant minorities declined. Although the California supreme court nullified an antimiscegenation law (passed 1872), similar laws remained in twelve other states into the 1950s and 1960s.¹¹²

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

251

After the war the most active ethnic discrimination in law and public policy in the coastal and mountain West was against African Americans rather than, as before, against Asians. When the California legislature outlawed racial discrimination in 1963, voters promptly adopted a constitutional amendment asserting rights of property owners to rent or sell as they chose, clearly designed to exclude African Americans from white neighborhoods.¹¹³ Whereas President Theodore Roosevelt intervened with the San Francisco school board in 1907 when it segregated Japanese children, and Mexican Americans brought suits against school boards in Orange and San Diego counties that led the California supreme court to outlaw segregation in 1946, in the 1960s and 1970s, what segregation in public policy survived applied to black neighborhoods almost exclusively. When a California judge found (1970) that the Los Angeles school board had illegally segregated black students, the school board delayed complying with the decision for eight years. Resentment against such practices contributed to riots in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992 and to the growth of the Black Panthers, fueled by extravagant rhetoric directed against white policemen, who symbolized official discrimination. As ethnic communities variously isolated their members from the world outside and prepared them for it, other communities also did: communities of belief, of employment, even of recreation. Some coincided and overlapped strikingly, perhaps more in the West than in older sections, as when sheepherders tended to be Basques, strawberry growers Japanese, sugar beet growers (at least in the mountain states) Russian Germans, teamsters Irishmen, although even most Basques, Japanese, Germans, and Irishmen had other vocations. The social identifications of churches varied widely, whether as mediators in acculturation or as bulwarks against it, adjuncts of separate communities. They never were as visible over the West as a whole as they had been when Franciscan missionaries represented Spain in California, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational missionaries the United States in the Pacific Northwest. Church membership in most western states lagged below national averages long after westerners were no longer predominantly unmarried males.¹¹⁴ Whereas in older states, the Roman Catholic Church had more immigrant members than any other denomination, it was so weak in those parts of the Southwest settled during Spanish and Mexican control that in the 1850s and 1860s it had to make new beginnings. Although it grew rapidly with Irish, Italian, and Portuguese immigration, as at San Francisco and in neighboring parts of California, it lagged in reaching Mexican Americans in areas where they were most numerous and increased most rapidly, even in recruiting Hispanic clergy.¹¹⁵ Some problems of churches reflected distinctive circumstances of western

252

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

society. In areas with floating populations, according to a Protestant minister in eastern Oregon, people who had been active in their former homes were slow to assume responsibility.¹¹⁶ “The fact is that out in the Rockies and on the frontier the church is the last thing started,” a Congregational missionary observed in 1912: “saloons and other places” had priority.¹¹⁷ And although the sinful lusts of the flesh threatened religion most visibly in frontier towns, churches were weakest and church membership was lowest in rural areas. Nearly seven-eighths of the rural inhabitants of an Oregon county in 1915 belonged to no church,¹¹⁸ fifteen-sixteenths of those of a Wyoming county a few years later.¹¹⁹ Often sustained only by missionary programs, country churches fared marginally in good times as well as bad. When land values rose in South Dakota, a Congregational official reported in 1904, many substantial members sold their farms and moved away, leaving their churches leaderless.¹²⁰ Yet churches were centers of many westerners’ lives in both rural and urban areas, especially but not exclusively where they symbolized ethnic tradition and were its principal vehicle. The “loneliness of an alien wilderness is likely to call forth whatever there is of religion in man,” Ole Rölvaag wrote in 1929, reflecting on the experiences of Norwegian pioneers.¹²¹ Even transients of mining camps and cattle towns whose circumstances were generally unpromising for the observance of religion—more unattached young males than families, more saloons and houses of prostitution than churches—welcomed missionaries and formed active congregations. When Robert S. Lynd as a young seminary student spent the summer of 1921 as a home missionary in the oil boom country of the Wolf Basin in Montana, he met an unexpected response: “In the precarious catchas-catch-can of this rough life,” he wrote, the minister “represents much of the enduring element in their lives which these people left behind when they drifted West.”¹²² The minority of far western states (five of sixteen) where church membership consistently ran above the national average was unusual not only in that respect but in that membership was especially high in the rural counties: in order of declining rates of membership, about 1952, Utah, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, (Texas), and Nebraska.¹²³ They were also states where individual denominations dominated large areas, as probably nowhere else except rural Louisiana and northern New England, and in some instances from the earliest settlements. Much of the rural Southwest remained Roman Catholic from Spanish and Mexican times, although in the first years of the American occupation, as under Mexico, many parishes were vacant even while counts of membership ran high. Mexican American families were more regular in bringing their babies for baptism, and so in entering them on parish rolls, than in attending mass and

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

253

confession. The soldiers and ranchers who were the ancestors of many of them had been on poor terms with the only clergy within reach in colonial times, the missionaries of the Spanish frontier outposts, whose purposes and interests conflicted with theirs. The western counties of the Dakotas and Nebraska had filled up heavily with Scandinavian and German religious colonies, many of whose pastors led them as they emigrated from Europe. Russian German Pietists and Roman Catholics sought areas where they could live near relatives and other fellow communicants. As their numbers increased, German Mennonites and Hutterites pushed on again to get more land and to escape the pressures of secularization. Unhappy over the heterodoxy of their neighbors, a group of conservative Mennonites not only moved from Nebraska to southwestern Kansas in 1906–8 but moved their church building with them.¹²⁴ Of the eighteen Hutterite colonies founded in South Dakota between 1874 and 1913, only one remained by 1934 after a wave of migrations to Manitoba and Alberta, mainly in 1918 and 1919; but then the tide turned, the total rising to twenty-four by 1965.¹²⁵ The church that grew most strikingly in the nineteenth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, grew still more in the twentieth, increasing more than twice as fast as the population of Utah, where the incidence of membership remained highest. Its new growth both extended and departed from lines of the old. Other denominations remained small minorities in eleven of twenty-nine counties in Utah and two in southeastern Idaho and in parts of Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming; the most traditional of the Saints continued to live within that general area. But the church no longer gathered its members literally to Zion, as it had done when caravans of them came by wagon or on foot from the Missouri River to Great Salt Lake.¹²⁶ Emigration to Utah had been the normal sequel to conversion in the early years, putting enormous strains on resources of the church as well as of emigrants; by the 1890s Mormon leaders were suggesting postponement, and by 1907 policy was that foreign members should stay in their own countries.¹²⁷ As the church did not stop growing after it renounced the gathering but rather expanded more than before, it also became no less central in the lives of its members, although the main purpose of gathering converts to Zion had been to protect them from corrupting gentile influence. Utah could not be the bulwark against Babylon that it had been before Congress, by the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887), systematically curtailed the temporal power of the church, attacked polygamy, and, while preparing to grant statehood to newer territories with smaller populations, put the territorial government of Utah into receivership.¹²⁸ But while church leaders in their policies and members in their practices conceded

254

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

Fig. 8.5. The Mormon economic West. From the mid-nineteenth century onward the economic influences of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) radiated out from its Salt Lake City headquarters to increasingly larger areas of the United States and the world. One of the notable Mormon economic institutions, which linked church and business interests, was the commercial firm of ZCMI, Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution. Photo courtesy Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. #23854.

much to gentile ways that would have been inconceivable in the time of Brigham Young, their concessions justify description as creative adjustment rather than surrender. They so easily accepted the values of conservative Republicanism that Reed Smoot—first Mormon United States senator (1903–33), banker, industrialist, and one of the Twelve Apostles—came to personify that their departures from earlier communitarian and egalitarian ways seem consequences primarily of changes within the Mormon community. With the church’s approval, control of the economy had already begun before 1887 to shift into private and gentile hands, while the church solicited investment from beyond its membership for industrial and commercial enterprises that developed on scales unknown in simpler pioneer times.¹²⁹ The religious lives of Mormons continued to be active and all-embracing expressions of the common faith even while the circumstances of secular life varied

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

255

more widely. At work and, for the most part, at school or college, they mingled in the gentile world; afterward they were busy with meetings, recreational programs of the Young Men’s and Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement associations, and other church-related activities. According to estimates of the church historians (1979), time in service of the church might range from about fourteen hours a week for adolescents to twenty to forty hours for adults.¹³⁰ Such associations and responsibilities both left little time for the devil and reinforced commitments that, having survived persecution in the first decades of the Mormons’ experience, were secure enough to permit them to serve God in different ways. The socializing effect of participating in the close community of ward and stake (groups of wards or congregations) appears in the remarkably thorough assimilation of foreigners: whereas immigrants in other western communities often drew on ancestral traditions, taking pride in their skills as Swiss cheese makers or Welsh choristers, the church discouraged its converts from establishing ethnic units, emphasizing the importance of learning English; although Scandinavian immigration into the Sanpete-Sevier region of central Utah was heavy, its folklore was Mormon rather than Scandinavian.¹³¹ Whether in Utah or in predominantly gentile states, moreover, diversity ended at the meetinghouse, which even architecturally reminded members of their common heritage. “Coming upon a Mormon meetinghouse in a strange town is like finding your favorite food franchise when you are traveling,” a member observed. “Once you’ve located the church and Colonel Sanders it’s as if you never left home.”¹³² The church flourished while renouncing not only polygamy, which no more than perhaps one Mormon household out of twenty had practiced, but also the rural setting that once had seemed essential to faith and morals and to biblical ways of life. As late as 1900 the church moved settlers from Utah and Idaho to a pastoral colony in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming in trains of covered wagons like those that had opened new agricultural frontiers in the time of Brigham Young.¹³³ Mormons continued to live by farming more than most other westerners and to cherish their ties to the land, and rural Utah remained the stronghold of membership (which was about three-fifths for the Salt Lake City metropolitan area against 73 percent for the state in 1987). But whereas the most exclusively Mormon communities were still small farm villages, soon membership increased most in cities; in 1920 four of five stakes were rural but in 1971 four of five urban. Whereas some conservative German Pietists retreated to more open spaces as the numbers of their nonconformist neighbors increased, Mormons flourished in gentile territory. (Ogden had been an exception early in the century, a railroad town where gentiles had come with the trains; but by 1950 it was nearly two-thirds Mormon.)¹³⁴ The dedication of temples at Los Angeles in

256

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

1956 and at Oakland in 1964 represented a recasting of the church’s mission to the gentiles, a new confidence in its ability to challenge the ways of Babylon in Babylon itself.¹³⁵ As when in the first years of the gathering pioneer missionaries found converts especially in parts of two continents most in flux, around the factory towns of New England and the British Midlands, the church offered the reassurance of faith and fellowship in the dislocation of metropolis.¹³⁶ In contrast, denominations generally liberal in theology and social doctrine, Congregational, Presbyterian, Protestant Episcopal, and Unitarian, grew more slowly than the general western population. The conventional wisdom was that their expectations of an educated clergy and the liturgical forms of the oldest of them were out of place in informal western society. “Our people,” the Protestant Episcopal bishop of western Nebraska wrote (1911), “seem to be less contented with life in the country and small hamlets than members of the denominations.”¹³⁷ Pentecostals differed from Mormons by most objective criteria. In general they were poorer (often moving on to other denominations as they prospered); they were far more likely to include African Americans and members of other minorities. Until late in the century they showed little interest in politics, which Mormons had taken to from the time of Joseph Smith, and they not only organized far more loosely but insisted that they had no organization. Yet their congregations offered fellowship and support and opportunity to their members and expected them both to join actively with each other and to act responsibly in all their associations, serving as bridges to the larger society while also resisting what they regarded as immoral pressures from it as staunchly as the much more structured immigrant churches, which also preached unchanging values but in time were more likely to make concessions in the means of maintaining them. Beginning at Topeka, Kansas, in 1900–1901, the Pentecostal movement had reached Los Angeles by 1906. Whereas in the Southeast it grew with economic distress in mill towns and with the culture shock that rural folk suffer on moving into cities, on the Pacific slope it gathered in the disoriented and distressed in the socially less organized parts of both urban and rural districts.¹³⁸ During and after the Depression of the 1930s, it appealed to migrant farmworkers in the Yakima Valley of Washington and the San Joaquin Valley of California, many of whom seemed hungry for psychological moorings and more comfortable in the shabby storefront meetinghouses of the Pentecostals than in the more conventional Methodist and Baptist churches they had attended in better times.¹³⁹ Like churches, communal associations varied widely in principles, membership, and cohesiveness. “Never before in America was the spirit of cooperation and communism developed as it has been in the arid West,” Ray Stannard

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

257

Baker wrote in 1902. “A man soon learns that the community interest is, after all, greater than that of the individual, and upon every important subject he submits his will to that of the community.”¹⁴⁰ Although various communal groups defined themselves as primarily religious, their appeals often varied with economic and social conditions. During the depression of the 1870s, Mormons had gone as far in some kibbutz-like cooperatives as to live in barrack apartments without kitchens, taking their meals together and, in the words of a chronicler, sharing title to “everything appraisable, from real estate to chickens, featherbeds and Ladies wardrobes,” although in practice each person was steward over his personal effects.¹⁴¹ They seemed heirs of southwestern Indians both as descendants of lost tribes of Israel, according to Mormon scripture, and as irrigators, their ditches sometimes amounting to restorations of systems that cliff dwellers had built according to other disciplines. Whether because western geographical conditions invited close association with fellow believers or because they offered cheap living and removal from skeptics and enemies, assorted gentile (including Jewish by Mormon terminology) reformers both secular and religious also staked out communitarian utopias, especially from the 1890s to the First World War, in southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies, and the interior deserts. Yet in general, cooperation lagged behind early expectations even when doctrine and the logic of physical circumstances seemed to invite it. Settlers on reclamation projects were slow to move beyond the water users’ associations that the government required them to organize. On most projects, an economist reported in 1929, establishing successful cooperative enterprises took ten to fifteen years.¹⁴² The Grange and other major farm organizations that promoted cooperation had the advantage of familiarity in establishing themselves in new settlements, and there were many communities, particularly among stable populations of small farmers, where the Grange hall was a major social center. But as the master of the National Grange observed (about 1911), in the West the Grange was not what it was in the East: “The social advantages of the Grange appeal much more to the Eastern farmer than to the Western. The Western farmer is absorbed in making money.”¹⁴³ Whatever his original inclinations, he could not easily afford other priorities in an economy whose controlling processes were both volatile and out of reach of individual farmers. An organization that concerned itself with larger economic realities tended to do so at the expense of the local activities, loyalties, and social ties that had helped to sustain the Grange in the 1870s and the farmers’ alliances in the 1880s and 1890s. Moreover, most organizations that challenged the economic system on other than religious principle

258

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

tended in some respects to accept it, at least by imitating it in scale and method and by concentrating on price. Thus the Equity Cooperative Exchange, which blamed the troubles of wheat farmers in the Dakotas, Montana, and Minnesota before the First World War on the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce and the grain merchants, railroads, bankers, and state employees who collaborated with it, concentrated on developing a countervailing system of terminal marketing. Many of its members soon moved on to support the Nonpartisan League, which looked primarily to government to maintain prices and profits.¹⁴⁴ Some western Granges emphasized cooperation less than statewide and national political action, by the 1930s along conservative lines in Kansas and liberal lines in the Pacific Northwest and northern California.¹⁴⁵ In contrast, shortly after Socialists almost elected Job Harriman mayor of Los Angeles in 1911, a group of them retreated from politics with him to an experiment in cooperative settlement in the Mojave Desert that they called Llano del Rio, where for three years they struggled to balance shortages of water and excesses of individualism.¹⁴⁶ (Reviewing the experience a decade later, Harriman observed, “We found to our surprise that there were more selfish men among the poor, in proportion to their number, than there were among the well-to-do.”)¹⁴⁷ Some cooperative organizations succeeded impressively by the tests of revenues and earnings but at the price of their original character. Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution, whose founders had intended it to serve as wholesale house for church-sponsored cooperative retailers throughout Utah, allowed gentiles to own stock from the 1890s and soon differed from gentile businesses most obviously in scale and in the Mormon symbol of the all-seeing eye and the words “Holiness to the Lord” over doorways.¹⁴⁸ Most other large churchsponsored enterprises were distinctively Mormon chiefly in that their original investors were religious as well as secular leaders and in that they conformed to the church’s plans for autonomous economic development.¹⁴⁹ Mormon cooperative communities soon gave up common ownership; virtually all had dissolved by the 1890s.¹⁵⁰ Although gentile social reformers and cultists early in the century continued to plan utopian farming communities, the principal surviving agricultural cooperatives operated much like business enterprises in other fields. As the economist Ira B. Cross noted (1911), growers’ associations in California seemed “to have been organized with but one object in mind, . . . to make money for their stockholders.”¹⁵¹ According to the president of one of them, most of their leaders were owners of fairly large farms or orchards, independent enough to have time for new commitments.¹⁵² At times westerners collaborated as laborers more than as farmers, church-

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

259

men, or cooperationists. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the years of their greatest strength, from their organization in 1905 into the First World War, looked much to western leadership and to the ideal of the “Western working stiff,” who seemed more dedicated, more class-conscious than working people in older states.¹⁵³ Even harvest hands occasionally came together despite generally unfavorable circumstances, contributing martyrs to the IWW at Wheatland in the Sacramento Valley in 1913. Employers who preferred Mexicans, Greeks, and south Slavs because they seemed more docile, less likely to ask for better terms, than laborers from western European stocks repeatedly found them joining rather than subverting unions. Mexican cantaloupe pickers struck as members of the United Workers of the Imperial Valley at the nadir of the twentieth-century labor movement in 1928,¹⁵⁴ well before César Chávez organized the United Farm Workers in the 1960s.¹⁵⁵ In Hawaii, Japanese and Filipino gang laborers on sugar plantations had reminded visitors of slaves in the antebellum South, but by the 1940s the territory had a labor movement conspicuous for discipline and political influence. Yet proletarian solidarity was precarious, always decidedly uneven, and intermittently threatened by economic and social changes beyond reach of those that they affected. It was most impressive in some of the older economic sectors aside from agriculture: in hard-rock mining, the maritime trades, and construction rather than in the service trades and the newer forms of manufacturing. For many years New Mexico, the Dakotas, and Oklahoma commonly ranked low in membership in unions, California, Washington, Oregon, and Montana high.¹⁵⁶ Until the 1970s the three coastal states were among the most highly unionized in the country, comparable in that respect to New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. San Francisco had stood out as a labor town by the 1870s; early in the century the rate of membership in unions there was perhaps three times that for nonagricultural labor nationally.¹⁵⁷ It had about two-thirds of the union membership of the state in 1901 although less than a quarter of the population.¹⁵⁸ The new western metropolis, Los Angeles, and southern California as late as the beginning of the Second World War were as staunchly nonunionist and antiunionist as San Francisco was unionist. It was no accident that when Ole Hanson, mayor of Seattle during the general strike of 1919, toured the country lecturing on the dangers of Bolshevism, he found Orange County, suburban neighbor to Los Angeles on the south, so congenial that he remained there to develop a “Spanish village” that became San Clemente.¹⁵⁹ As publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis crusaded for the open shop for more than thirty years, but distinctive social and economic circumstances in the southern counties prepared a receptive response for him: the rural, small town, and

260

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

southern backgrounds of many residents; the availability of cheap Mexican and, in early years, Indian labor; the large numbers of pensioners and health-seekers willing to work part-time without much regard for rates of pay; and low levels of employment in fields with traditions of unionization (manufacturing, shipbuilding, the maritime trades, printing). Migrant laborers, early in the century, most of them single men on the edge of subsistence, were slow to organize despite generally low wages and poor working conditions, especially in agriculture and wood products. Few worked long enough in any one place or with any one employer to feel that they had the stakes or the prospects to justify holding out for better terms. Although in some areas (particularly the mountain states, the Pacific Northwest, and northern California) they joined in revolutionary spirit in the Industrial Workers of the World, as men with families and other hostages to fortune could not easily do, effective organization tended to be sporadic in fields where terms of employment were worst. With little or no opportunity to bargain over rates of pay when hired, ordinarily they moved on when working seasons ended with no claim to charity or further employment.¹⁶⁰ Even in striking they often testified to their collective weakness, acting out of desperation when they felt that they had little to lose, then drifting apart after the crises that provoked them had passed. As an economist observed (1945), the conditions that provoked them to strike kept them from organizing successfully.¹⁶¹ The prospects of migrants varied both cyclically with the seasons and structurally with circumstances in the industries that employed them. When a sociologist who surveyed them in 1920 found that the largest single group was in the logging camp region of the Pacific Northwest,¹⁶² the wood-products industry was changing fundamentally. Investigating strikes that threatened supplies of spruce for military aircraft during the war, the United States Army had required operators to provide decent food and to clean up barrack quarters so foul that only the most marginal of itinerants would tolerate them.¹⁶³ Some operators tried to withdraw such concessions as well as to step up their attacks on the IWW and independent unions as soon as the war ended, but the highly capitalized technology on which logging and milling increasingly depended demanded corresponding skill and reliability. Bindlestiffs who drifted from one isolated logging camp to another gave way to settled employees who lived with their families in company towns or commuted to work by automobile.¹⁶⁴ Conditions that affected demand for labor and prospects for unionization in wheat farming changed still more than conditions in wood products from about the same time, during and after the First World War. Even when demand was highest, most migrants who joined the IWW did not maintain their mem-

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

261

berships. The economist Don Lescohier, who interviewed harvest hands in six states in the early 1920s, found that few of them spent much time as hired farm laborers: more than half came from cities, many attracted by the novelty of the experience of “one of the last big adventures left in American life.”¹⁶⁵ Prospects for organizing them declined precipitately as the use of combine harvesters reduced demand for labor, then practically disappeared as professional harvesters maintaining their own crews operated over areas large enough to justify using equipment that most farmers could not afford to buy.¹⁶⁶ Owners of such gargantuan machinery could not afford to turn it over to the kinds of crews that accepted substandard wages. Changes in employment were more complex in the reclamation states of the Southwest, where demand for labor greatly increased after it fell off in wheat country.¹⁶⁷ As irrigated land came under control of corporations, rather than the small family farmers for whom Congress had intended it, they concentrated on crops that demanded hand labor under conditions that in general only recent immigrants submitted to, and not all of them. Shortly before the First World War, farm labor in California was nearly half Asian (over two-fifths Japanese in 1909); during and after the Second World War it was predominantly Mexican.¹⁶⁸ By the 1960s and 1970s, when the United Farm Workers won contracts with major corporate employers (in grapes from 1966, lettuce from 1975), both unionization and the larger roles of laborers in society were developing in new directions. Farm laborers were establishing rights to bargain collectively predominantly on irrigated land, which once had seemed unlikely to require hired labor on significant scales, organized or unorganized, and in an ethnic group that employers had thought immune to such appeals. Some of the fastest-growing fields of employment in cities, where rates of unionization were still higher than on farms, had neither traditions of unionization nor circumstances conducive to it. During the Second World War union membership had increased sharply in expanding aircraft plants, but afterward the highest rates were in food processing and other older, less dynamic fields, some of the lowest in newer and more sophisticated branches of manufacturing, including those that transformed Santa Clara County in the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁶⁹ Semiconductor firms paid engineers, scientists, and highly skilled technicians well enough so that they could live more pleasantly in new suburbs recently developed on hillside orchard land, but they also employed many unskilled and semiskilled assembly-line workers at minimal wages over years when immigrant Asians, Latin Americans, and Pacific Islanders flooded labor markets. Changes in laboring populations and in the character of employment cut into the authority of organized labor even in San

262

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

Francisco, where the Irish teamsters, masons, and carpenters who had taken over its heavy work from Australians and Chinese of gold-rush days gave way in turn to Italians,¹⁷⁰ then Italians to Mexicans and African Americans, and they to eastern Asians while service trades overshadowed manufacturing. Numbers of immigrants in labor forces and labor unions, while always large, were easily exaggerated. Antiunion employers in mining country often spoke of strikers as foreign intruders; during and after the First World War, in their vocabularies the IWW became almost synonymous with German and then Russian conspiracy. The manager of a mine in Colorado in the 1890s found a list of strikebreakers “interesting because the names on it could be pronounced.”¹⁷¹ Such language sometimes expressed a sense of betrayal among employers who had imported foreigners as strikebreakers, systematically recruiting them by ethnic groups no larger than their foremen could handle so that they would be less likely to organize. Yet for many years native-born miners predominated in Colorado, Idaho, and Montana, and the foreign born were largely Britons (including Cornishmen and Welshmen), Germans, and Scandinavians, who assimilated easily.¹⁷² As a Denver journalist observed after the strike at Ludlow in 1914, it was only after operators imported alien laborers to break an earlier strike (1904) that the coal miners of Colorado ceased to be mainly Anglo-Saxon (that is, of British ancestry).¹⁷³ While welcoming immigrants among others that traditional American unions had neglected, and drawing on Europeans as they sought to put their situation and prospects in perspective, members of the IWW acted on predominantly American purposes and experience, and their early leaders were mainly native born.¹⁷⁴ In various respects the circumstances of foreigners in general made them poor prospects for unionization. Like most of the Argonauts of 1849, native born and foreign born alike, many came not as immigrants but as visitors intending to return to their birthplaces and so with little interest in movements unlikely to bring returns, in occupations that required commitments they did not want to make. Although many of these changed their minds, early in the century majorities of entire ethnic groups emigrated—nearly half of Greeks, two-thirds of Romanians and Slovaks, nine-tenths of Bulgarians, Serbians, and Montenegrans.¹⁷⁵ Many immigrants had essentially no tradition of unionism (the Chinese; the Japanese; at least until 1910, the Mexicans). Some came and worked so much within units of family or clan or contractual group as not to mingle easily with their neighbors; some of these depended on foremen and contractors who were their principal intermediaries when they came. In working at substandard wages and conditions and in suffering such constraints, the illegal immigrants of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were successors to the most visible immigrant workers

Social Attitudes: Cultural Bases

263

of the nineteenth century, the Chinese who had built the Central Pacific Railroad. Yet newcomers did not always remain quiescent. Japanese farmworkers held out for higher wages than the Chinese they replaced; Mexicans and southern and eastern Europeans sometimes became loyal unionists rather than strikebreakers. When the Western Federation of Miners tried to organize the Homestake Mine at Lead, South Dakota, in 1901, the native born deserted before the foreign born, Slavonians, Finns, and Italians holding out to the end.¹⁷⁶ At a strike at Clifton-Morenci, Arizona, in 1915–16, Mexicans rejected an offer that Anglos accepted.¹⁷⁷ An organizer for the IWW on the West Coast testified before the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914 that Japanese and Chinese workers had far better senses of organization than native Americans, as a result ultimately getting better wages and working conditions.¹⁷⁸ How much working people entered the larger society or showed that they had already entered it when they joined a union and enlisted in its causes depended on variables both under and beyond their control, including the attitudes of nonmembers and the fluctuations of the marketplace. But organizations formed around ethnic, religious, and economic principles never wholly contained their members. Mormons and Mennonites absorbed much from Babylon. The expanses of space that persuaded many immigrants that they could maintain their distinctive ways on the plains and in the desert as they had not been able to do along the Mississippi or the Volga seldom insulated them as effectively as they had expected. Increasingly they heard drummers that they had not brought with them and found themselves living by rhythms that they had not known when they came.

9

Social Relations and Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots— Agencies of Acculturation Important as many voluntary organizations were to both newcomers to the West and old residents, they seldom defined the relations of their members to each other, their neighbors, and their environment either fully over all ranges of their interests and concerns or constantly over time. Organizations based on ethnic and religious origins tended to last longer and command more loyalty than those based primarily on economic interest, especially as economies rose and fell with changes in technology and markets. But for the most part, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, through these groups people soon developed associations that linked them to other communities. Probably most potential westerners came to the new country not to live the rest of their lives in essentially new ways but rather to acquire the means of living in old ways, whether there or elsewhere, and some came explicitly to escape pressures to adopt ways that threatened their essential values. But in coming, they changed what they did and what they were. In a developing economy where competition more than habit decided who would survive and prosper many new arrivals had to learn new skills if not new trades. In a democratic polity even Russian Germans who substituted the collectivism of eastern European village communities for the individualism of separate homesteads had to vote in order to avoid military service and to keep their children out of common schools. Many immigrants knew foreign systems of cultural imperialism—Mexicans of Native American stock under Spanish and French rule, Mennonites under German and Russian—and how to resist them, but few had encountered pressures as irresistible as those of American democracy. Whether intending to maintain old ways intact or to adopt new, to stay permanently or only to pass through, both newcomers and older residents soon

264

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

265

found themselves caught up in systems of assimilation that affected nearly everyone, both foreign and native born. One of the most influential of these was the newspaper press. Taking much of its tone from itinerant printers and reporters who moved about as restlessly as prospectors for gold, western newspapers expressed frontier individualism in distinctively insistent forms. To sell their papers where circulation depended on street sales rather than subscriptions, editors in the larger and more fluid communities featured sensational versions of sensational news, developing “gee-whiz” styles both before and after William Randolph Hearst became their most conspicuous practitioner, and beyond as well as within the territories where his papers circulated. (A member of Hearst’s staff at the San Francisco Examiner allegedly said, “We run our paper so that when the reader opens it he says ‘Gee-whiz!’ An issue is a failure which doesn’t make him say that.”)¹ Their extravagant language as well as their emphases on crime and scandal sometimes made leaving town suddenly more prudent than impulsive, but it also sold papers. As a contemporary student of politics noted, yellow journalism like Hearst’s flourished in eastern and middle western cities with many immigrants as well as in the Far West,² attracting newcomers of both foreign and domestic origins. At Denver, where the population was much less foreign than at San Francisco, the Post operated much as Hearst’s papers did. When Harry H. Tammen took it over with Frederick G. Bonfils in 1895, he told the staff to offer the variety of a vaudeville show.³ The argument that journalists had to shout out loud, in effect, to make potential readers preoccupied with their own fortunes hear them, seems confirmed by the exception of Portland. The largest western city without a yellow press, it was markedly stabler and more homogeneous in population and less given to speculative extravagance than cities that Hearst entered and considered entering. The styles of its papers matched the sober collective temperament of its inhabitants. As a reporter for a national magazine said of Portland and the Portland Oregonian, “Its principal newspaper . . . does not feel the need of big headlines. Neither does the city.”⁴ Whatever their tones and techniques, western newspapers usually offered much more than printed entertainment. Having invested, in effect, in the prospects of their communities along with type, paper, and presses, their proprietors were ex officio boosters, predisposed to favor urban development. Since in new communities there were more papers than revenues from readers and advertisers alone could support, some depended heavily on marketing their ability to persuade readers how to spend their money or cast their votes. How much such strategies defined the journalism they practiced depended in large part on the purposes of their patrons. Political parties and candidates concerned with

266

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

specific elections tended to commit themselves for correspondingly limited periods. George Hearst, who had bought the San Francisco Examiner (1880) to support him in two candidacies, turned it over to his son, William Randolph, when he went to the Senate in 1887. Business firms continued longest to dedicate newspapers to maintaining congenial political climates in the mining states and Hawaii, but even there with declining concern. When the copper millionaire William Andrews Clark sought a seat in the Senate from Montana (1893, 1894, 1898–1900), he and the Amalgamated Copper Company, which backed his opponents, used newspapers as adjuncts to their campaigns, in the language of the historian of his times, wheeling them into position as armies mounted artillery.⁵ Thereafter, like railroads in all of the continental states and territories, they interested themselves in keeping their taxes low and government generally friendly to their interests more than in advancing specific candidacies. But by the time the company sold its chain of eight Montana dailies in 1959, they stood out not for influencing state politics but for ignoring it.⁶ As advocates of developing enterprise, editors and publishers were not always merely instruments of the “big men” that Lincoln Steffens featured in his accounts of state and municipal politics. Some became big men themselves, controlling politicians more than politicians and businessmen controlled them while tending their own stakes in economic development. Harrison Gray Otis promoted the transformation of southern California and adjacent parts of Mexico both as owner-publisher of the Los Angeles Times (1886–1916) and as major investor in successive projects of development. The members of real estate syndicates that he joined in 1903 and 1909 prepared for the transportation, publicity, and public subsidies that they needed to maximize their sales and profits by including also a railroad president, a politician, and the publisher of another Los Angeles newspaper.⁷ Reviewing its first seventy-five years in 1956, the Times observed, “To riffle through the files . . . now is to feel that it was the spirit of the young city.”⁸ As editor and publisher of the Anchorage Times (1935–89), Robert B. Atwood promoted both Anchorage and Alaska from when the city was no more than a village by non-Alaskan standards, advocating expanded airline service, statehood (in 1949–59 as chairman of the Alaska Statehood Commission, which also prepared for the transition), and development of petroleum resources, in which he invested at early stages.⁹ (After a state commission fined an oilfield services company, Veco International, for asking employees to make contributions to candidates friendly to its interests, Veco bought the Times [1989], announcing that it had done so to maintain a hearing for pro-oil, pro-development sentiment. Less than three years later, as circulation declined, Veco sold it to the competing daily, the News.)¹⁰

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

267

Fewer candidates in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries bought newspapers to advertise their campaigns and themselves than in the nineteenth. The mining millionaire Thomas Kearns acquired a joint interest in the Salt Lake Tribune a few months after he became senator from Utah in 1901 and shortly one in a new paper, the Telegram, but remained a silent partner.¹¹ Like Thomas M. Patterson, who retained his interest in the Rocky Mountain News after serving as United States Senator (1901–7),¹² Kearns did not run for another term. But more western editors, publishers, and reporters moved into politics, especially in the first decades. E. A. Hayes, who with his brother was proprietor and publisher of the San Jose Herald and the San Jose Mercury, served seven terms in the House of Representatives (1905–19). Others who moved from the press to public office included Gerald P. Nye, editor of the Bismarck Non-Partisan when he began his long tenure as senator from North Dakota (1925–46), succeeding Edwin F. Ladd, who had been editor of the North Dakota Farmer when he first won public office as food commissioner; Arthur Capper, who expanded his group of Kansas papers and magazines after he became governor (1915–19) and senator (1919– 49);¹³ and Capper’s successor at Topeka, Henry J. Allen (1919–23), editor and publisher of the Wichita Beacon. Joseph R. Farrington, managing editor and then president and manager of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which belonged to a family trust, was elected to six terms in Congress (1943–54).¹⁴ In Kansas, editorofficeholders in 1909 included the governor, a United States senator, three of eight United States representatives, six legislators, the superintendent of insurance, the state printer, the game warden, the secretary of the historical society, and the clerk of the Supreme Court.¹⁵ Other journalists went into politics without holding office, some of them without seeking it. Editors and publishers were principal leaders of the progressive Republicans of California who made Hiram Johnson governor of California in 1910; Chester Rowell (1867–1948) of the Fresno Republican was chairman of the Republican state central committee in 1916 and until illness took him out of the running a leading prospect for the governorship. The conservative bosses of what remained of the Republican Party in California after Rowell and his associates established the Progressive Party in 1913 were publishers in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, respectively, John D. Spreckels, Harrison Gray Otis, and Michael H. De Young; and publishers continued to be influential in state Republican affairs when Johnson and other progressives returned to the Republican Party after 1916. Earl Warren later recalled that as Republican state chairman in 1936 he had consulted Harry Chandler (Otis’s son-in-law), George Cameron (De Young’s successor at the Chronicle), and Joseph R. Knowland (publisher of the Oakland Tribune) after he served in the House of Representa-

268

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

tives).¹⁶ When as governor Warren appointed Knowland’s son William F. senator in 1945, it had long been understood, a news magazine reported, that if he became governor “Joe’s boy” would get the next vacancy.¹⁷ H. Gaylord Wilshire, the eccentric millionaire who ran for Congress as a Nationalist in 1890 (getting less than 2 percent of the vote) in a district that corresponded to southern California, published Wilshire’s Magazine (1900–1915), which for a time allegedly led the socialist press in circulation and which he used to promote both his political causes and his speculations in gold mines and Los Angeles County real estate, offering city lots and orange groves as premiums for subscriptions.¹⁸ It is clearer that journalists had advantages in politics, if only because their papers made them known in lands of strangers, than that editor-politicians greatly affected political trends. Yet two political scientists who concluded (1968) that differences in political behavior between northern and southern California were far greater than differences in demography could explain fell back on the influence of leaders and activists, noting that newspapers in the southern counties had been more conservative than newspapers around San Francisco Bay.¹⁹ As publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Otis made it, in the words of David Halberstam, “a strident extension of his prejudices and passions and ignorance,” which echoed through southern California for decades, well after his death in 1917.²⁰ The Omaha World-Herald may have significantly reinforced conservative Republican biases in Nebraska from the later years of its longtime publisher, Senator Gilbert M. Hitchcock (representative 1903–5, 1907–11, senator 1911– 23);²¹ previously in his Populist-Fusionist phase Hitchcock had helped William Jennings Bryan get Nebraska’s vote for president in 1896 by making him editor in 1894–96. Yet editors and publishers had more readers than followers. Some of the most durable and assertive of them opposed dominant political and social trends of their states and times, like Harvey W. Scott of the Portland Oregonian (1866–72 and 1877–1910), who preached conservative Republicanism and the evils of public secondary education against what became prevailing progressive tides, and Edgar W. Howe of the Atchison Daily Globe (1877–1910), atheist and misanthropic critic of small town mores.²² Such incorrigible individualists may have reflected popular tastes and general social needs more than they formulated major public policy. In a new and fluid society most people looked to newspapers primarily for information, entertainment, and reassurance of their common prospects. Selling their papers by meeting such demands in ways as various as their principles and material interests, rival editors and publishers concurred in proclaiming their confidence in the future growth of population and investment on which all sales ultimately depended. They were “builders of the commonwealth” (the title that the San

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

269

Francisco historical entrepreneur H. H. Bancroft gave to a collection of biographical sketches of leading citizens of western states and territories that he published in 1891–92) if anyone was. Although General Otis and his conservative collaborators and successors sometimes disagreed with Rowell on nearly every state and national candidate and measure, they shared his conviction that individual well-being depended on collective well-being.²³ Contrasting reports of social activities of people generally known only by name in large cities with those of “real people” in small towns, William Allen White celebrated the social contribution of the country newspaper in reinforcing the acquaintance of its readers with their neighbors. But both White and editors of the metropolitan press also practiced other varieties of what a biographer of White has called community journalism,²⁴ rendering and preaching public service by promoting causes that promised to advance the common welfare. White promoted a Young Men’s Christian Association for Emporia with the fervor that Otis put into the fight for a harbor for Los Angeles. At Girard, Kansas, Julius Augustus Wayland, editor of the socialist journal Appeal to Reason, justified carrying advertisements for local firms on the grounds that they competed with monopoly capitalists, and his staff also backed the manufacturer of an airplane that they hoped they could fly to the national Socialist Convention at Chicago in 1908, although Wayland prudently insisted on waiting until it should prove to be successful before mentioning it in print; after the Appeal ceased publication, he became president of the Girard Chamber of Commerce.²⁵ Mrs. Tom Ferguson of the Watonga Republican recalled that pioneer editors persuaded both residents and outsiders “that the new territory was well worth while, inspiring eastern capitalists with confidence and inducing them to come here and assist in the development of its vast resources.”²⁶ After about the middle of the twentieth century, when potential readers became so many as to challenge the capacity of the press to reach and inform them, western newspapers changed markedly in both character and apparent influence. Circulations of some grew with the social and economic jurisdictions of their cities. Weekly editions had continued to serve extended metropolitan demand later in the West than in the East, some of them until the Great Depression, although by then expanded Sunday editions had assumed some of their functions and improved transportation and Rural Free Delivery had taken dailies farther into hinterlands. The Denver papers sold within the range of Denver’s sovereignty over mining and cattle country, as the weekly edition of the Rocky Mountain News had done; as Spokane and Salt Lake City were the metropolitan centers of northern and southern Idaho, respectively, the Spokesman-Review and the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News were their chief newspapers; the

270

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

Fig. 9.1. William Allen White, journalist. William Allen White was a premier western and important U.S. newspaperman in the early twentieth century. As longtime editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, he wrote discerningly about national, regional, and international political, economic, and diplomatic issues that attracted a wide readership. Photo courtesy Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. B White, William A. #8.

San Francisco Chronicle served most of northern California as late as the 1940s; and the Portland Oregonian covered Oregon long after, although as a part of the Newhouse group, it lost the vigor that it had had under Harvey Scott and Palmer Hoyt (editors, respectively, 1865–72, 1877–1910, and 1939–46). The potential market seemed to grow so fast, and so many westerners were accustomed to reading out-of-town papers, bringing their devotion to the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Wall Street Journal with them from the East

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

271

and subscribing at rates matched only in the Northeast, that the Times briefly tried to float a western edition (1962–64),²⁷ as the Monitor and the Journal had done for many years. But meanwhile the Los Angeles Times commanded more respect as Otis Chandler, grandson of General Otis, expanded coverage of news and moderated editorial policy shortly after becoming publisher in 1960, and it continued to dominate home territory. In 1962 it passed the New York Times in circulation, in 1966 the Chicago Tribune; by 1978 it was issuing a San Diego edition as well as an Orange County edition (both discontinued in 1992) and had extended home delivery as far as San Francisco Bay. Yet in general, circulation grew more slowly than population. Circulation of daily newspapers on the coast and in some other parts of the West had been strikingly high early in the century, in 1920 dailies in California selling at about 53 percent above the national rate relative to population. During the Depression of the 1930s western papers lost circulation more than others; by the 1950s they were not selling so well.²⁸ They lost ground especially over years when, more than before, urban populations and activities dispersed into suburbs and divided along ethnic lines, challenging declining numbers of papers to cover more diverse and scattered interests. Even the Los Angeles Times reached relatively less of the population of Los Angeles County and neighboring counties, although as it absorbed the clientele of its rivals and more fully dominated newspaper publishing in the metropolitan area (as one of six dailies as late as 1931, one of two by 1961), it also became first in the country in total numbers of pages published and in advertising linage.²⁹ Although the publishers of the Times designed a new afternoon affiliate, the Mirror (1948–61), specifically to reach suburban interests, the circulation of all four Los Angeles papers increased by less than 2 percent during the following twelve years while the population of their marketing area increased by 60 percent.³⁰ Moreover, like papers in other areas, in general surviving papers lost authority while dominating circulation. Soon after the San Francisco Chronicle reached first place in the Bay Area in 1961, the Hearst Corporation decided to keep the Examiner solvent by moving it into the Chronicle’s printing plant and submerging its identity in a combined Sunday edition. The Chronicle had already outflanked the Examiner in the practices of yellow journalism, featuring local violence and scandal over investigative reporting of major political, economic, and social developments over and beyond the state for which it had stood out in the 1930s and 1940s, in the days of Rowell and his successor, Paul C. Smith.³¹ After its own fashion, it became as provincial as the Times had been under earlier auspices (as when the Times proclaimed in 1938 that the people of Los Angeles were less interested in what happened to Czechoslovakia than in whether Olympic Boulevard was extended), or as Tammen and Bonfils had been at the Post (“A

272

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

dog fight in a Denver street is more important than a war in Europe”).³² Perhaps the Chronicle retained more influence than most over local attitudes and even decisions, as when it fought the freeways that threatened to swallow up the city and to cut off the views of city and bay that new skyscrapers left. That influence may have owed something to its emphasis on local color, which was more definable and marketable in San Francisco than in the more diffuse territory of the Times, freeways and other environmental issues cutting across progressiveconservative spectra. But while San Franciscans knew the Chronicle’s feature writers, it was unlikely that they or the people of most other western cities knew the names of their principal editors and publishers or would elect either to office as once they had done. As newspapers receded from the foreground of western life other systems of disseminating news, opinion, entertainment, and propaganda assumed some of their methods and functions, and in such varied forms that the euphemism “media” described them even less adequately in the West than elsewhere. Television captured much advertising that previously had gone almost wholly into print, perhaps partly because it surpassed newspapers in penetrating or compromising with the new privatism of Americans and especially Americans in the more rapidly growing parts of the country who, living increasingly in automobiles and suburbs, interested themselves less both in their neighbors and in the major cities near them; circulations of western newspapers dropped especially after network television programming reached the coast in 1951. The rapid acceptance of television paralleled the earlier acceptance of the radio. Antennas and windmill generators designed to charge storage batteries had become common features of landscapes well beyond electric power lines in the 1920s; by 1930 nearly five of ten Nebraska families had radios, against four of ten nationally. Farmers soon learned to depend on broadcast bulletins of weather and prices, in some states from publicly owned transmitters,³³ politicians, salesmen, and clergymen to cultivate their clients and converts by broadcast programs. Robert P. Shuler and Aimee Semple McPherson regularly filled the churches they built in Los Angeles, allegedly largest in the country with seating for more than four and five thousand, but they reached vastly larger followings over their own radio stations. Adding to his audience at the rate of a hundred thousand persons a year shortly after he began broadcasting late in 1926, Shuler became a formidable political power, receiving over half a million votes as Prohibitionist candidate for the United States Senate in 1932. Dr. John R. Brinkley used a radio station that he established across the Mexican border in Coahuila to promote, first, allegedly rejuvenating injections and, then, his candidacy for governor of Kansas in 1930, 1932, and 1934. Book publishers traced

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

273

Fig. 9.2. Sister Aimee McPherson and the radio. Evangelist Sister Aimee McPherson pioneered in the use of the radio in the Los Angeles area in the 1920s. Her radio station KFSG (Kall Four-Square Gospel), beamed from Angelus Temple, allowed her to preach to listeners well beyond the thousands who weekly attended the church. Photo used by permission of the Heritage Department of the International Church of the Foursquare, Los Angeles.

sudden surges of demand in California in the early 1920s to broadcasts by Joseph Henry Jackson, book review editor of the San Francisco Chronicle; soon a network of radio stations carried his weekly “Bookman’s Guide” the length of the Pacific Coast; and for a generation the program continued to attract large audiences. The California public relations firm that Earl Warren engaged for his campaign for governor in 1942 relied heavily on radio; in later campaigns it used both radio and television in campaigns against Warren and for other candidates. Ultimately two of the most successful candidates for office on the coast came out of broadcasting: Thomas Lawson (Tom) McCall was a news reporter on radio and television in Portland when he defeated a well-established incumbent representative in the Republican primary in 1954, and Ronald Reagan moved from radio to motion pictures and television to corporate public relations before he challenged and defeated Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in 1966. An attorney with no experience in public office but the same name as a popular

274

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

television news broadcaster defeated a respected chief justice in Washington in 1990 without campaigning.³⁴ Despite such varied changes in form and uses, the press and its electronic rivals and offshoots followed tradition closely in some respects. While the Los Angeles Times from the 1960s directed itself to culturally more discriminating tastes, other papers essentially revamped formulae for elemental appeals that had worked before and since Hearst. In featuring local crime and scandal at the expense of less sensational news, the Chronicle both emulated television and reverted to practices of long standing in city and region. Its feature departments and much of its reporting met appetites for entertainment like those that the Hearst papers had cultivated especially successfully in the 1920s and 1930s, in assorted forms ranging from comic strips and puzzles to the lurid accounts of crime, catastrophe, and the supernatural featured in the American Weekly, largest of the supplements to Sunday editions, which Hearst had called “America’s family magazine.” In the words of a chronicler of change in American newspapers, such extensions of journalism became “a part of and an aid to the ‘new leisure.’”³⁵ Although only one general magazine reached and represented a large part of the West as Overland Monthly had done in its early years (1868–75), it did so with striking success. Sunset had begun (1898) as an advertisement for the parts of the West where the Southern Pacific Railroad operated, from Portland through California to New Orleans, promoting tourist travel and agricultural settlement in concert with the passenger, publicity, and colonization departments of the Harriman lines, travel agents, and chambers of commerce. Losing interest as it disposed of most of its agricultural land, the railroad sold it to the staff, which tried with only modest success to find a role for a general magazine (1914–28). Then a third owner, Laurence W. Lane, an Iowan who came out of advertising (as director of advertising for magazines published at Des Moines), devoted it to articles that in simple, practical, and above all graphic terms, amply illustrated, told western readers how to garden, cook, build and remodel their houses, and spend their vacations. Aiming more exclusively than metropolitan Sunday newspapers at suburban clienteles, in a few years he discouraged subscriptions from states east of Idaho, Utah, and Arizona by charging residents higher-thannormal rates and added the subtitle The Magazine of Western Living. In gardens, kitchens, and workshops that Lane built at Menlo Park, which had developed first as rustic refuge from summer fogs for San Franciscans, the staff tested directions for tossing salads, grilling salmon, laying adobe brick, and making old houses look new and new houses old, as much as anyone inventing the sybaritic way of suburban life that demanded such skills. As the editor of a national maga-

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

275

zine told a member of Lane’s staff, “This isn’t a magazine at all; it’s a kind of Western handbook.”³⁶ The new Sunset was like a handbook in format, convenient for keeping on kitchen shelves with the cookbooks and magazine-sized books that Lane issued as extensions of the magazine, and it was like a handbook rather than a conventional magazine in that after the first few years the staff wrote all articles and signed none. But its corporate personality reached and indoctrinated readers within the jurisdictions that Lane claimed for it, regional and topical, as effectively as White, Scott, Otis, and other editors and publishers who more overtly expressed their purposes and policies had done within theirs. Lane announced in his first number that he had asked readers what they were interested in; if that was how he developed his formula, he did so in the tradition of Hearst, who upon establishing the Los Angeles Examiner in 1903 found that the market for San Francisco–type progressivism was unpromising in southern California and, after a quick reappraisal of local mores, sent for Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, to “write up orange groves,” as a contemporary journalist put it.³⁷ Over the West as a whole, the press had much in common with other systems of communication and promotion. Hungry for the printed page as link with home, westerners also welcomed lively journalism as they welcomed lively theatrical and musical entertainment. Expecting local papers to support their speculations and otherwise reassure them that they had done well to invest themselves in growing communities, they organized chambers of commerce— often led by local editors—that expanded into promotional journalism on their own. Yet cultural vehicles and institutions developed more unevenly than economic means and cultural heritage might have justified. Publication itself varied widely from national norms and from the norms of the older northern states that most of the Far West (aside from Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico) resembled in literacy and educational achievement: while newspapers at least followed closely on saloons even during mining rushes, and in fact a rack of newspapers if not a newspaper reading room was as ubiquitous an adjunct to bars in mining country as a free lunch, book publishing seldom moved west, and when it did move it developed around individual personalities and family traditions more than around established channels of trade and concentrations of cultural activity. Of all H. H. Bancroft’s assorted enterprises at San Francisco, only an offshoot that concentrated on legal textbooks survived when he retired in the early 1890s; but equally idiosyncratic publishers, the Caxton Printers, Ltd., and the Arthur H. Clark Company,³⁸ continued their distinctive lists at Caldwell, Idaho, and Glendale, California, cities best known as home of a small Presbyterian col-

276

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

lege and as a quiet bedroom suburb of Los Angeles, site of a remarkable cemetery. Westerners apparently bought books about as much as other Americans but chiefly from farther away, from publishers and dealers in the East and Middle West.³⁹ They may have bought national magazines more than they bought their own daily newspapers, and at more than national rates,⁴⁰ whether because magazines reached them more satisfactorily in remote areas by rural free delivery or because magazines were more effective links with the older states they had left and looked back to. When the United States government began subsidizing education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, westerners seemed to need special encouragement and assistance to develop it. Both revenues from property taxes and inclination to spend them on schools often lagged. Most of the opponents of granting public lands for the support of higher education in 1862 were westerners, who preferred to keep them available for private use, although Congress appealed to the western bias for the practical by dedicating land-grant colleges to education in the agricultural and mechanic arts.⁴¹ In 1890 larger-than-average fractions of populations attended college only in Nevada, Oregon, and California.⁴² By the 1940s, by measures of time in classrooms and funds spent, the West as a whole had moved ahead of the rest of the country educationally. Recommending massive efforts to equalize educational opportunity in 1948, the President’s Commission on Higher Education contrasted high levels of support for education in California with low in South Carolina and Mississippi; the Far West ranked above other sections.⁴³ In the Pacific and mountain states enrollment in college had been two-fifths above the national rate at the time of the last census (1940).⁴⁴ California had over two-fifths of all students in American public junior colleges.⁴⁵ Although it had not yet adopted the master plan for higher education (1960), which called for more than tripling college enrollments in fifteen years,⁴⁶ the rate of enrollment at that level (grades thirteen and fourteen, or the first two years of a four-year college) already approached the goal that the commission set for 1960.⁴⁷ The commitment to public education that the commission noted in 1948 had been only emerging at the beginning of the century. As a group, western states were ahead of others in years of schooling completed, and some led in a few categories: Nevada and Colorado in expenditures per pupil (four-fifths above average),⁴⁸ Nebraska (tied with Iowa) in literacy.⁴⁹ A few lagged generally—Oklahoma, Arizona, and especially New Mexico, which was two-fifths illiterate; even some of the more prosperous states lagged in a few. Most were slow to develop preschool and kindergarten programs despite substantial early beginnings in

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

277

Fig. 9.3. Sacramento, California, Junior College. California pioneered in establishing a system of junior colleges. It was the first U.S. state to launch a large number of these post–high school institutions. The junior or community colleges eventually became notable ingredients of the state’s premier system of higher education. Photo courtesy California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento. Negative #CGL 464.

California,⁵⁰ especially where populations were scattered and children in rural areas started school late. Colleges and postgraduate professional schools were still later in catching up to eastern offerings and standards, although undergraduate enrollments had reached and sometimes exceeded national levels. Some of the most striking lags in the development of western systems of public education were in Pacific and mountain states where during nineteenth-century gold rushes students from Harvard and Yale had exultantly fitted themselves into stereotypes of the frontier as Argonauts making what they supposed would be brief forays into the wilderness. Kansas and Nebraska resembled educationally as well as economically and socially the rural upper Mississippi Valley states, from which most of their populations had come: with Iowa they led the country in sending children to school (nearly nine-tenths of population of school age en-

278

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

rolled around 1900) and in providing high schools as well as elementary schools. In 1900–1901 almost as many children were in public high schools in Kansas and Nebraska as in all the mountain and Pacific states and territories.⁵¹ More than the rest of the country, western states depended on private schools and on the preparatory departments of colleges for secondary education; and while many public high schools were established between 1890 and 1920, most of them were too small to offer much if any choice in curriculum.⁵² In Utah and Idaho private schools were predominantly Mormon, representing the Mormon sense of the wholeness of personal development and social experience as well as old suspicions between Saints and gentiles, in California predominantly Roman Catholic. But even there and still more in Oregon and Washington, where both Mormons and Roman Catholics were few, academies, including some associated with Protestant denominations, persisted long after primary and elementary schools passed from clerical control.⁵³ In Oregon, where Harvey Scott as editor of the Portland Oregonian had vigorously opposed public support of secondary education, academies enrolled more students than public high schools into the 1890s.⁵⁴ While Oklahoma stood out by beginning to desegregate entire school systems under court order only in the 1950s and 1960s, the Pacific and mountain states also were slow to recognize educational needs outside dominant ethnic and cultural groups. San Francisco, largest of western cities before the First World War and long the most cosmopolitan, with almost as high a ratio of foreign-born to native children in public schools as Boston and Chicago in 1910 (about one to two), maintained separate schools in Chinatown that the Chinese American community was reluctant to give up in more egalitarian times. Although California under progressive leadership otherwise gave unusual attention to the social and economic needs of immigrants and migrants, the first school for the children of migratory laborers opened (at Saticoy, in Ventura County) only in 1921; for many years most of the Mexican American children who attended it and other schools until age sixteen, as state law required, dropped out then,⁵⁵ and many attended, at best, only intermittently as their families followed the harvests, while independent districts made little attempt to coordinate what they got in successions of schools. The Office of Indian Affairs, in contrast, rigorously enforced uniform standards in its schools without regard for differences in cultural traditions and environments among Indians and between Indians and whites into the 1930s, when Congress authorized Indians to organize for local self-government and promised to support studying Indian culture (1934); in the view of Commissioner W. S. Jones, who had ordered school authorities to sup-

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

279

press Native dances and feasts (1902), such activities were “subterfuges to cover degrading acts and to disguise immoral purposes.”⁵⁶ Public higher education developed somewhat like public secondary education in that the farming states of the plains established their universities soon after or even before statehood, whereas California, first and most populous and prosperous of far western states, waited eighteen years (to 1868).⁵⁷ Kansas and Nebraska together had fewer inhabitants when they established theirs about the same time. Especially on the coast, some private institutions, most of them church sponsored, tried to assume roles of public institutions in the Mississippi Valley: thus Willamette University (Methodist), which had grown out of mission schools founded in 1834 and 1842 and on that basis called itself the oldest institution of higher learning west of the Missouri River, had a medical school before any with public support in the Far West and also a law school; and in the absence of state-supported colleges south of San Jose, the University of Southern California (then also Methodist, 1880) maintained extension centers and colleges of agriculture and medicine.⁵⁸ But hope and form often outran reality at both private and public colleges, most of which had concentrated on secondary and normal-school programs in the nineteenth century for lack of students prepared to do college work. None of the first students at the University of Kansas (founded 1864) had qualified for the collegiate department, and in 1901 students in preparatory departments exceeded those in collegiate departments at all western public universities but those of California, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, with only the universities of California, Kansas, and Oregon having no preparatory departments.⁵⁹ The oldest of far western public universities, the University of Utah (founded in 1850 as the University of Deseret and renamed in 1902), had closed when less than two years old, for lack of students, and then suspended college offerings entirely soon after it reopened; in 1901, like most western colleges and universities, it was still essentially a normal school insofar as it was more than a secondary or preparatory school.⁶⁰ The College of Law at Willamette University (1883), oldest law school in the Pacific Northwest, had three students in each of two classes in its first years; classes met at night, since both faculty and students were otherwise employed.⁶¹ State governments made no attempt to give common meaning to degrees and programs beyond those at colleges that they supported as in western Canada, where as early as 1877 provincial authorities had established the principle of a single degree-granting university for a province, which might coordinate operations of denominational and other private colleges.⁶²

280

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

Public colleges tended to appear earliest in states most of whose inhabitants proposed to stay there and especially to live as family farmers rather than as miners, but there and elsewhere they were as slow to command general support as they were to become the kinds of institutions that their names suggested they were, whether because as farmers new settlers only gradually extended their loyalties beyond their immediate neighborhoods and came to feel that their children might need more than elementary schooling, or because as natives of other states they thought of advanced and especially higher education as something to get “back east.” When promoters of pioneer town sites lobbied for favors of new state governments, they usually prized other institutions above colleges, after state capitals. A common quip in such competitions was that the winner got the state penitentiary, which usually had both a larger payroll than the state university and standards of admission that more citizens were likely to meet. Educators hoped for local support in recognition of the trade that colleges brought (Bethany College was “worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to our township,” a Kansas clergyman had said),⁶³ but such support seldom exceeded donation of a site and references to the value of college buildings in promotional literature as evidence of permanence and progress. The University of Oregon, founded seventeen years after statehood (1876), received less from the people of Eugene than from Henry Villard, financier of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who donated the nucleus of the university library as well as one of the first two buildings.⁶⁴ Local loyalties sometimes worked as much against as for an institution that needed general support when small communities rallied against it as a threat to independent colleges and to county normal schools. Thus residents of outlying counties of Oregon almost closed the university by voting against its appropriation by referendum in 1908, when no state university got less from state funds.⁶⁵ While substantial public support for public colleges did not always await evidence of returns from them, even the returns of athletic entertainment, until well into the century, few colleges could claim that they had done much for their communities or states by preparing students for gainful employment in them or by advancing applied research. Slow as western states were to establish land-grant colleges after Congress provided funds for them in 1862, colleges were slower still to develop substantial programs of agricultural education and enrollments in them; even in farming states, students preferred the standard literary, classical, and scientific curricula, as in high schools they preferred traditional college preparatory courses.⁶⁶ (The literary critic Burton Rascoe recalled how as a schoolboy at Shawnee, Oklahoma, where his family moved in 1903, he had expected to find conditions as he had seen them represented in Wild West

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

281

shows but instead fell under the influence of local newspapermen who recited Virgil, Horace, Catullus, and Homer; preparing to attend the University of Chicago, he planned to study French, German, Greek, and Latin.)⁶⁷ Professional training lagged well beyond fields of study of the land-grant colleges. Early in the century most western lawyers had prepared informally for the bar, and most of those with law degrees had taken them in the Middle West or East. Nor could that situation change rapidly: in 1901 only six states had law schools, and no state trained enough lawyers for its own needs.⁶⁸ As western colleges did not train their states’ lawyers, they also did not train their teachers: over the first third of the century in most states schoolteachers still had normal-school training or less, rather than college or university educations, and many of them also were immigrants. In California, private rather than public colleges had pioneered in technical and vocational training: in addition to the University of Southern California, the Throop Institute (1891, later California Institute of Technology), and the Leland Stanford Junior University (1891), whose founders had intended it to emphasize woodwork and mechanics. In deference to their wishes Stanford long retained a technical emphasis and was slow to develop studies in the humanities, although while Mrs. Stanford survived it offered an appointment in philosophy to William James. (As a visitor James spoke of the university as “Utopian” but added, “The drawback is, of course, the great surrounding human vacuum—the historic silence fairly rings in your ears when you listen—and the social insipidity.”)⁶⁹ Another visitor had remarked that Stanford seemed “rather a school of technology than a true university.”⁷⁰ A few energetic agricultural scientists at land-grant colleges had made contacts with farmers, particularly in high plains states, from the 1890s, but public colleges more broadly identified themselves with the economic interests of their states after the United States government began financing agricultural extension programs at them in 1914. Soon thereafter, from the 1920s, normal schools, which originally had offered little more than short courses in pedagogy for grade-school graduates, began transforming themselves into teachers’ colleges or colleges of education and then state colleges. Some students used them for essentially extensions of preparatory programs, remaining only two or three years before transferring to larger or more prestigious institutions. But once their names no longer implied that they were limited to teacher-training programs, they developed more diversified offerings and larger enrollments, after the Second World War some of them becoming the largest institutions in their states. In California, where students charged that the University at Berkeley had become an impersonally large “multiversity” by serving the interests of business

282

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

and government, by 1970 the largest enrollment was at California State University, Long Beach, formerly Long Beach State Teachers College. The landgrant colleges also changed much beyond their original functions, most of them developing full-fledged major curricula across the academic spectrum, although enrollments in agriculture increased as the technological and managerial requirements of agricultural occupations became more complex even while numbers of farmers declined. By 1970–71 Arizona State University and Oklahoma State University were larger than the University of Arizona and the University of Oklahoma, by the next year Montana State University larger than the University of Montana. The most striking transformations in curricula, size, and relation to community, however, were those at the locally controlled institutions first called “junior” and later “community” colleges, which from their origins developed to meet demands that other institutions did not satisfy. In their early years, from the establishment of the earliest at Fresno in 1910 into the 1930s, they proposed primarily to enable students to satisfy the requirements of the first two years of college without having to travel farther than to attend high school, and high school districts operated the first of them, often in high school buildings and with teachers recruited from high school faculties. Although in admitting high school graduates and adults beyond normal high school age they resembled vocational schools, continuation high schools, and night schools, they tried to match the offerings of colleges that their students wished to enter after completing two-year preparatory programs, taking names of courses from their catalogues and using the same textbooks. The University of California not only permitted students to satisfy some requirements in high school but for several years (1921–26) affiliated itself with junior colleges, which served essentially as extension centers for it; Stanford University planned to rely on them to the extent of reducing the size of what it and other western universities called the lower division.⁷¹ The Depression of the 1930s stopped talk of abandoning elementary or undergraduate instruction at universities but not the growth of junior colleges as the low costs of attending them made them more interesting. Moreover, they developed programs for students other than the high school graduates who planned to move on (“transfer”) to four-year colleges. Most of their offerings and most of their enrollments were in standard academic curricula, with courses often carrying titles, descriptions, and even numbers identical to those listed in catalogues of traditional institutions. But thereafter their enrollments grew fastest to the extent that they offered instruction like that previously available at vocational and business schools and extension, continuation, and recreation centers and

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

283

through Chautauqua and lyceum organizations rather than at more conventional colleges, public and private. By the 1960s most institutions that had begun as junior colleges called themselves “community” or “city” colleges, not merely because they no longer confined themselves to replicating introductory offerings of four-year colleges but also because they distinctively depended on their neighborhoods for enrollment and cues to the types of offerings they should emphasize. Although founders of most early western colleges hoped for local support (excepting only a few religious retreats), like founders of colleges in older states they preferred to locate them at safe distances from the distractions of urban life. Only Utah, Washington, and New Mexico had established their first public colleges in what became their largest cities (and when Salt Lake City was safely Mormon and both Seattle and Albuquerque were still small towns) and so within reach of substantial potential clienteles with distinctive needs and interests. Legislators grumbled at how limited offerings in agriculture at land-grant colleges and state universities were and how few students enrolled in them,⁷² but most students preferred academically more orthodox curricula. Railroads, stockgrowers’ associations, and associations of bankers and other businessmen often preceded colleges and offices of agricultural extension in promoting economic development and introducing improved technology. In deferring to local concerns, junior or community colleges deviated from general tendencies in western and American society to merge into larger units. Through at least the first quarter of the century, in much of the West getting an education had meant going progressively greater distances from home as consolidated school districts absorbed rural one-room schools and more students went on to high school and college. As late as 1921 California, most populous of western states, had only one public four-year college. Moreover, as late as the 1940s over half the college students from four western states and the territories of Alaska and Hawaii and over a fourth of those from three other states went out of state, while still larger fractions went away for advanced and professional work.⁷³ Into the 1960s the coastal states still accorded Alaskans and Hawaiians the privileges of residents, although they had their own universities. But by then enrollments were larger in junior or community colleges than in four-year colleges and universities. In California as a group they had had more students than the state university by 1929–30;⁷⁴ by 1976–77 one of them (Long Beach) had the largest enrollment at any level on a single site in California, although it was one of twenty public junior colleges in Los Angeles County alone. The new terms, “community college” and “city college,” fitted them not only

284

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

in that nearly all their students commuted from home, local boards controlled them, and at least part of their income came from local taxes but also in that their leaders shaped them so as to maximize local support and usually commanded it. They were more secure financially than both private and other public colleges were, suffering less from feelings against student protesters in the 1960s and 1970s and against taxes and tax-supported agencies and programs in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, even though usually they were more rather than less expensive for taxpayers than state universities were. In being close to their communities, the two-year colleges succeeded in some respects to the grade schools of earlier times and to the larger consolidated schools that reformers had sold to rural communities as means of checking the drift of population from country to city.⁷⁵ Early grade schools had served significantly to integrate communities in more ways than in educating their children in the common culture. They brought scattered populations together to tax themselves and to divide community service (as in deciding how to supplement teachers’ pay with room and board), and school buildings served as meeting places and social centers. But most rural schoolteachers served too briefly to develop significant ties in their districts. Public school personnel in cities tended to remain longer both in them and in the profession, less often regarding teaching as interval between school (in rural areas early in the century commonly no more than grade school or normal school) and marriage or advanced study. When leaders of professionally oriented school systems spoke of civic responsibility, they meant responsibility primarily to assimilate populations of diverse origins to generally accepted American ways, not to take educational doctrine from voters or parents.⁷⁶ In contrast, junior colleges as a group increasingly took their cues from local demand for other kinds of instruction. In so doing they developed new bases of support in their communities as well as new clienteles. “If you want to hear a storm of protest,” the superintendent of a California junior college district said in 1928, “suggest to the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotarians, and the Kiwanians that the junior college now in the community should be abandoned. These men know its value, they know it to be a magnet which draws to their locality people that are worth drawing, and who will help to add to its material prosperity and its spiritual wealth.”⁷⁷ But those who knew its value came to number more than the members of chambers of commerce and service clubs, who often dominated college governing boards.⁷⁸ Concentrations of students and their parents in the vicinity soon became far more numerous than for any four-year college; and moreover, more students prepared themselves to work in the community or simply to live more pleasantly in it rather than to transfer to distant universities.

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

285

Originally justifying their budgets to taxpayers as a means of saving expenses for children who otherwise would leave home for their education, administrators learned how to foresee and create demand among people who otherwise would not have thought of attending college; some had not only attracted new clienteles to their campuses by taking their curricular cues more from parks, playgrounds, and YMCAs than from universities, but also scheduled courses at retirement homes, resorts, and jails, in the words of an Arizona official “delivering education to the people wherever they are throughout the state.”⁷⁹ The junior college, a California educator said (1959), “opens its doors and its resources to all in a friendly and informal fashion without thought of credits or degrees or anything more than to assist the burgeoning of understanding in the individual as a member of a personal, physical, political, economic, artistic and spiritual world.”⁸⁰ Two-year colleges did not serve all areas and all residents of their districts uniformly: paradoxically, although they tended to enroll more students from economically lower strata of populations than four-year colleges, as they grew they tended also to move from central locations to more spacious quarters in suburbs, becoming less accessible to the urban poor than the vocational schools or sections of high schools that they absorbed. By the 1970s most large metropolitan areas had substantially more students in community colleges than in public four-year colleges and universities (in Los Angeles County, approaching three times as many), but white suburbanites were more likely to live near them than minority residents of central cities.⁸¹ In so serving new outlying residential developments they efficiently reflected the shape of western urban society, strung along the freeways that defined much of it; but they had become so prominent a part of it that, like the political system, they became targets for protest from members of groups that felt insufficiently represented in them and under pressure to redefine their responsibilities further.⁸² In protesting, the groups that were most critical, particularly Mexican Americans and African Americans, testified to changes both in themselves and in other parts of western society, including educational systems: regardless of how effective the colleges were as agents of cultural assimilation, by asking for fuller access to them, critics showed that somehow they had already been considerably assimilated, at least in purpose and expectation. In cultivating public support, junior colleges had the advantage of staffs that were probably as stable and as much committed to their communities as those at any other level of western education. Teachers in most rural and small town public schools early in the century had been new both to their schools and to teaching. In 1900–1920, 70 to 90 percent of rural teachers in Oregon were new

286

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

in their districts. Turnover declined as teaching became professionalized and as salaries increased beyond the range sufficient to attract graduates of elementary schools who expected soon to marry or to save enough money to attend college, but it continued to be high in rural areas and states, approaching half in Wyoming in 1925, where it was highest in the country.⁸³ The average rural teacher in Nebraska in 1914–15 hoped to move to a school in town but remained in the teaching profession less than two years.⁸⁴ Most teachers in small schools in territorial Arizona came from outside the territory, and few taught a second year in the same school.⁸⁵ Once junior or community colleges were more than adjuncts to high schools, turnover of full-time teachers was low; they tended to stay on the job and to develop associations more locally and less regionally or nationally within their academic disciplines than teachers in four-year colleges and universities.⁸⁶ They contrasted still more with the lecturers at Chautauqua encampments who in a sense had been their predecessors in the field of adult education over much of the rural West through the 1920s, and who, moving on regional or national circuits, seldom had significant local ties. There may have been less community within the established junior college of the 1960s and 1970s than within its predecessors of the 1920s in that a small body of students of about the same age attending essentially the same classes gave way to large numbers with widely varying purposes, ranging from those who seemed too young to go away to college to those who seemed too old, with many attending classes only at night or one or two days a week. Sometimes retaining few of the old specifications of a college other than the name (“Is the institution to achieve identity as a non-college college?” asked a Californian.)⁸⁷ and making almost any need or interest negotiable in the currency of academic credit, they developed focus in their communities that they had not had when they tried to meet, above all else, expectations established at more conventional colleges out of town. Even physically, the new college was visible locally as the old had not been, often occupying the most handsome aggregation of public buildings in the vicinity; and diverse though its educational missions had become, they were missions designed locally rather than by colleges out of town that their children hoped to qualify for. Catering to local desires and needs and otherwise taking on institutional citizenship in their communities more than most other educational institutions, community colleges increasingly accepted and even celebrated local and regional settings and traditions. The curricula of early western high schools and colleges had followed models in the older states as far as possible, and in choosing curricula their students were predominantly traditionalist as well.⁸⁸ While enthusiasm for the kindergarten and for observing nature on guided walks late

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

287

in the nineteenth century may suggest pedagogical devolution, educational reformers commonly emphasized uniformity in certifying teachers, adopting textbooks, and prescribing curricula and standards of performance and achievement.⁸⁹ As long as most of their students prepared to transfer elsewhere, the early junior colleges, like contemporary high schools, confined themselves to common academic currency of surveys of European, British, and American history; literature; and institutions. Few schools or colleges acknowledged their surroundings before the 1920s and 1930s to the extent of offering courses in local or regional history, or in foreign languages with local associations (in the Southwest, Spanish as well as Latin, Greek, German, and perhaps French).⁹⁰ But as they developed new local clienteles, community colleges more often recognized local and regional interests and traditions. Both some community colleges and some four-year public colleges with essentially local or regional constituencies also developed programs of college credit for work done off campus (sometimes listed as “practicum”), especially for participation in community activities and temporary duty without pay (“internships”) with business firms and government agencies. By so redefining their missions, colleges attracted more students and made themselves better known to citizens who might affect their budgets; they also helped their students to feel fuller citizenship, to know their communities and states better. In deferring to local concerns in their curricula, educators paralleled changes in attitude that were under way beyond their immediate clienteles. Slow to regard themselves as settlers or residents rather than as transients, sojourners temporarily removed from their old homes in other states or countries, many newcomers had been slow also to accept their neighbors and their surroundings even when they recognized that they probably would not go back to those that they had left behind. Those of them who accepted their own westernness and the West as residence did not necessarily accept each other: when pioneers in mining states gave up hope that they would find the riches they had come for, they became more rather than less hostile toward the Chinese (and later the Japanese), who seemed more dangerous to them as competitors in the labor force at large than they had within the mines, where on more limited ground it had been simpler to exclude them or run them out of town. Although Californians of the first four or five decades after the Mexican War, into the 1880s and 1890s, had fewer specific complaints against Spanish speakers as controversies over mining claims and title to land declined, they also were less disposed to recognize Spanish culture and tradition. In southern California, most of which was still a Mexican backwash when the first major influx of newcomers began to arrive on newly built railroads in the 1880s, real estate agents

288

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

not only refrained from capitalizing on local color but tried to pass over it, steering prospective buyers away from Mexican neighborhoods. Unfortunately, according to a correspondent of the New York Tribune during the real estate boom of the 1880s, driving from the railroad station to the center of Los Angeles took newcomers through remains of the old Spanish settlement, where they might get “glimpses . . . of . . . Mexican domestic life which are not attractive.”⁹¹ As development proceeded, soon little was left to hide. “We used to have a ‘plaza’ in our town,” a Fresnoan recalled. “Now we have a courthouse park.”⁹² From having been the most Hispanic of California cities, Los Angeles became the most conspicuously midwestern—the chemically pure city, a reporter called it.⁹³ “In a short generation,” another observed of the southern Californians, “they have wiped out a Homeric society of Latins and Indians and replaced it with a Gopher Prairie de luxe.”⁹⁴ Others began trying to maintain and recover elements of prior cultures while they were still under siege, at first selectively and sometimes at arm’s length. The architects that Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford engaged to plan the university they built south of San Francisco in 1886–91 drew on Spanish motifs as well as local materials, puzzling neighbors who were accustomed to classical and Beaux-Arts styles. They “were Boston men,” noted the editor of Overland Monthly, who doubted that the buildings they designed would be comfortable, convenient, or striking in appearance, “and the Mexican type of building has never been as well-loved by American settlers in California as Eastern artists think it should be.”⁹⁵ David Starr Jordan, first president of the new university, gave the names of Spanish missionaries, explorers, and officials to streets on the campus.⁹⁶ But far from considering that Spanish-speaking Californians as well as Spanish place-names might appear on the campus, Jordan himself apparently regarded them with aversion as both backward and potentially criminal.⁹⁷ Yet other newly arrived westerners were already beginning to cherish surviving remnants of Indian and Mexican culture and tradition. Charles F. Lummis, a young New Englander who became city editor of the Los Angeles Times when he went west in 1884–85, soon began appealing to southern Californians to preserve their heritage. Dedicating a magazine that he edited to the cause, he exhorted them especially to preserve and restore the Franciscan missions, which generations of both Mexican and Anglo-American settlers had pillaged and neglected.⁹⁸ By the time Lummis died in 1928, the aura of the past had become so fashionable that developers had turned from concealing and destroying to recreating it, transforming Olvera Street, conveniently near the site of a new railroad station, into a picturesque Mexican marketplace.⁹⁹ Indians and their heritage became acceptable later than Spaniards and theirs.

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

289

Early in the century it was a rare and eccentric Anglo who interested himself in surviving Indians beyond trying to get them off what was left of their land. Southern Californians cherished associations with the story of Ramona, the sentimental novel that Helen Hunt Jackson wrote to dramatize injustices to California Indians, but in early Ramona pageants the heroic characters were Spanish. If Mrs. Jackson had lived, she might have felt like Upton Sinclair, who when Americans read The Jungle as exposé of unhealthful meat products rather than of packers who exploited their employees said that he had aimed at America’s heart and hit it in the stomach. Even in New Mexico and Arizona, where Anglo-American immigration was slower to submerge Indian populations than in California, outsiders and newcomers recognized the Native heritage before local elites—first anthropologists, then artists and writers, then the Santa Fe Railroad, which built stations after Pueblo designs from about 1901. The Santa Fe made architectural history by drawing on Indian motifs for a hotel at Grand Canyon, El Tovar, in 1903, when neither living Indians nor the cliff dwellings of their ancestors had attracted many of its passengers. It began advertising Indian Detours through pueblos of New Mexico in 1925.¹⁰⁰ Ernest L. Blumenschein, one of the founders of the art colony at Taos, later recalled how few Americans knew the area when he stopped there by accident in 1898: “No artist had ever recorded the superb New Mexico I was now seeing. No writer had, to my knowledge, ever written down the smell of the sage-brush air.” Soon artists and writers came and stayed in force.¹⁰¹ About the same time and still more from the 1920s, resident southwesterners joined the managers of the Santa Fe Railroad and other outsiders in incorporating Spanish, Mexican, and occasionally Indian themes in architecture. The first exposition whose sponsors even pretended to concede much to local traditions was the Panama-California Exposition of 1915–17 at San Diego, where the most conspicuous buildings were fantasies in Spanish baroque unlike anything on the Mexican frontier.¹⁰² Like the Columbian Exposition at Chicago (1893), earlier western fairs and expositions had featured more conventional European styles of architecture: the Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair (1905) at Portland, Spanish renaissance (apart from the Forestry Building, a massive structure of logs); the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909) at Seattle, French renaissance, the architect in charge dismissing a proposal of Russian designs;¹⁰³ both the Midwinter Fair (1894) and the PanamaPacific Exposition (1915) at San Francisco, classical. Critics of a president of the University of New Mexico ridiculed him for having buildings at the university and a territorial fair (1909) designed after Pueblo and colonial models. But eighteen years later the regents of the university adopted the Pueblo style

290

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

Fig. 9.4. Pueblo architecture of the Southwest. In the early twentieth century, westerners attempted to recapture the regional past of the West through expositions, festivals, and architectural forms. The Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, designed by architect John Gaw Meem, illustrates well the popular Pueblo style of the Southwest. Photo courtesy University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, Coll #000-003-0079, LADD Collection, Zimmerman Library, Albuquerque, ca. 1942.

for future construction.¹⁰⁴ The New Mexico state capitol represented the transition: Roman in its first form (1912) with columns and dome, after the First World War it acquired a stucco veneer and a square bell tower in southwestern territorial style; a new building in 1967 was like an enormous Hopi kiva.¹⁰⁵ Meanwhile the Adobe Palace (“Palace of the Governors”), which territorial officials had plastered with mortar scored to simulate blocks of granite, acquired a new veneer in “early Spanish” style that an archaeologist called “a masterpiece of picture-postcard unauthenticity.”¹⁰⁶ Architects and developers in California, Arizona, and New Mexico lavished facades of stucco and tile over framed construction for both public and private uses from the 1920s, from school buildings and libraries to residences; the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads rebuilt stations in mission style, with arcades, balconies, and belfries.¹⁰⁷ In Albuquerque, a New Mexican wrote (1926), “People who used to build adobe houses and paint

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

291

them to look like brick are now building stucco houses to look like adobe.”¹⁰⁸ After the earthquake that destroyed much of Santa Barbara in 1925, local artists persuaded the city to set up an architectural board of review to enforce SpanishCalifornian designs, in what a reporter called a war on ugliness.¹⁰⁹ Whether the new styles authentically represented regional traditions was at least questionable. The term “mission style” applied broadly to hotels and railroad stations with stucco veneer and tile roofs, a California architect wrote (1911), while real missions were “left to crumble into shapeless rubbish heaps or to the destructive alterations of unthinking repairers.”¹¹⁰ In the furniture trade, “mission” meant the angular oak chairs and tables of the New Yorker Gustav Stickley and his imitators, although Stickley protested that the indigenous style that he sought had nothing to do with Spanish missions.¹¹¹ A Los Angeles department store featured a style that it called “Monterey” with a burro stamped into the leather backs of chairs.¹¹² The great vogue of styles called Spanish in domestic architecture in the Southwest spread from Florida, where the Mizner brothers had introduced it at Palm Beach in 1918.¹¹³ Los Angeles became an architectural kaleidoscope, a landscape architect complained (1928), of departures not only from Spanish missions but from Italian villas, Swiss chalets, and colonial farmhouses with formal French landscaping and miniature Japanese gardens as well as groves of palm and orange trees,¹¹⁴ though by the 1930s the tile-roofed ranch house dominated new tract developments. In general, variants in architecture and design only loosely reflected the ethnic traditions of householders outside the older Indian and Mexican American villages of the Southwest. Mexican neighborhoods in urban areas often were the least Hispanic, in their first stages because most immigrants could afford only the cheapest housing, in the next generation because those who made good showed it by breaking with tradition. “A kid who came up from the barrio would never build his house out of adobe,” a brickmaker at Albuquerque said (1983), “because that’s what his parents did, that’s what poor people did.”¹¹⁵ The flowering of so-called Indian art in its most commercialized forms owed much to buyers seeking an American equivalent to the arts-and-crafts movement of late nineteenth-century England, who encouraged Indian artists to work in more Indian-looking styles using materials and techniques essentially new to the Southwest. “The role of the Indian artist,” a New Mexico art historian has said, “has been primarily that of a performer, working from a script written by whites.”¹¹⁶ Accepting strange landscapes could be as difficult as accepting strange cultures, but in time some that had been repugnant became familiar and even attractive, from high plains to mountains and desert. Americans had repeatedly

292

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

revised their opinions of the plains west of the Missouri River since Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long described them as fit for no more than Indian country beyond a permanent frontier of white settlement. Travelers who crossed them on their way to the coast recalled what they had seen when mining turned out badly for them, especially if they had come under more favorable circumstances, after more-than-average rainfall, and looked more closely as they retreated. Moreover, once some remained there, generations that grew up on the plains associated them with home as well as with speculative opportunity. “Except for some of the people who lived in it, I think no one had ever found Nebraska beautiful until Willa Cather wrote about it,” one of her friends wrote.¹¹⁷ But by the time she gave literary sanction to it, two generations had lived there before they lived anywhere else. Much of the Pacific slope had been as assimilable as Nebraska and its neighbors to tastes and expectations that farmers developed in the older Middle West: deciduous fruits and fresh vegetables from the Willamette, Santa Clara, and Pajaro valleys supplied coastal cities before railroads learned how to take them to eastern markets, and wheat farming on large scales, especially in the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Salinas valleys, paralleled and sometimes preceded that in the northern plains. Southern California presented greater natural challenges. For about half a century promoters of tourist travel and real estate development in the vicinities of the aspiring cities of Los Angeles and San Diego tried to explain unfamiliar climate and landscape by emphasizing their Mediterranean and especially Italian character, echoing a northeastern tradition of incorporating Italy in the grand tour although not Spain. The coast between Santa Barbara and San Diego was “Our Italy” in their promotional literature, artists sometimes casting San Diego Bay so much in the image of the Bay of Naples as to show a western Mount Vesuvius overlooking it. As late as 1904–5 the developers of Venice, southwest of Los Angeles, dug canals in the sand and fitted out gondolas and gondoliers for them. But immigrants from geographically comparable parts of Italy—Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, and the Abruzzi—headed for San Francisco and other cities more than for rural terrain like their old homes; whether because they were too poor to buy land and did not plan to stay long enough to get crops from it or because they had not emigrated to America to resume the drudgery of scratching their livings from rock and sand, few settled in the southern counties or became farmers anywhere. The drier, higher, and more rugged terrains west of the wheatlands of the Missouri Valley and east and south of those of the Sacramento, the Salinas, and the Columbia were less easy to appreciate although in time they, too, became acceptable, even attractive, and parts of them supported urban as well as agricul-

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

293

tural settlement while some of the most productive wheat counties lost population. But few immigrants from older states and other continents came prepared for the deserts of the Southwest. Although Spanish soldiers from the eroded plains of Asturias could imagine raising long-horned cattle and Merino sheep along the upper Rio Grande in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a few of them became ranchers, there were better opportunities closer to main centers of imperial control and communication in Mexico proper; Spanish immigration had fallen off with Spanish imperial power well before Mexican independence and never revived significantly under American rule. Images of the interior Southwest, where temperatures regularly rose forty and fifty degrees in as many miles from the coast, were far less malleable through most of the nineteenth century. Then they began to change drastically as developers and settlers changed both the desert and opinions of it. Although irrigation never served small family farmers as promoters promised it would, dams that the United States government built after the Reclamation Act of 1902 brought both highly intensive crop agriculture and ultimately means of providing shade, ornament, fresh food, electric power, and other amenities of vacationing and residence into mining and grazing country. To most visitors the seventeen hundred or so miles west of the Missouri River had been simply the price, and except in winter an assertively unpleasant as well as tiresome price, of getting to the coast: the principal exceptions were those who came on business or in desperation, for their health. Tourists appreciated the service at station restaurants along the Santa Fe Railroad as much because it was fast and they could be on their way promptly as because the food was good. They might buy Indian souvenirs on trains or at platforms, but they seldom stopped to see either living Indians or the cliff dwellings of their ancestors. Apart from the Grand Canyon and such grotesque formations as those near Colorado Springs that Helen Hunt Jackson called the Garden of the Gods, deserts at best were uninteresting. “I have crossed the great American deserts many times,” wrote a correspondent of Outing (1905), “and have never found any one who cared to live there. . . . It is doubtful if one can make a strong enough plea for the desert, to induce people to visit it.”¹¹⁸ “The proposal of a trip to the desert for recreation,” a reporter said in 1914, when consumptives were beginning to appear at Palm Springs and other resorts in the California desert as well as in Arizona and Colorado, “is apt to strike an American used only to conventional outings as something of a joke.”¹¹⁹ Parts of the West too high, dry, or rugged for crop-farming were usually slower to seem homelike to anyone, but gradually they, too, became less repugnant. By the 1880s, although the great herds of buffalo were gone and with them the sport of shooting them from moving trains, Outing magazine began celebrating the

294

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

fast-disappearing ways of the range-cattle industry as an attraction to new kinds of vacationers who came to savor ranch life and what remained of wilderness. Several years after the Northern Pacific Railroad came through Dakota in 1883, enough vacationers were arriving on it to suggest to the Eaton brothers, who had persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to buy a ranch near theirs on the Little Missouri, that they charge guests for board and room and so establish the first dude ranch after the profits from raising cattle collapsed in 1886–87. The Wild West was most marketable when equipped with comfortable and well-catered accommodations. Far fewer travelers stopped between Chicago and the coast; they went on to the citrus suburbs of Los Angeles and the more urban pleasures of San Francisco, and for many years most of them concentrated at limited points, especially those that, like the Garden of the Gods or Pike’s Peak, did not require long detours from civilization. As Roosevelt observed after a western outing in 1903, most of the tourists then at Yellowstone were foreigners.¹²⁰ Yet more Americans went into the mountains, and not merely to pass beyond or to look for gold. Although visits to national parks increased enormously over the century, as recreation generally did, visits increased still more to those parks and parts of parks that Muir and other missionaries of wilderness cherished for the experience of communion with nature rather than merely for striking spectacle. When Roosevelt went to Yosemite in 1903, there were so few other visitors there that he was able to sleep under the open sky as John Muir suggested, although Muir was already worried about overcrowding even while he invited it by preaching the gospel of wilderness. Soon such solitude was impossible. The superintendent of the park counted 5,414 visitors in 1906, equivalent to less than one of three hundred residents of California (from which most of them came); by 1929 a hundred times as many, or about one of ten. Between 1910 and 1930, years that spanned the opening of the park to automobiles in 1913 and the road building and affluence of the 1920s, visitors increased about thirty-three times, two and a half times the rate of increase to all parks. As visitors increased, both what they sought and what they found at Yosemite changed no less than their numbers. When Muir began his fight for the valley in the 1860s, they limited themselves to inspecting the celebrated curiosities that Congress singled out for preservation by turning over to the state of California: the valley, its immediate rim, and the big trees at Mariposa. The price of physical discomfort on the trip was high enough so that many people were content to see the giant redwoods in paintings and photographs or merely their bark, which exhibitors at the centennial exposition at Philadelphia in 1876 stripped away and reassembled to show their monstrous girths. By the time Congress established the Yosemite National Park in 1890, an area several times larger than the valley,

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

295

Fig. 9.5. John Muir. John Muir, shown here at his writing desk, became a leading environmentalist and a founder of the Sierra Club in California in the late nineteenth century. After 1900 President Theodore Roosevelt and other national leaders consulted with Muir about conservation issues. Photo courtesy John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of Pacific Library, Stockton, Calif. Copyright 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust. F23 #1252.

more visitors ranged out over the high mountains, making their camps well out of reach of the hotel below. For many of them camping in unspoiled wilderness was their climactic experience. Tastes in parks and wilderness remained varied. Most members of the Sierra Club, which Muir founded in 1892, expected more amenities than the rations of tea and oatmeal and bed of a hollow log that sufficed Muir himself when he wandered into the mountains. By the middle of the twentieth century, as

296

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

weekend vacationers poured into parks within striking distance of metropolitan centers, trails in the woods became paved highways, lined with trailer villages, souvenir shops, and gasoline stations; the Music Corporation of America, which became concessionaire for Yosemite in 1973, planned to bring still larger crowds by developing it as a center for conventions.¹²¹ “Except for hundreds of shiny aluminum trailers and multi-colored tents,” a reporter wrote from the valley in 1966, “this might be any city after dark.”¹²² “Let’s Close the National Parks,” Bernard DeVoto had appealed in 1953, describing the deterioration of parks where visitors had doubled since the 1930s without increases in park personnel;¹²³ while the Park Service did not do that, it kept visitors without reservations waiting at entrances until others had left, like diners at a crowded restaurant. Although Grand Canyon, Bryce, and other parks in the southwestern desert never drew crowds as large as those at Yellowstone and Yosemite, over the region both visitors and permanent residents increased enormously. The desert also attracted new kinds of them, including many to whom climate and physical environment were principal attractions rather than prices of health or employment. As dramatically as Pasadena, Riverside, and other citrus colonies east of Los Angeles had grown from the 1870s, they only nibbled at the edge of the desert; for much of the year temperatures at them were no higher than as close to the coast as Los Angeles itself, and while the early tourist hotels had closed when their guests returned east in the spring, residents found that trees and thick walls made summer endurable. East of the Sierra Madre and the Sierra Nevada, shade was not enough. Air-conditioning, which motion picture theaters introduced in the 1920s (first at Los Angeles, in 1922), extended new frontiers of comfort; by 1932 western railroads were installing it in passenger cars on routes where travel between April and October had been ordeal by heat and dust.¹²⁴ When the electric-power projects of the 1930s and the prosperity of the 1940s and 1950s made it practicable on large scales in the interior, southeastern California, southern Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico entered a new era. Las Vegas became largest city in Nevada in the 1950s, skyscraper hotels and casinos replacing the shabby saloons that served construction workers on the Hoover Dam in the 1930s; by 1976 Phoenix was the largest city west of Chicago, after Los Angeles, San Diego, Honolulu, and the Texan cities that financed much of the southwestern boom and advancing on them. Sun City, which opened in 1960 as a retirement community, and others of its suburbs throve on the migration of what their neighbors called snowbirds, refugees from northern winters; but while the old and the affluent stood out in a few such places and censuses confirmed that people old enough to retire were increasing disproportionately at them, Arizona as a whole was not distinctively older or richer than the rest of the West. The

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

297

states with the oldest populations were those of the high plains and Oregon, where substantial migration from states to the east had started earlier but new kinds of economic opportunity had lagged until after Californians began moving there to retire.¹²⁵ Most of the new residents of the Southwest came to earn their livings, like most of their predecessors—the first as prospectors and miners, in the late nineteenth century, the next as irrigation farmers, in the early twentieth—rather than merely to draw on their investments and savings; but relatively few of them were rich or idle enough to come as sybarites, most came hoping for better lives at their new homes. Like the Pacific basin beyond, for most of the time that Europeans had been there Alaska and Hawaii had interested them and their American descendants more to trade with than to live in. When they finally began to grow as rapidly as some contiguous states—the lower forty-eight, as Alaskans called them—in the 1950s and 1960s, they also had distinctive kinds of immigrants with distinctive expectations. Like California, Oregon, and Washington after 1945, like California after 1848, both had interested some of their new residents during a recent war. While neither had maritime industries comparable to the shipyards and airplane assembly plants of the coast, and most members of the armed forces who served in them left with little regret, some had liked what they saw enough to stay or to return later. The new Alaskans of the 1940s and after were no more interested in farming than the New York volunteers who went to San Francisco in 1847 had been; when they homesteaded, as the law permitted long after land offices for practical purposes had closed in the older states,¹²⁶ many of them looked for potential in urban development, as on the outskirts of Anchorage, rather than in agriculture, despite the highest prices for food in the United States. Discoveries of oil in and after 1957 justified such speculators, as the discovery of gold had justified their predecessors in California. Urban amenities came to the North Slope by plane as to San Francisco by ship a century before; no frontier had depended more on sophisticated technology. Yet many Alaskans came and stayed for more than high wages. Oil companies and the construction companies that built the pipeline to serve them recruited heavily from states where hunting and fishing were popular recreation; and the adaptability of the recruits, like that of the men who had come to garrison the territory and build the Alaska Highway during the war and to rebuild Anchorage after the earthquake of 1964, varied much with their interest in the outdoors. Outside the heated compounds that major corporate employers built in remote areas, the quality of life in the bush was both distinctively assertive and to some distinctively attractive. Before the Second World War, for some mainlanders Hawaii played the role

298

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

of southern California and Arizona in the late nineteenth century, when much of the Southwest outside the mines had been a sanitarium. People retired from Alaska, if they did not simply move on after brief forays; but they might retire to Hawaii. But the length and cost of the sea voyage from the mainland long kept tourist travel to the islands at modest levels, while the limits of economic opportunities confined immigration chiefly to plantation laborers. Natural increase accounted for most of the growth in population into the 1960s. Starting from a smaller base, as late as 1960 Hawaii had grown less than a third as fast as California and Arizona since 1900 (3.1 against 9.6 times). Increases in immigration thereafter coincided with increases in numbers of tourists, although like tourists elsewhere, most did not stay so long after they came by plane. Total arrivals increased spectacularly, from 46,593 in 1950 (31,846 in 1941) to 296,517 in 1960, 1,746,970 in 1970, 3,934,504 in 1980. By 1970 more residents worked in hotels than on farms, by 1980 nearly two and a half times as many; a state agency estimated that expenditures by tourists accounted for over half of personal income.¹²⁷ Thus the first substantial boom of the islands was a rush to climate rather than to mines, farms, or oil fields, and in an urban rather than a rural setting. Tourists soon were so many that the hotels and apartments where they stayed hid the beaches that attracted them; unless they ranged outside Waikiki and central Honolulu they were as effectively insulated from the natural environment and local tradition as oil company employees in air-conditioned compounds on the North Slope. But whatever they sought in coming, more people lived in Hawaii because they wanted to live there rather than anywhere else, fewer because military service brought them there or because missionary service had brought their ancestors. Whether westerners committed themselves to each other and to the places where they lived more in the twentieth century than before, the objects of the commitments that they made and considered making clearly had changed. By the second half of the century few of them lived directly by the land, probably those who talked most of cherishing the natural environment less than most others. Like other Americans, they went more to the parts of their parks and national monuments most fully equipped with urban conveniences and most widely advertised, most easily represented in a postcard photograph, than to those that remained closest to their natural condition. (“Being here makes television mean so much more to us,” a western editor heard a tourist say at Yosemite.)¹²⁸ Farm populations became smallest and declined most sharply in states where the rhetoric of rural promoters and reformers had been especially hopeful. While some cities that had lost their old economic bases cultivated local color to attract vacationers, in general urban society and urban landscapes seemed less to reflect and

Social Attitudes: Putting Down Roots

299

focus their hinterlands as stockyards, packing houses, canneries, sawmills, and smelters accounted for sharply declining fractions of employment. Even San Francisco, Denver, and Seattle increasingly resembled Los Angeles, and Los Angeles them. Over the century different groups of western sojourners gradually decided to stay, for the most part ultimately reconciling themselves to each other and to natural environments and traditions more than they held themselves apart. In different degrees they accepted and even celebrated their diversity while also reconciling it with their common westernness and Americanness. In general more slowly than they joined labor forces and neighborhoods, they also joined political communities, receiving and accepting citizenship, voting and organizing as voters, increasingly seeking and holding public office in further token of their developing relation to their neighbors.

10

Western Politics

In a formal sense most of the West came of age politically before the nineteenth century ended or soon afterward. Congress admitted thirteen far western states between 1850 and 1896 and the last three contiguous states (Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona) in 1907 and 1912, although it kept Alaska and Hawaii waiting till 1959. In admitting these states and others Congress pronounced them equal to their predecessors; thereafter they were equal to older states of other regions not only in constitutional status and role—as in sending senators, representatives, and electors to Washington—but soon also in influence. To the extent that influence followed on experience in self-government within their boundaries before admission, states that were still new in the twentieth century qualified more fully than some that were older: whereas those admitted 1850–76 had been on probation as territories or as a de facto state (California) for from one to fifteen years, averaging about eight years, those admitted 1889–1959 had been territories for from seventeen to sixty-one years, averaging about thirty-seven years.¹ Moreover, although Congress conventionally expected a new state to have at least as many inhabitants as the average congressional district, and although throughout the century some western states among others had too few to claim more than one member in the House of Representatives (six of thirteen states having one representative each till 1903, five of eighteen states one representative each from 1993), once a territory became a state, small population was far less disadvantageous. Senators from small states had relatively few constituents to divide their time among and relatively more favors to distribute among them, especially as such ratios helped them to win successive terms and to make themselves better known in Washington as well as at home.²

300

Western Politics

301

How western political systems worked in larger and less formal senses was intermittently controversial since the first of them developed during and after the Revolution. Provisions for the political apprenticeship of the territorial system, through which most new states passed,³ had reflected misgivings that westerners were too far from older settlements to participate easily in the general government and that some of them were neither loyal nor reliably republican.⁴ Then westerners acquired an entirely different political reputation—as ardent nationalists and exponents of quintessentially American principles. In conventional imagery the western family farm became the foundation of free republican society. The general expectation by the 1860s was that most new states would be Republican, as the chief sponsors of the Homestead Act of 1862 had been and as the states admitted 1861–76 were, and therefore Democrats in Congress kept out more of them until Republicans had enough votes to admit six in 1889–90.⁵ Students of political participation in the 1950s and after gave the West high marks, noting that rates of voting ran higher over most of it than elsewhere. This was consistent with traits of westerners that seemed to dispose them to take part in politics, such as their high level of education, as well as with how much government affected their personal welfare.⁶ It also seemed consistent with appearances of political precocity that had impressed nineteenth-century political philosophers who fitted them into current ideas of ethnic origins of British and American institutions, comparing western political improvisations to medieval folkmoots. By their accounts the miners in camps from the American River to the Yukon, who gathered to define property rights or to lynch those they charged with violating them, worked from ancient scripts, restating first principles and reenacting fundamental compacts. Yet easterners still wondered if the West was as sound politically as it should be. Much of the mountain country and the Southwest seemed economically precarious and incompletely committed to American institutions. Long after miners and other newcomers outnumbered californios, New Mexico and Arizona continued to be heavily Spanish-speaking. Although Democrats in Congress sponsored New Mexico as a southern trade-off against new Republican states to the north in the 1880s, Democrats in the territory feared that Republicans would control the Mexican American vote.⁷ After the Spanish-American War, disillusionment with the inhabitants of the formerly Spanish islands reinforced prejudice against the former subjects of Spain in the Southwest. Suspicion of Mormons kept Utah a territory until 1896 and delayed seating a Mormon apostle as a United States senator until 1903. Although enough members of Congress overcame such doubts to admit

302

Western Politics

seven states in 1889–96, three more in 1907–12, still two more in 1959, the political commitments of many inhabitants of the new commonwealths were at best uncertain for many years. Some came as sojourners, leaving their families in their old homes and denying themselves more than enough to subsist on in order to take or send as much as possible back to them. While Asians accounted for substantial sectors of some industries as laborers or entrepreneurs, for nearly half the century they could not qualify as citizens or in most states acquire land. Native Americans over most of the century remained in various degrees in civic limbos, excluded from the main body politic as well as from most of their ancestral land but denied full jurisdiction over themselves. The economies of some mountain states, especially, well after admission were so specialized and so cyclical that their populations fluctuated with prices of silver, copper, and beef, while miners, stockmen, and farmers contended for access to resources to which for many years no one had clear and full title, and state governments were battlegrounds for rival interests or facades for absentee capital. Abandoning his usual optimism, the liberal economist Simon N. Patten complained that in establishing boundaries for the new states of 1889–90, “in defiance of nature” Congress had “created empires in which local institutions [had] no vitality”; he foresaw them governing themselves by party rather than by principle.⁸ While such analyses might suggest that westerners would be politically passive, easily influenced by political machines, corporations, and the Mormon Church, or simply by opportunistic time-servers, the specter of western radicalism arose repeatedly in the late nineteenth century and after. As southerners had feared that western governments would not protect property in slaves, easterners feared that they would not protect property in railroads, mines, and their own obligations, as when California adopted a constitution, widely called communistic, that provided for a state railroad commission (1879) and Yankton County, Dakota Territory, repudiated its bonds (1875–83). Whether or not their innovations were more drastic than those of southerners, western Populists became symbols of political and social upheaval as disturbing as the socialistically inclined laborers who sometimes joined them. In the words of William Allen White, they were what was the matter with Kansas when it needed to attract capital.⁹ The Populists’ western successors in reputation for deviance included progressives; authors of the provision for recalling judges in Arizona that offended President William Howard Taft in 1911–12; labor unionists who attacked Asian minorities and struck at mines, mills, and farms and twice (1919 and 1934) over entire cities; Socialists; and unhappy farmers—“sons of the wild jackass,” as a New England senator called them—who argued that the government should help them as well as eastern manufacturers in the 1920s. The West seemed less

Western Politics

303

radical in the 1930s and 1940s, when New Dealers looked to eastern cities for new ideas and new opportunity and dismissed western senators as reactionary isolationists. But when a Socialist, Upton Sinclair, won the Democratic nomination for governor of California in 1934, and the state teetered, as one of his opponents put it, between political epilepsy with the Democrats and political catalepsy with the Republicans, President Franklin Roosevelt chose catalepsy.¹⁰ From the beginnings of settlement, western politicians spoke the language of politics as it was known in older states and wore its labels while often practicing it in a different spirit and for different purposes. Circumstances of western life both drew members of emerging communities into politics and kept them aloof from it. At all stages they depended on government, both local and national: to back them in their differences with the Indians whose land they crossed and took; to deliver the mails; to build roads; to open waterways; and to subsidize systems of stagecoaches, steamships, railroads, and airplanes. Although they complained that Congress economized unfairly on territorial government, payments it made for salaries and expense accounts figured importantly in frontier economies at early stages, and few westerners seldom refused appointment to territorial office. If they went to Congress as delegates from territories or as representatives and senators from states, they could not easily survive there without getting the dams, military contracts, and assorted continuing subsidies that their constituents wanted. Habit and sentiment brought westerners into politics and defined their approaches to politics no less than demonstrable economic interest. With other Americans they inherited a system of political parties that had developed before political conflicts corresponded to conflicts over economic issues as much as they did in Europe. In the formative stages of new communities, attachment to party was one of the more portable of ties with home and the past, and emigrants often remained loyal Republicans and Democrats while their economic interests and the policies of national party organizations diverged. The absorption of the parties of the 1870s in the politics of reconstruction bothered them no more than the absorption of the parties of the 1860s in the politics of slavery, which had concerned them far less than railroads and homesteads; reassured by state leaders who ignored or openly repudiated national doctrine, they were slow to cut their ties in protest against monetary policies unacceptable to western farmers and miners. In the last years of the century, Hamlin Garland, who had stopped campaigning for Alliance and Populist candidates when he concluded that the People’s Party had avoided fundamental economic issues, interrupted his chronicling of the hardships of pioneering in Dakota to work on a eulogistic biography of Ulysses S. Grant. “From the time when I was three years of age,”

304

Western Politics

he recalled, “this great name had rung in my ears like the sound of a mellow bell.”¹¹ Since many voters clung to familiar political symbols even while they changed residence and their parties changed doctrine, political maps of the West tended to reflect the origins of its inhabitants. As emigrants moved west, the more northern territories and states in general became more Republican than the more southern. Arizona, southernmost of the territories and originally a territory of the Confederacy, had to wait for admission because it was too Democratic as well as too progressive.¹² Distribution of Republican and Democratic strength within Oregon corresponded for many years to the settlement of urban areas from the Northeast and rural areas from Missouri and the South;¹³ within Oklahoma, to the settlement of northern counties from Kansas, southern counties from Texas.¹⁴ In Oklahoma they also coincided roughly with boundaries between wheat and cotton, although farmers who raised them had little more to look for as farmers in one party than in the other. Immigration after initial settlement also affected political balances, as the overland migration of the 1840s, heavily from border states, had adulterated the influence of missionaries and traders from New England in pioneer Oregon and California before the discovery of gold brought new influxes from the East Coast. For decades after the first American settlements, immigration greatly exceeded natural increase over most of the Far West; in the twentieth century immigration continued to be large, exceeding natural increase in some states over many years, while diverging more than before from the old routes from east to west. Tapping new sources of population, it contributed to new political balances. Democratic majorities in Arizona declined after the Second World War as Phoenix and its neighbors attracted refugees from northern winters. Democratic registrations in California, Oregon, and Washington increased with immigration from the Southwest in the 1930s and from traditionally Democratic parts of the Middle West, East, and South during and after the war. Since some of these waves of immigration not only brought new majorities into being, submerging residents of older origins, but also shortly followed major economic dislocations—the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s, the two world wars and demobilization after them—their effects can be obscure. But the states that changed most tended to be those that had the most immigrants and the newest kinds of immigrants: in general, California, Arizona, Hawaii and other fast-growing states more than the farming states of the high plains, which by 1910 (Kansas and Nebraska by 1890) had passed their biggest booms. The political genius of American pioneers had in fact been striking, but commonly in the context of limited priorities for politics while they occupied

Western Politics

305

themselves with pioneering in directions of more predictable and proximate returns. Many of them so preoccupied themselves with personal agendas that had brought them west that they were as slow to commit themselves to political systems and causes as to commit themselves to churches, cooperatives, and other associations, even when they began thinking of themselves as residents rather than as visitors. Concentrating on prospects of fortune or adventure, unsure of where if anywhere in the new country they would put down roots, often they felt too little community of interest with their neighbors to join them for more than immediate purposes. The codes that they drafted in mining camps seldom extended beyond defining rights of property in mining claims. By the early twentieth century, looking back on their first essays into government, when they grudgingly agreed to serve their turns in neighborhood police patrols or volunteer fire departments, surviving pioneers were able to transmute their youthful selves in memory from transients to commonwealth builders as imaginatively as they had transmuted the prospects of city lots or mining stocks that they offered for sale. As late as 1881, when James Bryce addressed the legislators of the territory of Washington as founders of a new commonwealth, responsible to posterity for the foundations they laid, they told him that they had not thought of themselves in that light. As he noted, leaders of new states preoccupied themselves so much with material development that they construed the responsibility of drafting state constitutions narrowly, concentrating on economic provisions and giving little time to others.¹⁵ Thus the members of the constitutional convention of Washington (1889) regarded their office as so unmomentous that they discharged most of it by copying the constitutions of other states and, objecting to the price that a stenographer asked to transcribe his notes of their debates, left no record of them. By that time, the interests of many legislators and constitution-makers in economic policy focused on the power of corporations, which over much of the West had become as great as the energy of regularly constituted government was limited. Then and long afterwards, territories and states of the Pacific slope and the Rockies were fiefs of organized capital, especially in railroad and mining companies. Into the twentieth century the Harriman lines (Southern Pacific and Union Pacific) dominated California, Nevada, and, with the Wyoming Stockgrowers’ Association, Wyoming; the Hill lines (Northern Pacific and Great Northern), Oregon, Washington, and North Dakota; Anaconda Copper, Montana;¹⁶ Phelps, Dodge, Arizona; Kennecott Copper, Alaska; sugar factors (the Big Five), Hawaii. The lines of political and economic control were more complex east than west of the Rockies, corresponding to the dominance of farming rather than more industrialized enterprises and to the division of capital more

306

Western Politics

widely among more railroads and other interests (above all, banks and dealers in grain, but also in farm machinery and fertilizer) than those necessary for mining and cattle raising. But even in Kansas and Nebraska, which were old enough and close enough to the older Middle West to resemble Iowa and Wisconsin in their peoples’ senses of themselves, their citizenship, and their future, and where politicians had been maintaining at least facades of political orthodoxy since the Civil War, capital knew how to get its way; in the 1890s the facades cracked, and for a quarter of a century or more protest was the norm. Politically significant aggregations of capital varied widely in power and methods, as citizens varied in disposition to challenge it. Some had wielded essentially unquestioned authority from before territorial or state government. The Hawaiian sugar factors, heirs of missionaries and traders who had taken the best agricultural land, made one of their own, Sanford B. Dole, president of the Republic of Hawaii before Congress annexed it (1898) and established territorial government (1900). The Alaska Steamship Company was running Alaska when its government, organized as a military, customs, and judicial district rather than a territory from 1885 to 1912, was so insignificant that the company operated less through it than through officials of the state of Washington, which was headquarters for its trade, capital, and communications and all but formally for its government. Elsewhere dissidents occasionally prevailed, at least to the extent of winning high office and trying to reduce corporate privilege. Such reform as there was tended to subside in a few years as corporate lawyers baffled it in the courts and the reforming spirit ran out. Soon after California adopted a constitution that expressed grievances of farmers and workingmen against the Southern Pacific Railroad, public officials began to compromise. They could not easily maintain the new policies, not only because local governments needed the taxes that the railroad refused to pay while litigation dragged on, but still more because, while flaring up sporadically at specific grievances, Californians only gradually assumed civic responsibilities in a sustained way. Bryce described the paradox of hostility toward the railroad and failure to resist it substantially. Several years after the voters adopted a new state constitution providing for a state railroad commission, when he asked why the railroad magnates had not invoked the federal constitution through the courts to protect themselves from it, the answer was that they “had concluded . . . that it was cheaper to capture a majority of the Commission.”¹⁷ Businessmen who economically and culturally corresponded to those who had supported reform movements in older states, including those who sometimes joined Grangers and Alliancemen in economic causes, had been slow to think of themselves as permanent residents with long-term stakes outside their

Western Politics

307

immediate investments and therefore to assume the normal responsibilities of citizenship in state, city, or even neighborhood.¹⁸ Holding back, they allowed others to fill political vacua: express and stagecoach companies had long maintained the most effective police forces and carried most of the mails in the state. As the Workingmen’s Party collapsed in the early 1880s, a saloonkeeper, Christopher Buckley, who carried on its antimonopoly tradition rhetorically, ran the city of San Francisco while the Southern Pacific generally had its way over the state in matters important to it, giving respectable folk further excuse to stand aside. At San Francisco in 1889, Rudyard Kipling found that his “pleasant and well-educated hosts . . . spoke with a bitter scorn of such duties of citizenship as voting and taking an interest in the distribution of offices,” which he said he understood after visiting a saloon where politicians congregated. “Scores of men have told me,” he added, “that they would as soon concern themselves with the public affairs of the city or state as rake muck with a steam-shovel.”¹⁹ Outraged at officeholders who exchanged favors with large corporations and the party organizations that supported them, progressives like the Populists and other earlier reformers organized to reclaim government in the public interest. Mobilizing in nonpartisan coalitions, they concentrated initially on procedural changes designed to bring political processes from nomination and election to legislation more directly under popular control: nomination by popular vote in primary elections, nonpartisan elections in local government, recall from office by popular vote, the initiative and referendum. But such reforms were newer in form and sponsorship than in effect. Most of the great railroad and mining companies were unabashedly pragmatic, as willing to corrupt Democrats as to corrupt Republicans and usually corrupting both. Thus the Southern Pacific Railroad, which catalyzed Californians into revolt by openly dominating a Republican state convention in 1906, intended to dominate the Democratic convention as well while working still more closely with the Union Labor party of San Francisco.²⁰ Its leaders generally preferred to keep free of more exclusive and enduring commitments: although Leland Stanford used the railroad’s money and his influence as its president to win election to the United States Senate as a Republican in 1885, he did it to satisfy his own vanity rather than to advance its interests, which his associates at 65 Market Street felt he had impaired.²¹ The political power of the copper kings in Montana, an editor wrote (1912), “could not endure through a single campaign if citizens would exercise the same non-partisan intelligence displayed by the corporate managers.”²² The Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which owned the principal papers of the state for more than half a century before it sold them in 1959, often kept them in sterile neutrality.²³

308

Western Politics

Such opportunism was realistic. The two major parties were so close in strength regionally and nationally that neither of them was certain to stay in power, as neither did for long either in Congress or in most states, and differences between them in matters affecting major economic interests were not great through the 1920s except when the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in 1896 and 1900. The Democratic Party of California, which had absorbed most of the members of the defunct Workingmen’s Party in the 1880s, included both strident critics of corporate monopoly and such staunch defenders of property as Justice Stephen J. Field.²⁴ The two progressive governors who made the most of issues of corporate power and who most successfully enlisted support from labor against it were a Democrat, George W. P. Hunt of Arizona (1912–17, 1917–19, 1923–29, 1931–33), and a Republican, Hiram W. Johnson of California (1911–17). Nonpartisanship followed on what westerners wanted from government as well as on issues between bosses and reformers, which often had as much to do with personnel, symbols, and style as with policy. As Howard Lamar has shown, the politics of economic development were paramount in territories of the late nineteenth century; they had been so earlier, and they remained so much later.²⁵ More than other Americans, westerners depended on government both to clear the way for private initiative in settlement and investment and to keep their principal enterprises profitable, if necessary by supplying capital and supporting prices. When the major national parties were still preoccupied with slavery and its sequels in older sections, their western members were more interested in public lands and railroads. Later they wanted higher prices for wheat and silver more than they wanted civil service reform. Such favors were more visible than the favors that government gave to manufacturing and other more characteristically eastern and middle western enterprises, and less easily justified as serving the national interest. Commonly they required frequent action on appropriations and other legislation specifically and visibly directed at them as tariff schedules already in force and the sympathetic dispositions of regulatory personnel and judges did not. Developing irrigation and hydroelectric power from western rivers required scores of authorizations, appropriations, administrative rulings, and even diplomatic agreements, some of which were in controversy virtually at all times through the twentieth century, while leadership of national conservation policy and control of Congress shifted from Republicans to Democrats but were never exclusive provinces of either.²⁶ Those for whom such programs had high priority therefore could not prudently indulge in the luxury of relying on only one political party, however congenial it might be in some respects. Thus Senators Hiram W. Johnson (Republican,

Western Politics

309

California, 1917–45) and Charles L. McNary (Republican, Oregon, 1917–44) worked more closely with President Franklin D. Roosevelt than with his two Republican predecessors; Roosevelt gave them the dams that their constituents wanted while they maintained seniority and influence in their party, McNary serving as minority leader in the Senate and Republican nominee for the vice presidency in 1940. Johnson had joined two other progressive Republican senators, Bronson Cutting of New Mexico and George Norris of Nebraska, in campaigning for Roosevelt in 1932, although he further defined his independence by refusing to serve in Roosevelt’s cabinet; he had already passed by more than that when he declined the vice presidential nomination in 1920. Both Johnson and McNary refused to campaign for the Republican presidential candidate in 1936, Governor Alfred M. Landon; Landon had sat out the election of 1930 in Kansas after his candidate for the gubernatorial nomination lost it to a conservative.²⁷ As the other economic benefits that the national government conferred on westerners, from access to natural resources to railroads and public works, did not cement western loyalties to the parties that controlled it, neither did national political control before statehood. Territorial governors tried to distribute patronage so as to encourage politically right thinking and strengthen party organizations as well as to cultivate personal loyalty. But if the party in power in Washington did not give residents what they wanted, they might react against it. Such officers sent out from Washington, therefore, could more easily weaken than strengthen their party, whether simply because residents resented them for being appointed rather than elected or because they could not keep aloof from factional differences; the result was that resident politicians sometimes found life easier and their party stronger when the opposing party controlled appointments. Further, especially when majorities in national elections changed frequently, territorial politicians found it prudent to anticipate changes in control of the general government that might affect prospects that they and their constituents would get the favors they sought. One of the most durable of territorial political organizations, the Santa Fe Ring of New Mexico, included both Republican and Democratic members so that, in the words of one of them, a Democrat who had been a Republican, “whichever side might come uppermost, the dominant party was represented.”²⁸ The instructions that Mormon bishops allegedly relayed to their charges when the church decided to give up its own political party organization as well as polygamy—to become Republicans and Democrats in approximately equal numbers—suggest such strategy. Facing concern that Arizonians were too progressive as well as too Democratic and too Hispanic, when President Taft objected to a provision for the recall of judges in their constitu-

310

Western Politics

tion, they prudently dropped it until after he had proclaimed the new state admitted.²⁹ Territorial status seemed to have no simple and lasting effect on the balance of parties even in Alaska and Hawaii, where it had lasted over twice as long as in most of the rest of the Far West when they became states in 1959. Since they faced more stubborn objections to statehood than any other territory except Utah and depended more than most states and territories on governmental policies and programs, they and their politicians had special reasons to avoid displeasing Congress. Their records suggested that they would be loyal to the parties that had been in power in Washington when they first elected their own legislators and delegates;³⁰ as in some of the contiguous territories, some of their last appointed officers won in the first elections for state offices. Ernest Gruening, former governor of the territory of Alaska, went to the Senate; William Quinn, last governor of the territory of Hawaii, succeeded himself as first governor of the state, and until 1955 Republicans organized every legislature. But in 1962 Democrats won control in Hawaii, in 1966 Republicans in Alaska, which had been Democratic. Thereafter even strong personal and factional differences did not keep Democrats out of power in Hawaii, whereas Republican and Democratic votes were close in Alaska despite overwhelming majorities of Democratic registrations. New developments far overshadowed the heritage of territorial status in both states: in Hawaii they included the shift from agriculture to a highly urbanized and tourist-oriented economy, in Alaska discoveries of oil. And, as in other states, party labels lost much of their meaning as politicians developed their own personal and factional organizations and adopted policies that appealed as much to opposing parties as to their own. Thus political moorings in the Far West were weak well before the upheavals of the 1890s broke some of them. In some states the major parties had never been so firmly based or so orthodox as their leaders pretended when to avoid offending presidents and members of Congress they glossed over local deviations from orthodoxy: on slavery in Oregon and California before the Civil War, on the currency in Kansas after it. Then, as economic grievances made it more difficult for politicians to gloss over discrepancies between national policies and the interests of their constituents, defections became open and wholesale. Between 1892 and 1900 voters in eight of thirteen far western states elected Populist and Fusionist governors (a total of thirteen of the fourteen Populist and Fusionist governors in the country),³¹ in a ninth state, Nevada, two Silver governors. Nine far western states sent forty-one candidates of third parties to the House of Representatives between 1890 and 1902, for a total of sixty-nine two-year terms, while three southern

Western Politics

311

states sent nine for seventeen terms.³² In 1892 four of the then twelve far western states gave their electoral votes to the Populist candidate for the presidency, General James B. Weaver; in 1896 ten of the thirteen to William Jennings Bryan, whom the Populists endorsed when the Democrats nominated him. Only one of those ten previously had supported a Democratic presidential candidate: Nevada, in 1880. Thereafter the People’s Party became predominantly southern, in 1900 Bryan retaining only Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada of the ten western states he had carried four years before.³³ On the plains most Populists either were farmers or lived by dealing with farmers. In the eleven states and territories farther west they were not. As many as a third of inhabitants lived on farms only in Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Washington in the 1890s.³⁴ Moreover, in every western state many men and women who called themselves farmers might as accurately have called themselves speculators in farm land; even if they lived by raising and selling crops before they realized larger returns by selling their land, and even if they saw more of their neighbors than wheat and stock farmers in the drier states were likely to see, the prospect that they would sell out and move on made them less likely to develop the cooperative relationships that major parts of the programs of the southern alliances depended on. The largest western Populist majorities in presidential elections were in silver rather than wheat country, while in some states miners voted for Bryan along with Silver rather than Populist candidates for Congress and for state offices. (In Nevada the Silver Party organized in 1892, two years ahead of the People’s Party, which was a poor fourth in strength; although the Silverites endorsed national Populist platforms and candidates, ultimately they fused with the Democrats rather than with the Populists.) In California the People’s Party was chiefly urban, dominated at first by Nationalists, genteel Fabian socialists inspired by the utopian visions of Edward Bellamy, although they raised issues interesting to farmers, such as the monopoly of the Southern Pacific, and small farmers soon outnumbered them.³⁵ Both urban and rural Populists west of the wheat country of the high plains had concerns that transcended and outlasted the cyclical issues of the 1880s and 1890s, including low prices for silver and wheat. Both then and thereafter, feeling against monopolies ran high, breaking out along the coast in the singletax movement and attacks on the privileges and monopolies of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and in New Mexico and much of the developing interior in attacks on speculators in land.³⁶ In 1894, when cuts in wages at the mines and then a great railroad strike electrified western labor, the most conspicuous minor party victory in California was at San Francisco, which elected a Populist mayor:

WA 4 MT 3 OR 4

ID 3

NV 3 CA 8

ND 3

WY 3

1

VT 4 MN 9

SD 4

CO 4

IL 4 2 KS 10

MO 17

MS 9

McKinley R ( ep.) Bryan D ( em.)

Electoral Vote 271 176

Popular Vote 17,020, 00 0493,600

IN 16 KY 12 TN 12

AR 8

TX 15

NY 36

MI 14

IA 13

NE 8 UT 3

WI 12

AL 11

PA 2 3

OH 3 2 WV 6

VA 12

1

NH 4

ME 6 MA 15

RI CT 4 NJ 6 10 DE MD 3 8

NC 11

GA 12

SC 9

LA 8 FL 4

Fig. 10.1. The election of 1896. The pivotal election of 1896 pitted eastern Republican William McKinley against Nebraskan Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Bryan also gained the Populist nomination, representing its western agricultural and silver interests. Some thought Bryan’s loss represented the East’s defeat of an upstart West. Map by Bill Nelson.

Western Politics

313

Adolph Sutro had become a hero to workingmen first by building the great tunnel to drain and ventilate the Comstock lode over the objections of the big mine operators and then by building spectacular public baths and admitting the public to the gardens around his house and to a museum of the curiosities that he had collected on his travels.³⁷ As far western Populism represented grievances beyond those of farmers, far western political protest long survived the People’s Party; and in newer forms it drew heavily on Populist among other home-grown faiths and followings. While no new political party or movement gathered as much western support or represented as distinctively western grievances and purposes as the People’s Party, westerners continued to challenge established political systems, and sometimes more effectively. They adopted more reforms both procedural and substantive after they stopped voting Populist than before and strayed more freely over party lines, electing twice as many third-party candidates to the House of Representatives in 1898 and 1900 as in 1894.³⁸ They also voted more. By the test of voting in presidential elections they were still politically less active than other Americans in the 1890s. Then in the elections of 1900–16 they voted at close to national rates, thereafter above them.³⁹ And both constituencies and leaders that had asserted themselves in the time of the People’s Party became more influential after it disappeared. Superficially, the traditional two-party system seemed to revive quickly after the aberrations of the 1890s. By the test of performance at the polls, voters in most states returned to traditional allegiances. Into the last years of the next century, far fewer independent, fusion, or third-party candidates won elections than in 1892–1900. The Far West remained predominantly Republican, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming becoming more so in the second half of the century while Hawaii, Kansas, Nebraska, and North Dakota became less.⁴⁰ But the old parties still faced competition, some of it formidable. All minor party presidential candidates who ran either first or second in any state then and later did better in the West than over the rest of the country with the exception of Strom Thurmond (1948), who did that well only in three states of the Deep South. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt as Progressive ran first in three western states, second in seven others, getting nearly four-fifths as many western votes as Wilson as Democrat, nearly two-thirds more than Taft as Republican, over a fifth of his national popular and electoral votes in the sixteen states. Although Eugene Debs as Socialist ran well behind Roosevelt in every western state except Oklahoma, where Progressives were not on the ballot, he got a larger fraction of his national popular vote in the West (31.4 percent against 21.5 percent); running

314

Western Politics

third in five states, he got less than his national average of 6.0 percent in only two states and in five over twice as much. Both Progressives and Socialists were in various senses successors to the Populists in program, following, and spirit, many of them more so than in other sections; and like the Populists they varied widely in occupation and social class. As west of the predominantly agricultural plains states farmers were a minority among Populists, over large parts of the West laborers tended to be a minority among Socialists. In Oklahoma, most Socialists early in the century were small farmers, although an Oklahoma Socialist first won public office as candidate for mayor of Coalgate, a mining town. Among Utah Socialists, more than two-fifths were Latter-day Saints, including former members of the United Order.⁴¹ In both Nevada and Montana the Socialist Party at times had substantial middle-class membership and support, skilled tradesmen outnumbering laborers more than two to one in Butte in 1913, merchants almost equaling them.⁴² In California for nearly half a century it drew heavily on both unionists and middle-class philosophical reformers. The Socialist candidate with the largest following there, Job Harriman, was an attorney; the most successful at winning public office, J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley 1911–12 and 1912–13, was a Methodist minister. The first Socialist candidate for Congress in the state, Gaylord Wilshire, called the millionaire Socialist, had been a Nationalist. Speculating in Los Angeles real estate, he offered lots in subdivisions along the boulevard named for him as premiums for selling subscriptions to a socialist magazine that he published.⁴³ Like Populists, for decades many western Socialists approached politics as an extension of the Christian social gospel. “They took to their socialism like a new religion,” recalled one of their organizers in rural Oklahoma before the First World War. The encampments where they gathered in summer to study, fraternize, and absorb evangelistic oratory were, he wrote, “lineal descendants of the religious and Populist camp meetings of former days.” Thomas Woodrow, Socialist candidate for insurance commissioner of Oklahoma in 1914, a former Universalist minister, called socialism “the plan of salvation of primitive Christianity.”⁴⁴ Wilson had organized the Social Crusade (1898) to pursue “the Eternal Truth concerning Righteousness, Justice and Brotherhood” before he committed himself and the crusade to politics, endorsing the Social Democratic Party in 1900.⁴⁵ Louis Duncan had been Unitarian minister at Butte before he became state secretary of the party in 1910 and then mayor in 1911–13. After the First World War, Socialist strength declined more in the West than elsewhere, its main centers shifting to the Middle West and East. But in 1924 Robert M. La Follette as Progressive candidate with Socialist endorsement ran second in nine western states, first or second in three nonwestern states, getting

Western Politics

315

Fig. 10.2. H. Gaylord Wilshire, western socialist. A millionaire socialist spokesman, H. Gaylord Wilshire exerted major political influence in California—and across the nation—in the early twentieth century. Photo courtesy California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento. *F868.L8. W492 1924, Who’s Who in Los Angeles, 1924, page 19, top right photo. Negative #26,697.

more than a fourth of his vote in the sixteen, much out of proportion to their population. In 1932 western states gave the second and fourth highest percentages of popular votes to Norman Thomas, higher in Oregon than in New York. In 1948, when New York led in numbers of votes for Henry Wallace, the second, third, fourth, and fifth states were all western.⁴⁶ Socialists had done better locally. They almost elected a mayor at Los Angeles in 1911, when their candidate, Job Harriman, led in the primary with 44 percent of the total popular vote, losing only after they frightened opponents into

316

Western Politics

a coalition and after the McNamara brothers, whom the party had defended, confessed to bombing the Los Angeles Times. (The changes in Harriman’s own commitments and affiliations suggested the range of the party’s appeal there: he had run for governor as a Socialist Laborite in 1898, for vice president as a Social Democrat in 1900; after losing the race for mayor, he led a communitarian colony in the Mojave Desert, which later moved to Louisiana.)⁴⁷ In 1914, when five counties in western Oklahoma sent Socialists to the state house of representatives, Socialist candidates for senator and governor got over a fifth of the popular vote, in two Oklahoma districts candidates for the House of Representatives nearly a third; the Socialist candidate for United States senator in Nevada got over a fourth. Oklahoma gave the Socialist candidates for president their highest percentages in the country in 1908 and 1916. Although most Oklahomans who voted for Socialist candidates had not joined the party, in 1910, with less than 2 percent of the national population the state led in paid-up members, equal to a tenth of national membership.⁴⁸ But even at the Socialists’ peak, the greater threat to established political leadership was not outside the major parties but within them. It appeared most signally in the careers of progressive governors: Edward W. Hoch (1907–9), Walter R. Stubbs (1909–13), and George H. Hodges (1913–15) in Kansas; George Sheldon in Nebraska (1907–9); John Burke in North Dakota (1907–13); Coe I. Crawford (1907–9) and Peter Norbeck (1917–21) in South Dakota; John F. Shafroth in Colorado (1909–13); Hiram W. Johnson in California (1911–17); Joseph M. Carey in Wyoming (1911–15); Ernest Lister in Washington (1913–21). Proposing less to reshape the economy than to make government more efficient and responsible to the people rather than to corrupt political machines and the monopolies that had collaborated with them, they emphasized structural changes by which experts, members of regulatory commissions, and voters were to gain influence, party organizations to lose it. Reformers in California picked Johnson as a candidate on the strength of his record in prosecuting members of the political machine of the Union Labor Party in San Francisco, on trial for accepting bribes, and throughout his long career he remained much the prosecutor, attacking evil in expanding settings. He promised in his campaign to “kick the Southern Pacific Railroad out of politics,” developing his remarkable program of economic and social legislation only after he took office. He was alone in becoming a national figure, as United States senator for twenty-eight years (1917–45) and twice a major prospect for the presidency, but not in denouncing railroads for usurping the power of the people over legislators and other public officials: even in states where the economic grievances of the 1890s had not fully subsided, bills to forbid railroads to issue passes had high priorities in progressive programs.⁴⁹

Western Politics

317

While Johnson’s supporters in California, organized as the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, paid respects to political traditions that in their view bosses and bribe givers had desecrated, they and their opposite numbers in other states moved freely over party lines. When their party persisted in nominating conservatives for governor, Republican progressives in North Dakota voted for Burke, the Democratic nominee. Shafroth had gone to Congress from Colorado as a Republican (1895), winning reelection first as a Silver Republican (Fusionist, 1896, 1898, 1900) and finally as a Democrat (1902). In Wyoming, Carey, former Republican territorial delegate (1885–90) and United States senator (1890–95), withdrew as candidate for the Republican nomination five days before the nominating convention rather than submit to the party machine and won on the Democratic ticket (1910). The architect of Oregon progressivism, William S. U’Ren, as a Populist had collaborated with Jonathan Bourne, later elected as a progressive Republican senator (1906), to keep the state legislature from electing a conservative and to advance the electoral reforms known as the Oregon system. As he said, he had “no faith in party organization or party government,”⁵⁰ and Republican legislatures adopted much of his program during administrations of Democratic governors who worked with them.⁵¹ Johnson had first sought and received nomination for office from Populists (for sheriff of Sacramento County, 1892).⁵² Reelected governor as a Progressive (1914) and elected senator as a Republican (1916), he remained independent, commanding his strongest support as governor and senator outside otherwise Republican territory. Some westerners went into the new parties of the 1890s and the Progressive Party of 1912 feeling that they had not altogether severed their traditional affiliations,⁵³ but many never reestablished them, former Republicans moving especially to the Democratic Party. Later, with third parties no longer available as bridges, more direct movements between major parties were frequent enough to arouse little comment. In 1966 both major party candidates for governor of California had apostasized: Ronald Reagan, the Republican, had been a Democrat and Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, the Democrat, a Republican.⁵⁴ Institutionalizing attitudes that candidates’ behavior implied, western legislatures and electorates variously weakened party organizations and made party lines less visible. Soon after California made election of judges and most local officials nonpartisan (1911), most other western states adopted similar provisions, although only Nebraska added legislators (1935),⁵⁵ as Johnson had recommended that California do along with other state officials. Meanwhile, responsibilities of legislators and thus of parties that nominated them had declined with the initiative and referendum, adopted in South Dakota in 1898 and first used extensively in Oregon after 1902; and party caucuses and conventions lost major functions

318

Western Politics

Fig. 10.3. William S. U’Ren. Oregon politician William S. U’Ren became a behind-thescenes but nationally influential political thinker during the Populist and Progressive movements. He helped launch the important Oregon system of direct democracy, which included such political reforms as the initiative, referendum, recall, and more populist ways of electing U.S. senators. Photo courtesy Oregon Historical Society, Portland. Oreg. 4406.

when voters began nominating candidates in primary elections, first in California in 1909. Oregonians foreshadowed the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution by providing (1904, in the state primary law) that candidates for the legislature might pledge themselves to support whatever candidate for the United States Senate a majority of voters recommended in a primary election rather than the choices of their own party organizations.⁵⁶ When leaders of the Republican Party chose a conservative candidate for governor to replace the progressive who had died after winning nomination (1930), outraged voters elected another progressive by writing his name on their ballots. Although only Washington permitted

Western Politics

319

voters in primaries to choose from among candidates of all parties (the “blanket” primary, 1935), California weakened the party system still more between 1913 and 1954 by allowing candidates to run in primaries other than their own (crossfile) and without stating their affiliations. In consequence, for more than forty years often primary elections left little to decide: victors in one for governor, three for United States senator, and nearly half for United States representative got all or almost all votes.⁵⁷ Johnson and Earl Warren, who carried on Johnsonian progressive traditions, captured both Republican and Democratic nominations even after registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans, Johnson as senator, Warren as governor. When California abandoned cross-filing (by stages in 1954 and 1960), Democrats had argued that it kept them from electing as many candidates as their numbers justified. But there and elsewhere voters continued to split their tickets and candidates to campaign over party lines.⁵⁸ The most successful candidates ran independent campaigns, relying on personal followings rather than on party organizations, which after progressive reforms commonly had little to offer in funds and patronage. Upton Sinclair took advantage of weakened party machinery to win nomination for governor of California as a Democrat in 1934 months after changing his registration from Socialist, but his Republican opponents prevailed by employing a public relations firm to expose his record in the general election. Earl Warren briefly engaged the same firm when he first ran for the same office (1942); however, Richard Nixon resumed and most fully exploited the possibilities of negative campaigning in destroying his Democratic opponents for seats in the House of Representatives in 1946 and the Senate in 1950.⁵⁹ The weakening of party organizations at first seemed to favor candidates who had become known by carving independent careers in law, journalism, education, and nonpartisan movements for civic improvement and social or political reform rather by ascending conventionally from lesser to greater elective office. Senators William E. Borah of Idaho and Johnson of California came to public attention as trial lawyers and as special prosecutors in spectacular trials of public figures. Senators Mike Mansfield of Montana (1953–77), Wayne L. Morse of Oregon (1945–69), George S. McGovern of South Dakota (1963–81), and Gale W. McGee of Wyoming (1959–77) had been college professors. Few professional politicians, however, had as much influence with voters and in what was left of party machinery as two newspaper editors who never held office: Chester Rowell of the Fresno Republican in California and William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette in Kansas. Others moved from their papers to major public office: Gilbert M. Hitchcock in Nebraska, Arthur Capper in Kansas, Wallace R.

320

Western Politics

Farrington and his son Joseph R. in Hawaii, Gerald P. Nye in North Dakota, Charles A. Sprague in Oregon. Among western senators, Ernest Gruening of Alaska (1959–69) probably had the most distinguished journalistic career (as editor of the New York Nation and New York Post), but it preceded his arrival in Alaska by six years, his election by twenty-six years unless his writing in the cause of Alaskan statehood in the 1950s counts. But newcomers to public life even further from the political mainstreams, however defined, made formidable bids for office and power, sometimes successfully, especially during the 1930s and from the middle 1960s, when national crises fed revulsion against leaders of government and ultimately against government itself: “Dr.” John R. Brinkley, previously known for advertising sexual rejuvenation, in Kansas in 1930 and 1932; Upton Sinclair, the Socialist pamphleteer and novelist, in California in 1934; Lawrence and Willis Allen, two advertising men who devised a pension plan that brought in large profits to them and would have given them enormous political power if adopted, in California in 1938. Californians elected an actor as senator (George Murphy, 1964) before they elected another as governor (Ronald Reagan, 1966, 1970); they had already elected one as a representative (Helen Gahagan Douglas, 1944, 1946, 1948) and almost elected a second (Shirley Temple Black, 1968). In 1980 southern California Democrats supported a conservative Republican representative for reelection when a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Thomas Metzger, won their party’s nomination to run against him. Although the successes of such newcomers to politics, offering visibility and stage presence or rhetorical skill in appealing to discontent rather than experience or service in their party, were most striking in states where party organizations were weak and where professional promoters seemed to fill vacua in public affairs, in some respects western politics had become not so much disorganized as reorganized. The old major parties seldom commanded the loyalty that until the great disillusionments of the 1890s had dependably brought their members to the polls. Defectors easily defected again, after the first time thinking of themselves less as renouncing allegiances and associates than as exercising rational independence. Much of what commitment to party survived followed on the appeals of specific leaders and their programs, particularly national leaders, rather than on expectation of specific favors from state and local functionaries, who in most states as a result of progressive reforms had little patronage to offer. Thus while Democratic registration rose sharply with the popularity of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal in the 1930s, registered Democrats voted far more dependably for Roosevelt and his presidential successors and for their supporters in Congress than for Democratic candidates for state office. Conservatives had complained that voters could not choose intelligently

Western Politics

321

among the many candidates and propositions before them in progressive states, that direct legislation would make choices of legislators unimportant, and that voters would lose interest in elections generally if disciplined party workers no longer enlisted them.⁶⁰ But voters continued to interest themselves in politics. More of them voted as ballots became longer and more complex both in Oregon and in California. Instead of accepting the recommendations of party leaders and organizations, they demanded, got, and apparently read detailed expositions of measures on their ballots. Like the Populists of the 1890s, they often gathered in schoolrooms, more to learn and debate than to applaud. The Socialist organizer Oscar Ameringer arrived at a meeting in a one-room schoolhouse in Harrah, Oklahoma, that his auditors filled despite a rainstorm, the chairman swimming across a river where a bridge had washed out.⁶¹ If Oklahoma did not become a university, as the Ohio reformer Frederic C. Howe said Oregon did before elections, Oklahomans and other westerners literally went to school to study their political lessons, and with a new sense of controlling their destinies.⁶² But while party workers no longer delivered votes as they once had done, and large corporations less easily got officeholders and laws to suit them, government still responded to pressures outside constitutionally prescribed channels. At some levels it responded more than before, as where the decline of disposable patronage and other forms of preferment that party leaders could distribute left legislators with new appetite for favors from lobbyists. And as groups newly conscious of their potential influence prevailed over the old politics of interest, those groups also had interests that held their members together and prompted them to act, even when they believed that they worked for the whole community as the agents of railroad and mining corporations had not pretended to do. The story of the new politics is much a story of the activation of new political constituencies as they awakened to their interests: farmers, laborers, women, the old, the young, ultimately ethnic groups, among others. Although until the last quarter of the nineteenth century most Americans were farmers, and politicians had long claimed to represent their rural constituencies, farmers nevertheless were slow to assert themselves in politics and before government. In the Far West many of them were even slow to vote—and not only immigrants but also the native born, who were more likely to speculate in newly developed rural land and therefore to limit their commitments as they prepared to move on after selling it. Although by raising crops on what had been government land, developed on borrowed capital, and shipping them to distant markets on subsidized and regulated railroads they gave hostage to public policy no less than miners who sold silver and gold to the United States Treasury, they were slower than mine owners to recognize how much they had to gain from

322

Western Politics

government; they did not so often or so early send lawyers to the courts and to Congress to defend their interests as mining corporations sent lawyers to defend theirs. As late as 1910 Horace Plunkett, who had raised cattle in Wyoming in the 1880s and brought the perspective of an Irish agricultural reformer to his studies of rural affairs in the United States, observed that the political influence of farmers was “relatively small.” He continued, “American farmers have been used by politicians, but have still to learn how to use them.”⁶³ In states as predominantly agricultural as Kansas and Nebraska, where coherent agricultural interests had easily identifiable stakes, numbers of farmers who went into politics before the 1890s lagged far behind their proportions of the populations. In 1876–77 they were only a fifth of the members of the Nebraska state senate, less than half of the house of representatives; in 1890 no farmer had been elected governor of the state or member of Congress. Then, with Populist prompting, farmers suddenly took office out of proportion to their numbers: in 1891 they were three-fourths of both houses of the legislature.⁶⁴ Early in the new century, progressive movements, predominantly urban in leadership and concern in most areas, then the urgencies of the First World War tended to displace rural interests in politics. But farmers in a few states where their numbers were large and their interests relatively uniform promised to take charge even more quickly and fully than most western Populists had done. Reacting against the monopolies of Fargo, Minneapolis, and St. Paul, in North Dakota they organized themselves and the state politically through the Nonpartisan League. “Farmers” became synonymous with “voters” or “the people”; at the high tide of the league in 1919, less than four years after the first organizers began to recruit members, they were nearly seven-eighths of the legislature,⁶⁵ which passed programs of economic and political reforms far beyond any enacted in the 1890s: state-owned industry and banking, popular control of state enterprises, and recall of state officers. The league achieved less in other states, although it elected legislators in Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, South Dakota, Colorado, and Washington as well as in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Its triumph was as brief as it was spectacular in North Dakota, its opponents winning control of the legislature in 1920 by hammering at administration of the new state-controlled enterprises. The next year, using procedures that the league had introduced, they recalled Lynn Frazier, the farmer-governor elected in 1916 and reelected in 1918 and 1920. But shortly it came back, sending Frazier to the Senate in 1922 and electing governors in 1926, 1932, and 1938; when at the league’s last convention in 1956 it decided to combine with the Democratic Party, in so doing it still had enough members to make North Dakota a two-party state.⁶⁶ In states where the league recruited fewer members and won few elections it was enough of a

Western Politics

323

Fig. 10.4. The Nonpartisan League. The Nonpartisan League, a political party with socialist leanings, fared especially well in the northern interior West where railroads and grain trusts seemed to dominate the agricultural scene. Crafty leaders like A. C. Townley, shown here addressing a league meeting in 1917, advocated government-owned banks, grain mills, and insurance plans protecting farmers. Photo courtesy State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck. #B0921.

threat to stimulate other organizations to send out recruiters among the farmers to anticipate it⁶⁷ and politicians to make appeals like its own. In South Dakota, Peter Norbeck beat the league by imitating its programs, including state ownership, while denouncing the leaguers as socialistic agitators. “When the water gets too high,” he said, “let a little of it over the dam.”⁶⁸ The league was both timely and untimely in its purposes and programs. It appeared as progressives planned economic and social legislation, some of which had rural support; as automobiles and consolidated schools began to break down rural isolation; as state agricultural extension agents offered new assistance and leadership; as sudden changes in prices during and after the First World War made the exactions of mortgage holders, railroads, and middlemen more burdensome. But wartime priorities variously got in its way, new agencies of national government allocating supplies and setting prices of goods that farmers used and

324

Western Politics

produced. Demands for more effective state regulation of railroads suddenly became irrelevant when the president turned them over to a new United States Railroad Administration (1918–20); Congress had already begun to assume responsibility in a field of transportation hitherto left to local authority in many states when in the name of national defense it established a federal highways program in 1916. More fundamentally, as states had to defer to the general government in more matters of concern to farmers, farmers became too few to achieve nationally the kind of influence that they achieved in North Dakota. They had become a minority in the United States before the census of 1880; after 1900 they were a minority in every western state but the Dakotas and Oklahoma as well as nationally. Moreover, they remained as divided in their concerns over matters within federal jurisdiction as they had been when King Cotton and King Wheat symbolized the diverse interests of South and North. Farmers and their political advocates depended on various strategies to confront the problem of needing more from government while controlling fewer votes to influence it. They temporarily escaped some of the effects of declining numbers when Congress failed to perform its constitutional duty of redividing membership in the House of Representatives after the census of 1920, leaving it until 1933 on the basis of the census of 1910 and rural states therefore overrepresented; rural counties were comparably overrepresented in most state legislatures as the growth of cities left apportionment of members increasingly outof-date until the Supreme Court declared “federal” systems of apportionment unconstitutional in 1964, requiring that state senators represent people rather than areas. The most extreme imbalance in representation of rural and urban areas occurred in the years of greatest urban growth in California, where the bureau and other farm organizations sponsored a constitutional amendment that they called the “Federal plan,” adopted in 1926, which substantially reduced representation of the most populous counties in the state senate below already low levels while increasing representation of thinly populated rural counties.⁶⁹ In maintaining such disproportionate influence farmers collaborated with urban groups whose interests coincided with theirs on issues as varied as supplies and costs of water and electric power, freight rates, state highway systems, access to public lands and land in Indian reservations, tariffs, quotas, and subsidies, and immigration. In a few states, farmers joined laborers to constitute new and larger forces at the polls, as Alliancemen and Populists had tried to do in the 1890s. Cooperation with organized labor in North Dakota became alliance in Minnesota and Washington⁷⁰ and a farmer-labor ticket, short of a party, in Oklahoma. (The “federated” Farmer-Labor Party of 1923–24 was a creation of the Workers’ Party

Western Politics

325

rather than an outgrowth of farm groups.) But the dominant trend was away from rather than toward organizing separate parties, as the Nonpartisan League in capturing control of Republican primaries in North Dakota had moved away from the precedent of the People’s Party of 1892. Most farm organizations from the 1920s tried rather to persuade existing parties to endorse specific programs, to choose candidates pledged to those programs, and to work directly on state and national legislators and administrative agencies. This was the strategy of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which brought together state federations, established from 1914, in a national organization in 1920, significantly with an office at Washington. In its early stages the Farm Bureau was enough like the league to compete with it in signing up members.⁷¹ Its organizers, like the county agents, who were the first of them, concentrated on enlisting successful farmers (significantly, collecting dues in cash rather than in small checks for smaller amounts dated after harvest, as the league’s organizers commonly did). Whereas the league was strongest in the economically more marginal counties of western North Dakota, appealing most to farmers less successful than the Populists, the Farm Bureau had more members in California than in all other states west of the Rockies, in Kansas than in all other far western states.⁷² It tended to support programs that favored large and successful farmers; thus when issues cut across class lines, as in California in the 1930s, when farmers divided over relations with laborers and over the use of government water on large irrigated farms, the Farm Bureau aligned itself with the Associated Farmers, organ of agribusiness, rather than with the Grange, which represented small family farmers, and in coastal states north of the citrus belt and the San Joaquin Valley generally supported liberal causes, often collaborating with organized labor.⁷³ Counting on influence out of proportion to its numbers, the Farm Bureau characteristically never attempted to capture a party, let alone form one of its own; rather it affected government chiefly by lobbying. An Agricultural Legislative Committee that delegates from farm organizations established in 1921 drafted virtually all agricultural legislation of the decade.⁷⁴ Yet lobbying often was not necessary, since the Farm Bureau maintained close ties with the state agricultural colleges and the Department of Agriculture; its members long dominated the advisory committees that government agencies relied on in administering agricultural policy locally,⁷⁵ and they had powerful allies among the processors, distributors, banks, and public utilities whose interests increasingly merged with theirs. The favors that they sought from research and administrative agencies required neither legislation nor support from all or most farmers, who even in the bad times of the 1920s were slow to ask the United States government to do much more than encour-

326

Western Politics

age agricultural cooperation (primarily by exempting agricultural cooperatives from the operation of antitrust laws) or even to extend credit and otherwise to help farmers as government was already helping businessmen; farmers generally did not join in asking for parity in agricultural prices until that goal appeared in the McNary-Haugen bill of 1924. Through such strategies farmers and their advocates continued influential beyond their numbers. The Farm Bureau and farmer-businessmen like its members were ready to influence both the planning and the administration of farm relief when New Deal agencies dispensed it in the 1930s. Turnouts of farmers at the polls continued to rise substantially; by 1974 they voted more than any other group, while farm laborers voted significantly less than nonagricultural laborers.⁷⁶ Laborers on the whole entered politics in a different style and with different purposes, which converged only occasionally with those of farmers, in part because they were less likely than farmers to be citizens. (Immigrants made up more of the population of North Dakota than of any other state in 1900, 35.4 percent, most of them farmers; but only one of ten foreign-born male adults was an alien, against one of two in Arizona, where most of them were miners.)⁷⁷ Working seasonally or irregularly as prices and demand fluctuated, many miners, harvest hands, and loggers were migrants, unmarried or unable to live with their families and unsure of where they would be the next season. Some miners and mill workers lived in company towns where their employers were their local governments as well as their landlords, controlling public utilities, schools, and churches. Whether as transients or residents, tenants or freeholders, laborers did not readily form political blocs. The major parties, which got most of their votes, for many years differed less in doctrine and policy than in the origins of their members. A workingman in a western city early in the century was more likely to be a Democrat because as an Irish immigrant he had been one in New York or Chicago than because Democratic stands on economic and social issues served or attracted him. Western Republican strategists were as wary of doctrinaire stands that might narrow their base of support as they had been in the 1850s and 1860s, when fighting slaveholders cost Lincoln votes from labor in eastern cities; they continued to cultivate labor when eastern Republicans wrote off labor’s support after 1908, and over much of the West they had it in state and local elections after they had lost it in most presidential elections. Not sorting themselves out neatly by parties, laborers could not easily have dominated party organizations or relied on any party to reflect their interests. There is no sign that most of them wished that they could. The separateness

Western Politics

327

of voting and working, of national political loyalties and local economic and social concerns, seemed as natural as the separateness of church and state, not merely because they and their ancestors had gotten their votes and their jobs when one had nothing to do with the other, unlike Europeans who had won the franchise in struggles that were economic and social as well as political and built their party systems on economic and social interest, but because in the labor movement they had justified American tradition pragmatically. While industrial unionism made sense over much of the western labor market, unionists on the whole, and particularly those of the stabler sorts, easily lost interest in it, as they had lost interest in the Knights of Labor, which embraced it in the first generation of western organized labor. In general they conformed to the job unionism that the American Federation of Labor practiced after the collapse of the Knights in the 1880s, whether because they brought the current philosophy of unionism west with them or because it represented a limited commitment appropriate to a fluid society. Collectively they eschewed political ventures and continuing political commitments while individually using the ballot to supplement the economic weapons on which they chiefly relied to protect their interests at work. That concentration on immediate economic interest permitted wide variations in philosophy and long-range objectives within organizations and coalitions even in communities as different as San Francisco and Los Angeles, which in the first years of the century represented opposite poles of unionist and antiunion commitments. Until the 1930s, when public policy affecting labor relations became nationalized as never before and major labor unions cautiously began to invoke it to supplement and reinforce their economic bargaining power, the West was battleground and laboratory for competing strategies. Circumstances were far more favorable to political activity and influence among laborers in San Francisco than in the interior West or in southern California. Most wage earners who worked in the city lived there, whereas many salaried employees, managers, professionals, and proprietors commuted from adjacent counties. For westerners, they were stable in residence as well as occupation, and many had learned early to act together in various capacities: as members of unions, especially of construction workers, teamsters, sailors, and longshoremen, fully conscious of their importance in the local economy; as members of immigrant groups with active benevolent and fraternal associations and traditions of interest in politics, of which the German and Irish were largest. In 1900 more than three of five residents had either Irish or German parents. Such circumstances may explain why the Irish had large shares of public employment, years before they did so well in Boston, New Haven, and Providence, significantly larger than their share of the population,⁷⁸ and why, in years of

328

Western Politics

sharpest conflict between labor and capital in Los Angeles, in the 1890s and early 1900s, when Los Angeles elected one workingman to nineteen lawyers as state assemblymen, San Francisco elected over two workingmen to one lawyer.⁷⁹ Rudyard Kipling’s hosts in 1889 told him that the city was “governed by the Irish vote and the Irish influence.”⁸⁰ Although they also told him that as educated men they scorned voting and public affairs, participation in elections in San Francisco far exceeded that in the state and in Los Angeles.⁸¹ Contrasts between the politics of the two cities grew as they approached each other in size early in the new century. In 1901, ten years before conservatives joined reformers in Los Angeles to defeat a candidate for mayor who had the unions’ support, San Franciscans elected a mayor who was both member of a union and candidate of the new Union Labor Party. Yet laborers in San Francisco were not so active, purposeful, or successful politically in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century as the victories of candidates who solicited their support or themselves were laborers might suggest. They became a decisive force in politics only after much debate, indecision, and disappointment. During the depression of the 1890s the principal local unions avoided committing themselves to political parties as cautiously as the principal national labor organizations. Their experiences with a succession of leaders and movements that appealed to labor’s interests justified such doubts. At the height of the unrest out of which the Workingmen’s Party of California emerged in the 1870s, a Democratic candidate for election as mayor, Andrew Bryant, attracted votes by emphasizing his concerns for labor’s interests but after winning encouraged vigilantes to keep the unemployed in order. Adolph Sutro, who was elected mayor as a Populist with working-class support in 1894 and welcomed the masses to his estate and the amusement park that he built alongside, was “little more than a figurehead” in office, as he said on finishing his term. His successor, James D. Phelan, another wealthy philanthropist and reformer with sympathies similar to Sutro’s but more sophisticated and politically more ambitious, alienated labor even more decisively than Bryant by having policemen protect strikebreakers (1901). A new Union Labor Party benefited by revulsion against Phelan and employers with whom the strikers identified him, winning by a plurality. But the new mayor, Eugene Schmitz, the personable leader of a theater orchestra, was no less a figurehead than Sutro had been, leaving control of his administrations to a cynical opportunist, Abraham Ruef, who took bribes from corporations regardless of their labor policies and openly allied himself with a governor whom labor found particularly disappointing. The Union Labor Party survived briefly the investigations and trials for graft that brought down Ruef, Schmitz, and their

Western Politics

329

associates in 1907–8, its candidate for mayor, Patrick H. McCarthy, president of the Carpenters’ Union and of the Building Trades Council, winning election in 1909 in another divided field. But it commanded a majority of the popular vote only once, in 1905, when a noisy antilabor group, the Citizens’ Alliance, embarrassed the opposing fusion ticket.⁸² Accomplishing nothing in office beyond ending the trials, McCarthy failed to win reelection in 1911, when leading union officials abandoned the party; shortly after leaving politics and union affairs, he became a building contractor. His successor was James Rolph, Jr., first of a long line of nonpartisan businessmen-mayors who tried to build consensus behind programs of civic improvements.⁸³ In Los Angeles, as in San Francisco, working people went into politics to oppose antilabor policies; otherwise what they did and were in the two cities sharply diverged. Coming less from crafts, cities, and stocks with traditions of organization and militant action than the predominantly Irish and German teamsters and construction workers of the Bay Area, they were less prepared to counter the handicap of smaller numbers.⁸⁴ Their employers, in contrast, joined more closely and took more extreme positions than their counterparts to the north, inviting extreme responses. Business and professional people in the city had divided over moral issues in municipal reform; they agreed on differences between capital and labor, the good-government administration elected in 1909 adopting an antipicketing ordinance that the Los Angeles Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association drafted to reinforce a lockout in the metals trades. Unionists in turn joined to support the Socialist-Labor nominee for mayor in 1911, Job Harriman, and to proclaim the innocence of the McNamara brothers, members of the Bridge and Iron Workers’ Union indicted for dynamiting the building of the Los Angeles Times (1910), which for twenty years had led the fight for the open shop. Then they abandoned both causes in confusion when the McNamaras confessed to the bombing. For decades thereafter Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties were anchors of political reaction even when employers recognized unions, including the Times itself briefly and grudgingly by 1964,⁸⁵ while San Francisco and its neighbors repeatedly outflanked southern California on the left. Socialism proved to be a frail bond among its diverse supporters when they had to take stands on specific issues as inflammatory as the open warfare between the Times and radical unionists. Although Socialist candidates briefly drew larger votes than in the north,⁸⁶ prompting the state organization to transfer headquarters to Los Angeles, their strength depended importantly on Harriman’s personal magnetism rather than on clear consensus on doctrine or strategy. The party long maintained strains of eccentricity and utopianism that linked the Nation-

330

Western Politics

alism of admirers of Edward Bellamy in the 1880s and 1890s with the interest in panaceas that emerged in evangelistic movements for sharing wealth in the 1930s. After running for the mayorship a second time in 1913, Harriman concluded that political action was premature, “that all laws providing for economic changes must be preceded by industrial development that gives rise to such laws”; he turned from politics to cooperation, leading a communitarian group to the Mojave Desert in 1914–17 and then to Louisiana.⁸⁷ Another Socialist, Gaylord Wilshire, in his last years in the 1920s invented an electrically charged girdle that he claimed would restore health by ionizing the blood. Meanwhile, organized labor as a whole came to accommodations with state government, which kept it within the mainstream of electoral politics on that level. The working-class precincts of San Francisco supported Hiram Johnson’s Democratic opponent when Johnson won the governorship in 1910 on the strength of his record as prosecutor in the trials of Union Labor leaders for graft at San Francisco; but as governor he worked closely with union leaders, who had known him as counsel for the Teamsters. The State Federation of Labor, which had maintained representatives at Sacramento to protect labor’s interests since 1903, soon concluded that it was getting results. As Johnson pursued policies that unionists approved, the labor vote of the city and the state swung massively behind him. It developed in his time a long tradition of moving pragmatically across party lines, resulting in Wilson carrying the city and the state in 1916 and La Follette almost carrying the city in 1924 but Johnson and progressive Republicans close to him repeatedly winning overwhelming majorities, extending to Democratic primaries.⁸⁸ Characteristically, a Republican representative elected six times had been an officer of the San Francisco Labor Council; when the city again sent a Democrat to Congress, it was a newspaperman who had served as Johnson’s secretary and managed one of his campaigns.⁸⁹ Some such nonpartisan behavior continued into and after the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Johnson supported in 1932 along with labor. The State Federation of Labor rejected a Republican governor, Earl Warren, who maintained Johnsonian traditions as clearly as any leader of his party, for his Democratic opponent, James Roosevelt, in 1950, but then endorsed his Republican successor, Goodwin J. Knight, in 1954. For all their disappointments, for many years working people found more hope in politics in California than in any other western state. They fared worst in hard-rock mining country, where governors sent state militiamen or asked for federal troops to suppress strikes in Idaho in 1892–93 and again in 1899, in Nevada in 1907, in Colorado in 1903 and 1914, in Arizona in 1915 and 1917, and in Montana in 1917. Unionists were especially disillusioned in states where they

Western Politics

331

won at the polls only to lose in the courts or at the governor’s desk. Frank Steunenberg, elected governor of Idaho with Populist support in 1896, called out troops who rounded up both unionists who struck at Coeur d’Alene in 1899 and Populist county officials who protested on behalf of them. Laborers were conspicuously slow to organize politically in Colorado, where employers anticipated them both at mines and foundries and in government. When the legislature passed an eight-hour bill (1899) copied from a Utah law that the United States Supreme Court had upheld two years earlier, the state supreme court promptly declared it unconstitutional.⁹⁰ Then the voters approved a constitutional amendment to the same effect, which both major parties had promised (1902); but the newly elected governor, James Peabody, opposed it and sent the militia to enforce a lockout and to suppress strikes at Cripple Creek in 1903–4, stamping out union activity there.⁹¹ The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) had recommended separate political action through the Socialist Party,⁹² but union members supported a Democratic candidate for governor, Alva Adams (1904), whose election the Republican legislature nullified, turning the office over to a conservative Republican lieutenant governor. At the next election (1906), another conservative won when the opposition split three ways and union members voted for William D. Haywood, secretary-treasurer of the WFM, who ran on the Socialist ticket, rather than for Adams or Judge Ben Lindsey (Independent).⁹³ The eight-hour day came to the mines of Colorado anticlimactically in 1913 when the voters adopted it by initiative and, after years of insisting that the cost would be unbearable, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company concluded that going to three shifts would save it money.⁹⁴ Until about 1918 in Colorado, conservative Republican candidates polled spectacularly heavy votes in counties that thereafter were dependably Democratic, often by a third or more beyond state averages.⁹⁵ Such returns probably followed mainly on simple fraud, but laborers compounded their weakness by dividing their votes and by not voting at all, whether in accordance with the counsel of leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, established 1905) and antipolitical factions of the WFM, who argued that political action was futile because government would continue to support the interests of employers until the workers acquired economic power, or because as transients and foreigners many mine workers were not eligible to vote and had little interest in local issues.⁹⁶ While old Populists went primarily to the Democrats and Socialists, taking along with them many old Silver Republicans, like Governor Shafroth, and the Socialist vote dropped sharply after Haywood ran in 1906, the Progressive Party of 1912 picked up substantial support from labor by nominating Edward P. Costigan for governor in 1912 and 1914. As counsel for the

332

Western Politics

Fig. 10.5. Industrial Workers of the World. Organized in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or “Wobblies”) quickly became an influential radical labor organization among timber and agricultural workers. Particularly noteworthy up to the First World War, the IWW and its attacks on the war and its controversial strikes led to dramatic decline in the 1920s. Here members of the IWW are gathered in a bunkhouse in Bordeaux, Washington. Photo courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Negative #W & S 2459.

United Mine Workers, Costigan had represented miners charged with conspiracy to murder members of the National Guard at Ludlow in 1914; when Gifford Pinchot asked him to explain the causes of the conflict, he responded, “years of denial of social, industrial, and political justice. Legislation has been deferred, enacted law unenforced, property sanctified.”⁹⁷ Unionists later helped elect Costigan to the Senate as a Democrat in 1930,⁹⁸ but in 1914, with Costigan and Senator T. M. Patterson and a Socialist candidate dividing their votes, the governorship went again to a conservative Republican.⁹⁹ Miners in some other states first enjoyed and then lost what for a few years seemed significant political influence. In Montana, where stakes in both state and national politics were unusually high, in the shape of titles to veins of copper

Western Politics

333

ore as well as offices that copper millionaires coveted and the profits of selling silver to the United States Treasury, a striking reciprocity had developed between laborers and some local capitalists before statehood and continued past the depression of the 1890s. The WFM demanded unlimited coinage of silver when it was founded at Butte in 1893, and the mining magnates of Butte the next year offered help to the band of the unemployed (“Hogan’s army”) that set off to join Jacob S. Coxey in Ohio in his march on Washington. Mine operators solicited miners’ votes, William Andrews Clark promising them the eight-hour day in the campaign by which he won a seat in the United States Senate in 1900; all parties nominated union men as candidates for minor offices.¹⁰⁰ In Arizona relations seemed less paternalistic, labor commanding respect as a significant force at the polls by the eve of statehood. The working class of Arizona, an agent of William Andrews Clark reported to him (1911), “are getting so well educated that they will vote as a unit on any matter they believe directly affects them.”¹⁰¹ Union leaders lost interest in a territorial labor party when the Democratic Party endorsed provisions for a state constitution that they had proposed (1910), including the provision for recall of judges (meaning especially judges who issued injunctions in labor disputes) to which President Taft objected. Democratic candidates won most offices in the new state government, George W. P. Hunt serving as governor for fourteen of the first twenty-one years of statehood. Assuring parties to labor disputes that he would treat them impartially and privately deploring what he considered unfair behavior by mining companies, Hunt maintained a virtual working alliance between unions and the Democratic Party that foreshadowed the more institutionalized relationships of the New Deal.¹⁰² In Nevada, members of miners’ unions including the IWW, who commanded union hours and wages, frequently elected their members to local offices, occasionally to the legislature.¹⁰³ But state and local authorities intervened to support employers at decisive moments in these states, as in Colorado. During a strike at Goldfield, Nevada, in 1907, Governor John Sparks called on President Theodore Roosevelt for troops to maintain order at the request of mine operators, who promptly lowered wages and required workers to pledge that they would not join unions, although county officials friendly to the strikers protested that there was no danger. When Roosevelt threatened to withdraw the troops, Sparks asked the legislature to establish a state police force, which replaced them.¹⁰⁴ Governor Tasker Oddie similarly helped employers to break a strike at Ely and McGill in 1912, declaring martial law, creating a special posse to augment the state police, obstructing proceedings against company guards who had killed two strikers, and calling for the arrest of a third for inciting a riot.¹⁰⁵ In Arizona local authorities collaborated with vigi-

334

Western Politics

lantes who put strikers and others accused of sympathizing with them on trains and removed them from Jerome and Bisbee in June and July 1917. Governor Hunt was temporarily out of office after a disputed election; his replacement, Governor Thomas Campbell, who had asked for United States troops, told the transported men that he could not help them.¹⁰⁶ In Montana the loci of ultimate political and economic power shifted together when political control of Anaconda and its affiliates passed in the 1890s from local and western interests, led by men who had come out of the mines and whom miners regarded as their own kind, to outsiders, most decisively those who acted for the Standard Oil Company in establishing Amalgamated in 1899. For a few years they and other employers accorded the miners of Silver Bow County wages and working conditions unsurpassed in the industry and cultivated their political support; labor and capital remained at peace in Montana while they waged war in Idaho and Colorado. But the votes and bargaining power of miners lost value as sharply in the early 1900s as silver had lost value in the 1870s and 1880s when William Andrews Clark and F. A. Heinze, last of the major local capitalists who challenged the company, made their peace with it between 1901 and 1906 and left the state. Radical members of the Butte Miners’ Union accused leaders of becoming instruments of the company, challenging them particularly for accepting (1912) a system of registration by “rustling cards” designed, like that at Goldfield, to help it exclude troublemakers. When factional strikes erupted into open warfare, fought with guns and dynamite (June 1914), dissidents formed a rival union. Governor Sam V. Stewart declared martial law; the next week the company announced that it would deal with neither union. Until the New Deal reopened collective bargaining in 1934, Anaconda was an open shop. After the United States entered the First World War in 1917, mine operators charged strikers with being accomplices of German imperialism and then of Russian communism; the lynching of an IWW organizer, Frank Little, at Butte (August 1917) fed antiradical fervor rather than concern over conditions on the job that had given him an audience. Clark, gone to live with a young wife in a mansion in New York City after serving the term in the Senate that the miners had given him, said that he would rather close his mines, “flood them and never take another pound of ore out than recognize the anarchistic element in control of the so-called new miners’ union,” but incurred no reproaches for thus threatening to interrupt military supplies. The Montana Council of Defense and the legislature, which passed a sweeping sedition law (1918), joined operators, conservative labor leaders, and vigilantes in stamping out what survived of radical unionism; National Guardsmen and United States troops returned to Butte repeatedly.¹⁰⁷

Western Politics

335

To left wing socialists and members of the revolutionary wing of the IWW, such repression, supported by businessmen who called the open shop “the American plan,” confirmed the futility of seeking reform through political action instead of concentrating on economic change by economic means. Yet few workingmen gave up completely on government and political processes, let alone followed Haywood when he fled to exile in the Soviet Union in 1921. Until Socialists fell out among themselves over the crises of the European war and the revolutions that broke out during and after it, the Socialist vote was a barometer of workingclass discontent. It and votes for candidates of other minor parties were largest, in general, where labor had been most disappointed in government under major party or nonpartisan auspices: larger in Los Angeles than in San Francisco in 1911–16, in Nevada than in Arizona in 1908–16. Such dissent also was strikingly selective, frequently crossing party lines and running higher when candidates were well known and when change seemed most urgent at specific points or levels of government. Thus Lewis Duncan and J. Stitt Wilson, the clergymen who served as mayors of Butte (1911–14) and Berkeley (1911–13), respectively, ran well ahead of their tickets when they ran for Congress, and Haywood’s vote as candidate for governor of Colorado corresponded both to his popularity as an officer of the WFM and to the miners’ frustration with the results of the previous election. Socialist candidates for Congress and for the presidency did far better in Arizona than candidates for governor in Hunt’s time, in California in Johnson’s time.¹⁰⁸ During the 1920s, with membership in unions generally declining, and membership in the IWW and in unions with radical affiliations more than in others, prospects that the working class, having organized economically, would “find its proper reflection at the polls,” as Haywood had predicted,¹⁰⁹ seemed remote to all but the most dedicated of the faithful. Even before Socialists and Communists formally separated in 1919, leftist strength had drastically declined in the West, leaving leadership of the Socialist Party and its rivals mainly to easterners and midwesterners. It had begun to decline soon after the high tide of about 1904–11, whether because reformist compromises had dampened its appeal, as militant critics charged,¹¹⁰ or because the changing circumstances of labor did not easily sustain the old militance. Yet laborers did not abandon political action when they laid down the standards that had made them politically most visible. Their prospects for substantial and lasting influence had been slight as long as the shock troops of socialism were itinerants whose most effective weapon was their willingness to be arrested for a cause. According to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “rebel girl” of the IWW, who led strikes and free speech fights for it over the mining West for a decade, tran-

336

Western Politics

sients had little or no interest in local politics even when they threw themselves into political combat.¹¹¹ Marrying and settling down as economic grievances declined, they developed more assorted concerns, most strikingly in timber country, where employers under pressure to maintain production for war replaced the foul logging camp barracks that had shocked the army’s inspectors, but also in mining states. Outside the few large cities where working-class neighborhoods could swing entire congressional districts, they may have had most influence where small farmers were natural partners, as in the coastal states and in Colorado and Montana, where while miners declined as a fraction of the labor force, laborers joined farmers in electing Burton K. Wheeler, Thomas J. Walsh, and other liberal Democrats. In such areas the Socialist Party was a bridge to the major parties, in hard-rock mining country usually the Democratic Party, as the People’s Party had been before it. Labor was less effective politically where there were no traditions either of proletarian solidarity as among copper and silver miners, or of identity of interest among laborers and farmers in the old battles for silver coinage and against the money trust. Thus Kansas, a stronghold of progressivism as of Populism, reacted to the coal strike of 1919 by defining public utilities to include industries supplying food, fuel, and clothing and forbidding strikes in them. Labor was particularly ineffective in predominantly livestock country, as in Nevada, Wyoming, and western Nebraska. After the booms of the first years of the century, Nevada was “practically one large and desolate live-stock ranch,” a correspondent of the Nation complained in 1922, with a peripatetic male electorate nearly half of which vanished between elections,¹¹² leaving politics to the wealthy conservatives who impartially dominated both major parties. “By reason of our small vote and the transient character of some of our people, money is very influential in elections,” a senator from Nevada observed (1916).¹¹³ Economic, social, and political changes that began in the 1930s and 1940s promised to draw more laboring people into politics and to increase their political influence. As manufacturing increased and farming populations declined, more of the labor force moved into fields where membership in unions traditionally ran high. The Democratic biases of western union members became more pronounced as the United States government under Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted programs that unions endorsed and came to depend on, as Republicans sponsored measures that, like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, they considered hostile to labor, and as more working people and others came west from states and cities that traditionally had been Democratic. In California, a Republican, Goodwin Knight, was elected governor (1954) with labor’s support after promising to veto antilabor bills, although on other issues he was markedly

Western Politics

337

more conservative than his predecessor, Earl Warren. When Republicans nominated Senator William F. Knowland, who had voted for the Taft-Hartley Act and favored a state right-to-work measure, in place of Knight (1958), the Democrats won their greatest victory in the state in seventy years.¹¹⁴ Neither unions nor Democrats with union’s support did so well at other times. As before the Depression, Republican candidates usually did better in the West than over the rest of the country, Republican presidential candidates carrying all western states in 1952, 1956, 1980, and 1984, all but three in 1960 and 1988, all but two in 1968, all but one in 1976.¹¹⁵ While endorsement by labor was a decided asset in California and also in Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Colorado in the 1950s and was becoming one in Hawaii, it had lost value in states with different mixes of population and different traditions. A Democratic candidate for Congress in Nebraska in 1958, the year when the Democrats swept California, won after hastening to decline contributions from unions;¹¹⁶ when Governor Ernest W. McFarland failed to win election to the Senate from Arizona that same year, an issue was his Republican opponent’s charge that he had accepted funds from the AFL-CIO (which McFarland denied).¹¹⁷ That the West diverged from the Northeast politically even as in some respects it more closely approximated the shape of the Northeast economically followed both on changes in electorates and their perceptions of political issues that the West shared with the rest of the country and on changes peculiarly western, including changes in the labor force and labor unions. New populations and electorates submerged groups that once had defined much of the politics of their states: miners in Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado; stock raisers in Wyoming; sugar planters in Hawaii. While production of copper rose substantially in Arizona as production of gold did not in Alaska and Nevada, more new Arizonians came to farm and then to raise their families and their incomes in the sun than to mine: as Phoenix and Tucson far outstripped Bisbee, Jerome, and Prescott, employment in mining dropped from 14.0 percent of the labor force in 1900 to 2.4 percent in 1980 while more than doubling in numbers,¹¹⁸ and with it the fortunes of the Democratic Party. The Teamsters, who had made their accommodations with employers under Dave Beck’s leadership even in the 1930s, when longshoremen under Harry Bridges had raised the specter of class conflict in San Francisco, became still more conservative and affluent, supporting Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan for the presidency and appropriately entertaining Nixon at their real estate and resort enterprises at La Costa, where he made his first public appearance after he resigned from the presidency. Bridges himself in old age prided himself on his good relations with maritime employers.

11

Expanding Electorates

Over the last third of the twentieth century, fewer working people joined labor unions, and fewer of those who joined brought their membership into their politics. But some of them, including members of groups that had been politically passive and groups that unions had slighted, asserted themselves more both through and outside the labor movement. Some ethnic minorities had had essentially no representation in public affairs outside their own cultural, religious, and fraternal organizations: Native Americans, who little more than a century before had outnumbered everyone else west of the Missouri River; Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who were the largest element in the population of the Southwest with European ancestors when the United States took it from Mexico but several decades later commanded so little attention that no one, including themselves, knew what to call them; and Chinese, who outnumbered the Irish in California when the Workingmen’s Party under Denis Kearney briefly took over the state by making scapegoats of them. With only minor exceptions, organized labor and its advocates in politics well past the Second World War represented only relatively skilled labor of predominantly western and northern European antecedents. Non-Europeans and their descendants figured in politics chiefly insofar as unionists asked state and national governments to exclude or otherwise to restrict them, especially the Chinese (to 1902), the Japanese (to 1924), and other Asians. The Second World War was the nadir of Japanese fortunes on the mainland. Denied citizenship by United States law limiting naturalization to whites and Africans (until 1952) and restricted further by state laws that forbade aliens ineligible for citizenship to own land,¹ immigrants from Japan (Issei) had been marginal to the larger American community politically as well as economically and socially before the war. Although children

338

Expanding Electorates

339

born to them after they arrived (Nisei) were citizens, and the Japanese American Citizens League (1930) proposed to help them to defend and exercise their civil rights, no more than a third of those who were old enough registered to vote in Pacific Coast states in the 1930s.² The value of their citizenship proved questionable when the government evacuated them along with immigrant Japanese to what it called relocation centers early in 1942, systematically concealing evidence and otherwise violating law and due process,³ although few of them elected to renounce their citizenship or to go to Japan.⁴ Of all Asian Americans, Japanese Americans in Hawaii were first to enter politics in numbers large enough for many of them to win public office. They lost less ground there during the war than on the mainland, ordinarily keeping both property and jobs. Although the army removed some (about one in a hundred) and harassed many more, it did not intern them on the bases of ancestry and national origin, which would have been impractical for a group that formed over a third of the population and more of the labor force. As minor children reached majority the Japanese American voting population grew from one of the smallest ethnic minorities in the islands to largest, exceeding the hitherto dominant minority of northern European descent (haole in Hawaiian usage). When the first two Nisei won public office in 1930 (as members of the territorial house of representatives), Japanese Americans comprised fewer than one of seven adult citizens; by 1950 they were one of three, by 1955 two of five. They took more interest in politics as more of them became eligible to vote; although numbers who ran for office fell off during the war, to only two in 1942–44 (both successfully), they rebounded after it. Some of the more successful Nisei candidates had served in North Africa and Italy with the 442d Regimental Combat Team, making records that the army cited to enlist support of the war and American democratic values.⁵ They also became more visible and more eligible in the eyes of their neighbors as they advanced economically, by 1960 professionals of Japanese descent exceeding laborers and Japanese surpassing Caucasians in median income. Many new Japanese American legislators were attorneys.⁶ In the same years the relative strengths of political parties and the allegiances of new voters in Hawaii changed along with the voting population. The Republican Party, which in the 1920s and 1930s enlisted most new Nisei voters while reflecting the interests of the businessmen and planters who had imported the first of their parents as contract laborers, won the first elections after the war. Its margins narrowed precipitately in the 1950s as turnouts at the polls increased from less than half of eligible voters to almost nine-tenths. Most young veterans joined the Democratic Party, which attracted them by the stands it took on civil rights and its general openness to change, and which offered more opportuni-

2 +

-1

-1

-1

-1

1 +

-1

-1

19 +

5 +

-2

1 + -3 2 +

-1 1 +

-2

1 +

-1

-1 -2

-1

-2 Reapportionment 1910–1950 Net Change

+ 1 2 +

1 +

-2

-5

-2

-1

-6

-3

-2

-2

4 + 4 +

Gain in seats No change Loss in seats

2 + -1

-1

-1 -1

1 +

-1

-1

1 +

2 +

4 +

-2 -9

-3

-1

1 +

-5 -2

-2

1 +

-2

1 +

-2

1 +

-1 Reapportionment 1950–190 Net Change

-1

-4

-1

-3

2 +

-4

-12

8 +

-2

1 +

-1 15 +

Gain in seats No change

1 +

Alaska

Loss in seats

2 +

Hawaii

Fig. 11.1. Political reapportionment in the West. Demographic shifts led to the reapportionment of political districts in western states between 1910 and 1980. Expanding states and booming urban areas wrestled political power away from rural areas but not as rapidly as gains in those state and urban areas merited. Map by Bill Nelson.

Expanding Electorates

341

ties for political advancement as its following grew. When it won control of the territorial legislature in 1954, its victory was also a Japanese victory: in a majority of elective offices that for the first time went to Asian Americans, Nisei won 43 percent. The new majority leader of the house of representatives was Daniel K. Inouye, late of the 442d, who like many of his fellows had availed himself of veterans’ educational benefits, attending the territorial university and then law school. He worked for Democratic causes with John A. Burns, the popular territorial party chairman, who had been close to the Japanese American community and in 1962 became the first Democratic governor of the state. Elected as the first representative from the new state in 1959, Inouye became United States senator in 1963. When George R. Ariyoshi became governor in 1974, Asian Americans held all statewide elective offices.⁷ Asians won only scattered elections on the mainland, where they remained small minorities in all congressional districts, although immigration rose substantially after Congress repealed discriminatory legislation in 1965. San Jose, which elected Norman Mineta mayor in 1971 and United States representative in 1974, was whiter than other large cities in California and only 1.6 percent Japanese; Oakland, which was rapidly becoming black when it sent March Fong Eu to the state assembly before she became the first Asian American to win a statewide elective office (as secretary of state, 1974), was only 2.4 percent Chinese.⁸ S. I. Hayakawa—a Canadian by birth who had moved from Illinois in 1955 to teach at San Francisco State College, where he later became president—had no ties to Japanese or other Asian communities in California when he was elected to the United States Senate in 1976.⁹ Such successes seemed to follow on the decline of old antagonisms among other voters rather than on any new activism among Asians: whether because Japanese maintained ancestral traditions of reserve carried over to this country or because they had much to do in reestablishing themselves after the war, as a group they still seemed to be apolitical.¹⁰ Reflecting on the sudden collapse of anti-Asian feeling on the coast during and after the war, Carey McWilliams, who had felt that public policies conditioned private conduct and attitudes when he fought racial discrimination in California in the 1930s and 1940s, wondered whether the internment of the Japanese might have improved relations among the races by shaming whites into repenting for it.¹¹ As the internees began leaving the camps in 1943–44, Congress repealed (1943) the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1902,¹² and over the next two decades courts and legislatures curtailed other forms of racial discrimination. Inequality before the law declined as a problem for Asians to the extent that when the California Real Estate Association sponsored a constitutional amendment (1964) authorizing owners of real property to rent or sell it as they wished (Proposition 14, to over-

342

Expanding Electorates

rule a law against racial discrimination passed the year before) many Japanese Americans apparently supported it.¹³ The most marginal of minorities on the mainland over most of the century, politically as well as economically and socially, were not Asians and Asian Americans but others senior to them in both residence and citizenship: Mexicans and Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans. The one part of the West where many Mexican Americans had voted and held office from the time when the United States acquired it was New Mexico. Here a people whose ancestors had arrived before most of the first English-speaking settlers of North America and who as late as the Mexican War accounted for most of the population of European ancestry west of the Missouri River still outnumbered other Americans in the state after the First World War and over most of the valley of the Rio Grande north of the Texan border at the end of the Second. (Spanish-speaking New Mexicans usually called themselves Spanish or Hispanic Americans rather than Mexican Americans, Chicanos, or Mexicans, perhaps appropriate terms for people who had been there longer before Mexico broke away from Spain than since.)¹⁴ They maintained a share of about a third of public offices despite heavy new immigration, for many years voting at higher rates than both Mexican Americans downriver in Texas and Anglo- or northern EuropeanAmericans in the eastern counties called “Little Texas.”¹⁵ When Bronson Cutting, later United States senator (1927–35), entered politics after moving from New York to Santa Fe in 1910, he worked with Miguel A. Otero, a former territorial governor (1897–1906).¹⁶ More clearly than elsewhere in the Southwest, Hispanic ways persisted in the public life of New Mexico after the economic foundations of traditional society had decayed. Especially in the northern counties, townspeople had limited political experience from colonial times in serving on town councils (cabildos), farmers in maintaining irrigation systems (acequías) and dividing the water from them. In a society where ties of kinship and semi-manorial relations of tenant and landlord outweighed legalities, after annexation to the United States many New Mexicans continued to depend on patrones or protectors in political as in social and economic relations. Commonly businessmen and ranchers in territorial times, by the middle of the century heavily professional,¹⁷ patrones at once drew Hispanics of lesser station into politics and commanded distinctively personal loyalties among them. Commitments to party drew on narrower cuts of the experience of older states than in most parts of the West. Coming heavily from across the boundary with Texas, Anglo-American ranchers brought habits of voting Democratic with them. Hispanics for many years voted Republican both out of aversion to

Expanding Electorates

343

them and out of loyalty to their patrones, including territorial officeholders who remained after their terms expired to invest in local politics and property. They were more predictably regular in their loyalties than Anglo politicians at Santa Fe who in the 1870s and 1880s, when national political balances were so close that the next appointed territorial governor might be either Democratic or Republican, prudently cultivated a pragmatic nonpartisanship. Democrats in Congress accordingly feared that as long as Hispanics were a majority a state of New Mexico would be Republican, and the Republican majority of the state constitutional convention of 1910 included all the Hispanic delegates.¹⁸ Living on inherited wealth, Cutting was able to develop bases of support both independent of favors that governors and presidents might dispense and consistent with local tradition. Hispanics responded to his style and to his interest in them personally and in their culture as well as to the retainers that he dispensed among some of them as far removed from his social class as Elfego Baca, the legendary sheriff of Socorro County. For the most part they continued to vote Republican through the 1920s, but they moved with Cutting across party lines, supporting Democrats for the governorship in 1924, 1930, and 1932 and Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1932.¹⁹ Thereafter they were so predominantly Democratic that as Anglo immigrants dominated the larger cities the state developed an unusual combination of urban Republicanism and rural Democracy.²⁰ As Democrats, Hispanics continued regularly to win substantial shares of elective offices while constituting a smaller part of the population.²¹ The introduction of the direct primary system (1938), which they had opposed lest it complicate the traditional division of offices in balanced tickets, apparently did not disturb that pattern. In other states, Hispanics no longer held even minor public offices by the 1880s as new immigrants poured in. Spanish names almost disappeared from ballots in California; past the middle of the next century Mexican Americans voted and held office at lower rates than most other citizens and ranked lower socially and economically than both most immigrants and most natives. As late as 1950, when New Mexico had only about a tenth of the Hispanic inhabitants west of the Missouri River (including Texas; excluding Texas, under a fifth), it had all the Hispanic legislators; California had none between 1910 and 1962.²² Hispanics then still constituted such small parts of the populations of the states and parts of states where most of them lived—in 1850, 8 percent of the population of Los Angeles (where they were 27.5 percent in 1980, 39.9 percent in 1990)—that they could not easily have exercised much leverage in public affairs without unusual resources in wealth and leadership; but they stood out among ethnic groups in being as poorly prepared to move into them as into other dimensions of American society. In general they both needed more help

344

Expanding Electorates

and got less help from other residents who spoke the same language outside their own families. There was no Mexican American or Latin American equivalent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, or the Japanese American Citizens League, a reporter noted as late as 1967, when the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which briefly promised to parallel them before the war, had subsided.²³ Its task would have been more difficult as immigrants came from farther south, from interior and then southern Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as from the northern states from which most of them had come when AngloAmericans often called all Mexicans “Sonorans.” Bringing few of their own clergy with them, for many years they found little support and encouragement in the American Roman Catholic Church, which was slow to recruit Spanishspeaking priests until after evangelical Protestants began drawing substantial numbers of newcomers into storefront temples.²⁴ Although as late as 1950 the Bureau of the Census found that Hispanic immigrants had had more schooling than New Mexicans,²⁵ as a group they were both less educated than most other immigrants and less interested in education. In ranges of respect for academic achievement, technical and professional skill and knowledge, and acquaintance with the demands and opportunities of urban and monetary economies, they were at extremes from immigrants who had come much greater distances, especially from Asia and Russia both tsarist and postcommunist. Moreover, they had the misfortune of coming in force when specialized education and training were increasingly necessary while demand for unskilled labor was passing its peak or had already declined sharply. Facing the discouragement that followed on such handicaps, Hispanics lagged in defining their political and other purposes in relation to American society as in developing the means of realizing them. When they first came, they may have been no more disposed than newcomers from Asia and much of Europe to think of themselves as sojourners rather than permanent residents, but they were slower to revise their hopes and expectations. Except in New Mexico, many both retained foreign citizenship and loyalties and had no fixed residences or worked at length away from home. In 1910, when large numbers of agricultural laborers were just beginning to come north from Mexico, only one in eighteen adult male Mexicans in California had been naturalized, against one in two of others of the foreign born; by 1920, when the total had more than doubled, one of thirty-seven.²⁶ The Mexican “rarely if ever takes out his citizenship,” the manager of the agricultural department of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s had observed, “mixes in politics, or labor squabbles unless directed by some American group.”²⁷

Expanding Electorates

345

Prospects for Hispanic laborers deteriorated during the Depression of the 1930s. Many Mexican citizens took advantage of programs of repatriation that the Mexican government and local governments in California sponsored, numbers in the United States declining by over two-fifths over the decade. Those who remained or returned fared worse than most immigrants during the Second World War, when they became scapegoats in interracial conflicts in Los Angeles and other cities more reminiscent of nineteenth-century attacks on Chinese than of twentieth-century legalized discrimination against Japanese. Nevertheless even before the war Mexican Americans occasionally asserted their rights effectively enough to suggest that they might do more. Mexican berry pickers organized at El Monte in 1933, and a predominantly Mexican local of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union continued on strike at Los Angeles after an older and larger local accepted management’s terms.²⁸ By filing suit in 1931, parents in San Diego County kept a school district from assigning their children to segregated classes. Fifteen years later a group in Orange County obtained an injunction from a federal district judge ordering four school districts to stop segregation; when the circuit court affirmed the decision on appeal, the state legislature repealed the law permitting segregation that the districts had relied on.²⁹ That same year, 1947, a team from the Industrial Areas Foundation, which under the leadership of Saul Alinsky had helped minorities in South Chicago to help themselves, began organizing Mexican Americans in the Community Service Organization (CSO) of Los Angeles. Registering thousands of new voters, in 1949 they elected a Hispanic member of the city council, Edward Roybal, who went on to win a seat in Congress in 1962. (His one Hispanic predecessor in Congress from California, or any western state other than New Mexico, had finished his last term eighty years before, in 1883.³⁰ While population of Spanish origin in the state reached about one in five by 1980, Roybal remained the only Mexican American in the California delegation until after redistricting in 1982, when the number increased to three of forty-five.) Although no statewide candidate for office thereafter could continue to ignore Hispanics in California, their influence and even their interest in politics and government beyond specific local conditions still lagged behind their numbers. They continued to agree on Roybal in Los Angeles but on little else, even apparently on whether they had stakes in further political activity. Emphasizing mutual aid services, the Community Service Organization of Los Angeles lost interest in getting out the vote. Registration of Hispanics in Los Angeles County dropped in the early 1960s while the Hispanic population increased and candidates from other minorities won public office. Although, along with

Expanding Electorates

Boundary of the City of Los Angeles L O S

San Fernando Valley

d oo llyw Ho

MTS.

M T S .

Fwy.

Watts

Foot hill F

San Marino San Gabriel Monterey Park

Boyle Heights

reeway

Claremont

San Bernardino Freeway

Pomona SAN BENARDINO COUNTY

Whittier t San

An

a

Torrance

Pasadena

y. Fw

Downtown

South Central

reeway

Los Angeles International Airport

oF eg Di

Santa Monica Venice

na de sa Pa

Santa Monica Fwy.

San

Malibu

wa y

Beverly Hills Koreatown

Pacific Palisades

C O U N T Y

G A B R I E L

Altadena Glendale

ee Fr

Hollywood ONICA SANTA M

A N G E L E S

Burbank

ra Freeway Ventu

S A N

Harbor

VENTURA COUNTY

346

aF

ree wa y

Carson

Anaheim

RIVERSIDE COUNTY

ORANGE COUNTY

Garden Grove Westminster Santa Ana

Long Beach Huntington Beach

PACIFIC OCEAN

Costa Mesa

San Dieg o

Irvine

Newport Beach

Mission

Fr e e wa Viejo y

Laguna Beach

Whites

San Juan Capistrano

Hispanics African-Americans Asians

El Toro Marine Air Station

0

5

10

15 mi

San Clemente

Fig. 11.2. Ethnic Diversity in Greater Los Angeles. Los Angeles became the new Ellis Island for immigrants arriving in the second half of the twentieth century. Hispanic, Asian, African American, and American Indian populations greatly expanded and diversified the sociocultural patterns of Greater Los Angeles, as they did many other subregions of the West. Map by Bill Nelson.

others who previously had been oblivious to public affairs, Hispanic members of community advisory councils established through programs of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 gradually became interested in politics, they were slow in catching up politically with African Americans. When Roybal left the council in 1962, four Mexican Americans competed for his seat, which went to the one

Expanding Electorates

347

black candidate. No other Mexican American was elected to the council until 1985, when black members had increased to three, Hispanic population to half again as large as black population. A federal official called Hispanics “the most disorganized ethnic group in the country” (1967).³¹ Hispanics shortly moved into politics with more distinctive impetus and emphasis. When the CSO in Los Angeles seemed well established, Alinsky’s principal agent in California, Fred W. Ross, recruited a young apricot picker, César Chávez, to lead a drive to register voters as a volunteer at San Jose and then to work as a full-time organizer. In 1958 Chávez became general director. Becoming dissatisfied with what he called middle-class emphasis on political methods and remedies, he resigned when the CSO refused to finance a drive to unionize farmworkers and founded the National Farm Workers Association (1962), which later became (1973) the United Farm Workers Association, AFLCIO. Incorporating Ross’s techniques of organization with an evangelistic spirit that he had found in Mexican Pentecostal congregations, extending to singing at meetings, he made migrant labor a new force in western agriculture.³² Yet attempts to unite Mexican Americans on courses of action often did not get beyond disagreements over labels and what they implied. Especially in the 1960s, Chávez and other leaders appealed to their feelings as well as to specific concerns and objectives. More than other Americans, they were still struggling to define their stakes and even themselves, whether they were Americans in the sense of members of a common political system rather than exiles marginal to the dominant society. While willing to use established electoral machinery for defined purposes, some of the most charismatic new leaders were separatists in various senses, whether in calling for slates of candidates nominated independently of other political groups or in looking ultimately toward an independent state or nation. In New Mexico a Pentecostal evangelist, Reies López Tijerina, who reminded poor villagers and farmers that patrones, both Hispanic and Anglo, had neglected their most essential interests, announced a vision of reestablishing the bonds of traditional village society by reclaiming lost common lands. Forming the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), he occupied a Forest Service campground (1966) and proclaimed the restoration of communal lands and the establishment of the “Free City State of Tierra Amarilla.”³³ In Colorado, Rodolfo Gonzales (“Corky” Gonzales in his younger days as an amateur boxer), a businessman who had been one of the first Mexican Americans to rise in the state Democratic hierarchy and had organized Mexican Americans for Kennedy in 1960, left both the Democratic Party and a position as a welfare administrator and announced a crusade for justice (Crusada para la Justicia) to advance

348

Expanding Electorates

Fig. 11.3. Corky Gonzales, Chicano leader. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales became an influential Chicano leader in the 1960s. He founded the Crusade for Justice in the Denver area, emphasizing community-based programs for Chicano youth. Photo courtesy the Western History Collection, Denver Public Library. Z 8827.

the causes of Chicano culture and identity. At conferences for “Chicano liberation” at Denver (1969, 1970) he proclaimed an independent mestizo ancestral homeland of Aztlán transcending state and national boundaries and a state Raza Unida Party to fight for the return of lands and to nominate candidates for state and local offices.³⁴ At a convention of delegates from eighteen states and the

Expanding Electorates

349

District of Columbia at El Paso in 1972 that established El Congreso de Aztlán as a steering committee, Gonzalez argued against working with either of the two major parties, calling them “a monster with two heads that eats from the same trough” and saying that Chicanos had gotten results only from “our movement, our marches, and our martyrs.”³⁵ For a few years such visions of economic liberation on the basis of culturally distinct fellowship attracted some of the most charismatic young Mexican American activists at the expense of LULAC, which like the Japanese American Citizens League emphasized more modest agendas of working within established political frameworks. Never fully recovering, LULAC in 1983 closed its office at Washington, D.C., for lack of funds.³⁶ But neither La Raza Unida nor its leaders’ expansive rhetoric lasted long. In 1970 votes for candidates of the party in Colorado were fewer than necessary to qualify it for a regular place on the ballot; by 1978 there were no La Raza candidates for statewide office or for Congress anywhere. Prophetically, the chairman elected at El Paso in 1972 was not Gonzalez but José A. Gutierrez, leader of the Texan party, who had favored supporting Senator George McGovern for the presidency.³⁷ Most Hispanic voters (including Chávez, who had only sent an observer to El Paso in 1972) stayed with the major parties, usually voting overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. When a coalition of diverse groups elected Federico Peña mayor of Denver in 1983, he seldom mentioned his Hispanic background; he had been Democratic leader in the state assembly. In California the Farm Workers needed support from the state both to protect their right to recruit members and to supplement legislation that Congress passed in 1964 and 1966 and agreements that they negotiated with management, such as those with grape growers following a boycott that lasted nearly three years (1967–70). Lobbying at Sacramento, they worked with Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., whom Chávez supported as candidate for the governorship (1974 and 1978) and nominated for the presidency at the Democratic National Convention of 1976. While Hispanics generally continued to lag behind members of other ethnic groups in voting and in concentrating their votes behind candidates whose policies corresponded to their interests over wide ranges when they did vote (supporting Ronald Reagan when he ran for the governorship in 1966 and 1970 and for the presidency in 1980), Chávez increasingly went beyond appealing for urban support for the interests of the Farm Workers to representing the interests of all Hispanic Californians, and within the Democratic Party.³⁸ Rates of naturalization, registration, voting, and election among Hispanics outside New Mexico remained low, whether because they were not interested, or because many of them agreed with the more radical exponents of La Raza

350

Expanding Electorates

Unida that Anglo-Americans so dominated politics that disruption was their only recourse,³⁹ or because they failed to make the best use of their numbers. Responding to a suit that civil rights organizations and the Department of Justice brought, a United States district judge redrew lines of electoral districts in Los Angeles County in 1990 to permit more equitable representation of the Hispanic population, which then comprised about a third of the total for the county and ordered a special election to choose a supervisor in a new predominantly Hispanic district. But strikingly few Hispanic voters turned out, and although they ultimately chose the first Hispanic member of the board of supervisors since 1875, they did so only in a run-off election after four Hispanic candidates divided the vote.⁴⁰ Although African Americans overtook Hispanics politically over most of the West in the 1960s and 1970s, they had started later. Until the Second World War they were too few to figure much in the political arithmetic of states other than Oklahoma, whose white majority adopted southern systems of segregation and disfranchisement shortly after statehood.⁴¹ In 1940 not even Oklahoma or any major city other than Kansas City, Kansas, was so black as California and San Francisco had been Chinese for a generation after the gold rush.⁴² Political strategists in both local and state government could easily ignore small groups of newcomers: urban bosses who relied heavily on working-class immigrant allies in traditionally governed cities like Denver; urban reformers who had resorted to elections at-large to undercut what they regarded as corrupt machines in precincts and wards; state legislators preoccupied with maximizing the strengths of their parties as they laid out electoral districts. Moreover, since black newcomers came heavily from southern states where their political roles and economic opportunities had been marginal, in general they were less prepared to take part in public affairs than many foreign-born whites were or soon became. Surveying politics in Los Angeles in 1960, the political scientist James Q. Wilson called black residents interested but unorganized: “In Los Angeles . . . Negro entry into politics has really not occurred at all.”⁴³ Yet political prospects for African Americans along with those of other poor and ethnic minorities over the entire nation between the 1940s and the 1960s changed greatly along with their expectations and economic and social circumstances. Increasing faster than the general population,⁴⁴ they became significantly large fractions of western electorates, some so large that gerrymandering could not longer leave them as minorities. Moreover, they prepared for political action by taking advantage of public school systems and by moving into skilled and professional work. Although Californians worried about black immigrants from Mississippi whose children, like children of white immigrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas in the 1930s,

Expanding Electorates

351

were poorly prepared for school, censuses showed that levels of education advanced among black residents of voting age as among white.⁴⁵ Wilson found both that the black population of Los Angeles had increased so rapidly that it overwhelmed black leadership and that black professionals had increased still more rapidly: black attorneys by nine times since before the war.⁴⁶ While in the Middle West and East racial conflict seemed to rise each year with temperatures that drew unemployed youths into the streets, in the West into the early 1960s black newcomers were strikingly quiescent, even where ingredients of discontent and confrontation were in full supply. In Los Angeles and Oakland, where rates of unemployment approached half in some neighborhoods, black populations were so new and fast growing as to be strange to themselves as well as to their neighbors.⁴⁷ The administrative agencies of both cities were attuned to concerns of business firms and local elites, like the two publishing dynasties based at them, the Otis-Chandler and Knowland families, and indifferent to the grievances of the poor, who for many years remained correspondingly submissive. Their police forces were notoriously unsympathetic to minorities, in Oakland both wholly white and disproportionately of southern origin.⁴⁸ Wilson found “virtually no tradition of violence in race matters” in Los Angeles.⁴⁹ Then accumulated resentment against the police broke out in riots in south-central Los Angeles (Watts and adjoining districts) in August 1965; in six days thirty-four persons were dead and more than a hundred times as many in jail.⁵⁰ The next year (October 1966) two community college students in Oakland, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, drew up a platform for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and gave themselves titles (Seale becoming chairman, Newton minister of defense); soon they began trailing police over the streets. Describing how to execute “racist cops” by surprising them on coffee breaks and raising funds to buy guns by selling copies of the sayings of Chairman Mao Tse-tung alongside the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, they talked of racial self-determination and social revolution. By 1968 they were national symbols of dissent and conflict, Seale accused of conspiring to disrupt the Democratic National Convention at Chicago; they joined a small radical group, the Peace and Freedom Party, in nominating candidates for state and national office in California.⁵¹ For several years after the riots at Watts, races continued to polarize in Los Angeles and elsewhere. White liberals who had supported African Americans in struggles for civil rights were confused by the violence and alienation that Watts exposed, while only one in eight black residents of Los Angeles surveyed felt that the riots were “not justified.”⁵² After a commission investigating the incident re-

352

Expanding Electorates

ported essentially nothing new, Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, observed that an unwillingness to attack underlying conditions might “continue to teach impoverished, segregated, and ignored Negroes that the only way they [could] get the ear of America [was] to rise up in violence,”⁵³ but many officials seemed frozen in inaction as interracial friction increased. In 1967–70 five Panthers and four policemen died in encounters in California, most of them in and near Los Angeles,⁵⁴ where the chief of police, William Parker, had called the rioters at Watts “monkeys in a zoo,” saying “we’re on top, they’re on the bottom.”⁵⁵ Invoking racial antagonism, Mayor Sam Yorty upheld Parker and won reelection in 1969 over a black member of the city council, Thomas Bradley.⁵⁶ The Los Angeles school board, which had announced (1963) a goal of racially integrating the city schools but had done nothing toward that end, ignored a court order (1970) to proceed, and voters a few months later replaced the judge who had issued the order with a lawyer who campaigned against busing. Calling the judicial pressure “utterly ridiculous,” Governor Reagan ordered his legal staff to help the city to appeal.⁵⁷ Schools boards in Alameda County (Oakland and Berkeley) had already moved to desegregate, but when the director of the Oakland Museum, seeking to broaden its concerns and clienteles, appointed black and Chicano members to an advisory council (1969), the commissioners dismissed him.⁵⁸ Some of the more conspicuous leaders and groups of ethnic minorities preached separatisms of their own that raised visions of secession from the United States or least an autonomy within its boundaries. Thus some Mexican Americans challenged the cession of territory to the United States in the Mexican War, and Black Panthers proclaimed liberation by force. Such prospects were chiefly rhetorical, and the followings they attracted were neither large nor long-lived. More workable ethnically exclusivist strategies were possible where minorities were large enough to dominate electoral units and well enough organized to agree on candidates and programs, as in the one councilman district out of fifteen in Los Angles where black voters were a majority, which a popular candidate easily carried in 1963. But the two other black candidates who won seats at the same time, bringing black membership to proportionality to black population (12.9 percent in 1960, 17.9 percent in 1970) in the city but beyond proportionality in the districts that elected them, did so with interracial support. When one of them, Bradley, became mayor in 1973, he depended heavily on white liberal votes.⁵⁹ Elsewhere African Americans won office by working with whites both through established political systems and as candidates for nonpartisan office. White liberal support was especially conspicuous in Berkeley, where black membership

Expanding Electorates

353

reached a majority in the 1970s while black population declined.⁶⁰ In several cities African Americans first rallied their supporters by contesting white control of poverty programs established in the 1960s and then made them bases for further political gains: Newton and Seale had planned the Panther party in the office of a community action program in Oakland where they had worked (1967).⁶¹ The first black statewide official in California, elected superintendent of public instruction in 1970, was a nationally known but apolitical educator, Wilson C. Riles, whom President Nixon had appointed chairman of a presidential Task Force on Urban Education, and who according to a San Francisco reporter was “an unexpected intrusion to black politicians,” “a black man without organizational ties, . . . without a political base.” (Riles displaced Max Rafferty, recently [1968] Republican candidate for a seat in the United States Senate, who had attracted a huge following by claiming to expose subversion and sexual immorality in public schools, purging books and what he called leftist personnel while arousing increasing concern in both major parties as well as among educators. “No matter what one’s opinion as a censor of books, as a poseur of superpatriotism and supermorality, or as a phrasemaker,” observed the San Francisco Chronicle, which called him “a right-wing ideological snake-oil merchant,” “his administration of the schools has been pronounced incompetent by experts.”)⁶² In the three years following Riles’s election, voters in Berkeley elected a black mayor and then a black congressman and voters in Los Angles, Bradley as mayor, all of them experienced in public affairs. No other state and no other city had so many black voters so well organized as Los Angeles, but during the 1970s and 1980s black elected officials over the mountain and Pacific regions, including black members of at least one body with substantial white rural constituencies—the California assembly—increased out of proportion to population.⁶³ With a black population of only about 10 percent, Seattle gave (1989) a comfortable majority to a black candidate, Norman B. Rice. In the campaign Rice had emphasized his experience in prudent financial management as a member of the city council, while his white opponent tied his campaign to an initiative measure to stop busing of schoolchildren (which barely passed).⁶⁴ Even while white and black extremists reinforced each other, the Panthers dropped from the headlines and television screens. Never so numerous as they seemed, perhaps no more than 1,500 to 2,000 members nationally at their peak, they were, a chronicler of dissidence concluded a decade after they began, “not much more than a media event . . . an electronic drama, an expression of the romantic vein in American life.”⁶⁵ Regretfully concluding that they had offered more posturing than substance, a black reporter reviewed their history as a pro-

354

Expanding Electorates

longed partnership with the news media in promoting themselves as “pathological outsiders to the American mainstream.”⁶⁶ In the course of infiltrating poverty programs they antagonized Mexican Americans who resented others presuming to speak for them. Their alliance with white radicals and emphasis on weapons repelled the black community and invited attack by the police, Newton admitted (1973);⁶⁷ they further lost credibility by resorting to robbery and extortion.⁶⁸ By 1971 they had discarded guns, profanity, and talk of revolution and turned to the ballot; Newton enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz.⁶⁹ In Oakland Seale lost by a wide margin when he ran against the white incumbent mayor in 1973, but the successful candidate four years later was a black jurist, Lionel Wilson. Within nineteen years, 1964–83, while black population increased from about one in seven to nearly one in two, black membership on the city council increased from one by appointment to a majority by election; the first black city councilman had been a member of a city board (1957–64), Mayor Wilson a superior court judge (1964–76).⁷⁰ When Newton died in gunfire in 1989, Wilson declined to attend the funeral because of Newton’s “constant involvement in criminal activities.” Others credited rioters at Watts and the Panthers with galvanizing populations whose prospects had declined since much of them came west and with bringing their situations and grievances before the larger communities. Representative Ronald Dellums, first elected from an east bay district in 1970, said that the Panthers had paved the way for black politicians like himself,⁷¹ although they had just organized when he became a member of the Berkeley city council (1967) after serving on public agencies in the area for several years. Similarly, leaders of La Raza Unida who had awakened hitherto passive Mexican Americans to their stake in public affairs by holding up visions of an independent destiny around 1970 may have drawn them into more conventional political channels a few years later.⁷² Native Americans differed fundamentally from other ethnic groups in types of political experience while sometimes resembling them in levels of political activity. Their antecedents uniquely bound them to the land: they were the only Americans whose ancestors, as far as anyone had record of them, were born in the hemisphere and the only ones whose relations to parts of it were central in their cultures. But their antecedents also separated them from other Americans by endowing them with traditions, including political traditions not easily reconciled with those of dominant American communities. Although some eastern Indians had been remarkably creative in combining for limited purposes, tribal chiefs and tribal nationality had been largely creations of Europeans who did not understand social relations that were much different from their own and

Expanding Electorates

355

who could most conveniently gain title to land by dealing with leaders who seemed able to cede rights to it in European style. Moreover, while even slaves brought from Africa and their descendants hoped and intermittently had reason to hope that republican government would protect them from whites who oppressed them, Native Americans found government a principal agent of their misfortunes—when it proposed to help them as well as when it made war on them—and sometimes more so when it was republican, as the independent United States, than when it was monarchical, as the British and French empires. The systems of public lands and public education that to other Americans represented American opportunity and the benevolence of the government that administered them had quite different meanings for these first westerners: the homesteads that the government gave to its citizens had been their ancestral estate, and the schools that it endowed were systems of denigrating their ancestral cultures. Such contrasting views of government represented different values as well as different experiences: of progressive individualists ready to move almost anywhere to improve themselves and conservative collectivists who particularly cherished aspects of their culture that depended on their relations to their ancestral community and the setting they associated with it.⁷³ Indians became particularly wary of the government of the United States during the century after the American Civil War. Congress defined policy affecting them over most of that time in the General Allotment or Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, by which they would become citizens when they “had accepted the habits of civilized life,” although it left them with land that was too little and too poor to live on by any standards, including those called civilized. In the words of John Collier, foremost critic of Indian policy in the 1920s, the purpose of this federal legislation and that of reformers who felt that assimilation would serve the best interests of Indians was to destroy “Indian organization, institutions, and racial heritage to the end that the Indian as an Indian might disappear from the American scene with the utmost speed.”⁷⁴ Allotment in its various forms was far more effective in giving whites control over the most desirable land reserved for Indians than in preparing Indians to live on it or anywhere else as whites did. Early in the century the General Land Office divided much of the arable parts of reservations into homesteads, while the Indian Service leased some of the rest to whites, then encouraged Indian stockmen to farm what was left without providing them with either the water or the means of acquiring the skills, supplies, and equipment that they would have needed; the Reclamation Service took over vast expanses for river basin development, nearly two million acres between 1908 and 1927. When Congress autho-

356

Expanding Electorates

rized dividing parts of the Yuma and Colorado River and Pyramid Lake reservations into 160-acre homesteads for settlers it allotted 5 acres to each reservation Indian. As a special master commented later when Pyramid Lake Indians sued in district court, “In this arid climate where crops cannot be grown without irrigation, some homesteaders have struggled with 80 or 160 acres with water.” After 1934, when the policy of the government was to manage public lands under lease and permit rather than sell them and give them away, the service and the Army Corps of Engineers flooded increasing amounts of the most productive reservation land. In the course of the Missouri River Basin Project after the Second World War they forced four of five families on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota to relocate, over one in three on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux reservations in South Dakota.⁷⁵ For many years after Congress declared that all Indians were citizens (1924), the words meant little: states hesitated to extend services to them, fearing that they might claim more in benefits than they paid in taxes, and employees of the Office of Indian Affairs were reluctant to concede that Indians could plan their lives for themselves. Many Indians maintained their tribal ties, more than half continuing to live on what remained of reservations into the 1950s, often out of reach of services of county and state governments theoretically available to them and largely outside dominant political systems. Until 1948 Indians could not vote in Arizona and New Mexico, two of the three states (with Oklahoma) with largest Indian populations.⁷⁶ Some abstained from voting lest they lose tribal status while entering nontribal jurisdictions that offered nothing to them and in which they would be politically impotent.⁷⁷ According to a survey made for a congressional committee in 1956, less than 18 percent of Indians over twentyone years of age on reservations had voted in the last state or national election; the most common reason for not voting recorded was “apparent indifference.”⁷⁸ A new era for Native Americans seemed imminent when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Collier commissioner of Indian affairs in 1933. Proposing to reverse processes of allotment under way for nearly half a century, he invited Indians to reclaim tribal jurisdictions according to the Indian Reorganization (Wheeler-Howard) Act of 1934, which he designed as a charter of selfdetermination. But his program faltered from the start. New tribal constitutions threatened established customs and leaders. Although provisions for relief helped Indians among other Americans with low incomes, programs of conserving land and developing public power undermined traditional economies and folkways, sometimes more drastically than programs that they followed. Outraged by a program of reducing their herds of sheep and goats to control damage to range land, Navajos rejected reorganization.⁷⁹ Although earlier they had lost

Expanding Electorates

357

substantially by the terms of oil leases that appointees of President Warren Harding arranged and that Collier had vigorously attacked, they remained hostile enough to Collier and to Collier’s successors under President Harry Truman to support General Dwight Eisenhower for the presidency in 1952 and to ask him to appoint a Gallup banker, Glenn Emmons, one of the staunchest advocates of termination, as commissioner of Indian affairs. Endorsing Emmons, the Tribal Council said that it wanted “a businessman as commissioner and no more social workers, anthropologists, or reformers.”⁸⁰ Two other tribes also refused to accept the conditions of the act, while members of tribes who preferred the regimes of the older treaty councils attacked leaders of the tribal councils established in accordance with the Indian Reorganization Act as usurpers. Members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who proclaimed an independent Sioux nation at Wounded Knee in February 1973 represented an extension of such grievances on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota.⁸¹ During and after the Second World War, Congress reduced expenses and services that might have facilitated transition and, beginning in 1953, adopted resolutions and bills that called for terminating supervision and control (a policy that became known as “termination”) and further dividing remaining tribal lands, in effect reverting to policies associated with allotment. Although after widespread protest the Bureau of Indian Affairs reduced the pace of termination by 1958, the government did not clearly abandon it until the 1970s. Meeting with leaders of Taos Pueblo in 1970 to endorse a bill to restore Pueblo land, including a blue lake sacred to them, President Richard Nixon deplored centuries of “aggression, broken agreements, [and] intermittent remorse and prolonged failure” and asked Congress to “renounce, repudiate and repeal” the policy in the course of a general reorganization of agencies affecting Indians. Congress later passed both the bill affecting Pueblo land and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, providing that tribes should decide whether to participate in governmental programs and funding education under Indian control. In restoring tribal lands after many years of taking them for nominal payments, the government undertook a kind of devolution that advocates of termination had not expected.⁸² But pressures to transfer Indian lands and resources to speculators and developers increased again with the antigovernmental mood of the 1980s, when Secretary of the Interior James Watt called reservations “an example of the failure of socialism.”⁸³ Political activity among Indians at the grass roots changed less and more slowly than statements of policy in Washington. Native Americans were both less passive than they sometimes seemed to be before the act of 1934 and less active shortly after it than some assumed they would be. Although the United

Fig. 11.4. Indian activism and the Wounded Knee uprising, 1973. A Native American participant in the Wounded Knee uprising (1973) carrying his rifle illustrates the radical Indian activism that emerged in some parts of the U.S. and West in the 1960s and 1970s. Members of AIM took over the Wounded Knee battle site in South Dakota, ostensibly to gain attention for what they considered the mistreatment of American Indians throughout the United States. Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. P0181n, 1_01_01.

Expanding Electorates

359

States government had greatly weakened Indian social organization by destroying its economic underpinnings, by repudiating and ignoring commitments in treaties, and, from the 1870s and 1880s, by acting as if effective organization no longer existed, in fact more of traditional culture, including traditional political organization, survived than most whites recognized, including white administrators with whom Indians had to deal. Residence on reservations effectively isolated Indians from opportunities in the larger society that they might have found through contact with whites other than government employees, missionaries, and post traders, but it also left them with territorial bases on which they maintained and defined their cultural heritages and with common concerns that they addressed, sometimes with significant political consequences. Pending the final dissolution of tribal holdings that the act of 1887 contemplated, most agents had designated committees or councils to consent to arrangements for managing those properties and to help keep order on reservations. These bodies variously competed with traditional authority and reaffirmed it. As during earlier contacts with whites, some tribes adopted constitutions that extended over their entire memberships rather than merely over local bands or clans and that incorporated white electoral procedures and principles of representation.⁸⁴ The governments thus formed were by no means passive instruments of the Office of Indian Affairs. Some agents complained that they were forums for agitators.⁸⁵ They sometimes reached beyond bureaucratic channels to lobby for tribal interests and to enlist public opinion on their behalf. When Senator H. O. Bursum of New Mexico introduced a bill to legalize claims of squatters on Taos Pueblo land in 1921, a tribal leader said that they must organize “as we did long ago when we drove the Spaniards out” (in 1680). Encouraged by white reformers, members of the All Pueblo Council drafted an appeal to “the People of the United States” rather than to the Office of Indian Affairs and sent delegates to state their case in eastern cities and at the nation’s capital.⁸⁶ Although the act of 1934 prompted further political organization, continuing political activity developed slowly even within tribes that adopted constitutions. This did not mean simply that Collier had overestimated their political capacity and underestimated inertia among employees of the Indian Service who were slow to understand and accept the spirit of new policies. As commissioner he resembled his predecessors more than he realized, misunderstanding the values, culture, and specific needs of Indians while professing to advance them. He failed to see both how much tradition had persisted and how much it had taken new forms over years of living alongside whites and in fixed locations. Many members of tribes that had agreed to reorganize did not vote in elections for new tribal councils, considering them illegitimate.⁸⁷

360

Expanding Electorates

Native peoples had less difficulty in dealing with dominant political systems in Alaska than over much of the rest of the United States. Having few white neighbors and little that whites wanted over most of the first century of American occupation, until the 1960s, and remaining outside the jurisdiction of the Office (later Bureau) of Indian Affairs until 1931, for many years they were under much less pressure both cultural and economic than pre-Columbian inhabitants of older states and of Hawaii had been. Whether because of such circumstances or others, both agents of the United States government and missionaries tended more in Alaska than elsewhere to recognize and work within the frameworks of village society as they indoctrinated their charges in the ways of white America.⁸⁸ While retaining much of their traditional culture, Alaskan peoples adapted selected white institutions to their uses. Graduates of missionary schools who had become familiar with white forms of association as members of societies affiliated with the Presbyterian Church led in organizing the Alaska Native Brotherhood in 1912. Originally emphasizing assimilation (its first objective, according to its constitution, being “to assist and encourage the Native in his advancement from his native state to his place among the cultivated races of the world”),⁸⁹ it soon shifted focus toward maintaining Native rights within the dominant polity. Its most forceful leader in the 1920s, the Tlingit William L. Paul, a graduate of the Sheldon Jackson School (Presbyterian) at Sitka and of the Carlisle Indian School, had gone on to attend Whitworth College (Presbyterian) and to study business and law. Admitted to the bar when he returned to Alaska, he persuaded administrators of public schools to admit Indian children, established an Indian’s right to vote (1922), and recruited and organized Indian voters. Conducting their meetings in parliamentary order, members of the brotherhood and its affiliate, the Alaska Native Sisterhood, prepared for larger political arenas. Joining both major parties (chiefly the Democratic Party) and sometimes dividing in personal factions, they usually came together at general elections. Although by assuming the aggressive adversarial style of a trial lawyer Paul sometimes offended Indian traditionalists accustomed to more consensual ways, he and his associates attracted wide support by concentrating on such popular issues as the use of fish traps at commercial fisheries (which both Indians and whites had resented as symbol of outside control until the Department of the Interior and the new state government forbade it in 1959). Elected to the Alaska territorial House of Representatives in 1924 and 1926, he successfully supported legislation to exempt Natives who had already voted from a literacy test. By 1949 another leader of the brotherhood was president of the state senate; two years later Native membership in the legislature, including Eskimos, reached seven

Expanding Electorates

361

in a total of forty.⁹⁰ Although the practical returns of such representation at first were few, since the legislature had little power, on the eve of statehood Tlingit and Haida leaders took advantage of an act of 1935 permitting Natives to bring suit for land claims against the United States, which whites had sponsored to facilitate extinguishing Native title to land. Ultimately receiving (1968) an award of seven and a half million dollars to apply to economic and social development through a Tlingit-Haida Central Council, they were prepared to claim and administer their share of further awards when Congress adopted the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 at the instance of oil companies that then negotiated with Native owners to clear a route for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.⁹¹ Meanwhile Eskimos at Point Hope (population 386 in 1970) had successfully resisted plans of the United States Atomic Energy Commission to experiment with peacetime uses for nuclear fission by detonating enough bombs to excavate a harbor on the Arctic Coast about thirty miles away. Although community leaders at Fairbanks and Anchorage had responded enthusiastically when Edward Teller, director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, promoted the project to them in 1959, villagers challenged assurances of representatives of the commission that tests in the Pacific had shown that contamination would be insignificant, citing what some of them had seen at Nagasaki while in military service after the explosion there in 1945 and what they had read of radioactivity in the Marshall Islands after the experiment at Bikini in 1954. The village council called on other Eskimos to send representatives to Barrow, where those assembled asked the Department of the Interior to cancel the commission’s permit to occupy land at the site and recommended establishing a newspaper to inform and unify other Natives.⁹² Insisting more than before on setting their own course, Indians in older states responded to events and experiences like some that aroused other minorities. A new generation of activists interested in recovering traditional identity came out of the Second World War, many of them young men who had served in the armed forces. After the war they took advantage of educational benefits available to veterans and pressed for fuller opportunities for nonveteran Indians as well.⁹³ Programs of moving Indians from reservations into cities, which advocates of termination supported, in the words of Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, chairman of the Committee on Territories, to get “the government . . . out of the Indian business,” at once weakened specific tribal ties among those Indians who lost touch with their fellows on reservations and strengthened supratribal consciousness, preparing for more united political action including resistance to termination.⁹⁴ The National Congress of American Indians (1944), which represented the tribal governments organized after 1934, led the opposition. Estab-

362

Expanding Electorates

lishment of the Indian Claims Commission (1946) gave Indians further occasion to advance their cases, prepare tribal rolls, and decide how to use funds they got, while programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity (1965) helped them along with other minorities to represent themselves in the courts and generally to find their ways politically, as by providing for legal aid. The anthropologist D’Arcy McNickle (Flathead) observed as late as 1966 that Indians had been the least active of ethnic groups in the civil rights revolution and in radical attacks on the causes of poverty,⁹⁵ but increasingly they asserted themselves as others did, while insisting on their distinctive rights and destiny. They did not want to be pushed into the mainstream of American life, Melvin Thom (Northern Paiute), president of the National Indian Youth Council (which another Indian leader called “the SNCC of Indian Affairs”), had said at a conference on poverty (1964) called to persuade Congress to include Indians in the Economic Opportunity Act. But, Thom said, they needed political power. “This country respects power and is based on the power system. If Indian communities and Indian tribes do not have power we will never be able to hang on to what we have now.”⁹⁶ While Native peoples impressively advanced in political purpose and political expertise, nearly everywhere they lagged behind other minorities both in these respects and in numbers. Their populations increased substantially, but other populations increased still more. In Alaska they increased by 32.7 percent between 1939 and 1960 but declined from 44.8 percent to 19.0 percent of the general population while whites increased by 345.6 percent; by 1980 they were at 15.5 percent. In Arizona Indian populations increased still more, by 51.4 percent (1940–60), but declined from 12.3 percent to 6.4 percent, by 1980 and 1990 to 5.6 percent, less than a third as many as Hispanics. Everywhere but in Alaska at least one other minority outnumbered them. Their disadvantages were especially great in urban politics, where other ethnic minorities had made their marks. In 1980 Los Angeles temporarily led American cities in numbers of American Indians, but African Americans outnumbered them there 30 to 1, Hispanics 49 to 1 (in 1990 30 to 1 and 85 to 1). At Anchorage, where they constituted a larger part of total population than in any other large American city, at 2.64 percent in 1990 they were slightly fewer than Eskimos at 2.67 percent, less than half as many as African Americans and two-thirds as many as Hispanics, as well as smaller part of total population than influential minorities at other cities—the 23.0 percent of Hispanics at Denver and 39.9 percent at Los Angeles, the 43.9 percent of African Americans at Oakland.⁹⁷ Nor could they easily assert themselves through ordinary governmental channels in rural and urban fringe areas, where in western states most of them still were, few of them in central cities.⁹⁸ Where they had eked out marginal livelihoods on the

Expanding Electorates

363

land, fishing, trapping, farming, or raising livestock, ordinarily they looked to federal rather than state and local authority to help them maintain their claims to land, water, and fossil fuel deposits within their traditional territory. Indians occasionally staged demonstrations that were as striking as some by African Americans but that revealed their weaknesses as much as their grievances. The few members of assorted tribes who occupied the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay in 1969–71 may have drawn attention to demands for other land to which they had clearer title and that might have been more useful than a piece of rock without its own source of drinking water.⁹⁹ But the elaborate spectacle that members of the American Indian Movement staged before television cameras at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 both recalled how cavalrymen had attacked Sioux families there in 1890 and deepened divisions among traditionalists, young dissidents, and adherents of the tribal government established in 1935, whom the AIM asked the Interior Department to depose. Instead of relying on white friends, legislators, and administrators to redress their grievances, more often than before Indians sued and otherwise directly challenged infringements on their rights, as African Americans had been doing. The treaties that their ancestors had signed gave them access to federal courts, which by the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were newly disposed to listen to them. When the state of Washington, asserting jurisdiction over reservations as Congress had authorized states to do, restricted rights to fishing that Indians had reserved when they ceded lands in 1854, Indians on the Nisqually River staged “fish-ins” in 1965 and engaged lawyers to resist orders from state courts.¹⁰⁰ Uneven though the record of the United States government had been, Indians were accustomed to dealing with it, and they had learned that state and local authorities more often challenged them. Shortly they were able to pursue contests over termination and other issues with the help of funds and advice available through federally financed legal services programs. The Navajo Legal Aid and Defender Society (reorganized as DNA—People’s Legal Services, from its Navajo name, in 1973) figured in 27,400 cases in its first three years, 1965–68; agreeing that income earned on reservations was exempt from state income tax, the United States Supreme Court in 1973 accepted much of its case for tribal sovereignty.¹⁰¹ Moreover, Indians depended more on their own attorneys to represent them rather than on white attorneys that tribal governments or white friends engaged for them. Vine Deloria, Jr., executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, which helped tribes to fight termination, listened in 1966 to Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund describe its strategy in fighting judicial sanction for segregation in the courts and

364

Expanding Electorates

resolved to develop a national legal program for Indians; the next year he resigned to enter law school. After graduating he became chairman of the Institute for Development of Indian Law (1971), which began by publishing the texts of treaties and the proceedings of the councils where they were negotiated.¹⁰² The Native American Rights Fund (1970), briefly led by another young Indian attorney, John E. Echohawk, undertook research on land cessions and guided tribes in suits, some of which had substantial stakes. When Puyallup Indians gave up claims to land comprising the port of Tacoma and most of the industrial land in the city in 1988–90, they received land, trusts, and cash payments of $162,000,000.¹⁰³ Thus they and other tribes gained material bases and resources by which they might play distinct political roles in a third division of a national federal system coordinate with states. In addition to asserting their rights within what recently had been no more than white law, Native Americans moved further into systems of state and local government. By the middle 1960s they held legislative positions in six states. Many of these new politicians were attorneys, products of the postwar enrollment in law schools; some of them had sharpened their skills representing tribes in litigation. But few of those who went furthest confined their concerns to distinctively Indian causes. In 1991 an Idaho legislator, Larry Echohawk (Pawnee), became attorney general, the first Native American to win a state office; in 1994 he was Democratic nominee for governor. A Mormon, he represented values cherished in southeastern Idaho, where he had been prosecuting attorney of Bannock County (Pocatello). “My family is the realization of the American dream,” he said after his election in 1990.¹⁰⁴ The only Native American member of Congress at that time, Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne), from a district in western Colorado that was only 1 percent Indian before he moved to the Senate in 1993, was both personally colorful and generally conservative (switching to the Republican Party after taking his seat as a Democrat) as well as attentive to regional economic interests.¹⁰⁵ Alaskan Natives shared in the new political activism, building on earlier experience, although Native membership in the legislature declined with the Native share of the fast-growing general population, while stakes in government increased. Coming together in regional groups and drawing on support outside the state, Eskimos prevailed against challenges to traditional customs of hunting ducks (1961) as well as against plans to test atomic explosives near Point Hope, and Indians defeated a proposal to build an enormous hydroelectric dam on the middle Yukon at Rampart, which most politicians and leaders of business and labor favored. When the first state legislatures passed over rights of Natives in preparing to select public lands, villagers who previously had remained aloof

Expanding Electorates

365

from territorial and state politics came together for the first time and against greater odds. Organized in the Alaska Federation of Natives (1966), Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts joined forces with oil companies, which wanted titles defined to help them develop deposits on the North Slope, in campaigning for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971). By its terms they were to assume title to more than forty million acres of land—about a ninth of the area of the state and almost as much as in all reservations in the other states—and receive payments of nearly a billion dollars. To administer their new wealth they organized thirteen Native corporations, similar in most respects to orthodox industrial corporations, at least one of them, Sealaska, among the thousand largest in sales as well as resources, which became significant factors in Native community life. Native leaders who came forward during the struggle to influence the United States government were natural candidates for corporate offices; in turn they brought their corporate experience to electoral politics. Although friction developed between corporations and traditional Native authorities and among corporations, first the danger of losing their patrimony and then the responsibility of administering it and assuring that the Settlement Act would be enforced prompted political unity and activity as among few minorities anywhere. Most Native legislators were or had been officers of the corporations. Voting in outlying areas increased sharply in the first years of statehood, in 1958–68 by 92.6 percent among Eskimos, who in some villages had not voted at all, and became more effective as voters and officeholders gained experience.¹⁰⁶ Women moved into politics at still different rates and rhythms and against different obstacles. Until 1917 the only states and territories where they could vote were far western, beginning in Wyoming (1869) and Utah (1870), and when Congress proposed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919 the only far western states and territories where they could not were Hawaii, Nebraska, New Mexico, and North Dakota,¹⁰⁷ while east of the Missouri River they could only in New York (1917) and Michigan (1918). In most western states and territories, as in states of the Northeast and northern Middle West, women voted in school elections before they won full suffrage (by 1889 in all but California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Washington). Election to school boards and as superintendents of schools followed. “It is no longer a matter of much comment for a woman to run for an office in Kansas,” the reporter on the progress of suffrage in the state wrote in 1885, when a seventh of county superintendents there were women.¹⁰⁸ Once fully enfranchised (and sometimes earlier), western women won elective office earlier and more commonly than women elsewhere. They were the first elected to their legislatures (Colorado, 1894), to statewide office (North

366

Expanding Electorates

Dakota, 1892), and to Congress (Montana, 1916), and the first who served as an elected governor (Wyoming, 1925). The most conspicuous and influential woman officeholder early in the century was Kate Barnard, commissioner of charities and corrections in Oklahoma 1907–15, an impassioned and eloquent social worker who, with equal effectiveness behind the scenes and on the lecture platform, drew support from labor unionists, farmers, and clubwomen. An officer of a national child-welfare organization, who advised Governor Woodrow Wilson to seek her help in his campaign for the presidency in 1912, called her “the most consummate politician in Oklahoma.”¹⁰⁹ More than anyone else the architect of provisions in the state constitution affecting labor and welfare and of social legislation adopted in the first years of statehood, she led the Democratic ticket in 1907, over eleven years before she and other Oklahoma women could vote in general elections. Yet women in offices that carried more political power were still exceptional. In the half century after Jeannette Rankin became first woman member of Congress as representative from Montana in 1917, western states had more women members than the rest of the country relative to population, but the total was only twenty; of those, four served only nominally, averaging three months in office, by appointment pending special elections to fill vacancies, and three others began service by appointment or special election after their husbands died. Although Miss Rankin had six women colleagues in the House from other states when she returned for a second term in 1941, she was again the only woman member from west of the Missouri River; there was no other until 1945.¹¹⁰ By the end of the half century, in the Eighty-ninth Congress, 1965–67, there were six from the Far West, eight from other states (5.0 percent and 1.9 percent of all members); the numbers changed slowly until they jumped from eight and fifteen in 1991–93 to twenty-two and twenty-seven in 1993–95 (15.2 percent and 6.9 percent). Women in state legislatures also increased slowly. As late as the mid-1970s, of the thirty-five western legislative houses (the legislature of Nebraska being unicameral), three were all male and only thirteen had more than five women; California had more black than female legislators, as it had more black representatives in Congress. By 1993, when women averaged 20 percent of state legislators nationally, they were over 26 percent in seven western and three New England states, leading in Washington, at 38.1 percent, though lagging in Oklahoma, at 9.4 percent, forty-seventh, as in the South; they also were lieutenant governors in two western states of a total of four, attorneys general in three of a total of four.¹¹¹ Wyoming pioneered again, as it had pioneered in allowing women to vote, when Nellie Tayloe Ross became first elected woman governor in 1925, but she

Expanding Electorates

367

Fig. 11.5. Kate Barnard, Oklahoma reformer. Kate Barnard, commissioner of charities and corrections in Oklahoma, gained considerable attention as a reformer more than a decade before women could vote nationally (1920). She was the first woman in the country to be elected to a statewide office. Photo courtesy Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman. Ferguson Collection, #202.

had no western successor before Dixy Lee Ray, governor of Washington 1977–81; Governor Ray and Ella T. Grasso, governor of Connecticut 1975–80, were the first women elected in their own rights. (Mrs. Ross was elected a month after her husband died in office; in Texas Miriam A. Ferguson [1924] became surrogate to her husband when the legislature impeached, convicted, and disqualified him,

368

Expanding Electorates

Fig. 11.6. Jeannette Rankin of Montana, western politician. Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first female member of the U.S. Congress in 1917. Serving one term as a congresswoman, she voted against U.S. entry into the First World War and supported selective feminist measures. Reelected in 1941, she also voted against the Second World War, becoming the only member of Congress to vote against both world wars. Photo courtesy Montana Historical Society, Helena. PAC 87-103 F6/8. Photograph by National Photo Co., Washington, D.C.

in Alabama [1966] Lurleen B. Wallace to hers when according to the state constitution he could not succeed himself.) Kay Orr in Nebraska became the third western woman governor in 1987, Joan Finney in Kansas and Barbara Roberts in Oregon fourth and fifth in 1991, of a total of seven then serving nationally.¹¹² Women also were slow to become legislative leaders: in 1989 two western state legislatures had woman presiding officers and four had woman majority or minority leaders of four and nine nationally.¹¹³ The uneven record of women’s candidacies for office corresponded to patterns of resistance to woman suffrage. Like private and nonpolitical employers who first considered women for responsibilities outside the home that seemed compatible with traditional female roles in nurturing and homemaking, voters and politicians seemed to distinguish between public offices that reputedly called for the kind of temperament or experience that men were more likely to have and

Expanding Electorates

369

those that did not. When most western schoolteachers were women, well beyond national norms, but general western populations still predominantly male,¹¹⁴ and when school administrators were not far from the classroom in training and remuneration, election of female superintendents easily followed. Women schoolteachers were acceptable as administrators after education became professionalized; this was especially true as long as most professionally trained teachers were graduates of normal schools and most normal-school students were women. Nearly a third of county superintendents in California at the beginning of the century were women,¹¹⁵ a decade before women could vote, although formal standards were higher than in other states. North Dakotans elected a woman as state superintendent of public instruction on the Democratic ticket in 1892, twenty-eight years before women voted in general elections; her successor was the Republican woman nominee at the next election.¹¹⁶ Such choices did not immediately prepare voters to accept women in offices closer to the mainstream of politics and to stakes larger than those of pedagogy (although a woman state superintendent in New Mexico, Georgia Lusk, went to Congress in 1947).¹¹⁷ In Oklahoma voters made clear that they intended otherwise, restricting all offices but the commissionership of charities and corrections to men in the state constitution and until 1942 rejecting proposals to remove the restriction.¹¹⁸ Kate Barnard showed no interest in suffrage, saying that “the boys” had “always done what she asked them to do without her needing any vote for herself,”¹¹⁹ although her influence ran out when she tried to get not merely legislative appropriations for her charges but also protection from speculators who wanted land that belonged to Indian orphans.¹²⁰ Most of her successors were men. Soon after the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, women began to win other statewide offices occasionally and even customarily in other states, particularly offices with housekeeping functions and without histories as stepping-stones to political advancement: from 1927 state auditor in Arizona, from 1923 secretary of state in New Mexico.¹²¹ But educational administration as a whole became less accessible as principals and superintendents commanded larger salaries and budgets and as voters and school boards expected school systems to develop major athletic programs; often these administrators were former athletes and coaches with degrees in physical education. Western woman state superintendents fell to one in 1964, down from four in fewer states a half century earlier; at seven in 1991 they were fewer than secretaries of state (ten) and treasurers (fourteen).¹²² Women advanced slowly in general local politics after early successes, beginning with clerical or routine administrative duties: for example, in 1873 as county clerk and recorder of deeds in two Kansas counties. For many years few

370

Expanding Electorates

took their candidacies seriously where much was at stake. Less than two months after the Kansas legislature authorized women to vote in municipal as well as school elections in 1887, Susanna M. Salter, a leader in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, became mayor of Argonia. Her election followed an attempt by opponents of a Republican temperance slate to defeat it by printing tickets with her name in place of the name of the candidate for mayor; party leaders responded to the ruse by persuading her to run, and she won by a large majority. By the end of the century Kansas had elected fifteen other woman mayors, all in small towns.¹²³ Sponsors of an all-woman ticket elected at Kanab, Utah, in 1912 intended only to amuse, and the candidates ran without proposing to challenge traditional sexual roles or to go further in politics. “As you have no doubt heard,” Mayor Mary W. C. Howard wrote in the Improvement Era, journal of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association, as they completed their terms, “our election was intended as a burlesque, and we all treated it as a joke and had no idea of qualifying, but the leading men all insisted upon our doing so.”¹²⁴ Supporters of woman candidates in communities where politics were more serious business commonly argued that their temperaments and domestic responsibilities fitted them for municipal office generally as well as for schoolteaching and educational administration, sometimes precisely because the managers of municipal political machines conducted their business in quite unfeminine atmospheres of saloon and poolroom camaraderie. The first woman mayor of a large American city, Bertha Knight Landes of Seattle, had moved into municipal politics from leading roles in city and state women’s clubs, which in Washington as in other states had become major seedbeds in progressive public policy as their members occupied themselves with what reporters called altruism and proposals for “sociological” legislation.¹²⁵ When Landes was elected in 1926, a county grand jury had recommended that the city council impeach the incumbent, Edwin C. Brown; as president of the council and acting mayor while he was out of town, Landes had focused attention on political corruption by removing a controversial chief of police. Attracting nonpartisan support on a broad platform featuring a proposal to administer government through a city manager, she promised to enforce the law and to “support the moral and welfare projects in which women [were] primarily interested”; the voters gave her a large majority over Brown but rejected the city manager system. As mayor she lectured on “Municipal House,” saying “the city is only a larger home.”¹²⁶ But although leading civic organizations, the Central Labor Council, and the major Seattle newspapers endorsed her for reelection, a dark-horse candidate new to politics displaced her by a record-breaking majority. The “fickle public,” a reporter for

Expanding Electorates

371

Fig. 11.7. Bertha Landes, western municipal leader. Bertha Landes became the first woman mayor of a large U.S. city when she was elected mayor of Seattle in 1926. Photo courtesy Museum of History and Industry, Seattle. SHS 2344.

the National Municipal Review wrote, “seems now to have concluded that the office can be satisfactorily filled only by a man.”¹²⁷ Portlanders elected a woman mayor, Dorothy McCullough Lee, by a large majority in another interval of reform in 1948 after scandals in the police department, giving her nearly three times the vote of the incumbent.¹²⁸ At that time many cities had women clerks and treasurers, but among American cities of Portland’s size, only Sacramento had a woman mayor, whom members of the city council had chosen from their own membership and to chiefly ceremonial responsibilities.¹²⁹ A practicing attorney, Mayor Lee was almost unique, another Oregon woman politician noted, in admitting that she was not a very good housekeeper or cook. Although she had been elected seven times to the state legislature since 1928, she was the first woman member of the Portland city council when appointed in 1943. Her advancement was so much a novelty that although the two daily local newspapers supported her, they sometimes gave more attention to her hats than to her ideas; the Oregon Voter urged its readers to “vote for the courageous little woman!” Like Mrs. Landes, she appointed a

372

Expanding Electorates

new chief of police who vigorously attacked gambling and prostitution; she unsuccessfully advocated the city manager system, the city council refusing to propose a new charter that she supported. Her constituents also apparently tired of reform; running for reelection in 1952, she lost to a member of the council who had opposed her programs and offered himself as “a man for a man’s job.”¹³⁰ The first woman mayor who served more than one term in a large western city was first elected in San Jose in 1974, when concern over political corruption again ran high and seemed to help women candidates.¹³¹ In 1978, when Dianne Feinstein as president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors became mayor upon the death of George Moscone, women mayors were still few while increasing in number along with other women elective officers—less than one in fifteen among mayors of cities with populations larger than 10,000 in the West against less than one in twenty-three in the rest of the country.¹³² (But unlike most others Mrs. Feinstein went on to higher office, winning a seat in the United States Senate in 1992.) In the early years of western suffrage a common explanation of it as of the generally elevated status and expanded roles of women in the West in other respects was simply relative scarcity—excess of demand over supply. The status of women rose with the ratio of men to them, the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross observed (1912), “until, in the inter-mountain States, where there are at least two suitors for every woman, the sex becomes an upper caste to which nothing will be denied from street-car seats to ballots and public offices.”¹³³ But as time passed, the more striking correlations seemed to be with social traditions, including those imported from other sections: at the extremes from the Northeast, where movements for suffrage, temperance, abolition, and other causes developed together and reinforced each other and where women pioneered in employment for pay apart from domestic service, in textile mills and in public schools, and from the South, where feeling that women’s place was in the home was stronger and persisted longer and opportunities for women outside it were fewer. Bias against suffrage was especially strong and persistent in Oklahoma, most southern of western states. Alice May Robertson, who became the second woman member of the United States House of Representatives when Oklahomans elected her in 1920, had been president of the Oklahoma Anti-Suffrage Association into the same year, and she continued to dissociate herself from feminists on most issues while asking women to support her once they had the responsibility of voting. “I was opposed to suffrage,” she wrote in an advertisement during the campaign, “because I loved my home life and I think that is a woman’s sphere.”¹³⁴ In the words of the author of a major contemporary study

Expanding Electorates

373

of women’s activities, she was “hostile to all the measures in which organized women had been interested,”¹³⁵ denouncing the Sheppard-Towner bill for the care of women and children, which President Harding had recommended, as “German paternalism.”¹³⁶ Emigrants from European countries, where female spheres were most exclusively domestic and where alcoholic beverages were important in diet and culture, feared that enfranchised women would challenge such traditions. Reports of the fight for suffrage that leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association published abound in dark allusions to the backwardness of foreigners, referring primarily to those from continental Europe, and of the lower classes along with the machinations of brewers and distillers. Cities with beerand wine-drinking immigrant and laboring populations often were at best late converts to suffrage, their women slower to move into politics than the wives and daughters of immigrant members of the Nonpartisan League and other farmers’ movements.¹³⁷ “Women’s suffrage and prohibition go hand in hand,” the Bismarck Staatsnanzeiger warned (1913); suffrage was “a social and economic disaster which threatens the livelihood of the family.”¹³⁸ The workingmen of Oregon divided almost evenly on suffrage (1912), apparently justifying the cautious strategy of Abigail Scott Duniway, who for years had warned eastern suffragists affiliated with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to stay out of her state.¹³⁹ Yet sexual and ethnic minorities sometimes worked together despite traditional concerns. While enough immigrants opposed suffrage as a general proposition to invite nativist attitudes among suffragists as well as among prohibitionists, many immigrants supported individual women politicians, especially those who advocated social legislation where labor was strong. Likewise, although leaders of the most distinctively western and proletarian branch of the labor movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, were slow to concede parity to women, class solidarity sometimes overrode rather than reinforced ethnic heritage.¹⁴⁰ Thus Jeannette Rankin, whom an Anaconda editor called “a rabid Socialist of the IWW type,” had substantial support among the miners of Butte when she ran for the Senate in 1918;¹⁴¹ she almost carried Silver Bow County, a Democratic stronghold, against Thomas J. Walsh, the popular Democratic incumbent, four years after it rejected woman suffrage.¹⁴² Western Socialists joined enthusiastically in several state campaigns for suffrage while easterners only grudgingly seconded the party’s endorsement.¹⁴³ Western Populists in states with substantial laboring and immigrant memberships had endorsed suffrage while Republicans still opposed it.¹⁴⁴ Workingmen who had fought alongside women in Populist and Socialist campaigns in the 1890s and early 1900s did not need help from

374

Expanding Electorates

their betters in transcending traditional ethnic views of sexual roles. In some states they supported suffrage and such women candidates as Kate Barnard and Jeannette Rankin quite independently of the clubwomen who dominated the principal suffrage organizations in years when their agenda for reform had not yet extended beyond attacks on urban political bosses, and the liquor dealers who often were their allies, to include programs of social legislation. In Washington the pioneer suffragist Laura Hall Peters had come to the Populists from the Knights of Labor.¹⁴⁵ But the decorous leaders of the Washington Equal Suffrage Association expelled May Arkwright Hutton, whose “profane and obscene language” offended them as she campaigned in the raucous style of the miners she had cooked and washed for in the Coeur d’Alenes before she and her husband bought a share in a silver mine.¹⁴⁶ She went on to gather both the votes and the money of unionists, scorning more fashionable audiences.¹⁴⁷ In later years members of different ethnic groups sometimes sought political representation and influence more separately from each other and from feminists than unionists and suffragists had done early in the century. Unlike Irish, Italian, and German working people, who had had the common experience of emigration from overseas and often common membership in church and labor union, black and Mexican westerners for the most part did not even have time to explore their manifold differences before they became active rivals for employment and for help from government. Nor did either group have traditions of seeking women’s rights comparable to those of German and other European socialists, or the hard political sense that helped Irishmen to accept the votes that their wives and daughters could contribute to common causes. More than the moderates whom they hoped to displace, Black Panthers took for granted that their own males would dominate their movement and black society, and so seemed at first to diverge hopelessly from the new feminism. Yet like other black women, woman Panthers soon asserted themselves, challenging male domination at a conference of Panthers at Oakland in 1969.¹⁴⁸ They did not feel forced to break away as woman members of the predominantly middle-class white New Left of the 1960s did. (“We women were not leaders and were usually not taken seriously,” a veteran of white differences at Berkeley recalled, describing the “sexism of the white males who were the leadership of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS].”)¹⁴⁹ By the mid-1970s nearly a fourth of black officeholders in California were women, well above the ratio of women among white officeholders. More than half of these were in education rather than in positions more conventionally preparatory for political advancement,¹⁵⁰ but one of the most successful black candidates for higher office was Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, United States representative (1973–79).

Expanding Electorates

375

As the Far West entered its second century as an organized part of the American political community, within the frameworks of territories and states, political change had accelerated rather than subsided. The changes associated with advancement from territorial to state government, which ten of the eighteen states achieved between 1889 and 1912, seemed climactic to early historians and orators, comparable for politics to the construction of their last major railroads in the 1880s and 1890s for economic development, but changes that followed soon overshadowed them. New rivals to old parties appeared, and old parties transformed themselves in the quarter century after the admissions of 1889–90 and 1896: groups that had not defined and asserted collective political interests beyond matters that affected them most immediately gained strength after the admissions of 1907, 1912, and 1959. Some of these had seemed paradoxically to enter the general political arena in order to defend their right to live outside it in some respects: most signally, religious and national groups whose members had seemed to fear losing themselves in the larger American community as much as others feared that they would adulterate it. Some reconfirmed their distinct cultural and political identities while establishing their memberships in broader economic, cultural, and political systems, as if the two gave new life to each other. Most unexpectedly, Indians, who simultaneously moved beyond the stage of subsistence agriculture—for which neither their traditions nor the resources that whites left to them equipped them—to embrace commercial and industrial opportunities, assumed active roles in state and national politics and maintained their tribal culture and tribal political system. In the course of developing new variants in American federalism, the region contributed variously to change in national political balances and in the quality of politics elsewhere. Western socialists and progressives seemed to be most advanced in the first two decades of the century, when the California historian H. H. Bancroft said that Theodore Roosevelt was forerunner to Hiram Johnson as John the Baptist was to Jesus Christ.¹⁵¹ Then the West deferred to the East for the political initiatives of the New Deal (while brief afterclaps of socialism in California and Washington alarmed the New Dealers), but in turn the forelopers of the New Left and of the new ethnic politics as well as Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan came out of the far western sunbelt, advocates of old age and of youth, the most strident critics of big government, and the most voracious consumers of governmental subsidies, sometimes in the same persons. If western components of the federal system were approaching lasting equilibrium, they did not clearly foreshadow it.

12

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity: The Variously Far West

When Europeans first ventured long distances overseas, beyond the coastal waters and continental shelves where they had gone to fish and trade, across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Pacific, they hoped to find enough to justify the costs and risks of going, ideally some of the gold, gems, and spices that were the most concentrated forms of wealth they knew. Plundering the treasures of the Aztecs and Incas encouraged Spaniards to try to match them in another Mexico, another Peru. But when, shortly after overrunning central Mexico, they probed parts of what Anglo-Americans later called the Far West to the north, what they saw was so unpromising and the hazards of going were so great that they were slow to look further in that direction, concentrating rather on denying others footholds in it. Taking more than half a century to occupy New Mexico after first inspecting it, they waited nearly two centuries more to occupy Upper California, until foreigners came too often into what had been a Spanish lake. Then they did so without enthusiasm, supposing that returns from garrisoning it would not justify the costs, and never established much more than what amounted to a chain of lightly manned advance-warning stations along the coast. Although in time more newcomers came, distance and accommodation to distance long continued to define the Far West for all Europeans and for most Americans not of Native stocks. Much of its history for them was one of changing access over distance, at first chiefly external distance, distance from where they were and had been. Initially the best that many of them hoped to find there was a waterway through to Asia and the Indies, shorter and easier than the long, dangerous route around South America. Europeans first reached the Pacific Coast of North America overland from the Mississippi Valley more than two and a half centuries after they first went by sea, which terrain and climate made the more

376

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

377

practical route for decades afterward. They were still slower to find anything in the interior that seemed worth the trouble of taking it out, and not merely because, like all of the Americas, it was far from home. Geographical features that outsiders needed to establish themselves were many and conveniently close together on the eastern side of the continent, scarce and inconveniently far apart on the western: safe anchorages, navigable rivers, negotiable mountain passes, sources of wood and water. Most potential ports of entry that qualified in some respects fell short in others. San Diego Bay, the only protected harbor north of Baja California that Spaniards knew for over two centuries, commanded little hinterland. Crossing the bar of the Columbia River, principal navigable stream beyond it, at first seemed too dangerous to be practical over much of the year. The inland waterways off the straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia offered far larger and more protected anchorages than those found in Nootka Sound, where Britain and Spain contested claims in 1789–90, but like the mining camps that sprang up along the South Platte River in what prospectors called the Pike’s Peak country in 1858–59, most ports in the Pacific Northwest flanked mountain ranges that long afterward challenged railroad and highway engineers. The purposes of foreigners who prompted Spain to occupy Upper California in the last third of the eighteenth century and then displaced her there focused increasingly on commerce, which had been a decidedly secondary consideration for Spaniards once they found gold to carry away. By the time most of the Spanish Empire broke up between 1821 and 1826, British and Anglo-American merchants regularly frequented its outer reaches in western North America, at first chiefly to gather furs to sell in European and Asian markets. Beginning as an unforeseen dividend on the last exploring expedition of Captain James Cook when it crossed the Pacific Ocean from the Northwest coast to Kamchatka in 1778, trade in pelts of fur seals and sea otters was one of the first of successions of European capitalist enterprises in the Far West. Surpassing their Spanish predecessors in the arts of naval architecture and navigation, Anglophone shipwrights and sailors rapidly reduced the authority of old limits of distance. Nine years before Cook’s men reconnoitered the West Coast, Spaniards had taken 110 days to bring the founders of Upper California from La Paz, on the Gulf of California, to San Diego Bay, pressing the limits of physical endurance for some of them. Americans reduced time by sea between the two coasts of the continent, about fifteen times as far, from eleven and a half months in the Columbia in 1787–88 to eighty-nine days in the Flying Cloud in 1854. But travel by land, competitive with travel by sea from the middle of the nineteenth century, soon surpassed it in most respects. Time required, most of it west of the Missouri River, dropped from more than two years by pack train,

378

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

keelboat, and canoe in 1805 to twenty-three days by railroad train and stagecoach in 1858, seven by rail alone in 1869, three in 1936, seven hours by air in 1959. The profits that pioneer traders made prompted others to follow, both to trade and to develop the bases, outposts, and systems of transportation that trade depended on. Soon after, some of them building a city on San Francisco Bay as promising speculation in the infrastructure of intercontinental commerce found gold on the American River, others went far beyond it, and in greater numbers. Whereas fur had drawn hundreds, gold drew thousands, markets for goods and services that gold miners wanted thousands more. The fever for riches that propelled Spaniards over and beyond both Americas within about two decades after they first landed on the mainland revived at full intensity three centuries later. But while it spread with little regard to differences in nationality and social system, some of the most enterprising and in the long run most successful latter-day adventurers came from commercial economies that prepared them to invest in opportunities other than those of gathering treasure trove. Improvements in transportation opened some of the principal new undertakings, especially when those that the natural bounty of the land attracted stayed to develop it instead of merely carrying away the most portable forms of it. By the nineteenth century, systems incorporating the more elaborate and ambitious of them often had social as well as economic uses, carrying passengers faster and more comfortably than those that served chiefly for raw materials, and with them ways of life as well as goods on which life depended. The distances that most settlers in the older Middle West had come from their old homes closer to the eastern seaboard were so short that in most respects they lived much as their forebears had lived two or three decades before. Moreover, they easily kept in contact with families and friends they left behind. But distances to and within the Far West were so great and costs of moving so high that they lost heavily in associations and amenities that they could not easily replicate in new communities. The high value they placed on mail from home described their losses and priorities. Railroads soon justified much of the optimism of those who promoted them. The Far West developed on the basis of trade by rail after the first lines began operating across it between 1869 and 1909, much as the Old Southwest and the central West had developed on the basis of trade by water after the United States acquired the mouth and right bank of the Mississippi River in 1803. With few exceptions, the parts of it that developed most were along and near newly laid track.

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

379

Fig. 12.1. Distances in the West. Eye-stretching distances and undulating mountain ranges and valleys illustrate some of the physical challenges westerners met in attempting to connect the diverse subregions of the West. The male figure to the right, with his feet dangerously dangling over a steep precipice, is dwarfed by the wide-canvas backgrounds stretching out to the horizon. Photo courtesy Western Historical Collections, Denver Public Library. Mcc 1419.

The builders of the first transcontinental railroads at first assumed that they were not likely to collect revenues from traffic in passengers and freight proportionate to their costs. Rather, they counted on profiting first by exacting subsidies from national and local governments and by manipulating their finances, hoping later to collect tolls on goods they carried on American segments of transoceanic routes between Europe and Asia, if not to extend their systems into other hemispheres. But by the 1880s and 1890s, as changes in weather justified pioneers and promoters in challenging conventional images of a Great American Desert separating belts of potential farmland along the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, railroad companies interested themselves more than before in territory they crossed. Reducing prices on land that early settlers had passed by, they sought at once to sell more of it, to maximize income from opera-

380

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

tions, and to improve on their reputations for heavy-handed arrogance in both public and private affairs. Recognizing that returns on freight promised to be greater from crops than those from livestock, while building more trunk lines between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Coast railroad companies also laid more track in branches along them. By 1920, with slightly over a seventh of national population (14.6 percent), the Far West had nearly three-tenths of national railroad mileage (29.3 percent), far western lines accounting for nearly two-thirds of the increase since the depression of the 1890s, with new settlement and investment clustering along them. Those that built to and along the Columbia River between 1883 and 1909 tapped stands of timber that pioneer lumbermen had only sampled as long as they could reach no farther above tidewater than oxen could drag logs along skid roads. They also crossed deep, rich loams and, with other transcontinental lines, irrigable deserts more promising for agriculture than the gravelly shores of Puget Sound. Counting on revenues from potential cropland, they recruited farmer-colonists and developed what amounted to agricultural extension services for their benefit. Like express companies that maintained effective police forces to guard shipments of gold that they took from the “diggings,” and like the government of the United States in some of its early western jurisdictions, they assumed responsibilities commonly left to public authority in settled communities. Development was especially substantial in two quite different parts of the West that Europeans had neglected for centuries after first inspecting them: the Pacific Coast and the high plains. It followed even more closely on improved access by rail on the plains than on the coast, where Anglo-American merchants and miners had preceded large numbers of farmers. Responding to the inducements of colonization departments of railroads and territorial and state governments and of the assorted speculators and promoters who thronged along newly laid track, settlers soon occupied most unclaimed arable land in Kansas and Nebraska and moved into parts of Montana, the Dakotas, and Oklahoma that greater-than-normal rainfall between 1904 and 1920 made productive beyond previous expectation and that railroads made accessible.¹ North Dakota became the fourth western state in rate of increase in population in 1900–10, after Washington, Idaho, and Nevada; Montana was second in 1910–20, after Nevada only, and first in numbers and area of homestead entries. Before Europeans found gold on the western and then eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada in the middle of the nineteenth century, they had concentrated first along the Rio Grande del Norte and the Santa Cruz in New Mexico (including the future Arizona), then

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

381

along a narrow strip of coastal California between San Diego and San Francisco, later the Willamette River in Oregon and near the Great Salt Lake. But by 1900 they were rapidly filling much of what had once seemed an irreducible gap between the Middle West and those parts of the Far West. Although pioneer settlements along the coast and in the Southwest and offshoots from them had grown at more than national rates, as a group they had only about 27 percent of the population of the eighteen states, eclipsed by movements into the interior from the 1860s, at first chiefly into Kansas and Nebraska, then westward beyond them. Continuing demand justified some railroads in maintaining elements of immigration and colonization departments past the Second World War.² In that time and still more later, the term “Far West” meant less as costs of going west in time, money, and comfort declined; more people stayed when they went; and westerners along with other Americans outnumbered the easterners whose point of view it represented. By 1930 the eighteen states exceeded the population of the entire country on the eve of the industrial takeoff of the 1840s, by 1990 over two and a half times. Reaching parity with both the Northeast and the Middle West by 1978, westerm states remained behind only the South, and behind it by declining margins.³ The center of national population promised to move from Missouri to Kansas early in the twentieth-first century. Changes in language showed how numbers who went west and the frequency of their going and staying devalued the undertaking: from “Far West” for everything beyond Indiana around 1830, when going there from the East Coast by steamboat, canalboat, and stagecoach took more than two weeks,⁴ to simply “West” for the mountain and Pacific divisions in reports of the United States Census half a century later. As improving transportation eroded regional differences in numbers where physical distance once had isolated new communities from older settlements, it also eroded regional differences in condition. For the most part, developing specialized economies corresponding to their distinctive resources did not cut westerners off from changing tastes and habits: because they were different enough from other Americans as producers to warrant exchanging what they produced, they had opportunities in the course of the exchanges to become more like them as consumers. Growing when producers everywhere were refocusing on national markets, and when railroads both delivered the goods that they demanded and provided or facilitated services that supported demand, from advertising to wholesaling, western communities incorporated some of the newest and most visible fruits of national marketing faster than established communities elsewhere. The result was that Main Street was everywhere before it declined every-

382

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

where. “The city streets in Atlanta, Seattle, and Jersey City are much alike,” a sociologist who had lived on both coasts wrote in 1936, “with the same types of shops, electric signs, and advertisements of cigarettes.”⁵ Often taking hold most rapidly and visibly where systems of transporting goods and passengers expanded, the new nationalization of American culture depended heavily on services that developed with them. Sometimes it was most effective where it operated most indirectly, reaching scattered communities through nationally syndicated journalism and entertainment as well as national advertising. Traveling salesmen served as advance agents of the “latest out,”⁶ as a journalist called them, sporting current fashions and telling current jokes as well as carrying sample cases and order books on their rounds, but performers from New York theaters and music halls played similar roles as they circulated more visibly in more persuasively glamorous settings. When theater operators added motion pictures to the vaudeville acts that they booked through national circuits and motion picture producers moved from New York to southern California and used it as a backdrop, they further leveled folkways by preparing easterners to imitate the West as well as westerners to imitate the East. Well into the twentieth century such importations continued to reassure westerners that by improving transportation they could develop their states and communities over broad fronts, reshape them into what civilized communities should be. Yet they repeatedly found that they needed much more, and especially in territory between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains where for half a century, from the Civil War until the First World War, buffalo and cattle range had become cropland along advancing railroads. Carrying more goods and passengers more efficiently over greater distances than were negotiable for practical purposes in most of the West before they came, railroads and their successors both assimilated the populations of territory they crossed into more homogeneous national patterns and sorted out their components. Settlers used them to reach kindred spirits who lived as they did as well as to share the profits and pleasures of those who lived otherwise. Mormons gathered at Oakland as well as Salt Lake City, Mexicans at Omaha as well as East Los Angeles. Sometimes Indians went to the world beyond their national homes to safeguard themselves from it, adopting tools of Euro-American jurisprudence and politics to defend cultural values that missionaries and bureaucrats had tried to eradicate. As new and expanding forms of transportation varied more in conditions and components, they also varied more in effects. Early in the century they reshaped the West over large areas less clearly and for a few years more slowly than during

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

383

the previous century, when clipper ships, steamships, and railroads reconfigured a continent. Through the First World War automobiles defined only marginally where and how people worked and lived, in West or East, although westerners bought and used them more than other Americans. Far from fearing competition from them, railroads encouraged communities to improve public roads and their residents to trade and travel over them. Even those that had most aggressively sought to maintain and extend their authority had no regrets when, losing business to people who drove their own cars and trucks, they discontinued passenger service, first by rail over short distances in thinly populated areas and on electrified branch lines and affiliates, then in all forms everywhere. Many of the rail lines had never been profitable except insofar as they attracted newcomers who bought railroad land and depended on railroad freight, many towns laid out along new lines not growing enough to justify replacing original basic station buildings.⁷ Airplanes seemed still less threatening for at least as long. Even on scheduled routes, which extended as far as from the states to Hawaii and Alaska only in the 1930s, pilots stayed as close as they could to the help that railroads made available, so routinely taking their bearings from tracks that they called them the iron compass. By the 1920s automobiles and trucks and the roads they used were visibly revolutionizing how Americans built their houses and cities and took their leisure, and because much of the West grew faster than other parts of the United States, more and sooner there than elsewhere. But they changed western human geography, what people came west and how they distributed themselves, as much as railroads had changed it earlier only from the 1950s, when for the first time most American families owned cars and routinely depended on them. Whereas the Second World War revolutionized much of American industry, military demand requiring enormous increases in capacity in major sectors and over widely distributed areas, and suddenly advancing some beyond experimental and incipient stages, apart from prompting the army to build the Alaska Highway, the war affected civilian transportation mainly by deferring normal improvement and maintenance while burdening local systems especially beyond normal capacity. In consequence, when President Dwight Eisenhower proposed a network of interstate and defense highways (1956), intending that it would serve chiefly to move military convoys rapidly over long distances well beyond central cities in times of similar demands, local and regional public authorities preoccupied with accumulated current and local problems instead favored concentrating the most extensive and expensive construction within metropolitan areas. But far from relieving urban congestion, freeways so designed soon compounded it

384

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

as industrial and commercial complexes and residential subdivisions metastasized around their intersections and in their interstices, and at rapidly escalating costs. Outside of Alaska and Hawaii, society grew around air transportation somewhat later, after aircraft manufacturers that had reserved output for military demand during the war gradually developed civilian markets after it. Flying jetpropelled planes coast-to-coast in seven hours by 1959, airlines rapidly attracted most medium- to long-distance passenger traffic from obsolescing railroads that had not improved much on the three-day transcontinental schedules they introduced in 1936. Domestic passenger travel by air, one-seventy-fourth the volume of travel by train in passenger miles in the 1930s, exceeded it in 1958 and approached ten times as much in 1970, when American railroads abandoned nearly all their remaining passenger service beyond a few metropolitan commuting areas to the new National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak). The consequences soon ran well beyond shifting traffic from old common carriers to new. As airlines attracted increasing volumes of traffic at schedules and fares that made casual travel over long distances practical,⁸ more of the West sold services rather than goods, and to rapidly growing markets. Parts that had been among the slowest growing and the least likely candidates for development grew beyond scales that ships, railroads, and automobiles permitted. When New Yorkers flew to Las Vegas to gamble and attend the entertainments that hotel and casino operators offered over weekends, southern Nevada developed as spectacularly as southern California had grown after tourists began going there by railroad to escape eastern winters, and without comparably broadening its economic base. Different forms affected developing urban areas quite differently: main line railroads concentrated population within reach of natural resources on which most western economic activity had depended, electric trolley and interurban lines and still more automobile highways and airline systems dispersed it. But such differences appeared so late and at first so gradually that at least into the 1950s advocates of central cities welcomed all emerging varieties, seeking airports as eagerly as their ancestors had sought railroad terminals and joining automobile manufacturers and truckers in persuading Congress and federal and state highway departments to design freeway systems to carry traffic both between them and within them. Events proved some right and others wrong beyond previous experience. Las Vegas and Honolulu became fourth and fifth of western metropolitan areas in numbers of airline passengers when they were twelfth and fifteenth in population,⁹ personal services being the principal forms of employment in Nevada and Hawaii in place of mining and sugar planting

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

385

Fig. 12.2. Salt Lake City airport. Burgeoning air travel and new airports helped shrink the distances separating the oases population areas of the West. The Salt Lake City airport, as well as that in Denver, became important connections for travelers in the interior West. Photo courtesy Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. #01118.

and refining. The tourists who went there could not have gone in such numbers when going still took longer than most of them stayed when they went by plane. But in redefining urban life, freeways destroyed urban neighborhoods and the authority of major urban institutions. The experiences of two counties in California that at different times led the state in rate and volume of growth and became the two most densely populated in the West illustrate some of the diverse returns on expanding systems of transportation after the Second World War. San Francisco was already the largest city in the Far West when the United States acquired it and the rest of California in 1848. Feeding on the commerce that it attracted by commanding the best harbor on the coast and then becoming terminus of the first railroad from the Middle West, it remained largest and in most senses the principal western city for more than two-thirds of a century. Before the Second World War it still led northern California in both population and employment, much of its labor force commuting daily from the five nearest counties, whose populations altogether were about half again as large. Then, in half a century, its five neighbors grew to over

386

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

six times its population, while commuters filled freeways for a hundred miles around. In the same half century Orange County, which had begun as rural and suburban adjunct to Los Angeles, grew over seventeen times, becoming the second most densely populated county in the state, after San Francisco, and third most populous, after Los Angeles and San Diego. Recognizing the opportunities that changing transportation presented, the Irvine Company and other entrepreneurs that dominated it had capitalized on space as well as position, first raising cattle and oranges when railroads tapped markets for them in populous urban areas, then dividing pastures and orchards into planned residential communities as demand increased and developing amusement parks at interstices of freeways by which tourists converged on them. In that time commuting in Orange County had changed along with densities of population and differences in costs of land: first on electric trains from suburbs to central Los Angeles, then still more in commuters’ own cars from adjoining counties to commercial and industrial developments in fashionable coastal communities. Tract houses, shopping centers, and laboratories and factories based on new technology replaced orange groves there as completely as they had replaced prune and apricot orchards in Santa Clara County; they fell short still more of coming to focus in a central city.¹⁰ Pioneers had long foreseen most of the arable contiguous West becoming as productive, populous, and prosperous as parts of the country that Europeans had settled earlier and doing it in similar style once improved transportation reduced barriers of distance to manageable effective proportions. For many years, from the middle of the nineteenth century into the first third of the twentieth, their expectations seemed justified as large expanses once called desert fit for no more than the most primitive uses of nomadic populations yielded not merely satisfactory but superior returns in agriculture. For more than half a century after the United States took title to most of the high plains by buying Louisiana from France in 1803, it remained range of North American buffalo or bison, its only human inhabitants nomadic Indians who hunted them and a few Indian and white trappers along rivers that drained it. Then, soon after the first railroads came, the northern plains claimed what promised to be a lasting place in national and international agricultural productivity. In contrast to regions that within a few years depleted the natural resources on which their economies depended—the topsoils of the southeastern piedmont, the pine forests of Wisconsin and Michigan, the placers and lodes of the Sierra Nevada and Alaska—they and the plain of the Columbia River maintained and even improved their leads among wheat and grain producers, displacing most of the older Middle West and South as national and international breadbasket. Railroads distributed town

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

387

sites at midwestern intervals along new track as if expecting traditional market towns to serve the uses of traditional family farmers on them. Pacific Coast and to lesser extents mountain states sometimes offered such varied alternatives more than plains states, both because their climates and terrains extended more into eastern, midwestern, and European ranges and because their newcomers tended to bring wider ranges of experience as producers and of demand as consumers with them. Prospectors in the Sierra Nevada paid gratifyingly high prices for beef from southern California and fruit from the Willamette Valley long before San Francisco and Denver presided over regional markets that foretold possibilities of selling still more diverse outputs at greater distances. In the outer reaches of the interior West, agriculture developed both later and along ranges that tended to narrow rather than expand, as often proved possible and profitable beyond early expectations both farther east, where terrain and climate were more like those of the older Middle West, and farther west, along the Pacific Coast. Crop farmers soon specialized in what they could raise most efficiently to maintain their competitive edges and cover their costs, with crop farmers in the higher, drier northern plains taking the lead in wheat as they succeeded trappers, hunters, and prospectors after the Civil War. Harvests increased about seven times over the century from the 1890s to the 1990s.¹¹ States that had grown more in population and grown more wheat as late as the 1870s and 1880s deferred to Kansas, North Dakota, and Montana. Once such specialized economies got under way, like the systems of transportation that they developed around them tended both to exact larger prices than farmer-settlers had expected and to perpetuate themselves. Selling at a distance, which farmers typically had to do to find markets large enough to absorb their harvests, biased them toward doing it through middlemen whose commissions compounded burdens of charges for freight, interest, and assorted services that they had to absorb by selling more. It further biased them toward concentrating on standardized varieties of a few crops and other products with established markets that their intermediaries were accustomed to handle in large and interchangeable quantities. As an economist observed (1975), North Dakota, whose range of marketable products was one of the narrowest and whose distances from potential markets were among the greatest, was like a developing nation in relying “upon a few export commodities and thus the world price for those commodities for its economic well-being.”¹² But unlike most of the developing third world, it had no cheap labor with which to produce them. Therefore farmers had to lower their unit costs to competitive levels by mechanizing and otherwise rationalizing production, which usually meant increasing it much beyond

388

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

scales of traditional farming closer to markets. Farmers’ investments in land and improvements on the plains averaged substantially more than in older states, in North Dakota by two-thirds more than in Minnesota, over twice as much as in Missouri.¹³ Their investments in machinery and equipment were highest in the country.¹⁴ Thus building on their advantages in growing hard winter wheat, which seemed especially suitable to the terrain and climate and which many of their immigrant pioneers had known in eastern Europe, they satisfied the bankers, dealers, elevator operators, and shippers with whom they dealt, who had specialized in wheat as creditors no less than they had as debtors. Their common interests as well as their experience biased them against diversifying into alternative crops; they could not easily raise others on the land and with the equipment that they had bought. Although as long as weather and markets sustained them in paying off their debts they were nominally independent operators, in some years racking up substantial incomes, both in scale and in the control they maintained over their own destinies they had lost the freedom of the homesteader no less than most of those who worked in gold, silver, and copper had departed from that of the prospector. While differing enormously over time in technology and specific uses, the systems of transportation that linked the West with other parts of the world remained remarkably constant in some of their larger economic effects, railroads and initially freeways maintaining the processes of exporting raw and semiprocessed materials and importing finished goods that dominated western economic life since times of trade by clipper ships. Although some entrepreneurs moved highly capitalized operations over greater distances than the planters who left the eroded red clays of South Carolina and Georgia for the black loams of Alabama and Mississippi a century before, especially those who dealt in exhaustible natural resources, systems of production tended to be less mobile than final products. Frederick Weyerhaeuser began operating in the Cascades only when he and others had both used up the forests of Wisconsin and Michigan and reduced costs enough to compete in midwestern markets, the Guggenheims shifting to the riches of the Chitina Valley when they had reduced the low-grade ores of Bingham Canyon to tailings. Ships, trains, and planes brought wider cuts of goods than of conditions of the farms and factories that produced them. American production of consumers’ durable goods other than those of greatest bulk and lowest value still concentrated where it had developed around nineteenth-century systems of transportation and sources of raw materials and labor forces. Long after freight rate schedules no longer favored eastern and midwestern suppliers and after westerners became many and rich enough to support wider ranges of local and regional industry, they continued to import goods they

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

389

might have made for themselves, including the automobiles that they used and lived around more than other Americans.¹⁵ The prospects of most of the rural interior West took shape and reached equilibriums more fully and rapidly than those of areas developed along lines traditionally associated with urbanized parts of the Northeast and older Middle West. After it got improved transportation, much of it remained as unpromising as the area between the Missouri River and the Sierra Nevada called the Great American Desert had seemed when the government saw no better use for it than as reservations for Indians when whites wanted their more desirable land. Twenty years after railroads penetrated expanses of central Oregon that promoters called the “last homestead frontier in America,” the geographer Isaiah Bowman found only nineteen houses and shanties occupied of seventy within 135 miles east of Bend.¹⁶ Ten central and eastern Oregon counties comprising over half the area of the state averaged under four persons to the square mile in 1990, three that comprised more than a fourth averaging under one and a half. Four counties had fewer inhabitants than in 1910, when most of them had only recently arrived, while the population of the entire state had increased about eight times. Large areas never justified the hopes of their pioneers. Those who had prospered most were promoters and merchants who took toll of newcomers while prudently reserving their own resources. Many settlers realized so soon that they could raise marketable crops only briefly if at all that they retreated without making substantial commitments on claims shamelessly touted as equal to the best wheat and fruit land in the West but that under the most favorable conditions could produce marketable crops only briefly if at all, and then little more than alfalfa and hay. They were fortunate in having no memories of good times to persuade them to stay. Yet some farmers had fared better there than in Alaska, where commercial crop-farming and stock-raising had never been much more than stage properties cultivated for rhetorical uses even while demand for farm products increased with general population. Population leveled off and declined more slowly over Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, and parts of Montana and Wyoming, which had grown faster than the Pacific states and the rest of the mountain states together and continued to surpass them in major branches of agriculture. Losing the momentum that expanding railroad systems and rising prices for beef and wheat had sparked and sustained through the First World War, the northern plains regularly exported excesses of births over deaths. By 1980 the populations of the Dakotas were smaller than they had been in 1930. Kansas and Nebraska never again grew so fast as in the 1880s. Emigrants exceeded immigrants in Nebraska after 1890, in Kansas and the Dakotas after 1910, and intermittently in other states: in Alaska

390

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

SeattleTacoma PACIFIC OCEAN

CANADA PACIFIC NORTHWEST

Boise

Sacramento San Francisco/ San José

ROCKY MOUNTAIN

Reno GREATER CALIFORNIA

Omaha

Salt Lake City Denver

Kansas City

Las Vegas Los Angeles San Diego PACIFIC

Albuquerque Phoenix Tucson

OCEAN

Tulsa Oklahoma City

IMPERIAL TEXAS Dallas-Ft. Worth El Paso

Population distribution 1990 Census 50,000–200,000 200,000–500,000 500,000–1,000,000 1,000,000–5,000,000 >5,000,000

San Antonio

Houston

MEXICO

Fig. 12.3. Population growth in the recent West. Population growth patterns in the recent West, for the most part, replicated those of the early twentieth century. The Pacific and southwestern rims of the West expanded with new floods of newcomers, and the interior West lagged behind. Most of the immigrants moved to the West’s cities rather than its rural areas. Map by Bill Nelson.

1900–20; Nevada 1910–20; Utah 1910–40; Oklahoma 1920–60; Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming 1920–70; and Wyoming again 1980–90. In the 1960s, 376 of 538 counties in the five high plains and three plains and mountain states had lost population, 228 even in the 1970s, when all states gained and demographers talked of the end of the long movement into cities, as they did again in the 1990s.¹⁷ Densities of rural farm population over much of the plains fell to as low as they had been when whites first came there to stay.

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

391

The most rural counties of these mostly rural states, where railroads most recently had displaced hunters and gatherers for cattlemen and then cattlemen for crop farmers, lost most sharply, some counties in the Dakotas almost as much as those in the high deserts east of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada. By 1990 density of population in over half the counties of seven states had dropped to the ranges of less than six to the square mile by which reporters of the census once had identified marginal areas inhabited chiefly by scattered hunters, prospectors, stock raisers, and farmers on the poorest tillage.¹⁸ Settlers successively gained and lost most in western counties of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas that earlier farmer-migrants had passed over for decades. Outsiders spoke of these and other parts of the plains as throwbacks to times before white settlement, “relics of the American frontier” whose proper destiny was to revert to grassland, to exchange cattle for buffalo, antelope, and prairie dogs.¹⁹ Whereas North Dakota had gained population by net migration over the forty years before 1910 faster than any other western state, nearly three times as fast as California, over the next forty years it lost more by emigration, with South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas following in ranges that had been more typically southern than western.²⁰ Although areas of cropland and land in farms over the entire state remained about the same, and unbroken sod fell chiefly to scattered remnants along fencerows and in cemeteries and conservation projects, population on farms had declined by nearly five-sixths since the 1920s, from over three in five to about one in twenty-two, numbers of farms by over half. In sixty years, 1920–80, forty-three of fifty-five counties had lost population, thirteen of them by more than half. Some were hard put to staff and support county governments. Many of the European Americans as well as most of the Native Americans in them barely subsisted. Rural poverty—at rates that in some counties were over three times rates for both state and nation—no longer was a transitional phase accepted as price of economic opportunity but a lasting condition. A journalist writing (1995) that what remained of human settlement in the rural Great Plains was a federal welfare project asked, “Is North Dakota necessary?”²¹ After the First World War it became, according to two of its historians, “synonym for desolation, backwardness, and exile to much of the rest of the United States,” “the eternal twilight zone.”²² While by the 1930s rural and especially rural-farm population declined throughout the Dakotas and other plains states, urban population increased both in those that had diversified substantially into manufacturing and miscellaneous services distinct from agriculture and in those where a few essentially unprocessed staple crops still dominated exports and led regional economies. The largest increases in population through the second half of the century were

392

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

in and around the largest cities. By 1990 over two-fifths of North Dakotans lived in metropolitan Fargo, Bismarck, and Grand Forks (over a fourth within their city limits, against less than one-fifteenth in 1900), two-fifths of Nebraskans in metropolitan Omaha and Lincoln, three-fifths of Kansans in metropolitan Wichita and Kansas City. Some such farm-belt metropolises did more business than their shares of state populations suggested, drawing customers and employees across state lines: Fargo and Grand Forks from Minnesota, Omaha and Sioux Falls from Iowa. Small towns in most rural counties no longer promoted and invested in their rural hinterlands. The principal residents of many were retired people, their most active businesses no longer banks and real estate agencies but nursing homes and mortuaries.²³ Over the Far West as a whole, population concentrated most of all in the largest metropolitan areas of the most urban states. By 1970 almost half of it was at least close to where Europeans had first settled before many of them proposed to farm rather than trade or mine. Despite sharp increases in the mountain states and in the interiors of California and Washington, counties on and near the Pacific coast led in rate of growth and in numbers of principal cities.²⁴ California again led the region. Adding nearly a sixth more inhabitants than the seventeen other westernmost states combined over ninety years, it soon overshadowed them almost as much as during and just after the gold rush of 1848–49. Its share of regional population rose from 17.8 percent in 1900 to 47.1 percent in 1970, 48.5 percent in 1990, more thereafter. It had about changed relative positions with the five easternmost plains states, which dropped from 48.4 percent to 13.8 percent.²⁵ Likewise, the predominantly urban coastal counties increased their leads within the state. Those that had had two of three resident Californians in 1900 had five of six in 1970, three of four in 1990; shortly after the first rushes to the mines (1860) they had had fewer than two of five. Los Angeles County alone had more than twice the population of Washington, next most populous western state; in 1900 it had outnumbered only six of the eighteen. The city of Los Angeles overtook Portland, Seattle, Oakland, and San Diego in the 1880s and 1890s, San Francisco, Denver, and Omaha in the twenty years following, moving from fourth to first western city. By 1990 it was second in the nation, no longer ridiculed for annexing open country as it staked out boundaries that its promoters proposed to fill in later but as densely populated as most large cities in the East and Middle West. Omaha, which once had seemed to have more solid prospects in the railroads that converged at it and the stockyards and packing houses that they fed, had become a solid forty-eighth by developing a new economic base in insurance and other financial services. Advocates of western cities, often especially the most western of them, continued to promote access

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

393

and service for them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries much as in the nineteenth, although returns on new systems of transportation that promised to transcend limitations of waterways and railroad tracks often became more uncertain as their costs increased. Along with a vastly expanded aircraft industry, new industries based on semiconductor technology were by-products of research that expanding uses of aviation in the Second World War originally had justified. Once military demand had brought production and prices of microelectronic and micromechanical components of systems of aerial detection and fire control to levels where civilian uses were economic, manufacturers could renounce the umbilical cord of guaranteed profits that suppliers chiefly of military matériel often relied on. Further, when civilian versions of military transport planes made air freight more widely available and at lower cost, the miniaturization that had recommended semiconductor technology in warfare and prepared for civilian economies of information rather than of goods made cheap bulk transportation much less important for economic development than it had been for centuries. Some of the most innovative and profitable new enterprises clustered in regions where traditional resource-based industries had developed before the war—food processing in California; mining and smelting in Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico; fishing and milling wood products in California, Washington, and Oregon—and in the cities that presided over them, others where newer footloose industries based more exclusively on high technology had looked rather to concentrations of scientists and engineers around the universities that trained them and the residential and recreational amenities that they valued.²⁶ As the Danish economic geographer Sven Ileris noted of shifts to service economies in general, when much of the West depended on information and the technology of providing it rather than ultimately on natural resources, increasingly jobs came to men rather than men to jobs.²⁷ When Los Angeles became first and principal railroad terminal of southern California in 1882–85 and thus natural shipping point for citrus packers and destination for immigrants, San Diego in the main had resigned itself to housing tourists, invalids, and pensioners. Seeking to improve on the seasonal and cyclical traffic that they brought, by the 1940s and 1950s it parlayed its popularity as home port for naval officers into complexes of installations for the navy, Marine Corps, air force, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Enterprises that served them led its economy through the 1980s. But as military contracting declined thereafter, employment in aerospace industries falling by about two-thirds, industrial counterparts of research at the University of California at San Diego and at institutes and laboratories that clustered around it

394

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

seemed more promising harbingers of growth. By the 1990s journalists compared Sorrento Valley, alongside the university campus, where pioneers in networking concentrated, to Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley).²⁸ A Committee on the City of the Future passed over proposals of long standing to replace the municipal airport, favoring instead a regional fiber-optic grid to serve enterprises organized around information (1993).²⁹ When cities in Orange County considered how they might best use land that the Marine Corps vacated for a regional airport (1996), an attorney who specialized in problems of industries based on advanced technology recommended similar strategies of development to make the county “a digital port for the world.”³⁰ The Santa Clara Valley and the systems of connecting it and other parts of the West with their markets represented such shifts in 1997 when civic and industrial leaders of Palo Alto, site of the “farm” of Leland Stanford, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, combined resources to make it the highest-capacity switching point on the digital Internet. “Bandwidth in the late 1990’s,” one of its planners proclaimed, “is important for commerce in the same way that railroads were important in the 1890’s and seaports were in the 1790’s.”³¹ After failing to get permission to discontinue the trains on which it carried commuters along the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco, the SP abandoned the line to the state Department of Transportation. By that time, information technology, comprising both computing and telecommunications, had become in various senses the leading industrial group in the West as over the country,³² and the most promising new enterprises valued access to systems of transporting their materials and products less than access to universities that trained and amenities that attracted and held their skilled personnel. Some concentrated where most of their predecessors in manufacturing had processed yields of mine, farm, and forest, displacing sugar beets, grapefruit and melons as well as prunes, apricots, and grapes, although “research parks” after the example of Stanford University often failed to repay costs of developing them. Moreover, new types of industrial enterprises were not necessarily stabler than old for drawing more on technical expertise and for being limited less by distances from potential markets: some competed even more briefly as foreign manufacturers invaded American markets in electronic components and equipment as well as in automobiles, clothing, textiles, and processed foods. Although in some areas freeways carried traffic at posted speeds, notably over long stretches of the high plains, they aggravated and extended rather than relieved congestion of traffic within major metropolitan areas. They consumed central cities and converted farms around them into progressively more densely occupied industrial and residential suburbs and suburbs to suburbs.³³ And after

San Francisco

Silicon Valley

PACIFIC OCEAN

San Francisco Bay

101

880

Stanford University

Palo Alto

HewlettPackard

680

Mountain View 280

Los Altos

Sunnyvale

Intel Santa Clara San Jose 101

Apple Cupertino Campbell

200–1000 workers Over1000 workers

880

Fig. 12.4. Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley area of California represented the rapid and far-reaching influences of the new computer and other technological industries on the recent West. This quickly expanding industrial park was located south of San Francisco and near the Stanford University campus. Map by Bill Nelson.

396

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

airlines captured much of the business of interurban buses and passenger trains, they found that large aircraft could not stop profitably at minor airports and stopped serving them, leaving entire states practically without common carriers. Returns on transportation in both new forms and old could be especially uncertain where development had seemed most to hinge on it. Yet the opportunities and prospects of individual farmers and ranchers on the plains were much more limited than those on earlier frontiers of European settlement. Their returns fluctuated widely, especially in westernmost counties first homesteaded and planted when a few years of heavier-than-normal rainfall briefly coincided with high prices, shortly before they gave way to long interludes of drought, and where distance from markets and its consequences as well as extremes in weather leveraged fixed costs.³⁴ When demand declined, shipping and processing charges, taxes, and payments on debts could easily consume returns of stock raisers and crop farmers who typically had committed themselves so heavily as to price themselves beyond the means of newcomers to whom they might have sold their equities in better times. Agricultural staples, and especially those of subhumid high plains states, were like minerals in that factors no one could foresee chiefly determined demand and price. But accommodating to change was far easier and more effective in mining than in agriculture. Whereas mine operators might limit losses by reducing or suspending production when profits declined, preparing to operate more efficiently when they improved, fixed costs of farmers, including expenses of keeping livestock alive and fields arable, were so heavy and markets so unpredictable that they could far less easily tailor output to demand. Although in declining markets they might not recover even costs of shipping, often they could not anticipate that when they planted crops and bred livestock; and terrain and climate limited alternatives to products, such as small grains, whose markets fluctuated most, even for the rare operators who could cover costs of converting to them. Therefore they tended to raise customary crops at customary levels, depressing prices further. Moreover, unlike pioneers who had supplemented their incomes by working on neighbors’ farms or new railroad lines, in areas already brought under cultivation and equipped with basic infrastructures of transportation and distribution, most farmers had no such opportunities even if they could spare time for them. Despite evangelistic predictions that new pioneers on reclamation projects would combine the economic prospects of homesteaders in the older Middle West and the social prospects of twentieth-century suburbanites in more benevolent climates, their situations and those of dry-land farmers soon converged. In contrast to pioneer hog-and-corn farmers on well-watered land along navigable

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

397

rivers who could be self-sufficient at least temporarily on the bases of their own labor, like wheat farmers on the plains, most orchardists and truck farmers in reclamation country depended heavily on intermediaries to achieve economies of scale and to sell in distant markets. Lemon and lettuce packers and shippers could be as highly capitalized and well organized as millers and grain elevator operators, and no more amenable to the interests of small producers for being nominally cooperative. The vacant lots where immigrant Japanese families raised berries in and around coastal cities through the 1930s vanished long before Vietnamese and Cambodian farmer-immigrants came in the 1970s, while expanding suburbs displaced both citrus growers on the coast and those few operators who found small plots near cities in the central valleys of California. Mechanical harvesting extended from wheat to rice and cotton, then prunes and tomatoes, displacing both hand laborers and operators too small to buy complex machinery. Irrigated farms averaged larger than some other categories of land holdings after the Second World War instead of smaller as often before the First.³⁵ Few owners were new, and still fewer by far were family farmers who had ascended the traditional agricultural ladder. Principal operations were more highly capitalized, especially where grazing and dry farming recently had dominated, as in western Kansas and on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. Whereas operators on well-managed projects who used water prudently ordinarily maintained yields, others, such as those who in effect wagered that they could recover their investments before rising prices of power and declining supplies of ground water put them out of business, were as vulnerable to forces beyond their control as conventional growers who relied on rainfall. The narrowing of opportunity in agriculture was as evident in the changing origins and ages of residents of farming states as in their burdens of debt. In 1900 North Dakota had been more foreign born than any other state, at over a third of general population, over half of adult population. Moreover, the countryside was more foreign born than the cities, entries for homesteads varying with immigration before the First World War as in the previous century.³⁶ An agent of the North Dakota agricultural experiment station who stopped overnight at farmhouses on a month-long field trip across the state in 1916 reported that only three households were “American”; in one where both parents were native born, none of their four children spoke or understood English.³⁷ But by 1990 the Dakotas had the smallest fractions of foreign-born population outside the South and barely exceeded the smallest fractions there. Only Wyoming and Vermont had relatively more Hispanics and Asians. All over the West, as elsewhere, the foreign born concentrated in cities much more than the native born,³⁸ and although foreign-born farm operators were newsworthy

398

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

everywhere, they appeared more often in coastal than in interior states: French viniculturists preparing to retreat to the Willamette Valley if phylloxerae drove them from the Loire; Moravian Anabaptists frugally accumulating the price of land for new colonies in eastern Washington after increasing beyond capacities of their ancestral homes in South Dakota and Alberta.³⁹ Populations of both Dakotas had been among the youngest; by the middle of the century they were the oldest, while those of the most rural counties were substantially older than those of the most urban. New farmers there and elsewhere over the plains typically were heirs of former owners if they were not corporations, more commonly moving up the agricultural ladder by marrying than by saving and investing. But because established farmers absorbed much of the land that came on the market and then retired later in life after investing more in equipment and improvements, opportunities for all newcomers were fewer as well as less affordable. Opportunities for immigrant and native-born minority newcomers in urban areas, where most of them gravitated even within the most rural states, were at once more varied, more numerous, and more limited after the Second World War than before the First. Recent immigrants still concentrated around coastal cities that had been gateways from abroad and especially from Asia since the California gold rush, but they also scattered more widely over the interior: in the Dakotas first-generation Germans and Scandinavians had declined but Latin Americans increased. Southeast Asians and Latin Americans in rural as in urban areas had to meet higher requirements for employment than most of their European predecessors, sometimes competing less with them than with native-born Americans. Many of them could not easily break out of cultural and economic ghettos even when they wished to assimilate to the culture around them. In the last decades of the century, opportunity varied especially widely where industries based on natural resources had developed on new scales from the 1870s into the 1900s. Whereas some miners, smelters, and refiners gleaned lowgrade ores previously passed over, leaching them for smaller particles, others turned their backs irrevocably on operations that they had found or designed to be terminal or abandoned for more lucrative returns on their capital, Kennecott dismantling both the railroad to the mines on the Copper River and the bridge it ran over, Arco shutting down the pumps at the Berkeley Pit. The transformation of opportunity became graphic over the last third of the twentieth and early twenty-first century in mountain and high plains country, where a century before it had promised fortune and adventure in ranching and mining. When the news broadcaster and advertising entrepreneur Chester R. Huntley (“Chet” to his audiences on television) retired to Montana in 1970, he and his partners planned not to restore elements of the rural West he had known

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

399

as a boy but to develop complexes of residential properties and assorted rental accommodations with over ten thousand beds in a semiprimitive area within the Gallatin National Forest northwest of Yellowstone National Park, whose residents had lived by logging, grazing, and dude ranching.⁴⁰ Big Sky, Montana, Incorporated, eclectically incorporated appeals for assorted experiences, variously scaled and priced: from the mystiques of wilderness and representations of its traditional uses to skiing and other transplants recently grafted onto them, whether for sport, high fashion, or spiritual renewal. Huntley and other entrepreneurs counted on capitalizing on fast-growing interest in the more scenic parts of the mountain West, sometimes invoking traditions of pioneering but more commonly counting on changing tastes in sport and fashion. Much of their clientele spilled over from national parks, which attracted so many visitors after the Second World War that by 1953 one of their leading advocates proposed closing them to save them.⁴¹ Generally on less ambitious scales, promoters in towns left stranded when extractive economies declined tried to export atmosphere instead of ores and logs, in effect exchanging losses in residents for gains in visitors. Converting abandoned stores and hotels into museums and curio shops became endemic from the Badlands of South Dakota to the Mother Lode in California and the Lynn Canal in Alaska. Other prophets who recommended the more georgic charms of small towns in thinly populated areas of the northern plains⁴² and eastern Oregon occasionally attracted refugees from the pressures and prices of fastermoving areas to them as residents rather than tourists, but seldom enough to change the general prospects and character of an area as in parts of the Southwest and the mountain and Pacific states with milder climates and more marketable settings. Designs on outsiders to reinvigorate faltering economies went back as far as the 1870s and 1880s, when droughts and floods wiped out what remained of the livestock that had been the principal resource of southern California since Mexico inherited it from Spain and new overland railroads seemed unlikely to become the land bridges to Asia that their builders had counted on. But although local color could be marketable, returns on relics and images of the past varied widely. Tourists often were more interested in riding on surviving fragments of narrow-gauge railroads than in spending much time at what remained of the mining towns they had served. Butte celebrated its past by reconstructing a pioneer placer mining camp, although its mines had yielded so much over so long and promised to yield so much more that it stood out less for its simple beginnings than for the substantial headframes and other structures that survived from later and more industrialized phases of development on the surface⁴³ and

400

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

for the mansions that its copper kings had built there as well as in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. It also capitalized on its mineral legacies by mining on a small but profitable scale, applying new technology and nonunion labor to ores that Atlantic Richfield had abandoned, and by attracting the most expensive Superfund project in the country and major installations in environmental research when the Environmental Protection Agency addressed pollution accumulated at and around tributary mines and smelters over the last century.⁴⁴ But from being the largest far western city north of Denver and east of Seattle in the first decades of the century, Butte fell to fourth city of a state whose first city was smaller than Butte may have been at its peak. In the main, historic sites that could develop recreational uses found them far more profitable than their historical significance or symbolism. First enlisting widespread interest in the United States when the winter Olympic Games went to Lake Placid in 1932, skiing moved west on commercial scale four years later when Averell Harriman, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, opened the resort in southwestern Idaho that he called Sun Valley. He established it not where the trains that served it stopped, at Ketchum, which had grown up around a huge lead-silver smelting mill and then become largest western shipping center for sheep, but on a sheep ranch with more room for development nearby; the resort and the traffic it attracted owed nothing to the Wood River mining district around it but the branch line of the railroad that the mines had justified. A Chicago businessman, Walter Paepcke, showed the possibilities of trafficking in more assorted outdoor vacations just after the Second World War by adopting Aspen, west of Leadville across the Sawatch Range, which had barely survived as county seat and post office for dude-ranchers after silver mining declined in the 1890s. Building on beginnings in skiing from shortly before the war, he refurbished Victorian residences and a picturesque hotel to accommodate visitors. Then he imported high culture in the low season, putting it on display in a Goethe bicentennial celebration (1949) and institutionalizing it in the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (1950), where corporate tycoons discussed great books, and in festivals of music and theater. But the Paepckes succeeded so well in broadening Aspen’s appeal that the crowds it attracted overwhelmed their priorities. A film company bought the skiing enterprise; the institute retreated to settings more congenial to its purposes, moving headquarters to rural Maryland and summer seminars to southeastern Colorado. (“It’s become a town of glitz and glamor,” Mrs. Paepcke told a reporter, “no substance, a nut without a kernel.”⁴⁵ As incomes and prices of residential real estate in Pitkin County rose to highest in the country in the 1990s, doctors, dentists, and lawyers as well as resort employees drove thirty miles out of town for affordable housing.⁴⁶ Park City,

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

401

southwest of Salt Lake City, had been important enough for its silver-lead mines in the 1870s to justify church officials, businessmen, and economic planners in making a railroad to it one of their principal projects.⁴⁷ Surviving the general collapse of silver mining in the 1890s as a major American producer, it maintained a reduced but steady residential life before vacationers and commuters discovered it in the 1960s. By the 1960s most ski resorts that drew traffic from beyond their immediate vicinities looked more to contemporary Alpine than to pioneer western American models; they aspired to be St. Moritz or Cortina d’Ampezzo rather than Last Chance Gulch. None built on American antecedents in winter sports, as in the rough-and-ready exploits of young forty-niners in the Sierra Nevada; establishing and operating a ski resort had become big business at the level of high fashion. With more claim to precedent for their enterprises in early saloon society as well as in the speculative temper of pioneer metal mining, for a few years after Nevada legalized gambling in 1931 casino operators at Reno and Las Vegas favored pseudo-western themes in their advertising and decor. But as their business became more competitive they embellished it with elaborately staged musical entertainment and architectural fantasy unrelated to the regional setting. Thus over a century after Americans climbed mountains chiefly to take away the pelts of beaver that perversely lived there or the gold and silver under them and to reach more habitable terrain beyond, others found height itself if appropriately supplemented and packaged could be both marketable and inexhaustibly so. Recreational enterprise in stock-raising country more variously capitalized on its natural setting and on some aspects of local tradition. In contrast to builders of early hotels and watering places near Colorado Springs who designed them after European models, ranchers took in boarders first to supplement income from selling beef cattle and then to replace it. By the 1920s the town of Jackson, south of Yellowstone Park, which had been post office and general store for such ranchers on the upper Snake River, was becoming gateway and resort for tourists, prompting John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to buy land nearby that later became part of Grand Teton National Park. By the 1950s developers were subdividing ranch properties in northern mountain states into units that they later called ranchettes or miniranches. Sales in the general vicinity of Big Sky in the Gallatin Canyon dated from 1947, accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s.⁴⁸ Although much larger than residential and commercial properties in ski resorts, most ranchettes were much smaller than was practical either for crop-farming or for stock-raising, typically five to twenty acres in terrain where a grazing unit for one animal was fifty acres or more, but as small

402

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

Fig. 12.5. Deadwood. This brightly lit, nighttime photograph of downtown Deadwood, South Dakota, illustrates the transforming power of tourism and the gaming industry on the modern West. What happened in Deadwood occurred on a much larger scale in Las Vegas and in alternative forms with casinos on Indian reservations. Photo courtesy City of Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission, Deadwood, S.D. PHO.2004.1035.1.

as one acre in agricultural land in the Bitter Root Valley of Montana.⁴⁹ A land economist predicted speculative profits in what he called penturbia succeeding earlier western urban and suburban development;⁵⁰ his best examples were in vicinities of large metropolitan populations, as where Denver spilled over into Douglas County. Few owners of small properties off paved roads and beyond convenient commuting range from urban centers occupied them after first frosts even in Colorado. Much subdivision changed patterns of ownership more than numbers and distribution of resident population and the structure and strength of regional economies, except insofar as some ranchers who retained enough of their properties to give tourist guests illusions of authenticity concentrated on entertaining them rather than on raising livestock. A century after what some had called the closing of the frontier, the Far West

Frontiers of Land and Opportunity

403

continued to grow and change. From the beginnings of American settlement, it had done both in ways that set it apart from the rest of the United States, including parts also called western in their time, and that set its own parts apart from each other. Most of its inhabitants had at least begun to think of themselves as residents rather than sojourners away from home, and yet like other westerners before them, many of them seemed ready in some sense to move on, whether to another part of the West, the world, or the immediate metropolitan area, watching the fortunes of the community where they slept and paid taxes on the whole with interest and hope but without committing themselves closely to it. Few of them had made hostages of themselves as farmers do to their crops and creditors; few of them could seriously expect to live by farming, as most Americans once had supposed they would, but over most of the Far West such expectations or lack of them represented less of a change than they had represented in the Middle West. Most of them west of Kansas had lived otherwise in the 1870s, when the government had only begun to give prospective farmers the homesteads it promised them in the Homestead Act of 1862. Those who went west later were many more than those who at any previous time had owned or worked on western farms. Yet the opportunities that they found were not wholly unlike those that their ancestors had found before them: often with prospect of larger returns than they might have found elsewhere but also of greater uncertainties.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

CHAPTER 1. THE WEST IN 1901 1. The number of square miles with two or more inhabitants fell from 1,947,000 to 1,930,000. Hope T. Eldridge and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Demographic Analyses and Interrelations, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, United States, 1870–1950, ed. Simon Kuznets, III, American Philosophical Society, Memoirs 61 (Philadelphia, 1964), 5. 2. Willard D. Johnson, “The High Plains and Their Utilization,” U.S. Geological Survey, Twentyfirst Annual Report, 1899–1900 (Washington, D.C. [hereafter Washington], 1901), 4:690; Charles Moreau Harger, “The Short Grass Country,” Harper’s Weekly 45 (January 26, 1901): 88. 3. William S. Rossiter, “The Decrease in Rural Population,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 34 (July 1906): 74. 4. Everett Dick, “The Great Nebraska Drouth of 1894: The Exodus,” Arizona and the West 15 (winter 1973): 342. 5. From 78,475 to 398,331 (including Indian Territory, from 258,657 to 790,791). Net migration into Oklahoma and Indian Territory, 1890–1900, 501,300; net migration into the three Pacific states, 1880–90, 505,500. Net migration from Nebraska, 153,900; from Kansas, 149,800; from Nevada, 5,100. 6. From 91,806 to 143,480. Increases occurred everywhere but in Nevada and Nebraska (in Nebraska the decline was from 323 to 230). 7. San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 1903, p. 33, col. 1. Norway and Sweden together had 7,357,918 inhabitants in 1900, the fifteen continental states and territories north and west of Oklahoma 7,348,860; Alaska had 63,592 in 1900, 64,356 in 1910, 55,036 in 1920, 59,278 in 1929. 8. Of the labor force in Hawaii, 62.2 percent was in agricultural pursuits in 1900, against an average of 27.3 percent in the mountain and Pacific states and territories (ranging from 20.6 percent in Colorado to 43.8 percent in Idaho), 53.9 percent in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas combined, 70.3 percent in Oklahoma and Indian Territory combined, 62.4 percent in Texas. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population (Washington, 1903), 2:cxxxv. 9. Robert Louis Stevenson to Adelaide Boodle, April 6, 1889, and to Charles Baxter, May 10, 1889,

405

406

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

Notes to Pages 6–11 in Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York, 1902), 2:175, 180. Ray Stannard Baker, “Wonderful Hawaii: A World Experiment Station, I, How King Sugar Rules in Hawaii,” American Magazine 73 (November 1911): 28–29. London, “My Hawaiian Aloha,” Cosmopolitan 61 (November 1916): 172. Herbert P. Williams, “The Political Situation in Hawaii,” Outlook 64 (April 14, 1900): 864. In 1910 Hawaiians and part Hawaiians were 45.8 percent of native and naturalized males of voting age, Portuguese 9.8 percent. Portuguese were 50.6 percent of all Caucasians in 1910, Caucasians 18.7 percent of the total population in 1900, 23.0 percent in 1910. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Population (Washington, 1913), 3:1159, 1169. Rodman W. Paul, California Gold: The Beginning of Mining in the Far West (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), 332–33. Alaska had 7,656 miners in 1900 (23.0 percent of persons gainfully employed); the rest of the Far West, excluding Hawaii, had 135,788 (4.3 percent). Colorado and California had 29,957 (13.7 percent) and 26,891 (4.2 percent), respectively. Arrell M. Gibson, “Ranching on the Southern Great Plains,” Journal of the West 6 (January 1967): 147. Joseph K. Howard, Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome (New Haven, 1959), 165. James C. Malin, Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas: A Study in Adaptation to Subhumid Geographical Environment (Lawrence, Kan., 1944), 3–5, 49–54; Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865–1900 (New York, 1966), 50–51, 122, 125. Statistical Atlas of the United States, Twelfth Census, 1900 (Washington, 1903), 36. In all, 436 counties gained population. The highest ratios of counties losing to counties gaining were in Colorado (15–40), Kansas (54–51), Nebraska (35–54), Nevada (7–7), New Mexico (4–10), North Dakota (14–38), and South Dakota (28–37). Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population, pt. 1 (1901), xxxviii–lvii; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1914 (Washington, 1915), 116–18. Water and Forest 1 (September 1900): 3. Willard D. Johnson, “The High Plains and Their Utilization,” U.S. Geological Survey, Twentyfirst Annual Report, 1899–1900, 4, Hydrology (1901), 690. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 1 (1902), 689. Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York, 1945), 5:359. Farms operated by owners increased from 128,237 in 1890 to 202,596 in 1900; operated by cash tenants, from 7,292 to 18,782; operated by share tenants, from 10,349 to 21,530. Although the rate of agricultural employment increased, and farm population declined in Kansas only, 1890–1900, farm population formed a smaller percentage of total population in the three Pacific Coast states and Colorado as well as in Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Twelfth Census of the United States: Agriculture, pt. 1, p. 689; Leon E. Truesdell, Farm Population, 1880 to 1950 (Washington, 1960), 14, 17. Available data do not indicate how many farms operated by owners (or for that matter farms newly homesteaded) were land that stockmen had used as part of the public domain, or how many tenants were former owners, how many former employees, as on large properties whose owners chose to decentralize operations. Net migrations were 214,200 to California, 205,400 to Washington, 1880–90.

Notes to Pages 12–16 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

407

“What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” Overland Monthly 1 (October 1868): 303–4. Mark Sullivan, Our Times, United States, 1900–1925 (New York, 1927), 2:261n. From 1.991 cents per ton miles (1879) to 1.166 cents (1889). The largest relative increases were in Oklahoma (392.9 percent), Washington (63.4 percent), Utah (42.0 percent), North Dakota (40.7 percent), and Montana (38.0 percent); the increase in Indian Territory and Oklahoma combined was 77.1 percent. California (at 32.0 percent) had the largest absolute increase, 1394.9 miles, more trackage than in eight others in 1890. Interstate Commerce Commission, Third Annual Report on the Statistics of Railways in the United States . . . 1890 (Washington, 1891), 13–14; ibid., Thirteenth Annual Report . . . 1900 (Washington, 1901), 12–13. Electric service was still slight in 1900 and chiefly local. Fruit shipments increased by 159.6 percent, 1890–99. California led in production of prunes, which increased 368.3 percent, 1889–99. Acreage in wheat declined by 5.5 percent, 1890–1900, while production fell by 10.6 percent. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 2 (Washington, 1902), 91–92, 305, 599, 605. Net migration into Oklahoma 501,300 and 44,500, 1890–1900 and 1880–90; Arizona 21,400 and 10,900; Idaho 39,800 and 34,200. Kansas (which had net migrations of 149,800 and 159,700 in 1890–1900 and 1880–90) and Nebraska maintained their populations in the 1890s only through natural increase, after having grown by 43.4 percent and 134.9 percent in the 1880s. Though California’s net migration was one of the largest in 1890–1900 (172,700), it had fallen enough (14.7 percent below 1880–90) to lower its rate of increase in population from 40.3 percent to 22.4 percent, only 1.7 percent above the national rate. Alaska, which became a territory only in 1912, nearly doubled its population 1890–1900, increasing by 98.4 percent; the population of 63,592 in 1900 was the largest until the 1930s. Rates of increase in population in all western states and territories were lower in 1890–1900 than in 1880–90 except in Arizona, whose rate increased from 47.4 percent to 68.0 percent. These figures and most of those preceding derive from those in the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, 1960), and from Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population, pts. 1 and 3 (Washington, 1901). Noting that near the end of the century only the Pacific and mountain states were still growing at more than national rates, George G. S. Murphy and Arnold Zellner point out the importance of “once-and-for-all investments” incidental to a new region’s growth. “Sequential Growth, the Labor-Safety-Valve Doctrine and the Development of American Unionism,” Journal of Economic History 19 (September 1959): 404–7, 410. The ratios were 141.7 and 142.0 to 100 in the mountain and Pacific regions in 1890, 128.0 and 128.2 in 1900. The ratios in the United States were 105.0 and 104.4 to 100. United States, 13.3 percent 1880, 14.7 percent 1890, 13.6 percent 1900, 14.7 percent 1910. Mountain and Pacific divisions combined: 28.3 percent 1880, 24.8 percent 1890, 20.7 percent 1900, 21.8 percent 1910. The Japanese of the mountain and Pacific divisions increased from 1,559 in 1890 to 23,376 in 1900, while the Chinese fell from 96,842 to 67,729. San Francisco had 25,833 Chinese and 590 Japanese in 1890 (combined, 8.8 percent of total population), 13,954 and 1,781 in 1900 (4.6 percent). Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Population (Washington, 1913), 1:212, 225. In the area of Diller, in southeastern Nebraska, percentages of names of inhabitants who had not

408

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

Notes to Pages 16–20 been there ten years earlier declined from 75 percent in 1879 and 81 percent in 1889 to 36 percent in 1899. Robert Diller, Farm Ownership, Tenancy, and Land Use in a Nebraska Community (Chicago, 1941), 38–39. Kenneth M. Sturges, American Chambers of Commerce (New York, 1915), 42–43. Charles D. Willard, History of the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles . . . (Los Angeles, 1899), 55. San Franciscans also assumed the expense of the city’s first street-cleaning system in 1893. George W. Doonan, Commercial Organizations in Southern and Western Cities (Washington, 1914), U.S. Department of Commerce, Special Agents Series, no. 79, p. 24. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Commercial and Agricultural Organizations of the United States (Washington, 1913), 62d Cong., 3d sess., S. Doc. 1109. According to a survey by the Department of Commerce, chambers and boards on the Pacific Coast stood out for promoting the consumption of locally made rather than eastern goods. Doonan, Commercial Organizations, 7. Doonan, Commercial Organizations, 20–21. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 1, p. xxxix. Ibid., 801. In ten of the sixteen states, values of farmlands and buildings per acre fell, 1890–1900. Thomas J. Pressly and William H. Scofield, eds., Farm Real Estate Values in the United States by Counties, 1850–1959 (Seattle, 1965). In the stock-raising states part of the increases in numbers of farmers reflected inclusion of ranches on the public domain not previously enumerated. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 1, p. xviii. The percent was 7.5 in the Pacific and mountain divisions, 0.2 percent in the four plains states and Oklahoma, which had 57.3 of far western land in farms, 68.2 percent of population on farms. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 2 (Washington, 1902), 820, 867; Historical Statistics, 458, 460. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 2, pp. 819–20. Irrigators increased from 54,082 to 108,218, about half as much as farms. In 1890–1900, 97,030 farms, an increase of 66.5 percent; 1880–90, 62,155, 74.2 percent; 1870– 80, 35,511, 73.7 percent; 1860–70, 13,548, 39.1 percent; 1850–60, 27,952, 416.4 percent. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 1, p. xvii; Census of Agriculture: 1954, General Report, Statistics by Subjects (Washington, 1956), 2:46.

CHAPTER 2. AGRICULTURAL FRONTIERS: NEW FARMS AND FAMILY FARMERS 1. 2. 3. 4.

James J. Hill, “What We Must Do to Be Fed,” World’s Work 19 (November 1909): 12226–54. Speech of J. J. Hill . . . at Helena, September 27, 1909 . . . (Helena, [1909?]), 2. James J. Hill, “The Future of Our Oriental Trade,” World’s Work 10 (August 1905): 6465–67. Richard J. Orsi, “The Octopus Reconsidered: The Southern Pacific and Agricultural Modernization in California, 1865–1915,” California Historical Quarterly 54 (fall 1975): 197–220. Farmers and farm laborers exceeded miners in California by over a fourth in 1870; they were still behind in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana in 1880. Population of the United States in 1860, Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census . . . (Washington, 1864), 34–35; The

Notes to Pages 21–23

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

409

Statistics of the Population of the United States . . . Ninth Census (June 1, 1870) . . . (Washington, 1872), 674, 682, 720–46. Los Angeles Board of Trade, Annual Report for 1887–1888, quoted in Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis, Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 68. Water and Forest 1 (October 1901): 2. On the Publicity Bureau, see the papers of William Bittle Wells (University of Oregon Library), who headed it. Wells had edited the Pacific Monthly (Portland), 1898–1906. The Southern Pacific had established Sunset (1898) to advertise its territory; it regularly published material that the bureau also distributed in pamphlets. On Sunset, see chapter 6. H[adly] W. Quaintance, The Influence of Farm Machinery on Production and Labor, Publications of the American Economic Association, 3d ser., vol. 5, no. 4 (New York, 1904), 35. The gain in those fourteen states was more than three-fifths the loss in other states outside the South. Farm population in the sixteen territories and states increased by 46.4 percent in 1900– 35, in the rest of the country by 2.1 percent; number of farms by 69.0 percent against 11.2 percent, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 458. In the years 1894–1904, +94.7 percent; 1904–14, +91.1 percent; 1914–19, +109.3 percent. The price of wheat rose from $.49 to $.98 and $2.19. Historical Statistics, 511–12. Percentages of owner-operated farms mortgaged were higher in western states than in the rest of the United States, 1890–1910, especially in plains states, but declined significantly, as did the ratio of debt to value. Average equity per farm over the West as a whole rose well above the national rate, 1890–1910, most of all in the northern plains states (declining in Oklahoma). Donald C. Horton, “Number and Percentage of Farms under Mortgage,” Agricultural Finance Review 1 (November 1938): 48; Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Agriculture, 1909 and 1910 (Washington, 1913), 5:161–62, 167. “Ideal Country Life for Working People,” Harper’s Weekly 96 (September 13, 1902): 1295. Agnes C. Laut, “Harvesting the Wheat, IV, The New Spirit of the Farm,” Outing 53 (October 1908): 1, 4–5, 7. Phyllis H. Winkelman, “Fairview: Home of William Jennings Bryan,” Nebraska History 5 (spring 1974): 143–44. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population, pt. 2 (Washington, 1902), cxxxv. In 1900, 28.8 percent of employment was in agriculture in the mountain states, 26.1 percent in the Pacific states, against 35.7 percent nationally. Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier, Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York, 1945), 358–59. The increase in numbers of farms in the Far West, west of the Missouri and Red rivers, 1850– 1900, was 32.2 percent of the total outside the South (739,000 of 2,293,000); of the far western increase of 739,000, 67.8 percent was in the five plains territories and states (501,000 of 739,000) and 70.8 percent in the last two decades, 1880–1900. The Pacific division led the Far West in both numbers of farms and area of farmland in 1850 and 1860; but by 1870–90 Kansas and Nebraska alone had more farms than the eleven mountain and Pacific territories and states beyond, in 1880 and 1890 Kansas alone, although California had a larger area in farms, and the plains territories and states led in both categories until they fell behind in area of farmland after 1920. Historical Statistics, 458–60. By 1982, as farms in the northern plains states decreased cata-

410

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

Notes to Pages 23–24 strophically and farms in all other far western states but Washington increased (Oklahoma by 0.36 percent, 286), the number in the five plains states together barely continued to exceed that in all other far western states, although the northern plains states were far ahead of western and national averages in percentages of farms with sales of $10,000 or more; more than half of farms exceeded that amount only in those four states and in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, their numbers ranging down to as few as 18.9 percent in Alaska, 34.5 percent in Oregon. With 2.4 percent of the population of the United States in 1980, the five plains states had 12.5 percent of the farms, 16.2 percent of the farms with sales over $10,000; the eighteen states had 22.6 percent of the population, 25.0 percent and 28.0 percent of the farms. 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1984), 134–40, 264–70. Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, 1904), 94, 104; Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, vol. 2, Population, pt. 2, p. cxxxv. Increases in land in farms in the mountain and Pacific divisions were 9,975,000 acres in 1870– 80 (against 128,347,000 in the United States, 27,130,000 in the plains), 21,088,000 in 1880– 90 (against 87,137,000 and 37,306,000); 49,125,000 in 1890–1900 (against 217,983,000 and 56,708,000); 17,089,000 in 1900–10 (against 40,229,000 and 36,133,000). Historical Statistics, 458–60. The five plains states still had more than half of far western farms in 1982, though the thirteen other states had moved ahead in population on farms by 1950. Carroll D. Clark, People of Kansas: A Demographic and Sociological Study (Topeka, 1936), 46. In 1890–1900 more than a third (54 of 150) of the counties in western territories and states that lost population were in Kansas; in 1900–10 most of these (34 of the 54) more than regained their losses. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Population, 1910 (Washington, 1913), 1:104– 23. By 246,985,000 acres (209.1 percent); in the mountain and Pacific divisions alone, by 338,000 acres (231.5 percent). Historical Statistics, 460. On yields on wheat land, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat Acreage, Yield, Production by States, 1866–1943, Agricultural Marketing Service, Statistical Bulletin no. 158 (Washington, 1955), 2–25. Arthur F. Bentley concluded in 1892 that farmers whom he studied in Nebraska owed most of their wealth to increases in the value of land. “The Condition of the Western Farmer as Illustrated by the Economic History of a Nebraska Township,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 11 (1893), vols. 7–8, pp. 78–79. Prices averaged higher in North and South Dakota, Arizona, and Oklahoma; they were static in Nebraska and Idaho. Thomas J. Pressly and William H. Scofield, eds., Farm Real Estate Values in the United States by Counties, 1850–1959 (Seattle, 1965). Cf. Eleanor Hinman, History of Farm Land Prices in Eleven Nebraska Counties, 1873–1933, Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Stations, Research Bulletin 72 (Lincoln, Neb., 1934), 12, 18, 24, and Eleanor Hinman and J. O. Rankin, Farm Mortgage History of Eleven Southeastern Nebraska Townships, 1870–1932, ibid., Bulletin 67 (Lincoln, Neb., 1933). Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, vol. 5, Agriculture, pt. 1 (Washington, 1902), xxix. Charles W. Dahlinger, The New Agrarianism; a Survey of the Prevalent Spirit of Social Unrest . . . (New York, 1913), 114; Historical Statistics, 460. Farmland decreased throughout the Northeast, in four states of the older Middle West, and in ten southern states, including Texas. The decline in Texas followed the division of large ranches that had included grazing land, but over the eighteen territories and states, improved land increased sharply, much beyond land in farms, in the

Notes to Pages 24–26

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

411

mountain division by 89.4 percent against 28.3 percent. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Agriculture 1909 and 1910 (Washington, 1913), 5:30, 33. Pressly and Scofield, Farm Real Estate Values, 38–68. U.S. Industrial Commission, Final Report of the Industrial Commission (Washington, 1902), 19:120–21. Peter Tracy Dondlinger, The Book of Wheat: An Economic History and Practical Manual of the Wheat Industry (New York, 1908), 303–5. Ray Stannard Baker, “The Day of the Run,” Century Magazine, n.s., 66 (September 1903): 643– 55; Denver Republican, June 18, 1902. U.S. Congress, Report of W. A. Richards . . . Respecting the Opening of Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache and Wichita Lands in Oklahoma, 57 Cong., 1 sess., 1902, S. Doc. 341, serial 4241, pp. 1–14. William R. Draper, “Opening of the Kiowa-Comanche Lands,” Harper’s Weekly 45 (August 10, 1901): 805. “Distributing Homesteads by Lot,” Outlook 68 (August 10, 1901): 852–53; “Drawing Homesteads in Oklahoma,” Independent 53 (August 8, 1901): 1826. Charles Lowell Green, “The Administration of the Public Domain in South Dakota,” South Dakota Historical Collections 20 (1940): 167–68, 172–76. Other lotteries were held for land on the Lower Brule, Cheyenne River and Standing Rock, and Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations in 1907, 1909, and 1911. Jack Dozier, “The Coeur d’Alene Land Rush, 1909–10,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53 (October 1962): 145–50; George C. Bailey, Tall Trees Surround Us (Caldwell, Idaho, 1955), 11. Ike Blasingame, Dakota Cowboy (New York, 1958), 7. Ross R. Cotroneo, “Northern Pacific Officials and the Disposition of the Railroad’s Land Grant in North Dakota after 1888,” North Dakota History 37 (spring 1970): 92. The Northern Pacific sold 1,569,000 acres in North Dakota to ten purchasers in 1900–4, at an average of $1.63 an acre. E. A. Willson, H. C. Hoffsommer, and Alva H. Benton, Rural Changes in Western North Dakota; Social and Economic Factors Involved in the Changes in Number of Farms and Movement of Settlers from Farms, North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 214 (Fargo, 1928), 19. Mary Wilma M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 224. In 1900–1903 it had already sold 2,862,755 acres in Montana alone, well over twice the extent of homestead entries (1,209,963). Northern Pacific Railway Company, Fifth Annual Report . . . 1901–Seventh Annual Report . . . 1903 (St. Paul, 1901–3); Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 408; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1903 (Washington, 1904), 440. Ross R. Cotroneo, “Selling Land on the Montana Plains, 1905–1915,” Montana 37 (spring 1987): 43, 49. Richard C. Overton, Burlington West: A Colonization History of the Burlington Railroad (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), 473, 483. Entries for 1901–10 were less than 1 percent less than the total for 1881–1900; entries in 1891– 1900 had declined by 8.6 percent from those for 1881–90, while entries in other states increased by 17.4 percent. Thomas C. Donaldson, The Public Domain: Its History, with Statistics . . . , 46 Cong., 3d sess., 1881, H. Exec. Doc. 47, pt. 4, pp. 351–55; Statistical Abstract, 1911 (Washington, 1912), 28. Entries in the older Mississippi Valley states held up enough so that the total for the

412

39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

Notes to Pages 26–27 United States had declined by slightly over half, 1886–97 (51.3 percent); in far western states, where they had increased most in the 1880s, they dropped precipitously: in the Dakotas by 72.3 percent, 1885–90, in Nebraska by 91.1 percent, 1885–96. Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, 1968), 799; Statistical Abstract, 1895 (Washington, 1896), 365; ibid., 1901 (Washington, 1902), 435. In 1902, 98,829 original entries, 60.3 percent more than the nineteenth-century record of 61,638 in 1886; 18,329,115 acres in original entries in 1910, more than twice as much as in 1886; 59,363 final entries in 1913, 111.4 percent more than the 28,080 of 1890. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, 899–900. Acreage for 1918–35 included 68,123,290 in stock-raising homesteads, predominantly in Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana, 68.2 percent of the far western total of 99,861,226 for those years. Statistical Abstract, 1921 (Washington, 1922), 17; ibid., 1936 (Washington, 1936), 130. Entries thereafter were insignificant: 638,771 acres in 1936–40, 449,052 in 1941–50, 785,266 in 1951–60, 291,746 in 1961–70, for a total of 2,164,835, 0.71 percent of the total of 302,911,740 for 1901–70, of which more than half after 1935 (1,141,899, 52.7 percent) were in Alaska. Ibid., 1942 (Washington, 1942), 156; ibid., 1971 (Washington, 1971), 193. All entries between 1901 and 1935 (305,461,768) were over two-thirds greater than all entries before then, 1863–1900 (183,178,877); 69.3 percent of them were far western in 1863–1900, 98.4 percent in 1901–35. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, 800–1; Statistical Abstract, 1971, 193. Area of original entries, 1901–35, 469,853 square miles; area of the six states, 458,401 square miles. The area of final entries for the United States in 1863–1970, 422,524 square miles (270,415,324 acres), comprised 52.9 percent of that of original entries; if that proportion obtained in the region, the area of final far western entries in 1901–35 (248,552 square miles) exceeded the combined areas of Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. In all states and territories 1881–90, 64,744,366 acres; in the sixteen, 50,907,189; in all states and Alaska 1921–30, 53,459,760. Statistical Abstract, 1891 (Washington, 1892), 242; ibid., 1931 (Washington, 1932), 123. All classes of homestead land patented in all states and territories 1921–30 (62,246,511 acres) exceeded the total for the first twenty-seven years, 1868–94 (61,847,602). 1931, 123; Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, 799. Lemuel Call Barnes, Intensive Powers on the Western Slopes (Philadelphia, 1922), 16. Original entries for the United States, 1863–90, 120,411,411 acres; original entries, 1891–1935, 368,229,234 acres. They peaked in 1910 at 18,329,115 acres, more than twice the largest number in one year in the previous century (1886). Entries reached half the totals for 1863–1935 (488,640,645) and 1863–1970 (510,760,155) in the same year, 1907. The decade with the largest area of entries was 1911–20 (118,997,631); entries increased by 1.1 percent over 1901–10, when they had increased by 81.2 percent over 1891–1900. Original entries in Nebraska 1863–1900, 18,265,808 acres; 1901–10, 16,482,255; 1911–15, 5,106,548; 1916–20, 494,095; in the Dakotas 1863–1900, 28,974,698; 1901–10, 30,154,405; 1911– 20, 7,985,566; 1921–30, 1,639,562. South Dakota led in 1909, Montana in 1910–18 and 1920, New Mexico in 1907–8, 1919, and 1921–23. Henry A. Wallace’s Irrigation Frontier: On the Trail of the Corn Belt Farmer, 1909, ed. Richard Lowitt and Judith Fabry (Norman, Okla., 1991), 184, 188. Entries in Kansas had reached 1,584,378 acres in 1879. Entries in Montana, 1901–21, were

Notes to Pages 27–30

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

413

42,553,322 acres; in Kansas, 1863–90, 20,881,818 acres. Entries exceeded the 20,881,818 in Kansas in sixteen years in Colorado (1901–16, 21,230,013), in fourteen years in Nebraska (1901– 14, 21,588,403), in thirteen years in Montana (1901–13, 21,432,221). Donaldson, Public Domain, 355; Statistical Abstract, 1911 (Washington, 1912), 28; ibid., 1916 (Washington, 1917), 17; ibid., 1923 (Washington, 1924), 111; Paul Wallace Gates, Fifteen Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854–1890 (Ithaca, 1954), 239. N. W. Johnson and M. H. Saunderson, Types of Farming in Montana, Montana State College, Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 328 (Bozeman, 1936), 1:30, 32. Joseph Kinsey Howard, Montana: High, Wide and Handsome (New Haven, 1959), 236–42. Ralph W. Hidy, Muriel E. Hidy, Roy V. Scott, and Don L. Hofsommer, The Great Northern Railway: A History (Boston, 1988), 102–3. Pacific Monthly 16 (July 1911): 115; Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe, American Geographical Society, Special Publication no. 13 (New York, 1931), 98; Helen Parks, ed., Portraits: Fort Rock Valley Homestead Years (Bend, Ore., 1989), 39. Great Northern Railway Company, Montana’s Free Homestead Land (n.p., [1912?]), 2. E. W. Wright, “The Oregon Deadlock . . . , The Oregon View,” World’s Work 18 (August 1909): 11917–1922; George P. Putnam, “Opening up Central Oregon . . . ,” Putnam’s Magazine 7 (January 1910): 387–96; Pacific Monthly 26 (July 1911): 115. Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 413. U.S. Congress, Report of the Public Lands Commission . . . , 58 Cong., 3d sess., 1905, S. Doc. 189, serial 4766, pp. xxiv, 106–26; U.S. Congress, Report of the National Conservation Commission with Accompanying Papers, February 1909 . . . , 60th Cong., 2d sess., 1909, S. Doc. 676, serial 5399, 3:390–91. Will C. Barnes, The Story of the Range (Washington, 1926), 51. Reprinted from U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, Subcommittee, Hearings on S. Res. 347, 69th Cong., 1st sess., pt. 6. George K. Holmes, “Movement from City and Town to Farms,” Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1914 (Washington, 1915), 263. Edith Eudora Kohl, Land of the Burnt Thigh (New York, 1938), 6–7. H. Elaine Lindgren, “Ethnic Women Homesteaders on the Plains of North Dakota,” Great Plains Quarterly 9 (summer 1989): 157, 159–61. The estimate for 1910 is cited in Mary Isabel Brush, “Women on the Prairies: Pioneers Who Win Independence and Freedom in Their OneRoom Homes,” Collier’s Weekly 46 (January 28, 1911): 16. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, 800, tabulates entries by year. Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence, Kan., 1988), 133; on prearranged homesteading by “trainloads of women schoolteachers,” National Conservation Commission, Report, vol. 3 (Washington, 1909), 389. Metta M. Loomis, “From a School Room to a Montana Ranch,” Overland Monthly 67 (January 1916): 61–62. John Talbot Graham, “The Last of the Homesteaders,” Montana 18 (April 1968): 64–65, 72–75. Historical Statistics, 458; Howard, Montana, 236–42. Mari Sandoz, “The Kinkaider Comes and Goes,” North American Review 229 (April–May 1930): 424–25; Arthur R. Reynolds, “Land Frauds and Illegal Fencing in Western Nebraska,” Agricultural History 23 (July 1949): 173–78.

414

Notes to Pages 30–33

66. Marshall Bowen, “The Kinkaid Act and the Southern Sheridan County Sandhills of Nebraska,” Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 9 (January 1972): 45, 47. 67. H. N. Vinall, Forage Crops for the Sand-hill Section of Nebraska, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Plant Industry, Circular no. 80 (Washington, 1911), 3–4; Arthur R. Reynolds, “The Kinkaid Act and Its Effects on Western Nebraska,” Agricultural History 23 (January 1949): 20–29; Verna Lee Tubbs, “Settlement and Development of the Northeast Sandhills” (master’s thesis, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1957), 123–24 and passim; Kathryne L. Lichty, “A History of the Settlement of the Nebraska Sandhills” (master’s thesis, University of Wyoming–Laramie, 1960), 155, 157–58, and passim; John T. Schlebecker, “Agriculture in Western Nebraska, 1906– 1966,” Nebraska History 48 (autumn 1967): 254–55, 257–58, 264. 68. The Act of 1909 authorized homesteads of 320 acres on nonirrigable land in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming; later acts extended the principle to California, Idaho (1910), North Dakota (1912), and South Dakota (1915). Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, 503–4. 69. Benjamin Horace Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies (Madison, Wis., 1965), 387– 88. 70. Willson, Hoffsommer and Benton, Rural Changes in Western North Dakota, 15–16; Roland R. Renne, “Western Land Policies and Recent Ownership Trends,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 12 (February 1936): 42; Barnes, Story of the Range, 49–50. On the loss of summer range when former National Forest land in Montana was opened to homesteading in 1912, see Robert Henry Fletcher, Free Grass to Fences: The Montana Cattle Range Story (New York, 1960), 146–47. 71. Hal Borland, High, Wide and Lonesome (Philadelphia, 1956), 7. 72. U.S. Public Lands Commission, 1903–5, Report, 58th Cong., 3 sess., 1905, S. Doc. 189, serial 4766, p. 123. 73. Ernst G. Bormann, Homesteading in the Badlands: “The Last, Best West” (Stickney, S.D., 1971), 57–58. 74. Arthur Le Sueur (1867–1950), former mayor of Minot and assistant attorney general of North Dakota, who had farmed there in the 1890s. U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Industrial Relations: Final Report and Testimony . . . , 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, S. Doc. 415, serial 63937, 9:8989. 75. Willson, Hoffsommer, and Benton, Rural Changes in Western North Dakota, 104, 106. 76. Ibid., 59–60. 77. H. L. Davis, “Back to the Land—Oregon, 1907,” American Mercury 16 (March 1929): 318, 320– 21. 78. Robert J. White, Sagebrush Heritage: Early Memories of a Homesteader Kid (Baker, Ore., 1987), 1. 79. Mari Sandoz, Old Jules (Boston, 1935), 358. 80. M. L. Wilson, Dry Farming in the North Central Montana “Triangle,” Montana State College Extension Service, Circular 66 (Bozeman, 1923), 28, 124–25. 81. Report of the National Conservation Commission, 391. 82. Sophie Trupin, Dakota Diaspora: Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), 17– 23, 101–4, 107–8, 150–51.

Notes to Pages 33–37

415

83. Report of the Public Lands Commission, 70, 106, 124; Anna Langhorne Waltz, “West River Pioneer: A Woman’s Story, 1911–1915,” South Dakota History 17 (1987): 141–44, 241–95. 84. Sarah E. Olds, Twenty-five Miles from a Match: Homesteading in Western Nevada (Reno, 1978), 21, 41, 60–61, 62, 82, 102. 85. Janet S. Allison, Trial and Triumph: 101 Years in North Central Montana (Chinook, Mont., 1968), 118, 165, 179–80. 86. William Edward Kilgour, “The Nester,” Montana 15 (winter 1965): 39, 44–50. 87. Barbara Allen, “Homesteading the High Desert: Examining the ‘Failed Frontier’ from the Inside,” Idaho Yesterdays 33 (fall 1989): 5. 88. H. Elaine Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name: Women as Homesteaders in North Dakota (Fargo, 1991), 117–18. 89. In 1362 of 13,000 (9.5 percent) failed to appear to file or were found to be disqualified. Report of W. A. Richards, 14. 90. Barbara Allen, Homesteading the High Desert (Salt Lake City, 1987), 61, 86, 97–112. 91. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 93, 106. 92. Urling C. Coe, Frontier Doctor (New York, 1935), 236–37. 93. Alice Day Pratt, A Homesteader’s Portfolio (New York, 1922); Pratt, Three Frontiers (New York, 1955), 66–67, 70, 96. 94. Edward J. Bell, Jr., Homesteading in Montana, 1911–1923: Life in the Blue Mountain Country (Bozeman, 1975), 59, 66; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 3 (Washington, 1932), 122. Wibaux County was organized in 1914, one of twenty-three organized 1910–19. In 1920–70 the population declined by 52.9 percent. 95. James C. Olson, History of Nebraska, 2d ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), 198, 251–52; K. S. Quisenberry and L. F. Reitz, “Turkey Wheat: The Cornerstone of an Empire,” Agricultural History 48 (January 1974): 98–110; James C. Malin, Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas . . . (Lawrence, Kan., 1944), 162–67, 204–9. 96. William Allen White, “Fifty Years of Kansas . . . ,” World’s Work 8 (June 1904): 4871. 97. Guy E. Mitchell, “Vast Hidden Wealth in the Semiarid Region,” Forestry and Irrigation 11 (March 1905): 117–19, quoted in U.S. Congress, The Resources of the Semiarid Region, 58th Cong., 3d sess., 1905, S. Doc. 191, p. 1. 98. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural History Branch, Century of Agriculture: The First 100 Years of the United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, 1963), 14, 41–42. 99. Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 101–3. 100. The dry years in the state as a whole were 1907, 1910, and 1913, in the western counties 1904–5, 1907, 1910–11, and 1913. Marion Clawson, “Sequence in Variation of Annual Precipitation in the Western United States,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 23 (August 1947): 277; Frank J. Bavendick, Climate and Weather in North Dakota, 2d ed. (Bismarck, 1952), 53. 101. Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 63–64, 86–104, 346–53. 102. Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1901 (Washington, 1902), 90, 93. 103. Hamilton Wright, “The Government as a Homemaker,” World To-Day 10 (February 1906): 198; C. B. Parker, “A Plan for Reclaiming the Arid Lands of Our Great West,” Irrigation Age 15 (February 1901): 158. 104. Augustus Jacobson, “Our Arid Eldorado,” Gunton’s Magazine 24 (March 1903): 231, 233.

416

Notes to Pages 37–39

105. In California, 138,778 and 85,922 acres of irrigated land were in orchard fruit trees and subtropical fruit trees (then a separate category), 487,422 acres in hay and forage, 287,654 in pasture and unmatured crops, of a total of 1,445,832 irrigated acres in 1899. The two categories of fruit were worth 43.7 percent of all irrigated crops, hay and forage 18.9 percent; 40,371 more irrigated acres were in grapes and small fruit (berries). California was the only state where irrigated orchard fruits surpassed irrigated hay and forage in value; in other far western states orchard fruits and hay and forage were worth, respectively, 3.3 percent and 55.6 percent of all irrigated crops. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 2, pp. 822, 828. 106. The value of field crops was 64.4 percent in 1899, 51.5 percent in 1919, 40.9 percent in 1925. California State Emergency Relief Administration, Division of Special Surveys, Migratory Labor in California ([San Francisco], 1936), 7. 107. Sara C. Larson, Population in Finney County, Kansas, 1880–1958: A Geographic Study (Manhattan, Kan., 1962), 78–86; cf. Philip Eastman, “Windmill Irrigation in Kansas,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 29 (February 1904): 183–87; T. Lindsay Baker, “Irrigating with Windmills on the Great Plains,” Great Plains Quarterly 9 (fall 1989): 217–19, 225. 108. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 2, pp. 869–70. 109. Henry A. Wallace’s Irrigation Frontier, ed. Lowitt and Fabry, 27–28. 110. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, 5:834. 111. Frederick D. Kershner, Jr., “George Chaffey and the Irrigation Frontier,” Agricultural History 27 (October 1953): 115–22. 112. Gifford Pinchot, “The New Hope for the West: Progress in the Irrigation and Forest Reserve Movements,” Century Magazine 48 (June 1904): 310, 312; William Lilley III and Lewis L. Gould, “The Western Irrigation Movement, 1878–1902; A Reappraisal,” in The American West: A Reorientation, ed. Gene M. Gressley, University of Wyoming Publications 32 (Laramie, 1966), 57–74, 152–57. 113. L. R. Freeman, “Desert Irrigation in the Far West,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 29 (March 1904): 311. 114. Official Proceedings of the Twelfth National Irrigation Congress Held at El Paso, Texas, November 15–16–17–18, 1904 (Galveston, 1905), 370, 371; cf. Frederick H. Newell in U.S. Reclamation Service, Eleventh Annual Report . . . 1911–12 (Washington, 1913), 2. 115. Smythe, “Irrigation in the West . . . ,” American Review of Reviews 25 (January 1902): 80. 116. Blackmar, “Economics and Politics of the Reclamation Service,” Forum 38 (July 1906): 136–37. The cooperation necessary for irrigation “stimulates the civic conscience,” reported Arthur P. Davis, director of the Reclamation Service, “so that the local governments that grow up under such conditions are usually of a superior order and controlled by a superior intelligence on the part of the population living thereunder.” U.S. Reclamation Service, Eighteenth Annual Report . . . 1918–1919 (Washington, 1919), 10. 117. Phoenix Gazette, December 2, 1946, p. 14; on Maxwell, Donald J. Pisani, To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902 (Albuquerque, 1992), 285–94. 118. Mitchell, “Giving Men Homes on Land . . . ,” Forestry and Irrigation 11 (January 1905): 30. 119. “Reclamation Work for Socialist Settlement,” Forestry and Irrigation 14 (July 1908): 395–97; Paul K. Conkin, Two Paths to Utopia: The Hutterites and the Llano Colony (Lincoln, Neb., 1964), 108–9.

Notes to Pages 40–41

417

120. Smythe, Constructive Democracy: The Economics of a Square Deal (New York, 1905), 349. 121. U.S. Industrial Commission, Final Report (Washington, 1902), 970–71, 973. 122. L. W. Wakeley, Report 1913, 27 April 1914, Valentine Kuska Papers, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, 50 x-21-A. 123. Native whites of native parentage were majorities of rural Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, and Oregon. They were almost half the population in California in 1910 (49.996 percent, 453,874 of 907,810). Proportions of rural population were close to proportions of farmers except in Alaska and Hawaii (Alaska, 75.5 percent rural in 1900, 90.5 percent in 1910; Hawaii, 74.5 percent and 69.3 percent). The non-far-western states where native whites of native parentage were minorities were New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 (Washington, 1913), 1:192–98, 3:1133– 134, 1160; (Washington, 1914), 4:438; Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, 1977), 8. 124. 1980 Census of Population, Ancestry of the Population by State: 1980, Supplementary Report PC 80–S1–10 (Washington, 1983), 15, 17, 69–76. 125. Historical Statistics, 110–11. 126. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, 1:822–23. 127. Joseph Schafer, “The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin, I, Characteristic Attitudes toward the Land,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 6 (December 1922): 144. 128. John P. Johansen, Immigrant Settlements and Social Organization in South Dakota, South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 313 (Brookings, 1937), 50–51. 129. Topeka Capital, March 28, 1920, clipping in Immigration file 1:144, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. 130. Kenneth W. Rock, “‘Unsere Leute’: The Germans from Russia in Colorado,” Colorado Magazine 54 (spring 1977): 163, 165; Dena Markoff in Germans from Russia in Colorado, ed. Sidney Heitman (Fort Collins, Colo., 1978), 81–85; Paul S. Taylor, “Hand Workers in the Western Sugar Beet Industry,” Agricultural History 41 (January 1967): 21, 23; Taylor, “Migratory Farm Labor in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review 44 (May 1937): 544; U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, Immigrants in Industries, pt. 25, vol. 2, 61st Cong., 2d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 633, serial 5684, pp. 118, 120, 151–52; Richard Sallet, Russian-German Settlements in the United States (Fargo, 1974), 50–53, 61. 131. Allegedly two-thirds of the population was of Czech descent in the 1950s. John Stanley Hejhal, “The Czechs in the Melting Pot: Americanization in Colfax County, Nebraska, 1869–1959” (master’s thesis, University of Wyoming–Laramie, 1959), 8. At the census of 1920, first to enumerate Czechs, the county led the state in percentages of foreign born (23.8 percent) and of Czechs among foreign born (71.0 percent), though the number resident in Omaha was larger. Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920 (Washington, 1922), 3:596, 606–7. In 1980 residents of Nebraska claiming Czech ancestry comprised 6.5 percent of the population; the highest percentage in the East was 0.9 percent in New Jersey. Ancestry of the Population, 70. 132. In Oklahoma, 76 percent in 1900, 79.8 percent in 1910; in Oregon, 68.8 percent and 67.5 percent. 133. Russell Wilford Lynch, Czech Farmers in Oklahoma: A Comparative Study of the Stability of a Czech Farm Group in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, and the Factors Relating to Its Stability, Okla-

418

134. 135.

136. 137. 138.

139.

140. 141.

142.

143.

Notes to Pages 41–43 homa Agricultural and Mechanical College, Bulletin 34, no. 13 (Stillwater, Okla., 1942). But a study of farmers in six townships in central Kansas shows immigrants only slightly more persistent than native-born Americans. D. Aidan McQuillan, Prevailing Over Time: Ethnic Adjustment on the Kansas Prairies, 1875–1925 (Lincoln, Neb., 1990), 103. Sucheng Chan, This Bitter-Sweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley, 1986). The commissioner of labor reported in 1905 that Japanese and other Asians were becoming small farmers in Hawaii, where whites had failed, but more prophetically that they were moving into trade and skilled occupations in Honolulu and to California, where they could earn more and conditions of labor were freer. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Third Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii. 1905, 59th Cong., 1 sess., 1906, H. Doc. 580, serial 4988, pp. 21–23, 26–40. Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York, 1988), 3. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, pt. 26, vol. 1, pp. 33, 37, 46–48, 52–53, 68. The total in agriculture in Hawaii (39,320) was nearly three-tenths greater than that in continental United States (30,550). U.S. Bureau of the Census, Chinese and Japanese in the United States, 1910, Bulletin 127 (Washington, 1914), 21–22; Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 (Washington, 1914), 4:609–10. Of these, 37.8 percent of businessmen, 39.8 percent of farmers. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Chinese and Japanese in the United States, 1910, 27, 29; Yosaburo Yoshida, “Sources and Causes of Japanese Emigration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 34 (September 1909): 166. Immigrants who returned to Japan from 1910 until the 1930s apparently had stayed about eight years on the average. John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900–1942 (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 19. In Hawaii departures of Japanese exceeded arrivals by 11.3 percent in 1900–1905; in 1900–1910, when 81,575 adult male Japanese immigrated, the number of laborers increased by only 5,115. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Third Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 14–15; Andrew W. Lind, An Island Community: Ecological Succession in Hawaii (New York, 1968), 202. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Third Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 14–15, 21. Theodore Saloutos, Expatriates and Repatriates: A Neglected Chapter in United States History, Augustana College Library, Occasional Paper Series, no. 10 (Rock Island, Ill., 1972); Betty Boyd Caroli, Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900–1914 (New York, 1973), 16–17, 49–50, and passim; Jonathan Sarna, “The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881–1914,” American Jewish History 71 (December 1981): 256–68; Odd S. Lovoll, The Promise of America: A History of the Norwegian-American People (Minneapolis, 1984), 29. Thomas C. Smith, “Farm Family By-employments in Preindustrial Japan,” Journal of Economic History 29 (December 1969): 687–715. Japanese reports indicate that Japanese who came to the United States by 1908 were 21.5 percent merchants, 21.1 percent students, 21.4 percent laborers. The American commissioner of immigration reported that in 1907–8, before the restrictions of the Gentlemen’s Agreement (1907) took effect, students were 21 percent, laborers 12 percent, farm laborers 10.8 percent of Japanese aliens. U.S. Congress, House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, National Defense Migration, Fourth Interim Report, 77 Cong., 2d sess., 1942, H. Rep. 2124, serial 10668, 8:61. Ichioka, Issei, 4–5, 59–60, 148–49.

Notes to Pages 43–44

419

144. Denver Times, December 16, 1899, p. 1, col. 8; May 14, 1900, p. 3, col. 5; February 12, 1902, p. 11, col. 3. 145. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, pt. 25, vol. 2, p. 303. 146. On the shift away from sugar beets in Los Angeles County to more speculative crops, see Modell, Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation, 107. Of those on the continent, 41.7 percent were in California in 1900, 73.8 percent in 1940. Adon Poli and Warren M. Engstrand, “Japanese Agriculture on the Pacific Coast,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 21 (November 1945): 352. 147. Eighteenth Census of the United States: 1960, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Washington, 1963), 1–145. 148. Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 (Philadelphia, 1991), 55. 149. Modell, Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation, 106–7. The California Commissioner of Labor in 1910 found that Japanese comprised 66.3 percent of farm laborers in sugar beets but that Japanese farm operators had only 6.8 percent of their land in beets, which accounted for 4.3 percent of the value of all their crops. National Defense Migration, Fourth Interim Report, 68, 70. 150. Such figures indicate trends rather than exact amounts and proportions, especially after states began imposing restrictions on tenure in 1913 and Japanese operators systematically evaded them. The Commission on Immigration estimated 153,683 in 1909. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, pt. 25, vol. 2, p. 382; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Chinese and Japanese in the United States, 1910, 44; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, vol. 6, pt. 3 (Washington, 1922), 337; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, vol. 2 (Washington, 1943), 516. In 1940, with 2.2 percent of the population, they had 3.8 percent of the farms, 0.74 percent of the agricultural land. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, vol. 3 (Washington, 1943), 192, 207, 224. 151. Lloyd H. Fisher and Ralph L. Neilsen, The Japanese in California Agriculture, U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics (Berkeley, Calif., 1942), 11815, 11824. Some other estimates are higher. National Defense Migration, San Francisco Hearings, pt. 29 (Washington, 1942), 11283; Carey McWilliams, Brothers under the Skin (Boston, 1943), 105. 152. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Chinese and Japanese in the United States, 1910, 44–45. Average sizes in California rose briefly thereafter as Japanese tried to anticipate the effects of exclusion but declined from 70.1 percent acres in 1920 to 48.4 in 1930, 44.0 percent in 1940, when the average for all farms was 230.1; in Los Angeles County the average in 1940 was 11.6. National Defense Migration, Fourth Interim Report, 121–22. 153. Timothy J. Lukes and Gary Y. Okihiro, Japanese Legacy: Farming and Community Life in California’s Santa Clara Valley (Cupertino, Calif., 1985), 61. 154. In Los Angeles County the average for beginners, apart from one of sixty-eight persons with 100 acres and three with two, four, and five lots, was 6.8 acres; in Santa Clara County, where the average around Alviso, near San Jose, was 6.2 acres, nine-tenths of a smaller group said that they had first leased between 1 and 8 acres. The average of 10.7 acres in Los Angeles County does not include farms within the city of Los Angeles. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, pt. 25, vol. 2, pp. 381, 445–46, 466, 784–89, 830–31, 856–57; Lukes and Okihiro, Farming and Community Life, 63. 155. Edwin E. Cox, “Farm Tenancy in California,” Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Trans-

420

156. 157.

158. 159.

160.

161.

Notes to Pages 44–45 actions 11 (December 1916): 448, 454–55; John Modell, “Japanese-Americans: Some Costs of Group Achievement,” in Ethnic Conflict in California History, ed. Charles Wollenberg (Los Angeles, 1970), 108–9. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, pt. 25, vol. 3, pp. 304–5. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Chinese and Japanese in the United States, 1910, 44; Historical Statistics, 461, 463. The relationships of values had not greatly changed on the eve of the evacuation of the Japanese in 1940, when values of Japanese and all farms in California averaged $12,810 and $16,331, of land in farms $291 and $71 per acre. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, 3:192, 207, 224. Census data taken in 1920 show wide ranges in relative values of Japanese holdings among counties, the highest values being in the vicinity of San Francisco Bay, where they were especially small and farmers concentrated most on truck crops: in Los Angeles County land worth nearly half again as much more than the average, in Santa Clara County (San Jose) closer to twice as much as the average, in Alameda County (Oakland) six times as much. Robert Higgs, “Landless by Law: Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture to 1941,” Journal of Economic History 38 (March 1978): 210–11. In such metropolitan areas the price of agricultural land was driven up by householders who were interested mainly in pleasant suburban living and farmed, if at all, only casually as well as by truck farmers who served urban markets, south and east of San Francisco predominantly Japanese, Italians, and Portuguese. Kazuo Ito, ed., Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America (Seattle, 1973), 249–50, 497–99. According to one calculation, Japanese occupied 11.7 percent of irrigated land in California in 1919, when they were about 4.4 percent of farmers. William Frederick Weisend, “The AntiJapanese Movement in California” (master’s thesis, University of California–Berkeley, 1931), cited by Emil T. H. Bunje, ed., The Story of Japanese Farming in California (Berkeley, 1937), 21–22. In 1910, when general population in continental United States was 54.3 percent rural, Japanese population was 51.2 percent rural; in California the general and Japanese populations were 38.2 percent and 55.0 percent rural, in Washington 46.9 percent and 36.0 percent. Japanese in agriculture in California, however, were only 24.7 percent of those in all occupations in continental United States. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Chinese and Japanese in the United States, 1910, 21– 22. In 1920 Japanese in California were 53.8 percent rural, in 1930, 45.2 percent, in 1940, 44.2 percent. The native born, a majority in California by 1930, were more rural than the foreign born (48.8 percent and 41.6 percent rural in 1930). Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 (Washington, 1943), 2:518. In 1940, when 43.2 percent of gainfully employed Japanese in California were in agriculture, Japanese population was 44.2 percent rural; in Los Angeles County it was 18.3 percent rural. National Defense Migration, Fourth Interim Report, 99, 101. In 1980, however, when the Japanese and Japanese American population again was heavily far western and predominantly in Pacific states, while employment in agriculture among persons of Japanese descent in midwestern and eastern states was minimal (0.2 percent of employed persons in Illinois, against 2.4 percent of the general population; 0.197 percent against 0.221 in New York), it was much higher in the United States (4.3 percent of employed persons, against 2.7 percent). In California 7.0 percent were in agriculture, against 2.7 percent; but significantly in Hawaii—the one exception among western states with sizable Japanese populations—2.2 percent against 3.2 percent. 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. C, pt. 1 (Washington, 1983),

Notes to Pages 45–49

162.

163.

164.

165. 166. 167.

168.

169. 170. 171.

172.

173. 174.

175. 176. 177. 178.

421

1–101, 1–159–60; pt. 6, 6–111, 6–148–49; pt. 13, 13–29–30, 13–67; pt. 15, 15–108, 15–110, 15–131; pt. 34, 34–170, 34–192–93. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 (Washington, 1943), 3:215, 240. According to Higgs, Japanese-owned acreage increased by 81.8 percent while acreage rented or worked under annual labor contracts dropped by 19.4 percent, 1932–42. “Landless by Law,” 221–22. In the United States, 80.4 percent against 54.3 percent, in California 80.1 percent against 67.2 percent of those aged 14–20. Robert W. O’Brien, The College Nisei (Palo Alto, Calif., 1949), 126. On problems of Nisei in breaking out of the occupational structure that their parents had created, Modell, Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation, 127–38 and passim. Of these, 45.2 percent in agriculture, 23.6 percent in trade; in California, 47.8 percent and 22.7 percent; in Washington, 30.2 percent and 25.98 percent. National Defense Migration, Fourth Interim Report, 101, 104. Nebraska State Journal, September 3, 1894, quoted in Martin E. Carlson, “William E. Smythe: Irrigation Crusader,” Journal of the West 7 (January 1968): 41–42. William E.Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New York, 1905), xi. At San Ysidro, south of San Diego; at Tujunga, north of Los Angeles and soon a part of it; and near Hayward, south of Oakland. Henry S. Anderson, “The Little Landers’ Land Colonies: A Unique Agricultural Experiment in California,” Agricultural History 5 (October 1931): 139–40. Lawrence B. Lee, “William E. Smythe and San Diego, 1901–1908,” Journal of San Diego History 19 (winter 1973): 12–22; Smythe, “Real Utopias in the Arid West,” Atlantic Monthly 79 (May 1897): 609. The legislature accepted the promotional name when it organized Imperial County in 1907. Smythe, Conquest of Arid America, 46. By 1926 all far western states had projects except Oklahoma, although projects in Kansas and North Dakota had been abandoned. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, 2:820, 867; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Irrigation of Agricultural Lands (Washington, 1942), xxviii; 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 9 (Washington, 1978), chap. 1–-1–2, 10; 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1984), 45–47. In 1899 over a fifth of irrigated acreage was in pasture and unmatured crops, over half additionally in hay and forage. In 1974 less than a tenth was in cropland pasture and improved pastureland and rangeland combined. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 2, pp. 820, 822; 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 9, pp. 1–25. Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1941 (Washington, 1942), ix. California State Emergency Relief Administration, Migratory Labor in California [San Francisco], 1936, 7. Intensive crops comprised less than 4 percent of the agricultural product of the state by value in 1879, 78 percent in 1929. Paul S. Taylor, “The Immigrants and California’s Future: The Trek to California and the Trek in California,” in On the Ground in the Thirties (Salt Lake City, 1983), 178. Denver Republican, June 24, 1900; January 1, 1907. U.S. Reclamation Service, Twelfth Annual Report . . . 1912–13 (Washington, 1914), 3, 6. Committee of Special Advisers, Federal Reclamation by Irrigation . . . (Washington, 1924), 26, 29, 80, 154–202. 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 9, chaps. 1–25.

422

Notes to Pages 49–51

179. Lowell Smith and Pamela Deuel, “The California-Nevada Interstate Water Compact: A Great Betrayal,” Cry California 7 (winter 1971/72): 29; John M. Townley, “Soil Saturation Problems on the Truckee-Carson Project, Nevada,” Agricultural History 52 (April 1978): 280–91. The service had expected to draw water from Lake Tahoe. U.S. Department of the Interior, Committee of Special Advisers on Reclamation, Federal Reclamation by Irrigation, 17. 180. C. J. Blanchard, “The Quickening of Nevada,” Pacific Monthly 17 (May 1907): 581. Two years later a writer predicted that the area of the project would be settled as closely as the Salt Lake Valley, supporting half a million people in compact communities on small farms. Forbes Lindsay, “Reclaiming the Desert: The Transformation of Arid Lands into Farms and Homes: The Quickening of Nevada,” Craftsman 15 (February 1909): 574. 181. Chicago Record-Herald, clipping with dateline August 8, 1909, Hebard Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. Cf. a similar assessment (1911) by Professor Charles O. Merica of the University of Wyoming, Laramie, who foresaw that twenty acres would “support an entire family almost in luxury.” Merica, “New Wyoming,” Wyoming Farm Bulletin 1 (November 1911): 68. When population on farms in Wyoming peaked about 1935, farm holdings in Wyoming were among the largest in the country, averaging about 1,657 acres. 182. Estimated at 509,000 in 1985, 466,000 in 1990. 183. H. L. Holgate, “The Klamath Project . . . ,” Forestry and Irrigation 12 (March 1906): 115; William L. and Irene Finley, “The Crime of the Lower Klamath,” Sunset 53 (October 1924): 40. 184. Marvin P. Riley, W. F. Kumlien, and Duane Tucker, 50 Years Experience on the Belle Fourche Irrigation Project, South Dakota State College Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 450 (Brookings, S.D., 1955), 11. 185. F. C. Youngblutt, “In Planning Future Irrigation Projects Let’s Profit from Past Mistakes,” Dakota Farmer 66 (April 20, 1946): 6. 186. Robert Alan Goldberg, Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World (Salt Lake City, 1986). 187. Riley et al., 50 Years Experience, 14–15. 188. Bill G. Reid, “Franklin K. Lane’s Idea for Veterans’ Colonization, 1918–1921,” Pacific Historical Review 33 (November 1964): 447–61; Reid, “Proposals for Soldier Settlement during World War I,” Mid-America 46 (July 1964): 172–86; Annual Report of the Secretary of Labor, 1917 (Washington, 1918), 152; ibid., 1918 (Washington, 1919), 145–47; Franklin Lane to Woodrow Wilson, May 31, 1918, in The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, ed. Anne W. Lane and Louise H. Hall (Boston, 1922), 285–89; Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, 1918 (Washington, 1919), 7–9, 24–29; Lane, “Out of the Army Back to the Land: With the Help of the United States Government,” Touchstone 5 (June 1919): 220–23. 189. Henry Irving Dodge, “Back to the Land for Soldiers, An Interview with Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior,” Country Gentleman 84 (February 15, 1919): 4. 190. William E. Smythe, “A New Homestead Policy for America,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 65 (March 1922): 291; Report of the State Land Settlement Board of the State of California, September 30, 1920 (Sacramento, 1921), 48. 191. Albert Shaw, “California’s Farm Colonies,” American Review of Reviews 64 (October 1921): 403. 192. Northwest Irrigation and Development Congress, Seattle, September 16–17, 1920, Proceedings (Seattle, 1920), 76.

Notes to Pages 51–55

423

193. “Will the Soldier Farm?” Literary Digest 60 (January 4, 1919): 15–16; “The Teaching of Agriculture to the American Expeditionary Force,” School and Society 8 (December 7, 1918): 677– 78. 194. Wyoming State Board of Immigration, Second Biennial Report . . . 1919–1920 (Cheyenne, 1921), 8; J. F. Springer, “The North Platte Project Today,” Scientific American 123 (December 25, 1920): 629. 195. William E. Smythe, City Homes on Country Lanes: Philosophy and Practice of the Home-in-aGarden (New York, 1921), 13, 15. 196. California, Oregon, and South Dakota made loans to veterans who wished to purchase farms; North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Wyoming made loans more generally to farmers. B[ertha] Henderson, “State Policies in Agricultural Settlement,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 2 (July 1926): 286–88; W. A. Hartman, State Land-Settlement Problems and Policies in the United States, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Technical Bulletin no. 357 (Washington, 1933), 55–60. 197. Hartman, State Land-Settlement, 35–45. 198. New York Times, July 29, 1921, p. 7, cols. 1–2; July 31, 1921, p. 7, col. 2; Albert Shaw, “From New York to Idaho: A Farm Colony of City Folk, and Their Modern Caravan,” American Review of Reviews 64 (August 1921): 177–82; Uarda Black King, “Scott’s Ill-Fated Caravan,” A Folk History of Twin Falls County (Twin Falls, Idaho, 1962), 95. 199. (Boise) Idaho Farmer 28 (October 13, 1921): 1. 200. George Frederic Stratton, “Sundown at Roseworth: The Bitter End of a Hopeful Colony,” Country Gentleman 88 (November 3, 1923): 7, 32, 34. 201. (Boise) Idaho Statesman, September 15, 1921, p. 4, cols. 1–2; cf. ibid., October 4, 1921, p. 3, col. 1. 202. Mikel H. Williams, The History of Development and Current Status of the Carey Act in Idaho, Special Report, Idaho Department of Reclamation ([Boise], 1970), 77–79; King, “Scott’s IllFated Caravan,” 94. On other projects in the area, also unsuccessful, see Hugh T. Lovin, “A ‘New West’ Reclamation Tragedy: The Twin Falls-Oakley Reclamation Project in Idaho, 1908–1931,” Arizona and the West 20 (spring 1978): 5–24, and “How Not to Run a Carey Act Project: The Twin Falls-Salmon Falls Creek Tract, 1904–1922,” Idaho Yesterdays 30 (fall 1986): 9–15, 18–24, on an antecedent company, the West End Twin Falls Irrigation Company, whose organizer, Edwin T. Meredith, became an officer in the Idaho Farms Company. 203. Idaho Farmer 29 (March 16, 1922): 24.

CHAPTER 3. AGRICULTURAL FRONTIERS: FARMING ON NEW SCALES 1. C. H. Wendel, Nebraska Tractor Tests since 1920 (Sarasota, Fla., 1985), 7. 2. Macy H. Lapham, Crisscross Trails: Narrative of a Soil Surveyor (Berkeley, 1949), 32–33. 3. Arnold P. Yerkes and H. H. Mowry, Farm Experience with the Tractor, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bulletin no. 174 (Washington, 1915), 4–5, 8; Yerkes and L. M. Church, The Farm Tractor in the Dakotas, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farmers’ Bulletin no. 1035 (Washington, 1919), 3–4. M. L. Wilson reported in 1923 that where the prairie sod was broken, farmers in northern

424

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Notes to Pages 55–57 Montana were reverting to teams, finding them cheaper than tractors. Dry Farming in the North Central Montana “Triangle,” Montana State College Extension Service, Circular 66 (Bozeman, 1923), 91–94. Farm Machinery—Farm Power (St. Louis) published in 1918 a report prepared for the Department of Agriculture critical of a small tractor being manufactured by Henry Ford. The Suppressed Report of Professor Yerkes . . . On the Fordson Tractor [St. Louis, 1918]. Wendel, Nebraska Tractor Tests, 4–6, 8, and passim. Mary Wilma M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 511, 514–15; Reynold M. Wik, Steam Power on the American Farm (Philadelphia, 1953), 94–95, 202–5; Wik, “The American Farm Tractor as Father of the Military Tank,” Agricultural History 54 (January 1980): 126–27. Robert C. Williams, Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin’ Johnny: A History of the Farm Tractor and Its Impact on America (Urbana, Ill., 1987), 61–64, 87–92. The authors of a study of The Farm Tractor in the Dakotas (p. 28) reported that 93 percent were operated by the owner or members of the family. Cecilia Hennel Hendricks, Letters from Honeyhill: A Woman’s View of Homesteading, 1914–1931, ed. Cecilia Hendricks Wahl (Boulder, 1986), 209, 221, 224–25, 266, 268. From $885 to $395 FOB factory. Robert K. Mills, ed., Implement and Tractor: Reflections on 100 Years of Farm Equipment (Overland Park, Kan., 1986), 230, 232. Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (Ann Arbor, 1972), 87–97. According to bankers, 3,200, 2,100, and 1,205 of 13,327 (48.8 percent), respectively, in North and South Dakota and Kansas. Yerkes and Mowry, Farm Experience with the Tractor. Leo M. Hoover, Kansas Agriculture after 100 Years, Kansas Agricultural Experiment Bulletin 392 (Manhattan, Kan., 1957), 46; Thomas D. Isern, Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs: Harvesting and Threshing on the North American Plains (Lawrence, Kan., 1990), 177. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul Rhode, “The Farm Energy Crisis of 1920,” Agricultural History 62 (winter 1988): 49–50, 53; on tractors in eastern Washington, Alexander Joss, “The Wilbur Year,” Pacific Northwest Forum, 2d ser., 2 (spring–fall 1989): 24–58. Wik, Steam Power, 108, 145, 210; Thomas D. Isern, Custom Combining on the Great Plains: A History (Norman, Okla., 1981), 10–14. L. A. Reynoldson et al., The Combined Harvester-Thresher in the Great Plains, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Technical Bulletin no. 70 (Washington, 1928), 1; Isern, Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs, 1, 187. Robert P. Elwood et al., Changes in Technology and Labor Requirements in Crop Production: Wheat and Oats, Works Progress Administration, National Research Project on Reemployment and Recent Changes in Industrial Techniques . . . , Report no. A-10 (Philadelphia, 1939), 37– 39, v. Ibid., v. E. G. Nourse, “Some Economic and Social Accompaniments of the Mechanization of Agriculture,” American Economic Review 20, Supplement (March 1930): 115. Census of Agriculture: 1959, A Graphic Summary of Land Utilization (A Cooperative Report), Final Report, vol. 5, pt. 6, chap. 1, Special Reports (Washington, 1962), 31. Census of Agriculture: 1950, Land Utilization, A Graphic Summary, Cooperative Report, Special Reports, vol. 5, pt. 4 (Washington, 1952), 16. Cropland devoted to forage had dropped from about 81 million acres in 1918 and 1919 to about 11 million in 1950, 6 million in 1960.

Notes to Pages 58–59

425

21. Farm Implements (Minneapolis), July 31, 1909, p. 28, quoted in Wik, Steam Power on the American Farm, 149. 22. Edward A. Rumely, “The Passing of the Man with the Hoe,” World’s Work 20 (March 1910): 13249. 23. C. H. Matson, “A Giant Kansas Farm: The Mammoth Sherman Farm,” World’s Work 4 (July 1902): 2327–29; Who Was Who in America, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1942), 1117. 24. M. G. Cunniff, “The 101 Ranch . . . ,” World’s Work 11 (February 1906): 7219–28; New York Times, January 4, 1952, p. 40, col. 2. 25. Liberty H. Bailey, “The Pivotal Farm of the Union . . . ,” World’s Work 3 (November 1901): 1413–19; Gene Stratton Porter, “The Making of a Great Ranch,” Country Life 11 (January 1907): 298–302. A former traveling salesman and publisher in Massachusetts who had gone west for his health in 1888, Watson pioneered in growing alfalfa without irrigation, developing the dairy industry in western Nebraska; he claimed to have planned the largest barn of its kind in the world, holding 320 cows. Who Was Who in America, 1:1308. 26. Morton Rothstein, “Technological Change and American Farm Movements,” in Technology, the Economy, and Society: The American Experience, ed. Joel Colton and Stuart Bruchey (New York, 1987), 194–95; Wayne D. Rasmussen, “The Impact of Technological Change on American Agriculture, 1862–1962,” Journal of Economic History 22 (December 1962): 578–91. 27. David L. Wood, “American Indian Farmland and the Great War,” Agricultural History 55 (July 1981): 256–60 and passim. 28. Quotation from Malcolm C. Cutting, “A Manufacturer of Wheat: The World’s Largest Wheat Grower Runs His 95,000 Acres Like a Modern Factory,” Country Gentleman 91 (August 1926): 18–19, 44. Clipping, n.d., C. W. Brandon Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie; Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 519; Hiram Drache, “Thomas D. Campbell— The Plower of the Plains,” Agricultural History 51 (January 1977): 78–91; Wood, “American Indian Farmland and the Great War,” 263; Isern, Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs, 192. After the deflation of 1920–21, Campbell took over the assets of the corporation for $150,000 and organized the Campbell Farming Corporation (1922–49). 29. J. B. Lamson to C. E. Spens, May 19, 1924, file 75-A-38, Kuska Papers, Nebraska Historical Society, Lincoln; cf. Terry L. Anderson, “Bonanza Farmers and Subsistence: A Response,” Agricultural History 51 (January 1977): 105. 30. Archibald MacLeish, “Grasslands,” Fortune 12 (November 1935): 65. “I went out and lived in Montana through the whole wheat season with farmer Tom Campbell,” he recalled later. Archibald MacLeish: Reflections, ed. Bernard A. Drabeck and Helen E. Ellis (Amherst, Mass., 1986), 80, and cf. 114. By 1935 Campbell’s company began paying its debts and expanding (New York Times, March 19, 1966, p. 29, col. 2), but New Mexicans shortly complained that he again profited by others’ losses there, in 1937 acquiring land in Socorro County at a tenth its assessed valuation after a tax judgment. Hugh G. Calkins, “Notes on Community-Owned Land Grants in New Mexico,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service, Region Eight, Regional Bulletin no. 48, Conservation Economics Series no. 21 ([Albuquerque], 1937), 25, 31. 31. Leslie Hewes, The Suitcase Farming Frontier: A Study in the Historical Geography of the Central Great Plains (Lincoln, Neb, 1973), 9, 12–19; New York Times, May 21, 1956, p. 25, col. 2. 32. Louis Galambos, “The Agrarian Image of the Large Corporation, 1879–1920: A Study in Social Accommodation,” Journal of Economic History 28 (September 1968): 341–62.

426

Notes to Pages 59–61

33. John Lee Coulter, “Organization among the Farmers of the United States,” Yale Review 18 (May 1909): 298; Coulter, Co-operation among Farmers: The Keystone of Rural Prosperity (New York, 1911), 15. Then at the University of Minnesota, Coulter had taken two degrees at the University of North Dakota and written his doctoral thesis on the industrial history of the Red River Valley. 34. Charles Collins Teague, Fifty Years a Rancher: The Recollections of Half a Century Devoted to the Citrus and Walnut Industries of California (Los Angeles, 1944), 64. On how Italian truck farmers in California combined to buy equipment, see E. A. Stokdyk, “Collective Farming Among Vegetable Growers in the Coastal Region of California,” Journal of Farm Economics 13 (October 1931): 642–43. 35. M. L. Wilson, Dry Farming in the North Central Montana “Triangle,” Montana State College Extension Service, Circular 66 (Bozeman, 1923), 94. 36. M. L. Wilson, “The Fairway Farms Project,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 2 (April 1926): 156, 158–59, 161–62; Wilson, “Research Studies in the Economics of Large Scale Farming in Montana,” Agricultural Engineering 10 (January 1929): 6; William D. Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment (Lincoln, Neb., 1970), 31, 63; Malcolm C. Cutting, “Farm Relief by Factory Methods,” Nation’s Business 18 (February 1930): 48, 188, 190, 192. 37. Wyoming led all states in stock-raising homesteads, with 18,055,976 acres to June 30, 1935; New Mexico, Colorado, and Montana followed. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1936 (Washington, 1936), 130; on uses of the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916 as of the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 and its successors, see W. A. Hartman, State Land-Settlement Problems and Policies in the United States, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Technical Bulletin no. 357 (Washington, 1933), 27. 38. The only states where acreages did not increase were California, Nevada, and South Dakota. Production set new records in all states but California, where it had peaked in 1884 at 46,200,000 bushels; the harvest in 1937, 20,570,000 bushels on 935,000 acres harvested, was the largest since the twentieth-century record of 33,165,000 on 2,010,000 acres in 1901. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat Acreage, Yield, Production by States, 1866–1943 . . . , Agricultural Marketing Service, Statistical Bulletin no. 158 (Washington, 1955), 10–11, 20–26; Ann Foley Scheuring, ed., A Guidebook to California Agriculture (Berkeley, 1983), 113. Plantings of winter wheat for 1919 exceeded plantings for 1917 by 25.6 percent nationally rather than the 7–12 percent that the Department of Agriculture suggested. Plantings in Montana, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon, after making much larger gains, of 48.5 to 114.8 percent, went on to higher records between 1920 and 1937. Official Bulletin 2, no. 369 (July 25, 1918): 16, cols. 1–3; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat Acreage, Yield, Production, 27, 43, 45, 47, 48. 39. Lloyd P. Jorgenson, “Agricultural Expansion into the Semiarid Lands of the North Central States during the First World War,” Agricultural History 23 (January 1949): 32–33. Jorgenson also emphasizes the substantial earlier increases, 1909–14. 40. Donald E. Green, Panhandle Pioneer: Henry C. Hitch, His Ranch, and His Family (Norman, Okla., 1979), 114–15, 121. 41. Elwood et al., Changes in Technology and Labor Requirements in Crop Production, 11. 42. O. E. Baker, “The Outlook for Land Utilization in the United States,” Journal of Farm Economics 13 (April 1931): 204.

Notes to Pages 61–63

427

43. Charles B. Spahr, America’s Working People, 2d ed. (New York, 1900), 250, 257–58, 261; John Lee Coulter, “Industrial History of the Valley of the Red River of the North,” Collections of the State Historical Society of North Dakota 3 (1910): 610–11. 44. Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1923 (Washington, 1924), 19; and cf. O. E. Baker, “Land Utilization in the United States: Geographical Aspects of the Problem,” Geographical Review 13 (January 1923): 16–17, 41, 51–52. 45. Available statistics on acreage before 1918 are for acreage harvested only. Acreage harvested in the North Atlantic states in 1920–29 fell by 8.5 percent below acreage in 1910–19; in Kansas it rose by 39.6 percent. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat Acreage, Yield, Production, 2, 5, 11; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 511–12. 46. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Washington, 1932), 1325–33; Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, “‘In God We Trusted, In Kansas We Busted. . . .’” Agricultural History 63 (spring 1989): 190–92. 47. From the peak years, 1918 in Montana, 1919 in Kansas. The increase in acreage planted in Kansas, 1919–30, was 17.3 percent. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat, Acreage, Yield, Production, 11, 20. 48. O. E. Baker, “Land Utilization in the United States: Geographical Aspects of the Problem,” Geographical Review 13 (January 1923): 4. 49. The increase in wheat 1919–29 was nearly tenfold, 18,372 to 198,877 acres; in 1924–29 it was 128,242, while the decrease in pasture was 58,710 (45.8 percent of that). Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 1295, 1317, 1327; Allen D. Edwards, Influence of Drought and Depression on a Rural Community: A Case Study in Haskell County, Kansas (Washington, D.C.), 37. 50. Edwards, Influence of Drought and Depression, 37, 46. 51. Historical Statistics, 460–63. The value of the wheat crop fell by nearly three-fifths in current dollars, 1919–29; the value of the lemon crop more than doubled; the value of all irrigated crops in California increased by nearly two-fifths. Statistical Abstract, 1933 (Washington, 1933), 592; ibid., 1923 (Washington, 1923), 180; ibid., 1933, 567. 52. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture (Washington, 1943), 3:898, 901, 904; Historical Statistics, 200. 53. Population on farms from 339,000 (1900; 283,000 in 1890) to 670,000 in 1940, or by 97.6 percent, against 2.2 percent nationally; average acreage from 397 in 1900 to 202 in 1935, or by 49.1 percent (to 230 or by 42.1 percent in 1940). Historical Statistics, 458, 461. 54. Interstate Commerce Commission, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Statistics of Railways in the United States . . . 1900 (Washington, 1901), 31; ibid., Twenty-third Annual Report . . . 1910 (Washington, 1912), 32; ibid., Thirty-fourth Annual Report . . . 1920 (Washington, 1911), xvi. 55. Rahno Mabel MacCurdy, The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (Los Angeles, 1925), 70. 56. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture (Washington, 1902), 2:305. 57. Ibid., 292, 301. 58. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 3 (Washington, 1932), 95, 111, 543, 571; vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 396.

428

Notes to Pages 63–65

59. Total acreage in vegetables harvested for sale more than tripled in 1920–35. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 (Washington, 1913), 6:177, 180; Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1952), 15, 49–50, 91, 93–94. 60. Though dates from palms that the Department of Agriculture imported were for sale at Phoenix in 1899, successful culture in the Coachella Valley of California, near Indio, began later, by 1912. Charles F. Colley, “First Commercial Date Palm Experimentation in California, 1882–1900,” Southern California Quarterly 55 (fall 1973): 254; Colley, “The California Date Growing Industry, 1890–1939,” ibid. 49 (June 1967): 167. Commercial markets for avocados developed only in the 1920s, well after horticulturists began grafting trees in Florida (1900). Knowles Ryerson, M. E. Jaffa, and H. Goss, Avocado Culture in California, University of California Experiment Station, Bulletin no. 365 (Berkeley, 1923), 575–638; R. Ralph Robinson, “Avocado Industry is Rapidly Developing in Florida and California,” Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1928 (Washington, 1929), 135–37. 61. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Agriculture, pt. 1 (Washington, 1902), 188. 62. Roy J. Smith, “The California Land Settlements at Durham and Delhi,” Hilgardia 15 (October 1943): 399–492; Elwood Mead, Helping Men Own Farms: A Practical Discussion of Government Aid in Land Settlement (New York, 1920), 1–11, 94–103, 106–59, 168–82, 213–28. 63. Land in vegetables in holdings of 1,000 acres and more were 45.6 percent in 1964, 52.4 percent in 1969, 64.7 percent in 1987. Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1952), 15; 1964 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 48 (Washington, 1967), 108–9; 1969 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 48 (Washington, 1972), 102–3; 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1989), 100–101. 64. Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 33, p. 15; 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5, pp. 1–116. 65. William A. Taylor, “The Influence of Refrigeration on the Fruit Industry,” United States Department of Agriculture Yearbook, 1900 (Washington, 1901), 574, 576–77; San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 1919, p. 1, col. 4; Wells A. Sherman, Merchandising Fruits and Vegetables: A New Billion Dollar Industry (Chicago, 1928), 31. 66. Renamed Del Monte Corporation in 1967; acquired by R. J. Reynolds Industries in 1979; sold to DMPF Corporation in 1990. Roger Burbank and Patricia Flynn, Agribusiness in the Americas (New York, 1980), 167–70; William Braznell, California’s Finest: The History of Del Monte Corporation and the Del Monte Brand (San Francisco, 1982); Moody’s Industrial Manual, 1990 (New York, 1990), 3347–49. 67. Incorporated 1920; renamed Di Giorgio Corporation 1964; acquired by DIG Acquisition Corporation and Philip Morris Companies 1990. Moody’s Industrial Manual, 1987 (New York, 1987), 2773; San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 1951, p. 17, cols. 1–2. 68. A. W. McKay and W. Mackenzie Stevens, Organization and Development of a Cooperative Citrus-Fruit Marketing Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin no. 1237 (Washington, 1924), 13–44; Rahno Mabel MacCurdy, The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (Los Angeles, 1925), 10–64; Josephine Kingsbury Jacobs, “Sunkist Advertising” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Los Angeles, 1966). 69. McKay and Stevens, Organization and Development of a Cooperative Citrus-Fruit Marketing Agency, 22; Teague, Fifty Years a Rancher, 64. 70. Gilbert G. González, “Labor and Community: The Camps of Mexican Citrus Pickers in Southern California,” Western Historical Quarterly 22 (August 1991): 290–96, 305.

Notes to Pages 65–67

429

71. Michael R. Belknap, “The Era of the Lemon: A History of Santa Paula, California,” California Historical Society Quarterly 47 (June 1968): 124, 126–28. 72. Arizona, Idaho, and New Mexico had somewhat lower rates. Edmund de S. Brunner and J. H. Kolb, Rural Social Trends (New York, 1933), 41–42; R. R. Renne, Montana Farm Bankruptcies, Montana State College, Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 360 (Bozeman, 1938), 23–26, 41–42. 73. Donald C. Horton and Haven D. Umstott, Revised Annual Estimates of Farm-Mortgage Debt by States, 1930–43, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Agricultural Economics (Washington, 1944), 18–20. 74. Robert H. Fletcher, Free Grass to Fences: The Montana Cattle Range Story (New York, 1960), 146–47; Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1919 (Washington, 1920), 526; Ralph Hidy and Muriel Hidy, “Great Northern History Manuscript” [Cambridge? 1968?], 2:8– 19, copy at University of Oregon Library, Eugene. 75. Arthur Fisher, “Montana: Land of the Copper Collar,” Nation 127 (September 19, 1923): 292. 76. Garet Garrett, “That Pain in Our Northwest,” Saturday Evening Post 196 (April 12, 1924): 50. 77. Edward J. Bell, Jr., Homesteading in Montana, 1911–1923: Life in the Blue Mountain Country (Bozeman, 1975), 66–67; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 3 (Washington, 1932), 122. 78. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat Acreage, Yield, Production, 20. The value of crops harvested increased by 25.3 percent in 1919–29; it declined in all other states. In 1920–30 land in farms increased by 27.3 percent, and population on farms declined by 10.1 percent, numbers of farms by 19.0 percent. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture (Washington, 1943), 3:903; Historical Statistics, 458–60. 79. Walter M. Kollmorgen and George F. Jenks, “A Geographic Study of Population and Settlement Changes in Sherman County, Kansas,” Kansas Academy of Sciences, Transactions 54 (December 1951): 450, 457–63. 80. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Agriculture, 1909 and 1910 (Washington, 1913), 7:380–81, 387; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Agriculture, vol. 6, pt. 2 (Washington, 1922), 643–44, 649; ibid., Population (Washington, 1921), 1:571–72, 579; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, vol. 2, pt. 5 (Washington, 1943), 829, 831, 842; Census of Agriculture: 1935, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Washington, 1936), 731, 737. 81. Alexander Joss, “History of a Homesteader,” Pacific Northwest Forum 6 (fall 1981): 8, 10. 82. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, “Space: Its Institutional Impact on the Development of the Great Plains,” in Images of the Plains: The Role of Human Nature in Settlement, ed. Brian W. Blouet and Merlin P. Lawson (Lincoln, Neb., 1975), 214. 83. Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe (New York, 1931), 123, 135. 84. Families also moved former rural schoolhouses and converted them to residences. Richard Ashby, “Town Farming in the Great Plains,” Rural Sociology 6 (July 1941): 343. 85. Jan Otto Marius Broek, The Santa Clara Valley, California: A Study in Landscape Changes (Utrecht, Neth., 1932), 125. 86. Acreage in wheat in Sherman County, at 183,177 in 1949, had increased by 149.4 percent from 1939 (73,449); it had reached 103,484 in 1929, declining during the droughts and dust storms of the 1930s. Kollmorgen and Jenks, “Geographic Study of Population and Settlement Changes,” 450, 452, 462; Walter M. Kollmorgen and George F. Jenks, “Suitcase Farming in Sully County,

430

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94. 95.

96. 97.

98.

99. 100.

101.

Notes to Pages 67–70 South Dakota,” Association of American Geographers, Annals 48 (March 1958): 33–36; Kollmorgen and Jenks, “Sidewalk Farming in Toole County, Montana, and Traill County, North Dakota,” ibid. (September 1958): 209–31. Ashby “Town Farming in the Great Plains,”343. Hewes, Suitcase Farming Frontier, 97–120, 243, 251. Henry I. Dodge, “Transportation and the Cost of Living,” Country Gentleman, February 22, 1919, pp. 24, 26. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat: Acreage, Yield, Production, 2, 11. Between 1929 and 1939, by 40.8 percent in the mountain states, 60.3 percent in the Pacific states, 53.8 percent in the five plains states, against 30.6 percent in the United States. Values of crops harvested in Nevada and Oklahoma were less in 1939 than in 1909. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, 3:898–99, 901, 903. Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames, Iowa, 1982), 193. North Dakota led in 1930, with 67.0 percent of farms mortgaged, down from 71.1 in 1920. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm-Mortgage Credit, Technical Bulletin no. 288 (Washington, 1932), 4, 19; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture (Washington, 1943), 3:257, 289. After declining from 1922 to 1927, mortgage debt in North Dakota had risen again from 1927 to 1930 and 1934 to 1936. Horton and Umstott, Revised Annual Estimates of Farm-Mortgage Debt, 19–21. Horton and Umstott, Revised Annual Estimates of Farm-Mortgage Debt, 13. In the continental West, $596 per capita against $246 in other states. Leonard J. Arrington, “Western Agriculture and the New Deal,” Agricultural History 44 (October 1970): 342–43, 347. Arrington includes Texas in the continental West, here redefined to include only the sixteen other Pacific, mountain, and plains states. Ibid., 347. The policy had been (1935) to take ten acres of marginal land out of production for every acre brought into cultivation by reclamation and irrigation projects, retiring an area equal to all the harvested cropland of the three Pacific states. G. S. Wehrwein, “An Appraisal of Resettlement,” Journal of Farm Economics 19 (February 1937): 193–94. From 13,491,680 acres in 1929 to 13,654,678 in 1939, 16,839,225 in 1949. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture (Washington, 1943), 3:62; Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 3, Irrigation of Agricultural Lands (Washington, 1952), 38. Farm land irrigated (including pasture and unharvested crops) increased by 6.6 percent; in 1939–49 it increased by 12.2 percent, in later decades still more—in 1969–78, 28.5 percent. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Irrigation of Agricultural Lands (Washington, 1932), 64–66; 1978 Census of Agriculture, Irrigation (Washington, 1982), 4:146–47. Acreage irrigated declined 1929–39 in Colorado, Idaho, South Dakota, and Utah. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains: Years of Readjustment, 1920– 1990 (Lawrence, Kan., 1993), 133. William E. Warne, The Bureau of Reclamation (Boulder, 1973; repr. 1985), 127, 162–64; Richard W. Wahl, Markets for Federal Water: Subsidies, Property Rights, and the Bureau of Reclamation (Washington, 1989), 50; Michael L. Lawson, Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980 (Norman, Okla., 1982), 52, 59. John Ferrell, “Developing the Missouri: South Dakota and the Pick-Sloan Plan,” South Dakota

Notes to Pages 70–72

102.

103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114.

115.

431

History 19 (fall 1989): 311, 325; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Irrigation of Agricultural Lands (Washington, 1942), 510; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 3 (Washington, 1982), 14; 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1989), 205. In North Dakota, 71.9 percent of farms with electricity got it from their own generating plants in 1940, against 1.9 percent in California. National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Rural Electric Fact Book (Washington, 1965), 3; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 (Washington, 1943): 3:548, 553. “Rural Electrification,” Electrical World 131 (21 May 1949): 506–7. Hargreaves, Dry Farming, 132. On the “local associations of cattlemen” established under the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, see E. Louise Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies, 1900–1950 (Stanford, 1951), 229–31. Cf. John D. Lewis, “Democratic Planning in Agriculture,” American Political Science Review 35 (April–June 1941): 247, 458–60; Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966), 356–57. R. Douglas Hurt, The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural and Social History (Chicago, 1981), 97–98; James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York, 1989), 11. Marty Strange, Family Farming: A New Economic Vision (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), 131. New York Times, November 19, 1987, p. A29, col. 1. But an economist had noted that extension services supplied information available to large farmers from private sources. Lincoln Tweeton, Causes and Consequences of Structural Change in the Farming Industry (Washington, 1984), 44. Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1945 (Washington, 1945), xiii, 12, 14. Strange, Family Farming, 137–64; Tweeton, Causes and Consequences of Structural Change, 33–42. 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1984), 3. Washington Post, April 10, 1987, p. A25, cols. 4–6. The seven major agricultural counties of the San Joaquin Valley (Fresno, Kern, Kings, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Tulare) gained 526,400 acres (93.5 percent) in orchards and vineyards in 1945–78; in 1944–78 they gained 1,804,374 acres in harvested cropland (69.3 percent), 2,180,138 in irrigated farmland (92.6 percent), most of that after 1949 (1,401,338 and 1,334,687). The gain in harvested cropland in Kern was 539,154 acres (148.6 percent). The losses in orchards and vineyards were relatively greater than those in all cropland: harvested cropland in Santa Clara declined by 76.5 percent (134,317 acres). Census of Agriculture: 1945, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1946), 21, 60–69; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1981), 119–20, 165, 260. Land used for pasture in Kern County declined from 3,028,678 acres in 1945 to 2,045,477 in 1978, while cropland harvested increased from 362,784 to 901,938 acres, irrigated cropland harvested from 307,613 to 865,601, cotton harvested from 56,524 to 393,944 acres. Numbers of cattle and sheep changed far less, from 170,657 and 266,864 in 1945 to 192,841 and 207,064 in 1978, as practices in pasturing and feeding changed. Census of Agriculture: 1945, vol. 1, pt. 33, pp. 49, 73; Census of Agriculture: 1950 (Washington, 1952), 3:3–11; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1981), 119–20, 263–64. The average size of farms rose in 1930–40 from 41.7 to 47.8 acres in 1930–40 in Los Angeles

432

116.

117.

118. 119. 120.

121.

122.

123. 124.

125.

126.

Notes to Pages 72–73 County, from 82.9 to 108.2 in Santa Clara County; the ranges of sizes in Santa Clara and in the interior counties to the east were narrower, with slightly over one in fifteen acres (6.8 percent) in farms of 1,000 acres or more in Santa Clara in 1940, two of five in Merced in 1954 and 1959 (37.7 percent and 40.0 percent), somewhat less in Stanislaus (24.1 percent and 30.1 percent). Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 6 (Washington, 1942), 694, 706; Census of Agriculture: 1959, vol. 1, pt. 48 (Washington, 1961), 176, 178; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5, pp. 118, 260. Between 1945 and 1978, when harvested cropland in California increased by 1,363,837 acres (18.1 percent), although land in small farms (under 500 acres) decreased by nearly half, the net loss was only 53,024 acres (0.70 percent), while woodland in farms decreased by 2,653,765 acres, cropland used for pasture and grazing by 567,898 acres (1950–78 by 1,902,175 acres). Irrigated land increased by 3,650,900 acres (73.7 percent), from 65.7 percent of harvested cropland to 96.7 percent. 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5, p. 1. U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Technology, Public Policy, and the Changing Structure of Agriculture, vol. 2, Background Papers, pt. D: Rural Communities (Washington, 1986), 223. Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1982), 103; 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1984), 334. Joseph H. Engbeck, Jr., “The Vanishing Avocado,” Cry California 2 (winter 1966–67): 10–16; New York Times, January 10, 1982, p. 22, col. 3; September 26, 1982, p. 49, col. 2. Martin E. Carlson, “The Development of Irrigation in Nebraska, 1854–1910: A Descriptive Survey” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1963), 340–59; Gene E. Hamaker, “Irrigation Pioneers: A History of the Tri-County Project to 1935” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1958). James E. Tomayko, “The Ditch Irrigation Boom in Southwest Kansas: Changing an Environment,” Journal of the West 22 (April 1983): 23–24; Conner Sorensen, “A History of Irrigation in the Arkansas River Valley in Western Kansas, 1880–1910” (master’s thesis, University of Kansas– Lawrence, 1968). Irrigated acreage increased in Nebraska, 1954–78, from 1,171,369 to 5,697,779 (386.4 percent), in Kansas from 331,551 to 2,685,758 (710.1 percent), in California from 7,048,049 to 8,603,719 (22.1 percent). 1978 Census of Agriculture (Washington, 1982), 4:14; Richard E. Lonsdale, ed., Economic Atlas of Nebraska (Lincoln, Neb., 1977), 54. On additions to total areas irrigated by regions and decades, 1945–74, see Kenneth D. Frederick and James C. Hanson, Water for Western Agriculture (Washington, 1982), 15. Frederick and Hanson, Water for Western Agriculture, 30. Bradley H. Ballensperger, “Farm Consolidation in the Northern and Central States of the Great Plains,” Great Plains 7 (fall 1987): 258; Charles H. Davis, “Chemical Fertilizer,” in Office of Technology Assessment, Background Papers, vol. 2, pt. A (Washington, 1986), 117. Average sizes of irrigated farms in Nebraska increased from 40.5 to 236.9 acres, in Kansas from 118.9 to 337.3 acres. Acreage in corn raised for grain declined by 7.3 percent in Nebraska, by 33.4 percent in Kansas. Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 12 (Washington, 1952), 3, 12; ibid., pt. 13 (Washington, 1952), 3, 12; ibid., 1978, vol. 1, pt. 27 (Washington, 1981), 1, 17–18; ibid., pt. 16 (Washington, 1981), 1, 17–18. Percentages for Finney and Haskell are derived from data for 1949–78, except all for irrigated

Notes to Pages 73–74

127.

128.

129.

130. 131. 132.

133.

134.

135.

433

land 1950. Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 13 (Washington, 1952), 50–51, 87–89, 127–28; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 16 (Washington, 1981), 342, 345, 407, 410. Garst claimed to have taught Kansan farmers to irrigate, referring especially to center-pivot sprinkling systems and to corn. Roswell Garst to V. V. Matskevich, December 6, 1971, in Garst, Letters from an American Farmer: The Eastern European and Russian Correspondence of Roswell Garst, ed. Richard Lowitt and Harold Lee (DeKalb, Ill., 1987), 203–4. Finney County had led the state in irrigated acreage early in the century, when the principal irrigated crop was alfalfa. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 (Washington, 1913), 6:601–2. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, “Hard Times, Hungry Years: Failure of the Poor Relief in Southwestern Kansas 1930–1939,” Kansas History 15 (autumn 1992): 160–63; Holly Hope, Garden City: Dreams in a Kansas Town (Norman, Okla., 1988), 3 and passim. In 1973 less than 1 percent of the area of the chief northern sandhill counties was irrigated. Hope, Garden City, 53; Morton W. Bittinger and Elizabeth B. Green, You Never Miss the Water Till . . . (The Ogallala Story) (Littleton, Colo., 1980), 34–36; Robert Warrick, Wheels of Fortune: A Report on the Impact of Center Pivot Irrigation on the Ownership of Land in Nebraska (Walthill, Neb., [1976]), 4–6, 44–48. James H. Williams and Doug Murfield, eds., Agricultural Atlas of Nebraska (Lincoln, Neb., 1977), 39, 41. Agricultural Statistics 1941 (Washington, 1941), 56; ibid., 1981 (Washington, 1981), 32. Figures for much larger increases and totals in Kansas in Alain Revel and Christophe Riboud, American Green Power (Baltimore, 1986), 133, approximate those for all irrigated farmland. In 1978, 2.6 percent of land in wheat in Nebraska was irrigated, 4.5 percent in Kansas. 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 16 (Washington, 1981), 17; ibid., pt. 27 (Washington, 1981), 17. In 1982, when 6.6 percent of acreage in wheat nationally was irrigated, percentages in all plains states were still lower (Kansas highest at 6.1 percent); they reached 13.2 percent in Washington, 43.6 percent in Idaho, 77.2 in California, 100 percent in Arizona in Arizona and Nevada. 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1984), 312. Gordon Sloggett, Energy and United States Agriculture: Irrigation Pumping, 1974–80, Agricultural Economic Report no. 495 (Washington, 1982), 4–5; Frederick and Hanson, Water for Western Agriculture, 223–24; Opie, Ogallala, 251–53; High Plains Study Council, A Summary of Results of the Ogallala Aquifer Regional Study, with Recommendations to the Secretary of Commerce and Congress (Austin, 1982); Raymond J. Supalla et al., “Is the Ogallala Going Dry? A Review of the High Plains Study . . . ,” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 37 (November– December 1982): 311, 313; Donald R. Hickey, Nebraska Moments: Glimpses of Nebraska’s Past (Lincoln, Neb., 1992), 277, 282, 284. Bittinger and Green, You Never Miss the Water, 37; Ronald D. Lacewell and Glenn S. Collins, “Energy Inputs on Western Groundwater Irrigated Areas,” in Energy and Water Management in Western Irrigated Agriculture, ed. Norman K. Whittlesey (Boulder, 1986), 172; S. S. Johnson and E. V. Jesse in Lyle P. Schertz, ed., Another Revolution in U.S. Farming? U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Economic Report no. 441 (Washington, 1979), 369; Opie, Ogallala, 179, 183–84. In 1982–87 irrigated acreage increased only in Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, and Utah. Marty Strange, Family Farming: A New Economic Vision (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), 161–62; 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1989), 200–206.

434

Notes to Pages 74–76

136. William J. Chancellor and Warren E. Johnston, “Operating with Energy Shortages,” in Energy and Water Management, ed. Whittlesey, 297–303. 137. National Research Council, Committee on Irrigation-Induced Water Quality Problems, Irrigation Induced Water Quality Problems: What Can Be Learned from the San Joaquin Valley Experience (Washington, 1989), 1, 11, 70–71. 138. Helen Hosmer, “Triumph and Failure in the Colorado Desert,” American West 3 (winter 1966): 49; Erwin Cooper, Aqueduct Empire: A Guide to Water in California, Its Turbulent History and Its Management Today (Glendale, Calif., 1968), 76; William L. Kahrl, The California Water Atlas (Sacramento, 1979), 43. 139. At 49.3 percent of cropland harvested in 1987, acreage in hay comprised 2.37 times acreage in vegetables, having increased 71.7 percent since 1929; acreage in vegetables had increased 18.5 percent. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 6 (Washington, 1942), 691, 723, 751; 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1989), 279. 140. Rutillus Harrison Allen, “Economic History of Agriculture in Monterey County, California, during the American Period” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1934); Allen, “The Spanish Land Grant System as an Influence in the Agricultural Development of California,” Agricultural History 9 (July 1935): 137–40; William Orville Jones, “The Salinas Valley: Its Agricultural Development, 1920–1940” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1947); Jones, “A California Case Study in Location Theory: The Globe Artichoke on the Moro Cojo,” Journal of Farm Economics 31 (August 1949): 538–44. 141. Acreage in lettuce increased from 61 in 1919 to 2,488 in 1924, 20,404 in 1929, 44,001 in 1940, 64,222 in 1954. Census of Agriculture: 1925, 3:475; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, vol. 2, pt. 3 (Washington, 1932), 545; Census of Agriculture: 1945, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1946), 63; Census of Agriculture: 1954, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1956), 109. 142. Acreage in grapes in Oregon rose from 89 in 1969 to 432 in 1974, 2,589 in 1982; Washington had more, at 10,331, 18,549, and 26,728, having produced table grapes in the Yakima Valley before and during prohibition. Wine-making in the Northwest had been insignificant over about four decades after the first winery began operation in Oregon in 1933. 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 6 (Washington, 1978), 128; 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1984), 361–62; Stanley D. Miles, Oregon 1986 Vineyard Survey, Oregon State University, Agricultural Experiment Station, Special Report 804 (Corvallis, 1987); Portland Oregonian, May 27, 1934, sec. 2, p. 2, col. 2. 143. D. Allen Willey, “Irrigation Farming in the Southwest,” Scientific American 84 (June 26, 1901): 53; Arthur H. Cole, “The American Rice-Growing Industry: A Study of Comparative Advantages,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 41 (August 1927): 605–8. 144. Cole, “American Rice-Growing Industry,” 611–12; G. A. Collier, Rice Production and Marketing in the United States, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication no. 615 (Washington, 1947), 7; Henry C. Dethloff, A History of the American Rice Industry (College Station, Tex., 1988), 115–17. 145. Agricultural Statistics 1942 (Washington, 1942), 42; ibid., 1992 (Washington, 1992), 22. 146. Tucson Citizen, January 2, 1920. Acreage increased from 19 in 1909 to 106,283 in 1919, 211,178 in 1929. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Special Cotton Report (Washington, 1943), xiv–xv.

Notes to Pages 76–78

435

147. Wofford B. Camp, Production of Acala Cotton in the San Joaquin Valley of California, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department Circular 357 (Washington, 1925), 2 and passim. 148. Gregory, American Exodus, 25. 149. Leo V. Bakley and Carl E. Shafer, “History of Farm Structure: Cotton,” in U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, Farm Structure: A Historical Perspective on Changes in the Number and Size of Farms, 96th Cong., 2d sess., 1980. Committee Print, 251. 150. The year 1925 was the first in which California produced more than Arizona. Arizona remained the leader in Pima cotton; Arizona and New Mexico produced 7.7 percent and 0.6 percent of all cotton in 1985, California 23.2 percent. Length of staple of upland cotton in California was greatest in the United States in 1985, below average in Oklahoma, at 35.9 and 32.9 thirty-seconds of an inch. Statistical Abstract, 1926 (Washington, 1927), 628, 634, 636; Agricultural Statistics, 1986, 62, 69; Leo V. Blakley and Carl E. Shafer, “History of Farm Structure: Cotton,” in U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, 96th Cong., 2d sess., 1980, Farm Structure: A Historical Perspective on Changes in the Number and Size of Farms, 251. 151. Johnson and Jesse in Schertz, Another Revolution, 377. 152. Martin R. Cooper, Glen D. Barton, and Albert P. Brodell, Progress of Farm Mechanization, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication no. 630 (Washington, 1947), 79. 153. James H. Street, The New Revolution in the Cotton Economy: Mechanization and its Consequences (Chapel Hill, 1957), 167. 154. “California’s Cotton Rush,” Fortune 39 (May 1949): 85, 130, 136. The grower, later president of the Westlands Water District Board, ultimately operated about 105,000 acres. Ingolf Vogelen, The Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of U.S. Agriculture (Boulder, Colo., 1981), 61. 155. Street, New Revolution in the Cotton Economy, 166–67; Alfred James Fortenberry, Charges for Ginning Cotton: Seasons 1947–48 to 1954–55, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Marketing Research Report no. 120 (Washington, 1956), 15. 156. Trimble R. Hedges and Marvin Hoover, “Mechanical Cotton Harvesting,” California Agriculture (Berkeley) 12 (June 1958): 2. 157. David C. Large, “Cotton in the San Joaquin Valley: A Study of Government in Agriculture,” Geographical Review 47 (July 1957): 365. 158. Howard F. Gregor, An Agricultural Typology of California, Geography of World Agriculture, ed. Gyorgy Enyedi (Budapest, 1974), 4:63, 65, 67. 159. William J. Briggs and Henry Cauthen, The Cotton Man: Notes on the Life and Times of Wofford B. (“Bill”) Camp (Columbia, S.C., 1985), 278. 160. In 1982 farms harvesting 1–49 acres of cotton, 21.7 percent of farms, had 1.2 percent of harvested acreage in the state, 1.0 percent of the crop; farms harvesting 500 acres and more, 19.4 percent of farms, had 73.3 percent of harvested acreage, 74.9 percent of the crop. Special Cotton Report (1943), xi–xv; 1969 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 48 (Washington, 1972), 5; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1981), 17; 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1984), 20. 161. Former Choctaw territory, Le Flore was a county of small white tenant farmers (65.3 percent tenants, 95.7 percent of them white); the rate of illiteracy in 1920 had been more than twice that for the state (8.8 percent versus 3.8 percent; for native whites, 8.4 percent versus 2.3 percent).

436

162. 163.

164. 165.

166. 167. 168. 169.

170. 171. 172. 173. 174.

175. 176. 177. 178. 179.

Notes to Pages 78–81 Census of Agriculture: 1925, pt. 2 (Washington, 1927), 1043, 1077, 1094; Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 25 (Washington, 1952), 115; Census of Agriculture: 1959, vol. 1, pt. 36 (Washington, 1961), 183; 1964 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 36 (Washington, 1967), 397; 1969 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 36, sec. 2 (Washington, 1972), 323; 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 36 (Washington, 1977), 396; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920 (Washington, 1922), 3:815, 820. Mark Friedberger, Farm Families and Change in Twentieth-Century America (Lexington, Ky., 1988), 35–36. Viveca Novak, “Hawaii’s Dirty Secret,” Common Cause Magazine 15 (November/December 1989): 11–16, 27; Daviànna Po-maikaì McGregor, “Aina Ho’opulapula: Hawaiian Homesteading,” Hawaiian Journal of History . . . 24 (1990): 19, 31–32; Linda S. Parker, Native American Estate: The Struggle over Indian and Hawaiian Lands (Honolulu, 1989), 154–58. George Cooper and Gavan Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii: The Democratic Years (Honolulu, 1985), 412–29. From 2,485 in 1974 to 3,565 in 1978, 3,816 in 1982. 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 11 (Washington, 1984), 1. There had been 2,273 in 1900, 4,320 in 1910. Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 34 (Washington, 1952), 78. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 343. 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51, p. 383. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 275–76. By 75.5 percent, from 56,056 (62.2 percent, highest rate in the Far West) to 13,742 (3.3 percent). Kansas and Oklahoma were close, with declines of 74.5 percent and 74.0 percent (respectively from 55.4 percent to 6.4 percent and from 66.5 percent to 3.8 percent). Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population, pt. 2 (Washington, 1902), cxxxv; 1980 Census of Population, General Social and Economic Characteristics, United States Summary, PC 30–1–C1 (Washington, 1983), I-321, I-329, I-332. The percentage of gainful workers in agriculture had dropped to 49.0 percent in 1920, 24.5 percent in 1940. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 122. In the thirteen mountain and Pacific states from 521,582 to 604,671; in California from 152,371 to 310,954. There were absolute increases also in Montana, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and Alaska. E. V. Wilcox, “How Hawaii Helps Her Farmers to Market Their Produce,” Yearbook of Agriculture, 1915 (Washington, 1916), 133. Edward Norbeck, Pineapple Town: Hawaii (Berkeley, 1959), 152. Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 (Philadelphia, 1991), 59. The rates in 1980 were 2.2 percent and 3.7 percent of employed persons. However, Japanese and non-Japanese farm operators and managers were, respectively, 0.89 percent and 0.46 percent. 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. C, pt. 13 (Washington, 1983), 29–30, 67. Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii, 211–20. Ibid., 210. U.S. Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, Reports (Washington, 1901), 10:816–17. Historical Statistics, 498; Vernon W. Ruttan, The Economic Demand for Irrigated Acreage (Baltimore, 1965), 5–6. From 4.5 in 1860 to 6.9 in 1900, 10.7 in 1940, 65.0 in 1978. U.S. Department of Agriculture,

Notes to Pages 81–82

180. 181. 182. 183. 184.

185.

186. 187.

188.

437

Agricultural Research Service, Changes in Farm Production and Efficiency, A Summary Report, Statistical Bulletin no. 628 (Washington, 1980), 57. Labor-hours per unit of production declined from 1900 to 1935–39 by 26.5 percent in corn, 38.0 percent in wheat, 26.4 percent in cotton; from 1935–39 to 1975–79 by 96.3 percent, 86.6 percent, and 96.2 percent, respectively. Historical Statistics, 500; Agricultural Statistics, 1967 (Washington, 1967), 548; ibid., 1986 (Washington, 1986), 395. It was 3,749,000 in 1900, 3,825,000 in 1950, 1,304,000 (2.53 percent) in 1980. Historical Statistics, 458; Statistical Abstract, 1986, 635. 1980 Census of Population, General Social and Economic Characteristics, United States Summary (Washington, 1983), 1:321, 329, 332. Siegfried Birle, Irrigation Agriculture in the Southwest United States: Regional Variation of Crop Patterns (Marburg/Lahn, Germany), 167–69. Bradley H. Baltensperger, “Farm Consolidation in the Northern and Central States of the Great Plains,” Great Plains Quarterly 7 (fall 1987): 258–59, 262. That is, 73.5 percent in 1978, 75.6 percent in 1982, against 55.0 percent and 57.2 percent in California. In Nebraska, where substantial irrigation was much earlier than in Kansas and there were no counterparts to the Mexican land grants of California, such large irrigated farms constituted smaller though increasing shares, 41.1 percent and 45.8 percent. 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 27 (Washington, 1981), 22, 24; ibid., vol. 1, pt. 16, 657; 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1984), 169–70. Kern County 74.2 percent, the state 55.0 percent. Farms with 2,000 or more acres of irrigated land comprised 60.7 percent. Ibid., vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1981): 261; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Irrigation of Agricultural Lands . . . (Washington, 1942), 171. Leo V. Mayer, Farm Income and Farm Structure in the United States, Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, Report no. 79–188S (Washington, 1979), 48. Leon E. Truesdell, Farm Population: 1880 to 1950 . . . , Bureau of the Census, Technical Paper no. 3 (Washington, 1960); 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Supplementary Report, Provisional Estimates of Social, Economic, and Housing Characteristics . . . (Washington, 1982), 3–8. The definition of population on farms changed in 1974. Later estimates do not extend to individual states. Population on farms in the mountain and Pacific states in 1987 was 1.5 percent of total population (in all states 2.0 percent); in 1900 it had been 27.7 percent in those states (in all states 39.3 percent). Rural and Farm Population: 1987, Current Population Reports, ser. P-27, no. 61 (Washington, 1988), 9; Historical Statistics, 458. These rankings are approximations because records of both residence and employment are especially unreliable guides when many homesteaders were proving their claims, as early, and where farmland became suburbia, as later. Further, the census did not record population on farms for noncontiguous possessions. Percentages of employment in agriculture in 1900 were United States 35.6 percent, Oklahoma 70.3 percent, Hawaii 62.2 percent, North Dakota 60.9 percent, South Dakota 60.4 percent, Kansas 53.4 percent, Nebraska 49.9 percent, Idaho 43.8 percent, New Mexico 41.2 percent, Utah 34.8 percent, Oregon 34.5 percent, Wyoming 30.3 percent, Arizona 30.3 percent, Nevada 29.7 percent, Washington 27.1 percent, Montana 25.0 percent, California 23.7 percent, Colorado 20.6 percent, Alaska .01 percent; in 1980, United States 3.0 percent, South Dakota 16.1 percent, North Dakota 15.2 percent, Nebraska 10.7 percent, Montana 9.3 percent, Idaho 9.1 percent, Kansas 6.4 percent, Oklahoma 3.8 percent, Oregon 3.5 percent, Hawaii

438

189.

190. 191. 192. 193.

194.

195.

196. 197. 198. 199.

200.

Notes to Pages 82–84 3.3 percent, Washington 3.2 percent, New Mexico 3.2 percent, California 2.9 percent, Colorado 2.9 percent, Wyoming 2.8 percent, Arizona 2.7 percent, Utah 2.2 percent, Nevada 1.5 percent, Alaska 0.06 percent. In 1980 rates of employment in agriculture exceeded rates of residence on farms in all states but the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Alaska; rates of employment were more than twice rates of residence in Arizona (residence 0.51 percent), California (0.75 percent), Nevada (0.69 percent), and New Mexico (1.54 percent). Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population (Washington, 1902), 2:cxxxv, cxxxvi; 1980 Census of Population, General Social and Economic Characteristics, United States Summary (Washington, 1983), 1:327–32. Principal occupations other than farming were 24.8 percent in 1982, 27.2 percent in 1987 in the four northern plains states, 48.5 percent and 47.1 percent in the other fourteen. 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1984), 173–79; ibid., 1987, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1989), 145–50. Bruce B. Johnson, “The Status of Family Farming in Nebraska,” Farm, Ranch and Home Quarterly 23 (spring/summer 1983): 23–24. Warrick, Wheels of Fortune, 49–51. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wheat: Acreage, Yield, Production, 11; Agricultural Statistics, 1984 (Washington, 1984), 5. Yields still varied widely among states, in the 1980s approximating national yields in Kansas, twice national yields in California, well over twice in Arizona, about a sixth less in Wyoming. Historical Statistics, 500; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Statistics, 1983 (Washington, 1983), 5; ibid., 1986 (Washington, 1986), 5. The decline in Oklahoma was far greater after the war than in the 1930s, when acreage had dropped from 15,553,185 (1929) to 12,766,219 (1939); it was at 8,585,011 in 1978, 8,961,353 in 1982. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Washington, 1942), 370, 456, 564, 706; ibid., pt. 5, p. 212; ibid., pt. 6, pp. 4, 98, 174, 222, 322, 364, 432, 492, 536, 608, 676; 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51, p. 138; Agricultural Statistics, 1983, 384; ibid., 1986, 373. Acreage in the mountain states and territories and in Washington, Oregon, and California increased from 15,765,166 in 1900 to 43,339,815 in 1982; it had been 36,353,833 in 1929. 1969 Census of Agriculture, vol. 2, chap. 2 (Washington, 1973), 19. By percentage of sales. 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1989), 144–57; Statistical Abstract, 1989 (Washington, 1989), 18, 21–22. The others were Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, and Utah. 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51, pp. 144–50. 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51, pp. 302, 317; 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51, chaps. 3–14; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51, pp. 171–72. William C. Barnes and James T. Jardine, Livestock Production in the Eleven Far Western Range States, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Report no. 110, Meat Situation in the United States, pt. 2 (Washington, 1916), 7–8; E. Louise Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies, 1900–1950 (Stanford, Calif., 1951), 157–60. John T. Schlebecker, Cattle Raising on the Plains, 1900–1961 (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), 87–88, 95– 98.

Notes to Pages 84–86

439

201. [S. B. Howard] to J. B. Lemson [1920], Val Kuska Papers, file 50–21-N, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Neb. 202. Schlebecker, Cattle Raising on the Plains, 191. Farmers planted nearly half of plowable pasture land in the United States in crops between 1939 and 1949, nearly three-fourths of plowable pasture land in the Rocky Mountain region. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture (Washington, 1943), 3:40; Census of Agriculture: 1950 (Washington, 1952), 2:35. 203. George W. Collier, “Cattle Feeding for Profit,” Yearbook of Agriculture, 1926 (Washington, 1927), 201–3. 204. Charles L. Wood, The Kansas Beef Industry (Lawrence, Kan., 1980), 286–87. 205. Mont H. Saunderson, “Special Cattle Ranch Developments in the Northern Great Plains and in the Northwest,” American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers, Journal 17 (April 1953): 58–59. 206. Mrs. L. I. Sudlow, Homestead Years, 1908–1968 (Bison, S.D., 1968), 39, 287; Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota (Lincoln, Neb., 1968), 249, 253; Paula M. Nelson, After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900–1917 (Iowa City, 1986), 159; Census of Agriculture: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 11 (Washington, 1952), 278; Census of Agriculture: 1954, vol. 1, pt. 11 (Washington, 1956), 280; 1964 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 19 (Washington, 1967), 290. 207. Edward Everett Dale, The Range Cattle Industry (Norman, Okla., 1930), 163–64, 166. 208. “The New Cattle Business,” Fortune 61 (April 1960): 222, 227–28; J. R. Martin in Another Revolution in U.S. Farming? ed. Lyle P. Schertz et al., U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Economic Report no. 441 (Washington, 1979), 94, 97, 98. 209. That is, 54.4 percent of the national total in 1940–49. Agricultural Statistics 1951 (Washington, 1951), 326; Dale E. Butz and George L. Baker, Jr., The Changing Structure of the Meat Economy (Boston, 1960), 99–100. 210. That is, 15.7 percent in 1930, 15.1 percent in 1940, 11.8 percent in 1945. Agricultural Statistics 1942 (Washington, 1942), 383; ibid., 1945 (Washington, 1945), 294; ibid., 1947 (Washington, 1949), 326. 211. Jimmy M. Skaggs, Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607– 1983 (College Station, Tex., 1986), 177–78; on harvesting wild hay in the Big Hole Valley of Montana, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Making Hay (New York, 1987). 212. John K. Riggs in Henry C. Dethloff and Irvin M. May, Jr., eds., Southwestern Agriculture: PreColumbian to Modern (College Station, Tex., 1982), 87–88; Skaggs, Prime Cut, 179. 213. Agricultural Statistics 1973 (Washington, 1973), 304. 214. Ibid., 1988 (Washington, 1988), 264. 215. Ibid., 1951 (Washington, 1951), 337; ibid., 1988 (Washington, 1988), 270. 216. By 315.9 percent, 92.6 percent, and 46.2 percent. Historical Statistics, 520, 521; Agricultural Statistics 1988 (Washington, 1988), 258, 298. 217. Richard J. Arnould, “Changing Patterns of Concentration in American Meat Packing, 1880– 1963,” Business History Review 45 (spring 1971): 18–34; Mary Yeager, Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry (Greenwich, Conn., 1981), 239, 241. 218. Agricultural Statistics 1941 (Washington, 1941), 347; ibid., 1962 (Washington, 1962), 376.

440

Notes to Pages 86–91

219. Lawrence H. Larsen and Barbara J. Cottrell, The Gate City, A History of Omaha (Boulder, 1982), 249–51; Harl A. Dalstrom, A. V. Sorensen and the New Omaha (Omaha, Neb., 1988), 191–95. 220. Bert M. Evans et al., Wheels of Fortune: A Report on the Impact of Center Pivot Irrigation on the Ownership of Land in Nebraska (Walthill, Neb., 1976), 25–26, 28–30, 39–40, 55; Marty Strange, Family Farming: A New Economic Vision (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), 152–54; Strange et al., Half a Glass of Water: State Economic Development Politics and the Small Agricultural Communities of the Middle Border (Walthill, Neb., 1990), 66. 221. David M. Jackson, Warren R. Grant, and Cal E. Shafer, U.S. Sorghum Industry, Agricultural Economic Report no. 457, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service (Washington, 1980), 3–4, 7–8. 222. Testimony 1988 by B. H. Jones of the Packers and Stockyards Administration and B. W. Martin of the University of Wisconsin in U.S. Congress, House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Monopolies and Commercial Law, Mergers and Concentration: The Food Industries, Hearing, 11 May 1988, 100th Cong., 2d sess., serial 67, pp. 11, 14, 16, 62–63; Wichita Eagle, May 16, 1990, p. 1F, col. 4; p. 7F, cols. 2–5. 223. New York Times, October 18, 1993, p. A1, cols. 2–4, p. A12, cols. 1–2; Hope, Garden City, 17, 169; Opie, Ogallala, 153. 224. Wall Street Journal, July 16, 1990, p. A1, col. 3, p. A6, cols. 1–2. 225. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service, Status of the Family Farm: Second Annual Report to the Congress, Agricultural Economic Report no. 434 (Washington, 1979), 45. 226. Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1986, p. 64, cols. 1–6; New York Times, January 10, 1988, sec. 8, p. 1, col. 1. 227. Marty Strange and Chuck Hassebrook, Take Hogs, for Example: The Transformation of Hog Farms in America (Walthill, Neb., 1981), 2, 4–6, 8–10, 14–16. 228. Mergers and Concentration: The Food Industries (1988), 67–68. 229. New York Times, November 28, 1989, p. A10, cols. 3–5. 230. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economics, Statistics, and Cooperatives Service, Changes in Farm Production And Efficiency; A Summary Report, Statistical Bulletin no. 628 (Washington, 1980), 4.

CHAPTER 4. NEW FORMS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH 1. A. E. Thomas, “Goldfield: the New Eldorado,” Putnam’s Monthly and The Critic 1 (March 1907): 658, 661; Sally M. Zanjani, Goldfield: The Last Gold Rush on the Western Frontier (Athens, Ohio, 1992), 89. 2. Barton W. Currie, “The Kid-Gloved Gold-fields . . . ,” Harper’s Weekly 51 (January 26, 1907): 118. 3. John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California (Berkeley, 1992), 132. 4. Russell R. Elliott, History of Nevada (Lincoln, Neb., 1973), 396–97; Zanjani, Goldfield, 94–95; Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, vol. 11, Mines and Quarries, 1909 (Washington, 1913), 115; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Mines and Quarries, 1929 (Washington,

Notes to Pages 91–93

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

441

1933), 163–64. Although no twentieth-century district approached the annual yields from the Comstock Lode at their peak ($38,048,145 in 1876), by 1913 annual yields from the copper mines of Ely were over twice the value of yields from Goldfield; by 1916–18 Ely accounted for more than half the mineral production of the state; and by 1940, when another boom in copper was beginning, value of copper from Ely had exceeded three times the value of gold from Goldfield and approached that from the Comstock. Bertrand F. Couch and Jay A. Carpenter, Nevada’s Metal and Mineral Production, 1859–1940, Inclusive, University of Nevada Bulletin 37 (Reno, November 1, 1943), no. 4, Geology and Mining Series no. 38, pp. 13, 17, 50, 143–47, 132–38, and unnumbered insert; Terence Cole, “Golden Years: The Decline of Gold Mining in Alaska,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 80 (April 1989): 62–71. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1911 (Washington, 1912), 215; U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1987, vol. 1 (Washington, 1989), 401; ibid., Gold, 1988 (Washington, 1989), 3. T. A. Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska (San Francisco, 1909), 218, 338–40. Ralph Delahaye Paine, The Greater America (New York, 1907), 231–32, 235, 239–41; Charles Sedgwick Aiken, “Farming for Gold . . . ,” Sunset 23 (December 1909): 652; Clark C. Spence, The Conroy Placer Mining Company: A Pioneer Gold-Dredging Enterprise in Montana, 1897–1922 (Helena, 1989), 6–9. Yields from dredges that began operating on the Yuba River in 1904 averaged over twelve cents; they operated profitably on seven cents. The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond (New York, 1935), 2:497–98. Yuba no. 21, shut down in 1968 and reactivated in 1975, was the last operating gold dredge in California. San Francisco Chronicle, April 12, 1975, p. 43. George P. Baldwin, ed., The Black Hills Illustrated . . . (Philadelphia, 1904), 23, 43, 123; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns 1989 Nevada (Washington, 1991), 1–2; Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, vol. 11, Mines and Quarries 1909 (Washington, 1913), 113. Jim Robbins, “Gripped by Gold Fever,” New York Times Magazine, December 4, 1988, pt, 2, pp. 48, 50; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns 1987, Nevada (Washington, 1989), 1–3; Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, vol. 4, Population 1910, Occupation Statistics (Washington, 1914), 486–87. George Graham Rice, My Adventures with Your Money (Boston, 1913), 128; J. M. Carroll, “The Truth about Nevada . . . ,” Sunset 21 (May 1908): 52–54, 56; Couch and Carpenter, Nevada’s Metal and Mineral Production, 13, 152–53. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 602, 606. While Goldfield became briefly the most numerous and most flamboyant of mining towns in Nevada, the value of copper produced at Ely was more than twice that of gold produced at Goldfield, 1900–20, and over two-fifths that of all the silver from the Comstock Lode. Russell R. Elliott, Radical Labor in the Nevada Mining Booms, 1900–1920 (Carson City, Nev., 1961), 5. Robert Glass Cleland, A History of Phelps Dodge, 1834–1950 (New York, 1952), 98–99, 138–50. On the soundness of investments in copper (“a producing copper-mine is the surest business venture a man engages in . . .”), see Thomas W. Lawson, Frenzied Finance, The Crime of Amalgamated (New York, 1905), 230. Sarah McNelis, Copper King at War: The Biography of F. Augustus Heinze (Missoula, Mont., 1968), 212–13. On advances in smelting at Anaconda by 1902, see A. B. Parsons, ed., Seventy Five Years of Progress in the Mineral Industry, 1871–1946 . . . (New York, 1947), 129, 133; F. E. Richter,

442

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

Notes to Pages 93–96 “The Copper-Mining Industry in the United States, 1845–1925,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 41 (February, August 1927): 259–60, 690, 692, 694; H. Minar Shoebotham, Anaconda: Life of Marcus Daly, the Copper King (Harrisburg, Pa., 1956), 36–81; on Amalgamated and Montana Power, see Carrie Johnson, “Electric Power, Copper, and John D. Ryan,” Montana 38 (autumn 1988): 24–36, and Isaac F. Marcosson, Anaconda (New York, 1957), 144–48. Cleland, Phelps Dodge, 154, 200, 301–2. Lawson, Frenzied Finance, 371–73; F. Ernest Richter, “The Amalgamated Copper Company . . . ,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 30 (February 1916): 387–407; Orris C. Herfindahl, Copper Costs and Prices: 1870–1957 (Baltimore, 1959), 80–83. Eugene P. Lyle, Jr., “Founding the House of Guggenheim,” Hampton’s Magazine 24 (February 1910): 256–67, and “The Guggenheims and the Smelter Trust,” ibid. (March 1910): 411–22; Isaac F. Marcosson, Metal Magic: The Story of the American Smelting and Refining Company (New York, 1949), 87–89, 90; Salt Lake Tribune, December 31, 1905; John Fahey, The Ballyhoo Bonanza: Charles Sweeney and the Idaho Mines (Seattle, 1971), 170–71, 191; Fahey, The Inland Empire: Unfolding Years, 1879–1929 (Seattle, 1986), 182–83; W. Hudson Kensel, “Inland Empire Mining and the Growth of Spokane, 1883–1905,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 60 (April 1969): 96–97; Hammond, Autobiography, 2:500–525. On Utah Copper, A. B. Parsons, The Porphyry Coppers (New York, 1933), 71–75, and Leonard J. Arrington and Gary B. Hansen, “The Richest Hole on Earth:” A History of the Bingham Copper Mine (Logan, Utah, 1963), 30–40, 43–46, and passim; on development of porphyry and carbonate ores in the Southwest, Ira B. Joralemon, Copper: The Encompassing Story of Mankind’s First Metal (Berkeley, 1973), 196–98, 239–41. Leonard J. Arrington and Thomas G. Alexander, A Dependent Commonwealth: Utah’s Economy from Statehood to the Great Depression (Provo, Utah, 1974), 23–24; Arrington and Hansen, “Richest Hole on Earth,” 7, 71, 74, 90–91, and passim; Salt Lake City Tribune, January 18, 1948, sec. 2, p. 3, col. 4; Joralemon, Copper, 303; Thomas A. Rickard, “The Utah Copper Enterprise,” Mining and Scientific Press 117 (October 5–December 28, 1918): 445–49, 477–88, 515–25, 551– 55, 587–90, 713–24, 749–53, 783–91, 853–60. Five years before the company began precipitating leachings from the pit, Rickard had called a dump of tailings near Bingham “as dead metallurgically as the salt waste that it blankets.” Ibid., October 19, 1918, p. 515. Dale C. Stevens in Deon C. Greer, Perceptions of Utah: A Field Guide (Washington, 1977), 63. Russell R. Elliott, Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom: Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely (Reno, Nev., 1966), 179–90, 282–85. In the Rocky Mountain division, from 15.0 percent to 8.5 percent; in the Pacific, from 5.1 percent to 2.4 percent; in the Southwest, from 13.0 percent to 12.0 percent. Orris C. Herfindahl, “Development of the Major Metal Mining Industries in the United States from 1839 to 1909,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States after 1800, Studies in Income and Wealth (New York, 1966), 30:304. By 1950 nine states (Arizona, Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Utah, Wyoming) had more workers in mining than in 1900 but only two higher percentages in the labor force (Nebraska, 0.2 percent, and Oklahoma, 5.2 percent); the highest percentage was in Wyoming (7.5 percent). Eleven states had more agricultural workers. Simon Kuznets and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, eds., Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, United States, 1870–1950 (Philadelphia, 1957–60), 1:609–21, 623–31; 2:89–92; National Bureau of Economic Research, Out-

Notes to Pages 96–97

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

443

put, Employment, and Productivity, 304. Employment in copper mining in the West, 1902–9, increased by 177.3 percent, in gold and silver 24.9 percent, but employment in all minerals fell from 8.6 percent to 4.9 percent of total employment while increasing by 2.0 percent. Ibid., 341– 42. Joseph S. Leeper, “The Changing Urban Landscape of Butte, Montana” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1974), 1, 4. 1980 Census of Population, Detailed Population Characteristics (Washington, 1983), vol. 1, pt. 3, p.185; pt. 4, p. 381; pt. 28, p. 185; pt. 30, p. 284. Benjamin B. Hampton, “The Vast Riches of Alaska . . . ,” Hampton’s Magazine 24 (April 1910): 451–68; Hampton, “Shall Alaska Become a “Morganheim” Barony?” ibid. (May 1910): 631–46; Frederick H. Chase, “The Coal Crisis in Alaska . . . ,” Collier’s Weekly 48 (October 7, 1911): 19– 20; Harvey O’Connor, The Guggenheims: The Making of an American Dynasty (New York, 1937), 190–213. In 1912, production of Alaskan coal was 355 tons. Ed H. Thomas, “Alaska—a Future Empire,” American Review of Reviews 59 (January 1914): 56. Michael Malone, “The Collapse of Western Metal Mining: An Historical Epitaph,” Pacific Historical Review 55 (August 1986): 456–57; Raymond F. Mikesell, The Global Copper Industry: Problems and Prospects (London, 1988), 22; George H. Hildebrand and Garth L. Mangum, Capital and Labor in American Copper, 1845–1990: Linkages between Product and Labor Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 252, 274. “The Fading Mining Scene at Butte,” Engineering and Mining Journal 182 (July 1981): 9; Wall Street Journal, March 26, 1985, p. 10, cols. 1–2; Michael P. Malone, “The Close of the Copper Century,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 35 (spring 1985): 711; New York Times, June 28, 1982, p. A12, cols. 2–5. New York Times, August 5, 1986, p. A10, cols. 2–5; Gordon Witkin, “Rebirth of a Montana Mining Town—Maybe,” U.S. News and World Report 101 (October 6, 1986): 24; James Cook, “New Hope for the Dead,” Forbes 138 (September 8, 1986): 62, 64–65. “Back from the Dead,” Forbes 141 (January 25, 1988): 8; “Copper USA, a Triumphant Comeback,” Engineering and Mining Journal 191 (January 1990, supp.): C7; “Montana Resources: Richest Hill Once Again Yielding Copper Treasure,” ibid., C58; Wall Street Journal, April 27, 1989, p. B7, col. 2; U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1988 (Washington, 1990), 304. In 1987 Washington bought rolling stock and track from the Burlington Northern Railroad, operating Montana Rail Link in southern Montana. In 1991 he bought 64,229 acres in Wasco and Jefferson counties, Oregon, for less than followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had paid for the unimproved land in 1981; they had invested over fifteen times as much improving it. Richard L. Stern, “Denny’s Always the Low-Cost Producer,” Forbes 143 (May 15, 1989): 82–91; “MRL’s Tom Walsh: ‘A More Personal View of Business,’” Railway Age 192 (April 1991): 24; Portland Sunday Oregonian, May 26, 1991, p. K2, cols. 1–4; Richard L. Stern, “Bhagwan Washington?” Forbes 147 (June 24, 1991): 16. Jonathan D. Rosenblum, Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast LaborManagement Relations in America (Ithaca, 1995), 4, 198, and passim; Hildebrand and Mangum, Capital and Labor in American Copper, 245–61, 273–75, 284–91; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Technology and Labor in Copper Ore Mining, Household Appliances, and Water Transportation Industries, Bulletin 2420 (Washington, 1993), 8.

444

Notes to Pages 97–101

29. New York Times, November 14, 1987, p. 37, col. 3, p. 39, cols. 1–3; Wall Street Journal, November 24, 1989, pp. A1, col. 1, A8, cols. 4–6; Phelps Dodge, Annual Report 1988, 2, 4. 30. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Productivity Measures for Selected Industries and Government Services, Bulletin 2296 (Washington, 1988), 7; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns 1988 Arizona (Washington, 1990), 1. 31. Ronald E. Miller, “The Impact of the Aluminum Industry on the Pacific Northwest: A Regional Input-Output Analysis,” Review of Economics and Statistics 39 (May 1957): 200–209. By the time Atlantic Richfield closed its smelter at Anaconda, it had concluded that it could process copper concentrates more cheaply in Japan than in Montana. New York Times, July 25, 1980, sec. 3, pp. 1, 15. 32. Lewis L. Levine, The Taxation of Mines in Montana (New York, 1919). 33. Hammond, Autobiography, 2:517–18. 34. Roger M. Olien and Diana Davis Olien, Easy Money: Oil Promoters and Investors in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill, 1990), 19–23. 35. Historical Statistics, 582; Harold F. Williamson et al., American Petroleum Industry, vol. 2, The Age of Energy, 1900–1959 (Evanston, Ill., 1963), 17. 36. Arrell M. Gibson, Wilderness Bonanza: The Tri-State District of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma (Norman, Okla., 1972), 48–49, 79–83, 150, 164, 262–63. 37. Gerald T. White, Formative Years in the Far West: A History of Standard Oil of California and Predecessors through 1919 (New York, 1962), 3–4, 24–25, and passim. 38. Walter V. Woehlke, “The Great Julian Pete Swindle . . . ,” Sunset 59 (September 1927): 14; Guy W. Finney, The Great Los Angeles Bubble . . . (Los Angeles, 1929), 33; Jules Tygiel, The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties (New York, 1994), 31–34, 67, 84, and passim. In the early stages of the industry, when small operators occasionally prospered, economies of scale were not extensive. Harold F. Williamson et al., in National Bureau of Economic Research, Output, Employment, and Productivity, 377–79. 39. Kenny A. Franks, The Oklahoma Petroleum Industry (Norman, Okla., 1980), 18, 23; Carl Coke Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest (Norman, Okla., 1949), 185–87. 40. The Southern Pacific built wood-burning locomotives in California as late as 1888. Guy L. Dunscomb, A Century of Southern Pacific Steam Locomotives, 1862–1962 (Modesto, Calif., 1963), 131. 41. Donald E. Green, Land of the Underground Rain: Irrigation on the Texas High Plains, 1910–1970 (Austin, 1973), 53. 42. Williamson et al., American Petroleum Industry, 2:175n. 43. John B. Anderson, “The Blue Gum: A Brief Study of Eucalyptus Globulus . . . ,” Forestry and Irrigation 10 (February 1904): 65–70; C. H. Sellers, “Eucalyptus, A Substitute for Eastern Hardwoods,” Overland Monthly 53 (May 1909): 446–51; F. A. Pattee, “The Eucalyptus Industry in California,” Pacific Monthly 22 (October 1909): 423–27. 44. White, Formative Years in the Far West, 149–50; Williamson, American Petroleum Industry, 2:181; Day Allen Willey, “The Status of the Southwestern Oil Industry,” American Review of Reviews 29 (January 1904) 59. 45. Joseph E. Pogue, The Economics of Petroleum (New York, 1921), 153. 46. White, Formative Years in the Far West, 134–35. 47. Ibid., 301–2, 513.

Notes to Pages 101–104

445

48. Ibid., 581. 49. Williamson, American Petroleum Industry, 2:177. In 1917–19, Standard Oil sold between 70.6 percent and 89.2 percent of its petroleum products from California in the western market. White, Formative Years in the Far West, 582. 50. Pogue, Economics of Petroleum, 159. 51. John G. Clark, Towns and Minerals in Southeastern Kansas: A Study in Regional Industrialization, 1890–1930 (Lawrence, Kan., 1970). 52. Edmond O’Neill, “Petroleum in California,” Sunset 6 (April 1901): 183–84. 53. White, Formative Years in the Far West, 479–81; Williamson, American Petroleum Industry, 2:423–30. 54. John A. Hansen, U.S. Oil Pipeline Markets: Structures, Pricing, and Public Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 33. 55. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Manufacturing, 1939, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Washington, 1942), 868; Statistical Abstract, 1941 (Washington, 1941), 835. 56. Willis H. Miller, “Pacific Coast Oil and Natural Gas,” Economic Geography 12 (January 1936): 86. 57. Charles M. Coleman, P. G. and E. of California: The Centennial Story of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, 1852–1952 (New York, 1952), 106, 116–22; Louis C. Hunter and Lynwood Bryant, A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, vol. 3, The Transmission of Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 257, 408–11, 413; Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1983), 268–70; John Fahey, The Ballyhoo Bonanza: Charles Sweeny and the Idaho Mines (Seattle, 1971), 112–15, 118–23. 58. Coleman, P. G. and E. of California, 72–74; “Tower-System of Electric-Lighting,” American Architect and Building News 11 (June 10, 1882): 272, quoting San Francisco Mining and Scientific Press. 59. Joseph Aloysius Alexander, The Life of George Chaffey: A Story of Irrigation Beginnings in California and Australia (Melbourne, 1928), 37–38; J. A. Graves, My Seventy Years in California, 1857–1927 (Los Angeles, 1929), 248; “The Transmission Systems of the Great West,” Electrical World 59 (June 1, 1912): 1143; “Western Transmission Systems,” ibid., 1191. 60. Craig Wollner, Electrifying Eden: Portland General Electric 1889–1965 (Portland, Ore., 1990), 21–23; John Dierdorff, How Edison’s Lamp Helped Light the West: The Story of Pacific Power and Light Company and Its Pioneer Forebears (Portland, Ore., 1971), 5–6; Electrical World 20 (August 6, 1892): 92. 61. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Central Electric Light and Power Stations (Washington, 1903), 38; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Central Electric Light and Power Stations and Steam and Electric Railways 1912 (Washington, 1914), 19–20; Hughes, Networks of Power, 281–82; “The Transmission Systems of the Great West,” Electrical World 59 (June 1, 1912): 1142. 62. Hunter and Bryant, History of Industrial Power, 3:216–17, 257. 63. “Average Rates for Electricity in Thirty-six Large American Cities,” Electrical World 59 (March 16, 1912): 595–96; “The Municipal Plant at Seattle,” ibid., 59 (June 1, 1912): 1190; Wesley Arden Dick, “Visions of Abundance: The Public Power Crusade in the Pacific Northwest in the Era of J. D. Ross and the New Deal” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington–Seattle, 1973), 248–49, 256.

446

Notes to Pages 104–109

64. Frederic A. C. Perrine, “Hydraulic-power Development on the Pacific Coast . . . ,” Cassier’s Magazine 35 (March 1909): 620–25; “Developing the Resources of the Northwest Coast by Electricity,” Harper’s Weekly 53 (April 3, 1909): 15. 65. Historical Statistics, 241; Pogue, Economics of Petroleum, 152–53. 66. Portland Oregonian, July 3, 1938, magazine, p. 1, col. 7. 67. Dierdorff, How Edison’s Lamp Helped Light the West, 292–93. 68. Victor Anderson, Illusions of Power: A History of the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) (New York, 1985), 43–48, 65, 114, 122–33. Hydrogeneration continued to provide over half of electric power in the Pacific states into the 1970s (56.2 percent in 1973, after rising to 86.5 percent in 1935 and 93.4 percent in 1940) but fell below half in the mountain states by 1965 (47.6 percent; 29.1 percent in 1973). Total hydroelectric power generated in the mountain and Pacific states increased 1163 percent, 1935–70 (nationally, 545 percent); the two groups of states had nearly a third of the country’s hydroelectric power in 1935, nearly two-thirds in 1970. Edison Electric Institute, The Electric Light and Power Industry in 1935, Statistical Bulletin no. 3 (June 1936), 19; Edison Electric Institute, Statistical Year Book of the Electric Utility Industry for 1966, no. 34 (September 1967), 21; ibid., 1971, no. 39 (October 1972), 21. 69. Clarence C. Strong and Clyde S. Webb, White Pine: King of Many Waters: A History of Sawmilling, Shingle Manufacturing and Log Transportation in the Coeur d’Alenes (Missoula, Mont., 1970), 111–19. 70. Robert E. Ficken, The Forested Land: A History of Lumbering in Western Washington (Durham, N.C., 1987), 105–7. 71. U.S. Bureau of Corporations, The Lumber Industry (Washington, 1913–14), 1:215; U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, Sen. Doc. 415, 5:4937–938. 72. Thomas R. Cox (Mills and Markets: A History of the Pacific Coast Lumber Industry to 1900 [Seattle, 1974], 170) suggests that operators chose to make millworkers absorb declines in prices rather than risk their supplies of logs. 73. Harold M. Hyman, Soldiers and Spruce: Origins of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen (Los Angeles, 1963); Robert L. Tyler, “The United States Government as Union Organizer: The Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (December 1960): 434–51. 74. Ralph W. Hidy, Frank E. Hill, and Allan Nevins, Timber and Men: The Weyerhaeuser Story (New York, 1963), 212–14, 221–22, 237, 273; Robert E. Ficken, “Weyerhaeuser and the Pacific Northwest Timber Industry,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 70 (October 1979): 146–54. Access to midwestern markets was assured when the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1908 ruled against increases in reduced freight rates announced in 1893. John H. Cox, “Organizations of the Lumber Industry in the Pacific Northwest, 1889–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1937), 4–6, 164–65. 75. John M. McClelland, R. A. Long’s Planned City: The Story of Longview (Longview, Wash., 1976), 4, 10–18, 127–30, 209–10, and passim; Lenore K. Bradley, Robert Alexander Long: A Lumberman of the Gilded Age (Durham, N.C., 1989), 60, 121, 123, 129–34, 139–43, 155–56. 76. Stewart H. Holbrook, “The Logging Camp Loses Its Soul . . . ,” Sunset 66 (June 1926): 62. 77. John McClelland, Jr. Wobbly War: The Centralia Story (Tacoma, Wash., 1987). 78. Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, Timber and Men, 359–61.

Notes to Pages 109–111

447

79. Robert M. Cour, The Plywood Age: A History of the Fir Plywood Industry’s First Fifty Years (Portland, Ore., 1955), 13–15, 31, 91–92. 80. From 1,222 to 14,149 million square feet, three-eighths-inch basis, and from 10,522 to 15,250 million board feet. 81. Fahey, Inland Empire, 209. 82. Ficken, Forested Land, 173, 184, 216, 225. 83. Thomas R. Cox, “The Stewardship of Private Forests: The Evolution of a Concept in the United States, 1864–1950,” Journal of Forest History 25 (October 1981): 192; on early factors in stability, Cox, “Trade, Development, and Environmental Change: The Utilization of North America’s Pacific Coast Forests to 1941 and Its Consequences,” in Global Deforestation and the NineteenthCentury World Economy, ed. Richard P. Tucker and J. R. Richards (Durham, N.C., 1983), 14–29, 180–84. 84. Paul F. Sharp, “The Tree Farm Movement: Its Origin and Development,” Agricultural History 23 (January 1949): 41–45; William B. Greeley, Forests and Men (Garden City, N.Y., 1951), 115–16, 159–62; Rodney C. Loehr, ed., Forests for the Future: The Story of Sustained Yield as Told in the Diaries and Papers of David T. Mason, 1907–1950 (St. Paul, 1952); Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, Timber and Men, 390–91, 439–40, 503–6; Elmo Richardson, David T. Mason, Forestry Advocate; His Role in the Application of Sustained Yield Management to Private and Public Forest Lands (Santa Cruz, 1983), 29, 33, 37–38, and passim; Charles E. Twining, Phil Weyerhaeuser, Lumberman (Seattle, 1985), 228–32. 85. Michael Hibbard and James Elias in Forgotten Places: Uneven Development in Rural America, Thomas A. Lyson and William W. Falk (Lawrence, Kan., 1993), 201–2. 86. Alfred J. Van Tassel and David W. Bluestone, Mechanization in the Lumber Industry: A Study of Technology in Relation to Resources and Employment Opportunity (Philadelphia, 1940), 12, 14, 36, 42; Howard Brett Melendy, “One Hundred Years of the Redwood Lumber Industry, 1850– 1950” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1952), 51–52 and passim. 87. Bureau of Corporations, The Lumber Industry, 1:14–20; 2:11. 88. U.S. Public Lands Commission, Report, 58th Cong., 3d sess., 1905, S. Doc. 189, serial 4766, pp. vi, xvi; U.S. National Conservation Commission, Report, 60th Cong., 2d sess., 1909, S. Doc. 676, serial 5397–9, 3:389. 89. Kenneth C. Tollenaar et al., The Significance of the O & C Forest Reserve in Western Oregon (Eugene, Ore., 1968); Elmo Richardson, BLM’s Billion Dollar Checkerboard: Managing the O & C Lands (Santa Cruz, 1980); David M. Ellis, “The Oregon and California Land Grant, 1866–1945,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 29 (October 1948): 253–83. 90. McClelland, R. A. Long’s Planned City, 231, 237–38; Dennis C. Le Master, Mergers among the Largest Forest Products Firms, 1950–1970 (Pullman, Wash., 1977). 91. Historical Statistics, 542; West Coast Lumbermen’s Association, 1948 Statistical Year Book (Portland, Ore., 1950), 11–18. 92. Owen R. Cheatham and Robert B. Pamplin, The Georgia-Pacific Story (New York, 1966), 8–9. 93. Joe P. Mattey, The Timber Bubble That Burst: Government Policy and the Bailout of 1984 (New York, 1990), 3–6, 19, 30–32. 94. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Productivity Measures for Selected Industries and Government Services, Bulletin 2322 (Washington, 1989), 49. 95. Portland Oregonian, July 17, 1959, p. 1, col. 8; August 20, 1959, p. 1, cols. 4–6; September 29,

448

96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

101.

102.

Notes to Pages 111–113 1959, p. 1, col. 2; October 15, 1959, p. 8, cols. 5–8; July 22, 1982, sec. D, p. 10, col. 1; GeorgiaPacific Corporation, Annual Report, 1982 (Atlanta, 1 983), 4; William G. Robbins, “The Social Context of Forestry: The Pacific Northwest in the Twentieth Century,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (October 1985): 422–27; New York Times, February 24, 1991, sec. 3, p. 1, cols. 2–4, p. 6, col. 6. Mills in Oregon produced 65.4 percent of American plywood in 1965, 41.3 percent in 1978, 30.9 percent in 1984. In six years after 1978, when production of plywood in Oregon peaked, a fourth of the mills in the state closed. While representatives of both management and labor attributed the troubles of the industry to limits on sales of old-growth timber, waferboard and oriented strandboard, made from bonded chips of “weed” woods in the South and Middle West, took much of the market for Douglas fir plywood. Eugene Register-Guard, November 11, 1985, p. 4A, cols. 1–4; November 13, 1985, p. A1, col. 5. Champion International, formed in 1972 out of U.S. Plywood Corporation (1937) and other firms, which added substantially to its holdings in Oregon and northern California in 1959–66, joined Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser, and International Paper in closing western mills. From 10.12 to 8.2 workers. Catherine Caulfield, “The Ancient Forest,” New Yorker 66 (May 14, 1990): 78. Random Lengths Yearbook 1974 (Eugene, Ore., 1975), 162; ibid., 1976 (Eugene, Ore., [1977?]), 173; ibid., 1988 (Eugene, Ore., 1989), 189; Portland Oregonian, September 10, 1968, p. 1, cols. 6–7. Robbins, “Social Context of Forestry,” 413–27; William G. Robbins, Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850–1986 (Seattle, 1988). In 1963 nearly three-fourths of the saw timber in western Oregon was on public land. Tollenaar, Significance of the O & C Forest Reserve, 148. James N. Tattersall, “The Economic Development of the Pacific Northwest to 1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1960), 196, 199. Production by the largest producer of Douglas fir, Weyerhaeuser, rose from 8.8 percent in 1947 to 14.2 percent in 1963, while production by the four largest producers rose from 15.9 percent to 19.7 percent. Walter J. Mead, Competition and Oligopsony in the Douglas Fir Lumber Industry (Berkeley, 1966), 101, 103–6, 110. On innovation by a small company, see Eugene Register-Guard, November 11, 1985, p. 4A; on early reliance on “commercial log” (sources of timber not controlled by mills), which a lumberman said accounted for 40 to 45 percent of the lumber manufactured in Oregon and Washington by the early 1920s, see Robert W. Vinnedge, The Pacific Northwest Lumber Industry and Its Development (New Haven, 1923), 19. In 1963 nearly three-fourths of the saw timber in western Oregon was on public land. In 1980 total American consumption of lumber was 13.8 percent less than in 1906; per capita consumption was about two-thirds less. Consumption of petroleum increased by annually larger amounts until after prices began to rise sharply in 1973. Historical Statistics, 539; Statistical Abstract, 1985 (Washington, 1985), 554, 677. Andrew H. Trice, “California Manufacturing Branches of National Firms, 1899–1948: Their Place in the Economic Development of the State” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1955), 26; Harvey S. Perloff, et al., Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1960), 622–23, 632–33; Census of Population: 1960 (Washington, 1963), vol. 1, pt. 6, p. 249; Historical Statistics, 127.

Notes to Pages 113–117

449

103. Historical Statistics, 753; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, vol. 10, Manufactures, 1919 . . . (Washington, 1923), 1023–24. 104. Benedict Crowell, America’s Munitions, 1917–1918: Report of Benedict Crowell, the Assistant Secretary of War, Director of Munitions (Washington, 1919), 108, 114; Grosvenor B. Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917–1919 (Boston, 1923), 404. 105. Even the massive public works of the 1930s left employment in 1939 at 718, 27.3 percent below the 988 of 1900. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Manufactures (Washington, 1902), 2:42; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Manufactures, 1919 (Washington, 1923), 10:694; Census of Manufactures: 1921, Explosives (Washington, 1923), 10; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Manufactures: 1939 (Washington, 1942), 3:86. 106. Average tonnages of merchant shipping built on the coast declined by 10.9 percent between 1903–14 and 1926–29. Historical Statistics, 753; William Wolman, The Development of Manufacturing Industry in the State of Washington (Pullman, Wash., 1958), 64, 133; Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle, 1964), 162; Harold L. Kube and Ralph L. Danhof, Changes in Distribution of Manufacturing Wage Earners, 1899–1939 (Washington, 1942), 34–35, 36–39. 107. Howard T. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry (New York, 1933), 98, 395; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York, 1985), 289–303; Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988). 108. Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the MovieMakers (New York, 1950), 39. 109. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Manufactures: 1929 (Washington, 1933), 3:61, 66–67, 69–70, 77–78; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Washington, 1932), 241, 274; ibid. (Washington, 1933), 4:176–77; “Brief History and Statistics of the American Motion Picture Industry,” Motion Pictures Abroad 14 (March 15, 1940): 1–14; Mae D. Hueltig, Economic Control in the Motion Picture Industry: A Study in Industrial Organization (Philadelphia, 1944), 56–57; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, vol. 3, Labor Force, pt. 2 (Washington, 1943), 244, 248. In 1929, 77.2 percent of the labor force in production was in California, practically all of that in Los Angeles County (15,153 of 15,169). Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Manufactures: 1929, 2:1323–324.

CHAPTER 5. ECONOMIC GROWTH FROM THE 1940S 1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, 1904), lxxxviii– lxxxix, xciv; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, vol. 4, Occupations by States . . . (Washington, 1933), 18; Paul Rohde, “The Nash Thesis Revisited: An Economic Historian’s View,” Pacific Historical Review 63 (August 1994): 371–74. 2. Pacific Monthly 5 (March 1901): 204. 3. San Francisco Chronicle, April 25, 1943, p. 1, col. 1. 4. Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln, Neb., 1990), 19. 5. “Greatest Treasure Hunt,” Time 42 (November 8, 1943): 50. 6. Duncan Smith Ballantine, U.S. Naval Logistics in the Second World War (Princeton, 1947), 209, 411–12, 222; Robert H. Connery, The Navy and the Industrial Mobilization in World War II (Princeton, 1951), 221.

450

Notes to Pages 117–122

7. Alvin P. Stauffer, The Quartermaster Corps: Operations in the War against Japan, United States Army in World War II, ser. 6, vol. 17 (Washington, 1956), 134, 140, 142, 159. 8. Nash, World War II and the West, 48; M. I. Gershenson, “Wartime and Postwar Employment Trends in California,” Monthly Labor Review 64 (April 1947): 584; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, vol. 3 (Washington, 1943), pt. 2, p. 302; pt. 3, p. 646. 9. Nash, World War II and the West, 53–54, 248; New York Times, August 25, 1967, p. 32, cols. 1–5; Kaiser Industries Corporation, The Kaiser Story (Oakland, Calif., 1968), 27, 31; Mark S. Foster, Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West (Austin, 1989), 70–73, 88, and passim. 10. Nash, World War II and the West, 44–45. 11. Charles Wollenberg, Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito (Berkeley, 1990), 19–20. 12. Frederic C. Lane, Ships for Victory: A History of Shipbuilding under the U.S. Maritime Commission in World War II (Baltimore, 1951), 18–19, 827–29. 13. E. T. Grether et al., The Iron- and Steel-Using Industries of California: Prewar Developments, Wartime Adjustments, and Long-Run Outlook ([Sacramento], 1946), 112, 239. 14. Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York, 1991), 99–100. 15. Renè J. Francillon, McDonnell Douglas Aircraft since 1920 (Annapolis, Md., 1988), 1:2–3, 5, 14– 15. 16. Judith R. Goodstein, Millikan’s School: A History of the California Institute of Technology (New York, 1991), 156, 163, 168–69. 17. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Manufactures 1939, vol. 2, pt. 2 (Washington, 1942), 541–42; ibid. (Washington, 1942), 3:84, 90, 94; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Manufactures: 1929 (Washington, 1933), 1191–192. 18. Gerald T. White, Billions for Defense: Government Financing by the Defense Plant Corporation during World War II (University, Ala., 1980), 7–10 and passim; Connery, Navy and Industrial Mobilization, 367, 371–83. 19. William Glenn Cunningham, Aircraft Industry: A Study in Industrial Location (Los Angeles, 1951), 25; Herman G. Stekler, The Structure and Performance of the Aerospace Industry (Berkeley, 1965), 4. 20. Figures exclude Hawaii, Alaska, and Oklahoma. Wendell Berge, Economic Freedom for the West (Lincoln, Neb., 1946), 14, 74. The Defense Plant Corporation allotted 15.7 percent of its financing for plants in those states, or 16.4 percent with Oklahoma. White, Billions for Defense, 81–82. 21. Cunningham, Aircraft Industry, 43–44, 57, 105, 206, 213, 224; John B. Rae, Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 5–7, 8–11, 15–16, 30–31, 32, 54, 91–92. 22. James Richard Wilburn, “Social and Economic Aspects of the Aircraft Industry in Metropolitan Los Angeles during World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Los Angeles, 1971), 247, 253; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Labor Force, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Washington, 1943), 327, 328; Leonard G. Levenson, “Wartime Expansion of the California Airframe Industry,” Monthly Labor Review 61 (October 1945): 722; Eleanora H. Barnes, “Employment in the Northwest,” ibid., 594. Gershenson, “Wartime and Postwar Employment Trends in California,” 584. 23. Edward M. Gordon, “Employment in the Shipyard Industry, 1935–43,” Monthly Labor Review

Notes to Pages 122–126

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

451

58 (May 1944): 952; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Labor Force, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Washington, 1943), 302; pt. 4 (Washington, 1943), 984; pt. 5 (Washington, 1943), 886. Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, 72; Lane, Ships for Victory, 249. Richard Finnie, ed., Marinship: The History of a Wartime Shipyard . . . Sausalito, California, 1942–1945 (San Francisco, 1947), 48, 54; Lane, Ships for Victory, 257; Amy Kesselman, Fleeting Opportunities: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver during World War II (Albany, N.Y., 1990), 6–7, 89; Wollenberg, Marinship at War, 64. Rae, Climb to Greatness, 16, 40–42, 225–26; Jimmy M. Skaggs in Metropolitan Wichita: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Glenn W. Miller and Jimmy M. Skaggs (Lawrence, Kan., 1978), 13. Lane, Ships for Victory, 153. Francis Walton, Miracle of World War II: How American Industry Made Victory Possible (New York, 1956), 197–98. U.S. Surplus Property Administration, Aircraft Plants and Facilities: Report of the Surplus Property Administration to the Congress, January 14, 1946 (Washington, 1946), 1:41–50. Figures cover plants costing over $5,000,000. Cunningham, Aircraft Industry, 206, 212–13, 221–22. White, Billions for Defense, 71. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Estimates of the Population of States: July 1, 1940 to 1949, Current Population Reports, ser. P-25, no. 72 (Washington, 1953), 6. Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington, 1985), 46–55, 59–74; Richard B. Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin, 1971); Ernesto Galarza, Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story; An Account of the Managed Migration of Mexican Farm Workers in California, 1942–1960 (Charlotte, N.C., 1964); Joan London and Henry Anderson, So Shall Ye Reap (New York, 1970), 14. Commonwealth Club of California, The Population of California, A Report of a Research Study . . . (San Francisco, 1946), 15, 18–19. In California the labor force in agriculture fell from 10.27 percent of the total labor force in 1940 to 6.69 percent in 1950; in Arizona, from 22.41 percent to 14.9 percent. The labor force in manufacturing in California increased from 14.5 percent to 17.87 percent, from 410,878 to 754,612. Harvey S. Perloff et al., Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1960), 623, 625, 633. But employment in service trades continued larger, and employment in manufacturing in California as in other western states remained below national levels. George W. Rogers, The Future of Alaska: Economic Consequences of Statehood (Baltimore, 1962), 114–15; Joseph H. FitzGerald, Economic Development in Alaska: A Report to the President Prepared by Federal Field Committee for Development Planning in Alaska (Washington, 1966), 2; “Personal Income Patterns in Alaska,” Alaska Review of Business and Economic Conditions 6, no. 1 (1969); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Estimated Population of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands: July 1, 1940 to 1945, Population Special Reports Series P-46, no. 9 (Washington, 1946), 1; “Federal Revenues and Spending in Alaska,” Alaska Review of Social and Economic Conditions 19 (April 1982): 9. By 1987 Alaska was no longer the smallest state in population, having passed Wyoming. Laton McCartney, Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story; The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World (New York, 1988), 66; Nash, World War II and the West, 140–44. The increase in population for Hawaii, 1940–50, 18.2 percent, was lowest west of the Rockies, al-

452

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

Notes to Pages 126–128 though the birth rate was highest. While military personnel in the islands dropped from 395,575 in 1944 to 21,000 in 1950 (rising then to 48,000 in 1953), civilian population rose and then fell in 1952 to the level of 1946. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Current Population Reports, Population Estimates, Population Special Reports Series P-25, no. 29 (1949), pp. 1, 4; no. 76 (1953); no. 145 (1956), p. 5; and no. 227 (1961), p. 4. Cunningham, Aircraft Industry, 145–48. The general belief had been that only one of ten would be needed for postwar business. C. Hartley Grattan, “The Future of the Pacific Coast,” Harper’s Magazine 190 (March 1945): 302. “Will There Be a ‘Recession’?” U.S. News and World Report 22 (14 March 1947): 29–30, 33–34. Wytze Gorter and George H. Hildebrand, The Pacific Coast Maritime Shipping Industry, 1930– 1948 (Berkeley, 1952–54), 1:35; 2:6–7. “Boom in the Pacific States . . . ,” U.S. News and World Report 20 (January 4, 1946): 15–16; “California Boom: A Wave of New Industries Follow the Great Westward Wave of New Population,” Life 20 (June 10, 1946), 31. Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II’s Battle of the Potomac (Urbana, Ill., 1991), 155. James J. Parsons, “California Manufacturing,” Geographical Review 39 (April 1949): 240. Grether, Iron and Steel-Using Industries, 50–51. Duane A. Smith, “Boom to Bust and Back Again: Mining in the Central Rockies, 1920–1981,” Journal of the West 31 (October 1982): 4. Bonneville Power Administration, Pacific Northwest Economic Base Study for Power Markets, Summary (Portland, Ore., 1970), 44; Carl M. Loeb, Rhoads & Co., Aluminum: An Analysis of the Industry in the United States (New York, 1950), 49; Nathanael H. Engle, “Pacific Northwest Economic Outlook—1947,” Monthly Labor Review 64 (April 1947): 641–43. Nash, World War II and the West, 92–101, 115, 121, 125–27; Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, 197–99; Albert P. Heiner, Henry J. Kaiser, American Empire Builder: An Insider’s View (New York, 1989), 114, 276; U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1988 (Washington, 1990), 1:111; Charlotte F. Muller, Light Metals Monopoly (New York, 1946), 10; San Francisco Chronicle, May 2, 1943, p. 9, col. 5. Kaiser’s capacity in 1967 was 670,000 tons (18.6 percent), in 1988 273,000 tons (7.0 percent). Philip Farin and Gary A. Rubsamen, Aluminum: Profile of an Industry (New York, 1969), 16; U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1988, 1:111. William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States (Lexington, Mass., 1971), 4:1468. Kenneth Warren, The American Steel Industry, 1850–1970: A Geographical Interpretation (Oxford, 1973), 236. Paul A. Tiffany, The Decline of American Steel: How Management, Labor, and Government Went Wrong (New York, 1988), 18–19, 21–25, 28–30, 206–7; Warren, American Steel Industry, 246, 263–68; Foster, Henry J. Kaiser, 95, 98–104; U.S. Congress, Subcommittee on Surplus Property of the House Committee on Military Affairs and the Industrial Reorganization Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Postwar Economic Policy and Planning, War Plants Disposal—Iron and Steel Plants, Joint Hearings, U.S. Congress, 79th Cong., 1st sess., 1945, pp. 3, 29, 55–56, 81, 154. Warren, American Steel Industry, 263–76.

Notes to Pages 128–130 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

453

Hogan, Iron and Steel Industry, 4:1468. Warren, American Steel Industry, 238, 275. Tiffany, Decline of American Steel, 65–66, 93–94. Ibid., 117. Annual Statistical Report, American Iron and Steel Institute, 1973 (Washington, 1974), 36, 38, 55, 109; ibid., 1982 (Washington, 1983), 72, 78; Gene Gregory, Japanese Electronics Technology: Enterprise and Innovation, 2d ed. (Chichester, 1986), 130. New York Times, April 14, 1984, sec. 1, p. 32, col. 5; August 3, 1984, p. 29, cols. 3–4, p. 31, cols. 1–4; Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1984, p. 5, col. 1. William T. Hogan, Steel in the United States: Restructuring to Compete (Lexington, Mass., 1984), 11–12, 88; New York Times, November 8, 1990, p. C5, col. 2. New York Times, November 4, 1992, p. 4, col. 4; Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993, p. A3, col.2; July 28, 1993, p. D2, cols. 3–6. U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook [1992] (Washington, 1994), 645; New York Times, March 31, 1992, p. A1, col. 6, p. A13, cols. 2–3; July 21, 1994, p. C6, col. 5. Richard M. Langworth, Kaiser-Frazer, The Last Onslaught on Detroit: An Intimate Behind the Scenes Study of the Postwar American Car Industry (Kurztown, Pa., 1975), 32, 37–38; Kaiser Industries Corporation, Kaiser Story, 40, 42, 45; James M. Rubenstein, The Changing U.S. Auto Industry: A Geographical Analysis (London, 1992), 95. Automobile Manufacturers Association, Automobile Facts and Figures, 1963 (Detroit, 1963), 67; Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association, MVHA Motor Vehicles Facts and Figures ’79 (Detroit, 1979), 19; Ward’s Automobile Yearbook (Detroit, 1985), 75; Rubenstein, Changing U.S. Auto Industry, 95, 97–98, 153–54, 157–58, 162. U.S. Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook 1992, 699. Warren, American Steel Industry, 270. Petroleum Facts and Figures 1971 (Washington, 1971), 22, 70; T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln, Neb., 1978), 511–12. John Strohmeyer, Extreme Conditions: Big Oil and the Transformation of Alaska (New York, 1993), 30, 34, 36, 38; “Alaska’s Economy Since Statehood: The ISER MAP Economic Data Base,” Alaska Review of Social and Economic Conditions 21 (February 1984): 6; “The Petroleum Industry in Alaska,” ibid. 1 (August 1964): 2; “The Gold Mining Industry in Alaska,” Alaska Review of Business and Economic Conditions 2 (March 1965): 3. Bennett H. Wall, C. Gerald Carpenter, and Gene S. Yeager, Growth in a Changing Environment: A History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), Exxon Corporation, 1950–1975 (New York, 1988), 140. “Alaska’s Economy since Statehood,” Alaska Review of Social and Economic Conditions 21 (February 1984): 7; Mim Dixon, What Happened to Fairbanks? The Effects of the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline on the Community of Fairbanks, Alaska (Boulder, 1978), 6, 9–10, 40; Strohmeyer, Extreme Conditions, 80, 82–84, 89. A. Dudley Gardner and Verla R. Flores, Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mining (Boulder, 1989), 186. Ibid., 162; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1947 (Washington, 1947), 752; ibid., 1966 (Washington, 1966), 713; ibid., 1988 (Washington, 1988), 666; ibid., 1993 (Washington, 1993), 709.

454

Notes to Pages 130–134

73. John McPhee, Rising from the Plains (New York, 1986), 182–85. 74. Teton (Jackson) nearly doubled in 1970–80 but primarily with resort traffic. 75. New York Times, April 11, 1974, p. 37, cols. 1–2. But note dissent from reports of social disruption. Pacific Sociological Review 25 (July 1982): 275–376. In 1985 the census reported that 18.3 percent of homes in Wyoming were trailers, against 5.3 percent nationally. New York Times, April 20, 1985, I, p. 6, col. 1. 76. Andrew Gulliford, Boomtown Blues: Colorado Oil Shale, 1885–1985 (Niwot, Colo., 1989), 103– 4; Daniel Sperling, New Transportation Fuels: A Strategic Approach to Technological Change (Berkeley, 1988), 53–77; New York Times, August 6, 1980, p. D1, col. 3, p. D6, col. 5; Christian Science Monitor, February 16, 1982, p. B4, cols. 3–4; James Kelly, “Rocky Mountain High,” Time 116 (December 15, 1980): 28; Statistical Abstract, 1982–83 (Washington, 1982), 715; Eugene Register-Guard, February 13, 1982, p. 2B, cols. 1–2. 77. Gulliford, Boomtown Blues, 12–13, 149–50; E. J. Tracy, “Exxon’s Abrupt Exit from Shale,” Fortune 105 (May 31, 1982): 105–7; Moody’s Industrial Manual 1989, 2897. 78. Brice Wilkinson in National Real Estate Investor 29 (September 1987): 81–82. 79. Larson, History of Wyoming, 412–13; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns 1986 Wyoming (Washington, 1988), 1. 80. Statistical Abstract, 1989 (Washington, 1989), 21. 81. New York Times, September 4, 1994, p. 27, cols. 1–5. 82. “Where Have All the Billions Gone?” Alaska Review of Social and Economic Conditions 24 (February 1987): 3–5; “Alaska’s Economy: What’s Ahead?” ibid. (December 1987): 5; “Spending and Earning in the Recession,” ibid. 26 (June 1989): 3; Strohmeyer, Extreme Conditions, 101–7, 118– 19, 121. 83. Cunningham, Aircraft Industry, 105, 160, 213, 224; Census of Population: 1960, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 565; pt. 6, p. 845; pt. 18, p. 422; pt. 38, p. 446; pt. 49, p. 363. More than half of employment by sixteen leading companies was western in 1947. Rae, Climb to Greatness, 190. 84. “New Planes for Personal Flying,” Fortune 33 (February 1946): 124; Roger E. Bilstein, Flight in America, 1900–1983: From the Wrights to the Astronauts (Baltimore, 1984), 195–203; Bruce Bliven, “California Doesn’t Worry,” New Republic 114 (April 1, 1946): 440–41; Bliven, “Reconversion Pains Out West,” ibid. (May 13,1946): 692; Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York, 1992), 214. Civilian exceeded military aircraft produced in weight of airframes as well as numbers in 1946 and 1947. Aviation Facts and Figures 1953 (New York, 1953), 26; Aerospace Facts and Figures 1993–1994 (Washington, 1993), 30. 85. This was the initial argument of delegates from Seattle, where the Boeing Company ultimately surpassed its competitors in sales to airlines. Richard S. Kirkendall, “The Boeing Company and the Military-Metropolitan-Industrial Complex, 1945–1953,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85 (October 1994): 138–39, 148–49. Douglas, Convair, and Lockheed were earlier but ultimately less successful. Rae, Climb to Greatness, 176–77; John Wegg, General Dynamics Aircraft and Their Predecessors (Annapolis, 1990), 176–77, 188–89; René J. Francillon, Lockheed Aircraft since 1913 (Annapolis, 1987), 24–25, 33. 86. Expenditures of the air force, which Congress established in 1947, were first of the three services in its seventh year, in its tenth reaching nearly half the total with less than a third of total military personnel. Statistical Abstract, 1962 (Washington, 1962), 380; Aerospace Facts and Figures, 1970

Notes to Pages 134–138

87. 88.

89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

99.

100. 101.

455

(Washington, 1970), 13. Total American military spending increased by more than four times in constant dollars over the next twenty years, 1948–68, while personnel on active duty increased only about once and a half. William D. White, U.S. Tactical Air Power: Mission, Forces, and Costs (New York, 1974), 9. Tulsa World, October 16, 1993, sec. 3, p. 6, cols. 1–3; Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1993, p. D1, col. 5; Santa Ana Orange County Register, December 4, 1993, p. 3, col. 6; Francillon, McDonnell Douglas Aircraft since 1920, 1:26–28, 31, 33. Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken, Dismantling the Cold War Economy (New York, 1992), 172; Seymour Melman, ed., The Defense Economy: Conversion of Industries and Occupations to Civilian Needs (New York, 1970), 444–47; Aerospace Facts and Figures, 1993–1994 (Washington, 1993), 163. Rosy Nimroody, Star Wars: The Economic Fallout (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 115. Allen J. Scott, Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California (Berkeley, 1993), 118–20, 125. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961, 99–105; Scott, Technopolis, 61–62. Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (New Haven, 1982), 139–40, 246, 251. Seattle Times, November 24, 1994, p. B6, cols. 4–5; Peter M. Bowers, Boeing Aircraft since 1916 (Annapolis, 1989), 413–14. For the years 1990–92, nationally contract awards for research, development, testing, and evaluation were over two-thirds higher on missiles and spacecraft than on aircraft. In 1992 the two sections had over half of all contracts in missiles and spacecraft (37.4 and 15.5 percent), nearly twothirds of employment in missiles, nearly three-fourth in spacecraft. Aerospace Facts and Figures, 1993–1994 (Washington, 1993), 114, 145 163. U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns 1988 California (Washington, 1990), 10; ibid., 1992 (Washington, 1994), 1, 10. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986), 452. T. R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (New York, 1984), 89–90, 96, 116–18, 141, and passim. Employment in manufacturing in the San Jose SMSA rose from 18.7 percent in 1950, below the average of 19.6 percent for the whole state, to 35.5 percent in 1980, when employment in manufacturing in other SMSAs was 19.7 percent. Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 5 (Washington, 1952), 386, 389; 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. C, pt. 6 (Washington, 1983), 21, 112, 274. In 1980 over two-thirds of employment in manufacturing was in electronics, nearly a fourth of all employment. Data from American Electronics Association, Palo Alto, 1985. For surveys of economic analyses, Raymond P. Oakey, High Technology Small Firms: Regional Development in Britain and the United States (London, 1984); Peter Hall and Ann Markusen, eds., Silicon Landscapes (London, 1985); A. T. Thwaites and R. P. Oakey, eds., The Regional Economic Impact of Technological Change (London, 1985). New York Times, October 4, 1982, p. 1, col. 3; November 10, 1982, p. 16, col. 6. H. Edward Roberts and Williams Yates, “Altair 8800: The Most Powerful Microcomputer Project Ever Presented—Can Be Built for under $400,” Popular Electronics 7 (January 1975): 33; Reid, Chip, 144–45.

456

Notes to Pages 138–140

102. Michael Mortiz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer (New York, 1984), 87– 92, 136, 142, and passim; Everett M. Rogers and Judith K. Larsen, Silicon Valley Fever: Growth of High-Technology Culture (New York, 1984), 6, 10, and passim; Reid, Chip, 145. 103. New Yorker 53 (November 14, 1977): 41. 104. Walker’s Manual of Western Corporations, 77th ed. (Garden Grove, Calif., 1985), 140; Moody’s OTC Industrial News Reports 20 (January 30, 1990): 2382; ibid., 22 (25 January 1991): 2302. 105. “The Fortune 500,” Fortune 111 (April 29, 1985): 266–84. 106. Rolling Stone, September 1, 1983, p. 45; “A Wizard Called ‘Woz,’” Newsweek 100 (September 20, 1982): 69. 107. Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America (New York, 1992), 82, 97, 163, 175–76, 180, 212, and passim. A writer in Forbes called him “the first great technology business leader, the Andrew Carnegie of the Information Age.” Rich Karigaard, “Bill Gates,” Forbes 150 (7 December 1992, supplement): 63; W. J. Cook and David Burmeister, “The New Rockefeller,” U.S. News and World Report 114 (15 February 1993): 64–65, 66–67. 108. Portland Oregonian, July 1, 1996, p. A7, cols. 1–4. 109. By 1995 Forbes listed Gates as richest businessman in the world, another of his associates close after Hewlett. New York Times, June 28, 1992, sec. 3, p. 1, col. 5, p. 6, col. 3; Harold Seneker, ed., “The World’s Billionaires,” Forbes 150 (July 20, 1992): 161; “The Billionaires 1991,” Fortune 124 (September 9, 1991): 64; “The Forbes 500 Market Value,” Forbes 149 (April 27, 1992): 250; “The Billionaires,” ibid. 156 (July 17, 1995): 110, 136. 110. Scott Cohen, Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari (New York, 1984), 21–25, 27–28, 115, and passim. 111. Bro Uttal, “Behind the Fall of Steve Jobs,” Fortune 112 (August 5, 1985): 20–24. 112. Net income at Hewlett-Packard fell by 26 percent in 1984–85. Moody’s Industrial News Reports 58 (November 26, 1985), 3236; New York Times, November 17, 1985, sec. 3, p. 1, cols. 1–3, p. 28, cols. 1–6; December 19, 1985, sec. 1, p. 18, cols. 1–5; “America’s High-Tech Crisis: Why Silicon Valley Is Losing Its Edge,” Business Week, May 1, 1985, pp. 56–60, 62, 67; R. A. Povell in Joseph Finkelstein, ed., Windows on a New World: The Third Industrial Revolution (Westport, Conn., 1989), 30. 113. New York Times, February 28, 1982, sec. 3, p. 1, cols. 2–4, p. 25, cols. 1–6; September 6, 1984, sec. 4, p. 1, cols. 3–5, p. 6, cols. 3–4; Wall Street Journal, August 15, 1984, p. 20, col. 3; Franco Malerba, The Semiconductor Business: The Economics of Rapid Growth and Decline (Madison, Wis., 1985), 205–7; Daniel Okimoto et al., eds., Competitive Edge: The Semiconductor Industry in the U.S. and Japan (Stanford, 1984), 181 and passim; Carol A. Parsons, “The Domestic Employment Consequences of Managed International Competition in Apparel,” in The Dynamics of Trade and Employment, ed. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, William T. Dickens, and John Zysman (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 239, 241–42; Gene Gregory, Japanese Electronics Technology: Enterprise and Innovation, 2d ed. (New York, 1986), vii, 8–9, 11. 114. New York Times, December 26, 1992, p. 15, col. 6. 115. Zolán J. Ács, The Changing Structure of the U.S. Economy: Lessons from the Steel Industry (New York, 1984), 7–8; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, The Semiconductor Industry: Trade Related Issues (Paris, 1985), 7–8; Peter Hall, “Silicon Landscapes: High Technology Job Growth,” Built Environment 9, no. 1 (1983): 5.

Notes to Pages 141–143

457

116. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 542. 117. U.S. Agricultural Marketing Service, Wheat: Acreage, Yield, Production, by States, 1866–1943 . . . , U.S. Department of Agriculture, Statistical Bulletin no. 158 (Washington, 1955), 12, 24, 26–27. 118. Historical Statistics, 331, 511, 898. 119. New York Times, January 1, 1986, p. 9, cols. 1–5. 120. Mark Mason, American Multinationals and Japan: The Political Economy of Japanese Capital Controls, 1899–1980 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 117–18. 121. Richard Thomas De Lamarter, Big Blue: IBM’s Use and Abuse of Power (New York, 1986), 198– 99; Gregory, Japanese Electronics Technology, 16, 433; David Packard, The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company (New York, 1995), 72; United Nations, Centre on National Corporations, Transnational Corporations in the International Semiconductor Industry (New York, 1986), xxi–xxii, 160; John F. Keller, “The Division of Labor in Electronics,” in Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, ed. June C. Nash and María Patricia FernándezKelly (Albany, N.Y., 1982), 354, 362; Parsons in Dynamics of Trade and Employment, ed. Tyson et al., 243. 122. Art Garcia, “Silicon Valley Seen Shifting Its Emphasis: Change in Character Expected,” New York Journal of Commerce, January 17, 1979, p. 2, cols. 2–3, p. 17, cols. 2–3; “More Elbowroom for the Electronics Industry,” Business Week, March 10, 1980, 94, 97, 100; Allen J. Scott, Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form (Berkeley, 1988), 108–9, 205; Annalee Saxenian in Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban Development and Regional Restructuring, ed. Larry Sawers and William K. Tabb (New York, 1984), 189–90; Homer C. McIlroy, Jr., “An Analysis of the Factors Which Influenced the Location of New Manufacturing Industries in Northeastern Colorado . . . 1940 to 1950” (master’s thesis, University of Colorado, 1950), 125–26; Packard, HP Way, 196; John D. Garwood, “An Analysis of Postwar Industrial Migration to Utah and Colorado,” Economic Geography 29 (January 1953): 81–82, 84; Markusen et al., Rise of the Gunbelt, 185–87. 123. Raymond P. Oakey in Silicon Landscapes, ed. Peter G. Hall and Ann R. Markusen (Boston, 1985), 107; Milford B. Green, ed., Venture Capital: International Comparisons (London, 1991), 23, 139; Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984), 268. 124. Tom Forester, Silicon Samurai: How Japan Conquered the World’s IT Industry (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 47. By 1978 eight of the ten largest integrated-circuit semiconductor manufacturing firms in the world were in Santa Clara County. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Industrial Technology: Hearing . . . on Governmental Policy and Innovation in the Semiconductor Industries, . . . , 95th Cong., 2d sess., 30 October 1978, serial 95–138, pp. 4, 67, 91. 125. “The Fortune 500 Largest U.S. Industrial Corporations,” Fortune 111 (April 29, 1985): 268; ibid., 125 (April 20, 1992): 220. Firms controlled elsewhere had substantial plants in the area, one of the first a research center that International Business Machines established at San Jose in 1952. 126. 1982 Census of Manufactures, Industry Series, Office, Computing, and Accounting Machines (Washington, 1985), 7. 127. Peter Hall, “Silicon Landscapes: High-Technology Job Growth,” Built Environment 9, no. 1 (1983): 5; Gene Bylinsky, “California’s Great Breeding Ground for Industry,” Fortune 89 (June

458

128.

129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

137. 138.

139. 140. 141.

Notes to Pages 143–146 1974): 130–31; Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-IndustrialAcademic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York, 1993), 51–56, 71. Association of University Related Research Parks, 1988–1989 Research Park Directory (Tempe, [1988?]), 5, 10–29; Michael I. Luger and Harvey A. Goldstein, Technology in the Garden: Research Parks and Regional Development (Chapel Hill, 1991), 122–26; on the establishment of laboratories and manufacturing centers by established electronic and aerospace firms, see Stuart W. Leslie in Technological Competitiveness: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on the Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Industries, ed. William Aspray (New York, 1993), 82– 83. Robert J. Samuelson in Newsweek 116 (October 7, 1985), 59. On Stanford and other universities as catalysts in industrial innovation and growth, see Peter Hall, Annalee Saxenian, Ray Oakey, and Tony Taylor in Silicon Landscapes, ed. Hall and Markusen, 11–12, 22–27, 101–2, 137, 141, and passim; Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge, Eng., 1978), 127 and passim; Arnold C. Cooper, “The Palo Alto Experience,” Industrial Research 12 (May 1970): 58–60; on Motorola’s calculations in establishing a research and development center at Phoenix in 1948, see Brad Luckingham in Phoenix in the Twentieth Century; Essays in Community History, ed. G.Wesley Johnson (Norman, Okla. 1993), 89–90. Jeremy Young, “Has Silicon Valley Lost Its Zing? No, but It’s Changing . . . ,” Electronics 60 (November 12, 1987): 127. Piore and Sabel, Second Industrial Divide, 267–68; New York Times, July 17, 1994, sec. 3, p. 5, cols. 1–5; Portland Oregonian, August 14, 1994, sec. F, p. 1, cols. 2–4. Piore and Sabel, Second Industrial Divide, 270, 286. The fifteen far western semiconductor firms (computers and electronics) in Fortune’s list of the 500 largest corporations in 1989 averaged 222 in rank; the eighteen listed firms in metals, mining, foods, and forest products averaged 282. The ten listed semiconductor firms in Santa Clara County averaged 206.5. Fortune 121 (April 23, 1990): 346–64. San Jose Mercury News, April 16, 1994, p. 13D, cols. 2–3. American Electronics Association, Directory (Palo Alto, Calif., 1980), 230–36; Richard E. Schmieder, Rich’s Business Guide to Santa Clara County’s Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, Calif., 1984), 9. Ray Oakey in Silicon Landscapes, ed. Hall and Markusen, 104–5, 107; “Counselor/Crash Syndrome,” Forbes 134 (special issue, October 1, 1984), 244; Green, Venture Capital, 23, 39. Some two or three times the averages of companies of similar size in other fields. Hewlett-Packard consistently spent about 10 percent of sales. “Survey of Corporate Research and Development Spending: 1975: Where Private Industry Puts Its Research Money,” Business Week, 28 June 1976, 81–82 and passim. George Jensen and Leonard J. Arrington, Impact of Defense Spending on the Economy of Utah (Logan, Utah, 1967), 30, 32, 34. Roger E. Bolton, Defense Purchases and Regional Growth (Washington, 1966), 88–89. James L. Clayton, “The Impact of the Cold War on the Economies of California and Utah, 1946–1965,” Pacific Historical Review 36 (November 1967): 456, 466, and passim; Clayton, “Defense Spending: Key to California’s Growth,” Western Political Quarterly 15 (June 1962): 280–93; cf. Sterling L. Brubaker, “The Impact of Federal Government Activities on California’s Eco-

Notes to Pages 146–147

142. 143. 144.

145.

146.

147.

148. 149.

459

nomic Growth, 1930–1956” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1959), 204, 265–66, and passim. In 1960–70 it still led the state in growth of population but in 1970–80 dropped behind Orange and San Diego counties; in 1970–80 it dropped behind Santa Clara County in net migration. Only three other western states had populations in 1960 larger than its gain in 1950–60. Roger W. Lotchin in Essays on Sunbelt Cities and Recent Urban America, ed. Raymond A. Mohl, Robert B. Fairbanks, and Kathleen Underwood (College Station, Tex., 1990), 89–113. “When California Sneezes . . . ,” Business Week, December 3, 1991, 33; Federal Expenditures by State for Fiscal Year 1990 (Washington, 1991), 20, 37. In 1962, when Boeing’s commercial sales first equaled military sales, sales to the government were 78.8 percent of sales of the entire aerospace industry, dropping below half in 1979 (to 44.6 percent) and rising above half again in 1982 (to 57.4 percent; to 50.2 percent for the Department of Defense alone). Boeing’s sales by the late 1960s were about two-thirds commercial, as late as 1983, 62.3 percent; at the end of 1984 commercial orders were 65.3 percent of the backlog of unfilled orders. Moody’s Industrial Manual, 1970, 119; ibid., 1985, 1074; Aerospace Facts and Figures, 1963 (Los Angeles, 1963), 12; ibid., 85/86 (New York, 1985), 13; M. T. Gordon et al. in Big City Politics in Transition, ed. H. V. Savitch and John C. Thomas (Newbury Park, Calif., 1991), 219–20; Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1990, p. D8, col. 1. Herman O. Stekler, The Structure and Performance of the Aerospace Industry (Berkeley, 1965), 49, gives a higher figure for 1962, 94 percent. Malerba, Semiconductor Business, 204; William Wallace, “How the West Was Won,” Electronics 39 (August 8, 1966): 102; Michael Orme, Micros: A Pervasive Force: A Study of the Impact of Microelectronics on Business and Society (New York, 1979), 61. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported 255 military sales of semiconductors in 1972, 10 percent in 1979. The Semiconductor Industry: Trade Related Issues (Paris, 1985), 98. In 1980 the Pacific states had 30.3 percent of military prime contract awards for electronics and communications systems, 52.5 percent for missile and space systems, 36.4 percent for research and development. Aerospace Facts and Figures, 1982/83 (New York, 1982), 151; ibid., 1981/82 (New York, 1981), 144. New York Times, May 17, 1986, p. 27, col. 8; Robert De Grasse, “The Military and Semiconductors,” in The Militarization of High Technology, ed. John Tirman (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 78, 87–89, 93–94. For an earlier skeptical view of the effects of military funding, Robert A. Solo, “Gearing Military R & D to Economic Growth,” Harvard Business Review 40 (November– December 1962): 49–60. A survey of departures of employees to new high-technology firms founded in the vicinity of Palo Alto, 1960–69, showed a strikingly low rate from a research center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where much work did not seem commercially applicable. Arnold C. Cooper, “Spin-Offs and Technical Entrepreneurship,” IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management EM-18 (February 1971): 5–6. Keller in Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, ed. Nash and Fernández-Kelly, 354. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Industry Wage Survey, Semiconductors, September 1977, Bulletin 2021 (Washington, 1979), 1–2; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns 1989, California (Washington, 1991), 207. On women and minorities, see J. W. Henderson, The Globalisation of High Technology Production: Society, Space and Semiconductors in the Restructuring

460

Notes to Pages 151–154 of the Modern World (London, 1989), 39–40; Naomi Katz and David S. Kemnitzer in Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, ed. Nash and Fernández-Kelly, 333; Parsons in Dynamics of Trade and Employment, ed. Tyson et al., 251–52; Allen J. Scott, Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form (Berkeley, 1988), 105–18.

CHAPTER 6. THE URBAN OCCUPATION OF THE WEST: RAILS, ROADS, AND CITIES 1. Donald W. Meinig, Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600–1970 (New York, 1971), 38–41. 2. In addition, the GN and the Northern Pacific jointly owned the Great Northern Pacific Steamship Company, which maintained service to San Francisco and Honolulu, 1915–17. Howard Schonberger, “James J. Hill and the Trade with the Orient,” Minnesota History 41 (winter 1968): 178–90; Joseph G. Pyle, The Life of James J. Hill (Garden City, N.Y., 1917), 2:58–59, 258–59; Ralph W. Hidy et al., The Great Northern Railway: A History (Boston, 1988), 122, 252–53; Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (New York, 1976), 472, 545–46; Frederick E. Emmons, The American Passenger Ships: The Ocean Lines and Liners, 1873–1983 (Newark, Del., 1985), 56, 158–59. 3. George Kennan, E. H. Harriman, A Biography (Boston, 1922), 2:1–3, 6–7, 11–13, 26–28. 4. Silk trains on the Great Northern made records for speed between Seattle and St. Paul in 1911 and 1924 that regularly scheduled passenger trains did not exceed until 1947; they averaged fortythree a year in 1925–29, although by 1933 shipments had become small enough to move on passenger trains. Hidy et al., Great Northern Railway, 126, 179, 244–45. Opening at the nadir of the Depression, the route into California, which the GN had built in hope of improving unsatisfactory returns on traffic on the line up the Deschutes River, also was a disappointment; it never carried regular passenger service. Don L. Hofsommer, “Rivals for California: The Great Northern and the Southern Pacific, 1905–1931,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 38 (spring 1988): 66. 5. Ralph D. Paine, “Steam and Sail on the Pacific,” Outing 48 (May 1906): 214. 6. Thomas C. Cochran, “The Paradox of American Economic Growth,” Journal of American History 61 (March 1975): 933–35. 7. By over 2.6 times as much as in the preceding decade: 7,746.1 miles in 1891–1901, 20,151.8 in 1901–11. The largest increase over the twenty years was in Indian Territory and Oklahoma, from 1,277.17 to 6,076.06, by 375.7 percent. Interstate Commerce Commission, Fourth Annual Report . . . 1891 (Washington, 1892), 10–11; ibid., 1901 (Washington, 1913), 11. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1918 (Washington, 1919), 317. 8. George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America (Stanford, 1960), 388–98. 9. Ibid., 225. 10. Dudley F. Pegrum, Urban Transport and the Location of Industry in Metropolitan Los Angeles, University of California at Los Angeles, Bureau of Business and Economic Research, Occasional Paper no. 2 (Los Angles, 1963) 11. Between 1910 and 1920 Prineville, county seat of Crook County and principal settlement in the counties along the Deschutes before the railroad, grew in population from 1,042 to 1,144 but

Notes to Pages 154–160

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

461

Bend from 536 to 5,415; in 1930 Prineville had dropped to 1,027, while Bend had increased to 8,848. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 (Washington, 1931), 1:904–5. Donovan L. Hofsommer, Southern Pacific, 1901–1985 (College Station, Tex., 1986), 42, 92; Col. E. Hofer, “The Battle for Development in Oregon and Idaho,” Bonville’s Western Monthly 4 (September 1909): 222–24. The Oregon Electric, acquired by the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle in 1910, reached Eugene in 1912, Corvallis in 1913; the Southern Pacific began electrified service to Corvallis in 1917. Hilton and Due, Electric Interurban Railways in America, 395–96. Average freight rates per ton mile on the Union Pacific in 1875 and 1879 were 50 percent and 73 percent higher than on all railroads. Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture, 1900 (Washington, 1901), 839. West of a radius of about 500 miles from Chicago, the principle agricultural areas on the Union Pacific–Central Pacific systems were in California, about 1,500 miles farther. Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., Refrigeration in America, a History of a New Technology and Its Impact (Princeton, 1953). Organized by William Bittle Wells, editor of the Pacific Monthly, in 1906. W. B. Wells Papers, University of Oregon, Eugene. Robert G. Athearn, Rebel of the Rockies: A History of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad (New Haven, 1962), 33, 67, 130, 150, 195–96, 202–11, 221–22. The D&RG’s mileage increased from 1,691, to 2,610 miles, including the Western Pacific (929 miles) to 3,540 miles. After Gould lost control of his system in 1917, the Western Pacific, a well-built line, joined the Missouri Pacific in controlling the D&RG (1924). Ibid., 256. Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics, Columbia Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, 11 (New York, 1899), 24–25. D. W. Meinig contrasts Far West and East and defines major western nuclei in “American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62 (June 1972): 159–84. Thomas L. Cole in Lyman P. Powell, Historic Towns of the Western States (New York, 1901), 567. Tacoma increased modestly between 1950 and 1980, when both Portland and Seattle declined (Portland in 1950–60 and 1970–80 only), but by that time they were, respectively, more than twice and more than three times as large. Marc Simmons, Albuquerque: A Narrative History (Albuquerque, 1982), 213–14; Terry Jon Lehmann, “Santa Fe and Albuquerque 1870–1900: Conflict in the Development of Two Southwestern Towns” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University–Bloomington, 1974). The population had increased by nearly two-fifths in 1870–80, to 6,635, but then lost most of that, dropping to 5,072 by 1910, while the population of the territory increased at over twice the national rate. Simmons, Albuquerque, 215–19, 233; Bradford Luckingham, The Urban Southwest: A Profile History of Albuquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, Tucson (El Paso, 1982), 10. John H. Krenkel, “The Port of Los Angeles as a Municipal Enterprise,” Pacific Historical Review 16 (August 1947): 285–97; Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis, Los Angeles, 1850– 1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 113–16. Bradford Luckingham, “Urban Development in Arizona: The Rise of Phoenix,” Journal of Arizona History 22 (summer 1981): 197; Luckingham, Urban Southwest, 15–16.

462

Notes to Pages 160–162

26. Joseph Miller et al., eds., Arizona, The Grand Canyon State; A State Guide, 4th ed. (New York, 1966), 236–37. 27. Luckingham, Urban Southwest, 41, 52. 28. Allan Nevins, Frémont, Pathmarker of the West (New York, 1955), 587–88; on plans of Thomas A. Scott for the Texas and Pacific in 1871–5 and of the California Southern and Santa Fe in 1880–84 and ensuing enthusiasms, see Julius Grodinsky, Transcontinental Railway Strategy, 1869–1893: A Study of Businessmen (Philadelphia, 1962), 57–58, 166–67, 216–17, William E. Smythe, History of San Diego, 1542–1908: An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Pioneer Settlement on the Pacific Coast of the United States (San Diego, 1908), 2:352–55, 357, 359–60, and Lewis Burt Lesley, “The Struggle of San Diego for a Southern Transcontinental Railroad Connection, 1854–1891” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1934). 29. Patrick W. O’Bannon, “Railroad Construction in the Early Twentieth Century: The San Diego and Arizona Railway,” Southern California Quarterly 61 (fall 1979): 259–62. 30. In 1928 a San Diego developer said that more people had come by automobile through Yuma into southern California than by the Southern Pacific, most of them to Los Angeles. San Diego Union, August 8, 1928, p. 13, cols. 2–3. 31. Ibid., November 15, 1950, pp. 1, col. 3, and 2, col. 1; January 7, 1951, pp. 1, col. 3, and 13, cols. 1–8. 32. Service on the first segment of the “San Diego Trolley,” sixteen miles south to the Mexican border at San Ysidro, began in July 1981. New York Times, August 4, 1980, IV, p. 1, col. 2; July 26, 1981, p. 18, col. 1. The Southern Pacific had proposed in 1977 to abandon 107 miles of the 148mile line, continuing to operate only 18 miles near El Centro. Robert M. Hanft, San Diego and Arizona: The Impossible Railroad (Glendale, Calif., 1984), 106, 125, 153–66, 174–75; Southern Pacific Company, 75 Years of Progress (San Francisco, 1945), 22–23, 33; Interstate Commerce Commission, Sixty-ninth Annual Report of the Statistics of Railways in the United States . . . 1952 (Washington, 1955), 510; Wall Street Journal, February 10, 1977, p. 13, col. 4; Moody’s Transportation Manual, 1977 (New York, 1977), 568; Southern Pacific Bulletin 62 (October 1978): 11. After fire destroyed two bridges on the main line in the Carrizo Gorge in 1983 and the Interstate Commerce Commission refused to authorize the short-line company then conducting freight operations for the Transit Board to discontinue service over the entire line the board contracted (1984) with another operator, which maintained chiefly local service. Dennis D. Baker to Earl Pomeroy, February 9, 1988. 33. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, 1845–1889, Works (San Francisco, 1890), 31:427. 34. A. E. Thomas, “Goldfield: The New Eldorado,” Putnam’s Monthly and The Critic 1 (March 1907): 658, 661; Russell R. Elliott, Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom: Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely (Reno, 1966), 54. 35. Elliott, Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, 163–64; Twelfth Census of the United States: 1910 (Washington, 1913), 3:78–80. The population was 554 in 1940; no counts were recorded in 1920 and 1930. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population (Washington, 1942), 1:655. 36. George W. Hilton, American Narrow Gauge Railroads (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 306–9; T. A. Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska (San Francisco, 1909), 131; Edwin J. Foscue, “The Development and Decline of Skagway, Alaska,” Economic Geography 10 (October 1934): 425; Archie

Notes to Pages 163–167

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

463

Satterfield, Chilkoot Pass, Then and Now (Anchorage, 1973), 133, 135; Roy Minter, The White Pass: Gateway to the Klondike (Fairbanks, Alaska, 1987). Satterfield, Chilkoot Pass, 21, 43, 48–51, 58; David Wharton, The Alaska Gold Rush (Bloomington, 1972), 59–60; Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population (Washington, 1901), 1:426. Although the government-operated steamers operated as far up the lower river as Nenana in the 1920s, the population fell from 857 in 1900 (probably less than in 1897–99) to 415 in 1910, 371 in 1920, 147 in 1929. Arthur E. Knutson, Sternwheels on the Yukon (Kirkland, Wash., 1979), 120. Charmian London, The Book of Jack London (New York, 1921), 1:248; Jack London, “From Dawson to the Sea,” in Jack London, Tales of Adventure, ed. Irving Shepard (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), 43. Ernest Gruening, The State of Alaska (New York, 1968), 103, 115, 125, 127–28, 347. John McPhee, Coming into the Country (New York, 1977), 183–438; Jimmy Bedford, “Eagle on the Yukon,” Alaska Magazine 53 (November 1987): 29; James Wickersham, Old Yukon; Tales— Trails—and Trials (Washington, 1938), 36, 38, 55, 321–23, 440; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Population, 1920 (Washington, 1921), 1:680; 1980 Census of Population, Alaska, PC 80–1–A3 (Washington, 1982), 13. “Anchorage and the Cook Inlet Basin,” Alaska Geographic 10, no. 2 (1983): 28–37; Edwin M. Fitch, The Alaska Railroad (New York, 1967), 46, 49–51; Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 51 (Washington, 1953), 4–6. Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska, 267–69, 320; Judson C. Welliver, “Alaska, Land of Opportunity,” Munsey’s Magazine 51 (May 1914): 730. “Alaska’s Unique Transportation System,” Alaska Review of Social and Economic Conditions 17 (June 1980): 13, 15. With populations of 1,005 and 3,079 in 1970 and 1980, Valdez was 2.1 percent and 1.8 percent as large as Anchorage, 16.6 percent and 15.8 percent as large as Juneau; it had been 25.1 percent as large as Anchorage in 1920. “Alaska’s Unique Transportation System,” 4, 14. Knowlton W. Johnson et al. in The Future of Winter Cities, ed. Gary Gappert,Urban Affairs Annual Reviews 21 (Newbury Park, Calif., 1987), 124. U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission, Fourteenth Annual Report on the Statistics of Railways in the United States for the Year Ended June 30, 1901 (Washington, 1902), 11–12. In 1911 the ratio in Nevada had fallen to 37 for each mile. Ibid., Twenty-fourth Annual Report . . . 1911 (Washington, 1913), 11. The two roads agreed so to divide traffic only after the U.S. Railroad Administration had operated them as one line over their protests in 1918–20. Henry J. Fletcher, “Western Real Estate Booms, and After,” Atlantic Monthly 76 (May 1898): 694. William Shepherd, Prairie Experiences in Handling Cattle and Sheep (New York, 1885), 163– 64. Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe, (New York, 1931), 64, 66, 70, 97. Thomas A. Rickard, Across the San Juan Mountains (New York, 1903), 23. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 64, 66, 70, 97. Letter from Dale Martin, Butte, Montana, in Montana 37 (summer 1987): 87, commenting on Carroll Van West, “The Milwaukee Road Corridor,” ibid., 36 (autumn 1986): 69–71. In 1920

464

55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

Notes to Pages 168–170 only two of fifty-five towns that the Soo Line had established in sixteen counties of North Dakota had populations of over 1,000. John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis, 1985), 132. Wallace W. Elliott, History of San Bernardino County, California (San Francisco, 1883), 114, 116, 122, 129, 130. George H. Hildebrand, Borax Pioneer: Francis Marion Smith (San Diego, 1982), 154–214; Mel Scott, The San Francisco Bay Area: A Metropolis in Perspective (Berkeley, 1959), 85–86, 91–93. Bion J. Arnold, Report on the Improvement and Development of the Transportation Facilities of San Francisco (San Francisco, 1913), 5; James E. Vance, Jr., Geography and Urban Evolution in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley, 1964), 43–44, 57–58. Chief engineer in charge of rebuilding the transit system of Chicago, Arnold (1861–1942) was consulting engineer for Los Angeles and other cities as they reviewed their traction systems. In 1880–90, before electric transit and trans-bay competition, Oakland and Berkeley grew 30.0 percent as much as San Francisco; in 1910–20 growth there subsided somewhat, to 91.0 percent that of San Francisco, but accelerated sharply in other east bay communities that improved transit had reached later. Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890, pt. 1, Population (Washington, 1892), 442, 449, 450; Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900 (Washington, 1901), 1:439; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920 (Washington, 1921), 1:82; Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population (Washington, 1931), 1:130–31; Hilton and Due, Electric Interurban Railways in America, 405–6; John H. Skeggs, “The Bayshore Highway Dedication,” California Highways and Public Works 7 (November 1929): 9, 26. When the Southern Pacific rerouted its tracks through tunnels along the bay south of San Francisco in 1907, it reduced running times of its commuter trains while maintaining fares above those for comparable distances across the bay; although the population of San Mateo County more than doubled in 1900–10, increasing more than in any previous decade, it continued smaller than that of any other bay county but Marin, whose transportation the SP also controlled, in 1910, 10.8 percent that of Alameda. Spencer Crump, Ride the Big Red Cars: How Trolleys Helped Build Southern California, 5th ed. (Corona del Mar, Calif., 1970), 35–38, 47–119, 235; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 87– 92, 104; William B. Friedricks, Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California (Columbus, Ohio, 1992), 58–59, 61–62, 66, 68–69, 80–82, 91–92, 94. William D. Middleton, The Interurban Era (Milwaukee, 1961), 16. In 1910, of the twenty American cities with largest areas, five were western; in 1920, six; and of major western cities all but San Francisco occupied more space than most other cities with similar populations. World Almanac, 1911 (New York, 1910), 512–13; ibid., 1922 (New York, 1921), 778–80; Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 (Washington, 1913), 1:74–75, 77. While central cities in western metropolitan areas increased by 71.4 percent in 1900–10, suburban rings grew by 153.8 percent; substantial expansion of central cities by annexation tended to conceal the difference. John D. Kasarda and George V. Redfearn, “Differential Patterns of City and Suburban Growth in the United States,” Journal of Urban History 2 (November 1975): 51–56. Satellite areas around northern cities (including cities of the northern Middle West as far west as Kansas), where growth was as fast as in central cities, extended in 1900–10 only 0–5 miles; in 1910–20 to 10 miles; in 1920–30 to 35. In western (Pacific and mountain) cities satellite territory where the rates of growth exceeded rates in central cities extended to 30 miles from central cities

Notes to Pages 170–174

62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

465

in 1900–10, 35 in 1910–20, and the entire satellite area in 1920–30. Amos H. Hawley, The Changing Shape of Metropolitan America: Deconcentration Since 1920 (Glencoe, Ill., 1956), 150. It had been seventeenth in population in 1910, thirty-sixth in 1900. New York Times, January 12, 1919, p. 9, col. 2; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920 (Washington, 1921), 1:76; Mark Stewart Foster, “The Decentralization of Los Angeles during the 1920’s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California–Los Angeles, 1971), 2, 4. In 1917, 22.7 percent; in 1907, 24.8 percent. California, with 6.7 percent of mileage in 1917, had 16.3 percent of revenues from freight. Bureau of the Census, Census of Electrical Industries: 1917, Electric Railways (Washington, 1920), 27, 50, 152. Hilton and Due, Electric Interurban Railways, 225. Smythe, “Social Influence of Electric Lines,” Out West 19 (December 1903): 695. As in Outing 35 (January 1900): 409. Edgar C. Knowlton, History of Highway Development in Utah ([Salt Lake City?], 1964), 185– 86. Ronald Ridgley, “The Railroads and Rural Development in the Dakotas,” North Dakota History 36 (spring 1969): 167–69. Margaret Madison Lincoln, “The Highway Program of California’s Governor Gillett” (master’s thesis, University of California–Berkeley, 1956), 62–63, 73. Barton W. Currie, “The Gasoline Camel of the American Desert,” Harper’s Weekly 51 (March 16, 1907): 376–78. Ralph D. Paine, “The Gold Camps of the Desert,” Outing 48 (June 1906): 272. Walter E. Peck, “The Gasolene Prairie Schooner,” Scribner’s Magazine 44 (August 1908): 197– 203. Victor Eubank, “Log of an Auto Prairie Schooner,” Sunset 28 (February 1912): 188–95. Dallas L. Sharp, “From Bend to Burns,” Atlantic Monthly 113 (February 1914): 251; cf. Randall R. Howard, “Motorizing the Frontier,” Sunset 35 (September 1915): 588, 590, 592, 594, 596. James J. Flink, America Adopts the Automobile, 1895–1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 279–81; Flink, “Three Stages of American Automobile Consciousness,” American Quarterly 24 (October 1972): 458. Average wholesale factory prices fell from $2,131 (1907) and $2,131 (1908) to $604 (1916), ultimately to as little as $496 (1933). The cost of living rose by 23 percent, 1908–16. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 331, 511, 898. For figures on comparative sales in Nebraska, Clinton Warne, “The Acceptance of the Automobile in Nebraska,” Nebraska History 37 (September 1956): 221–35. John C. Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (December 1961): 437–40. Knowlton, History of Highway Development in Utah, 247. Census of Agriculture: 1945, vol. 2, General Report (Washington, 1947), 309. U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Highway Statistics Summary to 1965 (Washington, 1967), 37. Census of Agriculture: 1945, 2:330; Warne, “Acceptance of the Automobile,” 224. Flink, American Adopts the Automobile, 213. The census of 1945 was the first to count farms with trucks but no automobiles. At that time there were no automobiles on nearly a third of farms with trucks in the mountain states, nearly half in

466

84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96.

97. 98.

Notes to Pages 175–177 Oklahoma, over half in New Mexico; New Mexico had 13,608 farms with automobiles (45.8 percent), 5,754 farms with trucks and no automobiles (16.7 percent). Ownership of trucks on farms in the mountain states was at over twice the national rate—46.4 percent against 22.2 percent. Census of Agriculture: 1945, 2:310, 326, 330. E. H. Smith, “The Use of Automobiles on Kansas Farms,” Horseless Age 24 (February 7, 1909): 239. Sixteenth Annual Report of the Northern Pacific Railway Company . . . 1912 (St. Paul, 1912), 20. Isaiah Bowman, “Jordan Country,” Geographical Review 21 (January 1931): 48. Hargreaves dates the use of automobiles in the rural Great Plains, following on the problems of extensive farming, from about 1910; by 1916 it was a major trend. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 491. Bowman, Pioneer Fringe, 123. He reported meeting only four horse-drawn wagons in three thousand miles of driving on country roads in July and August, 1930. Ibid., 138. Great Plains Committee, The Future of the Great Plains (Washington, 1936), 52. John M. Gillette, “Mitigation of Rural Isolation,” Quarterly Journal of the University of North Dakota 7 (January 1917): 119. By 1920 South Dakota had displaced California with the lowest ratio, under half the national average at 1–5.3. U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Highway Statistics Summary to 1965 (Washington, 1967), 37. Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, vol. 5, Agriculture, General Report and Analytical Tables (Washington, 1922), 514; Census of Agriculture: 1945 (Washington, 1947), 2:309. Roy H. Holmes, “The Passing of the Farmer,” Atlantic Monthly 110 (October 1912): 523. John C. Belcher, “The Nonresident Farmer in the New Rural Society,” Rural Sociology 19 (June 1954): 123–24, 126, 128; W. James Foreman and Robert S. Eckley, Economic Development in Southwestern Kansas, pt. 2, Agriculture (Lawrence, Kan., 1951), 157; Walter M. Kollmorgen and George F. Jenks, “Sidewalk Farming in Toole County, Montana, and Traill County, North Dakota,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 48 (September 1958): 209–31. M. L. Wilson, “Research Studies in the Economics of Large-Scale Farming in Montana,” Agricultural Engineering 10 (January 1929): 10. Jessie E. Richardson and J. Wheeler Barger, Public School Dormitories for Rural Children in Montana, University of Montana, Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 201 (Bozeman, 1927), 7. Distances from farm to school prompted the building of dormitories for schoolchildren at public expense in Montana and Oregon. E. A. Willson, Off-Farm Residence of Families of Farm and Ranch Operators, Montana State College, Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 530 (Bozeman, 1957), 14; Neil W. Johnson, “Raw Materials of Montana Policy,” Land Policy Review 2 (September–October 1939): 35. Earl H. Bell, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: Sublette, Kansas, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Real Life Studies, no. 2 (Washington, 1942), cited by Nels Anderson, The Urban Community: A World Perspective (New York, 1959), 93–94. Ivon W. Ulrey in Transportation Problems and Policies in the Trans-Missouri West, ed. Jack R. Davidson and Howard W. Ottoson (Lincoln, Neb., 1967), 47. Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (Minneapolis, 1955), 26, 269, 345.

Notes to Pages 177–180

467

99. Charles W. Deyoe in The Rise of the Wheat State: A History of Kansas Agriculture, 1861–1986, ed. George E. Ham and Robin Higham (Manhattan, Kan., 1987), 162; Carl Cabe, Flour Milling (Lawrence, Kan., 1958), 32, 34–36, 38–39. Producing 17.5 percent of all wheat and 15.6 percent of all flour in 1950, first in both categories, Kansas processed more of its crop than most wheat states; but Minnesota and New York, in second and third places with 12.4 percent and 12.0 percent of flour, raised only 1.5 percent and 1.1 percent. Statistical Abstract, 1952 (Washington, 1952), 620–21. 100. The leading exception was South Omaha, which a few years after union stockyards opened there in 1884 became the third meatpacking center of the United States, next to Chicago and Kansas City. 101. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York, 1923), 152. 102. H. L. Davis, “A Town in Eastern Oregon,” American Mercury 19 (January 1930): 75–83; John F. Due and Giles French, Rails to the Mid-Columbia Wheatlands: The Columbia Southern and Great Southern Railroads and the Development of Sherman and Wasco Counties, Oregon (Washington, 1979). 103. In 1900–01, 482 appeared and 149 disappeared in Washington; in 1910–20, 207 and 274; in 1920–30, 96 and 156. Paul H. Landis, Washington Farm Trade Centers, 1900–1935, Washington State Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 360, Rural Sociological Series in Population, no. 3 (Pullman, Wash., 1938), 22, 24, 39. 104. Topeka Capital, November 1, 1961; Topeka Capital-Journal, October 15, 1961, October 22, 1961, October 29, 1961. Clippings, Financial Economics, vol. 1, 202, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka. 105. Philip R. Smith, Improved Surface Transportation and Nebraska’s Population Distribution, 1860– 1960 (New York, 1981), 44–45, 49. 106. In 34 of 57 mountain counties surveyed in a study of rural churches in 1927, the county seats had less than 1,000 inhabitants. Elizabeth R. Hooker, Hinterlands of the Church (New York, 1931), 124. Cattlemen in remote areas customarily bought staple foods in wholesale quantities once or twice a year. 107. Howard W. Ottoson et al., Land and People in the Northern Plains Transition Area (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), 249–51, 258–59; Richard G. Bremer, Agricultural Change in an Urban Age: The Loup Country of Nebraska, 1910–1970 (Lincoln, Neb., 1976), 38–39, 167, 173. On high rates of growth of small towns, as distinguished from crossroads rural hamlets in the West, 1940–60, see Glenn V. Fugitt and Donald W. Thomas, “Small Town Growth in the United States: An Analysis by Size, Class and by Place,” Demography 3, no. 2 (1966): 513–27. 108. Ottoson et al., Land and People in the Northern Plains Transition Area, 249–51, 253–59. 109. Marguerite A. Salomon, “Automobile Camp Sites and the ‘Gypsy’ Motorist,” American Review of Reviews 63 (May 1921): 531–32. 110. Ralph D. Paine, The Greater America (New York, 1907), 260. 111. L. A., “Impressions of a Careless Traveler: The Cities of Southern California,” Outlook 78 (10 September 1904): 117. 112. A. J. Wells, “The Country Life of California . . . ,” Country Life in America 1 (January 1902): 1940.

468

Notes to Pages 180–183

113. Henry G. Durand, “In the Land of Big Apples . . . ,” World’s Work 18 (August 1909): 11940. 114. Richard Lloyd Jones, “The World’s Fruit Basket: The Growth and Romance of Fruit Farming in the West,” Collier’s Weekly 48 (September 18, 1909): 17. 115. “The Wenatchee Valley, Washington . . . ,” Pacific Monthly 16 (July 1906): 130. 116. The Southern Pacific operated the Peninsular Railway, a system of sixty-eight miles in Santa Clara County around San Jose (population 28,946 in 1910), in 1904–34 after reports that competing lines in San Francisco and Oakland would enter the same territory. Hilton and Due, Electric Interurban Railways, 395–97, 404. 117. Ibid., 385–86. Mormons had settled in southeastern Idaho from the 1860s. Joel E. Ricks and Everett L. Cooley, eds., The History of a Valley, Cache Valley, Utah-Idaho (Logan, Utah, 1956). 118. Report of the Commissioner of Reclamation (Washington, 1930), 12. The great growth of Phoenix, as of other desert communities, came after 1950, as Phoenix grew from 106,818 (1950) to 439,120 (1960) and 581,562 (1970), and 789,704 (1980), the metropolitan area from 331,770 (1950) to 663,510 (1960), 967,522 (1970), and 1,509,052 (1980). 119. F. B. Linfield, “Size of Irrigated Farms,” Forestry and Irrigation 12 (July 1906): 311. 120. Virginia Weisel Johnson, The Long, Long Trail (Boston, 1966), 112; Donald Leslie Johnson, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Projects in the Bitterroot Valley, Montana, 1909–1910,” Montana 37 (summer 1987): 12–25. 121. Colonel L. V. Patch at the Oregon-Idaho Development Congress, Vale, Oregon, in Pacific Northwest 11 (January 1909): 3. 122. John Hudson, “Two Dakota Homestead Farmers,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63 (December 1973): 461. 123. George F. Stratton, “The Lucerne Widow: One Way of Getting Back to the Land,” Country Life in America 21 (March 1, 1912): 53. 124. Lawrence B. Lee, “William E. Smythe and San Diego, 1901–1908,” Journal of San Diego History 19 (winter 1973): 11, 23; Lee, introduction to William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (Seattle, 1969). 125. Carl F. Reuss in Joseph Ackerman, ed., The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural West (Chicago, 1943), 65–67. 126. Archie Binns, The Roaring Land (New York, 1942), 11. 127. Carl F. Reuss, Back to the Country—the Rurban Trend in Washington’s Population, Washington Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 426 (Pullman, Wash., 1942), 21. 128. Of families on the project, 82 percent had earnings off the farm averaging nearly $9,000, while the highest farm income in the group was $2,000. Delwin M. Stevens and Duane A. Portwood, A Socio-Economic Study of Part-Time Farming on the Kendrick Project, Wyoming Experiment Station, Research Journal 7 (Laramie, 1967), 10–11, 22–23. 129. James Hudson, Irrigation Water Use in the Utah Valley, Utah, University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper no. 79 (Chicago, 1962), 225, 228. 130. Telephones on farms in 1920: 38.7 percent in the United States and in the Pacific states; 46.8 percent in North Dakota, 59.4 percent in South Dakota, 76.4 percent in Nebraska, 77.9 percent in Kansas. Census of Agriculture: 1945, vol. 2, General Report (Washington, 1947), 321. Rural telephone service increased nationally and differences among states narrowed after Congress began subsidizing service in 1949. Don F. Hadwiger and Clay Cochran, “Rural Telephones in

Notes to Pages 183–186

469

the United States,” Agricultural History 58 (July 1984): 221–38; Hudson, Irrigation Water Use in the Utah Valley, Utah, 225, 228. 131. Dorothy Lawson McCall (Mrs. Henry McCall), was the mother of Thomas Lawson McCall, governor of Oregon, 1967–75. Dorothy L. McCall, Ranch under the Rimrock (Portland, Ore., 1968), lx. 132. By 1954 more than 90 percent of farmers had electricity in all states except Wyoming, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico, where the range was from 89.4 percent to 82.0 percent. National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Rural Electric Fact Book (Washington, 1965), 12; Census of Agriculture: 1954, vol. 2, General Report (Washington, 1956), 199, 200; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Marketing Service, Trends and Patterns in Levels of Living, Agricultural Information Bulletin 181, cited in Statistical Abstract, 1960 (Washington, 1961), 638. Electric companies in the coastal states and in Colorado developed their rural business on the basis of pumping irrigation and incidental farm lands. Edison Electric Institute, Rural Electrification in the United States (New York, 1960), 11, 14. 133. Family farmers in urban counties, however, often gave way to urban development. Los Angeles County lost 42 percent of its farms and 35 percent of its cropland in 1954–59. Richard Sasuly, “The Family Farm in California; A Pilot Study for the California Farm Research and Legislative Committee” (Santa Clara, Calif., [1963]), 19.

C H A P T E R 7. R A I L S , R O A D S , A N D C I T I E S F R O M THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1. Roger Lotchin, “World War II and Urban California: City Planning and the Transformation Hypothesis,” Pacific Historical Review 62 (March 1993): 146–52. 2. Investigation of Congested Areas Hearings, pt. 2, pp. 394–95, 524–25; “Grass on Main Street . . . ,” Architectural Forum 81 (September 1944): 85; Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro, Shopping Centers; Design and Operation (New York, 1951), 5, 237. 3. Baker and Funaro, Shopping Centers, 243–45; Manly Maben, Vanport, Oregon: Life and Death of an Instant City (Portland, Ore., 1985), 38. 4. A study of “planned regional shopping centers,” defined as including at least one major department store and other stores and services comparable to those in a central business district, shows 24 of 49 “adoptments” in 1949–59 in the Far West. Yehuoshua S. Cohen, Diffusion of an Innovation in an Urban System: The Spread of Planned Regional Shopping Centers in the United States 1949–1968 (Chicago, 1972), 30, 36, 113–16; cf. lists in Seward H. Mott and Max S. Wehrly, eds., Shopping Centers, an Analysis, Urban Land Institute, Technical Bulletin 11 (Washington, 1949), 1, 45. 5. Ronald Tobey, Charles Wetherell, and Jay Brigham, “Moving Out and Settling In: Residential Mobility, Home Owning and the Public Enframing of Citizenship, 1921–1950,” American Historical Review 95 (December 1990): 1413–20; Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 . . . (Berkeley, 1969), 502, 504. 6. Larry Schweikart, “Financing the Urban Frontier: Entrepreneurial Creativity and Western Cities, 1945–1975,” Urban Studies 26 (February 1989): 179, 182. 7. Portland Oregonian, September 13, 1953, sec. 2, p. 9, cols. 1–4; Gurney Breckenfeld, “‘Down-

470

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

Notes to Pages 187–191 town’ Has Fled to the Suburbs,” Fortune 86 (October 1972): 83; Meredith L. Clausen, “Northgate Regional Shopping Center—Paradigm from the Provinces,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43 (May 1984): 144–61. Douglas Porter, “The Development of University-Affiliated Research Parks,” in Research Parks and Other Ventures: The University/Real Estate Connection, ed. Rachelle L. Levitt (Washington, 1985), 70–73, 75–81. Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York, 1975), 222; Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), 54, 63. Quinta Scott and Susan Croce Kelly, Route 66, The Highway and Its People (Norman, Okla., 1988), 12, 14, and passim; Michael Wallis, Route 66: The Mother Road (New York, 1990), 6–9. Gelfand, Nation of Cities, 223; Seely, Building the American Highway System, 154–55. Hugo H. Winter, “Development of a Freeway System in Los Angeles Metropolitan Area,” Traffic Quarterly 3 (April 1949): 108; Howard J. Nelson, The Los Angeles Metropolis (Dubuque, Iowa, 1983), 280–81. California Legislature, Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Highways, Streets and Bridges, Engineering Facts 1946 and a Future Program (Sacramento, 1946), 25, 127, 129; John B. Rae, Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 184. Samuel Cummings, “New Hope for Large Cities,” in The New America That’s Coming . . . (Washington, 1956), 68. David J. St. Clair, The Motorization of American Cities (New York, 1986), 149–50, 152–54; Gelfand, Nation of Cities, 223; Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1914–1956 (Lawrence, Kan., 1979), 57, 59, 61. Gelfand, Nation of Cities, 228. “New Money,” California Highways and Public Works 35 (July–August 1956): 54. “Who’ll Get Helped or Hurt by Auto Freeways,” U.S. News and World Report 41 (December 21, 1956): 90–92. Stanford Research Institute, Impact of Improved Highways on the Economy of the United States (Menlo Park, Calif., 1958), 159. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Public Works, Subcommittee on Roads, Urban Highways, Hearings on Urban Highway Planning, Location, and Design, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1968, pt. 1, p. 145. Harl A. Dalstrom, A. V. Sorensen and the New Omaha (Omaha, 1987), 81–83; Victor Rosewater, “Repairing a Tornado’s Havoc,” American Review of Reviews 47 (June 1913): 706; on opposition to freeways in Omaha, see Janet R. Daly-Bednarck, The Changing Image of the City: Planning for Downtown Omaha, 1945–1973 (Lincoln, Neb., 1992), 151–54. Grady Clay (real estate editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal), “Impact of the Federal Highway Program,” Planning 1957 (Chicago, 1957), 50; Maurice Yeates, The North American City, 4th ed. (New York, 1990), 126. New York Times, March 3, 1959, p. 26, col. 2. Senate Committee, Urban Highways, pt. 1, pp. 138–39; pt. 2, p. 257. William D. Middleton, “California’s Verdict: ‘Trains Are a Winner,’” Railway Age 181 (June 9, 1980): 28–30, 32. The chief advocate of the state funding begun in 1975 was a state senator from San Diego.

Notes to Pages 191–193

471

26. New York Times, October 9, 1981, p. A12, cols. 1–3; October 14, 1993, pp. A1, col. 1, A12, cols. 1–2; Tom Johnson, “The Last Freeway,” Los Angeles Magazine 34 (September 1989): 114–15; Jack Hallen, “The Last Freeway,” Civil Engineering 62 (May 1992): 60–63; Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1993, pp. A1, col. 4, A33, cols. 1–2. 27. Railroads carried a majority of all common-carrier passengers between those cities as late as 1953, over the United States as late as 1948; airlines passed them between the two cities and nationally in 1957. Ely M. Brandes and Alan E. Lazar, The Future of Rail Passenger Traffic in the West (Menlo Park, Calif., 1966), 5–7: Association of American Railroads, Bureau of Railway Economics, Railroad Transportation, A Statistical Record, 1921–1963 (with preliminary data for 1964) (Washington, 1965), 35; William A. Schoneberger et al., California Wings: A History of Aviation in the Golden State (Woodland Hills, Calif., 1984), 120. 28. Tucson Arizona Daily Star, Tucson: The Shrinking Desert (Tucson, 1973), 2; Roger D. Launius, “Crossroads of the West: Aviation Comes to Utah, 1910–1940,” Utah Historical Quarterly 58 (spring 1990): 115–16. 29. D. R. Lane, “Recent Developments of Municipal Airports in the West,” American City 37 (July 1927): 1. 30. Lawrence H. Larsen and Barbara J. Cottrell, The Gate City: A History of Omaha (Boulder, Colo., 1982), 152, 154. 31. Nearly a third (216, 31.7 percent) of western airports were in the eight mountain states, which had less than a fifth of western population (19.5 percent). Jos. H. Wenneman, Municipal Airports (Cleveland, 1931), 363, 763–64. 32. As indicated by incomplete tabulations of passenger miles on scheduled flights, of 40,319,682 passenger miles January–June 1930 on domestic routes, 48.9 percent (19,716,557) were on routes entirely within western states or with parts extending into Texas or Missouri; in addition 19.8 percent (7,975,781) were on transcontinental routes, and only the remaining 31.3 percent were on entirely nonwestern routes. Air Commerce Bulletin 2 (December 1, 1930): 281–83. The sixteen western states, Alaska, and Hawaii had 31.0 percent of reported aircraft, 33.5 percent of pilots, and 32.9 percent of mechanics. Ibid., 2 (August 15, 1930): 81. 33. From Seattle 1969–89, from Bellingham instead of Seattle from 1989, after the Port of Seattle, concluding that passengers spent little, proposed sharply increased charges for a terminal. Other vessels operated between Seward and communities as far west as the Aleutian chain. Adventure Roads North: The Story of the Alaska Highway and Other Roads in the Milepost, Alaska Geographic 10, no. 1 (1983): 28–29; Alaska Review of Business and Economic Conditions 7 (October 1970): 3–4; Eugene Register-Guard, October 1, 1989, p. 6C, cols. 1–2. 34. Barrett Willoughby, Alaskans All (Boston, 1933), 90. 35. Sydney Bernard Smith, Air Transport in the Pacific Area (New York, 1942), 74; on the beginnings of commercial service at Anchorage (1927), see Stephen Haycox, “Early Aviation in Anchorage: Ambivalent Fascination with the Air Age,” Alaska History 3 (fall 1988): 1–20. 36. New York Times, January 24, 1999, p. 26, cols. 1–4. 37. Terrence M. Cole, “Ernest Walker Sawyer and Alaska: The Dilemma of Northern Economic Development,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 82 (April 1991): 47. 38. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Internal and Foreign Commerce, 80th Cong., 1st sess., Alaska Airports, Hearings . . . July 16, 1947 (Washington, 1947), 31. 39. About 26 and 822 times, respectively, on the bases of rough calculations from published data for

472

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

Notes to Pages 193–195 1939. Smith, Air Transport in the Pacific Area, 74, 75. In an account of Alaskan bush pilots, Jean Potter (The Flying North [New York, 1947], vii) writes 23 and 1,000 times per capita by 1939. San Francisco Chronicle, November 23, 1935, p. 1, col. 5; R. E. G. Davies, Airlines of the United States since 1914 (Washington, 1972), 252–54; Robert H. Schleppler and Charles E. Anderson, “The Martin Clippers,” American Aviation Historical Society, Journal 10 (fall 1965): 172–83; M. D. Klaas, “Last of the Flying Clipper Ships,” ibid. 13 (summer 1968): 97–98. In 1940, when a larger plane came into service, trans-Pacific arrivals and departures in Hawaii by air totaled 639; the fare for the twenty-hour flight initially was $360. Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, 1977), 460, 468. Smith, Air Transport in the Pacific Area, 79, 80. Wenneman, Municipal Airports, 762–64; Potter, Flying North, 115–6; Air Commerce Bulletin 11 (July 15, 1939): 18–19. U.S. Congress, Alaska Airports, 13–15; Willoughby, Alaskans All, 88; Cole, “Ernest Walker and Alaska,” 48. Allen Morgan, “Pickwick Airways,” American Aviation Historical Society, Journal 12 (summer 1967): 83; Kenn C. Rust, “Early Airlines, I,” ibid. 30 (winter 1985): 261; Air Commerce Bulletin 11 (July 15, 1939): 18–19. William M. Leary, Aerial Pioneers: The U.S. Air Mail Service, 1918–1927 (Washington, 1985), 102; Donald Dale Jackson, Flying the Mail (Alexandria, Va., 1982), 58. Paul D. Friedman, “Birth of an Airport: From Mines Field to Los Angeles International . . . ,” American Aviation Historical Society, Journal 23 (winter 1978): 285, 288–91; “Municipal Airport Operations in the West,” Western City 37 (June 1961): 20. During the war, military transport services controlled the Los Angeles Airport; it was designated as Los Angeles International (LAX) in 1950. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation operated the Union Air Terminal at Burbank from 1940 to 1978, only then selling it to the Department of Transportation of Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena. Schoneberger et al., California Wings, 46, 135; Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York, 1992), 251. The federal aid program for 1947 provided for construction or improvement of 800 small airports nationally; of these 230, or 28.9 percent, were in the eleven mountain and Pacific states and Alaska and Hawaii, which in 1950 had 13.4 percent of the population. “230 Small Western Airports in New Federal Aid Program,” Western City 23 (March 1947): 18–20. Bradford Luckingham, Phoenix: The History of a Southwestern Metropolis (Tucson, 1989), 84, 109; Michael Konig, “Phoenix in the 1950s: Urban Growth in the ‘Sunbelt,’” Arizona and the West 24 (spring 1972): 23; Luckingham in Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth since World War II, ed. Richard M. Bernard and Bradley R. Rice (Austin, 1983), 312. Dalstrom, A. V. Sorensen and the New Omaha, 91–92, 97–99; Harl A. Dalstrom, Eugene C. Eppley, His Life and Legacy (Lincoln, Neb., 1969), 87–89. Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1984, sec. 4, p. 1, col. 1; April 18, 1988, sec. 4, p. 1, col. 2; Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1984, p. 57, col. 4. With 4,324,029 by air in 1976 against 85,383 by ship in 1957. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii, 271; John Niven, The American President Lines and Its Forebears, 1848–1984: From Paddlewheelers to Containerships (Newark, Del., 1987), 239; Noel J. Kent, “Islands under the Influence: Hawaii and Two Centuries of Dependent Development” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1979), 403–6, 464.

Notes to Pages 195–198

473

52. Eugene P. Moehring, Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas, 1930–1970 (Reno, 1989), 132; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1963 Census of Business, vol. 7, pt. 2 (Washington, 1966), 30–39; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1972 Census of Selected Service Industries (Washington, 1976), 1:2–25; Bureau of the Census, State and Metropolitan Area Data Book 1982 (Washington, 1982), 156; Bureau of the Census, 1982 Census of Service Industries, Industry Series, Hotels, Motels, and Other Lodging Places (Washington, 1985), 3–17, 18. Figures on hotel rooms in 1982, when Los Angeles– Long Beach (36,386) was next after Las Vegas (46,419) and Chicago; Honolulu was next, fourth nationally (31,576). The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported that hotel and motel rooms combined increased by 22.1 percent 1982–88. Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, 1988 Annual Summary, Las Vegas Marketing Bulletin 16 (March 15, 1989): 1–2; New York Times, October 2, 1991, p. C1, col. 2. 53. John M. Findlay, People of Chance: Gambling in American Society from Jamestown to Las Vegas (New York, 1986), 122–26, 162, 201. 54. “Las Vegas Airport Expansion Pushed,” Aviation Weekly and Space Technology 92 (February 16, 1970): 36; “Air-Cushion Train Airport Link Studied,” ibid. (January 26, 1970): 36. 55. Eleven percent visited Hoover Dam, the most frequently visited other part of Nevada. Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, Las Vegas Visitor Profile—Fiscal Year 1988 Composite Report, July 1, 1987–June 30, 1988 ([Las Vegas], 1988), 49–50, 54. 56. Ben F. Gaines, “SFO: Airport Activity Touches Nearly Everyone,” San Francisco Business 7 (May 1972): 7, 14. 57. Ibid., 3; H. O. Walther, A Study of the Impact of Airports on the Market Value of Real Estate in the Adjacent Areas . . . (Chicago, 1960), 60, 75, 90. 58. Edward Soja, Rebecca Morales, and Goetz Wolff, “Urban Restructuring: An Analysis of Social and Spatial Change in Los Angeles,” Economic Geography 59 (April 1983): 214–15, 225. 59. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of International Affairs, Major Airports and Their Effects on Regional Planning (Washington, 1974), 7. 60. U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, The Airport—Its Influence on the Community Economy (Washington, 1967), 35, 37, 42. 61. Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1988, sec. 4, p. 12, cols. 1–2. 62. New York Times, December 27, 1982, p. A12, col. 1; June 25, 1989 (national ed.), sec. 1, p. 29, cols. 4–5. 63. At 11,845 in 1910, Eureka was larger than the largest cities in Alaska (Juneau, 1,644), Nevada (Reno, 10,867), New Mexico (Albuquerque, 11,020), and Wyoming (Cheyenne, 11,320). Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 (Washington, 1931), 1:693, 730, 1209, 1221. The Northwestern Pacific reached Eureka in 1915. 64. Charles Willard Moore, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 9/10 (1965): 58–59. 65. Judd Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning in an American City, 1897–1906 (Lincoln, Neb., 1980). 66. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures: 1947 (Washington, 1950), 3:90; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns, First Quarter 1959, pt. 10 (Washington, 1961), 20, 84, 100; ibid., 1962, pt. 10 (Washington, 1963), 18, 100, 104, 118. 67. U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns, 1984 California (Washington, 1986), 24–

474

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

Notes to Pages 198–200 191; County and City Data, Book 1988 (Washington, 1988), 60, 621; Bureau of the Census, 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1989), 354. “San Jose Discovers How It Feels To Be Rich,” Business Week, September 26, 1964, p. 77. For statistical comparisons, see R. D. Norton, City Life-Cycles and American Urban Policy (New York, 1979), 98–100, 196–97, 109, 162, and passim. Forty-three percent in 1912. Benj. C. Wright, The West the Best and California The Best of the West . . . (San Francisco, 1913), 221. In 1987 bank clearings at San Francisco were 53.0 percent of those at Los Angeles, in 1956, 56.0 percent. Dun and Bradstreet Corporation, Monthly Bank Clearings 39 (December 1987): 3. R. B. Cohen, “The new international division of labor, multinational corporations and urban hierarchy,” in Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Society, ed. Michael Dear and Allen J. Scott (New York, 1981), 300–303. In 1986, San Francisco 8.5 percent and 19.5 percent, New York 7.2 percent and 24.4 percent. It had 50.1 percent as many employees in banking as Los Angeles County in 1947, 69.1 percent as many in 1986; total employment over those years dropped from 34.4 percent as many to 15.1 percent as many, population (1950–86) from 18.7 percent to 9.0 percent. Business Establishments, Employment and Taxable Payrolls, 1947, 18–19, 32–33; U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Business Patterns 1986 California (Washington, 1988), 153, 158; ibid., New York (Washington, 1988), 122, 129; County and City Data Book, 1988, 42, 55; San Francisco Chronicle, March 31,1990, p. B1, cols. 3–4. Moore, Perspecta, 59. Jack B. Fraser, “In Santa Clara Valley: The Debris of Development,” City: Magazine of Urban Life and Environment 4 (August/September 1970): 26–27. San Francisco Chronicle, May 3, 1989, p. B1, col. 1. Dennis R. Judd in Susan S. Fainstein et al., Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment (New York, 1983), 217–19. J. Thomas Black, “The Changing Economic Role of Central Cities and Suburbs,” in The Prospective City: Economic, Population, Energy, and Environmental Developments, ed. Arthur P. Solomon (Cambridge, 1980), 109; Fainstein et al., Restructuring the City, 211; for numbers of tall buildings, World Almanac, 1947 (New York, 1947), 794; ibid., 1987, 672–89; Bruce B. Brugmann and Greggar Sletteland, eds., The Ultimate Highrise: San Francisco’s Mad Rush Toward the Sky . . . (San Francisco, 1971); Chester Hartman, The Transformation of San Francisco (Totowa, N.J., 1984), 2 and passim. Bureau of the Census, State and Metropolitan Area Data Book 1982, 279; County and City Data Book, 1983 (Washington, 1983), 65; 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. C, pt. 6 (Washington 1983), 285. Santa Clara County led in increases in population from the 1960s through the 1980s, although by smaller margins and at declining fractions of total increases, while Santa Cruz County, to the west and south, after gaining less in the 1950s than in the 1940s, gained sharply more in the 1960s and 1970s; in the 1980s Solano County, with the lowest individual income, led in rate of increase, San Francisco, which had lost population in the 1960s and 1970s, in net migration. San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 1989, p. B1, cols. 2–4, p. B2, col. 3; County and City Data Book, 1988, 42, 55.

Notes to Pages 200–201

475

81. New York Times, September 7, 1970, p. 12, cols. 1–5, quoting Karl Belser, “The Making of Slurban America,” Cry California 5 (fall 1970): 5–6. By the early 1980s San Jose was overtaking San Francisco, which had lost population after 1950. 82. San Francisco Chronicle, January 27, 1959, p. 1, col. 6, p. 2, col. 1; “Fury Over the Freeways,” Newsweek 53 (February 16, 1959): 35; Christian Science Monitor, June 11, 1968, p 3, col. 1. 83. San Francisco Chronicle, March 22, 1966, p. 1, cols. 7–8, p. 14, cols. 1–5. 84. Bion J. Arnold, Report on the Improvement and Development of the Transportation Facilities of San Francisco (San Francisco, 1913), 421. 85. In 1980, 38.5 percent, more than in any other American urban area except New York City. The second highest use in the West was in King County (Seattle), at 11.2 percent. County and City Data Book, 1983, 65, 611. 86. Stephen Zwerling, Mass Transit and the Politics of Technology: A Study of BART and the San Francisco Bay Area (New York, 1974), 25; J. Allen Whitt, Urban Elites and Mass Transportation: The Dialectics of Power (Princeton, 1982), 42–43, 52–53. 87. Burton H. Wolfe in Ultimate Highrise, ed. Brugmann and Sletteland, 194. 88. Fred Martin, “Bay Area Rapid Transit: A Building Boom in the Billions,” Fortune 87 (September 1970): 42–43. 89. San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 1980, p. 1, cols. 1–2, p. 22, cols. 5–6; “A Chicago Solution for Peninsula Commuters,” Railway Age 181 (June 9, 1980): 32–33; Richard Rodda, “California’s Investment in the Rebirth of the Passenger Train,” California Journal 13 (January 1982): 25; Donovan L. Hofsommer, Southern Pacific, 1901–1985 (College Station, Tex., 1986), 287; Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850–1930 (Berkeley, 2005). 90. Marshall Kilduff, “San Francisco’s Novel Scheme to Provide Affordable Housing, California Journal 13 (May 1982): 170; W. Dennis Keating, “Linking Downtown Development to Broader Community Goals: An Analysis of Linkage Policy in Three Cities,” American Planning Association Journal 52 (spring 1986): 1316. 91. Jan Krizek, “How to Build a Pyramid,” Public Relations Journal 26 (December 1970): 17–21. 92. Neil Smith and Peter Williams, eds., Gentrification of the City (London, 1986), 69, 183, 186, 189; Christopher M. Law et al., The Uncertain Future of the Urban Core (London, 1988), 16–17, 91, 230. Per capita income was highest in the fifty largest cities in 1985 (from second in 1979); in Los Angeles it was twelfth (from eighth in 1979). Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1989 (Washington, 1989), 451. 93. Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1983, sec. 5, p. 1, col. 2. 94. San Francisco Chronicle, August 1, 1972, p. 1, cols. 2–4, p. 24, cols. 7–8; Allan B. Jacobs, Making City Planning Work (Washington, 1980), 235–36, 244, 294; New York Times, July 3, 1985, sec. 1, p. 19, col. 1; July 28, 1985, sec. 2, p. 24, cols. 1–6; September 19, 1985, sec. 1, p. 16, col. 6; Kilduff, “San Francisco’s Novel Scheme,” 169–70; Jeffrey Heller and George A. Williams in Second Century of the Skyscraper, ed. Lynn S. Beedle (New York, 1988), 233–35, 265, 270; Douglas Porter and Nina J. Gruen in Downtown Linkages, ed. Douglas Porter (Washington, 1985), 2–4, 43; William Fulton, “The Profit Motive,” Planning 53 (October 1987): 9; Richard C. Collins, Elizabeth B. Waters, and A. Bruce Dotson, America’s Downtown Growth Politics and Preservation (Washington, 1991), 134, 137–41.

476

Notes to Pages 201–205

95. San Francisco Chronicle, February 28, 1991, p. A2, cols. 5–6; April 16, 1990, p. A2, col. 1. 96. William H. Wilson, City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, 1989), 168–87, 234–53; Robert L. Perkin, The First Hundred Years: An Informal History of Denver and the Rocky Mountain News (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 410; Gene Fowler, Timber Line: A Story of Bonfils and Tammen (New York, 1933), 308–9. 97. William Zeckendorf and Edward McCreary, The Autobiography of William Zeckendorf (New York, 1970), 5, 135. 98. Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill, 1987), 158. 99. Judd in Fainstein et al., Restructuring the City, 172–74; Mechlin D. Moore, ed., Downtown Denver: A Guide to Central City Development (Washington, 1965), 9, 15–17; Robert Cameron and Galen G. McFadgen, “New College Facilities, New In-Town Vitality Gained via Denver’s Almost Complete Auraria Project,” Journal of Housing 34 (March 1977): 124–27. 100. Moore, Downtown Denver, 26; Dennis R. Judd and Randy L. Ready in Reagan and the Cities, ed. George E. Peterson and Carol W. Lewis (Washington, 1986), 219; New York Times, April 26, 1982, p. A12, col. 1. 101. Carl Abbott, “Boom State and Boom City: Stages in Denver’s Growth,” Colorado Magazine 50 (summer 1973): 224; Abbott et al., Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, rev. ed. (Boulder, 1982), 283. 102. Wallace Stegner and Page Stegner, “Rocky Mountain Country: [Section] 6. No Mean Cow Town,” Atlantic Monthly 241 (April 1978): 83. 103. “The Price of Denver’s ‘Auto Cult,’” Business Week, April 10, 1978, p. 42. 104. Sam W. Brown, Jr., “The ’76 Winter Olympics: Snow Job in Colorado,” New Republic 166 (January 29, 1972): 15–18; Milton Viorst, “Bumpy Course for the Denver Olympics,” Saturday Review 55 (October 21, 1972): 14; New York Times, November 8, 1972, p. 31, cols. 4–5; November 9, 1972, p. 34, cols. 3–4. 105. Richard D. Lamm and Michael McCarthy, The Angry West: A Vulnerable Land and Its Future (Boston, 1982), 248–49; Judd in Fainstein et al., Restructuring the City, 187–90. 106. New York Times, November 10, 1986, IV, p. B7, col. 1; November 1, 1988, p. A25, col. 5. 107. Ibid., April 26, 1982, p. A12, col. 1. 108. Judd and Ready in Reagan and the Cities, 226; Richard W. Foster, “In Downtown Denver a Civic Group Calls the Shots,” Planning 49 (January 1983): 18–21; Carter Whitson and Dennis Judd in Big City Politics in Transition, ed. H. C. Savitch and John Clayton Thomas (Newbury Park, Calif., 1991), 150, 157; Collins, America’s Downtowns, 67–68. 109. New York Times, May 18, 1989, p. A10, cols. 2–5; April 27, 1990, p. A15, cols. 1–4; Washington Post, May 17, 1989, p. A2, col. 4; Denver High Country News 25 (May 3, 1993): 14; Denver Post, October 12, 1993, p. B1, cols. 4–5, p. B8, cols. 4–5. 110. Of the increase of 89,496 in 1950–60, 86,079 (96.2 percent) were in the annexed area. Census of Population: 1960, vol. 5, pt. 49 (Washington, 1963), 17. 111. Wilson, City Beautiful Movement, 148–67, 213–33; Richard Berner, Seattle, 1900–1920 (Seattle, 1992), 265; Dennis Ryan, “Urban Design in Seattle,” Environmental Comment, September 1981, p. 16; James A. Barnes, Comprehensive Planning in Seattle, 1911–1954 (Seattle, 1954), 4, 10–11; Norbert MacDonald, Distant Neighbors: A Comparative History of Seattle and Vancouver (Lincoln, Neb., 1987), 70–71.

Notes to Pages 205–207

477

112. Earl Clark, “How Seattle Is Resisting Water Pollution,” Harper’s 234 (June 1967): 91–94; John Fischer, “Seattle’s Modern-Day Vigilantes,” Harper’s 237 (May 1969): 22, 24, 26; Roberto Brambilla and Gianni Longo, What Makes Cities Livable? Learning from Seattle (New York, 1980), 43, 45, 47; MacDonald, Distant Neighbors, 193. 113. John M. Findlay, “The Off-Center Seattle Center: Downtown Seattle and the 1962 World’s Fair,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 80 (January 1989): 2–3, 5–7, 10–11. 114. MacDonald, Distant Neighbors, 193; Brambilla and Longo, What Makes Cities Livable, 45–47; Ruth Wolf, “Block That Freeway,” Seattle Magazine, February 1969, pp. 30–32. 115. Kenneth R. Geiser, Jr., Urban Transportation Decision Making: 1, Political Processes of Urban Freeway Construction (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 80. 116. MacDonald, Distant Neighbors, 158–59; Seattle Times, June 4, 1989, p. A22; New York Times, September 11, 1988, sec. 13, pp. 32, 34; Eugene Register-Guard, June 5, 1989, p. 5C, cols. 1–2. 117. New York Times, December 4, 1988, I, p. 34, cols. 1–2; Washington Post, January 30, 1989, p. A3, col. 2; Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1989, I, p. 24, cols. 3–4. Roger Sale, Seattle, Past to Present (Seattle, 1978), 227. The Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a series of extended reports on speculative construction of office buildings and its precarious financing, May 7, 1989, July 9, 1989, November 26, 1989, December 17, 1989. 118. Brambilla and Longo, What Makes Cities Livable, 87, 89, 91. 119. New York Times, July 28, 1971, p. 17, col. 1; Seattle Times, November 3, 1971, p. A1, cols. 1–3, p. B6, cols. 3–4; Alice Shorett and Murray Morgan, The Pike Place Market: People, Politics, and Produce (Seattle, 1982), 125, 131; Patrick Douglas, “Up Against the System in Seattle,” Harper’s Magazine 244 (April 1972): 90–92. 120. New York Times, December 10, 1991, p. B1, col. 6. 121. Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 116, 183. 122. Polly Lane, “Seattle: A Citizen-Watched Pot on Constant Boil,” Urban Land 42 (March 1983): 2, 9. 123. Jane Hadley, “The Politics of Planning in Seattle,” Planning 49 (February 1983): 16. 124. New York Times, May 7, 1989, sec. 4, p. 5, cols. 1–6; Seattle Times, May 17, 1989, p. A1, cols. 1–4, p. E2, cols. 1–5; May 18, 1989, p. D1, col. 3; Collins et al., America’s Downtown Growth, 145–47. The next year, however, the state supreme court limited the authority of the city over developers. Seattle Times, January 29, 1990, p. B1, cols. 2–5, B2, cols. 2–5. 125. Los Angeles Times, January 5, 1989, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1. 126. The increase of 150,789 in 1970–80, smallest since 1890–1900, was less than increases in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, and San Jose; Los Angeles again led in 1980–86. 127. “A City—200 Miles Long? The Story of Los Angeles,” U.S. News and World Report 39 (September 16, 1956): 47. 128. Sam Hall Kaplan, LA Lost and Found: An Architectural History of Los Angeles (New York, 1987), 59, 61. 129. Richard A. Smith, “Los Angeles, Prototype of Supercity,” Fortune 71 (March 1965): 200, 212; Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (New York, 1971); Henry A. Sutherland, “Requiem for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium,” Southern California Quarterly 47 (September 1965): 303–31. 130. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 41.

478 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

142. 143.

144. 145.

146. 147.

148.

149. 150. 151. 152.

Notes to Pages 208–209 New York Times, April 11, 1982, sec. 1, p. 22, cols. 2–3. Especially the Harbor Freeway, built 1952–70. Nelson, Los Angeles Metropolis, 194, 198. Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1989, sec. 1, p. 20, col. 1. David Gebhard and Harriette von Breton, L.A. in the Thirties, 1931–1941 ([Salt Lake City], 1975), 25. Michael Bateman, Office Development: A Geographical Analysis (London, 1985), 111; Jonathan Miller, “Can the ‘New Downtown’ Really Work?” Los Angeles Magazine 28 (September 1983): 196, 200. Christopher B. Leinberger and Charles Lockwood, “How Business Is Reshaping America,” Atlantic Monthly 282 (October 1986): 44. New York Times, September 5, 1972, p. 56, col. 4. Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1988, sec. 4, p. 5, cols. 1, 4. Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (New York, 1899), 473. County and City Data Book, 1988, 42, 46, 55, 59. Of cities with populations of 105,000 and over in 1990, Los Angeles was denser than all in the Far West except five in Los Angeles and Orange counties and San Francisco. Statistical Abstract, 1991 (Washington, 1991), 34–36. Census of Agriculture: 1945, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1946), 24, 64; ibid., 1950, vol. 1, pt. 33 (Washington, 1952), 46, 101, 103. John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley, 1992), 58–104. In 1950 natives of Germany were still second only to natives of Mexico among foreign-born whites. Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 5 (Washington, 1952), 105. Census of Service Industries, Subject Series, Hotels, Motels, and Other Lodging Places (Washington, 1991), 3:40–41. Increases in population figured from 1950, when it was 14,556. Robert G. Cleland and Robert V. Hine, The Irvine Ranch, 3d ed. (San Marino, Calif., 1962), 152, 154; William L. Pereira and Associates, Long Range Development Plan, University of California, Irvine, June, 1963 ([Los Angeles?], 1963); Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1983, sec. 5, p. 1, col. 3. Cf. similar usage in Gladwin Hill, “Big But Not Bold: Irvine Today,” Planning 52 (February 1986): 17. From 276.5 to 2,715.3 per square mile. Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 5 (Washington, 1952), 12; 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. A, pt. 6 (Washington, 1982), 9; County and City Data Book, 1988, 42, 55. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Agriculture, vol. 2, pt. 3 (Washington, 1932), 563; Census of Agriculture: 1959, vol. 1, pt. 48 (Washington, 1961), 103; 1969 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 48, sec. 1 (Washington, 1972), 342, 343; 1978 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1981), 172; 1987 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1989), 365. Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1987, sec. 4, p. 2, cols. 4–5. Allen J. Scott, Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form (Berkeley, 1988), 167. Census of Manufactures: 1947, vol. 3 (Washington, 1950), 91; State and Metropolitan Area Data Book, 1986 (Washington, 1986), 372–73. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Manufactures 1939 (Washington, 1942), 3:80–81, 108; 1987 Census of Manufactures, California (Washington, 1990), 9, 11.

Notes to Pages 209–211

479

153. Census of Population: 1960, vol. 1, pt. 6 (Washington, 1963), 451, 457; 1970 Census of Population, vol. 1, pt. 6 (Washington, 1973), 381. 154. Mark Baldassare, Trouble in Paradise: The Suburban Transformation in America (New York, 1986), 51. 155. Hill, “Big But Not Bold,” 16; “‘New Town’ Rises Back at the Ranch,” Business Week, September 23, 1967, p. 178; Ingrid Groller, “The Best Places to Raise a Family,” Parents 60 (May 1985): 106. 156. Groller, “Best Places to Raise a Family,” 105. 157. Paul Goldberger, “Orange County: Tomorrowland—Wall to Wall,” New York Times, December 11, 1988, sec. 5, p. 32, cols. 1–3. 158. Wyndham Robertson, “The Greening of the Irvine Co.,” Fortune 94 (December 1976): 92; New York Times, July 25, 1989, p. A6, col. 3; Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1985, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1. 159. Rural Rocky Mountain counties of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico increased by 7.1 percent. New York Times, May 18, 1975, pp. 1, cols. 2–3, and 44, cols. 3–6, citing study by Calvin L. Beale of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 160. William N. Ellis, “The New Futurism: The Post-Industrial Age Is Upon Us,” Futurist 9 (August 1975): 202–4. 161. New York Times, October 18, 1989, p. A8, col. 5; Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1989, 1, p. 1, cols. 2–3, p. 31, cols. 1–2; New York Times, July 9, 1989, p. 10, col. 1; Los Angeles Times, June 5, 1989, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 6. On the increase in migration from California to the Pacific Northwest, 1965–70 to 1975–80, see Larry Long, Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States (New York, 1988), 65, 108. 162. Northwest Business Barometer 29 (May 1991): 2. 163. New York Times, September 5, 1993, p. 8, cols. 1–4. 164. The level of white population in the city had risen in 1930–40 to 95.5 percent, close to the levels of 1870–1920, before dropping to 3.2 percent in 1960. 165. 1990 Census of Population and Housing, Summary Population and Housing Characteristics, California (Washington, 1991), 44, 48, 93. White population not of Spanish surname or origin declined by 516,182, 1970–90, while total population increased by 673,597. 1970 Census of Population, Subject Reports, Persons of Spanish Surname (Washington, 1973), 1. 166. Ibid., 48; Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1986, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 2; New York Times, August 28, 1989, p. A9, cols. 1, 4. 167. Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto, The Third Century: America’s Resurgence in the Asian Era (New York, 1988), xiii–xiv, 180–1; Kotkin, “Miracle by Default,” Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets (Santa Monica) 21 (August–September 1989): 24. 168. Edward Soja et al., “Urban Restructuring: An Analysis of Social and Spatial Changes in Los Angeles,” Economic Geography 59 (April 1983): 195–96, 211, 214–15; Susan Paterno, “Immigrant Workers Fight for Wages,” Progressive 53 (June 1989): 13–14. 169. Richard H. Ropers, “The Rise of the New Urban Homeless,” Public Affairs Report, Bulletin of the Institute of Governmental Studies (Berkeley) 26 (October–December 1985): 1–4. 170. Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1987, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1, p. 18, cols. 1–6, p. 19, cols. 1–6. 171. In Los Angeles, $4.76 an hour, $8,507 annually, in California (where more than half were in Los Angeles) $4.71 and $8,418, in New York $4.71 and $9,515, in the United States $4.90 and $8,747. 1981 Census of Manufactures, Geographic Area Series, California (Washington, 1985), 83; ibid.,

480

172.

173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180.

181. 182.

183. 184.

185. 186.

187.

188. 189.

Notes to Pages 211–214 New York (Washington, 1985), 76; ibid., Subject Series, General Summary, pt. 1 (Washington, 1986), 37; David Hensley, “The Impacts of Immigration Reform in the California Economy,” Labor Law Journal 40 (August 1989): 527–31. Christopher B. Leinberger in Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1987, sec. 2, p. 12, col. 3; Charles Lockwood and Leinberger, “Los Angeles Comes of Age,” Atlantic Monthly 261 (January 1988): 32–33 and passim. Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 1989, p. 7, cols. 2–3. Fraser, “In Santa Clara Valley,” 24. William H. Whyte, Jr., in The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), 136, 138. New York Times, October 18, 1989, p. A8, col. 2, p. A9, col. 4; Lockwood and Leinberger, “Los Angeles Comes of Age,” 32. New York Times, November 12, 1972, sec. 4, p. 5, col. 1. Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1987, sec. 1, p. 2, col. 6, p. 3, col. 4, p. 15, cols. 2–3; April 11, 1989, sec. 2, p. 6, cols. 1–2. Ibid., January 8, 1989, sec. 1, p. 1, cols. 5–6, p. 14, cols. 2–3. In 1909 and 1910, respectively. The county was first in the United States to establish a planning commission 1922. Mel Scott, Metropolitan Los Angeles: One Community (Los Angeles, 1949), 35, 86. Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1987, sec. 1, p. 15, col. 3. Michael Peter Smith in Michael Parkinson, Bernard Foley, and Dennis R. Judd, eds., Regenerating the Cities: The U.K. Crisis and the U.S. Experience, ed. Michael Parkinson, Bernard Foley, and Dennis R. Judd (Glenview, Ill., 1989), 88; Sutherland, “Requiem for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Auditorium,” 325–30; Nelson, Los Angeles Metropolis, 197; Samuel Greengard, “Let’s Make a Deal,” Los Angeles Magazine 33 (June 1988), 132; Wallace, McHarg, Roberts, and Todd, Central City, Los Angeles 1972/1990: Preliminary General Development Plan (Los Angeles, [1972]), 36; New York Times, August 14, 1991, p. B6, col. 5. New York Times, November 9, 1988, sec. 1, p. 3, cols. 1–2, p. 32, col. 2. Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1986, sec. 1, p. 3, cols. 1–6, p. 26, cols. 1–2; August 1, 1988, sec. 1, p. 2, cols. 1–2, p. 15, cols. 1–2; William Fulton, “The Profit Motive,” Planning 53 (October 1987): 6–10. Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1989, p. A22, cols. 3–6. Frank Malone, “Los Angeles Gets Ready to Dig,” Railway Age 180 (October 8, 1979): 48; William D. Middleton, “Los Angeles Metro Gets a Slow Order,” ibid. 185 (August 1984): 72; “L. A. Rail Line Stays on Track Despite Critics,” American City and County 99 (October 1984): 56; Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1980, p. 15, col. 1; Washington Post, September 30, 1986, p. A3, cols. 3–5. Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1984, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 6, p. 22, col. 1; September 2, 1984, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1; November 15, 1989, p. A1, col. 5, p. 20, col. 2; April 19, 1987, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1, p. 20, col. 1. Robert Scheer, “A Frontier Dream Has Come of Age,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1989, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1. Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1987, sec. 5 p. 5, col. 1; September 11, 1987, sec. 2, p. 4, col. 6.

Notes to Pages 214–216

481

190. Steve Oney, “All in the Family,” California Magazine 8 (November 1983): 74; Wall Street Journal, February 24, 1982, p. 1, col. 4, p. 25, col. 1; May 27, 1983, p. 10, col. 4; Gary Hector, “The Land Coup in Orange County,” Fortune 108 (November 14, 1983): 100, 102. 191. Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1988, sec. 2, p. 6, col. 1. 192. Ibid., April 19, 1987, sec. 1, p. 22, col. 2; April 21, 1987, sec. 1, p. 20, col. 3. 193. Ibid., September 30, 1987, sec. 1, p. 3, col. 5; September 12, 1987, sec. 1, p. 29, col. 4; January 8, 1989, sec. 1, p. 1, cols. 5–6, p. 14, cols. 2–3; February 6, 1989, sec. 2, p. 5, cols. 3–5; July 11, 1989, sec. 1, p. 17, col. 4; November 8, 1990, p. B6, cols. 3–5. 194. Mary Gilman Marston, George White Marston, A Family Chronicle (Los Angeles, 1956), 2:8–9, 11–21, 34–35. 195. Marston, George White Marston, 2:8–9, 11–21, 34–35; Iris H. W. Engstrand, San Diego, California’s Cornerstone (Tulsa, Okla., 1980), 74, 91, 98, 104; Uldis Ports, “Geraniums vs. Smokestacks: San Diego’s Mayoralty Campaign of 1917,” Journal of San Diego History 21 (summer 1975): 50– 56. 196. San Diego, Citizens’ Advisory Committee on the General Plan, The General Plan for San Diego—1945 . . . (San Diego, 1964), 19. 197. John Nolen, San Diego, A Comprehensive Plan for Its Improvement (Boston, 1908), 85–86. 198. San Diego Union, July 4, 1958, p 13, cols. 4–5; July 12, 1958, p. 13, cols. 7–8, p. 14, col. 1; July 31, 1958, p. 21, cols. 7–8; Engstrand, San Diego, 125; James Britton, “Does Mayor Dail Have a Planning Sense?” San Diego and Point Magazine 10 (May 1958): 48. 199. San Diego Union, February 21, 1961, p. 17, cols. 6–8; December 1, 1967, p. B1, cols. 1–2. 200. Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard, Temporary Paradise? A Look at the Special Landscape of the San Diego Region (San Diego, 1974), 5, 22. In 1987, another consultant, Allan B. Jacobs, called the valley “unsavable, a lost cause. Therefore, with the exception of the development of a narrow, elegant lineal park along the river, put a lot of development there.” Remarks before citizens’ advisory committee (duplicated transcript; n. p., n. d. [1987], 16–17). 201. San Diego City Planning Department, Background Summary: City of San Diego Growth Management Program (San Diego, 1986), 7; San Diego Union, September 22, 1965, p. 1, col. 6; November 9, 1967, p. 2, cols. 1–4. 202. San Diego Union, October 14, 1959, p. 1, cols. 1–3; November 29, 1960, p. B1, cols. 2–4; Forbes 108 (August 15, 1971): 26; “Nixon’s ‘Lucky City’: C. Arnholt Smith and the San Diego Connection,” Ramparts 12 (October 1973): 33; Forbes 123 (June 11, 1979): 16, 21; Washington Post, May 28, 1973, p. A1, col. 2; March 21, 1975, p. A2, col. 4; John Quirt, “Deil Gustafson’s Biggest Salvage Job,” Fortune 98 (November 20, 1978): 44–46, 8. 203. San Diego, Citizens’ Advisory Committee on the General Plan, General Plan, 25–26. 204. Lynch and Appleyard, Temporary Paradise, 27. 205. Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1971, pt. 1, p. 3, cols. 2, 4; p. 19, cols. 2–3, 5; Carey McWilliams, “Pete Wilson of San Diego,” Nation 224 (March 12, 1978): 306; William B. Rick, “Growth Management in San Diego,” Urban Land 37 (April 1978): 3–4. 206. Washington Post, April 17, 1983, p. A2, cols. 5–6; May 5, 1983, p. A2, col. 1; Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1987, sec. I, p. 3, col. 4; p. 23, cols. 5–6. 207. Richard W. Ellson, “Another Perspective on Growth Management,” Urban Land 38 (June 1979): 4–5; U.S. News and World Report 79 (September 1, 1975): 66; New York Times, March 4, 1979,

482

208. 209. 210. 211.

212. 213.

214. 215.

216. 217. 218. 219.

220.

221. 222. 223.

Notes to Pages 216–220 p. 17, col. 6; November 7, 1985, sec. 2, p. 11, col. 4; Sandiplan: Newsletter of the San Diego City Planning Department, September 1988, p. 1; Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1988, p. 3, cols. 1–3, p. 31, col. 3; Douglas R. Porter, “San Diego’s Brand of Growth Management: A for Effort, C for Accomplishment,” Urban Land 48 (May 1989): 21. New York Times, January 3, 1988, sec. 8, p. 4, cols. 2–5; San Diego Union, November 15, 1989, p. B6, cols. 1–2. New York Times, April 27, 1985, sec. 1, p. 7, col. 3. New York Times, March 4, 1979, p. 17, col. 6; June 28, 1987, sec. 1, p. 20, col. 3. Wall Street Journal, June 26, 1985, p. 29, col. 1; Bernard J. Frieden and Lynne B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 123–26, 148–52, 191–97; Paul M. Sachner, “Fun City,” Architectural Record 174 (March 1986): 128–35; Roger Cox, “San Diego’s Horton Plaza: The Shopping Mall of the Future?” Travel-Holiday 169 (January 1988): 10; Ford S. Worthy, “Booming American Cities,” Fortune 116 (August 17, 1987): 37; New York Times, January 3, 1988, sec. 8, p. 4, cols. 2–5. Porter, “San Diego’s Brand of Growth Management,” 21. Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1988, sec. 1, p. 3, col. 3, p. 31, col. 3; New York Times, July 9, 1989 (national ed.), p. 10, cols. 1–3; San Diego Union, November 8, 1989, p. A1, cols. 5–6, p. A8, col. 2; November 9, 1989, p. A1, col. 2, p. A3, cols. 2, 5–6, p. B8, col. 3. New York Times, June 7, 1962, p. 70, col. 4. San Francisco Chronicle, September 2, 1964, p. 3, cols. 1–5; Harvey M. Rubenstein, Central City Malls (New York, 1978), 105–9; David Hambach, “The Fresno Mall,” American City 80 (April 1965): 91–93; Bernard Taper, “The City That Puts People First,” McCall’s 93 (April 1966): 62, 64; Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities; the Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (New York, 1964), 226; “Upgrading Downtown,” Architectural Record 137 (June 1965): 182. Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1988, p. 1, col. 1, p. 18, cols. 1–6, p. 19, cols. 1–2; Victor Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment; Survival of the Cities (New York, 1973), 196. William S. Kowinski, The Malling of America (New York, 1985), 121–22, 233, 235. Ada Louise Huxtable in New York Times, November 23, 1976, p. 35M, col. 3. The satellite areas around northern cities (including cities of the northern Middle West as far west as Kansas) where growth was as fast as in central cities extended in 1900–10 only 0–5 miles; in 1910–20 to 10 miles; in 1920–30 to 35. In western (Pacific and mountain) cities satellite territory where the rates of growth exceeded rates in central cities extended to 30 miles from central cities in 1900–10, 35 in 1910–20, and the entire satellite area in 1920–30. Amos H. Hawley, The Changing Shape of Metropolitan America: Deconcentration since 1920 (Glencoe, Ill., 1956), 150. “Town with No Downtown—Yet!” Rotarian 91 (December 1957): 47. Rand McNally Commercial Atlas and Marketing Guide, Centennial Edition (New York, 1956), 83–88, estimated populations of the five at a total of 7,450. Edmund K. Faltermayer, Redoing America: A Nationwide Report on How to Make Our Cities and Suburbs Livable (New York, 1968), 168. Charles S. Sargent, Jr., Planned Communities in Greater Phoenix: Origins, Functions and Control (Tempe, Ariz., 1973), 12, 14–16. “Phoenix: The Blemishes in Boomtown,” Business Week, November 15, 1969, p. 144; on Sun City, “Why New Towns Boom or Fall Flat,” ibid., 149, and Findlay, Magic Lands, 160, 174, 347.

Notes to Pages 221–228

483

224. Gurney Breckenfeld, “‘Downtown’ Has Fled to the Suburbs,” Fortune 86 (October 1972): 158. 225. Kowinski, Malling of America, 233, 235; Emma Louise Philabaum, Westcor Partners, to Earl Pomeroy, October 3, 1988. 226. Bob Gottlieb, “The Phoenix Growth Machine,” Nation 229 (December 29, 1979): 681. 227. Washington Post, December 3, 1982, p. A2, cols. 1–2; June 20, 1988, p. A8, cols. 3–4; Jerry B. Coffman, “From City Manager to Deputy,” Public Management 68 (October 1986): 8. 228. New York Times, November 1, 1983, p. A22, cols. 3–4; November 3, 1983, p. 26, cols. 3–5. 229. Carle C. Zimmerman and Richard E. Du Wors, Graphic Rural Sociology (A Study in American Social Organization) (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 125. 230. “Phoenix: the Blemishes in Boomtown,” Business Week, November 15, 1969, p. 144, quoting a vice president of Motorola Corporation. 231. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Population, (Washington, 1913), 2:180; Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, (Washington, 1943), 2:139, 145. In 1980–90 the black population of Oakland increased further (by 2.5 percent) but declined to 43.9 percent of total population. 232. As measured by employment, nearly three fifths, 1950–88. Arthur W. Baum, “Omaha,” Saturday Evening Post 222 (September 10, 1949): 25; Janet R. Daly-Bednarck, The Changing Image of the City: Planning for Downtown Omaha, 1945–1973 (Lincoln, Neb., 1992), 46–48, 56, 123; Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 27 (Washington, 1952), 175–76; 1980 Census of Population, Detailed Population Characteristics, vol. 1, chap. D, pt. 29 (Washington, 1983), 316–17. 233. New York Times, December 5, 1993, pp. 1, cols. 2–3, and 20, cols. 3–6. 234. On observations of homogeneity, note David W. Varley, “A Quantitative Analysis of Regionalism in the United States 1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, 1956), 63–64; William F. Ogburn and Delvin Peterson, “Political Thought of Social Classes,” Political Science Quarterly 31 (June 1916): 300–317; Raymond E. Wolfinger and Fred I. Greenstein, “Comparing Political Regions: The Case of California,” American Political Science Review 63 (March 1969): 74–85; and Raymond D. Gastil, “The Pacific Northwest as a Cultural Region,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 64 (October 1973): 147–56.

CHAPTER 8. SOCIAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL ATTITUDES: CULTURAL BASES 1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 10, 12, 30. 2. Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., “Patent-Office Models of the Good Society: Some Relationships between Social Reform and Westward Expansion,” American Historical Review 58 (April 1953): 509–10. 3. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,” Atlantic Monthly 91 (January 1903): 90. 4. Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe (New York, 1931), 132–33. 5. Arrell Morgan Gibson, “Oklahoma: Land of the Drifter; Deterrents to Sense of Place,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 64 (spring 1986): 4–13. 6. Helen Churchill Candee, “Oklahoma,” Atlantic Monthly 86 (September 1900), 333–34. A sociologist reported “wagon-roaders” in Oklahoma thirty years later, predominantly rural in origin:

484

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

Notes to Pages 228–230 nearly one hundred camped near Picher (Ottawa County, northeastern Oklahoma) in March 1929. Robert S. Wilson, “Transient Families,” Family 11 (December 1930): 244. Ray Stannard Baker, “The Western Spirit of Restlessness,” Century 76 (July 1908): 468; cf. H. L. Davis, “Back to the Land—Oregon, 1907,” American Mercury 16 (March 1929): 314–23. Horace Plunkett, “The Human Factor in Rural Life,” Outlook 94 (February 12, 1910): 356. “The West’s Home-Making,” Independent 53 (January 10, 1901): 107–8. Charles Moreau Harger, “New Era in the Middle West,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 97 (July 1898): 281. Jacob Richards Dodge, “American Farm Labor,” Industrial Commission, Report, vol. 11, pt. 3 (Washington, 1901), 74. George K. Holmes, “Supply and Wages of Farm Labor,” Yearbook of Agriculture, 1910 (Washington, 1911), 199. Thomas F. Hunt, The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know (New York, 1912), 16–17; Beryl R. McClaskey, A Social and Economic Survey of Beadle County, South Dakota . . . (Chicago, 1940), 99; C. W. Pugsley and T. H. Cox, Land Ownership in South Dakota . . . (Brookings, S.D., 1937), 3. In 1920 values of farms operated by tenants were higher in all of fourteen far western states surveyed except Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah (Idaho and Washington not surveyed). E. A. Goldenweiser and Leon E. Truesdell, Farm Tenancy in the United States . . . , Census Monographs, vol. 4 (Washington, 1924), 187–88; and cf. findings that counties of the central Great Plains with high rates of tenancy in 1945 tended to be most prosperous: Don E. Albrecht and John K. Thomas, “Farm Tenure: A Retest of Conventional Knowledge,” Rural Sociology 51 (spring 1986): 18–30. On neglectful tenants and absentee landlords, see Paul Wallace Gates, Frontier Landlords and Pioneer Tenants (Ithaca, 1945), 28, 46–47, 56. J. O. Rankin, The Nebraska Farm Family; Some Land Tenure Phases, Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 185 (Lincoln, Neb., 1923), 4; R. L. Adams and William H. Smith, Jr., Farm Tenancy in California and Methods of Leasing, University of California Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 655 (Berkeley, 1941), 14. Dodge, “American Farm Labor,” 74; John D. Black and R. H. Allen, “The Growth of Farm Tenancy in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 51 (May 1937): 423, 425. James C. Malin, The Grassland of North America: Prolegomena to Its History (Lawrence, Kan., 1947), 280–89; Malin, “The Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 4 (November 1935): 342–52, but see D. Aidan McQuillan, “The Mobility of Immigrants and Americans: A Comparison of Farmers on the Kansas Frontier,” Agricultural History 53 (July 1979): 576–96. Average years of tenure in three counties in rural Colorado continued to decline into the 1930s. Olaf F. Larson, Rural Households and Dependency: A Comparative Study of Composition and Behavior of Relief and Non-Relief Households in Three Colorado Counties, Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 444 (Fort Collins, Colo., 1938), 43. Tenancy in New Mexico in 1910, when it was lowest in the continental West, was 5.5 percent (in California highest at 20.6 percent); it rose sharply thereafter, to 12.2 percent and 17.1 percent in 1920 and 1925, when it was fourth lowest. Benjamin H. Hibbard, “Tenancy in the Western States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 26 (February 1912): 372; Leon E. Truesdell, “Farm Tenancy Moves West,” Journal of Farm Economics 8 (October 1926): 445. “The Spectator,” Outlook 84 (29 December 1906): 1053–54.

Notes to Pages 230–232

485

19. On colonial antecedents of ranching in Texas, see Terry G. Jordan, Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching (Lincoln, Neb., 1981), 4–7, 10, and passim; cf. Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, “The Antebellum Southern Herdsman: A Reinterpretation,” Journal of Southern History 41 (May 1975): 147–66. 20. High rates of tenancy went with low values of land and farms and with cotton-raising, as in Seminole County (82.6 percent tenancy in 1910, average value of farm $1,616), Love County (82.3 percent and $2,444), Murray County (82.7 percent and $3,381). Tenancy had risen from 43.8 percent in 1900 to 54.8 percent in 1910 but declined to 51.0 percent in 1920, as tenancy declined in 1910–20 in several southern states while increasing, in lower ranges, in all other western states except Nevada. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, vol. 7, Agriculture (Washington, 1913), 352, 364, 368–69, 371, 376–77; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, vol. 6, Agriculture, pt. 2 (Washington, 1922), 35, 86, 620; cf. Otis D. Duncan, Oklahoma’s Farm Population: Some Facts and Figures, Oklahoma Agricultural Experimentation Bulletin B-379 (Stillwater, Okla., 1952), 5, 9. 21. U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report . . . , 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, S. Doc. 415, 1:86–87, 10:9159. 22. Thus land in wheat harvested increased from 9.4 percent of land in farms in Kansas in the 1890s to 21.7 percent in the 1920s; both the wheat crop and land in wheat harvested nearly tripled (increasing by 193.5 percent and 197.9 percent) while land in farms increased by 28.6 percent (land in farms 1890–1930 by 55.5 percent). U.S. Agricultural Marketing Service, Wheat: Acreage, Yield, Production, By States, 1866–1943 . . . , Statistical Bulletin 158 (Washington, 1955), 11; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1909 (Washington, 910), 119; ibid., 1931 (Washington, 1931), 621, 622, 641. Numbers of farmers in the state decreased in all decades after 1890. 23. Don D. Lescohier, Harvest Labor Problems in the Wheat Belt, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bulletin no. 1020 (Washington, 1922), 14, 17. 24. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York, 1917), 156, 209, cited by Paul S. Taylor, “Origins of Migratory Labor in the Wheat Belts of the Middle West and California, Second Half of Nineteenth Century,” in U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor of Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Powerlessness, 91st Cong., 1st and 2d sess., pt. 8C, July 24, 1970, Hearings, 6279. 25. Mrs. E. T. Curtiss, “Our Farm Life, How to Decrease Its Evils and Increase Its Blessings,” North Dakota Farmers’ Institute, Annual, no. 3 (Fargo, 1902), 47, quoted by Taylor, “Origins of Migratory Labor,” 6281–82. 26. Henry J. Allen, “The New Harvest Hand,” American Review of Reviews 66 (September 1927): 279–80; Thomas D. Isern, Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs: Harvesting and Threshing on the North American Plains (Lawrence, Kan., 1990), 174; Isern, Custom Combining on the Great Plains: A History (Norman, Okla., 1981), 12–20, 29–50, 74. 27. Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States (Boston, 1942), 105. 28. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 6 (Washington, 1942), 686, 678; Statistical Abstract, 1930 (Washington, 1930), 693. Intensive crops rose from 43.3 percent of production in 1899 to 49.5 percent in 1909, 78.4 percent in 1929. Levi Varden Fuller, “The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California,” in

486

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

Notes to Pages 233–235 U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violation of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, 76th Cong., 3d sess., 1940, Hearings Before a Subcommittee, on S. Res. 266, January 13, 1940, pt. 54, Agricultural Labor in California, 9893. 1974 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 5 (Washington, 1977), I-16; 1982 Census of Agriculture, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1984), 205; California Employment Development Department, Health and Welfare Agency, 1976 California Annual Rural Workforce Report (Sacramento, 1977), II-13; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 468: Victor J. Oliveira, Trends in the Hired Farm Work Force, 1945–87, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Agriculture Information Bulletin no. 561 (Washington, 1989), 3. F. H. Newell, “The Human Element in Irrigation Management,” Western Engineering 5 (February 1915): 330–32. Newell, “Federal Land Reclamation: A National Problem,” Engineering News-Record 91 (November 15, 1923): 802–3. Benjamin H. Hibbard, “Tenancy in the Western States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 26 (February 1912): 371; Edwin E. Cox, “Farm Tenantry in California,” Commonwealth Club of California, Transactions 11 (December 1916): 444, 454–55; U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Twenty-third Annual Report . . . (Washington, 1924), 34. By 1910 nearly a third of owners in the Imperial Valley were nonresidents. Nonresident ownership rose to 62 percent in 1930. Adon Poli and Ralph L. Nielsen, Nonresident Landlords of Imperial Valley, California (Berkeley, 1942), 5–7; J. Smeaton Chase, California Desert Trails (Boston, 1919), 287. Washington Post, September 25, 1982, p. A7, col. 1; September 30, 1982, p. A16, cols. 5–6. As an agent of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in 1940–44, Walter R. Goldschmidt found that in a community near Bakersfield (Kern County) where large owners held most of the land (91 percent of cropland in units larger than 160 acres), families both prospered less and seemed to have fewer common interests and social ties than families in communities with more small proprietors. As You Sow: Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness (Montclair, N.J., 1978). U.S. Industrial Commission, Report (1902), 15:575. Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, vol. 2, Population (Washington, 1922), 38–40. The largest immigrations of farmers (defined as those who operated farms for themselves or others) in the nineteenth century within years before and after the Civil War had been 87,888 (1854) and 61,888 (1882). The largest immigrations of farmers and farm managers in the twentieth century before and after the First World War were 18,474 (1905) and 22,282 (1920). Farm laborers and foremen exceeded laborers who were not farm and mine workers in 1906–7 and 1910–14. Historical Statistics, 1975, 110–11. L. W. Wakely, Report, 1913, 27 April 1914, in Valentine Kuska Papers, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln. In 1900, when foreign parentage in the United States averaged 34.3 percent, four exceeded New York (59.4 percent): North Dakota at 77.5 percent led the country, followed by Hawaii (75.3 percent), Utah (61.2 percent), South Dakota (61.1 percent), Montana (57.3 percent), California (54.9 percent), and Nevada (51.7 percent). Those with less-than-national percentages were Kansas (27.4 percent), Oklahoma (13.6 percent), New Mexico (16.2 percent), and Alaska (27.9 percent). Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population (Washington, 1901), 1:clxxxii.

Notes to Pages 235–236

487

40. Ibid., ciii, civ, clxxii, clxxxvii, 487; ibid. (Washington, 1902), 2:ccxvii; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Population (Washington, 1922), 2:37, 40, 46; Shih-shan Henry Tsai, China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1868–1911 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1983), 98. 41. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, vol. 7, Agriculture 1909 and 1910 (Washington, 1913), 276–77 and passim; ibid., vol. 5, Agriculture 1909 and 1910 (Washington, 1913), 180–81; for rural and urban native-born and foreign-born populations, ibid., Population, 1:841–43. 42. M. F. Greeley in U.S. Industrial Commission, Report 10 (1901):929–30. 43. U.S. Industrial Commission, Report, 15:496–503; U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, Immigrants in Industries, pt. 24, Recent Immigrants in Agriculture, vol. 1, 61st Cong., 2d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 633, pp. 35–36, 40. 44. John P. Johansen, Immigrant Settlements and Social Organization in South Dakota, South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 313 (Brookings, S.D., 1937), 50–51. 45. Vancouver Columbian, February 18, 1964. 46. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Washington, 1932), 72, 98– 100; 1980 Census of Population, Ancestry of the Population by State 1980, Supplementary Report PC 80–S1–10 (Washington, 1983), 18, 20. 47. Russell Wilford Lynch, Czech Farmers in Oklahoma: A Comparative Study of the Stability of a Czech Farm Group . . . , Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, Bulletin 39, no. 13 (Stillwater, Okla., 1942), 7, 33, 35, 37–38, 51, 93–96; Karel D. Bicha, The Czechs in Oklahoma (Norman, Okla., 1980), 49–54. 48. Topeka Capital, March 28, 1920; Richard Sallet, Russian-German Settlements in the United States (Fargo, N.D., 1974), 6–7, 22–53, 110–12, and passim; George J. Eisenach, Pietism and the Russian-Germans in the United States (Berne, Ind., 1948), 88–90, 92–93; E. A. Wilson, H. C. Hoffsommer, and Alva H. Benton, Rural Changes in Western North Dakota; Social and Economic Factors Involved in the Changes in Number of Farms and Movements of Settlers from Farms, North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 214 (Fargo, N.D., 1928), 6–7, 29–30; William D. Sherman, “Assimilation in a North Dakota German-Russian Community” (master’s thesis, University of North Dakota–Bismarck, 1965), 140, 142, and passim. On the introduction of Turkey Red and other Russian varieties (by Mennonites in Kansas as early as 1873), with the sponsorship of the Department of Agriculture, which also promoted other Russian wheats and Russian oats and alfalfa, from 1896–97, see K. S. Quisenberry and L. P. Reitz, “Turkey Wheat: The Cornerstone of an Empire,” Agricultural History 47 (January 1974): 98–110; James C. Malin, Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas: A Study in Adaptation to Subhumid Geographical Environment (Lawrence, Kan., 1944), 162–67; Mary W. M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 290–309; William Harter Miller, “Agriculture in the High Plains: The History of a Struggle against Environment” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1951), 176–80. 49. Kenneth W. Rock, “‘Unsere Leute’: The Germans from Russia in Colorado,” Colorado Magazine 54 (spring 1977): 163, 165; Dena Markoff in Germans from Russia in Colorado, ed. Sidney Heitman (Fort Collins, Colo., 1978), 81–85; Paul S. Taylor, “Hand Workers in the Western Sugar Beet Industry,” Agricultural History 41 (January 1967): 21, 23; Taylor, “Migratory Farm Labor in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review 44 (May 1937): 544; U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, Immigrants in Industries, pt. 25, vol. 2, 61st Cong, 2d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 633, serial 5684, pp. 118, 120, 151–52; Sallet, Russian-German Settlements, 50–53, 61.

488

Notes to Pages 237–240

50. Three of five grade-school children in Ellis County, Kansas (Hays), allegedly had German accents as late as 1946, although the first group of Russian German immigrants had come in 1874. Kansas City Times, July 31, 1946. On the persistence of communal traditions and the slowness of acculturation in the same county, see Timothy Kloberdanz in Frederick C. Luebke, ed., Ethnicity on the Great Plains (Lincoln, Neb., 1980), 62–63. 51. Angelo Anastasio, Port Haven . . . a Changing Northwestern Community, Washington Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 616 (Pullman, Wash., 1960), 3, 6, 8–10. 52. Oscar O. Wegelin, “Etienne Derbec and the Destruction of His Press at San Francisco, April, 1865,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin 27 (January 1943): 10–17. 53. While ethnic churches commonly expressed and protected inherited culture, they also mediated between cultures. Resisting radical socialist and communist pressures, the Suomi Synod encouraged loyalty to the United States; rates of naturalization among church Finns were high. Auvo Kostianen, “For or Against Americanization? The Case of the Finnish Immigrant Radicals,” in American Labor and Immigration History, 1877–1920s: Recent European Research, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 260, 266, 269. Cf. P. George Hummasti, Finnish Radicals in Astoria, Oregon, 1904–1940: A Study in Immigrant Socialism (New York, 1979). 54. Naomi Wiener Cohen describes the “happy union of America’s economic needs and the industry . . . of the Jewish peddler and shopkeeper” in the Pacific and mountain West. Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–1914 (Philadelphia, 1984), 29. 55. Andrew W. Lind, Hawaii’s People (Honolulu, 1980), 88, 104. 56. The U.S. Industrial Commission reported (1901) an estimate of almost 1,200 Chinese cigar makers and 1,379 Chinese employees in clothing factories in San Francisco in 1900, down from the 8,500 and 7,510 that the San Francisco Trade Assembly had reported in 1885; Southern Pacific lines west of Ogden employed about 7.3 percent Chinese and 7.3 percent Japanese in maintenance, against 20.3 percent Mexicans. In 1885 most cigar manufacturers had agreed to hire members of the Cigar Makers’ International Union. The commission also reported testimony that illegal immigration continued, including immigration of alleged natives of California. U.S. Industrial Commission, Report 15:748, 750; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971), 170, 214–15, 217–18. On the continuing decline of Chinese employment in manufacturing in San Francisco in the twentieth century, see Victor G. Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (New York, 1973), 61–62; on major Chinese businessmen, including owners of two large canneries on San Francisco Bay, see L. Eve Armentrout Ma, “The Big Business Ventures of Chinese in North America, 1850–1930,” in The Chinese American Experience, Papers from the Second National Conference on Chinese American Studies (1980), ed. Genny Lim (San Francisco, c. 1984), 101–12. 57. At 58,324 in 1950, the population of Chinese origin or ancestry in California was still 16,808 (22.4 percent) less than in 1880, in all the sixteen contiguous western states 35,704 (34.9 percent) less. Even in 1960 the population in the sixteen states was only 12,089 (11.8 percent) more. 58. Although Congress repealed exclusion in 1943, a minimal quota of 105 applied until it abolished the system of quotas by national origin in 1965. The first substantial immigration since 1882 came when President John F. Kennedy directed admission of refugees from Hong Kong in 1962. H. Brett Melendy, The Oriental Americans (New York, 1972), 65–67. The Chinese population of the sixteen continental far western states was 102,377 in 1880, 66,673 in 1950, 404,652 in 1980,

Notes to Pages 240–243

59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

489

805,711 in 1990; of California, 75,132, 58,324, 341,429, and 704,850. Compendium of the Tenth Census . . . , vol. 1 (Washington, 1883), 557; Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Washington, 1953), 106–7; 1980 Census of Population, Ancestry of the Population by State, Supplementary Report, PC 80–S1–10 (Washington, 1983), 21–26; 1990 Census of Population, General Population Characteristics, United States, 1900 CP-1–1 (Washington, 1992), 326, 328–29, 526. Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945 (Philadelphia, 1991), 16, 19–21, 33–34, 57; W. Thomas White, “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Railroad Work Force: The Case of the Far Northwest, 1883–1918,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (July 1985): 274–76. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, Immigrants in Industries, pt. 25, vol. 2, 61st Cong, 2d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 633, pp. 121–23, 298–99, 303–5. A. H. Naftzger, president of the California Fruit Exchange, in Industrial Commission, Report, 10:957. According to the Commission on Immigration, by 1909, 69.2 percent of married farmers and businessmen with settled residence reported wives in the United States, against 12.4 percent of married wage earners. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, Immigrants in Industries, pt. 25, vol. 2, 61st Cong., 2d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 633, pp. 27–29. Historical Statistics, 1975, 14. Immigration was 4.5 percent female in 1896–98 and 1900–1901, 14.4 percent female in 1902–6; further shifts followed the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 and the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924. U.S. Commission on Immigration, Reports, Statistical Review of Immigration 1820–1910 . . . , 61st Cong., 3d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 756, pp. 39–41. R. L. Duffus, “California Irredenta,” Nation 8 (April 12, 1919): 550–51; Carey McWilliams, Brothers Under the Skin (Boston, 1943), 165; Charles Wollenberg, “Race and Class in Rural California: The El Monte Berry Strike of 1933,” California Historical Quarterly 51 (summer 1972): 157. Wollenberg, “Race and Class in Rural California,” 155–64; on choice of land, see John A. Rademaker, “The Ecological Position of the Japanese Farmer in the State of Washington” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington–Seattle, 1940). U.S. Immigration Commission, Reports, Immigrants in Industries, pt. 25, vol. 2, 61st Cong, 2d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 633, p. 44. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), 326. Carey McWilliams, “Once Again the ‘Yellow Peril,’” Nation 140 (June 26, 1935): 735–36. Ivan H. Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley, 1972), 28–30, 48; David J. O’Brien and Stephen S. Fugita, The Japanese American Experience (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 5–9; on agricultural associations, Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston, 1991), 69–70; Edna Bonacich and John Modell, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community (Berkeley, 1980), 47–48. George P. West, “California the Prodigious,” Nation 115 (October 4, 1922): 326. Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Urbana, Ill., 1994), 95–107, 112–13, 119–23, 126–29, 132–33, 135. Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison, Wis., 1989), 47, 50, 58–59, 73–75, 79–80.

490

Notes to Pages 243–245

73. Ibid., 127, 132, 156–58; Robert W. O’Brien, The College Nisei (Palo Alto, Calif., 1949), 126 and passim. 74. By 1946–52, 40 percent of those with postgraduate training had moved to the Northeast. Bonacich and Modell, Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity, 180. 75. Japanese population in the three coastal states increased from 75.1 percent of the total in coterminous United States in 1900 to 88.4 percent in 1940; in California from 41.7 percent to 73.8 percent. Census of the United States: 1960, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Washington, 1963), 145; ibid., pt. 6, p. 58; 1980 Census of the United States, Population, vol. 1, C, pt. 1 (Washington, 1983), 12, 277. After the war it dropped from 69.3 percent and 59.9 percent (1950) to 59.7 percent and 52.2 percent (1980). Native born outnumbered foreign born on the coast and in California both before and after the war, although most immigrants arrived at San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles. 76. New York Times, January 2, 1985, sec. 3, p. 3, col. 1; Mark Singer, “The Chinos’ Artful Harvest,” New Yorker 68 (November 30, 1992): 142–56. 77. Filipinos were the only Asian immigrants who went in large numbers to Hawaii, which in 1980 had 11.7 percent of the Philippine-born in the fifty states, against 47.4 percent in California, 51.1 percent on the coast. 1980 Census of the United States, Population, vol. 1, C, pt. 1, p.296. 78. Joseph Aloysius Alexander, The Life of George Chaffey, a Story of Irrigation Beginnings in California and Australia (Melbourne, 1928), 2. 79. Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York, 1987), 31; Paul D. Friedman, Valley of Lost Souls: A History of the Pinon Canyon Region of Southeastern Colorado, State Historical Society of Colorado, Monograph 3 (Denver, 1989), 60–61; Kalervo Oberg, “Cultural Factors and LandUse Planning in Cuba Valley, New Mexico,” Rural Sociology 5 (December 1940): 441, 448; Sanford A. Mosk, “The Influence of Tradition on Agriculture in New Mexico,” Journal of Economic History 2 (supplement, December 1942): 46–48; Richard L. Nostrand, The Hispano Homeland (Norman, Okla., 1992), 217, 220–26. 80. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, “Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty,” Forum 59 (November 1913): 677. 81. Topeka Journal, August 14, 1913, quoted in Camille Guerin-Gonzales and Carl Strikwerda, eds., The Politics of Immigrant Workers: Labor Activism and Migration in the World Economy (New York, 1993), 53. 82. Charles P. Loomis, “Wartime Migration from the Rural Spanish Speaking Villages of New Mexico,” Rural Sociology 7 (December 1942): 384–95. 83. Historical Statistics, vol. 1, 107–8. The “Sonorans” were predominantly natives of Spanish or Mexican California and residents who had come from other parts of Mexico before the American conquest. The decline of immigration after the Mexican War is especially striking inasmuch as statistics on prewar immigration do not cover movements into territories that the United States acquired in 1848. 84. Warren S. Thompson, Growth and Changes in California’s Population (Los Angeles, 1955), 70, 72; Report of the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, pt. 1. (Washington, 1895), 670; Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, 1987), 3. 85. Historical Statistics, 105, 107. 86. On part-time nonagricultural employment in pre-Meiji rural Japan, see Thomas C. Smith,

Notes to Pages 245–248

87. 88. 89.

90.

91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96.

97.

98. 99. 100.

491

“Farm Family By-employments in Preindustrial Japan,” Journal of Economic History 29 (December 1969): 687–715. Paul S. Taylor, “Mexicans North of the Rio Grande,” Survey 66 (1 May 1931): 202–4. Ernesto Galarza, Barrio Boy: A Chicano Youth Coming of Age in Mexico and America (New York, 1971), 239. Low-Income Families in the Spanish-Surname Population of the Southwest, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Agricultural Economic Report no. 112 (Washington, 1967), 3–4; Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin, 1983). Vernon M. Briggs, Jr., Walter Fogel, and Fred H. Schmidt, The Chicano Worker (Austin, 1977), 76. In California, 37 percent in 1930. Ricardo Romo, “Work and Restlessness: Occupational and Spatial Mobility among Mexicanos in Los Angeles, 1918–1928,” Pacific Historical Review 46 (May 1977): 166. Paul Bullock, “Employment Problems of the Mexican-American,” Industrial Relations 3 (May 1964): 37–50. F. Chris Garcia, “Orientations of Mexican American and Anglo Children toward the U.S. Political Community,” Social Science Quarterly 53 (March 1973): 828; Michael C. Neri, “A Journalistic Portrait of the Spanish-Speaking People of California, 1868–1925,” Southern California Quarterly 55 (summer 1973): 200–201. On persistence and performance in schools, Richard Rothstein, “In Search of the American Dream; Obstacles to Latino Educational Achievement,” in The California-Mexico Connection, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal and Katrina Burgess (Stanford, 1993), 190–93, is consistent with such earlier findings as Celia Heller, Mexican American Youth: Forgotten Youth at the Crossroads (New York, 1966), and U.S. Commission on Immigration, 1907–10, The Children of Immigrants in Schools, vol. 5, 61st Cong., 3d sess., 1911, S. Doc. 749, serial 5871–875, pp. 285–376. On the Spanish of New Mexican Hispanos, see Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 7–10. Elmer W. Flaccus, “Arizona’s Last Great War: The Saga of Pia Machita,” Journal of Arizona History 22 (spring 1981): 5–6, 17. Donald L. Parman, Indians and the American West in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), 1–10. John Collier, “The Fate of the Navajos . . . ,” Sunset 52 (January 1924): 12; Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson, 1962), 410–12. Everett E. Hagen calls “the position of American Indian tribes the archetype of colonialism, for their social structure and culture have been disrupted and suppressed more completely than those of any people conventionally regarded as colonial.” On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins (Homewood, Ill., 1962), 471, and cf. 471–502. Ibid., 545; Tom T. Sasaki, Fruitland, New Mexico: A Navaho Community in Transition (Ithaca, 1960), 175–77. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 540, 543. In 1950, 10.8 percent; in 1980, 51.8 percent. Census of Population: 1950, Special Reports, Nonwhite Population by Race, P-E no. 3B (Washington, 1953), 17; 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. B, pt. 1 (Washington, 1983), 57; Patrick F. Petit, “A Preliminary Investigation of the Migration and Adjustment of American Indians to Urban Areas” (master’s thesis, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1969); Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst, To Live on This Earth: American Indian

492

101.

102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108.

109.

110. 111.

Notes to Pages 248–250 Education (Garden City, N.Y., 1972), 273, 275–76; Kenneth R. Philp, “Stride toward Freedom: The Relocation of Indians to Cities, 1952–1960,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (April 1985): 175–90; S. Lyman Tyler, “The Recent Urbanization of the American Indian,” in Thomas G. Alexander, ed., Essays on the American West, 1973–1974 (Provo, Utah, 1975), 43–62. New York Times, June 28, 1970, p. 37, cols. 1–3; December 5, 1974, p. 49, cols. 2–8; Theodore Stern, The Klamath Tribe: A People and Their Reservation, American Ethnological Society, Monograph 41 (Seattle, 1965). 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. B, pt. 1 (Washington, 1983), 57, 125, 128. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, 1918), 21, 33, 43; Historical Statistics, 22–32. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944), 186, 200. Jean A. Wells and Elizabeth S. La Perle, “Reconversion Experiences of Northwest Shipyard Workers,” Monthly Labor Review 64 (April 1947): 628; Quintard Taylor, “The Great Migration: The Afro-American Communities of Seattle and Portland during the 1940s,” Arizona and the West 23 (summer 1981): 110, 114, 117; Wilson Record, Minority Groups and Intergroup Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley, 1963), 6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790–1915, 92; 1970 Census of Population, vol. 1, pt. 38 (Washington, 1973), 46. The black population of California rose from 1.8 percent in 1940 to 7.7 percent in 1980, 7.4 percent in 1990, at higher rates than white but lower than Hispanic and Asian populations. Although the black population of Oklahoma declined absolutely only in 1930–50 (in 1940–50 by 13.8 percent, while the white population declined by 3.4 percent), it fell from 7.2 percent in 1940 to 6.5 percent in 1950, rising thereafter to 6.8 percent in 1980, 7.4 percent in 1990. Ivan H. Light, Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks (Berkeley, 1972), 36–44. Black professional employment in California increased from 3.4 percent in 1940 to 6.3 percent in 1960, 11.1 percent in 1970, but lawyers from 0.070 percent to 0.75 percent and 0.098 percent. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Washington, 1943), 232, 236, 306. James Q. Wilson, Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), 108, positing more rapid growth of leadership, gives estimates for black lawyers in Los Angeles in 1940 and 1960, respectively, lower and higher than figures in census reports. Although a study of black lawyers in 1965 shows a much higher ratio of lawyers to population in the Pacific and mountain West than in the United States, that ratio apparently had declined slightly since 1940. Harvard Law School Bulletin 22 (February 1971): 17; Jerome Shulman, “A Black Lawyers Study,” Howard Law School Journal 16 (winter 1971): 302–3. Gordon (1894–1976) was governor of the Virgin Islands 1955–58, judge of the district court of the Virgin Islands 1958–76. San Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 1976, p. 23, cols. 4–5; Edward B. Toles, “The American Negro Lawyer, 1844–1963,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 5, 1963, in Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 2 October 1963, 6205A–6A. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York, 1933), 204–6, 208. Horace R. Cayton, Long Old Road (New York, 1964), 3–4, 23, 35.

Notes to Pages 250–252

493

112. In all western states but Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas (repealed 1857), New Mexico (repealed 1886), and Washington (repealed 1867). The Oklahoma legislature was last to repeal (1969). Pauli Murray, comp., States’ Laws on Race and Color . . . ([Cincinnati], 1950), 18 and passim; Jack Greenberg, Race Relations and American Law (New York, 1959), 344, 397–98; Robert J. Sickels, Race, Marriage, and the Law (Albuquerque, 1972), 64, 155; Harvey M. Applebaum, “Miscegenation Statutes: A Constitutional and Social Problem,” Georgetown Law Journal 53 (fall 1964): 50–51, 61; Oklahoma [Session] Laws 1969, c. 45, #1. 113. Raymond E. Wolfinger and Fred I. Greenstein, “The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting,” American Political Science Review 62 (September 1968): 753– 69. 114. In 1952 the five western states with reported majorities of church members were Utah, New Mexico, the Dakotas, and Nebraska. Wilbur Zelinsky, “An Approach to the Religious Geography of the United States: Patterns of Church Membership in 1952,” Association of American Geographers, Annals 51 (June 1961): 150. Statistical evidence of an unchurched West is so contrary to informal indications that it invites interpretations to explain it away: that young and unmarried people postponed membership; that people could not find the denominations they preferred; that newcomers postponed transferring membership from their old homes. 115. Jorge Lara-Braud in La Causa Chicana: The Movement for Justice, ed. Margaret M. Mangold (New York, 1972), 88–89; Joan W. Moore and Alfred Cuéllar, Mexican Americans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 86–88; Leo Grebler, Joan W. Moore, and Ralph C. Guzman, The MexicanAmerican People: The Nation’s Second Largest Minority (New York, 1970), 450–52; Frances Leon Swadesh, “Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontiers from the Chama Valley to the San Juan Basin, 1694–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado–Boulder, 1966), 289; Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountains (Albuquerque, 1988), 141–42. 116. Maria Minor, Portrait of a Rebel: The Life of Robert Lewis Paddock, 1869–1939 (New York, 1965), 51. 117. Reverend W. B. D. Gray, Wyoming (n.p., n.d.); pamphlet, box 1, W. B. D. Gray Collection, University of Wyoming Library. 118. Fred W. Vincent, “Why the Country Church Is Dying,” Sunset 37 (October 1916): 18; and cf. H. P. Douglass and Edmund de S. Brunner, The Protestant Church as a Social Institution (New York, 1935), 243, 245. 119. Elizabeth R. Hooker, Hinterlands of the Church (New York, 1931), 106–7. 120. Horace W. Parsons, “The Development of Congregationalism in South Dakota, 1868–1928” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1937), 127–28. 121. Ole E. Rölvaag, “The Vikings of the Middle West . . . ,” American Magazine 108 (October 1929): 83. “It is impossible for one who hasn’t seen it to imagine how the church has followed in the footsteps of the pioneer,” he wrote in an autobiographical novel (1912) of his experiences in South Dakota, where he had emigrated in 1896; “how the church, like a mother, has taken him by the hand, asked him to straighten his back, rest a moment and look upward. . . . For the early pioneers, there was no force other than the church which could draw mind and thought away from the struggle for survival.” Rölvaag, The Third Life of Per Smevik (Minneapolis, 1971), 105. 122. Robert S. Lynd, “Crude-Oil Religion,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 145 (September 1922): 432. 123. Zelinsky, “An Approach to the Religious Geography of the United States,” 150.

494

Notes to Pages 253–256

124. D. Paul Miller, “An Analysis of Community Adjustment: A Case Study of Jansen, Nebraska” (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1954), 190, 382–89. 125. Marvin P. Riley, The Hutterite Brethren: An Annotated Bibliography . . . , South Dakota State University, Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 529 (Brookings, S.D., 1965), 11–13; Marvin P. Riley et al., The Hutterites: South Dakota’s Communal Farmers, South Dakota State University, Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 530 (Brookings, S.D., 1966), 8–11, 23, 29, 30. 126. James B. Allen and Richard O. Cowan, “The Twentieth Century: Challenge for Mormon Historians,” Dialogue 7 (spring 1972): 27; J. Kenneth Davies, “The Accommodation of Mormonism and Politico-Economic Reality,” ibid. 3 (spring 1968): 48. 127. Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York, 1979), 140. 128. Ibid., 138–39. 129. Ibid., 243; Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 384–400. Mark P. Leone, Roots of Modern Mormonism (Cambridge, Mass. 1979), 148–62 and passim, emphasizes the consequences of divestiture. Jan Shipps argues that after the Woodruff Manifesto (1890) responsibility for separating Mormon from gentile life shifted from the corporate body to individual members. Shipps, “In the Presence of the Past: Continuity and Change in Twentieth-Century Mormonism,” in After One Hundred Fifty Years: The Latter-day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective, ed. Thomas G. Alexander and Jessie L. Embry, Charles Redd Monographs in Western History, no. 13 (Midvale, Utah, 1983), 11–12, 27–28; and cf. Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, Ill., 1984). 130. Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience, 297. 131. Ibid., 217; Richard C. Poulsen, “Folk Material Culture of the Sanpete-Sevier Area . . . ,” Utah Historical Quarterly 47 (spring 1979): 133; William A. Wilson, “Folklore of Utah’s Little Scandinavia,” ibid., 151. 132. Mark Leone, “Why the Coalville Tabernacle Had To Be Razed: Principles Governing Mormon Architecture,” Dialogue 8 (summer 1973): 38, quoted in Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience, 266. 133. Charles Lindsay, The Big Horn Basin, University of Nebraska Studies, 28–29 (Lincoln, Neb., 1932): 191–96, 204; D. W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Pattern in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Association of American Geographers, Annals 55 (June 1965): 208. 134. Meinig, “Mormon Culture Region,” 215–20; Allen and Cowan, “Twentieth Century,” 30; on population in 1987, New York Times, June 3, 1987, p. A16, col. 4. According to reports by the Bureau of the Census, Utah had been 87.7 percent Mormon in 1906, 90.2 percent in 1936. Religious Bodies: 1906 (Washington, 1910), pt. 1, p. 47; ibid., 1936 (Washington, 1941), vol. 1, p. 61, vol. 2, p. 807. 135. J. K. Davies, “The Accommodation of Mormonism and Politico-Economic Reality,” Dialogue 3 (spring 1968): 48. 136. Gordon Shepherd and Gary Shepherd, A Kingdom Transformed: Themes in the Development of Mormonism (Salt Lake City, 1984), 38, 196, 204; Mark P. Leone (who emphasizes how the church has identified itself with economic and political institutions that it once had challenged), Roots of Modern Mormonism, 210–26 and passim.

Notes to Pages 256–259

495

137. Anson R. Graves, The Farmer Boy Who Became a Bishop: The Autobiography of the Right Reverend Anson Rogers Graves, S.T.D., L.L.D. (Akron, Ohio, 1911), 193–94. 138. Nils Bloch-Hoell, The Pentecostal Movement . . . (Oslo, 1964), 19–23, 28–29, 30–40, 57; Anton Beisen in The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural West, ed. Joseph Ackerman (Chicago, [1943]), 112; John B. Holt, “Holiness Religion: Cultural Shock and Social Reorganization,” American Sociological Review 5 (October 1940): 742, 744. 139. Walter R. Goldschmidt, “Class Denominationalism in Rural California Churches,” American Journal of Sociology 49 (January 1944): 348–55; Frank W. Young, “Adaptation and Pattern Integration of a California Sect,” Review of Religious Research 1 (spring 1960): 138–39. 140. Ray Stannard Baker, “The Great Southwest: III, Irrigation,” Century 64 (July 1902): 366, 371. 141. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 333–35; Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons (Salt Lake City, 1976), 268 and passim. 142. Dorothy Lampen, Economic and Social Aspects of Federal Reclamation (Baltimore, 1930), Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Science 68, no. 1, 105–6. 143. E. A. Ross, “The Middle West—The Fiber of the People,” Century 83 (February 1912): 612. 144. Theodore Saloutos, “The Rise of the Equity Cooperative Exchange,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32 (June 1945): 31–62; Saloutos, “The Decline of the Equity Cooperative Exchange,” ibid. 34 (December 1947): 405–26. 145. Lois G. Aldous, “The Grange in Kansas since 1895” (master’s thesis, University of Kansas–Lawrence, 1941), 156; Clarke A. Chambers, California Farm Organizations: A Historical Study of the Grange, the Farm Bureau, and the Associated Farmers, 1929–1941 (Berkeley, 1952). 146. Abe Hoffman, “A Look at Llano: Experiment in Economic Socialism,” California Historical Society Quarterly 40 (September 1961): 215–36. 147. Ernest S. Wooster, Communities of the Past and Present (Newllano, La., 1924), v. 148. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 298–99, 385. 149. For example, Utah-Idaho Sugar. Leonard J. Arrington, Beet Sugar in the West: A History of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1891–1966 (Seattle, 1966). 150. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 337–38. 151. Ira B. Cross, “Co-operation in California,” American Economic Review 1 (September 1911): 543. 152. Charles C. Teague, banker, agribusinessman, and president of the California Walnut Growers’ Association. Teague, Fifty Years a Rancher: The Recollections of Half a Century Devoted to the Citrus and Walnut Industries of California (Los Angeles, 1944), 114; on the California Fruit Growers Exchange, cf. Ronald Tobey and Charles Wetherell, “The Citrus Industry and the Revolution of Corporate Capitalism in Southern California, 1887–1944,” California History 74 (spring 1995): 8–9. 153. Robert L. Tyler, Rebels of the Woods: The IWW in the Pacific Northwest (Eugene, Ore., 1967). But Thorstein Veblen noted growing sympathy between members of the Nonpartisan League and members of the agricultural chapter of the IWW in 1918. Veblen, “Using the IWW to Harvest Grain,” Journal of Political Economy 40 (December 1932): 800. 154. Charles Wollenberg, “Huelga, 1928 Style: The Imperial Valley Cantaloupe Workers’ Strike,” Pacific Historical Review 38 (February 1969): 45–58. 155. The National Farm Workers’ Association (1962) merged in 1967 with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AFL-CIO) to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee.

496

Notes to Pages 259–261

156. Troy, Distribution of Union Membership, 18. 157. Christopher Morris Douty, “The Economics of Localized Disasters: An Informed Analysis of the 1906 Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1969), 108–9. 158. Lucile Eaves, A History of California Labor Legislation, with an Introductory Sketch of the San Francisco Labor Movement, University of California Publications in Economics (Berkeley, 1910), 2:61. 159. Who Was Who in America, vol. 1, 1897–1942 (Chicago, 1942), 517; New York Times, July 8, 1940, p. 17, col. 4; February 5, 1984, p. 20, cols. 1–5. Orange County had been split from Los Angeles County in 1899. 160. Eric H. Monkkonen, Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790–1935 (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), 6–9; Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (Chicago, 1923); Clark C. Spence, “Knights of the Tie and Rail—Tramps and Hoboes in the West,” Western Historical Quarterly 2 (January 1971): 5–19. 161. Stuart Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin no. 836 (Washington, 1945), 44, 406. 162. C. Luther Fry, “Migratory Workers of Our Industries,” World’s Work 40 (October 1920): 608. 163. Harold M. Hyman, Soldiers and Spruce: Origins of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen (Los Angeles, 1963); Vernon H. Jensen, Lumber and Labor (New York, 1945), 129–33; Tyler, Rebels of the Woods, 103–7. 164. James B. Allen, The Company Town in the American West (Norman, Okla., 1966), 29–31; John M. McClelland, Longview: The Remarkable Beginnings of a Modern Western City (Portland, Ore., 1949); Tyler, Rebels of the Woods, 216. 165. Lescohier, “Harvesters and Hoboes in the Wheat Fields, I, July in the Southwest,” Survey 50 (July 1923): 382, 490; ibid., “II, August in the Northwest” 50 (August 1923): 503. 166. Isern, Custom Combining on the Great Plains, 12–20, 29–50, 74. 167. In California from 80,707 in 1920 to 177,322 in 1950, 112,130 in 1970 (when the legal importation of Mexican braceros had stopped but the census notoriously understated the numbers of foreign born); in North Dakota from 37,116 to 32,052 and 13,133. Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, Occupation (Washington, 1923), 4:56, 93; Census of Population: 1950, vol. 2, Characteristics of the Population, pt. 3 (Washington, 1952), 90; ibid., pt. 34 (Washington, 1952), 108; 1970 Census of Population, vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, pt. 6 (Washington, 1973), 1537; ibid., pt. 36 (Washington, 1973), 365. As late as 1909, 50.5 percent of crops were extensive; by 1919, 63.4 percent were intensive, by 1929, 78.4 percent. Employment of farm labor increased by over half between 1910 and 1930, by over three times (366.7 percent) in truck crops. Levi Varden Fuller, “The Supply of Agricultural Labor as a Factor in the Evolution of Farm Organization in California,” in U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violation of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Hearings on S. Res. 266, pt. 54, Agricultural Labor in California, 76th Cong., 3d sess., 1940, pp. 19831, 19859, 19893. 168. The census category of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and all others (not white or Negro) was 14.8 percent in 1920; the category of Spanish language or surname was 55.6 percent in 1970. Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, vol. 4, Occupations, 882; 1970 Census of Population, vol. 1, pt. 6 (Washington, 1973), 1541. 169. As nonagricultural employment grew in Santa Clara County in the 1950s, rates of unionization dropped markedly below rates in older industrial communities along the bay. California Depart-

Notes to Pages 262–265

170.

171. 172.

173.

174. 175. 176. 177.

178.

497

ment of Industrial Relations, Division of Labor Statistics and Research, Union Labor in California, 1959 (San Francisco, 1960), 14; Irving Bernstein, “The Growth of American Unions, 1945– 1960,” Labor History 2 (spring 1961): 141. Union membership in San Jose–Santa Clara was 16.6 percent of the nonagricultural labor force in 1981, at southern Californian levels, against 29.7 percent in the Modesto area (primarily food processing). The percentage of union membership in nonagricultural employment in the entire state had fallen below the national average by 1971. California Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Labor Statistics and Law Enforcement, Union Labor in California, 1943 (San Francisco, 1944), 13–14; California Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Labor Statistics and Research, Union Labor in California, 1981 (San Francisco, 1982), 3, 5–6, 18. R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848–1880 (Berkeley, 1980); Steven P. Erie, “Politics, the Public Sector, and Irish Social Mobility: San Francisco, 1870–1900,” Western Political Quarterly 31 (June 1978): 274–89; Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford, 1982). T. A. Rickard, Across the San Juan Mountains (New York, 1903), 41. Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 2d ed. (Urbana, Ill., 1988), 24. In 1894 nearly three-fourths of the miners at the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mine in northern Idaho were immigrants, but immigrants from the British Isles and nativeborn Americans together comprised more than three-fifths of the total. Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860–1910 (Berkeley, 1979), 42; Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1993), 154. George Creel, “Poisoners of Public Opinion,” Harper’s Weekly 59 (November 14, 1914): 465. At the Homestake Mine in South Dakota, the shift from an English-speaking workforce had come earlier, by the 1890s. Joseph H. Cash, Working the Homestake (Ames, Iowa, 1973), 30–31, 33. Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 147–50; Joseph R. Conlin, Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969), 23. Wyman, Round-Trip to America, 11. Cash, Working the Homestake, 88–89. James R. Kluger, The Clifton-Morenci Strike: Labor Difficulty in Arizona, 1915–1916 (Tucson, Ariz., 1970), 66. On an early strike of Mexican railroad workers in California, see Charles Wollenberg, “Working on El Traque: The Pacific Electric Strike of 1903,” Pacific Historical Review 42 (August 1973): 358–69; on unionization of Japanese and Filipino agricultural laborers in Hawaii despite formidable obstacles, culminating in a strike by the Japanese in 1920, see Theon Wright, The Disenchanted Isles: The Story of the Second Revolution in Hawaii (New York, 1972), 130–33, 222–23. Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report and Testimony . . . , 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, S. Doc. 415, 5:4941, 4947.

CHAPTER 9. SOCIAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL ATTITUDES: PUTTING DOWN ROOTS— AGENCIES OF ACCULTURATION 1. Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper,” Collier’s Weekly 46 (February 18, 1911): 15. 2. Delos F. Wilcox, “The American Newspaper: A Study in Social Psychology,” Annals of the Ameri-

498

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

Notes to Pages 265–268 can Academy of Political and Social Science 16 (July 1900): 70–71, 78–79. In 1932, when Hearst’s influence had passed its peak, his papers had 47.6 percent of total circulation in California, 56 percent of Sunday circulation. Rodney Parker Carlisle, “The Political Ideas and Influence of William Randolph Hearst, 1928–1936” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1965), 14. Bill Hosokawa, Thunder in the Rockies: The Incredible Denver Post (New York, 1976), 22. W. H. P., “The Larger Coast Cities . . . ,” World’s Work 10 (August 1905): 6501. Michael P. Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864–1906 (Seattle, 1981), 153. Richard T. Ruetten, “Anaconda Journalism: The End of an Era,” Journalism Quarterly 37 (winter 1960): 3–12, 104; Michael P. Malone and Richard B. Roeder, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle, 1976), 280–81. Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy (College Station, Tex., 1981), 126, 154–57; Robert Gottlieb and Irene Welt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California (New York, 1977), 144. Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1956, sec. 3, p. 4, col. 1. John Hanrahan and Peter Gruenstein, Lost Frontier: The Marketing of Alaska (New York, 1977), 45, 67. New York Times, November 20, 1989, p. A20, cols. 3–4; ibid., December 8, 1989, p. C12, col. 1; M. L. Stein, “Anchorage Times Sold to Oil Company,” Editor and Publisher 122 (December 2, 1989): 34, 36; New York Times, June 4, 1992, p. C5, cols. 1–3; Anchorage Daily News, June 7, 1992, pp. A10–A11. O. N. Malmquist, The First 100 Years: A History of the Salt Lake Tribune, 1871–1971 (Salt Lake City, 1971), 202, 215. Practicing attorney, territorial delegate (1875–76), and U.S. representative (1877–79) before he went to the Senate, Patterson controlled the News 1892–1913 as a purely personal instrument. “He never had a personal following, as most public men have, nor was he an organizer,” a Colorado judge recalled, “but he . . . depended upon the hurrah of the crowd and upon lurid newspaper articles to win his fight.” Samuel W. Johnson, Autobiography (Denver, 1960), 119. Homer E. Socolofsky, “The Evolution of a Home-Grown Product, Capper Publications,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 24 (summer 1958): 151–67. Frederick Simpich, Jr., Anatomy of Hawaii (New York, 1971), 208. Charles Moreau Harger, “Those Kansas Editors,” Independent 68 (February 24, 1910): 395–98. Thompson B. Ferguson, co-publisher of the Watonga Republican with his wife, Elva Shartel Ferguson, was territorial governor of Oklahoma, 1901–6. Linda W. Reese, “‘Dear Oklahoma Lady’; Women Journalists Speak Out,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 67 (fall 1989); 265–66. Howard D. Wheeler, “A Republican Suicide,” Harper’s Weekly 59 (July 11, 18, 1914): 28–30, 57– 59; The Memoirs of Earl Warren (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), 111, 112. Knowland served in the House of Representatives, 1904–15, before he became publisher of the Oakland Tribune. Time 41 (August 20, 1945): 23. Howard H. Quint, “Gaylord Wilshire and Socialism’s First Congressional Campaign,” Pacific Historical Review 35 (November 1957): 327–40; Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Columbia, S.C., 1953), 267–69, 380–81; National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 42:91.

Notes to Pages 268–272

499

19. Raymond E. Wolfinger and Fred I. Greenstein, “Comparing Political Regions: The Case of California,” American Political Science Review 63 (March 1969): 74–85. But James Q. Wilson, “A Guide to Reagan Country: The Political Culture of Southern California,” Commentary 43 (May 1967): 42, argues that the influence of the Los Angeles Times merely indicated that its values were widely shared. 20. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York, 1979), 95. 21. James F. Pedersen and Kenneth D. Wald, Shall the People Rule? A History of the Democratic Party in Nebraska Politics, 1854–1972 (Lincoln, Neb., 1972), 327. 22. Lee M. Nash, “Refining a Frontier: The Cultural Interests and Activities of Harvey W. Scott” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon–Eugene, 1961); S. J. Sackett, E. W. Howe (New York, 1972); Harger, “Those Kansas Editors,” 395–98. 23. Miles Chapman Everett, “Chester Harvey Rowell, Pragmatic Humanist and California Progressive” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1966), 131, 360–61. Progressive editors and politicians often exaggerated differences between progressives and conservatives on issues: as Otis protested, he had attacked the Southern Pacific before Johnson, although less on moral than on economic grounds. 24. William Allen White, “The Country Newspaper,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 122 (May 1916): 890; Sally Foreman Griffith, Home Town News: William Allen White and the Emporia Gazette (New York, 1989), 159–84; on the press of early Kansas cattle towns, see Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York, 1968), 363. For an unfavorable view of coverage in one area, see William L. Rivers and David M. Rubin, A Region’s Press: Anatomy of Newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley, 1971). 25. Elliott Shore, Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890–1912 (Lawrence, Kan., 1988), 190–91, 225; Quint, Forging of American Socialism, 195–99, 203–4, and passim. 26. Mrs. Tom B. (Elva Shartel) Ferguson, They Carried the Torch: The Story of Oklahoma’s Pioneer Newspapers (Kansas City, Mo., 1937), 18. 27. James E. Brinton, “Failure of the Western Edition of the New York Times,” Journalism Quarterly 41 (spring 1964): 170–74, 318. 28. In 1920 daily English-language papers in the seven westernmost states sold at 330 copies per thousand population, against 263 for dailies nationally; by 1940 at 325, against 312; by 1950 at 361, against 357; but by 1960 at 312, against 328. Western states with low circulations early in the century tended to catch up: in Wyoming, whose papers sold at 51 percent below the national rate in 1920 (perhaps in part because Wyomingites bought Denver and other out-of-state papers as well as because circulation varied with urbanization and income), sales were at 26 percent below the national rate in 1970. California had been first in the West and fifth nationally; in 1970 Oregon and Hawaii were ahead. Circulation figures from Editor and Publisher, International Yearbook (1921–77). 29. Brinton, “Failure of the Western Edition of the New York Times,” 173. 30. “Los Angeles Times Revises Its Image to Reach Changing Market,” Business Week, November 19, 1960, p. 120. 31. Paul C. Smith, Personal File: An Autobiography (New York, 1964). 32. Gene Fowler, Timber Line: A Story of Bonfils and Tammen (New York, 1933), 139. 33. In 1930, 35.6 percent of farm families in the Pacific states had radios, against 21.0 percent in the

500

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Notes to Pages 274–276 United States, but 49.3 percent of farm families in Nebraska. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population, vol. 6, Families . . . (Washington, 1933), p. 53. Only 17.4 percent of farm dwellings in Nebraska were lighted by electricity. Ibid., Agriculture, vol. 4, General Report . . . (Washington, 1932), 518. Seattle Times, September 19, 1990, p. A1, col. 1; September 20, 1990, p. A1, cols. 1–4, p. A4, col. 5; New York Times, September 28, 1990, p. B16, cols. 3–6. William A. Hachten, “The Changing U.S. Sunday Newspaper,” Journalism Quarterly 38 (summer 1961): 281. Proctor Mellquist, “Sunset Is Unique as a Magazine,” Quill 42 (February 1954): 14. By 1932 the magazine appeared in three (by 1952 four) regional editions. The dual scale of rates for subscriptions dates from October 1939, the subtitle from July 1940. The lower rate for subscriptions originally was available in British Columbia; in 1952 it was extended to Hawaii, and in 1968 to Alaska. Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper . . . ,” Collier’s Weekly 46 (March 4, 1911): 36. Founded, respectively, by James H. Gipson (1885–1965) in 1904 and by Arthur H. Clark (1868– 1951, at Cleveland, Ohio) in 1902. Clark moved to Glendale in 1925, his heirs and successors to Spokane in 1993 and more recently to Norman, Oklahoma. While according to surveys in the 1920s and 1930s residents of most western states bought books at bookstores at lower-than-national rates, they subscribed to book clubs and to sets of encyclopedias at higher-than-national rates. Louis R. Wilson, The Geography of Reading . . . (Chicago, 1938), 207, 217, 220. But small presses continued to cluster around San Francisco Bay. New York Times, March 23, 1986, sec. 3, p. 4, cols. 3–6. Eight far western states were among the first twelve states in circulation of forty-seven national magazines in 1931. Wilson, Geography of Reading, 230. On western opposition to the Morrill Bill, see Edward Danforth Eddy, Jr., Colleges for Our Land and Time: The Land-Grant Idea in American Education (New York, 1957), 35. Mary Jean Bowman, “The Land-Grant Colleges and Universities in Human-Resource Development,” Journal of Economic History 22 (December 1962): 540–41. Calculations based on populations of college age would be more significant, but even some early-settled states ranked low: Utah forty-fourth (2.5 in 1958), Nebraska thirty-first (12.5 in 1958), Kansas twenty-fourth (5 in 1958) of forty-eight states. President’s Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education for American Democracy, a Report of the Commission (New York, 1948), 1:29–30. Ibid., 6:16 and table 22. With 10.54 percent of the population of the country in 1940, the Pacific and mountain states had 14.78 percent of the college enrollments. Ibid., table 23. Liaison Committee of the Regents of the University of California and the State Board of Education, A Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960–1975 (Sacramento, 1960), 45–46. The commission proposed providing for 4,600,000 students beyond the twelfth grade, including 600,000 in graduate and professional programs, and slightly over 41 percent of the population aged 18–21 in grades thirteen to sixteen. Higher Education for American Democracy, 1:39, 42–43. As early as 1930, 38.5 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds attended college in California, in 1940 41.4 percent, in 1931–42 between 21.4 and 27.1 percent of Californians aged 18–21. Census of Population: 1950, vol. 1, pt. 5, California (Washington, 1952), 5–63; Committee on the Conduct of

Notes to Pages 276–279

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

501

the Study of Higher Education in California, A Report of a Survey of the Needs of California in Higher Education ([Berkeley], 1948), 57. Report of the Commissioner of Education . . . 1901 [ser. 4299] (Washington, 1902), 1:xcii. Followed by Kansas, Utah, Washington, and Oregon. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Population (Washington, 1933), 2:1232. As late as 1919–20, only three other western states (Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada) were also above the national average in enrollments in kindergartens. Biennial Survey of Education, 1918–1920 (Washington, 1923), 586. For Kansas and Nebraska, 30,961 against 32,326 for the Pacific and mountain region, 95.9 percent as many; with South Dakota (3,128), substantially more. Report of the Commissioner of Education . . . 1901 [ser. 4300] (Washington, 1902), 1:lxxxiv, 2:1923. As late as 1917–18, high schools were above average national size (124) in California, Colorado, and Utah only. Ibid., 1916–1918 (Washington, 1921), 4:137. Ibid., 1939. On earlier dependence on clergymen for elementary school teaching, see David B. Tyack, “The Kingdom of God and the Common School: Protestant Ministers and the Educational Awakening in the West,” Harvard Educational Review 36 (fall 1966): 455–67, and Tyack, “The Tribe and the Common School: The District School in Ashland, Oregon in the 1860’s,” Call Number (University of Oregon) 27 (spring 1966): 13–23. As late as 1899–1900 the percentage of secondary students in private schools (including preparatory departments of private colleges) was still higher in the Pacific and mountain states and territories than in the United States despite relatively smaller numbers of Roman Catholics. Report of the Commissioner of Education . . . 1901, 2:1903. The Mormon Church decided in 1920 to transfer all of its academies to the state. The Utah state board of education had granted high school credit for courses in biblical history and literature taken in released time at church-operated seminaries. James B. Allen in Richard D. Poll, ed., Utah’s History (Provo, 1978), 588. Charles Abner Howard, “A History of High School Legislation in Oregon to 1910,” Oregon Historical Society Quarterly 24 (September 1923): 206–7, 212. Irving G. Hendrick, The Education of Non-Whites in California, 1849–1970 (San Francisco, 1977), 63–65, 69. Ibid., 48, 51. On the bureau’s discouragement of Indian dances in the 1920s, see Kenneth Philp, “John Collier and the Crusade to Protect Indian Religious Freedom, 1920–1926,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 1 (spring 1973): 22–38. The sequence (dates of statehood in parentheses) for state universities was Utah (1896) 1850, Washington (1889) 1862, Kansas (1861) 1866, California (1850) 1868, Nebraska (1867) 1869, Colorado (1876) 1871, Oregon (1859) 1876, South Dakota (1889) 1882, North Dakota (1889) 1883, Arizona (1912) 1885, Wyoming (1890) 1887, New Mexico (1912) 1887, Oklahoma (1907) 1892, Montana (1890) 1893, Hawaii (1959) 1907, Alaska (1959) 1917. Manuel P. Servín and Iris Higbie Wilson, Southern California and Its University: A History of USC, 1880–1964 (Los Angeles, 1969), 25–27, 30–33, 105–6. Report of the Commissioner of Education . . . 1901, 2:1653. In 1893, 64 percent of white male college students in western states other than California were in preparatory departments. MaryJean Bowman, “Land-Grant Colleges and Universities,” 529. The University of Kansas enrolled its last preparatory students in 1890–91. Clifford S. Griffin, The University of Kansas, a History (Lawrence, Kan., 1974), 166, 197.

502

Notes to Pages 279–283

60. Ralph V. Chamberlin, The University of Utah: A History of Its First Hundred Years, 1850–1950 (Salt Lake City, 1960). 61. Robert Moulton Gatke, Chronicles of Willamette, the Pioneer University of the West (Portland, Ore., 1943), 369–70, 586. Catalogues describe Willamette as the second oldest law school west of the Mississippi River, although nine other law schools apparently were earlier. Most private law schools resembled Willamette in such arrangements and in size. 62. When the University of British Columbia opened in 1915, it had 379 students, more than most colleges south of the border had in their collegiate programs. Robin S. Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada, 1663–1960 (Toronto, 1976), 114, 227. The only attempt at a monopoly in education in western states was the Oregon school law of 1922, which would have eliminated full-time instruction in parochial and other private schools by requiring attendance at a public school if the Supreme Court had not found it unconstitutional. David B. Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism: The Background of the Pierce Case,” American Historical Review 74 (October 1968): 76. 63. Emory Lindquist, Bethany in Kansas: The History of a College (Lindsborg, Kan., 1975), 31. 64. George N. Belknap, Henry Villard and the University of Oregon . . . (Eugene, Ore., 1976). 65. Henry D. Sheldon, History of University of Oregon (Portland, Ore., 1940), 147, 150; Joseph Schafer, Prince Lucien Campbell (Eugene, Ore., 1926), 133–36. 66. Only 1 percent of male graduates of the state universities of California and Colorado, 1891–95, were employed in agriculture, 7 percent in Nebraska, 4 percent in Wisconsin. The percentage of students enrolled in agricultural curricula in all land-grant colleges almost doubled, however, between 1882–92 and 1919–22 (from 12 percent to 23 percent). Mary-Jean Bowman, “Land-Grant Colleges and Universities,” 531, 533. On low opinions of agricultural colleges among leaders of farmers in the late nineteenth century, see Earl D. Ross, Democracy’s College: The Land-Grant Movement in the Formative Stage (Ames, Iowa, 1942), 118–20. 67. Burton Rascoe, Before I Forget (New York, 1937), 57, 79–81. 68. With 1.95 percent of American population in 1900, California had 2.04 percent of the law students (nearly 57 percent of those in the Pacific and mountain regions) but 3.73 percent of the lawyers. Of the far western continental states and territories, only New Mexico and Oklahoma had lower ratios of lawyers to population than the United States; Colorado had more than twice the national ratio, California nearly twice. By 1920 those states below the national ratio were Kansas, New Mexico, and the Dakotas; the leader was Nevada, with nearly twice, and the other twelve states were among the first twenty. Alexander B. Andrews, Legal Education and Admission to the Bar (Including Statistics as to Number of Lawyers in United States . . . (Raleigh, N.C., 1929), 29–33. 69. William James to Henry James, February 1, 1906. The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (Boston, 1920), 2:241, and cf. James to Theodore Flournoy, February 9, 1906, p. 244; Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, as Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes . . . (Boston, 1935), 2:444–45. 70. L. A., “Impressions of a Careless Traveler: Educational Institutions on the Pacific Coast,” Outlook 78 (September 24, 1904): 214. 71. Hugh Ross, “University Influence in the Genesis and Growth of Junior Colleges in California,” History of Education Quarterly 3 (September 1963): 144–48. 72. In 1900–1901 only 562 students were enrolled in college courses in agriculture in all far western

Notes to Pages 283–286

73.

74.

75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

503

states, about two-thirds of those in law schools, slightly over a third of those in medical schools, and less than one out of twenty-four of all students in college. Report of the Commissioner of Education . . . 1901, 2:1830–831. California had only 42, against 152 for Kansas; well over half were in Kansas, Washington, and North Dakota. Robert C. Story, Residence and Migration of College Students, 1949–50 (Washington, 1951), 5, 7; Charles Gossman et al., Migration of College and University Students in the United States (Seattle, 1968), 15, 48. Gossman found the highest rates of outmigration for undergraduate study in 1963 from Alaska (53.4 percent), Hawaii (34.1 percent), Idaho (32.6 percent), Nevada (30.4 percent), South Dakota (22.9 percent), New Mexico (22.8 percent), Montana (22.6 percent), and North Dakota (22.0 percent), the highest rates to public institutions for graduate study from Idaho (57.0 percent), South Dakota (54.2 percent), Wyoming (43.2 percent), Montana (42.5 percent), and North Dakota (41.8 percent). Undergraduate outmigration had changed little from 1938 and 1949; rates of graduate outmigration were lower in 1949, corresponding to the growth of graduate instruction at the smaller institutions (especially following the National Defense Education Act of 1958). U.S. Office of Education, Biennial Survey of Education, 1928–1930, Bulletin 1931, no. 20 (Washington, 1932), 2:383; California Department of Education, Statistics of Junior Colleges, Bulletin no. 1 (Sacramento, 1932), 39, 40. Enrollments in junior colleges had nearly doubled in the two years previous, passing those in the state teachers colleges (later state colleges and state universities) in 1928–29. J. M. Layhue, Consolidation of Rural Schools and Transportation of Pupils, Washington Department of Education, Bulletin no. 7 (Olympia, 1911), 22–24. The argument claimed too much: in thinly populated areas, some early consolidated schools had only one or two rooms, although some schools were so far apart that dormitories for students and teachers were necessary. Mary W. M. Hargreaves, “Rural Education on the Northern Plains Frontier,” Journal of the West 18 (October 1979): 29–30. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education . . . (Nutley, N.J., 1963), 80–81, 84. The authority of the school was above that of parents, John Swett, first state superintendent of public instruction, had reported in 1864. On Swett, see Nicholas C. Polos, John Swett: California’s Frontier Schoolmaster (Washington, D.C., 1978). F. J. Boren, “The Junior College: A Community Asset,” Teachers’ Journal of Northern California 3 (September 24, 1928): 4, cited in Walter Crosby Eells, The Junior College (Boston, 1931), 196. Mary Lou Zoglin, Power and Politics in the Community College (Palm Springs, Calif., 1976), 51–70; M. A. Rauh, The Trusteeship of Colleges and Universities (New York, 1969). George L. Hull, “Behind the Bramble Bushes: A Mid-Century History of the Community College,” Community College Review 2 (fall 1974): 11. Samuel B. Gould, Knowledge Is Not Enough (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1959), 55–56, quoted in Ervin L. Harlacher, The Community Dimension of the Community College (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), 3. Zoglin, Power and Politics, 40–41, 46–50, referring to one of the more fashionable and generously supported junior colleges near San Francisco Bay. Warren W. Willingham, Free-Access Higher Education (New York, 1970), 35, 54. “The Teaching Procession,” NEA Journal 14 (January 1925): 13, cited in Charles E. Rankin, “Teaching: Opportunity and Limitation for Wyoming Women,” Western Historical Quarterly 21

504

84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89.

Notes to Pages 286–287 (May 1990): 157; C. L. Huffaker and Katharine P. Kneeland, The Elementary School Teacher of Oregon, University of Oregon Publications, Education Series, vol. 2, no. 2 (Eugene, 1929), 32, 34. In 1929–30, when just under a tenth of Oregon teachers were inexperienced, a third were in their first year in their current positions. C. L. Huffaker, Teacher Supply and Demand in Oregon, University of Oregon Publications, Education Series, vol. 2, no. 5 (Eugene, 1931), 107, 119. National Education Association, Research Division, One-Teacher Schools Today (Washington, 1960), 19. Ronald E. Butchart, “The Frontier Teacher: Arizona, 1875–1925,” Journal of the West 16 (July 1977): 54–55, 60–62. According to a study of turnover in the early 1920s, percentages of teachers replaced each year in far western states were above national averages, varying widely with sizes of communities and levels of schools. In Washington in 1921–22, when the average replaced was 20 percent, 76.9 percent of teachers in one- and two-room rural schools and 40 percent of all elementary teachers were in their first year. National Education Association, “Teacher Turnover in the United States,” Research Bulletin 2 (November 1924): 142, 144. The highest percentage rates of turnover then were in Wyoming (47), Idaho (44), Utah (35), and North Dakota (33). Arthur M. Cohen and Florence B. Brawer, Confronting Identity: The Community College Instructor (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), 12–14. By 1970 only one out of four instructors at established junior colleges in California said that they would prefer to teach in a four-year college or university, against nearly half nationally. Ibid., 12, and cf. Young Park, Junior College Faculty: Their Values and Perceptions, Educational Resources Information Center Clearinghouse for Junior Colleges, Monograph no. 12 (Washington, 1971). As forces in their communities and recipients of local support, junior colleges lagged behind high schools and four-year colleges most conspicuously in competitive athletics: the best-known teachers in small-town high schools were likely to be the football and basketball coaches, but if members of their teams went further as athletes, ordinarily it was at universities and professional clubs, which could offer them longer eligibility and greater financial support. Cohen and Brawer, Confronting Identity, 23. The percentages of high school graduates who prepared for college were above the national average (31.27 percent) in the Far West as a whole, and in eleven of sixteen states, in 1901. Report of the Commissioner of Education . . . 1901, 2:1923. Higher percentages of secondary students elected the scientific course over the classical in the West than in the United States from the earliest surveys of the commissioner of education in the 1870s, although a majority continued in the classical course into the 1880s. The most striking deviation from national patterns appeared as graduate schools developed: in 1916–17 graduate degrees in engineering in the mountain and Pacific states ran over half above national averages, degrees in the humanities over half below. President’s Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education for American Democracy, 1:30–31. David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 23–26, 162–67; Tyack, “Bureaucracy and the Common School: The Example of Portland, Oregon, 1851–1913,” American Quarterly 19 (fall 1967): 475–98; John Frederick Scheck, “Transplanting a Tradition: Thomas Lamb Eliot and the Unitarian Conscience in the Pacific Northwest, 1865–1905” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon–Eugene, 1969), 183; John Swett, Public Education in California (New York, [1911]), 186–87, 191–92, 237–38, and passim. Wayne E. Fuller notes that professional educators who advocated consolidated schools favored planning

Notes to Pages 287–289

90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100.

101.

505

curricula to keep young people on the farm, introducing courses in nature study and agriculture, but over the resistance of parents who wished to continue emphasizing fundamentals. The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago, 1982), 221–26. In most of the Southwest, as over other parts of the United States, the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language was not common until German dropped from curricula during and after the First World War. State departments of education began requiring public school teachers to take college courses in state history and state school law during the Depression of the 1930s, as tariffs against out-of-state teachers. At Stanford University, Professor Mary Sheldon Barnes offered a course in Pacific Coast history and had students working in local history in about 1891–97, but the University of California, despite the resources of the Bancroft Library, which it bought in 1905, had no course in state history until 1913. Earl Pomeroy, “Old Lamps for New: The Cultural Lag in Pacific Coast Historiography,” Arizona and the West 2 (summer 1960): 108. New York Daily Tribune, May 2, 1886, p. 11, col. 2. French Strother, “Our Town Life—What Is It Worth?” World’s Work 14 (October 1907): 9452. Willard Huntington Wright, “Los Angeles—The Chemically Pure,” Smart Set 39 (March 1913): 107–14. George P. West, “California the Prodigious,” Nation 115 (October 4, 1922): 327. Milicent W. Shinn, “The Leland Stanford, Junior, University,” Overland 18 (October 1891): 341– 42. David Starr Jordan, The Days of a Man: Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy (Yonkers-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1922), 1:383–85. Referring in his autobiography to Mexicans as “ignorant, superstitious, and ill-nurtured, . . . lacking, indeed, most of our Anglo-Saxon virtues,” Jordan saw possibilities of improving them through vocational education. Days of a Man, 1:638–39. Tabulating arrests in Santa Clara County by racial antecedents, he noted the large numbers of Italian, Mexican, and Chinese names. Edward McNall Burns, David Starr Jordan: Prophet of Freedom (Stanford, 1953), 62. Edwin R. Bingham, Charles F. Lummis, Editor of the Southwest (San Marino, Calif., 1955), 100, 103–8. W. W. Robinson, Los Angeles: A Profile (Norman, Okla., 1968), 76. Keith L. Bryant, Jr., History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (New York, 1974), 119–21, 332. The name of the Montezuma Hotel, at Las Vegas Hot Springs (built and rebuilt 1881–86), recalls early attempts to provide Aztec ancestors for southwestern Indians, then generally thought to be uninteresting. The second Montezuma Hotel, built 1884–85 to replace a Queen Anne–style structure built 1881–82, was in indigenous rough-hewn sandstone, foretelling later concessions to regional materials and traditions; it was the work of Burnham and Root, the Chicago architects who in planning the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 helped to popularize classical, Romanesque, and Renaissance designs in marble for a generation. Louise Harris Ivers, “The Montezuma Hotel at Las Vegas Hot Springs, New Mexico,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (October 1974): 206–13. Biographical sketch by Mrs. J. K. Shiskin (1967) at New Mexico Historical Society Library, Santa Fe. The advertising department of the Santa Fe Railroad was already bringing artists into New Mexico and Arizona, although initially they emphasized dramatic landscapes, like the Grand Canyon, which Thomas Moran painted in 1892, rather than Indian culture. Keith L. Bryant, Jr., “The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Development of the Taos and Santa Fe Art

506

102.

103.

104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113.

114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

Notes to Pages 289–293 Colonies,” Western Historical Quarterly 9 (October 1978): 438 and passim; Ted Schwarz, “The Santa Fe Railway and Early Southwest Artists . . . ,” American West 19 (September/October 1982), 32–37, 39–41; Laura M. Bickerstaff, Pioneer Artists of Taos (Denver, 1955), 23, 31. Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900–1942 (Norman, Okla., 1983). An exception was the New Mexican building, whose exterior copied the Franciscan mission church at Acoma. A. E. Koehler, ed., New Mexico: The Land of New Mexico: The Land of Opportunity . . . Official Souvenir of the State of New Mexico . . . (Albuquerque, 1915), 12. Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics and Growth in a Twentieth-Century City (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), 42–43; George A. Frykman, “The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53 (July 1962): 90, 93. William G. Tight, president 1901–9. Thomas L. Popejoy, “U. of N. M.,” University of New Mexico, A Calculated Risk (New York, 1952), 14–15; Dorothy Hughes, Pueblo on the Mesa: The First Fifty Years at the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, 1939), 25–27, 29, 39–41; Marc Simmons, Albuquerque, a Narrative History (Albuquerque, 1982), 315–17; Carleen Lazzell, “Early SpanishPueblo Revival Architecture at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,” New Mexico Studies in the Fine Arts 10 (1985): 23–29. The Alvarado Hotel, built in California mission style alongside the Santa Fe tracks at Albuquerque in 1901–2, preceded by a few months the Mission Inn, at Riverside. Simmons, Albuquerque, 329. Jack E. Holmes, Politics in New Mexico (Albuquerque, 1967), 285–86. Bruce T. Ellis, Bishop Lamy’s Santa Fe Cathedral, with Records of the Old Spanish Church (Parroquin) and Convent Formerly on the Site (Albuquerque, 1985), 8. Carroll L. V. Meeks, The Railroad Station: An Architectural History (New Haven, 1956), 158. Erna Fergusson, “From Rodeo to Rotary . . . ,” Century 113 (December 1926): 206–7. Kenneth L. Roberts, “California’s War on Ugliness,” Saturday Evening Post 99 (July 10, 1926): 133. Arthur B. Benton, “The California Mission and Its Influence upon Pacific Coast Architecture,” West Coast Magazine 10 (May 1911): 160. Benton was the architect of the Mission Inn, at Riverside, sometimes called a Spanish mission. John C. Freeman, The Forgotten Rebel: Gustav Stickley and His Craftsman Mission Furniture (Watkins Glen, N.Y., 1966), 18, 45. New York Times, February 18, 1988, p. 19, cols. 1–2. Alva Johnston, The Legendary Mizners (New York, 1953). Spanish style had appeared first in modern Florida in the Ponce de Leon Hotel at St. Augustine (1887), built when Californians were still looking to Vienna, France, and the East Coast. Charles Gibbs Adams, “Our Architectural Tragedy,” California Southland 103 (July 1928): 28, cited in Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 325. New York Times, December 29, 1983, p. 16, col. 1. Jacob J. Brody, “Indian Painters and White Patrons” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1970), 217. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record (New York, 1953), 17. Charles F. Holder, “The Heart of the Desert,” Outing 45 (January 1905): 417, 423. Charles F. Saunders, “The California Desert as a Pleasure Resort,” Outlook 107 (August 22, 1914):

Notes to Pages 294–300

120. 121. 122.

123. 124. 125.

126.

127.

128.

507

997. Cf. Billy M. Jones, Health-Seekers in the Southwest, 1817–1900 (Norman, Okla., 1967), and John E. Baur, The Health-Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 (San Marino, Calif., 1959). “The President’s Trip and the Forests,” Century, n.s., 44 (August 1903): 635. Galen Rowell, “The Yosemite Story,” Sierra Club Bulletin 59 (October 1974): 17–20, 38–39; cf. ibid. 60 (February 1975): 14–15. Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1966, quoted in Stanford Ellis Demars, “The Triumph of Tradition: A Study of Tourism in Yosemite National Park, California” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1970), 206. Cf. Charles Stevenson, “The Shocking Truth about Our National Parks,” Reader’s Digest 66 (January 1955): 49. Bernard DeVoto, “Let’s Close the National Parks,” Harper’s Magazine 207 (October 1953): 49– 52. Margaret Ingels, Willis Haviland Carrier, Father of Air Conditioning (Garden City, N.Y., 1952), 64–65, 81. Median age increased slightly in Arizona 1940–50 and 1960–70 while decreasing in the West as a whole in those years, but the median remained lower in Arizona than in the rest of the West. The greater deviation was in numbers of the young, population seventeen years of age and under in Arizona exceeding that in the other states except Alaska. By the 1970s Arizona had a higher percentage of population over age sixty-four than the United States but was far behind South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska; and percentages of preschool children exceeded national averages by much larger margins. Orlando W. Miller, The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony (New Haven, 1975), 202, 207, 213; Marion Clawson and Burnell Held, The Federal Lands: Their Use and Management (Baltimore, 1957), 107, 108. In 1983 the Alaskan legislature established a program of homesteading on state lands, attracting thousands of applicants about eighty of whom received forty- and eighty-acre tracts in an initial lottery in 1984. Since most of the land in the program was in remote areas, some ordinarily accessible only by airplane, few homesteaders could expect the profits of urban development that homesteaders on federal land near Anchorage and Fairbanks had realized. New York Times, September 17, 1985, p. A18, cols. 3–5; Session Laws of Alaska, 1983, Alaska Statutes, Title 38.09, Public Lands, c. 103 ([Juneau], October 1984), 129–32. Robert C. Schmitt, Historical Statistics of Hawaii (Honolulu, 1977), 36, 100–104, 273–74; Hawaii Department of Planning and Economic Development, The Economic Impact of Tourism in Hawaii: 1970 to 1980 (Honolulu, 1983), quoted in Bank of Hawaii, Business Trends 28 (July/ August 1983): 1. Proctor Mellquist, of Sunset, at a conference at Carmel, October 30–31, 1958.

CHAPTER 10. WESTERN POLITICS 1. Counting from the time when territorial officers arrived to the time when the news of admission arrived, and ignoring time passed within earlier territories. 2. In 1904, with 13.6 percent of the population in the preceding census, states west of the Mississippi had nine of twenty-four committee chairmanships in the Senate (37.5 percent); in 1924, with 17.7 percent of the population, seventeen of twenty-five chairmanships (68 percent); and even in 1936, when southerners had an advantage in a Democratic Congress, with 18.4 percent of the

508

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

Notes to Pages 301–307 population far western states had eight of twenty-five chairmanships (32 percent) and seventeen of twenty-five ranking minority members (68 percent), North Dakota alone having five ranking minority members. George H. Haynes, The Senate of the United States, Its History and Practice (Boston, 1938), 2:1052–1053, 1057–1059. Cf. R. Earl McClendon, “Reelection of United States Senators,” American Political Science Review 28 (August 1934): 636–42. In 1981 far westerners had ten of nineteen chairmanships in the Senate although only four of twenty-five in the House; members from states west of the Mississippi (including Texans) had eleven and six. After the thirteen original states, all but Vermont, Kentucky, Maine, Texas, California, and West Virginia. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., “Jefferson, the Ordinance of 1784, and the Origins of the American Territorial System,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (April 1972): 243–44, 250–54, 258–59. Frederic L. Paxson, “The Admission of the ‘Omnibus’ States, 1889–90,” State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Proceedings 59 (1911): 77–96; Howard R. Lamar, Dakota Territory, 1861–1889: A Study of Frontier Politics (New Haven, 1956), 270–72. Lester W. Milbrath, Political Participation: How and Why Do People Get Involved in Politics? (Chicago, 1965), 53–54 and passim. Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846–1912: A Territorial History (New Haven, 1966), 498; Lamar, Dakota Territory, 272. Simon N. Patten, “The Decay of State and Local Governments,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 1 (July 1890): 26–42. The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York, 1946), 282. George Creel, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York, 1947), 288; Russell M. Posner, “A. P. Giannini and the 1934 Campaign in California,” Historical Society of Southern California, Quarterly 39 (June 1957): 190–201. Hamlin Garland, A Daughter of the Middle Border (New York, 1921), 33; cf. Garland, Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Character (New York, 1898), v. Lamar, Far Southwest, 497. William A. Bowen, Willamette Valley: Migration and Settlement on the Oregon Frontier (Seattle, 1978). V. O. Key, Jr., American State Politics: An Introduction (New York, 1956), 221–22; Samuel A. Kirkpatrick et al., The Oklahoma Voter: Politics, Elections and Parties in the Sooner State (Norman, Okla., 1977), 23, 30–31. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London, 1889), 2:689. Michael P. Malone, “Montana as a Corporate Bailiwick: An Image in History,” in Peter J. Powell and Michael P. Malone, Montana, Past and Present (Los Angeles, 1976), 57–76. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 3d ed. (New York, 1894), 2:427, 441–42. Gunther Barth discusses “reluctant citizens” and the evolution of their commitments in Instant Cities: Urbanization and the Rise of San Francisco and Denver (New York, 1975), 128–54. Cf. Earl Pomeroy, “California, 1846–1860: Politics of a Representative Frontier State,” California Historical Society Quarterly 32 (December 1953): 295–97. Rudyard Kipling, “American Politics,” in American Notes, vol. 6 of Works (New York, 1912), 266. George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley, 1951), 59–60, 61. Norman E. Tutorow, Leland Stanford: Man of Many Careers (Menlo Park, Calif., 1971), 245, 263–67; Oscar Lewis, The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker,

Notes to Pages 307–311

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

509

and of the Building of the Central Pacific (New York, 1938), 243–44, 246; R. Hal Williams, The Democratic Party and California Politics, 1880–1896 (Stanford, 1973), 67–69, 140–42. Jerre C. Murphy, The Comical History of Montana: A Serious Story for Free People (San Diego, 1912), 48. Richard T. Ruetten, “Anaconda Journalism: The End of an Era,” Journalism Quarterly 37 (winter 1960): 3–12, 104. Williams, Democratic Party and California Politics, 20–26. Lamar, Far Southwest, 476, 483. The sponsors of bills that established programs in dam building and irrigation were Senators Joseph M. Carey of Wyoming, Francis G. Newlands of Nevada, and George W. Norris of Nebraska, respectively a Republican in a Democratic Congress (1894), a Democrat in a Republican Congress (1902), and a Republican in a Democratic Congress (1933). Donald R. McCoy, Landon of Kansas (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), 66, 310. Being or having been a westerner did not help Herbert Hoover much in 1932: he carried no state west of Pennsylvania. Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota was not atypical in sitting out the campaign, telling voters that he “had too much trouble making up [his] own mind who to vote for for president to seek now to inflict [his] choice upon the people of North Dakota.” Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis, 1962), 53. Lamar, Far Southwest, 148, 166. For an account ascribing much less structure and design, see Victor Westphall, Thomas Benton Catron and His Era (Tucson, 1973), 98–99. When Arizonians drafted their constitution, leading members of Congress encouraged them. Previously (1909) the territorial delegate had asked George Hunt, later governor, to use his influence against a bill affecting corporations lest it hurt the cause of statehood. John S. Goff, George W. P. Hunt and His Arizona (Pasadena, Calif., 1973), 29–30. Democrats had been presidents for twenty-six of the forty-six years in which Alaska had had full territorial status; both houses of Congress had been Democratic for twenty-eight years. Republicans had been presidents for thirty-one of the fifty-nine years for Hawaii, including the first ten and last six years; the House had been Republican for just under half of that time (twenty-nine years), the Senate over half (thirty-one years). Elected in Colorado, 1892, 1898, 1900; Idaho, 1896, 1898, 1900; Kansas, 1892, 1896; Montana, 1896; Nebraska, 1894, 1896, 1898; North Dakota, 1892; South Dakota, 1896, 1898; Washington, 1896. The one not in the Far West was elected in Minnesota, 1898. California seven, for eight terms; Colorado three, for ten terms; Idaho three, for four terms; Kansas thirteen, for nineteen terms; Montana one, for one term; Nebraska nine, for eighteen terms; Nevada one, for five terms; South Dakota two, for two terms; Washington two, for two terms. The southern states were Alabama (one for two terms), Florida (one for one term), and North Carolina (seven for fourteen terms). In the thirteen western states by 12.7 percent, nationally by 2.3 percent. Bryan’s western majorities dropped from 81 percent to 56.8 percent. All of Weaver’s four states in 1892 had been western; ten of Bryan’s twenty-two in 1896 were western, four of his seventeen in 1900. And these were well below southern levels, with farm populations in 1890 and 1900 at 34.5 percent and 33.0 percent, 45.3 percent and 43.5 percent, 43.8 percent and 50.0 percent, and 31.3 percent and 38.3 percent. Michael Paul Rogin and John L. Shover, Political Change in California: Critical Elections and

510

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

Notes to Pages 311–315 Social Movements, 1890–1966 (Westport, Conn., 1970), 15–16, 17–18. Of the five members of the House of Representatives from California who ran with Populist nominations, one was from San Francisco, and only two were farmers, although one, a physician, had headed the Populist executive committee of his county. Robert W. Larson, New Mexico Populism: A Study of Radical Protest in a Western Territory (Boulder, 1974). Robert E. Stewart, Jr., and Mary Frances Stewart, Adolph Sutro: A Biography (Berkeley, 1962). Seven in 1890, eleven in 1892, five in 1894, twenty-three in 1896, eleven in 1898, ten in 1900. In 1868–88 above national rates in 7 elections (voting in one state counting as one election), below in 26; in 1892–96 above in 7, below in 18; in 1900–16 above in 33, below in 31; in 1920–64 above in 165, below in 44. Low rates of voting in the lower South in 1900–64 depressed national averages for those years. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 2:1071–72. Burnham notes that five of the eight states where participation increased in 1896–1916 were western—Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970), 84. Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming were predominantly Republican in both centuries; California joined them in the first half of the twentieth century. Only Montana was and remained predominantly Democratic. In the thirteen western states where Republican votes normally predominated between 1900 and 1928 (all but Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, where averages of Republican votes ranged from 27.1 to 33.4 percent), they averaged almost as high as in the seventeen of the Northeast and Middle West (57.5 percent against 58.8 percent), although they deviated more often and more widely from the averages (8.3 percent against 5.7 percent). At deviations of 9.1 percent and 10.0 percent from average Republican majorities, votes in Minnesota and Wisconsin were closer than votes in others of the older states to far western ranges. Richard M. Valelly, Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy (Chicago, 1989), 12. John R. Sillito and John S. McCormack, “Socialist Saints: Mormons and the Socialist Party in Utah, 1900–20,” Dialogue 8 (spring 1985): 123, 128. David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 266; Jerry W. Calvert, The Gibraltar: Socialism and Labor in Butte, Montana, 1895–1920 (Helena, 1988), 34–35, 38, 40–41, 63; Joseph Sullivan, “Rising from the Ranks: Socialism in Nye County,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 34 (summer 1991): 341. Howard H. Quint, “Gaylord Wilshire and Socialism’s First Congressional Campaign,” Pacific Historical Review 26 (November 1957): 327–40; Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (Columbia, S.C., 1953), 267–68. Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer (New York, 1940), 153, 263; Roger Horne, “The Christian Socialism of Thomas W. Woodrow, Oklahoma’s First Preacher,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 49 (spring 1971): 79, 86. Quint, Forging of American Socialism, 137–39. An exception before the war may have been California during Johnson’s governorship (1911–17), when much of the Socialist vote went to Progressive candidates; participation of voters ran higher when Johnson ran for a second term in 1914 than in any other election in the state, 1902–30. Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 46–47. The Socialist vote in California fell

Notes to Pages 316–319

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

511

from 13.4 percent (presidential 1912) to 5.5 percent (gubernatorial 1914) while participation increased from 43.3 percent to 59.6 percent; in Oklahoma, where the Progressive Party was not on the ballot, the Socialist vote rose from 16.4 percent to 20.8 percent. In 1920–36 Socialist votes were relatively highest in Wisconsin and New York. By 1932 Norman Thomas was not on the ballot in Oklahoma; in 1936 Montana, Oregon, and Washington, in each of which he received about 0.5 percent of the popular vote, were the only western states where he exceeded the national average of 0.41 percent. On Los Angeles, Leonard Pitt, “Red Flag over City Hall: Socialist Chances in the Los Angeles Mayoral Election of 1911,” paper given at American Historical Association, San Francisco, December 29, 1989; Michael Kazin, “The Great Exception Revisited: Organized Labor and Politics in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1870–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 55 (August 1986): 399; James N. Gregory, paper given at AHA, San Francisco, December 29, 1989. David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York, 1955), 34; Ira A. Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York, 1952), 364. The vote for Socialist candidates for the House of Representatives in Oklahoma in 1910 was over a seventh larger than in New York. Oklahoma Socialists opposed disfranchising Negroes, who commended them while reproaching Republicans for not acting more forthrightly. Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans from the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, Conn., 1977), 223–29, 235–36. Socialists in Nevada in 1912 led in percentage of total vote, at 16.5 percent. As in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota (1907), and North Dakota (1911). Robert C. Woodward, “William Simon U’Ren in an Age of Protest” (master’s thesis, University of Oregon–Eugene, 1956), 45. George E. Chamberlain (1903–11) and Oswald West (1911–15). Robert E. Burton, Democrats of Oregon: The Pattern of Minority Politics, 1900–1956 (Eugene, Ore., 1970), 12, 25–27, 31–32. Donald E. Walters in Royce D. Delmatier et al., eds., The Rumble of California Politics, 1848– 1970 (New York, 1970), 107–8. The progressive journalist Franklin Hichborn considered himself still a Republican even after serving as secretary of the Santa Clara County (California) Populist Convention of 1892. Franklin Hichborn, “California Politics, 1891–1939,” 5 vols. (Los Angeles, 1950), 241, 255. In 1954 the Republican opponent of Senator Wayne L. Morse of Oregon, who had left the Republican Party in 1952, was a former Democrat. Eugene C. Lee, The Politics of Nonpartisanship: A Study of California City Elections (Berkeley, 1960), 21–24. Burton, Democrats of Oregon, 28–30. In 1952, 75 percent of contests were concluded in the primaries, the last year of cross-filing, 27 percent in 1954, when candidates who cross-filed had to specify their own affiliations. Lee, Politics of Nonpartisanship, 10. More than half of the victors in elections decided in primaries in 1946 were Democrats, nearly half in 1940, 1942, 1944, 1950, and 1952. Majorities of Republicans were elected in 1954, 1956, and 1966 (nearly half Republicans in 1958 and 1960) as well as when cross-filing was in full force, and some majorities in contested elections after 1954 were in the range of majorities in elections where there had been only one major party candidate as a result of cross-filing. Independent and write-in candidates sometimes had done better than candidates who won both major party nominations.

512

Notes to Pages 319–324

59. When Clem Whitaker of Campaigns, Incorporated (Whitaker and Baxter), which until the 1950s was the only professional political consulting firm in the country, managed the campaigns of George Hatfield, Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, and the California League against Sinclair in 1934, he kept Hatfield as far as possible from Governor Frank Merriam, the Republican nominee. Donors to Earl Warren’s campaign for the governorship in 1942 employed him until he described Warren as running with Fred N. Howser, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, which Warren refused to do. Murray Chotiner, a Los Angeles lawyer whom Richard Nixon engaged for his campaigns in 1946, 1949–50, and 1952, used tactics similar to Whitaker’s, and Nixon’s staff worked with Lenore Baxter when he ran for the governorship in 1960. Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York, 1992), 83–84, 129–30, 335, 354–56, 363, 563, 570; Leo Katcher, Earl Warren: A Political Biography (New York, 1967), 164; Warren, The Memoirs of Earl Warren (Garden City, N.Y., 1977), 162–63, 165; Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon, The Rise of an American Politician (New York, 1990), 292–98, 528, 741–48; Herbert S. Parmet, Richard Nixon and His America (Boston, 1990), 426–27; Robert J. Pitchell, “The Influence of Professional Campaign Management Firms in Partisan Elections in California,” Western Political Quarterly 11 (June 1958): 278–300. 60. As early as 1914, a supporter of the Oregon system warned of the “tyranny of elections” and concluded that compulsory voting was imperative: “An election every few months has deadened the political conscience of the voter and he cares not whether he participates.” Gilbert L. Hedges, Where the People Rule (San Francisco, 1914), 111, 113–14. But apart from special elections turnouts ran high rather than low; they were especially high in California at the nadir of party loyalty in 1914. Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 28–29. 61. Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken, 228–29, 263. 62. Frederic C. Howe, “Oregon, the Most Complete Democracy in the World,” Hampton’s Magazine 26 (April 1911): 467. 63. Horace Plunkett, The Rural Life Problem in the United States: Notes of an Irish Observer (New York, 1910), 63. 64. Stanley B. Parsons, The Populist Context: Rural versus Urban Power on a Great Plains Frontier (Westport, Conn., 1973), 13, 48–49; Robert W. Cherny, Populism, Progressivism, and the Transformation of Nebraska Politics, 1885–1915 (Lincoln, Neb., 1981), 27, 34, 68, 70, 105, 144. Farmers constituted 59.4 percent of the labor force in Nebraska in 1880, 47.2 percent in 1890, 49.9 percent in 1900; the percentages were higher only in the Dakotas, Kansas, and Oklahoma among western states and territories. 65. North Dakota 1919 Legislative Manual . . . (Bismarck, 1919), 578–79. Candidates of the league had won 36 of 49 seats in the Senate, 79 of 113 in the House, or an aggregate 71.0 percent. Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (Minneapolis, 1955), 211. In 1920 farmers were 57.9 percent of the labor force, down from 60.2 percent in 1910. 66. Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), 471–72. 67. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire, 202. 68. Ibid., 124–25, 212. 69. The heavily rural counties north of San Francisco Bay thereby increased their membership in the state senate from eight to fourteen of forty senators until 1961; by then they had less than

Notes to Pages 324–329

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

513

one-thirteenth the population of the state. The three most populous counties, with over half the population, initially had three. The five most populous counties, with five, had over half the population. Don A. Allen, Legislative Source-Book: The California Legislature and Reapportionment, 1849–1965 (Sacramento, 1965), 61, 116–18, 167; Thomas S. Barclay, “Reapportionment in California,” Pacific Historical Review 5 (June 1936): 93–129; Hichborn, “California Politics, 1891–1939,” 2365–68. Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle, 1964), 166–69; Hamilton Cravens, “The Emergence of the Farmer-Labor Party in Washington Politics, 1919–20,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 57 (October 1966): 148–57. On the sympathy of Grangers in northern California for labor in the 1930s, see Clarke A. Chambers, California Farm Organizations: A Historical Study of the Grange, the Farm Bureau, and the Associated Farmers, 1929–1941 (Berkeley, 1952), 66–69. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire, 202–3. Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (Berkeley, 1953), 149–51, 185–86. Chambers, California Farm Organizations, 57–59. Gerald D. Nash, State Government and Economic Development: A History of Administrative Policies in California, 1849–1933 (Berkeley, 1964), 241. According to Paul J. Culhane, Public Lands Politics: Interest Group Influence on the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (Baltimore, 1981), 248–49, by the 1960s the grazing advisory boards had substantially lost influence as the staff of the bureau became professionalized and developed interests distinct from those of stockmen. Raymond E. Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone, Who Votes? (New Haven, 1980), 31–34. Percentages of foreign-born population ran higher in cities than outside them in every western state or territory in 1900 except Hawaii, where sugar planters depended heavily on immigrant labor. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900, Population (Washington, 1901), 1:civ, cvii, 913. Steven P. Erie, “Politics, the Public Sector and Irish Social Mobility: San Francisco, 1870–1900,” Western Political Quarterly 31 (June 1978): 278, 282–83. Alexander Saxton, “San Francisco Labor and the Populist and Progressive Insurgencies,” Pacific Historical Review 34 (November 1965): 422. Rudyard Kipling, American Notes: Rudyard Kipling’s West, ed. Arrell M. Gibson (Norman, Okla., 1981), 34. On participation in the state, Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 26–28. In mayoral elections of 1901 and 1911, the turnout was 50.3 percent and 59.7 percent of potential voting population by the census of 1910, against turnouts in the state of 46.9 percent and 43.3 percent in 1910 and 1912. In 1890 the turnout in the city was 73.5 percent against 65.4 percent in the state. In 1946–60, turnout of registered voters in San Francisco ran below averages for the state; percentages of adults registered ran below averages for nearly all of 1928–60. Eugene C. Lee et al., California Votes, 1928–1960 (with 1962 Supplement); A Review and Analysis of Registration and Voting (Berkeley, 1963). Walton Bean, Boss Ruef ’s San Francisco: The Story of the Union Labor Party, Big Business, and the Graft Prosecution (Berkeley, 1952), 58–59, 65; William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley, 1986). The two U.S. representatives elected from San Francisco in 1902 were Democrats whom the Union Labor Party also nominated.

514

Notes to Pages 329–332

83. Roger W. Lotchin, “The Darwinian City: The Politics of Urbanization in San Francisco between the World Wars,” Pacific Historical Review 48 (August 1979): 364–67. A brother of Mayor Rolph, Thomas Rolph, won two terms in Congress as a Republican, 1941–45. 84. In 1900 Los Angeles had over twice as many natives of Iowa as of Ireland, while San Francisco had over eight times as many natives of Ireland as of Iowa. 85. Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers, and Their Influence on Southern California (New York, 1977), 460–65. 86. Before Harriman ran in 1911, Socialist and other candidates that labor supported in Los Angeles seldom threatened to win. The Public Ownership candidate got under 13 percent of the vote in 1906, Harriman 37.7 percent in 1911, 26.3 percent in 1913. 87. Robert V. Hine, California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley, 1983), 114–31; Aldous Huxley, “Ozymandias,” Adonis and the Alphabet And Other Essays (London, 1956), 87–104; Abe Hoffman, “A Look at Llano: Experiment in Economic Socialism,” California Historical Society Quarterly 40 (September 1961): 215–36; Paul Kagan, “Llano del Rio: Portrait of a California Utopia,” California Historical Quarterly 51 (summer 1972), 131–54; William Knox Mellon, “Job Harriman and the Politics of Utopia” (Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1972). Louis Adamic (Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America, rev. ed. [New York, 1934], 264–77; My America, 1928–1938 [New York, 1938], 15–18, 22–23) pictures Harriman maintaining the antipolitical traditions of Bellamyite Socialism. The quotation from Harriman is from his introduction to Ernest S. Wooster, Communities of the Past and Present (Newllano, La., 1924), iii. 88. Rogin and Shover, Political Change in California, 70–71, 75. On labor’s disappointment in Governor James Gillett and its response to Johnson, see Philip Taft, Labor Politics American Style: The California State Federation of Labor (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 32–33, 41, 43–48. 89. John I. Nolan, representative 1913–23; Franck R. Havenner, representative 1937–41 and 1945–53, elected as a Progressive and Democrat in 1936, thereafter as a Democrat. 90. U.S. Commissioner of Labor, A Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado, from 1880 to 1904, 58th Cong., 3d sess., 1905, S. Doc. 122, pp. 51–52, 55. 91. George G. Suggs, Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners (Detroit, 1972); James E. Wright, The Politics of Populism; Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, 1974), 220–21, 263; Robert G. Taylor, Cripple Creek (Bloomington, Ind., 1966), 117–19. 92. International Socialist Review 2 (August 1901) 141, quoted in Vernon H. Jensen, Heritage of Conflict: Labor Relations in the Nonferrous Metals Industry Up to 1930 (Ithaca, 1950), 67; Commissioner of Labor, Report on Labor Disturbances, 42. 93. Wright, Politics of Populism, 248–49. 94. George S. McGovern and Leonard F. Guttridge, The Great Coalfield War (Boston, 1972), 82. 95. William P. Irwin, “The Rocky Mountain Ballot: A Story of Political Behavior in the State of Colorado” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1955), 99, 101, 123–24. 96. Marc Karson, American Labor Unions and Politics, 1900–1918 (Carbondale, Ill., 1958), 170; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World,” American Institute for Marxist Studies, Occasional Papers, no. 24 (New York and San Jose, Calif., 1977), 4–5, 24–25. 97. Costigan to Pinchot, April 30, 1914, in Papers of Edward P. Costigan Relating to the Progressive Movement in Colorado, 1902–1917, ed. Colin B. Goodykoontz (Boulder, 1941), 259. 98. Edward Keating, The Gentleman from Colorado: A Memoir (Denver, 1964), 506–7.

Notes to Pages 332–337

515

99. George A. Carlson, who won with 49.05 percent of the popular vote. While the Democratic ticket suffered from the unpopularity of the incumbent Democratic governor, Elias Ammons, who had given in to the operators at Ludlow, Edward Keating, later editor of a labor newspaper (Labor, sponsored by the Plumb Plan League), was reelected to Congress from Pueblo. 100. Michael P. Malone, The Battle for Butte: Mining and Politics on the Northern Frontier, 1864– 1906 (Seattle, 1981), 55, 76–79, 86, 150–56, 163–64; Jensen, Heritage of Conflict, 296; Carlos A. Schwantes, “Coxey’s Montana Navy: A Protest against Unemployment on the Wageworker’s Frontier,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73 (July 1982): 98–107; Emmons, Butte Irish, 266. 101. James W. Byrkit, Forging the Copper Collar: Arizona’s Labor Management War of 1901–1921 (Tucson, 1982), 50. 102. Goff, George W. P. Hunt and His Arizona, 40, 89–90. 103. Richard E. Lingenfelter, The Hardrock Miners: A History of the Mining Labor Movement in the American West, 1863–1893 (Berkeley, 1974), 133. 104. Russell R. Elliott, Radical Labor in the Nevada Mining Booms, 1900–1920 (Carson City, Nev., 1961), 30–32, 36–38; Elliott, History of Nevada (Lincoln, Neb., 1973), 222–23. 105. Loren B. Chan, Sagebrush Statesman: Tasker L. Oddie of Nevada (Reno, 1973), 57–60. 106. Byrkit, Forging the Copper Collar, 160–254; John H. Lindquist, “The Jerome Deportation of 1917,” Arizona and the West 11 (autumn 1969): 233–46; Philip Taft, “The Bisbee Deportation,” Labor History 13 (winter 1972): 3–40. 107. Malone, Battle for Butte, 150–55, 163–4, 208; Arnon Gutfeld, Montana’s Agony: Years of War and Hysteria, 1917–1921 (Gainesville, Fla., 1979), 10–12, 14–16, 23–27, 42–43, 50, 53, 85–87, and passim; Paul F. Brissenden, “The Butte Miners and the Rustling Card,” American Economic Review 10 (December 1920): 755–75; Charles Merz, “The Issue in Butte,” New Republic 12 (September 22, 1917): 216; Malone and Richard B. Roeder, Montana: A History of Two Centuries (Seattle, 1976), 156–57, 168–77, 205–14. 108. Statewide votes for Socialist candidates for major offices in Nevada peaked at 28.9 percent in 1916 (senator), in Arizona at 13.4 percent in 1912 (president). Hunt’s Socialist opponents got 5.8 percent in both 1911 and 1914; there was no Socialist candidate in 1916, when the presidential vote was 5.5 percent. In California the Socialist vote for governor dropped from 12.4 percent in 1910 to 5.5 percent in 1914, when Johnson was reelected; Socialist votes for candidates for Congress from San Francisco and vicinity were higher than votes from Los Angeles and vicinity in 1904–08, much lower in 1910–16, apart from the spectacular candidacy of Mayor Wilson, who got 40.0 percent in 1912. 109. Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York, 1905), 156. 110. Joseph R. Conlin, Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies (Westport, Conn., 1969), 127– 30. 111. Flynn, “Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World,” 4–5, and cf. 25. 112. Anne Martin, “Nevada: Beautiful Desert of Buried Hopes,” Nation 115 (July 26, 1922): 89–90. 113. Fred L. Israel, Nevada’s Key Pittman (Lincoln, Neb., 1963), 34. 114. Totton J. Anderson, “The 1958 Election in California,” Western Political Quarterly 12 (March 1959): 276–300. 115. In 1948 Dewey won only five western states but a higher percentage of the popular vote in the West (46.92 percent) than nationally (45.12 percent). He got 48.60 percent of the major party vote in the West, against 47.68 percent nationally.

516

Notes to Pages 337–339

116. Lawrence Brock, in the third district (Wakefield, Dixon County). James F. Pedersen and Kenneth D. Wald, Shall the People Rule? A History of the Democratic Party in Nebraska Politics, 1854–1972 (Lincoln, Neb., 1972), 367. 117. Frank H. Jonas, ed., Western Politics (Salt Lake City, 1961), 59. 118. Employment in mining had risen from 7,459 in 1900 to 26,805 in 1980. In 1900 it was 21.0 percent of all employment in Alaska (2.9 percent in 1980), 13.0 percent in Colorado (2.7 percent in 1980), 13.3 percent in Nevada (1.4 percent in 1980); in agriculture in 1900, 29.7 percent in Nevada (1.5 percent in 1980, against 15.3 percent in hotels and lodging places), 30.3 percent in Wyoming (5.0 percent in 1980, against 14.9 percent in mining, including 6.4 percent in extraction of petroleum and natural gas, up from 8.9 percent in mining in 1900). Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, 1904), 94, 104, 105, 108, 109, 114, 118, 122, 134, 138; 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, chap. C, pt. 3 (Washington, 1983), 28, 30; pt. 4, p. 38; pt. 7, p. 46; pt. 30, p. 30; pt. 52, p. 30; ibid., chap. D, pt. 30, p. 328.

CHAPTER 11. EXPANDING ELECTORATES 1. Congress first limited naturalization to free whites (1790), later opening it to Africans (1870). Arizona (1921), Idaho (1923), Montana (1923), Nebraska (1921), Oregon (1923), and Washington (1921), among other states, closely followed the provisions of California (1913, 1920). Consulate General of Japan, San Francisco, Documental History of Law Cases Affecting Japanese in the United States, 1916–1924 (San Francisco, 1925), vol. 2, Japanese Land Cases, 1014–38; Eliot G. Mears, Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast: Their Legal and Economic Status (Chicago, 1928), 164, 179–83. An act of 1935 qualified veterans of the First World War for naturalization. U.S. Congress, 74th Cong., sess., Statutes at Large 49 (June 24, 1935): 397–98. 2. Forrest E. LaViolette, Americans of Japanese Ancestry: A Study of Assimilation in the American Community (Toronto, 1945), 149. 3. Peter Irons, Justice at War (New York, 1983). 4. Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans during World War II (New York, 1969), 258–64, 274. 5. Thomas D. Murphy, Ambassadors in Arms: The Story of Hawaii’s 100th Battalion (Honolulu, 1954); John A. Rademaker, These Are Americans: The Japanese-Americans in Hawaii in World War II (Palo Alto, Calif., 1951); Gwenfread Allen, Hawaii’s War Years (Honolulu, 1950). 6. George K. Yamamoto, “Political Participation among Orientals in Hawaii,” Sociology and Social Research 43 (May–June 1959): 360–61; F. Everett Robison, “Participation of Citizens of Chinese and Japanese Ancestry in the Political Life of Hawaii,” Social Process in Hawaii 4 (1938): 58–60; on Japanese American attorneys as legislators, see George Cooper and Gavan Daws, Land and Power in Hawaii: The Democratic Years (Honolulu, 1985), 43. Although Japanese constituted increasing fractions of employees on plantations from the 1930s, in that time, as surviving plantations became more mechanized, wages increased while numbers declined; and gainfully employed males who were laborers fell from 35.9 percent in 1930 (down from 76.8 percent in 1910) to 16.3 percent in 1950, 9.9 percent in 1960. Andrew W. Lind, Hawaii’s People, 3d ed. (Honolulu, 1967), 28, 75, 77, 80, 93, 95, 97, 100. By 1977 professionals were about three and a half times more numerous than laborers (18.1 percent and 5.2 percent). Ibid., 4th ed. (1980), 85, 87. Japanese de-

Notes to Page 341

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

517

clined relatively as other immigration increased: from 37.3 percent of the population in 1940 to 36.9 percent in 1950, 32.3 percent in 1960, 28.3 percent in 1970, and 24.9 percent in 1980. As police captain at Honolulu handling relations with the FBI and matters of security, Burns had supported Japanese Americans as loyal citizens; in 1942 and 1943 he helped establish the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442d Combat Team. New York Times, April 6, 1975, p. 54, cols. 7–8; Yamomoto, “Political Participation among Orientals in Hawaii,” 360–61; Tom Coffman, Catch a Wave: A Case Study of Hawaii’s New Politics (Honolulu, 1973); Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (New York, 1961), 308–53; Theon Wright, The Disenchanted Isles: The Story of the Second Revolution in Hawaii (New York, 1972), 78–80, 189, and passim; Daniel K. Inouye and Lawrence Elliott, Journey to Washington (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), 230–31. In 1970 San Jose was 93.6 percent white, 1.6 percent Japanese ancestry; its population of Asian ancestry ranked above averages for the state in citizenship, naturalization of foreign born, and education. Oakland was 22.7 percent black in 1960, 28.3 percent in 1970, 2.4 percent Chinese in 1970. The first Asian-born member of Congress was an East Indian, Dalip Singh Saund, who was elected in 1956, 1958, and 1960 in Imperial and Riverside counties, California, where Asian populations in 1950 were 1.3 percent for the two counties; he had been a judge in Imperial County. When Michael Woo was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1985, its first member of Asian origin, the Los Angeles Times noted that his district was less Asian (under 5 percent) than the city (6 percent). After the election, Woo said that Asians should not expect special favors. Although his campaign funds came predominantly from the Chinese community, especially from his own family, he had extensive political connections in both major parties. Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1985, p. 1, col. 4. Japanese criticized Hayakawa, who as a resident of Illinois in 1942–45 had not been interned, for testifying against a proposal to compensate the internees financially (1981); he was not alone in opposing it, although others did not dwell on benefits of internment, as he did. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (Washington, 1982), 296. Harry H. L. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976), 191–92; on surveys showing low levels of political participation among Asian Americans with data on Chinese Americans adjusted for citizenship, see Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford, 1993), 156–58. On the “enryo syndrome” of reserve, see Hing, ibid., 124–26, and Bill Hosokawa, Nisei, the Quiet Americans (New York, 1969), 211–12. Japanese in San Jose, employed heavily in high-technology industries at incomes higher than those in other major cities, including Honolulu, depended less there, as elsewhere on the mainland, on employment in government and in the public schools, which had risen sharply in Hawaii after the war. In 1970, 23.0 percent of adult Japanese in San Jose had had four or more years of college, against 13.0 percent in Honolulu, 15.0 percent in Los Angeles. 1970 Census of Population, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipinos in the United States, Subject Reports, PC (2)-1G (Washington, 1973), 51. Carey McWilliams, The Education of Carey McWilliams (New York, 1979), 100–101, 106. President Franklin Roosevelt had asked Congress to repeal the act (October 1943) to “silence distorted Japanese propaganda.” New York Times, December 18, 1943, p. 2, col. 6; Fred W. Riggs, Pressures on Congress: A Study of the Repeal of Chinese Exclusion (New York, 1950).

518

Notes to Pages 342–343

13. Kitano, Japanese Americans, 191. But a survey of intentions to vote shortly before the election showed 61 percent of Asians and 53 percent of Mexicans planning to vote “no,” against 26 percent of whites. In the election, at Chinese precincts in San Francisco “no” votes were 74 percent. Raymond E. Wolfinger and Fred I. Greenstein, “The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting,” American Political Science Review 62 (September 1968): 759. Among Asians, 71 percent favored an antidiscriminatory housing ordinance at Berkeley (1963), against 34 percent of whites, 93 percent of blacks. Thomas W. Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: The Defeat of Berkeley’s Fair Housing Ordinance (Berkeley, 1965), 87. 14. Maurilio E. Vigil, “The Election of Toney Anaya as Governor of New Mexico: Its Implications for Hispanics,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 12 (summer 1984): 82. 15. E. B. Fincher, Spanish-Americans as a Political Factor in New Mexico, 1912–1950 (New York, 1974), 15, 250–52; Jack E. Holmes, Politics in New Mexico (Albuquerque, 1967), 12, 19, 20, 58, 292, and passim; Census of Population: 1950, Special Reports: Persons of Spanish Surname, Report P-E, no. 3C (Washington, 1953), 3C-6, 3C-15; Joan M. Jensen in Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, eds., New Mexico Women: Intercultural Perspectives (Albuquerque, 1986), 320–22. 16. William A. Keleher, New Mexicans I Knew: Memoirs, 1892–1969 (Albuquerque, 1983), 166; Richard Lowitt, Bronson M. Cutting, Progressive Politician (Albuquerque, 1992), 164. Otero was chairman of the New Mexican delegations to the Republican conventions of 1900 and 1904 and to the Progressive convention of 1912. 17. Holmes, Politics in New Mexico, 23, 33; Maurilio E. Vigil, Los Patrones: Profiles of Hispanic Political Leaders in New Mexico History (Washington, 1980); Daniel T. Valdes, “A Sociological Analysis and Description of the Political Role, Status, and Voting Behavior of Americans with Spanish Names” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado–Boulder, 1964), 59–60. 18. Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest: A Territorial History, 1846–1912 (New Haven, 1970), 148, 166, 190, 498, and passim; Fincher, Spanish-Americans as a Political Factor, 15–16, 103. 19. George Curry, George Curry, 1861–1947: An Autobiography, ed. H. B. Hening (Albuquerque, 1958), 272; Warren A. Beck, New Mexico: A History of Four Centuries (Norman, Okla., 1962), 306–8, 310–11. 20. The Hispanic shift to the Democratic Party became easier when “Little Texas” became predominately Republican. Robert D. Wrinkle in JeDon Emenhiser, ed. Rocky Mountain Urban Politics (Logan, Utah, 1971), 115, 117–18; Donald W. Meinig, Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600–1970 (New York, 1971), 91. Both major parties nominated Hispanic candidates before and after 1930, the Republican Party a large majority through the 1920s, the Democratic Party a slight majority from the 1940s. The traditional divisions of offices have extended to some offices and departments, most auditors and secretaries of state, for instance, being Hispanic into the 1950s. Daniel T. Valdes, A Political History of New Mexico, rev. ed. (n.p, 1971), 35. 21. When a multiracial delegation of New Mexican political leaders went to Washington in 1977 to oppose plans of the Department of Justice to review laws and elections for evidence of discrimination violating the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1975, it contended that Hispanic and American candidates for office were elected in numbers beyond their proportions in the population. The Hispanic share of seats in the legislature increased after reapportionment (1965, 1966, 1971, 1972), which reduced rural representation. Paul L. Hain and José Z. García and Hain et al., in New Mexico Government, rev. ed., ed. F. Chris Garcia and Paul L. Hain (Albuquerque, 1981), 221, 56.

Notes to Pages 343–347

519

22. Joan W. Moore, and Harry Pachon, Mexican Americans, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976), 156. Latin names in legislatures were chiefly Italian, occasionally Portuguese and French. 23. Helen Rowan, “A Minority Nobody Knows,” Atlantic Monthly 219 (June 1967): 49. On early voluntary organizations, James D. McBride, “The Liga Protectora Latina: A Mexican-American Benevolent Society in Arizona,” Journal of the West 14 (October 1975): 82–90; on the League of United Latin American Citizens, 1929–, see Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin, 1993), 63–64; Ralph C. Guzman, The Political Socialization of the Mexican American People (New York, 1976), 135–37; Francisco E. Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza: The Los Angeles Mexican Consulate and the Mexican Community, 1929 to 1936 (Tucson, 1982), 58–60. 24. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993). 25. Census of Population: 1950, Persons of Spanish Surname, 3C-15, 3C-27–30, 3C-35–38; Marguerite V. Marín, Social Protest in an Urban Barrio: A Study of the Chicano Movement, 1866– 1974 (Lanham, Md., 1991), 21; Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 152–62. 26. The number naturalized decreased by 2.8 percent, 1910–20. Mexicans in California, Report of Governor C. C. Young’s Mexican Fact-Finding Committee (San Francisco, 1930), 63, 73. 27. Report by Roy L. Garis in U.S. Congress, House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Western Hemisphere Immigration, Hearings on H.R. 8523, H.R. 8530, and H.R. 8702. 71st Cong., 2d sess., 1930, p. 437. 28. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 227–29, 235–37. 29. Robert R. Alvarez, Jr., “The Lemon Grove Incident: The Nation’s First Successful Desegregation Court Case,” Journal of San Diego History 32 (spring 1986): 116–35; Alvarez, Familia: Migration and Adaptation in Baja and Alta California, 1800–1975 (Berkeley, 1987), 48–49, 152–55; W. Henry Cooke, “The Segregation of Mexican-American Children in Southern California,” School and Society 67 (5 June 1948): 417, 420–21; Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District et al., 64 Fed. Supp. 544 (1946); 161 F.2d 774 (9th Cir. 1947); Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855–1975 (Berkeley, 1976), 108. 30. Mauricio Mazón, The Zoot-Suit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (Austin, 1984); McWilliams, Education of Carey McWilliams, 109–15; Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin, 1983), 169; Roy C. Rodriguez, Mexican-American Civic Organizations: Political Participation and Political Attitudes (San Francisco, 1978), 21–22; Guzman, Political Socialization, 139–41; Ralph Guzman and Eloy Duran, Across the River: The Story of the Community Service Organization (Los Angeles, 1951); Marín, Social Protest in an Urban Barrio, 46–48, 50– 52. Romualdo Pacheco had served 1877–78 and 1879–83 from San Luis Obispo. 31. Miguel D. Tirado, “Mexican American Community Political Organization, ‘The Key to Chicano Political Power,’” Aztlán 1 (1970): 53–78; Guzman, Political Socialization, 211–12; New York Times, August 24, 1986, p. E5, cols. 1–2; on effects of service on councils established through the Office of Economic Opportunity, Biliana C. S. Ambrecht, Politicizing the Poor: The Legacy of the War on Poverty in a Mexican-American Community (New York, 1976), 183–84. 32. Jacques E. Levy, César Chávez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York, 1975), 100, 115–16, 122, 126, 145–47; César E. Chávez, “The Mexican-American and the Church,” El Grito 1 (summer 1968): 9–12; Dick Meister and Anne Loftis, A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers (New York, 1977), 117–18, 122–23.

520

Notes to Pages 347–350

33. Stan Steiner, La Raza: The Mexican-Americans (New York, 1970), 70, 72–79, 81, 84–86, and passim; Peter Nabokov, Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid, 2d ed. (Albuquerque, 1970). 34. Christine Marín, “Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales: The Mexican-American Movement Spokesman, 1966–1972,” Journal of the West 14 (October 1975): 107–20; Ignacio M. García, United We Win: The Rise and Fall of La Raza Unida Party (Tucson, 1989), 91–96; Francis Donahue, “The Chicano Story,” Colorado Quarterly 21 (winter 1973), 310, 314–15; Richard Santillan, ed., La Raza Unida: Chicano Politics (Los Angeles, 1973), 3, 23–24, 52–60; Petra S. Hartmann-Laugs, Die politische Integration der Mexiko-Amerikaner . . . (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 52–55; on Crystal City and Texas, see José Angel Gutierrez, El Político: The Mexican American Elected Official (El Paso, 1972), and John S. Shockley, Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town (Notre Dame, Ind., 1974). 35. García, United We Win, 104–12. 36. Márquez, LULAC, 65, 109. 37. New York Times, September 3, 1972, sec. 4, p. 3, col. 3; September 4, 1972, p. 16, cols. 6–8; September 5, 1972, p. 17, col. 1; García, United We Win, 114–16. The party in Colorado had needed 10 percent in the gubernatorial election; its candidate for governor received 1.8 percent, its most successful candidate 2.5 percent for regent of the University of Colorado. Rudolph Gomez and Robert L. Eckelberry, “The 1970 Election in Colorado,” Western Political Quarterly 24 (June 1971): 278–79. 38. San Diego Union, May 14, 1981, p. 3A, col. 6; New York Times, September 19, 1983, sec. 1, p. 16, col. 2; for statistics of registration and voting by Mexican Americans in California, see Petra S. Hartmann-Laugs, Die politische Integration. 39. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation (San Francisco, 1972), 276; Dennis E. Judd and Randy L. Ready in George E. Peterson and Carol W. Lewis, Reagan and the Cities (Washington, 1986), 222–28; Rodney E. Hero, “The Election of Hispanics in City Government: An Examination of the Election of Federico Peña as Mayor of Denver,” Western Political Quarterly 40 (March 1987): 93–105; Stephen J. Leonard and Thomas J. Noel, Denver: From Mining Camp to Metropolis (Niwot, Colo., 1990), 404–5. According to a survey in 1984, the Twenty-fifth Congressional District (East Los Angeles), which had the highest level of Hispanic population in the West (58 percent), also had the lowest rate of voting in 1982 (25 percent of voting-age population). Thomas E. Cavanagh et al., eds., The JCPS Congressional District Fact Book (Washington, 1984), 9. 40. Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1988, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 2; August 4, 1990, p. A30, col. 4; January 25, 1991, p. A1, col. 2, p. A20, cols. 1–6; January 24, 1991, p. B1, col. 4, p. B4, cols. 1–4; on Hispanics in Orange County, see Lisbeth Haas in Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II, ed. Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (Berkeley, 1991), 258– 59, 262–65, 268–72. 41. Arthur L. Tolson, The Black Oklahomans: A History, 1541–1972 (New Orleans, 1974), 125–27, 146–51, 153–61; Jimmie L. Franklin, Journey Toward Hope: A History of Blacks in Oklahoma (Norman, Okla., 1982), 108–9; James M. Smallwood and Crispin A. Phillips in The Culture of Oklahoma, ed. Howard F. Stein and Robert F. Hill (Norman, Okla., 1993), 54–60; on Socialist opposition to disfranchisement, see Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, Conn., 1977), 223–29, 235–36. 42. The western states with the relatively largest black populations in 1940 were Oklahoma (7.2 percent), Kansas (3.6 percent), Arizona (3.0 percent), California (1.8 percent), and Nebraska (1.1

Notes to Pages 350–352

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

521

percent); the western cities with the relatively largest were Kansas City (17.3 percent, its 21,003 second only to the 63,774 of Los Angles), Omaha (5.4 percent), Los Angeles (4.2 percent), Oakland (2.8 percent), and Denver (2.4 percent). California had been 9.2 percent Chinese in 1860, 8.8 percent in 1870, 8.7 percent in 1880, 6.0 percent in 1890; San Francisco 4.8, 8.0, 6.0, and 8.4 percent. James Q. Wilson, Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (Glencoe, Ill., 1960), 21, 25, 27, 108–9. Thus the black population of California increased nearly five times as much as the general population of the state, 1940–60, the black population of Los Angeles over twice as much as the general population. The census of 1960 reported that adult nonwhites in California without schooling had declined from 8.5 percent in 1940 to 4.1 percent, while adult nonwhites with one to three years in college had increased from 4.1 percent to 10.6 percent. Eighteenth Decennial Census . . . 1960, vol. 1, pt. 6 (Washington, 1963), 235, 236. Wilson, Negro Politics, 108. The black population of Los Angeles had increased from 63,774 to 334,763, or by about four and a quarter times. In 1966–67 an estimated 47 percent of the workforce in the poorest part of Oakland, then 60 percent black, were unemployed. Will D. Tate, The New Black Urban Elites (San Francisco, 1976), 7. Edward C. Hayes, Power Structure and Urban Policy: Who Rules in Oakland? (New York, 1971), 39; Jerome H. Skolnick, Justice without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society (New York, 1966), 80–81. Wilson, Negro Politics, 103. John A. McCone et al., Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? A Report on the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (Los Angeles, 1965); David O. Sears and John B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston, 1973). Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York, 1970); Seale, A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York, 1978); Sol Stern, “The Call of the Black Panthers,” New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1967, pp. 10–11, 62, 64, 67, 68; on the FBI, New York Times, May 9, 1976, sec. 4, p. 16, col. 2. Carl Weinberg, “Education Level and Perceptions of Los Angeles Negroes of Educational Conditions in a Riot Areas,” Journal of Negro Education 36 (fall 1967): 380. Bayard Rustin, “The Watts ‘Manifesto’ and the McCone Report,” Commentary 41 (March 1966): 29–35. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Fire (Waco, Tex., 1978), 29. David O. Sears and John B. McConahay, The Politics of Violence: The New Urban Blacks and the Watts Riot (Boston, 1973), 151. A committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission accused Yorty and Parker of “gross negligence” before the riots. New York Times, January 23, 1966, p. 71, col. 4. John C. Bollens and Grant P. Geyer, Yorty: Politics of a Constant Candidate (Pacific Palisades, Calif., 1973), 167, 171. Two months after the decision by Judge Alfred J. Gittelson, an attempt to recruit a former policeman to assassinate him led to exposure of the plot. New York Times, April 30, 1970, p. 17, col. 1; November 5, 1970, p. 1, col. 7; John W. Caughey and LaRee Caughey, To Kill a Child’s Spirit: The Tragedy of School Segregation in Los Angeles (Itasca, Ill., 1973), 134–40, 150, and passim.

522

Notes to Pages 352–354

58. San Francisco Chronicle, August 8, 1969, p. 3, cols. 1–3, August 9, 1969, p. 2, cols. 7–8; New York Times, September 14, 1969, sec. 2, p. 27, col. 1. 59. Raphael J. Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton, 1991), 40–113. 60. Rufus P. Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb, Protest Is Not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for Equality in Urban Politics (Berkeley, 1984), 50–53. 61. Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York, 1991), 180; Hayes, Power Structure and Urban Policy, 153–55, 160; Harry E. Williams, “OEO and Political Activation: The Experience of Community Action Participants in Oakland and San Francisco” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1975). 62. Mary Ellen Leary, “Remarkable Mr. Riles,” New Republic 163 (December 19, 1970): 12; San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 1970, p. 42, col. 1. 63. Black membership in the assembly rose to six of eighty in 1975; the voting-age population of the state was 7.1 percent black in 1980, 6.1 percent in 1970. One of the new assemblymen, Willie L. Brown, a San Francisco attorney, became speaker in 1980, when membership in the senate had risen to two (5.0 percent). In 1979, 6.3 percent of all elected officials in mountains and Pacific states were black; the voting-age population was 4.9 percent black in 1980.National Roster of Black Elected Officials 9 (1979): xvi, xx–xxi. 64. Seattle Times, November 8, 1989, p. A1, cols. 1–4, p. B2, col. 5; November 14, 1989, p. A1, cols. 3–5, p. A8, col. 5.; New York Times, November 9, 1989, p. B15, cols. 5–6. 65. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Internal Security, Gun-Barrel Politics: The Black Panther Party, 1966–1971, 92d Cong., 1st sess., 1971, S. Rept. 470, p. 143; G. Louis Heath, ed., Off the Pigs! The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party (Metuchen, N.J., 1976), 214. 66. Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (New York, 1994). 67. “Playboy Interview: Huey Newton . . . ,” Playboy 20 (May 1973): 74, 76, 82, 88, 90; Ross K. Baker, “Putting Down the Gun: Panthers Outgrow Their Rhetoric,” Nation 217 (July 16, 1973): 47–51; John A. Courtright, “Rhetoric of the Gun: An Analysis of the Rhetorical Modifications of the Black Panther Party,” Journal of Black Studies 4 (March 1974): 249–67. 68. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Government Operations, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders, Hearings, June 18, 24, 25, 1969, 91st Cong., 1st sess., pt. 19, pp. 3796–98, cited by Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984), 372–73; Heath, Off the Pigs! 102–6, 134, 182, and passim. 69. New York Times, August 23, 1989, p. A1, col. 4, p. A15, cols. 3–4. 70. Election of minorities was facilitated by a shift from election at large to election by district, effective 1981, but black membership had already reached a third. Browning et al., Protest Is Not Enough, 64–67, 202–3; San Francisco Chronicle, August 28, 1964, p. 24, cols. 4–6. The black population of the city was about 13.9 percent in 1960, 17.9 percent in 1970. Lenneal J. Henderson, Jr., ed., Black Political Life in the United States: A Fist as the Pendulum (San Francisco, 1972), 247. Wilson previously had been on the municipal court, 1960–64. 71. New York Times, August 29, 1989, p. B12, col. 5; San Francisco Chronicle, August 29, 1989, p. A12, col. 3. 72. García, United We Win, 229–32.

Notes to Pages 355–357

523

73. Stuart Levine, “The Indian as American,” Mid-Continent American Studies Journal 6 (fall 1965): 6–7, 10. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Present Relations of the Federal Government to the American Indian, 85th Cong., 2d sess., 1959, Committee Print no. 38, pp. 157–74; on voting in southwestern Colorado (1960), see Gabino Rendon, Jr., Voting Behavior in a Tri-Ethnic Community (San Francisco, 1977), 16–18. 74. Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior . . . 1935 (Washington, 1935), 114. Donald L. Parman, The Navajos and the New Deal (New Haven, 1976), 54–55, 63–67, 77; Philp, John Collier’s Crusade, 163, 187–93, 240–41. On Collier’s insistence on working with tribes, disregarding the findings of anthropologists, see Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), 2:943. 75. Linda S. Parker, Native American Estate: The Struggle over Indian and Hawaiian Lands (Honolulu, 1989), 59, 60–65; William H. Veeder, “Greed and Bigotry: Hallmark of American Indian Law,” American Indian Journal 3 (December 1977): 13–14; R. L. Barsh and Patrick Morris in The Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Insight and Industrial Empire in the Semiarid World, ed. Paul A. Olson (Lincoln, Neb., 1990), 114–15, 195, 197–98. Kenneth Philp, “Herbert Hoover’s New Era: A False Dawn for the American Indian, 1929–1932,” Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 9 (April 1972): 57–58; Robert W. Young in Plural Society in the Southwest, ed. Edward H. Spicer and Raymond H. Thompson (New York, 1972), 186–87; Lawrence C. Kelly, The Navajo Indians and Federal Indian Policy (Tucson, 1968), 50–88, 61–103; McCoy and Ruetten, Quest and Response, 302–8, 331; Larry W. Burt, Tribalism in Crisis: Federal Indian Policy, 1953–1961 (Tucson, 1968), 11–12. 76. Felix S. Cohen, “The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950–1953: A Case Study in Bureaucracy,” Yale Law Journal 62 (February 1953): 350. A Utah law (1896) provided that persons living on Indian and military reservations should not be deemed residents of the state; the legislature repealed it only in 1957. Laws of the State of Utah . . . 1896 . . . (Salt Lake City, 1896), 385; Helen L. Peterson, “American Indian Political Participation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 311 (May 1957): 121–22; Penn Kimball, The Disconnected (New York, 1972), 186. Making all Indians citizens did not eliminate the status of wardship, which continued at least to 1934. Russel L. Barsh and James Y. Henderson, The Road: Indian Tribes and Political Liberty (Berkeley, 1980), 96–97. 77. Oliver La Farge, “Helping Elect the Great White Father,” Reporter 7 (28 October 1952): 31–33. 78. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Present Relations of the Federal Government to the American Indian, 85th Cong., 2d sess., 1959, Committee Print No. 38, pp. 157–74; on voting in southwestern Colorado (1960), see Gabino Rendon, Jr., Voting Behavior in a Tri-Ethnic Community (San Francisco, 1977), 16–18. 79. Donald L. Parman, The Navajos and the New Deal, 54–55, 67, 77; Philp, John Collier’s Crusade, 163, 187–93, 240–41. 80. Kenneth Philp, “Herbert Hoover’s New Era,” 57–58; Robert W. Young in Plural Society in the Southwest, ed. Spicer and Thompson, 186–87; Kelly, Navajo Indians, 50–88, 61–103; McCoy and Ruetten, Quest and Response, 302–8, 331; Larry W. Burt, Tribalism in Crisis, 11–12. 81. Thomas Biolsi, Organizing the Lakota: The Political Economy of the New Deal on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations (Tucson, 1992), 162–71, 182–4. 82. Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford M. Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin, 1983), 21– 23; New York Times, July 9, 1970, p. 1, col. 8, p. 18, cols. 4–6; December 3, 1970, p. 1, col. 4;

524

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92. 93.

Notes to Pages 357–361 Margaret Connell Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination, Since 1928 (Albuquerque, 1977), 198–201. On the long controversy over the Blue Lake and the surrounding 130,000 acres, which the government had included in National Forest reserves in 1908 without consulting the Taos Pueblo Indians, see New York Times, July 9, 1970, p. 1, col. 8; August 10, 1970, p. 28, col. 3; December 7, 1970, p. 48, col. 1; December 16, 1970, p. 25, col. 1; and John T. Whatley, “The Saga of Taos: Blue Lake,” Indian Historian 2 (fall 1969): 22–28. New York Times, January 19, 1983, sec. 1, p. 19, col. 3. Deloria and Lytle, American Indians, American Justice, 92–99. D’Arcy McNickle, They Came Here First: The Epic of the American Indian (Philadelphia, 1949), 292. Kenneth R. Philp, “Albert B. Fall and the Protest from the Pueblos, 1921–23,” Arizona and the West 12 (autumn 1970): 237–54; cf. John Collier, “Plundering the Pueblo Indians . . . ,” Sunset 50 (January 1923): 21–25, 56, and “The Pueblos’ Last Stand . . . ,” ibid. 50 (February 1923): 17–22, 65–66; Philp, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 27–54; Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque, 1983), 218, 220, 379–81; Whatley, “Saga of Taos Blue Lake,” 24–27. Accounts of the protests differ on Collier’s role. Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, The Jicarilla Apache Tribe: A History, 1846–1970 (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), 195, 197; (on Papagos) Kimball, Disconnected, 196; and (on Pueblos) Helen L. Peterson, “American Indian Political Participation,” Annals of the American Academy 311 (May 1957): 123, and Jack E. Holmes, Politics in New Mexico (Albuquerque, 1967), 197–98. Stephen W. Haycox, “Sheldon Jackson in Historical Perspective: Alaska Native Schools and Mission Contracts, 1885–1894,” Pacific Historian 28 (spring 1984): 22–23, 26; Haycox, “‘Races of a Questionable Ethnical Type’: Origins of the Jurisdiction of the U.S. Bureau of Education in Alaska, 1867–1885,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 75 (October 1984): 156–63. George W. Rogers, “‘Goodbye, Great White Father Figure,’ Pilot Not Commander, Essays in Memory of Diamond Jenness,” ed. Pat and Jim Lotz, Anthropologica 13, special issue (1971): 293. Philip Drucker, The Native Brotherhoods: Modern Intertribal Organizations on the Northwest Coast, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 168 (Washington, 1958), 38–47, 75–76; Alexander Mackay Ervin, “Civic Capacity and Transculturation: The Rise and Role of the Alaska Federation of Natives” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois–Urbana, 1974), 74 and passim; Stephen W. Haycox, “William Paul, Sr., and the Alaska Voters’ Literacy Act of 1925,” Alaska History 2 (winter 1986/87): 16–37; Who’s Who in Alaska Politics . . . 1884–1974, comp. Evangeline Atwood and Robert N. DeArmond (Portland, Ore., 1977), 47, 77; Ernest Gruening, The State of Alaska, rev. ed. (New York, 1968), 376–77. Indians voted at least from 1918 at Sitka. Ted C. Hinckley, Alaskan John C. Brady: Missionary Businessman, Judge, and Governor, 1878–1918 (Columbus, Ohio, 1982), 374 Philip Drucker, “Tlingit and Haida, Inc.: Success Story,” copy enclosed in Drucker to Clarence Jackson, Sr., President, Tlingit and Haida Central Council, April 19, 1976, copy of Stephen W. Haycox, University of Alaska; G. C. Anders in Struggle for the Land, ed. Olson, 129–30, 133–34, 140–41; Joseph G. Jorgensen, Oil Age Eskimos (Berkeley, 1990), 6–7, 14–16. Dan O’Neill, “H-Bombs and Eskimos,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85 (January 1994): 26–30. Szasz, Education and the American Indian, 107–9, 115.

Notes to Pages 361–365

525

94. Howard M. Bahr, “An End to Invisibility,” in Native Americans Today: Sociological Perspectives, ed. Howard M. Bahr, Bruce B. Chadwick, and Robert C. Day (New York, 1972), 409; Stephen Cornell, The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence (New York, 1988), 122, 131, 136–48; Joan Ablon, “Relocated American Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area: Social Interaction and Indian Identity,” Human Organization 23 (winter 1964): 296–304. 95. D’Arcy McNickle, “The Indian Tests the Mainstream,” Nation 203 (September 26, 1966): 275. 96. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom (New York, 1971), 67–68. The characterization of the NIYC is by Vine Deloria, Jr., in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York, 1969), 17. 97. F. Chris Garcia et al., in Politics and Public Policy in the Contemporary American West, ed. Clive S. Thomas (Albuquerque, 1991), 202–5. By the 1970s, however, some Native Americans had much more influence in municipal than in state government. Barsh and Henderson, Road, 252–53. In 1990 Oklahoma City led in numbers of Indians in western cities, but African Americans were nearly four times as many. 98. Many Indians who had moved to cities maintained legal residence on reservations while seldom concentrating in neighborhoods comparable to the parts of Oakland and Los Angeles that regularly elected black members of Congress and the state legislature. Alan L. Sorkin, The Urban American Indian (Lexington, Mass., 1978). While by 1990 the Indian population of Oklahoma was slightly over half urban, at 50.7 percent, unlike other minority populations most of that was in small towns and urban fringe areas, very little in large central cities. 99. Richard De Luca, “‘We Hold the Rock,’” California History 62 (spring 1983): 2–23. 100. Mary B. Isely et al., Uncommon Controversy: Fishing Rights of the Muckleshoot, Puyallup, and Nisqually Indians (Seattle, 1970), 107–10 and passim; New York Times, October 17, 1965, p. 72, col. 4; Laura McCloud in Josephy, Red Power, 99–104. 101. Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins, 273–75. On legal services programs and their applications, especially among Navajos and Papagos, see Robert C. Swan, “Indian Legal Services Programs: The Key to Red Power?” Arizona Law Review 12 (fall 1970): 594–626; on judicial remedies for incursions by states on Indian rights, Charles F. Wilkinson, “Cross-Jurisdictional Conflicts: An Analysis of Legitimate State Interests on Federal and Indian Lands,” UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 2 (spring 1982): 145–67. 102. Kirke Kickingbird, “An Editorial,” American Indian Journal 6 (January 1980): 2; Lynn Kickingbird and Curtis Burkey, “American Indian Treaties—Their Importance Today,” ibid. 1 (October 1975): 3. 103. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 25, 1990, p. A1, col. 1; Eugene Register-Guard, March 25, 1990, p. 4C, cols. 1–6. 104. Washington Post, December 9, 1990, p. A8, cols. 1–2. The states that had pioneered in electing Native American legislators were Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. 105. Congressional Quarterly’s Politics in America 1990: The 101st Congress (Washington, 1989), 242. 106. Prucha, Great Father 2:969–70; D’Arcy McNickle, Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals (New York, 1973), 156–59; Arthur Lazarus, Jr., and W. Richard West, Jr., “The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act: A Flawed Victory,” Law and Contemporary Problems 40 (winter 1976): 132–65; John Hanrahan and Peter Gruenstein, Lost Frontier: The Marketing of Alaska (New York, 1977), 95–96, 101, 118; Andrew L. Yarrow, “Alaska’s Natives Try a Taste of

526

107.

108.

109.

110.

111.

Notes to Pages 365–366 Capitalism,” New York Times Magazine, March 17, 1985, pp. 36, 51, 62–63; Gordon Scott Harrison, Electoral Behavior of Alaska Native Villages (Fairbanks, Alaska, 1970), 2–4. In sequence, Wyoming 1869; Utah 1870–87 and 1896; Colorado 1893; Idaho 1896; Washington 1910; California 1911; Arizona, Kansas, Oregon 1912; Alaska 1913; Montana, Nevada 1914; South Dakota, Oklahoma 1918. Congress overruled the territorial legislature of Utah in the EdmundsTucker Act (1887). Women had partial suffrage, extending to presidential elections, in North Dakota and Nebraska from 1917. They were delayed in three jurisdictions by technicalities: in Hawaii by a provision of the Organic Act reserving authority over suffrage to Congress (to 1918), in New Mexico by constitutional barriers to changes in suffrage designed to protect Mexican Americans, in North Dakota by complex procedure in amendment. Ida H. Harper, ed., The History of Woman Suffrage (n.p., 1922) 5:602, 715–16, 718, 720, 6:50, 201, 367, 389, 439, 502–3, 507, 529, 548, 594, 682; T. A. Larson, “Woman Suffrage in Wyoming,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 56 (April 1965): 57–66; Larson, “Woman Suffrage in Western America,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (winter 1970): 17–19; Larson, “Emancipating the West’s Dolls, Vassals and Hopeless Drudges: The Origins of Woman Suffrage in the West,” in Essays in Western History in Honor of Professor T. A. Larson, ed. Roger Daniels (Laramie, Wyo., 1971), 1–16; Robert W. Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 1846–1912 (Albuquerque, 1968), 279; Thomas G. Alexander, “An Experiment in Progressive Legislation: The Granting of Woman Suffrage in Utah in 1870,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (winter 1970): 20–30. Kansas from 1861, Nebraska 1869, Colorado 1876, Oregon 1878, the Dakotas 1879 (restricted 1883–87), Idaho 1885, Arizona and Montana 1887. Elizabeth C. Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester, N.Y., 1886), 3:663, 675, 708, 710, 775; Susan B. Anthony and Ida H. Harper, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (Rochester, N.Y., 1902), xvii, 474, 506, 543–44, 546. Alexander J. McKelway, quoted by Keith L. Bryant, Jr., “Kate Barnard, Organized Labor, and Social Justice in Oklahoma during the Progressive Era,” Journal of Southern History 35 (May 1969): 163 and passim, 145–64; cf. McKelway, “‘Kate’ the ‘Good Angel’ of Oklahoma,” American Magazine 66 (October 1908): 587–93. Within the intervening years, 1921–39, six other far western women had served full elective terms in the House of Representatives, four of them one term each; one, two terms; one, six terms. Emmy E. Werner, “Women in Congress: 1917–1964,” Western Political Quarterly 19 (March 1966): 16–30, does not distinguish between actual and nominal, honorary service. In 1941 six women served in the House from other states, three in the Senate. Western states had 22.8 percent of all seats in Congress in 1917–67; women members from those states (counted without regard for length of service) were 28.2 percent of all women members. Of the seven women who served throughout the Seventy-fourth Congress, 1941–43, three besides Miss Rankin had been first elected in their own rights rather than to fill out their husbands’ terms. In 1975 the all-male houses were in California (senate), Nevada (assembly), and Utah (senate); five had only one woman each. California had two female and three black U.S. representatives, three female and seven black legislators. Rutgers University Center for the American Woman and Politics, Women in Public Office: A Biographical Directory and Statistical Analysis (New York, 1976), xv–xvii; Joint Center for Political Studies, National Roster of Black Elected Officials (Washington, 1975), 5: xiii; New York Times, November 8, 1992, sec. 1, p. 18, col. 8; Eugene Register-Guard, November 19, 1992, p. 5A, col. 1; Karl T. Kartz, “The Election in Perspective,”

Notes to Pages 368–369

112.

113.

114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

527

State Legislatures 19 (January 1993): 16–17, 19. Women had been 12.1 percent of state legislators in 1981 (up from 4.3 percent in 1967, 5.2 percent in 1965, 8.1 percent in 1975), when the far western average was 13.6 percent. Although the five western states where women had full suffrage more than ten years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 1869–1910, included two that elected women at below-average rates, Utah and Idaho, those five averaged 16.6 percent, while the last five to grant suffrage (excluding Hawaii), 1918–1920, averaged 9.4 percent, with none above the national average (North Dakota close at 12.0). Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1982–1983 (Washington, 1983), 489; Book of the States, 1982–1983 24 (Lexington, Ky., 1982): 72. Irene Diamond, in Sex Roles in the State House (New Haven, 1977), 15, 20–23, attributes election of more women than sizes of legislatures might explain to the moralistic political cultures of some western states. Cf. Emmy E. Werner, “Women in State Legislatures,” Western Political Quarterly 21 (March 1968): 40–50. Secretary of State Rose Mofford became governor of Arizona in 1988 after the impeachment and conviction of Evan Mecham, serving until 1991. The other nonwesterners were Madeleine M. Kunin of Vermont, elected 1984, and Ann Richards of Texas, elected 1990. The western states were Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. Council of State Governments, State Legislative Leadership, Committees and Staff 1989–90 (Lexington, Ky., 1989), 135–50. A woman first served as speaker of a state assembly in 1933 (Minnie D. Craig of North Dakota, whom the Nonpartisan League had selected in caucus). New York Times, January 8, 1933, sec. 8, p. 2, col. 5. When a woman next became speaker, in 1982 (Patricia Kelly, again in North Dakota), the California assembly had had a black speaker (Willie L. Brown, Jr.) since 1980. Californians had elected a black lieutenant governor, Mervyn M. Dymally, in 1974. By the end of the century, when 69.7 percent of American public school teachers were women, percentages in most western states and territories were still higher (in California 82.2 percent), although general populations were predominantly male. Report of the Commissioner of Education . . . 1900 (Washington, 1901), 1:lxxii. Seventeen of fifty-seven. Women had been eligible for school offices since 1873. Anthony and Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, 4:506. Ibid., 4:551. Georgia Lee Lusk, representative 1947–49. Before serving as state superintendent (1931–35, 1943–47, and again in 1955–60) she had been a teacher and county superintendent. Nearly a third of those voting opposed the constitutional amendment adopted November 3, 1942. Directory and Manual of the State of Oklahoma (Oklahoma City, 1963), 212. McKelways, “‘Kate’ the ‘Good Angel,’” 590. Edith Copeland, in Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 1:91–92. Martin Groberg, Women in American Politics: An Assessment and Source Book (Oshkosh, Wis., 1968), 193–200. Women were state superintendents in at least five states in 1919–29 (seven in 1921–22); numbers dropped during the Depression with female employment on state and local payrolls generally (to one in 1936), then rose to five and six again between 1939 and 1950.Ibid., 193–200; National Women’s Political Caucus, National Directory of Women Elected Officials (Washington, 1991), 51–52; Mary Ritter Beard, Women’s Work in Municipalities (New York, 1915), 5. On displacement of women in schools of one state, see Courtney Ann Vaughn-Roberson, “Sometimes In-

528

123.

124.

125. 126.

127.

128. 129. 130.

Notes to Pages 370–372 dependent but Never Equal—Women Teachers, 1901–1950: The Oklahoma Example,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (February 1984): 39–58. For a table of changing salaries, see Edgar Fuller and Jim B. Pearson, eds., Education in the States; Nationwide Development (Washington, 1969), 102–3, and cf. 667–68. Monroe Billington, “Susanna Madora Salter—First Woman Mayor,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 21 (autumn 1954): 173–83; Lorraine A. Gehring, “Women Officeholders in Kansas, 1871–1912,” Kansas History 9 (summer 1986): 48–53; New York Times, April 7, 1887, p. 1 col. 7; July 1, 1986, p. A32, cols. 1–6. Mary W. Howard, “An Example of Women in Politics,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (winter 1970): 61. Women were both early and late politically in Utah. The legislature extended suffrage in 1870, the year after the legislature of Wyoming. Congress rescinded it in an attempt to curtail Mormon power by the Edmonds-Tucker Act (1887), but the state constitution restored it (1896), making Utah the third state with full female suffrage, and three women were elected to the first state legislature. Thomas G. Alexander, “An Experiment in Progressive Legislation: The Granting of Woman Suffrage in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (winter 1970): 20–30; Jean B. White, “Gentle Persuaders: Utah’s First Women Legislators,” ibid., 31–49. Reva Beck Bosone (Democrat, 1949–53) was one of the first women elected and reelected to Congress in their own right; an attorney, she had been a municipal judge. Discontent with the traditionally secondary roles of Mormon women became open in the 1970s and 1980s in controversies over the equal rights amendment. Mormon historians have noted political implications of women’s activity within the church and the dependence of Mormon society on the leadership of women whose husbands often were away from their families. Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago, 1981), 171–72; Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York, 1979), 220–40. Richard C. Berner, Seattle 1900–1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence, to Restoration (Seattle, 1991), 1:173–74. Doris H. Pieroth, “Bertha Knight Landes, the Woman Who Was Mayor,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 75 (July 1984): 120–21; National Municipal Review 15 (April 1926): 188; Sandra Haarsager, Bertha Knight Landes of Seattle, Big-City Mayor (Norman, Okla., 1994). Ganvyl G. Hulse, “Mayor Landes Defeated for Reelection,” National Municipal Review 17 (May 1928): 311; Richard C. Berner, Seattle, 1921–1040: From Boom to Bust (Seattle, 1992), 2:103–9. “The chivalry of the great open spaces seems, like the rest of our better instincts, to sustain itself only by occasional reversions to more primitive social attitudes,” another reporter observed. Julia N. Budlong, “What Happened in Seattle,” Nation 127 (29 August 1928): 197. Portland Oregonian, June 9, 1948, sec. 2, p. 5, col. 1. Belle Cooledge (1948–50). New York Times, February 17, 1948, p. 2, cols. 3, 8; “Two West Coast Cities Elect Women as Mayors,” American City 63 (July 1948): 7. Maurine Neuberger in New York Times, November 21, 1948, sec. 6, p. 33, col. 2, p. 34, col. 3. Mrs. Neuberger (senator 1960–67) was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1950. Oregon Voter 108 (May 15, 1948): 10, cited by Paul C. Pitzer, “Dorothy McCullough Lee: The Successes and Failures of ‘Dottie-Do-Good,’” Oregon Historical Quarterly 90 (spring 1990): 14; Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth Century City (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), 155–59; editorial in Portland Oregon Daily Journal, November 7, 1952, p. 20, col. 1; advertisement, “Why We Need a Man for Mayor,” Portland Oregonian, May 13, 1952, sec. 2, p. 2,

Notes to Pages 372–373

131. 132. 133.

134. 135.

136. 137.

138.

139.

140. 141.

529

cols. 6–7; February 20, 1981, p. C1, cols. 1–2; Richard L. Neuberger, Adventures in Politics: We Go to the Legislature (New York, 1954), 191. Yet Portlanders had elected a woman to Congress in 1936 and shortly elected another (Edith S. Green) ten times, 1954–72. Janet Gray Hayes (1975–82). New York Times, November 7, 1974, p. 32, col. 1; Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (Tucson, 1993), 112. Twenty of the total of thirty-seven in the West were in California. Municipal Year Book, 1978 (Washington, 1978), 249–353. Margaret T. Hance was mayor of Phoenix, 1976–84. Ross noted that rates of divorces varied with ratios of the sexes but without considering whether to attribute them to the status and temper of women who asked for them rather than the tolerance of male judges and legislators who sanctioned them: “fairness to women seems to be a Western practice that spreads East.” Ross, “The Middle West . . . The Fiber of the People,” Century Magazine 83 (February 1912): 615. He also did not take into account movements for political participation by women in other states, which then were already active in New England, where throughout the century percentages of females were distinctively high: in 1900 and 1910 highest, in 1990 second only to the East South Central division, where political participation by women developed slowly. Twelfth Census of the United States: 1910, Population 1910 (Washington, 1912), 1:252; 1990 Census of Population, General Population Characteristics, United States, 1990 CP-1–1 (Washington, 1992), 321. Maitreyi Mazumdar, “Alice’s Restaurant: Expanding Woman’s Sphere,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 70 (fall 1992): 302–3, 316. Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends (New York, 1933), 742. The author of the monograph on women was Sophonisba P. Breckinridge of the University of Chicago. J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 157– 58. More British than Scandinavian names and few German names appear in the part of an account of women in the Nonpartisan League in North Dakota concerning early suffragist activity; in the entire account, Scandinavian names lead. Pearl Andre, ed., Women on the Move (Bismarck, 1975). Cf. Burton W. Folsom, Jr., “Immigrant Voters and the Nonpartisan League in Nebraska, 1917–1920,” Great Plains Quarterly 1 (summer 1981): 159–68. On German American opposition to suffrage, associated with brewers, see Patricia O’Keefe Eaton, “Woman Suffrage in South Dakota; The Final Decade, 1911–1920,” South Dakota History 13 (fall 1983): 207–8, 218; Dorinda R. Reed, The Woman Suffrage Movement in South Dakota (Vermillion, S.D., 1958), 33–34, 69, 72, 95; Jonathan F. Wagner, “Prohibition and North Dakota’s Germans,” North Dakota History 56 (summer 1989): 31–39. On the view that the fears of suffragists expressed the “Puritan ethic,” see Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage (New York, 1967). William F. Ogburn and Delvin Peterson, “Political Thought of Social Classes,” Political Science Quarterly 31 (June 1916): 307–9; Ruth B. Moynihan, Rebel for Rights: Abigail Scott Duniway (New Haven, 1983); G. Thomas Edwards, Sowing Good Seeds: The Northwest Suffrage Campaigns of Susan B. Anthony (Portland, Ore., 1990), 204. Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York, 1979), 407–8. Louis Levine, “Politics in Montana,” Nation 107 (November 2, 1918): 507.

530

Notes to Pages 373–381

142. Ellis L. Waldron, Montana Politics since 1864: An Atlas of Elections (Missoula, 1958), 153, 168. 143. Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920 (Urbana, Ill., 1981), 108–9, 230–31, 304; Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (New York, 1952), 152, 261–62, 353; John Spargo, “Women and the Socialist Movement,” International Socialist Review 8 (February 1908): 449–55. 144. Peter H. Argersinger, “Ideology and Behavior: Legislative Politics and Western Populism,” Agricultural History 58 (January 1984): 45–46. 145. Mrs. Peters, who attended her first suffrage convention in 1871 and lobbied for the suffrage bill that passed the Washington legislature in 1896, had been active in the anti-Chinese agitation of the Knights in the 1880s; her son and nephews published the Seattle Daily Call, the unofficial organ of the Knights in the Northwest. Barbara Cloud, “Laura Hall Peters: Pursuing the Myth of Equality,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 74 (January 1983): 31–35. 146. Norman H. Clark, Washington: A Bicentennial History (New York, 1976), 89. 147. Benjamin H. Kizer, “May Arkwright Hutton,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 67 (April 1966): 55. The leaders of the WESA may have underestimated their fellow clubwomen, some of whom proved to be effective in reaching workingmen when Mrs. Hutton recruited them. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn later recalled how members of the garden clubs of Spokane had helped her in her complaints against conditions in the local jail during the free-speech demonstrations of November 1909. Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece: Autobiography of “the Rebel Girl” (New York, 1955), 95–100. 148. “Black Women in Politics,” National Roster of Black Elected Officials 6 (1976): xxiii, xlviii. By 1979 one-fifth of black elected officials nationally were women. Michael B. Preston et al., eds., The New Black Politics: The Search for Political Power (New York, 1982), 98. The interest of black and Mexican parents in their children’s education drew members of both communities into politics; the traditional prestige of black educators, as of black clergymen, may explain the apparently high political potential for experience in educational administration. In California and Oklahoma, the states with the largest black populations, school administrators were 26.0 percent and 38.0 percent of all black elected officials. Women comprised half of the eight black legislators in California in 1979–80 but only 6.3 percent of other legislators. National Roster of Black Elected Officials, 9:x–xi, xx–xxi. 149. Marlene Dixon, “On Women’s Liberation,” Radical American 4 (February 1970): 30–31; cf. Nora Sayre, “Politics,” Esquire 72 (December 1969): 118, 122. 150. Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New York, 1982), xiv–xv. 151. Hubert Howe Bancroft, Retrospection, Political and Personal (New York, 1912), 496.

CHAPTER 12. FRONTIERS OF LAND AND OPPORTUNITY: THE VARIOUSLY FAR WEST 1. James F. Hamburg, The Influence of Railroads upon the Processes and Patterns of Settlement in South Dakota (New York, 1981), 3–4, 7. 2. Val Kuska, who became colonization agent for the Burlington lines at Omaha in 1922, retired only in 1957. Lincoln Star, March 6, 1957, p. 16.

Notes to Pages 381–391

531

3. The Middle West as the eight states between the Ohio and Missouri rivers, the Old Northwest with Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri; the South as the south Atlantic and south central divisions without Oklahoma, a total of fifteen states and the District of Columbia. The margin between the South so defined and the eighteen states of the Far West, 42 percent in 1970 and 33 percent in 1994, was projected as 29.6 percent in 2000. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1995 (Washington, 1995), 34. 4. Seymour Dunbar, A History of Travel in America . . . (Indianapolis, 1915), 4:1120. 5. William F. Ogburn, “Urban Resemblances and Regional Differences,” Public Management 18 (July 1936): 203. 6. Gerald Carson, The Old Country Store (New York, 1954), 169. 7. H. Roger Grant, “Small-Town Railroad Stations on the Upper Plains: A Pictorial Essay,” Midwest Review, 2d ser., 1 (spring 1979): 35–38. 8. By 1980 airlines carried four times as much in passenger miles as railroads had carried when they broke all previous records during the war (1944), by 1994 eight times. Statistical Abstract, 1994 (Washington, 1994), 626; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 729, 769. 9. Federal Aviation Administration, Airport Activity Statistics of Certificated Route Air Carriers 12 Months Ended December 31, 1993 (Washington, 1994), 2–1, 2–2, 3–1, 3–2. 10. City and County Data Book 1994 (Washington, 1994), 67. 11. Figured from averages for 1900–1904, 1920–29, and 1990–94. Wide fluctuations in harvests complicate comparisons. 12. Mark S. Henry, North Dakota Gross State Product: 1960–1973, North Dakota Economic Studies, no. 12 (Grand Forks, 1975), 25. 13. 1997 Census of Agriculture, Geographic Area Series, vol. 1, pt. 51 (Washington, 1989), 145, 147, 148. 14. Ibid., 144, 149. 15. When the Ford Motor Company began moving headquarters of the Lincoln-Mercury division to Irvine, California, in 1998, personnel transferred were in sales, marketing, and vehicle development only, leaving those in manufacturing and design in Detroit. New York Times, January 23, 1998, p. C3, cols. 1–6. 16. Isaiah Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe (New York, 1931), 93–110. Cf. Harold L. Davis, “A Town in Eastern Oregon,” American Mercury 19 (January 1930): 75–83, and “Back to the Land—Oregon 1907,” ibid. 16 (March 1929): 314–23. Bend itself grew far more between 1910, when the railroad reached it, and 1931, when the line went on to California, than afterward, though Deschutes County became the fastest growing county in the state in the 1970s. 17. 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population, A, Number of Inhabitants, pt. 1, United States Summary, PC 80–1–A1 (Washington, 1983), 65–90. 18. Alaska (21 of 25 boroughs and census areas), Montana (46 of 56), Nevada (12 of 16 plus one independent city), North Dakota (36 of 53), South Dakota (35 of 66), Utah (15 of 29), and Wyoming (18 of 23). Variants of language referring to areas of low density occur in reports published 1874– 1903, although the term “frontier line of settlement” only 1874–83. Statistical Atlas, Twelfth Census of the United States: 1900 (Washington, 1903), 26. 19. Frank J. Popper and Deborah E. Popper, “Great Plains: Checkered Past, Hopeful Future,” Forum

532

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

Notes to Pages 391–396 for Applied Research and Public Policy 9 (winter 1994): 90–1; Doug Coffman, Charles Jonkel, and Robert Scott, “The Big Open: A Return to Grazers of the Past,” Western Wildlands 16 (fall 1990): 40–44. The extremes in rates of net migration per 1,000 population after 1870 by single decades had been from 1,320 for Dakota in 1870–80 and 909 for Oklahoma in 1890–1900 to −395 for Nevada in 1880–90, −209 for North Dakota in 1940–50. Hope T. Eldridge and Dorothy S. Thomas, Demographic Analyses and Interrelations, vol. 3 of Population Redistribution and Economic Growth: United States, 1870–1950, ed. Simon S. Kuznets and Dorothy S. Thomas (Philadelphia, 1964), 39, 247. The largest gain in absolute net migration in 1870–1900 was 501,300 for Oklahoma in 1890–1900, after 1900, 2,573,100 for California in 1950–60; the largest loss was −356,100 for Oklahoma in 1940–50. Historical Statistics, 1:93. North Dakota grew by 67.1 percent in 1890– 1900, 80 percent in 1900–1910; it lost population in 1930–50 and 1960–70. The excess of emigrants over immigrants, beginning in 1910–20, was progressively greater in each decade until 1950; net emigration in 1920–60 was about twice as great as net migration in 1890–1910. Jon Margolis, “The Reopening of the Frontier,” New York Times Magazine, October 15, 1995, pp. 52, 54. Robert P. Wilkins and Wynona Huchette Wilkins, North Dakota: A Bicentennial History (New York, 1977), 195–96. Richard R. Lingeman, Small Town America: A Narrative History, 1620—The Present (Boston, 1981), 443, 456–57; New York Times, February 14, 1971, p. 1, cols. 3–6, p. 68, cols. 2–7. Cities on and near the coast were five of the ten largest in the eighteen states and territories in 1900, seven of ten by 1940 and through 1990; Honolulu joined them in both 1900 and 1950. As late as 1970 the ten barely included Omaha, principal railroad junction and gateway on their eastern boundary, which had been third in 1900. The coastal counties grew by 45.6 percent between 1970 and 1990, from 53.6 percent to 54.3 percent of regional population. Estimated populations for 1994 represented 47.9 percent and 13.4 percent of the total for the eighteen states, projected populations for 2000, 56.7 percent and 12.7 percent. Statistical Abstract, 1995 (Washington, 1995), 28, 34. Michael I. Luger and Harvey A. Goldstein, Technology in the Garden: Research Parks and Regional Economic Development (Chapel Hill, 1991), 23–26, 83, 108, 175. Sven Ileris, The Service Economy: A Geographical Approach (New York, 1996), 128, 131. New York Times, March 24, 1997, pp. C1, cols. 2–5, and C6, cols. 1–4; March 31, 1997, p. C5, cols. 4–6. San Diego Union-Tribune, April 29, 1993, pp. B1, B3, B10, B12; May 8, 1994, p. A2. Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1996, pp. B6–7. New York Times, December 8, 1997, p. C1, cols. 2–4, and C15, cols. 1–6 New York Times, November 18, 1997, p. C12. Donald W. Meinig, “American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62 (June 1972): 160 and passim; Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History: Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, 1993), 2:425. Thus net income per farm in North Dakota in 1973 was third highest in the United States as well as in the West, at $35,692, after Arizona and California only; in 1977, at $2949, it was third lowest in the West, above income in Oklahoma and Wyoming only, but in 1987 it rose to $22,200.

Notes to Pages 397–402

533

35. In 1899–1909, when total irrigated acreage in California nearly doubled, average sizes of farms were declining; irrigated acreage per farm averaged less than half as much as in 1994. Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Agriculture 1909 and 1910, Alabama-Montana (Washington, 1913), 6:171–2; 1992 Census of Agriculture, vol. 6, pt. 1, Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey (Washington, 1996), 121. 36. On correlation nationally 1863–90, see Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, 1968), 402. 37. James E. Boyle, “Notes from an Agricultural Field Trip across North Dakota,” Quarterly Journal, University of North Dakota 7 (spring 1917): 177–78. 38. Percentages of foreign- and native-born rural farm populations in North Dakota were 3.7 percent and 9.5 percent, in South Dakota 3.4 and 11.0, 1990 Census of Population, Social and Economic Characteristics, South Dakota (Washington, 1993), 31; ibid., North Dakota (Washington, 1993), 34, 59. 39. Vance Youmans, “The Establishment of the Spokane Hutterian Brethren,” Pacific Northwest Forum, 2d ser., 6 (summer–fall 1993): 15–27. 40. Gallatin Canyon Study Team, Impacts of Large Recreational Development upon Semi-Primitive Environments: The Gallatin Canyon Synthesis Report (Bozeman, 1976), vi, 15, 19, 21. 41. Bernard DeVoto, “Let’s Close the National Parks,” Harper’s Magazine 207 (October 1953): 49– 52. 42. Margolis, “Reopening of the Frontier,” 57. 43. Patrick Malone, “Butte: Cultural Treasure in a Mining Town,” Montana 47 (winter 1997): 58– 67. 44. San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 1991, sec. A, p. 6, cols. 1–6. 45. Ted Conover, Whiteout: Lost in Aspen (New York, 1991), 117; Sidney Hyman, The Aspen Idea (Norman, Okla., 1975), 81–88, 97; James S. Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago, 1983), 113–204, 284–89; Sam Moses, “The Land of Peter Pan,” Sports Illustrated 47 (October 10, 1977): 35–36. 46. New York Times, January 3, 1998, p. A8, cols. 1–4. 47. Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830– 1900 (Lincoln, Neb., 1966), 347. 48. Gallatin Canyon Study Team, Gallatin Canyon Synthesis Report, 27, 32. 49. Tina Torgrimson, A Perspective on Subdivision Activity in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley ([Boulder], 1973), 3. 50. Jack Lessinger, Penturbia: Where Real Estate Will Boom after the Crash of Suburbia (Seattle, 1991).

This page intentionally left blank

Supplemental Bibliography David M. Wrobel

A short list of works is provided below to accompany Earl Pomeroy’s chapter notes. The works included here are for the most part more recent publications, that is, from the 1990s and 2000s. These supplemental bibliographies are not intended to be comprehensive, but used in conjunction with Pomeroy’s notes, they should provide a good sense of both the foundational and the current scholarship in the various subfields of twentieth-century western history. Many of the works listed here are pertinent to more than one chapter of Pomeroy’s book; however, each source is cited only once and in the chapter where its content is the most obvious fit. The opening section—the preface and chapter 1—includes a significant number of influential textbooks, anthologies, and historiographical works that have charted the course of the field of western history since the advent of the New Western History in the late 1980s. These works demonstrate the great degree to which scholars of the West have turned their attention to the twentieth century during the last two decades. A good number of these books address directly the state of the West at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century, the subject of Pomeroy’s opening chapter.

PREFACE AND CHAPTER ONE: THE WEST IN 1901 Anderson, Gary Clayton, and Kathleen Chamberlain. Power and Promise: The Changing American West. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Armitage, Susan, and Elizabeth A. Jameson, eds. The Women’s West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Bakken, Gordon Morris, ed. Law in the Western United States. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Butler, Anne M., and Michael J. Lansing.The American West: A Concise History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin. eds. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

535

536

Supplemental Bibliography

Deverell, William. A Companion to the American West. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Deverell, William, and Anne F. Hyde. The West in the History of the Nation. Vol. 2: Since 1865. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. Etulain, Richard W. Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. >. Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of History, Fiction, and Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. >, ed. Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians. 1991; Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. Etulain, Richard W. and Michael P. Malone. The American West: A Modern History, 1900 to the Present. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Etulain, Richard W., et al., eds. The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Bibliography. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Hine, Robert, and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. >. Frontiers: A Short History of the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Jameson, Elizabeth, and Susan Armitage, eds. Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Klein, Kerwin Lee. Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Lamar, Howard R. The New Encyclopedia of the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987, 2006. >. Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Limerick, Patricia, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles Rankin, eds. Trails: Toward a New Western History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991. Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 4: Global America, 1915–2000. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Milner, Clyde A., II, ed. A New Significance: Re-Envisioning the History of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Milner, Clyde A., II, Anne M. Butler, and David Rich Lewis, eds. Major Problems in the History of the American West. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Milner, Clyde A., II, Martha Sandweiss, and Carol O’Connor, eds. The Oxford History of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Nash, Gerald D. A Brief History of the American West Since 1945. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2000. >. Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

Supplemental Bibliography

537

Nash, Gerald D., and Richard W. Etulain, eds. The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. >. Researching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Nugent, Walter. Into the West: The Story of Its People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Nugent, Walter, and Martin Ridge. The American West: The Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Philips, Charles, and Alan Axelrod et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the American West, 4 vols. New York: Simon and Schuster–Macmillan, 1996. Robbins, William G., and James C. Foster., eds. Land in the American West: Private Claims and the Common Good. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Schackel, Sandra K., ed. Western Women’s Lives: Continuity and Change in the Twentieth Century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Schlissel, Lillian, and Catherine Lavender, eds. The Western Women’s Reader. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. Walsh, Margaret. The American West: Visions and Revisions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. White, Richard, and John M. Findlay, eds. Power and Place in the North American West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Wrobel, David, ed. “Forum: The American West Enters the Twenty-First Century: Appraisals on the State of a Field.” Historian 66 (fall 2004): 437–564.

CHAPTER TWO: AGRICULTURAL FRONTIERS: NEW FARMS AND FAMILY FARMERS Baron, Hal S. Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870– 1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Fiege, Mark. Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. Hurt, R. Douglas. Problems of Plenty: The American Farmer in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2002. Jordan, Terry G. North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Knobloch, Frieda. The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Merrill, Karen. Public Lands and Political Meaning: Ranchers, the Government, and the Property between Them. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Nelson, Paula M. After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900–1917. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Opie, John. The Law of the Land: Two Hundred Years of American Farmland Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

538

Supplemental Bibliography

Raban, Jonathan. Bad Land: An American Romance. New York: Random House, 1996. Riley, Glenda. Taking Land, Breaking Land: Women Colonizing the American West and Kenya, 1840–1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Schlissel, Lillian, Vicki Ruiz, and Janice Monks, eds. Western Women, Their Land, Their Lives. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Starrs, Paul F. Let the Cowboy Ride: Cattle Ranching in the American West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Street, Richard Steven. Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.

CHAPTER THREE: AGRICULTURAL FRONTIERS: FARMING ON NEW SCALES Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Fite, Gilbert C. American Farmers: The New Minority. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Hundley, Norris, Jr. The Great Thirst: Californians and Water: A History. Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Hurt, R. Douglas, ed. The Rural West since World War II. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Matsumoto, Valerie. Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Pisani, Donald. From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850–1931. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. >. Water and the American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1913. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Reisner, Mark. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New York: Viking Press, 1986. Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. >. Rivers of Empire: Nature, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. >. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

CHAPTER FOUR: NEW FORMS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH Cox, Thomas R., et al. This Well-Wooded Land: Americans and Their Forests from Colonial Times to the Present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Supplemental Bibliography

539

Emmons, David. The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1873– 1925. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Gardner, A. Dudley, and Verla R. Flores. Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mining. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. Mexican American Labor, 1790–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Igler, David. Industrial Cowboys: Miller and Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Jameson, Elizabeth. All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Lowitt, Richard. The New Deal and the West. Repr. ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Lukas, J. Anthony. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Malone, Michael P. James J. Hill: Empire Builder of the Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Orsi, Richard. Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Peck, Gunther. Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Righter, Robert. Wind Energy in America: A History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Robbins, William G. American Forestry: A History of National, State, and Private Cooperation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985. >. Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994. Scamehorn, H. Lee. High Altitude Energy: A History of Fossil Fuels in Colorado. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002. Smith, Duane. Mining America: Industry and the Environment, 1800–1980. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987.

CHAPTER FIVE: ECONOMIC GROWTH FROM THE 1940S Fernlund, Kevin J., ed. The Cold War American West, 1945–1989. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Foster, Mark S. Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. Gluck, Sherna Berger. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. Gómez, Arthur R. Quest for the Golden Circle: The Four Corners and the Metropolitan West. 1994; Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Hunner, Jon. Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004.

540

Supplemental Bibliography

Johnson, Marilynn S. The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Lotchin, Roger. The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. >. Fortress California, 1910–1961: From Warfare to Welfare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. >. The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Nash, Gerald D. The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. O’Mara, Margaret Pugh. Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Rich, Laura. The Accidental Zillionaire: Demystifying Paul Allen. New York: Wiley, 2002. Riebsame, William, et al., eds. The Atlas of the New West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Rogers, Everett M., and Judith K. Larsen. Silicon Valley Fever: Growth of High Technology Culture. New York; Basic Books, 1984. Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage, 1994. Szasz, Ferenc M. The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Titus, A. Constandina. Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics. 2nd ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. Travis, William R. New Geographies of the American West: Land Use and the Changing Patterns of Place. Washington: Island Press, 2007. Wallace, James. Overdrive [history of early computers]. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997. Wallace, James, and Jim Erickson. Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. New York: Wiley, 1993. Whitehead, John S. Completing the Union: Alaska, Hawaii, and the Battle for Statehood. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.

CHAPTER SIX: THE URBAN OCCUPATION OF THE WEST: RAILS, ROADS, AND CITIES Brechin, Gray. Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Brosnan, Kathleen. Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Deverell, William. Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. >. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Deverell, William, and Greg Hise. Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2005.

Supplemental Bibliography

541

Fixico, Donald. The Urban Indian Experience in America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Flamming, Douglas. Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Hise, Greg. Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Issel, William, and Robert W. Cherny. San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. Kropp, Phoebe S. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Moehring, Eugene. Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840–1890. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004. Mulholland, Catherine. William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Nicolaides, Becky M. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Schwantes, Carlos. Going Places: Transportation Redefines the Twentieth-Century West. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Sitton, Tom, and William Deverell, eds. Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Wild, Mark. Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.

CHAPTER SEVEN: RAILS, ROADS, AND CITIES FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR Abbott, Carl. The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993. Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 1990. >. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Findlay, John. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Foster, Mark S. A Nation on Wheels: The Automobile Culture in America since 1945. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thompson, 2003. Fulton, William. The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Garreau, Joel. Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontiers: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

542

Supplemental Bibliography

Moehring, Eugene. Resort City in the Sunbelt: Las Vegas, 1930–2000. 2nd ed. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000. Rothman, Hal. Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sides, Josh. LA City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

CHAPTER EIGHT: SOCIAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL ATTITUDES: CULTURAL BASES Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Alexander, Thomas G. Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890– 1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Broussard, Albert. Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900– 1954. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Camarillo, Albert. Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Chan, Sucheng, et al., eds. Peoples of Color in the American West. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1994. Connell Szasz, Margaret. Education and the American Indian: The Road to SelfDetermination Since 1928. 3rd ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Deloria, Philip, and Neal Salisbury, eds. A Companion to Indian History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Edmunds, R. David, ed. The New Warriors: Native American Leaders since 1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Fixico, Donald L., ed. Rethinking American Indian History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. Roots of Chicano Politics, 1600–1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Hayashi, Brian Masaru. Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Hoxie, Frederick E. Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805–1935. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hurtado, Albert L., and Peter Iverson, eds. Major Problems in American Indian History. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Knack, Martha C. Boundaries Between: The Southern Paiutes, 1775–1995. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Supplemental Bibliography

543

Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Martínez, Oscar J. Mexican-Origin People in the United States: A Topical History. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Matsumoto, Valerie J., and Blake Allmendinger, eds. Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Ngai, Mai. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Authority in the Modern West, 1874–1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Rawls, James J. Chief Red Fox Is Dead: A History of Native Americans since 1945. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996. Ruiz, Vicki. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sánchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Smith, Sherry. Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Szasz, Ferenc Morton. Religion in the Modern American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Taylor, Quintard. The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District, from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. >. In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the West, 1528–1900. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Truett, Samuel. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Vargas, Zaragosa, ed. Major Problems in Mexican American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Yoo, David. Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924–1949. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.

CHAPTER NINE: SOCIAL RELATIONS AND SOCIAL ATTITUDES: PUTTING DOWN ROOTS— AGENCIES OF ACCULTURATION Barringer, Mark Daniel. Selling Yellowstone: Capitalism and the Construction of Nature. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. Bryant, Keith. Culture in the American Southwest: The Earth, the Sky, the People. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2001.

544

Supplemental Bibliography

Burnham, Philip. Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the National Parks. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000. Coleman, Annie Gilbert. Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. DeBuys, William. Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985. Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Emmons, David. “Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West,” and “A Roundtable: Six Responses to ‘Constructed Province and a Final Statement by the Author.’” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (winter 1994): 434–449, 461– 486. Flores, Dan. Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. >. The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. Goetzmann, William H., and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Hausladen, Gary, ed. Western Places, American Myths: How We Think about the West. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003. Hyde, Anne F. An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820– 1920. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Jacoby, Karl. Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Johnson, Michael L. Hunger for the Wild: America’s Obsession with the Untamed West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. >. New Westers: The West in Contemporary American Culture. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Keller, Robert H., and Michael F. Turek. American Indians and the National Parks. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Louter, David. Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Luebke, Frederick, ed. European Immigrants in the American West: Community Histories. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Magoc, Chris J. Yellowstone: The Creation and Selling of an American Landscape, 1870– 1903. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. McClelland, Linda Flint. Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Morrissey, Katherine G. Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Murphy, Mary. Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914–1941. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Supplemental Bibliography

545

Nicholas, Liza, Elaine M. Bapis, and Thomas J. Harvey, eds. Imagining the Big Open: Nature, Identity, and Play in the New West. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003. Raftery, Judith Rosenberg. Land of Fair Promise: Politics and Reform in Los Angeles Schools, 1885–1941. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Righter, Robert. The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Rise of Modern Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Robbins, William G. Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1880–1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Rothman, Hal. Blazing Heritage: A History of Wildland Fire in the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Runte, Alfred. The National Parks: The American Experience. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Scharff, Virginia. Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Schneiders, Robert Kelley. Big Sky Rivers: The Yellowstone and Upper Missouri. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. Schullery, Paul. Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness. 1997; Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2004. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Steinberg, Ted. Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Truettner, William H., ed. The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Warren, Louis. The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Wilson, Chris. The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Wrobel, David M. Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. Wrobel, David M., and Michael C. Steiner, eds. Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

CHAPTER TEN: WESTERN POLITICS Dallek, Robert. Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Deverell, William, and Tom Sitton, eds. California Progressivism Revisited. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. DuBois, Ellen, and Robert W. Cherny, eds. “Women Suffrage: The View from the Pacific.” Special Issue. Pacific Historical Review 69 (November 2000): 537–616. Goldberg, Robert Alan. Barry Goldwater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

546

Supplemental Bibliography

Johnston, Robert D. The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Lay, Shawn, ed. The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Lowitt, Richard, ed. Politics in the Postwar American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. New York: Free Press, 2003. McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Rise of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Mead, Rebecca J. How the Vote Was Won: Women Suffrage in the Western United States, 1865–1914. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Sitton, Tom. John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Starr, Kevin. The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. >. Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. >. Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Stratton, David. Tempest over Teapot Dome: The Story of Albert B. Fall. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Thomas, Clive S., ed. Politics and Public Policy in the Contemporary American West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: EXPANDING ELECTORATES Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. 5th ed. New York: Pearson and Longman, 2004. Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. Fixico, Donald L. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. Fowler, Loretta. Tribal Sovereignty and the Historical Imagination: Cheyenne-Arapahoe Politics. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Friday, Chris. Organizing Asian American Labor: The Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, 1870–1942. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Gutiérrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. >, ed. The Columbia History of Latinos in the United States, 1960–Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Supplemental Bibliography

547

Iverson, Peter. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. >. “We Are Still Here”: American Indians in the Twentieth Century. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1998. Monroy, Douglas. Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Philp, Kenneth R. Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to SelfDetermination, 1933–1953. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pulido, Laura. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Ruiz, Vicki. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1900–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Starr, Kevin. Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Wei, William. The Asian American Movement. Repr. ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Whittaker, Matthew C. Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Wiese, Andrew. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Wunder, John R. Native Americans and the Law: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on American Indian Rights, Freedoms, and Sovereignty. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

CHAPTER TWELVE: FRONTIERS OF LAND AND OPPORTUNITY: THE VARIOUSLY FAR WEST Carr, Ethan. Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Cronon, William, ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Duncan, Dayton. Miles from Nowhere: Tales from the Contemporary American Frontier. New York: Viking, 1993. Egan, Timothy. Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Etulain, Richard W., and Ferenc M. Szasz, eds. The American West in 2000: Essays in Honor of Gerald D. Nash. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Farmer, Jared. Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and the Canyon Country. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Harvey, Mark. A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

548

Supplemental Bibliography

Kaplan, Robert D. An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future. New York: Random House, 1998. Kirk, Andrew G. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Rothman, Hal K. The Culture of Tourism, the Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. >. Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. Sellars, Richard West. Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Shabecoff, Philip. A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Shaffer, Marguerite P. See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Sutter, Paul S. Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Taylor, Joseph E., III. Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. White, Richard. The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. Wrobel, David M., and Patrick T. Long. Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.

index

Page numbers in italics refer to maps and photographs. Adams, Alva, 331 Aeronautics. See Aircraft industry; Airplanes and air service Aerospace technology, 134–35, 147, 393 AFL-CIO, 337, 347 African Americans: and Black Panther Party, 251, 351–54, 374; in California, 211, 222, 347, 350–54, 492n106, 492n108, 520n24, 521n44; discrimination against, 250–51, 350; education of, 250, 285, 350; as elected officeholders, 352–54, 522n63, 527n113, 530n148; employment of, 250, 492n108; map of, 227; photograph of, 249; and politics, 347, 350–54; population of, 248–49, 520– 21n42; and race riots in Los Angeles, 190, 251, 351–52; women officeholders as, 374, 530n148 Agricultural cooperatives, 64–65, 258 Agriculture: cotton production, 76–78; dry farming, 26, 35–36, 396; economics of, 396–97; and farm loans, 51, 423n196; and farm-mortgage debt, 66, 68–69; and foreclosures on farms, 66; fruit production, 12–14, 37, 49, 59, 63, 65, 67, 72–73, 141, 179–80, 198, 209, 212, 407n30, 416n105; Hill’s (James J.) promotion of,

549

20–21, 27, 155; and hired laborers, 231– 33; income of farmers, 69, 183, 468n128, 532n34; and Japanese immigrants, 41–46, 240–41; labor force statistics for, 9–10, 23, 78–79, 81, 82, 409n14, 451n35; and labor unions, 65, 259, 260–61, 345, 347; large-scale farming after World War I, 58–64, 81–82; map of, 54; markets for agricultural products, 387–88; mechanization of, 77–78, 80–81, 397; nineteenth-century statistics on, 5, 23, 408n46, 409n15, 410n17; nonresident farm operators and laborers, 67–68, 81, 82, 176, 181, 182; photograph of, 8, 43, 57;. politics and farmers, 321–26; prices of farmland, 18, 24, 62; and railroads, 10, 12–14, 19, 20–21, 36, 62–63, 153, 155, 166–67, 172, 380, 386–87; rice production, 75–76; statistics on farmland, 23– 24, 60, 410n17, 410n19; and tenancy, 10, 229, 230, 233, 484n13, 484n17, 485n20; and tractors and combine harvesters, 53–57, 57, 61; twentieth-century statistics on, 62, 81, 82, 83, 88, 391, 409n9, 409–10n15, 427n53; vegetable production, 63, 64, 141, 428n59, 428n63; wheat production, 8–9, 13, 21, 23, 24, 34–35,

550

Index

Agriculture (continued) 58–62, 66–68, 83, 141, 230–33, 292, 387–88, 407n30, 485n22. See also Irrigation; Truck farming; and specific states Agriculture Department, U.S., 55, 60, 75, 77, 79, 88, 187, 229, 325 AIM (American Indian Movement), 357, 358, 363 Air Force, U.S., 134, 135, 164 Air-conditioning, 101, 222, 296 Aircraft industry, 120–23, 133–35, 141, 146, 148, 261, 384, 393. See also Airplanes and air service Airplanes and air service, 191–95, 204–5, 266, 383, 396. See also Aircraft industry Airports, 191, 194, 195, 197, 385 Alaska: agriculture in, 83, 410n15, 437– 38n188; air service in, 192–94, 266; cities and towns in, 162–65; copper mining in, 94, 98, 305; earthquake (1964) in, 297; and education, 283, 501n57, 503n73; food prices in, 297; gold mining in, 7, 11, 89–92, 162; highways in, 192, 297, 383; homesteading in, 26, 297, 507n126; immigrants in, 486n39; military installations and spending in, 125–26, 145–46, 164, 297; mining corporations in, 95; mining employment in, 96, 516n118; Native peoples in, 360–61, 362, 364–65, 525n104; oil and gas industry in, 126, 130, 133, 266, 297, 310, 361, 365; politics and political parties in, 310; population of, 6, 90, 125–26, 133, 389–90, 407n31; railroads in, 162–65, 164; statehood for, 266, 300, 320; territorial government of, 306, 310; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 527n113. See also specific cities Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), 361, 365 Albuquerque, 159, 195, 290–91, 290 Alinsky, Saul, 345, 347

Allen, Henry J., 231–32, 267 Allen, Lawrence and Willis, 320 Allen, Paul G., 139, 140 Alliance Party, 303, 306, 324 Aluminum manufacturing, 127–28 The American Far West in the Twentieth Century (Pomeroy), viii-ix American Indian Movement (AIM), 357, 358, 363 American Weekly, 274 Ameringer, Oscar, 321 Anaconda Copper Mining Company, xi, 93, 95–96, 145, 305, 307, 334, 373 Anaheim, Calif., 209 Anchorage, Alaska, 163–65, 193–94, 208, 224, 266, 361, 362 Appeal to Reason, 269 Architecture, 288–91, 290, 505n100 Ariyoshi, George R., 341 Arizona: African Americans in, 520n42; agriculture in, 10, 62, 76, 77, 180, 223, 337, 429n72, 437–38n188, 451n35, 532n34; air service in, 191, 194; architecture in, 290; constitution of, 333, 509n29; copper mining in, 93, 96, 97, 305, 337; education in, 276, 282, 501n57; electricity in, 103; gold mining in, 160; homesteading in, 414n68; immigrants in, 43, 326; irrigation in, 48, 147, 160, 180; labor unions in, 330, 333–34, 337; manufacturing in, 121, 142, 222; military installations in, 117; mining corporations in, 95; mining employment in, 96, 326, 333–34, 337, 393, 442n20; Native Americans in, 247, 289, 356, 362, 525n104; politics and political parties in, 304, 313, 335, 337, 510n40, 515n108; population of, 3, 6, 14, 123, 407n31, 507n125; prices of farmland in, 410n21; railroads in, 160, 191; recall of judges in, 302, 309–10, 333; Spanish-speaking population in, 301; statehood for, 6, 300; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates

Index and officeholders in, 369, 526n108, 527n113. See also specific cities Arizona State University, 221, 282 Asians and Pacific Islanders: citizenship for, 302, 338–39; discrimination against, 398; labor unionists’ attack on, 302; in Los Angeles, 210–12; map of, 227; and politics, 339, 341–42. See also Chinese immigrants/Chinese Americans; Japanese immigrants/Japanese Americans Aspen, Colo., 400 Atomic bombs, 135–36, 186, 361 Atwood, Robert B., 266 Automobiles and trucks: and blurring of rural-urban distinctions, 179–80; commuting by, 67, 176, 219, 385–86; impact of generally, 383–84; lumber industry’s use of trucks, 109, 112; manufacturing of, 113, 122–23, 129, 389, 531n15; restrictions on large trucks in Los Angeles, 213; in rural areas, 55–57, 68, 84, 173–76, 178, 465–66n83; and suburbs, 179–80; and tourism, 174; and urbanization, 197, 204, 221. See also Highways and Trucking industry Aviation. See Aircraft industry Baca, Elfego, 343 Bailey, Liberty Hyde, 58 Baker, Ray Stannard, 228, 256–57 Ballinger, Richard A., 96 Bancroft, H. H., 269, 275, 375 Banking, 199, 242 Barnard, Kate, 366, 367, 369 Barnes, Lemuel C., 26 Barnes, Will C., 28, 84 Bechtel, Stephen D., 119–20 Beck, Dave, 337 Bellamy, Edward, 311, 330 Berkeley, Calif., 168–69, 314, 352–54 Billington, Ray A., xxii Bingham Canyon, Utah, 94, 95 Black, Shirley Temple, 320

551

Black Panther Party, 251, 351–54, 374 Blackmar, Frank W., 39 Blacks. See African Americans BLM. See Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Blumenschein, Ernest L., 289 Boeing, 120, 121, 134, 135, 146, 459n144 Bolton, Herbert E., viii Bonfils, Frederick G., 265, 271–72 Book publishing and book sales, 275–76, 500n39 Boone, Daniel, 1–2 Borah, William E., 319 Borland, Hal, 31 Bosone, Reva Beck, 528n124 Bourne, Jonathan, 317 Bowman, Isaiah, 34, 67, 166, 175, 226, 389 Bradley, Thomas, 352 Braman, James D., 190 Bridges, Harry, 337 Brinkley, John R., 272, 320 Brown, Edmund G. (Jerry), Jr., 349 Brown, Edmund G. (Pat), 273, 317 Brown, Edwin C., 370 Brown, Steve, 69 Bryan, William Jennings, 21, 23, 268, 308, 311, 312 Bryant, Andrew, 328 Bryce, James, 305, 306 Buckley, Christopher, 307 Buffalo, 2, 293, 382, 386 Buford, Robert F., 204 Bureau of Indian Affairs. See Office/ Bureau of Indian Affairs Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 111, 118, 204 Burke, John, 316, 317 Burke, Yvonne Brathwaite, 374 Burns, John A., 341 Bursum, H. O., 359 Calhoun, John C., 1 California: aerospace industry in, 135;

552

Index

African Americans in, 248–51, 347, 350–54, 362, 492n106, 492n108, 520n42, 521n44, 527n113; agriculture in, 9, 18, 20–21, 44–45, 48–49, 62–65, 67, 72, 74–79, 81, 124–25, 208, 232–34, 292, 325, 409n15, 416n105–106, 426n38, 437–38n188, 438n195, 451n35, 469n133, 532n34; air service in, 191, 192, 194–95, 197; architecture in, 290, 291; automobiles in, 56, 174; canneries in, 64, 136, 141, 177, 393; Chinese immigrants/Chinese Americans in, 15, 41, 235, 240, 338, 407n35, 488–89n58, 521n42; churches in, 255–56, 272; constitution of, 302, 306; education in, 276–79, 277, 281– 85, 500n47, 501n52, 501n57, 502n66, 502n68, 521n45; electricity in, 70, 103, 104, 183; electronics industry and computers in, 137–40, 142–45, 147, 209, 223, 458n134; European immigrants in, 41, 235; farm loans to veterans in, 423n196; farm size in, 63–64, 72; farm-mortgage debt in, 68; farmland prices in, 62; fruit production in, 13, 37, 49, 59, 63, 65, 67, 72–73, 141, 198, 209, 212, 292, 407n30, 416n105; gold mining in, 7, 91, 92, 137; highways in, 169, 187–91, 189, 200–201, 208–10, 212–15, 217, 219; immigrants in, 417n123, 486n39; irrigation in, 18, 37, 38, 47–49, 63, 70, 72–76, 81–82, 416n105, 533n35; Japanese immigrants/Japanese Americans in, 43–46, 235, 240–41, 243, 341–42; labor unions in, 259, 327–30, 337, 349, 496–97n169; land settlement scheme in, 51; manufacturing in, 113, 116, 119–22, 129, 134–37, 146, 209, 211– 12, 223, 451n35, 455n98; Mexican immigrants/Mexican Americans in, 65, 150, 243–45, 287–88, 343–47, 346, 349–50, 362; military installations and military spending in, 117, 145–47, 209; Native Americans in, 289, 362; newspapers in, 265–68, 270–75, 288, 316, 329, 498n1,

499n28; oil and gas production in, 98, 99, 102; politics and political parties in, 303, 304, 308, 311, 313–21, 328–30, 335–37, 349–54, 510–11n46, 515n108; population of, 3, 9, 123–24, 210, 245, 392, 407n31, 459n141; promotional literature on, 292; railroads in, 13–14, 37–38, 151, 153, 155, 158–61, 166–72, 171, 184, 305, 306, 307, 407n29, 462nn31–32; retirement in, 182; shopping center in, 186–87; Silicon Valley in, 137–38, 394, 395; statehood for, 300; stock-raising in, 85, 431n114; suburbs in, 179–80, 181; tenancy in, 484n17; tractors and combines in, 55, 56; vegetable farms in, 63, 64, 141, 428n59, 428n63; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 366, 369, 372. See also specific cities Cameron, George, 267 Camp, W. B., 77 Campbell, Ben Nighthorse, 364 Campbell, Hardy Webster, 35–36 Campbell, Thomas, 334 Campbell, Thomas D., 58–59 Canneries, 64, 80, 136, 141, 177, 393 Capper, Arthur, 267, 319 Carey, Joseph M., 316, 317, 509n26 Carter, Clarence D., vii Cather, Willa, 292 Cattle ranching. See Ranching Cayton, Horace, 250 Chaffey, George, 103 Chambers of commerce, 16–17, 21, 408n40 Chandler, Harry, 267 Chandler, Otis, 271 Chávez, César, 259, 347, 349 Chinese Exclusion Act (1902), 239, 338, 341 Chinese immigrants/Chinese Americans: in California, 15, 41, 235, 240, 338, 407n35, 488–89nn56–58, 521n42; edu-

Index cation of, 278; employment of, 239–40, 263, 488n56; exclusion law on, 239, 338, 341; in Hawaii, 239; population statistics on, 488–89n58; in urban areas, 248 Churches, 251–56, 272, 344. See also Mormons (Latter-day Saints) Cities. See specific cities Clark, William Andrews, 266, 333, 334 Coal industry, 100, 101, 105, 130–33, 336 Cochran, Thomas C., 153 Cody, William F., 52 Coe, Urling, 34 Colleges. See Education Collier, John, 355, 356–57, 359 Colorado: agriculture in, 18, 49, 68, 410n15, 437–38n188; education in, 276, 501n50, 501n52, 501n57, 502n66; electricity in, 104, 469n132; homesteading in, 27, 29, 31, 413n48, 414n68; immigrants in, 41, 43, 236, 417n123; irrigation in, 18, 49, 70, 73; labor unions in, 330, 331–32, 337; manufacturing in, 122, 128, 142, 222; Mexican Americans in, 244, 246, 349, 362; mining in, 94, 96, 127, 262, 331, 337, 393, 516n118; oil and gas industry in, 98; oil shale in, 132; penturbia in, 402; politics and political parties in, 311, 313, 316, 317, 322, 337, 349; population of, 406n19; railroads in, 27, 160; stock-raising in, 85, 87, 426n37; tourism in Aspen, 400; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 365, 526n108, 527n113. See also specific cities Colorado Springs, 135, 401 Communal associations, 256–58 Community colleges. See Education Community Service Organization (CSO), 345, 347 Computers, 136, 138–40, 140, 144, 394 Congress: African Americans in, 374, 526n111; committee chairmanships in, from Far West states, 507–8n2; His-

553

panics in, 345; Japanese Americans in, 341; members of, from Far West states generally, 300; Native Americans in, 364; reapportionment for, 324, 340; third-party politicians in, 310–11, 313; women in, 366, 369, 372, 374, 526nn110–11, 528n124, 529n130 Cook, James, 377 Copper mining: in Alaska, 94, 98, 305; Anaconda Copper Mining Company, xi, 93, 95–96, 145, 305, 307, 334, 373; in Arizona, 93, 96, 97, 305, 337; decline of, 398; labor force for, 98, 443n20; map of, 90; in Montana, 93, 96–97, 223, 305, 307, 332–33, 399–400; in Nevada, 94– 95, 441n11; production statistics on, 5; uses of copper, 92–93; in Utah, 94, 95, 96; value of gold versus copper, 7, 93 Costigan, Edward P., 331–32 Cotton production. See Agriculture Cox, Tom, viii Coxey, Jacob S., 333 Crawford, Coe I., 316 Cross, Ira B., 258 CSO (Community Service Organization), 345, 347 Cutting, Bronson, 309, 342–43 Czech immigrants, 40, 41, 236, 417n131 Dail, Charles, 215 Dams, 70, 104–5, 105, 119, 161, 195, 233. See also Electricity Davis, H. L., 32 Dawes Act (1887), 247, 355 De Young, Michael H., 267 Debs, Eugene, 313–14 Defense Department, U.S., 137, 187, 189– 90 Defense industries: aerospace technology, 134–35; aircraft industry, 120–23, 135; contract awards for, 145–47, 393, 459n146; electronic technology, 145; explosives manufacturing, 113; microwave

554

Index

Defense industries (continued) technology, 136; shipbuilding, 119–22, 124, 126, 128; wartime manufacturing during World War II, 116–26, 135 Dellums, Ronald, 354 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 363–64 Democratic Party: in California, 308, 336–37; in Far West generally, 303, 304, 308, 310, 313, 337, 510n40; in Hawaii, 339, 341; and Hispanics, 343, 349; and laborers, 326; and Nonpartisan League, 322; and presidential elections of 1896 and 1900, 308, 312; and progressivism, 316–17, 320–21; and weakening of party organizations, 317–20. See also specific politicians and specific states Denver: development projects in, 202–5; employment in, 204, 222; and environmental issues, 204; ethnic groups in, 362, 521n42; newspapers in, 265, 269, 271–72; in nineteenth century, 202; Olympic Games in, 204, 212; and penturbia, 402; photograph of, 203; and railroads, 160, 168, 202 Desert News, 269 Deserts, 293, 296, 389 DeVoto, Bernard, 296 Dole, James B., 80 Dole, Sanford B., 306 Douglas, Donald, 120 Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 320 Droughts, 3, 8, 30, 37, 66, 69, 70, 74 Duncan, Louis, 314, 335 Duniway, Abigail Scott, 373 Earl, Edwin T., 64 Eaton brothers, 294 Echohawk, John E., 364 Echohawk, Larry, 364 Economic Opportunity Act (1964), 346, 362 Education: of African Americans, 250; and curricula, 286–87, 504–5nn88–90;

graduate schools, 504n88; higher education, 276, 277, 279–86, 501n57; of Japanese Americans, 46, 242; junior or community colleges, 277, 282–87, 504n86; land-grant colleges, 276, 280–81, 282, 502n66; legal education, 281, 502n68, 503n72; of Native Americans, 278–79; in nineteenth-century, 276, 278; normal schools for teacher training, 281–82, 369; out-of-state college education, 283, 503n73; preschool and kindergarten programs, 276–77; private schools, 278, 501n53; and school administrators, 368, 530n148; and teacher turnover, 286, 504n85 Eisenhower, Dwight, 357, 383 Electorate. See Politics Electricity, 69, 70, 74, 97, 98, 101–5, 105, 183, 308 Electronics industry, 139–48, 209, 222, 261, 393, 394 Emmons, Glenn, 357 Employment. See Agriculture; Mining; and specific industries and states Energy sources, 98–106, 130–33. See also Coal industry; Electricity; Oil and gas industry; Waterpower Enlarged Homestead Act (1909), 30, 34, 36 Environmental issues, 109, 204, 212, 400 Eskimos. See Alaska Ethnic minorities: map of, 227, 346. See also Immigrants; and specific ethnic groups, such as African Americans Etulain, Richard Wayne, viii-ix Eu, March Fong, 341 Fairbanks, Alaska, 163, 164, 194, 361 Far West: in American national myth, xviii–xxi; definition of, ix, xxii; and erosion of regional differences, 381–82; European exploration and settlement of, 89, 98, 150, 153, 155–57, 244, 293,

Index 376–77, 380–81; historical accounts of, xvii-xx; landscapes of, 291–99; and limit of distance, 149–51, 155–56, 376–78, 379; nineteenth-century population of, ix, xxii, 2, 3, 14–15, 89, 389, 390; ratio of males to females in, 15; restless nature of inhabitants of, 228–30; settled areas in, 22; statehood for states in, xix, 5–6, 266, 300–302; territorial system for, 300–301; travel time from East Coast to, 377–78, 381; twentieth-century population of, xxii, 4, 9, 89, 123–24, 380, 381, 389–92, 390. See also Agriculture; Education; Mining; Railroads; Rural areas; and specific states and cities Farm Bureau, 60, 325–26 Farmer-Labor Party, 324–25 Farming. See Agriculture Farrington, Joseph R., 267, 320 Farrington, Wallace R., 319–20 Federal lands, 118 Feinstein, Dianne, 372 Ferguson, Miriam A., 367 Ferguson, Mrs. Tom, 269 Field, Stephen J., 308 Films. See Motion picture industry Finney, Joan, 368 Fishman, Simon, 59 Flour milling, 176–77, 177 Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 335, 530n147 Food processing. See Canneries Ford, Henry, 56 Forest Service, 109, 111 Frazier, Lynn, 322 Fremont, Calif., 219 Frémont, John C., 161 Fresno, 217, 267, 319 Frontier, 1–2. See also Far West Fruit production. See Agriculture Fusionists, 310, 317 Galarza, Ernesto, 245 Gambling, 195, 223, 224, 384, 401

555

Garland, Hamlin, 231, 303–4 Garst, Roswell, 73 Gas industry. See Oil and gas industry Gates, Paul Wallace, vii Gates, William (Bill) H., 139, 140, 144 General Land Office, 24–25, 28–29, 32, 60, 355 George, Henry, 12 German immigrants, 15, 32, 38, 40–42, 52, 236–39, 237, 251, 253, 255, 374 Giannini, Amadeo P., 242 Gillette, John M., 175 Gillette Syndrome, 131 Gold mining: in Alaska, 7, 11, 89–92, 162; in Arizona, 160; in California, 7, 91, 92, 137; labor force statistics on, 443n20; map of, 90; in Nevada, 91, 92, 441n11; process of, 91–92; production statistics on, and prices of gold, 91, 117; value of gold versus copper, 7, 93 Goldberger, Paul, 207–8, 210 Goldwater, Barry, 375 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 347–49, 348 Gordon, Walter A., 250 Gould, George J., 155 Graham, John and Bessie, 30 Grand Canyon, 2, 293, 296, 505n101 Grand Coulee Dam, 70, 105, 119 Grangers, 59, 65, 257–58, 306, 325 Grasso, Ella T., 367 Greeley, M. F., 235 Greenberg, Jack, 363 Gressley, Gene M., viii Gruen, Victor, 217 Gruening, Ernest, 310, 320 Guggenheim, Benjamin, 12 Guggenheim mining companies, xi, 94– 96, 145, 388 Gutierrez, José A., 349 Halberstam, David, 268 Hammond, John Hays, 94, 97 Hanson, Ole, 259

556

Index

Harding, Warren, 357, 373 Harriman, Averell, 400 Harriman, Edward H., 12, 151, 155, 305 Harriman, Job, 258, 314, 315–16, 329–30 Hatfield, George, 512n59 Hawaii: agriculture in, 78–80, 82, 83, 437–38n188; air service in, 193, 194–95; Chinese immigrants in, 239; and education, 283, 501n57, 503n73; Filipinos in, 243, 490n77; immigrants in, 6, 7, 40, 298, 486n39; Japanese immigrants in, 41–42, 43, 80, 235, 242, 243, 339; labor unions in, 337; military installations and spending in, 126, 145, 297; newspapers in, 499n28; politics and political parties in, 304, 310, 313, 337, 339; population of, 6, 126, 298, 451–52n38; statehood for, 300, 310; sugar plantations in, 6, 23, 41, 78–80, 79, 239, 259, 298, 305, 306, 337; territorial government of, 6–7, 306, 310; tourism in, 80, 194–95, 224, 298, 310, 384–85; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 527n111, 527n113. See also specific cities Hawthorne, Julian, 275 Hayakawa, S. I., 341 Hayes, E. A., 267 Haywood, William D., 331, 335 Hearst, George, 92, 266 Hearst, William Randolph, 265, 266, 271, 274 Heinze, F. A., 334 Hendrickson, James, viii Herseth, Ralph, 70 Hewlett, William R., 139 Hewlett Packard (HP), 142, 143, 458n138 Higham, John, 241 Higher education. See Education High-technology. See Computers; Semiconductor industry Highways: in Alaska, 192, 297, 383; in California, 169, 187–91, 189, 200–201,

208–10, 212–15, 217, 219; federal highway programs, 324, 383–84; impact of generally, 394; interstate highways, 383–84; maps of, 152, 188, 189; and residential construction, 127; Route 66, 187; in rural areas, 174, 178, 182; in Washington, 206. See also Automobiles and trucks Hill, James J., 20–21, 27, 107, 151–52, 155, 178, 305 Hispanics: discrimination against, 398; as elected officeholders, 349; in Los Angeles, 210–12; map of, 227; and politics, 342–50. See also Mexican immigrants/ Mexican Americans Hitchcock, Gilbert M., 268, 319 Hoch, Edward W., 316 Hodges, George H., 316 Hollywood. See Motion picture industry Homelessness, 211 Homestead Act (1862), 38, 46, 301, 403 Homestead Act (1902), 233 Homesteading, 3, 24–34, 182, 228, 297, 507n126 Honolulu, 184, 194–95, 224, 267, 298, 384, 473n52 Hoover Dam, 119, 195, 296 Hotels, 195, 199, 201, 209, 224, 401 House of Representatives, U.S. See Congress Housing: in California, 200, 201, 209, 341–42; discrimination in, 341–42; in Oregon, 124, 125; in postwar period generally, 126–27; in rural areas, 131, 183; and urbanization, 185–86 Howard, Mary W. C., 370 Howe, Edgar W., 268 Howe, Frederic C., 321 Hoyt, Palmer, 270 Hughes, Howard, 195 Hunt, George W. P., 308, 333, 509n29, 515n108 Huntington, Henry E., 169–70, 171, 172 Huntley, Chester R. “Chet,” 398–99

Index Hutton, May Arkwright, 374 Hydroelectric power. See Electricity IBM, 139, 142, 144 Ickes, Harold, 71 Idaho: agriculture in, 10, 23, 180, 180–81, 311, 410n15, 437–38n188; Buhl colony in, 52; churches in, 255; and education, 278, 503n73; electricity in, 183; farm foreclosures in, 429n72; homesteading in, 414n68; immigrants in, 43, 52, 235, 417n123; irrigation in, 47, 52, 70; labor unions in, 330–31; land lotteries of Indian lands in, 25; manufacturing in, 142, 222; mining in, 94, 162, 262, 393; Native Americans in, 525n104; photograph of, 43; politics and political parties in, 311, 322, 364, 510n40; population of, 3, 14, 124, 380, 390, 390, 407n31; prices of farmland in, 410n21; railroads in, 154, 160; statehood for, 5; tourism in Sun Valley, 400; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 526n108, 527n111 Ileris, Sven, 393 Immigrants: acceptance of, by native-born Americans, 238; ancestral culture of, 237–38; and churches, 251–53; countries of origin of, 40–41, 234–35; as farmers, 40, 41–46, 43, 124, 235–36, 239–41, 261, 486n37; foreign parentage in specific states, 486n39; help and support for, 236–39; and homesteading, 32–33, 39–40; illegal immigrants, 211; and labor unions, 239, 262–63, 488n56; laws on, 240, 241, 341, 488n58, 489n63; photograph of, 237; as railroad workers, 239, 244, 263; ratio of foreign to native born in Far West, 15, 40, 234–35, 397–98; violence against, 238; vocations of, 251, 262; and woman suffrage, 373–74. See also specific immigrant groups, such as Japanese immigrants/Japanese Americans

557

Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 356–57, 359 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), 357 Indian Territory, 3, 24–26, 407n29, 460n7 Indians. See Native Americans Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 107, 108, 259–63, 331–35, 332, 373 Industry. See Manufacturing Information technology, 393, 394. See also Computers; Electronics industry Inouye, Daniel K., 341 In Search of the Golden West (Pomeroy), viii Interior Department, U.S., 70, 117, 193, 204, 357, 360, 361, 363 Interstate Commerce Commission, 446n74, 462n32 Irish immigrants, 238, 243, 244, 251, 262, 326–29, 338, 374, 514n84 Irrigation: arguments for, 36–40; in Arizona, 48, 147, 160, 180; in California, 18, 37, 38, 47–49, 63, 70, 72–76, 81– 82, 416n105, 533n35; in Colorado, 18, 49, 70, 73; in early twentieth century, 46–52; government actions on, 308; in Kansas and Nebraska, 37, 73, 74, 81, 433n132; and local governments, 416n116; and Newlands National Reclamation Act (1902), 36, 38, 48, 73, 104, 225, 293; from 1930s to 1980s, 69–76, 397; and stock-raising, 37, 86. See also Agriculture Irvine, Calif., 147, 210, 214 Irvine Company, 208, 209, 214, 386 Italian immigrants, 235–36 IWW. See Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Jackling, Daniel C., 94, 145 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 289, 293 Jackson, Joseph Henry, 273 James, William, 281

558

Index

Japanese American Citizens League, 339, 344, 349 Japanese immigrants/Japanese Americans: businesses of, 241–42, 245; in California, 43–46, 235, 240–41, 243, 341–42; citizenship for, 338–39; credit associations of, 242; education of, 46, 242; as elected officeholders, 341, 517n8; as farmers, 41–46, 43, 124, 236, 240–41, 251, 261; in Hawaii, 41–42, 43, 80, 235; job opportunities for, in U.S., 42–43, 46, 418n142; and labor unions, 263; marriage of, 242–43; photograph of, 43; and politics, 339, 341–42; population of, 490n75; professional careers of, 242, 243; in relocation centers during World War II, 46, 243, 339, 341; statistics on, 15, 407n35; in urban areas, 248; during World War II, 124 Jefferson, Thomas, xviii Jeffrey, F. R., 51 Johnson, Hiram W., 267, 308–9, 316–17, 319, 330, 375, 510n46 Johnson, James Weldon, 250 Jones, W. S., 278–79 Jordan, David Starr, 288, 505n97 Joss, Bessie, 67 Journalists. See Newspapers Julian, C. C., 99 Juneau, Alaska, 165 Junior colleges. See Education Justice Department, U.S., 350, 518n21 Kaiser, Henry J., 119–22, 127–29 Kansas: African Americans in, 248, 520n42; agriculture in, 7–8, 9, 21, 23, 24, 34–35, 59, 61–62, 66, 68, 81–83, 87, 176, 230–32, 397, 409n15, 436n169, 437– 38n188, 438n197; automobiles in, 175; churches in, 253, 256; cities in, 392; and coal strike (1919), 336; combine harvesters in, 56; droughts in, 3, 8, 37, 66; education in, 277–80, 501n51, 501n57;

Farm Bureau in, 325; farm foreclosures in, 66; flour milling in, 177, 467n99; homesteading in, 27, 412–13n48; immigrants in, 40, 41, 236, 417n123, 418n133, 486n39; irrigation in, 37, 73, 81, 433n132; manufacturing in, 121, 129, 134; Mexican immigrants in, 244; mining employment in, 442n20; newspaper in, 267; oil and gas production in, 98, 99; photograph of, 123; politics and political parties in, 304, 306, 313, 316, 322, 336, 510n40; population of, 381, 389, 391, 406n19, 407n31; railroads in, 165, 380; small towns in, 178; stock-raising in, 84, 85; telephones in, 58; tractors in, 56, 61; woman suffrage in, 370, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 365, 368, 369–70, 526n108. See also Kansas City Kansas City, 123, 168, 177, 350, 392, 521n42 Kearney, Denis, 338 Kearns, Thomas, 267 Kennedy, John F., 347 Kerosene, 101 Kilgour, William, 33 Kipling, Rudyard, 307, 328 Knight, Goodwin, 336–37 Knight, Philip H., 139 Knights of Labor, 327, 374, 530n145 Knowland, Joseph R., 267–68 Knowland, William F., 268, 337 Labor unions: and agricultural workers, 65, 259, 260–61, 345, 347; in California, 259, 327–30, 347, 496–97n169; in Colorado, 331; and immigrants, 239, 262–63, 302, 488n56; and lumber industry, 107; and Mexican immigrants/Mexican Americans, 345, 347; and miners, 262, 263, 330–37; and politics, 326–37; and Populist Party, 328, 331; and Socialist Party, 329–31, 335; in specific industries, 261–62; and strikes, 141, 259, 260, 263,

Index 302, 328, 330–31, 333–34, 345; and TaftHartley Act, 336; violence against, 108, 333, 334; and woman suffrage, 373. See also specific unions Ladd, Edwin F., 267 La Follette, Robert M., 314–15, 330 Lamar, Howard R., vii-xvi, 308 Lamm, Richard, 132 Landes, Bertha Knight, 370–71, 371 Landon, Alfred M., 309 Lane, Franklin K., 50 Lane, Laurence W., 274–75 Las Vegas, Nev., 195, 223, 224, 296, 384, 401, 473n52 Las Vegas, N.Mex., 195, 505n100 Latinos. See Hispanics; Mexican immigrants/Mexican Americans Latter-day Saints. See Mormons (Latterday Saints) Lawson, Thomas W., 183 Lawyers and legal education, 281, 502n68, 503n72 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 344, 349 Lease, Mary Elizabeth, 8 Lee, Dorothy McCullough, 371–72 Lescohier, Don, 261 Lincoln, Abraham, xix, 1, 326 Lindsay, Vachel, 244 Lindsey, Ben, 331 Lister, Ernest, 316 Literacy. See Education Little, Frank, 334 Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, 120, 122, 472n46 Logging industry. See Lumber industry and wood products London, Jack, 6, 163 Long Beach, Calif., 184 Long, Stephen, 292 Los Alamos, N.Mex., 136, 186 Los Angeles Examiner, 275 Los Angeles Mirror, 271

559

Los Angeles Times, 266, 268, 271, 274, 288, 316, 329 Los Angeles/Los Angeles County: aerospace industry in, 135; air service and airport in, 191, 194, 195, 197; antiunionist sentiment in, 259–60, 327, 329; architecture in, 291; area of, 170, 208; automobiles in, 204, 213; banking in, 199; Board of Trade in, 21; business district in, 208; Chamber of Commerce in, 16, 17; churches in, 272; competition between San Francisco and, 224; cultural offerings in, 213; education in, 283; electricity in, 104; energy resources in, 101; ethnic groups in, 210–12, 248, 251, 260, 343, 344, 346, 350–53, 362, 521n42, 521n44; highways in, 187, 189, 190–91, 208–10, 213, 214; homeless in, 211; hotels in, 473n52; housing in, 209; illegal immigrants in, 211; income in, 209, 211, 479n171; industrial districts and manufacturing in, 147, 154, 209, 211–12; mayoral candidate in, 315–16; oil and gas production in, 98, 99; Olvera Street in, 288; Olympic games in, 213; politics in, 258, 314, 315–16, 329–30, 335, 352, 353; population of, 158, 170, 184, 198, 207, 208, 210–11, 220, 392; problems of, 210, 211, 212–13; promotional literature on, 292; public transportation in, 213; race riots in, 190, 251, 351–52; and railroads, 158, 159–60, 184, 393, 462n30; skyscrapers in, 207–8, 213; Socialists in, 258; Spanish and Mexican heritage of, 288; suburbs of, 208, 209–10; urban renewal in, 213 LULAC, 344, 349 Lumber industry and wood products, 101, 106–11, 108, 141, 260, 388, 393 Lummis, Charles F., 288 Lusk, Georgia, 369 Lynch, Kevin, 207, 216 Lynd, Robert S., 252

560

Index

MacLeish, Archibald, 59 Malls. See Shopping centers and malls Mansfield, Mike, 319 Manufacturing: after World War II, 126– 30, 136–45; of automobiles, 122–23, 129; before World War II, 112–13, 116; labor force statistics for, 143, 146, 451n35, 455n98. See also Defense industries; specific states; and specific industries, such as Shipbuilding and shipyards Marine Corps, 209, 214, 393, 394 Maritime Commission, U.S., 119, 120, 122 Marston, George W., 214–15 Martin, Glenn, 120 Maxwell, George H., 39, 50–51 McCall, Thomas Lawson (Tom), 273 McCarthy, Patrick H., 329 McFarland, Ernest W., 337 McGee, Gale W., 319 McGovern, George, 319, 349 McKinley, William, 163, 312 McLoughlin, John, 102 McNamara brothers, 316, 329 McNary, Charles L., 309 McNickle, D’Arcy, 362 McPhee, John, 163 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 272, 273 McWilliams, Carey, 232, 341 Mead, Elwood, 51, 180 Meatpacking industry, 85–87, 467n100 Media. See Newspapers; Radio; Television Metzger, Thomas, 320 Mexican immigrants/Mexican Americans: assimilation of, 382; and Catholic Church, 252–53, 344; challenges of, 245–46, 345; and Chicano movement, 347–49; citizenship for, 344; education of, 285, 344, 345; as farm workers, 65, 124, 241, 244, 245, 246, 259, 261, 345; heritage of, 243–44; and labor unions, 345, 349; in Los Angeles, 211, 343, 344, 345; photographs of, 232, 348; negative stereotypes of, 288, 505n97; and politics,

342–50; population of, 345; as railroad workers, 244; values of, 244 Microsoft, 139, 140, 144, 145 Microwave technology, 136 Middle West, ix-x, xxi, 2, 5, 14, 381, 531n3 Migrant labor, 231, 232, 260–61. See also Agriculture; Mexican immigrants/Mexican Americans Military expenditures, 454–55n86. See also Defense industries; World War I; World War II Military installations, 117, 118, 125–26, 209. See also Air Force, U.S.; Marine Corps; Navy, U.S. Mineta, Norman, 341 Mining: labor statistics for, 96, 97, 337, 442–43n20, 516n118; and labor unions, 262, 263, 330–37; in late twentieth century, 398; and railroads, 98, 155, 161–65. See also Copper mining; Gold mining; Silver mining Mitchell, Guy E., 39 Mitchell, William (Billy), 192 Mizner brothers, 291 Molybdenum, 127 Monk, Hank, 174 Montana: agriculture in, 10, 18, 20, 30, 58–62, 66, 67, 82, 176, 180, 410n15, 423–24n3, 437–38n188; automobiles in, 175; churches in, 252; coal industry in, 105, 132; copper mining in, 93, 96–97, 223, 305, 307, 332–33, 399–400; and education, 282, 501n57, 503n73; electricity in, 469n132; farm foreclosures in, 66; farm-mortgage debt in, 66, 68; homesteading in, 27–30, 32, 33, 34, 412n46, 412–13n48, 414n68; immigrants in, 235, 486n39; labor unions in, 259, 330, 332–34, 337; land sales by railroads in, 26, 411n34; mining corporations in, 96; mining employment in, 96, 262, 332–34; Native Americans in, 525n104; newspapers in, 266; photographs of, 13;

Index politics and political parties in, 311, 314, 322, 510n40; population of, 124, 380, 389, 390, 390; railroads in, 153, 160, 380, 407n29; statehood for, 5; stock-raising in, 7, 87, 426n37; Superfund project in, 400; tourism in, 398–400; tractors in, 61; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 366, 526n108 Moore, Charles, 197 Morgan, J. P., 58 Mormons (Latter-day Saints): assimilation of, 382; cooperative business organization for, 254, 258; and education, 278, 501n53; farms of, 183, 224; founder and leaders of, 238, 254; influence of, 224; legal status of, 253; and politics, 254, 301, 309, 314; and polygamy, 253, 255, 309; religious lives of, 254–57; settlement of, in Utah, 156, 180, 253, 253–54;women’s role, 528n124; and ZCMI, 254 Morse, Wayne L., 319 Moscone, George, 372 Motion picture industry, 113–15, 114, 141 Mountains, 294–96, 399 Movies. See Motion picture industry Muir, John, 3, 294–95, 295 Murphy, George, 320 Myrdal, Gunnar, 248 NAACP, 344, 363 NASA, 134–35, 137, 143, 393, 459n147 National Congress of American Indians, 361, 363–64 National Indian Youth Council, 362 National parks, 2–3, 118, 294–96, 298 Native American Rights Fund, 364 Native Americans: in Alaska, 360–61, 362, 364–65; and American Indian Movement (AIM), 357, 358, 363; assimilation of, 382; citizenship for, 302, 356; claims by, to land, water, and fossil fuel deposits, 363–65, 524n82; compared

561

with other western minorities, 246–47; education of, 278–79; as elected officeholders, 364, 525n104; employment of, 247–48, 375; heritage of, 288–89; in Jackson’s (Helen Hunt) Ramona, 289; land cessions from, for homesteading, 24–26, 355–56; laws on, 247, 355, 356– 57, 359; photograph of, 358; and politics, 354–65; population of, 362; removal of, from original lands, 247; reservations for, 11, 118, 227, 356, 357, 359, 389; in urban areas, 361–62, 525n98; and Wounded Knee uprising (1973), 357, 358, 363 Natural gas industry. See Oil and gas industry Navajo Legal Aid and Defender Society, 363 Navy, U.S., 128, 214, 393 Nebraska: absentee investors in agriculture in, 87; African Americans in, 520–21n42; agriculture in, 7–8, 9, 21, 23, 82, 87, 181, 230, 409n15, 410n20, 437–38n188, 438n197, 512n64; air service in, 192, 194; automobiles in, 174, 175, 178; Cather (Willa) on, 292; churches in, 252, 253, 256; cities in, 392; droughts in, 3, 8; education in, 277–79, 286, 501nn50–51, 501n57, 502n66; farm foreclosures in, 66; homesteading in, 27, 30, 32, 413n48; immigrants in, 41, 236, 417n123; irrigation in, 37, 46, 73, 74, 437n184; labor unions in, 337; land sales by railroads in, 26; manufacturing in, 121; mining employment in, 442n20; politics and political parties in, 304, 306, 313, 316, 317, 322, 327, 510n40; population of, 14, 381, 389, 391, 406n19, 407n31, 407–8n36; prices of farmland in, 410n21; radios in, 272, 500n33; railroads in, 165, 222–23, 380; stock-raising in, 58, 85–86, 86; tenancy in, 229; tractors in, 55; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political

562

Index

Nebraska (continued) candidates and officeholders in, 368, 526n108. See also specific cities Nevada: agriculture in, 426n38, 430n91, 437–38n188, 516n118; automobiles in, 173; and education, 276, 501n50, 503n73; electricity in, 183, 469n132; homesteading in, 33; immigrants in, 40, 41, 235, 486n39; irrigation in, 49; labor unions in, 330, 333; manufacturing in, 127, 142; mining in, 91, 92, 94–96, 162, 333, 337, 393, 441n11, 442n20, 516n118; politics and political parties in, 310, 311, 314, 316, 335, 337, 515n108; population of, 14, 49, 123, 336, 380, 390, 406n19; railroads in, 153, 160, 165, 305; statehood for, xix, 5; woman suffrage in, 526n107. See also specific cities, such as Las Vegas, Nev. New Deal. See Roosevelt, Franklin D. New Mexico: agriculture in, 23, 76, 83, 425n30, 437–38n188; architecture in, 290–91, 290, 505n100; and atomic bomb, 136; automobiles in, 173–74; churches in, 252; and education, 276, 283, 501n57, 503n73; electricity in, 469n132; farm foreclosures in, 429n72; Hispanics, 150, 235, 243, 244, 246, 301, 342–43; homesteading in, 27, 412n46, 414n68; immigrants in, 40, 235, 417n123, 486n39; irrigation in, 73; labor unions in, 259; mining employment in, 393, 442n20; Native Americans in, 247, 289, 356, 357, 359, 524n82, 525n104; politics and political parties in, 309, 311, 313, 342–43, 510n40; population of, 6, 123, 406n19; and railroads, 159; Santa Fe Ring of, 309; statehood for, 6, 300, 301; stock-raising in, 426n37; tenancy in, 229, 484n17; tourism in, 195; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 369. See also specific cities

Newell, Frederick H., 233 Newlands, Francis, 38, 509n26 Newlands National Reclamation Act (1902), 36, 38, 48, 73, 104, 225, 293 Newspapers, 265–72, 274, 319–20, 498n1, 499n28. See also specific newspapers Newton, Huey, 351, 353, 354 Nineteenth Amendment, 365, 369, 527n111 Nixon, Richard, 319, 337, 353, 357, 375, 512n59 Nolen, John, 215 Nonpartisan League, 322–23, 323, 325, 373 Norbeck, Peter, 316, 323 Norris, George, 309, 509n26 North Dakota: agriculture in, 8, 21, 23, 66, 82, 83, 181, 230, 231, 324, 326, 387– 88, 391, 397, 437–38n188, 438n197, 532n34; automobiles in, 175; churches in, 252, 253; cities in, 392; and education, 501n57, 503n73; electricity in, 70; farm foreclosures in, 66; farm loans in, 423n196; farm-mortgage debt in, 430n93; flour mills in, 177; Hispanics in, 398; homesteading in, 27, 28, 29, 31–34, 414n68; immigrants in, 15, 40, 235, 326, 397, 398, 486n39; irrigation in, 70; labor unions in, 259; land sales by railroad in, 411n34; mining in, 442n20; newspapers in, 267, 373; politics and political parties in, 313, 316, 317, 322, 324–25, 510n40; population of, 15, 380, 389, 391, 398, 406n19; poverty in, 391; prices of farmland in, 410n21; railroads in, 305, 380, 407n29; rainfall in, 35; statehood for, 5; tractors in, 56; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 365–66, 369, 526n108, 527n111 Nuclear power, 105–6, 132, 361 Nye, Gerald P., 267, 320, 509n27 Oakland, Calif.: African Americans in, 222, 341, 351–54, 362, 521n47; commuting

Index from, 200; development of, 168–69; Hispanics in, 521n42; newspaper in, 267; politics in, 341, 351–54; and shipping, 198; unemployment in, 521n47 Oddie, Tasker, 333 Office/Bureau of Indian Affairs, 58, 247, 248, 278–79, 356, 357, 359, 360 Oil and gas industry: in Alaska, 126, 130, 133, 266, 297, 310, 361, 365; in California, 98, 99, 102; corporations in, 99– 100; demand for petroleum, 112; and gasoline prices, 132; map of, 90; and oil prices, 203; photograph of, 131; in Oklahoma, 74, 98, 99, 134; in Texas, 74, 98, 102, 130; uses of petroleum products, 101–2; in Wyoming, 98, 130– 31, 131 Oil seed production, 83 Oil shale, 132, 203 Oklahoma: African Americans in, 248, 249, 350, 492n106, 520n42; agriculture in, 8, 21, 23, 61, 66, 76–78, 82, 83, 181, 324, 408n44, 410n15, 430n91, 437– 38n188, 438n197, 532n34; education in, 276, 278, 282, 501n57; electricity in, 70; farm foreclosures in, 66; farm loans in, 423n196; highways in, 187; homesteading in, 3, 24–25, 27, 31, 33–34; illiteracy of, 435n161; immigrants in, 40, 41, 417n123, 486n39; irrigation in, 73; labor unions in, 259; as land of drifters, 228; land runs in, 24–25, 25; manufacturing in, 121, 134; mining in, 442n20; Native Americans in, 356, 525n98, 525n104; oil and gas production in, 74, 98, 99, 134; politics and political parties in, 304, 313, 314, 316, 321, 324, 510n40, 510–11n46, 511n48; population of, 3, 6, 14, 389, 390, 390, 407n31; poverty in, 230; prices of farmland in, 410n21; railroads in, 380, 407n29, 460n7; statehood for, 6, 300; telephones in, 58; tenancy in, 230; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women

563

political candidates and officeholders in, 366, 367, 369, 372–73 Oklahoma City, 208, 525n97 Oklahoma State University, 221, 282 Olds, Sarah, 33 Olympic Games, 204, 212, 213, 400 Omaha, Neb., 86, 168, 192, 222–23, 268, 392, 521n42 O’Mahoney, Joseph C., 128 Orange County, 147, 172, 208–14, 259, 271, 345, 386, 394 Oregon: agriculture in, 9, 23, 75, 389, 410n15, 437–38n188, 438n195, 438n197; automobiles in, 174; churches in, 252; education in, 278, 280, 285–86, 501n57, 502n62; electricity in, 103, 104, 183; farm loans in, 423n196; homesteading in, 27, 32, 33, 34, 414n68; housing in, 124, 125; immigrants in, 41, 42, 235, 417n123; irrigation in, 49–50; labor unions in, 259, 337; lumber industry in, 108, 110, 111, 393, 448n95; manufacturing in, 122, 127, 129, 142; military installations in, 117; newspapers in, 499n28; nuclear power in, 104–5; photographs of, 108, 125; politics and political parties in, 304, 317, 318, 321; population of, 3, 297, 389; railroads in, 27, 42, 153, 154, 167–68, 178, 305; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 368, 371–72, 526n108, 527n113. See also specific cities Orr, Kay, 368 Otero, Miguel A., 342 Otis, Harrison Gray, 259–60, 266–69, 271 Outing magazine, 293–94 Overland Monthly, 274–75, 288 Pacific Electric Railway, 171 Pacific Outpost (Pomeroy), viii The Pacific Slope (Pomeroy), viii Packard, David, 139 Paepeke, Walter, 400

564

Index

Parker, William, 352 Parks, 202, 205, 206, 214–15, 285, 295–96, 298. See also National parks Pasadena Freeway, 189 Patten, Simon N., 302 Patterson, T. M., 267, 332, 498n12 Paul, Rodman, 7 Paul, William L., 360 Paxson, Frederic L., viii Peabody, James, 331 Peace and Freedom Party, 351 Peña, Federico, 204–5, 349 Pentecostals, 256 Penturbia, 402 People’s Party. See Populist Party Pereira, William, 210 Peters, Laura Hall, 374 Petroleum industry. See Oil and gas industry Phelan, James D., 328 Phoenix: air service and airport in, 191, 194; area of, 219–20; development of, 220–21; manufacturing in, 222; photograph of, 220; population of, 180, 191, 198, 207, 219, 337; and railroads, 160, 191; shopping centers in, 221; and Sun City retirement community, 220, 296; and water resources, 160–61, 223–24 Pike, Zebulon, 292 Plunkett, Horace, 228, 322 Politics: and African Americans, 350–54; and Asian Americans, 338–39, 341–42; and businessmen, 306–7; careers of politicians, 319–20; and conservatives, 320–21, 337; and corporations, 305–8, 321; of economic development, 308–10; and farmers, 321–26; and Hispanics, 342–50; and initiative and referendum, 317; and laborers, 326–37; limited priorities of pioneers on, 304–5; map of, 312; and Native Americans, 354–65; and origins of inhabitants in Far West, 304; and party loyalty, 303–4, 320; and

primary elections, 318–19; and progressivism, 316–17, 320–21; radical and third-party politics in Far West, 302–3, 310–11, 313–17; reapportionment, 340; and statehood for Far West states, xix, 5–6, 266, 300–302; territorial politics, 309–10; and voting behavior in Far West generally, 301, 313, 321; and weakening of party organizations, 317–20; and women, 365–74. See also specific political parties, politicians, and states Pollution. See Environmental issues Pomeroy, Earl, vii-ix, xvi Population. See Far West; and specific states Populist Party: candidates of, 310–11, 313, 317; and farmers, 311, 314, 322, 324, 325; Hamlin Garland on, 303–4; and laborers, xix, 328, 331; reforms supported by, 307, 311; reputation of, 302; and woman suffrage, 373–74 Portland, Ore., 158–59, 167, 204, 219, 222, 371–72 Portland Oregonian, 265, 268, 270, 278 Postal system, 178–79, 192 Potter, David, xx Pratt, Alice, 34 Progressivism, 313–15, 316–17, 320–21, 331 Progressive Party, 267, 313–15, 317, 331 Quinn, William, 310 Racial and ethnic minorities. See Ethnic minorities; and specific ethnic and racial groups Radar, 136 Radio, 175, 272–73, 273, 499–500n33 Rafferty, Max, 353 Railroads: and agriculture, 10, 12–14, 19, 20–21, 36, 37–38, 62–63, 153, 155, 166– 67, 172, 380, 386–87; air-conditioning in passenger cars, 296; and Amtrak, 191, 384; California state commission on,

Index 302, 306, 307; and cattle ranching, 84; and corporations, 305; and development of Far West, 378–83; electric interurban and suburban railroad systems, 153–54, 168–73, 171, 191; freight rates of, 12, 154–55, 166; fuel for, 100, 101, 130; and homesteaders, 29–30; and immigrant labor, 239, 244, 263; and intercontinental traffic, 151–53; land sales by, 26; and lumber industry, 107, 110; and manufacturing, 113; map of, 152; and meatpacking industry, 85–86; mileage statistics on, 153, 165, 380, 460n7, 461n17; and mining, 98, 155, 161–65; and movement of eastern industry and capital into Far War, 12–13; photographs of, 13, 17, 164; Publicity Bureau of, 21, 409n7; purposes and policies of, 151–58, 167–68; refrigerator cars on, 62–63, 64, 155; regulation of, 324; and tourism, 17, 37–38, 289, 293, 399, 505n101; transcontinental railroads, 158–61, 165, 197, 379–80; and urbanization, 158–66, 178, 218; and western settlement, 10–12 Ranching: changes in, during twentieth century, 83–87; and grazing land from public domain, 18, 84; and industrial feedlots, 85, 87; and irrigation, 37, 86; laws on, 31, 60; and meatpacking industry, 85–87, 467n100; in nineteenth century, 2, 3, 7, 399; and Omaha stockyards, 86; sale of ranch properties as ranchettes or miniranches, 401–2; statistics on, 31, 60, 426n37, 431n114; and tourism, 293– 94, 401 Rankin, Jeannette, 366, 368, 373, 374 Rascoe, Burton, 280 Ray, Dixy Lee, 367 Raza Unida Party, 348–50, 354 Reagan, Ronald, 190–91, 273, 317, 320, 337, 349, 352, 375 Reclamation Act. See Newlands National Reclamation Act (1902)

565

Reclamation Service/Bureau, 48, 72, 104, 233, 355 Reed, William and Rose, 33 Religion, 251–56, 272, 344. See also Mormons (Latter-day Saints) Remington, Frederic, 3 Reno, 223, 224, 401 Republican Party: in California, 267–68, 336–37; in Far West generally, 301, 303, 304, 308, 310, 313, 337, 510n40; in Hawaii, 339; and Hispanics, 342–43; and laborers, 326; and progressivism, 316–17, 320–21; and railroads, 167; and weakening of party organizations, 317–20. See also specific politicians and specific states Rhodes, Cecil, 94 Rice, Norman B., 353 Rickard, T. A., 162 Riles, Wilson C., 353 Roads. See Highways Roberts, Barbara, 368 Robertson, Alice May, 372–73 Rockefeller family, 12, 60, 99, 401 Rocky Mountain News, 267, 269 Rogers, Henry Huttleston, 93, 94 Rolph, James, Jr., 329 Rölvaag, Ole, 252, 493n121 Roosevelt Dam, 161, 180 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: and Hispanics, 343; and labor unions, 336; and Native Americans, 356; photograph of, 69; and popularity of New Deal, 69, 320; and public works projects, 187, 309; and repeal of Chinese Exclusion Act, 517n12; and Upton Sinclair, 303; and steel industry, 128 Roosevelt, James, 330 Roosevelt, Theodore, 3, 6, 38, 251, 294, 313, 333, 375 Rosie the Riveter, 123 Ross, Edward Alsworth, 372 Ross, Fred W., 347

566

Index

Ross, Nellie Tayloe, 366–67 Rowell, Chester, 267, 269, 271, 319 Roybal, Edward, 345–46 Ruef, Abraham, 328 Rural areas: automobiles and trucks in, 55– 56, 68, 173–76; blurring of rural-urban distinctions due to automobiles, 179–80; country towns in, 178–79; electricity in, 70, 183, 469n132; housing in, 131, 183; poverty of, 391; roads in, 174, 178, 182; teachers in, 285–86. See also Agriculture; and specific states Russian Germans, 237 Rustin, Bayard, 352 Ryan, Claude, 120 Sacramento, 217, 277 Salter, Susanna M., 370 Salt Lake City: air service in, 192, 197; airport in, 385; financial and governmental center in, 219; Mormons in, 156, 224, 255; newspapers in, 267, 269; and railroads, 160, 168, 184; segregation in, 250; ZCMI building in, 254. See also Mormons (Latter-day Saints) San Diego, 161, 184–86, 198, 207, 214–17, 289, 292, 393–94 Sandoz, Mari, 30, 32 San Francisco: advantages of, 158; and agriculture in California, 21; air service and airport in, 191, 195; banking in, 199, 242; cable car lines in, 168, 198; civic spirit in, 16, 408n39; competition between Los Angeles and, 224; cultural offerings in, 199; economy of and employment in, 122, 126, 135, 198–200; education in, 278; electricity in, 103; energy resources in, 99, 101; ethnic population of, 222, 250, 251, 278, 363, 521n42; financial and governmental center of, 219; fire of 1906 in, 112, 198; highways in, 200, 386; hotels in, 201; housing in, 200, 201; immigrants in, 235, 238, 240; labor unions

in, 259, 261–62, 327–30; politics in, 307, 311, 313, 316, 328–29, 335; population of, 158, 170, 184, 198, 207, 222, 385–86; public transportation in, 168, 169, 191, 200–201; and railroads, 158, 167, 385; suburbs of, 205; tall office buildings in, 199, 201, 207, 208; woman mayor in, 372 San Francisco Chronicle, 267, 270–74, 353 San Francisco Examiner, 265, 266, 271 San Jose, Calif., 198–200, 212, 223, 267, 341, 372 Santa Fe, N.Mex., 159, 343 Schafer, Joseph, 41 Schmitz, Eugene, 328 Scott, Harvey W., 268, 270, 278 Scott, W. D., 52 Scripp, Ellen, 215 Seale, Bobby, 351, 353, 354 Seattle: compared with San Francisco, 205, 207; ethnic population of, 222, 250; financial and governmental center of, 219; highways in, 206; master plan for, 205; office buildings in, 206; Pike Place Market in, 206; Pioneer Square Historic District in, 206; population of, 202, 205, 207; public transportation in, 205; and railroads, 159, 167; shopping center in, 186; strike in, 259; suburbs of, 205; woman mayor in, 370–71 Semiconductor industry, 137–47, 261, 393 Senate, U.S. See Congress Seventeenth Amendment, 318 Shafroth, John F., 316, 317, 331 Shale plants, 132 Sheldon, George, 316 Sherman, M. M., 58 Shipbuilding and shipyards, 113, 119–22, 124, 126, 128 Shockley, William B., 137 Shopping centers and malls, 186–87, 215–18, 221 Shuler, Robert P., 272

Index Sierra Club, 3, 295 Silicon Valley, 137–38, 394, 395 Silver mining, 3, 5, 10, 90, 96, 97, 117, 333, 400–401, 443n20 Silver Party, 310, 311 Sinclair, Upton, 289, 303, 319, 320 Skiing, 400, 401 Skyscrapers, 199, 201, 207–8, 213 Smith, C. Arnholt, 215–16 Smith, Francis M. “Borax,” 168–69, 170 Smith, Joseph, 238, 256 Smith, Paul C., 271 Smoot, Reed, 254 Smythe, William E., 39–40, 46–48, 47, 51, 172, 182 Socialist Party: in California, 258, 314, 315– 16, 329–30, 335, 510–11n46, 515n108; candidates of, 303, 313–16, 319, 320, 515n108; and cooperative settlements, 39, 258; journal of, 269; and laborers, 329–32, 335–36; in Oklahoma, 313–14, 316, 321, 510–11n46, 511n48; and woman suffrage, 373–74 South Dakota: agriculture in, 8, 9, 21, 23, 35–36, 82, 181, 230, 231, 324, 426n38, 437–38n188, 438n197; automobiles in, 175; churches in, 252, 253; and education, 501n51, 501n57, 503n73; farm foreclosures in, 66; farm loans in, 423n196; gold mining in, 92; Hispanics in, 398; homesteading in, 28, 31, 33, 412n46, 414n68; immigrants in, 40, 41, 235, 236, 398, 486n39; irrigation in, 70; labor unions in, 259; land lotteries of Indian lands in, 25–26; Native Americans in, 357; politics and political parties in, 316, 317, 322, 323, 510n40; population of, 15, 389, 391, 398, 406n19; prices of farmland in, 410n21; railroads in, 380; statehood for, 5; stock-raising in, 84; tourism in, 402; tractors and other farm machinery in, 56, 58; woman suffrage in, 526n107; women political candidates

567

and officeholders in, 526n108; Wounded Knee uprising (1973) in, 357, 358, 363 Soviet Union collapse, 135, 146 Space program, 134–35, 147, 393 Spaniards, 89, 98, 150, 153, 155–57, 244, 293, 376, 377 Sparks, John, 333 Speer, Robert, 202 Spokane, Wash., 168, 269, 530n147 Sprague, Charles A., 320 Spreckels, Claus, 75 Spreckels, John D., 161, 267 Stanford, Mr. and Mrs. Leland, 281, 288, 307, 394 Stanford University, 143, 145, 281, 288, 394, 505n90 Star Wars (Strategic Defense Initiative), 134–35 Steel industry, 128–30 Steffens, Lincoln, 266 Steunenberg, Frank, 331 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 6 Stewart, Sam V., 334 Stickley, Gustav, 291 Stock-raising. See Ranching Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), 134–35 Strikes, 141, 259, 260, 263, 302, 328, 330– 31, 333–34, 345. See also Labor unions Stubbs, Walter R., 316 Suburbs, 170, 179–80, 181, 205, 209–10, 219, 464–65n61, 482n219 Sunset, 275 Sutro, Adolph, 313, 328 Sutter, John, 102 Tacoma, Wash., 159, 184, 224 Taft, William Howard, 96, 302, 309–10, 313, 333 Tammen, Harry H., 265, 271–72 Teague, Charles, 65 Telephones, 58, 175, 179, 183, 468n130 Television, 272, 273–74

568

Index

Teller, Edward, 361 Temperance movement, 370, 373 Tenancy, 10, 229, 230, 233, 484n13, 484n17, 485n20 Terman, Frederick, 143 Territorial Papers of the United States, vii The Territories of the United States: 1861– 1890 (Pomeroy), vii Thom, Melvin, 362 Thomas, Norman, 315 Thurmond, Strom, 313 Tijerina, Reies López, 347 Timber industry. See Lumber industry and wood products Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1 Tourism: and air service, 194–95; in Aspen, Colo., 400; and automobiles, 174; in Deadwood, S.Dak., 402; in Hawaii, 80, 194–95, 224, 298, 310, 384–85; and landscapes of Far West, 291–99; in Montana, 398–400; in New Mexico, 195; in Park City, Utah, 401; and railroads, 17, 37–38, 289, 293, 399, 505n101; and ranching, 293–94, 401; and skiing, 400, 401; in Sun Valley, Idaho, 400; Walt Disney amusement park, 209. See also Las Vegas, Nev. Townley, A. C., 323 Toy, Eckard V., viii Tractors, 53–57, 57, 61 Transportation. See Aircraft industry; Airplanes and air service; Automobiles and trucks; Highways; Railroads; Trucking Truck farming: in California, 44–45, 49, 62, 63, 72, 124, 240–41, 420n157, 496n167; demand for produce from, 228; economics of, 397; and Japanese Americans, 240–41, 420n157; in Kansas, 37; map of, 54; and Mormons, 172; in Nevada, 91; specialization in, 88 Trucking industry, 86, 166. See also Automobiles and trucks Truman, Harry, 357

Tucson, 160, 161, 192, 195, 224, 337 Turner, Frederick Jackson, vii, viii, xvii, xixxx, 1, 225, 226 Turnoy, Harry, 32–33 Uncle Sam’s West, 118 Union Labor Party, 307, 316, 328–30, 513n82 Unions. See Labor unions United Farm Workers, 259, 261, 347, 349 Universities. See Education; and specific universities University of California, 71, 209, 250, 282, 351, 354, 393–94, 505n90 University of New Mexico, 290 Uranium, 131, 132 Urbanization: and automobiles, 197, 204, 221; and cities with largest areas, 170, 208, 464n60; differences among cities, 222–23; and ethnic minorities generally, 248; and housing, 185–86; map of, 196; population growth in urban areas, 391– 93; and railroads, 158–67, 178, 218; and shopping centers, 186–87; similarities among cities, 221–22. See also Suburbs; and specific cities U’Ren, William S., 317, 318 Utah: agriculture in, 83, 180, 183, 311, 437–38n188, 438n197; airport in, 385; churches in, 252; copper mining in, 94, 95, 96; education in, 278, 279, 283, 501nn52–53, 501n57; electricity in, 104, 183; homesteading in, 414n68; immigrants in, 43, 486n39; irrigation in, 70, 74; Jewish families in, 50; manufacturing in, 128, 129, 142; military installations and spending in, 117, 145; mining in, 95–96, 393, 400–401, 442n20; Native Americans in, 523n76; oil shale in, 132; photographs of, 95, 254; politics and political parties in, 314; population of, 123, 390, 390; railroads in, 153, 160, 172, 184, 407n29; statehood for, 6, 301;

Index tourism in Park City, 401; woman suffrage in, 365, 526n107, 528n124; women political candidates and officeholders in, 370, 527n111, 528n124. See also Mormons (Latter-day Saints) Utilities. See Electricity; Waterpower Valdez, Alaska, 165 Vanport, Ore., 124, 125, 186 Veblen, Thorstein, 178, 495n153 Vegetable production. See Agriculture Villard, Henry, 280 Voting. See Politics Wallace, Henry, 27, 37, 61, 315 Wallace, Lurleen B., 368 Walsh, Thomas J., 336, 373 Waltz, Pierce, and Anna Waltz, 33 Warren, Earl, 267–68, 273, 319, 330, 337, 512n59 Washington: African Americans in, 248; agriculture in, 9, 23, 75, 180, 182, 311, 410n15, 437–38n188, 438n195; churches in, 256; constitutional convention (1889) of, 305; education in, 278, 283, 501n57; electricity in, 104, 183; highways in, 206; homesteading in, 414n68; immigrants in, 42, 235, 236, 398, 417n123; labor unions in, 337; lumber industry in, 107, 109, 110, 393; manufacturing in, 121, 122, 127, 129, 134, 146; military installations in, 117; nuclear power in, 105–6; politics and political parties in, 316, 318– 19, 322; population of, 3, 380; railroads in, 16, 42, 151, 167–68, 184, 305, 407n29; shopping center in, 186; statehood for, 5–6; woman suffrage in, 526n107, 530n145; women political candidates and officeholders in, 366, 367, 370–71, 374, 527n113. See also specific cities Washington, Dennis, 96–97 Waterpower, 102–5, 105. See also Dams; Electricity

569

Water supply. See Irrigation Watkins, Arthur V., 361 Watt, James, 204, 357 Wayland, Julius Augustus, 269 Weaver, James B., 311 Weber, Adna F., 156–57 Wells, William B., 116, 409n7 West. See Far West; Middle West Western Federation of Miners (WFM), 263, 331, 333, 335 Weyerhaeuser, Frederick, 107–10, 108, 143, 388, 448n100 WFM. See Western Federation of Miners (WFM) Wheat production. See Agriculture; Flour milling Wheeler, Burton K., 336 Wheeler-Howard Act (1934), 356–57, 359 White, William Allen, 21, 34–35, 269, 270, 302, 319 Wickersham, Judge, 163 Willamette University, 279 Willys, John North, 68 Wilshire, H. Gaylord, 268, 314, 315, 330 Wilshire’s Magazine, 268 Wilson, J. Stitt, 314, 335, 515n108 Wilson, James, 35, 36, 61 Wilson, James Q., 350–51 Wilson, Lionel, 354 Wilson, Milburn L., 32, 60, 71, 176, 423– 24n3 Wilson, Peter B. (Pete), 216 Wilson, William B., 50 Wilson, Woodrow, 163, 313, 366 Windmills, 100–101 Wobblies. See Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Women: and Black Panthers, 374; as elected officeholders, 365–74, 526– 27nn110–11, 527n113, 527n122, 529n130; employment of, during World War II, 122, 123; as homesteaders, 28–30, 29, 33, 34, 182; as immigrants, 489n63; in labor

570

Index

Women (continued) movement, 335; and politics, 365–74; ratio of males to females in Far West, 15; resistance to suffrage and political involvement of, 368–69, 372–73; and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 374; suffrage for, 365, 369, 370, 372–73; as teachers and school administrators, 368, 527n114 Woo, Michael, 517n8 Wood products. See Lumber industry and wood products Woodrow, Thomas, 314 Workers’ Party, 324–25 Working class. See Labor unions Workingmen’s Party, 307, 308, 328, 338 World War I, 50–51, 68, 102, 107, 109, 113, 323 World War II, 116–26, 135–36, 243, 345, 361, 383 Wounded Knee uprising, 357, 358, 363 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 180 Wrobel, David, xvi, 535–48 Wyoming: agriculture in, 18, 182–83, 410n15, 437–38n188, 516n118, 532n34; automobiles in, 55–56; churches in, 255; coal industry in, 105, 130, 132–33;

education in, 286, 501n57; electricity in, 469n132; farm loans in, 423n196; homestead land for World War I veterans in, 51; homesteading in, 27, 28, 29, 414n68; housing in, 131; immigrants in, 43, 397, 417n123; irrigation in, 73, 182–83; manufacturing in, 128; mining in, 442n20, 516n118; newspapers in, 499n28; oil and gas industry in, 98, 130–31, 131; oil shale in, 132; politics and political parties in, 313, 316, 317, 337, 510n40; population of, 389, 390, 390; railroads in, 153, 160, 165, 305; stock-raising in, 60, 337, 426n37; tractors in, 56; woman suffrage in, 365, 526n107; women political candidates and officeholders in, 366–67 Yellowstone National Parks, 2, 52, 294, 296 Yorty, Sam, 190, 352 Yosemite National Park, 2, 294–95, 296, 298 Young, Brigham, 254 Zeckendorf, William, 202 Zellerbach, Isidore, 109 Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institute (ZCMI), 254