Colin Woodard (38 page)

The fantasy ended in the winter of 1886, when much of the Far West endured arctic conditions: weeks of subzero temperatures that killed somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the High Plains's cattle and not a few of its yeoman farmers. The following year the rains failed to appear, and in the year after that. By 1890, independent farmers were fleeing the drought-stricken region in droves, reducing the populations of Kansas and Nebraska by nearly half. Sixty percent of the million or so farmers on the plains gave up. The winter also put an end to the cattlemen who'd been overgrazing public lands beyond the railway zones, destroying the topsoil, which then eroded away into the tributaries of the Missouri River, changing it from clear to deep brown. The drought drove the cattlemen away, but the damage was permanent. “Since those high and far-off days the range has never been capable of supporting anything like the number of cattle it could have supported if the cattle barons had not maimed it,” Far West native Bernard DeVoto wrote in 1947. “It never will be capable of supporting a proper number again during the geological epoch in which civilization exists.” The Dust Bowl years of the 1930s only made matters worse. As DeVoto would later write, the Far West had “caused the collapse of the frontier culture, thus also set the full stop to the American dream.”
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What groups did survive the nineteenth century in the Far West—the Mormon enclave excepted—did so only by associating with massive external corporations or even larger federal infrastructure projects built by massive external corporations. The U.S. government dammed rivers and streams, built aqueducts to move water from one basin to another, and underwrote the construction and maintenance of extensive irrigation systems, all to enable a few farmers to grow crops in the desert. Mining companies expanded to new territories and states, often running them as their own feudal preserves. The railroads, having no competitors, continued to charge whatever they pleased, developing a system by which rail fares into or out of the Far West were many times more expensive per mile than fares in or between the Eastern nations and the Left Coast. As late as the twentieth century one could ship goods from Chicago to Seattle via Helena cheaper than from Chicago to Helena on the very same train. Raw goods could be shipped out of the Far West more cheaply than finished goods, in an intentional scheme concocted by the railroads to prevent manufacturing industries from taking hold in the region and to keep it dependent on the cities of the Left Coast, Yankeedom, the Midlands, and New Netherland.
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Internally, corporate control over Far Western politics and society was disturbingly thorough. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anaconda Copper literally ran Montana, buying off judges, local officials, and politicians in both parties and, via the “cemetery vote,” controlling the state's elections. Its politicians in turn delivered rules, regulations, and tax policies that enriched Anaconda and its executives. Founded by the ruthless Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant and veteran of the Nevada silver boom, and supported by San Francisco mining magnate George Hearst, Anaconda owned the mines, the smelters that processed the ore, the coal mines that fueled the smelters, the forests that supplied the timber needed in the mines, the power plants that powered the facility, the railroad that connected the parts, and even the banks that financed them. On Daly's death in 1900 his company employed three-fourths of all wage earners in Montana. As late as 1959 it owned five of the state's six daily newspapers, which repressed news unfavorable to the company (like stories regarding the fines it paid for sending faulty wire to Allied troops in World War II). Until the 1970s it maintained “hospitality rooms” for friendly legislators at the state capitol in Helena, where women and drink were available to the compliant. Notoriously stingy, Anaconda never gave anything to its hometown of Butte save a small workers' park; this was subsequently destroyed along with much of the town itself to make way for a gigantic Anaconda pit mine and future Superfund site.
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Meanwhile much of the land in the Far West that hadn't been turned over to the railroad companies, seized by mining interests, or granted to Indians as reservations remained in the hands of the federal government. Even today the federation owns about a third of Montana and Colorado; half of Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho; two-thirds of Far Western Oregon; and 85 percent of Nevada. Far Westerners have had little control over this land, which the federal government has often turned over for exploitation by the same corporate interests that have dominated the rest of the region. Lumber giants logged national forests for next to nothing. Ranching companies grazed on public lands. Oil and gas companies prospected on federally administered Indian reservations, with federal agencies often neglecting to require them to pay their royalties. Morris Garnsey of the University of Colorado summarized the other nations' attitudes toward the Far West in 1945. “Get control of the raw material, get it out as cheaply as possible, and haul it away as fast as possible,” he wrote. “The interests of the local area are a secondary consideration. The region becomes a colonial dependency of an industrial empire.”
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The result of these formative experiences is that by the early twentieth century, the people of the Far West would come to resent both the corporations and the federal government, seeing them as joint oppressors. By allying with the Deep South, their political leaders have managed to weaken federal stewardship of Far Western resources. Ironically, this has merely served to increase corporate dominance over their nation.

Far Westerners have long agitated for greater local control of their economic future. Despite the considerable influence of railroads, banks, and mining companies, they managed to write state constitutions that protected laborers via eight-hour work laws, banned private militias (which were often used to break strikes), and prohibited employers from including clauses in employment contracts that absolved them of responsibility for accidents, even those resulting from gross corporate negligence. The Far West was a hotbed of economic populism, labor unionism, and even socialism right up until World War II. Its people elected progressives like Montana senator Burton Wheeler (a Massachusetts native who sided with workers against Anaconda) or Senator William Borah of Idaho (who sponsored the bill creating the federal Department of Labor). FDR swept the Far West in 1932, propelled by the region's hostility to the Wall Street financiers they believed had caused the Great Depression. But the cultural revolution of the 1960s drove a wedge between the Far Westerners and left-wing forces in Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. “Liberalism was turning away from the popular economic progressivism with which Mountain states support had been forged,” Republican strategist Kevin Phillips would write at the end of the decade, “and was shifting into a welfare establishmentarianism lacking in appeal to the old radical Mountain states (where Northeastern causes are suspect, whether liberal or conservative).”
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The cartels have since made a comeback, in large part by backing political candidates who serve their interests while attacking the Far Westerners' other historic enemy: the federal government. Where the government was concerned, the popular majority long ago developed a concise agenda: get out, leave us alone, and give us more money. They want dams maintained on the upper Columbia but no regulations protecting salmon. They want Washington to keep providing $2 billion in irrigation subsidies but not to try to prevent them being used to exhaust the last of the region's great ancient aquifers. Many of the Far West's senators and congressmen receive most of their campaign donations from interests outside the region and have become among the most reliable champions of the external industrial corporations at work there. But they do so through the libertarian rhetoric of individual freedom from governmental tyranny. “We oppose the federal intrusion in the everyday lives of the people of our great country,” Wyoming senator John Barrasso explained in announcing the 2009 creation of a Western Caucus of senators. “The government should get out of the way of prosperity and liberty [and] . . . cannot legislate economic progress by spending billions in taxpayer dollars or imposing strict environmental regulations.” Utah senator Orrin Hatch added that “one of the aims of the Senate Western Caucus is to thwart the antioil agenda of the Washington elite and their extreme environmentalist allies.” Added his Utah colleague Robert Bennett, “It's time for us to recognize the tremendous treasure trove that the American West represents and move ahead in an intelligent fashion to exploit it,” noting that the energy resources extended “up on into Canada.” The senators did not propose increasing the self-reliance of their corporate donors by raising timber-cutting royalties or grazing fees on public lands to market rates, or making large agrobusinesses compensate taxpayers for the real cost of operating the dams and water projects that allow them to grow cotton in the desert.
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Indeed, the Far West's hostility to federal power has been the glue that's held this authority-averse region in an otherwise unlikely alliance with the continent's most authoritarian nation, with lasting repercussions for North America and the world.

CHAPTER 23

I
f the existence of the American nations seems persuasive enough for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, one might still ask how they could possibly have survived to the present day. After all, isn't the United States a nation of immigrants, and Canada, too, for that matter? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did we not welcome to our shores tens of millions of people from all over the world, those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free who flowed through Ellis and Angel Islands on their way to create the wondrously diverse America of today? Surely the cultures of the regional nations were subsumed by the great multicultural tide of 1830 to 1924, surviving only in the imaginations of a few old-money white Anglo-Saxon Protestants still hiding out in their last scraps of habitat: Nantucket, Harvard Yard, and Skull and Bones reunions. Did not the arrival of millions of Irish, Germans, Italians, Slavs, Jews, Greeks, and Chinese in the course of a single lifetime herald the birth of a genuinely “American” (or, for that matter, “Canadian”) identity that cemented the country together to fight two world wars?

The short answer is no.

These great immigration waves enriched and empowered these two North American federations, but they did not displace their preexisting regional nations. These remained the “dominant cultures” which nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants' children and grandchildren either assimilated into or reacted against. Immigrant communities might achieve political dominance over a city or state (as the Irish did in Boston or the Italians in New York), but the system they controlled was the product of the regional culture. They might retain, share, and promote their own cultural legacies, introducing foods, religions, fashions, and ideas, but they would find them modified over time by adaptations to local conditions and mores. They might encounter prejudice and hostility from the “native” population, but the nature and manifestation of this opposition varied depending on which nation the natives belonged to. Immigrants didn't alter “American culture,” they altered America's respective regional cultures. Indeed, in many ways the immigrations of 1830–1924 actually accentuated the differences among them.

A few words on this era of mass immigration. Between 1830 and 1924 some 36 million people emigrated to the United States. They arrived in three distinct waves. The first—the arrival of some 4.5 million Irish, Germans, and British people between 1830 and 1860—has already been touched on; it triggered Yankee fears that those immigrants who were Catholic would undermine the republic through slavish obedience to the Pope, and it motivated New England's mission to “save the west” by assimilating newcomers to the Yankee Way. The second, between 1860 and 1890, saw twice as many immigrants, largely from the same countries, plus Scandinavia and China. The third wave, from 1890 to 1924, was the largest of all, with some 18 million new arrivals, mostly from southern and eastern Europe (particularly Italy, Greece, and Poland), three-quarters of whom were either Catholic or Jewish; this wave also included many Chinese and caused some alarm among native-born North Americans who feared these new foreigners would be unable to assimilate to local ways. This third wave was cut short in 1924, when the U.S. Congress imposed quotas designed to protect the federation from the taint of “inferior races,” including Italians, Jews, and immigrants from the Balkans and East Europe. Immigration remained restricted—and heavily biased toward northern Europeans—until the early 1950s. Despite the scale of immigration, newcomers were always a small minority. The proportion of foreign-born remained at about 10 percent of the U.S. population throughout the period, peaking at 14 percent in 1914. Its cumulative effect was important but not overwhelming. Even after adding together all immigrants between 1790 and 2000—66 million altogether—and their descendants, demographers have calculated that immigration accounts for only about half the early-twenty-first-century population of the United States. In other words, if the United States had sealed its borders in 1790, in the year 2000 it would still have had a population of about 125 million instead of 250 million. The 1820–1924 immigration was enormous, but it was never truly overpowering.
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Another key point to note is that these “great wave” immigrants didn't spread out evenly across the federation but rather concentrated in a few locations. Throughout the period, the majority of immigrants lived in New Netherland, the Midlands, and Yankeedom and most of the rest on the Left Coast. They settled in a handful of gateway cities, especially New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Virtually none of them came to Tidewater, Appalachia, the Deep South, or El Norte. (The Far West, which was still being colonized, attracted only small numbers of immigrants, but they accounted for a significant share of the region's population—about a quarter in 1870, and almost a fifth in 1910.) New York City alone had more foreign-born residents in 1870 than the entirety of Tidewater, Appalachia, and the Deep South combined. Scholars have shown that immigrant communities tended to fan out to the suburbs as they gained wealth and influence; this kept the influence of “ethnic” communities concentrated in immigration's “have” nations, and left the “have-not” nations almost untouched.
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