Critics look at these efforts and see the work left undone. The conservation reforms, argues environmental historian Donald Worster, were half measures that reflected “no fundamental reform of attitudes.” Perhaps, but the old ideas the New Dealers resuscitated signaled another watershed moment for the West. FDR closed the frontier, once again. “Our last frontier has long since been reached and there is practically no more free land,” he declared during the 1932 campaign. Americans now faced the “soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources . . . , of distributing wealth and products more equitably.” In 1935 FDR signed an executive order withdrawing all remaining public lands from entry and placing them under federal conservation authority. The selling off or giving away of the public domain—a cornerstone of the nation’s conquest and redistribution policy since the Land Ordinance in 1874—came to a halt. Truly, this marked the passing of the nation’s long frontier era.48
FEDERAL LANDS IN THE WEST
. . .
President Franklin D. Roosevelt split history into before and after. He drew a line in time and suggested that westerners cross over and embrace different values—sober capitalism (ironic for the man who ended prohibition), scientific management, and federal conservation. The region’s economic problems, however, still bedeviled its residents. Roosevelt may have buried the frontier period of “go ahead and take,” but the stench of the corpse lingered for years. During the 1930s westerners Bernard DeVoto and Walter Prescott Webb again voiced the old western complaint of colonial exploitation. In an influential jeremiad of 1934, DeVoto argued that the East had created the West as a colonial dependency, had plundered its natural resources, and didn’t give a damn for its economic development. A few years later Webb published the angry Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy (1937), which argued further that the Great Depression was largely the result of the close of the frontier and uneven economic development of the West and South. New Dealers largely agreed. To survive, the nation’s economy needed its lagging sections to catch up. One of the most enduring legacies of the New Deal was Roosevelt’s decision to build an industrial infrastructure in these regions. The New Deal’s program of public investment was unlike anything seen in American history, and it transformed the West.49
The New Deal program focused on multipurpose river development. Reclamation concentrated on irrigation, but chronic surpluses altered the justification for water projects. Dams would produce electricity, regulate floodwaters, and impound runoff for redistribution. Electric utilities and companies manufacturing electrical appliances were two of the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy in the 1920s. Yet only 10 percent of rural households enjoyed electricity for their homes and work. Plugging farmers and ranchers into the electric grid became a philosophical bridge across regions. In 1928 a coalition of southern Democrats and western Republicans (“the alliance of cotton and corn”) passed the first multipurpose river bill—a huge dam and hydroelectric complex at Boulder Canyon on the Colorado River, designed to provide irrigation, flood control, public water supplies, and hydroelectric power to Arizona, Nevada, and California. President Hoover took the credit and named the dam for himself but blocked congressional attempts to secure federal funding for similar projects on the Tennessee and Columbia Rivers.
Roosevelt, however, was an enthusiastic supporter of river development. During his campaign for the presidency he came out in favor of the Columbia River project. “Vast water power can be of incalculable value to this whole section of the country,” he told a crowd in Portland. “It means cheap manufacturing production, economy, and comfort on the farm and in the household.” Massive infusions of federal investment could provide the spark to ignite regional economic growth. Even before he took office, Roosevelt announced the model New Deal river project, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Congress approved the TVA in the spring of 1933, and over the next several years New Dealers in Congress won approval for similar projects on the Columbia, the Sacramento and San Joaquin in California’s Central Valley, and dozens of smaller rivers throughout the West. Congressman Sam Rayburn of Texas sponsored the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which connected tens of thousands of rural households to the nation’s power grid. “I want my people out of the dark,” Rayburn told his colleagues. “Can you imagine what it will mean to a farm wife to have a pump in a well and lights in the house?” With clout as both southerners and westerners, Rayburn and other Texas Democrats were congressional leaders for Roosevelt’s program of development for the provinces.50
Hoover Dam with Lake Mead in the background. Photograph by Andy Pernick, 1996. Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior.
The projects employed tens of thousands of workers and helped launch some of the West’s biggest corporations. “The big winner of the New Deal,” wrote historian Jordan Schwarz, “was the West.” The river projects enriched regional construction companies and their leaders, such as Henry J. Kaiser, who became known as the New Deal’s “favorite businessman.” An able and energetic industrialist, Kaiser directed a crew that built the superstructure at the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia (three times the size of Hoover Dam) and the gigantic pilings for the San Francisco Bay Bridge. When he failed to win the contract for the construction of Shasta Dam on the Sacramento, Kaiser successfully bid to supply the cement, then in just six months constructed his own cement plant, the largest in the world. Cheap electricity from government-built dams stimulated the industrialization of the Columbia and Tennessee basins and propelled California forward as the nation’s leading industrial state during World War II. New western aluminum and steel mills provided the materials needed by western shipyards and aircraft plants. Kaiser turned from erecting dams to assembling aircraft carriers during the war. Power generated by dams on the Tennessee, Columbia, and Colorado Rivers fueled the industrial complexes that invented and manufactured nuclear weapons. Dams and construction projects intended to employ beleaguered Okies and brighten the nights of isolated farm families helped turn the United States into a superpower.51
. . .
The New Deal belief in the closing of the frontier also stimulated a rethinking of Indian policy. A cornerstone of frontier economics was the “freeing up” of Indian land and resources for private exploitation and development. The Allotment Act of 1888 was proposed as a departure from this pattern, but in fact allotment accelerated the assault on Indian lands. A study conducted in 1928 by Lewis Meriam of the Brookings Institution (a Washington think tank funded by the Rockefeller Foundation) concluded that allotment had “resulted in much loss of land without a compensating advance in the economic ability of the Indians.” In Oklahoma tribes such as the Cherokees were stripped of 40 percent of their holdings, with the rest being distributed in small parcels to Indian families. The lands of the Sioux were reduced by a third, the Ojibway estate by fully 80 percent. The total Indian land base stood at forty-seven million acres—only a third of what it had been when allotment was proclaimed as the solution to further Indian dispossession. Moreover, the report declared, the policy of assimilation had been nothing more than an attempt to “crush out all that is Indian” and had demoralized many tribes, making Native Americans the most impoverished group in the United States.52
The Meriam Report underscored allotment’s marginalization of American Indians. Instead of assimilating them into the mainstream, the program drove many to the desperate fringes. The wonks at the Brookings Institution felt free to criticize the sorry promises of assimilationists because they no longer believed in assimilation. The theory of human development and interaction that motivated them was “cultural pluralism,” a term coined in 1915 by the Harvard philosopher Horace Kallen. America, Kallen argued, was best understood as a “federation or commonwealth of national cultures,” a “democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and autonomously through common institutions in the enterprise of self-realization through the perfection of men according to their kind.” Kallen and the plura
lists leaned heavily on this last phrase. Assimilationists assumed the superiority of Anglo-American culture. Pluralists, by contrast, were influenced by new perspectives in anthropology being advanced by Franz Boas of Columbia University and his students Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, and Margaret Mead, all of whom had studied the Indians of North America. Impressed by the enormous diversity among cultures, the pluralists argued that each should be considered from within the framework of its own values and assumptions.53
John Collier attended some of these Columbia classes. A young southerner from Atlanta, he came to New York City in the early twentieth century and after a few years of course work became a social worker in the city’s settlement houses. But the pluralist perspective he had imbibed at Columbia clashed with the paternalism he found rampant in his profession. In 1920 Collier had relocated to Taos, New Mexico, where he became a great admirer of the communal culture of the Pueblo Indians. The Pueblos’ determination to preserve their traditions against assimilationists was what impressed him most. When the Pueblos became involved in a fight to defend their land and water rights, Collier jumped to their support and organized a network of reformers around the country. Eventually this network grew into the American Indian Defense Association, and Collier secured a national reputation as a critic of Indian policy. One of the charter members of Collier’s association was Harold Ickes, and when Ickes became Roosevelt’s interior secretary in 1933, he asked Collier to join the administration as the new commissioner of Indian affairs.
His policies, Collier announced at his swearing in, would focus on “ending paternalism and extending civil rights” to Indian people. “Indians, whose culture, civic tradition, and inherited traditions are still strong and virile, should be encouraged and helped to develop their life in their own patterns.” Collier drafted a set of reforms that were included in the Indian Reorganization Act, passed by Congress in 1934. The Indian New Deal represented a radical shift in Indian policy. It put an end to the government campaign of repression and inaugurated an unprecedented era of Indian cultural freedom. Boarding schools were phased out and replaced by reservation day schools in which Indians themselves had an impact on the curriculum. The bureau sponsored the publication of bilingual textbooks printed in both English and native languages. Indian people began to take a more prominent role in the running of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and by the early 1940s the number of Indian employees at the BIA had increased to several thousand.54
John Collier with Blackfoot Indian leaders, 1934. Library of Congress.
Collier issued a directive to Indian agents proclaiming religious freedom on all reservations. “There have existed tribal religions which have been forged through thousands of years of endurance,” he wrote, “which contain deep beauty and spiritual guidance, consolation, and disciplinary power.” Collier’s thinking and policies celebrated old—or old-seeming—traditions. While his pluralism and radicalism distanced him from the likes of Gifford Pinchot and Owen Wister, Collier shared their sense that modernity imperiled traditional practices and values. Wister wrote novels to preserve a white manly code of conduct, Pinchot organized the Forest Service to protect natural resources from rapacious capitalists, and Collier dedicated his stewardship of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to saving Indian cultures. Collier wanted to strengthen the tribes, not dismantle them for mainstream absorption. The Indian New Deal ended the policy of allotment. Remaining unallotted reservations lands were reconsolidated and placed under the control of tribal corporations. Individual Indians who had been awarded allotments were encouraged to exchange those lands for shares of common stock in Indian corporations. The BIA also established a fund from which tribes might borrow in order to purchase reservation lands from non-Indian owners.55
Apache cowboys on a roundup in Gila County, Arizona. Photograph by Gilbert Campbell, 1941. Arizona Collection, Arizona State University Libraries.
The Meriam Report had suggested that stock raising seemed to offer the most promise for the economic renewal of western Indians. “Not only does the average Indian show considerable aptitude for this work, but enormous areas of Indian land, tribal and individual, are of little value except grazing,” the report concluded. Encouraged by Collier’s BIA, the number of Indian cattle ranchers doubled and the value of Indian cattle sales increased more than tenfold, reaching three million dollars by 1939. One of the most successful examples was the San Carlos Apache tribe located in the Gila Mountains of southeastern Arizona. By 1940 the tribe’s twenty-eight thousand head of registered Herefords had become the largest in the Southwest. “The cattle industry is undoubtedly a fortunate choice for the reservation,” wrote an anthropologist studying the tribe. “Indians I have known like the idea of cattle work, for they feel it is worth a man’s effort.” The Apache cowboys tapped into the same reservoir of virile associations that attracted Wister and Teddy Roosevelt to ranch work, but they achieved a different outcome. As historian Peter Iverson notes, the mastery of animals while dressed in boots, spurs, and Stetsons “increased rather than decreased their identity as San Carlos Apaches. Being cowboys had allowed them to be Indians.”56
These successes depended on Indian peoples’ ability to exercise sovereignty over their affairs. Under the auspices of the Indian Reorganization Act, 181 tribes voted to organize new forms of representative self-government, and during Collier’s tenure about half of those tribes adopted written constitutions and elected leaders. To be sure, the BIA continued to have extraordinary authority in the affairs of reservation Indians, retaining veto power over the decisions of tribal councils and supervising the fiscal and economic arrangements of Indian nations. Indian agents and reservation superintendents continued to dole out jobs and funds, and many tribal councils acted as little more than rubber stamps. Nevertheless, the New Deal declared—for the first time in U.S. history—that tribal government had the right to exercise what the chief legal adviser of the Interior Department called “internal sovereignty.” Except in cases where tribal jurisdiction had been limited by the express action of Congress—as it did in 1885 when it extended federal jurisdiction to felony offenses such as murder, rape, and robbery committed on reservations—Indian nations were to enjoy all their “original sovereignty.” In the coming years, the federal government would violate its own directives, and many states encroached on tribal sovereignty without federal sanction, yet the legal principles the New Deal established set important precedent. Upheld by a series of federal court decisions after World War II, Indian sovereignty would become the cornerstone of Indian law in the second half of the twentieth century.
Sovereignty as the Indian New Deal defined it led to striking contradictions. The Tohono O’odham tribe of southern Arizona, for example, had no words in its language for “representative” or “budget.” In this instance, culture frustrated the reformers’ efforts to preserve culture. In other situations, political reorganization ran into long-standing disagreements within Indian communities between progressives and traditionalists, assimilationists and separatists, mixed-bloods and full-bloods. Among the most acculturated Indians—many of whom had accepted allotments and now operated farms or ranches—there were fears that reorganization of Indian policy might threaten their titles. Other acculturated Indians criticized what they thought was Collier’s sentimental and romantic attachment to traditional Indian culture. These critics argued that the Indian New Deal was a “back to blanket” program that would retard progress and condemn Indians to perpetual poverty and subjugation. The Iroquois leader Alice Lee Jemison, for example, argued that “reform only meant the strengthening not the diminishing of bureaucratic control in the lives of American Indians.”57
Traditionalists had their own bones to pick. Among those Indians who continued to believe in the viability of traditional forms of tribal government, there was considerable opposition to the establishment of democratically elected tribal councils and chairs. Many traditionalists feared that these councils would be dominated by assimilated India
ns educated in boarding schools. At Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, for example, a representative council replaced the traditional self-selected one in an election in which most traditionalists refused to participate. Disagreements over Indian reorganization fed into the politics of factionalism that existed on nearly every reservation in the country. Although most Indian tribes and communities accepted the Indian New Deal, seventy-seven tribes rejected it, among them the Navajos and Iroquois, two of the most influential Indian nations in the United States. Both already had traditional council governments of their own. The Iroquois feared that acceptance would compromise their hardline position on questions of sovereignty. In 1924, when Congress passed the Indian Citizen Act, declaring for the first time that Indians were U.S. citizens, the Iroquois council rejected it, insisting that the Iroquois people were already citizens of the Iroquois nation.
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