The American West
Page 44
Navajo shepherds with their flock. Photograph by Edward S. Curtis, c. 1905. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Collier had nothing to do with the Iroquois situation, but he was implicated in the rejection of the reorganization by the Diné (Navajos), a case that illustrated once again how good intentions and pluralist aspirations failed to mend the federal relationship with Indian people. According to federal studies of the multipurpose development project on the Colorado River, herds of Diné sheep were overgrazing grasslands and causing serious erosion, and the soil carried down to the river threatened to silt up the reservoir behind Hoover Dam. “Down there on the Colorado is the biggest, most expensive dam in the world,” Collier told a meeting of the Navajo council in 1934, “which will furnish all southern California with water and electric power.” He wanted the Diné to cull their herds, voluntarily he insisted in public at the time, but later he admitted that federal agents had bullied and intimidated Diné stock raisers to accomplish the slaughter of tens of thousands of sheep and goats. The Navajo stock-reduction program hit the smallest and most economically vulnerable Indian herders worst, devastating thousands of native families and reducing them to dependency on federal assistance. Collier and the BIA became anathema to most Diné, and the resentment over stock reduction resulted in a protest vote that killed the new constitution. Collier failed to strike a new deal with the largest tribe in the United States.58
In the name of reclamation, bringing water to southern California fruit orchards, and Los Angeles real estate developments, John Collier, pluralist defender of Indian culture, damaged one of the few remaining viable Indian economies in the West. Exemplars of survival against impossible odds, the Diné and their herds were sacrificed to the crosscurrents of the postfrontier West in which bureaucrats managed land, people, animals, and rivers in an atmosphere of eminent extinction and profound loss.
FURTHER READING
Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (2008)
Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (2004)
Robert V. Hine, In the Shadow of Frémont: Edward Kern and the Art of Exploration, 1845–1860, 2nd ed. (1982)
Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2001)
Jules David Prown et al., Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (1992)
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985)
Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (1999)
Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005)
G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (1968)
Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (1996)
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979)
David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (1993)
11
As the West Goes . . .
Though his screeching vocals, tattooed limbs, and teased-out hair would have blown ancestral minds, long-dead Americans would recognize elements of the story Axl Rose wailed in 1987’s “Welcome to the Jungle.” Rose and his heavy metal bandmates blasted a narrative of corrupted innocence, a tale of a young woman seeking fame in Hollywood. Ever since Americans have had cities they’ve told of rural innocents led astray by urban corruptors. Guns N’ Roses updated that cautionary tale, warning impressionable starlets to watch out for drug dealers and sleazy agents. The song’s environment—the jungle—harkened even further back into North America’s frontier history, to captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson’s.
Getting lost in the wilderness is one of the oldest plots around. Guns N’ Roses simply dressed it up in 1980s “hair metal” glam and cranked up the tempo. That’s how stories endure. The living grab onto them, renovate the setting and the delivery, and offer them as new products. Audiences latch onto deep history resurrected as a pop sensation. They get their ancient wisdom and their MTV.
The band could have set their story in any number of American metropolitan jungles. The 1970s and 1980s blighted urban cores across the country. Interstates plowed through downtown neighborhoods, dividing communities and providing an exit ramp to the suburbs for those with means. The federal government pulled back on spending and support at the same moment that local tax bases shrank. In the 1980s, when Americans pictured a wild or dangerous place, they envisioned burned-out sections of New York City’s South Bronx or Chicago’s crumbling Cabrini-Green housing project. But Guns N’ Roses picked Los Angeles, and their choice spoke volumes about the leading role that city played in modern American society and mythology. L.A. was the preferred location for twentieth-century Americans to lose their way. The relentless California sunshine teamed with Hollywood neon to dazzle transplants into ethical missteps. The contrast between gleaming surfaces and dark underbellies gave L.A. a noir shading. Both the bright light and the deep shadow contained iconic Americans with historical antecedents. If the wide-eyed starlet replayed the role of wilderness captive, her male counterpart was the hardboiled private detective. The gumshoe anchored noir films and novels, kicking the stories into action by exploring the recesses of urban corruption. In the beginning he thinks he understands evil, but he finds that the human heart has no ground floor. A case-hardened student of savagery, he was the reincarnation of Benjamin Church, the man-who-knew-Indians.
Specters from the outer limits of the colonial backwater, Mary Rowlandson and Benjamin Church, had no business haunting 1980s Los Angeles, arguably the dominant city of post–World War II America. The City of Angels sprawled at the center of a region at the center of a nation at the center of the world. Jumpstarted by New Deal projects and the preparation for war, economic development washed over the region, reordering relations among East, West, and South. Certainly the postwar West could no longer be considered a colonial periphery, what Bernard DeVoto termed the nation’s “plundered province.” Millions of newcomers poured into the region, a westward tilt toward the booming cities and suburbs of the Sun Belt, a shift that altered not only addresses but attitudes. For the first time in American history, the West became the economic, political, and cultural pacesetter for the nation as a whole. “Western” became a brand, a set of cultural associations, an ideological affiliation, disconnected from geographic location. A suburbanite could pull her Chevy Silverado into the garage of a three-bedroom ranch house with “Hotel California” playing on the stereo whether she lived in New Jersey, Peoria, or Flagstaff. Levi’s, surfboards, Scientology, pinot noirs, and chimichangas infiltrated the far corners of the nation. This shift was so fundamental that it calls into question the continued relevance of a sectional interpretation of American society. In the twenty-first century the attachments and identities of trans-Mississippi Americans are no longer defined by the huge and amorphous region known as the West but rooted in more discernible cultural provinces.1
If West lost its salience as a way of understanding contemporary history, the notion of the frontier also came under serious interrogation. Frontier became a cliché of American political rhetoric, appealing to the optimism and nationalism of voters. John F. Kennedy called for a “New Frontier,” and Ronald Reagan celebrated the trek of westering settlers into ever brighter futures. But as presidents mythologized, others wondered. Wasn’t frontier an ideological concept, an excuse for violent colonization that masked the evidence of conquest with its celebration of American progress?
John F. Kennedy presidential campaign button, 1960. Author’s collection.
Yet borders and borderlands proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century. The historic pattern of frontier migration and settlement conti
nued. The massive western migration of eastern Americans was matched by equally massive migrations from Mexico, Central America, and Asia. Millions poured across borders to join in making one of the world’s most multicultural societies. Moreover, American Indian peoples not only survived but began pushing back, successfully reclaiming important elements of their original sovereignty. The lines among ethnic groups became zones of interaction filled with diverse encounters, conflicts, and exchanges. They fit the enduring pattern of multicultural cross-fertilization that had defined American frontiers from colonial times. As the old notion of the frontier came under intellectual assault, a powerful upwelling of new frontiers took place.
. . .
In terms of economic development and political clout, the modern West exceeded nineteenth-century boosters’ wildest dreams. In the argot of Hollywood, the West became a star, with an increasingly strong gravitational pull that brought money, people, and ideas into its orbit. The New Deal set out to build an industrial infrastructure in the West, and those efforts laid the foundation for what was to come. The influx of federal investment during World War II telescoped decades of development into a few years. The Atlantic coast was deemed vulnerable to German attack, and military planners looked west to disperse vital industries. Then, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West became the staging ground for the Pacific theater. The federal government supplied 90 percent of the capital for western industries and military installations during the war. The aircraft industry expanded spectacularly in Texas, Washington, and California, aluminum plants sopped up the hydroelectric power of the Northwest’s great rivers, and steel foundries arose in Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, and southern California.
In April 1942, Henry J. Kaiser broke ground for a huge steel mill in the quiet, rural town of Fontana, fifty miles east of Los Angeles. During the 1930s, Kaiser became the West’s most prominent industrialist by building hydroelectric dams on the Colorado and Columbia Rivers. When the priority turned to winning the war, he quickly arranged for federal loans in order to build the world’s most modern and efficient facility for producing steel. The Fontana mill fabricated mammoth plates for the hulls of wartime merchant ships built at Kaiser’s new shipbuilding plants on the Pacific coast. By the end of the war, a new Liberty Ship was emerging from Kaiser’s plant every ten hours, making him the largest shipbuilder in American history. He drew his workforce—including a large percentage of minorities and women—from all over the country, luring them not only with high wages but with child care facilities and subsidized health care. The Kaiser Permanente health plan was one of the first health maintenance organizations in the nation and remains in operation to this day.
Kaiser’s biggest financial partner—aside from the feds—was Amadeo Peter Giannini, owner of the Bank of America. Giannini championed the West and invested in many western enterprises. He bankrolled the Hollywood studios of United Artists and Walt Disney, financed the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, and as a strong supporter of the New Deal reaped his share of investment opportunities during the 1930s. He and his bank were perfectly positioned to supply most of the private financing for the wartime economic boom that started in the West and radiated outward. By 1945 Giannini’s Bank of America had become the largest commercial and savings institution in the world. It was the first bank to fully computerize, to introduce direct deposit, and in 1958 to offer the first all-purpose consumer credit card, the BankAmericard (later renamed the Visa card).
Bankrolled by his family’s Houston petroleum fortune, Howard Hughes epitomized the capital flows that raised the postwar West to international prominence. He invested in aircraft and built the Hughes Aircraft Company into a giant of western industry. He won lucrative government contracts during the war and in the subsequent Cold War developed weapons-guidance systems, satellites, and clandestine projects for the Central Intelligence Agency. He put capital into Trans World Airlines, selling his share in 1966 for half a billion dollars. He started a regional airline specializing in short hauls not served by major carriers (a critical transportation resource in the spread-out West). Hughes also invested in Hollywood, financing films like The Outlaw (1943), featuring voluptuous Jane Russell. After the war Hughes bought RKO Pictures—a major Hollywood studio—and diversified its operations by buying into television stations and broadcasting old movies, demonstrating the profitability of film archives to a media hungry for programming. Hughes was also one of the twentieth century’s great eccentrics. His fear of germs and disease caused him to withdraw from public view. Still, though he never left his room, his money moved and grew. In 1967 Hughes began buying properties in the gambling mecca of Las Vegas. By the time he died in 1976, he had become one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Howard Hughes, Inglewood, California, c. 1940. Wikimedia commons.
While they represented the splashiest (and in Hughes’s case the weirdest) of the West’s postwar entrepreneurs, Henry Kaiser, Peter Giannini, and Howard Hughes ran with a pack energetic industrialists who parlayed regional economic development into corporations with global stature. The dams and public works of Kaiser had counterparts in the huge construction firms of Stephen Bechtel and John McCone, which moved from building dams in the 1930s to constructing military bases and freeways during and after the war. The Bank of America was only the largest of a number of powerful western banks; in Los Angeles, Security-First National financed much of the home construction boom in postwar southern California. Hughes was but a bit player in Hollywood’s growth as the capital of the nation’s culture industry, and the gamblers he looked down upon from his hermetically sealed Vegas penthouse were part of a growing tourism industry that stretched from the ringing slot machines of desert casinos to the dude ranches of Phoenix, from the ski slopes of the Rockies to the surfing beaches of southern California. Hughes was also just one of a group of western aerospace capitalists that included John Northrop, Allan Lockheed, Donald Douglas, and William Boeing. In the late 1950s both Boeing and Douglas created worldwide markets for their new passenger jets.
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the Columbia River in Washington State, 1960. Wikimedia Commons.
The West excelled in high-tech. Petrochemical industries in Texas and California laid the foundation for a superstructure completed during the war. “The center of gravity of scientific talent in the United States had definitely gravitated westward,” a prominent scientist observed in 1945. An early wartime model was the atomic laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the University of California assembled one of the most impressive groups of scientists in the world to build the first atomic bomb. At Hanford, Washington, forty thousand scientists and technicians produced the plutonium for those bombs, an assignment made possible by electricity from the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. At Pasadena, in southern California, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology conducted research in rocketry that would place it at the leading edge of space technology.2
Defense spending spurred this growth. In Seattle, where Boeing Aircraft dominated the local economy, military expenditure accounted for 40 percent of job growth in the postwar period. Near Denver, the nuclear production facility at Rocky Flats and the federal Rocky Mountain Arsenal employed more than twenty thousand people. In the postwar period, 40 percent of all federal aerospace contracts went to firms operating in California, an annual subsidy to that state’s economy that hovered near twenty billion dollars. “Defense spending,” wrote historian James L. Clayton, was “the primary reason for the extraordinary rapid expansion of industry and population in California since World War II.” Federal military demand, he estimated, accounted for two-thirds of the state’s manufacturing growth in the twenty years after 1945.3
In the 1950s Stanford University encouraged a consortium of science and industry in the nearby Santa Clara valley, and new electronics companies such as Hewlett-Packard accumulated the critical mass for what became known as Silicon Valley, a place where high-tech sta
rtups such as Intel, a computer chip maker founded in 1968, could prosper and grow into manufacturing giants. The founding stories of some of these companies is the stuff of modern business legend. In 1976 Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, two college dropouts tinkering in a suburban garage near San Jose, developed an easy-to-use-desktop computer they called the Apple. Five years later, their company, a startup they financed by selling a Volkswagen bus, was marketing thousands of personal computers and threatening IBM, the eastern computing tyrannosaurus. IBM jumped into the personal computer market after purchasing operating software from Microsoft, a company based in Redmond, Washington, led by Paul Allen and Bill Gates. By the end of the century, Gates was the wealthiest individual in the world (with a fortune estimated at more than a hundred billion dollars) and Steve Jobs had become the closest thing to a Silicon Valley rock star, complete with acolytes eager to purchase his company’s latest creations.
The economy of the postwar West, wrote historian Gerald Nash, “became a pacesetter for the nation.” In 1950 only 10 percent of the nation’s two hundred largest firms were headquartered west of the Mississippi. A half-century later that proportion had climbed to 37 percent. The West was home to some of the nation’s largest corporations: in electronics, computers, and software (Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle, Texas Instruments, Western Digital), aerospace (Boeing, Northrop Grumman), petroleum refining (Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon-Mobil, Marathon, Murphy Oil, Tesoro), wood products (Kimberly-Clark, Weyerhaeuser), and commercial banking (Wells Fargo). The West’s long colonial dependence on the East had ended.4