Posting 13: Tourism in the West

Also see my comments on Dave's blog posting.

My comments on:
Hal K. Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West

Several themes appear to be central to Rothman's book in addition to his central narrative of the three types of tourism: Las Vegas/Nevada as colony; the centrality of Vegas to understanding the West in post-industrial America; tourism as personal consumption--which Las Vegas and entertainment tourism epitomize; and a critique of corporate capitalism (at least in regards to its negative effects on Western communities).

Rothman, particularly with his chapters on Las Vegas, is in the West as colony school. Rothman interprets Las Vegas as "a colony of the rest of the nation, especially of California" (290). "Nevada," he says, "derived its sustenance by trading raw materials – gold, silver, and the possibility of quick freedom in personal or economic terms – for the finished products of American society" (291). Western tourist destinations are not just colonies in economic terms. According to Rothman, they are also colonies because they reshape themselves to fit the cultural ideals of tourists.

It seems that Rothman’s heart is on the Las Vegas story; for Rothman, Las Vegas entertainment tourism epitomizes twentieth-century tourism, all other forms were merely a prelude. But I find it difficult to accept this narrative of entertainment tourism as paramount – maybe in cash/profit but many still prefer the National Parks. Rothman follows the dollars, not hearts. Did it "succeed and envelope" heritage and recreational tourism, or is it a different type of tourism altogether that appeals to people seeking entertainment, not nature and history? But Rothman's description of entertainment tourism as "tourism without deep meaning" seems to be on the mark.

Rothman's real critique seems to be the detrimental effects of corporate capitalism on Western cities and their people. (Though there is also some critique of the way tourists themselves have reshaped the West to suit their cultural needs). He must make entertainment tourism paramount in his narrative, because it is essentially, at least in its post 1980 configuration, the production of corporate capitalism. Though he admires the visionary genius of entrepreneurs like Steve Wynn, Rothman prefers Las Vegas as it was before corporate capitalism. In some ways, he sees Las Vegas under the mob as more of a community than corporate Vegas, with its service economy, glass ceiling for workers, and extracted profits.

Posting 12: The Federal (Water Project) West and the Urban West

Also see my comments on Jim's blog posting

My comments on:
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
John M. Findlay, “Far Western Cityscapes and American Culture Since 1940”

John M. Findlay states in his essay that "the urban dimension of modern western history has not been accorded the place it merits." Both Findlay and Marc Reisner set out to correct this problem. Reisner adds the dimension of environmental history to the history of the urban West. For Reisner the environmental damage of federal water projects are a direct result of the rise of an urban West where it should not be. Findlay asserts that historians have failed to perceive the American West as an urban region; instead they have interpreted it as a "wild, rural, and pastoral" place. Findlay adopts the Turner thesis of the West, but in his interpretation it is not the rural West that has influenced the culture of the East in the twentieth century, but the urban West. And, like William Robbins, Findlay asserts that the West’s cities are its vital regions.

However, for Reisner, the cities are not the vital regions; the Western rivers are. Man must work with the rivers not against them: the environment is supreme. Reisner focuses on the role of federal water projects in shaping the twentieth-century West. Several themes are evident in his book: Reisner is anti-city ("sanitary slums"); anti-technology (instead of main-stem dams "we could have built more primitive off-stream reservoirs"); runaway federal agencies (the Bureau of Reclamation is bad and the Corps of Engineers is worse); and of course Reisner is similar to Elliott West in his assertion that the environment is supreme. Man cannot rule the environment and must work with it; the environment should be supreme in Western development.

Also, Reisner's interpretation of the West falls under the "West as colony" interpretation. Reisner argues that without the largesse of the federal government the urban West as we know it would never have developed. The urban West was and is wholly dependent on the federal government despite it leaders' reluctance to acknowledge that fact. Reisner, who could not be further from Robbins in his outlook, nevertheless agrees with him that the West was a federal colony. Moreover, Reisner recognizes the positive aspects of federal water projects that Robbins would emphasize--the economy was enriched; jobs were created, flood protection was provided, irrigation stabilized and saved land, rivers were put to productive use, and industry was developed; and he can not ignore the critical role of Grand Coulee's 2,138,000 kilowatts of electricity in winning World War II (but he doesn't spend much space on it). Reisner, though, sees all this as only "productive, creative vandalism."

Reisner, though, in my view is guilty of selective history. Reisner's interpretation of the federal water projects in the West is not the only one that can be made. What Reisner chooses not to emphasize is important. For instance, he chooses to emphasize the corruption involved in hydroelectric power and deemphasizes to the point of almost irrelevancy rural electrification that was a major goal of the New Deal and that moved many rural folk into the twentieth century and allowed them, particularly women, to take advantage of the labor saving devices of the mass production economy. And of course he chooses not to write about the other positive aspects of federal water projects mentioned above; instead he writes about their negative aspects. His choice of emphases almost determines his conclusions; they are preordained.

Posting 11: Status of the Revision to My Baker Inquest Essay

As I currently envision my rewritten essay, the main revisions will be three: reorganizing the paper, adding more detail and background on Cheyenne society, and incorporating material from the works of turn-of-the-century novel writer Charles King, who served at Fort D.A. Russell and wrote novels about army life in the West based on his own experiences.

The reorganization will involve dividing the essay into two parts based on two of the "stories" from the inquest testimony: the desertion conspiracy story to examine army life and the story of Baker’s last night and murder to examine Cheyenne society. I will deemphasize the reconstruction of the timeline and events of Baker’s last night.

Secondary sources that I will use for this revision include:
1. Oliver Knight, Life and Manners in the Frontier Army
2. Shirley E. Flynn, “Cheyenne’s Harry P. Hynds: Blacksmith, Saloon Keeper, Promoter, Philanthropist” Annals of Wyoming 2001 73(3): 2-11
3. Charles A. Volan, “Hell on Wheels: Community, Respectability, and Violence in Cheyenne Wyoming, 1867-1869” PhD dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2004.

In addition to the inquest documents, the primary sources that I will use for this revision include:
1. Charles King’s novels Campaigning with Crook and The Deserter
2. Excerpts from his other novels and writings contained in Knight’s book
3. Material that may be referenced in the Flynn article and available at the Library of Congress

I have all the above in hand except the Flynn article and King’s novel The Deserter. The bound copies of the Annals of Wyoming are in a section of the Library of Congress being inventoried and there is a 3-4 day wait for the items. The Deserter is available from the Library of Congress, but it is stored at Ft. Meade and there is a 3-4 day wait for it.

Posting 10: Cultural Change and Cultural Conflict in the Twentieth-Century West

Also see my comments on Marty's blog posting.

My comments on:
Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places
George J. Sanchez: Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
David G. Gutierrez, "Significant to Whom?: Mexican Americans and the History of the American West," Western Historical Quarterly (November 1993)
David R. Lewis, "Still Native: The Significance of Native Americans in the History of the 20th-Century American West," Western Historical Quarterly (November 1993)

Sanchez and Deloria have two different interpretations of the cultural encounters in the twentieth-century West. Deloria sees bi-polar cultural conflict ("Indian and non-Indian people"). But Sanchez sees no such bi-polar cultural conflict; instead he sees a process of adaptation in becoming Mexican American. Guitierez also frames his essay in a bi-polar opposition of cultures ("ethnic conflict"), with Mexican Americans fighting to overturn stereotypes and imposed cultural narratives (though he does give a positive nod to Camarillo's work revealing the diversity of Mexican-American experience) and his essay more akin to Deloria's view than that of Sanchez in that respect. Lewis also addresses Deloria's themes of stereotyped representations of Indian peoples and their importance in myths of white Americans and the refusal of whites to let Indians become modern.

Sanchez's main themes are diversity of experience and agency. Agency is important to Sanchez, as with Castaneda in "Women of Color and the Rewriting of Western History" but he does not use the cultural criticism method and he writes without Castaneda’s presentism and her "contest of cultures." According to Sanchez Mexican Americans, particularly those of the second generation, assumed a new ethnic identity. He shows that there were struggles within as well as without the Mexican-American community. Mexican Americans adopted different cultural strategies and there was a diversity of cultural/family experience. They did not define themselves in opposition to the dominant culture, but instead sought ways to integrate into it without denying or losing their Mexican heritage. His emphasis is on the individual agency of Mexican-Americans; government cultural programs and the Church hierarchy were not effective--individual choices were far more important in shaping Mexican-American identity. Also, he explains how this cultural change occurred without social mobility. And the emphasis is on cultural change, not cultural conflict. There is a theme of social justice, but it is far more muted that in Deloria, Castaneda, or Kaminsky.

Deloria's main theme is Native Americans fighting against representations of Indians in American culture that have stereotyped them as primitives prone to violence. The main opposition in Deloria’s book is between the real Indian culture, engaging with modernity, and the mythic Indian culture of white American imagination (their "cultural expectations"), acting as a tool of domination. He shows how Native Americans worked both within and against these cultural expectations, and how Indians who did not conform to cultural expectations, who challenged the narratives, helped to show the fictitious nature of "the stories that insisted on racial difference." But Deloria's themes are presentist because he uses the style/technique of cultural criticism, similar to Amy Kaminsky in "Gender, Race, Raza" and Castaneda. Also he has a theme of desiring to overturn injustice, and Deloria even seems to express resentment that African Americans have been culturally incorporated as Indians have not--Indians have been used as symbol/representations but none of their cultural productions have been incorporated into the mainstream culture.

Posting 9: The Photographed West

Also see my comments on Dave's blog posting

My comments on:
Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West

Sandweiss’s book takes us to another area where the myth of the American West interacted with the reality of the American West: photographs of the West and its people.

The photographs she examines supported the myth (and shaped the reality) of the West. They "shaped popular thinking about the very subjects they portrayed." They helped Americans imagine the West. They were "increasingly influential as a way of creating and shaping national visions of the far West." But, as with Elliott West's idea that fantasies imported from the East changed the West, Sandweiss argues that the combination of image and text also "spun predictive tales" about a West that could only come into being by changing the West as it was. Moreover, the photos themselves also were shaped by the myths of the West: "Indeed Americans' preexisting visions of the West shaped, to some extent, how photographs of the place would be made, marketed, and understood" (3-4). But despite their support of an imagined West, Sandweiss notes that the photographs produced a tension, because the camera showed exactly what was in front of the lens rather than the drama and excitement of novels or romantic paintings. But Americans never gave up their desire for the dramatic, romantic West.

This book is at the border between art history and history, using photographs as primary source documents. "Why, we must always ask, did a photographer make a particular image and who did he hope to influence with it," Sandweiss asks. This is the realm of art history. In the absence of the photographer's answer to this question, can we ever get beyond reasoned judgments about the artist's intent? Photographs, despite their seeming concreteness, are very difficult primary documents to "read." They are much more difficult to interpret than manuscripts – which, as we know, are difficult enough to interpret. But despite the difficulty of interpreting photographs, they do provide illumination of the ways in which Americans imagined the West – they were the shapers of imagination.

Sandweiss’s analysis is best when she examines the photographs in the context of "patron and publisher," marketplace and technology (reading photographs in history). Her reading of images through history as she calls it, her analysis of the photographs outside their publication context – outside their history – seems like a less effective technique of analysis for doing history. As she says they are then mere "artifacts of the past" – the realm of antiquarians, not historians.

Sandweiss, despite these difficulties, does a very good job of using these photos to "look at how American audiences created and sustained the enduring gap between the complex West of history and the West of the imagination."

Posting 8: The Intercultural (and Deconstructed) West

Also see my comments on Kent's blog posting

My response to:
Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks, eds., Women and Gender in the American West

The unifying themes of the essays in this book are not only women and gender but also intercultural relations.

Peggy Pascoe, in addition to her discussion of race as a social construction, provides a guide to understanding several of the other essays with her discussion of the difference between the two types of cultural history and her dissatisfactions with them. First there is the social historians' Clifford Geertz-type "thick description" that emphasizes community strength, collective consciousness, and active agency. But this type of cultural analysis encapsulates each culture so studied and does not study relations between cultures. Second there is the cultural critical approach: "replacing the old social history project of reclaiming the voices of powerless peoples with a different project – that of critiquing dominant peoples’ depictions of subaltern 'others.'" But by emphasizing shaping forces, it risks de-emphasizing agency. Pascoe believes that to avoid the problems with these approaches historians must be aware of the "tensions between the power of the dominant, on the one hand, and the agency of the oppressed, on the other," choose areas of investigation where multiple cultures are present, and "focus on the problem of recovering the perspectives of the powerless, as well as the powerful."

Antonia Castaneda and Amy Kaminsky certainly use the cultural critical approach in their essays, though Castaneda is concerned with preserving agency. They both see the West as a place of (violent) cultural contest (Castaneda writes of "brutally violent conflicts" and "cultural conflict." Both see the West as a colony and Western history as needing to be decolonized. For Castaneda explaining the West as a place of cultural conflict in “a context of colonization” is the main purpose of her essay. For Kaminsky the main goal is explaining that race is an unstable cultural construction and that gender is a fundamental part of that construction. She wants a comparative intercultural, not multicultural, examination of the West ("deconstructing, reconceptualizing, and reconstructing" the West). Also Castaneda also condemns multicultural history as proposed by Jensen and Miller because it marginalizes "those historically constituted as other" – it only explores Anglo conceptions of women of color. Although both writers offer much for historians to consider in their inquiries into history, both are guilty of presentism – the risk of the cultural critic "historian." History for them is NOW; there is no difference (Castaneda: "It was – and remains"). Their single axis of inquiry is oppression and the goal is justice – historical inquiry is only a vehicle to expose past and present injustice. Kaminsky, in particular, is presentist and her essay borders on an op-ed piece: history is not the main objective, it is a vehicle. In this respect she reminds me of Ian F. Haney Lopez's White By Law.

Susan Lee Johnson is not as easy to place historiographically as Castaneda and Kaminsky. She doesn’t quite seem to be in the cultural critic camp of Castaneda and Kaminsky, but she is poststructuralist and her theme is clear: historians must get beyond the male West and the white West to find the real West. Whiteness obscures race and the focus on men obscures women. Undoubtedly there is a history to recover there that has not been studied, but it raises questions of its own. For Johnson white men are in the way of the real discovery of the West (and post-structuralism can get them out of the way by deconstructing the domination of gender). Although Johnson does not want to completely remove white men, I would like to ask her if it is a valid interpretation to remove white men from a history of which they are so large a part. In other words, does a West devoid of (white men's) institutions and ideologies – Robbins's West – have any meaning?

Lynn M. Hudson, departs from the Kaminsky-Castaneda-Johnson approach, and uses Pascoe's type of historical writing. She is not interested in exposing injustice as a primary project but in examining the past. But she too is "intercultural." She uses cultural awareness to tell and analyze an interesting story about both the powerful and the powerless in the West – a story where several cultures intersected.

Posting 7: Capitalism as the Story of the West

Also see my comments on Dave's blog posting on Robbins

My response to:
William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West

Understanding the role of political economy in the history of the West, or any region, is immensely important and Robbins does an outstanding job of explaining the ways that capitalism shaped the course of the West’s politics and economic development. Understanding the West’s role in America’s capitalist economy is indeed "essential to understanding power, influence, and change in the American West..." (7).

Although Robbins's book was clearly envisioned as a corrective to what he considered the failure of the historiography to correctly address the importance of political economy in shaping the West, there is a problem with taking political economy too far as an explanatory device (which I think he does): you can end up with a scientific, neo-Marxian "system" view of history that posits the centrality of a process that is leading in an inevitable direction to an inevitable result (whether that is socialism or capitalism). Political economy is a key component of political culture and capitalism is a form of economic relations. AND THAT IS ALL.

Robbins's comparison of the post-Civil War West and South was off the mark in several respects. He puts forward a view of the New South as lacking in industrial development except for textile mills, but this interpretation does not agree with the New South of Ed Ayers in his book The Promise of the New South. (Robbins references this book once but does not see the New South as Ayers does.) Robbins fails to note the importance of extractive industries and the railroads in the economic transformation of the New South that Ayers emphasizes. Robbins says that one of the factors that made the West unique was labor mobility, but Ayers shows that in regards to the extractive industries this was also a characteristic of the New South's economy. In short, Ayers sees much of the dynamism in the South that Robbins sees as unique to the West. But Robbins's point that the West and South were both dependent regions after the Civil War is a good one.

Robbins analysis of the Western myth, however, is right on the mark. I find myself in agreement with Robbins's point that the essential reason that Canada lacked a rhetoric of dominance and conquest in its movement west was because America was forged in a successful revolution and Canada in counterrevolution. Myth as fable is definitely ingrained in the dominant national mood, and as Robbins says, we as historians need to understand these myths so that they do not inhibit our scholarly work. "Our task is not to celebrate myth but to look beyond it for understanding."