"The Whites of this Country Are Against the Government"
Reporting from the Associated Press about a series of talks in 2022 about the Colorado River contains the following detail: "Limiting population growth was not discussed as an option. [Ted] Cooke [general manager of the Central Arizona Project] said market forces, not the government, should dictate who moves where. 'People have the right to make a good choice or a bad choice,' he said, 'and that includes moving to a spot that might not have water.'"
I distinctly remember reading that a couple years ago, because I wanted to throw my computer out the window. Are you talking about the fucking Bureau of Reclamation when you say the government should not dictate who moves where? The bureau's purpose from the beginning was to entice people to move to the West. The American pasttime of benefiting from federal policy while complaining about the government is perhaps more apparent in Western water than anywhere else in US politics. The best selling book on the topic, Cadillac Desert, is at its core a book about the hypocrisy of "small government" conservatives, ascendant in the Reagan administration during which the book was first published. The introduction contains this: "Politicians of every stripe have sacrificed their most sacred principles on the altar of water development. Barry Goldwater, scourge of welfare and champion of free enterprise, was a lifelong supporter of the Central Arizona Project, which comes as close to socialism as anything this country has ever done (the main difference being that those who are subsidized are well-off, even rich)."
There is a lot of history to discuss here. Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri senator and one of the foremost champions of Manifest Destiny, said in the mid-1800s that western settlement "was not an act of government leading the people and protecting them, but like all the other great emigrations and settlements of [the Anglo-Saxon] race on our continent, it was the act of the people going forward without government aid or countenance, establishing their possession and compelling the Government to follow with its shield and spread it over them." This view continues to be favorable to many Westerners. The problem is it's not entirely accurate. As Richard White points out, "The armies of the federal government conquered the region, agents of the federal government explored it, federal officials administered it, and federal bureaucrats supervised (or at least tried to supervise) the division and development of its resources."
This perspective is important to point out, yet there is another dimension to this. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1910, "The pioneer of the arid regions must be both a capitalist and a protege of the government." As twentieth century politics solidified, especially in response to the New Deal and over the course of the Cold War, a pioneer being both of these things at the same time began to look more incongruous. In supporting the idea in his essay, Turner outlines how the federal government began building dams and otherwise contributing to the development of Western agriculture -- casting farmers who used Reclamation Service water as the government's proteges. The other half of the equation required being a capitalist (a term which was a bit provocative of Turner, relative to the yeoman ideal).
Preemption became the model for western settlement in the 1830s. The Preemption Act of 1841 made permanent the temporary preemption acts of the previous decade. These acts of legislation retroactively recognized the claims of "squatters" who made homes illegally, or extralegally, outside the borders of the country or on federal land. "Preemption" refers to the principle that the first person to make use of a resource preempts any other claims. The Homestead Act of 1862, as well as the General Mining Law of 1872, directed the development of the West by way of preemption: first come, first serve. With the Homestead Act, one's claim turned into a legal title if a viable farm had been created after five years. The prior appropration doctrine follows this same logic: first in time, first in right, so long as the claimant is actively using the water. In this sense, the law did follow behind homesteaders, miners, loggers, hunters, etc. in a way similar to what Benton described. And while the federal government protected these people in a significant way from their trespasses on Indigenous land, it did not protect them from failure. On that score, they were on their own.
Historian Gerald Nash, in his book The Federal Landscape, characterizes the nineteenth-century as a period where the efforts of individuals (Turner's "capitalists") led the development of the region, while the twentieth century saw the federal government take on that initiative. While this is a bit oversimplified, there is in fact a rather distinct difference that developed over the two centuries. The promise of nineteenth-century land and resource policy was that one could gain property by way of hard work, and by being first in line. Over the course of the twentieth century, that promise dried up (sorry) at a much quicker rate than expected because of the region's aridity. While investment from the federal government increased considerably, the promise of developing a resource directly into one's property began to diminish as jobs in the military or service industry proliferated.
Let's quickly run down the ways that the federal government remade the region. (Richard White also contends, "In some basic ways the federal government created itself in the West... By exercising power, the government increased its power.") Naturally, the Reclamation Act in 1902 represented a stake in developing and managing the West's water, which was necessary for everything else. The early 1900s also saw federal investment in metals mining. With the New Deal in the 1930s, the Bureau of Reclamation became more powerful, and public works programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps sustained rural economies during the Depression. Nationwide per capita spending averaged $399 during the New Deal, while Rocky Mountain states received $716.
World War II triggered a quantum leap in federal investment in Western infrastructure. Between 1940 and 1945, the federal government spent $60 billion in the region, building factories and military bases for the war effort. After the war, the spending continued. Military installations continued to sustain communities across the region, and the federal government poured much more funding into university research centers and aerospace companies -- Silicon Valley owes its existence to this source of funding. The Floyd Dominy years (1959-1969) of the Bureau of Reclamation saw a proliferation of dams along the Colorado River and throughout the West, providing water and hydropower to accommodate the growth of the region's cities. (It's also worth pointing out that the West has been the most urban region of the country, meaning the region with the highest proportion of residents living in cities, since 1880.) As the federal government invested in highway infrastructure and national parks, tourism became a large part of the Western economy.
Federal policy as well as investment contributed to substantial changes in the region. The Bracero Program, from 1943 to 1964, allowed temporary agricultural workers from Mexico to come to the US. This was the other side of a coin for which President Hoover began an effort to forcibly repratriate up to a million Mexicans, the majority of whom were citizens, and for which the Border Patrol in the 1950s rounded up and deported 1.3 million Mexicans under Operation Wetback; alternately welcoming and expelling these workers reinforced a racially defined dual labor system that kept wages low and workers pliable. The 1965 Immigration Act eased earlier restrictions on people from Asia and Latin America. Four million Asian immigrants came to the United States in the remainder of the twentieth century, with about half settling in the West. Many were educated professionals. This represented a new chapter for a region which had long attracted workers from overseas. Additionally, federal housing subsidies (combined with white flight from dense urban cores) led to a proliferation of sprawling single family home developments. The federal government even offered tax breaks for air conditioning. Project Independence, a federal initiative that responded to the oil crisis of the 1970s, led to the expansion of fossil fuel extraction in the West.
Beyond the climbing total of dollars going into region, something happened after World War II. The New Deal and the war represented a shift in how the government had treated the West, and the Cold War era saw a kind of return to an older mode. The federal government staffed and operated New Deal programs and wartime installations but later moved toward a role in which it incentivized private industry and essentially outsourced operations.
Let's zoom in a bit for an example. During World War II, the War Department essentially built three towns from the ground up for the Manhattan Project: Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. The government built housing and infrastructure and maintained stores and post offices for the workers. When the project was over, the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was not keen to keep operating its projects in this way; maintaining entire towns and workforces was expensive and logistically difficult. Also, the business interests that had been gnashing their teeth about the "socialism" of the New Deal finally began to get their way after the war, and the top-down design of the Manhattan Project attracted scrutiny. This influenced a decision to outsource the production of uranium ore to private prospectors. Rather than finding and producing ore itself, the AEC advertised a fixed rate and bonuses to encourage exploration. A few notable prospectors became fabulously wealthy, many others made a good living, and some hundreds of people lost varying amounts of money. The structure of the program meant that the government quickly met its goal for uranium, but it also depended on unremunerated labor and offloaded its responsibility for the safety of the miners. Prospectors made their claims on the fuel for the Atomic Age under the 1872 General Mining Law; the federal government in the West abandoned New Deal bureaucracy for a nineteenth-century model, providing a framework of law and expertise and encouraging private development with subsidies as needed.
At the same time, in the period after WWII, changes in the region's resources and the government's increased presence led to a departure from the original vision, something which tends to go unappreciated. For a region that was always supposed to fulfill the Jeffersonian vision, few bother to note the distinction that Jefferson made between owning property and working for a wage. I'm no Jeffersonian, but the distinction is important. The federally subsidized home loan that spawned tract homes with quarter-acre lawns echoes the Homestead Act's quarter sections, but the independence of owning property began to come with an entanglement of dependence on salaried work, on law enforcement (as ever, really), and the micro-tyrannies of Home Owners' Associations.
Frederick Jackson Turner described the frontier (in his seminal essay that laid out the "frontier thesis") as the "outer edge of the wave." The federal government and private capital, in their own ways, propelled the wave, and Turner's "pioneer" tried to surf it without being overtaken. The material reward is apparent, but pioneers also received encomia from politicians and commentators -- these smallholders were building the foundation of the American republic, etc. These tributes came partly from a place of sincere belief, but the vision of a common man's democracy also benefited boosters and provided cover for a resource policy that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. With only a quarter or a third of available public land going to homesteaders, the Homestead Act and similar legislation filled out the distribution of national wealth without threatening to overturn the hierarchy -- hardly characteristic of "socialism."
The old complaint that the West is a resource colony acknowledges to some extent how urban wealthy people, professionals, and politicians enriched themselves with comparable ease. The work of homesteading -- nation-building, if the politicking is to be believed -- was difficult, and many people failed at it. But the people complaining were and are often unsympathetic. The title of this post comes from a frustrated federal agent commenting on how white farmers were stealing Ute water in the Uintah Indian Irrigation Project in the 1910s -- he concluded that it was nearly impossible for the government to enforce rules around the irrigation water that the same government was providing in the basin. In other words, any principled objection to the exploitative relationship between the East and West typically led only to a lazy justification of one's own ruthlessness when faced with the opportunity to exploit someone else. Besides, challenging the country's power centers would require a movement, and exploitation was the sort of thing one could do on his own. The turn-of-the-century West is not known for fostering strong community ties, and many actively sought isolation. "Git Along Little Dogies" contains the lyric, "It's your misfortune and none of my own," which Richard White used as the title for his survey of Western history.
The adage that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan is turned on its head in the West. Failure has many fathers, but success is one's own, perhaps bolstered by the region's social Darwinism and the fact that there are not many extra people on a farmstead waiting around to take credit. It is easy to imagine an individual farmer getting an assist from the Reclamation Service -- while still engaging in battle with the high desert and eking out a meager living -- and crediting himself with his success. If a farmer like that makes up the fabric of a society, then we can see how that attitude might scale up. But over time, the illusory nature of rugged individualism could only become more apparent. The New Deal, for instance, was a lifeline for the rural West, and Western states rewarded Roosevelt with plenty of votes. From there, the government increased its patronage, only to see anti-government sentiment harden, in many cases, into extremism.
But the liberal critique of this phenomenon confuses investment with generosity. If the nineteenth-century West was a resource colony, how much really changed in the following century? The federal government oversaw the increased extraction of minerals and fossil fuels, and it managed the lands that produced cattle and timber. It also effectively created a tourism industry. Meanwhile, the free land that Jeffersonians viewed as crucial for yeoman independence and political stability was virtually gone after 1930. Westerners blame the government, especially after the Grazing Service and General Land Office merged to form the Bureau of Land Management in 1946, but this had just as much to do with capital, geography, and the passage of time.
There is a big question to answer. If the pioneer was both a capitalist and a protege of the government, why would he bite only one of the hands that fed him? One possible explanation lies in the region's resistance to class politics, reinforced by the material circumstances of individual owner-operators and the sense, in politics and popular culture, that these were the most authentic Westerners. It is also possible that the government is simply a softer target. As Richard White observes, "The very groups -- minorities, the New Right, the environmentalists -- that have demanded local control have ended up seeking their goals through the federal government." We can fault Western conservatives for a lack of integrity in complaining to the federal government, but it is not their fault that the complaints were so effective.
The political culture of the West has proven very lucrative for industry. The conservative, non-unionized Westerner, regardless of class, supports low taxes, few regulations, and dog-eat-dog capitalism. The region's history is one in which those who succeeded did so along these lines, and the New Deal failed to dislodge this mentality. It is conceivable that the pioneer who is still trying to surf the frontier's wave, someone like Cliven Bundy, is resentful that it is increasingly harder to do.
"In some basic ways the federal government made itself in the West," writes Richard White. This is worth considering when asking, as this 2022 headline does, "Why Won't Biden Touch the Bundys?" Cliven Bundy and his son Ammon have been notable figures in the transition from the Sagebrush Rebellion to the more recent Patriot Rebellion, movements of anti-government extremists whose resentment of public lands policy has festered into instances of armed resistance. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is at the center of that particular conflict, an agency which began as the Grazing Service. Ironically, Western politicians and cattlemen's associations supported the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act that created the service, as an alternative to President Hoover's plan to transfer federal lands to the states as a means of economic stimulus. At that time, ranchers saw the upside of having the federal government dedicate its resources to maintaining public lands for private profit. The later Rebellions have seemingly leaned more on ideology (and fundamentalist readings of LDS scripture) than on their own benefit (though Cliven Bundy's unpaid million dollar tab of grazing fees means that he's enriched himself doubly on the public domain). The BLM, since its creation in 1946, has been drowsily moving away from its original purpose as a maintainer of the open range toward an enforcer of the law. The slightest step in that direction, however, leads to denunciations of federal tyranny, and the agency usually acquiesces, sometimes for the safety of its field agents.
In 2021, Ammon Bundy and a group of followers set up an encampment on the border of California and Oregon next to the Klamath River. Amid severe drought, federal regulators shut off water to nearby farms for the sake of the river's salmon. Bundy and his crew threatened to break open the headgate if necessary, but did not follow through. The next year, the nearby Shasta River Water Association notified their local water board that they would not comply with drought-induced restrictions. These events came several years after Ammon Bundy led the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters, leading to federal agents' killing of one of the insurgents as he resisted arrest. Two dozen of the group were arrested, though Ammon and Ryan Bundy were ultimately acquitted. Ammon Bundy's encampment on the Klamath River, like Cliven Bundy's 2014 standoff with federal troops, saw the federal government respond with the kind of passivity and restraint that is seldom afforded left-wing protestors. Cliven Bundy continues to illegally graze his cattle on public lands to this day, seeing the government as a threat where ranchers in the 1930s saw it as a partner.
At the same time, the Bundys have long stopped being representative of the region. In their place are urbanites and suburbanites, many of whom have relocated to the West, who reproduce the myth of rugged invidualism through their politics. This is where the region's history joins with national and even global currents. The cradle of neoliberalism was Geneva, Switzerland, where the Mont Pelerin Society first met in 1947. Geneva hardly resembles the US West in many ways, though when the doctrines of those first libertarians under Friedrich Hayek eventually came to the region, by way of the University of Chicago and Chile, the idea of a toothless government operating as an incubator of private business aligned well with its history. Today, the Mont Pelerin Society is headquarted at Texas Tech University. Barry Goldwater, mentioned above, could not quite square the circle, and his 1964 presidential campaign was a disaster. But he opened the door for Ronald Reagan. Reagan visited Salt Lake City for a campaign stop in 1980 while the Sagebrush Rebellion (the precursor to the Patriot Rebellions of the Bundys) was nearing its peak and said, "Count me in as a rebel." He appeased the rebels with his appointment of James Watt as Secretary of the Interior, but what he gained out of the implicit bargain was greater: authenticity. A famous actor and former governor of California who wanted to shred regulations on behalf of Wall Street and big corporations laundered his elitist vision with American mythology. When George W. Bush, the son of a former president and a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, wore cowboy boots on the campaign trail, it was history happening again as farce. At any rate, Westerners found their champions in these impostors. The fact that ordinary Westerners fully surrendered their distrust of capital at the behest of federal politicians is no less paradoxical than any other event in Western history.
For the last forty years, it has been trivial for conservative Western politicians to court billionaires with the blessing of their constituents, regardless of income. Despite the fact that capital has long been threatening to overwhelm the Jeffersonian vision, anti-government conservatives and libertarians helped set the table in their states for business interests during the last half of the twentieth century. But the seams are starting to show. As Greg Grandin argues in The End of the Myth, the frontier myth gave way to the symbol of the border wall with the first election of Donald Trump. Reagan's optimism has darkened into the paranoia of preppers, lagging by a few decades behind the bunker mentality of extremist ranchers who would rather die than pay taxes. Now, as the region plans for water shortages with no clear solution in sight, far-right conservatives are breaking from their representatives in wishing that businesses would stop moving in. Last year, as he faced increasing criticism from the extremist fringe in his party, Utah governor Spencer Cox said, "We would love for people to stay in California instead of coming as refugees to Utah." He didn't mean it, and even adding the word "refugees" into his vocabulary will not satisfy the far right, nor will appearing with Trump at Arlington National Cemetery. The "Utah Way" that Cox likes to tout is rapidly crumbling, as is Western conservatism, in their respective tangles of contradictions. Still, at this point, the Mountain West would rather blame a nebulous liberalism migrating from California than entertain class politics.
So what do we make of the idea that the head of the Central Arizona Project does not want to tell people where to move? This position is frustrating, but historically consistent -- the federal government has provided the infrastructure and promoted westward migration for the populace, but one's own destiny is left up to the individual. The investment that upholds the region's individualism also threatens it, creating a situation that has only been tenable through expansion. The West's contradictions have been papered over for generations, possible because the outer edge of the wave continues to move forward. As Western growth and development slows and then stops, the repercussions will be felt throughout the rest of the country.
References:
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking, 1986)
Gerald Nash, The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999).
Frederick Jackson Turner, "Pioneer Ideals and the State University," in The Frontier in American History, (New York: Henry Holt, 1920).
Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)
Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017).
Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Annual Report of the American Historical Association (1893)
Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, vol. 2 (Washington: US Atomic Energy Commission, 1972).
Benjamin Kiser, "Bucking the White Elephant: Utah's Fight for Federal Management of the Public Domain, 1923-1934, Utah Historical Quarterly 88 no 2 (2020): 165-80.
Kendrick, Gregory D.; Peterson, Charles S.; National Park Service; and Bureau of Reclamation, Beyond the Wasatch: The History of Irrigation in the Uinta Basin and Upper Provo River Area of Utah" (Washington DC: National Park Service and Bureau of Reclamation, 1991). Paper 551.
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019)
Read more:
A Short History of Water in the US West
The Agrarian Foundations of the Western Water Crisis (1620 - 1902)
The 100th Meridian: Where "Free Land" Requires "Free Water" (1862 - 1923) How (Not) to Make the Desert Blossom as the Rose (1847 - 1860)Free-for-All in the Uinta Basin (1879 - 1920)
Race to the Bottom -- The Law of the River
The Sinful Rivers We Must Curb
Our Last Major Water Resource -- The Central Utah Project
The Case of Uphill Flowing Water
Water for City and Country in the Late 20th Century
What's the Deal with Water Marketing
Expansion is at the Root of the Problem