“UNDER GOD, THE PEOPLE RULE”
IN 1883 HAMLIN GARLAND left Dakota Territory, putting its harsh climate and windswept towns behind him. He had seen too many men and women broken—killed, driven mad, or bankrupted—trying to carve a farm from the deep-rooted, arid soil. Yet the land and its people called Garland back. Soon he put pen to paper, blurring the line between literature and politics to communicate what life on the “middle border” was really like—and why. He hoped someday that his stories and novels, rather than just achieve artistic “beauty,” could help “spread the reign of justice.”1
In “Under the Lion’s Paw,” Garland recounted the struggles of Tim Haskins, who, with his ailing wife, newborn baby, and two young children, fled his Kansas farm after grasshoppers destroyed what little he owned. Homeless, the Haskins family wandered the roads until they stopped at a farm where an older couple, the Councils, took them in. Steve Council finally arranged for Haskins to negotiate a two-year tenancy with a local landowner who in turn agreed to sell Haskins the land for $3,000 when the lease expired. It seemed like a dream come true: hard work, thrift, and some luck with the weather assured Haskins of becoming a property-owning member of the middle class, a virtuous yeoman-citizen in the true Jeffersonian tradition. Yet it was not to be. Haskins worked “ferociously” on the land and saved every penny he could.2 But after two years the landlord, Jim Butler, claimed that the improvements Haskins made to the land had made it more valuable. He demanded $5,000 instead. Enraged, Haskins nearly attacked Butler with his pitchfork, but after seeing his baby daughter, hung his head and returned to work. He remained a landless—and powerless—tenant.3
Garland read “Under the Lion’s Paw” at the 1892 Omaha convention of the People’s Party, already generally known as the Populist Party. It brought the audience to tears. Like many small farmers and tenants, the Haskins family did not realize that the system was rigged against them by landowners, bankers, corporations, and politicians.4 At one time Jim Butler had owned a store and “earned all he got.” But he discovered that speculating on land and extending credit to poor farmers was an easier way to make money. He could take fishing trips and sit “around town on rainy days smoking and ‘gassin’ with the boys’ ” while tenants like Haskins worked themselves “nearly to death” in the hope of “pushing the wolf of want a little farther from [the] door.”5
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of farmers like Haskins, and their wives, decided they had had enough. They joined radical agrarian movements that swept across the rural United States like a “political prairie fire.”6 The best known was the Populist movement, which had coalesced in the region but gained widespread national prominence in Omaha in 1892. Its members stretched from the cotton fields of the Southeast, up and down the Great Plains, and into the Mountain West. In some of these states, historian Lawrence Goodwyn contends, Populism was more “moment” than movement.7 But on the Northern Plains, commitment to the ideals of Populism—expanded access to economic opportunity and political decision-making—lasted far longer than the initial insurgency. With controversial political leaders and famously persuasive barnyard organizers, they carried forward the goals of Populism, enhanced at times by socialist and communist strategies, into many aspects of progressive Republicanism, the Nonpartisan League (NPL), and Depression-era organizations such as the Farmers Holiday Association.8 Together these movements made up an inspiring chapter in the history of the American left, as they put ordinary people first and honored the productive work they performed.
But Garland revealed even more about the political culture of the Northern Plains. Radical agrarian organizations, however fondly recalled, never held a monopoly on political ideas or ambitions. To the contrary, plenty of landowners, bankers, politicians, and small businesspeople like Garland’s antihero, Jim Butler, held power in the small towns of the region. They actively opposed the reforms proposed by radical farmers, year after year. These conservatives did not fear the concentration of economic and political power as much as they feared the diminution of their own. As they fought back against the “upstart” farmers through the business-friendly wing of the Republican Party, they prepared the political landscape for a future generation that would, during the Cold War era, try to extinguish the region’s political prairie fires for good.
The roots of the Rural New Right on the Northern Plains lay not only in how agrarian radicals and small-town conservatives saw the world differently but also in how they saw it the same way. In the 1960s and 1970s, cultural issues would come to dominate political debate nationwide, creating deep, seemingly intractable, divisions between Republicans and Democrats. But in an earlier era, a “common logic” around religion, gender, and race could instead form the glue that bound members of diverse white ethnic groups together, even when they disagreed vehemently on party politics.9 For example, the vast majority of Euro-American Dakotans, immigrants or native-born, Populist or conservative, tenants or landlords were Christian; like Garland’s Good Samaritan, Steve Council, they believed that Christianity’s moral principles made it the “only religion” there was.10 Furthermore, many people on the Northern Plains belonged either to doctrinally conservative denominations like Roman Catholicism or to one of the more conservative sects of larger Protestant denominations like Lutheranism, Methodism, and Presbyterianism.11 Consequently, even some Dakotans who supported women’s suffrage believed in the patriarchal heterosexual family where men were the sole proprietors and authorities.12
Most fundamental to social order in the Dakotas, as in the rest of the United States, was a racialized hierarchy predicated on the idea that whites were superior to all nonwhites and, most immediately, that whites “deserved” to settle on Native land and extract profits from it.13 For all their enmity, Haskins and Butler did not argue about whether the land should be plowed and its crop sold, just to whom the profits belonged, which of the two white men who claimed it. Furthermore, they surely agreed that homelessness and dependence on the charity of others was a fate even worse than tenancy. It threatened to equate poor white farmers with Native people, whom most Americans believed were incapable of citizenship and were going to “die out” within a few decades.14 In an era where whiteness “conferred both citizenship and the right to own property,” Populists fought not just for their right to earn a living, but for their right to be white.15
Few homesteaders new to the Northern Plains expected the task ahead to be easy. Whether they traveled from nearby states like Iowa or Minnesota or distant communities in Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, or Russia, they were far from home and often on their own.16 Plowing the deeply rooted and arid sod of the plains and building homes where few trees grew tested their physical and emotional limits. Added to those challenges were cycles of wet and dry years, prairie fires, grasshopper plagues, tornadoes, blizzards, and an endlessly blowing wind. For all living creatures these conditions could prove fatal. In the winter of 1886 to 1887, snow came early and never quit. By its end hundreds of thousands of cattle had frozen to death. Just two years later, the temperature dropped sixty degrees in less than an hour and snow fell so fiercely it was hard to see your hand in front of your face. By its end, dozens of schoolchildren and their young teachers, 235 people in all, had died. Some were found frozen in haystacks and snowdrifts. A few died only feet from their homes.17
But it wasn’t nature, or nature alone, that radicalized farmers. It was also that the prices they received for crops and livestock were increasingly dependent on a globalizing economy far outside their control. At the same time, the concentrated power of big corporations, big banks, and big political parties squeezed them for every last cent.18 This rapid economic transformation shifted the center of power from rural to urban areas, deepening regional inequalities. South Dakota Populist Henry Loucks put it bluntly: in 1830, farmers had owned 75 percent of the nation’s wealth; by 1880, less than 25 percent.19 Historian R. Alton Lee writes, “In coming to the plains, [farmers] had hoped to find a utopia of relatively free, rich land, but they came at a time when modern America was emerging and attaching increasingly less importance to the agrarian way of life.”20
Inequitable railroad fees radicalized Dakota farmers first. In many small towns on the Northern Plains, there was only one railroad to bring crops or livestock to market. And there were no regulations, not even “reasonable maximum” rates, to limit the monopoly these railroads enjoyed—even as they neglected to pay taxes they owed to the state.21 Farmers were literally captive to the out-of-state corporations: they could pay railroad fees or let their crops rot. Incredibly, Jon K. Lauck writes, “From certain points in Dakota, it was cheaper to ship wheat to Liverpool than to Chicago or Minneapolis.”22 The “middlemen” who represented large creameries, mills, or storage facilities also had unassailable power over farmers’ livelihoods. An agent could lie, for example, when he graded a crop’s quality and thus lower its price. And farmers’ problems did not end trackside. If the only local bank provided the terms for a loan, how could a farmer negotiate better terms? If politicians from both parties were being wined and dined by the same corporate executives; and senators were appointed, not elected, how could a farmer create change?23
The challenge of making ends meet on a farm was not new in the late nineteenth century. The inequity between farmers and the institutions of economic and political power, however, certainly was. When a drought and recession in the 1880s further multiplied farmers’ troubles, Charles Macune founded the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas, a model for cooperation rather than competition in agriculture that quickly spread north. The Alliance encouraged farmers to band together, extending their traditional “habits of mutuality” like barn-raisings and quilting bees, to larger economic organizations like stores and storage facilities.24 He also encouraged them to demand support from the state. Soon some Alliance members advocated third party political action. Among the economic reforms they demanded were: an increase in the money supply through the coinage of silver; the creation of a long-term “sub-treasury” system so farmers could store crops until the price had risen; crop insurance; and state ownership of banks and utilities. In politics they advocated for the direct election of senators, the more secret “Australian ballot,” and implementation of the initiative and referendum system, which allowed voters to decide on new legislation directly. They believed that as a third party, the People’s Party, their candidates could withstand the corrupting forces of the current political system. At first the idea seemed to work well. In the 1892 presidential election, the People’s Party candidate James Weaver of Iowa received over a million votes and won five states in the West; the party also won six governorships.25 Even so they did not win the White House.
In 1896, the Populist Party abandoned its third-party strategy at the national level and “fused” with the Democratic Party. To some this was the compromise that changed an authentic democratic insurgency, full of possibility for radical change, into a mere “moment.”26 Even so the Populists found their best-known champion: William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska. While he may have only been fully committed to the silver issue, throughout 1896 Bryan used his considerable oratorical gifts to advocate for the central place of farming in American life. “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”27 Meanwhile, his opponent, William McKinley, sat on his front porch in Canton, Ohio, giving press conferences and listening to the advice of business leaders.
While Bryan failed to win the nation’s highest office in three tries, the ideas and ideals that he endorsed so enthusiastically endured in many rural places. On the Northern Plains they even thrived. As Howard Lamar writes, Populist efforts “established a precedent for political flexibility that made it easier for … future third-party movements …to be heard.”28 Dakota farm leaders created innovative practices to fit their local circumstances. In South Dakota, where farmers had organized the first Farmers’ Alliance in a northern state, the charismatic newspaper editor Henry Loucks publicized its successes in every issue of the Dakota Ruralist. His colleague, Alonzo Wardell, experimented with a form of cooperative crop insurance that the national movement soon called “the Dakota system.”29 South Dakota Populists also enacted the initiative and referendum which has remained an essential part of the state’s political culture for over a century.
But the Populist Party’s success in South Dakota may have also been its curse; it had never fully dominated state politics and when rumors of corruption and opponents and money from outside the state targeted its leaders, the magic began to fade. In 1892, for example, South Dakotans elected their first governor, the Populist Andrew Lee, by only 319 votes. Though reelected in 1896, Lee lost a 1900 election for Congress in a landslide after his rural credit scheme failed. Likewise Senator Richard Pettigrew, a leading voice for Populism and anti-imperialism, lost his reelection bid in 1900. In a preview of the New Right’s campaign to defeat George McGovern in 1980, the national Republican Party spent an astounding half million dollars to push Pettigrew out of the Senate. Marcus Hanna, President McKinley’s top adviser and chair of the Republican Party, traveled across the state attacking Pettigrew. From the “viciousness” of his attacks, it was hard to tell which Hanna wanted more—for McKinley to win in November or for Pettigrew to lose.30
While the Populist Party was in decline, the adoption by progressive Republicans in South Dakota of several key items in its platform demonstrated how the movement created the “roots” of both Progressive-era and New Deal reform.31 Governor and three-term senator Peter Norbeck, for example, boasted that he was a true “champion of the needs of farmers.”32 He was the first governor of South Dakota to have been born there: in a dugout on his Norwegian parents’ homestead. Like the Populists before him Norbeck believed that the state should be used to help farmers in their fight against the powerful interests of corporations, banks, utilities, and corrupt political parties; he believed that cooperation between and among farmers was one key strategy. He supported a state-owned cement factory (approved by voters in a 1919 constitutional amendment), the 1907 ban on corporate farming, a rural credit program, state hail insurance, and, in time, women’s suffrage.33 But Norbeck’s reforms were just that—Populist ideas without their agrarian ideals. Hardly a farmer, he owned a well-digging business and invested in land, coming close to joining the “millionaires club.”34 More importantly, he loathed the “disloyal” programs proposed by a new agrarian organization, the Nonpartisan League (NPL), and temporarily barred its most effective organizer, the former socialist A. C. Townley, from the state.35 In the early 1930s he strongly supported the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, even though many farmers were alarmed by its requirements. Finally Norbeck added a new reform: conservation. He introduced the first regulated hunting season and established several state parks, including Mount Rushmore. Farmers, he may have forgotten, traditionally had little interest in conservation, at least of land. They preferred to produce more not less.
Enhancing the role of women in the public sphere was a goal Populists and Progressives largely shared, albeit in different eras. Nationally, female leaders like Kansan Mary Lease were well-known orators and authors: among many legendary stories about her, Lease reportedly told farmers in Kansas to “raise less corn and more hell!”36 Like Lease, female leaders in South Dakota did not speak solely to “women’s issues.” Sophia Harden of Huron and Elizabeth Wardell of Butte County organized for both the Farmers’ Alliance and the suffrage movement.37 They promoted rallies as social events for the whole family, diverging from the fraternal political culture of the time. Nevertheless, organizers found that many farm women—Scandinavian and German women, in particular—struggled to attend meetings given the long distances they sometimes had to travel, their extra responsibilities for household production and child care, and their husbands’ opposition.38 Two early South Dakota women who made their careers in radical agrarianism were unmarried. Alice Lorraine Daly, a socialist organizer, became involved when a fellow teacher in Madison was promptly fired after starting a union.39 Gladys Pyle was the first woman in American history to be elected (rather than appointed) to the United States Senate when she succeeded Peter Norbeck in 1937. Like Norbeck, Pyle was a progressive Republican dependent on the farm vote. In the late 1930s she found a way to champion the farmer and criticize Roosevelt at the same time. Far from doing too much, she said, the New Deal had “not done enough for the state.”40
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Populist ideas endured even more robustly in North Dakota, despite constant opposition from conservatives. Early farm organizers there faced one obstacle that their counterparts in South Dakota did not: an established political machine. By 1900 Alexander McKenzie controlled the Republican Party in the state through his powerful connections with corporations and investors in the Twin Cities. Famous for holding all of his most important meetings in a smoky backroom at the luxurious Merchants Hotel in St. Paul, McKenzie derided immigrant farmers, their ethnicity, poor English, and political beliefs. He was known to have boasted, “Give me a bunch of Swedes, and I’ll drive them like sheep.”41
Facing McKenzie’s power base, Alliance members and Populists (like members of the NPL later) took a different approach to organizing farmers: They treated them and their concerns—both local and national—seriously. They did not travel by luxury train car but by wagon (or Model T) to farms in remote sections of the state, encouraging farmers to organize cooperatively in their own communities and take up the issues that mattered most to them. They saw the possibility that the Alliance meetings could double as social outings in areas where isolation was one of the biggest problems farmers faced.
The records of the Alliance organization in Romness, North Dakota, show how neighborly cooperation and socialization melded easily with politics.42 At each meeting the first order of business was the needs of members and their families. In November 1892, for example, the Romness Alliance voted to donate twenty dollars to Nels Thompson who needed his leg amputated and a family whose crop had been lost to hail. Second, the group discussed their efforts to establish a cooperative store. They concluded each meeting with a discussion of “political interest.” They thought the moral purpose of their work was so closely aligned with Christianity that they appointed a chaplain. On January 24, 1891, he told them: “The wealth of the nation is accumulating … in the hands of a few—mostly now on corporations of which the leaders are [becoming] millionaires in a short time. [Mean]while the farmers and laborers have to work hard for the necessaries of life. But, Brothers, let us unite and stand united and work by every lawful means in our power to better our conditions. Not as the nihilist and anarchist with explosives, life and property destroying elements. But as good moral law obeying and peace preserving citizens.”43 Fourteen years later, in “the revolution of 1906,” it was not an Alliance member or a Populist but a progressive Republican candidate for governor, John Burke, who finally overthrew the McKenzie machine. Working with state representative Lars Ueland, Burke established systems for direct democracy, including initiative and referendum.44 But like South Dakota’s Norbeck, Burke was no farmer and definitely no radical. By 1915, many North Dakotans determined that progressive reform would not solve the economic problems they continued to face.45
At this moment, the two most talented farm organizers in history, A. C. Townley, a former socialist activist, and attorney William Langer, forever remembered by friends and foes alike as “Wild Bill,” arrived in the state to launch a truly radical political organization, the NPL. Both men’s approach was less reform, more takeover; their goal was to establish “people-first” alternatives to laissez-faire corporate capitalism. They demanded that the state acquire many kinds of businesses that profited from the farmer’s labor: creameries, packing plants, terminal elevators, flour mills, grain inspection stations, and banks. They promoted state hail insurance and the exemption of farm improvements from taxation. They also made sure that farmers knew that their concerns really mattered. Townley insisted, “If [the farmer] likes religion, talk Jesus Christ … if he is afraid of whiskey, talk Prohibition, if he wants to talk hogs, talk hogs—talk anything he’ll listen to, but talk, talk, talk, until you get his Goddamned John Hancock to a check for six dollars [the price of a membership].”46 The son of another early organizer, Frank Vogel, remembered that “Wild Bill” Langer also “had a genuine interest in the ordinary people…. If Bill Langer was speaking in a German speaking community, he would throw in a few words of German, a joke or a pun or some remark about a political enemy who did not speak German. He always loved to refer to local people in his speeches … and he got lots of laughs, keeping the crowd in stitches a good share of the time.”47 North Dakota NPL organizers also worked to include and elevate women. However much it may have seemed like a violation of the nineteenth-century doctrine of “separate spheres,” women served as NPL orators, organizers, and secretaries. Many did not see the contradiction. Ruby Craft, an NPL leader in Turtle Lake explained: “A family is the ‘Heart of Politics.’ ” She and other NPL women circulated their own newspapers and fought for improved educational opportunities both for their daughters and themselves. An NPL woman in Montana explained the seriousness of her work: “We are not going to talk about recipes for rhubarb … we want to know about the great battles for human rights so that we can vote straight when the time comes.” After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, NPL women took up the cause of voter registration to “make the women’s vote as strong as the men’s.”48
After a year of organizing in fields, barns, kitchen gardens, porches, and sitting rooms, the NPL boasted forty thousand members in North Dakota and entered its golden era of political power. Soon its newspaper, the Nonpartisan Leader, had twice as many subscribers as the next biggest paper in the state. In 1916 North Dakota voters elected NPL candidates Lynn Frazier, a farmer who had never served in public office, for governor, and William Langer for attorney general; the NPL also seized the house and put large numbers of candidates in the state senate.49 In a flurry of legislation, lawmakers established three institutions that still stand today—a state-owned bank, elevator, and mill, as well as a state-level Industrial Commission, chaired by the governor, to oversee them. But NPL leaders had more “take-over” in mind; they aimed to acquire and manage even more sectors of the economy. Over a century, the NPL (since 1956 the D-NPL) created a living legacy for the American left as a whole. Michael Lansing writes, “At the very moment most American intellectuals gave up on a central role for the people in politics … the League showed the ongoing potency of carefully organized and platform-focused citizen politics.” Even though their initial control of the government was fleeting—Governor Lynn Frazier and other officials were recalled by voters in 1921—the NPL “transcended cynicism to create enduring—if regularly ignored—legacies that hold the potential to reshape politics today.”50
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Dakota farmers faced their hardest times in the twin economic and environmental crises of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl when low crop prices combined with drought, heat, hordes of grasshoppers, and “black blizzards of dust” to render it impossible for farmers to make a living. Farmers struggled to pay back their loans or buy seed and feed, creditors foreclosed on their property, and local businesses shuttered. And the crisis on the Northern Plains started well before it did in other regions. In 1929, 16-year-old North Dakotan Ann Marie Low wrote, “there seems to be a furor in the country over a big stock market crash that wiped a lot of people out. We are ahead of them.”51 When journalist Lorena Hickok visited the region in 1932, she wrote “a more hopeless place I have never seen. This is the Siberia of the United States.”52 By 1933, 90 percent of residents in some counties qualified for federal emergency relief.
Throughout the United States, men and women responded to the Great Depression with a wide variety of alternative political and economic programs. On the Northern Plains farmers held a distinct advantage: two generations of experienced politicians and radical agrarian organizations. One new group, the Farmers Holiday Association (FHA), began in Iowa and quickly headed northwest to South Dakota. Like other radicals before them, members of the FHA believed they needed to work cooperatively to stop creditors from obliterating family farming. They argued that since bankers took a “holiday” to keep panicked depositors from emptying out their vaults, farmers should do the same. In the spirit of Bryan, one FHA leader averred: “we’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs and let them eat their gold.”53 Across the upper Midwest, farmers blocked roads to market, attacked those who tried to get through, and threatened bankers and lawyers who tried to foreclose on local farms. They even surrounded farm houses set to be auctioned, so that no one could get to the sale.54 Angry farmers and others looking for change elected Tom Berry, the second Democratic governor in South Dakota history.
The NPL’s unique legacy in North Dakota prepared farmers for even more sustained and institutionalized action. In 1932 voters elected NPL leader William Langer governor and almost immediately he earned his nickname “Wild Bill.” Langer ordered an embargo on wheat exports until prices rose. He banned foreclosures on farm properties as well as corporate ownership. He was rumored to have said, “Treat the banker like a chicken thief. Shoot him on sight.”55 Langer’s colleague and longtime NPL leader, William Lemke, was elected to the US House in 1932. He quickly gained a reputation for standing up for farmers. In 1934 he cosponsored, with then senator Lynn Frazier, a bill that forced banks to give bankrupt farmers five years to repay their loans. When Frazier-Lemke was ruled unconstitutional, he submitted a revised version, the Farm Mortgage Moratorium Act of 1935, which was renewed until its 1949 expiration.
FIGURE 3. Members of the Nonpartisan League (NPL) blocking access to a farm auction in the Great Depression. Courtesy State Historical Society of North Dakota.
But the crisis of the Dust Bowl did not simply provide renewed opportunity for flexible political responses in the tradition of radical agrarianism. It also transformed the nature of the agricultural economy itself, bringing white farmers into a new and enduring relationship with and dependence on the federal government.56 Their “consent” to this transformation was born of extreme necessity, etched by deep ambivalence, and punctuated by both traditional political and “everyday” habits of resistance.57 New Deal interventions—reductions in production, increases in conservation, and resettlement—could not have departed further from what farm leaders had long proposed. Farmers saw domestic allotment, in which the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) paid farmers to leave fields fallow, as a stark rebuke to those who prided themselves on producing food. To make matters worse, Congress passed the AAA after the 1933 planting and birthing season had begun, meaning that, to receive benefits, farmers were required to kill their newborn pigs and plow under their crops. The chance to destroy the products of their labor was hardly what farmers had fought for over half a century. Likewise payments scaled to help large landowners more than small contradicted their foundational principles. Forced to choose between participating in programs they opposed or losing their land entirely, almost all farmers, in the new federal lexicon, “cooperated.” It occurred to many, however, that the federal bureaucracy was now just another source of concentrated power rigged against them.
Farmers resisted domestic allotment on the political front first. Just after Roosevelt’s inauguration, Emil Loriks, representing the FHA, and John Simpson, representing the Farmers Union, went to Congress to promote an alternative to domestic allotment: the “cost of production” plan. Cost-of-production would guarantee a minimum price on crops so farmers could produce as much or as little as they chose, without the interference of an “army of [government] workers.”58 In other words, they proposed a plan where a sympathetic interventionist state would provide aid to farmers while also respecting their ability to manage their own industry. Simpson advised: “Never try to regulate the farmer. Turn him loose. If he is fond of work, he will have a big excess that he does not get much for; but what the home folks use he will surely get paid for it.”59 Loriks put it more bluntly: changes in the farm industry were best left up to “you and me.”60
When Congress rejected the cost-of-production plan and passed the AAA, large numbers of Dakota farmers—as many as 95 percent in some counties—signed up to “cooperate.” Before long they began to receive benefits based on the value of the average yield over five years on the acreage they promised to leave fallow. And yet their “cooperation” did not signal an end to their resistance as much as its relocation from the political to the “everyday” sphere. Roosevelt insisted that AAA programs be administratively decentralized, overseen by county boards with local men and not “outsiders” as members. As a result, local men were empowered to make the single most important decision: how many acres each farmer had to keep fallow and how many he could put into production. Quite often, farmers succeeded in “overestimating” their five-year average yields so they could produce more going forward. It is possible they kept poor records. But it is far more likely that the commissioners—their friends, neighbors, and fellow parishioners—looked the other way and allowed them to produce more than they were allowed.61 County boards found plenty of “reasons” to explain their abnormally high acreage figures to the Department of Agriculture: property lines had been “mixed up” or census figures had been inaccurate, or “slow-minded German-Russian and Indian” farmers had gotten confused. A federal agent who oversaw the local boards in Renville County, North Dakota, expressed it more candidly: some of the farmers were just “liars.”62
Farmers, who had hoped for federal programs they could control, learned instead to control what they could. They worked the system to their benefit when possible, learning to live with and profit from, if still not endorse, federal intervention. For decades they consistently voted for the candidates who vowed to protect federal farm supports even though they still disliked the logic behind them and the bureaucracy that operated them.63 Two decades later a new form of federal power with an even more impenetrable bureaucracy arrived on the plains in the form of air bases and nuclear weapons. When it did, when the warfare state joined the welfare state on the Northern Plains, Dakotans worked from the playbook they knew: they welcomed the economic benefits of militarization, created strategies to provide the best results for local people, and voted for politicians who acquired increased funding. From time to time, however, even the most “patriotic” Dakotans admitted that when the warfare state combined red tape and incompetence—secrets and lies—the consequences could be fatal.
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However much radical agrarian organizations were like “political prairie fires,” they also faced opponents determined to extinguish them. Smalltown conservatives in the “probusiness” wings of the Republican Party ardently opposed radical farmers and their proposals. While they were not conservative in all the ways the New Right would be, they were both conservative and plentiful enough to enable the rise of the New Right in later years despite the region’s radical heritage—provided that the right mixture of global, national, and local factors coalesced to support their cause.
First and foremost, conservatives in the Dakotas put their faith in American business and laissez-faire economics. They believed in competition not cooperation. Thus they also opposed any organization, politician, or program that advocated for the use of the government to regulate the economy—whether Populist, NPL, or New Deal. Rather than decry the growth of corporations and the globalization of commodities markets, they tried to emulate these trends.64 Some of the leading business owners in the region had moved from eastern states with money and educations in hand, planning to accumulate large-scale farms and ranches or launch small businesses. Most of these hardware stores, general stores, banks, and small manufacturers stayed small; some failed completely, especially in the 1930s.65 But a few were on the ground floor of what would become the country’s most powerful agribusinesses. Cargill Corporation began in Iowa but quickly moved west and by 1885 had one hundred storage elevators in the Dakotas.66
Dakota conservatives also defined their role in society through the lens of their class position. Whether their establishments were large or small, Dakota businesspeople counted themselves among the “best families” in their towns, usually attending the largest “mainline” Protestant churches—Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, or Episcopalian—and belonging to the most prestigious social clubs and organizations. Compared to farmers, they were more likely to be Protestant and more likely to be born in the US; if they were immigrants, they were more likely to come from Canada or Scandinavia, rather than Germany or Russia. They were heavily invested in “traditional Protestant concerns with upright behavior” and stood against the sale of alcohol, gambling, and even dancing.67 Further as employers and creditors, they also had the power to reward or punish those in the community who violated their values. Conservatives looked askance at anyone who depended on local charity or aid. The editor of the Woonsocket News wrote, “Any able-bodied man is able to make his own living without begging. Make him work for what he gets.”68
From the late 1890s onward, businesspeople and other conservatives implemented a variety of economic strategies, political maneuvers, and legal actions to foil agrarian reformers. On the regional level, this set the stage for the national movement of businesspeople against the New Deal and, subsequently, the rise of new conservatism.69 South Dakota bankers and attorneys, for example, upended Progressive governor Peter Norbeck’s plan to create a state-run rural credit bureau. In North Dakota, Alliance and Populist legislators faced fierce resistance from what remained of the McKenzie machine.70 When legislators proposed regulations on the railroad, for example, conservatives allied themselves with powerful railroad commissioners and demanded to know why anyone would want to inhibit the railroad, when they “have done and are still doing a mighty work toward the prosperity and material advancement of our State.”71 Conservatives stymied Governor Eli C. D. Shortridge, too, as he endeavored to push through reforms. Though funding for a state-owned elevator was approved and a few other bills passed, it was a “well-known fact,” according to Shortridge, “that every bill brought before the Legislatures of the past, that was not satisfactory to the corporations, and could not be otherwise defeated, was either stolen, mutilated, or destroyed.”72
North Dakota conservatives met their match in the NPL and “Wild Bill” Langer—until conservatives turned some of the radicals’ trademark tools against them. Because Langer and other NPL candidates ran as a branch of the Republican Party, for example, anti-NPL voters organized their own. They created the Independent Voters Association (IVA), held their own rallies, and published their own newspaper. Still outnumbered by NPL Republicans, they used the legislative process to block the NPL’s attempt to write a new constitution.73 They sought every piece of evidence that state-owned institutions were poorly managed, including the claim that the state bank wasn’t investing the money it had and that some NPL leaders were really supporting “Big Biz.”74 Finally in 1921 they weaponized one of the NPL’s most important political reforms against it: they organized and won a recall vote for three party leaders, including Governor Frazier, and won, replacing them all with men of their own.
With Twin Cities railroad men, corporate interests, and powerful judges and attorneys on their side, IVA leaders worked to get “Wild Bill” Langer out of office by any means necessary. They saw their best chance in the 1930s when it was revealed that Langer, by then the governor, had required state employees to buy a subscription to the Nonpartisan Leader. For that offense they got a guilty verdict that sent Langer to prison.75 But the verdict was overturned and, after two more trials, Langer returned to the governor’s mansion. In 1940 he was elected to the US Senate, but immediately faced an ethics committee investigation when opponents back home forwarded to Washington “evidence” of Langer’s allegedly corrupt practices as governor.76 Langer was cleared of those charges as well and served as a senator until his death. Perhaps apocryphally, North Dakota farmers were said to have written his name on their ballots for years after his passing.
To conservatives dedicated to laissez-faire economics, the protection of their own wealth, and the authority of their moral views, New Deal reforms seemed like the end of the world. If farmers were disappointed with the reforms and resentful of bureaucrats, they at least received benefits they believed their particularly unpredictable industry merited. Conservatives, however, saw the New Deal as an attack on their position in society. First, they worried that new programs diminished their economic independence and cultural authority. In a letter to President Roosevelt, for example, a mainline Protestant minister in North Dakota complained that there were no controls on how men on relief spent their money: as a result, in his town, there were four thriving saloons and seventeen bootleggers, while the church’s coffers were bare.77 Other conservatives were concerned that they had neither the power to select the men who would oversee federal programs nor the authority to get rid of them if they were not doing their jobs. Most crucially Roosevelt’s policies hurt conservatives in their wallets. This “class traitor”-turned-chief-executive increased taxes on upper-income families, gave workers the right to collective bargaining, and attempted to create a system of wage and price controls.
Dakota conservatives faced a more personal crisis when some discovered that their families qualified for federal aid, both emergency cash payments and works programs. Writes R. Alton Lee, this prospect filled many South Dakotans “with disbelief and dejection.”78 For some the only solution was to refuse to accept relief, a public sign that they were incapable of managing their affairs. Lois Phillips Hudson of Eldredge, North Dakota, whose father owned a local store, remembered how often her school lunch pail was empty while her friends’ were full and sometimes held a bright red “relief” apple. Even though she was desperately hungry, she, like her father, was also “really proud” that she had nothing.79 When she toured the states for her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, Lorena Hickok found a family with a single business suit left, which the father and son wore on alternate days when they looked for work. They preferred that desperate scheme to accepting relief.
However difficult their own circumstances, Dakota conservatives worked to find a new strategy to defeat New Dealism at home, where Democrats had surged in South Dakota and NPLers—while hardly fans of Roosevelt themselves—held the reins of power to the North. In both an echo of the World War I era and a preview of the Cold War, they found new and effective ammunition in accusations of socialism and communism.80 In South Dakota, for example, conservatives took advantage of many farmers’ resentment of the federal agricultural bureaucracy to defeat Democratic efforts to create state and local planning boards. Not fooled by the use of the faux-Populist language of “cooperation,” German Russian farmers complained that these planning boards sounded just like “Soviet-style five year plans.” To others they just sounded like another set of rules and regulations dreamed up by bureaucrats. Democratic governor Tom Berry traveled by train across the state, trying to get farmers to equate planning with familiar “habits of mutuality.” In Huron he said, “We have got to try to cooperate with one another instead of trying to buck one another. That is why we have been trying to do what they call ‘planning.’ ”81 Even a visit by Roosevelt in 1936 did not bring most residents around to the idea of a centrally planned economy. The Beadle County Planning Board resigned en masse rather than continue to participate in a “useless commission.” The Edmunds County Planning Board did the same, and called both its work and that of the county welfare board “shams, jokes, and money wasted.”82
The 1938 election in South Dakota began both the slow decline of agrarian radicalism on the plains and the first signs of a reinvented “new” conservatism, articulated first through what historian John Miller calls “McCarthyism before McCarthy.”83 The Republican Party, whose progressive wing was already less influential, swept the state, delivering a shocking condemnation of the Berry administration. The November 9, 1938, edition of Sioux Falls Argus Leader provided one reason voters had changed course so drastically: “South Dakotans Repudiate New Deal.” But that may not have been their only motivation. Accusations of communism also helped defeat at least one radical agrarian leader and elevate a rising conservative star. In his congressional campaign against Emil Loriks, a Farmers Union and FHA leader who had originally opposed the AAA, Karl Mundt linked Loriks to labor radicalism, support for the New Deal, urban-style political organizing tactics, and—most damningly—communism. He bragged to an audience in Sisseton, “The Communist Party of South Dakota is now openly holding political rallies to defeat me and I accept their opposition cheerfully … I have been fighting the un-Christian and un-American doctrines of Communism … for over ten years.”84 By the end of the campaign, Loriks, a World War I veteran who “loved his country more than anything,” was forced to prove his loyalty to voters over and over.85 They remained unconvinced. In victory, Mundt would go on to show to the nation what he thought true love of country required, working side by side with Senator Joseph McCarthy to eliminate communists in the government and force other Americans to prove their loyalty too. When years later a young congressman named George McGovern challenged the veteran Mundt for his senate seat, he experienced these same red-baiting tactics. After the loss, he vowed never to run against Mundt again and instead to aim for South Dakota’s “other” Senate seat. Even so McGovern found he could not escape conservative attacks that associated liberalism with un-Americanism. More than forty years after Mundtism ended Emil Loriks’ political career, its ideological descendant—Reaganism—would end George McGovern’s too.
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As politically divisive and difficult as the 1930s were, Dakotans of Euro-American descent found ways to reinforce shared values through a celebration of their history. The Depression coincided with many communities’ fiftieth anniversaries of settlement. To mark the occasion townspeople held pageants and parades, put on skits, and published local histories about the “old settlers” days. Some members of the Roosevelt administration, particularly those in the Department of Agriculture, believed that the settlement of the arid plains had been a mistake. But the mistake, at least politically, was theirs. Uniformly and vehemently, white Dakotans rejected their conclusions and responded by performing their parents’ and grandparents’ historic courage, self-reliance, persistence, and success. Meanwhile they censored anything the government issued that suggested different.86
But as in Garland’s story about the conflict between Tim Haskins and Jim Butler, the people of the plains had more in common than their “pioneer” history. The very fact of their common identification with the cultural symbol of the hard-working, independent, white pioneer at once depended upon and reinforced three beliefs so logical, so fully “embedded in the everyday,” that only rarely did they need to be explained.87 Long before they faced dust storms and far before they faced nuclear weapons, Dakotans of all political stripes shared a commitment to the protection of Christianity (sometimes exclusively Protestantism), patriarchal gender and family norms, and white supremacy. They did not express these convictions in the same ways, with some Dakotans promoting the use of violence and others eschewing it, for example. Most importantly some Dakotans then as now strongly opposed xenophobia, racism, and injustice.88 But if Dakotans sometimes disagreed on how best to maintain their shared culture, or even on which ethnic groups counted as fully “white,” they largely agreed on what their states had come to constitute: a “white [Christian] man’s West.”89 By the end of the Great Depression, when some Eastern bureaucrats, artists, and intellectuals argued that farmers should never have ventured onto the Northern Plains in the first place, Dakotans created a shared past to codify—in the case of Mount Rushmore to literally set in stone—the story of why they did, including what they had achieved and why it mattered. In this way they carried out the process Jason Pierce describes as “myth and reality bec[oming] inseparable, each supporting the other.”90
In the states’ first fifty years, Dakotans of all political persuasions believed that being Christian was fundamental to good moral character and constitutive of citizenship. They were hardly outside the nation’s norm. Nationwide, few Christians felt any compunction to hide their antisemitism. Henry Ford, for example, accepted the German lie that Jews were responsible for starting World War I. Every new car he sold came with a pamphlet explaining this view.91 Thirty years earlier, some Populist leaders incorporated antisemitism in their political language.92 Three well-known Populists in particular, Ignatius Donnelly, Mary Lease, and Tom Watson, distributed pamphlets that warned farmers about the conspiracies planned against farmers by “Jewish bankers.” One particularly popular tract told of a Jewish banker who planned to “bury the knife deep into the heart of America.”93 Tom Watson put his antisemitic views into action when, in 1915, he unabashedly rallied fellow Georgians to lynch Leo Frank, a Jewish manager of a textile mill where a young girl had been raped and murdered. He warned “the next Jew who does what Frank did is going to get exactly the same thing that we give to Negro rapists.”94
While no Jews were lynched in the Dakotas, many felt isolated and distinctly unwelcome in a region where there were “more United States senators than rabbis.”95 Few Dakotans objected, for example, when NPL leader William Lemke ran as presidential candidate in 1936 for the Union Party, and quickly became associated with the vicious antisemitism of its creator, Father Charles Coughlin of Michigan. Among other things, Coughlin called the New Deal the “Jew Deal”; like many other Americans he argued that Jews had “taken over” the government.96 In the Dakotas as elsewhere in the Midwest, discrimination against Jews in housing was not required by law but broadly practiced, allowed in the deeds of homes, and rarely investigated. As late as 1961, Jack Stewart, the conservative alumnus of the University of North Dakota who proposed the essay contest on “Our American Heritage—How Can It Be Eternally Yours?” did not allow Jews to stay at his resort, the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona. Even so, the university’s president, George Starcher, regularly met there with the alumni association, drawing the ire of activist undergraduates.97
But, in an era when the very definition of whiteness was in formation and religion was among its battlegrounds, some Dakotans did not consider all Christians to be equal. Protestants targeted Catholics with sustained hatred and sporadic violence from territorial days through the first decades of the Cold War. Jon K. Lauck writes that marriages between Protestants and Catholics were scandalous; children were taught simply that “you can’t mix wheat and potatoes in the same bin.”98 These religious schisms had consequences beyond marriage. Many Dakota Populists as well as nearly all conservatives sought to ban card playing, saloons, the sale of alcohol, and even dancing.99 NPL governor Lynn Frazier, for example, claimed never to have had a sip of alcohol and canceled some parties that had customarily featured music and dancing. But other important members of radical farm organizations, especially German Russians, deeply resented such attempts at forcible assimilation through “moral reform.” By the 1920s, the NPL in North Dakota stopped endorsing the national plank of Prohibition.
Dakotan anti-Catholicism became more organized and violent in the early twentieth century, an era that Nell Irvin Painter identifies as a peak in American history of racial differentiation among white ethnic groups.100 Across the Midwest in the 1920s, Protestants organized “klaverns” of the Ku Klux Klan, which, in its second iteration, targeted immigrants, Catholics, and Jews. In the Dakotas its “respectable citizens” terrorized Catholics especially.101 In Grand Forks the minister of the most prestigious mainline Protestant church in town, F. Hadley Ambrose, was found to be an imposter: an unordained man who moved to town to assume the role of “Grand Dragon.”102 He motivated church members to march against the growing number of Irish Catholics in the town, some of whom were on the local school board. Residents of South Dakota communities did the same. They marched in Rapid City, burning crosses in Lead and Sturgis and accused priests in Madison, Nunda, and Ramona of using dance and card and “booze parties” to convert members.103
Long after the KKK had fallen out of public favor in the Dakotas, anti-Catholicism remained. In the 1940s legislatures in both states banned nuns from wearing habits in their classrooms; as late as the 1960s athletic teams from Catholic schools could not compete for state championships.104 Some Dakotans were as alarmed by the candidacy of Massachusetts Catholic John F. Kennedy in 1960 as they had been by the candidacy of New York Catholic Al Smith in 1924. When Robert and John Kennedy came to South Dakota to stump for George McGovern, Bobby worried that they had actually hurt him. He was probably right. Some South Dakotans thought that if McGovern, the son of a Methodist minister, was friendly with the Kennedys, then he must be a secret Catholic himself. One admitted that, with five children, he would “make a pretty good Catholic.”105
Whether they perceived it in the early years or not, the shared experience of attending largely conservative denominations gave many Protestants and Catholics on the Northern Plains at least one worldview in common: a traditional view of women and family. While in the 1960s some large Protestant denominations became active in social justice work, including second wave feminism, in the prewar decades the churches most Dakotans attended were relatively theologically conservative. For example, German and German Russian immigrants might be either Lutheran or Catholic. Both, however, sought to protect their parishioners from the modernizing influences of American society, by retaining German language services, for example, at least until 1918 and in some places longer. Many of the Lutheran parishes they and other immigrants established would later become part of the Missouri Synod, the most conservative branch of the Lutheran church.106 Even early twentieth-century Presbyterians in the Dakotas—a “mainline” and largely “Yankee” denomination which in the 1910s became associated with the “social gospel” theology—considered themselves “old school.”107
The tepid, even “timid,” response of many rural Dakotans to women’s suffrage reflects these common views—as well as the degree to which social life in rural areas centered around the church.108 Populists, Progressives, and Nonpartisan Leaguers in both states had involved women in their movements, welcoming them to speak, organize rallies, and publish newspapers. Moreover, the South Dakota constitution made public universities and colleges open to both sexes and formally closed no occupations or professions to women.109 Even so, change did not come for women on the Northern Plains as quickly as many had hoped largely because for many voters the idea of women operating in the public sphere as equals to men was still unthinkable. Some Dakota women shared this concern, organizing as “antis” and arguing that the special nature of women’s difference from men would be destroyed if they became involved in partisan politics.110 As a result, even the most dedicated activists played down the revolutionary nature of suffrage. The NPL’s suffragists reassured legislators that women who voted would not become radicals, only more effective mothers and wives. Others downplayed any change suffrage would bring to the traditional relationship between men and women.111
Compared with other western states, like Colorado and Wyoming, the campaign for women’s suffrage in North and South Dakota was frustratingly slow. Local suffragists brought the issue to a vote in South Dakota in 1892 and 1896, losing both times. In 1898 the National American Woman Suffrage Association actually pulled their support in South Dakota. Its leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, believed the many non-English-speaking immigrant women and country families in the state were “not yet prepared” for it.112 South Dakota organizers such as Matilda Vanderhule also understood that any hope they had of winning over county farmers was to explain that the vote was nothing “radical,” just an extension of the kinds of community organizing—church bazaars, for example—that women already did.113 On their own, with no support from the national organization, they lost again.
In North Dakota the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement took a somewhat different tack: they linked the vote to the campaign for Prohibition, largely supported by Protestants, both native-born and Scandinavian. With the vote, they contended, women could counterbalance the corruptions of secular society, including saloons. This drew the ire of German farmers, anti-prohibition groups, the McKenzie machine, liquor interests, and railroads. They lost in 1914 and 1915. In fact neither North nor South Dakotans granted suffrage until World War I and, in the case of South Dakota, perhaps only because it was paired with an amendment that banned some immigrants from voting.114 Catt had been more right than she could have known. Many decades later when a second wave of feminists advocated for reproductive rights, among many other issues, they would meet with much the same hesitation from local people with conservative faith practices, by then including the evangelical movement. In those years, too, the “antis” took the lead to make sure that radical change did not alter the traditional roles of wife and mother they valued so much.
The most hegemonic component of the culture of the Northern Plains—the aspect furthest beyond debate or discussion—was the belief in the superiority of white culture. While all Euro-Americans had, in Toni Morrison’s words, lived in the “shadow of the African,” whites in the rural West lived more immediately “in the shadow” of the region’s indigenous people, whose stolen lands they cultivated.115 Even so the stereotypes they held about Natives—they were lazy, uncivilized, unintelligent, sexually degenerate, and immoral—overlapped significantly with those they held about other nonwhites and thus served at once to disparage them, to define core elements of whiteness, and to justify discrimination and violence. Most importantly, whites on the Northern Plains did not consider Indians to be advanced enough, perhaps not even human enough, to deserve to keep their land. The Billings Post stated bluntly in 1884: “It will be a great boon to this section, when these miserable, idle dogs are moved away, this valuable section of land thrown open to the use of people who will utilize it.”116 Whites believed that if Native people had no understanding of property, they were also incapable of self-government. In 1908 South Dakota governor William Beadle was asked why his state’s politics often grew so heated: his citizens had a “race instinct for local self-government,” he explained.117 In the late nineteenth century, as white farmers’ claim to land, and thus citizenship, became increasingly perilous, their decision to use the political sphere to protect it was at once a performance of their whiteness and a desperate attempt to define and salvage it.
As in other settler societies around the world, the federal government had done much of the dirty work that enabled white Dakotans to create communities on the Northern Plains. The Army of the West, surveyors of the Army Corps of Engineers, public-private partnerships that built the transcontinental railroad, and legislators who “opened” the west to home-steading cumulatively deprived Native people of their homelands and created a “continental empire.”118 On the Northern Plains, wars and treaties—some of which were broken before the ink dried—“removed” Lakota, Sioux, Crow, Cheyenne, and other indigenous people from the land and relegated them to the legal segregation and separation of reservations. When forced to give up yet more land under the Dawes Act in 1886, some Lakota turned to the Ghost Dance, a complex religious revival that began in Utah and spread quickly up the plains.119 When a band of Oglala Lakota under Big Foot traveled to sacred sites in December of 1890 to perform the Ghost Dance, the Seventh Cavalry of the US Army opened fire on them near the hamlet of Wounded Knee, killing as many as three hundred men, women, and children. Many historians consider this “attack” the last chapter in the Indian Wars. Others see it as the first chapter in the modern history of pan-Indian cultural resistance. In either case it demonstrated that the federal government would meet with lethal force any attempt by Native people to determine their own future.120
After the state had “cleared the land,” Euro-American settlers reinforced this new reality of white power. They did so with law, culture, and violence—all of which helped to bridge the gap of white ethnic difference. For example, while Native men and women were not forbidden from traveling off the reservation, border towns became de facto sites of violence and sexual assault. Ranchers organized vigilante groups to find Indians they suspected of stealing horses or food. In larger cities and towns, whites enforced structures of segregation in housing and employment, with “Indian towns” relegated to the outskirts of most communities and “no Indians” signs in the windows of businesses.121 And settlers continued to press state and federal officials to take remaining reservation lands. “West River” settlers in South Dakota, for example, were well known to graze their stock on Indian lands illegally, and to take up arms against any Natives who left the reservation or tried to keep them off their lands. Looking for a solution to this volatile situation, the US commissioner of Indian Affairs under McKinley, William Jones, arranged a lease for rancher Ed Lemmon on nearly a million acres of land promised to the Standing Rock Sioux in north central South Dakota, which only whetted Dakotans’ appetite for Indian land. Rather than appease Dakotans, such leases created even more calls for the end of Indian landholding altogether.122
Some early settler-colonists expressed sympathy for Natives and disagreed vehemently with those who, in the aftermath the Dakota War of 1862 believed that Indians should be wiped out.123 Populist leader T. R. Bland, for example, spoke out against both the massacre at Wounded Knee and the policies of forced assimilation. He hoped that the government programs would help tribes hold onto their lands.124 Some Dakota publishers supported the right to vote for Native men—even when they did not always support it for white women.125 In later decades South Dakota senator Francis Case sponsored a bill to provide compensation to survivors of Wounded Knee.126 “Wild Bill” Langer used his position in the Senate to investigate mistreatment of Indian youths in the federal prison at Fort Yates.127 But these early examples of relative open-mindedness around race stemmed either from the belief that Native people would soon disappear, victims of the unstoppable forces of “progress,” or from a general empathy with the poor rather than a complex understanding of racial injustice or a commitment to full equality. Populist senator Richard Pettigrew, for example, was very interested in Native people, but expressed it by collecting Indian artifacts—what historian Elliot West calls “a macabre competition … especially among private [collectors].”128 Even Hamlin Garland advocated for tribes to retain more of their land; at the same time, he was sure to buy Indian land when it became available through forced dispossession in Oklahoma. Case strongly supported the forced assimilationist policies of the 1886 Dawes Act and fought the New Deal’s attempts to restore Native culture.129 In the postwar years, neither Case nor Langer stopped to consider the impact on Natives of living in missile fields that threatened annihilation every day.
In a final step to imprint their power on the plains, whites wrote a history of the region that essentially erased Native people from memory. In 1923, progressive Republican Peter Norbeck hoped to draw tourists to the Black Hills. He hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had just finished sculpting a memorial to Confederates in Stone Mountain, Georgia, which also served as a gathering place for the KKK—an organization to which Borglum belonged. Norbeck asked him to create an enormous sculpture on a series of rock faces the Lakota called the “Six Grandfathers.” But Norbeck did not want Borglum to sculpt any Indian grandfathers. Instead Norbeck asked Borglum to carve four American presidents—two of them slaveholders and two of them advocates for the removal of Indians. In creating his art, Borglum destroyed much of the rock face that had been promised in perpetuity to the Lakota. Indeed he put more Dakota values on display than he knew—particularly the erasure of Indian history by whites who had commodified the land and put it to the plow.
As enduring as Mount Rushmore have been Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, written in the Depression years, and read by millions of Americans since. In them, white “pioneer” families, independent and deeply moral, works the land far from any government programs or bureaucratic interference. They do so, as recent critics have recognized, on a landscape where Indians have been erased and white families seem to take ownership as if by magic. For example, Wilder began the original 1935 version of Little House on the Prairie by comparing Native people to wild animals: “There [in the woods] the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no people. Only Indians lived there.”130 Today, this does not go unnoticed by critics such as Ojibwa author Louise Erdrich, who wrote, “The Natives were … a vanishing people who were going to go away. And that’s all one could feel about them.”131 But Wilder was far from alone in her effort to erase Native people and reify the myth of the pioneer. In 1932 the “Daughters of the Pioneers” erected a statue of a “pioneer family” in front of the new North Dakota “skyscraper” capitol. A man at the center, a woman and infant, and a male teenager face the future together. If any Indians could threaten them, they remained far away, perhaps already gone.132
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In the early years of statehood, Dakotans disagreed vehemently on many things, particularly the power of corporations and banks and the role of the federal government. While at odds on economic and political issues like these, few voters in South Dakota disagreed about the fundamental world view represented in their state’s motto: “Under God, the People Rule.”133 For South Dakotans the motto perfectly expressed their shared values and, in linking “myth and reality,” brought diverse political factions and white ethnic groups together. Thus the everyday “cultural logic” behind this motto endured longer than the reformist political economy some citizens imagined. The “God” of both the Populists and their opponents was a Christian God, for some, an exclusively Protestant God; the people “under” him were white men, with women as partners but not equals. At the time the motto was written, it would still be twenty years before women could vote and thirty before Native people could “apply” for citizenship. As we have seen, by the 1930s, the ability of the people of the Dakotas to rule their own affairs had diminished considerably. In the decades to come it would diminish even more. By 1970 the famous faces on Mount Rushmore could be in the sights of a Soviet nuclear missile’s navigational system. Yet Dakotans’ conceptualization of who the people were and who their God should be would stand fast and, for some, even deepen as the risk of instant annihilation intensified each year.