CHAPTER 4

“AN ENTIRE WORLD IN KHAKI BROWN AND OLIVE GREEN”

TOM BROKAW’S CHILDHOOD IN South Dakota barely resembled his father’s. Born in 1912 “Red” Brokaw grew up in his family’s small Bristol hotel and, like many in his generation, rose before dawn to do hard physical labor. He quit school when he was ten to work for a local jack-of-all-trades. One day the older man lowered Red, upside down and hanging from a rope, into a farmer’s forty-foot well to rescue a trapped piglet. As Tom put it, Red grew up when men and boys alike were defined by their work and their “work … produced tangible, useful things.”1 Tom, by contrast, felt he had never done anything “useful” at all. Red made sure Tom did his chores and always held a job, of course. But Tom was also in the Boy Scouts and played baseball, basketball, and football for town and school teams. He hiked the nearby hills, collected rock specimens, and attended club meetings. In high school he spent his free time at a nearby college drinking with sorority girls.²

Put in broad historical perspective, Red’s and Tom’s different attitudes toward the military were even more significant than their different life experiences.³ Tom acknowledged that most people in the Dakotas resisted entrance into World War II and implied that his father may have been among them. When the war came, however, Red and his fellow South Dakotans were prepared to serve. Even so Red did not volunteer but waited to be drafted and was not disappointed when he was assigned to a construction job in South Dakota rather than a combat deployment. For Tom and his friends, on the other hand, “military service was mandatory” even during peacetime and they fully embraced the obligation.4 Tom entered the University of South Dakota through the ROTC program and won its prize for best freshman cadet. After graduation he hoped he would be commissioned in the navy. He was devastated when the navy—and then the army—refused to accept him as an officer candidate because he had flat feet.⁵

What had happened to create such divergent attitudes and experiences over the course of a single generation? Tom pointed to December 7, 1941, as the day that “changed all that,” the “historic hinge” on the Northern Plains.⁶ But important changes in American society, Dakotan communities, and Tom’s own family had begun before the attack on Pearl Harbor and encompassed even more than the region’s rejection of Populist anti-militarism.⁷ The expanded reach of the federal government during the Great Depression, for example, had helped pull Red and many others out of poverty. By the time Tom was a toddler, Red worked for the military, a vastly more powerful and expansive federal organization than the New Deal state, and earned $6.88 per day, doing construction at an ordnance depot in Igloo. Next Red and hundreds of other workers built a series of four huge earthen dams along the Missouri River under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers. There the Brokaw family knew the security of “a steady year-round paycheck, good benefits, [and] low-cost but comfortable housing.”⁸ In the years between Red’s and Tom’s childhoods, the military state had come to the country and it too had “changed all that.” As Tom recalled, “My entire world, from the surrounding arid hills to the uniforms and vehicles, was khaki brown and olive green.”⁹

In one respect the arrival of the military state on the Northern Plains was plain to see: it physically transformed the landscape. Along with the Fort Randall Dam, the Army Corps of Engineers built an entire town for dam workers.¹⁰ Tom remarked on the “military precision” with which “Pickstown” operated, influencing even the ways men and women kept their yards, managed their households, and washed their cars.¹¹ He also noticed that a large number of workers were veterans; another subset had moved from southern states. Mississippians, North Carolinians, and Georgians introduced new foods, new words, new forms of religious expression, even a new kind of music—“country western.”¹²

But the arrival of the military state also had an impact on society in ways Tom could not fully discern. When Tom entered high school, the family moved east of the Missouri River to Yankton, a long-established community that was far larger than Igloo or Pickstown. What Tom couldn’t see was that Yankton had become a “tank town” too. American men of all backgrounds had served in the military in World War II; the businesspeople of Main Street shared a common worldview with the blue-collar dam workers from Pickstown. Everyone accepted the American military as a basic moral good and the repressive Soviet state as a direct threat to American ideals. Likewise they all admired military men, like Medal of Honor winner Governor Joe Foss whom Tom called a “man’s man of the highest order.”13 And everyone supported the work of veterans’ organizations and joined the teams and contests they sponsored. In his autobiographical descriptions, Tom confirms that during the 1950s militarization on the Northern Plains was so pervasive that it had become utterly ordinary.¹⁴

Across the Dakotas, other parts of rural America, and many distant and isolated corners of the world, the Cold War created “tank towns” where before there had been none. With them civilians became integrated into both the burgeoning wartime economy and the ongoing confrontation between East and West. In the United States, government spending on defense rose from 1 to 2 percent of GDP in the 1920s to 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s and 1960s, a 1,000 percent increase.¹⁵ In 1950, the US spent 70 billion dollars on defense; by 1960 that number had moved to 170 billion; by 1990, 343 billion.¹⁶ At the same time, new organizations like the CIA created the foundational structures of a secretive national security state, where tens of billions of dollars appeared only in “black box budgets.” This explosion of investment over half a century created a “permanent war economy” that spread the dollars, personnel, and physical presence of the military to every state in the union and to every continent on earth. Between 1946 and 1989 Americans spent over sixteen trillion dollars to defeat communism.¹⁷

Men and women on the Northern Plains hoped to get “their share” of this mammoth increase in federal defense spending. As they had for generations, Euro-Americans still feared “bigness” and concentrated power and sometimes derided the incompetence and arrogance of the federal bureaucracy. But since 1941 white Dakotans had largely come to admire the military, fear communism, and accept the legitimacy of most forms of international engagement. They wanted to demonstrate their utter and complete rejection of prewar anti-militarism. At the same time the ongoing contraction of agriculture and resulting rural depopulation made any potential injection of funding and employment irresistible.18 In Washington, DC, South Dakota senator Francis Case and North Dakota senator Milton Young, who chaired the Senate’s Military Appropriations Committee, used their considerable influence to bring federal defense monies to their states.¹⁹

In the 1950s, Dakotans began to get their share. It came first in a form they had coveted: three air force bases, one each in Rapid City, Grand Forks, and Minot. In the 1960s and 1970s, it came in a form they could never have imagined: 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) arrayed in “missile fields” around the bases. Before the Department of Defense decided where to locate the bases, boosters and elected officials in many Dakota towns battled each other for the honor—not to mention the jobs. Despite their previous anti-militarism, Dakotans did not worry that the bases would threaten local control of their communities. Instead they expected, perhaps due to their recent, albeit difficult, interactions with the New Deal, that the military would solicit community participation in the decision-making process. Before long they learned that, as James Sparrow has written, agencies of the warfare state “were far less beholden to state and local political interests than had been the case in the 1930s.”²⁰ Unlike the New Deal administrators who cared that people saw programs as their “own,” Department of Defense bureaucrats provided no processes for negotiation, no county commissions, and absolutely no convenient loopholes. Furthermore, their secrecy was legendary. In the end, Dakotans could not dictate where the bases would be, how many servicepeople would be deployed there, what their missions would entail, or how long the bases would remain. Far more than mere economic engines, the bases would become all-encompassing outposts of the military state whose presence over time transformed communities in ways few Dakotans could have anticipated.

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The Cold War never spawned an apocalyptic showdown between the United States and the USSR. But the physical and political preparations for such a confrontation combined with smaller proxy wars left no spot on the globe untouched.²¹ Many of these “local consequences of the global Cold War,” as Jeffrey and Catherine Carte Engel call them, will never be known due to covert actions and the secretive nature of intelligence systems. But what we do know took place—from the creation of huge weapons productions sites in Siberia, to the construction of nuclear submarine facilities in Scotland, the CIA’s recruitment of indigenous people like the Hmong in Laos, and even the moon landing—shows that the Cold War knew no “real geographical bounds…. peoples the world over felt its impact.”22 By the year 2000, the United States had at least thirty-six hundred separate military facilities around the globe.²³ To equip them, the United States instituted the first-ever peacetime draft and left it in place for a generation; the number of Americans serving in the military in 1960, five years before the official start of the war in Vietnam, was one thousand times as high as in 1920. Finally the expansion of the military also linked the federal government, corporate industry, university research facilities, and the military into an enormous “military-industrial complex.” At the dawn of the twentieth century, the US military was a small—inadequately small—operation. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, it was the largest employer and landlord in the world.²⁴

Few places on earth were more thoroughly transformed by the Second World War and Cold War than the American West. First seen as what one scholar termed an “outdoor laboratory”—an appropriate location for secret experimental activities—the West soon became, to another, “a vast complex” of military facilities of all kinds.²⁵ Between 1945 and 1965, the federal government spent 62 percent of its budget ($776 billion) on defense. At least one-third of that ($250 billion) went to western states, where only 16 percent of the nation’s population resided.²⁶ The construction of research complexes, mining and manufacturing facilities, military bases, experiment stations, and weapons sites created what historian Gerald Nash called “a federal landscape” in every western state. In Utah in 1965, one-third of personal income depended on defense spending.²⁷ While only one section of what Ann Markusen calls the nation’s “gunbelt,” the American West may well have been the most highly militarized region on earth in a time of “peace.”²⁸ The region’s representatives in Congress knew that their jobs depended on keeping federal money flowing and defining it not as “pork” but as a contribution to the nation’s “greater good.”²⁹

During the early years of the Cold War, defense planners largely overlooked the Dakotas due to the region’s lack of an industrial base or significant research facilities. In fact, by the mid-1950s, the Northern Plains was fast becoming a “fly-over zone” as far as the “permanent war economy” was concerned.30 But the “fly-over” zone offered something few other regions could—air force pilots could literally fly over it. The Northern Plains contained vast miles of empty airspace, with no “encroaching urban areas.” It had room not just for bombers like the B-2 and B-37 to fly but also for pilots to conduct target practice. In fact it was the perfect region for the Cold War air force to take up residence, as defense officials expected any Soviet planes to come over the Arctic Circle. In that scenario the Northern Plains were the nation’s first line of defense. By the mid-1950s the race for the bases was on.

Rapid City, South Dakota, got a head start in that contest; in the end its leaders and those in Grand Forks also learned the most distinct lessons from their participation.³¹ In late 1940, Senator Francis Case told city leaders that the air force was planning to build twenty-five new air bases across the country; if Rapid City was interested in being selected for one, its officials needed to make their best pitch. City leaders repeatedly wrote to and visited military representatives, promising full cooperation and emphasizing the vast amounts of open land and housing in the area. They repeatedly waited for some kind of response. Finally, the Rapid City Daily Journal announced that the base would indeed become a reality, due almost entirely to “Hard Work by Many Persons.”³² That was not entirely true. Rapid City was chosen for two reasons local leaders could not have controlled: first, a top air force general was a friend of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who had created Mount Rushmore.³³ Second, the area around Rapid City was so lightly populated—despite a small city and major reservation—that officials deemed it safe for a gunnery range, where pilots could practice dropping ordnance without putting civilians at risk, provided they hit their targets.³⁴

As it turned out, the Department of Defense was just starting to invest in Ellsworth Air Force Base. In 1953 the Eisenhower administration sought to reduce the size of the standing military by prioritizing air power and expanded Ellsworth again; a few years later it did so a third time. Each round of expansion required acquisition of land from ranchers and homeowners, with little or no opportunity for negotiation. Even so expansion seemed to promise far more than it took away: new residents, construction contracts, road improvements, enlarged school enrollments, and more. Indeed, very few South Dakotans—even those who sacrificed land or homes—protested the gradual militarization of their land and communities during this initial period. Many years later Marvin Kammerer, a rancher near Ellsworth, would become a vocal opponent of the air force and the Pentagon. But in the 1950s, he remembered, “We didn’t feel the same way about it. …We thought the Russians might be a real threat.”35

The greater Rapid City community also rallied behind the base, recognizing not only its role in national security but also its potential to enhance regional economic development for years. The Rapid City Chamber of Commerce, for example, became one of Ellsworth’s most important boosters, keeping close watch over the types of deployments, personnel, and support the air force might need. Early on the chamber recognized an important fact that set their priorities for the duration of the twentieth century: if the air force could open a base, the air force could close one too. In fact, the air force base in Glasgow, Montana, was shuttered only four years after it opened, stunning the local community and evoking comparisons to the wastefulness of the 1933 “plow-under” requirements of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA).³⁶ Over time Rapid City residents and state politicians would increasingly try to anticipate Ellsworth’s needs and address them in advance, even if it cost the state or community money. What was good for the air force, they figured, was good for Rapid City. By making this calculation, city officials revealed just how fully Rapid City had become a militarized space, beholden to and defined by the Cold War’s ongoing “wartime.” Looking back, few could pinpoint exactly how or when it had happened.

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The competition in North Dakota to acquire a large air base like Ellsworth felt like a bloody free-for-all, made all the more feverish by the secrecy of the military’s decision-making process. At first most North Dakotans, including Senator Young, thought that Fargo and Bismarck would get the bases and their B-52 bomber wings. Both had been mentioned by name in the Military Construction Bill of 1953. Both had municipal airports that could be expanded and sufficient populations (38,000 and 18,000 respectively) to provide support services for incoming personnel. Both local chambers of commerce had reassured the air force that their respective citizenries were ready to “cooperate” in any way necessary.³⁷ But in the end, neither got a base. To everyone’s surprise, a second site survey conducted in the spring of 1954 determined that neither airport could be adequately converted to military use, after all. It would work better, engineers reported, to find a “virgin site” in the larger Fargo and Bismarck “areas.”38

The rivalry among communities near Fargo and Bismarck became fierce and ultimately bewildering. The prize was enormous: air force officials had informed leaders in Fargo that initially 850 men would initially be stationed at each of the two new bases in North Dakota, with a payroll in excess of $2.7 million per year. To prepare, the air force planned to make significant infrastructure improvements.³⁹ And yet, federal largesse would not be free or unlimited. As air force legislative liaison, General Joe Kelly, wrote to North Dakota senator Milton Young, “The Air Force has an obligation to the taxpayers of the nation to develop its base structure with a minimum expenditure of federal funds.”⁴⁰ Thus one criterion for selection became “community support” and “economy of development.” In other words, municipalities willing to put up funds for the base or to defray real estate costs got special consideration. Soon Bismarck voters agreed to raise $150,000 for land, Minot approved $50,000, and Valley City, $62,500. Jamestown offered land for free.⁴¹

Mayor Oscar Lunseth of Grand Forks and his friend, chamber of commerce president Henry Hansen, were particularly aggressive in their campaign to attract the air force. The chamber sent a representative to the original survey site in Fargo when military officials first visited. The next day Hansen sent a letter complete with a careful map of “four or five sections of very level, quite useless alkali land” west of Grand Forks that could be used for the base, should the air force decide against Fargo. He also claimed that land appraisers had decided “this morning … that none of this land would be appraised for more than $25 an acre.”⁴² Better yet, the mayor and chamber promised to raise $65,000 for the purchase of a different plot of land, if necessary. In a letter of solicitation to the Lence and Englund Construction Firm, Lunseth began with a reminder: “By making these contributions we are doing our part in the defense of our country.” Then he got to the “practical and materialistic side to this new project”: that economic growth in the area will benefit all concerned. “I trust that you will be able to contribute to this fund and share with us not only the costs but much of the benefits which will certainly accrue in the months to come.”⁴³ The only thing that Grand Forks leaders did not do—although leaders of Fargo, Bismarck, Jamestown, Minot, Devils Lake, and Valley City did—was send a delegation to Washington in June when the final decisions were being made.⁴⁴

On June 17, the Department of Defense announced its final decision: Grand Forks and Minot had been awarded the bases. Fargo and Bismarck citizens were outraged and charged that the air force had not followed proper procedures. The air force told them only that deciding factors were “operational suitability, community support, and economical development of the site”—meaningless bureaucratic jargon if North Dakotans had ever heard it, which of course they had.45 More than one leader demanded that Senator Milton Young get some direct answers. How, for example, could Minot and Grand Forks be considered in the “area” of Bismarck and Fargo when both were more than fifty miles away? The air force responded that it relied on two new criteria: Grand Forks and Minot were in a “defense circle” set by the positioning of the new computerized radar systems; being farther north, they also were better positioned for interception of Soviet bombers flying over the Arctic Circle.⁴⁶

The lesson of the past—that Dakotans and other Americans might be able to work with the federal government as a transparent, if distant and sometimes arrogant and uninformed partner—no longer applied. In the Cold War military bureaucracy, nameless decision makers not only had the “final say” as to where bases would be located, they could change their minds afterward and arrive at a different “final say.” They could make communities wait for months, even years, for a decision. They could change the criteria without notice. They could play favorites based on economic contributions. They could “acquire” land from owners who hadn’t offered it. And while this did not happen on the Northern Plains, they could even force a community to house a base when its leaders and citizens had explicitly asked—begged—the military to take their town off the list.⁴⁷

North Dakotans had not expected the air force to be so secretive or inscrutable. But once the decision was finalized, they at least thought that the frustrating experience was over. They were wrong again. On December 7, 1954, military officials rejected the original location for the base—the “nearly useless alkali flats.” Officials preferred instead a section of farmland farther west of the city near the townships of Mekinock and Emerado. Unfortunately, that land was useful indeed. Hardly alkaline, the farms collectively produced $162,400 in 1953 and included two large turkey farms.⁴⁸ Mayor Lunseth never would have offered that land for the base. Even Senator Young objected to the repurposing of such productive farmland. No matter. After months of legal wrangling, all the farm families in the area lost their land and, according to their attorney Richard King, they received less than the appraised value for it.49 Some remained bitter for years. But for some of those who lost the most, having an air force base was well worth its cost. According to an acquaintance of the late Marijo Shide, whose father provided the largest section of land for the base, she always felt proud of the role her family had played in securing America’s safety.⁵⁰ She still felt at home when she visited the base—just as any patriotic American would.

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For all the rivalry and anguish that went into their acquisition; for all the concrete, asphalt, and steel that went into their construction; and for all the productive farmland that lay permanently fallow beneath them, the bases did not matter that much. They were not what changed Cold War politics and culture in the Dakotas. Over the course of fifty years the bases were merely physical manifestations of something far more consequential: the hundreds of thousands of military personnel who served there, whether rotating in and out of the region quickly or staying there permanently. In the heat of the race to acquire the bases, city leaders emphasized the financial benefits of militarization. And they were right to do so, as local economies indisputably benefited from the influx of funds. But over time, militarization—military people—brought changes that city leaders did not anticipate and problems they could not solve. Even so their dedication to the bases and their personnel did not waver. If anything it strengthened. By the end of the Cold War, when “realignment” threatened to close all three bases, the transformation of the communities and the region as a whole into militarized spaces, dependent upon and defined by the presence of and their commitment to the military, had long been fully established. The possible loss of a base felt more like a death in the family than an economic crisis. Even the region’s history, its public memory of the past, became a casualty of wartime.

Historians may never know the precise number of military personnel and family members who served at the bases on the Northern Plains during the Cold War. City leaders and residents initially imagined a relatively low number of military personnel at the bases, but the estimates of 850 in the early 1950s grew to numbers approximating 6,000 at Grand Forks, 8,000 at Ellsworth, and 12,000 at Minot in the 1970s and 1980s. But since these higher figures are only static snapshots of base population, they still do not tell the whole demographic story. They do not reflect the fact, for example, that servicepeople rotated through the region, on two-, three-, or four-year assignments or that during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, airmen were deployed abroad, replaced at the base, and, if they survived, might return. They also do not reflect the number of military dependents moving in and out of the base communities. As a result, the number of air force–affiliated people cycling through the region far exceeded initial projections. A conservative estimate suggests that between 1955 and 1995 as many as three hundred thousand service personnel and dependents were stationed at various times at the bases on the Northern Plains.51 To put that number in perspective, the combined populations of both states in the same years never exceeded 1.6 million and declined throughout the era. The more military-affiliated men and women who rotated through the region, the more contact the citizens of the region had with their ideas, beliefs, and cultural practices. The more military people lived on the Northern Plains, in other words, the more the military mattered.⁵²

While most servicepeople came to the Northern Plains, fulfilled their obligation, and were reassigned, others made their lives there. These men and women came to love the region’s local towns, prairie landscape, outdoor recreation, and people—including some particularly special people. Wade Bertrand, an airman from Louisiana, recalled a common saying among retirees in Grand Forks: “The Air Force brought me here; my wife kept me here.”⁵³ Over time veterans, retirees, and their family members augmented the active-duty servicepeople in the base communities, and by extension the region as a whole. Of course, everywhere a major military facility exists in the United States, a disproportionate number of active-duty military reside; and it makes sense that some return when they complete active duty.54 But base communities on the Northern Plains also attracted civilian employees of the military and a disproportionate number of veterans of other service branches who were drawn to the area’s resources and support. By 2017, veterans alone made up over 8 percent of the white non-Hispanic population of South Dakota, nearly twice the national average.⁵⁵ In the area around Rapid City in 2000, between 25 and 40 percent of the population over age eighteen were veterans.⁵⁶

FIGURE 5. Community members visit the Grand Forks Air Force Base on Friends and Neighbors Day, 1979. Courtesy Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection, University of North Dakota.

The impact of migratory and permanent members of the military on small communities went beyond raw numbers, leaving in Gerald Nash’s words, “a deep imprint beyond economic influences. Everywhere it served as a major employer; everywhere it determined the physical shape of cities and land controlled by military authorities.”⁵⁷ Everywhere it also contributed to alliances between military elite and local political leaders. Black Hills State University professor Ahrar Ahmad suggests much the same: “Most people [in South Dakota] know somebody in the military. Consequently, many people feel a sense of personal involvement in military operations … they wear their association with the services as a badge of honor and support for troops is frequently translated into support for war.”⁵⁸ Conversely, members of the broader military community give back to their communities in diverse ways, including volunteering at schools and churches and working at fire departments, rural police departments, and county sheriffs’ offices. Since 2000 Michael Brown, a retired missileer, has served as mayor of Grand Forks.59 In 1997 active-duty and retired servicemen and women rescued stranded residents in the devastating Red River flood. They housed the survivors both at the base and in their homes.⁶⁰ Air force officials even made it possible for students at Grand Forks Central High School to hold their prom on the base.⁶¹

Who were these people who became so important to their communities? Every service person stationed on the Northern Plains was a member of the air force, of course, the branch of the service with the highest education levels, longest average years of service, and, in the case of pilots, highest prestige and sense of “grandeur.”⁶² But only a small percentage were pilots, as the air force also trained security, maintenance, educational, and administrative personnel. In the 1960s the bases’ bomber wings would be joined by Strategic Air Command (SAC) units that operated, manned, secured, and maintained nuclear weapons in surrounding launch facilities. Whatever their assignment, the vast majority of the military personnel on the Northern Plains were white men; small numbers of African Americans arrived in the early 1960s followed by women of all ethnic backgrounds two decades later.⁶³ For many who arrived, their assignment to a base on the Northern Plains was rarely their first move. Throughout the Cold War, service members might have been assigned to facilities in California, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, or anywhere across the world. During the Vietnam era, pilots and navigators had also been deployed to bases in Asia, including Thailand, Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines, that served as launching points for air force operations. In fact, many had moved enough times to consider the air force their true “home,” and its values—honor, duty, and sacrifice along with what one blogger called the “I am the King of the ville” attitude regarding race, class, gender, and nationality—to be their own.⁶⁴

Yet most of the servicepeople who came to the Northern Plains had not been born and raised in the air force. They also brought with them the practices and values of their home communities—many in the American South.⁶⁵ Even before the Civil War, the South was the most “martial” of the regions in the United States; for whites in particular dueling, manhood, honor, and violence were closely intertwined.⁶⁶ The Cold War military buildup amplified this tradition by investing hundreds of millions of dollars for the construction or expansion of bases like Fort Bragg in North Carolina and manufacturing facilities like the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee. So much money poured into the South in the Cold War that South Carolina senator Richard Russell wondered if Charleston might fall into the sea.67 But historian James Gregory writes that military service or federal defense work was also a well-trodden “path” out of the South, helping to create a “southern diaspora” throughout the nation.⁶⁸

FIGURE 6. B-52 Bomber at the Grand Forks Air Force Base. Courtesy Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection, University of North Dakota.

As important as it was in the 1940s and 1950s, the military-driven migration out of the South accelerated after the Vietnam War. When the Department of Defense replaced the draft with the All-Volunteer Force in 1973, southerners became even more overrepresented in the military, with 44 percent of all service members hailing from southern states by the early twenty-first century.⁶⁹ This trend may be explained by the fact that, according to the Center for Naval Analysis, one of the most important predictors of whether young people volunteer for the military is the presence of military bases in their home communities.⁷⁰ Five of the largest bases are in the American South. But the influence of the southern diaspora on military enlistment rates and culture might go deeper still. Californians are also overrepresented in the military; California is a state with a large number of bases. Moreover, as Gregory shows, California is also home to well over a million southerners who migrated there from the 1930s to the 1970s.71 As military service has a multigenerational predictive component, it is likely that many second- or third-generation white Californians “inherited” their “southern” parents’ or grandparents’ positive views of military service despite their upbringing elsewhere.⁷²

The cultural impact of southerners and “southerners once removed” among the military personnel who arrived in small rural communities on the Northern Plains was significant, and in one respect, transformative.⁷³ Beginning in the late 1940s, servicepeople introduced several communities to religious practices associated with evangelical Protestantism. As we have seen, the Dakotas had long been home to relatively theologically conservative Christian denominations, ethnic-specific parishes, and separatist synods. By the 1950s the region’s faithful were also becoming familiar with Protestant evangelism through the national broadcasts and local appearances of celebrity preachers such as Jack Schuyler, Oral Roberts, and Billy Graham. But until the arrival of the bases and their personnel, local evangelical congregations were few. Quickly, however, service members from the South, Southwest, and California sought out places to practice their faith. In March of 1949, for example, six Ellsworth airmen who had previously worshipped in Church of Christ congregations began meeting at the Ellsworth Hospital and one of the base schools. By 1956 they had purchased land in Rapid City and completed construction on a facility of their own, while also traveling to Sturgis, Hot Springs, and Custer to found Church of Christ congregations there.⁷⁴ Likewise the two churches located nearest to the Grand Forks Air Force Base in its early decades were evangelical: the Baseview Assembly of God and the Calvary (Southern) Baptist church.⁷⁵ Ads like the one from the New Testament Baptist Church in Larimore, a few miles away, which described itself as “a friendly church where the Bible is the final authority,” were reprinted in official military newspapers.⁷⁶ In the 1970s, when many Dakotans rejected the increased liberalism of “main line” Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism on the plains outgrew its military origins and expanded to include Christian schools, book stores, radio stations, and political organizations. Thus just when many regions in the US saw declining numbers of churches and churchgoers, the Dakotas showed the opposite trend. In fact, despite the shuttering of many isolated “prairie churches,” far more churches were founded on the Northern Plains between 1970 and 2010 than before 1945. Few, however, were the kind that early settlers, especially those “business-friendly” Republicans from the “best families” in town, would have recognized.77

While Walmart did not arrive on the Northern Plains until the 1990s, it too originated in the South, had a commitment to the values of evangelical Protestantism, and owed at least part of its success to its self-conscious association with the military. A blogger named “Army Wife” wrote in 2012, “One thing I have always said for years is no matter where the military sends you in the United States, if you don’t recognize anything else you are almost guaranteed to see a Wal-Mart close by.”⁷⁸ She had observed a corporate strategy rather than a coincidence. Founder Sam Walton planned very carefully how to “roll out the formula” beyond the original Bentonville, Arkansas, stores, staying close to home at first and then building new stores in similar small-to-medium-sized southern towns, while also buying out competitors.⁷⁹ By the 1970s, however, stores dotted the south and southwest, often moving into towns near military bases. Walton knew that the migratory military families needed low-priced commodities and that they would find comfort and familiarity in the company’s folksy approach to retail and their embrace of evangelism. Moreover, Walmart was also quick to publicize its support for the military, including the millions of dollars it gave to veterans-related charities, even though, as “Army Wife” pointed out in 2012, it did not provide in-store discounts for military families.⁸⁰

On the Northern Plains in the 1990s, Walmart stores replaced many local businesses, some of which had barely survived the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. Old-timers complained that Walmart and other “big box” retailers, locating near malls or in other suburban spaces, would deliver the final death blow to the old Main Street.⁸¹ But most Dakotans welcomed the stores, its part-time jobs for farm women, low prices, convenient parking, and the company’s “carefully cultivated traditionalism.”⁸² Bethany Moreton writes that Walmart also introduced “Christian Free Enterprise” with its commitment to evangelical Protestantism, anti-communism, the free market, and traditional gender roles.⁸³ Far from just a store, then, Walmart was an engine of a new kind of political conservatism that was quickly replacing the “business conservatism” of former local elites. The Dakotas were far from Arkansas; but by the 1990s, the militarization of the Northern Plains made Walmart feel right at home.⁸⁴

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The influence of the military diaspora may have been even more significant when its practices and worldviews reinforced or redefined those already present in a community or a region. In the case of political conservatism it may well have done both. Before World War II, the political heritage of the Northern Plains was multifaceted; generations of conservative “business-oriented” Republicans vied with radical agrarian activists and organizations from the Populist Party to the Nonpartisan League (NPL). After 1945, however, Dakotans on both sides of the aisle largely rejected their traditional Populist anti-militarism and ousted socialists and communists in local organizations and schools. These trends leaned the region’s precarious hybrid political culture to the right. At the same time the political views of men and women in the military became less multifaceted, leaning the military itself more to the right. By the last decades of the twentieth century, more members of the military, for example, identified as Republicans.85 They also believed that the military had a positive role to play in the nation, particularly in defeating communism, and approved of increased funding for the military and for its missions abroad by large margins. Likewise they have admired the institution of the military itself. A 2009 Gallup poll found that over three-quarters of officers agreed with the statement that “civilian society would be better off if it adopted more of the military’s values and customs,” while just 25 percent of nonmilitary, nationwide, agreed.⁸⁶ Finally, while for many years military personnel believed it was important for them to stay “out of politics,” by the late twentieth century the reverse was true: military-affiliated Americans were more politically active on average than nonmilitary Americans were.⁸⁷

The conservative views of members of the military in the late Cold War decades on cultural issues—race, gender, and sexuality in particular—may have helped to redefine conservatism on the plains, replacing the prewar business Republicanism with its emphasis on economic issues to the new conservatism of 1980s and 1990s, with its added and distinctive emphasis on the “culture war.”⁸⁸ Among military elite (officers and retired officers) in 1999, for example, 45 percent supported barring gay men and women from teaching jobs; a few approved of taking books that “supported homosexuality” from library shelves; 73 percent supported permitting prayer in public school; only 10 percent backed ending the death penalty.⁸⁹ Journalist Thomas Ricks wrote in the Atlantic in 1997 that being a Republican—particularly a Republican on the “hard right” wing of the party—“is becoming the definition of being a military officer.” He based his conclusions in part on data collected by army Major Dana Isaacoff regarding the political views of cadets at West Point. Isaacoff found that they “pushed [conservatism] to extremes. The Democratic-controlled Congress was Public Enemy Number One. Number Two was the liberal media.... They firmly believed in the existence of the Welfare Queen.”90

As we will see, the increasing size of farms, the out-migration of activist farmers, and even the introduction of soybeans played a role in the region’s rejection of its mixed political heritage and its embrace of the New Right.⁹¹ But some commentators have suggested that militarization was the essential precondition that set legislative priorities of rural whites before, during, and after these shifts. South Dakota historian Ahrar Ahmad, for example, has suggested that attitudes held by members of the military have rubbed off on Dakotans as a whole: “A state that benefits substantially from military facilities and expenditures … feels an obligation to respond positively to military needs.”⁹² Likewise, J. D. Vance argues that the closeness of rural people’s “lived” connection to the military has made their views “increasingly distinct from those of urban people whose relationship with the military is more distant,” and has shaped their increasingly conservative politics.⁹³ Beginning in the early 1990s, when Republican candidates began to attack Democrats for being “soft of defense,” any meaningful distinction between Republican and Democratic candidates on support for the military diminished each year.⁹⁴ The resulting dynamic was nowhere clearer than in D-NPL incumbent senator Heidi Heitkamp’s 2018 campaign.⁹⁵ Running behind, Heitkamp filled her social media accounts with her visits to local bases and meetings with veterans groups, hoping to optimize her share of the votes of the broader military community. It was too little, too late—and perhaps not even the point. Heitkamp lost by 11 percentage points; many voters cited her opposition to conservative Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court as their deciding factor.

Military personnel in Dakota base communities also reinforced and redefined views on race, gender, and sexuality. In the early 1960s African American personnel stationed at Ellsworth air force base reported, as at other bases, that landlords, barbers, and restaurant and nightclub owners in Rapid City frequently refused them service.⁹⁶ Upon conducting their own study—the first of several of its kind over the next two decades—members of the South Dakota Advisory Committee to the US Civil Rights Commission, including Lakota leader and Episcopal minister Vine DeLoria Sr., reported that more than 90 percent of the owners of Rapid City bars and nightclubs in the city would not serve African Americans.97 The number was nearly as high at barbershops, and well over 50 percent at restaurants and motels. African American military personnel had the most difficulty finding safe off-base housing for themselves and their families. In one survey, Rapid City residents were asked if they would object to living in a neighborhood with “Negroes,” provided they were “well behaved.” More than a third answered yes.⁹⁸

FIGURE 7. D-NPL senator Heidi Heitkamp visiting Minot Air Force Base during her 2018 reelection campaign. Demonstrating her commitment to the military was an essential but nevertheless insufficient part of her strategy. Heitkamp suffered a double digit loss. Courtesy Office of US senator Heidi Heitkamp.

Southern racial practices might have traveled with the diasporic southern military personnel and defense workers, just as country western music, evangelical churches, and Walmart did.⁹⁹ In fact some Rapid City businesspeople told the investigators that they “had to discriminate” because the “white airmen” insisted on segregated facilities and that if their businesses served “Negroes” they would lose white customers.¹⁰⁰ Other South Dakotans also believed that their racial attitudes were different from southerners and that the region did not share in the “shame of the South.”¹⁰¹ But even if businesspeople on the Northern Plains adopted southern antiblack racial practices because they thought they “had to,” they were building upon similar practices already in place. One trailer park owner told an African American airman that he “didn’t rent to Indians or Negroes.”102 In other words, he did not need to learn how to discriminate on the basis of race. Racial segregation of Native people had been engrained in Rapid City and other communities on the Northern Plains well before the military arrived.¹⁰³

Military and local practices around gender and sexuality were also mutually reinforcing. Many historians have demonstrated that creating a “warrior” in the American military has long depended on and been defined by practices of misogyny, sexual violence, and homophobia.¹⁰⁴ The ritual practices of “military masculinity,” with its all but mandatory performance of aggressive heterosexuality, lead to “hybrid” spaces just beyond American bases at home and abroad, where “drinks, drugs, and women” have been readily available and instances of assault relatively common.¹⁰⁵ The Ojibwa leader Dennis Banks remembered clearly that, far from forbidden, sex with local women was practically required. Thinking back on it later, he realized that “the military served as a training ground…. You’re supposed to be macho and use women as sex objects.”¹⁰⁶ White service members too recalled the peer pressure to “try a prostitute” as a form of male bonding; “kind of a joke.”¹⁰⁷ This was true even at bases on the Northern Plains. When the air force chief prosecutor Col. Don Christianson’s father was stationed at Ellsworth in its early years, strippers entertained officers over dinner.¹⁰⁸ In 1991 when airmen at Ellsworth heard that over one hundred women in the navy and marine corps alleged that they had been sexually assaulted at the Tailhook conference, most thought they were just “complaining.” At that time it was still legal at Ellsworth for an airman to rape his wife.¹⁰⁹

Like servicemen, Dakotans did not think of women merely as sex objects, of course. Nevertheless they held essentialist views of gender and sexuality that were founded on, reinforced, and in time politicized by the region’s conservative religious culture. From the time of statehood when women’s suffrage took longer than in other western states, many Dakotans saw differences between men and women as “natural” and “God given.”¹¹⁰ One of those “natural” differences was men’s and women’s roles in sexual intercourse and procreation: it was natural for men to be sexually aggressive, for unmarried women to resist their advances, and for married women to comply with them. Moreover Dakotans during the Cold War years largely believed that imprudent women bore the responsibility for unwanted advances, rapes, and unplanned pregnancies. Even at the end of the twentieth century girls in the Dakotas were sent away to church-affiliated “homes” to have babies whose existence families did not acknowledge. When Debra Marquart was a teen and eagerly welcomed new sexual experiences, she concluded that “by choosing pleasure over fertilization, I fear I have committed an act of extravagance that separates me irrevocably from the long line of agricultural women in my family.”111 Finally, while very little research has been done on LGBTQ history on the Northern Plains, it is likely that for some gays and lesbians, life there was isolating, if not life-threatening.¹¹²

The arrival of bases and thousands of airmen threatened heteronormative ideals of marriage and family. Local officials worried that they would see marked increases in both sexual assaults and sex work and that local women would be at risk. When the Grand Forks Air Force Base was set to open in 1957, commander Leon Lewis approached Mayor Oscar Lunseth to propose that the city build a club downtown for his enlisted men who had no place to “hang out.” He received a resounding no.¹¹³ Lunseth knew that Rapid City already had a USO club; it attracted a shocking amount of traffic, hosting eight thousand servicemen each year; two hundred on an average night and three times that number for special events.¹¹⁴ Servicemen would not be the only people “hanging out” at the proposed club: sex workers and even local women dating airmen inevitably would be there too. However much Mayor Lunseth and the community council welcomed the military and wanted to support it, this was a bridge too far and before long the matter was dropped.

In Minot the problem of widespread prostitution was not theoretical. It was a long-established reality that grew more pervasive when the air force base arrived.¹¹⁵ In 1960, US district attorney and NPL leader Robert Vogel launched an investigation into and a crackdown on the small city’s reputation as a “center of vice”—illegal sales of alcohol, drug use, gambling, and prostitution. Convinced that publicizing the problem would help solve it, Vogel also assisted the Governmental Affairs Committee of the Minot Junior Chamber of Commerce (“Jaycees”) in conducting its own inquiry. He reached out to newspapers to insist that they cover the story even if it meant “bad publicity” for the town. He provided the court records of dozens of sex workers as well as photographs of the houses, bars, and cafés where sex workers lived and worked, and transcripts of interviews with sex workers themselves.

This treasure trove of information revealed—doubtless to Vogel’s horror—that Minot was a great place to engage in sex work. “Prostitute A” and “Prostitute B” (later identified by name in local news reports) both reported that sex work paid better in Minot than anywhere else in the Upper Midwest outside Sioux Falls. Their customers were hardly desperate or dangerous men; they were not even strangers. They were “high quality” men who either came from Minot or traveled from nearby Bismarck and surrounding towns. According to Prostitute B her customers included “businessmen, restaurant men, all kinds, men with pensions, men what [sic] were at times officials, things like that.”116 And, of course, they included men from the air force base, although Prostitute A said it was hard to tell how many airmen were among her clients since they rarely wore their uniforms and Prostitute B said she never asked to see credentials.¹¹⁷

Vogel’s investigation revealed that the men and women of Minot shared a surprising number of views on sex and gender with the military. First of all, they told Vogel that they “had to have” a sex trade if they had the air force base.¹¹⁸ They believed in other words that most men required, indeed deserved, sex; perhaps military men most of all. He accused the town of widespread apathy about the problem.¹¹⁹ Furthermore so long as local white women were not involved in prostitution, the people of Minot did not perceive sex work as a threat to their community, homes, or families. Many sex workers, including both Prostitute A and Prostitute B, were from out of town—perhaps Chicago—and thus personified long-held ideas about women’s demoralization in large urban settings. Moreover at least half of the sex workers in the area were African American, again demonstrating that they were not “from around here” and thus were not indicative of the corruption of their own daughters.¹²⁰ Aritha Robinson, for example, had been arrested in a raid on a two-story house in rural Ward County, where she and an unnamed man were caught “in assignation.” She explained to the court that she was waiting for her husband, a member of the military, to return from his overseas deployment and could no longer afford the rent at the home they shared. Her new landlord claimed not to have any idea how she earned money.¹²¹ While Aritha was found guilty, neither her “landlord” nor her customer faced prosecution. Whatever personal problems Aritha faced, no one in Minot—perhaps not even Robert Vogel—felt responsible for her or worried about her future.

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Between the end of World War II and the beginning of the war on terror, military and civilian life on the Northern Plains became integrated—demographically, politically, and culturally. By 2001 Rapid City, Grand Forks, and Minot were no longer just communities with military facilities; they were military communities. Accompanying this transformation were all the economic advantages their former leaders had imagined, and more.122

And yet, by the early twenty-first century, full integration with the military meant that the military’s challenges became the region’s too. Both Dakotas have a higher than average rate of veterans who have seen combat, including many younger veterans who have returned from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.¹²³ These cohorts, as in the US as a whole, have higher than average rates of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and suicide.¹²⁴ Likewise, as military pay has not kept up with cost of living, despite the attractive benefits of service, some military families struggle with poverty; they qualify for SNAP, Head Start, and local social services.¹²⁵ That military families struggle to make ends meet is reflected in the built environment near all three bases, where fast food restaurants, pawn shops, and trailer parks dot the landscape. Drug use and addiction rates among active-duty and retired military have also risen, even at bases where the main mission is the maintenance of nuclear weapons.¹²⁶

Women have paid an especially high price for the militarization of their communities. Both women in the military and the wives of military men and veterans face higher than usual rates of discrimination, sexual assault, and domestic violence. According to a 1993 survey, 12 percent of cadets at the Air Force Academy experienced sexual assault.¹²⁷ Meanwhile, female military spouses and partners nationwide experience a rate of spousal abuse two to five times higher than average. Throughout the 1990s the military considered domestic violence to be a private matter, a “relationship issue.” Even twenty years later, a history of violence against women was not automatically considered a disqualification for military recruitment.¹²⁸ Finally sociologists have recently shown that veterans, especially those who have seen combat, have lower rates of criminality in general, but higher rates of sexual assault.¹²⁹ In 2002 an army recruiter in Rapid City, knowing that a white man accused of sexual assault on Native land could not be tried in state courts, arrived unannounced at a Lakota woman’s home to perform a “required” physical examination. He then drove her to a remote area of the reservation and assaulted her.¹³⁰

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Despite all the challenges that integration with the military has brought, men and women on the Northern Plains remained wedded to the idea that bases are good for them and they are good for the bases. In 2018, the Minot Daily News could not say enough about the seamless bond between the “interrelated” civilian and military communities. The relationship was, above all, a two-way street: “There is a palpable appreciation for one another, affection and pride.” The base was so important, the writer suggested, that “one wonders what the state of Minot would be were it not for the massive contribution from the base.” He asked all readers to “thank any service member when the opportunity presents itself.” He thanked the air force base for being “more than a good neighbor but rather an essential component of the heart of Minot.”131

When they thought the air force might close Ellsworth in 2005, leaders of the Rapid City community went even further in their declarations of full integration with the military. Packing ten thousand residents into the Civic Center, speakers begged the Air Force Base Realignment Commission (BRAC) to change its mind.¹³² They forthrightly denied that their community had ever protested against American entry into a war or ever worried about the culture of militarism that would accompany a permanent standing army. In fact in his introduction to the video that began the city’s presentation to the Base Realignment Commission, Mayor Shaw said the very opposite:

[South Dakota] is a place where men carve mountains and the stars and stripes and the eagles still fly. Through world wars and a history of conflict, they heeded the call of a nation, born from the simple premise that all are created equal, and that each shares unalienable rights worth defending at home and abroad. From the beaches of Normandy and the jungles of Vietnam to today’s war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, South Dakotans have long served their country and still do so today surrounded by neighbors who welcome them home from their service, and in times of tragedy who never forget.¹³³

Governor Mike Rounds also proclaimed the historic “love” that the people of South Dakota had “always” felt for the military. Needless to say, neither Mayor Shaw nor Governor Mike Rounds mentioned their region’s near-universal support for Populist anti-militarism in the 1930s. Nor did they recount the neglect, torture, and deaths of the pacifist Hutterite brothers, Joseph and Michael Hofer, in their basement cell inside Alcatraz in 1918. To save Ellsworth they needed to demonstrate and celebrate the kinship that had developed between the townspeople and the military. And that is exactly what they delivered, because after all it was the truth.