Preface
1. Tom Brusegaard, conversation with the author, October 5, 2017, Grand Forks, North Dakota; Tim Pavek, interview, “National Park Service, Minuteman Missile Historic Site,” https://www.nps.gov/people/timpavek.htm?utm_source=person&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=experience_more.
2. Delphine Red Shirt, conversation with the author, September 2001, New London, Connecticut.
3. Among other works, see Delphine Red Shirt, Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
4. Sonia Narang, “Elderly Women on Okinawa United Against Plans to Move U.S. Military Base,” https://www.upi.com/Top_News/Voices/2017/02/20/Elderly-women-on-Okinawa-unite-against-plans-to-move-US-military-base/7221487604758/.
5. On Americans’ inability to “see” empire, see Daniel Immerwahl, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019), 3–20. On the concept of “shareholder whiteness,” see Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 149–67.
6. Quoted in Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 144.
Introduction
1. “Grand Forks Herald Publisher to Retire,” Bismarck Tribune, June 19, 2013, https://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/grand-forks-herald-publisher-to-retire-next-year/article_032f45ec-d960–11e2-ad61–001a4bcf887a.html.
2. Mike Jacobs, “The Prostitution of Patriotism,” Dakota Student, September 15, 1967.
3. No author to Mike Jacobs, no date, George Starcher Papers, Elwyn Robinson Department of Special Collections, Orin G. Libby Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota, OGLMC 238, Box 7, Folder 26.
4. Mike Jacobs, “Starcher Remains a Presidential Model,” Grand Forks Herald, May 31, 2018, https://www.grandforksherald.com/opinion/columns/4453866-mike-jacobs-starcher-remains-presidential-model.
5. Mike Jacobs, A Birthday Inquiry: North Dakota at 125; A Collection of Essays, ed. Steve Wagner (Fargo, ND: Forum Communications, 2014). Kindle only.
6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/25/south-dakota-lawmakers-are-showing-us-that-populism-is-a-lie/?utm_term=.dcde9972afdd. North Dakota voters preferred Trump by 35 points.
7. The New Right had roots in the anti–New Deal coalition, the postwar conservative movement among intellectuals like William F. Buckley, anti-communism, and the conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant traditions. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Nation Books, 2009).
8. Phillip Barlow and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Midwest: America’s Common Denominator? (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2004), 33–37. Several denominations largely seen as culturally conservative today worked for left-leaning social and economic causes too. In the Dakotas many Catholic leaders supported Populist reforms and, later, the antinuclear and family farm movements. North Dakota bishops Vincent Wehrle and Aloysius Muench, for example, worked with “Wild Bill” Langer and the Nonpartisan League. And yet their support had limits. While Wehrle and Muench supported initiatives to control the power of big business, their fear of socialism reined them in. Charles M. Barber, “A Diamond in the Rough: William Langer Reexamined,” North Dakota History 65 (Fall 1998): 2–18. See also Bishop H. B. Hacker, The Catholic Church in Western North Dakota, 1738–1960 (Mandan, ND: Diocese of Bismarck, 1960), 55. Furthermore some “mainline” Protestant denominations that we think of today as liberal had what one leader called an “old school” approach to doctrine. Kenneth L. Smith, “Presbyterianism, Progressivism, and Cultural Influence: William M. Blackburn, Coe E. Crawford, and the Making of Civic Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Paula M. Nelson, eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 3 (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2018), 104. Nearly all Christian groups worked to maintain the “social order” in areas of religious practice, race, and gender. Many did not support women’s suffrage. With far more devastating consequences, Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian leaders founded and administered boarding schools for Native children, where conversion to Christianity was involuntary and abuse and neglect accompanied the “civilizing” mission. Brenda J. Childs, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Linda M. Clemmons, “ ‘Business Is Business Even If We Are Christians’: The Politics of Grant’s Peace Policy in Dakota Territory,” in Lauck, Miller, and Nelson, The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, 3:32–57.
9. Even many white moderates in the region demonstrate what Eddie Glaude Jr. calls the “soft bigotry” of those who support civil rights but not full equality. “Don’t Let the Loud Bigots Distract You,” Time, September 6, 2018, http://time.com/5388356/our-racist-soul/. For Native people, full equality would require redress of treaty violations, something no Republican or Democratic candidate for national office from the region has fully endorsed. The ongoing conflict over the “Fighting Sioux” mascot at the University of North Dakota reflects many Dakotans’ desire to maintain control over the symbols and myths of settler colonialism. See Catherine McNicol Stock, “ ‘Reading the Ralph’: Privatization in the ‘New’ North Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck and Catherine McNicol Stock, eds., The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2020), 323–345.
10. Samuel Day, Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the 1,000 Missile Silos of the United States (Madison, WI: Progressive Foundation, 1988), 10. The best discussion of how the missiles came to be located on the plains is Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
11. According to Vance, “To these Americans, the military isn’t just an organ of the national security state; it is a safety net, health care provider, employer, educator and landlord.” J. D. Vance, “How Trump Won the Troops,” New York Times, November 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/opinion/how-trump-won-the-troops.html?_r=0.
12. See, for example, Mikkel Pates, “Flags on Farms,” Ag Week, July 2, 2018, http://www.agweek.com/business/agriculture/4467500-give-us-old-glory-flags-farms.
13. A study of 2015 recruits found that the states of North and South Dakota both ranked in the top ten for number of “high quality recruits”: high school graduates and others well prepared for service. Aline Quester and Robert Shuford, “Population Representation in Military Services (2015)” Washington, DC: CNA Reports, 2017, 27. According to the National Priorities Project, 44 percent of all military recruits come from rural areas largely in the South and Great Plains states. Montana has three counties in the top twenty for recruitment; Nebraska has two, South Dakota one. See National Priorities Project, “Military Recruitment 2008: Significant Gap in Army’s Quality and Quantity Goals,” http://www.nationalpriorities.org/militaryrecruiting2008, accessed July 1, 2018. This data is summarized in Bill Ganzel, “Rural America Supplies More Recruits,” Living History Farm, 2009, https://livinghistory farm.org/farminginthe70s/life_07.html. See also National Priorities Project, “Military Recruitment 2010,” https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2011/military-recruitment-2010/.
14. Historian Ahrar Ahmad has written “most people [in South Dakota] know someone in the military.” Ahmad, “War and Peace in South Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr. eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 1 (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2011), 203; Ahmad draws his data from “US Casualties: State-by-State Troop Deaths,” PBS News Hour, https://web.archive.org/web/20130424084902/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/middle_east/iraq/honorroll/map_flash.html.
15. David Finkel, The Good Soldiers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 209. Soon enough, Adam found, the experience of war began to “sour” (ibid.).
16. The question of how radical or conservative Dakota politics were before World War II has inspired lively debate. While Jon K. Lauck, Tom Isern, and others have called South Dakota a land of “agrarian conservatism” from its inception, others point to definitional leftist movements in both states. On the tradition of political conservatism, see Thomas D. Isern, “Confessions of an Agrarian Conservative,” South Dakota History 36 (Summer 2006): 218–23. On the history of the left, see William C. Pratt, “Another South Dakota; or, The Road Not Taken: The Left and the Shaping of South Dakota Political Culture,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 1:105–32; Steven A. Stofferahn, “The Persistence of Agrarian Activism: The National Farmers’ Organization in South Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 2 (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014), 209–41. Genuine economic and political radicalism endured the longest in North Dakota. See Michael Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
17. Sarah M. Vogel, “Advocate for Agriculture,” in Susan E. Wefald, Important Voices: North Dakota’s Women Elected State Officials Share Their Stories, 1893–2013 (Fargo, ND: Institute for Regional Studies Press, 2014), 87.
18. Throughout this work, the word Populist is capitalized any time it refers to the broad ideas of economic and political reform first articulated by the Farmers Alliance and People’s Party. Thus it is used to describe organizations and leaders who came decades later, even if they may not have adhered to every aspect of the original Populist agenda or movement culture. Most importantly, it includes Populist anti-militarism, which found expression as late as 1970, because Populists saw the struggle against war as part of their struggle against the power of large corporations. On the other hand, when right-leaning politicians who work on behalf of corporate interests and the military industrial complex, use populist-style rhetoric to appeal to broad swaths of Americans, the term appears with a lower case “p.”
19. The literature on Populism is vast and sometimes contentious. Two of the most influential works are Lawrence Goodwyn’s revisionist classic, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Charles Postel’s more recent, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Scholars are also interested in the ways in which populist rhetoric and ideals have appealed to the right. See Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); and Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
20. Brooke L. Blower, “Nation of Outposts: Forts, Factories, Bases, and the Making of American Power,” Diplomatic History 41 (2017): 455.
21. One new book reminds readers of the connection between Populism and anti-imperialism. Nathan Jessen, Populism and Imperialism: Politics, Culture, and Foreign Policy in the American West, 1890–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017).
22. Michael Kazin, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
23. David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: New Press, 2007); Bradley W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2018).
24. The America First Committee is more frequently referred to as “isolationist” than anti-militarist. But, as Brooke L. Blower has shown, the term “isolationist” was in fact used as a term of disparagement by prewar interventionists and postwar military expansionists. For this reason, I do not use it in this book except in quotations, and, while Blower prefers the term “neutralists” in the interwar period, I refer to all those who sought to remain at peace throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Dakotas as Populist anti-militarists. “From Isolationism to Neutrality: A New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919–1941,” Diplomatic History 38 (2014): 345–76.
25. Quoted in David T. Nelson and Richard G. Cole, “Behind German Lines in 1915: The Letters Home of David T. Nelson,” Journal of Military History 65 (October 2001): 1058–59.
26. Quoted in Robert Griffith, “Old Progressives and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 66 (September 1979): 342.
27. Marilyn B. Young, “ ‘I Was Thinking, as I Often Do These Days, of War’: The United States in the Twenty-First Century,” Diplomatic History 36 (January 2012): 1. See also Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Michael S. Sherry, “War as a Way of Life,” Modern American History 1, no.1 (2018): 1–4. I agree with Sherry that at its most concrete, militarization is “ ‘the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organized itself for the production of violence’ ” and, further, that the impact of militarization on society extends to “the memories, models, and metaphors that [have] shaped broad areas of national life.” In the Shadow of War, xi; Sherry is quoting John R. Gillis (who is employing Michael Geyer’s definition), from Gillis, Militarization of the Western World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 1. Third, I agree that war, rather than an anomaly in American history, is “what the nation does.” “War as a Way of Life,” 3.
28. Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
29. By 2011 some historians thought the literature on American conservatism had begun to rely on overused tropes and chronologies. See Matthew D. Lassiter, “Political History Beyond the Red-Blue Divide,” Journal of American History 98 (December 2011): 760–64. Not surprisingly, the 2016 presidential election sharpened the field’s focus on whiteness and the rural experience, and brought important works of sociology, journalism, and memoir to the public. See Kathleen Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016); J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016); Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019); Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (New York: Scribners, 2019). Two excellent books that examine the impact of militarization and the experience of war on politics and culture are Heefner, The Missile Next Door; and Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
30. Since 2013 historians have reexamined the field of Midwestern history. Jon K. Lauck, The Lost Region: Toward a Revival of Midwestern History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013).
31. Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 98 (December 2011): 723–43. On the Sunbelt and the urban North, see among many others, Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Jason Sokol: There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights (New York: Knopf, 2006); Jason Sokol, All Eyes Are upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2007); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
32. Quoted in Bruce J. Schulman, ed., The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), xiv; see also Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington, 1969). Phillips included a short chapter on the “farm states” (42 pages of 557) in which he recognizes the importance of immigrant heritage, New Deal farm programs, and a history of anti-militarism to regional politics. But he seems unable to explain a small pocket of support for segregationist candidate George Wallace in southwestern South Dakota—counties that border large reservations (451).
33. Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
34. Burgess Everett, “North Dakota’s Last Democrat?,” Politico, June 22, 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/06/22/heidi-heitkamp-north-dakota-239805.
35. In How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Daniel Immerwahr argues that the American West was the site of empire building during the “Indian Wars”; I contend that the region was a continuous site of this “hidden” process throughout its history. As Brooke Blower has written, “the United States has always been a nation of outposts” but in the Cold War years, American exceptionalism required the nation and its citizens to deny this history, embrace the notion of the “accidental” empire, and imagine that occupation (either at home or abroad) served the purpose of keeping local people “safe.” Blower, “Nation of Outposts,” 445, 456–59.
36. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 7. Other works that focus on bases within the emerging “new military history” include Mark Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); David Kieran and Edwin A. Martini, eds., At War: The Military and American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018); David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Henry Holt, 2017); Blower, “Nation of Outposts,”455.
37. David Vine, “Where in the World Is the U.S. Military?,” Politico Magazine, July/August, 2015, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/us-military-bases-around-the-world-119321; Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire, 355–71.
38. In On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), Sealing Cheng reveals the complexity of Filipinas’ motivations for working at American air force bases in South Korea.
39. Vine, Base Nation, 183, 186. See also Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
40. Dennis Banks with Richard Erdoes, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 44. Native soldiers in Vietnam would at times struggle with the idea of attacking “people who looked too much like ourselves.” Valerie Barber, interview, Twin Cities PBS and Vision Maker Media, The People’s Protectors, produced by Leya Hale, 2018, https://www.visionmakermedia.org/films/peoples-protectors.
41. Vine, Base Nation, 329.
42. White men have also remarked on the “peer pressure to ‘try a prostitute’ ” that exists on bases as a semirequired form of male bonding. Ibid., 166, 182. The military actively contrasts local sex workers with the USO entertainers and others women usually recruited from the United States. Rather than to provide sex, these “girls” were meant to “keep up [soldiers’] morale.” Kara Dixon Vuic, The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 3.
43. Banks, Ojibwa Warrior, 44–45.
44. Ibid., 50–55. See also Dustin Wright, “From Tokyo to Wounded Knee: Two Afterlives of the Sunagawa Struggle,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture 10 (Winter 2017): 133–49.
45. Catherine A. Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
46. The Northern Plains were home to several forts, including Fort Buford and Fort Sully, which were maintained by the Army of the West during the late nineteenth century. Robert Utley, The Indian Frontier, 1860–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.)
47. Lutz, Homefront, 3; John Harrington, “America’s Largest Bases,” September 6, 2018, https://247wallst.com/special-report/2018/09/06/americas-largest-military-bases/8/. For a searchable map see https://militarybases.com/.
48. Vine, Base Nation, 14.
49. Lutz, Homefront, 58–59, 134–36. Some people both inside and outside the military joked that Fayetteville was a place to “get a dozen beers and a disease” (7).
50. While some African American leaders and historians have seen the military as a source of increased equality of opportunity, others have argued that the military has institutionalized or even amplified the racism present in society at large. Gerald F. Goodwin, “Black and White in Vietnam,” New York Times, July 18, 2017; Jeremy P. Maxwell, Brotherhood in Combat: How African Americans Found Equality in Korea and Vietnam (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018); Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 78, 257–58. More recently historians have identified the ways in which the military was tasked with enforcing structures of racism and inequality beginning in the colonial period, including “removal” of Native people from their lands. Maj. Gen. Grenville Dodge “urged the army to ‘follow the Indians day and night, attacking them at every opportunity until they are worked out, disbanded or forced to surrender,’ ” writes Manu Karuka. “Nakedly indiscriminate, constant violence would be the means for establishing U.S. sovereignty and stabilizing U.S. property claims.” Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 69. See also Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishing, 2018).
51. Racial tensions rose on many bases in the 1960s and 1970s. At the Minot AFB, a group of African American servicemen published three issues of a newsletter called My Knot. http://cdm15932.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll8/id/24694.
52. Belew, Bring the War Home.
53. Lutz, Homefront, 207, 240.
54. Centralized government support of private industry in wartime began during World War I and came to full expression in the 1940s and 1950s. James Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Even though these innovations in public and private cooperation made the production of incredible amounts of war material possible, business historian Mark Wilson suggests that a concerted effort to diminish the role of the public sphere in the 1950s and 1960s helped to lay the groundwork for the triumph of private enterprise as part of the ideology of new conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s. Destruction Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
55. Valerie Kuletz, quoted in Heefner, The Missile Next Door, 12.
56. Robin Riley, “Hidden Soldiers: Working for the ‘National Defense,’ ” in Höhn and Moon, Over There, 203–30.
57. Kristen Iverson, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (New York: Broadway Books, 2012), 189, 132, 148.
58. Brooks, How Everything Became War.
59. Lutz, Homefront, 3.
60. Heefner, The Missile Next Door, 7.
61. Kathleen Belew writes that war cannot be “neatly contained in the time and space legitimated by the state … [war] comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.” Belew, Bring the War Home, 16.
62. A growing number of veterans are speaking out against the war on terror and the empty patriotic gestures that have prolonged it. See Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Andrew J. Bacevich, “American Imperium: Untangling Truth and Fiction in an Age of Perpetual War,” Harpers, May 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/05/american-imperium/; Phil Klay, “Left Behind,” Atlantic, May 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/left-behind/556844/; Phil Klay, “The Warrior at the Mall,” New York Times, April 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/14/opinion/sunday/the-warrior-at-the-mall.html.
63. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/.
64. Mary Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6.
65. Jessica T. Mathews, “America’s Indefensible Defense Budget,” New York Review of Books, July 18, 2019, 1.
66. Heefner, The Missile Next Door, 152. Anti-military activist and rancher, Marvin Kammerer, understood, as did the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center, that “the best kept secret of the gutting of American agriculture is the degree to which military spending is responsible” (quoted from Heefner, The Missile Next Door, 154). Heefner also quoted journalist Ian Frazier’s calculation that “in each county that housed a Minuteman, a single silo cost five years’ worth of cattle, grain, and wheat” (155).
67. Quoted in Vine, Base Nation, 212.
68. In What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), Thomas Frank argues that cultural conservatism largely convinced rural voters to vote for New Right Republicans, even though many of their fiscal policies could hurt them financially. He does not consider the impact of the presence of several military facilities and Minuteman missiles. In this book I do not assume that something is “the matter” with rural people, however much I disagree with their views on many issues today.
69. Robert F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the University of Kansas,” March 18, 1968, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18–1968.aspx.
70. Steven Lee, “Pistol-Packing Grand Forks Mayor Says He Refuses to Be a Victim,” Grand Forks Herald, December 19, 2012, https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/government-and-politics/2185561-pistol-packing-grand-forks-mayor-says-he-refuses-be-victim.
71. Lassiter, “Political History Beyond the Red-Blue Divide,” 764.
72. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Three Evils of Society,” August 31, 1967, https://www.scribd.com/doc/134362247/Martin-Luther-King-Jr-The-Three-Evils-of-Society-1967. King argues that racism, militarism, and capitalism as mutually interdependent and destructive forces.
73. Kazin, War Against War.
74. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/.
75. Lutz, Homefront, 253.
Chapter 1
1. Hamlin Garland, Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 374. “Under the Lion’s Paw” is part of Garland’s first publication, Main-Travelled Roads, originally published in 1891. See also Robert F. Gish, “Hamlin Garland’s Dakota: History and Story,” South Dakota History (1979): 193–209.
2. Hamlin Garland, “Under the Lion’s Paw,” in Main Travelled Roads, with introductions by William Dean Howells and Joseph B. McCullough (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 139, 141.
3. Ibid., 144.
4. Garland first advocated for the single tax movement. See Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Holt, 2017), 164–67. For a more complete discussion of Garland’s radical politics in the 1880s and 1890s, see Donald Pizer, ed., The Radical Hamlin Garland: Writings from the 1890s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), introduction; Jonathan Berliner, “The Landscapes of Hamlin Garland and the American Populists,” American Literary Realism 47 (2015): 219–34.
5. Garland, “Under the Lion’s Paw,” 135, 136, 141.
6. Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955).
7. Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
8. William Pratt, “Farmers, Communists, and the FBI in the Upper Midwest,” Agricultural History 63 (Summer 1989): 61–80; Lowell K. Dyson, Red Harvest: Communism and American Farmers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.)
9. There is now a rich literature on racial formation in the US between 1870 and 1930. For immigrant groups from Europe, learning the “cultural logic” of racism was essential to defining themselves as “white.” See Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge Classics, 2008); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2007); Ian Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006). On the common logic of the plains, see Karen V. Hansen, Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 15.
10. Garland, “Under the Lion’s Paw,” 138.
11. Mel Piehl, “Perspectives on Religion in Twentieth-Century American History,” in Bruce J. Schulman, ed., Making the American Century: Essays on the Political Culture of Twentieth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 141–54. Mel Piehl reminds us not to equate the fundamentalist views of Populists like William Jennings Bryan with the “new evangelism” of the 1970s and 1980s. See also Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Anchor Books, 2006). For the denominational representation and importance of religiosity in the Midwest, see Phillip Barlow and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Midwest: America’s Common Denominator? (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2004). On the experiences of non-Christians see Rachel Calof, Rachel Calof’s Story: A Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Samuel G. Freedman, “North Dakota Mosque a Symbol of Muslims’ Deep Ties in America,” New York Times, May 28, 2016, A13; Eric Steven Zimmer, Art Mamorstein, and Matthew Remmich, “Fewer Rabbis Than U.S. Senators: Jewish Political Activism in South Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Paula M. Nelson, eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 3 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018), 112–39.
12. Sara Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 14–20, 86–89.
13. Elliot West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2003): 6–26. The unstated tenets of settler colonialism were understood by new immigrants, the vast majority of whom were white; adopting them was part of their assimilation process, even if it did not always protect them from interethnic discrimination and xenophobia. Hansen, Encounter on the Great Plains, 15–16. Sara Egge, quoting Andrew Cayton, puts it bluntly: “Most Midwesterners believed passionately that the United States ‘was by rights a white nation, a Protestant nation, a nation in which true Americans were native-born men with Anglo-Saxon ancestors.’ ” Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest,8.
14. Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). White contends that “Americans had long regarded Indians as a collection of deficiencies. Their religions were deficient, their economies were deficient, their cultures were deficient, and their families were deficient. American efforts to ‘civilize’ Indians focused on … making them Protestant, organizing them into patrilineal families, and giving them homes” (151). Native scholar Nick Estes has written that “elimination”—through segregation or incarceration—is the “unfinished business of settler colonialism.” Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019), 185.
15. Jason Pierce, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2016), 14.
16. At the turn of the century, nearly half of the population of North Dakota had been born outside the US; more than a quarter of the population of South Dakota had. See Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966); William C. Sherman and Playford V. Thorson, eds., Plains Folk: North Dakota’s Ethnic History (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 1988); Herbert T. Hoover, A New South Dakota History (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 2005).
17. David Laskin, The Children’s Blizzard (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
18. Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (New York: Penguin, 2019).
19. R. Alton Lee, Principle over Party: The Farmers’ Alliance and Populism in South Dakota, 1880–1900 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2011), 71.
20. Ibid., 187.
21. Robinson, History of North Dakota, 226.
22. Jon K. Lauck, Prairie Republic: The Political Culture of Dakota Territory, 1879–1889 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 107.
23. David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 153. Danbom comments, “For farmers, the stick had two short ends” (ibid).
24. Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
25. Norman K. Risjord, Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 180.
26. Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 230–32 and passim.
27. Quoted in Kazin, A Godly Hero, 61.
28. Howard R. Lamar, “Perspectives on Statehood: South Dakota’s First Quarter Century, 1889–1914,” South Dakota History 19 (Spring 1989): 13–14.
29. Lee, Principle over Party, 36–41. See also Brad Tennant, “People’s Democracy: The Origins of the Initiated Measure in South Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 2 (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society, 2014), 8–29.
30. Lee, Principle over Party , 169–72.
31. Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
32. Gilbert Courtland Fite, Peter Norbeck: Prairie Statesman (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2005), xi.
33. Herbert T. Hoover and Steven C. Emery, “South Dakota Governance Since 1945,” in Richard Lowitt, ed., Politics in the Postwar American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 222.
34. Fite, Peter Norbeck: Prairie Statesman, 27, 57. A million dollars in 1920 would be worth over fifteen million in 2019.
35. Michael J. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 108–10. According to Lansing, Norbeck said the leaders of the NPL “ ‘live and grow on trouble’ ” (110).
36. Jeffrey Ostler, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Radical Agrarianism in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 128–29.
37. Lee, Principle over Party, 22–23.
38. Paula M. Nelson, “Home and Family First: Women and Political Culture,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays in South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 1 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2011), 137–38; Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest; Lori Ann Lahlum, “Women, Work, and Community in Rural Norwegian America, 1840–1920,” in Betty A. Berglund and Lori Ann Lahlum, Norwegian American Women: Migrations, Communities, and Identities (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011), 79–118.
39. William C. Pratt, “Another South Dakota; or, The Road Not Taken,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 1:113.
40. US House of Representatives: History, Art and Archives, “Gladys Pyle,” http://history.house.gov/People/Detail?id=20002.
41. Quoted in Risjord, Dakota, 191, 193.
42. By the 1970s Romness would be well inside the Grand Forks Air Base’s “missile field.”
43. Document Four, “Minutes from the Romness Farmers Alliance (1892)” http://ndstu dies.gov/gr8/content/unit-iii-waves-development-1861–1920/lesson-4-alliances-and-conflicts/topic-5-bosses-and-reformers/section-3-farmers%E2%80%99-alliance.
44. Curt Eriksmoen, “Populist Fought for Initiative, Referendum,” Bismarck Tribune, December 25, 2011, http://bismarcktribune.com/news/columnists/curt-eriksmoen/populist-fought-for-initiative-referendum/article_52b08f14–2da8–11e1-a39b-001871e3ce6c.html.
45. Charles N. Glaab, “John Burke and the Progressive Revolt,” in Thomas Howard, ed., The North Dakota Political Tradition (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981), 40–65.
46. Quoted in Risjord, Dakota, 195.
47. Robert Vogel, Unequal Contest: Bill Langer and His Political Enemies (Mandan, ND: Crain Grosinger, 2004), 10–11; Glenn Smith, “Bill Langer and the Art of Personal Politics,” in Howard, The North Dakota Political Tradition, 123–50.
48. Quoted in Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, 172–73. See also Kim E. Nielsen, “ ‘We All Leaguers by Our House’: Women, Suffrage, and Red-Baiting in the National Nonpartisan League,” Journal of Women’s History 6 (Spring 1994): 31–50.
49. Frazier knew almost nothing about protocol, so he hired Tony Thompson, an African American who had worked as a driver in the previous administration, as a personal messenger. His daughter, Era Bell Thompson, published American Daughter: The Life of a Negro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).
50. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, xi–xii.
51. Ann Marie Low, Dust Bowl Diary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 33.
52. Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasely, eds., One-Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 82.
53. Quoted in Theodore Salutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West: 1900–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), 443. See also John E. Miller, “Restrained, Respectable Radicals: The South Dakota Farm Holiday,” Agricultural History 59 (July 1985): 429–47.
54. Pratt, “Another South Dakota,” 116–19.
55. Quoted in Charles Conrad and Joyce Conrad, Fifty Years: North Dakota Farmers Union (n.p, 1976), 38.
56. As much as white farmers have long claimed to hate farm programs, they have also been privileged by them. The Roosevelt administration could not pass New Deal legislation without the votes of white southern Democrats; as a result many of the programs, including the AAA, included mechanisms whereby blacks were excluded from receiving benefits. Nathan A. Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki, “The Butz Stops Here: Why the Food Movement Needs to Rethink Agricultural History,” Journal of Food Law and Policy 13 (2017): 19–20. Ira Katznelson calls this the “southern cage.” Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 14–16, 133–226.
57. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
58. US Senate, Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, Agricultural Emergency Act to Increase Farm Purchasing Power, 73rd Congress, 1st Sess., 1932, Hearings of H.R. 3835, 109–12.
59. Ibid. See also US Senate, Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, To Abolish the Federal Farm Board and Secure for the Farmer the Cost of Production, 72nd Congress, 1st Sess., 1932, Hearings of S. 3133.
60. Quoted in Elizabeth Evenson Williams, Emil Loriks: Builder of a New Economic Order (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 1987), 157.
61. Catherine McNicol Stock, Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 145–47.
62. Ibid., 146. David Danbom explores the ways local boards on the Northern Plains could also deny certain people benefits. See David B. Danbom, “National Ideas and Local Power in Fargo, North Dakota, During the Great Depression,” in Schulman, Making the American Century, 37–50.
63. David B. Danbom, “A Part of the Nation and Apart from the Nation: North Dakota Politics Since 1945,” in Lowitt, Politics in the Postwar American West, 174–84.
64. Kristin L. Hoganson, “Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the US Midwest, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 98 (January 2012): 1025–51.
65. Robert E. Wright, Little Business on the Prairie: Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Challenge in South Dakota (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 2015).
66. https://www.cargill.com/about/cargill-timeline.
67. Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 40.
68. Quoted in Sioux Falls Argus Leader, April 13, 1925, 2.
69. Kimberly Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2010).
70. Robinson, History of North Dakota, 223.
71. Ibid.
72. Quoted in ibid., 224.
73. Ibid., 340–41.
74. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, 136.
75. Vogel, Unequal Contest.
76. United States Senate, “William Langer Expulsion Case,” https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/expulsion_cases/123WilliamLanger_expulsion.htm.
77. Stock, Main Street in Crisis, 125–26.
78. R. Alton Lee, A New Deal for South Dakota: Drought, Depression, and Relief, 1920–1941 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2016), 34.
79. Lois Phillips Hudson, Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984), 8.
80. This was not an entirely specious concern. See Thomas Biolsi, “New Deal Visions v. Local Culture: The Agony of the South Dakota State Planning Board, 1934–1939,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition 2:4.
81. Quoted in ibid., 88.
82. Quoted in ibid., 91–92.
83. John E. Miller, “McCarthyism Before McCarthy: The 1938 Election in South Dakota,” Heritage of the Great Plains 15 (1982): 1–21.
84. Quoted in ibid., 11. See also Scott N. Heidepriem, A Fair Chance for a Free People: Biography of Karl E. Mundt, United States Senator (Madison, SD: Leader, 1988).
85. George McGovern, interview by Jon K. Lauck and John E. Miller, November 25, 2003, Mitchell, South Dakota, 16. By permission of interviewers.
86. South Dakota banned the showing of the Pare Lorentz classic documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). On the controversy over the film, see John E. Miller, “Two Visions of the Great Plains: The Plow That Broke the Plains and South Dakotans’ Reactions to It,” Upper Midwest History 2 (1982): 1–12.
87. Hansen, Encounter on the Great Plains, 15–16.
88. No history of agrarian radicalism that praises its democratic ideals or otherwise distinguishes it from the conservatism of its day is complete if it does not also fully reckon with its distinctly undemocratic ideals and practices. Most recent historians acknowledge this contradiction, albeit rather weakly. Charles Postel, for example, writes that “populism’s relationship to democracy [was] complex” particularly in an era when race relations “turned especially menacing.” The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18. Michael Kazin explains that the Populists “shared the era’s core belief in white supremacy.” Populist Persuasion, 42. None explores the possibility that the desire to protect not just class status but race privilege may have lain at the core of agrarian radicalism.
89. Pierce, Making the White Man’s West.
90. Ibid., ix.
91. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010), 325–26.
92. In the1950s historians like Richard Hofstadter decried the antisemitism within Populist politics, even arguing that William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech employed the crucifixion metaphor as a rhetorical vehicle for coded antisemitism. Since the 1970s revisionist historians who see Populism as radically democratic rather than protofascist have argued that antisemitic language was limited to a few Populist leaders, largely from its “shadow movements,” and thus was not a defining component of the party’s original political worldview. Jeff Ostler is closer to the truth when he argues that “some Populists could have been susceptible to the anti-Semitism that pervaded American culture and how they might have given the theory of an English conspiracy an anti-Semitic turn.” Ostler, “The Rhetoric of Conspiracy and the Formation of Kansas Populism,” Agricultural History 69, no. 1 (1995): 26. See also Charles Postel, “Populism and Race: Separate and Unequal,” https://digital.lib.niu.edu/illinois/gildedage/populism.
93. Quoted in David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 178.
94. Quoted in ibid., 181.
95. Zimmer, Mamorstein, and Remmich, “Fewer Rabbis Than U.S. Senators.”
96. Leonard Dinnerstein, “Jews and the New Deal,” American Jewish History 72 (1983): 461.
97. President Starcher kept handwritten notes on Camelback Inn stationary. They are included among his papers in the Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection #238, Elwyn Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, North Dakota. On undergraduate activism, author conversation and email exchange with Sara Garland, October 4, 2017.
98. Jon K. Lauck, “ ‘You Can’t Mix Wheat and Potatoes in the Same Bin’: Anti-Catholicism in Early Dakota,” South Dakota History 38 (Spring 2008): 1–46.
99. Kazin, Populist Persuasion, 39–40.
100. Painter, History of White People, 317–23.
101. James Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Norton, 2017). Nell Irvin Painter says the motto for some klans was “Katholics, Kikes, and Koloreds.” Painter, History of White People, 324.
102. William Harwood, “The Ku Klux Klan in Grand Forks, North Dakota,” South Dakota History 1 (Fall 1971): 301–35. F. Hadley Ambrose was also known to be a prominent member of the IVA and tremendously opposed to the NPL. Michael Lansing, email to author, June 1, 2019.
103. Lauck, “ ‘You Can’t Mix Wheat and Potatoes in the Same Bin,’ ” 42. See also Charles Ranbow, “The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: A Concentration on the Black Hills,” South Dakota History 4 (Winter 1973): 74.
104. Lauck, “ ‘You Can’t Mix Wheat and Potatoes in the Same Bin.’ ”
105. George McGovern, interview by Jon K. Lauck and John E. Miller, 3–4. See also Tom Lawrence, “JFK at 100,” May 22, 2017, https://www.aberdeennews.com/news/opinion/lawrence-john-f-kennedy-at/articleb1e32dcc-891e-5117–89df-50efde4849a8.html.
106. Sherman and Thorson, Plains Folk, 190–92, 234–35.
107. Kenneth Smith, “Presbyterianism, Progressivism, and Cultural Influence: William M. Blackburn, Coe I. Crawford, and the Making of Civic Dakota,” in Lauck, Miller, and Nelson, The Plains Political Tradition 3:104.
108. Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 38–41. On the “timid” campaigns in North Dakota and the “daily, dirty politics of a prohibition state largely controlled by railroads and milling interests,” see Barbara Handy-Marchello, “Quiet Voices in the Prairie Wind: The Politics of Woman Suffrage in North Dakota, 1868–1920,” in Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly P. Rozum, eds., Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2019), 71.
109. http://files.usgwarchives.net/sd/women/suffrage.txt.
110. Paula M. Nelson, “Defending Separate Spheres: Anti-Suffrage Women in South Dakota Suffrage Campaigns,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 128–68.
111. Sara Egge, “Leadership, Immigrants, and the Fight for Woman Suffrage on the Northern Great Plains” (paper presented at the Organization of American Historians, Annual Meeting, Providence, RI, April 2, 2015). See also Egge, “Ethnicity and Woman Suffrage on the South Dakota Plains,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 218–39.
112. Egge, “Leadership, Immigrants, and the Fight for Woman Suffrage,” 1.
113. Ibid., 4.
114. Nelson, “Defending Separate Spheres.”
115. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). I adhere to Nell Irvin Painter’s contention that “race is an idea, not a fact, and its questions demand answers from the conceptual rather than the factual realm.” History of White People, ix–x.
116. Quoted in Kate Brown, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place,” American Historical Review 106 (February 2001): 31.
117. Quoted in Biolosi, “New Deal Visions,” 93.
118. Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).
119. Louis S. Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
120. Jerome A. Greene, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019); Estes, Our History Is the Future.
121. Historian Eric Zimmer, a volunteer with the Rapid City Native Lands project, has been retracing the history of segregation in Rapid City. Chynna Lockett, “Presentation Links Rapid City Housing to Segregation,” South Dakota Public Radio, http://listen.sdpb.org/post/presentation-links-rapid-city-housing-segregation.
122. Nathan Sanderson, “The Roots of West River Republicanism,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 2:67–68. The Garrison Dam project of the postwar period would force many Natives off their lands again. See Estes, Our History Is the Future, 133–68.
123. Chuck Lewis, “Frontier Fears: The Clash of Dakotas and Whites in the Newspapers of Mankato, Minnesota, 1863–1865,” Minnesota’s Heritage 5 (January 2012): 36–37.
124. White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 605. See also Ben Johnson, “Red Populism? T. A. Bland, Agrarian Radicalism, and the Debate over the Dawes Act,” in Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 15–37.
125. For a fascinating discussion of the “failed moment” when woman suffrage activists might have collaborated with those who supported the vote for Native men, see Molly P. Rozum, “Citizenship, Civilization, and Property: The 1890 South Dakota Vote on Woman Suffrage and Indian Suffrage,” in Lahlum and Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box, 240–61.
126. Greene, American Carnage, 373–80.
127. Charles Barber, “Reason on the Rez in the Age of Joe McCarthy: Senate Judiciary Chair William Langer’s (R-ND) Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency, Ft. Yates, New Town, Rolla and Bismarck, ND, October 11–14, 1954,” (paper presented at the Northern Great Plains History Conference, Mankato, MN, September 21, 2018).
128. West, “Reconstructing Race,” http://www.studythepast.com/his378/reconstructingrace_elliottwest.pdf, 7.
129. Richard R. Chenoweth, “Francis Case: A Political Biography,” South Dakota Historical Collections 39 (1978): 323.
130. Quoted in Michael Patrick Hearn, “Little Myths on the Prairie,” in Nancy Tystad Koupal, ed., Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2017), 132.
131. Ibid.
132. Stock, Main Street in Crisis, 199–200; Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Memory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 20–21, 112–14.
133. http://www.netstate.com/states/mottoes/sd_motto.htm.
1. Quoted in Michael Kazin, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914–1918 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 266. See also Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
2. On Alvin York’s actual experience in combat, beyond what is represented in the film Sergeant York (Hawke, 1941), see https://kentuckypress.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/the-controversy-of-sergeant-york-uncovering-the-wwi-iconic-heros-battleground/.
3. I use the terms Populist anti-militarist, anti-militarist, and, when needed for clarity, anti-interventionist rather than the more familiar term isolationist when writing about the movement against intervention in Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s. As Brooke Blower explains, “isolationist” was used by prowar forces before, during, and after World War II as a bludgeon and a rallying cry. See Brooke L. Blower, “From Isolationism to Neutrality: A New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919–1941,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (2014): 345–76. The term Populist anti-militarist also clarifies that the views of those “isolationists” from the upper Midwest were distinct because they were based in the radical agrarian views on the economy and centralized power first articulated nationwide by the Populist Party. This is largely the same view advanced by Wayne S. Cole in his work Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962).
4. Jack Warner supported FDR in 1932, later refusing a diplomatic position and telling Roosevelt he could do more for American foreign relations by making films. Harry was even closer to the president. Warner Brothers produced more prowar films, and produced them sooner, than any other studio. See Nancy Snow, “Confessions of a Hollywood Propagandist: Harry Warner, FDR, and Celluloid Persuasion,” https://learcenter.org/pdf/WWSnow.pdf.
5. On how the film navigated the “narrow ridge between capitalizing on Appalachian local color and exploiting it,” see Richard Gray and Owen Robinson, A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (New York: Wiley, 2007), 37.
6. Ibid. See also Adrianna Abreu, “Art vs. Propaganda: How to Prepare the Public for an Indeterminate Course of Action,” http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/reel_new/films/list/0_43_9.
7. Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over World War II, 1939–1941 (New York: Random House, 2014), 369.
8. When Nye learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, “Just what the British had planned for us…. We have been maneuvered into this by the President.” Quoted in David W. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land: Fighting Communism on the Northern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 10.
9. Quoted in Abreu, “Art vs. Propaganda.” See also Olson, Those Angry Days, 360.
10. Quoted in Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 40.
11. Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213.
12. Kazin, War Against War, 207. Hutterites wore traditional clothing, grew long beards, owned land communally, and spoke mostly German, making them particular targets of the Wilson administration’s vicious “loyalty” campaign.
13. Ibid., 207. See also Duane C. S. Stoltzfus, “Standing in Chains at Alcatraz: When Hutterites Were Called to War,” https://themennonite.org/feature/standing-chains-alcatraz/.
14. Just before the Hofers were drafted, their Rockland colony had refused to buy war bonds. Local people stole their cattle, sold it, and purchased the bonds “for them.” Stoltzfus, “Standing in Chains at Alcatraz.”
15. Quoted in Kazin, War Against War, 279.
16. Historians of Populism from Hicks and Hofstadter to Goodwyn, Sanders, and Ostler have evinced little curiosity about anything beyond the People’s Party’s important proposals to reform the American economy and political process. Even Charles Postel, whose innovative work takes on Populist religious and intellectual life, seems to care little about Populist views of America’s role in the world, saying that “most Populists paid little heed to foreign affairs.” Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 240. A recent exception is Nathan Jessen’s Populism and Imperialism: Politics, Culture, and Foreign Policy in the American West, 1890–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018). Jessen also disputes previous claims that Populists acted as collaborators in the imperialist project overseas, however much they benefited from settler colonialism and dispossession at home.
17. Postel, Populist Vision, 99–100, 122–23, 239–41. On the global and outward-looking nature of the Midwestern experience, see Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (New York: Penguin, 2019).
18. Postel, Populist Vision, 240.
19. David Lee Amstutz, “A Populist Approach to Foreign Policy: Governor William A. Poynter, the South African War, and the Indian Famine, 1899–1901,” Great Plains Quarterly 34 (Winter 2014): 12.
20. For the full platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League, see https://source books.fordham.edu/mod/1899antiimp.asp.
21. Kazin, Godly Hero, 85, 240–41. See also Merle Curti, Bryan and World Peace (Northampton, MA: Department of History at Smith College, 1931).
22. Kazin, Godly Hero, 87–90.
23. Quoted in Kazin, Godly Hero, 89.
24. William Jennings Bryan, “The Paralyzing Influence of Imperialism,” from the Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held in Kansas City, Mo., July 4, 5, and 6, 1900, Chicago, 1900, 205–27, accessed March 30, 2012, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bryan.htm.
25. Ibid.
26. Kenneth Elton Hendrickson Jr., “The Public Career of William F. Pettigrew of South Dakota, 1848–1926,” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1962), 231.
27. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
28. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 22–23.
29. Quoted in Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 45.
30. Hendrickson, “Public Career,” 214.
31. Pettigrew to William Augustus Croffut, October 28, 1899, quoted in Hendrickson, “Public Career,” 245.
32. Quoted in Hendrickson, “Public Career,” 218.
33. Ibid., 223.
34. Quoted in ibid., 226.
35. Terrence J. Lindell, “Populists in Power: The Problems of the Andrew E. Lee Administration in South Dakota,” South Dakota History 22 (Winter 1992): 343–65.
36. R. Alton Lee, Principle over Party: The Farmers’ Alliance and Populism in South Dakota, 1880–1900 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2011), 163–64.
37. Ibid., 164.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 164–65.
40. Quoted in Lindell, “Populists in Power,” 361.
41. Robert Lee Mattson, “Politics Is Up! Grigsby’s Cowboys and Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, 1898,” South Dakota History 9 (Fall 1979): 303–15.
42. Lee, Principle over Party, 222n37.
43. Rapid City Journal, April 8, 1898, quoted in Daniel Simundon, “The Yellow Press on the Prairie: South Dakota Daily Newspaper Editorials Prior to the Spanish American War,” South Dakota History 2 (1972): 226.
44. Herman F. Krueger, “A South Dakotan’s Experience in the Spanish American War,” South Dakota Historical Collections 39 (1978): 229.
45. Ibid.
46. Steven J. Bucklin, ed., “ ‘We Were All Mustered in Uncle Sam’s Army’: The Journal of Thomas H. Briggs in the Philippines, 1898–1899,” South Dakota History 34 (Fall 2004): 256, 257, 274.
47. Krueger, “A South Dakotan’s Experience in the Spanish American War,” 269. It would be reasonable to wonder if some South Dakotans actually had learned such brutality back in “Indian Country.” Katharine Bjork argues that their officers, including General John Pershing, carried the “lessons” of waging war against Natives in the American West with them to the Philippines and later to Mexico. Katharine Bjork, Prairie Imperialism: The Indian Origins of American Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
48. Krueger, “A South Dakotan’s Experience in the Spanish American War,” 275.
49. Michael Kazin, “If the U.S. Had Not Entered World War I, Would There Have Been a World War II?,” https://newrepublic.com/article/118435/world-war-i-debate-should-US-have-entered.
50. Kazin, War Against War, xii.
51. Quoted in Kazin, Godly Hero, 240.
52. Blower, “From Isolationism to Neutrality.”
53. Joel Andrew Watne, “Public Opinion Toward Non-Conformists and Aliens During 1917, as Shown by the Fargo Forum,” North Dakota History 34 (1967): 5–29, http://history.nd.gov/publications/public-opinion.pdf.
54. “Time for Good Sense and Moderation,” Fargo Forum, February 28, 1917, 4, quoted in Watne, “Public Opinion,” 10.
55. Quoted in Watne, “Public Opinion,” 19.
56. Ibid., 21.
57. Michael J. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 101.
58. Quoted in ibid., 100.
59. Quoted in ibid., 99–100.
60. Quoted in H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), 155.
61. Quoted in Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, 100.
62. Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight. Keith argues that as many as half a million rural men in the South may have avoided or refused conscription.
63. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, 130. See also 121–24.
64. Quoted in Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 154. Pettigrew was in ill health and in 1919 the case was dropped. While he was under indictment, a mob painted his house yellow.
65. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, 121.
66. Rex C. Myers, “An Immigrant Heritage: South Dakota’s Foreign-Born in the Era of Assimilation,” South Dakota History 19 (Summer 1989): 147. See also Frederick Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War One (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
67. Quoted in Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, 125.
68. Peterson and Fite, Opponents of War, 195.
69. Quoted in Charles M. Barber, “The Impact of World War One on German-Americans in North Dakota and the Midwest” (paper presented at the Heritage Center, Bismarck, ND, April 9, 2017).
70. Quoted in Barber, “Impact of World War One,” 11.
71. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy, 95; Barber, “Impact of World War One,” 8.
72. David T. Nelson and Richard G. Cole, “Behind German Lines in 1915: The Letters Home of David T. Nelson,” Journal of Military History 65 (October 2001): 1058, 1059.
73. Steven Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 167.
74. David M. Lubin, Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 173.
75. Ibid. For more examples of Dunn’s combat art see https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2015/02/02/wwi-combat-artists-harvey-dunn/.
76. Lubin, Grand Illusions, 252–53. See also John Steuart Curry’s Return of Private Davis from the Argonne (1940), https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/111400?returnUrl=%2Fart%2Fsearch%3Fdepartment%3DAmerican%2520Painting%2520%2526%2520Sculpture.
77. http://history.nd.gov/hp/WWImemorials.html.
78. Ibid.
79. “International Peace Garden: Preface and History,” April 14, 1932, unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Lorna B. Meidinger, State Historical Society of North Dakota.
80. “Statement of Significance: CCC Lodge, International Peace Garden, Rolette County, ND,” US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet, Section 8, 2. Courtesy of Lorna B. Meidinger, State Historical Society of North Dakota.
81. Bradley W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018); Blower, “Isolationism to Neutrality,” 345.
82. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations; Wayne S. Cole, America First: The Battle Against Interventionism, 1940–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953). While treading far too lightly, Cole does not dispute the antisemitism of some anti-militarists, even arguing that antisemitism “was in tune with” rural culture (Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations, 192).
83. David Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 180; Sylvie Murray and Robert D. Johnston, Writing World War II: A Student’s Guide (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), part 1.
84. Kazin, War Against War, 281.
85. Quoted in Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 26.
86. Quoted in Larry Woiwode, The Aristocrat of the West: The Story of Harold Schafer (Fargo, ND: Institute for Regional Studies, 2001), 67.
87. Resolution of the South Dakota American Legion, April 16, 1939, http://plains humanities.unl.edu/homefront/homefront.rec.0011; Extension of Remarks of Hon. Chan Gurney, Friday, January 10, 1941, http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/homefront/homefront.rec.0005.
88. http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/homefront/homefront.rec.0014.
89. Extension of Remarks of Hon. Chan Gurney.
90. On August 1, 1940, Nye and Senator Bennett Clark (D-MO) advanced Senate Resolution 152 which set up a congressional committee to investigate “war propaganda” coming out of Hollywood. Olson, Those Angry Days, 359–74.
91. Lindbergh’s father, a Minnesota politician, opposed entry into World War I. Charles Lindbergh likewise was committed to maintaining American neutrality, even after the invasion of Poland and the bombing of Britain. Having left the US after his son’s kidnapping in 1935, Lindbergh put his commitment to neutrality into action by advising Hitler’s Luftwaffe and gladly accepting a medal from Hermann Göring just weeks before Kristallnacht. His refusal to return the medal began a series of accusations of disloyalty that ended with him giving up his position in the US Air Force. After the war, he returned to the military and flew bombers in the Pacific theater. See Susan Dunn, “The Debate Behind U.S. Intervention in World War II,” Atlantic, July 8, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/the-debate-behind-US-intervention-in-world-war-ii/277572/. On Lindbergh’s racism and interest in eugenics, see Olson, Those Angry Days, 72–75, 459–60.
92. Quoted in Hart, Hitler’s American Friends, 181.
93. Ibid., 180.
94. Ibid.,182. See also Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations, 188–90.
95. Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 29.
96. Ibid., 21.
97. Schaffer, America in the Great War, 214–16; Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 21–29; James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19–47.
98. Alden Whitman, “Burton K. Wheeler, Isolationist Senator, Dead at 92,” New York Times, January 8, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/08/archives/burton-k-wheeler-isolationist-senator-dead-at-92.html.
99. Ronald Rodosh, “Lindy the Peacenik,” http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/lindbergh-battle.html.
100. Quoted in Elwyn P. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 423–24.
101. Robert P. Wilkins, “The Non-Ethnic Roots of North Dakota Isolationism,” Nebraska History 44 (September 1963): 221.
102. Kazin, War Against War, 287.
103. Blower, “From Isolationism to Neutrality,” 352.
Chapter 3
1. David S. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land: Fighting Communism on the Northern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 93, 97. See also David S. Mills, “Politics, Piety, and Patriotism: Early Cold War Politics in South Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 2 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 126–50.
2. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 100.
3. Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 35.
4. Senator Francis Case, for example, worried that a bill promoting universal military training would “commit the country to a permanent form of military direction—if not domination.” Quoted in Richard R. Chenoweth, “Francis Case: A Political Biography,” South Dakota Historical Collections 39 (1978): 362.
5. As a single example of this ongoing revisionism, in 2011 the Bismarck Tribune described the Farmers Alliance as a group that “sought to unite farmers in an effort to establish a free market.” Curt Eriksmoen, “Populist Fought for Initiative, Referendum,” Bismarck Tribune, December 25, 2011, http://bismarcktribune.com/news/columnists/curt-eriksmoen/populist-fought-for-initiative-referendum/article_52b08f14–2da8–11e1-a39b-001871e3ce6c.html.
6. Mary Dudziak, Wartime: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6.
7. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 10.
8. Ibid. See also Richard R. Chenoweth, “Francis Case: A Political Biography” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1977), 73–89.
9. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 12.
10. Walter Lippmann, “America’s Greatest Mistake,” Life, July 21, 1941, 74.
11. Fargo Forum, May 14, 1950.
12. Brooke L. Blower, “From Isolationism to Neutrality: A New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919–1941,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 2 (2014): 347. Blower also suggests that Cold Warriors could use the isolationist movement to explain that the US was but a “reluctant” empire, thus in a sense having it both ways (347).
13. Another complicating factor was that a staunchly anti-Nye candidate, Lynn Stambaugh, national president of the American Legion, ran as an independent. Curt Eriksmoen, “North Dakotan Was on Hitler’s Enemies List,” Bismarck Tribune, May 16, 2010.
14. Elwyn B. Robinson, The History of North Dakota (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 437–39. See also Dan Rylance, “Fred G. Aandahl and the ROC Movement,” in Thomas W. Howard, ed., The North Dakota Political Tradition (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1981), 151–82.
15. David Danbom, “A Part of the Nation and Apart from the Nation: North Dakota Politics Since 1945,” in Richard Lowitt, ed., Politics in the Postwar American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 178.
16. Quoted in Richard R. Chenoweth, “Francis Case: A Political Biography” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1977), 61. See also Richard R. Chenoweth, “The Black Hills—United Nations Capital,” South Dakota History 5, no. 2 (1975): 150–64. Charlene Mires, Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 9–12.
17. Quoted in “In the US Tradition,” Time Magazine, December 10, 1945, 30.
18. Ibid.
19. Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 3.
20. Robert P. Wilkins, “The Nonpartisan League and Upper Midwest Isolationism,” Agricultural History 39 (April 1965): 106. Many fewer South Dakotans supported the plan, reflecting perhaps the large numbers of Germans and German Russians in North Dakota. Sioux Falls Argus Leader, January 10, 1951.
21. Bismarck Tribune, January 15, 1951, 4.
22. Bismarck Tribune, February 1, 1951, 4. See also Fargo Forum, August 30, 1950.
23. Grand Forks Herald, March 9, 1951, 9.
24. Dakota Farmer, July 16, 1938, 293.
25. Ibid., May 7, 1938, 205.
26. Ibid.
27. Bismarck Tribune, February 21, 1951, 4.
28. Charles Barber, “Against the Grain: William Langer, the NPL, and the Left Wing Anti-Communist Tradition in North Dakota, 1918–1959” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Northern Great Plains History Association, Grand Forks, ND, October 4–7, 2017).
29. Ibid., 2. Langer had broken with the NPL in 1919 over A. C. Townley’s socialism.
30. Fargo Forum, May 21, 1950, 4.
31. Bismarck Tribune, March 29, 1951, 4.
32. Fargo Forum, August 20, 1950, 9; Bismarck Tribune, March 13, 1951, 4.
33. Bismarck Tribune, January 30, 1951, 1.
34. John E. Miller, “McCarthyism Before McCarthy: The Election of 1938 in South Dakota,” Heritage of the Great Plains 15 (Summer 1982): 1–21.
35. Communist organizations were concentrated in subregions of the plains, including Brown and Roberts Counties in South Dakota and the southwestern sections of North Dakota, with activity peaking in the 1930s and early 1940s. William C. Pratt, “Farmers, Communists, and the FBI in the Upper Midwest,” Agricultural History 63 (Summer 1989): 61–80.
36. William C. Pratt, “Rural Radicalism on the Northern Plains, 1912–1950,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 42 (Winter 1992): 51.
37. Quoted in Miller, “McCarthyism Before McCarthy,” 7.
38. Quoted in ibid., 9. See also, “The Farmer Is the Man,” in Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Avon Books, 1971), 261–66.
39. John E. Miller, “Historical Musings: Defining Moments in Twentieth-Century South Dakota Political History,” South Dakota History 42, no. 2 (2012): 183.
40. Matthew Pehl, “The Frustrations of Organized Labor in South Dakota and the Making of a Conservative Coalition in the Midcentury United States,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 2:103. Pehl argues that the 1940s were “key to the revivification of American conservatives and no issue proved more unifying for conservatives of many stripes than a rollback of organized labor’s newly achieved rights” (104).
41. Quoted in Pehl, “Frustrations of Organized Labor in South Dakota,” 115–16.
42. Ibid., 111.
43. See Jonathan F. Wagner, “ ‘The Greatest Thing I Ever Did Was Join a Union’: A History of the Dakota Teamsters in the Great Depression,” Great Plains Quarterly 8 (Winter 1988): 16–28.
44. Quoted in Pehl, “Frustrations of Organized Labor in South Dakota,” 113.
45. Quoted in Chenoweth, “Francis Case,” South Dakota History, 366.
46. Danbom, “A Part of the Nation and Apart from the Nation,” 179.
47. Mark R. Wilson points out that creating the postwar consensus around the importance of free markets and private enterprise was a particularly difficult task given the public-private partnership that had made possible the production of enough war material to win World War II. Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
48. Rylance, “Fred G. Aandahl and the ROC Movement,” 172.
49. Quoted in ibid., 182.
50. R. Alton Lee, “ ‘New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Misdealers, and Hiss Dealers’: Karl Mundt and the Internal Security Act of 1950,” South Dakota History 10 (Fall 1980): 277–90.
51. Ibid., 289.
52. Quoted in Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 175.
53. Richard Halworth Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 208.
54. Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 35.
55. Robert Griffin, “Old Progressives and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 66 (September 1979): 334–47.
56. Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 49. See also Scott N. Heidepriem, A Fair Chance for a Free People: A Biography of Karl E. Mundt, United States Senator (Madison, SD: Leader, 1988), 180–82.
57. “The Congress: The Censure of Joe McCarthy,” Time, October 4, 1954; “The Congress: Elbow Grease,” Time, November 29, 1954.
58. Many pro-McCarthy letters also came in to the region’s other political leaders, including some from members of the John Birch society. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 53–55.
59. Quoted in Jon K. Lauck, “George S. McGovern and the Farmer: South Dakota Politics, 1953–1962,” South Dakota History 32 (Winter 2002): 339.
60. Ibid., 341.
61. Ibid., 339–49.
62. R. Alton Lee, “McCarthyism at the University of South Dakota,” South Dakota History 19 (Spring 1989): 434–35.
63. Ibid., 436.
64. Ibid., 438.
65. Quoted in ibid., 430.
66. Ibid., 431–32.
67. Quoted in ibid., 433–34.
68. William C. Pratt, “Another South Dakota; or, The Road Not Taken: The Left and the Shaping of South Dakota Political Culture,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays in South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 1 (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2011), 105–32.
69. Elizabeth Evenson Williams, Emil Loriks: Builder of a New Economic Order (Sioux Falls, SD: Center for Western Studies, 1987).
70. Ibid., 146–47.
71. William C. Pratt, “The Farmers Union, McCarthyism, and the Demise of the Agrarian Left,” The Historian 58 (Winter 1996): n.p.
72. Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 41–42.
73. Pratt, “The Farmers Union, McCarthyism, and the Demise of the Agrarian Left,” n.p.
74. William C. Pratt, “Glenn Talbott, the Farmers Union, and American Liberalism After World War II,” North Dakota History 55, no.1 (1988): 3.
75. Ibid.
76. Quoted in Pratt, “Glenn Talbott,” 6.
77. Quoted in ibid., 13.
78. Pratt, “Another South Dakota; or, The Road Not Taken,” 123.
79. Pratt, “Glenn Talbott,” 13. See also Bruce E. Field, Harvest of Dissent: The National Farmers Union and the Early Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).
80. Alec Campbell, “The Sociopolitical Origins of the American Legion,” Theory and Society 39 (January 2010): 1–24.
81. Tom Brokaw, A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the Heartland in the Forties and Fifties (New York: Random House, 2003), 131.
82. Jim Fuglie, “Remembering a Great Man,” June 16, 2019, https://theprairieblog.com/2019/06/16/remembering-a-great-man-on-fathers-day/.
83. Matthew Farish, “The Ordinary Cold War: The Ground Observer Corps and Midcentury Militarization in the United States,” Journal of American History 103 (December 2016): 629–55.
84. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 143.
85. Ibid., 139.
86. Mark A. Lempke, “Senator George McGovern and the Role of Religion in South Dakota Political Culture,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 2:153.
87. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
88. Ibid., 86–87. See also Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Some officials in the federal government believed that part of spreading the idea of America was, in the 1950s, spreading the idea of religious belief and practice. John Foster Dulles, for example, hoped Americans would “extend their conception of morality and spirituality to the rest of the world.” Quoted in Sherry, In the Shadow of War, 159.
89. Darren Dochuk, “ ‘They Locked God Outside the Iron Curtain’: The Politics of Anticommunism and the Ascendancy of Plain-Folk Evangelicalism in the Postwar West,” in Jeff Roche, ed., The Political Culture of the New West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 97–134, esp. 102–5. Dochuk also points out that the “wildcat drillers” of the Southwest were evangelicals and, as such, fought against the representatives of corporate America and mainline Protestantism, like John D. Rockefeller, at the same time. Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
90. Dochuk, “ ‘They Locked God Outside the Iron Curtain.’ ” Some members of the 1960s counterculture also found their way to evangelism, though evidence of this trend on the Northern Plains is minimal. See Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
91. Mills, “Politics, Piety, and Patriotism,” 138.
92. Quoted in ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. “Images of the Black Hills Passion Play,” http://www.sdpb.org/blogs/images-of-the-past/the-black-hills-passion-play-1939–2008/.
95. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 77.
96. Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
97. Kevin M. Kruse, “Billy Graham: ‘America’s Pastor’?,” Washington Post, February 22, 2018.
98. Melani McAlister, “Billy Graham’s Legacy,” Process: A Blog for American History, March 21, 2018, https://www.processhistory.org/mcalister-billy-grahams-legacy/. McAlister asserts that, while Graham seemed open to issues around social justice, he was more interested in changing “hearts than laws.”
99. Roxanne B. Salonen, “Faith Conversions: 30 Years After Billy Graham Visited Fargo, Crusade Attendees Share Memories,” Dickinson Press, June 10, 2017, 1.
100. Kirk Johnson, “Mormons on a Mission,” New York Times, August 22, 2010.
101. Ibid.
Chapter 4
1. Tom Brokaw, A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties (New York: Random House, 2003), 24.
2. Ibid., 147–51.
3. James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7–13.
4. Brokaw, Long Way from Home, 225.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 61, 22.
7. David Mills explains that “the war was an important turning point in the history of the West, marking a transition from resistance to opportunism.” Cold War in a Cold Land: Fighting Communism on the Northern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 181. In this book I try to examine in more detail why this shift occurred and what its long-term political and cultural consequences were.
8. Brokaw, Long Way from Home, 75; see also David B. Danbom, “A Part of the Nation and Apart from the Nation: North Dakota Politics Since 1945,” in Richard Lowitt, ed., Politics in the Postwar American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 178.
9. Brokaw, Long Way from Home, 65.
10. Ibid., 190.
11. Ibid., 78.
12. Ibid., 75. Southern workers were recruited for many large federal construction projects in the West during and after the war. See Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20.
13. Brokaw, Long Way from Home, 152.
14. I borrow the word ordinary from Matthew Farish, “The Ordinary Cold War: The Ground Observer Corps and Midcentury Militarization in the United States, “Journal of American History 103 (December 2016): 629–55.
15. https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending. See also Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5–6.
16. Charles H. Anderson and Walter Isard, “The Geography of Arms Manufacture,” in David Pepper and Alan Jenkins, eds., The Geography of Peace and War (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 90; Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104 (September 2002): 726–35.
17. Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States,” 730.
18. The people of the Northern Plains are hardly alone in their practice of deriding the federal government while also benefiting from its financial support. Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow describes similar attitudes in the rural Midwestern community where he grew up. Remaking the Heartland: Middle America Since the 1950s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 259.
19. Even “Wild Bill” Langer, who maintained many Populist anti-militarist views, saw the upside of making “lemonade from lemons.” He worked to get an ammunition plant built near the Turtle Lake reservation to provide employment for Native people. Charlie Barber, email message to author, September 24, 2018.
20. Sparrow, Warfare State, 6.
21. Jeffrey Engel and Catherine Carte Engel, “Introduction: On Writing the Local Within Diplomatic History,” in Jeffrey Engel, ed., The Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007), 3.
22. Ibid., 21.
23. Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States,” 372.
24. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 6–7.
25. Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Destruction in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998), 38; Gerald B. Nash, “The West and the Military-Industrial Complex,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 40 (Winter 1990): 72.
26. Gerald B. Nash, The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 96, 98–99.
27. Ibid., 95. See also Roger Bolton, Defense Purchases and Regional Growth (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1966).
28. Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
29. In 1997, after Senator Kent Conrad procured a large new defense contract, Ian Swanson of the Grand Forks Herald explained: “Keeping the Air Force base open in Grand Forks and Minot… is an issue all of North Dakota’s politicians will back. It’s a pork issue, too, but unlike the trade issues it isn’t pork at the expense of a greater good (non-proliferations issues aside).” “Conrad Comes Home After $794 Million Pork Delivery,” Grand Forks Herald, November 25, 1997.
30. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 182.
31. The story of the coming of the base to Minot is relatively short, if also a bit confounding: the town of less than 20,000 had never asked to have the base located solely in its community. Instead leaders had proposed a joint “Bismarck-Minot” region. So, while the residents in Minot were rather surprised when their town was chosen, they too looked forward to its many economic benefits. Its population increased by over 50 percent, growing to 33,000 in 1957. Samuel H. Day, ed., Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the 1,000 Missile Silos of the United States (Madison, WI: Progressive Foundation, 1988), 17. See also Richard J. Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota: A Study in the Site Selection of Grand Forks and Minot Air Force Bases” (master’s thesis, University of North Dakota, 1990).
32. Redford H. Dibble, “Location of Base Result of Hard Work by Many Persons,” Rapid City Daily Journal, October 10, 1942. See also Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 264n19.
33. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 179.
34. A pilot stationed at the Grand Forks AFB reflected later on the dangers of living near a practice range. “I don’t know if I would like to live near there! But they haven’t killed anyone yet.” Dennis Almer, interview, State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND), Missile Site Oral Histories (MSOH), 32314–00001. While no ICBMs were placed on Native land, part of the gunnery range used during World War II was on the Pine Ridge reservation. That land has never been fully cleaned up or returned to tribal control. Seth Tupper, “Area of Former Badlands Bombing Range Could Remain Off-Limits,” Rapid City Journal, February 10, 2019, https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/area-of-former-badlands-bombing-range-could-remain-off-limits/article_71ebe406–508a-52c3–8fc4-b6f836379630.html.
35. Interview with Gretchen Heefner quoted in Heefner and Catherine McNicol Stock, “Missiles and Militarization: How the Cold War Shaped South Dakota Political Culture,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political History, vol. 1 (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2011), 226.
36. Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 115–16. Columnist Paul Harvey wrote, “You and I sowed a hundred million dollars on the prairies of Montana. Now, before the crop has matured, Uncle Sam wants to plow it under.” Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 196. On the base closing in Glasgow, see ibid., 197–98.
37. Quoted in Richard J. Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base: The Beginning,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, 1988, 8. Much of this material also appears in Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” but sometimes in slightly altered form. For clarity, I provide cites to both sources.
38. Richard Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base,” 8; Nolan,”The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 48.
39. Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base” 8; Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 40.
40. Quoted in Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base,” 11; Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 49.
41. Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base,” 8; Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 46–47.
42. Quoted in James McKenzie, Nuclear Weapons of Grand Forks: An Interpretive Catalog, Peace Issues (Grand Forks: University of North Dakota Center for Peace Studies, 1986), 2.
43. Quoted in Day, Nuclear Heartland, 16.
44. Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base,” 11; Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 47.
45. Quoted in Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base,” 12; Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 49.
46. Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base,” 12–13; Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 53.
47. City leaders from Newington, New Hampshire, and Plattsburgh, New York, asked the military to reconsider its decision to build bases in their communities. They worried that a Soviet attack meant “bringing death and destruction to a heavily populated area.” The Plattsburgh site also required the acquisition and demolition of Champlain College, which in 1953 held its last graduation ceremony before moving to a new location in Vermont. Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 187–89.
48. Nolan, “Grand Forks Air Force Base,” 20; Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 84.
49. Nolan, “The Air Force Comes to North Dakota,” 87, 94–99.
50. Tom Brusegaard, conversation with the author, October 5, 2017, Grand Forks, North Dakota.
51. For the methodology used to estimate this figure, see Appendix.
52. The Northern Plains were not the only place where the ratio of military to civilian population swelled in 1940s and 1950s. In Arizona, the 144,000 military people stationed there in 1940, “equaled the entire workforce in the state.” Nash, “The West and the Military-Industrial Complex,” 73. Nash writes further that the political alliances that developed to keep federal funds flowing influenced politics throughout the region (73).
53. Wade Bertrand, interview, State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND), Missile Site Oral Histories (MSOH), 32314–00004.
54. https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/12_Military-Service.pdf. See p. 201.
55. https://dakotafreepress.com/2017/09/10/population-notes-veterans-8–32-of-sd-population-higher-proportion-in-black-hills/.
56. https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/12_Military-Service.pdf. See pp. 200, 204. See also “Economic Impact Study: Grand Forks Air Force Base Realignment,” (for presentation by the Grand Forks Region Base Realignment Impact Committee [BRIC], November 17, 2006), 7, http://gfcounty.nd.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/Economic%20Impact%20Study%20-%20Final%20November%202006.pdf.
57. Nash, “The West and the Military-Industrial Complex,” 74.
58. Ahrar Ahmad, “War and Peace in South Dakota,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 1:203–4. Ahmad also details the total federal expenditures in the state, mostly from military spending and agricultural programs: 1.9 billion in 2011 (210n52).
59. Michael Brown, interview, State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND), Missile Site Oral Histories (MSOH), 32314–00006. Brown comments on how many military people he knew who “stayed or came back” to Grand Forks and are active in the community, one as a city commissioner, another as the president of the local rod-and-gun club.
60. Mike Brule, “BRAC Closing Would Be ‘Man Made’ Disaster After ’97 Grand Forks Flood,” Grand Forks Herald, April 30, 2005. See also Kimberly Porter, “1997 Grand Forks Flood: When History Became Personal,” North Dakota History 82 (Summer 2017): 18–34.
61. Porter, “1997 Grand Forks Flood”; “Remembering the Flood of 1997,” Grand Forks Herald, April 22, 2012, https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/2174209-remembering-flood-97-red-river-crests-15-years-ago-today. Air force personnel helped residents of Rapid City in 1972 when their community also suffered a devastating flood. Accommodations for housing victims of the flood were segregated by race. See Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019), 186–88.
62. Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 216.
63. African Americans joined the air force gradually during the 1950s and 1960s. By the late twentieth century all branches of the military had high populations of people of color. By 2000, there were four thousand African Americans in North Dakota; 58 percent of them lived in either Grand Forks or Ward counties, the two counties with bases. The base populations themselves that year were around 10 percent black. http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsTable/Dec_2000PL-U_GCTPL_ST7&_geo_id=04000U538. Accessed January 16, 2018. This version of Fact Finder is no longer available. Its data is currently compiled at factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk and www2.census.gov/census_2000/datasets/demographic_profile/North_Dakota/2kh38.pdf.
64. Quoted in David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 182.
65. For a complete demographic breakdown of military service after 9/11, see Tim Kane, “Who Bears the Burden? Demographic Characteristics of the U.S. Military Recruits Before and After 9/11,” November 7, 2005, Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/defense/report/who-bears-the-burden-demographic-characteristics-us-military-recruits-and-after-911.
66. Jeanette Keith, Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 6. Keith also reminds the reader of the South’s history of Populist antimilitarism in World War One.
67. Thomas Borstelmann, “The Cold War and the American South,” in Engel, Local Consequences of the Cold War, 82–83. See also Kari Frederickson, Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013).
68. James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Gregory writes that southerners who left their region “changed America” (xii). This migration involved the movement of both whites and African Americans, though they often moved to different locations. The military eventually provided “one clear pathway” out of the region for both groups. By 1970, 41 percent of black and 20 percent of white veterans who had been born in the South lived outside their region (37).
69. Sean Braswell, “Why the U.S. Military Is So Southern,” http://www.ozy.com/acumen/why-the-us-military-is-so-southern/72100. For the broader transformation of the Armed Forces and the mass marketing of military service, see Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
70. Braswell, “Why the U.S. Military Is So Southern.”
71. James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Annual state-by-state military population breakdowns can be found in Department of Defense, Population Representation in the Military Services, https://www.cna.org/research/pop-rep.
72. Gregory encourages his readers to think of the southern migration as both “a circulation” and as “fluid,” with families outside the region maintaining their regional ties and cultural practices. Southern Diaspora, xii, 7–8. Former secretary of the navy, Jim Webb, explains that in the South “military virtues have been passed down at the dinner table.” Quoted in Braswell, “Why the U.S. Military Is So Southern.” Statistics also show that 80 percent of volunteers have a parent or sibling who served.
73. In 2000, approximately 17,500 people born in the South were living permanently in North Dakota. This number increased with the recent migration of energy workers from Texas and other states with oil and gas production. For graphs of where Southerners have migrated, see “Mapping the Southern Diaspora,” http://depts.washington.edu/moving1/map_diaspora.shtml. In the air force even those who were not born in the South did live there for a time, as one of the only training facilities for new recruits was at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
74. www.churchofchrist-sd.com/histphoto.html. The Destiny Foursquare Church near Ellsworth began in much the same way, in the basement of a home and with largely military membership. According to a representative of the church, many of these military personnel “have been involved 110% and have become trusted leaders who rotate out but stay in touch with the congregation.” Weston Stephens, telephone conversation with Foursquare Church administrator as relayed to the author, July 2018.
75. Steve Lee “New Churches Spring Up,” Grand Forks Herald, April 17, 2009, https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/2096614-new-churches-spring. The numbers of new evangelical churches can be hard to measure with precision as they do not necessarily belong to a denominational organization but can pop up as unaffiliated congregations. See http://www.usreligioncensus.org/maps2000.php. The religious census of the US began including “independent” churches as a category in 2010.
76. Quoted in Day, Nuclear Heartland, 17.
77. Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2017). See also Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 222–35.
78. Army Wife 101, “How Many Wal-Marts Are Near Your Military Base?,” http://army wife101.com/2012/07/how-many-walmarts-are-near-your-military-base-walmart-petition-for-military-discount.html.
79. Sam Walton, Made in America: My Story (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 139–60.
80. Army Wife 101, “How Many Wal-Marts?”
81. Anna Jauhola, “During 80s, Downtown Transitioned,” Mitchell Daily Republic, March 21, 2014, https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/2473044-during-80s-downtown-transitioned-cafes-retailers-niche-stores-coffee-shops.
82. Bethany Moreton, “It Came from Bentonville: The Agrarian Roots of Wal-mart,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., Wal-mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New York: New Press, 2006), 61.
83. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Kevin M. Kruse makes much the same argument, albeit more broadly, in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
84. Moreton also points out that Walton overcame Populist resistance to chain stores and monopolies by portraying himself as no “foreigner” but a “small town boy made good.” “It Came from Bentonville,” 70, 74.
85. David L. Leal and Jeremy M. Teigen, “Recent Veterans Are More Republican Than Older Ones,” Washington Post, November 11, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/11/recent-veterans-are-more-republican-than-older-ones-why/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5419b6e927c1.
86. Adam Clymer, “Sharp Divergence Found in Views of Military and Civilians,” New York Times, September 9, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/09/us/sharp-divergence-found-in-views-of-military-and-civilians.html. See also a Gallup poll that demonstrates the more conservative views among veterans: http://news.gallup.com/poll/118684/military-veterans-ages-tend-republican.aspx. This trend began after the Vietnam War and accelerated after 9/11. Until 2016, the connection between military service and conservatism extended to Congress. See Tim Hsia, “The Role of the Military and Veterans in Politics,” New York Times, February 1, 2013, https://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-role-of-the-military-and-veterans-in-politics/.
87. Thomas E. Ricks, “The Widening Gap Between Military and Society,” The Atlantic, July 1997, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/07/the-widening-gap-between-military-and-society/306158/.
88. Steve Kornacki, The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of American Tribalism (New York: Harper Collins, 2018).
89. Clymer, “Sharp Divergence.”
90. Ricks, “Widening Gap Between Military and Society.”
91. Soybeans are a hardier and more drought-resistant crop, writes Mike Jacobs, giving farmers more economic security. “Subtle Soybean Becomes Conspicuous,” Grand Forks Herald, August 28, 2018, https://www.grandforksherald.com/opinion/columns/4490941-mike-jacobs-subtle-soybean-becomes-conspicuous.
92. Ahmad, “War and Peace,” 204.
93. J. D. Vance, “How Trump Won the Troops,” New York Times, November 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/opinion/how-trump-won-the-troops.html?_r=0. See also Clymer, “Sharp Divergence.”
94. For two examples, see Jack Dalrymple’s attacks on Kent Conrad in the 1992 Senate special election and Conrad’s increasingly defensive responses. Bismarck Tribune, November 18, 1992. Four years later Kevin Cramer would take a similar approach in his contest against Earl Pomeroy. Bismarck Tribune, August 23, 1996.
95. See the public Instagram account for Senator Heidi Heitkamp, October 30, 2018, for three images of the senator meeting with military members and visiting the Minot AFB; see also James Arkin, “How to Win in North Dakota,” Politico, November 1, 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/01/north-dakota-2018-senate-election-heitkamp-cramer-222094.
96. So many communities tried to enforce segregationist policies on service personnel assigned to nearby bases that the Kennedy administration asked a panel to investigate. In communities at home, as in the rear areas of combat, African American air force members were far more likely to face racial discrimination than they did in combat itself. See Jeremy Maxwell, Brotherhood in Combat: How African Americans Found Equality in Korea and Vietnam (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 15, 17, 138.
97. Some Dakotans consider Rapid City to be an outlier in terms of race relations. But several legal cases and regional commissions found widespread discrimination against Natives in communities across the Northern Plains in the 1970s and 1980s. See Susan Peterson, “Discrimination and Jurisdiction: Seven Civil Rights Cases in South Dakota, 1976–1982,” Journal of the West 25 (1986): 44–48; Montana-North Dakota-South Dakota Joint Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Indian Civil Rights Issues in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, August, 1974; United States Commission on Civil Rights, American Indian Issues in the State of South Dakota, hearing held in Rapid City, SD, July 27–28, 1978.
98. South Dakota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report on Rapid City, March 1963, https://www2.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12r18.PDF, 20–37.
99. The Cold War military had long-standing practices of encouraging or at least tolerating de facto segregation in its base communities. Nightclubs on “Hooker Hill” in Itaewon, South Korea, were racially segregated. Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There, 16–19, 22. Residential neighborhoods in Hanford, Washington, where plutonium for atomic bombs was processed, were also segregated so that white workers, especially those from the South, would feel comfortable there. Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 26–31.
100. South Dakota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report on Rapid City, 9, 38–39.
101. Brokaw, Long Way from Home, 188.
102. South Dakota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Report on Rapid City, 32.
103. Since the early twentieth century Natives in Rapid City, as in other communities, had been relegated to a series of “Indian towns” which had been relocated repeatedly when city leaders discovered the sites had value for whites. See Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996), 170. See also Estes, Our History Is the Future, 186–88.
104. Aaron Belkin, Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898–2001 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Alan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
105. Vine, Base Nation; Höhn and Moon, Over There.
106. Dennis Banks with Richard Erdoes, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 44–45.
107. Vine, Base Nation, 182; quoted on 166.
108. Robert Draper, “The Military’s Rough Justice on Sexual Assault,” New York Times, November 26, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/magazine/the-militarys-rough-justice-on-sexual-assault.html.
109. Ibid.
110. Sara Egge, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 38–61.
111. Debra Marquart, The Horizontal World: Growing Up in the Middle of Nowhere (New York: Counterpoint, 2006), 97–99, 119.
112. Several historians have recently suggested that rural America offered more opportunities for gay men and women than “urban-centric” academics often imagine. While they lived without a vibrant community, queer men and women were often accepted by their communities as “eccentric.” See Colin R. Johnson, Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013); Mary L. Gray and Brian J. Gilley, eds., Queering the Countryside: New Frontier in Queer Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2016). The dearth of queer scholarship on the Dakotas does not reflect a dearth of queer life. The Democratic mayor of Fargo in the 1980s, Jon Lingren, was publically supportive of gay rights, held the states’ first gay pride parade in 1982, and was an advocate for the first gay bar in the state. Cory Haala, email to author, June 25, 2019.
113. Leon G. Lewis to Oscar Lunseth, 11/12/1959, Oscar Lunseth Papers (hereafter OL), Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection 372, Elwyn B. Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Box 7, File 1.
114. “Minutes of the Base-Community Council of the Grand Forks Air Force Base, March 24, 1960,” OL Papers, Box 7, File 1, 1–2.
115. Like Minot, Rapid City had a long-established sex trade in the gambling towns of the Black Hills. In 1980 the base commander shut down a popular and well-known brothel in Deadwood, Pam’s Purple Door, because he felt that too many airmen were making the thirty-minute drive. Thadd M. Turner, Wild Bill Hickok and Deadwood City: End of the Trail (Irvine, CA: Universal Publishing, 2001), 44. It may be that Deadwood’s attractions were replicated closer to home, since Box Elder, South Dakota, has been called “a strip club with a large mobile home park.” “Comment” from cuiser20, February 6, 2010, http://www.city-data.com/forum/rapid-city/837307-moving-ellsworth-afb-2-weeks-3.html.
116. Minot Junior Chamber of Commerce, Why Minot? (Minot, ND: R-L-M Printing, 1961), 19. See also coverage in the Bismarck Tribune in 1960 and 1961, including “Vogel Charges Minot Wide Open, Blames Apathy,” Bismarck Tribune, December 14, 1960.
117. Why Minot?, 15–16.
118. Why Minot?, 31.
119. “Vogel Charges Minot Wide Open, Blames Apathy.”
120. Why Minot?, 21–22.
121. https://law.justia.com/cases/north-dakota/supreme-court/1963/123-n-w-2d-110–2.html.
122. Brad Schlossman, “In Emerado, Contractors, Retirees Express Concern,” Grand Forks Herald, May 13, 2005.
123. Niraj Chokshi, “What Each State’s Veteran Population Looks Like in 10 Maps,” Washington Post, November 11, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/11/11/what-each-states-veteran-population-looks-like-in-10-maps/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c86f4dcbaa5c.
124. To combat suicide, see new programs in “resiliency” at the Minot base: http://www.minot.af.mil/Base-Units/Resiliency/.
125. https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/12_Military-Service.pdf; Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Administrator of Head Start of Grand Forks, conversation with author, October 5, 2017.
126. Dan Lamothe, “Air Force Launches Investigation into Drug Use Among Troops Protecting Nuclear Weapons,” Washington Post, March 18, 2016.
127. Diana Jean Schemo, “Rate of Rape at Academy Is Put at 12 Percent in Survey,” New York Times, August 29, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/us/rate-of-rape-at-academy-is-put-at-12-in-survey.html. On a scandal involving a prominent female pilot stationed at Minot, see Marilyn Gardner, “Kelly Flinn’s Tale: The Military Applies the Scarlet Letter,” Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 1997, 13.
128. Karen Houppert, “Base Crimes: The Military Has a Domestic Violence Problem,” Mother Jones, July 2005.
129. Lucinda Marshall, “Why Male Military Veterans Are Committing Sexual Assault at Alarming Rates,” Alternet, May 25, 2007, https://www.alternet.org/2007/05/why_male_military_veterans_are_committing_sexual_assault_at_alarming_rates/. See also Daniel Engber, “Is There a Lot of Crime on Military Bases?,” Slate, November 5, 2009, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/11/are-shootings-at-military-bases-common-or-was-fort-hood-unusual.html.
130. Bill Donovan, “S.D. Case May Allow Claims Against U.S.,” Navajo Times, May 7, 2009, http://www.navajotimes.com/news/2009/0409/050709court.php.
131. “Minot AFB More Than a Good Neighbor,” Minot Daily News, February 8, 2018.
132. “2005 BRAC Regional Hearing,” Rapid City, SD, Tuesday, June 21, 2005, transcript. This document and many others can be found at a website dedicated to the successful effort to save Ellsworth. See http://www.ellsworthauthority.org/2005-brac—the-battle-to-save-ellsworth-.html. In 2019 the air force announced an expansion of Ellsworth’s responsibilities.
133. “2005 BRAC Regional Hearing, Rapid City, South Dakota,” transcript, 11.