Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch William G. Robbins MAKING A MODERN U.S. WEST: THE CONTESTED TERRAIN OF A REGION AND ITS BORDERS, 1893–1940 by Sarah Deutsch University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2022. Bibliography, index, notes. 656 pages. $50.00 cloth. Making a Modern U.S. West, a volume in the University of Nebraska Press History of the American West Series, covers the period from the 1890s to the eve of World War II. The first of the four chronological sections covers the federal government’s organization of its new continental and overseas empire and the lives of people in its territories. The second section treats trans-border movements involving corporate money, organized labor, women’s suffrage, and government and capital suppression during World War I. Part three focuses on speculative investment in natural resources and tourism in the 1920s, and the fourth part involves the deportation of Mexican laborers, New Deal efforts to organize union workers, and John Collier and the Indian Reorganization Act. To slow speculative activity in public lands, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1891, permitting the president to withdraw federal forests from the public domain. The problem, Sarah Deutsch writes, was that forests were “under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, which had no foresters. The Department of the Interior had foresters but no reserves” (p. 41). In fact, the opposite was true, the forest reserves were under the Interior Department and foresters were in the Department of Agriculture. President Theodore Roosevelt transferred the forests to the Department of Agriculture in 1905 under Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot and the Forest Service. Deutsch misidentifies the Homestead Act (1862) with the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, the legislation designed to settle the arid West. The act doubled land grants to 320 acres, attracting an inrush of homesteaders to arid regions. A period of extended drought “forced three-quarters of those who had arrived since 1916 to leave” (p. 133). The great American dilemma, race, functioned differently depending on location. Deutsch identifies conflicting and inconsistent accounts in federal commissions involving the classification of Mexicans. An Industrial Commission report in 1901 grouped Mexicans and Indians as “foreign whites,” while most of its commentary focused on Chinese and Japanese immigrants who dominated the news. When commissioners learned that Mexicans composed one-third of maintenance workers on Southwest railroads, they devoted one paragraph in the 800-page report to “Mexican peon labor.” The Dillingham Commission in 1911 complained about the lack of data on Mexicans in the United States but still devoted a few pages to Mexicans as an unprogressive race but intelligent enough for common jobs. Deusch devotes considerable attention to cross-border revolutions, giving greater attention to the Southwest than insurgencies north of the forty-ninth parallel. She offers an important reality about the southern border: “The Mexican Revolution laid bare that the history of the Mexican North and the U.S. Southwest were inseparable” (p. 132). Radical democratic movements existed across both southern and northern borders. Women’s movements followed similar trajectories, Montana electing the first woman to Congress in 1916, Canadians electing the first woman to sit in a legislature in the British Empire, and two Mexican states sponsoring Mexico’s first women’s congresses. The federal government joined with western corporations in suppressing the Industrial Workers of America and the Non-Partisan League when the United States entered World War I. To tell the story of the Northwest lumber industry, the government’s organization of the Loyal [End Page 404] Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, and the suppression of unions, the author relies on Harold Hyman’s nearly sixty-year-old book, Soldiers and Spruce (1963). Making a Modern U.S. West explains the conflicted state and federal efforts to marginalize Indians’ and other minorities’ rights to land ownership. Deutsch cites John Collier’s importance as a forceful proponent of fighting for the integrity of Pueblo lands. During the 1920s, fears about Japanese land ownership among White landowners along the West Coast prompted California to worry that the state was becoming a Japanese colony. Legislatures in...