Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch Sheila McManus Deutsch, Sarah–Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 640 p. Sarah Deutsch’s mammoth new tome on the United States West in the early twentieth century brings a fresh interpretive lens to these decades and draws new connections between familiar events. Its sheer size allows for both high-level thematic analyses and rich, granular case studies of how “what is usually placed at the margin” (p. 7) was central to the West’s history before the Second World War. Making a Modern West incorporates methodological insights from recent North American borderlands historiography into its nuanced discussion of how race, gender, and citizenship were used to shape the West’s communities, politics, and economies. Deutsch begins with the United States’ 1898 victory in the Spanish-American War and seizure of Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. The war “provided the nation’s policymakers and promoters and their audience with a new framework for western struggles over land, rights, and the nature of democracy and relegitimized both white supremacy and the concept of whiteness” (p. 5). US imperialism in the Pacific and these new territorial claims get little attention in the rest of the book and it is unfortunate that they only appear as a framing mechanism, but that starting point sets up her key theme of how multiple, new boundaries between insiders and outsiders were drawn in the West between 1898 and 1940 (p. 3). The book is divided into four parts, each covering one decade and three chapters. In Part I, “Demarcating, 1898–1910,” Deutsch explores the creation of a wide range of new divisions across the West, including between “the natural world” and built environments, the dusty past and shiny future, and among people (p. 13). Chapter 1, “Man and Nature,” focuses primarily on early irrigation and conservation schemes, the tensions between competing visions, and how they allowed the federal government to demonstrate their scientific modernity by dominating the landscape and enabling their White agrarian fantasies. The following chapter, “The Changing Meaning of Crossing Lines,” discusses cross-border landholding and development in the US-Mexico borderlands as well as “the patchwork quilt of changing racial formations at local, transnational, and imperial levels and the competing forces that deployed them, including colliding diasporas of workers” (p. 51) across both the US-Mexico and the BC-Washington borders. Chapter 3 is a case study of the Black town of Boley, Oklahoma, which became a microcosm of debates over race, manhood, citizenship, landholding, and the spaces in between, as Black, Creek, and White people debated what race and relationships were supposed to mean and look like. Part II, “Agitating, 1910–21,” describes some of the challenges to those “purportedly neat” racial, gendered, political, and environmental categories, including the Mexican Revolution, robust labour and farmers’ movements, White women’s struggles to get the vote for themselves, and disputes over the United States’ entry into the First World War. Chapter 4, “Revolution and Revolutionaries,” discusses the Revolution’s effects on radical politics across the US West and the [End Page 207] ways it “made credible the possibility of radical change in the United States” (p. 133). Chapter 5, “Women and Their Alliances,” focuses primarily on White women’s efforts to get the vote for themselves, and allies like the organized White farmers. The third chapter in this section, “Global Conflict and Local Strife,” examines the remarkable wave of upheaval across the West in 1917. In the same year that the United States joined the First World War, there were heated battles over labour rights in a range of primary sectors and women’s suffrage; between White ranchers and Indigenous Peoples over land rights; and between anti-immigrant politicians and Southwest growers who needed cheap, disposable Mexican labour to work in their fields. The war itself sharpened debates over who “really” belonged in the United States and deserved to call themselves a citizen. The section ends with the 1921 Tulsa...