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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and its Borders, 1898–1940 by Sarah Deutsch Alicia M. Dewey Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and its Borders, 1898–1940. By Sarah Deutsch. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. 666. Notes, bibliography, index.) Sarah Deutsch has written possibly the most important survey of modern U.S. western history in a couple of decades. Along with her own original research and interpretations, she has synthesized aspects of recent twentieth-century borderlands historiography with the new western history of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Although she treats the West as a region that has been a place of mixing, cooperation, and conflict among diverse groups, she moves beyond region to make a case, in somewhat Turnerian fashion, that the modern West played a significant role in forming and maintaining the twentieth-century U.S. nation-state as a “white man’s country” (454). The book is important to Texas history because she includes Texas as part of the West and incorporates examples of episodes in Texas history in almost every chapter. Although Deutsch’s work does not cover as broad a time period as Patricia Nelson Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton & Co., 1987) or Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), it is as significant because it encompasses the critical years between the late nineteenth century, traditionally viewed as the “end of the frontier” by Frederick Jackson Turner and those who followed him, and World War II, a time when the West had been modernized and fully incorporated into the United States politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Deutsch starts in 1898 rather than in 1893, the date of Turner’s famous thesis, because she sees the start of the Spanish American War as the beginning of a shift in the government’s approach to new territories and new peoples from a policy of “democratic incorporation” to “an imperial philosophy of official colonization” (3). Deutsch argues that this new imperial philosophy affected how the government managed land and people in the West, differentiating between Whites as the true exemplars of American citizens and non-Whites, like the colonized abroad, in a secondary status. Armed with new scientific “expertise” and eager to draw lines, segregate, and categorize, the federal government had considerable ability to influence and shape the West because of its control of the extensive public lands remaining there. Policies regulating water, land, and population aimed to transform the Jeffersonian “agrarian ideal of independent small farmers . . . into a self-consciously modern nation-state” [End Page 395] while continuing to preserve the western myth of boundless opportunity for White men. (2) The book is divided into four parts: Demarcating, 1898–1910; Agitating, 1910–1921; Speculating, 1920–1929; and Mobilizing, 1928–1940. Throughout, Deutsch explores federal, state, and local efforts to define physical and racial borders, create clearer definitions of citizenship, exclude or subordinate non-Whites, identify and promote as normative the White nuclear family and White community, preserve the ideal of the self-sufficient small farmer, and promote development that primarily benefited Whites. For example, in early twentieth-century South Texas, Anglos built irrigated farm towns that segregated ethnic Mexican laborers to one side of town, in contrast to the more ethnically mixed border towns, created new counties to give more power to White ranching and farming families, and formed the White Men’s Primary Association to attempt to keep ethnic Mexicans from political participation. Elsewhere, government-encouraged speculative investments in oil, land, and tourism in the 1920s benefited Whites, often at the expense of Native Americans. Deutsch contrasts efforts to delimit and control with the reality of blurred boundaries, mixing of peoples, and insurgent movements, showing that neither conquest nor homogeneity were ever fully achieved. Nature did not always cooperate with enough water for small farms despite the construction of irrigation canals and modern dams. Drawing clear racial lines was not always possible, often erasing complex mixed heritage, as in Oklahoma, where...