The Multiculti West

In the summer of 1919, Beatrice Larned Massey and her husband, in the company of another young couple, drove 4,154 miles from New York City to San Francisco in a Packard twin-six touring car. In Mrs. Massey’s delightful account of the trip, she described a truly remarkable encounter in the Yellowstone Valley of Montana. The travelers had to pull over while an eastbound caravan of several hundred families in ancient “prairie schooners,” passed by. These were people, Massey wrote, who “had tried to raise crops, and were literally driven out. The children looked pinched and starved. The women and men were the color of leather, tanned by the scorching sun of the plains, the dust, and the dry, hot winds. They had lost everything.” This meeting of a wagon train of dirt-poor eastbound homesteaders and a carload of enthusiastic westbound auto tourists, writes Walter Nugent, “must be one of the great symbolic encounters in recent American history,” the moment the 19th century settlement frontier gave way to the 20th century metropolitan frontier, a transition he rates “the major change in American history.”

Nugent, professor of history at Notre Dame, has an especially good eye for the exemplary anecdote. The personal detail breathes life into statistical material, the past tracings of birth, death, marriage and migration patterns. “Into the West” tells the grand story of the peopling of the great expanse of the continent that extends from the 98th meridian to the Pacific (including Alaska and Hawaii). Nugent has written a big, sprawling story about a big, sprawling place.

In notable ways, his account departs from earlier versions of “How the West was won.” The traditional triumphant narrative claimed the West as the premier site of white Anglo-Saxon accomplishment. But Nugent makes it clear that the American West has always included “people more diverse in race or class than those of the other great regions of the United States.” Consider Gold Rush California with its fortune-seekers drawn from all over the world--not only from the Eastern states and Europe but from Mexico, Chile, Australia and China. By 1860, more than a third of the state’s residents were foreign-born, three times the national average. San Francisco was probably the most polyglot city on the planet. More surprising, perhaps, is the ethnic diversity on the Great Plains, where American settlers were joined by tens of thousands of homesteading Canadians, English, Irish, Germans, Russians, Scandinavians and pioneers of other nationalities.

By the late 19th century the population of the Northern plains included a greater proportion of foreign-born than any other region of the country. North Dakota was the most multicultural state in the union. Nugent offers the examples of a colony of Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews who attempted to keep kosher under nearly impossible conditions in the countryside, 25 miles from the state capital of Bismarck, and a similar community of Lebanese Muslims near Minot, who built a little mosque on the prairie. The Southern plains were also a patchwork of ethnic communities. In the ‘70s, after the failure of Reconstruction in the South, thousands of African Americans left their former plantations to found dozens of black farm communities in the arid West--places such as Nicodemus in western Kansas, where by the mid-1880s some 150 families were struggling to make a go of it.

Immigrants and former slaves were attracted to the farming frontier of the Great Plains by the powerful allure of the homestead ideal--getting and keeping a family farm. Theirs were migrations of hope. But the West was also the site of forced removals and relocations--migrations of terror. As Western pioneers built new communities on the plains, the federal government did everything in its power to destroy ancient ones. Army officers and government agents squeezed Indian communities onto small “reserved” portions of their former homelands or forced them into God-forsaken corners of Indian territory. There was a terrible irony at work here, for much of the land taken from the plains Indians turned out to be totally inappropriate for family farming.

Taking the long view, as Nugent does, makes for a downbeat story of Western farming. In the well-watered region east of the Mississippi, the homestead ideal helped produce a stable society of small producers; but in the arid West, the dream of family farms turned into a nightmare. By the 1910s a “reverse frontier process” of de-settlement had overtaken the region. The outmigration of folks like the ones Mrs. Massey encountered in Montana resulted in the death of entire communities and towns. Agriculture continued to develop on the plains, but it was farming of the capital-intensive variety--using heavy machinery, chemical additives and the center-pivot irrigation systems that are rapidly draining the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the bedrock of the plains.

Refugees from Western farms did not go back East but to the booming cities of the West. Confronted by the difficulties of farm settlement on the plains, the main direction of American expansion shifted from the countryside to the city, and metropolitan growth made the West into the country’s most dynamically expanding region. The West included the fastest-growing cities in the nation, and by 1890 it had become the country’s most urbanized region. Western lands had long been promoted as a “safety valve” for the urban working class, but in fact Western cities operated as the principal outlet for rural discontent.

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As the historian Fred Shannon put it years ago, for every industrial worker who became a farmer, 20 farm boys moved to the city. “Into the West” offers a comprehensive analysis of Western metropolitan growth, but Nugent does not emphasize as he might the important role of gender in the migration. For every 20 farm boys who moved from the rural to the urban West there were perhaps 25 or 30 farm girls. The prominent place of young women in the historic migration from farm to city remains one of the great untold stories in American history.

The importance Nugent assigns to Western cities is underlined by the prominent place California, and especially Los Angeles, assume in his narrative. Inevitably some reviewers and readers will complain about this. Many Western regionalists argue that the states of the Pacific coast are not part of the West at all. “I wouldn’t let California into the West with a search warrant,” the late Robert Athearn of the University of Colorado once cracked. The recent Atlas of the New West (1997), published by the Center of the American West at Athearn’s alma mater, draws its regional boundaries so as to exclude the entire “left coast.” But I think Nugent gets it right when he argues that California was not an exception but an exemplar.

From its American beginnings in the Gold Rush, “California dreaming” was all about the creation of a new kind of society. Nugent writes that the state “moved directly after the American takeover to a more modern, incipiently twentieth century form of capitalism.” In his telling, the remarkable history of Los Angeles--from the aggressive acquisition of a water supply to the invention of the decentered freeway metropolis--was a harbinger of Western development.

World War II was a historic watershed in Western history, and Nugent is particularly good at summarizing the enormous movements of people that marked that transformation. During the quarter-century after the war, more than 30 million people moved beyond the Mississippi, the most significant redistribution of population in the nation’s history. California surpassed New York as the nation’s most populous state in 1964, and in the early 1990s Texas pushed into second place. Such growth is predicted to continue.

In federal population projections of the next 20 years, 15 states are expected to grow by rates of more than 30%--all but two are in the West. This growth is entirely metropolitan. California alone gained 17 million new urban residents; Texas, 9 million. During the 1980s, all but one of the country’s 30 fastest-growing cities were in the West and 18 were in California. Migration to the suburbs, Nugent argues, is the late 20th century equivalent of 19th century homesteading.

The migration has been profoundly multiethnic. As early as 1930, African Americans, Mexicans, Japanese and Filipinos made up half of the unskilled work force at the base of Los Angeles’ industrial economy. During the Depression, with more than a third of the country’s workers unemployed, a clamor arose for the deportation of the foreign-born. There are no reliable statistics on the number deported from Los Angeles, but estimates are that at least 1 million Hispanics were repatriated from the Southwest, many of them American citizens. It was, Nugent writes, “the largest involuntary mass migration under American auspices up to that time or since.” During the war, this was followed by the involuntary removal of 120,000 Japanese from their homes on the Pacific Coast to desert “relocation” camps. By making these movements central to his narrative, Nugent links Mexican repatriation and Japanese relocation to earlier episodes of western Indian removal.

Yet people of all backgrounds continued to move westward. During the war, the abandoned houses of Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles became the destination for thousands of African American migrants from the South. The multiethnic migration was intensified after Congress reformed the immigration laws in 1965, removing ethnic quotas. In the years since, a massive wave of immigration has brought more than 7 million Latino and 5 million Asian newcomers to the country, with most of them settling in the West. If current trends continue, 30 million to 40 million more immigrants will seek homes in Western cities over the next quarter-century.

Moreover, the Latino community is in the midst of a veritable baby boom. The result of these patterns is that in a great arc, from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific, the Southwest is in the process of turning “majority minority.” That is already true of New Mexico, and soon it will be the case in California, Texas and Arizona. “Into the West” should be essential reading for all Americans who want to put these recent events into historical perspective.