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John M. Findlay, "The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
01:11:14
An interview with John M. Findlay
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- [00:00]
John Finley
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Steven Hausman
Welcome back, everyone, to New Books in the American West, a channel on the New Books Network of Podcasts. I am Steven Hausman. I'm an assistant professor in the history department at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I am your host for today's episode, and I'm speaking today with John Finley. Dr. Finley is professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington in Seattle and is the author of many, many books and articles, including books like Magic Lands and Atomic Frontier Days, and also his latest book, which came out just earlier this year, I think about a month ago, in fact, which is called the Mobilized American 1940-2000, which is part of the University of Nebraska Press's ongoing series, History of the American West. Welcome to the New Books Network, John, good to have you here.
- [01:59]
John Finley
Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here on the New Books Network.
- [02:03]
Steven Hausman
We always like to start by just getting a sense of who our guests are. So I'll start by just asking. Excuse me, just asking a little bit about you, asking who you are, what your background is, and what got you interested in history and specifically about the history of the American West.
- [02:17]
John Finley
That was kind of a convoluted path. I grew up in Seattle, and I guess I grew up in the west, but didn't think of myself much as a Westerner. I wasn't really interested in history when I went to college. My father had been a doctor and he thought I should be a doctor, and if not that, a lawyer, a history professor wasn't on his checklist. It wasn't anywhere on the list at all. But when I got there, I was taking all these pre med courses or pre law kinds of things, and I just started loving history courses. I was shaking and really just enjoyed them and just delved into the major and had the luxury, the resources behind me that if this didn't work out, you know, I could do something different. So I went to college, finished college with a history major and then I went to grad school. And that's where I decided to become a historian of the American West. I found a mentor who was good on the west and would want to work with me about it. But also I had the experience. In 1978, I was hired by a company of archaeologists and anthropologists who were doing cultural resources work in part to fulfill the requirements of environmental impact statements. And they'd been told that they were fine on Native Americans, but they didn't have any on history of non native peoples in the areas. So they hired me to be their historian. And they sent me around to places all around California and Nevada to do projects on history, local history that were part of these EIR documents. And the first place they sent me was to Owens Valley, California. And Owens Valley, California is just this motherload of the American west in terms of an historian wanting to acquaint himself with issues. There's settler colonialism there and conflicts and cooperation between natives and non natives. It's the place where the city of Los Angeles gets its water supply in the early 20th century and then in the 1940s, it's a place where Japanese and Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. So all these major themes of the modern American west all play out in Owens Valley. And that was my first place to go study as a, as a while doing paid research. And it just opened my eyes to the west. And I never really looked back after that.
- [04:29]
Steven Hausman
And I'm also curious how you got involved in this particular book series. As I mentioned in my intro, Mobilized American west is part of this pretty long running, pretty expansive series by the University of Nebraska Press called History of the American West. It's this, you know, very highly lauded series written by excellent scholars. And I'm always interested when talking to writers who are writing as part of these big series, how you even go about doing this. How did you get involved in this series? And what made you want to write this kind of big synthetic text like this? And where do you even begin writing a book like this?
- [05:04]
John Finley
Well, the first answer is, how did I get involved in the series? I didn't know better. So there was a part of my career.
- [05:13]
Steven Hausman
A happy accident.
- [05:14]
John Finley
Well, there's a part of my career where I said yes to everything. Yes to writing this book, yes to being chair, yes to editing a journal, yes to running a Northwest Studies, Northwest History Center. And I just said yes to everything. And it turned out I couldn't deliver all those things I said yes to on time. I did deliver them eventually, but it took a long time. So this was a book that I agreed to before I really thought much about it. I agreed to it at the sort of heyday of the new Western history in the 1980s and 1990s. It was clear that there was a lot of good stuff coming out. Most of my work was on the 20th century west. And the 20th century west really hadn't been hashed through. There's not a sort of standard interpretation of the region that I'm fighting against in the book. So I thought, when asked, would you like to provide the synthesis, I thought, this is a job that needs to be done for this part of the region's history. This latter part of the history. It tends to peter out in Western text. The subject sort of just sort of withers away. And a lot of people would argue or have argued that the west became less distinct. That really it wasn't so much as a place for a region. I'm sorry, there wasn't much place for the region after World War II. That had pretty much been absorbed into the rest of the country or something like that. And I thought, well, there has been some absorption, but I think there has also been some ways that the west has remained distinctive and, in fact, has gone from being sort of a backwater without much influence to being a place that has a lot of influence over the rest of the country. And the rest of the country got, in some ways, got Westernized after World War II. So I thought that was an interesting problem to think about and work out. And fortunately, I took a couple decades to think about it and work it out. And through all that time teaching and interacting with students and learning about new scholarship and so on. And I was happy that I set myself the problem. So that was. I'm delighted to have done it, but I didn't know what I was getting into when I started it and I appreciate the people. The people showed me so much patience to finish it.
- [07:17]
Steven Hausman
Well. Oh, sorry, yeah, keep going. I was just going to ask again. You know, so it's this very long term process. So I mean, the field changes so much over the course of, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. So I'm just. I'm just so curious about how you went about actually researching it and then finding the time and the wherewithal to actually write the thing.
- [07:35]
John Finley
Well, yeah, so in a way, the problem is how do you decide what to put in and what not to put in? How do you decide what goes in this project and what doesn't? And I made a number of decisions about what the book wouldn't be. It was not going to be a textbook. I think textbooks really are great. I really, by having them available to the scientist students, but they tend to be comprehensive and they want to touch every base. And I didn't want a book like that. I didn't want one that was encyclopedic. I wanted one that had an interpretive narrative, an argument that was based on synthesis, but could hop around from place to place in the west, from example to example, and not expect to cover all of them. Not expect to cover every federal agency, not expect to cover every state equally or every decade equally. So it's impressionistic, it's very much interpretive. And it's also guided by the idea that I think the west is still an important region for discussion in the 20th century. We shouldn't overestimate the power of the west to be influential. I'm not ternaryan in the 20th century. I don't want to argue that the west was tremendously distinct or radically different or not sort of a part of a larger nation. It was all those things, but I decided what it wasn't and that helped me. So I tried to find a way to talk about things that did make the region distinctive. And we can talk about some of those ideas a little bit later. But one thing I'm always looking for is how's the west different? Not radically different, but somewhat different in some cases. And what do we make of that difference? Another thing is to sort of define, well, what is the west itself, right? So so much I'm defining what's not in the book, it's not an encyclopedia. But also I'm saying what is the west itself? How do we define that? Previous authors in the series, that is the authors of volumes before mine, just say, I'm working on the Trans Mississippi west and leave it at that they tend not to think much or write much about Hawaii or Alaska. Their main focus is the Trans Mississippi West. So they include South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. I basically see that tier of states as a Midwest or something different. I dip into it, but I don't cover it sort of as thoroughly as I cover the rest of the Pacific and Mountain states, including Hawaii and Alaska. So I'll make a decision that way too, to sort of what gets thrown in and what gets thrown out. So those are some of the ways I tried to narrow down the story. I wanted to see if the west was distinctive and how it was distinctive. I didn't want to be encyclopedic. I wanted to have the freedom to sort of build a narrative that was interpretation without trying to touch every base like a textbook might do. So that was my thinking that went into it.
- [10:43]
Steven Hausman
Well, let's get into the story of the west in this era a bit. And you begin the book by laying out the arc that you just described a moment ago, saying, Between 1940 and the start of the 21st century, the American west goes from being this kind of backwater region of the United States to, by the time we get to the start of the next century, this region that's capable of influencing not just the rest of the country itself, but really the rest of the world. So let's start at the beginning of that story. Can you give us something of like a thumbnail sketch of what the west is like in 1940? Who lives there? How numerous are the people that live there? How do they live? What kind of work do they do? And. And why was this region such a backwater in this era?
- [11:27]
John Finley
Well, so the west in 1940, the 13 states I'm looking at, included about 14 million people, and the population was more rural than urban. Only four of the. Well, only. Only a few of the states were actually more urban. And so it was pretty much a rural place. Its economy depended on extractive industry, logging, mining, fishing, farming, ranching. These industries had actually been in decline or at a kind of plateau since the end of World War I. And they're not a very sort of strong basis for a vibrant economy. Big corporations tend to have a lot of influence in these attractive industries, especially in the area of mining or logging and milling and so on. And those big corporations had a real heavy hand on the politics and the economy of the West. With such a low population, the west was not well represented in Congress. It couldn't get a lot of investment from the federal government for its Purposes of growth. And it was just kind of culturally a backwater, not really caught up to the rest of the country. There was an exception, and that was California with its major cities and its Hollywood productions. It already was becoming, in some ways, what geographers would call a cultural horror. But for the most part, the west was not fast paced. And whatever sort of progress it had made, of course, had been really undercut by the Great Depression. The Great Depression is before my story begins, but it's crucial to appreciate how the Great Depression just made all those extractive industries even worse. The Great Depression also results in a lot of media programs that began to sort of rebuild the west, partly through large infrastructure projects like dam construction and power lines and that kind of thing. So even before my starting point in 1940, the west is beginning to sort of get transformed by the Great Depression and the New Deal. And it's going to become moved in the direction of being less of a backwater. It's going to get more investment and more people to make it really transform it considerably.
- [13:47]
Steven Hausman
Let's talk about mobilization.
- [13:48]
John Finley
That.
- [13:49]
Steven Hausman
That mobilization that's so central to not just the book's title, but to the sort of central argument of the book itself. And of course, that mobilization is in reference to World War II, which is a conflict that's really going to have a tremendous impact in transforming and in shaping the 20th century American West. Can you talk a bit about the West's role in this war and how World War II goes so far toward changing the west in really fundamental ways?
- [14:15]
John Finley
Sure. So to sort of to fight the Second World War, the United States needed two fronts. It needed the Atlantic and the Pacific both. And it also needed to spread its defense plants, its testing areas, all around the country so that they couldn't be concentrated in one place that might be vulnerable to enemy attack. So the war just requires the United States to go to west as well as the east, across the Pacific as well as across the Atlantic. And it also requires the west to sort of make as much use. The people who are needed for war workers, they get recruited to go to these plants too. So there's this huge effort to sort of mobilize by preparing for war both in the Eastern states and in the Western states. And the west is going to get this massive influx of dollars for defense purposes, for research, for military bases. And a number of soldiers and sailors and war workers come to the west. And many like what they saw and decided to stay in the west or return to the west once they were done with the war. Experience the war was, I called it in the book, a huge solvent. It really gave people permission to leave their hometowns and look at other places. This is true for white people leaving the eastern states and going to the West Coast. It's true for native peoples, many who lead reservations, who go to war, work or actually enlist in the military. It's true for Hispanics or Latin America. Latinos and Latinas, many of whom are recruited by the from Mexico to work as laborers in the American west as braceros, just to meet the needs of the emergency. The federal government just transformed the region by massive investment and by massive recruitment of people to come there. And once they've come there, once they can experience living there, once they see it for themselves, they have permission to stay there or to come back after the war. There's a key thing though that happens that I want to emphasize. World War II by itself was short lived. It may not have seemed like a short lived to the people who lived through it, but the Nation demobilizes in 1946 and it sort of winds it down. But then in 1947, the nation remobilizes for the Cold War. And this is really a crucial fact because this experience of getting ready to defend ourselves, spending money, developing research, testing weapons, all that stuff that we had done During World War II, we're now going to do, and sometimes at an even enhanced level for the Cold War, which is not just for four or five years, but for four or five decades. So this mobilization, this preparation for war, it's not a short term thing. And by the time you get to the 60s, money spent on war is trickling out in all kinds of other places. So the federal government helps to build airports around the country. The federal government builds a system of freeways, in part motivated by the needs of defense, transportation. The federal government funds a lot of veterans, health care, college education and home buying through the GI Bill. All these things that are meant to be part of the warfare state become huge influences on the sort of domestic state after World War II and the Cold War. So there's this enhanced governmental role all across the society. And this really represents for the west huge investments, huge influxes of people. It goes from having 14 million people in 1940 to more than 62 million people in 2000. That's a fourfold jump. The whole country as a whole doubles the population. The west quadruples the population. So this dramatic difference and that difference in population plays out in politics, where there's more representation. It plays out in people buying homes, helping the boom in construction and the Depression pretty much is left behind. And the region is still. It moves forward in ways that no longer make it so backward. It still has corners that are of poverty, corners of inequality and suffering, but it's a whole different place from before the war.
- [18:37]
Steven Hausman
This is sort of my big takeaway from the book as well. I mean, you know, we talk about the 19th century American west, for instance, and talk about how you can't talk about that era in Western history without talking about the role of the military and the importance of the army in particular. And what I understood you're saying is that the 20th century American west is kind of a similar story. It looks different, of course, but that you can't understand this era without understanding defense spending and military mobilization as well.
- [19:01]
John Finley
Right. I think I'm making this story about the west, but the key thing is the American rise to globalism, the decision after World War II that the country's going to be involved around the world. It's going to fight a confrontation against communism globally, but it's also going to manage the currency. It's going to establish NATO. It does all these things in the name of being a superpower. And the west, in some ways, is just a segment of that. Rise to globalism, as Stephen Ambrose once called it, transforms all of American history, and often in ways that we just take for granted or don't stop and think about enough. But that's the key, and that's not located in the west, and it's not something Westerners can't control, but it certainly transforms the region.
- [19:54]
Steven Hausman
Throughout the book, you use your own family as an example of the type of person who is kind of coming to the west in this era, sort of the World War II and early cold War era. Can you tell us about Jack Finley and what his story explains about migration into the west and about the development especially of regional identity during this period?
- [20:18]
John Finley
Sure. So Jack Finley was my father. He grew up in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and in 1944, he joined the Army. Like a lot of his friends, he wanted to get into the action of World War II. And he graduated from high school, started college at University of Oklahoma and enrolled. Eventually, after a quarter of fumbling around, he joined the Army. And the army sent him to classes at University of Oklahoma until he was 18. When he turned 18, they sent him to basic training in Arkansas. And then they had to decide what to do with him. And he had qualified for a program that sort of was a way to sort of force feedback engineers and doctors into the military Personnel, and he was sent to Oregon State College in Corvallis, Oregon, to study engineering. He wanted to be a doctor. He knew that he wanted to be a doctor. So this wasn't exactly his first choice. But he was happy not to have to go to the front lines at that point. He's 18 years old, and he comes out to Corvallis, and he notices on the train trip out there how different the scenery is from Oklahoma. It's in the middle of the summer, and Oklahoma City has unbearable heat and no really good air conditioning. Here's a place that has summer weather, but it's mild. Moreover, there are these mountains, there's the ocean, there are these national parks that just don't have any equivalent. Back in Oklahoma. He's here at age 18 in Corvallis. And then by the middle of 1945, the war ends, and he's sent to Fort Lewis in Tacoma to train him to be a company clerk, to go to be part of occupying Europe after the war. So he sees not only Oregon, but also Washington. And he decides at age 19, 18 and 19, he's going to come back when the war is over and live there. Who would have thought that a kid age 18 makes that kind of commitment? But he does have this in mind, that he wants to go there. He's written about how wonderful the natural world is, the mountains, the rivers, the forests and so on. It's also different from Oklahoma. And he finishes his term of service in the military, goes back to school, finishes college and medical school in Oklahoma, marries my mother and tells her when he proposes to her that if she says yes, they're going to go live in Washington or Oregon. So she agrees to the deal, and by 1953, they moved to the Pacific Northwest, and they're living in Seattle. And they. I know about my father's experiences during the war because he sent a lot of letters back home to his mother and his grandmother. Well, the same thing happens once my mom and he get out here, living in Seattle. They begin sending letters again back to their. To my mother, to his mother and grandmother. And they're the same thing. They just revel in the nature, the fishing, the driving. My mother goes to the Pacific Ocean for the first time. They ski, they enjoy water sports. They do everything. And they just love the sort of natural world, even when it snows. My father, they go play horse around in the snow, and then he skis. And just everything about being in the outdoors is appealing to them because they just felt like they had opportunities there that they wouldn't have had in Oklahoma. I don't think Oklahoma was that bad. But he's growing up and getting resources to actually enjoy himself in certain ways. So a lot of this is new to him. But he just. He had a bunch of kids and he took us all camping, and he made a lot of the equipment himself. He was so committed to it. He just was. Really became a Westerner in his mind very early on. And that identity meant, in some ways, he wasn't in Oklahoma. And he had made a choice not to be in Oklahoma, but to be elsewhere. And that choice for him panned out. Now, a lot of people who came to the west didn't have that kind of choice, didn't have those resources. Again, I talked about Native Americans being able to leave the reservations during the war and afterwards. They didn't feel the same kind of choice that my father felt, in part because of termination and relocation policies by the federal government. Mexican Americans might think of the west as occupied land, the United States having taken it during the war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century. For them, the choice means something different. So I want to make it clear that not everybody had the same range of choices that my father had. Also, my father liked to tell his story in part because it sort of made himself the hero, right? He was the one who worked hard, went to medical school and could call the shots, could determine where he wanted to work because he had trained and had that, you know, was highly skilled. Not everybody was going to have the same resources. But also a lot of other people would have the kinds of spending on New Deal or on infrastructure or on education and GI Bill, kinds of things that made it possible to move west without a lot of economic risk. My father, when his business as a. As a family practitioner was slow, he could go down to Boeing and pick up some shifts helping care for Boeing workers so he could sort of let his small business as a doctor grow while also getting work at another. A big Cold War enterprise in the city of Seattle. So a lot of this wasn't just my dad's hard work. A lot of it was the whole nation sort of investing in the west in ways that wouldn't have been possible before, and him being able to benefit from those investments as a doctor and in other capacities.
- [25:39]
Steven Hausman
When we think about the social and the political and the cultural kind of upheavals and revolutions of the 1950s and especially 60s and early 70s, at least speaking for myself, I often think about Western places. I think about San Francisco and I think about Berkeley I think about, you know, Haight, Ashbury, things like that. But as you say in the book, the west and Westerners of all different kinds are playing really important roles in this era of change and social unrest and upheaval. Can you talk a bit about this? Maybe talk about how California is at the forefront of this. But also, if we zoom out, we see other stories at play as well.
- [26:17]
John Finley
Sure, sure. Thank you. It's a good question. My title for the book is the Mobilized American West. And as you pointed out, mobilization means, in part, preparing and engaging in warfare. But mobilization also means movement, demographic movement, and people moving to the West. Like my father and millions of others, that's a huge part of the story. The west is the destination for the latter 20th century, and huge waves of people come there and transform it in profound ways. So mobilization refers to warfare, fighting a war, engaging in war, and also refers to sort of movement of people, demographic movements. The third definition of mobilization I want sort of to apply to the region in this period is social and political movements of the kind you mentioned. In the 60s and 70s. The West, I argue, had more than its share of social and political movements. I trace these in large part through looking at different kinds of communities. I look at the experience of people who wanted to live in communes or experimental or utopian communities. I look at it. I look at, like you. Instead of within 12 miles of downtown San Francisco, you have a huge number of protest communities. The Haight Ashbury district, of course, the protests at San Francisco State College, often in support of Asian American activism. The Black Panthers coming out of West Oakland, the different kinds of protests and confrontation in Berkeley. The Red Power movement is part of this. And I would look at the occupation of Alcatraz and also a few years later, the occupation of Wounded Knee, another sort of Western protest, Western sort of confrontation. And all these are sort of part of this mobilizing people feeling in part because the west seems to offer them more opportunities or more support for the kind of activism they have in mind. The activism wasn't all radical, or it wasn't all sort of communard. The west is also the center for the growth of a conservative movement in the 60s and 70s. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan play huge roles in this and bring a sort of Western conservatism to politics that gains a lot of influence at the national level and produces Reagan both as the governor of California for eight years and then as president of the country for another eight years. So this California conservatism, sometimes emerging by using itself as a Foil against a lot of the protests of students and so on. Conservatism also emerges in the region and also has an influence on the nation. So I'd be careful to make sure that it's not just liberal progressive causes, but also libertarian and conservative causes that are part of these upheavals in this period.
- [29:15]
Steven Hausman
So I loved this book all the way through, but there was a chapter in the middle that kind of threw me for a loop. I mean, up until this point, it was following a pretty, you know, a fascinating but pretty kind of standard path through the narrative. And then we get to this chapter toward the middle, about the West's unique political culture, which was something I was not expecting at all, and that it really just kind of drew me in. I found it very fascinating. It was centered on these questions of things like direct democracy and the use of voter initiatives in particular. So I'm curious why you decided to devote so much of the book to this question of direct democracy and what are the roots of this particular and in many ways, kind of uniquely Western political mechanism and how it helps to shape Western politics in the 60s and 70s. I came away from the section of the book really firmly believing that, yeah, you got to understand this particular kind of form of politics in order to understand 20th century Western history. But can you talk a little bit more about it?
- [30:13]
John Finley
Sure. So I had sort of poked around the issue of initiatives, and I tend to, oh, there seem to be more. Seem to be more frequent in the American west than in the east and the Midwest and certainly in the South. And I didn't really know what to do with it. But fortunately there have been people who have sort of quantified, done studies quantifying these initiatives. And I began to look at that data more closely and just realizing how much the west was devoted or committed to these measures, as opposed to other parts of the country which are much less likely to sort of conduct their politics through initiatives. So I wanted to find a way to sort of. I thought, well, maybe this is something that, you know, needs to be discussed. But I still didn't think it'd be a major part of the book. But then it figured out. I figured, I decided, well, in addition to talking about how initiatives create a kind of political culture, I can also use the chapter to sort of look at different political issues that come before Westerners. Right. So in addition to talking about direct democracy as a mechanism for making decisions, I'm also able to go from 1940 to 2000 and say, well, in the 1940s, a lot of the initiatives concerned issues of labor and unionization. And then in the 1970s, 60s and 70s, a lot of initiatives dealt with environmental questions, including nuclear power and cleanup. And then there's some related to race and the English language. And then towards the end of the century, and then trickling into the 21st century, there's a strong movement in the west to legalize marijuana, first for medical uses and then for recreational use. So the chapter has these layers to it. On the one hand, I'm describing what the initiative is, how it works, trying to explain why Westerners adopt it more rigorously or more enthusiastically. But I'm also using the chapter to sort of. Here's the kind of overview of political issues that Westerners debated and decided and making it to sort of other things, political movements, social movements, and so on. So the chapter is operating at different levels. And yeah, so it's. There is a lot going on there, but I'm trying to. I told you I didn't want to write a textbook, but this gives me a chance to sort of do a survey of political history of the west without doing it in textbook form. The initiative is part of what's called direct democracy. And this. This comes out, comes about in the United States in the populist and progressive era in particular, beginning with the 1890s. And these populists and progressives are frustrated with how corporations control legislatures and important legislation can't get passed or won't be addressed. Direct democracy allows people to take government, including legislation, into their own hands. There are three measures associated with direct democracy. One is the recall, that is giving ourselves the power to vote somebody out who has been elected, but we want that person removed. The second is the referendum. That's where a legislature will pass a bill, but before it simply approves it and enacts it, it says we should refer this to the people for a vote. That's a referendum. The third is the statewide initiative where the people themselves propose a course of action or a piece of legislation without consulting or getting the approval of the legislature, just doing it themselves, often because the legislature won't do it. So these tools are invented or they're acquired or developed in the United states in the 1890s, in the progressive period, and at first are used a lot to discuss or debate issues of temperance and prohibition and also to modify elections. Some of the biggest users in this period are the Midwestern states, especially north and South Dakota. But those states tend to become less radical in the politics and more staid. And the usage declines from 1940 on though, five Western states are responsible for more than half of all the initiatives in the country. And the west just uses the statewide initiative much more commonly than other parts of the country do. One reason this is the case, I think, is that political parties here are weaker. Over and over again, instead of reviews of elections, political scientists say, well, Westerners, they're going to split their tickets or they're not going to vote with the party, they're going to vote more independently, or they're more enthusiastic about being independent rather than being members of parties, or they vote more frequently for independent candidates than other parts of the country do. So over and over again, the voting behavior of Westerners is distinctive. And having initiatives as a way to get legislation passed without necessarily having legislators approve it, that's another tool that Westerners adopt and use in a way that's much more distinctive or common here than other parts of the country. It's not without controversy. A lot of people complain about initiatives. They think that legislatures do a better job of compromising, of seeing different viewpoints. Initiatives tend to be yes or no. Either you prove it or you don't. There aren't often opportunities to compromise and that may be a problem. So people criticize these. But they're certainly entrenched in the American politics in the American west, not every state has them or not every state uses them very often. In Wyoming and Utah, there's a lot of they're part of the political structure, but they're very rarely used. In Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington and Oregon, they're very frequently used and become kind of like a fourth branch of government. Some people grow in at that, others make a lot of hay out of it. It's just they're just part of who we are.
- [36:05]
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- [37:00]
Steven Hausman
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- [37:06]
Steven Hausman
Another theme in American Western history in the second half of the 20th century, and yet another theme you can look at in many ways as a continuity from earlier periods as well, is the theme of violence. Specifically in the story that you tell. Armed Westerners taking political stances against what they perceive to be federal overreach or injustice of some kind. Could you maybe describe a couple different examples of this particular form of violence? Excuse me, violence. And why you think this version of violent political action has such a long tail, such a long pedigree in the region?
- [37:43]
John Finley
Yeah. So when I was writing the book, I sort of stood back and said, wait, wow, these people are really defying the government. They're really defying the government. And that defiance, something I wanted to sort of explore and explain. But as I read sometimes in History of the South, I read about white resistance to voting rights for blacks and so on. Well, not just the west is defined. Other parts of the country define it too. Be mindful of that. But how they defy what they defy over differs. In the west into the 1970s, some of the violent episodes that occur. Most of the violent episodes that occur, especially the ones I focus on in my book, have to do with disputes about land. The federal government owns more than half the land in the 13 Western states. In some places, it owns 88%, 90% of the land. And this makes it powerful and sometimes frightening for Westerners because there's so much power in government hands. Westerners depend on this land. I'm going to give you the example. I'll use the example of range cattle, but you could, you could say it. You could apply it to national forest sites for loggin. You could apply it to mines. A lot of the mines use federal land and so on. But I'm going to talk about ranchers and their cattle. Over the years, ranchers, they would acquire a ranch of private property, but they would always supplement that ranch with public acreage, usually leased to them by the Bureau of Land Management, the blm, but possibly through the Forest Service or some other entity. And so Westerners were used to using the public lands as if they were their own that belonged to the Westerners themselves. And this would be, it seems, okay. It's public land. We know it doesn't belong to you, but people have used it over generations as part of their ranch or part of their pasture for the cattle or for other wildlife, I'm sorry, ranch animals. So they become accustomed to using it and incorporating it into their own property, their own sort of ranch, and they see it as theirs. They may recognize that they don't own it, but they act like they own it and sometimes they make improvement on it. Plus again, these are attractive industries, often who live on a very narrow margin economically and they can't afford to have the land taken away from them or the land reduced in size, or they can't afford to have a number of conservation measure imposed on on them which will reduce the sort of quality of their pasture. So there's lots of tension, lots of opportunities for tensions as the west expands and as there's more and more sort of management of the land that had largely been unmanaged before. Where does management come from? Well, one place it comes from is the growing urban population. Urbanites like my father love the lands of the American west, but they don't see them as pasture or a source for logs. They want to go hiking them. They want the lands protected and preserved. They don't want them being overused by cattle or something like that. So the new urban population that begins to dominate the West, 84% of the population by the end of the century, they have their own views about how the land should be used, and they're pushing for more and more effective management and taking some of the lands out of economic activity, out of economic uses. There's also an environmental that begins to emerge and call for preservation or protection of lands that have been overused or are in danger of being overused. And together this sort of Western urbanites and the national environmentalists begin to reform or push for reforms in the way lands are managed. Lands are used in the American West. So this sets up all kinds of confrontations. As Westerners who are used to having these lands be part of their ranch or part of their livelihood in some way, they're finding that harder and harder to sustain. And they don't feel like they have the resources to go to court to fight against this. A lot of people who had advocated their interests in the Senate or Congress have been voted out or passed away. And the people who are champions of ranches are no longer so reliable to get special provisions in legislation to protect their interests. So a Number of sort of.
- [42:15]
Steven Hausman
Armed.
- [42:15]
John Finley
Confrontations occur around this. One early one that happens in 1943 is President Roosevelt declares a national monument at Jackson Hole. And he does it to sort of tie together the national parks of Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons by creating this national monument of Jackson Hole that's right between them and will allow, for example, wildlife to move from one part to the other without being hunted or without being run over on a road. Well, the ranchers of Jackson, Wyoming area protest this. For them, it's the taking of land. The Jackson Hole monument is in part created out of national forest land that they've been grazing their cattle on for a long time. So they take their cattle to the pasture area, and in defiance of the proclamation that it's a national monument, they turn the cattle loose there to feed there like they always had. And this is illegal. They're basically daring the federal government to intervene with them. They have weapons. I don't think anyone unholsters the weapons, but they have rifles on their horses as they move the cattle onto the. What used to be the range. So they defy the law. This is in the middle of World War II. And it's kind of amazing that Roosevelt decided to be so confrontational about the national monument in the middle of warfare. But it's also surprising that the citizens of Wyoming say, well, until this gets cleaned up, we're not going to buy war bonds. We're so mad at it, we're not going to support the war. It's almost unpatriotic, right? So there's this huge confrontation. It dies down eventually because after the war, Wyoming figures out how valuable national parks are to its economy going forward as it begins to embrace tourism. So the disagreement sort of disappears. But it takes a while. There are other kind of confrontations. There's a guy named John Prather, P R a T H E R, who owns a ranch in Mexico that's right along the White Sands missile range. And he's had a number of sort of run ins with the people who run the missile range. This is 1947, 48, 1950s. The missile range tests a lot of missiles. And the missiles get bigger and better. And as they get bigger and better, they go farther, sometimes actually going into Mexico itself, which is not a good neighborly thing. And so the army and now the Air Force wants to expand the size of the missile range to accommodate bigger and bigger missiles. That means taking away property that John Prather had been using for years and years in his family. So the government goes through all the processes of eminent domain and sends marshals out to John prather's property to seize the land, to condemn the land. Well, Prather's there with some buddies and they all have weapons and they say, we're not going to allow you to do this. This is our land. You can't do this. And the army basically blinks. It decides, okay, we don't want to confront this. We don't want to get in trouble for this. And it backs away and basically waits until he passes away and they have a chance to get the ranch for the property that they want for their missile range. Again, it's another episode. No shots are fired, but it's another chance where disputes over the land are really sort of intense. A third place is Alaska. Between 1959, when Alaska became a state, and 1980, there was a very slow process of taking the federal lands in Alaska and figuring out who they were going to be allocated to. And one thing that needed to be done was give some of them to the native peoples. That took a long time. And then the federal government wanted some of the lands for national parks, national monuments and other preserves. And it took a lot of them. And while this is happening, average white citizens in Alaska felt, what about us? We've been promised these lands and now it's taking two decades for us to get access to them. And when we do get access to them, there's a lot less to get access to because you protected it as a national park or something else, a national monument or wildlife area, something like this. So there's also then a confrontation in Alaska. In Alaska, there isn't a sort of armed standoff, but people who are protesting the use of these lands in Alaska might burn down a ranger station or burn down a ranger's plane. So there are acts of violence that aren't sort of don't involve guns, but there's still protests against what is perceived as the high handed federal government at root here. The problem was Alaskans saw the land as something that they ought to have primary access to or they ought to be the first beneficiaries. Their needs ought to be addressed first. But the legislation that creates a lot of these parks out of Alaska has the A N, I, L, C A and N I stands for national interest lands. So these are national interest lands. And the government says there's a broader interest in these Alaskan lands outside of Alaska itself. The other 49 states have a stake in this too. And we represent them as we try to decide what to do. With Alaska lands. And that's a source of frustration for the people living there who think that as the ones who have a livelihood dependent on the lands, they had to have first shot at them. Part of this is also tied up with the notion that people wanted to preserve this way of life. Logging or ranching, fishing. They wanted to preserve the way of life and have it be something they could pass along to their children or to other generations. So when there are protests against federal decisions about land use, a lot of the protest has to do with people losing sight of their way of life or afraid that that way of life is going to go by the boards, and they fight to try to protect it again, often with rifles. A lot of times, the rifles are meant more as visuals than as part of the actual confrontation. Most of these confrontations, there are no shots fired. There are some exceptions. One of the most violent confrontations has to do with with the lands on the reservation at Wounded Knee. When the Wounded Knee is occupied in 1973 there, the shots fired are extensive and both sides, natives and non natives, firing back and forth. There were several people killed and also paralyzed in that confrontation. In that case, the number of shots fired was enormous and lasted for months. The that issue of land. Yes, the native peoples are frustrated and angered by mismanagement of the lands by the federal government, but also there's a rift within the tribe itself about how the land should be used and who should get access to them and so on. So it's not just native peoples complaining about Indian land management, although there's a lot to complain about there. It's also native people disagreeing among themselves about what the proper uses of land are, and that also results in armed confrontation. So those are just some examples of how land created disputes. Now, you asked about white supremacy, and there are also white supremacists or white nationalists who emerged in the west mostly in the 1970s or after. There's a book by Kathleen Ballou called Bringing the War Home, and it highlights the growth of these white nationalists, Christian nationalists, white supremacist groups, especially after the end of the Vietnam War in 1974. 75. And these white nationalists aren't concerned about public lands. They have a different agenda. A lot of Nazis and neo Nazis in the United States were fascinated by the northwestern part of the continent. I'm thinking here about eastern Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, western Montana. These are places that, to a lot of white nationalists seem not heavily settled. And these people have a hope that by moving to these areas, they might be able to win office win in politics in places that, unlike other places, there aren't a lot of minorities in these places. And that's. But for this white nationalist, that's an advantage. That's a good thing. And also there aren't a lot of people who might vote against them. So white nationalists begin showing up in eastern Washington, at Hayden Lake in Idaho, and in other places in this area, committed to building their own kind of communes, their own kind of new kinds of community. But they commit a lot of crimes. Bank robberies, counterfeiting, some extremist groups get involved in murders and so on. And the story doesn't end well for the white nationalists. But the white nationalists don't go away. They stay behind. And in some cases, people who are white supremacists or white nationalists team up with people who are also protesting public lands issues. And this happens as well in some parts of the west at different points. So there are a number of armed confrontations. I've just emphasized the kind that emerged because of disputes over public land. And what they've seen is a set of federal arrogance or too much federal power over the lands. But some of the protests, some of the sort of violence has to do with white supremacy, too. That's not just a Western thing. But there are a strong current of white supremacy protests in the west, that's for sure. And that begins to evolve, especially after the 1970s.
- [51:36]
Steven Hausman
The idea of the west is also a central theme throughout Western history. I mean, you could even argue that that's one of the things that's drawing groups like neo Nazi groups into the west in the first place is this idea of what the west means, the meaning of this region. And part of that plays out through media, the genre of the Western, which also grows and matures throughout the period that you cover in the book, in film, and again in other media as well. So why do you think the Western genre, this kind of cultural idea of the west generally, why do you think it had such appeal in especially the middle decades of the 20th century? And what do you think is the future of this genre here in the early 21st century? Does it still have any kind of cultural cachet, do you think?
- [52:22]
John Finley
Those are good questions and tough questions. So I. Part of the. One of the things I'm really interested in this book is how Westerners think about themselves as Westerners. What does it mean to live in the west, to be of the West? And I try to hash that out, but I'm not altogether satisfied with what. What I found. I think Americans are fascinated with the west, they're fascinated with the cowboy, they're fascinated with Native American peoples. And the depth of those attachments or fascinations, I can't explain, I can't really grasp. I mean, it's a more powerful connection than I would say there ought to be. And I can't explain why. But, but in some ways the west has become synonymous with America in certain contexts. But at the same time, if you look carefully, people around the west are kind of doing the same thing people in the south are doing, right? People in the south are beginning to question some of the monuments to Confederacy, to Confederate leaders and to the so called war between the states. And they're recognizing, well, this, this might mean something that African Americans, that is insulting. And we should probably rethink, rethink having it up there. Westerners are doing some of that rethinking too. But they haven't overthrown the genre of the Western net either. It's still alive, but it's taken on new forms. So the high point of the Western genre in film probably runs from 1939 to 1969, a 30 year period. The genre that's featured in these films, it grows out of 19th century writing about the American west and especially the novel the Virginian, I think, published in 1902. There's a certain kind of formula that emerges about what the west means and how a Western is supposed to go and where it's supposed to be set, how it's supposed to take place, what the role of women is, what masculinity is supposed to, how it's supposed to be important. There's kind of a set of elements that get included in the Western genre. And it's very successful in the 1940s, 1950s, during World War II and the Cold War. And I think there's something about mobilization for war in those decades that helps sort of reinforce the appeal of the Western. The Western is often a confrontation between good and bad, between white and black. And it usually resolves the favor of white in favor of the good guys. And I think if you see the world in terms of us versus them, good versus evil, Americans versus Russians. Right. If you see the world as a binary place, the Western might be a nice way to kind of be entertained or an escape that isn't really an escape from that kind of thinking. So this genre exists. But like so much else about the west in the 1960s, the protests, the new way of thinking of things produces attack on the genre or in some cases strong efforts to remodel the genre Revise it. So the genre had been pretty racist towards native peoples over and over and over again. But by the late 60s, early 70s, there's a movement to sort of treat native peoples more fairly, to appreciate their perspectives, to use more native actors and writers and directors. And this begins to transform the western dramatically, having a whole different look at native peoples. The western had emphasized cattle, country, horses, cattle drives. But then a film like McCabe and Mrs. Miller said no. The western really was about industry and was about big corporations and it was about the little people sort of being squeezed out of opportunities as they emerged. So the Western genre begins to sort of become less appealing and people rework the formula to maybe make native peoples more prominent, point to understand the perspectives better or maybe to say, well, women weren't just silent types here. Women had active roles in the west too. Let's use the FEMOSTA to think more about women in the west, in the base. Let's look more at Hispanics, let's look more at African Americans. The genre becomes more multicultural. It also becomes sort of interplanetary. By that I mean the cowboys who used to feature in western genres go into space. Star wars and Star Trek are. Some are called space Westerns, right? And the cowboy takes on the new guys in a different context. So the genre kind of lives on in fragments or in pieces or in films that are more sort of outer space films. There's a phenomenon called post Westerns where films, usually about the modern west, often might incorporate fragments or bits and pieces of traditional Westerns into their, into their script. There's a number of ways where the genre is kind of kept on life support and kept alive. But something different is happening in the way that movies go after 1970 or the way that writing about the west goes after 1970. The Hollywood version of the west comes under sustained attack. Other writers, other filmmakers are part of that attack. In the 1980s, the so called new Western history emerges and adds to the attack. And the Hollywood version of the west is often the foil for these people. And so the genre isn't deceased, but it's much less prominent, much less influential than it used to be. The west is still important, but it's the terms on which it's going to be discussed. The west is going to treat different peoples, especially people who have been marginalized in earlier decades. It's going to be done quite differently. I should add, although the Western genre is changed, Western tourism is booming and reenactments, a tombstone, the national parks is a part of the Western experience. These are Things that are getting more and more attention all the time. So there's still a kind of interest in the west and the myths about the west and the place of the west, even if the genre itself has sort of been changed considerably.
- [58:45]
Steven Hausman
And you end the book with a point that you. That you made before in our conversation. You really underscore this idea that there really is never any post war American West. You make a point throughout the book to never really use the term post war because you're making a larger point that once the west mobilizes in the 1940s, then it never really demobilizes. Can you explain in a bit more depth what you mean by this and what it says about the American west and about the present and the future of the region?
- [59:15]
John Finley
The rise to globalism is now the new norm, right? We are engaged with the rest of the world in ways that we weren't in the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt worked hard to prod Americans to participate in World War II. Presidents don't work so hard anymore to get the people to sort of engage in conflict. And it might be a Cold War, which doesn't have a lot of shooting going on. It might be a hot war like in Vietnam or Korea, which were, of course, variations or themes in the Cold War. But Americans since 1939 have been mobilized, and it hasn't really stopped. So one reason I say this is to emphasize that it isn't just World War II. World War II is profoundly transformative, but without being backed up by four or five decades of the Cold War, the transformations wouldn't have been nearly so deep and lasting. The nation mobilizes not for four years, but for 50 years, 1939 to 1989, even a little bit beyond that, if you want. So it's five decades, not just five years of being engaged in warfare. And then even after the Cold War supposed ends, or whatever you want to call it, that is followed shortly by the War on Terror. So this engagement of Americans with the rest of the world is long term at a very high level. And the west continues to be affected by that, but so does the rest of the country and the rest of the world. It isn't a regional phenomenon, but it's certainly something that continues to affect the West. Also, by the time we get to year 2000 or 2001 or 2010, the benefits of defense spending have become so obvious in the West. So Silicon Valley in the Bay Area, that gets a lot of its early funding, a lot of its early sort of investment from the federal government seeking Basically miniaturization of components for missiles. That leads to microchips and to the computer industry. Boeing is heavily influenced by the manufacture of aircraft, and that comes in part from Boeing's role building bombers in World War II and building other kinds of aircraft for the military during the Cold War. So much of the west has part of the nuclear weapons complex. The nuclear weapons complex is also. There are also Eastern states that have a lot of it. But the west got more than its share, in part because Western sites seemed relatively empty and unsettled, and therefore better, perhaps, for some of the polluting activities that associate nuclear weapons work. And this nuclear weapons system is still here in large numbers. And also we're cleaning up the nuclear network in large numbers, too. So there's still a lot of investment, still a lot of activity around warfare. Some of it's, you know, some of the stuff being cleaned up is left over from World War II, but it's still radioactive. Other stuff is left over from manufacturing of nuclear weapons that we did last week. It's radioactive. We've got to deal with all of it. And this legacy of nuclear weapons isn't going to go away. It's going to be there for centuries. So in a sense, we'll be mobilized for a longer time than even my book suggests in the present version.
- [62:35]
Steven Hausman
And as we begin to wrap up here, I always like to ask my guests to reflect on the book from kind of a different perspective. So I'd ask you to put yourself in the position of someone who has read this book and is thinking back on it, is remembering it, say, five years hence, five years down the line, what would you hope that they remember or come away understanding from this book, thinking back on it from that kind of remove.
- [62:59]
John Finley
I guess my message is that regionalism still has a role to play in American history. It's a different role from before. And we need to think carefully about what region means. In doing regional history, we have to be careful to define the region. We need to say, this is what the west means, and this is what it means to this group of people. This is what it means to that group of people. What native people are going to think about it is different from, say, what Mormons in Utah think about it. During World War II, Japanese Americans on the west coast were mostly incarcerated. In Hawaii, most Japanese Americans were not incarcerated. How does this different experience from World War II? How did it send the groups in different directions once the war was over? So there's. I think region is still important in the later part of the 20th century. It's not the be all and end all. I'm not trying to be a Frederick Jackson Turner and have region explain everything, but I don't think regions should have disappeared from our interpretive tools either. That seems to me there's still reason to see them as still distinctive entities. I think also that when we talk about region, we've got to be prepared to sort of say, well, there's different regional systems. I'm looking at one that looks at east versus west or west versus Midwest, south and East. But there's another new regional alliance that's emerged, a regional system that's emerged and that's the sun built on the Frost Belt, some belt in the Rust Belt. Some people quibble about that or argue against it wholeheartedly. How could the Carolinas and California be part of the same region? But others have embraced it and said, this makes a lot of sense. And I'm going to write about the history of Phoenix. But the natural comparison points aren't Los Angeles and San Francisco. The natural comparison points are Charlotte, North Carolina, or Atlanta, Georgia. So people, there are different systems of regions out there, and we've got to think about which ones make sense for our particular projects and why they make sense or why they aren't useful and discard them if that's the case. So I think regionalism still deserves some attention, but I don't think it's the be all and end all for interpreting these 13 states.
- [65:21]
Steven Hausman
And then finally, I'm always interested in getting a preview of what my guests are working on next. I know that this book came out, I want to say, either this month or last month. So it's a very, very new book. But nonetheless, as you said, you've been working on it for something like 25, 30 years now. So I'm curious what you have been working on in the interim or what you have planned next. Give us a preview of what you're working on now.
- [65:45]
John Finley
I don't. So I retired. I'm recently an emeritus professor. I don't know that I have a book in mind. I have an article that's captivated my attention, and it's a Lewis and Clark piece. In 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the mouth of the Columbia river. And that was kind of the end of their trail coming west. And they needed to make a campsite. They needed to sort of build a fort where they would spend the winter. And they're sort of on the northern shore of the Columbia river talking about this one night. And Lewis and Clark, kind of consult every member of the party. What do you think about this? Where should we go? Have you gathered information? You know, how should we do this? And this episode of this conversation, this decision has been called an election or a vote. And I think the characterization is a little bit of an exaggeration. It's a little bit skewed. But I'm interested in finding out why that characterization was so popular, who it was popular among, and if there might be a better word other than vote or election to characterize what happened there on that evening on November 24, 1805. So it's kind of a Lewis and Clark piece that highlights historiography, but also investigates what really happened. And I'm trying to distinguish throughout the paper in the difference between what I call history, which is what you and I might try to do in our courses and in our research, and what I call heritage, which is a more popular, simplified version of history, still valuable in many ways, but different from history itself. So I'm looking at history versus heritage in the context of the election of 1805among Lewis and Clark's expedition.
- [67:25]
Steven Hausman
That's interesting. So not only are you going from the very recent past to the relatively much more distant past, but to me, it almost sounds also like you are. What you just described rhymes a bit with that chapter that I highlighted in Mobilized American west about this question of direct democracy and initiatives. And I see a little bit of connection there.
- [67:47]
John Finley
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't want to make too much of the connection.
- [67:58]
Steven Hausman
I won't make too much of it.
- [67:59]
John Finley
It is an advisory vote, in a way. It's an advisory vote, but it's a military expedition. The captains are outside U.S. borders. There's not really a. It's not like an official election with a registrar or anything like that. It's odd. People who champion this as an election note that not only did all the whites vote in the party, but so did York the slave and Sacagawea the Shoshone woman who was a teenager. So for the people who like this voting, it's this moment where Lewis and Clark look past American racism and sexism and permit a native woman and a black man, a black slave, to cast a ballot. I think that's a dubious claim to what actually happened. But there's a sense that somehow in 1805, these people were able to sort of provide voting rights for a woman and a slave that wouldn't be available for other women or blacks or former slaves who were decades hence. I just think that's a little bit of a stretch. So I'm trying to think about I don't want to puncture everyone's balloon. It may be a happy moment where we should appreciate the fact that the captains took the black man's and the native woman's thoughts and recorded them, but I don't think it's a moment of enlightenment or enfranchisement. And I also think if you make it into this big voting rights opportunity, you're distracting attention from the real struggle for voting rights which went on for centuries and in fact, it's still going on. This is not the same as, you know, Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King pressing for voting rights. This is something different, I think. So I try not to go too far towards the modern era with it.
- [69:43]
Steven Hausman
Well, I anxiously look forward to reading this article whenever and wherever it happens to come out. Thank you for giving us that preview.
- [69:50]
John Finley
Give me another 20 years and I'll get it out.
- [69:53]
Steven Hausman
All right, I'll wait. I'll mark my calendar. John Finley is professor emeritus of history at the University of Washington and is the author of the book Brand New Book, the mobilized American West 1940-2000, which came out just this summer with the University of Nebraska Press as the latest volume in their lauded History of the American west series. Thank you so much for joining me today, John.
- [70:18]
John Finley
It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.