This post stands aside from my previous reviews in that I have known the author, Jason Pierce, for almost 20 years since our undergraduate history days together at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. I always remember Jason as eager to push beyond the boundaries of existing scholarship into new ground in the fields of Western and environmental history. While I made a detour into librarianship, Jason went on into academia and earned his PhD in History at the University of Arkansas, where he studied under renowned Western historian Elliott West. Currently he teaches the history of the American West and Native American and environmental history at Angelo State University in Texas. It is a privilege to read and review his book Making the White Man's West, which is based on his doctoral dissertation. According to Pierce, the construction of white racial identity in the American West began in the early nineteenth century with the Louisiana Purchase. President Thomas Jefferson saw virtuous (white) yeoman farmers as the embodiment of democracy for the young republic in the West. Jefferson and others viewed the West as a racial "dumping ground" for Native Americans and even former African American slaves to separate them from white society east of the Mississippi River. (The dumping ground argument was later used during the Indian removal policies of the Jacksonian era). What surprised me is how many Federalist opponents of the Louisiana Purchase used race as justification for their arguments against Jefferson's acquisition. Many critics believed Louisiana's mixed population to be racially inferior who could not understand the nature of American republicanism. By the mid-nineteenth century, railroads like the Illinois Central recruited German and Scandinavian immigrants over the unruly Irish Catholic ones to settle the northern Great Plains because these Northern Europeans were seen as more white. By late century, the West was seen as a white man's refuge away from industrialization and waves of Southern and Eastern European immigrants on the East Coast. Pierce makes it clear that it was not just American westward expansion, but white American westward expansion. Pierce also argues that climate was related to white racial progress. White racial theorists believed that because Anglo-Saxons had learned to survive through struggle in climates neither too hot (such as Africa) or too cold (the Arctic), they were the strongest peoples. To whites, Mexicans in California were racially backward not only because they were a mixture of Spanish and Indians, but because they had been perverted by the region's's pleasant climate, which provided for all their needs with abundant fruit trees and other foods. During the late ninetieth century, writers like Charles Fletcher Lummis and Helen Hunt Jackson took a particular fondness toward Southern California, where they believed a benevolent climate existed that would not stifle white intellectual growth. Lummis used his magazine Land of Sunshine/Out West to promote and open Southern California to future white American settlement. This is one of many examples that stand out in the book. Making the White Man's West is an excellent, provocative historical analysis that will hopefully challenge readers' understanding of the history of the American West, as it did mine. The book's thesis covers almost every aspect of the nineteenth century West, including the California gold rush, the Mormon westward exodus to Utah, the expansion of the railroads, and ethnic violence against Hispanics and Chinese immigrants. The amount of research Pierce put into his dissertation/book is incredible. His research is very relevant to today's events, especially in the wake of white working class anger that elected Donald Trump to the White House. Pierce, Jason E. Making the White Man's West: Whiteness and the Creation of the American West. University Press of Colorado, 2016.
1 Comment
Michael White
2/15/2017 09:21:59 am
Tom good review, book sounds like a good scholarly read but read able unlike the Richard White's Middle Ground. Mythmakers of the West Shaping America's Imagination by John A. Murray is a enjoyable read that takes a popular cultures view of the same topic.
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