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Reviews
The American West in 2000:Essays in Honor of Gerald D. Nash
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Edited by Richard W. Etulain and Ferenc M. Szasz
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University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2003. Tables, notes, index. 216 pages. $29.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Richard S. Kirkendall
University of Washington, Seattle
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| This important contribution to the history of the American West is divided into two major parts. Part 1, the largest, offers nine essays on various topics. Part 2 focuses on the work of Gerald Nash and portrays him as the leading historian of the twentieth-century American West. |
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Margaret Connell-Szasz opens part 1 with a fascinating study in comparative history that links two groups of people: Native Americans and the Celts of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Each was subordinate to another group, each sought and obtained a degree of sovereignty in the late twentieth century, and each promoted a cultural renaissance. |
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The next two essays focus on agencies of the federal government. Writing about the National Park Service, Arthur R. Gomez concludes that it "must impose restrictions on visitations, noise and air pollution, vehicular traffic, and recreational modalities if the cultural and natural treasures of this nation are to remain intact for future generations" (p. 47). Donald J. Pisani proposes that the history of the Bureau of Reclamation since World War II can be divided into two periods. The first, dominated by dam-building, was influenced by "a postwar idealism that sought to revive the New Deal of the 1930s and win the Cold War against the Soviet Union." This dominance gave way to an era of "severe criticism" in which public opinion turned against the Bureau and halted the building of high dams (p. 53). |
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Two historians follow with tales in which western women played major roles. Margaret Bell Chambers argues that most male legislators opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and that, following its defeat, the women's movement stepped up efforts to elect women and enjoyed great success in the West. In doing so, activist women of the West "demonstrated that they too possess the pioneer spirit of independence and individualism" and "led the nation in women's political advancement toward the ... goal of equal justice and equal citizenship with men" (p. 83). Writing about another form of women's public activity, Carol Lynn MacGregor explores Boise's cultural life over the past half century and offers much support for her argument that the city is "in the midst of a wonderful cultural renaissance" (p. 103). |
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Next, Christopher J. Huggard writes about the mining industry's collision with environmentalists. He concludes that "the new ecological consciousness ... forced industry to rethink its practices" and that "ironically" a "more environmentally friendly technology, not the reversion to a pre-technological age,... will supersede the long-standing faith that the western world ... has in smokestack technology" (p. 123). |
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Ferenc M. Szasz emphasizes the great variety of religious groups in the West, the cooperation among them in the 1940s and 1950s, the decline of cooperation thereafter, and the need to revive it. The "religious dimension" of the modern West is of "utmost importance," he maintains, and the "cultural tranquility of the region depends largely on some form of general religious harmony" (p. 127). |
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Roger W. Lotchin, drawing on census reports, challenges negative views of western cities. He concludes that they are as "'livable' as any others in the United States." On this issue, Lotchin associates himself with Nash, writing that Nash "first put the idea of the positive western city on the map of twentieth-century western historians" (p. 161). |
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In the last essay in this part of the book, Gene M. Gressley promises to tell us what the West will be in the twenty-first century. His description of the West's major features includes expanded corporate power, globalization, environmentalism, water problems, and urban sprawl. The essay is learned, clever, and somewhat optimistic, but the crystal ball on which it relies seems rather cloudy. |
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The second part of the book emphasizes Nash's contributions to western history. In the introduction, Szasz praises his colleague's teaching and writing and offers evidence of his influence. Then the book turns to a brief but informative autobiographical sketch by Nash himself. It interests me greatly, for he and I entered the historical profession at the same time, I benefited from his work, and I came to regard him as one of the outstanding people working in recent U.S. political and economic history. |
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In the 1960s, I thought of Nash as a national, not a regional, historian, but in the book's final essay, Richard W. Etulain explains that his career took a highly significant turn soon after 1970. His pivotal work was The American West in the Twentieth Century (1973), which "established a new field in western history" and "provided the pioneering scholarly overview of the post-1900 American West" (p. 189). "No historian, before or since," Etulain insists, "has written a book that so shaped our thinking" about its subject (p. 190). A "Nash thesis" emerged in this book and was developed more fully in two books published in the 1980s on World War II and the West. According to Nash's thesis, the war "revolutionized" the region (p. 191). Examining all of his colleague's major works, Etulain boldly and clearly makes his case. "Until his death in 2000," he maintains, "Gerald Nash remained the most prolific and notable scholar on the post-1900 American West" (p. 186). |
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This essay suggests to me that the book might have been different. Instead of writing on several themes, the essayists could have focused on Nash's work and Etulain's interpretation. Each could have written about a major feature. That would have given the book unity, could have made it easier to read, and might have enlarged its impact. Something would have been lost, of course. We would have been deprived of essays that have their own virtues. |
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