Romancing the West in the Twentieth Century:
The Politics of History in a Contested Region

Albert L. Hurtado

This essay examines the political context of western history in western universities before World War II. Using examples from the universities of Texas, California, and Oklahoma, the author argues that political considerations influenced the work of western historians in a variety of ways. The essay also shows how fragile western universities were in their formative years.

In 1908, a well-known university man told his audience how he felt about the American West. "I have always noticed when the train passes North Platte coming west," he said, "that men stop wiping their necks at the edge of the collar . . . they begin to ask each other for a match, without reference to present condition of bank account or previous condition of servitude." These social changes seemed to accelerate as the train continued westward. "By the time we have passed Buffalo Bill's ranch, agriculture begins to yield to grazing, men sit on top of the horse instead of behind him, and the hat brims grow stiffer." "Who has ever shifted his life from one side of this frontier to the other without feeling he is in another world?" he asked rhetorically. Out West "the air is thinner, but the skin is thicker," he continued. "It has to be—a little. The sticks are thicker. And almost everybody carries one." The western atmosphere even invigorated men's cardiovascular function. "Hearts beat several times a minute more here than over yonder, but then there is more here for hearts to do than there." As the speaker warmed to his subject, he touched on the well-known tropes of frontier history, free men living on free land where they created a new society that was unencumbered by the restrictive customs of the East. Despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American Indians, Latinos, and Asians in the western United States, the speaker insisted that "only the people of the prairie schooners and their successors . . . really set their faces toward the West." 1 The West as a place and an idea about freedom, the speaker implied, was the invention of Anglo-Americans, and it was their inheritance alone.

1

Who was this lecturer who sounded so much like Frederick Jackson Turner or Theodore Roosevelt addressing the Denver Chamber of Commerce? He was Benjamin Ide Wheeler, president of the University of California. Wheeler was not a native westerner nor was he a historian of the West. He was born in Massachusetts, educated in New England preparatory academies, graduated from Brown University, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After earning his master's degree at Brown, he continued his graduate studies at Heidelberg University, where he received his Ph.D. summa cum laude. His special fields of interest were comparative philology and Greek. He taught briefly at Harvard, and settled into a distinguished career at Cornell University. In 1899, the University of California offered him the presidency, which he held until retirement in 1919. Wheeler is regarded as one of the University of California's great presidents. He is unquestionably the man who presided over that institution's initial rise to academic greatness. The honorary degrees conferred on him by Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, Columbia, and other universities were emblematic of the respect Wheeler enjoyed in academic circles.2

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