Mexico’s proximity distinguished Mexican communities from other immigrant communities in the American West. When Mexico ceded the territory to the United States, many Latino families were divided, and there was regular movement back and forth across the untended border. The border did not stop movement; it invited crossings. A typical Mexican farmworker of the early twentieth century might follow the harvest cycle through the irrigated fields of the Southwest, then return to his Mexican village for the winter. A cross-border migration pattern was the preference of many workers and employers alike. Early in the century, an inspector interviewing Mexicans at the border found that 69 percent had been to the United States at least once before. During the mass exodus of the Mexican Revolution, however, thousands of families decided to settle permanently in the United States. They founded new colonias in the dozens of farm towns servicing the intensive agricultural districts—usually on the rough side of the tracks, often on the site of former Chinatowns, abandoned during earlier bouts of vigilante violence. Newcomers headed for tenemos familias, places where extended family or former neighbors resided; colonias often had strong links with one or two villages back home. These allegiances influenced the immigrants’ worldview. Instead of seeing themselves as members of a region (the American West) or a nation (the United States or Mexico), the migrants perceived a borderland that transcended regions and borders. Anticipating the globalized linkages that would define the postregional, postmodern West, Mexican migrants spied a world sin fronteras—without borders.49
Growers were fond of assuring themselves that this pattern of continued loyalty to Mexico operated in their favor. As a spokesman for California growers put it, the Mexican was “a ‘homer’—like a pigeon, he goes back to roost.” Another grower condescended that “the Mexican likes the sunshine against an adobe wall and a few tortillas, and in the off season he drifts across the border where he may have these things.” In other words, the border made Mexicans pliable peasants, grateful for the employment that growers provided, unlikely to cause labor trouble. Mexicans did remain loyal to the country of their birth. They had one of the lowest rates of naturalization of any group in American history. But equating this ambivalence about citizenship with docility was foolish thinking. Consider how one immigrant responded when asked whether he planned to become an American citizen: “I would rather cut my throat before changing my Mexican nationality. I am only waiting until conditions get better, until there is absolute peace before I go back.” Not the words of a quiescent man. For many Mexican immigrants, memories of the native land included traditions of militancy. Parents taught children to admire grandfathers who had fought with Benito Juárez, fathers who had stood with Emiliano Zapata, mothers who had been soldaderas in the army of Pancho Villa. Far from apolitical simpletons, most migrants came from those areas where the Mexican Revolution had been most intensely argued and fought, and many had participated in peasant rebellions and union struggles.50
Working conditions in the fields and orchards of the Southwest provoked and tested these traditions. “The growers considered us slaves,” remembered one migrant Mexican worker; they “treated the horses and cows better than the farm workers. At least they had shelter, but we lived under the trees.” According to a report of the California Department of Immigration and Housing, most migrant farmworkers were forced to provide their own accommodations; some had their own tents, but others “fix[ed] a rude shelter from the limbs of trees.” Grower-owned labor camps were little better. California investigators found “filth, squalor, and entire absence of sanitation.” To make matters worse, the wages of farmworkers began to fall in the mid-1920s and kept falling during the Depression years. In 1935 a typical migrant worker earned only $280 per year (the equivalent of about $4,800 today). Mexican farmworkers responded by organizing unions and battling growers for better working conditions and higher wages. “We would have starved working,” declared one organizer, “so we decided to starve striking.”51
Mexican cotton pickers on strike in California’s San Joaquin valley, 1933. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Historians have documented 160 major farm-labor strikes in California alone during the 1930s, most of them featuring Mexican workers and organizers. High tide came in 1933, when growers were hit with 37 strikes involving forty-eight thousand workers and affecting two-thirds of the state’s agricultural production. In the words of Carey McWilliams, who served as chief investigator for California’s Department of Immigration and Housing in the late 1930s, these strikes were “the most extensive in the farm labor history of California and the United States; in scale, number, and value of crops affected, they were quite without precedent.” Organized by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, the actions began in April among pea pickers in the Bay Area, spread in June to the berry fields of southern California and in late summer to the fruit orchards and vineyards of the Central Valley, and concluded with a massive strike of fifteen thousand cotton pickers in the southern San Joaquin valley in October. Forcibly evicted from grower-owned camps, strikers set up their own makeshift communities on unoccupied land, including a huge tent city housing three thousand near the dusty valley town of Corcoran. A traveling troupe of Mexican actors known as Circo Azteca raised a platform near the center of camp and staged reenactments of radical events from Mexican and American history. Many of the strike organizers were veterans of the Mexican Revolution.52
These attachments to Mexico could inspire, but revolutionary memories and symbols paled next to the allies the growers could recruit. When the 1933 strikes were broken, as all eventually were, it was not because of the absence of worker resolve, for there was plenty of that, nor because of grower violence, although there was plenty of that, too, including three strikers shot dead and many more wounded during the cotton strike. No, most strikes were ended by the intervention of Mexican consular officials who arranged meager deals with growers under the assumption that the Mexican state represented the interests of Mexican migrants. Union organizers were infuriated by this violation of the principle of solidarity, but the Mexican government had decided that the continuation of these strikes was not in Mexico’s national interests. “The Mexican consul played a major role in California’s labor struggles in the 1930s,” writes historian Gilbert G. González, “providing a prominent bulwark against working class radicalism.” Stuck between states, Mexican laborers pondered various futures. Some would remain borderlanders, pioneers of the great muddled ground on the edges of nations, while others considered the implications of becoming Mexican Americans and joining the panoply of communities that made the modern West work.53
FURTHER READING
John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986)
Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (2002)
Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (1997)
Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900–1950 (1994)
Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (2001)
Robert V. Hine, Community on the American Frontier: Separate but Not Alone (1980)
Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (2008)
Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 (1993); City Girls: Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (2014)
T. Scott Miyakawa, Protestants and Pioneers: Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier (1964)
Sandra L. Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800–1915 (1994)
Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and the U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (2004)
Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (1976)
Devra Weber, Dark Sweat, White Gold: Cal
ifornia Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (1994)
9
The Urban Frontier
For most Americans, spaciousness defines the West. How else would pioneers advance, buffalos and antelopes roam, and tumbleweeds tumble? These are not activities performed in close quarters. In a memorable 1893 essay, historian Frederick Jackson Turner articulated a unique American need for elbow room. The settlement of an “area of free land,” he wrote, was “the really American part of our history.” Turner’s thesis proved as durable and free-ranging as a tumbleweed. But only six years after his star turn, another historian, Adna Weber of Columbia University, published a study that challenged Turner’s ruling assumption. “In the Western states a larger percentage of the people dwell in cities,” Weber demonstrated, “than in any other part of the nation except the North Atlantic states.” The West was more urban than rural. Instead of a free space or a throwback region defined by uninhabited wilderness, the West represented the cutting edge of an industrializing nation.1
You would not know this from many of the histories written about the region. Weber’s thesis sunk into obscurity as Turner’s rose to orthodoxy. It didn’t take a statistician to see that the twentieth-century West was increasingly urban and included the fastest-growing cities in the country, but this fact was taken as confirmation of Turner’s assertion that the “close of the frontier” at the end of the nineteenth century marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. The modern West might be urban, but westering had been predominantly rural, and nearly all of the history written under the influence of the frontier thesis echoed this belief.
In fact, cities had always been central players in westward expansion. Eyewitnesses said as much. “Without transition you pass from a wilderness into the streets of a city, from the wildest scenes of the most smiling pictures of civilized life,” remarked the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville after traveling through the trans-Appalachian West in the early 1830s. “Here it is not uncommon to have large cities spring up in a few years,” a Scots farmer in Illinois wrote to his family. The urban quality of colonization intensified in the trans-Mississippi West, where the aridity dictated a low density of rural population and the extractive economy encouraged the development of industrial urban centers. In the modern West, bustling cities provided a roadside sobriety checkpoint to writing under the sway of the frontier thesis. It took some serious mind alterations not to see the metropolitan character of living in what would become the most urban region of the United States.2
. . .
Americans’ first interior cities grew like fruits near the river branches that flowed into the main trunk, the Mississippi River. Town builders platted Lexington and Louisville in Kentucky during the American Revolution, years before the great postwar migration that filled the Ohio valley with Americans. Even as American armies continued to battle the confederated Indian tribes for control of the region, eastern developers laid out the town of Cincinnati as the administrative capital of the Old Northwest. In the Old Southwest, the entrepôts of Nashville, Natchez, and Memphis gathered plantation crops for marketing and shipment. They also provided a place for western grandees and granddames to display their wealth in mansions, carriages, slaves, and hoopskirts.
These incipient western cities were ruthless competitors for the trade of the extensive agricultural hinterlands of the Mississippi valley. Urban merchants sought to capture the business of thousands of farmers who were moving beyond subsistence and devoting more and more of their time and energy to the production of a “surplus” for market. What historian Richard Wade calls “urban imperialism”—the constant competition among towns for new rural markets—stimulated the expansion of commercial and industrial enterprises.3
Cincinnati won the early rounds for western urban supremacy. Founded in 1789, the Ohio River town had become a market center by 1800. “I could scarcely believe my own eyes,” a visitor from New Jersey wrote home, “to see the number of people and wagons and saddle horses and the quantities of meat, flour, corn, fish, fowl, and sauce [preserves and jams] of all kinds that were offered and actually sold.” Bread and jam, however, didn’t turn Cincinnati into a regional power: steamboats did. Henry M. Shreve, a Pittsburgh keelboat captain, launched the Washington, a double-deck, shallow-hull side-wheeler able to carry heavy cargoes in the relatively shallow waters of the upper Ohio. Taking advantage of its location at the center of the nineteenth-century corn belt, Cincinnati’s merchants concentrated on the slaughter and packing of pork (“corn on four legs”) for shipment downriver to New Orleans, from where it was distributed to butchers along the Atlantic coast. Lard they exported by the hundredweight for use as cooking fat in the Caribbean and South America. By the late 1820s, Cincinnatians squealed with delight at their status as the nation’s unrivaled meat-packing champion. Boosters crowned it the “Queen City” of the West while locals, less regally but more to the point, called it “Porkopolis.” Pork packers contracted for hogs not only in Ohio and Indiana but deep into Kentucky and far down the Ohio River, stealing business from Lexington and Louisville, and by the 1840s the butcher sheds were processing an estimated four hundred thousand hogs a year.4
Cincinnati on the Ohio River. Lithograph by Otto Onken, c. 1850. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
From the mountains of slaughterhouse refuse, enterprising capitalists created new industries—producing leather, brushes, glue, soap, and chemicals—and on this economic base Cincinnati rose to become the first industrial city west of the Appalachians. At midcentury some twenty thousand workers manufactured clothing, furniture, building materials, and cooking stoves, as well as such capital goods as steam engines and mills. “The city’s smokestacks,” writes historian Carl Abbott, “emitted a perpetual blanket of smoke as dense and black as that over the mill towns of England.” Cincinnati produced culture alongside smog. Numerous academies and “commercial colleges” sprang up. Scholars and everyday readers could peruse the scores of magazines, dozens of newspapers, and hundreds of books printed by local publishing houses. A Cincinnati firm published the famous McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, the most common texts used in western schools during the nineteenth century. All this development came from the close relation of city and country. “The pride and support of Cincinnati is her rich and extensive backcountry,” wrote an editor of one of the city papers.5
While steamboats on the Ohio River kept Cincinnati’s economy churning, farther downriver another western metropolis drew people and goods. Founded by French traders from New Orleans in 1762, Saint Louis benefited from its strategic location at the junction of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. The town long served as the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, but it was lead—essential for ammunition—that accounted for the economic boom that produced a city. During the territorial period, Moses Austin and other businessmen opened a number of successful lead mines in eastern Missouri, giving the city its start in the business. When steamboats began operating on the Mississippi after the War of 1812, experienced lead traders from Saint Louis were able to seize control of the commerce of the mining district upriver at Galena, Illinois. Control of the nation’s lead trade enabled Saint Louis to free itself from the economic dominance of Cincinnati and establish its own hinterland along the Mississippi corridor north of the city. By 1830, according to Thomas Ford, who served a term as governor of Illinois, “nearly the whole trade of Illinois, Wisconsin, and the Upper Mississippi was concentrated at Saint Louis.”6
For every Saint Louis and Cincinnati, hundreds of would-be king and queen cities stumbled and fell. Consider Alton, Illinois, upstream and across the river from Saint Louis. Illinois leaders, chagrined to find the commerce of their lead district in the hands of Missourians, arranged for the state bank to finance a plan by Alton businessmen to recapture the trade. But Saint Louis merchants, leveraging their commercial dominance, were able to prevent their Alton competitors from chartering enough steamboats, driving them into bankruptcy
. Alton hung on as a second-class river town, but dozens of aspiring cities were ruined by competition. On a trip down the Ohio, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was startled by the number of forlorn and abandoned towns he saw. “Each had its hopes,” he wrote, “of becoming the great mart of the valley, and had built in accordant style its one or two tall brick city blocks, standing shabby-sided alone on the mud-slope to the bank, supported by a tavern, an old storehouse, and a few shanties. These mushroom cities mark only a night’s camping-place of civilization.” Capitalism moved, convincing people and places that they had arrived only to leave them slumped in the dark like fungi.7
The busy Mississippi River levee at Saint Louis. Photograph by Boehl and Koenig, c. 1875. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
. . .
Nineteenth-century Americans tossed around theories that explained why some cities succeeded while others failed. They cited geography, the urban “law of gravitation,” and the “immortal fires of civilization.” The urban theorists were accomplished back-casters. They looked to nature, history, and “Isothermal Zodiacs” to explain why destiny chose their hometown for greatness. But advantage could quickly turn to disadvantage, as western capitalists learned repeatedly that their future belonged, not to God or the stars, but to Wall Street and State Street bankers.8
Eastern control became clear during the mid-1850s, when Saint Louis was thrown into turmoil by the border war that broke out over the future of slavery in Kansas. Proslavery mobs threatened eastern merchants, and in 1856 several incoming shipments of goods were destroyed in a desperate search for rifles being sent to free-soil forces. These attacks were front-page news in the East. In a powerful series of editorials, William Cullen Bryant of the New York Post discouraged his readers from further investment in Saint Louis. “Men who have no regard for the rights of others,” he warned, “cannot be expected to pay their debts.” Frances Hunt, a Bostonian doing business in Saint Louis, admonished his local associates that unless the attacks ceased, the “source of their prosperity shall be cut off and driven to a northern route.” With the open hostility toward “Yankees” unabated, Hunt soon closed his doors and joined the flight of eastern businessmen from the city. Almost overnight the city’s economy collapsed.9
The American West Page 35
