Uncle Sam to the Rescue

...Something the West's history does share with the East's is made abundantly clear in Empires in the Sun, as well as in other good regional and urban histories...

...Hoover Dam, note Wiley and Gottlieb, not only presaged a new energy and agricultural boom for the region...

...Too often it is opaque, convoluted, and overburdened to the point of short-circuiting...

...By 1890, when Howells published his novel, the myth of the American West was already secure...

...Wiley and Gottlieb's book stands in that same muckraking tradition of radical history...

...One gathers from the impressive and useful bibliography that the research has been thorough...

...They correctly note that this energy-defined concept usually obscures more than it illuminates and groups together towns and regions that have little in common...

...Empires in the Sun opens in Boulder City, Colorado, in September 1935, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicating Hoover Dam, the centerpiece of what was then the largest public works project in American history...

...A government-subsidized railroad now crosses this arid range, fueling the region's first interior development...

...If there has been any invisible hand at work here, it has been Uncle Sam's...

...An incident in 1966 is cited as an example of a trend of "the early sixties...

...Teddy Roosevelt had to form the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902 to stave off ruin and keep the boom-and-bust cycle rolling...

...Certainly it is a cherished myth: the lone cowboy, tall in the saddle, gun at his side, his Stetson-crowned silhouette riding toward the setting sun...

...But for those readers willing to put up with an occasional game of syntactical hide-and-seek, Empires in the Sun tells an important story about a region that continues to alter the configurations of American politics and capital...

...when the silver went, so did they...

...Nourished by dimestore romances throughout the Nineteenth Century, codified as historical doctrine by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, vivified by Hollywood throughout this century, the myth of the American West persists as one of the republic's most durable images...

...This has always been boom-and-bust country, and it always will be," proclaims a Phoenix booster in Empires in the Sun, an ambitious new history of the corporate West by Peter Wiley and Robert Gottlieb...

...Wiley and Gottlieb refreshingly avoid an overreliance on the Sunbelt formulation, an overworked concept employed by too many recent regional histories as a substitute for reporting and insight...

...A passage on a San Joaquin Valley water project raises as many questions as it answers...

...In a final chapter Wiley and Gottlieb examine the rise of enviromentalism and other grassroots activities...

...Tom Chaffin (Tom Chaffin is a free-lance writer in San Francisco...

...Lacking a strong two-party tradition and a secure resource base, the region's public life has often been given over to agents that have traditionally played only nominal roles in the East: ad hoc coalitions, get-rich-quick boomers, land syndicates, popular electoral initiatives, one-issue political movements...

...his fierce self-reliance and true grit speak for themselves as he carves out empires on land so rugged, dry, and godforsaken that no effete Easterner would touch it...

...They move on to draw the contours and history of specific Western power centers: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, and Las Vegas...

...With impressive breadth, Wiley and Gottlieb trace the origins of Western capitalism, the rise of the Six Companies consortium, and the growth of the West's modern corporate establishment—an operation decidedly more multinational and public sector-oriented than the men who stood beside President Roosevelt on that hot Colorado afternoon...

...It is the presentation that falters...

...The connection is this: Early on, the American West, like the East, reached the limits of its laissez-faire economy...

...The West has been eating chicken since 1849...

...The whole West would know what you mean...

...In a daring move, an obscure group of Western businessmen, short on capital and lacking influential ties in Washington, had won a major prize for the West, a prize that marked the beginning of the growth of a new kind of Western influence in national affairs and the rise of a resource-based Western capitalism...

...Heroic and self-reliant men and women did indeed contribute to the West's development, but it was the long arm of Uncle Sam that sustained them...

...Maybe the next bust will come when the water's gone...

...perhaps more significantly, its construction brought forth the "Six Companies" consortium, an ad hoc coalescing of regional concerns that created the West's first economy of scale and ushered in a new era of Washington-prodded growth...

...Massive public works programs provide the irrigation which nurtures settlement and agriculture...

...Still later in the Twentieth Century, Federal energy and military porkbarreling make for further price-fixing, behind-the-scenes deals and payoffs, massive raids on public resources...

...The true American existentialist, he strolls into town offering no resume...

...Samuel Bass Warner's The Private City, about Philadelphia, and Richard Wade's The Urban Frontier, about trans-Allegheny settlement, come to mind...

...You might call it 'The Lone Hand,' " the editor suggests...

...In the meantime, we'll eat the chicken today, and have the feathers tomorrow...

...The Forty-niners may have supplied their own incentive in the Mother Lode gold fields, but Uncle Sam's subsidized railroads soon became necessary to sustain the California boom...

...We found silver and built mining towns with opera houses, the works...

...Similarly, private water concerns were the first to irrigate California, but growing agricultural needs soon outstripped the private sector's resource base...

...More often than not, Washington has been picking up the tab...

...Their pursuits in heavy industry and construction would lay the foundation for today's West...

...Elsewhere, they deal with the role of Mexican labor in the Western boom and with the way government-imposed Indian tribal councils smoothed the way for extractive industries to move onto tribal lands...

...But where McWilliams's writing was lively and anecdotal, the writing in Empires in the Sun is at best workmanlike...

...Like the West's geology and weather, there has always been something unsettled about the region's politics and business...

...Gathered around Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes were representatives of a new breed of Western businessmen—the Bechtels, the Harrimans, the Eccles...

...Empires in the Sun retraces and updates much of the ground covered by Carey McWilliams more than thirty years ago in his various histories of California...

...Upon closer inspection, this West fades like a Mojave mirage...

...Maps are conspicuously lacking...

...A few examples that more careful writing and editing could have avoided: No date is given for a key anecdote that opens one chapter...

...Early in A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells's novel about the publishing industry, there is a conversation between a publisher and an editor of a new magazine who are looking for a title that will evoke the spirit of independence they hope will characterize their enterprise...