A POWERFUL TALE OF IMPERIALISM AT HOME
Hasseitine, William B.
A Powerful Tale Of Imperialism At Home MONTANA, HIGH, WIDE, AND HANDSOME, by Joseph Kinsey Howard. Yale University Press. $3. Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine THE Pulitzer Prize for drama last...
...Then, to complete the destruction, the Federal Reserve System began to squeeze the Liberty Bonds, the surplus crops, and the margin of credit from the state...
...MEANWHILE the hand of the Federal Government fell heavy on Montana...
...In the grazing country, owners of Texas cattle overgrazed the range, fought Indians and rustlers, produced a "beef rush" that paralleled the gold rush, and finally succumbed before the fierce and unpredictable weather...
...Montana, High, Wide, and Handsome is not only regional history at its best...
...Only a cynic, however, would suspect the Pulitzer Committee, whose conservatism has.often been remarked, of trying to erase some of the memory of more recent Oklahoma history...
...It is a record of exploitation and bungling...
...In fact, it's required reading for all those who would lay aside super-mannish dreams of global glamour and settle down to an understanding of what has been happening in Montana, and the Dakotas, and Oklahoma, and the other waste places of the land...
...The other heroes are those men, who, late in the 1930's, began to organize cooperative grazing and farming experiments based on their own experience and on scientific knowledge...
...THE answer comes—not so strangely—from Montana...
...crumble as the whitened buffalo bones bad done...
...For Montana, says Joseph Kinsey Howard in one of the most penetrating and inspired books in a blue moon, is an "object lesson in American domestic imperialism...
...Then Jim Hill and the homestead law brought thousands of "honyockers"—the Joads—in to plow the soil —to turn it, as the old Indian said, "wrong side up...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine THE Pulitzer Prize for drama last year went to Oklahoma, which, as a musical comedy, was not quite what old Joe Pulitzer had in mind when he set up the award...
...You're doin' fine, Oklahoma— Oklahoma's O.K...
...Not for years would the farmers learn the combination of Summer fallow and strip planting that would produce the world's finest wheat...
...They, too, fell before the Winter's blizzards and the Summer's droughts—but they had stirred up the soil, and the dry winds whipped it away...
...Significantly, the planned improvements have come from the region—not from far-off bureaucrats...
...Montana, High, Wide, and Handsome is regional history at its best...
...Instead, the book tells what happened to a land that God designed for buffalos and a few Indians, but which was looted in succession by miners, stockmen, railroads, homesteaders, the Selective Service System, and the Federal Reserve Bank...
...Then the prospector and the gambler came in the gold rush and stayed to tunnel the copper veins in the "richest hill on earth...
...But there is hope, too, in the story...
...Before they were through, they fitted a copper collar around the neck of the state's government, stopped the development of other industries, and forged chains for the workers...
...of a land where the grapes of wrath were stored...
...And for a moment the audience can almost believe it's absolutely real—but then, when the curtain falls, there returns the memory of another Oklahoma, home of the Okies, of Muley, of Ma Joad...
...It is, indeed, the national social crisis in miniature...
...Then came the hunter, killing for sport, or, more often, for hides, and the buffalo was gone...
...What happened to Oklahoma between the time when Gurley took Laurie home in the fringed-top surrey and the day when the Joads pointed the radiator of their untrustworthy, truck toward a western hope...
...The draft act of World War I took 2 per cent more men from the state in proportion to population than from any other state —and 26 per cent more Montanans were killed...
...Nor is there here that prepossession with recounting the crosses on battlefields or the double crosses of political campaigns that dulls the story told by the professional historians...
...Montana has packed a lot of history into 60 years, and author Howard tells the tale of frontier bad-men, miners, cowboys, homesteaders, Indians, politicians, and promoters with frankness, gusto, and sympathetic humor...
...It is a critique of plans made and implemented by distant theorists who knew nothing of local conditions...
...Montana is a "subject colony" to eastern exploiters, and "its story is that of the national social crisis in miniature...
...And, not to be academic about it, it's good reading as well...
...He proposed, instead, a cooperative society of men who know their responsibilities to the soff...
...The scene of the "drama" is laid in the Oklahoma of 1900, and in the second act the entire cast peals out a rousing pean to the land: "For we belong to the land And the land we belong to is grand...
...Here is no antiquarian quest for the curious incidents, the silly "firsts," or the minutiae that makes dead so much of local history...
...In the beginning there was grass which fed the buffalo and the frugal Indian...
...Banks failed—191 of them in the '20's—and men's hopes began to...
...There are heroes in it One of them was John Wesley Powell of the U. S. Geological Survey who studied the land and the climate and warned—in 1878—that the homestead law could not be applied to the arid regions...
...It's sociology, economics, and ecology at their best, too...
Vol. 8 • June 1944 • No. 25
