Select Published Articles
by Michael Cassity
I have listed below a handful of my historical articles that collectively illustrate the kinds of issues I value in my research, and, for that matter, that show why I think the study of history matters, or should matter. There is a lot to learn in the past but we have to ask the right questions if we are going to learn anything important or even useful. These show the kinds of questions I ask and that I encourage others to ask.
These articles are either not posted on the web or are posted in ways that require special, controlled access to the journals in which they appear. To encourage you to seek them in your local library or other collection, I am copying excerpts from each to help you get an idea of the content of the articles.
These articles are either not posted on the web or are posted in ways that require special, controlled access to the journals in which they appear. To encourage you to seek them in your local library or other collection, I am copying excerpts from each to help you get an idea of the content of the articles.
"The Past Forsaken: The Crisis of
an Oklahoma Community"
“The Past Forsaken: The Crisis of an Oklahoma Community,” Southwest Review, 61 (Autumn 1976), 396‑409.
One thing that I have noticed repeatedly in my examination of history is that in a political and economic system that responds to organized power, when sacrifice is made it tends to be made by people with the least power. That may be part of the lesson learned in the account developed in this essay. This piece is a personal favorite of mine partly because it focuses on a small town (Kaw City) near where I grew up, partly because it was published in a literary quarterly and not a historical journal, and partly because the message hits on a number of broad social issues.
One thing that I have noticed repeatedly in my examination of history is that in a political and economic system that responds to organized power, when sacrifice is made it tends to be made by people with the least power. That may be part of the lesson learned in the account developed in this essay. This piece is a personal favorite of mine partly because it focuses on a small town (Kaw City) near where I grew up, partly because it was published in a literary quarterly and not a historical journal, and partly because the message hits on a number of broad social issues.
Even on a small map of the United States you can see it. From its origins in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the Arkansas River proceeds in a direct course following the thirty-eighth parallel, veering slightly to the southeast until it reaches the Red Hills of Kansas. From there the river makes a sharp turn to the northeast beginning a vast, smooth arch with its northern limit at Great Bend, then curving down through Wichita and finally crossing into Oklahoma in a due south direction. But about fifteen miles into Oklahoma the course of the Arkansas changes dramatically. Instead of following a direct path or making a large bend, the river begins to wind back and forth, working its way around the rocky red hills of Oklahoma, creating a pattern that can only be likened to a writhing wounded snake or a rope held taut and then dropped into an area one-third its length, so that the course is marked by constant switchbacks and oxbows. Thus the river has gone for centuries. Thus it goes today.
High on the hill in the first oxbow and overlooking the river as it comes from the west, makes its bend, turns back to the west, and then heads toward the south, lies Grandview Cemetery. On that same hill, across the road from the cemetery, is Kaw City. It is by following this course of the river, by noting the sharp turns and loops it makes, that Kaw Citians have reckoned their location since the town was founded around the turn of the century.
Something looks wrong in Kaw City.
* * *
If you put together these two ways of looking at the episode by placing the priorities and values of this community within the context of the pattern of change in the past and the present, one further observation leaps out: These people hold a sense of what is right that conflicts with what is real. To live between the two, to internalize the tension between justice and reality and suffer, or to resist and find yourself completely powerless, is to have lived in Kaw City. To live in the present without forsaking the past is to know finally the pain and meaning of this experience.
High on the hill in the first oxbow and overlooking the river as it comes from the west, makes its bend, turns back to the west, and then heads toward the south, lies Grandview Cemetery. On that same hill, across the road from the cemetery, is Kaw City. It is by following this course of the river, by noting the sharp turns and loops it makes, that Kaw Citians have reckoned their location since the town was founded around the turn of the century.
Something looks wrong in Kaw City.
* * *
If you put together these two ways of looking at the episode by placing the priorities and values of this community within the context of the pattern of change in the past and the present, one further observation leaps out: These people hold a sense of what is right that conflicts with what is real. To live between the two, to internalize the tension between justice and reality and suffer, or to resist and find yourself completely powerless, is to have lived in Kaw City. To live in the present without forsaking the past is to know finally the pain and meaning of this experience.
“Modernization and Social Crisis”
“Modernization and Social Crisis: The Knights of Labor and a Midwest Community 1885‑1886,” Journal of American History, 66 (June 1979), 41‑61.
Don’t be misled or intimidated by the title of this essay. In fact, in this essay I try to take some of the mystery and aura out of a concept that needs to be exposed to the light of day more frequently. While some scholars—even some historians who have trouble defining the idea—view the process that modernization describes as an inevitable process (often calling it progress and thereby also dismissing the people opposed to it), this essay endeavors to show that popular resistance was substantial to the shifts in social and economic (and political) organization of society in the making of modern America.
Don’t be misled or intimidated by the title of this essay. In fact, in this essay I try to take some of the mystery and aura out of a concept that needs to be exposed to the light of day more frequently. While some scholars—even some historians who have trouble defining the idea—view the process that modernization describes as an inevitable process (often calling it progress and thereby also dismissing the people opposed to it), this essay endeavors to show that popular resistance was substantial to the shifts in social and economic (and political) organization of society in the making of modern America.
This experience also bears on modernization and the nature of opposition to that process. Clearly, the pressures of modernization were at work in Sedalia much as they were in other communities across the nation in the 1880s. There the most visible manifestation of that process of change was the centralization of authority, the "upward flow in the location of decision-making." Opposition to that process in Sedalia was clear, coherent, and precise, and was not confined to a specific part of society. Such opposition cannot be explained by popular failure to understand the modern economy or a failure to "come to grips" with social change. Nor can it be ascribed to the inertia of local allegiances. The sentiment for local autonomy and antimonopoly represented the form in which the real issues were expressed and the tools whereby real goals could be achieved. The substance of the opposition, and perceptions that gave rise to it, centered around the principle evident time and again in the rhetoric and actions of these people – the decentralization of decision-making power so that people could govern their own lives and relationships in the most direct way. In light of the conflict generated in this town in the 1880s, the question of how or if the modern system gained popular legitimacy emerges as one of the central problems of industrial America.
“History and the Public Purpose”
“History and the Public Purpose,” Journal of American History, 81 (December 1994), 969-976.
Why do historians study the past at all and to whom do they direct the results of their studies? Of course, there is no agreed-upon answer to those questions, but in this essay I suggest my own approach: to fulfill the promise and potential (and obligation?) of history as an intellectual activity, history needs to explore the connections between the past and the present. To do otherwise is to trivialize history. Plus, we need to address not only public issues but also the public itself, to make the public our audience. As one who has spent a considerable portion of my career doing various kinds of “outreach,” I sometimes get a little weary of my colleagues who proudly teach a form of narrow and sterile history to their own students, a narrow segment of the population, defined largely as 18-25 year old people.
Below I am copying the first and fourth paragraphs of the essay.
Why do historians study the past at all and to whom do they direct the results of their studies? Of course, there is no agreed-upon answer to those questions, but in this essay I suggest my own approach: to fulfill the promise and potential (and obligation?) of history as an intellectual activity, history needs to explore the connections between the past and the present. To do otherwise is to trivialize history. Plus, we need to address not only public issues but also the public itself, to make the public our audience. As one who has spent a considerable portion of my career doing various kinds of “outreach,” I sometimes get a little weary of my colleagues who proudly teach a form of narrow and sterile history to their own students, a narrow segment of the population, defined largely as 18-25 year old people.
Below I am copying the first and fourth paragraphs of the essay.
The recent survey by the Journal of American History clearly shows that historians approach
their subject with a goal of improving the present and that they endeavor to
engage the public in their efforts.
Just as clearly, however, the survey also shows that while they value
the utility of history for today, the connection between the past and the present
is often indirect and may be evident only ultimately. Similarly, while historians value communicating with the
public, their view of the public is dominated by traditional college classroom
demographics. The public purpose
is larger in our values and commitments than it is in our practice. It need not be so.
* * *
My own experience in Wyoming suggests that historians can make more of a contribution to the public purpose by connecting past and present at critical points and, moreover, that the opportunity exists to move beyond the traditional classroom to address a broader range of audiences. Or, to put these points together, we can bring history to bear on public issues in the public forum, and in so doing we can find greater personal satisfaction and fulfill our vision of the contribution that history can make to society.
* * *
My own experience in Wyoming suggests that historians can make more of a contribution to the public purpose by connecting past and present at critical points and, moreover, that the opportunity exists to move beyond the traditional classroom to address a broader range of audiences. Or, to put these points together, we can bring history to bear on public issues in the public forum, and in so doing we can find greater personal satisfaction and fulfill our vision of the contribution that history can make to society.
“A Question of Progress: The Cross S Ranch in History”
“A Question of Progress: The Cross S Ranch in History,” Great Plains Journal, 42 (2006), 3-22.
Did you ever drive the backroads of the nation and see the abandoned farm and ranch buildings that stand in the middle of fields, lonely, barren, even ghostly in appearance, and wonder if they had always been that way, who lived in them, whatever happened there? This is an inquiry into the history of one of those abandoned houses and it attempts to connect the house—and the people who built it and lived in it and called it home—with the larger patterns of history. Hint: these houses do not get left behind just because they got old. They are abandoned because the society and economy around them changed and they, and the purpose for which they were built, no longer conformed to the dominant pressures of the economy.
The following excerpts come at the beginning and the end of the article
Did you ever drive the backroads of the nation and see the abandoned farm and ranch buildings that stand in the middle of fields, lonely, barren, even ghostly in appearance, and wonder if they had always been that way, who lived in them, whatever happened there? This is an inquiry into the history of one of those abandoned houses and it attempts to connect the house—and the people who built it and lived in it and called it home—with the larger patterns of history. Hint: these houses do not get left behind just because they got old. They are abandoned because the society and economy around them changed and they, and the purpose for which they were built, no longer conformed to the dominant pressures of the economy.
The following excerpts come at the beginning and the end of the article
Just as one of the hallmarks of the Great Plains is its vast, open, and seemingly endless space, a closely associated element of the Great Plains landscape is the frequent punctuation of those immense prairies with the remains of buildings that are now silent, lonely, and abandoned shells of the busy lives they once knew. A proper appreciation of those buildings begins with a consideration of them as monuments—but monuments to what? They may be monuments to the past, but without a clear understanding of the past they represent, and without comprehension of their connection to the forces of history that shaped them, they are sadly as empty of meaning as they are of inhabitants now.
Too often they are simply relegated to the mists of past times that are dimly understood and poorly remembered, regarded as vague mileposts on the road of progress without further exploration of the actual contours of that road. If the past has a connection to the present, however, and clearly it does, that road needs to be explored. The buildings themselves offer a vantage point for understanding the larger history of which they were a part. Each building, after all, has a life of its own with a beginning, middle, and end. And that life reflected the larger changes at work in the transformation of the countryside, in the transformation of the Great Plains, and indeed in the transformation of the nation. Understanding those changes, and their meaning, is the essence of historical inquiry.
* * *
Looking back at the long course of its history, the transformation to which this building was both a participant and witness was at once subtle and profound, obvious and elusive. On one level the transformation demonstrated the changes in agriculture in this area, a shift from open range cattle ranching to homesteading, to horse-raising, and to crop production as a family farm, and finally to intensive crop raising even when the family that owned and operated it no longer lived there. On another level, however, the transformation was more than one represented by different stages as if they were somehow inevitable stages of history. Rather, the agricultural transformation evident with the Cross S Ranch was even more fundamental; that transformation was one of changed purpose and meaning in the use of the land and of changed values associated with rural life and the priority organized society attaches to that life.
The history of the Cross S Ranch above all provides a human measure of changes that are too often simply calculated on ledgers and statistical tables and the ranch serves as a reminder of the revolution in which a society based on agriculture became instead a society in which agriculture was reduced to but one specialized part of the larger economic machine. If this is progress, it is a kind of progress that leaves out the needs and aspirations of people close to the land, people who value traditions, people who see ranching and farming as ends and not means, people who have goals in life that are not always capable of being measured in terms of profit margins. In this way, the Cross S Ranch stone house, that abandoned building on the prairie, is indeed a monument, but not a monument to agricultural and social progress; it is a monument to a way of life that has passed, and a monument to the destructive power of the system that replaced it.
Too often they are simply relegated to the mists of past times that are dimly understood and poorly remembered, regarded as vague mileposts on the road of progress without further exploration of the actual contours of that road. If the past has a connection to the present, however, and clearly it does, that road needs to be explored. The buildings themselves offer a vantage point for understanding the larger history of which they were a part. Each building, after all, has a life of its own with a beginning, middle, and end. And that life reflected the larger changes at work in the transformation of the countryside, in the transformation of the Great Plains, and indeed in the transformation of the nation. Understanding those changes, and their meaning, is the essence of historical inquiry.
* * *
Looking back at the long course of its history, the transformation to which this building was both a participant and witness was at once subtle and profound, obvious and elusive. On one level the transformation demonstrated the changes in agriculture in this area, a shift from open range cattle ranching to homesteading, to horse-raising, and to crop production as a family farm, and finally to intensive crop raising even when the family that owned and operated it no longer lived there. On another level, however, the transformation was more than one represented by different stages as if they were somehow inevitable stages of history. Rather, the agricultural transformation evident with the Cross S Ranch was even more fundamental; that transformation was one of changed purpose and meaning in the use of the land and of changed values associated with rural life and the priority organized society attaches to that life.
The history of the Cross S Ranch above all provides a human measure of changes that are too often simply calculated on ledgers and statistical tables and the ranch serves as a reminder of the revolution in which a society based on agriculture became instead a society in which agriculture was reduced to but one specialized part of the larger economic machine. If this is progress, it is a kind of progress that leaves out the needs and aspirations of people close to the land, people who value traditions, people who see ranching and farming as ends and not means, people who have goals in life that are not always capable of being measured in terms of profit margins. In this way, the Cross S Ranch stone house, that abandoned building on the prairie, is indeed a monument, but not a monument to agricultural and social progress; it is a monument to a way of life that has passed, and a monument to the destructive power of the system that replaced it.
"E. P. Thompson and the Local Historian"
“E. P. Thompson and the Local Historian,” in Carol Kammen and Norma Prendergast, eds., Local History Encyclopedia (Walnut Creek, California: American Association for State and Local History and Alta Mira Press, 2000).
We all have much to learn from E. P. Thompson, the historian whose famous The Making of the English Working Class, “Time, Work‑Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” and many, many more books and articles contributed to a reformulation of the focus of social history on both sides of the Atlantic. I should say, moreover, that we still have much to learn from him and from his work, even over a half-century after the publication of The Making of the English Working Class. In this essay I try to suggest where historians, academic and otherwise, have sometimes fallen short and where they can direct their energies. Instead of pulling out paragraphs from this short piece, I will extract some sentences to give an idea of its flavor.
We all have much to learn from E. P. Thompson, the historian whose famous The Making of the English Working Class, “Time, Work‑Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” and many, many more books and articles contributed to a reformulation of the focus of social history on both sides of the Atlantic. I should say, moreover, that we still have much to learn from him and from his work, even over a half-century after the publication of The Making of the English Working Class. In this essay I try to suggest where historians, academic and otherwise, have sometimes fallen short and where they can direct their energies. Instead of pulling out paragraphs from this short piece, I will extract some sentences to give an idea of its flavor.
It is not an exaggeration to suggest that E. P. Thompson’s profound explorations in history still present the best opportunity to develop a richer, more meaningful, field of local history. Indeed, that opportunity is a fundamental responsibility.
* * *
At the heart of his scholarship he focused on the ways in which people deal with the circumstances of their existence in a society that tends by its organization and purpose to reduce them to economic definitions instead of regarding them as fully human beings. Thus his history looked at people historians had usually neglected, people who did not leave diaries and documents, people at the middle and bottom of society, people who sometimes lived outside the law, people who were often regarded with condescension and contempt by the authorities.
* * *
In emphasizing the importance of historical context, of the “agency of the people,” and of a microcosmic view of life and history, E. P. Thompson showed how large issues could be explored with powerful results at the local level.
* * *
We need always to ask, as E. P. Thompson urged, “those questions of satisfaction, of the direction of social change, which the historian ought to ponder if history is to claim a position among the significant humanities.”
* * *
At the heart of his scholarship he focused on the ways in which people deal with the circumstances of their existence in a society that tends by its organization and purpose to reduce them to economic definitions instead of regarding them as fully human beings. Thus his history looked at people historians had usually neglected, people who did not leave diaries and documents, people at the middle and bottom of society, people who sometimes lived outside the law, people who were often regarded with condescension and contempt by the authorities.
* * *
In emphasizing the importance of historical context, of the “agency of the people,” and of a microcosmic view of life and history, E. P. Thompson showed how large issues could be explored with powerful results at the local level.
* * *
We need always to ask, as E. P. Thompson urged, “those questions of satisfaction, of the direction of social change, which the historian ought to ponder if history is to claim a position among the significant humanities.”
“Huey Long: Barometer of Reform in the New Deal”
"Huey Long: Barometer of Reform in the New Deal,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 72 (Spring 1973), 255‑269.
Written more than four decades ago, I examined Huey Long’s critique of the measures proposed and enacted (and ordered) by the Franklin Roosevelt administration with an eye to understanding the issues separating Long, and a great many others, from the New Deal. As it turns out, the New Deal was anything but consistent and Long pointed out how the administration often took the side of big business, how it promoted a centralization of economic power, how it left out the “forgotten man” that Roosevelt had promised to redeem.
Written more than four decades ago, I examined Huey Long’s critique of the measures proposed and enacted (and ordered) by the Franklin Roosevelt administration with an eye to understanding the issues separating Long, and a great many others, from the New Deal. As it turns out, the New Deal was anything but consistent and Long pointed out how the administration often took the side of big business, how it promoted a centralization of economic power, how it left out the “forgotten man” that Roosevelt had promised to redeem.
It was perhaps impossible for the New Deal to offer any more than a dilution of Huey Long's program. The assumptions, goals, and methods of each were, after all, quite distant. The touchstone Long consistently applied was the condition of the unorganized individual. In the measures promoted by the New Deal he perceived the intensified enforcement of a set of relationships that oppressed that unorganized person. When the Roosevelt administration defined the problems facing America as the consequence of overproduction, it revealed the full dimensions of those relationships. Reform that focused on restricting output, raising prices, and stabilizing production benefited only organized producers, and the best organized, most powerful producers – the large corporations – benefited most of all. Not only did Long see the New Deal aiding directly the rich and the powerful but he felt that the power to make such decisions was increasingly being removed from the public and vested in agencies independent of popular control. Moreover, unlike the relief for the rich, the relief for the poor was a regressive pittance; it could not be otherwise in a system that rewarded wealth and power. To rectify the situation, Long proposed the opposite course: instead of the centralization of wealth and power he urged its decentralization; instead of the reinforced fragmentation of society into corporate blocs he called for the unification of citizens as taxpayers and consumers; instead of widening the chasm between the very rich and very poor he proposed to limit the depths to which a person could fall and to put a maximum on the profits he could accumulate. It was only appropriate that the slogans Huey Long coined for the realization of this society through the redistribution of political sovereignty and economic power were "Every Man a King" and "Share Our Wealth." As he did this he stood in the efflorescence of a progressive tradition of reform that would be a long time seeking an equal spokesman.
Wyoming in World War II
" 'In a Narrow Grave': The Subjugation of Wyoming in World War II," The Wyoming History Journal, 68 (Spring 1996), 2-13.
In this article I offer a reassessment of the way that the experience of World War II reshaped the society, economy, and culture of Wyoming. The sacrifice made by Wyoming's sons and daughters in combat is clear, but the sacrifice on the home front is too often overlooked or, when considered, too often minimized or rationalized as a necessity. [Note: the journal in which this appeared was the official journal of the Wyoming State Historical Society in the years in which the Wyoming Department of Commerce, which had previously published Annals of Wyoming, expelled (or privatized) the Wyoming State Historical Society and ceased publishing Annals. Later the State of Wyoming reached agreement with the Wyoming State Historical Society and agreed to provide support for the resumed publication of Annals by the WSHS.] This article was recognized as the outstanding article on Wyoming history for that year by the Wyoming State Historical Society.
This set of events cries out for understanding and suggests a metaphor for the experience of Wyoming during the war. It suggests that forces were unleashed that completely transformed Wyoming, that generated (1) a loss of local control, (2) the triumph of technology, and (3) a loss of identity. These forces subjugated traditional Wyoming. This sacrifice of society itself was more subtle but even greater than the obvious sacrifice of soldiers and sailors and airmen in combat.
* * *
By some lights, the pattern of change in Wyoming augured well for the future, a future in which the state counted for less and less and the national system counted for more and more. Yet, the pattern has its darker side. During World War II Wyomingites moved from the farms and ranches to the towns and from the towns to the cities; small schools were closed and students went to consolidated schools in town; agriculture became mechanized in the same way that the army had changed from horses to gasoline engines; small farms and ranches declined as big ones expanded; individuals increased their portion of the total tax bill as corporate taxes declined in their proportion; as the competitive market was replaced by a controlled market of government and business centralization, the least powerful, the individuals who saw themselves as part of a proud tradition of independent sovereigns, found themselves left out, with only the government to protect them; that government, however, responded to power, to organized power, rather than to need in an inverse equation of the social contract, an inversion that sounded suspiciously like the relationship between the people and the state common to the nations we fought in the war. The problem was that the people of Wyoming were being asked to sacrifice their lives in combat; they were being asked to sacrifice their material comforts and hard-earned rewards; they were being asked to sacrifice priorities in their personal lives, in the purpose of their society, and in the purpose of their economy and government; they were being asked to sacrifice not just the symbols of past traditions, but the institutions and practices of those traditions as well. What it came down to was that the people of Wyoming were being asked to sacrifice their pride, their independence, their values, and their birthright. For what? Of course the sacrifice was for a grand, noble cause: saving the world from totalitarianism, preserving democracy and freedom; protecting societies based on the sanctity of the individual as determinant of his or her own fate; preserving a society where individual fulfillment is the purpose of the social structure. The irony in the effort is clear; the sacrifice was really of individuality itself, of democracy and freedom, as people were being harnessed to a new system.
* * *
As we reflect on the visage of Wyoming in the post-war years, perhaps the most accurate insight was that inscribed by a young writer named Jack Kerouac who visited Cheyenne during Frontier Days in 1947. This is what he saw:
Big crowds of businessmen, fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire, bustled and whoopeed on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne; farther down were the long stringy boulevard lights of new downtown Cheyenne, but the celebration was focusing on Oldtown. Blank guns went off. The saloons were crowded to the sidewalk. I was amazed and at the same time I felt it was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition.[1]
Kerouac said this not with contempt but with sadness. What he was witness to was the narrowing of life in a proud land to its commercial attributes, the emptiness and ritualization of lifestyles that once had meaning, and the artificiality of reverence to past traditions. What he was witness to was the funeral dirge for the burying of the soul of Wyoming in a very narrow grave.
[1]Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1955) Signet Edition, p. 29.
In this article I offer a reassessment of the way that the experience of World War II reshaped the society, economy, and culture of Wyoming. The sacrifice made by Wyoming's sons and daughters in combat is clear, but the sacrifice on the home front is too often overlooked or, when considered, too often minimized or rationalized as a necessity. [Note: the journal in which this appeared was the official journal of the Wyoming State Historical Society in the years in which the Wyoming Department of Commerce, which had previously published Annals of Wyoming, expelled (or privatized) the Wyoming State Historical Society and ceased publishing Annals. Later the State of Wyoming reached agreement with the Wyoming State Historical Society and agreed to provide support for the resumed publication of Annals by the WSHS.] This article was recognized as the outstanding article on Wyoming history for that year by the Wyoming State Historical Society.
This set of events cries out for understanding and suggests a metaphor for the experience of Wyoming during the war. It suggests that forces were unleashed that completely transformed Wyoming, that generated (1) a loss of local control, (2) the triumph of technology, and (3) a loss of identity. These forces subjugated traditional Wyoming. This sacrifice of society itself was more subtle but even greater than the obvious sacrifice of soldiers and sailors and airmen in combat.
* * *
By some lights, the pattern of change in Wyoming augured well for the future, a future in which the state counted for less and less and the national system counted for more and more. Yet, the pattern has its darker side. During World War II Wyomingites moved from the farms and ranches to the towns and from the towns to the cities; small schools were closed and students went to consolidated schools in town; agriculture became mechanized in the same way that the army had changed from horses to gasoline engines; small farms and ranches declined as big ones expanded; individuals increased their portion of the total tax bill as corporate taxes declined in their proportion; as the competitive market was replaced by a controlled market of government and business centralization, the least powerful, the individuals who saw themselves as part of a proud tradition of independent sovereigns, found themselves left out, with only the government to protect them; that government, however, responded to power, to organized power, rather than to need in an inverse equation of the social contract, an inversion that sounded suspiciously like the relationship between the people and the state common to the nations we fought in the war. The problem was that the people of Wyoming were being asked to sacrifice their lives in combat; they were being asked to sacrifice their material comforts and hard-earned rewards; they were being asked to sacrifice priorities in their personal lives, in the purpose of their society, and in the purpose of their economy and government; they were being asked to sacrifice not just the symbols of past traditions, but the institutions and practices of those traditions as well. What it came down to was that the people of Wyoming were being asked to sacrifice their pride, their independence, their values, and their birthright. For what? Of course the sacrifice was for a grand, noble cause: saving the world from totalitarianism, preserving democracy and freedom; protecting societies based on the sanctity of the individual as determinant of his or her own fate; preserving a society where individual fulfillment is the purpose of the social structure. The irony in the effort is clear; the sacrifice was really of individuality itself, of democracy and freedom, as people were being harnessed to a new system.
* * *
As we reflect on the visage of Wyoming in the post-war years, perhaps the most accurate insight was that inscribed by a young writer named Jack Kerouac who visited Cheyenne during Frontier Days in 1947. This is what he saw:
Big crowds of businessmen, fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire, bustled and whoopeed on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne; farther down were the long stringy boulevard lights of new downtown Cheyenne, but the celebration was focusing on Oldtown. Blank guns went off. The saloons were crowded to the sidewalk. I was amazed and at the same time I felt it was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition.[1]
Kerouac said this not with contempt but with sadness. What he was witness to was the narrowing of life in a proud land to its commercial attributes, the emptiness and ritualization of lifestyles that once had meaning, and the artificiality of reverence to past traditions. What he was witness to was the funeral dirge for the burying of the soul of Wyoming in a very narrow grave.
[1]Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1955) Signet Edition, p. 29.
