crop for the generations, “as a commercial enterprise and at the same time as a way of life.” Notably, he writes the intertwined biographies of grain magnate Ray Garvey and ambitious farmer John Kriss, hardheaded businessmen if there ever were such, as vehicles to illustrate the “dual nature” of farming as a business and as a way of life. “John Kriss,” he concludes, “represented that impossible mix about as well as an actual person could.”
Two works on the culture of wheat harvesting extend the concept of a commodity culture on the plains to its logical limits. Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs (Isern 1990) deals with the vainglorious era of steam-powered threshing in a way that delineates the economic and social systems by which work was accomplished (the organization of custom threshing and threshing rings, the recruitment of harvest labor, adoption of new technologies of mechanization) while at the same time also zooming in on folk practices (how to build a shock of grain, how to manage a cook car, what the whistle-signals blown by a steam traction engineer meant to the people in the field). Both the systems and the folkways of wheat culture here described loom large because they crested during the so-called Golden Age of American Agriculture. Another work (Isern 1981) takes up the story of wheat harvesting with the advent of itinerant custom harvesting during the World War II era. The author emphasizes the regional suitability of custom harvesting, whereby agricultural contractors (themselves farmers) package and transport the capital and labor requirements of harvest for farmers, as well as the role of custom harvesting as a connecting link of agricultural operations up and down the plains, Texas to Saskatchewan. He also, however, develops the self-consciousness and community—the mentalité, one might say—among the custom cutters, a tight subculture.
The history of agricultural research and technology on the Great Plains suffers in the telling from the limitations of regionalism. Knowledge systems are either federal (governmental operations comprising national and state entities) or global (economic operations that transgress boundaries). For instance, the work of historian Alan I. Marcus on the origins of experiment stations as organs of agricultural colleges under the Hatch Act of 1887 (Marcus 1986), a work of national scope, establishes a template for thinking about public research on agriculture. Interpretation of the subject highlights tension between farmers, even scientific farmers, and agricultural scientists, over the research agenda. There was a growing sense that to improve an agriculture that was elevating in expectations and practice, scientists might have to loosen their ties to farmers at the grassroots and elevate the profession of agricultural science. The scientists prevailed; experiment stations became “part of the new network for creating and disseminating agricultural information”—a network embracing rationalization, systematization, and standardization. Agricultural science became less about solving farmers’ problems and more about transforming farmers’ practices—and lives.
Good histories at the state level on the plains pick up on this tension. A history of the agricultural arms of Oklahoma State University (Green 1990) discloses programs and personnel embedded in the interests and culture of farmers through the early decades of the twentieth century, then becoming increasingly institutionalized. A history of the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station (Danbom 1990), while arguing “the value system of the scientists has changed little, if at all,” nevertheless recounts notable episodes of farmer–station conflict over communications and research and then labels the post-World War II era a “Golden Age” for the station. This was the very time when escalations in federal funding inevitably shifted priorities in the direction of national imperatives. Left unanswered by studies of national and state dynamics is the question: What was the regional dynamic? Similarly, studies of agricultural mechanization such as the history of the farm tractor by Robert C. Williams (Williams 1987) explicate the subject from a national perspective—but surely, in a region as ready to embrace mechanization as was the Great Plains, there must also be a distinctively regional story to tell, too. David Vail proves that region can provide the structure for a study in the history of technology with his work on agricultural chemicals and aerial spraying; he even devises a new name for the region, Chemical Lands (Vail 2018a).
Regional developments in technology commonly emerge parcel to other regional stories, such as the harvesting of small grains, or the provision of water in a semiarid region. Thus, picking up where the work of Erwin Hinkley Barbour left off a century earlier (Barbour 1899), T. Lindsay Baker offers a compendium of windmill models and technology pertinent to both livestock operations and crop irrigation on the plains (Baker 1985). Historians of irrigation (Green 1973; Sherow 1990; Opie 2000) inevitably bore deep into technology, whether it be the hydraulics of water diversion for surface irrigation or the logistics of pumping from underground aquifers. The same scholars reckon with environmental possibilities and consequences; surely the turbine pump and the center pivot have a lot to answer for—or perhaps it is those who deploy them heedlessly who must answer. John Opie declares (2000), “For more than three decades the plains irrigator has been persuaded to plow his fields and water his plants fencerow to fencerow to keep domestic prices low and feed the world… . Difficult choices … cannot be postponed forever.” Perhaps, then, it is best that Great Plains historians tend to serve up technological and environmental histories in parcels wrapped up along with recognition of human agency. Surprisingly, technological deployments on the plains in the twenty-first century to date have made petroleum available in seemingly unlimited quantities, while no solution for the finite nature of the Ogallala Aquifer is in sight. At risk is not only the entire regional agricultural complex of irrigation, feed grains, petrochemicals, feedlots, packinghouses, immigrant labor, and urban development but also the very natural systems of the plains. These issues want the application of holistic historians.
The more intractable problems of regional agriculture have generated multiple political movements centered in the farmers of the plains. There are several ways of explaining this. Early historians of the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry and of the Farmers Alliance and People’s Party attributed the Granger and Populist movements of the plains to frontier deprivation and post-frontier disillusionment. They explained radicalism, or even unusual cooperation, by stretching the Turnerian blanket far enough to cover it. As the conception of the Great Plains evolved from one of frontier to one of region (Kraenzel 1955), regional disadvantage—sparseness of population and resources, remoteness, dependency, resentment of the metropolis—seemed a more generally applicable explanation. At the same time, some scholars looked inside the farm movements, attempting to divine their natures and rely less on external determinants.
Thus in Solon Justus Buck’s pioneering history of the Grange (Buck 1913), he locates the “center of agricultural discontent” in the “great prairie states,” where farmers “were from the first handicapped by the notion that they were to make their fortunes by raising wheat, and for a long time were unable to grasp the fact that conditions of soil, climate, and market facilities demanded a change.” Later, more definitive work on the Grange (Nordin 1974) does not so much reject the diagnosis of prairie discontent as distinguish the Granger movement, a political reaction to hard times, from the Grange as a fraternal order.
The issues of the Grangers in the 1870s became the issues of the Farmers Alliance in the 1880s and of its political offspring, the People’s Party, in the 1890s. What caused sturdy farmers to rise up and demand regulation of grain elevators, regulation and even nationalization of railroads, public sources of credit to ease mortgage debt, inflation of the currency, and the other items on what seemed a radical agenda? Again, Populism’s pioneering historian (Hicks 1931) insists the explanation lies in the demise of the frontier: “It was only as the West wore out and cheap lands were no longer abundant that well-developed agrarian movements began to appear.” Chapter 1 of Hicks’s The Populist Revolt is “The Frontier Background.”
As reconsiderations of the Populist movement unfolded, the hottest controversy in the historiography of Great Plains agriculture precipitated. Post-World War II scholars such as Richard Hofstadter (Hofstadter 1955) became suspicious of the motives of rural populist movements in general and the Populist movement in particular, considering it regressive, reactionary, and bigoted—not at all the progressive cause it had been made out to be.
