a defensive work that nevertheless has stood the test of time (Nugent 2013 [1963]), Walter Nugent decries the straw man of the “Populist as Monster” and methodically reiterates the constructive relationships between Populists and immigrants, while denying the movement was seriously stained by anti-Semitism. Norman Pollack assertively doubles down on the progressive nature of the “grass-roots world of Populism” in The Populist Response to Industrial America (Pollack 1962): response was not reaction, after all, and “Populism formulated an extraordinarily penetrating critique of industrial society.” Over time other thoughtful interpreters joined Lawrence Goodwyn (1976 ) in describing and analyzing the “movement culture” of the Populists. This line of analysis actually dovetails well with Hicks’s descriptions of Populist parades, picnics, and glee clubs singing “The Farmer is the Man.” Populism seems well and truly rehabilitated—except that anyone who studies the exuberant anthems of the Populist singing clubs will be troubled by their frequent pejorative allusions to Jewish financiers.
Populism may have sucked much of the oxygen from the study of agrarian radicalism on the plains, but recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the other early agricultural revolt of the prairies, the Nonpartisan League, founded in 1915. For more than a half-century Political Prairie Fire (Morlan 1955) stood as the standard reference on this North Dakota-centered organization that co-opted the Republican Party to assail big business and defend the family farm. Notably, the Leaguers, although not stridently collectivist, embraced targeted elements of state socialism. Their forward-looking farm credit programs did not last, but the state bank and the state mill and elevator they established still thrive. Terry Shoptaugh (1997) offers a critical review of the leadership exercised by Arthur Townley and the rest of what he calls the League’s “sons of the wild jackass,” while Michael J. Lansing (2015), after essentially doing for the Nonpartisan League what Goodwyn did for the Populists, detailing their progressive culture, goes farther: he commends their example for America in the twenty-first century. With this broadening of significance, we are not (just) in Kansas (or North Dakota) any more.
A continuing deficiency in the historical literature of agriculture on the Great Plains is lack of attention to gendered elements of agricultural life. Webb set a poor example with The Great Plains, paying not even lip service to women’s vital roles in agricultural life (or any other aspect of life) on the plains. A half-century later Glenda Riley addressed the deficiency with The Female Frontier (Riley 1989), arguing for the continuity of women’s lives in the move west to the plains on account of the constraints of separate spheres. Women’s lives, confined, presumably, to domestic matters, did not undergo the transformational interaction with the physical environment that defined regional life. Since then feminist historians have questioned this somewhat wooden assumption, but it was important to break the silence.
An outstanding contribution to the explication of gender roles on prairie farms are the works of Paula Nelson on West River South Dakota (Nelson 1986 , 1996). Gender is not the central subject of these books, but it is addressed in due course in grounded and perceptive fashion. The detailing of life routines for Carrie Miller in Butte County establishes her roles on the homestead not according to what she could not do but according to what she did—“Carrie Miller was never idle,” writes Nelson. “She managed all the indoor labor… . Her tasks went beyond the door of the soddy to the garden and the barn, and even to the field when she wished.” Moreover, Nelson’s research gives the lie to the determinisms of both Webb and Riley: environment mattered, and women changed rules, due “both to their roles as producers and to the region of the country where they lived.” They raised children differently, they navigated changing societal norms, and they secured better education for their children’s future. Speaking of children on the farm, the excellent work of Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (Riney-Kehrberg 2005) on rural childhood is regarded as standard, but in an essay on Great Plains agriculture, it should be noted that her Childhood on the Farm blurs the Midwest and the plains, which might not matter to Riley, but it does to Nelson.
Other histories give a sharper edge to considerations of gender and to the idea of the family farm. Clearly, the rise of mammoth farming corporations such as the Campbell Farming Corporation in Montana (Fitzgerald 2003), which far eclipsed the fondest dreams of old-time bonanza farmers, created no such space for the definition of women’s roles as Nelson describes. Moreover, where family farming once flourished, women found, as the twentieth century advanced, that their possibilities and prerogatives were undercut by mechanization (which had been sold as a liberating influence) and by the social expectations and cultural pressures brought to bear by business models and agricultural education (Jellison 1993; Neth 1995). Even home extension work, welcomed by farm women for its social and educational opportunities, proved erosive of women’s roles and standing. Finally, there is the ethnic factor to consider. Vast tracts of the prairie landscape constituted what an assiduous scholar of immigrant farm settlements has termed a “prairie mosaic,” peopled almost entirely by farmers who spoke English as a second language, if at all (Sherman 2017 ). Generalizations about gender roles do not necessarily hold.
It is worth mentioning that every work cited in the preceding passages treating women and gender roles in Great Plains agriculture was authored by a female scholar—a good indication as to from what quarter the remedy to historiographic deficiencies in this subject area may be expected.
In 1935, Paul B. Sears wrote Deserts on the March, an instant classic of American conservation (Sears 1935 ), and Woody Guthrie wrote “Dust Bowl Disaster,” a powerful ballad of the great dust storm of April 14, 1935. Sears says, “The face of earth is a graveyard, and so it has always been.” Guthrie says, “We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom.” Neither commentator conveys much of the triumphalism that marked the earliest historical writing about agriculture on the Great Plains.
Nor do our historians of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The most evenhanded of them is R. Douglas Hurt (Hurt 1981). The work is dispassionate, detailing the circumstances and repercussions of this environmental catastrophe, but it eschews the blame game: Hurt catalogs contributing factors in the simple multiple-causation fashion of a working historian. On Hurt’s right hand sits the work of Paul Bonnifield, whose treatise on the Dust Bowl (Bonnifield 1979), written from the spindly grassroots of the Oklahoma Panhandle, minimizes the contributions of the federal government to disaster relief and valorizes the common folk who hunkered down and persevered. On Hurt’s left hand sits the work of Donald Worster, whose Bancroft Prize-winning history (Worster 1979) betrays no hesitation in laying blame: capitalism was the cause, and farmers were accomplices. The Dust Bowl was an unforced error.
Popular belief commonly traces the economic and demographic decline of the Great Plains to the Dust Bowl; Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath compounds the confusion. That the shuttering of communities and the outmigration of youth were largely phenomena of the post-World War II era, reaching a nadir during the 1980s, does not gainsay the public impression that things have gone downhill for a long time, and the Dust Bowl looms as the memory trigger. This sense of long-term decline is what Geoff Cunfer recognizes as the “declensionist narrative” of Great Plains history.
In On the Great Plains (Cunfer 2005), a startling work of reinterpretation, Cunfer takes blame off the table by questioning all the given explanations of the Dust Bowl. His thorough examination of county-level data reveals that the great plow-up was less thoroughgoing than was thought; most of the Great Plains remains grassland. Contrary to popular tropes of instability in a harsh environment, Cunfer charts the long-term stability of land-use across the region—with wheat as “the quintessential cash crop of the plains.” All this is set-up for Cunfer to reconsider a question Malin had posed a half-century earlier: “What natural and human factors contributed to the dust storms of the 1930s?” In answer, he suggests that rather than lay all grief to “human ecological failure,” historians should accept the fact that dust storms “are normal forms of ecological disturbance” during extended drought. Cunfer never says husbandry and conservation do not matter—but he moves the baseline for explanation. The Dust Bowl may not have been the pivotal event in Great Plains agriculture history. The Great Plains may not be in the permanent grip
