The year 1889 is so full of meaning in the history of the Great Plains. To Samuel Western (that’s his real name, seriously), it connotes the writing of constitutions, five of them, all in the Great Northwest — North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — as authorized by Congress in the Omnibus Bill of 1889. He writes about them in his new book from University Press of Kansas, The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and Northern Rockies.
It’s not a perfect book. Occasionally I hear an ax grinding in the background, and now and then as a historian I want to contest some point of authority, but still, Western brings a powerful, if critical, message to the prairies. I have ordered multiple copies, so I can gift one to each member of my district legislative delegation. Presumptuous, you think?
Well, who among us has not mourned the decline in civility and the partisan stubbornness of our regional politics in this century? Who has not suspected that our political intrigues are products of outside instigators, think tanks and dark money and all that? Minority party members rail against majority dominance, but I have had personal conversations with majority party representatives who say they long for better days in the past, when they talked across the aisle and agreed or disagreed as friends.
It’s not a matter of blame, Western says, although it may be a matter of regret. It’s a matter of history, economic and cultural. He sees the five-state area as a sort of constitutional region, with a common history of origin. Leaders herein, he says, “possessed a unique set of values. It’s time to bring them back into circulation.” The spirit of 1889 had these characteristics:
- Hostility to American Indians, and most any people of color. OK, our bad.
- Respect for the “promise” of women in society and advanced attitudes toward their rights.
- “Commonwealth values,” that is, genuine concern for the public good.
- Enthusiasm for capitalism, but not necessarily for free markets or laissez faire ideology. We liked making money from the start.
- Confidence in the ability of the state to be a force for good.
Western essentially asks, what the heck happened to us? He thinks we have descended into “a civic and political nightmare” where “there are no common values.”
This may be an overstatement, but there is truth and concern in it. How did it happen? He says, our values “have been hijacked.”
It happened not by default, but because at key junctures of our history, instead of broadening our economic and social base, we entrenched with major commodities — agricultural and mineral — and rested content in a colonially dependent status. In terms of agency and imagination, we hollowed out. This, in turn, made us vulnerable to takeover, the more so as media consolidation and communications technology drowned the independent voices among us.
This is not just a matter of public policy; the attitudes percolate into folk culture. So I’m reading, and listening for the spirit of 1889.
