R. Douglas Hurt. The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011. 344 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8165-2970-4; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8165-2972-8.

Reviewed by Heather Fryer (Creighton University)
Published on H-Environment (December, 2014)
Commissioned by David T. Benac (Western Michigan University)

At the dawn of “the American century” the Great Plains was synonymous with openness, opportunity, and hope. It was also a terrain whose tempestuous economic, legal, and social climate brought many a settler to ruin. For all of its extremity and paradox, Great Plains history has received numerous ”flyover” treatments based on presumptions that the region is devoid of historical agents, historical events, and historical change. R. Douglas Hurt presents a complex, dynamic, and nuanced history of the Plains and its people in The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century. His synthesis of the scholarly literature on the Great Plains is augmented by original research to create a kaleidoscopic view of a place most perceive as “colorless” and “flat.” The analysis is set within a loose twentieth-century chronology in which, much like the landscape itself, “[o]ne thing blends into another across time and space” (p. xiii). Intersecting currents of the Plains’ environmental, economic, political, and social histories flow through this spacious field of inquiry, allowing Hurt to develop meaningful generalizations about the history of Plains that respect the variations in historical patterns across time and location.   

The geographic parameters pose interesting questions at the outset, as illustrated by a scribbly map in the preface tracing multiple authoritative renditions of where  “the border” lies between what is—and is not—“the Great Plains.” Another map renders a “useable and reliable regional location” that includes portions of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Hurt ultimately establishes the “general parameters” of his study at “the political boundary of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma before angling downward to Dallas and San Antonio, then stretching northward through Roswell, New Mexico to Albuquerque and then along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains through Denver, Colorado, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Billings and Great Falls, Montana” (p. xii). Excising the provinces seems a missed opportunity to move the cartographic imagination beyond a United States-centric narrative in which “place” is defined by the state, instead of the ecosystem.

Within these narrowed borders Hurt develops a layered history of a multiethnic Plains where gender, religion, race, class, occupation, political outlook, citizenship status, and the flow of money influenced when, where, and how one lived in the region. Most sought their chance to make their living on the land—whether through farming, ranching, mining, drilling, or in the business and industries that supported such enterprises. At various points in the twentieth century homesteaders (male and female), German-speaking immigrants (Christian and Jewish), Klan members, socialists, oil men, New Dealers, braceros, civil rights activists, Native entrepreneurs, refugees from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia, and many others indelibly altered the social landscape of the Great Plains, creating new confluences and rending deep rifts. 

Several of the chapter titles chart changes in the region’s emotional climate, which shifted as abruptly and dramatically its weather patterns.  A turn-of-the-century “age of optimism” marked by the last phase of homesteading and the early days of dry farming gave way to an “age of uncertainty” ushered in by the political, social, and economic upheaval of World War I and the rapid rise of the oil industry in the 1920s. Devastating drought and economic collapse in the 1930s brought the “anxious years” of federal agencies joining the struggle to bring the land under human control by pitting “one element of nature (drought) against another (water)” with reclamation projects of every sort (p. 186). The infusion of federal programs and federal dollars into Plains agriculture raised ambivalent feelings and ideological dissonances that have yet to fully quell. Both atmospheric and ideological discomforts abated during World War II, however, when demand for agricultural products heralded an “age of certainty” in which everything grew bigger and, presumably, better. Acreages, crop diversification, mechanization, irrigation (from the newly developed Ogallala Aquifer), and farm profits all expanded rapidly, due in great part to the myriad ways in which the federal government minimized the risk of everything from price fluctuations to soil erosion. It was in this fertile period that the region’s ambivalence about the federal presence took root as its main political preoccupation, giving partisan politics its distinctive pragmatic flavor in the postwar era. 

The final chapters chronicle “the perils of agriculture” and the “the inevitability of change” as living on the land became less tenable for all but agribusinesses, industrial meatpackers, oil companies, and other corporate producers. The descendants of the homesteaders who thrived during the “age of optimism” lost their livelihood through farm consolidation, which spurred young adults to pursue work opportunities outside the region. The simultaneous in-migration of laborers from Mexico and placement of refugees from Asia and Africa reshaped the ethnic and political contours of Plains communities, but mostly at the local level. The contentious late-century politics of environmentalism and indigenous rights extended a long history of interest group politics through the twentieth century, infusing pragmatic, idiosyncratic blends of liberalism and conservatism into the Midwest Republicanism that remains solid across much of the Plains.   

Hurt’s attentiveness to mood—particularly that of the homesteaders and their descendants—places human agents squarely at the center of this history. Yet the narrative illuminates the depth and persistence of the inextricable connection between the natural and social landscapes in this region of farms, reservations, grazing lands, dust storms, shelterbelts, rising cities, sprawling suburbs, and multiplying missile silos. The continual and unavoidable engagement with the natural environment forms the core of “the Plains experience” and, by extension, Plains identities.

Hurt realizes the aims of his study by formulating two generalizations about how the land shaped the society and culture of the Plains. First, because the land is beyond human control—all things good and bad being largely attributed to “God’s will”—Plainspeoples “lived carefully because persistence, no matter the outcome, meant to conquer” (p. 259). This blend of resignation and determination made the Plains a collection of “next year” societies spurred by every disappointment to work harder and with great hope for better days ahead. Second, the people who stayed—and continue to stay on the Plains by choice—share a deep sense of belonging in (and perhaps of belonging to) this ever-challenging terrain.

The narrative is fast-paced with the shifting prismatic effects of a kaleidoscopic view. However, its absence of jargon and well-wrought renderings of Plains lives and events make it an interesting and accessible text for students and general readers. Scholars will appreciate both the breadth and the depth with which Hurt traces the intricacies of the social, environmental, and political histories of the Great Plains. Perhaps most valuable of all, however, is the way that The Big Empty de-romanticizes the relationships between the American heartland and its people by bringing the historical record to bear on a past that has been richly storied but unevenly studied.

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Citation: Heather Fryer. Review of Hurt, R. Douglas, The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. December, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34025

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