Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898–1940

In Making a Modern U.S. West, Sarah Deutsch provides a sweeping update to previous efforts at a bird's-eye history of the US West. The book refreshingly centers labor and work as part of a series designed to push the boundaries of western history, connecting themes like infrastructure development, financial trends, and labor migration within a history of borders and empire. Deutsch explains, "In this period the 'frontier' with its seemingly limitless opportunity became a place with borders" (9). Within this framework, Deutsch demonstrates how stratified categories of race, gender, and class were lived out in the daily experiences of people such as miners, migrant workers, and employees throughout the region. Deutsch demonstrates how in the West a "contest over both the vision of the past and various visions of the future" set the parameters of what modernity and the modern nation-state would look like (2).The book is organized into four chronological parts. The first, 1890 to 1910, focuses on federal efforts to create borders, boundaries, and categories, in the West. Deutsch begins with the 1898 Spanish-American War to situate western history within the history of American empire building and the creation of racial categories which, in the West, were often localized and arbitrary. She describes the war as an event that "relegitimated both white supremacy and the concept of whiteness" and helped to define the United States as a ruling and not dependent nation. She then turns to infrastructure and describes the rise of irrigation, embodied by the Newlands Act and Hetch Hetchy, as further helping to create empire and systems of displacement, inclusion, and exclusion. She then turns to the role of the newly established Border Patrol in creating racial categories and in complicating an entrenched system of cross-border labor migration. The second section provides challenges to these categories and focuses on social movements that pushed back against clear borders or boundaries between the years 1910 and 1921. She describes the Mexican Revolution, conflicts between labor and capital, and conflicts over civil rights and the US entrance into World War I. She argues that such conflicts were particularly ferocious in the West.All sections are well written and engaging and cohesively push against established narratives of the West to demonstrate the region was not a uniquely plundered, isolated, and malleable space, nor was it unimportant to events happening in the East. To this end, the third and fourth sections are of most interest to labor historians, as they demonstrate how attention to work, labor, and economic relationships help us to see historical events in new ways. In section 3, Deutsch uses the 1920s to shift from a focus on radical movements to "economic democracy characterized by easy access to speculative investment" (14). She focuses on systems of speculative commerce and mining to highlight how speculation was encouraged by federal regulations and policy. Deutsch sees this process as both defining American democracy in the twentieth century and shaping the geography and environment of the West. Later, she uses oil to describe the creation of a new "speculator state" or "a state that is organized to promote and protect speculation and that creates . . . the modern citizen as a speculator" (232). She sees this framework as impacting everything from state elections to mineral and land rights to citizenship and links it to the creation of the bureaucratic federal government. To this end, she juxtaposes a mythical, empty, free West that existed in the collective cultural imaginary with the West of reality—in which the West didn't fit clear narratives or categories. Such emphasis on ambiguity runs throughout the section and the entire book, providing welcome nuance.In the fourth and final section, on the 1930s, Deutsch looks at mass mobilizations that challenged the celebration of speculation in the context of global economic disruption and the collapse of previous systems of "economic citizenship" (342). The three chapters in this section deal with the expulsion of Mexican workers, agricultural strikes, and the impact of large-scale federal infrastructure projects in the West. Throughout, she sees the remaking of economic boundaries as both blurring and reinforcing borders and argues that by the 1940s the West had "taken on its contemporary contours" (14).Deeply useful as a teaching text, Deutsch's book demonstrates the national importance of the region. Her thematic focuses elevate often siloed histories such as environmental history, Native American history, or union history through interwoven narratives. While the structure, in which each section's thematic and topical chapters discuss the same rough time period, can get a little repetitive, the engaging prose, emphasis on useful terminology, and nuanced descriptions of key terms make the book an easy adoption for those teaching classes on US western history. Chapters or excerpts would make great fodder for lectures or shorter class readings.